The Queen of Palmyra (40 page)

I look straight into my mother’s widened, blameless eyes. Something in me curls up to strike, to say maybe none of it would have happened if she’d
been
there. But then I don’t say it because, even after everything, she still smells like burnt sugar, and all I can see is a woman half my age, her hair like wings, racing the devil to the bootlegger, rescuing someone else’s precious cargo. I walk to the door and open it for her.

On the way out, she stops and looks at me as if she’s seeing me for the first time. “You were afraid,” she whispers.

“So were you.”

She nods. “Eva was the only one who wasn’t afraid of him.”

“She was afraid,” I said. “But she didn’t run.”

At first light the next morning I head for Roselawn Nursing Facility down in Chalmette. I head down Claiborne. People cluster in clumps up and down the street. They look at the sky and one another. They shake their heads. Some wait on their front stoops with suitcases beside them. The traffic is terrible and it takes me a good two hours to get there, though I’m going in the opposite direction of most people.

The parking lot at Roselawn looks deserted. Inside, all the breakfast things have been cleared away. Two old men sit at a table playing checkers. I continue down the long fluorescent hall. A woman clutching a frayed doll dozes in her wheelchair. Daddy’s door is shut. I go in without knocking. He is in bed asleep. His
roommate is out or dead. Here, I suppose, you never know. I go back out in the hall and drink a long time from the water fountain. My head is pounding. I get two aspirin out of the bottle in my purse and swallow them with some more water. Then I go back into his room and pull a chair up to his bed, in the process kicking aside his brick shoe on the floor. He’s had physical therapy and now walks with a walker. Judging by the empty breakfast tray, he eats like a horse.

I watch him sleep. His thinness makes his nose loom large and beaked. With that nose and his bald head, he looks as if he’s finally transmogrified into the Nighthawk of my imagination. Old and loony before his time, as if the swamp of ugliness in his head has turned into quicksand and sucked him in completely. After I stashed him down in Chalmette, I suspected they drugged him more than necessary since he’d lost most of his mind and strength but not his meanness. More power to them is what I thought.

Now I want him awake. I push the button on his bed to raise him to a sitting position. I poke his shoulder. “Wake up.” I can’t bear to call him Daddy though it’s on the tip of my tongue. I poke him again, harder. He grunts and his eyelids flutter. There is a crust around them. “Hey,
wake up
!”

“What, what,” he mutters, then turns over and looks at the door, confused and irritated. He hasn’t been shaved today. The bristles on his cheeks and chin are white.

He struggles to sit up in bed. As he throws back the sheet, I smell his old man filth. I sit back in my chair. He peers at me in a predatory way. I cringe a little, still the rabbit.

“
What
?” he says fretfully. “What you waking me up for?” I can tell he doesn’t know me, though I now have his full attention.

I lean forward into the stink of his excrement. His breath
is sour. There are deep pits in his face. “Daddy, you killed Eva Greene. I saw you do it.
I saw you
.”

He blinks a few times. Then, ever so precisely, he draws his gnarled right hand, stained brown between his judging finger and his warning finger, from under the sheet and lifts it slowly as if it is monstrously heavy and puts his finger in the position between his mouth and the beaked nose. The sign of silence. He reaches over and fumbles around for my hand. He knows me now. He knows I can keep a secret.

The hair rises on the back of my neck. “
You killed her
.” I whisper the words but I feel as if I’m shouting. I lean over him, down into his face and seek out his eyes under their hooded lids. I want some acknowledgment of the truth. A nod, a blink, a twitch. What I discover there is nothing at all. His pupils look like saucers somebody has poured milk into. I haven’t seen him for so long that I didn’t realize he had developed cataracts. He probably can’t see much of anything.

