Susanna J. Sturgis: Writer • Editor • Martha's Vineyard

This completes the grandparental triptych from To Be Rather Than to Seem. Yes, I had four grandparents -- five if you include Grandma's second husband, Dave Little -- but the fourth, George Sturgis, was remarkable only for his absence, not only as a person (he died seven years before I was born) but as a memory.

A Confederate flag hung in Grandmummie's dining room. The longer I went between visits, the bigger this flag got. I'd walk into the dimly lit room braced for a Stars & Bars that was at least three feet by five, and do a double-take when I spotted the actual banner hanging high on the wall above the fireplace. Simply framed in wood, it was closer to twelve inches by eighteen.

Considerably grander was the World War I recruiting poster next to Grandmummie's desk, which occupied the corner of the dining room between the double doorway to the parlor and the double doorway to the hall. It depicted a grandfatherly Robert E. Lee, visage haloed by snow-white hair and beard above a gray uniform, saying "I fought for Virginia. Now it's your turn." I liked this poster. Whenever I talk about my grandmother, it's often the first thing I mention. It symbolizes so perfectly the difference between the New England side of my family and the Southern side. Having grown up in Massachusetts, I still tend to conflate the interests of the commonwealth with the interests of the nation. The Virginians didn't make that mistake.

Grandmummie was born Eleanor Washington Swann in Richmond, capital of the old Confederacy, and there she grew up, the seventh child of nine, eight of whom made it to adulthood. Her mother, called Maman in the French style, had been canonized by the family long before I was born, largely for putting up with her less-than-saintly husband. Great-grandfather Swann had two doting sisters in Alexandria. From the details let slip by his daughter and granddaughter, I inferred that he returned to Richmond occasionally, got his wife pregnant, and then fled back to the coddling of his sisters. With the assistance and genteel condescension of her more fortunate relations, my great-grandmother raised her children and taught piano to help make ends meet. I don't believe the eight who achieved their majority produced more than eight children among them. This reluctance to reproduce either their genes or their families characterizes both sides of my family, and my generation seems to have inherited it: my three siblings, two first cousins, and I have produced a grand total of two children, both of them my sister's.

Grandmummie married Ward Mayhew Parker Mitchell, whose antecedents were Yankee on one side and Maryland on the other. If getting out of Richmond was my grandmother's objective, the marriage achieved it: her husband was in the U.S. Consular Service. Their three children were born in three different countries: Guy in Virginia, my mother in Mexico, and Hugh in Spain. Grandmummie's account of her life in these and other places, Seven Homes Had I: The Experiences of a Foreign Service Wife, was published in 1955. Everyone agreed that she was by far the couple's better diplomat: she was gregarious where Grandpop was aloof, flexible where he was arrogant, and fluent in Spanish and French while he mangled both languages. By soothing feathers her husband had ruffled, she saved his diplomatic career more than once. Nevertheless, he left the Consular Service somewhat abruptly during the run-up to World War II. The Mitchells returned to Brookline, Massachusetts, to the house at 17 Milton Road, where Grandmummie lived till she went into a nursing home at ninety-nine. Grandpop died in 1962.

The compact, overstuffed parlor at Milton Road featured an upright piano and a bench with a needlepoint cushion. Grandmummie played by ear, as did Uncle Hugh, and it didn't take much to persuade her to sit down at the keyboard. To each grandchild she assigned a song. Mine, big surprise, was "Oh, Susanna." To brother Roger went "Dixie"; John, named for Marylander John Hanson,[*] of course got "Maryland, My Maryland"; and Ellen's was "The Bonnie Blue Flag." "Oh, Susanna" is the only one written by a Yankee, but I didn't know that till much later; "I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee" sure didn't sound Northern, and wasn't Stephen Foster the guy who wrote "My Old Kentucky Home," "Old Black Joe," and "Way Down upon the Suwannee River"? Over the years I've raised a few eyebrows by belting out "Maryland, My Maryland" when everyone else was singing "O Christmas Tree": "The despot's heel is on thy shore, Maryland, my Maryland! His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland, my Maryland," and so on.

Among my favorite records as a kid were Tennessee Ernie Ford's two collections of Civil War songs, one featuring the North, the other the South. Both were released in 1961, when I was in fifth grade. I liked the Southern songs best, especially "Stonewall Jackson's Way" and "Riding a Raid." Horse-crazy but still horseless, I was a sucker for anything that galloped; sentimental numbers like "Lorena" and "Vacant Chair" made me squirm. Once Grandmummie spoke to my fifth-grade class about the Civil War. I don't remember anything she said, but I vividly recall that a classmate picked up on her Southern sympathies, not to mention her southern accent, and asked if she supported slavery. The question was more pointed than she expected from a ten-year-old; she was flustered, and I was embarrassed not just on her behalf but on my own, because I felt implicated in my grandmother's apparent ambivalence about slavery.

