PART V
I have often wondered what might have happened to my mother after she finally stopped drinking, in 1983, had it not been for her father, who, I suspect, worried over his daughter every day of his life as a parent, and who, in the years leading up to his death at the age of ninety, energetically sought reassurance, typically from me, though also from my sister, that his daughter would one day overcome her anger and make a place for herself in the world.
“Don, what do you think of your mother’s prospects?” he would ask me whenever I visited him and my grandmother in North Carolina. “Do you think she’s doing all right?”
All right? I never knew quite what to say. Should I speak the truth and risk upsetting him? Sometimes I said nothing. I remember sitting on the sofa in the house on McCoy Cove Road, feeling helpless, looking out the living-room window at the low gray mountains nearby.
My grandparents’ house was neither beautiful nor remarkable — not like many Black Mountain residences, some of which had been built as vacation bungalows in the Arts and Crafts style — but it was a good house, and my grandparents, while in their seventies and eighties, had done painstaking work on it and on the narrow, sloping yard that was given over, out back, to shade trees overhanging a picnic table, and to my grandfather’s vegetable garden and my grandmother’s flower beds. There was a garage out back, too, at the end of the driveway that passed the house as it climbed the grade from the road. Sometimes when he was in a storytelling mood, my grandfather might slip away through the kitchen and across the patio and up the driveway to his workroom at the back of the garage. A moment later, steady on his feet, and chewing a toothpick or a stick of Dentyne, he would come inside the house, lower himself into his chair, and begin volubly speaking. Often, my grandmother got up and left the room, because she did not approve of his drinking.
My favorites of his stories took place in the mountains. My grandparents had graduated — she in 1926, he a year later — from Tusculum College in Greenville, Tennessee. At around the time they were there, I remember him telling me, a scholarship was endowed by a widow who lived in, of all places, Miami, Florida. It was the widow’s desire, as I recall my grandfather’s understanding of things, that part of her money be used to educate students from the poorer reaches of the western Appalachias. She had herself been a child of the mountains, I remember from the story, and, through education, had found her way into the modern world. Because the pupils brought to Tusculum under her scholarship were largely unschooled, the college committed itself to their comprehensive education. In return, the matriculated men and women — who might go on to train in medicine or law or engineering, but who, I gathered, often quit with teaching degrees — promised to return to their home communities, where they would live and work for a set term of years.
Neither of my grandparents was a recipient of the scholarship. But for a time after he graduated, my grandfather recruited for it. He told of driving a Model A Ford along dirt trails and over hilltops and through narrow mountain hollows; sometimes, he said, he drove up creek beds. When he came across a house or a small subsistence farm, he would get out of the car and ask whether the inhabitants knew of any young people who might want to go to college. Were there any around, he would ask, who showed signs of being school material?
One of my grandfather’s tales had him driving a rocky creek bed that led toward a mountain hamlet. As my grandfather neared the hamlet, he heard rifle fire echoing from the darkness behind the trees. When he got close enough to see buildings, the firing let up. My grandfather drove into a clearing surrounded with old structures that featured cluttered porches on which, I seem to recall him saying, dogs and children sat eyeing him. It was a poor place, like most all the places he visited in that job, a place that I picture as a scene in a photograph taken by Walker Evans or one of the other photographers who worked for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. That day, men with guns pointed toward the ground came out into the open — they came from here and there, not in a group — and gathered in a circle around my grandfather’s car, where they politely discussed his business with him. When that was done, my grandfather got back in his Model A and drove on. I can imagine one of the men saying to him, “Go on up that way and you’ll find a boy,” then waving a hand in the air. The mountain men retreated into the forest from which they’d come, and, after my grandfather had got a short distance away, their firing resumed. It is not clear to me whether my grandfather knew with certainty, or believed with conviction, that the men had been taking aim at each other. But I remember that he sometimes talked about the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, which took place in the West Virginia and Kentucky mountains not terribly far north of the Tennessee farm country where he and my grandmother had been raised. The Hatfield-McCoy feud involved deliberate assassinations and a love affair, though it did not, contrary to folklore, carry on for scores of years. It lasted from 1878 until 1890, and exerted a tremendous hold on the imaginations of people living in that part of the world in the years during and immediately after its heyday as news.
According to my grandfather, one of the students who came to Tusculum under the widow’s scholarship had been born into a feud. O., a Kentucky boy, arrived at the college wearing a sidearm beneath his coat. O.’s father had killed a man and gone into hiding — not so much from the law as from the victim’s kin — and O. had vowed, in the event his father was killed by the man’s relatives, to avenge the death. For this reason, O.’s revolver never left his side. Did O. carry the gun to class? I might ask my grandfather, interrupting the narrative. Did he hide it in his pants at a Saturday-night dance? Did he keep it loaded beside the books on his desk? My grandfather thought he might have done these things. O. was ready at a moment’s notice to abandon school and hunt for revenge.
Until that time, he studied literature. It was customary in those days, the story went, for Tusculum students to produce a play at commencement, and in his senior year O. was encouraged by his teachers to write the play. My grandfather claimed to have seen the production, and described the work as a loving portrayal of O.’s family, and as an unromantic though somewhat comical depiction of backwoods poverty, stern religion, and alcoholism. It was, I suppose — and if I correctly understood my grandfather’s remarks about it — a work of American naturalism, possibly an accidental work of naturalism, and, I suspect, in keeping with styles taking hold on the American stage during the years between the world wars. This style could be seen in the works of Eugene O’Neill and others who had studied under George Pierce Baker, whose drama seminars at Harvard placed the literature of the theater in an active and responsive rather than a purely academic and literary context. Great plays are authentic, living stories of a civilization, and, in Baker’s view, the plays then being written for the American stage required, in order that our society could find itself mirrored in its contemporary theater, a milieu in which practical training in professional stagecraft might bring into existence a class of artists able to conceive and perfect what amounted to a new American art form. Baker’s famous classes became a foundation for the Yale School of Drama, founded in 1925. According to my grandfather, the commencement speaker for O.’s graduating class at Tusculum was a colleague of Baker’s who had gone to teach at the Drama School in New Haven. At the performance of O.’s play, which received rousing applause when the curtain came down, this guest speaker, startled to his feet by O.’s unexpected talent, promised him, before God and the Tusculum community, a place at Yale.