Cousin Martha Clarke & other Recollections of Small Town South

[The following story is quite long. If you would like to print it out to read, click here for the Google Docs file.]

Only recently I discovered that my cousin Sallie McConnell lives in Mendocino, and my husband and I made a trip to take her three family pictures that I discovered when closing my mother’s house in the small North Carolina town where her mother Martha Clarke and I grew up. [Martha Clarke is Sallie McConnell’s mother.] Before turning them over to Sallie, I looked long and hard at these family pictures—one of Martha Clarke as a baby with her beautiful, glamorous mother, Viola, another as a young girl of four or five with perfect curls, a swath of tulle draped just below her bare shoulders and her eyes turned demurely to an open book, “The Age of Innocence” personified. The third picture showed Frank, Jr., Martha’s older brother and only sibling, in a white sailor suit, looking for all the world like the scion of a wealthy, important family. He died tragically from an automobile accident in his twenties, and Sallie told me she had never seen her uncle’s picture. How strange, I thought. He was the darling of the family. Frank, Jr., he was called, as if Junior were a second name. Frank, Sr., was always Big Frank.

I asked Sallie to bring her mother to see me when she next came from Florida to visit, and not long afterwards she called to say that they would come for an afternoon after Martha Clarke arrived at the San Francisco airport. I was really looking forward to getting together. Our families had been very close for three generations. When my parents married, Viola stood up with my mother Emily. I felt remiss that I had neither spoken with nor seen Martha Clarke for over forty years, but she had stopped sending Christmas cards or replying to mine.

When in our telephone conversation I told Martha Clarke that I would give the three photographs to Sallie, she said, “I destroyed all my pictures of Frank, Jr. There’s no one left who knows who he was.”

Perhaps she felt that these images were false and bespoke an outdated era when studio photographers, copying Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, romanticized mothers and children. In family parlors reproductions of “Baby Stuart” and “Blue Boy” were taken from their elaborate plaster frames and replaced by photographs of real children depicted in post-Victorian gentility and splendor.

It was not only the South that sought these transformations. My husband grew up on a farm in the Mid-west and his family photos give no hint of the harsh life of farming. His mother and the three boys look as if they never trudged through mud to do chores or indeed ever changed out of embroidered batiste waists and black sateen pants.

Much as I wanted to see her again, I was a bit apprehensive about this meeting with Cousin Martha Clarke. Born in 1915 just in time for the fun and games of the roaring twenties, she was always out of my orbit—more glamorous, more adventurous, and more modern than I could ever hope to be. By the time I was born in 1925, the gloom and doom of the depression were just around the corner.

My first memory of being in the Bennett family house and of Martha Clarke and Frank, Jr., has me hiding under a kitchen table while they chase wildly all over the house shooting at one another with a siphon bottle of seltzer water. Having no idea what the real function of the weapon was (my family did not imbibe alcohol), I don’t remember how long I was trapped under the kitchen table; but terrorized as I was, I recognized unmistakably that they were having fun.

In the Southern tradition Martha was always called by both her first and middle names, Clarke being her mother’s maiden name. If she had been a boy, she very likely would have had Clarke for a first name. This practice of honoring the mother’s family name was sometimes carried to extremes in our county. One of my brother’s friends was given the name Battle, which added to the family name of Wall, inevitably invoked Stonewall. A family with the name of Flowers named their son Wax. Pride of the family, no matter how odd its expression, was endemic to the region.

For Cousin Martha Clarke, it seemed to me, life was opulent and exciting. Our families were back and forth in one another’s houses; no more than three blocks separated us; but fatherless from the time I turned two, my family’s style was conservative out of economic necessity. We lived with our widowed grandfather, who feared fire, impropriety, and automobiles. He refused to ride in one. The Bennett family, by contrast, had a huge touring car and employed a chauffeur, Nathan, like all local chauffeurs, black. He also helped Viola with her flowers. She loved flowers and was very artistic. Big Frank had a large greenhouse built for her and paid the expenses for the exquisite arrangements she made for weddings and parties. When we visited Sallie in Mendocino, she proudly showed me Viola’s basket for carrying cut flowers.

Martha Clarke attended the local high school and was popular with her crowd. When she graduated, she enrolled at The Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, ninety miles from our hometown. At this state-supported secular school, college life was less socially restrictive than at the numerous small church schools for women scattered throughout the state. Big Frank had been a star football player at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where women students were not admitted until the Junior year.

When my turn came, I also attended The Woman’s College; but our experiences were quite dissimilar. World War II was in full swing during my college years and the lack of escorts sharply reduced the social life of the campus. Most of us spent Saturday nights in the college auditorium attending the free movies and sing-a-longs.

In addition there was a big difference in our upbringing, which, I believe, relates chiefly to the War Between the States. Martha Clarke grew up knowing how bitter her Grandfather, Captain Frank Bennett, became after he lost his arm to a Yankee sniper when he was walking home barefoot after the war had ended. Not yet married to Elizabeth Curry, he was only nineteen. They met when he visited his sister Eliza Bennett Townsend, who had married a Georgia man, and engaged Elizabeth Curry to serve as governess for their children. As her obituary recounts, “the friendship begun there, ripened into love, their marriage being consumated [sic] in June, 1876.” This link brought her niece, my grandmother Virginia Curry, to Anson County to teach soon after her graduation from Shorter College in 1885, where she received a gold medal for Deportment.

Farming was Capt. Frank’s vocation; and despite his handicap, he made a success of it. Nonetheless, he remained unreconstructed. Many years later when he had grown a long, white beard, he was formally photographed in full regalia, his empty sleeve pinned dramatically to his uniform. By this time the local lore attributed the empty sleeve to “unusual bravery in the Confederate army.”

Martha Clarke was forbidden by Big Frank to memorize the Gettysburg Address when it was assigned to her high school class. My grandfather, by contrast, was too young to go to this war and never spoke of it so far as I can remember. The proprietor of a dry goods store, he concentrated on business and county affairs, being for many years a county commissioner. His ire was taken out in his hatred of chain stores and the damage they did to local merchants like himself. It was after his death that I learned his mother was a Quaker and that her family moved from North Carolina because they did not believe in slavery.

About the War Between the States, my generation was given little official history. There was a deep silence from church and school, which the United Daughters of the Confederacy did their best to remedy. Young children were virtually shanghaied into an adult-managed organization called Children of the Confederacy. These were, however, doomed, one-of-a-kind organizations, not fueled by the spirit of competition which contributed so much to the vitality of the two chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution—the Thomas Wade Chapter and the Craighead Dunlap Chapter. There was even a third chapter at one time, but a merger apparently strengthened both chapters. In a town of approximately three thousand, the D.A.R.’s were a driving force for good citizenship as they saw it. Frequent assembly programs concocted by these energetic ladies concerning proper display of the flag were a staple of our schooling along with annual tableaus of Betsy Ross in a powdered wig designing our first flag with her womanly needle.

In a contest with the D.A.R. the U.D.C.’s championship of a lost cause was no contest. There were no rules for displaying the Confederate flag. The county was settled before the Revolution and prided itself on that early success. It was usual for young people to marry within the county circle, thus making high romance of Capt. Frank and Aunt Lizzie. Even after World War II, when two young men brought home wives they met while training in Oklahoma, they were then and still are referred to as War Brides.

Martha Clarke and I grew up sharing this small town educational and societal background. As I waited for her to arrive I thought we should have a lot in common and a lot to talk about—forty years’ worth.

The incident connected to Martha Clarke that I remembered most strongly and with considerable pleasure took place when I was nine or ten. At the end of her second college year, a trailer was required to transport her belongings home for the summer; and Nathan was dispatched to pick her up. Ordinarily Viola would have accompanied the chauffeur, but Big Frank was gravely ill and she could not get away. As a familial substitute my mother Emily was enlisted, and I was taken along because there was no one to leave me with at home and perhaps as a kind of chaperone to my mother. Also a convenient Southern custom of that time allowed a black person to go into any “white-only” establishment if serving in the capacity of nurse to a white child. It was not unusual to see a white-starched uniformed black woman sitting in the “white” section of a movie house, her presence legitimated by a small child in her charge. Noone [sic] ever claimed that the laws of “segregation” were stricter than the laws of expediency.

Since my family seldom had the opportunity to ride in a car, it is also possible that my mother thought of the expedition to bring Martha Clarke home from college as a grand treat for both of us. We would be traveling in style through the country for several hours to the big city of Greensboro, where the Jefferson Standard Building (an insurance company) rose at least twelve stories into the sky. It was possible to ride an elevator to the top floor and look down at the bustling city from a balcony. Since air travel was not yet available, looking down at the world was a strange and unusual experience, something like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

We left early in the morning for our adventure, and it was my understanding that the trip there and back was what we had to look forward to. No one promised anything more.

