I needed to forget, for a few minutes, the poetry workshop I had just conducted at the state prison for women-to forget fifty-five-year-old Jewell's lifelong dream of "staying in one of them motels, just once;" Chain Gang Candy's tale of throwing Clorox into her faithless husband's eyes; and black Doris's story of being railroaded into prison by the white police officer who was the father of five of her six illegitimate children. As I lounged against the cheap veneer headboard, trying to focus on Tony's (of the Tony, Orlando, and Dawn show) cheerful sing-along, on the way he lifted women from the audience-plain, fat, and pantsuited-to momentary media "life," the phone rang.
My sister Anne's voice came tiredly over the line. Mother had been found unconscious, she said: dressed in a new blue peignoir and her best white-gold costume jewelry, with her favorite bright-red lipstick carefully applied, she had left a scrawled note and an empty bottle of pills beside her bed. Anne would be traveling with her by ambulance to a hopsital in Atlanta; would I meet her there as soon as possible? As I faintly registered Anne's irritation that, as usual, I was not on hand for a family crisis, I felt a mixture of relief and numbness that lasted through the minutes of making phone calls, throwing things into suitcases: Mother has finally done what for years she had said she would do. . . .
What I had once seen as the condition of being female, I now saw as female and Southern. I perceived by mother, grandmother, sister, and daughters-all the women whose roots I shared-as netted in one mutual silken bondage. Together, we were trapped in a morass of Spanish moss, Bible Belt guilt, and the pressures of a patriarchy stronger than any other part of the country. I wondered what would have become of us had sisterhood, rather than feminine policing and competitiveness, been our ambience.
. . .
April. Savannah. The city is a woman, from her cavernous houses, through her veils of pale gray lace, to her labia-pink azalea.
A bunch of them blaze pink in a jar on my worktable. I have a chenille bedspread with a peacock on it, and a cedar chest given me by Grandmother Lee. A small green lizard that glides across my kitchen floor when I walk in barefoot. I have two pretty cotton skirts and a pair of good boots. I have Mother's typewriter, a stack of white bond, a bottle of Gallo Chablis Blanc. . . .
Breathing magnolias, I pass verandahed houses in which I glimpse, through white-veiled windows, cool high rooms like those in Grandmother Lee's house when I was ten-white doilies, high mantlepieces, tall chairs and beds. I have on my green gingham dress again, my starter bra with the blue ribbon, my baby-doll shoes. I think of my boyfriend, Troy, and his dwarfed church next door. I think of Mother, of Grandmother Lee, of Grandmother Annie, of Anne. I think of Jesus and Culver and the Famous Southern Poet and my son, David. . . .
Two black toddlers, their hair in corn rows, do the twist inside Hula-Hoops. A black father walks his baby girl in a pink dress shaped like a tutu. Another, in his Sunday suit, walks two paces ahead of his teenage son, clapping hands rhythmically, strutting in a way echoed exactly by the boy. Two sanctified women, still in their white dresses and gloves, rock on a porch and fan themselves.
"I wish I had a nickle tuh put in thet slot ma-cheen!" sings out a young voice behind me. "Hal-lee-lu-ja!" shouts an old man as I pass.
I have no parents, husband, children, money. I walk down the street, ready to begin my life.
From the Afterword
I wrote the first chapter of Fatal Flowers in 1976 standing in a cabin in North Georgia at the Hambidge Center near Clayton. The cabin sat at the edge of a vast field which the Center's director assured me was a place where only sheep wandered, but UFOs landed. My mother, Melissa, had killed herself the year before, and her widower, Uncle Wayne, who lived up the road in Franklin, North Carolina, had insisted I take a rifle to keep beneath the cabin's narrow cot.
. . .
The rifle was of little help when I picked up a mountain man at the bar behind the Dillard House restaurant and brought him back to the cabin where he terrorized me with tales of the women he had killed. But each morning I got up, fixed a cup of coffee on the wood stove, and set to work at the upright L.C. Smith manual typewriter on the little oil-cloth covered table. The things that frightened me most were not UFOs or violent men, but the demons inside me, I was writing for my life, and I knew it.
. . .
Ironically, it was my mother who had given me the steel to speak up. In the small things, she had emphasized honesty above all else. But she was also the perfect embodiment of the dictum, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." She wore her white gloves until the day she died. And her fear of anger and sexuality, of revealing what she considered to be her deeper shame, had made me fearless, risking the dark places of the psyche.
Mother would have almost certainly been shocked by Fatal Flowers. Or would she have been? I like to imagine the small frisson of shock crossing her face, along with the need to suppress a smile, at hearing my truths, her truths, our truths expressed at last.
Rosemary Daniell
July 1999