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I first felt the town's indelible weight through Mama's Victorian interpretations. She had grown up in the town and, according to her, its people were alert to our every move. Even on the farm, we felt their eyes. I escaped them by riding my horse to the back of the field and climbing my favorite tree, a Chinaberry in whose forked branches I sat for hours, reading. I couldn't hear Mama even when she yelled, though, sometimes, if I looked up and saw a small figure waving vigorously from the back fence, I came on home.

For years after I returned to live in Alachua as an adult, I collected my mail from the post office after dark, took my exercise walks at night, alone, and never used my front door which could be seen from the street. I wanted to avoid the townspeople; I didn't want them to see me. "At home, estranged," a visiting friend proclaimed.

By Mama's lights, Alachua was a living courtroom in which she was always on trial. If you listened to her, we all were. I was forty, and she was still monitoring me, now, about accepting an invitation to swim in a private pool:

"I wouldn't be going out there to their house every day if I was you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I wouldn't be doing it."

"Doing what?"

"Going out to their place every day and swimming in their pool. It just doesn't look right."

"But, Mama, they invited me to use the pool."

"Well, I sure wouldn't. Somebody will have something to say about it."

Mother was concerned with form and, if she were telling this, she'd go about it differently. She'd think first of how it looks. When she organized our family photo album, on the left side of the first page she put a picture of herself wearing a navy skirt, dressy white blouse, and high-heeled shoes and, opposite her, one of Daddy dressed all in white--shoes, shirts, slacks--the works. Daddy's holding a white hat and his hair is black. Mama's was completely white, even before they married. Slightly below the narrow space between those first two pictures, she pasted one of the farmhouse they moved into before I was born. Then me, a baby hugging a soft doll, lying on a pallet in the sunshine beside a weathered cypress wall. Behind the house’s pitched tin roof, a mule angles his head over the barnyard fence and into the picture.

Mother left out her first child, who died at birth: "Little Brother." Somewhere, I once saw a picture taken at Antioch Cemetery of my father, glassy-eyed, holding the small bundle that was his infant son’s blanket-wrapped body. At the gravesite, Daddy insisted on undressing the baby. Looking for some visible reason for his boy’s death, Aunt Nadine said. Daddy thought it was punishment for all his drinking.

Until I was a teenager and visited a girlfriend who lived in town, I knew only three places there: my grandparents' Queen Anne house, the First Baptist Church, and the school. I saw them first through my mother's eyes. She had grown up in the house to which she had one of her first-graders deliver me, a preschooler, on weekday mornings while she was opening class at the same Alachua school she'd attended as a child. She was the first person baptized in our yellow brick church, built in 1918. She knew these places as well as her own face in the bathroom mirror.

When I entered kindergarten, I was allowed to walk alone the short dirt lane to Grandmother's. She had bought the house with Granddaddy Meggs's life insurance money, moved Mother, Aunt Nancy, and Uncle Colson in, and advertised it as a boardinghouse. But people didn't have to sleep there to eat her chicken and dumplings, hoecakes, and fried fish; they could come just for lunch. One night, Mother, wakeful in her front bedroom, overheard the parlor ceremony in which Grandmother married one of her boarders, Malachi Strickland.

The family had been Methodist until Grandmother remarried. Now, they attended the First Baptist Church where Granddaddy Strickland was a founding member and a deacon. He took his duties seriously, operating the house as nearly as possible like an outpost of First Baptist. Most of my conversations with him were biblically based and, today, considering my grandparents and their influence, I realize that, as a child, I saw little more in them than the rigidity of the couple in Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic.

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Among my grandparents' dearest friends were the three Morgans, retired missionaries who came each winter to visit and stayed for several weeks. When we heard acorns crunching under car wheels, we ran to the kitchen window and watched as Dr. Morgan slowly pulled his car and house trailer into the dirt lane, then parked under the limbs of a big oak near the back door. Wearing voile dresses and lace-up shoes, Mrs. Morgan and her grown-up daughter, Constance, jumped out with brooms and swept up the crushed acorns. Then they set up folding chairs and had a cold supper laid by the time Dr. Morgan got the trailer's electric and water lines hooked up. After supper, they were ready to give lessons.

