Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory - Softcover

Duff, Gerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0875654355 ISBN 13: 9780875654355

Verlag: Texas Christian University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Novelist Gerald Duff grew up both in Polk County, in Deep East Texas, and in Nederland, near the Gulf Coast, two drastically different areas in terms of social and economic status, and the way they interact. These communities shaped the way Duff thought and lived, causing him to build up certain false personae to fit in with the crowd. These changes and more are described within the pages of Duff’s new memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory.

From dealing with intrusive family members to judgmental classmates to marital bliss and misery, Duff’s memoir describes situations familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. Experiences unfamiliar to the youths of today include growing up during World War II and the descriptions of propaganda tactics, hunting for your own meals, and dealing with the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s. Other occurrences however, such as working a summer job and the awkwardness of first dates, speak to people of every generation, young and old.  

Early in life Duff learned to tell lies as a survival mechanism against his meddling family and occasionally cruel classmates. He describes the ordeal of hiding both his domestic situation and his talent for the written word. Duff’s talents for lies and half-truths helped him not only to discover a hidden talent within himself, but also a future career. 

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In addition to writing fiction, poetry, and scholarly works, GERALD DUFF has taught literature and writing at Vanderbilt University, Kenyon College, Rhodes College, and Johns Hopkins University. He has published eleven books, including Indian Giver, finalist for  the Great Lakes Colleges Association First Novel Award, and Fire Ants, which was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for the 2007 Best Book of Fiction. His other books of fiction and poetry have won the St. Andrews Prize for Poetry and the Cohen Award for Fiction, and have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Texas Institute for Letters Award, the University of Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Prize. Home Truths is his first book with TCU Press.

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Home Truths

A Deep East Texas Memory

By Gerald Duff

TCU Press

Copyright © 2011 Gerald Duff
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87565-435-5

Contents

AUTHOR'S NOTE, 
1 What You're Named Is What You Are, 
2 God's Hospital, 
3 The War in Texas, 
4 The Cat and Dog Picture Shows, 
5 The Calves of Dolly Roberts's Legs, 
6 The Brass Knucks in Mama's Dresser, 
7 What Reading Smelled Like, 
8 The Fall from Grace, 
9 A Talent for the Lie, 
10 The Water We Had to Drink, 
11 Washed in the Blood, 
12 What We Hunted, 
13 Take, Eat, This Is My Body, 
14 Kissing Linda Smith and Loving Jannis Jones, 
15 Leaving for Marshall Hall, 
16 Who Is a Cajun and Who Is a Negro?, 
17 Wanting Some Tongue, Too, 
18 Burning the Sofa My Sister Slept On, 
19 Arriving Late at Nederland High, 
20 The Way Louisiana Girls Smelled, 
21 Margaret, I Could Have Been a Good Abe Lincoln for You, 
22 Multiple Choice Questions, 
23 A Need for Relief, 
24 A Change of Major, 
25 Licking Down My Lunch in Fayetteville, 
26 A Foreign Student in Illinois, 
27 Not the Thing, But the Thing about the Thing, 
28 Fugitive at Vanderbilt, 
29 A Fortunate Fall, 
30 As Kool-Aid Is from Gin, 
31 Women Writing about Women Writing about Women, 
32 Cousin Joseph Winston Tells the Truth, 
33 From Honey Island to Menard Chapel, 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 

CHAPTER 1

What You're Named Is What You Are

SO I was doomed. I knew that as my mother told me there was no escape from my name, and I knew that words were what doomed me. They always have.

The first memory I can recall is my being lifted over a wire fence by my father while my mother watches, and being placed down on a surface covered with snow. That was in Texas, but I didn't know it at the time. I must have been well over a year old because I can remember standing in the snow and looking up at my parents on the other side of the fence, wondering why they were beaming at me. They must have told me what the white stuff on the ground was, but I don't remember that and I don't remember being much interested in where I had been placed or the white stuff I was standing in. I did realize the two of them wanted some reaction from me, but I couldn't figure out just what that was. That puzzlement as to how I ought to react to their expectations of me did in fact set a pattern and characterized the entire course of my relationship with my parents from that day forward.

