Oxford American | Fall Issue 2022 [#118]

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS A MAGAZINE OF THE SOUTH FALL 2022 CELEBRATING 30 YEARS

HOTEL KANSAS CITYTHE FABULOUS FOX THEATRE, SAINT LOUIS PERFORMING 2 HOTEL KANSAS CITYTHE FABULOUS FOX THEATRE, SAINT LOUIS ICONIC STAYS. THAT’S MY M-O.SHOWTIME.THAT’SMYM-O. ARTSPERFORMINGMO MOCULTURE

THERE’S A MO FOR EVERY M-O. FIND YOURS. 1860 SALOON, SAINT LOUIS LIVE MUSIC MO THERE’S A MO FOR EVERY M-O. FIND YOURS. 1860 SALOON, SAINT LOUIS SOULFUL SOLOS. THAT’S MY M-O. LIVE MUSIC MO

southernenvironment.org Petracca©LaurenWolfeLynne©Mary Bowery©Nate

We are the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the nation’s most powerful defenders of the environment, rooted right here in the South. As lawyers, policy and issue experts, and community advocates and partners, we take on the toughest challenges to protect our air, water, land, wildlife and the people who live here. We can solve the most complex environmental challenges right here in the South.

Solutions start in the South.

4 FALL 2022 Cover: THE FUTURE IS PRESENT, 2019. Digital print, silkscreen, collage, gloss varnish, custom color frame, by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw, Cherokee) © The artist. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London FEATURES 60 WHERE THE ANIMALS SLEEP AT NIGHT A story by Meghan Reed 66 UNDETERMINED CIRCUMSTANCES Disappearance and discovery in American waters by D. T. Lumpkin 74 EL COQUÍ SIEMPRE CANTA Listening for the ambient sounds of home by Maria Sherman 80 POEMS Diptychs by Mikey Swanberg and Erika Meitner 88 FIFTY-SEVEN DOLLARS An excerpt from Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir by Margo Price 92 RASHIDA A story by Elias Rodriques 102 EASTMAN, GA. 2022 A search for a Southern past by Farah Jasmine Griffin ART BY Jeffrey Gibson, Adrienne Elise Tarver, Yatika Starr Fields, Peter Fisher, Eliot Greenwald, Arghavan Khosravi, Bear Allison, Melanie Willhide, Margaret Curtis, Charlie Boss, Miranda Bruce, Pableaux Johnson, Luis Lazo, Rae Klein, Renee Hannis, WC Bevan, Curran Hatleberg, Rachel Boillot, Jewel Ham, Georgette Baker, Mahsa Merci, Elijah Gowin 08 Editor’s Letter: To The West by Danielle A. Jackson POINTS SOUTH 14 The Mustang, by Gwen Thompkins 18 Cavities and Debris, a story by Melody Moezzi 22 Stumbling Stone, by Benjamin Hedin 26 Marble City Mourning, by Mariah Rigg 32 Wednesday in Athens, by Patrick D. McDermott 36 The Spirit of the Bend, by Jarrett Van Meter 42 Sting Like a Bee, by Leslie Pariseau OMNIVORE 116 COMING UP FANCY The ever-expanding identity of a Southern gothic epic by Jewly Hight 124 HOPE AFTER “DOPESICK” An interview with Beth Macy Q&A by Carter Sickels 128 FROM THE WEB Stories by Mary Edwards and Osayi Endolyn AMERICANOXFORD FALL2022

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  5 Copyright © 2022 The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc. All rights reserved. The Oxford American (ISSN 1074-4525, USPS# 023157) is published four times per year, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, by The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc., P.O. Box 3235, Little Rock, Arkansas 72203. Periodicals postage paid at Conway, AR Postmaster and at additional mailing offices. The annual subscription rate is $39 for U.S. orders, $49 for Canadian orders, and $59 for outside North America. (All funds must be U.S. dollars.) POSTMASTER: please send address changes to The Oxford American, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-3000, or e-mail subscriptions@oxfordamerican.org, or telephone (800) 314-9051. For list rental inquiries, contact Kerry Fischette at (609) 580-2875 or kerry.fischette@alc.com. Advertising, editorial, and general business information can be obtained by calling (501) 374-0000. “Oxford” and “Oxford American English” are registered trademarks of Oxford University Press, which is not affiliated with The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc. We use the title with their permission. Printed in the USA Weary As I Can Be, 2021. Oil on canvas by Adrienne Elise Tarver. Courtesy the artist

LESLIE PARISEAU is a writer and editor in New Orleans. She is a co-founder and features editor at PUNCH, and has written for the New York Times, the Los An geles Times, GQ, the Ringer, the Intercept, and Jacobin, among others. Pariseau holds an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. MARGO PRICE is a Artist,edreleasedsinger-songwriter.Nashville-basedShehasthreeLPs,wasnominatforaGrammyforBestNewperformedon

CARTER SICKELS is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City), winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award for Appa lachian Fiction. His debut novel, The Evening Hour, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 and is now streaming. His writing appears in the Atlan tic, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guernica, Joyland, and Catapult. Sickels teaches at Eastern Ken tucky University.

Saturday Night Live, and is the first female musician to sit on the board of Farm Aid. MEGHAN REED is a proud Southern writer born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. She holds an MA from Mississippi State University, where she was associate editor of the national literary journal the Jabberwock Review. She is a mid dle-school teacher who instills in her students a love of travel and good Originallybooks. from Honolulu, Hawai‘i, MARIAH RIGG is a Samo an-Haole writer and educator. She has an MFA from the Univer sity of Oregon and is currently a PhD student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, Puerto del Sol, Joyland, and elsewhere. She is a fiction editor at TriQuarterly and the nonfiction editor at Grist, a Jour nal of the Literary Arts.

OXFORD AMERICAN 6 FALL 2022

ERIKA MEITNER is the author of six books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me, which was the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in poetry and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

MARIA SHERMAN is a music and culture journalist living in

MELODY MOEZZI is an IranianAmerican Muslim activist, attorney, award-winning author, and visiting associate profes sor of creative writing at UNC Wilmington. Her latest book is The Rumi Prescription: How an Ancient Mystic Poet Changed My Modern Manic Life, which earned her a 2021 Wilbur Award. She is also the author of Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life and War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims. She lives in coastal North Carolina with her husband, Matthew, and their ungrateful cats, Keshmesh and Nazanin.

D. T. LUMPKIN recently returned to his home near Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and two daughters after living for three years in London. His recent work has appeared in the Sun and Five Points. He is working toward his PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia.

FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she also served as the inaugural chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies. Griffin received her BA in history and literature from Harvard and her PhD in American studies from Yale. She is the author or editor of eight books, including Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton, A2021).frequent contributor to the Oxford American , BENJAMIN HEDIN is the author, most recent ly, of a novel, Under the Spell. He also produced a forthcoming documentary about Indigenous reparations, Lakota Nation vs. United States Nashville-based critic and jour nalist JEWLY HIGHT is a frequent contributor to National Public Ra dio and NPR Music. Her work also appears in the New York Times and numerous other outlets. She was the inaugural winner of the Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism, and helped launched WNXP, the all-music public radio station in her city, as editorial director. She last wrote for the Oxford Ameri can in 2017.

ELIAS RODRIQUES is an assistant professor of African American Literature at Sarah Lawrence College and an assistant editor at n+1 . His writings have ap peared or are forthcoming in the Guardian, the Nation, The Best American Essays 2022, and other publications. His first novel is All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running

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PATRICK D. M c DERMOTT is a writer and editor whose work has ap peared in the Fader, Stereogum, and Nylon, among other places. He has an MFA in creative non fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is working on his first book.

GWEN THOMPKINS is a journalist, writer, and native of New Orleans. Since 2012, she has been the executive producer and host of the public radio program Music Inside Out, which showcases the unusually varied musical land scape of Louisiana. She is also the New Orleans correspondent for WXPN’s World Café. Thompkins was the longtime senior editor of NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and later NPR’s East Africa bureau chief, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Currently, she is writing a book based on the Music Inside Out interviews. Find the full archive at: musicinsideout.org.

MIKEY SWANBERG is the author of On Earth as It Is (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press) and Good Grief (VAPress). He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and he lives in Chicago.

JARRETT VAN METER is a writ er originally from Lexington, Kentucky. He currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and is enrolled in the University of Georgia’s narrative nonfiction MFA program. Brooklyn, New York. Her first book, LARGER THAN LIFE: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS , out on Hachette imprint Black Dog & Leventhal, is currently being adapted into a docu mentary film by director Gia Coppola, Jason Bateman's Aggregate Films, and the Oscar-nominated studio XTR.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  7

Diving Birds of Green Lake, 2016. A painting by Yatika Starr Fields. Courtesy the artist and Garth Green Gallery

EDITOR’S LETTER

BY DANIELLE A. JACKSON

To the West

n a fourth-grade class on Tennessee history, we learned about the state’s three grand divisions, so distinct one wanted to go its own way during the Civil War. We knew Memphis was westernmost. We were topograph ically unique: flatter, more swamp-like, with rainy seasons like the tropics. We were tethered to Mississippi, the state and the river, and to the eighteen counties of the Delta. Which meant we looked and ate and sounded more like Mississippi than most of Tennessee. We made barbecue, moonshine, Tina Turner, C. L. Franklin. A tambourine and a palm, a double-time piano, a worried line cooed over a bottom-heavy blues.

I

On a school trip to St. Louis, we learned the city calls itself the “gateway to the west.” Texas, we were told, is bifurcated by the ninety-eighth meridian, which signifies the start of the nation’s westward sprawl. Our part of the South and the West were geographic neighbors, energetic kin—kissing cousins, if you will, sharing land mass and waterways and a constant exchange of people. The borders between us are soft, elastic, permeable. Our generation played Oregon Trail on Apple IIes and read Willa Cather, whose childhood move from northern Virginia to the plains of Nebraska inspired My Ántonia, a novel I would come to love. My father lived in the Arkansas town where Howlin’ Wolf had been a radio jockey. Back then, the cities just across the river had a reputation. They were raucous, a kind of “wild, wild West” with gambling and fun, untamed parties. They courted an association with the Rhodafrontier.Bell,my great-grandmother, was born enslaved near Sel ma. She went west, to Mississippi, when freedom came. There were forests to clear, cotton to tend to, silt-rich soil in which to plant. When Thomas Moss, a postman and co-owner of People’s Grocery near Memphis, was pursued by a lynch mob, his final utterance, according to Ida B. Wells, was, “If you will kill us, turn our faces to the West.” Later, Wells told an audience: Hundreds left on foot to walk four hundred miles between Memphis and Oklahoma. A Baptist minister went to the territory, built a church, and took his entire congregation out in less than a month. Another minister sold his church and took his flock to California, and still another has settled in Kansas.

8 FALL 2022 nosimplewordfortime

During a speech at Brown, Ralph Ellison echoed Wells. “Freedom was…to be found in the West of the old Indian Territory,” he said. El lison was born in Oklahoma City to parents from South Carolina and Georgia. Maybe some found freedom, for a time: before the massacre in Tulsa? Storytelling about the West is often sentimental, sweeping, fanciful, a rosy impression only slightly connected to reality. Memphis became a city because the Chickasaw ceded their bluffs— four wooded, rugged hills formed by the meanders of the Mississippi that were dense with green and rich loess soil. Most of Middle and West Tennessee had been carved out of a series of treaties and land grabs by the American government, culminating in Congress’s In dian Removal Act of 1830. People who were Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole and made their homes east of the Mississippi were required to relocate, along with their black slaves, to unorganized territory west of Missouri. Over the next two de cades, more than sixty thousand former residents of the Southeast traveled treacherous routes west, through north Georgia, Alabama, middle and western Tennessee, southern Missouri, and almost all of Arkansas. While researching Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the scene in Memphis. “I saw them embark to pass , 2022. Screen print on Arches 88 mounted to mat board with inlaid panel of handwoven beadwork, by Jeffrey Gibson. Edition of 24; 24.5 x 15 inches. © Jeffrey Gibson, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  9

DANIELLE A. JACKSON Editor Digital Editor VERONICA ANNE SALINAS Assistant Editors CHRISTIAN LEUS, ALLIE MARIANO, JULIA THOMAS Editor-at-Large ROSALIND BENTLEY Poetry Editor REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL Art Directors CARTER/REDDY • www.CarterReddy.com Art Researcher ALYSSA ORTEGA COPPELMAN Copyeditor ALI WELKY Editorial Interns ANDREW BRANNON, ALICE BERRY, GRACE CAPOOTH Contributing Editors LUCY ALIBAR, REBECCA BENGAL, ROY BLOUNT JR., WENDY BRENNER, KEVIN BROCKMEIER, BRONWEN DICKEY, LOLIS ERIC ELIE, BETH ANN FENNELLY, LESLIE JAMISON, HARRISON SCOTT KEY, KIESE LAYMON, JESSICA LYNNE, ALEX MAR, GREIL MARCUS, DUNCAN MURRELL, CHRIS OFFUTT, AMANDA PETRUSICH, PADGETT POWELL, JAMIE QUATRO, DAVID RAMSEY, DIANE ROBERTS, ZANDRIA F. ROBINSON The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc., Board of Directors Chairman SARA A. LEWIS RICHARD MASSEY, JENNY DAVIS, ENJOLIQUÉ A. LETT, DANIELLE A. JACKSON SARA A. LEWIS Executive Director Advertising Sales Director KEVIN BLECHMAN (678) 427-2074 • kblechman@oxfordamerican.org Senior Account Executive KATHLEEN KING (501) 944-5838 • kking@oxfordamerican.org Senior Account Executive CRISTEN HEMMINS (662) 801-5357 • cristenhemmins@gmail.com Senior Account Executive RAY WITTENBERG (501) 733-4164 • rwittenberg@oxfordamerican.org Marketing and Communications Manager KELSEY WHITE Accounting Manager SHAVON TAYLOR Development Coordinator AMANDA BOLDENOW Engagement Editor LAURA DALEY Creative Consultant RYAN HARRIS Fulfillment Coordinator SARAH GRAHAM The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc., receives support from THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES, AMAZON LITERARY PARTNERSHIP, ARKANSAS ARTS COUNCIL, ARKANSAS HUMANITIES COUNCIL, AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY COMMISSION, THE DEPARTMENT OF ARKANSAS HERITAGE, THE JULIA CHILD FOUNDATION FOR GASTRONOMY AND THE CULINARY ARTS, STELLA BOYLE SMITH TRUST, THE WINDGATE FOUNDATION, AND THE COMMUNITY OF LITERARY MAGAZINES AND PRESSES SUBSCRIPTIONS The quickest, greenest way to subscribe is to visit our website. A one-year subscription (4 quarterly issues) is $39. www.oxfordamerican.org/subscribe • (800) 314-9051 SUBMISSIONS We accept online submissions. Please visit our website for more information. ABOUT US The Oxford American is a nonprofit quarterly published by The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc., in alliance with the University of Central Arkansas (UCA). OFFICE ADDRESS P.O. Box 3235 / Little Rock, AR 72203-3235 Phone: (501) 374-0000 Business Staff: info@oxfordamerican.org Editorial Staff: editors@oxfordamerican.org the mighty river,” he wrote. “No cry, no sob was heard among the assembled crowd: all were silent.”

The 2020 Census reported growth among every non-white group of residents in the U.S., including Indigenous households.

The state parks’ association says Arkansas is “the only state that witnessed the removal of all five of the Southeastern tribes as they moved west.” Pinnacle Mountain, just west of Little Rock, was a key site along the Trail of Tears.

The balmy December I last saw my father alive, we drove past Pacaha burial mounds near the Hopefield Bend Revetment, a levee on the Mississippi’s Arkansas side. He told me a DNA test had revealed an Indigenous ancestor from the 1700s. He din writes, “So much of what is written about the Cherokees tends to emphasize removal.” We should remember that the American South has reams of Indigenous history, dead and alive, to recover, and honor, and connect with.

In this issue, frequent OA contributor Benjamin Hedin notes that Quatie Ross, wife of Chief John Ross, head of the Cher okee Nation at the time of removal, is buried in Little Rock’s Mount Holly Cemetery. The legends say she died nearby, on the Trail from Georgia, after giving up her sole blanket to keep a young fellow traveler warm. Hedin speaks to a descendant of Chief Ross and visits the headquarters of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, which sits on the western end of North Carolina. The story, about a soon-to-be published census of the Cherokee Nation before removal, speaks to loss, journeys, place-making, and also what, and who, remains.

Other stories in the issue similarly reflect on journeys, loss, and the resonant joy that can be found in Southern place-mak ing. Farah Jasmine Griffin travels to the town in middle Georgia where her grandmother grew up. With her immediate family, Ms. Willie Lee Carson had moved North, to Philadelphia, and was less than willing to speak at length about where she’d come from. Still, Griffin says, “the South, embodied in my grandmother, held us together.” Maria Sherman writes about the song of coquis as part of the living soundscape of Puerto Rico, her own ancestral home. Jarrett Van Meter, in his OA debut, travels to a part of Kentucky along the state’s border with Tennessee that is often, quite literally, left off from most maps of the state. He finds a close-knit cluster of families, a beautiful, expanding land mass, and the freshest, best-tasting catfish he’s ever encountered.

“The sun never knew how wonderful it was,” Louis Kahn once said, “until it shone on the wall of a building.”

The issue also features two pairs of poems, by Mikey Swan berg and Erika Meitner. I love what Meitner writes about space, place, and the human body: What does it mean to be almighty with joy of discovery? We can’t sense space without light.

We’re proud to present wise and delightful short fiction from Elias Rodriques, Melody Moezzi, and the debut of Meghan Reed of Little Rock. “Where the Animals Sleep at Night,” an enticing mélange of magical realism and traditional realism, caught our eye because of its beautiful sentences, its surreal moodiness, and what it had to say about home, adventure, exile, and the utter unknowability of other people.

Thank you for carrying us through thirty years and

Donations of any amount make a difference. We appreciate all of our readers, subscribers, and supporters. The names of every donor who makes a contribution by October 1st will be printed in the next issue. helping celebrate

the next thirty! NOWDONATETOSCAN $1000 • Membership in the OA Society • One-year subscriptiongift to the Oxford American • Texas Love Letter LP (while supplies last) • A lifetime subscription $250+ • Membership in the OA Society • One-year subscription to the Oxford American • One-year gift subscription to the Oxford American • Texas Love Letter LP (while supplies last) $100+ • Membership in the OA Society • One-year subscription to the Oxford American KEEP SOUTHERN MEDIA ALIVE & INDEPENDENT Do you want to hear a good story? Donating to the OA keeps independent media alive. Subscriptions only cover 12% of the cost to create the magazine you love. That means we need your support. Want to see the OA thriving for 30 more years? Then please donate today. Your support comes with great perks: LOVETEXASLETTER LP

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG/DONATE When you give to the OA, you support Southern writers and artists who chronicle the vitality of our region and trouble harmful stereotypes. You also support one of the few nonprofit Southern literary organizations with queer women and women of color at the helm. Dr. Sara A. Lewis and Danielle A. Jackson have a vision for the OA’s next thirty years. What does this vision look like? It looks like reframing the narratives told by and about the South in the words of Southerners themselves, with a purposeful shift toward more stories by writers of color, queer writers, disabled writers, and writers historically excluded from the canon. In addition to amplifying more Southern voices, the OA is committed to broadening our readership by providing free copies of each issue to underserved communities, including students, rural reading groups, and incarcerated readers. Your contribution makes this work possible.

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PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE Contributions of $5000 or more in the past year African American History Commission · Amazon Literary Project with the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses · Arkansas Arts Council · Arkansas Humanities Council · Ruth & Thomas Cross · Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy & the Culinary Arts · Massey Family Charitable Foundation · National Endowment for the Arts · National Endowment for the Humanities · Poetry Foundation · Redwine Family Foundation, Inc. · Richard “Disceaux Dicki” Sheeren · Stella Boyle Smith Trust · The Watson-Brown Foundation · Windgate Charitable Foundation · University of Central Arkansas · Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation EDITOR’S CIRCLE Contributions of $1000 or more in the past year Anthony Arrigoti · Houston & Jenny Davis · William Isaacson · Connie & Samuel Pate · Keith Pryor · Matthew P Quilter · R&B Feder Charitable Foundation · Thomas & Janice Wilson LITERARY CHAMPIONS Contributions of $250 or more in the past year Sidney Ansbacher · Irwyn Applebaum · Colleen Bartlett · Charles Beach · Michael Berkshire · Xavier Beynon · Jeff Brothers · Alice Calhoun · Afton Cooper · David Coppe · Brad Dowler · Shane Estep · Michael W Feldser · Christian Ford · Robert Christian Ford · Peter Gartrell · John Goodwin · James Grube · Ryan Harris & Susan Barr · Natalia Hodge · Catherine Hughes · Sara Hurst · Keith Kelley · Katie Kimbrough · Atheil Lashley · Ina B Leonard · Robert & Nell Lyford · Ashley Matejka · Lisa Darnay Meadows · Randall Morley · Sallie Oliphant · Kevin Patterson · Jimmie G Purvis · Kim F Quillen · David Radulovich · Dudley C Reynolds · Kirk Reynolds · Bernie Rosman · Ashley Ross · Michael Sapeta · Daniel & Jennifer Smith · Ray Smith · Aaron & Anna Strong · Millie Ward OA BENEFACTORS & TRAILBLAZERS Contributions of $100 or more in the past year Virginia Simpson Aisner · Amber Albritton-Reiman · Patrick Anderson · Ryan-Ashley Anderson · Angela Arcese · Susan Arnold · John Aselage · Chris Barton · Jeanne Beatty · Richard Blanton · Steven Blevins · Kat Bogacz · Linda Booker · Eliza Borné & John Williams · Susan & Robin Borné · Treasia Bouton · Laura L Bradley · Carol Brantley · James Brinn · Chad D Browning · John Bunten Jr. · Rick Bybee · Anthony Cantor · John Carmody · Ted Cashion · Lauren Cerand · Robert TJ Childers · Scott Clackum · Edward T Claghorn · Joan & Bruce Coffey · G. Dale Cousins · Andrew Crispin · Gail B Crump · Kimberly Daggerhart · Fred & Sarah Beth Davis · John Dennis · Donna Thompson Douglas · Jon Edwards · Julie Enszer · Rebecca Evans · Robert Fallon · Ms. Richard Faszholz · Donna Ferron · Deborah Fisher · Ben Fountain · Linda Fowler · Slaton Fry · Tom Funderburk · Katherine Z Gailliot · John Paul Gairhan · Ron Gephart · Philip W Gibson · Rabbi Jeff Glickman · Melanie E Gray & David Rubin · Laura Green · Sarah Greenberg · Glenn Greisman · Michael Gresham · Ann Marshall Grisgby · Leonard Grinstead · Paul V Guagliardo · Helen And Alexander Haris · David Harrison · Robert Hart · Henry G Hartzog IV · Edward Hebson · James Henderson · Thomas G Hendricks · Barbara Herring · Marnie Heyn · Samuel Hinojosa · Mindy Hodges · Jack M Holland · Adele Holmes · Janet Holmes Uchendu · Amy Holt · Chad Hood · Joe Horton · Mark Hughey · Andrew Humphries · Laura Ingram · Samuel Jackson · Glenn Jacobs · Lee & Paula Johnson · Matt Jones · Michael Jones · Tim Jones · Steve Jones · Danny Kahn · Jane R Kell · Robert K Kettenmann · Kathleen King · Mal King · David King · Andy Knott · Mack Land · Katherine Landrum · Holly Lange · Jean Larson · Tracy Lea · Jessica Lee · Jerilyn Lewis · Howard Ligon · Jason Linetzky · Buz Livingston · Elizabeth Lynch · Michael Maloney · Stephen Manella · Steve Marston · Bryan Mathis · Patrick McCoy · Richard McGuire · Dwight McNeill · Frances M McSwain · John & Meg Menke · Chalmers Mikell · Gammy Miller · Rosanna Miller · Abigail Moore · Erik Moore · William M. Muller · Dean Neff · Mike Nichols · Christine Ohlman · Rod O'Mara · Rebecca O'Neil · Larry Ortega · Ann & Rick Owen · Elizabeth Owen · Cliff Oxford · Martha & David Pacini · Gene Paquette · Robert Parker · Joel Patterson · Dee Dee Perkins · Wade Perry · Patrick Payton · Rhonda Gail Phillips · James Powers · Jeanie Ramey · Georgia Raynor · George Redlinger · Robert Rettig · Alex R Rodriguez · George Rothert · Alan Rothschild · Jileen Russell · Robert Rychliki · Jeanette Saddler Taylor · Kelly Samek · Archie Schaffer III · Jeffrey P Schlatter · Chad Schrock · Howard Scott · Quin Segall · Milton W. Seiler, Jr. · Bill Semich · Adam Short · Ralph Simpson · Kate Small · Irvin Smith · Eric Steele · Christopher Strawn · Jane Tatum · Joe Thomas · Garland Thorn · Harrison Tome · Roger Trapp · Ben Van Dusen · David L VanLiew · Tim Walker · Christopher Walters · Doug Warren · James A Washburn · Ralph Webb · Randy Wilbourn · Reba Williams · Cary Wilson · George Wise · Vickie Wyatt · Randy Yauss · Randy Zielinski

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FALL 2022 POINTS SOUTHOXFORD AMERICAN 13 Photograph by Peter Fisher from his monograph At Least I Heard Your Bluebird Sing, published last year by Pomegranate Press. Courtesy the artist

Santa hadn’t asked when he was standing on that corner. Nor had the United Methodists who were handing out flyers for their car wash fundraiser. But the clown spoke as if he knew our family, waiting there at the red light. Momma was in the front passenger seat, and my sisters and I were in back—which, in a 1964-1/2 Ford Mustang, meant we were as close as three people could get, irrespective of their DNA. I was the youngest and heavier than the others—“husky” was the word I so dreaded—and sat on the end, directly behind Daddy, who was slim. We girls had quarreled over which of us would have to ride the hard middle of the Mustang’s bench seat all the way from New Orleans, up the Plank Road, and onto the loosely graveled lane where our grandpar ents lived, almost thirty miles north of Ba ton Rouge. We’d argued the way children do when they don’t want their parents to know—rolling our eyes and sucking our teeth, furiously whispering and careful not to let our arms or thighs touch in that tuna can of a car. Now, we focused on the adults. Their thighs weren’t touching at all. The clown wanted an answer. Our mother, a tall, fair-skinned beauty Sidney Poitier had once picked out of a crowd, blinked a few times. But she didn’t say anything. Daddy seemed startled. He looked left, di rectly at the clown’s face, and then turned his head slowly right and looked at our mother. He waited a beat. Then he turned back to the clown and, from the sliver of an angle I could see in his side mirror, he smiled the smile of a man who’s been caught in a tight spot. The clown handed him his card. I saw it all—the clown’s eyes, Momma’s blinks, Daddy. From behind, it looked as if he had made a quiet effort to shake his head no. Daddy was clever that way. Quick. He took the clown’s card and tapped it into his shirt pocket, behind the pencils that already were dulling the broadcloth. Momma never could brighten the fabric, no matter what she tried.

“What time is it?” our middle sis ter asked from the middle seat. “You need to be somewhere?” Daddy answered, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. Nobody said anything after that. Even our silent, sisterly grudge fell away. We settled into the backseat, thighs touching now, in quiet agree ment that something had spoiled. Momma turned her knees toward the passenger door. Daddy glanced at her again, then caught sight of the green light and accelerated, driving us straight through the intersection. I sucked my thumb and waited. As we merged onto Airline High way, it occurred to me that Mustangs must look strange when they’re stuffed with passengers inside. Not so the Volkswagen Beetle, which was already peculiar because the engine was in the back and the trunk was up front. It was funny to see how many people could squeeze in. A crowd of arms and legs dangling from the windows and under the hood looked a merry mess, as if the car was gobbling up pedestrians in a madcap, carnivorous frenzy. Our older brother had a red Beetle, and once a month he’d take our grand mother on her errands up and down the Plank Road, from the Clinton Bank and Trust south to Delmont Village, where the D. H. Holmes department store was. Everybody—even Big Mama—laughed when she’d back her six-foot frame into that car, wearing a tall wig, high heels, and a full-frame, hook-and-eye girdle. Sometimes, when I rode with them, she’d buy peppermint sticks at the Woolworth’s for the drive home. We’d have a ball, sucking and chatting about nothing and waving back at the people in their cars. But when the drivers on Airline Highway looked over at our bright white Mustang, counting five gloomy faces inside, they sped up or slowed down just enough to stay out of sight. Airline Highway is part of the Highway 61 that Bob Dylan writes about, the one that Governor Huey Long had wanted paved in the 1930s to slip down faster from the state capitol to the French Quarter. Highway 61

14 FALL 2022

Night Car (mountain/road triptych), 2021. Oil stick and acrylic on canvas by Eliot Greenwald, 48 x 75 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist

W hen I was a child, a clown pushed his face into the driv er side window of our family car and asked my father, “Are you happy?”

BY GWEN THOMPKINS

The Mustang

Revisited likely meant nothing to our father, though he didn’t mind watching Dylan sing on television. Daddy cared for music more than he ever could describe and sometimes talked about seeing Count Basie and His Orchestra in Denver, where he’d lived as a bachelor after leaving the navy. He also saw Louis Jordan there, and he smiled one of his rare smiles when he spoke of Dinah Washington. Frowningly, he’d mention Billie Holiday drunk at a diner one weekend night. Even now, when I picture Ms. Holiday, she’s listing over a cup of coffee in a restaurant booth, someone slapping her awake. Something was wrong with the tire. We’d passed the Airline Drive-In and turned onto the Plank Road by then and the long succes sion of orange-and-blue, blue-white-and-red, and red-black-and-white filling stations had ceased, as had Highway 61’s many railroad crossings and traffic stops. The Plank Road was a smooth, two-lane state highway, giving rise to green pastures and brown-and-white cows. Small towns like Baker and Zacha ry had signs mentioning them along our way, though no signs marked Cheneyville or Schulingkamp or the other little places where our cousins were living. But they were there. We felt a wobble on the other end of the bench seat.

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“And Gwinnie, you just as fat. You girls look some pretty in your clothes. Yes, indeed. Y’all want something? They got cold drinks in the Daddyicebox.”andBig Papa walked over to Big Papa’s acre of turnips and collard greens on the sunny side of the house and discussed them in far more detail than one might think possible.“Glory Dean, how you feelin’?” Big Mama asked“I’mMomma.fine,”Momma said, searching the house for her sisters. “Where are Lo’ and Dorothy?”“Theycomin’,” Big Mama said. “Is Ike stayin’?”“No,he’s going back to New Orleans,” MommaDaddysaid.walked to the gate. “Well, I’m going,” he told us. “You ain’t gon’ eat nothin’?” Big Mama called out from the porch. “No, I’d better get on the road,” Daddy said, still “Something’ssmiling.wrong with the tire,” Big Papa explained. “Oh, you gotta get that fixed,” Big Mama said. “Well, drive safe!” “Bye, Daddy!” Geselle said. “Bye, Daddy,” Gayle said. Momma and I just waved. Daddy turned the car around easily on the gravel. “Y’all be good,” he said out the window, slowly accelerating. I can’t remember if it was the last time we were all there together. Nor do I remember how long it was before Daddy left home for good, giving Momma the car, expanding his business, and taking care of us all remotely. But as the Mustang passed us, I noticed how wonderful it looked with only him inside. Sunlight made the white pop even brighter against the green brush pressing in from the forest, while the wheels kicked up a spray of caramel-colored dust. We could see straight through the back glass and over his shoulder to the open road. We could hear the wheels speeding over the rocks and the ebbing hum of the engine. That’s how Mustangs are when they’re running as they should. They move fast and free. We could see straight through the back glass and over his shoulder to the open road.

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“Why don’t you move to the seat on this end?” he said gently to our middle sister, the skinniest one, built like a dragonfly. He opened the door and we all squeezed out from behind Momma’s seat and then squeezed back in again. Daddy looked hard at Momma then and pressed his lips together until we couldn’t see them anymore. Our eldest sister, already five-foot-ten in the sixth grade, moved to my end, which landed me in the hard middle, the foam as stiff as a saddle. Momma folded her arms in her lap, saying nothing, and we took our cue from her. She was pretty enough not to be handy, or animated in public, and believed that men existed—often to the torment of women—because they were meant to fix things. And yet, more than likely, she was angry. It had taken her days behind closed doors to convince Daddy to drive us to her family in the country and he had announced our departure only that morning. He’d leave us there a week and then come back, because he almost never wanted to stay. In addition to his regular job as a construction company supervi sor, he’d take masonry work on the side, or refurbish old houses he’d buy to rent. That’s what weekends were for, not driv ing up to Clinton and back, no matter how smooth Huey Long’s asphalt was. Daddy changed the tire with us inside. He, too, was built like a dragonfly, but he was as strong as any man we’d seen, with hands like leathery oven mitts. Growing up on a farm in northern Florida, he had learned his punishing work ethic there—all seven days of the week, except Christmas, or why ever try? Even his mother had died in labor, bringing her eleventh child into the world. After that, when Daddy milked the cows in the morning, they’d mistake him for a calf. Or maybe they understood exactly who he was—a little boy without a mother. Either way, he remembered, “They’d lick me right on the “Moooooooo!”head.”

“Hey, Ike,” Big Mama called to Daddy as we climbed out of the car. She was standing on the porch in a house dress, with her fists high on her hips. Big Papa’s bloodhound stood up and walked slowly to the fence gate, while the Labrador puppy went wild, barking and twisting as if ticker tape was in the air.

I said, after we’d merged back onto the road, passing a blur of cattle.

“Y’all gettin’ so tall,” she said. “Gayle, how tall are “Five-ten,”you?” Gayle said, as a new country lilt in her voice lifted her smile. “You so skinny, Gazelle,” Big Mama told Geselle, instantly changing the soft “G” in her name, the way everybody did over here.

Daddy pulled to the shoulder and leapt out. As his door opened, the car cabin suddenly came to life with the whooshing air of passing traffic and the loud skirls of transmissions changing gears. A few shoves on the passen ger side rear tire confirmed what he’d been afraid of—a slow leak.

“Daddy, what kinds of cows are those?” “Not sure,” he said, nose up, his eyes dart ing back and forth from the road to the grassy fields behind barbed wire and creosote posts. “Maybe Jersey. Or…Brahman.” Daddy swiv eled his head again and leaned back toward the pastures behind Momma’s head, looking genuinely interested. “Are they cows or steers?” our middle sis ter on the end asked. “They’re cows,” I said. “They have…squeez ers.”Momma and the girls laughed. Then a mitt snaked from behind the driv er’s seat and hit me on the leg. “Don’t say that,” Daddy said. “That’s nasty.” I had no idea what he was talking about. But everybody stopped laughing and I put my thumb back into my mouth. We passed some Guernseys. Then, Daddy took his foot off the gas and braked slowly, turning into a small forest on a dirt road that I never saw coming.

“How are you?” Daddy said, smiling. “We fine,” Big Papa said, shaking Daddy’s hand. Everybody was tall on Momma’s side of the family and Daddy looked like the odd man out. He petted the Labrador. Momma’s thoughts mirrored the puppy’s. “Hey now!” she said to everybody, laughing. She grabbed her pocketbook, slammed the passenger door, and walked toward the house without looking back. “Get the bags,” she said to us as she swung through the gate and climbed the porch steps. “Y’all get the bags.” We got the bags. Then we held them as Big Mama smashed us, one by one, to her bosom.

CARLOS.EMORY.EDU Intaglio Gem Depicting Isis-Aphrodite Roman. Late 2nd–mid 3rd Century CE Crystalline quartz, var. amethyst. Gift of the Estate of Michael J. Shubin. 2008.031 108. Photo by Bruce M. White, This2021exhibition has been made possible through generous support from the Michael J. Shubin Endowment, the Evergreen Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Krista Lankswert, and New Roman Creative. EXPLORE EXHIBITIONTHE

I should’ve found a new dentist years ago. The fact that Dr. Patel has stopped giving me his signature scratch-and-sniff stick ers and started calling me “the Elder” might have been enough to force others out by now, but not me. We’ve been through too much together: dozens of cleanings, six fillings, two extractions after an unfortunate encounter with the bottom of a swimming pool, and one nitrous-fueled hallucination wherein the toucans on the ceiling flew down to greet me. And history aside, where else am I going to find a free Pac-Man machine in the waiting room? So much is my penchant for Pac-Man and my loathing for change that, at thirty, I am still seeing my pediatric dentist. But Dr. Patel didn’t meet me as a full-grown adult earning

Cavities and Debris

A STORY BY MELODY MOEZZI

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The Touch, 2019. Acrylic on canvas stretched wood panel, by Arghavan Khosravi. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

DARBY DENTAL SUPPLY . Grow the fuck up QUALITY CERTIFIED Leave Dr. Patel PATIENT TOWELS . Finish my PhD al ready ECONOMY Move out of Macon BULK. Procure new employment that doesn’t involve torturing rodents

“Why’d“In“What’s“No,Spanish.”it’sArabic.”itmean?”thenameofGod.”yousayit?”“It’sjustaprayerIsay before starting something—like before I eat or leave the house or drive or take a test. Stuff like that.”

“She's real tired,” Katie explains. “Stephen says I make her tired, but that’s not really true. She’s sick. Not like she’s-gonna-die sick, but like when you’re always tired and fall asleep when you don’t want to. That kind of Isick.”tryto make eye contact with the two conscious mothers in the room, hoping they will sense my total lack of maternal instincts, pity me, and rush to scoop Katie

a doctorate in biochemistry. He met me as a miniature refugee fleeing the Iran-Iraq War and landing in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Only a week after we left Tehran, the aforementioned swimming pool face-plant suddenly made dental care a high priority for my family, and Dr. Patel was the only dentist in town who worked weekends. His was the first brown face I encountered in any position of authority in America. He bore a striking resemblance to my favorite uncle, who had just died in the war, and he didn’t care that we barely spoke English. So of course, it’s possible I grew a little too attached. It’s also possible I’m digging way too deep for ex cuses. Whatever the case, I feel embarrassed to be here, but I also feel reassured by the faded jungle-themed wallpaper peeling at the seams. Shouldn’t I be allowed to stay at least as long as the wallcoverings? Such is the mental flotsam whirling about my head as I level up at Dr. Patel’s ancient arcade table. Just then, from the television bolted to the ceiling, a giddy meteorologist interrupts Judge Judy to report tornado warnings. My eyes drift up to it for a second at most, but by the time they dart back down to the Pac-Man machine, it’s too late. Death is inescapable. Trapped in a corner between two ghosts, orange to my left and red below, I collide with the latter and disintegrate on contact. Sirens and Dr. Patel’s voice muffle the sound of my virtual demise as reality sets in: Several tornadoes have already touched down around us. We aren’t safe here.

“Bismi-what?”Startled,Iopen my eyes to find a little girl standing before me. Where seconds before there was nothing, just empty space between my body and the patient towels, now there is this pintsized human staring at me.

2 PLY PAPER. Quit dating assholes. 1 PLY POLY. Start painting again PLASTIC BACKED. Stop skipping breakfast. ABSOR BENT Hydrate STRONG Exercise SOFT Cease freeloading on my parents’ mobile plans 18" X 13" Learn to cook (45.7 CM X 33.0 CM). Do my own damn taxes 500/BOX Find a general dentist Stunned by this strange string of Dar by-Dental-Supply-inspired directives, I re solve to follow them all. To seal the deal, I close my eyes, take in a deep breath of bubble-gum-bleach, and exhale slowly, whis pering a prayer: bismillah.

“Bismi-what?” she repeats. “Bismi-llah,” I reply.

“Like ready, set, go?”

Her head is draped in a mop of tight red curls framing a face full of freckles, and her enormous green eyes bulge defiantly out of her skull. She wears a faded blue cotton dress with multicolored buttons in the shape of various farm animals running down the front. Her stomach protrudes just enough to give prominence to the purple cow. She is missing one of her shoes but doesn’t seem to mind. Stepping forward, she comes in close and looks me square in the eyes, the way only children have the nerve to do.

“Sure. Why not?” I reply. Desperate to exit this conversation, I lift my head above the boxes and scan the room for this kid’s mom.

“I don’t know that word.”

“Follow me,” says the sweet old man who should be a waning memory, a charming relic of my childhood graciously bequeathed to future generations. This whole scenario might make sense as a bizarre dream, with me playing the part of a living anachronism. But as an actuality, it’s absurd. Here is Dr. Patel, a fixture from my past dragged into the present courtesy of my epic indolence and misoneism. And here am I, a grown-ass woman following him, his staff, three children, and their moms into a basement I never knew existed. Small, oblong, and bare—with concrete floors, fluorescent overhead lights, white walls lined with brown cardboard boxes, and a solitary drain at the center—the basement reeks of bleach and bubble gum. Following Dr. Patel’s instructions, we push aside packages to make room for our bodies, sitting on the floor against opposing walls. I head to a far corner, maximizing the distance between me and the others, moving a carton labeled PATIENT TOWELS, and quickly taking its place against the wall. Behind this box and sandwiched between two others (SALIVA EJECTORS and ORAL EVACUATOR TIPS), I long to disappear.Eventhe most mundane small talk will likely force me to explain why I’m here. So I keep quiet and out of sight, sinking into my corner sanctuary, hugging my knees close and tight. Together, side by side, my patellae create a cradle for my chin. A fit so seamless it has me imagining all these bones fused at some point in fetal development, like conti nents once joined, yet destined to drift apart, a human Pangaea divorcing itself. Soon my chest fills with panic. Hoping to extinguish it, I try a trick a firefighter once taught me: shifting my focus away from the racing thoughts in my head (What if Brazil crashes back into West Africa? What if this tornado flattens all of central Georgia? What if we never get out of here?) and toward an object in my immediate vicinity (the patient towels). Fixating on the box, I read every thing on it. The words are as random as they are irrelevant to me, yet each one delivers more comfort than the last. And with that comfort comes clarity, a flood of revelations flanked by nonsense, the latter somehow bringing the former into focus:

“You don’t need to. It’s not English.” “Is it Spanish? I watch Dora, so I know some

“I’m Ziba,” I say as I shake her hand. “Where’s your mom?” “She’s over there,” Katie replies, pointing to the opposite corner of the room. I follow the direction of her pudgy finger with my eyes to a thin blond woman holding a stuffed Big Bird on her lap. She looks wan and weathered, her head cocked so far to the left that it seems on the brink of snapping. She is beyond sleep, mouth agape, harsh fluorescent light reflecting off a string of drool inching toward Big Bird’s beak.

“I’m Katie. What’s your name?” she asks, holding her hand out to shake mine like this is old hat to her, like she sneaks up on strang ers in basements every day with the express intent of staring them down and shaking their hands, like she is living in some Peanuts special where parents are irrelevant.

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So I begin reading, assuming she will quickly realize how tiresome and confusing it all is and make me stop. But she doesn’t. Until—nearly a third of the way through the article—I read the word Fallujah. She grabs my arm and looks up at me with her big emerald eyes. “Have you been there?”

up. No such luck. I’d have to move the box of saliva ejectors for the other moms to see us. But I’m so repulsed by that label alone— unable to imagine even speaking those two words in succession without gagging—that I can’t bring myself to handle the box. What if, at the exact moment I pick it up, a torna do crushes us all? My obituary could read “Graduate Student Crushed Beneath Box of Saliva Ejectors.” I can’t risk it. “Have you ever been sick?” Katie asks. I want to say I’m sick right now, but I say “yes”“Sure,”“Areinstead.youbetter?”Ireply.“It was never anything se rious: just colds and flus really—” “Can I see that?” she interrupts, bored by my trivial viruses. She is leaning out from behind the patient towels and pointing at a man across from us. “See what?” “The magazine that man is reading. Please ask him for it, Ziba!” “You ask him.” “You’re bigger. He’ll listen to you.” I lean over to get a better look. He isn’t part of Dr. Patel’s staff and doesn’t have a kid in tow, so I’m just as confused as someone else would be looking at me prior to Katie’s arrival. But he is at least fifty, and by Dr. Patel’s own chronic telling, I am his oldest patient. Just then, the man straightens his back against the wall, revealing a UPS logo above his left shirt pocket, and the mystery is solved. He looks affable enough and I’ve never had a bad experience with a UPS courier, so I get up and give in to Katie’s demands. She follows closely behind. “Excuse me, sir,” I say softly so as not to wake anyone up.

“Would you mind lending your magazine to my friend Katie here?” I ask. “Can’t you see that I’m reading it?” he snaps.“I’m sorry, Katie. The grown man won’t let you see his magazine,” I tell her, just loud enough for him to hear as we head back to our corner and sit down. He then gets up and walks toward us, the magazine (which I can now discern as Time) in hand.

Defeated, Gopher drops the magazine onto the floor next to us, rolls his eyes, and heads back to his side of the room. I’m baffled by how quickly she got him to cave. Growing up in Iran and even here, I’d never have spoken to an adult like that. To this day—bound by the endless intersections of Southern and Persian hospitality—I wouldn't dare. But Katie is brave and shameless. She proudly hands me the Time “I didn’t want this,” I say. “But I can’t read so good yet. You have to read for me. Pleeease, Ziba.”

The other two patients—tweens with the trials of impending adolescence airing brutal previews on their faces, the girl’s caked in glitter and the boy’s coated with cystic acne— are lying on their mothers’ laps. Both moms hold up their own heads with one hand and rest the other on the heads of their respective offspring. The secretary and hygienist sit serenely against the wall behind Dr. Patel, presumably asleep as well, muted shadows.

Katie’s mom has set the tone for this after noon without trying. Apart from Katie and me, the UPS guy, and Dr. Patel (who appears to be doing paperwork), everyone else is either fast asleep or well on their way. Most knees have been released, and despite the sirens, people seem oddly calm.

“But the name: Fa-lu-ja. It sounds so cool. Like a circus or a cartoon or something. Even if bad stuff happens there, it can’t be all bad.” She keeps repeating the only prayer she knows I andtoo—simple,knowselfless,sacred.

“I’m older than you, and as a person who has been on this planet for quite—”

“Could I pleeease see your magazine, sir? I’ll give it back,” she interrupts. He looks at me as if I am to blame for this. I feel a little sorry for him, crouched down on the con crete like an oversized gopher, now looking up at me with his beady blue eyes, but I’m not about to take the blame. I have no interest in his “Comeperiodical.on,”Katie continues. “Don’t be such a meanie. Didn’t they teach you that you’re supposed to share?”

“How old are you?” he asks Katie sternly, squatting down so they are face to face. I immediately stand up. It won’t be hard to throw him off his center of gravity if he tries to touch her, and I am ready to do it. Despite my general aversion to children, this one is growing on me. “Six and a half. How old are you?” she responds, unperturbed, reminding me of myself at that age. I’d already survived a revolution and was living in a warzone, so it took a lot to scare me back then. I was raised to never let anyone hurt or intimidate me—at least not without a fight. Political turmoil aside, Katie seems to be the product of a similar upbringing.

The magazine is several months old, but the world hasn’t changed much. I probably should decline Katie’s request based on the cover alone: a shirtless, hooded, emaciated prisoner, arms tied behind his back—presum ably one of the Abu Ghraib detainees—with the words “Special Report” and “IRAQ: HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?” printed above his head. But having no children of my own and zero desire to create any, I suck at discerning what is and isn’t appropriate for them. Both of my sisters have kids, and over the years, I have repeatedly gotten in trouble for exposing them to too much too soon, from Gray’s Anatomy to Public Enemy. Point being, I should know better by now, but I don’t. “You really want me to read you Time? It’s not like Dr. Seuss. It’s boring and depressing.”“Doyouhave Dr. Seuss?” Katie pleads. “No,” I concede. “Then Time! Please read it. Pretty please with a cherry and sprinkles on top?”“Fine. What do you want me to read?” Katie slides in close beside me and takes the magazine from my hands, flipping to a story with a photo of George W. Bush grinning like a maniac while shaking some general’s hand. On the opposite page is a bloodied soldier lying on the ground next to a Shetank.immediately points to it, nudging my elbow with hers: “This! Tell me what it says.”

“Um, no, Katie. It’s super dangerous. You don’t wanna go there.”

“I know,” she says, staring at her shoeless foot. “My brother Stephen died there.” Is she serious? I think to myself. Then: Of course she is serious. She’s six. What the hell were you thinking reading this to her? All I wanted was a filling, and now here I am stuck in a basement under a tornado, traumatizing a total stranger, a child, for no good reason. Unlike a filling—painful for a few minutes, but ultimately advancing us to victory in the battle against tooth decay— there is zero upside here. It’s far too late to get out of this mess now, and even if it weren’t, there is nowhere to go. Are you even supposed to tell kids that young when people die? And if so, are you supposed to tell them where and how? It just seems like Katie knows way too much already, but then again, I guess I did too at her age. I always found it strange how the same people who would tell us kids not to fight with one another would then go off to war to kill each other the second they were grown. I close the magazine and lay it on the floor facedown, re membering how tightly Uncle Hamid hugged me the last time I saw him, like his body knew he’d never return from the war even as his words tried to convince me otherwise.

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“All the best art is a mess that gets the artist into trouble,” I say. “But I have a mom too, so I get it. Why don’t you wait here while I go pick up the pieces?” But before Katie can answer, the lights go out, and my mind regresses twenty years in an instant. At ten, in Tehran, tornadoes were nowhere on my radar. Back then, when the lights went out, it wasn’t wind we worried about. It was war. So I do what my parents trained me to do in the event of an aerial bombing: I find a basement—convenient given I’m already in one, albeit twenty years later and across the Atlantic. But trauma leaves no room for daft delineations around time and space. Here, reflex reigns. Just as my pupils take the darkness as a cue to dilate, my psyche takes it as a cue to negotiate. Thus, with neither thought nor effort, I proceed to step two of my childhood civilian military training: desperate devotions. Filled with a fervor only explosives can evoke, I pray with the passion of a pilgrim crawling to Karbala on Ashura. These aren’t the prayers I used to speed through five times a day like an annoyed auctioneer selling my soul for a few more minutes with a jump rope or a pogo stick. These are the prayers I extend and enun ciate like a dread-filled delinquent knowing this might be her last chance to repent for every prayer she has ever skipped or sped through. My loud, elongated Qur’anic verses fill the basement, waking everyone up but me. As our eyes slowly adjust to the dark, Dr. Patel and several others, including Katie’s mom, take turns asking me what’s wrong, attempting to comfort me, to coax me back into the present. But none of it registers, so I keepUnsurprisinglypraying. for Macon, there are no other Muslims in this basement. But there is Katie, and as of twenty minutes ago, she knows bismillah. As I stand, bend, kneel, and prostrate, she does the same, holding my hand in hers, our limbs connected like two electrons in a covalent bond. All the while, she keeps repeating the only prayer she knows I know too—simple, selfless, and sacred—over and over again. A tiny, acciden tal shaykha clearing out decades-old psychic debris, she fills the incandescent emptiness with a single word, spoken in succession and solidarity. Bismillah. Minutes later, when the lights return and the sirens cease, Katie’s zikr persists, carrying me back to the twenty-first century intact. Ready. Set. Go.

“No way, lady! That’s my magazine. It’s not from the waiting room. She said she would give it back. Now look what she’s done to it, what you’re letting her do to it.”

Standing behind Katie, Gopher can’t see her face. I’d like to think that if he could, he would shut up right quick and crawl back into the sad hole whence he came, but I doubt it. He saw me wipe her tears, so he must know something is wrong. Having obliterated the magazine in her lap, Katie gathers the pieces in her skirt, turns around, and empties the mess onto Gopher’s faded brown work boots. His face turns so red so quickly that it looks as if his blood might actually be boiling. Still, he mercifully says nothing as he wrings his hands and returns to his side of the room. But this time, through no act of his own, Gopher doesn’t walk back as just another trifling human. Rather, he does so—thanks to Katie—as a monument in motion, scraps of copy scattering across the concrete with his every step, dispersing devastation in all directions, disaster confetti. Were we in Man hattan, Katie could revive and direct this same scene nightly, call it performance art, and charge admission. But being in Macon, I know there will be no repeat performances, so I savor this one. “I feel better,” Katie says. “I didn’t want to be mean, but it felt good to tear something up. You “Sure.know?”Andlook at what you made,” I say as she sits back down beside me and we behold Gopher’s retreat. She has stopped crying and is resting her head on my arm. “You see those snippets of paper flying all over the place? It’s so pretty, like moving art.” “Art? It’s a mess though. When my mom wakes up, I’ll be in trouble. She’ll make me clean it up for sure.”

“I promise I’ll buy you another copy. Just please, give us a minute,” I tell Gopher as I wipe Katie’s cheeks with my thumbs, holding her head in my hands.

“I’m so sorry that happened to your broth er, Katie.” My immaturity and carelessness have no doubt further wounded this innocent girl, and I hate myself for it. But she doesn’t look sad or distraught. She just keeps staring at her unshod foot: her sock, that pale pink that sinks in when you accidentally throw in a red with whites. “Why? It’s not your fault,” Katie says calm ly, sliding a tiny turquoise crucifix back and forth along the silver chain around her neck. “Do you have a brother?” “No, just a couple sisters.” “I only had Stephen; now it’s just me and Mom. She’s okay, but since he died, she doesn’t play with me as much—and she sold our trampoline. Do you have a trampoline?” “No. I’ve actually never been on one.” “Oh, Ziba, they’re so much fun. You’ve gotta try it,” she gushes.

Katie has somehow managed to jump from her dead brother to trampolines in mere seconds. I’m grateful though, as I’ve now exceeded my max quota for blood and gore for the day; trampolines I can tolerate. But Katie is already bored with them by the time I come to this conclusion.

“Of course. I’m sure it’s nice normally, but right now it’s a huge mess. There’s a war going on. It’s not safe.”

Grabbing the magazine in front of us, she stands up, turns around, and then sits back down to face me, lotus style, her back against the patient towels. Without a word, she calm ly and deliberately proceeds to tear the Time to shreds. Gopher soon notices from across the room and jets back to us. “Tell her to stop!” he whisper-yells at me. Tears are now streaming down Katie’s face, but she is silent and still. Not a single sniffle or even a chin quiver. Just a flood of tears.

LostontheTrail, 2013. Photograph on canvas and wood by Bear Allison. Courtesy the artist

StumblingStone

At the time of removal, the term for Andrew Jackson’s policy of wiping the In digenous presence from lands east of the Mississippi, there were between fourteen and fifteen thousand Cherokees living in the Southeast. Four thousand households, roughly, and Saunt has an entry in his sys tem for each one. Personal possessions like the ones owned by Chewey are only a small part of the tabulation. Working off of twohundred-year-old surveys and assessments,

BY BENJAMIN HEDIN T hey are filed away in boxes in the Na tional Archives, books and ledgers full of blotchy, ornate handwriting. A sheet inside of one, dated June 19, 1838, lists a fiddle and shot pouch horn, four chairs, and some bedding. Anoth er gives the price for a spinning wheel and plough. Turning forward, you find mention of bee stands, cotton cards, pails, and chisels. And while they seem nothing more than a catalog of the most ordinary possessions, the pages delineate a tragedy of immeasurable scope, for they are the records of what a people lost when they were evicted from their ancestral lands, forced to give up everything they“It’sowned.really quite astonishing,” said Claudio Saunt, a professor of history at the University of Georgia who found these lists one day while doing some research. “The govern ment produces thousands of documents in the process of deporting Cherokees. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say we know more about the Cherokees than any other people in the world.” The cover of the book Saunt was showing me had a label: returns of property left by the indians and sold by agents. Most of the entries in it were from the summer or fall of 1838, in the days after the U.S. Army began sending the Cherokee people who were living in Georgia, North Carolina, Ten nessee, and Alabama to the stockades that were the point of origin for the Trail of Tears. The pages record not only the property that was owned but also the name of the white person who acquired it. From the page dated June 19, 1838, for instance, we learn that a Mr. Sloan purchased the fiddle that only days before belonged to a Cherokee man named Chewey. His loom went to Colonel Neely, who also bought, for around a dollar, Chewey’s table, bed, and piss pot.

Saunt, the author of Unworthy Republic, an award-winning study of the expulsion of the Cherokee and other Southeastern tribes, has been collecting and digitizing records such as these for more than a year. In 2023 he expects to publish an interactive, virtual census of the Cherokee Nation as it existed two centuries ago. Even in the offline, ges tational stage in which I was able to view it, the archive is startling and remarkably de tailed, and raises important questions about the kind of action historical memory can or should inspire.

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receipts, trial records, and bills of credit, Saunt has established how much land be longed to each household, the number of cabins on the property, and their square footage; he has mapped each location as well, creating what is in effect an atlas of dispossession. Looking at the screen, one sees thousands of pins, each representing a Cherokee person or family, arrayed across a territory stretching from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina in the north to the Atlanta suburbs in the south, and west to Muscle Shoals.

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“It’s all about a presence on the landscape that was erased and then forgotten,” Saunt said of the mapping component of his proj ect. “For me it’s a challenge to try and restore thatFrompresence.”myhome in Atlanta I can drive to a number of these sites within an hour. The Chattahoochee River on the city’s north boundary was once the cordon separating the United States and the Cherokee Nation. Not far from Truist Park, the stadium where fans of the Atlanta Braves pretend to be Indi an by waving foam tomahawks and chanting a parody of a war cry, the 285 beltway cuts across land that belonged to a Cherokee family named Lynch, who cultivated a vast orchard on this side of the Chattahoochee, with more than two hundred peach trees. While the Trail of Tears is a familiar sto ry, Cherokees were being driven off this

property before then. “All I ask in this cre ation,” sang men in the earliest days of the nineteenth century, “is a pretty little wife and a big plantation / Way up yonder in the Cherokee Nation.” The State of Georgia did all it could to accommodate this request. If you were white and had eighteen dollars to your name, you could purchase a ticket to one of Georgia’s land lotteries and stand a chance at winning a homestead in excess of a hundred acres. Though the Cherokees’ right to the land had been affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, the lottery results were enforced by the Georgia Guard, a paramil itary outfit acting at the behest of the state. No one was exempt from such theft, no matter how powerful or wealthy. John Ross, the first elected Principal Chief of the Cher okee Nation, came home one day in 1835 to discover someone else living on his land. Ross had been in Washington, D.C., meeting with lawmakers, and in his absence his barn, stable, and furniture were confiscated. There was no sign of his wife, Quatie, or their children. Before setting off to find them Ross had to pay for a night’s rent in his own house. Eventually the town of Rome, Geor gia, would be built on this spot, at the confluence of the Oostanaula and Etowah Rivers. According to Saunt’s database, Ross’s property was valued at $17,797.25, equal to half a million dollars“Theytoday.took everything,” said Allen Buck, a fifth-great-grandson of Ross, who is named for one of the Principal Chief’s brothers. An ordained Meth odist minister, Buck presides over the Great Spirit Church in Portland, Oregon. He grew up in Oklahoma, not on the reservation set aside for Cherokees after removal but in the college town of Norman, and while they are separated by seven generations, Buck likes to joke that when he looks in the mirror he thinks of a photograph taken of Ross when the chief was approximately the same age Buck is now. “I have his big old fat earlobes, and crazy hairs growing out of my eyebrows,” he said. “I’m afraid I sort of look like him.”

“I didn’t,” he said, “but I will tell you, I have always had these recurring dreams where I’m being accused of something that I didn’t do. It’s some form of I didn’t do this, this isn’t my fault, why can’t anyone hear me, why can’t anyone see me, why are they putting my family in jeopardy, why are they taking these things from me?

N orth of the town of Rome one enters Tennessee, which is a Cherokee word, of course, as are so many place names in this southernmost realm of Appalachia. Nantaha

“Maybe everyone has those dreams that are part of the collective human unconscious, but I think it comes from further back. It’s baked in, the grief and the sorrow and the trauma of what happened.”

The Trail did not extinguish the Cherokees’ language, the traditions of their culture, or their claims as a sovereign nation.

When he was young Buck did not hear much about his family’s Cherokee past. He was raised by his mother, a white woman, and he told me that in school, “I was taught the American mythology about the Trail of Tears. They celebrate the pioneers, the people who took the land. Boomers and Sooners.” It was only at family reunions that Buck would pick up other types of stories, finding out that Quatie Ross died on the Trail of Tears, for instance, her final resting place in Little Rock,“I’mArkansas.stilllearning how to be Cherokee,” Buck said, “how to be traditional Cherokee, what that means. There’s a lifetime of work to do.” He spoke in particular of adhering to the principle of gadugi, a Cherokee word that translates loosely as working together, in the spirit of the collective, and he also said he was passing on rites such as going to water, a traditional Cherokee healing practice, to his children. “Our ceremonies,” he told me, “bind us to the past, the present, and the future.”Later, as we looked at a survey of Ross’s property, one made in the months before it was given away by lottery, I asked whether, at any of those family reunions, Buck learned about the time Ross was suddenly turned out of his home.

la. Cullowhee. Hiwassee. When we say these words we recognize, knowingly or not, the title the first known inhabitants inscribed on the region, and it is sometimes forgotten that there are still thousands of Cherokees who live in this part of the United States. In 1838, in the midst of removal, a handful of Cherokees fled into the mountains and hid from the army. When the roundup was over they came out and joined another group who had been given permission from the United States government to stay in the East, based on treaties signed in 1817 and 1819. Later this remnant became known as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, a federally recognized tribe.The headquarters of the Eastern Band is in Cherokee, North Carolina. The town is a few miles from Kituwah, an archaeological site lo cated in the floodplain of the Tuckasegee Riv er. A small rise in the center of the field indicates the remains of an ancient council house, said to be the source of the fire from which all the settlements in the old Nation were lit. Though it has largely vanished, Kituwah, “the mother town,” as Cherokees call it, still has the power to inspire. Cherokees the world over come to sprinkle dirt on the mound, in the hope of raising it to its former dimensions, and on the morning I drove by, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma was seated near the river performing for a class of schoolchildren, a thin mist scudding across the low ridges and mountains that encircle the field.

The Principal Chief of the Eastern Band is Richard Sneed. He moved to Cherokee in the 1980s—he lived in New Jer sey until he was fourteen—and is serving his third term as Principal Chief. In many ways, little about the job has changed since the days of Ross. Sneed is constantly engaged in negotiations with the federal government, pressing it to uphold pacts made with the Cherokees. Before our interview he was on the phone about Tellico Lake, a federal proj ect of the 1970s that dammed the Little Ten nessee River and flooded acres of Cherokee burial grounds in the process. The Eastern Band was promised this land would be taken into trust, and “we’re still fighting that fight to this day,” Sneed said. Over the years Sneed has done a fair amount of research on his genealogy. His family tree is exhaustive, dating back gen erations, to the earliest known Cherokee records. “This is not our story,” he told me

24 FALL 2022

“We have value systems that predate this country by thousands of years,” Sneed said to me, “and we have to be deliberate about identifying what those values are, and delib erately go back to those things and deliber ately teach those things and, more important, be deliberate in living it out.”

“What happened in Wallowa,” said Buck, “is an inspiring thing and gives me hope. Does it make anything right? I don’t think so. But there’s some healing there.”

I f removal does not define the Cherokees, that leaves another question: How much does it define Georgia? In the end, so much about this state, its property lines, the make up and patterns of its population—for it was slaves who worked the land that was cleared of Indigenous people—comes back to the decision to expel the Cherokees. And even if it can’t be settled with any degree of finality, it is still important that we ask this question, since it signals a willingness to confront the facts of history.

when our conversation touched on the re moval period. On the pages in front of us was a name, Sololah, that can be found in Saunt’s archive. A relative of Sneed’s father, Sololah lived on two acres, in a cabin of twenty-four square feet, near Robbinsville, a short drive along Highway 28 from where Sneed and I were speaking now. I understood his point. So much of what is written about the Cherokees tends to empha size removal, whereas the Eastern Band has maintained an unbroken connection with a piece of their homeland for centuries. And yet even though he was talking about the Eastern Band, I was reminded of something DeLanna Studi said after walking the Trail of Tears with her father. Studi, an actress and playwright from Liberty, Oklahoma, re traced the route west in the summer of 2015, nine hundred miles beginning at Fort Butler, near Murphy, North Carolina, where one of Studi’s ancestors had been held prisoner in 1838. Though it was painful, she said, “to see how much we lost,” what Studi came to real ize was that removal “doesn’t define us as a people,” since the Trail did not extinguish the Cherokees’ language, the traditions of their culture, or their claims as a sovereign nation.

After he moved to Portland and took over the pastorate of Great Spirit, Buck began giving parcels of land that were in Methodist ownership to Indigenous nations. In 2021 he transferred a lot in Idaho’s Wallowa Valley to the Nimi’puu. The size of the property was not large, but it gave the Nimi’puu a presence in the Valley, their sacred homeland, for the first time since they were sent out of it in the 1870s, at the end of Chief Joseph’s war.

While Saunt thinks of stumbling stones as a way, as he put it, of restoring a presence on the landscape that was erased, he does not believe an exact equivalent can be installed in the territory of removal. “Those are in urban areas, on sidewalks,” he said. “You can’t do the same with the Cherokee Nation. It’s very rural.”

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  25

“Acknowledgment is only the entry point,” Buck said to me when I asked if it was time to move beyond commemoration and think of broader acts of restitution—a monetary reparation, perhaps, to the heirs of those who lost their holdings, or returning the country’s national parks, tracts that in most cases were illegally taken, to tribal hands.

Saunt is not of Indigenous descent. He was born in San Francisco, and though he has been teaching at the University of Georgia since 1998, it was only recently that he turned his attention to the removal of the Eastern tribes. A few years ago, Saunt read some letters written by his grandfather, a Jewish engineer who escaped from Hungary and settled in Ohio during World War II. “That got me thinking about deportation and the story of where we live,” he said, adding that the ex pulsion of the Cherokees prefigured pogroms that occurred later in countries like Algeria and Russia. “State administrators looked to the United States as a model for what you do with populations you don’t want.”

So much inheres in the land that cere monies like this have more than a symbolic power. Sneed told me it was “a dangerous precedent to rewrite history. What’s done is done.” But he had experienced firsthand what Buck was talking about. For generations Kituwah belonged to a white family, until the Eastern Band purchased the site in the 1990s. Reclaiming Kituwah, Sneed said, set off a “renaissance of our arts and crafts, our language. Getting it back was very healing.”

Much of it is rural, true, yet it would be easy to place a stumbling stone in Rome, Georgia, on land that belonged to John Ross. There is in Rome a footbridge named after Ross, but no mention of land lotteries, of expulsion or dispossession. It has all been consigned to the past, that remote era where America has kept removal for so long, deter mined to see it as just another bloodless his torical force, a sin of our fathers, beyond the reach of culpability. And yet as anyone who visits Rome can attest, watching shoppers drift in and out of the Blue Sky Outfitter, or golf carts moving through the Coosa Country Club, the theft of land is still paying out.

“Decolonization always involves giving back.”

In essence, this was the vision articulated by Buck, who also referred to intentionality as an important part of Cherokee identity, the conscious seeking-out of language and custom. He and Sneed both became citizens of a tribe by virtue of their ancestry, one in the Cherokee Nation, one in the Eastern Band, yet they believed being Cherokee was not something you could simply inherit. It had to be daily striven for, daily renewed.

On the day we met in his office at the Uni versity of Georgia, Saunt showed me the picture of a stumbling stone. These are the memorials, conceived by the German artist Gunter Demnig, found on sidewalks in cities across Europe, small stones inlaid with a brass plaque that bears the name of someone who lost their house or business and was deported during the Holocaust. Walking the streets of Berlin, or Budapest, one cannot avoid them. The stones enact a pause, a fig urative stumbling, interrupting one’s daily routine to occasion, in their gentle way, a kind of Whilereckoning.heplansto publish the archive next year, and recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his work, Saunt knows publication and completion are not neces sarily the same thing. Records can be linked indefinitely, and Saunt intends, one day, to show the chain-of-title for each property in the system, as well as the census data for people like Colonel Neely, who took home so many of Chewey’s possessions on that day in June of 1838. In this way, some Georgians will be surprised to learn the source of their cherished heirlooms.

To acknowledge removal in ways we have not yet done, finally, be it in the form of stum bling stones, land return, or something else, might add meaning to our country’s image of itself, to our parades and ritual genuflections. Without practiced equality or justice, after all, flag-waving and protecting statues be comes little more than performance art. “The hard part,” said Buck, “is getting institutions to really let go. It has to start with people in power and in privilege telling the truth about what happened.” That, he said, is the value of Saunt’s archive, the way it might push us toward recognizing not only the truths of the past, but also that there is a healing whose benefit might extend to us all.

26 FALL 2022 The New Loss Is Not Like the Old Loss, 2022. Duraclear and archival pigment print on LED lightbox, 44 x 38 inches by Melanie Willhide. Courtesy the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles

ix nights before my friend Sam and I hike through Ijams Nature Cen ter to Alvis Williams’s grave, Mama texts me about Hunter’s death. It is 9 p.m. on a Tuesday and I have just gotten home from the bar. I’m tipsy and working on my novel—inspired by the loss of my brother’s best friend, Micah. Annotations are spread across my bed. It had rained, and because I sat outside at the bar to lessen my chances of COVID, I am naked, having stripped out of my wet clothes. I cry first, nestled into the hollow of my secondhand mattress. Hunter was my stepdad Wyatt’s oldest friend. He’d spent many evenings on our outdoor lanai after paddling races and simulator training with my pilot stepdad, and it was on these nights that I had borne witness to Hunt er’s many transformations—from a bachelor to a newlywed to a father, from a divorcé to a happily married man once again. Hunter was like an uncle to me, and, throughout my monosyllabic childhood and shy teens, he was the only one among my stepdad’s friends who’d never failed to talk to me, to try and make me laugh. I call Mama once my tears are spent. Beneath my damp body, the annotations have crumpled. A breeze from the open window be side my bed tickles up my back. On the phone, Mama recounts how Hunter had passed: he had a heart attack while cross ing the Kaiwi Channel. One second he was paddling a one-man canoe, the next he was in the water. The people in the escort boat tried to pull him out, but, slippery as a fish, he kept falling back in. It took them forty-five minutes to get Hunter to the hospital. By then, he couldn’t speak. A machine had to breathe for him. The doctor told Hunter’s wife he’d suffered a fatal traumatic brain injury and nothing could be done. Mama says Wyatt has flown to Maui to be with Hunter. That they have unplugged Hunter today. She says I should call my stepdad. But when I hang up, I can’t call. I don’t know what to say to Wyatt. And, selfishly, I cannot stand, in hearing more about Hunter, the thought that any day, one of my own parents could end up dead.

S am is the first to show me Stanton Cem etery, and is the reason I even stumble upon the letter left by a descendant of one of the miners buried there. We go in April, at the height of everything’s bloom, with a plan to walk through Ijams Nature Center until we are hot enough to swim. Besides yoga and the occasional walk through North Knoxville, I have not exercised in months, hibernating in what, for me, has been the coldest winter. Sam tells me Knoxville does not compare to Chicago, where they lived for eight years, or South Bend, where they grew up, but I am from Hawai‘i, where anything below sixty-eight degrees warrants two layers and a Dutchjacket.clover creeps in around the trail. It is seventy degrees, and I am in shorts and a tank top, a choice that would shock my twelve-year-old self. But the humidity adds at least five degrees, and besides, after seven years, I am finally beginning to acclimate to the continent. I pant up the soft slope of Tharp’s Trace. My eyes are on my feet, willing them to continue. When the trail flattens into a graveyard, I am too tired to notice. It is not until Sam says, look up, that I realize we are among the dead.

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M y family and I have suffered countless losses, grieved endlessly over long-dis tance calls and texts in the two and a half years I have not returned home because of COVID. I often wonder if it is possible for them to still know me, and more than that, if it is possible for them to still love me after thirty months apart. Hunter and Wyatt grew up together on the beach in Kahala, next to a cemented-in river so small it does not show up on Google Maps. When I finally text Wyatt to ask how he’s doing, all he says is, It’s hard . In the twenty-three years I’ve known him, I have never seen him cry, not even when his own mother passed. I wonder, after texting Wyatt, if my grief for Hunter is earned. If the tears I shed are for him or myself. Because Wyatt is right, it is hard. Hard, in a world of never-ending loss, to tell what it is that I mourn. To stop long enough to grieve a single person.Sometimes I wish I could write a book about everyone I meet. A library of my life, more solid than the memories in my head. In Hunt er’s book, I would write about the protea farm we stayed at for his first wedding on Maui, how I held the flower stamens of those blooms—soft and round, delicate as a drowned bee’s thorax—in my nine-year-old hands. I would write about the standup paddleboard relay he and Wyatt raced, suffering through the novice escorting of my brother and me to win their division. I would write about the first time Hunter visited after his daughter’s birth, his smile so wide it was froggy as he held her on the green couch of our lanai, laughing at my stepdad. I would write about the comfort of Hunter’s voice through the airplane’s headset I wore the first time Wyatt let me land his Hard, in a world of never-ending loss, to tell what it is that I mourn. To stop long enough to grieve a single person.

Marble City Mourning

BY MARIAH RIGG

S

W e don’t dig graves where I’m from. Our cemetery is the ocean. Instead of under headstones, my family rests in the surf spots of O‘ahu’s South Shore. I cannot count the number of times I have paddled out to spread ashes, the soot of a life sticking to my fingers as I reach into a canvas bag. I cannot count the number of plumerias, pua kenikeni, pika kes, orchids I have picked from my mother’s I cannot count the number of times I have paddled out to spread ashes, the soot of a life sticking to my fingers as I reach into a canvas bag.

My grandmother, Nora Williams, was only 10 years old when this happened and her family was still grieving the loss of her 17-year-old brother Charlie. What a blow that only 3 months later, on New Year’s Eve, her father, who she loved dearly, died at the young age of 37. Not only was the family bereft, but they were also plunged into the worst poverty. They had always been poor, but they had a roof over their heads and food on the table. Life would become much more difficult for the Williams family.

I write these narratives about Alvis and his son Charlie because I want people to know that they were real, they were loved, and they were dearly missed.

O nline, all the pictures of Stanton Cemetery are from autumn— kudzu reaching up naked trunks, five-starred maple leaves carpeting the frosted grass in red. But on the afternoon I go with Sam, daffodils melt like butter over sun-warmed graves. White aster waves in the wind. What a beautiful place to rest, I say. And sad, Sam adds. Behind us, the hill falls to Mead’s Quarry, the lake a sliver of black through the trees. From the mid-1800s through the Great De pression, the quarry’s marble was used to build all across the U.S. from the Nation al Gallery to Grand Central Station—and during that time, it was the main source of jobs in eastern Tennessee. Because of this, Knoxville was named Marble City. After the Depression, the quarry switched to gravel and limestone, and by 1978 it was no longer a mine but an illegal dump. As the years passed, the quarry flooded, until it became a place for the residents of Knoxville to swim. Sam leads me past a hundred-year-old hand-carved headstone marking a baby’s grave, past the scalloped headstones of Wil liam and Martha Stanton, after whom the graveyard was named, to a marker at the edge of the cemetery’s plot. The old marble of the marker is spotted with moss that grows like tufts of hair from a chest and streaked by the rain of many seasons. A rust-chewed silver frame leans against the headstone, the letter inside it curled and yellowed, the words half-stolen by Southern humidity. Alvis New ton Williams, the letter begins. I kneel to read the faded print written by Linda Williamson, Alvis’s great-granddaughter, and as she re counts the story of his death, I wonder how Alvis lived. I think of Hunter’s life and wonder who might one day remember it. Later, when I look up Alvis Newton Wil liams online, when I search for him in the University of Tennessee library archives and ask the people at the Ijams’s front desk, all I will find is what I already know: the location of his grave. Like so many others, Alvis is remembered not by his life, but by his death.

A fter we read Linda Williamson’s letter, I tell Sam of Hunter, and then of Micah, who died only last year. We sit on the cemetery bench and imagine what it was like to live in Knoxville a hundred years ago, when they were still mining marble and the hills were blasted bare. But soon the bugs come, so I follow Sam out of the clearing and back into the trees, where we descend through ash and gingko, pass lookouts and spring-fed falls, until we get to the discontinued railroad. I followed these tracks for miles once, Sam tells me. All they led to was a suburb I wonder if Marble City would feel like home to Alvis without the mining and the marble. I wonder if, knowing how he died, he would even grieve any of it. And while, for the most part, I can catalog the changes to Hawai‘i in my two-and-a-halfyear absence, there is a chance that Alvis might not recognize his home now, just as the people who live in Knoxville do not re member him. When Sam and I walk the rails, we treat them like balance beams, our feet sliding down the tracks.

T he death of Alvis was like folklore to me when I was growing up. I had heard the stories of my great-grandmother Susie Annie Williams having a dream where she saw her husband in a casket without his head, and how she begged him not to go to work, but he went anyway, to prove to her it was only a dream. She had reason to worry because he worked at Mead’s Quarry cutting marble. I know it didn’t happen the next day, but some time, at a later date, one of the saws cut loose and Alvis was decapitated. After my grandmother died in 2009, I found the newspaper clipping of his acci dental death in the bottom of a chest in her room. The newspaper said he had worked there for 18 years, and he was a sawyer. They also listed his name wrong, calling him “Albert Williams.” They didn’t mention the decapitation.

dad’s Cessna, how Hunter’s encouragement as the tower operator was the only way I was able to find the courage to push the throttle down. I would write about how he and Wyatt cheered as I bounced down the runway of Kahului Airport. But even if I wrote down all the memories I have of Hunter, I am not sure it would be enough. I am not sure that, even if I com piled all the memories of everyone living and dead who knew him, I could reconstruct him.The day after Hunter dies, Wyatt texts me again. We miss you. You are doing real ly good up in Tennessee getting your PhD Everything is the same here and it will be when you are ready to come home. But how can it be the same when Micah, Hunter, my step-grandmother, and so many of the peo ple who populated my childhood are dying or dead? How can I call Hawai‘i my home when I have not swum its waters or hiked its hills in over two years, when it, and I, have changed so much in my absence?

