Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
Sherman’s brother; a plea from him was enough to prevent Sherman from toasting the town). I learned this from a brochure with a cover photo of a handsome young couple got up to look like a Southern belle and a Confederate officer. Another version lay beside it, printed in Japanese.
‘How about storytellers?’ I asked on a whim. ‘Anyone in town with a reputation as a good talker?’
‘Am I talking too much?’ Colonel Dan McHenry Hicky (‘Laddie’ for short) asked his wife, Hattie. We both assured him he wasn’t. ‘Well, then,’ he continued, taking my arm in a courtly way, ‘let me show you this mantlepiece in the dining-room. See? It doesn’t quite fit. That’s because this is the mantle from the old slaves’ quarters. We had to sell the original during the Depression.’
Both Hickys were far too polite and attentive to be bores, but they lived in a house that prattled on with a vengeance. ‘Rosehill’, as it had once been called, was the only home in Madison to have remained in the same family since before the Civil War (Dan was the sixth-generation owner). Every room, every rug, every piece of furniture told a story, and like the parents of an accomplished but mute child, they spoke enthusiastically on its behalf, translating the sign language of beams and boards into three continuous hours of patrician-toned English. I had been referred to Hattie by the Chamber of Commerce –’ She does costume tours of town; she’s a great one for stories!’ – and given directions to their house. Typically, I missed the street and pulled into a driveway to turn around.
‘Are you the lady who wants to hear stories?’ an elderly man asked, emerging from the garage. He generated kindness and mild curiosity. I said Yes, but that I was at the wrong house.
‘Oh, this is one of our houses,’ he replied. ‘Come on in.’
The Hickys were both in their eighties. He was nearly blind from glaucoma, with thick glasses and an endearingly unhip notepad and pen in his shirt pocket. She was small and slender, self-conscious in her not-for-visitors trousers, with hair the color of champagne touched by a drop of cassis. Both had inherited homes in Madison, bringing their total in this historic town of white-columned gems to three. Of these, Rosehill was the showplace. The easy graciousness of those whose lives had been devoted to the appreciation of beauty, rather than the necessity of work, still clung to it – like an invitation to a ball.
Iris Murdoch said that beauty ‘unselfs’ us. ‘The sight of a bird, or a bank of sweet peas, or a lovely cloud formation,’ she wrote, ‘breaks us out of our narrow egos.’ She believed that anything that promotes ‘unselfing’ is conducive to goodness, and that the best example is beauty. I bring this up because while some people are swept away by sweet peas and others by ankles and calves or particular shades of table linen, I am seduced by architecture. Beautiful houses encourage imitation. The harmony of design that makes them calm makes me want to be calm; their lack of rough edges makes me want to shed whatever ill emotion is pricking my skin like a stubble of thorns. Their sure lines guide my eye on a seamless journey up pilasters and over eaves, into corners, down staircases, through spaces dark and secret, light and open. Murdoch said this is the accomplishment of beauty, to lure the eye off the self. Stories do the same thing, and equally well; they, too, draw me out of the easychair of the ego and into motion along a route of words – calisthenics for the soul. Storytelling houses are the ultimate exercise.
‘We have a ghost livin’ next door,’ said Hattie, giving ‘door’ a well-bred Southern ‘ah’ at the end, rather than the West Country ‘r’ most Americans chew on at the ends of their words. ‘McCooter is her name. She was murdered on the property. And she likes to drink. If you have a party and don’t leave a drink out for McCooter, she’ll knock the slats out of your bed … Sure enough, a new family moved in and didn’t know the story, had a housewarming party. That night, didn’t the slats fall right out of their bed!’
We left the front porch and its Egyptian Revival doorway – the Valley of Kings transposed into white clapboard – and entered a world decorated by the dead. ‘As a little boy I couldn’t wait to get new furniture,’ said Dan. I had no sympathy. The front parlor was cavernous, swallowing up a crystal chandelier, several pieces of immense Empire furniture, a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror, and a rare nineteenth-century piano. The carpet dated to the 1840s, purchased by an ancestor of Dan’s from a travelling peddler with a sewing machine.
‘That’s my grandfather, John McHenry,’ said Dan, pointing at a pastel portrait of three children from 1859.
‘It was made while the family was taking the Grand Tour,’ interrupted Hattie. She got up to show me John McHenry’s ancient passport. ‘See, it goes into great detail. Forehead: Full. Eyes: Light. Nose: Aquiline. Chin: Oval. Complexion: Dark. And then it says here, “Accompanied by Wife.”’ She made a face.
‘See, in the picture,’ Dan pointed but didn’t look, ‘he’s wearing the uniform of the Georgia Military Institute. His whole class enlisted in the Confederate Army on March 20, 1864, when John was fifteen years old. He was put on sentry duty: his first post. It was dark, and he heard a rustling in the bushes. He hollered “Halt!” but there was no answer. So he hollered again, but the noise just got louder. So he fired his musket at the noise, and he heard something drop. It was a pig. His only casualty in the Big War.’
‘Now, see this picture,’ Hattie showed me a hand-tinted photograph. ‘This is Laddie at seven, with his head on that little boy’s lap. Only the little boy was an old man by then. It was taken in the nursery upstairs.’
We moved into the entrance hall. It had been added in 1848 to what was once the outside of the house, in effect becoming the central hallway when another wing was built on the other side. One half of the house has closets, the other doesn’t.
‘During the Big War,’ began Hattie, ‘the town was occupied by Northern troops. One elderly man from Madison – Mistah Smith – was escorting two ladies downtown when they were accosted by a drunken Yankee. While trying to protect the ladies’ honor, Mr. Smith was shot and mortally wounded. He was brought here to die. See, he passed away right there, on the third step.’ She patted a stair-tread and I instinctively spun the melodrama in my mind’s eye, giving it lots of blood and weeping.
‘Another Yankee rode his horse up and down the hallway,’ tisked Dan. ‘Ruined the black and white checkerboard floor.’
The depth and continuity of their knowledge stunned me. Generation upon generation, harboring the same memories in the same house, of a war fought on their doorstep, carried, even, into their front hallway: it was completely alien to my experience of the United States. Half my ancestors were peasants who would have been smarting under the thumb of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while the American Civil War was in full swing, and the other half, though probably in the States, are shadowy figures who lived out their lives in unknown locations. The intimacy of the Hickys’ relationship with the past – both the personal and the national past, intertwined into a breathtakingly accessible history – fascinated but gave me goose bumps at the same time. My reaction to their stories reminded me of staring dispassionately into a gaping hole in my leg after an accident, and thinking, how interesting, it looks like the pith of a carrot, even while alarmed that it was my own bone and flesh I was seeing. No wonder so many pilgrims to the South return with reports that the War Between the States, as Southerners call it, or better yet, The War for Southern Independence, lingers so vividly in the contemporary mind. In Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horowitz quoted an Oklahoma man working in North Carolina, as saying ‘In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago. Folks here don’t see it that way. They think it’s still half-time.’
We moved into another parlor where there was framed Confederate money on the wall, a tiny set of scales used to measure ore during the California Gold Rush, a silhouette of someone who had danced at General Lafayette’s ball, and a photograph of another ancestor who went down with the Titanic. Showing me an elegant little powder keg, Hattie, eyes glinting with wicked pleasure, said, ‘If our little mother-in-law [Zoe] were here, she’d say, “Dahlin’, I do apologize, but this is what we kept the gunpowder in when we were shootin’ at you.”’
The wonders continued.