Sitting Up with the Dead, page 25
“That takes energy,” I responded, feeling perilously sluggish from hunger (I later discovered to my horror that Ollie never sleeps more than four hours a night). The burning bush had been a good simile: Ollie burned so much energy that she siphoned off her listeners’ oxygen. I yanked myself back into alertness, noticing her meticulously painted red toenails.
“Here’s some wisdom for you to go home and ponder, Pamela. It’s just for you: ‘The ear tried the words even as the mouth tasted meat.’ Job 34:3. Think about it.”
It unnerved me that she seemed to know I was hungry; even more so that she thought feeding my ears would be meal enough. Shortly afterward, Ollie began to touch on the topic of storytelling and spirituality: that the stories she told belonged not to her but to the past, which she perceived in an almost personified way, as if her visual imagination were shaped by a knowledge of African ancestor worship. “I know nothing, but they know everything,” Ollie whispered. “I have to wait for them to tell me.”
I sensed that she was speaking from the shadowland between belief and metaphor, and was trying to sift the difference between them when my friend Bryan Holzwanger suddenly blew into the Reading Room on a breeze of anarchy and beer. Two worlds — both in which I had but a toehold — poised to collide.
Physically, Bryan was the antithesis of Ollie. He looked like a rakish cherub reluctantly grown into adulthood: short, stocky, with very thick blond curls and a rosy complexion. Born twenty-six years ago in Mobile, Alabama, Bryan had recently moved to New Orleans. Since this was the closest we would come to each other, I had invited him up to Laurel to meet Ollie and me, and was feverishly wondering if I’d been rash to do so. Bryan had a ferocious intellect and was as attracted to juxtaposition as a vampire to an exposed jugular. It made me uncomfortable that he and Ollie were breathing the same air. I stuttered an introduction and then simply stopped, mouth open, with not a word to say that would make sense to both of them simultaneously. Bryan got the point and, promising “to be a good boy,” took his friend Kerry off to see the museum’s collection. Ollie returned to her work of making me a better person.
She said that she was the fifth of fifteen children. She had used stories, borrowed from her elders, to keep her younger brothers and sisters quiet when she looked after them. “Not for their sake, for mine,” she explained. “So they’d be good and I wouldn’t get into trouble.” Once, while her mother was out, their pet goat had gotten in the house and charged at its reflection in an armoire mirror. “There was glass everywhere,” Ollie said, wincing at the memory. No one had noticed the goat because they were so engrossed in her tales.
As she continued to comb images and incidents from her memory, I gradually became aware that, while nuggets of stories liberally peppered her conversation, they rarely grew into full-blown tales. She had too much to convey to me, I think, to settle into the slowness stories demand. She said that she had spent two years caring for an old man named “Mr. Clean,” who had once killed an intruder and was so ornery no one else would have him. She told me about “Mrs. Smith,” a childless widow feared by parents but adored by children. Mrs. Smith was kind and understanding, and the children had visited her against their parents’ wishes. One day they arrived to find that she had had a stroke; yet because they had responded to her kindness rather than their parents’ prejudice, they were on hand to save her life.
“Now, you tell me what that story means, Pamela.”
“Um, that children aren’t weighted down by adult preconceptions?”
“There’s no wrong answer. But it means that our children are watching us all the time. They learn by example, not by being told. Now you see why I’m so busy.”
I glanced over at Bryan and Kerry, who had been staring at us in silence since they returned from their rather brief tour.
I asked where the story had come from.
“HOW CAN YOU ASK ME THAT?” Ollie shouted. “You should know that, girl! I’ve just bared my soul to you! What did I tell you I did for twelve years? That I do every day?”
I had only wanted to know if it were based on an incident or if it were a parable of Ollie’s beliefs, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was that for Ollie, stories were tools with which to shape change, or seeds to be planted in her listeners’ conscience. Like verbs, they performed an active function; they were never the nouns of simple entertainment. For Ollie storytelling was a kind of social work — and when stories didn’t work fast enough, she quit telling and nursed and cooked and organized and politicked and championed. “Would you believe me,” she asked cryptically toward the end of our conversation, “if I told you I was never a child?”
