Affection and Estrangement: a Southern Family Memoir

By Preston M. Browning Jr.

Preston Browning Jr. entered the world in 1929, a few months before the Crash and the onset of the Great Depression. In Culpeper, Virginia, Browning grew up amid the pervasive poverty of the times where he recalls being labeled by his father as the worlds worst grouch, led in song by Miss Lizzy Lovellwho banged on the piano at the local Episcopal church, and seated astride a cow who needed a lot of convincing to take him for a ride around the pasture beyond his house.

With humor and exceptional detail, Browning shares a lively memoir that focuses on his coming-of-age journey and subsequent experiences in the rural South during the 1930s and 1940s, providing a compelling glimpse into how his family and others helped shape his emerging sense of self, his convictions, and his character. While providing snippets about the era and sketches of more than twenty relatives and ancestors that include an amusing retelling about his Uncle Sweets experiences at a hoochie-coochie show, Browning details the fascinating legacy of his Southern upbringing during a time when a struggle for racial, economic, and social justice prevailed in America.

In this inspiring memoir, a Southerner reminisces about small-town Virginia before, during, and after the Great Depression through entertaining stories about his unconventional ancestors, his immediate family, and his own experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 30, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440171307

Preston M. Browning Jr.

Preston M. Browning Jr. earned degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago for over thirty years and is an avid writer. Browning and his wife, Ann, have four children and live in Massachusetts.

Book preview

AFFECTION AND ESTRANGEMENT

______________

A SOUTHERN FAMILY MEMOIR

______________

Preston M. Browning Jr.

iUniverse LLC

Bloomington

Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir

Copyright © 2009, 2014 Preston M. Browning Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4401-7129-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-7131-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-7130-7 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 02/10/2014

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

1)   Beginnings

2)   Deepening Love, Intimations of Alienation: A Southern Boyhood

3)   The Very Extended Family

1)   The Grotesques

2)   The Ordinary and Not-So-Ordinary Others

3)   Good Country People

4)   Colored Folks

4)   The Patricians: History and Biography

5)   Legacy: The Land That Formed Me

Appendix A: Ole Mammy’s Story

Appendix B

1)   Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Hartwell Cocke, courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Cocke Papers.

2)   Holograph of previous letter

3)   Letter to The Baltimore Sun regarding distinguished members of the extended Cabell family

4)   Obituary of Col. William Cabell

5)   An account of a ride with General Robert E. Lee, taken by a young member of the Cocke family

Fierce with reality: The phrase comes from Florida Scott Maxwell’s The Measure of My Days, a journal she published in her eighties about laying claim to the events of her life. Preston Browning’s Virginia memoir appears late in his life and it, too, achieves much of that lovely ferocity, an achievement that crowns ordinary lives like Cousin Virgie whose tongue goes in and out to the rhythm of her rocking chair and Uncle Lewis (Sweets) at the hoochie-coochie show in Culpeper.

Standing further back in time are tonier forebears like William D. Cabell and his school for Civil War veterans being groomed for admission to Harvard and General John Hartwell Cocke, a collaborator with Thomas Jefferson in establishing the University of Virginia.

The gestures and language that bring these Brownings and Cabells and Cockes to life allow the reader, right along, to apprehend all that Browning has been and done. Reading Affection and Estrangement makes us, too, fierce with reality, thanks to the memoirist and his stunning stories.

Janet Varner Gunn, author of Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience and Second Life: A West Bank Memoir.

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Preston Browning’s family memoir is warm and evocative. The heart of it lies in Browning’s reflections on that vanished way of life, and on his mother and father. I could read a great deal more of this intimate family history. The cameos of the grotesques are charming and amusing and season the whole. But when the author is actively present on the page, either in characterizing himself in those days, or  in probing the mystery of his parents’ relationship (that ultimate mystery for us all) or explicitly interpreting southern culture—that’s when this book really comes alive. The final chapter, Legacy: The Land That Formed Me, is noteworthy for its nuance in examining that culture—more than nuance, complexity, a willingness not to discount the force of either side of a paradox.

