The Rocks

My essay, "The Rocks," will appear in the Chattahoochee Review's spring issue as the Lamar York prizewinner for nonfiction. It took two years and a great deal of research to complete, and I'm not sure if it will ever really be finished. The essay is about seven graves on my grandmother's property and the family lore that surrounds them. The research took me through Reconstruction Appalachia, introduced me to two women (both single mothers-one my great, great grandmother- whose husbands left them with children to raise and farms to tend), and led me to a startling revelation in my own DNA. Here's an excerpt:

"The graves are slightly rounded or squared, setting them apart from the others because that is all the memory that sharecroppers could afford in Reconstruction Appalachia. No words or dates speak from the stones about people who once lived and worked and loved, and no flowers are there to prove that someone loved them back. So the woods took them in, blanketed them with leaves, and protected them with a fortress of briars and fallen limbs braided by wind. Underneath the graveyard ivy, the dead leaves, and a hundred years of soil there are bones angled into moist ground where they settled like a long, tired breath after the wooden coffins returned to the earth.

Family lore could not explain why the rocks were there, but older folks were sure that they belonged to freed slaves who had once worked the cornfields down below, just seven among the hundreds of enslaved people who once lived here. I have often wondered if their story was conjured, like the ghosts my great-grandparents described as we sat on the porch in the summer’s gloaming, fireflies pulsing around us. Was the story a way to anchor tales to family property that we would someday inherit, lest we ever think of selling?

The rocks hunkered in the shadows of low hanging branches several decades after I saw them as a little girl. And in all that time, I never thought to ask questions of the one living person who knew the most about them."