Accessing blood-knowledge in Katherine Anne Porter's The Old Order.

Accessing blood-knowledge in Katherine Anne Porter's The Old Order. "I AM THE GRANDCHILD OF A LOST WAR, AND I HAVE BLOOD-KNOWLEDGEof what life can be in a defeated country on the bare bones ofprivation." In her discussion of blood-knowledge Katherine AnnePorter refers to an inherited awareness of a family past. Porteracknowledges that her understanding both of the years prior to the CivilWar and of the Reconstruction South stems not just from her own livedexperience but from the fact that the "older people in my familyused to tell such amusing little stories about" those times("Portrait" 160). In this respect blood-knowledge passes fromgeneration to generation through stories and recollections. While Porterclaimed that despite being "a Southerner by tradition andinheritance" she neither belonged to "the guilt-ridden,white-pillar crowd" nor was she "Jewish enough, or Puritanenough, to feel that the sins of the father are visited on the third andfourth generations," the guilt that she denies suffering herselfcan be found in her most autobiographical character, Miranda Gay(Thompson 4). In Old Mortality Porter writes that Miranda Gay, and hersister, Maria, "had lived not only their own years; but theirmemories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in thelives of the grown-ups around them" (174). Miranda and her sisterinherit blood-knowledge, yet throughout Porter's fiction suchremembrances combine the factual and the mythical, as well as secretsand lies. As a result, blood-knowledge carries with it the lingeringpresence of the unspoken as well as the spoken. For Porter's fictional Gay family the tension betweenverbalized accounts of the past and the things too terrible to utter isparticularly apparent throughout The Old Order and Old Mortality. Theseworks follow Miranda Gay from her childhood in the post-ReconstructionSouth through to her eventual departure from the family's Texashome. The family knowledge that Miranda inherits during her formativeyears is a sanguineous mix of fact and fiction, typed by secrecy. Suchsecretion leads Janis Stout to point to the "pervasive quality ofreticence" that permeates Porter's work, a reserve Stout findsmost noticeable in Miranda (113). Stout adroitly suggests that "itis largely in silence that [Porter] ponders the follies and the wondersof this world and attempts to puzzle out their hidden meanings"(125). Interestingly, while she acknowledges that it is "a corruptsociety that deals in falsehood" that Miranda objects to as shetries to uncover that which has been secreted, Stout does not trace thatcorruption to the race issues that pervade The Old Order (143).Likewise, in his discussion of the workings of memory in Porter'sfiction, although he recognizes that through Miranda's eyes readerssee "the truth that lurks beneath convention," Edward Schwartznever links that truth to the racial aspects of the Miranda stories(70). Such aspects, or what Patricia Yaeger in her exploration of racein Porter's work terms "racial melancholia," are, Iargue, deeply embedded in the blood-knowledge that passes from one Gaygeneration to the next (Dirt 18). In these stories blood and bloodlines are riddled with complexpermutations as the Gay family deals with the"responsibilities" of its "tangled world, half white,half-black, mingling steadily ... the confusion growing everdeeper" ("The Journey" 337). In Old Mortality the familytake pride in their lineage, in the perfection of Amy's "whitesilk ankles" (186), while in "The Journey" the matriarch,Sophia Jane, continually worries about the children born "in theNegro quarters" waiting to see whether they "would rum blackafter the proper interval ...". Porter's ellipses intimatethat many of the babies carry the white blood of the Gay men, anunspeakable yet not an invisible fact. Sophia Jane is a stalwart ofsilence since despite her knowledge of the black babies born with Gayblood, she maintains family stability by keeping "silent" andshowing "no sign of uneasiness." She even draws futuregenerations of Gay women into this vigilance, sending "her eldestgranddaughter" to check the skin color of the new babies (337). Sowhen Stout asks why Miranda is so "reticent," so"guarded," readers are drawn to the omissions that revolvearound the slave quarters. As I hope to show, silences shadow theGays' interactions with one another, suggesting that that whichthey seek to deny is never far from the surface. As Luise White suggests"Secrecy and lies conceal, they camouflage, but they certainlydon't hide everything" (15). At the base of the Gays' modified interaction, and theblood-knowledge it produces, lies the fear of miscegenation and the needto gloss over the family's role as both slave owner and continuedprocurer of black labor. Porter's own denial of racial guilt mayaccount for the fact that traces of such guilt in The Old Order havetypically been overlooked by critics in favor of the gender politicsinvolved in Miranda's maturation. However, as Gretlund confirms inhis work on Porter's unpublished story "The Man in theTree," (1) the main character, often referred to asMaria, suffers from acute guilt in the wake of the hanging of thegrandson of Nannie, the long-serving servant of Maria's family (9).Indeed, Porter refers to "the