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The Land

Micaceous red clay caked beneath my toenails as I stretched, forcing my weight down—propelling myself skyward, toward the reach of towering long leaf pines.

This is neither our land, nor the families’ before us. It’s the land of the Muskogee Creek. And we, random descendants—a family whose surname dapples papered deeds of colonizers’ past—are, at most, undeserving stewards whose “rights” to this bounty are tenuous and never truly justifiable.

***

Borne from exhaustion and a borderline comical series of unfortunate events in New Mexico, I found myself without a job, and forced from my RV site. Like recognizing a bad dye job, I acknowledged it was time to return to my roots—the clay, the green, the creek carving its way through the land as it’d done long before we skipped stones from its sandy banks.

Outside, six inches of snow covered the ground, the sun slowly damning the powdery clumps to frigid slush. Bertie shuddered awake, the side view mirrors vibrating from the slow rumble rippling beneath the sheet metal siding. JoJo slipped under her blankets and commenced her pre-departure routine of heavy napping.

Ten minutes later, Bertie crept out of the RV park, up the hill I coasted down nearly a year prior when I landed in Santa Fe—and felt the same sense of awe and curiosity and pure, unadulterated fear surge through my veins.

This was not your place. And that’s okay.

At the road, I attempted a U-turn and promptly rolled into the far curb. Quickly recalibrating to driving my 10,000 pound home rather than my sedan, I waved apologetically to passing motorists—whose windshields held an unobstructed view to a homemade sign taped to my back window that read, “Thank you for your patience.”

***

The mechanic’s child stared intently at me, her captive audience; her snuffles punctuated each page turn as she recited the names of the coloring book’s line-drawn characters. Behind her, a candle slowly burned down into a sickly sweet cinnamon-scented layer, barely overpowering the olfactory bouquet of oil and spent rubber.

Beside me, JoJo gazed up, visibly annoyed. Hours prior, I’d limped Bertie off of the interstate into the small Texas garage, and all but begged the mechanic to consider helping my aged, rusting beast of a home get down the road. And eight hours later, we’d entered the costly homestretch.

With my heart in my throat, I continued on through Texas, anticipating every slight bump or shudder to end in Bertie’s mechanical failure. But days later, after weathering storms and traffic snarls and impatient drivers, I rolled from asphalt onto gravel, off the county road: the land, my goal.

***

The next day, I hugged my childhood hair stylist and promised an imminent appointment while attempting to place the patron who sat in her chair—head foil-wrapped, waiting to be streaked. The moment I walked out the door, I recognized her as my former neighbor.

Shortly thereafter, I nearly toppled from my bar-side perch in a hipster-focused coffee shop populating a downtown storefront blocks away from my childhood home.

Easily the oldest person sidled up to the poured concrete countertop, I stared vacuously cow-eyed at the kind barista when he said to pay whatever I felt was appropriate.

“First time here, huh?”

“Not in Opelika. But yes, first time here.” In a coffee shop that didn’t have an early bird special, with current music, where I felt aged like a bottom-shelf wine, far from the glare of an unintended spotlight whilst visiting my estranged grandmother in the same nursing home where my great grandmother died.

My mind wandered as another barista opened a side door, illuminating a small cocktail bar in the space adjacent to the coffee shop. Narrowing my eyes, I attempted to reconcile the crumbling, vacant downtown of my youth with the vibrancy of what lay before me—expecting an unseen director to shout,”YES, that’s it! Confusedly nostalgic!”

***

A brisk breeze cut beneath my jacket and danced across the clover field sprawling before me and my father.

“So, you’re back?”

Less a question and more a pronouncement, the words’ weight didn’t go unnoticed. I paused.

“Yes.”

With another invisible hurdle cleared, we eyed the field and I explained what I intended to do there: the site where I’d begin again.

I exhaled, breathing into the wind a smile I felt forming—the joy and anxiety behind it melding with the squeak from the hinge of our broken childhood seesaw far afield. A short distance away, grassy tufts sprang around tumbled rocks—humble markers for beloved family pets returned to the red earth.

Everywhere a memory: a footnote for life chapters to be written.

A chance for rebirth.

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White Privilege: The Lion in the Room

I’m a few hours away from another phone interview. The hurdles we clear in the course of starting a new career are stressful and tiring, and we often just long for them to be behind us, with an offer waiting in our inbox.

But for me, there’s something more wrapped up in this particular interview.

When I made the decision to leave my papered academic past for nonprofit work, I knew it wasn’t going to be glamorous, the path wouldn’t be littered with hundred dollar bills. The adage “underpaid and overworked” became my mantra, whether or not I embraced and adopted it. And it was okay, because I felt like what I was doing was worth the exhaustion that nips at most nonprofit professionals’ heels.

