An Iris Blooms

I sat and watched an iris bloom.

Have you ever taken the time to do that? I read somewhere that you can see the slow opening of the petals during unfoldment. As much as I love irises, I knew it was something I wanted to do before I die.

Two days after the spring equinox, the William Faulkner irises at the front of my house were standing strong and vibrant in tall stalks with buds above sword-like leaves, promising flowers.  A bloom happens when the bud unfolds, the sepals fall to provide a landing pad for bumblebees, and the upright petals stand up. I decided to put aside everything else and devote time to one delicate possibility.

On one side of the front porch, in the perimeter of the arborvitae, death lay. Four baby birds, house wrens, still featherless, had been pulled out of the tall, white George Murphy birdhouse and flung against the grass, I assume by other birds. The black cat who lives behind me would have eaten them. There were no wounds, just heaps of little bodies. The natural world is mean and heinous and murderous.

On the other side of the front porch, among Lenten roses, periwinkle, and grape hyacinths, the irises grew and multiplied. Their rhizomes were collected and pocketed by an old acquaintance from a pile of thinnings on a sidewalk at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, home of Faulkner, the Nobel Prize–winning author. A handful of bulbs gifted to me turned into a full bed of flowers and giveaways to English teacher friends.

I sat on the bottom step of the porch in the shadow of the house a foot away from the irises and turned my attention in that direction. Toward hope and life and possibility. In spring, the natural world gives us that, too. It’s a matter of which way you want to look? Petals of the cherry tree flowers sailed by on the wind. I just sat and stared at the capsule of bloom all folded up. The sun inched higher, the shadow backed away, and light fell on the stalk.

Unstirring, I watched as still-folded sepals—the lower three petals above the spathe—seemed to puff out in slow motion, like someone was blowing a tiny breath from within. Movements were so slight, they were almost missed by the naked eye. I focused on a small crevice at the top of the bud between two sepal folds and watched it widen—stared, didn’t blink, didn’t move. I saw a flicker of movement, the petals beginning to separate. Kept staring, afraid to blink, afraid to look away for even a second.

Behind me, angry warning cries of birds ramped up. The wrens were fighting off their enemies, the ones who emptied their next and killed their young.  

The petals perspired. Tiny gray-purple veins showed up in the light. The sun shone inside the puffed-out petals on the beard, the “fluffy caterpillar” at the base of the falls.

Slight movements. I saw them. Cheered silently, not wanting to jolt or twitch or divert my eyes away from this miracle of birth.

Direct sunlight created more sepal stretching. A flicker. Sepals began to separate. The bud began to open, revealing the upright petals still wrapped together.

Another flicker, a stretching of petals apart from each other, a pop. Two curled sepals. Then three. An iris blooms.

It is the pinnacle of growth, after the forces and processes of nature have worked and pushed and supported the plant to maturity.  

The Tower

On my way to writers group, I called my son. “I’m up at the Tower.” I was letting him know that I would be out of touch all morning, up at the Brentwood library, critiquing short stories with seven other Harpeth River Writers. That way, he didn’t have to worry, or call the police, send them to my house, to parade through for a welfare check, making sure I’m not dead on the floor…like my sons have done to me once before.

A child of Nashville and Williamson County, he knew immediately where I was. Everybody around here knows the WSM Tower. It’s an iconic landmark. A beacon. You can see it from anywhere. Years ago, the port development engineer I worked for sent me to the town of La Vergne, east of Nashville, to pick up a report. “Stay on the main roads,” he warned. “You’ll get lost if you try to take a short cut.” That was an invitation to prove him wrong. It was the day before GPS, and I drove all over the backroads, up and around hills, lost as a goose, until . . . I saw the Tower way off in the distance. I worked my way toward it.

