Padgett Powell - Edisto

So they had Theenie and her aunt there, all conned by those python co-ax and lesser electric mba, afraid to move because of the equipment d the occasion. But they won’t take any kind of picture guff except TV, which is too big to refuse, unless they are disoriented by having gone to Chicago or someplace when young, or somehow else got sophisticated. An integration program or two don’t change a person’s fundamental suspicion of film. It may even be old voodoo stuff.

Once we stopped on Meeting Street to get some flowers and a lady was selling baskets. The thing is, they always have about a thousand items arranged around them and they sit in some aspect of focus in the center or at a corner of the inventory and weave more. You could run off with eighty pieces before they could get up and shake off the marsh grasses and throw the one-tined weaving fork at you and call down Wrath. It wouldn’t be pretty when It caught up with you and the loot, sitting around with eighty hot basket things you stole from a woman. So no one ever tries it. They are so confident — sitting and weaving, their whole factory spread out, being walked on by tourists — they watch only the present basket, reach into their grocery sack beside the chair for new straw, and answer questions.

"Ma’am, how much is this one?"

"Hum? Hum fuff-teen.”

The basket is preciously set down.

"And this one?"

"Hum sebem."

Ah. The money begins to fish out and she stops weaving. "Two for twelb." Consternation. But no.

One will do.

During the purchase a man with his family steps up and says, "Ma’am, can I get a picture of you and your work?"

She ignores him and he starts eyeballing with his camera. "What choo wont?" she says.

“A picture—”

"You ain' buyin’ ."

"Well. . no. . I just-"

"Well, you got to be buyin’."

The first deal is still closing. The buyer gets a bright idea. " I’m buying," he says. "I could take it for him."

She looks at him with a reserved scowl — reserved for the money yet in his hand. "Is it your cambra?"

"No."

"Is the pitcher for you?"

"No."

"Wel1 den." And they close the deal. The false buyer leaves, uppity in his mlnd. He considered buying something to get the picture, but the word "extortion" or some such got to him. He don’t know she knew he wouldn’t buy, she wasn't trying to sell anything, she was just stopping the picture-taking.

Well, that’s what happens when a plain camera comes around. But when the federal oral boys rolled up looking like Fellini with zits and surrounded them with a TV studio — brushed aluminum and diffusion parasols — and scared them with the full brunt of the Modem Age, they took it, staring into the Indigo zoom. Great big glass eye looking like a gasoline spill on a black tar road.

It makes me think of the first federal historians. What a time! The W.P.A. hired writers to write stuff like this. At least I have this book the Doctor said was very good and it seemed like this kind of stuff. But those writers were invisible, perched up in a corner watching sharecroppers bag z’s, composing with a whispering pencil. Today’s federal historians perch you up, light you up, make you up, and put you in the can, electronically. So here’s the part of basket weaving that they got, which they wanted to get — Theenie and her aunt sitting there weaving away. They wrap coils of grass around the shape in their mind and tie the coils in with other straw, which they push through with one tine of a fork. They mix in dark pine straw to make their design. They reach into their grocery bags for grass and keep building the coils. 'Their eyes never leave the work except when tourist money comes out of a pocket. Then something happened, right in the middle of a perfectly good taping. The bag holding the green and brown spray of grass and pine needles fell and exposed Theenie’s feet, and one of them was in a slipper, which was fine, and one of them was in a steaming half of a sweet potato, which was not fine.

"What is that?" cried the sociologist behind the camera.

Looking down at it, the other historian bent over and accidentally let the boom mike into the picture, like a closed umbrella pointing at the potato, going to stick it.

"Cut," said the first cameraman. "Dammit, it was perfect."

"We can edit it," said the sound man, and that's all you see, except for the sound man’s head going in for a look at Theenie’s foot in the potato, like he’s going to hold his nose. His head is at the very bottom corner of the frame looking at it, and Theenie is in full center, looking at the camera with the face of a bull. Then they cut the filming.

"Never did edit out that damn potato," the pale one says when the show was over.

"Why would you want to?" Taurus says.

"Hey. Who would like believe it wasn’t a joke or Monty Python or something? This is oral history? Taurus looked evenly at the six screens whining off with little piss noises coming out. "I guess so,” he said. ·

"Thanks for showing us," I said. "We got to go. Dr. Manigault is very grateful. I’d seen it." I lied. "It was him that needed—" Taurus was out the door; I was going to give them an oral history spew they’d never edit out.

But he was already down the hall.

"Hey. Let’s go get something to eat."

"Like what?"

"Potatoes."

He smiled. "What was that, anyway?"

"They use them for corns and bunions. Potatoes are the second great cure."

"And the first?"

"Ammonia."

“Ammonia?"

"Yeah, except not like you said it. Say it ah-MON-ia and it’ll cure whatever it won’t clean."

The only thing I remember about the rest of the day is the shirt I had on. It was my green-and-yellow. I tried to picture a new universe of potato Wearing, who could and who couldn’t. It was at the Grand. Preston and Jinx had on potatoes big as brogans, flared open at the ankles like construction workers’. The bitches came in in high-heeled spuds trim as cigars. Jake had on a nondescript pair. I had on some saddle oxfords, warm ones. Then I saw the oral history boys trying theirs on, and every one they reached for them, red sparks hit their fingers like Dorothy’s red shoes. They couldn’t get their potatoes on. The Doctor had a pair at the foot the wicker settee which she chose not to put on.

They were out of style. She just sat on her legs folded up under her and had a dreamy look. Then I took mine off and tried on everybody else’s, like Goldilocks. Daddy's were in a drawer at his desk with his golf shoes. He could wear them, I thought, for a special occasion. Then Taurus showed up very inconspicuous. He was kneeling down, I thought looking at his. Then I saw he was polishing his potatoes. He was the only one taking care of them. He was using a big Kiwi hardwood brush and the skins were lightly steaming, and the brush stroking through the steam pulled it in slow clouds like a tug on the waterway in the early mornings.

One of My Custody Junkets

When we got out of the oral history studio we went over to the market to see some real basket weaving. It was going on as usual — about five or six ladies on their metal cafeteria chairs (they must have got a deal, or they closed a school out in the country, or it burned, except chairs). They were all set up on the outside corners of the old slave-market longhouses, surrounded by their four hundred straw artifacts and sacks of new grass and straw at their feet, in the sunshine. Just inside, where all the flea market tables were, it was dark, with all kinds of van people selling jewelry and belt buckles and other things you can get in a pawnshop.

The van people came every weekend and sold this stuff like portable garage sales, stopping in on Friday night to hold their booth and early Saturday setting up, mostly in the middle of the market. At the upper end, where the auction block for the slaves had been, they filled the market in with boutiques painted in pastels. They have antiques there too, but these are on consignment from the North, Daddy says. They also have fancy restaurants that write what they have to eat on a blackboard outside so you know the food is as fresh as new chalk. They should use one of those at school, to upgrade the image: "Today we have a fresh, steamed hot dog, pork beans, butter squash, Tuesday surprise cake, cold, sweet milk. $.35."