Dirt Road

Ashton Russell

            It happened this semester, maybe a month ago. It was a creative writing class and we had a visiting writer who was leading the discussion that day. She was focused on people’s heritage and families. She asked questions about what generation we were and where our families came from. Then we went around the room saying our answers. I remember when I wrote down what generation I was I put ‘generation y’ because I thought that was what she was talking about. But people started answering saying “fourth generation” saying their families came from Ireland, Poland, and England. When it was my turn I didn’t have an answer. I was the only one who didn’t know what generation or where my family came from. It’s nothing new though, I have spent most of my life wondering all about my family’s past. But I’ve never gotten full answers. Just scrapes of information, one little bit here, one little bit there. Slowly over twenty-one years I have pieced together a little bit of something. Not much though.

             I joke around with people and tell them I am just a southerner. Because that’s all I really know. My families worked on farms, didn’t have high school educations, and never really moved away from Alabama. This past Christmas break I was at my grandmother’s house, my mom’s mother. Gran has been making photo albums for all the grandkids with pictures of us from when we were born to the present. I was sitting in the old maroon recliner looking at my photo albums. Gran was sitting across from me talking to my mom. I noticed she had put bunch of old black and white photos at the end of the book. I asked her what these were. She told me they were pictures of her and Papa’s parents, and some pictures of Gran and Papa when they were younger. Mom said they should be in the front. We started taking them out of there plastic coverings. I told her we should write on the back of them so I would remember who they were. Then I got stuck doing the work because Gran hates writing anything. She can’t really spell that well. She quit school her sophomore year to help her family on the farm. I joke with her about it sometimes.

            Occasionally you can catch my grandmother sitting, talking on the phone, with a piece of paper in front of her. Her name is written over and over all around the page. Jo Anne Bush, Jo Anne Bush. At 71 she still practices her signature.

            I was asking her questions about her father and mother, what they were like as we shuffled the old photos around. She held up a picture of her father, telling me about him. How he was the sweetest man she ever knew. In the picture he was standing in a field with a white t-shirt on, his arms crossed and a funny smirk on his face. I noticed that Gran had his nose, big and round. She showed me a picture of her mother. A woman I had only met when I was little at the nursing home. She always called me my mother’s name. She was all bones, with a puff of white hair then. I didn’t recognize her in the photo though. She was younger, probably in her forties. She had on a dress that touched the ground. She was definitely what some would call a large woman. She didn’t smile in the picture either.

            I had assumed that Gran’s family was similar to Papa’s. That they lived on a farm and did what people that live on a farm do. But when I asked her about where she grew up she told me several different places. She said to me that her parents never owned a farm, that they moved around a lot, that they worked on other people’s land. I knew that my grandparents had grown up with nothing, but I never knew that Gran’s family was that poor. So poor that they couldn’t even have their own land to farm. I was shocked, why hadn’t she told me this before? Why had I never known about this?

            Gran has told me many stories about her childhood. Some having to deal with out-houses and that weird thing she calls the ‘slop jar’. How her father liked to eat the brains from the pig, how she liked the ‘cracklin’ (otherwise known as the skin from the pig). That my great-grandmother’s name was Trixie. That one of Trixie’s brothers was actually named ‘Dellie Ware’. She had told me before about how many brothers and sisters her mother had. That my great-great-grandmother eventually ran out of names.  The last kid was named ‘ZY’. But once I knew that they were tenant farmers it all seemed to make more sense. My mom’s family was poor, uneducated, and southern.

            When you ask my grandmother where her family came from all she knows is the names of small towns in Alabama. Black, Thurston, or Geneva. She doesn’t know what country they came from or when they would have decided to live in America or Alabama. Papa is the same way about his family. Telling me nothing more than the simple facts. Born in Slocumb, Alabama, worked on his family’s farm until he left.

            I remember a few years ago I was home from school, on some break but I can’t remember which one. I was sitting on the couch in the living room looking at old photo albums (again) with my mom. She jumped up and ran to the book shelf, telling me she had something she had been meaning to show me. But she kept forgetting. She pulled out a huge notebook. Someone in Papa’s family had put together a sort-of lineage thing. It had the names of all his relatives they could find, tracing his family back to the Civil War. Someone had found and kept a letter that one of Papa’s great-great something or other had written. It was from a man writing to his wife during the Civil War. The original copy is not readable. Beside it is a typed version that you can read. The man didn’t really know how to write or spell. He was in Kentucky at the time I think, fighting. His wife was in Alabama with a baby that he had not seen yet. I remember that he spelled Kentucky like ‘Kintukie’.

            It was the coolest thing I had ever found. I had never seen a note or letter written by anyone in my family before. Especially someone in my family that long ago in the past. For the first time I really felt connected to that past, to something as distant in our minds as the Civil War. I’m sure I thought about it before, in some history class, thinking yeah sure I had ancestors that might have fought in that war. But it meant more to see proof in front of me. That I actually could say yes, I had ancestors who were in the war.

            The notebook had a typed family tree listing births, deaths, marriages, and kids. I read them all, having no clue who the people were. But the one I remember most was a lady named Elizabeth. It had listed that she died young, in her thirties, from mixing watermelon and ice cream. I laughed out loud at that one, and had to read it to my mother. There were sad ones too, that a young boy died from being run over by a tractor. But all the people it talked about were farmers, were poor, and lived in southeast Alabama. Lived in the small towns like Hartford, where mom is from. Which to this day only has a square in the center of town. All the stores are closed down now. But that used to be where my mom and aunt would shop with Gran. Or Slocumb where Papa lived as a child. The highway that runs through it is the only street in the whole place. I think there might be a Piggly Wiggly. Probably the last in the state.