blood guilt" that many of thewhite townspeople feel after the lynching, a guilt that manifests itselfin the "horrible sense of shame" that plagues Maria. (2) Thelynching may act as the trigger for Maria's feelings, yet she hasalways known "by intuition all that lies beneath this surface offriendly relations": for Maria, her servants and laborers "area horrible burden on ... her conscience." This burden is less overtin the The Old Order, where the much younger Miranda begins the processof piecing together a hidden family history: she is involved in fillingin what Malcolm Bull terms "the void left by the hiddenness oftruth" (9). The Gay family's narrative is one marred by gaps:omissions that pivot around the interconnectedness betweenmiscegenation, black labor, and blood-knowledge. While Porter goes some way to addressing these gaps in "TheMan in the Tree," as Ciuba notes, she never finished the story"perhaps because she was not yet ready to face the fullimplications of the hanged man. The consummate craftswoman was still toomuch the daughter of the Old South, still too limited by some of theracial prejudices that make her fictional surrogate feel so guilty"(60). Porter's "racial prejudices" are not a matter ofconcern here; rather, the significance rests in the silences surroundingblack labor and violence, silences that are most pronounced in The OldOrder. In order to explore the silences and gaps that mar Miranda'syouth, it is necessary to chart the processes by which the Gay clandeceive themselves, and the effects that such deception may wreak on itsindividual constituents. Richard Gray notes that Porter belongs to the Southern"renaissance," that group of authors writing between the twoWorld Wars who were simultaneously involved in, and reacting against,the modernization of the region (3). As a new order supersedes the old,we see in Porter's work a fear of change in the anxiety surroundingmiscegenation. Metaphorically this concern centers on a desire tomaintain order and stability through the preservation of a purebloodline. For Sophia Jane, that new world, characterized byinextricable changes in black-white relations, modern agriculturalpractices, and growing women's rights, results in "forebodingthoughts" that leave "a bitter taste in her throat"("The Journey" 333). However, a cleansing concoction of familymyths washes away the "bitter taste"; this peculiar mixreinventing the bloodknowledge that passes down through the generations.Mary Titus contends that Porter's use of the phrase blood-knowledgeresonates with "the chimes of the Agrarian nostalgia"(Ambivalent 183). For the Gays such romanticized versions of the pastlead to layers of obscurity as myth supersedes reality. Porter highlights the distorted nature of the family'sromantic outlook throughout Old Mortality. When Harry tells hisdaughters that there "were never any fat women in the family, thankGod," Miranda, even in her youth, begins to doubt the legitimacy ofthe these tales (174). She immediately thinks of Great-aunt Keziah whosehusband "refused to allow her to ride his good horses after sheachieved two hundred and twenty pounds" (174). While this stands asan example of their ability to re-imagine the bloodline, the Gays areequally defined by their reticence, as shown by Sophia Jane'ssilences. Future generations of the Gays inherit, through the bloodline,this uneasy combination of myths and secrets. The complex notion of blood-knowledge in the Miranda stories may beread in light of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's psychoanalyticaccount of the "transgenerational phantom." The phantom occursas unspeakable family secrets are passed down through the generations;each new generation keeps alive the hidden facts of a family'shistory. Nicholas Rand, in his editor's note to Abraham andTorok's study, claims that the "concept of the phantom bringsthe idea and importance of family history, in particular the secrethistory of families, to the forefront of psychoanalysis" (168).Importantly, Rand goes on to argue that Abraham and Torok's phantommay be read both historically and socially. He suggests that Abraham and Torok's work enables us to understand how the falsification, ignorance, or disregard of the past--whether institutionalised by a totalitarian state ... or practiced by parents and grandparents--is the breeding ground of the phantomatic return of shameful secrets on the level of individuals, families, the community, and possible even entire nations. (168-69) Arguably, beneath the prevailing Gay legends that Miranda inheritslie "shameful secrets" whose absence from the family'sstories creates gaps within the familial narrative. Abraham and Torokclaim that "what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left withinus by the secrets of others" and for the Gays black labor andmiscegenation go some way toward forming the gaps that act as hauntingpresences in these stories (171). Certainly, Miranda and her siblings feel guilty when they hearstories about slavery from Uncle Jimbilly in "The Witness."The children have only a vague understanding of slavery yet when theyhear Uncle Jimbilly's stories they nevertheless experience"faint tinglings of embarrassment" (341). While DeMouy claimsthat Uncle Jimbilly's tales of enslavement are merely metaphoricsince "What he actually