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The ancestors tangle
and compromise in re-telling. There is the twenty-bedroom Sunnycrest,
the ice engineer, the tall Southern sons, the watermelon farm, Jelly and
her wheelchair, Uncle Harry’s bleeding axe wound, Great Aunt Mamie’s
slip left on the department store floor.
Their telling won’t be contained in neatly shaved, perfumed memory.
Paternal and maternal wreathe and knot. Clasp, like thighs.
The details of the ancestors are termites, eating door frames and panels
of formal remembrance, defecating in sawdust the unseemly acts.
Babies born squalling and smeared, blood whitened and blued.
Slave shacks stood on the Rollins farm.
Major Fulgence deBordenave and the Lousiana Zouaves arrived, starved
and defeated in Franklin.
Mamie gave birth to a daughter, raised as her sister.
My grandmother married a Frog with weak kidneys.
Muscles straining, back steaming, the ice engineer lowered ice into the
steaming engine room of the train.
In my sweating limbs, the rounds of their blood merge.
The house of memory is broken. No longer turreted, no longer roofed with
great slate planks, no longer ten-lead paned, no longer white-sashed and
rimmed with carved boxwood topiaries. History has decomposed her, turned
her green and laden at the edge of a woods, left her to sulk in the shadowed
moss places of honeysuckle vine and black beaded pokeweed, where poison
ivy shines with oil and the wide umbrellas of Queen Anne’s lace
quiver and beckon.
What they wanted to keep separate, laundered and polished, I have let
fall in the laced heap of my veins. My father’s uncle Harry spits
into my mother’s grandfather’s monogrammed handkerchief, folds
it, and hands it back with a white-lipped grin.
The distinct stories are mingled, soiled, stained. They have fallen into
the hot fuming lap of the wood, their voices the black flies buzzing.
In the cool poison quiet of those oily green nooks, the pile of tumbled
chimney rock is these stubborn men: Ernest Augustus upside down in a cab
full of dead flappers, sallow Hugh dying silent, Dr. deBordenave driving
his cart away from his mad daughter.
Here, twined with black snake and honeysuckle vine, my great-great grandmother
died a maiden aunt, my grandmother haunts a tree, my great-aunt painted
watercolors in the asylum for seventy years. The loam of breasts, which
suckled or did not, pulses under the ferns.
The crafted and revised histories, what they wrapped in white linens and
put away with the monogrammed silver have blackened and hollowed. Each
half-truth or lie or feigned ignorance bowed a wood floor, cracked a shining
banister, opened a bedroom to the ravages of weather.
The memory house is broken open and a peony washing bowl sits tilt in
the swarming ant dirt.
I know the ancestors better in leaf and light than they ever wanted to
be known. I hear their stories, the buzzing voices which omit or include.
I know who resented God, who believed in failure, who suffered for lack
of humility, who did not know to love. I know who left what beauty behind
in our blood to flutter or scourge or shine. I know the curl of their
lip in my own pale face.
They have no more story to make, those limp leaves curling in August heat.
They are seeds spilled from pods, earthworms milking soil, but still,
in obscene summer heat they hiss with tongue and wing: You are not
owner of these tales. [B] ELIZABETH ROLLINS
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