When I first began trying to get students to keep “memory” journals — diaries that record only facts, no emotions, in the hope that I could prove to them that active, tangible descriptions convey emotion — I would usually use an example of a day in March 1982 when I went snake-hunting with Butch Hefflefinger. It was for a story at the Waco Tribune-Herald, my first gig in journalism. The rattle snake round-up was a kind of perennial, and often given to Yankees. I spent the day in Bosque County, hunting snakes with Butch and his friend, whose name is lost to my sieve-like memory, although I can see his face. We caught 17 snakes on that warm spring day. I wore a peach-and-blue checked shirt, part of a wardrobe of Joseph A. Banks clothing that my parents had purchased for me in hopes that I would look more professional when I joined the working world. When I got home that evening, I stood on my front porch at 509 W. 23rd Street and watched the sun set. It was a curious fact of Waco geography that the grid was completely off, so one could stand on W. 23rd Street, look straight ahead and see the setting sun off to the right. I nibbled a Stoned Wheat Thin. I don’t know what that scene conveys to anyone else, but I was happy and filled with anticipation. I had spent a day watching — and, in one instance, sort of helping — two men catch 17 rattlesnakes. Life seemed full of possibility. Within the month, I fell in love-ish.
And now here’s my Saturday at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home. The curator, a friend of friends, agreed to meet us at 5 p.m. to give us an after-hours tour. Three tourists wandered onto the grounds and they were invited to join us. We walked down the lane of cedars. Jack Pendarvis told me they had been planted to ward off airborne . . . “Yankees?” I suggested, when he groped for the word. Actually, it was yellow fever. I had been inside Rowan Oak before, but this time we were allowed to step around Plexiglass barricades and even touch things. My husband plinked one key on Faulkner’s typewriter, a J, he later told me. The curator insisted that the Coen brothers tried to steal Faulkner’s typewriter. He also said that, although they deny it, the Coen brothers have included a Faulkner reference in every film except Blood Simple. I asked about The Big Lebowski and he cited the cowboy, played by Sam Shepard, who says, “They abide.” (Also, his name is Faulknerian.) I asked about Miller’s Crossing, and was told that the name of the bar, the Halstead, appears in Sanctuary. (May be mangling that. If I were Nicholson Baker, I would come back later in a footnote and address all these issues.) I found Faulkner’s slender phone book, hanging from a string, and looked him up; he was listed under the proper spelling, Falkner, which he never formally changed. Many of the stories we heard centered on Faulkner’s formidable ego, an ego so large that I later wondered if there was some irony to it. When we told the curator that Faulkner’s burial wishes — in the ground in 24 hours, plain pine box, no embalming fluid — sounded very Jewish, he told us a story about a virulently anti-Semitic comment Faulkner made about his original publishers. The lucky tourists who had crashed our private tour left early, to everyone’s amazement. By the time we left, it was so dark that we needed a flashlight to make our way down the long lane of cedars. Much later, about midnight, after a dinner of fried catfish and gumbo and Ro-tel fries and BYOB wine, we made a pilgrimage to Faulkner’s grave. “Hey, Mr. Faulkner,” my SO said, “a black man is president.”
Sunday afternoon, driving back to Jackson to catch a plane, the SO and I began listing all the graves we have visited. Elmore James, that very afternoon. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin. Yeats. Poe, of course. The various “celebrities” of Arlington Cemetery. Lindbergh. Harold Plessy. Faulkner and James in the same weekend seemed particularly apt.
Best cemetery on the East Coast is Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, VA. Don’t know about the entire country.
Brian–if you visited Jackson’s grave in Lexington, did you also visit General Lee’s tomb in the basement of Lee Chapel at W&L?
When I was a little girl, my mother and her sisters routinely took us to the cemetery where their father was buried so that we could clean up the family plot. Do people even do this anymore? Last year in a fit of genealogical fervor, I tried to find my great grandmother’s grave in Macon, GA. Because of the racial foolishness of the south, I had to start my search in the “white cemetery” where I found familiar names, but not my relative (maybe). I had one of those comic moments as I stepped across the graves of some confederate soldiers and smiled at the irony of them and me both admiring the beauty of the Ocmulgee River flowing beneath us downhill at Rose Hill.