Martha Clarke, my mother expected, would be packed and waiting for Nathan to load up her trunks and hatboxes, and we would turn straight around and head home. Martha Clarke had other ideas. She was packed, but she had an afternoon date with her current beau and was determined to keep it. She knew that my mother was an incurable romantic.

“There’s the most marvelous movie on downtown, Emily,” she said. “It’s a musical. You’ll love it.”

Martha Clarke knew that my mother loved music, particularly operettas.

“What about Nathan?” my mother asked. “What will he do?”

“There’s a nice balcony for colored.” She had thought of everything.

Did she know that I loved movies? Did she know that “Naughty Marietta” with its daring tale of masquerade and escape would stick with me for the rest of my life? Was there ever another movie like it for total fantasy? Was there any voice more vibrant than Jeanette McDonald as the young aristocratic Frenchwoman who escapes an unwanted marriage by taking her maid’s place on a sailing ship to the new world? Was there ever a heroine as clever as Marietta for outwitting all efforts to make her the bride of some uncouth man of the frontier? And Nelson Eddy? Was there ever a more melodious stout-hearted man among stout-hearted men?

Yes, my mother loved it. And yes, I loved it. Martha knew her cousins. What did Nathan think? Which character would he have identified with? He is sure to have said he liked it. The movie house was at least ten times larger and grander than the dinky theater in our hometown. It also had a balcony for “colored” with a separate entrance and box office. Possibly they were better seats than the downstairs for whites. The total lack of air conditioning was not segregated; and when the lights were off, we were all one color.

I was eager to ask Martha what she remembered about that magical afternoon. I didn’t want to dive right in as if it were the only reason I invited her to our reunion. I thought I would wait for a chance when the conversation naturally turned towards that period of her life. Understandably, we talked of many people we knew in common, laughing about hometown eccentrics, the women who ruled the U.D.C. and the D.A.R., looked at old pictures, and in the southern way worked at reestablishing some common ground for our kinship. Not strange to say, she arrived with her own favorite stories and recollections. About “Naughty Marietta” I never got a word in edgewise.

“I used to carry you around when you were a baby,” she said, putting me immediately at a disadvantage.

“You wrote poetry when you were in college,” she said with a loud laugh. “‘I can’t understand it,’ your Aunt Beth said. ‘What does it mean?’”

I remembered well Aunt Beth’s peals of laughter. “That’s more poetry than truth,” was a common putdown in my adolescence and one that brought my blood to the boiling point and set me declaring with sputtering intensity that “poetry is truth.” More peals of laughter.

My efforts to educate my relatives met with little success. Forty years’ later, I could see that my literary interests and ambitions were always and continued to be regarded as good for a laugh, something they expected I would “grow out of.”

Ironically, it was Martha Clarke and her insistence on keeping her afternoon date that enabled me to experience “Naughty Marietta,” my inspiration when as a young adult, disguised as an ordinary person, I climbed onto the Greyhound bus that transported me and my two suitcases to the new world.

[Undated personal story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

The Nativity Scene

[This short essay was originally accompanied by a photograph, lost somewhere in Virginia's many the boxes of ephemera, perhaps years ago when she moved from her Palo Alto house to a old folks' home in the area.]

When the Huntley-McKinnon family home in Wadesboro, NC, was dismantled, one of the treasures discovered in the Plunder Room was this Nativity Scene. Emily Toy Huntley McKinnon probably assembled the group during the thirties, for the principal figures were molded in Germany and the price for sheep, pencilled on the underside, was 2 for 5 cents. It was a mobile scene, like the early Mystery Plays, travelling from 3 Brent Street to the second grade of Wadesboro Elementary School and the Wade Mill School, both long gone, and to the Primary Department of the First Baptist Church. This depiction of the Holy Babe with Mary and Joseph, the wondering shepherds, and the wandering Wise Men carries a provenance of many small hands touching and holding.

Perhaps it was the interest of children in one of the players--the donkey--that accounts for his absence when the other pieces were found carefully wrapped and packed away. His spindly legs, tiny body, and greyish coat that actually felt fuzzy, must have seemed irresistible to children and at some point he became too crippled to stand. Our cousins Connie & Bill McKinnon found the new donkey, who instantly slipped into his role and is now resting after the journey. Soon he will carry Mother and Babe on the Flight into Egypt.

When Virginia and Andrew Mann were working on the photograph, there seemed a certain mystery involved in the placement of the figures. At some angles the Wise Men were deep in conversation; at others their attention was drawn to the Baby Jesus. The position of the Angels was especially difficult. It seemed to us that the Angels should hover, but these particular ones remained earthbound, the smallest one insisting on center stage and apparently moving slightly when the shutter clicked.

When the figures are reassembled each year they renew their relationships to one another and to our childhood memories of celebrating Christmas. We hope that this card is one that Emily would have enjoyed sending. It is sent to wish you a happy Christmas, 1987.

[Paragraph breaks added for the sake of readability.]

The Ribbon Clerk

[The following notes appear to be planning for a story, which Virginia may or may not have eventually written.]

Rogers family 8 - also tourist home

Very few people came to live in _____ voluntarily. It was mostly the circumstance of being born there and having no choice. When the _____family set-up housekeeping in the old Coppedge house, nobody imagined they would have the impact they eventually did. They were like having the circus or the carnival stay all year instead [of] one single week. Excitement

As if visual were vulgar. Remember how some people used to say they didn't care for television. They preferred to read or listen to good music on radios or records.

The Ribbon Clerk

mix that up with
the Rogers family
the daring teacher
how poverty was a convenient excuse for rejecting vulgarity

[Undated notes by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Mother & Daughter

Mother, you try to die
And I am trying to help you:
This morning I defrosted the big freezer
And scrubbed the bottom of the refrigerator.
Last week I wrote your obituary
And made two copies for your sons' approval.
I called your sister-in-law and
We agreed that your time had come.
Oh, sad, to say.
I washed your favorite dress by hand.
How you hated the unkind automation of great machines to your favorite clothes.
I selected a pair of earrings for you to wear to hear the angels sing
And a freshly polished pair of white shoes
Because it is the proper season.
But mostly I tried in a way you would know to help you leave us and go.
I polished the silver.
Although you will leave from another house;
The table will be set for you in another house.

[Undated, handwritten poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. I had to omit a few words that were entirely illegible, but they were only adjectives anyway. This poem conveys the great tenderness Virginia felt for her mother, who obituary you can read here: "Emily Toy Huntley McKinnon".]

Eve

I have dreamed of being naked
So often I cannot be sure
It has not happened and
Breaking out in a cold sweat
I check to see if I remembered
To dress before leaving the house.
Perhaps I stood at the telephone
Receiving such startling news
That the thought of clothes on
A body still dripping from the shower
Left me as one bereft, losing
All habits and reasonable behavior.

Those dreams I have of nakedness
Terrify and wake me up
To discover that I am
Totally covered with more than ample cloth.
Though these dreams often put me in public places
No one has ever called the police
Or offered to wrap my nakedness in a blanket.
Does some demon inside me want
To go undressed because I can't
Forget my mother saying
How ugly the human body is.
And yet I know she did not really believe such nonsense
For she clothed herself
In splendid materials and much jewelry
And her hats were covered with flowers.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Another handwritten first draft.]

Shellshock

The brothers, both veterans of World War I, built small houses side
by side, very near their mother's
Their businesses did very well and
The older brother made a path
Strung with lights to walk each night to visit her.
Slightly uphill though later
Graded for a tennis court
Because of the
War he needed the lights, being shellshock,
That mysterious condition which
Explained the somewhat strange
Behavior of certain veterans or their wives
His wife, for instance, was passionate about flowers
The younger brother's wife was not
And he built a big handsome house
Some distance from their mother's
And soon his small house was moved
To another lot they owned of the older brother to
Leaving much land for the wife growing flowers and flowering shrubs
Azaleas rhododendrons & crepe myrtle
The beautiful landscape was
Pointed out to all visitors but
The children of both brothers were sent off to school
And the tennis court grew up in weeds.

The brother who suffered shellshock
Died and later the wife who loved flowers died
And all of the children of both brothers divorced:
So what do we know about doing well in business, shellshock
And the failure of flowers?

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. This was clearly a first draft, handwritten on a piece of yellow notebook paper. Thus there is some grammatical confusion and the lines lack Virginia's usual meticulousness.]

That Was Georgetown in 1950

[December 30th, 1990: Virginia had a letter to the editor published in response to "Is There a Klepto in the Stacks?" The original article is archived on The New York Times website. Virginia's letter was composed as follows...]

To the Editor:

In 1950, when I lived in Washington and possessed a Georgetown public library card, my eyes were opened to the imagination and strategies of those who shelve books in libraries.

