“ ‘Cannot,’ I said, ‘being no child now, nor a bird.’ ”
—W. H. Auden, “1929”
I keep returning to the house in my dreams. It was the house we grew up in, my brother Gabriel and I, and we lost it years ago, after our parents died. I hardly ever remember my dreams, but these scenes persist, reappearing every few months to disturb my sleep with Technicolor clarity and angst. Sometimes I manage to enter the house, but always with the knowledge that it now belongs to strangers, that I have no right to be there, that I’m intruding. If I climb the stairs to my old bedroom, I find it cluttered with alien furniture. I know I’ll be expelled. I tiptoe out, shaking. At other times, I find the front door locked—that door painted bright red, standing out from the blue-gray clapboard façade. Guiltily, but with the determination of a thief, I sneak into the barn, which I find unchanged from our time there, with its dusty beams, a rack against the wall for rakes and shovels and trowels, a shelf for flowerpots. Except, except … our mother’s study, a cramped room at the front, is empty, and our father’s study, a larger room at the back, across from the horse stall, is empty as well, no books on the wall of shelves, no papers strewn all over the floor. Here the dream breaks down as I wake in terror of being arrested for trespassing.
We lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, on what used to be a farm. Our house had been converted from a 300-year-old onion and cow barn that was attached by a long, open shed to a horse barn. The property was still a working farm when our parents bought it in 1953, newly married and knowing that I, their first child, was on the way. The poor cows were exiled from the barn that became our house; I’m told that for a while, they still grazed in the adjoining field, and would amble up, perplexed, to stare through the sliding glass doors into their old dairy, which had become our dining room. Upstairs, which was the ground floor facing the front lawn and the driveway, the front hall welcomed anyone coming in through the red door. On entering, one found the guest room and a terrace to the right, and to the left, a cozy library with a fireplace, and beyond that, a double door leading into the enormous hayloft we called the Big Room, a two-story space as grand as a cathedral. Mighty chestnut posts supported the ceiling; even mightier horizontal beams defined the roofline and the Gallery, the high loft where bales of hay had been stacked, and where we now kept a guest bed and a closet. The chestnut trees that supplied those beams must have been giants. In the core of the house, an open staircase led to the upper rooms: our parents’ bedroom at one end of the hall, Gabriel’s bedroom and mine at the other. My window looked out the back onto a row of dusky, sacerdotal spruces four stories high. From my bed, placed along the windowsill, I peered into their boughs. It was like sleeping in a treehouse.
After our father’s death in 1989, our mother could no longer manage the house and she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house and barns and fields were sold. A few years later, we heard, they were sold again. And then, from a 2005 article in The New York Times, we learned that the 300-year-old house and barn had been torn down and the spruces felled to make room for a McMansion that was now being sold for $3.7 million. That well-known American writers—Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark—had lived on the site seemed to have had little influence on the property’s value. “That,” said the listing agent’s assistant, “depends on the celebrity. An author might not add the same amount as, say, Brad Pitt.”
The author’s home was once a working farm. The horse barn, shown here, connected to the living quarters (a former onion and cow barn) via a long, shed. (Courtesy of Special Collections Library, WKU)
Childhood, in that protected realm, felt eternal. It was as if the rhythm of our lives had been ordained since the Creation. Our parents worked in their studies from nine until two, during which time they were not to be disturbed. Our mother drove her small, pale green Olivetti typewriter as if it were a cantankerous horse in the dense fug of her Winston cigarettes: those scarlet packets might have been an emblem of motherhood, as far as we could tell. Our father didn’t smoke. In his study at the back of the barn, he battered away at his stately typewriter, moored like a tugboat on his desk; you could hear the clackety-clack of the keys, the bell’s metallic squawk each time he reached the end of a line, the thunk as he slammed the lever to return the carriage and attack the next line. Every once in a while, with a ripping sound, he tore a page out of its rollers and fitted a new page in.
If we weren’t in school, that intense parental activity left my brother and me free to roam. The house and barn perched on top of a long hill. A small vegetable garden lay behind the barn. We mostly grew asparagus there: in the spring, I took pride in being sent out with a knife before suppertime to cut the pale rosy stalks. Beyond the garden, a mown field extended to a line of trees. In the grandest of these, an enormous maple, my brother built a treehouse. Already handy with tools as a small boy, he constructed a sturdy hideout about 12 feet off the ground, with a little plank floor, a patch of roof, and a ladder nailed to the tree trunk. The field swooped down the hill past two apple trees to an immemorial stone wall at the bottom. A narrow opening in the wall led into the field beyond. In winter, when we sledded or flew on our toboggan down the slope, we had to be careful to steer toward the gap in the wall to avoid a crash. It snowed heavily in those years, the 1950s: I seem to be describing an ancient world. Certainly, a different climate.