Now he falls back on his pillow, almost instantly asleep. His mouth opens and he begins to snore softly, contentedly. I get up and walk out of the room. As I go down the deadly bright hall, I contemplate how beautiful the retina is, how it looks like a flower of a million colors. How those colors, the most vivid you’ll ever see and a thousand shades of each, never stay in the same place but are always flowing one into another, becoming the inverse of themselves. My father’s retinas must have looked like that; everyone’s do. And what did those lovely retinas see when they saw Eva walking down that narrow dusty street? They, if not he, must have registered the yellow of her scarf, the neatness of the navy blue suit, the purposeful gleam in her eye. The way she had of putting one foot directly in front of the other when she walked as if she were balancing a heavy load. The backward slope of her shoulder under the weight of the briefcase. The curve of hip and
breast. Glint of rhinestones from her glasses frames. And where did all this information from my father’s beautiful retinas go, in the mind’s locked box? What language did it travel to on its airship of innocent, deliberate synapses? Not to the words
beauty
or
strength
. Not to live and let live. Not even to lust, though there must have been some of that. The word, if he ever thought it, would have been his father’s.
Impurity.
The foul and the feculent, corrupt and defiled. Sons who were not sons. Daughters who were more than daughters. Flesh and bone gone wrong. Tainted by blood. Ruined.

At the front door the nursing home manager catches up with me. She is huffing and puffing. “You’re not taking Mr. Forrest? Most families are evacuating their family members. I thought you had come to get him.”

“No,” I say coldly. “I’m not taking him.” I keep on walking.

My evacuation plan is to start driving, not north but east, east to the marshes and east toward the storm. I will cross the four narrow covered bridges, their overhead girders glittering like rhinestones, over water that is both fresh and salt, surly and choppy. The water will soon be getting higher, licking the bottoms of the bridges. I will cross over inlets with alligator swamp tour signs, but no boats. At some point, I will take a right toward the Gulf. I will drive on forsaken roads past boarded-up houses until the road dead-ends into the Gulf of Mexico. Then I will sit on the hood of my mother’s car facing the dark, uneasy water, and I will wait.

So I drive east, despite all the signs and arrows and roadblocks telling me to go the other way. The strip of flat swampland I drive on gets narrower and narrower as the expanse of gray water on either side grows larger. In the swamp on either side of the road,
fingers of murky water make paths through the tall grasses as if giant hands are reaching out for something down in the marshes. As I drive, a sentence takes shape in my head. I begin to diagram it.
The girl saw everything through the dirty window, but she didn’t say Daddy stop and she didn’t tell.

And what would he have done if I’d banged on the window and made him pause? Would he have turned the screwdriver on me? I was the one who zigzagged over the field toward home. He took Eva by surprise and she froze in the tall grasses.

When I reach the Gulf, the beach is deserted, not even any seagulls on the pilings out in the water. There is a beach road that turns left, following the sea. I ride on it for a few miles across a low bridge that the water is slapping over.

When I can, I pull off the road and get out of the car. Through the spray and drizzle I see a pelican sitting on a dead branch a ways inland. Perched on her branch, an awkward, hunched thing, she contemplates a still pool of water. We both wait for a good long while; I watch her while she watches the water. I think perhaps she is crippled; it is not a natural way for a pelican to fish. It has started to rain. Behind me the leaden sky and gray ocean have become indistinguishable.

Once, I watched Eva wash herself at the kitchen sink. The afternoon light had splashed on her wet arms and made them sparkle against Zenie’s green leaf curtains. She had dried herself on a blue and white checked towel. Ray and I had sat at opposite ends of the table with our notebooks open, waiting for our lesson. Then she had turned from the sink and smiled at us and sat down between us, groaning that her feet hurt, and given us our sentence.

Now, in a motion both hesitant and sure, the pelican gathers her hollow bones and lifts, her pouch full. It is a heavy gathering, a splatter and a moment where it seems she will fail to rise. When
I follow her path through the fog and drizzle, I see another road up a ways. It turns left, away from the water. It is a sharp turn, the kind a story can make, but not a railroad track or the line of a diagram.

A story, who can know its secret night journeys or what precious cargo it might yet carry? Why it says you go or you stay, or wears its hat just so? As for the rest, here’s how it begins: The girl, no, the woman named Flo gets back into her mother’s car and cranks it up and turns the windshield wipers on high. She drives up the road through the fog and the rain and the years behind her and the years ahead of her, shivering, soaked to the skin, her hair in a tangle. In a few hours she will pass a family walking along the road—a man, woman, and boy—and she will stop and pick them up. In another month she will drive to Millwood and tell what she saw, though by then her father will be another untagged, unclaimed body in the state morgue.

