Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in the South and went away long enough to be ready to come back. You could say I’m from South Carolina in a lot of ways that matter and in some ways that definitely don’t. After trying on other states and a few cities for size, I ended up in rural southside Virginia, and here I am: caught in a glad sticky web of husband, work, family, friends, pets, and a farmhouse in constant need of improvement.
My Grandmother’s Skin
In the photograph my grandmother is standing on a beach. She is about fifty, and her bathing suit shows off what used to be called a good figure. She wears a straw hat with a small brim and huge round sunglasses. Though I remember her as gentle, the cigarette she has between her lips as she squares off to the camera makes her look tough.
The picture is no more than three inches square. I bring it closer, ready to recall the grandmother of my early childhood. Maybe I remember that beach. Maybe I know those sunglasses. I get caught up in the familiar act of constructing, inventing memory. If I wasn’t there, I could have been, and soon I will be capable of thinking back to this moment as part of my life, even if I could have been no older than two at the time. If I was born at all.
This time, though, I am stopped in my nostalgia making. My eyes travel over my grandmother’s figure and reach her legs. I don’t remember having seen Nana’s bare legs in the nineteen years that I knew her. Even at the beach, she always wore long pants, and now I see why. Traveling up one leg is a long uneven area of pale skin, light against the summer tan. A smaller white spot covers the opposite knee, and others freckle her arms and chest. The photograph is not black and white, but it is old enough that the colors have melted into something other worldly—the pastels of a time that has passed. Still, the small shock I feel does not come from finding a lost memory, but from finding my own present here, on this circa 1960 sepia beach.
***
Soon after finishing grad school I adopted a dog named Trouble who lived up to her name. One day she pulled me down onto the pavement in her haste to catch a squirrel. My favorite jeans were ruined, and the scrapes on my knees lasted weeks. I thought nothing of it when the new skin was lighter than the old, but gradually what had seemed to be scars began to spread. Other spots appeared on my elbows, my hands, my abdomen. Vitiligo, my parents pronounced. My father showed me a white spot on his hand. My mother pulled back the neck of her blouse to show me a spot on her shoulder. I fell back into the reassurance of genetic belonging.
Except that soon I would surpass my parents in this inheritance. What were small pale sandbars that refused to tan turn to islands that claim more and more territory. My fingers are almost entirely white, and archipelagos are emerging across my feet and along the underside of my upper arms. In my mid-forties I retreat into long sleeves, long skirts, long pants, even in the summertime. The feeling of the sun’s heat on my skin is high on my list of pleasures, but it is one I now deny myself. An hour in the sun makes my condition emerge, like a slowly
developing photograph, contours and contrasts presenting themselves more loudly to the world.
***
Vitiligo is thought to be an autoimmune disorder affecting one to two percent of the population. Something in the body makes the cells that cause pigmentation—melanocytes— die or switch off. Internet sites call the causes “mysterious.” Doctors shake their heads sympathetically. As a carrier, I am lucky to be of European descent, since the disease is much more obvious for those with darker skin. Michael Jackson is perhaps the most prominent sufferer from Vitiligo, which afflicted him starting in the mid-1980s. His post-adolescent paleness was not merely a vain cosmetic decision, as he once explained to Oprah. He claimed he underwent the expensive and painful skin peels to hide what nature was doing to him—to get ahead of the process, as it were. Domestic animals can also have vitiligo: Arabian horses, Rottweilers, some breeds of chickens.
I stare at my computer screen, at photographs of vitiligo. A small happy girl strikes a ballerina pose in a tutu, her legs and arms brown and white like a palomino pony. A big black dog with pink spots gazes into the camera, head on paws. A hand with no body, looking like a medical specimen, bears a caption “young woman with vitiligo.” My own hand as it rests on the keyboard looks like hers. Tan and pinkish-cream, dark and light, present and absent. Like the flat screen before me, the surface of my skin resists questions about what lies beneath and beyond it. Questions about heredity, belonging, transformation, disease.
Still, I keep looking, jumping from one site to another in search of an explanation for what is happening to the body I present to the world. I go to medical sites, to encyclopedias, to fan pages, to support groups, foundations, chat rooms. I encounter all kinds of information and conflicting advice. I learn that someone is working on a possible cure using an extract from black pepper. I find a genetic explication of the disease that I cannot understand. At bottom, it seems that there is not much to be done about this condition, at least not right now. Beneath it all, I am back to the shaded binary that grows on me, while the computer whirs along with no good answers, spinning stories from its invisible code.
***
When I think about the freckles that sprinkle across my son’s nose, the mole on his chest, I wonder whether his skin will always follow the pattern of dark on light, or whether it too will develop its own inverse, like Harry the Dirty Dog washed in slow motion. Looking at him also reminds me that there are many worse things to worry about. The nightmares of my maternal imagination, after all, have conjured much darker things for both of us. Vitiligo is not fatal. It is, from a certain point of view, a cosmetic inconvenience. Some cultures have associated it with the presence of evil, but most know better. By my fifties, the negative has
developed on most of my skin. I am the palest person in every room, or so it seems in my morning weightlifting class, where I watch myself raise my white, white arms over my head. A brown spot on my face, shaped like Brazil, persists from earlier days, not an age spot so much as a memory on my cheek. So I should just stay out of the sun, suck it up, and get on with my life. As my husband once put it, most people don’t care about what I look like nearly as much as I think they do.
