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

affinity for, but gambling was in the blood of the Joneses. Granddaddy and his brothers kept a gambling house on Chester Street and had poker games in backrooms all over town. Adjoining an office, they ran a burlesque club called the Gaiety Lounge.

After the wreck, I think that Dad felt, at not yet thirty, that he’d gambled enough for his lifetime. He’d anted up big time and nearly lost the whole pot, tip and gig money, life and limb. Lying propped up on the bed, on frilly sheets of peach and blue, he taught me to play gin instead, and we played and played. “It’s the same rules as poker hands but with ten cards each, and you go back and forth pulling from the deck and discarding till you get all your cards in hands of three or more.”

The bluffing was better, more suited to fits of giggles. I’d pretend to be laying a card on the discard pile and at the last minute flip it over and declare, “Gin!” Little kids love nothing so much as a successful trick.

My brothers were considered too wild, too prone to the manners that went unchecked in them to be trusted so close to Dad’s leg, and it was just me and Dad telling stories, playing gin. No bets, though sometimes we tallied up cards unused in losing hands to keep score.

“What do you think of your old one-legged daddy?” he asked with teasing exaggeration, but there was missing the daringness that had led him to talk back to the neighbor.

“You look like a pirate,” I said, which made him laugh. The laughs you get as a child hold strong as other memories morph or recede, as stories must change to survive. It was my turn to retell to Dad the stories of my favorite pirates for him.

Gather ’round, and I will tell some more tales of the Golden Age of Pirates. We have met already the most fearsome, Blackbeard, who, before storming ships for bounty and entering battles for blood, twisted gunpowder into the ends of his beard and hair and lit the strands to look like the devil come straight from hell. Who hung no Jolly Roger from his galleon mast, but strapped for all to see a human skeleton holding an hourglass. Who blockaded Charleston Harbor for the summer of 1718 and held captive prominent Charlestonians. Stede Bonnet we know already, Blackbeard’s less-competent friend and onetime partner, more of a professional acquaintance, it must be said, their workplace the high seas! I earlier left hanging the question of the Gentleman Pirate, but he was captured in a rowboat, kept in the dungeon of Charleston’s Old Exchange, and hanged alongside fifty less-colorful pirates in the purges that began in 1718. Speaking of colorful, there is Calico Jack, the pirate famed for the bright and flowery prints he liked to wear, “flowerdy,” Nana would say, for flying first the aforementioned flag with the skull and crossbones, for keeping not one but two lady pirates among his crew, and if they brought with them bad luck, then it was Jack who suffered it, and not the ladies.

Mary Read and Anne Bonney were the women he allowed on his sloop, the Ranger. They bound their breasts, dressed as men, and enlisted as privateers, before realizing they could do better and becoming pirates. When Anne’s lover Captain Calico Jack was captured in Jamaica, she got a last visit with him before the execution, and instead of the comforting words of a mourning wife, she flat-out said, “Jack, if you’d fought like man, you wouldn’t be getting hanged like a dog.” Both women were caught, and upon sentence of death revealed that they were pregnant. Read died from childbed fever in a Jamaican jail, but Bonney disappeared from the record. Some historians believe that a relative bought her freedom and escorted her to Charleston or Virginia, where she lived out the rest of her days the luckiest woman alive.

Waccamaw Academy closed at the end of that school year spent playing cards, and we would be sent to the public elementary school in Socastee. My new public school took annual field trips to the pirate dungeon in the basement of the Old Exchange in Charleston, practically the epicenter of everything pirate-related. Melting wax figures of pirates chained to walls and pinned in torture forever between pieces of wood were displayed in its brick basement with the wide archways that looked like the bowing between the legs of cartoon cowboys. Another place of sorrow and haunted by all manner of ghosts. The pirates executed along with Stede Bonnet in the hanging purges that capped the Golden Age are said to scream and rattle their chains in the basement that is still called a dungeon. Hair is pulled, backs are pushed on stairwells, cold fingers are felt closing around throats.

Calico Jack was not the first or only pirate to fly a flag with fearsome images waving warnings to the ships and ports of the Carolinas. It was only his that caught on, for reasons lost, as he was not the most successful pirate, despite his progressive policies for aspiring lady pirates. The many flags of Black Bart show a sense of humor. A man in wide culottes standing on two skulls. A man in a tricorn hat toasting a skeleton. Blackbeard’s flag depicted a devil throwing a spear at a red heart. A common school assignment was to draw and color a Jolly Roger of our own. Stacks of photocopied paper, blank but for the outline of a rectangle, sat at the corner of the teacher’s desk for idle students to take and ponder the pirate life. In place of skull and crossbones, I layered wobbly circles and lines until my cat appeared.

My parents received a settlement from the trucking company, but it was not enough to cover their hospital bills and a new car, much less what was about to come. Dad could not wait tables for