I’m nobody you know, but it’s slow at work just now so I’ll stick my nickel’s worth in.
Go for it man. I recognize many of your thoughts about family history and stories that disappear mainly because I’ve had them too. Unfortunately I waited too late to talk to relatives and record so much was forever lost. Not that it means a lot to anyone but me - my family was nowhere near so colorful as yours.
But mainly, do it so I can read it! Pretty please with sugar on top?
ME & BOBBY E. LEE, Part 1
Robert E. Lee’s Birthday
19 January 1981
(the day before Reagan’s inauguration)
In space no one can hear you scream, but the same is not true in a grocery store produce section. When the scream is from a son in search of his mother the sound travels even farther and faster than it might otherwise.
“Muh! Muh!”
“I’m at the front of the store goddammit!”
“Well convey yourself to the back of the store! I’m in need your assistance!”
"I AM BUSY! I’m trying to find hot dog buns in multiples or three! Six or twelve preferably…”
"Well delay it a moment and I’ll join in the search! But for now come here and help me to discern an eggplant!”
"Damn boy! You can’t discern an eggplant! Hell, you’re over fifty years old!”
“Somehow that particular bit of information forms the sole hole in my knowledge! Now get over here and mend it!”
Due to an odd and hereditary resonance in both voices the conversation would have been audible to anybody in the Big Bear Grocery Store even if it had not been shouted, which it was. While a few hearing the exchange may have thought “what an odd looking and odder sounding and very loud twosome” most simply thought “Professor Sampiro and his mama are here”.
There were precious few to think anything at all as the store was almost empty. The fact that it was early afternoon on a weekday during the school year contributed to the vacancy but the main factor was the recent opening of Winn Dixie shopping center two miles away. The new supermarket’s bigger selection, better prices and cleaner aisles aligned with the TG&Y, Harco Drugs, True Value Hardware and Wetumpka Alabama’s first pizza place had dealt the long ailing Big Bear, a 50 year old store with dim lighting and seemingly allergic to cleanliness, a mortal blow.
The lack of people in the store was enough to diminish whatever embarrassment I may have otherwise felt, though that would have been minimal anyway as for my father and grandmother shouting to each other across a grocery store was relatively good behavior. At least there wasn’t any singing this time and Grandmother’s dentures were in her mouth rather than her hand.
Actually even singing wouldn’t be so terrible as long as it was Daddy singing, for he at least had a decent bass voice (if with a bit much vibrato and overused), but if he sang I knew that Grandmother would join in, and while her singing voice resembled few things more than it did a cat dying in mid orgasm it was the one thing she had she didn’t mind sharing. Grandmother’s denture displacement I minded under any circumstances.
To anybody new to the sound of Daddy’s voice, the appearance of its maker would and would not have matched any visual images they probably had. He was a big man in all senses, a never small but once athletic frame now officially gone to rotundity. He stood roughly 6’5, though ‘5 was less from genes than from the brown felt Stetson whose brim was currently being preserved by a cloud of smoke from the King Edward cigar clamped in his mouth. (In 1981 you could still smoke in most grocery stores [and doctor’s offices and hospital rooms and most other public places].) As today was his off day and he would be spending a good part of it in his pasture tending to his cows he wore one of his older ties and most durable three piece suits, specifically a three piece corduroy that looked like it had endured months of constant wear with no washing (because it had), but only the vest and pant legs were really visible under the bulky overcoat that would not have seemed out of place on Jesse James. Somehow even under all the layers, however, you could tell that his fat was surprisingly firm.
The hair under the Stetson was cut short, coarse, rarely washed and prematurely gray, a color that when combined with the pronounced crow’s feet, ruddy face and a general aged demeanor made him seem much older than his 54 years, while the firmness of his portliness and a certain unquantifiable agelessness subtracted the years again. Ultimately he was a 54 year old who looked 70, but a very young 70.
Overall his attire and countenance were a hybrid of historian, cattleman and slob, all of which he was. He may or may not have looked like a man who had built a rambling 4 BR suburban style ranch house on a hill that was convenient to nothing but the tin roofed log house he was born in and named it for a 195 line Tennyson poem he could and often did quote aloud from memory. He may or may not have looked like a man whose most dreamt of vacation spot that he had not yet seen was Vincennes, Indiana, or a man who two years before had taken a cruise to the Bahamas and left the ship exactly once (that to buy a dozen King Edward cigars), who dismissed Star Wars as a silly entertainment indicative of the wasted minds of American teenagers but would laugh out loud for days over a joke by Minnie Pearl, who could recall to you every play in every Auburn University football game he had ever seen and the Secretary of State of every United States president but could not change the channel on a television set. What physical appearance would match that description to most people would be hard to judge, but all these things and the description above are true.
He also had a particular aroma about him, not foul but most certainly distinct. It was a personal blend of cigars, cow feed, evergreen and a naturally occurring musk that overpowered the English Leather cologne he also used. (At night time whiskey and peppermint would be added to the noisome.) His most defining characteristic, however, was his voice, a powerful vibrating baritone and bass frequently likened, if only by him (but not without justification) to that of Orson Welles. This morning it had been exercised as he stood through the skylight of his beloved 1977 Toyota Corolla (the same mustard color as the suit he was wearing, which is why he chose the suit) and boisterously sang sad love songs of the Civil War for the benefit of his heifers. (He knew the songs from both armies and sang them with some equanimity but today they were Confederate only in honor of Robert E. Lee’s birthday, a holiday in Alabama and the reason he was off from work and in a grocery store in the early afternoon.) At the moment the voice was being exercised in pleas and orders for help to his mother as he scanned the produce like Vespucci seeking landfall in his quest for eggplants.
“Damn it Muh! Just tell me what one looks like and I’ll go from there! This is your one chance to return to the field of education!”
“I’ve been retired from education for almost twenty years! Get Jon there to help ya! Only thing I’m interested in expanding education on is the marketing of weenie buns!”
He weighed the suggestion about me helping him. In fact I actually knew what eggplants were and was in fact standing at the small bin of them waiting for a break in the Trans-Big-Bear conversation to demonstrate said knowledge once I was asked, which he asked with his usual and qualified paternal élan.
“Being privy, as I am, to your failing marks in most matters academic and otherwise and to those in science in particular I am going to put my chips on the color of logic and wager you do not know what an eggplant is. Am I correct in my assessment?”
“Yes sir, you are correct indeed” I responded. I felt the mentioning of my science grades, however accurate in terms of their misery, was gratuitous and did not deserve positive reinforcement.
“M-hmm. Well, you can read at least, so put those damned purple gourd things back where you found 'em and help me look for an eggplant. The name would suggest them to be off-white and oval, would you not adjudge?”
“That would seem logical, sir. Do you think they might be with the eggs?” I asked, putting the eggplants back in their bin.
“I wouldn’t think so. I would guess the emphasis to be on the plant part. Could this be them? No, the sign says this is a… rutabaga…”
A painfully thin and acne faced stock girl pushed her buggy full of already wilting lettuce past us and began unloading it into the aisle. I recognized her, for until a few weeks before we had gone to the same school and ridden the same bus. She had been in the same grade the first year I was at the school but not the second or third. She had finally dropped out after her sixteenth birthday, which was just as well since it was her third tour of duty through eighth grade at the time. She gave no more sign of recognizing me than of having heard the exchanges between my father and grandmother and literally jumped when my father’s voice interrupted her from replenishing of the lettuce bin.
“Pardon me young lady, would you be so good and able as to show me an eggplant?”
“Huh? Oh… uh… eggplants… they… that’s them over there” she said, indicating the bin two yards away from him.
“These things?” he asked as he walked towards them.
“Yes sir.”
“Hmm. Hell, you just had your hands on these Jon. Too bad you didn’t know what they were.” He held one up and examined it as if it were the skull of Yorick. “They’re not aesthetically displeasing, but neither would they seem to invite comparison to eggs. Whence the etymology do you reckon?” he asked her.
She spent an open mouthed moment wondering if he was talking to her and if he was expecting an answer before deciding, correctly, that the answer to both was yes.
“Wha-at?”
“Why do they call them eggplants? I see the justification for plant, obviously, but there’s nothing overtly ovular, to wax assonantly, about it is there?” She may not have known the meaning of word rhetorical but in his silence she did deduce, correctly, that it did not apply to this question.
“Uh… I don’t know sir. I ain’t the one named 'em that.”
“Were you not? Well I must have you mistaken with another. A relation of similar appearance involved in the business of naming plants, perhaps?”
She did not know if he was joking. He was. She hedged her bets by remaining open mouthed and expressionless.
“We’ll table the discussion then. I’ll take it upon myself to learn why they’re called eggplants and if we meet again I’ll gladly share with you” he said with a cigar lit smile. “But a more important query for now is in your experience would you judge this particular eggplant to be fair and representative or does it incline to small or large?”
I remembered her having the exact same expression she wore now the year we were both in 8th grade when our science teacher, annoyed at the girl’s giggling and note passing with one of the Bassett twins, asked her to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity to the class. In her defense it would have been especially difficult since she was only in eighth grade and subject he had been discussing was the reproductive cycle of marsupials.
“I… thank… they… uh… I really don’t know sir lemme run git Mr. Jerry…” and she was gone without emptying or even moving her buggy, running as if he’d just asked her to go with him on a business trip to New Jersey.
“I wonder if it’s the information she lacks or just the skills to impart it” he queried to nobody in particular, then regarding the eggplant he stated “He was a fellow of infinite jest, most excellent fancy…” before placing it back into the bin.
