Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr

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Outside the Magic Circle

The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr

The University of Alabama Press

Family, Nursie, the Church

MY FATHER'S FAMILY came from Union Springs, Alabama, which is right in the heart of the black belt, and my mother's family came from Memphis, Tennessee. Before I was born my father went to Birmingham as the preacher for South Highland Presbyterian Church, which is on the corner of Highland Avenue and Twenty-first Street. I was born in the parsonage. My mother said that from the beginning I was an extremely greedy and red-faced yelling baby. I was considered the bad child of the family. I was the youngest and evidently was demanding from the beginning.

As far as I know, my father's family was English, and the name Foster comes from "forester," the king's forester. Probably they were woodchoppers, and they arrived in this country way back, about 1700. The story was that one brother settled in Massachusetts and one brother settled in Virginia around South Boston, where there are still a lot of Fosters. Dr. Luther Foster, who is president of Tuskegee Institute, came from that area. Dr. Foster is black, and he and I can't claim kin, but a lot of black and white Fosters live in that area.

My great-grandfather came south with General Greene's army in the Revolutionary War and fought at Cowpens and Kings Mountain. After the war was over, the state of Georgia gave General Greene a land grant to settle his soldiers on. It's called Greene County.

My great-grandfather married a girl named Hannah Johnson. I was told that because of the Indian wars, they met in a stockade. Of course, the white settlers were taking the land away from the Indians. But Great-grandfather and Hannah were married and had thirteen children—twelve sons and one daughter. My grandfather was one of them. They prospered and did very well. My grandfather was sent to Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia and became a doctor. Then he came back to Georgia, and about the 1840s he met my grandmother. She was a Heard and her mother was a MacGruder. They were Scottish Presbyterians. She was only fifteen when they married and went to Alabama. They settled in Union Springs, and evidently they brought some slaves with them.

Union Springs at that time was a very rich part of the country. People settled there as part of the migration from the old worn-out lands in the East to the West—to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and finally to Texas. They didn't know how to conserve the land and fertilize it in those days, so they had to get fresh land. Union Springs has quite a history because there was a terrible competition among the slave traders. One man poisoned the big spring and killed all the slaves the other trader was selling. Horrible things like that come out of the past and chill your blood. Whatever glamour the society had, it was based on this terrible slave system.

My grandfather acquired a lot of land in Union Springs. Outside the town is a ridge they call Chunnenuggee Ridge. It is above the lowlands where the slaves worked and cotton was grown. My family settled on that because the high land was thought to be outside the malaria belt. All plantation owners lived up on the ridge. Of course, no one really knew what caused malaria. They thought it was the miasma of the swamps. They didn't know it was mosquitoes.

My grandmother had fifteen children, but a lot of them died. The Foster graveyard down in Union Springs is just full of little graves: "Such-and-such child that died of summer complaint at the age of nine months." Out of the fifteen children, only four lived to be old. Two of the boys, I was told, were killed in the Civil War.

My grandfather opposed the Civil War. He was a Whig and by that time he had become quite prosperous. He thought the nation should settle the slavery issue the way England did, by the government buying up the slaves and recompensing the owners. He hated William Lowndes Yancey. He thought Yancey was a firebrand and was plunging the South into war. Since Grandfather was opposed to the war, he bought a substitute to fight for him. So Grandfather didn't go to war, which was a great disgrace in those days. I never heard about it until I was older.

Not only did my grandfather not go to the war, but he also didn't buy Confederate bonds. In those days, the cotton growers shipped their cotton through Mobile to Liverpool, and the factors in Liverpool made the settlements. Grandfather told the factors in Liverpool to keep his money for him. When the war was over, he was one of the few men in Alabama who had any money, any gold. The Confederate money was worthless by then, of course. So Grandfather prospered considerably after the Civil War. The family lived in great style, and Grandfather bought up all the lands of these poor fellows who had invested in Confederate bonds. When I first remember the plantation, it covered about 35,000 acres of land—which was a lot of land.

My grandfather had slaves, of course. I was always told that the slaves were so loyal that "Ole Mose" hid the family silver and took the horses into the swamp during the war to protect them from marauding Yankees. They all loved Grandfather dearly. I was brought up, you see, on the romantic tradition of the benevolent slave system.

I never knew my grandfather, because he died before I was born, but my grandmother died when I was about eight and I remember her very well. I was named for her, Virginia Heard Foster. I had reddish hair and she had reddish hair. Very red, in fact. She was the most delightful person. She was like a queen bee. She had always been surrounded by servants or slaves. She never had to do anything in her life but be charming. Everybody loved her dearly and called her "Miss Ginny." Her husband adored her. He would go down to New Orleans and send fine dresses back to her. She was like Dora in David Copperfield: she was childlike. But she was full of laughter and everybody loved her.

