Every Day by the Sun Read online

  Town streets were laid out in an orderly grid with the courthouse at the hub, and the main street, Lamar Boulevard, connecting north and south. A Confederate statue, so common to Mississippi towns, faced south.

  On Saturdays, farmers from out in the county came to town in mule-drawn wagons filled with seasonal produce to sell on the circle surrounding the courthouse. The pace was easy and slow even on days when Ole Miss had a home football game.

  Each Christmas the square was transformed into a magical place when long strands of brightly colored electric lights were mounted on the courthouse cupola and stretched across the streets to the roofs of surrounding buildings. The square at night resembled a giant carousel, an enchanted place.

  DURING THEIR BRIEF year together, Dean and my mother had lived in Memphis with Vernon Omlie, Dean’s mentor and partner at Mid-South Airways. One painful afternoon in late November, Louise and William drove to Memphis and collected her belongings and Dean’s. They said good-bye to a weeping Exxie Hardiman, Omlie’s housekeeper, who had taken Dean under her wing and later welcomed Louise with open arms, nicknaming her “Baby Lou.” Every Christmas, my mother received a letter from Exxie recalling the good times. They were addressed:

  Baby Lou Faulkner

  South Lamar

  Oxford, Mississippi

  Louise moved in with Maud and settled into Dean’s room to await my birth.

  Maud’s house was a buff brick structure located a few blocks south of the square. The courthouse clock could be seen from the dining room window. It was a British-style “captain’s cottage” that she had designed herself with a gabled roof, a porthole-shaped window in the center gable, and a wraparound front gallery with French windows and a green canvas awning. A captain’s lantern hung by the front door. Each morning Maud would roll down the awning to keep the sunlight off the parlor furniture. In winter the house was heated by a cantankerous coal furnace that she stoked by hand, and in summer it was cooled by large, black oscillating floor fans. The house was a few blocks from the local cotton gin, and in season it rumbled day and night. By late October the window screens were white with cotton lint.

  Maud’s home showed her love of detail: high ceilings, hardwood floors, a formal dining room, a spacious parlor with a fireplace, three compact bedrooms, and two baths ideally suited for her, her husband, Murry, and Dean, when he still lived at home. Much of the furniture had belonged to Murry’s grandfather, William Clark Falkner, some of which he brought back from Mexico after the war of 1846: primitively carved, heavy oak chairs and tables, mirrors, and sideboard.

  Dean’s bedroom had a private entrance off the gallery. After Murry’s death in 1932, Maud and Dean lived together until September 1934, when he married Louise and moved to Memphis. Two maiden ladies, Miss Frances Ward and Miss Judy Reed, rented the front bedroom for twenty-five dollars a month (the same rate Maud charged writer Elizabeth Spencer fifteen years later). Then on November 10, 1935, the crash brought Louise to her.

  Maud’s other sons were married with families of their own. Jack lived in North Carolina and was an FBI agent who traveled the world, and John lived in Lambert, Mississippi, farming and crop dusting. One year John sent his sons, Jimmy, fourteen, and Chooky, eleven, to live with Maud and attend school in Oxford. They slept on cots in the dining room. William and his wife, Estelle, lived in Oxford, but at the time of my birth he was in Hollywood working as a screenwriter. A month before I was born, he sent my mother a one-line telegram: “What will we do if it’s a girl?” After Maud telephoned and left the news of my birth, he wrote to my mother: “You take care of the girl until I can get there and do it,” a vow he honored for the rest of his life. The first step was having himself declared my legal guardian shortly after my birth.

  I was born in Oxford just before daylight on Sunday, March 22, 1936. Spring had come early that year. The redbuds and dogwoods were in full bloom as Maud took Louise for a long afternoon drive in her yellow Buick coupe with a rumble seat, which she loved dearly. They had driven far out in the county on gravel roads. It was twilight when they pulled back into Maud’s driveway. Before dark she telephoned her family doctor, Gene Bramlett. “Gene, this is Maud. Meet us at the hospital now. Louise is having our baby.”

  Being born in a Mississippi hospital during the Depression was apparently a luxury. Two babies were delivered in Oxford’s Bramlett Hospital in 1936. I was one of them, and William Lewis, Jr., son of the co-owner of Neilson’s Department Store, born exactly one month before I was, was the other.

