The phone rang. I was reading and let the call go to the machine. “I have spoken too long for a writer,” the voice of Ernest Hemingway said as my outgoing message. “A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.” Beep.
“Baseball,” Dad said, using an affectionate but ultimately mocking nickname from my childhood. “When you get this—”
I stepped over to the phone and picked it up.
“Dad,” I said.
“I want to run something by you,” he said. “Mother is not doing well.”
“Oh no,” I said.
“My mother, I mean,” he clarified. “I don’t mean to worry you, she’s OK now. But she was saying how much she would love to spend some time with you. And I was thinking what if you came and spent a couple weeks with her this summer? You could help her be able to stay home and be independent a bit longer. We’re not sure how safe it is for her to be alone.”
“That sounds great,” I said.
“I’ve always wanted to canoe down the Edisto,” Dad added. “Maybe I can come for a couple days and we could take a canoe trip.”
A few years earlier, when I had announced to the family that I wanted to be a poet, most everyone had rolled their eyes or mocked me. But Grandmother Woods had said, “Why, that’s wonderful. We haven’t had a poet in the family in hundreds of years.” I still cherished that, and now, I knew from our occasional letters, she was proud I was studying ancient Greek and Latin, and I wanted to spend time with her.
I was living with a new girlfriend by that time, and things were not going well, so I was happy to have an excuse to leave Albuquerque for the summer. We’d met in French class. She was only eighteen. Soon she moved in with me, to the same apartment where Blake and I had lived on Coal Avenue. I used my broken heart as an excuse to maintain a distance while also having the warmth of another person lying beside me. She really loved me, but I couldn’t return the affection, and our relationship had become acrimonious.
“Maybe I’ll call Chuck and try to go spend a few weeks with him in West Virginia,” I said to Dad.
“He’s living there now?” he said. “I thought he was in Columbia.”
“He moved into an old hunting cabin that his grandfather owned down in a hollow. He works the ‘hoot owl’ shift, as he calls it, at the nearest truck stop.”
“Well, good,” Dad said. “This sounds like a plan.”
Over the coming weeks, Dad and I worked out the details, and as soon as I finished my last exam, I got into the Isuzu Trooper he had bought me after I sold the van and cranked it up. I drove a few blocks down Lead, which was parallel to Coal, and merged onto I-40, which I stayed on for the next three days.
I’d hoped to make it in two, but on my last night, I finally gave up and stopped at a small motel between Nashville and Knoxville and slept a weary sleep in which I felt as if I were still rolling forward, exhausted, restless, and nearly feral. I woke up and left around ten the next morning, starving. I saw the yellow sign of a Waffle House and pulled off the highway and into the parking lot. I’d eat some breakfast, hit the road, and make it to Greenville by dinner.
After days alone, walking into the chain restaurant was a sensory overload. The crackling of bacon, the smell of brewing coffee and cooking eggs and toasting toast and frying hash browns all blended with the bright-yellow decor and neon lights and the country songs playing on the jukebox as people sat chewing at their tables. As much as I hated to admit it, I felt as if I were home when I sat on one of the round stools at the counter.
When the waitress brought my coffee, I ordered eggs, grits, hash browns, and toast. When someone played David Allan Coe on the jukebox and everyone in the restaurant sang along, I almost thought I could like the South.
Mom and Dad were living at Summey’s house again while they built one in a new subdivision about a mile from where I’d last lived with them, and as I pulled into the driveway later that afternoon, the flower beds in front of the house were exploding in a slow profusion of color. Pale-orange tiger lilies regally drooped between purple irises beside the garage. Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” drifted out my open windows and through the yard, where I noticed Summey, crouching down pulling weeds. I turned off the car and opened the door.
The air was thick, the humidity pulsing with the thrum of insects and the emergent, occasional flashes of evening’s fireflies.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, boy,” he said, straightening up slowly and wiping his palm on his cheap Kmart chinos. He spit a squirt of tobacco on the ground and started to walk, tottering, toward me. He had had a relatively minor stroke and had aged more than the time that had elapsed since I’d last seen him the previous winter would suggest, his movements halting, his eyes rheumy, and his skin splotched and dry, hanging from his skull like a grease-stained paper sack.
