My mom just called. My Uncle Bill just passed away. He was really bad with Alzheimers, but he and my aunt Margaret, (my mother's last surviving sister) had been married for 64 years. He was a bad ass motherfucker too. Trouble on tw0 legs and a hoot to be around. My mom's kin all come from up in a holler in the mountains of Virginia. I always knew it as "Sandy Ridge" but I doubt it's even on a map now. My grandfather and his father too, well fuckin everybody, grew tobacco. My grandfather and my uncles made shine. After the Vietnam war, my uncles grew weed with the tobacco. They weren't hippies tho... they were all good with a gun and protected what was theirs mercilessly. (I saw my uncle Cammel shoot and kill a dog just walking by, because it was walking by.)
Funny, they don't like to talk about it. In the summers of 2009 and 2010 I went to Florida where my uncle Jerry, uncle Gracen, and uncle Demma live. Demma was Bills illegitimate son by my aunt Flo. Bill was already married to my aunt Margaret when Flo came up pregnant. She was a teenager. She had the baby and my grandma and grandpa said it was theirs. Flo wouldn't discuss paternity and would tell you to mind your own fucking business if you asked her twice.
I thought Demma was really one of my mom's brothers. He is actually my mom's nephew. As Demma got older and older, it became just painfully obvious that Bill was his father. OMG. Margaret and Bill had moved up to Michigan and started a family and Demma didn't see Bill except like once a year at the family reunion. But Christ, Demma was shaped just like Bill, was a mirror image of Bill's facial features except Demma got Flo's red curly hair. All my kin in Virginia are/were tall and thin with red curly hair. Bill was from Kentucky. He was short and stumpy, walked stiffly, and had large eyeballs. Demma is just like that! As adults they both looked like hobbits and whispers started to surface.
Flo never spoke of it. Hillbillies, at least all the ones I've known and loved during my lifetime, do not tell their secrets. My parents had moved us to California, but we went back to Virginia almost every summer during my whole childhood. My cousins and I ALL gave Cammel a wide berth. We fucking knew he wasn't right. If he offered one of us a cold soda (which was an extremely rare thing to find, since electricity didn't come to the that holler until 1980) we would in NO WAY get close enough to him to take the soda! Well, guess what? uncle Cammel did time for molesting his own daughters, from when they were three years old. Guess what else? I nor my cousins were surprised. But we never said a word about him to anyone. We just kept away from the sick fuck. Nobody had to warn us. I don't know how, but we taught each other without any details. Some of us didn't have the vocabulary to explain one goddamm thing but none of us got near him. We did not tell anyone anything about him. Hillbillies do not talk shit on their own kin. SO Flo never said who Demma's dad was, and she died drunk driving.
Now Bill is gone, and he never acknowledged that he was Demma's dad. I am sure he would have denied it if confronted about it, because he would never admit to Margaret that he slept with her sister. Hillbillies will not tell on each other and they don't like the law at all, but they are bad about fucking. They are the randiest group of human beings you could ever want to meet, or avoid, whatever. My grandma had 11 kids in 10 years. Children born in their house built of boards and flour paste and newspaper with an outhouse down the path a ways. The house had no running water but there was a creek nearby. The stove in the kitchen burned wood all day every day and my grandma cooked a lot whenever I was there, because all her kids came home every summer and brought their families.
It seems so strange to me. I loved my grandmother and grandfather. I loved the smell of the curing house where the tobacco hung after harvested. I loved to hear my grandpa play banjo and sing. Even though I grew up in southern California, I thought Virginia was fantastic. I could leave the house in the morning with my cousin Jen and we could stay gone all day. We drank from creeks, which were abundant. We ate berries. It is almost impossible to believe that my precious grandparents lived the way their parents did, and the way their parents did, right there on Sandy Ridge, since before the Civil war. An indentured Irishman got land there after a stint in New York during which time he married an English girl. I guess the move down to Virginia included family from both sides and a few stragglers, plus a misplaced native american woman. I saw a really old, faded picture of her at about 90 years of age. She was strong. They all were strong. I can't imagine going on a wagon ride for days just to get to where you are going and have to clear the fucking forest! Clear it they did. Acres and acres of thick forest, trees hand felled one by one. Houses built and outhouse pits dug. All of that was happening and the people were having 14 and 15 kids. More hands make light work? My great grandma was a midwife. She assisted her daughters and daughters in law during childbirth. If nothing else, she had a lot of experience with her own 12 kids. I guess as time passed and she became the eldest matriarch she'd be obliged to assume the role of midwife, would she not?
ah shit. I need to stop writing and go pee. I wonder if I will continue this, or delete it, or just leave it alone.
