what right did I, one of its own, have to abandon it? Could one person make a difference to a homeland? Could I be a tongue for a whittled and beleaguered landscape? What was my responsibility toward honor, and toward my convictions, and toward my family, who had not left south Georgia for seven generations?
The last time I’d been here was the day we put my grandmother, Beulah, with the dead, who live not so far away, less than a mile down the road, in a grassy cemetery.
She had died very quietly, one leg already an inky blue-black from a blood clot, with a final tremor of breath. My mother had been at her side. Mama had stepped into the nursing home corridor and summoned a nurse.
“Baby, she’s gone,” the nurse said.
Viewing of the body took place the day after Grandmama died. All afternoon I sat within a fluctuating ring of people under the water oaks in her swept yard, listening to stories while neighbors brought chicken and dumplings, pans of rolls, pound cakes. No one cried. We sat in the presence of death and did not mention it. Family flocked in from Chattanooga, Orlando, Jacksonville, Chicago, kinfolk I rarely saw, and while we dug our chair legs into the ground with our squirming, we stared into the faces of our kin, updating pictures in our minds. Late afternoon I ironed a nice dress, used a smudge of Grandmama’s blush and lipstick, and rode to the funeral home with my cousin Jimmy.
Grandmama’s casket had been wheeled to the front of the chapel. It was shining silver and gold, surrounded by roses and huge pots of white lilies. The casket was open, with the top of Grandmama’s head, lying against pink satin, visible. I thought it looked as if any moment she would raise herself and ask what on earth she was doing in such a ridiculous box. “Help me out of here,” she’d say, and I would. Her eyeglasses rested on her lifeless face. What need did a body have of glasses?
The few people in the chapel were immediate family, contemplative and somber on the benches. Slowly I walked past them to the front of the parlor and stood beside Grandmama, looking down at her. Aunt Coot joined me. We had often stood together beside Grandmama’s bed, especially during the last fortnight, when I’d helped take care of her. Most of that time she wasn’t able to even speak. My aunt reached down and touched Grandmama, smoothed her hair, fingered her elfin ears. The undertaker had fixed her hair in precise, neat curls like a short-haired doll might wear, and my grandmother would’ve liked the way it looked. I touched the curls, my hand following my aunt’s. Grandmama’s hair felt the same as when she was alive, rough and wiry. Her ear was cold, frozen and unbending. Her hands were stiff and bloodless, and holding one of them I remembered with satisfaction that a few days before I’d removed fingernail polish a nurse had painted on. Grandmama never in her life enameled her nails.
We sat and sat. People started to arrive at the funeral parlor: neighbors from Spring Branch Community who’d known Grandmama all their lives. Nieces and nephews. Distant kin. “You have to be Lee Ada’s daughter,” someone said. “You look exactly like her.” I tried to meet them all, following genealogical lines until I was exhausted, fitting people into a framework of history and place that embraced me.
During the last rites the next day, I sat beside Uncle Percy. Most of the time, he twiddled his thumbs round and round, motion without purpose, but once I looked over to see a tiny spring flowing from his eye. On my left, Aunt Fonida’s body rocked and shook with silent tears. Uncle James, a Baptist minister, recited Grandmama’s favorite verse, Ruth 1:16. “And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
I rode with Aunt Fonida in the slow burial procession, following a glossy black hearse from Spring Branch Church along a clay road that turned toward Carter Cemetery. Behind us, a snake of cars crept past farms that Grandmama had passed all her life, houses where she’d stopped to visit. This was her world, and now she made her last journey through it, back to a clay hill where we would bury her beside Granddaddy, among the dead of that country. At ninety-three, the matriarch of my mother’s side of the family, my last living grandparent, the elder of the clan, was gone.
After the interment, after everyone had proceeded back to the house and eaten the last helpings of chicken-and-rice and pineapple cake, and then fled to their new cars and left the history that was no longer relevant to their lives, I drove away to graduate school in Montana with my young son.
“You won’t be back,” friends said. “You’ll fall in love with the West, and one of those cowboys.”
“I’ll be back,” I replied.
One night on the Montana prairie, I dreamed of my grandmother. All night the coyotes had been singing. They had two camps, one to the east and one to the west, and their songs passed back and forth: bays, trills, barks. The wild dogs seemed to never stop howling. Theirs was a night tongue, calling interdependence and belonging. I lay awake listening and understanding none of it.
Toward morning I dreamed I was haying a field on my grandmother’s land. I was riding the vintage John Deere and the sun was close and brilliant, but not oppressive the way it usually is in late summer in the South. I was practically flying, bare armed, over this field. I knew that although my grandmother was dead, she was watching from the line of water oaks at the edge of the pasture. Yet her body seemed to be the hayfield itself. I dreamed this so wholly that when I woke I thought I was there, in my grandmother’s grassy arms.
The morning I urged the U-Haul out of Montana, I dashed into the sidewalk cafe we frequented to grab a bagel, and there was my friend Davy, drinking coffee and waiting, newspaper scattered about.
“Sweetmeats,” he greeted me. Davy is easy in his body, slim, his neck-length hair plowed by finger lines. Although he is openly gay, we are very flirtatious.
“Babydoll,” I answered, jovial. “I’m on my way out.” He knew I was homeward bound.
“Know how women in the South wear blue jeans cut off short, and they sew lace to the hem?” Davy asked with false innocence. He’s a Charleston native, so he knows only too well the poignant stereotypes and untruths of the rural South.
“They got big hair and when they walk their pantyhose go swish, swish, swish,” he drawled. “And the men, they drive around with Confederate flags stuck all over their trucks and there’s a dead deer lying in the back they’ve poached. And they live in house trailers with a pile of beer cans in the yard that they’ve thrown out the window as they emptied them. And it’s ‘nigger this’ and ‘nigger that.’”
He paused, looked directly at me.
“Girl, you gone come out the house and there’s a big ole rattlesnake coiled up on your front porch showing its teeth at you.” Davy opened his mouth wide, somehow managing a vulgar, lustful expression. He has the most expressive lips ever put on a man.
“Wild pigs come out in the morning from the swamp—watch out when you go rambling or they’ll get you, get your boy, and get your little dog, too. Don’t go swimming in no river, ole alligator’ll drag you under.” He drew in a quick breath. I dropped head to hands.
“And it’s so hot down there you’ll have to shave your legs.” Davy took a sip of coffee and banged his mug down, coolly picking up a section of paper. I sat in the sweet sunshine, feeling behind me the beautiful people drinking their organic, hazelnut-flavored, songbird-friendly coffee, and beyond them the lovely enlightened town, and even beyond, the majestic mountains washed in green, rising past the cafe window.
“What you want to go back down there for?” Davy asked.