The Tower has been part of the Brentwood landscape since 1932 when it was granted the ability to reach forty states and is one of the oldest still-operating broadcast towers in the United States. It was once the tallest structure in the nation. The site was chosen because of its deep bedrock under a flat, grassy meadow and its location near the Little Harpeth River, which provided a good ground. It is widely known because it boosts the power and coverage area of the station that created the Grand Ole Opry.

The Tower has power in height and depth. It has a reach, sending out words and lyrics and music far and wide. It stands for something.

The John P. Holt Brentwood Library, across Concord Road from the Tower, holds 165,000 author creations.

It is all inspiration for a writer who meets there twice a month, at the Tower, in the middle of all those volumes—novels, memoirs, short stories. . . .

January Six

This is one of those dates—like the dates of President Kennedy’s assassination and Nine Eleven—that I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing and how I felt.

January six. I heard the incitement speech, I saw the marching, I saw the anger and the intent, and I immediately got alert texts from both sons, one in North Carolina, one in Mississippi, to turn on the TV and watch. I sat down in my Haverty’s recliner fifteen feet in front of the TV, turned up the sound, flipped from channel to channel before settling on one…and they were all showing the same thing and saying the same thing. My sons and I were joined together in this—phone calls, speaker phone, texts that didn’t stop—and we were throwing a whole lot of words around—exclamations and swear words and even the worst word of all. And a lot of commentary. And I said right then and there in the middle of it: “It’s a coup d’etat.”

And it was.

Attempted coup. Insurrection. I remember learning that word—junior high maybe. “A blow to the state,” my history teacher said. My sons and I sat together-apart for hours, hearts racing, chilled to the bone, unsure of what to do to be safe from this horror. A mob of thousands breaking windows, doors, beating police, pushing themselves inside the Capitol, chanting to hang the vice president, wanting to take hold of certain ones in Congress, wanting to stop a constitutional process. We know what we saw. We know what we heard. We know what it was. We know why it happened.

As of December, about 1,240 people had been arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol, accused of crimes ranging from trespassing, a misdemeanor, to seditious conspiracy, a felony. About 710 people have pleaded guilty, 210 to felony offenses. More than 450 were sentenced to incarceration. People are still being arrested. Even today, three years after the coup attempt. Trials are still going on. These trial proceedings have helped to flesh out the story of how an angry mob of a former president’s supporters, egged on by his lies about a stolen election, stopped the democratic process, if only for several hours.

Since 1797 each president has peacefully handed over power to the next. One president refused to hand over power peacefully, wanted to keep the power for himself, even though he was told, he knew, he admitted he knew he lost.

And I suspect he would do it again.

Angel Wing Jewelry

I’m about to walk into 2024 wearing my longtime favorite life motto: LIFE IS ABOUT CREATING YOURSELF. Not about finding yourself. Not about sitting around and hoping something good will happen. Not about waiting for someone to show you the way. But claiming your creation and the powers placed within you to step out and be and do.

I’ll walk into the new year armed with the Angel Wing necklace I bought at a booth in The Painted Tree in Franklin. I bought my granddaughter Jillian a similar one. The friend I was shopping with bought her granddaughter one, too.

It seems Angel Wing jewelry is a trend in some fashion circles these days because it comes with meaning. This one comes with an antiqued rustic brass cable chain and several charms that are reminders of ideals that guide one through life.

