by Deb Spera
“Chickadee, chickadee, where’s she gonna be?” Odell hollers.
“I’m here, Odell,” I shout. “I’m right here!”
Through the Spanish moss he comes—but carries no limp, no crutch. A whole man. Shielding his eyes with one hand he comes out of the dark and into the light searching. In his arms he holds our baby girl, our daughter, our Esther.
“I’m here,” I cry.
Esther turns at the sound of my voice, and flings out her arms to me, hollering, “Mama!”
Gertrude
Retta’s people carried her home, and Mr. Coles was carried to the deathbed meant for his wife. A line of people came to bear witness to the lawmen, including the governor who was held for the better part of the night. Lonnie stayed by my side until the questioning was done. He told all who would listen that I saved them. Edna and the help fed those that came and when it was over every dish was scraped clean. Mr. Coles died later that night. No one cried for his loss. Sheriff said to me, before he left, that maybe people get what they deserve. But I don’t believe that’s true. My mama didn’t deserve to forget the family who loved her, any more than we deserved to see her suffer, any more than Retta and the Missus deserved their heartache. People get what they get.
When me and my girls returned home to Branchville two days later we found the people of Shake Rag had fixed our roof and filled our pantry with food. Our beds were made and wood was chopped and stacked for the coming winter. When the news of Odell reached us, we stood among them in their grief. He died on the road coming home to his wife. We joined the congregation at the Canaan Baptist churchyard when they laid Retta, Odell and their daughter side by side in their final resting place—their girl in the middle. Mary stood and, talking through her tears, told them her own stories of Retta and Odell and all they did for us. The congregation yelled their praise as she spoke and shared her grief as she wept. Only six years old and already the bravest girl I ever did see. After we dried our tears and filled our bellies at the church rectory, I stepped away from all I knew.
Someone has taken up residence in Berns and Marie’s house. There is smoke in the chimney for the day has bite. Out on the railroad tracks a train comes through easy, slowing for the station ahead. An old man tips a blue hat to me, and quick as he came, he is gone. Deep in Polk Swamp, the quiet has begun. The milkweed bugs have flown south for winter. Cicadas, boll weevils and black flies have burrowed deep in the earth to lay their eggs and sleep. The ridge is still here, but I can’t cross over, for resting in sunlight below the barren trees are too many alligators to count—a congregation.
The men will come one day soon to build their highway, turning this swamp into the fortune I will pass on to my girls. And the big mama alligator who ate my sin? She will hear the grinding of their machinery long before they arrive. She will be here, like she is now, hiding beneath the black surface, waiting, surrounded by an army of alligators.
No. None of us get what we deserve. We make the best of what we got.
In the evening as the sun drops low in the western sky I finally come to stand at the edge of a yard amid palmettos and watch my Lily clear the clothesline in back of the house she is promised to. She is swollen with child. For a moment she stands alone and quiet against the coming night sky. When she raises her head I step into the last light so she can find her mama.
Annie
The moon rises over the Battery, orange and fat—a harvest moon. In the bay, Fort Sumter lies dark and silent, a mere remnant of what once was. They’ve begun tours there, my daughters tell me. People pay money to see the cannonballs still imbedded in stone or dredged from the sea. Imagine, paying good money to see the relics of war. The tide is up, nearly covering the reeds near the old ferry landing where boats used to carry in the dead. Waves lap against the shore in rhythmic sameness. If I am still I can remember the time before it all began. How ironic. In the after, I find the before, but what good is the knowing when you can’t erase the war and its aftermath? We must live in the rubble. There is a knock at my bedroom door, and I’m pulled from my memories.
“Aunt Annie,” my granddaughter says. “Supper is served.”
