My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew. It was the middle of the night in the Everglades swamp in 1925, when my daddy woke his best friend Cecil out of a deep sleep in the bunkhouse just south of the floating dredge that was slowly chewing its way across the Florida Peninsula from Miami on the Atlantic to Naples on the Gulf of Mexico, opening a route and piling dirt for the highway that would come to be known as the Tamiami Trail. The night was dark as only a swamp can be dark and they could not see each other there in the bunkhouse. The rhythmic stroke of the dredge’s engine came counterpoint to my daddy’s shaky voice as he told Cecil what was wrong.
When Cecil finally did speak, he said: “I hope it was good, boy. I sho do.”
“What was good?”
“That Indian. You got the clap.”
But daddy had already known. He had thought of little else since it had become almost impossible for him to give water because of the fire that started in his stomach and felt like it burned through raw flesh every time he had to water off. He had thought from sunup to dark of the chickee where he had lain under the palm roof being eaten alive by swarming mosquitoes as he rode the flat-faced Seminole girl, whose name he never knew and who grunted like a sow and smelled like something shot in the woods.
He had not wanted her, but they had been in the swamp for three years. They worked around the clock, and if they weren’t working or sleeping, their time was pretty much spent drinking or fighting or shooting gators. So since he could not have what he wanted, he tried to want what he could have, but it had been miserable, all of it because of the way she sounded and the way she smelled and the mosquitoes clotted about their faces thick as a veil and the heavy black flies that crawled over their legs.
“It weren’t all that good,” daddy said.
“No,” said Cecil, “I don’t reckon it’s ever that good.”
Gonorrhea was a serious hurt in the days before they had penicillin, and the hurt was compounded because daddy had resisted getting any treatment or even telling anybody until the pain finally forced him to do it.
“I don’t know what I’m gone do.”
“I do,” Cecil said. “We gotta get out of the swamp and find you a doctor.”
Cecil felt some obligation to help, not only because they had been friends since childhood but also because it was Cecil who had left Bacon County first to work on the trail and was later able to get his buddy a job working with him. It was all in the best tradition of “If you git work, write.” And when Cecil wrote that there was steady work and good pay to be had in the Everglades, Ray had followed him down there.
He got on one of the gangs cutting right-of-way and in less than two years worked his way into the job of dredge operator. He was then not yet twenty and it was a sweet accomplishment for a boy who had no education, who was away from the farm for the first time in his life. But the clap soured the whole thing considerably.
Cecil was waiting for him when he came out of the doctor’s office in the little town of Arcadia, Florida. It was the third doctor daddy had seen, and this one agreed with the other two. The word was final.
“He says I got to do it.”
“Jesus,” Cecil said.
“It’s no other way.”
“You gone do it?”
“I don’t see no other way. Everyone I seen says I got to have one taken off. I guess I do if it ain’t no other way.”
“Jesus.”
On the long drive back to the swamp in Cecil’s Model T Ford in the shimmering heat of early summer, they didn’t talk. Daddy did say one thing. “I won’t ever have any children if they take it off. That’s what the doctors said. All three of’m said it.”
Cecil didn’t say anything.
Did what I have set down here as memory actually happen? Did the two men say what I have recorded, think what I have said they thought? I do not know, nor do I any longer care. My knowledge of my daddy came entirely from the stories I have been told about him, stories told me by my mother, by my brother, who was old enough when he died to remember him first hand, by my other kin people, and by the men and women who knew him while he was alive.
It is demonstrably true that he went to work on the Tamiami Trail when he was seventeen and worked there until he was twenty-three. He did get the clap down there and he did lose a testicle because of it in the little town of Arcadia. He came back to Bacon County with money in his pocket and a gold watch inscribed on the back: “To Ray Crews, Pioneer Builder of the Tamiami Trail.” Cecil got such a watch, as did several of the men who saw the job through from start to finish. Those are facts, but the rest of it came down to me through the mouths of more people than I could name. And I have lived with the stories of him for so long that they are as true as anything that ever actually happened to me. They are true because I think they are true. I, of course, had no alternative. It would have been impossible for me to think otherwise.