My first surprise was in finding Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa" in the "Adventure" section, and my second in finding Havelock Ellis's "Studies in the Psychology of Sex" not on the shelves at all. When I made an inquiry, the librarian motioned me to follow her into the closed stacks. There on a secluded shelf for the most-often-stolen books was Havelock Ellis cheek by jowl with "Robert's Rules of Order."

Oh, well, that was Georgetown in 1950.

Virginia Mann
Stanford, Calif.

The Immigrant's Love of Snow

Because it came at night with no intent or purpose,
Like unsolicited dreams of loving women,
Snow was more powerful and precious than rain,
More powerful and precious than pain.

It lay like a beautiful language awakened
Translating his foreignness into beauty,
Refining odd dreams into duty.

Always he moved quickly to believe possibilities,
Kissing the stranger who held him so bravely,
Was it the beauty of snow or the coldness alone he craved?

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann, dated November, 1994.]

Dying in California 2

[The following is an alternate version of the previously posted poem "Dying in California".]

The blossoms begin in February:
Almond turns white as brides,
And Quince blots red against the wood,
Violets mock the cold earth
While hyacinth cannot hold back.

You rest uneasy on your bed:
I think how we trudged across
The lower garden patch,
Past the pear trees and wild
Persimmon's despised fruit,
Entering the woods noisily
And laughing at the snake's escape.

Lifting up the carpet of needles
We dig deep in the woods' floor
Filling pail after pail of sweet decay
To feed your treasured flowerbeds,
Your Mr. Lincoln, dear Helen Traubel,
Queen Elizabeth, Razzle-Dazzle and Peace,
The children of your retirement years.

Those happy times of planting
Bring you back to life but what I can't
Forget is how you felt to wake one day
To find your brother's footsteps in new
Snow and how you always wished you'd
Cooked his breakfast or waked
At least in time to say goodbye.

Now you would shout for quiet
If only you could speak again
In this wild western place
This noisy room where you will leave
The deaf, the blind, those without mind,
A roommate who chooses to speak Portuguese.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Grandfather's Woods

To go to the woods
Follow the path through the gardens,
Starting at the woodpile past the splitting block,
Walk through the tall grass growing by the chicken yard fence,
Then pause for a moment to look yonder at the next town,
Nine miles away, its white schoolhouse like a chalk mark,
Against the sky's edge we later learned to call horizon;
It looks so close, but we have no way to get there,
No automobile, no horse and buggy, we imagine
The ones who live there can see our house
On our ridge as we can see the one building large enough
To hold the entire village of Walls and Liles so agreeable
To call their little town Lilesville, County of Anson,
We scarcely know those people nine miles away
For we are the county seat and all official business
Must take place in our Courthouse, convened by our big bell,
Not to mention our several churches and funeral parlors,
They however, have their own cemetery, every soul written up
In Ripley's "Believe It or Not" sheltered by a single oak tree

To go to the woods
Take a look at the spot where the boys would pitch a tent
For sleeping out and play strip poker until the unlucky one
Must dance about in dark with flashlights played their tricks
Blinding the squirming boy who's never heard of Michelangelo
Don't stop to smell the American Beauty Rose that grows
Against the chicken yard fence, but keep going down the slope
Where butter beans and squash are bearing profusely as okra,
And the pear trees drop their fruit to mush and marmalade
Then cross the lower field behind the long-gone barn where
The family milk cow grazed on rabbit tobacco and native grass,
Kicking up arrowheads from Pee Dee indian camps
But before we reach the grapevine swing
We stop where four trees grow like corners of a house
Readymade to build a fort

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Aerodynamics

The turtle has no wings to flap
Or dulcet voice to sing and rap
And yet if one were meant to race
This paradox would set the pace.

We cannot hide our hands and feet
Nor draw our heads in half so neat.

The ways of Nature contemplate
And thus our shells we simulate,
Direct the flow of air with care,
While turtles plod with time to spare.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Activity

[This is a different version of the previously posted poem "Activity Time", simply titled "Activity".]

Returning from the travelogue,
Weekly escape when Death is slow,
Does the professor's wife remember
Florence where she was a bride
And raw with love and love of art
Or is it all fresh to her and the
Professor she can no longer recall?

At music hour three times a week
Does the old pianist playing by rote
Hear Mozart plain or does he prefer
Muzak so low he hardly hears a note.

Your fight against this strange place
Where February feels like spring
Is almost over now.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Goodbyes

Words said to end the conversation
Seem to pass the time,
They sever head from heart
While tying time in knots
So wet and tight no one can ever
Loosen what little time remains

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Maternity Leave

The mail person is giving birth:
She who knows our family names
And notes the numbers on our box
Is not who mixes up our mail.

The neighbor's stuff in mine and
Mine in theirs or none at all
Makes all things possible when
Thus no sacred rules apply.

Will some letter arrive today
Or tomorrow telling me of your
Afterlife, the satisfactions you
Feel in having dinner with friends.

String beans, mashed potatoes,
Pickled peaches, chow-chow, jello
Salad, parker-house rolls, and
Roast chicken, caramel cake and
Homemade boiled custard ice cream.

Could I have, dear Lord,
Just one more letter
Telling how it is at Heaven's table,
The pleasures of good appetite.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. This one is particularly relevant as Thanksgiving draws near.]

Advice

Poems are like fossils
Dug up by the mind,
Simple as ferns gigantic
And gentle as dinosaur kind.

Take care then with fossils
Unplowed from the ground
For words never die
When once they are found.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. After reading the phrase "dinosaur kind", I couldn't help but think of this poem in terms of Jurassic Park... Photo below by Choo Yut Shing.]

Burial

Out of his fear of fish and fin
Man builds a box to set him in
Another box of strongest steel
Against the moisture of the field.

But we who die while not on land
Are buried by a quieter plan,
For quicker is the soul set free
By fish than ever is the sea.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Wrong Turn

Rain fell on the romantic, historic site
And brought inside the bride and groom
But did not dampen guests or toasts
Until after the last of many cheers
We took a wrong turn on the winding lane
Or didn't take the turn we meant to take
And drove deeply into black country night
Further and further from the city's light
Before consensus from our bubbly brains
Decreed we stop the car and think.

Darkness was like a dream or waking
With insomnia when the power has failed
Or a meaning we could not escape for
Love of Freud no wrong turns or right
Turns without meaning and we had,
The whole car full, chosen gloom.

Not one decisive thought could bring us
Near to light until a dog barked his right
To bark decisively and fear brought memory
Back to trace our path like Mission padres,
Wondering how we could have lost our heads,
To the Mission town and threw our muddled
Selves upon the imitation Mission beds
To dream our imitation Mission dreams.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. The grammatical looseness of these verses, particularly in the second stanza, is very unusual for Virginia's writing.]

Morning at Stanford

Jordan, first President of Stanford and an ichthyologist, once said that everytime he learned the name of a student he forgot the name of a fish.

Morning at Stanford

For follows me;
It waits, like memory:
Father holding the boat steady
For me to climb in,
Stepping ladylike between the
Rods and bait.

He sits with paddle high
Over Ledbetter Lake
Smothered by fog,
As I untie the knot
That sets us free from pier
And Mother, sleeping yet, intent.

Knowing the paths of righteousness,
You glide through water
Over the tree stumps
Where the fish lie deep:
You cast;
The fish strikes.
"There is no better way
To catch a trout,"
I hear you say,
Chuckling softly, skillfully.

Now, at Stanford, I remember that
Early morning lesson,
For the fog chokes the Inner Quad
And hides our mother Jane,
Her chosen message to the Western World.

Here by Olmstead's landscape plan
I wait to see the great tree flame again
And the sweet cacti bloom in this dry air,
Waiting as Jane did for some sign of
Fruitfulness.

At 9 a.m. the clock will chime
Westminster's borrowed tune,
The fog will lift and break
As bikers cross and Don meets Ray,
In Building Ten where money's spent.

Old Jordan loved his fish,
But let them go
To learn the students' names.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. I wish she had attached an explanation for more of the allusions in this poem... If you know what she's talking about, besides fishing and then Stanford University, then please illuminate me in the comments. Who is "our mother Jane"?]

Memoir of the Runner

Wheeled outside by Nurse to wait in the sun,
Tied across the chest and underarms, ordered
Restrained lest I lean too far and touch some
Vision of my drifting thoughts, old dog tricks;
My running days, my walking days, my days are over.

The boy ran hard from practice in late afternoon
Bursting both lungs to reach my chores before
Dusk mocked the promises made in happy faith:
How joyous flowed sweet juices then,
How kind reproach was poured like
Blessing on my sweat.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.

