Home? Which Way is that?

Going home: The very words have a special American resonance, a complex reverberation involving the emotions as nothing else ever does. They immerse the mind in shadow and substance, myth and reality and, over all, the tricky maunderings of memory, the unstoppable insult of time. Cutthroat time.

It had been seven years since I had returned to the place of my birth and five of the six visits before that had been for family illnesses or burials, sanctified by Christian services but always somehow, like death everywhere, freighted with pagan ritual. The mourners mourn for themselves and their stricken awareness of mortality. The jokes in the family parlor are funnier, dirtier. The cocktails flow more freely at the country-club bar. Cakes are baked. There is an orgy of eating. There is something new to do, to talk about in the town. In country roadhouses they dance harder to make up for the emptiness they feel, in spool beds they screw as if they, too, might die tomorrow.

I had not wanted to go back, in spite of the beauty and generosity and tradition of the place, in spite of the rootedness I knew deep in my bones I could never repudiate. Going home meant the most painful reminders of old sufferings, a dread reconsideration of old mistakes, the resurrection of old ghosts. I went out of duty and love and because I was looking for something.

It began in the most unlikely of places: the workroom of my home in Southern California, where I write this. I am sitting here, as then, looking out my window at a pocked and stunted magnolia with aphids blackening the edges of leaves that, in the South I knew, would be green and shiny as the eyes of madmen. In the ten years that I have been in this house, my tree has not grown one inch nor produced a single sweet-smelling white blossom. Back home there is hardly a magnolia in the mothballs of memory that is not larger than our two-story house there, and whose summer fragrances are nothing short of staggering.

My children ignore the needle-pointed do not disturb sign on my workroom door and make fun of my accent, or the scars of it, yet they seem more and more hungry in their curiosity about where my people—their people—come from. They have never been to my home town. Have never known chitlins, corn bread, scuppernongs, crab apples, wild plums, lightning bugs like diamonds on the lambent air, the sweet promise of the seasons, stately antebellum mansions, June bugs on a string, the call of bobwhite, hauntingly beautiful cemeteries with Greek temples and Egyptian obelisks and mausoleums with richly romantic carvings on Italian marble, the funny lies their cousins tell. Have never "gone riding" on Sundays and dropped in on neighbors without calling, nor seen kudzu take over a steep-sloping riverbank or wild azaleas enchant a pine forest redolent of resin, nor caught sugar-cane syrup in tin pails while an old mule pulled round and round the great grinding logs, nor eaten collard greens and black-eyed peas and leftover grits, nor been to a peanut boil or a barbecue where goats and pigs cook for two days in the earth, nor fished from a river as dark and lordly as the Chattahoochee, whence cotton once went all the way to Liverpool. Have never realized Faulkner's theory that one loves a place not just because of but despite, shared his understanding of the idiosyncrasies of Southern place, river, soil, "opaque, slow, violent, creating the love of man in its implacable and brooding image."

So I had promised them flowers and cousins and rivers and graveyards, pledged them a springtime picnic beside a canyon of many clay colors, broiled chicken with gravy for breakfast, sopped up with rolls that rise in a churn on the hearth by the fireplace, more and better fried chicken and deviled eggs and Dixie cups and caramel cake than they would ever see in all the rest of their days. I would bedazzle them with a youth's vision of the glory of the South in general, the cherished landscape of my home place in particular, of Thomas Wolfe's celebration of "the magic and the singing and the gold."

It would all be there, somehow, appealingly the same. A graceful topography, grand people, a familiar coziness, the smell of permanence. For their sake, I would not allow the private emotional charges between me and the place I came from to be short-circuited by old abominations, by the ancient forces of race, politics, sexuality or family heritage—the direst enslavement of all: "Other people know or knew your mother and father," I was warned, "your grandmothers and aunts and uncles and cousins, and you are forever judged against that knowledge."

Yet up until the very last, I devised many reasons for not going back. For one thing, I knew the real home town was not mine. I had lived a somewhat sheltered life, and when I returned from private schools, it was always coming home, never going home. There was no more reality for me in people getting up and going to work in the door factory or the paper, peanut or cotton mills of now than there was then, when Negroes stogged in poverty went to the fields before dark to cut their fingers on mean cotton balls, kill snakes between dusty rows in the pitiless Alabama sun and keep sullenly silent when they were cheated with weighted scales. And I knew none of it. Or didn't want to. Just as I squirmed in embarrassment at my father's jokes or the endless barbershop twaddle about poontang and nigger cuttin's. Though as anyone could tell you, violence and screwing course through Southern life like twin grails in the vaunted search for manhood.

One remembers what one wants to remember, forgets what one wants to forget. I knew I had not so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember, with any clarity: the unseemly humiliations of the black people; the torpor of our endless summers; the sumpy smell of Saturday-night violence; the dark rising sexuality sublimated in dank high school gyms; all the clumsy pawing in the back seats of borrowed cars; the violations of virgins I had put on unshakable pedestals; the aching monotony of the empty moist streets by night when the town seemed as strange and silent as Stonehenge; the unspeakable waste, through alcohol, pills or insanity of so many good friends and relatives; the awful details of the lingering deaths of my father, my aunt and both grandmothers, the suicides of my mother and two uncles, all the sorrowful voices and sickbed rooms, the wills fought over in equal parts anger, greed and shame.

I tended to see all these in dim reveries, if at all, in blurred and dreamlike images, images stuck in the imagination of some long ago, some no doubt fixed at birth (the very day an uncle shot himself), others at puberty or during what was laughingly called adolescence, many alongside sickbeds, most at funerals, and all attenuating time with the deceptive facility of a film dissolve. Did it matter? Another Southern writer, Elizabeth Hardwick, had told me that "nothing is to be gained by reality—but much is lost in illusion." So the truth is hard to find. But one must seek slabs of it, nonetheless, knowing that memory effects distortion. It was no longer a question of going or staying. I would go because I had to go.

I dismissed Thomas Wolfe's elephantine argument of whether or not you could go home again as so much square, sentimental hyperbole and held fast now with Kierkegaard, who wrote that "only robbers and gypsies say that one must never return where one has once been." My wife was convinced that I should resolve my ambivalent feelings about home by going there and writing about it, that perhaps I could do my best writing in the effort to separate the symbols and myths of memory (and the fictions that swirled about me and that I had bought as a child) from the actuality, for only in such a separation could I really perceive myself, my place, my home, my parents and friends. Could exorcise old demons and fill my Empties. Could, au fond, grow up. At the very least, perhaps, I could draw some liberating nourishment, along with the sentimental follies and the bitter tastes, from being restored, for the first time as an adult, really, to another time and place I felt I could understand.

