Logical Family: A Memoir
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About this ebook
"A book for any of us, gay or straight, who have had to find our family. Maupin is one of America’s finest storytellers."—Neil Gaiman
"I fell in love with Maupin’s effervescent Tales of the City decades ago, and his genius turn at memoir is no less compelling. Logical Family is a must read."—Mary Karr
In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer.
Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man "on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired." Realizing that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT (including a beloved portrait of a Confederate ancestor), and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s.
Reflecting on the profound impact those closest to him have had on his life, Maupin shares his candid search for his "logical family," the people he could call his own. "Sooner or later, we have to venture beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us," he writes. "We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives." From his loving relationship with his palm-reading Grannie who insisted Maupin was the reincarnation of her artistic bachelor cousin, Curtis, to an awkward conversation about girls with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, Maupin tells of the extraordinary individuals and situations that shaped him into one of the most influential writers of the last century.
Maupin recalls his losses and life-changing experiences with humor and unflinching honesty, and brings to life flesh-and-blood characters as endearing and unforgettable as the vivid, fraught men and women who populate his enchanting novels. What emerges is an illuminating portrait of the man who depicted the liberation and evolution of America’s queer community over the last four decades with honesty and compassion—and inspired millions to claim their own lives.
Logical Family includes black-and-white photographs.
Armistead Maupin
Armistead Maupin is the author of the Tales of the City series, which includes Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn, The Days of Anna Madrigal, and Mona of the Manor. His other books include the memoir Logical Family and the novels Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener. Maupin was the 2012 recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award. He lives in London with his husband, Christopher Turner.
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Reviews for Logical Family
68 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A friend turned me on to Tales of the City and I read them in quick succession. Great entertainment. So I picked up Logical Family when I saw it in the library and couldn't put it down. It's a memoir of growing up in the south (way to conservative for a gay person), leaving it, and finding himself. He regales us with his honesty and humor and intelligence as he takes us on a 40-year romp through his life. It's a fabulous read with delicious stories.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Armistead Maupin is a surprisingly divisive figure: people like or dislike his books for obvious political reasons, of course, but also for the same sort of reasons that readers disagree about Dickens: he is a writer who produced most of his work as serials under heavy time-pressure, relying on a superb natural storytelling ability, deliberately terrible jokes, topical references and sometimes rather too facile sentimentality. If you first came across Tales of the city at a time when there was no positive, funny light fiction featuring LGBT characters (as I did), you might be inclined to regard it as wonderful; if you saw it on TV and then went back to read the books you might just as easily dismiss it as too glossy, romantic and American. I think he's one of the great modern authors of light fiction, up there with Wodehouse and Alexander McCall Smith, but I know a lot of my (gay) friends just don't see the point of him at all...It's possibly a bit more interesting if you know something about Maupin's background - he comes from a very conservative family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his ancestors included a slave-owning Confederate general, and his father sounds like the sort of lawyer who would happily have appeared for the prosecution in To kill a mockingbird. Maupin - although he was well aware of his sexuality from an early age - started out in life trying to fulfil the hopes of his family: he served as a junior naval officer in Vietnam, his first employer in his chosen civilian profession of journalism was Jesse Helms, and he volunteered for a veterans' "aid" project in Vietnam set up by Nixon's spin-doctors to try to discredit the anti-war movement (there's a gloriously creepy photo of him shaking hands with Nixon). It wasn't until he moved to San Francisco in the early 70s that he came out as a gay man and realised that the political movements he had been supporting were precisely those which were oppressing him and making it impossible for him to live his true identity. A large part of Maupin's reasons for publishing this memoir now, in the Age of Trump, seems to be to take us through this painful process of awakening again and remind us of how easy it is to fall unreflectingly into accepting the (sometimes hateful) ideas that we see around us in the communities where we grow up.Of course, this isn't the first time that Maupin has discussed his background: he's often used his relationship with his family and "the South" in his fiction, and