He had moved on from the produce bin and seemingly the conversation, not waiting for Mr. Jerry, when he removed his cigar, cleared his throat with a loud particular noise so unique to him as to be patentable, and said in my general direction but to nobody in particular, "My guess based on decades of classroom experience would be she lacks both the knowledge and the communication skills in equal parts, but what bothers me most is that I seriously doubt she’s remotely curious why they’re called eggplants. Regarding which, MUH! How you comin’ with those hotdog buns!? Need me to send the boy over?!”
"I’ve long moved on from there! I’m over here in peanut butter! You see the crackers where you’re situated?!”
"NO! I sited the eggplants but I’m seeking qualitative judgment. They’re between purple and black I just learned!”
“Of course eggplants are purple black! We used to call colored people eggplants! You think we’d have called ‘em that if eggplants were green and white!?” she asked logically and oblivious to the fact it may offend. “If you see crackers pick me up two boxes! Saltine! Not the store brand! You’d think they’d keep ‘em with the peanut butter so people could associate peanut butter and crackers now wouldn’t ya!?”
“I’m on the prey for it Muh! Pick me up a jar of that peanut butter with the jelly already mixed into it while you’re over there!”
"Store brand!?” she asked.
“Whatever’s the more economic! Are cans of chili on that aisle?!”
“Why the hell would chili be with peanut butter?! You put peanut butter in chili?! Associate…”
The manager, an obese, effeminate, exceptionally friendly man with thin blonde hair and Coke bottle glasses, came walking quickly down the aisle, grinning broadly and hand extended.
“Why Professor Sampiro, how on Earth are you doin’? I was thinkin’ about you just the other day when my little girl… you know I married Colleen Snively… we got a little girl named Denise, five years old… she asked me why there aren’t no Indians any more like on TV, and I got to thinkin’ about the day you walked us all down to the football field and had us reenact the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and had us cryin’ when you read to us what that old woman wrote from the Trail of Tears!”
“You’re very kind” he remarked, pumping the man’s hand and smiling genuinely at the memory. “If I can say so without sounding too self congratulatory, and due to practice I can, Horseshoe Bend was one of my more dramatic lectures. Of far less dramatic potential is the matter of eggplants, however. Walk with me back to the produce bin and when we are here… which we now are… look upon these and tell me, do you adjudge the ones in this store to be small or large by eggplant standards?”
“Lessee… actually, them… these… are a little bit on the small side.”
“Hmm. My wife gave me her grocery list. She asks me to bring her two large eggplants. How many of these would it take to equal that?”
“Mmmm… I’d git about three or four probably.”
“I was afraid of that. That seems to be a dear price.”
“Well this is January, they ain… aren’t in season. Gotta bring ‘em in from Mexico. I tell you what… these been out there a couple of days and we’ll be throwin’ 'em out tomorrow anyway, why don’t you get about two or three of ‘em, then get you another bag about the same. I’m gonna be the one ringin’ you up anyway cause all the cashiers are gone to lunch or just gone, you know we lost most our staff when the Winn Dixie opened. I’ll just let you take the second bag on out for free.”
“Well I shall call you Signor de Medici, for you are indeed a merchant prince.”
“Well I try. Course I’m gonna be a prince in exile in a few weeks” he laughed, pleased with himself for the analogy. “You know that Winn Dixie has just killed us, we just waitin’ for ‘em to pull the plug and close our eyes. Course it was nice that with Mr. Ross and Mr. Jenner jumpin’ ship they made me manager, captain of a sinkin’ ship I guess, but at least for however many days I have a better salary and a nice title for my résumé… but listen to me goin’ on, I’m keepin’ you.”
“Not at all. Today is the one hundred and seventy fourth anniversary of the birth of Robert Edward Lee in 1807 and consequently as an employee of the great state of Alabama I am off with pay. I am on no schedule.”
“That’s good. My daddy-in-law works for the state and he’s off for Robert E. Lee’s birthday too and I’m tryin’ to get on with ‘em myself over in motor vehicles. D’you know they’re talkin’ about changing it to old Martin Luther King’s birthday next year though? Now that’s gonna cause some commotion, I tell you what.”
"If they change it from the greatest of generals to a paid holiday in honor of Martin Luther King then so help me I’ll express my contempt for the notion by refusing to come into work.” Jerry wasn’t sure he was joking (he was) but he hedged his bets and laughed. After a second’s reflection Jerry began to say something which my father forestalled by continuing:
“Of course they can call it what they want to, for me and most others it will still be Robert E. Lee day, for the young and for black folks it’ll be Martin Luther King. Rather like the co-opting of Easter and Christmas from pagan holidays I imagine.”
“Yessir I suppose. You should hear some of the old timers still come in here go off on it, Lord! I’m not what you’d call a liberal but you’d think old Martin Luther King killed their dogs the way they carry on and call him every kind of thing…”
“Well, fair is fair. Time is a river and Lee is on a leaf in it. We still get off for Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’s birthday. Of the two I’d rather honor Lee as he was competent and a reasonable man. Davis was a fanatic and a fool. But alas Martin Luther King was not born June 3 like Davis and I doubt his widow would move the birthday, so we’ll be pragmatic.”
“Yessir, I guess so…” said Jerry. “Sure enough… well, better get back, nobody’s mindin’ the store… literally…” and he to leave. Halfway past the chili he returned, summoning a little nerve and a little smile as he approached my father, still stationary as if waiting for this, and asked the formidable old-looking man
Admit it, you don’t remember me do you?"
“Yes, in fact I do. Your name is Jerry. You are the husband to the former Miss Colleen Snively.”
“Yep that’s me” he said politely, fully aware that my father had read the “Jerry- Asst Mgr” name embroidered onto his threadbare brown vest (Big Bear evidently felt no need to update his title or replace the vest before their inevitable fall) and that he had just mentioned being married to Colleen Snively a moment before. “Well, it was nice seein’ you again, and…”
“And your surname is Latham” my father continued. “It is a surname inherited from your father who is Gary Latham, husband to the former Cindy McKissick Latham, both from over in Kent.”
“Yessir, I sure am!” he said, the smile more genuine.
“And Gary is the owner of a tire place over in Tallassee and a farm near by, but had he in fact been pharaoh of Old Egypt at the time of Moses you need not have worried for you are not his firstborn. You have two older brothers named Troy and Gary, Jr.”
“No flies on you professor! Troy’s over in Opelika now and Gary got on with…”
“And you have a younger sister named Deborah who I believe married Terry Clark’s boy… Roger… who’s in the service.”
“Yessir, they have five boys of their own if you can believe it!”
“…and you were born on the fifteenth day of December of 1948.”
Jerry’s mouth dropped, allowing a moment of silence my father fed upon.
“Oh my lord, professor! Now that is just amazing!”
CONT’D
“Not amazing, just a simple memory” Daddy said, obviously amazed with himself. “December 15, 1948… a Wednesday as I recall and… unseasonably warm for December, until a rain that began in the afternoon turned it cold that night.”
Jerry just shook his head not sure what else to say, so Daddy helped him.
“Now, Mr. Latham, you would be justified in your option if you still wish to be amazed."
“Ha ha ha… I’ll take your word for it! I know it was a Wednesday but I don’t have a clue what the weather was doing… I was pretty young then, like they say!” He was clearly by his not-quite-as-old-as-he-looked old teacher. “Good Lord almighty, those computers they keep talking about everything going to got nothing on you, professor!”
"You anywhere over near the weenies!” came Grandmother’s strident but clear and carrying voice.
“I’m in produce with the eggplants and a younger Latham!”
“Sweet Jesus on his cross boy! How long does it take you to find a cursed eggplant!"
“The emphasis was on the ‘younger Latham’! The eggplants are sighted, I’m but conversing with a young man who had the pleasure of my instruction in his youth…”
“Can’t be too youthful! You hadn’t taught school in ten years or more!”
“We have established he is three and thirty years as of last month!”
“Well does he know where weenies are?!”
“Those are the dulcet tones of my mother” he explained to Jerry. “She is herself an aging pedagogue of variant lucidity. And my cigar it would seem is no longer aglow.”
"Oh I know of Miss Sybil, I’ve heard that she was uh… rememberable herself.”
“That she was, deny her what you will. Fired once for saying man would walk upon the moon before her career was over, don’t you know.”
Jerry nodded for there was no other real course of action and said “Well, whatever the case, even if you hadn’t just done everything but told my fortune I’d still say you were the best teacher there ever was at that school and it’s not like you can fail me or cost me my job, I got no reason to butter you up! You know, I got out of your class and I thought I’d go to college and study history, but then I had Coach Williford and Mrs. McGraw after you and they changed that."
“And it is my sad duty to inform that that old fool Williford is still being allowed to misinform students. It’s my hope that he”- he indicated me, the first acknowledgement of my presence by either party in the conversation- “will be able to avoid him as he’ll manage to undo in one semester fourteen years of home instruction on the subject. That is my youngest issue, Jon, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Jon. I thought your kids all went to private school in Montgomery.”
“They did. The oldest two graduated some while ago, valedictorians both. They’re in Auburn now studying pharmacy. For this one I’ll owe the Fates a chicken if he manages to graduate high school without divine intervention and get into a correspondence school in television repair. I spent thousands of dollars for him to see him flunk out of 7 th grade in Trinity, pulled some old strings to get him into 8th grade in Wetumpka’s because they’d take a mangy monkey to get that government money, and he improved marginally in his first year but he’s still borderline. Except in math and science. In those he routinely crosses the borders into ignominy”
“I’m standing right here Daddy.”
“Don’t worry, buddy, I was lousy at math and science myself!” the frayed coat wearing obese and nervous manager of the doomed and dying store reassured me with a knowing smile. I was worried my father would exploit the man’s circumstances in his presence to drive home a point about the value of math and science but either his occasional reserves of tact or his more than occasional habit of ignoring people when he felt he had not formally yielded the floor won out.
