Kinfolks (6 page)

Wellesley also prides itself on uplifting the disadvantaged. I pause to wonder if they've somehow learned about the Melungeons and mistaken me for one.

Fortunately, one of the three Tennesseans is a junior from Nashville named Ophelia, who's been assigned to me as Big Sister. She takes me under her ample wing and explains the mysterious codes that govern the incomprehensible behavior of our Yankee classmates. She, too, has a doctor father, a Yankee mother, a sister, and three brothers. Apart from her bright red hair and heavier build, we could be twins.

What I find most shocking at Wellesley isn't just that the other students raise their hands in class and volunteer to talk. It's also the fact that nobody smiles or comments on the weather when we pass on the campus sidewalks. In Kingsport, I conducted endless discussions — with clerks I'd never seen before — of their latest operations and the delinquencies of their children. Some days I'd wanted to punch a clerk in the mouth to get him just to sell me a damn Coke without intruding on my private turmoil with his sordid family sagas.

But soon my early training in the orange crate kicks in at Wellesley, and I begin to cherish my invisibility. When I wear my nightgown to class beneath my trench coat, no one notices. In Kingsport, such sartorial behavior would have been critiqued for weeks.

My only complaint is that after having accepted me for being a Tennessean, Wellesley immediately tries to transform me into a Wellesley Girl. I'm forced to take a speech test. Because of my mother's extensive coaching on how to pronounce “cow,” I'm able to conceal my true accent and win exemption from the remedial speech class.

The posture test requires us to strip down to our underwear and be photographed from several angles, as in police mug shots. Because of the Q.T. initiation fashion show, I know how to strut my stuff in a bra and panties, so I pass with high marks.

However, I'm unable to sidestep the Fundamentals of Movement class, held weekly in the gym. For half a year we're given instruction in how to sink into a sofa while balancing a cocktail glass and how to get into a sports car in a skirt without flashing too much thigh.

My hopes are high that I'll one day need these skills, but each blind date is more excruciating than the last. Few experiences are more demoralizing than spending a rainy weekend at Yale with a surly preppy who hates you. I soon realize that my problem is the same as when I auditioned for flag swinger: I'm not a fun person.

My parents don't drink alcohol. It gives my father migraines, as it did his father. Also, a coalition of preachers and bootleggers — strange bedfellows indeed — has conspired to keep Kingsport dry. Moonshine is available, but some partakers suffer blindness and lead poisoning. To buy branded liquor, you must drive to Virginia. But if you get caught by Tennessee patrolmen on your trip home, you forfeit your car. Hence, the popularity of iced tea in East Tennessee. My blind dates in New England find me a drag because my idea of a bacchanal is half a beer.

However, I'm soon fixed up with Richard from Cornell. He belongs to a fraternity in which the brothers drink so much that nobody notices or cares that I'm sipping the same cocktail all night long.

Education at Dobyns-Bennett consisted of the memorization of dates and facts. At Wellesley, I soon learn that facts aren't facts. Math has always been my favorite subject because the answers to problems are either right or wrong, as opposed to the multiple shades of gray in the humanities. But once I learn in calculus about the existence of imaginary numbers, I decide not to major in math after all.

In Bible 101,1 discover that even the word of God has been put into His mouth by ancient Christian spin doctors. With magic markers we highlight the verses inserted into the gospels by various factions trying to bolster their own grip on power.

One day in English class I experience my first true thought. As we discuss “Flowering Judas” by Katherine Anne Porter, I notice the recurrence of the word
silver
. In a flash of illumination I realize that Porter has done this on purpose to suggest a parallel between one of her characters and Judas Iscariot.

My mind promptly retreats into darkness. But I know I've discovered a new function for it. Southerners are always trying to prove how nice they are (even when they aren't), and Yankees are always trying to prove how smart they are (even when they aren't). It's the difference between leading with your limbic brain or your neocortex.

