Falling Through Space (30 page)
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Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
Tags: #Falling Through Space, #General Fiction
The south I was driven to was a land of flat, delta fields and rooms full of people talking, talking, talking. Porches at night with people drinking whiskey and talking. Porches in the afternoon with women drinking tea and talking. Porches in the early morning with my grandmothers and great grandmothers and great aunts and great great aunts drinking coffee and talking. Kitchens full of people making mayonnaise and stirring batter for cakes and cornbread and talking. The cooks and I out in the garden picking vegetables for lunch and talking. People wearing srarched shirts and dresses waiting around for church to start and talking. The minister preaching, the choir singing, us singing “A Mighty Fortress is Our Lord” and “The Church's One Foundation” and “I Sing a Song of the Saints of the Lord.” Our voices everywhere, filling the earth with exclamations, excitations, questions, answers, pining, crooning, laments and praises.
Even if I were alone on the lawn inspecting bugs and collecting things the world was full of sound, crickets and birds and frogs and the wind, the sound of the bayou running past, voices rising from fishing boats, oars touching water, laughter from the store and the bridge, people teasing and upbraiding, stories being told, excitement passed along.
Of course we had to begin to write some of that down. If I think of the late afternoons when the houses were quieter I see in my mind's eye people reading and writing. The minute they stopped talking they began to read and write.
“Read to me,” I was always demanding. I didn't want them to stop and read a
children's book
. I wanred to hear the essays in the
Progressive Farmer
or the letters to the editor in the
Deer Creek Journal
or the short stories in
The Reader's Digest
or
Good Housekeeping
, or, if it were my Great Grandmother Biggs or my Grandmother Gilchrist, some paragraphs from the latest Book of the Month Club book. I could go all over the house at Hopedale Plantation being read to. Eli Naylor might be in the kitchen reading Exodus or Leviticus, my brother, Dooley, would be reading
The Hardy Boys
. My cousin, Bunky, would be reading a
National Geographic
, my cousin, Laura, would be reading a musical score she was memorizing for the piano.
All we did was talk and read and write and sing. Of course we became writers. All my cousins believe they could write anything I write if they would agree to go live all alone in the Ozark Mountains and be too selfish to stay married. I believe it too but I never encourage any of them to do it.
If you are a child and you have an ambition to do something in the world, it is helpful if you know a real, live person who has already done it. Because there is a tradition of writing in the south and many writers live here, it is possible to have these “role models” without anyone noticing it or calling them that.
In my case I knew writers and I knew someone who knew a poet. My grandmother had gone to school with a poet named Mildred Plew Meigs and had an autographed copy of her book of poems to prove it. I was allowed not only to read this book of poems but to carry it around in my hand and take it to my room and dog ear the pages and finally, when I was older, to own it. No wonder I became a writer. I didn't think it was some mystical thing no human being could achieve. My grandmother had walked and talked with a real, live poet. This proved becoming a writer was within the grasp of mortal men.
Also, and equally important, my aunt was married to a newspaper editor. I would show off for him unmercifully whenever he came into a room. I wanted him to know we belonged to the same subspecies, that I was a writer too, although it hadn't been made manifest yet.
All of these answers seemed sufficient for my life and work, but they did not tell me why Richard Wright became a writer or Eudora Welty, whose parents were from the midwest.
A piece of the puzzle fell into my lap a few weeks ago and that piece is the inspirarion for this essay. I was watching a documentary on Irish immigration and the announcer said the English settled the northeast but mostly Irishmen and Scots settled the south. Eureka! I screamed. It's a Celtic thing. Then I began to figure. I am half English, a quarter Irish and Welsh and a quarter Scots. The way I figure that is, the Scots blood makes me love to workohn McPhae, the English genes make me anal retentive about finishing what I start and the Irish and Welsh are the magic that turns words to music. I would bet there are very few southern writers without some Celtic genes but please don't get mad at me for believing that or challenge me to prove it. Many other racial groups have great musical and verbal skills. Perhaps it is the blend of all of that which has made us writers.
All of that is, of course, conjecture. What I know for sure is that southerners are writers because they love language and they love to live in worlds of their own making. Shakespeare loved the worlds he created. Harold Bloom says of Shakespeare he saved his creativity for the plays. He wasn't a wastral or a crazy man or mean to people. Everyone who wrote of him says he was a pleasant person who was fun to know.
