Southern Gothic

I first met Southern Gothic in an old copy of Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge, a library cast-off with a broken binding.  I was in my first years of high school - or maybe I was even still in middle school. In those days I binged on books, sat down with them on lonely afternoons and curled up, barely moving until I turned the back cover and stretched cramped limbs.

So I started in on this book I'd chosen for its interesting title and the charm of its deterioration - no deeper planning, no name recognition.  I liked the eponymous story for its biting depiction of race relations, didn't get the title, gave up trying to.  I read the second pulled along by the tension, the same way I read mysteries, skipping chunks of narration for the plot.  And then I hit the third story, "A View of the Woods."  

I had slowed down a bit by now - the book was making me nervous.  I preferred my dystopias to be clearly delineated alternate worlds, not this just-twisted, recognizable planet.  At that age, I might have never heard of southern gothic, and was definitely not prepared for this.  As the grandfather and girl sniped at each I wondered whether there was a point to this interminable fighting, worried a little, wished it would end.  I was enough of an innocent that when the murder finally happened, written so bluntly, so sparingly - "then he brought it down twice more" - I was truly and deeply shocked.  

I closed the book, only three stories in, and fled to the kitchen.

Since then I've grew a little more of a taste for southern gothic - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in the form of another battered secondhand book, stands in the part of my bookshelf reserved for rereading - and I've also grown more careful about what exactly I choose to binge on.  But I never finished that particular O'Connor collection.

And I think sometimes that I'm still just as innocent.  Gathering stories in the South, I did not expect or imagine that real life would imitate fiction, in content or in style.  Southern gothic is just a genre, the grotesque turn a plot element, right?  But family stories every now and again took a twist to the horrific.  The grotesque writ large - "So they hunted him down and hung him in the woods" - or small:

But listen, I’d do anything my daddy told me. 

(My great-uncle Sid is in story-telling mode, an old man with a smoker's cough and a sly look in his eyes.)

I don't care what it was, I believed him. Lemme tell you what I did one time. I wanted a knife so bad. I was a little boy. I’d see these little knives they had about thaaaat long, closed up, little penknife things, and I wanted one so badly but mama was scared of me having one because she thought I’d cut myself. So I never could get one. I tried and tried and tried. Finally I got one, don’t remember how exactly I got it but I got one and boy, I was so happy to have that little knife. And I was just carrying it around and showing it to everybody and talking about that little knife. I was probably about three, four, maybe. 

Daddy came in and I had to show it to him. He said "man, that's a fine knife." He said, "Now, I tell you what you do." He said, "You go out into the edge of the field and plant this knife like that, and it'll come up and make a whole tree full of knives, and you'll just have a whole treefull." Well, see, I knew they planted corn and beans and stuff and it would come up and make all that stuff, so I believed him! 

I went out to the edge of the field and planted a knife. Well the next day I thought about it and I went out to see if a tree came up and I couldn't see a thing. I couldn’t figure out where it was. I couldn’t find my knife. And daddy had got what he wanted all the time, get rid of the knife. But see, I believed him. 

He told me one time when I caught a crow, I caught a crow one time, and I was going to make a pet out of it. And I bought it home and I told him, see, I’m going to make a pet out of this crow. He said, "Aw, you can't make no pet out of that crow." I said "Mmm, yeah I am, I’m gonna pet it, pet it." And he said, "well, if you wanna make him talk, you take a knife and split his tongue. And he'll talk."  I said," Ohhh, that's a good idea."  

So I got my knife and split his tongue. The next morning he was dead.  

That's what daddy wanted all the time. Again he got me. He'd get me all the time.

(Uncle Sidney laughs.  And because every gothic tale needs an innocent, I sit at his kitchen table, swallowing hard, eyes wide, trying to chuckle.)