• • •

Eufaula, Alabama, had 8357 people in 1960, according to the census takers, and 9102 by 1970; but, as my cousin Edward Trippe Comer III, an eloquent grandee, says, "It's about 6000, isn't it? Always was." For to most people who stayed there, it will never change, will certainly never ride the express version of the Zeitgeist. The average annual family income is just over $6500. Lacking the percipient traveler's memory, concealing no mnemonic device with which to (continued on page 152)Home? Which Way Is That?(continued from page 118) unearth the living past, I did feel the whole Southern landscape was much the same. And inexpressibly beautiful. Yet everything was altered. The bird's nest was still in its place, as it were, but the twigs were softer, rotting imperceptibly, and the birds had flown to some other morning.

The first thing you notice, though, even before getting very far from Atlanta, which is not Southern to me, is how everybody smiles a lot. So you smile, too. In the South, you cannot tell transcendent love from ersatz charity, so you don't try. You just beam until your cheeks ache and before long your smile is not just perfunctory but fixed. You know that even when you leave it will stay behind, like the grin on Alice's Cheshire cat, the vestige of your awful gladness—real and expansive, or just a fixed clinging smile, up a tree? Whichever, when the smile goes, you fall from grace. Is it better to be a renegade? Not to care?

Passing the 2500-acre Callaway Gardens, 80 miles south of Atlanta, the mind jerks back to a scene uncountable years before when my father had taken me to dinner at Cason Callaway's large but unpretentious log cabin, and Mr. Callaway, a textile magnate, had told his son Bo: "My dream, son, is to build the prettiest garden that will ever be seen on earth till Gabriel blows his horn." And I believe he has very nearly succeeded. At the Gardens Country Store, we buy muscadine sauce and speckledheart grits and a sumptuous picnic lunch known locally as "the feedbag," alas. (One thing the South never was to me was quaint.)

We drive 12 miles along the high hot ridge of Pine Mountain to Warm Springs, where Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, or exactly 27 years before. Which is uncanny. Because I can remember when my father took me there, too, to meet his friend the President. The Little White House seemed so inviting then. Now, in spite of obviously loving upkeep, it seems oddly proletarian and, with its curious display of pots and pans, specially constructed bath, raised toilet, the famous unfinished portrait, hand-controlled auto, wheelchairs and braces, even depressing.

But as we get closer to the place of my birth, things seem to shade into the rich depths of the landscape itself, my palms begin to sweat, history may be heavy upon the land but not upon me here, now. I am as nervous as a cat and on fire inside. I need a drink, but the whole area is as dry as a brick. My God, this is real life. It comes all in a rush.

Oak, elm, locust trees are coming into full leaf. The rural South, unchanged, is greening into April, dense, still, heavy with blossoms of pear and plum, mimosa and crepe myrtle, redbud and the ubiquitous dogwood like a snowfall. Smell of new grass and warm sweet clover. The fragility of the natural harmony of the road is underscored by the dark dull sweaty faces of convicts pouring hot tars and leveling slag and aching for a cigarette, by the potbellied deputy with bullet eyes as depthless as a rabbit's, a sawed-off shotgun arrogantly cradled in flaccid arms.

The souvenirs of the South flicker past like images in a magic-lantern show: Dr Pepper billboards, a chinaberry tree in every Negro yard yielding its bitter unwanted fruit, peeling whiteclapboard churches, each with its own lopsided graveyard, old overalled men sitting on sagging porches, dilapidated barns proclaiming the timeless glories of Prince Albert Tobacco, Garrett Snuff and Spark Plug Chewing Tobacco, lonely ash-gray shacks on wobbly stilts of brick set back deep in dirt yards with broken-down Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs in each one; and the black, brittle, unspoken sorrow of fireruined forests, joyless workers in dungarees with necks wrinkled like old boots, country stores selling fat back and corn meal, taters and hogshead cheese, sardines and "sody crackers," dead side roads leading to auto graveyards, gas stations with specialists in the turning of brake drums and the reconstruction of transmissions....

Why is this sweet bitter land always so glutted with the rusting corpses of automobiles? I ask my friend behind the wheel.

The remembered defensiveness—is it endemic to the South or to every small American town?—flashes like an unsheathed sword: "What do you do in California—recycle 'em?"

Yes, as a matter of fact, we do, smashing and pressing them into marketable metal bricks. (We have different, more terrible graveyards in California.)

We are less successful remarking on the plight of the sweltering convicts, long after the sight of them. It always depresses me, I say. We used to toss them gum and candy and cigarettes until the guards shook their shotguns at us, and my father would declaim: "The way of transgressors is hard."

"Better to have 'em buildin' our roads and bridges," says my friend, "than punchin' each other out like they doin' out y'all's way." And we're not even home yet.

As we approach the town, I wonder aloud if I should sell the untenanted, uncultivated land I still own sloping off from the main highway down to the river. The U.S. Government no longer pays my brother and me for not raising hogs, for not growing peanuts—still a major cash crop in an area where the cotton that built the whole thing has gone. (It now comes from the delta, from Texas, from California, even from Egypt.)

"You might wait and see how this new two-million-dollar resort development near your property turns out," says my driver. "They're buildin' a big golf course and stuff. But it's gonna be public, so the nigras will probably ruin it. 'S why our taxes are so high...."

I should be accustomed to this kind of thing by now, but my silent anger is exacerbated by the presence of my children, who are not. I hate my silence and am confused by the nameless anxiety that grows in my gut as the last miles toward home fall away.

A huge billboard proclaims Ben Reeves for the Second Congressional District. Ben Reeves! My God, he was a mere boy when I left home. And here he is hoping to move into the void left by my father's good friend George Andrews, who has died. When I was about to ship out to Korea as a rifleman, my father had prevailed upon Andrews (unbeknownst to me) to contravene the inexorable forces of the U.S. Army. My father was certain I would never return and apparently had convinced our Congressman, who telephoned me at my base and said he could arrange for me to enter West Point, although I was 22 and had already graduated from one military academy and an Eastern college and was, in my offduty time, attending graduate school at Columbia. I went to Korea.

