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

were not loud at all. Is that even how you skin and dismember a deer? Dressing it by undressing it one layer at a time. The images have merged perhaps with scenes from the horror movies I watched with my brothers and cousins that I should not have been watching. In the back seat of the car on the way back to Myrtle Beach, I declared myself done for good with pageants.

Dora and other classmates still competed in those pageants, but I began telling anybody who would listen that I would go to college. It must have seemed a boast as grating as crinolines in so young a kid, but the part of me that still clung to fairy tales and ghost stories knew the power of repetition, and so I reminded myself as often as I could. For Nana especially, her education had guaranteed nothing, perhaps even was a mark against marriageability. What Southern man wanted a wife who knew more than he did and had a piece of paper to prove it? I wanted that piece of paper and the freedom it offered. I was told once by a cousin, “Your brothers can go to college.” And by Granddaddy, “Your husband will go to college.”

Nana had a pageant portrait made for my parents. For years, it hung over Uncle Jack’s old piano, over the smaller picture of me in my competition bathing suit. A couple of feet tall, it took some strength for me, at sixteen, to remove from its place on the wall and tear the heavy portrait paper in half and then into little pieces. Sweating and sticky afterward, the rhythm of tearing and breaking so soothing. The broken glass cut my hands and that felt good, too, like when I used to stick my hand out the car window and catch spikes of rain in my palm. It felt like the only way to extricate myself from the patterns I saw around me. Stories, like anger and ghosts, come more alive with every repetition. Almost all stories, unlike memories, are told in the predictable rise and fall of tumescence. Men imagining what has fallen into their laps. Here we chuck out Aristotle in favor of the forms of women who tell stories shaped like themselves that history made a point of forgetting. The stories of women, like their bodies and lives, are fuller, rounder, softer. Prone to repetition. Like love. Like songs. Like ghosts.

Take, for instance, the ghost of a woman known as both Mary and the Lady in White. The Lady in White is said to still be seen running into the waves on nights when the moon is full. There’s a boat tour out to Edingsville Beach to try to catch sight of her. She lived in a beachfront cottage on that remote end of Edisto Island, with her husband, a fisherman who spent long stretches at sea in the 1880s. As you may have seen coming, unlike poor Mary and the rest of the island, a hurricane had its eye on our lovely coast with its eyelashes of sea oats. She knew, as the wives of sailors just know, that her husband’s ship had sunk, and at first light after the storm’s passing, she raced to the beach and saw, however improbably, the body of her husband floating beyond the waves. She was last seen running into the surf to retrieve his body and is herself accounted thereafter drowned. Dragged under by the storm’s riptide or her own grief. Without a husband, what was there to live for, I guess is the moral of the story.

6

_________

The Ferry or the Road?

I ACCOUNT IT PAST TIME TO HIT THE ROAD AND get out of Myrtle Beach for a while. How easy to get stuck there, even on the page. We are on our way to Charlotte, the Queen City, named for a queen of Britain, where downtown is called uptown and the ghosts are friendly.

Ah, but how to leave home. It is always harder than you think. Presently, I wonder which route to show. Every going is different, though crossing the river is easier these days. When Nana was a girl, as she would say, and she and her family traveled from High Point, North Carolina, where her daddy worked for a time in the furniture business, to Myrtle Beach—no. I will let her tell it. “When I was a girl,” she liked to tell, “and you wanted to go to the beach with your family, you took an oxcart to the flat ferry, down at Peachtree Landing, and you signaled the ferryman by hitting a piece of metal that was hanging off a tree branch against a plowshare that somebody had strung up.” I heard this account from her more than once, though the first railroad to Conway from the other side of the river opened in 1900. River crossings were at Socastee for the Waccamaw and Galivants Ferry for the Pee Dee. The railroad went over Withers Swash, where children would learn their swimming strokes and fished for flounder. Swash means as a verb to move with violence or bluster, and as a noun, it is a narrow channel of water between sandbanks. Easy to see how swashbuckling came to be applied to pirates. During the height of Prohibition, a boat from Canada was trying to sail around the Volstead Act, as so many did. The coast was full of rum-runners for the same reasons that it appealed to the pirates of the Golden Age. The network of inlets and rivers made hiding out easy. Like the Capitana, the Planter, and many more, this Canadian ship sank in a storm between the shore and the horizon. A partial list of known shipwrecks along the Low Country includes the Lucy Ann, the Horace Greely, the Peace and Harmony, Queen of the Wave, Gem of the Sea, and Freeda A. Wyley, whose broken limbs stick out of the sand