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purejuiceThis is my entry in the first annual doctorgogol Halloween Memoir Marathon.
Oh well.
It just goes to show that winter is the time for introspection and Halloween is the rent in the veil between the two worlds pf summer and winter, through which the spirits can pass -- to rest, or not, as needed.
The Ballad of Aunt Cherie
She is the family secret, Aunt Cherie, and Cherie is my middle name. I had never seen my own name on a gravestone until this year. When she shot herself in her father’s library in the summer of 1940, the only thing the old man said was, “I didn’t know she knew how to use a gun.”
More than sixty-five years after her death, and more than forty years after I first learned that she was a Lesbian, I woke up one morning last week and realized that what I know about Aunt Cherie had changed. It’s a little thing, the substance of things unseen, but it is the only real thing I have made of the gifts my father and his family left me. Literally, it is the assurance that the truth of the facts will appear if I can get them and if I can hold them long enough in my mind without drawing any conclusions.
I knew only that she had died before I was born. My parents had been on the road then – they were in Peru -- and had been on the road ever since then. They didn’t unpack until I was about 12 years old. Then all the family books and grandfather clocks and ancient prints of giant blue herons emerged, and I could begin, in the silent house, in the hall Daddy had made into a library, on the seven-foot long day bed they’d had custom made somewhere so Daddy’s feet wouldn’t hang over the end, to piece together just who we were.
Sitting on the day bed looking at the paperbound volumes of poetry Aunt Cherie had published – Masks and Gypsy Music in 1937, Shadows and Windy Places in 1938, and Song of the Isles in 1940 -- was the first I knew of her. In the poems, there were swashbuckling boy poses struck on highland moors and pirate ships and gypsy caravans, a few small poems about masks, a few long poems setting Bible scenes to epic dialogue. Her “Ballad of the Storm”, published the year she died, fuses two of her genres, and is a highland story set to epic dialogue. It ends with a flourish:
“For I’d rather face what the wild sea brings
Or die in the outer isles,
Than seek Dunvegan’s help again
Or suffer his crafty smiles!
Drive out beyond the bay,” he cried,
“Turn out past Dunvegan Head!
We’ll take our chance with the wind and storm,
And the sea shall bury our dead!”
The inscriptions of her books, in a handwriting I determined to be hers from looking at her signature on the fly leaves of other newly surfaced books, which had not followed us around the world, were mysterious. “To Jim,” they read. “From Bob.” For more than forty years, I have always thought they were books dedicated by Aunt Cherie, as Bob, to her mysterious girlfriend, “Jim.” Aunt Cherie had died, I was always told, of a broken heart, and I was sure that Jim was the woman who had done it. What I woke up knowing, just the other day, is that the truth was less romantic, smaller, and much sadder. The books were inscribed to my father, one of whose obscure nicknames was Jim, from the older sister he thought of as “Barb.” She thinks of herself as Bob. His letters home all speak of her as “Barb.” That could break your heart. A Southern accent can hide a world of gender performance.
The greatest thing my father’s people have given me is my life as a writer. The linguistic talent, the ear, the books, the curiosity, the hell-bent asperity and tough-mindedness -- all those things are gifts, after all. With his Charleston accent and his newly issued college degree in Latin and Greek, my father had no recourse, in June of 1930, but to take a job driving cars from Detroit to Florida. When that did not suffice, he spent Christmas homeless, one of the many stories he never did tell me, and sold oranges on the street corners of El Dorado.
As would befit the scion of many generations of Presbyterians – called Orangemen when they colonized Ulster -- whose motto is a Latin and not a Gaelic one. Nec tamen consumebatur. This is a reference perhaps less to the burning bush, as the Church of Scotland claims, and more to the ferocious Calvinist martyrs of the Scottish reformation, who were burned at the stake. It was my man, John Knox, who told Mary, Queen of Scots, she was a whore, and so was her Pope. He made her cry.
And they were not consumed.
Nor was Scotland. Nor was indeed the Confederacy where their descendents, my father’s people, added their own brand of hillbilly intransigence to the war between the states.
That war is not yet over. When I went for the first time to see Aunt Cherie’s grave on All Saints’ Day this year, in Gifford, the little town they were living in when I was born, the local paper had two big stories. There was a large color photograph of the high school homecoming queen in the place of honor reserved, in newspapers outside the Shenandoah Valley, for photographs of war. In the Shenandoah Valley, Miss Kelsey Giardano, in her crown, a chic black suit, and a smile slightly fixed for the ages, waved at the stadium crowd only a small town football game can muster.
The lead story on the front page was about the state battle flag carried throughout the Civil War by the 28th Virginia Regiment, 600 farmers of the Shenandoah Valley. The flag had been captured nearly a hundred and fifty years earlier by a Minnesota regiment at Gettysburg. The Virginians still want it back. The Minnesotans, as they had been for nearly a hundred and fifty years, were still saying no. When the U.S. government ordered Minnesota to return the flag at the turn of the 20th century, they said no. When the Virginia Senate asked them for it again at the turn of the 21st century, Minnesota’s then-governor Jesse Ventura said, “Why? I mean, we won.”
It is a mark of progress, to be certain, that a pretty girl named Giardano could be elected homecoming queen. Most of the names in that part of the world, in the Appalachians and the Blue Ridge, are Church of Scotland names, breakaway Presbyterian sect names, and have been since the 17th century. They’re the ones who were too mean to emigrate with their younger brothers through the Cumberland Gap west to manifest their destiny and to send their accents all the way to the Alamo. One reason is the Shenandoah Valley is the most beautiful place on earth. The beautiful old blue mountains are too far away to block out the sky, and just close enough to protect the old farms and farmers from the Indians and the British and the cruel plantationeer Englishmen of the Tidewater, and the worst of their slave and sharecropper economy, and for a while, the old blue mountains sheltered the bread basket of the Confederacy, and its railroad, and its free men, from the Union army. In that part of the world, Johnny Reb’s name was Scottish. He was Presbyterian. In the New World, back country Presbyterians disrupted Anglican services, drove off the preacher’s horse, stole his church key, set a pack of hounds to fighting outside, and fed his parishioners barrels of whiskey just before communion services. Fox Butterfield, in his book, All God’s Children, contends the Scots-Irish, with their thousand-year-old lex talionis culture of revenge, taught black Americans how to be violent.
So the valley and the Carolinas were settled by fire-breathing Presbyterian farmers who lost the war. Half of the 600 farmers of the 28th Virginia Regiment were killed and half of the survivors were crippled. All that is left now is the most beautiful valley, the old blue mountains, the volunteer sycamore growing alone high up on edge of the cliff slashed along the old Indian trail which became, after the turnpike, after the railroad, Interstate 81, its yellow and red leaves turning over and over in the breeze, glittering in the wake of the tractor trailers. Or the statue of a Confederate soldier far off on the horizon, with his head bowed, in a wheat field, the honeyed autumn sunlight pouring over the harvest.
Cherie’s parents were born in South Carolina during the Civil War. They grew up during reconstruction almost in the terms described in Gone With the Wind. Their children were raised on stories of that “impoverishment of land and people”, according to a memoir left by one of their sons. “It was a pleasant surprise,” Uncle Laudy wrote, looking back at the age of 90, “to find that these people north of the Mason-Dixon line did not have horns and tails as I had imagined, but were really people with whom I could relate.” My mother, a Yankee, confirms this prejudice and says Aunt Cherie was the only person in the family who spoke to her.
My grandparents drilled all five of their children on Sunday afternoons in the Shorter Westminster Catechism, which has only 107 questions.
“What are the decrees of God?
“A. The decrees of God are, his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.”
The Protestant ethic was invented by Calvin and his descendents, the Puritans in New England, the Presbyterians in the the Shenandoah Valley and the Carolinas. My grandparents were foreordained, perhaps, to work, as they did, like dogs. Their religion hardened. They hardened.
They were not consumed.
They would never be hungry again, and my father’s letters home to his devout and highly cultured parents are full of racial epithets I never heard him use. Niggers, spigs, dagoes and kikes abound. He spent his life working shoulder-to-shoulder with the people he spoke of, as the world and his work commanded, in the New Deal labor camps for young men where they all started out in 1930, and, when he finally got paying work, in South America and Africa.
There is no record of the hymns they sang. My father once told me a wintry little joke his father had made about the new young pastor. The pastor was very tall, and my grandparents were very old but yet he played the organ and she sang on in the church choir. They called the pastor “Towering o’er the wrecks of time.” This verse and its hymn, complete with digital piano accompaniment, can be retrieved from the internet (http://www.hymnsite.com/lyrics/umh295.sht), where the Presbyterians have uploaded every fiery detail of their history, including, among other traces, the funeral sermon delivered in 1858 by my great-great grandfather for his father-in-law, my great-great-great-grandfather. To meet these old ones unexpectedly, face to face, on the internet, along with e-mails I might wish I had not written, submerges me in a sea of immortality that at first made me seasick. Visiting Cherie in her grave helped me come to terms with it.
I like to think of the young Cherie absorbing the special rhymed Psalms the Presbyterians rewrote during the 16th century Scottish Reformation, along with war-like verses, dancing fiddles and the Elizabethan English of the mountain people, and the crisp patrician drawl of the Charlestonians that they visited in the summer, walking the beaches of Sullivan’s Island, riding the trolley down the Isle of Palms, picking crab for their breakfast plates of grits.
The metrical Psalms were rendered apparently into verse as befitted the oral tradition of the Scots, and as a mnemonic device for the Presbyterians’ illiterate converts. Their baptism meant they would all learn to read the Bible for themselves. That poor people, women, and slaves should be taught read was revolutionary, and the Presbyterians set up parish schools across Scotland, among the first institutions in the world to suggest that education should be free to the Protestant public.
Psalms which rhyme also echo the more familiar language of the King James Bible, so that a child like Cherie, with a good ear for music, would have grown up conscious of listening to at least six different kinds and eras of spoken English – Elizabethan Scots or mountain English, Charleston, her maternal grandmother’s British accent, Shenandoah gentleman, rhyming Scottish Psalms, and King James’s own 17th century Bible English. Psalm 27, and the rest of the English Bible, are best known in the words of its later translation, in 1610, by King James, as the one which goes, Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger. I can hear the metrical rigor of the earlier Scottish version in many of Cherie’s poems. The 1564 version of Psalm 27 was composed, as were many of them, as a Scottish ballad and set to music.
My heart confesseth unto thee,
I sue to have thy grace:
Then seek my face, saidst thou to me;
Lord, I will seek thy face.
In wrath turn not thy face away,
nor suffer me to slide;
My help thou hast been to this day,
be still my God and guide.
When both my parents me forsake,
and cast me off at large,
E'en then the Lord himself doth take
of me the care and charge.
