I come from a county on the Gulf Coast of Alabama bordering the Florida panhandle. Winston Gant, the pugnacious attorney who sold my father the lot on which he built our first house, claimed to sleep with his head in the Heart of Dixie and his butt in the Sunshine State, a report no one felt compelled to disprove.
Brewton was a colony of middle- to upper-middle-class homes built on Murder Creek, a tributary of the Conecuh River. The place got its name from a tale about a party of Royalists traveling in the 1700s from South Carolina to Pensacola who were savagely slaughtered by a roaming band of traders. Centuries later, the football teams of Brewton’s T.R. Miller High School and East Brewton’s W.S. Neal face off each October in a bloody combat that makes that fracas pale in comparison.
In the 1960s and 70s, the town claimed to have more millionaires than any other Southern town of its size, a fact proven by the still-standing mansions built by the early lumber barons, many of them occupied by their descendants. That tidbit, combined with the cold hard-ish fact that the area, known as the blueberry capital of the south, had also been declared one of the one hundred best small towns in America by some Yankee journalist, lent its citizens the impression they weren’t adrift in a sea of paucity and ignorance.
In any case, we had all been informed at a very early age we should be damned grateful we lived in Alabama. After all, it could be much worse. We could live in Mississippi, a place I passed through twice growing up without ever finding out what made it worse than the state we already lived in.
Some idiot once said God never gives you any more than you can handle, but the way I always saw it, all you have to do is glance in any graveyard, back alley bar, or skid row refrigerator box to find those who got just that.
Tina Kimbrough, a Baptist preacher’s daughter, was a product of the fifties. Homecoming queen two years in a row, she married my father, Garrett Stalworth, her high school sweetheart. Abandoning her dreams of becoming an art teacher so she could raise a family, Tina suffered three nervous breakdowns because she couldn’t speak up for herself.
My father, on the other hand, chose pharmaceuticals as his profession, adjusted his blinders, and took off running. Tina developed a lifelong tell—a shallow clearing of her throat every time one of her requests to my father to take the garbage out, let the dog in, or lower the volume on the TV was ignored. “Aheeem,” she’d say, completing the task herself without another word.
“Did you want something, baby?” Garrett would yell from another part of the house five minutes later.
“No,” my mother would whisper, slamming the screen door, shoving a chair roughly under the table, or clanging a glass noisily in the dish drain.
When Tina was in labor with my sister, both of them almost died. The doctors forbade her to have another, instructions my mother thankfully took to heart for only a short time. According to most accounts, Sis came out of the womb bawling like a burn victim and offered those around her no relief in sight for years.
My great-aunt Violet told my mother to let her cry, advice she had gleaned from an article in Ladies Home Journal. But day after day, a naïvely hopeful Tina would dress Sis up in her frilly pink finest, pretending this time would be different. And day after day, the ladies of the town would nod nervously as mother and child approached, Tina offering them another opportunity to peep into the inviting confines of the carriage before they were forced to excuse themselves over another one of Sis’s bloodcurdling bawls.
Aunt Violet used to tell Tina there was only so much shit a person could take before they took the reins of their life into their own hands. And although Violet drank herself to an early death because God had given her more than she could handle, I probably owe my life to that gin-soaked observation.
“You’ve got another one yet,” she told my mother as they sat on opposite ends of the Formica table in our little white house on Dawson Street.
“But the doctors—”
Violet patted Tina’s hand. “You’ve got a boy. Worth the trouble. Not like this first one. Easy labor. A happy, grateful child.”
Aunt Violet was gifted with two uncanny abilities: telling the future and removing a person’s wart by rubbing it with her thumbs, an art that had its roots in our ancestors’ native Germany and perfected in backwoods Appalachia. Sometimes she even read the subject’s fortune through the designs on the wart. On this particular day, she was removing a callus from the bottom of one of Tina’s aching feet.
While Tina sipped her tea, she calmly took in her aunt’s old world divination, ignoring Sis’s fiery screams from the nursery upstairs.
“You should get someone to help with the other,” Aunt Violet said, tilting her head in the direction of Sis’s cries. She stepped on the lid release of the trash can before dropping the remains of the callus on an empty bag of English peas.
* * *
When my sister was three and a half, Tina had reached the end of her rope. Returning to the car in tears from yet another humiliating scene in the A&P, when she had actually been asked to remove Sis from the premises, Tina saw an ad for Dewey’s Sweet & Soft Laundry Detergent playing on ten identical televisions in the storefront window of Horton’s TV & Hi-Fi. In the ad, the stunning, happy mother held her giddy, handsome baby boy playfully above her head in soft, loving focus. Stuffing a still-sobbing Sis into the back seat of the Falcon, Tina’s focus drifted back to the carefree scene of mother and son before her.
I swam out—like a fish—nine months later, arriving on the heels of a storm that stole springtime blooms from gardens as far north as Birmingham. For the first time in history, the Azalea Trail, a pageant where debutants paraded in hoop skirt regalia by antebellum homes like the Civil War had only been a tale told to bad children, had to be called off.
The delivery nurse said it was the easiest birth she’d ever attended.