An ordinary girl born into a family of witches by Diana Wagman

An ordinary girl born into a family of witches

I wanted to see what my mom and sister did. But as bad spirits descended on our lives, I also longed for normalcy

Diana Wagman

Topics: Life stories, Real Families, Witchcraft, Missouri, Mental Illness, Supernatural Powers, Spirits, Editor's Picks, Life News

 

 

The author's family: Her grandmother, sister, and mother.

“Do you see them?”  My mother crouched in the big green chair and stared at the wall above the fireplace.

I didn’t see anything.

“Right there!  And there!”

It was early evening in our suburban Maryland home. I’d come downstairs from doing my eighth grade homework to ask about dinner.

“Spiders!”  Mom pointed.  “Giant spiders.  Crawling on the walls.  The ceiling.”

“What should I do?”

I didn’t see them, but she did and I thought there was a good chance the spiders were real — if invisible to my 12-year-old eyes.  Mom wanted me to get the broom, open the front door and shoo them out.  I did as I was told.  Who was I to argue?  Everyone in my family saw things I couldn’t see.

That’s what came from being the one ordinary girl born into a family of witches.

My maternal grandmother could see the spirit world.  She had regular sightings and conversations with supernatural creatures.  She also found lost objects, healed minor illnesses and predicted the future for her friends and family.  I was visiting Grandma one hot summer in Missouri and a neighbor showed up at the back door.  She was upset.  She had lost her garnet tea ring.  My grandmother held the neighbor’s hands and chanted.  Then she gave her a glass of sweet tea and told her to go home and look in her silverware drawer.  Sure enough, the neighbor telephoned, the ring was there under the spoons and forks.

My mother saw ghosts and omens and had her own gifts.  She always knew who was calling on the phone and even what letters we would receive.  My older half-sister regularly spoke to the dead.  In Missouri, for some reason, being a witch made sense.  The town where my mother grew up was tiny with one stop-light, and our family, the Jacksons — proud, if distant, descendants of President Andrew Jackson — had lived there for generations.  My grandmother knew everyone and everyone knew her and by extension everything about my mother and my sister and me.  They knew my mother’s first boyfriend and what she wore to her high school prom.  They knew I wanted to be a dancer and that my sister was in all the advanced classes at school.  The older folks remembered my great-grandmother and my great-aunts and uncles and told me long, meandering stories about horses and flower shows and barn dances. Everything seemed out of another time. The houses were big, Victorian, old and rundown.  As a child I thought it was because witches lived in all of them and witch houses were dilapidated by definition.  Later, of course, I understood the town was dying economically, the loans coming due on the surrounding farms, the small shops being swallowed up by the Wal-Mart 30 minutes down the highway.

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But as a kid visiting for two weeks each summer, Missouri was all about the magic.  My grandmother pointed out fairies in the grass, the elf that lived under the bridge, an angel she saw one night granting wishes in a cornfield.  I never saw anything, but I believed it was there.  My sister saw the elves and angels.  My sister has the same green eyes with dark rings, the same fair skin and light hair as all the Jackson girls.  I take after my pragmatic, Jewish dad — my mother’s second husband.  I have dark, curly hair and brown eyes and not a magical bone in my body.  Grandma knew my father’s blood was to blame.  My sister was blunt about my lack of mystical talent.  “Half-breed,” she called me.  I liked that better than when she said I was “normal” or “ordinary.”  In my family ordinary was the worst thing anyone could be.  My mother kicked my ordinary father out of the house when I was 4.

At home, in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C., we mostly kept our abilities to ourselves. We were supposed to be a single-parent family like any other.  Mom taught first grade at a public elementary school.  She drove me to dance lessons and went to the grocery store.  No one showed up at our door asking for predictions or remedies or for Mom to find lost jewelry.  My sister kept quiet about the visits the deceased made to her dreams, the visions she had in the upstairs bathroom or outside in the yard, all the things she talked about freely with Grandma.  Yes, we knew there were no coincidences, nothing just happened, it was all because of magic, but we didn’t talk about it outside the family.

Mom said the world was too harsh, too mundane, too stupid to understand that we were special.  My childhood was fun. We danced and sang.  We built fairy houses in the backyard, made up chants to keep the goblins away, and every night we left cookies on my windowsill for Peter Pan.  Anything, everything, was possible.

