Swamp Fire Stephanie Singletary

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES

SWAMP FIRE

STEPHANIE SINGLETARY

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008

The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Stephanie Singletary defended on July 2, 2008.

______Diane Roberts Professor Directing Thesis

______David Kirby Committee Member

______James Kimbrell Committee Member

Approved:

______R.M. Berry, Chair, Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

For Mom and Dad

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my major professor, Diane Roberts, for her guidance and support, and for our Friday meetings at All Saints. I’d also like to thank David Kirby and Jimmy Kimbrell for serving on my thesis committee. I would like to thank my family for the countless hours they spent on the phone with me and finally, I would like to thank Jason for his endless encouragement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT…...... vi

PART I…...... 1

A Selective Love...... 2 A Fifth of Lord Calvert...... 6 The Indian Garden ...... 10 Saved by Jesus ...... 17

PART II...... 24

Camels and Chickens...... 25 Dad Tells Stories...... 31 Fifteen Months in Iraq ...... 39

PART III ...... 44

Like a Board Game ...... 45 An Entirely Different Family...... 50 Swamp Fire ...... 53

PART IV ...... 62

Lily’s Ghost ...... 63 Her Eighty-Five Years ...... 67 Christmas at John’s...... 72

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 79

ABSTRACT

My thesis “Swamp Fire” began with the essay of the same name. After I wrote this essay, I decided to do a nonfiction thesis and began asking my family questions. I wanted to know about my parents’ struggles, about how we ended up where we did. The answers often surprised me and created new questions. I learned about the lives of my parents, then grandparents, then great grandparents and as the pieces came together, I realized that my family history is much richer than what I had assumed. There is still so much to say, so much to write and perhaps my initial vision was too ambitious for a thesis. As of now, my thesis works as a beginning, a draft, a road map to what will become a much longer manuscript. “Swamp Fire” is the thesis version of the book I want to write about my family.

PART I

A Selective Love

I grew up in Lafayette County, Florida, down a lime rock road that wound its way like a snake through swampland and planted timber. Our yard was a rectangular acre of land plopped in the middle of the woods, in what seemed a sanctuary of nature. Deer ate Mom’s roses and mother quails skittered through the edge of the yard, the chicks following close behind in a single file. In the spring, the woods become impossibly green. The grass grows faster than we can mow and the sweetgums burst with star shaped leaves. Our yard becomes littered with lyre leaf sage and tiny purple flowers. Dragonflies zip through the air. At night, bats swoop through the yard, eating insects. Whippoorwills call out their distinct song, frogs croak, crickets chirp, lightening bugs twinkle and raccoons sneak onto the front porch to eat the dog food. My younger brother Cody and I watched them once through the glass of the front door. They looked up at us, still grabbing the round pellets with their deft hands, as if daring us to try and stop them. At the end of the yard, Mom hangs birdfeeders for the cardinals and finches and she mixes sweet red nectar for the hummingbirds. She hangs the hourglass-shaped feeder from the mimosa tree and watches the tiny birds from the kitchen window. But not all creatures are so welcome. There are mosquitoes so thick you’re forced to stay indoors or wear DEET. There are yellow flies, which are meaner and faster than mosquitoes ever thought about being. There are black bears and snakes and gators and bobcats. We don’t see them very often, but we knew they’re out there and we don’t treat them kindly. Our love of nature is selective. Once we pulled into the yard in Mom’s brown Buick—which she swears was burgundy—and there was an armadillo digging holes near the rose garden. Mom stopped the car and popped the trunk, where she kept her twenty-two rifle. My older brother Michael, who was ten at the time, loaded the gun and shot at the armadillo. He missed and the armadillo charged after him grunting. Michael jumped onto the hood and we laughed at him from inside the car. Moccasins and rattlesnakes get the same treatment if they appear within a mile of our house. We shoot them, or run them over with our vehicles, their guts popping out of their tube- like bodies.

One summer Michael was mowing the lawn and found a three-foot alligator in our kiddy pool. My grandfather came over from next door and caught it, securing its jaws with duct tape. He drove down the road and released it in Bear Bay, a creek just a quarter mile away. I was surprised that he pardoned the alligator, but perhaps gators are his weakness. A few years later he brought scraps to another gator in the bay that he called Bear Claw. * My siblings and I became experts at extermination at an early age. When Monica and I were five and six we rolled in the clover patches that erupted with fluffy white blossoms. We’d lie on the ground, our blonde hair intertwined, and look for shapes in the clouds. But the clover also attracted honeybees, so we caught them with Merita bread bags and smashed them inside the clear plastic with our little fists. We thought they deserved to die simply because they were bees, and bees sting. We killed other pests in the yard such as Georgia thumpers. They are the largest grasshoppers I’ve ever seen, growing to three or four inches long with big black eyes, big enough to look up at you and grin. Their jumping legs are long and bent, spiky with black and yellow stripes. Michael, Monica and I lifted them with our badminton rackets and tossed them in the air. Then we whacked them, their yellow guts splattering our shirts and leaving residue on the knitting. Mom said they were eating the lilies, so we felt it a necessary extermination. At my grandparents’ house next door, bumblebees had burrowed into the wooden beams of their shed. So we took a plastic yellow baseball bat, tapped on the beams to stir them, then swung at them as the emerged, angry and flying erratically. We took turns, made a game of it. We had years of playing Little League and treated it like batting practice. We hit the bees with loud thuds, their fat black and yellow bodies falling to the ground, still buzzing until we squashed them with a twist of our shoes. Later Michael taught Monica and me how to kill tree frogs. We caught them on the front porch where they gathered to eat moths attracted to the porch light. We cupped them in our hands and peaked inside at our little POWs, making sure they hadn’t escaped. Then we took them to the bathroom and filled a blue aluminum cup full of scalding water and dropped the frogs in one at a time. They died instantly, their arms and legs extending fully like pot handles. They became dark green, posed and stiff. They looked like plastic soldier men.

We were the kings of those woods, deciding what would live and what would die. Deciding what was beautiful, what had value. But I felt guilty for killing the frogs and was glad we flushed them down the toilet to get rid of the evidence. Their deaths served no purpose. * Dad took Monica and me squirrel hunting one time. We parked the truck on the side of the dirt road and walked into the woods. I let Monica carry the BB gun and walked alongside them. I’m sure we were too loud, whispering to one another and crunching on sticks and leaves, but Dad was spending time with us. We didn’t really care about the squirrels. Michael was good at shooting squirrels. He would shoot three or four of them and clean them in the yard, their soft and fuzzy brown tails collecting in a pile. Then he’d bring their small, slick bodies into the kitchen to fry them. Mom says my grandmother cooked them for her when she was little. Dad likes them smother fried with onions and gravy. The squirrels and birds are just target practice, Michael says. He says that when you shoot enough of them, you become a better aim for the real thing: deer hunting. People come from all over the county, and some from out of state to hunt in those woods. You can hardly drive the three miles of dirt road between our house and the highway without having to brake for one. They sprint through fields cleared of timber, their white flag tails erect. They come into our yard to eat the flowers and into my grandfather’s garden to eat the peas. When our family kills a deer we make jerky and sausage, and we deep fry venison nuggets and eat them with Tiger sauce and cane syrup. During season, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks drive by our house daily. Each truck has a dog box full of deer hungry hounds with orange collars, and a driver dressed head to toe in camouflage. Guns fill the racks inside the cabs. I’ve never really liked deer hunting. I have no problem with killing animals to eat them, but I don’t like the sport of it. The mounting of heads and antlers, taxidermic trophies that somehow prove masculinity. Dad has never kept antlers, but Michael and Cody have a few. Michael says that he’s going to kill and eat the deer anyway; he might as well have a token of his efforts. The worst part of deer hunting is the use of tracking dogs. They get lost and left behind to wander the dirt roads, their ribs becoming more prominent each day. When I was sixteen, I kept a bag of dog food in the trunk of my car for this reason. When I spotted a lone dog, I pulled my car over and poured out a small pile of kibble, hoping it would buy the dog a few more days.

I’d seen enough brown and white hounds dead in the ditch, not from being hit by trucks, but from starvation. They become the true casualties of hunting, their deaths slow and painful, much crueler than that of the frogs, less dignified than that of the deer. The closest I’ve ever been to a deer was when one broke its leg in front of our house. It was running from the dogs whom we heard howling in the distance. It leapt, but didn’t make it over a barbed wire fence. I walked over to it with Dad and sat down beside it. Her leg was completely snapped, hanging on only by the skin. I patted her head between her erect ears, trying to calm her down. Her fur was soft and warm and her eyes were big and black, a mixture of panic and peace in them. She must have known it was all over. Dad told me to walk away and he slit her throat to end her misery. Then he took her to the back yard and hung her by her back legs on a two-by-four that’s nailed between two tree trunks just for that purpose. I watched as he sliced into her belly, her innards falling into a metal tub underneath. Then he skinned her, the tan and white fur and skin ripping away from her body, revealing the red muscles underneath. He cut through the muscles in her neck, made his way to the bone. As he worked to decapitate her, I stared into her eyes. They were still big and black, but they were empty. She was no longer a deer then. She was now flesh and bone, a meal hanging in our yard, no different than a slab of meat in a butcher shop.

A Fifth of Lord Calvert

Dad says that Mom chased him around like a banshee Indian. They met at the Jiffy store where she and her mother, Granny, worked and Mom swears that from the moment she saw him, she knew he was the man she was going to marry. Mom was rail thin with feathered bangs and was setting up a Christmas tree in the front corner of the store. She couldn’t stop staring at my Dad, so he finally waved at her on his way out the door. Mom and Dad ran into each other occasionally after that. But because of their age difference— Dad was twenty and Mom was fourteen—they didn’t really date at first. Instead, they’d sit on the bleachers together at the ballpark and talk. Eventually, Dad was allowed to drive Mom home after work. She closed up the store with Granny and Dad had fifteen minutes to have her home. One night Dad was standing in the doorway of the store waiting on Mom to finish up. He had recently broken his leg while shingling a roof and was leaning against the frame of the door. Mom’s father, Papa, showed up drunk and began talking loudly to Granny. He called Mom a whore. Dad looked up at him and said, “Well that doesn’t say much about the man that raised her.” Papa stumbled over to Dad and punched him. It was a sloppy punch, but Dad lost his balance, grabbed onto Papa’s shirt, and they both fell onto the asphalt. They wrestled around on the ground, one man drunk, the other with a broken leg, until Papa grabbed Dad by the throat and said, “I’ll kill you.” Dad didn’t want to hurt Papa since he was drunk and since Mom was watching the whole scene, so he pulled Papa’s hands behind his back to control him. In the process, Papa’s arm was broken in two places, just below the shoulder. Dad says you could hear the bone snap. What happened next could have kept me from ever being born. Papa pulled out his pistol, and aimed it at Dad’s head. By then Dad was standing by his red truck and he glanced down at the twelve-gauge shotgun he keeps in the front seat. But he decided to get in the truck and drive away. When the cops showed up later to arrest Papa, Dad didn’t press charges. Mom was forbidden to see Dad after that. She must have known things would go this way. This is how everyday was at home. *

Mom grew up in the same woods as we did. Her family moved to Mayo from Jacksonville when she was about four and moved into the same trailer we grew up in when she was nine. She tells us about climbing the same bent-over oaks. About fishing in Bear Bay with her brother and sister. I always imagined that she grew up the same way we did, but when I ask her to describe her childhood, she simply says, “Hell.” She describes the change as gradual. Perhaps it was her awareness that was gradual too. For vacation, the family went camping at Golden Head State Park and after school Papa took Mom bass fishing at Koon Lake. The two of them would paddle out into the middle of the lake and spend all afternoon together. I imagine her sitting in the tiny boat next to Papa, surrounded by lily pads and cypress knees. This was the happy childhood she should have had. But things didn’t stay this way for long. Mom says everything was fine when Papa was sober, but when he drank, he turned into someone else. Someone who was angry and did strange and violent things. During dinner, Papa threw plates of food on the ceiling. Even now I won’t sit next to him at Thanksgiving. He has an aura, his rage brimming just below the surface. Mom says Papa was easily set off, and just to prove that he was angry, he tore through the house like a tornado, turning over lamps and tables, cutting up the new couch and chair with a pocketknife, setting the bathroom door on fire with lantern fuel while my grandmother was inside. Eventually, Papa drank a fifth of Lord Calvert every day and these episodes occurred more often. They became normal life. Mom says she just got used to it and tried to stay out of his way when he was home. When he wasn’t home, he was at the bar gambling away most of his paycheck on poker. The only money Granny ever got from him was what she grubbed out of his pants pockets when he passed out. And every year when the income tax return came, Papa and his brother Gordon would go up to Thomasville Georgia, where they grew up, and wound up drunk and in jail. This was their annual tradition. “It’s a wonder he didn’t kill nobody and nobody killed him,” Mom says. Papa hung out with a whole gang of drunks, and his friend Bill died in the bar from a blow to the head. The bar Papa frequented was segregated: whites in the front room, and blacks in the back room with the pool table. If Papa wanted to play pool, he’d take out his pistol and run everyone out of the bar. Papa and his brother Gordon both liked to mix alcohol with firearms.

When Mom was five, she slept on a bed in the hallway. One night she woke up to go to the bathroom and Papa and Gordon were fighting at the foot of her bed. Gordon was trying to shoot himself and Papa was trying to take the gun away from him. Mom had to pee the bed. Papa threatened to commit suicide once too. He locked himself in his bedroom, his pistol loaded, Granny on the other side of the door, frantically trying to get in. Then she heard the blast of the gun. She called out to him, “Doug?! Doug?!”, but he didn’t answer. He hadn’t shot himself, but instead shot a hole through the window. He sat in the room quietly and Granny cried outside the door. I wonder if she also felt a sense of relief. I don’t understand how Granny lived this way, but I guess things were different back then. Mom says that Granny’s mother insisted Granny marry Papa because he was a preacher’s son, and threw away the love letters Granny received from the boy she really loved. Granny wasn’t an affectionate mother. She was quiet, reserved. Mom says she felt like Granny was “just there” in the background. She worked a lot at the Jiffy store and tried not to upset Papa. She caught the brunt of anger and though she didn’t fight back, she still sported the occasional black eye. Granny did try to leave a few times. She would gather her three children and go to her mother’s house. Then Papa would apologize and beg her to come back home. He told her he had changed, that things would be different. He told her everything that a man like him tells his wife and children. Mom begged Granny not to go back home and I can’t imagine asking my mother to leave my father. Or knowing, even as a child, that it would be best for the family. But Granny went back every time. I guess we all have to decide what we’re willing to put up with, what we think we deserve. * Soon after Papa forbade Mom from seeing Dad, Dad’s father died of a heart attack. Mom went to see him against Papa’s wishes and when he found out, he showed up at Dad’s house with his trusty pistol at his hip and took Mom home. The next day, Papa invited Dad over for dinner. The entire time they dated went like this. Papa alternated between death threats and dinner invitations depending on how much he’d had to drink.

My parents decided to get married since it was actually easier than to continue dating. They wed August 27, 1980. It was three days after Mom turned sixteen and Papa still had a sling on his arm for the wedding.

