CAR TRIPS WITH MY GODMOTHER

In a few weeks, I'll be going my first true vacation trip in many years. Pleasure trips from the past come to mind as good anecdotal topics. It is very tempting to tell you about going to Florida with your mother to meet your great-grandparents, but that is her story to tell. Or maybe one day your grandmother will let you wear the sweatshirt we had made for her after the trip, emblazoned with the slogan, "I Guess They Didn't Understand After All."

No, it is better that I tell you about going to Vicksburg, the Natchez Trace, Chattanooga and Ruby Falls in the summer of 1964 with my mother and godmother. Let us begin with my godmother, Dollye Lloyd, now a short woman with thin red hair hanging below her waist, given to sequined, mumu-style garments, chewing tobacco and ill-tempered, bad smelling dogs. Daughter of a railroad executive and Natchez belle, Dollye attended Centenary College (just like most of your paternal grand-people) and was second runner-up in the Miss Louisiana contest in 1939. A striking, poised, educated beauty and enthusiastic actress, she tried out for the role of Scarlett O'Hara when the "Gone With The Wind" production people were scouting the South, driving to the audition in a 1936 DeSoto. This whale-like vehicle replaced the '32 Dodge, which replaced the '29 Dodge, and was itself replaced by a 1940 Buick coupe with rumble seat, which gave way in turn to a '48 Mercury, a '52 Dodge, and a '56 Dodge which had to perform until 1985, at which time it was replaced by a special order Cadillac convertible.

Now, I am no car nut, and indeed avoid grease, oil and rust whenever possible, and so it may seem odd that I am able to recite my godmother's driveway "begats" in such details. The explanation is that she never traded a car in, and so I was quite familiar with all of these vehicles, which lived under tarpaulins and kudzu in her back yard at the end of Woodlawn Lane where the bayou cuts back on itself under a high, verdant, snake-infested bank. The explanation for the lengthy service period on the '56 Dodge is a bit more complex.

Dollye was more than an enthusiastic actress; she was a media professional, and her chosen medium was radio. A popular announcer, she commanded respect and a lavish salary from the town's top radio station for years, reading the daily newspaper comic strips to children over the air, introducing the big bands that played live in the station when they stopped in Shreveport on tour, and informing listeners of regional cultural news in a voice that, to this day, is the most expressive I've ever heard. I have, on dozens of occasions, watched her talk wild birds down from tree branches to eat from her hand. However, as the sixties drew closer, the new medium of television began to steal a great deal of the glamour, glory and advertising revenue from radio, even in the Deep South. About a year after I was born, Dollye decided to take a little time off from radio (just a year or so, long enough for the fad of television to blow over so that radio could regain its position as Queen of the Airwaves) and live on her savings in the house she shared with her mother, Ethel, who had inherited it, along with a pension of close to $300 per month from her railroad executive husband, who had died in 1936. Dollye never worked another day in her life.

The savings dwindled away in the inflation that began in the '60s, as did the spending power of Ethel's pension from her husband, which had been so munificent in the '30s. Household servants were dismissed around 1961. Socializing outside of a small circle of friends diminished, even the season tickets to Marjorie Lyons Little Theatre Productions, which Dollye had cherished since the days when she was automatically given the leading female role in every play went by the boards. Dollye and Ethel retreated to one small portion of the house, which they referred to as the "spinsters' annex," each autumn to conserve on heating bills, and learned to spend more time in the lush yard, more or less maintained by former family retainers and my father, during the warm months to avoid the temptations of cost-prohibited air conditioning. Tea bags were re-used; paper napkins were cut in half, grocery store butchers were cultivated for special deals, and those close to Dollye more than once received as Xmas or birthday gifts items which we had ourselves donated to the Salvation Army. The furniture, once lively and bright with floral patterns, gilt and brocade, faded to the dull, pastel hues reserved for shadow by Toulouse-Lautrec. Raccoons made their way into the attic from the bayou and urine-stained the ceilings in several rooms. Dollye's mongrel dogs, Buffy and Skeety (circa 1959-1971, horrible, stinking brutes that were cudgeled into one of the old cars when company came over) brought rabbits back from their dawn excursions into the bayou each day, and these were important nutritive subsidies. The '56 Dodge remained in service.

In the Deep South, gentility is not always related to income, and my godmother's social position was neither tarnished nor shaken by her lengthy period of adversity. To receive an invitation to one of her night blooming cirrus parties (a moonlight summer event which culminated dramatically with the midnight blossoming of an odd Mexican flower in her garden), or to be asked to sample her hot tamale pie, to have that last drink with her at whatever house she might be (she always dropped an Alka-Seltzer in her last scotch, claiming that doing so prevented hangovers), or, best of all, to share in the New Years Eve hunt through the yard for the two or three bottles of Andre pink champagne she buried someplace in the garden each New Years Day (convincing us all that it aged better and tasted best that way), then to rebel yell along with her as she fired her grandfather's LeMat revolver (returned to him according to practice regarding officers when he surrendered with Pemberton at Vicksburg) into the air to start us on another trip around the sun, all of these things were much sought-after treats and honors. Now you know about my godmother.

In the summer of 1964, for some reason, my mother decided that a car trip through the mid-South in summer would be a great family bonding adventure, so she packed me(age 7, just finished reading Gone With The Wind), my sister Heloise (age 14, just starting to date the fellow she's been married to since 1967) and Dollye into the new Corvair convertible and headed east, crossing the red clay cotton and pine country of upper Louisiana on Interstate 20 and the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. The bridge, largest I had crossed up to that point in life, handled locomotive as well as automotive traffic, and we were accompanied by a huge, menacing freight train which not only sparked much melodramatic panic in my mother, but also blocked the view of Ol' Man River that I'd been promised for the previous hundred miles.

