“Time is the longest distance between two places.” — Tennessee Williams

ROBERT BEERS

My long-time Miami friend Jeanne Roberts Eklund and I ruminate back and forth across the sea sharing similar insights, and mostly laughs, about the oddities of humankind be they British, Americans or others.

Her latest:  “I always say Northerners have as many nuts ones as we Southerners…but they lock theirs in the attic while we rejoice in ours and put them on display. Tennessee Williams was a journalist, not a novelist…he reported on typical family members.”

Instantly I related and thought of my Blanche Debois mother and Colquitt.  Mom was essentially a delightful fantasist,  a 100% Southerner who carefully cultivated her pronounced drawl, maintained her Deep South airs and graces whilst living most of her life north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Colquitt was her family’s hometown, in Southwestern Georgia, as well as in another solar system and a former century.  I had been to Colquitt as a child and in my college years went on Thanksgivings to visit my Aunt Grace and Sis Charlie.  Now Charlie (they were expecting a boy and, what the heck,  already had the name selected) never married but was a sister to Grace and my late grandmother Kate, so for reasons that defy logic outside of the Confederacy, she was nicknamed ‘Sis.’

My own youth was spent largely in the Midwest and around Cape Kennedy, both quiet Middle American. So Colquitt forever fascinated.

As you drove into town a road sign read:  ‘Pull for Colquitt or pull out’ and they meant it. The local newspaper was inexplicably named The Miller County Liberal and gave my brothers and me great reading material and laughs for months after every visit. The ads where the best part and still are.

Miller County Liberal ad from March 30, 2010

In 1968 Tennessee Williams arrived at Florida State University to visit its rather accomplished English Department. Not one to be confined in a lecture theater, he had a large, fanned wicker chair brought out to leafy Landis Green supposedly to give a bit of a talk and to answer students’ questions.

Unfortunately, while I was not too far away from the master playwright, I could not understand a word he said. I heard only mumbles and throat-clearing. Tennessee natty in his three-piece white suit, smoking from an ivory cigarette holder, flashing that broad Mississippi smile was blotto, pie-eyed, drunk.

A week later the news came that Aunt Grace died. The ensuing few days were the Glass Menagerie meets Suddenly Last Summer. My uncle, William Calhoun Baggs, called to tell me the news saying that he was flying up from Miami straightaway and we would drive from Tallahassee to Colquitt.

This was the only good news. Baggs was my mentor and hero, editor of the actually liberal Miami News, close friend of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and a journalist of the ilk I wanted to become.

‘Uncle Calhoun’ arrived and we set off up US 27, a straight shot, one hour drive north to Colquitt.

“A newspaper editor and a university student, the first human beings in recorded history to ever get lost coming from Tallahassee to Colquitt,” Sis Charlie said in her best stern schoolmarm tone tapping her left foot in its sensible oxford laced shoe on the grey wooden veranda.

“Guilty. I was driving; we were talking, ended up in Dothan, Alabama,” I said.

Sis Charlie was a lifelong high school English teacher, the family realist and sweet of heart. It was hugs all around as we went into the house and for the first time in my experience I saw a few tears on my rugged aunt’s cheek.

The house was pre-Civil War with 20-foot high ceilings, had little lighting and was scented by the sweet fragrance of the talcum powder they wore in the searing heat.

We talked of Aunt Grace. She was the frailest flower in the bunch and always had some ailment, usually ill-defined with the primary symptom being ‘a case of the (mysterious) vapors.’ In the end her heart was weak, as she had always maintained, and it stopped in the night.

My two aunts were Methodists and went to church every Sunday and they fervently believed, not necessarily in their religion, but that being Methodist was greatly superior to the only other choice in town, being a Baptist. The Methodists were upper-class and the Baptists quite something else, as we had been told many times, in the lore of Colquitt.

Soon the rest of the cast arrived. Alice Jane was Grace’s only child and her husband was Mickey Middleton. Alice Jane, like her mother, was the mistress of smooth Southern sarcasm and Mickey, a controversial choice to marry being a Baptist, had the patience of Gandhi and piercing insights into his wife’s family.

After medical school Mickey became a GP for a few years, then considering various friends and family as well as Southwest Georgia in general, he went back to med school and became a psychiatrist practicing in Thomasville, Georgia.