Tony Regan's Locks

Part One  Part Two  Part Three

After Bill Regan died, Tony Regan kept on living in that old house, all by himself, and he never married.  They said all of the first batch of Regans, the children of William B. and Julia, were a little peculiar, on account of Bill and Julia being cousins.  Tony Regan was the most peculiar of the lot.  He hummed, tunelessly and loud, as he walked around the perimeter of his property, compulsively weeding his fences.  Tony hummed so loud that the black folks who lived across the street were straight scared of him, wondering what on earth was wrong with a man who would make so much noise.  Though he was a friendly man who would talk to anybody for an hour, he lived a little bit like a hermit - tucked away inside his father's old house, not so good about bathing or cleaning, rarely venturing off his own property.  Chief among his peculiarities was Uncle Tony's obsession with locks.  He put locks on everything - on all the doors to his house, on the door to his smokehouse, on the gates on all his fences - and he would never just lock them once.  After he locked a gate or a door, he would walk about twenty feet, then turn around and just look at that lock.  And then he'd go back, and unlock it and lock it again, and then he'd stand there and pat that lock - just like you'd pat a pet.  And if you asked, he'd say he was making sure he was safe, and nobody would come and steal him and Granddaddy Regan's money again.  That money was safe for sure now.

But if there was any of that money left, nobody ever saw it.  Tony sure never spent it on anything, wearing his clothes out until they were rags.  Most folks though Tony had gone out of his mind, and was guarding money that was lost forever years ago.  If there were a few whispers that Old Man Regan had a second stash of cash - one he never told a soul about for fear it would be stolen, too - and that Tony wasn't quite as crazy as he looked, and was guarding that last little scrap of the Regans' "dead money" - well, most people just dismissed that as the nonsense it was.  That money was as gone as Old Man Bill.

What about the rest of the family? In the last years of his life, Bill Regan finally let his children own the 180 acres they had each been farming for him.   Most of the fourteen Regans kept living on their land, borrowing money to plant it with crops and hoping to earn enough at harvest to pay back their debts, and maybe keep a few hundred dollars on a good year.  A couple of children moved into town and made a slightly better living buying and selling cattle... with weighted scales, to earn a little extra bit of profit.  They were prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years.  They were landowners but never plantation-owners, often poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but not rich like their father was.  Those children's children, Bill's grandchildren, bought up enough farmland for 20th-century farming businesses, or went to school, or joined the military, or found themselves city jobs.  Today most of them have children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

One of those children lives today in his great-grandfather's house, old William B.'s, the one Tony guarded for so many years.  Old Tony never had any children, and passed his property to a nephew, and it kept being passed down son to son.  The old house looks a little different now, surrounded by modern detritus, but if you squint real close you can see the ancient wood barely holding up the porch roof.  The Regan there today is a bit of a recluse, and heavy on the drink, so he doesn't get many visitors.  The angry german shepherds in his yard are as good as any lock at keeping strangers and would-be cattle buyers off the property.

The Regan fortune's gone, of course, that's for sure.  But if it wasn't gone... If any cash was still around, it'd be locked up inside that junked old house, inaccessible to the world, rotting away in a secret compartment somewhere.  It wouldn't be doing anybody any good.  And since everyone knows the money must be gone, no jealous neighbors would ever think of whispering to thieves in the night.

No, the money isn't there.  But if it were, it would be utterly useless, and forever safe.  Just how Bill Regan, my great-great-grandfather, would have liked.

The Night That Broke Bill Regan's Heart

Part One  Part Two

In the dead of winter, when the Georgia air was biting cold and the ground was dusted with snow, a car drove up to Bill Regan's place.  They arrived soon after nightfall, when the little house was surrounded by darkness and empty woods.  Uncle Bill sent his son Tony to answer the door, and Tony - about thirty years old by then - pulled it open to face three men he'd never seen before.  These men smiled at the two Regans. b "We're looking to buy some cattle," said one.  "At a real generous price," added another.  Old Man Regan saw dollar bills dancing as soon as he heard those words, and he invited them into his house to talk business.