Right now, though, the best she can do is to peer through the windshield and make sure she doesn’t miss that sharp left, finding herself, to her astonishment, back in it because the story—the lines and the chalk, the upturned faces, the river that cupped them all—had already begun to miss her.

About the author

   
Meet Minrose Gwin

About the book

   
On Writing
The Queen of Palmyra

Read on

Praise for
Wishing for Snow

Excerpt from
Wishing for Snow

About the author

Meet Minrose Gwin

M
INROSE
G
WIN
has been a writer all of her working life, starting out as a newspaper and wire service reporter covering politics, human interest stories, and the overnight police beat.
Wishing for Snow
, a memoir about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, was published in 2004 and hailed by
Booklist
as “eloquent” and “lyrical”—“a real life story we all need to hear.” Minrose has published creative nonfiction and poetry in the
Women’s Review of Books
,
IKON
, and several book collections, and has taught creative writing workshops at universities and the University of New Mexico Taos Writers’ Conference. Wearing her other hat as a literary critic, she has written three scholarly books (one a CHOICE book of the year) and is a coeditor of
The Literature of the American South
,
published by W.W. Norton, and the
Southern Literary Journal
. She currently teaches contemporary fiction at the University of North Carolina and lives in Chapel Hill. Like her character Florence, Minrose grew up in Small-town Mississippi. This is her first novel.

About the book

On Writing
The Queen of Palmyra

The Queen of Palmyra
plunges deeply into the psyches of some riveting characters; it also tackles the big issue of racially motivated violence. How did you go about juggling those two balls?

Very gingerly. Win Forrest is a particularly risky character. He’s so despicable that he could easily drop to the level of a stereotype. We have to understand why he does the things he does, that terrible father of his who drives him every day of his life to uphold “purity.” On the opposite end of the spectrum, Eva can’t be just a saintly victim; she has to have her quirks, she has to be feisty and vulnerable, generous and selfish, fiercely intelligent and naive. That’s why Eva’s voice erupts in the next to last chapter; she can’t be a mute victim.

This book is fiction but is based in the 1960s South. Did you personally live any of this history when you grew up in Mississippi?

I lived the white side of this history and observed the black side. My babysitter, Eva Lee Miller, to whom the book is dedicated, was African American, and I’d be dropped off at her house on the black side of town and spend hours there “helping” her sew and cook and clean,
though I doubt I was of much help. Like Zenie Johnson, she was a witty, brilliant woman who fended off the burial insurance man with queenly aplomb. She had a wicked sense of humor where white people were concerned, and she let me know from the get-go that she didn’t trust any of us. She and her husband, Hiram Miller, worked several different jobs to make ends meet. I visited her in her home until she died, and we wrote letters back and forth when I went off to college. Over the years, I became deeply attached to her and admired her enormously. She worked hard and she never gave up; she was a model for me. In my own family, my mother was rather progressive for the times, though not openly so, and my stepfather treated African Americans respectfully. But from an early age, I had the feeling that something was very wrong. I think of my generation of Southerners as the bridge between the Jim Crow days of this novel and the present, when things are far from perfect, but greatly improved. Would Medgar Evers or Eva or anyone fighting for the right to vote in the early sixties have expected the election of a black president by 2008? Even Myrlie Evers-Williams, Medgar Evers’s widow, has said she didn’t think it would happen this soon.

Uncle Wiggily, Br’er Rabbit, Nancy Drew, Bomba the Swamp Boy—this book is so much about stories.

Yes, how they mold us, how we depend so desperately on them, how they can
make us whole or tear us into a million pieces. We tell ourselves stories that make our lives bearable. These stories shape us and show us how to make sharp turns and put one foot in front of the other—they can trip us up or take us by the hand and lead us home. The stories Florence hears and reads help her empathize with others. Because of that empathy, she casts aside the Bomba story, though it sinks into her unconscious in an insidious way. For her own survival, she must take to heart Uncle Wiggily’s optimism and Nancy Drew’s intrepidness. She must be tricky and scheming like Br’er Rabbit in order not to get stuck in the briar patch.