bears witness to, by his own person, is notphysical abuse of slaves by their owners but the physical deteriorationand certain death to which all humans are slaves" (129), the impactof his stories on Miranda indicate that she has knowledge, albeitencoded, of her family's involvement in slavery. In this respectPorter's blood-knowledge and Abraham and Torok's phantom aredeeply intertwined since the symptoms of the phantom's return donot, according to Rand, "spring from the individual's own lifeexperiences but from someone else's psychic conflicts, traumas, orsecrets" (166). The reader of The Old Order, then, "mustlisten for the voices of one generation in the unconscious ofanother" (Rand 166). That Miranda certainly desires to hear moreindicates both that she is attuned to the gaps in her knowledge and thatshe seeks to fill in those missing spaces. As Yaeger suggests withregard to Miranda, "in Porter's landscape [there] is theburning sense that all around us, and all around the child there is anexcess or remainder" (Dirt 20). Such uncontainable excess mayreturn as a transgenerational phantom, a phantom that points to the gapsin this family's history. In a bid to cover over those gaps the Gays place Miranda'sdead Aunt Amy on a pedestal, elevating her to a place where herwhiteness can be viewed but not contaminated. Significantly, OldMortality opens with reference to the photograph of Amy, who, even indeath, remains the object of the family's gaze. Indeed, Henningerdraws attention to the fact that "Aunt Amy's photographdisturbs her young nieces ... because the smile seems at once to existin the dead past and the alive present" (3). Even after death theGay family remains hugely invested in the idea of Amy as the idealSouthern belle: for them she embodies "the old order," a timewhen lines between black and white were, at least on the surface,clearly delineated. Richard Godden suggests that as "the color linewas criss-crossed in the quarters, so the pedestals soared at theplantation house" (1004). Godden's illuminating account ofblack labor in Poe's "The Raven" provides a useful glossfor considering Amy and what she represents for the Gays. For Godden the "cult of Southern womanhood raised the standardof the unbreachable hymen precisely because miscegenation breached thecolor line throughout the prewar South" (1005). AlthoughPorter's Amy belongs to a post-Civil War era, the emphasis onantiquity in the titles Old Mortality and The Old Order naturally implya backward glance to a lost plantation system where the purity of thewhite Southern lady floated "free from the violence for which shewas the cover story" (McPherson 3). The Gays' sepia-coloredimage of Amy serves to validate their whiteness and to deny both thefact of miscegenation and the black labor upon which the family depends.As Godden argues "Southern labor is a site of physical exchange inwhich ... the black is traumatically lodged within the generic body ofthe white owning class--he lodges there as a revenant, a man who is bothdead and alive and whose presence must be denied" (1006). The Amymyth, then, is an attempt to displace the black body. Titus, in her work on Porter's recreation of her own ancestralpast, claims that Porter's autobiographical texts share thesentiments of the Agrarian manifestos, particularly "John CroweRansom's description of the Southern gentry in the lead essay ofI'll Take My Stand: '...Their true inheritance is not laborbut leisure'" (Ambivalent 187). The blood-knowledge that flowsthrough The Old Orderis therefore corrupted as the Gay family seeks todraw out any trace of labor that contaminates their guilt-free leisure. At the heart of this blood washing lies Sophia Jane. As Ciubanotes, Sophia lane "overmasters blackness at everyopportunity" (62-63) so it is little wonder that she presides overa family whose "hearts and imaginations were captivated by theirpast, a past in which worldly considerations had played a very minorrole" (Old Mortality 175). Sophia Jane not only "overmastersblackness": she also works to render it invisible. Certainly, it is Sophia lane who celebrates her own closeness withNannie, who leads the family in its attempt to gloss over thefamily's dependence upon black labor. When she arrives at thefarmhouse every summer she first sets the black quarter in order bysending a worker for "such lime for white-wash, so many gallons ofkerosene oil, and so much carbolic acid and insect powder." Onlyafter "every hut was whitewashed" could she tend to settingher own house in order ("The Source" 323). Because she isabsent from the farm most of the year, the living conditions of theblack workers do not trouble her, but she can secure her presence at thefarm only when she has successfully whitened that quarter. In a worldwhere the purity of bloodlines is essential to maintaining a version ofthe Old South, Sophia Jane's cleaning instructions emerge from herneed both to render the black field laborers invisible and to hide anytrace of miscegenation under a coat of whiteness. Of course,whitewashing the cabins leaves beneath each fresh coat the traces of theold, thereby hiding but not eradicating what the Gays perceive asthreatening blackness. Miranda begins to look for what lies beneath the surface of familymyths. When she and her sister look at the photograph of Amy without