Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

WILLIAM FAULKNER,
LIGHT IN AUGUST

At a few times in my life, I’ve not been aware that I’ve just stepped onto a large X.

Change might not be on my mind. Why change? I’ve always admired lives that flourish in place. The taproot reaches all the way to the aquifer, the leaves bud, flourish, fall, and grow again. I like generations following one another in the same house, where lamplight falls through the windows in squares of light on the snow, and somebody’s height chart still marks the kitchen doorway. But there I stand on the X, not knowing it’s time to leap, when, really, I’d only meant to pause. In Oxford, Mississippi, one chance weekend, the last thing I expected was a life-changing epiphany.

Looking up at a white southern manse with the requisite rocking chairs and hanging ferns on the porch, I ratcheted my carry-on bag up the steps and rang the bell.

“Is this all right? Everything decent is full because of the football game,” the woman who gave me a lift had explained.

Decent
, she said. You hear that word all the time in the South:
a decent person, a decent meal, a decent amount of time, that’s decent of you
. I don’t recall hearing the word often at home in California. As she drove away, I waved and her car picked up speed.

A shutter hangs slightly askew, and from paint-encrusted windows white flakes scatter on the porch floor.
Lead-based
. If I pressed a screwdriver into the sill, I’d find rot. Now, standing on the other side of a screen door, I’m biting the side of my forefinger, as I do when I’m nervous. But why should I be nervous? A memory flashes of my mother dropping me off at camp, gunning the Oldsmobile out of there as soon as my trunk of summer clothes was unloaded.

No one is on the other side of the door, but on a table I find a note: “WELCOME! You’ll find number three at the top of the stairs on the left.” The hallway smells familiar. Pound cake? A toasted slice smeared with butter, my preferred snack when I was a southern child.

A four-poster bed with a nubby white bedspread almost entirely fills the square room. Crocheted doilies adorn scuffed bedside tables; a fake bouquet fails to brighten the chest of drawers. There’s a smell, not bad but not good, no, not good. Pine-scented disinfectant, worn-out shoes, and certainly a mattress someone has sweat-soaked during August naps. Speckles of blue mildew border the shower curtain. Dust motes. A thousand memories suddenly free-fall through me.

I’ve long since cut the tie that binds. I left the South a million years ago. And I’m midway into a book tour, a celebratory trip; this will be only a short hiatus before my reading at Oxford’s famous Square Books. For two weeks, I’ve been traveling—the exhilaration of events in bookstores, jaunts on everything from supersized flying mastodons to kite-sized flap-a-doodles, sumptuous feasts, even the late-night minibar dinners, have been fun, plus the constant joy of new places. My energy even overpowers the chronic sleeplessness that keeps me rotating on the sheets until my skin feels rope-burned.

Ah, it’s the quiet old house that throws me back inside the globe. Shake it and golden dust falls down over the fairies. The high ceilings, the graceful proportions of the room, the trapped time—that’s it, a room where a newborn squalled and a reprobate uncle slept it off and a woman sat monogramming pillowcases in the rocker. When I was eleven and stayed overnight at my grandfather’s house, I’d sleep in the square pale green bedroom where my grandmother spent her illness before she died. Mother Mayes rested in a slipper chair by the window. The coils of her shimmering silver hair sprung close to her pink scalp. I caught a faint, rank odor: her flowered, flounced gowns—talcum, yes, Fleur de Rocaille perfume, rice pudding, starch, rose lotion, a back smell of pee-pee. In the glass by her bed, her false teeth seemed to smile.

My heart booms. It’s damned hot, even though October is half over.

When I left the South at age twenty-two, the force that pushed me west was as powerful as the magnet that held me. For years when I went back home to visit, I broke out in hives. The insides of my arms erupted in the same place as when I had severe poison ivy at thirteen as a junior bridesmaid at my sister Nancy’s wedding. My mother was annoyed.
Keep your disgusting arms close to your sides
. The weepy yellow seepage stained the pink tulle dress.

Powerful juju, I say aloud.

My cell phone has no signal. In the hall I find a house phone and call a taxi. After a hundred rings, a woman answers. She covers the phone with her hand and I hear her yell, “Can you go get this lady?” I wait on the porch with my bag. The ancient man who pulls up in a dilapidated car takes me to a motel near downtown. I need neutral ground. Not Tara Redux.

Good luck—they do have one last tragic little room. At least I can walk out to a restaurant, instead of eating a package of cheese crackers for dinner. At least I see no giant oaks spreading their bony fingers outside the window, no hedges of arching bridal wreath, no rectangular panes of gossamer light on polished heart-pine floors. Just a shaky wall heater that sounds as if it’s flying to Atlanta, and a maroon bedspread covering thousands of nights of unspeakable acts. The carpet resembles matted hair.

Late in the afternoon, I walk into town and am stunned by the human scale and harmony of glossy white and redbrick nineteenth-century buildings, some with upstairs porches called so charmingly in the South “piazzas.” Shaded streets complete the natural complement of architecture that does not dwarf but, instead, extends the excellent proposition that the body will live well in this space. Under the protection of the sun-spangled leafy canopy, I feel suddenly buoyant. The verdurous air sends me reeling back to my Georgia hometown’s trees: crape myrtle, oak, palm, longleaf pine, magnolia, pecan, sycamore. Roller-skating on bumpy, root-torn sidewalks, in and out of shade, down the street as though down a green chute, I knew the blitheful cool, then—what a shock of difference—the sliding into light. The sun could melt a bar of gold. In Fitzgerald, so much green—that’s how we saved ourselves from the burning eye of God.