In my preteen years, Mom began to embrace her skills more and more.  She said our house was haunted and that she spoke regularly to the ghost.  The ghost told her things, helped her make decisions, even occasionally what we would have for dinner.  If we made the green light on the drive to school, it was the spell my mother had recited.  Signs and omens appeared regularly both in the sky and in the Washington Post.  It was a little much, even for my sister.  She was a teenager by then, more interested in sex and drugs than magic.  She did not want to be embarrassed.  Mom was quick to point out who among our friends was evil and who was fine.  My sister always liked the evil boys.

One day Mom ran out of the house so abruptly she left the front door standing open.  I saw her on the sidewalk, talking, laughing with someone I, of course, couldn’t see.  She came back inside, smiling with happy tears in her eyes.  Her father, long dead, had come walking down our street.

“Didn’t you see him?” she asked me.  “Didn’t you?”

When I shook my head, she patted my shoulder, smoothed my curls back and told me she was sorry.

“Maybe it’ll come,” she said.  “One day.”  But I could tell by her face she didn’t really think so.

In Missouri that summer, my grandmother healed my sister’s boyfriend.  Bobby was a local farm boy, cute, with brown arms and a white belly I saw at the swimming hole.  He had warts all over both his hands like a dusting of powdered sugar on his tan skin.  Grandma took off her wedding ring and ran it back and forth over every wart while she chanted.  She said a final prayer, made us all say, “Amen,” and then let him go.  A week later my sister told me Bobby touched her breast with his hand and there wasn’t a wart on it.  That was the year Mom began taking the car to drive to the next town.  She’d smoke a cigarette and use the pay phone to call her new man back in Maryland.

Shortly after we returned home and after the spiders on the wall, my mother broke down.  It was like that, like the car breaking down: She was moving along in her usual way and then one by one things began to clunk and stall and go wrong.  First, she stopped eating anything except Saltines crumbled into a glass of milk.  She ate this with a spoon.  A special spoon and a particular glass that sat always on the counter beside the sink.  She thought other food was poisoned, a unique poison that affected only her, not my sister or me.  Next, she forbade us to wear certain clothes — like turtlenecks — and anything black or purple.  Then there were words that were prohibited.  “Butter.”  “Lavender.”
“Jesus.”  She went to work as a teacher each day, but when she came home something else would fall apart.  She was afraid to answer the phone.  She wouldn’t sleep in her bed.  She played solitaire for hours at a time.

That man she had called on the pay phone, the tarnished Swede who would become my first stepfather, saw less of this than my sister and I.  When he came over in the evening he saw Mom happily making dinner and thought she didn’t eat because she was watching her ever-diminishing weight.  He saw her sitting at the Steinway baby grand in our living room, a gift from my father, and refusing to touch the keys, and he thought it was because she — who used to be a concert pianist — was too shy to play for him.  He didn’t know there were bad spirits lurking in the music waiting to be released by her playing.  In the space between the notes, she whispered to me, that’s where they live.

One morning that spring, my mother came into my room to wake me for school.  I heard her and pretended to be asleep.  I breathed in her scent.  She had almost stopped eating, but still she smelled of all my favorite foods.  She stroked my forehead with her fingers, smoothed back my curly hair as she always did.

“Get up, Diana,” she said.  “It’s your birthday.  You’re 5 years old today.”

It was not my birthday, and I was almost 13.

One by one, other larger parts of her failed.  She threw her shoes — all of them — at my father one Friday when he came to pick me up for a visit because somehow, magically, he had made them all too small.  She set out to drive my sister and me to school and decided to go to Missouri to see her mother instead.  Two hours later, she pulled a U-turn on the highway — drove right across the grassy median — took us to school and dropped us off, saying, “Have a good day” as if nothing had happened.  Then there was the night she didn’t know who I was.  She looked at me, turned to her boyfriend and asked, “Who is that girl?”   I didn’t care about her powers anymore, I just wanted my mother to be normal — whatever that meant for her — but she was badly broken.  The doctors, the hospital, my father coming to stay with us were necessary.  It wasn’t just a flat tire by the side of the road; she had exploded.

