Retired professor pens memoir about childhood in Culpeper

A wide-open spirit of nurturing nature flows like Mountain Run through a new memoir by a retired English professor who spent his boyhood romping around Culpeper in the 1930s and ’40s.

Preston M. Browning Jr. also writes about class, religion and race in “Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir” — a candid and expertly crafted reflection of a Culpeper and a south that’s quite different from today.

Browning, who taught 35 years at the University of Illinois in Chicago and now runs a writer’s retreat in Massachusetts, returns to the place of his youth Sunday for a reading and book signing in the Culpeper library at 2:30.

The Friends of the Library hosts the free event.

Not an easy read, but most certainly an engaging one, “Affection & Estrangement” embraces the outdoors like Thoreau, offering grand tales of days-long jaunts down the Rapidan River, the physicality of farm life, hunting bees, fishing, daffodil picking, gardening, cow riding and endless other country boy activities.

“On all sides and in all seasons, we were surrounded by a world of natural beauty that never failed us,” Browning writes. “Except for school, nothing structured our lives more than the changing seasons. Nature was our second mother, ever tender, always faithful.”

In winter, Preston and his siblings would sled down “a long, steep” hill on a neighbor’s farm across U.S. 15, along which Browning grew up, just a few miles south of downtown.

In spring, bird watching (and shooting) was commonplace as was the gathering of flowers for sale “often to the old ladies we knew at St. Stephen’s” Episcopal Church in town, where Browning’s family attended.

Summer brought earthy farm chores like feeding slop to the pigs, berry picking and collecting “cow piles” for placement in mother’s garden. For fun, there was “seining for ‘mad toms,’ catfish-like minnows that were perfect bait when angling for bass.”

In fall, Browning recalls hunting for wild Chinquapins (nuts) for use in games of marbles and more tricks than treats on Halloween.

All year round, the adults expected the youngsters to do farm chores — for the author the hard work seemed welcomed.

“Here we were boys among men, and while the machinery broke down with infuriating regularity, necessitating trips to the blacksmith shop or to Swan’s farm implement shop in town, we were part of an ongoing enterprise that, in its totality, really worked, with a beginning, a middle and an end.”

Browning’s “Beginnings” — offered in detail in the first 79 pages of “Affection and Estrangement” — also included picture shows in town, Joe Lewis’s heavyweight matches on the radio and the legendary people-watching spectacle in the center of town.

“ … Saturday night in Culpeper provided a remarkable sight: hundreds of country people crowded the sidewalks, pushing into stores to purchase coffee or sugar and other things that could not be grown at home, greeting friends and neighbors, and if there were a few pennies that could be spared, viewing one of the western films that the local movie theater featured each weekend.”

The south’s segregation of the races gets more than a mention in “Affection & Estrangement with Browning digging deep to explain how it was. The “gulf” that separated black and white was “absolute,” he writes, and it “appeared to be unbridgeable.”

And yet black and white intersected daily, Browning goes on, mentioning local icons like “Skinny” Love, the black barber of yesteryear who regularly cut his hair. (There’s still a black-owned “Skinnies” barbershop on Main Street).

Browning writes that though he was “not aware … of physical brutality suffered by our black citizens at the hands of whites … the daily humiliations visited upon our black neighbors were numerous.”

For example, blacks could not purchase tickets for the train until it pulled into the station. Minstrel shows with white men in black face were commonplace in Culpeper back then, “regularly organized by leading citizens of town” and portraying African Americans as “stupid and shiftless,” Browning writes.

“The racism of that time and place was an indelible aspect of the culture but one of which most white citizens were largely oblivious. The contemporary black population was descended from slaves, they received a decidedly inferior education … and many acted as their ancestors had been forced to act during slavery.”

Older Southern readers will perhaps more easily grasp the prevalence of this culture while younger folks might find it more difficult to understand how accepted and deeply ingrained segregation and racism were.

It even infiltrated the church, according to Browning, recalling Lucy Thompson, “the only black Episcopalian I knew as a child.”

Though expected to sit in the balcony at St. Stephen’s, she once or twice dared to sit in a back pew and “some members of the congregation reacted as if Sherman’s regiments were marching up Main Street.

“Lucy, of course, received communion last — and alone at the altar rail,” Browning writes.

He also tackles class in the memoir, outlining five distinct classes among the whites of Culpeper. At the bottom was “poor white trash” followed by “good country people,” “lower middle class,” “the yeoman farmer or middle to upper middle class” and finally, “the real upper class.”

Browning says his family belonged on the fourth rung up, just below upper class.

“In the south of my childhood, class distinctions were too real to be denied, since the members of these classes exhibited distinctive habits, tastes and attitudes toward everything from music to laying a table,” he writes. “The chasm separating the poor whites from those inhabiting the upper reaches of the social world was enormous.”

Browning handles the touchy topics of race and class with objectivity, quoting various sources on the subject. He notes that he often spoke up in defense of equality for black people, even marching 25 years later with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma, Ala.

Speaking against the normal of Culpeper 70 years ago, “surely contributed to my growing sense that I was different and did not ‘fit in’ with the society into which I had been born,” he goes on, “and could not accept without question the conventional wisdom of that time and place.”

Local icons like Anne Wingfield, Crimora Waite and Duff and Angus Green earn mentions in the first half of “Affection & Estrangement,” a memoir that starts with a reference to the sun rising early over Mount Pony in early summer — the view from Browning’s childhood bedroom.

High school at Woodberry Forest in the 1940s created lifelong friends and memories as did Browning’s college days at William and Mary, full of “drunken weekends and almost nightly bridge and poker games.”

The second half of “Affection & Estrangement” covers a great deal about a great many of his ancestors and while providing interesting insight into the author the genealogical vignettes were cumbersome at times. Some of it was difficult to get through.

Then again, the memoir is about the life of Preston Browning, Jr., and it is certainly a storied one. His honesty, overall, is energizing and, at times, emotional.

Somewhere in all of it there’s humor, too.

“Writing this book has, in a sense, been a process of revelation for me,” Browning writes in his final chapter, and, “ … being a white Southerner in the 21st century, especially one given to introspection and reflection on his Southern heritage can become something of a burden.”

Intimate and enlightening, “Affection & Estrangement” has more of the former than the latter and provides a valuable look back at a time gone by for all Americans.

Here’s to a lighter burden.

Want to meet the author?

Preston Browning Jr. of Massachusetts, a retired University of Illinois English professor, talks about his new memoir Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Culpeper Library. In “Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir,” Browning discusses his upbringing on a farm just south of Culpeper along U.S. 15 a few miles south of Culpeper.