Prologue:

The Mark of the Migratory

There is something inherently gothic and romantic in the American South.  I grew up on flat red clay stretched into coastal plains under which untold numbers of marred soldiers, stripped slaves, and pocked indians leaked into the soil.  The land, the region, is at once idyllic and incriminated, quaint but threaded with guilt.  For generations my mother and father’s family had been born into this enigmatic and conflicted place.

The Romantic and the Gothic, like most mystic ideas, are more easily borne from afar.  I could see the tinderbox in which I lived from the time I was a child, and knew both the intimate beauty of my home, and the inevitable misunderstandings and stereotypes that surrounded it.  My love for the American South is something I was born into, without choice, and have defensively guarded and fiercely protected, like one would a sometimes-unsavory family member.

One in every generation feels that this place is too much to bear, and has to leave.  My uncle, Daddy’s older brother, grew his hair long, sailed for a year, married a Jewish woman, became an AIDS nurse and moved to Boston.  He is the fiercest preserver of family history, the most knowledgeable, the most consumed by reverence for the ideal of home, among his siblings.  From my first childhood memories, I knew I would leave.

We listened to country music radio with my cousins everywhere we went in the van or station wagon.  Every lapse between songs brought out the story of yet another singer who had risen to fame from a heretofore unknown Southern town.  I didn’t necessarily want to sing, but I did glean from those slick radio voices that it was possible to put a place on the map by leaving it, by sacrificing it for someplace bigger.  And I wanted to achieve that desperately.  

I needed the land, and lifestyle I had been born into to become otherworldly, a kind of supreme fiction for my own life.  Enough miles would make it holy, worthy of the kind of extraordinary reverence I already felt.  I could be differentiated, and with differentiation would come exoneration, and a platform for correcting egregious misunderstandings.

Around the age of eight, I gained awareness of my own dialect, and coached myself into shedding it when beneficial.  At eighteen, I engaged in a northing, moving four hundred miles to the northwest, within arms reach of a major city and the mountains, for college.  Virginia was exotic to my eyes; within weeks I was witnessing the most brilliant full trajectory of fall I had ever seen.  Nearly all of the trees, rather than just a few, paraded the reds and oranges they seem to accrue overnight.  Once the leaves fell, the trees stood in barren, exquisite beauty.  They engaged in fractilinear line value beyond what any graphite and paper could produce, looking as if they had upended themselves, so their roots might meet the sky for a few months.

It was not that I had never been anywhere.  I’d travelled the country, as well as left it for South America and Europe.  But I found the experience of living within my new environment breathtaking; it was the ability to chronicle its changes daily that entranced me.  By the opulence of spring, I’d found a new hand to hold down the rain-wet, lamp-lit streets.  Before long, my toxic naivete and utter obsession with The Boy from New England would nearly devour me; when he turned loose of me, the following fall, I was a gnawed, hollowed, weeping mess, a shadow of my younger self.

I mourned and found company with a painter as bereaved for lost-love as I.  I spent weekends talking philosophy with his roommates, sitting on a downtown roof, smoking hookah.  My grief was still so raw, I couldn’t look myself in the mirror in the painter’s bathroom.  By spring, I made the acquaintance of a beautiful man (a musician), but held him at bay from my chaotic life until summer, when he gave me no choice, driving down to my beloved coast.  We went to the beach every day and talked about Buddhism at length, and within days, I was standing in his hotel room, choosing a grey tie for him to wear out downtown.  Over the years, I slowly traded him my doubts and fears for the simple joy of his company.  I found in him a man kind and gentle, creative, stable, and loving.

My life is like that of many birds.  Whiffing the change of season, the faltering sunlight or strengthening wind, I take off, going seaward, or north, leaving family or friends or country in pursuit of better climate.  From every break the past becomes writable: distant, but not severed.

This is the first physical manifestation of a photograph for which I am entirely responsible: I took it, I processed the negatives, I enlarged it, printed and developed it.  It is very satisfying to finally, finally learn this skill in its entirety!  One small step for man, one giant leap for Whitney.

For a reference to my First Memoir Writing Assignment, as well as the accompanying disclaimer, click here.

