Homesick (6 page)

One of the blessings of traditional Southern cuisine is how it has come to serve as a vehicle of communion between blacks and whites when they meet outside the South. It’s something for which the late writer and editor Willie Morris, an expatriate Mississippian living in New York, was grateful. In his memoir
North Toward Home,
Morris describes bringing his wife up to the Harlem apartment of the jazz writer Albert Murray and his wife for dinner on New Year’s Day 1967. They were joined there by novelist Ralph Ellison and his wife, and together the six Southerners, four black and two white, had what Morris described as “an unusual feast: bourbon, collard greens, black-eyed peas, ham-hocks, and corn bread—a kind of ritual for all of us. Where else in the East but in Harlem could a Southern white boy greet the New Year with the good-luck food he had had as a child, and feel at home as he seldom thought he could in [New York]?”

If the classic Southern comfort food hasn’t changed at Weidmann’s, in recent years something else has: It used to be a lot busier. When I was growing up, Weidmann’s was a destination restaurant. They flew in fresh seafood from the Gulf of Mexico on a regular basis, including oysters straight from New Orleans. It was said to be Alabama football coach Bear Bryant’s favorite place to eat, which itself gave the place semireligious status. Back then, the din of dishes and silverware clanking on tables and pans banging in the kitchen was so loud we children could hardly hear ourselves think. It was so exciting. I remember sitting there in my Sunday dress, thinking Weidmann’s was the center of the social universe—which, in Meridian, it was. Each table had a handmade clay jar of peanut butter in the center, and we kids would smear gobs of it on saltines while waiting for our food to come, causing Mama to fuss that we were ruining our appetites. Of course, she was right. I don’t think any of us ever managed to finish our dinner. Still, I remember eating lots of fried chicken, crabmeat cocktail, shrimp remoulade, and that black-bottom pie, with its creamy chocolate filling and chocolate wafer crust.

While Daddy was settling the bill at the cash register, we kids would go trawling through Jean’s Treasure Chest, a suitcase-sized box of candy set out for children to have a treat before they left. Not long ago, Jenna, Berry, and I were laughing over how puny the Treasure Chest really is. When we were kids, it could have fallen off a Spanish galleon as far as we were concerned.

After dinner, Daddy would often load us into the car and drive down to Enterprise to visit family. We loved hearing Daddy tell stories about his childhood days at Homeward—explaining why the house was built with a breezeway (or “dog trot,” as it was called), how the old wooden stove worked, how they used to sleep in deep featherbeds—things like that. And we’d always come home with a stash of jellies, preserves, pickles, and relishes from Aunt Margaret’s pantry. But we were restless kids, and before long we’d start thinking about heading home, getting back to playing out, as we used to call it, with our neighborhood friends.

And that mix of restlessness and contentment certainly carried through to Christmastime. We had a few of our own twists on the traditional family Christmas—the first being that it always seemed to start at four o’clock in the morning on December 25. Each of us kids was assigned a particular piece of living room furniture, marked by our own personal Christmas stocking—as the oldest, I got the couch—and we would tumble together into the living room at the appointed hour and make a beeline for the stocking and unwrapped presents we knew that Santa had piled there for us to find.

But the real celebration came later that day, at the family Christmas party at Uncle Thomas Ward’s place. All our big family events in those years were held in the dark-paneled living room of the big, stately home he shared with Aunt Carolyn and their three kids, Tom, Robert, and Judy. The whole clan—including Daddy’s two sisters and their families—would gather there around dark on Christmas Day. I can close my eyes now and hear the tinkle of ice cubes at cocktail time, smell the sweet aroma of bourbon melting into the spicy scent of the cedar tree, and slip into a Yuletide reverie.

Though my own home in Los Angeles is decorated in a modern, minimalist style, the rich interior of Uncle Thomas’s house remains my touchstone for what home looks and feels like. His house conveyed a sense of comfort, certainly, but it was a comfort that went beyond simple physical convenience. The furnishings and décor gave it a sense of security and solidity; they stood for tradition, as if the people who lived there must be in touch with an older, more civilized way of life. And the early memory of those warm family gatherings imprinted itself, I realize now, deeply upon my consciousness.

I recently had a
eureka!
moment while reading
Home,
a fascinating history of domestic life by the architect Witold Rybczynski. In the opening chapter Rybczynski examines the success of the designer Ralph Lauren, who has made himself the standard-bearer of a romanticized American classicism in style. (I often describe the atmosphere at Uncle Thomas’s house as “like a Ralph Lauren ad,” and most people know exactly what I mean.) Lauren excels at “evoking the atmosphere of traditional hominess and solid domesticity that is associated with the past,” Rybczynski observes. “Is it simply a curious anachronism, this desire for tradition, or is it a reflection of a deeper dissatisfaction with the surroundings that our modern world has created? What are we missing that we look so hard for in the past?”

