Instead of mincing like a preadolescent girl, for two years I cantered, galloped, trotted, and occasionally even pranced.
During this period, my sister visited Boston. Her gift to me upon her return was a treasured black leather bridle, complete with steel bit. With that bit between my teeth, and her (or my mother) holding the reins, I ran around our front yard, neighing.
In the middle of my dilemma over how to express my creative energy without its being ridiculed, interrupted, or destroyed, my mother asked if I would like to take piano lessons. At first, I recoiled from the suggestion, since it would mean sitting inside for long periods and I preferred to run. But Mamie felt strongly that one of her daughters should play the piano, given her own talent and love for music.
After weeks of discussion, I agreed. My first teacher, Mrs. Bowen, lived near us and taught in her home. After about a year with her, I transferred to the Birmingham Conservatory of Music and half-hour lessons from Miss Edith Plosser. I was excited to have a music teacher with such an unusual name, though she seemed cold and stern. Her repeated complaint was that I did not practice seriously or long enough. Since we did not own a piano, practice meant calling our across-the-street neighbor, Nell Hill, to find out when it was convenient for me to come over to her house where there was an out-of-tune upright. At the same time that she complained about my sketchy practicing, Miss Plosser thought me potentially talented, so she set me to such masters as Bach, Scarlatti, and Clementi. They had no tunes and were terribly demanding technically. I began to cut practice times shorter than usual.
Once I was safely ensconced at the conservatory, Mamie convinced my father that I had to have a piano. Somehow, one was procured—a Betsy Ross spinet, made in America of partly seasoned wood because of the Second World War. Since our house was already liberally furnished, my piano was placed in the hallway outside my bedroom door. My sister’s bedroom was at the end of that hall, so when I practiced, she was trapped in or barred from her room. Any time she interrupted, I welcomed the break, though the situation must have irritated Betty.
My third teacher, Mr. Parker, was over six feet tall with jet black hair and deep-set, searching eyes. His hands were enormous, reaching an octave plus two with ease. His span and temperament inclined him toward Franz Liszt, so I studied most of Liszt’s corpus. My hands are also fairly large and by sheer determination, I can play an octave plus two. I gave that measure of determination because I was amazed at the raw emotion within the music. A part of me otherwise unknown and unencouraged was awakened, and putting my passion into the ivory keyboard had less risk than my previously chosen media. My interpretations pleased Mr. Parker, so he set me to such equally romantic giants as Rachmaninoff, Katchaturian, and the mature Chopin. I suddenly turned from a phlegmatic pupil into someone who went eagerly to her turquoise velvet piano stool and stayed there, hoping my sister would not need to get into or out of her bedroom, pounding away at the forte passages, rendering soft parts with maximum tragic sadness.
At first I exulted in the forte passages, hitting the keys with such ferocity that I sometimes made the crystal vase that sat atop the piano vibrate. After seeing Rubenstein at our local auditorium, I began to raise myself off the piano stool as I banged some percussive chord of a Chopin étude or Rachmaninoff concerto. Gradually, as I came to trust both the piano and myself more, I let myself pour years of accumulated melancholy and aloneness into the pianissimo phrases, knowing without language that the keyboard was a safer repository for such emotions than writing or speech. After all, the moment I struck the key, the act was over. Musical tears could always be explained away as deriving from Chopin’s romanticism or Brahms’s sweetness. Not having to “own” the emotions that sounded from my fingers emboldened me to express myself more deeply and fully than in any other circumstance or medium.
Playing the piano gave me even more satisfaction than playing pitch with a hard ball. Like my hero, Walt Dropo, I was left-handed and preferred to play first base, since it was one of the few instances in which being left-handed counted for rather than against me. I had a beautiful leather hardball glove with Walt’s signature on the claw, and the clean “splop” of a ball landing solidly in the pocket of that mitt brought me small but distinct rushes through my mid-twenties when I finally abandoned playing pitch.
My two outlets became counterproductive, since the ferocity with which I played pitch endangered my hands for executing delicate piano runs. Mamie, of course, wanted me to give up pitch, but I refused. Once I went so far as to limit baseball to two hours a day during the month immediately preceding a major recital. I remember occasionally going to lessons (in the musty house where Mr. Parker and hisailing mother lived) with a sprained finger. My thumb took the worst beating: if I reached to catch a side ball incorrectly, my thumb bent back on itself from the force of the throw. When that happened, swelling set in, lasting at least three days. Often I could not play a note intended for the right thumb because mine was too big for the space between keys.
The worst scene in this battle of wits with my mother and between the selves warring within me occurred the month before my senior recital. After several solo pieces, I was to end by playing a Katchaturian duo with my teacher. By this point in my career, I knew I was good, at least at broadly romantic music. Maybe I panicked at the prospect of a career as a pianist. In any event, I entered into my pitch activity with renewed concentration, extending my allotment by however many minutes it took Mamie to realize my time was up.
A week before the big event at the concert grand, as I was catching a particularly hard throw by my playmate, Kenny, I felt searing pain. As my thumb folded back, I knew I had sprained it badly. I began immediately soaking my swollen finger religiously. After two days, my thumb barely fit into the key area. Lying about my pain, I practiced with a strange enthusiasm, leaving off my baseball fetish entirely. The night of my performance, pains shot from my thumb up into my right arm. No one knew I had taken six aspirin just before leaving home. I executed my solo pieces with clarity and passion, and in the final duo, Mr. Parker and I played superbly. The audience applauded enthusiastically, but I took that recital as further proof of something I was coming increasingly to believe and practice: people seemed satisfied, even pleased, with performances at which not quite all of me was present or in which not quite all of me was engaged.
Part of my coming to consciousness as a feminist has been a growing understanding that my mother was indeed an artist, whose media included church work, flower gardening, and decorating her home. In the South of her youth, girls seldom resisted the cultural pressures to marry and become mothers. My mother seems genuinely to have enjoyed her home and family. But the person talented enough to win a music scholarship surely must also have needed creative outlets. The intensity with which she carried out her Altar Guild duties, planted new bulbs, arranged flowers throughout the house, or created beauty in our living room impressed me even as a young child. As I struggled not to fear or suppress my own creativity, I believe I watched Mamie more closely, looking for clues to becoming a woman with deep longings for aesthetic and spiritual fulfillment.
I frankly have no idea what would have been done about my spiritual training without my mother’s influence. Whatever Daddy may have believed about Christianity or any other religious system, he felt no need to attend church or to discuss religion with me as I was growing up. Once he did tell me that the part of the Bible he liked best was Psalm 1, so I read it repeatedly, trying to discover some clue about him or me or God. The psalm speaks angrily about the ways of the wicked being like “chaff which the wind driveth away,” and of the wicked themselves perishing. One’s only hope seems to be not to walk “in the counsel of the wicked” or sit “in the seat of the scorners,” which to my father may have meant doing tax forms free for people whom the world deemed unworthy. To my young mind, however, these images called up harshness and punishment; they advocated strictness to the letter of the law if a person wanted to escape terrible consequences. I did not find the God behind this psalm appealing and was not surprised that my father preferred to stay home on Sundays and read the paper.
But Christ was important to my mother, and she talked to me about him often. Her stories centered around a nice man who helped everyone, judged people not by their actions but rather by their inner wishes, and worked breathtaking miracles without a wand