Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 Swamp Fire Stephanie Singletary Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES SWAMP FIRE By 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. ii 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. iv 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 v 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. vi PART I 1 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. 2 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. 3 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