to lure the eye off the self. Stories do the same thing, and equally well; they, too, draw me out of the easychair of the ego and into motion along a route of words – calisthenics for the soul. Storytelling houses are the ultimate exercise.
‘We have a ghost livin’ next door,’ said Hattie, giving ‘door’ a well-bred Southern ‘ah’ at the end, rather than the West Country ‘r’ most Americans chew on at the ends of their words. ‘McCooter is her name. She was murdered on the property. And she likes to drink. If you have a party and don’t leave a drink out for McCooter, she’ll knock the slats out of your bed … Sure enough, a new family moved in and didn’t know the story, had a housewarming party. That night, didn’t the slats fall right out of their bed!’
We left the front porch and its Egyptian Revival doorway – the Valley of Kings transposed into white clapboard – and entered a world decorated by the dead. ‘As a little boy I couldn’t wait to get new furniture,’ said Dan. I had no sympathy. The front parlor was cavernous, swallowing up a crystal chandelier, several pieces of immense Empire furniture, a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror, and a rare nineteenth-century piano. The carpet dated to the 1840s, purchased by an ancestor of Dan’s from a travelling peddler with a sewing machine.
‘That’s my grandfather, John McHenry,’ said Dan, pointing at a pastel portrait of three children from 1859.
‘It was made while the family was taking the Grand Tour,’ interrupted Hattie. She got up to show me John McHenry’s ancient passport. ‘See, it goes into great detail. Forehead: Full. Eyes: Light. Nose: Aquiline. Chin: Oval. Complexion: Dark. And then it says here, “Accompanied by Wife.”’ She made a face.
‘See, in the picture,’ Dan pointed but didn’t look, ‘he’s wearing the uniform of the Georgia Military Institute. His whole class enlisted in the Confederate Army on March 20, 1864, when John was fifteen years old. He was put on sentry duty: his first post. It was dark, and he heard a rustling in the bushes. He hollered “Halt!” but there was no answer. So he hollered again, but the noise just got louder. So he fired his musket at the noise, and he heard something drop. It was a pig. His only casualty in the Big War.’
‘Now, see this picture,’ Hattie showed me a hand-tinted photograph. ‘This is Laddie at seven, with his head on that little boy’s lap. Only the little boy was an old man by then. It was taken in the nursery upstairs.’
We moved into the entrance hall. It had been added in 1848 to what was once the outside of the house, in effect becoming the central hallway when another wing was built on the other side. One half of the house has closets, the other doesn’t.
‘During the Big War,’ began Hattie, ‘the town was occupied by Northern troops. One elderly man from Madison – Mistah Smith – was escorting two ladies downtown when they were accosted by a drunken Yankee. While trying to protect the ladies’ honor, Mr. Smith was shot and mortally wounded. He was brought here to die. See, he passed away right there, on the third step.’ She patted a stair-tread and I instinctively spun the melodrama in my mind’s eye, giving it lots of blood and weeping.
‘Another Yankee rode his horse up and down the hallway,’ tisked Dan. ‘Ruined the black and white checkerboard floor.’
The depth and continuity of their knowledge stunned me. Generation upon generation, harboring the same memories in the same house, of a war fought on their doorstep, carried, even, into their front hallway: it was completely alien to my experience of the United States. Half my ancestors were peasants who would have been smarting under the thumb of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while the American Civil War was in full swing, and the other half, though probably in the States, are shadowy figures who lived out their lives in unknown locations. The intimacy of the Hickys’ relationship with the past – both the personal and the national past, intertwined into a breathtakingly accessible history – fascinated but gave me goose bumps at the same time. My reaction to their stories reminded me of staring dispassionately into a gaping hole in my leg after an accident, and thinking, how interesting, it looks like the pith of a carrot, even while alarmed that it was my own bone and flesh I was seeing. No wonder so many pilgrims to the South return with reports that the War Between the States, as Southerners call it, or better yet, The War for Southern Independence, lingers so vividly in the contemporary mind. In Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horowitz quoted an Oklahoma man working in North Carolina, as saying ‘In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago. Folks here don’t see it that way. They think it’s still half-time.’
We moved into another parlor where there was framed Confederate money on the wall, a tiny set of scales used to measure ore during the California Gold Rush, a silhouette of someone who had danced at General Lafayette’s ball, and a photograph of another ancestor who went down with the Titanic. Showing me an elegant little powder keg, Hattie, eyes glinting with wicked pleasure, said, ‘If our little mother-in-law [Zoe] were here, she’d say, “Dahlin’, I do apologize, but this is what we kept the gunpowder in when we were shootin’ at you.”’
The wonders continued. I saw Hattie’s grandmother’s wedding dress, with a waist just about the circumference of my upper thigh. I learned that glass used to be shipped in cylinders to prevent it breaking, then re-heated to be stretched flat and cut (which is why there are so often bubbles in old glass); that Zoe’s mother’s name was Philoquia; that Hattie had a Yankee grandmother from Nashua, New Hampshire. I saw chests stuffed with muffs and boas and velvet hats from winters long past, and a desk of Georgia pine that had survived a fire in Arizona, the heat from which had resurrected long-dormant insects which woke, gnawed, and gave a fabulously ornate burling to the wood.
Hattie showed me the pink satin ‘Southern belle’ dress she wears for summer tours. I asked if it had been specially made. She burst out laughing, glanced conspiratorially around, and whispered loudly, ‘Forty dollars, off the rack. It’s a prom dress, from the Juniors department!’
Dan wanted me to look at his poetry. One poem was about a dog, another a sensitive meditation on the sky from his perspective as a fighter pilot in World War II. As we poured over his work, Dan knowing by heart what he could no longer see, Hattie turned on the radio and began a kind of private, swaying dance, singing along to ‘Summertime’ in a breathy alto. Then they wanted to take me out for fast food, but I was exhausted, and badly needed to make sense of my notes. Suddenly sad at the idea of leaving them alone in their beautiful temple, I ran to the car and fetched a crumpled bag of what Granny Griffin would have called sorry-lookin’ peaches that I’d bought earlier to give to Nancy Basket, and presented it instead to Dan and Hattie by way of thanks.
‘He didn’t bore me. That’s why I married Laddie,’ Hattie said as she saw me out. ‘It doesn’t do to be bored in life.’
The next day in the breakfast room of Madison’s Days Inn (set on a commercial strip a respectable distance from the historic downtown), I ate my Cheerios under an amateur watercolor of Rosehill. The contemporary painting imagined the house in pre Civil War days, with several Uncle Remus-looking figures toiling – they were too picturesque to be merely working – in front. Yesterday Dan Hicky had said that an old man, a former slave, had knocked on the door around the turn of the century and told his grandmother that the house used to have a balcony in the shape of a heart leading to a second story porch. The painting, however, portrayed mid-nineteenth-century Rosehill in its current incarnation, with a traditional porch stretched vertically across the façade. I felt smug for hours.
I also read a booklet Hattie had given me that she’d written about Madison – I was trying to avoid several elderly members of a bus tour who were holding bagels over their eyes like Lone Ranger masks – and learned two things: how to make ‘Georgia’s Coke-Cola [sic] Salad’ (red Jello, crushed pineapple, Bing cherries, cream cheese, and ‘two cans Coke-a-Cola’), and that the former owner of Cyclorama had lived in Madison.
