Sweet Chariot

Sweet Chariot





I am an old woman. Eighty-nine years ago, I was born in this town, right in this house. Eighty-nine long years.

For my whole life there has stood, directly across from this house, a white pavilion, the center of the town square. It’s the town’s pride, and is always well kept. This gazebo has been a refuge from showers and a secluded spot for lovers. It’s been the platform for acceptance speeches and the site of brass bands. It’s hexagonal in shape, Victorian in style, and has quietly watched the generations raising their children, planting their trees and flower beds, painting their houses, moving away and moving back. I know that it carefully watched this house. I know, because I have watched it watching. It has seen all of my family pass through these doors.

This is an excellent house for watching. The large front room, windowed all across the front, provides a shady view of the square. The kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom all lie to the rear of the house. It’s also an excellent house for a wheel chair. The chair has been a god-send, and I feel silly for resisting it for so long. It’s very comfortable, and I and Mehitabel the cat, can manage by ourselves quite well.

Part of my time I spend rummaging in my memory’s closets in search of, and usually finding, some bright treasure to hold up and smile at. I correspond with a large number of friends, and I also spend a goodly amount of time thinking about mortality and the brevity of life. Oh, the flight of time.

I was born Susan Allen Pope on April 10, 1912, the day the ill fated Titanic sailed from Southampton, England. Unlike this ship, I was destined to have smooth sailing for the first part of my life; my icebergs came later.

I was a teenager through what we called ‘the crazy times’ or The Roaring Twenties. The victory of war, the birth of jazz, prosperity, and flappers. Modernity and consumerism. Women were winning the right to vote. It was an amazing time. I was 17 when it came to a crashing halt, right up against Black Tuesday. My father had seen the gathering danger, and managed to pull back at the right time, saving the bank from disaster. This was also the time of the budding of my feminism, and when I started writing.

I wrote every day; I wrote about everything I could think of. All that I wrote during this experimental time I destroyed, and I only remember two of the short stories. Finally I decided to write an essay on modern feminism, and it clicked. The essay was published and then re-printed in one of the glossy woman’s magazines.

I revived the short stories and wrote more, and these were published also. My work drew the attention of Angie Gold, who became my new literary agent, my friend, my mentor, and my confidant. Angie is an angel, and it wasn’t long before I realized how lucky I was to connect with her.

I was a writer! My imagination soared. It was my chance to be associated with Hemmingway, Sinclair Lewis. I might meet artists. A writer! I pictured this as my entree into a new world. As often happens in this life, I was absolutely right, but for all the wrong reasons. The thing that had the most lasting impact on my life was my introduction to Angie’s wide circle of friends.

On Angie’s recommendation I read Elizabeth Dorr’s ‘Black Wings’, and I then dropped a note to her introducing myself, a note which started a friendship-in-letters that lasted for the rest of our lives. More about El later.

Three years later I met and married Douglas, my wonderful Douglas. Father was able to start him in the bank, where he excelled. When I was 21, I got pregnant, and lost the baby, late in my term. The doctor was confident that we could have another child. The next year, we bought the lake house and I got pregnant again. During this pregnancy, in the fall of that year, my mother grew seriously ill, and that winter she passed away. Early that coming spring my beloved Douglas got a blood fever and passed away also. I lost the baby, the final connection I felt I had with Doug. When Father passed that summer, I was reconciled to be the next. It was if my entire life had come to a stop, I didn’t know if I would ever feel again; I felt that I had fallen into a dark well. I spent some time drifting in a fog, then I sold the place at the lake and moved back into the old house. With Mehitabel. I started to write again, and in this way I finally found a direction.



At Angie’s urging, I started a correspondence about woman’s rights with Lee Krasner, and discovered that she was married to Jackson Pollock, and through them I came to know both Andrew Wyeth and Willem de Kooning. My correspondences grew and flowered.

Some of these wonderful people wrote often, some infrequently. Some stopped in and visited, and that always made for delightful times. My little house was becoming a crossroads for some of the most amazing people of my time. I was astonished to find a network of artists, writers, and thinkers that centered in New York, and spread globally.



From the time we met, it took El four years to open up enough to tell me the entire story of her despair, a story as remarkable and gripping as any fiction novel.

She was raised by her grandparents in South Carolina Methodist parsonages, having lost her mother as a toddler to tuberculosis. Remarkably, by the age of seventeen, she earned a Masters degree and secured a teaching position in a remote village, a tiny place lost in the fold of the map.

