I don’t know if she was anything more than a dedicated amateur. She must have been good at playing “the Madwoman,” because she had played it once before at the Alexandria Little Theatre. When she came to visit us in Raleigh, she and my mother, also a little theater actress, referred to “the Madwoman” so off-handedly that it might have been someone they knew. When my mother played Eliza Doolittle, Grannie helped her with her Cockney accent. They could be actresses together, those two—that was their bond—and I’m sure it had offered them both, at different times, blessed relief from bombastic husbands. An actress had rehearsals, after all. An actress could be away from home for reasons other than the Junior League and the Piggly Wiggly. I can remember my father’s growly discontent as he served up the chicken divan casserole our mother had left behind on one of her rehearsal nights. “Your mama’s down at the theater with the goddamn fairies.”
The summer I turned ten my parents put me on a train to Virginia so I could stay with Grannie for several weeks. Looking back, that strikes me as out of the ordinary. Had Grannie actually requested this visit, or had there been a crisis at home, some unmentionable “female operation” that necessitated a long-term child-sitter? I had already figured out that ladies kept family secrets even theater-loving boys were not allowed to hear. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled about it, since I would have the Madwoman all to myself. It would be just the two of us when we went to the Smithsonian or down to the Hot Shoppe in Shirlington for roast young tom turkey with all the trimmin’s, and hot dogs in exotic rectangular buns.
Virginia was just as steaming hot as North Carolina, but Grannie built a nest out of old mattresses in her cool basement laundry room where I could curl up with my “Uncle Scrooge” comics and feast on buttered bread and iced tea, addictions that have followed me down the years. It was there that Grannie first began reading my palm, gently interrogating me about all my lives, past and present. As much as anything, palmistry was her excuse for offering tactful wisdom. When I grew older and Grannie visited Raleigh more frequently, I watched with pride as she read the palms of many others: my school friends, our maid Camilla, and once, during one of my parents’ parties, the governor of North Carolina. Sometimes she dispensed with personal contact altogether and cruised for palms in public places, sneaking a peek on the fly. I was with her once on a crosstown bus when she nearly fell out of her seat in her effort to eavesdrop on an interesting hand on the other side of the aisle.
My own readings became a regular affair, the equivalent of a semiannual checkup. I’m sure that was because Grannie wasn’t getting the answers she really wanted. When she studied my lifeline and asked me about career choices, my reply would be the same for many years: “I want to be a lawyer like Daddy.” Whereupon, she would manage a feeble smile and close my fingers like a book she was done with for the evening. She rarely interceded in family matters, especially ones that might challenge my father’s game plan, but she knew about me. She knew.
By the time I was thirteen I knew about me, too. I had begun to have dreams about kissing grown-up gas-station attendants, a development that disturbed me since it wasn’t just messing around the way boys did on camping trips; it was flat-out romance. I learned the hard way to put a towel behind the toilet tank to keep it from banging against the wall when I jerked off in the morning. My father had called me on this over breakfast: “What was that thumping I heard this morning, son? You spent an awful long time in the crapper.” He must have been thinking, with some degree of relief, that this was the advent of Girls for me. At the time, it was unimaginable to me that he could have known what was going on, much less tease me about it, but I was mortified just the same. Five years later I saw him inflict similar torment on my thirteen-year-old sister when he found a box of Kotex in her suitcase on a family trip. Such matters were never discussed in our family, but as soon as one of us arrived at a scary new rite of passage, the old man was there to greet us with a knowing leer. He seemed to enjoy making us uncomfortable. He was a pissed-off, shut-down guy, but I never stopped to think about why. All I knew—all I thought about, really—was that sooner or later I was bound to disappoint him.