Like Eva and Flo, you’re a teacher. Do you see teaching as a major element of
The Queen of Palmyra?

Teachers can change lives and open spaces in the world where there were none, in large ways and small. Eva does this for Florence; she arms her with “the sentence” so that she can make it through the fifth grade and move on with her life. Eva teaches Ray and other African Americans how to pry open the white-controlled world by using language as a lever. In her turn, Florence teaches semicolons and diagramming to her inner-city students in New Orleans to help them map out an incoherent world. That’s why Florence takes that sharp left turn back into her story—it’s the act of teaching that calls her back, it’s Eva who calls her back.

What does
The Queen of Palmyra
say about the scales of justice?

That they’re very wobbly at best and heavily weighted toward the powerful. Several white women, men, and children who witnessed horrendous crimes during the Civil Rights years have come forward in the past couple of decades to testify about these crimes. In most cases, these belated witnesses felt enormously threatened during the sixties when these acts of violence were committed and so just recently have felt they could speak. Some of them had actually forgotten the events and then remembered them in adulthood. Many of the perpetrators of these crimes were old and sometimes on the brink of death when their cases were reopened, so the question of justice, of how one can close one’s eyes when fear is involved, of how people turn away from the most terrible things and the dire necessity that prods them to do so—all of these tragic stories drove me to create Florence Forrest. One thing Florence has to face in her adulthood is that her silence, her blindness, has precluded any chance at justice for Eva’s murder. This seems to have been an unconscious choice—we’re never quite sure—but it’s a choice and, as the years pass, it can’t be undone.

What would have happened if Florence had spoken up that summer?

If you look at the historical evidence, Win Forrest probably would have been
acquitted. Southern juries back then were all white and all male; white murderers of African Americans got a free ride. Examples from that period abound. The murderers of Emmett Till went free. The trial of Byron De La Beckwith, who killed NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, twice resulted in a hung jury; finally, in 1994, Beckwith was convicted, but by then he was an old man and had lived out most of his natural life. The two hung juries in the Beckwith case were considered a victory by the prosecution back in the sixties.

Did you have to do extensive research for the novel?

My research into the Civil Rights Movement in central Mississippi in the early sixties has been pretty thorough because I’m also working on a book about Evers. His death took place in Jackson, Mississippi, the summer of 1963, the summer of the novel. His murder and what it meant to black Mississippians figure in Florence’s and Eva’s side-by-side stories.

You’re a scholar of Southern literature as well as a writer. What makes Southern literature Southern?

The rich variety of writing over the last couple of decades makes that a hard question to answer, but there’s a sense of location that’s peculiar to Southern literature—it can manifest in a
character’s voice, maybe a particular inflection, a resonance; in a groundedness in place or a sense of loss of home; in a painful awareness of what’s been called “the burden of Southern history,” the long shadow of slavery and Jim Crow and their present-day ramifications. Location, Eudora Welty says, is both “the crossroads of circumstance” and “the heart’s field.” Southern literature pivots around both, in ways that are mysteriously both specific and universal.

So, do you see yourself as a Southern writer consumed with your own cultural past?

I’m interested in the
idea
of being consumed by the past, how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us despite our best efforts to erase them on the blackboards of our minds. For me as a writer, the Southern past is a teacher. It helps me understand the human willingness to avert the eyes from what we don’t want to see, or deafen the ears to stories we don’t want to hear. It’s a human failing—this ability to blind ourselves to the terrible things that don’t directly affect us. This is how the Holocaust happened—and it’s something I think we need to question constantly in ourselves. Eva will always haunt Florence. Florence will always walk that levee and think about her.

Read on

Praise for
Wishing for Snow

“
Wishing for Snow
sits on the short shelf of books that I will never part with. Minrose Gwin writes with a poet’s lyricism, a historian’s scrupulousness, a maverick’s ingenuity, and a daughter’s immense love. A wholly original and transcendent memoir.”