Just as the first shimmering vision of my Bluff City rises on the distant horizon, I am told: Tom is drinking himself to death, Babe's left him. Bubber is in jail for running over a little girl with his car when he was snockered. Billy is living on borrowed time. Bobby is getting into everybody's wife but his own. (Southern gentlefolk never ever say fucking, though Tallulah Bankhead once turned on a friend of mine who was dogging her at a reception in Birmingham and snapped: "Listen, shrimp, if you don't leave me alone, the fuck's off.") Red has been to the insane asylum twice and is still hopeless. His family is broke. Betty Jo has been an alcoholic ever since her husband was killed. Grace is still having spells (which means she's crazy) and the shock treatments only made her worse. Jake is giving illegal abortions—right in his office. And dopin', too. Lethe is getting a divorce—she's on dope, too. Eleanor took her life—pills and liquor. Junior finally came out of the closet and went off to Miami with his boyfriend—liked to killed his family. Lewis blew his brains out, right in the middle of a coon hunt. And Gloria is just eaten up with the big C. So bye-bye, Miss American Pie. (The names of the unfamous in this paragraph are fictional.)

These are my friends and, while the pattern of our lives was painfully, infinitely adumbrated many years before, we never believed the prophecies, never believed the grotesque blurred shapes that foreshadowed such a future. Never believed our fathers were drunks and our mothers insane. We were staring, after all, at an infinity of chances. Our youth was eternally fixed to some golden rhythm, we were given the opportunity to enjoy the very best our country has to offer, we would know only victories, we would live forever.

Yet now we manage to titter strangely as we tick off these attritions of time, the dread vagaries of fate. But deep down we know it is the hollow laugh that wards off imbalance, madness, for we are glimpsing the skull beneath the smile, the atomization of all things dear and peculiarly Southern. The center is not holding.

Lost in ambiguities, bleak congeries of them, we round a bend beyond which I know every topographic detail. But this is spring and no one I knew ever died in spring, so I am dazzled by the wild cornucopia of flowers and ancient oaks on the broad residential approaches to my home town, untouched by our war. I am ambushed by beauty, by a landscape that would have made Piranesi weep. It is almost enough to gather up the raveled threads of an earlier idealism, to evoke that aura of promise and possibility in which we had all basked once. Before our whole life as men found its image—and its peril—in the penis. In moneygrubbing. Before, as Yeats put it, "the ceremony of innocence was drowned."

We have, my contemporaries and I, long become accustomed to finding every physical thing dwarfed in the stretches between green-and-golden childhood and whatever is the next step of our lives (which for me was definitely not maturity). Our school, our church, our main street, my own street, my home, my grandmothers' homes are forever shrinking to mere fractions of their former glorious scales.

Still, I pass one of my grandmother's houses now—the one that was once a universe of giant armoires in high-ceilinged bedrooms, four-poster beds, an attic full of flying squirrels (one was rabid and bit her), marble baths with imported bidets I thought were baby baths, a real horse and buggy, the garage where she kept a Studebaker for years that she never learned to drive and where we masturbated, made magic and played out marionette shows at ten cents a head—and it has diminished itself beyond belief. (Leah, the cook, unable to accept the replacement of the horse by an automobile, called the garage the "gorral.")

The swing on the porch where "Munnie" told all the funny stories until a stroke made her frail, white and speechless is gone. My grandmother was a Comer, generally acknowledged as the most remarkable family in the state, and as a child she rode in a carriage around town in Jefferson Davis' lap. It didn't seem to have spoiled her. But she spoiled her own.

Two doors down from Munnie's house I see the beautifully restored ("by those Jews") antebellum home of her father, my great-grandfather St. George Legaré Comer, whom we called "Papoo" and who was the last of the Comer brothers—of the generation of which it was said, "There was never a fool nor a coward." (Cousin Ed scoffs at all this: "We were named after what we were—wool combers in Scotland.") One brother became a distinguished governor of Alabama, one a railroad president, two became presidents of a series of manufacturing plants, three simply became millionaires one way or another and Papoo was a brilliant lawyer, a witty Bible-class teacher, a leader in reviving the state National Guard after the humiliation of Reconstruction. He cultivated orange groves in the Indian River country of Florida, served several terms as mayor of Eufaula, banged away on a grand, square-shaped rosewood piano that his slaves had buried during the war, and it was from his balcony of spacious porch and Ionic columns that Jefferson Davis spoke on his last Southern tour.

I can remember being bounced on Papoo's knee as a very young boy and asking him to tell me about the slaves. And Munnie would say, "I wish you wouldn't speak to Mr. Comer on the subject of slavery." Years later, she still had illiterate black retainers quartered in mysterious back rooms of her home and carefully scissored every reference to Negroes that ever appeared in Life. When Eleanor Roosevelt admonished Southern blacks to quit working in white homes for five dollars a week, Munnie fired off a letter to our cousin John Shaw Billings, then editorial director of Life, Time and Fortune, that surely must have shattered his spectacles at 50 paces. Even though she never acknowledged the fact that Negroes were human beings, all the ones who had anything to do with her, including those "too lazy to hit a lick at a snake," were crazy about her, and at least a couple of them fainted at her funeral.

When, during the war, F. D. R. asked my father to serve on his NRA Board in Washington, she refused to speak to him for days and insisted that she "adopt" my brother and me while he went "up North" to work for those rich radicals who were bringing ruin upon the South and the country. Yet she was the gentlest person I ever knew, she harbored no interior hatreds, no spitefulness or distrust, and outside of my own mother, who jumped out a window at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis when I was 17, I loved her more deeply than I loved anyone else.

When she was down, which was seldom, she was, in her own wondrousstrange vernacular, "lower than a gnat's heel." When a friend was sick, she would dial the operator and say, "Now, Central. Sweet Alice Jelks is not at all well—she's having one of her spells. So when you ring, ring softly, please." (No one ever had mental illness or even cancer—only spells. And colds were never colds but catarrh.) When she read in the Eufaula Tribune that a friend had been buried in blue, she phoned the editor in high dudgeon: "Well, I don't care what she was in, you should have had the decency to say that she was in black." When Munnie's husband died, circa 1916, she refused to leave her house for eight years, never thought of another man and never wore anything but black for the rest of her days, which were plentiful.

Her husband, my grandfather Frank Wilkins Jennings, must have loved her equally as much: When he was courting her, he was known as quite a rounder, and he was told by Papoo that drinking was severely frowned on in his household and that if Mr. Jennings was serious in his intentions toward the young Laurie Comer, he would have to straighten out more than a little. They married when she was 18 and my grandfather never took another drink the rest of his life.

Baby talk came as naturally to Munnie as breathing, and once downtown she came upon our no-nonsense cousin Wylena Upshaw Kennedy with her little boy, leaned down and said, "Bobby, let me see dem toofies." At which Wylena growled in a voice roughly as deep as a bull moose's: "Robert, show Cousin Laurie your teeth!"

