But, then, one can never
tell who might be observing from some obscure corner of the world, I think
as I swab diligently at the lipstick blotch with my left hand, massaging
until it becomes nothing but the memory of a blush. Small things such as
the milky-blue tendrils of smoke that rise and curl from my cigarette like
the cursive letters of a message written on the wind to an unknown
correspondent. Smoking in the dark is no fun, but one can always smoke
alone.
It’s New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2003, and I’m sitting in my bathrobe in
Mobile, Alabama, trying unsuccessfully to keep warm in a poorly insulated
house and feeling like a bad blues song. The temperature outside is
probably not much lower than fifty degrees fahrenheit, but the dampness of
the night air makes it register in the bones as thirty. I shiver and,
after contemplating its neatly-arranged contents, break into my “sausage
and cheese gift box” from Wal-mart, which someone has given me in a
friendly holiday gesture. I examine the cylindrical packaging of the
smoked cheese, finally snipping the end off its plastic casing with a pair
of scissors and squishing the soft cheese out in the same manner that I
will later tonight squeeze toothpaste from a Colgate tube. I take a sip of
cheap but nicely-chilled wine, rolling the crisp flavor of the sauvignon
blanc against the smoky flavor of the cheese, and turn my attention to
Bukka White, who is singing with enthusiastic nostalgia about Stuttgart,
Arkansas, the small town roughly halfway between Little Rock and West
Memphis where, if push comes to shove, I must say I grew up. Although I’m
alone on this most social night of the year, I am not exactly lonely, only
slightly bemused by the fact of my isolation. A perfect night to reject
the illusory offerings of a necessarily murky future and focus on the
past, a perfect night to inhabit and be inhabited by memory.But in a
moment of delay, typical of the writer stalled somewhere between a fear of
beginning and an absolute horror of not, I become fascinated by the burn
marks on the surface of my kitchen table—still, black spots different in
size and shape that represent the many nights spent seated here with wine
splashing into glasses far too frequently and a chain of cigarettes
burning to ash between our fingers, the occasional forgotten cigarette
left too long on the edge of an ashtray, which finally falls unnoticed to
the wood beneath. What are these burns but black marks on the page,
decipherable only by those intoxicated enough to forget that smoldering
ash does burn, does leave a trace, is precisely a carbonic residue of
words spoken the night before?
Put the blindfold on me, then, my dear, and I’ll tell you a story that we
can revise in the morning over coffee, oranges, and the screech of a green
cockatoo. For, in the end, what are we but the stories we tell of
ourselves, a series of constructions and reconstructions built on
congealed words and gestures, some so tiny as to be almost imperceptible
and others so grandiose as to be laughable? You tell me your story, Bukka,
and I’ll tell you mine.
In June of 1969, Bukka White was at the Memphis Blues Festival, singing a
four-and-a-half-minute song called “Stuttgart, Ark.” In June of 1969, I’d
never heard of Bukka White, but, at ten, I was just about to experience
one of those major adolescent set-backs that would make me sing a tune
about Stuttgart very different from Bukka’s. For Bukka, leaving Stuttgart
was the heartbreak and returning, his fondest dream. Although he’s around
sixty when he sings this song, the persona he adopts as he sings is that
of someone much younger, someone who is looking forward to his
twenty-first birthday so that he can take a Greyhound bus back to
Stuttgart, a place reputed by Bukka to have “some of the prettiest women .
. . that you men folks ever saw.” You don’t have to listen too hard to his
lyrics to hear the high esteem in which he holds Stuttgart.
My mother and father take me from Stuttgart, Arkansas, when I just was
only five years old. Yes, my mother and father take me from Stuttgart,
Arkansas, when I was just only five years old. You know I used to hear so
much about Stuttgart, Arkansas, I told the people that’s where I was bred
and born. You know I said when I count twenty-one years old, I’m going
back to Stuttgart, Arkansas. Why you going back there? Oh, yes, if I grow
up and get twenty-one, I’m going back to Stuttgart, Arkansas.
(2)
While Bukka and I might have agreed that Stuttgart women are awfully
pretty, the lyrics of a Chester Burnett song would more accurately have
summed up my opinion of the place: “I’m leavin’ you. I’m going to have to
put you down. If you can’t treat me right, there’s no use in my hanging
‘round.”