• The Angel Wing. When I soar with the angel wings, I can look upon my life journey and feel protected and empowered. It gives me hope and strength to rise above the negativity, hurts, and failures in life. I am not alone; I have my guardian to look out for me. It could also stand for a loved one I’ve lost—one who has walked with me: a mother, father, spouse.
• The Cross. This is a symbol of love and hope and sacrifice. It represents the foundation of the Christian faith. It can serve as a motivator to grow into the best version of myself or a declaration of living a life of love and care for others.
• The Compass. Known as a symbol of guidance and protection, the compass has shown explorers the way home throughout the ages, guiding them through rough seas and dangerous paths. It is also a symbol of guidance and direction in my personal and spiritual life: a moral compass, reminding me who I am, where I came from, what is right, what I stand for, and where home is.
• The Black Crystal. The tiny globe is the color of strength and wisdom. Black is about the absence of light, and I need this shadow side for everything to stand in balance. Black holds the promise of knowledge not yet found.
• The Pink Crystal. Pink gemstones promote self-love, self-worth, and self-acceptance.
• The Basket of Loaves and Fish. I added this one to the mix. I bought this at the Catacombs in Rome when I was there during my college days. The catacombs are former under-earth burial grounds that date from the second to fifth century, a network of dark and narrow underground tunnels and tombs. The early persecuted Christians gathered in the tunnels secretly to worship and pray. They used symbols so their rulers would not know who they were and why they were meeting. In early Christian art, the loaves and fish symbolized Christ. The basket of loaves and the fish are also symbols of the Eucharist. Symbols of the Christian life.

I don’t really need reminders all the time. But I have them for the times I forget. The times I need strength. The times I need to feel self-worth and self-love. For when I need to soar.

Changing Times

This first morning back home from vacation, I sit in the still-dark living room, reading again my old copy of Dispatches from Pluto by Richard Grant because Danny, Judi, and I talked about that book in one of our group’s lazy afternoon snatches of conversation. How does an Englishman living in New York City move to Pluto, Mississippi, and describe the Delta so perfectly, when I was born and raised there and can’t? Danny, career journalist and author of two books, suggested I read another Mississippi-themed Grant work of nonfiction, which I ordered the minute I got home.

In the stinging silence, I latch onto the words stringing across the page: “The sky yawned open . . . the horizons leapt out . . . the light turned golden and radiant . . . the land was as flat as the ocean.” I have a gnawing sense that there are people around me. That I should set my mug down lightly so as not to wake anyone. That any second, someone will walk into the room with a greeting and a hot cup of coffee. I think that’s only natural after spending five days in a rental house on the Alabama coast with seven other people and a dog. This is the family group I used to travel with—from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. To the Maritimes, the Grand Canyon, the Badlands, Yellowstone, down Highway One, up the snow-covered Tetons, even to Area 51.

How times have changed. We used to do wild and crazy things, like riding a tidal bore on the Shubenacadie River, speeding over high sand dunes on the Pacific coast in a dune buggy with a tall flag on back, rafting the raging Colorado River. This year, we sat.

We sat on the beach under a tent. Sat on the deck of our house looking out over the Gulf waters. Sat in the window-walled room of our rental. We relaxed. Some fell asleep, mouths wide open. We ate and drank. Fresh shrimp, coleslaw, pulled pork, pasta salad. For breakfast, Buzzy’s homemade biscuits. For daylong desserts, coconut cake and Mississippi Mud Cake. Iced tea and Riesling from Germany and bourbon slushes. Coors Light, ginger beer. One night we ate at the Sassy Bass grill, teeming with multicolored lights draping the ceiling, big bowl drinks, and waitresses in tie-dye. I had the Gulf snapper and street corn. Nephew Adam, award-winning graphic designer, took pictures of cool, beachy art on the walls.

The next generation—Adam, Chaderlee, Hayley—came on this trip.

First thing in the mornings, I brewed coffee and sat on the deck to watch the sunrise. I walked on the beach with my sister Judi and my dog Heidi to gather shells and see what the night brought in. The hot pinks of sunrise threw colors against the slate and gunmetal grays of the water and across the wet, white shimmering sand. Ragged and muted phthalo-blue clouds lined the horizon, occasional thunderheads, like popcorn, looming.

Days, we watched the white caps and the waves roll in, as we pushed the hair out of our faces, whipped by heavy winds. Waves came in one after the other—swelled, crested, curled over along a horizontal coil of white foamy sea, slapped and crashed onto the churning waters at the base. We drove to the end of the peninsula and toured Fort Morgan. Lee and Hayley put together a 1,000-piece puzzle: theme, Where the Crawdads Sing. Everybody passed the time sunning on the beach, napping, reading a book, or sliding fingers across iPads. Except me. I chose to go unbooked and unplugged. To seek, think, absorb. Maybe to change the way I do life. To prepare for my future by doing what’s best for me and not others who are doing what’s best for them.