* * *
A Bit of Background
Growing up, I was haunted by stories of family hardships that resonated even more powerfully when I became a mother and raised a family of my own—that haunting found its way into the pages of this book. Though Call Your Daughter Home is a work of fiction, my great-grandmother’s and grandmother’s voices accompanied me so strongly as I wrote that I felt their presence in signs and wonders. I wrote on my back deck and a certain mockingbird visited me daily, following me into the house on three separate occasions over a one-month period. The bird allowed me to capture and hold it in my hands. Some mornings it stood at the back door as if waiting to gain entry. This was one of many happenings that reminded me of how connected we are to the natural world and what lies beyond.
It is a rarely talked-about fact that the South was plunged into a deep depression well before the crash on Wall Street in 1929. Cotton was the primary crop throughout the region before the boll weevil infestation decimated its economy from 1918 until the mid-1920s. Many people starved to death. My family, and so many others, suffered the one-two punch of the Great Depression that soon followed.
As a child, I traveled to Branchville, South Carolina, from Kentucky to visit my great-grandmother, Mama Lane. I boiled fresh peanuts, used the outhouse, plucked a chicken and shelled pecans from the yard for winter. Mama Lane raised five children in Branchville, living on Highway 21 (aka Freedom Road) in a small rental house that had no plumbing. A red pump by the kitchen door supplied the family with water for daily needs. My great-grandfather died when the children were young, due to an accident at the sawmill where he worked. After his death, Mama Lane farmed the children out to relatives so they would be fed until she found a job that enabled her to reunite the family.
I spent every weekend and most of my summers with her daughter, my mamaw, who worked all of her childhood picking cotton and scouring porches for a nickel. Those were, as she said, desperate times, and she lost her teeth in her teenage years due to malnutrition. She became mother to six, grandmother to eight, and was always afraid of us children getting worms. She believed they were caused by unsanitary conditions, which may explain why she scrubbed us so hard at bath time. A remarkable low-country cook, Mamaw never used measurements, and canned and froze everything she could from her garden. Her peach cobbler recipe was relayed to me as stated in this book.
Gertrude, Retta and Annie are complete inventions of my imagination, each an amalgamation of many women I found, or know, that have endured hardship because of their circumstance or skin color. While researching this book, I stumbled upon Clelia McGowan, who plays a small cameo in these pages. Clelia is buried in the history books of Charleston, but her existence is a shining example of what opportunity, education and courage can do. After her husband died of pneumonia, Clelia was a single mother to three children. She was president of Charleston’s Equal Suffrage League, and once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August of 1920, the governor of South Carolina appointed McGowan to the State Board of Education, making her the first woman to be appointed to public office. In 1923, she and her colleague Belizant A. Moorer became the first women elected to the office of Alderman in the City of Charleston.
I wrestled with whether or not to use the N-word in this novel. It is a word I deeply despise, but to avoid it felt dishonest to the place and time. Historically, the N-word has been used as a tool to systematically degrade and dehumanize an entire race of people. To ignore its existence is to ignore the plight of what the African American community has endured at the hands of the white majority. I’ve used the word sparingly in these pages to demonstrate the low moral arc of a society unwilling to take responsibility for the pain and suffering caused to an entire population of people.
Many settings in
this book exist today. Shake Rag is a small black neighborhood in Branchville. Though you won’t find it on any map, ask anyone in town where it is and they will point the way. Branchville, or the Branch as it was originally called, was home to three Native American camps, and named for a branch in a trail under an old oak tree where traders came to exchange goods. That trail was so well situated that the Branchville Railroad, built in 1828, runs along those same paths.
Camp is based on Indian Fields Campground in St. George, which has been in existence at this location since 1848. This Methodist revival camp consists of an open-air tabernacle, which seats one thousand people, and ninety-nine cabins (called tents). These tents are passed down from generation to generation and surround the tabernacle in a circular shape—a symbol of shared religious experience. Camp still takes place the first week of every October, which historically marks the end of harvest season. Though electricity has been added in recent years, Camp is still quite primitive. Bathroom facilities are numbered, designated outhouses, one per tent. An unspoken competition over which tent has the best cook still exists. Pudding, made of ground-up hog lungs, is a real thing. I’ve tried it. Not bad.
