I stood on the bank and squinted at the two white-clad figures in the middle of Deep Creek’s swirling water. As a nine year-old city girl temporarily plunked down in the Smoky Mountains for a family visit, I was on high alert for things I couldn’t see back at home, and this was going to be a big one.My cousin Annette, six years older, was on the list of my most admired people. She could cook and sew and win 4H prizes. She had the same name as my favorite Mouseketeer, and I harbored a secret hunch that she was really the famous Annette and the family was keeping it secret. Plus, she was a teenager with teenage friends, some of them boys.
Now she was standing in the middle of the creek in a pretty white dress with lace trim. I bet she made it, I thought in a spurt of pride. I knew from experience what she was up against out there. That water was cold as ice. I knew that because her mother Anna Lou would regularly pile the cousins into her Plymouth and barrel over mountain roads to take us to the swimming hole “up Deep Creek” and then back to her house for popsicles.
Part of my annual immersion into the ways of my relatives was the agonizing entry into that frigid water, a test I had to pass to prove myself. While my cousins dove in and got it over with, I inched in, crunching down to pat the freezing water onto my goose-bumped arms. Once I finally gathered my courage and plunged in, it was a victory. Annette didn’t usually go along, being too busy with more sophisticated endeavors.
I stood on the bank behind Anna Lou and Uncle Commodore, my mother’s brother, and their sons Don and Jim. They seemed to think this was a normal occurrence. I had heard we were going to a baptism but that sounded like a churchy thing, not a swimming hole thing. What were we doing here? And what was a baptism anyway?
Was my petite Grandma there, having clambered down the bank on her tender feet, in her voile dress and Sunday hat with the veil? You know how memory is, focusing in on the main event and leaving the edges blurry. Grandma may have stayed home, since this was a Presbyterian ceremony and the rest of the family, she included, was Baptist. I didn’t know the difference, but they certainly did.
There was a lot of religion in that town. The various Baptist churches, red brick with white steeples in town and the more modest weathered wooden ones up the hollows, seemed to have the strongest foothold. One recent day, I had tagged along on an all-day genealogy outing up into the mountains with my aunts. I snapped pictures of the white clapboard church that a great-grandfather had built, and of the family headstones that surrounded it. It was something. How could a kid from 1111th Street have roots way out here, in a hollow that my aunts could barely find? I was more interesting than I’d thought.
The Presbyterian Church that my cousin was seeking entry to was back in town, painted bright white, right down the hill from her house, a couple of blocks from the almost defunct railroad line, just around the bend from the Baptist one of the rest of the family. But the church that made the biggest impression on me was the one that we had nothing to do with. It announced itself by a gothic-script sign on the highway into town: St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, Masses 8, 9, 10:30 am. It sat on a ridge overlooking the A&P and the Tuckasiegee River, its austere grey stone looking medieval and menacing. I didn’t stop to think that my home church back in Chicago was housed in an odd replica limestone Irish castle that may have looked as misplaced as this one. It also escaped me that my Unitarian church building served as the symbol for the South Side neighborhood that was so heavily Catholic it practically smelled of incense. Nine year-olds aren’t much on irony.
The ceremony was about to start. The other figure, the white-suited preacher, began to stir. He boomed a few words in his God-calling voice, put his arm around my willing cousin and – oh my gosh – dipped her backwards under the water. And held her there. And kept holding her there. Her family stood stock still. Since they were older than I was and better swimmers, I figured that if she needed rescue, they’d be on the job, and I should quell my impulse to splash out there.
The preacher’s incantations continued and to my relief he finally lifted her up, streaming, still breathing, and escorted her to the bank where her mother waited with a white terrycloth towel. We trooped back to the house for the usual pot luck – plates of sliced tomato and cantaloupe still warm from the sun, pyramids of sweet corn picked that morning, fried okra, stacks of cornbread, beef cooked beyond well-done to just this side of charcoalhood, and fried chicken from the poor creature I’d seen my grandfather ax-murder earlier in the day. I might have been the one from the city, but in their way, my relatives were far more conversant with violence than I was, but the necessary violence it takes to run a life close to the land. Dessert was Anna Lou’s coconut cake and watermelon, eaten in the yard so the juice could run down to the elbows.
I never asked Annette what it felt like to be dunked and baptized, being too shy and too young. I didn’t yet know that the result of curiosity could be learning, if only I’d ask. I remember how it felt to me. I’d glimpsed a jaw-dropping event I’d never see again and that my friends back home couldn’t imagine. For a while, the gulf between me and my relatives had widened, with me on the outside peeking in, wondering what would happen next.
But by the end of the meal, while the aunts cleared the table and teased Grandma into sitting on the convertible step-stool while they washed the dishes, and the men rocked on the porch, I played with my cousins out by the lilac bush. We chased fireflies and captured them in Ball jars with perforated lids that stayed on the back porch. Laughter leaked out of the kitchen windows, and the low rumble of the uncles’ voices rolled off the porch. In the process, I was restored. This was my family. I loved their slow speech and Southern story-telling. I loved their food, and how they loved my mother. And I loved Annette who gave me something to shoot for.
I wasn’t required to understand all their ways to belong there. It was a great gift of my childhood to see so early that we could be different yet connected. Annette was the star of that day in my memory but I think I was the lucky one. Later, dishes done, we all gathered in the front room and sat in a giant circle, moths hitting the screens, and the funny stories began. What I would give for a chance to hear those voices again, trying to top each other. Their generation is all gone now except for Commodore who celebrated his 100th birthday this summer. I inhaled all that love and knew I’d have a home here if I ever needed it, and vowed to take all these folks home with me in my memory, where they still reside.
CBH 09/09
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