AM Ringwalt
from
Prose-Space
I was on the couch with Will while our cat looked overhead to the fan spinning around, around, around. A Petoskey stone, a type of fossil from Northern Michigan, hung from the fan on a satin string. The stone was no pendulum. It barely swayed in the fan-moved air. Carrot, our cat, traced the barely-sways with her face, clear whiskers muted by dusk and candlelight. I thought, then: I want to behold everything like this. In active hypnosis.
*
During my first week in Nashville, I conflated the silence of the fan in our living room with the sound of an antique clock in our nearby bedroom. In other words, I thought the clock was the fan. Unlike a traditional clock’s distinct second-by-second intonation, our clock sputtered some digital churn, blurring the space between 10:00, 10:01, 10:30. In other words: the click of the clock reverberated in its wooden shell, allowing each second to cross-pollinate with the last and with the next. The click of our clock was a ricochet, inviting multitudes. If I closed my eyes and only heard the sound, I would think it was every time at once.
*
The fan was silent, our clock ricocheted, and a fossil hung from the fan with impossible stillness.
*
I have experienced space in this way, a site of collapse and overflow.
*
We were going to go to a concert at Betty’s but decided to stay in. My face was on Will’s lap, my legs sprawled across the couch we rested on. I wore a sheer nightgown and robe set I found for $20 at an antique store in Asheville the week before. He opened a website—Folkstreams.net—on his phone. The pink fabric of my robe, somewhere between satin and gauze, clung to the emerald texture of the couch.
*
Across town, unseen: silver tinsel under fluorescent lights, a mouth before a microphone, a checkered tile floor.
*
Instead of going to Betty’s, we watched a thirty-minute-long film on Minnie Evans, a prominent folk artist from North Carolina. The Angel That Stands By Me. Minnie Evans, late in her life and slowly staggering with the help of a gallery curator, ascended a wooden staircase into the room where her work was on display. It remained unclear whether or not the curator filled the walls with Minnie’s work for her arrival or if a retrospective exhibition was underway. For the next several minutes, and with no clarification on the context, Minnie attended to her work as if she’d never seen it before, as if its symbols pulled something out from her. As if the symbols compelled her. Her lips formed a child’s smile. She shook.
*
The Angel That Stands by Me opens with a 16-millimeter film shot of the full moon suspended in blackness. I heard Minnie Evans’s voice before her face appeared in the video. In the progression from moon to Minnie, I felt a connection being forged. She became the moon. At ninety-one, Evans’s voice was certain and slow, delight punctuating each word as if she were envisioning her speech before her. Each vowel trembled in the frame of consonance, in the frame of her mouth. Language activated in her articulation—aural apparitions made visible only to Evans, apparitions she then set out to share.
*
She spoke: The moon was shining, and it drew my attention. In this moment, time gave way to duplicity. The moon of the video, fuzz in film, became the moon from her past. She turned to her past. She wanted her audience there, with her, in a time of innocence. She understood the visionary potential of childhood. She culled a vision of the animals on that ring around the moon, understanding then in her nineties that this vision was particular to her lived experiences. I wasn’t like the other children. I thought everybody could see them.
*
The fan still turning overhead, the emerald fabric of the couch darkening with dusk-light from the window to our left, Will and I watched the artist speak— transfixed. Minnie Evans described a dream. In her sleep, she heard a voice, and the voice asked her: Why don’t you draw or die? Her story was so comforting because it was a child’s story transposed into a mother’s voice, a mother so old her memory was fraying. Her story was a lullaby, warbling vowels as chorus.
*
Later in the documentary, Minnie sat with her sons on a front porch surrounded by green. She talked about how much she loved her sons, and they all smiled back at her. She introduced them to the camera by name and birthdate. She wanted her audience to know who her sons were. She wanted her audience to remember. Despite her sincerest intentions, she got every birthdate wrong. Her sons tried to correct her, quickly realized the futility of correction, and proceeded to smile at their mother as if she were completely correct. I wondered, while watching this exchange, at what point Minnie’s memory began to erode. At what other points her sons chose to affirm her misrememberings.
*
As a child, I’d often ask my mother before sleep: tell me about your childhood.
*
Perhaps Nashville resonated with me as home-space because of the way it echoed my childhood in North Carolina. Perhaps the traces of humidity from the coast of the Atlantic unspooled toward the Cumberland River, inviting me there to stay. Perhaps it was the fact that my parents had lived in Nashville before I was born. Perhaps the residual violence of my mother being held at gunpoint in Nashville demanded my attention. Perhaps it was the fact that my childhood dogs—two basset hounds, sisters, mythic in my memory—were born there. Per- haps, perhaps—I was compelled to stay.