“What was that you were listening to?” he asked as we walked toward one another, where the gray driveway met the lush green yard.
“Woody Guthrie,” I said. “I listened to his Smithsonian recordings half the way home.”
“I used to love him,” he said. “Back when I was young. ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ ‘Pretty Boy Floyd,’ but then he became a goddamn communist—”
I wanted to talk to Summey about music. He’d instilled a deep love of country music in me that had been reborn over recent years.
“Once he went Red, I wished that sumbitch was dead,” Summey said as Mom stepped around him to see me, pressing her hair, a brighter brassy shade of middle age than it had been, against my face.
“Baseball,” Dad exclaimed, his big Woods voice booming out over the hill as he wrapped his arms around me.
For the last few years I had been surrounded by people I’d known only for brief periods, and it was strange to be embraced, surrounded, by so much shared history.
“Come here and give me some sugar,” Nanny said as she shuffled out in the biggest rush she could muster. “Let me hug your neck.”
This was the same party of people who’d assembled in this same place just after my birth, when they released Mom and me from the hospital twenty-two years earlier and we moved into the basement here. After the long days on the road, little sleep, and constant motion, sunstruck, I was overwhelmed with emotion, and that feeling annoyed me. I didn’t know what to do with it.
I kissed Nanny’s cheek and wrapped my arm around her.
“You need a beer?” Dad asked.
“I’d love one,” I said, and we all walked inside.
I was going to rest up there for a few days and then drive down to Edisto, where I’d stay for two weeks. After the first week, Dad would come, and we’d go on the canoe trip. And when he left, my cousin Michael was going to spend a few days with me and stay another week to take care of Grandmother after I drove to Chuck’s in West Virginia.
On my second day in Greenville, Summey wanted to go to the Jockey Lot—a giant flea market—in Anderson, South Carolina. We all got up early and piled into his burgundy, wood-paneled station wagon. Mom drove and Summey sat shotgun beside her in the front, while Nanny sat beside me in the back. Behind us was a wheelchair that Summey used sometimes since the stroke.
We were on some small rural road, trees and fields passing in a thick green blur outside the window, when the lights of a patrol car started to flash behind us. I felt the familiar thudding dread in my chest, even though I didn’t have anything illegal on me.
“How fast were you going?” Summey asked.
“I don’t know, Daddy,” Mom said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Summey said as she pulled off the road.
“Daddy,” Mom said.
“I got it,” he said.
A red pickup rattled past. Summey opened his door at the same time the deputy, parked thirty feet behind us on the side of the road, opened his.
“Hey there, buddy,” Summey said, tottering forward on the road’s narrow shoulder, pocked with weeds and trash, his Yankees cap perched lopsided on his head and Levi Garrett dripping from his lips.
“Get back in the car, sir,” the deputy said, insistently.
“But hey,” Summey said.
“Daddy!” Mom yelled from the car window.
“Sir, get back in the car,” the deputy said, his hand hovering by his hip above his gun.
“Buddy,” Summey said, his voice desperate, pleading.
“Sir.”
“Goddamn it, Daddy,” Mom said, starting to open the driver’s door.
“Ma’am!” the patrolman yelled. “Stay in the car!”
Summey finally turned and tottered back to the car, the bill of his Yankees hat pointed straight at the ground as he studied the motion of his feet through the sand on the road’s narrow shoulder. When he sidled back into the seat in front of me and the door slammed shut, I looked down, pretending I hadn’t seen anything, as the deputy approached Mom’s window, wary.
In the end, the cop only gave Mom a warning. As the deputy walked, straight legged and stiff, back to his car, and Mom eased onto the two-lane road, Summey muttered, “Goddamn it,” over and over again, almost under his breath but entirely audible, and my heart broke for him. I realized that being part of the good ol’ boy system—that loose network of the white men who controlled these towns—was essential to his identity.