When we reached the Mississippi shore, Dollye became animated and insisted that we stop immediately, and so we parked in the shadow of a billboard reading "Get US Out of the United Nations!" Dollye leapt from the car, salaamed gracefully, and kissed the soil of her native State. Her affection for Mississippi was an inherited trait ... I remember listening in fascination over the years of my childhood and youth as Ethel (Dollye's mother) gradually transformed their family farm into a plantation and the cream on the milk required first active skimming, then heavy hoes, then specialized industrial equipment, then chain saws to remove from the milk of a magically growing herd of cows while more and more joyful Negroes sang better and better while picking whiter and whiter cotton from the richer and richer soil, etc.

Entering Mississippi at Vicksburg, one is immediately confronted with batteries of Confederate six-pounder field artillery, because it was here that Grant cut the Confederacy in half by conquering the last urban crossing point still in Rebel hands. It was a protracted siege operation, with much digging of trenches and canals, many charges, redoubts, counterattacks, desperate hand-to-hand fighting, grim tales of Yankee cowardice, looting, pillaging, arson and rape, Southern nobility, restraint and heroism, and all of the other Civil War lore which has been left in the responsible, honest, unbiased hands of Southern battlefield tour guides since Appomattox. Because of its strategic importance, Vicksburg was more important to the outcome of the war than Lee's three days of whoopsies at the strategically insignificant hamlet of Gettysburg, which coincidentally concluded on the same day.

When I first climbed those green hills, dressed in Sears Roebuck's best Confederate uniform for children, carrying a toy musket, incited to a higher fever pitch at every redoubt as Dollye read the plaques and inscriptions and began railing anew about "what those damyankees did to our magnificent Southern boys," Mississippi was at its worst. The Civil Rights movement was afoot, both in Washington and in the Deep South, especially in Mississippi and Alabama, where mean, inbred, clay eating, militant, semi-literate, Bible thumping redneck cracker white trash had somehow taken everything over. There was a clear distinction between the rest of the South and these two States because nowhere else had the most despicable, murderous, embarrassing elements of society actually attained anything more majestic than pellagra in their communities, whereas Alabama and Mississippi elected them.

The attitude within my family was that we felt that the Freedom Riders and black leadership were on our side as long as they were fighting the redneck power base in Alabama and Mississippi, because we were certain that we were not on the side of those people. This did not mean, however, that we were wholly immune to the lure of the Southern legend, Margaret Mitchell's "land of cotton fields and cavaliers," and, in the naive days of 1964, we believed Northerners to be unscrupulous, common immigrants who had invaded the Confederacy with no motives other than theft and mischief and who had continued to oppress, rob and inconvenience the South whenever possible since the War. Please try to forgive us for having been where we were when we were there.

In any event, I was not the only one on the hallowed Vicksburg battlefield who fell under the spell of Dollye's "Look What Those Damyankees Did To Our Good Southern Boys" rhetoric. An angry mob formed around her and chased two station wagons full of tourists from Illinois out of the park. I fired my toy musket in the air and flung my Sears Roebuck forage cap about in the field, enjoying the afternoon much more than did my mother, my sister, or any of the rapidly departing Illinois tourists.

My mother, always a perceptive, resourceful person, rearranged the next day's itinerary to take us to a place called "Ruby Falls" instead of proceeding straight to Chattanooga and the nearby Civil War battlefields at Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain. Ruby Falls, located in the foothills of some mountain chain in either Tennessee, Alabama or Georgia(I've looked for this enchanted place on maps many times over the years and never located it), featured waterfalls streaming over multi-colored quartz-like rock formations, an underground hall of funhouse mirrors and altered gravity (achieved by carefully worked out angles between the floors and walls designed to alter one's directional judgment, and to cause excruciatingly aching ankles for days after the experience in most adults) and the world's largest collection of ceramic lawn elves.

One day, I must ask Heloise if she enjoyed Ruby Falls as much as I did. I have no idea at the time of this writing about anyone's impressions but my own, and I was highly, favorably impressed. One day, too, I must ask my mother what she did to keep Dollye from making scenes at the hallowed, bloody grounds we visited during the remainder of the trip. Something kept her quiet. I've often suspected that my mother hid Dollye's Alka-Seltzer so that she'd be hung over ever morning until we got back to Shreveport.

Once we got back home, life returned to normal for all of us. Dollye continued to coerce the '56 Dodge to the grocery store and on her other errands each week, sharing the grocery runs with a mysterious, poorly dressed stranger she'd met and befriended years earlier. After noticing him entering cabs several times outside the store and/or exiting them at a boarding house between the store and her house, she introduced herself and suggested that they should coordinate their shopping so that she could drive him to and from the store each week, figuring that she could save him the money he was spending on cabs at no cost to herself and perform what Southerners of her generation referred to as "a Christian act." Their relationship never extended beyond the weekly grocery shopping trips; indeed, Dollye never set foot beyond the front porch of the man's boarding house, learning only when contacted by an attorney after his death in late 1984 that he had been an eccentric millionaire.

In appreciation of Dollye's "Christian act," by the way, the man designated her as sole beneficiary of his estate, which is why the '56 Dodge was finally replaced by a special order red 1985 Cadillac convertible and wheeled into its reserved space under a tarp in the back yard, in line beside the '29 Dodge, '32 Dodge, '36 DeSoto, '40 Buick coupe with rumble seat, '48 Mercury and '52 Dodge.

Sign My Guestbook View My Guestbook