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

none was found, I would become the pirate and offer treasure from the house to be buried. One of the few things Nana ever got mad at me for was burying a bumblebee-shaped broach she had given me made from stripes of black enamel and real gold, its wings twinkling diamonds. She and Mom took their turn as treasure hunters and shoveled up the whole backyard looking for it. Still there like the corn snake lost in the house. There was always the family of snakes who lived under the shed and were good for sport. Dad once found us out there using a stick to flip one of these serpents, banded in candy-corn colors, into the air like it was a pancake, and moving quick as an adder himself, ran in quick strides to knock the stick out of my brother Justin’s hand and pull us away. I can still see the stripes pinwheeling through the air, scarlet and saffron spinning brightly against a cornflower blue sky, before it tumbled down to a dusty and stunned landing. “What in the hell?” So unfurled the litany. “Don’t y’all know any better than to be poking at a poisonous snake?”

He got a good look, once it hit the ground, muttering under his breath counting snakeskin rings with an outstretched finger. “Red on black, friend of Jack. Red on yellow, kill a fellow.” It was a king snake and not the near-identical coral snake, whose bite is the closest thing on this continent to a cobra’s. They are thought of, coral snakes, as docile and slow compared with the muscle of a cottonmouth or the meanness of a copperhead.

“Leave the poor guy alone. He’s just a tired old kingsnake, probably got a family to take care of under there. Go on little guy, go on,” Dad said in a gentle tone for the poor animal. Perhaps he was thinking of the time he was scolded as a child for playing with toy soldiers. He’d knotted shoelaces around the plastic necks of a few traitors and flung them over a chair, only to have May Ella, Grandmama as he called her, scream and run out of the room. Nana took her youngest boy against her side and explained that as a girl, her mother had seen a man hanged from a tree by a mob. We nested under Dad’s arms and squatted down to watch our friend slither home. It was a game we kept on playing even after this scene, and when that king snake decided it was time to wriggle up the social ladder and move on up to a better neighborhood, Justin took to throwing the cat up in the air, which seemed to bother nobody, not even the cat, a brave ginger tabby we called Toffee, who developed gangrene after someone shot a BB pellet into his thigh.

When we were old enough, my brothers and I were enrolled in school at Waccamaw Academy, named for the indigenous people who built their villages among the loblolly pines in the gum-cypress wetlands and blackwater swamps spilling between the banks of what is now the Waccamaw River and the Pee Dee River and who almost certainly did not wear the feathered and tasseled crown of the school’s sports uniforms, printed in indigo blue on cotton sweatshirts. Before the first Roanoke colony was established and then unaccountably disappeared in North Carolina, before Jamestown was settled and heralded as the New World in Virginia, and a century before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, a Spanish colony was attempted in 1526, near present-day Georgetown, an hour south of Waccamaw Academy, by the Spaniard Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, an acquaintance of Diego Columbus, son of Christopher. Ayllón, the forgotten conquistador of the Carolinas. He called his settlement San Miguel de Gualdape, after sailing a Spanish caravel from Hispaniola to claim the boggy pluff mud for the Spanish crown. Did it seem a cursed mission, a cursed place from the beginning? The flagship, Capitana, struck a sandbar and sank, and the group’s supplies were lost. The shipwreck is thought to rest underneath North Island near Georgetown, the land itself moved by centuries of storms and shifts to hide the ship from scholars and treasure hunters alike. San Miguel de Gualdape is recognized by historians as the very first European settlement in the United States. The first place in the United States where enslaved people from Africa were brought ashore, too. And the site of the first revolt of enslaved people in the United States. Only a few months into his venture, Ayllón died of some illness, perhaps the country fever that took Alice Flagg, or the smallpox or measles he passed to the Waccamaw, which would kill nearly the whole population and erase their language forever. The few European survivors abandoned South Carolina soon after, until the English came a hundred years later.

For a while, I searched for the translations of any journals or letters he might have left behind. I have had to settle for secondhand accounts and the journals of Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish soldier shipwrecked near Galveston, Texas, in 1528, after a hurricane claimed his ship. Left for dead, like Drunken Jack, but washed ashore with more faith than rum. He and the few survivors walked for eight years, from the Island of Doom, the name they gave to Galveston, until they found a Spanish outpost in Mexico. The slim purple edition of this account was published as part of a series on explorers that included an abridged account of the travels of Marco Polo, who claimed therein to have seen a griffin, the mystical lion-eagle hybrid, in flight somewhere near what is now Zanzibar or Madagascar.

So close to the river was Waccamaw Academy that when the banks overflowed from rain, storm, or tides, the football field returned to swamp. Practices and field days had to be adjusted when the presence of alligators on the grass deterred the presence of small student