“Yes, absolutely,” I told her. “You had too much to do.”
Ollie nodded slowly, smiling.
I was so absorbed in my crawfish and corn chowder that I didn’t stop to consider the impression we made: a statuesque black woman of a certain age in orange African garb, two young white men, not long out of college, and a sunburned, sleepy woman in her late thirties with a notebook, all crammed together at a table in a noisy bar. The conversation went something like this. Bryan: “I told Kerry we were going to Mississippi to meet this girl. I said you were pushing forty, but you were cool. You could pass.” Me: “Pass for what?” Kerry: “If you look at her forehead in the light, you can see a bunch of gray hairs.” Me: “Pass for what?” Ollie: “My name, de Loach, means of the light.” Me to Ollie: “I’m not surprised.” Me to Bryan: “If I didn’t dye my hair, I’d have a skunk stripe like Susan Sontag.” Kerry: “Who?” Bryan: “Think ‘Bride of Frankenstein.’” Then to me, “Twenty-nine, but only in the right light.”
Bryan lit a cigarette and Ollie chastised him. She ordered a Coke and sent it back because it was flat. He took a long sip of his gin and tonic and told her in his lazy, Gulf coast accent, “Ah always say, a fountain Coke is like a rock concert. It may not be that great, but at least it’s live.” To my amazement they discovered a mutual fondness for Mississippi’s slot machines. Ollie said, “I don’t gamble, but I like to play the slots. It relaxes me.” At this, they smiled at each other over the worn brown table, its surface pocked with pale drink rings like so many scrambled Olympics logos, in a weird, mutual appreciation. I had underestimated them both.
“My grandfather’s face looked like this table,” said Ollie, smoothing it with her fingers. “He was lined and dark brown too.” She told us a story about him and her grandmother: “Ant’ny” — she said this in her grandmother’s piercing, nasal voice, with her eyes scrinched up — and “Ole Miss,” which she did in her grandfather’s baritone. Apparently he never called her anything else.
“Well, a cat got into our smoking shed, where we hung the meat, and it kept eating my grandfather’s handiwork. So one day when he knew the cat was inside he stepped into the shed and commanded Ole Miss to close the door. Imagine us: a tall, regal old black woman with all these little black children running around her, leaning against the door to keep it shut. And my grandfather and that cat went to war.
“Finally, we heard him yelling, ‘Open up, open up!’ and she opened the door and the cat ran out. Ant’ny came next, bleeding all over his bald head. Well, Ole Miss burst out laughing, and we children were shocked. We thought our grandmother wanted our grandfather dead! It wasn’t until I heard my mother tell the story to my father later, and he fell about laughing, that I understood it wasn’t a real life-and-death battle.”
At that Ollie left us to go sit up all night with a sick friend. I looked concerned and she said, “Don’t worry, it’s only from 1l P.M. to 7 A.M.” When the rest of us left the bar a little later Bryan asked me to come over to his car. The sun was setting but it was still very warm. Slow jazz filtered onto the street from another nearby bar. He went to the trunk and produced a big brown shopping bag. “For you,” he said with a flourish.
I looked inside and found a bottle of Dalmore twelve-year-old single malt. It was fantastically hot from sitting all day in the beating sun; in fact, there were stains around the top as if it had actually boiled.
“I have a friend,” said Bryan, “who’s a real Mississippi gentleman. I mean, magnolias and mint juleps just follow him around wherever he goes. So one time I was sitting in a traffic jam with him, and he reached across me to the glove compartment, and pulled out a pint of whisky. He said, ‘The traffic in this state just tries mah nerves. If I didn’t take a nip or two, I’d probably have an accident.’ Since I know the roads down here, I thought you might need some too.”
