Even though I returned to Memphis in defeat, something was changed and would never again be the same: I was famous, publicly acknowledged as beautiful and rewarded for it, different and set apart. I’d imagine a friend’s voice getting a little crispy and impatient, disallowing me any complaint about fatigue or boredom or a bad hair day. The president of the pageant did offer me a summer job at the shows he produced for Six Flags over Texas--my first professional offer--but my parents wouldn’t let me live away from home by myself. I was still somewhat useful to pageant officials, who asked me to appear at a party for the next year’s Miss Teenage hopefuls. “Actually,” said the letter from the director of public relations, “all we want you to do is smile prettily when you are introduced and mingle with the girls, convincing them to enter the contest.” Smiling prettily seemed to be my talent.
EVERY CHILD IN MEMPHIS GREW UP UNDERSTANDING
that it was the cotton capital of the world, that the crop had dominated the economy, even the society of the city since before the Civil War, when a major slave market provided the necessary labor of industry, and cotton brokers dotted the waterfront, transacting business at a cotton exchange that rivaled Wall Street. King Cotton still occasioned the biggest social event of the year, the Cotton Carnival. From the time I was a little girl, I stood with the crowd awaiting the Carnival king and queen, who were chosen from the wealthiest and most prominent families in town. They arrived on a flower-bedecked barge, blindingly lit and dressed in shiny rhinestoned costumes, at the historic downtown steamboat landing, lined with cobblestones that were said to have been brought to North America as ballast on Spanish galleons and towed upriver by mules. The local country clubs named royal princesses to the king and queen’s court, and Chickasaw’s board of directors appointed me their representative in 1968, a commission that could not be refused, whatever my disdain for pageantry. I had to make an appointment with the “modiste” who was making the princess costumes, after receiving a mimeographed sheet of instructions: “You are to bring sixteen (16) button white fabric gloves for evening and ‘shortie’white gloves for day costume. You are to bring small button pearl earrings (no loops or “dangles” please).... A rhinestone tiara is to be worn with your nighttime costume. A deposit of $5 will be required.... You will be responsible for furnishing two pairs of shoes—plain, closed heel (opera), closed toe pumps.
NO FLATS OR BALLETS, PLEASE
. Hose for your daytime costume will be furnished....
MOST IMPORTANT
: Wear the foundation garment you plan to wear with your costumes when taking your measurements and for fittings.”
There were no blacks represented in the Carnival--they had their own separate Cotton Makers Jubilee--and the only black people I knew were domestics or warehouse workers at Shobe, Inc. Memphis was still cleft along rigid color lines, with segregated barbershops and libraries, and there were
COLORED ONLY
signs with figurative hands painted in dark colors pointing to different drinking fountains and rest rooms. The local movie house had a colored box office and seating up in the nosebleed section of the balcony, a brutal sauna on humid summer nights. In 1965, when a maverick theater operator at the Poplar Plaza Shopping Center screened
A Patch of Blue
and Sidney Poitier actually kissed a white woman, the audience reacted with an audible “Whoooa.” Blacks were admitted on a different day at the Mid-South Fairgrounds every fall and attended the Negro school a mile away from my own. There is still, in a public park across from the University of Tennessee Medical School, a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in rural Tennessee. Despite an ongoing controversy, it’s allowed to stand because he was a famous Civil War general. Once, when I was very young, my grandfather and I saw the hurried scattering of spectral white gowns and pointed hoods, illuminated by the glow from a burning cross, as we drove through the “other” part of town. The sight of the Klan in full regalia strikes fear in the heart of even a little white girl and an old white man.
“Da-Dee, who are the ghosts?” I asked. “Don’t bother your pretty head,” he answered, but he put his foot to the gas pedal.
