I drove back to Greenville the next day, and from there to West Virginia, where I was planning to spend two weeks in Chuck’s cabin, helping him chop wood for the winter. He’d told me to call him from the truck stop off the highway and he would come and meet me, and I could follow him into the holler where he lived in his grandfather’s old hunting cabin.
As I waited for him in the truck stop parking lot, I marveled at the depth of green in the rolling range, which somehow combined the smaller hills we’d grown up tramping around in with the wildness and the fury of the western mountains I was only learning about living out West.
I saw the old two-tone blue truck pull up in my rearview. Then he drove up beside me, windows down, Bob Dylan coming from the radio.
“Let’s go,” he said, and I followed him down some wildly winding roads, around whose curves he went faster than I was comfortable going, until we reached a long, shadow-covered gravel road that led us deep down into the holler, toward the river at the bottom of the valley.
When Chuck got out of the car, I noticed the big, dirty-looking bandage hanging off his pinkie. He’d told me the story about how late one night he was trying to make a bong from a coffee pot and when he pulled hard on the plastic handle, the glass carafe came apart, creating a sharp shard that sliced through his pinkie’s tendons and clear to the bone. Blood was everywhere, he said, and he had no gas in his truck. He also had a motorcycle, but he couldn’t hold the handlebars or use the throttle with his hand like that. He had no phone at the time, and he was worried he was going to bleed out and somehow managed to siphon enough gas from the motorcycle into the truck to get to the house of a neighbor who was a nurse, and she helped him stop the bleeding enough to get him to the hospital.
But now he couldn’t work, and, as importantly, he couldn’t chop wood, which he needed if he was going to make it through the winter in the small, two-room cabin, and I was ostensibly here to help him, although we both probably knew we would do very little chopping.
“This is amazing,” I said as I walked in and set my bag on the couch. The walls were a bright, unfinished wood that still smelled alive, despite the many years now they had been holding up the cabin’s tin roof.
I’d been hearing about this cabin on Chuck’s grandfather’s farm, and his neighbors up here, ever since I’d first met him a decade earlier, when he’d moved down the mountain to Columbia as a teenager and we’d gone skateboarding downtown. The best thing he’d ever written was a story about driving between West Virginia and South Carolina as a kid and seeing lights burning in cabins like this and wondering what people were doing in there and then, years later, meeting his neighbor Dale and realizing they had been listening to bluegrass music and smoking homegrown marijuana.
“Let’s go to the river,” Chuck said.
He was bigger now, around the waist at least, after working in kitchens in the years since he’d lived with me and Blake, but there was something else different about him. Chuck moved with a kind of practiced certainty as he walked out the door into the bright-green field surrounding the small wooden cabin on his grandfather’s farm, just up the hill from a pond whose brown surface sparkled in the sun. His gait displayed a sense of being at home as he let the fingertips of his good hand run across the slick black coat of his dog, Jack.
Chuck stepped wide over the seat and sat down on his three-wheeler and cranked the engine so that it belched out a big cloud of petrol smoke.
“Hop on,” he said.
I’d been expecting some kind of Thoreauvian idyll, but the loud clanking of the engine assured me that I’d been wrong about that. Because we were in the wilderness, we would use more obvious, if not just more, machines.
Nervously I got on the back and wrapped my arms around Chuck’s chest, and he tore through the woods, small branches bouncing back, slapping my arms and my face. My heart pounded, and I felt certain I would fall off or that we would crash. But I realized that to Chuck, this was now as ordinary as driving to the store in a car.
When we got to a clearing by the river, bluegrass music seeped out above the squeals and splashes of delighted children playing in the running water and the laughter of adults watching them.
Chuck introduced me to Dale, a tall, thin, shirtless man with cutoff jeans and dirty-blond hair hanging over his shoulders and a light mustache, and his two brothers, Bob and Steve. Dale introduced his wife and his kids, but the segregation of the sexes began when the conversation really started rolling, and it quickly became clear that the three brothers were going to test me while the women tended to drying and feeding the children on the banks of the river.
“We rassle for brown eye around here,” Dale said, looking me dead in the eye.
