Lucinda Williams

After the release of Lucinda Williams’ memoir, “Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You,” Wyatt Williams explores the family stories, Southern territory, and distortions of memory that her songwriting evokes.

My mother was born in New Orleans in 1953, the same year as Lucinda. Her father, Jack, was a drinker. They lost their house in New Orleans when she was 5 or 6 years old, evicted, probably after he lost another job. They moved just across the state line to a little house on the coast in Mississippi. Her youngest brother, Stephen, was so small they put him in a dresser drawer on the backseat for the drive over. Jack would drive back into New Orleans on occasion for odd jobs. They were Irish Catholic and, for a few years, a Catholic school in Bay St. Louis allowed her to attend for free on account of being poor. Jack didn’t stop drinking. When he beat my grandmother, sometimes my mother’s half-brother Parker would try to stop it. Stephen drowned in a fishing pond. He would have been maybe 2 years old. In 1965, their house in Mississippi was destroyed by Hurricane Betsy, and Jack left. The order of events is unclear now, but they both happened that year. My mother saw him only once again before he died.

The strange part about going through a house destroyed by a hurricane is how much of it is still there but in the wrong places. The roof is still there, but in pieces in the yard. The windows are still there, but they’re in shards in the sink or scattered on the floor. The stuff is all moved around inside and bloated full of floodwater and made unrecognizable. It gets to be hard to remember where things were supposed to be in the first place. And then there are other things that are just gone, disappeared with the water or the wind, and it becomes hard to say if they ever were there to begin with.

As I understand it, my mother felt some responsibility to try to help keep things together for her mother after Jack left, after the storm: cooking, cleaning, helping keep after her younger siblings. She was 12. Parker worked on shrimp boats for a while, bringing home the occasional sack, until he left for California to play pool. There were some beautiful moments: She snuck into a club to see Otis Redding. On holidays, her mother made French bread dressing with oysters from the Gulf. She told me once that the purest feeling of happiness she’d ever felt was being a little girl on the coast with her brothers, making mud pies in the pluff.

I’m not sure if I can remember my mother’s mother; if I possess any real memories of her or if they are invented ones that my mind has made out of old, weathered photographs. But if I can remember her, I would remember the deep folds of her skin in the sun on a beach in Mississippi. She would have been sitting on a folding chair, smoking long white cigarettes, and her mind would have been long gone and absent from Huntington’s disease. She died a couple of years before my parents split up. I have no memory of any funeral.

Anyway, the year that I remember hearing Lucinda’s voice for the first time would be the same year that her album Sweet Old World came out, and I know this because I can see the cover of the cassette in my mother’s car. I have that memory clearly. I don’t think I’m inventing it. The album’s title track is a tender melody sung in direct address to a ghost, Lucinda naming the things in the world that a man left behind by killing himself:

The breath from your own lips / The touch of fingertips / A sweet and tender kiss / The sound of a midnight train / Wearing someone’s ring / Someone calling your name … See what you lost when you left this world / This sweet old world

But I remember the drives that year more than the music, the sound of Lucinda’s voice more than the words of her songs. The highways in South Louisiana are never on solid ground for long. They curve up and over the water. Maybe you already know, but the maps most people see of Louisiana are all wrong. Half the drawn land has washed away. Maybe one day it’ll all be water. Some people call the stretch of highway we were living by in those years the spillway, just south of Lake Pontchartrain. When floodwaters come up from a storm surge or a high river flows down after the winter melt, it all spills there under the raised highways. There are alligators and cypress trees and flatboats and fishing camps on stilts. All visible from a car window, just passing by, listening to Lucinda. My mother married a man in Florida a few years later, and we moved again, and I didn’t see my father as often after that. 

The songs we hear as children end up being a lot like our fathers; we go on hearing them in our heads even when they’re not around. 

