Low Country Page 5

  The house on Calhoun Road has always been known to us as “Nana’s house,” and here I will take what credit is mine, as the first grandkid to use the name that everybody uses just the same as if a painted oar with the words were over the front door like on the vacation homes on Ocean Boulevard. A flick of premonition doled out so innocently by kids, or something said so often it had to come true. Granddaddy sold the little house on Thirty-third Avenue that had weathered Hurricane Hazel and a thousand storms inside. I might venture that he was subliminally drawn, in part, to the street’s name. John Calhoun had advocated that South Carolina secede from the Union forty years before the canon fuse was lit at Fort Sumter. Look at any surviving portrait of Calhoun, and see a man burning up with hatred. It’s an expression that reminds me of Granddaddy’s.

  I came to understand, from the first time I saw him raise a hand to Nana, that his inner well of fury ran too deep to be contained in just one body, and that the terrifying anger behind his violence was the spring of his other most defining quality, his racism. We all understood that the targets of his rage were innocent as we were, more innocent most likely, and his hatred of just about everything fueled his words and actions. Kathleen, the maid Nana had hired to keep house when she started keeping books for the family motels, was the only black person allowed inside their house. He spewed hateful language upon catching sight of a person that did not please him, even on the television. Nana warned us with hurricane seriousness never to bring over friends whose very existence would displease him, to save playdates and off-the-cuff invitations to her house for when he was out of town, with his mistress, it was unsaid truth. She thought she was protecting friends and guests, but it was for her sake just as much. To save herself from his fits. Behind his back, sometimes the boys would dare to approach the incantations that scared us more than his belt, to flat out make fun of him because they could. “Granddaddy’s two favorite words are damn and the N word,” the refrain went. Nothing’s funny about the truth in those words, but laughter, like love, is a kind of rebellion. Derision is an easy shield for children trying to protect themselves from hate they don’t understand and can’t escape. Laughing at him was the only way to gain power over his tyranny.

  Nana’s house remains the same as during our childhood, except for the tile that replaced the carpet. It’s a sprawling single-story house with a backyard patio that holds up a porch swing and looks onto a tennis court, something called a rock garden that has always just been a circle of small pebbles ringed with monkey grass and camellia trees, a concrete pool set into the top of a small slope that leads to the one-bedroom Back House and a gardener’s shed. All of this is crowned on the far end by the great magnolia tree, which is without question the best kind of tree for climbing. I have never seen the pool, outfitted with a rusted, crumbling plaster diving board, with any water but a foot of slimy green pond scum that houses families of giant toads and patches of cattail reeds.

  The pool was filled with clean swimming water for only their first year on Calhoun Road. Not long after the furniture was moved in and bags were unpacked, Granddaddy and Nana flew to Las Vegas, where the Jones brothers and their wives—and on other trips, their mistresses—went to golf and rub shoulders with gangsters and wannabes like themselves. They left Dad and Leslie in the care of Kathleen, who had worked for the family since the days of the Sea Dip, when she drove up from Georgetown in an old pickup truck whose bed was filled with other black women who commuted to Myrtle Beach to clean the motels that appeared along Ocean Boulevard. When my parents could not afford to buy a crib for me, it was Kathleen who gifted them one of polished walnut. Had she wanted to cool her feet in the water of the pretty seascape held in the windows of the motel rooms she cleaned, she would not have been allowed. Black vacationers were banned from the beaches, as well as motels and hotels and restaurants, and had to venture half an hour north to Atlantic Beach to enjoy the water. Until the mid-1960s, ropes were strung across the beach and well past the breaking waves at the borders of Atlantic Beach to keep sand and sea segregated.

  Mike threw a pool party in his parents’ absence, and most of Myrtle Beach High School played quarters on the patio in between make-out sessions in the pool and god knows what else in the Back House. Kathleen, her everyday kindness steeled into the practicalities of survival when faced with a yard full of drunk and coked-up white teenagers, locked herself and the two younger boys in a bedroom and called the police. After that, Granddaddy drained the pool. He had an excuse to throw a few punches at Mike, not that he ever needed any, and to then throw him out of the house for good. He had already kicked him out once for refusing to crop his hair military-short, probably hoping that he’d be drafted sooner rather than later. Such was the offense of needing your bangs trimmed, were you male. At fourteen, Dad brought home a friend who Granddaddy chased out of the house with fists raised for daring to have his hair down to his shoulders. This the son of one of Nana’s best friends. When Dad went outside to apologize, his friend handed him Honky Chateau, the new Elton John album that had just come out. “No hard feelings, man,” he said as he passed to my dad the album that he played the most in high school. In the same bedroom Kathleen had once locked them inside, he had found the record that inspired him to learn how to write his own songs, grow a beard, and stop cutting his own hair.