My grandmother lived more than half of her long life in New England, and another nearly two decades were spent mostly abroad, but Southern she remained to the end. She was an expat, like the French professor I had at Georgetown who'd been living in the States for thirty years, hadn't lost an iota of his accent, and claimed to misunderstand English whenever it suited his purposes. As a rare Southerner in the heart of Yankeeland, Grandmummie stood out -- something she thrived on, whether as a Foreign Service wife, as a women's club speaker, as an active member of several organizations (including the Boston chapter of the Authors' Guild) and St. Paul's Episcopal Church (of which she was the first female member of the vestry), or as the hub of her extended family, most of whom still lived in the South. My mother, lacking self-confidence and unable to fake it, was daunted and dwarfed by her mother's outgoing personality, and by her father's habit of comparing her unfavorably to her mother at every opportunity.

As I moved into feminist adulthood, noticing more and asking more questions, I came to understand my mother more and admire my grandmother less. For years I saw Grandmummie as less person than persona, a shtick: Daughter of the Confederacy in Old New England, lucky number 7, favorite color red. Five feet tall at most, she couldn't have weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet; she frequently attributed her good health and longevity to carrot sticks, salted peanuts, and beer. She had the politician's facility for answering the question she wanted to answer rather than the question that was asked. I had no idea when she started going deaf because she rarely heard anything I said. It was frustrating, even infuriating, then, but now I get it: the best way to avoid disturbing questions is to not-hear them, and if you're a charming, outgoing southerner in exile, you'll almost certainly get away with it.

My parents hosted a big celebration for Grandmummie's ninetieth birthday, in 1982. The southern kinfolk, many of whom I'd never met or only vaguely remembered, arrived in force; nearly all were my parents' age or older. Grandmummie presided with authority. In the following years, though, she was frequently heard to say "No one should live past ninety." I understood this to mean that life had become wearisome to her. I can't imagine her ever saying this in so many words, still less that she wished she hadn't lived past ninety.

In her very late nineties Grandmummie was hospitalized with a broken hip. She never returned to the house on Milton Road. I suspect her mind/body took advantage of the situation to let go of a history that had grown too heavy and too confusing to be borne any longer. Physically frail but in relatively good health, she lived several more years in a nursing home, where she charmed the nurses, doctors, and staff but rarely recognized members of her own family. I was living on Martha's Vineyard by then, but my trips to the Boston area were rare and I never went to visit her.

In my family, saints and ogres usually come in mutually dependent dyads. Considering either one in isolation distorts them both. Grandpop was the ogre, Grandmummie the saint, but though my visual impression of Grandpop as an old man is vivid, nearly everything I know about him is filtered through the perception of his wife and children. Grandmummie I knew firsthand for many years. She never seemed entirely authentic to me; she was an excellent actress, always on stage, always playing a part. But her imprint was real, and lasting. Those songs took root in me, along with the Robert E. Lee poster and the Confederate flag, and left me romantically susceptible to Lost Causes, even those with politics I came to consider reprehensible. Several Civil War tunes had been sung with different words during the Jacobite rebellion; "Riding a Raid," for instance, led back to "Bonnie Dundee." For a while I cheered for Bonnie Prince Charlie; I still love the sound of the word "cavalier" and can sing most of the "Skye Boat Song" by heart. I remember watching The Gray Ghost, a TV show about the Confederate guerrilla colonel John Singleton Mosby, even though that it only lasted a season and I was but six years old when it aired. Two or at most three years later a young readers' biography of another guerrilla leader would capture my imagination. T. E. Lawrence, both the man and the legend, continues to fascinate me fifty years later.

I didn't mean to come out to my mother when I did: having dinner with her at L'Escargot, a Washington, D.C., restaurant, circa 1978. She was working for Beacon Press, where one of her colleagues was Mary Daly's editor; I was enthralled with Daly's then-newest, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, and "Well, I'm a lesbian" just sort of slipped out. Grandmummie was there too. The restaurant was fairly noisy and she was hard of hearing, so I wasn't sure how much of the conversation she'd heard or understood. When I next visited her in Brookline, we had tea at the little table in her old-fashioned kitchen. She opened the conversation with "So I hear you're into lesbianism." I swear those were her exact words. I didn't know what to say. Fortunately I didn't have to say anything because she went on to tell me -- not in great detail, but without equivocation -- how poorly the men in her family had treated the women, "the men" being primarily her father and her husband, "the women" being her mother, herself, and her daughter, my mother.

Now I wish the conversation had gone on, over hours or months or years. At the time I was too startled, uncomfortable, and scared: Grandmummie had exposed herself as more than a persona, less than a saint, and I didn't know how to respond. A window of possibility opened, then almost immediately and very quietly closed. I never glimpsed that window again. I didn't look very hard.

Note:

[*] I grew up believing what I'd been told, that John Hanson was the first president of the Continental Congress and thus the real first president of the United States. George Washington was merely the first president under the Constitution ratified in 1787. Claims and counterclaims abound, but after reading some fine print I don't believe this is true. Hanson was elected to the second Continental Congress, was a signer of the Articles of Confederation, and was the first person elected to a term as president under the Articles -- the official term seems to have been "President of the United States in Congress Assembled. But two men served as president before him, so his claim to have been the "first president of the United States" needs a couple of asterisks and some fine print. As far as I'm concerned, George Washington can be the real first president of the United States. Since Grandmummie was a collateral descendant of his, we've got that base covered too.