They say the South is full of storytellers, but I am unconvinced. It seems more accurate to say that it is full of people who are very, very tired. At least this was my childhood experience in Mississippi, where there was very little to do but shoot things or get them pregnant. After a full day of killing and fornicating, it was only natural that everyone grew weary. So we sat around. Some would sit and nap, others would sit and drink. Frequently, there was drinking and then napping. The pious would read their Bibles, while their children would find a shady spot to know one another biblically, or perhaps give birth to a child from a previous knowing. Eventually, though, all the sitting led to talking, which supposedly led to all the stories, or at least the beginnings of stories.
In my family, we were unable to finish any. Until now.
Back then, most of our stories were told at the dinner table, after the meal, by my father, Pop, and his father, known to his peers as Monk. These men, to whom I am deeply grateful for giving me life and a name and any remnant of virility that might linger in my fragile and bookish bones, could not get to the end of a story if you gave them a map and a footpath lined with Nilla Wafers. In their storytelling, they went back and forth, like Vladimir and Estragon, in a slow and maddening game of interrogatory squash played by men with no arms.
“Well,” Monk would say, from one end of the table.
“Well,” my father would say, from the other end.
This is how all their stories began. I’d be sitting there, waiting for a story, a tale, something.
“You ever speak to old Lamar Bibbs?” Pop would say.
“Not since him and Gola Mae went down yonder after the thing up at the place,” Monk would say.
The younger me would perk up, eager to hear some gothic fable drawn from the mists of Mississippi Hill Country lore. Perhaps a story about a mule trampling a baby, or the time when everyone got the yellow fever and died.
But all was quiet. Monk would be leaning over and staring at his folded hands, as though he had been bludgeoned with a skillet, while Pop would be studying his dentures, which he held in his palm like a small, wounded vole. Then he would place them back into his mouth, having divested them of any lingering corn.
We were in Coldwater, Mississippi. Ronald Reagan was president, spacecraft were shuttling in the space over our heads, and the homes of American children were filled with Atari consoles. But here in Coldwater, it might as well have been 1850.
“Whatever happened to old Billy Bridgewater?” Pop said.
“Pulled a tumor out his head.”
“Out his head?”
“Cracked him open like they might would a coconut.”
“Seem like it would change a man.”
“He got to cussing awful bad is how they knew.”
“At his wife?”
“At everybody.”
“Church, too?”
“Sad to say.”
“Was it him got his ear chewed up over in Hernando?”
“Naw, that was fellow name a Gentry.”
“Jim Gentry?”
“Luther.”
“Luther Hines, you mean.”
“Grassley.”
“Old Luther Grassley!”
“He’s the one got him a dog looks like a wolf.”
“And the one ear.”
I was eager for them to finish the story about whatever bad thing happened to Lamar and Gola Mae Bibbs, or how Mr. Grassley lost his ear and how that affected his ability to find happiness or wear eyeglasses. Really, I just wanted to hear any story that didn’t compel me to wonder if these people really were my people, or if they’d found me in the back of a dead gypsy’s wagon. I was sort of starting to feel like they had.
“Papa fought in the Spanish-American War,” my grandfather said, looking down at the brass zipper of his coveralls.
Finally, a story about our family. War. Honor. Death.
“Did he kill any Spaniards?” I asked.
Ah yes, I would hear how my father’s father’s father climbed San Juan Hill, flanked by Teddy Roosevelt and General Calixto Garcia, to impale some gallant Basque with a bayonet glinting in the Cuban sun. Did he die? Did he win glory? Did he slink into Havana under an alias and take up with a mulatto woman and make a Cuban baby that he remained in contact with for the rest of his days, sending letters downriver to New Orleans and eventually paying for the child’s first trumpet?
“Shoot, boy, I don’t know,” my grandfather said. “He got tired and stole him a horse and come home.”
It didn’t bother me that one cannot actually ride a horse from Cuba to Mississippi, unless that horse is either magical or inflatable. What bothered me was that the story offered so little information. Perhaps they were trying to protect me from the truth: that our family was born in dishonor and wickedness, rife with ancient malefactors, Chekhovian job-lots, con men, Marxists, crooked preachers, barn-burners, possibly union bosses from the fiendish land of Cleveland. Or, worse, that our family was uninteresting.