The Indian Garden

I walk through the six-foot gate and into my grandparents’ garden, passing the rows of peas and turnips to the row of squash. My grandmother is squatting on her toes, gathering the yellow crookneck vegetables in a metal bucket that rests beside her. Her baby blue housecoat skims the top of the dirt, and in this position she looks much smaller than her 5’8” frame. I am carrying a royal blue encyclopedia, opened to the word “Halloween.” “See,” I point to the text. “It’s not about devil-worshipping.” Granny glances up at me. “I don’t trust that book,” she says, continuing with her work. “But, it’s the encyclopedia!” I say. “The only book that’s for certain is The Bible.” I should have expected this response from her, but I was only thirteen at the time, still young enough to think I could change her mind. * My grandparents’ names are Frances and Douglas Sellers. They are Mom’s parents and I grew up next door to them. Frances wore her hair in braided pigtails, which my sister Monica and I referred to as tangles when we were little. We had so many grandmothers at the time—two grandmothers and three great grandmothers—that we called her Granny Tangles to differentiate. Douglas became Papa Tangles and the name has stuck ever since. Granny and Papa Tangles both grew up on farms so it seemed only natural that they would start their own garden. Papa was raised on a vegetable farm in Ochlocknee, Georgia and Granny was raised in the same house she lives in now. Her family used to farm the entire space between her house and ours. There were dozens of acres of peas and corn, okra, squash and melons. Her parents, Evelyn and Harry McCray, were produce suppliers for the grocery stores and restaurants for nearby Cross City. Granny and Papa Tangles’ garden is on the same soil, but it’s much smaller, about one acre. They grow corn and tomatoes, eggplants, okra and squash. Butterbeans, acre peas, collard greens, potatoes, turnips and rutabagas. The field had remained untilled for ten years. I asked Papa why he decided to start the garden again. He said, “Because I got hungry.” * The day I brought the encyclopedia to Granny in the garden was in the year of their first harvest. She had always hated that my mother allowed us to celebrate Halloween and I was

10 there to tell her about the Celtic tradition, how they dressed up to ward off evil spirits that might ruin the harvest. I was going to tell her that I’d protect the garden with my pirate costume. But, I decided against it. Mom made us help out in the garden after school that year. Like Granny, Mom grew up working the field with Papa Harry. Mom adored her grandfather and loved working alongside him, picking peas and okra for ten cents a bushel. I guess she thought we would find the same pleasure in it. It was fun at first. It was something new and I liked planting potatoes with Granny. She showed me how to cut off the eyes of the potatoes and place them facing down in the small holes Papa made. But when it came time to harvest, I quickly changed my mind. I hated being out in the sun, working under Papa’s critical eye. He told Monica that he didn’t like the way she was weeding, to which she replied, “Then do it yourself.” I felt the same way, and learned that the easiest way to get out of the work was to complain until Mom could no longer stand listening to me. “I don’t even eat peas,” I said. “And I hate butterbeans.” I complained about the dirt under my fingernails. I said that I hated picking squash because the leaves made my hands itch. Eventually she sent me home, yelling something that was supposed to make me feel guilty. She probably said, “You do whatever the hell you want to.” I did feel guilty, but not enough to keep me from walking home and watching TV. I realize now why she was so angry. For her, and for Granny, it was simply a part of responsibility. Children were supposed to help out on the farm. She was trying to teach us the value of hard work. * For most of the year, the garden becomes the center of my grandparents’ lives. Papa is happy to have something to do since he retired. He even bought a tractor and he rides it around like a giant blue prize pony, cranking it up and driving it around the yard for everyone who comes over. He keeps himself busy with plowing and planting, daily watering and finally the harvest. The garden yields enough to freeze a years worth of vegetables for Granny and Papa and our family of six. And they still have some left over to sell at the Jiffy store and some to give away at church. Each time I visit Granny and Papa now, we sit on the back porch and gaze out into the yard. We have little to talk about so they tell me about the garden. The eggplants are

11 getting big. The tomato vines are full. The corn is growing tall. They offer me frozen bricks of vegetables in Ziplocs from their freezer. Granny hands me acre peas and butterbeans and a jar of homemade fig preserves. But the only thing I’m interested in is the creamed corn. It’s my favorite crop from the garden and I know it’s better than any corn I can buy in the store. I also know it takes the most work to prepare. It’s Dad’s job to cream the corn each year. He sits on the back porch for hours with bucket after bucket of field corn and sweet corn. Piles of empty green husks form around him, building the bottom layer of what will become a monstrosity. Next he removes the silk. He uses an electric drill rigged with a scrub brush to clean the stubborn strands that cling between each row of kernels. They fly off in every direction like tiny strings of spaghetti. Then he cuts off the tops of the kernels with a sharp knife, the white and yellow heads falling into a bowl in his lap. And finally, he scrapes out the starchy insides of each kernel with a butter knife, the juice splattering his shirt and face as it drips down the knife to join the kernels. Corncobs are left strewn about the yard after the dogs run off with them, scraping the last of the sweet juice with their teeth. * Granny Tangle’s mother was named Evelyn, but we called her Meme. She was Native American and had high cheekbones and long, impossibly white hair that she pinned down with bobby pins. She once told my mother of an Indian burial ground near Bear Bay, a creek that runs under the dirt road just a quarter mile away. I’ve always wondered about it as we pass by the creek each day, but Mom says that that’s something you shouldn’t mess with. I’ve asked Granny several times what kind of Native American Meme was. She replies, “Two-legged.” We both laugh, but I wonder why she doesn’t care, when this is her heritage too. When the question also means, “What kind of Native American are you?” and “What kind of Native American am I?” Granny’s sister Iris says Meme’s father was either half or three quarter blood, a mix of Apache and Cherokee. Mom says Granny doesn’t think of herself as Native American and I wonder where my own fascination comes from. People have commented on my own cheekbones since I was young. Mom is in now in her forties and where most people have gray hair, hers is as white as Meme’s. She says it’s her Indian blood. She says she’s always bragged about her heritage, attributing her “meanness” to being part Apache.

I grew up pretending that I was an Indian. After a long rain, the yard would stay covered with two inches of water. The ditches would fill up two feet deep and the small pit of natural gray clay in the field beside our house became slick and alive. Michael, Monica and I made fist sized balls of the clay to use as “Indian soap”. We washed our T-shirts with it, pretending we were doing laundry on a riverbank. We thought that was what Indians did. We covered our arms and legs with the smooth slippery soil that dried in the sun and crumbled on our skin. We looked like elephants. Behind our house was a small swamp that stayed dry most of the year. But it too became full of water. We would drag Dad’s green fiberglass johnboat under the barbed wire fence and paddle it out into the water. We waded through our temporary swamp, guiding ourselves between trees with long sticks, like Sacagawea, catching tadpoles and crawfish with nets. My most important goal though was trying to find arrowheads. I searched for them in the woods near my house, thinking that they somehow made me more Indian than I was. That they would serve as evidence of my elusive heritage. I’ve walked along the dirt roads and trudged through recently logged fields in search of them, but I’ve never found one. Papa finds them frequently. He uncovers them each time he tills the soil. They appear on top of soft mounds of dirt, unearthed like little treasures, the flint skillfully crafted into a triangle shape with ridges along its sides. And though the garden has changed a lot over the years, the arrowheads seem to be the only thing consistent, as if the soil magically produces them for us to find, a tangible token of our past. For this reason, I’ve always thought of the garden as an Indian Garden. Papa collects the arrowheads and displays them proudly inside the house. He has dozens of them of all different colors and sizes. Some are lined along the railing of the back porch. Some sit in the curio cabinet among Granny’s collection of bells. But the best ones are mounted like antlers and hang in their living room. Granny’s family has farmed this land for generations and I can’t help but wonder how old the arrowheads are. And I wonder about the people who made them. So I asked Granny to tell me everything she can about her family, where they came from, what they were like. She said, “I’ve never been interested in my family history.” * I remember visiting Meme in her yellow house on highway 51 when I was very young. I swung on a wooden swing that hung from a tree by Rascal’s pen. Rascal was her fat, black dog

13 with matted hair that she loved like a child. She lived there until the accident. She pulled her car out in front of a semi truck and was so broken and bruised that Mom says she didn’t recognize her in the hospital. After that, she moved in with her daughter Iris. When Monica and I were older, we went to Iris’s to “baby-sit” Meme when Iris had to be away. We fixed her iced tea and sandwiches and brought her sugar-free Klondike bars from the freezer. She couldn’t get around very well and spent most of the day sitting in front of the TV, watching the news. She began sentences with “back in my day” and talked about how parents don’t spank their kids anymore. She said about her own kids that she “beat ‘em till their eyes bled.” Meme lived with Iris for several years, then moved to a nursing home in Mayo for the last year of her life. Mom urged us to visit her there. I only went a few times. I pulled into the parking lot and checked the time, told myself thirty minutes would be sufficient. Then I walked into the nursing home, faked smiles at everyone I passed along the way, hoping that they had great granddaughters that visited them too. Even if they were as reluctant as I was. Meme was happy to see me and she smiled a full smile that made her cheeks round under her eyes. Granny Tangles has the same smile. I had to have known she would die in that nursing home, but I didn’t like to think about that. I didn’t realize then how much I would be losing. She was my connection to the heritage that my family never cared about. She could have answered the questions that no one else seems to know the answers to, or are reluctant to share. On her deathbed, Meme told the secret of her own mother’s death. She was very young and her mother was pregnant. Upon childbirth, her mother’s baby was quickly taken away from the room and no one ever saw it again. Meme’s mother died that day, soon after the delivery. With her last breaths, Meme said that her father was responsible. That he’d asked the doctor to give her mother something to make her die. I guess she meant he poisoned her. She also believed that her cousin Lillian was really her sister; that Lillian was the missing baby who’d been taken away from the room the day her mother died. Meme wanted the family secrets to be known. Perhaps this was her loyalty to her mother. Her attempt to keep her alive through telling this story. Iris has a box full of notes Meme wrote, “a box of scribbles” she calls them. There are countless sheets of loose paper with difficult handwriting. Meme tried to chronicle her family tree. She wrote poetry and music, jotting down what she could remember of the songs of her father’s people.

* I asked Granny Tangles to tell me about her life. This is all she said. When she was little, it was her job to milk the cow before school. Then after school she worked the field with her brothers and sister Iris. She tells me about sewing skirts and dresses out of flour bags and feed sacks. In the summer, she worked in tobacco fields to make extra money to buy school clothes. Her life, and her family’s life, revolved around the farm. When I asked her to tell me about Meme, the first thing she said was, “She was a good mother. She whipped us a lot.” Meme worked in the field alongside Papa Harry, disciplined the children, kept the house clean, did the laundry and ironing and cooked for the family. Granny told me about the family fishing trips to the Steinhatchee River. They cleaned the fish on site and fried them over a campfire. This seems to be her fondest childhood memory. Granny says she doesn’t remember much else from those days. Mom says she probably doesn’t want to remember. That some things are easier to forget. I didn’t know Meme very well, but it seems there was a side to her I never knew about. Or at least a side of who she was a very long time ago. On her deathbed, other secretes emerged too. Her children had gathered to say their goodbyes to their mother. They reminisced about the old days, both reminding and revealing their secrets to one another. Mom tells me that one time, Meme beat Granny and locked her in the corncrib. That she may have beat Granny to death had one of her sons not intervened. When I ask Granny about this, she tells a different story. She says it was a Saturday and she and Meme had gone to town. The store clerk gave Granny a piece of candy, and Meme thought she stole it. The clerk insisted that he had given it to Granny, but Meme didn’t believe them. As punishment for lying and stealing, Meme locked Granny in the corncrib. “She checked on me every hour or so,” Granny says. I prod her to continue, ask her for more details. She replies, “It’s nothing that needs to be written about.” This is the response I get to every story I’ve heard about Meme. Stories of madness. Stories of her trying to force herself onto her sons. Stories I’ve overheard through hushed whispers, the details sworn to secrecy. I wonder if this is the family history Granny isn’t interested in. *

Last year Granny and Papa didn’t grow their garden. Papa’s arthritis was flaring up and he wasn’t physically able to. But this year they’ve returned right on schedule. And while I’ve never shown too much interest in the garden before now, the thought of it not being there is troublesome. It feels like the end of something. Something much bigger than the corn and squash and tomatoes. Like my connection with my great grandparents and generations before them, however weak it was to start with, will soon be gone. And if my parents decide not to pick up where Granny and Papa leave off, someday after they retire, then this will be the end of a way of life for my family. The Indian Garden will grow over with weeds and this history I’m trying to uncover will remain with the arrowheads, buried deep in the soil.

Saved by Jesus

I asked Papa about his drinking. I was surprised at how easily the question came out, and even more surprised at his willingness to talk about it. Papa says he started drinking at an early age and he didn’t quit drinking until 1989, when he was saved by Jesus. It was March fourth and he’d been up all night drinking. He was home alone and watching television and he says God started talking to him through the preacher on TV. Papa prayed for forgiveness and in the twinkling of an eye, he was sober. It was very scary, he says. He went from being so drunk he couldn’t walk to being dead sober, and he never drank again. While I’m sure Papa’s sobriety was a blessing, it was also a curse. He went from mean drunk to mean Bible-totin’ Christian. He won’t hesitate to lecture you on God and Heaven and going to church. I guess he feels entitled to do that now. * Before Papa sobered up, Mom kept a distance between him and us. She didn’t want us to see the man she saw growing up. Papa says he’s glad we never saw him drunk back then. He’s glad we were too young to remember him the way he used to be, before he got sober. But my brother Michael, who’s the oldest, does remember seeing Papa drunk one time. He was about six years old and he went with Granny and Papa to Hilliard, near Jacksonville, to visit Papa’s parents. On the way home, Papa looked over at Granny from the passenger seat and said, “You don’t love my Mamma.” Granny protested that she did, in fact, love his mother. “No you don’t,” Papa argued. I imagine his alcohol breath, his scrunched-faced look of disgust I grew up seeing. Granny was driving and began sobbing, “I do love her, Doug. I do.” The two went back and forth like this and Michael crawled underneath the seat and plugged his ears. * “Papa’s family weren’t nothing but a bunch a drunks,” Mom says. His parents, my great- grandparents, were Alma Lee and George Washington Sellers. They made homemade beer and wine on the farm, and the family drank and partied all weekend. But just like Papa, his father George was saved and got sober. He even became a preacher. He was an illiterate man, but after he was saved he was able to read the Bible. “God gave him that gift,” Papa says.

My great grandparents had a sort of Romeo and Juliet ending. Alma had been admitted to the hospital and George thought that she was going to die. He knew he couldn’t live without her, so he went home and shot himself in the head with a shotgun. Alma was released from the hospital the next day, a widow. Soon after that, Papa moved a trailer onto his property and Alma lived there for a couple of years. My sister Monica saw a similar episode as Michael when she stood with Granny and Papa as they watched the movers place the trailer at the end of the yard. Papa said to Granny, “I’d do this for your mamma, so I don’t know why you have a problem with it.” “I don’t have a problem with it,” Granny said. “You’re only doing it cause you know you won’t backtalk me,” Papa said. Papa always accused Granny of not liking his family. He even blamed her for the death of his brother Gordon. Since Papa and Gordon always got so drunk together, and always fought when they were drunk, Granny didn’t want him living in their house. Gordon wound up moving to New York and died homeless on the street. * I don’t know if I ever met my great grandmother Alma before she moved next door to us. I was about eight years old and it was strange to get a new grandparent. We called her Grandma and when we visited her, she gave us butterscotch candy from the glass dish on the kitchen counter. For Christmas, she gave me a string of fake pearls and a bracelet with seashells. When we visited, we’d sit on the floor and watch TV with her. She always put her robe on over her nightgown because she thought the people on TV could see her. She lived there for only a year of two. Mom says she grieved herself to death, that she had lost the will to live without her husband. She refused to drink water and died. * I have only a few childhood memories of Granny and Papa Tangles. Monica and I used to go with them to Alton Church of God when were nine and ten. Granny would pick Monica and me up and take us back to her house and wait for Papa to finish getting ready. He was always in front of the bathroom mirror, shaving or fixing his hair that was dyed and permed. The house was dark and smelled sweet from Granny’s homemade bread. On the dining room table, there was fudge, nut cake, coconut cake or whatever she had baked that week. Underneath the kitchen sink, Granny had crates full of canned soda and in the living room, there

18 was a candy jar full of Hershey’s kisses. Granny always had something sweet for us. On the way to church Granny gave us fruit flavored Certs and after church we went to the Jiffy store to get ice cream. But sometimes Papa wouldn’t allow us to go to church with them. One time we were sent home because we didn’t eat breakfast before we came over. Granny gave us brownies but Papa didn’t approve. Another time Papa sent us home because he didn’t like the dresses we were wearing. Mine was green and Monica’s was yellow. They were lacy with white bows and we adored them. They were hand-me-downs from our cousins and they were the best dresses we ever owned. Monica and I were sent home crying. Every holiday I can remember went this way too. Papa would pick on me about something until I was in tears and running the quarter mile home. He yelled at us for climbing the cedar trees, for letting the porch door slam or for getting a Coke from the fridge without his permission. This is how I remember every Thanksgiving. I don’t think of the turkey or ham or pumpkin pie, or playing football in the yard with my uncles. I think of how much I hated Papa. * I moved away from home six years ago and I don’t visit Granny and Papa Tangles very often. The only time I do is when Mom urges me. Last year, she guilted me into going because Papa was having heart problems and his arthritis was so bad he had subtly threatened to commit suicide. She told me teary-eyed that it might be my last chance to see him. I still didn’t want to go, but I thought that I’d more likely regret not going, than going. It was a Sunday afternoon, so Granny and Papa were sitting on the screened in back porch, fresh out of their church clothes. Granny and Papa were sitting in matching rocking chairs on each side of the back door. They were surprised to see me, but they didn’t get up, so I leaned against the frame of the screen door. “How’s school?” Granny asked. “Oh, it’s good. I love it actually,” I said. Then we all were quiet, looking out into the yard. The pear trees were full, their limbs bending with the weight of the solid fruits that would soon fall. Red hummingbird feeders hung from the branches. “See my hummingbirds?” Granny said. I nodded, then wondered why she claimed ownership of the tiny birds. It was the same routine every time I went over. We all stared out into the yard quietly, occasionally breaking the silence with routine observations. Papa would talk about the garden soon.

