Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [10]
As he tucked me in, Dad told me stories about Ella Voss, his black nanny, who had been emancipated at age eight in 1863 in Helena, Arkansas, and had come to be his mother’s nanny, and then, when she had children, Ella took care of my father and his brother and three sisters, too. He lovingly imitated Ella Voss and her baffling refrain for any situation he brought to her as a young boy: “Lye rose catch medlars, Mister Steve, lye rose catch medlars.” He wasn’t sure what this actually meant, but it came to be comforting, even in its mysteriousness. If any of the five children spilled their milk at the dinner table they’d be sent into the kitchen to eat with the help. My father would intentionally spill his milk to eat with Ella Voss and her sisters Ginny, Alberta, and Odessa, who also helped out at their house, and hear stories of their lives.
My father said his mother gave birth to him and had a Corona typewriter on her lap a couple hours later to finish her daily column, “Here and There,” for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “Ella was all I knew, raised me, and then one day when I was about six this white woman comes in and says she’s my mother. My sister Tad cried when she found out she was white. Just fell apart.” My father, a man who has gone through life with just half a degree of separation, told me that Grandma Darst had, for about fifteen minutes, until she decided it was complete silliness, been in the UDC, United Daughters of the Confederacy, with Tennessee Williams’s mother. His sister Betty was friendly with Dakin Williams, Tennessee’s brother. His childhood was teeming with characters and artists and newspaper life and kids and race relations, politics, civil rights and funny stories. It sounded crazy and wonderful, and yet I knew listening to him that there was something else at work. My father’s stories were postdated checks, promissory notes of what was to be restored: the prominence, the name, the black chauffeurs smoking and having a plate of food at the back door of their house on Westminster Place while his uncle Joe, the mayor of St. Louis, was inside talking with his mother and father about housing for the poor, civil rights, revitalizing the city economically, the plans for the Saarinen arch on the riverfront. They were meant to sustain us, sustain him, until a better day, a day when he would fulfill his promise as a writer. It didn’t take a lot of convincing to get Dad to tell stories about his childhood, St. Louis or his family. The past was his number-one love. If there is some genetic opposite of my father it might be Madonna. I wonder if reinventing yourself would even be a concept that my father could grasp. Reinvent? My father didn’t even rewrite.
I was heading unenthusiastically into the fifth grade. I thought having skipped a grade out in Amagansett proved that I had already conquered school. I didn’t want to be a writer, I wanted to be a detective. I carried a huge satchel around with me wherever I went, even just around the house. There was an office in this bag: pens, yellow lined legal pads stolen from Dad, a camera, a tape recorder, baby powder for fingerprinting, handcuffs. Others in the family didn’t see my potential as a private eye, however, they just saw me as a dick. It seemed that if I touched something, it broke;