Family Stories: The Carters in Plains

The branching and flowering of Southern family trees are the special province of Novelist Reynolds Price (A Long and Happy Life, The Surface of Earth). Assigned by TIME, Price went to Plains from his home in Durham, N.C., and met many of the Carters. He writes:

Despite the waves of tourists and newsmen who are washing over Plains (pop. 683) and providing brisk business for the Peanut Museum, the sandwich shop, and the new stores selling what Miss Lillian calls "Jimmy-things," the main pastime still seems to be memory--as it is in all villages, Southern or otherwise, where people lead lives of work and family. Stop most anyone you see--they're generally stoppable--and he or she will soon be spinning you a web of recollection to entertain you both. They tend to start with Carters, since that's why you're here; but soon they'll show you a crowd of human reasons for stopping at this wide spot in the road and listening well, even if Jimmy had been born in Savannah and was not their pride. He clearly is and they all call him Jimmy, to your face and his--no reverence yet--as they sketch in his family backward from him. For if you are quiet and let them tell what they need to tell, not what you think you want, then the story is family, unendingly.

There is one memory left to start the story forward and work down to Jimmy, who seems a tad still in that ongoing stream. Mr. Alton Carter, age 88, is Jimmy's dead father's elder brother. A short, gentle-voiced man, he haunts his son Hugh's antiques store on Main Street, meeting all with old-fashioned manners and a memory that runs back, clear and voluminous, to the early '90s, well before his mother Nina moved here to Plains with him, his three sisters and his brother James Earl. For with all his tendrils of memory and hearsay that reach from the main stem back toward the Revolution, England and Ireland, Mr. Alton starts his own tale where he knows it to start--with calamity his own eyes saw up close.

His father William, Jimmy's grandfather, was killed in 1903, 50 miles south of Plains in a fight with a man named Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver): "My daddy went over to his place to argue with him about a little desk that he took off. They fought in his store with bottles. They had barrels of beer bottles. They stood there busting bottles over one another's head. My daddy got out and started home, going this-a-way; and Taliaferro got out and started his way, his home was out thataway. And Taliaferro run off out there about 30 yards and stopped and started shooting. He shot three times but he didn't hit him but once, in the back of the head. He never did have time to get out his pistol. I was as close to him as that truck [15 ft. away]."

After four trials, Taliaferro was freed; and Nina Carter brought her children to Plains to be near her husband's brother there. Alton was 15, went to work in the store where he still works daily (then a general store), helped support his family on $25 a month, acquired the store in time, and saw Jimmy's father grow and pass him in success: "Everything Earl laid his hand down on, when he picked it up, there was three or four dollars. When he died he left about 4,000 acres of land and a heap of money in the bank."

Mr. Alton smiles all through his story but--today at least, and I haven't led him--it touches his nephew Jimmy only at the end, again in a family way, no thought of world fame: "We still got the family land in Webster County. Earl's wife and children, they got part of it." When asked if he'll go to see Jimmy Carter sworn in as President, he says, "No sir, I'm too old to get that far from home," and turns to bagging peanuts as you hope some enterprising history student is motoring toward him with deliberate speed and a carload of tape.

Earl's wife sits across the street at the depot, rocking most afternoons and greeting pilgrims with her tart high spirits, in spite of "muscle spasms from signing my name." Her name was Lillian Gordy; and since the early '20s when she came to nurse, she's been here--18 miles from her birthplace (except for two years in India, the Peace Corps). She married Earl Carter and bore him four children--Jimmy the first. Sitting with her there or nine miles away at Faye's mobile home Bar-B-Q Villa in Americus, you may gather Miss Lillian has all but exhausted her desire to reminisce about Jimmy now. She's 78 and has been hard at it for more than five years--his governorship and presidential campaign.

She hasn't, though. She adores him and, once her quick eyes have cleared you, she comes at her version of the big family story head on, the way Southern women of her age and class come at everything--"I got my liberalism from my father. Papa was postmaster over in Richland. He'd bring meals from the hotel to the post office and let Negroes eat there; they couldn't eat at the hotel." Or when asked about her father's family--"I never cared much about my kin. I'll tell you why. We were the poor side of the family, and they didn't know me till Jimmy was Governor." As straight as that. And whatever else of her version she offers, you're apt to lose in the sight of her strong rich face, lit with joy and the certainty of power around the great eyes. All her story is there. She has stamped all her children with the Gordy good looks--a still, grave radiance that slowly melts into broad delight at the life before them. The flat kindly face of Mr. Earl's photographs has made no print on any of them except the rufous Billy, a wily jester; yet Miss Lillian has claimed that they loved their father better.