We lived in Memphis, but Pop insisted we play baseball just over the state line in Mississippi, where the game retained its purer, more barbaric qualities. My rural teammates had fascinating lives. Many of them lived in trailers and other sorts of homes capable of being rolled down a hill, which had a real sense of adventure to it, while others had metal teeth and chewed tobacco. Here we were, barely eight years old, and one of them was already an uncle, while another teammate came to practice one day carrying a giant dirty baby.
“I wish I had a little sister,” I said.
“Shoot, this here’s my aunt,” he said, carrying her like a sack of Ol’ Roy dog food.
I was sure such family arrangements must violate some important commandment or at the very least demonstrated what sorts of accidents can happen in homes capable of interstate travel. Still, those boys had interesting families, with what I imagined to be shirtless parolees and tattooed cousins in bikinis and knife fights around the dinner table. Why couldn’t I have a family like that?
I secretly hoped my people were hiding something, some story that would illuminate the dark underneaths of our beds. But my parents were not even divorced. Pop was a devoted father, a large and powerful man who showered us with guns and love. He did not drink, or hit our mother; his only luxury the occasional heart attack. And Mom was a saint, a gentle schoolteacher who believed in the inherent goodness of all creatures, unimpeachable in her love for others, a woman who seemed to believe that the source of all human pain was merely a misunderstanding or an accident, never intentional, and whose greatest sin was smoking cigarettes in the bathtub, where she believed we could not smell them, and which made us believe she was trying to set the house on fire.
Of course, even in our serene, sidewalked neighborhood, there was trouble, families who were dismembered and flailing. I had seen under those families’ beds, had found all sorts of secrets, mostly in the form of magazines filled with naked women. These women had breasts the size and shape of experimental weather balloons, and looking at them made my pants hurt. Perhaps my own parents hid things under their bed, too?
One day, I ran home, reached my arm into the dark horizontal crevasse, and felt something: a secret magazine! When I pulled it out, my fears were not allayed. For there in my hands curled the glossy evidence of dark family secrets: an old copy of Mississippi Game & Fish. I could only pray that my father had no sexual feelings for the eastern wild turkey.
Here’s what I knew about my family:
Our people were originally from somewhere between Scotland and the Holy Land. They were poor and downtrodden and forced to eat their children. They sold their uneaten children onto a boat that debarked somewhere between Baltimore and Charleston, so that those children could learn to be poor and downtrodden in a whole different place. Eventually, these children fled the Atlantic seaboard for the fertile lands between Memphis and New Orleans, where they were promised the opportunity to starve to death under more democratic forms of government that only occasionally enslaved people. In time, some took to preaching, others to cattle and cotton, and they entertained themselves on Saturday nights by hitting one another with a razor strop until the sun rose and it was time for church. With hard work, my grandfather obtained a cow and sold its milk. When the teat ran dry, he trapped mink, which he took to Memphis to trade.
“Who’d you sell them to?” I asked.
“The Jews,” he said.
“Like in the Bible?”
“I reckon.”
Also, I knew, had heard whispered, that my mother had once been married to a man named Gene and my father had once been married to a teenager.
Who was a hussy, they said.
There was quite possibly a gun involved, the first gun I would ever shoot. A .410.
Had the gun been stolen? Won in a duel? Or had I made this up?
Dreamt it? Hoping it would be true?
And who was Gene?
“Gene is gone,” Mom said.
“Tell me about the hussy,” I said.
“There’s nothing to know.”
Perhaps Gene and the hussy were part of the same story?
I was still a child but wanted to know so much, about the past and the hussy and Gene and the history that seemed to hold secrets of lust and calamity, but whom could I ask? Monk was interested only in stories that took place before the discovery of penicillin, and Pop was too busy with his demanding coronary condition. Mom was the obvious one, but she seemed too fragile.
Best to wait.
One problem was that, in my family, stories were not good things.
“Don’t you tell me a story,” Grandmother Key would say upon asking one of us if we had done something unspeakable, such as desire food when hungry. She said the word story as my father did, the first syllable rhyming with low or row or no.
A sto-ree.
“I seen you take a biscuit,” she would say.