  There has never been a Poor Little Fatherless Child as spoiled as I. For the first five years, I thought life was perfect. My uncle William believed that a girl would be secure psychologically if she felt safe between the ages of two and five. (I certainly qualified.) My mother and I alternated between Maud’s home in Oxford, and that of my Hale grandparents in the country, with occasional interludes at Rowan Oak. They were all havens of order and stability.

  I never called anyone “Mother” or “Father,” or “Mom” or “Dad,” and certainly not “Mommy” or “Daddy,” though my Hale grandparents, Pearl Brown and Elijah Sanford, were “Mama” and “Papa,” which I thought were their real names. Maud was always “Nannie,” and William was “Pappy.” Their attempts to get me to say “Mother Louise” failed. The best I could do was “Mowese,” which I gradually shortened to “Wese.” The name on my birth certificate was Dean Faulkner. Nannie called me “Lamb.” Papa Hale called me “Little Feller.” Everybody else called me “Dean Baby.”

  When I was just six months old, Wese went to work as a part-time secretary. Caroline Barr, whom we called Mammy Callie, and who had nursed all four Faulkner boys and Jill, Pappy’s daughter, walked the half mile from Rowan Oak to Nannie’s every morning before dawn to supervise my care. In winter and summer she wore layers of clothing topped by a frilly long apron stiff with enough starch to stand by itself, and a matching white lace cap. She was so tiny that when Pappy picked her up after she collapsed shortly before her death, he could not believe how light she was, smaller than his mother, who stood a mere four feet eight inches and weighed eighty-nine pounds. Pappy held her funeral in the front parlor at Rowan Oak, and in 1940 he dedicated Go Down, Moses to her:

  TO MAMMY

  CAROLINE BARR

  Mississippi

  [1840–1940]

  Who was born in slavery and who

  gave to my family a fidelity without

  stint or calculation of recompense

  and to my childhood an immeasurable

  devotion and love

  Her tombstone in St. Peter’s Cemetery bears the inscription “Her white children bless her.”

  At Nannie’s house, Mammy would sit in a child-sized wooden rocking chair with a cane seat and no armrests to prevent bumping a baby’s head. Pappy had it made especially for her. It was placed next to the fireplace in the front parlor, where she dipped snuff as she held me and spat into the furnace register. In winter the stench of drying snuff was overpowering. An argument arose between Nannie and Mammy over whether snuff dipping was permitted in the parlor. If Nannie wanted her to attend me—and she did, though certainly not for any physical contribution, considering that Mammy at her advanced age could hold me only when someone placed me in her lap—she would have to take Mammy, snuff and all.

  A young woman named Jerry was my regular nurse. She came every weekday at eight and stayed until five. Her one duty: Keep Dean Baby happy. To Jerry, a happy baby was a good baby, and good babies who were mostly seen and not heard had good schedules. Early to bed was an integral part of Jerry’s routine. Before she left for the day, I ate an early supper and then went happily into the bathtub, where she sang my favorite song: “Froggy Went a-Courting.” And if we had had an exceptionally good day she would recite “The Little Orphan Annie.” I could hardly wait to hear her say “The goblins will get you if you don’t watch out.”

  Then, thoroughly scrubbed, in a clean fresh nightgown, I was handed over to Nannie or Wes
e for a bedtime story such as “The King’s Stilts.” When I was old enough, Pappy had a pair of fire-engine-red stilts made for me with “DEAN” painted on them in large black letters. Then I said my “Now I Lay Me” prayers on my knees and stalled as long as I could over my list of “God blesses” from every family member down to every dog I could think of. By six o’clock I was in bed. Rarely did I see the sun go down.

  Jerry taught me wonderful things: how to stand on my head, to say the alphabet backward (which I can still do), and to mind my manners. I learned not to be a scaredy-cat sissy-britches cry-baby tattletale Goody Two-shoes. The yessums and no’ms, please-sirs and thank-you-ma’ams are still with me—and with my children—thanks to Jerry’s attention-getting devices, such as “I’ll snatch you bald-headed,” and “I’ll yank a knot in you,” and most of all, “Just because you don’t get caught telling a lie don’t mean you were telling the truth.”

