In St. Thomas

Of late I’m impatient with children’s books. Though, thinking back, I remember I read Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish translation to Tallulah as she nursed, two or three months old, soliloquies in Hamlet as lullabies, and Sandra Cisneros’s La Casa en Mango Street before she was two, and she was happy. Lately she revealed an interest in The Odyssey, and sobbed uncontrollably when Beowulf died, and requested repeated chapters of The Sun Also Rises, intrigued by the fishing and the bullfighting and the drinking. (She knows from drunk mans.) She began to invent games featuring Lady Brett Ashley. Hemingway wrote some nice, simple, prose—like a kids’ book, kind of, yet so much more satisfying. (“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”) The Odyssey and Beowulf, though—they were meant to be spoken. The emotions and motivations emerge stark and spare, like hillsides of granite.

I took a walk to the ferry dock at an unaccustomed hour. It had gone dark. I passed the usual detritus, the plastic bags and go cups and empty Medallas shining under the streetlights. The wind was coming from the sea on the other side of the hill as I listened to the sound of the coquís, and one of the men playing dominoes outside the bar lifted his plastic cup of liquor and called out Hi, loudly in English.
Is it tristes tropiques, whatever those are, exactly? (I look up Levi-Strauss on the internet.) Are tristes tropiques like cruisebummers—that haunted sense of something missing, a void to be filled in paradise? I passed the house of a woman we’d known. She had died of cancer two days ago. She’d gone up to her old home in Vermont to die and because I never saw her leave I couldn’t shake the feeling that she hadn’t. I walked past the empty restaurant where a young chef we’d met had started working, when the tourists didn’t come to her restaurant up the hill.
Then I understood that melancholy was something I was looking out of, into the night--displacing it to this other world presumptuously from the world in my own head. The feeling that I don’t belong here, and I can tell, somehow, that I never will. And the places I’ve loved—are they closed to me, indefinitely? That’s the thing about wandering, for me, the intensified awareness that things are always changing and temporary, the craving for difference alternating with the need for certainty, some place that is safe and unchanging. Some place that I now know, and always will, does not exist and yet—like those beautiful archetypes—it is, it must be.

Día de los Muertos

At the edge of Strom Thurmond Lake on the border of South Carolina we pulled over for a picnic. Restless, I went walking on the verge of the access road, into nothingness, the sun shining. I found a cardboard box with the bottom rotted out—the spine and hipbone of an animal resting on lichen and dead leaves, discolored by the elements—a small dog, perhaps. Empty beer cans and a candle tipped in the underbrush, the tall glass cylinder filled with white wax. I used to see them on the low shelves of grocery stores in New Orleans, used for offerings. We tossed food into a stand of pine and drove on. In Edgefield the signs will tell you that a beautiful woman’s head was once split open at the foot of the courthouse steps.

Strom Thurmond and my grandfather were cousins, born in the same house. A wide white house, nothing special, save for the whispers of my grandmother and grandfather, newly wed, living on the second floor. She’d wanted to be a lingerie buyer for White’s department store in Augusta and fly down the road behind the wheel of Model T and drink beer across the river. She came here to teach school and lived in a boarding house. Her father-in-law asked her to drive him. She was beautiful behind the wheel. Strom Thurmond’s grave is marked by a giant slab of local granite, the carved words sonorous--survived by his black daughter, the child of a family servant he must have cornered in an upstairs bedroom when he was just a teenager.

Liberty Hill Road stretched past anonymous miles of pine. At a clearing in the woods my mother pulled the car over. Once she’d come out to her ancestors’ plantation and found a pile of chicken parts. The house was gone now, faded on back into loam. She walked over to a mound of broken granite. "They’ve plowed up the gravestones," she said. "They plowed the gravestones up." It must have been mere broken rock, not gravestones at all. For the coffins, those would have rotted, too--but what had happened to the bones?

What we've been doing lately

I’m in Georgia with Tallulah—on shore leave while Adam works on the boat and eats pressed meat sandwiches and bachelor biscotti. I’ve been working on and off on a project about the Confederadoes, Southerners who left the south after the Civil War for points farther south—Mexico, Cuba, Brazil. These were some of the most committed separatists, perhaps among those who envisioned themselves becoming white Yankee slaves. South Carolina, where my mother’s family has lived for generations, was the first state to secede, so it’s no surprise that the Edgefield (SC) Colonization Society was prominent in discussions of expatriation. And, as it happens, one of my ancestors, a man named Harrison Strom, was a member of the Society. I sat trying to imagine Harrison Strom. I imagined him sitting in an upright chair in a dim parlor, reading Ballard S. Dunn’s Brazil: A Home for Southerners. People, even prominent people, would have been poor, I figured, after the war, and maybe he didn’t have much money for lamp oil. Harrison Strom was thinking. He was thinking about what to do. As he lives in my mind he is filled with bitterness. His thoughts are angry thoughts, and he dreams of leaving this mess behind even as his blood feels tied to the land. Perhaps he populates the unknown country of Brazil with docile slaves and makes the fields grow rich crops, the Portuguese names of which he has heard, but which slip from his brain like water.