“Yes, I’d hoped he’d study law at one point. My grandfather’s brother was on the state Supreme Court back in the 1890s and I thought he could continue that tradition. As of his last report card, a D in algebra and a C- in science, I’d be quite content if his experience before the bar doesn’t involve an accusation of vagrancy, at least not in my lifetime.”
“Did Mama say we need any Maxi pads, Daddy?” I asked. “Daddy had groin surgery this summer and has to wear maxi-pads in his underwear for the wound” I volunteered politely.
“Indeed I did have groin surgery, which I don’t recommend” he said cheerfully, seemingly not the least embarrassed. “I gave an address at a junior college up in north Alabama and came back richer an infection from the mattress in the dorm they supplied me with. Most miserable experience.” He exhaled a plume of the replacement King Edward- he inhaled cigars almost to the degree others inhale cigarettes. “As a caring father it gladdens me to know that Jon’s grades assure he’ll be spared ever having to enter a college dorm or the demands of a professional career. Should he ever have interest in learning of them I fancy he can ask his brother or his sister, whichever one’s garage he happens to be living in.”
“Daddy, you are without a doubt…” I caught myself. In my private ethos discourtesy to my father was quite permissible in private but filial respect was demanded in public. “You are without a doubt in need of cattle feed, and the day is shortening.”
“Indeed it is. To which I would add that…”
“Oh don’t worry Jon, my daddy’s the same way” Jerry reassured with a chuckle, uncomfortable as I was with my father’s unnecessary exposition on my shortcomings. “Just loves to talk about my weight problem with me right there in the room like people can’t see I’m fat as a butterball. But your daddy’s right on that about Coach Williford, if you have a choice don’t take him. Man’s mean and…,” he whispered, “dumb. Can’t say it too loud cause he comes in here. I hate to hear you aren’t teachin’ no more professor. But what is it I heard you do now, you’re like the state historian or something now aren’t you?”
Had Jerry asked Jackie Kennedy Onassis to please autograph his 6.5 mm 91/38 Mannlicher- Carcano rifle he may have seen a much darker expression than the one triggered by Maxi-Pads could summon slide over the aging pedagogue’s face. It passed very quickly, replaced by neutrality.
“I was…” a cigar puff “…something akin to that for a while, yes. Not exactly. I am now, thanks to the glorious wisdom of Governor Fob James, the official consultant for Driver’s Education to the State Department of Education.”
“Huh…” said Jerry, not sure what else to say. “Well… was that a promotion? Come with a raise?”
“No”, a most definite “leave it” as the subtext. Unfortunately Jerry only read the ‘no’.
“Who’d they replace you with as historian?”
“His name eludes me at the moment, though I do seem to remember I had the pleasure of expelling his son once.”
“Well… uh… he must be distinguished if… he’s following in your footsteps.”
“Indeed. When the Encyclopedia of Sycophancy and Idiocy is compiled I wager you’ll find no more detailed and illustrious entry.”
“Well, you know they say ‘Fob’ is the dirtiest ‘F’ word in Alabama” Jerry laughed lightly, repeating an often repeated Alabama joke. “At least he’s done a couple of good things. He made it legal to pray in schools again.”
“Yes he has. And certainly his name figures prominently in an increase in my own prayers, most of them of a decidedly Old Testament flavor.”
The subtext here was “This audience is concluded”, and the print was dark enough that this time Jerry did read it.
“Oh Lord I’m standin’ here gabbing like it’s a church social” he said, looking at his watch as a barely remembered prop. “I bet there’s a line at the cash register. Isis was supposed to get off five minutes ago which measn she probably just walked on out cause she never was much good and she knows I can’t fire anybody cause nobody’s gone come to work at a place that’s fixing to get closed anyway. I’ll see y’all when you check out!” He was off towards the front with a wave and a hurry.
“Peace unto you, Master Latham.” called my father, and we set out to find father-son bonding and weenies.
CONT’D
“Daddy do you absolutely have to go into my grades or everything else that is or might be wrong with me every time you see somebody?”
“Oh, son of my wife, I’d never have the time for everything wrong with you. Just a fair synopsis alone would take three hours. For the grades, I only mention them when it seems relevant. Or when the spirit moves me.” Cigar puff. “The spirit is currently active. MUH! Where the hell are you?”
"Over getting me some hoop cheese!”
“Well keep talking and I’ll navigate to you!”
As it was only about ten feet away the echolocation did not take long, but she obligingly kept yelling. "I don’t want anymore of that low fat cheese! Stuff made me sick as a damned dog with the constipation for three days and then the squirts for two days after that! You found me yet? And if…”
“LaFayette, we are here” he announced from immediately behind her. “However much hoop cheese you were planning to get add a half. I want a slice myself but nobody else in my house eats it. Jon would perhaps join me in a slice but formulating new ways to continue towards failure in math and science cuts into his time for cheese appreciation. Such a pity he seeks to emulate Big Bear managers rather than his father.” This was actually not an insult but an odd form of peace offering and I understood it as such.
“That is not true daddy. I absolutely promise you that every time I move closer to failure I emulate you as a father.” Cold as it was, this was also a peace offering, and stranger still it was accepted as such with even a smoky nod of admiration for the quick return. It was not a conventional or simple father-son relationship, but it did have interesting rules.
“Boy should always seek to improve upon their daddy while remaining respectful and subservient” Grandmother said, oblivious to what was actually being discussed or the rules of the relationship. “I need some bathroom soap. Realized that when I was bathing today. The bar I had was hard and dusty.”
Grandmother’s last weekday outing with my father was during the Christmas holidays when she accompanied him to the courthouse to check on some land boundaries. I had not been along myself but I knew from the sibling who had that one of its highlights was her using a dozen clicks of the probate judge’s stapler to fasten her pants to her jacket when her lack of a belt was causing possible exposure. Even Daddy, a man whose areas of excessive vanity did not include fashion or grooming, had been a bit embarrassed by that stunt and for today’s trip had subtly encouraged her to improve her appearance. The subtle encouragement was contained in the phrase “So help me Muh if you come out of that house looking like one of the devil’s shit rays again I’m gonna drive off without you.”
Surprisingly for a woman not accustomed to receiving or yielding to ultimatums she had complied. For Grandmother (a heavy qualification) she actually looked better than usual today, the vest, slacks, three jackets, man’s dress shirt and lady’s tie between them representing every shade of green and most of the decades of the century. She’d even drug a comb through her hair until it lay flat and docile rather than its usual state of manic rebellion, not only surprising me with how long and white it was but giving her an even greater resemblance to Chief Dan George than usual. (If she had her hatchet the look would have been complete, but she left it at home.)
“Look here, these wienies are buy one get one free! Now they’re in packs of twelve, which is why I was trying to find correspondent bun packaging. But they only had packs of eight which makes no sense whatever. Probably why they’re going under. But I figure if I buy three packs of buns, that’ll be twenty four.”
“Stands to reason, Muh, though we can’t be certain til we employ it.”
“So here’s what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna buy those three packs of buns, and you get two packs of wienies. That’s one bought pack and then one free one. I’ll take the free one, in exchange for which I’ll give you one pack of buns and you can buy me three cans of tuna to offset the price of the other pack.”
“Why wouldn’t I just pay you for half the other pack?”
“Because I’m an old woman with nothing to live on but four old age pensions and that little bit of money from my daddy’s estate! And I gave birth to you and who was it helped you out when you were just married and penniless with my old refrigerator? Which I could have sold to anybody but sold to you for half what I paid for it. And sold it to you on time at that.”
“And thirty years later I have the opportunity to make it up to you. Sounds like a plan. Two cans of tuna for your labor pains and a 30 year old refrigerator. Hell, I’ll throw in some mayonnaise as long as it’s store brand.”
“Jon, your legs are sixty-seven years younger than mine. Take this buggy and get me the rest of the stuff on my list. I need Maxwell House coffee, three cans of hot dog chili, the store kind, and a six pack of Charmin toilet paper, and a big bag of dried butterbeans, a 60 watt light bulb and some long grain rice. Now let me tell you how to remember all that. Pretend you meetin’ at the house of a man named Maxwell Rice and he gives you some coffee. And you’re there to talk about going down to Chil e, and his wife is 'charmin’and offers you some butterbeans…”
“And you eat so many of his charmin’ wife’s butterbeans you gotta go to the can three times and shit so much you use six rolls of toilet paper!” Daddy said laughing hard. “And that can you got to go to’s in Chile, and when you get there the light bulb’s blow!” and laughed so hard he choked on his cigar smoke. As much as I wanted to remain stoic, because I was still pissed at him, I thought it was almost as funny as he did.
“I’m tryin’ to give your son a device to remember assorted items and you foul it up!”
“I think he’s better able to remember toilet paper and butterbeans and the like than going on a trip to Chili to see man eating butterbeans and light bulbs on the crapper or whatever the hell it was!” While they argued over the effectiveness of the mnemonics that “served me well in fifty years of teaching!” and “I can remember 16 things but not some long convoluted damned story” and the like I found all of the items she’d mentioned, turned to go back, saw the Maxwell House and remembered I’d forgotten the rice, got mad at myself for remembering through Maxwell Rice, then rolled the buggy back up to the still bickering duo just in time to hear Orson Welles ask Chief Dan George “Well why the hell didn’t you just give him the list!”
“You do your remembering your way and I’ll do it mine! Thanks to my system I don’t have to have a list, wasting paper when you got mind power! You ready to go yet?”
Arriving at the cash register we were greeted again by Jerry Latham. “Well professor, I just got off the phone with my Mama two minutes ago and you ‘missed it by that much’! like who was it used to say on tv… Maxwell Smart!” I immediately thought of coffee and rice. “Mama said the rain started that night after sundown instead of in the afternoon. But that you even knew it rained, hell that you even knew the date…that was somewhere three Co’cola signs past incredible!”
