7
WHAT AINESLEY SAW WHEN he first encountered Marcia over a decade previously at the FloraBama Restaurant was a pretty twenty-one-year-old, small, almost tiny in stature, with the blue eyes of her father, and still blessed with a teenage trimness. Her smile was quick and welcoming, albeit only for those who approached her first. By nature she was relatively shy, the more so due to her sheltered upbringing.
Marcia had spent two years at Hartfield Academy, an elite finishing school at Hattiesburg a short car trip from Mobile across the Mississippi line. Well taught there, she had impeccable manners, and her knowledge of dinner arrangements and protocol was almost professionally thorough. She fitted the mold of her region and class. The Old Rich are more polite than others around them. Southerners are more polite than those of other regions. Therefore Southern Old Rich are the most gracious people in America. And egregiously proud--it has often been remarked that Southern gentlemen and would-be gentlemen are both the best mannered and most heavily armed.
At the time she met Ainesley, Marcia was a junior at Spring Hill College, a small Catholic liberal arts college of good reputation. The campus was within convenient walking distance of Marybelle, with much of the route lined by live oaks and the photogenic gardens of sufficient quality to regularly make the Home and Garden section of the Sunday News Register.
Her social life at Spring Hill had thus far been almost entirely with other girls who themselves had not yet settled on boyfriends. Disciplined and compliant by both nature and training, she was a dutiful student, earning mostly A's and B's. Only moderately talented in art and music, she possessed a compensatory intellectual passion for American history. Her parents, Jonathan and Elizabeth, were more than a little pleased to see that from an early age she was fascinated by stories of the extended Semmes family, of Mobile, and of the South, in that order. While still in her teens, she had spent three afternoons interviewing Aunt Jessica for a research paper on Semmes antebellum genealogy.
When she came of age in the mid-1970s, America's great social revolution had already spread across the South. It had reached Mobile, and engaged the full attention of the faculty and students of Spring Hill--short of bra-burning and cafeteria sit-ins. Women were increasingly seen as capable of gaining professional and economic parity with men. Neither Marcia nor her parents, however, particularly wanted her to enter the venues now opened by this change. She was raised to be a Southern lady. Her vision of an appropriate life was to be Old South: white women of the middle and upper classes the customary rulers of the home, and men the providers.
The preferred professional venues of the best families were law, medicine, and the military, with esteem graded in each according to rank, income, or both. And all the better if a successful older son later took over management of the family estate. Business was acceptable, especially if conducted as a member of the family firm. A political career was also acceptable if taken to a sufficiently high level. Congressman, senator, or governor were excellent. Mayoralty okay, if of a decent-sized city, preferably also accompanied by membership in the Cosmopolitan Club or an equivalent elite group.
Marcia's expectations for her own eventual place were lofty. At least it never occurred to her that she might someday descend to the warrens of the proletariat. She had witnessed herself some of the great changes that were still sweeping across the South. Studying history, she knew how so much of the region had emerged from poverty, finally to join modern America only during the Second World War.
Marcia was wholly aware of the changes occurring immediately around her. She had watched the gobbling up of the highways out of town by strip malls, so that the suburbs of Mobile turned into warm-weather replicas of those around, say, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis. The rural South had been further transformed by the conquest of disease. One seldom heard anymore of hookworm, pellagra, or dysentery, the former scourges of poor country folk.
Marcia's parents could remember WHITE ONLY signs on drinking fountains. They could tell her when fast-food restaurants began to replace "cafes," and when strip malls pushed out five-and-ten downtown stores. When their own parents were young, they saw highways crowded on Saturday mornings with the mule-drawn wagons of sharecroppers, white and black, on their way to market. Now there were cars and trucks driven by employees with paychecks and credit cards in search of the best affordable satellite dish.
The voters of Alabama, currently among the most conservative states politically, had flipped in only one generation from populist Roosevelt Democrat to hard-right Republican. Marcia was used to seeing bumper stickers that advised GOD, GUTS, AND GUNS MADE AMERICA, LETS KEEP ALL THREE. On one side of the rear bumper, that is. A sticker on the other side might read SO MANY PEDESTRIANS, SO LITTLE TIME or DON'T LIKE MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT.
But that fierceness was softening too. New homes in the best parts of Mobile and across the bay in the arts-and-literature pockets of Fairhope were as likely to be occupied by a Stanford-trained neurosurgeon or an architect from Chicago as by a scion of old wealth. They were coming in, and joined by their equals born in South Alabama. All were welcomed. They were the spearpoint of the New South.
Yet hereditary privilege and its aura persisted. In Marcia and her parents and many others of their class, a residue of antebellum glory still lingered. It could be summarized by the Three Graces of Southern Nobility. First, there was Old Family and Money; next, Gracious Living, including spacious houses surrounded by sumptuous gardens that displayed large showy flowers, and indoors featuring antique furniture passed down, not bought; and finally, the gray wool of the Confederacy. For this last, forebears were better remembered if they had been officers. If that was fortunately the case, portraits would hang in the library or along the center hallway. A general was a treasure for the ages, and lower-ranked officers were certainly acceptable, while enlisted men were best left as add-ons during postprandial conversation.
Marcia Semmes was a modern young woman but her roots were in an antebellum ghost town. People there, if they accepted you socially, delighted in telling you their family history. More than the members of any other American subculture, they wanted to discourse on their "people"--their forebears, back more than three generations, back to participation in each war in turn, back, if their phylogeny could be so documented, to the English-speaking pioneers who had settled the land. And they wanted to show you their homes, if those homes were sufficiently large and grand, and the better if built not by themselves but a long time ago, by their people.
Marcia's branch of the Mobile Semmeses was descended from a cousin of the Confederate "Sea Wolf," Admiral Raphael Semmes. Although direct descendants of the great man were also present in her generation, and her own line was only collateral, she was later to say to Raff more than once, "Remember, son, you are what your people are." And, "You need all of the help you can get in this life, and down here a great name means a lot." She never admitted to herself the possibility that Raff might eventually settle elsewhere in the world, like some ordinary person looking for a job up north, or that the treasured memory of the great man for whom he was named might someday be reverently folded and put away for good in some safe and remembered place along with the stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag.