Gordon’s picnic is a snapshot of the Fayerlees and Meriwether’s Southern family reunion. It’s an August tradition for more than one hundred folks from all over the South and elsewhere. It’s not a happy day.
As revealed by Sally Maury, who was thirteen years old at the picnic, the chief picnic activities are family dysfunction, eating, and drinking (until drunk). The picnic dinner is a typical gourmandish offering of barbecued “carcasses” (probably pigs), ham (probably baked), chicken (probably fried), chicken salad, pickles, potato salad, stuffed eggs (Deviled), hot rolls (biscuits), chess pie (sugar and eggs pie), chocolate cake, coconut cake, sweet tea –and five cases of whiskey.
Now older (but not wiser), Sally still does not understand what happened at this picnic, which was the last of its kind. She is aware of facts but not meaning, but she is not tuned to the undercurrents of the adults’ unhappiness. She is mindful of the family tension, especially Cousin Eleanor and Cousin Tom, whose marriage is on the verge of collapse. She knows her parents are tense at the gathering because her father is a Maury, not a Fayerlee or a Meriwether, like her mother.
The “petrified woman” is a young female with exposed breasts. She is an attraction at a carnival to entertain. When Sally sees Stella, the petrified woman, she’s unimpressed and not curious. She sees the sleeping figure of a young woman wearing a white satin dress cut so low that you could see her bosom. But Cousin Tom, however, who is embarrassed (and a little drunk), pays the carnival man a few dollars, and everyone moves on. When Cousin Giles looking asks, “How come her boobies move if she’s been dead so long.” Tom suggests she may be resting.
Later, Sally recalls how Cousin Tom tells his Cousin Marie that he encountered a most charming woman, whose charm consisted in being petrified. “Some women are just petrified in spots,” he says, intending malice to his wife Cousin Eleanor, “but she was petrified all over.” then Cousin trips, falls, and breaks a glass. Sally reports, “I never did see him get up off the floor.”
As it turns out, this is Sally’s last reunion. Something she does not miss.
Cousin Tom and Eleanor’s marriage is an autobiographical allusion to Gordon’s torturous marriage to Allen Tate. Tom’s drunken behavior and collapse on the floor suggest Gordon’s desire to humiliate Tate.
Featured Image: In 1937, Gordon and Tate attended a happy picnic with Ford Madox Ford at Benfolly, their home in Clarksville, Tennessee. See discussion of Ford’s “Banquet at Calanque (1932)” described in his memoir of living in Province.
See Caroline Gordon. “The Petrified Woman (1947).” In The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981.