“No, ma’am,” I would say, dropping the delicious greasy puck into a back pocket. She was a good-hearted woman, but she believed that eating between meals led to terrible things like miscegenation and the use of microwave ovens.
“What would Jesus do if he thought you was telling me a story?” she’d say.
What I thought was, Jesus would like me to have a biscuit, because he loved me and did not want me to suffer. Eventually, though, I would surrender and hand over the puck, covered in fuzz, and go outside for a switching.
“This is what happens when you tell me a story,” she’d say, peeling a thin, leafy shaft from the hedge. From a very young age, I learned that stories were fraught with sin, never true, and that if you told them, somebody would start hitting you with the shrubs.
But maybe they hit you because the stories were true. Everybody I knew, it seemed, had disturbing true stories to tell about their family arrangements, and I wanted a story or two of my own, wanted it fiercely, a story that would tell our story, that might involve some secret sin, a gun, fisticuffs in a baptismal, something.
“Our family is boring,” I told my brother, Bird, one cold workday, as we were burning more garbage.
“Boring, hell,” Bird said. “Fucked-up is what it is.”
He had a look on his face that suggested he knew things I did not. I pressed him, but he said nothing. Later, while scavenging for clean socks in his room, I came across a scrapbook, mostly chronicling Bird’s early attempts at art and athletics, but with something else, too: a very old news clipping about an agent of Mississippi’s Alcohol and Beverage Control dying in an automobile accident. The date was August 1977. The agent’s name was Gene.
Here’s what I gathered:
Gene was Bird’s biological father.
Gene had died, tragically, suddenly, leaving Mom and Bird. Then Mom, bereft of a husband and someone to cook for, had married my father, a union that eventually produced me.
But the date on the article was 1977.
And I was born in 1975.
So Gene died when I was two?
No, that wasn’t right.
And odder still was that, when he’d died, Gene had been married to a woman named Faye. Which was strange, because that was my father’s sister’s name. My aunt. Aunt Faye.
What did it all mean?
The upshot was that Gene and the woman who’d soon be my mother had divorced and then in the span of a year had each remarried, and their new spouses, Faye and Pop, respectively, happened to be siblings, which meant Gene had to watch his new brother-in-law father a child with his ex-wife.
Wait, what?
Had this Gene really divorced my sweet mother and married my sweet aunt Faye, the sisters-in-law who now seemed to get along famously, smoking cigarettes out back after Sunday dinner? And why had my father married his new brother-in-law’s ex-wife? And wasn’t it wrong to have a cousin who was also your stepsister and an aunt who was also your stepmother, as Bird must have had? I needed help figuring it out—maybe a compass, some graph paper, a eugenicist. I had enough knowledge of human biology to know that such rambunctious behavior could lead to birth defects, or at least a great deal of confusion at family dinners.
I confronted Mom with Exhibit A, the newspaper article.
“Why was Gene married to Aunt Faye?” I said.
She took a great deal of time to fold her dishrag into a pleasant, limp quadrangle over the edge of the sink she’d just emptied.
“Why do you want to know?” she said.
“Do I have all my chromosomes?”
“Good Lord.”
Something happened in that moment. The woman, Our Mother of Perpetual Hope, this gentle, beatific fifth-grade schoolteacher with the little Santa Claus brooch, she of the perennial smile and the everlasting faith and the lovely cloud of permed hair that could have snared a passing brace of mallards, crumbled like a biscuit in a boy’s back pocket, and then told me everything.
How she and Gene had lived next door to Aunt Faye in the small town just up the road from my grandfather, the latter a widow herself by that time, with two children who would eventually be my older cousins. How Faye had invited my not-yet mother and Gene and little Baby Bird for Fourth of July down at Monk’s farm. How Mom had met Pop there, him with a precious little kindergartenish daughter and married to a whole other woman who was always napping in some other room. How Pop and Gene had quickly become hunting buddies, enjoyed killing things together, deer, ducks, time. How Pop and Gene had gone to the Liberty Bowl one cold winter night and then sat in the truck afterward, watching their breath.
“I’m going to leave her,” Gene had said to Pop.
And Pop thought Gene was crazy, and said so, and Gene left her anyway.
