The Two Kinds of Stories We Told

My mother didn’t like it when Grandmother Althea told me stories about the family. You could practically hear my mother’s eyes roll when Althea started on the family’s bad luck. Not bad luck, my mother would correct her. Bad businessmen. Bad decision-makers.

But Althea always waved that away. And what made them that way, she’d reply defiantly. Rather than argue, my mother would abandon the house. I’d find her out by the rabbit hutch, lips clenched around a cigarette as she pushed rolled-up lettuce leaves through the chain links to the rabbits inside.

~

Mom insisted that the visits back home to Baton Rouge be educational at least, so we always took the long way from New Orleans and stopped at one of the plantation houses along River Road to learn about the terrible strained history of the Deep South. It was our practice to stop at Ormond, either coming or going, for a catfish lunch out on the restaurant’s brick courtyard, and regardless of the swelter.

My mother’s plate would sit untouched while she sipped her Coca-Cola and looked out at the large mowed field behind the restaurant. It's used for weddings now instead of sugar cane. Crushing ice between her teeth, she would tsk and mutter, “Who thinks it’s a good idea to get married at a house built on the backs of enslaved people?”

People in this part of the South have long memories, so even though my mother used her married name whenever she returned, there were people who recognized her when we were in the commercial district. They asked after Althea’s health and eyed me while attempting not to be doing so.

“This young lady yours?” they’d ask, and my mother’s arm would lower onto my slim shoulders like a drawbridge. For a long time, I didn’t know what they were looking for. I didn’t know that Althea considered me part of the bad luck.

~

On one of our trips to see Althea when I was eight, I opened the car window to let in the caramelized smell of a burning cane field. My mouth watered. My mother tsked as we passed two Black men walking along the road with bandanas over their noses, eyes squinted narrow against the haze that was a by-product of burning the leaves off the cane before harvesting.

“Put the window up, Violet, honey,” my mother said.

I knew that it wasn’t the masked men, but the smoke that had her worried. Not long before, I had done a school report on the sugar industry and learned that burning cane fields was a practice that had largely stopped in the world outside Louisiana. It would not be until later in my life that I would think about why farmers in my state were still using a process that the rest of the world had given up as antiquated, and later still that I thought to put this practice alongside other antiquated things about the place I came from: balls where masked young men presented a number to a valet to identify the young woman with whom he wanted to dance; Mardi Gras clubs that declined to parade rather than open their ranks to minorities; the election of Klan members to the legislature.

“See that?” My mother pointed off to the left to a field where a dilapidated wooden structure stood. The building was derelict. Tall grass had grown up along the outside of it and even from the road we could see that the roof had collapsed. “That used to be the family’s saw mill. When your grandmother was a young woman, there were five farms, a saw mill, a sugar mill to process the cane. I remember a country store, too. The store was still around when I was a little girl. Most of the rest wasn’t.”

I knew Althea called them farms rather than plantations to differentiate them from operations that used slaves. This was probably not a lie. As far as I ever knew, my great-grandparents had begun their farming ventures on this side of the Civil War. Still, in Reconstruction Louisiana, anything was possible.

“So, we were like barons?” I asked, thinking of the Snoopy cartoon strips I read in the Sunday paper.

My mother laughed. “Not exactly.”

The wind was changing direction. In the distance, the smoke from the burning field had become smears in the blue sky.

“Mom,” I asked, “how come you never talk about your family?”

“Do what I tell you,” she said, eyes going hard. “Put up that window.”

~

There were always two kinds of stories on the visits to Grandma Althea: the one she told, and the one my mother told after. If Althea told me how she waited outside a bar with a pistol to shoot her cheating husband, Mom always found me later to correct the details.

“Don’t believe her when she says she didn’t pull the trigger because she thought of me at home,” Mom said. “The real reason she didn’t kill him was because she passed out in her car waiting for him. I used to yell, ‘Mother, it’s me, don’t shoot!’ when I came home late at night because your grandmother was usually drunk and kept a loaded pistol under her pillow.”

When I asked why Althea lied about these things, my mother sighed. “Violet, baby, it’s not enough for some people to see the world the way it is.”

~

In New Orleans, the most famous dishes, the gumbos and jambalayas, have always been made by throwing in a little bit of this and a little bit of that, whatever was left over, whatever sounded good. The dishes came by way of Acadiana and West Africa. Europe and the Caribbean, too. A thing outsiders don’t understand is that there is no set recipe for the dishes that everyone holds up as characteristic.

In our house, for instance, there were competing étouffées. When my mother made it, she used an old family recipe that called for a brown roux. If my father was cooking, he started with a blond roux. As an adult, I even took a cooking class where the teacher made it with a tomato base.