William Shakespeare is my favorite writer. My second favorite writer is William Faulkner. I think he also loved the worlds he was creating. That's why he kept on writing about them until he died. He had to keep on finding out what was happening in Yoknapatawpha County.
When I was younger, I hated being called a southern writer. I wanted to be a universal writer. Now I know there never was a universal writer, just an occasional man or woman who was so true to the place they knew that it was made meaningful to people in any culture.
I was reading
The God of Small Things
last summer and I kept thinking, this is just like the Delta. A writer has hit pay dirt when the reader thinks the other side of the world is just like the place they lived.
It is all metaphor. Everything is a metaphor for everything else. Everything stands for everything else.
Wherever there are men and women and love and death and courage and kindness and betrayal there will be writers. Maybe there are so many southern writers because we have been living so hot and heavy down here for so many years. It took hot, passionate, powerful men and women to carve a civilization out of the wilderness of forest and swamp and plains that was the south. From the very beginning, from the time Cortez came from Florida to Arkansas, there were epidemics carried by mosquitos and many people dying along the way. There were floods and plagues and forests to cut down and rivers to tame.
Later, by the time I got here, there were screened-in porches to keep out the mosquitos and time in the late afternoon to drink whiskey and tell the stories. I was lucky to live when that was going on and curious enough to listen. My mother was telling a story the other day about a friend of hers who married beneath herself and had “rough children.”
Maybe that's why we are writers. Maybe we are a lot of rough children. Most of the southern writers I know would fit into that category, except, of course, Eudora, who is the exception that disproves everything I say.
Provenance
ORIGINS
Going to the Coast,
Southern Living
, March 1984
National Public Radio Journal Entries
March 26, 1985,
Mississippi Writers,
Reflections of Childhood and Youth
, Volume II
February 26, 1985,
Mississippi Writers,
Reflections of Childhood and Youth
, Volume II
January 1, 1985,
Mississippi Writers,
Reflections of Childhood and Youth
, Volume II
INFLUENCES
National Public Radio Journal Entries
National Public Radio Journal Entries
On Belonging to Art,
Almanac of the Franklin Mint
, Vol. 8, No. 3
Clarence, A Celebration,
Dixie Magazine,
New Orleans Times-Picayune
(Summer 1985)
National Public Radio Journal Entries
WORK
National Public Radio Journal Entries
A White River Journal,
Southern Magazine
, Vol. I, No. 6 (March 1986)
National Public Radio Journal Entries
Sons and Brothers and Husbands and Lovers,
Or, Why I Am Not a Feminist
FURTHER REFLECTIONS
In Praise of the Young Man,
Vogue
Magazine (September 1997)
How to Have a Small Dinner Party,
for Dean Faulkner Wells's cookbook of writers
The Greatest Airplane Flight of My Life
The Darkness and the Light,
Washington Post Sunday Magazine
(1994)
Transitions,
Washington Post Sunday Magazine
(1997)
A Southern Christmas,
Washington Post Sunday Magazine
(1994)
A Delta of Three Rivers,
Outside Magazine
(April 1999)
I'm Not Slave Material,
Health Magazine
(1993), Family Issues McGraw-Hill Publishers (1995)
Like a Flower of Feathers or a Winged Branch,
Creative Non-Fiction
(1997)
The Fabulous Booklined Walls of My Grannie,
New Woman
(1996)
The Almost Complete and Final Answer
The author is grateful to the following for permission to reprint previously copyrighted material:
Excerpt from
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
by Gary Zukav. Copyright © 1979 by Gary Zukav. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow & Co. Ltd.
Excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” in
Four Quartets
by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot; renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and Faber & Faber Ltd.
Excerpts from the unpublished papers of Walter Inglis Anderson reprinted by permission of the family of Walter Inglis Anderson.
Excerpt from “Renascence” in
Renascence & Other Poems
by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Copyright 1917 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, Literary Executor of the Estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Excerpts from “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound” in
All My Pretty Ones
by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1962 by Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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Copyright © 1987 by Ellen Gilchrist
Cover design by Steven Seighman
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