Sting Like a Bee, by Leslie Pariseau

Sting Like a Bee

BY LESLIE PARISEAU

Resa “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 visitor’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.)

As people came in and out of the ramshackle 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.” 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-

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 shoulders, 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 Indians—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 respective neighborhoods, dressed in suits made of intricate beadwork and layers of feathers. They’re often described as three-dimensional, 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 historically 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 working 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.

The tradition of African Americans masking in the iconography of Native American people has been around since the mid-nineteenth century, derived from a gumbo of origins, 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 shooting, 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, ascending to big queen and eventually became recognized all over the city as one of her era’s culture bearers.

“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 Gucci.” 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 meaning of a queen to the Warriors. “A big queen should be beside the chief at all times,” Harris said. “Not behind, beside.”

When Bazile reappeared, she brought prepared 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 next time I tracked Bazile down was on Mardi Gras morning, at Kermit’s Tremé Mother-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 documentary 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 manifold, 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 participating 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. Dressing as a baby doll provided visibility on a holiday where women, let alone Black women, were relegated to the literal sidelines.

Bazile recalls the first time she saw a baby doll. She was six or seven with her grandmother in the Calliope Projects and saw the

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 consciousness; 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—listening 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.

When Bazile 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 Hurricane 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. 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. “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.

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 intersection, the Cheyenne Hunters tribe, dressed in peachy pink feathers, began to trail behind, entranced by the jovial women in satin, swinging parasols and shuffling along.

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.

When I ask Bazile what it’s like transitioning from a tradition that is entirely about women forging a path of visibility and power 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.

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 orders 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 inevitable. “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.

“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 instructions. 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 instructions 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.

UniquelySouthern. Distinctly Mississippi.

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.

JIMMY "DUCK" HOLMES, BLUE FRONT CAFÉ, BENTONIA

The Delta

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.

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.

THE CROSSROADS, CLARKSDALE

ELVIS PRESLEY HOMECOMING STATUE, TUPELO

The Hills

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 influential 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.

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.”

WILLIAM FAULKNER'S OFFICE, ROWAN OAK, OXFORD

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 experiences and exhibits. Be sure to check out The MAX’s calendar for concerts and other special events before you visit.

THE MAX, MERIDIAN

“Mississippi is a state for all those who are wanderers at heart.”

THE MAX, MERIDIAN

BIG APPLE INN, JACKSON

Capital/ River Region

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.

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 immersive walk through one of the Civil War’s most pivotal military campaigns, the siege and battle to claim the city.

OHR-O'KEEFE MUSEUM OF ART, BILOXI

Coastal Mississippi

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.

MARY MAHONEY'S OLD FRENCH HOUSE, BILOXI

Come Wander With Us

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

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 mantra 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 revealing 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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.

Leif 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.

“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.”

I always hated that little punk.

“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 do?”

“Backyard.” 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.

“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 petals 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.

“Vegetarianism, Owen? Why encourage that?”

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

“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.

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

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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 support—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.”

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.

“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 moment then put his spoon down and clasped his sticky hands together.

“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 children 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 describing 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.

Igot 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 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.

“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?”

“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.”

“Can I have specifics, please?” In response, the principal took out a file.

“He 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

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.

Back at 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.

“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.

No 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.

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.

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

“You don’t seem mad.”

“Not mad, more curious than anything.”

“Hang in there, we’ll get through to him. Love you.”

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

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

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

“Are the other kids mean to you?”

“Sometimes they call me weird. My teacher thinks I’m weird too.”

“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.

“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.

“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.

I smiled 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.

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

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 karma, 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.

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.

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?”

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

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.

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.

“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.”

The officer cleared his throat.

“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.”

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

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.

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

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

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.

“Where are you going to look?”

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

“I’m coming too.” We called his name, tramped through the overgrown 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.

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.

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

t was a late spring morning when I set out driving to the small unnamed creek in southeast Alabama 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.

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 transition zone from the mountains to the coastal plains, a place people drive through without noticing much except poverty and red dirt.

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.

One 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.

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 theft.

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. 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.

Fast-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 appeared in my suggestions. 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.

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.

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 well.”

“Forty-five years. Can you imagine?”

“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.

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

“All-rightie then,” he said.

We talked about it awhile longer and then hung up without mentioning 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.

On 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 Clinkscales’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 middle-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.”

“Who?” one woman said.

“The kid they found in that creek,” the other said.

“Ohhhhh. Yeah.”

“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.”

I asked whether someone going from LaGrange to Auburn would drive this way.

“No,” the other woman said.

“Well,” the first said, “it depends on what part of Auburn they was headed to.”

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

“Maybe.”

I wanted it to be so. I’d driven to Cusseta hoping to convince myself

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.

In 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 newspapers 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.

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.”