I wanted to believe in the elves, the ghosts, the people she spoke to I couldn’t see.  I did not want to believe she was crazy.  I assumed — with desperate, childlike fervor — that the coarse, conventional world had attacked her because she was so fine, so delicate, and so completely extraordinary.  My mother was beautiful. When she walked into a room all eyes followed her, men fell over themselves to light her cigarettes, pull out her chair, buy her a drink.  Even my father, angry and rejected, said she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.  That beauty and vulnerability were part of her power.

“Witchy,” my father told me definitively, “but not witchcraft.”

Post-hospitalization, Mom found a psychiatrist she met with every day.  She was afraid of drugs, wouldn’t even take an aspirin, so she white-knuckled her way through psychosis.  She married the Swede and fighting with him took up a lot of her psychic energy.  If she saw things — which I’m sure she still did — she didn’t share.  When the phone rang or the mail arrived, Mom said nothing.  When she stared over my shoulder and I turned to look, she never said anyone was there.  She ate a variety of soft, milky foods and went to sleep in her bed.  She was easier to live with, but she stopped dancing in the kitchen, stopped making Mickey Mouse pancakes for dinner, and no longer gave advice to people in the grocery store.

That next summer when we visited Grandma, Mom lied about her marriage to the Swede, about the hospital and the shrink.  If Grandma noticed Mom as subdued and uncharacteristically tentative, she didn’t mention it.  We went to church as always, we visited with what family was left, but we didn’t sit around the kitchen table telling ghost stories.

In the middle of one night, Mom crept up to the attic where my sister and I slept and woke us up.  She told us to be quiet so we wouldn’t wake Grandma and had us follow her out to the backyard.  My sister and I exchanged a glance.  Where were we going?  What would she do?   She spread a blanket on the ground and we sat down under the stars and waited.  With a flourish, Mom brought out a secret package of store-bought cookies.  She smiled devilishly and pulled the plastic package open.  My sister and I laughed.  Grandma would have been horrified at the mass-marketed sweets, but we were relieved that Lorna Doones were all Mom wanted to offer.  We whispered and giggled like girls at a slumber party and ate too many cookies.  My sister started to tell us about the dream she’d had about Great Aunt Jessica and my mother shushed her.  She didn’t want to hear it.

I had my one psychic experience the following summer in Missouri.  Grandma was in the hospital dying of lung cancer.  It was a Sunday evening, and I was 14, bored and lonely, sitting on the pale green couch in Grandma’s tidy living room.  It was hot and the windows were open.  The sheer curtains moved in the breeze and the old rocking chair—that now sits in my Los Angeles living room—swayed a little back and forth.  Slowly, fading up into focus, my great-grandmother Granny Jack appeared in that chair.  And then one by one standing around her I saw other people in old-fashioned clothing, about a dozen men and women I didn’t know.  I wasn’t scared. I was thrilled.
The phone rang in the kitchen.  I turned to hear my mother answer it and begin to cry.  My grandmother had died.  When I looked back, all the ghosts were gone.  As my mother and I drove to the hospital I told her what I’d seen.  She patted my thigh, said nothing.  I think she thought I was trying to comfort her.  Maybe I was.

My mom died young.  My sister still speaks to her and Grandma regularly in her dreams and occasionally gets a visitation while she’s cooking.  The signs and omens continue for her, magical occurrences abound.  She has a shrine in her house of old photos of Mom, Grandma, Granny Jack, an aunt or two in sepia tones that I think I recognize from my visitation.  Nothing like that has ever happened to me again.  I never developed any gifts of any kind.  I have always been ordinary.  I used to watch for signs of the abilities in my children.  My daughter is blond and fair.  She’s extraordinary, as is my dark-haired son, but in the best way — the way all children are to their parents.  The way children should be.

I’m not a witch.  I’m not crazy either.  But the fear of being ordinary wakes me in the middle of the night.  I sit up, my heart thumping, and hold my breath, listening for a voice, a footstep, even just a sigh that never comes.  In the dark I can almost feel my mother bending over my bed to smooth my hair off my forehead, but she isn’t really there.  I still wish I had some ability, some connection to beyond. I still want to see what no one else can see.

Diana Wagman is the award-winning author of five novels. Her latest, “Life # 6,” arrives May 2015.

