eerie calls and cackles back and forth across the creek bottom as the numbing chants of whip-poor-wills and choruses of katydids and crickets lulled me to sleep.
Today, Edgefield is still a rich refuge for wild things. Most of them don’t attract the attention that deer and turkeys do. Hand-standing spotted skunks secret themselves in hedgerows and old fields. Webster’s salamanders hide in the litter of the forest floor. Christmas darters, Carolina heelsplitters, yellow lampmussels, and eastern creekshells won’t win any contests for charisma but the decorative little fish and trio of freshwater mussels survive in Edgefield’s creeks and not many other places. Many rare plants are found there, too. These rooted and leafed things are more often than not overlooked even though their lyrical names demand attention: adder’s tongue, streambank mock orange, shoals spider-lily, yellow sunnybell, Oglethorpe oak, eared goldenrod, Carolina birds-in-a-nest, small skullcap, and enchanter’s nightshade.
Edgefield has been less welcoming of—and less of a refuge for—human diversity. Under regressive and racist governors who fostered and promoted policies aimed squarely at exclusion and violence, the power base in Edgefield kept things stuck in a state of antebellum stagnation, separate and nowhere near equal. While the South has long laid claim to a culture that values manners, loyalty, honor, and a slower pace of living, there are other, less admirable traits that ooze out from between the niceties. A heaping of hypocrisy is often served alongside the southern hospitality. Double standards are as common as ragweed and persistent as kudzu across the region. The “good old days” that some pine for weren’t the best for all of us. But Edgefield was still my refuge, primarily because it was and is a sanctuary for creatures that aren’t subject to the prejudices of men.
My memory continues to run like a rabbit around the times spent in the small piedmont place I called home. It weaves and winds through woods and wetlands to reconnect me to my nature-loving roots. That pleasant wandering is reason enough for remembering—and returning—home.
A rusting, dented black mailbox teetering atop a decaying post marked the spot: Route 1, Box 29, Republican Road. Driving west you bore left at the mailbox, onto the dusty dirt road where the county had abandoned regular maintenance to chance and persistent complaints. If you stayed straight on that road for about a quarter of a mile, you’d see a brick house, tinted somewhere between orange and red, the hue of sun-faded clay. The Ranch was a typical 1970s dwelling, nothing spectacular, but mostly modern. It was comfortable and a place Daddy and Mama had worked hard to build. It had been a much smaller house until my parents bought an old army barracks and attached it to the little four-room affair that had been the Lanham abode. They encased the new addition in these clay-colored bricks, added a touch of distinction with white columns on the front porch, and called it home.
The porch looked out over a yard Mama had tried to cover with a slow-growing patch of carpetlike Zoysia grass. But it never lived up to her expectations, and weeds and Bermuda grass had to suffice for lawn. Behind the Ranch a huge hay shed sheltered food for the cattle, Daddy’s farm equipment, and almost everything else he thought might be of some future use. There was a chicken coop in the corner of the shed, and on the far side and out of sight (but not smell) a pigpen.
All of it—the Ranch, the hay shed with its tacked-on animal pens—was surrounded by nature. Well-tended gardens, crop fields, and rolling pastures buffered the Home Place from the government timberland. There was even a wetland of sorts, which in later years I would learn was really an open cesspool—the Ranch’s own homemade sewage system.
The homestead was also buffered from the outside world. Mama and Daddy were progressive thirtysomethings who’d come through the 1960s civil rights movement. They were still overcoming discrimination but saw a way to provide better for all of us, improving and enlarging their condition. Inside the Ranch there were the decorative signs of 1970s progress: faux-wood paneling and sculpted carpeting in gaudy colors. My big brother, Jock; older sister, Julia (“Bug”); and little sister, Jennifer, all grew up there. For me, though, it was mostly a part-time home. A good portion of my life up until I was fifteen was spent at the other, less-than-modern house that sat across the pasture.
That house—the Ramshackle—was down another road in both space and time. My grandmother Mamatha’s place was everything the brick Ranch wasn’t. It had a rusting (and leaky) tin roof, six tiny rooms, and an exterior of brittle, white tiles that were loose or missing in places. The house had a snaggletoothed look where the black tar paper showed through the gapped tile teeth. The porch roof had a ragged hole where she’d shot blindly one night at a hooting owl she claimed was a bad omen.
The yard was Mamatha’s pride and joy. She would sit on the wood-planked front porch on warm spring days, admiring her green-thumbed handiwork. Over her five or six decades of occupancy she’d collected fieldstones of every shape and size and arranged them carefully around a huge arborvitae tree. In that dedicated space Mamatha planted all kinds of flowers, which flourished under her constant care. Much of her success depended on the tons of manure she constantly mined from our feedlot. My grandmother worked hard to control things in that little world of stone and cowshit—watering, hoeing, and weeding were never-ending work.
Outside the flower ring, however, an army of weeds crept in from the adjoining pasture. Most of what was in that tiny space was green, and from a distance looked lawn-like. There were three or four old crepe myrtles in the yard that erupted in purple and white blooms in April and May. Little copses of lemon-yellow daffodils and nodding snowdrops preceded the crepe myrtles in the new warmth of March. The last time I visited the Home Place many of those flowers, now probably a hundred years old, were still heralding spring.
In the complimentary light of a fading sunset, with your eyes squinted just so, Mamatha’s place looked quaint: the little house in the big woods. Coming closer and stepping through the ill-fitting door would reveal the truth, though. Probably built sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, the Ramshackle was almost a functional museum of the Depression-era South. The house was a shoddily constructed thing, with an interior of hastily painted Sheetrock walls and creaky, uneven floors covered by sheets of cheap, fading vinyl. In one room, a remnant piece of threadbare beige carpet provided the “luxurious” touch to an otherwise basic decor. The indoor plumbing, with exposed metal pipes and white enamel basins, was a relatively recent addition. Insulation had been an afterthought. The modern improvements included a 1950s Frigidaire that Mamatha always called an “icebox.”
In a scary, dimly lit, and moldy-smelling lower room that had probably been someone’s quick-fix idea of an addition, a coffin-sized deep freezer sat entombed in piles of old clothes, magazines, and other junk my pack rat grandmother just couldn’t bear to throw away. The freezer kept other items in an icy state of suspended animation. Plastic containers and bags filled with the bounty from gardens past sat stacked and frozen against some future famine. Foil-wrapped mystery meats and leftovers from long-ago church suppers were wedged into every nook and cranny. There was food in there that had seen several decades pass. If Mamatha had pulled a coelacanth—the prehistorically creepy, bottom-dwelling fossil-fish-amphibian—from the depths of that freezer, it wouldn’t have been a surprise. I suppose my father came by his hoarding gene honestly.
In spite of her “collecting” my grandmother kept a clean—if not neat—home. Twine-bound brooms made of the tawny stems and tassels of dead broom sedge kept the floors cleaner than any vacuum ever could. Mamatha scrubbed her floors—sometimes on her knees—and seemed always in some mopping, sweeping, or dusting mode.
My grandmother’s humble Ramshackle sat next to a dilapidated smokehouse. A notched-log structure that may have been built decades before the house itself was, it always seemed ready to give up the ghost to time and gravity. Though salt-cured pork had hung there in the past, by the time I came along the smokehouse was a dark and dank junk shed filled with all kinds of unappetizing and inedible things. My grandfather’s World War I gas mask stared
