Foggy Mountain Breakdown
My mom grew up in the dirt poor suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, and that's where I was born. My mom never knew her dad. My grannie took up with a young scruffy traveler and carried my mom out of wedlock. My mom doesn't say anything about those days, and she's the kind of quiet steady person you don't ask. I don't know her dad's name. I don't know what he looked like, what he liked to eat, if my mom ever met him for coffee and sausage and grits and told him of her life and husband and children. But I do know one thing. I remind my mom's family of him.
When I was a kid my Kentucky relatives scared me. We rarely visited them. I can count six times I saw them during my young years, and each time was a cigarette fishin' pole biscuit haze with my dad sitting outside, far away, with the newspaper and a radio and my mom eating southern deep fried donuts and drinking Tab in the kitchen while my sisters and I tried to play with southern deep fried cousins we couldn't, didn't want to understand. I remember my grannie holding court at a card table, Schlitz beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, slurring her words, blowing smoke and laughing. The right side of her face didn't work, it drooped from stroke, eye melting into cheek melting into lips like a wrinkled moist trout. My granpop, my mom's step-father, never spent much time with us. He'd go fishing or to the track to place bets on sleek ponies. He drank dark liquid out of a silver flask he kept in his back left pocket.
One summer we spent a week in Kentucky while my dad interviewed in Tennessee and West Virginia. My mom drank more Tab in the kitchen with her step-sisters and my sisters and I sat on Great Aunt Stella's front porch and drank limeaid and ate biscuits with strawberries and cream. Aunt Stella wore cat-eye glasses rimmed in rhinestones and sported the biggest, wobbliest cauliflower wart I ever saw on her red chin. Liver spots and raised veins and deep lines criss-crossed her hands, nightmare hands, and years later my sisters and I would use eyebrow pencils and mascara to draw age scars like Aunt Stella during Halloween.
"Birdie," she said, over and over, "you shore like music, don'tcha? You're just like your grandpappy. You have his eyes, hon. He'd come singing those mountain songs. He was Melungeon, you know." Aunt Stella shut up when grannie or my mom poked their heads of the house next door. She hummed to herself and rocked in her small wooden chair, making a scrape, scrape, scrape sound against the gray and uneven wood slats of the porch. My sisters and I fanned ourselves with handmade paper fans decorated with bits of stray red yarn. "Yup. You shore take his features, hon."
The next day I asked my mom what Melungeon meant.
"Where did you hear that word?" My mom's voice was sharp and direct, so unlike her normal southern comfort. "Did Aunt Stella say anything to you?"
"No, ma'am. I just read it in a book, that's all." I didn't get an answer.
The rest of the week my sisters and I played hide and seek in Aunt Stella's overgrown tomato beds and caught tadpoles in jars, let our feet dangle in the rushing creek, felt the algae and minnows and smooth rocks, let that water run over us. We ran back to the white lurching house in bare muddy feet, waited for dusk to catch fireflies, ate pickles wrapped with cheese. I heard Aunt Stella whisper something to Aunt Mary and Cousin Margaret, whisper something like "Birdie, Melungeon, just look at her eyes, listen to her sing."
And yeah, I sang, sang songs from the radio about rollerskates and keys and long gone wrong and bits and pieces of that Kentucky country music so new to me, music I didn't hear where we lived in the cold north. My sisters didn't sing except in church, my mom and dad didn't raise the roof with yodels and bumps and grinds like me. What's a Melungeon, I wondered. Aunt Stella made it sound like a bogeyman. She said it the same way she said "colored."
The last night of our Kentucky visit we didn't chase fireflies. The sky brimmed with strange green black clouds and the rains fell in torrents on the tin roof. I remember my grannie making me and my sisters hide under a table while a siren blew and blew and blew. Tornado! Tornado! The rain fell forever, my back was cramped from the table, and I had to pee, oh I had to pee, rain please stop! And then I heard something small, something beautiful. It sounded like a guitar or a harp, but twangy, and fast, and I bolted from under the table to the bathroom. Sitting on the waiting folding chair next to the bathroom door sat an old man with a banjo. I could barely see him in the dark, but I could tell his eyes were closed and his mouth was raised in a lopsided grin. He picked a song, something sweet and quick, and he said in a low rumble, "Don't be worrying about the storm, dear. Just sing and it will pass. Music makes all things pass." I ran back to the table. I forgot I had to pee. And I sang the songs I knew until the storm passed.
The next day as we packed to leave I asked my grannie who the man with the banjo was. She looked at me like I was crazy. "Ain't no one play banjo here, Birdie." She waved goodbye with her cigarette as our station wagon pulled out the drive.
The next week I sat in the town library and read about Melungeons. Just people in the mountains, I thought. Why'd Aunt Stella get in such a huff? And ten years later, during a tornado spot in my life, I bought a banjo at a pawn shop and taught myself Red River Valley. I still play it today, all those songs, me and my banjo and my lopsided grin.
2:16:00 PM 
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