In between Bible verses and songs, the Morgans told us stories about the Chinese heathen they had converted and saved from Hell. Constance handed out colored paper, scissors, and paste for the construction of one-inch square gospel books. As my sister and I dutifully cut and pasted together inch-square bits of paper, Constance sang the story symbolized by each double-spread page: red for my scarlet sins, black for Hell, yellow for God’s love, blue and green for the sky and the earth He had created, and white for my soul after Jesus washed it clean. The books had no words. Subsequent lessons began with our singing this song for Constance as, each week, we cut and pasted new books. We were to carry the books with us at all times but, inevitably, mine got lost in the corners of my pockets and came out of my washed clothes as pea-shaped balls of lint.

Though we may have thought a little less fervently about our salvation, we were more relaxed when the Morgans left because, for one thing, Grandmother could go back to cooking in the aluminum pots they had warned her against. Even without their influence, however, the Strickland house remained orderly, governed by Granddaddy's rules. Daily, he read the Southern Baptist Handbook, along with his Bible readings, after lunch. In good weather, he read lying in the front porch swing and, afterwards, fell asleep there.

The front porch was off the living room which was cool, dark, and quiet, and, when I was a child, never used. No one played the piano or read the musty books Uncle Colson left stored in the oak secretary when he went away to World War II, and wherever he lived after that. Except me. I read the books, and I also played the upright piano, though I was often made to stop because Granddaddy was napping (a perplexing reason, since he was deaf). While he slept, I took off my shoes and silently leapt from one piece of furniture to another, admiring my image in Grandmother’s gold-framed mirror which hung over the fireplace from a heavy cord and reflected the entire room.

Grandmother's ruby red wool rug was her most exotic possession. Its patterned intricacies and elaborate scrolled borders made it a magic carpet. On it, I followed Uncle Colson to sea and watched while an artist tattooed the blue anchors that flexed on his biceps when he lifted me above his head. I didn’t see him often. He was the family’s mystery man, and an especially interesting one to me because I had entered his world first through the pictures in his travel books and later through the heads of characters unlike anyone I knew, in stories like God's Little Acre.

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No food or coffee ever appeared on the parlo'’s glass-topped coffee table. It held only a silver miniature of St. Peter's Cathedral sent by Aunt Nancy who had gone to New York City to get trained as a nurse after St. Luke's in Jacksonville said she was too fat. She had no children and Uncle Colson and his children were never around. There were hundreds of faded, oval pictures of relatives in the velvet album that sat on a special stand beside the old clock in the living room, but I had no cousins to play with. There was my younger sister, but I recall her in the parlor only once, the day she threw a wedge of wood used as a doorstop and cut my face. I still have the scar.

Aunt Nancy could see the Empire State Building from her Manhattan apartment window and she had married a sea captain, a Scot who came to America as an apprentice to Edward J. Smith, the captain who later went down with his ship, the Titanic. Aunt Nancy sent us bracelets from Queen Elizabeth's coronation, red plaid taffeta dresses, and woven caps from Fair Isle off the coast of Scotland. She sent me what I thought was the most beautiful doll in the world, a wooden one with painted-on hair and eyes that opened and closed--until my sister decapitated her.

I lay on the high-backed sofa under a window that looked out on the porch where Granddaddy was sleeping and pictured myself somewhere else, somewhere far away, floating on my back in the China Sea, perhaps--its perimeters bordered with the blue and white pattern of my mother's willowware plates--watching the mandarin’s daughter and her lover as they turned into birds and flew to the horizon. Aunt Nancy and Uncle Colson had got far away from Alachua, from where I lay rubbing my hand along the glossy fabric of the horsehair sofa, looking up at my small length in Grandmother’s mantel mirror, imagining myself in the China Sea under a faultless sun.

This was before television or the beginnings of rock-and-roll, and it was a quiet house, even when Granddaddy was not napping. Again and again, on an old Victrola in the front room I played Victor Herbert's recording, "March of the Wooden Soldiers," from Babes in Toyland. Sometimes I got bored and ventured out on the porch.

"Can't be real chains in Hell, Granddaddy."

Granddaddy looked up from his reading, hit the dial on his hearing aid with one finger, and cocked his head.

"Can't be real fires, either."

"And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit."

He stared at me like there was nothing more to say.

"Granddaddy, that must mean it would only seem to be like a real fire and seem like chains. Fire hot as you say would melt those old chains right off."