In addition to the inferred Presbyterian Scottish tradition of rhymed Psalms, Cherie explicitly acknowledges the work of the folklorist Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, who tracked down and recorded the lyrics and melodies of the Gaelic songs sung on the islands off the west coast of Scotland. These three volumes of Songs of the Hebrides were published starting when Cherie was 9 years old and ending when she graduated college . The title of Cherie’s last collection of poetry – Song of the Isles, of 1940 – is the same as the last poem in the collection, set, as she specifies in the subtitle, to an air from Kennedy-Fraser. Touchingly enough, this ancient Scottish tune – thought to be nearly extinct when Kennedy-Fraser took it down -- can now be heard, its electronic snare drums and bagpipes skirling just a little as they march away into the cold sea fog, on the internet. http://www.footstompin.com/music/bagpipe_music/the_pipes_are_calling/tracks/the_road_to_the_isles
It is the road music to whose slow march step Cherie wrote her valedictory. She writes,
For the magic of the islands is a voice within my soul,
And the mystery of the western sea beguiles,
But once I’ve made my answer, why, the power’s beyond control,
And forever I am clansman of the isles!
To me, her only scholar, those are her last words. It is possible she went down like a soldier.
My father spoke, and Uncle Laudy writes his memoir, using many of the mountain locutions I heard at the dinner table 50 years ago. I heard them again at the farmers' market in Haddington three weeks ago. An old farm wife had a meager display spread out on the brick wall in the sunshine of windfall chestnuts, a few gnarled Black Arkansas apples, and the last gleanings of the vegetable garden. Gardens frost out early up in the mountains. Two tweedy old college town ladies walked by, arm-in-arm. Said one tweedy old lady to the other, “There’s a fine mess o’ green ‘maters.” My father used this colorful and vehement language all his life, and to eavesdrop, where death has not silenced it, started me listening very carefully to what was going on down there.
My father’s letters home and Cherie’s poems had laid unread by me until I was nearly sixty years old. I started thinking about going to pay my respects to Cherie – I am one of only 10 people now alive who remember her -- three years ago. Dying alone is what we all must do, and I suspected it wasn’t as bad as people softer than the old ones made it out to be. Cherie had died alone, and if I thought about her long enough, or, more precisely, became willing to think about her, her suicide, her Lesbianism, her secrets, I could learn something, if not the secret of blissful solitude itself.
And reading what my father had to say to his family years before either my mother or I appeared in his life revealed a whole different world to me. As a daughter, I was most intimate with my mother. Her childhood had been unhappy and until I looked at my father’s early photograph albums and the letters home which told the story of the photographs, which had until then been virtually anonymous, I did not realize that an unhappy childhood was not the norm.
My father’s childhood was happy, I think, and so would be Cherie’s. The memoirs of his older brother, which I bought in Haddington and just finished reading, are the corroboration. Both Cherie and my father appear briefly in Uncle Laudy’s stories, things about them I never knew. Their sister Idelette appears not at all, nor does their oldest brother, Uncle Geebie. Because their father was pushing 50 when my father was born, Geebie served as Daddy’s surrogate father, and Idelette, two years older, as his partner in crime. They loomed much larger in the stories my father told. Both are invisible in Uncle Laudy’s world.
Far more vividly drawn than his two sisters are the locations of the picnics they had as children – Kanode’s Mill, Lover’s Leap, Coal Bank Hollow, the names of the forest plants they found – galax, arbutus, pipsissewa, mountain laurel, the work the children had to do – helping grandfather build the barn, scything alfalfa, breaking the ice in the cow’s drinking trough, killing chickens, picking potato bugs off the plants and drowning them in a can full of kerosene oil, sorting apples and eggs, the names of the boys in the Boy Scout troop – Froggie, Sam, Clyde, Skeeter, Henry, Dibble and Strother.
Vivid too is the tenant farmer on the apple orchard the family owned up near Twelve O’ Clock Knob in Gifford, the little town down the mountain east of Haddington. When the great unpacking of the books took place when my family came home and stopped traveling the world, two of the things which surfaced in the silent house were a 13-foot long stuffed rattlesnake and several monkeys carved out of peach pits. There was even a monkey carved out of an apricot pit, holding his tail between his hands and feet. These mysteries of my childhood are explained by Uncle Laudy. He writes of how and where Daddy killed the rattlesnake and that it was Jake Blankenship, the tenant farmer, who taught Laudy how to carve the peach pits. There is a pencil drawing of Laudy’s hands in old age carving, hands so like my father’s that the power of bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, their mystery in drawings or photographs, comes up to me like the images in the photographs my father and his father took and developed themselves.
That Jake Blankenship, Twelve o’ Clock Knob, the peach pits, Daddy’s hands, should be so vivid, and Idelette invisible, and the dead Cherie’s hem just glimpsed disappearing around the corner, in Laudy’s memoir, confirms the secretness of the family secret. There is a hint too, as to why, in this very competitive family, the girls simply did not make it into Laud’s childhood memory. The schoolyard game in 1913 alternated between stickball and “redlining” the girls, Uncle Laudy writes. The boys “locked hands and yelled ‘red line’ and swept the girls off the playground and back into the schoolhouse.” And that, as the mountain men would say, is all she wrote.
If Cherie was a Lesbian – “a tomboy”, Uncle Laudy writes – he writes not at all of his younger sister Idelette. Idelette, well-bred, well-mannered, could hardly bring herself to speak to strangers, including her sisters-in-law. She had herself photographed, as a young lady, in the Prince Hal at Agincourt bowl haircut she favored all her life, in profile, gazing meaningfully off camera, wearing a jerkin and gripping the hilt of a pretend sword. There is a picture of her in a cotton plaid kilt, sash, tam and gaiters, glowering into the camera holding her puppy dog Mac. There is the Robin Hood series of Idelette with her bow and arrow. In her forties, she joined the 13-year-olds’ Sunday school class, and had to be told gently by the pastor of the small town church she attended all her life that this was not appropriate. She never worked, never married, and made a life for herself. She became a fire tower watcher and a Cub Scout leader.
Far more timid and cloistered than Cherie, Idelette stayed home with their widowed mother, after whom she had been named. Often my aunt masculinized their name, and signed herself “Junior”, reducing their first name – as iconic to Calvinism as Kadija and Mary are in other latitudes -- to an initial, followed by her mother’s maiden name and surname. In old age, the Trekkies discovered her -- the haircut finally worked its magic – penetrated her disguise, and began to invite her to conventions as Doctor Spock. She went, and there is a newspaper photograph of the immensely aged Idelette, her bowl cut as dark and luxuriant as it had been in the 1920s, smiling as she never had before, surrounded by young people in Klingon costumes. Idelette went straight beyond sex directly to Neverland; for her, it was always the romance of gender. Thus did Idelette live, more chaste, tougher, than Cherie, dosing herself with naturopathic remedies, almost 60 years longer than her sister. She lived into the 1990s, long enough for the world to change, and long enough for Idelette to be crowned in old age, at last, with the love an intergalactic hero deserves. I like to think Cherie also met such a fate.
Looking at the pictures of my father as a child, and at the photographs he took as a child, I learned not only that a childhood could be happy but that he and I look alike. Before manhood squared his jaw and muscled his face, my father and I could have passed for twins. Until I saw that picture, of Idelette and Daddy, aged perhaps six and eight, in their summer whites and sun hats and matching Dutch boy bangs, in the dappled light of World War One, I did not know where I came from.
It was the same, the sense of a whole world of undiscovered happiness opening to me, when only recently did I find pictures of Cherie, in the pin-tucked Gibson girl dress, blonde waves, and hair bow in which she is first seen, pouting, as the Princess Royal in a family of boys, circa 1904. There are no candid pictures of Cherie; the family albums show her in the back row with the parents, the position the eldest sister in a large family always assumes. Tantalizingly, there’s a picture of her reading a book, but the title is just slightly too small to read. Only when I started looking at a small obscure picture album of photographs my father took in the early 1920s – pictures of posters of the Kaiser, pastures long replaced with munitions plants, Fancy and Maude, the plough horses -- that one, wallet sized, unlabelled and faded nearly to black, made me think it might be Cherie. I enlarged it and heightened the contrast and found one of the two best pictures of her we have. Daddy has pasted it in the 1921 section of the album, and I wonder if it is her Sweet Briar graduation picture. It shows a proud young lady, with her mother’s twinkling eyes and a wavy flapper bob. Somewhere, in a crumbling album inherited by a beloved niece or nephew, I hope there exist more pictures of Cherie laughing, in Paris, in a low cut dress, perhaps, in a smoking jacket, in a tam o’ shanter with a yard long pheasant plume, drinking absinthe, laughing, her long beautiful fingers holding a peach pit.
Of “Paris Nights”, she wrote
Many a famous spirit goes past in the pale lamplight,
Many a soul unknown slinks by in the dark wet night;
And the tragic ones gleam red, and their laughter dies in pain,
But the golden ghosts are the golden youth that loved, and shall love again!
For springtime comes each year, and lovers seek the quays
Still haunted by the olden youth of other days;
And so on an April night, alone in the dark and rain,
I see them, hear their voices, down by the brown old Seine.
The captions in my father’s albums, written in white ink in his microscopic spider writing, slip into the family slang he always used when speaking of Cherie or writing to her. I have one letter he wrote to her. If their childhood was happy, the pictures showed me, the family slang he fell into when he talked to her, composed of puns and invented words, German, Gothic orthographical puns like substituting effs for esses, set pieces about adventures like earthquakes my father had just survived – repeated in other letters home -- and mountain man expletives, well then, hully gee, Cherie’s childhood could not have been but happy too.
I’d always wondered where the siblings’ sense of the romance of adventure had come from. What had they read as children? Where did these ideas of pirate ships and far away places come to them in Haddington, Virginia, whose population was 700 when Cherie was born? It couldn’t have been all catechism and rollicking rhymed hellfire. In 1900, when Cherie was born, at home, attended by the college physician, W. F. Henderson, it was even more remote. The train stopped miles away in Cambria, and sometimes when it snowed you had to shoulder your suitcase and walk to Haddington. My father’s life outside this Eden was one adventure after another, geographic, and sexual, and Cherie’s poetry records not only pirate and gypsy adventures, but travel to Scotland, Paris and at least one of the Protestant strongholds in the southwest of France. Of Carcassonne, the fortified anti-Catholic medieval city of the French Cathars, the Mecca of street-fighting Protestants everywhere, Cherie wrote
Barren fields where the blackbirds fly,
Misty river below the hill;
Amethyst turrets against the sky,
Flaming red with sunset dye;
Walled from the taint of modern ways….
Twisted streets where there roam by night
Ghosts of the gorgeous golden days:
And the pale moon shines down
Over the amethyst towered town.
