Sweet Mystery: A Southern Memoir of Family Alcoholism, Mental Illness and Recovery by Judith Hillman Paterson

From the Publisher

Judith Paterson was just nine when her mother died of a virulent combination of alcoholism and mental illness at the age of thirty-one. Sweet Mystery is her harrowing account of the memories of her mother, placed against a background of relatives troubled almost as much by Southern conflicts over race and class as by the fallout from a long family history of drinking, denial, and mental illness. An exquisitely written memoir that captures the perspective of childhood as evocatively as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Sweet Mystery is rich in the details and flavor of small-town life in the rural South of the 1940s. Drawing on both personal experience and recent research, Sweet Mystery explores the effects of early trauma as well as the strengths of circumstance that enable some children to survive them.

Publishers Weekly

This memoir of a troubled childhood in 1940s Alabama is "engrossing," said PW. (June)

Product Details

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Emily and Duke

Emily and Duke came from families about as different from one another as two families that had been in Montgomery for several generations could possibly be. My mother's forebears had gambled all on the Civil War and been staunchly post-Confederate ever since. My father's, on the other hand, had come to Alabama as abolitionist missionaries and founders of schools for the freed slaves during Reconstruction. The conflicts were deep and everlasting and, I believe, had something to do with what went wrong between my parents. Nevertheless, the two families had some things in common: they did not grieve, and they did not admit failure: the Ware-Walker-Hillmans out of shame for having failed so utterly and lost so much; the Patersons out of fear that if outsiders like themselves showed weakness, they would be destroyed or driven out of the place where they had come and wanted to stay.

Montgomery, Alabama. On the banks of a big river where there had never been anything but Creek Indians until the French came in 1715 and built a fort impossible to hold against the wilderness and the Alibamu tribe of Creeks, for whom they named the place. After that, nothing but a few trappers and traders mixing white blood with red blood for a hundred years until Tennessee militia General Andrew Jackson plucked 22 million acres out of the heart of the Creek Nation and turned it over to people like my ancestors, Robert and Judith Anthony Ware, who brought African slaves, money, and the idea of aristocracy from North Georgia, where they had fought the Revolution, given up their Quaker-Baptist opposition to slavery, andfallen in love with what the cotton gin might do for their fortunes.

"The Wares were here before there was a place," my maternal Great-aunt Bessie Ware Walker liked to say, meaning nobody in Montgomery had a longer local pedigree and more right to pride of place than we did. Be that as it may, the Wares arrived in 1822, bringing forty slaves and a tribe of kinsmen.

Robert was sixty-two. Judith was fifty. I can't imagine what they were thinking. They certainly found no aristocracy there, just a frontier village with some sixty (mostly log) houses and a population of 239 white people, 156 slaves, and six free men of color, set down near the banks of a river along a line of the most cantankerous soil anybody ever tried to plow, with air so close you could hardly breathe in it and fevers worse than Georgia's.

Still, some of the settlers survived, and by 1850 black bodies and short-staple cotton had turned black dirt into black gold and made Robert and Judith's children "rich as God," some people said. Rich enough for their son James Anthony and his wife, Jane, to swap the log plantation house for an Italian villa in town and then trade it for a Greek Revival mansion furnished with china and silver from England and a rosewood bed said to have been ordered by Queen Victoria but rejected because it was too short for Prince Albert. Rich enough to turn frontiersmen into aristocrats and Revolutionary patriots into rebels gambling all on a civil war that hadn't a prayer. And still they prayed to a God they thought still listened, until, in the end, they had fought their own country and lost almost everything, including, I believe, their moral moorings.

And when the war was over, most of the plantations lay fallow. Black people and white flocked to town and camped out in shacks all around it. Rich and poor alike ate whatever they could get their hands on. The carcasses of starved horses and mules piled up in the streets. What could anybody do?

The first thing they did was refuse to repent and resist all efforts to make them act like a conquered people. And by the time the Congressional Reconstruction began two years later, the demoralized James Anthony had died, and the once prideful, now chastened Jane Ware had moved her family upstairs and rented the ground floor of her columned mansion to the officers of the Occupying Army for $125 a month. Never mind that their neighbors thought it shameful to profit off the horrors of the Reconstruction (carpetbaggers, scalawags, and niggers running everything), Aunt Bessie's Grandmother Jane saved the family plantation when all around her were losing theirs. And before her husband was cold in the ground, she abandoned what was left of the Wares' hard-shelled, Georgia-Baptist religion and took herself back to the sweet-smelling Episcopal Church of her own forebears to be comforted in the dark certainty that God's ways were unknowable to man—as if the whole thing had been the fault of a Baptist god, and the Wares, the cotton gin, and slavery had nothing to do with it.

