re-post seven: sisterhood

from september 2008:

[My grandmother, whose name was Azile, never let anyone forget that she was actually "Eliza" spelled backwards.

She grew up on a gutted-out plantation site in southern Arkansas, in a tiny pinprick of a town called Lily. Her father worked as a local vetrinarian, but the stories I always enjoyed hearing were the ones about her sisters. There were four of them, all relatively close in age. The pictures I've seen are like something out of a gothic southern novel from the 1930s; the girls are dressed in polka-dot frocks with big skirts and wedge heels, their soft hair coifed and pinned, but set against the flat dullness of their yard, little tufts of weeds everywhere, and the visibly peeling paint of the house behind them...well, it all looks painfully mismatched. They fought a lot. I think it was Lillian Smith, one of the white female writers who tried to make sense of Jim Crow and the Lost Cause in the first decades of the twentieth century, who suggested that nothing defines the southern family more than a delicate balance of refinement and violence. Somehow I have always taken great pride (twisted, right?) in knowing that my mother's family had fit this bill, living tenuously together in a rickety house with Civil War-era teacups, lace hankerchiefs, an old diamond chandelier, and all the great works of literature but certainly not much cash. They killed chickens in the back yard; Azile could remember the sounds of the squawking well into her old age, and I think it had always bothered her a bit. I would bore you to recount all the stories.

Like the time her sister Devonne adopted a pet parrot; apparently it would squeal and talk too late into the night. My grandmother had had enough, it seems, and steeled into the cage late one evening, tossing the poor parrot into the water of the primitive washing machine on the front porch. The next morning, Devonne was, of course, rather revulsed by the news. The story may have been embellished along the way, but some reports of the incident include bits of shattered Coke bottle flying through the air. Yet the fighting was premature, it turned out, because the "damn parrot" had survived the night, swirling around in the soapy water until he had managed to fly away and fit himself nicely unto a branch of a nearby tree.

It's not as if any of this is all that interesting, or all that unique really. But I have always been facinated with the relationship between those four sisters. They are all gone now except for Devonne, who was the youngest; she's amazing and, I think, if she'd been born just twenty years after she was would have been some sort of radical lesbian feminist writer. The four of them loved each other, I have always suspected, with a kind of passion that had to be all on or all off. Maybe it was growing up in the shadow of a time and a place that really didn't exist anymore. Azile knew Shakespeare, but she never could figure out how to work a VCR. And I've always been nervous that somehow that kind of sisterhood might be genetic. I have two older sisters (although by blood, they are both actually half). We share the same mother, and thus, that bloodline. But somehow I think our sisterhood is more modern than that, more evolved. Joan, who is five years older than I am, is perhaps the center of my soul. If I were a ship in need of guidance, she would be my lighthouse, strong and bright in the worst of times. We are drawn to each other for the good and the bad, able to communicate without words. But we use a lot of words anyway. There's no parrot story (although when I was five, Joan did accidentally cut my leg open with a piece of glass from a popcorn bowl), but there is laughter, and there have been plenty of tears, plenty of pain.

Maybe with each successive generation we all get a little bit more normal.

The reason I even thought about all of this today is because I spent a lovely stretch of time with my roommate Meg and her sister Lauren this weekend. Their sisterhood is so in sync, with every squinch of their faces, every smile, every gesture, that I was easily reassured of my convictions--that there is no more compassionate a relationship, no more unconditional a love, than that of a sister. So, a big thank you to both of them for that wonderful gift. And we would have a photograph to commemorate the evening--replete with frosty beer bottles and an Athens night sky--if Lauren's phone/camera had a better flash on it...