|
|
|
Shelters
by Cesca Janece Waterfield In some traditional and conservative Southern homes, a man’s rank as the apex of the familial hierarchy assures him of his family’s immutable assent, but also requires that he provide their guardianship. In facilitation of this relationship, there are some unusual aids. Foremost in my memory is a silver corrugated shed. Growing up in Southern Alabama, my family spent more time at the home of my Godparents Jim and Emily Jones than we did at ours in the suburb of Daleville. Every weekend we pointed our Pontiac toward Abbeville and counted the hills until we saw their brick rambler. The soil so far south is actually clay, ranging from rust-colored to a deep crimson. The soil's unique hue dominates and sells folk art paintings to tourists who are charmed by its distinctive color and intrigued by how hospitable those fields are for crops. The Jones’ driveway was perpetually sticky with that clay in spite of the addition of crushed oyster shells. It resembled a red horseshoe that cupped the rambler snugly inside and it was surrounded by a working farm with cattle and plenty of kids. Before our car had stopped rolling, the Joneses were out the door and down the steps to greet us, each one pressing us into a hardy embrace. The men shook hands and updated one another on issues left hanging since last weekend; an ailing bull, a broken fence or an uncooperative transmission. Before Emily would loose me from her soft-armed clutch, she inquired about my behavior during the week. In the South, little girls are admonished to “be sweet.” It is salutation and send-off, and to me, it is a reminder to the girl to arrange her overall demeanor, responses, even her personality in relation and reaction to those around her. It is a recommendation for passivity. You may hear little boys urged to “be sweet” as well, but it is something rarely advised to males over age 10, while adult women still are reminded to manage “sweetness” without her “counsel” having any idea what world she enters each day. My mother and Emily could hardly be described as fast-fading violets or prone to harboring unspoken disagreeable opinions. Maybe this is why the women sometimes preferred the company of each other when opportunity arose to socialize without the men. Emily, my mother and we girls passed many visits on the sheltered patio outside even when the heat induced a sluggish torpor in us. We sat at a picnic table, going inside to check on a steaming pot of something plucked that morning from the garden and to fetch sweet iced tea. All things domestic - the house and kitchen and their duties - were the responsibilities of Emily and the girls. Here they cooked, raised children, entertained visitors, sewed, studied, played piano, and celebrated holidays and birthdays. Although Jim and the boys hung prize bass and bucks on the paneled walls and were only occasionally shooed from the house, the women produced and were products of its neat order. A good Baptist home, propriety and decorum was its dual-code. The agonizing excitement of a televised wrestling match could result in the loss of one’s mind long enough to elicit impassioned shouts and stomps, but such behavior, if prolonged, invited rebuke from Mama. Neither the absence of real meanness in her tone nor the lilt of her drawl softened the nettles when you knew you were wrong. The counterpart of a woman’s being “sweet” is the man’s duty to shelter her from things uncourtly while nurturing his own propensity for being such. Therefore, it was Jim’s wish to separate any coarseness from the girls and women in his orbit. One day while my family visited, Jim turned off the highway, his gargantuan red Chevy loaded with sheets of steel and lumber. Pulling his large frame from behind the wheel and into the humidity, he rearranged the wad of Redman in his cheek and announced to his oldest, ”Jimbo, we got some work to do.” Sons, cousins, my father, and a neighbor or two hammered and measured, spit and winked, pausing only long enough to take cold drinks ferried to them by the kids too young to labor. We all knew the shed was for doing things unthinkable in the house - sipping whiskey, telling lies, playing cards, recounting and laughing at dirty jokes right out loud - and I think something more than logistics or chance convinced Jim to build it across the driveway from the house. Though it stood a foot or so above ground directly behind and to the left of the sheltered porch under which we spent so much time, some innate logic dictated that reaching the shed’s heavy door should require a symbolic crossing. It was a mushy, easily trod driveway, but it was meaningful, just the same. In the winter, the men shucked Apalachicola oysters here, and in other seasons, they fried enormous catfish feasts in a gas-powered deep fryer that we still use and call, “the Alabama cooker.” Real windowpanes gave the shed some hominess and provided sunlight and a view of the stable and backfields. An industrial fan pushed around hot