Linda Williamson.

28 FALL 2022

and Sound received a seventy-thousand-dol lar grant to restore the footage of Barth’s life, and I can’t help but think about how else the money could’ve been used: to tell the stories of locals from the area like Alvis, or better yet, to change the stories of those who live now, people I see every day evict ed from their homes below bridges and in parks. I will never accept how some people’s stories are told and others erased, why, in the library of history, those like Walther Barth are remembered, while others like Alvis and Hunter, or even Sam and me, are slated to be forgotten. Every day I write, I write to change this, though I know that, alone at least, I cannot.

A lvis’s pick rises. Hunter’s paddle falls. How far must I be from my grief to write it? Sam and I stand at the edge of the main dock. Before us, children splash in the quarry, disrupting the sheen of oil that sits atop the water—runoff from the road and hundreds of sunscreened bodies. When Alvis died, there was no way he could have known that the marble he mined would one day be under water. That the mine where he spent his days would one day be where the people of Knoxville swim. Jump on three? I ask. Sam clutches their stomach. It looks cold, they say. I’ll go first then, I say, and be fore they can agree, I dive in. The top layer is lukewarm, but below that it is freezing. When I open my eyes all I see are a few spinning leaves and silt all the way to the bottom, wherever that is. This is what grief is to me: jumping in a lake without knowing if it is warm or cold, how far it is to the bottom, or if anyone will follow you in. I surface and turn to Sam, who stands ten feet from me on the rocking dock, waiting for my verdict. It’s warmer than I thought it would be, I tellSamthem.jumps in, and when they surface, they are wide-eyed. It’s colder than I expected, theyMaybesay. this is what grief is like, too: never knowing how it will hit you, only certain that, like the loss that bears it, the grief will remain ever-close, and constant. Sam and I swim until we can’t feel our toes, until our fin gertips have pruned beyond recognition.

Two days later, Wyatt texts me pictures. Hunter’s send off, he says. It was really good Love you. I scroll through the pictures until I get to an aerial shot. Hun dreds of colorful boats and boards gather in a circle, the people who ride them so small I cannot tell them apart. To the left, a jet ski speeds, its wake marring the aqua of the Pacific. I can almost hear the whine of its engine buzz, can almost taste the salt of its spray. When I zoom in, the ocean is so clear that I can see the reef below. I have never lived farther from the Pacific than I do now. Sometimes, the distance suffocates me, and it is on these days that I need most to swim. Though the fresh water of the quarry is calmer than the ocean I grew up in, it is enough, even on cold days when all I can do is dip a finger, to soften the rock of longing that hardens in my chest. Because of this, I am grateful for the quarry, grateful for friends like Sam who suffer my driving for the fifteen minutes it takes to cross the river to South Knox. On the weeks I shut myself in my apartment, Sam is the one who texts me, how is your heart? The one who gets me back into the world, whether that’s to the quarry or to the grocery store or simply to class. I would not have survived the first year of my PhD studies without our long walks and conversations, without our swims and late-night noodles. Things happen in cycles, Sam says, as we talk about Hunter and Micah. Last semester, our fiction professor told us things happen in threes. I wonder who I will lose next, or if I have already lost them. I wonder who Nora and Susie lost, or if—as it seems to be in a world infected by capi talism and mass shootings and an unend ing pandemic—their losses, like ours, were constant. Did they have any time to grieve Alvis or other family members, or were they thrust into the immediate struggle of keeping themselves housed and fed? Were they forced to survive instead of feel? To push their grief aside so they might live? I n the film class I take with Sam, we watch a selection of home movies made by Walther Barth, a German doctor and skilled ama teur cameraman. Shot in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the movies are from his time in Europe, pre-World War II, and after, when he moved to America. But we do not watch Barth for this, nor for the shots he got in Berlin during the rise of fascism, but because his home movies include the oldest known footage of southeastern Tennessee. In his hours and hours of film, there are a few shots of Barth flying above the Tennessee River and driving through the Smoky Mountains. The Tennessee Archive of Moving Image

garden only to throw them into the ocean, the blossoms swirling with ashes, washing up on the sand where they are taken home by tourists. And though there is no possible way that those I love stay in the places they are scattered, there is a comfort in the act of paddling out to visit them, a sense of reso nance in the fact that their final resting place is the reef that circles the island, protecting O‘ahu from tsunamis and storms.

I have never lived farther from the Pacific than I do now. Sometimes, the distance suffocates me, and it is on these days that I need most to swim.

30 FALL 2022

Hunter’s family schedules his paddle-out for the end of May, a day I cannot make. His ashes are not spread at the surf spots in which he grew up—Tongg’s or Old Man’s, where my own family swims—but he is instead laid to rest in the water outside of Ukumehame Beach Park on Maui, a place he grew to love as a husband and father. On the day of Hunter’s paddle-out, I google his name from a sunny deck in Tennessee and find a picture of him and Wyatt—twelve years old and at a six-man regatta, paddles in hand. Glare illuminates the specks of dust on my dirty laptop screen and I wonder, looking at the pic ture, if sixteen-year-old Hunter would have lived his life any dif ferently if he knew how he would die. I wonder, if fifty-one-year-old Hunter could choose a single day from his life, which one he would choose to live again.

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One blogger described the band’s sound as “countrygaze,” a made-up microgenre com bining country and shoegaze that gestures to the way many Wednesday songs incorporate hallmarks of Southern music: muck-smeared riffs, regional poetry, lap steel flourishes. But while the Truckers tend to tell place-based tales through a screwy blend of electric folk and classic rock, Wednesday sets childhood stories and rural-suburban imagery against the bleary hooks and mesmeric waves of noise endemic to grunge and shoegaze bands of the late twentieth century.

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Wednesday in Athens

W ednesday began in 2017 as Karly Hartz man’s personal songwriting project, and she’s now the band’s frontwoman and prima ry lyricist. After soundcheck, I find the twen ty-five-year-old outside the venue wearing an army-green tank top and Western-cut blue jeans, her wavy brown hair stuffed under a rhinestone-studded denim cap with the word sexy embroidered on it. The rest of her band—bassist Margo Schulz, lap steel player Xandy Chelmis, guitarist Jake Lenderman, and drummer Alan Miller—are nowhere to be seen. A couple of seconds after I introduce myself, Hartzman is approached by a wiry older man with chin-length straight hair and a face mask. Hartzman seems to recognize him, sounding sincere when she says, with a brisk and somewhat dreamy diction that I’ll soon recognize as her default manner of speaking, “It’s great to meet you.”

K arly Hartzman grew up in a middle-class section of Greensboro, the third-biggest city in North Carolina. As a kid she ditched school a lot, yearning for the freedom afford ed by family trips to an RV park in Mocksville, a nearby town best known as Daniel Boone’s teenage residence. Hartzman was allowed to explore the sprawling community un supervised; fleeting snippets of boom-box country music soundtracked her wanderings. Although she wrote frequently, she didn’t buy her first guitar until after she moved one hundred and seventy miles to Asheville for college, where she studied photography.

Hartzman’s voice is an arresting instru ment. It’s sweet and folksy one second, as jagged as a broken Miller Lite bottle the next. She has the ability to skip notes with out forcing it, a yodel-adjacent skill that she has begun crediting to both her Southern upbringing and her Jewish roots; because of its unique scale, a lot of Jewish vocal music showcases a similar note-leaping technique.

BY PATRICK D. M c DERMOTT

You can hear Hartzman testing that elas ticity on the first Wednesday album, 2018’s yep definitely, a collection of topsy-turvy twee-pop that she made with help from pal Daniel Gorham in an on-campus recording studio. When she started playing those songs live around Asheville, Hartzman figured out

hen I suggest meeting the Ashe ville-based North Carolina rock band known as Wednes day in Athens, Georgia, where they would be performing the first show of a two-month cross-country tour, I am aware that the city has a rich musical history. That in addition to R.E.M. and the B-52s and Pylon, both Drive-By Truckers and the late, darkly comic singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt have roots downtown, in the poorly lit nightclubs adjacent to the University of Georgia’s stately North Campus. That any one claiming Athens as a crucial epicenter of the “alternative rock” boom would have a pretty solid case. But it isn’t until I make the nearly six-hour drive from my adopted home in Wilmington, North Carolina, that I learn, from a backlit marquee hanging over West Washington Street, that the Truckers will be performing a half-block away from the Wednesday show—at 40 Watt Club, the fabled rock venue that’s been operating in one Athens location or another since the late ’70s. Because the club’s doors won’t open for a few hours, early birds keep trickling into Flicker Theatre & Bar, a narrow down town Athens joint with walls the color of a pumpkin.InsideFlicker, people keep greeting each other with long hugs, saying things like great to see you or it’s about time you turned up. Looking on from a small table next to a serve-yourself popcorn machine, I piece together that this clique of cheery, mostly middle-aged patrons are Drive-By Truckers fans, long-acquainted diehards reuniting at last for the accomplished alt-country group’s first hometown gig in two years. Nobody but me seems to be paying much mind to the half-muted melodic ruckus coming from Flicker’s intimate performance space where, through a curtained-off doorway at the front of the bar, the five members of Wednesday are currently finishing their soundcheck. They’ll play their own headlining show later tonight, in that very room. Like Drive-By Truckers—a group that’s been grappling with the joy and shame and absurdity of Southern American life since the mid-1990s—Wednesday’s music simulta neously honors and complicates traditional conventions of country and Southern rock.

“Anything music-related is all self-taught,” she says, explaining that she learned chord shapes by watching YouTube videos of Mitski, Jessica Lea Mayfield, and “other people who have small hands like me.” Certain songs by Mayfield, who grew up touring in a bluegrass family band, were especially revelatory. “I hadn’t heard guitar like I wanted to play paired with a vocal anywhere near mine,” Hartzman remembers. “That was huge.”

While we’re hunting for an out-of-the-way place to talk, Hartzman explains that the man was Drive-By Truckers bassist Bobby Matt Patton. “There are some towns where you could trick yourself out of thinking you’re in the South,” Hartzman says, spotting some haphazardly arranged outdoor furniture on the sprawling lawn of an empty-seeming mansion. Stray beer caps dot the grass like aluminum dandelions. “But not this one,” she continues. Her phone buzzes. It’s Jake Lenderman, calling from someplace close by. “I’m doing that interview,” Hartzman says into the phone, before getting around to more pressing news: “Also—I just met Bobby Matt.”

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  33Burning Toile, 2021. Gouache on paper by Margaret Curtis. Courtesy the artist and Tracey Morgan Gallery, Asheville

Miller and guitarist Jake Lenderman are the most easy-going on the road, Hartzman decides, which basically means they’re will ing to hop in the back row of the van when no one else wants to. Hartzman and lap steel player Xandy Chelmis trade driving shifts; Lenderman is temporarily barred after run ning into a pole at a gas station. (“A total fluke,” he says.) Bassist Margo Schulz me ticulously curates each show’s set list while Chelmis, who often sports a ’70s-coke-dealer mustache, handles food and beverages. “His standards are so specific,” Hartzman explains. “I’m like, ‘Xandy, do you want to look up a place?’ And he’ll be like, ‘OK, there’s a catfish shack in threeHartzmanmiles.’”is the de facto tour man ager, a role she clarifies is “one thou sand percent” against type. “I have to do a lot of bullying to get people up and out, which I hate,” she says.

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With gritty dissonance and impres sionistic lyrics about North Carolina nights and finding love at a gas sta tion, I Was Trying found Wednesday creeping closer to the aesthetic that Hartzman always dreamt of losing herself in, a sonic world where hu mor, melody, harsh noise, and heart ache can all coexist, sometimes in a single song. “Pass the billboard on the street / And wonder if hell will swallow me up,” she sings on thrashy opener “Fate Is…,” referencing fireand-brimstone propaganda while her penetrating vocal crescendos to a ragged Hartzmanwail.emailed the album mas ters to musician Owen Ashworth, who decided to release I Was Try ing on his small indie label, Orindal Records, in early 2020. Their next album, Twin Plagues, released by Orindal in the summer of 2021, feels less like curious kids fucking around and more like musicians tapping into something deep and communal. “They put everything into those songs,” Ashworth tells me later over email. “There’s so much love and joy in the music they make together, and that comes through.” The album was recorded in a legit Asheville studio that was offering discounted pandemic-era rates, and Hartzman wrote most of the tracks alone, then invited her bandmates to help make them bigger and weirder, to let their in-stu dio freak flags fly. “I was like, We’re actually doing what I always wanted to do,” Hartz man remembers. Twin Plagues, which won Wednesday a lot of new fans in the Carolinas and beyond, feels literary in both content and delivery. The im agistic fragments that populate “Handsome Man,” an up-tempo standout with a bong-rip riff and droning feedback, are sung with the kind of hard line breaks that poets use to build tension and complicate meaning. The titular refrain of weary ballad “How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do” repurposes a line of dialogue from an early-morning, whiskey-fueled heart-toheart in James Baldwin’s 1962 novel, Another Country. “Cody’s Only” unfolds like flash fiction, with Hartzman’s pastoral lilt building in intensity alongside crunchy guitars and weepy steel tones. When the song ends, the narrator isn’t quite the same. And neither is the person who just listened to it.

W hen a few other band members meet Hartzman and me outside, we all talk for a while about Wednesday’s upcoming tour, which isn’t their first but is by far their lon gest. Drummer Alan Miller, who’s baby-faced with round glasses, tells me he didn’t sleep well last night because he was so excited.

“You don’t bully,” Miller says. “Yeah, you’re good,” Lenderman adds.With the exception of Schulz, who’s from Maryland, all of Wednes day was raised in North Carolina, and they tend to embrace their Southern roots without irony. This past March, the band put together a collection of covers that, in addition to songs by Athens’s own Vic Chesnutt and Drive-By Truckers, includes Wednes day-fied versions of Gary Stewart’s “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” and Roger Miller’s “Lock, Stock, and Teardrop.” It doesn’t feel like an overstatement to call their take on Stewart’s honky-tonk staple transcendent. Over reverb-soaked guitars that squeak and swerve like an old kiddie coaster, Hartzman’s voice sounds equal parts resilient and heartbroken, a performance that reminds me of something outlaw music pioneer Waylon Jennings told journalist Peter Guralnick in a 1974 interview, explaining how certain songs are country to their core, even if the arrangements suggest otherwise: “It’s the singer, not the instrumen tation,” he said.

It’s not just Hartzman’s distinctive voice that links Wednesday to traditional country music; it’s also in the way that her writing is inextricably tied to real-world scenes and characters: an argument overheard through a wall, a teenage drug experience gone awry, a radio melody half-remembered from a day dream. In his book Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals in American Music, Guralnick Photo of Wednesday by Charlie Boss

that she was more interested in a different sound, something with more texture and emotional intensity. “I was like, I want to get louder and grosser,” she says, reminding me of the teeth-chattering arrangements I heard Wednesday practicing on the other side of the barroom wall. For Wednesday’s first full-band album, I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, Hartzman linked up with the same crew who piled into a silver Sprinter van early this morning to drive from Asheville to Athens: Schulz and Chelmis, both regulars in Ashe ville’s DIY house show scene, plus Miller, a fellow UNC Asheville alum. (Daniel Gorham played guitar on the record, though Jake Lenderman contributed backing vocals and would later be come the band’s full-time guitarist.)

In a 1984 New York Times arti cle, journalist Robert Palmer explained how terms like “cowpunk” and “prairie modern” were being used to describe a wave of young bands in America and the UK who were “personalizing country music and making it palatable for the MTV generation.” You can hear traces of those “cowpunk” groups— Rank and File, the Gun Club, X side project the Knitters—in the hook-stuffed noise that Wednesday performs today. But the thing about microgenres—like “cowpunk,” or more recent examples like “chillwave,” “vapor wave,” and now “countrygaze”—is that even when they enter the zeitgeist, they’re almost always transient. To me, the music Wednes day makes feels dynamic and untethered to a trend, which is part of what makes listening to it so exciting. They seem less interested in making throwback sounds accessible to contemporary listeners than with creating space for weirder and louder music in the sometimes change-resistant worlds of mod ern country and Southern rock. In the recent past, Alabama-born song writer Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee has told twangy short stories over swirling guitars. Another young Appalachia-based artist named Indigo De Souza has written more than one song that stretches indie-pop in disorienting, grungy directions. Even the groggy solo tracks Jake Lenderman releases as MJ Lenderman, with titles like “I Ate Too Much At The Fair” and “You Have Bought Yourself A Boat,” put an atmospheric spin on plainspoken country. Still, it’s hard to predict if there’s much longevity to “coun trygaze,” a label that’s not pervasive outside of nerdy music circles and might never be, or if Wednesday’s sound is reflective of any larger trends in the contemporary South ern music space. But I won’t be surprised if I start hearing bands that sound a little bit like Wednesday. In an era when a lot of popular music feels engineered for ubiqui ty, tweaked and tailored to fit on as many playlists as possible, it’s refreshing to hear new rock songs with a strong sense of place. Songs that resonate thanks to—not in spite of—their specificity. Songs that are sad and funny and cathartic and true. “I’ve never felt good about any genre peo ple try to put us in,” Hartzman says when I ask the members of Wednesday what they think of the “countrygaze” tag. Miller takes a moment to consider the question. “I think we have some songs where that’s accurate, and other songs where it doesn’t relate to [our sound],” he responds politely. Lend erman—who is lanky with sideburns and a stoned-sounding baritone—seems to feel similarly: “It’s not like we set out to be coun trygaze,” he says, before suggesting it’s cool that people care enough to attempt to classify their sound in the first place. “It’s a good sign,” he decides.

Hartzman’s instinct is to write from life, to capture Southern culture and its diverse influences through a subjective and expe riential lens. This habit, plus Wednesday’s candidness about the words and sounds that have influenced their aesthetic, helps cir cumvent conversations about authenticity.

And that’s exactly what they do. After selling some records and loading up the van, Hartzman and the rest of Wednesday— subsisting on fumes and adrenaline—race next door to catch the end of the Drive-By Truckers concert, where Bobby Matt Patton is joined on the 40 Watt stage by the rest of his“Peoplebandmates.keep telling me that it feels like something big is coming up [for us], but I only really feel that because other people are saying it,” Hartzman said. “If I desire something in return for being able to do my favorite thing in the world, it’s just to like, survive—and also for my parents to be proud of me.”

describes American roots music, which has origins in religious and secular folk songs from Africa and Europe, as “music ‘from the heart’…music that is deeply engraved in [the performer’s] background and experience.”

After spending time with Wednesday, in person and on record, I’ve become increas ingly confident that both of those goals are within reach. In just a few weeks, over the phone from a tour stop in Nebraska, Hartz man will tell me that the band signed a new record deal. She will explain that the Truck ers hand-picked Wednesday to open for them on an upcoming tour, and I’ll be able to hear the thinly veiled excitement in her voice. But that comes later. Right now, Wednesday are just five friends for whom listening to music is as life-and-death as making it. Right now, they’re at the Drive-By Truckers show, having the time of their lives.

I t’s a couple hours later and the band is on the Flicker stage, sounding really good. The room is lit with dull red bulbs, a vaguely occultish vibe heightened by the antique lamps and life-size animal figurines lined up on a shelf above the band’s heads. “The air smells good in Athens,” Hartzman says to the audience, which is mostly casually dressed twentysomethings, although one person is wearing a red cocktail dress and another has on a coral-colored trench coat. “And we’re from the mountains, so we know good air.” Some people mosh during the climax of “Fate Is…,” and some people sing along to “Cody’s Only,” the latter of which surprises Hartzman, who grins wide and flubs a few lyrics. At some point, I real ize that a handful of the people I assumed had tickets to the Truckers show are here, watching Wednesday. They play some new songs, too. Their next album is already recorded; Hartzman told me it features a lot of outlaw-inspired lyrics and at least one song that wouldn’t be out of place on pop-country radio. “Our identity is really strong right now,” she explained. “It’s not just me bringing the band an idea and them piecing it together; it’s like, one big piece that’s always been there.” Halfway through a hard-hitting unreleased track that opens with lyrics about walking on water and raising the dead, Hartzman sing-screams something I can’t make out but am nonethe less deeply moved by. Schulz, head-banging behind her bass in an Orange County Chop pers sweatshirt, flashes a barely-there smirk.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  35

“As long as you aren’t being someone you’re not, it’s pretty easy to avoid appropriating,” Hartzman says. Across multiple conversa tions and repeat listenings to Wednesday’s discography, I never once get the sense that she’s interested in being anything but herself.

Whereas a lot of indie and punk artists have historically rejected or even condemned the very notion of “home,” Hartzman listens closely to her parents’ stories and—like a lot of great American songwriters before her—finds inspiration in the complicated culture she inherited. “You learn a lot when they start telling you things they didn’t feel comfortable telling you when you were a kid,” she There’ssays.something messy and beautiful about the struggle to name something, about fumbling around for language to define the indefinable.

Near the end of the set, Hartzman warns the audience: “One of my favorite bands is playing next door and we’re gonna run over after, no offense.”

On the quiet-loud-quiet Twin Plagues highlight “Cliff,” named after Hartzman’s maternal grandfather, she sings: “You soon seem to be wearin’ thin / And my Dad picked a Dallas Cowboys urn to put your ashes in.”

36 FALL 2022 Illustration by Miranda Bruce

Even as the Bend’s population has dwin dled from 332 at its height in 1880 to fifty in 1970 to just nine in 2020, its land mass is actually growing. Morgan loves that his county is the exception to the one constant of the PVA world: a county’s land mass. Up river erosion, deposited via river dynamics, has resulted in the Bend alone adding seven hundred acres to Fulton County’s total area since Morgan took office in 2006. Fulton I needed an introduction while it was still running, while there were still grains in the hourglass: stories, voices, and spirit.

he stark scenery felt at odds with my excitement, a moment of great personal anticipation set against a vast and unoccupied canvas in the belly of the country. There is no state line sign on the way in, but Kentucky begins where the dual meridian stripes of Tennessee State Road 22 melt away, the brown pavement darkens to black, and the name becomes Ken tucky Bend Road on the GPS. Behind me: a tennessee state line sign—green, riddled with bullet holes, pronounced against the empty fields and clear February sky behind it. I had made it to Kentucky Bend, the forgotten outpost of my home state, a place I had only learned of two months prior. Three dogs, two friendly pit mixes and a Chihuahua mix, trotted up to greet my truck like a state-appointed welcoming party. I first learned of Kentucky Bend while visiting my father for Christ mas. Flipping through a state road atlas in his Lexington condo, he pointed to the small piece at the bottom left of the page. In 2004, the state adopted the slogan “Un bridled Spirit” for promotional use on, among other things, government stationery and license plates. But those were just words. Here it was in essence: a piece of the Common wealth that had jumped the fence and was running loose on the other side of the state line. In February, as soon as my schedule allowed it, I packed my suitcase, my dog, and my bicycle into my pickup and headed seven hours west from my home in Asheville, North Carolina, to the Bend for a reunion beyond the pasture, a backdoor homecoming. The Bend is geographically removed from the rest of the state. Its oxbow shape is a result of three successive New Madrid earth quakes in late 1811 and early 1812. The earth quakes remain the most powerful to ever hit the United States east of the Rockies—strong enough to change the course of the Missis sippi River. The Bend is plainly visible on the statewide maps that actually include it. If you were to pick up Fulton County, the state’s westernmost county, between your fingers and flip the state over, as if turning back a page in a book, Kentucky Bend would look like the period punctuating the state of Kentucky. It’s Kentucky’s Hawaii. Or rather, it is Guam: an association in name more so than spirit. I read everything I could find about the place: from Mark Twain’s account in Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, to a 1972 New York Times article, to one Associated Press writer’s account from 2002. All of the stories seemed to look backward, into the history and lore of this geographic oddity.

P ete Morgan is the Fulton County proper ty value administrator, or PVA, a locally elected official tasked with the assessment and appraisal of all property that lies with in the county. Morgan usually makes the four-and-a-half-hour drive from Hickman to Frankfort, the state’s capital city, once a month for business in the Kentucky As sociation of Counties (KACo) building. The building has long rows of windows stemming out from a pillared entryway. Just inside the main door, in the front atrium, a giant map of the state is etched into the floor.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  37

“I always want to take a marker and draw it on there,” he said. I met Morgan at Discovery Park of America, a museum roughly for ty-five minutes east of the Bend in Union City, Tennessee. He wanted me to see the earthquake simulator, which replicates the New Madrid quakes responsible for the Bend’s formation. The Bend has become an obsession of sorts for Morgan.

The Spirit of the Bend

BY JARRETT VAN METER

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Last year, he was named the state’s PVA of the Year. Introducing him at the award dinner, Jonathan Bruer, the PVA of nearby Carlisle County, said, “If you spend more than five minutes with Pete, he will mention Kentucky Bend.” Once you are looking for it, you will check every map, Morgan told me. The KACo floor map is missing its period, but so too are many maps and state renderings.

Morgan stops here on every visit, admir ing the network of one hundred and twenty counties that make up the state’s forty thou sand square miles. His eyes always pan to the left, down and out to the tip, to the county that looks like the silhouette of a sneaker: Fulton County. The rendering bothers him. While the map is largely accurate, his county is missing something.

Then I checked census data. The 2020 census put the population of the Bend at just nine, half the number from 2010. I decided to go while there were still people, while it still held Kentucky culture, whatever that might look like. I needed an introduction while it was still running, while there were still grains in the hourglass: stories, voices, and spirit.

Roy Wilson, Winston’s brother-in-law and neighbor, lives another quarter mile up the road with his brother, Marvin, and mother, Miss Daisy. Roy mows the cemetery’s grass, but mainly stays busy catching, cleaning, and dressing catfish from the mighty and feral Mississippi, which wraps around the Bend like a bonnet. Just beyond the Wilsons’ is the road’s first fork. If you continue straight, the road turns to red-dirt gravel and meanders past ponds, bean fields, and the site of what residents still claim was the biggest cottonwood tree in the world, big enough for five men to wrap their arms around, fingertip to fingertip, before a bolt of lightning snapped it to a stump.

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It was also the name of the church split by the Watson-Darnell feud famously recounted by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi. The decades succeeding Twain’s visit were boom years on the Bend. People like Donald Lynn’s grandfather and Daisy Wilson arrived to pick the abundant cotton. A new church was founded, then a school in the same build ing. Steamboats were the backbone of a thriv ing economy, hauling agricultural products and other cargo, as well as mail, up and down the river. A cotton gin opened, and a lumber and wood products company was established in the northern portion of the Bend. Ferry boats and other services associated with the busy river traffic sprung up. Corn and wheat were the dominant crops on the Bend after the earthquakes, but cot ton began to gain a foothold soon after the publication of Life on the Mississippi. By the turn of the century, nearly all the land was devoted to cotton, much under share cropping and tenant farming arrangements. Neighbors picked cotton together, the cool water that bonneted the land a mere figment somewhere beyond the heat of the fields. The workers ate together: fish and game, preserves, and vegetables, garden-fresh and pickled. Relationships were formed, a sense of community fortified. By the 1970s the growth of offshore cotton production began to drive domestic prices down. U.S. farmers, including those on the Bend, shifted their focus back to corn and soybeans. This return to grain production was accompanied by increased mechaniza tion, leaving many of the farmhands without work. People began to leave the Bend. Today, Winston Whitson leases all of his property to other farmers who grow soybeans, corn, andPecanwheat.trees also grow here, and after shutting off the car, Winston walks me behind the house to show me his. His back porch is collapsed; his son ran into it with a tractor while mowing. It is February and the tree is bare, but the ground is speckled with pecans. He stoops over and grabs one, cracking the husk in a fluid, one-handed motion.

County soil. Kentucky soil. “Once it starts growing reeds and willows and maintains that, even though it’s a sandy soil, it is taxable,” he explained. Mark Twain said, “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Except on the Bend. When we reached the parking lot outside, I crouched down to examine the outline of Kentucky depicted on one of the state license plates. No dot. No Bend. T he nine current residents of the Bend belong to three families: the Whitsons, the Wilsons, and the Lynns. While mathe matically this doesn’t bode well for natural accretion of population, it makes finding everyone easy. The Whitsons live just over the Kentucky state line. It is their dogs that greet incoming cars. Winston Whitson is the patriarch, having lived on the Bend for all of his eighty years. The first house on the left belongs to him and his wife, Patricia. Their daughter, Leanne, lives across the road, in a small brick home previously occupied by Win ston’s mother. The wood siding on the garage is a scar from tornado damage, and rusted out homestead equipment adorns both yards like garden statues. From there the road runs tautstraight, cutting through acres of beautiful, vast, and rich farmland. On the right, just up the road from the Whitsons’ houses, a stone foundation that once held the house of Winston’s grandmother now sits like an empty stage. A bit farther, still less than half a mile into Kentucky, is the Whitson Cemetery. There are plenty of Whitson headstones— but also long-gone family names like Cross, Adams, and Speer—all contained by a short, chain-link fence.

The pavement bears to the left, the road becoming Stepp Cr-426, named for the fam ily that was once the largest landowner on the Bend. What was formerly Stepp land is now occupied by Donald Lynn and his wife andFromdaughter.thedriver’s seat of his black Cadillac, parked just inside the state line, Winston Whitson points to the pecan tree in his daugh ter Leanne’s front yard. The plot was once the location of the Bend’s only general store, owned and operated by Winston’s daddy, Joe. The building served as the Bend’s voting precinct, gossip center, and grocery. When Joe Whitson set up the first television in the shop, people gathered to watch wrestling matches.Winston points out a sign that commem orates Compromise, the origin point of the 1858 state survey line that became the official boundary between Kentucky and Tennessee.

“Real thin, the shell on these,” he says, popping the meat into his mouth and scanning the flat horizon. “Most of ’em is real Thenhard.”it’stime for me to leave so that Winston can head into Tennessee to get a prescription filled for his wife. Bend residents do most of their day-to-day shopping in Tennessee. They only travel to Hickman, the Fulton County seat, to register their cars, pay their taxes, and vote. Travel to the Kentucky mainland used to be com monplace. Adrienne Stepp taught school in Fulton City, and she and Barbara Lynn, Donald’s mother, would take trips to the bank every Thursday, making an afternoon of it by stopping for lunch at MeMaw’s Cafe, which, like many other shuttered Hickman businesses, fell victim to population decline in Fulton Politicians,County.likeformer Fulton County clerk Betty Abernathy, used to routinely campaign on the Bend, but the number of possible votes is no longer worth the time and gas. Abernathy’s successor skipped the trip. Even Pete Morgan didn’t come during his first campaign. Now, according to Abernathy, many people in Fulton County aren’t even aware that the Bend exists at all. The road taut-straight,runs cutting through acres of beautiful, vast, and rich farmland.

The State of Kentucky now foots the bill for the education of Bend residents in Tennessee schools. This arrangement saves unruly bus trips for state employees and long, ragged days for commuting students. An old red pickup now occupies the space next to the road where the schoolhouse once stood. Like at the Whitson compound, a pit bull mix greets me in the Wilson driveway. The yard is a gallery of equipment, sheds, and clutter. Roy’s fourteen-foot, camo-colored fishing boat and trailer, parked behind the house, is carpeted with sticks, debris, and weathered flotation devices. He occasionally fishes from shore but prefers to take his boat. He brings food with him, usually a sandwich or canned meat, and plenty of water. He wears knee boots.

“If I lived somewhere else, I’d have a dif ferent lifestyle a bit, I’m sure,” he says, a can of Dr Pepper bulging from the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. “It’s just where we are, what family you’re raised up in and where you are. I told Mom, if we were raised up in Louisiana, I’d be up hunting alligators sometime in the past.”

Two of her adult sons, Marvin and Roy, live with her in the modest, single-story home.

T he next day I stopped at the state line again, this time on my bicycle. The wind was powerful and it was at my back. I imag ined the border like a starting line, count ed down from three, and accelerated into began to blur around me. I was barely pedaling, but each ped al revolution seemed to add another mile per hour. Past the cemetery. Past the Wilsons’ place. I took my hands off the handlebars and extended them out beside me like wings. There were no cars; there would be no cars. The road was straight. No boundaries, no fences. Instead of hooking left on the pavement I stayed straight on my runway, grabbing the handlebars as the pavement gave way to gravel. Even with gentle chop, the wind pow ered me north. The sky was vast, spreading far beyond the river’s boundary. A Kentucky terrarium.Iskidded to a stop at my turnaround point four miles later. My ears were ringing from the wind, my eyes blurry with tears. My heart was thumping and my cheeks sore from grinning. I checked my Strava app: I had been rolling at a speed of twenty-five miles per hour on perfectly flat ground. It was the ride of my life and nobody had seen it. Then it was time to head south, against the wind.

Kentucky.Thefields

D aisy Wilson and her husband moved to the Bend in 1942 to pick soybeans and cotton. They leased roughly seventy acres and, like the Lynns, expected to inherit a piece of the land they had worked and called home for many years. But it was not to be.

Roy, who is seventy, prefers to fish the Mississippi. It yields fresher, tastier fish, he says, and offers him peace and solitude. He taught himself to cast at nine. Watching him cast a ten-foot pole is like seeing a trebuchet hurl a bowling ball. It’s a clean, vertical arc that fires the five-ounce weight a hundred yards into the distance. Roy has lived his entire life on the Bend, save for a few weeks he spent in Tennessee. A neck injury, decades back, has limited the universe of jobs available to him, so he doubled down on what he loves most: fishing. Although he takes care of his mother and works odd jobs for the Bend’s absentee landowners, he spends most of his time on the water. He received positive re inforcement at an early age for helping to feed his large family, supplementing the garden work of his parents to produce a tableful of fresh food every night.“Itput a few meals on the table, and I guess it saved us a few dollars off and on, here and there, rather than going to the store, but mainly we raised a lot of garden,” he said. “We had a big family; there was ten or twelve of us here at one time.” An autodidact, he learned how to read the water. He can gauge its speed from shore. He knows how weather in July will affect spawning in March. He plans ahead: If he is fishing on one of the Bend’s small lakes, he will take a chain saw with him, cut off dead limbs, and stick them out in the deep water to attract sum mertime fish.

“A lot of the residents of Hickman and Fulton and Cayce, the older ones are aware of the Bend and a lot of them have been down there, but the younger children, I doubt if they even have any idea if the Bend is even part of us,” Abernathy told me over lunch in Union City, Tennessee. “So really, the knowl edge is not widespread that the Bend is even part of us, which is sad. It’s a beautiful area.”

February is peak season, the cooler wa ter temperatures giving the meat a cleaner taste. In the morning Roy packs a sack with a sandwich, cinnamon rolls, and water. He

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  39 Map from The American Historical Magazine Vol. 6, No. 1 (January 1901), published by the Tennessee Historical Society

Mr. Wilson passed away, and so did one of their children. Two sons went to work on riverboats and a few kids trickled into

Reelfoot Lake, a few miles across the state line from the Bend, draws fishers from throughout the southeast. Its shallow but vast water is home to catfish, crappie, and large-mouth bass. Lake fishing has long been a way of life here.

Tennessee. Her daughter Patricia married Winston Whitson and moved down the road. But Miss Daisy, now ninety, has never con sidered leaving. Despite coming up empty in inheritance, in the late seventies she bought a house and three acres of her own just up the road from the farm where she once worked.

The church that doubled as a school was on the Wilsons’ land. Winston Whitson went to school there, as did Roy Wilson and his siblings before the building burned down.

waits until noon to launch, as the sun is be ginning to heat the water enough for the fish to become active.

It was a meal of substance, if not refinement. Free of pretense but full of flavor.

40 FALL 2022

Bend resident, lives with his wife, Kristi, and daughter, Adri anna, at the end of Stepp Road amidst a con stellation of modern barns, sheds, and houses once occupied by Stepp employees. Alfred Stepp was seen by many as an influencer of the Bend, organizing residents as a voting bloc and using his connections to give the Bend a county-wide voice. The Stepps raised cattle, and Alfred shooed away any aimless visitors and sightseers who disrupted his herd of twenty-five hundred. Donald Lynn’s grandfather first came to the Bend to work for Alfred. Donald’s parents also worked for him and, after Alfred passed, for the widowed Adrienne Stepp. When Adrienne died in 2002, the Lynns were rewarded for their years of loyalty to the tune of 2,267 acres, making them the largest landowners on the Bend. The large bell in the Lynns’ front yard was used by a resident cook to summon Stepp employees in from the fields for meals. The former Stepp residence sits farther back on the property, empty, modest, and sagging with age. The Lynns don’t get many visitors. Most folks pull off at the state line or turn around at the cemetery. Security cameras are posi tioned throughout the property, and from the couch in their living room I watch the family’s two yellow labs sniff my truck on the security monitor. On the walls above us are the mounted heads of a half-dozen trophy bucks. In the corner of the room are enough guns to adequately arm all three of them: Donald, Kristi, and Adrianna. After coaching me on how to prepare the fish, Donald leads me outside to his four-wheeler and we speed off into the heart of his property to his own fishing spot. Yelling over the motor and whipping wind, he tells me about the 2011 flood, which submerged the Stepp house up to the top of the chim ney but came just short of the Lynns’ house, which is built on a gentle rise. During the flood, Kristi and Adrianna stayed in Ten nessee with family, but Donald stayed home, taking his boat to and from high ground.

I placed one of my catfish Ziplocs in a large metal dog bowl to thaw during the eighthour drive home. Back in Asheville, I stopped at the supermarket for buttermilk and canola oil for frying, and I credit beginner’s luck for the beautiful, flaky orange catfish that I enjoyed for dinner that evening. I fanned the Lynns’ pickled okra a third of the way around a white plate and I mirrored it on the other side with Roy’s catfish. I filled in the remainder of the wheel with Winston’s pe cans and plugged the middle with a hubcap of tomato jelly. It was a meal of substance, if not refinement. Free of pretense but full of flavor. Unbridled. I took a picture, then cleaned my plate.