My first cousin Laurie Comer Kelly recalls, "I often think of how she used to kiss me after we'd been separated a long time—just staccato kisses so fast you couldn't even count them, accompanied by a sound that was more like approval of some fine gourmet dish. She always carried a big black pocketbook and it always contained an endless supply of goodies for any children she encountered. She used to get me to brush her hair for her and it was almost down to her waist. She would sit in a chair in her bedroom, rocking, and I would be brushing with all my might—it took it, too, with her thick mane—then she would comb the hair out of her brush and roll it into a little ball and put it in a Wedgwood pitcher that sat on her dresser. Bertha, who came onto the scene after Leah burned up in a fire, would empty the pitcher every day and groan. I can see Munnie now, with that fast little walk of hers that was almost a trot. I never heard anybody say anything unkind about her, and her whole personality and countenance just twinkled."

She laughed a lot, at herself as well as at others, and her laugh always ended in two musical notes that sounded like "Oh, law." She attended every graduation of her seven grandchildren, adored chaperoning dances, went to thousands and was always the most entertaining person there. She never went to bed if there was anything better to do and she usually read the newspaper around two a.m., for fear of missing something. It wouldn't have occurred to her that it was possible for anyone to stay too long at the fair. She was the fair.

She liked to tell friends how I had come home from Sunday school saying that we had sung about a big, cross-eyed bear, when, in fact, we had sung about how heavy is the "cross I bear." When Bishop Carpenter of Birmingham called on her and asked for a small weak glass of whiskey, she snapped, "Of course, Charles, but why weak and why small?"

When anyone asked her where Eufaula was, she would reply with majestic insouciance: "Directly over the center of the earth." And when the Paris-based actress Olivia de Havilland visited our home and made the tactical error of telling my grandmother that she had never heard of Eufaula, Munnie said: "How very strange, dear. Everyone in Eufaula has heard of Paris." And I remember when, at my graduation from Culver Military Academy, she was asked by the chaplain where she came from, she answered: "Heaven is my home—but I'm not the least homesick!"

She never allowed any of us to dance, play cards, tell fortunes or go to the picture show on Sundays, when, after all "the gizzards and the lizards" were gone, her favorite pastimes were "skipping around the block" or down the "alleynue" with my brother or me; listening to the bulletlike thrum of hummingbirds, the late-evening cry of robins, the tinkling bells of her back-yard cows (one of which got up on her dining-room table and into the sugar bowl while she was in church), the mill whistle and the looms going clickety-clickety-clack and the bells ringing in the little brick churches; and visiting the Fairview Cemetery. It was, and still is, the prettiest place in town, a veritable fairyland of dogwood and azaleas and daffodils perched on a lovely green knoll backing onto the forlorn railroad tracks and the river.

First we visited the family plots and read the serious epitaphs; e.g., St. George Legaré Comer was "Diligent in Business / Valiant in Spirit / Serving the Lord / Faithful unto the End." John Fletcher Comer, who died in his mid-40s, got an elaborate monument of Carrara marble as tall as I was and a eulogy to match: "The path of this just and pious man was like a shining light, clearer as he approached and walked in the meridian of his days. His wife, children, home and friends were cherished treasures. Moved by the generous impulses of an honest heart, controlled by a will, yielding to no opposition, in defense of firm principles, he left a name radiant with those virtues that make up the full measure of a reliable friend, valued neighbor and influential citizen, and now my beloved is with Christ in God, the spirit's home." The inscription was written by his wife, Catherine, who gave herself full credit on the monument.

Then we would look for the funny ones. One said cryptically, "And this too shall pass." There was "Little Willie, who has at last gone where he will be appreciated." And Dear Dorothy, who "faced the trials of life with fortitude, and triumphed in moderation."

When my grandmother died, in 1965, a few months apart from my father, the gravediggers had to remove my grandfather's gravestone and dig down to his remains, so that, according to her explicit wishes, her casket could be lowered to rest upon his. Her name and the dates of her birth and death were simply added to the original grave marker.

• • •

A few minutes from Munnie's house is Broad Street, which leads, finally now, into my own street, the Country Club Road. It was the whole world when I was growing up and seemed to be at least ten miles from town. It is, in fact, probably no more than two. It was unpaved then, rust red like Georgia clay, and only one or two Negro shacks, a sharecropper's decrepit house and my other grandmother's home were in view of our home, The Myrtles, named after a great fronting of crepe myrtle long since gone. We swung on cut vines over swimming holes in our limitless woods. We climbed to the tops of the younger pines and "rode" them to the ground.

All of this land is covered now with pleasant too-close houses, but as we pass, I can still see that poor sharecropper who had a flock of mean children—or at least in their natural resentment of us they seemed so—virtually no crops at all and two chinaberry trees whose berries we fired out of homemade popguns. But he bedazzled us every winter when, at the first good frost, he slaughtered his hogs.

In place of the neat green lawns of now, I see only those poor squealing animals yoked by their hind legs to an elaborate wooden scaffold, see the blood spurt out of them as their necks were slit with long knives, see the raw pale bloodstreaked flesh poke through inch by inch as they were skinned from tail to ear. And I can taste the sausages' burning-rich oils and spices as they flowed through my morning grits and salt-rising bread before I went off to school each day.

School. One evocation, one sprung trap of memory, leads to another. Sometimes I would ride my pony cart, sometimes take the bus, but my favorite mode of transportation was a wagon pulled by a pet billy goat and maneuvered by a little colored boy named John Henry who had to sit with the goat outside the schoolhouse until classes were over, sustained only by the milk and peanut-butter sandwiches my mother had fixed for him and his unlimited patience. If after school we had to go into town on some errand, he had a real struggle keeping the goat from eating everything fresh displayed by the grocers on the sidewalks in front of their stores.

On one of those trips, we encountered my charming incorrigible vagabond uncle, Frank, whose occupation, if he had one, I never knew. I had just come from under some mustard plasters for my bronchitis, was wheezing still, and he asked me if I was having trouble breathing. Before I could reply, John Henry said, "Nawsuh, Mistuh Frank, he just got a gee-tar in his nose." For a long while, he was my best friend.

But going home isn't all flashback. There is upon me now the blunt reality that my house simply isn't as spacious and sun-burdened as it was, that it no longer feels like mine at all, since the lady who lives there, once married to my father, quite rightly has made it her own and filled it with her own tasteful things. But they are not my things. I use all the wrong cups and glasses. I don't even know where to look for my mother's portrait and dare not ask. Even my back yard, where I used to ride my pony under the pecan and black-walnut trees until a wayward limb plucked me off and onto my ass, where I used to roam as in vast pastures and French gardens, where I carved out a sloping baseball park, is shrunk beyond recognition. And how do I explain to my children the yawning chasm between what I must have told them and what we see here now?