Granddaddy was named for Malachi, the last Old Testament prophet, and Mother said he took the Bible literally, confiding to her his belief that the Lord's Supper the Baptists celebrated with saltine crackers and bitter grape juice four times a year was the actual Body of Christ. I doubt Granddaddy realized he had embraced Roman Catholic doctrine. And the Baptists at church never found out; if they had, they wouldn’t fondly remember him as "Uncle Mallie."

Although I heard stories, songs, and sermons about God's love, I was mostly occupied with avoiding his displeasure: not using one's talents was one of the sins I was taught about in Sunday School. I'd asked God's forgiveness whenever I hadn't written anything for whole weeks. I memorized scripture, sang in the choir, put coins in the collection plate. No one knew that in my prayers I bargained, asking Him not to take away the words that hummed in my head, marvelling that each time I came back to it, writing was still there--as dependable a thing as I had found in this world.

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I attended Vacation Bible School, marching through the still cool air of the early summer mornings, up the high church steps with the other children, beneath the bell pull that hung just above our heads in the vestibule, and down the aisle splotched with the greens and golds of the stained glass windows. I loved the tinkling piano we marched to, and the American and Christian flags we saluted. I meant it when I saluted the Bible and pledged, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer."

In my preschool Sunbeams group, I learned to recite from the Gospel according to St. John, and when I became a teenager and a member of the Girls' Auxiliary, I completed the "Maiden," "Lady-in-Waiting," "Princess," and "Queen" steps, after which, robed in white, I was "crowned" in a ceremony in Gainesville.

The requirements for becoming a G. A. Queen included memorizing the names and addresses of all Southern Baptist missionaries. There were hundreds and as I finished up the last of them sitting in a hot car waiting for my mother to come from a faculty meeting, I promised myself I would never again memorize anything.

Mama taught Sunday School as well as Vacation Bible School and also recruited an "angel choir" of preschoolers who wore pale pink robes with white bows that tied under their chins. While Mother directed, I accompanied them on the piano.

She was not dour, my mother, just nervous and terribly self-conscious. As a young woman, she had sung in the church choir. One Sunday when she stood up to sing, the plain slip she wore under her dress fell to her ankles and bunched up over her shoes. Telling this, she laughed, "Just folded it up and put it in my purse." She had momentary flashes of irreverence, like the time we were singing, "Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?" when she chuckled and whispered into my ear, "I just hope they'll let me in." An old photograph from Mother's flapper days shows her in the rumble seat of a Ford roadster, standing on her head with her legs up in the air. Clearly Mother had been less restrained before her marriage.

In church, I was moved by emotion, but I didn't grasp why we must "die for Jesus." Like Granddaddy, I inclined toward literalism. I made friends with a succession of ministers' children, and then lamented when the deacons, for reasons discussed only in closed meetings, sent those families away. I was dismissed by a Sunday School teacher who would not let me explain that, regardless of any burning bush, the Ten Commandments were plain common sense.

The Baptists were not long on logic, but they reached me with their music. Most of all, I loved the songs of a revivalist named Don, a handsome man with shiny black hair who had found Jesus in prison and, when he was released, took to the highways to tell his story in song:

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Don crooned and the choir hummed, pulling at me like a magnet. I longed to go forward, but I had already been baptized. I wished I had waited for Don.

At home, riding my horse, I explored the most remote fields of our farm which joined San Felasco Hammock where I liked to imagine panthers and Indians still roamed. I preferred country to city, but even in the town I was able to discover a way into mystery: a secret stairway so narrow my shoulders rubbed its musty walls as I climbed stealthily up from the church basement to a small door which opened onto a filled baptistery tank. The same stained-glass Jesus I had watched from a pew out front during baptisms was tending his sheep above the tank’s darkened back wall. I had already been immersed by the preacher but, as I stood alone there, the tank looked perilously deep. Near my foot hung a frail ladder of three steps. When the heavy velvet hanging at the front of the tank moved, I jumped; air blowing up from the basement stairs, I supposed.

I shivered and hugged myself. Then I remembered that, after all, I could swim. I was a good swimmer, even though I had almost drowned once, when, for an unending moment underwater, I had groped toward the blurred shapes of my fellow swimming students. There in the gloomy baptistery, standing alone above the vastness of the tank, I reassured myself that I was not afraid. I knew how freeing it could be to lean back and let the water take you.