he's always been open about his background in the press. In 1998, the British novelist Patrick Gale produced a very nice little biography of Maupin commissioned by Absolute Press for their excellent "Outlines" series of LGBT lives. By Gale's own account, they spent a hilarious few days together going over Maupin's past life in a series of interviews, which Gale eventually condensed into the 150-page format the series called for.Having read that, I wasn't expecting to learn anything radically new from Maupin's own recollections of his early life: not surprisingly, what he says about himself in Logical family largely covers the same ground. Maupin reserves the right, in an "Author's Note" in the new book, to "plagiarise myself", and does so copiously: a lot of the jokes and phrasing are very close to the wording that Gale transcribed from their interviews nearly twenty years ago. But of course, there's a lot more background detail, and a few slight changes of emphasis - I felt that Maupin's father was presented as less of an ogre, more of a slightly tragic buffoon who committed himself to an indefensible value-system and was subsequently unable to go back even when he knew that what he was saying was absurd, for instance. And Maupin's time in the navy is seen less as a foolish aberration and more as a youthful adventure that taught him things about comradeship, subversion, and how male communities work. Maupin wonders from time to time whether his professional storytelling instinct is leading him to "improve" on incidents in his past - there's a wonderful side-note about a discussion with the historian Douglas Brinkley, who, having been told the anecdote about Maupin's conversation with Nixon in the Oval Office, checks it out on Nixon's notorious tapes ("the tapes", Maupin calls them) and discovers that it was even funnier - in a creepy kind of way - than Maupin tells it.There is also rather more here about his reactions to the killing of Harvey Milk, whom he seems to have known quite well. This is one event that Maupin obviously felt he was too close to to be able to bring it into his fiction - I was always a little puzzled about why he used the (more obscure, to most of us) Jonestown massacre in a plot without any mention of Milk. (I don't think the cover designer of this book can have noticed the comment about Milk disregarding a death-threat because it was written in crayon, though...)An interesting, funny, and very well written memoir, as you would expect - probably something to read for the pleasure of the text rather than for the information it brings.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I loved Armistead MAupin's Tales of the City series,and I'm happy to say that I loved his memoir of growing up in a conservative southern family and finding his own way to the truth of his life in San Francisco just as much. It's funny, sad, heartwarming and, ultimately, optimistic about the human condition. We need more people like him gracing out planet.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/53.5 Engaging memoir of this author, who was raised in the South by a father who was raging racist and homophobe. Hiding his own sexuality caused much conflict within himself, and in trying to please his father he enrolled in law school, which he soon dropped out. Then he joined the service and was sent to Vietnam. Eventually he would find acceptance professionally with the serialization of Tales in the City. Personally he would form a logical family, those in whose company he felt accepted, including Rock Hudson. For years he hid his sexual inclinations from his family but finally came out to his sister, who at the time told him his mother also knew, they did agree it was wiser, however, to not tell his father.As he mentions, "Southern women keep secrets to protect their delicate men." I'm not Southern so don't know if that is true or not but I do believe most women everywhere do the same. His writing is most natural, it flows so well. So much history, the sixties, the war, his career, and how his thoughts changed as he gained confidence in himself. Found this a most interesting memoir, and now a confession. I have never read this authors fiction but......I do intend to and to start with Tales of the City. I find that after reading memoirs or autobiographies of authors and I then read their novels, I have a different take, a keener insight into their work.ARC from Edelweiss.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you've known and followed Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City books (and the TV serials made from them), then you probably already have read about, or heard about, some of his life stories that he covers in this book. Even so, to have the chance to hear him tell these stories in his own words, in his own voice, was quite special. Maupin has an uplifting and affirming way of writing, that is so accessible and so pleasant to read. It that style coupled with his sincerity and honesty that captured readers from the initial serialized stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, and that made all of his Tales books such a joy to read. Like many gay men of my age these books hold a special place in my heart and bring back many memories of my own coming out and my life journey since.That sincere, honest, pleasant style carries through here to the stories of his own life. I can't recommend this one enough - best in audiobook format.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Mostly funny anecdotes. A little self-indulgent. But I mostly enjoyed reading it.
