THE HEAD OF THE CLAN: A Southern Homecoming
By Phoebe Kate Foster
 

There's nothing like a funeral to get far-flung kin together, as my folks always say. A death in the family is a command performance and no excuse suffices for not showing up -- not work, not prior commitments, not living 1,500 miles away, and certainly not the mild case of benign estrangement that had allowed me to keep my Tennessee relatives at the other end of a long distance call for years.  So, when the phone rang in my New York apartment and I heard my Uncle Goopah in Nashville lugubriously intone, "I hope you're sittin' down…", I should have said, "Sorry, wrong number," and hung up quick before he could inform me that my Uncle Moley had passed. 
                       
 "I don't know how the family will manage without him," Goopah continued.  "After all, he was -- " and he paused for dramatic effect, "the *head of the clan*."  The pause was so weighty and his voice so reverential that I almost expected to him to say "The Son of God" instead.
                       
As the oldest of six children, Moley took over raising his siblings when their parents died in an accident.  He so relished his position of authority that he never relinquished it, spending the next fifty years keeping everyone straightened out and flying right.  It was such an oppressive regime that his sister -- my mother -- convinced my father to get a job up Nortth when I was in junior high and we fled to the safe haven of Stamford, Connecticut.  My mother never went back; the weekly phone calls were more than enough for her.  Even when she died, her body didn't re-cross the Mason-Dixon Line; she had her ashes scattered on Yankee ground, much to Moley's consternation, of course.
                       
I'd never been back, either.  But suddenly I found myself, a great big grown-up Manhattan career woman, being told by an uncle I hadn't seen in more than twenty years that he'd booked me a reservation on a flight to Nashville where I was expected to be. "I'll have one of your cousins pick you up at the airport, Feebie-Jeebies," he concluded, and hung up before I could protest. 
                       
I winced at the old nickname.  Nobody in my family is called by their given name.  Uncle Earl became Goopah when his first grandchild couldn’t flex its gums around the word Grampa.  Morley became Moley because everyone spelled his name the way they pronounced it. I won't go into how Uncle John-Roy became Boo and Uncle Randolph became Skeeter and Uncle Montgomery became Gummy.  It's too weird.
                       
But the truth is that peculiar pet names are part of the powerful spell cast by atavistic Southerners, who believe that by speaking a special word, they can summon you back to them, no matter how far you've roamed or how much you've changed.  
                       
***
                       
"Hey, Feebie-Jeebies.  I've come to take you home," said the cousin who'd been sent to pick me up at the airport.  
                       
I jolted in surprise, both at the sight of a face as familiar as my own (whose name, unfortunately, I didn't recall) and the word *home*.  The shock of being back in a place I seldom consciously thought about was physical, like a slap or a sudden fall.  Over time, the memories of my Southern childhood had faded into seeming like a novel I'd read.  Now, with every block we drove down, every familiar scene and landmark we passed, the years melted away like makeup on a Mid-South summer day.  I could feel myself being reduced once more to the skinny little kid who sat on sun-fried front porches and buggy backyard gliders, swatting mosquitoes and swabbing her prickly heat with Calamine, rotting her teeth with Goo Goo Clusters, and listening to the Opry on the radio every Saturday night.
                       
At Goopah's large turn-of-the-century house, the kinfolk and the covered dishes were gathering.  Neighbors bearing foil-wrapped platters and casseroles and crockpots made their way up the path to the verandah with me.  Not to bring food to a grieving family is the Unpardonable Sin, marking you as a no-account person or worse still, a Yankee who labors under the erroneous impression that a condolence card will suffice.  I suddenly recalled when Great-Aunt Glorianna passed away the year before we moved up North and a desperate bachelor friend of the family unearthed an ancient dust-and-nut encrusted cheese ball to give us.  Better that than nothing at all.
                       
My uncle and aunt were waiting for me at the front door.  Goopah wore a pulled down, suitably sorrowful face as he moaned, "Oh, Feebie-Jeebies, how awful it took a tragedy to bring you home."  My aunt Sarah-Lynnette smelled of starch and setting lotion, and was wearing the same crisp black dress she'd used for funerals when I was a child.  She said, "Hey there, Baby Girl," and hugged me with one arm while accepting a big bowl of something from a neighbor with the other.
                       