They intended what they presented of the world to me to have a certain calculated and known effect, as they saw it, and they habitually stepped back to watch me gather it in. My problem was not one of having no reaction to their proffers, but of having an impure one, a reaction composed of contradictions and second guesses. I knew they wanted something from me, but I was doomed never to know just how I should behave at such times. So my habitual response was to make something up to satisfy, to act in a way calculated to advance my state, and by so doing to be left alone to my own devices. I learned to create my own truth. I learned the wonderful use of the lie and how it could serve me.

I've always been a coward physically—as far back as I can remember and all the way up to today—and soon after that snow episode on the Texas Gulf Coast, the first event illustrating that fact occurred. It involved a board laid over a ditch full of water which I was expected to negotiate alone. I must have successfully gotten over it on the way out of our yard, because I was coming back toward the house when the trouble began. A boy named Jimmy was blocking my way over the board, and I knew I was no match for him, of course, though he was smaller than I was. I knew he would prevail, and I knew that because I feared it. By that point, I had learned that what I dreaded was likely to happen precisely because I didn't want it to happen. Jimmy would master me because I was afraid he would.

I was shirtless, and I know that because he scratched my back hard enough to draw blood as I struggled to get by him on the board over the ditch. I was weeping before the action even started, always being good at crying, and I knew I was doomed to defeat from the beginning because I saw it coming and because the boy had a better name than I did.

His name was Jimmy, a good, solid, ordinary label, and I was called Gerald, a designation I had already learned was that of a sissy and a loser. So when Jimmy went to work with his fingernails, I hardly even pushed back, but wailed instead for my mother to rescue me. She did, explaining to me later that I'd have to learn to stand up for myself and fight back against those who opposed me. There was no comfort for me in that, and I remember crying even harder then, realizing I'd never be able to take up arms and defend myself from Jimmies and Johnnies and Bobbies, permanently hampered as I was by my weak name.

What you were called was powerful and indicative of success or the lack of it, I knew, and my parents had betrayed me at birth by naming me Gerald, adding further damage by giving me the middle name of Aldine. "Why?" I remember asking my mother. "Why am I Gerald? Why can't I be Johnny?" She didn't attempt to answer me, except to say later when I declared that I would be known as Johnny henceforth, "No, you won't be Johnny. You won't be anything but what you are. You're Gerald, and that's what you're going to be called now and forever."

I had two grandfathers, unlike my own grandchildren who have five or six at last count. One was my mother's father, Grandpa Irwin, who always wore a tie and a starched shirt, and drove a car to come see me. He brought bananas when he came, a rare treat in wartime Texas. So when he invited me to go back with him from where we lived in Hardin County to spend the night in his apartment in Beaumont (he was separated from his second wife by then), I was eager to go. I wouldn't have agreed to go with my other grandfather, my father's father, who had a full beard and lived in a log house even deeper in the country than we did. He lived with a wife who was not a real grandmother to me, and he was sick and stayed in bed all the time, even in the daytime, waiting to die, though I didn't know that was going on.

Once when I was visiting him with my parents in his log house, and my cousin Willie Vee was there, too, he asked us grandchildren to give him a kiss. That would've involved crawling up in the bed where he lay and putting our lips somewhere in that tangled mass of hair on his face. Neither of us would do that, of course, Willie Vee shaking her head no so hard that her hair thrashed back and forth and the tears from her eyes splashed on the floor like big raindrops.

Amos Duff then reached into a pocket and drew out two nickels, offering Willie Vee and me one each to kiss him. I immediately did what I had to do to get the money, sticking my face into that mass of whiskers and rubbing my hand across my lips afterwards until my mouth hurt. When Willie Vee continued to refuse the offer, I did it again and got the other nickel, causing all the adults crowded into the room to laugh loud enough to hurt my ears. I remember looking at them in contempt and anger, wondering what was wrong with my aunts and uncles, my mother and father, and the old man lying in the bed next to the fireplace. Nothing was funny when nickels were involved.

Willie Vee remembers that event, too, but nowadays as an older woman self-christened Virginia...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Texas Christian University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0875654355
• ISBN 13: 9780875654355
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 149
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar