Ne'er do Well: My Father's Missing Middle Name
I am an adopted Mobilian. I chose to come back here after being part of the diaspora that fled in the 70's when the world seemed less violent elsewhere than here. Born in Opelika, I was one of the first baby-boomers. My father and mother met at Toomer's Drug Store, married in Opelika where my mother cheered the football team while my father, in WWII, sat in the tailgunner position of a navy airplane. My father crouched in a trench in Nevada while a 31 kiloton atomic bomb exploded a few hundred yards away, and that moment changed my life forever.
The fallout from that blast killed my mother, my father, and the myth of the American dream all at once. That I didn't know the cause of death doesn't change the fact that the cancer from that radiation would permeate the rest of my life.
But there was that idyllic time from six to sixteen spent on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. The years of my father being the workhorse of the church, commodore of the Yacht Club, hard working president of the Chamber of Commerce, PTA president, and husband to the beautiful spirit that was my mother before her life extinguished so suddenly in 1968.
By 1969 my father had found two more little girls and a wife who were willing to give more than they should have to help him right his ship. I left for college and never looked back, my wake being enough to drown a few of the younger ones who had no idea what was causing all the tumult.
I fled to Columbus, Mississippi first, then Auburn, then Atlanta. From there I lugged my furnishings and my late mother's silverware to Tampa, Kernersville, NC, Orlando, Greenville, SC, Miami, and then finally back to Kernersville. My husband and I parted ways at that intersection of I-40 and I-85 and I took off for Atlanta. Then after ten years of single motherhood and yet another huge life change when the children were no longer in my care, I returned to Fairhope in time for my 30th High School Reunion.
Fairhope welcomed me with open arms, but I had a burning desire to write and paint and share what I had seen with the world. I found a way to go back to school, and I thought that I could monetize my experiences somehow. Others do that, I reasoned. I worked in a bookstore full to the brim with books others had written about their lives. I just needed to get busy and figure out how to tell this complex story.
Fairhope is full of writers, artists and poets who make their living selling the stories and books they write. I had the passion and the story - but what was missing was that little bit of security that would have allowed me to get down to business.
A roof over my head. A room of one's own. Security is all a writer needs. My father found it in a tug boat and an abandoned shack in Bleaker, Alabama. I found that same security for a time in Fairhope, but the necessity of paying rent forced me to turn away from writing. I moved again - this time to re-enter college where I immediately was embraced by both the English department and the Art Department. I had finally found a place where my dual talents were both valued. At least as long as I was paying for the privilege of obtaining a degree, via student loans.
My friends remarked once that my student loan debt would buy a house. My sons have already checked to see if they will be responsible when I am dead. I think that there is an easy answer to the problem of what I should do for the next ten years or more. Write the damn book. Get on with it. Publish it here, there and everywhere, in whatever form that requires.
My art degree was completed in 2005. I discovered Daily Kos that same year. My creative non-fiction English thesis lurched from my gut in 2007 and I've been begging people to read it ever since. The thesis was titled Delusions of Grandeur, and it is good as far as a thesis goes. It's just that a work produced for a committee that is paid to grade papers is not going to produce a best-seller.
I think there are times when you should not have to beg people to read your work. I've hesitated to publish even on DailyKos when it was my artwork I was promoting.
Somewhere in the fog of the last four years I recall someone begging me to allow them to publish it. I was probably in the middle of one of those moves at the time. Some German company was interested in the work, I recall, because Germany is more interested in visual literacy than we are in the US and my work does ask the reader to consider whether or not we need to rethink how we teach.
I was prepared for others to be uninterested in my navel gazing.
But nothing prepared me for the self-discovery that occurred the cold thanksgiving day when I drove to Magnolia Cemetery to try and find my grandmother's grave. It was there, among the swampy ruts and the silent witnesses to history that I learned that my roots are here in Mobile.
My adopted home has not been sure what to do with me, however. Because my namesake grandmother and I traveled to England together in the summer of 1967, my view of the world radically changed. My view of Mobile changed again when I climbed into the rotunda of Barton Academy on a warm May afternoon this past year.
I could see clearly that we were mistaken in who we chose to hate, who we feared, what mattered in the overall scheme of things.
I could not find a place where my voice was welcomed. Try as I might to give voice to my observations, my pleas with my friends, family and neighbors always came with a groan, and sometimes more of a shout, that I found very difficult to ignore.
I found that relationships don't survive political differences very well. Nor do other friendships when the loudest is not the most inclusive voice. I learned that being branded as a liberal was to be told I should keep silent if I wanted to sell art, or to be heard over the shouts of the team members on either side.
I have written about my father, and his struggles to find a voice as a poet. I've written about his life as a visionary in Fairhope, a man who paved Fairhope International Airport and sold land on Ono Island, a man who never thought about health insurance till his wife died of cancer, who never thought about abortions till his daughter needed one, and never thought about divorce till he could no longer face his second wife with the news that he was broke, and broken. I know now why he never came back home with his third wife to stay. It was not because he didn't love her and want his beloved home town to know her - but how could he have brought her here, to his mother's proud city and introduce her and her dark skinned sons to the community that had not forgotten my mother all those years ago.
This morning I remembered an incident in downtown Fairhope that might have shaped me more than I realized. I'd seen a car filled with babies and children in front of a local store, and being a person who speaks to everyone I asked them where they were from. They were farm workers, looking for a job, and living in their car. My mother cried and left the room after explaining to me that we could not allow them to live in the basement of our house as I'd been so silly as to suggest.
I didn't realize that until I walked Magnolia Cemetery, where I passed family members from England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and who knows where. I didn't know until I walked through the muck at Magnolia Cemetery how many countries contributed to my being there.
I didn't understand what brought them here. I had to look way back in the archives to realize how I came to be who I am. It isn't easy to sum up a city like Mobile. We are the best of so many worlds, and for some reason, we are also the worst of so many worlds as well.
My friend John Sledge writes beautifully about his adopted home. I wish I had his skill with words. I do think he senses that we need to be more able to understand the complex forces that came together over time to build this city. I smile each time I think of how I first came to know John. His grandfather delivered my grandmother. On his birthday. My grandmother was named Susie Sledge Douglass because of that fact.
My father didn't have a middle name. His father, Edwin Warley, was the son of another Edwin, the Cabbage King of America. My grandfather died when my father was 15, and I always remember that my father in his despair would mutter something about how there was no hope for a widow's son. I also know that her name for people who couldn't earn a living was Ne'er do Well. My father ran all the way from Fairhope to Heredia, Costa Rica to escape from that middle name.
I wrote, and published, and wrote more. But writing requires a reader. And if readers are afraid to speak out because they are yelled down and mocked, ridiculed and ostracized, then the writers will go away. I stopped writing when my views of the world were not ones that others wished to hear. I never stopped blogging, but I changed from one blog to another as the internet evolved.
I rediscovered my voice in 2008. I had been allowed to teach a group of incoming freshmen to write. I had no idea what I or they were doing there, but I walked in and turned to the assembled and saw the same terror on their faces that I had felt 40 years before. I learned more that day about Mobile and about me than I could share if I wrote forever about it.
I would like to teach again. I would love to earn a living doing what I am best at doing. Teaching people to be who they are, bringing out the best in young and old alike through their words. When this state learns how to employ teachers and pay them a living wage, it's possible I'll still have something to say to the students. I can't wait for that day.