Nights, we looked at the bright lights of oil rig platforms and scanned the sky for shooting stars and constellations. We watched the crescent moon. “With my glasses on, I see two moons,” I noted. “Without glasses, I see four crescents.” They told me I better go on and get cataract surgery.

September nights are cool. The days warmed up, though. And the constant and ever-coming waves whooshed in, the sound calming and lulling. It’s like life. The years and days and hours keep coming in as far as the tide allows and then they fizzle and flatten out.

We watched the ships going in and out of the deepwater port at Mobile and identified them at marinetraffic.com. Mobile handles containers, coal, steel, automobiles, aggregates, and forest products like wood chips. We saw container ships, bulk carriers, and offshore service ships and wished for binoculars to get a closer view.

We watched workers from the wildlife service, conducting a study to assess the numbers of Alabama beach mice in the undisturbed coastal fringe of sand dunes, beach grass, and creeping beach morning glories in front of us. Endangered Alabama beach mice struggle to co-exist with new developments along the coast. They’re threatened by extreme weather events like hurricanes, by non-native house cats and native red foxes, and by the use of all-terrain vehicles and other degrading recreational activities. The little creatures come out at night to feed on plant seeds and insects. They forage for food and dig their burrows in the dunes just above the high-tide line and rest in them during the day. They make tunnel systems and living chambers within the root network of dune vegetation and prefer areas with high densities of crab burrows as escape cover. Thriving beach mouse populations indicate healthy dune ecosystems which help protect coastal habitats, especially during hurricanes.

This was all happening under our line of vision between the plastic deck chairs we sat in and the choppy gray Gulf waters. We were not aware that something was churning, chewing, growing beneath the surface.

Crabs bigger than my hand lived on the beach, too. Heidi met a male cocker spaniel just like her—Sonny, who came to the beach every morning on his vacation to hunt crabs. Heidi greeted him, but he didn’t give her the time of day. His daddy said, “I guess he hasn’t got time to think about girls when he’s got huntin’ on his mind.” Heidi never knew it, but as she whiled away time in the beach tent with us and dug and slung sand every whichaway making a hole to stay cool in, her movements and vibrations sent three great big crabs scrambling to the next tent.

This year, we didn’t go ocean kayaking or parasailing. Nothing fast and daring. It was hard enough to walk—to pick up our feet and pull our legs—through the heavy, piled-up sand on the boardwalk from our house to the beach.

We observed nature—jellyfish, pelicans, sea gulls—and the cycle of life, as a gull dipped down and snagged a fish. We even delighted in the mockingbird who came to the deck every morning for the crumbs of Buzzy’s biscuits Judi left out. We initiated conversations with others and welcomed them and their dogs to come visit any time. Tigger, a sable boxer from Little Rock, had already invited himself onto our deck after Heidi yelled a greeting. We looked up things we wanted to know more about on Ipads and Iphones. We soaked in time with the people of our pasts, family, those we share blood and memories with. Things are different now. The world is different. We are different.

We see and do things differently.

We keep on doing what the Alabama beach mice do—prepare and hope for more future.

After the eight-hour drive back home to Nashville, my hands hurt so fiercely from gripping the steering wheel that I had to dig out the joint cream with glucosamine and Boswellia and get out the heating pad.

It’s been one year…

Below is the ending of my long essay titled “Choices.”

June 24, 2022. The Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion, upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists.

            Dissenting justices said that “young women today will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers.” This includes my granddaughter, fourteen, a product of in vitro fertilization, now under scrutiny in post-Roe. “From the moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of,” the justices said. “A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term.”

A state can force her . . .

***

Or her parents could.