I still listen to Lucinda with my mother when we get together. The music is a clear part of my memories with her. It would’ve been in St. Landry Parish, after her second divorce, when she had moved back to live in Louisiana again, sitting in rocking chairs on her wraparound porch and looking out at the retired racehorse in the far pasture. It would’ve been around sunset, the low golden rays cutting through the limbs of a live oak in the near pasture. Spiderwebs over the outdoor speakers. Drinking beer after work. Not saying much, just listening to the songs. Lucinda’s voice filling the distance: “He had a reason to get back to Lake Charles / He used to talk about it / He’d just go on and on.” There were stacks of firewood and a crooked barbed wire fence and a rutted-out drive leading down through a line of oaks. The only way I know to describe the beauty of this place is to name the things in it.

My mother, between drags on a cigarette, asked, “Who would ever talk about Lake Charles that way?” 

Lucinda Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a few months before my mother. Lucinda’s father, Miller, taught poetry at universities. The family moved a dozen times over the course of her childhood — chasing short, bad teaching contracts back and forth between college towns in Iowa, Mississippi, Utah, Georgia, Louisiana, and farther south to Chile and Mexico. Her mother, Lucy, was a drinker. They were often short of money, sometimes borrowing bread from the neighbors to eat. Like my mother’s little brother Stephen, they used a dresser drawer instead of a crib for Lucinda. Lucy was medicated with lithium, among other things, and prone to mood swings and deep spells of depression. Miller would blame Lucy’s slurring and incoherence on the medications, not the alcohol. When an incident with Lucy would become too much — “yelling, screaming, cussing, throwing things at my dad or at the wall” — Miller’s best solution was to take the kids out to play Putt-Putt golf. He once found Lucinda, 3 years old, alone and crying, locked in a closet by her mother. Lucinda was kicked out of high school and never finished. Miller remarried and eventually settled into a nice university job in Arkansas. As an adult, Lucinda continued her father’s pattern of moving regularly, never sticking around for too long, adding more places to her list: Houston, Austin, New York City, Los Angeles, Nashville. She has said that for most of her life she felt most at home when in no place at all: in a bus on the road, in a hotel room, on another stage on another night.

But in her songs, she returns again and again to the same territory, setting her words in the same familiar places. One of the more common observations about Lucinda is her gift for singing these place names. On her masterpiece, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, this is the order in which they arrive: Macon, Jackson, Rosedale, Mississippi, Algiers, Opelousas, Louisiana, Lake Charles, Nacogdoches, East Texas, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Lake Pontchartrain, Heaven, Greenville, West Memphis, Slidell, Vicksburg. No one sings these words like Lucinda does. When she names them, she makes them her own. There are plenty more in the rest of the work: Beaumont, La Grange, Pineola, Subiaco, Thibodaux. I could go on. You get the point. She’s made it clearly. Draw a line that starts in East Texas and runs through South Louisiana and over the river and up through the Delta all the way to Memphis and across to the Ozarks in Arkansas and back down to Texas again. Add in the afterlife and that’s her territory. 

There are different names that could be given for this territory, this place she sings about. A good one, I think, would be the idea of Louisiana. (That comes from a thing she once said to author Bill Buford: “All my old boyfriends were in love with the idea of Louisiana, and they’re dead!”) A few other artists have worked with the idea of Louisiana: You can glimpse it in a couple of Les Blank’s documentaries. It’s in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms but not really in the other novels. You can hear it when Clifton Chenier squeezes his accordion. You can taste it, maybe, if you are standing outside somewhere eating with your hands and the food is dripping a little down on your feet. But you can’t actually ever go visit it, because it doesn’t exist. Lucinda’s territory isn’t what’s drawn on the map, not exactly. 