“The Migration”

We left like unpracticed bedouin.  A naturally introspective child, I said goodbye to almost no one, but, instead, walked from the Bradford Pear, to the Mimosa, to the Willow, and Pine.  They had been the stakes of my childhood home; these trees literally planted alongside my infancy were the things we could not take.  There would be other steps to other foyers, even other hydrangeas, daffodils, ferns, but my name wouldn’t be scarred onto other trunks, and no other willow would crown my head hundreds of times.

I’d found the yellow legal pad weeks earlier.  Dad always wrote with the same kind of pen: black except for the metal clip and a tiny ridged circle on the head of the cap that was colored– red for grading, blue for everything else.  In his unnatural hand (that of a 1950’s-born reformed lefty) he’d scrawled ‘hilton head’ and ‘wilmington’ across the top.  Down from there spilled the pro’s and con’s of each.  I don’t remember any of them.  We ended up in Wilmington.  

In a sense, we were going home.  Both my families were ocean people.  And a man named Williams had left Bristol, England some hundreds of years before and found his way to Wilmington.  His descendants, named and renamed Iradelle, Blackwell, Williams, would ultimately rend my great-grandmother, Isabel Williams.  She was a painter and nurse, who’d gone inland to the windless, red-clay land where I grew up.  She married John Blackwell, and gave birth to my father’s mother, and two more children.  Daddy had spent childhood summers with his grandmother’s spinster sister, Capki (Catherine), at Wrightsville Beach, a peninsula-turning-barrier-island just outside Wilmington city-limits.

We’d been migratory for my whole life: like a catch of shore-birds, going east for summers, and west for the rest of the year.  The edginess, openness, and vulnerability of seascape was intimately familiar to me, and I considered myself a ‘local’ rather than a tourist– after all, my maternal grandmother, and some cousins still lived there.  It was the landscape not of vacation, but of a kind of mystical genealogy.  I loved the wide, flat beach of the Grand Strand for its seeming endlessness, building to a deeper and deeper blue.  The whole of it was so fragile, and yet piled with pastel-colored summer homes with whimsical pun-infested names, like The Barry-cuda, The Dock’s House, or What’s to Sea.  Daddy made sure we understood from a young age why the dollar-weeds and sea oats were to be left holding the dunes together, and never ever carried home.  We’d go to the jetties to see the shrinking beach to one side.

The whole landscape, driving seaward from our house, was scarred by a particularly devastating hurricane that hit in ‘88.  Row after row of pine trees were frozen, still upright, but completely dead, brown, needle-less.  The floods of saltwater had killed them, rather than the wind.  They were drowned like over-tended house plants.

The summer we moved to Wilmington, I turned fourteen.  I didn’t help pack, and am pressed to remember whether I was at camp, or simply staying over-long at my grandmother’s house.  I do remember coming home to find my things in boxes.  My front-of-the-house, three-window room had lost the usual light and shadows on its pink walls, the floor was back to being unclothed; the innards of the trees, lines waxing and waning with annual rainfall, lay open-faced on the floor.  As far back as my memory stretched, I had always lived in this room, in this house, in this town.  My mother’s sisters and their children lived in the same town.  We were eight-strong, and our childhoods are in many ways indistinguishable; we lived like some kind of African compound, except the houses weren’t mud, and the matriarchs all had green eyes and blonde hair.

I understood that we had to go.  That there were actions so egregious that adults had no option but to leave the wagging tongues of small towns, a child tucked under each arm, bridges burning.  We left my mother’s family’s business in shambles, my dad’s career dead where it lay; Wilmington was far enough.  That was probably somewhere on the legal pad; Wilmington: “far enough.”  Far enough to escape the long shadows, to start clean, to enter exile.

We went back on weekends for a while to dust, until the house was sold.  I didn’t care much; it didn’t look the same.  The house my mother designed with its jack-and-jill bathrooms, a sun-porch, a playroom, built-in china cabinets, was now alien.  I had been raised in a yellow house, with white porch railings and grey porch floors, reminiscent of the impenetrable Haint Blue of Charleston row-houses.  The house we sold was grey, however, not yellow.  Sometime the spring before, we had watched the sky ink-over in a descending tornado.  Every living thing lay quiet and still.  Where we lived, the humidity meant homes without cellars or basements, so we sat in the windowless middle bathroom for the several minutes it took the storm to touch and pass.

