Crossroads

Thirty-five or so years ago my husband, Michael, and I started thinking about moving to California. Or rather, he started thinking, and I started worrying. I didn’t know if I’d be able to write out there. I wondered and worried pretty much nonstop until I was able to ask Eudora Welty what she thought about it.

Whenever I was in Jackson, Mississippi, the owner of the Lemuria bookstore would drive me to her house along with a bottle of bourbon and a large bag of M&Ms. I knew whatever she told me would be remarkable and right, and it was. I was sitting on the living room sofa. She was in her chair in the corner. We chatted for a minute, and then I told her that Michael and I were thinking about moving. If I left North Carolina and lived somewhere else, like California, I asked her, would I still be a Southern writer?

She leaned forward and said, “If your cat has her kittens in the oven, would you call them muffins?”

I always tried to sound intelligent around her, but I said, “Huh?”

She said it again, slowly, “If your cat has her kittens in the oven, would you call them muffins? Think about it.”

And I did, a great deal, after I got over the stroke it caused.

What she meant, I decided, was that I carry the will and the desire and the need to write inside of me, within. Whatever circumstances or external factors happened to be outside and around me, things without, didn’t matter as much. It sounded to me pretty much like I could move to New Jersey or Alaska or Antarctica and still be a Southern writer. So after some planning and preparation, we packed up and left. I remember when the move was because I was writing Charms for the Easy Life and had to ship boxes of notes and things like Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters records and tapes of old radio shows that I was scared would get lost or damaged in transit.

We’d bought a house without seeing it in person, and so I had no idea what the neighborhood was like until we got there. It was in Marin County, north of San Francisco, in the San Geronimo Valley. The neighborhood, turns out, was just us. You got to the house by driving through a mile of massive redwoods, like the ones in The Petrified Forest, the Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis movie. I remember standing in the front yard of this house that was also made of redwood — dark, with heavy doors with black iron trim — and telling the Realtor that this was all a little scary. Maybe we’d made a mistake. Thinking, I suppose, that it’d impress us, she told us that the actor Klaus Kinski, of Nosferatu the Vampyre, lived a couple of miles away.

There were no flat green lawns with white painted houses or sandy hills like those you drive through on the way from Raleigh to Pinehurst. There was no flat white sandy beach or gentle waters and tidepools for our girls to play in. The nearest shoreline was all rugged cliffs and crashing waves. There wasn’t a Harris Teeter, no Crabtree or Kmart. In Raleigh, when Michael used to get home from work, I’d often run up to Crabtree and walk around Sears to change gears and relax. I’d stop at the candy counters on the way out. Then I’d go home and cook supper. After everything was done, and the girls were in bed, I’d sit on the couch with Michael and read what I’d written that day. Out there, we grocery-shopped at places I felt like I had to change clothes to go to. I remember not knowing how to clean the house with the redwood floor-to-ceiling everywhere without Clorox Clean-Up and Windex. I couldn’t tell if the floor was clean by looking at it.

Maybe I was lazy and didn’t try hard enough to thrive outside the South, but I just didn’t like it there. I was like a plant that’s set in the wrong window and keeps bending toward the sun. I didn’t adjust to my new surroundings or to anything without. Within was unchanged and wanted to go home. I don’t remember exactly how long I was there, but it was probably no more than five, maybe six months. It certainly wasn’t long enough to be able to test Miss Welty’s cat-in-the-oven theory. I didn’t write a word in the redwoods.

The South Miss Welty was referencing when she spoke to me that day lives, for the most part, in my memory, and thank God for it. The Raleigh I live and write in today has moved on past the days when you wouldn’t have been shocked to hear a story about so-and-so’s backwoods country cousin whose cat had her kittens in the oven. Writing about my childhood, growing up in Nash County, I’ve had the privilege to be able to bring back to life a family who lived down the road from me. They lived in a lopsided shotgun house on the Tar River, perilously close to the water. They had a lot of ringwormy-looking children. They’d boarded up the house and were mainly living in the yard. A girl on the bus told me that they’d broken all the plates and were eating off records. A boy, she said, had been seen eating cornbread off a 45.

They also had heating and storage issues, of course, and often left the oven door open. I didn’t hear that a cat had had her kittens in it, but I did hear that some squirrels or opossums or something like that were living in it. I love that there was a possibility of kittens being born in an oven, and that the oven was Southern, like the interior place where my memories are kept, safe with my need and desire to write.  PS

Kaye Gibbons is a novelist and a member of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. She’s currently working on a memoir.