Low Country by J. Jones (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

Country. The author, a woman, I remember noticing, claimed on the inside that a librarian at the Library of Congress told her that South Carolina is the state with the most folktales in the whole of the U.S. Nonetheless, it was a thin volume with its title in white letters over a photo of live oaks and their Spanish moss in which I found the tale of Alice Flagg, a ghost story I’d heard from Dad and Uncle Leslie many times by candlelight on stormy evenings and before their dinner shifts at whatever seafood joint they were working at the time. Finding this well-known oral story printed on paper served to amplify the power of all the other oral history I’d heard in passing. It seemed to mean that everything I’d heard was true. You will kindly forgive my retelling if you have heard this story already.

Dr. Allard Flagg was a young and respectable Low Country physician, and he and his mama and sister, Alice, lived in a white plantation house known as the Hermitage. I went to visit the place as a girl, and maybe I forgot to hold my breath going past the family graves, as I have carried Alice’s story with me. Her grave, a flat slab of marble on the ground, is marked only with ALICE. Alice fell in love, as pretty young girls are supposed to do, but her brother found the object of her adoration, a turpentine salesman, unacceptable. Dr. Flagg sent Alice off to boarding school in Charleston, where she took down with something called “country fever,” which the dictionary will tell you is an old-timey term for malaria. She was shipped back to the Hermitage, where Dr. Flagg, in treating her, discovered a ring on a yellow ribbon that she had tied around her neck. While Alice was hallucinating with fever and heartbreak, her loving brother took her engagement ring and threw it into the swamp. Naturally Alice died of malaria, or to spite her brother as I would interpret, though heartbreak is the scientific cause of death usually given in the stories. She’s spent the last two hundred years walking the gardens of the Hermitage looking for her ring. I guess jewelry lasts longer than romance in the afterlife, too. Rereading the story as a girl from Nana’s recliner, my mind of its own accord saw Granddaddy as the controlling, vindictive doctor, and Nana as the lovesick belle who walks the earth looking for, if not her lover, the evidence that she was loved.

5

_________

Waccamaw Academy

I ASKED NANA WOULDN’T SHE LIKE TO FINISH up college, get her degree. Ever the Southern lady, she only said how proud she was of me. Was it the decades of hearing Granddaddy say “Jackie ain’t got the sense” or “Jackie, nobody wants to hear what you have to say” to strangers and family? The shameful sigh of relief in realizing that insults were all for now. A half century of diminishment where there should have been affection takes a toll on the most tenacious of spirit, and to hear her describe herself as Granddaddy would upon breaking a nail or misplacing a phone number brought out, well, speak of the devil. It brought out Granddaddy’s temper in me. “I wish you wouldn’t call yourself stupid-fatugly,” I’d say. I found myself angry with her putting up with his abuses, but I was mad at myself for feeling his anger come out in me. An unfair and even crueler response than the words of a small, petty man.

My mom and Nana enrolled me, and my brothers too, lest we forget them, in a small private school in Horry County. Mom begged the tuition from her father back in Charlotte, a small humiliation that would change my life. My parents’ income came mostly from waiting tables, and they had put all their savings toward buying a little brown house in Conway. In a small wonder in the biggest county east of the Mississippi, Waccamaw Academy was only a short drive from our little brown house in Conway. I did not realize how big this tiny house was in my memory until the last time I left Myrtle Beach, when I took a detour to drive by the old neighborhood on the way out of town. I could practically see my dad and Jack in his white Cadillac, see the steamboat straight out of Mark Twain that had been docked there throughout my childhood. Is it that the recollection of life from a child’s wide eyes and narrow world feels bigger, or that we were looking down from the peak of our happiness? I was shocked to see our little brown house barely bigger than a double-wide trailer, though still surrounded on two sides by pine forest and kudzu vines, and on the third by blackberry brambles, where a family of black snakes used to live. I recall here a line from Amy Hempel that I cling to as my nana would a proverb. “What seems dangerous often is not—black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence.” Of black snakes, Dad always said, “They’re the good guys.” The only good guys in our story, though take care in their company, as even a venomless bite can scar.

As children at the little brown house, we spent our days digging holes for no reason at all. We wrestled and fought until Bandit, our collie with a strip of orange across his eyes, pulled us off one another by the neck of our T-shirts. Dad had taught the collie to intervene when it looked as if somebody was getting hurt. We hunted lizards of glow-in-the-dark green on the ringing chain-link fence that surrounded our backyard. Once captured in little palms for cups, we coaxed open their mouths with delicate strokes on their bubbling red throats and let them snap shut on our earlobes and dangle like earrings. We dug holes in the backyard looking for pirate treasure and when