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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2022
SECOND PLACE, 2021 ALEX ALBRIGHT CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE BY EMILY DUNLAP CARTER with photographs by the author
SANDSPURS AND BRIARS, I Red and Green, Reappraised
In the mid-1930s my daddy and Uncle Max were gifted wool caps. I think Uncle Daniel received one too and I think his was green, but he and his cap don’t star in this story. Daddy got a blue cap and Uncle Max a red one. My daddy was the knee baby. His brother Max arrived just shy of Daddy’s second birthday, robbing him of the cherished spot of the youngest. With three older sisters, an older and younger brother, Daddy felt unremarkable as the fifth kid, the nothing special middle boy. He begrudged Max’s birth in a way that only siblings can, both loving and resenting the very air that Max breathed. It’s hard on a person in a family bent toward typecasting and branding to create distinction without clear birthright. In spite of his good looks, charm, smarts, and personality, when it came to his family of origin, Daddy felt he was an extra in the movie. My six-year-old father wanted the red cap. Along came a day when cap-clad Daddy and Uncle Max were chopping kindling at the wood pile. Daddy snatched the red cap from Uncle Max’s head and axed it. He hacked and spliced and severed and slashed leaving remnants of red across the wood yard, a woolen massacre. Hearing Max’s cries, Grandma came running. Since it was the ’30s, and I know how my family rolls, I suspect a switch or belt entered the crime scene. Daddy was forced to surrender his blue cap to Max. Though left capless, this justice was fine by him. As long as Uncle Max didn’t have the red one, Daddy was happy.
This same plotline went down a few decades later between two of my three brothers, the middle and youngest boys. A coveted Matchbox was totaled in a single car accident involving a kid-size Converse sneaker. There was a similar lack of remorse with the Matchbox incident. The theme of if I can’t have it, then you can’t have it runs deep and wide in my family. There’s something about envy that bores flesh-eating wounds into the heart, causing us to hew mohair and stomp metal. It’s been my personal experience through lots of lessons (some painful) that it is both good and bad news that I don’t always get what I deserve. If others have what I desire, that’s on me to work to gain what I want. Others aren’t taking my share. It hurts my heart to think that my daddy didn’t feel special enough in his family. He was never happier than in fellowship with his siblings, yet some deep-seated sentiment of inequity drove him to lop at the confidence of his children and struggle to extend grace and joy for the success of those around him. That little red cap didn’t die in the wood yard. It rose again and haunted much of his life. My daddy was a good man and I loved him. This isn’t about him not being enough or having enough in my eyes. It’s about his own view of himself and how that lens distorted the scenery around him. Not all that is wrecked in the wake of envy is tangible. Envy can injure relationships through its henchmen: gossip, snarking, and overt and
EMILY CARTER is a lifelong North Carolinian. She grew up in the Sandhills, went to Appalachian State University, and currently lives in Beaufort with her husband, John. She is a board member of The Writers’ Exchange and a contributor to Haunted Waters Press. Read more sketches from “Sandspurs and Briars” in the fall issue of NCLR Online 2022.
Final judge Michael Parker selected Carter’s “Sandspurs and Briars” for second place, describing it as “vignettes assembled . . . from the wispiest of memory or detail . . . developed, without evident exertion, and with great economy, into nuanced observations about family, time, memory, landscape and language.” Parker remarks that Carter “has brought the world, lively and flawed, to us.”