Using two anchors, one off the bow and one off the stern, he settles down in the current and casts. As the fish come in, he keeps his haul in a livewell or a stringer off the side of the boat. On a good day he will haul in about fifty catfish, a better day closer to a hundred. Sometimes he fishes buffalo using his bow. He cleans the catch in the backyard and then gives away most of the fish or seals them in Ziploc bags with water to freeze. He leads me into the kitchen to a waist-high reach-in freezer that sits beneath portraits of the Wilson family and of Ronald Reagan. By itself on a shelf next to the pictures is a Ronald Reagan action doll. The Wilson house is small. It’s heated by a stove positioned just inside the front door. In the living room, Miss Daisy watches television. Roy pulls out three tightly packed Ziplocs of frozen blue catfish. He loads them into a foam cooler, covers them in ice, and hands them to me. He gives fish to friends, to siblings, and to the Lynns and Whitsons. Shar ing his work, his craft, is an act of joy, nearly as much so as the catch itself.

“Everything changes, you know that,” he says. “This ain’t really changed a whole lot, just fewer people. That’s the way that’s changed, and with the flooding problem and all that, you don’t really have to worry about nobody really building back.”

We pull up to the bank of the sixty-six-acre Watson Lake, where he and his siblings grew up fishing and where he taught Adrianna. He points into the distance and tells me about the incarcerated people who escaped from the Lake County Correctional Complex in the 1980s and tried to cross the Mississippi on driftwood. They all drowned. Then we whiz into a back field, his dogs running along beside us in the gray February afternoon. He slows to a halt but leaves the engine running. He points out an eagle’s nest to our right, and the smokestack of the alumi num plant in New Madrid, Missouri, across the river to the north. Sometimes, on Friday nights in autumn when the wind is just right, he is able to hear the pep band playing at the high school football games there. Donald attended school in Tennessee. He remembers his older brother David, not even a teenager, driving them from their house to the bus pickup at the state line, stopping to pick up all the other Bend children along the way. Donald played high school football at Lake County High, just south of the state line in Tiptonville. In 2019, when Adrianna was a student there, Lake County won a Tennessee state title. She was the only Kentucky kid in school. When we return to the house, Kristi Lynn loads me up with more food. Two jars of pickled okra and a jar of tomato jelly, both homemade, and more pecans to go with Winston’s. A freezer full of meat—plus canned veg gies, fruit jellies and jams—these have saved Donald’s family many car trips, he says. He ate these foods growing up and ate them when floods stranded him. They are foods of preservation. I ask him if he envisions a time when the isolation wins, when nobody lives out here anymore.“Ikind of do,” he says after a brief pause. “We’ll probably be the last.”

“It is rewarding,” he tells me. “You don’t think about it until you get later on, years past, but you say, ‘You know, they ate a few meals off my labor.’ That’s kind of rewarding.” A fter leaving the Wilsons’ I head deeper into the Bend to visit the youngest, and northernmost, Bend fami ly: the Lynns. Seeing my cooler full of fish, Donald Lynn says Roy’s catfish is the tastiest he’s ever eaten.

“You can take that fish, drop it in the deep fryer, the oil, and you can use that oil the next day to fry chicken,” he says, examining my cooler after I pull into his driveway. “It don’t taste fishy. A lot of catfish tastes mud dy, especially on the Mississippi where he’s catchingDonald,’em.”athird-generation

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BY LESLIE PARISEAU R esa “Cinnamon Black” Bazile is seemingly everywhere, and yet difficult to track down. After some digging, I found Bazile on a Tuesday afternoon in February at the desk of the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum, chatting with tourists who had wandered in off Dumaine Street in the French Quarter. She wore a matching cerulean blue skirt and head wrap, and a ruffled African print top. Faux eyelashes, beaded hoops, and a stack of necklaces and onyx rings completed the look. When Bazile learned that it was one vis itor’s birthday, she insisted on performing a candle-lighting ceremony to bring good luck, asking the woman’s partner to film while we all sang “Happy Birthday” several times over until she blew out the candle. Bazile works two days a week at the museum. She had started there back in 1980 after winning a Marie Laveau lookalike contest, and so, when I couldn’t find her anywhere else, I’d call the front desk and talk to her there. (Bazile has a cell phone. It just proved to not be the most effective tool for getting in touch.)

The power of an Indian’s suit lies in her reveal in the battle for “pretty.” That day, Bazile was a voodoo priestess, but she lives a number of different lives that take her all over the city. She’s also a baby doll and a Black masking Indian queen, and she appears in films and productions, often as a priestess. These branching paths, she said, have taken over her house: “One room is voodoo, one room is baby dolls, one room is Indians.” Of course, these titles have little context or meaning beyond New Orleans, and Bazile’s place in the universe is inextricably bound to a world that doesn’t always abide by time or technology. Which is a long way of telling you that I often had a hard time hunting her down. The next time I found her was on Florida Avenue along the canal in the Lower Ninth Ward, a week and change before Mardi Gras. Parked outside of an abandoned community center, I called her wondering if I had the wrong address. She begrudgingly reoriented me, and couldn’t promise that she had much time to talk. She was at Victor Harris’s house, the big chief of the Spirit of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors, where the tribe was sewing against the clock. She greeted me out front alongside spy boy—the person who keeps watch for the big chief—Albert Polite, who stood sentry at the door. He informed me that I was not to talk to Chief Victor Harris. Bazile led me down a set of stairs while Polite called out, “Fire in the hole!” to indicate our entrance. At a work table sat Jack Robertson, the Warriors’ designer. He was mulling over a swatch of African print and a row of feath

42 FALL 2022

Sting Like a Bee

Photo of Ms. Cinnamon Black by Pableaux Johnson

As people came in and out of the ram shackle lobby, she answered the phone, ribbed guests, and helped them pick out voodoo dolls and other trinkets. She showed off the neck patch she was sewing for her Indian suit: rows of cowrie shells and faux pearls were nestled amid gold rickrack. Though she preps for Mardi Gras throughout the year, it picks up in the weeks following Twelfth Night, and she said her hands have been busy sewing in a race to finish. “You can take a photo,” she said, holding up the intricate piece, “but you can’t show anyone.”

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  43

ers, which would become a headpiece for one of the tribe’s young warriors. The suits are spiritual, and Harris’s designs come to him in visions. For many Indians, they take the entire year to make, the construction undertaken in secret so that no other tribe will know what’s in store. Bazile settled onto a stool, dreads swinging around her shoul ders, looped through with gold rings. It was the rare moment when she appeared not in costume, unguarded, not performing. That day, Bazile was an Indian. If you don’t live here, it’s possible you’ve never heard of Black Indians or Mardi Gras Indi ans—terms that vary depending on which tribe or member you ask—but they are one of America’s most majestic and dramatic examples of extremely local, longstanding folk tradition. On Mardi Gras day, dozens of tribes emerge on the streets of their respec tive neighborhoods, dressed in suits made of intricate beadwork and layers of feathers. They’re often described as three-dimension al, sculptural in their grandiosity of scale. Some suits can weigh over 150 pounds and tower four feet above their wearer’s head. (In one photo I unearthed in the Historic New Orleans Collection from 1984, a wildman’s bonnet contained an enclosure housing a live parakeet.) But the Indians also come out on St. Joseph’s night, which was histor ically an evening of violent battles between the tribes; since Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas called for peace in the 1960s, the battles have become more symbolic, with chiefs parading to see who is the prettiest. The Indians also come out on Super Sunday in the most epic of New Orleans’s Second Line parades. Bazile explained that the suits they’d been work ing on all year would be worn on all three occasions. Her suit, a mass of white feathers and black and gold fringe, was made up of dozens of patches (patches are the individual pieces that compose a suit) and had taken her months to sew.

“You don’t pick the tribe. The tribe picks you,” said Bazile, who has been in the Spirit of Fi Yi Yi for over twenty years. “You have to be invited into it. You have to be a part of a family, a part of the bloodline. You can’t just put on the suit or you’re fake. Like a fake Gu cci.” Some members are born into the tribe, like Bazile’s grandchildren, while others are invited based on kinship and understanding.

While Bazile spoke, Big Chief Victor Harris appeared in the sewing den, wearing a red skull cap. He arranged some of his patches on the table, and when Bazile disappeared upstairs for a moment, began talking about his suit, his calling to the tribe, what it feels like when the Spirit takes over, and the mean ing of a queen to the Warriors. “A big queen should be beside the chief at all times,” Harris said. “Not behind, beside.”

The next time I tracked Bazile down was on Mardi Gras morning, at Kermit’s Tremé Moth er-in-Law Lounge, a New Orleans institution founded by Ernie K-Doe back in 1994. The music club was taken over by local legend trumpet player Kermit Ruffins in 2014, and presides as a mainstay of community and gathering in the Tremé. Donning a white, ruffled dress, smocked with silver sequins, and matching bonnet, Bazile stood outside, posing for photos with her group, the Tremé Million Dollar Baby Dolls, awaiting a local news crew’s lenses. She twirled a lacy white parasol, and a Black doll dangled from her shoulder. This morning, she was a baby doll, the most elusive of the city’s maskers.

“It used to be that the baby dolls only came out once, maybe twice a year. It used to be so special,” Bazile said some weeks later over coffee. “But now it’s once a month or so.”

Though still a lesser-known tradition, the baby dolls are ever more visible around the city, with groups emerging at Second Lines and neighborhood festivals. The New York Times recently featured a short documen tary by filmmaker Vashni Korin on the dolls called You Can’t Stop Spirit. “Like with any folk culture, these things are not recorded and put in archives,” said Kim Vaz-Deville, professor at Xavier University and author of The “Baby Dolls”: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition Of course, the origins of dolls are man ifold, with one story tracing the tradition back to a group of friends and family in the Tremé neighborhood in the early twentieth century who were influenced by the fashions of vaudeville and began dressing in satin dresses and bloomers to evoke the look of a child’s baby doll. Another story pins the origins to Storyville’s red light district sex workers who satirized the idea of dressing like a little girl, wearing garter belts and throwing money at male onlookers as they paraded through the streets. (Apart from New Orleans, in Trinidad, there is record of women dressing as dolls and/or carrying dolls and shaming men into giving them money.) Regardless of origin, dressing as a baby doll and dancing through the streets, above all, provided agency to Black women who were historically disallowed from partic ipating formally in Mardi Gras; up until the 1960s, official parading, for the most part, was the territory of wealthy, white Uptown men whose exclusive krewes dominated the mainstream depiction of the holiday. Dress ing as a baby doll provided visibility on a holiday where women, let alone Black wom en, were relegated to the literal sidelines. Bazile recalls the first time she saw a baby doll. She was six or seven with her grand mother in the Calliope Projects and saw the

When Bazile reappeared, she brought pre pared plates of fried fish, stuffed crab, and egg rolls for Robertson and Harris. “What does a queen do? What I’m doing right now,” she said laughing. “It’s like a support system; you make sure the tribe has what they need. You look after the children, work with the children so they know what to do.” Her own grandchildren are part of the tribe, the boys looking up to the big chief, playing Indian as soon as they can run.

The tradition of African Americans mask ing in the iconography of Native American people has been around since the mid-nine teenth century, derived from a gumbo of or igins, including Wild West shows that passed through the city in the 1880s, the mutual aid that Blacks and native people provided one another before and after the Civil War, and the ancient ritual of masking in West and Central African cultures. The tribes are organized in a male-dominated hierarchy that flows downward from a big chief—spy boy, flag boy, wildman—with the queen often seen as a kind of atmospheric accessory to the chief. It’s a role that’s evolving in some tribes with more codified responsibilities, and in Bazile’s case was forged by the queen that came before her, Kim “Cutie” Boutte. When Boutte, at age fifty-five, died in 2020, killed by a stray bullet in a retaliative shoot ing, Bazile, who had been second queen, became the big queen. It’s clear the tribe is still devastated by this loss, and several times throughout our conversations, Bazile expressed missing dancing next to Boutte in the streets. “That’s my big queen,” she would say, in present tense, as if Boutte had simply transubstantiated. “She was remarkable. She took care of all the children. She was small but she sting like a bee,” said Bazile. Boutte became a little queen when she was five, as cending to big queen and eventually became recognized all over the city as one of her era’s culture bearers.

At last the dolls reached the temporary home of the Backstreet Cultural Museum, a hub started by the late Sylvester Francis, dedicated to preserving Indian culture. The Mandingo Warriors waited there for Bazile, who would quickly change suits and join them as queen. But the transition didn’t go as planned. In an unexpected turn, the Warriors left without her and she had to catch up a couple of blocks away, where they were facing off with Black Feather, a tribe from the Tremé. When I sat down with Bazile some weeks later, she told me it was a test. “The men want us to believe we don’t have power, but we do,” she said.

The power, as she explained, is in caretaking, guiding the children into their understanding of the culture, and supporting the chief in his work, a role that seems, in some ways, counter to the autonomy portrayed in the culture of the dolls.

The final time I see Bazile is on Esplanade on a brilliant April day the week of Jazz Fest. She’s just come from a performance and is dressed in black and brown tribal print, ceremonial white paint dashed and dotted around her eyebrows and down the bridge of her nose. Again, she’s a voodoo priestess, neck swathed in cowrie shells and beads, fingers jangling with silver rings. She or ders a decadent praline-flavored iced coffee topped with a mountain of whipped cream. She commands the attention of everyone she walks past. One woman stops her, says she recognizes her as the host of a live TV show from back in the 1980s in which Kermit Ruffins was her house band. She tells me about how she got her stage name, Cinnamon Black, from the late Charles Gandolfo, who founded the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum. She was a twin, she tells me, but her sister died at birth. She talks about the idea of the Marassa Jumeaux, the divine twins of voodoo, and how her name “Resa” echoes the term. We talk about the nature of transition, the fact that it’s inevita ble. “Everything must change. Nothing stays the same,” she said, a chorus she’s sung in conversations before. I ask if she’s considered what she said about leaving the dolls. “Baby dolls are always going to be a part of my spirit and my soul, but now that I’ve accepted this big responsibility it’s going to require more of my time and a hundred percent of my attention.” But she also talks about her first days in the dolls, dancing through the streets past porches where older women who remembered the dolls from decades before would stand up and wave at them, bewitched by their return.

dolls coming down the street toward Rose Tavern. They were buckjumping (the rapid, rhythmic dance step associated with New Orleans Second Lines) and pulling feather boas between their legs. Her grandmother grabbed her and tried to cover her eyes, but the image was etched into Bazile’s conscious ness; she wanted to be a doll. Around the age of twelve, she and her friends started their own doll group under the guise of Cabbage Patch Dolls, so her grandmother couldn’t read her real intentions. Years later, as a young mother, she was hanging around with some of the Tremé’s older women—including Lois Andrews (Trombone Shorty’s mother), Merline Kimble, and Antoinette K-Doe—lis tening to their stories, when the topic of baby dolls came up. Maybe it was time to bring them back. The tradition had died out, which Vaz-Deville explained was, in part, a product of the civil rights movement, when the importance of dignity—in profession, appearance, and public behavior—became paramount in pushing integration. “Folk cultures weren’t seen as respectable,” said Vaz-Deville.WhenBazile heard the Tremé women talking about the dolls, she perked up. They called upon Mariam Batiste Reed in the Sixth Ward to hear about her mother Alma, who had masked as a baby doll, and eventually the Gold Digger Baby Dolls and the Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls were born. Bazile joined the former, but would run a renegade—join other groups—when she could. After Hurri cane Katrina, she started her own group, the Tremé Million Dollar Baby Dolls, an homage to the Million Dollar Baby Dolls, one of the earliest known groups from the 1910s. Bazile’s aim in helping revive the dolls, of which there are about seventy-five today by Vaz-Deville’s estimation, is intertwined with the idea of women as a representative of a culture and a community. She acknowledges the role’s historic association with sex work, but disavows it as a contemporary thread. Today, the role is one of embodiment and power, rebutting the negative stigma of legend. “When you are a baby doll, you’re doing a reenactment. They are women who have their own cars, women who have their own jobs. Women who are mothers, who are caretakers of the elderly, women who people seek out to ask questions,” she said.

44 FALL 2022

“You don’t show your breasts, you don’t wear high heels because you don’t miss that with a baby.” Their style of dance may change depending on the audience; Mardi Gras day is a lively two-step on account of being a family event, while other parades and appearances might allow for more provocation.

“My dream has come true. My dream is to see baby dolls all over. There are so many baby dolls I can’t even count them anymore,” she said. “When I leave, I’d like to leave them with a story. Everything in life has instruc tions. Some of us come with them inside of us and some of us don’t. Birds came with instructions how to fly. Trees came with in structions how to grow leaves.”

As the sun wanes on the avenue, I pull up a few photos that my friend the photographer Pableaux Johnson has taken of her over the years. The final one shows Bazile walking the route on Super Sunday, her Indian suit glittering. She is magnificent, carrying the weight of her creation through the streets. When she sees it, she is full of delight, “Oh! Who is she? I would like to know her. Can I meet her?” Bazile, in this moment, is not a priestess or an Indian or a baby doll, but a child again, stunned at the wonder that such a creature could exist.

When I ask Bazile what it’s like transition ing from a tradition that is entirely about women forging a path of visibility and pow er to one that is dictated by male energy, often performed as a show of strength, she doesn’t hesitate to explain its symbolism: “It’s another lesson to be learned: how to be in a male-dominated society when you’re a powerful woman,” she said, leaving it at that. Bazile has considered that it might be time to transition away from the dolls to keep up with her duties as a queen. But in seeing the thrall she holds over people, in her white ruffles and bejeweled boots, it’s difficult to imagine that she could ever fully let this life go.

On Mardi Gras morning, she led the dolls out under the Claiborne Underpass with a brass band following behind, echoing off of concrete and cars. A small crowd followed, and as they moved through the Tremé, people stopped to watch. At one intersec tion, the Cheyenne Hunters tribe, dressed in peachy pink feathers, began to trail be hind, entranced by the jovial women in satin, swinging parasols and shuffling along.

Whereas some modern-day dolls will appear in short shorts and bustiers, the dolls that Bazile claims are dressed in ruffled skirts and bonnets, carrying parasols, baby bottles, and pacifiers. They do the dance of the jazz.

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For true fans of Southern culture, Mississippi is a place unlike any other. Many of the South's literary, musical, and artistic traditions are rooted here, offering travelers a unique opportunity to deepen their understanding and appreciation of Southern creativity and its cultural impact.

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The Delta

The Mississippi Delta is home to three museums dedicated to its musical heritage: GRAMMY Museum® Mississippi (Cleveland), the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center (Indianola), and the Delta Blues Museum (Clarksdale). Beyond the blues, the Delta is emerging as a destination for food travelers. The city of Greenwood, in particular, has elevated Southern culinary tradition to new heights. Local favorites include Fan & Johnny’s, which offers creative takes on Deep South and international cuisine, and the Crystal Grill, known for serving up cream pies topped with “mile-high” mountains of meringue.

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The Delta, in the northwest part of Mississippi, is the “Birthplace of the Blues” and has also been called “The Most Southern Place on Earth.” Here, according to legend, Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the Crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 to become a masterful blues performer. While the Crossroads story has no real basis in fact, there’s no disputing the wealth of musical talent that the region produced, from pioneers like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and B.B. King to present-day luminaries such as recent GRAMMY® winners Bobby Rush, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, and Cedric Burnside.

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The Hills

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Tupelo, a city just one hour to the east of Oxford, is the birthplace of Elvis Presley. Before he became the world’s most popular entertainer, Elvis lived in a humble tworoom shotgun shack, now a small museum located within the city’s 15-acre Elvis Presley Birthplace Museum. Tupelo boasts three statues, several murals, and numerous sites dedicated to the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

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The Hills Region of northeast Mississippi encompass the lush, rugged woodlands, clear lakes, and bubbling streams of the Appalachian foothills. Oxford is home to the University of Mississippi and one of its most influ ential students (and likely its most successful drop-out), William Faulkner. Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, is open for tours, and visitors can view his office and the vintage Underwood typewriter he used to compose many of his works. Visitors to the University can also see a civil rights monument and statue commemorating the courage and determination of James Meredith, a hero of the civil rights movement and the first African-American student to integrate Ole Miss in 1962.

WILLIAM FAULKNER'S OFFICE, ROWAN OAK, OXFORD JAMES MEREDITH AND CIVIL RIGHTS MONUMENT, OXFORD

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The Pines Region of east-central Mississippi is distinguished by its vast expanses of lush forested lands and two Mississippi State University campuses, in Starkville and Meridian. The region was once the home of two cultural giants, Tennessee Williams, one of the 20th century’s greatest playwrights, and Jimmie Rodgers, the “Father of Country Music.”

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In Columbus, you can tour the Victorian-style home where Williams once lived and get travel information, as well, since the home also serves as the official Columbus Welcome Center.

More than a museum. Visit a juke joint and build your own blues band, throw a pot on a virtual potter’s wheel, cook up a digital feast, and watch the words of Mississippi writers jump right off the page. This is no ordinary experience. This is Mississippi to The MAX! Downtown Meridian | msarts.org

THE TENNESSEE WILLIAMS HOME & WELCOMECOLUMBUSCENTER,

In Meridian, the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Experience (The MAX) showcases the lives and works of Mississippi’s greatest writers, artists, and performers – including Jimmie Rodgers – through a variety of interactive expe riences and exhibits. Be sure to check out The MAX’s calendar for concerts and other special events before you visit. atareallis“Mississippiastateforthosewhowanderersheart.” THE MERIDIANMERIDIANMAX,THEMAX, SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

Vicksburg, located 45 minutes to the west of Jackson, is a must-see for American history buffs. Visitors come from around the world for an opportunity to take an im mersive walk through one of the Civil War’s most pivotal military campaigns, the siege and battle to claim the city.

Jackson is Mississipp’s capital city, and it’s where you’ll find several of the state’s premier cultural attractions, including the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Museum of Mississippi History, and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. The “City of Soul” and its surrounding metro area boast a vibrant restaurant scene, offering everything from elegant “tasting menu” experiences (at Elvie’s and Southern Soigne) to the iconic pig ear sandwiches of the Big Apple Inn. The Big Apple Inn is located on Farish Street, which was once a bustling center of African-American commerce. Their building was a frequent meeting spot for civil rights activists and leaders during the civil rights era.

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“Find something new everyaroundcorner.” NATCHEZHISTORICLONGWOODMILITARYVICKSBURGMONUMENT,NATIONALPARKHOME,

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Auto enthusiasts, this one is for you! Save the date for the 14th annual Renaissance Euro Fest Classic European Auto and Motorcycle Show being held September 30-October 2, 2022. Browse through classic vehicles from all over the world among the Old-world style atmosphere of Renaissance at Colony Park. For more information, visit www.visitridgeland.com/events/

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Just north of Jackson is Ridgeland, a city located on the historic Natchez Trace Parkway and Ross Barnett Reservoir. Ridgeland is where you’ll find the Bill Waller Craft Center and one-of-a-kind works created by members of the Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi. A wide range of artisan-crafted goods is available for purchase in their spacious retail gallery.

Vicksburg National Military Park features more than 1400 monuments and memorials scattered across the park’s scenic roads and trails. Another Mississippi River town, Natchez, has preserved hundreds of historic homes and mansions dating back to the pre-Civil War era. Several of the homes serve as bed-and-breakfast inns while others offer guided home and garden tours.

COME ALONG FOR THE RIDE IN RIDGELAND

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Somewhere down south is a stretch of coastline with fish that need catching, fresh Gulf shrimp that need eating, and poker tables that need one more player. We could tell you where, but that would spoil the fun. Start exploring at SecretCoast.com

FIND YOUR SCENE in Mississippi 7/20/22 1:34 PM

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Learn more at VisitMississippi.org/SouthernCulture

MARY MAHONEY'S OLD FRENCH HOUSE, BILOXI MUSEUM OFBILOXIART,

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While Coastal Mississippi is perhaps most famous as a casino destination, the cities lining Mississippi’s 26 miles of beaches have an important cultural heritage, as well. Ocean Springs is home to the Walter Anderson Museum of Art which celebrates the art and legacy of the naturalist, visual artist, and printmaker. Nearby, in Biloxi, the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art showcases the works and history of the “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” George Ohr. The region is also home to the University of Southern Mississippi’s diverse campuses - 300 acres in Hattiesburg and 52-acres beachfront in Long Beach.

Mississippi’s coast is also the perfect place to sample fresh Gulf seafood. One of Mississippi’s most famous restaurants, Mary Mahoney’s Old French House, has served guests, including U.S. presidents, dignitaries, and celebrities, for three generations. The restaurant is appropriately named as it is indeed located in an old French house that was built in 1737 when Mississippi’s coast was claimed as a French territory.

“Aaron mist,” from All That You Leave, by Luis Lazo. Courtesy the artist60

ATANIMALSWHERETHESLEEPNIGHT DEBUT FICTION A STORY BY MEGHAN REED 61

L eif announced at dinner that he was not going to eat meat anymore by screaming the moment I put a piece of chicken to my lips.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. Kids, you know. He went into detail about his monastery in the mountains of Tibet, about his best friend, Akar, and the process of making tsampa and yak butter tea. When he told me this, we were eating breakfast. He shared a man tra with me over his oatmeal, Sanskrit floating off his tongue as he pushed away his tiny, tiger-shaped plastic bowl. I asked him: “Excuse me, where does your bowl belong?” I wasn’t about to let him know I was terrified of him. His father had already gone to work so I had no backup; I knew the odds were stacked against me. What’s worse is for the past few months my son has been having sleeping problems. We’ve tried everything: sound machine, sleep sack, bedtime routine, sleep study, prayers of supplication to every god we could think of. This slip in reality could be related to his sleep deprivation. His mind was now going wild at the age of five—and so my mind was going wild at the age of thirty-seven. They don’t tell you about these things when you’re pregnant. They don’t tell you that your child can be a terror and you can’t send them back and ask for another one. I have never really connected with my son the way a mother and child should. We have a strict business relationship—I make sure he stays alive, and he slowly wears me down year after year by reveal ing all my faults and innermost fears. It’s his father who’s the better mother—he’s the one who should have been pregnant with him. Oh, he would have melted every time Leif jabbed his side with his powerful baby fists and woke him up at all hours of the night. In all honesty, I just didn’t know what to do with Leif—he was so foreign to me. I didn’t understand him, even though he was my own flesh. I wasn’t the one who particularly wanted children, that was Owen. He wanted three—we compromised on one, as it was me who was putting in the heavy lifting. I hemorrhaged during Leif’s birth and nearly died. The first time I saw my son he had already been in the world for two days. Two days of bonding with everyone else except me. Two days of touching other hands, seeing other faces. I sometimes wonder if I’d had that first contact with him, would we have the bond that we should? Like those women who pull their own babies from their bodies, and in all their wetness and dripping fluid, hold them to their bare chests crying and laughing, forgetting all the pain and labor, letting the umbilical cord transfer all the needed nutrients, latching their babies to their breasts and feeding them what nature intended—colostrum. Colostrum, which I had to pump out and dump down the drain. I felt like a fake, the shocking scar across my belly to prove it. I no longer wore bikinis or exercised in only sports bras. Motherhood had taken that from me—had taken my body.

My five-year-old told me he was a Buddhist monk in his past life.

It was odd to hear him embody a deer and describe feeling a gunshot. I was sure we never told him anything about hunting and killing animals. I assumed he’d picked it up from some D-bag kid at school whose father goes out every weekend to destroy nature and bathe in the blood of his victims.

“Vegetarianism, Owen? Why encourage that?”

“No way, he’d know.” He’s such a good dad, damn him. So, Owen dug a hole while Leif picked flowers from the garden and arranged them around the dissected chicken carcass. Once they were covered over, Leif began muttering in Sanskrit while spreading flower pet als on the grave. He took his hands to prayer position at his heart, brought them to the middle of his forehead, and bowed. “Namaste,” he said. Owen and I looked at each other. “We can go inside now.” He turned and ran inside, putting on the TV, dirty knees and running nose, and monk voice. Owen and I stayed outside.

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“Leif, we don’t talk about killing.”

I knew kids could have big imaginations, but up until this point, he’d been a pretty dull kid. No imaginary friends, no pretending he was a unicorn or anything.

“We don’t eat animals. We are animals,” he yelled and started crying over his cut-up chicken. “Buddy, you’ve always eaten meat,” I said. “I didn’t know what meat was. Marshall told me it’s dead animals.”

“Why not? I think it’s cool that he’s socially conscious at such a young age.”

“You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to,” Owen said, taking the pieces of chicken from Leif’s plate. I gave him a look, which he understood, and he gave me a look back. Parenting is just a bunch of looks sometimes. I didn’t think we should be the parents that let our kid run all over us—he didn’t think we should run all over our kid. “We have to give him a proper burial,” Leif said. “Of course, bud. We can do that.” God love him, Owen gathered the chicken from our plates and picked up the carcass. “What should we “Backyard.”do?”We proceeded to the yard, Owen carrying the sacrifice. I wasn’t about to waste a whole rotisserie chicken on the raccoons. I sped up to Owen. “I’ll distract him and you go hide it in the refrigerator,” I whispered.

“I felt a hurt here,” he pointed to his chest, “in front of my two babies. I tried to run away from it, but the pain made me fall down and then everything went black and now I’m Leif.”

I always hated that little punk.

Iwas tying Leif’s shoelaces for school in the morning after another night of trying to soothe him back to sleep—it was my turn last night—when he told me of his other past life as a deer.

“But we can agree that he needs to see someone at least, right? I mean, a Buddhist monk, a deer?” He looked at his feet, pushing a stick with his shoe.

I got a call from the school saying Leif had pooped on the playground. I asked them if it looked “deerish.” “Define ‘deerish,’” they said. I quickly looked up photos of deer poop on my phone. “You know, like pellets,” I said. “I’ll ask Diane; she saw it.” A pause. “Diane says, yes, it was deerish poop.” I told them he had digestion issues, which they didn’t seem to care about. They told me to come down right away and get him. Apparently, they drew the line at feces. “And actually, we need to talk about some other incidents that have been happening.”

“I liked to ring the gong and see the mountains. The gong made me feel like my body was full of bees. Being a deer was more fun because I got to do anything I wanted. I miss it.” He resumed eating his ice cream and kicking his legs back and forth. I became curious. “Do you wish you were still a deer?” “Yeah, guess so.” He shrugged, then scratched his nose. After this, he only really talked about being a deer; he spoke of dewy mornings in the hills and forests, of fog and sunlight and the darkest nights; he spoke of fear, but also the contentment of simply existing on earth, of leaping over tall fences meant to keep him out. I started researching reincarnation, specifically stories about chil dren who talked about their past lives. I was surprised to find that there were a growing number of accounts. Some people believed them, some didn’t—same story as with everything. I was shocked, however, by the accuracy of some of these accounts. Children de scribing the intricate details of their life as a Samurai without having previous knowledge of such things. Many of these accounts were posted on personal blogs. Some entire blogs were even dedicated to their children’s stories of their past lives. On Naomi the Elephant Girl, a blog by someone named Adriana L., I asked what she did when her girl started telling her about her past life. She answered immediately: “We started asking a lot of questions, and above all, we didn’t treat it like a joke. Now I can 100% say that my wife and I believe her.” Reincarnation was not something I had spent much time thinking about before Leif’s stories. For whatever reason, I latched on to it. A year after Leif was born, I was diagnosed with postpartum depression. My work at my consulting firm took such a hit that I had to step down from my executive role to focus on my recovery. I suppose I always blamed Leif for that—it wouldn’t have happened to a man—in fact, it didn’t happen to Owen; he didn’t have to give up his work in real estate. No, it happened to me. I was angry as I watched my male coworkers with children advance beyond me. At home with Leif, I stared at him for hours and wished he would disappear. Spending money on daycare felt ridiculous, since I was technically able to care for him, but I wished my life could go back to how it was before. I fought to get back to where I was in my job, but there was something missing in me. Sometimes when I looked at Leif, I got a sense that I could see in him the thing that had gone missing in me. I wanted it back so much sometimes that I had the urge to claw it out of him, but I wouldn’t know where to look. But perhaps deep down I feared that part of myself was not meant to be found in this lifetime.

“Can I have specifics, please?” In response, the principal took out a “Hefile.seems to have no regard for proper social and school rules. For instance, two weeks ago he started eating a classmate’s worksheet in class. A day after that, he was collecting and eating acorns on

“So, what did you like most about being a monk and a deer?” I looked up from my bowl of untouched vanilla. He thought for a mo ment then put his spoon down and clasped his sticky hands together.

“But what about the reincarnation monk stuff, and the deer—that’s unsettling right?” I said. Owen nudged my shoulder. The therapist gave an annoyingly cryptic therapist smile that probably meant she thought we were bad parents.

“I think it would be beneficial if you all went vegetarian with him, you know, show him that you’re supportive. He’s a serious little guy.” We were sitting in the therapist’s office after Leif’s first session.

“When I get to the office in the morning, I’ll ask Rodney who his daughter sees.”

“We have a bit of a problem, Ms. Evans.” The principal looked concerned as I sat down in front of her desk. Her office was crowded, stacks of papers and boxes. She wore a pantsuit, but she had dark circles under her eyes.

“And what’s that?”

“Children often develop vast imaginations and stories as part of a coping mechanism when things change or they feel that they need something to make them secure.” “You’re saying he doesn’t feel safe with us?” I said. Owen put his head in his hands. I didn’t get it apparently—I never do.

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“Not really, but in a way. It could be something that happened at school. The big thing that you all need to show him is your sup port—he needs to know that you are there for him and he can talk to you if he needs to.” She paused. “Show an interest in the things he has started focusing on, like the monk and the deer. You may find it a bonding experience.”

I sat in the waiting room of the principal’s office and felt that familiar pit of dread in my stomach, as if I were a child, about to be punished for mouthing off to the teacher, again. I was a little punk, I won’t lie. Up until now, I thought Leif was the opposite of me—docile.

The concentrated smell of crayons overwhelmed my senses. The students’ artwork hung along the walls, not an inch of blank space left without a shitty giraffe with three legs, or a dog that just looked like a blob with a rogue eye coming out of one ear. Kids don’t get anatomy; none of these creatures would even be able to walk if they were real. I didn’t get the appeal and decided that kids are pretty bad artists for the most part. A smiling man poked his head out from behind the desk and told me I could go in to see the principal.

So, I started asking him questions about his monk and deer selves. The therapist said we should encourage this, as it is a natural part of his development. I decided to leave work early and pick him up from school to take him for ice cream. Usually it was Owen who did these things, but I was determined to make a connection with him. His mouth was full of chocolate ice cream; it ran down his chin and dripped onto his polo shirt, but I didn’t say anything about it. I just let him eat. The shop was local, organic, and had vegan options in case he wanted them. It was nice out, the rain had finally stopped, so we sat outside at the black iron table and watched the people walking and riding by with dogs and babies.

“Leif has been involved in multiple incidents, and we didn’t think it was serious until today when he used the playground as, well, a toilet.”

It was midnight when we were awakened by the downstairs door sensor beeping. Owen and I went downstairs to find the back door

“Stag,” from Under My Skin, by Luis Lazo. Courtesy the artist

Owen called and said he was driving home. I told him Leif had pooped on the playground and was currently eating acorns.

“Rachel.” He paused. “We’ve always known you weren’t the happy peppy type.”

N

“Are the other kids mean to you?” “Sometimes they call me weird. My teacher thinks I’m weird too.”

the playground, where he got other children to do the same. One classmate actually got sick.” She flipped the page, sighing. “Last week he was telling the teacher he didn’t have to listen to her; then just about every day, I’m told he scratches himself very disruptively and says he has fleas. The teachers tell me he even uses the table and other students as scratching posts, and now this.” I wasn’t angry, just intrigued. When he got into the car, he looked out the window the whole way home and I wondered what he was thinking.Backat home, he wanted to go out to the backyard. Our yard is forested, the type of yard I wished I’d had as a kid growing up. It’s unfenced, and the back portion is wild and overgrown and leads into the woods. There was an autumn chill in the air, and spiderwebs were popping up on every corner between every walkway, so that we had to bat them away or stoop under to avoid them. My father told me years ago that you know fall is coming when you start seeing spiderwebs everywhere. I got a jacket and joined Leif in the backyard. He went straight for the forested section, and I saw him put something into his mouth. Getting closer I saw he was eating acorns and the leafy parts of some plants. I followed him and let him do his thing. Maybe I was a bad mother for letting him eat acorns, but it looked like he knew what he was doing, and there were some plants he avoided entirely. I just wanted to understand him.

“You don’t seem mad.” “Not mad, more curious than anything.” “Hang in there, we’ll get through to him. Love you.”

Iswear, when I woke Leif up for breakfast, there was a different essence about his face, a primitiveness that wasn’t there when I put him to bed. I couldn’t explain it. “Do you have friends at school?” I asked him while he played with blocks in the living room.

“How do you know which ones to eat and which ones not to?” “My deer mother taught me when I was a baby.” I started to wonder about what my past life would have been. “Leif, who do you think I used to be?” At this, he left his foraging with a fist full of green acorns and leaves and walked over to where I was kneeling in the grass and pine needles. He put his free hand on my face and looked into my eyes.

“I think you were someone really sad and lonely, and it was so big that it followed you here.” Jesus, maybe he had been a monk. He stood there, and I put my arms around him and hugged him to my body—needing to feel something living close to me. He rested there only a few seconds before squirming out of my grip and running off into the trees.

And then there was the part of me that Leif had cracked open, the part that believed I had always been doomed. I felt like something I had done in a past life had karmically cursed me in my subsequent lives. I was at the point where I’d believe anything.

“I wonder if antlers can do this.” As he reached over and tickled Leif’s sides, Leif screamed, put his arms around me, and squeezed tight.“Save me, Mom!” he yelled. I hugged him back, protecting his body and laying kisses on his head, soaking up the feeling of being a mother.Ismiled at Owen and wished I could relive this moment in all my future lives. I wished that in all my lives there would be love like this—that my son and I would meet as different people in different bodies at different times, and each time we’d learn to love each other better; each time we’d realize our cosmic connection sooner. I hoped that we would recognize each other and that those moments would transcend lifetimes and starve away the sadness within me.

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“Well, I like your type of weird, buddy.” I smiled and ran my hand through his fine hair. Later, I picked up a picture book about deer at the store. That night after I had given him a bath, Owen and I lay in his bed and read the book to him. It was rare that we did this, lying there as a family. It was rare that I felt good doing this; I felt more like a mother with my son lying against me and reading about the different types of deer and my husband behind us, me leaning against his weight, him encircling us with his bigness. We were a family. Leif laughed at every page. I’d never seen him so engaged with a book before.

o one told me about postpartum depression. I didn’t have anyone to reassure me that I was not broken. I still felt as though I had no one to tell me these things. There was part of me that believed I would never find my missing pieces—that they had been scattered across the globe and nothing short of a Tolkien-like journey could bring them back to me. I was rebuilding, but from what? I had tried all the medications. Nothing helped.

“Oh, Mom, look at that. One day, I’ll have points like him.” He pointed to the antlers on the buck on the next page. Owen laughed.

“Not really, I just play by myself.” He knocked down the tower he’d built and started cleaning up the rubble.

“Love you. Hey, Owen—do you think I’m a sad person?”