thedistorting nostalgia that plagues the adults around them, they see a faded kind of merriment in the background.... The clothes werenot even romantic looking, but merely most terribly out of fashion, andthe whole affair was associated, in the minds of the little girls, withdead things.... The woman in the frame had been Aunt Amy, but she wasonly a ghost in a frame, and a sad, pretty story from old times. (OldMortality 173) As an interrogative child Miranda, despite hoping that she mightgrow up to be as beautiful as her dead Aunt, nevertheless questions thevalidity of family stories. Significantly, "The Grave" findsMiranda looking for treasure in empty graves, an exhumation process thathighlights her role as the family archaeologist searching for thosethings buried beneath family myths. "The Grave" recounts a day in 1903 when nine-year-oldMiranda and her older brother Paul go on a hunting expedition on old Gayfamily land. By 1903 the Gay family has lost much of its wealth, in partdue to the death of Sophia Jane. By the time of the grandmother'sdeath the family cemetery on their Texas land had contained "abouttwenty graves" (362). In death, however, Sophia Jane relinquishesher family's hold on the land as part of it "was to be soldfor the benefit of certain children, and the cemetery happened to lie inthe part set aside for sale. It was necessary to take up the bodies andbury them again in the family plot in the big new public cemetery, wherethe Grandmother had been buried" (362). The removal of the gravesfrom the family plot to a public cemetery signifies a key change in theGay family's attachment to the land: Miranda and Paul now feel liketrespassers on the "black, rich soft land." The children, inan echo of Porter's own childhood, become "landless," asituation that Darlene Unrue, in her recent biography of Porter, claimswas "a classification Katherine Anne always associated with a lowersocial rung" (29). Porter underscores the dramatic change in theGays' fortunes as she interlaces their landless position with areversal in race relations as Miranda worries that "Maybe one ofthe niggers'll see us and tell somebody" (363). In a momentwhen Miranda and Paul are acutely aware of land and ownership, theirrecognition of their own changed fortunes coincides, in this moment atleast, with a reversal as the fear of a policing black gaze curtailstheir time on the land. The complex race issues that arise out of the children's visitto the family graves resonates out of a soil that contains, as Yaegerexplains, extraordinary numbers of women, men, and children [who] fall intothe landscape and disappear. It is as if the foundation or basis forthis world is made out of repudiated, throwaway bodies that mire theearth: a landscape built over and upon the melancholic detritus, thedisposable bodies denied by white culture. (Dirt 15) Indeed, while the cemetery had housed the white family, the landitself contains traces of the black labor that allowed the Gays a lifeof "wealth and leisure" (365). In "The Fig Tree,"while Great-Aunt Eliza tells Miranda that the weeping she believes comesfrom the ground is actually the sound of tree frogs, Miranda'syoung consciousness may be more attuned to the melancholic sounds thatemanate from the ground than to the adults who choose to ignore thesources of their privileged existence (361-62). Yaeger's reading of the racial dynamic of these stories offersa useful way into the complex attachment to the Southern soil in theMiranda tales. Yaeger rightfully notes that The landscape of The Old Order is filled with real and hypotheticalbodies--with buried children, buried chickens, and the bodies oftortured slaves. In the secret world of the child, these voices come tolife again. Their weeping marks not only the child's individualloss but her culture's predations. (Dirt 19) Certainly, the graveyard returns readers to "The Witness"and Uncle Jimbilly's horrific stories about slavery that he tellswhilst whittling small tombstones for the graves of dead animals andbirds. The guilt and embarrassment that his stories evoke in Miranda andher siblings reveals their perhaps unconscious awareness of their ownfamily's position as slaveholders ("The Witness" 341).Miranda's guilt during the storytelling is similar to Maria'srealization in "The Man in Tree" that "she was therepository of a never-ending wrong." As Robert Brinkmeyersummarizes, Uncle Jimbilly "delivers a telling rebuke to thefamily's glorified past, nudging the children out of theirinnocence" (161). Miranda's keen attention to UncleJimbilly's tales opens her up to the unspoken remnants of herfamily's past. Yaeger suggests that "Something is calling outfrom Miranda's past that escapes the control of its concepts, thatcontinues to weep. The child becomes the agonized vehicle for this lostreminder" (Dirt 20). As Yaeger argues, Miranda senses herfamily's complicity in slavery, yet whilst the "tortured"history of black-white relations in the South demands that we payattention to the black bodies beneath the soil, we equally need to payattention to the white bodies that were once contained in the Texasearth. In "The Grave" the children's discovery of theempty plots reveals a level of regret at the loss of a family past, apast bound up in a plantation code. The fact that the family has lost part of the land and that familybodies are now located in a public rather than a private space underpinsthe effects of modernization in the region. For Yaeger, The grandmother's gravesite refigures female fecundity; herbody enters the text as a locus amoenus, a pleasant place.... Thisgravesite is sexually charged; it becomes a site of openness,exploration, nonaggression, and sensuality, and yet, for the children,this is a landscape peculiarly without gender or name.