  Nannie also had a cook, Lily, who arrived at the house by nine o’clock to have dinner ready at noon, the main meal of the day. The laundry was picked up on Monday and delivered on Thursday. A handyman, Henry Jones, lived just two blocks across the street from us. He could fix anything that broke. Every Friday, Mr. Ray drove in from the county to deliver a dozen eggs and a pound of butter. On our doorstep at dawn every other day appeared two quarts of milk in glass bottles that revealed cream at the top, along with a pint of heavy cream, which Nannie hand-whipped for desserts. She ran a tight ship with some very good help. We lived well in spite of the Depression.

  Meals were served in the dining room because to Nannie the kitchen was a workplace. In block letters she painted “DONT COMPLAIN DONT EXPLAIN” over the stove, her adaptation of a phrase made famous by Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. When she ate alone, Nannie took all of her meals in the dining room, where she kept her easel by the window to catch the morning light. A slight odor of turpentine infused the air.

  At every meal she would entertain me with a story we called “The Boat.” I don’t know when she made it up, but it was a significant part of our daily ritual, a meal-to-meal serial of adventure and danger during the First World War. At supper she painted a different scene on the bottom of my glass using tempera paint on the outside. I was able to see these pictures only if I drank all my milk. Our “boat” looked very much like the Titanic, but the heroic characters were based on our family and friends. Whenever Pappy ate with us he would take over the storytelling. His torpedoes barely missed the bow (and Jimmy and Chooky and me), and more than once the machine guns of his Messerschmitts raked the deck. We abandoned ship only to be miraculously rescued at breakfast the next morning.

  I lived with Nannie, but I thought of Rowan Oak as home, too. Pappy had bought the antebellum house with four acres of land for six thousand dollars. It had been built in 1848 by Colonel Robert R. Sheegog and was designed by the architect William Turner. A traditional Greek Revival–style home, it had two stories, high ceilings, and two large parlors on either side of a central hallway. The facade featured a second-floor balcony behind four white columns, all framed by a cedar-lined walk. The first impression was of quiet grandeur, but in 1930 when Pappy, his wife, Estelle, and her two children from a previous marriage moved in, the house was falling apart from years of neglect. There was no electricity and no running water; squirrels and mice were completely at home on the second floor. Pappy and Aunt Estelle had their work cut out for them. The shell of a house needed everything from a new foundation to a new roof, wallpaper, wiring, plumbing, painting, and screens for windows. Pappy rolled up his sleeves and went to work, doing many repairs himself. Even in its dilapidated state, the house—with its grounds and long, curving driveway—evoked his great-grandfather’s estate at Ripley. He named it “Rowan Oak,” after the Scottish legend that a rowan tree bough nailed over a barn threshold would ward off evil spirits, keep the cow’s milk from going bad, and—most important—guard and protect the privacy of all who lived there.

  Behind Rowan Oak was a small cabin, and after Mammy Callie’s death in 1940, Chrissie and Andrew Price moved into it. Chrissie and her daughter, Estelle, helped run the house, while Andrew tended the grounds and horses. At Rowan Oak, I learned that “dinner” meant the evening meal and candlelight. Aunt Estelle was an excellent cook. She made exotic curries and chutney dishes and set an elegant table with meals served by houseboys on delicate china, with silver goblets, silver bread and butter plates, and finger bowls on hand-embroidered linen place mats. In season there was a centerpiece of fresh-cut flowers. Pappy presided over this table with a quiet dignity and pleasure.

  He was a stickler for good manners and taught my cousins Jill and Vicki and me how to behave at table: We were not to sit down until Aunt Estelle was seated. The grown-ups were given a choice before the first course was served: to smoke at table or drink wine with the meal. He would not allow anyone to do both. Smoking dulled the palate. The wine could not be appreciated. He would circle the table, wine bottle in hand, and each adult had to make a choice. He designated smokers by turning their empty wine glasses upside down so there could be no recanting the decision. We were to serve ourselves from dishes presented by the houseboy left to right. We were not to begin to eat until Aunt Estelle took the first bite (just in case the food was poisoned, he said). We were not allowed to leave the table until permission to be excused had been asked of, and granted by, our host.