I did eventually find the right cemetery, but most of those grave marker were no longer readable or long gone. I enjoyed myself; my then 89 year old aunt was very, very nervous, insisting that we were in the wrong place (both places). That was only a partial truth.
Anne – I was lobbying for it, but we had all the young folks loaded into the minivan, headed for Williamsburg (and the waterparks and so on); so that my lovely wife allowed me ONE diversion. Given the choice, and given Robertson’s enthralling biography of TJ, Stonewall was the choice! (I remember that this was the same summer that JFK Jr crashed into the sea. The coverage of that abstract [to us] event made my wife choke up – even as I rolled my eyes…and standing at the same gravesite where Thomas Jackson stood in the snow and cried over his dead wife pretty much choked me up, even as Pam rolled hers!)
(and as a further TMP thing, while we were at Williamsburg, my son and I went down the parkway to Yorktown to see the Chesapeake Bay and the Revolutionary War battlefield…and the park ranger who lead a brief walking tour there was an attractive young woman with a heavy Russian accent. She was a recently minted new citizen, and it was more than a little funny that she knew so much more American history than the informal assemblage of vacationing Americans!)
The last time I was in DC I was wandering around over in Georgetown and found Dean Acheson’s grave.
I used to work with a man who grew up in Oxford, MS. William Faulkner was his father’s Boy Scout Master.
My favorite cemetery is the old Burying Ground n Beaufort, NC (big surprise, I know). They have the grave of Vienna Dill, who died of Yellow Fever and was buried in a glass topped casket. Years later, vandals dug her up and found her body perfectly preserved; however, when they opened it, her body disintegrated before their eyes. Another little girl who died at sea was preserved inside a keg of rum and buried in it when they made port at Beaufort. Supposedly there was a British officer from the Revolutionary War days who requested that he be buried standing up saluting his King, but no one can point out exactly where this grave was.
You can also see the graves of Captain Joshua Pender, who seized the Federal garrison at Fort Macon a month before Fort Sumter (the governor of North Carolina made him give it back), and Captain Ottway Burns, who commanded the privateer sloop Snap Dragon during the War of 1812. Burns’ grave has a cannon from the Snap Dragon atop the tomb.
And yes, Jackie, people do still go to the family plots to see that the graves are kept clean. And to raise hell at the groundskeepers if they aren’t.
Isn’t Blackbeard in the Beaufort Cemetery as well?
My grandparents are buried in a little chapel cemetery in Kings Crossing, VA, which is in a valley in the middle of Massanutten (sp?) Mt. which is in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley. I check in when I’m in the area and notice that other families have as well. Every other visit I plant a bag of bulbs, but I haven’t yet been by to see them bloom.
What are Ro-tel fries?
I have a friend who is a baseball fan, like me, who has taken a photo of Hall of Famers graves he has visited.
You SO’s comment about the new president must have Faulkner spinning.
On a trip to my hometown, Asheville, NC, a girlfriend (a high school english teacher) and I visited Riverside Cemetery to look for the graves of Thomas Wolfe and O.Henry. Thomas Wolfe was easy to find but oh, how we hunted for O.Henry until it occurred to me that his actual name was William Sydney Porter.
Cheese fries in which Ro-tel tomatoes have been added to the cheese sauce. Yum!
Well – if you’re a native of Baltimore, referring to yourself as a ‘Yankee’ might have lead to difficulties, back in the day (that place was our own Sunni Triangle, when the chips were down).
I have dragged my lovely wife onto many national cemetaries, at the big ACW battlefields; but also, we sought out Stonewall Jackson’s grave in Lexington VA, after I read a very good biography on him. What struck me was how often his remains were dug up and buried again (eventually including the arm he lost before he died, and which was buried at Chancellorsville), and (not less interesting), the odd ettiquette of which dead wife got moved to be with him, and which one did not (I think it reduced to – last one alive gets the place of honor!)