I take my children down to the end of the lawn, where the indifferent oaty greens of devil grass fade into thick pine forest, to the cabin where my friends and I spent so many splendid and terrible weekends, blowing things up with my large chemistry set from F. A. O. Schwartz, taking cold showers right on the front porch (my father called it "Woodrow Wilson democracy" when he insisted on situating it there and often said, "Don't be ashamed of what God gave ya"), barbecuing chickens on the big permanent brick barbecues common to that time and place and, with elaborate concealment and wonder, exploring the myriad colors of our freshly erotic world, a world made sweeter then by the polymorphous sexuality of childhood.

But the cabin has literally tumbled over into a thicket of briar patches and dark underbrush, every object has rotted and animals' nests are burrowed into the shiplike bunk beds. Alongside the cabin ruins, the old scuppernong arbor, where we practically lived in late summer when those peculiarly Southern grapes were in season, has gone to rust and stalk and seed from lack of care. Their musky cousins, the succulent muscadines, have vanished from the bay trees without a trace. The dream is perishable after all. And one does not, as one might expect or wish to, meet the past at every turn: I am paralyzed by the sudden confrontation of immediate family propriety and problems of property, repairs, city-council rulings, taxes, access roads, ownership, even sewage access.

I don't want these problems now, don't even want a party. I want to show my children their father's home and town and countryside and drop in on a few, very few friends and relatives, at our own pace, in our own good time. I have made this abundantly clear in advance. But nobody has listened, no one heeds my simple wishes, and it all goes agley. I even have to telephone the city clerk on some domestic business and talk to the pulpwood company about taxes on our pine trees and whether or not to clear the land and replant for a harvest 15 years away....

There are several calls from realtors whose curious hunger to sell our little remaining property—which has not even been assessed—has a sad air of desperation in it that makes me "nervous," another favored Southern euphemism. You can be aphasic with some terrible mental affliction, but you will be called nervous all the same.

I am pushed and pressured—to see the family attorney next door, to talk to a member of the city council about the feasibility of delaying the sewage connection, to inspect the new bank, to visit the restored jail, to speak to the president of the mills my father once ran about the devastating dividend cut, about the cost of maintaining a millowned marina with its courtesy Rolls-Royce, to inspect the peeling paint on the back of our house and the rotting clapboards on the front and to determine who will make the repairs and when. After all, our family retainer, Thomas, is 70 years old. All I want is a cousin's funny story and a drink.

This is not meant to be a missive of vengeance, a means of settling scores, but I am stunned and saddened at our apparent inability to do anything right, chronic complaint of all homecomers, no doubt, and from each small act a misunderstanding springs and grows in bitterness and recrimination. We get up either too early or too late for breakfast, and there are words. "Thomas has been standing by all morning, but he's busy with other things now." Or "It'll be easy with my next house guests—we run on the same schedule." I miss my own mother and father now in the most immediate and lacerating—and unsentimental—of ways.

The first night home we broil steaks and corn on the cob under huge magnolias on the moonlit patio of old friends, drink and gossip too much (every member of the art department at Auburn is dismissed as "queer" by one of my cousins, and it is suggested that my brother, an advertising man turned artist, stop painting "and go back to work").

The night is largely sleepless and the next day we are not on deck when the first of a disarming group of old ladies—cousins and aunts and schoolteachers—arrive for a ten-a.m. "coffee," though I don't even drink coffee. But these affairs are not without their redeeming graces—the ladies bear gifts and they are warm and winning and frequently funny. To an out-of-towner who inquires routinely about her family, one of my dotty cousins replies, with no trace of emotion: "Well, one of my sons is gettin' his third divorce and the other is in prison for killin' his daddy with a shotgun."

They say home is a place where one is remembered, which may be the nicest part of it, all those smiling, courteous people bearing offerings of love and remembrance: A great-aunt, nearly 90, brings a copy of her own family cookbook; a Good Ole Boy brings by a fresh lunker bass from Lake Eufaula (which across the river in Georgia is called Lake George); an alcoholic cousin pours medicinal screwdrivers at 11 a.m. and quotes Einstein and Cicero, a bust of whom he keeps in his office; the newspaper owner delivers an entire supper of broiled chicken and rolls and gravy; the pharmacist volunteers all the pills your body craves; the lady who always baked the best cakes in town remembers that your favorite is caramel; someone brings the lemon sherbet with fresh peel in it, another makes the requisite divinity candy and another, the chocolate icebox cake you loved as a boy. Another cousin brings a Soave from Italy, a rarity in these parts. It is not unlike all the funerals.

The funerals. At the last one, I didn't even cry. I was older and by then, I felt, something had separated me like the planets from everyone else. Felt it was my first going home instead of coming. There was even something thrilling about it, about its power to coalesce. Like violence, like orgasm and like war. The spirit and the pride of what was left of the family was overwhelming. "It shows what a really close family can do to hold each other up," my brother had said. But I still felt like an outlander.

The house was full of people for three days, and I had never seen so much food nor as many people working in the kitchen nor as many relatives and friends and flowers and messages. The first telegram had come from Governor Wallace, in fact, long before he got couthed up by Cornelia. The whole time was one of a lot of laughing and talking and visiting and reminiscing and not much crying. I'd always remember that. The amount of laughing is what amazes me in retrospect. I felt it was a symbol of love, somehow, and everybody holding everybody else up, to stave off...morbidity? Someone asked a dippy cousin of mine who she loved more than anyone else in the world, and she said her brother. And the person said, "You don't mean you loved him more than your own husband?" And she said, "Who? Ed? Why, he was no blood kin to me." And we all laughed, laughed hard at that.

The church was packed, and there was a full choir, and the minister read, at my bidding, that sweet poem from Shakespeare's Cymbeline about how all golden lads and lasses must like chimney sweeps return to dust—though he hadn't wanted to and insisted on inserting the countervailing powers of his New Testament, too. Afterward, at the house, a cousin I'd never seen went on at great length with a joke, the gist of which was this: The woman says: "I went to the doctor today and he told me I had a beautiful body." And her husband asks: "What did he say about your big fat ass?" And the woman says: "As a matter of fact, your name was never mentioned." Our old cook was in hog heaven—hearing dirty stories like that and bossing everybody around in the kitchen. It was almost like old Christmases. Christmases not as they ever were, probably, but as remembered.

Spiteful memory. That is the whole thing. And the shock of recollection, of old dead moments, things lost because you want them to be, but also what I loved and had to lose and cannot forget.

• • •

On the third day, after a night wracked with dreams and sweat and thrashing, we are late leaving another coffee, which means we have to skip a cocktail invitation at the country club to make a party in the country before a dinner in town. And we are blamed for all these indiscretions with tight lips or sly words that burn their acid print upon my brain.

