My Southern Journey Read Online Free Page A

mixing the concoctions, but the active ingredient was always the same. It required, to start, a few tablespoons of corn whiskey, which some people—but nobodyI know who’d ever had any—called moonshine. Hooch was more like it. Busthead. Popskull. There wasn’t anything nice about it.
    Into the glass the old women of the family squeezed a lemon, if they had one; lemons were dear in the foothills of the Appalachians in those days, for mill workers and pulpwooders and roofers. Then, they stirred in a tablespoon of golden honey.
    If there was no honey, they took a hammer and broke off a big chunk of peppermint candy and let it melt in the glass. Sometimes, if the child coughed loud enough and their hearts broke and their fear rose, they would place the chunk of peppermint in the toe of a white sock and bash it with the hammer, or just swing it against a post on the porch. It melted quicker that way, beat to dust.
    I remember once they gave this medicine to my brother Sam.
    He said he did not remember it.
    “I reckon so,” I said.
    He does remember he went to sleep.
    My mother recalls there was giggling.
    I do remember the first time they gave it to me. I am not sure how old I was, but I was in school, so had to have been at least 6. The peppermint did not do the job, and the corn whiskey burned a hole from my lips to my lower intestine, but, oh, what a wonderful feeling it was when the fire went out. The world went soft. The world turned gold. I floated. I flew into the dark. Moonshine. I get it now.
    I know they would not have hurt us for anything in the world. Nothing was more precious, to these people who worked so hard with their hands for so little, than their babies. They simply used what they had.
    I am glad that little boy in the Huddle House lives in a more enlightened time, but maybe just a little sorry, too.
     
    TIME FOR THE YEAR’S BEST NAP
    Southern Living , Southern Journal: November 2012

    T he turkey carcass is down to bones. The mashed potatoes are nothing more than a sad, hopeful, metallic scraping—some people just can’t accept that gone is gone. The pinto beans and ham are in Tupperware, divided 14 ways. The last biscuit is a memory. (Or so it seems. My mama always hides one or two away for my boy, Jake.) Over the last crumbs of dressing, old women say, “Don’t know what happened…it just wasn’t fit to eat.”
    It is time for my people to gather in the living room and unburden themselves of all the fine gossip they have been holding onto since September, like money. I will be there, with them, sometimes with a half-eaten piece of chocolate cake balanced dangerously on one knee, but I will hear almost none of it.
    I would rather be awake, to find out whose garden did well and whose didn’t, and whose foreign car isn’t running good—because you know they should have known better—and whose children have misbehaved. I would like to know what is happening to our kin across the state line—my Aunt Juanita calls them “the Georgia people,” like they are a new species—and who last killed a snake. They will say that the snakes seem to have stayed out longer this year, and no one will say it any more but we’re pretty sure it’s because those men walked on the moon. I want to hear it all, swirling around me, assuring me that no matter what happens inthis uncertain world the things that truly matter, things here, are all right.
    But the same peace of mind that settles on me as that talk drifts around the room is the same peace and comfort that tugs me into the calm darkness. My mama will look at me from across the wood floor and say, quickly, “Let him sleep.” I know this because sometimes I am not quite out, and it is the last thing I hear.
    It would be all right with me if it was the last thing I ever hear.
    I will blame the chair. I bought it out of a catalog a quarter-century ago, what the catalog called a British club chair, but it just looks like a leather chair to me. It is firm