I Wanted to Be William Faulkner
Without being drunk
Faulkner made me who I am
Famous author William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi reminded me of home. Not the beautiful house I grew up in, in the woods in Indiana, much as I adored it there. But Mama’s family homestead in the mountains of northeast Alabama. And Papa’s Melungeon family’s home in the hills of Tennessee. Places where people did what they had to survive. Dirty or clean. Sweating, praying, building, distilling, sleeping outside with a gun to protect the crops, the animals, the house.
Sleeping outside in the dew to protect the house from being taken by the tax collectors killed one of my Alabama ancestors when it gave him pneumonia. Previous ancestors, related to Jimmy Carter, survived the fires that General Sherman set, killing their animals and crops, burning their houses (and no, they didn’t have slaves.)
Papa’s family of feuding gunslingers were part Black, as that ethnic group, Melungeons, tend to be escaped slaves who hid their identities among the hills of Hancock county, where no law enforcers dared go.
I loved my parents well-turned adventure stories about their families, and I knew all the relatives in the photos, including those who had died before I was born. I knew about the lovable rotund bootlegger…