They sat by the fireplace, built up real high for some warmth on that cold night, and the men sat for a while chatting about cattle. They started to barter, real friendly-like.  And the three strangers tried not to stare at the safe, sitting plain as could be in the corner of that big square room.  They talked and talked until Bill Regan looked right at ease, and then one of the men said, "Could I fetch a cup of water, do you think?"  Bill Regan pointed at the door, towards the pump outside, nothing but profit on his mind.  He didn't watch as the man walked past the pump and straight to the trunk of his car.  When that stranger came back in, he carried a gun in his hand.

The friendly smiles on the three men's faces had flown away, replaced by hard stares and cruel grins.  The men pinned down Tony, hog-tied him, and threw him on a bed, then turned to Bill, elderly and weak, and told him, "Old man, you're going to open that safe."

But William loved his money too much to hand it over, even with a gun in his face.  "I can't remember the combination," he lied.  Tony lay on the bed, tied up and helpless.  "I just can't remember it."

The men looked at each other, as calm as could be.  Then they looked at the iron beside the fire, waiting to help press some shirts, because Bill Regan was a neat and well-dressed man.  They placed that iron right on the coals of that big, hot fire.

"Well," the men told Bill.  "We'll just have to make you remember."  And they pulled off his shoes, and waited until that iron got hot.  Old Bill saw the iron glowing bright red, saw the looks on these men's faces, and by firelight he could just make out the terror in the eyes of his son Tony, but he didn't give in.  "I don't remember," he said, while Tony tried to shout around the rope in his mouth.  "I just don't."  So the men shrugged, and they sat on William's small frame to pin him down.  They waited another long second, to see if the old man would come to his senses, and then they pressed that iron firm against the soles of William's feet.  The crackling of the fire was drowned out by Bill Regan's screams, but outside the house, the empty woods and cold winter night swallowed up the sounds.  Soon the pain grew stronger than Bill's love of money.  "I remember," Bill Regan gasped.  "I remember, for the love of mercy, I'll open it!"  Was the agony in his voice from the pain in his feet, or from the thought of saying goodbye to those beautiful stacks of bills?

On his hands and knees, sobbing, pathetic, old Bill crawled to his safe and slowly dialed in the combination.  But despite his pain and his fear, Bill was still thinking of his money.  When he opened the door, h grabbed one bag of cash and tried to hide it underneath the safe.   But the men saw, and they grabbed a stick and beat old Bill for trying to cheat them like that.  Then they hog-tied Bill Regan and threw him on the bed next to Tony, and carried all the bags of money out into their car.  Laughing, they drove away to the north.

It took hours before Tony wriggled out of the ropes tying him down, and then he ran as fast as he could to the closest farm, banging on the door and hollering for help.  They went to town and roused the sheriff, and the very next day the sheriff started asking around about the strangers.  It was more than two years before they found them, scattered across the country from Chicago to New York, and they never did find a penny of the money.  They brought the men back to Early County to prosecute them, and they stood before an even older Bill, whose feet had healed but whose pride never had.  "I'm sure you had a real good time with all my money," Bill snarled.

"Nah," said the men, cruelly.  "It wasn't that much."

When they went to prosecute those men, the court didn't give them hardly any time in jail, because people said the money they stole hardly counted as money - "Dead money," they called it, like they always had.  "Dead money.  The old man wasn't using it anyway - it was barely a crime."

After the robbery, William Brown Regan wasted away until he died.  He never was the same again - he didn't care about a thing.  Folks said he died of grief over losing that money, which he'd loved so much more than he should have.  And while Bill Regan may have had fourteen children, it didn't do him much good when he was dying.  See, he'd had more children than he had love and kindness for them; he was as stingy with his heart as he was with his money. And when William lost his fortune and grew old, and weak, and needed to be cared for like a baby, his children remembered what a tight-fisted and unloving father he had been.  All that land, and he wouldn't pass it down properly to his grown children - he made them work it for halves, like sharecroppers.  No, they didn't look at him with kindness - not even Tony.  Only one of all his fourteen children would agree to take him in - and that was his son John Howard, the same son Bill had turned away when John Howard came begging for a little syrup for his starving children.

