Also, Ol' Flap is a bit of a mystery to me. When I look up characters in Jude the Obscure, which I have never read, it does not come up, neither does Old Flop. Mama's A's and O's are identical. At any rate, it refers to God. This story is a little long for a blog post, but I think it is worth the read. I hope you enjoy it.
Finally, I'd like to go on the record saying that there is no proof of the illicit affair described. There is certainly no doubt that Daniel McHan West (Uncle Dock) was a West - he looked just like all of the rest of them. Was this story motivated by the fact that Mama herself had just had an affair? Was it the delusions of an old woman who had just been worked up by Thomas Hardy? Who knows? No one. At any rate, here it is, a story about Grandma West (Willie Anne Feemster Sides West), fondly referred to as Gram...
pictured: Willie Anne Feemster Sides West "Annie"
Begin Entry: Journal of Anita West Moss 1987
The summer I was fourteen years old, Gram decided it was time to get ready to die. "I'm sick of this," she said "Everybody who knows me is lying up yonder in Greenbrier. I don't aim to put up with it too much longer." And her delicately bowed mouth set itself in the thin tight line I had known all my life. Gram was no talker. She was a listener and a reader. I read Jude the Obscure to her that summer. "Durn ol' Flap," she would mutter. He never lets up, does he? Never gives poor folks a chance. Curse that Jude, a pure fool, the way most men are. Gram considered Ol' Flap a contemptuous name for the Lord, not her personal Savior, but her personal enemy. And after she got to talking about it, I couldn't help but agree with her.
Now it's deep January, and middle age has me in thrall. I need to go to the Spa Lovely and do at least two hundred stomach crunches. I need to work my body and make it hurt, just the way the lithesome Jane Fonda urges me to do, but I'm not going to, I say to myself defiantly. I'm going to finish up this shortbread and think about Gram. This Christmas I noticed for the first time that Gram's body has found its reincarnation in my older daughter. My daughter is walking around in the delicately fragile lovely bones of her great-grandmother who died years before she was born. I look at the face of a sixteen-year-old Gram. She was born in 1875 so that means that picture would have been taken in 1891. My hair is just the color of hers. It looks just plain brown but it is all tinged and burnished with red highlights and turns glorious in the sun. Hers is long but is pulled back severely into a bun. In the front, though, she has the Gibson Girl Fringe. She looks haughty and defiant and bored - stares coldly at the camera with her intense blue eyes. The bones of her face are delicate and lovely - high cheekbones and a poignant jaw - not too prominent. It is the kind of face that makes women famous; that's why Gram was voted the most beautiful girl in the county the year she turned sixteen even if she was the orphaned girl adopted by the Widow Sides who ran the Ackerman Inn to support herself and her daughter. And that's why the handsome Manley West jilted his fiance, Amy Lou, and started courting Annie Sides. Gram jilted her own sweetheart, Will, for the sake of my granddaddy's coal-black hair and tall graceful form, and yellow-gold eyes that crinkled up when he smiled.
"That was my most serious mistake in life," Gram said, "Jilting Will, who adored me and treated me like a delicate Chrystal and would have stood by me and been good to me, even when I wasn't the best-looking girl in Ackerman any longer." Then Gram clutched my hand "Never, never marry a good looking man," she said, "Women never will stop running after them - not even after they're old - old fools running after young gals." "Oh, I don't plan to marry, Gram. I plan to have lovers and dumping them first before they get a chance to dump me." I imagined myself in a black form-fitting evening gown, covered with silver sequins, my silver fox jacket tossed carelessly over my shoulder; exhaling a long drag on my cigarette, "Well, so long," I'd say to my broken-hearted, cast-off lover, "See you around." Then I disappear from his life to haunt his dreams forever. I walk off into a magical city street. I hum a Ruth Etting tune..."Love Me or Leave Me." "Well, good luck," Gram said, "but there has never been an old maid in our family. I'll be thinking about this when I watch you walk down the aisle."
But Gram had no real interest in my life. Her mind ran on her life between the paroxysms of pain that gripped her abdomen, caused her sometimes to go out of her head and hallucinate, and believe she was giving birth to one or another of her nine children.
"Do you think you can wash my hair?" she asks, "I was ever particular about my hair," Yes, I know she was particular. All my life I had wanted to brush that wavy silver hair that reminded me of Sparkle Pretty in the funny paper. But now Gram was too frail to wash her own hair. One day last winter she had broken her hip. I believed her when she said she didn't fall. She said her hip broke while she was brushing her hair out in front of the mirror in the bathroom and then she fell. And then she really began to go down. She said her poor old body knew it was time to die; that's why it had give out on her like that, just let her know in no uncertain terms that she had made up her last garden, put up her last batch of crisp green watermelon pickles, crocheted her last antimacassar or lace doily. But Gram was in the mood to do some talking after she had been such a quiet pretty little thing all of her life, and it seemed she couldn't tell it all fast enough.