“Where are you going to look?”

“I’m coming too.” We called his name, tramped through the over grown brush, the thorny vines capturing our feet, leaves crunching beneath us. We could see our breath in the beams of our flashlights. It was another hour before we found him huddled under the bushes and brambles in the woods behind our house. He’d wedged himself so deep in the branches, we could barely make out the reflective dinosaur jacket I’d put on him that morning. Owen gently pulled him out from under the bushes. He was breathing—warm even—gangly body, spindly legs, and too-big ears. He was fast asleep, looking like he was sleeping better than he had in months.

I wondered if it was too late to change my karma. Was it already my fate to be miserable in my next life? The thought made me want to give up. I was so tired of being miserable. Was it bad karma to be sad about nothing in particular—to be sad about having too much and feeling like it was all nothing, useless—that I was useless? Could depression get me reborn into a toad? No, that wasn’t it—but I wanted to believe that depression made my life more sacred. To be latched to a burden—to struggle just to live—was my own good deed to the world, to take this weight and bear it myself—to fight to see the light that others didn’t notice. Perhaps this awareness of the dark was what purified me. I lived in the dark so others could thrive in the light.

“Most likely he tried to run home, or he’s nearby the school. We’ll have a couple officers looking here and I suggest we go look around your neighborhood and all possible routes to your house.”

“Out back again; he’s been obsessed lately.”

He started growing a thin, fawn-colored fuzz on his body. I dressed him in a beanie, long sleeves and long pants. He didn’t want to go to school, but I told him if he was brave, we could go camping over the weekend and he could sleep outside.

It was midnight when we went back to our house, hoping that this time, he would run around the corner into our arms. We couldn’t sleep. The police were searching the city and our neighborhood, and they had posted an officer out front overnight and put out a missing child alert. We’d called everyone we knew to help look, and they were out scouring the neighborhood. I felt like it was wrong of me to take a break, to sit down when my child was still out there. I put on my winter hat, gloves, a warm jacket.

His ears started changing. They looked bigger than before, ever so slightly curved. His nose was noticeably wider. He seemed happier than he had in a while and spent the entire day outside. When I called for him to come in for his dinner, completely vegetarian now, he came running up. “Can I sleep outside?” he said. “No. We sleep in beds.” “There are beds outside. I like outside. I feel better there. I used to sleep outside. Why can’t I now?”

wide open and Leif asleep in a heap on the ground wrapped in his blanket. Owen picked him up and carried him back into the house, but Leif woke and started crying, begging to go outside. We stayed with him and read the deer book until he finally fell asleep again. We were all on the couch; Owen and Leif slept, but I was wide awake with Leif stretched across my chest. I moved my hand in circles on his small back, the weight and heat of his body soothing me. The birds had yet to start chirping, and in the quiet of our living room, as I held my son, it occurred to me that maybe we were part of each other, and maybe my missing pieces were not missing after all. In my research on reincarnation and kar ma, I learned that the Buddhist life cycle is called Samsara. Life, Death, and Rebirth all connect to the karma you produce from each life. If you live a good life, your karma is good, bad and your karma is bad. Your karma determines what or who you will be reborn as. I thought about my life; my karma was surely bad until this point. Not murderer bad, but I definitely wasn’t Mother Teresa. Karma reminded me of the Catholic teachings I grew up with: Do good so that you will get something good in return. I just didn’t see the purity in doing good just to get into heaven. On the opposite side, maybe humans are so messed up that they need threats to be good people.

The officer cleared his throat.

“Well, now you don’t sleep outside—you have a bed inside.”

I was in a meeting with my new clients when my assistant rang in to say that the school couldn’t find Leif. Even last month I would have been mad at him for messing up my meeting, but I wasn’t mad this time—I was only worried about him. I handed the meeting over to my coworker and rushed to the school to find the police and Owen already there. Apparently after morning recess, he didn’t come back in with the other students. They thought he’d slipped through a gap in the fence.

We looked all afternoon, circling around our neighborhood, calling for him, driving all the routes we took to school. It started to get dark, and I could feel the cold in my lungs, the crisp air like a death sentence. Owen began to break down, and I wanted to as well. We were sitting on the back of the fire truck drinking coffee in Styrofoam cups.

“Don’t even think that. We’ll find him.”

“What if…” he started to say, tears in the corners of his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” said the principal. “The recess teacher on duty had to break up a biting fight, and we think that’s when he ran away. We checked the whole building.”

He glanced at Owen and me. “We really need to find him before the sun goes down and the temperature drops.”

As Owen laid out the cushions from the patio furniture in the grass and took some blankets from the couch, I made sure the police and everyone else knew that we’d found him. We settled down on the makeshift bed and put Leif between us. Owen took my hand across our son’s small body, and our gaze met over the rise and fall of his fawn-spotted coat. Leif turned and nuzzled close to me. I rested my head on his, breathing in his soft wild smell. I held my family in my arms, knowing I was not strong enough to keep them, and closed my eyes to all the noises of the animals at night.

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in DisappearaAmericanwatersnceanddiscovery Fountain of Lies, 2021. Oil on linen on panel in oak frame by Rae Klein. Courtesy Arch Enemy Arts 67

Oh! ye whose dead lay buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

It was mid-afternoon when I passed Cusseta without realizing it. I met several logging trucks loaded with timber, then saw the sprawling cutover where the logs were coming from. Past the cutover, I crossed a small bridge over a muddy creek. A couple of miles later, when I reached Interstate 85, it hit me: that must have been the creek. I’d looked at it on Google Earth. I knew the creek was small, but this one hadn’t seemed anywhere near big enough to conceal a car for forty-five years. I turned around and headed back. The prospect of seeing the spot where a kid had vanished made me feel a little sick. It reminded me of the agony of not knowing where someone you love has gone and why they won’t come back.

t was a late spring morning when I set out driving to the small un named creek in southeast Ala bama where Kyle Clinkscales had been found. I wanted to decide for myself what seemed more likely: that he’d crashed his car and died, or, as most people in the area believed, had been killed and put there. The creek was in Chambers County, about a fivehour drive from my home near Nashville. Back in December of 2021, someone had spotted the hatchback of his 1974 Pinto Roundabout sticking above the muddy water and reported it to the police. Later that day, after removing the car from the creek, police found human remains inside, along with Clinkscales’s ID. He’d been missing for forty-five years. There hadn’t been any updates since the discovery. My route to the creek was similar to the one I would’ve taken to visit my father: south on I-65, east on I-20, exit onto Highway 431 through the Talladega National Forest. My father still lives in the same place where I grew up—an unincorporated community in east Alabama called Delta. Now I’m forty-two, though, and I don’t visit as often as I once did. After leaving the National Forest, I watched the passing scenery, once so familiar, with an outsider’s gaze. A junkyard. A lonesome gas station. Kudzu. I’d just moved back to Nashville after living three years in London and wondered how these scenes would strike the friends I’d made there. Around noon I pulled off the side of the road to take a picture of the Dixie General Store, which sells Confederate flags and MAGA memorabilia and so on, and sent it to a friend who shares my loathing of such things. I was in too much of a hurry to stop at the Haunted Chickenhouse, with its display of stacked and overturned antique hearses, then came within ten minutes of my father’s house but kept heading south, then crossed the Tallapoosa River—the same river where my mother had crashed and died when I was fourteen. It was because of my mother’s death that I was so drawn to the Clinkscales case. She’d become a missing person back in 1994 and stayed missing for two years. During that time I never once stopped believing she was alive and would one day return home or be found. But then, late summer of 1996, a scuba diver who was inspecting the supports at Foster Bridge came across her car. Some of her remains were inside. The rest had washed out into the Tallapoosa.

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South of LaFayette the dirt roads and embankments become a garish red, heavy with oxidized iron. The sight of red dirt always makes me melancholy. I spent the first fifteen years of my life in the Piedmont region of the state and have always thought of it as a tran sition zone from the mountains to the coastal plains, a place people drive through without noticing much except poverty and red dirt.

“Who?” one woman said. “The kid they found in that creek,” the other said. “Ohhhhh. Yeah.”

O n the way back to the creek, I pulled into the empty gravel parking lot of a country restaurant called The Front Porch to see if anyone could confirm it was indeed the spot where Clink scales’s car had been found. As I climbed the steps to the porch, I noticed the antique plates someone had placed in the flowerbeds as decoration. Some of the plates were broken. Inside I found two mid dle-aged women prepping for the evening shift. Before asking them any questions about Clinkscales, I complimented their restaurant. I was sincere, too. I’ve always liked the kind of family restaurant you sometimes find miles from the nearest town. Then I told them that my mother had been a missing person back in the ’90s and that I was interested in writing a story about the disappearance of Kyle Clinkscales, though I made sure to add I wasn’t “from the media.”

“I don’t guess.” My father has a few short stock responses he rotates through when people talk to him. The phrases themselves mean little; it’s his tone that conveys his meaning. That day on the phone, his tone told me he was as intrigued by the case as I was.

“All-rightie then,” he said. We talked about it awhile longer and then hung up without men tioning my mother once. I rarely mentioned my mother to him. It made me uncomfortable to say “Mommy,” which is what I’d still called her when she disappeared. And to say “my mother” felt like I was telling a stranger about her. So I just told him about Kyle Clinkscales, confident he knew what I wanted to convey: that, as bad as it had been for us, it could’ve been so much worse.

“No,” the other woman said. “Well,” the first said, “it depends on what part of Auburn they was headed to.”

“Maybe.”Iwantedit to be so. I’d driven to Cusseta hoping to convince myself

years. Can you imagine?”

F ast-forward twenty-four years: I was doing my best to homeschool my two daughters through the first London lockdown and sneaking lots of quick YouTube breaks to decompress, when a video about scuba divers finding a car popped up in my suggestion list. I clicked it. The algorithms took notice. Over the next few months, I watched dozens of similar videos about scuba divers finding people who’d been missing for years, sometimes decades. Apparently, using scuba gear and high-end sonar technology to search for missing people underwater had become a hobby of sorts, and some of its devotees had their own YouTube channels. I’d never known that so many cars were scattered throughout America’s waterways—creeks, rivers, reservoirs, even retention ponds—with so many unmourned bodies inside them. I found it a little comforting to learn that what had happened to my family wasn’t as rare as I’d always thought. By the summer of 2021, when I moved back to the Nashville area, I’d grown bored watching these videos, but some of them still ap peared in my suggestions.

Forty-five years, ten months, and twelve days after he left the Moose Club, Kyle Clinkscales’s remains were found. Maybe the water level in the creek had lowered over the years. Or maybe the metal latch on the hatchback had rusted and finally gave way, allowing the hatchback to pop open and rise above the water. The people who needed to know most that Kyle had been found—his parents—were both dead. His father John had died of a heart attack in 2007. His mother Louise had died in January of 2021, less than one year before her son was finally found. After watching a couple of news stories about the case and reading every article I could find online, I dialed up my father. “It’s just a little creek,” I said. “I don’t even think it has a name.” “Oh “Forty-fivewell.”

Duringtheft.the next two years I believed all kinds of stories about my mother—stories that served to explain how the mother I thought I knew could leave me and stay hidden without even letting me know she was okay. I believed the police when they said that she would eventually get tired of hiding and come home, that she was probably staying in California with some distant relatives, that one day somebody would spot her and pick up the phone, or a police officer would pull her over and run her tag, or someone would crack and tell us where she was. Then, when she was found dead, I didn’t know what to believe. Mostly I just went numb.

O ne June afternoon in 1994, my mother told my father and me she was going to the Piggly Wiggly about six miles away in Lineville. I had just turned fourteen. When the store closed at nine o’clock that night, she still hadn’t returned. Around an hour later, my father and I went looking for her. When we returned home, we called the hospital, then the police, then every other person we could think of.

Kyle Clinkscales had last been seen on January 27, 1976, at the Moose Club in LaGrange, Georgia, where he worked part-time as a bartender when he wasn’t attending classes at Auburn University. When his shift ended at 11 P.M., he left, supposedly heading back to his apartment in Auburn, about forty miles away. His parents were expecting to see him again on Friday, but they didn’t think too much of it when he didn’t arrive. They figured he’d gotten tickets to a basketball game in Gainesville he’d mentioned wanting to watch. But by Tuesday they’d grown worried enough to notify the police.

“They both died without knowing,” I said. It was this detail that had most drawn me to the story.

A county investigator visited early the next morning to tell us that my mother had been scheduled the day before to come in for an interview about some money that had disappeared from a neighbor’s trailer. My father had no idea about this. The investigator told us he believed my mother was now hiding to avoid prosecution for this

In December, when the video about Kyle Clinkscales appeared, I only clicked it because he was from LaGrange, where my father and I had often gone fishing at West Point Lake, and because the creek where he’d been found was only an hour south of Foster Bridge, where my mother had died.

“What if someone wanted to avoid main roads?” I said. “Like somebody who’d maybe been drinking?”

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“I’m trying to find the creek where they found him,” I said. The two women discussed it for a while until one of them decided to call a man who lived nearby. “He knows all about it.” While we waited, we chatted. One woman said that after the car was found, “everybody on Facebook was talking about it. People were saying they’d seen the car before but just thought someone had dumped it there.”Iasked whether someone going from LaGrange to Auburn would drive this way.

Based on other information from this caller, police arrested Jimmy Earl Jones and charged him with several crimes, including concealing a murder. Jones pled guilty to the lesser of the charges: giving false statements. His testimony in court would turn out to be the closest thing to an answer the Clinkscales would get. According to Jones, after leaving the Moose Club, Kyle stopped by Hyde’s place to drop off some money he owed. Jones, who claims he was present at Hyde’s, said he “heard two shots, and I—when I turned around, I was in shock. And we carried him and put him in the shop.” Later Hyde told Jones that he’d put Kyle in the lake but that he’d eventually gone back and moved him to a place where he thought no one would ever find him.

I n Kyle’s Story: Friday Never Came—a long-out-of-print volume published in 1981—Kyle’s father John Clinkscales tells the story of the few years after his son went missing. It’s not so much a memoir as something akin to self-help—a guide of sorts for people whose loved ones have disappeared. It opens with a series of case studies. For a second while reading it I got nervous: What if he mentions my mother? I was relieved to remember the book had been written over a decade before she died.

Finally, about halfway through the book, Clinkscales gets around to a detailed chronology of Kyle’s story. John and his wife Louise did many of the same things my father and I had done after my mother disappeared. They handed out Missing Person flyers. Begged news papers and TV networks to talk about the case. Chased down leads, no matter how absurd. Researched religious cults. Invented stories to explain why Kyle might’ve wanted to disappear.

I

Yet the years wore John Clinkscales down. By the time he got around to writing his book, he felt there was “no more than a fifty-fifty chance” of ever seeing his son alive. And apparently this percentage continued to drop. In his obituary it is written that he was “preceded in death by his son.”

’d been standing in The Front Porch for about ten minutes, talking to the two women who worked there, when the man they’d called on the phone—who supposedly knew insider details of the Clinkscales case—finally walked in. The restaurant interior was dark and cool, and when the man opened the door I felt a rush of afternoon heat. He closed the door behind him and gave me a quick look and a nod.

Theabout.January 27, 1996, edition of the LaGrange Daily News reads, “Just re cently, Sheriff Donny Turner and his investigators received information that Kyle was killed the night he disappeared from the Moose Club and his body was dumped in a hole behind a county home. His car was reportedly pushed into a lake in the southeast part of the county.” A judge signed a warrant for investigators to search Ray Hyde’s junk yard and drain a nearby pond. They found nothing, but still arrested Hyde for possession of a firearm as a felon.

I wonder, if my mother were still missing to this day, would I have given up hope like John Clinkscales had? Would the stories I told myself have continued to evolve in her absence? Would they have turned darker, serving to suppress hope rather than bolster it? I think so. I’m glad I didn’t have the chance to find out.

J ohn and Louise Clinkscales both died convinced that Ray Hyde had murdered their son. Hyde had been a member of the Moose Club where Kyle tended bar. Maybe Kyle had seen or heard something at the Moose Club—a drug deal in the park ing lot, or some loose talk about hot cars—that Ray Hyde didn’t want him to know

that Kyle’s death was accidental. I didn’t want to believe the rumor that most people in the area, even the authorities involved with the case, seemed to hold as fact: that Ray Hyde, a local man known to meddle in stolen cars and drugs, had killed him.

During the next two years I believed all kinds of stories about my mother—stories that served to explain how the mother I thought I knew could leave me and stay hidden without even letting me know she was okay.

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Four years following Hyde’s death, a man phoned the Clinkscales residence and said he knew what had happened to their son. When he was seven, he said, he watched two men put Kyle in a lake. Kyle’s body had been stuffed into a fifty-five-gallon drum and covered with concrete. When investigators drained the lake, they found no human remains, but they did find an indention that could have once held a barrel.

Later, Hyde told a reporter that, if he needed to get rid of a body, he wouldn’t dump it in a pond less than a mile from his house. “I’d dump it off the Georgia coast, weighted down with a couple of electrical transformers where the sharks could eat it.” When he died in 2001, most of the county assumed he’d gotten away with Kyle’s murder.

At first, according to the book, John Clinkscales “thought the odds to be about nine to one” that Kyle was alive, even though his son had never struck him as the sort to just up and run off. As the weeks passed, his confidence actually grew: “I felt that if something had happened to him, the fact would soon surface. Each day that went by was an indication that nothing had happened.”

“You know, my mother disappeared back when I was fourteen,” I said (the man’s eyes widened), “and the police told me and my father she’d stolen some money from a neighbor and then ran off to avoid get ting in trouble for it. I mean, they acted like they knew it, too. But they were wrong. She was finally found in the river where she’d just crashed. She’d been dead the entire time.”

I left the restaurant and pulled off the side of Chambers County Road 83 right before the bridge. There wasn’t a house in sight. The sun was just begin ning to drift low, but not low enough to cool the day. I stepped away from the road and cringed as a pulpwood truck roared past. Did the driver wonder why I’d stopped? Did he know what had been found in this creek? The asphalt emanated tendrils of heat. The forest beside the road was thick and raucous with insects, birds, squirrels. As I crossed the bridge, I gazed down at the yellow water where the Pinto had been submerged. The creek seemed hardly wide enough to hold a car. I went to the place where, based on photos, the Pinto had been pulled out. In these photos, the front of the car is pointing south—the direc tion Kyle would’ve been driving if he’d decided, for whatever reason, to take this back road to Auburn. Then again, if the winch had been hooked to the bumper, the car would have ended up pointing this direction regardless of its position in the water. I thought back to how certain the man in the restaurant had seemed. God, I wanted him to be wrong. The creek flowed over a flat concrete spillway and fell a few inches into an almost stagnant pool. The water was far too murky to see through. All that hideous red dirt probably kept it stained. Above the bridge the creek was small, and below the pool it narrowed again, but here it widened and seemed deep. It was an unusual feature. I

He didn’t smile or make any friendly gestures. One of the women told him I was looking for “the creek where that boy was found.” “What boy?” he said. “You know—story of the month.” “Oh.” He looked me over again in a way that seemed subtly dis approving. I was wearing a Penguin shirt and tapered pants and bright-colored sneakers—probably unusual attire for a white man in Chambers County, Alabama. He was wearing jeans and low-top boots. “It’s about a mile up the road,” he said. “If you hit the railroad tracks you went too far.” I asked him which side of the road the car had been found on. “The right side,” he said. He pointed north and said, “Going thataway.”“I’mtrying to figure out,” I said, “if the kid was driving from LaGrange to Auburn, how would the car have gone into the creek?” “It didn’t go into the creek at all.” I thought about what he’d said. “Oh. You mean someone put him there.”“Yup.”“What makes you think someone killed him?” I asked the man, hoping I didn’t sound confrontational. “I don’t think,” he said. “I know it. Everybody knows.” “But—” I said. I hate it when peo ple think they know things they really don’t. I’m not sure if the South has a disproportionate number of such people. I just know that, growing up, I was surrounded by them. “How do you know?” I said, making sure to put emphasis on the how and not the you. “I was in law enforcement. I got contacts. They know what happened.” I find nothing less persuasive than the I-got-a-buddy-who-told-me argu ment. I tried to imagine it: retrieving the barrel from the pond, separating the decomposing remains from the concrete, placing the remains back in the car, hauling the car thirty miles to a creek across the state line (presumably in the middle of the night), lifting the bed of the rollback so the Pinto rolled off the bridge and landed in just the right position for it to disappear for forty-five years.

It felt damn good to see in the man’s face that I’d made him sec ond-guess himself.

O f course, I hadn’t been entirely honest when I told the man my mother had just crashed. It’s possible she drove herself into the river on purpose. For two years, my father and I thought she was avoiding prosecu tion for theft. We even came to believe she was hiding in California. The details that led us to believe this are too numerous and convoluted to list here. They were enough to convince a grand jury to indict her for felony flight, though. Yet the instant my father learned of her death, he let go of all the stories. She’d died in a car crash. Simple. Happens all the time. Take a long drive through the rural South and count the crosses. The evidence of my mother’s guilt was all “circumstantial,” as my father puts it, “and after the fact.”

Photo of Louise Clinkscales © Renee Hannis/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  71

There are no forms or files to account for how bad one person’s luck can run—how, of all the places, she crashed in a river, her car flipping upside down as it settled in the shadow of the bridge, shielding the white paint from the sun’s revealing rays. There are no forms stating whether she stole the money or not, or why she was driving across Foster Bridge at all. She’d told us she was going to the Piggly Wiggly; the police told us she was supposed to be coming to see them. Foster Bridge isn’t on the route to either place. Prompt 49 on the certificate asks for the manner of death. The answer: Undetermined Circumstances

My mother’s death certificate showed less certainty. It lists the date of her death as August 26, 1996, but following the typed date, the medical examiner wrote in the word found. A bureaucratic anom aly: the d in the word spills over into the next prompt. There wasn’t enough space on the form to say all that needed saying.

I’d stood below the bridge where my mother died, too, and talked to my father about whether she might’ve committed suicide. He says she didn’t, of course, and I don’t try to persuade him. If anything, I want him to convince me. I tell myself it shouldn’t matter how someone dies, only that they’re dead. I tell myself I’m strong enough to accept the unknowable. But these are lies.

“The small flock of ducks in the foreground,” reads the caption beneath a third photo, “is oblivious to the tragic scene unfolding behind them.” Over a decade later, in a workshop at Ohio State, I would write a short story about a murder er who uses a rollback to drop his victim’s car from a bridge. When he looks down from the bridge rail ing, he notices a cou ple of ducks floating cheerfully past. When I wrote this scene, I wasn’t consciously thinking of my mother. I’d forgotten all about the newspaper photo with the ducks. I just thought it was a

An image in the August 29, 1996, edition of the Clay Times-Journal shows the car still half-submerged, the back bumper connected to a steel cable. Two men on a boat observe the progress. The man who discovered the car is wearing his diving gear. He stands on the bow, balancing himself with one hand on a pylon. Overhead I count nine faces peering down from the railing. In another photo, titled, Almost Over the Top, the car’s front tires have gotten hung on the bottom of the bridge. The weight has lifted the wrecker onto its rear wheels. The men seem ill-suited for the task. They are improvising, at risk of fouling everything up.

Another pulpwood truck thundered over the bridge, its wind ruf fling the leaves. I’d driven five hours to look at this creek. Now what? I pulled out my phone and took a picture, thinking, It sure is an ugly damn creek. A horrible place to disappear I walked back to my car and took another picture of the bridge. Then I climbed in and turned the ignition and plugged in my phone. As I headed north, the lecture I’d been listen ing to automatically picked up where I’d left off. It was Alan Watts, the popular ’60s phi losopher, sharing the insights of Zen Bud dhism with a crowd of California hippies. The title of the talk: “Not What Should Be.” A fter visiting the bridge in Cusseta, I headed toward Delta to stay the night in my old bedroom. My father and I were planning to go fishing the following morning. On the way, I stopped at a grocery store and bought some ribeyes, charcoal, and beer. Then I ignored Google Maps and took a slightly longer route to Delta: County Road 82, which crosses Foster Bridge. There used to be a cross here, but it rotted away and my father hadn’t replaced it. The water was almost the same green as the steep hills lining the river—a much prettier spot than Kyle Clinkscales’s creek. Two and a half decades earlier, when the Alabama Marine Police and Sheriff’s Department had winched my mother’s car from the river, soda cans and shreds of upholstery poured from the shattered windshield. At one point, the men standing at the bridge’s edge looked down to watch a white tennis shoe bob atop the ripples and begin drifting slowly south.

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Fosterfewcemeteries.way.I’devenatDeltabridge.sinisternocentimage—somethingcoolintocontrastthemanontheIkeptdrivingtowardwithoutstoppingthebridge.Ididn’tknowforsurewhydecidedtocomethisSomepeoplevisitOnceeveryyearsIdriveacrossBridge. I found my father seated on his front porch. He lit a cigarette as I pulled into the red clay driveway. As soon as I climbed out, I saw some of the broken arrowheads I’d started dropping in the driveway back during college once I’d gotten tired of collecting them in boxes. I stooped down to examine a few of them. I liked noticing how, over the years, they moved from place to place. I guess it was the wind and rain that moved them. I set my bags on the edge of the porch and took a Miller Lite from the box. “Hand me one of those,” said my father. It was late enough now that we could sit outside without sweating. I drank and looked around at the yard. The woods came right up to the house. He’d recently cut a few trees that had gotten so large they would’ve destroyed the house had they fallen.

I’m A Desperate Man, 2021. Oil on linen by Rae Klein. Courtesy the artist

thought about probing it with a branch to determine its depth but decided against it.

I“Oh.”walked over to my father’s bass boat and opened the rod locker and took out a few reels that needed new line. The rod handles had mildewed, so I went to my car and grabbed some disinfectant wipes and returned to my beer on the porch to clean them.

He said he didn’t see why someone who’d killed and hidden him and gotten away with it for so long would then take the risk of digging him back up and moving him. “I think that would be stupid. If you got something hid so well, digging it up would not be a smart move.”

I knew he didn’t like talking on the phone while driving so I decided to end the call. “All along, the kid had just crashed,” I said. “All these stories people told and he’d just crashed. Forty-five years of stories.”

“Well,” I said, “I hate to say it, but I think somebody put that carHethere.”sounded disappointed when he said, “You think somebody killed him?” I was surprised he hadn’t used one of his stock responses. I told him the whole story of Ray Hyde, of the man who’d called the Clinkscaleses in 2005 claiming he knew what had happened, and of Jimmy Earl Jones, who’d spent several years in jail for lying to police. I’d already told him most of these details over the phone, but now I was all but convinced of their veracity. “I don’t know, just looking at this creek—it’s a hole—it looks deep. Deep enough to hold some big catfish.” I pulled up the picture of the creek on my phone and handed it to him. “It’s the kind of place a person might know about, especially if they like to fish. I’m just thinking, if the man wanted to hide a car, it’s almost an ideal spot. You’d never think to look there.”

“But—” said my father. “It still don’t make sense. You’re telling me, this man—he killed this kid, buried him in the bottom of a pond, then went back and dug him out and hauled his car off to this creek and dumped it. Can you imagine someone doing something like that? ’Cause I can’t.” “I can’t imagine killing someone over money in the first place,” I said. “So it’s irrelevant whether I can imagine doing all that other stuff.”

That’s why I was so elated to learn that Kyle’s Pinto had been in fourth gear when it entered the creek. The likelihood that he hadn’t been killed but had just crashed and died and disappeared made me think that my father might be right after all about my mother. Maybe she didn’t commit suicide. I’m not saying I’m totally convinced—just that I’m giving him a much greater chance of being correct than I did before finding out how wrong everybody was about Kyle Clinkscales.

“I just wanted to tell you that you were right.” “Oh well.” I’ve never been so happy to lose an argument.

As of the writing of this essay, there have been no further updates on the Kyle Clinkscales case. Maybe there never will be. Part of me thinks it shouldn’t matter how he died, but without knowing a cause of death, there’s no real sense of resolution. How a person’s story ends affects the meaning of the whole narrative.

I hadn’t expected the sheriff to tell me much I didn’t already know. I’d assumed he would say he couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation. I was wrong again. He told me they’d found bones in the car but that they were waiting on a lab in Atlanta to return the DNA test results. He doubted whether they’d ever determine a cause of death. Then, even though I hadn’t yet asked about it, he told me some people do use this route to go to Auburn, even if it’s not the most obvious course. “So,” he said, “there’s that possibility.”

I heard someone talking in the background and realized the sheriff had me on speaker phone. The sheriff said something, but I wasn’t sure if it was directed at me or at this other voice. After a few seconds of silence, I said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite hear what you said.” “It was in fourth gear,” he said. “Ignition was on.”

“I mean, this creek isn’t big enough to hide a car. You’d have to set everything up just right to dump a car there and have it disappear.”

I once learned in a magazine-writing course that, while conducting an interview, it’s best to use silence to your advantage. Let it linger. Perhaps the pressure of it will push your subject to reveal something. But on the phone with the sheriff, I just couldn’t wait to get to the question that mattered most—a question my father had specifically told me to ask: “Was the car in drive or neutral?”

S everal weeks after I’d made the drive to the bridge where Kyle had been found, I decided I could no longer put off calling Sheriff James Woodruff of Troup County, Georgia. He hadn’t been directly involved with the investigation of Ray Hyde or Jimmy Earl Jones. But he was the man in charge now. I’d been putting off the call out of fear, I guess—a habitual fear of talking to cops. I worried he’d be rude to me, or tell me something I didn’t want to hear, such as that they’d found a bullet hole in a fragment of skull. But he was friendly as could be—much friendlier than the “expert” I’d met in that Cusseta restaurant. He started out by asking about my mother. I’d mentioned in an email what had happened to her so he wouldn’t think I was just some busy-body looking for good gossip. I also told him I’d been to West Point Lake many times with my father. (We’d competed there in the West Georgia Bass Club.) He said he’d just recently been talking to someone about West Point Lake, saying how so many people would travel to their county to enjoy a body of water that the people who lived there just took for granted. Probably ten minutes passed before we got around to talking about Kyle Clinkscales.

That’s when it hit me: We were having the same disagreement about Kyle Clinkscales that we’d had dozens of times about my mother. And just like in those previous conversations, I was rooting for him to be right, even as I found his version of events just short of persuasive.

“All-rightie then,” he said with a tone of relief and maybe a little satisfaction. “Going highway speed on a back road.”

“But that’s exactly what happened, whether someone did it on purpose or not. It went into that creek and stayed disappeared for forty-five years.” At the sound of a carpenter bee, he jumped up and grabbed a tennis racket. The bee escaped before he had a chance to swing. He sat back down and said, “I bet I’ve killed a hundred of them things this year.” He wasn’t being cruel. They were burrowing into the rafters. “Still,” he said, “there’s West Point Lake right there outside LaGrange. The man could’ve rolled the car off a boat ramp. I don’t buy it. The kid just crashed and everybody made up a story to explain why they couldn’t find him.”

A few minutes later we hung up. Immediately I called my father. “Can you hear me?” he said. “Yeah.”“I’mdriving and got you on Bluetooth so I got to shout at the roof.” I told him Kyle Clinkscales’s car was in fourth gear.

“All-rightie then. The unsolvable crime,” he said, “couldn’t be solved because it wasn’t a crime.”

“You mean it’s possible he just crashed there?”

“He had a rollback.”

“But how’d he get the car there?”

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CANTASIEMPRECOQUÍEL Free Frog, 2021. Mixed ink media on paper by WC Bevan. Courtesy River House Arts74

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First, they clap. Then they veterancartographergrewwheredras,houseingairplanefromchartclosetothencelebration,aHomecomingbreathe.lookslotlikerelief:aandthefreedomexhale.Icanmyeyesandthejourneylandinginantoarrivatmisabuelos’inRíoPiePuertoRico,mymamitaup—likeaoraFormula1

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driver, synaptic pathways tracing the curves of each turn.

The Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport smells humid and full—a warmth I breathe in, and then out once we turn into my abuela’s driveway a few kilometers away. Here, it smells like wet metal—the security bars on the windows, the ornate design of the gate. She changes the color of the facade frequently; it’s always bright and pastel, contrasted gray with moisture. The dampened ground and dripping Flamboyan trees smell like family, but it only feels like home once the day turns to night and the coquis sing. Coquis, for the uninitiated, are tiny tree frogs about an inch or two long, native to Puerto Rico, that have only recently begun to spread through accidental and human intervention. They never evolved to grow webbed feet, so they cannot swim, thus they are sequestered in Puerto Rico and the neighboring islands of Vieques and Culebra. And yet: My abuelo was born on Vieques, and when I traveled there for the first time, a year after he died, I didn’t hear a single coqui. It was as if they were in mourning, too. He was a patient, quiet man, kind and loving. He was married to my abuela—neither patient nor quiet, a spitfire her whole life—for sixty-five years. Even now, it feels like an impossible amount of time. Coquis’ ubiquity has made them a point of pride for Boricuas, though they appear to have been first classified as a new species in 1965 by American taxonomist Richard Thomas. Puerto Rico, a land of many identities and races, is also one of the world’s oldest colonies, existing under military occupation or protectorate status since 1508, by Spain and the United States—like the colonizers before him, Thomas was late to the party, claiming a “discov ery” for his own. Coquis appear on centuries-old Taíno engravings. They exist in many different colors: brown, green, yellow. I’d learn to compare the trio of coquis to the myopic teachings of racial parity in Puerto Rico, where it is taught that the archipelago is a consistent mix of three cultures: American, Spanish, and indigenous. It’s a lot of politicking for such a small amphibian. At night, coquis sing by making a loud call. The male coquis cry out the prefix “CO-,” to warn neighboring male coquis to get away, and the suffix “-QUI” or “-KEY,” a sound meant to entice neighboring female coquis. I love the performance of it: coquis sing a serenade in the open air in the dead of night, a rising whistle like a Baroque lover beneath a balcony, a constant cry for the love of women. As a child, on my annual trips to Puerto Rico to see my closest family—from Texas, Virginia, and Germany, wherever we were living at that moment, or from New York, where I later moved to pursue a career in music journalism—I didn’t think of their scientific classifications, or their diet of insects, lizards, and other frogs. I thought of the comfort they provide—an endless, ambient cantata at a time where other places offer si lence: the stillness of childhood bedrooms in Texas and rural Germany, the quietude of our garden in Virginia. It’s what Audre Lorde referred to as the “music that did not have to be listened to because it was always around,” when writing about her mother moving to New York City from Grenada in Zami. At night, even when you’re asleep, there’s music playing. No wonder songs became my professional and personal passion. In Puerto Rico, you could never stop listening. The only silence exists between the syllables, and even that is filled with chirping insects, restless birds, and, in the rural areas, a jíbaro’s mooing cow, along with the tre ble of my abuelo coughing while brewing our morning pocillo. When I became an adult, I started recording the coquis’ song on my phone, looking for patterns in their rhythms, attempting to learn if they change in intensity with the seasons, but mostly, to hear my family’s home when I needed that particular familiarity the most. The recordings brought me comfort. Between interviews for my day job as a music reporter, on my tape recorder and iPhone, I heard their natural songs. I might as well have been recording my tía’s laugh, or my abuela singing, “Pollito, chicken / Gallina, hen / Lapiz, pencil / y Pluma, pen / Ventana, window / Puerta, door / Maestra, teacher / y Piso, floor,” a song I thought she wrote for me and my brother to learn Spanish. I later learned it to be the

W hen you call someone in Puerto Rico, at night, you will hear the coquis sing. They are the ambient music of an island so rich in the stuff, a reggae tonero with the band performing their own dembow. As far back as I can remember, there were weekly calls to Puerto Rico—a ritual I’ve grown to appreciate; with enough frequency, the cold, technological distance can grow warm. I always loved that you could hear that a person was in Puerto Rico, even before they revealed that’s where they were located. If someone in my family was on a trip and didn’t disclose their plans, there was no hiding it, we were well aware. It’s a rare thing: being able to hear a place without relying on the language of its people, in this case, the dropped “r” for an “l” in the acentoHearingpuertoriqueño.themusicof a place, of course, isn’t unique to Puerto Rico: You can record the sounds of a market place in Tangier, Morocco, the winds of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a Louisiana thunderstorm, how church bells sound different at the Duomo in Florence than a village square in Chile. In researching for this piece, I learned that Anita Hill also packs a recorder with her on her travels—“you can capture sights with a camera,” she told Condé Nast Traveler, “but it’s harder to capture sound… That’s how I like to remember.” For her, like so many of us obsessed with collecting songs, ambient music is meant to be experienced once and then repeated like an echo, amplified, and altered, with the harsh cut-off of an expired recording, the click of its coda. Each listen is hearing the past, and it only grows more remote from the time of its occurrence. Recording those sounds undoubtedly changes them from ambience, a sense of place and time, to anthro pological study—digestible, commodifiable, no lon ger ephemera but hardened permanence—the kind of quandary ethnomusicologists have been debating since sounds could turn into soundscapes. When Thomas Ed ison invented the phonograph in 1877, ambient sound was forever changed: Listening to a coqui, for example, was formerly evanescent—gone in the daylight when they no longer sang. Now, they can be heard whenever, wherever, at a distance. On my tape recorder and in songs, the nuanced crackle of their croaks is flattened, dried out from the wet season. Capturing sound feels narrower than hearing it in person. But that does not

product of American colonial rule; she was using it to teach me Spanish the same way she was taught in grade school to learn English. Coquis brought me to a Puerto Rico much more ancient than that history, an inherited resilience and spirit. Turns out, there are many different ways to articulate home for an audience with a different memory of it—or no memory at all.

The dampened ground and dripping Flamboyan trees smell like family, but it only feels like home once the day turns to night and the coquis sing.

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El coquí, el coquí siempre canta es muy lindo el cantar del coquí por las noches a veces me duermo con el dulce cantar del coquí coquí, coquí, coquí, qui, qui, qui coquí, coquí, coquí, qui, qui, qui.

In Lorde’s case, unlike Santos’s, she allows the expert rhythm of cicadas (which some entomologists have com pared to Tuvan throat singing) to add texture to her song of summer—they are not the focal point, but a fabric of her production. Removed from its original place, we can hear the sound of a New Zealand summer in the middle of an American one—a piece of a collective memory sep arate from our own experience, woven into the song like a metronomic synthesizer. The golden canary yellows of her New Zealand pop bright against the backdrop of our non-kiwi ones—to our ears, her home is loud. And yet, the cicadas can be noticed in Lorde’s song, or they can be ornamental—highlighted or glazed over like Muzak overheard from someone else’s phone on the beach, however you listen.

mean it’s without merit. Photographs give us a sense of the past, but a place today doesn’t sound like it did two hundred years ago. Coquis, it can be assumed, have remained largely the same. In our natural histories, the ones we choose to protect, we can hear the past and the present in the present. What, then, happens when an ambient sound is record ed and mixed, altered and ahistoricized, in the interest of art-making?

