In an era where gender identity and sexual orientation can get you a beating by bullies or shot dead in a nightclub, writer Shane Mitchell celebrates otherness — and a great-aunt who lived her life with courage and gusto.
by Shane Mitchell
September 4, 2024
“Would you mind if I take off my wig?” asked my great-aunt.
On an afternoon steamy enough to wilt lettuce, she lounged on the screened porch of her red brick house in Richmond, Virginia, and whipped off her crown of glory. An easily embarrassed teenager, I tried not to gawk, but it was unsettling to see how few strands remained of her flyaway hair. To set me at ease, my effervescent great-aunt, Lillian Aileen Shane, made light of it while fanning herself with the fake locks. My mother attributed this loss to those early permanent wave machines Aileen submitted to, like a bride of Frankenstein. In a generational photograph taken on a windy day at the beach when I was maybe 3 years old, we all had the same will-o’-the-wispiness, although I would never achieve the same frizzy carrot top that distinguished other women in the Shane family.
Aileen was a bird.
In the South, this faintly damning label excuses behavior outside starchy normative bounds, as applied to drunks, liars, flirts, artists, unrepentant atheists, and others of the socially incorrect persuasion. Akin to character, weirdo, freak, and downright odd. You never called anyone that to her face. In her own words, she was “a peculiar Southerner from a small town.”
Perhaps this is because my great-aunt made progressive life decisions for the time and place of her birth. Born May 24 1892, Aileen thrived during the New Woman era of the early 20th century. After she graduated with a sociology degree in 1914, her father objected to her pursuing employment. In a hand-typed memoir of her career, Aileen wrote: “He thought it would be grand for me to sit and rock on the porch and sew a fine seam. Why should his ‘frail’ only daughter have to earn a living? Bridge parties and dances were to his liking.” But good works appeared more to her liking, and she stubbornly left home for Chicago. Her father gave her a fur coat to stay warm in the Windy City and refused to see her off at the train station because he was weeping too hard. Aileen landed at United Charities, famously located at Hull House, where she would sit in the cafeteria near enough to activist Jane Addams — founder of the American social work profession — to “look into her magnificent, spiritual face.”
My great-aunt went on to earn her master’s degree at Smith College School for Social Work, and then settled in a teaching position in the newly formed Richmond Professional Institute at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. That’s where she briefly mentioned meeting “Anne, a newcomer from Ohio” in 1929. The two would be together for the rest of their lives.
This is when it becomes complicated. My mother was born in 1929, the oldest child and only daughter of Aileen’s beloved brother. Maybe it was because she had the same crazy, curly red hair or because she also burned a little brightly. No matter, Aileen took a shine to her. By the time Mom was a young girl, she was sent to stay with her aunt for longer and longer visits, perhaps dumped in Richmond, as I have come to understand, because her own mother was increasingly besieged. Four more children — all boys — in quick succession. The Great Depression. A little depression, never properly diagnosed. So Aileen helped nurture a daughter not her own.
Then a grand-niece.
That summer my great-aunt overheated under her wig, and revealed something of her true self, I was 15, and my parents had sent me off alone on a southbound train from New York with the sole instruction: “Get off at Richmond.” Aileen and Anne greeted me in the grand lobby of Union Station, one cheery and chattering, the other buttoned down and stern. Both appalled at the unsuitable clothing in my suitcase. (My mother got an earful.) It was a sad and lonely spell for me, because Mom was manifesting her own drama, and honestly, I only wanted to be swimming in the lake and playing baseball at twilight back home, not spending precious summer weeks with little old ladies in pillbox hats and sensible heels. They took me to a secondhand store and bought a couple of dresses so we could dine at the James River Country Club, where I ate lime sherbet in a silver dessert bowl for the first time. Aileen taught me how to snap a hand fan, a remarkably flirtatious skill. She also gave me a tooled-leather jewelry box, and Anne allowed me to choose a silver-and-coral ring from hers.
I still have both. But my memories are riddled with half-truths and secondhand narratives. Why can’t I remember Anne ever laughing? Was my great-aunt really the funny, carefree one? Were they frugal because of circumstance, or was it just a quirky habit to swipe hotel stationery and hand soaps?
It helps to read their letters and postcards again. Travel journals. Retirement tributes. Falling down a digital rabbit hole reveals Anne’s aunt to have been a notable suffragette. Even a will is telling, gifting my mother enough money to buy a house and granting Anne the use of dining room furniture for her lifetime. Mom was piqued about the fur coat, which went to a cousin. Of all the photographs I have inherited of these two companions, my favorite was taken in 1964, facing each other with sweet smiles in front of a dresser loaded with antique silver and a framed reproduction of Auguste Renoir’s lively portrait of 5-year-old Marguerite-Thérèse “Margot” Berard. Both aunts wear respectable strands of pearls and almost matching short-sleeved floral dresses.
On a recent morning in New York, I had a spare hour and rushed into The Met to see the gallery devoted to Renoir and his contemporaries. Tucked awkwardly in a narrow corner hangs the original painting of that sprightly child in a white pinafore. (Another little girl with flyaway hair.) Unlike his grander portraits, this one has a feeling of being dashed off, the brushstrokes looser, flat background purplish-brown, capturing her lifting mood after a fit of tears. The cobalt blue of Margot Berard’s bright eyes has an entirely unpredictable effect, no longer muted in an inexpensive copy. So this is what it’s like, I realized, to see someone clearly for the first time, to come into focus at last.
Aileen and Anne witnessed the burning of bras and the passage of Roe v. Wade into constitutional law, while I’ve observed it overturned and the passage of “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. In a present era where gender identity and sexual orientation can get you a beating by bullies in a school bathroom, or shot dead in a nightclub while dancing with your friends, it’s obvious that many of us still do not tolerate otherness kindly. Individualism shouldn’t be reduced to a joke, yield a snide aside about appearance, or elicit a viable physical threat. Being female doesn’t require performative femininity, either, unless you actually like putting on dresses. At one point, my mother hesitantly asked my newly out sibling, “Do you think they were gay?” That is the wrong question. Ultimately, their sexuality is none of our damn business, and who says all relationships have to be one or another thing? Aileen and Anne chose their lives, and lived them with courage and gusto. My great-aunt certainly imparted some of that to my mother, who in turn, I like to think, shared it with me.
Aileen was also the first woman of significance in my life to leave us. She had pressed me to attend her undergrad alma mater in South Carolina, but when the admissions catalog arrived, I discovered yellow-and-purple striped beanies were required attire for first-year students, and I had grown long past being told what to wear. Besides, I got a free ride to Vassar, where the liberal arts were more liberated. My junior year, we still had a bank of old-fashioned phone booths with retracting glass doors in the lobby of my dorm, and I stood there numbly after my mother called to say her dearest aunt had shuffled off her wig for the last time. That semester, I studied with author and guest lecturer Gail Godwin, whose course centered on two books, an 1893 novel by George Gissing titled The Odd Women and, in an obvious act of self-promotion, her own recently published derivative, The Odd Woman. Feminism wrapped in romantic garbage. Hated both, didn’t care if she flunked me.
Give me the true odd birds, the ones with wigs and feathered fans. ◊
Shane Mitchell is a James Beard award-winning journalist and author. Her writing has appeared in Saveur, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, and other publications. Her next book is The Crop Cycle: A History with Southern Roots, published this fall.