Chuck had warned me about this. His neighbors were very aware of Appalachian stereotypes, especially from the 1972 Burt Reynolds movie Deliverance, where inbred and isolated mountain men torment and rape the interloping city guys who end up stuck in their holler.
“Why do you think I’m here?” I said.
They laughed, and it seemed I had passed the first test, though many more would come.
As we stood there talking for the next hour as the sun cut through the tops of the trees to mottle the rock-ripped river, I learned that the three brothers sometimes built fences for other folks but that Dale had gone without a real job for years. He hunted for meat, chopped wood to heat their house, and grew vegetables. And, Chuck explained when we got back to his cabin a little later, for cash, Dale grew and sold pot.
“We’re in business together now,” Chuck said.
A little later, just after dark, we saw lights cut through the windows and heard the rumbling of tires on the gravel. Dale’s brother Bob knocked on the door. He was a big guy, with a broad head and a haircut that went straight across his brow in a way that seemed almost childish.
Chuck had told me that Dale didn’t drink, but Bob did. He had a twelve-pack in his hand as he walked in. He cracked open a can and tossed one to each of us. Then he sat down and crushed up pain meds and snorted a line.
“Want one?” he said.
Sure.
“Let’s go driving,” Bob said as soon as the crushed pharmaceuticals had flown up into our nasal cavities.
I thought it was a terrible idea, especially since they had been talking about how “Ole Ernie,” a friend who seemed to have been better than everyone else at everything, had recently died while driving over the mountain.
We walked out into the incredibly dark night and piled into a busted-up old Mustang 5.0, all carrying beers. Bob looked around the headrest at me in the back seat, his eyes gleaming in a way that struck me as demonic, just before he cranked the car and hit the gas, sending a spray of gravel up at Chuck’s cabin.
“Watch the dog,” Chuck said as Bob skidded off for the beginning of the most terrifying drive I’d ever been on, jumping hills and gullies, real-life Dukes of Hazzard shit on the dark mountain roads. I closed my eyes in terror as they laughed at me.
“Ole Ernie could jump this better than anyone,” Bob howled as he hit the gas and roared up a hill, resulting in one of those awful airborne moments when your stomach flies up into your throat.
“That’s where he got killed, right there,” Bob said after his tires crashed back down onto the earth.
Amazingly, we made it back to the farm unscathed, with a new case of beer.
“I’m hungry,” Chuck said.
“Me too,” Bob said.
I was also hungry, but I’d rather have starved than get back in that car right then. As it turned out, they had something worse in mind.
“Let’s gig some frogs,” Bob said.
“Frog giggin’!” Chuck exclaimed. “Hell yeah.”
Gigging frogs means going out in a boat with a lamp strapped to your brow and a silver, five-pronged spear in your hand and using the light to freeze big bullfrogs long enough to bring the spear down through their heads and then pull them up into the boat.
We were wasted, and I didn’t like the idea of being in a boat like this, and I hoped they would abandon the idea when they realized that the boat was down at the river. Instead, we got in Chuck’s truck to go and fetch it. But the truck got stuck in the mud. My Isuzu was a four-wheel drive, so they made me drive it over, where they tied it to Chuck’s truck so I could pull it out, and then, finally, an hour after the idea came to them, we were sloshing around in our boat on the primeval pond, scanning the scum at its edge, looking for the big bullfrogs making their deep, riveting ribbits roar up through the night.
After seeing Chuck use the spear a few times, I was ready. We paddled slowly up toward the bank, where he had a frog frozen in his beam. I could see the eyes glowing orange above the submerged green skin. And then like lightning my silver spear came into the beam of light and straight down so that its pronged spikes went right through its head. I pulled it up and scraped it from the spear and into the bucket and I felt kind of sick.
When finally we’d caught enough for a snack, we ran the boat ashore and went back to Chuck’s porch, where we cut the skinny long legs off the big plump bodies of these amphibious beasts the size of baseballs.
“It feels bad to waste so much of them,” Chuck said, slicing off the legs. “But there’s nothing you can do with the bodies.”
