by Kristine Langley Mahler
I am seeking permission to access the places I never entered, the memories I packed in cardboard boxes and shoved into the archives, a place whose impact on me I am still trying to understand.
Project Description:
A return to an in-between place, a liminal place, a preadolescent place with four years of phantom occupation. The town never admitted I was there, but a dash between 1992 and 1996 doesn’t make it an epitaph. History needs beginnings and ends, but not my history.
An outline, a delineation of the line that I traced out, or the one encircling the city that kept me out.
It is a trip I have taken for years; the errata litters my Google search history. I sent the historical society fifty dollars for the 1300-page county chronicles so I could learn the secrets of every family profiled. But the families submitted their own stories, I realized partway through, so now I am paying attention to what is included, and what is absent.
Pitt County has always been over one-third Black. But the family histories in the book are nearly all white.
My middle school bore the name of C.M. Eppes, a reference to the principal of the Black high school which had mysteriously burned down in 1970. Its destruction had forced the county’s hand, and the long-delayed desegregation finally occurred as the Black students joined the white students at Rose High School on Elm Street. Twenty years later, the conjoined student body moved to a newly-built high school, and the former Rose was converted into a middle school—C.M. Eppes Middle—one year before I began sixth grade.
The soapstone lab tables had decades of gum adhered to the undersides, a constellation of colors. It was not all spearmint-white.
I will return to that town, hog-belly-up on the coastal plains of North Carolina, to document what I wanted to see but did not. Or I will document what I did not want to see but did. I will produce an essay about the essay I will write about the essay I would write if I actually had to return.
Here is my cable cord, here is my fractal wire, here is my spider thread. All I have to do is open a browser.
Product of the funded activity:
The disorientation I already know. Things have changed, things have not. Arrival was like a choked inhale, departure like a choked exhale. I will take out my yearbook and look up everyone on the Pitt County tax assessor website so I can drive by their adult houses. Maybe I will catch a glimpse of someone, like the time in 2005 when I saw the thin Mr. Grace, which will make me reconsider the futures I assumed were fixed.
I will leave out the nice encounters, or I will reframe them with the skepticism of a girl who remembers the sight of her broken diary in a friend’s hands, a mother looming behind, when the doorbell rang.
I will circle my old house like the boys who had come when I was home sick. I called the police because I was thirteen and alone and I was scared because one boy had picked up a metal pole by the basketball hoop, feinted like he was going to hit my dog. When the police arrived, the boys scattered into the ditch creek behind my house. After rustling them up literally by the scruff of their shirts and tossing the boys into the back of the car, the police told me they’d asked the boys what they were doing in this neighborhood because they obviously didn’t belong there.
I should have mentioned the boys were Black. I should have mentioned that when Bojangles started building on the corner lot, someone spray-painted get your black restaurant out of our white neighborhood on the brick wall. I should have mentioned that the neighborhood kids biked over for Bo-Berry Biscuits anyway. I should have mentioned the boys were my age, but boys my age had gotten O.S.S.—Out of School Suspension, not I.S.S.—at my middle school for bringing guns.
The window has been open while I’ve been elsewhere. I will lick the yellow pollen that’s settled on my shoulder; I will spit and rub a circle on the windshield until I can see where I’m parked.
Activities/Process/Methodology:
Will I drive or will I fly? Won’t I want my mix tapes—tapes, not iTunes playlists—in the car with me? Will I want to hear Toni Braxton, Janet, SWV? I’ll need to re-buy them. Maybe I’ll go to the mall with the cemented graveyard in the middle of the parking lot. If I am unable to locate a music store, I will flip the top of my notebook and scribble sic transit gloria mundi.
I will wait to hear the right songs on the radio. Or I won’t. They are there, somewhere; I am there and those are the familiar chords of “Carolina in my Mind.” But I cued them up.
I have chosen my Airbnb, a house barely a block away from the house where I lived. I’ve picked my weekend—the 100th anniversary of the county fair, the last weekend of September. I will buy a soft-pack of Marlboros from the vending machine on the east side of the Holiday Inn up the road from Betsy’s house, shoving in quarters the way she did, and I will pay attention to how my body reacts to the old smell of tobacco smoke. Maybe I’ll inhale for the first time in my life as a performative metaphor for how living there damaged me.