Buford wrote that her songs are “relentlessly about pain or longing or can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head sexual desire, but most often they’re about loss, and usually about losing some impossible fuckup of a man.” And Robert Christgau noted that her music “achieves its perfection by being more imperfect.” She has won or been nominated for more than 15 Grammys, received several lifetime achievement awards, been compared to Billie Holiday, and called “one of the great geniuses of popular music.” When The New York Times asked Steve Earle to describe her voice this spring, he said, “Have you ever been in New Orleans or Mobile or someplace really far South when the gardenias start to bloom?” I don’t detect any lies. If anything, I’d say her critical reception is an understatement. 

If this was one of those stories written on the occasion of her memoir, Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You, now would be the part where I would begin to describe the book and the body of her work and maybe digress one or two times to a wider context as a way of making the case for her being as important as any of the great songwriters of our time (yes, including Dylan), which is how I feel. To be honest, though, I don’t care much for that sort of explanation or whether you agree with me about her status in the canon or not. The other stories can give you those things. The occasion that I want to tell you about is how I got a PDF of Lucinda’s memoir on the third of March this year and kept reading it over and over again for months, often sitting at my dinner table in Iowa City alone and late at night and listening to her music very loud until I fell asleep in my chair. Other times I was sober in bed, quietly making notes on the pages I printed out. Other times in a clawfoot tub with my thumb on a phone, trying to keep my hands dry with a towel. You could call what I was doing research — I certainly wish I could bill by the hour for it — but you could just as well call it a séance. I was looking for ghosts. I can’t tell you exactly why I spent so much time doing this over and over and over again. Sometimes I felt so physically sad from the work of dredging these things up, whatever it is that Lucinda’s voice can draw out from me, that I had to stop myself and try to forget the whole thing. I’d listen to Lightnin’ Hopkins for a few days, feel a little better, and then eventually go back to Lucinda. 

This is a foolish way to spend your time — going back night after night to the lonely well of your pain to have another drink — but show me a single Lucinda fan who hasn’t done it on occasion. It was winter in Iowa, and I was feeling a long ways from the idea of Louisiana. I might have been under the spell of something else at the time (a woman from Mississippi; other troubles) but I couldn’t explain any of that or say much about it if I tried. What I tried to type out on those nights instead was something about Lucinda’s approach as a poet: the way that, when you can’t exactly explain what you’re thinking or remembering without getting it somewhat wrong, or when the thing you’re trying to explain is inexpressible, sometimes the only way to do it is to just name your world: the places and people and things in it. Sometimes that can be the only way to explain it. 

A friend, the writer Noah Gallagher Shannon, recently told me that while he was studying at Columbia University, one of his journalism professors, Sam Freedman, brought in a copy of Lucinda’s lyrics for “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” as the lesson for the day. The gist of Freedman’s lesson as Noah remembered it: “Look how much she’s doing with so little.”

Like many of Lucinda’s songs, that one is hardly more than a list of unexplained things: the scent of a simple breakfast, the crunchy sound of a rural drive, the names of the singers on the radio, the objects seen out a window, a screen door, a curtain, a suitcase, some voices and “stories nobody knows,” a little girl, dirt, tears. When we were discussing it, Noah posed a question that seemed to him almost too obvious to even ask, “It’s an abuse song, right?” Not that abuse or trauma is ever mentioned, just that everything around it is named. The song works because of what is left unsaid.

Lucinda tells a story about writing that one, that she tried out a version at the Bluebird Café, a thing you do when you’re still working on something in Nashville, on a night when Miller happened to be there. Her father approached her after the show and apologized for her childhood. She says before that night she didn’t even really know what she was writing about, that she was just trying to name a few things that a 5-year-old girl might notice. She didn’t know it was about her own trauma until her father recognized her in it. 

“When I was growing up, I never saw any families really enjoying their children,” she writes in the memoir. “I remember thinking as a teenager, ‘Wow, nobody seems to like having kids. Nobody seems happy having kids. It’s a burden, not a joy.’ It seemed like everybody would rather be partying and fucking each other freely.”

“People think musicians are wild and crazy and drunk and fucking each other all the time. Musicians are nothing like writers, not even close, from what I’ve seen,” she writes.

