This story covers a variety of time periods including the 1920s through the end of the century and present day. Each of the characters relating her experiences was over the age of 18 when such experiences occurred. The material in italics is the recollections of the ghost of the narrator's great grandmother which she was sharing with the narrator many years after the events occurred.
I was 22 when I first met my great grandmother, Miss Emmy. My strongly traditional Southern family didn't talk about her very much. She was our family's black sheep. She had been dead for a long time, so I was actually meeting Miss Emmy's ghost. But meeting her that warm, steamy, July night twenty years ago changed my life.
Ghost you may ask, questioning my credibility before I've even begun the story, but ghosts weren't a big deal in the family in which I grew up. We lived in a big old Ante-Bellum mansion on a couple of thousand acres of prime bottom land down the river a bit from Greenville, Mississippi. We had values that hadn't changed or been seriously questioned for generations, and we had money, lots of money. In addition to the farm we owned a small bank, the local TV station, a radio station, and the county newspaper, plus a car dealership, a farm equipment franchise, and a tire store. Basically everything you needed to run a local economy in Mississippi. I can't say we owned the local politicians, but . . . well, you know.
But the land was the core of the enterprise. The family had been born there, lived there, and died there for more generations than I can count. We even had our own cemetery up on the 'Hill' behind the house. It was generally accepted in the family that the ghosts of various of our ancestors would wander down from the Hill from time to time and visit—mostly just to check up on us, making sure the family values were being maintained and the family's position in the community was still respected as it had been in their day (whatever century that might have been in). Yes, we had ghosts, but they weren't dangerous, and we all grew up knowing they would be coming by to visit from time to time.
The family values, you might ask? Pretty much the usual for a family in the southern aristocracy—work hard, go to church, obey the commandments, earn and command respect in the community, and above all else
don't ever sell the land
, the land that was the source of our wealth and our power in the community. There were also some unspoken values, like don't marry beneath your station, make sure the right politicians are elected, and . . . well you know, the usual rural southern values about race.
But Miss Emmy was not among the ghosts that came down the Hill. She died giving birth to my grandmother and by the time I was old enough to ask questions about my great grandmother all I could get from the family was, "She went abroad and died young." I did learn enough to find out that she had returned from Paris before my grandmother was born, but there was never any mention of my great grandfather, so I had always assumed he had stayed in Paris. As I said, she was the black sheep. She went abroad and came home pregnant and without a husband. That did not match the family values.
I had just finished my senior year at Vanderbilt when I met Miss Emmy. In Miss Emmy's day the family values didn't include sending female members of the family off to college, but by the time I came along it was accepted, so long as I went to some approved southern university like Vanderbilt and didn't study anything too radical. I had double majored in English Literature and Art History. Those were considered "safe majors" by the family. Not at all the same as though I had gone to Berkeley for four years and studied feminist theory.
I had seen other of the family ghosts on numerous occasions, so I wasn't all that shocked when Miss Emmy appeared in my bedroom as I was preparing for bed. Like the other ghosts I had met she kind of shimmered around the edges. If you weren't used to ghosts you might think there was something wrong with your vision, but I knew better. Also their habit of appearing and disappearing into thin air could be a little unnerving until you got used to it.
"Hello Lisa," she said. "It's so nice to meet you."
"Hi. . . . uh . . . which one of my relatives are you?" I responded.
She smiled. "Oh I guess you wouldn't know me," she said. "I don't come down the Hill very often. I'm your great grandmother."
"Miss Emmy?"
She smiled and nodded. Unlike most of the ghosts that came down the Hill to visit she looked young and very pretty. Her thick, dark, lustrous hair was cut very short and curled around her face in a way I thought quite attractive. She was wearing a pale blue dress (a frock they would have called it in her day) that hung from narrow straps, strings really, and fell straight to a hem well above her knees. She was thin and had a moderate bust that the frock showed to her advantage. Her hips were relatively narrow. She looked a lot like a 1920's flapper.