In the perpetual dark woody twilight of the parlor, my numerous female cousins perched on Victorian velvet settees, the drab mourning clothes accentuating the characteristic paleness of their skin and hair: the Foster women, ethereal and artistic in some lights, wizened and wily in others. They rose up like a flock of languid birds to greet me, limp frail-boned hands fluttering as they swirled around me and uttered small shrill cries of combined welcome and condolence, oozing tiny delicate tears as they swept me deeper and deeper into the house, where the rest of the family awaited me.   
                       
Presently, the limousines from the funeral parlor arrived to take us to the cemetery, along with an entourage of cars containing other mourners.   Laying Moley to rest was a brief process; rather, it was the assembling and then the dispersing of the hordes come to pay their last respects that took so long. Uncle Goopah was at the very epicenter of things, spooning the aged in and out of their cars, distributing tissues to the weepy, arranging everyone around the grave site in a hierarchically proper and aesthetically pleasing order.  He strategically positioned Moley's black housekeeper Evangeline where Boomer Seaton, my second cousin-once-removed and rumored Klan member, couldn't see her, and tugged Great Aunt Lyddie's hiked-up dress
down over her ample posterior.  Goopah's long arm of hard-knuckled justice reached out to rap the skulls of misbehaving children, and his sharp cough of censure stopped an inebriated Uncle Gummy from peeing in the bushes.
                       
I watched my uncle in amazement.  "Moley's toady," my mama had always disparagingly called him.   When had that mousy, mealy-mouthed little man become so formidable? I wondered.
                       
As the thick mauve light of early evening engulfed the landscape, family and close friends returned to Goopah's house for supper.  The great oak dining table was groaning under the weight of hams and turkeys and fried chicken, pans of cornbread and beaten biscuits, crockpots of grits and greens, and bowls of rainbow-colored congealed salads, all courtesy of the neighbors.  A cousin handed me an overflowing plate and I was surprised at how good everything tasted.  When I was done, I hunted around for the bar.  It was in the back hall, of course, where Goopah had always set it up for funerals: easily accessible to the thirsty, but discreetly out of sight for the benefit of the teetotalers -- and my family was pretty equally dividedd on this one, the strait-laced Baptists and Methodists on one side, the free-and-easy Episcopalians and Catholics on the other.  
                       
Among the jugs of gin and sour mash, I discovered a lone unopened bottle of Scotch, undoubtedly purchased specially for the prodigal niece from the North.  I was about to pour myself a stiff one when I heard the sound of disputing voices crackling like static on the radio.  I padded through the pantry lined with Mason jars of preserved fruits and vegetables and slowly cracked open the kitchen door.  Gathered around a half-empty jug of Jack Daniel's on the dinette table were my uncles, drinking out of jelly jars and hollering at each other. 
                       
"You can't be!" Gummy was yelling at Goopah.  "You're not the next eldest, I am!  It always passes from the eldest to the next eldest.  Any fool knows that."  
                       
"Well, you surely ain't up to do doing it!" Uncle Goopah shouted back.  "With the quantity of gin you drink every day, you don't have a clear enough head to find a pot to piss in -- which you proved today when you attempteed to relieve yourself in the cemetery in front of half of Nashville."
                       
"Best weed your own patch 'fore you weed anyone else's," Gummy retorted.  "You act so righteous 'cause you buy your poison in them little bitty pint bottles, like liquor don't hardly touch your lips at all.  But you buy 'em at different places every day so the store clerks can't gossip about the bank manager being too crocked to manage his accounts."
                       
"This is getting nowhere," Skeeter interjected.  "Moley was high as a Georgia pine most days and so mean that he would have thrown a drowning man both ends of a rope.  What the family *really* needs right now is a man of sensitivity, perception, élan -- "
                       
"Oh, for Chrissake, Randolph, get off your high horse!" Goopah barked.  "You ain't talkin' to your eighth grade English class.  You're talkin' to your kin, who know you're as dumb as a bucket of fish heads."
                       
"*Eee -- lan*?" hooted Boo.  "That sure don't describe *you*, Skeeter."
                       
"And it sure as hell don't describe you either!" snapped Skeeter.  "Moley always said Boo was a half-baked yokum who can't pour piss out of a boot."
                       
"At least I didn't marry a Yankee!" Boo shouted.
                       
"No, you married one big fat cow and that's the only thing you've stuck with your entire life!" Skeeter shrieked.  "How many jobs have you lost?  I lose count."
                       
"I've had many careers!" Boo hollered.  "I'm a Renaissance man!"
                       
"You're a bum!" bellowed Gummy.  "You call selling plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesuses and fuzzy dice a *career*?"
                       