Thus Grannie became a comfort in the minefield of my adolescence. Alone among my family and friends, she made no assumptions (and held no expectations) about my blossoming masculinity. When my father referred to Reverend Sapp as a “fairy nice fellow,” Grannie registered disproval with a scolding glance and a soft “Oh, Armistead, must you?” Once, when she and I attended a garden party at Mount Vernon (not George Washington’s house but a slightly smaller replica in a fancy Raleigh neighborhood), we spotted a woman in spike heels tottering ahead of us on a perfect green lawn. She was a pale-pink hallucination, a tipsy flamingo on the run, perfumed and powdered to the nth degree. As soon as she was out of earshot, Grannie turned to me with a sly smile and murmured, “Any woman who is all woman or any man who is all man is a complete monster unfit for human company.”
This was the South in 1958, and I had never heard such a thing.
FOUR
IT WAS MY FRIEND CLARK WHO told me how my Southern grandfather had died. Clark, if you remember, was the one who had taken me spelunking beneath Christ Church. He was a bit of a self-styled rogue, a stoop-shouldered, hatchet-faced boy with a perpetual wild hair up his ass. He had a way of goading me into action, or at least into acquiescence, by muttering the same challenge every time: “Have you no spirit of adventure?” He said that before he drove our pickup into the surf at Carolina Beach and when he proposed a BB-gun fight between tents on an Explorer camping trip. Never mind that the pickup got stuck in the sand or that a BB got lodged in the cartilage of another boy’s ear and had to be dug out, with considerable effort, using the pointy end of a church key—Clark had a way of forgetting his fiascoes.
Clark idolized my father. His own father was a soft-spoken architect who worked in a converted brick water tower downtown, so my father’s constant bombast and engagement with everything and everybody must have been attractive to Clark. Both of us, I suppose, longed for what was conspicuously missing at home.
One day, as I often did after school, I walked through the woods to Clark’s house. When I asked him about a fresh scratch on the side of his face, he dismissed it manfully as nothing, then led me down to Nicotine Alley, his secret smoking place in the woods. There, lighting a Lucky and speaking in the mumbling tones of a B-movie hood, he told me he’d been in a fight with another kid, a kid whose name I didn’t recognize. Clark said he had been defending my father’s honor.
“About what?”
“He called him ‘the suicide’s son.’”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Because your granddaddy killed himself.”
I was dumbfounded. “How do you know that?”
Clark just shrugged. “Everybody knows that.”
Everybody did know that, including Mummie, who was on her Stauffer machine when I got home that afternoon. A Stauffer machine was a vinyl-covered bench that looked like a modern massage table, only lower, with a center part that moved from side to side at various speeds in the name of exercise. It was wildly comic to us kids, since Mummie looked like a horizontal hula girl when she used it.
I stopped at the door of her walk-in closet, not far from the head of the Stauffer machine, which seemed to be set at its highest speed. My mother was always svelte and beautiful, so I couldn’t imagine why she thought she needed it. In those days people often said she looked like Elizabeth Taylor.
I got to the point right away.
“Did Daddy’s daddy kill himself?”
“Oh, Teddy . . . you frightened me!”
“Sorry.”
She turned off the machine and sat up on the bench in her terry-cloth jumpsuit. “Who told you that?”
“Clark.”
“Well, that was very naughty of him.”
“He wasn’t being mean. He was defending Daddy. Is it true?”
She told me she didn’t
know much about it herself. My father had spoken of it only once, just before they got married, and she had never raised the subject again, realizing it would be too painful for Daddy. It had happened at home, she said, at night, while Mimi and her other two children were in the house. He had used a shotgun. Daddy was nineteen and away at college, so an old family retainer had driven to Chapel Hill to break the news in person. “Your daddy done kilt hisself.”
Zebedee, I thought. That must have been Zebedee.
I had met Zebedee only once, when Daddy had suddenly taken a different route to a nursery to stop in front of a rundown house in the country. A skinny old black man had come out of the house, recognized Daddy, and thrown his hat to the ground in a gesture of amazement and joy. They clearly had not seen each other for years. Daddy got out of the car to talk to him, but I couldn’t hear their conversation. Afterward all he said to me was: “Zebedee used to work for us. Fine fella.”