Typing up my grandmother's writings, I have been surprised by the pain she felt for herself and perceived in others. During most of my life I held a childishly simple, cheerful view of Grandma... which was only natural because I was a child.

I suspect this poem was written about my grandfather, Virginia's husband. "My running days, my walking days, my days are over." There is tender tragedy in that line. I wonder if she missed the teenage version of him that she never met.]

Immobility

Two cast iron rabbits
Painted white
Sit on the bright
Green lawn,
Alert to one another,
Making no plans
For the future.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. This one evokes William Carlos Williams' short piece, "The Red Wheelbarrow".]

Divorce

[Trigger warning for horror/gore.]

The magician's wife
Wore black tights and a green scarf
Or was it green tights and a black scarf?
Her skin was pale against the
Black box as the knife fell through
And he saw what he had done,
Turning green as the black
Day dawned red against all others:
Two halves
And now she lay asunder.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Spring Thaw

An old letter whimpers, skirls, and lets go,
Reborn litter from the melting snow,
Sweet words chasing down the drains,
Embracing, blurring thoughts, wet remains.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

In Reply to the Lady's Tears

Love is a plate of onions sliced thin
Straight through to the center
With the green hearts growing,
Wild as sin and tender beyond counting.
Why then are your tears showing
Now that I am packed to go,
Did you think love was a fountain,
Forever damned to overflow?

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

When Moths Break Through

I knit this sweater long ago
And think you did not like it so
Keeping it there within your chest
No matter that it fit you best.

Somehow I think it slightly queer
That all these years you held it dear
Yet never put it on to wear
Despite your wish to show you dare.

But now that forty years have gone
And nimble fingers turned to stone,
You take my sweater out with pride,
Indeed there’s little time to hide.

You think it right to speculate
When blood’s too thick to circulate,
How holes inside this sweater grew
But still, you say, it looks like new.

Those thieving moths cut through my care
Though larvae stopped but moments there
Where heart might once have been
Gathering strength to fly again.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Old, Old Lady by the Boat Works

Old, old lady in black stockings
And a warm sweater
Sitting in the hot summer sun

We wash by you with our broken motor
And you see us no more than
The blur of the newspaper
The fuzzy hum of the radio
You never got the hang of the television dial
And thought it wasn’t much good anyway,

We stifle our anger at the lousy motor
That’s holding us back from a fine run on the river

At the motor mechanic methodically checking the catalogue
At the three-day delay that eats our vacation like a waning moon

Old, old lady in black stockings
And a warm sweater
Sitting in the hot summer sun
We pass yearly and wonder if

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. I may find the rest of it later. This was undoubtedly a first draft, scrawled by hand on yellow paper. The poem lacks the meticulous grammar of Virginia’s polished pieces. Nevertheless, it is evocative.]

If I Live and Nothing Happens

Lucy Tillman came to sleep
In our plunder room
After working all day for
Cousins Frank and Viola
Who had steam heat
And a refrigerator
That made ice cubes.
But Lucy preferred our house
Which she knew to be quiet at night.

Cousin Viola was volatile and Cousin Frank was
Dying of athlete’s heart,
But they gave each other no quarter
And never bothered to keep their voices down.

Lucy liked the respectable dullness
Of our fireplace, the religious coldness of
Unheated bedrooms.

Every morning when Lucy left us
To return to the luxury of her workplace, she never failed to say,
“I’ll see you tonight if I live and nothing happens.”
Nothing happened.

Cousin Frank died first,
Then Lucy, who refused medical treatment.
And volatile to the end, Viola went.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. I don’t know if this is fiction or not, but the end is very mysterious. What happened to Lucy?]

Paternal Anecdote

[The following is an excerpt from a letter.]

The swingset of my youth was not so grand. It was a children’s swing mounted on a metal A-frame. I can almost remember the day my father erected it in our backyard at the way back end of the lot. My father was an exceptional craftsman—a cabinet-maker in early adulthood—and seemed to take real pleasure in building things. But he apparently couldn’t support a family that way and eventually went into business and started wearing suits to work and never seemed quite as happy. Like two of his brothers, he smoked heavily and died young. I sometimes wonder how things would have been if he’d stayed a carpenter.

The Marriage Business

[This snippet of a short story is a bit mysterious. It is undated, handwritten, and ends on a cliffhanger. At the beginning of the document, Virginia scrawled some enigmatic notes. Then she launched into the tale of a small-town minister bewildered by his social situation, ruefully relating events in retrospect. Enjoy!]

The Cow Mooeth (a play by Sid Wates)
the picnic flowers Crepe Myrtle
[???]

       Now I live in California and long ago left the ministry. I’m an orthopedic surgeon and minister to a flock of all faiths or of none. The exact word for my charge of vocation is “demitted.”

       California is a very different climate from North Carolina where I grew up and started my ministry, but there is one area slightly south of San Francisco where some of the same plants I knew way back then flourish and will forever evoke in me the bittersweet memories of my failure to become a minister, anybody’s minister. It was a comedy, fortunately a one-acter. You would know without anyone telling you that I did not see it as a comedy at the time.
       I had not been invested but a few months before I was called upon to perform a number of weddings.
       “There’s always a flurry around June,” Mrs. Stevenson, the church secretary, told me. “You’ll get a lot of invitations.”
       I had already begun to think that a new minister was a kind of local entertainment, but it was the two weeks of parties before every wedding that surprised me.
       “They want to get to know you,” Mrs. Stevenson said. “The young couple and the families, so you’re like a friend who’s marrying them.”
       I must have sounded like an idiot and believe myself the more fortunate of men in my chosen vocation.
       I had had some anxieties about living in a very small town with no [real restaurants? red vestments?] as a bachelor with no widowed mother or sister to keep house for me.
       But I had lived there six months and only once had found myself at home with no alternative but to scramble eggs for my dinner. Even then my larder was stocked with chocolate-chip cookies and caramel cake.
       Beware fudge-bearing young ladies and beware the fudge-bearing young lady who offers, indeed insists, upon teaching you to make fudge.
       When the mother of Miriam Hancock appeared in my office, Mrs. Stevenson had warned me she would be coming, to talk about her daughter’s plans to be married and the desire of the family that I perform the ceremony. I was unprepared to be chained.
       I was the proverbial bird chained to its perch from the first moment she held out her hand and said in the most cordial, natural way, “If any of my girls had been boys”—there was the tiniest coloring of cheek at this—“I would have so wanted to have him go into the ministry.”
       I must have beamed in full appreciation of the compliment she had paid me. My spirits were lifted, and I felt positively elated.
       After we had agreed on a date and a few details—Mrs. Stevenson kept a checklist for the bride and groom and a carbon copy for the mother of the bride—Mrs. Hancock rose to leave and once again extended her hand, “We’ll know one another a bit better after this is all over.”
       That was the understatement of the year.

[Undated story by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Wedding photos below via George Eastman House: 1 & 2.]

Long Pants in the Sunset

[The following is an undated short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann, which I suspect is loosely based on her own life, and particularly that of her husband. The plot meanders, surprisingly and beautifully, through soft memories of rural life. The portrait of “Frank’s Dad” is especially touching. Anyway, enjoy!]