Richard Todd, author of The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity.

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The memoir’s true appeal lies in Browning’s ruminations on the Southern condition, which he adeptly explores, referencing Southern writers he knows well, including William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Lillian Smith… . The author closes his story with learned social commentary about the meek and obedient white mother, the nurturing role of the black ‘mammy,’ and the sexual repression and common alienation of the Southern male… . His deconstruction of early-1900s Southern ideologies is the memoir’s most engaging aspect.

Kirkus Review

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"Affection and Estrangement is a memoir that is more than just the story of a single life. It is also the tale of a time and a place, and a study of how each person finds identity in his or her unique existence.

"Browning’s ‘Southern family memoir’ is just as charming as one might hope, but its depth—of research, of emotional intelligence, of conveying life’s complexity—will give readers a welcome surprise. Browning’s voice is warm and friendly, without being overly folksy.

"Browning ends with a chapter where he examines himself as a man and a memoirist. This closing section of introspection and sociological examination will resonate with readers who have also pondered their own societal and familial ancestry.

"Race, religion, class, and education are themes that Browning explores with openness and honesty in personal and historical contexts. Though he always writes with compassion and fondness, these issues are where the estrangement mentioned in the title comes in.

"Affection and Estrangement will appeal to people of all ages, from all areas, who are interested in ancestry and the exploration of history and culture through memoir. It will hold the most interest for Southerners who grew up in a similar time to Browning and who see their own lives in his story."

Clarion Review

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"The author terms himself an ‘accidental memoirist’ because the book’s contents originally were just sketches he wrote about his extended family’s quirks, compassion, honor and occasional unkindness. He later added his own history, one of a rebellious troublemaker in the 1930s and ‘40s in Culpeper, Va. who finally settled down, getting master’s and doctoral degrees and then teaching English at the University of Illinois at Chicago for more than 30 years.

This family history is a complex read. Nonetheless it adds an intimate contribution regarding the impact of Southern culture on its inhabitants.

blueink Review

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Gertrude Browning with Anne, Charles and Preston Jr.

For Anne Browning Ripley and Charles William Browning (Charlie)

and

Katie, Sarah, Rachel, and Preston III

and

Cornelia Cabell Stephenson, Gertrude Stephenson Browning,

Preston Mercer Browning Sr., and Mae Rixey Moore

in memoriam

and

again and always

Ann

Although there are many Souths, there is also one South.

—W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South

The Southerner possesses, deep down, the sense of a fitting and orderly world, a cosmos.

—James McBride Dabbs, The Southern Heritage

It has been said that when southerners aren’t going to church, they’re cherishing old grudges, burnishing Civil War statues, or remembering something.

—Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy

During the heated controversy over the expansion of slavery that led to the Civil War, Virginia acted as a moderating influence, somewhat like a wise old patriach, and wherever the Virginia gentleman emigrated, he carried with him something of the refinement and moderation that marked the society he had left.

—Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old South

There is a problem facing each of us, black and white, but it is not the Negro problem. It is the problem, for Negroes, of finding some way to live with white people. It is the problem, for whites, of learning to live with ourselves.

—Lillian Smith, The Winner Names the Age (1942)

Nowadays, what may be consumed in the South may have been baked in Omaha. But true southerners hold historical and cultural bonds to heart, above geography; they remain southern wherever they are—New York, Chicago, Paris, London—and their food is part of their cultural identity.

—William F. Neal, Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking

Aristocracy in any real sense did not develop until after the passage of a hundred years—until after 1700. From the foundations carefully built up by his father and grandfather, a Carter, a Page, a Shirley began to tower decisively above the ruck of farmers, pyramided his holdings in land and slaves, squeezed out his smaller neighbors and relegated them to the remote Shenandoah, abandoned his story-and-a-half for his new hall, sent his sons to William and Mary and afterward to the English universities or the law schools of London. These sons brought back the manners of the Georges and more developed and subtle notions of class. And the sons of these in turn began to think of themselves as true aristocrats and to be accepted as such by those about them—to set themselves consciously to the elaboration and propagation of a tradition.