My father stood silently and politely nodding, a slight smile on his face formed by the curvatures for the unlit cigar he’d just inserted rather than pleasure. Jerry Latham had no way of knowing that had he told his old teacher that December 15, 1948 was in fact the day a volcanic eruption in Mobile Bay had covered Alabama in fiery coals and blackened the sky for seven weeks my father’s high opinion of his memory (for which he had all the excessive vanity he lacked in his appearance) would have been no more affronted, but he remembered his manners anyway.
“Muh, this is Mr. Gerald Latham of Kent. He was in my eighth grade history class circa 1962.”
“Pleased to meet you ma’am” he said, not indicating that he had noticed my father just paid for a bag of two eggplants while putting a bag with half a dozen unchecked into the same grocery bag. “You were a teacher yourself once upon a time I hear.”
“M-hmm. Retired in sixty-four. I taught a Latham boy once myself. Name was Calvin as memory serves, would have been at Seward Memorial round about 1953. Biology.”
“Oh yes ma’am! That was Uncle Cal, Daddy’s baby brother. Lord have mercy do you two remember ever single kid ever sat in your rooms?”
“I remember him. Red headed, freckled, kind of skinny but good lookin’. You must take after your mother.” Vital to the understanding of my grandmother was that she did not mean this as an insult.
“That’s what people say” Jerry responded in stride.
“Decent student, Cal Latham. B student I’d say. Main thing I remember is that he borrowed the best pair of scissors I ever owned one afternoon close to the end of the school year and he never brought 'em back.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Well don’t be sorry, not your fault. But whenever you talk to him ask him does he still have the scissors he borrowed from Mrs. Sibyl Murdock Sampiro long about 1953. I was thinking about 'em just the other day, best pair I think I ever owned. Paid seven dollars for 'em even then. Be upwards of twenty today probably.”
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t ask Uncle Cal anything, ma’am” he said with an ‘I understand old folks’ patronizing smile to my father. “You see…”
“How come? Won’t talk to you? Is it cause you’re sissy? That’s no call not to talk to somebody. My brother Albert was sissy, used to like to play with my sister’s dolls and dress 'em up, but a good man. Boys used to call him Alberta. Went over…”
“No ma’am!” he said with polite curtness, somehow managing a lisp on ma’am. “I can’t talk to Uncle Cal cause he’s dead! Got killed in a chopper crash in Vietnam when I was a boy, must have been fifteen years ago!”
“Lord… as a sinner once said, ‘God-damn’. Cal Latham got killed in Vietnam” she relayed to my father, reflecting on the tragedy. ""I reckon those scissors are just gone then.”
“Yes’m…” said Jerry.
“Did Cal have a family? Wife, children anything?”
“Yes ma’am. He married a German lady he met in the service and had twin girls, but she went back to Germany when he died to be with her people. We hadn’t seen her since."
“That’s a shame” she said, reflecting on the loss again. “Scissors probably all the way in Germany. Cost as much to mail ‘em as they’re worth. I can tell you for sure she wouldn’t have thrown ‘em out, they were too good for that.”
“I reckon they are ma’am. That’ll be twenty six dollars and forty seven cent, Professor…”
“Now I hope you rung up my stuff separately from his…cause it’s going to two different places and I’m paying separate.”
“I rung it all up together ma’am. It wasn’t separated out…”
“Well let me tell you what I had so you can add it up. I had a bottle of Heinz catsup, and the jar of store brand peanut butter, and I had a twelve pack of wienies but they were the free ones. And I had two packs of the buns. Now the tuna was four for a dollar, but my son’s getting two of those and the mayonnaise… Here let me just give you a system to remember it all. There’s this man named Maxwell Rice who…”
“We’ll figure it out when we get home, Muh. Jerry’s only got about fifty good years left before he has to retire. Just put this all on my account, Jerry.”
“Oh sorry, Professor, you must not have seen the sign. We don’t run accounts for anybody anymore. Stopped a couple of months ago, probably on account of Winn Dixie. Just cash and check only now…”
“Well… that would most likely account for the severity of the decline in business. Please know I do not fault you.” Always irked when he could not charge he wrote out a check and signed and extended it as if it were Jerry’s official pardon. “If this should bounce I pledge to give you another one of equal value. And I made it for twenty above the amount.”
Jerry’s humor somewhat returned, he didn’t even notate the check. “Technically we don’t give cash back neither, but I’ll make an executive decision” he said, handing over a twenty. “Professor can I ask you a favor?”
Lowering his voice into a conspiratorial tone he confided “Truth be known, the reason I didn’t go to Winn Dixie is I got an application in with the state already. Motor vehicles. Thing is, only references I got are here and they don’t give references other than yeah he worked here, and before here I worked for my Uncle Clay’s tree farm for nine years and he’s passed on. And then there are folks who know and like me but I don’t know how good an impression they’d make you wanna know the truth. I can’t help but bet that you write like you talk. If I was to put your name and number down can you give me a reference for the application I put in with the state?”
“I would be most honored and shall impress upon them that not to hire you would be a mistake of cataclysmic consequence.”
“Thank you!” he said with a beam. “It sure was good seein’ ya’ll again. Bye professor, bye Jon!” waving like a Beverly Hillbilly. “Bye Miz Sampiro” he added with a notable dip in enthusiasm.
“Nice to meet you, Jerry Latham” Grandmother told him, pushing her buggy through the door and possibly out of his earshot when she lamented “Best pair of scissors I ever had. Nine dollars, just gone to the Nazis.”
My father either did not overhear or perhaps just chose not to comment. He could not care less about a long lost pair of scissors when there were more pressing concerns at hand.
“I knew the Lathams didn’t have sense to get in out of the rain” he opined. “But I thought they could at least tell the goddamned time right.”
The Big Bear shared a parking lot with Wetumpka City Hall, tacked onto the back of which was the small public library. Daddy handed me a biography of Santa Anna and another of Roy Acuff and asked me to return them. “They had to special order them both so make sure they don’t just put 'em back on the shelf. That woman in there might be some use if she could read. I’ll be here waiting in the car.”
I returned the books to the circulation desk and relayed the message and bumped into my father coming in as I was going out. I was frustrated to see him, figuring he had probably decided I’d taken eight seconds longer than I should. This was after all the man who called the Orlando, Florida coroner’s office when my sister and I were thirty minutes later than the appointed meeting time the day we spent at Disney World, leading to his famous line “What the hell at Disney World can hold you up half an hour?” Instead he just said “Something I need to check on. Just take me a minute. Go wait in the car with your Grandmother.”
I did, knowing that a minute for Daddy was a different gauge than for the rest of humanity. Grandmother kept me company.
“How’s your mama’s leg getting along?”
“It’s a lot better. Since the last surgery she’s been walking a lot better.”
“Pity she didn’t sue those people caused her accident. Could have probably got a fortune, driven 'em to the poorhouse. Used the money for her children. Some folks just don’t think of others. I sure would have. How her people doing? The Bows and them?”
“Fine. We saw them at Christmas and Thanksgiving like we always do, probably won’t see them til next Thanksgiving.”
“Guess with Blanche’s daddy being dead and her sister’s husband both dying last year there was a lot of that turkey left. I sure don’t remember seeing any of it. Hell, I bet I could have got enough from those two funerals not to have had to cooked for six weeks and nobody would have missed it and y’all didn’t even invite me. Have to get rides to stranger’s houses for funeral food.”
“I’m sorry Grandmother. The next time Mama has two close relatives she loves to die I’ll be sure and bring you a doggy bag.”
“What’d they caused her sister’s husband to die?”
“Some type of heart problem, I’m not exactly sure of the specifics. He checked in for some chest pains and never left the hospital, died a few days later during a surgery.”
“Hmm. Never let them cut you open if you can help it. And your granddaddy died of something lower down of course, after they cut him up. What’d he have when he died?”
"Some type of a growth on his…”
(A quick aside: I’ve mentioned earlier than it’s never the least believable stuff that is embellished. My father really did tell former students and other acquaintances their d.o.b., weather conditions on that day, etc., more than once when I was with him, the very loud conversations across grocery stores were routine [I changed them from ALL CAPS though], Grandmother’s querie about a dead GI’s scissors, etc.- all actually happened.)
If you DON’T write a book, it’ll be practically criminal.
Heck, if you write it and then can’t find a publisher, I reckon you could almost publish yourself just off SDMB orders. 
Sampiro, please don’t go to grad. school for creative writing. I have watched several talented friends being destroyed by the Iowa program or Ole Miss. You have your voice and your material. Please contact me offlist. I think I have my profile set up to show my address.
Tabby
Well, Jon, thank you for all of this amazing writing here in the past few. Beaucoups and then some. I honestly don’t get how your mind works so fast here.
Tis a blessing. at least.
About participating in a Writer’s workshop… with you, I’d say Do It. You are astute enough to know what you need, and already have a great understanding of method, and certainly have no loss of impetus of words flowing through. You’ll do fine in any writer program. But, you would probably benefit from being around folks writing all the time, without detraction of the "real "world.
I’m going to suggest a couple of decent ones close to home to me.
Ole Miss; Yeah, and well, but it’s close to you. But, The mayor of Oxford Town, Richard Howorth, is also the past president of the Independent Bookseller’s Association, and he’s been the Mayor of the town for two terms. His bookstore has the best reading schedule I’ve seen, especially with Southern Writers. Southern Writers rule there, and Oxford is a good place to live. I’ve been gone for six years, up in Chapel Hill, NC, and I really miss Oxford for my literary fixing. Oxford is more brilliant with it.