I am not a musician, but perhaps what I’m trying to do is not radically
different from what a certain type of musician does, if there’s any truth
in Peter Guralnick’s analysis of the performers who figure in his book
Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians. What Guralnick
writes about is, as he says, often called “roots music,” music in which
performers sing “from the heart,” music “that is deeply engraved in [the
performer’s] background and experience.”(3) According to Guralnick,
these “roots” musicians. . . all recall a boyhood in the country, on the
farm, a shared experience that links them inextricably not to the
undifferentiated mass audience that television courts, but to a
particular, sharply delineated group of men and women who grew up in
circumstances probably very much like their own, who respond to the music
not just as entertainment but as a vital part of their lives.
And yet, as Guralnick points out, the oddly contradictory thing about
these musicians is that the very ones who sing from the heart about home
are the very ones who felt most alienated in and/or have become most
alienated from the place they grew up. Elvis, for example, sang of himself
as a stranger in his own hometown, and, according to Guralnick, the very
first artistic impulse of musicians such as Howlin’ Wolf, Charlie
Feathers, Jack Clement, or Charlie Rich arose in response to “their
alienation from the world in which they grew up[,]” and thus Guralnick
concludes that “it might be difficult to say that success has distanced
them from their origins any more than traits of character or personality
distanced them to begin with” . Obviously, I can’t identify with Guralnick’s roots musicians on the basis of their talent, success, or
musical genius, but if there is any foundation for my belief that we have
something in common, it is surely to be found in this contradiction. For
the place I grew up never embraced me, nor I it, and yet it haunts me like
the ache of an old wound, the kind of wound that never quite heals, the
kind that can only be made by someone or something you love deeply enough
to be deeply hurt by—hence the need to write about it.
In looking back, I realize that I’ve seldom if ever lived in a place where
I felt a true sense of belonging. Perhaps this feeling of alienation is a
common one. Perhaps no one feels really at ease anywhere anymore. Or maybe
there are people who feel secure wherever they go, carrying with them some
internal faculty that allows them to understand the temporal life in a
less personal or more detached way than the rest of us. Or maybe my
inability to feel at home stems from the fact that by the time I was ten,
our family had already moved ten times—from one coast to another, from one
state to another, from one town to another, and even from one country to
another. These moves were never undertaken haphazardly, however. There
were always impeccably sound reasons for them. For instance, the move to
Richmond, Indiana, was made so that my father could attend a Quaker
college, where he and my mother became steeped in the Anabaptist
tradition, political activism, and the pacifist stance toward war and
violence. Or the move to the Belgian Congo, where my father trained
Congolese pilots and farmers in aerial agriculture when the Belgian
colonizers began leaving en masse. Or the move to Little Rock, where we
could attend a bi-racial Presbyterian church and live in a mixed
neighborhood. Given this history of movement, the real aberration was
settling down, and it was only then that I registered most acutely the
feeling of not belonging.
The house we first lived in, upon arrival in rural southeastern Arkansas,
was located on the grounds of the Almyra Municipal Airport, and the road
we traveled to the towns on either side of us, Almyra to the south with a
population of 400 and Stuttgart to the north with a much grander
population of 10,000, was gravel. Many years have passed since 1969, but
even now the Yoder road (named after the Mennonites who created a
community there and then disappeared) remains only partially paved, as if
the passage of time and progress functions only intermittently in that
particular place. My sister and I attended a one-room school in Almyra,
where all the grades sat together to do their reading and studying and
were only distinguished when called to the table at the front of the room
to do supervised work such as fourth-grade history or fifth-grade science.
It was at this table that I first encountered the word “fuck.” During
math, Brad Schrock, who was sitting next to me, laughed and pointed to
something penciled in the margin of my used textbook. I saw a word I
didn’t recognize and pronounced it aloud in the form of a question. That
semester I made a “C” in math.
This, then, was the situation in which our parents had inserted us, and it
was here that we had to find our place. What do kids do when they want to
belong? They take their cues from those around them; they do what the
other kids do, and the thing that my female classmates did was draw paper
dolls. But these were like none I’d ever encountered. They made Barbie
appear modest and rather matronly by comparison, for these paper dolls
looked as if they had just stepped out of a cartoon version of the Sports
Illustrated swimsuit issue. We were little girls drawing seriously adult,
seriously sexy paper dolls who wore bikinis and exotic clothing meant to
be seductive and alluring. By the time I’d finished the fifth grade, I had
drawn so many that I began filing them by name and storing them in a
recipe box. This fact, in itself, gives me pause. Why were the drawings of
these women so diminutive? And why did I file them as if they could be
reduced to specimens or types? And, most importantly perhaps, why place
them in a recipe box?