Part and parcel to most nonprofit work is educating the public. Whether your organization increases awareness about racial inequality, STI transmission, human trafficking, environmental conservation, planned parenting, LGBTQIA advocacy, or animal welfare, the crux is always education. Because a more informed public is more likely to speak out, stand up, and effect meaningful change.

As a kid, I didn’t always grasp the importance of why I had to do certain things, and why my parents pushed me and my sister to branch out – always reinforcing how crucial it was to be able to relate to people from different backgrounds and respect differences. During those teachable moments, I – like most my age – would roll my eyes and complain about spending yet another valuable weekend of my youth planting trees, cleaning up roadside garbage, caring for injured wildlife, or taking food to people in need.

I’d often think Where’s my freedom? Why do we have to do this? Nintendo and Bonanza marathons were much more appealing.

Little did I know, I was learning exactly what it meant to be free – and, not until I was much older, the problematic, insulating effects of white privilege.

***

Growing up in the Deep South, racial lines were socially mapped and cultivated in our consciousness through school and print media – and unabashedly writ into the landscape of our small Alabama town. In ninth grade, we weren’t taught World History, but rather Alabama History. We came to recognize “the other side of the tracks” or a “rough area” was synonymous with a predominantly black neighborhood or an area of violence. In daily dialogue, describing people without a racial preface was unheard of – there was no “There was this guy” or “That lady at the grocery”; often whispered, black became the most important identifier in a descriptive parable relayed from the day’s happenings. Without fail, that hushed tone conveyed something else – something sinister pulsing through that word and, by association, the person to whom it was applied. Everyone was guilty of such profiling – even if we didn’t realize the implications of what we were doing, we became complicit in widening that divide, contributing to tacit racial tension. But this proclivity wasn’t reserved for towns in the South. Whenever Andy and I talk about growing up, we always touch on how racism was just as prevalent farther north – just cloaked in different veils. We both grew up very differently, but we shared a privilege we couldn’t exactly articulate until now, in retrospect.

Even still, we also shared a nagging feeling that we were somehow different. In high school, I had an odd fixation with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – the weight of the albatross a fitting analogy for the emotional baggage that’d been weighing me down, something that I was terrified was as obvious as a dead bird strung around my neck. But it wasn’t. And I could pass. Again, not until I was much older, I realized the color of my skin diluted my difference – made it more socially acceptable.

Not until I became more outspoken, and had the privilege of a collegiate education, did I start to comprehend the enormity of the problems humanity faces. We parse and segment as a means to better understand, but in so doing, we lose the connective thread that connects them all: education. And by education, I don’t mean post-secondary. I mean hands-on, face-to-face, person-to-person interaction; getting in the dirt together and finding common ground in meaningful, proactive ways. But many of us must first acknowledge our white privilege – that we have the luxury to obsess over the death of a Zimbabwe lion, while our black friends are under threat every single time they leave their home. Until we understand why black bodies are grossly policed, are subjected to structural violence, and take action to change it, we can’t really move forward to tackle everything that we face.

***

I’m inching closer to my interview, and I’m remembering why I was drawn to this particular organization: its emphasis on early, comprehensive education for every child, every family. And I can’t help but think about what I learned as a kid, and how much I want to teach my child so many of the same things – chief among them, respect.

I hope I’ll be open about difference, and be able to answer hard questions. I hope I’ll be able to appropriately frame how inequality hurts everyone, and how important it is to speak out and stand up for your friends, known and unknown – to speak and to act.

Because if we don’t first take care of our species – prioritize humanity – there’s no hope for those others with whom we share this planet.

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My South

It’s odd what little things claim the last bit of wherewithal I have not to crumple and cry over the shattered remains of a former life.

After all, it’s a doughnut shop, a cheap convenience store. But among the strewn cream-filled dough and dollar store merchandise, crafting supplies and thrift store clothes, is a bit of me–the late teen-early twenty-something me. So amid the wreckage I see a broken reflection, something alien and somehow familiar; something that raises the hairs on the back of my neck and whispers, “Remember me?”

And much more: places where lifelong friendships were born and nurtured from nascent beginnings, full of awkwardness and immaturity and fun; the long walks through neighborhoods and energy-fueled conversations etched into a historic landscape. Everything comfortably familiar I took for granted.

But I can only grasp at former landmarks–the pawn shop where I bought my first TV, the restaurant with the best hangover cure, the picturesque neighborhood of forties- and fifties- era cottages. All now reduced to splinters, pieces of broken lives–friends’ lives changed in moments, their voices echoing across static-laden telephone lines.

But then I have cause to breathe a sigh of relief–a luxury, really: Though drained and wrenched, they’ve made it. They’re not red X’s.