I don't know at what point it began to be so, but the Wares as I knew them were a bitter, resentful people, convinced that the Civil War had unjustly and tragically divested them of wealth and a way of life that had been rightfully theirs—never mind that both were built on human enslavement. The two great myths of their lives—that they had been wrongly bereft of their wealth arid that they were better than their circumstances—left them diminished in mind and spirit and shackled to a set of values that freed them to break the small rules of ordinary life while binding them to the complicated social and racial dance they called the Southern Way of Life.

Though Emily behaved in every way to deny it, the words "We have been deprived of what was ours; we are entitled to more; we are better than other people" burned like a live coal in a dark corner of her own heart. And that darkness married itself to something in Duke that was similar—though the circumstances that had put it there could hardly have been more different.

Just as the prematurely white-haired Grandmother Jane was turning her mansion in town over to the Yankees to save a 2,000-acre plantation in the country, the seventeen-year-old William Burns Paterson, who would be Duke's grandfather, was leaving a dirt-floored cottage in the rural village of Tullibody, Scotland, and going down to the docks at Glasgow to hop a freighter for New York. As the brightest and most ambitious of the nine children of landless farmers and brewery workers, Will had gone to school just long enough to fall in love with learning and dream of doing something worthwhile with his life.

But first he wanted to see America, which is what he did for three years, seeing all but three states of it, traveling sometimes with just "a dog, a gun, and a fishing line," working at anything that paid, and discovering a country vast and free beyond his dreams. Until, sometime in 1870, still seeing America, still working at anything that paid, he had followed the Reconstruction railroad boom north from New Orleans to Hale County, Alabama, and there found himself standing at the heart of that band of dark soil that had once made a few white people very, very rich, where impoverished freedmen now made up over half the population, and blacks and whites alike now labored night and day just to feed their children.

It was there, in the rural Black Belt, eighty miles west of Montgomery, that he started to teach black railroad workers to read and write and do figures. And it was there that he began to dance the fine line (which it would be his destiny to dance for the rest of his life) between his belief in education and human betterment and the traditions of a place built on class and caste, where learning was often ridiculed, where before the Civil War there had been little public education, and where now there was none.

By 1871 he had built the one-room schoolhouse he called Tullibody Academy in the county seat at Greensboro and by 1878 had gone to head the American Missionary Association's Lincoln School at Marion, Alabama, which, in the last days of its strength, the Reconstruction legislature had made the first state normal college for Negroes. There he and Margaret (Maggie) Flack, the Ohio-born, Oberlin-educated missionary teacher he married, created a model school and had a daughter and four sons. My grandfather was born there in 1883 and named James Porter Paterson for Maggie's father, a private in the Union Army killed marching toward Georgia to free the slaves.

Soon, Lincoln School and Normal University graduates were in demand to teach all over the South. Maggie and Will had the school of their dreams, and it looked as if Alabama was going to nurture one of the most useful institutions ever to take hold in American soil. And then, in a flicker of time on a dark night in the winter of its ninth year, the campus went up in flames set by vigilantes hostile to higher education for Negroes and outraged by the racial integration at the Lincoln School.

In the wake of the fire, the legislature ordered the Normal School moved to the state capital at Montgomery, and as soon as it got there withdrew all funding, leaving the school to be supported by black churches, Northern contributions, and the free labor of the teachers. And when funding was finally restored two years later, it was restored mainly for industrial training. And still the school prospered and trained teachers, and the Patersons built a long shotgun house near the campus and put a tiny greenhouse in the back yard and gardened the acres around the house and started a nursery business they called Rosemont Gardens.

That is where they were living the night they awoke to find a cross-shaped straw scarecrow burning in the yard and a note left at the door giving the "nigger teacher" twenty-four hours to get out of town or have his house burned to the ground with his family in it. My father remembered his father telling the story: how he lay on the floor with his mother and siblings and some teachers from the school and smelled the straw burning and saw the cross silhouetted on the wall and waited all night for the sound of boots on the porch that never came.

Creeping through the brush the next night to make good their promise to set fire to the house and the school if the teacher was still there when they returned, the Klansmen found Will sitting on the porch of his house rocking in a rocking chair, back and forth, back and forth, with a book in his lap. Coming closer, they saw what they had missed in the dark, five Confederate veterans, the best shots in the county, sitting in chairs behind the teacher, their guns on their knees. So the cowardly vigilantes retreated much faster than they had come; and every year after that, for as long as the school's defenders lived, the family sent roses to them on their birthdays, doing it, my father said, long after Maggie and Will were dead and some of their descendants had forgotten why we honored this particular set of old men in this way.