It seems indecent to deconstruct your auntie’s poetry for dyke imagery, though Cherie’s poetry is so full of salty stormy seas and gypsy kisses one cannot avoid it. Reading it, I feel the way I do when I see my friend’s handsome son on TV. He is the star of a TV show. I can’t watch it because I know he’s a real person. I knew his grandpa. It seems doubly indecent to comb the work of a suicide for evidence of her end, though one can see that too in Cherie’s volumes. Since her poems are the only thing I have of hers, aside from her name, making no judgement is her gift to me, a way of learning from what turns up long after others have drawn their own conclusions and pronounced Cherie, and her poetry, dead. Her sexuality is so lightly veiled as to be coarse in its innocence. In a volume dedicated to her parents, she writes, in “Salt Thirst”:
Fresh water lakes bring me no peace! I crave
The biting foam of a cold wind-riven swell,
The tossing breakers, strong with salty smell,
Not bound by rock and beach and shallow cave
And city walls near by….
No, from their tasteless waters I would rest,
And drink that salty wine in ecstacy!
Oh, girl.
There is a dispute over her innocence. My mother was told she committed suicide because she discovered she was gay. I think I remember Daddy told me she killed herself because a love affair ended badly. I will not decide whether or not a poem like “Salt Thirst” tips the scales of her innocence, though it does seem fathomless. Never again such innocence, writes Larkin, never before and never since. What I can do is to use the evidence of “Salt Thirst” to hope that Cherie was only bereaved and not disgusted when she died.
When I turn my critical faculties off, I can see Cherie calling for adventure again and again. She finds it at sea or in Scotland or on the Silk Road, with a beautiful woman, a long way from Haddington.
There are a number of possibilities for sources of this wanderlust. Laud records that on Sunday afternoons, after the catechism, Grandfather read them Treasure Island, Ivanhoe -– by Scott, another national monument of Scotland -- and the desert island tale of The Swiss Family Robinson. Grandfather was an opera buff, and corresponded with people all over the world exchanging biology specimens and stamps. Cherie often sees herself in an operatic breeches role, and there is a self-dramatizing whiff of the enthralling ethos Wayne Koestenbaum writes about of opera for gay people – the most sublime plots of opera are, she does it and she dies.
Cherie and my father both collected stamps from penpals around the world, and Daddy sends her samples of his stash of Peruvian stamps. The Scots themes of her poetry suggest familiarity with the romantic bestsellers of her father’s childhood, like Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, but until I turned to the internet there were secrets about Cherie I did not know. One of them is the existence of what is called boys’ books. There is also a tiny whiff of Swinburne, the sadomasochist who wrote of Lesbianism. Most strongly there are Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barrie – Long John Silver and Captain Hook, the romance of piracy itself – were invented by tormented Scotsmen. It was Stevenson who first wrote the immortal poem which ends, Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, and it was Treasure Island that grandfather read to the children on Sunday afternoons after they’d finished the interminable shorter catechism. He’d usually fall asleep during what Uncle Laudy remembered as the “most bloodcurdling parts”. After his nap, they’d go for a walk.
The hints had always been there in the bookcase in the silent house. Lying on the daybed I found, and read, my father’s childhood copies of Penrod and Penrod and Sam, the last of a fifty-year run of boy books. Cherie would have been 14 years old when they first were published, and my father five. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – the hero of what some believe to be the great American novel – is the most famous hero of a boy book, but boy books came before and after Huck. Scholars of childhood have recently descended upon the study of children’s books – since children themselves leave so few records of their lives – and have discerned a distinct Huckleberry strain in a run of books published between 1870 and 1914, when Penrod and World War One ended the reverie.
Childhood – or boyhood, explicitly – was defined in these books as a time of savagery and freedom, a barbarianism for which the narrative voice is nostalgic. Eden was a devilish frontier, never again to be visited by readers saddened and impoverished by the Civil War, civilized to the extent that boys no longer left home to work at age 12 and stayed at home until they were 21, and yet were not sexualized by Freud. They were innocent to a degree hard to credit now.
In boy books, there were adventures to be had in which girls and women represented cleanliness and godliness to be avoided. There were small-town values, abundant nature, a harmless gang of kids, including black ones -- Penrod’s companions, the twins Herman and Verman, never do grow up -- (Irish) bullies, (Jewish) rich kids, hypocritical adults. A cult of the “bad boy” was so firmly established by the 1890s that measures had to be taken. One expert argues that the Boy Scouts were established to tame the savage bad boys, who turned bad at about the age of 12 yet could not, under the new child labor laws which marked the progress of the industrial age, leave home or be put to work for another 10 years. My grandmother founded the Boy Scouts in Haddington in 1915. For him, Uncle Laudy contends. Well into his 90s Laud still had his Tenderfoot badge. He qualified for it on July 7, 1916. He says nothing about grandmother’s founding a Girl Scout troop for Cherie and Idelette, even though the girls’ movement had begun in 1912. Perhaps they weren’t as savage as Laudy, who was a Presbyterian minister for 60 years.
If Penrod and Treasure Island were among the boy books in Cherie’s girlhood, the rest of Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M Barrie might have been too. I vaguely remember from Daddy’s bookshelf a small hardbound copy of Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, about his walk through France. Its spine was faded by the sun, and someone’s signature was in the upper left hand corner of the inside cover. Where it is now, with the rest of Cherie’s history, no one knows. After the most romantic life on the road – Stevenson crossed the Atlantic and America, in steerage, coughing blood, against the wishes of his rich and terrifying Presbyterian papa to get to his bride -- Robert Louis Stevenson died young in Samoa in 1894. Peter Pan first saw light as a play which premiered in 1904 and as a novel when Cherie was 11 years old. The work of both Stevenson and Barrie is taken with increasing seriousness as the decades pass; Stevenson’s poetry, as well-loved now as it was when it was published, is now considered small but beautiful. His prose – for years Kidnapped and Treasure Island were considered boys’ books -- is considered of the first rank. Among its most ardent fans are sophisticates whose lives span the 20th century -- James, Nabokov, and Borges. In his letters, five volumes of which were published when Cherie was 24 years old, Stevenson’s ferocious disagreement with his father’s passionate Calvinism became known. Stevenson’s beatification as Scotland’s Bohemian martyr vagabond took place in the public eye. It may have been of more than passing interest to Cherie that he wrote a trilogy of stories called The Suicide Club, worked in Scots dialect, themes, and ballads. Stevenson wrote his own “Requiem”:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
He is buried on a mountain top in Samoa overlooking the Pacific. The last two lines are his epitaph.
J. M. Barrie’s sleight of hand in the doubling and tripling of identities in the story of Peter Pan – the actor who plays Mr. Darling always plays Captain Hook -- has proved a full employment mandate for queer theorists, who dote upon the true saga behind the story of the lost boys. It began with Barrie’s taking nude photographs of a family of beautiful little boys. As soon as they were orphaned – both young parents died of cancer within three years of each other -- Barrie adopted them. This story is as full of kidnapping pirates as Treasure Island, as full of voyages, and of boys so bad they are the only people in the book who never do grow up. Girls do – in Neverland, even little girls and fairies have grown-up emotions. Tinker Bell suffers sexual jealousy, and she shares with the maternal Wendy the altruism of self-sacrifice. Peter, one of the truly original characters in literature, is the most savage of all the Huckleberry Penrods, a boy so bad he is immortal and unloved. He stands outside the nursery window watching, something his 21st century readers find creepy in its pre-Freudian innocence.
All of these themes – the bereavement of the Civil War, the demarcation it created between modern industrial life and idyllic childhood setting, the bad boy books which came to represent that, the wanderlust, the Bohemian vagabondage, the hidden identity, the ballads, the highlands, the queer sexual innocence so freely sublimated in words – can be seen in Cherie’s life. The tension in Stevenson’s sunny poems of childhood and travel is that he wrote virtually all of them coughing blood – he called his lung disease “bloody Jack” and wrote poetry in bed. One critic says his travellin’ man poems are all about the road between childhood and his inevitable death; one can hear exactly this stricture – an inevitable curtain or deadline -- in Cherie’s poems. Whether it is her death or her sexuality that will put the final period on her life is a question that is still alive in Aunt Cherie’s poems. There, she is always breaking free or folding or clipping her wings.
As Stevenson writes, in what some consider to be his best collection of poetry, Songs of Travel (1895):
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river -
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life for ever.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around
And the road before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
And the road below me.
He set the pace on the road for all the Bohemian voyagers which came after, from Woody Guthrie to Jack Kerouac. As we have seen, Cherie’s last published poem is road music:
It is here my heart is dwelling….
Where the white road runs forever….
Stevenson’s 21st century critics emphasize his theme, for example in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of “exploring moral ambiguity and duality in human nature; a recurring theme is the contrast and conflict between good and evil.” Cherie too writes a sexual dialogue in her poems, often posing as a passionate man or an equally passionate woman. She uses it to most interesting effect in “Words Unspoken,” two separate poems in which both the man and the woman speak. Her face pressed to the window, she longs to leave him and go out into the storm. He lets her –
My darling, my witch-wife! See how she leans on my breast?
Her lips are a woman’s, she loves me – Then devil take the rest!
Scottish folklore is full of marriages between spirits and men. “Witch-wife” is the title of a poem, published in 1917, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the flapper poetess role model of Cherie’s feminist generation.
In “Viking’s Daughter,” Cherie writes
You have listened to me this once, because I spoke of the sea,
But now that look comes over your face again, and you hear me not;
You lie in my arms dreaming, but not of me.
Your sea has beaten me down, drowned, conquered me in
its waves;
It is stronger than I, stronger than inland love
To your proud heart, and more than mountain’s power –
And tho’ it kill me, I must let you go.
There is a story hidden in the sequencing of Cherie’s published poetry. “Viking’s Daughter” occurs midway in her middle volume. The remainder of that and her final volume, some 29 published poems, contain only two love poems, both elegies to love in old age. In “Remembering”, she recalls the crimson touches of her first volume, Masks and Gypsy Music. She writes, for the last time:
Eyes, dearer far than the blue sea’s tumbling wonder,
Lips, half-parted in the tender longing of farewell,
Snatch of song, tang of scent, the turn of a rounded shoulder –
Dreams from the misty land where memories dwell.
So but a waltz, a burning gypsy lovesong and – tonight!
That volume is dedicated to K.R.C.H.. I wonder if she was married, and if, some day, I will know.
Without being a real scholar of poetry, I sense Cherie’s dialogues, many of which were printed in little magazines, including The Christian Observer, owe a great deal to her contemporary, Stephen Vincent Benet, who won the Pulitzer in 1929 with “John Brown’s Body” – an epic poem criticized for its cinematic style. If there are echoes of Hollywood in Cherie’s vision, a real scholar would find echoes, too, of the propulsive, but very strictured rhythms, of Vachel Lindsay, the far crustier Scots-Irish religious zealot, visionary, and hobo poet of the previous generation. He committed suicide when Cherie was 31 years old.