  Uncle Mike, as the firstborn, took a lot of the hits. What drives a man to hate his own son from the very beginning? Nana often said she thought he was jealous. Mike had been conceived after an impatient engagement that lasted just a few hours. They were married at the courthouse and spent their wedding night in Nana’s office at the local bank, South Carolina National, where she was a bank teller and a bookkeeper. She had some numbers to finish before they could enjoy any celebrations. Now maybe it is perhaps more apparent why Nana’s mom, May Ella, thought of him more as a horse thief than a son-in-law. Mike was born while Granddaddy was stationed in San Diego with the Navy, where he discovered not a love of the sea, but a talent for boxing. He even won the Golden Gloves competition in the flyweight division. A local newspaper described him as “scrappy.” I have never seen Granddaddy on the beach, despite his milking its charms for his bottom line. He may be the only person in Myrtle Beach who never bothers to consult with the ocean. When he came home, he put all of his energy into throwing punches at his family. “Come look at these photographs of your granddaddy,” Nana has begged often. A scrapbook of his boxing days sits where it always has on a shelf of photo albums. She seems proud of him, and I wonder if that is her defense of what she knows we have seen. “If it is enough for me to put up with, then can’t nobody say it’s too much,” she may as well have said.

  There is no denying that Mike has alternatively been called both a fuckup and a genius. When his number came up during Vietnam, as Granddaddy hoped it would, I am sure, he didn’t pass the physical. He had been born deaf in one ear, the Army doctor said, and he danced up and down the bus on the way back to town from the base. “Your number got called up?” he asked the grim-faced teenage boys in their new uniforms returning to Myrtle Beach on the bus from Conway. “Why don’t you give me your girlfriend’s number since I’m gonna be staying here,” he’d recount to me and the boys before we knew what Vietnam was. He was the first of the brothers to divorce, still a semi-scandal back in 1990 South Carolina. Though Mike’s two sons would have been better off with their mother, Granddaddy is said to have had words with the judge seeing to custody matters. Mike got both boys full-time. What backwoods Southern judge didn’t regard tribal masculinity as justice of the first order? Granddaddy didn’t care a lick about my cousins, Chris and Brian, but they were property like any other that he knew how to take. Fairness, like compassion, belongs to the fantasies of women. Mike moved into the Back House, and Chris and Brian moved into Nana’s house, where, in front of the rest of us, Granddaddy let loose on my two little cousins for no reason other than they were Mike’s. The only salve for this renewed generational trauma was the t
ender attentions of Nana.

  Often when the boys and I were at Nana’s, Mike offered us each a few bucks to clean the Back House for him. This usually meant that he was expecting a date. He’d herd us all into the one-bedroom house beside the carport, promise us a dollar or two, and leave again in a disheveled frenzy. I was seven when he moved in back there, so my brothers and cousins were a year to a few years younger, and we were all young enough to feel like we had to do what he told us to do, while also knowing fully that Mike, as he had no authority over anything, really had none over us. We made a show of tidying up at first, and once alone, covered the walls and refrigerators with stickers and drawings. We went through his drawers and shelves, of course, pocketing any cash or coins that we knew from experience he’d never pay us after promising a going rate. Inevitably one of us would come across assorted tablets and bags of powder in between couch cushions and next to ashtrays, and we knew somehow that it was what was called “drugs,” without quite grasping exactly what that was.

  I was living in a northern city after college, working at a bookstore and tinkering for the first time with writing my own stories, still fantasies about living abroad, of Sardinian summers and wine-dark seas, or monastic peace on Himalayan mountaintops, when I was summoned to Myrtle Beach. Mike had had a stroke. In fact, he’d had several and was laid up at Myrtle Beach Hospital, unable to move or speak. By that time, he lived alone on the inland side of the Waterway on the way to Socastee. After the first stroke, he’d fallen between his bed and a wall, unable to get up or call for help. Nobody found him for days, and Mike had another series of strokes. Leslie and a cousin found him, after Nana called up both of them saying, “I want y’all to go check on Mike.” It was unusual that he would go so long without asking her for money or favors.

  After Granddaddy joined the rest of the family at Nana’s house, the doctor called him up with an update on the condition of his eldest son. I watched him go from his typical “Howdy, howdy” on the phone with a fellow member of the Horry County Boys’ Club to fuming in the space of a breath. Mike’s blood-test results showed an array of unnatural substances in the blood. His strokes were no longer a temptation to pity the bad luck of his firstborn, but cause to double down on his bitter hatred. Granddaddy, always so angry and ashamed of his son, couldn’t contain his wrath, but with a glance at me adjusted his anger. I had assumed he had wanted to spare my ladylike sensibilities, which would surely be shocked to hear the word cocaine, as if I had not been picking up little plastic bags of it in the Back House since the second grade. Now I think it was his own embarrassment he sought to hide. “It’s that goddamn,” he began to shout and looked at me, “that goddamn Coca-Cola. Michael hadn’t got one bit of sense messing around with that goddamn Coca-Cola.” Mike got his speech back, slow and slurred, and returned to the Back House in a wheelchair.