“That’s right,” Bob said, heaving the bleeding, legless body of a frog down toward the pond. “No meat, just guts.”
Then Chuck battered up the legs and fried them in a skillet on his stove. We each ate four legs and ended the endeavor a lot hungrier and drunker than we had been when they’d decided we should go frog gigging.
The whole scene was impossibly exotic to me. On a census form, we looked the same: Gen X white men. But the lives of Chuck’s rural neighbors were worlds apart from mine. My romanticism was flecked with what was probably some obvious condescension—but it went both ways.
“Man, you’re city,” they said so often during the short time I was there that they finally just started calling me City.
For Dale and his brothers, city was the worst insult, a nearly fatal and insurmountable flaw. In my case it meant that I was physically weak and didn’t know how to fend for myself or survive without the massive modern infrastructure, which they hated almost as much as they hated Bill Clinton and the ATF.
“They’ve got assault rifles disassembled and stored away in PVC pipes buried all throughout the hills so Clinton can’t come and take them away,” Chuck explained one morning. “Anybody comes to fuck around up here is gonna have a real bad time. In whiskey days, when the revenuers came up, they didn’t come back down.”
I looked up at the shotgun hanging on the wall above the fireplace.
“My great-grandfather apparently killed someone,” I said. “A Black guy, after the Civil War, and had to go hide out in Texas.”
“Really?” Chuck asked.
I was rolling a joint on an album cover as Chuck flipped through his collection looking for something to play.
I recounted to him the story my dad had told me. I’d not been able to stop thinking of it since I had left Edisto. I’d begun to use the Greek mythology in which I’d been immersed for the past couple of years to try to make sense of it.
“In Greek tragedy there’s an idea of miasma,” I said. “It’s an inherited curse that comes down for generations. Like Tantalus cooked his child Pelops and fed him to the gods, and the curse stayed with the family, causing increasing grief, including the Trojan War, for four generations, until Orestes, who had killed his own mom, went and made peace with the Furies—the deities who avenge shit like that—for all of the crimes of his family.”
“And you think your family is cursed because of your great-grandfather?” he asked, pulling a flat black vinyl disc out of its cardboard sleeve and setting it on the player.
I brought the joint to my mouth and licked the paper, giving it a final twist as the first deep, resonant bass notes of Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It” blared out of the speakers. Chuck turned down the volume a notch or two and tossed me a lighter.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I feel like the Furies might be demanding something.”
Chuck laughed.
These thoughts sounded ridiculous as I spoke them. I was always dramatizing my life, my mind a self-mythologizing machine. But I was getting high, in a cabin in the woods, with one of my oldest friends, and this seemed like the time to indulge in such speculation.
I passed the joint to Chuck, who took it between his thumb and forefinger and took a big hit.
“Why did he kill the guy?” Chuck asked, his voice scratchy and faint from the smoke filling his lungs.
“My dad didn’t really know,” I said. “But he thought it was because the guy was Black.”
Chuck took another hit and handed me back the joint. He picked up the album cover lying on the top of the stack in front of him. On the cover Tosh was standing shirtless, with dreadlocks and a pipe, in a field of cannabis.
“I love my neighbors,” Chuck said. “I mean, I couldn’t survive up here without them. They help me in so many ways. And they’re mostly cool as hell. But they are also super-racist. And I don’t think they mean it. It’s just like they’ve never been around Black people before.”
I inhaled from the joint, the pot inside of which Dale and Chuck had grown.
“I thought that Dale especially is such a cool guy that he’d understand if I explained it to him,” Chuck said. “So one day, we were getting stoned and I was playing this album and I showed him the cover, and you know what he said?”
“What?” I asked.
“He said, ‘I’d like to kill that n***** and take his pot.’”
“Damn,” I said, feeling a bit less certain about where Dale’s taunting of me might eventually lead.
“It really shook me,” Chuck said. “It made me question what I’m even doing up here.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I tried to say something about how we were all the same and treated by the government the same,” Chuck said. “You know, about how we were playing into what the government wants if we let them separate poor white folks from poor Black folks.”
He took the joint back from me and took a hit. I got up and walked over to his coffee maker and poured myself a refill.