Jean-Paul Sartre in his autobiography Words, when writing about a man’s tendency to smother his son, said his own father sired him and then had the decency to die. I’ve always thought that because my daddy died before I could ever know him, he became a more formidable memory, a greater influence, and a more palpable presence than he would ever have been had he lived. I’m not sure precisely what that says about me, but surely it must say more about me than it does about my daddy or his death. It also says a great deal about the people and the place I come from. Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. It is all—the good and the bad—carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.
If that is so, is what they bring with them true? I’m convinced that it is. Whatever violence may be done to the letter of their collective experience, the spirit of that experience remains intact and true. It is their notion of themselves, their understanding of who they are. And it was just for this reason that I started this book, because I have never been certain of who I am.
I have always slipped into and out of identities as easily as other people slip into and out of their clothes. Even my voice, its inflections and rhythms, does not seem entirely my own. On journalism assignments during which I’ve recorded extended interviews with politicians or film stars or truck drivers my own voice will inevitably become almost indistinguishable from the voice of the person with whom I’m talking by the third or fourth tape. Some natural mimic in me picks up whatever verbal tics or mannerisms it gets close to. That mimic in myself has never particularly pleased me, has in fact bothered me more than a little.
But whatever I am has its source back there in Bacon County, from which I left when I was seventeen years old to join the Marine Corps, and to which I never returned to live. I have always known, though, that part of me never left, could never leave, the place where I was born and, further, that what has been most significant in my life had all taken place by the time I was six years old. The search for those six years inevitably led me first to my daddy’s early life and early death. Consequently, I have had to rely not only on my own memory but also on the memory of others for what follows here: the biography of a childhood which necessarily is the biography of a place, a way of life gone forever out of the world.
On a blowing March day in 1927, just before his twenty-third birthday, my daddy started back home with his friend Cecil in the Model T Ford. They had been down in the swamp for six years, though, and they were in no particular hurry. With a bottle of whiskey between them on the floorboard, it took nearly three weeks to make the 500 miles up the coast of Florida on U.S. Highway 1, a blacktop double-lane that followed the edge of the ocean up from Miami to Fort Pierce to Daytona and on to Jacksonville. From Jacksonville, they cut up toward the St. Marys River, which divides Florida from Georgia. The air went heavy with the smell of turpentine and pine trees as they drove on north through Folkston and Waycross and finally through Alma, a town of dirt streets, a cotton gin, a warehouse, two grocery stores, a seed and fertilizer store, and a doctor, who had—besides a cash register—some pens out back to hold his fees when they came in the form of chickens and goats and hogs.
In the car with him as they drove, there was a shoebox full of pictures of my daddy with five or six of his buddies, all of them holding whiskey bottles and pistols and rifles and coons and leashed alligators out there in the rugged dug-out sea of saw grass and mangrove swamp through which they had built the Tamiami Trail.
As I work, I have those pictures, yellowed now, still in a pasteboard shoebox where they have always been kept. For better than four decades, when the old shoebox wore out every year or so, the pictures have gone into a new shoebox. I once put them in a heavy leather album, the better to keep them, I thought. But after a week or so, I took them out again. The album seemed wrong. I did not like to look at them caught in the stiff, protected pages. I gave no thought to why I didn’t like to see them there, but I believe now it was because a worn and vulnerable pasteboard box more accurately reflected my tenuous connection with him whom I never knew but whose presence has never left me, has always followed me just out of reach and hailing distance like some vague, half-realized shadow.
