style="font-size:15px;"> Vickie and I are almost the same age; we both grew up in the 1960s. But whereas my memory is infiltrated with public television and private photographs – images concurrent with my childhood – Vickie, who grew up without a television set, remembers stories with roots trailing back into the deep, deeper, deepest past. What does it mean that I had lived in the suburban North, and Vickie in the rural South? Does it mean anything at all? I didn’t have answers yet, so I scribbled these questions on a napkin smeared with pimento-cheese, and very much hoped I’d figure them out before the end of my pilgrimage, two months later, in the bayous of Louisiana.
‘Where ya from?’ asked the woman at the counter.
‘Rhode Island,’ I guessed, hoping I’d understood the question. For good measure I complimented her on the Coke float.
‘You didn’t get that accent in Rhode Island,’ said a voice behind me. ‘There’s London in that voice.’
I was floored. LaMar Russell, owner of Russell’s Pharmacy, had read the invisible pedigree of my speech and found Wales in it (he thought it was London, but from the perspective of central Georgia, they’re close enough). It was uncanny. The thing is, I don’t think I have a discernible British accent; in fact most people think I’m from Virginia. I explained that I had gone to the University of Wales for graduate school, and had come to love the country so much that I often woke up astonished that I continued to live and breathe without the Welsh landscape and language. LaMar looked triumphant. The only other people to have spotted rogue signposts in my American diction were a gas-meter reader in Rhode Island and an elderly couple at Gatwick Airport. In the midst of discussing the outrage of delayed flights, the woman had grasped my hand and with feeling told me how good it was to meet someone from home. ‘We’ve been travelling for five months,’ she enthused, ‘and you’re the very first fellow Tasmanian we’ve met!’
As I told this story to LaMar and the woman I couldn’t understand, it occurred to me that Vickie had never told me a story. I laughed out loud. I hadn’t noticed until then.
I CONTINUED ON A MORE OR LESS northerly route out of Forsyth. I had called a storyteller with the engaging name of Nancy Basket from a payphone in Cedar Key, and made an appointment to see her in Walhalla, South Carolina, the following afternoon. Walhalla is in the westernmost corner of the state, a region that has more in common with its hilly northern neighbors – North Carolina and Tennessee – than with the low country of coastal South Carolina. In fact it is officially part of Appalachia, and not a long drive from central Georgia. I had time to get there slowly.
What I really wanted was to get a pedicure. Vickie Vedder’s glamorous toenails had put the idea in my head. Besides, I thought, beauty parlors were probably breeding grounds for all kinds of local stories: what else can you do while your perm sets or nails dry but talk? Unfortunately, piney woods – I now understood why this phrase comes so easily to Southern songwriters – had the countryside in a vice-like grip, leaving towns few and far between. The first substantial one I came to was Monticello, where I stopped a noticeably well-coiffured blonde woman at another courthouse square, beneath another Islamic-domed edifice, and asked her about pedicures. She gave me convoluted directions to a little house outside town, with a hand-painted ‘Beauty Parlor’ sign out at the front.
‘No, sweetie,’ said the girl in the front room, between careful strokes of nail varnish, ‘we don’t do no ped-i-cures on Fridays. You’re outta luck.’
I went back to the Courthouse square to get my bearings, and just behind the spot where I’d questioned the woman earlier was another beauty parlor; I figured it must have been obscured by her minivan.
‘Don’t do nails. No toenails neither,’ responded the receptionist, who was wearing an old-fashioned, wraparound blue robe, hair glistening with gel. All the customers and hairdressers were black, and all were staring at me. ‘You not from here, girl, are you?’
Undaunted, I decided to try Madison, just up the road, where I parked on yet another sober, red-brick courthouse square, dominated by yet another cupola straight out of the Arabian Nights. I asked about beauty parlors in the chamber of commerce, and was told they’d all be closing about now.
While waiting my turn to talk to the woman behind the counter, I’d been fingering a book of Madison, Georgia matches – emblazoned with two messages: ‘The Town Sherman Refused to Burn’ and ‘For Safety Strike on Back’ – and reading the promotional material. Madison’s claim to fame was its thirty-five antebellum houses that had miraculously survived the Union Army’s torch-and-pillage march across Georgia (apparently a Madison resident and former U.S. Senator named Joshua Hill had not only opposed secession, but was a friend of General Sherman’s brother; a plea from him was enough to prevent Sherman from toasting the town). I learned this from a brochure with a cover photo of a handsome young couple got up to look like a Southern belle and a Confederate officer. Another version lay beside it, printed in Japanese.
‘How about storytellers?’ I asked on a whim. ‘Anyone in town with a reputation as a good talker?’
‘Am I talking too much?’ Colonel Dan McHenry Hicky (‘Laddie’ for short) asked his wife, Hattie. We both assured him he wasn’t. ‘Well, then,’ he continued, taking my arm in a courtly way, ‘let me show you this mantlepiece in the dining-room. See? It doesn’t quite fit. That’s because this is the mantle from the old slaves’ quarters. We had to sell the original during the Depression.’
Both Hickys were far too polite and attentive to be bores, but they lived in a house that prattled on with a vengeance. ‘Rosehill’, as it had once been called, was the only home in Madison to have remained in the same family since before the Civil War (Dan was the sixth-generation owner). Every room, every rug, every piece of furniture told a story, and like the parents of an accomplished but mute child, they spoke enthusiastically on its behalf, translating the sign language of beams and boards into three continuous hours of patrician-toned English. I had been referred to Hattie by the Chamber of Commerce –’ She does costume tours of town; she’s a great one for stories!’ – and given directions to their house. Typically, I missed the street and pulled into a driveway to turn around.
‘Are you the lady who wants to hear stories?’ an elderly man asked, emerging from the garage. He generated kindness and mild curiosity. I said Yes, but that I was at the wrong house.
‘Oh, this is one of our houses,’ he replied. ‘Come on in.’
The Hickys were both in their eighties. He was nearly blind from glaucoma, with thick glasses and an endearingly unhip notepad and pen in his shirt pocket. She was small and slender, self-conscious in her not-for-visitors trousers, with hair the color of champagne touched by a drop of cassis. Both had inherited homes in Madison, bringing their total in this historic town of white-columned gems to three. Of these, Rosehill was the showplace. The easy graciousness of those whose lives had been devoted to the appreciation of beauty, rather than the necessity of work, still clung to it – like an invitation to a ball.
Iris Murdoch said that beauty ‘unselfs’ us. ‘The sight of a bird, or a bank of sweet peas, or a lovely cloud formation,’ she wrote, ‘breaks us out of our narrow egos.’ She believed that anything that promotes ‘unselfing’ is conducive to goodness, and that the best example is beauty. I bring this up because while some people are swept away by sweet peas and others by ankles and calves or particular shades of table linen, I am seduced by architecture. Beautiful houses encourage imitation. The harmony of design that makes them calm makes me want to be calm; their lack of rough edges makes me want to shed whatever ill emotion is pricking my skin like a stubble of thorns.
