I grew up in Durham County, in a big old one-story farmhouse down a dirt road off  a short connector road. One of the bigger roads was named for a Tobacco Plant Manager, and the other was named for a local landowner. The neighborhood in which I grew up belonged to the wife of a former President of Duke University. The rental was most likely made possible by connections at my mother’s job. Until just before my mother was killed in a car accident in 1972, she worked at Duke Press. In the first years after we moved there, my father was in Graduate School in Chapel Hill. I believe that he had arranged his schedule so that he could stay home with me during the day.  My father and I used to go walking in the woods, and one day we found a small graveyard, surrounded by a short iron gate. I recognized the names on some of the headstones. It was the name of one of the big roads nearby.

     When I was six and started first grade, my mother arranged a carpool with a local farming family. There were two little children I traveled to school with. My mother would drive us to School, and Chris’s uncle would carry us home in the afternoon. Chris and Karen’s family owned had a lovely two-story house surrounded by a tall hedge, fields, and several sheds and outbuildings. I do not know what they grew on the farm, probably tobacco, but they also kept hogs, and they had a smoke house. 

     Chris was my age, and his sister was a year younger. He could drive a tractor himself,  and I was envious. He could also describe a hog killing, and I helped him slop the hogs a few times, so I never had any euphemistic conceptions about where bacon, sausage, and country ham came from.

     One day I had a birthday party. It must have been my seventh. Mom and I made iced sugar cookies instead of cake, and we invited about 30 kids. Mom, not wanting me to be spoiled, advised the mothers not to buy me birthday presents. Mom played Old Timey Records, and we all square-danced out on the lawn. This would have been 1968. Chris was invited, and regardless of my mother’s instructions, he brought me a card with a dollar in it. I thought it was wonderful, but my mom frowned. When I asked her what was wrong, she explained to me that Chris’s family, a “Negro” family might not have been able to afford to give me that dollar.  She pondered how we could return it, and came up with nothing. To keep it was greedy she said, but to return it would have been an insult. Suddenly I was aware of my mother’s dreadful shame, and it became mine.

    As I grew up and came of age in the south, I was aware of a painful irony inhabiting our serene southern forests. Along with evening mosquitoes, screened doors, and the stifling heat of summer, I was aware of a cruel, static, battle going on between the frustrated ghosts of enslaved servants and the landowners who enslaved them. As I came of drinking age, and joined my ancestors that sweet dehydrated alcohol enhanced lethargy of summer, I discovered the terror of trying to avoid ghosts by playing dead.

      When I was about 4 years old, I used to stand in the hall beside our kitchen and look out the screen door across the blackberry patch towards the woods, which concealed this little cemetery.  I thought about what lay in the ground there, and wondered if I would ever get to see a real skeleton.  When the moon was full and the wind was high before a spring thunderstorm, I imagined that the spirits rose out of the ground and would blow across the blackberry patch to my screen door. I would shiver and get goose bumps.