If it were another musician, the coquis would lose their place—much like how Spanish singer Rosalía’s use of reg gaetón in her music not only reads little like a celebration of reggaetón, but also like an underscoring of Spain’s colonial rule of Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, the Latin places in which the genre originates. And just like a place can be experienced through sound anywhere, taking those ambient markers of a geography isn’t unique to coquis. New Zealand pop star Lorde, for example, sampled the sounds of cicadas on her 2021 album Solar Power. The loud, high-pitched rhythm of the male cicada’s tymbal muscle bending the surface of its abdominal segment creates a clicking sound one hundred to four hundred times a second, an insects’ hum found on every continent in the world except Antarctica (they have a thing for temperate and tropical environ ments) that those residents have learned to associate with summer, the same way we might think of an ice cream truck’s jingle or fingernails clinking against the condensation of a cool glass of lemonade or agua fresca.

“Ay Bendito,” a track on Romeo Santos’s (of bachata boy band Aventura) 2017 studio album Golden, begins with the sound of coquis—isolated, glossy, shiny—elevated by musician Alvin Medina, who plays the cuatro, a short, four-stringed, traditional Puerto Rican instrument, not unlike a small guitar. I was taken by the sweet, consid erate use of the coquis’ song, how it immediately set Santos at night, quicker than any goth-y coldwave song ever could. It’s also a lovesick pop song, so charmingly Boricua, an exercise in taking the organic sounds of the coqui and bringing them into crisp production, no feeling of legitimacy lost.

Whatever the appreciation, her sound and Santos’s are located truths, not too dissimilar from inorganic samples, like the “sound effects of guns unloaded and bullets being shot in popular songs like Daddy Yankee’s ‘La Gasolina,’” tying early reggaetón influences to the caseríos, as Verónica Dávila Ellis wrote about in their essay on Ivy Queen for this magazine; or even the tractor motor that introduces Kenny Chesney’s 1999 hit “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” a sound meant to bring its listener straight into the American heartland—even though, at that point in time, Chesney was already a rock star, fully divorced from the rural working-class existence he was aiming to attract with his sample. For Santos, the coqui song is his intro, integral to the listening experience. There’s conveying authenticity, and then there’s embodying it. All of these musicians are using samples in similar ways, but for different aims. For Santos, it’s to commune with his culture and bring what is most important to him to those outside the island. (Despite the fact that technologically reproduced sounds can also be desta bilizing for listeners who share that history—I cry out of adjacent homesickness when I hear a recorded coqui almost as much as I smile.) Daddy Yankee brings attention to the barrios while co-opting their rhythms: If violence is in the soundtrack for life, then violence will be in the soundtrack for his art. In the case of Chesney, it’s a co-op tion of a sound’s geography to appeal to that geography, and, ideally, a much broader one keen on fetishizing a rural existence. His tractor isn’t grounded in memory; it’s an image meant to be captured and commodified— even if the song itself is charming and hilarious. There’s no shortage in the potential and actual roles of music made from ambient sounds—only the promise that their meaning and message can be made malleable when removed from their original context. For the diasporic creators, however, it is always motivated by evoking home—bringing tangible place to the intangibility of sound. That impossibility is why I’ve always loved the coquis’ song, ever since I was young. I don’t have many memories from childhood. They are blocked, an impenetrable void I find comfort in—few moments unlock and reveal themselves. When they do, it’s a burst of dopamine, flashes of geography, a feeling, a sound, a familiar warmth that requires little intellectualizing to appreciate. One is a song. A coqui nursery rhyme, or folk song, taught to children.

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Because coquis are a point of pride in Puerto Rico, a symbol of Boricua-ness pre-Latinidad, their songs frequently appear in popular music by Puerto Ricans.

The coqui, the coqui’s always singing

The coqui’s singing is very nice And sometimes, I go to sleep at night With the sweet singing of the coqui Coqui, coqui, coqui, qui, qui, qui Coqui, coqui, coqui, qui, qui, qui. I hear it in my abuela’s voice, though I’m not quite sure she ever sang it to me. It could be something I saw on a children’s television show or read in a book when I was finally old enough to appreciate my multiracial identity instead of attempting to slide into the systemic ease of my whiteness. Either way, it is a memory with a place—even if it’s one I’ve tricked myself to associate with her house. It is accepted, in cognitive and neurological psychol ogy, that the brain etches memories by locating them in their geography—where did the event happen, before the how or why. It’s a process called episodic memory formation, the notion that we associate things with the place and time they happened. No wonder it is also a commonly used tactic to ground a person suffering panic attacks: chair, desk, lamp, carpet, friend, body. Once you have a place, you have a sense of being. I moved around a lot as a child, so my relationship with place is impermanent; I feel a deep sense of con nection with people everywhere, but I float between geographies. Those memories are hard to ground, but I find myself attempting to put them somewhere. And so, the coqui folk song—the sound of a human voice attempting the call of “co-” and “-qui,” and repeating it with the saccharine sweet, “qui, qui, qui,”—brings me home, to my abuela’s bright kitchen and the collection of rooster figurines, to the intoxicating smell of arroz con gandules on the stove. Even removed from its location, their song draws me close—because its sound can’t be stripped from who I am, the geography that lives within me. But I don’t always have access to it—in the same way memories drift into that black void, inaccessible until I enter the sound and not the recorded soundscape. And sometimes entering the sound is simply remembering it—not quite like experiencing it for the first time, but certainly sharper than hearing a recording. I n January 2021, I found out my abuelo had died. I was not in Puerto Rico. My mom called me, and she was not in Puerto Rico. Behind our loud, lamenting tears on the phone was silence. If we were on the island, the coquis would’ve filled the space between the moments we struggled to breathe. They would have grounded us in our geography, and sung to us, to bring the women close, to embrace who we are and who our ancestors were, like coquis never growing webbed feet to leave. We would have sung home.

I cry out of ascoquiIhomesicknessadjacentwhenheararecordedalmostmuchasIsmile.

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Two Poems BY MIKEY SWANBERG PHOTOGRAPHS BY CURRAN HATLEBERG 80

Opposite: Untitled (Main Street), 2020. All photographs are from

81

River's Dream, published in June by TBW Books, available at

edge effect in the alley beyond the planet fitness I stop to watch an eastern cottontail munch on a pizza crust I know our universe does not ration pain because I am here with all of you but standing by the dumpster watching him enjoy his early dinner I know its opposite must also be true I hold my belly where I was split like I’ve been doing since they split me where they took some feet out I thought at first they’d left me with less I think now it’s fine it took me a long time to see that they were only making room for the rabbit the shaggy cardboard the side streets filling with white-orange summer dusk all this hot-&-ready joy Hatleberg's monograph www.tbwbooks.com

82 FALL 2022 An Easy Guide to Insurance Claims Adjustment ask yourself if their body can stand what happened I can see from my chart you went through some things you've got to believe you're their friend as you offer what seems like nothing but really how are you doing Rememberpretend the money is thebutmedicinethentalks tend to darken so keep it light how much so and for longhow most folks let out a little gasp to aboutthinkthefuture who doesn't want to eat a little medicine? will you missworkyour have alreadytheybeenburned? if no themasktry how much is enough where were you headed if yes will you walk again will the parts taken out of you grow back find a numberroundniceandlowballthattoimaginelifewithoutpain right after an thereaccidentisonlysmalltalk accidenteveryhasaprice how old are you this man your family do you have a wife are aroundyou herewhat do you like to do for fun do you werewhereknowyougoing

Untitled (Camaro), 2017 OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  83

Two Poems BY ERIKA MEITNER PHOTOGRAPHS BY CURRAN HATLEBERG 84

“We are in constant free-fall around the earth,” says the astronaut at the International Space Station in an interview before she heads out on the first all-female space walk to replace a battery unit that failed to activate. Unlike certain metals, our limbs often bend to our will & reassemble themselves. In the first light we are always worn out & often leaving. Body with machinic consistency, a systematic reshuffling of parts. The disappearance of the body into loneliness. I would like to tell you about the tactile universe. What we are sure of is minimal: the mystery of the unseen inside of things—the gliding, flexing, bone-breaking grooves of peripatetic movement or a longing for stronger feelings. I would like to be inhabited perhaps not gently but with some kind of energy; think Rem Koolhaas on reinforced concrete: “infinitely malleable at first, then suddenly hard as a rock.” His photo is gritty & I delete it almost immediately. Each material has its own kind of aliveness. Twisted white sheet across his thigh & what else? I need to say: the him can be anyone. “What do you say instead of ‘manned space flight’?” asks the radio reporter.

Our destinations are numerous if we believe airport flight boards or Sunday preachers.

Opposite: Untitled (Thistle), 2018 85

If we consider cyberspace & also other galaxies as sites of meaning-making or reachable termini.

Letter on Space & the Body

“Human space flight,” the female astronaut says— “crewed.” Alone, my hands glance this remote capsule & I slide open to the night, my body a radiant city, a desert of transparence, a line of escape, an unraveling net, an ever-growing vault of uncertainty. The quiet storm of the burning bush. A message that needs transmitting urgently. What does it mean to be almighty with joy of discovery? We can’t sense space without light. “The sun never knew how wonderful it was,” Louis Kahn once said, “until it shone on the wall of a building.”

Untitled (Diamond), 202086 FALL 2022

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  87

What I’m saying is the planet is on fucking fire, says Bill Nye the Science Guy, and I want to say Amen, Bill, I am half-witness to this, our superlative rain storms, the river always swollen past its banks, the wide stretches of sand from my childhood just gone at the beach—lifeguard shack meets ocean meets parking lot all within a few feet of each other. I walk my mountain neighborhood in spring dusk and notice the gaps where cemetery oaks stood before the derecho—straight-line wind event that took them out along with power for a week. That year I had thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket fertility drugs in our fridge and had to move all the vials to campus, powered by the university’s coal plant, which endured the storm and kept running. My office is downwind so books get coated in a fine sheen of black dust in minutes when I open my window and this week my cough won’t quit. This week, Bill, I watched you take a blowtorch to a globe on television to illustrate global warming to the viewing audience while the radio news was all fetal heartbeat bills— near total bans on abortions in Kentucky, Louisiana, Georgia—and I thought of the time I waited for a friend under the gold clock in Grand Central Terminal while a bevy of women wearing red-hooded cloaks and severe white bonnets walked past in pairs. I gawked with tourists as the women slowly circled the station before I realized they weren’t actual nuns or a cult but a promo stunt for the Hulu version of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. This week in Harlan County a group of miners are blocking a coal train to protest unpaid wages owed to them. My friend Christine was a women’s clinic nurse before she became an anthropologist and offered to teach a group of us academics how to perform abortions. It’s just suction, she says. Bill, we all know what will happen to us when the temperature rises: floods, fires, crop failures, extinction. In Alabama girls will be forced to carry their rapists’ babies and, Bill, do you even know how to date a pregnancy correctly? One fifth of coal miners in this region—a place that’s been stripped and fucked over limitless times by corporations—have black lung disease. You add 280 days to the first day of your last period. In Ohio, the state legislature introduced a bill that requires doctors to reimplant ectopic pregnancy into a woman’s uterus, which is physically impossible. There is every reason I should be anti-abortion, Bill— the years of peeing on sticks and injections, the IUI and IVF, the adoption. But I believe in bodily autonomy—my colleague who locked herself to an excavator to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline from tearing through our streams and forests to bring fracked gas right past us from West Virginia, to sell abroad. On TV you say, you’re adults now and this is an actual crisis, and Bill, I want to burn this whole motherfucker to the ground but I don’t have to. We are in cataclysmic decline and you’re here with me, your blanket, fire extinguisher, bucket of sand lined up next to you. I am failing to find productive uses for my rage—for the hard and dangerous work of having a body in the Anthropocene, so I shear butterfly bushes and barberry back from my vinyl siding and hose spigot, tend to my fig tree whose branches are dead— whose leaves, new and green, cluster around the roots.

“Mike’s Guitar,” a photograph by Rachel Boillot from her monograph Moon Shine: Photographs of the Cumberland Plateau (Daylight, 2019) © The artist88

FIFTYSEVEN DOLLARS BY MARGO PRICE AN EXCERPT FROM Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir 89

I had been given a copy of The Essential Bob Dylan and became obsessed with “Maggie’s Farm.” I sat around smoking tiny crumbs of weed from a metal one-hitter and listening to the song on repeat. I was completely obsessed with Dylan’s lyrics, delivery, and attitude. He was mystical. How he channeled the words and the sound that he did was a secret I yearned to unlock. The way he sang wasn’t perfect, but it was honest. Listening to Bob led me to artists like The Band, Skip James, Victoria Spivey, Leonard Cohen, Karen Dalton, John Prine, and Kris Kristofferson. Joni Mitchell turned my world upside down. Her playing, her voice, and especially her lyrical prowess were unique and incredibly refined. This is how you write a song, I thought as I listened to Blue on repeat. “A Case of You” had to be one of the most perfect songs ever written. She didn’t revisit the same old clichés; she dug deep and mined some of the best compositions I had ever heard. I was enjoying the time and the space to myself, and despite being broke, I found the solitude glorious. I penned several songs that week. None of them were great, but I was learning. It beat going to a lecture hall to listen to uninspired professors, that was for sure.

Although I still had a fake ID, I only drank occasionally back in those days. I was still distancing myself from alcohol because of the incident at Northern Illinois. Nonetheless, I liked to spend my evenings taking in the nightlife. I found myself spending lots of time at random little coffee shops, dive bars, and clubs. I enjoyed spectating and occasionally performing at writers’ nights, poetry readings, and karaoke bars. The people I met were almost always friendly. The Southern charm and warm hospitality were intoxicating, and I was really lean ing in to my new life. I had only been in Nashville a couple of months when I totaled my second car. Star and I had been out dancing all night during the summer solstice, and I drove myself home around five a.m. I looked down for one second to follow directions on a comedically large paper map of the city when the box truck in front of me stopped abruptly at a yellow light. I slammed on my brakes, but it was no use. I ran into the back of the truck and crushed the front of my car. So there I was. I had no car and no real friends in town yet. I had fifty-seven dollars left to my name and hadn’t found a job, although I’d tried. I didn’t want to ask my parents for money, so I knew I needed to find employment soon. Star had run off to spend a couple of weeks in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with an older man named Giovanni. Giovanni wore Gu cci tracksuits and thick gold chains. He let everyone know he was loaded—I mean filthy rich—and involved with the Mafia. Star asked if I wanted to come, but I was intimidated by him and the crew of yes-men he kept close by. More than that, I knew I needed to get my life together. There was barely any food in the fridge, and I was living off of hummus, stale bread, cereal, and soy milk. I spent two weeks alone playing records, writing songs, and reading books on astral travel.

“Jesus Christ, why didn’t you tell me?” I was scared and angry. I stormed out of the bathroom, went outside, and paced in the street. She could be so two-faced sometimes, it terrified me. That night was not the last time she tricked me into taking a drug I thought was something else.

Nashville and city life were all so new to me, I felt like I was going one hundred miles per hour when I first arrived. I didn’t have much money to burn at the bar or at fancy restaurants, but anytime I found myself out and about, someone usually offered to buy me drinks.

“What is this?” I asked, panicking. Star and her friends started laughing. “It’s meth! Ha ha ha, you just did meth!” Star was beside herself.

“You want a bump?” She flashed her kohl-rimmed eyes down at the bag of white powder in her hand. Uppers weren’t really my thing, but I agreed anyway. We went into the bathroom with a few other girls, and she pulled out a tiny silver spoon with a snake head on the handle. I took a whiff and immediately regretted it. The left side of my face felt like it was burning.

The date was May 29, 2003, and we had packed up my belongings in my daddy’s pickup truck and rolled into Nashville looking like the Beverly Hillbillies. We had some old furniture tied down in a flatbed trailer, including a twin bed, a rolltop desk that had been my grandmother’s, and two bright-orange, ratty couches I had in herited from my parents. My folks had planned to trash them, but I loved that every time I sat on them, I felt like I was transported back to 1977. Everything I had was worn, but I valued the sentimental. Besides, my cousin Star had plenty of nice belongings for our new place. She and I moved into an apartment with vaulted ceilings in Antioch, Tennessee, just twenty minutes outside of Nashville. Star wasn’t the best influence, but she had a colorful personality and there was never a dull moment with her around. She was just two years my senior but much more experienced at living on her own. We had grown up together, and she could talk me into trying just about anything. Star had been arrested for cocaine possession when she was only seventeen and had a felony on her record. I shouldn’t have been surprised when she offered me some during my first week in town, while we were out dancing with her friends at a club called Envy.

I counted andtheinterstateinred-tailedseventeenhawksperchedthetreesalongtheasIstaredoutwindowofthecar,Itookitasagoodomen. 90 FALL 2022

“Um . . . okay. Let me think what I should play you.” Even though he was family, I was nervous as I tuned my guitar.

I picked up a copy of the pocket-sized local paper called All the Rage and began looking for open mics to play. I began frequenting a little hotel bar called Hall of Fame Lounge inside the Best Western off Music Row. It was easy to get on the list to play there. It felt cozy. There was wood paneling on the walls and tacky Cracker Barrel–like decorations—antique signs, photos of no-name old-timers, bad taxidermy. I was told Townes Van Zandt used to play there before he

I don’t remember what I played for him, but I only had a handful of songs in my catalog at the time. When I finished my whispery folk number, he sat there in silence. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair and waited for some feedback. He looked me dead in the eye and said, “Here’s what you need to do. You need to go home and throw away your television, get rid of your computer and your phone and your radio. Just sit there and write and keep writing for a long time. Focus on it. Don’t do anything else with your free time, just learn to write.” I was heartbroken, but deep down I knew he was right. I nodded and tried not to cry. I knew I was still learning, but I’d thought there would be some kind of compliment sandwiched with the crit icism—like “You’ve got a great voice, kid!” or “That one metaphor was pretty clever.” Nothing. Just brutal honesty and the cold, hard truth. I was not ready yet. I left with my head hanging down and returned to my apartment. What am I doing here anyway? I thought. Who do I think I am? I’m not special. I’m not a poet. I can’t write songs. The icing on the cake was that I still needed to find paid work. I dreamed of one day being able to get a proper gig at one of the real venues in town. I made a vow to myself that I would work to go from playing dive bars to the holy grail of stages, the Ryman Auditorium. I made a list of all the places I wanted to play in between: Winners, Losers, Springwater, Mercy Lounge, Exit/In. I accepted that I was on the bottom of the food chain, but the only way to go was up.

died, and that was enough to pull me in. I made friends with a couple of the middle-aged writers who hung out there. Most of the folks at the Hall of Fame were older, but that was fine with me. I almost preferred the company of old folks to that of my peers. I didn’t have many original songs but quickly found that the ones I did have didn’t really cut it. I studied the writers who got strong reactions from the crowd. What made their songs good? Stories? Melody? Themes? Humor? Sadness? All of it. I knew I had a lot to learn. I came back week after week and signed my name on the clipboard, waited for my turn to sit on the stool and sing my songs. My mom was convinced that I already should have made it and that my songs were already good. She believed in me even when I did not and arranged for me to go over to my uncle Bobby Fischer’s house and play him some of my tunes. He was well connected in the business, knew a lot of the right people, and had lived in Nashville for over thirty years. Many notable musicians cut his songs, from George Jones to Charley Pride, Tanya Tucker to Reba McEntire. My mom was sure Bob could help me get my career on the right path.

“Well, let’s hear what you got.”

A couple of weeks later, Star returned from her trip and my privacy was gone. With my parents’ help and an insurance payout, I got a new-to-me used car. I landed a job selling cheap clothes at Wet Seal in the Antioch Mall. The pay was minimum wage, and I wasn’t good at budgeting, so money was always tight. Star was a Gemini with multitudes of personalities. When Star was five years old the doctors had discovered a hole in her heart. She had to have open-heart surgery, which left a jagged scar that ran down the middle of her rib cage. The incident had convinced her that she was the reincarnation of Cleopatra. She always said, “If you pretend you are somebody, people will think you are somebody.”

I followed her lead and began to dress more outlandishly when we went out to dance clubs and wild parties. She had a lot of eccentric friends who were different from most of the people I had met in the Midwest; she knew mystics and tarot readers, drug dealers and Reiki healers, drag queens, rappers, producers, and engineers. One evening she took me backstage at a Wailers concert, and we smoked a couple of spliffs with the band. It was the first time I’d been put on a guest list, and I had never experienced such an open atmosphere. It didn’t hurt that she was casually dating the drummer, Zebulon. I wasn’t great at holding a job, and after a few short months of working retail at the Antioch Mall, I was over it. I pulled a no call, no show one morning and they canned me. Luckily, Star got me a job making continental breakfast at the Hotel Preston she managed out on Briley Parkway. It was terrible for my night-owl schedule. I had to get there at four in the morning to make biscuits and gravy, waffles, and powdered eggs. Many mornings I arrived irritable and sleep deprived. I wasn’t much of a cook and had never worked in the service industry before. The job was also minimum wage, and there were no tips. I didn’t last more than a couple of months before my irresponsibility got me fired again. Star was understandably frustrated with me but had one more connection for a job. She swore she would disown me if I screwed it up. It was at a Men’s Wearhouse in the Cool Springs Galleria, selling cheap suits. I hated it more than any other job I’d had thus far. It required that I dress in business casual, and the other employees were cold to me. I never sold a single suit. I walked out one afternoon on my lunch break, before I could even collect my first paycheck. Weeks passed and I remained unemployed. I tried busking down on Broadway with my guitar, a tip jug, and a handful of wildflowers for adornment. Busking seemed like a rite of passage for anyone who aspired to be a songwriter, and I loved watching the tourists pass by. I studied the other street performers to see what did and didn’t make money. Well-known songs that were recognizable to the folks passing by were more likely to work, but I didn’t know many covers that seemed to impress the straw-cowboy-hat-and-fannypack-wearing crowds who walked the strip, drunk on light beer. Still, I remember feeling accomplished when I counted the money I had made. Forty-five bucks for about five hours of work. I shoved the crinkled paper money into the pocket of my blue jeans, packed up my guitar, and went home feeling proud of my little hustle.

I visited his house in Green Hills one afternoon to get his opinion and see if he could plug me in to the music industry pipeline. He was in his late sixties at the time and had a kind soul. His wife, my great-aunt Helen, gave me a warm hug and poured me a cup of coffee. It was good to see family. I followed Uncle Bobby to his den and we sat in chairs across from each other.

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Excerpted from Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir Copyright © 2022 by Margo Price. All rights reserved. With permission from the University of Texas Press

92

RODRIQUESELIAS

A STORY BY

get somewhere and sit down, 2021. Oil and acrylic on canvas by Jewel Ham. Courtesy the artist 93

They smelledwaygossipsmelledthetheyrain.

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The crowd turned and screamed, clamoring around Jerome and greeting him with handshakes and tapped fists. The last to welcome

Their noses twitched before they recognized the scent. They wiggled their nostrils as though trying to sift one fragrance from the other. And they drew in thick moisture until it filled their airways, leaving residues that tasted of screened-in porches, summer afternoons. When the cooling wind took hold, they cross-checked their noses with their eyes, heads turning for some glimpse of the horizon and the sky, which were never hard to see on their peninsula, where the highest point was a trash dump five hours south. They looked not for the clouds but for what lay beneath: gray lines streaking, thicker than shadows but patchier than funnel clouds, as if cross-hatched into the air. And they searched for movement, its approach, or its flight. Theirs was a prophesying they had not recognized as such. They had accurately predicted summer storms so often that they thought it more science than magic. And they had been raised where everyone shared common weather antennae, where predictions of precipi tation were such a well-established genre of speech that they did not notice it any more than they did their several kinds of present tense. But it was a kind of foresight. And on that late April evening in 2017, Jerome, the last surviving member of the Freeman family, took part in that Floridian ritual, having felt the air shift as though uncomfortable in its sleep, but he did not smell rain. As he walked into the house party in Bunnell, he identified the scent when the eyes of the crowd in the dark lit up with recognition. He tried to quell his suspicions as old friends and relatives dapped him up and embraced him, guiding him in a switch-backed route to each person bobbing on the carpeted living room turned into a dance floor. And yet, even though the humidity hung heavy between the bodies crammed together in movement, he felt the rumors just departed and the ones on the way, the talk filling his insides like the smell of rain. Jerome did not let his senses overwhelm him, as he had when he was young. He stopped every conversation short. He was looking for someone. When he finally made his way onto the back porch, shad owed by light peering through the kitchen window, he saw a group of young men holding their hips as if elderly and old men sagging their pants as if juvenile. They gathered around in the corner, yelling numbers and talking shit, pausing only for the click clacking of dice knocking together. When the dice came to a stop, some fell quiet and others erupted into screams. In their midst, one with close-cropped hair gathered stray bills, arranged them, and threw others on the ground. Before he could pick the dice up, Jerome said, “Peanut, I ain’t bailed you out but four hours ago, and you already shooting?”

“That’s what I heard too, but I heard they was New Orleans slaves. Light-skinned folk. That’s where old man Freeman learned how to embalm Black folk so they ain’t stink. Then they started fucking on these Florida niggas and got dark.”

“They never let her live it down neither,” Unc said. “Covered it in the paper for weeks. Called her the unluckiest woman in the whole county.”

“Rome,” Peanut said. “I ain’t even realize you got here. You fixing to lose some money tonight?” “I’m straight,” Jerome said. “You ain’t fixing to snitch?” “Nigga, I’m your lawyer. What you tripping for?” “The old Rome would’ve been thrown some bills on the ground.”

him, Peanut, threw an arm around Jerome’s back and dangled a hand in front of his shoulder.

“You better tell him,” Peanut replied.

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“That’s what I heard,” a third added, “but I heard they ran from a Georgia plantation. Only dumb niggas who thought they’d get free running south.” “Back in the day, runaways to New Spain got free.”

“Think she in the kitchen,” Peanut said as he rejoined the game. “Better hurry up though. You know she don’t stay single.” “Appreciate you.” As Jerome walked away, Peanut tried to distinguish Jerome’s contours from the shadowy walls. He could make out the center of his blobby body but not its outline. He squinted, and Jerome blurred into the surroundings. Peanut rubbed his eyes, and Jerome opened the sliding glass door, which Peanut detected not through sight but from the squeak of the old screen.

“Calm down, old head,” Peanut said, returning to the gamblers. He pulled his denim shorts up, crouched, and swept his hand across the floor so swiftly that undiscerning eyes were surprised to see the dice once lying on the floor gone. While looking for the vanished toys, they heard their clacking and realized Peanut held them. He had not seen the dice, of course, but he did see a glint of moonlight and swept his hands across the floor until he felt them.

Peanut’s eyesight wasn’t always this bad. He first noticed it getting worse after he started underwater welding for a company based in the Jacksonville port. He loved the work at first. Though breathing through a tube chapped his throat, he enjoyed patching up ships, seeing the way the torch’s light illuminated the submarine world. And the pay provided enough to contribute to his mother’s bills and to save to move out of her house. Things were so good that he did not pay attention to his coworkers, who began to wear glasses and eventually disappeared. He did not think much about them until fifteen months in, when he lay in bed with his eyes closed and saw a faint blue light. He assumed he was seeing things. The glow was dull. He was probably just excited about finally having a job he enjoyed. He figured it better to ignore it. But in time, the light got brighter. Eventually, it kept him up at night. Sometimes, he could even see it in the day. Then it collapsed in on itself, and a spot of his vision went black. He spoke to his manager, who directed him to human resources, where a white woman in her sixties told him that this was common for underwater welders. She sent him to a doctor, who told him his eyesight was going. He would need glasses. After losing a day’s pay, he returned to work worried. He could not quite see; what if he accidentally cut his hand off? When he shared his fears with his manager, he sent Peanut back underwater, where dread made his thoughts race. In time, his anxiety and deteriorating sight became too much. Even though he had not paid off his student loans to the professional school that had promised him high-salaried, steady work, he quit. But his eyes continued degrading so that, even with his contacts in, on the night that Jerome came to his party, he could barely see his friend—his lawyer—who had gotten him out of jail on his bogus armed robbery case.

“Nigga, let them dice go,” one of the older men said.

“Chill, God,” Jerome said. A voice yelled from the corner, “Peanut, throw them dice.”

“The old Rome would’ve drove drunk and fought like three niggas on the way through the door.” “Who you fronting on?” Peanut said. “You been a bookworm since you was eating lunch in the school library.” The crowd laughed too loud for Peanut to hear Jerome’s re sponse. A few added insults. When the noise quieted, Jerome said, “Rashida here?” Peanut took a step back and looked Jerome up and down. Then he turned around, cocked an eyebrow, and inspected him again.

Peanut threw the dice. Because he could not make out the num bers, he waited until the voices yelled. Unc stayed quiet, which told Peanut that he had rolled what he needed to.

“Learn your lesson?” Peanut asked. He picked up the cash on the floor. In the pile’s center, he saw the welder’s blue light again, emanating from the money. He had had the hot hand for some time now. He didn’t know how long his streak would last. He decided to bet“Peanut,conservatively.whowas that?” one of the men in the corner asked.

“Nigga,” a voice yelled, “you going to stand there all night?”

“Read about them in seventh grade,” Peanut said. “Miss Funk’s class.”“She the one whose classroom that driver crashed into?” Unc said. “Poor Miss Funk,” Peanut said. “She just minding her business, standing at the white board when the ground shakes. Classroom fills up with smoke. Dry wall everywhere. Some drunk driver pick ing up their kid smashed into her classroom at Buddy Taylor. She probably pissed herself.”

“This ain’t bingo night, Unc,” Peanut said. “You got time.”

When the chorus of voices died down, Peanut threw a few more bills on the pile, figuring the dice had not let him down yet. He flicked his wrist. He felt a crick and heard a crack. The dice rolled off his hands erratically. Before the voices yelled to tell him what numbers showed, he knew. Peanut shook his head and let the dice lie, a blue light shining from them as a man from the crowd swept up the bills. A weight gathering in Peanut’s stomach, he stood up and stuck out his hand to Unc, who passed him a smoke.

“You ain’t know?” Unc said. “You just roll up barefoot out the backwoods of Palatka?”

“I heard they was runaways from farther south,” another voice said. “Planned on going north but got to this country town where ain’t nobody know them and just told everyone they was free. Said they last name was Freeman.”

“That right there’s the prince of Bunnell,” Unc said. “Last son of the Freeman line, oldest Black family in the county. They been here since slavery. White folk let them roam because they knew how to handle dead bodies and the white folk sure as hell wasn’t going to touch no dead nigga, let alone bury them.”

Jerome chuckled. As Mae piled food on a Styrofoam plate, he looked away and ran his hand down the back of his neck. The once prickly fuzz growing in was smooth now. He needed a haircut. How long had it been? Jerome tried to count the weeks since his last visit to the shop where Unc worked as he scanned the room for Rashida.

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“Read about them in the book too,” Peanut said. “Rome Freeman and Rashida Mason, the only two folk whose last names still in the town. The book said the Masons was house slaves, then poor folk. Women who made ends meet by cleaning houses. We was just kids, so we cracked on Rashida for always being broke. We might’ve had holes in our shoes, but at least we wasn’t no house niggas.” “Kids cruel,” Unc said. “I know it,” Peanut said. “Clowned the both of them then forgot. Then Rashida and Rome started dating in high school and we started cracking on them again. Saying shit like, ‘Check out Prince Rome slumming it up with the slaves.’ Then they’d break up and we’d stop. Then they’d get back together and we’d clown them again.”

“Ain’t shit change,” Wildcat said, just before Rashida threw her arms around Jerome and her head over his shoulder. Jerome stumbled back. He caught his footing but did not move his arms, the knocking of their clavicles overwhelming him with memories of all the times she ran to him. After all their breakups and months apart, she always returned to him in the wake of personal disaster, sprinting toward him at first sight, until she didn’t.

“She the one teaching us,” Peanut continued. “Had us read this book about Henry Flagler. There was one chapter about niggas. Mostly about the Freemans. They was Black embalmers, but they was also slaves. Old man Freeman worked out an arrangement where his master leased him out to bury other folk, and Freeman got paid a little. Sooner or later, he saved up enough to buy himself and his wife. So Miss Funk was teaching us about the Freemans while little Rome Freeman sitting in her class. You know how kids is. We start calling him the Prince of Flagler. Sir Prince Freeman, Duke of the P section, heir to nothing.” Everyone chuckled, and Peanut turned to the small window look ing onto the kitchen. He tried to see past the heads hovering over the sink and the food. He was looking for Rashida’s hair through a clearing between shoulders, but he couldn’t see that far. He couldn’t see Jerome either. And he didn’t know if it was the distance, the darkness, or his eyes that blinded him.

“Let me fix you a plate then. Wasn’t for you, wouldn’t be no party.” “I ain’t do nothing nobody else wouldn’t.” “You always was humble. And too skinny.”

Jerome walked into the front room, where one of Peanut’s Ja maican uncles whispered something to his son, who held the aux cord. The music changed and the bounce caught hold of all the middle-aged men wearing push broom mustaches and Clark desert treks, who two-stepped to the reggae beat with grins. Jerome had heard the uncle and all his friends were tough guys on the island, known for shaking folk down to collect debts. He suspected they were remembering those hardscrabble days now, though it was hard to imagine those old men had ever struck fear into anyone. As Jerome mused about their past, the uncle raised his bottle and nodded. Jerome did the same. Then Jerome saw her, leaning against the wall with a Solo cup in hand and talking to Wildcat. She was sun-burnished, wearing a dark purple lipstick, a black t-shirt, and white Forces. Her hair was a dark brown, cut close to the scalp, and she wore large gold hoops. She flashed a smile.

“Freemans wasn’t alone though,” Unc said. “It was them and the Masons. House slaves on the old sugar plantation cross the tracks.”

“Boy, you always had a one-track mind,” Mae said. “Go on. She over“I’mthere.”coming back though. Ain’t leaving without my plate.” “It’ll be here.”

“That’s the girl he going to see right now?” someone asked. Peanut nodded. “She fine?” “She off limits.”

“Glad you made it,” Mae said. “You know I wouldn’t have missed this,” Jerome said. “So you say, but I know you college boys get busy.”

Jerome last saw her six years ago. They were in his room in the Black fraternity house at the University of Florida. He told her he

“I ain’t been in college for a minute, Ms. Robinson. Besides, you know I ain’t never pass up your food.”

When Jerome walked away from the back porch, he assumed that the dice-throwers’ conversation turned to him and Rashida. In middle school, he had frequently overheard whispers about the two of them during classes where they sat next to each other. And in high school, he had felt the eeriness of silence that fell when they walked into a room together. He learned, in short, how to identify when people were going to talk. After all these years, foreseeing gossip still warmed his cheeks and made him reconsider finding Rashida, as though he were still the same boy who feared that she did not share his feelings and so avoided her, lest she reject him. But Jerome had driven to this party after a long workday to see her. He could not let himself be dissuaded. As he repressed his stomach’s unease, he made his way to the kitchen, a corridor flanked by a stove keeping pots warm on one side and trays full of food on a counter on the other side. The fried fish, mac and cheese, sweet-potato pies, and more were cratered where partygoers drove serving utensils into the plates. In the corner, a jar of cash to help Peanut get back on his feet overflowed. Jerome shoved some bills in and then had paused to consider making a plate, though his desire to see Rashida rushed him on, when he heard a voice made husky by years of smoking. He turned to see Peanut’s mom, a heavyset woman north of fifty wearing a red apron and holding a wooden spoon. She hugged him. After she let him go, she smiled, gleaming white teeth carving laugh lines deep into her face. Peanut’s mom, Mae, had not seen Jerome since he played high school football with Peanut. She had heard about Jerome going to law school and then returning to Flagler County to work as a public defender. She had also heard that his father had died. Though she had never much liked the wrathful mortician, who looked down his nose at the church congregation, and though she had heard that he charged Black folk more than white funeral home directors did, Mae felt a pang when she saw his funeral announcement. She wondered if that little boy from that long line of funeral home directors dressed his own father’s corpse. She didn’t reach out because she didn’t want to overstep. But looking at this grown man who had gotten her boy out of jail, stubble shading his face but his eyes the same as ever, Mae regretted not sending flowers. As she inspected his hollowing cheeks, she wanted to ask how he was sleeping, but this was not the time. This was a party and this boy was not so little anymore.

“Excuse me, partner,” Jerome said, angling his body between Wildcat and Rashida.

Jerome held out a hand, beckoning her to dance as the song came to an end. The silence lingered and the room turned to the boy with the aux cord. People heckled him, and the DJ told them to pipe down. Then he put on “The Electric Boogie.” Rashida hustled onto the dance floor, leaving Jerome hanging. He watched her doing the Electric Slide, the smile spreading across her cheeks. She turned, bounced, stepped, snapped, and rolled her arms in unison with the crowd around her, composed of single-digit kids to older folks who lacked the full range of motion but still moved enough to evoke their long past, best dancing days. Though they all moved in sync, Jerome saw only Rashida, the rest seeming like a shadow cast by a flickering light. She looked up, down, around, and everywhere but at him, laughing and losing herself in the dance.

“Alright, old heads,” the DJ said between songs. “You had your fun. Now put the kids to bed.”

Jerome was wrong. She did not pick up his calls, respond to his texts, or reach out until years later, when Hurricane Matthew washed A1A onto the beach. She asked if he was okay. He was. He parlayed that exchange into a longer conversation, an email chain, and the occasional call, through which she told him about life in Philadelphia: The snow, the style, the people. Then, a few months ago, she said she was coming back to finalize the sale of her childhood home, and even though she agreed to come to Peanut’s welcome-home party at the last minute, Jerome didn’t expect her to hug him. He was surprised that she had buried their bones. When she tightened her embrace, he wrapped his arms around her and closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deep the lavender scent of her hair, the life it brought back to him.

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“I“Jealous?”ain’tthe type.” “And you got no claim,” Rashida said. “Ain’t never stopped me before.” “Thought you wasn’t the type.” “Both and.” “And then some more,” Rashida said, rolling her eyes. He was the same person that he was years ago, when he acted like they could just date long distance, as if nightly phone calls would quell his stormy emotions. He was still that boy peering through the crowded hallways to see who she walked with at Flagler Palm Coast High School. He looked older, but nothing had changed.

“Come“Whatever.”on,Rashida.

Figuring he would have more fun on the floor than hugging the wall, he joined in, occasionally bumping into the people around him. He knew the moves but never had that ability to predict the future and remember the past that everyone else called rhythm. He jostled elbows, hit hips, and knocked knees through the Electric Slide, the Wobble, and the Cupid Shuffle. Spectators clowned him loud enough that he could hear, but his stomach never unsettled.

