In Victorian South, Discovering Your ‘Sainted’ Grandfather Wasn’t So Perfect
Family secrets weren't so secret in a small Southern town
My erudite and aristocratic maternal grandmother, Lessie Covington Secrest, would probably be appalled and embarrassed that one of the most memorable family phrases passed down to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren comes from her crude and illegitimate half-sister, the out-of-wedlock daughter of her sainted father, an esteemed attorney in Monroe, NC. Or, with her ironic sense of humor and literary mindset, she might laugh it off.
My grandmother was a product of the repressive, hypercritical, hypocritical Victorian Era, which placed an emphasis on highly moralistic, straitlaced language, manners, and appearances; romantic, puritanical notions of love and marriage; rigid gender roles and frequent segregation of the sexes. Men and women didn’t usually know each other well before marriage. Later in life, they discovered they had unrealistic views of each other before marriage, placed each other on a pedestal, only to endure and frequently feel locked into marriages of disconnection and great disappointment.
My parents were taught the Victorian social mores of their parents but took them less seriously. They had more freedom to choose partners and careers. My generation rebelled even more against the expectations, hypocrisies and “duties” of the Victorian era. Attending religious services routinely in order to prove ourselves to be upstanding citizens is less important in urban and suburban areas than it was in the small-town conformist South where, if you weren’t attending church, your neighbors would ask what were you doing on Sunday morning. Tithing and charity are less noticed. Greediness, dishonorable behavior and insobriety are less likely to be found out. “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking,” observed the journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken (1880-1956).
My childrens’ generation is either unaware of these social mores, or take them less seriously than even my generation did.
In retrospect, in gaining our freedom “to be who we want to be” outside the fishbowl of the small town, we may have lost some great values and manners as well.
My uncle, Mac Secrest, a retired journalist, in his 2004 autobiography, Curses and Blessings, recalled a revelatory family event, set in the family home in Monroe, N.C., in the early 1930s. After I read it, I imagined that similar stories could occur today in the Middle East — particularly Turkey and the Gulf States such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Living there was kind of like traveling back in time to an era before I was born in America. It reminded me that cultural behavior is a matter of a society’s development.
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