Oleanders

The woman waters the beautiful but

Poisonous plants, grown tall in her

Twelve-year tenure, replacing the

Small picket fence which afforded

No privacy to the previous owners,

No romance, one might say, although

They were known to be a particularly

Harmonious couple with a golden

Harp in their picture window.

The present owner calls out to me,

Holding the hose to the oleanders

For we are in a time of great heat,

"Are you still writing?"

"Yes," I call back,

"Are you still breathing?"

Her oleander hedge grown so tall and lush
Reminds me of an Indian woman

Visiting California, who questioned

Why we would have oleanders in our yards,

This plant, so full of blooms,

From which in Delhi she has known

Despairing women to squeeze juice enough

(The pink or white flowers are quite moist)

To make a welcome drink.

[Poem written by Virginia McKinnon Mann in June of 1993. Photo credit: stoplamek on Flickr.]

Exposed

When I was fourteen on a band trip to West Palm Beach

We had a free afternoon to amuse ourselves

And I went with a group, mostly boys, on a yawl

Run by this couple from Maine, who came down

And took tourists out to fish in the deep water.

It astounds me yet how they penetrated my

Perfect disguise, my tight robe of obscurity.

I looked "so much" they said like

Their good friend at home; they could

Hardly believe their Northern eyes,

Smiling at one another as if it were a

Wonderful thing, a gift they presented

To my damp identity, forced to walk the plank.

Their smiles of approval were like a medal

I could wear inside my band uniform:

Couldn't they see I was not "cute"

Or the least bit popular with boys,

These friendly Yanks who squeezed my lumpish

Southern self and left their fingerprints.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. This one really resonated with me. Photo from the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives.]

Tonsils, 1930

When I was five I rode

My tricycle to the hospital

To have my tonsils removed.

My mother walked with me,

Carrying a small bag.

She would sleep on a cot

Listening for the sound of blood.

I liked to ride my tricycle

So far from home and liked Dr. Charles,

A solemn, taciturn man, who had been

Overseas and seen men die untended

And knew what needed to be done.

Full of ether, I slept all night;

But the next day, my throat hurt

So much I longed to die,

Turning my head to the wall

When Miss Myrtle, our dearest

Friend and neighbor, came to drive

Us home, carrying a melting pint of

Vanilla ice cream.

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann, written in October of 1994. Photo via State Records NSW.]

The Wood Pile

Note: A Southern friend brings a load of wood from his own stand of trees, saying that when he was growing up, certain ladies in his community always brought potato salad to the home in times of grief.

The Wood Pile

My friend, your gift of trees, lacy with lichen,

Each log containing some history of the other,

Lies rudely dismembered in my yard;

If sons were got in parts

With the deftness of your woodsy art,

We'd make a merry stack,

Each piled upon his brother,

But hearts grow old and slow.

We borrow from the piglet parts

To give us longer, stronger life,

Lying below the surgeon's knife

Like the lamb bleating for Abraham,

Struggling to be his sacrifice.

Uncommon friend, your educated axe

Reminds me now of that old father

And how he sweat until belief became relief.

[Undated poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

The Way He Walked

If I should meet my father in heaven would I know him? It's a good question. I was only two years and ten days when he died within a few weeks of being diagnosed with kidney disease. No one in the family knew how to explain his death to me. They could hardly comprehend it themselves. Lindbergh had just flown the Atlantic alone and the United States was awash with joy.

I suppose that I thought my father was late coming home from work. He often was at the pharmacy until closing time at 9 p.m. It was only two blocks from our home, 3 Brent Street, Wadesboro, N.C.; and it was his custom to walk to work in the morning, to walk home for lunch and back for the afternoon before walking home for dinner and sometimes back for another stint at the pharmacy. The climate is temperate in that part of North Carolina, and I can imagine that it was an agreeable walk. Perhaps I stood at the front door and watched him head off back uptown walking with his hands behind his hack.

It's too bad that I couldn't keep a journal. I would know what they did with me when the funeral was held. I would know if my brothers went or not. They were five and six, old enough to be told about death and relied upon not to demand unseemly attention. A child barely two years old might cry and cause further distress to the grieving widow. Perhaps our grandfather held my brothers' hands. What a blow it must have been for him to lose his son-in-law Will. Grandfather did not care much for the company of women. He complained that they "talked at random." Papa we called him. Daddy we called our father. Was I talking when he died? I think so. There is no reason to suppose not. Apparently I had formed a strong attachment to my Daddy. For a long time after he died, I was told many years later, his close resemblance to his brother McKay was disturbing to me. "You would get upset when Mac came to visit," my mother said. "He had to stay away until you were older." The voice would have been different, but they were near in age and there was a striking physical resemblance. The feeling of loss would be further intensified by Uncle Mac's visit. Perhaps my mother experienced something similar.