And the reason Pop thought Gene was crazy was that the woman was a good woman, the kind you don’t leave. The kind you marry.
And so Gene had left my future mother and the Little Baby Bird, had just up and disappeared, then reappeared, with the neighbor, Faye, Pop’s sister.
If you feel that this arrangement requires a diagram, you are not alone.
And so Mom left town, putting herself and her boy away quietly in shame, and how Gene’s old hunting buddy, this swaggering talker with the giant head, had shown up on her doorstep with a hanging-clothes bag over his shoulder and a burning fire in his heart.
“Go away,” Mom had said.
“I’ve come for you,” Pop said.
“You’re married,” she said.
“Not no more,” he said, the napper having walked out for a quieter bed.
And Mom told it all to me, how she let him inside, and he told her what he wanted: a good wife. He’d had two bad ones, he said. Also, he needed a son of his own. And she figured, well, she could probably see to that. Pop was right: She was a good woman.
“We both needed to start over,” she said.
And so my mother and father were married, and Gene and Faye were married, and Mom and her former husband were once again in the same family, married to a brother and a sister, and it was unclear how this would ever be normal and who should bring the coconut cake on Christmas.
It was around this time, I believe, that Mom took to locking herself in bathrooms with cartons of Winston Lights and mystery novels.
And then I was born, making the whole situation terminally irreversible, son of a son of a son, to carry on the family name, with what was said to be a giant head, like the fruit of a gourd, like my father’s before me, a great big gourd-head baby.
I had to sit down to take it all in, and use a pencil and pad to work it out, trying to see that my older brother, really a half brother, had once been my stepcousin, if such a thing even existed, and that my mother and aunt had been married to the same man in the span of a year. Finally, I had my story, and I wanted to unhear it. Bird was right. Fucked-up is what it was.
Which is what makes it such a good story, and probably why I just told it to you now, more than thirty years later. I am in a new place, a new home, far from Memphis and the Mississippi that would make me into the man I am, whatever kind of man that is. Skittish. Prone to sweating and stories. These days, I find myself wondering what sort of story I should tell my own children.
“Tell us a story!” my oldest daughter, eight, asked before bed one night. She and her sisters were on the top bunk, where my enormous boulder of a head rose like a moon over the horizon of their bedclothes. It was a new century.
“A story?” I said.
“One from when you were little, like us!”
I have told many stories since leaving Mississippi, at comedy clubs and in black boxes and on Greyhound buses and inside Waffle Houses bathed in oleo and yellow light, where I deployed pink and blue packets of artificial sweetener as visual aids. I would write their names on the packets, blue for Gene and Bird and Pop, pink for Faye and Mom and the other women who starred in what had come to seem, in the intervening years, a sort of Old Testamentish farce.
It is a sad story, and a funny story, and our story.
“What kind of story do you want?” I asked my daughters, in their nightgowns.
There were so many to tell, and to finish. The farmhouse in Coldwater is empty now, and so many of my people are dead and buried on the greenest hills I’ve ever had the pleasure of crying on, and Faye is dead, too, and so is Gene, him buried in a double plot that will be forever single, because Faye married again and is buried elsewhere. And Ronald Reagan is in the earth, and the space shuttles are forever grounded, and Atari is gone.
“Tell us a Mississippi story!” one of my daughters said.
We live in Savannah now, a city with sidewalks and art galleries and things to do besides kill and fornicate, and the South is dying, maybe dead, driven from the earth by progress and the demand for affordable chinos. Nobody is ever bored anymore, and Mississippi is terra incognita to my children, a place at the far end of the map where dragons be.
I looked into their eyes and remembered wanting to hear, to know, so desperately. Were they old enough to hear the story of our family?
“Hurry it up in there,” my wife said from the other side of the house. It was bedtime.
“Tell us a story about when you killed some deers!” they said.
Should I tell them a hunting story, I wondered, or the story of how my great-grandfather was a horse thief, or the story of the boy who was older than his very own uncle, or all the stories of my father and the things he showed me and did to me and with me and for me, and how I came to be a part of this world, fathered through what seems like sin and defilement, but was really just the human heart behaving as it will, when set loose?
“Well,” I said.
And they leaned forward.
This is how all my stories begin.