Bragging, she admitted she had contracted diarrhea in twenty-one countries. To my grandmother, a severe case of diarrhea was some sort of traveler’s badge of merit, signifying a willingness to forsake the merely picturesque for the wilder backwaters of the world. In Syria, she consumed a bowl full of sheep’s eyeballs, which she reported tasted exactly like one would imagine sheep’s eyeballs to taste. She was more adventurer than connoisseur but made careful entries about her diet. In various parts of the world she dined on caiman’s tail, the poisonous flesh of blowfish (which made her fingers numb), shark fillets, ostrich eggs, chocolate-covered locusts, elvers pickled in brine (for years I thought she had eaten elves, tiny people preserved like dill pickles), antelope liver, goat genitals, and boiled python. After studying her diet, one did not wonder long over her recurrent bouts of diarrhea; one only wondered how she kept herself from vomiting during every meal.
For three unstoppable years her task was endless voyage, the discovery of uncommon things in uncommon places, the study of herself in the text and footnotes of alien geographies. Later, she admitted that she wanted to build up a reserve of scintillant memories for the old age she felt was fast approaching. She traveled to be amazed, transformed into a woman she was not born to be. Not by intent but by example, she became the first philosopher of travel our family produced. By rambling about, Tolitha discovered that there were things to be learned on the tangents and the extremities. She honored the margins; the wild side made all the difference. At the summer solstice of 1954, an amiable band of Sherpas led my grandmother on a two-week trek through the Himalayas where at dawn one morning on the brutally cold rooftop of the world, she watched sunlight disclose the snowy flanks of Mount Everest. A month later she saw a migration of sea snakes in the South China Sea and was on her way home.
She arrived in Colleton somewhat exhausted and threadbare. Very significantly, she also came into our town penniless. My mother would do the figures out loud in a bit of obsessive calculation of assets lost and moaned that Tolitha had gone through more than a hundred thousand dollars. But if she had surprised her family and her town by satisfying some innate lust to travel, she shocked them all when it came to settling down again. Unknown to any of us, she had reopened diplomatic channels with my grandfather, rekindled whatever amity or affection the Depression had extinguished, and wrote him engaging, sisterly letters throughout her peregrinations. Whether out of a sense of privacy or tact, he never mentioned those letters to anyone; my grandfather Wingo was the only one in our town who was not stunned when our grandmother arrived back in Colleton after an absence of more than twenty years and went directly to his house on Barnwell Street, unpacked her clothes, and placed them in the same chest of drawers she had abandoned so long ago. “Even a sea bird’s got to rest sometime” was the only thing she offered as explanation to anyone. Ten trunks full of the most marvelous and useless exotica followed her to Colleton, and her house Overflowed with much of the eccentric memorabilia of the planet that had struck her fancy. My grandfather’s living room, which had been so quintessentially southern, filled up with African masks and art, ceramic elephants from Thailand, and trinkets from every bazaar she had plundered in Asia. Each item had a story behind it, a country, a specific set of adventures, and she could retrace her steps by letting her eyes circle the room. Her secret, we would discover, was that once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.
My father’s family reconstituted itself when he was thirty-four years old.
My mother took inexhaustible pleasure in demeaning the life and times of my grandmother. There was not a woman alive whom my mother did not consider a rival, and my grandmother’s return to the fold after her romp about the continents brought forth torrents of my mother’s self-righteous denunciations. “I don’t see how a mother could ever leave her children during a depression,” she would snort privately. “Men abandon their families all the time, not a mother. A true mother. Your grandmother committed a crime against nature, against all natural law, and I’ve never heard her once mention it or drop to her knees to beg your father’s forgiveness. And don’t think it didn’t hurt your father. Don’t you think it didn’t affect him. No, you can trace all his problems back to that day he woke up and found that he no longer had a mama to feed and care for him. That’s why he’s mentally ill. That’s why he acts like a beast sometimes. Then Tolitha went and squandered a future on her own follies instead of investing it in a savings account. She came back to this town without a dime. If I was Amos, I’d have kicked her out on her ear. But men are more sentimental than women. Mark my words.”
She revealed these misgivings only to her children. When she was with Tolitha, my mother praised her independence, her courage, and her complete nonchalance about the attitude of the town toward her. Tolitha gave not a shit about the public opinion of Colleton. She was the only woman I knew when I was growing up who had ever been divorced. In many ways, she was the first modern woman that Colleton had produced. She offered no explanations and no apologies for her actions. After her return there were rumors of other marriages on the road, alliances with lonely men on ships, affairs of both convenience and the heart, but Tolitha said nothing. She simply returned to my grandfather’s house and began living with him again as his wife. Amos still bored her with the rapture of his religious convictions. But there was something ineffable between them, something comfortable, something friendly. My grandfather was delighted to have her back. He had never looked at another woman. He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives. I think my grandmother could have loved a hundred men. As I grew older and got to know her, I think she probably did. She was irresistible to men and a threat to every woman who crossed her path. Her allure was offbeat, indefinable, and original.