I'm not certain if the gory details of how racist his parents and family were, and how he was when growing up (into his twenties), are productive? Slurs abound. Like, Armistead, I think you're trying to be honest and transparent about where you came from and what you used to believe, but did you ever have a black character in Tales or no? And the (literal) bed built by the enslaved people your ancestors owned, you still sleep comfortably in it? - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A must-read if you're a Maupin fan, but this memoir should have a lot of appeal for readers who aren't familiar with his Tales of the City series. The first half of the book is a surprisingly openhearted portrait of Maupin's dysfunctional upper-crust Raleigh family, and of Maupin's young adulthood as a insecure, sheltered neoconservative estranged from his own sexuality. The second half chronicles his creative and personal life in San Francisco, where Maupin assembles a new identity and chosen family and witnesses the rollercoaster of San Francisco history in the 70s and 80s.
This book is unabashedly, gloriously namedropp-y (the clickbait title would be, "You'll Never Guess Which North Carolina Conservative was Armistead Maupin's First Boss"). Yet Maupin delivers a book with as much substance as gossip, a romping narrative that has a lot to say about Southern, and American, identity.
The audiobook is read by the author, and beautifully so. I'll have to keep an eye out for book signings in this area; I'd love to meet him. Now if only I can find a time machine that can take me back to 1970s San Francisco.... - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful story of Maupin's life, he narrates his book in plain and direct language. HIs anecdotes include everyday people along with the famous and infamous, for me they are part of the natural progression of the story. The audiobook includes an interview that touches on many of the topics in the books.
Book preview
Logical Family - Armistead Maupin
Prologue
WHEN I WAS A BOY IN Raleigh I was afraid of being locked in Oakwood Cemetery overnight. Every Sunday after church, when our blue-tailed white Pontiac cruised through the entrance, I fretted about the sign posted above us: GATES LOCKED AT 6 PM. I never voiced this fear to my parents, but it hovered over me like a threatening storm cloud all afternoon. What if we lose track of the time? That could easily happen as we plucked dandelions from my grandfather’s grave or posed sullenly for Daddy’s never-ending slides, rigid as garden gnomes. Our family plot was on a rise with the other Nice Families, a respectable distance from the gate, so the caretaker, a runny-eyed old man who kept a spittoon in his granite cubbyhole, might overlook us when he left for home. That enormous gate would clang shut, and we would be trapped there all night, eating acorns for survival, drinking dew off the lilies—my brother, my sister, my parents, and me—Cemetery Family Robinson.
This was not your usual ghoulish graveyard terror, since I found the cemetery anything but spooky. I loved its winding lanes and tilting stones, the way its pale-green dells were flecked with pink in the spring. I reveled in its rich hieroglyphics, all those corroding angels and renegade jonquils, the palpable antiquity of the place. This was our family seat, after all, the ground to which I would return someday, permanently planted among my ancestors. So what was so scary about that? Folks in Raleigh might assume it had to do with the way my grandfather had died. But I wouldn’t learn about that until later, when I was well into my teens and the matter of why we came to the cemetery every Sunday would finally be explained. Even then, though, my focus would remain on the writing on the stones, not on what actually lay in the boxes beneath them.
Oakwood Cemetery was not just the landscape of our past but also the very blueprint of our family for years to come. My father would eventually lay out the rules for his children in a self-published family history called Prologue,
so named for a famous line in The Tempest: What’s past is prologue.
Antonio uses the phrase to explain his intention to commit murder. My father used it to justify bragging about his ancestors, and he murdered the truth more than once in the process.
One thing is certain,
the old man wrote after rattling off a roll call of all the lawyers, governors, planters, and generals in our family, is that wherever one of these men met success, there was a self-effacing and goodly lady by his side.
Back then I was still too young to realize that there would never be a lady by my side, goodly or otherwise. Nor would I have noticed how the old man had summarily reduced his wife and daughter to dutiful handmaidens. I felt only this shapeless longing, an oddly grown-up ennui born of alienation and silence. Some children experience this feeling very early on, long before we learn its name and finally let our headstrong hearts lead the way to True North. We grow up as another species entirely, lone gazelles lost amid the buffalo herd of our closest kin. Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us. We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.
So maybe I was beginning to understand something on those Sunday afternoons in the cemetery. Maybe I sensed I didn’t belong there, now or forever, that my true genealogy lay somewhere beyond these gates, with another tribe.