Then he would want us all to walk through the rows together. I would shadow his slow steps, my feet sinking into the soft gray dirt, and listen. He would tell me which crops were growing well, which were plagued with insects. Then he would offer me some okra or corn and I would refuse twice. The third time I would give in, say thank you, and Papa would send Granny to the shed for a bucket. But this time our routine didn’t occur. “Wanna go to church with us tonight?” Granny asked. “No thanks. I need to drive home soon. I have a lot of homework,” I lied. I put one hand on the door. I could have kicked myself for going there on a Sunday. “Why don’t you want to go to church?” Papa said, his eyes scrunched in concern. It seemed the question he was really asking was Why are you a bad person? I was caught off guard and scrambled for what to say in return. As many times as things like this have happened, I always come back thinking that one day it will be different. I promised myself a long time ago that I wouldn’t let him of all people, judge me. Normally I would have said, “maybe next time”, or something as equally passive. This is how I’ve been taught to respond to Papa. To be meek, reserved, to accept that “Papa is just being Papa.” But this time I didn’t. “Why would I want to go?” I said. I was preparing a long list of reasons why I hated their church, bad memories, insults, things Papa had done that I’m sure he didn’t know I knew about. I was ready to call him a hypocrite. I took a deep breath and held it. “Because the Bible says…” he began, and didn’t stop for several minutes. He was well prepared, but I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t listen. Instead I stared at the yellow side paneling of the house. I kept my eyes moving so the tears wouldn’t gather and fall down my cheek. Then I looked at Granny, but even she wouldn’t help me out. I stood stone faced until he was done. My list was gone. I had forgotten everything I was going to say. I said goodbye and left quietly and thought that perhaps it was better that way. * About a year later I called Granny and Papa on the phone. I’d never called them before, but I was doing research on my family history and I felt safer talking to them on my cell phone from Tallahassee with an eighty-mile buffer between us. I was surprised that I was able to ask them such bold questions. When I asked Papa about his drinking, I realized as the words escaped my mouth, that I was no longer scared of him. We were both adults.

I asked him about getting saved. I asked him about his family, where he was from, about his time in the Army. We talked for about an hour and at some point, he asked me, “Why do you want to know all of this?” “I just want to know why we are who we are. How we got here,” I said. I was referring to how our family got to be farmers in those woods. How, of all places, we ended up in Mayo, Florida when both of my parents began their childhoods in Jacksonville. But when he asked me to elaborate, I said jokingly, “I wanna know how we wound up poor folk living in a trailer in the woods.” I even chuckled as I said it. I must admit that this was what I set out to discover months ago, long before my research led me into something greater, into questioning my heritage and the life experiences of my parents and grandparents. The more questions I asked, the more questions I had, and the more I realized I knew nothing about my family. I went home to Mayo a week after the phone call. Mom said that Papa wanted to see me and told me I should visit him since I was in town and they lived right next door. Everything inside of me was screaming for me not to go, especially after how the last visit went. But I went anyway. I pulled into their yard, opened the gate and walked up to the house. Granny was sitting on the back porch in her rocking chair and Papa was taking a nap in their bedroom. I was relieved and hoped that I could spend time alone with Granny and then leave before Papa woke up. But I wasn’t that lucky. He joined us on the porch a few minutes later and began what he thought would be a subtle way into the conversation he felt we needed to have. He was standing by the screen door and I was sitting in a rocking chair in front of him. He told me a story about finding a book on the side of the road years ago. He and Granny had passed by it several times and finally said out loud to one another that if that book was still there when they passed by again, they’d pick it up. It was a condensed Reader’s Digest with an article on the pioneer women of America. Papa described to me the images of mud huts with no floors, descriptions of a way of life much harder than his or mine had ever been. Papa said that God wanted him to find that book so he’d realize how much he had. He was giving me a lesson on materialism and appreciation, not unlike the “there are starving children in Africa” lesson you get when you don’t finish your dinner. He was giving me the lesson you give a child.

My face grew hot as I sat there listening. I wondered how long he had spent planning this conversation, thinking he could teach me something about the world. Thinking he had some wisdom to pass on to me. And as he talked, I remembered that he records every phone call made to his house and he had probably replayed our conversation from before, picking out details to use as ammunition against me. I remembered when Granny called me at Christmas, asking me to meet her in town to give me my secret Christmas present with money Papa doesn’t know about. She talks in code, living a life of constant supervision. Papa was going on and on about how he had to learn to appreciate what he had. How he felt he had so little, until he found that book. How there was so much more to life than having nice things. “Yes, I get the point,” I said, raising my hand to stop him, my palm facing his direction. “Is this why you wanted me to come over here? So you could tell me all of this like you planned?” He was taken aback by my abruptness. “I didn’t plan nothing. I say what I mean and I…I don’t come at nobody backhanded or sideways,” He said. “And who told you I wanted you to come see me? I didn’t tell you to come over here.” He stared down at me, a scowl on his unshaven face. I sat with my arms crossed, my foot tapping. “You think that if I didn’t leave Jacksonville that I would have made more money and y’all wouldn’t be living in that trailer,” he said, pointing his crooked finger at me as he talked. “Well if I’d a stayed in Jacksonville, then y’all wouldn’t be the same people as y’all are now. Your Mamma might’ve turned out to be a drug dealer for all we know.” Right then I realized what was wrong with him. It was guilt. This was the guilt he’d been carrying for years. Guilt for being a drunk and gambling away money. For never being a good father or husband. Papa was towering over me and I reverted back to my teenage self. I hated every second of being on that porch and I realized that I couldn’t recall a single moment spent with him that I’d enjoyed, not a single fond memory of him in my lifetime of being his granddaughter. I rolled my eyes at him, trying not to cry, taking in his raspy voiced criticism like tiny arrows. “You’ve got your butt on your shoulders. That’s what’s wrong with you,” he said. “Yeah, well I get it from somewhere,” I said. “Oh, you get it from me, huh?” He mumbled something else, then walked out the door and into the yard. “I’m done with this!” I said and stood to leave.

“Don’t leave like this,” Granny said from her chair beside me. “I’m sorry, but I’ve had all I can take.” I slammed the porch door and sped off in my car, squealing my tires down the driveway. * The next day Granny called me from work to apologize on Papa’s behalf. I was back in Tallahassee in the Publix parking lot, back to my safe distance. “Papa didn’t mean for that to happen,” she said. “I don’t think either of you were representing yourselves very well.” I knew she was right, but for some reason I still wanted her to take my side. She wasn’t calling from home, her words weren’t being recorded. I wanted her to stand up for me for once, to say something besides, “Well, you know your Papa.” I wanted her to say acknowledge, just once, that Papa was wrong. That he had always been wrong. But, perhaps this is all she knows. This power structure that seems the core of our family. Papa’s tyranny, his expectation of unconditional loyalty and respect. And perhaps my expectations have been unfair. I had hoped that Granny and Papa could talk about the past and I honesty thought they’d be flattered at my attention. At my interest in their lives. I’ve never really talked to them like this before, inquiring no longer as a child, but as an adult. I hoped this would be a way for us to be closer, to form some kind of real relationship. Perhaps this is too much for both of them. Knowing that their grandchildren are no longer ignorant of the past. That we know all of the secrets they’d hoped would go away with time. All I wanted to do was document the lives of our family. To write down the details, to learn about their struggles, to recover anything that could count as family history. To learn more about my grandparents whom I’ve never been close to. My grandparents to whom I’ll never be close.

PART II

Camels and Chickens

My Dad left for the Gulf War in January 1991. I was six years old, and too young to imagine the bombing of Baghdad or the burning oil fields of Kuwait, the boiling black smoke of those inextinguishable flames. I just knew that Dad was going to the desert and we didn’t know when he’d come back. Mom had recently given birth and was left to take care of the four of us; Michael, Monica and I were nine, five and six, respectively, and Cody was just a few months old. Mom was working at the state prison in Madison, a forty-minute drive away, so we spent a lot of time with my paternal great grandmother, Granny Willis. Granny Willis also looked after my three cousins Fred, Misty and Renee and she somehow managed to keep the seven of us in line. When she wasn’t cooking for us, cleaning up after us or tending her flowers or chickens, she sat in her recliner in front of the television watching The Price is Right and The People’s Court. She spat tobacco snuff into an empty vegetable can filled with paper towels, and if we got too rowdy, or said dirty words like I did, she’d look at you calmly, and through a mouth full of snuff and false teeth she’d say, “Go cut me a switch.” Granny’s house was white with a tin roof and a long porch with wood floors painted blue-gray. We used the porch as a hockey rink, using five gallon buckets, cane poles and golf balls we found in the neighbor’s yard. To the right and behind the house were fields of pines. To the left was a cane field where Michael and Fred dug a four-foot hole in the center and covered it with a sheet of tin. This became a popular place for hide and seek. We ran full out chasing one another, our bare feet beating paths into the field, the cane towering above our heads, the long green leaves making our arms itchy with tiny cuts. Some of the stalks came out solid white, an anomaly among the green, and we thought they were special, that they had some kind of magic. Between the house and the cane field was a huge pecan tree with a tire swing and the front yard was full of trees and flowers. I pretended I was Mary from The Secret Garden as I traipsed through the yard full of Granny’s carefully arranged plants. There were roses and periwinkles. Altheas, pink azaleas, red and white camellias, wisteria, impatiens and daffodils. Honeysuckle, phlox and black-eyed susans grew wild in the perimeter of the yard, attracting

masses of butterflies. There were orange monarchs, black and white zebra longwings and giant swallowtails. Monica and I caught them with our hands and carefully pinched their tiny heads, enough to kill them without disturbing their general shape or causing damage to their winds. This was an idea we got from seeing Granny’s coasters, which were clear with butterflies sandwiched between the glass. I guess we thought we’d display our butterflies somehow, but once we’d collected a dozen of them, we didn’t know what to do with them. So we left them in a pile on the ground. The ants ate their bodies, leaving behind just the wings that blew away in the wind. * At the center of our entertainment were Granny’s chickens. There were twenty or so of them in a coop in the corner of the yard. In the morning before school, I took a coffee can full of feed and scattered it on the gray dirt inside the pen. Then I walked among them as they pecked, collecting feathers from the ground, often tempted to pluck them straight from the chicken. There were black and white speckled ones and deep orange ones. But the best were the rare shiny ones that were so green they were almost black. Next, I gathered the eggs. This terrified me at first. I walked into the small tin shack with rows of nesting hens, tiered like bleachers, with each hen staring at me as if they knew I was stealing their children. I lifted the hens with my hands, separating mother from offspring, and pulled out the warm, brown eggs from underneath. I cradled them all the way to the kitchen, treating them more like baby chicks than breakfast. Dad says he ate green omelets for breakfast when he was overseas. Breakfast came in large metal packages shaped like casserole dishes and they dropped them in a trashcan full of hot water to warm them. Then they opened the containers with a can opener. He had to attend breakfast if he wanted lunch, as MREs (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) were distributed then. Each MRE came with an assortment of items. There was some variation in the food, but each pack came with cocoa or fruit punch, Taster’s Choice instant coffee, creamer and sugar, chewing gum, a rough napkin/toilet tissue, salt and pepper, a moist towelette, matches and a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce. There was a main dish like chicken and rice or beef stew and there were crackers with peanut butter, squeeze cheese or grape jelly. My siblings and I ate a lot of them when we were older. Dad would skip meals while on National Guard duty and bring them home for us. We took the brown plastic package with us as we wandered the woods, pretending we were lost and the MRE was all we had left in order to

26 survive. We used the matches to start a fire and divvied up the meal. The best MREs had Charms candy and dehydrated fruit. The peaches were a square block as dry as Styrofoam, but came to life on your tongue, the saliva magically turning the crunchy orange boards back into food. * At Granny’s I climbed the chinaberry tree that hung over the edge of the chicken coop. When a chicken ventured close enough, I shot chinaberries at it with a slingshot. The chicken would squawk and jump three feet in the air, confused by its invisible attacker. A few hens were allowed to roam the yard with a peep of chicks following close behind. Granny constantly warned us, “Stay away from them biddies or that mamma’ll flog you.” We stalked them anyway, hoping to catch the fluffy brown chicks without getting attacked by the mother’s talons, but we were too scared to get close enough. Dad told me that he caught a goat when he was away. He and five other men from the National Guard shared a large tent together. They were attached to an Army unit, but were isolated in their own area, fenced in with barbed wire. He said they took turns on guard duty, but had a lot of free time and nothing to do. So they played cards and told jokes. Dad caught the goat on a dare. He tackled it to the ground, and then threatened to eat it, just to see the horrified look on his friends’ faces. The only things we successfully caught at Granny’s were insects. At night, we’d sit on the porch by the electric blue bug zapper and catch the giant beetles attracted to the light. Then we’d go into the kitchen and take down the tin can from the windowsill above the sink. It was full of rubber bands and strings Granny saved from the top of the chicken feed bags. We’d take out the longest strings in the can to use as a leashes for the beetles, our pointy-footed POWs. * My seventh birthday passed while Dad was away, so he sent me a letter with seven riyals. The money looked much different than the green and white bills I knew and I was fascinated by the yellows and purples, the geometric designs, the picture of King Fahad. Mom sent Dad the only thing he ever requested—Charmin toilet paper—and he sent what treasures he could. Once Monica and I received perfume that smelled like roach spray. It came in a black aerosol can and since the writing was in Arabic, it may have in fact been Raid. The curves of the letters were beautiful, forming the name on the label. We walked around Granny’s yard spraying our arms and chests, feeling like exotic Arabian princesses,

twirling in circles with our arms stretched out beside us. We used every drop of that stinking perfume. Dad called when he could, often in the middle of the night, and we talked to him in order of birth; first Michael, then me, then Monica. But Monica rarely talked to him. When Mom offered her the phone she simply shook her head and cried. I asked Dad what he said to us on the phone. “What can you say?” he said. “I asked y’all how school was going and your Mamma told me about work and Cody. And that was it. Just small talk.” The only thing I remember from all of our conversations was when Dad told Monica and me that we were under the same sky. So Monica and I sat on the wooden front porch steps at home and blew kisses to the stars. In case he didn’t come home from war, Dad wrote each of us a short letter saying goodbye. I didn’t read mine until a few years ago. My letter was dated 10:10 pm 2nd of February ’91. Dad said I had a love and concern for others, a tender heart and the ability to express feelings without words. He told me to help Mom, to keep peace within the family with my understanding ways. He said that I reminded him of himself, the way we looked at the world. He said, “I wish I could have been there to see you ‘shine’.” To Michael, he said to take care of the family, to be the man of the house. To be a good influence for Cody, who never got to know his Dad. He told Monica that she was special. That she was different than the rest of us. He didn’t write a letter to Cody who was only two months old when he deployed. “What do you say to a baby?” Dad said. * At Granny’s we played a game of war with the pears. We divided up on either side of the house and threw the rock hard fruit at one another, aiming blindly. We threw them as hard as we could but they rarely cleared the house. Instead they’d hit the roof with a loud thud and then roll down to the ground. Granny came out of the house with her hands on her hips and said, “Y’all better quit that!” We also threw magnolia pods at each other. They look so much like real grenades—their green spiky bodies, thick stems and perfect, handheld size—that it just seemed natural to hurl them at one another. We gathered them in little piles and ambushed each other. I liked to play boys against girls; the boys were older and bigger, but there were four of us and only two of them.

One afternoon Michael and Fred were in the field behind Granny’s house shooting birds with a BB gun. Monica was following close behind them, shouting, “Fly away birds, fly away!” and waving her arms to shoo them. Michael turned around and yelled “Shut up!” and as he turned, accidentally shot her in the arm. She fell to the ground and Michael saw the blood on her shoulder soaking through her purple sweater. He carried her back to the house and Granny sat her on top of the hamper in the bathroom and applied a towel to her wound. I remember the blood squirting out with each heartbeat in bright pink waterfalls, gushing down her arm, softly splashing on the floor. It was more blood than I’d ever seen. Monica sobbed, “I don’t wanna die! I don’t wanna die!” I stood behind Granny and I prayed that she would be okay. I prayed that Dad would be okay too. That he wouldn’t get shot. That he’d come home soon. Mom stopped at the Jiffy store to get gas before taking Monica to the emergency room thirty miles away. Granny Tangles was there trying to keep Monica calm. “I’m gonna bleed to death!” she repeated, and Granny told her that she could have some of her blood. The BB had hit an artery in Monica’s shoulder. The doctor stopped the bleeding and stitched her wound, but was unable to retrieve the BB. He would’ve had to make a large incision to fish it out, leaving Monica with an ugly scar. But since the BB wasn’t toxic, the doctor simply left it there, thinking it could be removed later after it worked its way to the surface. The next time Dad called, Mom said, “Monica got shot—” and the phone call was disconnected. Dad didn’t know what to think, didn’t know if Monica was okay, or if she was even alive. It took only a few minutes for Dad to get reconnected and hear the whole story, but he says it felt like much longer. Seventeen years later, that BB is still there. It never worked its way to the surface and instead has moved from her shoulder to her back. You can see it in her x-rays, a tiny round spot, her own little souvenir of that time in our lives, the time we were children without a father. * After six months, Dad’s deployment was over. That’s what I remember most: his return, and the boxes and boxes of stuff he brought back from the Middle East. There were brightly colored prayer rugs with pictures of peacocks and mosques, Pepsi cans with Arabic writing, bags of desert sand, an assortment of strange rocks that were green and red and looked like dried Play- Doh. There were coins and paper money, MREs, a brass incense burner shaped like a genie bottle and rolls of undeveloped film.