Looking at them, I think I see some of what my daddy was and some of what I have become. He was taller than I have ever grown, being as he was six feet two and weighing always about 170 pounds. Everything about him—the way he stands, his every gesture—suggests a man of endless and exuberant energy, a man who believes in his bones that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. His is the gun that is always drawn; his is the head that is turned back under the whiskey bottle. He has already had enough trouble and sickness and loss in his short life to have broken a lesser man, but there is more often than not a smile of almost maniacal joy, a smile stretched around a mouthful of teeth already loosened by pyorrhea, a disease which would take the two front teeth out of the top gum before he died shortly after my birth.
They made their way up the coast of Florida, stopping here and there, staying at one place in Jacksonville for nearly a week, drinking and being rowdy in the best way of young men who have been on a hard job and now have money in their pockets, always talking, rehashing again what they had done and where they had been and where they were going and what they hoped for themselves and their families, even though my daddy carried with him the sure and certain knowledge that he would never have any children.
“It ain’t the worst thing that could happen,” Cecil said. “You ain’t but a partial gelding.”
“That ain’t real funny, Cecil.”
“I reckon not. But it still ain’t the worst thing.”
They were on the St. Marys River in a rented rowboat, drifting, drinking, ignoring the bobbing corks at the ends of their lines, not caring whether they caught anything or not after six years in a swamp where fish had been as plentiful as mosquitoes.
Daddy said: “If it ain’t the worst thing, it’ll do till the worst thing comes along.”
Cecil gave his slow drunken smile, a smile at once full of kidding and love. “The worst thing woulda been to let that old man and his boy eat you alive.”
“They’d a had to by God do it.”
“Oh, they’d a done it all right. They’d already et several before they started looking at how tender you was.”
“I guess. Dying cain’t be all that hard though. Without thinking about it at all, people drop dead right and left.”
Cecil said: “It’s one thing to drop dead. It’s sumpin else to have your head pulled off.”
These were not violent men, but their lives were full of violence. When daddy first went down to the Everglades, he started on a gang that cut the advance right-of-way and, consequently, was out of the main camp for days, at times for more than a week. When he almost got killed working out there on the gang, Cecil almost killed a man because of it. Daddy’s foreman was an old man, grizzled, stinking always of chewing tobacco and sweat and whiskey, and known throughout the construction company as a man mean as a bee-stung dog. He didn’t have to dislike you to hurt you, even cripple you. He just liked to hurt and cripple, and he had a son that was very much his daddy’s boy.
Because my daddy was only seventeen when he went out there, the full fury of their peculiar humor fell upon him, so much so that once it almost cost him a leg in what was meant to look like an accident when a cable snapped. If it had only been some sort of initiation rite, it would have one day ended. But daddy was under a continual hazing that was meant to draw blood.
When he got back to camp, he found Cecil over by the mess wagon. When he’d finished eating, daddy said: “I’m scared, Cecil. That old man and his boy’s gone kill me.”
Cecil was still at his beans. “He ain’t gone kill you.”
“I think he means to.”
Cecil put his plate down and said: “No, he ain’t cause you and me’s gone settle it right now.”
Cecil was six feet seven inches tall and weighed between 250 and 275 pounds depending upon the season of the year.
“Cecil, that old man don’t know how strong he is his own self.”
“He’s about to find out. You just keep his boy off me. I’ll take care of the old man.”
They found the old man and his boy on the dredge and the fight was as short as it was brutal. They locked up and went off the dredge into the mud, the old man on the bottom but with his hands locked on Cecil’s throat. He would have killed him, too, if Cecil had not thought to provide himself with a ten-inch steel ringbolt in the back pocket of his overalls which he used to break the old man’s skull. But even with his head cracked, it took two men to get his hands from around Cecil’s throat.
The old man was taken out to a hospital in Miami and his boy, whom daddy had managed to mark superficially, a cut across his forehead and another down the length of his back, went with him and nothing more was heard of the matter. At least for the moment. But a little over two months later word came into the swamp that the old man and his boy were coming back.
“Me and Luther’s comin back to settle. We gone take the biguns one by one and the littluns two by two.”