Though he wasn't among them, I think Emily's grandfather, Henry (Hal) Tabb Walker, was the sort of man who might have done such a thing. Hal had come to Montgomery to read law the year the Civil War ended and had married Eliza Ware, the short, plain daughter of the short, plain Grandmother Jane who had saved the plantation. Captain Hal was stocky like the Wares and not much taller than his 5'3" wife, but he was a personable, well-spoken young man who had spent four of the first five years of his life in a suite at the White House, where his father served as personal secretary to his uncle and former law partner, President James Knox Polk.

Though the Knox-Polk-Walkers of Tennessee were business people, lawyers, and natural-born Jacksonian Democrats with little to gain from cotton and slaves, when their state seceded, so did they. Hal's urbane father, knowing nothing of war, had raised a Confederate infantry regiment from among the Irishmen of Memphis and taken the Irishmen and the seventeen-year-old Hal to fight at Belmont and then at Shiloh Church—where North and South would learn, along with the Walkers, that the war was going to be about death and destruction and disillusionment beyond anything anybody had imagined or bargained for. Twenty-three thousand men fell at Shiloh and thousands more (including Hal's father) came down with typhoid and dysentery. Within a month, the forty-four-year-old Colonel Walker had gone home to die, broken in body by exposure, exhaustion, and dysentery and in spirit by the sight of carnage nothing in his life had prepared him to look on.

With that, Hal joined the cavalry as aide-de-camp to his brother-in-law, Confederate General Frank Crawford Armstrong, and with him served at Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Knoxville, Atlanta, Franklin, Nashville, and Selma. But the gregarious, Union-reconciled Hal Walker did not do well in Montgomery, married to the war-embittered, antebellum-minded Eliza Ware.

For a while during the Reconstruction, he tried journalism. But when the planters criticized his paper for opposing the Ku Klux Klan and promoting organized labor, land reform, the education of Negroes, and cooperation with the Reconstructionists, Hal gave it up and afterwards became a general in the United Confederate Veterans, dabbled in politics, brokered cotton, backed an electric amusement park that made a little money and lost a little, and never did much of anything with his life. He had wanted to be more than he was, I am sure, but the resistance of the Wares combined with some weakness in his own character held him back.

The Yankee officers were still occupying the ground floor of the Greek Revival mansion when my grandmother, Augusta Knox Walker, was born there on January 14, 1871. The second child and first daughter of a family needing something to hope for, Knoxie, as she was always called, was gorgeous, with golden hair, dark eyes, and tawny skin. She was high-strung from birth, hard to keep occupied, and as willful as her older brother, Croom, whom Grandmother Jane favored and spoiled. A son named James but called Boise was born on Christmas Day three years after Knoxie. But it was my Aunt Bessie, born ten years after that, who became her father's favorite. The two certainly looked alike, with their short, broad shapes, wiry black hair, and long Walker jaws. Both loved good talk, good food, and the old ways that were passing and would never come back.

As soon as Bessie was born, the family sold the Greek Revival mansion and moved to the Victorian townhouse where my mother grew up, which they always called "410" because of its address, 410 South Court Street. They moved, they said, because the new house was modern and had both a kitchen and a bathroom in the main building. They moved, too, I suspect, to get the money to educate and launch the Walker children in society. Both Croom and Boise attended the preparatory academy at Sewanee, and Boise completed a year of law school at the University of the South, but both young men went to work early in the insurance business. It was Knoxie on whom the family lavished the luxuries of expensive trips, jewelry, and clothes, expecting their beautiful daughter to marry a man rich enough and prominent enough to restore the family to its rightful place in the scheme of things.

Though the campus of the "colored college" where Maggie and Will were raising and educating their own children was only a few miles from the antebellum part of town where the Ware-Walkers lived, the families were separated by a social divide so vast that no one would have believed it possible to breach it at all, much less as swiftly and fully as the gifted, ambitious, and personable children of Maggie and Will were going to breach it. All four of their sons graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) and made names for themselves as students and athletes and came home to take over a nursery business that by then included a shop downtown and a complex of greenhouses and gardens on a stretch of suburban land bought with money inherited from Maggie's mother—the same war-widowed, Irish-born mother who had sold part of her tiny farm in Canfield, Ohio, to send her daughter to study with the abolitionists at Oberlin.