("Poetics" 272) However, Miranda knows that she plays in her grandfather'sgrave and although the grave in which Paul plays remains unnamed, hisdiscovery of a decorated ring certainly marks that particular sitefemale. Rather than being genderless, the landscape proffers bothmasculine and feminine gifts, gifts connect the siblings with theirfamily history. The empty graves act as open wounds or, to employ Abraham andTorok's term, gaps. The children find themselves drawn to theseempty spaces but on initial inspection they are rather disappointed withthe "commonplaceness of the spectacle" (362-63). Theseseemingly empty holes, then, act in a similar way to Abraham andTorok's notion of gaps. On one hand, the graves seem like littlemore than void spaces in the soil, but at the same time they containtraces of the past. These graves effectively offer Miranda analternative way back into her bloodknowledge. That the Gay dead are no longer concealed within family land placesgreater significance on the children's finds. Miranda discovers, inwhat was her grandfather's plot, "a silver dove no larger thana hazel nut, with spread wings and a neat fanshaped tail. The breast hada deep round hole in it" (363). My earlier allusions tomiscegenation and black labor as gaps in the family narrative may beapplied to the silver dove's gaping breast. The object from thepast returns Miranda to her heritage, a heritage marred by omissions. Miranda has already inherited a subtle understanding of herfamily's past and present status through her blood-knowledge.Despite her awareness of her father's weakened economic status, shealso has blood-knowledge of the family's affluent past. AlthoughHarry's fortune has diminished Miranda still has "vaguestirrings of desire for luxury and a grand way of living which could nottake precise form in her imagination but were founded on family legendof past wealth and leisure" (365). Porter evokes the force of thispast at the close of the story where a grown Miranda, having long lefthome behind, remembers the day that Paul stood "twelve years old, apleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and overin his hands" (368). In order to elucidate the complexity of theclosing image I will, here, discuss the events that follow thechildren's graveyard excursion. Having unwittingly hunted for relics of an old plantation orderthey now direct themselves towards their original prey, rabbits anddoves. After Paul kills a rabbit Miranda watches her brother pull backthe animal's skin, seeing how The flayed flesh emerged dark scarlet, sleek, firm; Miranda with thumb and finger felt the long fine muscles with the silvery flat strips binding them to the joints. Brother lifted the oddly bloated belly. "It was going to have young ones." (366) Significantly, Porter, in describing the children's find,switches to formal address as she refers to Paul as "Brother."Prior to his awareness of the "oddly bloated belly" Porterrefers to Paul either by his forename or in the possessive, "herbrother." While such terms of endearment were not uncommon duringthis period in the South, the appearance of "Brother" at thispoint in the story intensifies the sibling relationship. Porter further reinforces the sibling, blood connection as sherefers to Paul as "The brother." On realizing that the rabbitcarries "young ones" Paul Very carefully ... slit the thin flesh from the center ribs to the flanks, and a scarlet bag appeared. He slit again and pulled the bag open, and there lay a bundle of tiny rabbits, each wrapped in a thin scarlet veil. The brother pulled these off and there they were, dark gray, their sleek wet down lying in minute even ripples. (366) That the switch to formal address occurs as "the brother"reveals both the rabbit's pregnancy and the "bundle of tinyrabbits" heightens Paul's role in the scene. Paul'sripping of the "scarlet bag" and his pulling off of the"scarlet veil[s]" echoes the tearing of the hymen. In effect,Paul, in pulling apart the bloody veils, opens his sister up toreproductive knowledge. At the literal level, then, the rabbit moment opens Miranda'smind to procreation. Indeed, Mary Ann Wimsatt has termed "TheGrave" a "female initiation story" (88) while William L.Nance regards it as a story that "achieves a universality oftruth" since this "brief moment in the life of the youngheroine is one which she shares in some way with every girl" (104).Certainly, in many readings of the story, the womb and the reproductiveknowledge to which Miranda are exposed are typically cast in terms ofpatriarchal discourse. Even Yaeger, despite her own claim that "Apoetics of birth will require a theory of the changing values andsociohistorical meanings of women's biological contribution (orrefusal to contribute, or inability to contribute, or forcedcontribution) to the production of children" ("Poetics"269) does not situate the