The pastor of the evangelical church I attended, late ’90s, asked a couple to come up to the podium and give their testimony about the rape of their daughter, about sixteen. A pregnancy had resulted. The womb-child immediately became the focus of the violent rape-attack.

            This embryo at six weeks was curved with a tail like a tadpole, a crown-to-rump measurement of a quarter-inch, limb-buds instead of formed arms and legs, and a cluster of cells emitting electrical signals that would eventually form a heart. No eyes, no ears, no brain yet.

            The parents of the girl claimed this mere tadpole was life. Their worldview dictated that their child should carry the rapist’s child for nine months, suffer through the agony of labor, and squeeze a watermelon-sized baby out of her vagina.

            Their teen-child was five feet tall, with fully formed arms and legs, a heart that could hurt, eyes, ears, and a brain that could reason and remember.

            The girl—pushed down, forced open, penetrated—had her innocence ripped away, along with her choice of the man she’d make love with the first time, in a traumatic assault that changed her body, her future, her identity.

            But the point remains, the parents would argue: the sperm cell of the fertile man and the girl’s egg cell on a trip down a fallopian tube did nothing wrong, did what nature intended them to do—find each other and join up. The family believed the join-up with its screams and pain and terror was life—a blessing of God endowed by its creator with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Did the teenage girl have those same rights?

            The congregation clapped and yelled “amen” and “thank you, Jesus,” rejoicing that this family protected the join-up, a life. “Hallelujah!”

            An uneasy feeling crept over my goose-pimpled flesh, and my heart vibrated robustly against the bones of my chest. If it had been my daughter . . .

            I wouldn’t have forced her to have a baby. I’d put my daughter first. Her physical, mental, emotional health—first. Wouldn’t anything else be child abuse?

            I mean, this was not like a girl deciding to cheat on an exam or shoplift a tube of lipstick or sneak out and go to a concert. This child didn’t choose to do wrong. A crime was committed against her. And her parents made her serve time for it.

            The pastor invited the girl on stage, her body still misshapen from her ordeal, to stand in front of the cheering congregation to be praised for giving up a year of her life, giving up the sanctity of her body, giving up her innocence and purity, and finally, giving up her baby.

            I hurt for her.

            Silent sobs erupted from that tight place below my throat. I was bothered down where the spirit meets the bone. How did we get to a point in our society where we rank our own living, breathing, beloved child below a criminally induced tadpole?

            At that time, those parents had a choice of how to mercifully handle their daughter’s crisis. Today, parents and children don’t have a choice.

            I left church that day and never went back.

***

In this post-Roe era, I fear for any girl or woman attacked by a rapist. She’s left with the agony of the criminal’s excretion smeared all over her, growing inside her, stamped in her head, and in some places, she’s left with no choices, forced to deal with this the rest of her life.

I am lucky. I had two wanted conceptions, two healthy fetuses, two healthy pregnancies, two healthy babies.

In post-Roe, I fear for any woman who is not perfect—normal and healthy with a normal and healthy embryo and fetus that can be carried to term and delivered as a normal, healthy baby. I fear leaks in amniotic sacs, complications like ectopic pregnancies or preeclampsia, and abnormalities rendering a fetus non-viable. Because women, in some states, have no choices. And nature doesn’t always do what it’s supposed to. If anything goes wrong, women may not be entitled to efficient, standard, lifesaving medical care.

My own state of Tennessee, spring of 2023, had no protection for the life of the mother and had to debate what to do about it.

Women in post-Roe are nothing more than cattle—heifers—all herded down one chute, branded with one religion’s theory of when life begins and a government’s mandate to deliver.

Approaching One Year – another segment of “Choices”

Saturday, it will be one year that Roe v Wade was overturned after decades of fundamentalists looking through their little periscopes at one tunneled, round circle of view at one tiny aspect of a big and complicated and far-reaching issue. I’ve been looking at pregnancy experiences of women in my own family and my own experiences and sharing those here on my blog. This is one more section of a long essay titled “Choices.”

