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

mother, May Ella. Bathed in light, they are all young and happily chatting as they did in life from those very spots. As I was sure my grandpa had died with the unfinished business of some ghosts, I knew Nana had done what she set out to do in life. She’d made her grandchildren love her better than anything. She deserved better, but she gave away the best of anything she ever got.

A notebook filled with lifetimes of my family’s stories was stolen from my car in a parking lot before Nana’s death, and for months, I could not look at the white of paper without feeling her leave me again. She was the keeper of family stories. “I’m the matriarch,” she asserted with a defiant pride, sure of her place at the head of a family that had belittled not just her, but all of its women, as if willing a world of women with power. Men have always been credited with the stories women kept alive. In returning to this place I had let go of, I would make her ghost not a lovesick or angry one as I’d learned the ghosts of women to be, but as the loving beacon I knew in life. What healers and psychics could not bring back after my first real experience with grief, I must do for myself.

Here, for the last time, I must take back my words. It is all more complicated than that. How can I heal all these women, my kith and kin, these mothers and grandmothers, much less myself, when I see now that I have been living out their eternal fates as if a ghost myself even as I try to write them into freer lives after death? I am little Julia Legare, who nightly forces open the doors between death and memory. I am the Lady in White, who plunges over and over into ocean waves to save not one body but generations under full moons reflected up and down the coast. Like Alice Flagg of the Hermitage I wear a gold ring on a chain around my neck to keep close the love of someone gone. With a silent clasp, on the morning of New Year’s Day, I hooked one circle through another and walked once more across King’s Highway from Nana’s House, over Ocean Boulevard, beyond the boardwalk to the beach where I looked and looked until I found her between the dunes wearing on her finger the ring that I had around my neck.

Every Sunday, Nana told me that she wished she could follow me around for a day, to see what my life living somewhere else was like. One Sunday when Jared happened to be visiting her, we turned our phones on to video chat, and I walked her through my apartment, around my neighborhood, past subway entrances, doing laps around the park, telling her about my days in the city, how I had been apple picking the day before. “Ain’t it a miracle,” she declared, and at first, I thought she meant the technology.

If only I had the same skill with time as Grandpa, who could catch and move its hands at will over clock faces. Nana used to sneak barefoot to the clock, her mother’s wedding present, on their family’s mantel and wind back the hands to give her and her sister a little more time to play under the moon. If only I could reclaim the superstitions and stories passed on to me from fear and remake them as I would see the daughters of the Low Country. As free to be, to come and go, as they are to breathe. I could befriend the ghosts that wander the highway or find themselves lingering on the beach.

On the drive to the airport leaving one last time, I passed the oaks that hide the rice and indigo plantations now covered in sculpture and fairy lights in the shape of butterflies. The site where my great-grandmother ran her gambling parlor out of the gas station. The water park where my brothers and cousins and I splashed and warred with runes painted in neon zinc across our cheeks. The seafood joints, the motels and hotels, the lazy rivers and mini-golf courses. The vacant lot where the Pavilion used to stand before it was torn down for no good reason. The road that turns off King’s Highway and leads to the swing bridge in Socastee. I think of my nana’s favorite way to say goodbye as we reach the cemetery where we buried her yesterday, or a lifetime ago, under the name that is hers and mine. See you later, alligator, she liked to say with a wave in a lilting invitation for me to finish. Instead of holding my breath, I breathe her in and remember. After ’while, crocodile.

Acknowledgments

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THANK YOU TO MY EDITOR, MEGHA MAJUMDAR, whose brilliance, grace, and generosity continue to amaze and humble. For the time and care you’ve put into this work, I will never be able to thank you enough. Here I will try once more, with deepest love: thank you.

Thank you to Catapult and the most wonderful team: Robin Billardello, Nicole Caputo, Wah-Ming Chang, Jordan Koluch, Alisha Gorder, Megan Fishmann, Rachel Fershleiser, Katie Boland, Samm Saxby, Laura Gonzalez, Dustin Kurtz. Your support and work on this book has meant the world.

Endless gratitude and love to my agent, Stephanie Delman, who reached out just as I was ready to give up. Your encouragement and belief in the vision I had for this book kept me going, and I am marvelously lucky to know you and to have you on my team. For anyone on the verge of giving up, keep going.

Thank you to my family, especially to Mom and Dad for your love and generosity—much of this book was written at a folding table in their storage closet. Thank you to Uncle Leslie and Robyn for all of your love and support,