But now that my neocortex has been jump-started, there's no stopping it. Soon I'm critiquing situations I've always blindly accepted, like a brat pulling the wings off butterflies. Along with this newfound ability to tear anything apart comes chronic melancholy. I feel like Eve after her expulsion from the Garden of Eden as she starts to realize that she and Adam are two separate people and that the talking snake is not really her friend.

Since these are the Martin Luther King Jr. years, I quickly grow less proud of my grandmother's alleged ancestral land grants in the Tidewater. After the murder of some civil rights workers in Mississippi, a hallmate bursts into my room to announce, “You southerners make me sick!” Another muses over a pot roast dinner one night, “It's so interesting to hear you say something intelligent in that accent of yours.” This, despite the fact that I've passed their damned speech test.

I'm bewildered. Back home I was teased because my mother was a Yankee and my pronunciation of “cow” was so bizarre. I'd always longed to be a real southerner. Now I'm being accorded that honor, but it's been transformed into a badge of shame. We learned in school that southerners fought the Civil War to protect our homeland from invasion by immigrant Yankee riffraff. But my hallmates tell me its purpose was to end slavery. I have to admit that, if true, this seems a worthy goal.

After a couple of days in the library employing my newly activated neocortex, I discover that I'm not even a pseudo-southerner. East Tennessee is so mountainous that most of its antebellum farms were subsistence operations, so there weren't many slaves. These struggling farmers, many descended from indentured servants, resented those large landowners and merchants who were profiting from slavery. Also, many mountain families took pride in ancestors who'd fought to free the colonies from Britain and were appalled by the notion of dissolving that hard-won union.

In 1819, a Quaker named Elihu Embree founded the nation's first abolitionist journal, the
Manumission Intelligencer
, in Jonesborough, the town in which my family's farm is located. When Tennessee seceded from the Union, East Tennessee tried to secede from Tennessee, as West Virginia had from Virginia. During the Civil War, 30,000 East Tennesseans joined the Union army, comprising one-third of all white southerners who fought against the South. Guerrillas in East Tennessee burned railroad bridges there to cut Confederate supply lines. Mountain men called “pilots” led Confederate draft dodgers and deserters and escaped Yankee prisoners to the Union lines in Kentucky.

My neocortex collapses into a whimpering stupor. Since I'm taking a creative writing class, I decide to write a short story set in East Tennessee to sort this out. As Flannery O'Connor once wrote, “The Southerner knows he can do more justice to reality by telling a story than he can by discussing problems or proposing abstractions…. It's actually his way of reasoning and dealing with experience.”

In the resulting tale, one character says to another, “Law, honey, where'd you get that hat at?”

When my professor returns the story, she's scribbled in the margin, “Real people don't talk this way.” I've never before known that the people I grew up among weren't real. This might explain why I'm so confused.

Embracing my newly excavated Appalachian heritage, I buy a banjo and learn to play it badly. Ophelia plays a guitar, and our favorite tune is “They Are Moving Grandpa's Grave to Build a Sewer.” The hallmate who's sickened by southerners offers to cover our waitress shifts in the dining hall if we promise never to play it again. To punish her insolence, we sing eight verses of “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” All around the courtyard windows slam shut. But even Ophelia good-naturedly ridicules East Tennesseans as white trash who make a laughingstock of the entire state.

Undeterred, I continue to court my inner hillbilly, lounging around the dorm in bib overalls, an undershirt, and bare feet. When my housemother, Mrs. Bradner, complains, I accuse her of cultural imperialism. I explain to my profoundly uninterested hallmates that the Deep South is to Appalachia as mint juleps are to Pepsi. That if the plantation South is the land of moonlight and magnolias, the mountain South is the land of moonshine and magnum rifles.

I take my final exams in the infirmary, where I'm incarcerated for a month with carbon monoxide poisoning acquired on a trip home from Cornell in a car with a faulty exhaust system. I also have mononucleosis from the stress of trying to function in such a bizarre place.

But I do survive the cut my freshman year, despite feeling like the first amphibian ever to lie gasping on dry land. And I've learned the most important lesson of an Ivy League education: Ivy Leaguers are no different from anyone else — except for the fact that they don't know this.