The food at the parties is wonderful, the booze is still pulled out of closets or brown paper bags, and there is the usual plethora of brawlers, heavy drinkers, randy old goats—living metaphors of Southern manhood—and horny aging women who do funny shimmies on their knees on the living-room rug when the going gets heavy, neurotic and vinous, as if these are the only ways to blunt the pain of the earth. My father's old friend Colonel Upshaw used to say: "Some grow old gracefully, others learn to dance." These dance.

I am constantly asked why I left and just as constantly told this is the best old place of all, "God's country," "prettiest place this side of heaven." Is it a cry of despair of trapped men desperate to justify their lonely imprisonment, or a fair judgment, a fine prophecy? I do not know. I only know that everyone insists that someday I shall come home again to stay.

And sometimes I feel that those who did stay, whether by choice or by circumstance, are the noblest and most courageous of all. They may be rooted in outmoded tradition—they can talk forever about the workings of an antique cherry pitter—self-convinced, sterile and smug in their provincialism, indifferent to their own monotony; but they have intelligence, loyalty, trust, respect and a sense of sufficiency. They feel the fullness of the moment and know how to enjoy it. (And I would trade my funkiness most any day for that fullness and sufficiency.) They don't seem to mind that the great train that once ran triumphantly along the river's edge of the town, whistle-wailing its promise of other joys, new lands, thrilling cities, has gone forever. Perhaps they intuit that everything shines only in the heart. Even Ceres' gold.

Deep in my bones, I envy their rootedness and the fact that they have managed to evade the vast restless migrations that seem to beset the rest of the country, especially my adopted land of California (that country of the mind). No matter what is happening to them now, surely their children must reap some good in the unconscious exigencies of permanence, of place. "To be deeply rooted in a place that has meaning is perhaps the best gift a child can have," Christopher Morley wrote long ago. "If that place has beauty and a feeling of permanence, it may suggest to him unawares that sense of identity with this physical earth which is the humblest and happiest of life's intuitions."

I am also pressed to say "honestly" how I like my home town. I always remark on its beauty, the courtesy, the grace and generosity of spirit of its people. But to one of my brighter cousins I make the error of saying: "Frankly, I have never known anything anywhere like the Southern apposition of kindness and bigotry, gentleness and violence, chasteness and carnality." I have just committed the cardinal sin of the South. And peremptorily, I am slapped down with the old familiar weapons: What about the freakiness of Los Angeles, the bigotry and violence of the Northern city I once lived in—all the usual defensive clichés. And sex comes back to one thing: How would you feel if your daughter married a black, especially a smelly, unlettered black like we got around here? Just walk into the bank on payday. Endless unanswerable talk still about "the degeneration of the race" and creating "a society of mulattoes."

When I ask one of the founders of the all-white private school if there can be quality education underpinned by racism and a doctrinal belief in exclusion, I am greeted with a menacing silence that is like thunder. So mostly I avoid race and politics—this is Wallace country to the core. And as someone—Willie Morris, I believe—has said, the poor South has been too long the palliative of the national guilt.

Thomas Wolfe knew that "there was something twisted, dark, and full of pain which Southerners have known with all their lives—something rooted in their souls beyond all contradiction, about which no one had dared to write, of which no one had ever spoken. Perhaps it came from their old war, and from the ruin of their great defeat and its degraded aftermath. Perhaps it came from causes yet more ancient—from the evil of man's slavery, and the hurt and shame of human conscience in its struggle with the fierce desire to own. It came, too, perhaps, from the lusts of the hot South, tormented and repressed below the harsh and outward patterns of a bigot and intolerant theology, yet prowling always, stirring stealthily, as hushed and secret as the thickets of swamp-darkness. And most of all, perhaps, it came out of the very weather of their lives, out of the forms that shaped them and the food that fed them, out of the unknown terrors of the skies above them, out of the dark, mysterious pineland all around them with its haunting sorrow."

• • •

Certain members of my family are not speaking to others—I have to learn which ones and why and how to deal with them, what moves to make. Mostly I make the wrong ones. "You know I have never understood her," one close relative says of another. "She has put me on the spot too many times. In my prayers I ask the good Lord to forgive me for hating her." Another says: "Let's not let her destroy us. Let's forget about her. We are a family and love one another." And another, pulling me aside: "He's not even an in-law, he's an outlaw. I don't expect ever to see him again. You just love my son and me." I don't like being put in these positions. I feel tired of things now.

We do manage to get some flowers—after they have been husbanded for the party in our honor—from the house to the graves of my grandmothers and father and mother and a recently departed uncle, a brilliant, urbane gent whose entire adult life was wrecked upon the shoals of Nembutal and phenobarbital, on uppers and downers that frequently landed him in the pokey, whence my father invariably had to bail him out.

We visit some of the beautifully restored mansions—Eufaula has more treasures in the National Register of Historic Places than any spot in the state—and one entire neighboring town cunningly articulates life as it was lived in the 1850s, right down to operative basket weaving, pottery making, quilting and spinning and the shodding of horses. The great houses of Eufaula were used as Confederate hospitals during the Civil War and were mercifully spared when, in the spring of 1865, 4000 Federal cavalrymen arrived at the very moment of armistice.

We sift through a lot of historical detritus about our family and come across some substantial clay: a picture of a great-great-uncle, John Wallace Comer, with his faithful black "body servant," both in Civil War uniform. Uncle John returned from the Battle of Atlanta wounded, but it is said that he never would have returned at all without the aid and devotion of his young chattel.

I am very much taken with the courage, energy and passion for justice evidenced in the public addresses of my great-great-uncle Braxton Bragg Comer during his term as governor of Alabama, a time of plunder and corruption in high places: He built a high school in every county of the state, built the first schools for the deaf, dumb and blind, brought the tax dodgers to taw, equalized assessments to make the privileged pull their share of the load, upgraded the universities, subdued the "liquor dragon," kicked the lobbyists out of capitol corridors, insisted on "full hygienic conditions and humane treatment" for convicts and told the people: "We have in Alabama 800,000 citizens of the colored race. These people are a part of our body politic, and our duty to them and to ourselves is to help to remove from their way every obstruction to successful progress. Our prejudices are not against them, they are for them.... I am grieved to say that there is more friction now between the races than there has been for years, and I believe this friction is growing. How to stop and reverse the current is a question well worth your study and attention." That was in 1907 (George Wallace, are you listening?).

