The song

When I was a boy growing up in Mississippi, my father liked to “drive around looking at houses.” That was his expression. We lived in the very center of Jackson, a block from the Capitol building; it was the ’50s, I was 6 and on. I don’t know what my father felt about owning the small red-brick duplex in the older part of town-if he liked it much or didn’t. It is the inner city now, but it was our home then, a place he’d bought so I could be born in it. It was what he could afford.

I only know that he was in love with the suburbs, the rapidly replicating ripple-rings of new housing, filling up the vacant farms and woodlots and horse pastures beyond Jackson’s limits, the reverberance of the postwar economic boom and of the white race-anxiety that changed the character of old urban life in Mississippi forever, and created the New South.

Both my parents had been raised in rural places-west Arkansas (not South, exactly)-both of them born in the first decade of the century. Cities, to them, were Little Rock, Fort Smith, Oklahoma City: raffish, expanding towns, more than complex, grinding cities. What thoughts they had about “urban life”-about big-city anomie, changing demographics-I don’t know either. They wouldn’t have had any thoughts about it, is my guess.

Most likely the appeal of the suburbs, in their minds, had to do with “the new.” They’d grown up in old, equivocal housing, far down rucked dirt roads. Isolated. In my mother’s case that had meant no electric, plumbing situated out-of-doors, water drawn from a well. The new had appeal. It was the opposite of most everything they’d known.

In particular, new meant the state of whatever domiciliary arts were then to be found in suburban Mississippi: solid-seeming builder-designed homes; winding, blackly paved, curbless streets. Front yards cows didn’t stand in. Carports, driveways, good drainage, circuit breakers. New sounds in the air, a modern sense of comfort and security achieved at the modest cost of uniformity.

To my father, a large, handsome, wide-eyed, sweetly unassuming man, “driving around looking at houses” meant long, sunny Sunday afternoons spent in the family car, a brown, ball cap 1947 Mercury. My mother in the front beside him, me in the back alone, he enjoyed motoring out after church, north toward where the new development took up. He must’ve wanted to stay apprised of what was happening there. Jackson’s limits were widening, houses sprouting, woods retreating, hay fields, plow ground, small holdings succumbing week by week, being translated into “lots” and “tracts,” buildings-to-be lined out with pine stakes, footings poured, septics sunk, studs printing up yellow in the warm piney air.

We saw it all through our car window. Only curious, my father didn’t seem to feel the need for closer inspection. He just passed along, staring out, smoking, looking, my mother and me his confederates. They spoke, I’m sure. Voiced their appraisals. “That’s a nice place.” “Yes.” “He’s building those all alike, isn’t he?” “That sits too far toward the creek.” “I don’t like a carport. I like a garage.” “I don’t like brick.” Afterward we drove home.

I was never consulted, nor did I inquire. I was just their little boy. Even so, it was my presumption (unstated) that people did things with certain other things in mind. Outcomes. Buying a house could have been such an outcome. Why else look? And look and look. Yet, houses drifted by us the way small towns float past a slow train-car window, and with comparable consequence. I don’t know if my father maintained an idea of what money was selling for in 1954, or if he had a “solid down” in his pocket. He’d accumulated some small savings. But he didn’t have the VA, or a pension from his job. My mother didn’t work. They’d been married 15 childless years before I came along. They just loved each other, and later me. It’s possible they didn’t think a lot about the future. He’d already had a heart attack and didn’t have so long to live. It’s possible they did know that.

It’s a fair measure of ourselves as adults-of our empathy, at least-that we try to achieve a view of our parents’ lives more as they viewed them and less in the ruthless, tunneled vision of childhood (not that our parents’ view would necessarily be clearer). Looking at houses, it’s my belief, was the center puzzle-piece of my father’s imagination. His pleasure. It was not all of what he dreamed, by any means: He had fears for sure, solid memories, some future remaining. He loved. But through the car window, his imagination’s private screen, he could see himself most vividly-standing in his yard, trimming his young trees, watering new grass, building certain things, relaxing in a lawn chair on a freshly mowed palette of green, arriving home from his job at dusk, the house lights blazing, my mother and me in attendance, sitting down to dinner in a room with a real picture window that showed an aqua sky, then later drifting to sleep tired, and waking refreshed and eager, backing down a sloped driveway on his journey to work, whistling a tune, a sweet, rare magic in his head. The song of the suburbs.

I hear this private music to this day, being after all, his son. Though that time, and he, are far away from me now.