          Cousin Jack, always good for a laugh, chuckled as he told the story. “We had a pig house with a stained glass roof. It came from that old church Frank’s Dad bought from the Baptists. That was wonderful lumber, bound to have been.”
          “What happened to it after you moved off the farm?” Frank’s wife Elizabeth wanted to know. She collected beautiful things and the possibility of rescuing the stained glass window from a pig house was intriguing. She remembered something about stained glass from years ago when Frank’s Dad was still living, a reference she had not understood at the time but was too busy with a baby and new house to worry about. Frank had said, “Oh, forget it. Who cares about stained glass?”
          Now, she could see Frank’s whole body go rigid. He considered her rush for beautiful but useless things eccentric, unlovable.
          Cousin Jack shrugged, “Who knows? We were so damn glad to move into town. Personally, I couldn’t forget slopping pigs fast enough.”
          Frank shook his head. Morosely. His Dad had never raised pigs, had advised Uncle Bob not to, too prone to disease; but he wasn’t one to jaw off about some other farmer’s business, especially not his sister’s husband.
          Elizabeth could see Frank didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking and was slipping into a mudpuddle and soon would fall into a quagmire from which he would descend to a weeklong pit of black mood. How could he and the ebullient Jack be first cousins: the high-powered lawyer with stubborn insomnia and bitten-to-the-quick fingernails and the once bankrupt, twice divorced (though now happily remarried) former shoe store owner (ruined by the competition who gave Green Stamps) at last making a splendid living from wind, hail, and tornado insurance.
          “It fell into my lap literally,” Jack explained. More than once. “God did all the advertising for me. I never spent a penny taking out ads and my phone started ringing off the hook.”
          “Right,” Frank said. Like selling earthquake insurance after a big one.”
          Elizabeth and Cousin Jack got on well together, although it was Frank who wanted Jack to visit. “We grew up together. Same age. Before they moved to town their farm was next to ours. Uncle Bob wasn’t much of a farmer and they were very hard up. I was embarrassed at Christmas when I got more presents than Jack. I didn’t tell him what all I got.”
          Frank looked at this moment of revelation, Elizabeth thought, like a dying man who had fought a duel on some point of honor. His mother said to her when they were newlyweds, “He’s sensitive, more than you, Elizabeth.”
          Jack was still going on about the church. “Your Dad never gave an inch. That bunch, those foot-washing Baptists, wanted it both ways.”
          “‘Mealy mouthed’, he called them,” Frank said. “He hated that. Hypocrites.”
          “He was the original tell-it-like-it-is,” Jack laughed. “Your Dad was a kick in the pants.”
          Elizabeth wanted the whole story, how the Baptist deacons came to the summer kitchen and offered to buy the church back on the same day that the crew arrived to start taking it apart. Somehow it had not dawned on the deacons when they made the deal that Frank’s father was going to use the lumber to build his own house that he, heathen that he was, and his family, not so heathen, would live in. The very boards that had been consecrated would become bedroom floors, hallways, whatever. The baptistery would be used for a bathtub or to water the horses. They could just imagine that, would not put it past him.
          “Sacrilege is what they thought,” Frank said.
          Jack hooted, “Lord, yes, the old hypocrites.” He cleared his throat suggestively.
          “What had they imagined he wanted the church for?” Elizabeth asked.
          “God only knows,” Jack said. “They needed the money so bad they had to sell and nobody else even came close to your Dad’s offer. In fact, I heard he was the only bidder. They had sold the land already, but only if they removed the church first.”
          Frank chimed in, “The congregation was like the rest of us, not well off. Poor as church mice.” He grinned at Jack. “They owed the minister and he had a family to feed and they couldn’t pay the fire insurance on the building and who knows what else. They were at risk to lose their last remaining asset. Selling the building was going to clear the decks and those who wanted to could join the church in town and maybe bring a small gift with them. It definitely made good business sense.”
          Jack hooted again. “‘It was God’s will,’ the minister said. Lord knows he wanted to sell. He only preached there every third Sunday, but still he deserved to get paid. He buried a lot of people and married a few. Funny thing about that preacher. He loved horses. Poor as he was, always kept a nice riding horse. That’s why he didn’t even try to get a city church.”
          Frank said, “He could have sold that horse to feed his children.”
          “Would have broke his heart, you know that Frank,” Jack said. “Nobody in the church wanted him to give up his horse. He’d a sooner sold off one of his children.”
          Elizabeth jumped. “I hope you don’t mean that.” Just when she thought she preferred happy-go-lucky Jack to gloomy Frank, he came out with something horrible, disguised as a joke.
          “Sure as Hell do,” Jack said. We’re talking old times here. He had five girls, you know.”
          Elizabeth swallowed hard. She knew if she looked at him straight he would be smiling, waiting to see if he had pushed her buttons. God knows men never quit. She could fight back, which he would love, or she could cave. “Did you ever go to that church, Frank?”
          Jack answered for them both, “Not hardly. Presbyterians and Baptists don’t mix, especially United Presbyterians.”
          Frank brightened for a moment. “I played my trombone there once. It’s how I got my first long pants. Mother wanted me to play at the Woman’s Club meeting, which was held at the church on a Saturday, and I said I would play only if she would buy me a pair of long pants. I was still wearing kickers for dress-up. We had overalls for school, but knickers… How I hated knickers.”
          Jack laughed, “Worse than knickers was the long stockings we had to wear.”
          “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Frank went into a deep silence, thinking about his trombone. Did he still remember the positions? Did he even have the breath to play if he did remember? The trombone would have burned up in the fire except he had left it at Jack’s house on Friday because snow was starting to fall and he was cutting across the field in time to do chores before it started up hard. Had Elizabeth got rid of it when they moved to the new house?
          “Come on, Jack,” Elizabeth said. “Let’s take a walk. That’s what they do in Jane Austen, walk among the shrubbery.”
          Frank leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He wanted to remember… He wanted to feel again the pain and suffering when his mother said, “Play Easter Parade, son, so I can cry a little.” That was the last time she visited, after his Dad died suddenly of a heart attack, his cigarette still burning between his fingers. Elizabeth was still nettled over his mother saying that about wanting to cry when he played Easter Parade. “She could not understand or rather,” she said, “she did understand.” That’s what horrified her.

*************************

          When they were undressing for bed, Elizabeth asked again about the window. “How did it happen that Jack’s family got the stained glass window for their pig pen? Didn’t your folks want it?”
          “I can’t remember anything about the stained glass window. Maybe Jack made the whole thing up. There probably wasn’t any stained glass window. I don’t remember. That church was dirt poor. Where would they have got the money? They probably didn’t believe in stained glass. Graven images, you know. Or maybe you don’t know.” Elizabeth with her Ph.D. in 19th Century Literature was illiterate in many ways. His mother had never truly forgiven him for marrying a Unitarian. Talking about the stained glass brought back all that sadness about the fire, as if he hadn’t worries enough without the house burning down.
          “David lost his drum set. My dog Hoover died. Mother’s furniture her father gave her for a wedding present was gone entirely. We spent the night with Uncle Bob and Aunt Winnie. I slept with Jack in the room with Bob Jr. and Donald.”
          He had always felt sorry for the delegation of foot-washing Baptists. They’d not had a Dutchman’s chance against his father. He could feel himself falling down the well, remembering the looks on their faces. His mother wasn’t going to help them either. It was the first time he saw what she was really like, how tough she was. Even if he could have helped, they would have despised help from a twelve-year-old boy.
          But what choice did his father have? They couldn’t live in the summer kitchen forever, certainly not through another winter. They’d only made it as well as they had because most of the winter was over when the house burned. They had been in town doing their Saturday shopping and when they got back home everything was gone. It was still smoldering with Uncle Bob and Aunt Winnie standing there crying and moaning. They felt worse than anybody because they saw the fire when it first lit up the sky, but there was nothing they could do to put it out. The acetylene gas lights were like torches in every room.
          When he saw the delegation of Baptists coming down the road he had wanted to head them off and save them the humiliation they were going to experience at the hands of his father. He knew how it was going to go, and it did go exactly as he supposed it would.
          His father stood there at the door of the summer kitchen and said, “I can’t.” He was not an imposing figure. Until he was married, he had thought of being a jockey. He was almost the right size and he had the temperament to win every race, to go for every advantage. He knew that about himself, he said when he was showing Frank how to use a crop on his pony.
          He looked at all those Baptists and he didn’t say, “Sorry, I can’t” or explain how awful it was trying to live in the summer kitchen, how miserable his wife was without the beautiful furniture her father had given her for a wedding present, how his older boy had lost his drum set and how his younger boy Frank had lost his dog Hoover. He didn’t throw in that it was Hell them all jammed together in the summer kitchen so that he and the wife were behind one curtain and her old maid sister was behind another, the boy behind another, the older boy staying in town to go to high school. He never pled to be understood.
          Every time they made their offer to buy back the church, he shook his head and said, “I can’t do it.” He didn’t invite them inside either. Steel, he was like steel when he wanted to be.
          Later his mother said, “I suppose they wanted you to let them pay you back over time since everybody knows they’ve already spent the money or most of it.”
          “We didn’t get that far,” his father said. “No use to lead them on.”
          Frank wanted to scream at him. “Why didn’t you give them a sporting chance?” He didn’t though. He knew enough not to, but he went to bed with a sick headache.
          “A bunch of mealy mouths,” his father said and Frank wanted to laugh then, but he knew not to do that either.
          Sorry as he was for the Baptists, he couldn’t wait to get out of the summer kitchen. The only way it was at all bearable was that he could sleep over at Jack’s house on the weekends.
          When they went to buy new clothes (the store opened up for them that Sunday) he made sure he got all long pants. No more knickers ever again and no corduroy. He hated the feel of it and the noise it made when his legs rubbed together. His mother didn’t have the energy to argue with him. “Let him have what he wants,” Dad said. “He’s near grown.”