One
MY MOTHER HELPED ME WITH MY very first effort at writing. We were living in a duplex in Raleigh, on Forest Road, near the new shopping center. Out in California a three-year-old girl had fallen down an abandoned well, and I was determined to console her. I was only a few years older than this child, so my mother must have taken dictation. I couldn’t begin to tell what I said. What could I have said?
I’m sorry you fell down a well.
Please don’t be sad.
I hope they get you out soon.
What I do remember is how I’d pictured this letter being delivered: someone dropping it directly into the well, like a wishful coin consigned to a fountain, before it drifted down through the clammy darkness into the little girl’s outstretched hands. I figured she would be expecting the letter, awaiting my words of comfort. And my words, if I just chose them carefully enough, would save her in the end.
I suppose my mother must have heard a mailing address on the radio, one provided by the family. Either that or she never mailed the letter at all, intending it only as an exercise in empathy, a homemade remedy for her heartsick, overimaginative child.
The point is: I remember nothing, happy or sad, about the fate of Little Kathy Fiscus. A quick Googling reveals her name and the fact that her attempted rescue in 1949 was one of the first calamities ever to be broadcast live on television. I know now that the well was only eighteen inches wide and that the rescuers recovered Kathy’s body a hundred feet beneath the field where she’d been playing three days earlier. The doctor who broke the news to thousands of rapt onlookers said she had died of suffocation only hours after the last time her voice was heard.
A haunting detail, but one I don’t remember. I would surely have remembered that voice.
My mother must have changed the subject as soon as the truth was known, distracting me with a Little Golden Book or an antiques store. (I enjoyed antiquing at a revealingly early age.) My mother spent most of her life withholding things, shielding her children and her husband from uncomfortable truths. I’m sure she must have learned this at the feet of her own mother, an English suffragette who had a few doozies of her own to hide. Still, my mother believed in the curative power of letters. She must have written thousands over the years. When she wasn’t at The Bargain Box, selling used clothes for the Junior League, or hosting a radio panel show for teenagers, you could hear her writing in her den, clattering away on a millipede of a typewriter that popped out of a desk like a Victorian magic act.
I remember the letters she sent me at summer camp and how I reread them daily like a soldier at the front. There were four or five pages sometimes, covering the front and the back, the type inevitably crawling up the margins to a sideways ballpoint finale. Love, Mummie. That signature was my undoing at camp. Another boy spotted it, and since no kid in his right mind called his mother Mummie, there were immediate taunts about moldy pharaohs in their tombs, complete with bedsheet impersonations. My mother, who called her own mother Mummie, never knew of my humiliation. By the time I was a teenager I had decided to call her Mither, a name that struck me as elegant and ironic, so the joke could not possibly be on me. I did the same thing with my father who became Pap after years of being called Daddy, a name only children would use. I was learning to build my manly armor with words, being careful, so careful, like my mother.
Her letters were my only balm at Camp Seagull. Those were days of random self-disgrace in the prickly Carolina heat, days of capsized sailboats and fumbled baseballs and arrows landing short of their mark. There was one other kid who felt like a friend, another miserable ectomorph, but he bunked in another cabin, so our time together was limited. Sometimes we would meet up at twilight to walk along the shore of the Neuse River, away from our torturers, swapping notes on the universe as we poked in the sand for sharks’ teeth. (What was his name, goddammit? He looked me up in San Francisco in the early eighties, when a few published novels and a listed phone number made me easy to find. He told me he was gay like me but not very good at it. He liked my books, he said. He seemed so profoundly sad. I’m wondering if he ever made it past the plague, or if he lives with the virus, or if he died in one of the other ways, or if he’s on Facebook right now, like so many people I never expected to hear from again, posting videos of cute interspecies friendships.)
When he wasn’t around, this nameless boy, I would linger in the mess hall after supper and vanish into the comforting whir and flicker of a movie. They were usually war movies, my least favorite kind, but there was always a moment when the gunfire stopped and a lady appeared, a wife or a girlfriend, speaking softly amid soft music. How I craved a woman’s gentleness in that all-boy bedlam. I even considered sharing my anguish with Miss Lil, the wife of Cap’n Wyatt, the camp director. She was the only lady around, and not nearly as glamorous as my mother, but she bore a passing resemblance to Dale Evans and might be a sympathetic ear.