—Sandra Scofield,
author of
Occasions of Sin: A Memoir

“Astonishingly honest, tender, and brave, Minrose Gwin’s luminous memoir of her mother’s troubled life should be required reading for anyone struggling to forgive a difficult parent.
Wishing for Snow
is a marvel of empathy and insight. With lyrical intelligence and clarity, Gwin distinguishes her mother as a vulnerable, sensitive, and gifted human being apart from a daughter’s crushed expectations.”

—Marianne Gingher,
author of
Adventures in Pen Land:
One Writer’s Journey from Inklings to Ink

“The mother-daughter tie is perhaps the most intimate any of us will ever experience. Stories of rage and laughter, the songs of survival and destruction are passed through the birth cord and from the mother’s milk.
Wishing for Snow
is a testament to a difficult and disturbing relationship between a mother and daughter, both poets attempting to sing in a difficult age. This gift of a book made me question: how do any
of us become poets? Here is one very particular and moving answer.”

—Joy Harjo, author of
How We Became Human: Collected Poems

“An eloquent memoir of a daughter seeking a clear view of her complicated, crazy mother and coming to grips with her…. Gwin’s mother is very much alive in this lyrical book. She haunts the pages with her own words, shakes webs from Gwin’s closeted memory, and stirs up the dust of a life lived intensely, madly, and often painfully…. This is definitely a real-life story we all need to hear.”

—Booklist

“
Wishing for Snow
addresses the complicated nuances of love without ever descending to sugarcoated sentimentalism—and without allowing anyone (herself included) to be free from guilt, implication, or accountability. Gwin’s memoir brings her…into conversation with authors from Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor to Doris Betts, Gail Godwin, Janisse Ray, and Dorothy Allison. Her book is one that demands to be read.”

—Southern Scribe

“Gwin describes [anger] with honesty, conveying the complexity of simultaneously loving and being furious at the mother whose mental illness presented her with so many seemingly insoluble dilemmas…. The mother is marvelously present throughout the book.”

—Women’s Review of Books

“Gwin’s effort to reconcile her own identity with her mother’s life and death is tender and haunting—a compelling and satisfying read.”

—Gulf Coast

“At turns, Gwin’s memoir is sad, hilarious, frightening, rambling, and positively operatic…suffused with both Gwin’s wish to understand her mother and the knowledge that fulfilling such a wish is likely as impossible as snow that sticks in Mississippi at Christmas.”

—Mississippi Magazine

Excerpt from
Wishing for Snow

T
HERE IS SUCH A THING
as crazy-mother bonding. This can occur unexpectedly any time two women who have crazy mothers are having a conversation. It happens when one realizes the other also has had a crazy mother, and it is both painful and pleasurable. There are more crazy mothers than you might think. You can be having a professional lunch at a conference or with colleagues in another department and one of you will mention, perhaps without even intending to, that she has a crazy mother. Oh, she will say to you or you will say to her, your mother was, uh, mentally ill? Yes, she was crazy, you will say.
Really crazy
? she will ask. (Many people will claim that their mothers are crazy when they do not know what they are talking about.) Yes, you will say,
really
crazy. Attempted suicide, anorexia, paranoia, violent, the whole bit. I had to commit her twice. A flash of recognition across the table, a sigh. So was mine. Yes, mine was too.

What follows is a conversation that no one else can possibly follow. It is made up of codes, silences, sighs, pauses. The first question: Is she dead (yet); code, are you still going through this? The second question: What about the rest of the family? Gone you say. My brother and I have not seen each other since the funeral. My sister calls when it snows at home; she is unaccountably excited by snow. Ah yes, my friend will say. Yes, I know (silence). What about you,
she says, how are you; code, do you sometimes feel crazy too, are you scared like me of becoming your mother? I’m okay now, you say. I kind of lost it—went over the edge and couldn’t stop crying—after I committed her the second time. Therapy, anti-anxiety drugs, anti-depressants, anti-everything. None of it helped. It’s only time that helps, don’t you think. Now I’m okay. Yes, I’m okay now I think. Oh yes, she says, me too but I’m still on the Prozac. Hope to get off soon. Sometimes it seems impossible to think about it all. Sometimes it is too much to believe.