Apparently I had not given up hope that Daddy would reappear. Weeks after he had been buried and my mother was taking me for a stroll in the neighborhood, we found ourselves behind Mr. William Marshall who, like my father, had a habit of walking with his hands clasped behind his back. I never see men walk this way anymore, but perhaps men do not customarily walk as a method of transportation as they did in 1927. If they walk nowadays it is more often for exercise. They swing their arms or hold them up in a pumping motion. Apparently Mr. Marshall's walk with his hands clasped behind him, probably wearing the same type of white linen suit that was so usual in the southern summertime, appeared to me to be that of missing father. "There's my Daddy," I cried out, breaking my Mother's heart all over.

She knew, of course that time would drown my feelings for my father. I would forget how he smelled, the soft plumpness of his body as he carried me to the backyard to look at the chickens. I know that this was a ritual he had established with me from a letter to my mother from the hospital when he still had hope for a recovery. "Tell Virginia," he wrote, "to see after the chickens."

He was a respected pharmacist, accorded the title Dr. McKinnon, fastidiously clean, something of a dandy from the photograph taken when he and my mother were "courting." Looking at this picture once together, my mother told me that it was taken by Hugh Hammond Bennett, a native of Anson County who became chief of the U. S. Soil Conservation Service. "He was out taking pictures on a Sunday afternoon," she said and added hastily, "Oh, I don't mean that he was working on Sunday." My father sits with one hand propped on his thigh and a pleased-as-punch expression on his face while Emily Toy Huntley smiles demurely with both hands in her fur muff. She looks down as she has been told to do by the professional photographer who took the senior pictures for her college yearbook, "The Oak Leaves," Meredith College, class of 1911. Unlike the other seniors, Emily's picture is a profile. She said the photographer was dissatisfied with the first proof and asked her to try a different pose. Her neck is beautifully bent as she follows his instructions to incline her head slightly. She wears a "rat" of extra human hair in her piled-up coiffure. She looks every inch a gentlewoman. How could she have known what happiness and sorrow lay in store for her?

[Undated recollection by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]

Holding the Wire

Transmogrified,

She cried,

"I am annealed!"

The juice that sealed

The hand that pealed

Was not revealed,

Instead congealed.

The lightening bug the soul became

It's work the dark of night to tame.

[Written by Virginia McKinnon Mann in September, 1997. Note: there are two typos in the last stanza that I left uncorrected.

This poem seems appropriate to post while 2014 is still new. Lots of people have been talking about new year's resolutions, and although I don't think "Holding the Wire" is about that kind of self-transformation, my mind made the connection.]

Sleep

[Sleep is rarely a sophisticated activity, as demonstrated by this man bedding down in his tent. Photo via OSU Special Collections & Archives : Commons. And now for a bit of verse. . .]

The father lies open-mouthed,

Snoring in the smallest room:
Tractor vibrations jiggling

His aching farmer's brain.

The mother disdains sleep,

Province of uneducated men:

She sends the sons away

To study how not to sleep.

Each night they slip

A tiny knife into their ears

Like surgeons excising life

With who knows what call-in shows.

[Written by Virginia McKinnon Mann. This poem was undated, but appeared on the same page as "Certified Fame", which was dated October, 1994.]

Certified Fame

The hero of his own story

Watched the Hero and himself

Appear on screen together:

His friends gasp in pleasure.

Later an old newsreel

Shows Ray Lyman Wilbur

Standing, top hat in hand,

As Herbert Hoover, mentor and friend,

Throws out the first ball

Of a disastrous season.

[Written by Virginia McKinnon Mann in October, 1994. Ray Lyman Wilbur was the third president of Stanford University and 31st United States Secretary of the Interior, according to Wikipedia. I guess Mr. Hoover (31st president of the United States) wasn't much of a ballplayer.]

Mrs. Dunlap's Dutch Colonial: Part Three

[The first and second installments have already been posted. You may recall that Papa just said to Mr. Benton, the carpenter, "Those poles are illegally trespassing on my property." What happened next was. . .]

Mr. Benton, who never expected the fence to get put up in the first place, apologized and moved his posthole digger and the sawhorse before taking the poles back to Mrs. Dunlap's garage.

