Clear Pictures

by Reynolds Price

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A major new work by Reynolds Price, Clear Pictures is a memoir of childhood and youth in the rural South, a story of growing up, of discovering the intricate entanglements of family, love, solitude and faith. A gallery of powerful faces and lucid memories and a rich portrait of a world now mostly vanished into the past.((Atheneum--Nonfiction)

Release date: June 12, 1989

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

THREE USEFUL LESSONS

WILL AND ELIZABETH PRICE

I'm Lying In Dry Sun, alone and happy. Under me is a white blanket. I'm fascinated by the pure blue sky, but Topsy the goat is chained to my right -- out of reach they think. The sound of her grazing comes steadily closer. I've sat on her back, she pulls my cart, I'm not afraid. Suddenly though she is here above me, a stiff rank smell. She licks my forehead in rough strokes of a short pink tongue. Then she begins to pull hard at what I'm wearing. I don't understand that she's eating my diaper. I push at her strong head and laugh for the first time yet in my life. I'm free to laugh since my parents are nearby, talking on the porch. They'll be here shortly, no need to cry out. I'm four or five months old and still happy, sunbathing my body that was sick all winter.

That scene is my earliest sure memory; and it poses all the first questions -- how does a newborn child learn the three indispensable human skills he is born without? How does he learn to live, love, and die? How do we learn to depend emotionally and spiritually on others and to trust them with our lives? How do we learn the few but vital ways to honor other creatures and delight in their presence? And how do we learn to bear, use and transmit that knowledge through the span of a life and then to relinquish it?

I've said that all but one of my student writers have located their earliest memory in the third or fourth year. My own first memory appears to be a rare one. The incident was often laughed about in my presence at later gatherings -- the day poor Topsy went for Reynolds's diaper, got a good whiff and bolted. So I might have built a false memory from other people's narratives. But I'm still convinced that the scene I've described is a fragment of actual recall, stored at the moment of action. If it wasn't I'd have embellished the scene further -- adding clouds to the sky, a smell to the grass, the pitch of my parents' voices. What I've written is what I have, an unadorned fragment that feels hard and genuine. And the only trace of emotion is my lack of fear, my pleasure, both of which produced my first awareness of dependency -- the goat won't eat me; help is near.

From the presence of Topsy, I know I'm in Macon, North Carolina. She was born, the same day as I, on my Uncle Marvin Drake's farm up near the Roanoke River. My father has had a small red goat-cart built, big enough for me and one child-passenger; and Topsy is already strong enough to pull us. Since we left Macon before I was a year old, then the memory comes from my first summer in 1933. That February 1st, I'd been born in the far west bedroom of my mother's family home in Macon.

Macon was then a village of under two hundred people, black and white. Because it was an active station on the Seaboard Railroad's Raleigh-to-Norfolk line, it had grown north and south from the depot in the shape of a Jerusalem cross-a north-south dirt street, an east-west paved road parallel to the train tracks and a few dirt streets parallel still to both axes.

There was a minuscule but thriving business district -- three grocery and dry-goods stores, a gas station and a post office. There were two brick white churches, Methodist and Baptist, and two frame black churches, one on the west edge and one in the country. There were fewer than forty white households, mostly roomy but unpretentious frame houses, no pillared mansions. A few smaller black houses were set in the midst of town with no hint of threat or resentment; but most black families lived on the fringes of town -- some in solid small houses, some in surprisingly immortal-seeming hovels. And on all sides, the sandy fields of tobacco and cotton lay flat and compliant, backed by deep woods of pine and cedar and big-waisted hardwoods.

Almost every white family employed one or more black women, men and children as farm hands, house servants, yardmen, gardeners and drivers. With all the deep numb evil of the system (numb for whites)-slavery and servitude did at least as much enduring damage to whites as to blacks -- those domestic relations were astonishingly good-natured and trusting, so decorous that neither side began to explore or understand the other's hidden needs. When they'd granted one another the hunger for food, shelter and affection, their explorations apparently ceased; and the ancient but working standoff continued.

