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 father came and went, almost invariably in a rage, and in terror his children gave him wide berth. Daddy was eleven when his father abandoned the family for good.
My grandmother on that side worked in the fields, cooked in cafes and bootlegged whiskey to feed her family, who never had shoes on their feet or more than a set or two of clothes, and who never had enough food. Those were hard times. Mama, on the farm, hadn’t known hunger. She told stories of opening watermelons and cutting out the heart to eat, then throwing the rest to the chickens.
My mother’s parents disapproved of her association with my father, an objection that forced their daughter to elope. Part of their worry was justified in the years to come, for my mother chose a hard-working life for herself. That life, however, was founded on a bedrock of love, which makes most anything not only possible to withstand but also unalterable.
When they married, my father opened a junkyard, just outside the city limits, which barely sustained them and the young’uns they begat one after the other. I was the second child. Kay was first, four years older than me; my brother Dell was born a year later, and Stephen a year after Dell. A brilliant, tormented man, my father quested for the meaning of life; he became very dogmatic in his religious beliefs and started a church in a warehouse he bought downtown. Mama gave away her shorts and high heels, and quit wearing jewelry and lipstick. She began to go about with her head covered, in dresses dark and calf length. Daddy banished the television from the house.
Then, with four small children, my father succumbed to the mental illness that had plagued the Ray name for generations, the illness Mama’s parents had worried about when he showed up at their door to court their middle daughter. During a three-year span, Daddy was hospitalized a number of times at the state mental institution. Later, my father would temper his brilliant fire, and use it to create and invent and repair and make do. Through it all, somehow, Mama kept her family fed, clothed, and together.
Longing had characterized my existence in this homeland. We were ever poor and very different from other townspeople—proud, fervently religious, marred by lunacy, suspicious. We were doomed to isolation. As a girl I longed for a different life, a peaceful, forgiving one, a life such as other people lived, such as I read about in books. I longed to be away, or for things to be different. I longed for lovers, before and after I had them. Growing up with so many yearnings, I became both their progeny and their maker, so that longing trailed me into adulthood. Everywhere I turned, I wanted the world to be the way I had imagined it could be.
Looking back from far away, that childhood seemed remote and unreal, any shame lessened by the knowledge that always, during and after childhood, both our parents loved us—would die for us, in fact. They acted in what they considered to be our best interest. But my apostasy was real, and I felt there was no going back, not to the whereabouts of my sorrowful origin. I remembered too clearly how cramped life had been there.
Southern Georgia had been the country of longing. Could I make it, now, the country of gratification?
Surely I am not the only human who wakes up one day, having left home, and finds herself slave to a patria, imprinted with its memory, wanting to return. Maybe it’s true of humanity that we carry our nativity inside us forever. We have witnessed time and again people’s spirits tugging at their bodies, trying to go home: emigrants pining, tears rolling at the thought of fjords or steppes or lochs. In my years away from south Georgia, I had not been able to forget it. After all, even my bones were ossified from that locale, formed of it as surely as the tupelo and cypress are. My blood, its blood.
The landscape of my childhood was one of fierce occupation by trees. When we rode country roads on Sunday afternoons on the back of Daddy’s truck, the woods crowded in on all sides, thick and cool, the trees intimate and sensual in ways we could not understand. Above, their interlacing branches made canopies we rode slowly beneath. In the bottoms, where the roads rose on bridges and above culverts, we passed through swamp chestnut oak, beech, and magnolia, the hard, red clay of the earth offering us clear passage. Along the high sand ridges we rode through longleaf pine flatwoods, where the last sunlight, as it cast through the tall and silent pines, made of the grass a kind of lace.
Even then, new methods of logging and the row-cropping of trees had begun, but I was too young to see this. I saw only a wall of forest as the truck chugged up a slight rise, then the pines, then a white-painted house sitting amid fields planted in cotton. I saw pecan trees shading the house, and Confederate roses in the yard. Barefoot children played in the dry ditch, gathering knobby pebbles of ferric oxide, rain rocks, to toss gingerly and carefully after us. As dark came on, we watched for foxes and deer to dash out, watched for snakes, watched for anything, our bright lights piercing before us as if into a dark-green tunnel. The music of choirs trailed out of country churches.
My life had not been the movement toward grace and happiness I had dreamed as a young woman it would be. After seventeen years away, I had arrived at the knowledge that I no longer felt at home on the earth, riven as I was from our predominant culture—cities with hordes of strangers, a gluttony for material things, loss of nature and family farms, general disconnection to land. I hungered to be part of a rural community defined by land and history and blood. The sap that ran from my roots to my branches mingled with the sap of my neighbors: this person a third cousin, this a fifth, that a sister-in-law, this a dead uncle’s wife. Couldn’t I plop down among them and be surrounded by meaning, and finally happy? I desired the jubilance of the place for my son, who was nine years old. I wanted him to run barefoot and pick blackberries and climb magnolias and play with his cousins.
I knew by then I had to write, and my grandmother’s farmhouse had lain empty not only the two years she’d been dead, but since she and Uncle Percy had moved over to the trailer, for comfort’s sake, nine years before. I hoped it would be a quiet abode where I could write.
I was a grown daughter, a single mother, a naturalist, and a writer. Could I resolve the troubles of childhood, since I would no longer be a child in a childhood place? Could life be functional here this time? Could I find a voice where I had not had one?
South