When he was gone, it was strange to imagine him on the other side of the world. We could have just as easily imagined him on another planet. But when we developed the pictures, everything became real. The blue and cloudless sky. The camels, just outlines in the endless sand. The helicopters, like black dragonflies flying overhead. Dad in uniform, a soldier called to duty, his nametag reading “Singletary” across his chest.

Dad’s Stories

Recently, I went home to visit my parents in Mayo. I arrived around five o’clock and parked my car in the front yard. I pulled my new mountain bike out of the trunk, the front wheel detached, the back seats collapsed forward for it to fit. Then Dad helped me to reattach the front wheel, something I had only done once since I bought the bike the week before. We loaded up our bikes in his pickup and drove three miles down the dirt road to the highway. We knew better than to ride on the dirt road; if a vehicle passed us, we’d be covered head to toe with a fine white dust of lime rock. I am twenty-four and haven’t ridden a bike in about ten years. Monica and I used to ride down the dirt road every summer. When we were in elementary school, we’d ride down to Pickle Creek, with a plastic shopping bag full of oranges from Uncle Punk, Granny Tangles’ first cousin who lived down the road. The oranges were plump and juicy with skins that were dull orange and paper-thin. At the creek, we gathered sticks and built a bridge across the small stream using mud and rocks as mortar. The bridge wasn’t successful, but we kept trying. We rode home at dusk eating the oranges, spitting out the seeds on the road, the juice running down our chins. When we were older we rode our bikes all the way to town, a total of eight miles each way. It took a few hours but we were bored and had nothing better to do. We’d go to the Jiffy store where Granny Tangles worked, buy a Popsicle and ride back home. Sometimes I rode to my friend Happy’s house; she lived on the way to town on a farm with cows and horses. * I had never ridden bikes with Dad before. He and Mom had just started riding in the evenings and I was glad because I’d been nagging them both about getting more exercise, especially Dad. His father died of a heart attack in his forties, just before Mom and Dad got married. His grandfather also had a bad heart—the very reason he was dismissed from the Army. Dad parked his truck on the side of the road, lit two Swisher Sweet cigars, and we headed off down highway 355. We pedaled slowly down the empty road. It was cloudy and the wind was at our backs, blowing hard enough to keep the mosquitoes off. The fields beside us were thick, the brush filling the spaces between the oaks and pines. The cheap cigars smelled like roasted marshmallows, a smell that will always remind me of him.

“How long have you been smoking,” I asked Dad. “I don’t know. Since I was eight?” he said. “Eight?! Your parents didn’t beat your ass?” “They didn’t know it,” he said. “No, I take that back. When I was thirteen, Dad gave me a Zippo lighter for Christmas. Mom didn’t like it. She told me she weren’t gonna buy me any cigarettes. I told her that was all right; I’d buy my own.” We both laughed. I told Dad about the first time I tried to smoke. I realized that I was probably only eight years old myself. I stole one of his cigarette butts from an ashtray and went out to the backyard and squatted down behind the rabbit cage. But I couldn’t get it to light, so I threw it underneath the trailer. * I looked over at Dad and realized how funny he looked on his bike. His bushy black hair with just a sprinkling of gray, his thick face slightly weathered from years of working in the sun, his round belly. He is just shy of fifty years old, but on that bike, he looked like a kid. “Did you ride bikes when you were little?” I asked. “Oh yeah,” he said. “But thing’s were different back then. When we were little, we went off by ourselves and rode our bikes all around the neighborhood till it got dark. And that was in Jacksonville. Not Mayo. You can’t do that nowadays.” “Why did y’all move to Mayo,” I asked. “Well, we lived in Jacksonville till I was thirteen. I went to an all white school and had never even talked to a black person before. Then I got bussed to Ribault Junior High, an all black school. There were only a few white people in my whole grade.” “What do you mean they ‘bussed’ you?” “Forced desegregation,” he said. “Just like in Forrest Gump.” “What was that like?” I asked. “What was that like? Huhuh, that’s why we moved to Mayo,” Dad said. “What do you mean?” “The violence. The race riots,” Dad said. “They had to put up fences and barbed wire all the way around the school, right up next to the buildings. There was only one way in the school and one way out.” “Guess that was before fire codes, huh?” “If there’d a been a fire, we’d a been screwed.”

We saw a truck approaching in the distance so we moved to the right side of the road. “But why did y’all move?” I asked again. “Cause I got my ass beat every day. The high school boys would come over to the middle school. They’d corner me in the courtyard and I had nowhere to go. Or they’d come up behind me in the bathroom when I was taking a piss. They’d get around me in a circle, then ask me for my lunch money. I had two choices. But I wasn’t giving them my money. So I had to fight. There were about seven of ‘em and they’d turn their class rings around where the jewel part was on the inside. Then the boy behind you would slap you upside your head. When you turned around, another boy would slap you. I had burns the size of silver dollars on my face.” “And nobody did anything about it?” “There weren’t nothing you could do. The whole school was rioting. So I started wearing steel-toed cowboy boots to school to kick them boys in the cods. And I carried pencils with me and when one of them rascals turned around, I’d jab ‘em right in the kidneys.” “Did they leave you alone then?” I asked. “No. There were too many of ‘em. So I threatened to bring a gun to school and that was the end of that. Mom moved us kids to Mayo.” Dad’s bike swerved close to mine. He was trying to adjust the gear with the lever on the handle, but the chain was stubborn. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not trying to run into you.” “That’s all right,” I said. He had his desired gear and looked over his shoulder behind us to check for cars. Dad told me about the series of moving they did after that. To get out of Jacksonville, his mom moved the kids to Mayo, a hundred miles away, where Granny Willis lived. They lived in front of her house in a small shack. It was a converted fish house with no stove or hot water. Dad’s father stayed behind in Jacksonville. A few months later, the whole family moved to Hastings, “The Potato Capital of Florida.” It was much smaller than Jacksonville, but close enough—only fifty miles away—for Dad’s father to drive to and from work. They picked up payments on a defaulted home loan for a beautiful plantation house on a potato farm off a brick road called Cracker Swamp Road. The house was white, turn-of-the-century with two stories, a wrap around porch and columns. There was an artesian well and a Monkey-puzzle tree that stood one hundred foot tall. Dad says it’s his favorite of all the houses he’s ever lived in.

The five-acre farm was rented out to potato farmers and after each harvest, Dad’s family picked up the potatoes left over in the field. This became crucial when, soon after they moved to the farm, The Teamster’s Union went on strike. My grandfather was a Teamster’s mechanic and drove the fifty miles each way to Jacksonville to picket. He was a dedicated man, Dad says. Dad walked through the rows in the field, gathering potatoes on the surface that the farm equipment missed. Then he’d dig around the dirt, unearthing all the potatoes he could find. They banked the potatoes in the barn, alternating layers of pine straw and potatoes to keep them dry so they wouldn’t spoil. The family also visited a dumpsite where potato companies would abandon the rejected potatoes—the ones with cuts or flaws that wouldn’t survive shipping. They loaded up the back of the truck with hundreds of pounds of discarded potatoes. I grew up hearing this story. Dad stands over the stove caramelizing onions in bacon grease and tells us about eating potatoes for every meal. He stirs the thick and creamy stew, carefully explaining the recipe to us. Later, he cuts potatoes in thin round slices and fries them. He serves them to us on white bread with mayonnaise. He teaches us how to never go hungry.

“Didn’t you get sick of potatoes?” I asked. “Nooo. I love potatoes. We ate them a different way everyday.” “Did you eat anything else?” “Sure. We ate mostly potatoes, but we ate other stuff too. Our neighbors grew vegetables and we’d help them out and they’d give us green beans or whatever they had. And we always tried to get one piece of meat a day. We’d buy one piece of steak and Mom would cut it up and make a lot of gravy with it to eat with our potatoes. Or we’d get bacon to put in our potato stew. We bought the meat with the silver dimes we saved in our piggy banks.” After 1965, dimes were no longer made of silver. Instead, they were made with copper and nickel. Dad’s family lived on the farm for a year or two, and then moved back to Jacksonville so his dad didn’t have to drive back and forth anymore. Dad didn’t want to move back to Jacksonville. He had too many bad memories there and he no longer had friends there either. But the final straw came when Dad entered Ed White High School in Jacksonville and they wouldn’t accept some of the credits he took in Hastings. So, Dad dropped out of school and left Jacksonville.

“So you just ran away?” I asked. “Yep. I went to Crescent Beach,” he said. Crescent Beach is only fifteen miles from Hastings, where his girlfriend Kathy lived. “How old were you?” “Sixteen.” “Your parents didn’t care?” “Mom said she could have me arrested and I said, ‘What good will that do?’ so she left it alone.” “What about your dad?” “We didn’t talk that much back then.”

Dad got a temp job with the city and stayed with friends. But when the job was up, he lived homeless in the sand dunes. I imagine him walking shirtless in cutoff jeans through the white sugar sand, his black dog, named Bitch, beside him. He made money by towing tourists out of the sand. He didn’t have a truck, but worked as a scout for his friends who did. He walked up and down the beach, finding vacationers who had driven too close to the surf. Then he’d radio his friends over to tow them and they’d split the money they made. Dad told me about dealing with his “customers”. He said, “Them stupid Yankees would get their cars stuck in the sand and I’d go over to them and tell ‘em, ‘Hey man, I’ll pull you out for ten dollars.’ They’d say, ‘Fuck you. I’m not paying you shit.’ Then I’d wait a little bit till they realized there weren’t no other way out. Then they’d come back and ask me to tow them and I’d say, ‘Alright, that’ll be twenty dollars.’” Dad laughed and I smiled at him. I rode zigzag on the road next to him as he told me about living on the beach. It was 1975 and college students from Flagler and University of Florida drove up and down the beach every night. There were kegs, coolers full of beer, and lot of dope, he said. He ate one meal a day, a sub sandwich from the gas station, and used the public bathroom and shower. He had no one to answer to and Dad says it was the best summer of his life. When that summer ended, he lived with friends and worked odd jobs until he was old enough to join the military. With his mother’s signature, he joined the Army on his seventeenth birthday. *

I know his stories as if they were my own. But as I listened to them that time, I realized that there were some stories I didn’t know. I never knew my grandfather, and when Dad talks about his life, he rarely mentions him. He’s just a character in the background. I took a sip of water from my sports bottle and looked over at Dad. I paused, almost afraid to ask. Afraid that there was a reason he’d never told us about his father. “Tell me about your dad,” I said. He paused to think and I made a list of the things I knew in my mind. He served in the Army. He was a mechanic. He died of a heart attack. It was a short list. “My dad was a good man,” he said. “He was honest. Straightforward. He said what he meant and meant what he said.” I took in the details. I was creating a person in my mind. “What else?” I said. “He’d do anything in the world for anybody.” When Dad said this I smiled because this is how I would describe him. “My dad could do anything,” he continued. “He was good at plumbing and electrical work. He was a tractor trailer mechanic.” He smiled, remembering a story he’d never told me before. “One time he almost cut his finger off with a hacksaw when he was building me a playhouse. That’s the only time I ever heard him cuss. He never raised his voice.” “How bad was the cut?” “He cut into his index finger at the knuckle but it was sewed back on.” “Like father like son,” I say. I’m referring to Dad’s index finger. He cut off the tip of it while he was working on a car engine. But his wasn’t sewed back on. “Oh, God, and one time when he was working underneath a semi engine, he dropped a screwdriver in his eye.” I gawk at him, imagining the scene. “It was bad. Dad came home with stitches in his eye-ball. Can you imagine?” he says. This reminded me of Dad’s own eye story, another story I grew up hearing. When he was six years old living in Jacksonville, some neighborhood kids were throwing Coke bottles up at streetlights by his house. Dad had cut his feet on the broken glass so he went over to the kids and told them to stop. Then one boy tossed a bottle up while Dad was standing there, and the broken bottom came down and stuck him in the eye. Dad’s eyes are hazel, mostly brown, but when he’s happy, they get very green near the center. His left eye is a little hazy with the milky scar tissue.

“What color were your dad’s eyes?” I asked. “They were blue. Very blue.” Dad told me about my grandfather’s mischievous grin. About fishing together and shining his dad’s shoes each morning. Every detail explained so much to me about who my Dad is. The two sound so much alike. We rode quietly for a few minutes and I could tell Dad was thinking, scanning for old memories. He laughed and said, “When I was little, he told me that part of being a man is eating sardines. So I ate them rascals down and said ,‘Now what?’. Then he told me that I had to drink buttermilk. So I did. Have you ever had buttermilk?” I nod. “He didn’t think I had it in me, but I was tough. Do you know any kids who’ll eat sardines and buttermilk? That’s just the kind of humor he had.” Dad was smiling and his joy was infectious. I could tell how much he loved his father and I was happy to finally hear these stories. “Were you two close?” I asked. “Dad was always working or sleeping. I didn’t get to really know him till just before he died.” * When I was growing up, Dad was gone a lot too. He always held a full time job and was in the National Guard for fifteen years. I remember staying up hours past my bedtime just to see him for a few hours each week. When he was home, he was busy fixing things around the house. He changed the oil in Mom’s car, fixed broken sinks and toilets and windows. He worked on the electric pump in the yard when the water got too orange with iron. He climbed the fifty-foot tower to our TV antenna after storms left our four channels fuzzy. He built the front and back porch and added a bedroom to our trailer. He had an endless list of backbreaking work, waiting on him when he got home. The little time we did spend together, he made special. We played catch. He tucked us in, read us stories. He took Monica and me squirrel hunting and we challenged him to footraces on the dirt road when we were too little to realize that he let us win. The best time I’ve ever had with him was when I was twelve. Mom usually goes on our field trips, but when our gifted class went to sea camp in the Florida Keys, Dad went with me. We rode together on the school bus for the 500-mile drive. We drank Pepsi and ate Corn Nuts,

mandarin oranges and sliced limes. At camp, we learned about mangroves, we dissected squid and swam with nurse sharks. My favorite picture of him is from this trip. The two of us are on a boat getting ready to snorkel. We are wearing knee-length wetsuits and Dad is standing next to me as I sit, mask and snorkel on, pulling on my flippers. I cherish this photo, and everything he’s ever given me. He sent me riyals from Saudi Arabia and a wooden dolphin from Panama, wrapped in a colorful hand-sewn cloth with a parrot on a tree branch. The cloth is framed in my living room.

“Do you have anything from your dad?” I asked. Dad told me about his father’s thirty-eight pistol. It belonged to his grandfather, then his father and was passed down to him when his father died. He also has his dad’s wool jacket. “It’s been hanging in my closet for twenty-eight years,” Dad said and I wondered why I’d never seen it. I also wondered why I’d never heard these stories before. The more he told me, the more I wished I had met my grandfather. “Why haven’t you ever talked about him before?” I asked. “Well, when my dad died I had just gotten to know him. It turned my whole world upside down.” I knew my grandfather’s death upset him; I’ve never seen my Dad cry but Mom says he does every year on his dad’s birthday. Twenty-eight years later, Dad still cries. * We hit our turnaround point and headed back to the truck. I looked over at Dad, memorized the details of that day. His striped shirt. The clouds and the wind. The mosquitoes. I know that one day I’ll tell my kids about that day of riding bikes with him. I will tell them about the scar in his eye. About his uneven chest, how he was born without his right pectoral muscle. I’ll tell them how he tucked me in at night, folding the blankets around me like an omelet. How he brought home pink carnations with glitter for Monica and me. I will tell them his stories.