From Jessica - AVENNOIR - THE DESIRE THAT MEMORY COULD FLOW BACKWARDS

Dear Writers and Filmmakers,
Have a very happy Thanksgiving. Here is a gorgeous film link from Jessica with more links to come.
Enjoy.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKOW30gSMuE

Avenoir: The Desire That Memory Could Flow Backwards - YouTube We take it for granted that life moves forward. But you move as a rower moves, facing backwards—you can see where you've been, but not where you're going. An... Watch now...

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Preview YouTube video Avenoir: The Desire That Memory Could Flow Backwards

Avenoir: The Desire That Memory Could Flow Backwards

From Tayari Jones' recommendation: PEN/Fusion Emerging Writings Prize for Young Writers

http://www.pen.org/content/penfusion-emerging-writers-prize-10000

PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize ($10,000)

The PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize is an annual award that recognizes a promising young writer of an unpublished work of nonfiction that addresses a global and/or multicultural issue.

This prize is awarded to an unpublished manuscript by a young writer under the age 35 who has had at least one prior publication (articles, essays, op-eds) in a national magazine or journal. The manuscript submission must be an original, previously unpublished work of nonfiction (essay, memoir, general nonfiction, etc.), written by one person, in English, ranging word length from 8,000 to 80,000. The winning manuscript will be chosen by a panel of three judges: distinguished literary authors selected by PEN’s Literary Awards Committee. Manuscripts are judged blind, to avoid any form of bias; the identity of the author of the winning manuscript (and all other submissions) is not known by any judge until after the decision is finalized. Only PEN awards administrators are able to view the submitter's identity.

This award will be conferred for the first time during PEN's 2015 Awards cycle. 

Eligibility and Submissions for the 2015 Awards

Deadline

Submissions will be accepted now through February 27, 2015

Who is eligible

• An applicant must be a young writer under the age of 35 who has had at least one prior publication (articles, essays, op-eds) in a national magazine or journal.
• The manuscript submission must be an original, previously unpublished work of nonfiction (essay, memoir, general nonfiction, etc.), written by one person, in English, ranging word length from 8,000 to 80,000. 
• Submitted manuscripts may not be under consideration by any publisher during the judging period. 
• Applicants will be notified immediately when manuscripts are no longer under consideration (in Spring 2015 for all but finalists) at which time applicants will be free to submit the work elsewhere for consideration.

How to apply

1. Submit your online appilcation here. Please note that the application will ask for:

a. A $35 submission fee to be paid by credit card when submitting submission form.

b. A short description of the work and also briefly detail how this work connects to a global or multicultural issue.

c. The applicant's resume or CV that provides a history of past publishing experience for PEN staff to review for eligibility. 

d. The 8,000 to 80,000 word manuscript. Please remove any names or identifying information from the manuscript pages, as the award judges will read anonymously.

For any questions, please write to awards@pen.org

ORDINARY SHOES by Brenda Miller - a three minute film and essay

I just found this online and it's exquisite - still photographs and old movie footage and voice over. So much of what you all are doing right now. Enjoy!

https://vimeo.com/111598662

Ordinary Shoes

by BRENDA MILLER • September 18, 201416 Comments

I’m not a graceful child. I bump into furniture, spill drinks, wake with bruises for no discernable reason at all. I trip over carpets, stain my shirts the minute I walk out the door, and my lank hair slithers free of any barrette. But when I put on my roller skates, I turn into a different person, a person who can skim lightly above the surface. I’m going so fast—the world is a blur—but I know how to stop. I can execute the perfect turn that will keep me from spilling off the curb.

And now I’m putting on a show, wondering if my mother is watching: my mother who used to be a star skater, nearly a pro: she has a picture of herself in the short-skirted outfit, one foot pointed to show off her shapely calves, one hand casually settled on her tiny waist. Her hair is sprayed, her lipstick bold. Her skates gleam white, the blonde wood wheels momentarily at rest.

This person exists before the varicose veins, and the heart attacks; before the husband and children and the worry that’s her constant companion. It’s a mother’s job, she says, to worry, though for years during my childhood she displayed a needlepoint on the wall that intoned: “Worry is the advance interest you pay on trouble that seldom comes.” And now, at age eighty, she stands perpetually in the posture of unease: her back bent, hands wringing one another, though when I point this out—uncharitably, making fun—she pulls them apart and says, you’ve got it wrong. Her wrists, she tells me, hurt her all the time, even in her sleep, and she wakes crying, her hands ablaze with pain.