Lucinda often tells stories about Miller as a way of telling something about herself. One version of her origin story, an explanation of where she and her haunted, beautiful voice came from, is an anecdote her father often told from the months before her birth. Miller was apparently fanatical about Hank Williams and went to see him play one night in late 1952, when Lucy was pregnant with Lucinda. Miller would later go on to be an influential man of Southern letters, the author, editor, or translator of 34 books, the inaugural poet for Bill Clinton’s second term. But that night in 1952, Miller was just a fan who introduced himself after the show and convinced Hank to drink with him at the gas station next door. They talked for some time, maybe about growing up in the Great Depression, maybe about making it out of rough circumstances and into a better life; maybe they shared in some shop talk, just two South-obsessed poets talking about writing. In Miller’s many retellings of their conversation, he would claim that Hank had shown him some truth about his soul, about being from the South. 

What exactly Miller would claim Hank had said that night depended on who he was telling the story to. In an obituary written by Philip Martin, Hank’s advice for Miller was abbreviated to just two words: “Drink beer.” Martin notes that, if this was actually the advice, Miller didn’t take it. He preferred 1.5-liter bottles of chardonnay. 

The more elaborate version of Hank’s advice, which Lucinda reworks in her memoir, was a message about dualities: “to be able to accept and move in both the world you were born into and the world you found on your own.” A few weeks after Miller and Hank met, Hank would get into a fistfight at a bar in Alabama, followed by a bender in the backseat of a Cadillac (drinks and pills and two shots of morphine from a doctor) on the way to a New Year’s Day gig in Ohio that he couldn’t play because he died first. Lucinda writes, “I was born three and a half weeks later.”

What to make of this? I mean aside from the suggestion that Lucinda is maybe the reincarnated soul of Hank Williams. What is she telling us about herself by retelling her father’s stories? Is it maybe that the recurring character of her songwriting — a wayward mystic poet from Louisiana or somewhere nearby who cannot stop poisoning himself with drink and drugs and the impossible problem of being a man — was chosen for her by her father long before she was old enough to meet that character again and again in life? She doesn’t say that exactly. Just that somewhere in that messy story, within the different versions of it and the said and unsaid things, that’s one place where Lucinda’s voice might have come from.

If there is anything that gives us access to the afterlife, why would it not be music? Music, which has no visible presence despite being unmistakably there. Music, which cannot be measured for value or well understood intellectually. Describing a song as you heard it one afternoon years ago is no different than the problem of trying to describe an encounter with a ghost. So why wouldn’t music be the way that we talk to our dead? 

I’m not saying that Lucinda Williams possesses the spirit of Hank Williams’ ghost. I’m also not not saying that. There are an awful lot of ghosts in her songs, both speaking and being spoken to. We know a few of their names. 

There’s the poet Frank Stanford, whom Lucinda met because of her father’s literary circle in Fayetteville, Arkansas. At the time, Stanford was married to the painter Ginny Crouch, living with the poet C.D. Wright, maybe seeing Ellen Gilchrist on the side in New Orleans, among other affairs. Lucinda saw him for a couple of months before he died. She received flowers from him on the day that he shot himself: “I don’t know if he sent them on the same day or the day before or what. I got the flowers, but I never saw him alive again.”

Fourteen years after Stanford died, he appeared in her song “Pineola,” along with her father in the opening lines, the pop of his final gunshot preserved in the song’s opening snare hit:

When Daddy told me what happened / I couldn’t believe what he just said Sonny shot himself [pop] with a forty-four / and they found him lying on his bed 

It seems almost impossible that someone could spend 14 years writing 34 lines of poetry. But one of the things to understand about the work is that it isn’t as much about putting down words as it is about learning to see, reteaching yourself to look at the world, your own life, and find the shapes and patterns. There are other men in the songs. Some are still alive. Some aren’t. Telling about them and their troubles is a way of telling about herself.

