The Southern Gothic Childhood that Kickstarted a Cult

Southern Gothic is our trademark and birthright around these parts I call home. We grow up with all sorts of misfit neighbors and kinfolk. Physical and emotional maladies seem to sprout like kudzu. From deaf-mutes to necrophiles, religious zealots to amputees, we have it all. We can’t make this shit up. 

But we can put it in our fiction. Just read Faulkner and Flannery, Cormac and Carson and see if we don’t.

And me, I will use it too - but not as fodder for fiction. Instead, it’s on my menu for memoir. 

Now, thank the good Lord, there was no necrophilia in the dark recesses of my childhood. But, true Flannery style, we did have a Bible salesman: my father selling scripture to anyone he could hold captive. And there was a prosthetic, too - just not from an amputee. And there were leg braces, straight-up Forrest-Gump-style. Oh, and there was plenty of twisted scripture...  

Sometimes people with the best hearts can make the worst choices. 

A Wheel of Fortune contestant said that line jokingly about his wife marrying him, but it got me thinking about my father and the choices he made so long ago. Choices that sucked him - and us right along with him - into a spiritual cyclone of unbelievably destructive dimensions.

Growing up, we lived in a brick ranch on a dirt road just east of the Ole Miss campus. There was a carport off the kitchen, a horse shed out back, a fern gully due south, and blackberry brambles as far as the eye could see. Our neighbors consisted of a one-eyed man who struggled with alcoholism, a couple of naked hippies, a random homeless grad student, and lots and lots of snakes.  I’d say all that qualifies as a veritable cornucopia of southern gothic ingredients.

Technically speaking, the road we lived on was gravel, but I remember one spring it rained 92 out of the 90 days and the gravel all washed away. Front porch mudslides and a mud bound Volkswagen bus became our new normal. That season, we lived on hot pickled okra and well water until my mother hitched a ride to the local Jitney Jungle atop a backhoe just to grab some peanut butter and bananas. 

Now, I told you there’d be a prosthetic in this story, and I don’t lie. (I may embellish, but I never lie.) The heavy drinker - the one over the gully and through the mud? He had a glass eye, and any given night, he’d wander our way and knock on the carport door. If I answered, he’d knuckle his eye out, pop it in his mouth, and roll it around on his tongue like a jawbreaker. Then he’d spit it out and offer it up to me. I had wet-the-bed night-terrors over it. 

I’ll call him Shine – if not for the prosthetic spit-shines, then for his moonshine pilgrimages. You see, Shine would show up looking for liquor or ladies, or both, almost every single night. It got to where Mama was afraid to answer her own door. 

If Daddy was home, he’d carpe the diem and minister to Shine’s soul. I think that’s where his passion for scripture truly set fire. My father was fairly lost himself at the time - his own father having recently passed - and I’ve heard an existential crisis like that makes a body vulnerable to cultish ways. 

Regardless, there in our kitchen, my dad would fire up the Holy Spirit and force-feed scripture and coffee down Shine’s throat till he got a bellyful and went off in search of other spirits. 

Now Shine wasn’t the only strange and suspect man we’d find in our kitchen back then. The grad student studied physics by day and lived in his car in our side yard by night. Every morning, he’d steal into our house to swig milk straight out of the wax carton. 

I was a toddler then, in leg braces. (Told ya.) Dr. Stone told my folks I had some sort of rotational deformity, so I wore the human equivalent of a leather and metal horse harness every night. I wasn’t allowed in the kitchen until my mother unshackled me every morning. The screws in the feet chewed up the linoleum, leaving Mama in a tizzy. 

I’d watch the grad student quietly from the hallway as he unfolded the spout and chugged away. I did a whole lot of watching back then and not a lot of talking. Every single thing about him was disheveled. His head, with its matted tufts of hair, his chest, with its pale, pudgy flesh, his Hanes briefs, with their drooping posterior.

He drove my mother crazy. But he was my father's most faithful disciple - somehow fascinated with Daddy’s frenzied spiritual awakenings. As far as my father was concerned, this man could do no wrong. 

Those naked hippies though - Dad made it pretty clear they could do no right. They lived on the other side of us from Shine.  Of all the neighbors, they scared me the least and Dad the most. 

To me, the most fascinating thing about them wasn’t their nakedness, but their giant outdoor waterbed. It sat about thirty feet from their back porch, hidden by jutting canna lilies with giant purple stalks and flaming red tips. The flowers sheltered the hippies from view when they laid naked in the sunshine. 

I watched them from a rusted-out Chevy perched among a mess of brambles at their tree line. A sapling had sprouted through the floorboards and crept through the passenger window. It housed a whole lot of spiders, an occasional garden snake - and me. From my vantage point, I pretended I was a member of the Swiss Family Robinson surveying the island’s inhabitants in their natural habitat.  

I don't remember him much, just that he had long, lanky limbs and hair. But her, she was an Ole Miss beauty queen drop-out with caramel skin and honey hair and, according to my father’s definition of hippies, a love for mind-altering substances. 

She once gave me a Mrs. Beasley doll from Family Affair fame. It had a blue polka dot body, frizzy blond hair, and a non-functioning pull string. This Ole Miss Beauty Queen was probably twenty years my senior, but to a 5 year old, she became my closest friend and the closest thing I will ever know to a goddess - or a hippie, for that matter.

There were other people in my life in those early days, too. Every Wednesday night, Dad hosted prayer meetings in our living room, where he strummed his guitar with a pick and sang Delta Dawn with my mother. I don’t remember much about the folks there. Just that they were mostly college kids who probably wanted an A in my father’s physics lab. 

Daddy often prophesied about the end of days and always shouted in tongues. There was also some laying-on of hands and some casting out of demons. It all fell just short of snake handling, though.

So, there you have it. The southern gothic roots that propagated my father’s crazy, cultish curiosity with off-the-grid faith -- a faith that grew exponentially in the coming years, from bible studies in living rooms to mass exodus in moving vans. 

Before I was scarcely out of my scooter skirts, Daddy - along with dozens of other pater familias across northern Mississippi - had gathered up their children and “chester” drawers, their bird dogs and buckshot,and set off for the promised land of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. 

There were no dry creek beds or blackberry brambles for me to explore there, no gravel roads or outdoor water beds. While there was a brick ranch, it wasn’t nearly enough. My uprooted Yoknapatawpha soul soon failed to thrive in that parched and painful place, under the parched and painful faith of my father.   

But that’s a telling for another time. 

My childhood, and all its flagrant and fine-tipped grotesqueries, proved fine fodder for a future writer. And it all stemmed from a good heart making irrevocably bad choices...

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