A truly odd book to read is Stealing Lincoln’s Body. In it one learns about the failed attempt to rob the president’s remains from his tomb in the 1870′s, and what was done to preclude such a thing. Short version: the president’s sarcophagus was literally hidden in the basement of the memorial, beneath a pile of lumber (they tried to dig a grave in the ground, but hit water). When Mary passed away, she joined the president in the basement. (they were finally properly interred at the turn of the century, but not before one last peak inside the coffin, to be sure Lincoln’s remains were still there – which they were. He was said to be chalky white and still quite well preserved)
I love cemeteries and visit Arlington every time I’m in DC. Boot Hill in Tucson, which seemed a little gimmicky. Only got to one in New Orleans, unfortunately.
Best cemetery in the U.S. would be?
Perhaps this is the time to share with you the following website (just cut and paste):
http://www.findagrave.com/index.html
It does come in handy for those of us doing research now and again.
–Marjorie
“memory” journals — diaries that record only facts, no emotions, in the hope that I could prove to them that active, tangible descriptions convey emotion”
I was puzzling over this for awhile; there’s something in there that I want to disagree with, despite the irresistable sense that it is correct.
The word “convey” was tripping me, presumeably. Finally, I settled for accepting that the reader reacts emotionally to the facts that the writer conveyed….but in a much different way than a television reacts to the signal conveyed to it by a broadcasting network. The writer ‘conveys’ a fact the way a person skips a rock across a pond; the fact may or may not behave the way the skipper intended; it may or may not make it across the pond.
Once on Nance’s site the conversation prompted me to recount a singularly terrible experience, and indeed – the memory of it reduced to just plain facts, which triggered lots of emotional memories – in shorthand. (brand new church, the smell of fresh paint and new carpet, brilliant sunshine streaming through a large window in a pre-K classroom, small white open casket near the big window, and so on)
Once again, LL is correct
Kevin: no one is really sure where Edward Teach’s body is buried. His head was put on a pike and displayed on the bowsprit of Lt. Maynard’s ship, and later displayed as a warning to pirates at a place called Teach’s Point on the Hampton River in Virginia. One legend is that the body was thrown overboard, and that the headless body swam three times around Maynard’s vessel before sinking.
Another legend is that Blackbeard’s skull was preserved, plated with silver, and used as a drinking cup by the residents of Ocracoke Island, who keep it as a closely guarded secret. Other versions of the story have the skull residing at the famous Skull and Bones fraternity (of which the Bushes, pere et fils, were members) and in Gimghoul castle (home of a similar secret society at the University of North Carolina).
There are four installments left in Green Raincoat. Sorry about the interruptions, but I am (reasonably) sure it will wrap up in January, by the 18th or 24th. Which actually works out rather neatly, as the story ends in January.
Laura,
We know that it’s not your doing. I thought I was being patient when the whole series started, but as we get closer to the ending, I am just anxious to find out what happens!
Sorry if I was whinging too much.
Thanks so much,
Marjorie
Not at all, Marjorie. I’m flattered that you’re looking for the entries, which cannot be said of most people related to me by blood. Just want to share all the info I have.
Can I just pop in here to say that the New York Times is making me nuts with all of this postpoing yet another chapter for yet another week! Egads.
–Marjorie (who, by the way, went to Karen E. Olson’s talk/booksigning at the Yale Bookstorn on Saturday. Karen was very entertaining. When she explained that people had emailed her asking for less swearing in her future books, I raised my hand and insisted on MORE swearing. And sex! “Shot Girl” even has a quote from Laura on the front cover.) Thanks, Karen.
Hey – speaking of Baltimore as our Sunni Triangle (back in the day) – here’s hoping that those folks are better behaved the NEXT time a lanky fellow from Illinois passes through Charm City via rail, on his way to the White House!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28235124/
“WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama will kick off his inaugural celebration on Jan. 17 � the weekend before his swearing in as the country’s 44th president � by traveling on a train to the nation’s capital.
He and his family will start their daylong journey with an event in Philadelphia before boarding the train and picking up Vice President-elect Joe Biden and his family in Wilmington, Del. The president-elect and his group then will make a stop in Baltimore before making their way to Washington.”