When he had bailed me out of trouble, it was about him as much as it was about me. He wanted to prove that he could do it. It was a demonstration of his power as a white man in white America. He’d been insulted as a mill-village linthead kid and he never wanted to stand for that again. He needed to be singled out for being powerful and special rather than for being poor and powerless.
But as we made our way in relative silence toward what was dubbed “the South’s biggest and the world’s biggest flea market,” he grappled with this realization that his power had slipped.
“Goddamn it,” he snarled. “I can’t believe you were speeding like that. Could have killed us all.”
“Daddy, we only got a warning,” Mom said.
“You were driving like a goddamn maniac,” he said. “Women should never be allowed to drive.”
“Carl,” Nanny said from beside me. “You’re just mad that the deputy didn’t know you.”
“Oh, shut up,” he said. “I don’t give a damn. Times have changed. Can’t fix no tickets anymore. To be a homegrown white man just don’t mean what it once did around here.”
“Like I said, you’re just mad that he didn’t know you,” Nanny said.
“He was only Bay’s age,” Mom said. “How would you expect him to know you?”
“Goddamn it, I said shut up,” Summey said.
When we got to the Jockey Lot, Mom and I traded off pushing Summey’s wheelchair, and as he perused baseball cards, bonsai trees, orchids, and various of his other obsessions, it was as if he was determined to prove, through his pugnacious haggling, that he still had the power and the juice to get what he wanted.
I remembered that whenever he used to take me to see country concerts at the Carolina Coliseum when I was little, he’d always walk up to an usher at a side door in order to avoid the line. But he’d talk so long with the usher before the guy would finally say, “Oh, just come on in here,” that it would have been much quicker to wait in the line like everybody else. And though he never showed our tickets, he’d always bought them long in advance. It just made him feel good to know he could get in free if he wanted to.
“None of the same old vendors are here anymore,” he said. “The ones with the good stuff. They been replaced by so many of these Chinese and all kinds of other people.”
Summey saw his own decline as universal. It was not that he was failing the world. The world was failing him. It had gone to shit, and for the next couple of days, he stumbled around, muttering angrily and yelling at Nanny for no reason.
Sitting out on his back porch, looking over the city, I asked him one afternoon about when he was stationed in Nashville during World War II.
“Did you ever go see any country concerts then?” I asked him.
“Oh, hell no,” he said. “People would ridicule you. The country in country music was meant as an insult. Back then, they didn’t even call it that yet. They just called it hillbilly music, and being called a hillbilly was even worse than being called a linthead. Only thing socially lower than a hillbilly was a colored person. They didn’t have signs hanging up that kept hillbillies out, but boy you could tell by their attitudes that most fancy whites didn’t want no goddamn hillbillies around. If I’d listened to that music, they probably would have sent me off to war instead of keeping me in the office.”
“What did you listen to?”
“I told you I listened to some Woody Guthrie before he became a goddamn commie, because he kinda had that country sound but was accepted by everyone,” he said. “But mostly we’d just listen to the big band stuff that they had at army dances and that sort of thing.”
“I’ve been listening to a lot of Hank Williams Sr. now,” I told him. “And you remember I loved Junior when I was growing up. But what I notice now is that Hank Senior just sang country songs. But all of Hank Junior’s songs are meta—”
“Are what, college boy?” he said.
Summey had not gone to college, but he’d ended up in Nashville during the war because when the army created a new air force division, he had aced the test, and he was always a little resentful of college people, including his grandson.
“Junior’s songs are songs about country music,” I said. “It’s something that he’s mad about, that disdain we both felt. Something he wants to fight about.”
“Goddamn right,” he said. “We need more fight like that.”
His own sense of fight had become more pugnacious even as it became less effective.