He put on trap, the older folks slinked into the kitchen, and Rashi da walked to the window. Sweat formed a thin film on her face and trickled down her neck. She had forgotten the way Florida nights

You ain’t got but twelve hours till you head home. You trying to fuss or you trying to have a good time?”

was not going to law school up north with her; he was staying in Gainesville to get his degree and to be close to his father, who had taken ill. She did not say anything. She pushed her books into her ratty JanSport backpack, left, and avoided him for months, during which time he knew she was angry at him for abandoning their plan and for refusing to cut the umbilical cord, as she once put it. But he assumed she would eventually come around. She might not forgive him for returning to the man who had always treated Rashida like a gold digger, but she would at least say goodbye.

As for Rashida, when the shock of seeing Jerome subsided, when she lost the familiar scent of his sweat that conjured images of the toned boy sweating through his track uniform, and when she realized they were holding each other the way they might in the privacy of a home she once imagined they would live in together, she opened her eyes, let go of him, and withdrew. She inspected her ex-boyfriend. Grays dusted his hair, which retreated from his temples. His body, once thick with muscles put on from high school football, felt bonier now. She knew that he would age, but she didn’t expect the years to be so visible. “Think your man walked away,” Jerome said.

“Ain’t mean nothing by it,” Jerome said.

“Depends on what you got in mind.”

After all their breakups and months apart, she always returned to him in the wake of personal disaster, sprinting toward him at first sight, until she didn’t.

retained heat as though they were under a blanket. She sipped her cranberry vodka, now more melted ice than anything else, and leaned against the cool glass. And she watched Jerome jump with his fists above his shoulders, screaming along the words. He looked at home dancing to trap. Something about the heavy bass and the deep voices yelling at full reverb possessed him so that he looked more like the football player he wanted to be than the left of femme boy he never realized he was. Maybe he wasn’t the boy she remembered. Maybe this place had changed. None of the people in the room looked all that familiar. They said hello and reminisced, but the past they spoke of sounded different than the one she recalled. As Jerome walked off the dance floor and toward her, Rashida saw Peanut’s mom wink at her and then whisper to someone. She was probably sharing a rumor that would likely be passed on, and by the end of the night, it would be the same old shit: The progeny of two Palm Coast families were destined to be together. All the stories about rich marrying poor came rushing back. Rashida had heard so much about ancestors who had been house slaves, about their descendants becoming domestics, about her great-grandmother getting paid pennies in segregated restaurants as the town boomed around the railroad, about her grandmother cleaning white folks’ houses after the bust, about her mother’s drug-addicted joblessness. She had tired of the gossip long before she went to college. She had hated that people talked about her as Jerome’s charity case, and she felt the same anger welling in her stomach as she imagined them talking about her in that way today. The old frustrations made Rashida turn away to look out the window, where her half-trans parent reflection clouded her view of a masculine-looking woman she did not quite recognize.

None of the people in the room looked all that familiar.

“You fucking with me?” Jerome asked. “No, I’m mad. But you ain’t never used to say sorry.” “I done some growing since you been gone.”

“You outgrow all your old friends?” “I ain’t say all that.” “And your bad habits?” Rashida asked. “Some of them.”

“I ain’t never said you was trying to trap me.” “Be honest,” Rashida said. “You love when niggas say you lifting up the Jeromepoor.”watched Rashida chew the inside of her lip. His thumb rubbed the gold signet ring he inherited from his father, the same man who told him that he couldn’t date in high school. That did not stop him. Once he had his growth spurt, he snuck out his window and rode his beach cruiser to see any number of girls, until he and Rashida landed in the same International Baccalaureate classes and they started studying together. She never slept with him back then or even saw him after 8 p.m. because she was too busy studying, so he saw her in the hallways or at track practice. Once, his father caught them holding hands as they descended from the school bus after a track meet. His father—five inches shorter than Jerome—rushed across the parking lot, grabbed his uniform, and dragged him to the car. He shoved Jerome in and rushed to the driver's seat. His father struck him open palmed across the face, the signet ring knocking against Jerome’s cheekbone and shooting pain down his jaw. He wound up for another hit, but Jerome grabbed his wrist and slammed it into the car door with all the anger he stowed away from his father’s many below-the-collar beatings. His father froze. Jerome’s coaches and classmates were watching. Jerome let go. His father smoothed out his blazer and drove away, rolling the window down to wave to the coaches whose loved ones he had bur ied. He never hit Jerome again, but he did not hesitate to lambast Jerome for dating a girl whose mother was an addict, whose father ran away, who came from nothing and would always be nothing. His son was tarnishing the name that all the men before him had worked so hard to preserve, he said repeatedly, but Jerome never listened. Even now, Jerome did not recall his father’s lectures so much as the anger that seethed in their house, as he fiddled with the ring he once felt against his cheek, still staring at Rashida. “I’m sorry,” Jerome said. Rashida chuckled.

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Maybe he wasn’t the boy she remembered.

“Still tripping off talk?” Jerome said. “Easy for you to say.”

“You think I’m cocky.” “Ain’t nobody thinking about you,” Rashida said. “Can’t believe you still getting mad at me for other niggas gossiping.”“Youain’t the one they said was poking holes in condoms.”

Maybe this place had changed.

“Ain’t that old.” Unc laughed, then said, “You want to separate these boys before horseplay turn to fist fighting?”

“Pretty big of you to post Peanut’s bail,” Rashida said. “I just got the bail reduction. I ain’t pay out of pocket.”

Rashida with that foul mouth?” Unc said, hearing her but unable to discern her features. He hadn’t seen her since he used to hang around her mom, Leona. At the time, Leona and Rashida lived with Rashida’s grandmother. Leona never had any money, so Unc used to drive Leona back to his place to drink and get high in the hopes that she would eventually sleep with him. Unc met Rashida once when she stood to four foot six. He drove over to pick Leona up and, as he was about to pull into their home, he saw a little girl—the image of Leona—drawing in pink chalk on their driveway as a stray cat circled her. Unc pulled onto the front yard, exited the car, and said hello to Rashida, who had turned grass sprouting from cracks of concrete into crowns for her stick figures. She didn’t respond. Unc took a step and she screamed. The cat hissed. His big feet were smudging her people, she said. Unc apologized, tiptoed carefully around her drawings, and rang the doorbell. Rashida’s grandmother came to the door first, inspected him in a way that made him feel small, and asked what he wanted. Unc said he was there for Leona. Rashida’s grandmother closed the door, Unc heard some yelling, and Leona came out. They walked by Rashida, who Leona patted on the back before getting into Unc’s car. Then they drove back to his house, where they lost themselves in a weekend haze. Occasionally, Unc was lucid enough to ask Leona if she needed to go home, but Leona always said her mother was taking care of Rashida. Unc and Leona eventually fell out. After that, Unc only saw Rashida when he went to see Peanut run at track meets. On that night, more than a decade after the last competition, she looked like the ghost of Leona, the spirit of a woman not seen in years, not in Daytona or St. Augustine, not even as far as Jacksonville or Orlando. He did not know if he was hallucinating when he saw Leona’s mouth moving as Rashida said, “It’s me, Uncle Moore.”

“You remember that?” Unc said. “I “Guessremember.”somefolk still remember the old days.”

“You owe me one,” Rashida said as she walked to Jerome, grabbed his hand, and led him off the back porch. She moved so quickly that she didn’t realize their fingers had interlaced until the door creaked behind them. Jerome’s palms were slick with sweat. Her breath shortened for a moment before she pulled away.

“You still smoke?” Jerome looked down. Rashida said, “Let’s go outsideRashidathen.”walked through the crowd, occasionally stopped by people who leaned in to whisper until they saw Jerome following, at which point they let her pass. Rashida smirked at the occasional bend in the neck, signaling that they would look Jerome up and down when Rashida could not see. Then she slid open the glass door and stepped onto the back porch, where arid smoke hit her nose. Her breath was shallowing with a craving as she walked toward the backyard when Peanut yelled, “Where y’all going?”

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“We just going to smoke,” Rashida said. “Oh y’all too good to burn with the hoodlums now?” Peanut said. “You move up North and think this screen just for show?” “Ain’t nobody too good for nothing,” Jerome said. “Y’all should’ve seen this nigga in court,” Peanut said. “Wouldn’t nobody believe this nigga in the black blazer and tight slacks was the same nigga who pissed his pants in the second grade.”

“You threw in though.”

“A Jerome“Figured.”little.”looked down at Rashida. He had never seen her hair this short. She wore it straightened and long in high school, the way people said her mom used to. All the boys on the track team ogled her back then, watched as she triple-jumped, seeing the ripples through her thighs and up her body through her ponytail when she landed in the sand, a cloud of it flying into the air as her hair settled. When she was in college, she cut it to shoulder-length, and she never let Jerome put his hands in it, but she still straightened it.

“Come over here,” Unc said, “let me get a look at you. You all tall“Inow.”ain’t but five five.”

“Taller than you was the last time I seen you.” “When I was drawing in the driveway?”

“Why don’t you do it?” “These old bones too tired.”

He had seen pictures of her new style on social media. In one, he saw her with a braided, masculine-looking person holding clippers;

“Don’t forget who whupped your ass in the seventh grade,” Jerome said. “I got you back in tenth.” “I know you not talking about the time you sucker punched me. This nigga crying uncle because I had him in a headlock. Told him I’d let him out if he calmed down, and he crying for mercy and I free him and this nigga punch me in my face. You lucky Officer Macpherson got between us.” Peanut and Jerome neared each other, their voices loudening. In the corner, Unc worked the toothpick in his mouth, a strand splin tering that he tried to keep from his gums. He had seen Peanut puff out his chest and watched him get pulled into a fistfight he couldn’t handle before. When Peanut was younger, Unc was quick enough to snatch Peanut out of a scrap, though not without threatening the kids who wanted to hit his nephew. But tonight, his knees hurt. His hips ached. And he had to squint to see the two silhouettes overlapping like shadow puppets. “Simmer down,” Unc said. “They just measuring dicks,” Rashida said. “Ain’t nobody throw ing“Thathands.”little

“We wasn’t going to scrap,” Jerome said. “I ain’t got all night.” “You in a rush?” Rashida reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Newports and a lighter. She lit hers and the minty chemical taste filled her mouth. She passed the smokes back to Jerome, whose long fingers brushed her hand. She let his graze linger for a moment, her hair standing on end, and then pulled away. The nicotine turning her head light and the occasional breeze cooling her, she wandered through the sandy soil of the backyard, staying close to the house where little grew. A thick oak tree stood nearby. Weeds collected at its base and thickened farther away from the house into a thick underbrush in the undeveloped lot behind. Rashida wondered what animals slept there—what mothers guarded their kin—as the party continued near them.

“When I was younger,” Rashida said, “I used to have these images in my head. I’d be walking through FPC and suddenly I’d just see

he assumed they were dating, but he didn’t know the person’s gender. The photos of them continued for months—them in restaurants, them at drag shows, them at a beach where the sand looked grainy and the water murky—until, a few months ago, the pictures stopped.

“I“Like“Jealous?”Isaid—”ain’tthetype. Only corny niggas repeat themselves.” Rashida pulled on her cigarette and blew out, the wind flaring too hard for her exhale to plume.

“You broke up with her?” Jerome asked. “They broke up with me.” “Sorry to hear that.” “It is what it is.” “Still,” Jerome said. They were quiet for a moment, standing between the echoing music behind them and the drone of frogs coming from the undeveloped lot. “Way folks down here sniffing round you, you would think ain’t nobody know.”

Rashida kept her eyes on Jerome, but he wasn’t looking at her now.

Jerome was quiet for a moment. A wind rustled, sounding like static. Then he said, “You thinking about your mom?” “You a therapist now?” Jerome shrugged. “Ain’t mad at my mom no more,” Rashida said. “But I ain’t choose none of that neither.”

“I ain’t never had none of the airs about it other folks have,” Jerome“Mustsaid.benice.”“Ain’tniceornot

“Work ain’t never going to love you,” Rashida said. “That shit ain’t going to break up with me neither.” Rashida laughed.

“Way you talk, I don’t know why anyone would leave.”

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“Like our kids get the whole kingdom.” Rashida turned to him, but Jerome didn’t move. She followed his line of sight out into what they called wilderness, though it was little more than a plot of undevelopment. Even that was only true for now. One day, someone might buy it and build a home or raze the P section and build a golf course.

“What that kid got to inherit, anyway?” Rashida asked. “Earth ending.” “War coming.”

“Seeing someone.” “Ever been with a man?” “Yeah, but it wasn’t never that strange to me,” Jerome said, think ing of his father, who took up with a man named Leon after Jerome’s mother died. Leon worked at the funeral parlor with Jerome’s father, and Jerome had not thought much of him until one day, when he was twelve or so, Jerome saw them kissing as he peeked through a crack in the door to his father’s office. The way Leon deferred to his father’s touch, leaning his slender back against the wall as his father kissed his neck, looked strange to Jerome. But he didn’t stop watching until they separated. From then on, whenever Jerome spent his afterschool hours at his father’s funeral home, he spied on them. His father did not tell him the truth until he was sixteen. By that point, he had long since gotten used to it.

“You? Polyamorous?” “You would use the ten-cent word.” “Mr. Monogamy? Mr. I want to get married at twenty-six and have a bunch of babies?” “After you left,” he said, “I was in a bad way.”

“Then them same niggas turn around, talking about, ‘You the history. You got to marry Rome. Keep our stories alive.’”

“After Pops died,” Jerome continued, “I realized keeping our name going was his dream. Not mine. So I just tried to forget and focus on what I got to do that day. Come to realize I’m good at working. Ain’t much good at relationships, but I can put in a twelve-hour day.” Jerome looked out into the night, trying to figure out just how far his eyes could see in the dark before everything became blurry. The distance was less than he thought. The longer he kept his eyes open, the more the greenery blurred, piling into one large shadow.

“This funny to you?” Jerome asked. “Would it matter if it was? Ain’t got nothing better to offer you. What I’m supposed to say? They was right and us getting married and having kids better than you working all day? Way folk talked about us, you’d think a ring came with the deed to Flagler County.”

“You still dating old girl?” Jerome asked.

“What’s so funny?” Rashida asked. “You miss the talk, the stray cats. You miss it down here.”

“That small-town chatter,” Rashida said. “Everybody talking so loud, can’t hear nothing.” Jerome chuckled and shook his head. Rashida turned to him as he leaned against the wall tinted gray in the moonlight. He was a shadow in the shadow, a darker graphite in a drawing, visible mostly through the movement of his laughter.

Though Rashida and Jerome had talked on the phone through that time, Rashida had never mentioned a partner or a breakup.

nice,” he said. “Just is. After you left, saw a couple folk. Seeing someone now, but it’s casual, open.”

“Everybody like the beach, but that don’t mean they want to live in a “Theysandcastle.”gotbeaches in Philly?” “One,” Rashida said. “Little spit of dirt behind this Walmart on the Delaware. Seen some pigeons eating cigarette butts round there.”

“The next recession.” “Or all three,” Rashida said. “And that kid ain’t choose to be born into all of this. Got to live with all the bad coming their way without any of the profit.”

Rashida hit his chest lightly and leaned against the wall next to him. She put her cigarette to her mouth. The smoke clouding at its end narrowed to a single tentacle. A breeze pushed it into her eye, which singed until she closed it. Then she exhaled.

“Like ain’t nobody seen a dyke before,” Rashida said with a laugh. “What about you?”

“I “Ain’tknow.”the one who did drugs or fucked a no-good man. I just got the aftermath. Her sleeping all day. Never keeping a job. Apologizing to Grandma and telling her it was going to be different next week. Then the week after. And Grandma never said nothing. Just kept reading her Bible. Kept talking about Job and keeping the faith. Shit was hard to watch. Then there wasn’t nothing to see. Looking around the house and she not there. Just gone. Ain’t nobody seen her. Maybe she dead. Maybe one day she’ll turn up asking for money.” “Ain’t your fault.” “What good that do me?” Rashida said. “I still got to deal with the consequences. And I got to hear the shit people say about my folks.”

“It’s my fault,” Rashida said. “Don’t matter who fault it is,” Mae said, handing Jerome two paper plates wrapped in aluminum foil. “A wrong is still a wrong.”

Letting their hands approach the other’s may have been a capit ulation to all the small-town legends, but neither of them believed anymore in making guesses about their futures, knowing that time makes fools of all fortune tellers, as it had of them more often than they cared to remember. Worried about looking silly in front of the other, whose opinion they had come to accept did matter a great deal to them, and reminded of the inaccuracies of history’s estimates of the days to come, if indeed they were dealing with history and not mythology, they stopped trying to predict the hereafter when they got into Jerome’s car. They were too lost in their conversation to hear the music playing in the house or the men yelling on the back porch or the rhythmic stepping of feet in the party, all of which dwindled to silence as they drove away.

“You ready to get out of here?” Jerome asked. “Lead the way,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette on the bot tom of her shoe. Jerome grabbed her wrist, led her through the back porch, and waved goodnight to everyone as they kept walking. Rashida didn’t pull away, though she knew it was silly to let him guide her through the front room of Peanut’s house; it wasn’t crowded enough to lose him. But she was happy to play along as he pulled her to the kitchen, reminiscing about the old days when they were both Bright Futures scholarship kids in the big city that was Gainesville. She was so lost in the memory that she did not hear Peanut’s mom call out to Jerome and did not see Jerome stop, so she bumped into him. They caught their footing and he let go of her wrist, but they both laughed, shy grins lingering as they stood apart.

‘After Pops died,’ Jerome continued, ‘I realized keeping our name going was his dream. Not mine.’

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myself, running down that hallway. Out the door and through the parking lot. When I got to Route 100, I’d hop in a car. Gun it. Smoke coming out the tires. And then the car out the frame. Gone.”

Jerome nodded. He knew those images well. Sometimes, he lost himself in escape fantasies for so long that, when they left him, he realized he had been walking for some time and was many paces from where he thought he was. The daydreams came when with friends or alone, at school or at track meets, but they never came when he was with Rashida. He told her as much one night in college, when they tired of Gainesville and drove all the way back to Bunnell for her grandmother’s cooking, after which they sat on the hood of his car and pointed out stars. She said she felt the same. And here he was, again, the old fantasies projected onto the screen in front of him, interspersed with the occasional image of her driving him back to Philadelphia, as Rashida smoked in the shadow cast by the overhang of the gutters above.

Jerome laughed and hugged Mae goodbye, and Rashida did the same, promising Mae she would call her if she needed anything or if she was in town and wanted a good cup of coffee. Then Rashida followed Jerome out of the house, arms hanging by her side, watch ing when he looked over his shoulder to make sure she was still there. They passed two figures standing in the driveway—Peanut, who squinted to see through his failing sight, and Unc, who swore he saw Leona walking away—awaiting a chance to spy on history in the making. And after they said goodbye, Jerome and Rashida wiggled their noses, as if sniffing for the scent of what was to come. To any passerby driving down that dark street, the two would look like barely distinct shadows. The distance between them wouldn’t give any sense of how close they once were nor would it show how the two managed the space between them, speeding up or slowing down to ensure they were equidistant, though neither would pull away if the other neared. In fact, both would welcome an unexpected, accidental touch—the brush of hands swinging, for instance—and the shock of feeling that would come with it, surprising like the cooling drops felt by runners when the skies open and bathe them in their waters, reminding them that their bodies will eventually feel refreshed again. Who was to say if the shock would come from their desires or their memories, from the stories they told themselves or from the stories they heard others tell about them? History, rumor, and prophecy had commingled for so long that they never could tell the difference between them.

“Jerome and Rashida,” Mae said, “I know you not sneaking out without saying goodbye.” “We came to see you,” Jerome said. “After making such a big deal,” she continued, “about getting some of this good food on your bones.”

Sally Looks for the Promise of Spring, 2021. Collage by Georgette Baker. Courtesy the artist and Zucot Gallery, Atlanta102

BYGEastman,a.2022FarahJasmineGriffin A SEARCH FOR A SOUTHERN PAST 103

As Obery and I drive through Eastman and the surrounding area, I look at a lanky teen boy with dreadlocks and wonder if he might be related to me by some shared ancestor. Would my grandmother recognize a street we pass? Turn right and it’s named Congo Lane; make a left and it is Indian Drive. What history might those names hold? Would she have been able to tell me? I imagine if I’d had a different relationship to this place I would have enjoyed sharing the story of those road names with my husband. I have no such connection to or memory of this town or itsInhistory.theabsence of a specific place, the South to me was embodied in the very being of my grandmother. A soft-spoken, physically beautiful woman the color of cinnamon with high cheekbones and large expressive eyes that seemed to hold untold stories, Willie Lee (Turner) Carson was neither vain nor self-centered. In fact, she was selfless to a fault. My favorite phrase of hers was “let that baby be,” which she used whenever another adult chided a child for being too dreamy, or too sensitive, or some other perceived weak ness. She loved deeply. Never suffocating, her love was instead protective and freeing. At the end of my first semester in college, my boyfriend’s family invited me to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day in New York. I was so excited about the trip, but my grandmother had been hospi talized so my mother and I decided it best that I not go. Visiting her in the hospital on Christmas night, I bent down to kiss her and she whispered to me, “You go to New York.” I did and within two days I received the call to return home because my grandmother had passed Althoughaway.Ibarely remember the sound of her voice, I remember the way she said certain words: For instance, I recall ouvah for our. I don’t hear her voice, but I still feel it like an embrace. She was a remarkable cook, and we all associated her food with

Mama, my grandmother, didn’t talk much about the South, not in any real detail. I knew her father, Papa Henry, had been a share cropper before bringing his family to Phil adelphia. Those of us she loved and helped to raise, my cousins and I, all remember the same stories: a billy goat that followed her to school and ate her straw hat. How she learned to shoot and how she learned to kill a chicken. And, the one that prompts my sky observation, the time she saw a tornado in the distance, gathered her siblings, and ran to safety. To my mind these stories, meant to entertain her young grandchildren, were full of exotic farm animals (there were no goats in South Philadelphia, though some folk did have a chicken or two), and dramatic weather. At their center sat the adventurous girl she had been. But she didn’t bother to name the town or county where they lived. We grew up knowing she was from Georgia, and the state therefore held a special place in our hearts. Her siblings and some of their children re turned for family reunions and the like, but not Mama. And unlike many of the children of my generation, who went south for sum mer vacation, or to attend a grandparent’s funeral, my first cousins and I never visited “home.” It’s not that Mama didn’t travel— twice before I started kindergarten she took me on my first train trips to visit family in Florida, and we drove for hours with one of her sons-in-law to see his family in Kinston, North Carolina. She went to Detroit and Okla homa where she had relatives I’d never met.

Unlike neighborhood friends and classmates, many of whom were the children of migrants from the Second Great Migration, my mater nal and paternal grandparents were part of the First Great Migration, which started as early as 1910 and ended around 1940 and saw approximately 1.5 million people leave the rural South for cities in the Midwest and Northeast. Between 1940 and 1970, almost five times as many Black Southerners, many of whom already lived in Southern cities, relocated to urban centers in Western, Mid western, and Northeastern states. Mama and her parents and siblings came in 1923. Both of my parents were Philadelphia-born. So I am two generations removed from the South. I always envied those with closer ties. One of the many things I love about the family I married into is the closeness between the New Jersey and the Virginia branches, who still travel regularly back and forth. My hus band has such fond memories of what feels to me like a family homestead. He and his sister Linda and their first cousins have a sense of grounding in their shared memories of summers in Charlotte County that seem to bond them. Recently I accompanied him to Farmville where he eulogized his Aunt Kate. The funeral provided yet another opportu nity for his family to gather. Afterward, we joined the cousins and their spouses at one of their spacious homes, and we laughed and talked and I watched with admiration as they reminisced and lovingly teased each other.

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“That’s the sky Mama saw,” I say aloud.

It is raining and my husband, Obery, and I are driving an hour south on Route 23 from Warner Robins, Georgia, to Eastman. He turns the windshield wipers off so that I can take a photograph. It is a dramatic sky, full of majestic, gray, rolling clouds. I have come here, to Middle Georgia, to Dodge Coun ty specifically, to see and feel the land my grandmother knew: the land of her birth and rearing. The land from which she migrated at age nineteen with her parents and four younger siblings—a sister and three brothers. The land to which she never returned.

The South, embodied in my grandmother, held us together. It gave us a sense of our worth and an ethical sensibility, something culinary and spiritual—a set of values rather than a place. And yet, we, the progeny of Willie Lee, were the wayward branch in more ways than one. Bound by a fierce loyalty to each other and steadfast in our devotion to the woman we variously called Mother, Mama Carson, or Mama, we were nonetheless unchurched. In this way we were distinct from the children of some of her siblings. I was introduced to Christianity by my middle- and high-school classmates, some of whom were quite fun damentalist. My grandmother did not attend church, nor did she require her children and grandchildren to do so. Why? Also, though my grandmother married David Carson shortly after her arrival in Philadelphia and later gave birth to their three daughters— Eunice, Eartha, and Wilhelmena—she raised them as a single mother after separating from him. In later generations, we contained our share of teenaged mothers. And, significantly, we never went back to Georgia. Perhaps these things are related. I don’t know. I n 1995, I published my first book, Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative, an interdisciplinary study identifying the “migration narrative” as a prima ry form of twentieth-century African American cultural production. An outgrowth

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an extension of her love for us and the care and attention given it with her Southern up bringing. Good food was not only delicious, but also nourishing, feeding our spirits as well as our bodies. I recall feeling sorry for children who seemed reared on fast food and sandwiches from the corner store. The memory of her homemade donuts delights me even now. And I sometimes crave her lamb chops even though I no longer eat red meat. I was well into adulthood before realizing it was her tangy and sweet marinade I liked more than the actual cut of meat. She took that recipe to her grave. A few years ago I called a cousin and said, “I’m trying to make Mama’s lemonade.” He responded, “Then you are trying to make a cup of love.” Later in the conversation he said, “I’ve been chasing her flavors my entire adult life.” In our own way, all of us have been trying to hold tight to something she gave us. Mama seemed happiest when her children and grandchildren were all gathered togeth er. A satisfied smile came across her face and she’d quietly laugh at our antics. Just before I started middle school she came to live with my mother and me and became a central part of my rearing, as she had been for my other cousins. To this day, we all say the same blessing over our food because Mama taught us: “Our Father, thank you for this food that we are about to receive for the nourishment of our bodies, Amen.” It warms my heart to hear my street-smart, tough male cousins whisper this over each meal. Such a simple prayer of gratitude, for food, for life: a prayer that weaves us together and lives in us as part of the grandmother who we revered and who in some way continues to guide us, still. We all, in our own way, aspire to be like her, to cook like her, to love children the way she loved us, to be as fair minded as she was. The biggest compliment you can pay to a woman in my immediate family is to tell her she looks like Mama. (I am convinced it is why some of us forgo coloring our hair. We hope the gray will come in as soft and glistening as hers.)

Photograph of vintage postcard by Carter/Reddy

Wanting to know more about Eastman and our family’s ties there and contemplat ing a visit, I reach out to a cousin, Paul, the youngest child of one of my grandmother’s brothers. He shares my interest in family history and in African American history in general. Like my mother and me, he also grew up in Philadelphia and continues to live just outside of the city. Paul recalled finding mention of the Cooper lynching and church burnings in the book 100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginzburg and asking his father, my great-uncle Ernest, about it. Uncle Ernest was a little boy when the family migrated and had no recollection of why they left. He didn’t remember hearing stories about lynching, but he did relate the difficulty Papa Henry had negotiating with landowners. In recent months my mother, now ninety-four years old, has shared a story about Papa Henry killing a white man’s cow in order to feed his children, and told me he had to leave Eastman because of this transgression. I have no evidence that my grandmother’s family left Eastman because of racial vio lence, though clearly this was part of the atmosphere in which she lived. Apparently following the rash of violence and church burnings, many Blacks left the area. My grandmother’s nuclear family left within four years; I think one of her brothers, my Uncle Joe, given name William, left for Philadelphia first. While my great-grandfather and anoth er of his siblings migrated to Philadelphia and Connecticut, respectively, other family mem bers stayed and not only survived but thrived in Middle Georgia. Some of those who stayed acquired land, prospered, educated their children, and helped to build a strong and rich Black community of churches, schools, and civic organizations. I find my great-grandfather in the 1910 and 1920 censuses. He is listed as head of house hold with his wife, my great-grandmother Lula (whom I remember as Mama Lula), my grandmother, and first two, then later four of her siblings. In 1910, my great-grandmother is listed as mulatto, as are her three children. By 1920, the entire family is Black. I recall each of my grandmother’s siblings with warmth and fondness. My great-uncles often visited their big sister, especially on Saturday or Sunday mornings, and they called her Lee. Uncle Joe would pour coffee with cream and sugar from his cup onto a saucer, allow it to cool, and give me a sip. Uncle Ernest and his wife Aunt Anna (Paul’s parents) often rewarded me with gifts for good grades. I especially re member a prized white transistor radio. And, the youngest, Uncle George, lived just around the corner from my childhood home. We were closest to him, and my mother and I visited him frequently. Uncle George worked for the sanitation department and would honk the horn loudly when passing us on the street. I don’t remember Aunt Fannie visiting my grandmother, but we went to see her. An el egant, shapely woman with shoulder-length black hair, an expert seamstress, confident of her physical attractiveness, she was always ready and generous with advice, especially about romantic relationships: “Jazzy, always marry a man who loves you more than you love him.”

That same year, sixty-five-year-old Berry Washington was murdered by a mob because he “shot in defense of his daughter’s honor” after she was assaulted by a white man. The lynchings of Cooper and Washington took place during the infamous Red Summer of 1919, when hundreds of Black people were murdered at the hands of vigilante mobs and in race massacres throughout the nation. I am especially struck by Cooper’s defiance, but it is Washington’s attempted defense of his daughter from sexual assault that really sticks with me. I am a scholar of the Great Migration. I know and have identified the conditions that many Black people fled, but these Eastman incidents strike me in a deeply personal place and provoke a bevy of new questions for me.

Until I wrote that dedication I had no idea from where or when Mama migrated, but the fact that she had is, in part, the origin of my efforts to write about the impact of this mass movement on Black history and culture. I called her younger sister, my Aunt Fannie, who gave me the when and where, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask the why of their leaving. I often sought out information about Eastman and planned someday to visit, but it would have to be a purposeful trip. There was nothing to take me there. Eastman is in the middle of the state. It sits at least two hours from any where, Savannah to the east and Atlanta to the north. Macon is about an hour away. I’ve visited Savannah and Atlanta many times in my adult life, taken there largely for work or research, or simply to visit cities I like and see people I enjoy spending time with. Trips for work and leisure have taken me elsewhere throughout the South: Louisiana, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and most recently to Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama. On that trip, I went with friends to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, where founder Bryan Steven son explained that each pillar with a number of names listed in the same year symbolizes a massacre. I found myself unconsciously looking for such groupings of names and one stood out to me: Dodge County, Georgia. Later that day I looked up Eastman to see if it is located in Dodge County. It is. At least nine lynchings are reported to have occurred in Dodge County from 1882 to 1919. In 1882, four Black men and one woman were legally hanged following the “Eastman Riot.” The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution blamed drunken Blacks who attended a “Negro camp meeting” in Eastman, began fighting amongst them selves, and eventually assaulted innocent whites. These accounts celebrate the fact that it was a legal execution instead of mob rule. There is something deeply troubling, however, about this rendering of the story. In July 1903 an Eastman mob in search of a man named Ed Claus, accused of assaulting a white woman, lynched the wrong man. In 1919 a gang of white men abducted and killed Eli Cooper, who had been trying to organize Black sharecroppers. They set a Black church on fire, believing it to be a meeting place for planning what whites feared would be an “uprising.” Cooper’s corpse was thrown into the fire. Several other Black churches and lodges were burned as well. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cooper had been accused of “talking considerably of late in a manner offensive to the white people.” Cooper’s talk of racial equality and white fears of the rumored Black uprising led to an atmosphere of racial terror for Eastman’s Black residents.

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In The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, Donald Lee Grant writes that Cooper, “an elderly Black work ing on the plantation of A. P. Petway near Eastman, was burned to death for orga nizing Black field workers and for saying that the ‘Negro had been run over for fifty years, but it must stop now, and that pistols and shotguns were the only way to stop a mob.’” The Chicago Defender carried news of the lynching with the headline, “Church Burnings Follow Negro Agitator’s Lynching.”

of my dissertation, the book is dedicated to “My Grandmother, Willie Lee Carson (1904–1981), who migrated from Eastman, Georgia, to Philadelphia in February 1923, and her three Philadelphia-born Daughters.”

W hen I began to prepare for my trip, Paul, who has attended family reunions and keeps in touch with relatives, generously puts me in touch with more family members, including those who are still in Georgia—some in Eastman and others in Atlanta. My husband joins me on the sojourn, a pilgrimage of sorts as much informed by Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as by any of the historical research I’ve done. I seek out the roads mentioned in the census records, but they seem no longer to be in existence.

Two kind and curious librarians at the local library explain that they were probably old country roads, non-existent on current maps. They each go out of their way to help me track down gravesites and other information. Together they join a long list of librarians I have known and for whom I’ve been grateful throughout my life. Modern-day Eastman is a small, friendly town of just over five thousand residents. I am struck by a number of mixed-race children. Not that many really, but enough to stand out to me, and I think of the “mulatto” des ignation for my great-grandmother and her children and all that it connoted historically: the sexual exploitation and violence of slavery. “Times have changed,” I think. The children I see are parts of large, loving white families, out for a meal or in the nearby Target. There are colorful banners hanging from poles—a beautiful mandala with “Welcome to East man” on one and another with multicolored painted hands pronouncing “Eastman Unit ed.” They wave softly in the breeze. Outside of Eastman, on our way to lunch in nearby Warner Robins (with its young African Amer ican woman mayor, LaRhonda Patrick), I see bumper stickers and lawn signs denigrating Democrats, but I see no such partisan signage in Eastman proper. Against our will, Obery and I become immediately addicted to both the service and the fried food at Sharks Fish & Chicken Chicago Style, and near the end of our time in Eastman we find a spacious, sun-lit coffee shop, The Frozen Bean, which we wish we’d discovered earlier in our trip, as it would have become a daily stop for us. One day we visit a churchyard that con tains a cemetery. Two generations of my grandmother’s family are buried there. I am moved to see both the family name, but also the given names as they appear and reap pear throughout the generations. It seems my grandmother may have been named for one of her paternal uncles, Willie Lee. I find the well-kept grave of the only paternal (first) cousin whose name my mother recalls hear ing. She says my grandmother spoke of him with great affection. On my last day, I make it to one of his daughter’s homes, which she shares with her delightful husband. She is dressed beautifully in a flowing caftan with matching satin slip pers. They both greet me with warm embrac es: “You are Fannie John’s granddaughter,” she says. “No, Fannie John was my great-aunt; her sister, Willie Lee, was my grandmother.” She has not heard of Mama but welcomes me anyway. She and I talk about her health, and she shares what she knows of family history. She’s met Fannie John and knew my grand mother’s brother Ernest well. She later came to know Paul and they keep in touch. The well-kept home she shares with her husband is full of family photographs and surrounded by family land. She has her husband identify each photograph. They explain that theirs is the home where everyone gathers for holidays and reunions. As we leave she tells me how happy she is to have connected with a new cousin and then she relates that her eldest sister, the true family historian, has since passed away, but her youngest, who lives in Atlanta, will know more and encourages me to reach out to her. I do as soon as Obery and I arrive in Atlanta later that evening. A few days later we find ourselves in an other home, greeted by two more of my grandmother’s cousins (I am still learning the language of kinship—they’re her first cousins, once removed). They are pretty, stylish, grayhaired women, both younger than my own mother. The younger of the two has the same coloring and joyful smile as Aunt Eartha, my mother’s middle sister. One of their daughters, who has taken over the family genealogy project, is there as well. Once again, they are kind and welcoming, interested and more than willing to share what they know. In re sponse to their query I explain that, no, I am not Fannie John’s granddaughter. Fannie John had three husbands, but no children. I am Willie Lee’s granddaughter. They show me family trees and other documents related to land ownership. The family tree is detailed. At the top, our common ancestor, not a Morriso nian Flying African, but a very fair-skinned railroad man named Moses. Beneath him and his wife, Lucinda, there are four sons, one of whom is my great-grandfather, Henry, married to Lula. There they are on the tree, and under them my grandmother’s four sib lings: Joe, Fannie John, Ernest, and George. But, there is no Willie Lee. I feel an urge to establish her legitimacy. She is listed on the census, I tell them, and pull up grainy photos of the documents I’ve found. There she is, see? She is the oldest child; she has the same last name. Her name was Willie Lee, like your uncle, but her siblings called her Lee, and friends who knew her when she was young sometimes called her Billie. This tumble of words rushes out of me. I say it longing for a bit of recognition for her. I will later send photographic evidence of her existence and, yes, I admit, evidence of her beauty. Among many photographs there is one on the wall, not far from the framed family tree, from one of the family reunions, in front of the church that Obery and I visited. From the dress, I surmise it was taken sometime in the 1970s or 1980s and there, front and center, is my grandmother’s sister, Fannie John. “That looks like my Aunt Fannie,” I say. “My grand mother’s sister. They favor each other.” One of my newly found cousins says, “Yes, that is your Aunt Fannie John. She’s standing next to my Aunt Fannie Mae.” I silently wonder, “Why didn’t Fannie John tell them about Mama, her sister?”

“We will have to correct the family tree,” says the youngest of my new cousins. I am filled with gratitude that Mama may be reunit ed with and embraced by her family. We chat some more: They share stories of their family farm, tell of their pride in the accomplishment of their father, and let me know about an upcoming Zoom reunion. We are shocked to learn that Obery knows one of their in-laws, an activist minister in North Carolina. We call him and all laugh and find comfort in the fact that the world, our world, is so small. I leave Georgia the next day. I leave with more questions than answers. Why didn’t Mama talk about her birthplace? Why isn’t she on the family tree? How is it that her siblings are known to this branch of the fam ily, but she is not? Was she disappeared, or is her absence of her own making? Did she prefer it this way? With the exception of the abundant pine and magnolia trees, and the drama of a magnificent sky, I still know little of the South my grandmother left. I don’t know why she never returned. If she wants me to know the answers, I have no doubt she will steer me toward them as she continues, even after death, to guide so much of who I am and what I do.

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OXFORD FALL 2022 OMNIVORE AMERICAN 115 Photograph by Peter Fisher, from his monograph At Least I Heard Your Bluebird Sing, published last year by Pomegranate Press. Courtesy the artist

COMING UP FANCY

“They never had the camera on me,” explains David Lowman, the performer behind the Collins persona, whose disappearance through the floor appeared to ignite a streak of flames and a rapid reappearance. “Reba would be on the other side, at the end of the fire. So it looked like I traveled,” he corrects himself, “Reba traveled, in the red dress, across the stage.”