Now, I think she came back because she had done everything she wanted to do; I also believe that she came back to save her grandchildren from the fury of her son and the emotional coldness of her daughter-in-law. Whatever, she provided a voice, a conscience, a court of appeals we could fall back on during a crisis. She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself. Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother. Tolitha never scolded us, disciplined us, disapproved, or made her love conditional on our behavior in any way. She simply adored us in all the manifestations, both troubling and endearing, of our childhood. From her mistakes, she had codified an unadulterated ethic: Love was not a bridesmaid of despair; love did not have to hurt. Armed with such potent knowledge, she returned quietly to the life she had abandoned. Whenever my father hit us, my mother would say, “He only did it because he loves you.” Whenever my mother struck us with her hairbrush, her broom, her hands, she did it in the name and under the sign of love. Such love as we got hovered beneath the sign of Mars, a frayed refugee of some debased and ruined zodiac. But my grandmother brought back from her journeys a revolutionary doctrine: Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood. At first, the three of us drew back when she tried to hug us, to take us on her lap. Tolitha stroked our hair and faces. She kissed us until we purred like cats. She praised us in songs of her own making. She told us we were beautiful. She told us we were extraordinary and would do great things.
Her return strengthened the already formidable Wingo matriarchy. The Wingo line produced strong men, but none of us were a match for the Wingo women. In their eyes we could elicit the czar’s metallic glint, the tyrant’s cold assumptions. When Tolitha returned, a duel of power began that would not end until my mother drove with me to place my grandmother in the nursing home in Charleston twenty-five years later.
The man she returned to, Amos Wingo, was one of the strangest men I’ve ever met and certainly one of the f
inest. Any study of my grandfather becomes a meditation on saintliness. His whole life was one long hymn of praise to the Lord, one long, boring hymn of praise. Prayer was his single hobby; the great God, Triune, his only subject. To analyze my grandmother’s wilder, more secular biography, you must have some compassion for the impossibility of living out a life with a man committed to saintliness. Saints make wonderful grandfathers but lousy husbands. Years later, my grandmother revealed that when Amos made love to her he kept moaning, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus,” as he writhed within her. She claimed it took her mind off what she was doing when he invited Jesus between the sheets.
When we were very small, my grandfather walked the three of us down to the dock on Melrose Island and told us the history of his spiritual life. As he soaked his long, thin feet in the Colleton River, it did not surprise me one single bit when Grandpa Wingo revealed the secret that God himself had appeared to the young Amos Wingo and instructed him to live a life according to the Word. God often honored my grandfather with these chatty, arbitrary visitations throughout his entire life. Amos would write long letters to the editor of the Colleton Gazette, spelling out in exact detail where each vision had occurred and a word-for-word disquisition on what exactly the Creator had on his mind. From these letters (which Savannah carefully preserved) you could deduce that God spoke without much thought for the codes of spelling or grammar and an uncanny fondness for southern vernacular. “God talks like a redneck,” Luke said after reading one of these epistles. In fact, God spoke in a voice unnervingly similar to my grandfather’s, and those desultory letters to his townsmen were both the bane and secret glory of my childhood. But Amos himself admitted it was hard to lead a normal life when God was constantly interrupting him with spectacular and time-consuming interviews.
Savannah was the first to ask the question, “What does God look like, Grandpa?”
“Well, Savannah,” my grandfather answered, “he’s a right pretty-looking fellow. There’s always a lot of light around him, so I can’t see him too good, but his features are regular and his hair is darker than you might suspect. It’s kind of long, too, and I’ve thought maybe I should ask to cut his hair. I wouldn’t charge him a cent. Just trim it up a little bit. Shape it around the sides.”
Savannah was the first person who ever said aloud that Grandpa Wingo was crazy.
But it was a sweet, uncomplicated craziness if that is what it was. During the height of the Depression, God appeared to him on a daily basis and his family had to live on what they could fish out of the river and that alone. He quit his job as a barber and quit selling Bibles, believing that the Depression was a celestial sign that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand. He took to preaching on street corners, screaming out bizarre psalms of faith and perdition to anyone within earshot, sometimes lapsing into the terrifying, arcane grammars of the unknown tongue that manifested itself like some tortured epilepsy of the soul.
Grandpa Wingo was also something of a wanderer, “gypsy blooded,” my grandmother called it, but she said it cynically, because she felt that Amos did not put that much imagination into his travels. He just liked the feeling of being on the road, and it did not matter much to him where he was going. The summons would strike him without warning and he would leave Colleton straightaway and on foot, drifting around the South for months at a time, selling Bibles and cutting hair. Even in repose he had a distracting nervous mannerism—his right leg would shake and jiggle as if there were an engine idling beneath his knee. That vibrating leg was always a reminder that he could be gone the next day, heading south for Florida or west for Mississippi, to spread the word of the Gospel and to sprinkle talcum on freshly barbered necks. He deposited the Lord’s word like pollen on the stamens and pistils of every human soul he drifted upon in his errant, unpremeditated ministry.