If not there, than here, UNC-Chapel Hill. Very great many good Southern writers, two good presses, I think way more what you’d want than Iowa. It’s very supportive to Southern writers here.
Basically, you don’t need any anybody to Make/encourage you to write, yer quite apt with that; yep, yer amazing output would benefit from an allying editor, to guide it, with good hand in hand. Explore areas that have those folks at hand.
The trouble with the truth: it has little sense of timing. Sometimes things are more accurate when this is fixed.
The following is a true story, one of those that proves the cliché “Truth is a helluva lot more Southern Gothic than fiction”. It’s very barebones (for me at least), unadorned and to the point.
Except of course for the backstory, which is this:
In Summer 1970 my parents were hired to start from scratch and administer a private Christian (i.e. segregation) academy in Chambers County, Alabama, so they started by buying The Gaines House, an antebellum mansionette on Main Street in LaFayette (lah-FAY-it), the county seat.
There’s not a photo of the house on the web that I can find, but it was/is next door to this house (built in 1912 by Senator Tom Heflin from the bribes he didn’t receive from Hearst) and looked a good bit like this one (no longer standing but same style and in the same town) but my understanding is that it was renovated a few years ago and is now a showplace. At the time the best that can be said is it was livable- structurally it was okay, bathrooms and wiring had been added and were in decent condition, etc., but it creaked and groaned and froze in winter and boiled in summer (no insulation or central h/ac) and had the little things that you expect from old houses: unexplained noises, wobbly stair rails, uneven floors, weak balconies, coffins, etc…
Actually the coffins weren’t unexplained. The house had been a funeral home a couple of decades earlier, which was good because what renovation occurred in the 20th century was for this, but a couple of coffins remained behind. Both were upstairs. Moving the first one (the little one) down the spiral staircase, which was beautiful to look at but a bitch to maneuver and shook, rattled and rolled, was such an ordeal that my mother said “to hell with it” for the second one. It was huge (it was actually the crate a coffin came in, but funeral homes kept these on hands for the really big beloved’s); even swinging it over the [unlevel and shaky] bathroom on pulleys like we did the heavy furniture [I vaguely remember that move] would not have been remotely easy- so she just covered it with a quilt and throw pillows and used it as a sofa and storage chest in the hallway.
Also included in the sale of the house were two genuine slave cabins and one of their inhabitants. The cabins were behind “the big house” and the inhabitant was Roy, a slightly retarded old black man who had lived their since childhood if not since birth; previous owners (of the house, not of Roy- he wasn’t quite that old) had put wiring into his shack and installed an outhouse (with plumbing and bath) on the property for his benefit and he was literally mentioned in the sales agreement: he had a lifetime lease on the cabin for $5 per month for as long as he wished to remain there (which turned out to be from his birth to his old age to a few weeks after my grandmother moved in). The other cabin didn’t (to the best of my recollection) have wiring but it did still have a roof (surely not the original) and we used it as a storage shed.
The back yard, at least to a child of 3 – 4, was massive and had oaks that you knew were ancient before you knew what ancient was. One memory I have of it is the plastic biplane swing we had and how it was hung- the swing was just a dimestore item strong enough to hold a small child and it was strung by a rope to the limb of one of the massive trees in the back yard. The main reason that plane stayed in the family collective memory was the amount of rope it hung from: Luna’s first husband, the “old money” stoner moron, was given a ladder, 50 feet of rope and told to hang the swing. He climbed the ladder, tossed the rope over the limb, wrapped it back around, then wrapped it back around, wrapped it back around, wrapped it back around, wrapped it back around, wrapped it back around, wrapped it back around, wrapped it back around, etc., until he had wrapped all forty or so feet of the rope not needed to suspend the swing around the limb of the tree until the limb looked like there was a small child wrapped up in it and my mother and Mustang, coming to inspect the job, just held their mouths agape and forever after said “Damn…what a nincompoop” whenever they looked at it.
I remember liking the place mostly. It was the only time in my childhood I lived in a town, even if it was a small one, and there were lots of senile old women to play with just like back home. But the place was spooky, especially after my grandmother moved in, uninvited. She shared a room with me so most of my memories are of her shrieking me to sleep with renditions of “there was an old woman who swallowed a fly” and snoring loudly before she ever got to the “swallowed a horse… she’s dead of course” line that was my favorite. She was also left to give me breakfast one morning and I’ll never forget the breakfast: oatmeal covered with boiled chocolate milk and a piece of leftover fried chicken. And she decided since Roy’s rent was included in the place then so was Roy and began ordering him around til he moved in with his sister. And she also had a tendency to only leave the place when it would be convenient to have her around, such as when the kids needed a babysitter.
I remember watching a moon landing (no idea which one) while we were there and I remember my fourth birthday because while it’s not my earliest memory it’s the earliest I can pin a date to (December 1 1970).
When I didn’t sleep with grandmother I shared my sister’s bedroom because the house was somewhat Addams-ish and understandably spooky for a child. My sister would have been 11 or 12 at the time, depending on when this story happened. (We only remained there for a year, and to my father’s eternal delight re-sold the house for a $1,200 profit.)
The unembellished yet most Southern Gothic true story you’ll read today and yet one I do not intend to publish:
One night at The Gaines House I remember being woken up by my sister who was absolutely terrified. “Get dressed Jon… get dressed! NOW GODDAMNIT GET DRESSED!” (She’s always had a colorful vocabulary.) When I wasn’t moving fast enough to suit her she pulled me out of bed and dressed me herself by throwing her jacket- still remember it- faded red sweatsuit type jacket with a zipper and a hood- over my PJs and- still remember these and their oddity since my family were rabid Auburn fans- bedroom shoes with little rubber elephant heads on the end. I tried to ask her what was going on and she kept shooshing me and she was crying and since I worshipped my sister I cried too.
My parents were having a huge screaming match. These weren’t an every night occurrence but neither were they rare- they were always good for a few “pull out the china catalogs cause we’ll need replacements for some pieces by morning” fights each year and my mother always won. This probably didn’t scare me so much (I remember remembering this better than I remember it happening if that makes any sense). My sister peeked her head out the door and after a while she saw what she was waiting for (probably my mother’s back was turned) and she ran as quietly as she could with me in tow out the hallway, past the coffin and down the creaking spiral staircase which made her cry harder because the creaking could have alerted my mother, but it didn’t.
At some point I asked her what we were doing and she told me “We’re running away… we have to run away”. I didn’t understand of course but I did understand when she told me if I cried she’d beat the crap out of me (cause she would have). We made it outside and it was cold weather and being kids of course we had no money or great familiarity with where to go. We ended up going into the old slave cabin (either the one used as a storage shed or the one vacated by Roy, no idea which) and sitting huddled in there. I still didn’t know what the problem was but of course I was crying.
I DO REMEMBER (and don’t just remember remembering) this: it was about sunlight when the door flew open and my sister screamed and my mother and my father came in and threw their arms around us (particularly odd for my father because he was the least physically affectionate of men) and soon everybody was squalling (except probably my father) and whatever the matter was seemed to be forgiven and we were back upstairs sharing the king bed with my parents.
YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS later when I was a teenager or about 20, one of the last times I saw my sister at Locksley Hall (she came to visit) I asked her if she remembered this- if it happened or if I just dreamt it.
“Oh it happened… I can’t believe you remember it but it happened. I’ve never been that f*cking scared in my life. My teeth were chattering and I mean really rattling and chattering— I was that scared. I thought we were both going to die.”
Why did you think that, I asked.
My sister (deadpan): Maybe it was the old house and the wind and stuff, but mainly because Mama told Daddy she was going to come into our bedroom and shoot us both in the head and then kill herself but leave him alive to call the police and explain why his wife killed his children. This was before I knew how full of shit she was of course but I thought she was going to do it. I’d heard her threaten to kill herself before but this was more or less new.
I absorb it, which I’m embarrassed to say wasn’t difficult. I’d overheard her making this threat to Daddy about me once or twice when I was a kid. Finally I asked “Where was [our brother]? Was he in the house?”
She thought about it for a moment and said “I don’t remember if he was there or not. Maybe I figured he’d slow her down or something, or maybe he was sleeping over with his friend at the Heflin House. Doesn’t matter really, she didn’t do it.”
“Yeah, I got that part.”
“But to this day I still think she may have really been planning to…”
“I don’t” I told her. “She said things like that for shock value and rage and… because she had to.” (Hard to explain, but the best wording comes from Vonnegut whose mother had similar episodic psycho rages- he described it as being “like vomit”- it has to leave her mouth and there is no stopping it.)
My sister told me “Well… I’m not so sure. After all, there’s a reason she figured out we weren’t in our bed and came looking for us.”
This was chilling for a moment. Then I told her “I really don’t think she’d have come in there to kill us, then gone back into her room and said to Daddy “Garland I was gonna blow the kids’ heads off but they’re not in their bed, help me look for ‘em” or that he would have said “Let’s try out back. Where’s [their brother] or did you wanna kill all three of ‘em at the same time?”
I think she probably heard us leave, I explained to my sister, and then realized we’d overheard her and it was a slap in the face. You know her- never once did she apologize for those things the next day. We were all just supposed to pretend they never happened.
“We did a good job of that” said my sister. “Really good. Sometimes I used to wonder if they really happened because the next morning she’d be making breakfast and sweet and wonderful as could be.”
Yup.
Yup.
Yup.
Yup.
