Then: Close the shutters, pull the drapes, lie down, and Take A Nap. During that time of day when it was too hot to do anything, people just didn’t even try to do anything. There was no air-conditioning, and people just didn’t fight the climate then the way they do now. They closed the shutters, pulled the drapes, and took a nap. Our brains only function for two weeks out of the year in this climate anyway. Weariness, bone laziness, gets in the blood because we ain’t adapted to this climate yet. Even if we
are
born here, we don’t realize that three million generations of something more northern is suffering subtropical languor. We
are
in the subtropics down here, and that means a constant battle between humanity and humidity. We just ain’t adapted. It is only by conscious efforts we keep the motor running during the six months of August. One reason I believe in the nap is, if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. Alligators nap, possums nap, cats nap. Everything in this climate naps. Not even monkeys come out in hot weather like we have. They’re sitting in the trees picking little flakes of skin off each other’s shoulders. Quietly. During the heat of the day.
Between one-thirty, say, and four o’clock, which was nap time, there was not a sound. Nobody would dare make a sound. If someone was awake, he or she would be very silent and move barefoot through the house so as not to wake up those who were napping. Nap time was sacred. I think that’s why people lived longer and were mostly in a better humor. I can remember when, at three o’clock in the afternoon on a summer day downtown, there was no sound. No motion. There was total silence and stillness. Our society would be better off if that were still the custom: fewer divorces, fewer murders, fewer nervous breakdowns, fewer bankruptcies. Because in our climate, people change their minds constantly and are quick to take offense, so lifelong feuds are born.
So after lunch, everybody just crawled into some corner and fell asleep. Rebecca would retire to a rocking chair on the back porch and doze. She might have darning in her hand, but she wasn’t darning. I loved to sleep in the front parlor, which was used only for the official visit when the priest came to dinner. It was very cool in there because it was kept closed always. Of course, the moment the sun was going to hit the house they would close the shutters and close the curtains to keep everything cool inside. There were glass transoms over all the doors between the rooms which could be flipped open by a long metal rod that came down and rested on the door frame near where the doorknob was. You could push that up or push that down to open and close the transoms. Usually the windows in the front room would be left up, with the shutters closed, so that what air was moving—and we were close enough to Mobile Bay that there was always some air moving—came in the lower part of the window and went through all the open transoms in the house. If you moved intentionally at a slow pace, got everything done before ten o’clock, and took a nap after lunch, you wouldn’t even have dreamed of inventing air-conditioning.
*
At night, porch life went on forever. All ages and colors sat together on the porch, rocking and fanning and telling stories. When the gossip got really good, my grandmother would switch from English to French.
“And nobody knew where she was, they looked high and low, nobody could find her, and then she was seen in New Orleans with—”
And the rest would be in French, so that little eavesdroppers couldn’t hear the rest of the story. I knew then that one day I would learn French, because French was the gossip language. All the good parts happened in French. When the going got really good, it was in French, not English. So I knew one day I had to learn that language and find out all I’d been missing.
Children played hide-and-seek, and those were the sounds you heard for blocks around at twilight. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Coming, ready or not!” Then you’d hear these giggles as people were found. We also played statues, where somebody puts their head against a tree and says, “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty, stop,” while the rest are running around. When you hear “stop,” you have to stop and be a statue. The one who was counting gets to choose who is the best statue. Then that person gets to do the counting and all of us have to run around again and be a statue when we hear “stop.”
On special nights the children from several houses would get together and play steamboat. Steamboats were when you took an old shoebox and first cut out crescent moons or star shapes or flower shapes. Then you lined the box with scraps of colored tissue paper that came from candies or oranges. Then you filled the shoebox halfway with sand or ashes and you had two little vigil lights from the church and a long string attached to the front, and you’d go up and down the sidewalk pulling your steamboat. The procession of steamboats would be one block long, going up-and downriver. And you’d be saying, “Toot-toot! Ding-ding! King’s Landing! Demopolis!” And it was a pretty sight, those little illuminated colored boxes moving along. Playing steamboat. You didn’t do it every night. You’d sort of check with the other children: “Are we going to do steamboats tonight?”