Will and Maggie believed in hard work and self-reliance and the American dream, but they held their children close and taught them to trust only one another and to put the needs of the family above all personal desires and to live above reproach. Failure to thrive and failure to understand the intricacies of black-and-white mores when they came there could have meant death, exile, or the end of their work—until, finally, failure and doubt and the need for help from outside the family had become a shameful, unacceptable thing among them. There was a streak of sadness and defensiveness in the Patersons as I knew them that came, I believe, from the realization that it was not going to be possible for them to be who they were and still be as admired and loved as they wanted to be.

In truth, the need to stick together and defend themselves against attack seemed never to end, and when Maggie died of Bright's disease in 1904 and was buried across the line in the black section of the segregated cemetery (making a statement even in death), the main building of the school burned to the ground. "I cannot think it was set fire," the ever-sanguine Will told a reporter. "Rather, the fire has revealed to me the great interest there is in our work and how many friends we do have."

My grandfather Jim Paterson was twenty years old when his mother died—a good student in his junior year at college, a star football player, captain of the baseball team, and already a skilled horticulturist. He was, I believe, something of a poet in his feelings and more interested in making friends and pursuing his own interests than in fighting to raise the family in the eyes of the world, a role that fell to his brothers—Will Jr. and Haygood—who did it extremely well.

Jimmy, the gentle one, the one closest to his mother, was a fair-skinned, energetic fellow with a wiry build and stark, plain features—"so homely somebody had to love him," my Grandmother Ila said to explain her love for a man who was not only plain-looking but self-conscious about his looks and vain enough to want to make up for them with perfect grooming and a dapper style of dress. He had something to be self-conscious about, I suppose, since he had been born with a large upper lip with a ridge in the middle of it, as if two lips had been intended rather than one—"nigger lip" being something he and his brothers believed they had to fight about (though his parents told them not to) every time his schoolmates said it.

The double lip seems also to have been a blessing, since his going into the hospital to have it "cut down and stitched up" was the occasion of his meeting the dark-eyed nurse he would marry. But Jim was bashful as well as vain and all the stories the down-to-earth Ila Watson told about their courtship and early marriage emphasized those two qualities.

First there was the unnecessary surgery on his upper lip, which looked all right the way it was, she said, and didn't look much better afterwards. Then there was the time he borrowed a fine horse and buggy to take her for a ride. Trouble was, the horse had diarrhea and slung "liquid manure" all over them and the buggy every time it swished its tail. The point of the tale was twofold: the difficulty my grandmother had not further embarrassing the mortified Jim by howling with laughter (which she always did when she told it), and Jim's vanity in wanting to come courting a country girl like herself in a finer style than he (plain and poor as he was) had a right to.

While plain Jim Paterson courted the country girl Ila, Knoxie played the Southern belle to the point of parody and continued a debut that lasted thirteen years. Only a woman as independent and beautiful as Knoxie could get away with it for so long, everybody said, without being pitied as an old maid—though I think some people must have seen the loneliness and confusion beneath the flamboyance and pitied her anyway.

At some point during those years, Knoxie began a strange, lifelong romance with a reserved and soft-spoken man named Charles Poellnitz Gunter, born in the last days of the Civil War to a family that had backed the Confederacy with such fervor that when the hostilities ended some of them took their slaves and migrated to Brazil. Nobody knows why Charlie Gunter and Knoxie courted so long and never married. Aunt Bessie said Knoxie never loved anybody else. Some people said Charlie was too much in love with the ease of living at home with his mother and sisters to think seriously of marrying anybody. Some said they both knew he would never make enough money to afford the spoiled and extravagant Knoxie.

Eliza said her daughter was so flighty nobody would have her, and it was in response to that gibe, some people said, that Knoxie married Jim Hillman, who had first come calling on the much younger, much less beautiful Bessie. The family put it out that Jim Hillman was very rich and that Knoxie had finally found someone good enough for her. In truth, the rather mysterious Mr. Hillman from Birmingham and Kentucky was far from rich and, even if all his prospects of inheritance had come true, would still not have been rich enough to match the rumors the family spread.

And so it was that on January 5, 1905, two weeks before her thirty-fourth birthday, Knoxie (who by then had changed her name from Augusta Knox to Knoxie Polk) married James Hoggatt Hillman in the Victorian parlor of the house at 410. Family lore has it that on the morning of the wedding Knoxie sent Charlie Gunter a note saying, "Come get me." Instead, he came to the wedding and shook the hand of the groom like the good friend of the family he had always been.