The Above Cont’d:
So a few months and 35 years after the flee for the cabins night, my sister and I had a knock-down drag-out white trash loudest voices stand-off and cuss-out and fish-fry this summer as I was literally preparing to go get in my car and drive home after spending 11 almost perfect days with my mother at my sister’s beach house. The argument involved a 2,800 year old mummy, a Cracker Barrel and a cell phone quirk 9all true) and on my honor my sister started it. She reacted almost as crazily as my mother could to something that was never meant to offend and made some bitchy comments she really shouldn’t have about my mother’s sister and her niece (the famous Luna) and…well, things got ugly. Real ugly. On her lawn. Names were called, rather horrible ones, violence was threatened, a retarded minister stood silent witness, etc… It was all over absolutely nothing. (Unfortunately it was also the last time I ever saw my mother, though we spoke constantly, several times per day, on the phone for the next/last two and a half weeks of her life.)
Well, my mother sided with me in the argument but at the time she didn’t have a choice but to remain with my sister. (I was going back to Montgomery to prepare her house for her return.) Whether she sided with me because she truly believed I was in the right or because it involved her “precious g*ddamned Luna” (to quote my sister) or if it was just because it was my side (for we really did, for better or for worse, have an “I totally disagree with your motives for fighting in this conflict, but we’ll take that up after we kick your opponent’s ass” automatic alliance most of the time). Whatever her motives for siding with me, my mother gave my sister straight up hell for a solid week following it while residing in her house, brushing aside all manner of retorts and ripostes and attempted offensives of my sister and then trampling through her breastworks and defenses like a heifer over a popsicle stick fort, laying waste her fields, slaughtering peasants, torturing snipers, routinely executing every soldier and torching every store of grain, advancing on the capital and then getting nasty.
At first I’ll admit I was thinking “Heh heh…oh sister, you gotta learn to stop poking thumbtacks in the tigress’s ass” but by the third day or so, while I was still furious at my sister, I was also secretly telling my mother “COOL IT! YOU’VE MADE YOUR POINT! YOU’VE EVEN GONE A BIT TOO FAR TO GET YOUR MESSAGE THROUGH…”
On about the fourth day my sister was just a pitiful dirty refugee in her own kingdom and begging for mercy. She was calling me and everyone named or involved and about to call major news outlets and Katie Couric to apologize, in a way. “I’M SORRY! I AM SO SORRY I SAID THOSE THINGS! I DIDN’T MEAN THEM I TAKE THEM BACK! I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE! GODDAMN SHE’S EVIL! I SURRENDER! WHATEVER I DID OR WHATEVERS I AM SORRY YOU ARE WELCOME TO STAY IN MY HELL YOU CAN HAVE ANY DAMNED HOUSE OF MINE YOU WANT! TELL LUNA SHE CAN COME MOVE IN AND BRING THE PRAIRIE DOG AND THE LIZARDS AND THE DAMNED HORSE! I SURRENDER UNCONDITIONALLY, I CAN’T TAKE THIS WOMAN GOING AT ME ANYMORE!” and as mad as I had been at her I could tell that her teeth were chattering again because your life ain’t been hell til making it hell was one of my mother’s pet projects.
I told her “I’m over it. I’m sorry Mama’s still carrying on. I said all I had to say before you ever through my suitcase into the Century Plants” and she kept crying and repenting and Mama got on the phone and after a night of victory celebrations and the blood of the last twelve nuns from the kingdom she calmed down and normality or something like it resumed. When I was talking to my sister a few days later she was telling me about how relentless the woman was even at 70 and terminally ill when furious.
“I’m damned near fifty and I’m a millionaire several times over and all that but she… she can…”
Since she couldn’t seem to find the words I volunteered “She can still make you go hide in the slave quarters?”
“Bullseye! She can make me sneak past the coffin and run for the cabins. Well, at least I own a lot more and a lot nicer cabins to hide in than we ever had before.”
The point of bringing this up when I return.
So even though it’s completely true from the coffin in the hall to the suitcase in the Century plants (What’s a Century Plant you ask? Imagine the offspring of a cactus and a squid) I can’t use it.
For one thing- it starts with me in bed with my sister, involves a creaking spiral staircase, has a retarded black man as side character, winds up in an abandoned slave cabin and hinges on a woman threatening to kill herself and her children- you’d only have to add a drunk Indian prophesying doom and rape by a defrocked preacher and you’d officially have the most Southern Gothic short story of all time- NOBODY WOULD BELIEVE IT! They would insist “You popped some Metamucil, sat down at the word processor and pulled this story out of your ass because that’s all WAY too exaggerated!” (Incidentally, this is one of those “stories I wouldn’t have told if my mother were still alive” stories.)
For another thing, that house was only about a year of my childhood and I can’t say it or anything that happened in it (even that night, whose gravity I didn’t understand at the time) really left a powerful impact, just the occasional memory. The vast majority of my childhood was spent in a comfortable rambling ranch style middle class house and the old southern homes from my childhood were 99% dog-trot double cabins and the like, not the stereotypical spooky old politely ruined and ivy coated Greek Revival mansionette.
For another thing, if I wrote a memoir at all chronologically this story would come first because I was no more than four years old when it happened. It would introduce the reader to my mother in such a way that she’d be foreshadowed for the rest of the piece. She comes across as an unrepentant predatory monster, which she was, but that’s not ALL she was, because her White Nights (as I came to call them much later), while defining events of my childhood, only occurred once or maybe twice a year, sometimes not even that. After my mother hit menopause (which I’m guessing wasn’t coincidental) YEARS would go by without one- she’d have two or three per decade. When she wasn’t auditioning for the lead in the MINNIE PEARL PLAYHOUSE production of Medea she really was a fantastic person.
Oh, she had her temper tantrums periodically, don’t get me wrong, but nothing like White Nights. She was also a woman who for decades had almost not a moment for herself, sacrificed constantly for the education of her children, took in the relatives of a husband who she in many ways despised but who she also went into exile at the all black school with and was still trying to have another baby with a year before he died (when she was in her 40s and he in his 50s). She’s a woman who one of the few times that I ever saw her truly break down and cry it was over the dead body of Billie, who she had been unable to revive with mouth-to-mouth-resuscitation and chest compressions and whose death she still mourned more than twenty years later; Billie was a three week old tiny and deformed St. Bernard puppy she kept alive on a heating pad and fed with baby bottles after her “birth mother” (B.B.) rejected and refused to nurse her (which animals will sometimes do to deformed offspring).
So if it appears at all it will have to be in a flashback, and it probably will not at all because again: it’s TOO. Too over the top (it’d be easy to turn it into a really macabre comedy it’s so melodramatic), too Southern Gothic, too surreal (there was a coffin in the hallway and a slave cabin!), too dreamlike, that while, on my holiest oath (something to the effect of may I live to be an old man living in a tornado wrecked house with most of my penis missing and no running water if I am lying) it happened.
So the point is that I don’t have to embellish the actual events, I even have to downplay or ignore them some times. (Mustang used to pick up live rattlesnakes in the road or woods by their tail and “whip” their heads off to impress children, then give them the rattle as a necklace; a 72 year old lobotomy victim spinning naked in a snowfall with her tongue out, 92 year old twins convinced the government was spying on their dead cats, a woman who drove a car into a dead mule rather than drive around, etc., all sound made up, and all happened…) And also to include only these stories gives a wrong impression of my childhood because they seemed the most mundane thing in the world at the time; I’d be surrounded by the mother lode of raw source material and irritated that I couldn’t figure out how in the novel I was writing I could believably get Bloody Mary to play the lead in a time traveler’s production of A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum in Brigham Young’s Salt Lake City .
So, if there’s anybody still interested I’m going to take the EGGPLANTS story above and show exactly what is and what isn’t real (and perhaps explain why I did it that way) so that I can ask a question I’ve sometimes debated: “is it fiction or non-fiction?” Not rhetorical as I’d truly love to read opinions. (And I quite apologize for being way more self referential and seemingly self obsessed at the moment, but I’m currently in the midst of some “life decisions” that will affect the next couple or three years so to an extent I’m sounding it out.)
Sound it out my friend. I thought, as I was reading EGGPLANTS, that you father must surely have known what an eggplant is. I figured it was more of an “how does one tell if an eggplant is good or not” exchange between your grandmother and your father. I could be wrong though. Anyway, I’d love to see the story dissected and give my opinion. After all, being a fellow southerner, I’ve never been averse to giving my opinion.
The Eggplants piece (or, full working title, “Maxwell Rice and teh Overtly Ovular Eggplants”) is extremely rough; the only thing I changed from the very rough and written under fire first draft was the changing of names and the changing of ALL CAPS FOR THE SHOUTING! to regular case) is the first in a trilogy that are collectively entitled ME AND BOBBY E. LEE, 1981. The following two are far too rough to post and won’t be refined anytime in the near future, but I’ll synopsize them here so that I can better explain the purpose of any changes and the like.
**ME & BOBBY E. LEE, 1: MAXWELL RICE AND THE OVERTLY OVULAR EGGPLANTS (above)
ME & BOBBY E. LEE, 2: THE MIDGET, THE MILK MEN AND TALES FROM OLD GALATIANS **
We leave the library and continue to the Cattleman’s Cooperative where my father is to buy food for his cows (which is why even with gas an appalling $1.15 per gallon he’s driving his aubergine Cadillac- he uses it as a truck). There’s an encounter with his cousin Pete (Pete’s wife is a taller-than-average she-Yankee, Pete is 22 inches high and rides in a papoose like device on her back- Grandmother thinks Pete [her cousin] married beneath himself and puns and double entendres ensue including my grandmother’s actual line “She better not look down on my family… none of my folks ever married a damned circus freak!”).