Fifteen Months in Iraq

Seventeen years after my father returned from the Middle East, my fiancé was given orders to deploy from the very same base, Fort Stewart Georgia. He is scheduled to be in Iraq for fifteen months. I had plenty of time to get used to the idea of him leaving. He’d been in the military for three and half years and had joined with every intention of deploying. But that last night in October was worse than I could have imagined. I was sitting in the passenger seat of my car and I could feel the time dwindling, counting down the minutes we had left as I stared at the digital clock on the dashboard. The little numbers shone green, tiny colored illuminations against the darkness. I sat quietly, imagining our future together. We’d get married. Buy a house. Have children. I knew that I wouldn’t be happy until I got to this future I was imagining. That I’d begin a countdown to get there, that I’d squander the next year of my life waiting. I watched the numbers change until I couldn’t take the silence any longer. I turned on the radio. It had finally come down to this last night and I couldn’t believe we had nothing to say. There was so much inside of me, but after five years together, we had said it all already. So we listened as the radio skipped through the scant stations within frequency. Through frantic car ads from local dealerships promising zero percent APR till the New Year, through gospel music promising salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, through static that promised we were in the middle of nowhere in Southern Georgia. I stopped when I found a Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song. We don’t have a song really; we have a band. Jason smiled at me. We used to listen to their albums when we cleaned his apartment together and when we took nighttime drives around Tallahassee. The music drowned out the sound of the engine. It made me happy, because for a few minutes it was just the two of us and that song, and I was able to forget that this was our last night together before he deployed. * His deployment was supposed to start in July of 2007. When he told me this, it didn’t seem real. Though he spent six months in Fort Huachuca, Arizona for training, had been an intelligence officer for a year, had bought gear for his deployment and had been studying Arabic, I convinced myself that he wouldn’t actually go. I believed that something would change at the last minute. That our troops would come home before he was sent out. That’s how my life

usually works out. It had always seemed that no matter how ill prepared I was, or how inevitable a situation had become, things came out in my favor. God would provide, as they say. I actually got annoyed with him when he asked me to help him study Arabic. It was fun at first. I learned to say about fifty words, my favorite being the word for fruit, which sounds like “fawakit”. But eventually, we couldn’t even ride to the store to get gas without listening to an Arabic CD, or him handing me a three-inch stack of flash cards, demanding me to quiz him. I had to say things like “Hault! Drop your weapon!” and then wait for him to say the Arabic equivalent. I was driving eight hours round trip from Tallahassee to Fort Stewart each weekend to see him and every minute we weren’t eating or sleeping was spent preparing for the deployment. I knew that what he was doing was important, but I honestly didn’t think he’d deploy. I didn’t know how I’d be able to handle fifteen months apart, so I figured that the universe wouldn’t expect me to try. Jason and I had been together for almost five years and had endured the difficulty of our long distance military relationship for three and a half of those years. After he finished law school, he joined the Navy, then transferred to the Army and had moved around quite a bit. In a way this prepared me for being apart. But it also wore me down over the years. The distance, the driving, the loneliness. I was afraid the deployment would be too much, that it would be that last condition that would make the relationship no longer bearable. When July came around, Jason’s deployment date was moved to August, then September. Then September came and went and his deployment date was pushed back to October. Again, I thought that this trend would continue. I thought that he would never actually deploy. When October came around and his deployment date hadn’t changed, I got worried. I thought , what if this really happens? So, I focused all of my energy on him. I was beginning my last year of grad school at Florida State University. I was teaching two freshman composition classes at the University and I was supposed to be writing my thesis. But I didn’t write a single word before he left. I didn’t hang out with my friends. I didn’t go home to see my family. Instead, I drove back and forth, spending four nights a week in Fort Stewart, staying in Tallahassee only three nights—just long enough to teach my classes on Tuesday and Thursday. On several weekends we met in Jacksonville and drove to his parents’ house in Fort Lauderdale. It was physically and emotionally exhausting and by the time October twenty-fifth rolled around, a part of me was glad that he was finally leaving. I had had so much time to

40 worry about him leaving, to wonder how we’d get through this fifteen-month separation, that I was ready for the countdown to begin. The sooner he left, the sooner he’d return. * When we arrived at his apartment near Fort Stewart Georgia that night, it was nearly empty. He’d been packing for weeks and most of his gear had already been shipped overseas. I imagined his black, Army-issued “tough box” sitting in the sand with his name written in all caps on top, LT LESSER. We had just taken most of his personal things to his parent’s house in Fort Lauderdale, so there was nothing left but the cheap furniture he bought when he moved there a year ago: an uncomfortable tan futon and a queen sized bed with no frame, a wooden dresser and nightstand, two glass end tables and two floor lamps. Most of it was purchased at the used furniture store down the street. With the constant ebb and flow of deploying and returning soldiers, they must make a killing. We went to sleep soon after we arrived at the apartment. It was late and we had spent all day traveling. Jason kissed me on the forehead and said goodnight, and I crept to the right side of the bed near the window and lay there for a while, listening to his steady breathing and the droning hum of the fan. Everything felt smooth and rhythmic and normal. But I couldn’t help but think about how my entire life was about to change. I was afraid to fall asleep, knowing that I was only hours away from driving back to Tallahassee, from saying goodbye to my fiancé for a very long time. I lied awake trying not to think about tomorrow and eventually drifted off to sleep, remembering how we met five years earlier. It was my first semester in college and I went with some new friends from my poetry class to a club called The Moon. It was a Friday night, which meant it was “Stetsons Night”, and the club was equipped with country music and a mechanical bull. I noticed Jason from across the room, his short blond hair, green eyes and muscles. He noticed my super short hair and tight black shirt. He thought I was a city girl, New York he guessed, so he was quite surprised when he heard my Southern accent. He was a twenty-two year old Jewish law student from Fort Lauderdale and I was an eighteen-year-old girl from a one traffic light town. He was different than anyone I had ever met. It didn’t take long before we were spending most of our time together. He taught me history and I edited his papers. He often mentioned that he couldn’t believe I was only eighteen and after a month or so he told me he had something to confess. My mind raced. What could he have to confess? Did he have a girlfriend? Was I a part of some twisted bet among frat boys?

Everything was going so well and it was all about to end. I waited in suspense, until he finally spoke. “I’m really twenty-four. And my birthday’s next week”. He smiled and I couldn’t help but smile back. I was shocked that he had lied, but I secretly loved that he was almost seven years my senior. * When we woke up the next morning, Jason went to the U-Haul station to pick up a truck while I stayed behind to sort through the boxes in the kitchen. It’s funny how much stuff you accumulate. Every book, receipt and aspirin bottle had to be dealt with. Jason had already sorted through his stuff and all that was left fit in a few boxes. I was to take what I wanted and toss the rest. So, I inherited his microwave—which I desperately needed—a few pots and pans, canned soup and some items I didn’t actually want, but kept simply because they were his, like the white, plastic globe with colorful streaming lights that must have caught his eye on the way out of Wal-Mart. It was ugly, tacky. But it was his. Jason returned to load the Uhaul with furniture to resell at the store they’d come from. I didn’t go with him. I would be of no help with heavy lifting and I needed to be away from him for a while. I didn’t want to think about him leaving, and that’s all I could think about when I looked at him. I didn’t let myself cry when he was in the room, but there was an understanding between us; my sadness and his guilt hung heavy in the air. I began cleaning, to keep my hands and mind occupied. I scrubbed the toilet and bathtub. I cleaned out the refrigerator and swept the floors. I dusted and vacuumed. When I was finished, the apartment looked the same as the day he’d moved in a year ago. Only emptier. When he returned to the apartment there was nothing left to do. There was no TV to watch, no chair to sit on. There was just to the two of us in the empty apartment. So we lied on the floor together for an hour while I sobbed quietly on his shoulder. Then, he turned in his key to the front office, we said our goodbyes, and I drove the four hours home. My official countdown had begun and I knew that this was going to be the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. This time, I have seen what the war is doing to this country, what it has been doing to soldiers and their families for the past few years. I have heard the names of soldiers who’ve died. Heard the blasts of machine guns on CNN. Heard the messages of extremists. I know that I will constantly worry and wait for phone calls. I will worry about how the deployment will affect him, how it will change our relationship. I’m not six years old anymore

42 and I can’t retreat to the cane field or to Granny’s gardens. I can’t climb the pear trees or chase the chickens. This time, I know just how much I have to lose.

PART III

An Entirely Different Family

Michael, Monica and I were born in a four-year time period. We were close enough in age to play together, to share toys, to have the same memories. Toward the end of my first year in school, Dad took Mom out for brunch to celebrate because Monica would start Kindergarten in the fall and they’d finally have all three of us in school. But a week later, Mom found out she was pregnant with Cody. Every summer before school started our family went on vacation. We camped at Fort Clinch State Park near Fernandina beach, and took trips to St. George Island. The island is a three and half hour drive from Mayo and we stayed on the mainland in Eastpoint. My favorite vacation was when I was six, the first year we stayed at Sportsman’s Lodge Motel and Marina. The motel overlooks Apalachicola’s East Bay, a perfect place to fish and tong for oysters. It is part of Florida’s “Forgotten Coast.” There are oak trees and squirrels and a pier for fishing. Peacocks roam the property freely and next to the main office is a raccoon cage. Some of the raccoons were albino and we were fascinated by their ghost white fur. In the mornings, Mom drove us across the four-mile bridge over the bay to the island. Mom would set up her folding chair and an umbrella, where she would spend most of the day tanning while Cody slept beside her in a playpen with a blanket over the top. Michael, Monica and I would line up for sunscreen then run out into the water to catch up with Dad. We’d swim out past the breaking waves to a sand bar and snorkel for starfish and sand dollars. Dad found a huge conch shell that year and we took it home with us. The shell was a creamy light orange, perfect, without a chip. We laid it in an ant bed for a week, while the insects ate out the dead flesh of the snail. We ate lunch at the beach under the pavilion. We had Cheez-It crackers and made ham and cheese sandwiches with Miracle Whip. Our cooler was full of generic canned sodas. We had root beer, orange, pineapple and grape, but my favorite was the peach soda. Back at the motel, Michael and Dad fished off the pier. Mom watched Cody and Monica and I wandered around the property. We chased the peacocks, climbed the thick vines that hung from the trees, and picked orange-red honeysuckles to lick the one drop of nectar from the end of the tube shaped flowers. While wandering the property, we met a girl name Tiffany, the only other kid I ever remember seeing at the motel. We shared our Barbies with her and she showed us how to tease

45 our hair with a comb. Since she was a few years older than us, we would have done anything she told us to. So we followed her to the far end of the property to a bathroom with a red sign on the door that said “KEEP OUT”. Inside, the toilet was broken and filled with maggots. The three of us peed on them. When Mom saw us coming out of the bathroom, she dragged us by our ears out to the pier and made us tell Dad what we were doing. The next afternoon Dad and Michael caught several small sharks, strung them through their gills and tied them to the post at the end of the pier. Monica was leaning over, watching them swim and poking them with a stick. Dad told her to stop but she didn’t listen. Then she fell off the pier and into the water. She was terrified that the sharks were going to bite her and began screaming until Dad reached down and pulled her out. Then Monica and I spent the rest of afternoon running up and down the muddy coast next to the pier, jumping over cinder blocks and old tires, cutting our feet on oyster shells. We stayed out until the sun set over the bay, the tide low and calm, the salty breeze blowing across our pink faces. When I think of that motel, I don’t think of Cody. We went to there for nearly ten years, but he wasn’t there when the motel still had magic. Before we realized the rooms were cheap and smelled like bleach and mothballs. When we were still amused by white raccoons. By the time he was old enough to play with the rest of us, we were teenagers thinking we were too old for family vacations. * At home, Michael, Monica and I wandered through the woods all day building forts, pretending we were lost, pretending we were Indians. And at night, we played together in Michael’s room. Michael would talk to Monica and me in a funny voice and make up stories about a talking rabbit. We listened to a Simpson’s cassette tape over and over trying to imitate Bart Simpson’s voice and we sang the only part we knew of Sir-Mix-A-Lot’s song, “Buttermilk Biscuits”: Now, buttermilk biscuits here we go Sift the flour roll the dough Clap your hands and stomp your feet Move your butt to the funky beat.

Most of our games we made up. My favorite was bowling in the bed. One of us had to be the “ball” and lie flat on the mattress and roll from one end of the bed to the other. The “pins” had to jump over the ball and try not to get knocked down. When Cody was three or four, he stood outside of Michael’s door, knocking with his tiny fist to come in. We told him to go away, but he persisted, so the three of us schemed about how to keep our baby brother from wanting to play with us. I took Michael’s blanket from his bed and stood by the door, then told Cody to come in. When he did, I tossed the blanket over his head and wrapped it around his body. Then we ran outside to Mom’s car, clutching Cody like a sack of stolen money. We opened the car door and threw him in the front seat, still wrapped in the blanket. We locked the car doors, ran back inside the house and turned off the porch light. That seemed to be Cody’s place in our family. As soon as he was born, he became an object of torture. When he was still in diapers, I would hold him over the trashcan in the kitchen and tell him I was going to throw him away. When he started crying, I put my hand over his mouth and begged him to be quiet so he wouldn’t wake up Mom. We also teased him because he was born cesarean. We’d tell him that he wasn’t born like the rest of us, that he was extracted. He didn’t know what that meant so he’d say, “No I wasn’t. I was born!” We told him that he was an accident and then Mom would have to explain that he was really a “surprise”. We told him that we found him on the side of the road, or in a dumpster. We told him he hatched from a buzzard egg. When Cody was ten, Monica and I threatened to tie his hands up with electrical tape in Granny Willis’s yard. He doubted the strength of the tape, so we grabbed him and taped him to the swing set, his arms spread like Jesus. He thought it was funny at first as he stood immobile, the black tape around his wrist. But as he tried to wriggle free, Monica and I pelted him with magnolia pods. He started hollering for Dad to come help him and Dad came over with the water hose and pointed it at him. Dad didn’t spray him, but I’ll never forget the look of betrayal on Cody’s face. When I think of Cody, this is the way I remember him. I think of him in diapers. I think of the skinny little boy with white hair, bright green eyes and freckles. I think of the ten-year-old boy with the telescope, the boy who loves Power Rangers, the boy who’d do anything for our attention. *

Last August, in that two-week break between summer and fall semester, I went home to Mayo for a few days. That’s the only time I go home really. Semester breaks and holidays. While I was home, Cody and I went bass fishing on Koon Lake. Cody let down the tailgate and together we slid Dad’s johnboat into the bed of his truck. The boat’s been lying in our yard for as long as I can remember. Dad bought it in 1977 as a gift for his father. It is twelve-foot long, light aqua green fiberglass with a live well in the back. When I was little, Monica and I used to fill the boat with water from the hose and used it as a kiddy pool. Koon Lake is only a few miles down the road and as Cody drove us, I looked over at him and realized how grown up he was. He was just shy of seventeen and was as tall as Dad and Michael. They’re all about 5’10. Cody wore his red LHS baseball hat, his sandy blonde hair poking out from the sides. The freckles across his nose were dark from the sun and his eyes were as green as mine, shining behind his long blonde eyelashes. The lake was shallow, only a few feet deep in most places. The water had dropped so low that the dock towered ten feet above the water, exposing the bottom of the beams where they went into the ground. The lily pads that should have floated on the surface were brown and shriveling under the sun. We dragged the boat down the bank and paddled out into the murky water. Cody directed us to a corner he thought was lucky and we began casting our rods. Within a few minutes we were working the reels, the taught lines squealing, the rods bending with the weight of the fish. I pulled in my first bass and made Cody take it off the hook for me like Dad does. Cody wiggled the hook back and forth and I could hear him tearing the gills. When he finally freed the hook, he tossed the fish back in the water. It was a few inches smaller than regulation. I wondered if it would survive the trauma, and a few minutes later I saw my fish floating on top of the water. It made me sad so I asked Cody if we could keep it anyway. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “A gator or something will eat it.” But I couldn’t leave it there, knowing it was my fault it had died. I begged Cody to get it out of the water. “We killed it so we have to eat it,” I said. “It’ll be okay,” he persisted. But I refused to cast my rod again until we got it, so he paddled over and scooped it out of the water with his hands.

I liked spending time alone with Cody. I haven’t spent enough time with him since I moved away six years ago and I wondered just how much of his life I had missed. When I left for college, he was only eleven. On the ride home Cody began telling me about a prank he pulled at school, then stopped and said never mind. “Tell me,” I said. “No, you’ll yell at me,” he said. “No I won’t. Just tell me.” “Me and Tripp caught a gator the other day,” he said grinning. “We took it to the school and let it go in the ag pond.” “Cody! You could get into a lot of trouble. What if some kid gets attacked at school? You could go to jail,” I said. Cody sighed and said, “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.” I knew he was right. My response was so predictable. I’d always questioned him about his grades, told him to college, to stay out of trouble. I wasn’t his friend or his cool older sister; I was another adult nagging him. His prank was just another antic on the list of things he did that both surprised and worried me. I couldn’t believe how different he was than Michael, Monica and me. He didn’t seem to have the same motivation we had. He didn’t care about his grades or going to college. I realized that he never lived in the yellow house in Day. He didn’t go camping at the “Whirl Hole” or rides bikes with us down the dirt road. He doesn’t remember when Dad left for the Gulf War, or the six months Dad spent in Panama. He had an entirely different childhood. An entirely different family. I looked over at him and said, “Cody, I feel like I don’t know you at all.” He said, “No. No you don’t.”