The origins don’t matter, only taste. Locals know that long before fancy restaurants put these dishes on their menus, they were made by the Cajuns in the backwaters and the Blacks on the blocks.

~

As a little girl, nothing made me happier than the visits to the country. Besides the fact that my grandmother was a gregarious and entertaining story-teller, Althea’s property on the outskirts of Baton Rouge seemed magical to me. I gathered fallen pecan nuts in a frayed basket from the back porch. I blew gently into the faces of the fluffy yellow chicks to watch them shake their little heads. I burrowed into the back of Althea’s closets to rub my face against the stored fur coats there that smelled of moth balls, and I examined the curio cabinet in the front parlor, never quite being able to make out the mysterious details of the bric-a-brac because even with the curtains opened, sunlight seemed afraid to venture too far inside the house.

If my father never came with us on these visits, it was easy as a child to believe the gentle lie that the trip coincided with some project he was working on. One summer visit when I was eleven, I noted my mother’s good mood draining away the closer we got to Althea’s. I asked why we kept coming if she didn’t like to.

She nudged her pocketbook toward me on the seat. “Find my cigarettes, will you?”

I rooted through the purse until I found them and handed the pack over. She tapped it against the steering wheel and drew a protruding cigarette smoothly from the pack with her front teeth. She lowered the window while she waited for the lighter to heat. When it popped, she pressed the red tip of it to her cigarette, drew deeply and blew the smoke out of the open window. These trips were only times I ever saw her smoke, and I was fascinated by the whole business, not understanding how something that looked so glamorous could be so bad for you.

Finally, she replied. “Sometimes you do things you don’t want for family.”

I was too young then to appreciate the powerful draw of one’s own people, to understand the old Southern fidelity to generations and heritage, so it didn’t seem that complicated to me. Yes, I would miss cracking the sweet Coca-Cola coating on the customary baked ham with a spoon, but I didn’t want that more than I wanted my mother to be happy.

“We don’t have to come,” I told her with an inflated sense of generosity.

Mom took a long drag from the cigarette. “She’s your family, and you’re hers. She has a right to know you. You have the right to know her.” She tossed the cigarette from the window and rolled it back up.

We were passing one of the many chemical refineries on the way from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. To me, they always looked like a pile of haphazardly stacked cages. There was no logic to the structures; they were all lattice scaffolding, belching smokestacks and steel towers. A lunch truck was parked inside the chain link fence that separated the road from the refinery’s property. People of every hue of brown and white waited patiently in line.

“Anyway,” Mom added, “it’s good for her to see my family isn’t cursed, even if she thinks hers is.”

I would remember that comment when, returning from graduate school to attend Althea’s funeral more than a decade later, we stood at the side of the grave, my father finally with us, my mother dry-eyed and brittle, and I, not the first time, aware of the eyes of the mourners on us. My father and I each held one of my mother’s hands. It was then, seeing the different shades of all our intertwined fingers, that I remembered what she had said.

I squeezed my mother’s hand to get her attention. “You did the right thing,” I whispered to her when she looked my way. She nodded curtly and returned her gaze forward, over the grave and into the distance.

~

After lunch on one visit, Althea sent me to get the condensed milk from the icebox. She stirred a teaspoon of the thick, sugary syrup into her coffee cup, then dipped the teaspoon back into the can, twirling it three times before she handed it to me. As I licked the spoon, she told me – only twelve - about the accident in which her brother had died. Having bought himself a new Cadillac Roadster, Brother Herve had stalled the unfamiliar car on the train tracks and couldn’t manage to escape before the train hit him. I naturally looked to my mother to see her reaction.

“Oh, Mama,” my mother sighed in exasperation, rising to gather our empty cake plates and bring them to the kitchen. “You know as well as I do that that was no accident. Brother Herve was drunk as a coot because the bank had foreclosed on Shadyside.”

“What’s Shadyside?” I asked, flattening my tongue along the bowl of the spoon.

“One of the farms,” Mom explained, stopping in front of the hallway mirror to check her reflection. “Uncle Herve was in charge of the financial end of the business, and he was going to have to come home and explain to the family that he’d bankrupted them.”

Althea’s spoon clinked hard against her saucer. “Don’t go telling the child that! That has nothing to do with Brother’s death. What do you want her to think about her own people?”

Mother’s eyes moved to Althea in the mirror. “Which ones?” she asked.

She carried the plates into the kitchen as Grandma Althea made a sound like a hissing goose at her back. The unexpected noise startled me and I cut the roof of my mouth on the thin, battered edge of the spoon, but as a parent myself years later, I also accompanied the necessary little lies I told my children with something sweet to eat, just as Althea had done.

