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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780814258507 |
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Publisher: | Ohio State University Press |
Publication date: | 12/05/2022 |
Series: | 21st Century Essays |
Pages: | 192 |
Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Generations (Like Surrender) We're several miles from town, Post, Texas, where there's nothing much but cotton and the sky, and all around us it's the bare-slate land I'd once called home. I'm visiting from what feels far away-the Metroplex. I've ridden out with my father, and his, to load a couple of cattle into a trailer. (And it takes no time to realize that I feel like less a man out here.) I don't belong, I think. Not here, not anymore, at least. Anyway, I sure don't look the part: black jeans hug skinny to my legs, undirtied and near brand-new; my white Converse, the most worn part of me, appear stain-spotted gray along their sides; and my blue t-shirt, a hug against my belly, is just a shade or two darker than the bright sky that holds solid above us. It's the one constant, I think, the thing about this place that hasn't changed, that won't ever: that sky. (And the country-here-now, I think, it makes me feel so small.) I'm 26, and like a child, I'm stepping back to watch the work. My father's found an old plow part. It's sizable, near rusted. Half buried in the dirt. It's settled near the base of the leaning yellow house where we've stopped to get the trailer. Where several generations of my father's family learned to work, and hard. There's a picture of them here, what's tucked, yellow-faded, into one of my grandmother's many picture albums. It's the first generation lined and coupled up together, standing by the porch. My grandmother has made it her aim to document her family and her husband's family's history-our history-and she taps the corner when she pulls the photo out and shows me: 1925, it says in chicken scratch, above the sepia earth. The men wear suits with vests or else something close: a dark pant with a dress shirt and a tie, and they look, I think, like men. Two women of the three wear white dresses where the matriarch wears black, and every dress meets skin or dark hose at just below mid-calf. All eight of those standing in the photo arch their shoulders forward as if some great weight has settled at the very moment they've been captured. Their row of faces stare toward the camera's lens, and the biggest smile is hardly one at all; their eyes must face the sun as they squint, tight, and their mouths appear as solid lines to match them. Even the youngest of this group-or the one who I imagine must be: the girl on the left of the porch's steps who can't be much older than 16, maybe 17-her body appears to struggle against itself, as if she's working to hold herself up from something unseen-some force that's pulling down and tying her to the earth. The man who stands up highest, on the first step of the porch beside his wife, he has my father's hands, and his father's hands. It's a small fist curled at the edge of a dress shirt's cuff-a tint darker than his face-cracked and lined with dirt. Now, all these years later, my father's father-the man that I, my sister, my cousins and our parents all call Grandaddy-nearing 80-he helps my father raise the piece of plow. The movement shakes off dust, or well enough, so that it powders down and back into its place like snow. I step forward from my lean against my father's truck-what's bright, bright red, and, still, what's somewhat new to me-longing to do something, anything, with my hands. But Grandaddy waves me off with a nod of his head. And my father waves me off with a nod of his head. And the motion makes me wonder how they see me. If they think I might get hurt. (They're gentle signs, I think. But there they are.)
Table of Contents
Part I
Exodus 3
Knowing Me, Knowing You 5
The Howling-Out 28
On Roadside Crosses 32
Generations (Like Surrender) 69
Part II
What We Are 81
Part III
Baptism 101
Axis 107
Blurs 123
Child of the Clouded Brow 133
In Case You Find Us Unresponsive 149
Part IV
Coda 171
Acknowledgments 177