Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised Southern, I started moving up the map from Alabama after college, settling finally in Brooklyn, New York. For a while, I tried to get rid of my exterior Southernness—the drawl, the handwritten thank you notes, the fussing over my appearance, the home-cooked meals, the good manners. But over time I realized that I needn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. I like to handwrite thank yous! Anything else you want to tell the Dead Mule? …Of course there are dark things about our Southernness, big things we were taught and/or lived through. But when those things come up, I like to bring James Baldwin into my room to remind me that “ Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”
Just Sit There and Look Pretty
With my long wavy brown hair, white skin, and clear blue eyes, maybe I was a dead ringer for her or at least for the picture of her on the Sunday school room wall back then. Who would really know? I wasn’t paying much attention in class when I heard my teacher, Mrs. Frazer announce, “And Isabel will play Mary in our Christmas nativity scene. It was 1957. I was in the first grade at St. John’s Episcopal School in Montgomery, Alabama.
My conflict with religion started that day, when I was told I had to pretend to be the Virgin Mary. Before then, I hadn’t thought about God or the Bible or Mary. I didn’t have much exposure; I didn’t have any questions. Yes, I went to Sunday school, but Sunday school involved coloring pictures and listening to fantastic stories that seemed like magical, and sometimes sinister, fairy tales: a brave young boy killing a giant with a sling shot, a nation of bad people destroyed by a huge flood, or a scary snake that made a good woman eat a forbidden apple. God was all powerful, pulling the strings behind the scenes in each story. I didn’t make any connection between God and me until that day at school. When Mrs. Frazer told me that I would be a character in the nativity—a reenactment of the birth of the son of God with me pretending to be the mother of God— my mind started to wonder. Who was God, anyway?
At first, I experienced a sort of Biblical amnesia, but somewhere in the recesses of my six-year old mind, there was a recollection of a Christmas story—the birth of Jesus, the Son of God, in a barn with his parents and some animals there–a heavenly scene bathed in white light. But wait, why wasn’t God there? He was the real father. Did Mary have two husbands? The story was fuzzily forming in my mind. Yes, I remembered seeing the nativity tableau the year before at St. John’s. The panorama was impressive with people in all sorts of costumes, and Mary seemed to have only a small part. She looked really beautiful in her long robes, but she didn’t say or do anything. As it came into focus who I would be posing as, the emotional turmoil began to roil.
There must have been something mysterious and powerful in my DNA that, at such an early age, I knew profoundly that I could not pose as the Mother of God. I was a shy child and didn’t like being the center of attention. And yet, I knew the Southern cultural code of compliance-do what you are told. I always did. Don’t ask questions, especially about religion. I didn’t ever. Believe, don’t question. It was ingrained early. I kept my silence and held back my tears. I tried to get through the rest of the day at school, but Mrs. Frazer’s words were a buzz; the blackboard was a blur. The images of last year’s nativity kept emerging like a giant movie in front of my tiny face—figures of a man and woman that looked like ghosts in a crowded area with people dressed in strange-looking animal costumes, boys dressed as shepherds and exotic kings, girls and boys dressed in white angel robes. The scene was eerie. As I came back to what was going on in the classroom, I felt alone and segregated from my fifteen other classmates. No one else seemed bothered by their roles.
When I got home and told my mother what had happened, I broke down. The tears kept coming, and I didn’t understand why. My mother showed her practiced reassurance: “Oh, you will be a perfect Mary. What an honor! You won’t have to do a thing, Isabel, but just sit there and look pretty.”
“Yes, ma’am but….” I couldn’t speak beyond the pro forma, and her attempt to console me only sent me further into distress. The words, “Just sit there and look pretty,” would become a refrain throughout my time lived in Alabama. “Just sit there and look pretty” didn’t just apply to religious training. I would later learn it was the mandate for Southern girls in the 1950s if they wanted to meet success in the world, and meeting success in Montgomery, Alabama meant marrying– a man!
I couldn’t sleep that night. So many questions and the recurring movie and this time, I was in it, my little body rolled up in a blue and gold robe, hovering over the Son of God, a doll wrapped in what looked like bandages. The whole set that was in my mind had a scary, supernatural feeling that multiplied my anxiety.
The next day at school, Mrs. Frazer took me aside to discuss what I would be wearing in the pageant and what would be happening. There would be one other person, a fellow student, Mark, who would play Joseph, Jesus’ father, but wait, not his real father. It was all so confusing. A doll, that represented Jesus, would be in a crib right in front of me. I didn’t have to say anything. I would be wearing that blue and gold robe that I had appeared in in my ruminations the night before. Again, the stoic Southern-girl leitmotif come from Mrs. Frazer. “Isabel, You’ll just sit there and look pretty” brought on an avalanche of emotion. I tried to hold back the tears but couldn’t. She asked me to explain, and I sputtered out that I was afraid and couldn’t pretend to be Mary. Mrs. Frazer seemed to understand and leaned in to give me a hug.
“Isabel, you won’t have to do anything, but if you really, really don’t want to play the part of Mary, you don’t have to. Please, please don’t cry.” My small, thin body relaxed for the first time in 24 hours, and I became myself again. Mrs. Frazer had saved me from my first conflict with religion and from pretending to be someone I knew I was not —a theme that would surface many times before I finally left Alabama in 1973 and found my safe place.
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*Statue in photo – church owns 300 dresses for it, rotating them daily to create her signature look. The woman is Terry Garcia, the current (as of 2021) Sacristana of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, constructed beginning in 1869 in Santa Fe, New Mexico