story's interest in reproduction withinthe collection's wider interest in slavery. For readers of"The Journey," Sophia Jane's careful watch over the colorof the babies born in the "Negro quarters" lies behind anyreference to reproduction in the "The Grave." Furthermore, Porter intensifies the link between black bodies andthe rabbit incident as she details Miranda's reaction to the bloodyscene. With the metaphoric hymen ripped, thereby displacing the puritythat the family clung onto through the figure of Amy, the repressedreturns to the surface. Watching Paul skin the animal Miranda recallsthat "Uncle Jimbilly knew how to prepare the skins so that [she]always had fur coats for her dolls," fur coats that tie to herknowledge of the "family legend of past wealth and leisure"(366). Beneath that existence, however, lie the hands of Uncle Jimbilly,hands that "were closed and stiff from gripping objects tightly,while he worked at them, and they could not open altogether even if achild took the thick black fingers and tried to turn them back"("The Witness" 340). Porter's inclusion of UncleJimbilly's name during this scene means that black labor is neverfar from the reader's, and arguably Miranda's, mind. WhenMiranda sees blood running over the dead rabbits she trembles"without knowing why" (366). On the surface, her dawningunderstanding ties to her first realization of reproduction, yet thenature of blood in these stories points to something that lies beyondthe immediate experience of this generation of Gays. As Godden suggests The figure of the revenant slave, structurally central to a premodern regime of accumulation and to the unconsciousness of an owning class, never forms, but makes itself felt at the lower levels of the narrator's consciousness and consequently at the outer semantic reaches of his language. (1007) Miranda's blood-knowledge flows with the spoken and theunspoken and at any moment the hidden surfaces to create within her anuneasy sensation, a feeling that blood is more complicated than familystories suggest. Indeed, on discovering the dead rabbits inside the womb, Mirandaand Paul undergo a series of conflicting emotions. As Paul pulls awaythe veil that covers the unborn rabbits, Miranda exclaims "Oh, Iwant to see" (366). Porter italicizes the "see,"effectively underlining the importance of Miranda's desire to look.Miranda is the vehicle through which Porter opens up the complex layersof meaning in the Gay world, the child being the only one who wants toknow more about slavery. Paul would rather not hear UncleJimbilly's stories but Miranda "wanted to know the worst"("The Witness" 342). Unlike her grandmother, who was able to"keep silent" about the racial mixing on her farm, Mirandaconstantly seeks to look beyond family myths. However, even at the moment that "her former ignorance"surrounding gestation disappears and she begins to learn "what shehad to know," Paul turns the moment into a secret. He buries"the young rabbits ... in their mother's body ... and hidesher away," a process of secretion not unfamiliar to those with Gayblood (367). Paul stresses that Miranda must remain silent about theincident, asking her to tell no one about their find. Yet, as Whitenotes, "secrets and lies are not forms of withholding informationbut forms by which information is valorized" (11). By demandingthat Miranda keep their discovery secret, Paul effectively signals theimportance of what they have just seen. As White goes on to suggest, we"might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden bya secret, but we see the ideas and imaginings by which people disclosewhat should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealingone narrative with another" (11). The idea of one narrative'sconcealing another is central to Porter's Miranda stories andoffers a useful way to view the Gays whose dominant narratives about Amycan barely conceal the black bodies whose labor lies beneath herwhiteness. Read in light of the social and economic context of the story, acontext in which the family has already had to sell part of their land,keeping Miranda innocent keeps her safe from the threat of exogamy. Thefamily, though, are unsuccessful in their bid to keep Miranda innocent.Miranda, following in the impetuous footsteps of Amy, makes an earlymarriage that severs her connection to the home place. By the close of"The Grave" readers find a grown Miranda in a "strangecity of a strange country" (367). Miranda's crossing overborders into strange lands places her at the heart of an exogamous movebeyond the confines of family and region. As Miranda walks through these alien streets "without warning,plain and clear in its true colors as if she looked through a flame upona scene that had not stirred nor changed since the moment it happened,the episode of that far-off day leaped from its burial place before hermind's eye" (367). The foreign streets bring forth the rabbitmemory, a memory that involves the family land and a moment when hersibling introduced her to the knowledge that would eventually lead toher exogamous departure. However, Miranda works back through that memoryto the moment that she and Paul made their discoveries in the familygraves. In doing so, Miranda returns to a time before she wakens intoreproductive knowledge, a time that nevertheless contains