I felt bad watching Summey’s decline, but by the time I left Greenville to drive to Edisto two days later, I couldn’t wait to escape the atmosphere of resentment that filled the house. In his fury at his failing life, he was determined to fight against something all the time, and usually the target turned out to be Nanny or Mom. That was the way white men rolled, I was learning—at war with the world, until you start to lose. Then at war with women, especially those closest to you.
On Edisto, a barrier island whose purpose is to protect the mainland from storms, it had always seemed as if the world were declining, crumbling under the weight of the waves of time. But unlike Summey, Grandmother Woods could surf those waves, happily advancing toward the time when her body would find itself in the earth beside her parents and her grandparents, and, she believed, her soul would be reunited with them in heaven.
A decade earlier, she’d had a heart attack and been declared legally dead. Dad was the only one of the brothers at the hospital, and she said that as her spirit rose from her body toward the most peaceful white light imaginable, she could see Dad sitting alone in the waiting room and decided to come back into her body. Now she faced her own demise with grace.
It was a balmy, hot afternoon when I arrived at her house at the beach.
“I hope you don’t mind if we leave the windows open instead of using the air conditioner,” Grandmother said, her bent body hunched like a question mark in a loose-fitting blue shirt, as she pointed at the window unit, as soon as I walked into the kitchen. “I want to get as much ocean air as I can before I die.”
There was something bracing about her breezy embrace of mortality, something not unlike the desire to keep the windows open despite the heat and the humidity, an acceptance of reality that I admired. And since I had become increasingly interested in environmental issues, I was happy to forego the Freon.
“My friend Sally just dropped off a whole basket of tomatoes,” she said. “And a loaf of John Derst bread. Would you be interested in a tomato sandwich?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, looking at the bowl of globular red tomatoes on the counter and the picture of a Confederate officer on the brown plastic wrapper of the Captain John Derst bread, which was hard to find outside the Lowcountry and was best for tomato sandwiches.
“I’ll make two for us if you’d like,” I said.
She smiled her crooked, lopsided smile.
“Why, I’d love that,” she said. “And there are some beers that Irvin left. We can have one of those with the sandwich and it will be grand.”
“Edisto has the best tomatoes in the world,” I said as I walked over to the bowl.
I picked one out to slice; heavy and warm in my hands, it felt alive. I washed it in the sink and then opened the drawer beneath the cabinet and pulled out a knife.
“Do you like your tomatoes peeled?” Grandmother asked.
“I can peel it for you if you’d like,” I said.
“That would be nice.”
She turned on the TV.
I slid the silver blade of the knife as gingerly as I could beneath the skin of the tomato, trying to separate it from the flesh without gouging out chunks of good meat.
“Do you think he did it?” Grandmother asked.
“What?” I asked, looking up from my lip-biting concentration on the tomato, as its juice dripped off the cutting board and onto the counter.
“O. J. Simpson,” she said. “I assume you’ve been following the trial.”
“No,” I said. “I really haven’t.”
I prided myself on not watching TV, remaining separate from the cultural moment, and I was disappointed by how closely Grandmother seemed to be following the trial of a famous Black football player accused of killing his white ex-wife and her lover.
“I don’t know if he did it,” she said as the blade of my knife passed through the tomato’s pink flesh. “But I watched the entire prosecution and I don’t think they have the evidence to prove he did it. There are still too many questions.”
“I really haven’t watched it,” I said, slathering a thick layer of mayonnaise across the slices of yellow bread.
“If they find him guilty after this case,” she said, “I’m afraid the Blacks everywhere will riot like they did in Los Angeles.”
Sweat dripped down my face, and I noticed that the air outside had stilled, taking away our breeze.
“I definitely think in that case, with Rodney King, that they had a right to be mad,” I said, bringing both sandwiches over to the table.
“We’ve always had good relationships with the Blacks here,” she said. “There are many more Blacks than whites on the island, and so there was always a certain respect. Growing up, I learned to speak Gullah, but I didn’t think anything of it. But now I’m proud of being able to speak it.”
I walked to the refrigerator and came back to the table with two cans of Olympia Beer.
