Saturday, May 17, 2008

Oxford, Mississippi

Eventually, I will be able to summarize in paragraphs, etch the hours of ancestry upon a page. Eventually, the stories will be mine, and I will spit them forth over meals, mark the air with laughter, however mild, however molded to spent time.

For now, however, I try to piece together the siding, the cherished, the choked out horror that only what we reminisce expels. For now, I tease a past that preceded me, tickled by the weeping palms and ports, of that very river all children struggle to spell.

I look in books for the beginning. I break open Faulker to adopt the tongue. I imagine my grandmother on a Mississippi street and my father, shirtless, in coveralls, snaking the sodded line of his fishing rod. I imagine a youth I could not have known; not human but continental, a local youth, a youth of drawls and jumbled grits, of Sunday dress and belligerent baptisms.

I wonder if I can really claim it as my own, that past, that ancestry, that fat of cornbread seeped through pores; posh pigs all sweated in those heirloom Augusts; a man who was not yet mine.

And yet, I wonder, without it, how different we would be. Whether those dawns would be of fantasy, or grim folktales feathered with forgotten stows. If collard greens would have graced my plate; if sear-sucker would have dashed my sister's marriage. If we would have perhaps seen those streets that lie smartly magical, a Marquez-land of sorts, spelled out by our father's childhood, the hoods, the quicksand of humid breathing. And yet akin to my fear of viewing movie-renditions of books that I love, I fear encountering that other Oxford, that southern city of his live accounts. I fear not saving a story already put to rest, my own modern Pompei of sorts, where women have denounced petticoats and have men shed their three piece skins.