Although I don’t know how I would have answered these questions then, I do
know that whatever my classmates had been drawing—even if, instead of
paper dolls, it had been something as unsexy as an old tennis shoe or a
blade of grass—I would happily have drawn it for the simple reason that I
loved to draw. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that the way these
drawings functioned for the girls around me was different from the way
they functioned for me. This is pure speculation, but perhaps, for them,
drawing paper dolls had the same value or importance as writing the name
of a boy over and over again on a piece of notebook paper, or seeing what
his last name looked like coupled with the title of “Mrs.” Perhaps they
were drawing what they wished to become, creating a future version of
themselves. For me, however, the idea that I would someday become a woman,
someday resemble these paper dolls, was so fantastic as to be
inconceivable. I drew, then, not what I wished to become but in order to
become.
When one is on the brink of puberty, one’s identity is at its most
precarious, and thus one often draws (no pun intended) hasty and erroneous
conclusions about oneself and one’s relationship to the rest of the world.
My hasty and erroneous conclusion was that I was not feminine enough nor
pretty enough to ever be a woman, much less a desirable one. And so by the
time I had entered the fifth grade, the vision of the life I planned to
lead was well established and quite simple: I would live in Switzerland,
create art, and never marry. Painting against the sublime backdrop of the
Alps, I would make a name for myself, and I would keep it.
Needless to say, when an art competition was announced at school that
fall, I flung myself into a frenzy of feverish activity. This was a chance
to prove myself, the chance that I, like the inconspicuous flea or tic
waiting to attach itself to its victim, had been waiting for. I would
continue drawing paper dolls at school, but I would draw something serious
for the art contest. Having been influenced by books that reproduced the
rich, chocolate browns of Rembrandt, the funky cubism of Picasso, and the
giraffe-like edifices and stretched timepieces of Dali, I had come to
believe that there was a fundamental difference between “low” and “high”
art, and so I chose to draw what I considered to be the height of “high”
art: a still-life of a bowl of fruit.
In the days before the competition was to be judged, I drew sketch after
sketch of a bowl that looked almost boat-like with its mast of firm,
upright bananas and its fruit-shaped passengers peering over the side:
plump clusters of grapes cascaded down the bow, their vines tangled around
shiny apples that nestled up against pockmarked oranges and triangular
pears, the slice of watermelon beside the bowl resembling nothing if not a
dinghy. When I was finally satisfied with the arrangement of the objects
and had achieved what I felt to be the perfect juxtaposition of fruit, I
began work on the shading. I thought about light and how it should hit
from just the right angle, giving everything the proper glow and shine.
Occasionally, my sister would peek over my shoulder and make awe-filled
noises. “That apple looks so real,” she would say, almost breathless. Or,
“How’d you get those bananas to look kinda bruised?” Or, “What sorta
grapes are those gonna be? Purple or green?” We both thought I was
creating a masterpiece, and when I saw it tacked up next to the other
drawings that lined the walls of the assembly hall, I knew with certainty
that it was the best. None of the others exhibited the attention to
detail, the concern for realism, or the love of color and shadow and line
that my still-life did. It stuck out like a sore but beautiful thumb
amidst the hurried sketches of barns with pumpkins and shocks of wheat in
the foreground or of empty rice fields with the usual “V” of Canadian
geese flying overhead. But I didn’t win. I didn’t even get an honorable
mention.
The day the contest winners were announced was one of the most miserable
days of my young life. How could it be that Gina, whose barn looked more
like an igloo, had won the contest? She wasn’t a good artist, and she
didn’t need the honor of winning. She already belonged. Even now, 34 years
later, I can still conjure up the overwhelming sense of shame and
confusion that wrapped itself around me as tightly as the linen strips
binding an Egyptian mummy. Winning had seemed within reach, a just and
true outcome, but then the world tilted and everything slid out of place.
My sense of identity, my sense of justice, my sense of what made sense—all
were thrown out of focus. This was to have been my debut, the first moment
of public recognition, the day that would not only set my future on course
but also establish with certainty my value to and place in the community.
