We are looking innocently and intently into one another’s faces, seemingly with no heed of the camera, the photographer, or the other children. The outside world had vanished for that frozen moment.
The other photo dates from high school days. I am at Sarah Jones’s house after school, palling around with her and Sue Hood, another schoolmate. The three of us were fast friends for a year until Sarah and Sue began having predictable dates with boys, and I sunk further into my inability to secure any such prize. On this afternoon, we are posing suggestively: Sarah lounges on her front step while I stand near her in a pose I’d seen Hedy Lamarr strike in movies. We look content and connected, something I was not to feel often outside the confines of my home.
When I was eight, I made my first and only penny peep show and experienced a devastating blow to my efforts to share my creative self outside my family. My mother carefully taught me how to construct such a spectacle. First you must find a sloping hillside (we had a huge one in our vacant lot filled with flower beds). Then you take a trowel—or better yet your hands—and burrow into the slope. When the space is the right size, you line it with cardboard to keep out falling dirt and curious bugs. With the frame complete, the real work begins. A penny peep show is made up of tiny bits of paper or material, formed into recognizable objects, all placed in that hollowed-out space and covered with a piece of window glass. The glass in turn is covered with a cloth or strip of cardboard, thus hiding your “show” from view. People are then invited to take a peep at the cost of a penny. These projects were popular in my childhood, and I paid lots of pennies to see other children’s shows.
When I came to make my own, I decided to be more elaborate in my choice of objects to put in the boxed-in space. I made tables and chairs of match sticks, painstakingly gluing each slim stick to its fellows. I constructed people from wads of cotton, dressing them in scraps of cloth from my mother’s hooked rug work basket. Finally, I wrapped live flowers in tiny waxed-paper containers that would hold water longer than newspaper. After almost a week of preparations, I invited neighbor children and even a few select adults to “peep” by writing crude invitations that I dropped into mailboxes. On the appointed day, I stationed myself beside my wonder half an hour before showtime, just in case someone tried to get a free sneak preview. As viewers began to arrive and give me their pennies, my heart pounded with what I would only later understand to be artist’s nerves before an unveiling.
After about ten people had come, I took advantage of a lull to run inside to the bathroom. Less than five minutes later, I returned to find the glass smashed in, the flowers crushed, and the little matchstick furniture in shambles. I burst into angry tears and screams that lasted over an hour. I was inconsolable, filled with fury for whoever had destroyed some inner part of me that I had lovingly presented to be “peeped” at. My mother never convinced me to build another show, though she often would sit on the ground with me and begin putting things together from the dirt around us. I would watch her for a few moments and then break into sobs until she had to take me inside and comfort me with candy or some other sweet.
The next Easter Mamie gave me a gorgeous spun sugar egg: a peep show with an isinglass window that opened onto a resplendent garden filled with every imaginable flower and a bunny for good measure. The next year, she began giving me special decorated eggs made of thin milk glass. Each bore my name, the date, and some lovely design: tiny blue forget-me-nots; a bouquet of purple violets; a wreath of yellow jonquils. I have moved this collection around with me over the past thirty-five years.
I do not remember making anything for a long time after my peep show was wrecked. Determined to protect myself, I retreated into my head, where images and creations seemed safer than when set out for public display. I crammed in story after story of little girls who saved friends from disaster and then gradually focused on horses or cats or more exotic animals once I had read Kipling. In the animal stories, I was always the undying champion who rescued them from capture and caging in zoos, or from natural predators.
One of my favorites, which I told myself from the ages of eight to eleven, with minor variations, focused on the same subject as my game with trucks among the oak roots—running away:
A little girl packs a wicker picnic basket with all the leftover fried chicken and biscuits from her mother’s refrigerator, leaving room for her floppy-eared harlequin rabbit and a story book. Then she tiptoes out of her house while her mother fixes lunch. She runs as fast as she can, as long as she can, and winds up on the edge of town where the road begins to open onto lush meadows filled with butterflies and brown-skinned hopping rabbits.
She runs into the very center of this grass sea, plops down with her cache of chicken and biscuits, and begins unwrapping little packets of food. She can never eat just the one she’s made for that afternoon but keeps at it until all the food is gone. Her stomach full, she lies down in the field, reads a little, quickly falls into a sleep filled with magical dreams. Usually she is awakened by a beautiful yellow and blue butterfly lighting on her nose or by a furry rabbit sniffing loudly around her hair and face. These interruptions never frighten her, because she never wakes to find it dark.
Once the little girl sits up, she realizes that she is hungry. It is dusk and the sun is going down. She begins to feel cold and lonely, hugs her rabbit to her chest, and sings herself back to sleep. She is protected during the night by fairies or brownies and rises to a glorious sunrise and a little dish of Cream of Wheat.
After eating, she sets out for far places that she always reaches safely. These journeys lead the little girl to cities and countries whose names her big sister has taught her, places like Borneo and Atlanta and Walla Walla, Washington, her favorite place in the world to say out loud.
My stories never had endings. I just stopped telling them or let them trail off into shadowy scenes while I went into the kitchen to help my mother do the dishes. As I retrace their outline, I realize that what is missing is another human being. Though I was able to surround my heroine with benign and affectionate nature, I could not conceive a companion of her own kind.
The closest I ever came to such a person was my make-believe baby sister. Between the ages of seven and ten, disliking dolls, I fabricated Sarah Sue, much my junior. I bossed her around unmercifully but defended her from the ornaments that were likely to slip off their marble-top tables at any moment and from the adults who could interrupt her at their whim. She was an admiring audience for my roly poly bug collections, my June bug captures, my skating up and down the sidewalk that marked our property boundaries. She consoled me about having to eat at least one or two of the carrots on my plate or about having to sit quietly after lunch in the summer. When my mother took me downtown while she shopped at all her favorite department stores, Sarah Sue listened to my endless complaining and shared my dislike of such activities. I do not remember why I stopped creating her, but I suspect it had something to do with her getting too big to handle and having a will of her own. In any event, I eventually gave her up rather than continuing to drag her around as a flimsy sign of my imaginary power.
Just about the time I lost Sarah Sue, I entered into one of the most purely creative if bizarre stages of my young life. I felt increasing pressure to become more lady-like, as Mamie talked about brassieres and lipstick and ruffled dresses. I decided to withdraw from the irksome business of growing up, since I knew that I did not want to become a southern lady, learning how to faint without hurting myself or letting my skirt rise above my knees, or how to lower my eyes, hold them down, and then raise them slowly and alluringly. While my mother indoctrinated me into the culture she believed I was destined for, something inside me resisted fiercely. Sensing that Toni, the defiant ten year old, would lose, I cleverly chose to become a horse. I had already read many cowboy stories as well as technical studies of horses that described breeds, named body parts, and defined various gaits and habits.
Borrowing from one of my favorite radio programs, “Tennessee Jed and His Great Horse Smokey,” I became Smokey. Weekday afternoons an hour before the “Lone Ranger,” the show was a southern version of the classic masked Samaritan. Having no gender, Smokey was a means for me to escape the confining behaviors appropriate for adolescent girls. I whinnied at the table when I wanted something, and my parents acknowledged but did not disrupt my fantasy. Years later, when I took psychology courses and learned that children are hospitalized for far less severe antisocial or withdrawal