Cecil sent word back on a piece of ruled tablet paper. “If you and that boy come out here for me and Ray, have your boxes built and ready. You gone need’m before you git out again.”
For whatever reason, the old man and his boy did not come back into the swamp. The matter had been settled. Surely not to everybody’s satisfaction, but settled nonetheless. They had done it themselves without recourse to law or courts. That was not unusual for them and their kind.
Up in Jeff Davis County, just about where I was born and raised, a woman’s husband was killed and she—seven months pregnant—was the only witness to the killing. When the sheriff tried to get her to name the man who’d done it, she only pointed to her swelling stomach and said: “He knows who did it, and when the time comes, he will settle it.” And that was all she ever said.
In Bacon County, the sheriff was the man who tried to keep the peace, but if you had any real trouble, you did not go to him for help to make it right. You made it right yourself or else became known in the county as a man who was defenseless without the sheriff at his back. If that ever happened, you would be brutalized and savaged endlessly because of it. Men killed other men oftentimes not because there had been some offense that merited death, but simply because there had been an offense, any offense. As many men have been killed over bird dogs and fence lines in South Georgia as anything else.
Bacon County was that kind of place as they drove into it finally toward the middle of March in 1927. There were very few landowners. Most people farmed on shares or standing rent. Shares meant the owner would supply the land, fertilizer, seed, mules, harness, plows, and at harvest take half of everything that was made. On standing rent, you agreed to pay the landowner a certain sum of money for the use of the land. He took nothing but the money. Whether on shares or on standing rent, they were still tenant farmers and survival was a day-to-day crisis as real as rickets in the bones of their children or the worms that would sometimes rise out of their children’s stomachs and nest in their throats so that they had to be pulled out by hand to keep the children from choking.
The county itself was still young then, having been formed in 1914 and named for Senator Augustus Octavius Bacon, who was born in Bryan County and lived out much of his life in the city of Macon. Bacon County is as flat as the map it’s drawn on and covered with pine trees and blackjack oak and sand ridges and a few black gum and bay trees down in the bottomland near running creeks. Jeff Davis and Appling counties are to the north of it, Pierce and Coffee counties to the east, and the largest county in the state, Ware, joins its southern border.
There was a section of Bacon County famous all over Georgia for moonshining and bird dogs and violence of one kind or another. It was called Scuffletown, not because it was a town or even a crossroads with a store in it, but because as everybody said: “They always scuffling up there.” Sometimes the scuffling was serious; sometimes not.
About a month before my daddy drove back into the county, Jay Scott opened his mouth once too often to a man named Junior “Bad Eye” Carter. He was called Bad Eye because he was putting up wire fence as a young man and the staple he was driving into the post glanced off the hammer and drove itself deep into his right eye. He rode a mule all the way to Alma, where the doctor pulled out the staple, but the eye was gone forever. Having only a left eye gave him an intense, even crazy stare. Talk was that he could conjure with that unblinking, staring left eye.
For a long time there had been bad blood between Bad Eye and Jay Scott over a misunderstanding about some hogs. Bad Eye was chopping wood for the stove when Jay walked up. The woodpile was just inside the wire fence that ran along the public road. Jay stopped in the road and for a long time just watched him. But finally, watching wasn’t enough.
“Watch out, old man, a splinter don’t fly up there and put out that other eye.”
Bad Eye kept on chopping, the strokes of the ax regular as clock ticking. He never even looked up.
“Splinter in that other eye, we’d have to call you Bad Face.”
Ruby, Bad Eye’s wife, saw the whole thing from the water shelf on the back porch of the house where she was standing. Jay saw Ruby on the back porch and said, loud enough for her to hear: “Why don’t you git your old woman out here? They tell me she does most of the ax work for you anyhow.”
That was when Bad Eye looked up, a big vein standing in his forehead. “You stand out there in a public road and talk all you want to. But don’t come over the fence onto my land. Don’t reckon you’d have the stomach for that, would you?”