"First thing I remember," she said, her voice low and weak but still soft and musical the way voices from the southern part of the state are, "I woke up in my little white bed with my doll, Amanda, beside me and the house was full of strange voices and funny smells. When I stood up in the little crib, I called out for my mother, one of my aunts came and picked me up. She said my mother was not feeling so awful well and neither was my pa. She said I'd have to wait to see them. She took me in the kitchen, and Dorsey, our Negro cook, took me in her arms and sat by the big wood cook stove my mother was so proud of and fed me some ham and hot biscuit. Later that day she took me and my doll, Amanda, off to her cabin to play with her grandchildren while my mother and my pa got over the influenza. I heard her say to Queenie-Lee, her daughter, that lived there with all those little young 'uns. that the flux had already turned into the bloody flux and that old Dr. Holland said neither one of them had even a fifty-fifty chance.
So the next thing I know, my grandpa was holding me in the rain at the cemetery and the preacher was throwing dirt in on my mother and pa, and that was the last I ever knew of my fine young father, William Feemster and my beautiful young mother, Anne Foreman. But they were fine people from fine families and they both had good educations. There are doctors and lawyers in West Point today with the name of Feemster and Foreman. And why mother's and father's people didn't want a sweet little baby girl, their own flesh and blood, I never will know. But I made up my mind never to try and find out. I said Ma Sides is the only kin I have. When I was about thirty-five years old, one of my mother's sisters took a notion to find me, after she had allowed her own dead sister's only child to be raised with a stranger, but I never answered the letter. Your Aunt Rene has ever held that against me. She said the Foreman and the Feemster families were influential people in this state. I said they don't influence me, and I am to keep it that way. And then Rene was so hacked and so vexed that she just hushed about it.
The first thing I recall after that rainy time in the cemetery, I was sitting up in the buggy alongside my grandpa. I clutched Amanda close to my chest. Amanda was in my stocking at for Christmas, and I was the proudest thing of her that ever was, even if one of her eyes was gone and the tip of her china nose chipped. I sat up beside my tall grandpa and tried my hardest not to cry and I didn't. I just sat wrapped up in a big black shawl and listened to the rain falling real steady on the hood of the buggy and watched Grandpa's stern profile. It seemed like days and days that we were riding in the buggy in the falling rain. It was December and cold, too. And lots of folks were dying off the way my mother and father had. I reckon my grandpa felt like he couldn't take care of a baby girl, either, for the next thing I knew he was lifting me and Amanda down from the buggy. We had pulled up in front of the Ackerman Inn. A tall figure ran out of the front door and took me out of Grandpa's arms. "So this is that precious baby girl. I'm Sally Sides," she said "From here on out I'm going to be your Ma." And she told the truth about that because we never spent another night apart the rest of Ma Sides life. I said it and I meant it. Any man who wanted me had to make room in his home and heart for the only family I ever knew. And I'll say this for Manley West; he was good to Ma Sides. Lord, what am I saying. Manley West was good in so many ways. It wasn't his fault that the women couldn't leave him alone and would just traipse after him till he couldn't stand it. Anyway, when I was still a young woman, your Mama was maybe two years old, well, I paid it all out to Manley. I stepped out with another man. Yes, Lord, the blood rose up and beat in my breast every time I would see that man. We'd look into each other eyes and know what we both wanted. So I met him at night for one whole summer. I longed for him. Black, bottomless passion held us like that. If Manley knowed anything, he never let on. Just the way I never let on that I knew about all of those women. When that man took me I would look up over his shoulder and feel like the hot stars were so close I could touch them and I would think this is really all there is, but I reckon Ol' Flap has paid me out for that wicked pleasure in the hot night. Because then the man wanted me to leave Manley and the children and especially when I knew there would be another baby. So when I said I couldn't, he turned mean on me. He got hard-hearted and bitter, and he'd try to hurt me at night - bruised my flesh. Finally, I said I'd have to end it and he put his hands around my throat and threatened to kill me. So that was the way Daniel came into this world, from those summer nights when I left Manley's bed and fled through the darkness just to be with him. But it wasn't enough for him to hurt me and bruise me. No, I reckon he couldn't stand the sight of me and Manley and our children. So he set Manley's sawmill on fire. We lost everything in that fire. So, I reckon that was the beginning of the punishment - seems like it's just been going on like that ever since."