The other thing children did was the penny poppy show. You saved odd things, like an unusual wine cork which came out of a bottle of port from a Portuguese ship, say. Or you saved a lizard skull that had been found somewhere. You saved a piece of colored glass. You saved a broken mother-of-pearl comb. And you would dig a little hole which you lined with either broken mirror or tinfoil. Then you arranged all your unusual things in that. You covered it with a piece of wood or a piece of cardboard or maybe some banana leaves. Somebody had to pay, either two banana caramels, or one penny, and you’d let them see your penny poppy show, just for a minute. You’d pop it open and pop it shut. For a penny or two banana caramels. That’s a penny poppy show.
I remember once, somebody in the neighborhood had put a used condom in one. She didn’t know what it was. She had found it in the shrubbery near the Baptist church. And she didn’t know what it was. This was a little girl who always had fresh roses in her penny poppy show and dolls and antique mirrors. And then a used condom. She’d washed it and had it lying out. Of course, the little boys knew what it was, and she was about to burst into tears because she thought we were laughing at her penny poppy show.
Most people went in around ten-thirty. If it was really hot, the men would stay out forever. They’d be drinking juleps, or there was a drink called Cuba libre—very fashionable during the twenties and thirties—which was Coca-Cola with dark rum in it, about half and half. Very cold. Coca-Cola then was not sweet, and it was said to have a pinch of real cocaine in it. It did give you a lift in a hot climate, on a hot August day. It was called “the pause that refreshes”—that was the ad—and it was. Everybody at around ten in the morning, and in midafternoon when they woke from their nap, wanted a Coca-Cola. The more old-fashioned wanted iced coffee with a slug of black rum in it, but most people wanted Coca-Cola because it really gave you a lift. After all, it was a chemist in Atlanta who invented it, boiled it up in his backyard. A Southern drink for a Southern climate. So the men would stay out on the front porch, rocking and talking and sipping their Cuba libres.
*
I come from a vanished world of big dinners at high noon, afternoon naps, suppers at twilight, and long evenings of hide-and-seek and rocking on the front porch. It was a different world. I can never remember being bored. I never knew what boredom meant until I had my first office job in New York City. In Mobile, it seemed to me that everything was so exciting. A thousand details to consider. A thousand details. And everybody was so busy, they didn’t have time to quarrel or feud. They might frown and snap at each other, but that was the end of it. There were no hours of solemn crankiness. That’s a recent thing. Everybody had their tasks to keep the whole show going. So nobody had time to have their liver irritated by concealed frustrations. Everybody had their little tasks, and everybody contributed. It was understood. Everybody instinctively took up their tasks, so they could sit around on the front porch and giggle in the evenings. No radio. No television. Not much traffic. So the minuet of daily life was a rhythmic thing. You did the same thing every day at the same time.
*
Now this was not a fixed, Yankee, do-or-die schedule. If anything out of the ordinary happened—STOP—and consider it. Southerners will stop everything, but
everything
, even a war, to hear a funny story or a juicy bit of scandal. And of course, if there was going to be a parade,
everything
stopped and everyone rushed to Government Street to see the parade. There were so many parades, not just at Mardi Gras. When the circus came to town, there was a parade. I mean elephants, and red-and-gold cages with lions and tigers and baboons and marching bears. When the beverage called Nehi came out, in a tall bottle “as high as your knee” (it wasn’t), there was a float I’ll never forget. It was a well-turned female leg in a high ankle-strap sandal covered in gold leaf and a bottle of cream soda as tall as that knee. There was a tall female leg and a tall bottle, and that was all there was on that float. And it said, “Nehi has come to town.” Then on Memorial Day, the Confederate veterans marched down Government Street in their gray uniforms to the Confederate section of Magnolia Cemetery. And sometimes a bunch of neighborhood children would get together and make their own parade.