Afterward, the side-yard was filled with frozen planets the size of softballs.  Grayson and I held them to the light, examining the whitish center and liquifying sides.  The pear tree was ravaged; there were holes knocked in the yellow siding, dents on the hood of Dad’s truck, a broken window.  The beautiful yellow siding was twelve years old, and could not be matched; my mother chose to replace it with cool grey and new floodlight fixtures.  Overnight, the house shrank in its lot, and would never look the same.  The metaphor of the now-ashen color was unbearable in its perfection.

My parents let me paint murals in my room in the new house.  I’d been there when we found it.  I remember my grandmother saying we’d seen some fifty houses by then, when our slightly overweight and deeply kind realtor, a middle-aged blonde woman, walked my mother into a brick house on a street of brick houses.  Barely through the door, I heard her let out a terrifying primal scream, followed by: “THIS IS IT!  THIS IS IT!  THIS IS THE HOUSE!”  Four bedrooms, three-and-a-half baths, we bought it from a retired couple.  It didn’t have a willow, or mimosa, or pear, and the only pines were the fast-growing kind: tall, thin, branchless until the very top.  Bullet died within a few years; Daddy just walked out one morning to find her stiff, cut down by an aneurism or heart-attack.  Nobody told me until her body was already gone, in the truck with Daddy and Grayson; they buried her in a field on the family hunting property.

That summer, without any new friends, I threw myself upon the tiny glass pots of paint we’d bought.  The Carolina Blue walls, sloped like those of an attic, quickly bore spongy clouds, a rendition of the Cape Hatteras light house, a spread of dunes and broken fence, a gull on pilings, a stretch of water capped by a sailboat.  In the four years I lived there, the paintings were never finished.  The gull lived by a penciled ghost companion, the dunes never got their preserving grass.  After a couple of years of out-of-state college my mom called for permission to paint over them; the walls are yellow now.

Once I could drive, I’d go to the beach every day in the summer, before or after my part-time job.  I’d drive the back-road through Monkey Junction and Myrtle Grove, over the bridge, and down to the beaches: Carolina, Kure, Fort Fisher.  I’d go alone with a book and towel, taking long walks and swims.  Something about the way the ocean made me hungry and tired and satisfied killed the long days, gave me a destination.  The daily sea baths were marked by a kind of sanctity.  I’d let the waves pummel me, or lay on my back on windless days when the water was smooth like glass, soaking up salt in my pores, letting it clean me, heal me.

I reasoned, if we had to leave, there was no where else to go but the shore.  A landscape so rough and so vulnerable, the tiny pulsing marshes, and the yearly storms lived in me, fed on me, marked me again and again with cycles of grief and joy, with the aches of the growing.  In the Port City’s old downtown I’d walk by the Williams’ cottage, a historic landmark turned bed and breakfast, or pass my fingers over the marriage plaque of my great-great-grandparents in St. James’ and let the idea take root.  I knew about the brackish water hiding nasty sandbars, about the children’s hospital where my grandmother had nursed, the cobbled slope of Market St., made for the rolling of barrels of pine pitch toward the docks on the Cape Fear River.  

And yet, given the first chance, I left.  I found the ocean an unsettlingly accurate reflection of self.  And, having learned nomadism, I became insatiate again.

Writers have no ethics, if by ethics you mean respect for the lives and truths of others, and if by respect you mean leaving them alone, and if by leaving them alone you mean not ever seeing them as material. Words are a currency and the lives of others an entire economy. How much to tell? How shall it be told? What you know of someone else’s life has one value when kept to yourself and a different value when told. One power when you shut the door behind you, lean in close to my ear, when we go to the movies together, laugh behind cinderblock buildings, send notes to each other from our own pens in our own hands. When I watch your face change like clouds moving over water. We feel so close, these intersections of our lives like a secret conduit. We actually believe we might feel the same way about something.

And then there is the power of turning your sigh into a metaphor, our car trip into a narrative with a significant ending. The power of turning you out of the inner folds of my life and into dialogue.