Funny, they don't like to talk about it. In the summers of 2009 and 2010 I went to Florida where my uncle Jerry, uncle Gracen, and uncle Demma live. Demma was Bills illegitimate son by my aunt Flo. Bill was already married to my aunt Margaret when Flo came up pregnant. She was a teenager. She had the baby and my grandma and grandpa said it was theirs. Flo wouldn't discuss paternity and would tell you to mind your own fucking business if you asked her twice.
I thought Demma was really one of my mom's brothers. He is actually my mom's nephew. As Demma got older and older, it became just painfully obvious that Bill was his father. OMG. Margaret and Bill had moved up to Michigan and started a family and Demma didn't see Bill except like once a year at the family reunion. But Christ, Demma was shaped just like Bill, was a mirror image of Bill's facial features except Demma got Flo's red curly hair. All my kin in Virginia are/were tall and thin with red curly hair. Bill was from Kentucky. He was short and stumpy, walked stiffly, and had large eyeballs. Demma is just like that! As adults they both looked like hobbits and whispers started to surface.
Flo never spoke of it. Hillbillies, at least all the ones I've known and loved during my lifetime, do not tell their secrets. My parents had moved us to California, but we went back to Virginia almost every summer during my whole childhood. My cousins and I ALL gave Cammel a wide berth. We fucking knew he wasn't right. If he offered one of us a cold soda (which was an extremely rare thing to find, since electricity didn't come to the that holler until 1980) we would in NO WAY get close enough to him to take the soda! Well, guess what? uncle Cammel did time for molesting his own daughters, from when they were three years old. Guess what else? I nor my cousins were surprised. But we never said a word about him to anyone. We just kept away from the sick fuck. Nobody had to warn us. I don't know how, but we taught each other without any details. Some of us didn't have the vocabulary to explain one goddamm thing but none of us got near him. We did not tell anyone anything about him. Hillbillies do not talk shit on their own kin. SO Flo never said who Demma's dad was, and she died drunk driving.
Now Bill is gone, and he never acknowledged that he was Demma's dad. I am sure he would have denied it if confronted about it, because he would never admit to Margaret that he slept with her sister. Hillbillies will not tell on each other and they don't like the law at all, but they are bad about fucking. They are the randiest group of human beings you could ever want to meet, or avoid, whatever. My grandma had 11 kids in 10 years. Children born in their house built of boards and flour paste and newspaper with an outhouse down the path a ways. The house had no running water but there was a creek nearby. The stove in the kitchen burned wood all day every day and my grandma cooked a lot whenever I was there, because all her kids came home every summer and brought their families.
It seems so strange to me. I loved my grandmother and grandfather. I loved the smell of the curing house where the tobacco hung after harvested. I loved to hear my grandpa play banjo and sing. Even though I grew up in southern California, I thought Virginia was fantastic. I could leave the house in the morning with my cousin Jen and we could stay gone all day. We drank from creeks, which were abundant. We ate berries. It is almost impossible to believe that my precious grandparents lived the way their parents did, and the way their parents did, right there on Sandy Ridge, since before the Civil war. An indentured Irishman got land there after a stint in New York during which time he married an English girl. I guess the move down to Virginia included family from both sides and a few stragglers, plus a misplaced native american woman. I saw a really old, faded picture of her at about 90 years of age. She was strong. They all were strong. I can't imagine going on a wagon ride for days just to get to where you are going and have to clear the fucking forest! Clear it they did. Acres and acres of thick forest, trees hand felled one by one. Houses built and outhouse pits dug. All of that was happening and the people were having 14 and 15 kids. More hands make light work? My great grandma was a midwife. She assisted her daughters and daughters in law during childbirth. If nothing else, she had a lot of experience with her own 12 kids. I guess as time passed and she became the eldest matriarch she'd be obliged to assume the role of midwife, would she not?
ah shit. I need to stop writing and go pee. I wonder if I will continue this, or delete it, or just leave it alone.