After discussing the presidential inauguration (Reagan is to be sworn in the following day) and other small talk, the manager of the Cooperative, a lifelong friend of my father, invites him into the office at closing (the store’s about to shut down for the day) to enjoy some moonshine another customer dropped off and shoot the ordure. After a near episode when my father asks my Grandmother to drive the car around back to the loading docks for the feed to be loaded ut thinks better of it (she hasn’t driven in almost 10 years and is a dry drunk longing for the keys- she LOVES driving fast [which is why she hasn’t driven in 10 years]) he ends up pulling it around himself and then returning to the office for his moonshine.
One of the black men on the loading docks is a 50-something man named Jimmy Murdock, the latter being my grandmother’s maiden name which of course prompts a politically incorrect remark from her. He denies being related to “any of your family property” but does remember her father as he had the same last name, which gives excuse for a tale of grandmother’s eccentric and evil father.
When the feed is loaded I wander into the office to see if my father is ready to go. He’s holding court with the men of the Cooperative telling a story about an old black janitor from school some of them remember and a prissy English teacher they all despised. The story has some obscene elements and the men in the cooperative, already feeling little pain from the moonshine, are barely able to breathe, and it’s odd to me to see my father telling such a crude and red-faced “Pentecostal worthy” story. By the time it ends he comes out to the Cadillac and realizes he’s too drunk to drive home, so he engages “my lost birthright, Mr. Murdock” in conversation while he sobers.
ME AND BOBBY E. LEE, 3: MICHAEL THE MESSIAH AND THE GOLGOTHA BULLET
When Grandmother is snoring loudly as her son and Jimmy talk, Jimmy begins to drop some of his “Yassuh, sho wuz… Lawd knows dats’ da trufe” act. He’s actually very intelligent, self-educated, left Alabama as a teenager, travelled all over the world in the military before settling in Philadelphia, raising a family and finally returning back to Alabama in his fifties. He discusses the ways it has and has not changed since his boyhood, his opinions on the Civil Rights era (related to the MLK Holiday discussion) the things he does and does not like about the South and the country (in part related to Reagan’s inauguration scheduled for the next day), why he came back, etc… The conversation turns a bit more serious.
My father, possibly because he’s intoxicated or possibly because he foresees his own death in the relatively near future (“I doubt I will live to see my grandchildren, I will assert matter of factly and without reservation that if I do and even if they are born while my children are young they will not be old enough to remember me when they die”), possibly because he’s in a strange mood, begins to discuss his opinions on history, philosophy, religion, the nature of humans, etc., all using “The Temptation of Robert E Lee” as a parable, then switching to Martin Luther King, who in my father’s estimation was a messiah (note smaller case- my father discusses his belief in a “messianic caste” that can be called to active duty) and because MLK accepted his assignment he had to die, for all messiahs have to die (my father names Lincoln, JFK [but not RFK], Sacco and Vanzetti and others). He reenacts King’s last “Audience with the Divine Author” that, in my father’s estimation, occurred on the balcony in Memphis.
Short version: The voice offers to release King and let him die an old man, wealthy from book deals and lucrative positions in academia and the like and living his life out in peace, but like E.D. Nixon and Ralph Abernathy and others from the movement he’ll be a name people know but can’t really place, only scholars will be able to tell you the things he did and few if any will recognize his picture, or he can die and his cause will be magnified, he’ll be an icon, his name will be remembered forever, he’ll become a near godlike figure and emblem. If King wishes to die in mostly anonymous and forgotten comfort he need do nothing, “But if you would live forever in death, Michael*, lean forward now…”
His audience (me and Jimmy) is spellbound until he does the “BANG!” as ‘Michael’ leans into the Golgotha bullet. We’re not sure what we’ve witnessed but he’s mostly sober now, but he does impart to us that he himself was of the messianic caste, but he declined his mission. He also declines to say what it was other than the moment he was called came in 1958 and ultimately the Author decided to go to another, leaving him with his messianic aspirations and ‘talents’, but without the means to satisfy them.
At the end of this I’m not sure if I’ve just seen an unstable drunk finish a performance that will embarrass him tomorrow or something profound and neither is Jimmy Murdock, but he is to say the least intrigued. My father invites him to Cotton’s Barbecue that weekend so that the “great grandson of former slaves and the great grandson of former slaveowners may sit together at the table of… well, the counter is better actually, the Formica there lacks the splinters of the wooden tables” and insists on giving him a tip for his services over Jimmy’s strenuous objections.
As we leave we see Jimmy waving in the background and laughing as he holds his tip, a bag of eggplants, all in the rear view mirror. Down the road I exchange a couple of questions with my father, for I have never seen this side of him, and I tell him “They don’t last but there are moments when I am pretty sure I love you”. After a pause he responds “I believe the reciprocal to be also true. But do not attempt to use it for leverage for you’ll never know when those moments are.” It’s the closest we ever get to expressing affection for each other (especially since this is after the incident for which I was unofficially disowned “until your 18th birthday when I can and will disown you with legality and impunity and from which time you will never receive a penny from me”).
*Not a misprint; Michael was M.L.King’s birth name and the one my father used to refer to him throughout this odd monologue.
**These words were oddly and exactly prophetic. Upon his death I received a monthly Social Security check from his estate, which before Reagan would have continued until I was 21 so long as I remained in college but due to changes made by Reagan ended when I was 18. Since my birthday is on the 1st of the month and the checks came on the 3rd I didn’t receive that month’s even, so literally any support from him stopped on my 18th birthday.
You mentioned Vonnegut, who was a favorite author of mine in high school (the last thing I remember reading of his was Palm Sunday). I have never claimed to be a literary person (I still don’t get A Confederacy of Dunces), but Vonnegut seemed to balance the normal or mundane with the wild and unbelievable. Your mother’s humanity has come through in your descriptions of her in part because of the mercy and compassion she showed. When we would rather not admit it, I think we all know or know of someone who has inhabited the extremes of human emotions and rationality. And whether or not they want to admit it, there are others who have had similar experiences, and who would write to you on tear-stained letters saying “Thank God! Someone else knows what it was like. I’m not alone.”
The way you have described your family in these posts gives them a depth that makes their subsequent actions believeable, and by their own recognizable humanity create the story that you deliver. Perhaps what might trip up people more is that you lived through all of that and write as beautifully as you do (and it’s probably a good thing people don’t see those twitches and tics 
).
Vlad/Igor
The way I anticipate “ME AND BOBBY E. LEE” working is this: Part 1 (Rice/Eggplants) is essentially the prologue to the book. Chapter 1 of the book then flashes back to 1972 or so and proceeds from there chronologically, catching up with Part 2 (Midget/Galatians), after which the rest of 1981 is addressed in subsequent chapters. After addressing the events of January 12/13, 1982 (the last day of my father’s life- majorly rewritten since the last time I sent it out) the next chapter is ME AND BOBBY E. LEE, Part 3 (Michael/Bullet), even though it occurred one year before. Following part three is a description of my father’s own odd (and frozen) funeral on January 15, 1982, the first official celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday as a state holiday.
The piece is ultimately about transition and January 1982 will have many transitions, which is why I’m playing with the order (in the current plan). Transition is marked by R.E.Lee Day becoming M.L.King days as the Old (or rather Middle) South gives way to the (next) New(est) South and by Reagan’s inauguration the next day (which also helps mark the event in time a bit). Most of the events are true, but they’ve been cut and pasted into a new order and location.
The truth:
Robert E. Lee’s birthday really was a holiday in Alabama (as were Thomas Jefferson’s and Jefferson Davis’s) and in 1981 it really was a very heated issue. About a decade had passed since the Civil Rights reforms had really been implemented throughout the state and the generation then in power (those who were college age when Rosa Parks was news) used it as an issue to start a backlash against blacks and white liberals. My father really was off this day, which really was a Monday, and I really did go with him and my grandmother to the grocery store and other shopping (he always used holidays to take care of business).
My father and his mother really did yell at each other across grocery stores. They really did prefer shopping at the dying-on-the-vine Big Bear because of the acoustics and size and, for my father, because of the charge accounts. (He never paid cash when he could charge even if he had the option- caused major problems down the road.) “Jinny”, the ugly acne faced stupid girl who repeated 8th grade two ½ times, is real, really did work at Big Bear, really was afraid of my father.
My grandmother really did dress like a scarecrow when she left her house and really had once used the probate judge’s stapler to hold up her pants. She also believed that when ordered to match that meant “wear all the clothes you have of a particular color”. She really did use insane mnemonic devices and memory systems that were longer than most short stories to impart grocery lists and other things you needed to know.
Jerry Latham is either fictional or a composite character if you prefer. In physical appearance and voice he’s actually based on a bank clerk who was a former student of my father’s and who, hard as it is to believe, my father really did give the birthday/weather report for that day/etc., for, and this was far from the only time the old man did that. If it wasn’t the exact day of birth and weather conditions it might be the exact mailing address of the house where the person grew up and the names of his/her five aunts and the dog they had as a kid, or a quote from a paper the student wrote that he liked or their then telephone number or something equally obscure and arcane. I honestly don’t know how he did it- it could not have been rehearsed as the encounters were too spontaneous- but he evidently had a savant like memory for minutiae, especially where his students were concerned. (The birthday/weather was the fat effeminate bank clerk.)
The clerk really did ask him for a reference for a state job, my father evidently wrote one that sounded like a papal fiat, and whether it was the reference or not the student seemed to think so and was among the genuine mourners at the funeral a year after REL Day 81.)
Grandmother bringing up a pair of scissors taken (or that she said were taken) by a dead former student who was a relative of some type of service person and her shameless “damn shame, reckon his widow has them then?” follow up upon learning the person was dead happened pretty much identical to they way it’s portrayed above except as memory serves it was with a waitress (but I could be wrong). Her “is it because you’re sissy?” comment is fictional but it’s absolutely something she’d have done. (She asked a girl who worked at the nearest filling station to our house and who had a large birth mark “Does that strawberry thing stop you from getting boyfriends? You can tell ‘em they’re not hereditary if they’re afraid of having babies with one.” While to the best of my knowledge the bank clerk didn’t contradict my father’s answer about the weather conditions, HAD he done it rest assured my father would not have rested until he checked it in an archive as he was exceedingly vain about his memory (and was usually in the right).