Yet a major strand of the harmony of all their lives consisted of the easy flow of dialogue expressive of mutual dependency, jointly sparked fun and the frequent occasions of mutual exasperation. There were even glints of rage from each side; but in our family homes at least, there was never a word about the tragic tie that bound the two peoples. And if a cook or yardman mysteriously failed to appear on Monday morning, even the kindest white employer was sure to foment angrily on the blatant no-count ingratitude -- no trace of acknowledgement that a bonedeep hostile reluctance might be fuming.

Since the family trees of strangers are high on anyone's boredom scale, I'll limit the following to what seems bare necessity if I'm to track these mysteries. My mother Elizabeth Martin Rodwell was born in 1905 and reared in Macon in the oak-shaded rambling white seven-room house built by her father in the mid-1888os. He was John Egerton Rodwell, station master of the Macon depot. He'd grown up in a big nest of brothers on a farm, some four miles north, between Macon and Churchill. His mother Mary Egerton, whether she knew it or not, could have claimed descent from the English family that commissioned John Milton to write his masque Comus in 1634 to celebrate the elevation of John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, to the Lord Presidency of Wales (the leading player in Comus was his daughter Alice Egerton, age fifteen). While the memory of such a standing was retained by a few of the deep-country farmers my Egertons had become, after two centuries in slaveholding Virginia and North Carolina, they seldom bragged on their blood.

My mother Elizabeth's mother was Elizabeth White -- called Lizzie, even on her gravestone -- from the oldest continuously settled part of the state, Perquimans County in the northeast corner, eighty miles east of Macon. Lizzie's mother had died in Lizzie's infancy, and she had been reared by her storekeeper father and an agreeable stepmother. On a visit to friends in Macon, she met blackhaired, brown-eyed funny Jack Rodwell; and she married him soon after. She was all of sixteen, mirthful and pleasantly buxom (a later problem), not pretty but widely loved for her good talk, her endless self-teasing and much ready laughter.

She was fated to bear eight children in twenty years, seven of whom survived her. One boy died in his first year; the other three left home early, in the common Dickensian fashion. They packed their small belongings, kissed their parents (all my kin flung themselves on kisses with the recklessness of Russian premiers), flagged the train and headed up the line for railroad jobs in Norfolk, already a teeming port of the U.S. Navy. Of the four daughters, my mother Elizabeth was the youngest. Lizzie used to claim that Elizabeth was conceived because, well after Lizzie thought she was done, the Seaboard added a four a.m. express. Its window-rattling plunge through the heart of Macon would wake Jack nightly and leave him with nothing better to do in the dark than turn to his mate.

My father William Solomon Price was born in 1900 in Warrenton, the small county-seat five miles from Macon. Before the Civil War, the town was a social and political center of the state (a local statesman Nathaniel Macon was Speaker of the House of Representatives in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson). As such it was the home of wealthy slaveholding planters, many of whose elegant houses have lately been refurbished, though Warrenton now shares the sad lot of all bypassed farm towns -- its children leave.

Will's father -- Edward Price, a famed dry wit -- was a son of the town carriage-maker, of Welsh and Scottish stock; Edward's mother was a Reynolds from Perth, Scotland. Barely out of boyhood and balked by Reconstruction poverty from his hope to study medicine, Edward avoided the family business and clerked for the remainder of his life in the county's Registry of Deeds. Will's mother was Lula McCraw, also of Warrenton and the descendant of Scottish, English and French Huguenot immigrants. One of her third-great-grandfathers was James Agee, a Huguenot whom we share with our Tennessee cousin, the writer James Agee. Lula Price was small, with a bright voracious mind, watchful as a sparrow and capable of winging a startlingly ribald comment from behind her lace and cameo with such swift wit as to leave the beauty of her face unmarred. Her short narrow body bore six strong children, all of whom survived her; yet she found the energy to run a ten-room house generously, almost lavishly, on her husband's modest income with a strength of mind and hand that, again, her white-petal beauty belied.

My parents met six years before their marriage. The meeting was in 1921 when Will was twenty-one and Elizabeth sixteen. They'd each gone to a dance at Fleming's Mill Pond, with other dates -- Will with Sally Davis, Elizabeth with Alfred Ellington. Elizabeth's date introduced her to Will; and despite Sally Davis's beauty and wit, an alternate circuit at once lit up. First, both Will and Elizabeth looked fine and knew it, within reason. Second, they were both storage batteries of emotional hunger and high-voltage eros. And third, their short pasts -- which felt like eons -- had left each one of them craving the other's specific brand of nourishment.