A family memoir reveals that servant problems did not take root after World War Two: "Servants as usual this morning idle and exceedingly annoying," wrote Laura Beecher Comer in 1864. "If I had reliable servants, no doubt the discipline here, in this life, would be incomplete to fit and prepare me for a happy death. At least Edmund was sold on Saturday. I am glad he is gone. Then who should appear at my door but Alberdeir, a very capable but exceedingly bad servant we had sold. I sent him immediately away."

And the exactness of the old family inventories staggers the imagination: "mewls" (by name), horned cattle, hogs, work oxen, trundle beds, tallow, potash and Java coffee measured in hundreds of pounds, syrup in gallons, blacksmith tools and axletrees, mill drays and harnesses, coal and iron, rifles and shotguns, well buckets and ropes, mewl racks, wheat, scythes, spokes, nails, sheep shears, grindstones, cotton gins.

But most intriguing are the inventoried lists of slaves with names like Temperance. Please and Patience, which were the lengthiest of all. I am curious to know why "One Negro Man Miles" was worth a paltry $100 and "One Negro Boy Redick" was valued at $1500 and "One Old Negro Woman Suckey" was appraised at 000.00. Age, sex and ability, I suppose, made the difference. John F. Comer's inventory alone lists 46 slaves, not counting their children. By 1858, our county had 12,000 slaves valued at $8,000,000.

Alone, I visit the old marble soda fountain, one of the few left in the entire South, where after school I watched in awe as my best friend, Bob, served up frosty Cokes with lots of crushed ice and a dash of vanilla or cherry and, for me, fresh limeade with grape juice in it and he threw in the lime, too. Since Bob's family owned the store, we sneaked condoms out of there by the dozen (though I didn't lose my virginity until I was 18, with a hotel whore on a mushy night in Panama City, Florida).

Today, Bob owns his own store across Broad Street from his parents'. Donning work clothes and dark glasses, I wander mock-casually to the prescription counter and say: "Hey, buddy, got any rubbers?" "Sure, man, what kind you like?" "Like 'em thin—whadda they call it, lambskin?" I stretch this simple-minded colloquy to a full three minutes before Bob recognizes me and explodes in tears and laughter and, unbelieving, just shakes his head from side to side and says over and over, "Sonuvagun."

But the keenest blending of pain and pleasure in my home-coming is the requisite cocktail party. I am less disturbed and embarrassed to meet my family's friends than my own. We shared so much, then so many years separated us, and now we have so much to say and yet nothing. We have plenty of vodka and gin, but only Scotch and bourbon are served. With each face, each name, come shards of experience from a long time ago, uncertain fragments of failures and triumphs, shared hopes and hells of the murmurous past. And drinking makes things swirl. Reflections are distorted now, fragments of illumination from a prism.

"I'm just middle-aged, middle-weight and middle-class now, Bob," says the well-constructed wife of one of my best friends. But I don't think of her as any of these things. My mind jerks back to a canoe in a moonlit pond, when I managed my first real kiss, fumblingly, and the canoe nearly spilled us into the pond we knew was full of water moccasins. Seeing her husband, my old camp friend, reminds me that some 30 years before this night, we were staring up from a bedroll beside Lake Burton in north Georgia, and in the stars I could see that we were immortal or, rather, I could not see how we could be anything but immortal, ever. And every time we left for camp, my friend's porcine father would grin and say, "Now, boys, if you can't keep yo' pants buttoned, keep a balloon on yo' pecker."

Another old girlfriend slides into view, and all I can remember is that hers was the very first breast I ever pressed, covered or un-. We were frightened young men, uninstructed by parents or teachers in the dark mysteries of sex, and even the horniest guy could hardly get laid, for, as another Southerner has put it, "The girls were all married or crazy virgins who went to church."

Still another face makes my heart leap. I do not see her. I see myself years younger, lying beside the club pool, mesmerized by a tuft of black hair protruding from the crotch of her ill-fitting swimsuit. It was perhaps my first flush of carnal knowledge. Those were extremely difficult times for me, for I felt I was loved only if I made a conscious effort to be charming—a mere pubescent!—but a smudged unseemly image of myself stood in the way of my being thus, and so I created my own vicious circle of sex in which venereal relations were precluded. When we made it, we made it only guiltily and in the dark.... Sentimental dissolves.

My beautiful favorite first cousin sweeps into view and I am relieved to see her, for we have few secrets between us. A divorcee, she is wickedly acknowledged by my cousin Ed as "the man hating widow Rhymes." But again the moment is transmuted with the deceptive ease of a film flashback to the day her father, my mother's brother, as fine a man as ever walked the land, blew his brains out behind the bank of which he was president.

My brother had said, "I felt it was such a cheat to all of us who loved him and wanted him to get well." Later he added, "I think I have it settled in my own mind now that he did the right thing—and it required courage and thoughtfulness and deep thinking to do it." And my aunt had said, "If he'd only told me, if he'd only told me, I would have held his hand while he pulled the trigger."

In flickering sudden flashbacks I see other awful scenes—scampering around our house looking for new places to ditch my father's whiskey or hide his pistol while he raved drunkenly against us, cruelly recounting our mistakes, and against himself, until the doctor came and knocked him out and carried him off to one institution or another. He would eventually come home from his $100-a-day treatment centers and address us with: "You'll never have the acumen for making money like your father." That was his tragic redemption.

My father was also intelligent, funny, generous, romantic and devastatingly charming. He could be meaner than hell and, in the next moment, as soft and gentle as a spring rain. If we, my brother or I, seemed ungrateful on some occasion, he would come on like Lear, raving: "'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.'" If we disobeyed him, he would spank us with the back of his brushes and quote 1 Samuel on the dire result of Saul's disobedience. If he farted in front of us, he would say, whimsically: "Who did that? You do that?" He had both the grace and the gaucheries of a Scott Fitzgerald. He brought us expensive and wondrous gifts from the big Eastern cities and wrote the most loving of letters, for he did not know how else to touch us, to show his love.

The stunted part of my memory tells me that my brother resisted many family scenes by running off and reading himself into a state of intellectual or aesthetic grace. But then I remember he was the only witness to the spectacle of my mother's only sister, a brilliant decorator who went bananas down in Havana, racing by moonlight and her own mad music down the Country Club Road—nude. And I know how for most of his life my brother has struggled out of the arroyos of despair and up a seemingly endless series of hills pushing the Sisyphean stone toward mental health. I pray he gets there.

Noting my distress at these mob affairs, my closer friends take us into their fine new homes, where there are beautiful children and no memories (for me), or to their ranches to ride Tennessee Walking Horses, which I had loved more than anything when I was growing up, riding alone most of the time across clay gullies and green meadows and along creeks with Indian names like Cowikee and Chewalla, and I'd dismount and go skinny-dipping and play with myself on a sand bar under a cathedral of Spanish moss.