“In fact, I have a lovely idea,” she said. “I can say the blessing in Gullah and you can say it in Greek.”
“I don’t know if I can think of a blessing,” I said. “Because it’s not a spoken language anymore, what I study, and we just translate literature. But I do know a couple brief passages from the Bible.”
“Well, we’ll each do that,” she said, delighted. “I’ll recite a Biblical passage in Gullah and you can say one in Greek.”
“OK,” I said, sitting down.
She recited a Bible verse in Gullah-Geechee, which was musical and lilting and also sounded like what was being discussed at the time as “Ebonics.” I’d later learn that Gullah applied an English vocabulary to various West African grammatical structures. But back then, I just reveled in the juxtaposition of this little old white lady speaking in a dialect that seemed to me so “Black.”
The only Greek verse I had memorized was 1 John—“in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—and I thought it was an appropriate prayer, but as I finished, I imagined Grandmother saying, “Word up” instead of “Amen,” and I laughed out loud. She didn’t know what I thought was funny, but she seemed delighted and joined in my mirth, allowing her chirping laugh to flutter from her lungs like a beautiful, erratic bird.
“That was lovely,” she said. “We have a new tradition.”
The sandwich was divine. When I took my first bite, the tomato juice mixed with the mayonnaise and ran down my chin.
“Let me get us napkins,” I said, rising from the table and catching a drop of tomato juice in the palm of my hand as it fell from my chin.
“We have always had good relations here,” Grandmother said, evidently needing to unburden herself of something. “I would never judge a colored person for being colored. But there have always been so many more of them than us down here on the island—in the Lowcountry in general—that we always had to be worried about outsiders coming in and turning them against us like they did in the horrible days of Reconstruction. That’s why I’m so worried about what is happening with this trial.”
Her use of the word colored was antiquated and discomforting. But who was I to judge? I loved her as much as I loved anyone and, whatever she said, she seemed far more comfortable around Black people than anyone else in my family did. She even knew Gullah. There was no way she was racist.
Still, it seemed strange what she was saying, about Black people vastly outnumbering white. That was clear in the center of the island, I guessed, away from the shore, where it was sparsely populated and there were small houses and shacks tucked back amid overgrown patches of vine-wrapped trees. Those houses were entirely populated by Black people. But I realized I’d never seen a Black person on the beach here. Maybe at the pavilion, but hardly even there and never on the beach itself. She’d told me once that Black people didn’t like the water, but that story seemed even more puzzling if they lived here in vast numbers. And I saw plenty of Black people at the lake in Columbia. So something about the way the population of the island worked didn’t make any sense to me. But I didn’t follow the thought very far—because my whiteness meant I didn’t have to. It wasn’t in my interest to consider how the whites seemed to have gotten all the wealth and how they managed to keep it. That’s the way whiteness works. Brutal interventions create circumstances that appear natural to the next generation.
There was no reason for me to think about why there weren’t Black people on the beach and why Black people didn’t own any of these beach houses. I could just go swimming. And after my years in the desert, I couldn’t wait to run into the ocean and dive into a crashing wave.
* * *
The day after Dad arrived, we woke up early to go to the river. We had packed a cooler full of beer and sandwiches. We put it in the back of the car and drove an hour inland, stopping to buy five pounds of boiled peanuts at a roadside stand before we reached a recreational outfitter on the Edisto River, where we rented a canoe.
Dad had been in the Coast Guard during Vietnam and had owned a boat when I was a kid, and he was comfortable on the water and confident as we set out. I was a good swimmer but did not have much experience rowing canoes, and as we shoved off into the tea-black water, life jackets draped over our necks, I had a hard time paddling so that we went straight.
“Serpentine,” Dad yelled, laughing as I sent the boat slithering over the water like a snake. He was making fun of my physical limitations the way he had all my life, but I had been away from home long enough that I could laugh along now.
“Oh, shit,” I said, a couple of hours later as I noticed the first drops from the heavy rain cloud that had been advancing toward us all morning.
