Getting ready

My father died in 1999, leaving much unsaid about his past. The rough sketch he did leave only inspires more questions. Dad was a great-grandson of a Confederate officer killed by deserters he'd been dispatched to collect. The Confederate was well regarded. He'd been a schoolteacher, a Methodist-Episcopal minister and local merchant. He'd opposed Southern secession as necessitating a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, but when war became inevitable he volunteered to raise a company in the Confederate army and became its commander. The house in which he was murdered is rumored locally to be haunted; it's said blood seeps up through the floorboards near the fireplace where he was shot.

As far as I can tell, the Confederate's death precipitated a familial decline. The generation encompassing my grandmother -- the Confederate's grandchildren -- struggled as subsistence farmers on their ancestral property near the Pearl River, a dogtrot cabin in the Piney Woods. My great-uncles were moonshiners. My grandmother, Mommee to me, was more or less a transient who drifted in and out of the lives of her five children (each by a different man). Dad never liked to talk much about any of that, but he said enough to convey certain images: being taught to toast wood shavings to put in the whiskey so it would color nicely, being paralyzed with terror at having to go alone to the outhouse at night, the Confederate's dagger on the mantel, hitchhiking with his mother, headlights from an uncle's car swinging around the side of the house just as the car took out a front porch pillar before tearing back into the woods to hide the still from "revenue men."

For years I've wanted to know the story to which these images belong, despite having squandered the opportunity to learn more of it from the Confederate's grandchildren and great-grandchildren while they were alive. The last of the Confederate's great grandchildren in my line died last year. We family waited in torrential, tropical rain to bury her. As I sat in the humidity in my cousin's enormous American car listening to Crosby Stills and Nash and breathing cigarette fumes, all of us waiting for the rain to let up, every facet of the loss settled on me.

The Great Recession has left me loosely employed. For the first time as an adult I have large blocks of flexibly scheduled time, and I can meet the obligations I do have by way of a cell phone, a laptop and a wireless connection. That reality has merged in my mind with the propulsion to put the family story together.

Still, I didn't understand I was taking this trip until Monday, two days ago, when I told the University of Southern Mississippi's housing people that I'd take the apartment they'd described to me, a one-bedroom in early 1960s graduate student housing. It's even possible my parents lived in one of these units just after they were built. An even spookier possibility: I may have been conceived in the apartment where I'm about to spend the next six weeks. Will confer with Mom re this.

Anyway, I take off on Friday. I figure it's a four-day trip if I drive eight hours a day. I got the car serviced today.