After Gram got done with that story, she drifted into sleep for a while. And I figured a way I could wash her hair. When she woke up, I told her we could put a chair in the bathtub and let her sit in it while I washed her hair, so that's what we did. Gram's body looked almost like a child's because it was so thin but the flesh had fallen sadly. I thought I'm glad she loved that man under the stars and felt the life all around her - all that pulsing life in the Mississippi night with the katydids murmuring and the crickets singing and the fireflies flickering. I could imagine the sweating bodies in the darkness and felt the heat sweeping washing over me as I washed Gram's body and shampooed her hair. After I had dried her small body and brushed out the wavy hair, I read some more from Jude the Obscure. Gram said Sue Bridehead was the silliest fool she ever heard of. We both said we liked Return of the Native a whole lot better.
Gram loved books and had read so much in the poor light of oil lamps that one of her blue eyes had gone askew or at least that's what her children said. Aunt Beryl often said reproachfully, "Mama let the bread burn many a time when she was reading a book." "Good," I thought"let the damn stuff burn." Once Aunt Beryl said, my grandpa got so mad that he put a stack of books in her oven and burned them. But he regretted that rash action because Gram grabbed up all of his pipes and his checkers and dominoes and stuffed them in the oven.
I tried to braid Gram's hair just the way she always did, but I couldn't get it right. The waves still fell the right way around her face, though, and I helped her into her blue nightgown; then she fell back exhausted against a stack of pillows. Gram decided she didn't want to eat anymore. "No," she would shake her head when I brought her tray into her, "Take it away. Eating is for folks that can get well. Nourishment won't help me, not no more." But I did get her to sip some cold lemonade and to taste just a little lime sherbet from the pink depression glass dish she thought was so pretty. What she needed to do was to keep talking. So she held onto my hand and talked as fast as she could, as if she knew there wasn't much time left or at least time when she wouldn't be out of her head. I sat listening to my grandmother, my mother's very own mother and grieving already because I knew when she was gone, I would never stop missing her. And I already saw the day my own mother would die and how her mind would run on Gram. "Our mother was remarkable, truly remarkable -- such a beautiful smart genteel woman just wasted in these cotton fields." And my aunts would nod their agreement.
Gram began to talk again, "I got way down yonder ahead of myself a while ago; I had started telling about when I went to live with Ma Sides shortly after my mother and Pa died with influenza. I don't know what I thought when Sally Sides said she was my new ma. I don't know what may have been between her and my grandpa. He was a widower by then and Ma Sides had lost her husband in the War between the States. I'll tell about that directly. It could have been that Ma and my Grandpa loved each other. Maybe he gave me to her because she'd been cheated out of having children of her own. Maybe my aunts really wanted me and he wanted Sally Sides to have me to make her beautiful gray eyes light up with love whenever she'd look at me. Maybe that's how it was. But I never will know. Ma wouldn't never talk about it. My aunts never came to visit, so pretty soon I got used to living in the inn. Drummers would come through - the same ones regular - and they all looked forward to staying there because Ma Sides was the best cook I ever knew. She'd cook all day and serve a big Sunday dinner every night of the week -- ham and fried chicken and country fried steak and peach and pear pickles that she put up herself and blackberry pie from the berries we'd work so hard to put up. Her pantry looked just like a country fair with the jars all labeled. We did most of the work ourselves --- just had one Negro girl to help with the cleaning and Sam Acker would help with the outside work. Somehow in all that work and worry Ma still found time to teach me to read and write and count because she'd finished at the female academy before she had married young Captain Sides. After the war, the schools was all shut down for a long time, but Ma taught me to read from her book of Aesop's Fables. Whatever she'd teach me, why I'd memorize just that quick and tell it back to her when we'd sit down before the fire in the evening with the guests. All the men, the boarders, made over me and said what a smart pretty child I was. And Ma would smile and say "That child is from one of the finest families in this country. She would be dressed in silk if her folks hadn't died on her." But Lord, I wanted to go to school so bad I'd dream and hope I could go somehow, and finally the schools did open, and I went for a few years, but Ma's health began to go down and I had to stay home and try to keep things going seven days a week. Ma often talked about her young husband. He was from a fine family. One of his uncles had even been a general in the Confederate Army, and Ma always thought her handsome young husband was in something called the Intelligence Corps. She knew for a fact that he would go cross Union lines and gather up information and that what he did was an awful secret. Anyway, he came back home once to get a fresh horse and to tell her he had to light out for Texas but that he would come back for her or send for her whenever he could. Within the hour, Ma Sides said the Yankee soldiers came to look for him. They searched the house, but the Yankee Major was polite to her and wouldn't let the soldiers take anything. And Ma was always so thankful they didn't burn her fine house since that's how she made her living. Finally, she did have to sell off all the fine furniture, most of it from her people to pay the taxes. Ma said she stood on the veranda in the twilight and watched her young husband ride away across the pasture and not daring to think of what turned out to be true; that she never saw nor heard of him again. She didn't believe he made it to Texas. She believed the Yankees caught him and killed him, but since she never did know for sure, why of course she never did feel free to marry. I have always hoped in my heart that she and my grandpa loved one another, for there never has been a finer woman on this earth than she was with her high forehead and the widow's peak of black hair and her big gray eyes that were so full of fun and yet so full of pain. I reckon my grandpa knew that his daughters, my aunts, would never have been the mother to me that Sally Sides was. - not even my own mother could have been any better. So I reckon my grandpa knew what he was doing when he rode through the rain with Amanda and me wrapped up in my mother's black shawl. And growing up in the Ackerman Inn was truly interesting, even if it was more work than several grown men ought to have to do. But Ma Sides and I ran that Inn and made money and paid our debts and folks respected us for it, too. And Lord, the things that happened in that inn.