The whole domain was enchanted. But the most serious magic, for me, resided in the Mud Hole, a small pond at the foot of the hill, off to the side where the stone wall petered out. I spent hours in the boughs of a maple tree that leaned over the pond. I sat there dangling my legs, observing the glossy black water below me, the frogs squatting and burping at the muddy brink, and occasionally a water snake swiveling across the rippled surface. In the fall, pairs of mallard ducks scudded down to occupy the Mud Hole for a few days, paddling, dunking, shaking themselves before taking to the skies, the males with their iridescent green heads and their homely wives, heading south. In winter, the pond froze. Our intrepid mother would sweep the snow off with an old broom and help us lace up our skates so that we could zip around its narrow circumference, giddy with our prowess and speed.
The Mud Hole had necromantic power. Inspired by stories I’d read, I experimented, scooping its murky water into a small iodine bottle and screwing the cap on tightly. For weeks—was it months?—the bottle sat on the dresser in my bedroom, and I pretended to be a witch, pouring drops into miniature teacups for my dolls. They suffered no ill consequences; perhaps their health improved. Perhaps they spoke to each other when I left the room.
Not magic, but majestic, was the huge eastern rat snake our father found one evening in the back field, partway down the hill. Pa came back to the house to fetch us. We followed him out to the field, and there was the snake god, about six feet of him, lazily looped in the tall grass around his hole. He regarded us, we regarded him. I held my father’s hand tightly. “He won’t hurt you,” my father assured me. Slowly, deliberately, indicating that he ruled the field and had no time for us, the snake slid out of sight into his private realm underground.
Animals populated our world. We lived with them in stories: The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, Rabbit Hill, Tarka the Otter. And living animals surrounded us, were part of the family. We lived in a kind of zoo. We had canaries and also guinea pigs. There were various cats: Weenie (short for “Halloween”), a black cat who turned up one Halloween; gray Maxwell, who proved to be female and gave birth to kittens in a cardboard box in my closet; the fluffy orange Persian, Mango. For a while, we kept rabbits. Our father built a hutch for them in the shed—ingenious, we thought, since part of its floor was made of wire mesh, allowing the droppings to fall to the shed’s dirt floor. Our rabbits spent a good deal of time in the house, hopping around on the broad, caramel-colored Mexican tiles of the kitchen and dining room floor. At one period, Jimmy Jammy, the three-legged rabbit (he’d had an accident with a kitchen chair), Weenie the cat, and Danny, a red-brown spaniel mutt, were all best friends: they ate dried dog food out of the same bowl and slept curled up together in Danny’s cushioned dog bed.
When I was seven, our animal kingdom admitted a dramatic new member: Cricket, a Welsh pony. This was my mother’s idea. She had grown up on a failed chicken farm in Connecticut and had had a pony; therefore, I had to have a pony. Cricket was dark brown and mean, and he inhabited the horse stall in the barn across from our father’s study. My mother took care of him, letting me help her pitchfork soiled straw out of the stall and haul in fresh bundles and buckets of water. I remember brushing his coat and stepping out of the way to avoid being nipped. I liked the tangy smell of him, and the aroma of his saddle and bridle. In good weather, he was tethered on a long rope in the back field. And there I had my adventure.
I was never to mount Cricket by myself, I had been warned. Only when he was saddled and my mother was walking alongside was I allowed to ride this princely creature. Of course I disobeyed. One afternoon when our parents were away in New York on some adult engagement, I found Cricket in the back field, peacefully grazing. I carried a bucket from the barn and placed it next to him. I stepped on the bucket and, seizing his mane, hoisted myself up. For a moment, I sat proudly astride, admiring the meadow from my new height. Suddenly, I was hurtling through the air; the sky and the horizon of trees whirled around and changed places, and I must have blacked out as I hit the ground, because the next thing I remember is lying flat on my back in the prickly grass, unable to move, or even to breathe, with waves of pain shooting along my spine. Gabriel, who had been watching from the top of the hill (I hadn’t seen him), ran crying for our babysitter. Cricket resumed his lunch.
The aftermath remains a blur. The babysitter—a middle-aged lady, I vaguely recall—hauled me up (not a recommended maneuver for someone in my condition, I realize now), carried me to the house, and laid me in my bed. Commotion ensued on my parents’ return. At first I lied, claiming that I’d been rolling down the hill and had hit a rock. Gabriel, unfortunately, told on me. I was bundled off to a doctor the next morning for my first experience of x-rays, which confirmed that I’d broken three vertebrae; I spent the next few months mummified in a plaster cast from my collarbone to my hips. The humiliation of having to wear sack dresses and sit at a special table in the back of the second-grade classroom because I could no longer fit in my desk dissuaded me from any further solo equestrian trials. It also occurred to me that lying wasn’t a good idea.