Then he waited for Mrs. Dunlap to return from wherever she had gone and sat down to think why she would want a fence like that anyway. It was while he was sitting on her kitchen steps looking intently at the grape stakes that it came to him how much they reminded him of "The Lost Colony." He had taken his family two years ago to see the pageant, and he had found every part of the experience interesting.

"It would be better, Mrs. Dunlap," he said when she finally came home from The Book Review Club, "For you to have a kind of Tom Sawyer fence, you know, wide boards and painted white. I'd advise using house paint, lasts better than whitewash. Tom Sawyer was just a story, but the fence went with his Aunt Polly's house; and these Lost Colony poles don't go with your house, not a bit of it."

Mrs. Dunlap was not at all interested in Mr. Benton's decorating ideas, for she long ago accepted Duncan's pronouncements as the final word. Or as one member of The Book Review Club said after hearing Mrs. Dunlap recount Duncan's opinions on architecture, "The Oracle hath spoken."

Mrs. Dunlap could guess without even asking Mr. Benton why the grape stakes were back on her property, but Mr. Benton told her anyway.

"Mr. Huntley said those poles were trespassing on his property. Illegally trespassing is what he said."

"When he sees how nice and natural my fence looks, he'll be begging me to put one up on his side to hide those unsightly oil barrels," Mrs. Dunlap said in a just-you-wait-and-see kind of voice.

Mr. Benton kept quiet. After all, he could not force her to take his advice. He showed her where he thought the post holes should go if she was determined to have a Lost Colony fence, but he could not help mentioning that it might be bad luck considering what happened to those poor colonists. Duncan would come to see his mother and all that would be left would be one word carved on her pecan tree, "Croatoan," the meaning of which not one single person in the whole wide world knew.

"That's the silliest thing I ever heard of," Mrs. Dunlap said, but decided to wait to hear what my mother had to report after her talk with Papa.

It was a little like "The Emperor's New Clothes," Mr. Benton told his wife when he got home. Mrs. Dunlap thought the fence was high style for no reason other than Duncan telling her it was, and. anybody could see it was no style at all. He also told the folks at the hardware store that Mrs. Dunlap wanted him to build a Lost Colony fence, and pretty soon every car in town slowed down to take a look. Mrs. Dunlap never doubted for a moment that they were all looks of pure envy. Although no one asked her how they too could order grape stakes for fencing, she volunteered when she went to Ann's Beauty Shoppe to have her weekly shampoo and set that they were a special order from her son Duncan, who had been charmed by their naturalistic style while visiting his bride-to-be in Georgetown, District of Columbia, the Nation's Capital.

The next day when Mr. Benton came to work he tried to persuade Mrs. Dunlap if she was determined to go ahead with the job to use leather strips to lash the poles together. He explained that he actually had seen "The Lost Colony" and that he had examined the way they constructed their enclosures. "It will look very natural, Mrs. Dunlap, if that is what you are after."

"What I'm after is making my side yard look more presentable so a person coming to visit won't be looking straight into my garage."

"You might have run your driveway on the other side of your house," Mr. Benton said, "But I guess it's too late to cry over spilt milk. Tell me again, Mrs. Dunlap, what the name of your house style is."

"Dutch Colonial," she said. "Duncan sent me the house plans, and he also sent me the grape stakes."

Mr. Benton, who already knew that Duncan had exerted what he considered undue influence on his mother, was planning to say that he was pretty sure the Railway Express people would come pick up the grape stakes and send them right back to wherever they had come from; but just then my mother came out to tell Mrs. Dunlap that she had not been able to persuade Papa to let the grape stakes be used. She was trying to use any but "obscure" not wanting to hurt Mrs. Dunlap's feelings, but in her concern not to make fun of Mrs. Dunlap she said "congeal" instead of "conceal" and had to ask for a glass of water before she could get out what was the honest truth: Papa did not wish for Mrs. Dunlap to beautify his property, no matter how earnest she was in her wish to do so.

The next day Mrs. Dunlap took Mr. Benton's suggestion to place all twelve poles in a kind of rippling arrangement just past her kitchen door, partly hiding the garage and her clothes line, providing a backdrop for the bushes that were already planted and growing well. "That way," he said, "It won't look near so much like 'The Lost Colony.'"

Mrs. Dunlap laughed. "I certainly don't want to look like 'The Lost Colony,' not even for Duncan and his bride."

"And there won't be any ghosts lurking around," Mr. Benton added, but Mrs. Dunlap was already thinking about something else.