***

June 24, 2022. The Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion, upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists.

            Dissenting justices said that “young women today will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers.” This includes my granddaughter, fourteen, a product of in vitro fertilization, now under scrutiny in post-Roe. “From the moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of,” the justices said. “A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term.”

A state can force her . . .

***

Or her parents can.

The pastor of the evangelical church I attended, late ’90s, asked a couple to give their testimony about the rape of their daughter, a child of about sixteen. A pregnancy had resulted. The womb-child immediately became the focus of the violent rape-attack.

            This embryo at six weeks was curved with a tail like a tadpole, a crown-to-rump measurement of a quarter-inch, limb-buds instead of formed arms and legs, and a cluster of cells emitting electrical signals that would eventually form a heart. No eyes, no ears, no brain yet.

            The parents of the girl claimed this mere tadpole was life. Their worldview dictated that their child should carry the rapist’s child for nine months, suffer through the agony of labor, and squeeze a watermelon-sized baby out of her vagina.

            Their teen-child was over five feet tall, with fully formed arms and legs, a heart that could hurt, eyes, ears, and a brain that could remember.

            The girl—pushed down, forced open, penetrated—had her innocence ripped away, along with her choice of the man she’d make love with the first time, in a traumatic assault that changed her body, her future, her identity.

            But the point remains, the parents would argue: the sperm cell of the fertile man and the girl’s egg cell on a trip down a fallopian tube did nothing wrong, did what nature intended them to do—find each other and join up. The family believed the join-up was life—a blessing of God endowed by its creator with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Did the teenage girl have those same rights?

            The congregation clapped and yelled “amen” and “thank you, Jesus,” rejoicing that this family protected the join-up, a life. “Hallelujah!”

            An uneasy feeling crept over my goose-pimpled flesh, and my heart vibrated robustly against the bones of my chest. If it had been my daughter . . .

            I wouldn’t have forced her to have a baby. I’d put my daughter first. Her physical, mental, emotional health—first. Wouldn’t anything else be child abuse?

            I mean, this was not like a girl deciding to cheat on an exam or shoplift a tube of lipstick or sneak out and go to a concert. This child didn’t choose to do wrong. She didn’t do anything stupid. A crime was committed against her.

            The pastor invited the girl on stage, her body still misshapen from her ordeal, to stand in front of the cheering congregation to be praised for giving up a year of her life, giving up the sanctity of her body, and finally, giving up her baby.

            I hurt for her.

            Silent sobs erupted from that tight place below my throat. I was bothered down where the spirit meets the bone. How did we get to a point in our society where we rank our own living, breathing, beloved child below a criminally induced tadpole?

            I left church that day and never went back.

***

Our Histories Cling to Us

The following is my ten-minute talk at the 2023 Franklin Book Festival, Franklin, Tennessee, Saturday, June 10, 2023.

My longtime genre is creative nonfiction—the writing of true stories using the tools of fiction, like plot, scenes, character development, dialogue, intimate details, and description. My book is Remember the Dragonflies: A Memoir of Grief and Healing, about the sudden death of my husband. After he died, I felt a strong power/voice telling me, “You’ve got to go through this all by yourself and deal with it.” And I did—a straightforward and real approach of walking through the shock and hell of loss and the pain and chaos of grief. It was a journey of feeling the feelings, crying them out, writing them down in blog posts, and clawing my way up the side of a cliff to get out of that dark hole.

It’s a book I didn’t want to write. But women kept saying, I don’t know what I would do if I lost my husband. I didn’t have a choice. It happened. Here’s what I felt and what I did and what you might also encounter.

