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151 16 Dreams of Selma While her mother was alive, Ann made annual trips to Selma. There she would see her young nieces, Edith and Lane, the daughters of her beloved brother, William. The girls admired and enjoyed their aunt “Deat,” as she was called within the family. (No one knows the origin of the nickname .) Ann often brought with her a set of sculpting tools and pieces she was working on. She would allow her nieces to try and emulate what she was doing. “We were terrified we would break something,” they said. When she was in Selma during the summers with her nieces, she used to take the little girls on walks at nighttime. This was a pre–Civil Rights Selma, still innocent of the bloodshed that was to come. As Ann and the children strolled through the humid, shadowed streets, she would regale them with stories about the darkened houses and the characters who had lived in them. She would tell them tales about their own family heritage and the bravery their ancestors had shown during the Civil War. She loved telling them about their famous ancestor, Philip J. Weaver, and how he would oversee his merchandise as it was loaded in New York City onto the ships that transported it to Mobile and his stores. While the other owners would waste time partying and getting drunk, Weaver would stay with the ship to see that his goods were loaded first. This way, if there was a storm (and there were often terrible storms) and the ship was in distress, his merchandise was at the bottom of the hold and would be the last to be jettisoned. “Deat was so proud of this story of her greatgrandfather ’s work ethic,” Edith and Lane remembered. Ann knew very well that this was an important part of her inheritance. 152 · Part IV. The Journey to the Source: Florida, 1954–1982 “She always preached family to us,” Edith said. “She said we must stay close to each other as sisters. She remained a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy so we could inherit her membership as direct lineage. She also joined the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames for us.” She could also be generous financially, paying, for instance, for Edith’s college bills at the University of Alabama. On Sundays the three of them would go to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church together. The Weavers had their own pew, the only family to have one, but it was unmarked and few parishioners knew about it. Ann was distinctly displeased when she and her nieces arrived at the pew and found others sitting in it. The three Weavers would pray under the vibrant colors of Aunt Clara’s stained-glass windows. Ann had grown up under the light of these windows, the perfect metaphor for Clara’s glowing artistic reputation throughout the South. Now Ann had surely outstripped her aunt: as Clara’s reputation waned under the pressure of modernism, Ann’s elusive, abstract work seemed the more exciting, important, and likely to last. Yet even as she escaped the shadow of her famous aunt and her aunt’s style of art, Ann saw with increasing clarity the meaning of her family, her southern background, and her history, and how precious it all was to her. Her German shepherd dog was called Jeb Stuart. (He replaced an earlier one called Beauregard.) Monique recalled an occasion when a guest at dinner said how great Abraham Lincoln was, and Ann became very upset . “Lincoln was Public Enemy Number 1!” In her library were over fifty volumes on the Civil War and Confederate history. She even chastised her nieces on occasion for not sounding southern enough. Yet the ambivalence remained. Her cousin Trot Vaughan tells an amusing story of when he was twenty-eight years old and traveling through India in 1971 as a backpacker. He was in the American Express office in New Delhi when he saw an older woman he thought he knew sitting near a desk. “Annie Vaughan!” he called out across the room in his deep southern accent. She turned and glared at him, horrified. “Who are you?” she demanded. When Trot explained he was her cousin from Selma, she calmed down, telling him she would be happy to see him again but was leaving the next day. So there it was, her old, abandoned southern name and history she thought she had escaped...

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