Jay came across the ditch, put one foot in the wire and one hand on top of the fence post, getting ready to climb up and swing over. But he never did. That was as far as he got. Bad Eye, who had started chopping again, never missed a stroke, but drove the blade of the ax through Jay’s wrist and two inches deep into the top of the post. Ruby said she bet you could hear him scream for five miles. Said she bet somebody thought they was slaughtering hogs, late in the year as it was.
Jay tied off his arm with his belt and then fainted in the ditch. When he woke up, Bad Eye was sitting on the woodpile with the bloody stump of a hand.
“This here hand belongs to me now, sumbitch. Found it on my land.”
Jay fainted again. Two of Bad Eye Carter’s kinsmen were killed in the fight to get the hand back. Jay wanted to give it a Christian burial. They never did get it back, but Bad Eye went fishing one day and didn’t come back. They finally found him floating in Little Satilla River. His blue and wrinkled body had raised the fifty pounds of rusty plow points tied about his ankles.
It was this part of the county that my daddy and his people came from, back up in what’s known as the Forks of the Hurricane, not far from Cartertown, which was not a town either but simply a section of the county where almost every farmer was named Carter. The Forks of the Hurricane was where two wide creeks rose in Big Hurricane Swamp and flowed out across the county, one creek called Little Hurricane and the other Big Hurricane. I was a grown man before I realized that the word we were saying was hurricane because it was universally pronounced harrikin.
So daddy came back to the home place, where his own daddy, Dan, and his mama, Lilly, lived with their family, a family which, like most families then, was big. His brothers and sisters were named Vera, D.W., Bertha, Leroy—who was crippled from birth—Melvin, Ora, Pascal, and Audrey.
Daddy’s granddaddy had once been a slave owner and a large landholder, but his family, like most families in that time and place, had fallen on evil days. They still owned the land they lived on, but they had to constantly fight the perpetual mortgage held by the bank. There was a place to put your head down and usually enough to eat, but when daddy came home from the swamp, farmers were saying there wasn’t enough cash money in the county to close up a dead man’s eyes.
Daddy proceeded to do what so many young men have done before him, that is, if not to make a fool of himself, at least to behave so improvidently that he ran through what little money he’d been able to get together working in Florida. Cecil drove off to live in the mountains of North Georgia, so daddy bought himself a Model T Ford and he bought his mama a piano and he bought himself a white linen suit and a white wide-brimmed hat. I don’t know how he could have managed it after the car and the piano, but he may have bought himself several of those white suits, judging from the number of pictures I have of him dressed in one. In the first flower of his manhood, he was a great poser for pictures, always with a young lady and sometimes with several young ladies.
I lift the lid off the shoebox now and reach in. The first picture I see is of him, his foot propped up on the running board of his Model T Ford, standing there with a young lady wearing her bonnet, the sun in their faces, smiling. And looking into his face is like looking into my own. His cheekbones are high and flat, and a heavy ridge of bone casts a perpetual shadow over his eyes. There is a joy and great confidence in the way he stands, his arm around the girl, a cock-of-the-walk tilt to his pelvis. And along with that photograph there are others: him sitting under a tree with another young lady, she short-haired and wearing a brimless little hat almost like a cap; him leaning against the front fender of the Model T, still in that immaculate white linen suit with yet another young lady; him standing between two girls in their Sunday frocks on the bank of a river, probably the Little Hurricane.
There is no doubt that in that time he was, as they say in Bacon County, fond of lying out with dry cattle. Maidens, or at least those young ladies who had never had a child, were called dry cattle after the fact that a cow does not give milk until after giving birth to a calf. An unflattering way to refer to women, God knows, but then those were unflattering times.