I haven’t a clue who the manager of the BIG BEAR was when it closed, but I do remember him orating until they cashed a check for him against policy either in appreciation of the oratory or just to get the nutty old man with the loud mother to leave (most people thought he was much older than 54) while the desire to charge anything he could becomes important when he dies (and nickel and dime charges equal thousands of dollars).
In real life it wasn’t an eggplant but a rutabaga that he couldn’t identify so he ended up asking, Melvin Udall style, every clerk in a store to come identify one (I don’t believe that Grandmother was with him at the time as she’d have known one) and even barged into an employee break room to ask one of them to “come elucidate me in the matter” (or some similarly worded comment- INCIDENTALLY, he did not speak like that because he wished to impress but because he loved the sounds of certain words and the cadence of certain sentences, almost an autistic obsession) to some stunned gapes from the minimum wage employees. My father’s “he shit so much he used six rolls of Charmin” joke is invented but it’s very much in character. He loved crude humor and something about his telling the jokes, even though they were crude and stupid, was just absolutely hysterical.
However, it would be boring to refer back constantly FAMILY GUY style (not that I don’t love FAMILY GUY) to “the time he tried to get the stock guys off their asses to elucidate a rutabaga” or “not as embarrassing as the time she asked the woman whose brother had died if the family still had her stapler” or “like the time he told the bank clerk his birthday and what the weather was doing”, etc., when by putting a composite character into a real place you can have them all occur at one time.
As for the things that occur later: Cousin Pete was very much real and whenever we encountered him my father addressed him at (no pun intended) length, never making reference to Pete’s size except to make anybody else who did look like a fool. (Pete was of at least average intelligence and was even a good business man but people talked to him like he was either retarded or a small child.) Since it was known that his children were his biologically (they had lesser versions of the same illness) it proved his marriage was consummated which meant that whenever he and his wife left a place people, including my father, would all say in unison “How?” Grandmother’s comment about how no member of her family ever married a circus freak is true as are some of the unintentional entendres she makes in that scene that have the men at the Cooperative about to die (on her suspicion the wife only married Pete for his money: “She knew he had a little something and she aimed to get her hands on it as soon as she could!”)
Jimmy Murdock is not so much a composite character as a compressed one. My father met him several times, my grandmother really did make a thoroughly disrespectful remark (something to the effect of “Yep, if there hadn’t been a war we’d be able to tell you to hurry up with that order or we’ll sell you south cause we’d be your rightful owners through my daddy” or something equally “cute”). Jimmy really did deny knowing the names of any of the slaves my Grandmother rattled off (she was born 34 years after the War but still knew the family slave inventory) only to later admit to my father that his grandfather was not only ‘Abner’ who my grandmother had listed but that he and my grandmother’s grandfather had been best friends when they were kids, even sharing beds and treehouses together as the family continued to work for the Murdocks for quite a while after the war.
Jimmy and my father in reality talked every time he came in to the Cooperative when Jimmy was there and actually did begin meeting for lunch on the weekends at the barbecue place. My father also took him to a particular Dairy Queen to treat him (my father did not treat lightly) to atone for a sin he (my father) felt he had committed there under Jim Crow. Jimmy was also at my father’s funeral (unrecognizable in a very snazzy suit) and was crying even though he freely admitted to my father when others weren’t around that he generally couldn’t stand white people (my father assuring him that “I’m not so fond of them myself”).
However, I’ve condensed a friendship that actually lasted for several years into a meeting and talk that day alone as it saves exposition (the reader learns who Jimmy is when he tells about himself) and synopsizes their friendship (in the conversation as in life my father first begins to respect Jimmy as more than a menial dock worker when he learns the reason he’s working at the job is to help his kids in college; Jimmy himself is doing fine with military retirement). Also I combine a story Jimmy tells about race relations ca. 1942 (which were both better and worse than popular fiction by non-Southerners often portrays them) with another story that’s more poignant by another source, so in that sense he’s a composite character.
People I’ve left out because they’re, like the cabin refuge, too strange to believe or because the stories are so full already:
*the old black man who used to walk through downtown Wetumpka wearing a blonde toupee, decades old Zoot suit, bright lipstick and rouge (he was also a sidewalk artist),
*Grandmother and Lucy’s sister Crecia who was their total opposite- refined, always dressed to the nines, sweet, clean and among the last people on Earth you’d expect would have to be secured behind locked doors and accounted for whenever the president was in the area (she’d sent him a letter discussing how she would kill him if she were an assassin, naming particular poisons and how she would get them into his system, and the FBI took a very sweet interest in her) and who took a 100 mile cab ride back to the state hospital when she felt her husband was apologizing for her eccentricities (“I don’t mind being crazy but I will not tolerate being patronized!”)
*Geronimo Q. Russell, proud proprietor of a business he built on my father’s pasture and named in hand painted Jethro Bodine style signs “GERONIMO Q. RUSSELL PRODUCE AND VEGETABLE COMPANY, INC., LTD., LLC, INTNATIONAL, ESQUIRE”. His children went through college largely from the money Geronimo raked in selling turnip greens and watermelons to white tourists and Talladega 500 traffic who stopped on the highway because they “just gotta get out of the car and make a picture of ourselves with that old colored man and his signs!” (Geronimo knew what he was doing.)
*Pearl, the aunt with the dead cat Nativity scene (though I only met her a few times so I don’t feel the right to include her)
*Miz Ruby and her blind sister who babysat me and took me to funerals and had me “be sure and kiss the body so she don’t haunt ya”.
Etc. etc. etc….
Anyway, I consider the accuracy of what I’m writing to be roughly on par with a particularly accurate Hollywood biography of a real person (none of which come to mind for their accuracy offhand, but let’s say THE AVIATOR or Spielberg’s new LINCOLN biopic if it turns out well). It’s incomparably more accurate than Frey or JT LeRoy of course, though that’s not saying much, and I’ve no idea of the accuracy level of Sedaris or Burroughs (other than court records alone indicate that the psychiatrist who took in Burroughs was at least as nutty as Running With Scissors alleges).
Your call: creative nonfiction, fiction or memoir? Much appreciation for any answer.
PS- The bizarre messianic conversation did happen as it is described and even as the aftermath of sobering to drive drunk, but it was definitely not on the day he first met Jimmy and if it was on R.E.L. Day 1981 it’s coincidence (though it would have been around that time and MLK Day came up in the conversation, so who knows).
And of course throughout I’ve edited dialogue. I incorporate exact quotes when I can remember them, construct them in the way the character would have spoken when I can’t remember what was said, and tweak them to make them funnier or more poignant (i.e. Grandmother’s bluntness and supreme self centeredness was a lot more embarassing at the time than it was funny, but it was so absurd that in retrospect it’s funny, so… I think the point is something Sea Monkeys being a con but I can’t remember.
I like the sound of “creative nonfiction”. It reminds me of a barely remembered phrase from an introduction to Poore Richard’s Almanack where Franklin explains that the writings within are “liberally sprinkled with Truths.” I find this true of your writings as well; regardless of the every jot and tittle accuracy, there are indeed “Truths” contained therein that resonate with all who read it. It matters not one whit whether the character John Smith or Abby Normal actually lived, breathed and fornicated, as long as their words and actions are grounded in the factual context of the story.
The phrase I would use to describe your narratives is “Based on Actual Events.” If asked if these stories are true, you can honestly reply “They’re true enough.”
Perfect.
At the risk of sounding overtly iconoclastic; what difference does it make? I prefer the stories you write when you write them the way you think they should be written. I have learned to love many of the characters in your life through your passages. I would not love them less for being fictional, imprecise or embellished. Nor would I discount them simply for appearing trite or sterotypical.
In fact, I would encourage you to be less judgemental of what is believable or not, and instead focus on telling the story itself. Don’t the outrageous characters deserve to have their stories told too? I definitely want to hear about Crecia, Pearl and the rest, and it isn’t fair to them or to your fans* to censor yourself because a small minority of readers insist on maintaining a stubborn credulity.
You could tell the most accurate and verifiable story in the history of the English language and there would still be some who insist on disbelieving. You could also write the most outrageous fantasy ever and… well, look at the legions of Tolkien followers. In the end, the only categorization that matters is “Stories Worth Reading” and “Stories Not Worth Reading”. Yours belong squarely in the first, and that’s enough.
*When I use the term ‘fans’ I am very selfishly referring to myself and no one else.
This is what your fans want. Listen to your fans.
I agree that you shouldn’t worry about the believability of stories or characters that you personally know are true. I would prefer that you tell your story without worrying about whether or not I’m going to believe it; I don’t wnt to be second-guessed anyway. Artists shouldn’t hide or ignore the truth for fear of rocking the boat or having someone call out the dreaded “nuh-uh!”
I’m all for using composite characters and that sort of thing though, just for efficiency and clarity. There are plenty of *true * stories that aren’t 100% factual.
I concure. As for the semantic argument, I think “creative nonfiction” or “memoir” both work well, though I have a personal fondness for the word “memoir.” You may be omitting or condensing the truth, but it’s all true. I respectfully disagree with Rhubarb regarding the phrase “based on actual events.” I find that phase most often casually tossed out by movies that have only the tiniest sliver of truth in them, but are looking for a shortcut to the audience’s credulity. Your stories are far more original, truthful, and entertaining than anything I’ve seen “based on actual events.”
