wall when they come face to face with a passive-aggressive – emphasis on passive. Granny called it “bide’n her time”. She’d ugh-huh and ugh-huh (that means fake it), grimace and gesture when the ‘greats’ from Daddy’s family were around. But, later, she’d say, “Ooooh-wee, listen heah. Them Roberts ain’t nothin’ but trash. Heah they all come up the highway from Ocilla like a band’a gypsies, thankin’ Macon, Georgia was Somewhere. Back then Macon wut’n nothin’ – a one-trawf waterin’ hole maybe fer a tired mule, but’je Granny, heah, she ain’t got nothin’ in her heart fer Macon or nobody out’a Macon, includin’ them Collins’ses and that bunch’a Hamms. They ain’t nothin’ but talk. Granny could whup ’er one of ’em if she took the notion.”’
When I said Vickie became Granny, I meant it. Even without the costume – she’d shown me a picture of herself in a long dress, apron and bonnet, the bottom edges and corners of her mouth smudged with brown eye-shadow to imitate snuff stains – sitting in her air-conditioned living room on a sunny June morning, in her fashionable summer dress, fingernails and toenails painted bright red, Vickie Vedder became Granny Griffin. She scrunched her face, fixed her eyes wide, never once taking her pupils off mine. Her voice came out high and scratchy, like the ragged end of a rook’s cry, sustained and riding on a fast, cocky trot of vowels and consonants – utterly different from any other sound I’d heard her make. When she finished a particularly pithy phrase she’d make a kind of ‘put-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it’ S curve with her head and shoulders, dropping the left one, raising the right, following it up with her left jaw, and ending with a cock of the right eyebrow. Now and then she’d splice in a mannerism of her father’s – the middle finger in the ‘know-it-all’ position – for extra emphasis. The effect was mesmerizing. The old lady was smart and funny, but because she had been so quickly conjured to life in a pretty, young body, I was too amazed (and a little alarmed) to laugh.
I stumbled into downtown Forsyth at an extreme ebb tide. I wasn’t depressed – on the contrary, I found Vickie elating – just utterly depleted. The town looked settled in its well-to-do ways, and baked pale in the mid-day heat. I parked in the shadow of the Monroe County Courthouse, a ponderous Victorian comment on law and order in red brick, topped by an Islamic-looking dome, which sat smack in the middle of town and effectively quartered Main Street into a square. Then I wandered into Russell’s Pharmacy to buy a pen (Vickie’s talk had used up my ink) and found that the Russells also ran a sandwich shop next door, with an old-fashioned ice cream counter and wrought iron tables and chairs. The funny thing was that each chair and table foot was covered in a slit-open, neon-yellow tennis ball. The effect against the otherwise black and white floor was surreal, as though it had been decorated by Magritte. I hoped the floor had recently been waxed, but I never found out.
A friendly woman at the counter offered me a pimento and cheese sandwich with extra mayonnaise, a combination I’d never heard of but Southern friends consider a kind of holy food, and coaxed me into a Coke float to go with it. I could barely understand her accent; in fact, she had to repeat ‘pimento’ several times before I got it. All of her words seemed glued together.
As carbohydrates and sugar rekindled my brain cells, I remembered what had been nagging at me all morning: Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s classic study, Honor and Violence in the Old South. One of the cornerstones of Wyatt-Brown’s argument stressed the honor code of the antebellum South: the idea that Southern morality was based on honor, a public virtue conferred by the community, as opposed to the self-regulating morality of private conscience, and that, consequently, slavery could function without contradiction in such a world, because honor required its opposite – abasement – in order to have value. The public element of this system intrigued me. When virtue is an external construct, an individual must base his self-worth on the opinions of others; no space is sanctioned for the consolation of private dignity. As Wyatt-Brown wrote, ‘public factors establishing personal worth conferred particular prominence on the spoken word and physical gesture as opposed to interior thinking or writing.’ He went on to add that, at heart, the ‘archaic concept that thought itself was a form of speaking’ had not died out in the pre-war South.
Thinking as a form of speaking remains a self-perpetuating legacy in parts of the South, or at least it did during Vickie’s childhood in Gordon, Georgia. If I had learned anything from her that was alien to my experience in America, it was precisely this. I wrote and Vickie talked. ‘My family is predisposed to talk,’ she had said, laughing, ‘and maybe think.’ Speech not only brought Granny Griffin back to life, it triggered something very like a dialogue in Vickie’s head between her childhood memories and her adult analysis. Following an in-character lecture on how ignorant folks rhernt (ruined) perfectly good peas and beans, Vickie paused to consider her grandmother. ‘From what I could tell about Granny,’ she explained, ‘is that as she aged, she began creating a private world of thought. She actually didn’t like her in-laws, her husband, the neighbors; a lot of the community style also didn’t jive with her natural inclinations to be a loner. Family life crowded in on her thoughts, and I feel like Daddy Runt was a “too busy” person to talk through things with her. This was observable from anyone watching them live out their lives.’
Vickie’s observation was made for my sake: it was the result of public display, of having an audience. It was, literally, thought as a form of speech. In North Toward Home, Willie Morris said there was something ‘spooked-up and romantic’ about a small town childhood in the South, which he attributes in part to growing up in a place where reading books was unacceptable. The imagination had to work itself out somehow, he said, and that was usually through talk, the endless telling of tales. In a rural world without access to other means of preservation – today Vickie mourns the fact that she never had a camera as a child – talk was both a family legacy and the means to a kind of private immortality. On countless summer evenings, shelling peas on the porch, Vickie’s living relatives made the dead as familiar as Old Man Mag, Eva Mixon and the mule, but as they spoke, they were in turn laying down their own investment in Vickie’s memory, for now she tells stories about the way they told stories.
‘I think my Granny Griffin, Daddy Runt, Daddy, Mama, and all their relatives have actually become characters and stories unto themselves,’ Vickie had said. ‘That’s because their storytelling styles, their lifestyles, and their mannerisms … are what’s worth knowing about them. It’s not what they said; it’s how they were affected by what they were saying, the people they thought of to remember … And it became a joy to the living members of our huge family to sit and listen to stories about the dead members and how they had acted when they were alive … To hear my daddy talk about the Collins family was funnier than actually knowing a Collins … All by himself, he could take you back to the spot where it all happened, so we were taken into his mind, and we loved him and his voice and how he raised his big old hands, his grin … He would say, “I can’t tell ye another word, I’m s’tickled by that crazy Ethel Collins. If her Mama had know’d what that gal was doing …” And on he’d go. And it was as if the whole clan, the whole farm, the whole scene was still important.’
My grandmother had only waved to me in silence in my dream-memory of the slides. Vickie’s grandmother had done one better: she had come alive again and spoken to me that very morning. In Vickie’s experience the past lived through speech. Granny Griffin was inside her and could come out at her bidding, because when she had really been alive they had talked. Granny had lived next door and talked to Vickie and through a constant funnel of stories had lent her not only her own life, but the lives of hundreds of other relatives stretching back down the ages. My family, by contrast, had shared landscapes – the beach at Cape Cod, Nantucket Sound and the big jetty where we’d fished into countless blue twilights – and it was into these places that we had spilled our love. They and the images we took of them silently testified that we had been happy together. They were our stories. But when we were pictured within them, waving or not, it was almost as icons of age or gender or some other universal attribute, like pleasure: Smiling Young Girl in Seascape; Heroic Man Fishing on Jetty. We individuals kept our narratives battened inside as silent memories, held close