traces of theGays' complex family history. To understand the way she views home at this point in the story itis necessary to consider the way that the memory returns to her as shewalks through this strange city: An Indian vendor had held up before her a tray of dyed sugar sweets, in the shapes of all kinds of small creatures: birds, baby chicks, baby rabbits, lambs, baby pigs. They were in gay colors and smelled of vanilla, maybe.... It was a very hot day and the smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery at home: the day she had remembered always until now vaguely as the day she and her brother had found treasure in the opened graves. Instantly upon this thought the dreadful image faded, and she saw clearly her brother, whose childhood face she had forgotten, standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over in his hands. (367-68) Here, images intersperse with one another, conflating past andpresent, thereby permitting "the juxtaposition of different spacesin a single picture" (de Certeau 84). All of the sweet baby animalsand birds naturally return Miranda and the reader to Uncle Jimbilly, theone person whose account of slavery was not sugarcoated. A three-foldlayering is involved here as interconnecting chains link the smallsugary animals to Uncle Jimbilly, the whittler of tombstones for smallanimals, whose sepulchral pastime further evokes the family cemetery in"The Grave." The earth in and around those empty graves had"a pleasantly sweet, corrupt smell" the same smell thatreturns to Miranda in the market street (363). Ultimately, the mixtureof sweetness and corruption points to the use and abuse of black bodieson Gay land. One particular type of sweetness that Miranda knew as a child camefrom the fig trees on her grandmother's land. In "The FigTree" Miranda thinks of how the figs "at home were black andsugary," preferable to the "white ones" at thefamily's summer home (355). Miranda draws a connection between thedark figs of home and Nannie's face that "was wrinkled andblack and it looked like a fig upside down" (358). Indeed,Miranda's preference for the "dark and shady ... figgrove" with its saccharine harvest conjures up the black breast ofNannie who suckled Sophia Jane's eldest children before Sophia Janedecided to breastfeed her own babies (354). Although Harry was not fedby Nannie, his awareness of motherly figures reveals the intertwinednature of black and white in the South. While Harry did not have a wetnurse, Porter's own father, Harrison, the basis for Harry, wasbreastfed by the family's own Nannie, Mammy Jane (Unrue 21). Harry,we are told, was one "of that latest generation of sons whoacknowledged, however reluctantly, however bitterly, their mysticalnever to be forgiven debt to the womb that bore them, and the breastthat suckled them" ("The Last Leaf" 351). The final commain this sentence separates womb from breast highlighting the potentialrole of two women in the nurturing process, one white and one black.Titus writes that in Porter's notes "the fig tree isassociated with fertility, mother and grandmother, or simply the family,faithfully reproducing the same blood through the generations"("Mingled" 121). However, miscegenation troubles thatbloodline, and as white child suckles on black breast the ingestion offluid suggests that what flows through these white bodies is a complexmix of races. The sweetness that Miranda aligns with corruption in thegraveyard and in the marketplace ties to her developing awareness of herfamily's dependency on black labor. Furthermore, it is the overwhelming artificiality of the "dyedsugar sweets" that force Miranda to recall the bloody reality ofthe dead rabbit and its young, "each wrapped in a thin scarletveil." The abrupt transition in the story from the day'sevents to Miranda's presence in a strange city bypasses"twenty years." Readers of Porter's other Miranda talesknow that a twenty-year jump covers a time frame in which Miranda haseloped, married, and divorced. When Miranda stands in the market streetof a strange country, suddenly recalling the image of the dead rabbitsfrom "its burial place," her memory returns her to the placeshe has left. The pregnant rabbit and all the attendant images of thatparticular day return to haunt Miranda due to the connection betweenthose events and her own developing awareness of exogamouspossibilities. Miranda's negative experiences of exogamy, though, account forher dismissal of the dead rabbit for a memory that takes her back to aseemingly more innocent past, one in which she still retains anattachment to her family. Miranda regards the memory of Paul asreassuring in the face of change. When Miranda looks back from hervantage point at the close of "The Grave" she herself, perhapsunwittingly, becomes involved in the time-honored Gay tradition ofnurturing romanticized views of the past, effectively replacing the"dreadful vision" of the dead rabbit with the "childhoodface" of her brother. Yet that closing image contains residues of the siblings'secret and Miranda's developing awareness of her family'scomplex past. Even the land that seems to offer escape smells corrupt.That corruption underpins Porter's Miranda stories; no memoryremains uncorrupted, remains free of what Porter refers to as the"peaks and edges ... of family anecdotes"("Portrait" 