I asked my mother if they knew why my grandfather had killed himself.
“Not really, but . . . it was during the Depression. And he had too many old ladies to deal with. That might have been part of it.”
“Old ladies?”
“Who lived at the house. Aunts and such. Mimi’s folks. It may have gotten too much for him. I don’t know, darling.”
I couldn’t imagine why he would kill himself because of old ladies. That was another family house I couldn’t begin to picture, since I had seen it only from the road. Daddy’s father had built it in the twenties, out at the far end of Clark Avenue, near Meredith College. It was a big brick place with square white columns set back among oak trees. I could see Daddy with Zebedee in a Model T, heading home to that house, wondering what remnants of his father were still on the walls, realizing he had just become the man of the house, whether he wanted it or not.
Mummie could see where my vivid little mind was going.
“And you mustn’t ask Daddy about it, darling. Do you understand? We don’t need the details.”
Maybe she didn’t, but I did. I was thinking about those overwrought condolence letters in Mimi’s dresser and the time I’d heard Mimi weeping in her sleep and her persistent delusion that the ladies of Christ Church were investigating her. Daddy wasn’t the only person who’d been left with a mess to clean up. And what about his brother and sister, who had still been young children at the time? Had they all heard the shot? Who got there first? Yes, a few details would have been useful, but Mummie was a lifelong list keeper of Things That Might Hurt Your Father, and she was very clear about this one. He shouldn’t have to think about this ever again.
At least Daddy’s rage finally had a reason. Twenty years after his father’s suicide he was still lashing out at the world, at goddamn integrationists and goddamn Communists and mild old Fred Fletcher with his subversive philosophy of tempus fugit. Tempus would never fugit for my father; it was stuck in 1933.
Unreconstructed.
And something else occurred to me once I’d learned about my grandfather: Daddy had a way of threatening to die whenever he argued with my mother or endured the pouting disapproval of his children. “Well, you don’t have to worry about me, anyway. I won’t be around much longer.” I had never taken this seriously, considering it little more than histrionics over his high cholesterol, whatever that was. Now I wondered if suicide might run in the family, if the gun he kept in the bedroom closet, right there on the shelf above the Stauffer machine, might do the job one day. Whenever Daddy blew up at dinner and stomped off to the bedroom in a blind fury, I would consciously count the seconds after he left, as if marking the distance between a flash of lightning and the terrible thunder that was certain to follow.
The truth about my grandfather made me look at my father through different eyes. He seemed more breakable to me now, more broken; but rather than question the values that had sprung from his trauma, I chose to embrace them completely. He needed me on his side, after all, and I needed him to love me, so I resolved to follow in his conservative footsteps. There was already a national movement afoot to take back the country from the Communist sympathizers, and I would be part of it.
I started reading my father’s copies of Human Events (where, at this very moment, Ann Coulter is writing love letters to Donald Trump) and studied the flyers that Daddy got in the mail from the John Birch Society. When, at sixteen, I was named student City Manager of Raleigh for a day, I told a reporter that young right-wingers like me would soon be of voting age, and that should serve as fair warning to liberal politicians who wanted big government and socialism. I had just read 1984 and Brave New World, so I thought that’s what we were fighting against, a totalitarian regime that wouldn’t stop at putting rats on your face. My father’s face was flushed with pride when he read my adolescent war cry in the morning paper.
“Attaboy, son! You tell those sonsabitches!”
Not long thereafter the old man gave me a book called Race and Reason: A Yankee View. It was written by someone named Carleton Putnam, a businessman who eventually ran Delta Air Lines, and who was, in fact, a Yankee—a smart one, to boot, according to my father, since he went to Princeton and Columbia, and was an aristocrat, and wasn’t afraid to speak the goddamn truth. This made him a perfect last-ditch voice for the cause of segregation. Putnam had studied the skulls of whites and Negroes and come to the conclusion that Negroes needed another five hundred billion years of evolution before they could breed with the whites without damaging bloodlines. This timetable served everyone, he argued, black and white alike, since it let the races evolve at their own rate and achieve their highest biological destinies.