“But he said, ‘That n***** is rich and I ain’t,’” Chuck said, dropping his voice to a whisper when he said the offensive word, even though we were in the middle of the woods, evidently surrounded by racists.
“Fucking A,” I said. “I imagine that’s something like what motivated my great-grandfather, but I don’t know. I always heard people in my family talk about how they lost everything after the ‘Wo-ah,’ as they call it. I guess he thought that was who took it from him.”
“I remember when we first met in Columbia arguing about the Civil War,” Chuck said. “You were kind of into it.”
“I wouldn’t say I was into it,” I said. “At least not then. But when I was a little kid, totally. All my heroes were Civil War generals and shit. My mom used to read to me from a little red biography of Robert E. Lee, and I loved that book. I can still smell it in my mind.”
“The small farmers up here didn’t want any part of helping the plantation owners,” he said. “But if anyone is gonna rebel against the government now—it’s gonna be some hill people.”
We both started laughing, but it was a dry, uneasy laugh.
“You want to go see the plants today?” Chuck asked.
He had a field of pot plants hidden in the wild, and when we tramped out to look at them, I didn’t think to put on long pants. Two days later, my skin was oozing and weeping a yellow pus, with enormous blisters swelling up until they burst. I had never gotten poison ivy in South Carolina and had assumed I was immune to it. But the West Virginia variety kicked my ass.
Finally, after a few days of constant misery, I asked Chuck to take me to the emergency room. They drained the poison from my legs and gave me a cortisone shot. On the way home, we stopped by Dale’s house.
After he smoked two joints with us, he started asking what they’d given me at the hospital.
“Cortisone,” I said.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I had this friend who took that, fucked him up. They use it to control your mind,” he said. He went on like that, telling me increasingly grim horror stories about my medication and the untrustworthy doctors at the ER.
“Then his nuts swelled up so big they was like cantaloupes,” he said.
“I gotta go,” I said to Chuck, feeling light-headed and nauseated and paranoid and doomed. My heart was pounding, my ears ringing. I wouldn’t know that these were all symptoms of a panic attack until years later.
“He’s just fucking with you,” Chuck said.
“I can’t stand up,” I said. “I need to go.”
We got in Chuck’s truck. I buried my face in my arms as Chuck drove down the winding path to his cabin. I got out and staggered over to the deck, where I lay down flat on my back, barely able to breathe, and stared up into the infinite blue of the sky.
After a few minutes, Chuck was standing over me looking down.
“You OK, dude?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said.
“Your mom is on the phone,” he said.
“Tell her I’m asleep,” I said.
“She said it’s important,” he said. “Something about your grandmother.”
I went into the cabin, still feeling as if I could barely breathe, my lungs constricted, struggling.
I picked up the black phone receiver.
“Grandmother Woods has to have an emergency surgery,” Mom said. “Your Dad is on the way there now. You need to come home.”
I left first thing the next morning. Grandmother died before I made it to Greenville, and so a few days later I was standing there in the Edisto Island churchyard where hundreds of years of Baileys were buried, my skin weeping yellow pus beneath my thick black wool suit, wiping sweat from my face with a handkerchief and trying not to scratch my legs as they laid her body in the ground beside her husband, Hernando Jennings Woods, and her parents.
Dad stood there in his black suit in the shadow of the Spanish moss hanging from the live oak trees, and he looked wrecked, his face somehow both ruddy and ashen all at once. He told me he’d driven around in Grandmother’s burgundy Plymouth that day listening to oldies with the windows open, and by his eyes I could tell he had been weeping. He was an orphan now, and though it was weird to think of my own father in that way, it seemed to fit the forlorn way he carried himself.
In the service, the minister had remarked on Grandmother’s love of the word pusillanimous, which, he confessed, he hadn’t known until she taught it to him. But now, as he reflected on its meaning of stingy cowardice, he could clearly say that Gertrude Woods had been in no way pusillanimous. She had faced death magnanimously, with an open heart.
I watched clumps of the porous gray dirt fall onto her casket. Dad walked up and put his arm around me.