Dialogues about dualities and masked passion, between lovers, seafaring clan warlords, heroes of old Virginia and the Bible feature in any number of Cherie’s poems, with pious verses overwhelming the sexual ones in her last volume. She writes about death and sleep, about patience, about folding her wings, about drought and the death of roses, about prayer in wartime, about ghosts, about coming home after her death to Scotland, and my favorite, about going to the woods on Thanksgiving with her dog. It sounds like Virginia, plainly confronted, and not the land of counterpane Cherie dreamed of when she closed her eyes. In “Thanksgiving”, she meets four hunters. Only one sees her, understands what she has come for. He says,
“I get you, stranger: I am tied
All year on night shift at the mill.
Thanksgiving Day I want my fill
Of woods and tramping. That’s the stuff
To make you over! Not enough
In just one day, though. Stranger, shake!
I don’t crave hunting for its sake….
And not to shoot, but look and see
What’s in the woods, on days I’m free.
I get you, bo – but not these three!”
Her pleasure in being recognized does not equal her pain and anger in not having been seen. In the last verse, anguish is the only passion left her, and the fineness of her ear and observation disappears for good. Poetry painful to read follows, poetry about Jesus – I am Thy minstrel! – with only just one touch of the gypsy music, and none at all of Cherie, unmasked.
It was the internet and Uncle Laudy’s memoir which, finally, did a little of the unmasking. Shadows and Windy Places is the title of her second volume, the one in which the carefully sequenced poems lead up to “Viking’s Daughter” and make a denouement with small, calm death poems, Jesus and Patrick Henry dialogues. “Shadows and windy places” is a quote from Swinburne, the famous decadent who wrote of Lesbianism, among other things, and from his most Lesbian poem – “Atalanta at Calydon.”
When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
Atalanta is the man-killing girl in Greek mythology who was warned by the oracle at Delphi never to marry. She refuses to marry, shoots arrows, and, for one brief shining moment, can outrace any man. Famous for his rhyme, his sado-masochism – his strictures, if you will -- his death wish, his drinking and his fiery red hair, Swinburne is the most masterful – if the best-hidden -- of Cherie’s teachers. He is one of the great rhyme artists of the English language. And of all the pain.
Googling, I found too that Cherie’s little book, of 36 pages, had a reader. Shadows and Windy Places is among the five boxes of papers left to the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania by the ninth poet laureate of the state of Delaware. To think that Cherie has been forgotten by everyone but the Internet marks a new frontier. The message in the bottle she threw out from the windy place nearly 70 years ago is not only still bobbing on the sea of immortality, it is riding the first three hits -- the crest of the wave.
So I went to the mountain town where she had been born and where they’d all grown up. I stayed in a bed and breakfast on the campus of the university which my grandfather had helped found, and where his five children grew up not only fierce but proud, poor as paupers, inclined to histrionics, courage, and shyness.
The bed and breakfast universe is one in which no niche is without its doily, no bed without its 20-pound duvet, and French toast is made by soaking croissants in eggnog.. What is not French toast has cheese on it.
If you’re lucky, there will be fellow guests like the Chinese nano-physicist to talk to – they do not eat cheese -- and a nice corgi called Mr. Chops, who does. The landlady will know all the gossip of the past half century, including the name and phone number of the publisher of your uncle’s memoir, and the fact that her former husband, a professor, ran the local porn video club in her basement. It is still a very small town –despite the growth of the university from the estimated 500 students it had when Cherie was a child to the 26,000 it now boasts. The reason, my landlady suggested, that I had never visited despite its legendary status in my childhood was that it is the end of the earth. Professors cannot be seen at the local porn venues, even if there are any. It was not until 1992, more than a generation after Stonewall, that the gay and lesbian students on campus organized a caucus. The first thing I saw when I stepped onto the quad was the back of a girl’s head, artfully streaked with several hundred dollars worth of different shades of blonde, and pony-tailed. Tri-Delt is the only thought I had, and stopped to watch her get into a Honda Accord with the familiar sorority decal – the three triangles which represent the epicenter of heterosexuality -- in the back window. This persistent sexual homogeneity may account for what Cherie called her “restlessness – my sin”, and my father’s perpetual motion, far, far away from Haddington and the shorter catechism.
In the books the publisher brought me, I found, at last, the only real glimpse of Cherie that there is left. Uncle Laudy writes:
My oldest sister was a rugged tomboy who
regretted that she was not born a boy in
England during the period of the War of the
Roses. She tried to sell me on the idea of being
a cabin boy on Sir Francis Drake’s frigate,
or on Captain John Flint’s pirate ship. We
could run away to sea. Of course she would
always be the captain. We made wooden
sabers, stained with pokeberry juice to show
that we had fought many engagements with
the Spaniards. The fantasies went as far as hiding
pieces of bread and cheese from our meals in
secret places under the piano as provisions for
when we ran off to sea. One cold day we even
got as far as the back pasture gate before
deciding it would be too cold at sea that day. We
retired to the hay barn to eat our dry bread and
cheese. I lost all interest in the Spanish treasure
ships after that.
My father wrote a letter home every week for nearly 70 years, and until I went to Cherie’s grave, I could not account for a strangely vague and resonant letter from Peru wishing my grandmother a happy birthday in August of 1940. It is a letter written by hand, which was unusual among this series. My father wrote from Peru on a typewriter, and in this hand-written letter he says:
Puno, Peru
Aug. 1, 1940
Dearest Mother,
Am thinking of you so much these days and want you to know on the 9th that I am thinking of you and thanking you for not only my life but the equipment to make that life worthwhile. We’ll soon be home to express personally what is hard to put on paper. I can hardly tell you how we are looking forward to coming home.
Sailing date is Aug. 22. We arrive in Panama on Sept. 1st and then see what boat we can catch from there to New Orleans. Probably arrive in N.O. about Sept. 12 and shoot for home.
All my love,
Cherie had been buried two weeks earlier, on July 23, 1940, according to the Interment Record given me by the loquacious cemetery plot salesman at the new cemetery alongside the old turnpike outside of Gifford. Her grave, marked by a flat bronze plaque, has only her name and years on it, 1900-1940. This birthday greeting to his mother is the only reference my father ever made to Cherie’s death in his letters home. He too lost all interest in Spanish treasure after that, except for one last word -- my middle name.
Sappho specifies myrrh, laurel garlands and wine for the celebration of poets. I poured a bottle of wine grown from new vines on the island of Lesbos on Cherie’s grave. I stuck myrrh incense sticks on it, on my grandparents’ graves, Idelette’s, Uncle Laudy’s and the grave of his dear wife, who died less than a month after he, after 61 years of marriage. I got a long garland of mountain laurel from Gardens of the Blue Ridge and made a wreath for everyone. Uncle Laudy’s incense stick would not burn, but the rest of them did. The beautiful old blue mountains, their trees red and gold, were very silent, remote and gentle. I read some of Cherie’s poems and sat in the sun for a while. The loquacious cemetery plot salesman had told me the strangest thing he’d ever seen there was a Buddhist funeral, and the very strangest thing he'd ever seen was the funeral of a good old boy who had been buried naked in a body bag in his own backyard. Nothing is against the law, he told me. So I left the Lesbian bottle of wine inside the wreath on Cherie’s grave, and carried out the box full of burned matches I’d struck to keep Laud’s incense stick going. And two of the oak leaves splattered with wine.
And the buzzing went away. When I finally sat down to read her poems, in preparation for this trip, I had already suspended my critical faculties and much of my sense of time and space, so as to let what was known to me come to me. What came in, through this rent in the veil, was a loud buzzing sound, like powerful shortwave radio static, I heard as I put the poems away late on the afternoon of October 18. It was information. I recorded it and watched it too. She might have been saying no. She might have been protesting the queasiness I feel when she takes her stand, with such unimaginable innocence, in what I now believe is not only Scotland the brave, but Scotland the queer. In the Scotland of her poetry, she was free.
That night I went to Gillie’s, the health food restaurant which now stands blocks from where they all grew up together. I was eating shrimp fettucine in the corner by the Styrofoam bust of Elvis when a variety of men and women of all ages began to come in carrying instrument cases. They pushed the tables to the side, and pulled the restaurant chairs into a circle, withdrew their fiddles, mandolins, banjoes and guitars, and began to play the mountain music that began there back in the 17th century. They began with “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” what had once been an African-American hymn, “Who Will Drive the Chariot When She Comes?”, long morphed into a mountain song. Black people – whose contribution to old-time music derives from the fact that half the fiddlers in the upper South at the turn of the 18th century were black -- sing, She'll be loaded with bright angels when she comes. The New River Old Time Music jam sing, She’ll be wearing pink pajamas when she comes.
She’ll be wearing pink pajamas when she comes, the young man sang. In old time music, words are the anchor, each syllable embellished with at least five notes from at least five instruments, so that the simplicity of lyrics does nothing to convey the shimmering complexity of the notes or the sinuous line of the melody. The words are not the least of what’s going on in old-time music, but they are its most laconic incarnation.
They sit in a circle facing each other, as if conversing, rather than performing. They went on to play a large repertoire they all know by heart of old-time music those mountains have been keeping safe all these years. “Julie Ann Johnson”, “Sadie the Cat”, “Liberty”. There’s a little drone in old-time music, like the bagpipes maybe, or a buzzing, and you can bliss out trying to catch it. As I listened, I began to think it was the music of the spheres I was hearing, inside the old old music, and that that is what the buzzing sound was. Nothing against the law.
In “Dream of Adventure,” Cherie wrote
Some quiet night in Kashmir’s Vale we’ll meet,
Passing along the road to Samarkand,
And I’ll salute, and the blood in my temples beat
As you leave your troop and give me your trusty hand.
Then on to new adventures, you and I:
To live – or, not less gloriously, to die!
It was, I used to think, my father who had passed along the road to Samarkand, and Cherie who had died.
So when my father told me at the end of his life that he would kill himself before he went to the assisted living facility, I believed him. I hid his guns. When he went, I gave them away. When they called from the nursing home to tell me he had died, I wondered. I wondered if somebody had slipped him a needle of morphine. Or if he had hurled himself out of his hospital bed with the collapsible sides. Something in the voice of the night death messenger over the telephone told me not to ask any questions.
Now I know it’s just as possible that what I believe is a lie, and that the truth is that Aunt Cherie came by and said Come with me. Let’s go play pirates.
But that is known to God. What I know, their gift, up here in the sunshine, is that they were not consumed.
With love from
Cherie
Christmas, 1938
doctorgogol Halloween Memoir Marathon.Oh well.
It just goes to show that winter is the time for introspection and Halloween is the rent in the veil between the two worlds pf summer and winter, through which the spirits can pass -- to rest, or not, as needed.
She is the family secret, Aunt Cherie, and Cherie is my middle name. I had never seen my own name on a gravestone until this year. When she shot herself in her father’s library in the summer of 1940, the only thing the old man said was, “I didn’t know she knew how to use a gun.”