  The year I was born, the Prince of Wales was to be crowned Edward VIII, King of England. In his honor the Gorham Company released a new flat sterling silver pattern called “King Edward.” Nannie’s sister-in-law Holland Pierce Falkner (whom we children called “Auntee”) and Nannie promptly ordered my first place setting of sterling flatware. By the time I was married twenty-two years later, twelve place settings were nearly complete—the king’s abdication notwithstanding.

  Every two or three months, Wese would drive me out to Mama and Papa Hale’s farm, where Papa had built a wood-frame house on land he inherited from his father. While Mama and their three children stayed in the nearby town of Ecru in Union County, Papa and some hired hands sawed wood, baked bricks, framed and roofed, put in window panes, whitewashed the house and picket fence, and dug a well. They added a front porch with a swing and rocking chairs, and—best of all—a screened sleeping porch in the back.

  As Wese and I drove east on Highway 30, time fell away. The farm, without electricity or plumbing, seemed to exist in a bygone era. There was no running water, no telephone or radio or refrigerator or electric fans. Not even a coal furnace or stove. The house was heated by fireplaces and the kitchen by a cast-iron wood-burning stove. A box of kindling sat next to it. At night the house was lit by kerosene lamps.

  Mama Hale was up before dawn every morning, stoking the kitchen stove. She made ham and eggs (if the hens were laying), biscuits with white gravy, her blackberry jelly or Papa’s homemade molasses. We had fresh milk, if the cows were giving and hadn’t grazed on bitterweed. Otherwise Mama opened a small tin of Carnation Evaporated. There was an icebox—a large wooden cabinet with the bottom half insulated to hold a fifty-pound block of ice. Food that needed refrigerating was stored above. The ice truck would show up intermittently during the summer. Most of the time we did without. Water was drawn from the well behind the house. It was always cold.

  My best friend in town was a little towheaded boy, Carl Downing, who lived two doors down from Nannie and who charged me a penny to ride my tricycle in front of his house till Nannie caught him at it. My best friend in the country was B. C. Jones, a handsome and funny African American boy a year older than I, who lived with his parents just down the road.

  B.C.’s father sharecropped with Papa and ran the sawmill, worked the fields, slaughtered the hogs, cured the meat, and made the sorghum. Every Saturday his mother helped Mama Hale wash clothes in a cast-iron pot over a fire in the yard. B.C. and I would follow her around as she hung the wash out to dry. We tried to do everything the grown-ups did—hoeing, chopping and picking cott
on, weeding Mama’s garden, and generally getting in the way.

  Life on the farm was orderly. Cows had to be milked, chickens fed, pigs slopped. Every Saturday afternoon, Papa would put B.C. and me in the back of his pickup for the five-minute ride to George Adams’s store. He’d bring us a Baby Ruth to share while he talked weather and crops with our neighbors. If he could find some children to play with us, he’d stay for a game of checkers. On Sunday morning, Papa, Mama, and I were at Philadelphia Baptist Church by nine o’clock, squeaky clean.

  B.C.’s main job was to “take care of Dean Baby”—along with my dog, Spot. Though Pappy and Aunt Estelle had several dogs at Rowan Oak, they weren’t mine. Nannie hated dogs and would not have one in her house. Spot stayed in the country and waited for me. As the sun went down, I would say good-bye to B.C. and go inside. Mama would light the kerosene lamps, one in the living room and one to walk around with. We ate a cold supper left over from noon, then played Rook or Chinese checkers until everyone was yawning. Papa and Mama Hale allowed me to stay up past my bedtime. Nights were still and silent except for katydids and tree frogs. It was my favorite place on earth.

  Occasionally the comfortable rhythms were disturbed. During the Depression many homeless, hopeless men walked the country roads. Some stopped at our house and begged a meal or offered to work for food. Mama fed all of them. B.C. and I would watch them approach the house. They made us feel sad but they never scared us. Gypsies were another matter.

  Late on a Saturday afternoon, Papa came home from George Adams’s store and told Mama that a band of gypsies had been seen camped on Cypress Creek only a mile or two away. “How many?” Mama said. We were shelling beans on the porch. Her voice shook. B.C. and I moved closer to each other on the swing.

  “Probably two families,” Papa said. “They have two wagons, a horse and a donkey, five or six men and women and a few little ones. They’ll be coming this way before dark.”