Monday, May 14, 2012

I Like to Find Dead Folks' Margin Notes in Old Books

Central State Hospital, the Asylum,
located at Milledgeville, Georgia.
As a child, scheming relatives spoke of my dear Aunt Beulah: "We'll  Send her to Milledgeville!" They said it in more syllables than are spelled.


By the 1960s, Milledgeville was not known to a child as the vanquished capital city of our State. It was known as a place where the mentally disabled were constrained, not in loving care, but in isolation and abuse. Though the city, in truth, is a far more gracious place than the harsh Old South often depicted, it had assumed an image as a place for incarceration of The Insane — though of course, now, we are kind and good, so we house them in underpasses, instead.

Her short-term memory fading with age, as she knew, she began carrying it on slips of paper in her purse. They might be scattered like mustard seed throughout her dwelling. Her scratchings worked, most of the time, to meet her daily needs. Forgetful as she was on occasion, and fretful sometimes, she was yet patient and joyful about greater things. I first skipped a stone across Etowah waters from her shore. I met her mule.

Under a floppy straw hat, she walked me to her stretch of the river, shouldering a few cane poles strung with line, already baited from her worm bed. I was intrigued by reflections of gold among the strands of wiser silver and white in her hair. She was so proper that she thought she ought to put up her braids before going out, though it was only for a hike across her own land. She cast the lines and set the poles, then showed me how to do the same: await with patience, or return another time. Later, she made my daddy scale and gut the fish, and we ate them for supper. A different Sunday, a casserole's pepper cleared my head and had me seek its eggplant savor all my days.

She taught me to whistle a dog with two fingers. And two teeth. So loud a shrill, so little breath, and she was more than the square of my age! She kept all her teeth to the end of her days. She was my Granny's closest sister, and they shared memories of one another with me that furl beneath my skull today.

Aunt Beulah retained, through her nineties, the acuity to manage a farm on the banks of a river coveted by a utility, and she never was forcibly committed, not for profit, nor for reason, nor the good intentions of meddlesome kin. A daughter, who loved her, later lived there, as well, beneath the cooling towers of the power plant. I recall the great windmill that powered her farmhouse; those who tilted at it only took it after she was gone.

As I motor through underpasses, I contemplate graffiti that captures a journey, so an offhand phrase from a web page also caught me metaphorically, "I studied art in Milledgeville". I found it in the introduction to a wonderful artist, Jessie Parks, more of whose works I hope to share in later posts.
Portrait of the artist's father and grandfather.
Copyright © 2010 Jessie Parks All Rights Reserved
Used with permission.














































































Her studies were not in the old asylum, but where my Granny and her sisters also studied in the early 20th Century, when their school was called Georgia State College for Women. (Its matriculants were known as Jessies.) Her works evoke paling memories and honor to our elders — banners we must unfurl to rally us against the desertion of our culture by its own.

While most of us prefer to cross over the top of a bridge in sunlight, Ms Parks is unafraid to show the dark shadow of an underpass or hard abutment, maybe cracked on impact. Take a thoughtful look: the windlass turns. She wrote that she likes to find dead folks' margin notes in old books. There's life in those! Watch for more of these scratchings soon.

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