—W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South

Lillian Smith’s was the small-town deep South … Its main fears were of the body, of blacks, and of death. Divided against itself, fearful of itself and the omnipresent black others, the white South lurched between languorous summer days and nights and sudden explosions of violence, between the decorous, bloodless religiosity of church circle meetings and the powerful religious psycho-dramas of yearly revivals, between amicable contacts between black and white and then the dreaded lynchings. Behind it all stood sin, sex and segregation.

—Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–1955

You don’t write fiction with assumptions. The things you see, hear, smell and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all, and the South impresses its image on us from the moment we are able to distinguish one sound from another.

—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

And such was the Courtesy of these early Virginians that scarce a Traveller’s Account or a History written in that Day may be found which fails to mention in some way their open-handed Liberality.

—The Williamsburg Art of Cookery

North Carolina: A valley of humility between two mountains of conceit.

—A popular North Carolina saying

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In writing a book such as this, one incurs many debts. There are, first of all, family members; in my case my sister, Anne Browning Ripley, and my brother, Charles William Browning (Charlie). Charlie has been an indispensable resource throughout the entire creative process. Without his acute recollections of a multiplicity of features and episodes of our childhood in the Browning family, things that I should have recalled but did not, this study would be greatly impoverished. It is no exaggeration to describe him as my second memory.

In addition, my children—Katie, Sarah, Rachel, and Preston III—have read parts of the manuscript at various stages in its evolution and have offered useful suggestions and unflagging encouragement. They have my deep gratitude. Preston III and his wife, Gudrun Stoffelmayr, came to my rescue at a critical moment, resolving mysteries and solving problems regarding computer use and formatting of the manuscript. It is difficult to find language adequate to express my appreciation for the gift of their expertise. More than once, Rachel also answered a long-distance call for computer help, allowing me to write instead of fuss with the technology, for which I am also deeply grateful.

Then there are the many former residents at Wellspring House, a retreat for writers and artists that my wife, Ann, and I established in 1999. They number in the dozens; those who have heard me read some of the sketches and have offered advice and encouragement, urging me to complete the writing and to get the book into print without further delay. Should I attempt to name all who fall into this category, the list would be impossibly long. Here I name several, begging forgiveness of those whose names are omitted. Among those who I believe deserve special mention are Jim Weigang, who challenged me early on to write a preface that was not just another chapter of the memoir and provided eleventh-hour help getting the illustrations and final text ready for publication.

Abbot Street, when I was still in the beginning stages of the writing, read all that I had available and told me he liked what he’d read and that, in his judgment, my accounts of life in the rural South seventy years ago would appeal to readers under thirty-five as well as to older ones.

Among others in this category deserving special mention are Daniela Gioseffi, Susanne Dubroff, Eileen Kennedy, Shola Friedensohn, Vivina Ciolli, Jody Stewart, Carol Dine, Jennifer Barber, Christopher Bursk, Tehila Lieberman, C.D. Collins, Heather Atwood, Barbara Blatner, Susan Freireich, Aine Greaney, Joan Michelson, Kimberly Chang, Linda Clum, Nancy Clum, Shizuka Otake, Kathleen Cromwell, John and Martha Christina, Trish O’Sullivan, Antoinette Claypool,Theresa Connelly, Jan Tramontano, Tucky Fussell, Mary Ellen Sanger, Sydna Bryne, and Leni Zumas.

As this project was nearing its completion, Randi Faust and Carl Herman listened to me read from the final chapter, adding to our mutual enjoyment comments about life in the contemporary South—they live in Houston. Because Randi is from Chicago and Carl from Texas they made an ideal sounding board for my reflections on Southern pathologies.

In a moment of near panic, I called on Fred McKinnon for help in deciphering computer code from the publisher in order to revise the manuscript; I am deeply in his debt.

