But I also know I can't find it in me to wish that my youth had had such choices in it. Modern women after all, despite the real gains they've earned, are missing out this instant on some boon the mysterious future will bring--like the final victory over cancer, which is surely not more than twenty years off, and the promise of upright sane lifespans past the century mark. So doesn't it seem a form of greed to demand everything the world can afford at any given time? Coming along where and when I did, I'd estimate I've had some real luck and nowhere near as much heartbreak as many women known to me. I think that ought to give my kinswomen pleasure or relief anyhow--but of course it doesn't, and they may well be right. Maybe I've been a blind galley slave and my main miseries were caused by men. I continue to doubt it. And if so, well I only say Thank Christ for blindness.

Once I've admitted to that much thinking, I owe the very paper I write on at least a final attempt at saying what I think my life's been and where it might take me when I head out of here. The first thing I find is, to my considerable surprise, I've thoroughly enjoyed it which is likely the main reason I'm writing this. Among a lot else it's an overflow of pleasure and thanks. Most days lately I feel I'd do it all over again, even the torments, especially if I could start out next time in the confidence of living through nearly a century with a mind and body that worked for all but four years. What kind of a challenge would that be, though, with a promise at the start?

I'm not claiming I have no regrets.

Regret stacked behind me at a regular rate in my active years, less frequently since I "took the veil" at ninety-three, the year I broke my leg. I think most of my sorrows and guilts are owned-up-to here. In my mind at least, I've been as capable of cruelty, waste and physical harm as any felon in our vicinity. And the mind's where cruelty counts above all. To make a near-deathbed confession, though, I'm bound to admit that--if I could do it all again --the one thing I'd try hardest to improve, to have more of, would be s.e.x with my husband.

I'm not smart enough to say why exactly. I hate to repeat the only thing that's ever troubled me about it, but I think it's a problem that so many people overlook and then get damaged by. Again in all my TV'-WATCHING time--from the worst soap slop to the Mind Extension channel--again I've never heard anybody say what s.e.x is about, what it's for. And again that's not to say I think it's just for baby making. If the dark truth be told, I think I always felt s.e.x brought me closer toward G.o.d or Heaven at least than anything else I did with my husband or anybody else but you can't say that in the Christian church, not any I've known.

That was one more reason church has meant so little to me. I've seen better sights and felt stronger feelings elsewhere--well-intentioned feelings--than any church in my experience can offer. And more than a lion's share of those good things pa.s.sed into my mind and body through Palmer Slade as he worked above me, almost always in the night when

I couldn't see enough. I know that's the happiness I think of most in what amounts to my present lone state. If that seems wrong or hard to hear from a speckled crone, I'll take the penalty whenever it's applied.

So owning up to my worst and best, and trying to look as far ahead as these dim eyes can see, I think the memory of me will last out the span of my kin who are presently alive plus Mally and Simon. More than not, I truly believe they'll remember me somewhere along the scale from gladly to pleasantly. I've amounted to that much anyhow, a likable memory in a handful of minds, give or take a few natural reservations. Isn't that the best most people can claim? Mally and Simon of course could bring the deepest-dyed indictment against me and all I represent--I and all my kin and neighbors with our semi-pink skins. No way any legacy or modest trust fund can wipe the slates of any white person in any black eyes.

But the greatest wonder of that remarkable race is how slender a grudge it's held against us. Oh I understand that millions are rightly and violently mad and millions of others so stunned by history that they scarcely see plain sunshine above them. I've watched all the fiery riots and ma.s.sacres. There are half-starved pot-bellied black children up many a gulley in the county I live in. So why aren't all of us pink souls flat-dead in our beds with throats cut ear to ear?

And by us I don't just mean me and my kin, my Southern neighbors, but way the bigger part of white America. And in case I seem to have claimed some premature wisdom on the subject of racial relations, let me say that the little I've done to swim upstream against the current of blind white fear doesn't amount to so much as a single handful of dry dust thrown on those wild waters.

As it is, Simon Walton has keys to all my doors and my car to boot. And Mally Shearin cooks every morsel I eat, not to mention her merciful attentions to my body where one slight slip could kill me on the floor. Once they and their kind memories are dead--theirs and several of my blood kin's memories (say, thirty years from now)--for practical purposes

Roxanna Slade will be dead as King.

Tut and with no hill of gold to mark her corpse. Therefore gone entirely except for those few peculiar strangers who haunt country graveyards and read lost names on mossy tombstones.