The person I remember best from the plantation in Union Springs is old Easter. She was a black woman who had been a slave. I was told as a child that after Reconstruction the slaves would not leave or they would leave and then come back. And when I was a child, the backyard in Union Springs was still full of slave cabins filled with old men and old women who had been slaves and still lived on the plantation. They were scared of freedom maybe. I don't imagine they had any money either. They may have gotten a little bit, but they stayed on the plantation and were fed. I remember sitting in their laps.

Easter was probably one of the smartest women I ever knew. I think this is one reason it was hard for me to swallow the prevailing theory that blacks were inferior. Easter was a short black woman who wore white aprons and dresses and a white starched bandanna on her head, and she ran the plantation. She wore the keys. You couldn't get a cookie unless you asked Easter. She put the food out for every meal, and I'm sure she even planned the meals. She may have asked my grandmother about some things, but Easter was in charge of everything. She was always in charge of us children. We did exactly what she told us to do. She had a very great dignity.

I remember that Easter never laughed. I think a sense of humor is very hard on a dictator, because Easter was always dignified and autocratic. She couldn't punish us—not physically—but she could punish us by saying, "You're not going to get your morning cookie." Easter was absolutely the law and there was no appeal—not to your mother or your grandmother or whoever else you complained to about Easter. They always thought Easter knew best. And she really did. She was a very wise woman, and she really was a woman of tremendous achievement, because she ran that whole place.

I don't know how many people there were on the plantation. They raised their own sheep and cattle and chickens and had eggs and milk and clabber and butter. There was an enormous orchard and a tremendous scuppernong arbor. Almost everything came off the place except sugar, salt, coffee, and flour.

We lived in Birmingham, but we went down to Union Springs every Christmas and every summer. At Christmas we would stay about a week, but in the summer we would stay weeks and weeks at a time. To me the plantation was absolutely the Garden of Eden. Every meal was a delight. I always have liked to eat, unfortunately, and the meals were delicious and abundant. For breakfast we would begin with a baked apple. In those days, they couldn't get oranges and grapefruit. Then we would have oatmeal, and there would be broiled chicken and fried sweet potatoes and steak sometimes and batty-cakes and waffles and grits. You never saw such a huge breakfast. For dinner we would have lamb or beef or fried chicken. In the winter there would be great platters of birds, quail, just drowned in butter. Everything was drowned in butter, which was churned every morning. Ice cream was a great treat and was made once a week. The meals had endless vegetables and all kinds of fruit. The fruit was picked just when it was ripe, so we would have delicious figs just bursting with juice, and peaches. I thought it was the most perfect place in the world. I never saw anything wrong with it at all.

My nurse would go to Union Springs with me from Birmingham. She would bring her little girl and we would all play in the backyard. It was absolute, sheer, unadulterated joy, as far as I was concerned. I can remember the smell of it now. Everything smelled so fresh and good. And I remember waking to the sound of cowbells in the morning, with the cows going to pasture.

My grandmother, since she had no work to do at all, would play with us. She would play flinch with us, which was a card game, and she would always cheat. When she could cheat and get by with it, she would laugh. She thought that was so much fun. All my aunts ever did was sit on the front porch and rock and do fancy work. I had one aunt who didn't do anything. She never even did fancy work. She just rocked. She never even talked. She just ate and rocked and slept and had some children.

Sometimes my grandmother would take us to the little town of Union Springs. I got the idea at that time that she owned the town. She had two carriages besides two or three buggies. One carriage was an open carriage, a Victoria, and she had matched bay horses. She had a coachman named Washington who wore a high silk hat. Grandmother Foster was the biggest, richest person in town. She wouldn't even go into the stores. The people who ran the stores would come out to the buggy or the carriage and ask her what she wanted and bring out the things. She would buy us the most beautiful material, real linen and lace.

All of our underwear was made of linen and lace by Miss Paulk, who lived next door. The Paulks had fallen on hard times. I suppose they had gone to the war and lost their lands. They had a big beautiful house, but they had lost all their money, so Miss Katie Paulk sewed for my grandmother. Our dresses were hand embroidered with a lot of scallops. To me, this was bliss. Just lavish bliss. I adored it. I was absolutely entranced by it.

In the winter Granny Foster would go to church in her carriage, which was lined with red satin. She would wear a little bonnet and a little fur cape. When I went to the church with her, Wash would get out and open the door and then Granny Foster would make her royal progress into the church. I just knew that she owned that church. I'm sure she provided most of the upkeep. The preacher was named Dr. Bell, and I was aware that Dr. Bell was obligated to my grandmother.