The man who loves Lake Charles in Lucinda’s songs was named Clyde Joseph Woodward III. Lucinda writes that she mostly didn’t know he was a drug dealer at the time, that he mostly kept it hidden from her. By the time she picked up the phone in a motel room in 1984 and heard a man on the other end of the line say, “Where’s my fucking money?” she knew it was time to end it with Clyde. 

She tells us that they attended the memorial service for Lightnin’ Hopkins together, that they spent weeks at the Chelsea Hotel while she was recording demos in New York, that he could move as easily in the white-tablecloth world of well-to-do New Orleans as he could in some dive in Acadiana. He also possessed what she calls “that cycle of death” and accounts for his fondness for chasing alcohol with uppers. Clyde died of cirrhosis seven years after she left him in 1991. Near the end, when Lucinda heard what kind of shape he was in, she got on a flight, but by the time it landed in Texas, he was dead. It might not necessarily have gone that way. In one song, he shows up and appears to offer her a suicide pact. Or maybe it isn’t suicide, maybe it is just his idea of fun: jumping off a bridge together. 

In the other song about Clyde, she sings about riding around with him in a yellow El Camino, listening to Howlin’ Wolf, on the road from Lafayette to Baton Rouge. She says this guy, Clyde, likes to make a stop in Lake Charles. On a map, this makes no sense at all. Lake Charles is west of Lafayette, and Baton Rouge is to the east of it. There’s no way to stop in Lake Charles on the way to Baton Rouge from Lafayette. But in other ways, this makes perfect sense, because there isn’t a single person in any of her songs who has ever taken the road in the right direction or gotten anywhere on time. 

One of the things Lucinda admits in her memoir is that some people don’t remember Clyde the way she does. They describe him as a clumsy bully, someone who was styling himself as her manager but only ever getting in her way. That he was a distraction and impediment to her art. That anyone else could see the enormous amount of cocaine he was doing, the erratic mood swings that came with it, and that she wouldn’t let herself see that until later. That he doesn’t appear that way in the songs, that we are able to understand Clyde as beautiful, that we are able to see him as she saw him, that we are able to encounter his myth redrawn into her territory – that is her rare gift.

The ghosts that haunt her later work are often her parents. It’s her mother’s Christian guilt in “Louisiana Story.” It’s her father’s thoughts dissolving into air in “Dust.” It’s her mother’s funeral all over West. The way Lucinda describes her mother, though, she was a ghost long before she was dead:

“At Christmastime, … I walked in from outside and a figure appeared in the hallway. It was Mama in her nightgown. I could smell the alcohol coming through her pores. She motioned to me, as if signaling something. She managed a half smile. I waved back. She wanted me to know that she was there.” 

When I think about where Lucinda’s voice comes from, the deep roots of it, I’m reminded of a definition for the blues that Dr. Cornel West once gave to the filmmaker Astra Taylor: “The blues, my kind of blues, begins with catastrophe. Begins with The Angel of History in [Walter] Benjamin’s Theses, you see. It begins with piles of wreckage. One pile on another. That’s the starting point. The blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed.”

When I was a kid, the only adult I knew who would admit to believing in ghosts was my mother. She said the old house we’d lived in when I was little had had one, that she had seen it herself. 

A few years ago, I drove to Baton Rouge just to look at the old house, but the place had been torn down. If there had ever been a ghost, I wouldn’t have known how to see it anymore. The property was just a patch of deep, green grass, some broken cinder blocks, and a magnolia tree that wasn’t how I remembered it. I knew that magnolia was tall — 30 feet, maybe 40, maybe the largest tree in the world — and the thing that was standing in its place was all wrong and puny and small. Maybe just 15 or 20 feet. Seeing it like that didn’t change anything about my memories. If anything, I thought maybe the magnolia was misremembering itself, getting its own story wrong. I knew how tall that tree was. 