Or something.
My father loved Race and Reason. It was his go-to political tract on the subject of race, his Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It didn’t mince words, he said, but it was written in such a calm scholarly voice that it sounded, well, reasonable—just as the title implied. It wasn’t racist to make a case for segregation, just reasonable.
Daddy’s own thoughts on racial mixing tended to run to the practical side:
“Don’t worry, son. If you ever knock up a little nigger gal, we can send her to Puerto Rico for the operation.”
It seems to me now that this was his feeble effort at wishful thinking. I’m pretty sure Daddy already knew that I would not be knocking up anyone in the next five hundred billion years, but he didn’t want discrimination to stand in the way of my manly fulfillment. Poontang was different, he said. Poontang was fine.
THERE WERE STILL plenty of white people in Raleigh who thought (and talked) the way my father did, but their ranks had been diminishing since the mid-fifties, when the Supreme Court had ruled for the desegregation of public schools. It was easier for me to accept my father’s bigotry as gospel because I had never known a black person beyond our maid Camilla, a thin, soft-spoken spinster with whom I watched American Bandstand every afternoon after school. She insisted on coming in the back door, calling herself “an old-fashioned colored lady.” Sometimes, when we dropped off our old clothes at Camilla’s house, I saw her brother Lovelace, who worked as a porter for the Seaboard Railroad. Beyond them, not one black person. Not in the Boy Scouts or my private grade school or either of my public high schools, junior or senior. Black folks were almost as invisible to me as queers were to everyone else in the South, including other queers. In 2008, when I was invited back to Broughton High as a guest of the Gay-Straight Alliance, an African-American girl was astonished to learn that there had been no kids of her color in the school when I was there forty-five years earlier. No more astonished than I, certainly, that LGBT kids were now walking the hallways of Broughton in HERE AND QUEER T-shirts.
The South makes social progress, like everywhere else, though it does its level best not to notice it while it’s going on. Only later, when it stands a serious risk of looking like a total asshole, does it claim to have always been on the side of decency and justice. (The same style of black-on-silver historical marker that identifies the home of my slavery-defend
ing Grandpa Branch now celebrates the site of a 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro.) It’s hard for the South to get things right from the start, because, ever since the Civil War, it has taught itself to equate righteousness with losing. We must be on the right track, y’all, because everyone else is against us. In my seventy-two years I have heard Southerners offer this excuse for everything from segregation to miscegenation laws to the “religious liberty” currently invoked in the name of subjugating gay people. And in every instance, when the Supreme Court reminds them that decent Americans don’t act in this way anymore, they haul out the states’ rights flag and brandish it in a Rebel-gray fog of amnesia.
When my father died in 2005, one of his obituaries said he’d always been sorry he’d been born too late to fight for the Confederacy. He meant that. And in a sense he achieved it. If slavery could not be preserved as an institution, at least he could still fight to see that those folks stayed in their proper place. That’s what he thought he was doing, I suppose, on the unforgettable Sunday when he marched the whole family out of Christ Church in the middle of one of Dansapp’s sermons.
Christ Church had never completely excluded black people from its services. There was a steep, dark balcony that had once been a slave gallery, and black folks were still seated there on occasion, if they were, say, the beloved family maid of someone getting married or buried. They were never offered communion at the rail. Dansapp thought it was time for that to change, and stated as much in his sermon, creeping up on the subject with talk of Christian love for our Negro brothers and sisters. When my father realized what was up, he muttered an order to my mother.
“Let’s go. Right now!”
Mummie was as confused as the rest of us and didn’t immediately respond.