I will dissect the neighborhood names of “Westhaven” and “Club Pines,” the conjoined places that made up my world, to emphasize how it was both a haven for white people in the southwest of the city and a club bordered by tall pines like a fence.
My daughters cannot come. My husband cannot come. My parents and my siblings cannot come. The only person I want to retread those years with me is dead, which is why she is the only one I want.
I will see if I can drive, by memory, the route Sherman or Quefe took as they bussed us from Club Pines into the decaying heart of the city so we would integrate the schools. Past the Piggly Wiggly, past the mortuary catty-corner from my elementary. I don’t remember the mortuary being there when I was a student, but the reference is too elegant to leave out. The Google Maps car captured a man on the front porch of one of the shotgun houses that faced the fifth grade wing of my school; I will recount the time my teacher had to call the cops because the rap was blasting so loud we couldn’t hear her trying to instruct us. They’ve removed the barbed wire from the top of the chain link fence that surrounded the playground, but now I’m not sure if the barbed wire was really ever there, or if we just wanted it to be.
I will get a guest pass to tour Eppes, find the U.S.S. trapdoor in the band room we always swore was where the really bad kids got Under School Suspension. It’ll be football season, I can smell the pigs roasting in the massive grills under the stadium rows down the street at Ficklen.
I know how I need to look. I’m growing my hair out, I’m practicing my foundation. I’ll buy an old t-shirt at Goodwill, a company with a regional name that can’t be found everywhere, but I won’t wear the shirt until I’m on my way back home. Then I’ll write about how I wear that town on me like a brand.
I have returned a hundred times; I have never come home.
Budget Justification:
The Airbnb is ridiculously cheap—something like $59/night for the entire house. The listing shows three bedrooms, two of which have unframed beds on the floor. The new owner is only half-trying. That neighborhood used to mean something. I will work the word “crestfallen” into the essay somewhere to echo Crestline Boulevard, the street with my house. The Airbnb is only thirty numbers down from mine. The Airbnb is actually my brother’s friend’s old house—I confirmed that through the county tax assessor website because I wasn’t sure I had remembered correctly.
But the backyard is the reason I want that house—I want access to the ditches snaking through the neighborhood. I will live out my fantasy of rafting through the drainage. I have mapped their paths. I know I can enter the ditch behind the Airbnb and paddle until I am behind my own house. It is the only way I can get into my old backyard, now, because the new owners put up a six-foot fence surrounding what we used to leave wide open.
The people to whom my parents sold our house twenty-three years ago are the people who still own it. Their daughters are married, their son has left town, the old man is near retirement age. I have to go to my house before they leave, while my last name might still carry currency. I will stand on the front porch and prove I lived there once; I will ask if they still have the hook-and-eye latches on the cubby doors leading under the eaves in the upstairs bedrooms. I will ask if they ever found the shark teeth we strained from the creek and brought back in our pockets, little bite-threats, still sharp thousands of years later.
I will promise, like the Miranda Lambert song, that if they will just let me in I won’t take anything from the house that broke me.
Nowhere hurts like the place you learned to be hurt; nowhere hurts like the place you were a preadolescent. I will not think of the empty stairwell where I stopped to remove the sports bra I did not need, wiping at my underwear with jean pocket corners that I inspected, looking for red and never finding it. I will not think of the bus seat with the hand thrust over the top, his quick fury when I declined to draw a starburst because he was a boy, not because his skin was darker, shame that I could not vent because I was afraid of men. The answering machine messages filling up the tape, playback I would muffle with my thumb.
I will go to the site of the old Pier One and tuck dollar bills onto any shelf to pay off the change purse I stole. I will go to Brody’s and buy any prom dress I want because I cannot have the jean vest and white tulle skirt I desired when I was thirteen. I will buy myself a lot of things as reparations, and when I get home, I will lay them out on my bed, photograph the lot, and store it all away in a box I will not open because I just need to possess. It will be an adroit metaphor for the entire trip.