*************************

          Elizabeth remembered Frank’s father coming with Mother Millicent to visit them when they had barely moved into their brand new house. Frank made a list of things to keep him busy. Trees to plant. Touch-up jobs where the movers had scraped off the paint. “He has to have something to do or he’ll go crazy.”
          What was it that gave her the idea that Frank did not want her to like his father? But she did like him, from the first, even though Frank warned her, “He’s nothing like me. We got along because I never crossed him, but he can be crude. Dirt farming is dirt farming. No bones about it.”
          All her ideas about hygiene and good manners vanished. The first thing he said, to test her she supposed, was he didn’t believe all that crap about germs; and she was sure he purposely didn’t wash his hands after working in the garden. When he needed to blow his nose he stood outside in the yard and held his thumb and forefinger above his nostrils while he blew hard. She knew she looked stunned but couldn’t help it.
          “Learned to do that out plowing,” he said, not looking sheepish or saying, “I left my handkerchief in my other pants.”
          But more than Mother Millicent he helped with the children, rocked the baby to sleep, complimented her cooking. One day when she was feeding the baby, he sat with her and told her the most awful dirty joke she had heard since college, something gross about lighting up after being plugged in. He watched her expression and when she laughed at the punch line he winked. Was he paying her some kind of compliment or was it a challenge for her to turn her back on him? Why?
          No wonder Frank was a mess. A sweet-as-pie mother and a bastard for a father. He had her in a bind. If she didn’t laugh at his jokes, she would be a stupid snob.
          His greatest compliment for her, however, came through Frank who reported that his father said when he had taken the two of them to his office and they were discussing all the ins and outs of getting organized in a new house, “Elizabeth hides work.”
          That was the supreme compliment, Frank explained. “If you wanted a letter of recommendation from one farmer to another and you said that about a hired hand, it would be like giving him an A+.”
          She wondered why he said that to Frank but not to her. She became self-conscious and wondered how it was she “hid work.” She began to watch herself and lost her rhythm.
          The last day they were there, she was holding Frank Jr., standing with Frank’s Dad by the garage waiting for Frank and his mother to come out with her suitcase.
          Inside the Mother was pressing a $100 bill into Frank’s hand. “I want you to have a nice suit, son, for when you’ll need it. Dark blue would be nice. You wouldn’t wear a black suit all that much, not enough to get the good of it.”
          Frank took the bill. No way could he refuse. She wasn’t thinking of Dad going first. That never occurred to her. Or she was thinking that the good dark suit would do double duty.
          “It makes me happy to know you’ll look nice when the time comes.”
          “Let me close your suitcase.” God in heaven, am I a good son? Am I a good son?
          “I didn’t wear half the dresses I brought.”
          “Sorry, I couldn’t get off work more to take you places.”
          “I understand, son.”

*************************

          Dad was smoking like a smokestack. Elizabeth held the baby away from it as much as possible. “They’re taking a long time over luggage.”
          “Milly wanted to give him some money to buy a new suit. He’s got plenty of suits. I can see that all right.” He spit on the pavement and ground out his cigarette.
          Elizabeth wondered what that was about? Later when Frank explained it and showed her the bill, he laughed first and then they both exploded and fell on the bed laughing in each other’s arms. It had been a long visit.
          Dad held his arms out for Frank Jr. “Come to your grandad, little guy.”
          The baby smiled at his Grandfather and snuggled into his arms, grabbed his bolo tie and sucked on it.
          Dad pushed the baby’s hair back and stroked his cowlick. Frank had had one when they first met before it disappeared when he started getting bald. “Your daddy is a good fellow, but he’s not Jesus Christ.” He turned to Elizabeth, “She wanted me to keep the stained glass, put it in the living room, but I told Bob to take it and use it in his pig house. Bob was too educated. And he was lucky. Roosevelt came in and he got the Postmaster job. It was steady. He had beautiful handwriting.”
          Elizabeth imagined stained glass in the living room, the western light coming through and hitting Frank’s trombone while his mother played the piano accompaniment to Red Sails in the Sunset.
          Frank was wearing tweed knickers with a matching Norfolk jacket and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked straight back. There was a picture to prove it. All the relatives gave back their pictures after the fire. There were more than you could have imagined, but none of Frank’s father. There were several of Frank and his mother, taken when Frank was about eleven by an artistic type photographer, a kind of misty look to the features, the way you might dream somebody looks, not the way they actually look in real life.

*************************

          Before Jack left tomorrow she would take a picture of him and Frank, full length; and she would try to get Jack to describe the stained glass. Was there a picture of a Bible story, a miracle perhaps, or just a pattern of colored glass? She devoutly hoped the latter.

Dying in California

The blossoms begin in February:
Almond turns white as brides,
And Quince blots red against wood,
Violets arise from the cold earth,
Hyacinth cannot hold back its head.

Your fight against this alien corn
Where February feels like spring
Is almost over now:
You rest uneasy on your bed.

I remember trudging across
The lower garden plot,
Past the pear trees and wild
Persimmon's despised fruit,
Entering the woods noisily and
Laughing at the snake's quick slither.

Lifting the carpet of needles
We dug deep into the woods' floor
Filling pail after pail with sweet decay
To feed Mr. Lincoln, dear Helen Traubel,
Queen Elizabeth, Razzle-Dazzle and Peace,
The children of your retirement years.

Those happy times of planting
Bring you back to life but what I can't
Forget is how you felt to wake one day
To find your brother's footsteps in new
Snow and how you always wished you'd
Cooked his breakfast or waked
At least in time to say goodbye.

Now you would shout for quiet
If only you could speak again
In this noisy room where soon you leave
The deaf, the blind, those without mind,
A roommate who chooses to speak Portuguese.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Note scribbled beside the second-to-last stanza: "going to enlist in the Navy and".]

Lucky Draw

[Excerpt from a letter to "Clarus and Gwennie", dated 3/15/1989.]

Before the days of Green Stamps, Instant Rebates, and Mail-In Refunds, the Saturday night Drawing held at closing time and sponsored by the progressive merchants of Alexis was one of the highlights of Keith's boyhood when his beloved neighbors Bessie and Rollie McKnight took him into town with them. As some of you will recall, a purchase of 25 cents gave the purchaser a ticket to be deposited in a big barrel. At the magic hour of nine o'clock, the winning numbers would be drawn. In 1937 Keith's family bought a new Ford for $700. Figure that one out--it makes a lot of tickets for the barrel. Keith doesn't remember what the competition was that particular Saturday night, but he was feeling very hopeful holding onto his big wad of tickets held together with a rubber band. (Have you noticed that even computers haven't put rubber bands out of business!) He recollects that he didn't receive the Grand Prize but close to it, for when the winning numbers were announced, he held one lucky ticket that awarded him 10 smackeroos. As all of us recall, in 1937 and for a few more years, that was a grand and wonderful sum. However one might want to construct luck, the laws of probability were definitely in his favor.

Fallen Leaf Lake

(for JKM, 7-7-84)

Now in our thirty-fourth summer
We come childless to the Bassett Cabin:
To dip our thickened frames in the Lake
As if to slake old puritan aches;
Could witch's water been colder,
More purifying than this noble Lake?

Bill's boat skims over the snow-fed
Water, clear to the secret bottom,
As steady goes our prow
Like Susan's crayon to draw the shore,
Setting it now once more
In memory's bank -- our Fallen Leaf,
Against the winter's lack
When the Big Dipper's dimmed
By the Bay's ruinous light.

At dusk we watch the Falls
Which feed so well our Lake,
Its fish, its ducks and ducklings,
Its continuous, Wordsworthian roar,
Reducing the Ski-Nautique
To puny mosquito-power.

Sated with spray, we stop
At St. Francis of the Mountains,
Bonnie and Marvin's place,
Beflowered in Columbine and Queen Anne's Lace,
To read in brass again the names who died in war --
Allen, Bassett, Brett, Canning, Culver, Etcheverry,
The words: "They will not grow old"
And we make bold to add our names
To those who also cannot leave this Lake.

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann, presumably written in July, 1984. Photo by Steve Jurvetson.]

From the Market

The woman carries the cantaloupe in her palm,
Protruding like a proud pregnancy.
Her fingers turn up, become a bowl;
Each foot dances to ripeness.

Was the cantaloupe singing
As she made her way to home and mate?
Would she dare to eat
The golden flesh when she woke
With cravings in the night?

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Dated "July, August, September 1997". Photo by Kabsik Park.]

Drinking Honeysuckle in Palo Alto

Walking near Gamble Garden we came upon
Young girls hovering over honeysuckle blooms
Like bees, biting off tips and sucking
The sharp sweetness--drop by drop.

My just such girlhood pushed up from
Mind's bottom and fought for air:
Kicking and flailing to break water's surface
And beat off bully Time, whose fat palm
Shoved against my face until lungs gave out and
Memory dropped back like an old tire
Into the silt of Welika Lake.

For a moment, before we resumed our conversation,
I was overcome by humidity and the trickle
Of sweat running down pancaked legs
Blurring white shoes with hopeless longing
For Dr. Moore to stop praying for life after death.

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. June, 1993.]