The grownups. Who were they? Our parents, first: Father Sky and Mother Earth. They shaped our world. The minor deities ruled specific provinces: teachers kept order at school; occasional doctors menaced us with shots and rewarded us with paltry stickers. Babysitters exercised even skimpier authority. Grownup friends of the family didn’t impose rules but leaned over us with Olympian beneficence or simply ignored us. I resolved, early on, never to grow up.
Still, rumors of an outside world did reach us. Reverberations wafted in with the grownups, with the air they stirred by entering the house. Our parents worked hard and didn’t carry on an intensely social life, but once in a while, guests arrived for dinner at the long dining room table our father had built: an eight-foot length of butcher block supported on a cast-iron frame he’d ordered from a local blacksmith. On those evenings, Gabriel and I had a hurried supper in the kitchen and were dispatched upstairs to bed while the adults argued, laughed, nibbled peanuts, and clinked ice-filled glasses in the library before descending to the dining room to eat the delicate meals our mother composed for those occasions. Their voices floated up the stairs: high-pitched trills of women’s laughter, solemn pronouncements, occasionally a sharp challenge.
It hardly concerned Gabriel or me what the grownups were arguing about: we were busy making up our own stories. But we sensed the different histories flowing into our family. Our mother was a Yankee, from what I later understood to be threadbare New England gentility. As a young woman fresh out of Vassar in the Depression, she had worked as a translator for Trotsky, living in his house with his entourage in Mexico City. Our father came from a small town in Kentucky, his mother a schoolteacher who died young, his father an officer in a tiny bank that went belly-up in the Depression. Though they sprang from different worlds, they had both had rural childhoods; both had known poverty. They had grown up through the Depression and World War II. Now, in the 1950s in Connecticut, they wanted to keep us safe.
Their friends were northern and southern. Displaced southerners gathered at our house: our father’s old friend Cleanth Brooks, his colleague from years back at Louisiana State University and now at Yale, and Cleanth’s wife, Tinkum, one of my godmothers; Gabriel’s two godfathers, Albert Erskine, our father’s editor, and John Palmer, the editor of The Yale Review and dean of Silliman College at Yale; Vann Woodward, the historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction; Ralph Ellison, almost a southerner (from Oklahoma, but with roots in South and North Carolina), and his wife, Fanny, from Kentucky. Occasionally southerners who now lived farther afield appeared: my other godmother, Katherine Anne Porter, with her silver curls, from Texas—not really the South; and Eudora Welty, with her enormous, tender eyes and receding chin.
I caught fragments of their conversation without even meaning to. It wasn’t only the South that was racist; northern segregation was vicious, too. Something called civil rights. Something called integration. Except for the Ellisons, we were all white. Once, when Eudora was visiting on a mild spring day and the elders were sitting out on the terrace, I plunked myself down at the piano in the Big Room and, with fiendish perspicacity, began pounding out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” My mother came flying into the room. “I was only practicing,” I said grumpily.
Northerners came, too. They were displaced in a different way: most of them were leftists, disabused of their prewar certainties. Only years later did I begin to grasp what ferocious hostilities would have divided them in the 1930s—divided the Trotskyites, like my mother and the writer John McDonald, from the Stalinists, like Lillian Hellman and the painter Peter Blume. But here, in the late 1950s, they sat together, drinking bourbon (“Or would you prefer Scotch?”) and eating my mother’s sole meunière. World War II had gobbled up the revolution.
Our parents held a grand party every New Year’s Eve, and it was then that the Big Room came into its own. The party took days to prepare. Our father hammered garlands of pine boughs and ivy along the beams in the front hall; crates of wine and liquor were delivered; rented tables and chairs were set up in the dining room and the library; our mother spent days polishing silver and counting plates and wineglasses and arranging white linen tablecloths. Silver baskets held mounds of apples, oranges, dates, Brazil nuts, and walnuts, and fascinating two-legged silver nutcrackers (busting open a Brazil nut and prying out its smooth ivory flesh with a silver prong was a feat). On the night of the party, two women served the food our mother had prepared, and cleaned up afterward: Mildred, a tall, angular white woman whose regular job was cooking lunches at our school, and Florence, a Black woman who sometimes helped our mother with housework. “Black”—though we said “Negro” in the 1950s. And Florence’s skin wasn’t “black”; it was richly honey colored. I noticed, because there were so few darker-skinned people in our lives.