Like a Board Game

When I was fourteen, my parents mentioned that a house had gone up for sale, just a few miles down the road. The house had a screened-in porch and a sycamore tree in the front yard. It was simple, but it was a house. I imagined living there, in a real house on a paved road. We passed it everyday on the way to school and I imagined the bus stopping there, instead of down the dirt road at our trailer. I imagined that kid in the back seat would stop saying, “Why are we stopping at the dump today?” It was all I could think about for weeks. I was imagining birthday sleepovers and backyard barbeques. Having the softball team party at my house for once. I picked out the color I would paint my room. Violet. But we never bought that house. They were probably asking for too much money. Or maybe my parents were just dreaming. * My parents have lived in four different homes together. Their first house was a small two-bedroom on highway 27. The kitchen was lemon yellow, the bathroom sea foam green. They moved there when they got married and within three months, Mom was pregnant with Michael. He was born on her seventeenth birthday and as a joke, someone put him in a box with a bow in the hospital room. They lived there for a couple of years, then moved into the house that belonged to my paternal grandfather. He had the house built in 1978 and died two years later. When his wife Granny Myrtle later remarried, she vacated the house and my parents bought it. Dad had just gotten close to his father before he died and wanted to keep the house in the family. The house was tan with brown trim and a brick fireplace. The kitchen counter and the front door were the same bright orange. Mom says she loved that house. She knew how important it was to Dad, and she too was fond of my grandfather. Mom didn’t know him well but he was accepting of her, she says. He treated her the way her own father should have. A year after they moved in, I was born. It was April 1984, and Mom quit her job at the Jiffy store to stay home with the kids. Dad was working at Gilman paper company and decided to join the National Guard to make extra money. He had already served in the Army, and knew he could handle the part time demands of the Guard. The extra paycheck would be just enough to cover the mortgage and allow Mom to stay home.

Six months after I was born, Mom was pregnant with my sister Monica. With the third kid on the way, Dad changed jobs. He was afraid of getting laid off at Gilman, so he started working at the state prison as an EMT. He took a pay cut, but it was a steady job with health insurance. But it didn’t take long for financial crisis to set in. The military got behind six months on Dad’s pay and my parents were struggling to keep up with the mortgage. Mom called the National Guard once a week to ask about Dad’s paycheck. “I drove them people crazy,” Mom said. Mom and Dad could pay for all of their bills except the mortgage, and after six months of fighting with the banks and the military, Mom and Dad had to give up the house and move again. Mom cried the day they moved out. She had so many good memories in that house of Christmases and birthdays. And she knew how much it hurt Dad to lose that house. The next house we moved into was in the town of Day, not a real town, but a community with a caution light and a post office about ten miles west of Mayo. Monica was born just after we moved in. It seemed that every time we moved, our family got bigger. The house in Day was yellow, two stories with four bedrooms. The front porch was screened in and full of Mom’s plants. There were jade plants, philodendrons and a five-foot Cactus from my great grandmother, Meme. Mom grew strawberries in the back yard and fox grapes grew wild up and down the dirt road. Mom says that Day was full of skunks, rabbits and rattlesnakes. My parents were always shooting the snakes in the yard. They had three young kids at home and were worried one of us would get bitten. “You could hear them in the yard just singing their rattles,” Mom says. One time a truck drove by the house pulling a small trailer. Mom says a huge rattlesnake was in the road and it bit the trailer tire and flattened it. “I never thought it could happen,” she said. “I’d heard people talk about snakes biting your tires, but I wouldn’t of believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.” I was very young when we lived in Day, only two or three years old, but I do have a few memories there—my very first memories. In the front yard, Michael, Monica and I sat in a green kiddy pool under the mimosa tree. Michael grabbed the water hose and climbed the skinny limbs above us, shaking loose the fluffy pink blossoms that floated down like feathers. He tied the hose to a branch with Dad’s tie— probably his only one—and the hose hung down like a snake creating a tiny waterfall.

My parents tried to buy the house in Day. They hated throwing away money by renting, but the owner wouldn’t sell. So, we moved again. But this time, we didn’t move into a house. This time we moved into a trailer in the woods, about ten miles south of Mayo to a place called Brushy Hammock. It was 1988 and it was the same trailer my mother grew up in. * Mom’s family bought the trailer when she was nine. I imagine the trailer was much nicer when she lived there. It was new then. The Oscar-the-Grouch green carpet in the master bath, the brown calico carpet in all the other rooms. That was fashionable in the seventies. The particleboard kitchen still had a glossy finish where Mom learned to roll out dough for chicken and dumplings. It’s funny the way the trailer came to be our home. Granny and Papa Tangles were living in the trailer and my great grandmother Meme lived in the house next door. When Meme moved away, Granny and Papa moved into Meme’s house. This left the trailer vacant and my family moved in. It was like a board game, where each family moved up to the next colorful square. Of course, living in an old trailer was no step up for us, but my parents thought it was a good move, temporary, until something better came along. For the trailer and the acre of land, Dad paid Papa 3000 dollars cash. We lived in the trailer for three years before Cody was born. I remember the day Mom told us about my baby brother. Michael, Monica and I were all corralled into my parents’ bedroom, sitting on their king size waterbed that took up most of the room. Mom instinctively draped her thin arms around her stomach, smiled and said, “Mamma’s gonna have another baby.” I was five at the time and I remember being excited, and confused. This confusion only grew when Michael cried, “We’re gonna be poor!” Mom says she told him we weren’t gonna be any poorer than we already were. When Cody was born, the Singletarys became a family of six, and Mom finally got her tubes tied.

Swamp Fire

We had smelled the smoke for days, the acrid scent of burning pine, and I knew that we would have to leave. The fire was getting closer and there was nothing we could do to stop it. The fire was started by lightning a few weeks earlier. It was small and thought to have been extinguished. But that summer, Florida was practically begging to be burned. The drought was insufferable; Koon Lake was completely dry and Ten Mile Pond had been affectionately renamed Ten Inch Puddle. Prescribed burning had been neglected in Lafayette County for some time and the entire area was planted timber, peat bogs and dried swamp. It was perfect fuel. It was 2001, I had just turned seventeen, and it was my last year at home. We lived only a few miles from Mallory Swamp where the fire started. We lived down a curvy lime rock road that wound its way deep into the woods. I was worried about getting trapped if a large tree fell across the road. But my parents weren’t worried. In fact, they were excited. And I was excited too, at the thought of our trailer burning down. Mom came into the living room and asked, “Y’all wanna go see it?” The thought hadn’t crossed my mind, though I had imagined what the fire would look like. It was one of the largest wildfires in the state’s history and had burned tens of thousands of acres by then. I pictured an action movie explosion, a massive ball of black and orange that would swallow the trailer in seconds. We loaded up in Dad’s red and white Ford pickup, parents up front, children in the back. I wrapped myself in a brown blanket and sat with my back against the cab to keep my hair from getting tangled in the wind. It didn’t take long to get to the fire. Just three miles down the dirt road, a right turn and a few miles down highway 355. We pulled the truck over where a few fire fighters were resting. We had only a volunteer fire department, but a few hundred people from around the state showed up to help. I sat on the back of the tailgate and gazed into the burning woods. It wasn’t at all what I had expected. There was only a shallow flicker of flames, a foot or two high. It reminded me of the lowest setting on our gas stove. But we were just on the edge of the fire, which was moving like an ink stain, its creeping perimeter growing in an uneven circle. Somewhere within that circle were the hotspots, the giant balls of fire I had imagined. The volunteers were eating sandwiches and drinking water from coolers. The fire was getting close to the highway and there was no point in trying to save the last twenty yards of

53 grass. They were going to let it burn out and try to keep it from crossing the asphalt and setting a new plot of trees on fire. The men stood there, exhausted from days of fighting the fire, soot streaking their faces unrecognizable. But Dad recognized one man named Rufus, who was his old military friend who worked for the forestry department. “Ain’t no stopping it,” I heard Rufus say. “By the time we put out one acre, a hundred more are on fire.” He wiped sweat from his forehead, revealing pale skin underneath. “It’s not heading toward y’all’s house anymore. But you should be ready just in case.” “Well, if it goes that way, we’ll just leave,” Dad said. “Shit, I hope it comes. Then I can build me a new house,” Mom said grinning. I agreed with her for a moment. It would be nice to be rid of the trailer and have a home that I wasn’t embarrassed of. But I didn’t get too excited though; my parents had been talking about building a house for as long as I could remember. Each year they’d offer up a new prospected deadline and our eyes would light up imagining new carpet and ceilings, and shiny new sinks. Next summer we’ll lay the foundation, they’d say. Another year and a half. When the tax return comes in. When we finish paying off the truck. It was as if the fire was deciding for us. If the trailer didn’t burn down, we’d keep living there. If it did, we’d build a house. That’s what Mom and Dad said. But we didn’t have any homeowners insurance. I can’t imagine we could get much coverage anyway. Our trailer was thirty years old and Dad paid only 3000 dollars for it in the eighties. I watched the gentle waves burn what was left of the grass, turning it black like the rest of the land. The burnt trees stood before us, charred black poles with sparkles of orange burning embers that glimmered up and down the tree. We didn’t stay long, but before we left, I walked to the edge of the fire and touched it with my fingertips. * Living in a trailer isn’t that uncommon, especially in the South. And I don’t think it’s that bad to live in one either. But our trailer was old and living in any home that’s deteriorating brings about a certain shame that seeps into every aspect of your life. It defines a part of who you are. I started the gifted program in first grade, and my classmates knew me as the smart kid. But I still felt the need to prove that I was more intelligent than my peers. The ones who got brand new cars on their sixteenth birthdays. The ones who wore nice clothes and didn’t have

jobs. The ones who lived in houses. Later, I became Valedictorian, earned a scholarship, and graduated from college a year early just so that I could “beat” everyone else. I imagine my mother’s experience was quite different. The trailer was much nicer when she grew up in it. It was new then, with a calico carpet of black, brown and beige and bay windows in the living room. But trailers don’t hold up like houses. Particleboard crumbles, plywood bows, ceilings leak. And no matter how much you vacuum, no carpet can survive twenty years unscathed. I was devastated the first time I realized how dirty our carpet was. I was nine years old and while walking from the shower to my bedroom, I dragged my foot across the floor to sooth an itch. When I got to my room I noticed a long, black smear across the top of my foot. I stared at my right foot, now alien, for a few minutes before I realized what had happened. I washed my feet again in the yellow metal bathtub and tiptoed back to my room. A few years later, my sister and I got new carpet in our bedroom. It wasn’t new actually, but it was much better than the carpet we had. Dad installed new carpet in his mother’s house and took her old carpet home. The holes for her floor vents didn’t match ours, so we had two rectangular holes in the middle of the room, exposing the blue padding underneath. To solve this, we cut matching sections of the leftover carpet and duct taped them to the floor. It looked okay. That is until you tried vacuuming it, or walking on it. The sections came undone and we had to stick them back down like stubborn puzzle pieces. We had to explain this when our friends came over and they looked up at us, just as embarrassed as we were, as we pulled the rosy pink sections off of their shoes and re-taped them to the floor. Every room in the trailer had these embarrassing little blemishes. In my bedroom, the ceiling had fallen in the corner creating a dark hole that filled with spider webs. It’s hard to keep spiders out of your home when you live where we did. Especially since Mom insisted we leave the spiders alone. She liked them because they caught the other bugs in their webs. Ours doors were all dark brown and hollow, most of them with fist-sized holes, punched in various fits of anger. Michael punched his door in when he was twelve, after his first girlfriend Rachel broke up with him. That same year Michael left a loaded shotgun propped up next to the back door, just for a minute, while he got more ammo from his room. Cody was only three at the time, but he figured out how to pull the trigger and shot a jagged hole through the thin wall. It’s a blessing that he didn’t shoot himself or anyone else. Dad eventually fixed the

inside wall, but on the outside, the aluminum side of the trailer had an exit wound, poking out in little metal twists. Even our bathtub had a jagged hole near the drain. It had rusted straight through so you could see the gray dirt below. While taking a bath I always imagined that the slow dripping of my bathwater must look like the trailer was peeing. * The fire continued to burn. When the winds picked up, the fire jumped a quarter of a mile at a time through the treetops. It was growing larger and less predictable. Then one night, the smoke hung just above the roof, a thick blanket of gray. Rufus called. “If you want to save anything, you better get it, and get out.” The fire was only four miles from our home and headed straight for it. This was our official evacuation order. By that time it was early morning. Mom came to my room and woke me. I was groggy, still half asleep and reluctant to get out of bed. She threw trash bags at me and told me that I had one hour. One hour to decide what would come with me, and what would be left to burn. I got dressed and went outside. There was no moon, no stars to be seen, but I could see the orange glow above the trees. I spent most of that hour in my room. I had my own room for less than a year, acquired when Michael moved out, and had spent a lot of time painting my walls. It was halfway covered with bright colored acrylics. There was a large self-portrait with a bubble quote full of hearts. A wall of colored circles. A floor to ceiling tree with a monkey dangling from a branch. A five- foot fire-breathing dragon. I wondered if I hadn’t predicted it all. The fire-breathing dragon next to a tree? I stared at the walls, my work, where I had spent so much of the last year of my life. I’d never be able to take that with me. I opened a trash bag by shaking it, allowing the air to slip in and inflate it. I filled it with my favorite clothes, then quickly sorted through everything else. I had nothing of real value, no jewelry, not even a CD player. I loaded the car with the trash bag, a black milk crate full of acrylic paint, the wooden dolphin Dad sent me from Panama, and my small collection of paperbacks. Everything else I left behind. I don’t know what my siblings took in their trash bags, but Dad took his guns, rods and reels, military papers, and life insurance policy. Mom took all of the family photo albums and her collection of shot glasses. Then we gathered our pets. Cody put his dog, Hobby, in Dad’s truck and we gathered up seven of our cats in Mom’s car. One stubborn cat got left behind. We

56 drove to town with my grandparents right behind us. They brought only a few changes of clothes and my grandmother took two quilts she made with her mother. Our entire lives were summed up by the contents of our vehicles. We’d all been wishing out loud for the fire to come, but now it was actually happening. I was being forced out of bed, forced out of my home, forced out of the woods. Maybe it was just the adrenaline, but something about that night was terrifying. The fire was coming, the clock was ticking, the smoke was growing. As much as I hated the trailer, and as much as I hated living there, I didn’t want it to go like this. I didn’t want it to burn to the ground. This wasn’t the same as moving up, as overcoming our circumstances. This would be another victory for the trailer. Another way in which it controlled us. When we left, I stared out the window and watched the trailer disappear from sight. Then I watched my grandparent’s house disappear too. How could we have all been so selfish? Other people lived down our road, all relatives. And our lives were in danger. What if Rufus hadn’t called us in time? We stopped in a parking lot in town, eight miles away from home. It was six a.m. Granny and Papa stayed with my uncle and my family stayed with Dad’s grandmother, Granny Willis. We drove to her house while the sun rose, talked briefly and headed to bed. Mom talked excitedly about building a new house. About custom cabinets and a master bedroom, the floor plans she’d been drawing in her head for years. * This wasn’t the first instance of fire the trailer had ever seen. In fact, Cody had nearly burnt it down several times. He had a fondness for fire, which my parents say all of the Singletary children had. Without central heat and air, we relied on box fans in the summer and a kerosene heater in the winter. The heater was a round white barrel with a metal cage around it to keep you from burning yourself. But since the cage was also metal, it got hot too. I burned my legs on it countless times. And while it did keep the house much warmer, it was too hot to sit close to it, and too cold to be far away from it. So we had to find a balance. We were like planets revolving around the sun. It was amazing how much heat it could produce. If we were particularly cold, we’d stand next to the heater and hold out our shirts over the top, capturing the rising heat. We did this in short bursts since more than just a few seconds became unbearable. One Christmas, Monica held

57 my Barbie over the top of it and the plastic hairs melted into each other creating a hard lump that stuck straight above her head. When Cody was four, he laid his blanket across the top of the heater to warm it. He was home alone with my dad, who was in the bathroom at the time. A few minutes passed and Cody went to the bathroom door saying, “Daddy?” “Be out in a minute,” Dad’s voice came muffled through the door. “Daddy,” Cody persisted. And when Dad didn’t come out immediately, Cody resorted to pounding his little fists on the door screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Then Dad burst from the bathroom, pants around his ankles. He smelled the smoke and knew what had happened. He extinguished the flames and took the heater outside the back door. Luckily no one was hurt and nothing was destroyed. Except for the blanket of course. The heater always scared me for just that reason. Sometimes I wouldn’t even go to bed because I was afraid of the heater catching the house on fire. We usually didn’t sleep with it on, but there wasn’t a spoken rule about this. On the coldest weeks of the year, we left it on and I never knew if Mom or Dad checked on it in the middle of the night. Usually the last person up had the task of grabbing it by the handle and taking it to the back porch. Then we hit the extinguish button which released wispy black smoke. It was an unpleasant task, but I preferred to put it out myself, just so I’d know it wasn’t left on. Cody found several other ways of setting fires in the trailer. One time he simply lit the trash on fire, inside the kitchen. Again, Dad had to drag Cody’s fire out the back door. Michael tried this too when he was younger, but he set the trash on fire inside of his bedroom. Another time, Cody threw Michael’s baseball jersey over a lamp and caught the sleeve on fire. And once when Mom was cooking, Cody tossed a towel on the burning gas stove. * I woke up the next morning in the bed with Monica and Cody was in the next bed over. My parents had already left for work. School was out for the summer so we had to entertain ourselves at Granny’s house. Monica and I reminisced about the time we stayed with Granny when Dad left for the Gulf War ten years earlier. We shared the bed with our cousins Misty and Renee. It had an iron frame that was painted white and on the corner, the paint had chipped in little squiggles. We called it the spider bed and scared ourselves with stories about it coming alive at night while we were sleeping.