Back at the house, Dad and his five brothers sat around the kitchen table playing cards and gambling for items that weren’t included in the will. They were all drinking and were louder than normal, and I could see that they were working out their remaining issues, orphans all, but still a band of brothers, “my little Woods men,” as Grandmother liked to say.
“Hell no, you’re not getting that,” Irvin said. “She always promised that to me.”
“She promised it to me too,” Bully said.
“She promised that painting to everyone,” Richard said.
Laughter rippled around the table.
“Deal,” someone said.
“Oh, look,” my aunt Alice said, holding up a stack of papers. “Here’s a short story she wrote in high school. ‘A Dark Romance,’ it’s called.”
“She got an A on it,” another aunt, Susan, said from beside her.
I noticed Michael slip out the kitchen door, and I followed him down under the house. We went into the small room and he lit up a joint.
“I imagine this will be the last time we’re all here together,” Michael said.
The whole family used to gather for a few days every winter that culminated in a big New Year’s oyster roast. Once we’d awakened to an alligator under the house next door and stood around watching as rangers lassoed it and wrestled it onto a truck.
“The will says to keep the house for the use of the family,” I said, trying not to scratch the blisters filling up again with yellow liquid on my legs.
“Come on,” Michael said. “They’ll sell it.”
“The family used to own most of this island,” I said. “And soon we’ll have nothing.”
“Nothing,” he said. “But some cash—and of course we won’t see any of that.”
“Tragic,” I said, without any real sense of the real tragedy of my family’s history on the island, the infamy that was my true inheritance.
I knew that Grandmother had experienced an increasingly urgent sense of guilt for the Edisto, or Oristo, people who had lived on the island when the Europeans arrived in 1666 and were all gone by 1700.
“They destroyed a whole world,” she’d said of her ancestors. “Even if they didn’t know it.”
That destruction was only the beginning of what we had wrought, but in this moment of confusion and grief I was reverting to the sense of familial pride that had been instilled in me.
A few days later, I said goodbye to Mom and Dad, Nanny and Summey, in the driveway of the house they all shared again, eager to get back home to Albuquerque.
“I’m so glad you got to spend that time with Mother,” Dad said.
“Me too,” I said, wrapping my arms around him.
I got into the car, cranked it, and backed out of the driveway up on Piney Mountain. I drove toward Ashville, where I got on I-40 headed west, and for two days I sat there, lost in a kind of meditation as the flat landscape rolled by. When I finally crossed from Oklahoma into Texas, I thought about the story of my great-grandfather’s flight from South Carolina into the desert, about how much harder such a trip would have been in those days, of how many things could go wrong, requiring the assistance of a woman who was married to a man named Hernando. I thought about the crime he had committed and what might have prompted it. Why had he killed a Black man? And how had he managed to return? What had it meant for him to have redeemed the state?
I knew I couldn’t answer any of those questions, but I let them ride with me as I passed the panhandle stockyards and then went through Amarillo with its signs advertising a free seventy-two-ounce steak to anyone who could eat it in a single sitting. I allowed my mind to bounce around the mystery of Dr. I. M. Woods and what kind of inheritance, miasma or hidden treasure, he might have left me.
But I was thinking about it wrong from the start, and that error guided all my subsequent thinking. When Dad told the story to me, and when I passed it on to Michael and to Chuck, we’d framed it as if Dr. Woods had killed the man because the man was Black. But that line of thinking ultimately blamed the Black man for his own death. We could have said that it was because Dr. Woods was white that he’d killed the Black man. But then we would have been forced to ask what part of that whiteness we had inherited.
When I got home, Dad sent me a photocopy of “A Dark Romance,” the short story Grandmother had written. I held the gray, lined paper in my hands and looked at the title, at the way she’d looped the script, and at the phrase cullud gal, which the teacher had underlined, writing, “Very good” beside it.
I folded the story and put it back in the envelope and put it in a drawer with my writing. I thought that whatever she had written about a “dark romance” would not reflect well on her, and I did not want to see it.
Whiteness is the freedom to forget, the ability to look away, that we might see our families the way we want to see them, the way that best reflects the way we want to see ourselves, whether as rebels or as scions.