John Howard was a generous as Bill was stingy, and he shared his food with anybody, family or stranger, who was hungry, and he opened his home to the old and infirm when nobody else would take them in.  In the final years of his life, Bill Regan, the proud man who wouldn't give a penny to anybody, found himself flat broke, depending on another man's generosity to keep him alive.  And that's what we call irony.

How Bill Regan Made (and Lost) a Fortune

Part One

William B. Regan was born in 1855 in a log cabin, one of Robinson Regan and Elizabeth Brown's many grandchildren. From his parents he inherited fifty acres of land and an almost unbearably stubborn nature, and from this inheritance little Bill Regan built an empire.

First he gained even more acres of family territory by marrying his cousin, Julia Regan.  They had nine children, all slim and small and stubborn, marked by a double dose of Regan genes - and then Julia died.  So since his cousin had worked out the first time, Bill went ahead and married his dead wife's younger sister, but soon she died, too.  Those days women's work was hard, and childbirth was harder, and women often died young.  So Bill married a third wife, a 17-year-old girl - unrelated - who bore him five more children.  While his wives were birthing and raising that small army of Regans, Bill was very, very busy.

Over eighty years, Bill Regan turned those first fifty acres into well over two thousand acres of Georgia farmland and forest.  Like his grandfather, he knew how to handle a herd, and he had sheep and cattle grazing all across the county.  Every year when the local farmers got together to round up those free-roaming animals, read their markings, and divide them up, he'd sell mountains of sheep's wool and fine beef, awakening envy in his neighbors.  He cut down some of the forest on his land and turned it into farmland, where he grew corn, cotton, and sugarcane.  Other acres he kept as valuable virgin timber, and in these woods he hid a still and turned out gallons of whiskey.  He had barns full of meat, cane syrup, moonshine, and hay, and pretty soon he had a serious fortune saved up in the bank in town.

Little Bill Regan truly was a little man, short and slight, even by Regan standards. But he was a proud man, and when he rode on his horse with his back ramrod-straight, he looked as tall as he seemed to feel.  He was a smart man, for all he'd had no education, and a determined and hard-working man.  But Bill Regan had a problem.  Some men have a drinking problem, some men have a womanizing problem, some men have a gambling problem, but Bill Regan didn't have any of these - he had a money problem.  See, he loved money too damn much.  He loved money more than he loved his wives, more than he loved his children.  He may have loved money even more than he loved his prize horse. He almost loved money more than he loved his life.

In 1929, Bill Regan had $35,000 saved up in the banks, and when the banks started to crash, he pulled that money out and stored it all in a giant safe in the corner of his house.  By then he was an old man, living alone with his grown son, Tony.  And at that time, during the Depression, when folks were desperate for money and there were no jobs to be had, land - good farmland, good timberland - could sell for fifty cents an acre.  If Bill Regan had only spent his money, his children would have grown up to live like kings.  They could have lived like the old plantation owners, like the men who ran the sawmills; they could have entered the legislature.

But Bill Regan wouldn't spend his money for anything.  He wouldn't spend it on his house, wouldn't spend it on his clothes, wouldn't spend it on a car, and certainly not on helping anybody else.  By the time he was an old man, he wouldn't even spend money on land anymore.  He was so tight with his money that when the winter grew hard and one of his sons came asking for a little bit of syrup, for his hungry children - William's grandchildren - William said no.  He had hundreds of gallons of cane syrup stored away, but he would not unlock that barn.  He was a tight man, a stingy man. And everybody knew it.   Everybody knew that William Regan's money rotted away in his safes, that it grew stale and never circulated, that he never shared it when others were in need.

