And Another Thing: The Aunts

By Carole Taylor


My mother's mother died when my mother was 4 years old, and after being shuffled around to various female relatives, she was finally reared by my grandfather's two sisters. That in itself is a long story and it gets longer each year, but I'll only tell part of it here.

Every summer all through my childhood, Mama would pack up my brother and me at the crack of dawn and we'd leave what would have promised to be a reasonable summer day in the mountains in Tennessee and plow with my mother's determined German intensity through six hours of sweltering valley humidity west toward Memphis and my great aunts' house.

Kitty had lived with someone named Erin until Erin died of cancer when she was 40 or so. I never knew Erin, but a journal of hers ended up in a box of old photographs Mama has. Nanny, my other great aunt, lived with her friend Mamie, and when Erin died, Nanny and Mamie moved in with Kitty. They were all school teachers together, and the three remaining women lived together for 40 years. Kitty had one bedroom with two twin beds and slept alone. Nanny and Mamie had a big double bed in the other bedroom, and shared it. They all wore men's pajamas, or at least the style of men's pajamas. But during the day, and every day regardless of the occasion, they all wore dresses and pearls, though Kitty snuck in overalls when she could get away with it. They each had specific duties around the house which said more about them than a resume. Kitty did the yard the way she taught math. Mamie cooked breakfast and let Nanny sleep late, and she cleaned the house with maniacal rectitude. Every day. Nanny dragged her spoiled and Mamie-coddled self to the kitchen around eleven and cooked dinner. Lunch, to you Yankees. They played canasta as if it were the solution to world peace, and they went to church every Sunday but didn't mention it otherwise, and they ran around all over creation in a classic '57 Chevy. Nanny drove.

Now, growing up, I had no reason to examine their lives. They were just The Aunts. They came to visit us in the mountains the summers we didn't go to Memphis, and they played canasta with my grandmother and they made me nervous. I tiptoed around my real aunts because they had little patience for children. I liked Mamie best because she was soft and a hugger. My blood great aunts preferred that I be ever somewhere else because I was almost always fresh from some event which involved mud and puppies and a smelly horse, all of which would waft in ahead of me.

I actually didn't think about their relationship with each other until years after I came out. They were just The Aunts. But once I did consider the possible implications of that double bed, I was pretty sure I knew who else they were. When I pointed out this probability to my mother, she was of course abashed in her typical Southern belle way, denied it and blew me off. Mama is convinced that I sprang fully and uniquely warped from among an otherwise perfectly unbending German heritage stretching back to a signer of the Declaration of Independence. She does not know why I popped out the way I did, but I am the only mistake her family ever produced. Just me.

One day a few summers ago, I was going through the mountain of Nanny's old photographs, some of which date to the Civil War, and in among Nanny's things I chanced upon a photograph of her and Mamie when they were in their 30's, around 1920. Mamie is in her usual girlie-girl dress and pearls and heels and blush and sitting in a chair gazing up at Nanny. Nanny has on a man's suit and tie and men's shoes, and looks back at Mamie with adoring eyes. The denouement of this photographic novel is unmistakable.

I probably shouldn't have, but I'm evil and I couldn't help myself. I took the picture to my mother, who years before had made her denial and as much as called me a novelist long before I was one, and said, "What's up with this outfit?" She looked at it closely as I watched her face. There was a pause. Apparently she hadn't seen this picture before, or hadn't looked at it with a lengthy attention span. "Oh...you know Nanny...she was always clowning around...." she evaded. But she knew what I was pointing out, now that I had pointed it out again.

Nanny did clown around a lot. But this wasn't Halloween. And in Erin's journal, along with pictures of a trip the four of them made to California and poems Erin had written, there is a quote from an author that I had not heard of till I was nearly 30. The quote was important to Erin, but the author's name was what riveted me: Radclyffe Hall. If you don't know who that is, you need to go look her up.

Finding our history is important to all of us. Finding clues that women generations ago knew who they were and knew their connection to a larger community is our own connection to that larger community. That it took me half my life to find I'm not alone in my family is one of the reasons I write about coming out. History lost is no history at all. History not spoken is history rewritten, because it then depends on supposition and detective work and chancing on documentary evidence that still only hints at a greater truth.

That Nanny and Mamie loved each other was never questioned by anyone in the family, ever. That they shared their lives intimately for 40 years is fact. That they were devoted to one another is unquestioned. I call that a marriage. And I don't want some great niece of mine (surely Godde will grant me *one* lesbian heir) 30 years from now, to *wonder* about who I was, or who Bridget was, or why we slept in a big double bed.

Come out, come out, come out when you can. For your children. No matter who gives them birth, we all give them life.


Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.