Angela Ball
SNAP ME
I spent the long years of young adulthood in love with men separated from me by impediments marital or geographic. Men I wasn’t meant to have. Many of whom I didn’t. Too many I did have, briefly, in secret momentousness and misery. For me, they were escapes from isolation, shortcuts to connection. But closeness seldom results from such relations; and if it does, the process is awkward, like a breech birth or the upside-down writing of the left hand. At the time, I didn’t know that. At the time, I was all about pursuing the impossible. In August 1979, this impulse led me to the ghost town.
Rodney was about thirty miles north of Natchez. In the mid-1800s it was alive and thriving, until the day the Mississippi River decamped, taking a new, more direct path to debouchment. A stroke of luck in the form of a teaching job had brought me to Mississippi. My (married) love, a historian at the university, had said that I needed to see Rodney, especially its graveyard. Following his recommendation was a way to honor our connection—hopefulness based on nothing, and the grander for it. One thing I immediately understood about Mississippi was its penchant (now greatly diminished, thank God) for the lost cause, the thing that fell apart, “went south.”
The coterie of elderly Black men in front of the convenience store was familiar to me from the courthouse of my hometown in southeastern Ohio—except there they were white, and wearing overalls, farming clothes. These men were wearing shirts and slacks, looking freshly ironed but faded. George’s shirt was yellow. His straw fedora had a band with a burgundy stripe, a chevron. North and south, white and Black, they were chorus for the play, be it tragedy, comedy, or farce. Pulling up there in my almost-new Oldsmobile (a graduation gift from my parents) in search of directions, I was the very definition of cluelessness. When I couldn’t understand the directions the men gave, and as they began to disagree among themselves on the best way to Rodney, I acted on impulse: Would one of them be willing to ride along with me, guide? The men reared back in their spindly chairs. Then one of them stood up. “I’ll ride with you,” he said. As he got into the car, his friends stared, astonished. His name was George. We drove away.
*
At the motel where I had stayed the night before, I chanced to see the British actor I was in love with: on TV. We had met in Denver (he a visiting professor of theatre and English, me a graduate student) and remained in contact. In the TV show that I hadn’t known about, he played a sage and smoothly compassionate doctor, glasses sliding down nose as he pronounced the fate of a young patient. It made perfect sense that he would appear on this solo journey aimed at understanding the state I found myself in. It seemed a message saying, “True love is far away. You will never be at home here.” Thinking of the show as a “message” to me was more than a little egocentric. One of my teaching colleagues used to make swooping gestures and noises: “The world’s revolving around you again!” and it was true.
And, yes, I was in love with two people at once. Wanting but not having. My actor love, a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and schooled at Cambridge, was living the end of the era of the traditional acting voice of Britain: upper class (Oxbridge), sonorous, measured, and perfect for Shakespeare. This enabled a career touring the campuses of America to play a popular role: British thespian. When attending dinners in his honor he wore a splendid black cloak, trimmed in velvet, like his voice. He was a famously good Polonius, and played him many times, with great relish. I rendezvoused with him backstage at the National Theatre during a performance. The prince having run him through with a sword as he spied from behind the arras, Tony had time to kill before curtain call. He often carried his hands behind his back while walking, gesturing with one or the other, and he did that while leading me through narrow corridors to his dressing room. There was a thrilling sense of the illicit that, come to think of it, matched perfectly with Polonius’s lubricious world view as he warns Ophelia about accepting Hamlet’s affections: “He’ll tender you a fool.”
*
Having taught for a year in Mississippi, I was beginning to understand the proximity of the past. In 1979, lynchings were fresh in memory, a story told by many grandfathers. In opposing ways.
When their sense of their own importance, their self-worth, is threatened (or perceived as threatened), people react with violence. This happens everywhere. Eudora Welty’s 1963 short story “Where is the Voice Coming From,” her immediate response to the murder of Medgar Evers, written from the point of view of the killer, is an eloquent lesson in exactly how this works: “There was one way left, for me to be ahead of you and stay ahead of you, by Dad, and I just taken it. Now I’m alive and you ain’t. We ain’t never now, never going to be equals and you know why? One of us is dead.”
*
The sexual revolution, fueled by the Pill, was not a very good deal for young women, my mother said. As I age, her words float back to me, clothed in rightness. A graphic example from pre-Pill days: in Cuba, “free love” was a doctrine of Castro’s revolutionaries. Young women were encouraged to join guerilla bands. One day they were revolutionaries. Fierce as their boyfriends, dressed in the same fatigues. The next they were fallen women in house dresses, babies on their hips.