He was also bad to go to the bottle, as so many men have been in the family. He drank his whiskey and lay out with dry cattle and stayed in the woods at night running foxes and talking and laughing with his friends and was vain enough to have it recorded as often as he could with somebody’s camera. It must have been a good time for him then, a time when he did not yet have a wife and children or the obligations that always come with them.
Because of the stories I’ve heard about him, his recklessness, his tendency to stay up all night and stay in the woods when he probably should have been doing something else, and his whiskey drinking, I have often wondered if in some way that he could not or would not have said, he felt his own early death just around the bend. He had been an extremely sickly child and Granddaddy Dan Crews had never thought that he would raise him to manhood. When daddy was three years old, he got rheumatic fever and from it developed what they called then a leaking heart. After he developed the trouble with his heart, apparently from the fever, his kidneys did not work the way they should and he would swell up from fluid retention and spent much of his childhood either sitting in a chair or half reclining on a bed.
The doctors in Baxley and Blackshear and even as far away as Waycross—about thirty-five miles—had been unable to help him. Granddaddy Dan in desperation mailed off for some pills he saw advertised in the almanac. Daddy’s brother, Uncle Melvin, told me that when the medicine came, the pills were as big as a quarter, the size you might try on a horse. Granddaddy Dan took one look at them and decided he couldn’t give them to his boy as little and sick as he was. So he put them on the crosspiece up over the door and forgot about them. But daddy, then only five years old, but already showing the hardheaded willfulness that would follow him through his short life, began to take the pills without anybody knowing about it. Whether it was the pills or the grace of God, the swelling began to go down and within a month he was able to get out in the field and hoe a little bit and in the coming weeks he gradually got better.
But he always had that murmur in his heart. Mama says she could hear it hissing and skipping when she lay with him at night, her head on his chest, and it was that hissing, skipping heart which eventually killed him. That and his predisposition to hurt himself. There seemed to be something in him then and later, a kind of demon, madness even, that drove him to work too hard, to carouse the same way, and always to be rowdier than was good for him.
Maybe it was his conviction that he would never have children that was hurting him, doing bad things in his head and making him behave as he did. He had to have thought of it often and it had to give him pain. Families were important then, and they were important not because the children were useful in the fields to break corn and hoe cotton and drop potato vines in wet weather or help with hog butchering and all the rest of it. No, they were important because a large family was the only thing a man could be sure of having. Nothing else was certain. If a man had no education or even if he did, the hope of putting money in the bank and keeping it there or owning a big piece of land free and clear, such hope was so remote that few men ever let themselves think about it. The timber in the county was of no consequence, and there was very little rich bottomland. Most of the soil was poor and leached out, and commercial fertilizer was dear as blood. But a man didn’t need good land or stands of hardwood trees to have babies. All he needed was balls and the inclination.
And in that very fact, the importance of family, lies what I think of as the rotten spot at the center of my life or, said another way, the rotten spot at the center of what my life might have been if circumstances had been different. I come from people who believe the home place is as vital and necessary as the beating of your own heart. It is that single house where you were born, where you lived out your childhood, where you grew into young manhood. It is your anchor in the world, that place, along with the memory of your kinsmen at the long supper table every night and the knowledge that it would always exist, if nowhere but in memory.
Such a place is probably important to everybody everywhere, but in Bacon County—although nobody to my knowledge ever said it—the people understand that if you do not have a home place, very little will ever be yours, really belong to you in the world. Ever since I reached manhood, I have looked back upon that time when I was a boy and thought how marvelous beyond saying it must be to spend the first ten or fifteen years of your life in the same house—the home place—moving among the same furniture, seeing on the familiar walls the same pictures of blood kin. And more marvelous still, to be able to return to that place of your childhood and see it through the eyes of a man, with everything you see set against that long-ago, little boy’s memory of how things used to be.
But because we were driven from pillar to post when I was a child, there is nowhere I can think of as the home place. Bacon County is my home place, and I’ve had to make do with it. If I think of where I come from, I think of the entire county. I think of all its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness.