Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography

3. "All Manner of Defeated, Shiftless, Shifty, Pathetic and Interesting Good People": Autobiographical Encounters with Southern White Poverty

73 CHAPTER THREE “All Manner of Defeated, Shiftless, Shifty, Pathetic and Interesting Good People” Autobiographical Encounters with Southern White Poverty IN A TIDEWATER MORNING: Three Tales from Youth, his fictionalized memoir of growing up in eastern Virginia in the 1930s, William Styron wrote of his boyhood fascination with the Dabneys, a poor family who lived nearby and with whom he spent a great deal of time as a ten-year-old. They lived in a “rambling weatherworn house that lacked a lawn. . . . On the grassless, graceless terrain of the front yard was a random litter of eviscerated Frigidaires, electric generators, stoves, and the remains of two or three ancient automobiles, whose scavenged carcasses lay abandoned beneath sycamores like huge rusted insects.”1 The young Styron had found a ready playmate in the youngest of the Dabney children, a boy named Little Mole, who “had never been known to use Lifebuoy soap, or any other cleansing agent.” But Styron’s real fascination lay in the patriarch of the Dabney clan. While Vernon Dabney dealt in junk and auto parts, his true calling was producing bootleg whiskey. The Dabneys had not always been poor. Theirs was once a name associated with such ffvs (First Families of Virginia) as the Randolphs, Tuckers, Peytons, and Lees, but due to the unfortunate marriage of his father to a “half-breed Mattaponi or Pamunkey Indian girl from the York River,” the family had “long ago slid down the social ladder” and the Dabney name “had lost almost all of its luster.”2 74 ‡ chapter three Styron provides a portrait of the Dabneys that is at once both comic and poignant, as is the story in which they figure so prominently. It centers on the predicament they faced with the arrival, in 1935, of an ancient black man named Shadrach, who walked from Alabama back to Virginia because he considered himself a Dabney who wanted to die and be buried on the Dabney ground from which he had been sold away in 1850. Despite the hardships—financial and otherwise—that Shadrach’s interment imposed on the Dabneys, their dynastic sense of noblesse oblige somehow rose to the surface and they made it their mission to “oversee his swiftly approaching departure, laying him to rest in the earth of their mutual ancestors.” Vernon Dabney was not, Styron insisted, “an ill-spirited or ungenerous man (despite his runaway temper).” But he was a “soul beset by many woes in the dingy threadbare year 1935, being hard pressed not merely for dollars but for dimes and quarters, crushed beneath an elephantine and inebriate wife, along with three generally shiftless sons and two knocked-up daughters, plus two more likely to be so.” Yet with Shadrach’s appearance in Mr. Dabney’s yard, Styron writes, “I saw him gaze down at the leathery old dying black face with an expression that mingled compassion and bewilderment and stopped up rage and desperation, and then whisper to himself: ‘He wants to die on Dabney ground. Well, kiss my ass, just kiss my ass!’”3 What makes Styron’s depiction of southern poverty so distinctive is how appealing a lifestyle it represented to the young boy. “Oh, how I loved the Dabneys!” he writes in the voice of youthful innocence: I actually wanted to be a Dabney—wanted to change my name from Paul Whitehurst to Paul Dabney. I visited the Dabney homestead as often as I could, basking in its casual squalor. . . . The mother, named Trixie, was a huge sweaty generous sugarloaf of a woman, often drunk. It was she, I am sure, who propagated the domestic sloppiness. But I loved her passionately, just as I loved and envied the whole Dabney tribe and that total absence in them of the bourgeois aspirations and gentility which were my own inheritance. I envied the sheer teeming multitude of the Dabneys—there were seven of them—which made my status as an only child seem so effete, spoiled, and lonesome. Only illicit whiskey kept the family from complete destitution, and I envied their near poverty. Much of the appeal of being a Dabney lay in the perfectly normal sensibilities of a ten-year-old boy. “They were Baptists,” he wrote. “As a Presbyterian, I envied that. To be totally immersed—how wet and natural! They lived in a house devoid of books or any reading matter except funny papers—more envy. “All Manner...