Barely twenty-one, I arrived at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop unsocialized, never having lived away from home. As a wise poet friend described it, I was “fresh meat.” Once, at a party, a fellow student famous for being an ex-NBA player carried me bodily to a car and shoved us both into the back seat. All I had to say as I struggled was, “Wouldn’t you like to get to know each other better?”
He didn’t rape me—there were too many people close by. That was accomplished by one of the international writers visiting Iowa from Britain. On a snowy night, I had come to see a Japanese writer, a young woman, the suitemate of a young poet who was tall and slender and wore a kind of fright wig. I remember the three of us dancing together in a circle. At some point, my friend said she was ready for bed. It was very late, and the sidewalks surely had the glaze of ice they held from November to April. I asked to stay the night in their suite and somehow ended up fully clothed on top of the poet’s bed. “This is platonic, right? I don’t want to impose.” My girlfriend had disappeared. The poet proceeded to remove things from me: first shoes, then jeans, then blouse, his motions neither violent nor gentle. “No, I don’t want to do this,” I said, but didn’t have the spirit to fight—too naïve, too compliant, too fearful of conflict, ugly exchange of blows. Nothing I said slowed his preparations. After he had finished, hoping to make things right for myself, I attempted to cuddle against his inert, bony form. At sunup I dressed while he was still asleep, fled. To report him never occurred to me—would not have, as the saying goes, “in a million years.” Many years later one of my students presented me with a research paper on “this really interesting, radical English poet.” My rapist.
*
My mother had sacrificed her happiness to rules. She lived under a far different set of requirements than I, in a town where the Victorian age lasted well into the nineteen-sixties. She told me about a boy she knew before she met my father. “His name was Peaches,” she said. “He had dated my older sister, Pauline, and it was wrong to see him. The few times I went out with Peaches, I sat waiting for his car on the front porch. With my hat on.” The romance represented her chance for a good marriage, and forever after she carried the sense of having forfeited it. Peaches—how did he get that name?—prospered in life, becoming the popular, kind superintendent of the local school board. When I asked why she wouldn’t leave Father, she said, “I can’t. Marriage is my identity.” She was cheated in other ways, too. Though she was an equal partner in the family insurance business, she seldom got the credit she deserved. When she answered the phone, ready to help, the caller often asked to speak to her husband.
*
George told me the turns to make till we arrived at the ghost town, dominated by its fine, crumbling church and its graveyard, untended for a hundred and fifty years. The cemetery’s obelisks, pocked and streaked with lichen, algae, and mosses, were like ghosts of tombstones. Its fencing, still upright, was of filigreed wrought iron, fashioned by artisans in New Orleans with the knack of making that stygian substance look as delicate as the lace bodice of a gown. Weeds, some with evil-looking purple berries, and vines with stickers that attached themselves indiscriminately, grew everywhere. George didn’t want to go in, citing the probability of snakes, “maybe even rattlers,” but in I waded with my notebook to record names, dates, and epitaphs for a poem. The resulting work was accepted by a journal but never printed, because the journal, appropriately enough, folded before the issue containing it could appear.
I offered George a beer from the travel cooler in the Oldsmobile’s trunk. He drank it standing under a tree while he waited for me to take my notes. The day was heat-ridden, no breezes, only a clinging humidity. The rampant vegetation seemed its visual voice, especially the kudzu that gave small trees a second, spectral form.
The ghost town appealed to me, I think, because it resembled a woman deserted by the powerful lover who had given her substance, a story, a life. I often thought in terms of such parables. As I navigated the days, I made decisions in accordance with my own unrealistic expectations, the dream overlay I placed on people and places. No wonder I resembled a sleepwalker. I was a big fan of the movie The Story of Adele H. Written by François Truffaut, Jean Gruault, and Suzanne Schiffman, it is based on the diaries of Victor Hugo’s daughter. After her ruin by an army officer, Adele follows him to several countries in hopes of what—winning him back? She had never “had” him. Of course, I didn’t see it that way. To me, she was not a stalker, stubbornly wrong-headed, attempting to join her life with that of an ordinary jerk who treated women cavalierly in the style of the day, in the style of all days, but the ultimate romantic. That Adele grows increasingly delusional, that her life ends in an insane asylum, didn’t register as warning. She was my partner in unreality: abstracted from all else, love was her sustenance, her ideal.