The red sea of doubt did not part that day, however, and I did not walk
through to the promised land. Instead, we moved to Stuttgart the following
year, and although Almyra had been the scene of the betrayal, Stuttgart
suffered the brunt of my anger. I continued to draw, but it would be
nearly twenty years before I publicly exhibited my work again. As the
years passed and my female classmates began resembling the paper dolls we
had created, their budding good looks giving them the confidence to enter
the Miss Mallard beauty pageant and their interest in cooking, the skills
they needed to create recipes that would win them the coveted title of
Miss Fluffy Rice, I became a staunch feminist, the bitter kind that gives
feminism a bad name. (4) My vision had been blown to bits, and I felt like
blowing Stuttgart up in return. If the other girls wanted to use their
bodies and faces like a canvas and paint themselves into existence as
farmers’ wives, they could do so, but I wouldn’t. I did not want to be a
paper doll filed away in a recipe box.
This was my attitude when, at 18, I kicked the delta dust off my heels and
left Stuttgart for yet another community in which belonging would be hard
to achieve. At 44, I’m no longer angry at Stuttgart. In fact, I prefer
flat land to mountains, and there’s nothing as beautiful to me as a rice
field just before harvesting time, nothing that moves me to tears more
quickly than the graceful swoop and glide of an Ag Cat, Snow, or Air
Tractor “dusting” crops in the stillness of a hot summer day, nothing more
evocative than the sickly-sweet chemical-smell of stam in the early hours
of dawn.
Thankfully, when I look back on the events that took place in the fall of
1969, I find that I have a new understanding of them. If it’s possible to
argue, as Guralnick does, that Elvis’s “original triumph [as an artist]
was his very artlessness,” perhaps it would be possible to argue that my
original failure as an artist was my very artfulness. What I would say
now, if I were to occupy the position of judge and comment on that bowl of
fruit, is this: very nicely executed, from a technical standpoint, but
ultimately lifeless. The apple does not convince me that it’s just been
plucked from the tree. The banana does not convince me that it’s been
handled by a living, breathing human being. The artist has been far too
careful, far too restrained in her treatment of the fruit. Clearly,
there’s so much at stake for this artist that she has lost her nerve. She
has taken no risks, avoided making mistakes, but in doing so has made the
greatest mistake of all. Now, these other drawings, while rather poorly
executed, show a kind of hurried dash that suggests life and movement, a
raw vitality that the still-life lacks. The still-life is an artful
treatment of an artful subject, a representation of a representation, a
drawing that suggests an understanding of art so abstract that it is
completely alienated from real life. What we’re looking for in a winner is
a drawing that doesn’t open the gap between art and life but closes it.
The still-life opens the gap so wide that the artist seems to have fallen
in.
I doubt that the judges of the contest critiqued my still-life and the
other drawings in this particular manner, but what they must have seen
when they looked at my bowl of fruit was a drawing that defied the
definition of the contest. It was the Grand Prairie Autumn Art Festival,
after all, and what did that bowl of fruit have to do with the Grand
Prairie or with autumn?
The folks down in the Mississippi Delta don’t make a living off bananas or
grapes or apples or oranges or pears. They grow soybeans and wheat and
milo and cotton and, most importantly, rice. In fact, Stuttgart is still
touted by the Chamber of Commerce as the “rice and duck capital of the
world.” It’s the home of Riceland Rice, and while the Ricebird football
team may not have had the most intimidating name, they did have a pretty
good winning record when I was in school. As for the square dance club my
parents belonged to, it was called the Levee Walkers in honor of the
farmers who walked the levees to inspect their fields. The town of
Stuttgart takes its rice very seriously, and, just as the Irish are said
to eat potatoes, the residents eat it at every turn. And when the rice has
been harvested, and the fields look empty and bleak under the gray skies
of November, the ducks fly in to pick over what’s left, and with the ducks
come wealthy hunters from all over the U.S. and Canada. They come to the
Grand Prairie and spend money to sit in a cold duck blind, where they
drink apricot brandy and wait for unsuspecting fowl to fly by.
If I’d set my bowl of fruit afloat on a flooded rice field, put a wounded
duck or two falling from the sky, or sketched Miss Fluffy Rice plucking a
piece of fruit from the bowl, I’d probably have won the contest hands
down. But the bowl of fruit just didn’t belong in the Grand Prairie Autumn
Art Festival. It was awkwardly out of step with place and time just like
the hopeful, young artist who had created it. Ironic, isn’t it? The very
thing that was meant to mark her place in the community was the very thing
that marked her distance from it.
As I take another sip of wine and huddle more deeply into my bathrobe, I
feel a sad tenderness for the ten-year-old me who seems simultaneously
very near and very far away, and I wonder whether I’d have any song to
sing at all, now, if success had come when I supposed it should have, if
success had come so early, if success had come in the grave, silent
contours of a still-life.
Endnotes
Becky McLaughlin