There are a lot of theories about what trauma can do to our brains, how it rearranges things or gets passed from one generation to the next. Medical literature is full of them. I don’t pretend to know which ones are right. I get their descriptions of it mixed up with my own: an inability to recall, a loss of memory, an omission or distortion of events, a mind responding to stress or pain or trauma and trying to leave out certain parts that keep coming back anyway, a repetitive rewriting of an event to dull the emotional response, the white-hot pain that keeps returning, a set of fragments reorganized, the desperate desire to refocus on pleasure or beauty instead. 

I grew up hearing about the idea of Louisiana from my parents. One of the places in their memories was a dance hall in Cankton, outside Lafayette, called Jay’s Lounge and Cockpit. In the stories my mother or father told, it was a long, low building that they would enter through a door in the middle. To the right was the bar and the stage and the zydeco band. Whoever was playing would play all night. Jay’s wife, Marie, would walk around the room with a cardboard beer box stacked with tea sandwiches — she’d even cut the crusts off — that she handed out for free. But to the left, through another door, they could get to the other half of the building, which was a lowered pit with a concrete pedestal where cockfights happened and people made bets on the roosters until dawn. 

I would tell you that maybe this place wasn’t real, but Hustler sent a reporter down to Jay’s to watch the cockfights in 1978 and came back with a story that said bets on roosters in St. Landry Parish were reaching $70,000 on the big nights. You can look up the old gig posters to see all of the famous names who played there: Clifton Chenier, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Marcia Ball, Ernie K-Doe. There’s vague mention in the piece of “prominent country-music stars” who brought their roosters around those parts for fights. George Jones owned a house not far from there. 

The cocks that lost their matches and bled out in the pit would get plucked and go into a gumbo pot at the end of the night or at dawn or whenever the band and the fights stopped. It’s unclear when the cockfight gumbo would have been served. The version of the story that my father likes to tell is that the sheriff owned the place and that’s why it never got busted. Sometimes people tell lies in places like this, but it’s usually because lies can be a more interesting way of telling the truth. These are just myth-place stories, the idea of Louisiana. At least some of this paragraph is true. 

Most Christmas mornings for the past couple of decades, I’ve made the same drive that Lucinda and Clyde take in “Lake Charles,” from my mother’s house in St. Landry Parish outside Lafayette, where we would have a long Christmas breakfast, to my father’s house in Baton Rouge, where we would have a long Christmas lunch. This isn’t far at all from where Jay’s used to be. The drive shouldn’t take much more than an hour, but I don’t think I’ve ever done it in less than two, sometimes three. There’s a gas station with a backroom casino off one of the exits that stays open on Christmas morning. There are no windows and hardly any lights aside from the machines, so even at bright noon it can feel like midnight. The same woman has been working the Christmas shift for as long as I’ve been going. She sells Budweiser, a dollar a bottle. I’ve never seen another woman in there aside from her. It’s a place for the kind of fuckup man who, in a best case scenario, might end up dead in a Lucinda Williams song. I like to pretend that I don’t belong there, that I’m not like the other quiet guys distracting themselves from whatever is wrong with their lives by losing money in a back room on Christmas morning, because I only ever hang around for long enough to lose 40 bucks. 

When my mother and I lived in Florida after her second marriage, she got tested to see if she had inherited the gene for Huntington’s disease. The DNA had only been identified a few years earlier and testing for it was not common. But she wanted to know if it was coming for her. She was getting to be the age when the disease had started to destroy her mother’s brain. The test came back negative. It was meant to be a relief for me and my sister — not only that our mother did not carry the gene, but that we wouldn’t have inherited it, either. We never talked about what Jack had, though. There’s no test for that disease, I don’t think, except life. 

A few years ago, on Christmas morning in 2018, I hit $500 on a lucky bet at the gas station casino. I hung around a little longer, only because that’s the polite thing to do, cashed out, tipped the waitress, and said Merry Christmas. I haven’t been back since.

