Summer in the Country — Part 1

A mini-memoir story [8/52*]

Heath ዟ
Heath ዟ
Jul 28, 2017 · 5 min read

When I was a kid, I’d visit my aunts, uncles, and cousins in the country during the summer. When I say country, I’m talking the deep south, Mississippi, dirt roads (or gravel if you were posh), pet goats, 3-wheelers with front racks to stabilize a rifle and a deer rack in back, Piggly Wiggly stores, etc. — Redneck USA.

I was the city cousin, considered sophisticated and worldy (as much as those terms could possible apply as a kid), a minor curiosity.

When I was around fifteen years old, I met this kid, Edgar. I think he was about the same age as me. He may have been a second or third cousin, who the hell knows down there, but suddenly I was at the mercy of a country person without a close familiar blood-relative to buffer it. I was officially off reservation.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked Edgar, but some strange shit goes down out in the country and I’d always had a cousin (they all love me, even Galen, who used to beat the shit out of me and his brother on occasion) to steer me clear of the shit my city-brain might have trouble adapting to on short notice.

So Edgar and I were sitting on the front porch of his house. He asked me ‘Hey, do you like to rap?’ Now, rap was a thing, and I wasn’t completely ignorant of it, but (and forgive me for this, it was simply childish ignorance at a time before I was aware of people starting to really explore other musical genres as much as now) Rap was an urban thing that black people listened to. It never occurred to me that this redneck kid was talking about that. If maybe he had said ‘Hey, do you like rap?’ minus the ‘to’ I’d have been a little more up on what he meant.

I answered him ‘well, yeah, sure.’ I always had a broad vocabulary and a penchant for watching television shows and movies that were atypical for my age. As such, I had a lot of outdated, or nearly outdated, phrases floating around in my head. When Edgar asked me ‘Hey, do you like to rap?’ I immediately interprted it as ‘Do you like to chill out and chat about stuff?’

Of course I was down with shootin’ the shit. I was a shy kid, but chatting one-on-one with someone who wasn’t a pretty girl wasn’t too hard at all. Besides, chatting on the front porch, in the country, could sometimes net you some gnarly treats such as homemade icecream, blackberry cobbler, cookies, cake, or maybe a biscuit with some bacon in it (though it usually came with iced-tea, which I despised at that age… I was more of a Kool-Aid kind of kid).

This dude suddenly starts up with something that I now realize was an attempt at free-style rap/rhyme, but which sounded to me, at that time, like he was brain damaged. In my defense it was bad… real bad. Maybe if he’d been any good at it, I would have been less ‘WTF?’ and more ‘uh… okay.’

Realize, now, there was no Eminem. We had Vanilla Ice and the Beastie Boys (respect, but still seen as a bit of a novelty act at the time) representing white boys in rap music. Add to the fact that I lived in Mississippi, land of cultural left-overs, and you may understand how a situation like this had never really coalesced in my mind.

Now, picture a redneck hick kid (they’re my relatives, I can say that) trying to bust out some freestyle… and, I mean, god only knows where he even heard of it. It was bad. I wish I could remember, specifically, but it was some heinous jibba-jabba of the first order.

He suddenly stops and gestures his hand at me. I’m like the fuck you want, dude? but I’m being polite, so I just awkwardly stare from his hand to his face and back again.

‘Take the mic, man!’ I’m telling y’all, there was no microphone! If you’ve ever been dropped into a situation where nothing makes sense, but everyone else seems to be in on it, that’s similar to how I felt. It might as well have been bug-eyed aliens showing up to offer me Cheerios, for all the sense it made to me.

After a moment, I reluctantly took the mic from him. I felt like an idiot, but I couldn’t help wondering is this somehow totally normal and I’m just ignorant? His rap was so bad I couldn’t even tell what it was I was supposed to do. From what I could tell, following his example, I was supposed to say stuff with an uneven and choppy cadence, so I tried.

Naw... naw, man, that ain’t right. Here.’ He reaches over and takes the mic back. This fuckin dude, holding an imaginary microphone, with a raised eyebrow and a look on his face like he just sucked on a lemon, told me I wasn’t doing it right. Let me tell you, that trademark scowl on Ice Cube’s face… it wasn’t always there. It mysteriously appeared at the same moment Edgar was working that phantom microphone and rhyming fuck with pickup truck. Call it synchronicity, call it fate, call it a white dude saying another white dude is responsible for an iconic part of rap/rhymin/hip-hop history, call me crazy, but looking back, Edgar murdered a tiny piece of black culture that day.

I don’t know, man, I never rapped before.

It’s cool. They don’t rap where you’re from?’ Looking back, that was comic gold. This backwoods, camo-wearing, mayonnaise-and-banana-sandwich eating, Country Cornflakes for breakfast, cornbread and buttermilk spooning, barefoot in the Piggly Wiggly walking, boot-scootin-boogey doin motherfucker was seriously asking me if urban culture, which had so obviously reached Neshoba County, Mississippi, had managed to trickle down into the city.

I guess not.

I was saved from further discussion by the arrival of his mother, his sister, and a handful of her friends.

Come on, man, let’s hang out,’ he said, heading in behind them.


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Heath ዟ

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Heath ዟ

https://amazon.com/author/heathhouston — What’s sorely missing from our society today is the imminent threat of a righteous ass-kicking.

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