Will that truly be it for all this effort? Have I and mine struggled on as we have just for an endless blind unbroken rest in the common dirt? All through these pages I see I've mentioned G.o.d and Fate a lot, both h.e.l.l and Heaven. Am I headed either place? Are there any such places? I certainly claim no authority whatever. But I have what feels like two real pieces of evidence, however private to me and my eyes. First I'm aware that my lasting to be near a century old is no guarantee of wisdom or foresight. Many turtles live longer than that, and I just saw two nights ago that a healthy elephant in the jungles of India may well live to be 125. (elephants of course and maybe some turtles are far superior to human beings as are all whales and dolphins.) But the point is that I'm as old as humans get to be with rare exceptions. And the main hint that I've picked up on the subject of immortality has come with my age in the past ten years. I've watched a few dozen people through their long lives and I see that, unless they go crazy or are addicts, they just stay who they were from the day they were born. I'm speaking of friends live and dead like Leela and Simon, Mally and Palmer, even poor Ferny Dane who's been gone so long I can barely see his face. I don't mean that people learn nothing from life, but the hearts and souls they bring here with them as they leave what Miss Olivia called "their mother's fork" are extremely persistent. With a naturally good soul, that's excellent news, not so with the bad.

The fact that our inner depths are fairly unchangeable sounds not only scary but like a promise of something to me, something far more durable than one set of bones. We come here from somewhere that shaped us already. After so many years we head out again for maybe that homeplace or somewhere else that keeps on lasting.

The other hint has stayed with me the whole way through my life. Long before I joined the Methodist church at age thirteen, I knew there was something in the world but me. I'd felt it keenly from the age of five, mainly when I was outside the house in the garden or the woods and when I was alone or with Negroes who could always get still enough to let nature speak and be partly heard. The thing that I knew had caused my feeling never seemed like something especially good or monstrous.

I never felt like the thing was spying on me to catch me out in some dirty dealing. But it did feel enormous, and it felt like me. It was so huge in fact that it const.i.tuted everything seen and unseen. And I was a small part of its complicated makeup--among the smallest cogwheels but a working part still, not vital maybe but working still. I could choose not to work by killing myself or shirking my duty. But the bigger thing would go on without me, though it hoped for my service and could hear my requests.

With all the pain and waste I've known in my own life and lives that touched mine--not to mention the horrors of this whole century, one slow bloodbath--I've never been able to shake that knowledge that came with my childhood. Children seldom are fooled, I've found, about main things like truth and what's right. I haven't discussed it with anyone since Palmer died. He was the only person I've known who could hear me out and not laugh or run for the nearest exit. But however hard I've slashed away in my bad times at what I knew, I haven't succeeded in felling the trunk of that certainty that came into the world with me, straight out of the box like batteries with a flashlight. Even TV religion, all of it calling itself some brand of Christian, hasn't quite shut me down. To be sure it's bolstered my weak blood pressure to dangerous heights and sickened my stomach with its hatreds and lies.

But once I get myself calmed down, if I lie in my own bed in the dark and look straight up at nothing at all beyond the ceiling, I can almost always start to feel again that calm first fact from my childhood. And then the whole great hoop of whatever is, gorgeous or dreadful as it may be, starts turning in the night sky above me bearing everything that has ever been or is--from Dinah Beecham's frail perfect fingers the day she was born, to Olivia Slade's meanest effort to drive me down or Roebuck Pittman's raving in the road, plus the men and women who torture children daily, plus Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt and the true living saints.

Once I've glimpsed that for the length of one more night anyhow, I can tell myself that the only axle which matters is turning with all its weight of trees and waterfalls, plagues and fire storms, souls in torment and me in some surviving shape no doubt huddled out toward its rim holding nothing in hand but my strong memories and the hope to keep breathing so long as I know my family's names and can smile when they touch me. The hoop itself may never fail. If I'm dead wrong then I'm no worse than dead. And by the time I'm numb and cooling, whether tonight or years from tonight (there's a woman in France who's a hundred and twenty and talks good sense), I'll likely be tired enough for sleep, though if what's called for is music and dance, I estimate I'll be prepared, if only to hum and sway in place.

REYNOLDS PRICE.

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated in the public schools of his native state, he earned an A.b. summa c.u.m laude from Duke University, graduating first in his cla.s.s. In 1955 he traveled as a Rhodes Scholar to Merton College, Oxford University to study English literature. After three years and a B.litt. degree, he returned to Duke where he continues in his fourth decade of teaching. He is James B. Duke Professor of English.

In 1962 his novel A Long and Happy Life received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel. Since, he has published nearly thirty books. Among them, his novel Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.

His Collected Stories appeared in 1993, his Collected Poems in 1997; he has also published volumes of plays, essays and two volumes of memoir Clear Pictures and A Whole New Life. A Palpable G.o.d in 1978 contained translations from the Old and New Testaments with an essay on the origins and aims of narrative; Three Gospels in 1996 contained his translation of Mark and John with introductory essays. His tenth novel The Promise of Rest appeared in 1995 and completed--with The Surface of Earth and The Source of Light--a trilogy of novels ent.i.tled A Great Circle and concerned with nine decades in a family's life.

His television play Private Contentment was commissioned by "American Playhouse" and appeared in its premier season on PBS. His trilogy New Music premiered, with a grant from the Fund for New American Plays, at the Cleveland Play House in 1989. His sixth play Full Moon was performed by the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in 1994, and in 1995 he began to broadcast regular commentaries for "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his books have appeared in sixteen languages.