Authors: Lisa Alther
I remember my father's describing a Ku Klux Klan march up Broad Street when he was a boy during which he and his friends identified the marchers by their shoes. And I recall finding a tattered Ku Klux Klan manual in a box in our attic. When I brought it downstairs, my appalled mother said the box had been left there by one of my grandmother's cousins.
I also recall, before my wedding, a party at the house of some family friends at which one of the caterers turned out to be Henrietta. Henrietta was our cook until I was six. Cooks in those years also cleaned house and looked after children. Henrietta even went with us to New York to visit my mother's family. When Michael was born, she quit, saying four children were too many.
I hadn't seen Henrietta since, and I scarcely remembered her. But when I spotted her in her white uniform, setting a casserole of garlic grits on the buffet table, I rushed over and threw my arms around her. Her arms remained at her sides. I backed away, as shocked as she by my behavior. But my body must have stored up a record of her many kindnesses to me when I was small.
I explained who I was.
She replied, “It's nice to see you again, Miss Lisa.”
She turned and walked back into the kitchen. I just stood there, wondering if there had been a hint of irony in her “Miss Lisa.”
Looking back on this from London, I can certainly understand any irony. My family paid her the going rate of $20 per week to take care of us, while her own children stayed home alone. Ever since my Wellesley years I've been exempting Appalachia, and therefore myself, from racism, but I've been mistaken. Our town's pleasant life was made possible by the underpaid labor of our black citizens. The only roles in which I ever saw them were as maids, janitors, or yardmen.
I start a new novel to sort out these troubling memories, naming it
Original Sins
. But for me, unlike for my Puritan forebears, original sin isn't something that infects a baby at birth. It's imposed on him or her by the surrounding community insofar as they rank one another by superficial differences such as skin color, accents, possessions, or genitalia.
Gradually the politics of my new friends begin to seep into this novel about a small mill town in East Tennessee. I start regarding the Model City as a colony of Yankee industrialists, exploited for its cheap labor, abundant raw materials, and lack of environmental protection laws. These capitalists, fleeing the unions of immigrant workers up north, were lured to Kingsport by J. Fred Johnson's promise of a plentiful supply of “100 percent hardworking, God-fearing Anglo-Saxon workers,” as promotional materials described the parents and grandparents of my friends and classmates.
By threatening the whites in town with the availability of the blacks, the benevolent plant managers on Watauga Street, with whom my grandmother played bridge and my grandfather played golf, kept wages low and profits high. Like Squanto, who taught the Pilgrims to grow corn, and Sacagawea, who guided Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, and Pocahontas, who saved Jamestown from starvation, my beloved grandparents were actually Uncle Tom Toms.
I reflect on the demented caricatures of these “100 percent Anglo-Saxon” mountaineers in the funny papers and on television â
Deliverance, Heehaw, The Beverly Hillbillies, Li'l Abner
. If you can dehumanize your victims, as American soldiers did the Vietnamese, you don't have to feel quite so guilty about exploiting or destroying them.
Original Sins
features five characters who grow up together â two sons of a mill worker, two daughters of a mill manager, and a son of the manager's maid. Three leave town, and two stay. The question I struggle with in foggy Londontown is why those who leave a place leave and why those who stay, stay. Why did certain fish decide to crawl out on dry land? Why did my grandparents desert the coalfields of Virginia? Why did I abandon the beautiful Tennessee river valley they bequeathed me? After 592 pages I conclude that people leave a place because they don't fit in.
One of my new friends from London longs to see the American South, so she joins me on a visit to Kingsport. We meet my grandmother for lunch at the country club. I have to hand it to my grandmother: she doesn't even blink at my friend's spiky magenta hair and dangling labrys earrings.
We sit at a table by a window overlooking the Holston River. My grandmother points out her house on the opposite cliff. Then she asks my Marxist comrade if it's difficult to find reliable servants in London these days.
Back in London, I meet a family of Afghanis through mutual friends. The father has published several books of teaching stories taken from the Sufi tradition, and his sister has collected and recorded folktales from traditional cultures all over the world. The Sufi stories feature animals in the same role as do Cherokee tales â to illustrate the antics of an individual's psyche. The two sets of tales from opposite sides of the globe seem almost like branches of the same tree. A couple of stories are identical in both traditions, apart from adaptations to the local environments.