I never worked up the nerve. Nor did I share my homesickness with my mother, though she seemed to sense it from afar. Her letters soothed me with detailed visions of my imminent deliverance: We’ll put a mattress in the back of the Country Squire so you can stretch out and read to your heart’s content. I’ll have all your favorites, darling—lots of Little Lulus and Uncle Scrooges. Don’t say I don’t mollycoddle you!
I never said that, never even used the word. It was Daddy who believed that sensitive boys could be permanently warped by sympathy. What was the point in making a man out of me if my mother unraveled it with her love?
On the way back to Raleigh, battling in the back of the station wagon with my brother and sister, I felt the sweet relief of our family made whole again. When we played Cow Poker or read aloud the Burma Shave signs, or, in the case of Mummie and me, lobbied my father passionately for a stop at a flea market, it was easy enough to believe that life could always be like this. It was easy to forget that camp had made me glimpse the hardest truth of all: that my mother’s absence would one day be permanent. I had done the arithmetic more than once, lying in bed after taps. She was in her late thirties; in another fifty years she would be dead.
As it turned out my figures were off considerably.
My mother must have known who I was even then. She called me her little Ferdinand, the Disney bull who sat in the pasture and smelled the flowers rather than go out and fight in the ring. It took me another quarter of a century to level with her. It makes sense that I chose to do so in a letter, getting the words exactly right, the way she had taught me. My letter was a work of fiction addressed to a fictional character in Tales of the City,
but I had poured my heart into it with such naked intimacy that I knew she would realize that the message was meant for her.
I waited for a response, but none came. Not a letter or a phone call that might speak to the long unspoken. Though what right had I, really, to expect an answer? The letter had appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, where millions of people could see it, including my parents in Raleigh, who subscribed to the paper because of my work, but it could hardly be described as an act of bravery. I had avoided the chance of rejection by addressing my message to everyone and no one.
I had thrown it down a well, and there was no voice from the bottom.
Two
WHEN I WAS SIX, WE MOVED across town to a nicer neighborhood called Budleigh, where our new L-shaped ranch house aspired to colonial charm with dark-green shutters and a superfluous cupola like one you might find on a Howard Johnson’s. With the leftover lumber my father built a playhouse in the backyard that was big enough to hold all three of us kids. For me, it was also a playhouse in the theatrical sense, since there was a porch along one edge that worked wonderfully as a stage. Above the porch, above everything, Daddy had emblazoned a message with my mother’s red nail polish: SAVE YOUR CONFEDERATE MONEY! THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN. I already knew this was not especially suited to a production of Jack and the Beanstalk, but I was determined to make the best of what I’d been given.
My brother and sister were too young for the theater, so my costar was Freddy Fletcher from down the street. I played Jack, and Freddy played the bean seller and the Giant. Freddy couldn’t act worth a damn, but he offered other advantages. His father was in show business—an announcer down at WRAL Radio—so, amazingly, the Fletchers had their own mimeograph machine at home. Freddy and I cranked out flyers by the dozens and got giggly drunk on the sweet purple fumes as we passed them out door-to-door on Gloucester Road.
One afternoon, Mr. Fletcher came by our rehearsals after his morning at the station. He was bald and smoked cigars and reminded me of Dennis the Menace’s next-door neighbor in the Sunday funnies. We played our beanstalk scene for him, the one where I climb a bamboo pole to the roof of the playhouse, and he seemed impressed. The next day, though, Freddy showed up with a strange proposal.
I’ll give you five bucks for something.
I told him he didn’t have five bucks. I knew this because Freddy and I got the same allowance, and I didn’t have five bucks either. I had probably already spent my last quarter on a matinee of Rear Window and a box of Red Hots at the Village Theater. We were both paupers. We didn’t run around with that kind of money.
Freddy corrected himself. "My daddy will give you five bucks. He pointed to my father’s message above the playhouse.
If you’ll get rid of that."
