I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century

Chapter I GRANDMOTHER SMITH’S PLANTATION

CHAPTER I Grandmother Smith's Plantation E VERY DAY IN SUMMER AND ON WARM DAYS IN THE WINTER MY grandmother sat in her chair at the end of the long front piazza and smoked her clay pipe-a thing, I have since been told, a lady never did. But a lady did. She did, in fact, whatever she pleased and no one had the hardihood to question. She was little and old and dried up, and attention to looks stopped at cleanliness; a stranger would not have guessed, to see her sitting there, that so much power could be lodged in so little space. The split-bottom chair was her movable throne, placed to catch the warmth of the sun; here she sat quietly puffing her pipe, meditating upon the rights and privileges and duties of a matriarch. She wore her crown as a busy queen must, on the back of her head: a generous coil to which her nne gray hair was drawn back straight from the forehead. Her steel-rimmed spectacles, impatiently pushed up on top of her head, rode out a precarious existence winking in the sun, to be used only on occasion, like false teeth and hats and corsets. This was before the days when old women thought they could stay young, when they let themselves go in unstayed ease. There was a deep fold where bosom and stomach met, cut deeper by her apron string, a pleasant place for a small boy to warm his hands on a chilly day and useful for holding thimble, scissors, spools of thread-not needles; needles were worn high on the left shoulder, trailing from I 2 I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century their eyes lengths of black and brown and white. Her head had settled down between her shoulders and her chin was not very far from her nose. But there was no laxness anywhere. She was whole, and the full expression of her wholeness could be seen in her face, where the tiny muscles around the mouth and between eyes and ears held the fiat surfaces of forehead and cheeks together. in an active harmony. No part of her face ever spoke alone. When she sat humped in her chair, her crown riding low on the back of her neck and the pipe going good, we knew that we could come to her with our troubles and our joys, all of us, children and grown-ups, black and white, and receive from her what can be got from only the very old and very good, a sort of fusion of love and justice, a thing so rare as to be without a name. Wisdom is perhaps the nearest word, though lacking in warmth. But she could be stern. Her eyes grew sharp and pointed, as sharp and pointed as the words that came clipped from her thin and sensitive lips. A blundering male was most often the victim. She never forgot that women live in a man-made world, and she had a way with men; not, however, the way to which they were pleasantly accustomed. She had long put away everything that was female, even everything that was feminine, retaining in the armory of her old age only the intellectual trickery that is peculiar to women, a strange irrational logic that leaves men gasping and helpless. She was gentle with women-with her three daughters-in-law, who were always being a little startled at the unruly household in which they found themselves, and with others who lived on and about the place. In general, she chose the gentler way, despising the coward precept, "divide and rule." It was a wild kingdom when her children came for a visit, always at Christmastime and in the summer. It took skill to hold together a family of three sons and their wives, a daughter and her husband, and Grandmother Smith's Plantation 3 seventeen grandchildren, among them three orphans, ranging in age from infancy to middle youth. The depot at Lynchburg, South Carolina, was the most eXCItmg place in the world. I cannot remember the beginning of the journey with my mother from our temporary dwelling-place in Darlington or Kingstree or Columbia; I remember only my arrival at Lynchburg, grimy and cindery and happy. I was terrified at the snorting engine belching black woodsmoke and the lordly baggage-smasher dropping trunks from a dizzy...