We could see the I-95 overpass up ahead.
“Let’s try to reach it before it gets too bad,” Dad said. “It’s just a summer storm, it shouldn’t last long.”
We dug our oars into the thick water made dark by the tannin in all the cypress knees growing up from the surface like the Gothic spires of sandcastles, and we paddled hard through the rain for five minutes. We reached the bridge just before the sky erupted in torrents of water. I stepped off the front of the boat into the shallow water off the bank and pulled it ashore.
Dad opened the cooler and handed me a beer. He cracked one open for himself.
“You want your sandwich?” he asked.
“Might as well,” I replied.
We sat there a few minutes eating our sandwiches and sipping our beers, listening only to the sound of the rain in the water around us and above us as the tires on the bridge sloshed through it.
When I finished my sandwich, I leaned forward and pulled out the damp paper bag of boiled peanuts. I took one out and cracked the shell with my thumbs, then slurped out the salty brine before I ate the purplish flesh of the nuts ensconced within it. I dropped the shell into the water, where it drifted like a canoe in a naval battle, bombarded by giant drops as the rain started coming down even harder just as the sun cut through bloated clouds. Balls of water bounced up off the surface of the river and caught the light like pearls.
“How did your dad end up with the name Hernando?” I asked Dad, idly.
It had always seemed odd to me that his father, a white guy from Clarendon County, South Carolina, was named Hernando Jennings Woods, even though everybody called him Jenks, a shortened form of his middle name, but I’d never asked about it. Since I lived in New Mexico, where Spanish names were the norm, I’d been meaning to inquire.
“We don’t have any Hispanic blood, do we?”
Dad smiled and leaned toward me, the tight life jacket hugging his Falstaffian belly as the weight in the beached canoe shifted dramatically starboard.
“The story is that his father, my grandfather Dr. Irvin McSwain Woods, had to go hide out in Texas,” he said, leaning back so that his weight settled our boat once more. “Somehow he got into trouble there or on the way there. And, as my daddy told me, a woman saved his life. He promised to name a son after her husband, who was named Hernando.”
“Your granddad was an outlaw,” I quipped, putting a cold, wet peanut shell between my lips, extracting the meat, and tossing the shell into the black water, where it floated, bobbing for a moment, before it was lost.
“After the Wo-ah,” he said, as if that explained the man’s story all in three words. Like many people in our region, Dad pronounced war in two syllables, and for most that made it clear which war they were referring to. The Wo-ah always meant the War between the States.
“Why did he have to hide out after the war?” I asked.
“He killed a man,” Dad said, looking away.
I knew my great-grandfather had fought in the Civil War, but this was the first time I’d heard this story. A gust of wind swept over the water, and we remained silent for a while. The storm had cooled the air, and the dark cypress knees looked less hazy around the edges than they had earlier, despite the raindrops rushing down to the river. I washed down the peanut brine with my warming beer.
“Who did he kill? And why?”
Dad paused, thinking. The smell of rain cut through the odor of overripe vegetation and the swampy, alluvial rot at the edge of the rolling river. A car above us blew its horn.
“Because the man was Black, I guess,” Dad said. “There was a lot of that in those years, I think, when people returned from the Wo-ah. They couldn’t accept that it was over. I don’t know if it was a lynching or a murder or.…”
He trailed off, staring hard at the peanut he was picking at with his thumbnail. The shell dropped from his hand and fell into the shallow puddle of water sloshing in the bottom of the canoe, then floated there.
I didn’t know how to respond. I had always heard my great-grandfather had served in the state legislature, and these two pieces—outlaw and lawmaker—didn’t seem to fit together.
“So he killed somebody and then came back and was elected to the legislature?” I asked.
“I think so,” Dad said. “But nobody really talked about it. The killing.”
“And what was his name again?”
“Dr. Irvin McSwain Woods,” he said. “I. M. Woods.”
“And he fought in the Civil War, right?” I asked.