We played “I spy” in the bedroom and after Granny went to sleep we’d sneak into the kitchen and steal cornbread from the table. She made it in a cast iron skillet and sliced it like pie. It’s moist and chewy and it’s still the best I’ve ever had. I’ve tried to make it myself using her recipe, but mine doesn’t taste quite the same. Outside we caught butterflies in Granny’s gardens. We shot chickens with chinaberries and slingshots and played hide and seek in the cane field. But being at Granny’s was different than when we were kids. The house and yard seemed much smaller and the cane field was gone. I couldn’t help but wonder if at that very moment, my home was disappearing too. Monica and I talked about my parents building a new house. We were both doubtful that it would happen, but we couldn’t help but get caught up in our mother’s excitement. We’d been dreaming of houses our entire lives. We didn’t want much, just a house we weren’t embarrassed of. We wanted things most people take for granted like a new bathtub and new carpet, central heat and air. In the summer, the hundred-degree heat intensified under our tin roof and remained trapped inside, long after sunset. So a window in every room was propped open with a white box fan. The fans in the front of the trailer faced inward, at the back of the trailer they faced outward. We were creating our own breeze. In our room, Monica and I used to sit in front of the fan at night, letting the air blow on our faces. We talked into the fan, our mouths an inch away, and our voices got chopped and distorted by the hum of the fan. We sounded like robots. We pressed crayons through the square slats of the cover and the large white center became green and red and purple. The fans cooled us down, but while we slept, our hungry cats would tear out the screens and climb in through the window in the space beside the fan. They’d go into the kitchen and tear open the plastic bread bags from the counter. We’d wake up to find the cats asleep beside us, the ceiling covered in beetles and moths. * That night we all ate dinner together at Granny’s table. This is something we never did at home since we didn’t have a dining room. When Cody was born, Dad put up a wall and made it into a bedroom. Granny made fried pork chops, chicken and rice, collard greens, tomato and noodles, and cornbread. Then we watched the local news in the living room, my parents on the couch, kids on the floor.

We were waiting for news on the fire but all we heard was general information that we already knew. There was a fire, dubbed the Mallory Swamp Fire, and it was burning out of control. The newscasters spoke of the evacuees and I thought that that was what it must feel like for victims of earthquakes and tornadoes, the wreckage displayed on the screen for the viewers. For most people, it was just another natural disaster. For us, it was our entire lives. When bedtime came, we carefully maneuvered inside Granny’s small bathroom. I brushed my teeth while someone was in the shower. When I was in the shower, Mom or Monica would come in to use the toilet. After a few days at Granny’s, our routines became familiar. Monica, Cody and I shared a room, my parents went to work, the kids watched TV with Granny, we ate dinner, then we went to bed early and got up to start the whole thing over. I wondered what we would do if the trailer actually burned down. Even if my parents could miraculously build a house, where would we stay in the meantime? Would this be my life now? Our stay at Granny’s no longer felt like just a visit and I thought that, perhaps, there were worse things than living in the trailer. * It was hard not to worry about what was going on back at home. Dad’s “wait and sees” were no longer appeasing, and I couldn’t listen to Mom’s talk of floor plans for another second. I just wanted to know about the fire but it was very hard to get information from anyone. The firemen’s resources were limited and they faced one problem after another. There were no road signs to help navigate the intricate webbing of dirt roads. This was especially confusing, and dangerous, for those who weren’t from our area. The choppers tried to drop buckets of water over the flames, but because of the drought, water was scarce. One pilot actually dipped water from a dairy lagoon and when it landed on the fire, it burst into flames. The lagoon water was full of highly flammable cow manure. Efforts were then turned to saving homes. Some houses were covered in flame retardant gel and a bulldozer dug a fire line in our yard, twenty feet from our trailer. But even this was futile. The hundred foot trees could still fall on the trailer, and it was easy for the fire to jump across the fire line, which was just ten feet of unearthed dirt. The fire had been burning for weeks and eventually, I became convinced we’d lose our home. I thought that if I just accepted it, it wouldn’t be so hard to deal with when it happened. I concentrated on it—the image of our empty one-acre lot, a rectangular box of dirt where the trailer used to be. I imagined it so many times it seemed real.

* I thought about how much work Dad had put into the trailer. I remember when he built the front porch five years earlier. I was impressed that he knew how to build one and I loved to see him work with power tools. I wanted to be just like him. I imagined that one day he’d teach me so I could make furniture, dollhouses and rabbit cages. For weeks, we heard the piercing scream of the skill saw and the constant thud of hammering. Sawdust collected in little yellow piles. When he finished, the porch was beautiful, with a tin roof and three wooden steps. The porch created a facade; it made the trailer look more like a house. We even got a front porch swing. The next year Dad added a back porch with a laundry room and screened it in. It was funny to look at the trailer from the side. Our doublewide had grown to a quadruple wide I wondered if we had any pictures of the trailer. I tried to pin down the exact color of the siding: off-white on top with a tannish bottom and shutters. I went through each room of the house and I was amazed at how much I could remember. Amazed at how much I didn’t realize I knew. I had never thought about the décor, the way my mother decorated our home. The choice of wall color and furniture. The wall hangings and knickknacks. The dinner plates. I hadn’t thought of how much of her would be lost. She grew up in that trailer too, and I hadn’t realized that all the stories she told me about her childhood happened there, in those same woods, in those same rooms, on that same carpet. I wondered if that’s why she wanted the place to burn. * Finally, twenty-five days after the fire began, the Mallory Swamp Fire was extinguished. The 300 evacuated families were allowed to go back home and assess the damage. The state lost 61,000 acres and ten million dollars worth of timber. I was nervous on the drive back home. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to unpack when I got there, or if we’d move back to Granny’s for good. It was a three-mile drive down the dirt road to our house and each turn intensified my dread. When we turned the last corner I saw that my grandparents house was okay. Then another curve and I saw the trailer. Everything looked the same, except for the mountain of plowed up land the bulldozer had dug. There was no damage, not even from the smoke, so we moved back into the trailer. It was like we had just been on a strange family vacation.

PART IV

Lily’s Ghost

My sister Monica and her husband Edward came to Tallahassee in early December to go Christmas shopping for their two children. I joined them for lunch at Gordo’s, the local Cuban restaurant. When I arrived, they were already sitting at an outside table, and when I saw the look on Monica’s face, I knew she had something to tell me. She was calm, deliberate, with a strong look in her eyes. I knew it was something more than some juicy gossip, which would have warranted a sort of giddy excitedness we both get. She lit a cigarette and offered me one, then began to tell me about the day before. “Yesterday morning I was using the bathroom and I saw a man in my shower,” she said. “What did you do?!” I asked. “I screamed bloody murder,” she said. “I heard her scream so I went in the bathroom, but there weren’t nobody else in there,” Edward said. Later that day, Monica was driving to town and she suddenly slammed on the breaks and extended her arm across Edward in the passenger seat. He looked around for a deer, or a stalled car, but there was not even a cardboard box in the road. Monica swore she saw a man in a plaid shirt holding hands with a little girl in the road. As she told me this, I thought that this was the news she had to tell me. That she was hallucinating. I also have a wild imagination and sometimes see things that aren’t there. When we used to walk down our dirt road at night, I swore I saw eyes glaring at me from the bushes, and the treetops were shaped like monsters. Even now I mistake the shadows in my bedroom for ominous creatures. But as she continued, I realized that her story was much stranger than what I was expecting. Her two-year-old daughter, Lily, came into the room that evening crying. “There’s a ghost in my room Mommy,” she said. Monica tried to comfort her by telling the ghost to go away. But Lily persisted, “He’s still here.” “Where is he baby?” Monica asked. “He’s in the kitchen now.” Lily led Monica and Edward into the kitchen, and while they didn’t see a ghost, they say there was a marked difference in temperature as they entered the room. “It was ten degrees colder than the rest of the house,” Edward said.

Since Lily is quite advanced for her age, Monica and Edward thought she was just pretending. That her precocious nature explained how a child so young could be so engaged in play. Lily began talking to the ghost. She asked questions then paused for a response. Monica and Edward didn’t pay attention to what she was saying, thinking she’d lose interest and go back to sleep. Lily continued talking to the ghost as she lay between them in their bed and even asked Monica to hold the ghost’s hand. Monica held out her hand and Lily placed it appropriately. I had been quietly sipping my pineapple soda as the details unfolded, but this gave me goose bumps. “Weren’t you scared?” I interrupted. Monica and Edward both shook their heads no. “There was something very comforting about it,” she said. “Was it really a ghost? Or was Lily just pretending?” I asked. “I don’t know,” Monica said. “But I don’t know how something could keep her interest for so long.” “How long?” I asked. “She talked to the ghost for two hours,” Monica said. “Two hours?!” I said. “I asked her to tell me about the ghost, what he looked like, what his name was—” “—What did she say?!” “She didn’t really answer me. But when she asked for a name, Edward and I both looked at each other and said ‘John’.” * Monica married Edward when she was eighteen and moved into his trailer next door to his parents. Soon after that she got pregnant with Lily. My family wasn’t very happy about it. They thought she’d blown her chances at life. She was going full time to North Florida Community College while Edward worked at the prison. Having a baby would make things a lot harder on them. When Mom’s mother, Granny Tangles, heard the news of the pregnancy, she said to Monica, “Now why’d you go and do a thing like that?” She wasn’t excited about her first great grandchild and she didn’t ask if Monica was happy. She gave her the same response she gave Mom when she was pregnant with Michael.

Before Lily was born, my grandfather’s house went up for sale. Dad had lost the house when Mom was pregnant with Monica twenty years earlier and he was desperate to get it back in our family. He and Mom couldn’t really afford it, and Mom refuses to leave the woods she grew up in. So Monica bought the house to make Dad happy. That’s the same reason she had Lily. She says that at least part of the reason she had kids so young, was to make sure Dad got to meet his grandkids. When Monica bought our grandfather’s house, we knew nothing about him. I didn’t even know his name until asking Dad after I heard the story of Lily’s ghost. His name was John Vershal Singletary. I understand Monica’s fear of Dad dying. She and I have always feared Dad’s death. But not in the way that you fear for all of your loved ones. We fear Dad’s death specifically, obsessively, as if we are preparing ourselves. Dad’s father died of a heart attack in his forties and his grandfather had a bad heart too. We must have also felt Mom’s fear when we were growing up. A fear that was evident, though she never talked about. One time Dad was very late in coming home from work. It was hours after Mom expected him home so around midnight or so, Mom and I got in the car to go look for him. I don’t know what she expected. If she thought she’d find him in town getting gas, or having a beer with his friend Peewee. We drove around for a long time and on our way back home, the headlights shone on a bright red reflector on a telephone pole. Mom gasped. Her first instinct was that it was Dad’s truck turned over in a ditch. It turns out that Dad had come across a couple who were broke down on the side of the road. It was dark and raining so Dad drove them all the way home to Lake City, a forty-mile drive away. I asked Mom why she went out looking for him instead of waiting for him to call. I thought it was because she’s controlling. She always wanted to know when and where he was at all times. What she told me made me understand her a lot more. It made me understand my entire childhood more. Before Dad left for the Gulf War, he had an EKG. The results showed that Dad had a minor heart attack about six months earlier. He says he thought he had one, but he didn’t go to the doctor. His test results indicated that his heart was in bad shape and with his family history, he feared the worst.

He waited about three months to tell Mom about the tests. He didn’t know how to tell her that he didn’t think he’d live much longer. His father died in his forties and Dad was already creeping into his thirties. Dad told Mom to expect his death. He wanted her to be prepared. We never knew about Dad’s heart attack or his conversation with Mom until now. But we must have sensed that kind of worry, that anxiety Mom carried around for so long. That fear of losing someone forever, your connection to them becoming only what they’ve left behind.

Her Eighty-Five Years

I went to Lily’s third birthday party at Monica’s house in June 2008. There were pink balloons and a table full of presents wrapped with bows. Lily’s main present was a pink, two- seater Barbie jeep that she and her brother Colt could drive around the yard. I bought Lily an orange My Little Pony with a cowboy hat and a purple mermaid Barbie. After Lily opened her presents, we ate yellow cake with chocolate frosting and Neapolitan ice cream. I sat at the kitchen table and when I looked around I realized that in that same room, were five generations: my great grandmother Granny Willis, her daughter Granny Myrtle, Dad, Monica, Lily and Colt. Granny Willis is eight-five now, and has four great great grandchildren. Lily and Colt are two of them. Granny Willis left the party just before dark and walked the short distance to her house behind Monica’s. I grabbed the notebook from my car and followed her home. I’d been saying for too long that I’d was going to ask her about her life. Granny walked slowly and I looked around her yard as we made our way up the driveway to her house. The grass was tall and needed mowing, and there were several stumps from recently cut trees. The chicken coop and chinaberry tree were gone, and though they’d been gone for several years, it made me sad that night. I have so many fond memories at Granny’s and that night I thought about the fact that I was no longer a child. That the time I had spent at Granny’s during Dad’s deployment was seventeen years ago. That Granny was seventeen years older now, her steps slower, her pains stronger, her falls more frequent. When we got inside her house, Granny sat in her mauve recliner and I sat a few feet away at the dining room table. The room hadn’t changed much since I was young. The deep burgundy carpet and tiny kitchen table. The blue and white plastic wind chimes near her bedroom, the 8x10 pictures of Granny, taken every five years or so for the last twenty years. I opened my notebook to a fresh page and Granny noticed my engagement ring. She asked me when Jason and I were getting married and I told her I wasn’t sure since he was still in Iraq. Then I wondered myself. When would we get married? When would we have children? I realized that it would be a long time before any of that could happen, and my future children would probably never know Granny Willis. *

I began by asking Granny about her husband. She told me his name was Arthur. He was nineteen years old when they got married. She was fifteen. “Were you excited to get married,” I asked. It was strange to think about Granny at fifteen, a young woman in love. “Not really,” she answered. “I weren’t nothing but a youngin wanting to get away from home.” “Did you have a wedding?” I asked. “No. I ran away,” she smiled. “We went to judge and he married us.” “What did your parents think?” “Oooh my Daddy was maaad. Mamma knew what I was doing. She did the same thing. But we were both jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire,” she said, then spat tobacco snuff into a vegetable can. * Granny Willis was born Mildred Christine Clyatt. She was born in 1923 and was raised on a farm in Chiefland, Florida. Her father’s name was Grover Cleveland Clyatt and her mother was Jessie Mae Menten. She wasn’t sure how to spell her mother’s maiden name, so my spelling is just a guess. Granny was second born of four, with two sisters and a brother. Her family farm started out with forty acres, but doubled to eighty, then one hundred and twenty. They grew corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts and sugar cane. They kept chickens and leased several acres to cow farmers. Each winter, the family killed fifteen or twenty wild hogs that stayed fat on acorns. That was enough meat and lard for the entire year, she said. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine the details. Granny had raised chickens for as long as I could remember, and next to the coop she grew peanuts and hot peppers. “Granny, how long have you had chickens?” I asked and smiled at her, remembering the times I used to feed them and gather the eggs. “I’ve had chickens all my life,” she said. “Up till a few years ago. I can’t keep the foxes, koons and opossums from getting ‘em now.” She paused and rubbed her left hand that was still healing from a fall. “Some days I can’t get up and tend to them. And I ain’t gonna have nothing I can’t take care off. I wish I could have ‘em but I can’t no more.” I was sad for her when she said that, and I thought about what Monica had told me earlier that night about getting chickens. She wants to build a new coop between her yard and Granny’s. That way Granny can have chickens again, and Monica will take care of them for her.