I consider staying permanently in London so that I don't have to be an American anymore. Although I've only officially been one since I arrived in England, shouldering the blame for everything that's wrong with the world has me already exhausted. I'd have preferred to remain a simple Appalachian peasant so that I could be a victim of American imperialism rather than its perpetrator. But if I could become an exile in England instead of just a tourist, I could disclaim responsibility for anything at all.
I also love living at the crossroads of the former British Empire. Every day I meet fascinating new people from South Africa, New Zealand, India. Each time I fly out of Heathrow, I stand in front of the departure board and savor the names of the destinations, just as I did with the boxcars back home: Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Moscow, Stockholm, Tangiersâ¦.
On the other hand, after two years in London I still feel like a foreigner, despite the Tidewater land grants. My British friends are cool, witty, and urbane. Their most insulting epithet is “wet,” meaning “earnest,” which they often apply to Americans (despite the fact that it won't be Americans who will build an altar of teddy bears outside Kensington Palace after Princess Di's death). If you lay dying among the strutting pigeons in Trafalgar Square, your charming rescuers would offer you a pun to undercut the gravity of your situation. The British lack the Christ-crazed hysteria of southerners and the somber fanaticism of Yankees, and I find myself homesick for both.
In the end, I conclude that it isn't healthy for me to live in a place where people hate me for eating hamburgers.
Back in Vermont, as I await publication
of Original Sins
, curiosity finally trumps inertia. For many years I wondered why my father or grandparents didn't take us to meet our Virginia relatives. But I've had my driver's license for over twenty years now, and I've never gone either. Now that I have a child of my own, I find myself more interested in the gossamer webs of kinship. So I decide to fly to Tennessee, leave Sara with my parents, and at last drive to southwest Virginia to meet some of these strangers who reputedly share my genes.
After I arrive at my parents' house, my grandmother's silver Cadillac materializes in the driveway like the coupe of Cruella De Vil. I go out to greet her. Her frosted perm is afrizzle, but she says nothing. She believes that cultivated people should communicate in ultrasonic squeaks, like bats. And she does get her point across: she doesn't want me to visit her childhood stomping grounds. But I don't know why.
She slides out of her car. As I hug her, I can tell that she's lost weight. Encased in mink, she feels like a bear emerging from hibernation after a long winter's nap. I've heard through the grapevine that the Virginia Club is appalled by my first novel,
Kinflicks
. It's bawdy and contains some vulgar language. It also implicitly criticizes Tennessee Eastman, Kingsport's sugar teat, for polluting the town's air and water. No one has uttered a word about the book to my grandmother, in keeping with the old southern dictum, “If you can't be kind, be vague.”
Looking me up and down, my grandmother says, “You know, your father's a wonderful man.”
“Yes, ma'am, he is.” I glance at her quizzically.
“He never has a bad word to say about you!”
She sweeps inside to greet Sara, leaving me standing in the driveway feeling as though I've just been slapped.
My father's response to
Kinflicks
was, with an amused smile, “I ought to take you out to the woodshed.”
But my friend Nellie reports that he's written on a slip of paper the amount of money for which the paperback rights sold and pinned it inside his suit jacket. Whenever people bring up the book at parties, he just opens his jacket and flashes the amount at them to shut them up.
I soak my corn bread in the liquid from my soup beans at a cafeteria in Clintwood, Virginia. Across from me sit my father's schoolteacher first cousins, Vonda and Zella. I'm trying to figure out why my grandmother has never introduced us. They seem delightful in every way.
I'm intrigued by their names, but they have no ancestral explanation for them. Their parents just liked the sounds. This isn't uncommon in our region. Some of my relatives I've never met are named Arbutus, Nicatie, Bluford, Darkus, Ordealy, Perlina, Orbra, Bureta, Ancil, Rebeal. One is even named Spicie Dewdrop. And I've heard of girls in Riverview called Formica Dinette and Placenta Sue.