I want to say I’m sorry. I want to enter the old photograph, go out with that young skater onto the smooth floor of the roller rink, its shine high and clean, and take my mother’s hands in mine. We would enter the circling flow of skaters: some who clomp across the floorboards; some who swoosh by, hands clasped behind their backs; some who skate backward with sly grins. Couples skate side-by-side, holding hands both front and back; solo skaters spin in place, slowly, carefully. Some may try jumps and spill onto the rink laughing, while children race, arms pumping, and over it all: the music—music like a carousel, music made for circling—occasionally interrupted by a voice far above, a voice directing us clockwise or counterclockwise, fast or slow, while benched spectators watch from the sidelines as the gyre turns.

My mother and I might skate side-by-side, holding hands like sisters or best friends, her knuckles pressed against mine, wedding ring glinting like the mirrored disco ball above. Or perhaps she could stay young for this excursion: a teenager, and me the elder, watching as if she were my own child, both of us obliged to surrender to momentum. We’ll understand how grace arrives only after long practice, and the falling down is really the most essential part of the glide. Eventually the music squeaks to a stop, and we’ll skate easily back to the bleachers, sit down to untie our long complicated laces. My mother will note how the white leather is now scuffed with our passage, and she’ll rub at the stains with her thumb—licking and scrubbing, licking and scrubbing, saliva, as all mothers know, the most potent of cleansers. I’ll quickly tie up my sneakers and wait patiently until my mother is ready to put on her ordinary shoes.

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Brenda Miller directs the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in English Studies at Western Washington University. She is the author of four essay collections, including Listening Against the Stone, Blessing of the Animals, and Season of the Body. She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes.

Miss Alice Lee - Atticus in a Skirt

From my blog today:

Miss Alice Lee

I wrote these stories of Monroeville folks in 2009. I was lucky enough to get to meet Miss Alice Lee for a moment when she was working in her office one spring day in 2007. Today I will drive down to Monroeville for her funeral, and I'm taking Norah. She lived an incredible life, practicing law until the age of 100.

I've been to Monroeville around countless times now, and each time I drive through the town I think of Miss Alice practicing law since 1943. When I first wrote the biography about Harpe Lee, a man in Monroeville said to me, "You got it wrong in your book. Miss Alice works six days a week at the law office. You need to fix that in your book. You said she just works three days a week. No ma'am. It's six days. Fix it."

Harper Lee called her sister "Atticus in a skirt." I think of Mary Murphy's beautiful documentary "HEY BOO," and her friendship with Miss Alice. (See Mary's article from THE DAILY BEAST below.) I'll have much more to write after today, but I want to get on the road to Monroeville with Norah, who first saw Monroeville at the age of eight when we were doing school visits in Monroe and Wilcox County.

LINKS OF MISS ALICE LEE
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/19/365120931/alice-lee-sister-of-mockingbird-author-dies-at-103
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/montgomeryadvertiser/obituary.aspx?n=alice-lee&pid=173221455
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/01/harper-lee-s-sister-alice-is-100-still-practices-law-and-remembers-everything.html


MEETING MISS ALICE LEE

Miss Alice is the older sister of Harper Lee who still works three days a week at the law office in Monroeville, Alabama. She will be 98 on September 11, 2007. I had contacted her about an interview, and I received a call from her secretary on our first morning in Monroeville. The secretary said that Miss Alice would not be talking to me out respect for her sister. I said that I understood, and I asked if I might bring my children's novels to the law office, which was located in a bank building off the town square. The secretary said that would be fine and that she would be there all day.

Our plan was to drop my children's books off with the secretary to give to the Lee sisters and then leave immediately. Maybe they would see from my books (akin to Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables) that I wasn't out to write a sensational biography. Yet, when we arrived at the law office about an hour later, the secretary was no where around. Only Miss Alice Lee was there. I was so nervous, and so was my sister, Keely, who'd come with me for the week of interviews for moral support and note-taking. Miss Alice is also deaf and so did not hear us come in the door. We stood in the hallway within her sight range debating what to do, while she stared down at her desk paging through documents.

