[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Perhaps she felt that these images were false and bespoke an outdated era when studio photographers, copying Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, romanticized mothers and children.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.]
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