  Chris must have been only thirteen when he was kicked out of the only place he’d really ever called home, however unwelcoming half the household had been. Nana took Chris and his younger brother, Brian, to school, fed them, checked their homework, and made sure their favorite cookies were kept in the house, generally acting as maternal as possible after their own mother was swindled out of custody. Nana was the only stable, loving presence for them there, and as one of the many ways Granddaddy would belittle her daily in our collective presence, he made a show of telling my cousins how worthless they were. “They won’t amount to nothin’, Jackie, why waste your time and my money on them?” he asked, even though it was his machinations that brought them into his house. He never bothered to hide his hatred for whatever he decided deserved his ire, and as extensions of the son he hated, Chris and Brian were easy targets. The gist of the refrain changed little, except occasionally that he raised a hand to her or one of us, or called her names. And yet we had all grown so used to this; the heaviness of my memory of this particular incident is my own teenage sadness at being by then only a visitor for these scenes and knowing that I’d never know the true extent of their torture. We’d just moved away, to Charlotte, and so my brothers and I were visitors ourselves.

  Granddaddy’s violence needed no provocation. At thirteen, Chris was a young man in need of recognition and a child in need of attention. He was smart and caring enough to take the heat off his grandmother, who defended him daily at her own expense. On this evening in my memory, I sat at the kitchen table in front of her coffee maker and next to the decorative stained-glass hands in prayer. Whose hands were they, I still wonder. Jesus’s? Suddenly, Chris and Granddaddy were screaming at each other in the doorway between the living room and the long, dark hallway. It’s a scene that I can rewind to watch over and over, and though it is mercifully muted, I would prefer to reclaim the space and forget it altogether. I can feel the distress of my nana, which burns my skin worse than a sunburn. She moves to intervene and then stops. Chris was a star player on the school baseball team then, and Granddaddy picked up his baseball bat. The moment of wondering if he will actually use it lasts as long as the rest of the memory. Chris took off running down the hallway, and we all jumped up and ran after them. Having reached the end of the hallway, Chris turned around. Something in him changed or else he had nowhere to go. He reached out and took the bat from Granddaddy’s hand. Here again history has repeated itself as unfailingly as a chorus. Granddaddy had been in nearly the same position before, nearly in that exact spot some twenty years before, when his two younger teenage sons, Dad and Les, caught his arms on their way down to Nana’s back and told him, “Never again.” At least, not in front of them.

  If I were a scientist or a believer, I might posit the existence of a black hole at the end of that hallway. Nothing so fancy as time travel or teleportation, but it was as if I were watching both scenes play out at once and caught a flicker of intergenerational déjà vu across my cousin’s face that gave him the strength to say, “Never again.” My mind is not so superstitious as some, but there are indisputable events that appear before you plain as day, no matter how much you wish they wouldn’t. Granddaddy shoved him aside and locked himself in his bedroom, and Chris stalked the hallway, smashing the glass in every family picture and the embroidered “Serenity Prayer,” leaving a trail of blood and broken glass but taking the baseball bat with him and leaving the house for good.

  Granddaddy forbade Chris entry to the house, and though Nana would sneak him in and offer him whatever she could, the fear of being discovered kept their visits short and fraught. His moment of casting off his bruised childhood was surely as freeing as it was terrifying, but it also bound Chris even closer to his captor. That spark of rage that festered into hatred was now given free rein to rot away at his own insides. He went to live with Uncle Les and Ralph Howard for a time. He lived with his mother on and off, and between corners and shelters. Nobody knew it until it was too late, but he was already buying his own white powders, first the same crushed-up pills and cocaine his father preferred, and then heroin. What else but opium to dull both pain and hatred, while giving yourself more of each with every hit.

  I once described Nana and Granddaddy, when asked by a boyfriend’s parents about my family history, as “high school sweethearts.” I was caught off-guard, and they had indeed gone to school together, meeting for dates at the Pavilion and the boardwalk, dancing the shag on Ocean Boulevard as kids. More out of panic than deceit, I wanted to be liked and welcomed into a family whose uncomplicated affection I wanted to know better. “Yeah, real sweet,” said the guy I was going out with, whom I’d met at our fancy New York college. He gave me the same disbelieving face 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 disso
nance 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.