The thirty-five-year-old groom was a pleasant-looking man with bright blue eyes and regular features. He was intelligent, mild-mannered, and a lover of books and literature, but so passive in his approach to life that I have never heard of anyone who had a strong sense of who or what he was. What I do know is that he was a binge drinker, with a record of personal and business failure that left him largely dependent on his half brother Thomas Tennessee (Tenny) Hillman. A brilliant, hunchbacked little man who had pioneered the steel industry in Birmingham, Tenny was one of a long line of Hillmans who had fallen in love with the idea of turning mineral ore into tools made of iron, and followed that yearning south from New Jersey to Kentucky to Birmingham. The Hillmans brought with them a heritage that combined monumental ambition with a depressive gene (sometimes manic, sometimes not) that runs in that side of my family as deep as any mineral runs in the earth.

As heir to that heritage, Tenny and Jim's father, Daniel Hillman, had built an iron-making empire on the land between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers in Kentucky and then sacrificed half of what he had made to the Confederacy, and afterwards, when he was fifty-eight years old, taken a young Nashville heiress named Mary Ann Gentry to be his second wife. Though broken in mind and spirit by then, he was still healthy enough to add three sons (my grandfather being the last of them) to the four legitimate (for there seem to have been quite a few others) children he already had. And still sagacious enough to buy large mineral properties in Alabama for Tenny, who—to complicate matters—had by then married his stepmother's younger sister, Emily Gentry.

And so it was that the man Knoxie married had grown up almost fatherless in the isolation of a defunct Kentucky iron compound that had once worked thousands of slaves and made millions of dollars. My grandfather was eleven years old when his father was admitted to the Western State Asylum for melancholia and fifteen when he died of what the hospital called exhaustion. When he was seventeen, Jim was enrolled in Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire but stayed only a few months. Afterwards he worked off and on for Tenny in Birmingham and then went into the Army for a while. He was married briefly to a Birmingham woman who, with the help of a servant, "escaped" the family home in Kentucky on the train and refused to go back. By 1905, when Knoxie married him, Jim was living in Birmingham again and running an ornamental-brick-manufacturing business financed by Tenny and the Aunt Emily who was also his half-sister-in-law.

Unlike Knoxie, who was (as F. Scott Fitzgerald said of the Montgomery woman he married) "reared to be idle," my Grandmother Ila believed that the only approach to life that made any sense at all was working and scrimping and saving, which is what she was doing at the Laura Hill Infirmary in Montgomery when Jim Paterson showed up to have his double lip reduced. Though I doubt Ila ever knew true privation, the history of it in a family descended, as hers was, from the slaveless, hard-laboring farmers of plantation-dominated Wilcox County, Alabama, was so real and so recent that she never lost her fear of it.

And then came love and sweetness with a man she didn't marry for four years because she feared they couldn't afford it. And when they did finally marry, they moved into Will Paterson's crowded cottage on the edge of campus, where in March 1910 their first child was born. He was named William Burns Paterson III, for one of the heroes of education in Alabama who happened also to be the sweet-faced, frumpily dressed old man who was the baby's grandfather.

Though named for his grandfather, Ila and Jim's firstborn was called Sonny, and the name stuck with him for life—an earnest, lovable child who looked and acted just like his father and was so adored by his mother (and was so adoring of her) that Ila said she wouldn't mind his being an only child. But Sonny was not to be an only child, and by the time Ila found herself pregnant again, the cottage they were building behind the Greenhouse (as the growing complex of Rosemont Gardens greenhouses was always called; in honor, I suppose, of its tiny back-yard beginnings) was almost done. And so she hoped for a daughter, but the daughter she hoped for turned out to be my father, born on March 10, 1913, and named Julius Porter for his father and his two grandfathers, but eventually called Duke, a nickname derived from Ila's babytalk endearment "Dookie."

Will Paterson died two years later at sixty-six, still doing the work he believed the Almighty had put him on earth to do, still going before the legislature every year to call for a level of education for Negroes considered almost as radical in Alabama in 1915 as it had been in 1870. After their father's death, Will 's four sons (though not his daughter) grew increasingly cautious in their identification with the beliefs that had brought their parents to Alabama. If my father knew that he and his father had been named for an abolition-minded Union soldier killed marching through Georgia with Sherman's Army, he never told it and neither did anyone else in the family. His generation seldom spoke of the remarkable community at Marion into which their parents had been born and the terrible blow the loss of the school had been to their grandparents. They seldom spoke of the insecurities, insults, and privations the family endured in Montgomery for the sake of the unpopular work they had brought there. Though they maintained a loyalty to Alabama State Teachers' College (now Alabama State University) and supported it in numerous practical ways, philosophically they drifted steadily in the direction of the mainstream in which they now lived and made their living.