165). Despite Miranda's ability to detect thesecrets and lies that taint the Gay family's blood-knowledge, shetoo finds comfort in supplanting terrible memories with pleasant images.Thinking of Paul holding the dove does not, however, create an imagefree of complexity. The dove, with its gaping breast, points to allthose things omitted from the prevailing Gay myths. Regardless of their attempts to remain silent, or to cloud thetruth with romanticized versions of the past, the Gays cannot escape thefact that "blood is blood" and that blood carries with it theunspeakable as well as the spoken (Faulkner 243). Throughout The OldOrder the reticence concerning miscegenation and black labor begins tofalter as Miranda looks beyond the surface of things. As she does so,she sees the warped hands of Uncle Jimbilly, just as she may haveperceived the hidden babies of the slave-quarters in the bloody womb ofthe rabbit. As the "old order" disintegrates in these stories,the "persons who defy the boundaries that taboo onceregulated" (Bull 291) can no longer be contained by the Amy legend. Works Cited Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernal, Vol 1.Trans. Nicholas Rand. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. Katherine Anne Porter's ArtisticDevelopment: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism. BatonRouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993. Bull, Malcolm. Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision andTotality. London: Verso, 1999. Ciuba, Gary M. Desire, Violence and Divinity in Modern SouthernFiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy,Walker Percy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. StevenRendall. Berkley: U of California P, 1984. DeMouy, Jane Krause. Katherine Anne Porter's Women: The Eye ofHer Fiction. Austin: U of Texas P, 1983. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. London: Vintage,1995. Godden, Richard. "Poe and the Poetics of Opacity: Or, AnotherWay of Looking at that Blackbird." ELH67 (2000): 993-1009. Gray, Richard. The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of theAmerican South. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Gretlund, Jan Nordby. "'The Man in the Tree':Katherine Anne Porter's Unfinished Lynching Story." SouthernQuarterly 31:3 (Spring 1993): 7-16. Henninger, Katherine. Ordering the Facade: Photography andContemporary Southern Women's Writing. Chapel Hill: U of NorthCarolina P, 2007. McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgiain the Imagined South. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Nance, William L. Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection.Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1963. Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Stories of Katherine AnnePorter. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965. --. "The Man in the Tree." Fiction, uncompletedfragments--(Lynching Story), Series II, Box 4, Reel 69, Papers ofKatherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of MarylandLibraries. --."Portrait: The Old South." The Collected Essays andthe Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: SeymourLawrence, 1970. Rand, Nicholas. Editor's Note. Abraham and Torok 165-69. Schwartz, Edward G. "The Fictions of Memory., Katherine AnnePorter: A Critical Symposium. Ed. Lodwick Hartley and George Core.Athens: U of Georgia P, 1969. 67-82. Stout, Janis P. Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Memory in theWorks of lane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and loanDidion. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1990. Thompson, Barbara. "Katherine Anne Porter: An Interview."Paris Review 13 (Winter-Spring 1963): 1-30. Titus, Mary. The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter. Athens: Uof Georgia P, 2005. --. "'Mingled Sweetness and Corruption': KatherineAnne Porter's 'The Fig Tree' and 'TheGrave.'" South Atlantic Review 53:2 (May 1988): 111-25. Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of anArtist. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 2005. White, Luise. "Telling More: Lies, Secrets and History."History and Theory Theme Issue 39 (December 2000): 11-22. Wimsatt, Mary Ann. "The Old Order Undermined: Daughters,Mothers, and Grandmothers in Katherine Anne Porter's MirandaTales." Southern Mothers: Facts and Fictions in SouthernWomen's Writing. Ed. Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff. BatonRouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 81-99. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing SouthernWomen's Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2000. --. "The Poetics of Birth." Discourses of Sexuality: FromAristotle to Aids. Ed. Donna C. Stanton. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1992. SARAH ROBERTSON University of the West of England (1) The unpublished story also contains the working titles:"The Southern Story" and "The Never-Ending Wrong." (2) Fiction, uncompleted fragments--(Lynching Story), Series II,Box 4, Reel 69, Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections,University of Maryland Libraries. I would like to express my sincerethanks to Barbara Davis, President of the Katherine Anne PorterFoundation, for granting me permission to quote from this unpublishedstory.