When I read Richard Friedman’s article about good parents and bad seeds in the New York Times today, I thought, “Well, of course. It’s self-evident, isn’t it? Parents who do everything right can always end up raising a child who simply goes wild, for unexplained reasons. It’s built into human nature, the possibility that some of us go astray despite the best rearing possible.”
I suspect that this insight into the tendency of original sin to produce bad seeds in any generation may be built into the upbringing of people raised in traditional Southern families, because, well, there simply are bad seeds.
Many of them. They exist. We meet them in the flesh.
In our own families. And our family stories are often morality tales turning on the question of what to do about the bad seed that keeps popping up in a particular family line, the tares that grow amidst the wheat no matter how diligently we cultivate our field of grain, the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Family stories about bad seeds are explanatory stories designed to tell us where things went wrong, and to assure us that despite their having gone wrong, a certain moral order in the universe will try to right things again, and will dispense karmic justice to malefactors as it does so.
Southern families—and, I suspect, families in many cultures—specialize in identifying the particular line that tends to yield rotten seed. These family lines are not uncommonly the line of the mother-in-law, who, in the eyes of daughters-in-law, bears the blame for producing refractory sons against whom their wives ought to have been warned before they married.
A great-aunt of mine once told me that when she and her siblings misbehaved, her mother (a Harris from Georgia) clucked her tongue, shook her head, and said, “I see the old Godwin blood coming out in you now.” In the same story-telling session, Great-Aunt Grace also told me that her father once had another of his daughters tie a stubborn cow to a tree, broke a thick limb from the tree, and proceeded to bludgeon the cow between the eyes with the limb. As she said, “Seeing that put me off my daddy for life.”
The Sneads whose mother was a Godwin were plain mean. Everyone knows that. And so it didn’t surprise me at all when I went to the last reunion of that side of my family I’ve attended, in 1984, and the cousin presiding over the program announced, mid-afternoon, “They say some folks here want to trace our family history.” Then, screwing up his face to an ugly mask, he added, “I don’t intend to give any of them a bit of information, and they have no business prying into my life or my past.”
That’s how the Sneads are, I sagely and sadly told myself, as I decided that I’d never again go to one of their reunions, since I (along with my uncle) happened to be the object of the hateful announcement.
I was not surprised by Cousin R.’s announcement because his grandfather, my great-grandfather, not only bludgeoned cows between the eyes with tree limbs, but also abandoned his wife and children when he fell in love with another woman as he approached midlife. And his brother, a judge in Texas, was so mean to his wife, stories tell, that she burned the house down with him in it.
Another brother appears in records of their local church censured after he “took an ax”—presumably to threaten a hapless brother in the Lord with said ax. When their mother, she of the bad Godwin blood, joined that church in her old age, such a hullaballoo ensued that the church had to adjourn its worship that Sunday and reconvene the next to decide whether it could find heart to offer Sister Harriet Snead the right hand of fellowship.
And, since all of these stories have come to me down a family line dominated by a much-abused great-grandmother who suffered at the hands of her Snead husband with the bad Godwin mother, I do, of course, have to ask myself whether all Godwins are ipso facto mean, or whether only some Godwins—lamentably, those from whom I myself happen to spring—are given to cruelty.
Certainly there’s a streak of outright peculiarity in every Godwin I’ve ever met, or about whom I have read. Some distance back in our family history is the romantic Miss Clotilde Godwin, who is said to have spied for the Revolutionary forces as she courted British officers in southeastern Virginia. And then she surprised both sides by running off with one of the British officers with whom she had fallen in love. In her non-spying time, she kept a school for children, in which she taught the children to spell the much-loved Virginia dish of sour milk curds, bonny clabber, as “bonnaugh clabbaugh.”
Just because. Because she preferred the latter spelling. And what Miss Clotilde wanted, Miss Clotilde got.
The penchant for fanciful orthography was apparently shared by other members of the family, including her cousin down the line, my great-great grandmother Harriet Godwin Snead, she of the church-disrupting capabilities. When Harriet applied for a pension on her husband’s Creek War service at the end of their lives, she spelled her name so many different ways in the single pension application—Harriet, Harriett, Harriette, Hattie, Henrietta—that the federal office sent it back to her, asking her to verify the correct spelling of her name.