“He was in the military academy in Camden when it broke out and joined and was shot in the knee at Gettysburg,” Dad said. “It’s rare that someone my age has a grandfather who fought in the Wo-ah, but Daddy was so much older than Mother that we sort of gained a generation. Or lost one.”
He dug his hand into the cooler and scooped up a Pabst Blue Ribbon and offered it to me. His gold St. Christopher pendant swung out from under his T-shirt as he handed it to me. I leaned back onto my bench and looked at him fishing out a beer for himself as I pulled my old can from the foam koozie, crushed it, and put it in the plastic bag tied to my bench.
Maybe we both wanted to talk about the deep history of white supremacy underlying that murder, underlying our shared history, but neither of us had the courage or the language. We did not know how. Instead, I took a slug of my beer, wanting more answers, even if I didn’t yet understand my questions.
It’s difficult for white people to think about whiteness; it is like walking in a hall of mirrors where each lie reflects all the others. At the center there is horror. I knew this murder was only the tip of what whiteness hides. Behind it lay enslavement, rape, torture. To think such thoughts feels overwhelming, and so, most of the time, we quickly quit.
We sat there in silence listening to the rain and sipping on our beers. He used the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe the rain from the lenses of his glasses. I did the same with mine.
“Once we regained control, Granddaddy was a hero,” Dad said. “He had redeemed the state.”
I realized that the we Dad used here meant white people. Or southern white people, as opposed to the Yankees.
I’d heard the word redemption in my South Carolina history classes in the third and eighth grades, but I couldn’t remember what it meant, and here it seemed nefarious, associated with this murder.
But more than I felt any moral opprobrium, I was taken with the narrative of the story, which was like something out of William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy. I was excited more than horrified. I could identify with Dr. Woods’s flight into the desert to escape South Carolina, whatever its cause.
“What happened in Texas that he had to be saved by the woman?” I asked, imagining writing a novel about the whole thing.
“I don’t know,” Dad said. “Maybe he got shot. Some kind of physical injury where she had to nurse him.”
He took a sip of beer and looked away. We sat like that for a few minutes.
“The rain has let up,” he finally said.
A pale sheet of golden sunlight ran across the surface of the now-steaming water. A black snake slithered by our craft and disappeared as we pulled our oars off the rails. Like a couple of adventurers, we pushed ourselves out into the current. We steered toward a bend of knotted cypress knees and an overhang of old live oak as the sound of the highway and human life grew distant, replaced by the insistent hum of frogs and insects as we moved away from the overpass toward a less traveled part of the river.
We didn’t talk about the murder as we drove back to the house or later that night, and I never asked Grandmother about it. But I kept thinking about the crime, possibly a lynching, and it came up again a few nights later, after Dad had left the island and returned to Greenville, when my cousin Michael and I were drinking.
We were sitting at Coot’s Lounge, the only bar on the beach. It was humid, and the spinning fan swirled cigarette smoke around in the thick air. The band had just quit playing, and now its members gathered around the other end of the bar, accepting shots from a crowd of tourists. Michael and I sat sipping beer from plastic cups, and I kept bumming cigarettes from him. A breeze blew in the open windows and scattered our smoke as the sound of balls on the pool table clamored across the room.
“Did you ever hear much about our great-granddad when you were a kid?” I asked.
Michael was four years older than I, and when he was a kid he had lived in Manning, where my murderous great-grandfather Dr. Woods had also lived.
“He fought in the Wo-ah, I think,” Michael said, his voice resonant and slow. “Was a doctor maybe.”
“My dad told me that he lynched somebody,” I said.
Michael squinted weirdly at me, and I assumed he couldn’t hear me, despite the generally loud volume of my voice.
“Yeah,” I said, even louder. “He had to go hide out in Texas after he lynched someone after the War. Isn’t that crazy?”
Michael cut his eyes at me more forcefully this time.
“Chill,” he hissed, barely moving his lips.
I had been sitting sideways on my stool, one elbow on the stained blue bar, facing Michael. I turned to look in the mirror behind the bar to take in the scene. There was a Black man sitting two stools down on the other side of me. He was older, probably sixtyish, with a bald head and thin white whiskers etched across his mouth.