Kathryn’s Tale
IWOKE ON FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH as I always wake, without my glasses or contacts. Instead of drapes, many of the motels I stayed in hung heavy plastic shades across their rooms’ large, lone windows. For some reason, wear and tear I guess, these were often filled with infinitesimally small holes, through which the white-hot morning sunlight tried to pour into the room. Against the dark shade, and without my glasses, the tiny bursts of light throbbed and twinkled like so many stars. Every morning, I would wake to a whole galaxy — suns and supernovas and even red giants — in a motel room. If there was magic on this road, I found it in these $49-a-night solar systems. Although I complain about them, I secretly love motels. Like good stories, they offer evidence that ordinary life, even if only its furniture, can temporarily be held at bay. This particular morning, as I lay in bed squinting, I could just make out the constellation Cassiopeia in the Super 8 Motel universe.
Friday the thirteenth was also the day that I would meet Kathryn Windham, a storyteller who lived in the haunted city of Selma, Alabama, with a ghost named Jeffrey. The coincidence wasn’t planned, but I reveled in it. Yesterday at the bar, Kerry had been exceptionally quiet (I think he was surreptitiously watching a baseball game on television), but at the mention of Kathryn’s name he spun around and faced me.
“You mean you’re going to meet the Ghost Lady?” he exclaimed. “Wow! Cool.”
In the two and three-quarter hours it took to drive from Laurel, Mississippi to Selma, Alabama, I found more radio stations than things to look at. The scenery principally consisted of pine trees, kudzu, planted trailers surrounded by hubcap collections and dry cornstalks, and old-fashioned gas stations where all they sold was gas. In Demopolis, Alabama, I stopped at a roadside family restaurant for a nightmarish chicken salad plate: a grisly mix of canned pears, bone, and gristle swamped by mayonnaise and, possibly in an attempt at fusion cuisine, topped by a maraschino cherry. After lunch I continued on to Selma in my rented Oldsmobile, which had a habit of honking at will, feeling distinctly unwell.
Walking around Selma in the early afternoon was like wearing a hair shirt made of heat. Its historic district, as shady and grand as that of Laurel, testified to the city’s rapid rise after its destruction in the War. Actually, it wasn’t quite destroyed. Water Street, which backs up to the unhurried, jade-colored Alabama River, maintains one of the few commercial districts in the South that managed to escape the torch. The two-story buildings, their cornices shaved into flat rows like adjacent, architectural crew cuts, retained a feeling of the old frontier; if they had a motto, it would be that restoration is only for sissies (renovation had a weak toehold on the street). One grand seven-bay-window façade, still wearing its nineteenth-century grillwork, was just that: a façade. I looked through immense oblong windows to see a small meadow and mature trees growing in its roofless interior.
I had to be careful with Selma. As I limped around in the sun (my back was still twisted, and I was all too aware of that chicken salad), my memory kept dragging me back, past the porches and awnings, not to a streetfront forest but to those old, blue-rinsed ghosts, rolling forever on a 1960s television set in my memory It was in Selma that the civil rights movement had become a nationally visible Voting Rights campaign. In response to the killing of a black demonstrator by a state trooper, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights leadership had decided to lead a march from Selma, fifty miles east to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. On March 7, 1965 — nicknamed Bloody Sunday — six hundred marchers had just mounted the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River in Selma when state troopers attacked, most reports say without warning. The march was televised, so the world saw what I remember. People screaming and running from the police, who were snatching and beating anybody they could reach with billy clubs and cattle prods. These images emerged through a mist of tear gas, which gave the footage the surreal sense of dreamtime: a ghost story and a live report, all at once.
I walked down Water Street to see the bridge. In the sun, it looked homely and humpbacked, like a steel model for an overgrown box turtle. Selma’s Chamber of Commerce brochure had this to say about the incident: “Late in 1963 voting rights activity began in the city and this culminated in 1965 with the Selma to Montgomery March led by Dr. Martin Luther King. Months of daily demonstrations led up to this climactic moment that resulted in the U.S. Voting Rights Act…” One line later, it added, “In recent years Selma has been the host city for several movie productions. One of these [was] Blue Sky; starring Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones … The other was Body Snatchers III”.
I knew I had found the Ghost Lady’s house when I saw the license plate of the car parked out front. It read, simply, “Jeffrey.”