To which she replied something like the following: You fools. Of course I know that my name is spelled Harriet in the family bible. But I have always understood a person has the right to spell her name any way she wishes.
Peculiarity and meanness combined: an unpleasant and potentially lethal combination. One about which families and human communities must make certain hard, sober decisions.
Given that some members of some families simply will be both peculiar and mean, and no one knows why or how this happens—it just does, generation on generation—the challenge of parents is to decide what to do about the bad seed. The challenge of human communities is to decide how to deal with seeds that sprout awry despite the best efforts of the community to sow hearty seeds, to cultivate assiduously, and to remove the weeds from the cultivars.
Historically, the most common strategy parents in my culture have used to deal with this perennial challenge is a strategy of containment. The son who perpetually brawls, scorns education, refuses to do work assigned to him, besmirches the family’s good name by whoring, gaming, or reveling drunkenly in public (private behavior is a whole other matter) must be contained, assigned to another family member strong enough to curb his behavior.
And such containment must continue, many parents have insisted in the past, for life, beyond the lifetime of the parents. In my family, wills often make arrangements that, to all extents and purposes, bond one family member to another for life, if he (it usually is a he, though I have seen wills in which similar arrangements are made for daughters who have had a child out of wedlock) expects a share of the parents’ estate.
There is a wisdom about such family arrangements—a wisdom that it behooves other social groups to study. At the core of the wisdom of containing the bad seed is the question of discernment: parents are challenged to see their children as dispassionately as possible, to recognize both the strong and the weak among their children, and to assure that the strong make room for and guide the weak.
To change the metaphor from agriculture to an image from the pre-agrarian past of our nomadic, foraging ancestors: the challenge is to recognize the wolf in our midst, and to learn to deal wisely with the wolf. Wolves are notoriously tricky, the gospels remind us, because they often come to us in sheep’s clothing. Wolves aren’t self-evident.*
They are often the most appealing member of the flock to which we belong, the one we least expect to have the capacity to engage in rapacious behavior.
Wolves dress up like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and loll grinning across the bed, asking us to kiss their cheeks as they tense to spring and devour us when we reach down for their embrace.
The best way to deal with wolves walking on two legs is to learn to spot them, and having identified them, to find ways to contain the violence with which they threaten to disrupt our family or our community. And to remember as we do so that those whom a community may be inclined to see as the wolf, because he or she wears rough clothing and has rough manners, may, in fact, be the savior sent to save us from the wolf hidden in our midst, he of the suave ways and glozening tongue, he whom we never see as the predator until it is too late.
These are lessons transmitted through the wisdom of family stories. They are lessons we forget at our peril. They are lessons our society, with its fixation on glitzy, constantly shifting commercial images of the bright and beautiful (and the rich and famous) forgets at its peril.
They are lessons we’ve already forgotten, long since. If we had not forgotten them, we would not have elevated one smiling wolf after another to the halls of political and ecclesial power, and put one wolf after another in charge of the purse strings of our economic life.
Because wolves and bad seeds are everywhere, and they won’t ever go away. And our only weapon against them is to learn to see them as they are, and then to act decisively and wisely to contain the evil of which they are—always—capable. Even as we recognize that the potential to engage in lupine behavior resides in our own breasts, as well, and the vigilance we exercise in dealing with others must begin first and foremost in our own hearts.
*I have a distant cousin who spent part of her life living along the Canadian border in the inland northwest part of the United States. She tells me that wolves often came onto her porch when she lived in that region, and that they were magnificent, non-threatening creatures who have gotten a very bad and undeserved rap. I trust her testimony, and want to emphasize that I’m talking here about human and metaphoric wolves, not real ones. About whom I’m happy to keep an open mind and learn more.
The graphic is a shot from Mervyn LeRoy's 1956 film "The Bad Seed," which my brothers and I watched with horrified fascination over and over when we were children.