Surprising to all concerned, Duncan was pleased with Mr. Benton's arrangement, which he pronounced "serpentine" and reminiscent of the brick walls Thomas Jefferson designed for the University of Virginia.

"I can live with that," Mr. Benton said; and Mrs. Dunlap smiled with naturalistic pleasure.

[The end! Undated story by Virginia McKinnon Mann. I think the moral is that we all ought to run out and get some grape stakes. Ha!]

Mrs. Dunlap's Dutch Colonial: Part Two

[Click here to read the first installment.]

Duncan, who doubtless had heard from his mother about the unsightly oil barrels, explained in a letter what he had in mind. "You can use twelve stakes on one side of your driveway and ask Mr. Huntley to let you put twelve stakes on his side. That way you can partially screen your garage and totally obscure Mr. Huntley's oil barrels."

Mrs. Dunlap came over to talk to my mother and repeated Duncan's instructions word for word or so she thought. My mother was surprised to hear that Mrs. Dunlap wanted to "obscreen" the oil barrels, but knew Mrs. Dunlap well enough to know what she meant. After all, she had once overheard Mrs. Dunlap respond to an invitation she meant to accept by saying in her most gracious voice, "I am delighted to decline."

"A son like Duncan," my mother said, abandoning more graphic comparisons, "Admirable as he is, has caused Mrs. Dunlap to lose her ordinary sense of speech."

The oil barrels were without a doubt unattractive, but they were necessary to provide the feed line to the stoves. Modern steam heating such as Mrs. Dunlap's new house had was thought by Papa and many others in our town to be oppressive and possibly unhealthy.

As Mr. Benton, who did carpenter jobs for everybody in town and who constructed the housing for the barrels, raised to an elevation impossible to ignore, said when he finished, "Those barrels hit a person right between the eyes."

My mother, who thought all along that it was a good idea to obscure the oil barrels, had not been able to convince Papa that it was worth paying for; but she promised Mrs. Dunlap that she would try again to persuade him.

Mrs. Dunlap went straight home and called Mr. Benton, a very talented and well-read handyman, to come and talk to her about the job. "My son Duncan says these grape stakes make a charming, naturalistic type of fencing."

The first thing Mr. Benton said was, "Mrs. Dunlap, you don't want that kind of fence with your kind of house. They don't look good together. You'd do better to plant some more bushes."

"I don't have time for bushes to grow, Mr. Benton. Can you do the job or not?"

"Tell you what I'll do," he said. "I'll line those poles up and lean them against a sawhorse and let you see how it looks. Then I'll line them up on Mr. Huntley's side and see what the effect looks like to him, but I'm not digging any holes until you think it over. How does that sound?"

Mrs. Dunlap apparently forgot that she was going to wait to hear from my mother's attempt to get permission from Papa before proceeding and said, "Just you do that, Mr. Benton. I'm in an awful hurry to get this job done."

That afternoon when Papa ventured outside for his modified constitutional, he was confronted by a sawhorse and twelve grape stakes propped up in such a way as to conceal his oil barrels and lying beside them was Mr. Benton's posthole digger. Mr. Benton had gone home for lunch.

Mrs. Dunlap forgot to tell Mr. Benton that she was due at The Book Review Club as it was her turn to bring refreshments. She also desired a venue to announce Duncan's engagement. Everybody in town already knew, but it was after all Mrs. Dunlap's privilege to offer the announcement in her own words and with the pride of the moment she was entitled to. She set off happily and did not worry about Papa's seeing the execution of Mr. Benton's idea as she thought that his eyesight was failing so badly that even if he did happen to come outside he probably would not notice the grape stakes on his property.

Of course, Papa's eyesight was not good enough to read small print or to work out the knots in his high top shoes, but he could certainly see 12 six-foot poles lined up on his property was well as the sawhorse they were propped against. "Trespassing" is what he said, kicking at the poles when Mr. Benton returned from lunch. "Those poles are illegally trespassing on my property."

[Part two of an undated story by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Click here for the final installment.]

Mrs. Dunlap's Dutch Colonial: Part One

[Here's a two-sentence review of this piece: "Come for the history. Stay for the story." As Virginia's granddaughter, I am biased. But hopefully your assessment will match up with mine! Read on. . .]

"The Lost Colony" sounds like "The Lost Atlantis," a myth or perhaps a ghost story, but North Carolinians cherish their history of being the first port of entry, thirty-three years before the Pilgrims famously landed on Plymouth Rock.