After a few tense moments of deliberating, we just decided to leave the books on the secretary's desk. It was then Miss Alice Lee looked up and saw us. Her white hair up in neat bun, she wore a lavender suit and tennis shoes. A flash of concern crossed her face, and I explained who we were and that we were not staying but only wanted to drop off the books. She looked at me carefully and said, "I will give these books to my sister, Nelle Harper, but she is suffering from macular degeneration and cannot read them."

I said, "They are for you too." Then she gave me a big smile and we said good-bye.

We got outside and breathed in the warm April sunshine, our hearts pounding. We later learned that there is a saying in the town of Monroeville: "If you don't know something, go ask Alice." She's been working at the law office since 1943."

i later learn a story of Miss Alice when she was on the committee to select a minister. One man’s name came up and all Miss Alice said to the committee was, “I’m too old to be preached to by a fool.”

(Below is a picture I found on Facebook, which captures the beautiful essence of Miss Alice Lee.)

Other Monroeville stories from 2009

MR. GEORGE THOMAS JONES

We met George Thomas Jones on Tuesday evening in his home. He is the town historian and newspaper columnist, whose columns have been made into books, "Happenings in Old Monroeville, Volumes One and Two." He was born in 1922 and moved to Monroeville in 1926 and was about three years ahead of Harper Lee in school. He has also been caring for his wife, Louise, who has been bedridden for fifteen years with Parkinson's disease. Louise and Harper Lee were good friends and played golf together.

Bunny Hines, the librarian, remarked about him, "George Thomas Jones will have a jewel in his crown!"

Jones' mother started the lunchroom program at school. She made ham, pimento, and banana & peanut butter sandwiches. Baby Ruth candy bars cost a nickel. Vegetable soup and crackers were ten cents. She knew the country kids couldn't go home for lunch, and she felt the school needed a lunchroom, so she set up one in the school basement.

Sitting in his living room, we were transported back to the days of old Monroeville. He told of us childhood games like "Hot Grease in the Kitchen" and watching "Nelle" take on three boys on the playground after a hair-pulling incident.

But one of the funniest stories was a memory of Truman Capote. "I was a soda jerk at a local drugstore, and Truman was two years younger than me. He was a short runty kid with long yellow hair. He came in one day and said, ‘Boy I sure would like something good but y'all ain't got it.'"

I said, "Truman, what do you want? I'll fix you anything you want."

Truman said, "Fine! Fix me a Broadway Flip!"

Jones admitted he had no idea what a "Broadway Flip" was, which embarrassed him, but all he could think to say was,

"‘Boy, I'll flip you!' And I flipped him off the stool. He flew out of here so fast."

We must have talked for at least two hours that night, and Jones became a friend over the next two years. When I didn't know the answer to something, he would reply by email in lightning speed. And if he didn't know the answer, he would go dig it up. The gift of this book was that the majority of people I interviewed and got to know were in their 80s and 90s.

JENNINGS CARTER

Jane Ellen Clark, the curator at the Monroe County Heritage Museum, told me that I had to interview Jennings Carter, the likely inspiration for Jem Finch, since Carter, his cousin, Truman Capote, and Harper Lee played together constantly as children. She said she got chills the first time she met him because she noticed that his arm was broken in the same place as Jem's arm.

We met Jennings Carter in Clark's office, and like she said, his left arm hung shorter and seemed to be at a ninety-degree angle to his body. He had a shy smile and right away said, "I don't know what I can tell you that hasn't been said."

I asked about the games he'd play with Truman and Nelle. He said the Truman and Nelle loved to read the comics with Truman's elderly cousin, Sook, and sometimes Sook would get the word wrong, but she never minded if they corrected her. Jennings said that Sook did send a fruitcake to President Roosevelt, but that he never wrote back.

"I imagine the White House must get a lot of presents at Christmas," Jennings smiled. "We were in a dry county, but Jenny kept the best whiskey in the house. Sook never had to go to the bootlegger the way Truman said."

He talked about the apple tree that divided the Lee and Faulk properties. "Jenny Faulk (where Truman lived) and Nelle's mother shared a border in their yards. An apple tree was on that border. Each claimed the apples and would kick them into their own yards."

Carter said that Nelle was just another kid. "We didn't even know she was a girl. She was courageous. She would ball up her fists and hit you like a man." He and Truman used to go riding on a mule, and when I asked the mule's name, he said with a grin, "Nelle."

