my body, “This is what matters.” I was looking for wholeness.
The stories are examinations of personal, family, and community history. They are observations on rural living, accounts of my efforts to find society, and essays about the landscape around me. Only by inspecting each piece could I come to a conclusion about whether my life belonged there.
Instead of a tribe, what I found in my south Georgia home was an erosion of human bonds—both to each other and to the land. Those elements I sought, such as community and sense of place, had been compromised one way or another. I saw a way of life that once had made sense pitched into failure.
During the past century, our country suffered a rural exodus; current figures estimate that 80 percent of the United States population now live in cities. The result is that agrarian communities are diminished. Nowhere in recent human history are our tribal, interdependent natures more realized than in farming communities; although these social units are not without dysfunction, ostracism, and strife, here the human spirit seems to thrive. I wanted to inhabit that life.
Perhaps stories keep us as a people in place glued together. As the stories vanish or are lost—as people depart homeplaces, as the landscapes are destroyed—no new stories form to replace them. Without the stories that fasten us each to each, the web that is community commences to unravel, its threads flapping in the wind, finally tearing loose completely and wafting away.
A life constructed of stories can be had. A simple, wonderful existence is possible in the country, one full of beauty and meaningful work and shared resources. It is possible, though many forces of the twenty-first century would tear it apart, to live in community.
I am clinging to a shaking cobweb strung between a leaky house and a wind-torn barn. I am spinning like crazy to reconstruct it, conversing with the ghosts of the pine flatwoods to weave their old stories in with the new ones. Here and there across the web, others are working hard, laying thread on top of sticky thread, to catch and bind us anew. People are spinning night and day, adding the bright colors of their dreams. We may make a beautiful net yet.
Kitchen side of the house, spring.
Long Road Home
When I shoved open the door of my grandmother Beulah’s farmhouse, shut tight and neglected many heavy-hearted years, I entered a history that stretched backward not simply to the limits of my memory but to the farthest point of my family’s memory, although the people who knew that beginning are no longer known.
It was night when we arrived, my son and I. Mama and Daddy met us at the place, and Uncle Percy strolled over, the tip of his cigarette a pinpoint of orange ash. A security light on its tall pole cast pearly shadows across humps of bushes in the yard, lighting the concrete steps. The screen of the porch reflected the light, as if a huge moon were shining, so that the screening appeared silver and not deep rust, and translucent, as it would by daylight. The screen door, loosed at its joints, sagged against the porch floor, whose gray paint was tarnished by a thick layer of dust the umber of the road running east of the house.
Then we were standing on the porch, trying to get in through a door that had not been opened in years. In the dim light, I recognized a plant stand in the corner that Granddaddy had made out of a tree for Grandmama’s flowers. He chose a cedar with many branches, and each branch, planed level, now held an empty clay flowerpot. Spiderwebs constructed around the porch corners, having collected the reddish gray dust that blanketed everything, dangled like old rags.
Uncle Percy fiddled with the door. The eldest son who had never left the homeplace, Percy lived in a trailer across the yard. “This key ain’t wanting to turn,” he said. “I believe I’ve bent it.”
“Can you get it out?” Daddy asked. Uncle Percy fiddled some more, then handed the freed key to my father. “Looks like it’s cracked,” Daddy said. “Percy, you mind if I try it? We’ll be in a fix if it was to break off.” My head hurt from a terrible blend of fear and excitement, and from a long day driving east, pulling our possessions behind the truck. I sat down in one of Grandmama’s rocking chairs.
The incandescent bulb lit one side of Daddy’s face, which was the face of concentration. With a great deal of jiggling, Daddy forced the lock’s tumblers into position and the doorknob turned. The door groaned as it separated from its frame. My father can make anything mechanical work—his heyday was the era of machines.
When I rose, the back of my shorts and shirt were stained with dust. Mama tried to brush it off. “Can’t sit down until we clean,” I said.
“It’s that road,” Mama said. “The summer’s been so dry. When cars pass, the dust boils over the house.”
Daddy did not enter the unlit doorway but instead relocked the lock. He jiggled again, and again the door heaved loose from its frame. “You got to back the key out about an eighth inch,” Daddy said to me, “and turn it counterclockwise. That key’s cracked and could break anytime. You got to be careful.” He returned the key to Uncle Percy ceremoniously, and my mother’s brother, who had inherited the house, turned to me.
“You’re the one gone be needing this,” he said.
I wouldn’t, as it turned out. In the years that I occupied the house, it would almost never be locked from the outside.
“I’d take that key down to the hardware first thing tomorrow and make a copy,” Daddy said emphatically. “We need to replace this doorknob. I’ll look on the yard for one.” By “the yard” he meant the junkyard he owned, seven miles away, where I was raised.
Daddy stood back. Mama too. I moved past them and hesitantly stepped through the open door into the interior darkness. Behind me, Uncle Percy fumbled for a set of light switches on the wall by the door.
What I recognized first was the smell. Despite having been closed up for years, the house had the same rush of pine and cedar it had always had, a fragrance I have never smelled anywhere else, ever—one of absolute belonging.
A light came on, then another.
Almost nothing had altered since I’d last been inside, nine or ten years before. Grandmama had been alive then, and one could think now that she wasn’t far away. Her belongings—vinyl sofa and chairs bought in the early ’70s, pictures of her children’s families, gilded lamps, the same candy dishes—were a study in life interrupted. Whatnots, including a ceramic bluebird on a limb and an ashtray shaped in the form of a coiled snake, lined the low wall between the two living rooms. A lifesize ceramic owl hung from the ceiling. Husks of dead insects that had been trapped inside littered the rust-colored carpet. Every exposed surface was coated with a film of dust, including the lacy drapes, which would not survive a washing. When I reached for one of the plastic yellow roses in a vase on the end table, it disintegrated at the touch.
“The old house needs a lot of work,” Uncle Percy said then, affectionately. “Nobody’s even been in here in I don’t know how many years.”
I never thought I’d return to south Georgia to live, to my hometown of Baxley (population 4,150), to a farm seven miles from town on a dirt road. I had left Baxley seventeen years earlier, because it was expected that I would leave—mine was the first generation to attempt college—if I was to make anything of myself, and because I could not entertain the idea of living in a place where the people knew so much of each other’s history. The world was infinite, full of possibility, and anonymous; Baxley was small, which to me meant limited and constricting.
My mother had been raised on this respectable farm, but my father was a town boy, a ruffian. He came from bad blood—his father was a ne’er-do-well, a brawling boaster, a lunatic woodsman. Daddy never remembers my grandfather sleeping a peaceable night with his wife and eight children; he never remembers a normal evening with his family. Instead, his