But vanity is hard to shake. For a southern woman, I don’t wear a lot of makeup, but that started to change twenty years ago when I first hid the rough white triangles under my eyes with something meant to cover dark circles. Without it, I was Perrot in reverse, a constant sad clown. A pale spot the size of a silver dollar grew under my chin; soon it would ease over my jawbone and I would start looking for the perfect liquid foundation. In time, my grandchildren will trace the continents on my cheeks and ask me what they mean.
Once ladies wouldn’t go out without gloves and hats. I have slowly taken on yesterday’s fashions as my own affectations, more eccentric than I want to be, or at least at an earlier age. The spaces I live in are littered with brimmed hats and bottles of expensive sunscreen, spf 80.
***
In my real memories of my grandmother on the beach, her outfit is very different from the 1950s bathing suit in the picture. By the time I started to notice, she was wearing brightly colored lightweight clothes onto the beach with us. She wore long-sleeved floral blouses, gloves, and wide-brimmed hats. Her favorite beach pants were a startling yellow. My Frogmore pants, she called them, named after a tiny South Carolina town near the state park where we stayed. We knew almost nothing about Frogmore as a real place, but we loved the name and chanted it with delight each time she came out to join her grandchildren on the sand.
She was wearing vintage Frogmore the day she saved us from drowning. At low tide, my cousins and I decided to swim out to the sandbar that came and went each day. When we got there we ran from end to end collecting shells, thrilled to be on land that was temporary, ephemeral, emerging—a gift, we thought, to those brave enough to reach it.
We didn’t hear our parents calling from the shore as the tide came in. Nana had planted a stick in the sand near her fishing bucket when we swam out, and now the stick was nearly covered by insistent, incoming waves. Our fathers swam out to meet us and help us through the undertow. Only when we got back did we understand our danger, when our mothers caught us up and scolded us, when my father turned and walked away to find a beer, shaking. Nana had stood watch over our rescue, a flag on the beach in canary slacks.
***
In May of my first year of college, Nana was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given just a few months to live. That same year, I was expected to start the summer season as a South Carolina debutante. A newly-minted Smith feminist with theory and politics on my side, I resisted, but my mother’s wishes were hard to refuse when she was away in Kentucky at her own dying mother’s bedside. And though Mama thought of herself as a feminist, too, she called more than once to tell me that a debutante season was something she had always wanted for her only daughter. Luncheons, dinners, and dances filled that June and July, and I went to all of them, torn between scoffing at the process and worrying that my clothes weren’t right.
Sometime that summer I flew to Louisville to see Nana for the last time. She had a favor to ask of me. Would I go shopping to find a wig that would suit her after chemo? My mother had a mission for me, as well: to decide on the type of debutante gown I would wear for the balls the following winter. Mama and I were to visit bridal shops, where I could try on wedding gowns for form and fit. We could stop by some wig stores in the same neighborhood.
What followed was a strange day of shopping. The gowns were of course white, the wigs gray, and my summer tan made for bright contrasts. With each fitting I saw more than someone else’s dress or hair: I felt costumed in other phases of my own life. I was only nineteen, but all day I shifted dutifully from bride to matriarch and back. I was both fiancée and grandmother, though I had no family of my own. The day was shaded with sadness, for my dying grandmother and, vaguely, for other things I would surely lose as my life progressed from moment to moment. But looking in the mirror at the older versions of myself, I was also interested to think what those future selves might be like.
***
By forty-five I was past being a bride and years away from being a grandmother. My hair was losing color, like my skin, but more slowly and more conventionally. I did not color it. But when my skin darkened in the summer in spite of all my efforts to stay pale, I applied self-tanning lotion to the white spots on my hands and elbows. Awkwardly, imperfectly, I tried to erase what my genes are doing to the canvas of my skin. Each time my mother caught me doing this, she recalled her mother doing the same thing, painting tanning lotion on with a Q-tip. During this daily cosmetic task, I had time to feel several things: annoyance that I needed to do it, shame that my vanity wouldn’t let me skip it, connection with my grandmother, and a passing irrational fear. Did this routine application of chemical stain to her skin cause her cancer? Never mind that she smoked her whole life, that she drank considerably more than I did, and that she lived in a different time. As I worked to cover that spot on my thumb, I couldn’t help but think about where my similarity to her might end.
My grandmother was the middle daughter of three, raised by a divorced mother and doting grandparents. When her grandfather died, he left money to each of the three girls. The oldest lived off of her inheritance for as long as it lasted in Brooklyn (drank it up with her common-law husband, according to my mother). The youngest took hers and spent it on a trip around the world. My grandmother used her money to build a house, the Louisville house in which my mother grew up and to which we grandchildren would make long summer visits. Of the three daughters, she was the one who grew tomatoes and sewed her granddaughters’ dresses for dancing school. She taught us to bait a hook and to catch lightning bugs. I remember her deft, two-toned hands reaching out to play Parcheesi or Mah Jong. Our Nana,
earth-mother with a map on her skin.
***
Before our family gathered for our annual week at the beach, I visited the local Good Will and found exactly what I was looking for. On that first sunny July morning, I emerged from the beach house in rainbow-striped slacks, a long-sleeved fuscia t-shirt, movie-star shades, and a very large sunhat. I struck a pose and got the response I was expecting. Frogmore! my family exclaimed. My cousin snapped a digital picture, destined for family email circles in the weeks to come. I hide my inheritance, and I wear it. Beneath these clothes, the story mapped on my body changes and grows.