More than sixty-five years after her death, and more than forty years after I first learned that she was a Lesbian, I woke up one morning last week and realized that what I know about Aunt Cherie had changed. It’s a little thing, the substance of things unseen, but it is the only real thing I have made of the gifts my father and his family left me. Literally, it is the assurance that the truth of the facts will appear if I can get them and if I can hold them long enough in my mind without drawing any conclusions.
I knew only that she had died before I was born. My parents had been on the road then – they were in Peru -- and had been on the road ever since then. They didn’t unpack until I was about 12 years old. Then all the family books and grandfather clocks and ancient prints of giant blue herons emerged, and I could begin, in the silent house, in the hall Daddy had made into a library, on the seven-foot long day bed they’d had custom made somewhere so Daddy’s feet wouldn’t hang over the end, to piece together just who we were.
Sitting on the day bed looking at the paperbound volumes of poetry Aunt Cherie had published – Masks and Gypsy Music in 1937, Shadows and Windy Places in 1938, and Song of the Isles in 1940 -- was the first I knew of her. In the poems, there were swashbuckling boy poses struck on highland moors and pirate ships and gypsy caravans, a few small poems about masks, a few long poems setting Bible scenes to epic dialogue. Her “Ballad of the Storm”, published the year she died, fuses two of her genres, and is a highland story set to epic dialogue. It ends with a flourish:
“For I’d rather face what the wild sea brings
Or die in the outer isles,
Than seek Dunvegan’s help again
Or suffer his crafty smiles!
Drive out beyond the bay,” he cried,
“Turn out past Dunvegan Head!
We’ll take our chance with the wind and storm,
And the sea shall bury our dead!”
The inscriptions of her books, in a handwriting I determined to be hers from looking at her signature on the fly leaves of other newly surfaced books, which had not followed us around the world, were mysterious. “To Jim,” they read. “From Bob.” For more than forty years, I have always thought they were books dedicated by Aunt Cherie, as Bob, to her mysterious girlfriend, “Jim.” Aunt Cherie had died, I was always told, of a broken heart, and I was sure that Jim was the woman who had done it. What I woke up knowing, just the other day, is that the truth was less romantic, smaller, and much sadder. The books were inscribed to my father, one of whose obscure nicknames was Jim, from the older sister he thought of as “Barb.” She thinks of herself as Bob. His letters home all speak of her as “Barb.” That could break your heart. A Southern accent can hide a world of gender performance.
The greatest thing my father’s people have given me is my life as a writer. The linguistic talent, the ear, the books, the curiosity, the hell-bent asperity and tough-mindedness -- all those things are gifts, after all. With his Charleston accent and his newly issued college degree in Latin and Greek, my father had no recourse, in June of 1930, but to take a job driving cars from Detroit to Florida. When that did not suffice, he spent Christmas homeless, one of the many stories he never did tell me, and sold oranges on the street corners of El Dorado.
As would befit the scion of many generations of Presbyterians – called Orangemen when they colonized Ulster -- whose motto is a Latin and not a Gaelic one. Nec tamen consumebatur. This is a reference perhaps less to the burning bush, as the Church of Scotland claims, and more to the ferocious Calvinist martyrs of the Scottish reformation, who were burned at the stake. It was my man, John Knox, who told Mary, Queen of Scots, she was a whore, and so was her Pope. He made her cry.
And they were not consumed.
Nor was Scotland. Nor was indeed the Confederacy where their descendents, my father’s people, added their own brand of hillbilly intransigence to the war between the states.
That war is not yet over. When I went for the first time to see Aunt Cherie’s grave on All Saints’ Day this year, in Gifford, the little town they were living in when I was born, the local paper had two big stories. There was a large color photograph of the high school homecoming queen in the place of honor reserved, in newspapers outside the Shenandoah Valley, for photographs of war. In the Shenandoah Valley, Miss Kelsey Giardano, in her crown, a chic black suit, and a smile slightly fixed for the ages, waved at the stadium crowd only a small town football game can muster.
The lead story on the front page was about the state battle flag carried throughout the Civil War by the 28th Virginia Regiment, 600 farmers of the Shenandoah Valley. The flag had been captured nearly a hundred and fifty years earlier by a Minnesota regiment at Gettysburg. The Virginians still want it back. The Minnesotans, as they had been for nearly a hundred and fifty years, were still saying no. When the U.S. government ordered Minnesota to return the flag at the turn of the 20th century, they said no. When the Virginia Senate asked them for it again at the turn of the 21st century, Minnesota’s then-governor Jesse Ventura said, “Why? I mean, we won.”
It is a mark of progress, to be certain, that a pretty girl named Giardano could be elected homecoming queen. Most of the names in that part of the world, in the Appalachians and the Blue Ridge, are Church of Scotland names, breakaway Presbyterian sect names, and have been since the 17th century. They’re the ones who were too mean to emigrate with their younger brothers through the Cumberland Gap west to manifest their destiny and to send their accents all the way to the Alamo. One reason is the Shenandoah Valley is the most beautiful place on earth. The beautiful old blue mountains are too far away to block out the sky, and just close enough to protect the old farms and farmers from the Indians and the British and the cruel plantationeer Englishmen of the Tidewater, and the worst of their slave and sharecropper economy, and for a while, the old blue mountains sheltered the bread basket of the Confederacy, and its railroad, and its free men, from the Union army. In that part of the world, Johnny Reb’s name was Scottish. He was Presbyterian. In the New World, back country Presbyterians disrupted Anglican services, drove off the preacher’s horse, stole his church key, set a pack of hounds to fighting outside, and fed his parishioners barrels of whiskey just before communion services. Fox Butterfield, in his book, All God’s Children, contends the Scots-Irish, with their thousand-year-old lex talionis culture of revenge, taught black Americans how to be violent.
So the valley and the Carolinas were settled by fire-breathing Presbyterian farmers who lost the war. Half of the 600 farmers of the 28th Virginia Regiment were killed and half of the survivors were crippled. All that is left now is the most beautiful valley, the old blue mountains, the volunteer sycamore growing alone high up on edge of the cliff slashed along the old Indian trail which became, after the turnpike, after the railroad, Interstate 81, its yellow and red leaves turning over and over in the breeze, glittering in the wake of the tractor trailers. Or the statue of a Confederate soldier far off on the horizon, with his head bowed, in a wheat field, the honeyed autumn sunlight pouring over the harvest.
Cherie’s parents were born in South Carolina during the Civil War. They grew up during reconstruction almost in the terms described in Gone With the Wind. Their children were raised on stories of that “impoverishment of land and people”, according to a memoir left by one of their sons. “It was a pleasant surprise,” Uncle Laudy wrote, looking back at the age of 90, “to find that these people north of the Mason-Dixon line did not have horns and tails as I had imagined, but were really people with whom I could relate.” My mother, a Yankee, confirms this prejudice and says Aunt Cherie was the only person in the family who spoke to her.
My grandparents drilled all five of their children on Sunday afternoons in the Shorter Westminster Catechism, which has only 107 questions.
“What are the decrees of God?
“A. The decrees of God are, his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.”
The Protestant ethic was invented by Calvin and his descendents, the Puritans in New England, the Presbyterians in the the Shenandoah Valley and the Carolinas. My grandparents were foreordained, perhaps, to work, as they did, like dogs. Their religion hardened. They hardened.
They were not consumed.
They would never be hungry again, and my father’s letters home to his devout and highly cultured parents are full of racial epithets I never heard him use. Niggers, spigs, dagoes and kikes abound. He spent his life working shoulder-to-shoulder with the people he spoke of, as the world and his work commanded, in the New Deal labor camps for young men where they all started out in 1930, and, when he finally got paying work, in South America and Africa.
There is no record of the hymns they sang. My father once told me a wintry little joke his father had made about the new young pastor. The pastor was very tall, and my grandparents were very old but yet he played the organ and she sang on in the church choir. They called the pastor “Towering o’er the wrecks of time.” This verse and its hymn, complete with digital piano accompaniment, can be retrieved from the internet (http://www.hymnsite.com/lyrics/umh295.sht), where the Presbyterians have uploaded every fiery detail of their history, including, among other traces, the funeral sermon delivered in 1858 by my great-great grandfather for his father-in-law, my great-great-great-grandfather. To meet these old ones unexpectedly, face to face, on the internet, along with e-mails I might wish I had not written, submerges me in a sea of immortality that at first made me seasick. Visiting Cherie in her grave helped me come to terms with it.
I like to think of the young Cherie absorbing the special rhymed Psalms the Presbyterians rewrote during the 16th century Scottish Reformation, along with war-like verses, dancing fiddles and the Elizabethan English of the mountain people, and the crisp patrician drawl of the Charlestonians that they visited in the summer, walking the beaches of Sullivan’s Island, riding the trolley down the Isle of Palms, picking crab for their breakfast plates of grits.
The metrical Psalms were rendered apparently into verse as befitted the oral tradition of the Scots, and as a mnemonic device for the Presbyterians’ illiterate converts. Their baptism meant they would all learn to read the Bible for themselves. That poor people, women, and slaves should be taught read was revolutionary, and the Presbyterians set up parish schools across Scotland, among the first institutions in the world to suggest that education should be free to the Protestant public.
Psalms which rhyme also echo the more familiar language of the King James Bible, so that a child like Cherie, with a good ear for music, would have grown up conscious of listening to at least six different kinds and eras of spoken English – Elizabethan Scots or mountain English, Charleston, her maternal grandmother’s British accent, Shenandoah gentleman, rhyming Scottish Psalms, and King James’s own 17th century Bible English. Psalm 27, and the rest of the English Bible, are best known in the words of its later translation, in 1610, by King James, as the one which goes, Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger. I can hear the metrical rigor of the earlier Scottish version in many of Cherie’s poems. The 1564 version of Psalm 27 was composed, as were many of them, as a Scottish ballad and set to music.
My heart confesseth unto thee,
I sue to have thy grace:
Then seek my face, saidst thou to me;
Lord, I will seek thy face.
In wrath turn not thy face away,
nor suffer me to slide;
My help thou hast been to this day,
be still my God and guide.
When both my parents me forsake,
and cast me off at large,
E'en then the Lord himself doth take
of me the care and charge.
In addition to the inferred Presbyterian Scottish tradition of rhymed Psalms, Cherie explicitly acknowledges the work of the folklorist Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, who tracked down and recorded the lyrics and melodies of the Gaelic songs sung on the islands off the west coast of Scotland. These three volumes of Songs of the Hebrides were published starting when Cherie was 9 years old and ending when she graduated college . The title of Cherie’s last collection of poetry – Song of the Isles, of 1940 – is the same as the last poem in the collection, set, as she specifies in the subtitle, to an air from Kennedy-Fraser. Touchingly enough, this ancient Scottish tune – thought to be nearly extinct when Kennedy-Fraser took it down -- can now be heard, its electronic snare drums and bagpipes skirling just a little as they march away into the cold sea fog, on the internet. http://www.footstompin.com/music/bagpipe_music/the_pipes_are_calling/tracks/the_road_to_the_isles
It is the road music to whose slow march step Cherie wrote her valedictory. She writes,
For the magic of the islands is a voice within my soul,
And the mystery of the western sea beguiles,
But once I’ve made my answer, why, the power’s beyond control,
And forever I am clansman of the isles!