When I asked him what was wrong with that, he just shrugged and went home. I wondered if his father thought the inscription was disrespectful of the South, but that was stupid, since nobody respected the South more than Daddy did. It was just for fun, anyway, like Daddy’s cartoon in the bathroom: the grumpy old Rebel soldier with a Confederate flag and the caption that said: Forget, Hell!
That night I told Daddy about Mr. Fletcher’s offer. He was sitting on a stool at the counter between our kitchen and family room, where, almost every night, he sipped bourbon on the rocks and scarfed Triscuits and cheese from a wooden salad bowl. When he heard my story, his face balled up like a big pink fist.
"Fred Fletcher said that? That he would pay you?"
I shrugged. That’s what Freddy said.
Did he say why the hell why?
I shook my head warily. Daddy’s scattershot anger could be unnerving. Even when he wasn’t mad at you, he sounded like he might be.
How did he even know about the goddamn thing?
I told him. Mr. Fletcher came by to watch our rehearsal.
Presumptuous sonofabitch!
I hesitated a moment before asking: Are they Yankees or something?
Hell, no.
Daddy thrust a Triscuit into his mouth and chewed ferociously. "They’re from Fuquay Springs. They’re just common."
Common was worse than Yankee in Daddy’s book. Some Yankees were fine, he said—the genteel ones from New England—but common was just plain common.
Mr. Fletcher’s offer—his five-buck bribe,
as Daddy described it to Mummie—was never discussed again. The nail-polish manifesto stayed intact, and Mr. Fletcher didn’t come to Jack and the Beanstalk when it opened the next day. His wife, Marjie (whose name did sound a little common once I’d thought about it), arrived on her own with a tray of Rice Krispies treats. I wondered if she’d be upset, but she smiled at me pleasantly as I waited by the playhouse for my entrance.
I was costumed in Rit-dyed green tights and one of Daddy’s old white shirts, cinched at the waist with my webbed Boy Scout belt. I was trying to go over my lines, but I was distracted by Daddy as he yelled at my mother about Mr. Fletcher. (Mummie referred to this as addressing the jury,
though never to Daddy’s face.)
. . . sonofabitch thinks he can pay my son to renounce his heritage!
All right, darling, lower your voice.
Mummie knew that Marjie Fletcher was seated nearby, and Daddy, of course, knew it, too. He wanted her to hear this.
"You ever listen to that goddamn thing? ‘Tempus Fugit!’ He can tempus my fugit."
I recognized the name of Mr. Fletcher’s radio program.
It’s goddamn ridiculous. Fairy tales for grown-ups. Does all the voices, too. Calls himself the Fairy Tale Man. Nobody takes him seriously.
Sounds sweet,
my mother offered.
It ain’t sweet. It’s propaganda. You know what that means? Tempus fugit? Time flies, that’s what. Nothing remains the same. That’s Communist right there!
My mother caught my eye, hoping for a way out. Look,
she said brightly. There’s Teddy! Doesn’t he look stalwart?
Daddy would not be silenced. I don’t listen to the damn fool thing, but Hank Haywood heard it down at the Sphinx Club. All these forest creatures rompin’ around in harmony . . . but it ain’t about that at all. It’s about lettin’ niggers in the schools.
Be quiet, Armistead!
My mother’s forefinger shot to her lips like a scarlet-tipped musket raised in warning. She didn’t approve of that word. Not in public, not with Marjie Fletcher sitting within earshot. Once, down at a cottage at Wrightsville Beach, I used the word in a row with our maid’s daughter, a skinny girl three years my senior. My mother overheard it and yanked me away by the wrist.
You do not use that word, Teddy. Ever.
She took my steam shovel.
I don’t care. You don’t use that word. You hurt her feelings.
Daddy says it all the time.
It doesn’t matter,
she said. He’s your father.
That was her explanation for so many things.
I banned the N-word from my vocabulary, but there were further intricacies to be learned about race, and my mother set me straight on those as well. When I referred to someone as a colored lady,
she corrected me gently: No, darling, she’s a colored woman. There are no colored ladies. Only white ladies are ladies.
It was all so complicated.