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.”

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? During the next two years I I think so. I’m glad I didn’t have the chance to find out. believed all kinds of stories about John and Louise Clinkscales both died convinced that Ray Hyde had my mother—stories that served murdered their son. Hyde had been a member of the Moose Club where Kyle tended bar. Maybe Kyle to explain how the mother I had seen or heard something at the Moose Club—a drug deal in the parking lot, or some loose talk about hot thought I knew could leave me cars—that Ray Hyde didn’t want him to know about. and stay hidden without even The January 27, 1996, edition of the LaGrange Daily News reads, “Just recently, Sheriff Donny Turner and his letting me know she was okay. 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 junkyard and drain a nearby pond. They found nothing, but still arrested Hyde for possession of a firearm as a felon. 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. 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. 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’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.

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 disapproving. 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’m trying 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 people 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 argument. 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.

“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 getting 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.”

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

Of 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 prosecution 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.”

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 anomaly: 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.

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.

Ileft 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 beginning 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 direction 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

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

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.

Another pulpwood truck thundered over the bridge, its wind ruffling 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 listening to automatically picked up where I’d left off. It was Alan Watts, the popular ’60s philosopher, sharing the insights of Zen Buddhism with a crowd of California hippies. The title of the talk: “Not What Should Be.”

After 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.

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.

“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 murderer who uses a rollback to drop his victim’s car from a bridge. When he looks down from the bridge railing, he notices a couple 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 cool image—something innocent to contrast the sinister man on the bridge. I kept driving toward Delta without stopping at the bridge. I didn’t even know for sure why I’d decided to come this way. Some people visit cemeteries. Once every few years I drive across Foster Bridge.

Ifound 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.

“Well,” I said, “I hate to say it, but I think somebody put that car there.”

He 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 how’d he get the car there?”

“He had a rollback.”

“Oh.”

I 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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

Several 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.

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.”

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

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 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?”

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.”

A few minutes later we hung up. Immediately I called my father.

“Can you hear me?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m driving 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,” he said with a tone of relief and maybe a little satisfaction. “Going highway speed on a back road.”

“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.

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 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.”

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

EL COQUÍ SIEMPRE CANTA

First, they clap. Then they breathe. Homecoming looks a lot like relief: a celebration, and then the freedom to exhale. I can close my eyes and chart the journey from landing in an airplane to arriving at mis abuelos’ house in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, where my mamita grew up—like a cartographer or a veteran Formula 1 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 “discovery” 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 silence: 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 treble 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

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.

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.

When 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 reggaetonero 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 acento puertoriqueño.

Hearing the music of a place, of course, isn’t unique to Puerto Rico: You can record the sounds of a marketplace 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 anthropological study—digestible, commodifiable, no longer ephemera but hardened permanence—the kind of quandary ethnomusicologists have been debating since sounds could turn into soundscapes. When Thomas Edison 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

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 recorded and mixed, altered and ahistoricized, in the interest of art-making? 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. “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, considerate 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.

If it were another musician, the coquis would lose their place—much like how Spanish singer Rosalía’s use of reggaetón 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 environments) 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.

In Lorde’s case, unlike Santos’s, she allows the expert rhythm of cicadas (which some entomologists have compared 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 separate 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.

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 destabilizing 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-option 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.

Idon’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.

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.

I cry out of adjacent homesickness when I hear a recorded coqui almost as much as I smile.

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 psychology, 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 connection 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.

In 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.

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

Letter on Space & the Body

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

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

“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.

“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.”

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 Anthro- pocene, 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.

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 inherited 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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

I counted seventeen Although I still had a fake ID, I only drank occasionally back in those days. I was still distancing myself from alcohol red-tailed hawks perched because of the incident at Northern Illinois. Nonetheless, I liked to spend my evenings taking in the nightlife. I found in the trees along the myself spending lots of time at random little coffee shops, dive bars, and clubs. I enjoyed spectating and occasionally performing at writers’ nights, poetry interstate as I stared out readings, and karaoke bars. The people I met were almost always friendly. The Southern charm and warm hospitality the window of the car, were intoxicating, and I was really leaning in to my new life. I had only been in Nashville a couple and I took it as a good omen. 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 Gucci 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. 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.

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 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 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.

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.

“Well, let’s hear what you got.”

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

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 criticism—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.

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

They smelled gossip the way they smelled rain.

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 precipitation 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, shadowed 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?”

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

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

“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.”

“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 response. 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.

“Chill, God,” Jerome said.

A voice yelled from the corner, “Peanut, throw them dice.”

“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.

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

“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.

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

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

Peanut threw the dice. Because he could not make out the numbers, 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 conservatively.

“Peanut, who was that?” one of the men in the corner asked.

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

“You better tell him,” Peanut replied.