To me, her only scholar, those are her last words. It is possible she went down like a soldier.
My father spoke, and Uncle Laudy writes his memoir, using many of the mountain locutions I heard at the dinner table 50 years ago. I heard them again at the farmers' market in Haddington three weeks ago. An old farm wife had a meager display spread out on the brick wall in the sunshine of windfall chestnuts, a few gnarled Black Arkansas apples, and the last gleanings of the vegetable garden. Gardens frost out early up in the mountains. Two tweedy old college town ladies walked by, arm-in-arm. Said one tweedy old lady to the other, “There’s a fine mess o’ green ‘maters.” My father used this colorful and vehement language all his life, and to eavesdrop, where death has not silenced it, started me listening very carefully to what was going on down there.
My father’s letters home and Cherie’s poems had laid unread by me until I was nearly sixty years old. I started thinking about going to pay my respects to Cherie – I am one of only 10 people now alive who remember her -- three years ago. Dying alone is what we all must do, and I suspected it wasn’t as bad as people softer than the old ones made it out to be. Cherie had died alone, and if I thought about her long enough, or, more precisely, became willing to think about her, her suicide, her Lesbianism, her secrets, I could learn something, if not the secret of blissful solitude itself.
And reading what my father had to say to his family years before either my mother or I appeared in his life revealed a whole different world to me. As a daughter, I was most intimate with my mother. Her childhood had been unhappy and until I looked at my father’s early photograph albums and the letters home which told the story of the photographs, which had until then been virtually anonymous, I did not realize that an unhappy childhood was not the norm.
My father’s childhood was happy, I think, and so would be Cherie’s. The memoirs of his older brother, which I bought in Haddington and just finished reading, are the corroboration. Both Cherie and my father appear briefly in Uncle Laudy’s stories, things about them I never knew. Their sister Idelette appears not at all, nor does their oldest brother, Uncle Geebie. Because their father was pushing 50 when my father was born, Geebie served as Daddy’s surrogate father, and Idelette, two years older, as his partner in crime. They loomed much larger in the stories my father told. Both are invisible in Uncle Laudy’s world.
Far more vividly drawn than his two sisters are the locations of the picnics they had as children – Kanode’s Mill, Lover’s Leap, Coal Bank Hollow, the names of the forest plants they found – galax, arbutus, pipsissewa, mountain laurel, the work the children had to do – helping grandfather build the barn, scything alfalfa, breaking the ice in the cow’s drinking trough, killing chickens, picking potato bugs off the plants and drowning them in a can full of kerosene oil, sorting apples and eggs, the names of the boys in the Boy Scout troop – Froggie, Sam, Clyde, Skeeter, Henry, Dibble and Strother.
Vivid too is the tenant farmer on the apple orchard the family owned up near Twelve O’ Clock Knob in Gifford, the little town down the mountain east of Haddington. When the great unpacking of the books took place when my family came home and stopped traveling the world, two of the things which surfaced in the silent house were a 13-foot long stuffed rattlesnake and several monkeys carved out of peach pits. There was even a monkey carved out of an apricot pit, holding his tail between his hands and feet. These mysteries of my childhood are explained by Uncle Laudy. He writes of how and where Daddy killed the rattlesnake and that it was Jake Blankenship, the tenant farmer, who taught Laudy how to carve the peach pits. There is a pencil drawing of Laudy’s hands in old age carving, hands so like my father’s that the power of bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, their mystery in drawings or photographs, comes up to me like the images in the photographs my father and his father took and developed themselves.
That Jake Blankenship, Twelve o’ Clock Knob, the peach pits, Daddy’s hands, should be so vivid, and Idelette invisible, and the dead Cherie’s hem just glimpsed disappearing around the corner, in Laudy’s memoir, confirms the secretness of the family secret. There is a hint too, as to why, in this very competitive family, the girls simply did not make it into Laud’s childhood memory. The schoolyard game in 1913 alternated between stickball and “redlining” the girls, Uncle Laudy writes. The boys “locked hands and yelled ‘red line’ and swept the girls off the playground and back into the schoolhouse.” And that, as the mountain men would say, is all she wrote.
If Cherie was a Lesbian – “a tomboy”, Uncle Laudy writes – he writes not at all of his younger sister Idelette. Idelette, well-bred, well-mannered, could hardly bring herself to speak to strangers, including her sisters-in-law. She had herself photographed, as a young lady, in the Prince Hal at Agincourt bowl haircut she favored all her life, in profile, gazing meaningfully off camera, wearing a jerkin and gripping the hilt of a pretend sword. There is a picture of her in a cotton plaid kilt, sash, tam and gaiters, glowering into the camera holding her puppy dog Mac. There is the Robin Hood series of Idelette with her bow and arrow. In her forties, she joined the 13-year-olds’ Sunday school class, and had to be told gently by the pastor of the small town church she attended all her life that this was not appropriate. She never worked, never married, and made a life for herself. She became a fire tower watcher and a Cub Scout leader.
Far more timid and cloistered than Cherie, Idelette stayed home with their widowed mother, after whom she had been named. Often my aunt masculinized their name, and signed herself “Junior”, reducing their first name – as iconic to Calvinism as Kadija and Mary are in other latitudes -- to an initial, followed by her mother’s maiden name and surname. In old age, the Trekkies discovered her -- the haircut finally worked its magic – penetrated her disguise, and began to invite her to conventions as Doctor Spock. She went, and there is a newspaper photograph of the immensely aged Idelette, her bowl cut as dark and luxuriant as it had been in the 1920s, smiling as she never had before, surrounded by young people in Klingon costumes. Idelette went straight beyond sex directly to Neverland; for her, it was always the romance of gender. Thus did Idelette live, more chaste, tougher, than Cherie, dosing herself with naturopathic remedies, almost 60 years longer than her sister. She lived into the 1990s, long enough for the world to change, and long enough for Idelette to be crowned in old age, at last, with the love an intergalactic hero deserves. I like to think Cherie also met such a fate.
Looking at the pictures of my father as a child, and at the photographs he took as a child, I learned not only that a childhood could be happy but that he and I look alike. Before manhood squared his jaw and muscled his face, my father and I could have passed for twins. Until I saw that picture, of Idelette and Daddy, aged perhaps six and eight, in their summer whites and sun hats and matching Dutch boy bangs, in the dappled light of World War One, I did not know where I came from.
It was the same, the sense of a whole world of undiscovered happiness opening to me, when only recently did I find pictures of Cherie, in the pin-tucked Gibson girl dress, blonde waves, and hair bow in which she is first seen, pouting, as the Princess Royal in a family of boys, circa 1904. There are no candid pictures of Cherie; the family albums show her in the back row with the parents, the position the eldest sister in a large family always assumes. Tantalizingly, there’s a picture of her reading a book, but the title is just slightly too small to read. Only when I started looking at a small obscure picture album of photographs my father took in the early 1920s – pictures of posters of the Kaiser, pastures long replaced with munitions plants, Fancy and Maude, the plough horses -- that one, wallet sized, unlabelled and faded nearly to black, made me think it might be Cherie. I enlarged it and heightened the contrast and found one of the two best pictures of her we have. Daddy has pasted it in the 1921 section of the album, and I wonder if it is her Sweet Briar graduation picture. It shows a proud young lady, with her mother’s twinkling eyes and a wavy flapper bob. Somewhere, in a crumbling album inherited by a beloved niece or nephew, I hope there exist more pictures of Cherie laughing, in Paris, in a low cut dress, perhaps, in a smoking jacket, in a tam o’ shanter with a yard long pheasant plume, drinking absinthe, laughing, her long beautiful fingers holding a peach pit.
Of “Paris Nights”, she wrote
Many a famous spirit goes past in the pale lamplight,
Many a soul unknown slinks by in the dark wet night;
And the tragic ones gleam red, and their laughter dies in pain,
But the golden ghosts are the golden youth that loved, and shall love again!
For springtime comes each year, and lovers seek the quays
Still haunted by the olden youth of other days;
And so on an April night, alone in the dark and rain,
I see them, hear their voices, down by the brown old Seine.
The captions in my father’s albums, written in white ink in his microscopic spider writing, slip into the family slang he always used when speaking of Cherie or writing to her. I have one letter he wrote to her. If their childhood was happy, the pictures showed me, the family slang he fell into when he talked to her, composed of puns and invented words, German, Gothic orthographical puns like substituting effs for esses, set pieces about adventures like earthquakes my father had just survived – repeated in other letters home -- and mountain man expletives, well then, hully gee, Cherie’s childhood could not have been but happy too.
I’d always wondered where the siblings’ sense of the romance of adventure had come from. What had they read as children? Where did these ideas of pirate ships and far away places come to them in Haddington, Virginia, whose population was 700 when Cherie was born? It couldn’t have been all catechism and rollicking rhymed hellfire. In 1900, when Cherie was born, at home, attended by the college physician, W. F. Henderson, it was even more remote. The train stopped miles away in Cambria, and sometimes when it snowed you had to shoulder your suitcase and walk to Haddington. My father’s life outside this Eden was one adventure after another, geographic, and sexual, and Cherie’s poetry records not only pirate and gypsy adventures, but travel to Scotland, Paris and at least one of the Protestant strongholds in the southwest of France. Of Carcassonne, the fortified anti-Catholic medieval city of the French Cathars, the Mecca of street-fighting Protestants everywhere, Cherie wrote
Barren fields where the blackbirds fly,
Misty river below the hill;
Amethyst turrets against the sky,
Flaming red with sunset dye;
Walled from the taint of modern ways….
Twisted streets where there roam by night
Ghosts of the gorgeous golden days:
And the pale moon shines down
Over the amethyst towered town.
It seems indecent to deconstruct your auntie’s poetry for dyke imagery, though Cherie’s poetry is so full of salty stormy seas and gypsy kisses one cannot avoid it. Reading it, I feel the way I do when I see my friend’s handsome son on TV. He is the star of a TV show. I can’t watch it because I know he’s a real person. I knew his grandpa. It seems doubly indecent to comb the work of a suicide for evidence of her end, though one can see that too in Cherie’s volumes. Since her poems are the only thing I have of hers, aside from her name, making no judgement is her gift to me, a way of learning from what turns up long after others have drawn their own conclusions and pronounced Cherie, and her poetry, dead. Her sexuality is so lightly veiled as to be coarse in its innocence. In a volume dedicated to her parents, she writes, in “Salt Thirst”:
Fresh water lakes bring me no peace! I crave
The biting foam of a cold wind-riven swell,
The tossing breakers, strong with salty smell,
Not bound by rock and beach and shallow cave
And city walls near by….