By the time Duke was born, two sons—Dan and James Hoggatt Jr.—had also been born to Knoxie and Jim Hillman in Birmingham. By then my grandfather's mother had died and left him enough money to form a real-estate partnership with a Mr. William Watts. Tenny was dead by then, having left his two half-brothers one doIlar each, believing he had done too much for them already and knowing that their Aunt Emily would give them whatever they needed. As it turned out, Jim Hillman and his family were going to need a great deal.

Whatever the pressures were (his mother's death, his half-brother's death and disinheritance, one full brother dead of tongue cancer at twenty-one, the other gone West without a trace, his and Knoxie's incompatibility, the challenges of fatherhood to a man who had himself been practically fatherless), soon Jim Hillman was going for days without sleep, hearing voices and imagining terrible things happening to his sons. Some say he lost his mind like his father, some say he had a brain tumor, others say it was syphilis. In any case, his paranoia turned (who knows why) toward his partner Watts—until, one day in the winter of 1914, my Grandfather Hillman, a master marksman, took his gun to work and shot and seriously wounded Mr. Watts, who, fortunately for all concerned, did not die.

Perhaps because he was, by then, truly insane, perhaps to save him from being tried for attempted murder, Jim was declared non compos mentis and hospitalized in private quarters on the wooded grounds of a private sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky, where he stayed for nearly two years at the expense of his aging, childless, and wealthy Aunt Emily. And there in a cottage where my mad or nearly mad grandfather lived (with "a servant and all the amenities," Aunt Bessie always said), my mother, Emily Gentry Hillman, was conceived, an unwanted child if ever there was one.

She was born on November 6, 1914, in a hospital in Birmingham, and handed almost immediately into the care of her unmarried thirty-one-year-old Aunt Bessie. Her seventy-year-old Great-aunt Emily added her namesake to her will and died two years later. Her father, whom she never saw, died a year after that in the state asylum at Anchorage, Kentucky, of what funeral records called apoplexy. He was forty-eight. Knoxie was forty-six, and Charlie Gunter was waiting in the wings to be her lover again and cause a minor scandal by spending unchaperoned weekends in the house on Mountain Avenue in Birmingham.

For self-indulgence and flamboyance, Knoxie's widowhood almost rivaled her debut. She traveled, partied, drank, smoked, dressed to the nines, went about with Charlie, and paid so little attention to her children that soon they were spending almost as much time in Montgomery with Bessie as they did in Birmingham with their mother. Finally Knoxie ran out of money and moved the whole family back to 410 South` Court Street in Montgomery.

Duke's life was as different from that as could be, and would on the surface seem to have been made for happiness, and I believe there was great happiness in it. And yet my father seemed almost from birth to have felt himself an outsider in a family of insiders—an outsider simply by temperament and by his own definition rather than theirs, for, in truth, I don't think any of the Patersons ever lost the sense of themselves as a people barricaded together and out to prove they were "as good as anybody."

Duke was a wistful, temperamental child whose initial lack of interest in school and competition (and long hours spent walking wordlessly through the Greenhouse at his father's side or curled up in the crawl space under the house, building toy cars from spools and scraps of metal) filled everyone except his father with consternation. My father had trouble in school from the beginning, and because school was one of the ways in which the Patersons proved themselves and because his brother was so good at it, the trouble seemed worse than it was.

By the 1920s, Ila and Jim had started to prosper both from the family business and from a poultry-breeding enterprise they ran on their own. Jim bought a camera before most people had one and owned one of the first radios in town. When Duke was nine, his father and a friend took a boat from Miami to Cuba and bootlegged enough Prohibition rum back into the country for Jim to buy a Roamer touring car. He taught the whole family, including his small son, to drive, and on the weekends took carloads of friends over fifty miles of country road to see Auburn play football.

Then suddenly Jim, the father, the playmate, the one who had loved his mother most, the one who could work circles around all his brothers and had two paying jobs and more friends than all the rest of them put together, began to lose his strength from a heart-muscle infection that, in those days, could not be cured. And so he was dying, but dying slowly, until around Easter 1927, near the time of Duke's fourteenth birthday, when the terrible, painful death from a ruptured appendix began.

And Ila said, "Let him die at home then, where he belongs and where I can look after him to the end," and Duke alternated between pacing the rows of sweet-scented lilies in the Greenhouse and watching his father twist and stiffen and suppress the pain and go white and then gray and finally die in the black leather chair where he had sat listening to the radio and reading the papers for as long as his son could remember. And Ila, not ordinarily inclined to sentiment, got a wooden gift box her husband had given her and took a little bottle of perfume he had given her and put a drop of sweetness on a lace handkerchief he had given her and sat down to shed the only tears anybody ever saw her shed over him, and afterwards declared to everyone that there would be no more tears and no more sorrow and that her sons would go back to school on Monday and they would get by somehow and life would go on as it always had.