She may be right, but you feel she knows that she won a victory in them more important than the balances of household emotion, the victory deep-cut in the face she gave them--her lock-jawed passion for decency, justice, and her life's conviction that the only honorable surrenders are surrenders to laughter and mercy. If she's mostly given over now to laughter, pride and sass, she has earned her fun; and within the fun, one can still sense rock--a broad standing shaft of rock which one could reach and stand on if one were in need, not a deferential tourist. She has told of her struggle to nurse leprous children in India, a struggle that she won. Like all family women, she has lived for others' needs; and the story of her children is spun on those poles--their need, her provision, now their various repayments.

Her elder daughter Gloria, two years younger than Jimmy, is also close by on the west edge of Plains with her husband Walter Spann. She tries to place herself for you at once and tell a too simple tale--"I'm a farm wife and nothing else; listen, I'm country." Country covers a good many things--most of the life of mankind, for one--but what she seems to be asking to mean is naive, innocent. Again the face talks when the mouth reneges--her mother's face on Gloria, 30 years younger, broader, lined differently but as deeply. Even if she hadn't, in self-defense, just published an eloquent account (Good Housekeeping, January) of her own large sadness--an imprisoned son, William, 30--you'd see that her eyes and smiling mouth have long since given up attempting to conceal a sizable and only partly healed wound near the center of her life. Yet she won't talk of that (and has written about it so she won't have to talk).

She talks of happiness--"Up till now I've been the happiest member of our family"--and the hard-won beauty of her face sets the claim. Then she comes on a memory that has her beaming (they are all splendid beamers since they knowingly beam against the grain of what they've endured): "When Jimmy was a boy, we called him 'Hot'--he was always fired up--but he never liked it; so when he got away to Annapolis, he wrote me right away: 'Dear Gloria, Please do not call me "Hot" and please do not write to me on lined notebook paper with pencil.' " That she and her mother laugh long at the memory is one more piece of the story they tell--a healthy piece. For anyone who sat out the parched family pieties of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon years, the sound of home laughter that laps all sides of Jimmy Carter comes as welcome as water.

He is naturally more guarded--any boy who suggests the name "Hot" to his kin and turns up at 52 as President-elect was hardly slated to end as a joker--and even in Faye's cafe the next night with a handful of journalists, his wife and daughter, round a ten-foot table over perfect steaks, he is not prone to giggling fits. What he mainly does--or did in that company--is listen with a blowtorch intensity which makes most other brands of human attention seem dazed or bored. (And Rosalynn his wife shares the trait--an interest almost animal in strength and necessity, though her brand seems to come from her mother, Miss Allie Smith: a quiet, impressive lady with the broad, handsome, watchful face she's given her daughter.) Some watchers that night--all of them non-Southern--found the gaze a little ominous, even predatory: Are we being sized up for future consumption ?

The opposite, I felt. In his own way, he was telling a private piece of the long family story. The son of strong, lovable, amusing parents (rooted in a place and confident there) and the sibling of vivid and irreverent juniors, he is trained to expect equal fare from the world. He can't often get it, but he's trained to go on trying--as courteous son; tried but patient older brother; as Christian fellow creature; and as lifelong veteran of small-town culture, which requires a sophistication of manners at least the equivalent of manners at Versailles.

The night as we sat at table, an elderly man in clean work clothes approached the President-elect from the rear and touched him on the shoulder. Carter quickly turned, smiled, stood and called the man's name. The man apologized for interrupting but said that he wanted to say thanks again, that he'd never forgot the help Jimmy gave. Then he greeted Rosalynn with the same unabashed dignity and left. Carter sat and, since we were silently curious, offered that the man had phoned him years before when the man's daughter shot the husband who was beating her, that the man had not forgot whom he turned to for help.

As my writer's pattern-making brain was seeing a neat circle close in the air of the past two days--tales of two lethal fights (Carter's grandfather, now this friend's daughter)--Carter quietly inscribed a larger arc: "You may not know what a warehouseman means to a working farmer." Born in a tobacco town half the size of Plains, I felt rightly chastened and remembered that I knew. I also guessed I'd heard one version anyhow of the story I came to hear --the oldest story, of blood kin, desperate dependency, and mercy: the story we hope to hear in all human discourse. Our kin, or our townsmen at least, love and guard us against ourselves and the perilous world. They use us kindly when we've turned and left.

With all the cold fears our past four Presidents have drenched us in, all the seedy disbeliefs they've sowed, I left Faye's that night feeling better for my own kin's chances now and lighter on my feet, which slid in Georgia mud--purple Sumter County clay, the ground of many Carters over 125 years; apparently a national family at last to feed us with stories and the actions they cause: varied fare and nutritious, the stories of care and honest consolation that we've needed for very much longer than was good.

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