The more I researched this story, the more in awe I became of the enduring spirit of Mama Lane and Mamaw, who, as young women with few resources, stood their ground, and survived, during a great crisis. I am humbled and inspired by the ferocity of their motherhood. Mama Lane and Mamaw are gone now, but I continue to return to Branchville and Charleston. Mama Lane died in 1992 at the age of 92, just one week before my daughter was born. Mamaw died in 1995, eleven months after her son, my uncle Boogie, passed. Before she died she promised she would give me a sign once she got to where she was going, as proof she was all right—likely, she said, through a bird. Just before she crossed, she heard a choir singing her name. I, too, hear an unnamed voice when I travel to South Carolina. Without fail, as the plane descends over those vast estuaries, the voices come soft, but clear, whispering one word, over and over: home.
Acknowledgments
Like any creative endeavor, many people took this journey with me. It is my honor to thank them here. To Mark Bowden, who set off a chain of synchronicity like nothing I’ve ever witnessed. Mark took my questions seriously and when he couldn’t answer them sent me to his friend and publisher, Morgan Entrekin. I owe enormous gratitude to Morgan and his colleague Allison Malecha for reading my work and introducing me to a remarkable woman and agent, Duvall Osteen. Duvall read a series of short stories I’d written and told me those stories were novels in disguise. It was she who suggested I begin with the first story entitled “Alligator” and expand from there. Without her this book truly would not exist. To Robert Eversz, my teacher, without whom I would have stumbled in the dark for years. His support and incredible guidance during the writing of each section and draft of this book was invaluable. I hope to work with him again and again. To my editor at Park Row Books, Liz Stein, whose insights humbled me and made this book better with every draft.
I’d like to thank my friends and family in Branchville, South Carolina: Oretta and Glen Miller for their stories and many kindnesses to my family; Johnny Norris for his knowledge and service to the Branchville Railroad Museum; the congregants of Canaan Baptist Church for their generosity of spirit; and their pastor, Vernon Blanchard, whose knowledge and faith in Scripture guided me through the biblical sections and sermons of this book. I consider him my friend. Thank you to the late Myrtis Easterlin for welcoming me into her home and sharing her stories and passion for sewing despite being so sick. She was one of a kind and is missed by all who knew and loved her. Thank you to my cousins who grew up in Branchville: Juniebug (Cecil) and Barbara Berry, Ann and Ernest Walters, and Bill Barrs, with extra thanks to my cousin, Marcia Jackson, who was my goodwill ambassador through the stomping grounds of our grandmother and great-grandmother. She introduced me to many people, shared her stories and showed me Indian Fields Campground. I am greatly indebted and fortunate to call her family.
I’m lucky to have a powerful coalition of women friends in my life, too many to name here, but they know who they are. I would be remiss, however, not to mention two groups: the Triangle, who kept me sane most of my life and whose nicknames are inappropriate to print here, and my GO8, who believed in me as a writer long before I knew I was one. A special note of thanks must go to GO8 member Katy Coyle, who read every single draft of this book and gave me her helpful thoughts, the mark of a true and patient friend.
I come from a long line of strong Southern women who have zero fear of hard work and opinions on everything. My mother, Pat Passmore, and her sisters, Vivian Fields and Dorothy Walker, are my guiding lights. Our fearless leader was their mother, my mamaw, Edna Alma Lane. She cussed with great regularity, and raised us like crops. I wrote this book for her and miss her every day. I’d like to thank my husband, Robert Spera, who sat with me when I cried on the couch in terror after Duvall told me to write this book. His ability with story is invaluable and his kindness unsurpassed. Rob continues to be my secret weapon. I’d like to thank our children, Rachel Alma, Nicholas Angelo and J. Aubrey, who taught me the power of a mother’s love. They and their father are my everything.
ISBN-13: 9781488095443
Call Your Daughter Home
Copyright © 2019 by Deb Spera
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