The Singular Event

The coastal plains of North Carolina were good to my father after he had a couple of different jobs and settled down. He told me that when he first came here as a young man he thought he had died and gone to heaven. He persistently told me about how fortunate he felt to be able to live here up until he got so old no place on Earth could possibly satisfy him that he was home.

The only time my father and I went anywhere alone together was a trip to Mississippi I took him on, just so he could satisfy his constant and unwavering cry "I wanna go home. Why are you keeping me here against my will? I wanna go home. You say you love me, now prove it. Take me home." So, despite my better judgment, I agreed to drive him back to Mississippi to see if that would do any good. Not only was where he needed to go not Mississippi, but for my father there was no place like home. A week before he died, his dead oldest brother came got him and took him there.

I don't believe for a minute that I was the only member of my natal family that was inconsolably afraid of my father until the day that he died. My father was a very talented man. He appeared to possess a thousand ways to skin a cat. He could think of ten thousand ways to make being alive a miserable ex-is-tense when he wasn't happy. The man had no stable set of rules of conscience, and he betrayed the ones he confessed to. He would whup yo' ass with a stout stick if you "disputed" him "Don't dispute me boy, not as long as you live in the house where I put the food you eat on the table."

That was the most powerful influence I knew in my formative years. He never said "Don't sass me, boy.", like I heard a lot of other boy's fathers say when I was around them. He never said, "I don't wanna hear none of yo' lip, boy!", like I'd heard a lotta men say. Both to their sons and edgy acquaintances. My father didn't say those things. Maybe because he was raised in Mississippi where they had another way with words. He always told me not to dispute his word. Don't question the sincerity of his word. He might be wrong, and infrequently admitted it as a tactic, but he didn't allow his family to question his authority in public, and there was a heavy price to pay if we got stupid.

I chose my battle ground. It's about the onliest (only-est, it's some sort of colloquial representation of a lack of choice) option I possessed as a boy who wanted to go prodigal. It ain't only the only choice one has in order to survive, it's the onli-est choice besides Death around my father. Rock and a hard place, Southern-style. Sure. I could have made it easier.

My father got a little too cocky. Like a lotta math whizzes'. He was good with numbers. He thought that was enough. He didn't know what Salmon Rushdie confessed to understanding. Fiction reveals the truth more profoundly than fact does. It's more difficult to find the way, and there ain't no proof left for the pudding, but truth is more wisely approached via misdirection than by earning bragging rights and Nobel Prizes. The word is mightier than the pen.

The chink in his armor was that he said repetitively at the dinner table where he reigned supreme, that his boys (me, and my younger brothers) would only be forced to take the first two years of his four-year vocational program. He knew the story of the king who always left the fourth side of the pen open to give the animal the beaters drove forward a chance to escape. Noblesse oblige. Why would my father not provide this open way. He was of the blood.

All the time he was tell us at the dinner table that his boys only had to take two years of his four-year curriculum, I was agreeing with him, and openly saying that's all I'd take. He ignored me. He didn't believe I could possibly do that. It would dispute his word. He didn't think anybody was that stupid, not even his own son. After I took two years of his courses and served as his whipping boy to show his supposed impartiality, I declared, "No more.", and stuck to my decision. I won, and of course, by winning, I lost. Truly, and in more ways than One.

I never knew my father's family. His father died at the age of seventy-four when I was two years old, and my father's mother died a year or so after her husband. I think he had five sisters. When we went back to Mississippi for my parents to visit their families, we usually stayed with my mother's parents, who I got to know fairly well before they died.

Other times we stayed with my father's oldest sister had a number of children. All of them were considerably older than me. I sorta knew the two youngest boys, but I was a child to them. No blame. I envied them. They had the usual gadgets that weren't allowed at our house. Mostly because of the lack of money to afford them. I can't get it outta my mind now. I'm suspicious my oldest aunt was my actual grandmother. The woman who died when I was 3-4 years old that was supposed to be my grandmother was too old to be pregnant with my father. Unwed mothers in those days were considered throwaways. They got "sold" as a form of slavery. It's still a cruel world.

The Reconstruction Years after the Civil War and the economic devastation caused by the cotton boll weevil made Mississippi the poorest place in the United States to live during the time my parents were growing up there. Both of my parents grew up in the rural countryside north of Meridian, Mississippi. My mother's family lived ten miles due north of Meridian, and my father's family had a place a little east of due north about twenty miles away from Meridian. Meridian was the defacto region center of that area of the country which included some of midwestern Alabama.

I wish I could describe what it felt like when my family drove back to Mississippi in the summers to visit their families. It was a place where the people who lived there were sort of forced to put on a happy face when visitors from out-of-state visited. It seemed like my parents went to a lot of trouble to help their families keep up the facade, and their siblings did too.

It was kind of crazy, because all my parent's siblings had gone someplace else to make a living also, many of them to work in the oil fields as roughneck's, and they planned their vacations to be in Mississippi at the same time as my parents, so they could see each other, but they were all pretending and acting nice to such a degree that everybody went home kind of disappointed they didn't see the people they grew up with.

To me, the one thing, the singular event that described how it's own people felt about Mississippi during those times, happened soon after my father's mother died. He adored her, and thought they had a special relationship. He was there when the older children left to seek their fortunes. He was the youngest child, and it was traditional for the youngest child to inherit the family home.

There was a reading of her will during the time we were there for her funeral. She had instructed her daughters not to let my father inherit any property in Mississippi, but to sell it at auction and send him his share of the money instead. She didn't want him to come back to Mississippi. She thought Mississippi was jinxed, and for his own sake she wanted him gone from there. Her family name was Spinx. Yeah, with the X. They say it came from England. X? In an English surname?

That made my father sadder than any other event I can remember. Okay, maybe not the saddest... ever... for all time. He was a man. He had false expectations like men do. After all, as homo sapiens, we're all possessed by the same species-wide flaw. We can't realize our own possibles in real time. How could that flaw alone not account for multiple and myriad periods of self-imposed sadness?