My Two Souths

Dust Storm, Pampa Texas, April 14, 1935

     In my life, I've known two Souths.  The first I lived, the second, I learned from books.  My lived South was my two grandmothers. One was a from South Carolina family, but born in Texas. When I knew her, she lived in New York City.  The other was a Martha's Vineyard Yankee by way of Kansas City, Kansas.  When I knew her, she had retired to St. Michaels, Maryland.  

     

     The born Southerner was an ideal grandmother for a child whose parent's marriage was failing. Indulgent, physically warm, well-travelled and well-educated, her New York apartment was decorated with furniture and bibelot from her former residences and travels.  She couldn't cook, and let me subsist on Ritz Crackers, Wispride cheese and Coca-Cola when I visited from the suburbs.

     The Yankee grandmother had a vinegary mouth.  I couldn't seem to be well-behaved around her.  She lived in a white-pillared house on some 10 or 20 acres on a tidewater creek.  The grounds were maintained by what was called a colored, William.  The gardens, the fields and the barn were his kingdom. He grew the strawberries which the so-called colored cook, with my grandmother's assistance, preserved.  Lunch and dinner were eaten in the dining room. There was a buzzer under the table to summon the cook to serve.  

     I first knew the South as a place, as a child visiting St. Michaels.  The marshy, humid smells were layered with the scent of gasoline, clams, and crabs from the town dock adjacent to the property.  In the morning I could hear the engines of trucks and boats, and the voices of the watermen setting out for the day.  This and the mild weather made it a heavenly spot to visit from the snow-bound, and for me, lily-white North.

     In the years since then, I've made a point of visiting places associated with the Southern grandmother's family.  There's the almost deserted village of Cokesbury, South Carolina and the former cotton growing region around Waxahachie, Texas.  There's also the Texas State Asylum for the Insane in Terrell, where my grandmother and her sister confined, for a time, an eccentric nephew.  (A Texas lawyer got him released.)

     My last visit to the South, as an adult, was a visit to Pampa, Texas, on the fringe of the Dustbowl of Oklahoma.  I went to bury my born Southern grandmother's grand-niece, who wanted to be buried with her parents there.  I'd known her when we both lived in Washington, DC, which doesn't really count as a Southern city.  She didn't speak much about Pampa, saying only that the wind never stopped blowing.  She's still accurate about the weather.  Pampa today, to the dismay of many of its white residents,  has a large Mexican population.  It also has a Thai restaurant, owned and staffed by Laotian refugees who live in Amarillo.  

     My second South,  I've learned from books.  My father, a writer and only a generation removed from the South, had a curiosity about the region.  His guide was a New York Stater who'd written about his sojourn there as Stars Fell on Alabama; a volume not universally popular in the South. Together they took a river-boat down the Mississippi for Life Magazine, and met with other authors like Roark Bradford and Dubose Hayward in New Orleans.  Both would today be considered appropriators of Black culture.

     I learned much more about my Southern roots from genealogy.  In the course of research, I've seen the "Slave Schedule" from the 1860 census which shows my great-great-grandfather, Francis Ambrose Connor, as the owner of twenty-nine slaves.  I've seen the record of the litigation amongst his eleven children over the fate of those twenty-nine.  Presumably, it's the sale of his share that sent him to Medical School and set up his drugstore in Waxahachie.  There's a picture of my grandmother and her sister with their Black nurse, Hattie Hix, who is just a few years older than they.

     So there I am, an implicated sojourner.  I can't claim the South, I don't want to, but I can't disclaim it, either.