Into the Briar Patch
A Family Memoir
by
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Chapter One Hold on Tight and Save the Baby When my mother was an infant, the family home burned to the ground. It was 1915 and early spring in South Carolina. Nine people were asleep inside the farmhouse when the fire started: the husband Tom, the wife Laura Ann, five sons ranging from seventeen to nine years old, a seven-year-old daughter, and a baby girl. The cause of the fire was unknown—perhaps a single ember had slipped from the fireplace onto the wood floor, or perhaps some malicious person had struck a match in the dark. The family awoke to smoke and flames, yet still in time for everyone to escape alive. As the flames rose, someone handed the infant Maisie through a first-floor window to her seven-year-old sister, Ansie. Ansie. Get a good safe distance away. Shield Maisie’s face with this blanket. Wait till we come and find you. Ansie was terrified. Her parents could not help her now, for saving the baby was her task alone. She took the bundled infant and hurried toward the open woods past the garden. As she ran, the voices behind her were unrecognizable, high and frantic over the boiling thunder of the fire. The whole sky glowed red. In that incandescent light Ansie’s own hands flashed red to her, and the baby’s howling face lit up like fire. She bent her face over her sister’s, but the baby was not burning. Its skin was cool and smelled like sweet clay. Ansie heard the crack and whine of timber on fire, but she did not turn around to watch the flaming shards explode. She pushed ahead, away from the heat waves in her wake. She was far from the house now. Had she run clear of the heat? Would she lose her way in the night woods? Ansie saw a huge fallen tree in the red darkness ahead. She stepped around the splintered trunk and crouched behind its mass with the baby. The trunk was as wide as Ansie was tall. The fire couldn’t reach her here, could it? Yet from her new refuge, Ansie heard a sound she knew well, hooves striking earth, thuds that grew louder, with grunts and snorts and wheezes of animal panic. The mules were headed her way. They would trample her and baby Maisie, for sure. She pressed up against the fallen tree trunk so that its projecting branches would shield her, blocking the mules. Could mules break through thick branches? Strong as a mule. Ansie’s chest was the size of a mule’s hoof. She placed the baby in the small cavity where the trunk curved down and inward. She leaned her body hard into the tree. Her ears filled with hooves, as unyielding as the earth they pounded. Minutes passed. The hoofbeats diminished. The mules must have run off toward the swamp. Ansie peered over the log. Buckets of water were being handed forward near the house. Were those the neighbors from down the road? She looked around and saw that the barn door had swung open. The boys must have let the mules out to save them from being burned alive in the locked barn. Yet the barn and outbuildings were untouched. The sky was the same, an urgent red, when Ansie heard another sound that was not hooves. She realized it was Maisie, wailing as if her baby heart would break. Ansie placed Maisie across her shoulder, as her mother would have done, and jiggled the baby up and down. “Hush now, hush now,” she soothed. “It’s all right now.” Ansie was comforting herself as well. She felt safer because Maisie was safe. She remembered her mother’s tuneful voice calling, Hold on tight, now, and don’t let go. She said that whenever some precious goodness was at stake. The house roared and crumbled for a good while that night. Ansie stayed where she was until the water-bearers gave up hope and the flames died down on their own. When the grownups called her back to the house, Ansie returned with a saved baby. As a child, I heard Mama’s version of this story, which was sweet and simple: someone had handed her out the window of a burning house, and then it was all right. Mama told her stories as if through white gauze, purifying them of conflict. Her favorite anecdote was of herself at nine months old being comforted on her mother’s shoulder, enveloped by peace and well-being. The more robust version of Ansie’s escape from the fire and the mules was told to me years later by Ansie’s daughter, Diane.
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About the Book
This book is the story of the author’s quest to understand her family history. She tries to untangle the briars of the past by tracing lines of cause and effect back to the early 1800s. As slaveholders, her South Carolina ancestors lived inside a psychological briar patch of American history. Through family documents and cultural studies, the author explores the likely results of slaveholding upon the family character as it passes from parents to children. History participates in shaping the moral psychology of a Southern family through five generations. Deep within the briar patch lies the will to survive. Belief in one’s own goodness is necessary to survival. The author considers evidence of her family’s self-professed virtues—physical bravery, nurturing, and purity—and locates their roots partly in slaveholding. Her family may have needed to intensify certain qualities as if they were extreme virtues, in order to reassure themselves of their own goodness while they were participating in slavery and Jim Crow. These unspoken depths of the briar patch may also have produced stories about blacks and whites that turn and twist so as to reassure whites that they were themselves good. Into the Briar Patch interrogates the roots of racism and the interplay of culture and soul. The psychological entanglements of slavery seem to have brought about both good and bad in family history, both fruit and thorns. The family tree becomes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Each branch bends differently, and each family story sounds its own wistful, amusing, tragic, zealous, or ironic tone. Kirkus Discoveries praises the book as “an expansive, accomplished memoir” with “succinct, rich language that rings in one’s ear like a wind chime gently stirred by a slow breeze.” Madelon Sprengnether, memoirist and Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, writes that Into the Briar Patch is “a profound meditation on the mixture of good and evil” and praises the author’s “compelling . . . labor to achieve not only clear-eyed understanding of the past, but also compassion for all of the (living and dead) players involved.” Further information about Into the Briar Patch is at http://www.mariannregan.com.
About the Author
Mariann Sanders Regan writes fiction, memoir, literary criticism, and other forms of prose. She is Professor of English Emerita at Fairfield University in Connecticut, where she has taught Renaissance literature, allegory and fantasy, women’s studies, and persuasive writing. She has a BA in mathematics from Duke and a PhD in English from Yale. She grew up in North Carolina. She and her husband, who have two children, live in Connecticut. Her novel, Immortality News (Creative Arts Books, 1999), is a cheerful satire of the American health insurance industry and an inquiry into human nature. If our society could suddenly afford excellent health care for everyone, would we really choose to deliver it? Regan has also published fiction in the literary journal Inkwell. Regan spoke on the Investigative Memoir panel at the annual conference of the Associated Writing Programs in 2009. Her memoir, Into the Briar Patch (AuthorHouse, 2011), is about the author’s maternal family, who were farmers in South Carolina from the early 1800s through recent years. This book explores the long-term effects of slaveholding upon white Southerners, and it inquires into the makeup of good and evil. Love Words (Cornell University Press, 1982), a book of literary criticism, discusses early modern love poems by Medieval and Renaissance poets. The author offers a new poetics based on the fundamental psychological structure of the self. Mariann Regan is currently writing Face Incorporated, an academic satire of a fictional university being swallowed by today’s corpocracy. She is also working on a book of short stories, Gyroscopes. For further information about Mariann Regan's writing, go to http://www.mariannregan.com.