Curiosity: A Postmortem

Curiosity died. It happened while I was sleeping. I guess. I don’t rightly know. All I know is that I woke up this morning thinking, I never want to leave this bed.

I am interested in nothing, I thought to myself. I’m not curious about anything. My lack of curiosity alarmed me. It’s death to a writer. Not to mention a human being who aspires to be fully alive, present, loving.

Then I asked myself, When did my curiosity about the world die? 

Was it the day that I came running up to my young, shy mother, asking, “Mommy, why does that lady at church always wear the same blue dress?” My father had only recently been ordained a Southern Baptist minister, and there he was, pastor of a church, and she, the pastor’s wife, the focus of attention she did not want. 

She shushed me. “I don’t know, but don’t ask her. It might be the only dress she has, and you might hurt her feelings, and she might cry.”

Silenced for the moment, I was evidently unconvinced. The following Sunday, or one soon thereafter, I came bounding up to her. “Mommy! Mommy! I asked her, and she didn’t cry!”

Every time my mother recounted the story, she looked down, closed her eyes, shook her head. With the expression of a woman who wished the earth had opened that very moment and swallowed her. 

No doubt, she felt that she was teaching me an important lesson about being respectful of other people and setting limits on my all-encompassing curiosity when it might be hurtful. But I took the lesson further. I shut down. Not right that moment, perhaps, but certainly in the years following. I stopped noticing what anyone wore. I even stopped seeing people. If you asked me to describe them, I couldn’t. All the more extraordinary because I was the child who reportedly went into a room for the first time, and, after five minutes, could tell you the colors, the shapes, the arrangement of everything in the room. Another skill lost somewhere along the way.

On the other hand, maybe my curiosity died the day I blurted out, “My Grandmommie drinks beer!” 

My grandmother was mortified. “I certainly do not!”

“Well,” I paused to recalibrate, “—my Daddy does!”

Horror of horrors! What would people think. As a Southern Baptist preacher, he wasn’t supposed to drink. No Southern Baptist was supposed to drink. Every Sunday we read out loud the covenant pasted in the front of our Broadman hymnals, pledging to “abstain from the sale, manufacture, and use of intoxicating drink as a beverage.”

“Now you know that’s not true!” she said. “Don’t tell stories!”

I see now that what I was trying to do was make sense of the world of adult secrets that I could feel humming all around me. I can’t help noticing that I didn’t actually ask a question. Maybe I had already learned that questions were not appreciated. Instead I threw out a bold statement, just to see if I got a bite. What I got was, smacked down. Because, as it turned out, not only was curiosity rude, it might uncover a painful family secret.

Come to find out, thirty years later, there was someone drinking in our family, but it was none of the people I named. My PawPaw, Grandmommie’s husband, was an alcoholic. A “periodic binge drinker,” as my mother told me through a cataract of tears. Even at the distance of thirty years, it was something shameful and emotionally ripping. 

On some level, I suspect I already knew. In church, I had heard my grandmother and my mother put their heads together and whisper, “Did you smell So-and-So? They’ve been drinking….” I could smell the smell they were referring to coming from the pew behind us.  I was confused. What are they talking about? That’s the way PawPaw smells….

(When I shared that memory with my mother, she went into full denial. “We never took you children over to the house when he was drinking!” That may have been true, but I would be surprised if PawPaw didn’t have a little stash hidden away to get him through to the next binge.)

Then I discovered that adults lied, which didn’t help matters. When my brothers and I asked how PawPaw was doing after his cancer surgery, we were told he was getting better. A few months later we were at his funeral. 

Come to find out, they knew he was dying all along. I learned that it was not only rude or inconvenient to ask questions. You couldn’t be sure that the answer you were given was the truth. 

Then there were the questions it never occurred to me to ask. For example, about the Black kids who rode the school bus with me.

They always sat in the back. The back of the bus was my favorite place to sit, because I loved the fizzy feeling in my stomach when we went over bumps in the country road and the back of the bus leapt up into the air. My family called them “leapty-dips.” The youngest of the Black children, about 7-ish, must have loved it as much as I did, because he would hoot and holler whenever it happened, and then we would laugh together.

It never occurred to me to ask why the Black children always rode in the back. I assumed the reason was that they liked it as much as I did. And I never asked why they didn’t get off the bus to come into the school with us. I simply accepted that that’s the way it was.

There were other questions that I never asked. Why was it that they never came over to play, when they lived just up the road from the farm? Why didn’t we ever go to their house? I mean, we went to Suzy and Jacky Parker’s house, which was further down West Neck Road. And Robert Holliwell, my brother’s friend, lived even further away, but he came once for a sleepover. What was the difference? I never thought to ask.