Jane Falla was generous with her time, reading and critiquing an early draft and agreeing to read proofs at the end. Thank you, Jane.

From John Barbour I learned much that was useful about reading—and writing—memoirs, and I found especially illuminating his discussion of how Mary McCarthy dealt with shame in her autobiographical writings.

Richard Todd read parts of the manuscript and was liberal with his praise, a gift for which he has my enduring thanks. Neil and Louise Hertz let me know that they found the original sketches engaging; their comments came at a time when encouragement was welcome.

Harvey Stanbrough served as an early editor; his many suggested changes have led to an easier-to-read and more felicitous style. Thanks, Harvey.

Leland Jamieson went far beyond what a friend might normally be expected to offer, reading the entire manuscript from beginning to end and sending more messages than I can count. While I did not act on all of his suggested alterations, I surely took all of them into consideration, and many found their way into the final version. I owe him an immense debt of gratitude.

Nancy Tilly, a friend of more than fifty years, has been consistently supportive of my work. I am pleased now to be able to express deep gratitude for her encouragement and affection.

Janet Gunn, a loyal friend of more than four decades, read the entire volume with care and offered a number of ideas for improvement. She is the author of a scholarly study of autobiography and a memoir of her own and has taught memoir for many years; hence she is admirably suited to offer advice about mine. As I indicate in chapter 5, she also gave me a book, The Foreign Student, in which I discovered thoughts on Southern racism and shame that could not have come into my consciousness at a more opportune moment. Janet knows how deep my affection is for her and how profound my gratitude.

Nancy Cirillo, a former colleague and a dear friend for many years, read more than one version of Affection and Estrangement. To those readings Nancy brought her scholarship as a student of modern British and post-colonial literature as well as her perfected sensitivities and high critical standards drawn from reading countless autobiographies and memoirs. It was a little daunting to have such a critic, but it is a blessing to have such a friend.

Bob Parati, a fellow Southerner, read the manuscript and offered suggestions regarding content and organization. He also created the initial version of the cover design, most of which has been retained, spending hours locating frames for the photos and making critical choices for the overall design. A million thanks, Bob!

Another Southerner, a Virginian, in fact, Don Faulkner, provided some very candid critiques of the book’s early chapters, which led me to eliminate a number of paragraphs of description of Browning family life that he avowed added little or nothing to the flow of the narrative. He was correct and for the (I hope) improved new version I wish now to thank him.

Patrick Callahan, an expert at the computer, provided extraordinary help in meeting the publisher’s formatting specifications, scanning photos, and solving other computer-related problems. My gratitude for his assistance is great.

Among Ashfield friends, Richard Todd was an early reader of parts of the manuscript and could not have been more supportive of my writing. I owe him a profound debt of gratitude. Mariel Kinsey responded with wise advice to certain portions of a chapter not included in the final version, although parts of the rejected material found their way into chapter 5. John and Mary Snow listened to me read sections of chapter 2 on race and religion, offered sound critiques, and introduced me to the writings of James Dabbs. John and Lou Ratté listened attentively as I expounded some of my ideas about the South, encouraging me not to slack in my efforts to get the book into print. For the friendship and support of all of these neighbors, I am deeply grateful.

Patricia Lee Lewis is an exemplary writing-workshop leader. I have benefited greatly from participation in three of Patricia’s workshops, and my gratitude for her gentle but firm criticism of my work is boundless. She knows, I hope, how much I appreciate her wisdom and her skill.

I wish to thank Angus Green for correcting errors made in the original manuscript regarding two deceased Culpeper, Virginia, residents.

Several years ago, while doing research on the Cocke and Cabell families at the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library, I found the staff of the Special Collections Department unfailingly gracious and consistently helpful in responding to my requests for documents, photographs, and other materials. I am, as we used to say in Virginia, much obliged. And I wish also to thank the staff of the Rappahannock County Library in Little Washington for their assistance in my researches on the Stephenson, Browning, and Hite families.