Moments later Kathryn Windham warmly invited me into her house: a brick bungalow in a modest fifties development that her friends had warned was becoming a ghetto. (“That means most of my neighbors are black,” said Kathryn, who is white, in a “so what?” tone of voice.) I would have said her ordinary house was the last place on earth that could have been haunted, but for Kathryn’s things. A formal Empire sofa was accented by putty-colored wall trim, the latter painted a shade that spoke more of the owner’s love of history (it had “early nineteenth-century” written all over it), than a decorator’s need for a neutral tone. Stately antiques were matched with whimsy: a mobile made from a Coke can cut into a propeller plane; a collection of hollowed gourds and bird feeders, hung from the ceiling; an old-fashioned wheelchair pulled up to a writing desk (“It’s comfortable,” explained Kathryn). I knew immediately it was the human Jeffrey had chosen, not the house.
Kathryn and I sat at her dining room table and drank grapefruit juice. Throughout our long conversation — “You can stay until the [Atlanta] Braves game comes on,” she had told me, “then you have to go” — the phone rang incessantly. She answered each call firmly but politely. “Put it in writing, and I’ll gladly consider it,” she would say, before perfunctorily hanging up. White-haired but agile, her face lined but her eyes huge and alert behind large glasses, I found it hard to believe Kathryn was eighty-one. She did not suffer fools gladly and had no trouble sharing her opinions (she had a hard one, as Granny Griffin would say, on answering machines). If I misinterpreted her, she corrected me. Like Ollie, Kathryn had a twenty-year-old’s interest in the world and an old lady’s forthrightness. It was a fine combination.
She had been a newspaper reporter for forty years. “I began in Montgomery as a police reporter,” she said. “I was received badly. The men told me, ‘You should be writing the society page.’ I responded that I didn’t know enough adjectives. It was lost on them, but I enjoyed saying it.” In the fifties and sixties Kathryn covered the civil rights movement and took photographs of all the principal movers and shakers. “It was a traumatic time … Selma has a lot to live down, and probably never will,” was all she had to say on the subject, though I noticed a copy of J. J. Chestnut’s Black in Selma lying on the table.
After about half an hour of conversation, I could no longer resist asking about Jeffrey. Kathryn smiled in a tired way, as if signaling, “so it’s come to this.” I hoped I hadn’t disappointed her. Jeffrey, as it turned out, was a shadow in a photograph and a bump in the night. He was simply a benign, occasionally unruly presence. He walked when everyone else was sitting, he locked doors that had been open, he moved furniture, he scared the cat. He even showed up as a vivid and much-tested, but ultimately inexplicable, shadow in the background of a photograph of a young woman. One of Kathryn’s children had named him Jeffrey. “As you would name a pet,” Kathryn said.
There is no accompanying tale to explain Jeffrey’s behavior. He is the most curious of all creatures: an effect without a cause, a ghost without a story — which was perhaps a relief and an outlet in a town already heavily haunted by its past. Sometimes, if we give the wild things, the frightening things, a name, domesticate them, they become manageable. I wondered if it were a coincidence that Jeffrey had turned up at about the same time as the civil rights protests. There had been a lot to be afraid of back then: for whites, a changing world order, and for blacks, retaliation against a campaign for self-respect that could cost them their lives.
In a memoir of her newspaper days, Odd-Egg Editor, Kathryn recalled the ugliness of that time, and the conflicting feelings the movement spawned. She remembered men in her church who would line up and try to intimidate the few black churchgoers who dared enter the sanctuary. She wrote that she had protested, calling their actions “unwise and unchristian,” but didn’t stop attending. She recalled being afraid only once, when “a chorus of angry white women standing near me” had shouted “Kill them! Kill them!” at passing black marchers. She called little attention to her own bravery in signing a desegregation order as a member of the Selma board of education, despite receiving hate calls and having her car shot at. Yet she was also infuriated by Northern whites — “outside agitators” — who came to march in Selma. Didn’t they have their own problems? Why didn’t they leave the South to work out matters itself? Ultimately, however, Kathryn wrote that her life was essentially undisrupted by the demonstrations. It had taken Jeffrey to shake up her home, to register, in a mild, housebound way, the seismic activity of the era. Perhaps his story, in a very elemental way, a way that preserves the process by which revolutionary change registers in the folkloric record, is, literally, history.