These first colonists came in 1587 to Roanoke Island just off the North Carolina coast and apparently were established when their ship set sail again for England to bring supplies and more colonists. Four years later when the ship returned, the settlers had vanished, and the only clue as to what became of them was the single word "Croatoan" carved into a tree.

A pageant called "The Lost Colony" is produced yearly near the coastal town of Edenton, and the setting is constructed of materials that came easily to hand for the settlers, who stripped young trees into poles which they lined up for fences.

These enclosures are similar to the grape stake fences which screen off small gardens of another early settlement, Georgetown. There houses are built flush with the cobbled streets and lack the porches or veranda popular in the lower South, where "garden" refers to the growing of vegetables and other areas surrounding a house are called yards.

Mrs. Dunlap's son Duncan, enamored of his fiancée, was also enamored of her family's house in one of these stylish Georgetown neighborhoods with just such grape stake fencing. When his mother was planning her new house as close as possible to Papa's house and yard, Duncan ordered architect's plans for her in a style which if not as grand as the Georgetown houses were at least distinctive, even peculiar, for the street we lived on where every house, large or small, was introduced by a porch. The plans stated that the style was Dutch Colonial; and when it was almost finished, the Railway Express truck delivered another package from Duncan of a size and shape puzzling to the Railway Express Agent, to the driver, and to all those who watched him load and unload.

The house plans Duncan sent ignored Mrs. Dunlap's need for a garage, which Duncan claimed was an anachronism anyway, thus creating a lively discussion when Mrs. Dunlap passed on his comment after looking the word up before going to The Book Review Group.

Duncan's ongoing effort to educate his mother to the level he had attained through seven years of higher education included his frequent use of words such as anachronism with accompanying instruction. Contrary to what one might expect, his mother enjoyed these lessons and practiced what she learned on her neighbors, especially my mother, and on other members of The Book Review Group. There was sometimes a certain nervousness about her conversation, a studied manner in which she would say, "That reminds me" when the prior connection was either faint or nonexistent, and the listener was surprised by a discourse alien to Mrs. Dunlap's usual downhome manner.

"Duncan means well, I suppose," my mother said, "But he's trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," blushing with embarrassment the minute she realized what she had said. "Of course, I don't mean that the way it sounds."

The garage that Mrs. Dunlap's contractor, who claimed he did not need any particular plans, put up for her was lacking in aesthetic appeal; but the lot being so small and the house being so large for the lot, the main problem was that the garage and the clothes line were necessarily placed in the only available space remaining and stuck out like two sore thumbs.

Duncan, soon to be married, doubtless wanted his mother's house when he brought his future bride to meet her to look as attractive as possible, perhaps to look as non small-town Southern as possible without his seeming to express disloyalty to his upbringing. If Mr. Dunlap, Sr., had lived long enough to experience this phase of Duncan's ambivalence towards his hometown, he might have encouraged Mrs. Dunlap to be less malleable; but as it was, Mrs. Dunlap was pretty much putty in Duncan's hands. Mr. Dunlap, Sr., for instance, like Papa, had been opposed to new-fangled conveniences of all kinds and refused to get into a bathtub, citing with dramatic flourishes that the one time he tried it he slipped and nearly broke his neck. He would doubtless have been shocked to learn that Duncan had talked Mrs. Dunlap into having two bedrooms upstairs, one with a stall shower, the first such arrangement in the memory of her contractor, as well as a basement with furnace for central heating.

Papa's house, by contrast, only recently had been modernized to the extent of installing thermostat-controlled oil-burning stoves to replace the old cast iron wood-burning stoves. Unfortunately, the oil barrels were installed on Mrs. Dunlap's side of the house and were unsightly to say the least, but in no way an aesthetic irritant to Papa, who stayed indoors in bad weather and otherwise sat on the front porch where he avoided seeing Mrs. Dunlap's house altogether. His former brisk walk uptown, his daily constitutional, had been reduced by the infirmities of age to puttering around in the back yard when the weather was nice.

It was soon after Duncan and his fiancée announced their engagement to Mrs. Dunlap that the Railway Express truck drove through our backyard (not everyone knew how keenly Papa resented that liberty) right up to Mrs. Dunlap's kitchen door and unloaded the bundle of grape stakes.

[First third of an undated story by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Click here for the second installment. Roanoke illustration via State Archives of North Carolina.]

At Home

Photos via The U.S. National Archives on Flickr, captioned "Bedroom and living-room in company-owned home of workers in Highland Cotton Mills, High Point, North Carolina. This is one of the best there, 1936". Virginia would have been 11 when these vignettes were captured, although she lived some 80+ miles away.