Low Country, J. Jones [top 10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

of a friend who’d gone to Harvard, whose ancestors were Ivy League–educated back to the Mayflower, when I mentioned that one of my brothers had dropped out of high school. Like I’d just revealed that I had met a Martian, though I guess that was her feeling. I could distance myself from my Southern ghosts, from the lowness I felt I was from for so long, but I feared that I would never belong or be understood anywhere else. I mistook these moments of cultural dissonance as signs that my fears were truths and removed myself a little at a time from where I worked hard to get and then wondered why I felt so distant from both who I was born as and who I wanted to be.

A neat and tidy cycle that I could not talk about with anyone except my other grandfather, Henry. I used to think I had a good grandfather and a bad grandfather. In any case, Grandpa Henry knew the feeling of living among outsiders, the educated a few rungs up the ladder of class, and sticking out even though you want not to be noticed at all, even when being noticed for something is part of what got you ahead in the first place. Aspiration is somehow lauded and clawed at. “Just smile and be yourself, kid,” he’d sooth, when I’d tell him how I felt. “Grandpa, but I feel like I don’t belong,” I’d go on, meaning first to the hallowed halls of my university—but it’s not time for the relief of his faith in me just yet. Soon enough we’ll be sipping on whiskey and ginger ale and sharing stories with him under the scuppernong vine. We are still in Myrtle Beach at the moment, and he is a four-hour drive away.

Why on earth did Nana marry Granddaddy? When did he go from a shy kid taking his girl on spins around the old Ferris wheel to chasing his grandchildren down a hallway with a baseball bat? His own father, that old moonshiner Harvey, was said to knock his boys around. Did Granddaddy catch or inherit from his father what he got beaten into him? Nearness to violence taints our imaginations, the images we acquire must have some power to influence our bodies to action, and it is the hardest of things to stop imagining the worst once your mind’s in motion. At a certain point, there is the choice to use this chain to hurt instead of breaking it. “Look at this,” Dad once said to me, as he passed his phone from his rocking chair to mine on a front porch many years into the future from my memory of that day at Nana’s house. He had a video going, of a friend of his, singing a song called “Hurt People Hurt People,” and I could see the hairs on Dad’s forearm standing up straight at the simplest of lines.

Everyone she was related to, which is a lot of folks, and a few she wasn’t, told Nana to leave him. “He’s my husband,” she said as she always and only ever said. Nana was no gold digger, but she was both too smart and too pretty not to be aware of the value of her beauty as a useful asset. The Joneses had their money by then, and were known for being a little dangerous. The thrill of danger gets awfully mixed up with the butterflies of love, though I have no doubt she loved him no matter how much he hurt her. I can feel the cool white tile of her living room underfoot as I imagine her telling the story of how her grandfather on the Hardee side was swindled out of their family land near Galivants Ferry, where the alligator- and cottonmouth-filled swamps that flank the Little Pee Dee River dry out into fields of tobacco farmland loomed over by crumbling plantations. As told to her by her parents and she tells it, too. A neighbor figured he might expand his acreage by accusing my great-great-grandfather of sleeping with his wife. That way, this neighbor could shoot dead my great-great-grandfather and buy off both judge and jury. Then he would be free to kick the grieving widow off her land. So the story goes.

I took the liberty, however, as she must have done, too, of interpreting this tale as a reminder that resources included husbands. A husband would have been the most valuable resource. As she’d say freely, perhaps in contrast with me, she “developed early,” and was a Hitchcock blonde by age fourteen at a time when there was nothing better a woman could be. Even if she’d gone on to get her college degree, she was first and foremost a creature built to love who wanted to be loved in return. In a land ruled by men, an open book is not as safe and half as warm as open arms. As she built a small kingdom out of her children’s and grandchildren’s adoration, perhaps the skin of reality stretched thinner and thinner, so that a realm owned by women built between letters and pages could be penned with growing ease to temper the harsher dimensions of her married life.

More important, she was in love, as she said. She had won a scholarship to Winthrop College, an all-girls school upstate in the red-dirt piedmont that she attended for a semester. Her mother and sister sewed her a single skirt and blazer, as they were too poor to buy any of the required uniform. After her first semester, her own daddy had a heart attack, and she gave up on college to go to work as a bank teller to support her ailing parents. Someplace in the world there is a language wherein the word for man translates the same as the word for burden.

Nana kept on her coffee table next to the photo albums a book of folktales and ghost stories from the Low