Like most of the people in that time and place, my family had a tacit code of “benevolent” racism: my grandparents treated their black housekeepers with familial fondness and support, dispensing hand-me-down clothes and leftover food with the fraudulent magnanimity of the times. Waiters and bellhops were addressed by their first names, whatever their age, and I shelled peas on the back porch of the lake house with a kind and dignified elderly lady named Annie who had to call me Miss Cybill. It would have been unthinkable for me to challenge the views and vernacular of the older generations. Even though I was enlightened by the climate of civil rights activity, I did nothing. There were black kids in my high school class, unknown to me and my circle of friends. Our connection to black culture was through the music of the times, Jr. Walker and the All-stars spoke to us in a different way from how our parents had related to the Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers, although I hardly examined the societal ramifications of the soulful sounds.
In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. brought his Poor People’s Campaign to Memphis in support of the mostly black striking sanitation workers. Hundreds of men who hauled garbage and dug sewers gathered at a rally to hear him say “It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages,” and strikers wearing sandwich boards that read I AM A MAN were maced and tear-gassed on Main Street. Local news reports portrayed King as an irresponsible agitator who had goaded the rabble to violence. Shops were vandalized, and we heard that the train from Chicago to New Orleans passed through Memphis without stopping. The National Guard was called out in armored tanks that moved through the streets on rubber tracks--my friend Jane and I went driving around to see them rerouting traffic, sending people home. Some of the locals acted as if the turmoil was a huge personal inconvenience, but others treated the presence of armed guards in our midst with a comically misplaced sense of southern hospitality, pressing sandwiches and doughnuts on them. Rubbish in sacks and cartons was piled everywhere, and delicate ladies swooned at the mention of rats. The Mississippi River and the network of open drainage ditches in the city combined to host a sizable rodent population--it was said that a rat could traverse the city more quickly by ditch than a person could by car. And they were big enough to mount and ride. I once went to a “Sunset Symphony” picnic near the river and remarked on a cute little cat wandering near the water. “Not a cat,” I was told.
I was standing with friends on the colonnaded veranda of my high school in the late afternoon of April 4, just weeks before our graduation, when we heard that Dr. King had been shot, and within a few hours, the world way beyond Memphis knew that he was dead. The Lorraine Motel was a few miles away, too far to hear the firecracker blast of the assassin’s bullet or to see Dr. King’s friends trying to scrape his blood from the balcony, but too close for comfort to my family and a large part of the city’s white population. My father made sure his luger was loaded, and Moma called to say that Da-Dee had moved a shotgun down to the front hall.
There was a pall over the city for weeks, a sense of fear and chaos, with stringent early curfews and the intensified presence of militia. High school proms were canceled by municipal decree, as was Cotton Carnival, and I was not displeased to be a princess in absentia. When I passed a black person on the street, I averted my eyes with a searing flash of shame. I felt absolutely responsible for the murder. I knew the expression “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” although I was not to assuage my guilt with action for another twenty years. But after the initial shock, nobody in my little microcosm talked about the shooting. It became unmentionable. Palm Sunday fell three days after Dr. King died, and there were green fronds decorating the white pillars of our church but no sermon from the pastor about healing the wounds of race relations in our community. Commencement exercises proceeded on schedule but I recalled no mention of the assassination.
As a graduation present, my grandparents gave me a trip to Europe: the beginner’s three-week tour with a group of students from the local high schools, through London, Geneva, Madrid, Lisbon. We had to skip Paris because of the student riots against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but that meant extra time in Italy and my first exposure to its masterly painting, sculpture, and architecture. I had inexhaustible energy for museums and basilicas, panoramas and piazzas, never-drying underwear hung on Juliet balconies and dark-haired boys who flirted in charmingly accented English limited to “Hello, beautiful.” And the trip occasioned an epiphany. Looking up into the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I was overwhelmed by the power of those frescoes--the creation of Adam with God’s outstretched hand and the last judgment of Christ--but my eyes drifted to the image of a half-clothed female.
“Excuse me,” I asked the guide, “who’s that big ol’ muscular woman reading a scroll?”
“That is the Delphic Sibyl,” he answered. My name, a name I’d hated and heard mispronounced all my life, was known to Michelangelo (albeit with the spelling tweaked). And why was a pagan symbol on the ceiling of a Christian chapel? Because it was a Sibyl who prophesied the coming of Christ. And there were lots of us. In Roman mythology, the guide informed me, Cybele was a supreme being called the Great Mother of the Gods, rchitec temple in her honor was erected on the site now occupied by the Vatican. The high priestesses known as Sibyls were named for her, and their oracles were so respected that they guided imperial policy for Roman emperors.