Everything moved so quickly during that pyrotechnic stunt—a magical display of transformation conceived for a song about up ward mobility. Anyone who scoured the show credits would’ve found only this thoroughly ambiguous line: “David Lowman, illusionist.”

The only kind of illusion that he specialized in was female imper 116

The ever-expanding identity of a Southern gothic epic BY JEWLY HIGHT It was truly a showbiz spectacle, the way that Reba McEntire closed each night of her ’96/’97 arena tour. That was when the crowds finally got to hear “Fancy.” By her standards, it was a low-charting single, one that had stalled at number eight on Billboard’s Hot Country chart in 1991, at a moment when she was one of her genre’s biggest superstars and most reliable hit-makers. It became the undeniable fan favorite nonetheless, so stout was the conviction and so tenacious the theatricality she brought to the Southern gothic epic. The mini-movie treatment she’d given it in the music video would define the song’s visual presentation ever after. The song itself was a survivor’s account of escaping starvation in Louisiana after her mother, abandoned by her man, scraped together money to dress her daughter up and send her out to do sex work. Its protagonist has since built quite the comfortable life for herself, that much we know from the lyrics. McEntire’s clip fleshes things out further; she plays the part of Fancy Rae Baker herself. Now a showbiz celebrity taking a cab back to the shack where she grew up, Fancy is determined to disrupt the cycle that she lived through by turning the property into a home for runaways. By the live show’s grand finale, McEntire’s ticket-buying public had witnessed umpteen costume changes, but this was the one they’d really been waiting for: Fancy’s glamorously vampy red dress. As the band played the instantly recognizable intro of portentous electric guitar chords doused in swirling delay and layered with rhythmically muscular acoustic strumming, a figure in fur strode into the spotlight on stage, mirroring the music video that filled the Jumbotrons. Arriv ing at the slyly satisfied song lyric “I ain’t done bad,” the performer threw off her coat for the big reveal of the crimson, sequined gown underneath. But not all was made evident before she sank through a trapdoor in the floor; not even fans who recognized the song’s queer potential would necessarily have known that it wasn’t her they’d just watched, but instead a drag queen known as Coti Collins, engaged in a striking, production-aided kind of passing.

Shattered Towards Me, 2021. Oil color, fragmented mirror on canvas with silver frame, 20 x 16 inches, by Mahsa Merci. Courtesy the artist 117

But what if home isn’t a place of sustenance and stability? What if it’s disintegrating around you? And what if the best thing—the only thing—that dear old mother character knows to do for her eighteen-year-old is supply her with cosmetics and a dress that shows some leg, prepare her to charm male clients, and send her away?

Gospel, blues, and r&b lineages certainly have their own traditions of enduring material, social, and spiritual hardship. Gentry leaned heavily on r&b flourishes in her original version of the song, with her swinging vocal cadence, lightly funky rhythm section, and calland-response backing vocals. And in fact, aside from a cursory cover version of “Fancy” from the white country singer Lynn Anderson in 1970—who merely sounded like she was in a hurry to reproduce

“I thank Reba, every time I see her,” emphasizes Lowman, Col lins’s creator. “I get teary eyed, and I always thank her for allowing me to live a life that I never thought I would be able to live. My dad was a coal miner on a pipeline underground and worked very hard. And I get on stage and flip my hair and make twice as much money as heLowmandid.”

clarifies that “Fancy” isn’t his favorite number to perform. “But it definitely bought me my log cabin here,” he gestures at the homey set ting shown on the videocall screen, “and it definitely bought me a new car and it bought me a condo in Ra leigh. So I love it.” I f you really want to understand the resonance of “Fancy,” it helps to not only consider aesthetic qualities, but also to get into the more crass mat ters of class sensibilities and income level. The song has had many lives over the last half century: an entry in the modern country and pop canons and a drag standard. Made famous by two straight, cis, white women—first its author Bobbie Gentry, then McEntire—it’s been notably claimed and reframed by people of color and LGBTQIA folks who’ve found it to be a sympathetic text and a powerful mirror. Gentry had already risen to prominence as a singer-songwriter and savvy showperson who brought country themes, settings, and sensibilities, along with r&b trimmings and symphonic flourishes, to pop audiences by the time she released the song in 1969. She told the entertainment magazine After Dark that she wrote it with women’s lib in mind, and by that, she meant women’s economic liberation specifically. “Fancy” has been endlessly referred to as a rags-to-riches story, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Gentry created a melo drama about how class and gender performance are intertwined; there’s no upward mobility here without a mother putting all she has into cultivating her daughter’s high-femme appeal, and the daughter throwing herself into maximizing her desirability in the eyes of men of means. It takes a phenomenal amount of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and determination for poor, rural women who’d otherwise find the trappings of femininity unavailable to them to pull that off. As scholar Nadine Hubbs explains in Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, an essential intervention in the historical nar rative, femininity is itself a middle-class construct, and one defined in deliberate contrast to working-class women.

sonation, and he’d been refining his Reba for several years by then.

The song has had many lives over the last half century: an entry in the modern country and pop canons and a drag standard.

Traditional country tropes—the saintly sacrificial mother figure; the pitiable, innocent figure of the orphan; the cautionary figure of the fallen woman; the sturdy, comforting memory of home—appear in “Fancy,” only to be pried out of their familiar, fixed positions as markers of the moral and immoral. Gentry had no interest in reinforcing such judgments; she was unfurling a tale of necessary ruthlessness and shrewd self-fashioning. A century ago, when hill billy performers started making their first commercial recordings, their repertoires were already filled with pining for the good ol’ days and the old home place. A contemporary version, the ode to the hometown, is full of familiar faces and places and dirt roads that singers know like the backs of their hands, somewhere that has everything they need to live a meaningful and fulfilling life. Any of these templates can be repositories of potent, even pernicious, nos talgia—fantasies of clinging to the comfort and stability of life within the confines of an unchanging past and a presumedly straight, white, cisgendered, patriarchal social order.

Each time the song’s chorus comes around, Fancy recounts her mother’s all-consuming goal: “Your mama’s gonna move you uptown.” The coun try music industry had undertaken a similar project with the country radio format, cycling through countrypolitan aesthetics, promoting the buying power of its audience to Madison Avenue advertisers and, by the time McEntire reached her peak cultural and commercial impact in the late ’80s and early ’90s, reflecting the middle-classing and suburbanizing of whiteness nearly as much as the rest of the nation. There was a different kind of fantasizing involved in playing at rural, blue-collar pride at a safe remove from the people who were actually living those realities. And Fancy shakes it all up with her canny, confrontational use of the charged self-descriptor: “I might’ve been born just plain white trash, but Fancy was my name.” She’s insisting on the worth that she already had before and during her rise to riches, and rejecting the condescending appraisals of those she sees as “hypocrites.”

Long before the broad popularity of Ru Paul’s Drag Race became a launching pad for professional queens, Lowman built a profitable and lasting career on the strength of this entry on his résumé; Coti Collins had been part of McEntire’s act, and “Fancy” was just as much her signature number as it was the seasoned country superstar’s. Collins concluded her collaboration with McEntire, moved on to the Vegas Strip, then Lake Tahoe, before premiering her own show at an Oregon casino, and, in recent years, bouncing between numer ous cities in the South and Appalachia. When she did “Fancy”—a highlight of a repertoire that includes knowing and committed interpretations of other McEntire hits and contemporary country, Broadway, pop, and soft rock numbers—folks understood that they were seeing a kind of meta-drag: a queen’s portrayal of a country diva’s version of a tale of escaping destitute, rural origins through the strategic heightening of her feminine appeal.

118 FALL 2022

She was still living as a boy at the time—it would be another decade before she came out as trans, queer, and femme—and she’d hurry home from elementary school, while her mother and grandmother were still at work, and search her mother’s closet for finery. There was no red gown, so Mitchell settled for a black halter number, a fur stole, and stockings, and posed in front of the bathroom mirrors.

D avid Lowman first became fascinated with drag during college in West Virginia. Before that, he lived with his Southern Baptist grandparents in a small, southern Ohio river town. He describes their household as a “sheltered” and “comfortable” one, and notes that they could afford to spring for a brand-new Trans Am for his sixteenth birthday. Two years later, though, he was ready to move

“I was a little kid, and I can say this confidently now,” she qualifies, “but I was afraid to let anybody know before: I used to dress up in my mom’s clothes and stuff and do all these music videos.”

Told that she wasn’t “college material,” her grandmother went on to complete multiple doctorates and worked into her seventies as an English teacher and librarian. She foresaw the importance of computers early on and developed programs that trained inner-city kids to use them. Mitchell’s mom had tech ambitions of her own. She spent many years working her way up from a low-paying IT help desk job to overseeing the launch of a massive online banking platform, proving how skilled she was over and over to those who underestimated her on the basis of her race and gender. During that long climb, there were times when she and her two kids were basi cally homeless, making do in a car or staying with family, bouncing from Virginia Beach to Maryland, New Jersey, and St. Louis, where they were finally able to buy a house of their own.

Mitchell remembers her mom, grandmother, aunties, and their friends gathering for crab boils that were more about mutual care than crustaceans. “I would just sit there and be a fly on the wall and listen to these women’s conversations,” relates Mitchell. “The main thematic movement was them hearing each other’s struggle, but encouraging each other [on] how to move forward. That’s in ‘Fancy,’ too. I caught those connections, because I was like, ‘Oh, there’s this whole uphold each other so we could try to get to the next better thing. And there’s got to be something more.’ And ‘Fancy’ has her coming back from having found something more.”

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“I was this poor, Black kid watching GAC on this old-ass, broken television that I was going to make work,” she recalls. Her grandmother encouraged her to listen for the rhythmic and harmonic complexity in the music of Earth, Wind & Fire, Fela Kuti, and Pat Metheny, and from there, Mitchell followed her own curiosity to country. She imagined herself pining through a pop ballad like Faith Hill in the “Breathe” video, swaddling herself in nothing but sheets with an obscenely high thread count, and stepping in for Lee Ann Womack in the clip for “I Hope You Dance,” a celestial fount of inspiration, flanked by ballerinas and children. McEntire’s “Fancy,” though, moved Mitchell to action.

Then Mitchell would arrange chairs like four-door sedan seating, substitute a boombox for a car stereo, and prop up her giant, plush Fievel, a cartoon mouse from an animated ’80s movie, in the driver’s seat to reenact the video’s opening arrival scene. “He was my driver,” she says of the mouse, “and I would tell him to pull over and hold the car, and then I would get out and reach over really slightly [to the boombox], like somebody was watching and I needed to hide it, and press play. And then the strings and the weird guitar moments and the cool harmonics would come in, and I was walking up to the house in the mirror. It was a whole thing.”

Even after her mother ascended professionally, landing in some thing like middle-class stability, and then faced a cancer diagnosis, Mitchell marveled at how she continued her tireless labor: “I was like, ‘You know you could sleep sometime and rest, right?’ But that’s also the thing to ‘Fancy.’ That’s in there too, the lack of rest.”

“The main part that I reenacted,” says Mitchell, “was this move where a lot of times in the music video, Reba stands like this.” She raises her chin, turns her face away, and gazes off. “Almost like a bust in dignified profile like, ‘I’m going to stand and you’re going to take my likeness in’ kind of thing. I always really liked that.”

There were parallels between the mother and daughter in “Fan cy,” cast off as worthless by society and left to waste away in their one-room shack, and the way that Mitchell saw her own mother and grandmother treated by the world, “because they saw them as Black and poor and not worth anybody’s time.” Mitchell’s kin took it as a challenge: “I’m going to prove you wrong.”

Mitchell veered from her mom’s path by channeling her own tech obsessions into musical instruments, recording software, and microphones. Between her late teens and early twenties, which she writes off as her “hardcore Christian, pray-the-gay-away” era, she put her musicianship to use as a church worship minister. After she set that aside and moved to L.A., she went to Hamburger Mary’s, a burger joint staffed by drag queens, and saw one of them perform “Fancy.” Though Mitchell hadn’t thought of the song in years, it hit closer to home than it ever had. There she was, taking steps toward her outward femme transformation, reminded of a protagonist who’d also left behind what she knew to fashion a new self-presentation and a more livable life. Remarks Mitchell, “You have those moments where you go, ‘Oh, oh, this all makes sense.’”

She enjoyed them, but the world treated her differently when she dressed up like that.”

a recent hit—most of the first renditions recorded in the wake of Gentry’s were by Black soul and jazz performers, including Irma Thomas, Spanky Wilson, and Rosalind Madison, although Thomas’s cut would stay shelved until much later. They each had their take on the song’s defiant statement of “white trash” self-identification.

Mitchell’s childhood grasp of what was going on in the song, and how it related to things she’d seen firsthand, was nearly as elaborate as the way she played pretend. She recognized what she calls the “code-switching” function of those glamorous going-out clothes of her mom’s: “I knew what they were for when she put those on.

Thomas, who sounded tough over her subdued backing, switched the line to “plain Black trash”; Wilson, who unspooled artful phras ing over a funky, resplendent arrangement, subbed in “plain Black girl”; Madison, in an especially hot, rollicking reading, skipped that bit all together.

L eahAnn Mitchell, an artist, engineer, and producer who works under the moniker Lafemmebear, got enthralled with the clip’s soft-focus melodrama when she was eleven. Her mind was so active that she had a difficult time sleeping, and delighted in discovering that the channel Great American Country played videos through the night.

on: “It was time to go. I was exploring my sexuality. I never did anything in the small town, because it was small and I didn’t want it to get back to my grandparents.”

Doors to exploration began to open when he enrolled at Mar shall, a mid-sized university in the mid-sized city of Huntington. He met a student who was openly gay in his dorm and got his first invitation to a gay bar. “I was a little hesitant,” Lowman remembers, “because I was very shy. I wasn’t out. And we went out to the bar and there was a drag show, and I thought it was a woman up there singing. And he described it was not a woman. So I was kind of intrigued.”

1995 © PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy120 FALL 2022

By the mid-’80s, Lowman was performing as Coti Collins, chan neling the aerobic teen-pop effervescence of Debbie Gibson and the extravagance of Broadway divas. “I felt more of a person in drag,” he says. “I felt important, I felt needed, I felt secure. I wanted to change the perception of female impersonation. I wanted to take it to a different level.” Growing up, he’d been a Top 40 listener, a fan of the middle-ofthe-road, variety show pop of Donny & Marie and Sonny & Cher.

Though he’d enjoyed the grown-up storytelling of McEntire’s re signed ballad “Whoever’s in New England” when he happened to hear it on the radio, he seldom sought out country music until it was practically assigned to him. One day, he tried on a friend’s red wig on a lark and was told that he bore a striking physical resemblance to McEntire. “I was offended, because I wanted to look like Debbie Gibson,” Lowman admits. “Now think about where my career would have been, if I was just thinking Debbie Gibson.” Gibson’s fame was already fading by the time Lowman was a rising performer in need of a new, show-stopping number for the 1994 Miss Gay National pageant, so he decided to lean into the likeness and try doing “Fancy.” That competition was the first of many times that Coti Collins would command attention in a red dress, lip-synching like she was testifying with been-there authority. She soon joined the cast of Cowboys LaCage, a club in Nashville’s touristy Lower Broadway honky-tonk corridor that featured drag. Billboards around town promoted the show, in which Collins played several different Publicity photo of Reba McEntire,

In response, one of McEntire’s managers searched for a producer who’s a Black woman to do a remix for the box set Revived Remixed Revisited. It was Apple Radio host and longtime McEntire chronicler Hunter Kelly—a witness to the tour that featured Coti Collins, no less—who made the introduction to LeahAnn Mitchell, better known as Lafemmebear, now an independent artist and producer. “I think I deserve—as a Black person, as a Black femme, as a Black woman, Black trans woman, all of these identities—I deserve to be able to change the narrative and shape it how I want to shape it,” Mitchell reflects. “And when Reba saw that, I know she was very moved and surprised in a good way that there was this connection between these fans she didn’t even know she had.”

“I definitely want to imitate Reba,” Lowman explains—he has a closet full of red ensembles made in the image of hers to back it up, including an exact replica of the two-piece pantsuit she’s adopted fairly recently. “But I do make it my own.” Midway through the song, Fancy recounts the vow she made to herself that she “was gonna be a lady someday”; Collins, in her evolving ownership of “Fancy,” is prone to play up the campy, multilayered irony of a drag queen acting out a poor woman’s aspiration to pass as a lady of higher status, looking down at herself and back up at the crowd with a bright, cunning grin.

roles, Reba included. Those ads were how McEntire—who’d already discovered that she had a significant number of gay fans, thanks to their enthusiastic response to her 1990 album Rumor Has It, which featured “Fancy,” and its Barbra Streisand–inspired cover photo—first laid eyes on her doppelgänger. Lowman was given advance notice the night McEntire bought out the venue for her team, though he says he was too young and green to be as fazed by her presence as he would be now. Collins made enough of an impression to ultimately land an invitation to join McEntire’s Starting Over tour, and apply her mastery of “Fancy” to the grandiose stunt that required a double.

Lowman’s favorite line in the song, the pivotal, proudly defiant statement of “white trash” identity, is an occasion for accentuation. In YouTube footage spanning two decades, Collins can be seen serv ing sass with calibrated gestures. She might make a show of tossing her hair over her shoulders. Or place one hand on her hip and use the other to raise her chin high. “At that point,” Lowman says, “I want to show a sense of pride, something that shows I’ve made it.”

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In a related connection, people who approach Coti Collins after one of her performances often seem like they’re collapsing any distinction between the drag queen and McEntire herself. Maybe they feel that that’s as close as they’ll get, the best they can hope for. “Not everybody will get to come up and talk to Reba,” Lowman reminds, “but they can come and talk to me, and I’m the next best thing. Everybody has a story, and everybody usually has a Reba story, and I hear them all.”

A year or two ago, TikTok was the site of another delayed discovery for McEntire and her team, although long acknowledged by her fans. They couldn’t help but notice how often her single-mom anthem “I’m a Survivor,” the theme song to her Reba sitcom, was being used by Black women on the platform to soundtrack their videos.

The Lafemmebear remix of “I’m a Survivor,” which dropped in summer of 2021, doesn’t feel as breezy as the original; Mitchell’s treatment—pensive parts from hand-played instruments laid over a firm beat with a busy bass drum pattern—suggests that there’s a toll to making it through. There are echoes of the “Fancy” narrative in this full-circle moment. That production work not only helped Mitchell buy her own house, it also altered how some of the white real estate professionals that she dealt with during the process viewed her.

McEntire picked Lowman up in her private jet, and they zipped down to Mississippi for dress rehearsals. Lowman may not have played arenas before, but he’d made a study of how McEntire entertained at that scale: “I watched her do it in a concert video and I studied every move. But the most important is getting her feelings. She told a story through her face. I always like to tie my hands down and look in the mirror and tell the story, lip-synching it just by facial movements. And then you can add your hands.”

Since he’d come to “Fancy” as an interpreter, who then became a fan, he had a certain objectivity. He considered the song’s emotional impact, and how Collins could heighten it, from a slight remove, like a film actor preparing for a role.

“I have used this Reba thing to disarm awkward moments living in the northern Californian country,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I did a song for Reba McEntire,’ and it just can shut some racism down. Look, I’m not going to lie to you. That’s a complex thing to say out loud.”

While Lowman hasn’t given much thought to the connections between how he and Fancy each built prosperity on perfecting high-femme performance, and refusing to let classist, heteronor mative, or misogynistic judgment hold them back, he places a great deal of value on McEntire’s embrace: “I’m happy that I still have a great relationship with Reba.” He once turned down an invitation to appear on Jerry Springer out of the very valid concern that the talk show’s agenda was to make a fool out of someone, whether that be him or McEntire. “I’m not going to ever do anything to disgrace Reba’s name,” Lowman says. S till, as McEntire herself proved with her indelible music video and countless award show performances, and Gentry before her through variety shows that she conceived, “Fancy” was very much television material. Its use in a lip-synch battle on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars (the McEntire version) and as fodder for Chaka Khan to sing in a friendly Cyclops costume (the Gentry version, loosely speaking) on the celebrity competition show The Masked Singer, drove home its status as a pop music standard. So did a gloomy, gender-flipping version by Orville Peck, the perpetually masked and anonymous performer who’s gained visibility on the fringes of the mainstream as an explicitly queer and aridly avant-garde country stylist, and a robust rendition with which Reyna Roberts, one of the few Black women with country record deals, serenaded a beaming McEntire herself on TikTok. By taking up “Fancy,” both performers sought to prove that they knew what came before them and could contribute something to it.

In these exchanges, Mitchell feels compelled to whip out her bona fides to establish her humanity and her professional proximity to McEntire all at once.

“The big part of the story is she did something that wasn’t socially accepted,” he concludes, “but she got where she wanted to go. And she didn’t care what people thought. She’s talking back to everybody that questions her.”

“The people like that, especially the straight people,” Lowman observes of audiences who come to drag shows. “They think it’s funny. I like to be serious in my art. But you can’t be too serious; you can’t be freaky serious. You have to have fun with it. You have to make the audience laugh.”

The Tacky South presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that examine connections between tackiness and the American South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake and the ubiquitous influence of Dolly Parton. Charting the gender, race, and class constructions at work in regional aesthetics, The Tacky South explores what shifting notions of tackiness reveal about US culture as a whole and the role that region plays in addressing national and global issues of culture and identity. The Tacky South

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Into the Sun 40, 2009. Varnished pigment inkjet print by Elijah Gowin. © The artist. Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery124

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“I gravitated toward the people who weren’t waiting around for justice,” Macy writes. These are the doers who often work outside of typical bureaucracies, “regularly travers[ing] the backroads and under-the-bridge encampments of America’s Third World.” Many are former drug users who now do outreach to peers, or nurse practitioners delivering needles and hepatitis C testing kits out of the trunks of their cars to patients in parking lots and trap houses. They are recent college graduates who grew up with parents suffering from addiction, and are now convincing local law enforcement to offer jail-based treatment instead of perpetuating the endless cycle of arrest, probation, and relapse. They are volunteers sometimes risking their own arrests, and ex-DEA agents and lesbian ministers working to create ties across divided communities.

About ten months after the residency in Virginia, Macy and I met on Zoom—she was in her home office in Roanoke, Virginia, and I was at my house in Cincinnati. Macy spoke enthusiastically and quickly, spilling over with information about her research and stories about the people she writes about, the “outsiders and underdogs.” Communities and generations have been decimated by the epidemic, and Macy doesn’t soften the truth or paint over the grim outlook—without more robust, massive structural changes at the national level, it is difficult to create lasting, significant changes. However, Macy has also witnessed a change in attitudes, which can save lives. As we discussed the radical, inspiring, and innovative work she observed on the ground, Macy said she hopes that maybe Raising Lazarus can also be used as a “guidebook” for people who may feel hopeless about the crisis: “If you read it and you’re looking

ast summer Beth Macy and I overlapped by a few days at the artist residency the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. At least, her name was on the list of residents: I hadn’t seen any sign of her—not at dinner or lunch, or walking the grounds. I asked around. Maybe she’d left early? A painter told me, “Oh, I don’t think she comes to dinner much. She’s on a deadline.”

The next evening, the setting sun turning the sky shades of silver and pink, I sat at Macy’s table with several other writers and artists, and we talked about politics, COVID, and our creative work. Macy was easygoing and a nimble conversationalist—she drank a beer and talked about writing and researching her new book, the one she was on deadline for and which she described as more hopeful than Dopesick, but still dark. Macy was warm and quick-witted, and sparked with the restless energy of a curious mind. After dinner, she swiftly headed back to her studio. She wanted to spend more time hanging out, she said, but she had that deadline. I imagined that even without a deadline, Macy would be working—she had that kind of dogged energy, a commitment to telling the story she needed to tell and finding the right words. I didn’t see her again at the residency; she likely spent nearly every waking hour writing and editing her most recent book, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. In Raising Lazarus, the follow-up to Dopesick, Macy examines the opioid epidemic through multiple threads, following the legal trials of the Sackler family, and the efforts of the activists working to hold them accountable. Macy also reports on outreach workers across Appalachia and the rural South tackling the opioid crisis with innovation and action—and trying to stop overdose deaths.

BY CARTER SICKELS

HOPE AFTER “DOPESICK”

In her reporting, Macy conveys with urgency the dire realities of the opioid epidemic: More than a million Americans have died from drug overdoses since 1996, and death from drug overdose is the largest factor in decreasing the overall life expectancy for Americans. Fentanyl, a potent synthetic found frequently in street drugs, has also caused a spike in overdose deaths. Opioid addiction also contributes to a rise in homelessness, domestic violence, and child neglect. It’s hard stuff. But running throughout the book is a shared belief that it is important to treat people with opioid use disorder (OUD) with humanity, to dismantle the web of stigma, and to understand addiction as a chronic illness.

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An admirer of Macy’s investigative journalism on the opioid crisis, I was eager to meet her. Back at my studio, I messaged Macy on Face book, and she immediately wrote back that she’d come to dinner tomorrow. She was on deadline, she explained.

Macy has been working on deadline for over thirty years. She was a staff writer for the Roanoke Times for twenty-five years, reporting on social issues and marginalized communities that led to writing 2014’s Factory Man, on economic dislocations caused by globaliza tion, and the New York Times bestseller Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, from 2018, on the opioid crisis. The Hulu TV adaptation of Dopesick, for which Macy was an executive producer and co-writer, premiered in 2021 and stars Michael Keaton and Rosario Dawson. The TV series captures the realities of Appalachia and opioid addiction with complexity and compassion, while also dramatizing the Sackler family’s role in flooding rural America with OxyContin. Macy is also the author of Truevine, which tells the story of a racially motivated kidnapping in nineteenth-century Virginia.

An interview with Beth Macy

BM: I have a slide on my presentation that’s a quote from Dan Bigg, who’s the father of harm reduction and started the Chicago Recovery Alliance in the ’90s: “Any positive change as a person defines it for him or herself is our definition of recovery.” So, it’s this idea of going to people and helping them, but not making the perfect the enemy of the good. We’re going to be okay if you’re still using drugs, but we want to help you improve your life beyond chaotic use, when and if you're ready to do that; and in the meantime, to stop the spread of HIV and hepatitis C, we’re going to give you clean needles and connections to care. Now we know that people who use needle ex changes are five times more likely to eventually go to treatment, but that’s not the goal. In fact, when I was going out [shadowing] Jessica Maloney [a peer recovery specialist at Olive Branch Ministry], who drives around to the little towns in North Carolina to check on clients, we’d meet somebody and then we’d get back in the car to rehash. I’d ask her, “So are they ready to go to treatment?” And Jessica kept saying, “No, Beth, that’s not the goal, the goal is to make them trust us because we know that the recovery can’t really happen until they buy into it. And that has to be on their timeline.” I think we’ve all been acculturated and brought up to think recovery is abstinence, and it’s not. I have been bumping on this for ten years. The people you write about are often doing difficult work on the frontlines and socially progressive work in deep red states, which seems like such a paradox. Can you give another example of the innovative, harm-reductionist care you witnessed?

Carter Sickels: Raising Lazarus is a follow-up to Dopesick. What led you to write this book? Why did you want to con tinue telling the story of the opioid crisis?

The beginning of the book isn’t the first beginning of the book that I wrote. But after my editor read [in an earlier draft] the first four chapters, she said, “You know you really do your best writing when you write about people you admire.”

126 FALL 2022

When Lill creates this cream that helps somebody get better on their own, they’re doing it not just by their own ingenuity, but also with help from addicted folks who are out there helping and foraging for these herbs in the mountains. [When I learned about this], a part of me goes, Yeah, so now we’re using a treatment invented in the Middle Ages, is that what we're up to? But [what Lill is offering] is not unlike [the approach of] Tim Nolan [a nurse practitioner who drives all over the foothills of Western North Carolina to provide clean needles and testing, his street outreach coordinated by Olive Branch Ministry]. In Raising Lazarus, Tim, with clean needles and hepatitis C testing kits, goes out to the trap house in the holler where Jordan Hayes had assembled her friends for a hepatitis C testing party. The thing is, when you get people involved in their own care, that’s really empowering. As Michelle Mathis would say, that’s when you get to experience a miracle of raising Lazarus. Can you walk me through your process? How do you balance the interviewing with writing the book? You also balance many storylines—how did you figure out the focus or how to BM:start?

BM: The hair is standing up on the back of my neck just remembering this about Lill Prosperino [a thirty-year-old nonbinary harm-reduc tionist in Charleston, West Virginia] and what first made me want to write about Lill. People who use drugs in Charleston, West Virginia, don’t even feel entitled to go to the ER when they have a life-threat ening abscess because they’ve been treated like shit so many times before. They’re stigmatized and just treated horribly. So Lill figures out a way that they can create these “drawing-out salves,” so [people who inject drugs] can heal their own abscesses. That’s a big key to harm reduction [to involve people in their own care and recovery].

Well, the hardest thing, especially with this subject, is getting people to trust you. The material is only as good as the amount that the person you’re interviewing trusts you. It took a long time to get to Michelle Mathis [and build up that trust] and then it took even longer to get to Tim Nolan.

And I thought, Well, what is the biggest takeaway from the book? And, it really is this idea of don’t disappear. You can get better, and don’t disappear. And the scene that moved me the most was following Tim Nolan and just watching him work. [Raising Lazarus now begins

Beth Macy: When I was finished with Dopesick, it was before Tess [Henry] died. [A central character in Dopesick, Tess was a young mother who was addicted to heroin and was murdered in 2017, her body discovered in a dumpster.] Then Tess died and I had to rewrite the end. I went to the funeral with Tess’s mother to be there when she said goodbye to the body. It was just so lacerating and painful, and I thought, I never want to write about this again. It was just so dark. I wanted to move on. But then the response to the book was good, and I was able to go out and talk about it. As I was traveling and talking about it at bookstores and addiction conferences and reading groups, I was starting to learn about really cool things that were happening on the ground. I initially met Michelle [Mathis], who runs the Olive Branch Ministry [a harm-reduction ministry based in the Foothills of North Carolina that offers a number of services including syringe access and naloxone/Narcan distribution] because I was speaking at a panel and she was on the panel before me, and I heard her say, “We have to meet the other side—law enforcement—where they are too.” I’d never heard anybody say that before. [Divisions between harm reductionists and law enforcement are typically stark; through years of outreach, Mathis’s “biscuits and pragmaticism had won over the local cops,” Macy writes, and began to affect the way the police treated people with addiction.] I thought, wow, how can I figure out what her secret sauce is, in terms of doing harm reduction in a rural community where it’s very conservative and there is probably a lot of hesitancy to handing out needles. And yet she’s figured out how to do it. How did that happen? I thought if I could shine a light on these little corners of inspiration and these beacons of innovation, then maybe that will help engender the political will necessary to bring harm reduction innovations to scale, to match the scale of the crisis. Can you explain what harm reduction care is and why it is necessary for fighting the opioid epidemic?

for techniques on how to make change in your community, even in a conservative community, you can get all kinds of ideas.”

I really appreciated that the TV show was clear about showing why medical treatment for opioid addiction is critical for recovery. That rarely gets presented. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about these misunderstandings about addiction and recovery that are so ingrained in our society. Something that I’ve always heard, for example, is that people struggling with addiction have to hit rock bottom before they can ever go into treatment, and I’ve learned that is a misconception.

BM: Well, first, you have to find the story beacons, and those are the people who sort of get you the entrance into it. In Charleston, I started out with Joe Solomon, who runs the harm reduction group SOAR [Solutions Orient ed Addiction Response], and then he got me to Brooke [Parker, also with SOAR], and Brooke got me to all these other people. I just met Michelle by accident, she got me to Mark, Mark got me to the people doing the harm reduction there. And, I just don’t go away. I follow up by phone, and I always have follow-up questions. I type up my own notes. I remember better what I have if I type it up myself. It’s very laborious, but it also makes me think better and see connections better if I’m actually touching every sentence. Then, I always have follow-up questions and I’ll call back and then I’ll make another appointment to come back. And, then if I’m writing about somebody who is marginalized, I always tell them, “Look, I’m going to read this back to you and want to make sure I got it right and I don’t want you to get in trouble.” A lot of reporters… I mean we’re taught not to do that. But I feel like if it’s somebody who’s never been interviewed before and they’re already in this position of feeling marginalized and stigmatized, we owe them that. Then I just try to sort out [my material] and I always just go with what moves me. That’s the only way I can make a story out of it. I figure the biggest problem [facing people with addiction] still is stigma, and we’re not going to put a dent in that until we get people to see people with OUD as human beings with a medical condition. So, I try to figure out, what are the stories? Of all the scores of sto ries that I have gathered for this book, what are the ones that move me the most? And, if I can tell them movingly and accurately, then I can help move the reader and that will help get rid of the stigma.

My two goals going in for the project were, one, that we not stereotype Appalachia. We’ve all seen it. You know, Hillbilly Elegy. And I just didn’t want somebody like Robert to see it and be ashamed. I didn’t want Dr. Van Zee [a primary character in the book Dopesick who was a doctor in Lee County, Virginia, and one of the first to question Purdue about OxyContin’s addictive qualities] to see the show and be ashamed. I didn’t want any of the folks I interviewed to be ashamed. And the second goal, and I think we nailed it, is to show that while abstinence might work for alcohol, it doesn’t work for OUD. And so, you see Keaton, an A-list actor, get on methadone and then Suboxone, and you see him in counseling.

Publicity photo

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG  127

Danny and I would have conversations on the phone with [the people who inspired characters in the TV show] and we would in terview them together. In the show, the Michael Keaton character is based loosely on Dr. Steve Loyd, who’s from Tennessee and had gotten addicted to Oxy himself. We brought Dr. Loyd into the writers’ room one day, and we just asked him everything. We asked him how he initially got addicted, we asked him all the tricks [and how he got away with it]. [There is a scene in the show] when Michael Keaton takes the forty milligrams from his patient and then writes his patient a script for eighty, and puts the extra pills in the drawer so that he can take them himself, and that scene was coming directly from Dr. Loyd.

BM: Totally a misconception. Especially in the era of fentanyl, which is in almost every drug now… Just assume if you’re buying an illicit drug, it has fentanyl in it. Everybody says that, from harm reductionists to law enforcement folks. Tess’s mom now says, “I used to believe in rock-bottom thinking too, but rock bottom has a basement and the basement has a trap door.” We can’t wait for rock bottom because it’s too often just death. from Little, Brown and Company

with Nolan urging a new patient he meets in a McDonald’s parking lot to come back for another appointment, to not disappear.]

BM: I was nervous going in because it’s Hollywood and they were throwing so much money at this and I didn’t know Danny Strong [the series showrunner] at the beginning. What is so different about writing a book is that I’m just here [in my office] with all my notes, my phone, my computer. But in a writers’ room for a TV show there are several people [writing and collaborating]. We had six people [in our writers’ room]…all with great experience, and then Danny Strong was our leader. Danny had a real vision for the story and great energy, and whenever we didn’t know something, he would hire consultants. He let me weigh in on that too. I suggested we hire Robert Gipe [Appalachian author of Trampoline] to make sure we had the language right and the parts about Appalachia exactly right. Danny would send Robert an email [with a question about the script], and Robert would give us five possible answers to the question, and the answers were all just so creative…and helpful.

That issue around stigma and shame certainly comes up in the series Dopesick. I’d love to hear you talk about Dopesick being adapted into a TV series. How did it feel to be a part of that experience?

Tim was so unflappable.…There’s something really joyful about Tim, and I think it’s because he does it out of a spiritual goodness. He is like a saint and never gets tired—his happy place is when he’s driving around after he’s worked all day long in the clinic. Then the thing with Tim was that he had discovered this little window and figured out how to reach these people, and that was really moving to me. I learned halfway into my career that I do my best writing when the values of the people I am writing about match my own. I’m writing about outsiders and underdogs. You write about people and places with such care and empathy. Can you say more about how you get people to open up and trust you?

“Anniversary Dinner Given to the Members of the Blackbirds Company,” New York Public Library Digital Collections

“In the expanse of the main dining room, we sit at the semi-circular counter, a fixture that makes its own grand statement in front of what was once the portico to the numbered departure gates. Mama Jewel and I are balanced on high stools that, when we are not engaged within each other or our meal, offer us a perspective that transcends the physical landscape. While certain things fall out of memory over time, the olfactory sense can redirect what has nearly gone adrift. As it is intended, the sophisticated retribution of an elevated pork and beans dish calls and responds to heritage, dignity, and the space between.”

128 FALL 2022

Read the full stories at oxfordamerican.org FROM THE WEB ON SOUND SIGNALS AND BLACKBIRDS OF 1928 Wikimedia Commons; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library.

“In 1928, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson starred on Broadway in Blackbirds of 1928, a musical featuring an all-Black cast. After initial subpar reviews, Lew Leslie, a white vaudeville performer-turned Broadway writer and creator of the show, added new sections, including one solo number for Bojangles. In ‘Doin the New Low Down,’ Bojangles sings and dances on a stairway as his main set piece. Bojangles did not receive wide recognition as the iconic performer he was until well into his middle age. His contributions to Blackbirds quickly became a hallmark of the show, with ticket sales tripling in number after his routine was added. The Afro-American cited the musical as a ‘sensation,’ and it was considered a highly successful Black production of the era, running for more than five hundred performances. The following year, Leslie hosted an anniversary dinner for the ensemble, attributing each of the fifteen dishes offered to a different cast member. A vague reference to hors d’oeuvres opens the meal, credited as à la ‘Monsieur Bill Robinson.’ Course three, the filet of sole, went to Mademoiselle Adelaide Hall. The dinner features a roasted spring chicken, cauliflower in hollandaise, and parsley with new potatoes. It closes with cakes, ice cream, and sweet potato pie.”

OSAYI ENDOLYN muses on shaping complex traditions, jubilation, and archival menus.

MARY EDWARD S pauses us to listen to history, memory, and atonement at The Grey.

Economy Hall

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Throughout landmark events from Haitian Revolution to the birth of jazz the organization’s members rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights all Author Fatima Shaik has crafted a meticulously researched narrative that reads like an epic novel. Buy it today at hnoc.org/ourbooks.

Follow us on social! @visit_thnoc THNOC publications are available at hnoc.org/ourbooks at your local independent bookstore.

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Named the 2022 Humanities Book of the Year by the LEH Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood chronicles one of the most important multi ethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle

The Hidden History of a Black Brotherhood by Fatima Shaik hardcover • 525 pp. $34.95

Now available from The Historic New Orleans Collection

The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood by Fatima Shaik hardcover • 525 pp. • $34.95

TITLESNEWADDITIONAL&NOTABLEFROMTHNOC

Throughout landmark events from the Haitian Revolution to the birth of jazz the organization’s members rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all Author Fatima Shaik has crafted a meticulously researched narrative that reads like an epic novel. Buy it today at hnoc.org/ourbooks.

Named the 2022 Humanities Book of the Year by the LEH Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Black Brotherhood chronicles one of the most important multi ethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle

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