Will had graduated from high school four years earlier and had since held easy jobs, none of which required him to go more than a few hundred yards from his family home, while continuing to sleep and board with his parents. His two elder brothers had gone as far as was imaginable then, to Tennessee; but all three of his witty and unassuaged sisters were still in place -- the eldest having left her husband and returned unannounced at the age of twenty with a young son to live for good in the shadow of her father, whom she loved above all and whose deathbed pillows were found in her cedar chest at her own death, more than fifty years later. Both Will's parents were in hale, testy, often hilarious control; so the house contained eight Prices in five bedrooms, plus at least one cook and a handyman.

I can hardly think how a healthy young man, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven, can have stood to inhabit such a crowd of watchers and feeders -- and stood them, day and night, for ten years after finishing high school -- but stand them he did. As the youngest son, Will was his mother's "eyeballs." And later evidence suggests that she unconsciously mastered his growing dependence on alcohol to keep him close to an all-forgiving bosom (Elizabeth told me, late in her life, that "Will's mother would ride with him to the bootlegger when no one else would go").

For whatever reasons, Will's extrication from the grip of such a rewarding and demanding mother -- and from his fondness for Sally Davis -- took him six long years of fervent courting. And once he and Elizabeth had steeled themselves, they married as far from Warren County as they could go and still be sheltered by kin. Elizabeth's nextoldest, and favorite, brother Boots gave her away in Portsmouth, Virginia; and in Warrenton, Will's sisters rose at dawn to set all the clocks in the Price house an hour ahead. Then at "noon" -- as the distant vows seemed imminent and their mother announced her imminent heartspell -- they could say "Just calm yourself, Muddy; it's too late now. Will and Elizabeth are a whole hour married and on the train." And so they were -- the Orange Blossom Special, in a "drawing room" suite (courtesy of Elizabeth's Seaboard brothers) and bound for Florida, one of the gorgeous ends of the Earth in those grand days.

Elizabeth's parents had died young. When my mother was eleven, Lizzie's kidneys failed; and Elizabeth was led to her mother's deathbed-surrounded by galvanized tubs of ice to cool the fierce heat -- for a final goodbye. Three years later, sitting on her own porch, Elizabeth looked up the dirt road to see a mail cart from the depot roll toward her. It bore her last anchor -- Jack Rodwell her father, dead of his second stroke at fifty-eight.

From the age of eleven, Elizabeth and her sister Alice, called Britsy and five years older, were mothered by their kind sister Ida. Ida was eighteen years older than Elizabeth; and with her came her then-volatile husband Marvin Drake and their three boys. Though they were Elizabeth's near-contemporary nephews, they quickly became her surrogate brothers, foster sons and chief playmates.

The Drakes had moved in at Lizzie's death to keep house for Jack and the girls; and once Jack died, they stayed for good. Ever after, Elizabeth's feelings about the years of at-home orphanhood were understandably mixed. She was grateful for the chance to remain in her birthplace with mostly well-intentioned kinfolk. But on rare occasions in my own childhood, I'd see her ambushed by sudden resentment. In those short forays, she'd glimpse the worst -- she'd been dispossessed in her rightful place by an interloper with a cold eye for gain, a brother-in-law (who would ultimately purchase the Rodwell children's shares in the home and will it and all its Rodwell contents to his Drake heirs). In a few days though, I'd hear her say "Let's drive up home and see Ida and Marvin." In her best mind, my mother knew they'd kept her alive.

Will and Elizabeth were reared then in classic, though healthily honest, family situations where blood-love, or at least loyalty, was the binding principle of a majority of the by-no-means happy populace. As an inevitable and paradoxical result, my young parents were primed for another love, private but transcendent, that would lead them out of the blighting shadows of their homes into the glare of their own graceful bodies in one another's hands, worked as they were by aching need.

