Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "Southern Women" by Shirley Abbott (©1993 by Franklin Square Press).

The South where I was born and raised was Arkansas, in a peaceable little resort town called Hot Springs.

My mother and the other women I knew as a child, just before World War II began, were farm women, one or two generations removed from the real pioneer days, gentled and domesticated by the time I came among them. But the marks were there. Their skin was leathery from working outdoors. Some of these women were serene and some hot-tempered, and in either case they brooked no transgressions of their notions of morality, and woe to anyone who spoke to these women with disrespect. They were not innocent or submissive or delicately constituted, not afraid of balky cows or chicken hawks. It took them approximately two hours to transform a live rooster into Sunday dinner. They could reason with a mule and shoot a gun. But they also knew just how to take hold of a baby and what to say to a weeping two-year-old.

Urban spirit that I was, I had no more aptitude as a farmer's daughter than my fattier had as a farmer. I hated digging potatoes, and I hated gathering eggs. I hated the smell of chicken houses—vinegary, sweet, rotten一despised the chickens, shrank from the finger-skinning work that went on seven days a week, indoors and out. I comforted myself with the thought that I had, after all, not been born for such indignities.

Sometime in the late 1960s feminists brought forth the notion of sisterhood—of women "bonded" to women. Sisterhood was going to be "powerful." But sisterhood was nothing new to me. It has been a zealously guarded secret among Southern women for years. Next to motherhood, sisterhood is what they value most, taking an endless pleasure in the daily, commonplace society of one another.

The most vivid memories of my childhood are long afternoons when my Aunt Vera would come to our house with her daughter June. Sometimes the four of us would dress and get in the car and drive around Hot Springs, buying thread and snaps at the dry-goods store, "rattling up and down," as my aunt called it, on Central Avenue. Hearing what they said on these afternoons, I gradually realized that my mother and her sister were not awed by men in the least, that they preferred each other's company.

I also realized that these two women had unmatronly desires, usually involving beautiful dresses and travel, that otherwise went unmentioned—merely the circumspect fantasies of a pair of young housewives caught in the coils of the commonplace. And yet the sharing of these fantasies made them laugh, gave them a secret life as they bent their dark heads over the sewing machine. I knew that the part of their lives they liked most was here, with each other. Not at the supper table or at work. My father used to be jealous of these tête-à-têtes, and he had cause.

I was in love with my mother too. I hated her doing housework, could not bear the sight of her in an old dress and a pair of unlaced oxfords, feeding soapy bedsheets into the wringer, scraping carrots and parsnips at the sink. But one thing she had acquired in town was the ability to be glamorous, to divorce herself, by means of paints and polishes, from that other world. I loved her glamorous aspect.

On those rare afternoons when she did abandon her housework and go out, having brought her face to its state of daytime perfection, she would take up her car keys and shut the door on her immaculate house. She and I would set out for town together. We'd go find a parking place and go into Woolworth's for a spool of thread and a nickel's worth of candy. Sometimes, to my despair, she'd bump into one of her thousands of cousins on the street and talk for half an hour. The exoticism of the afternoon would vanish sooner than the bag of candy.

Many years later, I stopped to wonder why a woman of her thoroughly practical inclinations would spend upward of an hour prettying up to go to the dime store. She certainly was not trying to attract a man. She was not doing it for Daddy, for by the time he got home from work she'd be in a housedress again, perspiring over the kitchen range. Nor was she competing with other women. She was doing it for fun, and for a mark of her separateness, and for a way of showing herself—and me—that even so responsible a person as herself could do something that had no purpose to it. It was her one real break with her past. Maybe she wanted to let me know, in the most subtle way, that femininity was not merely the massive, serious, strenuous thing she usually made it seem to be, but occasionally a matter of pleasing yourself.