Robins in January

Against the puny frost of winter's clime
The cat benignly waits upon the Nelsons' mat,
Not cold, but cowed by raucous swarm
Of birds demented, flying blind
From Pyracantha hedge to Toyon wild,
Eschewing sober meals of insects plain:
Fermented berries muddle our poor Robin's brain.

For once the feline eye does fail to charm
These drugged and shameless stunting birds:
Their nobler instincts gone astray
They swoop and cry like banshees
Loosed upon the cul-de-sac, this saintly Place,
Our leased home, their captures space;
For when they dive like fighter planes,
They drop their blood-red berries where they may
And once again out mother Nature does her dance
With robins turned to bacchanal
And gardens sown by happenstance.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Undated, but I suspect it was written in January. Under the title was the legend, "for Corinne and Lyle Nelson of San Rafael Place".]

Children

Sonya

Sonya walks
Like the bamboo leaf
Holding the water droplet
Until it falls.

Sonya walks
With dancing hands,
Planting each foot
Towards those she loves.

Kevin

Today a tiny seed
Floated on my breath,
Moving as Kevin moved,
Our second son,
Who saw the world
So small and cried,
"A beauty, a beauty!"

[Two poems by Virginia McKinnon Mann, printed on the same page. August, 1995.]

Found Money at Bodega Bay

Who can resist the sand dollar,
Its circled star and tiny dove
Between each hollow spine?
Pick up this treasure trove
Before the tide comes in
Stripping the beach-bed clean,
Before the silver seekers
Appear with detecting machines.

They cannot see the sand dollar
Which does not rudely beep
But lives in silent symmetry
Inside my castle keep.
As I am motionless at sea
By captive childhood's dream,
Remembering another ocean,
Another beach to glean.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Photo by Rachel Hathaway.]

Sylvia

My neighbor of three years, off and on,
Calls me Sylvia although my name is Virginia.
I like the sound and do not correct her.
No one else will know for she speaks
To no one, complaining that all
Are cold and unfriendly.

How did she know that Sylvia would please,
That I would carry it all day
Like an old postcard found in a library book
Imagining Sylvia's life?

After dinner I tell my husband
That he may call me Sylvia if he wishes;
He slyly replies, "Who is she?"

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

No. 64

The bus driver, Black Mother, waits
For the train to arrive,
The passengers to become her children:
She remembers me, calls out my stop,
"Santa Clara and First,"
Not far from St. James' Park,
Historic San Jose.

She watches me leave and carries
The other children of her run
To their appointed places,
Heavy in her heart
For the daughter who suffers
From surgery, from chemo, from surgery.

Dear Mother of God, how beautiful
You are in the Cathedral of St. Joseph:
What street of this besainted city
Will you name for the Black Mother,
Who cannot save her daughter from pain,
Who drives her bus so kindly,
Speaking gently to the old White Woman,
Who, like herself, cannot save her
Daughter from pain?

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. May, 1995. Photo of the Virgin of Montserrat via Wikimedia.]

Notes Regarding John Donne

John Donne, that favored poet,
Thought Death a fraud,
Uncommonly proud,
But he was given to metaphor
Wildly extravagant, indiscreet.
Why must I be dug up now
And later in self-reproach
To hear rock and roll,
The tortured young writhing
Like dying dogs, scratching
On the window glass.
"In this room, was John Donne, undone."

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. These lines were scrawled on a scrap of paper, not neatly typed like most of the others. I edited the capitalization and punctuation in accordance with Virginia's established style. Portrait of John Donne (below) via Wikimedia.]

Ripening Pears

Walking in Grandfather's old, untended orchard,
We find the trees grown taller than our reach,
The aged trunks too thick to shake,
Stubborn as Grandfather himself,
Thinking we women have no need for pears.
You climb and shout as wild as a boy,
"I'll toss them down, you catch;
Pretend each one's a china egg."

A furtive skill we practice then,
Filling our aprons when baskets fail,
Treading softly on the attic stair;
No need to tell our Jack and Will,
Whose bed and board we richly serve,
How pears lie wrapped in hidden rooms,
In secret watched and gently turned.

Long past their natural life
Our summer hoard grows slowly ripe
As daughter turns to mother blessed
And smiles across the cloth are passed
While, lips upon the mellow skin,
We catch each other's glowing eyes
Setting our teeth against the fruit.

But Jack and Will cry out for knives,
Pearl handles glow, stilettos flash,
Quick work is made of stem and core,
Only a crescent remains, a wasted moon.

A fall of snow shakes down the leafless trees
Like Leghorn feathers whitening nests
Of brooding hens: our orchard stirs
And waits for Nature's fresh assault.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Photo by Chris Walsh.]

Registered Nurse

The old nurse moves among her patients
Checking their linens and watching
Their visitors for signs of tiring,
Duty to her patients clear when
All else is muddled in her brain:
To women hanging by a thread,
Trying to breathe their last,
She brings her comforting words,
"When you need me, I'm a maternity
nurse. Just call me anytime."

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Activity Time

Returning from the travelogue,
Weekly escape when Death is slow,
Does the professor's wife remember
Florence where she was bride
And raw with love and love of art
Or is it all fresh to her and the
Professor she can no longer recall?

At music hour three times a week
Does the old pianist play by rote
Hear Mozart plain or does he prefer
Musak so low he hardly hears a note.

Your fight against this alien corn
Where February feels like spring
Is almost over now.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. The first verse was heavily edited, but I typed it up in the original. The edited version follows below...]

Returning from Tuesday travelogue,
Weekly escape when dying is old,
Does the Professor's wife recall
Florence where she was bride
And bold with love and art
Or is it all new and interesting to her,
Like the Professor she longs to meet.

Play Like

A girl from another town, near my age,
Came to visit her grandfather every summer
And her sweet double step-grandmother.
We played at being grown-up movie stars
With names no one local could claim kin to.
I like the sound of Stone,
And she chose Cavendish.
It was a year when calm beauty was admired:
Remember Rochelle Hudson?

My friend's mother, beautiful and divorced,
Looked exactly like Norma Shearer.
I could easily see the resemblance
And was relieved not to be her daughter.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Pictured above: Rochelle Hudson (left) & Norma Shearer (right).]

The Cowgirl

       My first memory of myself before I started school as a six-year-old is set in my grandfather's bedroom. He has struck out for his daily constitutional and I am sure he will not return before lunchtime. I will not disturb anything in his room. When I leave, my image will disappear from his mirror.
       I am standing in front of his bureau with my pistols pulled, wearing my cowboy outfit, practicing the tone of voice in which I will rid the earth of "one more yellow dog". But I am perfectly harmless. My six-shooters do not even have caps. They have been cast off by my two older brothers, as have the chaps and the red bandanna around my neck. I have left my stick horse outside, as he has come to seem ready for pasture. I try different positions for my elbows, different stances for my boots, old ones I found in my brothers' closet.
       I am tired of being the little sister playing with dolls. I want to go alone into the woods. I am not afraid. I can take care of myself. I am looking straight into the mirror--but something moves and I hear a snicker and giggle before the door shuts. I hear my mother, my aunt, and our cook whisper, "Don't let her see us."
       They have vanished from the hall before I can see them eavesdropping. I have been taught that eavesdropping is not polite, that it is sneaky.
       I run upstairs to get rid of the ridiculous clothes and the pistols. I will never again let myself be made fun of. I go outside and find my stick horse. I say goodbye and put him out of his misery.

[Recollection by Virginia McKinnon Mann. December, 2006. Photo (below) by Philip Howard.]

A Prayer for the Word Processor

Oh word of God, bestowed to man and woman,
Chiefly woman now, protect us from the machine
That wants to think for us, to remember for us,
To remember the errors of our ways and erase
Them before the impulse exists (to put all our
Works into one access, random if possible)
To know not the paragraph, for it may transfer
To another page or the scratch of the pen,
For it is slow and leaves the sign of old ideas.

Protect us Lord God from preserving our printouts
Forever, for they are not worthy;
Protect us from believing that all words are spelled
Equally, that electronic impulses are more precious
Than rubies, more meaningful than the handwritten note.

In our late middle age we have learned to eat
Bread without salt, drink coffee without cream
For thus we mean to live forever.

Preserve us from processing the words of our hearts
And knowing not whereof they came.

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann; dated May, 2006. Photo by Haris Awang.]

Three Yellow Jackets

A new rain washes plum petals
Onto the freeway and you are dying
Now while the petals fall:
"Spring has come early,"
We say that every year in California,
Far from the cold news of the East,
The middling South, the Sunbelt,
Where it's always cold in March,
Touch and go for trees that
Show their fruit, nipped in the bud.

