Homesick (7 page)

But for me those humiliations were just a start. Two of the girls, Cheri and Sally, decided they would make me wear a sign everywhere that said
I’M BEAUTIFUL AND I KNOW IT
. I was an extremely self-conscious fourteen-year-old, and have never felt more vulnerable. I’d never given too much thought to how I looked, and I was far too shy and insecure to be conceited. But that’s not how the other girls saw me. They didn’t even know me, but they were determined to take me down a peg.

Walking around with that poster board sign hanging around my neck for a week was perhaps the most scarring experience of my young life. I allowed these girls, whose adolescent envy, self-doubt, and insecurity were at high tide, to humiliate me in order to bolster their own fragile self-image. Worse yet, I allowed them to do it because I so wanted to belong to their club. I let them make me wear a sign that made me seem haughty and arrogant, knowing it was intended to publicly cancel out whatever physical beauty I possessed. They believed that everything came easy to me, and by God, they were going to rob me of that.

At the age of fourteen, it truly felt as if they were murdering my soul. Even now, all these years later, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I remember feeling so confused, convinced I must have deserved that kind of treatment—that I was so worthless it only made sense for the other girls to treat me that way. These girls were troubled, I now see, and they had to cut me down to size to alleviate their own feelings of inadequacy. With the passage of time, of course, we find ways to explain such things away, and even forgive them. But the mark they make on us is indelible.

It took me years to get over the pain and doubt inflicted upon me in that solitary week of humiliation. Every time I would accomplish something that had anything to do with my physical appearance—becoming a cheerleader, being elected Homecoming Queen in college, becoming a model—I would be racked by self-doubt, haunted by the worry that I was a hollow person with nothing to offer but an attractive façade. All because of a culture—a culture especially prized in the South, I realize—that made a contest, and a currency, of adolescent beauty, and in the process turned generations of young women against one another. And I endured it without complaint, just to belong.

Once you were in one of these clubs, of course, it was all peaches and cream. We went to chapter meetings, did community-spirited things such as visiting the elderly at rest homes or helping out at children’s shelters. The lasting legacy for me, though, was the meanness I had to endure to get in. If social cohesion is one of the good things about growing up in a small town, the downside is
the unchallengeable power of cliques. That sort of thing is in the nature of the teenage beast, but in bigger towns and cities there are usually so many different social groups within a single school or locality that most kids can find others they feel comfortable with. Not so in a small town. If you don’t conform, even at the cost of sacrificing your principles and self-respect, you will be an outcast. And if you have a sensitive nature, it will mark you for life.

Many years later I ran into Sally, one of the girls who had been so mean to me during Hell Week, at a class reunion back home. I decided to talk to her about what she had done to me, hoping it would help me come to terms with my own memories. She was horrified. The next day she sent me an arrangement of flowers, in the colors of the Dusties. The card said, “You’re beautiful, and
I
know it.” It was such an elegant and gracious thing to have done, and I was so glad I’d taken the risk of approaching her. It made it possible to build a lovely friendship with Sally, rather than continue to mourn that one horrible week when we were teenagers. I think we’re both grateful that we found a way to forgive and be forgiven.

There were only thirty-five kids in my graduating class, so everybody knew everybody else at Lamar. I never went steady in high school, just dated a bunch of different guys. We’d go water-skiing a lot, and to the movies, and ball games, or go tubing down the Chunky River. In the summer we’d have lake-house parties in nearby locales, or go for big weekend jaunts to New Orleans. Music was a big part of our life; we drove to Mobile, Tuscaloosa, and Jackson for concerts as our favorite bands toured through the South. But our most common pastime was to hang out in the parking lot of the Quik Stop—and that was as much fun as anything.

Sandy Steele was my best friend then, and I did everything with her and three other girls. After I got my license we’d all pile into the red Plymouth Barracuda Daddy bought me, and drive around the houses of boys we had crushes on. We’d slow down, hoping to catch sight of a boy out washing the car in his driveway—then we’d have a shrieking giggle fit, and floor it. That’s small-town courtship for you.

This story would be a lot spicier if I could offer true confessions of a failed Southern lady. The truth is I was a good girl, more Melanie Wilkes than Scarlett O’Hara. I don’t credit it to any particularly strong sense of virtue. Rather, it had to do with my chronic shyness, and the severe pressure to conform to my mother’s and society’s expectations.

I was the perfect young Southern woman: quiet, demure, feminine, seen and rarely heard. Polite. Proper. Never raised my voice, never gave my parents a moment’s trouble. Shied away from unpleasantness. Strove to maintain that teeth-together-lips-apart ideal. And I wouldn’t have had the courage to risk a moment’s presumption. I will never forget this: One day during my teenage years my next-door neighbor’s mother, a sophisticated woman and family friend, took me aside. “Sela,” she told me, “you must never think that you’re beautiful. It’s just not an attractive trait. There’s always someone more attractive than you, and always someone less so.” And I was my mother’s daughter: I never doubted for a moment that she was right.

My Southern childhood was a happy time. And yet somehow, by the time I was through with high school, I had become overwhelmed by the urge to escape. Why was I so lonely? Why did I want to leave? Why was I afraid that if I didn’t get out of town, some essential part of me would die, and I would never get over it?

