We avoided talking about the trial, Mom and Uncle Tinsley made a point of getting along, and on Christmas Day, instead of giving each other presents, Mom decided we should all put on performances. She sang several numbers from “Finding the Magic”—and, in fact, she didn’t want to stop, saying, “Okay, if you insist, I’ll do one more.” Liz recited Poe’s poem “The Bells,” which, despite its title, wasn’t very Christmasy and, in fact, was really dark. I read my Negrophobia Essay, this time remembering to use Uncle Tinsley’s pregnant pauses. That prompted Mom to joke that Uncle Tinsley should dig out the old Confederate sword that the Holladays had been handing down for generations and give it to me because I was really getting in touch with my Southern roots.
“All the Confederate stuff around this town gives me the heebiejeebies,” Liz said. “One of the houses on the hill actually flies that flag.”
“It’s not about slavery,” Uncle Tinsley said. “It’s about tradition and pride.”
“Not if you’re a black person,” Mom said.
“Hey, Uncle Tinsley,” I said, “maybe, for your performance, you can play the piano.”
He shook his head. “Martha and I used to play together,” he said. “But I don’t play anymore.” He stood up. “My performance will be in the kitchen.” For dinner, he was going to make squash casserole, from the old Holladay family recipe, and roast loin of venison with mushrooms, onions, turnips, and apples.
It was dark by the time dinner was ready. While Liz and I set the table, Mom found a bottle of wine in the basement. She poured glasses for herself and Uncle Tinsley, half a glass for Liz, and a quarter for me. Back in California, Mom liked to drink a little wine in the evening. She’d let me have sips before, but this was the first time she’d given me my own glass.
Uncle Tinsley said his short prayer, thanking God for the bountiful feast before us, then raised his glass. “To the Holladays.”
Mom gave her little smile, and I thought she was going to say something sarcastic, but then her face softened. “It’s funny,” she said. “The Holladays used to be such a big deal.” She raised her glass. “To the four of us,” she said. “We’re all that’s left.”
Liz stayed home all winter with Mom, who took her job as a teacher pretty seriously. Mom and Liz read Hermann Hesse and e. e. cummings and some guy called Gurdjieff she’d heard about on her spiritual retreat. Mom made up an entire course about Edgar Allan Poe. Liz was particularly drawn to poems like “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” and “The Bells,” with lines such as “And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” and “To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells.” She got such a charge out of the word “tintinnabulation” that she wrote an entire paper on its Latin roots and its place in music.
Uncle Tinsley was working on his geology papers and genealogical charts, as well as making the occasional hunting trip, coming home a couple of times with a dead doe strapped to the hood of the Woody. He also pitched in on Liz’s schooling, giving her lectures about calculus, the geology of the Culpeper Basin, and the composition of Virginia’s orange clay, explaining C. Vann Woodward and why in point of fact the Civil War should not be called the Civil War—“There was nothing civil about it, for one thing”—and should instead be called the War Between the States.
Maddox kept trying to mow me down with the Le Mans and its new whitewall tires, but since Liz was never with me, I stopped worrying about him as much and started to enjoy school a little more. Miss Jarvis, who was the yearbook adviser as well as my English teacher, talked me into joining the yearbook staff, which was more fun than I expected it to be—more fun than the pep squad. It was also a lot of work. We had to take photos, write captions and sell advertising, come up with the memorial page for the senior who got killed in a car crash—Miss Jarvis said it happened pretty much every year—and create themes for the candid shots, like “Caught Off Guard” and “Silly Dance Moves.”
Meanwhile, the kids were getting used to the idea of integration. The football team had a terrible year, and there were still occasional fights between black and white students, but the basketball team was doing better thanks to a couple of really tall black players. One guy was so big that he was called Tyrone “The Tower” Perry, or sometimes just Tower, and he was such a good player that we gave him an entire page in the yearbook. The cheerleaders were also looking more like a team, the black girls doing a little less dancing and the white girls doing a little more. Vanessa’s mother, who owned a beauty parlor for black women and sold Avon cosmetics, had a powder-blue Cadillac, and she started driving a group of black and white cheerleaders, including Ruth, to the away games.