You will never taste another peach
Just picked from overripe culls
Of Loma Lou orchard, rooted in
Our sandhill county, far from the
Atlantic, but certified to have been
Underwater once, the ocean's floor,
Apt history for Lord Anson's land.

Stroking your forehead and murmuring
My last words over and over, my good
Mother, knowing no other, no better,
I remember gathering peaches when
Three yellow jackets flew up your
Dress and set you dancing, frantic:
How did they dare, I wondered, then and now,
Assault my God-fearing, widowed mother,
Whose body even I had never seen.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Photos by Sarah Sammis (above) and Susie Wyshak (below).]

Look Alikes

"Mr. Meier, a 49-year-old Swiss native with a craggy-boyish resemblance to the late actor Anthony Perkins..." Suburban Journal, NY Times, Friday, July 9, 1993. (A16)

For the third time I have been told
By strangers that I resemble
A famous actress: each time
I am astounded for I know that
We are not related and furthermore
I am twenty years her senior, shortish,
And never dressed smartly,
Downright slovenly at home, though
Not quite "grunge" (I like my
Fingernails to be clean.)

An expression comes over someone's face
As I am told how something about me
Is like this famous actress.
It is certainly not my figure
They have reference to or my speech,
A North Carolina Piedmont drawl
Unhurried by years in the West.

Wanting to laugh out loud,
I smile instead and look pleased.
The cited resemblance is surely
Meant to flatter--fatuous as it seems.
It would surprise the famous actress
To be told, by friends or strangers
That she and I are look alikes;

I peer in the mirror for some clue
To this puzzle and finding none
A way to accept it for what it's worth,
Knowing no one means to insult me
By association with a movie star.

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. I suspect that these verses were written not long after July 9th, 1993. The article quoted in the beginning can be found online: "Down-to-Earth Methods On a Back-to-Earth Farm".]

Lightning and Hail in Carolina

The TV screen explodes in midnight dark;
High-tech lightning cuts football sleep;

You shift and dream of games in Illinois,
Should we fully wake to news and portents
Of undeniable weather--the satellite report,
Will it ever rain out here on desert land?

Weather was childhood's chief excitement
Turning porch chairs to makeshift fort
Against the blowing spray, huddling
In cramped and sweltering happiness
While Papa paced the boards triumphant
That cataracts had not wholly dimmed his sight:
Watching for a third strike to the Ashcraft house
Across the street, enraged by Nature's mean
Caprice, wanting to believe our Baptist God,
As well as he, loved his neighbor, his friend.

These stormy freaks of lightning
Struck him in the pit of inherited faith,
Who thought the sparrow's fall was meant
To keep us safe, to keep us all.

Another springtime storm, I found
Myself at home in the upstairs hall
While hail as white as big and white as ping pong balls
Crashed windows down like heavenly rocks,
The family all but one gone to church
To wail against the death of our dear cousin,
Was I thought too young or delicate to mourn?

Drawn back to the wall, I watched the monster hail
Pound and bounce like cannon balls on tin
And liked the strangeness of unleashed furies,
Liked how it felt to have the house in my command
The pagan simplicity of owning up to fright,
I'd read my Junior Classics and wondered what I'd done
For Zeus to loose his bolts upon my twice watered head.

When drenched and chastened mourners returned
Our lawn was like a driving range
And in the chicken yards
All over town, the wondering hens
Gave thought to the frozen biddies they might claim.

[Photo by Dylan Fogarty-MacDonald. Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Third Grade

The Principal came to the door

And told John, who sat next to me,

That Mark, his friend and neighbor,

Five years older, had shot himself.

John, crying, was excused for the day

For Miss Cameron knew how it hurts

To discover that the boy you play

Hide and seek with every night

Want to die, shouting, "Home free!"

But the bullet only blinded Mark,

And he learned to tune pianos,

Married a loving woman,

Was forgiven by his parents

And his beautiful sister,

Who was crowned Queen of the May.

John, however, never forgot

That moment when the Principal

Came to the door and called him out;

And John, himself, died young,

Painfully, they said, of cancer,

One of the so-called natural causes.

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann; written October, 1994.]

Emily Toy Huntley McKinnon

[This is Virginia's biography of her mother.]

Emily Toy Huntley was born in 1890 and lived well into 1984. Thus she began life between two centuries, the eldest child of Virginia Thomas Curry of Baker County, Georgia, and Walter Jones Huntley of Anson County. Emily never wavered from the strict standards instilled by her parents' teachings and example; but when called upon to adapt to the changed world that her long life brought her into, she did so with grace. This flexibility and nonjudgmental attitude served her well in many years of teaching.

First instructed by her mother along with brother Walter (born 1895) and sister Mary Elizabeth (born 1900) at home on Brent Street, Emily attended the local academy. Her college years were spent at Meredith in Raleigh. A member of the tennis club, she also was Captain and played Center for the senior basketball team. Beside her picture in the yearbook is "The very pink of courtesy." Motto for the class of 1911: "Womanliness, Worth and Wisdom."

Emily's happiness at graduation was marred by the knowledge that her mother was ill and could not attend the ceremony. How gravely ill had been concealed from Emily at her mother's request, and it was a grievous shock when her mother died the day following her return home. The household was in mourning, and Emily gave up her teaching position away from home to become housekeeper for her distraught father and surrogate mother to her eleven-year-old sister and sixteen-year-old brother. Her mother's first cousin Frank Bennett and his wife Viola Clark Bennett along with her beloved Auntie Lizzie rallied round the bereaved family. Lucy Tillman, who had worked for the family since she was a young girl, assisted with household duties.

After several years at home, Emily was able to accept a teaching position at Orrum along with her lifelong friend and fellow Meredith graduate Myrtle Ashcraft. Their "new teacher" experiences were recollected merrily as they visited over the years on the front porch of the Huntley home.

This porch with its willow swing for two was the site for the courting of Emily by the young druggist who came from Maxton after completing his studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. William Louis McKinnon and Emily kept company for several years before marrying June 6, 1919.

They began housekeeping in a downtown apartment, and in August of the following year became the proud parents of William Louis, Jr.  Before the birth of their second son, Walter Huntley, they moved to the Brent Street house where Emily again became housekeeper for her father as well as her growing family. Here in 1925 their third child Virginia was born.

The young couple were engaged in all phases of Wadesboro's social and religious life. Will was an elder of the Presbyterian Church, where their children were baptized as infants. Emily, however, did not give up membership in the Baptist Church; and later she and the children returned to the church of her parents.

In May of 1927 as the nation was joyously celebrating Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic, Will succumbed to kidney disease, diagnosed only three weeks earlier. Emily again was called upon to shoulder enormous responsibilities. She sought employment in the local school, but a suitable opening did not become available until 1931. From that time she taught second grade until retirement at age 65.

Enthusiastic and dedicated, she was challenged by the individual, gifted or not gifted, cooperative or not cooperative. She embodied the quality of fairness and respected her fellow teachers and Principal Julia Cameron. Emily and her sister Beth, who returned to the family home with husband William Lain after World War II, joined Mr. Louis Fogelman for a number of years at the Wade Mill elementary school, each teaching a double grade. They considered this a choice assignment and enjoyed the keen interest parents showed in school activities. Emily cherished a second-grader's compliment, "Mrs. McKinnon has so many patients." When the Wade school was consolidated, Emily returned to the Wadesboro site and Beth went into social work.

During the years of keeping house for her father and teaching, she was also fulfilling her role as mother to her children, attending to their education and bearing the anxiety of having her sons overseas throughout World War II.

She did not revere war, but felt compassion for the casualties of war. A fifty-year volunteer with Anson County Red Cross, she was also active in the Legion Auxiliary from World War I when her brother enlisted in the Navy.

Walter Huntley, Sr., became increasingly frail in his 91^st year and required a great deal of care from his daughters. They were fortunate in their helper Minnie Ingram, who for many years assisted the family.

Delighting in the birth of each grandchild (Hunt, Christopher, William, Marilyn, Judson, Kevin, Nancy, Susan, Andrew) Emily took her first trip away from the South to visit her second grandson born in Wisconsin. Later she combined visits to family with sightseeing by tour bus and enjoyed the national parks and meeting new people.

At age 84 Emily's long struggle with glaucoma left her unable to lead the independent life she preferred. Agreeing to live with her daughter and family at Stanford, California, was her last big decision. She became the cherished resident grandmother, limited in her activities but not in her good humor and willingness to adapt. Eager to continue her life's pattern, she became a "friendly visitor" through joining another volunteer, Betty Walker, who drove to their assignments and enriched Emily's last years through their shared visits to shut-ins.

Lively and alert through her 91st birthday, Emily's health declined rapidly thereafter, and the last two years were spent at Pilgrim Haven, a Baptist-administered facility. She is buried in Eastview Cemetery next to her beloved Will.