One day in 1930 some strangers came in to town, and started talking to some of Bill Regan's neighbors, and pretty soon they heard that the old man had land and cattle and sheep and was tight-fisted with the money he earned off them.  And his neighbors whispered that the money was "dead money," that "Uncle Bill" never used it for a damn thing, and it was a damn shame he kept it stuck up in that safe, and these strangers pricked their ears up at that.

"What safe?"

And one neighbor, whom Bill had always counted as a friend, narrowed his eyes.  He thought of all of William's wealth, his beautiful horse, his endless acres; thought how if he'd had that wealth, he'd have treated a neighbor with generosity.  And his eyes turned an ill shade of green.  He looked at these strangers, who were all but licking their lips, and he said, "That safe he keeps in his house.  That house, right up the road."

And the men decided to pay old Uncle Bill a visit...

Part Two

How the Regans Came to America

"So... what are you actually DOING?"


Well, here's an example.  In 4 parts, here is the central story of the Regan family's collective memory - the one that pops up most often and is remembered most vividly.  The first part of the story comes from records and family legend, the last from living memory and observation - the middle two from an ambiguous blur of memory and second- or third-hand tales.  Sometimes different storytellers contradicted each other, or explained they were fuzzy on details.  And then I added a bit... I think this all happened.  But I wouldn't call it nonfiction, or history.  Call it what it is: a story.



How the Regans Came to America

Once upon a time there was a man named Richard Regan, who lived in the green hills of Ireland, and decided it was time to cross the ocean and start his life anew.  He moved to the new colonies in America to settle down on a patch of land he could call his own, in the area they called North Carolina, arriving to the New World just in time to take up arms and fight in the Revolutionary War.   Soon after the war was over, just as the Constitution was being written up by important men a little farther north, Richard and his wife, Catherine, had a son, Robinson, and a daughter, Olive.

Fourteen years after Robinson was born, Richard packed the family up to move to Georgia, where new lands had just been carved out from the Seminole Indians and split up into lots of red-clay soil and acres of virgin timber.  He'd brought from Ireland the inherited knowledge of a long tradition of sheepherding, and started building up a herd of free-roaming sheep, grazing beneath the pine trees.  His wool production, plus the food he and Catherine raised on their small patch of land, was enough to support their small family.  Of course, every now and again they had to run into the swamps to hide from the last remaining Seminoles, who rode around seeking vengeance for the theft of all their lands, but hey, that was a typical occupational hazard.

Robinson Regan grew up into a man in Georgia, and met a young woman about his age, by the name of Elizabeth Brown.  She was the daughter of Jesse Brown, who had moved from England and who, like Robinson's father, had fought in the Revolutionary War.  Jesse Brown and his wife, Delilah, were a prosperous couple, and when Jesse died he owned land, cattle, a house, and several slaves.  Jesse had done well for himself in his new life, and his children's children would later be prominent landowners and businessmen; the Regans owned half of Early and Miller counties, and the Mosely name can still be found across southern Georgia on storefronts and doctor's offices.  But while the Brown sisters, as much as Mr. Mosely and Mr. Regan, helped found these twin dynasties, and while Jesse Brown's wealth may well have been the kernel of these countless fortunes, the Brown name was lost to family history - save for some Mosely and Regan boys named "Brown," out of a family tradition whose origins nobody remembers.  Such is the misfortune of having daughters.

Jesse Brown left a third of his cattle herd to his daughter, and another third to his son-in-law, but although Robinson Regan had married well and inherited much, his family was not rich.  Maybe he just had too many children.  While their parents each had only two, Robinson and Elizabeth had ten children, and that's ten children that survived into adulthood, mind you. When theiur land and money was divided up - in true Irish tradition, split up among all the children, instead of just passed to the oldest son - there wasn't quite enough to go around.  So the Regan children carried on as subsistence farmers - prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years.  They were landowners but never plantation-founders, usually poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but never rich.

Never rich, that is, until William Brown Regan came along.

Part Two