“OUR HISTORIES CLING TO US. WE ARE SHAPED BY WHERE WE COME FROM.” ~ Chimamanda Adichie

Maybe I became a writer because of my childhood summer visits to my grandparents’ farm in the poor county of Kemper in east-central Mississippi. Hot afternoons, I sat on the front porch with my grandfather and listened to him tell stories. He put himself inside the head of a farmdog or a barnyard mule and related the thoughts and experiences of that animal—feelings, emotions, dialogue, interior monologue, sensory details, and description. An uneducated man put his heart and imagination into creating an effective story in deep POV.  

And there was the land itself—family land that came with a history hidden beneath its surface. My people moved there after a treaty in 1833 sent native Americans west. Seventy-five Indigenous—Choctaw—graves remain there. Each one was marked with a red-iron rock. My people respected those graves, but my grandmother’s brother moved all those stones away. Wiped out history. If I don’t tell what my father told me about the burial ground, it’s lost to future generations.

So there are stories to tell about that farm—playing with cousins and running wild and free—and those are some of the first stories I published back in the 90s. There’s the surface story and the deeper story.

Forming stories is like molding a clump of clay. When you start shaping it, looking at it, thinking about it—THINKING—you start to feel it move under your fingers, you smell the earth in it, you feel the grit. Exactly what did my people do? They took the land from the original people and did it legally and set up their own culture. I’m the fifth generation to own that land—after the treaty.

“OUR HISTORIES CLING TO US. WE ARE SHAPED BY WHERE WE COME FROM.”

We’re shaped by our past, what our people before us did, the experiences we’ve come through, the Place we came out of. That’s where I get my stories. Everything I write is true or based on truth.

Truly, I’m a writer because I was born and raised on the other side of the state from the farm—the Mississippi Delta. A place of clashing contradictions and irreconcilable disharmonies and disturbing history. Where two cultures lived side-by-side in unequal worlds.

I grew up there in the 1960s during the civil rights movement. My life brushed against history. I heard things, saw things, experienced things—things that today some people want to say are not true. Some of you may remember the summer of ’64 when three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi…near my grandparents’ farm. Three months after the bodies were discovered, I stood in the spot where their car was burned, charred branches hanging around me, the tragedy palpable, heavy on me.

I was taught all my growing-up segregated days, We are separate but equal. In 1970 while doing my practice teaching, I sat observing an English classroom in an all-Black school and saw for myself that I’d been lied to all my life.

I was taught by my society, “Sit down, shut up, take what comes to you, believe and accept what you’re told, and for God’s sake, don’t rock the boat.”

I’m a writer because I can’t do that. I have stories to tell. Lies to expose. Truths to claim.

“OUR HISTORIES CLING TO US. WE ARE SHAPED BY WHERE WE COME FROM.”

My newest manuscript, yet unpublished, is a novel shaped by my history. Eva Clare Carlyle returns to her still-segregated Mississippi Delta hometown and becomes best friends with the Black granddaughter of her family’s former household maid. They are brought together for a reason: to stand up against the very thing that separated them during their childhood.

Eudora Welty said, “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.”

Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

As writers, we have the POWER to educate, enlighten, and entertain. To express universal truths. To empower others. To inspire change.

That’s what I want to do in my writing. Inspire change. In me. And in you.

Happy birthday to Baby and another segment from “Choices”

I was pregnant again in 1978, living in a rural Mississippi Delta town with a large indigent population, most deliveries being done by “granny” midwives with no medical training. Early 1970s, this area had the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. Health care received by pregnant women was “deplorable,” said Dr. Edward Hill, local physician and medical director of a midwifery program established in 1973 by the town’s small county hospital and the University of Mississippi Medical Center to offer comprehensive health care provided by certified nurse midwives. While the program was designed to give poor women access to care, others in town with means and good health insurance and the option of seeing an obstetrician in a nearby city—including me—chose to take advantage of this personalized, natural approach to pregnancy care and delivery. 