As a child, I knew that Grandmother owned the church and she owned the town and she owned the great big house with white pillars and she owned the plantation. She was the queen bee. And when I was little, that was what I wanted to be. I wanted to be like my grandmother and have everybody love me and everybody obligated to me.

Christmases were marvelous. There would be a great big tree, and in the morning, the family would gather with presents. Then in the afternoon Granny Foster would have the black children in first, and they would get their presents. Then she would have the Sunday school children in. She didn't have them together; they came at different times. But I do remember that one little black child got a tiny toy piano, and one of us white children wanted it and tried to snatch it away. My grandmother wouldn't allow that. She was very fair-minded about things like that.

My father was raised in this atmosphere of wealth and abundance and servants. He had two brothers and a sister—Uncle Hugh and Uncle Robert and Aunt May. There were only these four when I grew up. My uncle Hugh lived across the street from my grandmother, and my uncle Robert lived in St. Louis. Aunt May, who was so fashionable and so unpleasant, lived in New York. Uncle Robert was destined for the bar and became a lawyer. My father was destined for the church and became a Presbyterian preacher. Uncle Hugh was destined for business, so he went into the bank. And Aunt May was destined to be a great Southern belle, which I suppose she was. Later she was the cause of the downfall of the whole Garden of Eden for me.

Nothing had changed since my father's childhood. The black people on the plantation were free, but they were still there. And there was still that old abundance. Everybody was welcome for dinner. No matter how many people you had, you could have more.

My father went off to school and then went to Southwestern, which was a Presbyterian college. It's in Memphis now, but it was in Clarksville, Tennessee, when my father went. He also went to Hampden-Sydney in Virginia, which was another Presbyterian school, then to Princeton Theological Seminary. And since his family was well off, he also went to Edinburgh.

When I was grown up I went to see the big Presbyterian seminary in Edinburgh. It looked like a great fortress on the side of a hill, very dark and stark. I found my father's registration and his records there. From Edinburgh he went to Germany and studied at Heidelberg and the University of Berlin. That was his undoing later; that was where he got the new theology—the idea that not every word in the Bible was literal truth, that a lot of it was myth.

For a long time, we had Daddy's theological library, but it got to be too heavy to carry around. Nobody ever wanted those old books. They were just so out of date and foolish, it seems. But my father had an excellent education and he read a great deal. He had a passion for books. He loved sets of books, beautiful sets of books.

Daddy was brought up to do absolutely nothing for himself. He always had somebody to wait on him. He would ride up on a horse and throw the reins and yell, "Jim" or "Joe," and somebody would come and take his horse. His clothes were washed and laid out for him, and the fires were built and food prepared. Daddy just thought all that came about by magic. He never did one single thing in his life. He never washed a dish or cooked a meal or washed his clothes or curried a horse. He could hardly learn to drive an automobile, because he was so used to somebody doing everything for him. He was an honorable man, but he was brought up to think that he was the Lord of Creation. Everybody else was inferior. He was very kind about it, but black people were just so far down the scale that you never thought of them except as somebody to wait on you. He thought Easter was a fine woman, and he treated all the servants with great respect, but Daddy was a child of his time.

When my grandmother died, the system at the plantation was just the same as before the slaves were freed except that they were paid a little something. Granny Foster still had the same number of servants, and they still lived in the backyard. She still had Easter, who slept at the foot of her bed. Easter would bathe Granny every morning. And when my father went off, he had a body servant who went to school with him for a while—a Negro boy who had waited on him when he was on the plantation.

When Daddy returned from Europe and a trip to the Holy Land, his first church was in Tennessee at Mount Pleasant. After that he became pastor of the Idlewild Presbyterian Church in Memphis, where he met my mother.

My mother's mother was Josephine Rice. Her family lived in the Tennessee Valley at a place in Alabama called Somerville. I was brought up on the tale about a huge brick house in the Tennessee Valley and a huge plantation, all luxury and wealth. Theirs was the first brick house built in the Tennessee Valley, I was told. My great-grandfather was named Green Pryor Rice. He had been a Presbyterian preacher himself, but he was also in the Legislature of Alabama. He was in the Alabama Senate for a long time. In one of the early histories of Alabama, the author goes on about his distinguished appearance and great oratorical ability and brilliant mind. Then the author ends by saying, "Mr. Rice had all the attributes of a great man, and no doubt he would have achieved far more fame than he did except for his unfortunate weakness for the bottle." I was always told that he was a great planter from Kentucky with hundreds of slaves.

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Excerpted from Outside the Magic Circle by Hollinger F. Barnard. Copyright © 1985 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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