Nights we go to fish camps and eat fried catfish with hush puppies and, when we tire of this old Southern ritual, we find fresh oysters in some country cabin or we go to a roadhouse and eat ribs and chicken and shrimp and rolls and listen to country music and drink bourbon out of brown paper bags.

There is another bolt hole just across the road from our house: the cozy home of the sister of my old friend Harper "Nell" Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. We drink whiskey sours and phone Nell long distance and gossip and I remark that I was distressed to read that Truman Capote was ill and depressed in Switzerland. Not so, says Nell, he is not ill at all, though he may be depressed "because his face lift didn't take."

The last couple of days I talk to a couple of ministers and one of them still cites that thing in Matthew about setting the sheep on the right hand and the goats on the left, which remains his rationale for racial segregation. Or for God's granting eternal life to whites and assigning blacks to purgatory. Another, however, sees the continuing segregation as a symptom of the fear that the white man in his lack of progress has for the black in his advances, economically, socially and, most signally, in dignity and self-esteem.

Another, a fine new addition to our town named Joe Blair, says: "The heartache of many a minister in this town is not race but the high rate of alcoholism found here. Several have said they have never served in a place where there were so many. How can we say that something that hurts this many people belongs to a gracious way of living?" How, indeed?

The former publisher of the Eufaula Tribune, Elizabeth Upshaw, and its forward-looking editor, Joel Smith, hearten me with their lively and progressive reportage: They dare to run engagement announcements and photographs of black girls; and announcements, also with photos, of the social and athletic achievements of black boys; they write pleas of help for an old black woman whose house has burned to the ground and editorials extolling the talents of one of the town's own, Marilyn McCoo of the 5th Dimension, whose late grandfather was the only black doctor in town when I was a boy.

They forthrightly report that a white father has thrashed his baby son and thrown him into Lake Eufaula; that a white policeman has been relieved of duty in the shooting death of a 22-year-old Negro; that the mayor's 15-year-old stepson, wearing a deputy sheriff's uniform and badge, is patrolling the town like "an adolescent Lone Ranger traveling with city policemen while they are on duty and apparently holds and exercises the full powers of search, seizure and arrest and apparently considers himself the last hope for the morals of our rapidly decaying youth."

And they reminisce freely of the tragic forced march of the Eufaula clan of the Creek Indians, who founded our Bluff City in some unrecorded year, along their "Trail of Tears" from Alabama to Oklahoma. I am moved by Chief Eufaula's farewell address to the Alabama legislature, which drove him away from his rightful home: "We leave behind our good will to the people of Alabama, who build the great houses, and to the men who make the laws. I came to say farewell to these wise men, and to wish them peace and happiness in the country which my forefathers owned, and which I now leave to go to other homes in the West. I leave the graves of my fathers...but the Indian fires are going out, almost clean gone, and new fires are lighting there for us."

An English ethnologist who visited the Eufaula Indians' village in 1752, in search of some horses that had been stolen from the British, described the local clan as "the lowest in the nation but two" and said the early Eufaulians were "the most unruly, as they all command and none obey." To which editor Smith says: "Now, doesn't that sound just like Eufaulians today?"

I learn, from an 1836 Journal of the House of Representatives, that a great-great-uncle, Governor Clement Comer Clay, was directly responsible for driving the Creeks out of the state. In that year, he told the Senate, the House and the Secretary of War that "many of them had taken reservations, which they had subsequently sold, and having squandered the amount of consideration received, had become destitute of all means of subsistence, except by labor (which Indians never willingly perform) or by marauding on our citizens, and that many of them had hence become paupers and vagrants, degraded by vice and intemperance, and had committed numerous depredations on the property, and acts of violence on the persons of the white inhabitants, resorting to plunder and rapine which had sometimes terminated in death. Nothing short of their entire removal beyond the Mississippi would secure to our citizens the peaceful enjoyment of their homes."

I talk to a newspaper reporter whose chief concerns appear to be long hair in the city schools and marijuana use among the kids. The school board holds a marathon special meeting to discuss "the hair problem" with students and parents. One distinguished citizen has grown a striking beard and is referred to behind his back as "looking like some Jewish rabbi." An old-line schoolteacher in the public high school says forlornly: "I'm afraid the world we once knew is gone forever—nigs, you know." Conversely, a reconstructed lady in charge of a public office has recently hired an ex-Marine officer and peremptorily warns him: "You can say shit, you can say fuck, but don't ever say nigger around here."

Another citizen protests busing with the full force of his garrulous sophistries: "The carpetbaggers in Washington want to yoke the South with a program that they don't want to enforce on their constituents in the North. The news media have exposed them with sending their own children to posh private schools. The Negro race still holds the South in full responsibility for slavery. If they will check into the history of the traffic of human flesh, they will find that the financial backing came from the New England states.... Many wealthy families in the North owe their original wealth to this area. Many of the people who have shouted loudest for the Negro rights are the descendants of people who instructed their ship captains to drown their cargo of slaves if the ship was threatened to be boarded by countries unfriendly to slavery."

After these long litanies of racial fury, after reading new paeans to John Birch, after hearing soon enough who's committing adultery with whom, who's insane, who's drunk, who's dopin', who's puttin' on airs, who's lost his money and who's made a pile, who's going to have an operation, even the most tasteless joke brings relief. One cousin says to me: "The only good nigger is a dead Detroiter—that's where all the servants've gone." And somehow, from some ventricle of old but probably honest prejudice, I laugh.

But I soon loathe that laugh. And I know that I must leave now, even under the sting of friends' remarks that I am always in flight. They are right. It is the only way to ease the secret sorrowful burdens I always feel here, of all the densely woven unspoken things I know and feel, but for which I can find no language. It never turns out the way one hopes it will. Yet leaving is always losing something, too, like tearing off pieces of skin. For I adhere to my heritage.

But among all the random tides of the emotions, the muzzy vision of a slow attrition of the human soul by the South's pain, its ineffable unhealable wounds, among the blunting of whatever exultation I longed to see at least in the eyes of my children, one thing stands clear: That old square Thomas Wolfe was right. In what I had taken to be my home-coming I see, as did he, only my leave-taking, my farewell. I have cast off the blinkers of childhood, found among the ruins of myth my own reality, and I have grown up. I am a Southerner, and the South is forever rooted in me, but I am no longer rooted in it. There remains the common bond of ways of speaking and remembering, of caring and loving, of the land on which my people lived and fornicated and suffered and in which I buried them, one by one, but these are no longer binding ties.

I go away from here now to make a life for myself and my own children in the shadow of my own blighted magnolia, west with the sun and my new ulcer, alone and free.