Kaye was my certified nurse midwife. She informed me in the third trimester that my baby was positioned face up and would need to turn naturally before delivery and come out face down. My first child was also “sunny-side up,” but my obstetrician in the big city hospital in Texas did not know. He induced and left me in labor all day before a nurse discovered the position of the fetus. He used forceps to turn my baby, as I screamed, “You’re going to pull its head off!” My child was born with a cephalohematoma, a condition that causes blood to pool under a newborn’s scalp after a difficult delivery, and a cut from the forceps. This is why I chose nurse midwifery.

During my midwife-assisted labor and delivery in the small county hospital, it was just me, Kaye, my husband, and the nurses. And a doctor friend who came just to be there. I expressed a need for water, and Kaye directed the nurses, “Give her anything she wants.” I liked that. With my first child’s delivery in the big city hospital, I was only allowed ice chips, and I was one of hundreds of women carted from ward to ward for each stage of labor, the women yelling, groaning, pushing, vomiting, bellowing. We lay in beds a few feet apart lined up like fat cows at a feeding trough.

That small county hospital in the Delta closed in 1989; the midwifery program ended. Currently, Mississippi has not only the highest infant mortality rate in the nation, but also one of the highest maternal mortality rates. And the highest rate of premature births which contribute to infant mortality. A March of Dimes report slapped an F on Mississippi for maternal health.

{Read that again and get the image in your mind.}

Yet, it was Mississippi that the Supreme Court looked to in 2022 in order to make best decisions on women’s health care as they decided Mississippi’s court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

***

June 24, 2022. The Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion, upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists.

            Dissenting justices said that “young women today will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers.” This includes my granddaughter, fourteen, a product of in vitro fertilization, now under scrutiny in post-Roe. “From the moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of,” the justices said. “A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term.”

A state can force her . . . ***

Another segment from “Choices”

Following is an excerpt from a personal and family-centered essay titled “Choices.” Next month will mark a year since Roe v Wade was overturned after being the law of the land for fifty years and five generations of women who had efficient and often life-saving health care, choices, and the right to make their own decisions about their bodies and lives. This segment is about my third-great-aunt, sister of my great-great-grandfather. I discovered her secret while doing genealogy. Maybe I should feel guilty for broadcasting it all over the world, but I think it has a message for us today out of the pages of 1861. I don’t want to go back…to men making decisions for women based on their religious beliefs.

***

In the early days of my grandparents’ church, founded in 1850 with several Hardys as charter members, a committee of men regularly chastised members for conduct not in keeping with Christian principles. The committee called the wayward ones to account for their sins—like dancing, card-playing, and drinking ardent spirits. If the accused repented, they remained in fellowship. Otherwise, if they did not make satisfactory acknowledgment, the church excluded them. Booted them right out the door of God’s House.

From Minutes of West Kemper Baptist Church, as is: “Saturday before the third Lord’s Day in April, 1861 . . . After devine service . . . Met in conference . . . A charge was brought against sister Martha Hardy [my third-great-aunt] for adultry, the fact being fully known of her case. It was resolved to withdraw the fellowship of the Church from her, and announced by the moderator that the Church be no longer responsible for her conduct.”

The “fact” was a baby.

Martha, listed as a spinster in family history, got pregnant out of wedlock and got kicked out of the church.

It’s history. It’s real life. It’s the way it was. Many churches followed this practice.

I remember when I was a young teen, my Grandma Nora told me one of the great aunts got knocked up by an Indian chief. Choctaws once lived on our family land; seventy-five Choctaw graves remain on my sister’s portion. Grandma’s legend is consistent with the church minutes.

The churchmen of Martha’s religion gave her no opportunity to repent. She was at the mercy of the holy ones who only knew how to eliminate what they didn’t like.

Would she have fared better if she’d gotten rid of her sin before a bump ever showed beneath her apron? Before the men of her religion had an opportunity to judge her and make decisions for her that would change the course of her life?

Could the church have acted in a manner more in keeping with Christian principles?

Martha had one choice. She raised her child. Her brothers altered public records, hid the truth, reinstated her in the church, and moved her and her church letter to another county.