The Gothic and My Grandmother

In other posts, I’ve written about my connection to that scary mountain music of Appalachian South. I’ve also written about how, when art connected to those themes reappears, I find it immediately connects with me. But the most personal connection I had with this material was my father’s mother.

Born and raised in Tennessee with frequent trips to North Texas (and back), she survived the lean times of the Great Depression with her two siblings, went on to marry a Brooklyn-born GI, was a stenographer, and was a loving — and gently eccentric — grandmother.

That said, there were a number of times during her visits to my safe, suburban home where she related some of the viscera, gore, and makeshift tourniquets required by farm life in the early 20th century. I recall her recounting her own grandmother telling her to “hide her eyes” as the field workers helped in the home exsanguination of a dead relative and poured the bowls of blood into the fields. In the days before refrigeration, this, in addition to wrapping the body in ice from the ice-house, was necessary to make sure the body was sufficiently undamaged so that the undertaker could do his work. In fact, this bloody work had a piece of furniture associated with it: the “cooling board,” which, in my memory, she called a “cooling chair.”

As I recall, my parents were out with my grandmother once looking at antiques and someone has mislabeled a piece as a “chaise lounge” which required my grandmother’s correction: “Oh, child, that’s a coolin’ chay-uh.”

Death was just another thing to be managed, like foxes on the property, stillbirths, and kitchen fires. I remember checking out a book called Foxfire from my elementary school library once which talked about the realities of Appalachian life. Coincidentally, she and my grandfather were staying with us. I left it out one night in the living room and, the next day, I found out she’d stayed up most of the night reading the book cover to cover. She recognized the stories of tobacco drying and corn shucking. I’ll always wonder which of those stories didn’t need history for her to clearly recall them.

I had never really put two and two together, but my grandmother was a vessel of the English-Scots-Irish Gothic’s migration into Appalachia from Europe to me.