Now I know: Suzy, Jacky, and Robert were White. The other children, whose names I never learned, were Black. (Why did I never learn their names?)

In southeastern Virginia where I grew up, history was never far away. The schools took us on regular and repeated field trips to Jamestown, Yorktown, Williamsburg. I still remember the fragrance of the boxwood that hedged the cottage yards and lined the streets of Colonial Williamsburg. That, and the White actors in period costume who demonstrated what life was like in colonial days. For White people, that is. If slavery was mentioned, it must have been only in passing. It made no impression on me.

In the summers, my parents and grandparents took us to plays like “The Lost Colony,” about the early English settlers who mysteriously disappeared from Roanoke Island and left a single cryptic clue: the word Croatoan scratched into one of the palisades of the wooden fort. The only question was, what happened to the English settlers? 

 They also took us to see “Unto These Hills,” which depicted the uprooting of the Cherokee people from their homes, and the deadly march to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears. While I cried for the poor Cherokees, it had already been presented as a foregone conclusion that their destiny was to yield to the forces of civilization. Which was brought by the White settlers. A tragedy for the Cherokee people, but necessary in order to achieve progress. I never really questioned it.

And it never occurred to me to ask who were the Indigenous people who lived in southeastern Virginia when the English settlers came and claimed it. The story we were given was about settlers who stumbled into a vast and vacant wilderness, ripe for the cultivating. Empty of all human habitation. 

Our parents took us on weekend day trips to the sites of famous Civil War battles in Virginia. The two Battles of Bull Run, or Manassas. Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg. We walked the trails and stood on rolling green hills in peaceful parks that I did my best to imagine as the scenes of violent, bloody battles. I got goosebumps as my father read to us, with dramatic flourish, the markers recounting heroic stories of brave generals. Confederate generals mostly, as I remember. The stories I loved best were about Stonewall Jackson. How Jackson got his nickname (“There’s Jackson, standing like a stone wall.”) How he was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville, the victim of “friendly fire.” How General Robert E. Lee likened his death to “the loss of my right arm.”

In school we were taught that the cause of the Civil War was something called “states’ rights.” In other words, the North (as we learned the history) tried to boss the South around and interfered with their freedom, their right to do as they saw fit. If any student dared to suggest chattel slavery as a cause, our teachers, who were White, shut them down right quick. “No. The issue was states’ rights.” No one pointed out that the right the Southern states were so eager to safeguard was the right to enslave people of color. We didn’t question any further, we just took notes. We had been taught not to ask questions. We had learned not to try to connect the dots. 

In Richmond, I took for granted the monuments to fallen Confederate heroes that lined Monument Avenue. We drove past them every week on the way to piano lessons or the eye doctor. Right in the center of the broad boulevard was the grandest monument of all of them, the figure of General Lee, astride a bold stallion, noble in defeat. Still ostensibly in command. 

All of this history, told from the White point of view, we absorbed like the air we breathed. And who thinks to question the air they breathe? Not me, in any case. Not back then.

This morning I woke up feeling like I didn’t ever want to get out of bed again. Feeling like I had no interest in anything or anyone, no curiosity. That curiosity itself was dead, and the only thing to do was to sing a sad hymn, get on with the funeral. And then go back to bed.

Instead, I got curious. About curiosity. Specifically, when it was that my curiosity about the world died.

Ha! Come to find out, curiosity does not give up the ghost so easily.

It could be that I’m just tired. In the last few years I have been asking all the questions I never asked for the half-century before. Questions like, who were my ancestors? Did they enslave Black people? (They did.) Did they fight for the Confederacy? (They did.) Were my ancestors part of the mob that lynched a Black 15-year-old in Princess Anne County in 1885? (I’ll never know for sure, but I’m betting they were.)

And, damn it—although I now know the answer—why didn’t we get together and play with the Black kids who rode on the bus? Why weren’t they allowed to go to school with us?

The time for some of these questions has been and gone. The question before me in this moment is: When will I ask questions about what is happening right now? What are the things I’m witnessing now that I’m not asking questions about? What are the things I’m doing now that I need to interrogate? How has White supremacy warped me? I don’t want to come to the end of my life and wonder why I didn’t ask the questions I needed to ask, or why I wasn’t curious about what was happening right under my nose.

Truth be told, it may well be that I need to go back to bed and get some rest. I am tired, and that’s a fact.

But in any case, it’s too damn early to do a postmortem on curiosity.