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

of cruelty was progress. The ironing out of accent was a way to fool myself into believing that I could be different than those women who suffered to make me. If I could have painted the roof of my mouth that lovely shade of haint blue to scare away the ghosts of women I did not want to be, the women I came from, I would have licked clean the brush. I was supposed to be a boy, declared both a doctor and the family tree. It was impressed upon me that I was wanted however I came out, but I have wondered if this aberration rooted in me from the beginning a sense of indignation and unbelonging. The near-miss is a favorite trick of fate, and I always knew that being a girl meant hurting for what my brothers didn’t realize they had. Remarking upon this or any injustice was considered rude, I learned fast. My unease did not matter, so long as I was seeing to the ease and comfort of those around me. A lesson I hated to see practiced by my nana and mom, but found myself following.

Nana didn’t keep pear trees or hang trinkets from any ancestral cedar, but an ample magnolia stands skyscraper-tall in her backyard. From the top branches, you can see clear across to the beach and back a few centuries. What is now King’s Highway, still the main road in town, was once the route George Washington took when he visited Long Bay, as Myrtle Beach was known in 1791, and the road was named in typical backward civility for the new republic’s first president. Only once in my lifetime has the tide flirted with the roots of our Great Tree, and no storm has yet knocked it over, so who knows what’s up there. Memories woven between branches alongside the other forgotten junk. Swing ropes and water guns and toy action figures. Children are all born pagans, inspired by season, sin, and blood sacrifice.

My parents moved us away from Myrtle Beach when I was in high school, and Charlotte, North Carolina, may as well have been New York City. While my childhood classmates became teenage mothers and drug addicts or both, I was sent home from my fancy college prep school, having applied and tested for admittance as my lone act of teenage rebellion, for wearing overalls. I got made fun of for dressing and talking like the hick I was. In a lonely flashlight-lit blanket tent, I read aloud Their Eyes Were Watching God over and over to comfort myself in the more familiar realm of put-upon women who talked in the melodies of my nana, a music that I knew from watching her could cushion the severest of blows. I didn’t say much in school, but when I did, it was always the right answer, delivered in perfect television neutral. I was experienced at ignoring greater meanness. Rising above, as Nana would say. The name-calling, classroom hair-pulling, being tripped and pushed in hallways. These were small sufferings and worth the tolerating, if this fancy school helped me to escape a fate as vengeful spirit trapped by the stories I knew by heart. A Myrtle Beach education would not get me where I wanted to go, and though I wasn’t sure where that was, I knew that it had to be different and far away.

More than a decade after graduating from the fancy college prep school, during a time of devastating grief, I saw weekly a young woman who called herself a healer. In a railroad apartment in Brooklyn, the walls adorned with her own trinkets of worship, we discussed why I left a safe and salaried magazine job, how my writing progressed or didn’t, and the things I tried to keep hidden from everyone else I knew. Our sessions were a relief and a terror. I described ghosts I was not sure I had seen and received knowing nods and leading questions that made me feel, for an hour a week, less alone. Were those really the voices of loved ones long gone who called out my name in subway cars and expensive restaurants and while I brushed my teeth? She held her palms an inch over my navel for long periods or pinched my toes following a particular order, as I held cool white stones of differing shapes that were painted in pretty patterns of smiling suns and dreamy-eyed prancing jaguars. She said these stones were from the Andes, and I felt it impolite to press. “There, you see,” she sometimes declared without elaboration after such a performance. More than once, she asked if I knew the tall man with the blue eyes who always stood behind me. One session, she informed me that I had somehow healed all the women I had ever been, as well as all my grandmothers going back to Eve, and I wish that I had asked her how. I began to feel unsettled less by my supernatural company than by her earthside acquaintance. I came to understand what it was I wanted from my own voice and never went back.

The Joneses built their fortune on worshipping the water, before it was lost worshipping wealth. My education was paid for, in part, by tourists who anointed themselves with suntan oil, who glutted themselves annually on deep-fried seafood at all-you-can-eat buffets, readying their own slippery, cooked limbs for sacrifice. With the right SPF, they think they are safe from all manner of natural forces. They don’t know which ghosts to watch out for, and we, the locals, take advantage of their ignorance, which makes us blasphemers as well as con men, and I’m just fine with both. Come take a ride on the Ferris wheel that spins like a prayer at the edge of the world, the tallest wheel east of the Mississippi. How easy to feel, in these lofty moments, that this life is more real than the tall tales that outlive