“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
That paragraph from Lolita speaks to me. My mother was photogenic (though there was no freak accident). I had my "pocket of warmth in the darkest past." I recall from my childhood "remnants of day suspended," and I still can see the midges in the air and smell fragrant honeysuckle entwined within the hedges.
I was born in 1946 in Jacksonville, in the state of Florida. My birth occurred a mere 81 years after the Civil War ended and ratification of the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. Those events—slavery, the Civil War—have always seemed like ancient history to me. Yet, the passage of time from the last day of slavery in America to the day of my birth amounts to only a single human lifetime.
My grandfather, my mother's father, was a quiet, easy-going man. He was born in 1884 in rural Virginia. Slavery still existed when his parents were born. I sometimes think about the impact of that evil institution on Caucasions of that day—not slaveowners, but ordinary people: farmers, merchants, country folk, city folk. I think about how the attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices engendered during slavery have rippled down the years, affecting my grandfather's life, his daughter's life, my life. I am the third generation of my family to be born after the end of the era of slavery.
My grandmother, as I remember her, was a heavy-set woman with a nervous disposition. My grandparents were always elderly when I knew them, and yet they were somehow ageless. I thought they were probably born elderly and hadn't changed at all since birth. Grandmother read the Bible every day for a half hour after lunch, which she called dinner. (The last meal of the day was supper. In olden days, the word "dinner" referred to the largest meal of the day, usually eaten at noon. No one used the word "lunch.") She was strict about not allowing profanity in her house. Uttering the word "darn" would bring me a reprimand. When I was 13 and 14 years old, I had a morning newspaper route, and after delivering papers I would often stop by her house and visit with her. She always prepared breakfast for me, which consisted of a tall stack of pancakes, butter, syrup, and bacon. (I ate as much as I could hold and never gained an ounce of weight.) She was an easily frightened woman, and after her death there was speculation in the family that her death may have been caused by some kind of nervous event that today would be called a panic attack, which might have precipitated a heart attack.
Those were the people who produced my mother. She was born in a slightly more enlightened era: 1916, a time when women still could not vote. (The 19th Amendment would not be passed until 1920.) Even as a boy I recognized that my mother was a very photogenic woman. She was pretty. She was, like her mother, a nervous woman who was easily frightened. Most of her immediate family did not understand her fright and had little patience with her. There were some who ridiculed her fright when it appeared.
My father was a hard-working, hard-drinking, often angry man, born in 1922 in the heart of Dixie: Alabama. He was a product of his milieu. He was a racist, but he wasn't a hater. He was never a hater. His racism involved the simple belief that Caucasions were superior to other races in certain respects. He never extrapolated that belief into an action against another person or another race.
For example, on one bright, summer day (I was working in Burlington, North Carolina then) I was visiting my parents, and my father suggested the two of us drive to the countryside and stop at a certain black church. My father worked with a man who was a deacon at that church and that is how he had learned that the church's air conditioning had failed. My father was an air conditioning mechanic; I was an electrical engineer. He figured the two of us could get that a/c system working again. And we did. The repair was pro bono. My father neither asked for, nor expected, payment for the work. His reward was knowing that the people attending that church would no longer suffer in the midday heat.
I have a brother, born five years after me. We were never close—too many years between us. I was serious, intent on becoming an electrical engineer when I grew up. My brother had no ambition that I can recall. He attended university for four years but because he kept changing his major, he never earned a degree. Later he went to a technical school and became an optician. He's worked as an optician ever since. He may be retired now. I don't know. The last time we spoke, and it was brief, was in 2010 when I called to tell him I was driving to Florida for our cousin Ron's funeral. We spoke on the phone for less than a minute. The previous time I saw him was in 2004 when he was passing through town.
So my father's DNA will not be propagated into the future. He had two sons, but I had no children and my brother had one child. That child had no children other than the daughter of a woman he married, in other words, his stepdaughter.
It's just as well. My father and his brother were both heavy drinkers and lived misspent lives in some ways. Neither of them should have had children, but they did and their insanity, though muted, lives on through my brother and myself, though I'm not going to write about my own particular craziness, because (1) it would serve no purpose and (2) I've written about a significant portion of it already, in two blog posts titled Panic and A Conversation. If you haven't yet read them, just follow the links and you'll have enough soap-opera commentary to put you into psychoanalysis.
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