Next came Aunt Essie and Felix, Junior. Aunt Essie resembled the kindly grandmother who looked after Tweedy Bird.

A few years back the entire disparate clan had assembled for a family reunion one Thanksgiving in her home in Gainesville, Florida. Essie was the hostess, of course, and therefore insisted on doing all the driving around town. However, Essie could hardly see a thing, wore eyeglasses with lenses a half-inch thick and drove with her nose nearly touching the windshield.

“Essie, just want to know when did the State of Florida pass this law that allows blind people to drive?” Aunt Grace asked as we yet again almost hit a palm tree and slid through a stop sign.

Grace had her own rules regarding cars. Once stopped for going the wrong way on a one-way street she told the police office, “But I am only going one way.”

On another occasion she was stopped for having out-of-date license plates. Not missing a beat and with some outrage Grace said she certainly did have new plates and if the officer would kindly come over to her house they are waiting for him on the mantle and he would no doubt know, unlike Grace, how to install them.

The star of the funeral was Felix, Junior. Far from the rest of the family’s fondest for 1960s preppy attire, FJ dressed as if he was a permanent resident of the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach:  Bright blazers, equally colorful trousers and woven two-toned leather loafers.

He owned a hair dressing shop in Gainesville, sported brown hair dyed bright blonde and was above all else prone to hysterics.

So soon after he arrived there was a prolonged attack of tears which led to Felix face down and pounding his fists on the floor and then curled up in a ball howling: “Why did it have to be her, why not me? I am ready God, take me, take now!”

He hadn’t even called her in five years,” Sis Charlie sniffed.

Uncle Calhoun and my cousin Dr. Mickey decided it was high time for a drive and invited me to escape with them. Grace and Charlie were teetotalers and Miller County was a dry county so we were heading to a bootlegger.

It was soon after the Untouchables had been a top TV show and I was expecting a hidden building with a little sliding opening so they could see who was at the door. Instead, outside of town we pulled into the driveway of a large, grand ranch house. Mickey went to the door, rang the bell and he and a gentlemen from inside the house emerged and motioned for us to come with them to the garage.  The garage door lifted up electronically and revealed a warehouse of bonded booze.

“Better get a case, Calhoun suggested, Mickey agreed and we headed back to the house with 12 bottles of blended Scotch.

Now while the two ladies never drank in this house we would be allowed to and Mickey had long ago made sure Charlie and Grace could, too. When Grace was having trouble sleeping he put Creme de Menthe in medicinal looking bottles and told them both to have a small glassful every night.  Both often remarked how their medicine did, in fact, really help with insomnia.

None the less, quite a few drinks did not settle Felix Junior down and while the theme of his moaning sonatas changed from time to time, the volume did not.

So, eventually with pleading from neighbors added to those inside the house, Mickey went to his medicine bag and produced a syringe full of sedative.  FJ took the shot gladly.

“I don’t understand, I gave him enough to down a rhino and he is still standing,” said Mickey a couple of hours later.

I found Uncle Calhoun  in a back bedroom. It was his room in high school. My grandparents, his parents, both died very young and he was orphaned at 13 and Aunt Grace and her husband took him in and he went to Colquitt High School.

I could tell Grace’s death was beginning to hit him. We talked and he told me of his journeys to the local library and reading Shakespeare, Clements and Dickens in this room. He spoke of their many kindnesses and how Alice Jane as well as my mom was like his sister.

Adjacent to the bedroom was a large bathroom that had obviously been added to the house after indoor plumbing came into being. In the center of the room was a very large bathtub.

“That’s the tub,” he said.

I did not understand.  Calhoun explained that Bill Dancer, Grace’s husband who died when I was a baby, used it as his summer office. And it turned out, and Tennessee would have liked this touch, that he conducted business in the hottest months sitting in the tub ‘buck naked’. He sold lumber and clients would pull up a chair and they would make deals, all others clothed and Bill Dancer without a stitch on.

“And, this was not considered unusual?” I asked, really astonished.

“Not here, not then.”

And as Jeanne wrote there was no hiding of or from any of it; we just over a long funereal weekend rejoiced in all that was there and always had been on full display.

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