I hated school: I was the smallest, youngest student and my regular preschool playmate, Ronnie Chambers (who lived on the farm nearest ours), had found himself a new girlfriend in kindergarten. When the teacher privately polled us for Homecoming Court nominees, I fingered the tiny Red Cross pin on my collar and said that I wanted to be in the court. I voted for myself and Ronnie, and I was hurt when he and his new girlfriend won.

If I hated kindergarten, I detested first grade. Although there were two sections, I was put in Mother's, only she wasn't my mother any more. She let me know at once that, at school, she was Teacher. I spent the entire year sending her messages coded with our cat’s name, the horse's name, Daddy's name; anything to get her to recognize me as her daughter. But she was determined not to be criticized for favoritism and when I "acted up" she would call me to the front of the room, get out her wooden ruler, and turn me over her knee while my classmates watched.

Mama had a wide, heavy desk at the front of the room and a small American flag that fit like a peg into a hole on the desktop. There were easels, blackboards, and a piano on which Mama exuberantly banged out chords while we sang "Camels and Bears/and ponies are found/prancing around/on the merry-go-round/Toodle-ee-o, toodle-ee-o/come take a ride/there's a pony for you."

My mother was a dedicated teacher. She brought milk we shook into butter, waffle irons, and maple syrup she poured onto the waffles we made. Our Valentine's Day box was large and red, covered with white paper doilies, and had a slit on top where we dropped in the valentines. Our large airy room had ceiling-high windows on one wall and a cloakroom on the other. I sometimes lingered in the cloakroom after lunch, touching the other children's coats, rubbing the fabrics, imagining their warmth. When my classmates lined up after lunch to march out of the cafeteria and across the playground, through the auditorium, and down the long wooden hallway to Mother's room, I raced ahead to steal a few minutes with Mrs. Trinkner.

Marion Trinkner taught in a sunlit classroom with a special rug that was divided into squares, each decorated with a letter of the alphabet. At naptime, each student chose a letter to sleep on. Mrs. Trinkner had a refrigerator full of ice cream and chocolate milk and she held me on her lap while she read aloud from The Wizard of Oz. In Mrs. Trinker's classroom, I was special.

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In Mother's room, we worked quietly at our desks copying the letters of the alphabet from models tacked up over the blackboard. Sometimes, we could hear Mrs. Shaw playing "Fur Elise" in the small room at the back of the school where she gave piano lessons.

Mama's work still draws praise in the community, even though she employed methods now considered archaic. When two children "picked" at one another, she would draw a chalk ring on the hardwood floor and tell them, "Get inside it and fight until you've had enough. Just go ahead and fight." Once, she snatched the American flag from its place on her desk, broke its staff in half, and used the splintered stick to spank my friend Ray's behind. I didn't watch; I stared through the windows, straining for the sound of Mrs. Shaw's piano.

One day, a few years ago, when Mama was out of town, her gardener called. He was terribly excited about something on the radio, something about Mama. I was frightened until I realized he’d been listening to Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story" in which one of Mama's former students, now a nationally known speaker, revealed the source of her ambition. She said she had resolved in first grade that if she ever got out of Hortense Cauthen’s class, where her mouth was often taped shut for speaking out of turn, she would "never stop talking." The yardman liked this.

My "Rest of the Story" is about a girl named Dottie Howse, the teacher's pet in my first grade class. Dottie's family moved to Alachua after the 1948-49 school year was already underway. She was brought into our classroom, introduced, assigned a desk, and we were informed that her father had helped develop the atomic bomb. Mama told the whole class Dottie was the smartest student she had.

Left alone in the classroom while my mother attended a faculty meeting, I ransacked Dottie's desk. I found a fifty-cent piece and took it with me when I walked down the lane and across the washed-out dirt road to Grandmother Strickland's.

I began feeling guilty before I even arrived so, as soon as my grandmother turned her back, I went up the lane, through the schoolyard, found an unlocked door, and reentered the darkening building to return Dottie's money. But I didn't just put the coin back in her desk; I sat down in her chair, put my hand in, and felt all around inside the desk's cubbyhole. I held each of her stubby pencils in my hand, straightened her sheets of construction paper at right angles, and rubbed my palms over a fingerpainting she'd done that day. Finally, I slid the coin all the way to the rear.

I sat in Dottie's chair and thought about being Dottie Howse, having brothers like hers who were named Danny and David, and a mother with long, black hair. I visualized them around their piano, all together, harmonizing inside their red brick home. I thought of her daddy, Mr. Howse, whom I knew to be a genius.

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