If a dancing beggar came through the street, everybody stopped everything to watch that beggar do that shuffle dance and collect in his tambourine. Even in the height of the Depression, people found pennies for anybody who entertained. And if the pie man came—he had this little thing full of hot ashes and had these apple turnovers that were so good. Everybody stopped everything to get an apple turnover. If a special boat was coming in—let’s say a Greek boat was coming in—everybody went down there to see this Greek boat coming in and the goodies that came off the boats.
In those days, in Mobile, people weren’t as serious about the eight-to-five world. In fact, there was no eight-to-five world. There was only the twenty-four-hour, “live this life on this planet” world. And it’s why I haven’t lasted very long in the eight-to-five world. I tried it in New York, but I couldn’t take it.
I think of the carefully ordered lives of so many people that I see much younger than myself. Get up in the morning and they turn on the weather report and then they have their breakfast and then the children are taken to school. And then they go to their offices. And the wife gets to the washing machine. And goes to shop. And then he goes to some greasy spoon downtown for lunch. She either meets other ladies at some place or she heats a can of soup at home. Then she goes to pick up the children. And it’s all of them, rows and rows, house after house, of them all, and at night they turn on the TV. They are all living what I consider the kind of boredom that causes cancer. Or murder within the family. Or early divorce. Or children who turn out to be either sex maniacs, thieves, drug addicts, or dedicated archivists.
But boredom was unknown to me as a child in Mobile. Life was a dazzling, ever-changing kaleidoscope of colors and movement and sound and different flavors juxtaposed. You know art is the juxtaposition of unlikely objects. Boy, we have a lot of that in Mobile. Examples: a goat coming down the stairs of the house in town; English, rare English roses growing in a mud bank above where the alligators are sleeping. The relics of Mardi Gras that are in every attic. Mobile has more of this surreal quality than the rest of the South.
High Tide and High Wind
There were three maiden sisters in this big two-story house across from us on Conti Street. The Misses Nana, Evelina, and Jessamina Ebeltoft. In the parlor they taught music: Chopin, Schubert, and Schumann. They also taught ragtime. I often think, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a film of Miss Nana in her tight corset and that pale face, not one drop of makeup, playing ragtime? Then they taught painting on cloth. A lot of grand young ladies, for their wedding dresses, had white moiré taffeta with white lilacs and white roses painted on them. Seamstresses who were going to make wedding dresses took these classes from the Ebeltoft sisters. They didn’t have anything to do, and they thought, What could I do? Then, you painted on cloth. Now, you might study computer science.
On the side of the house, there were all these oleanders and wax privet. Along the Conti Street side there were these little steps going up to the second floor, where they had a bootleg school. They taught shorthand and typing secretly upstairs. The Southern belles were taught music and painting on cloth in the parlor downstairs. Southern belles heavily veiled were taught typing and shorthand secretly upstairs.
My grandmother was best friends with those Ebeltoft sisters. They were a little dotty, and she was their source of information. They’d run over and ask the damnedest things.
“Oh, Miss Annie! Miss Annie! Do you brown your stew meat in bacon fat or butter?”
Whenever there was news of a storm coming, these three sisters would come wringing their hands and say to my grandmother, “Oh, Anne-Elizabeth, what are you going to serve for the hurricane?”
“Same as ever,” Ma-Ma would say. “I’m going to bake a ham, roast some chickens, make a lot of bread and cookies. I have some new potatoes, a lot of dried beans and rice, some beautiful pearl barley.”
The other lady across the street, Mrs. Allen, would say, “I don’t keep potatoes in the house during a hurricane. They might ferment. Sometimes I’ll loosen the corks in the good wine—you just don’t know what will happen—those pressure changes. Things can blow up and potatoes will ferment.”