This was the original opening for “Small Games Of Chance”. I took it off when the novel evolved into a different creature and this no longer suited its ethos. But as with anything we work long and hard to create I felt sad to lose it. So here I share it. This is a stand alone piece now. I think the passage gives background to what drove the writing of the novel in the first place.
Brief Encounter With The Biographer
Myth and magic are part of how I see my unknown grandmother. At death she left a very old voodoo mojo bag to my father. This connects me to her directly because in turn at his death he left the amulet to me with instructions to always wear it. I do so now. How does it feel against the bare skin of my chest? The small bag is warm and strangely comforting. I would never willingly take it off. It seems to gently pulse as if grandmother holds me close to her heart.
In writing my grandmother’s biography I tell one day in her life. I chose Annunciation Sunday for the day, an important Christian myth day when a wondrous virgin heard she would conceive and bear the child of a God. I chose a Virgin Day because one of the few things known about grandmother is that she was raised by French nuns on the prairie of Indian territory. The year came automatically, 1928, the last before the hard winds of the Great Depression blew this family asunder and away.
Otherwise, my father’s mother hovers faceless, shapeless, and without history. When a child my curiosity about her became intense. No longer living yet very much with my father, grandmother it seemed reigned over the ages. I would ask about her. Nothing of significance came in reply. Did he keep his mother away out of shame or dislike? Was he protecting himself, or her?
She was a veiled presence as well at my father’s family gatherings, of his five brothers and one sister, while their father, also dead, came to life in their conversation. We did not live in the American South nevertheless these were southern people in exile prone to much telling of stories from their shared heritage. Rarely the word ‘maman,’ the French name they curiously used for her, arose among them. But then she came forth in a way I thought could be dread.
I knew my father’s people were from Alabama, of the blighted Wiregrass Region, a whisper away from the Gulf, from a family poor and proud, intelligent and well mannered. What made them all like that? Odd too I heard them occasionally speak some French to one another, rough and uncertain. Where they then speaking of her?
This grandmother unlike other women in my family could not be buried. Early on I understood that whatever, whoever, she was formidable and unorthodox. My father’s family died off one by one and left no memories of her, of ‘Maman.’ The absence where I thought she ought to have been became like rippling heat over our western roads that never went anywhere.
In childhood I began creating her for myself, a woman who raised such giants of my earth. Her life came to my mind in pieces.
Gustave Courbet the French painter created a work he titled “l’Origine du Monde.” This painting hangs in the Musee Quai d’Orsay in Paris. It is a realistic study of a nude woman’s torso. The view is from between her legs with the curves of buttocks rising in foreground to a carefully rendered vulva at center. Above this is a venus mound dense in pubic hair and then a soft lovely tummy that seems anticipating caresses or ready to rise with child.
Finally at top are the breasts, one covered, the other bare with an aroused pink nipple. The naked breast is in equal parts sexual and for suckling. Its nipple caps the work at center. This nipple is the one point of vivid color, small and far off like an Italian hill top town in a Renaissance painting
Courbet’s painting captures the eros of woman, beyond doubt, especially I expect to pubescent boys. But to others, many, it is surely painted from the viewpoint of a lover, while some, perhaps, see it at core as an adoration of the source of human desire and life, the vagina and womb. This painting then becomes a landscape of our conscious and subconscious selves—sexual, reproductive mythical and imaginative.
Courbet painted his masterpiece purposefully without head or face. What face could go with such a body? Seeing it for the first time brought my grandmother fully to mind, so well known and yet anonymous. It set me directly to writing about her. My image is her, I think. Except, also, it is not.
Yet again she might well have been what I see. Who is to tell when so little is known?
The mythic illuminates her story, the blur to the ends of reality that I can not fathom.
While writing I have felt my fingers guided at the keyboard by a sure, soft touch, a Gulf Water
Breeze, making the words I see on my screen about her show mysterious, vague yet emotive. I’ve come to intuit why her children, in awe and from a painful love, so rarely spoke her name, ‘May.’