Our parents were writers. Their friends were writers, artists, musicians, and scholars, with a few editors and publishers thrown into the mix. The guests arrived in high party regalia and tossed their coats on the guest room bed: ladies in a swirl of silk and taffeta, gentlemen dressed up as gentlemen, in tuxedos. All except the sculptor Sandy Calder, who always wore a bright red flannel shirt. (Once, in a snowstorm when the oil furnace broke and arctic cold gripped the old barn house, Sandy asked for a wrench, went down to the cellar, banged and twisted a few things, and set it working again.)
The guests swooshed in, they flocked into the Big Room, the laughter and greeting and conversing began. Gabriel and I mooned about in our pajamas, spying. Eventually we would be sent upstairs to put ourselves to bed. The gruff photographer Walker Evans and his young wife, Isabel, would be staying the night in my bedroom, so a cot was made up for me in Gabriel’s room, next to his shelf of toy trucks. We read our storybooks and heard waves of grownup argument and hilarity ripple up from downstairs. Much later, after dinner, phonograph music lilted up to us: Strauss waltzes, hits from the Roaring Twenties, jazz, and when we crept down, we saw the guests swaying around the room in couples. It was annoying, the next day when the wayfarers had departed, to find that Walker had smoked in my room and stubbed out his cigarette in the little china swimming pool for my dollhouse.
The grownups at the party moved ritualistically (so it seemed to me), almost like the carved figures moving around on their narrow track of an elaborate Swiss town clock when the hour struck. But we also knew them, some of them at least, as real people. As “real” as grownups could be. One scene still plays in my memory: an eminent man, a novelist, sat in an armchair next to the fireplace, and a woman—not his wife—sat on the floor next to him, leaning against his leg, quietly weeping. The party flowed on.
I didn’t want to grow up. I wanted childhood to last forever. My older cousin Rebecca promised me that she wouldn’t grow up, either; and then, without warning, she betrayed me, turned 14, and began wearing lipstick and became—of all horrors—interested in boys. But time did seem frozen in that Connecticut suburb, for a while anyway, though The New York Times arrived faithfully every morning and our parents read it, frowning, at the breakfast table. Years later, worlds later, in college, I learned the Latin phrase hortus conclusus, the walled garden of the Song of Songs and of medieval and Renaissance poetry, and it seemed to me to describe our childhood in Fairfield, where the fields were indeed fair, and lilac and dogwood bloomed in the spring along our driveway.
School hardly broke the spell, at first. The Korean War was not even a rumor in our school: it hadn’t happened. In the fourth grade, our social studies textbook displayed, side by side, a black-and-white photograph of ominous apartment blocks with the caption “Communist East Berlin” and a brightly colored picture of a department store bedazzled with lights like a Christmas tree, titled something like “Happy Shopping in West Berlin.” “There will be no more war,” declared our teacher, the elderly Miss Gould. “We won the war.” Then the school bell would clang, and we were directed to crouch under our desks for a drill “in case of nuclear attack.”
This was 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis had rattled our parents and teachers in October, but they kept it pretty much to themselves except for those exercises under the desks. And some of my schoolmates’ families constructed “bomb shelters” in their basements, which soon filled up with Ping-Pong tables and arrays of canned food.
But the next year, time—or could we call it “history”?—did break in. It was a gray day in early November. I was in fifth grade. In the middle of some lesson, Miss Gould suddenly opened the door and beckoned to our teacher, Mrs. Westfall, who stepped into the hall for a moment with her colleague. When she returned, her face was ashen. “Children,” she said, and paused. “Children, the president has had an accident. He’s in the hospital.” We rode the school bus home as usual that afternoon. When it stopped at our mailbox on our country road, Gabriel and I clambered out with our school satchels and walked up the long driveway to our house. But as we approached, the red front door opened, and our mother stood there framed in the doorway with tears running down her face.
Our parents didn’t live in a hortus conclusus, though they made one for us. I didn’t know, until a few years later, about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four little girls a couple of months before the assassination of President Kennedy. We knew that our parents wrote books, and every now and then, cartons of a newly published volume would arrive at the house, but I didn’t know, at age seven or eight, that our father—brought up in white, segregationist Kentucky, educated as an undergraduate at white, segregationist Vanderbilt University—had published in 1956 a little book called Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South, or in 1961 a study of the effects of slavery and Jim Crow, The Legacy of the Civil War. I did know that in 1964, when I was 11, he began leaving home to travel through the South (and parts of the North), interviewing leaders and workers in the civil rights movement. He’d be gone for several weeks at a time, then reappear and head out to the barn to type things up.