I had been preparing for bed when she arrived so I sat nearly naked on the edge of my bed staring at her. No one I knew had ever met Miss Emmy. I started to reach for my robe that was lying on the edge of the bed, but Miss Emmy spoke up. "No need for that. It's warm in here and It's not like I haven't seem nudity before."
I said, "Okay," and left the robe where it lay. Then I just sat there, nearly naked and silent, waiting to see what Miss Emmy wanted. In my experience the family ghosts didn't come down the Hill without an agenda.
After a long silence she spoke up, "I'm sure they have all told you terrible things about me."
"Just that you went to Paris and came home pregnant without a husband, and that you died in childbirth when my grandmother was born."
"Well, that's all pretty much true," she said. What they didn't tell you was why I went to Paris and how much fun I had there. They also left out the part about my marriage when I was 18.
"So why did you go to Paris?" I asked.
"The family sent me. They were afraid, no sure, that I was going to embarrass them. By the time I was 22 I was a bit of slut. I had married right after I finished high school. As an 18 year old virgin I had no idea what I was getting into. I just went ahead with the marriage my parents arranged for me—to a forty-five year old plantation owner from the next county to the south of us. He was a drunk and he liked to beat women, especially the ones he was married too (I was his third, the first two having died under, I later learned, somewhat mysterious circumstances). Beyond our wedding night he showed no interest in sex with me whatsoever, preferring the whores in the cathouse down on the river. Since I was being ignored, I took up having sex with others—first one of his brothers, who seduced me (and was my first real introduction to sex, my wedding night being a bit of a bust when my new husband passed out), and then with a couple of the plantation's field hands.
One night my husband came home drunk and started in on me with his belt and his fists. I gave him a push and he tripped, hitting his head on a table as he was going down. It killed him. It was all hushed up as an accident, but somehow a will magically appeared which left everything to the brother who had seduced me. He made it clear that he wanted nothing further to do with me now that he owned the plantation. I came home with nothing but a car and a few clothes. After a couple of months at home my family sent me off to finishing school in Paris. "
Wow, I thought to myself. No wonder the family won't talk about her.
"But Paris," she continued. "My god, it was such a wild place in the 20s. Lots of parties, lots of booze, and sex. Oh my god yes, there was sex with just about anyone you took a liking to. Paris was such a fabulous place then."
"Were you with all the famous ex-pat writers and painters?" I asked, thinking back to my college classes.
"Some of them. They were okay, but they were a little intense about their work. I'll tell you though, that Zelda Fitzgerald was sure a nut case," she said, shaking her head. "She was such fun when she was in her manic phase, but when she was depressed she was a real downer."
"And her husband, Scott. Did you know him?" I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh for sure. Maybe I slept with him. I don't really know. There were parties that I never could remember the details of. Scotty was usually around so . . . maybe."
"But for real decadence," she continued "you had to get to know the remnants of the French aristocracy. Oh those people had really dirty minds and they reveled in their decadence."
"So who was my great grandfather? Was he one of those decadent Frenchmen?"
She shrugged her shoulders again. "Probably. There were lots of candidates. I was a very busy girl," she said with a smile "Oh, it was such fun after growing up in this strangled culture." Her voice assumed a sour tone on the last two words.
I didn't respond, but the way I raised my head and looked up at her asked what she meant by the end of the sentence.
"Oh you should know girl. You've been off to college and you know there are more open cultures than we have around here. This place." She gritted her teeth. "It's all about who your family is and whether you come from the right folks, never mind asking what you value or what you can do. And race! For god's sakes, we have that so screwed up. You would think that after Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and the others got through kicking our ass over that issue we would have figured out a better way to do things, but no, not us. We just cling to our 'family values.' And whatever you do don't sell the land. It makes me just as mad today as it did when they sent me off to Paris all those years ago."