Along the back roads of the rural South, he carried one suitcase filled with his clothing and his barbering tools and another, larger one, brimming with Bibles of all shapes and sizes. The least expensive Bibles were small, black, and utilitarian, the size of children’s shoes. But their print was small and could induce myopia if read too fervently in bad light. He considered it his duty to push the showier lines. The Cadillac of Bibles was one of dyed, milky white Naugahyde with gold tassels to use as page markers. It was sumptuously illustrated by the Biblical paintings of “The Great Masters.” But the crowning glory of this radiant volume was that the spoken words of Jesus of Nazareth were printed in vivid red ink. These most expensive Bibles were invariably snatched up by the poorest families, who purchased them on a generous time-payment plan. In my grandfather’s wake, poor Christians would often have to make the difficult choice between paying the monthly tariff for their flashy white Bible or putting food on their table. The memory of my grandfather’s pious and God-struck presence must have made the choice more disruptive than it should have been. Not making a payment on a Bible my grandfather equated with grievous, unspeakable sin, but he would never bring himself to repossess a Bible once he had filled out for free the family chronology in the middle of the book. He believed that no family could feel truly secure or American until they were all named up in a decent Bible where Jesus spoke in red. Though it sometimes strained his relationship with the company that supplied him with Bibles, he refused to take the Word of God from a poor man’s house. The Bible company had to send other men in my grandfather’s footsteps to repossess the Bibles or collect the money due. But Grandpa Wingo sold more white Bibles than any other salesman and that was where the real money was made.
As a salesman of Bibles, my grandfather became something of a legend in the small-town South. He would hit a mill village or a crossroads town and start going door to door. If a family was not in need of a Bible, then someone in that family was probably in need of a haircut. He would cut a whole family of hair at a group rate. He loved the feel of human hair between his fingers and had an abiding affection for bald men. He spoke of the life of Christ above the razor’s hum and the dense clouds of talcum as he brushed the falling hair from the necks of squirming boys and girls. When he retired, the Bible company bestowed upon him a set of gold-plated hair clippers and a certificate of gratitude that legitimized a fact we’d suspected all along: Amos Wingo had sold more Bibles than anyone in the history of the company who had gone door to door. In its final testimonial and in a last stunning moment of poetry, the company referred to him as “Amos Wingo—The King of the Red-Letter Bible.”
But as a traveling salesman whose territory covered five southern states, my grandfather often left my father in the lackadaisical, inconstant care of maids, cousins, maiden aunts, or whomever Amos could rustle up to care for his son. For very different reasons, neither of my grandparents ever got around to the fundamental business of raising their only child. There was something unsponsored, even unreconcilable, about my father’s quarrel with the world. His childhood had been a sanctioned debacle of neglect, and my grandparents were the pale, unindictable executors of my father’s violations against his own children.
My grandparents were like two mismatched children and their house retained some flavor of both sanctuary and kindergarten for me. When they spoke to each other it was with the deepest civility. There were no real conversations between them; no light, bantering moments, no hints of flirtation, no exchange of gossip. They never seemed to be living together, even after my grandmother’s return. Nothing human interfered with their unexamined affection for each other. I studied their relationship with something approaching awe because I could not figure out what made it work. I felt love between these two people but it was a love without flame or passion. There were also no rancors or fevers, no risings or ebbings of the spirit to chart, just a marriage without weather, a stillness, a resignation, just windless days in the Gulf Stream of their quiet aging. Their uncomplicated joy in each other’s company made our own parents’ marriage appear obscene. It had merely taken them half a lifetime of separation to grow perfect for each other. I lo
oked to them for some explanation of my father and I could find nothing. He was not present in their eyes. Their merger had produced something completely new and unseen. I never heard Tolitha or Amos raise their voice. They never spanked us and were almost apologetic when they corrected us in the slightest way. Yet they had created the man who fathered me, who beat me, who beat my mother, who beat my brother and sister, and I could find no explanation or clue in my grandparents’ house. Their very decency, their inviolate calm, disturbed me. I could not look to these people to discover where I came from: There was something missing, broken, unanswered. Somehow these two gentle souls had produced a violent son who in turn had produced me. I lived in a house where the shrimper was feared. It was never said aloud. My mother forbade us to tell anyone outside the family that my father hit any of us. She put the highest premium on what she called “family loyalty” and would tolerate no behavior that struck her as betrayal or sedition. We were not allowed to criticize our father or to complain about his treatment of us. He knocked my brother Luke unconscious three times before Luke was ten. Luke was always his first target, the face he turned to always. My mother was usually hit when she tried to intervene on Luke’s behalf. Savannah and I were struck when we tried to pull him off our mother. A cycle was born, accidental and deadly.