He told us a few stories, not much, about those trips. He didn’t want to scare us, I think. He described riding in a car at night on a country road with civil rights workers, the headlights off so that they wouldn’t get run off the road or shot. He told of spending the night in a farmhouse with the shades all pulled down and the lights off except for one small lamp in an inner room. But I was unprepared for what I found one day in our mailbox.
I used to walk down our long driveway, some days, to collect the mail. Not that I expected anything for myself; I simply liked the idea of mail. It was early autumn; leaves still clung to the branches of the trees, crinkling into yellow and rusty orange. I opened the mailbox, reached in, and touched—something strange. It was a torn, bloody rag, about as big as a dishtowel. And pinned to it, a crudely printed newsletter with KKK in large black letters across the top, a cartoon of a figure hanging from a tree, some columns of print that I didn’t read, but scrawled in pen, this message, which I did read: “We know where you live, you N-lover, you Jew-lover, you and your family.” (I won’t write out the hateful word.)
Something stopped inside me. The word stunned really does mean something: to be so slammed on the skull that meaning falls apart, that thinking fails. I gathered up this mess and ran back to the house and delivered it to my parents. There followed consultations in low voices. To call the FBI, or not to call the FBI? They didn’t call, I’m sure. I sensed, from what I overheard, that they sensed that that would be futile.
Our father persisted in his travels, interviewing people working in civil rights, thinking about civil rights—Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, James Forman, and many others, including his friend Ralph Ellison. These conversations laid the foundations for my father’s book Who Speaks for the Negro? It came out in 1965, and I would read it much later. My one glimpse of the way the book came into being, besides the horror at the mailbox, was Stokely Carmichael’s visit to our house for lunch on a late spring day in 1964. Perhaps my father conducted the interview with him there, though that would have been odd, since all the other interviews took place elsewhere. But my father was especially interested in this young man who had just graduated from Howard University with a degree in philosophy and was becoming prominent as an activist for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, joining sit-ins and Freedom Rides across the South to integrate buses and trains. He’d been jailed and beaten up, and still he kept at it. He was at a crossroads, my father felt. I remember his telling us, that night at dinner, that he’d helped arrange a scholarship for Carmichael at Yale to pursue whatever independent postgraduate course of study he wished.
Carmichael was tall, polite, serious. He was 23. We all sat for a simple lunch—a salad of some kind, probably—at the dining room table as the cool light, filtered through the spruces, played over us. Gabriel and I ate quickly and ran off. But Carmichael made a strong impression on me at the time, and I remember his courtesy, the feel of his self-possession. I remember, later, our father’s quiet disappointment when Carmichael turned down the scholarship. Yet he understood. As he wrote in Who Speaks for the Negro? about Carmichael and a long list of other activists of that era, “There are many of them. There will be more. There will be many more, and with their coming something else will happen. There will be a great release of energy. … History has seen such moments when energy, long suppressed, has found a way. We sometimes look back on them as great ages.”
My sense of being a child didn’t end with the discovery of a bloody rag from the Ku Klux Klan. But my feeling of time and context did change. A much larger world sprang into view. It would take years for me to find my own way in it, to make my own mistakes; that’s called growing up. We blundered into the 1960s. “We”—our family, the country. I see now, looking back, that we were all finding our way. We were all, grownups and children, imperfectly “growing up.” Stokely Carmichael grew up, through SNCC to Black Power and the Black Panthers and harassment by the FBI, to life in Guinea and Ghana as Kwame Ture, supporting pan-African revolution (and, alas, a virulent brand of anti-Zionism). Malcolm X was shot in February 1965, a few months after his conversation with my father. The spring of 1968 brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The Vietnam War was tearing our country apart and ravaging Vietnam. I was in boarding school. There, we did study history, real history, reading primary documents. I woke at dawn, walked down to the local subway stop with friends to distribute antiwar leaflets, and by nine a.m., I was back at school in my Latin class, learning, not irrelevantly, about the poets under the Roman Empire.
Decades have barreled past. The American empire flails spasmodically in war after war. My parents died years ago; our childhood house is long gone. We are all provisional: people, houses, countries. But perhaps the house in Fairfield is not entirely lost. If I listen inwardly, I can hear the tap-tapping of my parents’ typewriters as they made their sense of things. I hear the wind in the spruces. I see the Mud Hole’s dark waters. They are still a source. And I find myself reciting the last lines of an early poem of my father’s, “Bearded Oaks,” not in ancestor worship, but because the poem helps me to understand the mystery of living in and out of time, and to discover what it is to have a conscience:
We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we can spare this hour’s term
To practice for eternity.
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