On reflection, of course, what finally drove me away from the South was the very same code of customs and manners I look back on today with such wistful admiration. For better and for worse, Southern manners were the defining influences of my life. They made me love the South and hate it, too, sent me away as surely as they now draw me back.

What I was feeling, it’s clear to me now, was a growing discomfort with the unforgiving rules of the old Southern social order. As a child I had lived within those rules as within a warm blanket, nurtured and protected by the sense of security they offered—but at a price. This culture of honor and chivalry, which defines Southern society and gives it so much of its decency and beauty, has a dark side, and that is shame.

Honor, after all, is something that can only be conferred by others. So if you’re raised in a society obsessed with personal honor, you’re likely to spend an awful lot of your life worrying about what others think of you. And more often than not you’ll be willing to contort yourself to no end in order to save face, or to keep others from losing face.

Even as a little girl, I had a distant awareness of the costs of such behavior. Mama, for example, always insisted that we step aside and allow others to pass ahead of us. It was the decent thing to do, she said, and of course in principle she was right. And yet I’ve since learned that it’s not always the best thing to let a pushy person get ahead of you in line—especially when you’re as naturally shy or self-effacing as I was. The line between demurring from a position of strength, and doing so out of fear of causing a scene isn’t always clear in such a rigid society.

You can imagine how crazy-making this can be. Southerners can be bizarrely averse to confrontation. Daddy and Mama once sustained a serious blow to their finances rather than force a showdown with a local advisor who left them exposed in a business deal. This isn’t a matter of weak character. It would have involved accusing the man of negligence—which is to say, of being dishonorable. That’s a cut that goes very deep down South, and it doesn’t heal easily, if at all. A man can be ruined forever if he loses his honor. My folks must have figured that so unpleasant a confrontation wouldn’t be worth the trouble—or perhaps that the kinder thing was to overlook the offense.

Southerners like my parents tend to embrace a fantasy image of perfection that will admit no flaw, weakness, or shortcoming. For them denial isn’t just a coping mechanism; it’s a way of life. When I was growing up, you’d hear ladies pronounce the name of serious diseases under their breath, as if whispering a word like “cancer” would somehow keep the affliction away. Things deemed unpleasant—menstruation and sexuality, but also grave matters such as unplanned pregnancy, wife-beating, or alcoholism—were spoken of only rarely. And if they were, the discussion was so smothered in euphemism and indirection that it made frank discussion next to impossible.

The silent suffering endured by so many Southerners, especially women, can only be guessed at. A friend of mine once told me about his ninety-four-year-old great-grandmother, who lived with her husband in a tiny Southern mill town during the Depression. She had to work as a telephone operator to help feed her family, which didn’t go unnoticed among the other respectable women in the town. “The uppity ladies looked down on me, but I didn’t let it get to me because I knew that they had nothing to be uppity about,” he remembers her saying. “They carried on like aristocrats, but the truth was, their doctor and lawyer husbands were running around on them whenever their backs were turned. They knew it, and everybody else did, too. ‘Course, you couldn’t say anything about it.”

No, you couldn’t, because to talk about financial hardship or sexual infidelity would be to admit that there was something wrong with you. And that’s not easy to do in the South. That old woman’s husband probably felt shame that his family was so desperate that his wife had to go to work. But he never would have spoken about it—he just wouldn’t have been able to.

What’s at the bottom of all this, I can’t help feeling, is fear—fear of vulnerability, of emotional need, of weakness of any kind. It calls to mind a memory that has stayed with me longer than I’d have expected: When we were children, Mama would drive us past the graveyard, and ask us, “Who’s buried in that cemetery?”

“Who?”
we’d say together, following the familiar ritual.

“Minnie!” Mama would say.

“Minnie
who
?”

“Minnie people!” she’d say, then cackle in a witch’s voice.

“Mama, stop!” we’d yell. “Mama,
stop!
” But she’d just keep on laughing.

I remember that story because, as funny as it seemed, passing those headstones always
did
scare me a little, and I think it did her, too. That joke of Mama’s was her version of whistling past the graveyard. She knew we were afraid of the unknown, of bad things happening, of what’s under the ground—in other words, of what’s not being said. She felt the need to protect us kids from the horror of death by making a macabre joke about it. Don’t spend too much time dwelling on mysteries; don’t upset the order of things.
Look away
from those unhappy thoughts.
Look away.

And the truth is, I spent much of my childhood looking away. I’ve come to see that as one of the roots of my childhood loneliness. Was I exceptionally sensitive as a child? I don’t know. I was an observant child, I know. But I spent so much time worrying about what was okay to say, what might be safe to ask—so much so that I only felt safe expressing myself in the branches of my grandmother’s mimosa tree, or later at the cemetery, where I sat and opened my heart to David, the brother I never knew.

When it came to being in public, all I knew was that it was my duty always to look on the bright side of things, to keep up with the convivial bonhomie of the tight-knit community around me. And as the oldest child, somehow I knew it was my role to teach my sister and brothers to do the same. This was the difficult underside of my mother’s insistence on decorum: From Daddy’s drinking to my own fear of loneliness, so many things went unspoken, for fear of betraying the family trust. I was fitted early for that stoic mantle, and it rested heavy on my shoulders.