The Fruits of Memory

Abstract

Each fall I receive an exact intimation of how far away I have become. Such signs are not always dramatic, Old Testament notwithstanding. When God, or memory, or past, or any stern force wants to get your attention, ways are legion. Ravens shriek over Ezekiel's cowering head, branches burn and are not consumed, a child turns in a ninety-year-old womb. There's a secular version too: a taste of a coming season in wind can sweep your whole life past you, rich in portent. Elizabeth Spencer in The Voice at Back Door describes this as the dusty stir of autumn in twilight, with indescribable quality beneath eagerness and color that tried to speak and could not. Such thoughts are designed to haunt, in one way or another. But there are different kinds of haunting. And different kinds of ghosts, which live in different places. The most powerful ghost that reaches for me in early fall, here in Chapel Hill, lives in a grocery store, in neat ranks of plastic snap-top boxes with stickers bearing name of an orchard in Wadesboro, North Carolina. The phone number is included on sticker, in a shade of green that almost matches contents. Antiseptically, rebelliously, inside box nestle thick-skinned globes of golden-green, sprinkled with microscopic brown freckles and sometimes wide, harmless liver spots, like those on hands of a beloved elder. Scuppernongs. The folksy humor that such a name encourages, popularized in tiresome public-radio commentaries about Mama 'n' them, should be fiercely resisted. This name is a rich briar patch of syllables, strange with forbidding strangeness of ancestor stories that terrify when viewed with humility. Trivializing name because of its link to memories of individual and collective rural pasts means trivializing namers. It means trivializing southern rural life, and it means scoffing at darkness from which stories reach for you, opening their scarred palms. The words of those stories taste as dark and rich as any fruit. Your great-great-uncle stuck a knife in a man's back when he cut in front of him in line at cotton gin. Your great-aunt, youngest child of a family that included six older brothers and a mother who beat them all with a mule bridle, struck out in middle of night to elope with a traveling salesman. Your grandfather, her second- or third-oldest brother, was still cursing spot, forty years later, where salesman's car outdistanced Hupmobile bristling with father, brothers, and shotguns. You imagine that girl's frightened anger and shudder, but you lean into touch of stories on your shoulder, amazed at how gentle those long, rough hands can feel. And there is no way now to explain or relive to yourself that gentleness--the paradoxical draw of way of life that can produce such violence--except to lift that clamshell box from grocery-store shelf and take it home, and once home to eat them, one at a time, remembering how far away time was when you ate them where they, and you, belonged. Twenty minutes into country from Alabama town where he maintained controlled chaos of a small-town doctor's life, near tiny, lyrically named settlement of Oak Bowery, your grandfather kept a farm--a farm your family has sworn will be last of its holdings to go in times of depression. Here he maintained a herd of Angus and Hereford cattle, and a lake of catfish, and an orchard of plum and peach trees in which you were forbidden to climb but did anyway, and a rustling, purple-smelling fig tree, and a well of pure water that tasted like tin dipper on its nail above wooden well lid, and a scuppernong arbor. High summer was time of peaches and plums, yellow jackets glutted into harmlessness, and your grandmother in pedal pushers and not-yet-white hair posing happily above bushel baskets and scarred plastic buckets brimming with rosy fruit. …