She wants Lily and Colt to have the same experiences that we had. She wants them to feed the chickens with Granny and gather eggs. But I wonder if she’ll really do it. If she’ll have the time and money. If she’ll put up the coop before it’s too late. * “Did you go to school?” I asked. “Honey, I’d a been lucky if I’d a finished the second grade,” Granny said. “Us kids had to work. And honey, people this day don’t know what work is. I started hoeing corn when I was a little bitty thing,” she put her hand flat in the air to indicate how little she was. Then she told me about making cane syrup. “I’d spend all day six days a week for a month or two just feeding sugar cane into the mill. We made three or four hundred gallons of syrup every year.” She paused, then sighed. “I did my share of hard work. I started plowing and planting by myself when I was ten. I plowed with the horse, since Daddy couldn’t keep up with her.” Her father had lost his lower leg when he was eighteen because of a bone disease. She told me about his peg leg, how he went to the river and got a hickory stick and whittled it down to the right size. Her mother sewed him a cushion to go between his leg and the wooden peg and he used a belt to keep the peg in place. Her mother was beautiful, she said. But she was very sickly. “She was down six months one time and her feet didn’t touch the floor,” Granny said. “She didn’t even know she was in this world. She stayed unconscious for weeks at a time and we fed her boiled potatoes to keep her alive.” Granny cried all the time when her mother was sick and told me about bathing her in the bed. Her mother complained of migraines and had extreme hemorrhaging spells. Eventually a doctor came to their house and performed gynecological surgery on her mother on the kitchen table without anesthesia. She told me of washing her mother’s blood soaked clothes in a metal washtub. Granny says that she made jump ropes out of grape vines and her sister climbed trees like a cat. Granny was scared of heights but one time she climbed the pecan tree to shake out the nuts. She said when she got up there, she didn’t know how she was gonna get down. Eventually she had to jump. I wrote quickly, jotting down the details as she talked. She was smiling, happy to have the company, and amused at her own stories. She told me about their plow horse, about breaking

69 it in, how fast it could run and how once it had thrown her uncle ten feet in the air. She laughed so hard she could hardly tell the story. Her mouth was opened wide, her face flushed. I’d never seen her laugh like this before. I asked her if she had any pictures of herself from when she was younger. She pulled a picture frame off of a shelf and pointed to a black and white, wallet sized photo of her when she was fourteen. The photo was among a random collection of others and I would have never guessed it was her. But when I looked at Granny closely, I could see that little girl in her. She said she had a few others and pulled out three photo albums and a box from a drawer. She showed me old pictures of her husband, mother and father who had all passed away long before I was born. There were pictures of Dad’s father too and his eyes were as blue as Dad said they were. Granny showed me pictures of her brother who lives in California whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years. There was even a picture of her grandfather, my great great great grandfather, who lived to be one hundred and four years old. He was tall and thin with a white beard. There were several pictures of Granny at various weddings and holidays. She picked up one from twenty years ago and shook her head, complaining about how old she looked. I thought she looked exactly the same in all of them until she said that. I looked up at her face, then at the 8x10s on the wall. Her hair had progressed from dark gray, to light gray and is now pure white. In that moment, Granny became old to me; she looked her eighty-five years. Granny continued with her stories and I imagined her as the young, brown haired girl in the first photo she showed me. She told me about using crops as currency. They didn’t have any money, she said. They paid their workers with groceries and traded eggs for what groceries they didn’t grow on the farm. Eggs were worth two cents a dozen and hog meat went for three cents a pound. But when Granny was thirteen, her father sold the farm for next to nothing and moved to Tampa to work as a tool man for an electric company. Two years later, Granny married Arthur and moved to Mayo. The two worked on a tobacco farm and grew a few acres of their own tobacco. Together, she and Arthur and had nine children. One child was stillborn and Mom tells me that Granny still mourns that baby, since she never got to hold her.

Then in 1952, Arthur died a slow and painful death. I asked Granny what he died of and she rattled off a list of diseases. She said he had diabetes, cancer, and heart problems. When he died, Granny Willis had eight young children to raise on her own. “I didn’t have nothing when he died,” Granny said. “I didn’t have one sheet to my name.” * After I left Granny’s, I thought about everything she had told me. I thought about her as a real person—as a child grieving the loss of her parents, a wife who’d lost her husband, a mother who’d buried five of her nine children. As a woman who spent forty years laboring the fields, then twenty more in a Goldkist factory. I had only known her as my great grandmother who raised chickens and babysat me. I didn’t know about her hardship, her suffering, her entire life that had been there all along, that past that never goes away.

Christmas at John’s

Every Christmas, our family has at least three different parties to attend: one for Dad’s side of the family, one for Mom’s, and one for just our immediate family. When I was younger, Dad’s family had the best party by far. It was the one we looked forward to all year. The party was held at the home of my Granny Myrtle and her husband Alvin. It was the only day of year the entire family saw each other. Alvin’s kids brought their families, so I had a stockpile of step-aunts and uncles and step-cousins for one day a year. Granny’s tree was covered with homemade ornaments we’d made over the years. There were tons of presents and red bows with mistletoe in the doorways. There were platters with cheese and crackers, green olives and sweet gherkins. Crock-pots were filled with Swedish meatballs and little sausages. Tina made cookies, Mom made divinity and there were gallons of thick eggnog. The kids ran through the yard with flashlights, playing hide and seek and telling ghost stories. Going to Granny Myrtle’s was the best part of Christmas. * Granny Myrtle is the only grandparent I’ve ever felt close to; the only one who was what I thought a grandparent should be. When we were little, my cousins Misty and Renee and my sister and I would spend the weekend at her house. Granny would curl our hair and let us wear her Love’s Baby Soft perfume. We wore her mood lipstick that was neon green in the tube and appeared hot pink on our lips. She’d take us to Green Oaks Café in town and we ordered cheeseburgers and French fries. Afterward, she’d make cream soda floats and we’d make pallets in the living room floor with quilts and couch pillows. We watched Pretty Woman and Dirty Dancing. I was never close to Alvin, my grandmother’s third husband. I’ve never considered him my grandfather though I’ve known him as long as I can remember. Perhaps it’s a genetic loyalty to my real grandfather. I didn’t know much about him growing up, but I could feel his absence. He died too young, too suddenly. Granny Myrtle married him when she was only fourteen. Dad says he was a good man and he saved Granny Myrtle from her life at home, helping Granny Willis take care of her seven younger siblings after her father died when she was eleven. I never knew Dad’s real father. I knew Alvin. Alvin has white hair and a white beard that is orange near his nostrils from smoking. He used to sit in his recliner or in his office and smoke cigarette after cigarette. But I don’t

72 remember the house smelling like smoke. Granny kept the house clean and tidy, everything in its place, especially Alvin’s things. He has an enormous VHS movie collection that we he’s very protective of. He recorded every movie that came on TV and made copies of the ones they rented. They are in identical black plastic cases with white labels, lined alphabetically in the living room entertainment center. We had to beg to watch one, and promise to rewind it when we were done and put it back in the right spot. A few years ago, Granny suffered several mini-strokes. No one knew what was wrong with her. Not until it was too late, after she had already changed. Her smile was still the same, but something was missing, like she wasn’t quite connecting to you when you talked. She has since separated from Alvin, and moved to a new house in town by the library. Recently she called my Uncle John telling him that a cat had kittens in her mattress. When he showed up at her house, she was under her bed with a butcher knife trying to cut them out. * There was no Christmas party in 2005 and in 2006 our party was moved to Granny’s new house. We had a potluck and Uncle Don’s wife Katie brought a dozen or so of her own relatives that weren’t related to us. I didn’t want to be unfriendly toward these strangers, but they were intruders, killing what was already a dieing tradition. That year, I brought Jason with me for the first time. He is Jewish and I had celebrated a few Hanukkahs with his family. I was excited to finally share with him one of my favorite traditions. But when I got there, my brothers Michael and Cody had already left to go to the movies, and Monica had to leave early to go to work. And every couch cushion and chair was full with Katie’s relatives whom I’ve still never officially met. They looked so generic and unfamiliar. It was as if I was at the wrong house, with the wrong family. The kids of these strangers were tearing through the living room, going in and out of the house, yelling and screaming in a way that I would only tolerate from my real nieces, nephews and cousins. I regretted the hour and a half drive to get there and understood why my brothers left so quickly. I was happy to see my aunts. Tina had lost weight and Marsha had changed her hair. They were happy to see me too, and I wanted to catch up, to tell them about my life, about college, about Jason. I hadn’t seen them in a few years. But I only stayed for a few minutes, just long enough to give a courtesy hello. I was too disappointed to stay. I thought that the only thing worse than missing that Christmas, was having a mediocre one.

I drove back to my apartment in Tallahassee, realizing things would never be the way they used to be. I’d lost my grandmother, and now I’d lost Christmas too. When Christmas 2007 came around, I hoped things would be different. We were starting a new tradition. One much like the original, but better. This year’s party was at my uncle John’s new house and only our close family was coming. Katie’s relatives were banned and John and Tina planned a beautiful party with beef brisket and potato casserole, deli platters, coffee and hot chocolate, cake and cookies. The newness of that Christmas was buzzing in the air, everything seemed perfect and it should have been the Christmas I had been missing for years. * When I was fourteen, I thought my family’s dream of having a house was finally going to come true. It was 1998 and Dad decided to start a construction business with uncle John. Dad had spent time in construction when he was younger and loved it. He says it was what he was meant to do. On his fortieth birthday, Dad quit his job at the prison to pursue his dream. John and his wife Tina lived in Tallahassee at the time. Tina worked as a CPA and they had recently built a new house. But when they decided to have children, they took a huge gamble: Tina quit her job and John went into business with my Dad. John began driving back and forth from Tallahassee to Mayo, an eighty-mile drive each way, so he and Dad could build houses. Dad and John had been doing odd jobs for a while, with a friend who had a contractor’s license. But this time, it was John who had the license and he and Dad would be working for themselves. They called the company JSBuilders, or rather my Uncle John did as the JS are his initials. John had the license and owned fifty-one percent of the business, but I don’t know why they didn’t call it Singletary Builders, or The Brother’s Builders, or anything that would signify that this company belonged to both of them. Dad says he wasn’t happy with the name, but John took care of the paperwork end of the business, so JSBuilders it was. Mom didn’t want Dad to start the company. She says she knew that John would let him down. But the rest of us were excited. We thought that after a few years of building houses for other people, Dad would be able to build a house for us and we’d move out of the trailer. I knew that I’d cherish any house my Dad built, and began to understand why he was so sad to lose his father’s house.

I was proud to tell people what my father did, that he didn’t work for anyone else. I was proud that he was doing work that he loved, work that he believed in, and therefore, work that was important. But that pride came with a price—a price that my family may never recover from. Their first official job was to build a house for their brother Don. At the time, Don was living in a singlewide trailer. He was building his house through the SHIP program. The government was going to pay the down payment, and loan him two-thirds of the cost of the house, so he had a budget of about 50,000 dollars. Dad says he and John could have built him a fine house for that much. But along the way, Don kept asking for upgrades, such as whirlpool bathtubs, a fireplace, a garage and skylights. John handled all of the paperwork so Dad wasn’t aware of just how much money they were losing by building their brother’s house. Dad says he lost two years salary building it. And when the house was complete, Don refinanced it. Since it was worth much more than he paid, he pocketed tens of thousands of dollars. When Don moved into his new house, he sold his trailer to John. John and Tina wanted to move to Mayo so the kids could be close to Tina’s parents. And with their two small children, the loss of Tina’s income, the mortgage for their house in Tallahassee and the shaky start of John and Dad’s business, John and Tina had gone from earning six figures to being dead broke. Our family wasn’t much better off. Dad made only about 7,000 dollars before taxes that first year, working sixty to eighty hours a week. This combined with Mom’s salary from the prison wasn’t nearly enough to raise our family of six. But we kept going. Dad was happy. He was doing what he loved and he had faith that things would work out. The next year went the same. It takes time to build up a business and Dad and John had to spend a lot of money buying equipment and paying workers. Anyone who worked for Dad and John always got a paycheck when they worked, even if Dad and John didn’t. The third year, Dad’s salary increased to 14,000 dollars and by year four he made 24,000. But by year five, we were so financially drained that Mom and Dad didn’t think we could make it another year. Mom had been using credit cards to get by. All of our food and gas, class field trips and school clothes had been bought with credit cards for almost five years. Work was also inconsistent and it was possible that in year five, they could make no money at all. Mom blames John for the failure of the business. He promised to keep them in work, to contract jobs. He was supposed to do the paperwork end of the business, but when Tina

75 bought a CPA company in Mayo, he spent most of his time in her office, doing work for her business. He let Dad down just like Mom thought he would. When Dad finally decided to throw in the towel, we had a lifetime of debt and no way out. Dad says it was the hardest decision he’s ever had to make in his life. To avoid bankruptcy, Dad quit working with JSBuilders and went back to work at the prison. * When I arrived at John’s house Christmas 2007, I was stunned. I hadn’t been to his newly finished home yet and wasn’t expecting such extravagance. Dad said it was a million dollar home, but I didn’t really know what that meant. When I pulled into the yard, I was impressed by its massive size. It looked like a castle. The house is two stories with 6000 square foot, four bedrooms and three and a half baths. The living room has a twenty-foot ceiling, a twenty-foot wall of glass and a tile fireplace. There are Jacuzzi bathtubs, walk in closets, a home theater room, a play room, two laundry rooms, two stoves and refrigerators and dishwashers, a two car garage, an office and Florida room. It is the nicest house I’ve ever been in. I was amazed that they had gone from living in a singlewide trailer, living paycheck to paycheck, struggling like my family had, to having a million dollar home and business. It turns out that soon after Dad quit the business, John contracted the biggest job of their career. It was a multi-million dollar home, one of only a few in the county. It was the first real money the business made, but since Dad didn’t actually work on this job, he didn’t collect a penny. Monica and I gave ourselves a self-tour of the house and it wasn’t hard for us to find an empty room to talk. “Can you believe Bre’s room?” Monica said. “I know. It looks like a princess lives in there. Her own bathroom, walk in closet, a chandelier. My God, did you see the curtains?” I said. “Did you see the dining room?” “This house is right out of a magazine,” I said. While we were happy for our aunt and uncle and their family, it was hard to be in that house that night. We’d spent our entire lives hoping our parents would buy a house. Not a mansion. Nothing as excessive as my uncle’s house. Just a house. I wanted them to have even a fraction of what my uncle had.

All three Singletary brothers had lived in trailers, but now, Don had a new house that his brothers built for him and John had a house that our family couldn’t even dream of. Dad had nothing to show for the work he’d done, for all that he had lost. The five years of his life that he invested in that company. The five years my family bought groceries with credit cards. For the debt my parents would be paying off for twenty years. For Dad’s failed dream. I was getting upset as we talked, so Monica and I discreetly left the house, and went to the front yard. We walked through the parked cars and found my parents standing next to Dad’s truck. Dad was smoking a Marlboro Ultra Light and Monica took out two cigarettes for us from his pack. The four of us had formed a make shift circle, almost hiding behind the vehicle. Mom was leaning against the front of Dad’s truck. Her bright red sweater was striking against the cold white metal, but her arms were folded, her head down. She wasn’t herself on her favorite holiday. She didn’t seem like the woman who listens to hours of Christmas music, watches Rudolf and Frosty every year on TV, the woman with Santa figurines. “What’s wrong?” Monica asked her. “I’m just sick to my stomach,” she muttered. “Why?” Monica said. “Have you been in that house yet?” We all glanced up at the enormous gray beast, unable to hide from its windows, looking down at us like giant, oppressive eyes. “Is there a smell or something?” Monica whispered. “No.” Mom paused. “How am I supposed to go home after being in that house? How am I supposed to go home to my trailer where I can see the ground through the bathtub and the water heater’s held up by bricks?” I take a drag from my cigarette as she talks. “It makes me feel like white trash.” I didn’t know what to say to her. I understood how she felt. It’s the same feeling I had only minutes earlier as I toured the house. But for me it was somehow different. I am still young, unmarried with no children and have plenty of time to figure out my life, to find a home. I’m not trapped the way she has been forever. She needed us to be there for her, to say something, to acknowledge that she was right and that she wasn’t alone. But I didn’t say anything. The rest of us stood there smoking cigarettes and Dad handed me a bottle of Bud Light from his truck. I imagined what the four of us must have looked like in the yard together, how cliché we must all have seemed.

I knew Mom wanted Dad to agree with her. But he would never betray his brother. He wasn’t bitter about his brother’s success. It was just his brother’s turn, his ship had come in, he said. He acknowledged the success of Tina’s business, that his brother deserved his home. That they had made choices and had opportunities we didn’t. When I asked Dad if he felt that John owed him anything, he said no. “Things worked out unfairly,” he said, “but John didn’t cheat me.” Mom stood there silently and I contemplated hugging her, but just couldn’t do it. I was afraid that if I did, I would cry. I was afraid that if I did, then everything she was saying would somehow be true. That she would be white trash. That I would be white trash. So Monica hugged her. She’s always been the martyr of the family. Like buying my grandfather’s house, hugging Mom was her duty.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Stephanie Nichole Singletary grew up in North Florida and attended FSU, earning her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing in 2005, and her MFA in Creative Writing in 2008.