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

“You know I can’t do that.”

“I don’t see why not. I’ll drive you down to the courthouse myself.”

She brought him his mail the next day like all the others. Against some odds and wishes, Granddaddy recovered enough to return to Nana’s house on Calhoun Road, by then truly her house, just as her grandchildren had always called it. After the failure of the Amphitheater, Granddaddy had to sign the house over to her ownership so his creditors wouldn’t be able to claim it.

If you are from Beaufort, it is likely that you have heard the story of little Julia Legare. If she had been born in our century, she might have been a pageant queen with her breeding. Before she was just another affluent girl carried away by a mosquito bite, Julia was a child of her time, which was the early 1800s. From her home in Edisto, south of Murrells Inlet, she learned her letters, went to church, embroidered Bible verses. Whatever it was that affluent young ladies did at that time. She might have had tea with Eliza Pinckney, the indigo grower. There would be no chores for her. Little schooling. Very little life at all, sadly. She was buried in the family mausoleum in Edisto Beach, which draws visitors even now. Tourists and teenagers, mostly. When the marble door to the mausoleum was opened after the next death in the family, more than a decade later by most accounts, the grieving family found the body of little Julia not in her grave but beside the door, which has never again been closed despite some effort. After trying to lock, deadbolt, or otherwise chain the portal closed and finding it reopened in the daylight, the family gave up and just left it open for Julia to roam free as she likes, as free as any man living and the spirit of any woman dead.

From her rocking chair, Nana told me over and over the story of Alice, of the Flagg Flood, and many others. Read from her books on the coffee table and from memory. She told only one story about her granny, but it is a real gem among them. This is the granny who had fifteen children. Nana’s mother, May Ella, was the mystical seventh, the first daughter who was herself heard to proclaim that she’d rather have a heart attack than another baby after her children were born, which is what she died from, after all. The favorite pastime of Granny, my great-great-grandmother, was sewing over and over a funeral shroud for herself. From whatever scraps of white fabric she could find, she made shroud after shroud. After completing each one, she’d ask one of her children or grandchildren what they thought about this one and then the next. No matter their reply, every time she undid the stitches and tore out the thread. May Ella worked at the Air Force Base during World War II and even brought her mother some yards of fine white parachute silk to be cut and recut, joined and torn open as she pleased. Once her children and grandchildren were grown, this was how she spent her days, waiting to wrap herself in white silk that must have been finer than whatever she was married in. I could take it to mean that she felt her work was done, her children born, alive, and grown, so what was there left for a woman to do but die. In some grief for this woman I didn’t know, my heartbreak for a grandmother who obsessed over her grave clothes for decades, I want to see the possibility that this repetition was some final act of subversion. Here was a gift of luxury and selfishness just for herself. In the precision of stitches, some sense of control. She chose to wrap herself in a life of her own making.

It is neither as straightforward nor as metaphorical as I want. How can I heal all of these women, my grandmamas going back to one flood or another? It hardly matters which, there have been so many. A parable so perfect that Jesus could not have done it better than my nana. Maybe he did, but I confess that I have never read the good book and have no plans to in the future. I am choosing the stories from the mouths of women, some painted and some bare, and as far as I am concerned, their words are all the truer for the color. I am also putting off what I cannot bear to lose for good, and like a hurricane, I will change tack without warning.

The ghost of Theodosia Burr keeps me company in New York. She is seen in the finest translucent fabric descending in ethereal grace to earth via staircase, of all vehicles, in an old townhouse on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village. Women report their earrings pulled at by her, as if to say, Listen. Or, just, These would look better on me. Did you know some claim that Theodosia’s ghost walks along the Grand Strand in search of her father? Rumors run amok, I say. If she is not by her husband in Brookgreen Gardens, and why would she be, what had she to keep her tied to Ocean Boulevard? I will keep Theodosia in New York, where her presence makes sense, where it follows the rules. That is not her walking up and down the beach of the Low Country enjoying the sun of a New Year’s Day in a pink bikini top.

12

_________

The Gray Man

THERE IS ONE LAST GREAT HURRICANE WHOSE winds will blow through these pages. The Flagg Flood of 1893 is occasionally mistaken for the Mermaid Storm of 1881. Allow me to set the record straight. Yes, we are once again among the Flagg family, with one of Alice’s brothers, in fact. Not Allard, the brute who sent her away from her lover and induced