Duke remembered his father's writhing with pain, his mother's grief, the smell of the lilies, and his father's regret that he was going to die without seeing what the Model A Ford would look like. Neither Duke nor Sonny ever cried over anything in Ila's presence after their father died that I ever heard of, though I heard often how she would say, "Straighten up your face, boy," to Duke to stop him from crying even when he was very small.

At bottom, my Grandmother Ila seems to have thought suffering and sorrow were either too useless or too threatening to be countenanced, and I never saw any evidence that anything that befell her changed her mind.

She was a woman soaked in reality, with almost no interest at all in anything imaginary—and there was a small, hard knot of judgment and fear inside her that brooked "no foolishness" from anyone who saw life less matter-of-factly than she did.

Within days of her husband's death, she had agreed to let the family support her and her sons rather than go back to nursing and running the poultry business on her own. Whatever reservations she had about financial dependency (and I think they must have been substantial) were overcome. And after the decision was made, she seemed never to have questioned her right to the tiny pension she received from her husband's family for the rest of her life.

Unfortunately for Duke, the sting of "charity case" (and submitting to the authority and high standards of his father's oldest brother, Will) added its opprobrium to the death of his father in a family in which the father-son bond was practically sacred and in which sorrow, failure, and the need to be comforted were not allowed. And the wound ached and ached and my father matured slowly and haltingly and resented all efforts to make him do otherwise. And it must have been at that time that he started to develop the haughty, intolerant, sometimes violent side of the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature that I knew in him—a usually witty, sensitive man, painfully vulnerable to the suffering of others, whom a drink of whiskey or the stab of some feeling too painful to bear could turn, without warning, into a tornado of rudeness and fury.

Emily was thirteen in 1928 when the now debt-ridden, now heavily drinking Knoxie sold her house in Birmingham and moved her family in with Bessie. Emily, who couldn't have been happier, showed up for the eighth grade at the Lawrence Street public school wearing knickers and a ruffled blouse, looking like no other girl there, and began at that point to make friends of her own and to dress in the tailored, conventional style she had always liked—no matter what Knoxie said, no matter what Bessie wanted her to do. It was also there, I believe, that she began to take a heavy load of the hardest courses and to panic whenever her schoolwork wasn't perfect and to turn from everybody's pal and the best sandlot athlete in town into a soft-featured beauty with breasts bigger than she ever wanted them to be and boys pressing her for attention and her trying to be equally nice to everybody.

What she wanted most was to enjoy her friends and do the things they did without displeasing Knoxie and Bessie any more than she had to. Most of all, she wanted to be different from Knoxie—to be kind to people, to marry for love and belong to a big, happy family of people who loved one another.

And then, who knows why (the unstable family life? an inherited fragility? adolescence gone wrong?), something inside her started to slip. She attended Sidney Lanier High School for a year and dropped out the next fall because the crowds in the halls frightened her and too many people were smarter than she was—and spent the rest of the year keeping Bessie and Knoxie company at home and enjoying the baby Jimmy, recently born to her brother James H. and his wife.

Though he had no idea who she was, Emily remembered Duke in high school as a handsome, well-built young man, somber and tense in a way that translated (to her) as pure sex appeal. He was making a name for himself playing football but doing so poorly in school that the family sent him to Georgia Military College, where for two years he quarterbacked the football team to victory and had more success in school than he had ever had before and glimpsed (and, I believe, understood) what a highly disciplined life might have made of him. He wanted to join the Navy and see the world, but the family was of one mind: he should go to Auburn, join a fraternity (now that fraternities would have them), play football, get a degree, and come back to work in the family business like all the others.

But Auburn was too big for my father, he missed his friends in Georgia, he couldn't adjust, he skipped classes and got in fights, and—though he captained the freshman swimming team and played football—he wasn't disciplined enough for either college sports or college academics. It was there that he began to drink in a troubling way and to fight a brooding disappointment in himself and his failure to live up to the expectations of the people who loved him.

Fourteen million Americans were out of work in the spring of 1933 when Duke dropped out of college and set out to make a living on his own, saying the last thing in the world he wanted was to join his cousin Bill running the Greenhouse under his Uncle Will's thumb. Instead, he borrowed enough money to open a gas station with a friend and supplemented his income selling life insurance.