air in summer and a wood stove kept it warm in winter. The floor was pine except below the stove, though watchfulness and Jim’s constant warnings to his boys meant that risk of fire never became more than what drove their vigilance. The shed was lined on one side with a workbench built into the wall. Formidable looking tools hung everywhere though the larger farm implements were stored in a barn connected to the hen house. A white formica and aluminum table sat in the center since even in a space meant for working, conversation and company were essential. Not all activities inside the shed’s walls, however, were suitable for those back at the house. A sudden interloper would occasionally arouse the flash-quick yet unruffled reflex of hiding a bottle or a magazine, and crudeness was recognized as a forgivable, even acceptable form of expression. I had not yet visited childhood friends and been part of the tiptoe contingent inquiring into a father’s secret stock of scandalous and exciting Playboy magazines. In my house, that would have been unthinkable. My father is known to blush easily, for being gentle, and back then, somewhat shy. I entered the shed once to see Bill, the youngest Jones son, toss a Playboy magazine onto my father’s lap. My father’s embarrassed grin gave way to a timid page-turning exploration to everyone’s laughter, which brought forth my own, though I was too young to understand the humor. Nevertheless, I promptly reported back to the women who initially found the picture of my father unexpectedly confronted with such images amusing. After a good laugh, modesty led Emily to cluck her Baptist tongue reproachfully. I felt privilege that I could be a small observer of both worlds. Despite its status as a veritable secret society, the shed’s existence was Jim’s kind of homage to the house, neither an escape from it nor a malicious attempt to exclude us. It served as a shield to the girls he loved, and in this feast for the unrefined, he raised his sons to treat us as anything but. Looking back I can see that the perceived need to protect women from the common is a shelter of its own for some men, a substantiation of their strength and importance. The image of the steel magnolia, the strong and wise Southern woman, is cliché yet to some extent, it is often true. I doubt anything in the men’s language, entertainment, or corruption was unknown to the adult women who sat beneath the patio. Yet something within each of them recognized the male need to safeguard her “sweetness,” and to the extent she had absorbed a life of lessons in being “sweet,” she humored him. There is real autonomy and freedom in being mercurial, in possessing a Janus-like ability to project reliance while sustaining resoluteness and quiet vigor. A woman who openly admitted or revealed her force alienated herself among men who took shelter in her dependency on them, and a wise woman recognized that to achieve her own goals, both traditional and pioneering, she needed men, especially in that society and at that time. To circumvent a restrictive environment, women nurtured feminine qualities while developing an unobtrusive strength. The women showed their strength and resolve most evidently among each other. There was no reason among women to mince words, to smile when she didn’t feel like smiling, or to pale the intensity of her intentions. I am glad I was there to look up at their expressive eyes and faces while the moths dithered around the patio light. I am grateful to have been the young listener off whom their sharp wit ricocheted. Most of the time both families were together; women, men, and the children. Yet when the women had passed a day together, they sometimes joked about what was taking place among the men. This discussion usually came as the temperature dropped with the sun. Sometimes in an attempt to unravel their secrets, we sat stone-still, barely stifling our titters, eyes fixed on the orange axle of light beneath the door, and listened to the low roll of male voices inside. More than once while we strained to discern a few syllables, that hum would suddenly erupt into laughter. The surprise was infectious and jolted free our own delighted laughter. The end of this elevated moment usually indicated time for bed and I would tiptoe into the shed to be hoisted up into Jim’s lap for a few minutes until we all went inside. Since leaving Alabama for Virginia, and later, urban universities, I have benefited from the objectivity that time’s passage can bring and an education that has left me critical of some of the things I lived and witnessed. The shelters I take as an adult are different, but my limitations are fewer than those that Emily and my mother woke to after warm nights like those in which I saw only promise. I'm thankful for the years I had perched between the radiance of Jim’s smiling, bearded face and a shadow I hadn’t named yet. I’m thankful for the house, the families, and the women inside the red horseshoe before I had to grow up and name it.
|
|