The repeatable public stories of their courtship were among my own favorites from their long repertoire. There was the night when, returning from a performance of The Merry Widow in Henderson, Will left his Model A Ford for a moment to buy cigarettes; and Elizabeth, still too well-mannered to mention a body-need, was forced to lift the floorboard and pee quickly on the hot gear box. It reeked mysteriously through the rest of Will's evening. Or the time the same car got bogged in quicksand and almost sank them. Or the hard days of Will's terror when Elizabeth suffered a ruptured appendix, twenty years before the discovery of antibiotics, and was rushed in agony from Macon to Norfolk on a stretcher in the baggage car of a train -- the only place she could ride flat -- for six weeks of desperate but successful remedies. Or Elizabeth's happiest memory of her strongly ambivalent mother-in-law -- the time they were driving alone together, struck a turkey, killed it neatly and brought it home to eat. Or the lovers' own mutual fits of jealousy and their laughing reconciliations, alone in the woods by the sandy creek in Macon or at big late dances in the open pavilion at Fleming's Mill Pond or a place in the woods called Largo.

Well before I was in school, I came to realize that they'd been together twelve years before my birth -- six years of courtship and six of marriage. And with that realization came a kernel of bitterness that I'd missed so much of them, that they'd had so much without me. Knowing nothing of the mechanics of reproduction, I lamented my absence from so much fun and from all the magical snapshots in their albums. Why hadn't they wanted to bring me in sooner?

The kind of merciless consolation available only to children and madmen came in my realizing simultaneously that those twelve years broke into two pieces, good and bad. The courtship was happy, though subject to the clouds I've mentioned (Sally Davis took a long time resigning her hold on Will, and Elizabeth ran an unpredictable sideline in other beaux). But the six years of marriage before my birth were all but tragic. Will's boyish taste for bootleg liquor -- the fuel of so much of his early fun -- became a nightmarish and paralyzing thirst.

The drunkenness, and all the missed work-days, led to aimless dangerous roving with his bachelor best-friend and fellow-soak, whom I'll call Alec, while Elizabeth waited -- sober and wretched in whatever room they'd rented that month. And all round, the troubles of an always-poor state grew as the Great Depression plummeted. Even Will's sisters, two of whom by then had suffered disastrous marriages, told Elizabeth that they couldn't fault her if she left for the sake of her own self-respect and sanity. She later admitted that, in their courtship, she drank her own share of bathtub gin, especially at Boob's nonstop party in Norfolk. But now, avid as she was for her own chance at life but devoted to Will in his pitiful baffling thirst, she was sober in earnest. And she stayed. Long after his death, she said to me "The thing was, he always came back late to me, so sick and helpless, saying I was all he had. I wanted to doubt him, but I knew it was true."

With all their other troubles, living near their families in a fruitful farming county, they never went cold or hungry, though I've heard Mother say "With one dollar bill you could pack the car with groceries; the only trick was finding that dollar." More than once she was forced to down her pride, approach her solvent brother-in-law, who owned the local feed-and-seed store; beg for a dollar and endure his asking "Why in the world? -- to buy Will's liquor?"

Will's constant worry, beyond a drunkard's guilt, was jobs and income. Like his father and two older brothers, he'd never really thought of college; and he was skilled in nothing more saleable than wit, charm and a generous heart. As a boy and a youth, he'd sold newspapers, clerked in the freight office of the Warrenton Railroad's depot. He even rode as conductor on that lightly traveled, remarkably short line -- less than five miles out to Warren Plains and back. The only job I recall his mentioning from those first married years was door-to-door life-insurance sales. At least it wasn't office work. With his own Ford, and without the cold-eyed scrutiny of a boss, Will could roam the backroads of Warren and Vance counties, canvassing hard-up farmers. I never heard tales of his drinking at work but he must have. For whatever reason, the jobs were short and unambitious; and he and Elizabeth moved restlessly from rented room to rented room, all within a fifteen-mile radius of their family homes.

Pictures of Will Price in youth show a strong upturned face with a radiance almost better than beauty, a heat centered in the gray eyes that burn with what seems fervor -- where does it come from; what fuel does it take? A few years later, the courtship pictures still show him as a trim dapper man with splendidly live eyes, an upright carriage of his medium frame and with always the threat of a smile on his mouth. But I've found no pictures of him from those hard first six years of marriage; and surely that gap in the record can't be accidental (thirty years later when I got a home-movie camera, he was openly fascinated with his own walking likeness; and he often said he was going to buy a whole reel and get me to use it all on him, though sadly he never did).