I quit my job in Atlanta that same month and moved to Bali, which is as far on this planet as you can get from that gas station. There were some days over there that I entertained the idea of never coming back, one way or another. What I found in Bali were beautiful people who grew rice and liked to go to cockfights on the weekend and barbecue pigs and make moonshine and play music and believe that there was little barrier between our physical world and the one of ghosts and spirits. What I mean to say is that I glimpsed just a fraction of the enormous beauty of that place, and all my heart could recognize in it was the idea of Louisiana. I knew then that I would never escape it. 

I moved back in 2020, ended up just on the other side of the river in Mississippi with a group of friends. The water was high that year and the casino had to bring in pumps to keep the river out of the gambling floor. We caught catfish on trot lines and cut them up and fried them for dinner night after night. We foraged for mushrooms and picked buckshot out of wild turkeys and soaked their breasts in buttermilk, and on the very best of days, drove over the bridge into Louisiana, where a drive-thru liquor store would sell double-strength frozen daiquiris in Styrofoam cups, and we’d drive home drinking with windows down as the sun set on the river bluff. I’m leaving out a lot of parts of this story and telling some of it out of order and don’t particularly care if it makes sense. There was a blond woman from Mississippi I fell in love with on account of her voice; it didn’t work out. But if you asked for an explanation why I love this place, the only answer would be just the same as why I hate it. There aren’t enough hours in the day. 

At some point while working on this story, I reached out to Tom, Lucinda’s manager, to see about talking with her. I wasn’t sure what I’d ask. I tend to think, for her at least, it’s all there already in the work. I’ve grown suspicious of my instincts to ask artists to fill in the details that they leave out of their work, all the more when omission is part of their beauty. Maybe we could’ve just talked about the blues, if Dr. West’s definition of it would be her definition for what she does, too. Honestly, I considered telling her about that woman from Mississippi, asking if she had any idea what to do about it. Maybe there was the thing that Bill Buford had put at the end of his story about her, about the incompatibility of happiness and making art, about needing to be unhappy and alone to write well. I did want to know if, after all these years, she thought he’d gotten that part right. I only wanted to ask that question for selfish reasons, because I can’t seem to figure it out for myself. But it didn’t matter, anyway, because Tom and I couldn’t make it work.

The person I had a real question for was my mother, anyway. We don’t call each other often. I don’t visit home much. I’ve made up excuses. But I called her on a Friday afternoon and told her I’d been writing this thing about Lucinda and for some reason that had made me think about her and her father, Jack. 

“That’s odd,” she said. “I don’t even have a picture of him.” 

I said that it had never occurred to me to feel anything but hate for him, but I’d never met him and he was my grandfather, after all. You get to a certain age and start worrying about the things you didn’t know about that you might have inherited. You start to wonder if there’s some kind of test for it. I asked if there was any other way to see it, if there was anything at all good or beautiful she could remember about him. If I was missing something. If she could name a single good memory with him. She didn’t have to think about that for long. 

“No,” she said. 

But there were other beautiful things, and she said she could name some of them. Her grandfather, who taught her how to grow vegetables. And the dresses her mother sewed because they could not afford to buy them. The embroideries they did together. And the way being hungry can teach you how to cook. Trapping rabbits and climbing trees. How much her mother loved to read. That maybe her story about Otis Redding was only half-true. The corner of Carrollton and Palmyra. The sacks of shrimp that Parker brought home from working on the boats. She went on naming these things as long as we talked. Oak trees hanging over the road. The pluff mud and that rotten smell. The seawall. The water.

Wyatt Williams is the author of Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating. His essays have been published by The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others. His work has been supported by awards, fellowships, and residencies from MacDowell, the University of Iowa, Hambidge Center, the James Beard Foundation, and others. Over the years, he has been employed as a restaurant critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a rickshaw driver, and a welder. He is currently the CLAS Visiting Writer in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa.

Find this and other amazing stories in Issue No. 6