Emily, meanwhile, had fallen in love with a brilliant University of Virginia law student named Sam and gone off to a finishing school in Manhattan run by Charlie Gunter's sister, Mrs. Rosa Gunter Semple. She would go to Mrs. Semple's for a year, she thought, and then she would marry Sam, whom Knoxie admired for his Virginia roots and his reputation for brilliance and his plans to practice law in Montgomery. In love with the image and reflected glory of a man she thought far above herself, Emily went to New York expecting to get engaged to Sam over the summer. A few weeks after she left, Sam's younger brother was killed in an automobile accident. The family was in chaos, and Sam was devastated.

Emily sympathized from afar, perhaps not knowing she ought to come home, perhaps unable to face the kind of suffering she was sure to see if she did, perhaps thinking it was kinder and more polite to let the family grieve alone. Another young woman saw it differently and made it her business to go to the house every day and to do what she could for the family and Sam. Emily was so happy in New York (rooming with one of Mrs. Semple's nieces, going to the museums, the opera, a different historic church every Sunday, the Bronx Zoo, Coney Island, all the best shops and big department stores, celebrating her nineteenth birthday in a tea room on Fifth Avenue, learning a little French and some Spanish, going to dances with West Point cadets) that she "fairly glowed" when she got off the train at Christmas, and had more admirers than ever before, though she only had eyes for Sam. In February, her roommate's sister and the woman who had comforted Sam came on the train to New York to see the sights and visit their friends at school.

Sam's new friend had an invitation to take them to tea at the apartment of that famous Alabamian, Tallulah Bankhead. Only they didn't drink tea; they drank whiskey. Everybody except Emily, that is, who never drank anything with alcohol in it and ordered hot tea even in bars, telling her friends she feared the tendency to abuse alcohol was in her genes. After tea, they walked around Manhattan and then went to dinner in a restaurant. They were all having so much fun, smoking cigarettes in public and laughing about Emily's short haircut and all the strange doings at home and who was "going with" whom—until Emily started noticing looks being passed across the table, as if the others knew something she didn't know, until finally Sam's friend took her left hand out of her lap and flashed a diamond engagement ring, blindingly bright in the light from the lamp on the table.

She was going to marry Sam in June, she said. She and her friend came to New York to tell Emily. Sam wouldn't tell her, so she came herself. Somebody had to do it.

Emily didn't believe them. It must be a joke. How could he have pretended at Christmas? How could he have written the letters he wrote? Impossible for anybody to be so cruel.

Something locked inside the woman who was to be my mother and for two days she acted as if nothing had happened and woke up on the morning of the third day in a blast of light too bright to be borne. The sound of her roommate splashing cold water on her face went off in her head like the shot of a gun. The sun was too bright, the air too cold, tiny noises were magnified a thousandfold. Her pulse pounded in her head and she felt like someone was cutting her heart out of her chest with a knife.

By afternoon, her bags were packed and she was stepping on the train in a state of bliss—so happy to be going home (to sleep forever in her own bed and forget everything that had happened since she left there) that she thought she would never be sad again. But the sadness had only begun.

For months she confined herself to the third floor at 410—not eating, not sleeping, not talking, not crying, not howling, not banging her head on the wall—comforted only by the sweetness of her three-year-old nephew, Jimmy, as recently and totally abandoned by his parents as she had been by her sweetheart. She pulled the shades and stared into blackness. When she ate at all, she ate sitting on the bed, feeding and being fed by a three-year-old child.

Bessie paced the wide halls downstairs, railing at Sam, his fiancee, and all their relations, wringing her fat little hands and sobbing into them the way Emily should have been doing but wasn't. They were all so young and stupid, and Sam was such a fool.

Emily was just too good for Sam, Knoxie said, and would soon forget all about him. She herself had loved and lost scores of beaux and spent her whole life apart from the only one she really wanted. "All things pass for the young," she said.

As it turned out, things did not pass quickly for Emily. Sam married. She postponed the debut she was expected to make in September. The only thing that gave her pleasure was the party she arranged for Jimmy's fourth birthday and the company of a few friends. She stopped caring about her looks and grew as thin and pale as Knoxie.

By fall, she had gotten her spirits up enough to talk the trustees of her Aunt Emily's estate into letting her buy the maroon Chevrolet she wanted. Soon she was taking everybody she knew for drives and picnics in the country. Her brother Dan and his wife, Helen, had a daughter now, Emily's goddaughter and first niece. Hope grew in her that her family might be coming alive again, with the little boy Jimmy at 410 and the baby Helen out at the house Dan had built not far from the old plantation house to which her Uncle Boise had returned from Texas with a family of cousins her age and younger.

I don't know what else my mother did that year besides master golf with a speed that amazed her friends, but by Christmas 1934 her small, athletic body was as lithe and voluptuous as ever; her skin was soft and rosy. Her fine brown eyes glowed and the gold shone again in her chestnut hair.