It's only with my birth that he appears in the albums again, holding me with the winning edginess of a fledgling member of the bomb-disposal squad. But by then, in his early thirties, he's taken on weight. It looks like bloat and, worse, there's a blurring glaze on the once-hot eyes. Half-smiling still, thoughtful and protective as he is, by now there's a presence in his life even more demanding than his wife and first son.

I also have no pictures of Elizabeth from those six years. But her long absence from the record of an eagerly snapshooting family is also eloquent, though I recall only two occasions when she mentioned the slow pain. In 1961, seven years after Will's death, I was living in England and working on an autobiographical story called "Uncle Grant." It was about a black man who worked for us in those early years; and I wrote to ask Mother if Grant, in his devotion to Will, had ever drunk with him. She answered quickly; no, Grant "never took a drink with Will that I know of." And then, for the only time in all her relations with my writing, she hinted at a possible suppression -- "I don't know, but maybe 'twould be better not to bring in the drinking days, they were so horrible" (that instinctive slide into the poetic 'twould still sounds its desolation). When she reappears in my baby pictures, it's clear that she's fared much better than Will. In her late twenties now, she's lost her baby fat but is still a good-looking woman ("a well set-up girl, I can tell you," as Will might have said). Whatever pain those dark eyes have eaten has left no trace, not yet.

In the face of their own problems, and the economic world-maelstrom in which they were helpless floaters, it's hard to guess why in early May of 1932 they conceived a first child. Once I was grown, Will told me of the pains he took in those years to preserve a single washed condom in a box of powder for numerous uses, but he didn't connect the fact with my conception. I may have been an accident, and few of us want that; but it feels at least possible from here that Elizabeth, justifiably leery of childbearing, arranged to conceive as a last hope of braking Will's rush to drown. She'd tried every other way she knew. Maybe a child would get his attention where all else had failed; he had seemed to enjoy his nearest nephew and niece.

Physically, the pregnancy was uncomplicated. They were living in Henderson as the day approached, again in a rented room with a cranky widow who monopolized the bathroom. The intention was, though, that I should be born in Elizabeth's home in Macon. I've said that it was her birthplace and that of her brothers and sisters; it had also seen the deaths of one of her brothers and both her parents. No Rodwell or Price of their generations had yet been born or died elsewhere. Will's boyhood friend Dr. Pat Hunter supervised the pregnancy; and when Elizabeth felt contractions in the late afternoon of January 31st, she and Will lit out for Macon. (Earlier in the day Adolf Hitler had assumed dictatorial powers in Germany, but they wouldn't have known or cared.) Elizabeth's water broke before they arrived; but she walked from the car into the house, to find Ida and Marvin playing rummy with friends. There was no telephone; a cousin drove to Warrenton to fetch Pat Hunter; someone else went for Betty Lyons the black midwife. And soon after they arrived, labor set in.

In the living room Marvin, Will and the friends tried to wait it out. They scrambled eggs and played more cards by the hot woodstove, though Will was far too scared to concentrate. By midnight nothing had come from the bedroom but cries from Elizabeth. The friends left; Marvin tried to sleep. But Will lurked helpless at the edge of the hardest birth ever suffered on the place.

It was remembered as that, even by the other women present -- black Betty Lyons with Ida and Cousin Joyce Russell, who administered ether on a clean cotton pad till she herself was nearly unconscious. By the time I began to listen, that night was one of the epic family tales, a ghastly double-death turned back as cold morning broke. In the far west room on a white iron bed six feet from a woodstove, Elizabeth worked for twelve hours.

I was breeched -- turned backward, stalled defiant -- in the womb; and since antibiotics were twelve years off and a caesarean was all but unthinkable, Pat Hunter struggled to turn me. No luck. Near day when Will peered in again, Pat looked up and said "I'm losing them both." It was all Will needed. More than once in later years, I watched him hear the story of his next act from others; but I never heard him tell it. Even for a narrator as driven and dazzling as he, it was far too weighty for public performance.