I asked him about his arm, and he said he broke it falling off a roof when he was twelve. He said that when they were kids that Saturday sometimes meant a double feature. Sook would give Nelle, Jennings and Truman "Jenny's store money" for the movie (a dime each). Jenny also was an artist but her drawings burned in a house fire. Carter said, "The fire was on the coldest night of the year." I couldn't help thinking it was like Miss Maudie's fire.

MR. A.B. BLASS

"The Yankees hit the consonants, but Southerners hit the vowels," was how A.B. Blass described the difference in speech between the North and South.

Our interview with A.B. Blass went for six hours. It started with dinner at the Radley Café and a trip to the town square. In the South, a story takes as long as it takes. That is the way it was with Blass, too, a childhood friend of Harper Lee's.

Even as adults, Blass and Harper Lee swapped stories whenever she came home from New York. She liked to work at her father's office in the mornings, and when she'd see Blass leave his hardware store, she'd call out, "A.B.!" and he'd say, "Nelle Lee!" And the two of them would have coffee and catch up on gossip.

As a high school boy, the clock tower of the courthouse proved irresistible to Blass. He explained that a man who "liked a drink" happened to be in charge of winding the clock. Blass said, "The man gave me the key to go up there if I'd wind it up for him. Well, this one time I got this idea to add an extra gong after clock struckmidnight. I hit the bell with a heavy piece of metal. The next day at church everybody was saying, "Did you hear the clock struck 13 times last night?" Blass did it again the following week, and the old clock man said to him, "A.B., I need the key back. Clock is broke, striking 13 times, upsetting folks."

Blass told him, "I'll fix it for you." He quit striking the clock.

He was in charge of the annual Christmas Parade in the 1950s, and the local black high school had marched without incident for years until the KKK tried to make it "Whites Only." Instead of caving into the KKK's demands, Bass canceled the parade. That night, the KKK rode in their cars to Blass's house. They circled the house with their inside car lights on, so Blass and his family could see them in their robes. His wife and daughters were crying in terror. Blass called police departments in three different counties, but no one would come out.

Finally, they went away, but the next morning, Harper Lee's father, Mr. A.C. Lee came up to Blass and said, "Son, you did the right thing. You stand by your guns. It'll be all right."

TWO ALABAMA GIRLS: ARTELIA BENDOLPH and HARPER LEE

Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, and Artelia Bendolph was born on August 7, 1927. I am fairly sure they never met though they grew up just thirty miles from each other in the Black Belt of Alabama. Harper Lee came from Monroeville. Artelia Bendolph was raised in Gee's Bend, a place accessible by a ten-minute ferry ride or an hour over rough back roads to Camden.

Harper Lee was known as "Nelle," but I don't know if Bendolph had a nickname or not. There is not much written about her. She wasn't famous. The picture of her is more famous than she ever was. I know that she left Gee's Bend for Mobile approximately the same time Lee left Monroeville for New York City. Lee moved to New York to become a writer. Bendolph left to find a job in Mobile to send money home.

Harper Lee was white.

Artelia Bendolph was black.

Sometimes when you write a story, you have to cut the parts that you really want to keep. During the final editing stages, I had to cut out the story of Artelia Bendolph and the Gee's Bend section, but I couldn't get this picture of her out of my head. Arthur Rothstein took the picture of her in 1937. He was an official photographer for the Farm Security Administration, under President Roosevelt, and his job was to travel with other photographers during the Great Depression to take pictures of the rural poor.

In 1962, approximately during the same time as Hollywood began shooting the film ofTo Kill A Mockingbird, the Gee's Bend ferry service was stopped by local white officials hoping to discourage civil rights protests. The ferry's closure isolated all Gee's Bend residents from their jobs, emergency services, shopping, and most significantly, voting. P.C. "Lummie" Jenkins, the sheriff of Wilcox County, said, "We didn't close the ferry because they were black. We closed it because they forgot they were black."

The ferry was closed for 44 years and reopened in 2006. About a month ago, I decided to take the ferry from Camden to Gee's Bend to see what it looked like and to meet some of the women quilters, who continue to make extraordinary quilts in a little trailer. The sunlight hit the Alabama River as the ferry made its crossing. I think I went looking for my next story.