Some five or six years later she met and wed Marsh Dorr, owner of Oak Lane Plantation, which had a population of some two hundred laborers, the descendants of slaves. El and Marsh’s marriage quietly cooled to indifference, and El turned to this Negro community for the love and understanding she had so long desired. Then El found herself pregnant, and when Marsh found out, the child was torn from her womb, and he had her sterilized. Her life became barren dispair, and El withdrew completely into the African community.

Her sorrow was unfathomable; she was unsound and bed-ridden for a period of years. She was tended by an old slave woman, and was saved by her careful ministrations, saved by her wisdom, saved by her ancient magic. El made her choice to live in this world, secluded and safe, and turned her back on the white world. Here she stayed hidden until the unbelievable meteoric rise in her popularity, and the wealth that came with it.

El always said she was no writer, that she was just recording, replaying a way of life. She writes in slave dialect, the local patois, which at first is hard to read. A few pages on, when you learn the language, her dialogues ring like a true bell. El rejected the plantation stereotypes, and made her characters real. She made them breathe. She gave them goals and hurdles that were reflections of her own life.

Especially since the release of ‘Black Wings’, El’s work has become the hot focus of much publicity, and the opinions of her work vary widely: Childish, too explicit, and too agitative on the one hand, inspired, thoughtful, and provocative on the other. Her popularity is highest in the Northwest, and her books are banned from public libraries in South Carolina. She is destined to remain in the lime-light for the rest of her life.

El loved the art of Georgia O’Keefe. The empty beauty, the wild desert serenety that O’Keefe showed us appealed to El very much, and she travelled there often. To her, O’Keefe’s Southwest was the landscape of promise. She said, “To understand O’Keefe’s art, one has to read her letters to Stiglitz. She is full of passion, love, and anticipation, and her painting allows us see the Southwest not as it is, but as she is. ”

She comes here to see me quite often. Such friends! She and I and Mehitabel enjoy our tea and watch the pavillion. When we’re both writing well, we have many memorable conversations. H. L. Mencken often came with her and what a wit he was. He played with ideas the way Mehitabel plays a mouse. He is El’s publisher, and quite a journalist in his own right. He’s a cultural critic; a cynical, outspoken, self-styled judge of society. Our conversations never slouched when he was here. They sat up straight, and paid attention.

Our discussion turned to life and death, and he said, “Try to leave mortality out of it and see time as a circle, not as a line stretching on forever; see it as a cycle turning and repeating. From this perspective, we don’t count much as individuals, ‘cause we’re not too different from one another, and we pretty much just repeat what our parents did. We become fossils waiting to be buried, then dug up again. And the stuff we create doesn’t add up to much, either.

“That’s looking at it from a geological perspective,” I said, “and it makes life seem hopeless. Seen from the here-and-now view, it doesn’t look so dark. To leave death out of the story misses the whole point. Don’t fear life, and you won’t fear death. I’ve had so much die inside me, that my fearfulness has turned to wonderment. The candle may be brief, but it shines brilliantly while it lasts. I wish my death to be joyful, a vivacious, gala event.” This last I said quite airily, but I meant it. I said goodnight, and went to bed.



Later that year, El came to my house to die. At the last, she asked for a white sheet which she draped herself, and with her final breath she said, “Oh how beautiful.”



I’m finally getting impatient for the final scene, myself. I’m thinking about the director of that scene, when he arrives. I call, “I’m in here. Come in, I’ve been waiting a long time for you.”

Through the front windows comes a brilliant blue-white light that dissolves away the front of the house. I wheel closer and I am enveloped by this light. I peer out, and where I always have seen the pavilion, I see the past, the present, the future. I see infinity! I feel I should have known this all along!

His hand Is a shape of light and I put mine into it. I was suddenly a little girl, and it was summer, then I changed to another little girl in the winter, and then I was carrying a baby under my heart, and I see visions quickly then faster-all-on-top-of-one-another and then I see in the street a wonderful streetcar, and there is music and I hear my father behind me say, “Ahh.”

In the streetcar is my beloved Douglas and the two babies I had loved but never seen; the streetcar is full of my loves; all my dear friends; it is full of memories all in the bright sun. The car is sparkling with dreams and desires. I have spent years wondering about the Great Maybe and it’s finally here, and no maybe about it. I hear El’s young voice calling in the old trees, “Hurry up, Susie, you’re gonna be late.”