~

By the time my parents had moved to New Orleans and had me, only one of the farm houses was still in the family. My mother’s cousin owned it, and it was reputed to be haunted. More bad luck, Althea clucked whenever it was mentioned. We visited, anyway. My Mom would sit in the rocking chairs on the portico drinking iced tea with her cousin, while I swung lazy circles around the columns of the colonnade, gawking up at the roof, painted light blue to fool the wasps into thinking it was sky. When I got bored, I’d go inside and wander around, twisting myself up in the heavy fringed drapes and peeking into the brick chimneys.

The cousin and her husband had renovated the house, sold off the land surrounding it, and when they were done, bought ads in the tourist magazines touting the historic home. They charged a fee, but not one as exorbitant as their neighbors down River Road. To take advantage of the growing interest in the history of slavery, my cousin also wrote ambiguous descriptions that side-stepped the issue of whether slaves had worked the place when it was an active farm.

Visiting as a teenager, I, too, sat in a rocking chair, a glass of sweating ice-tea in my fist. Since we’d last come, my cousin had built a long drive using oyster shells, another authentic practice from the Antebellum period for a house that was play-acting. All those neatly-arranged white shells felt like admiration for a way of life that I felt we should be excoriating rather than trying to recreate. The longer I sat there listening to my mother and cousin not mentioning it, the angrier I grew on my father’s behalf.

I knew it was terrible manners, but I finally blurted out, “Grandma Althea says this place is haunted. Is it?” At my belligerent tone, my mother turned to me curiously. My cousin regarded me coolly with a raised eyebrow, and took a sip of her drink.

“Of course,” she said, and she and my mother dissolved into laughter.

Humiliated by their unexpected mirth, I could only grip my glass tighter. It was unclear whether they were laughing because the house truly was haunted, or because it wasn’t haunted but the rumor that it was was part of my cousin’s business strategy. What was clear was that I was on the outside, not to be included in the knowing of the two older women sharing a private joke about what could or couldn’t be seen.

~

It was when the last of the rabbits died that Althea told me about her other brother, Montclair, and how he’d walked out into one of the family cane fields and shot himself.

It was mid-morning, and already the cicadas were buzzing. I was mowing the front lawn, trying to think of a way to politely pluck my shorts from between my sweaty butt cheeks. I was grateful when Althea came down the porch steps with a glass of ice water for me. I drank the glass off in one long gulp.

Althea leaned down to pluck the weeds growing through cracks in the front walkway. Her white hair was brushed away from her face in stiff waves and her back was a gentle curve as she leaned over, fingers searching for the base of the weeds. She wore a light blue linen dress with a thin, white belt at her stout waist. Her sensible ecru flats and thick ankles gave me the sense that she had grown out of the ground she stood on, that she was as much part of it as weeds that crept possessively over the edges of the walkway.

I crouched down and joined her in plucking. We worked silently, her moving toward the porch, me moving slowly in the opposite direction toward the street. The heat was thick and dozy.

From around the side of the house, my mother came carrying a tied garbage bag. Althea straightened and shaded her eyes. Mom carried the bag to the can on the street, lifted the lid and dropped the bag in. It made a thud as it hit the bottom. Then she walked back the way she had come, Althea and I watching her go. My mother’s behavior normally being something of a mystery to me anyway, I shrugged off her silent sortie and went back to weeding. Althea, however, remained staring thoughtfully after her, her eyes distant as if she was and wasn’t seeing her daughter retreat.

“I was just about your age when my brother - this was Brother Montclair - went out into the cane and killed himself,” she said. I sat back on my heels to listen. “We never did know why.” She turned from where my mother had disappeared around the corner and bent over to resume plucking weeds. “He’d always seemed happy to me. But he was so much older than I was. Maybe I didn’t know him very well.”

At lunch, we helped ourselves to cold plates of egg salad and asparagus aspic. Mom announced that the last rabbit had died.

“Well, that’s that, then,” Althea said. She took up an unpolished knife and spread her egg salad on a piece of brown bread as she launched into a story about the historical society calling to ask for a donation the previous day, but between the image of Brother Montclair bleeding among the cane stalks and now knowing what the thud had been, I found I’d lost my appetite.

That night as she brushed her teeth in the guest bathroom, I told Mom what Althea had said about Montclair committing suicide, expecting her to have a clarification. Mom looked first surprised, then grudgingly respectful, so I knew that the story was true. “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “I think both her brothers killed themselves.”

We climbed into the double bed and turned off the porcelain bedside lamps. My back ached from the yard work and it felt good to lie down. In the corner of the room, there was a little nightlight giving off a red glow. I turned on my side and stared at it, thinking about my mother’s dead uncles. I wondered if there was much difference between bad luck and bad decisions.

“Sorry about your rabbit,” I said. I knew from her breathing that she was still awake. Mom had often spoken of the rabbits as if they were nutty and delightful relatives, their behavior unfathomable, unlike that of our dog who was clearly motivated by food.