            Southeast Alabama isn’t much to see even today. Don’t get me wrong, the land is beautiful. It’s flat, green most of the time with nothing for miles but farmland. When farmers grow cotton it makes the flat land look like it’s covered in snow. The south’s version of snow. If its peanut time, the fields are full of small bushes with peanuts growing underneath. It’s true too, how they say ‘the skies are so blue’. Days and days in a row back home with no cloud in the sky. It’s even pretty in the summertime when there’s the daily afternoon thunderstorm. The clouds roll in dark and scary, but the rain falls and cools everything that was burning up.

            Sometimes I like my families past, I think it’s interesting and strange that most of my ancestors were poor farmers. But other times I hate it. I hate that that is all I know, that no one in my family’s past did something interesting and notable. Most of them just lived, farmed, had kids, and died. I know that is a shitty way to look at my ancestors, but sometimes I just wish there was more. Sometimes it’s just not enough that I am simply from Alabama. That my family is literally from Alabama, that is all they are, that when I say I am from the south it is deeply true.

            Sometimes I want more than that. Than that simple answer. You’re from the south, you’re from Alabama, Ashton. I don’t know why, but it’s not enough. When I think about home I have both good and bad images in my mind. All the good relates to the weather, the sky, the grass. The physical surroundings I know so well. When I miss home, those are the things I miss. The smell of fresh cut grass. The warm breeze before a storm. The smell of dirt when peanuts are being harvested. The bad is different. I think about how easy it is to get stuck there. How my whole family has fallen into that, my mom living only thirty miles from her parents. My dad moving only across town, my aunt living a few miles from us, her kids living literally down the road from her. Alabama is a mix of things for me. Part of me is glad that is where I come from. But the other part of me wants to know more than that. Wants to know why my ancestors moved there, why they stayed, if they had a choice.

            It doesn’t help that nothing is known about my dad’s family. He was adopted. We know he was born in Dayton, Ohio, his real last name is Shultz, his mother was young and unmarried, and that he only lived their until he was five or six. My grandmother, Mimi, adopted him in Ohio. But she was from Alabama too. She grew up just a few miles from my mom’s mother. Her family had a farm and she worked on it until she married and left. Then she moved back to Alabama after living in Ohio for almost ten years. Dad doesn’t really care to look up any information about his real mother. Of course I do. Not because I want to meet her and call her grandmother. But because I want to know if his parents were German (from the name Shultz), how long they lived in Ohio. Where his parents would have came from. I think maybe then I would feel complete about my self, my past. Maybe then I could say, oh my ancestors were German on my dad’s side. Then I could be more than just from the south.

            Maybe someone would be like me, maybe it would explain why I am the only one in my entire family to move away, to get a college education, to dream to be more than just from the south. But who knows if the day will ever come when my dad decides to find out anything about his real mother. I just have to wait.

            In one of my classes this semester we read some of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men By James Agee. The teacher brought in a book full of photos by Walker Evans. Its all pictures from the 1930s of families in the south who were poor tenant farmers. I borrowed the book. I went to my room and sat on my bed and looked at the photos. There was a ton from Alabama. Photos of people who were like my grandparents and great-grandparents. I flipped through the sections till I got to Alabama. There were photos of street corners. I thought maybe that’s what my grandparents might have seen in their towns. Maybe they walked past buildings that looked like the ones in the pictures. Then there were photos of families in their homes. I looked at the furniture they had. It all looked homemade. I thought maybe that’s what was inside my grandparents homes. I thought maybe if I looked at them I could know more about my family. Maybe my family wore those same kinds of clothes, had those same kinds of tools in their house. I could learn to understand and appreciate my families past.  The houses reminded me of Papa’s farm house. He still owns the house his father built for their family; no one lives out there though.

            I have always hated walking into that house. It’s so old and everything about it scares me. The old wood floors creek with every step. There’s a small doorway in the living room that leads up to the attic, I think. It always freaks me out because it’s so small and the handle is old with a rusted lock on it. The bathroom was added on years later to the house. It’s all the way in the back. The first time I ever used it was a few years ago when my family was having a bone fire outside. I got freaked out because of the shower. The shower head is the usual looking kind, but the weird part was how low it was. If I stood in that shower the water might hit my stomach. I would have to crotch down to just get my hair wet. It doesn’t help that Papa once told me a story about that house from when he was younger. He had brother who died at the age of 13 but I can’t remember what from.  He told me they kept his brothers casket in the living room for three days. He said his room was right beside the room his brother laid in. That night he couldn’t go to sleep because he was scared. I hate walking through that room now.

            But maybe next time I go out there to that house I will try not to complain about it. Not ask someone to go to the bathroom with me because it’s too scary to go by myself. And not bitch about it because it was Papa’s home, because his father worked hard to build it, and because it is all he has left to remember his family. It’s a part of the family and it’s a part of me too.

            I was shocked that day in class when everyone knew their heritage. I figured there would be a least one other person like me, with no answer. I still don’t know why it bothers me so much to not know everything about my ancestors. I just know that sometimes I feel empty. Unsure. All because I don’t really know who or what I am.