At iUniverse Press I have been challenged and encouraged by Krista Hill, who has never let me forget that revisions are fine but that manuscripts, if they are to be published, must at some point come to a conclusion. For her belief in the soundness of my book and for her persistence in goading me to finish the job, I am grateful.

As noted in the preface, Professor James E. Miller Jr., in a somewhat oblique way, may be the party responsible for the creation of this volume. Without Jim’s warm response to the original sketches of family members and his question regarding publication, it is surely possible that I would not have been inspired to write this book. Jim has been a mentor and friend for almost forty-five years, and I am pleased to have this opportunity to acknowledge the importance of this relationship and to express my gratitude.

Neither he, nor anyone else mentioned above, bears any responsibility for lapses or flaws the reader may discover herein. For those I declare sole ownership.

My final words of gratitude belong to Ann. During the early years of our marriage, she came to know many of the family members about whom I have written and has often supplemented my recollections with her own. She has also listened patiently as I’ve repeatedly read aloud the sketches or other portions of the manuscript and has offered sage advice. For the gifts of her wisdom and educated sensibilities and for her steadfast support and love during the fifty years of our marriage, she has my deepest gratitude and my enduring affection.

PREFACE

Some time ago, the American novelist Anne Tyler wrote a book entitled The Accidental Tourist. In a quite real sense, I have become an accidental memoirist.

Seven or eight years back, I began writing sketches of relatives I remembered from my childhood and youth in the 1930s and 1940s. A number of these relations were quite strange, eccentric, even grotesque people in the sense of Sherwood Anderson’s use of that word, that is, twisted and thwarted in their development toward wholeness as human beings, yet loveable. In one of the stories of Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the narrator speaks of the gnarled, imperfect apples left on the trees after the autumn harvesting. In them, he says, is a sweetness that the apples shipped to market lack. The grotesques, he implies, possess such a sweetness. My grotesques, with one or two exceptions, exhibited a similar quality.

My intention in writing these sketches was simply to create portraits of personages from a bygone era for my own amusement and that of my immediate family. Eventually it seemed appropriate to include portraits of my parents as well as of several people who had been employed by my family in various capacities and whom I had come to know fairly intimately.

At Christmastime of 2004, with eighteen of these portraits completed, I sent a little book containing the sketches, plus a brief introduction, to members of my family and a few friends. The response was gratifyingly positive, and even enthusiastic. One recipient of my volume, a former professor of mine at the University of Chicago, James E. Miller Jr., described the contents of this slender volume as very, very interesting and asked whether I had considered publication. I had not.

Jim Miller’s query set me to thinking. And to writing. As I began composing what I believed would be an introduction of no more than ten pages, I found my memory spewing a veritable tsunami of images from seventy years earlier: Miss Lizzy Lovell banging on the piano at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Culpeper, Virginia, or me seated astride a cow, trying, with only slight success, to induce her to give me a ride around the pasture beyond our house. Eventually the ten pages morphed into a lengthy chapter covering major aspects of life in the rural South as I remembered it, as well as my own life in the Browning family and in our small town. Gradually the shape of this book came into view.

Most of these portraits are of people I knew directly. A few, however, are of ancestors, some born as far back as the eighteenth century. Since some of these ancestors—for example, General John Hartwell Cocke—were persons of distinction in the cultural and social life of Virginia, and since their attitudes toward a host of subjects and their moral and ethical values had been passed on to my mother and through her to me, in however attenuated a form, I decided to include them. Thus the reader will encounter here portraits not only of General Cocke and his second wife, Louisa Maxwell Holmes Cocke, but also of my great-grandfather, William Daniel Cabell, born in 1834. Among the original eighteen sketches was one of my grandmother, Cornelia Cabell Stephenson, born in 1859, who died several years before I was born.I made my appearance in the family constellation in 1929, a few months before the Crash and the onset of the Great Depression.