I mind once they was two men that made up their minds to have a duel. They had made it up to come to the inn and spend the night then meet with their seconds at dawn down by the river. We could just hear them upstairs pacing in their rooms. Ma and her guests started talking about what a pack of foolishness it all was - two grown men bound and determined to shoot each other. We didn't know what the trouble was but Ma said it was another example of the way men would do - deprive their wives and children of a husband and a father because their precious honor was offended. Finally, Ma said she had put up with that pacing long enough. She said she was going to try and talk some sense into them. So she went marching up the stairs and knocked on Mr. Irwin Lefever's door and talked for a long time. Then she went to Mr. Edward Armstrong's room and talked; then back to Mr. Lefever's room and so on till she had talked them both out of the duel. She said come down to the dining room and we'd all drink a glass of elderberry wine she'd made herself. So they came down and shook hands and we all drank elderberry wine and ate teacakes. Ma was the hero, but few people could resist that sweet southern voice that sounded like music - all lilting and lovely - but which talked such good sense. Ma Sides was some woman. Everbody in Ackerman said so, and it was the truth.
Your Granddaddy's people lived in Newberry, South Carolina for a long time - since the Revolution. I've heard how his ancestors fought with Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, against the British. They had a fine plantation and good educations, but after the war, they lost everything, because, like most folks, they couldn't pay the taxes the Yankees put on them. So the family broke up - some of them are still in South Carolina. Buddy (Gram's oldest son) always said he would go back to South Carolina when he grew up, and of course, he did, too.
(Gram was proud of that because, Eugene, Uncle Buddy's son had played football for Clemson I can see her now hovering over the radio following every play and jumping up and clapping when Clemson would score a touchdown. She was the same way when Carl Edward played for Ole Miss and after that she was just hooked on the game and could tell more about it than any of her grandsons could. If one of her favorites lost, she would sulk for days.)
Well, anyhow, that's how the Wests came to Mississippi, Lots of folks from the East came to Mississippi and lots went on to Texas or Oklahoma hoping for a new start. I reckon it was too hard to stay and see everything your folks had worked for in ruins. As I told you already, I was engaged to Willford Millsaps, but then at church one Sunday, Manley West and I kept staring at each other over our hymn books. That was the fall they voted me the prettiest girl in the county. I was just barely seventeen when I married Manley. Of course, Will didn't come to the wedding. At the reception, I noticed that Manley's younger brother stayed right beside me. A long time after that, Sam told me that your grandpa's fiance, the one he jilted for me, had sworn to kill me. Sam was scared to death she might come to the reception and do it, so he stood close to me the whole time.
Manley did real well in the sawmill business, and we prospered and the precious children kept coming one after another, but then when that man turned against me and burned Manley's sawmill, that just ruined everything. We had to leave Ackerman and come to Monroe County and Manley just never did take ahold after that. I reckon we'd both done too much hurt to one another. We both quit smiling after all that. Then when your Uncle Paul took his own life, I knew Ol' Flap had it in for me. I knew he aimed for me just to keep payin' for it all. First, it was your Grandpa's foot that was burned so bad, then that eczema that drove the life out of me and really made me crazy, and all those years when Manley was down and I waited on him. But I'm about done with it now, I reckon."
End Entry
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