Holding On (2)

Holding On (Dialogue)

            When I first held you that February day in 2002 I knew that I opened my arms to a loving baby boy.  The doctors and nurses wheeled your mother into the delivery room.  I watched as the doctor pull a bright light over her abdomen.  Swiftly the doctor ran a knife across Tosha’s stomach as this revealed red, brown, and orange colored flesh inside her stomach.  I thought to myself what are they going to do to her.  I always thought babies exited the mother’s body through the vagina but this procedure was different.  The doctor answered what I thought was a silly question, “why did you cut open her stomach” to which he replied “she cannot have a vaginal birth.”  Oh,” was the only response I could make as the doctor informed me “it would be too risky.”     

            “Can I hold him” I said to the nurse who rushed you to the waiting blankets. 

“Ma’am now you’ll have to wait outside.”

I exited the delivery room and watched outside the small window as they carried you to a container and placed your little body inside.  Covered in a white blanket with thin blue stripes, I knew that inside I had been given my first great-grandson.  You didn’t know me but I knew you.  We played together even when you were still in your mother’s womb. 

As the months progressed until the day you were born I imagined that I would hold you for the first time.  I did.  I watched as the doctors and nurses brought you into my world and placed your thin dark body into a warm blanket.   Maybe the doctor held you two feet in hand, upside down, and spanked you.  Doctors do things like that to see if you have a voice.  I don’t remember because I was too overjoyed.  I was saying under my breath, hand him to me, hand him to me right now. 

            Your birth brings our family into its fourth generation:  Great-grandmother, Mary Jean; grandmother, Linda; and of course your mother, Latosha.  Anyway, I knew that in a few moments I would hold you and say to myself, “Gramma loves this little boy.”  I left the delivery room knowing that I would forever hold you in my arms.  When I was allowed to receive you from the nursery I gently pushed your cart, for lack of a better word, around to your mother’s waiting arms. I placed my right hand behind your head with my left hand on your bottom so as to get a good look at you even though you could not see me; I felt that my loving presence would embrace your little body.   I held you until your mother said, “Can I have my son?”  She had to ask for you because I did not want to give you up.  “What is his name, I asked her.”  She said, “Kolin, Kolin Brooks Rowell.”  With a name like Kolin Rowell I immediately laughed and said, “Colin Powell.”  “No,” your mother said, “Kolin Rowell.”  I thought, oh! What kind of name is that?  People will call him Colin Powell.  For many months I continued to call you Colin (co-lynn) until I realized I had my own Kolin (ca-lynn). 

            Now you are two years old and able to run through each room of my two-bedroom apartment.  I mean literally run from the living room to the kitchen and in and out of the rooms where we sleep.  I turned off the lamplight while singing “Rock a bye baby on the tree top.”  As I pulled you close to me the word, “go to sleepy little baby”  floated from my lips.  Out when the light and I held you close to my body so that sleep would come to you.    “Simmer down Kolin,” was all I could say as you gathered up your toys.  The excitement of playing with hockey sticks, footballs, all kinds of toys thrilled you.  I wanted to sleep, “can I go to sleep now” I says in a soft voice.  Then, as you drifted off to sleep I carefully placed your limp body into my bed.   As I laid you down your big eyes opened and your face emitted a glow as if to say “thank you Gramma for making me go to sleep.”  I couldn’t help picking you up once more to let you know that I thank you for being in my life.  As I lay you down you drifted off to sleep until 5:00 a.m. in the morning when you awoke to another round of swiftly running throughout the apartment.  Even though Gramma was tired from last night I awake refreshed and ready to run the course of the apartment with you.  After about two hours you began to wind down.  I took you into my arms; placed myself on my sofa and rocked you back and forth until you fell asleep again. 

            Eleven years old I still hold you in my arms.  Great-grandmother now a sixty-year old undergraduate student majoring in English/Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham I still find time to shoot a few hoops (basketball) with you.  When you aggravate your four year old sister, London and your eight year old brother, Sephan, I chase you through the house, running up and down the stairs, in one room and out the other.   I’ll bet you didn’t expect that from a great-grandmother, Ha!  I’ll bet you don’t even think of me as a great-grandmother?  After the chase subsides we sit beside each other and laugh about who won. 

            “Let’s do it again gramma.”

            “I have to go to work.”

            “I wanna play.”

            “Maybe later.”

 I hold on to the dream that I will be alive to see you fulfill your dreams and attend a University because great-grandmother has paved the way.