No, from their tasteless waters I would rest,
And drink that salty wine in ecstacy!
Oh, girl.
There is a dispute over her innocence. My mother was told she committed suicide because she discovered she was gay. I think I remember Daddy told me she killed herself because a love affair ended badly. I will not decide whether or not a poem like “Salt Thirst” tips the scales of her innocence, though it does seem fathomless. Never again such innocence, writes Larkin, never before and never since. What I can do is to use the evidence of “Salt Thirst” to hope that Cherie was only bereaved and not disgusted when she died.
When I turn my critical faculties off, I can see Cherie calling for adventure again and again. She finds it at sea or in Scotland or on the Silk Road, with a beautiful woman, a long way from Haddington.
There are a number of possibilities for sources of this wanderlust. Laud records that on Sunday afternoons, after the catechism, Grandfather read them Treasure Island, Ivanhoe -– by Scott, another national monument of Scotland -- and the desert island tale of The Swiss Family Robinson. Grandfather was an opera buff, and corresponded with people all over the world exchanging biology specimens and stamps. Cherie often sees herself in an operatic breeches role, and there is a self-dramatizing whiff of the enthralling ethos Wayne Koestenbaum writes about of opera for gay people – the most sublime plots of opera are, she does it and she dies.
Cherie and my father both collected stamps from penpals around the world, and Daddy sends her samples of his stash of Peruvian stamps. The Scots themes of her poetry suggest familiarity with the romantic bestsellers of her father’s childhood, like Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, but until I turned to the internet there were secrets about Cherie I did not know. One of them is the existence of what is called boys’ books. There is also a tiny whiff of Swinburne, the sadomasochist who wrote of Lesbianism. Most strongly there are Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barrie – Long John Silver and Captain Hook, the romance of piracy itself – were invented by tormented Scotsmen. It was Stevenson who first wrote the immortal poem which ends, Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, and it was Treasure Island that grandfather read to the children on Sunday afternoons after they’d finished the interminable shorter catechism. He’d usually fall asleep during what Uncle Laudy remembered as the “most bloodcurdling parts”. After his nap, they’d go for a walk.
The hints had always been there in the bookcase in the silent house. Lying on the daybed I found, and read, my father’s childhood copies of Penrod and Penrod and Sam, the last of a fifty-year run of boy books. Cherie would have been 14 years old when they first were published, and my father five. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – the hero of what some believe to be the great American novel – is the most famous hero of a boy book, but boy books came before and after Huck. Scholars of childhood have recently descended upon the study of children’s books – since children themselves leave so few records of their lives – and have discerned a distinct Huckleberry strain in a run of books published between 1870 and 1914, when Penrod and World War One ended the reverie.
Childhood – or boyhood, explicitly – was defined in these books as a time of savagery and freedom, a barbarianism for which the narrative voice is nostalgic. Eden was a devilish frontier, never again to be visited by readers saddened and impoverished by the Civil War, civilized to the extent that boys no longer left home to work at age 12 and stayed at home until they were 21, and yet were not sexualized by Freud. They were innocent to a degree hard to credit now.
In boy books, there were adventures to be had in which girls and women represented cleanliness and godliness to be avoided. There were small-town values, abundant nature, a harmless gang of kids, including black ones -- Penrod’s companions, the twins Herman and Verman, never do grow up -- (Irish) bullies, (Jewish) rich kids, hypocritical adults. A cult of the “bad boy” was so firmly established by the 1890s that measures had to be taken. One expert argues that the Boy Scouts were established to tame the savage bad boys, who turned bad at about the age of 12 yet could not, under the new child labor laws which marked the progress of the industrial age, leave home or be put to work for another 10 years. My grandmother founded the Boy Scouts in Haddington in 1915. For him, Uncle Laudy contends. Well into his 90s Laud still had his Tenderfoot badge. He qualified for it on July 7, 1916. He says nothing about grandmother’s founding a Girl Scout troop for Cherie and Idelette, even though the girls’ movement had begun in 1912. Perhaps they weren’t as savage as Laudy, who was a Presbyterian minister for 60 years.
If Penrod and Treasure Island were among the boy books in Cherie’s girlhood, the rest of Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M Barrie might have been too. I vaguely remember from Daddy’s bookshelf a small hardbound copy of Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, about his walk through France. Its spine was faded by the sun, and someone’s signature was in the upper left hand corner of the inside cover. Where it is now, with the rest of Cherie’s history, no one knows. After the most romantic life on the road – Stevenson crossed the Atlantic and America, in steerage, coughing blood, against the wishes of his rich and terrifying Presbyterian papa to get to his bride -- Robert Louis Stevenson died young in Samoa in 1894. Peter Pan first saw light as a play which premiered in 1904 and as a novel when Cherie was 11 years old. The work of both Stevenson and Barrie is taken with increasing seriousness as the decades pass; Stevenson’s poetry, as well-loved now as it was when it was published, is now considered small but beautiful. His prose – for years Kidnapped and Treasure Island were considered boys’ books -- is considered of the first rank. Among its most ardent fans are sophisticates whose lives span the 20th century -- James, Nabokov, and Borges. In his letters, five volumes of which were published when Cherie was 24 years old, Stevenson’s ferocious disagreement with his father’s passionate Calvinism became known. Stevenson’s beatification as Scotland’s Bohemian martyr vagabond took place in the public eye. It may have been of more than passing interest to Cherie that he wrote a trilogy of stories called The Suicide Club, worked in Scots dialect, themes, and ballads. Stevenson wrote his own “Requiem”:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
He is buried on a mountain top in Samoa overlooking the Pacific. The last two lines are his epitaph.
J. M. Barrie’s sleight of hand in the doubling and tripling of identities in the story of Peter Pan – the actor who plays Mr. Darling always plays Captain Hook -- has proved a full employment mandate for queer theorists, who dote upon the true saga behind the story of the lost boys. It began with Barrie’s taking nude photographs of a family of beautiful little boys. As soon as they were orphaned – both young parents died of cancer within three years of each other -- Barrie adopted them. This story is as full of kidnapping pirates as Treasure Island, as full of voyages, and of boys so bad they are the only people in the book who never do grow up. Girls do – in Neverland, even little girls and fairies have grown-up emotions. Tinker Bell suffers sexual jealousy, and she shares with the maternal Wendy the altruism of self-sacrifice. Peter, one of the truly original characters in literature, is the most savage of all the Huckleberry Penrods, a boy so bad he is immortal and unloved. He stands outside the nursery window watching, something his 21st century readers find creepy in its pre-Freudian innocence.
All of these themes – the bereavement of the Civil War, the demarcation it created between modern industrial life and idyllic childhood setting, the bad boy books which came to represent that, the wanderlust, the Bohemian vagabondage, the hidden identity, the ballads, the highlands, the queer sexual innocence so freely sublimated in words – can be seen in Cherie’s life. The tension in Stevenson’s sunny poems of childhood and travel is that he wrote virtually all of them coughing blood – he called his lung disease “bloody Jack” and wrote poetry in bed. One critic says his travellin’ man poems are all about the road between childhood and his inevitable death; one can hear exactly this stricture – an inevitable curtain or deadline -- in Cherie’s poems. Whether it is her death or her sexuality that will put the final period on her life is a question that is still alive in Aunt Cherie’s poems. There, she is always breaking free or folding or clipping her wings.
As Stevenson writes, in what some consider to be his best collection of poetry, Songs of Travel (1895):
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river -
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life for ever.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around
And the road before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
And the road below me.
He set the pace on the road for all the Bohemian voyagers which came after, from Woody Guthrie to Jack Kerouac. As we have seen, Cherie’s last published poem is road music:
It is here my heart is dwelling….
Where the white road runs forever….
Stevenson’s 21st century critics emphasize his theme, for example in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of “exploring moral ambiguity and duality in human nature; a recurring theme is the contrast and conflict between good and evil.” Cherie too writes a sexual dialogue in her poems, often posing as a passionate man or an equally passionate woman. She uses it to most interesting effect in “Words Unspoken,” two separate poems in which both the man and the woman speak. Her face pressed to the window, she longs to leave him and go out into the storm. He lets her –
My darling, my witch-wife! See how she leans on my breast?
Her lips are a woman’s, she loves me – Then devil take the rest!
Scottish folklore is full of marriages between spirits and men. “Witch-wife” is the title of a poem, published in 1917, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the flapper poetess role model of Cherie’s feminist generation.
In “Viking’s Daughter,” Cherie writes
You have listened to me this once, because I spoke of the sea,
But now that look comes over your face again, and you hear me not;
You lie in my arms dreaming, but not of me.
Your sea has beaten me down, drowned, conquered me in
its waves;
It is stronger than I, stronger than inland love
To your proud heart, and more than mountain’s power –
And tho’ it kill me, I must let you go.
There is a story hidden in the sequencing of Cherie’s published poetry. “Viking’s Daughter” occurs midway in her middle volume. The remainder of that and her final volume, some 29 published poems, contain only two love poems, both elegies to love in old age. In “Remembering”, she recalls the crimson touches of her first volume, Masks and Gypsy Music. She writes, for the last time:
Eyes, dearer far than the blue sea’s tumbling wonder,
Lips, half-parted in the tender longing of farewell,
Snatch of song, tang of scent, the turn of a rounded shoulder –
Dreams from the misty land where memories dwell.
So but a waltz, a burning gypsy lovesong and – tonight!
That volume is dedicated to K.R.C.H.. I wonder if she was married, and if, some day, I will know.
Without being a real scholar of poetry, I sense Cherie’s dialogues, many of which were printed in little magazines, including The Christian Observer, owe a great deal to her contemporary, Stephen Vincent Benet, who won the Pulitzer in 1929 with “John Brown’s Body” – an epic poem criticized for its cinematic style. If there are echoes of Hollywood in Cherie’s vision, a real scholar would find echoes, too, of the propulsive, but very strictured rhythms, of Vachel Lindsay, the far crustier Scots-Irish religious zealot, visionary, and hobo poet of the previous generation. He committed suicide when Cherie was 31 years old.
Dialogues about dualities and masked passion, between lovers, seafaring clan warlords, heroes of old Virginia and the Bible feature in any number of Cherie’s poems, with pious verses overwhelming the sexual ones in her last volume. She writes about death and sleep, about patience, about folding her wings, about drought and the death of roses, about prayer in wartime, about ghosts, about coming home after her death to Scotland, and my favorite, about going to the woods on Thanksgiving with her dog. It sounds like Virginia, plainly confronted, and not the land of counterpane Cherie dreamed of when she closed her eyes. In “Thanksgiving”, she meets four hunters. Only one sees her, understands what she has come for. He says,
“I get you, stranger: I am tied
All year on night shift at the mill.
Thanksgiving Day I want my fill
Of woods and tramping. That’s the stuff
To make you over! Not enough
In just one day, though. Stranger, shake!