WHEN GROWN-UPS TALKED about Daddy they often liked to use the word unreconstructed. For a long time I didn’t understand what that meant, historically speaking, but it sounded like someone who had been taken apart and never put back together. Unreconstructed. Most folks used the word with humor and affection, but sometimes they would inject a disdainful note as if Daddy had somehow gone too far. I figured them to be Yankee sympathizers—or, like my Maupin cousins up in Cincinnati, actual Yankees—so I paid no mind to them. Yankees didn’t get it.
I had sort of hoped that Freddy would turn out to be a Yankee. I myself had been accused of that, so I would have enjoyed turning the tables. Since I had been born in Washington, D.C., while Daddy was skippering a minesweeper in the Pacific, some of the kids at Ravenscroft School said that made me a Yankee. (Washington, after all, had been the capital of the North.) I had no choice but to take my accusers to our living room and show them the portrait over our Roman brick fireplace.
That’s Grandpa Branch. He was a Confederate general who died at Antietam. A Yankee sniper shot him off his horse when he was talking to General Lee. They put his body on display downtown in the Capitol. Mimi still sleeps in his bed.
Then I would take them to my grandmother’s room and show them the bed itself, a sleigh bed with a chipped mahogany veneer that exposed the pale, dry bones beneath. It’s very old,
I would tell them. "It was made by slaves in our family."
That’s how my father always put it: slaves in our family.
I had copied his language because I thought it made us sound genteel but compassionate, the sort of kindly slaveholders who embraced their human property as family. Exactly where we held the slaves—or even where that bed had been made—was not entirely clear to me, but no one ever challenged the claim. Grandpa Branch’s house, a gratifyingly white-columned mansion with its own North Carolina historical marker, still stood down on Hillsborough Street, but it was nowhere near a cotton field. When I tried to picture house slaves doing whatever they were supposed to do, the image failed to materialize, since I’d never even been inside the house. It was a funeral home now, and a shabby one at that. It catered to Baptists and Holy Rollers, Daddy said, so none of us was ever likely to be found there, dead or alive.
This was disappointing, since my grandmother had told me so much about this house. General Sherman, she said, had been quartered there on his bloody March to the Sea. The Yankee general had been a friend of Grandpa Branch back when they were both in the U.S. Army, so he had accepted the kind hospitality of Grandma Branch and placed guards around the house to protect it from his own plundering troops. (I’ve often wondered about the sleeping arrangement—it was not the sort of thing I would have asked Mimi—but who could have faulted the hapless widow for being hospitable
when her life and home were at stake.)
This was Mimi’s own grandmother, so the story felt thrillingly current every time she told it, as if she herself had heard Sherman and Grandma Branch swapping pleasantries over hotcakes at the breakfast table before he went about his daily pillaging. Mimi always ended the story by saying that the weathercock on the steeple of Christ Church was the last poultry left in town after Sherman’s army left.
I loved telling friends about the time Mimi rode on Jefferson Davis’s catafalque. I wasn’t completely clear on what a catafalque was, but I imagined it to be a sort of coffin-on-wheels with a platform for passengers. The Confederate president had been dead and buried in a New Orleans cemetery for almost four years when his widow decided he should be moved back to the Capital of the Confederacy. So, nearly thirty years after the South had fallen, the remains of its president were transplanted slightly to the north in a grand public spectacle that was part funeral procession, part whistle-stop tour. Mimi, by virtue of her slain Rebel grandfather, was invited to ride on this sacred box of bones when it passed through Raleigh. She was five years old. What she remembered, from the middle of the next century, was a starchy dress and the way her mother had scolded her when she smiled and waved merrily to the mourners along Hillsborough Street.
There was still evidence of this history in Mimi’s room, most of it contained in a chest of drawers that looked like the big-shouldered sister of Grandpa Branch’s sleigh bed. Even as a boy, I was allowed to explore this treasure trove in the name of family research. I found sepia photographs mounted on cardboard and letters from Civil War days, one of which—I forget whose—I took downtown to the Hall of History for lamination before returning it to the dresser. The bottom drawer held shoe boxes of typewritten letters bound with crumbling rubber bands. I found them less interesting than the others, since they were all from the 1930s, barely a decade older than I