What, indeed? I can think of a hundred things: a sense of belonging, a sense of rootedness, a sense that our world is enduring and that we ourselves will endure along with it, through generation after generation. That is why, though I’ve never lived there myself, I’m glad that Homeward still stands today, and that my Aunt Celeste still lives there. It’s why I’m glad my siblings and I have always remained close, far-flung though we may be. And maybe it’s why I find my mind wandering back, these days, to those Christmases we spent together as children, in front of a warm fire, when all was right with the world.

Many a night in those preteenage years, Jenna and I sat home with Mama, watching old movies starring beautiful women like Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor, with their dark hair and dramatic makeup. That standard of beauty was really taken to heart by our parents’ generation, especially in the South. There was lots of pressure to look perfect, and to
be
perfect—to live up to the unreachable ideal of womanhood. I remember Mama telling me when Jenna and I were really little that in our next house she wanted a staircase, so that when we were older she could watch us girls descend in our ball gowns as we left for a spring dance. And I think it must have been from those old movies that Mama got her idea that if her daughters were going to become proper Southern ladies, they might need a little help.

When I was three, Mama sent me off to start taking dance lessons. I must have been feeling a need to be noticed, to stand out from the crowd. I remember performing in a revue as one of twenty little girls in a row, all dressed as miniature brides. All of a sudden—and much to my parents’ alarm—I stepped out of line, marched front and center, and performed my routine solo. It seems I had the performer’s showboating instinct from the beginning, though it would lie dormant for years.

My dance teacher was a local legend named Miss Mary Alpha Johnson. But dance wasn’t the only thing she taught. Reader, I tell you proudly that I am a graduate of Miss Mary Alpha’s charm school, where we aspiring ladies were instructed in the proper ways to walk, talk, sit, and behave.

We laugh at the idea of a charm school today, but I credit Miss Mary Alpha with teaching me poise and how to carry myself. In fact, it was so important to Mama that Jenna and I grow up to be proper Southern ladies that she enrolled us in a second charm school, a weeklong course at the Sears department store. Sears gave us a little textbook to study, filled with chapter titles like “Good Grooming Is Just a Matter of Organization.”

I paid Miss Mary Alpha a visit on a recent trip home, and she entertained me graciously in her enchanting parlor, which is a little girl’s fantasia of femininity. The walls are blush pink, the white trim looks like icing on a wedding cake, and the porcelain statues of ballerinas resemble spun sugar. A lady to her fingertips, she was wearing heels and jewelry, her white hair brushed up from her fine-boned, still-beautiful face like a swirl of meringue. That day Miss Mary Alpha was opening registration for a new class of dancers, as well as students for her charm school, but she still made time for me. We had pink fruit punch and homemade cheese straws, and talked of old times.

Is charm school dated? Well, I guess so. But if there were one available in Los Angeles, when the time came I would have my daughter, Anabella, enroll in a heartbeat. Social grace will never go out of style.

After leaving elementary school, I briefly attended public junior high before transferring to Lamar, a small, traditional private school. Starting in the ninth grade, the kids of the town were encouraged to join one of the same-sex social service clubs, which were like junior sororities and fraternities. The girls could join the Debs, Mes Amies, or the Dusties. I was a Dusty. The boys had Phi Kappa or DeMolay to choose from. Phi Kappa had chapters statewide. I was a Phi Kappa little sister, so I would get to go to a lot of conventions and chapter meetings in towns all over the state, which were full of eligible boys. Needless to say, it was a blast. All the local social clubs had a dance every year that was known as a “lead-out.” Girls dressed in long gowns to be formally announced; sporting black tie, their dates would escort them to the front of a stage to have their photograph taken, then we’d go home and change into pants for the dance.

These clubs were the center of our high school social life, and if you didn’t belong to one, you were relegated to the margins. The pressure to conform, and the fear of not belonging, was so great that most kids were willing to put up with sadistic hazing during the pledge period, which not for nothing was called Hell Week. For the girls the ordeal was purely emotional, but the boys had to suffer physical abuse, too. It was pretty cruel, actually.

If you were a girl suffering through Hell Week, you weren’t allowed to shave your legs. You weren’t allowed to drive—you had to ride your bicycle everywhere. You couldn’t see a guy. (I got “caught” once when a boy I was friendly with stopped by, for a completely innocent visit; I leapt into bed to pretend sickness, and narrowly escaped censure.) You’d have to deliver small gifts, called “happies,” to older members of the club. If you’d run into a member during that week, you’d have to perform a charming little move called an “air raid,” which involved falling immediately to the ground and reciting something you’d been told to memorize. I remember having to commit to memory, among other things, the lyrics to “Sweet Baby James” by James Taylor. And during Hell Night, the culmination of it all, the older girls would scream at you, crack eggs over your head, make you write essays on toilet paper—anything to force their will upon you.