I don’t crave hunting for its sake….
And not to shoot, but look and see
What’s in the woods, on days I’m free.
I get you, bo – but not these three!”
Her pleasure in being recognized does not equal her pain and anger in not having been seen. In the last verse, anguish is the only passion left her, and the fineness of her ear and observation disappears for good. Poetry painful to read follows, poetry about Jesus – I am Thy minstrel! – with only just one touch of the gypsy music, and none at all of Cherie, unmasked.
It was the internet and Uncle Laudy’s memoir which, finally, did a little of the unmasking. Shadows and Windy Places is the title of her second volume, the one in which the carefully sequenced poems lead up to “Viking’s Daughter” and make a denouement with small, calm death poems, Jesus and Patrick Henry dialogues. “Shadows and windy places” is a quote from Swinburne, the famous decadent who wrote of Lesbianism, among other things, and from his most Lesbian poem – “Atalanta at Calydon.”
When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
Atalanta is the man-killing girl in Greek mythology who was warned by the oracle at Delphi never to marry. She refuses to marry, shoots arrows, and, for one brief shining moment, can outrace any man. Famous for his rhyme, his sado-masochism – his strictures, if you will -- his death wish, his drinking and his fiery red hair, Swinburne is the most masterful – if the best-hidden -- of Cherie’s teachers. He is one of the great rhyme artists of the English language. And of all the pain.
Googling, I found too that Cherie’s little book, of 36 pages, had a reader. Shadows and Windy Places is among the five boxes of papers left to the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania by the ninth poet laureate of the state of Delaware. To think that Cherie has been forgotten by everyone but the Internet marks a new frontier. The message in the bottle she threw out from the windy place nearly 70 years ago is not only still bobbing on the sea of immortality, it is riding the first three hits -- the crest of the wave.
So I went to the mountain town where she had been born and where they’d all grown up. I stayed in a bed and breakfast on the campus of the university which my grandfather had helped found, and where his five children grew up not only fierce but proud, poor as paupers, inclined to histrionics, courage, and shyness.
The bed and breakfast universe is one in which no niche is without its doily, no bed without its 20-pound duvet, and French toast is made by soaking croissants in eggnog.. What is not French toast has cheese on it.
If you’re lucky, there will be fellow guests like the Chinese nano-physicist to talk to – they do not eat cheese -- and a nice corgi called Mr. Chops, who does. The landlady will know all the gossip of the past half century, including the name and phone number of the publisher of your uncle’s memoir, and the fact that her former husband, a professor, ran the local porn video club in her basement. It is still a very small town –despite the growth of the university from the estimated 500 students it had when Cherie was a child to the 26,000 it now boasts. The reason, my landlady suggested, that I had never visited despite its legendary status in my childhood was that it is the end of the earth. Professors cannot be seen at the local porn venues, even if there are any. It was not until 1992, more than a generation after Stonewall, that the gay and lesbian students on campus organized a caucus. The first thing I saw when I stepped onto the quad was the back of a girl’s head, artfully streaked with several hundred dollars worth of different shades of blonde, and pony-tailed. Tri-Delt is the only thought I had, and stopped to watch her get into a Honda Accord with the familiar sorority decal – the three triangles which represent the epicenter of heterosexuality -- in the back window. This persistent sexual homogeneity may account for what Cherie called her “restlessness – my sin”, and my father’s perpetual motion, far, far away from Haddington and the shorter catechism.
In the books the publisher brought me, I found, at last, the only real glimpse of Cherie that there is left. Uncle Laudy writes:
My oldest sister was a rugged tomboy who
regretted that she was not born a boy in
England during the period of the War of the
Roses. She tried to sell me on the idea of being
a cabin boy on Sir Francis Drake’s frigate,
or on Captain John Flint’s pirate ship. We
could run away to sea. Of course she would
always be the captain. We made wooden
sabers, stained with pokeberry juice to show
that we had fought many engagements with
the Spaniards. The fantasies went as far as hiding
pieces of bread and cheese from our meals in
secret places under the piano as provisions for
when we ran off to sea. One cold day we even
got as far as the back pasture gate before
deciding it would be too cold at sea that day. We
retired to the hay barn to eat our dry bread and
cheese. I lost all interest in the Spanish treasure
ships after that.
My father wrote a letter home every week for nearly 70 years, and until I went to Cherie’s grave, I could not account for a strangely vague and resonant letter from Peru wishing my grandmother a happy birthday in August of 1940. It is a letter written by hand, which was unusual among this series. My father wrote from Peru on a typewriter, and in this hand-written letter he says:
Puno, Peru
Aug. 1, 1940
Dearest Mother,
Am thinking of you so much these days and want you to know on the 9th that I am thinking of you and thanking you for not only my life but the equipment to make that life worthwhile. We’ll soon be home to express personally what is hard to put on paper. I can hardly tell you how we are looking forward to coming home.
Sailing date is Aug. 22. We arrive in Panama on Sept. 1st and then see what boat we can catch from there to New Orleans. Probably arrive in N.O. about Sept. 12 and shoot for home.
All my love,
Cherie had been buried two weeks earlier, on July 23, 1940, according to the Interment Record given me by the loquacious cemetery plot salesman at the new cemetery alongside the old turnpike outside of Gifford. Her grave, marked by a flat bronze plaque, has only her name and years on it, 1900-1940. This birthday greeting to his mother is the only reference my father ever made to Cherie’s death in his letters home. He too lost all interest in Spanish treasure after that, except for one last word -- my middle name.
Sappho specifies myrrh, laurel garlands and wine for the celebration of poets. I poured a bottle of wine grown from new vines on the island of Lesbos on Cherie’s grave. I stuck myrrh incense sticks on it, on my grandparents’ graves, Idelette’s, Uncle Laudy’s and the grave of his dear wife, who died less than a month after he, after 61 years of marriage. I got a long garland of mountain laurel from Gardens of the Blue Ridge and made a wreath for everyone. Uncle Laudy’s incense stick would not burn, but the rest of them did. The beautiful old blue mountains, their trees red and gold, were very silent, remote and gentle. I read some of Cherie’s poems and sat in the sun for a while. The loquacious cemetery plot salesman had told me the strangest thing he’d ever seen there was a Buddhist funeral, and the very strangest thing he'd ever seen was the funeral of a good old boy who had been buried naked in a body bag in his own backyard. Nothing is against the law, he told me. So I left the Lesbian bottle of wine inside the wreath on Cherie’s grave, and carried out the box full of burned matches I’d struck to keep Laud’s incense stick going. And two of the oak leaves splattered with wine.
And the buzzing went away. When I finally sat down to read her poems, in preparation for this trip, I had already suspended my critical faculties and much of my sense of time and space, so as to let what was known to me come to me. What came in, through this rent in the veil, was a loud buzzing sound, like powerful shortwave radio static, I heard as I put the poems away late on the afternoon of October 18. It was information. I recorded it and watched it too. She might have been saying no. She might have been protesting the queasiness I feel when she takes her stand, with such unimaginable innocence, in what I now believe is not only Scotland the brave, but Scotland the queer. In the Scotland of her poetry, she was free.
That night I went to Gillie’s, the health food restaurant which now stands blocks from where they all grew up together. I was eating shrimp fettucine in the corner by the Styrofoam bust of Elvis when a variety of men and women of all ages began to come in carrying instrument cases. They pushed the tables to the side, and pulled the restaurant chairs into a circle, withdrew their fiddles, mandolins, banjoes and guitars, and began to play the mountain music that began there back in the 17th century. They began with “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” what had once been an African-American hymn, “Who Will Drive the Chariot When She Comes?”, long morphed into a mountain song. Black people – whose contribution to old-time music derives from the fact that half the fiddlers in the upper South at the turn of the 18th century were black -- sing, She'll be loaded with bright angels when she comes. The New River Old Time Music jam sing, She’ll be wearing pink pajamas when she comes.
She’ll be wearing pink pajamas when she comes, the young man sang. In old time music, words are the anchor, each syllable embellished with at least five notes from at least five instruments, so that the simplicity of lyrics does nothing to convey the shimmering complexity of the notes or the sinuous line of the melody. The words are not the least of what’s going on in old-time music, but they are its most laconic incarnation.
They sit in a circle facing each other, as if conversing, rather than performing. They went on to play a large repertoire they all know by heart of old-time music those mountains have been keeping safe all these years. “Julie Ann Johnson”, “Sadie the Cat”, “Liberty”. There’s a little drone in old-time music, like the bagpipes maybe, or a buzzing, and you can bliss out trying to catch it. As I listened, I began to think it was the music of the spheres I was hearing, inside the old old music, and that that is what the buzzing sound was. Nothing against the law.
In “Dream of Adventure,” Cherie wrote
Some quiet night in Kashmir’s Vale we’ll meet,
Passing along the road to Samarkand,
And I’ll salute, and the blood in my temples beat
As you leave your troop and give me your trusty hand.
Then on to new adventures, you and I:
To live – or, not less gloriously, to die!
It was, I used to think, my father who had passed along the road to Samarkand, and Cherie who had died.
So when my father told me at the end of his life that he would kill himself before he went to the assisted living facility, I believed him. I hid his guns. When he went, I gave them away. When they called from the nursing home to tell me he had died, I wondered. I wondered if somebody had slipped him a needle of morphine. Or if he had hurled himself out of his hospital bed with the collapsible sides. Something in the voice of the night death messenger over the telephone told me not to ask any questions.
Now I know it’s just as possible that what I believe is a lie, and that the truth is that Aunt Cherie came by and said Come with me. Let’s go play pirates.
But that is known to God. What I know, their gift, up here in the sunshine, is that they were not consumed.
With love from
Cherie
Christmas, 1938
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 07:10 pm (UTC)"Salt thirst", given the dedication to family, reads to me like what might be called a coming out. It is a coming out in a southern (?) style I recognize-- the disclosure not separated from the context of the entire person and ~all~ her dreamings and wantings (not just the sexual or romantic).
It is harder maybe to recognize this in contemporary times when the coming-out message du jour is "I'm just like everyone else and want the same things everyone else wants, except I love women instead of men."
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 07:41 pm (UTC)>All that is left now is the most beautiful valley, the old blue mountains, the volunteer sycamore growing alone high up on edge of the cliff slashed along the old Indian trail which became, after the turnpike, after the railroad, Interstate 81, its yellow and red leaves turning over and over in the breeze, glittering in the wake of the tractor trailers.
oooooh! i've seen the leaves. i've been blown around by the slipstream of those semis, too.
i'm halfway through but ready to respond, will take the rest slowly and enjoy the plums.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 09:26 pm (UTC)Words fail.
I salute you, J. The last line had me in tears.
And it occurs to me that this could be a book, if you wanted it to be.
Damn, but you set the bar high.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-20 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-01 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-01 06:38 pm (UTC)