One of the significant pleasures of a project such as this one is the opportunity it affords to recall a time that seems unbelievably remote from our early twenty-first-century existence. No one today, I would guess, would dream of driving seventeen or eighteen miles over very bumpy roads virtually every Sunday to visit relatives. Yet week after week, my mother, my father, my two siblings, and I, sometimes joined by a friend, left after Sunday dinner for the trek to Woodville in Rappahannock County. And although I’m sure we did not visit all the aunts and uncles and assorted cousins every week, we visited a heap of relatives pretty regularly.

Thus my childhood memories are stocked with these characters as well as with recollections of the world they inhabited, one where outhouses were commonplace (as I write in Miss Annie, Annie and Uncle Harry didn’t have a proper bathroom until about 1945), where water was pumped from a shallow, dug well, and where light after sundown came from a kerosene lamp. Trimming the wicks was a daily task, as were emptying slop jars and bringing in wood for the fires. We in the forward-looking town of Culpeper, of course, had indoor plumbing and electric lights. And movies!

In writing about persons long dead, one hopes to do them justice, however difficult that may be. In this process the writer quickly finds that really capturing the person in question is never an easy task, human personality being the protean and elusive thing that it is. We may think we remember accurately, and yet we know deep down how skewed, partial, and deceiving memory can be. In the case of persons one has known as a young child, the task is rendered doubly difficult, for then fact and fancy really do blend.

In examining a past that will no doubt seem exceedingly distant and, to some readers, perhaps particularly the younger ones, disconnected from our present-day concerns, I have been conscious of the part played by an appreciation of history and tradition in the lives of Southerners well into the twentieth century. I have constantly held before me William Faulkner’s dictum that the past is never really past but always a constitutive part of the present, awaiting us also as images and building materials of the future.

As every historian and anyone else who has attempted to resurrect the past knows, the past is a slippery thing, Each generation interprets the past using its own presuppositions, its own tools, its own social and psychic needs. Hence a book written in 2009 about Lincoln will inevitably be quite different from one written in 1909 or 1939. In his fiction, especially in Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner dramatized convincingly the impossibility, finally, of ever describing a past event and telling precisely how it really happened or describing an individual and capturing completely his or her essence.

For me, the critical issue in writing this book has been the patricians, my aristocratic ancestors, who seem to have been genuine paragons of virtue. Always as I read about them, understandably wishing to affirm their natural goodness, questions lurk in some dark hole of my consciousness: were they really that upright, that honorable, that compassionate, that warm in embracing family and friends, that true to the code of behavior inherited as legitimately as their lands and their slaves?

And their slaves! Always for a contemporary white Southerner, this is the sticking point. How could they have lived with themselves while holding other human beings in bondage? To answer this question, I think one must judge these persons and their actions by the beliefs of their time, not those of our time. In nineteenth-century America, it was generally accepted that persons of African origin were mentally inferior to those whose ancestors had come from Europe. Moreover, certainly in the South, there existed the widespread conviction that freed blacks and whites could not live amicably together. Hence any plans regarding emancipation were inevitably linked to emigration. The country of Liberia came into existence largely as a consequence of the belief that freed blacks would be content only if returned to Africa, to a land of their own.

It is also important to acknowledge that the South’s peculiar institution, as it existed in Virginia and elsewhere in the Upper South, was often different, in some cases radically different, from its manifestations in the Deep South. (The sketches of John Hartwell Cocke and his second wife, Louisa, as well as of my great-grandfather, William D. Cabell, reveal the bonds of affection that appear to have existed in the master-slave relationship in these two Virginia families. It is worth noting that some of the Cocke family’s former slaves, living in Liberia, sometimes wrote of longing to return to Virginia.)

My readers may also be surprised to learn that in the 1830s the Virginia legislature debated the issue of emancipation. There were many among the planter class in Virginia and elsewhere in the Upper South and in the border states who believed that (to use the language of my ancestor, General Cocke) slavery was a curse upon the land and who desired fervently to free black people from bondage. A major impediment, however, was the matter of compensation. Who would provide the huge sums needed to compensate the owners of several million blacks? When one realizes that African