He fled the house in the freezing dawn, went out to the woodshed; and there he sealed a bargain with God, as stark and unbreakable as any blood pact in Genesis -- if Elizabeth lived, and the child, he'd never drink again.

By the time he was back in the house, Pat had finally turned me, damped forceps to my pliant skull, braced his feet on the rail of the bed and pulled me out by main force. My rubbery skull was dented, and one ear was torn; but once I'd wailed and been handed to a revived Joyce for bathing, Pat went to tell Will. Elizabeth was alive, exhausted but safe. And plainly I was there too, the first of their sons.

No one recalled, in my presence, what either Will or Elizabeth said to Pat or to one another, nor did anyone say when Will told her of his solemn deal. Likely the first words, after endearments, were my name -- Edward for Will's dead father, Reynolds for his Scottish grandmother. Will's elder brothers had so far produced three girls and a boy, none of whom bore their grandfather's name. My guess is that it meant much to Will to go to his mother with the news of a boy named Edward Price -- again. There seems to have been no question of a name from the Rodwell side, though Elizabeth often told me "Will put his foot down -- you couldn't be a junior." That was saved for another boy years later, when Will may have loathed his own name less.

He must have told Elizabeth his hopeful news soon because, obedient to medical wisdom at the time, she spent the next three weeks in bed (or near it) and would have needed cheering. For the remainder of his life, he teased her about the long rest -- "I thought we'd have to hire a damned steam shovel to get you up. You were that scared of touching your foot to the floor." She had been badly torn and would need surgical repair years later.

God had kept his half of the bargain. The family myth had it that Will Price kept his half. The fact is, in time he did but not at once -- and no wonder. In the upper South in the 1930s, the help available to a drunk who hoped to quit was no more unusual than prayer and no more imaginative than the standard injunction to buck up, be a man and do the manly thing. Professional help was limited to small private clinics for the discreet sobering up of drunks who could pay for weaning, "vitamin" shots and a dollop of scoutmasterly advice; but one and all, the clinics were notoriously unsuccessful in long-range help. It's now conceded that the majority of enduring recoveries in America are achieved through membership in Alcoholics Anonymous, but A.A. had not been organized in 1933. It was one year off and nearly twenty years before its groups appeared in the smalltown South.

So Will was all but on his own. His mother and sisters were slim help; the middle sister was involved in her own sad marriage to a charming drunk who would soon kill himself, leaving her and a young daughter to return to the Warrenton home. Both Will's brothers, by then in Tennessee, were also drinkers -- as were all three of Elizabeth's and ultimately all her nephews. Whether or not Will's mother unconsciously fostered his thirst, there's no doubt that in his cups he often resorted to the tiny glistening face of his mother, so ready to forgive and provide what an interloping wife was baffled to find.

The interloper though was the stronger prop, the wife he'd courted so hard for years. Elizabeth was no more a trained alcoholic counselor than anyone else in the South of those days; but she was passionately ready to help, to nurse him in his sickness and to wait in hope. Once she told me "The help was seldom more than waiting, then fixing him soft-boiled eggs with butter in a glass." Years later Will also acknowledged the spiritual guidance of Robert Brickhouse, his Baptist minister in Warrenton; and he had the bald enormous fact of a mortal deal with the God he never questioned. If Will Price couldn't keep his half of the bargain, then in his mind the unquestioned corollary was that God had every right to reclaim Elizabeth and Reynolds. And given the Old Testament tally of God's response to such defaults, the corollary surely stood cocked and ready to seize its double blood-due.

I stress that I never heard my father mention the deal and its terrors; he was no chattering fundamentalist but a silent wrestler in the scalding dark. In the first two years of my life, we continued to camp out -- first in Henderson, fifteen miles southwest; then around Warren County with relatives and in rented rooms; so I spent many hours in the close company, not only of my housewife-mother but with Will. I remember frequent bearhugs and the scrape of a beard that could never quite be shaved; I can see flashes of my first Christmas; I have a glimpse of his delight when I took a first step on my first birthday. But I have no memory of seeing him high or loud or abusive.

Will and Elizabeth were long dead and I was in my forties before I learned from Lulie, the sister nearest Will in age, that Will concluded the deal more gradually than legend records. Admitted, at once he began to quit or taper off, as drunks still say. There