Vonda tells me about a road trip another cousin took with my grandmother. Several hours from home my grandmother realized that she'd forgotten her glasses.
When they checked out of their hotel the next morning, my grandmother said to the desk clerk, “Sir, I know that your guests must sometimes leave their eyeglasses in their rooms?”
“Yes, ma'am,” he said, “plenty do. We save them in a box in case they come back for them.”
My grandmother explained her plight. She proposed borrowing an abandoned pair to use on her trip, which she'd return to him on the way home. He pulled out the box of glasses. She tried some on, picked a pair she liked, and continued down the road. Vonda marvels at my grandmother's resourcefulness, insisting there has never been a problem she couldn't solve.
{Kinflicks
may be the first.)
A jury arrives at the cafeteria from the courthouse across the street. Our waitress explains that the case they're hearing involves a football star at the local high school. The previous year he ran into a goalpost headfirst, scoring a winning touchdown and breaking his neck. He was buried in a church cemetery in town. The footballer's parents have divorced, and his mother is moving away. She's suing the father for custody. She wants to dig up their son and take him with her.
After lunch, I scale a steep hill on the edge of town. In the doorway of her attractive contemporary house I meet my grandmother's cousin Hetty Swindall Sutherland. A decade older than my father, she wears her gray hair in a braid coiled atop her head. Vonda and Zella have reported that she sprints up and down her bluff, into town and back, every day. She reminds me of an aging Heidi. After assuring me that the rumors of a Cherokee in the family are untrue, she gives me a huge volume of oral histories collected early in the twentieth century by her late lawyer husband from the original settlers of the county.
Back in the car I look up the references to my various ancestors. One concerns my four-times-great-grandmother Betty Reeves. Her great-granddaughter, a first cousin to both my grandparents, states that Betty was a Portuguese Indian. I sit in stunned silence. Is this what my grandmother doesn't want me to know? Some of the early Melungeons claimed they were Portugueseâ¦.
I also find several accounts of Civil War skirmishes in that area. I learn that my grandmother's grandfather John Wesley Swindall (also my grandfather's great-uncle) was a sergeant in the Union army. There's a photo of him and his wife. He has straight black hair, a bushy gray beard that conceals his face, and small dark eyes. His wife, Polly Phipps, a granddaughter of the Portuguese Indian Betty Reeves, is a dark-eyed brunette. I read that John Wesley's mother, Betsy Swindall, never married and that John Wesley's father was named Solomon Tolliver.
I discover that my grandmother's great-uncle Eli Vanover injured an arm fighting for the Union in the battle of Cranesnest in 1864. Her great-grandfather George Howell also fought for the Union in that battle.
My grandfather Reed's parents, as well as some Vanover relatives of my grandmother, moved behind Union lines in Kentucky so as not to have to support the Confederacy. My grandfather's grandfather Robert Y. Haynes was taken prisoner by some Confederate soldiers, who slaughtered one of his cows. Ironic that my grandfather put himself through medical school by caring for Confederate veterans, some of whom might have fought against his own relatives.
Having at last accepted that Appalachians are as racist as other southerners, I now discover that most of my ancestors supported the Union. I'd revere my ancestors, whoever they are â but who the hell are they? No wonder my grandmother, self-proclaimed duchess of Dixie, doesn't want me prowling around over here. If she's a southerner, then Billy Graham is Jewish.
Next I drive to the town of Wise to meet a distant cousin named Greg. We sit over glasses of iced tea in a coffee shop. He has dark, shiny hair and ruddy coloring. A few years younger than I, he's writing a history of my grandmother's family, the Vanovers. He, too, is a schoolteacher, and he tells me about tracing the Vanovers back to Cornelys Van Hovgem, who emigrated in 1684 to Flatbush in Brooklyn from Zeeland in the Netherlands. His descendants moved to New Jersey and then to North Carolina, where the fifth Cornelius Vanover married a woman named Abby Easterd, who is Greg's and my four-times-great-grandmother. Greg says some of her earlier descendants applied for membership in the Cherokee Nation based on their claim that she was a full-blooded Cherokee.