He was also looking straight into the mirror, where he held my reflection. I turned and smiled.
He directed his gaze toward me but did not smile back. He picked up his watery drink, took a sip, and squinted at me with what looked like disgust.
I flushed, feeling a bit flummoxed and confused. I was just talking about history.
I did not look away.
“How’s it going?” I asked the man. He barely lifted his chin in acknowledgment.
I spun slowly on my stool toward Michael. There were fresh beers in front of him. I took the last sip from my cup and set it on the bar, then picked up the new one.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Let’s walk outside and have a smoke,” he said, already standing up. “Check out the ocean.”
We palmed our plastic cups and got up and ambled out of the bar.
“What was up with that dude?” I asked.
“Man, you can’t go around talking about lynchings and shit,” Michael said, laughing and shaking his head a little. “He was fucking pissed.”
“What?” I said. “What’s there to be pissed about? None of us were around then.”
“I know,” said Michael, who still lived in South Carolina. “But I could see him over your shoulder when you were talking, and his eyes kind of lit up and his shoulders tightened. It’s the kind of look you see someone get a few minutes before a fight starts. With the trial and all, things are tense.”
“Free O. J., those cops are definitely racist,” I said. “But a murder our great-granddad committed a hundred and fifty years ago doesn’t have anything to do with that.”
The surf crashed against the sand in the distance.
“I heard that the Klan burned a church in Manning a couple weeks ago,” Michael said. “They caught some dudes, I think.”
“Yeah, that’s terrible too,” I said. “But what does that have to do with us or with our great-grandfather?”
“I told you my idea,” Michael said as the sea breeze ruffled his hair. “We need to bring back the Confederate flag, as a sign of rebellion, but put a Black Power fist in the center—or maybe instead of the stars—because that’s also a sign of rebellion, and together it would be a sign of unity. We have more in common down here, Black people and white people, than any of us have with Yankees, whatever race they are.”
That was the kind of clever but meaninglessly abstract argument that passed for iconoclastic with a certain sort of Gen X white boy raised on David Letterman’s sarcasm and music ranging from the Clash to Public Enemy. White boys like me. We’d smoke weed and snort coke or Ritalin or take Xanax and drink liquor and riff, endlessly entertaining ourselves and each other with this idle bullshit. Such proposals were our version of baseball statistics, more smoke to keep us from having to really look at the world.
“Something both Strom Thurmond and Louis Farrakhan could get behind,” I said, and snuffed out my cigarette on top of the trash can, still feeling uneasy about the allegation that I was somehow responsible for the deeds of my ancestors.
“Exactly,” Michael said. “If you can get the extremes, you get the middle.”
We stood and looked out into the darkness for a minute, contemplating this sophomoric profundity with no intention of ever following through on any of it.
“You want another beer before we go?” he asked.
I wasn’t going to leave because some old guy had gotten pissed off at me.
“Yeah,” I said, and we turned toward the door. “This round’s on me. You want a shot?”
“Just chill, though,” Michael said.
I nodded.
“I mean, it’s not like we killed the man,” I muttered as we walked back inside, taking up stools a bit farther down the bar from the Black man who had scowled at me.
I was deeply invested in the freedom my whiteness granted me to see history as story, invested in my insulation from the horrors of my inheritance. But the story I’d heard from my father would stick with me in ways that I could have never predicted at the time, leaving me feeling uneasy, as if there was something just beneath the surface of myself I could not see. It would not be too much to say that whiteness was a ghost that began to actively haunt me, even if it disappeared whenever I tried to get a good look at it. Eventually I would come to see that each of my evasions, every insistence on my innocence, every deflection of responsibility, was an echo, not of the earlier crime, but of its cover-up.
The cover-up that constitutes the contemporary sense of whiteness has whitewashed the crimes of our history and the privileges of our present, so we are able to think of ourselves as victims.