On Magnolias and Going Home

There is something about going home to Alabama, the trek to my mother’s adopted birthplace, that feels like a pilgrimage. Greeted at the end of the sojourn by my aunt, a steely white haired grandmother, she always stood hands on hips on the back porch of her mobile home next to the magnolias. Imbued with ease and grace, she was the refuge after the past year’s turmoil. She stood resolute and welcoming: a reminder that all was well, and if it was not, she would make it well.

Evelyn Anne Hudgins McCain could hold her own. A daughter of an abusive father, a sister of five, a mother of two girls, a grandmother of four boys, and the adoptive grandmother of myself, my own siblings, and many more Cedar Bluff children, she had learned to stand tall despite her five foot frame.

Raised by my grandmother, Ms. Jo, Evelyn was the first born child in the Hudgins family. Ms. Jo spent most of her years of motherhood ill, fighting both emphysema and what was referred to at the time as manic depression: known today as bipolar disorder. She birthed six children, three sets of two, each ten years apart, and my mother, the last of the six, was only discovered in the midst of an aborted hysterectomy. Evelyn Anne, twenty two years of spitfire and gumption, was already a mother herself when Ms. Jo soldiered through her exhaustion and her middle age to deliver my mom.

My mother, known as the “Kitty Cat,” was the youngest of six and a precocious child, as the last child often is. She grew up alongside Evelyn’s daughter, as an aunt to a niece older than herself. Ms. Jo’s frequent hospital stays punctuated Kitty Cat’s elementary school years, and once, hushed whisperings about Ms. Jo’s submerged car, the alcohol in the passenger seat, and the empty road. After fifty years of poverty, depression, and isolation, Ms. Jo lost her battle against her own mind and her own body.

Evelyn Anne, ever the grounding force, was thrust into premature matriarchy. Evelyn deftly sewed together the seams of a torn and threadbare family, exhausted by loss and uncertainty. She bore her appointment as refuge well, rescuing my mother and uncle from my grandfather’s drunken rage with unconscionable frequency. She planned and prodded and patched and prevailed, even against the same mental illness that plagued her own mother.

In response to the disruption and devastation of her family structure, my mom became adept at hiding her emotions. The dusty South, with its rumbling thunder clouds and deceptive calm, is akin to my mother. A product of the region, my mother was cheer captain, fast food worker, dirt bike rider, and valedictorian of her high school class. She was never what she seemed.

Rather, she was a living contradiction and case study in resolution and determination. At seventeen, she moved herself to New York, spent nine years working full time to attend college part time, moved away from her family yet again, raised three children of her own, battled mental illness that has followed the women of her family, wrestled with autoimmune diseases, and survived a separation from her husband. And throughout, she has remained the resolute refuge, following the example set by Evelyn Anne.

To this day, my mother is a magnolia — her roots running deeper than the lake that she skied. She is the image of grace, grit, and gratefulness. She is home, as Evelyn was home, as Ms. Jo was home. Going home to Alabama means going home to my mother, the woman who raised me, and to the women who raised us both, and to the magnolias.