Project Timeline:
Can I bring myself to eat at Ragazzi’s? Will I allow myself to be buttered up with breadsticks? Will I go to the head shop and buy the butterfly polymer clay candle holder out of spite? Do I even still want it?
I will contemplate moving my family there, that much I know. I will tell myself that if I can just get a membership to the Lake Ellsworth pool, my daughters’ adolescence would be different. They don’t have to be Northerners coming in clueless. I can give them Cotillion, teach them how to slur -ville into -vul.
I will not remember to check my privilege because when I lived there, I thought I had none. But in that town, every white person does.
I’m in the county fair building with the pumpkin I entered in the decorating contest, the white one I painted with splotches of brown, hooked with sunglasses, and angled a floppy black hat atop, an honorable mention ribbon tagged on my Michael Jackson. I didn’t have to get an honorable mention; not every contestant did. I will compare that memory to the Gravitron, the feeling of being pinned against the wall as the floor dropped out, stuck in whatever position I had assumed, arms either indefensibly splayed open or else crunched against my chest, my own weight crushing myself.
I will reference the apocryphal line I said when my family first moved there, the one where I swore I cried when we arrived but I’ll laugh when we leave. I will not mention that I cried when we did actually leave, or else I will make a reference to a familiar syndrome, ham-handedly renaming it Stokes-home for the county town nearby.
Of course I will cry when I leave because all leavings are like the first one.
When I get back to the Midwest, I will note the humidity, how it’s different. How the prairie sun burns but doesn’t leave a slick sweat coat on my skin, a damp sunscreen I always tried to wipe off. I could not recognize the secrets that place tried to reveal to me, which is why I have to return over and over until I learn that I don’t have to return. I will always witness what I want.
Contribution to the field/conceptual importance:
There will be something I have forgotten that I will disclose at the end. I said “disclose,” but I wrote “enclose” the first time. I’m still watching for the out line.
The wallpaper in the bathroom of the Airbnb house reminds me of the wallpaper in my old bathroom, which is another reason I will rent that house. I will comb through the rooms at leisure, finding the right place to perform the displacement game. If I curl on the floor facing the same direction I once faced, covering my exposed arms with my childhood blanket, I can transpose locations—as long as I keep my eyes closed, I am actually there, in my old house. All the physical facts are in place.
I have had dreams where I rented my old house, but there were rooms that didn’t exist. These are the portals I will access to slip through memory into the places I didn’t want to see when they were corporeal.
It will all seem smaller, closer. It always does.
The tobacco fields that have turned into an extension of the subdivision will be representative of the town building atop its history. I will not use those houses as emblems of progress, because progress means growth and too many things have remained the same.
A few years after I left, the parents’ association filed a lawsuit against the public school board, alleging that their white kids were being discriminated against: they were still being forced to desegregate lower-income elementary schools nearly fifty years after Brown v. Board. The town moved with its own deliberate speed, building an elementary school near my old neighborhood which the board claimed the burgeoning southside population required. Then the town tucked under its lower lip, sliding a court-approved policy across the table: race cannot be the sole measure of diversity.
There used to be a house I remembered on the way out to the new hospital, which is no longer new. The house had a wide circle driveway; the house was set back far from the road. The house was two stories tall with white pillars and it looked like Tara in Gone with the Wind. If the house is no longer there, I will describe the old South making way for the new. Or constructions of the South being replaced with new construction. If it stands, I will find some way to tear it down.
How can you write yourself back into a place you once inhabited where you never felt like you belonged? This essay encircles the premise of taking a trip back to a county where I lived for four years, while confessing that the trip will never actually occur. That the trip, in fact, does not have to occur, because I already know how I would shape what I might see based on what I would want to see. But the examination of memory widens the cracks to find concurrent narratives I did not recognize at the time. I framed the piece like a grant proposal, because ultimately, I am seeking permission to access the places I never entered, the memories I packed in cardboard boxes and shoved into the archives, a place whose impact on me I am still trying to understand.
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Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays 2019, received the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review, won the 2019 Sundog Lit Collaboration Contest, and has been published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, The Normal School, and The Rumpus, among others. She is the Publisher/Editor-in-Chief at Split/Lip Press. Find more about her projects at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.