Sheryl St. Germain

Essays

Menuett

Southerners are notorious for their love of drama and exaggeration. There's so much drama to the land here-not only flooding, but recurring hurricanes, heart-stopping heat and humidity, schizophrenic muddy land that can't decide whether it's land or water-that we've developed an appetite for it. Scheherazade and her fantastic tales would have flourished in New Orleans where tall tales and exaggeration in every-day talk abound. And, in the popular imagination, a love for the sentimental and melodramatic. Opera and blues, the most emotionally charged musical forms, are big favorites in New Orleans. My grandfather, August Frank, a typical New Orleanian whose father immigrated to America from Germany, loved sentimental poetry. My grandmother would often send me to fetch him from the neighborhood bar he used to frequent, and I'd find, him, more often than not, standing tall and stiff (and usually half-crocked), reciting, for the umpteenth time, "The Face on the Barroom Floor" as if it were the most profound poem he'd ever had the privilege to encounter.

Just as it's more important for our politicians to be interesting than to be honest (Edwin Edwards is a case in point), it's more significant that our life stories be interesting than literally true. That's not to say there's no truth in our stories, though, only that we've fixed them up because no one here will listen to you unless what you're saying is engaging or otherwise entertaining. That's why my mother distorted the truth-whether consciously or not-when telling me the story of how my great grandfather accidentally shot his eye out. She insisted for years that the accident occurred when he learned his wife had given birth to an eighth daughter; he was upset because he had wanted a son to help him in the fields. Each time his wife had gotten pregnant he had prayed for a son, and each time his wife had given birth to a girl. This last girl had been too much, the last straw, my mother said. And so he shot his eye out in anger, and cursed his wife's womb, and the family, while doing it. In fact, I found out while doing genealogical research that there had been a son early on, and the son had been a great help to his father, had probably been in the fields helping him when they received the news about the eighth daughter. My mother neglected to tell me about the son because it just wasn't as interesting a story if you knew about him.