“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.”

“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’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.”

“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.”

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.

“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 picking up their kid smashed into her classroom at Buddy Taylor. She probably pissed herself.”

“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.”

“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 looking 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.

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

“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.”

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

“She off limits.”

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.

“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.”

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

“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 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.

“Boy, you always had a one-track mind,” Mae said. “Go on. She over there.”

“I’m coming back though. Ain’t leaving without my plate.”

“It’ll be here.”

Jerome walked into the front room, where one of Peanut’s Jamaican 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.

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

“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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Jealous?”

“I ain’t the 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.

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

“Whatever.”

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

“Depends on what you got in mind.”

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.

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.

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

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

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-transparent reflection clouded her view of a masculine-looking woman she did not quite recognize.

“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.”

“You ain’t the one they said was poking holes in condoms.”

“I ain’t never said you was trying to trap me.”

“Be honest,” Rashida said. “You love when niggas say you lifting up the poor.”

Jerome 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 buried. 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.

“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.”

Maybe he wasn’t the boy she remembered. Maybe this place had changed. None of the people in the room looked all that familiar.

“You still smoke?” Jerome looked down. Rashida said, “Let’s go outside then.”

Rashida 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?”

“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.”

“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 splintering 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 throwing hands.”

“That little 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.”

“Come over here,” Unc said, “let me get a look at you. You all tall now.”

“I ain’t but five five.”

“Taller than you was the last time I seen you.”

“When I was drawing in the driveway?”

“You remember that?” Unc said.

“I remember.”

“Guess some folk still remember the old days.”

“Ain’t that old.”

Unc laughed, then said, “You want to separate these boys before horseplay turn to fist fighting?”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“These old bones too tired.”

“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.

“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.

“Pretty big of you to post Peanut’s bail,” Rashida said.

“I just got the bail reduction. I ain’t pay out of pocket.”

“You threw in though.”

“A little.”

“Figured.”

Jerome 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.

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

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

“You still dating old girl?” Jerome asked.

“Jealous?”

“Like I said—”

“I ain’t the type. 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.”

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

“Seeing someone.”

“Ever been with a man?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t never that strange to me,” Jerome said, thinking 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.

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

“Must be nice.”

“Ain’t nice or not nice,” he said. “Just is. After you left, saw a couple folk. Seeing someone now, but it’s casual, open.”

“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.”

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

“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.

“Work ain’t never going to love you,” Rashida said.

“That shit ain’t going to break up with me neither.”

Rashida laughed. “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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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 know.”

“Ain’t 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.”

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

“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.

“What’s so funny?” Rashida asked.

“You miss the talk, the stray cats. You miss it down here.”

“Everybody like the beach, but that don’t mean they want to live in a sandcastle.”

“They got beaches in Philly?”

“One,” Rashida said. “Little spit of dirt behind this Walmart on the Delaware. Seen some pigeons eating cigarette butts round there.”

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

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.

“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

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

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.

“You ready to get out of here?” Jerome asked.

“Lead the way,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette on the bottom 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.

“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.”

“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.”

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, watching 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.

Letting their hands approach the other’s may have been a capitulation 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.

“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 County 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.

Mama, my grandmother, didn’t talk much about the South, not in any real detail. I knew her father, Papa Henry, had been a sharecropper before bringing his family to Philadelphia. 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 returned for family reunions and the like, but not Mama. And unlike many of the children of my generation, who went south for summer 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 Oklahoma 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 maternal 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, Midwestern, 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 husband 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 opportunity 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. 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 its history.

In the absence 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 weakness. 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 hospitalized 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 away.

Although I barely 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

an extension of her love for us and the care and attention given it with her Southern upbringing. 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 together. 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.) 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 fundamentalist. 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.

In 1995, I published my first book, Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative, an interdisciplinary study identifying the “migration narrative” as a primary form of twentieth-century African American cultural production. An outgrowth

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.” 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 anywhere, 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 Stevenson 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 themselves, 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.

In The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, Donald Lee Grant writes that Cooper, “an elderly Black working on the plantation of A. P. Petway near Eastman, was burned to death for organizing 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.” 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.

Wanting to know more about Eastman and our family’s ties there and contemplating 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 violence, 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 another of his siblings migrated to Philadelphia and Connecticut, respectively, other family members 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 household 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 remember 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 elegant, 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.”

When 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” designation 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 Eastman” on one and another with multicolored painted hands pronouncing “Eastman United.” They wave softly in the breeze. Outside of Eastman, on our way to lunch in nearby Warner Robins (with its young African American 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 contains 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 reappear 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 hearing. 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 slippers. They both greet me with warm embraces: “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 grandmother’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 another 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 response 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 Morrisonian 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 siblings: 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 grandmother’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 reunited 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 family, 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.