Sealing my exit from the South (just as my grandmother has feared), I marry Richard from Cornell after graduation. The reception takes place in our backyard in Kingsport beneath a huge revival tent erected for free by an evangelist who's one of my father's many grateful patients.

A New Jersey native, Richard is working at an ad agency in New York City. By bribing several Dickensian characters lurking in a basement office, we manage to rent an apartment with high ceilings and parquet floors in a prewar building overlooking the Hudson. The only drawback is that getting from the subway on Broadway to our building is like negotiating the no-man's-land between the British and German trenches during World War I.

As a wedding gift my father gives me a box of bullets and the .38 special his father carried in his medical bag on house calls in case of attack by a drug addict. My father kept the pistol in his sock drawer at our house in town for the same reason. But the West Nineties clearly trump the streets of Kingsport when it comes to danger. So I take the pistol to a gun shop on Broadway to get it cleaned. When I pick it up, the dealer tells me I'm lucky I didn't fire it because a metal guard is missing and I'd have blown my hand off.

As I walk back to our apartment, I imagine a scenario in which I shout at an attacker, “Stop or I'll blow my hand off!”

I've spent my first two decades struggling with whether I'm a southerner. Since my mother is a New Yorker, I feel genetically entitled to spend my next two decades struggling with whether I'm a Yankee. So I put my banjo in mothballs, buy some suits at Saks, and start work as an editorial assistant at Atheneum Publishers. Richard and I attend operas, concerts, and ballets. We eat at ethnic restaurants all over the city and attend plays both on and off Broadway. On weekends we join the nearly inert lines of traffic in and out of the city in order to ski in Vermont and swim off Long Island. We eat lobsters on Cape Cod and cotton candy on the boardwalks of New Jersey. I conclude that I like being a denizen of my mother's motherland.

My mother's grandmother, Ruth Griswold Greene Pealer, was a piano teacher and choir director who rose to the rank of national genealogist for the Daughters of the American Revolution. En route, she traced eleven lines of her family back to England — and one to the
Mayflower
(along with six million other Americans). Late in life she modeled for a bust included in an international exhibition called
The Family of Man
under the label “Caucasian Female.” A cast of it sits on our piano back home.

Ruth lived in South Danville in upstate New York. Her husband, Phillip Greene, died of Bright's disease when her son, my maternal grandfather Floyd Greene, was five. She married again, this time to a farmer and state assemblyman named Peter Pealer. Peter had lost several fingers in a fireworks accident (in a novel variation on my childhood horror of extra fingers).

Caught up in the fight for women's suffrage, Ruth delivered a speech entitled “Woman and Her Advancement” to community groups. In it she maintained that since God made the creatures of our world in order of increasing significance, Woman as the last created was intended as “the crowning work of the Creator.” This was confirmed, she insisted, by the fact that Woman was the “last at the cross and the first at the sepulcher” and that it was to Woman that Christ first appeared after His resurrection. However, because of Eve's having been unjustly blamed for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, “eternity has no time and words no power to express the despairing anguish and woeful heart experiences which have been the lot of Woman through all the ages.”

Upon discovering that she was a third cousin once removed to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ruth longed to go where the big-league suffragists roamed. In a letter to her teenage son Floyd she explained, “If I don't get out of this town, I'll go crazy.” So she left Floyd to finish high school while living with an uncle, and she dragged Peter Pealer to Washington, D.C.

Hating housework, Ruth insisted they live in a hotel. While Peter worked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Ruth joined the Women's Christian Temperance Union and Wimodaughsis (short for Women/mothers/daughters/sisters), a suffrage association. She also served as president of the Women's National Press Association.

Ruth attended rallies addressed by Susan B. Anthony and commented in letters to my grandfather on the beautiful hats and dresses of the audience. She marched up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in a hat piled high with fake fruit and flowers, demanding the vote. About her fellow suffragists she wrote to her son, “People outside have no idea of the ‘push,' interest, and determination of the women to win their cause. There is no such word as ‘fail' with them, and that is a force that men will find it impossible to break.”