The landscape will always change. But I need friends to watch with me as it reforms, springs from its leveled state, and rises again–just like we did all those years ago: looking to the horizon of an unknown future, hoping for answers in the sunrise.

***

The Tuscaloosa tornado only took a few minutes to raze so much of what had been my home for four years–some of the most formative of my life. And I became acutely aware of how quickly so much could be ripped away to a soundtrack of reverberating tornado sirens, and the subsequent stale silence.

Evil is often guised as a fiery deity, a slithering reptile. But that evening, as I watched part of my past being obliterated, and wondering who among my friends was witnessing it firsthand, I felt that the vortex–an all-consuming monster–was close enough to evil incarnate. And when I was able to exhale, I became immensely protective of all that I identify as my South.

***

But my South isn’t as many things as it is. The Civil War never consumed front porch conversations, and Confederate flags didn’t wave from front yards dotted with rusted-out Fords. And the local ABC Store wasn’t the nexus for the incestuous relationships in which all southerners allegedly engage.

My South is a string of recollections and experiences–and each may be a little ahead or a little behind the curve, but still mine. And they all have the same base: the Alabama I experienced before I finally went through puberty; before I came out; before I knew anything of consequence; before I left it all. The Alabama between the bygone and the here and now.

The Opelika with the Walmart-Western Sizzlin’ hub near the interstate, before Opal knocked the “Western” clean off and it became “The Sizzlin’.” An Opelika with its intact mill village. The railroad town where O.B. Ennis and A&P were the go-to grocery stores before Kroger and Winn-Dixie got popular. The feed-and-seed store with the back room incubator that filled the warm air with newly-hatched chicks’ cheeps. Gorging on Tyler’s hamburgers, fries, and apple pies the first year we spent making a home out of the old clapboard house in the derelict historic district.

The old Mirarchi homestead.

It’s when we got too tired and covered in lead paint dust, and ventured downtown with ten dollars to entertain ourselves, starting with egg salad sandwiches and pickles at Haynies–a genuine soda fountain. How we’d let our feet dangle from the red vinyl swivel stools as we munched on the toasted bread slathered with silky egg salad. With the only noise being the buzz of a radio and the fans swirling overhead, watching the dills float around in the huge glass jar on the countertop.

Walking, contentedly full, to Southern Video–with its worn, velvet-lined floor–and renting the reliable standbys: The Witches or a Tell-Faire Peak Theatre rendition of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, and our favorite Nintendo game, Jackal. And then walk back–our parents unconcerned about a seven or eight block walk, unlike today. It was just a blink, not that long ago.

Hearing in sixth grade about Windows, and wondering what the hubbub could be about. Being part of a generation to play outside–using our imaginations like remote controls: a mud hole as a sea; plywood and blown-out tires as a fort in an azalea bush. Fourth of July, and the neighbors: young families with big dreams for the big houses falling apart around them–gathering in the graveled alley next to our house and setting up card-tables to feast on fried chicken, ambrosia salad, macaroni and cheese, paprika-laced deviled eggs, collard greens, potato salad, pies and cobblers.

The front porch–the columns, the cold floor beneath my feet, the balustrades salvaged from a demolished house, the porch swing and fan; how I’d curl up in the wicker settee with a bowl of ice-cream and glass of sweet tea just as the cicadas started screaming their heat songs.

Coming home after band practice to a Royal Doulton bowl full of lukewarm venison meatballs. The food, an Italian-Deep South blend: pigeons and polenta; collards and fried chicken; the discount bakery’s tandy cakes and apple pies; pasta fagioli and chipped beef; Mrs. Story’s hot dogs and The Dairy Barn’s milkshakes and Thomas Pharmacy’s peppermint sticks; pecan tassies and butter cookies; cornbread and pinto beans; venison and wild turkey; pizzelles and coffee.

The landscape: azaleas and spider lilies; irises and hydrangeas; pecans and oaks where old elms used to root; kudzu and English ivy; acubas and iron weed and camellias. The people: Miss Ruby watering her mint plants; childhood friends maiming bugs with magnifying glasses; Laura and me flipping through World Book encyclopedias–stopping on colorful images of dogs and horses–and watching Bonanza and American Gladiators while gorging on pigs-in-blankets and Kid Cuisines.

Everything else: antique shops and flea markets; turkey feathers and deer antlers; squirrel traps and garden snakes; a rattler’s warning in waist-high grass; wildflowers and mischief.

At the property.

Tracking time with hunting photographs: from when I’m just shy of antler tines, to shoulder-high; to a face smeared with blood, holding the deer myself. Felling trees and planting them, burning underbrush and pissing outside.

It’s the comforting sepia curling around the edges of these memories, creating a warmth I associate with home.