September 9, 2009
The best trick when I’m familiarizing myself with a town is to go to the cemetery, and to the beauty parlor. In between the two, I found this bit of local porch decoration. I feel like it pretty much explains my day. Some hair, and some bones. Just a bunch of keratin and calcium, momentarily coalesced.
When I was a little girl, my mother’s mother used to take me to eat lunch on my grave. It was in a town not far from here – at the small old 1820s cemetery, and I remember it was under an oak tree. So everything felt rather familiar this morning as I travelled to the nearby Old City Cemetery, starting my first round of research for my family stories novel set here in this town – they have done a lot of laudable research about local 19th c. midwifery medicinal and burial practice, and they have records for that era’s brothels because of their extensive unconsecrated potters field where prostitutes were buried.
But the gates weren’t open that early in the morning to the “grave garden” (what they call it), so I went to hunt down a cemetery for hair. Get a little wash and set.
Upon entering the parlor, the hairdresser immediately checked my YogaWest waterbottle for contraband booze.
He said, “I can’t allow liquor in here before four in the afternoon. Earlier than that, drinking is indecent. I refuse to further accommodate my clients’ alcoholism.”
He paused, “Then again, they have a lot to drink about.”
This is an alternate to the more commonly heard expression, “a lot to think about.”
He continued: “You know, the woman in here before you, she was dead drunk. She had a mug of coffee that was actually just whiskey. Well! Her husband moved his mistress into their basement apartment and she wants a divorce, but you know, you can’t get divorced in Lynchburg. Not if you want to live here. So her friends came in here with her to get her to just relax about it, because if she raised a fuss she’d lose all his money and be back in a trailer again. So she was going to get her hair done. You know, to relax. They said they were thinking of her kids. But they were thinking of Church. She can’t lose her place in Church. And of course the whole trailer situation. Her parents saved all their money while she was still young and pretty and sent her to work at the Country Club just so she could marry a man like him.”
He wanted to know what I was doing here, so obviously an interloper. I told him I was at an arts center near Sweet Briar.
“Oh,” he said, “you’re up there with the Whores on the Hill.”
He said that’s what Jerry Falwell – whose Liberty College is in Lynchburg – calls Sweet Briar. “Don’t worry, though,” he said, “just don’t let anybody take you up to Liberty on Tuesday nights. It’s Pray Straight night. That’s where they try to make you not gay anymore. I get lots of gay men in here. I tell them, honey, it’s okay that you’re gay, you know. And they say, Hush – I used to harbor those thoughts before Liberty let Jesus into my heart. And I say, well, those are fine thoughts.”
That was his comprehensive explanation for why he doesn’t let people drink during their haircuts. So they can’t escape from their attempts to dodge out of their dreams. I heartily concur. In Lynchburg, they call the liquor store the “All Boy’s Club.” Something to think about.
After that, he mostly complained at great length about the man he hired to repaint his bathroom because his wife has no teeth. “In Lynchburg, if you don’t brush right, your teeth go black by forty. That painter is a good looking man. So how can he let his poor old wife literally just rot away like that? She came to get five dollars from him and you couldn’t understand a word she said, with those teeth just rattling around in there or mostly gone.”
After the disasterous styling experiment, I went to look for Pearl Buck’s house to clear my head before the cemetery.
There was a very posh sandwich shop next to her house. Nobody has two cents to rub together, except the people on a Pearl S. Buck pilgrimage, who apparently don’t flinch at paying $13 for a tuna fish sandwich by the side of the road. Peculiar.
The cemetery was pretty intense. More on that another day. If you see the white boxes in the midground, they are bee hives. For making cemetery honey, of course. And why not? Makes you less lonely for your dead.
For today, I learned three particularly interesting facts within entering the gates:
(1) although there are 20,000 gravestones, 60,000 people are buried here;
(2) About 75% of the people buried here were African slaves;
(3) About 40% of those buried here are younger than four years old.
They have a Pest House here – an old stable where the people with contagious diseases were kept. Right in the middle of the cemetery, to make burial more straightforward. There were human skulls all over the place, right out in the open.
Not surprisingly, there is more to the story of the Pest House, and that will wait for another day, when we are all a bit better prepared for the full impact of emotional collision. The South is not shy about tragedy, that’s for sure. It’s a beloved and familiar turf. I left right before sundown, when the gates close to the Grave Garden.
On the drive home, I took some photos of the neighbors’ porches.
It was time to get back in time for dinner – shrimp and grits with fried turnips and collards. I ate a lot of fried turnips. They were tasty. After all, I have bones and hair to grow. So I had two slices of pecan pie.
Then a glass of ice water at the gazebo, while bats and grasshoppers tried to eat our heads. The grasshoppers seemed equally happy trying to eat our hair as their eponymous grass. Well, mine anyway. Must have been something in the resin-like substance implicated in the wash and set. But the bats were clearly drawn to the grasshoppers, and it was rather a gothic farm tiara I had about me for a while. I thought of those infestations and plagues of grasshoppers, and wondered if these were zombie Egyptian grasshopper bats that eat faces. Maybe that’s what happened to the hoodoo deer head on the neighbor’s porch. All these are better questions for daylight, so I declared my day done.
Tomorrow, when I put honey on my granola, I will know exactly from whence it came. And to all you honeys out there, God created divorce and lesbianism for a couple of damn good reasons. Life is good here, says this whore on her hill.