"I work for an up-and-coming novelty manufacturer!  I'm one step away from being assistant sales manager!" Boo howled.
                       
"You're one step away from being on the dole again!" Gummy roared gleefully.
                       
"At least my wife's not a piece of illiterate white trash I picked up in a bowling alley!" Boo crowed.
                       
"At least I'm not so ignorant I can't keep a job!" cried Gummy.
                       
"*Enough*!" thundered Goopah.
                       
Gummy poked Goopah in the chest.  "Who the hell appointed you the goddamn moderator?  Everyone knows what Moley thought of *you*.  You were a mewlin' pukin' little twerp in his estimation.  You got no sense, Earl.  Never had.  Never will."
                       
"And you got no house, Montgomery!" Goopah yelled triumphantly.  "How can we hold a family confab in a goddamn *trailer*?"
                       
"Now I've got a perfectly nice house -- " Boo began to say.
                       
"Which you own for today or as long as your current *career* -- whatever that amounts to -- lasts," interrupted Goopah.  "And so y'all can plainly see that I am the most qualified of the remaining brothers to be head of the Foster clan now.  I have a prestigious position with the largest bank in the region, a wife who's not an embarrassment to the family, and a handsome house with an historic plaque on it.  Which is more than can be said for any of *you.*"
                       
The other uncles opened their mouths to protest, but at that very moment, Boo saw me and froze.  The others turned and stared at me.  Goopah was the first to shake himself loose from the tableau.  Taking my arm, he firmly steered me out of the kitchen as he said, "Why, Feebie-Jeebies!  Whatever are you doing in here?  I saw your aunt Sarah-Lynnette settin' out on the back porch catchin' the evening breeze.  Why don't you go keep her company?" and shoved me out the door. 
                       
My aunt was on the porch, just as Goopah had said.  She'd changed from her mourning attire into baggy cotton pants and a hot pink tee shirt with a map of the former Confederate states on it that said in sequins, "I may rise again but don't expect me to shine," and was sitting splay-legged on a rickety bench swing.
                       
"Hey, Baby Girl."  She patted the place beside her.  "How are you survivin' bein' back in the bosom of your loved ones?" 
                       
I flopped down.  "Do you know what's going on?" I asked.  "My uncles -- professional men with college degrees and Waterford crystal to drink out of -- are in there swilling whiskey out of *jelly jars* and fighting about who's going to be head of the Foster *clan*.  Like we're all hillbillies back in some Godforsaken holler."
                       
"I know," she replied mildly.  She reached out and patted my hair, like I was a still a little kid.  "You take after your mama so much.  You're the spittin' image of her, I swear."  She sighed.  "I miss your mama every day of my life.  I knew when y'all moved away that it'd be a miracle if I ever saw you or her again."
                       
The unexpected mention of my mother made me feel like crying.  I could remember her rocking on this same porch in the same swing with Sarah-Lynnette when I was a child, both of them complaining about how all the menfolk had wild hairs up their asses.  Suddenly, I felt terribly tired, and slumped against my aunt's warm cottony side.  She draped an arm over me, and for a long time, we rocked in silence with our memories.
                       
"Don't you pay them damn fool boys no mind," she finally said.  "When there's a death or a crisis or too much change comes too quick, it feels safer to go back to the old ways for awhile.  They'll get over it by-and-by."
                       
The ruckus of men with wild hairs up their asses leaked out of the kitchen into the peaceful evening.
                       
"Oh, Lord," my aunt groaned. 
                       
"Where's this New South you hear so much about?" I asked.
                       
My aunt uttered a deep laugh that made her vibrate like an old pipe organ.  "I don't rightly know myself. Still looks like the same old South to me.  'Cept now there's arugula 'longside the collards in the supermarket and folks at the country club have taken up callin' their grits *polenta*."  
                       
She stood up, stretched leisurely, and extended her hand to me.
                       
"Welcome back to the dimple of the universe, Baby Girl.  Let's go pull them feudin' boys apart and get us a nightcap 'fore they drink it all up."                 
 

#

Phoebe Kate Foster lives on the Outer Banks of NC where she is an associate editor for PopMatters (www.popmatters.com) and The Dead Mule.  Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Slow Trains, Flashquake, Eclectica, Electric Acorn, Starry Night Review, The Dead Mule, Megaera, Tattoo Highway, Emrys Journal, and The Distillery: Artistic Spirits of the South, among others.