Harrison Strom never went to Brazil. He lived and died in Edgefield County, and I have no idea what happened to him. Perhaps he died in bitterness. As for the real Confederadoes—some of them went and came back, some of them formed Southern colonies, and their descendants speak fluent Portuguese, and many of them have dark skin.

On Friday we drove over to Greenwood to visit my grandmother, who is 96 now. Her voice drops a note and grows confident when she talks about the past. I remember her haunting small-town archives and libraries, researching genealogy. She found things that shocked her—like the ancestor taken away by Cherokees, who turned his back on the world he’d left. This seemed deeply embarrassing to her, yet she confessed it as if she wanted us to know. Perhaps she has secrets. Her daughters tell each other stories about her. She was illegitimate, they say. Her father was a mulatto. There is nothing but stories upon stories, blurring the edges of each other, wearing upon each other like water does on paper and I’m left with vague impressions as powerful as vivid dreams.

My mother was telling me the other day about her grandfather—he was superintendent of schools in Edgefield, then signed up soldiers for World War II. And out of the story—not a story, really, but a kind of meandering river that doubles over on itself, leaving ox-bow lakes—in a instant I felt this man, whose name I still don’t know. I felt him very near, even, I would say, in my blood. I knew then that he had lived with the intention of creating me. So that I—he could not have known it was me—so that I (not only I) could live. And now I present some part of him to the world. This rural Southerner, with a patch of cotton and a job downtown and who knows what thoughts in his head. This unknown man suddenly seemed almost as real to me as my own child. Almost. Just for a single, vertiginous moment.

I opened a book about Edgefield, a work of scholarship that, according to the inscription, my sister and mother and I presented as a gift to our grandmother in 1985. None of us have any memory of that. There was a blue piece of paper inside, carefully folded, with a little dot of something in the center. I touched it idly, like you would an old receipt or tag-end of paper that might be good for writing a grocery list. After awhile—I was doing something else at the same time--I took the paper out again and unfolded it. It was a letter that had been written and posted in Edgefield. It said something about a debt. An ordinary thing committed to paper. The fine sepia ink was dipped by A. Simkins as he wrote to R. M. Fuller about some piece of business that concerned them both. It startled me, I admit it. The paper didn’t seem to have aged at all in a hundred and fifty years.

It's what's for dinner

A big batch of bachelor biscotti!

Adapted from A Treasury of New Zealand Baking

2C 3Tbsp flour
3/4C  sugar
1 tsp b powder
2 large eggs and 1 yolk
2/3C hazelnuts (blanched, whole)
3oz dark chocolate chunk
optional--citrus zest

another option--forgo nuts and chocolate, add liquor--and don't put that bottle away, keep it close, that's your friend

Preheat--350F

Combine flour, sugar, b powder in large bowl.  In separate bowl, beat until just combined eggs and yolk--add to the dry ingredients and mix.  Add the hazelnuts and chocolate, using your hands to combine all ingredients thoroughly until mixture forms a ball.

Transfer to clean surface and knead the mixture about 2 minutes.  Divide the mixture in 2 and shape each part to a flattened log shape, about 12 inches long.  Place on baking tray.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until lightly golden and firm to touch.  Remove from oven.  Use a heavy, sharp knife to slice each log on the diagonal into pieces 1/2 inch thick.

Lay biscuits flat on the tray and return to the oven for further 10-14 minutes, until golden. 

Cool before serving. Store in airtight container up to 1 month.

Building a better mousetrap

The main question I have is how did it get here. How? I was reading Tallulah a bedtime story. She was lying there, looking up, when suddenly she exclaimed, “Look! A little mouse!” She says many outrageous things that turn out to be true. I looked. There was nothing. A second later, a mouse appeared in the porthole. It seemed surprised when I squeaked with delighted dismay. Later, in the night, I was awakened by a loud crunching sound. There was the mouse again, silhouetted in the moonlight. When it saw me it threw up its little hands and ran away. We read on the internet about how to make a no-kill mousetrap using a 2-liter Coke bottle, but the mouse went in there and ate the food, leaving only a little je m’en foûtre behind. The ante has been upped.