Mom tsked. “The last rabbit I took care of here was probably the great-great-great-grandparent of the one who died today. There were dozens back then.”

I had a vision of generations of rabbits procreating in the back hutch, and realized that there’d only ever been a couple there when we visited.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What happened to all the rabbits?’

My mother slipped her arms around me, pulling me close. “Violet, honey, they weren’t pets. Althea raised them for food.”

~

I was in the plumbing aisle of the Ace hardware store when Mr. Macandless came over and asked if I needed help. I’d turned sixteen two months before and driving was still new and exciting, so when Althea had said she needed a part, I’d volunteered to drive into town and get it. Now I stood, befuddled. The owner, Mr. Macandless, an elderly Black man with tight white curls and broad, full cheeks, must have seen something that looked like panic in my face as I turned with the two pieces of hardware in my hands.

“What you lookin’ to fix, young miss?” he asked me.

“A watering trough,” I told him. “But I don’t know the difference between these two.” I held them out for him to see.

“Won’t make no difference.” He took them from me. “Do the same thing, just called different names. This one,” he raised his left hand to show me, “is called a globe valve. This other one is called a stop valve.” He held out his right with the valve shining copper against the flat of his palm. “Do the same thing, though.” He handed them back to me. “You got a leaking trough?”

“That’s what Althea said.”

Mr. Macandless reached behind me and took a copper float from one of the bins. He handed it to me. “Probably gonna need this one, too, then. If you don’t, tell Miss Althea she can bring it back.”

I put the globe valve back into its bin and followed Mr. Macandless to the cash register. He rang up the two items and put them into a small paper bag. I’d seen him looking at me from under his eyelashes, so I wasn’t surprised when he asked, “You Miss Althea’s granddaughter?” He handed the bag to me. I nodded and took it from him. “How’s your daddy?” he asked.

I was used to people asking after my grandmother and mother when we visited, but this was the first time I’d been asked about my father. “You know my father?”

“Oh, sure,” Mr. Macandless said. “Boy’s grandfather, Jude, farmed a piece of land over in Maringouin and he used to come up on the weekends sometimes to help him. Always brought his clarinet, but Jude wouldn’t let the boy play in the roadhouses, even though he was good enough to. Thought they’d be a bad influence. Jude, he invited the local musicians out to play at his house instead and your daddy just set on the porch and played and played with those fellas. He still play?”

I shrugged. “Some. Teaches, mostly.”

Mr. Macandless nodded. “Got so peoples would come out to Jude’s place when they heard your daddy was in town. How your daddy met your mama. Didn’t they never tell you?”

“Only that they met at a party where daddy was playing,” I told him.

Mr. Macandless chuckled. “Sure enough.” He gave me a thoughtful look. “You ever meet your people?” I knew he wasn’t talking about Althea.

“Yes, but I didn’t know Jude. I only ever saw a picture of him.”

“Get to spend time with them at all?”

“Oh, sure,” I said, thinking about the strawberry ice cream I used to make with Gram Gemma on my birthdays, and how Grampa Julian used to put me on his lap in the big car and let me pretend to steer it.

“Well, good,” Mr. Macandless said, following me to the door. “Tell your daddy that Clarence Macandless sends his regards, and tell Miss Althea to call me if she needs a hand with that trough.”

He lifted a hand in farewell as I backed the car out of the parking spot. When I looked in the rearview mirror, he was still standing there looking after me, just like I knew he would be.

~

I was forty-seven when my mother died, and all the boxes of letters, deeds, business receipts, and bank IOUs ended up with me. I got a chance to see for myself what was true and what was exaggeration. So: Brother Montclair walked out into the middle of a sugar cane field and shot himself with his shotgun, probably because of gambling debt. Brother Herve got his car stuck on the tracks as the midnight freight train bore down on Baton Rouge. The train was carrying cattle to Amarillo. Herve was carrying a flask of booze. Empty, as it turned out, same as the family bank account.

My mother was right, after all. Althea’s bad luck was only bad decisions. You can turn the bad to the good - like my cousin had done with the old family house - or you can turn the good to bad, the way Althea had when she wrote my mother the words she did upon learning her daughter had married a Black man.

Unlike my grandmother, my mother died with her family stories largely untold. The one letter I found in her jewelry box was the one in which Althea asked her to bring me home so she could meet her granddaughter. When I showed it to my father, he read it without comment and handed it back with a grim nod. I still think my mother did the right thing.

In the cooking class I took as a distraction from my mother’s death, the teacher told us that the word "étouffée" was French for “smothered” or “suffocated.” No doubt my sudden snort of recognition startled my classmates, but it felt as rich as the stew we were stirring that this should be the one dish my mother brought away from her home.