*
I couldn’t be keen without being terribly keen, leaning forty-five degrees toward the man of interest, against my British girlfriend’s advice to “let him pursue the fair damsel.” A school colleague was more graphic: “Hang your meat in a far tree,” she said. The word “meat” hovered, dripping its ugliness, distracting me from the practicality of her counsel. Distance conferred value. Was a quality I didn’t aspire to, couldn’t afford. I dragged an immense loneliness like a ghost’s set of chains—where did it come from? Maybe from my father’s hands grabbing at my mother’s arms, squeezing and bruising them, his face locked in a grimace, teeth clenched, while charges and declarations buzzed from between them. Mother and Father were forever enemies, my sisters and I the territory each sought to rule. My mother’s weapon a coldly pronouncing intelligence; my father’s, impotent muscle. Maybe it came from the ache of my mother’s absence when she was conveyed to the so-called “asylum”—institution anything but safe. It was built during optimistic times soon after the Civil War and was a famous marvel, with its spacious grounds featuring small lakes in the shapes of the suits of cards; with its octagonal main hall, shape thought to soothe the troubled. Like many institutions begun in idealism, it became a place of stern hardship. One woman incarcerated there was lost while playing a game of hide-and-seek with a staff member. She was never found, the story goes, except as a brilliant stain left on the stones of a remote staircase. The stain still exists, as does the cemetery of blank tombstones, unattainable to her. I never discovered the circumstances of my mother’s six-week-long incarceration. Only that she suffered shock treatments, supported their heavy voltage, and that she had temporary memory loss, a common side effect. My father had wept when she didn’t remember who he was. (His parents had farmed, and passed along necessary cruelties from that hard subsistence, but also a vein of sentimentality.) My mother never talked of her time “away.” My oldest sister, who had been fifteen years old, never talked of it, nor did the middle sister, who had been ten. I was three and remember only feeling alone, bewildered. I have pieces of an explanation—Father shattering “a brand-new bath tub,” Father “breaking Mother’s arm.” Never in her life did Mother report his rage, his battering. Not to the police, not to the psychiatrists. “That’s family business,” she said.
*
I finished taking notes, and we drove back toward the little store on a series of twisty roads with no other cars. “You ever done any brain snapping?” George asked. I was taken aback. I’d never heard the term, but it could mean only one thing. So direct and exact it took the breath. “I am sixty years old, and I ain’t done any for fifteen years or more. It sure wouldn’t take long.” I looked sidelong at George. “I’m in love,” I said, absurdly, “so I can’t.” George seemed unperturbed. “I got a good bed. Wouldn’t take no more ’n five minutes.” “No,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
When we arrived, George asked me to wait while he went inside the store. He emerged carrying one beer, lifted the Oldsmobile’s trunk, and placed it in the cooler.
I had picked him up, so in his terms his proposal was perfectly normal. Any white woman who would carry a Black man in her car was bound to do just about anything. As I drove away, the chorus waved. So did George, but he was looking at his feet.
*
I’ve often wondered what it would have been like to go with George, to lie down with him. This has nothing to do with myths about potency. If only the benighted idea of race had never come to us, in all its absurdity, so many wrongs might have been avoided. The difference between George and me had to do with the conditions we were raised under, and how people’s words had stuck to us. How could we meet as equals? I would immediately become, if I wasn’t already, a crazy white bitch. Maybe not to him, but to his friends. What would he be to me? I tried figuring this out in a poem that imagines a belated tryst, though he must surely be dead; I’m now ten years older than he was when we met.
Tonight, my guide, we’re together on a mattress in a cinder-
block room, window an open rectangle. I unbutton
your shirt, touch the jut of your chest. You hover; I pull
your face low, stroke your shadowy cheek. Snap me.
What happens here is too fluid to be real; the last two words, even though the poem has explained “brain snapping,” too glib. I direct the scene. Though I address George, he is more idea than person, a ghost of himself.
Even at the time I knew that the excuse I offered him in the car, that I was “in love,” was inadequate. He had helped me with the thing I wanted. It made sense for him to ask my help with the thing he wanted. It was wrong of him to ask, but understandable. I, a well-to-do white woman, could never know the price George had paid for the apparent peacefulness of sitting in front of that store, among friends.
Maybe I don’t need to write the poem, because surely the story of the crazy white woman who took George in her Oldsmobile has survived at the convenience store, among its chorus, inflated by retelling until I say yes to George’s request for brain snapping. Multiple times, meaning I stay the night, stay into the freshness of morning, having become the ravenous one, as I had been already, in my other life.
ANGELA BALL teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. She lives in Hattiesburg with her two dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.