I know how pretentious and melodramatic this sounds, but something in me clicked at that moment in that place of such beauty and grandeur. I’d never been exposed to fine art-hell, the closest I’d gotten to classical music was 101 Strings of Mantovani. It was as if the world had been in black and white, and suddenly there was a new palette. There seemed to be a personal message in the chapel for me: the existence of a female deity before the time of Christ symbolized the limitless power and potential achievement of women. If God is a man, then woman is not created in his image, limited by a celestial glass ceiling. But if the holiest of holies is female, then women can do anything. I have a droll friend who says she doesn’t believe in God, only in signs from God. I believe in both, and the Sibyls were a little calling card from the divine. The visual stimulus of great art was sensuous and powerful, and it made me long to do something creative. Modeling was not what I had in mind.
MODELING GOES BACK A LONG WAY IN OUR FAMILY:
when my grandfather was a toddler, he wore a wide-brimmed hat and pulled a red toy wagon in a turn-of-the-century advertisement for Shapleigh’s Hardware. My first paying job, in my junior year of high school, was for Coppertone, made by the Memphis-based Plough Corporation. (A dump truck backed up to a photography studio fitted with fake palm trees and poured in a load of white sand.) It must have been a slow news day when Ken Ross, a staff photographer for the local paper, asked me to pose, without pay, for a few seasonal photos in which I scared some Halloween goblins. He was a scout for the Model of the Year pageant, the brainstorm of a man named Stewart Cowley who owned a modeling agency in New York City, and Ken put my name on a list of suggested entries. When Stewart called, my parents thought I was too young to consider leaving home but decided it was only polite to meet Cowley at the Peabody Hotel when he came to look over the local pulchritude. Our appointment coincided with the ritual marching of the ducks through the Peabody lobby: In the 1930s the hotel manager returned from a weekend hunting trip having partaken of a little too much Tennessee sippin’ whiskey and thought it would be fun to put some of his live duck decoys in the lobby’s ornate marble fountain. The enthusiastic response from guests begat a tradition: every morning at eleven, under the care of an exalted bellboy called the duckmaster, a gaggle of English call ducks descend in the elevator from their home on the roof to spend the day splashing in the fountain, and every evening at five they return. It’s one of Memphis’s prime photo ops.
Stewart Cowley had been a theatrical agent before World War II and had a certain flamboyant flair--there were framed photos of two large standard poodles in his suite. I didn’t know that his contest idea was contemptuously referred to as Stewart’s Folly by his New York competitors--my parents simply told him, “Maybe next year.” The first Model of the Year contest drew a huge audience when it was telecast on CBS--so much for Stewart’s Folly, although another man claimed Cowley had stolen the idea, and he spent so much time in litigation that he was known as Suin’ Stew. When he returned to Memphis the following year, I was planning to study art history at Louisiana State and was still disdainful of anything that smacked of a beauty pageant. My mother insisted that I show him the courtesy of turning him down in person, and I went to the hotel in defiant disregard for my appearance, wearing cutoff jeans, with skin tanned mahogany and unwashed hair too blond from the sun. We sipped sweet iced tea, a southern tradition with its overkill of sugar, whileCowley chatted about the rewards awaiting the contest winner: a contract with his agency and $25,000 guaranteed in modeling fees the first year.
I’d rehearsed a smug little speech about having a higher calling to study Italian art. “I’m really not interested in being a model,” I said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Cowley replied. “You have a good chance of winning here in Memphis and going on to New York.” There was a twinkle in his eye as he dealt his trump card. “And you’re a helluva lot closer to Italy in New York than in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”
My father was cutting the grass and my mother was sitting on the front porch in a wrought-iron chair when I returned from the local Model of the Year pageant. There was a huge pile of yellow roses poking out the window on the passenger side of the 1960 Ford Fairlane I’d inherited from my great-grandmother, which required putting your foot flat to the floor every time you accelerated.