This is the story of how I, a
nice girl raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and educated at fine,
Northeastern liberal institutions came to feel utterly and completely at home
in the rural south. The woman who catalyzed this transformation of allegiance
for me was Leona Fennell, so it is also the tale of Leona.
In 1991 I had just finished
my Masters in Art Ed at Tufts, and there was a scarcity of teaching jobs in New
England. Possessed with a spirit of adventure one June Sunday, I purchased a
bunch of newspapers and sent out a flurry of resumes. There was no response to
my inquiries until August, when I got a phone call from Eleanor Adams,
principal, Colleton Elementary, in Walterboro, South Carolina. School was
starting the very next day, and they needed an art teacher.
“Are you white?” she asked
me. “I can hear from your voice that you are white”.
Although Mrs Adams was ready
to hire me on the basis of just my stellar resume and a phone conversation, I
wanted to visit the school and the town BEFORE signing a year-long teaching
contract.
I flew down to visit the
small town in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Driving out to Walterboro from the
Charleston airport was a soft and stunning experience, massive pines, dark,
swampy dips, soft and pungent air.
Mrs. Adams put me up for the
weekend with her Aunt Leona; and that was all it really took for me to agree to
sign the teaching contract.
Leona is a retired beautician
and closet interior decorator. Thus her large brick ranch is immaculately
composed circa 1977 and meticulously kept. It’s all velour wallpaper and color
coordination. There is a blue parlor for entertaining- plush carpet, dark wood,
mirrors and a blue living room set. The kitchen is pink and green with frilly
lamp shades and crocheted doilies for the bible stands. The screened in side
porch is lavender. Naturally there’s a beauty alcove complete with helmet hair
dryers.
“Call me Ma, you home now
baby.” Leona said this every day, and then proceeded to give a litany of
instruction and advice with her very particular blend of accent, inflection,
and speech impediment.
(She told me she had a “tie
tongue” which I had never heard of, but I guess that this condition makes for
some kind of speech impediment. To me, this just made Leona’s utterances more
charming and endearing. There was another young woman teacher also living with
us who was from a town about two hours away. Her name is Denise, but Leona
couldn’t quite say it correctly, just as she can’t say my name correctly. We
are Jenise and Tea-er. Denise was not ever in Leona’s favor. She was pretty but
fat, and this and some of her habits and affects mage her seem slovenly. Leona
still asks me what her name is every time I see her.
THESE ARE SOME OF THE
LEONAISMS
*Take off your shoes as to
not dirty the carpet.
*Answer with YES MA’AM.
*After wearing any item of
clothing outside of the house, wash it. This prevents the acquisition of
cockroaches.
*It is good for your teeth to
eat sticky or hard candy if you keep it in your mouth while it dissolves.
As she had such a passion for
clean clothes (and cleanliness in general), Leona would circle ads for washer/
dryers in THE SHOPPER every week for me.
In the evenings, Leona would
drive me slowly around Walterboro in her white Cutlass Supreme, narrating the
town. There’s the funeral parlor where Larry works, there’s the Baptist church,
there’s the Methodist Church, that there’s the Jew Church.
She introduced me to all of
her friends while holding court on the lavender side porch. After her mortician
friend visited (“you know I work on dead people”) she said, “You know, Larry is
a HE-SHE…”.
While an earlier version of
myself might have been horrified by these descriptions that Leona belted out so
regularly, I was able to appreciate her honesty and warmth and the complexity
of her being.
I found my own place to live
in Walterboro and managed to maintain my relationship with Leona. Whenever I
visited she’d always reassure me that I was home. Eventually I moved back to
New England after having kids. It was a difficult decision, but my husband and
I felt that it’d be easier to be closer to family; also we were happy to leave
behind giant cockroaches, fire ants, mold, ample sweating, and poor schools.
A few years ago I brought my
2 lovely daughters to the south for a visit. Our first stop was Leona’s. She
set us up in the guest bedrooms with their high metal beds and frilly bed
skirts. She luxuriated in the act of brushing and fashioning the girls’ long,
beautiful hair. After lavishing them with TV, candy, and sweet tea, she said,
“relax girls, you home now.”