That time when we were kids and your father yelled at you in front of me and you didn’t guard your face, which crumpled, as we would never want our faces to crumple, into the folds of an old man who knows for sure it won’t get any better. I saw that. It was mine. And you knew I saw it, so it was ours. And now it’s not.

We all want to be loved, but some of us are willing to gut our lives of secrets, their moist insides stiffening and cracking in the sun, then look, like a dog, for approval. Some of us are willing never to live a moment again until we’ve inked it on the page. Some of us don’t know how else to live. I don’t know how else to live. So don’t be my friend.*

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I can’t begin to tell you, readers, how steadily I have meditated on exactly this problem. Everyone seems to assume poetry is autobiographical, confessional, even when it is not. And I have gotten myself into trouble with this blog more than once. I have hurt people, people I care about. It bothers me quite a bit. But, I feel I have the right to my memories, to my view on the world. It is narrow, and flawed, to say the least, as is everyone’s. The difference being, of course, that I publisize mine in a way that most people don’t. I feel compelled to do that. I only hope that my readers can understand my limitations. I am not judging, or propagating, or condemning; I am merely telling, shaping the raw elements of my experience into chains of metaphors by which I can make some sense out of being. I love you all.

* emphasis my own. This excerpt is from Benson’s book The Sparkling-Eyed Boy which is a highly inventive memoir of sorts.

This is the roll of color film that I took at the Folklife Festival in DC.  I am still waiting for my Pro Black and Whites to be processed, as well as all of my 120 film from the Diana+.  These things take extra time and effort, but should be worth it (I hope!).  Although I successfully processed my own negatives during my photo class at the Richmond Visual Arts Center, about two weeks ago,  I’m not sure I trust myself alone with a metal canister and a bunch of chemicals, yet.  Maybe one day soon.  For now, I’m outsourcing, and (impatiently) waiting.

See my first reflection on the Butterfly Gardens (which sadly yielded no photos).

Successful author and surgeon Sherwin Nuland, has a presentation on ted.com about his own battle with depression and his rehabilitation via electroshock therapy.  I’m not so interested in electroshock therapy, but there are moments in which his testimony about his experience broke through to me, and spoke for me, so clearly that I wept.  He’s telling his story to a broad audience after almost thirty years, and that takes particular courage.

Though I’ve turned a corner, I still have days, hours, of slippage, of backsliding into the tunnel.  I feel that way now, and I rarely write from this place unmediated, but I want to if only for a few paragraphs.  What I experience now, in my present life, is more of a kind of transient melancholy than the true grips of depression that snatch up whole weeks, months, years, in their entirety.  What I feel now is a sort of rawness, an edginess, which actually makes my skin prickle and hurt to the touch.  (Much like accounts I have read of Autism-spectrum persons who experience oversensitivity to noise, lights, textures, etc.)  I have a feeling of total isolation, of detachment, and yet of a singular kind of burden.  My heart, and whole body, ache for the world at large, for the way the wet leaves look on the tree outside, for every story I’ve heard recently, for every person who is moving or changing or ending or starting.  I am at once a concentrate of my being, and a vacancy of it.

It resembles extreme fatigue, and drunkenness in some ways, and probably mirrors some feelings of small children in that I am frustrated; I feel things so profoundly and deeply and cannot articulate them.  I have no wish to speak out loud right now, but I can write, because writing doesn’t require the movement of my mouth.  The cleanest exit from this state of being, I have found, is actually to consciously live it.  Be quiet in your quietness, feel the sensations of your body, but don’t worry about them, don’t fight it.  It will pass, but not of your own volition.  Don’t cry or rage or try to tell someone and vent your frustration on their lack of understanding.  Just be.  Just be until you return to yourself, until the world is not so heavy and hard to understand.  Slowly, bubbles of you rise and break against the surface again, and your body unthaws, and your posture straightens and you can smile and read and talk and sing.  

I have never felt like these episodes were entirely unique to me.  Of course not.  Nor are they purely burdensome.  They are insights, trips down the mine-shaft to stir up what might be better understood in daylight.  They are wells into, and the welling of, being.