*
Perhaps Nashville resonated with me as home-space because of the sheer lack of experiences I had in its midst. Nashville was a blank for me to move through, unchoreographed: anonymous, unburdened, content in my vulnerability. I entered, through Nashville, an ouroboros: the very sense of space I gleaned from my early days there, a self-claimed sense of space after years of emotional dis- placement, could not—would never—absolve the city from its own colonizing acts, nor my benefiting from the city’s gentrification. In other words: I found my space through another’s displacement.
*
Five Points, a hub off Gallatin in East Nashville, quickly became a haunt for Will and me. To get to Five Points from our apartment, we walked along Fatherland, a street veiled in trees and filled with vibrantly painted bungalows. On our walks, we’d praise the magnolia trees, the cats loping on sidewalks and driveways, children running in front yards with their parents close by. In Five Points, I got a tattoo of a dagger in a shop across the parking lot from a dimly lit bar called Duke’s, I sat in a window-laden café for hours reading books of poet- ry, I met Will at Three Crow for cheap wine and late-night conversation. Later, I’d learn that the city center became what it was after a 1998 tornado gutted its infrastructure. Once a lower income neighborhood, the destruction the tornado yielded became a green light for developers; as investors came running, its residents and once-homeowners could no longer afford to stay. New roofs were erected, a new foundation for the social framework of East Nashville solidified.
*
My summer movements, manifold and maximal, rarely gave way to stillness. Summers, in the past, were times of collection and connection. I gathered emotional and sensory impressions to unfurl, through writing, in the coming fall: the drive to Southampton like driving toward the end of the world (the monotony of trees and sun and smooth paved road), my mother cutting strawberries in the morning before anyone else woke, my friend Amandla brushing her hair before a mirror.
*
This summer, I’d planned for the pattern of moving—again—but as the season drew near, I felt myself pushing against the current of routine. Each movement was counterintuitive. My body grew fatigued. I imagined attaching myself to the landscape, the yellow light on the hills. How could I fix myself to fleeting light? Will and I had plans to drive twelve hours east of Nashville. We would meet my parents on the coast of North Carolina, where I was late to see their new home. In the car, I watched us move away from East Nashville, onto Ellington Parkway, and past the fog as it clung to the trees beside the interstate. I was hypnotized by the fog, the way it hovered like oval mirrors, like portals (to where?).
*
The drive conjured something delirious in us: in the vigilance traveling demanded, in the exhaustion resulting from sustained motion. Will commented, as we drove away from our home state, on the way the air smelled in Tennessee, as if each leaf of every tree opened itself up and ushered forth some earth-rich perfume. You could smell it through the barriers of the car, if you paid close enough attention. And I did: like a handful of blades of grass turned to poultice in my palms, held up to my nose, and slowly inhaled.
*
We only stayed in New Bern for the weekend, and we filled our time with returns: driving past my childhood home, walking along the river, connecting memory with experience. The moss I marveled over as a child hung from the same trees, two decades later. I remembered buying peanut butter candy at the pool with a handful of coins, walking in between rows of trees with my brothers, dancing in my childhood home for anyone who would watch. I wore a long-sleeve black velvet dress on the beach, my impractical uniform. I caught a minnow and named it Emily. My mother told me I remembered far more than my brothers, each insignificant moment piling up in near-symbolic import.
*
During our visit, my parents drove with Will and me along the coast. Out the window of the car: Spanish moss, a graveyard, centuries-old homes gutted by Hurricane Florence. Statues of metal bears at least twice my height. I noticed the way in which the water level of the river aligned perfectly with the paved river walk, teasing overflow with every movement of wind. I noticed molding paint on wood panels of the homes, chipping paint on the wood panels of the homes, the momentary dormancy of the river. I noticed the threat of the river, the wind, or both.
*
My mother told me, during this drive, that she believed I had a twin who died in the womb before birth. This was the first time she’d ever said anything about my maybe-twin. My father looked out the window, making a sound to indicate either a breach of secrecy, or perhaps disbelief. But my mother spoke of blood.
*
I was breech in the womb, and my mother was bedridden for weeks before her obstetrician rotated me. Did I hold my maybe-twin while upside down in the womb, one half? Did my maybe-twin die as I turned? If not then, when?
*
I believe my mother because she felt all of my movements. I believe my mother because she, herself, believed. I read, later, on that emerald green couch: my mother my mirror.*
*
I didn’t fully understand why my parents chose to return to New Bern. Over the course of several phone calls leading up to their return, we talked about the damages riddling the small coastal town they called—even from afar—home. We had spent nearly two decades in Wisconsin, a small city on Lake Michigan. My mother scoured properties for sale online from the safety of our once-kitchen table. She wanted to move to the historic downtown, into a small collection of streets parallel to the Trent River. After the hurricane, we shared photos of water rescues. A woman standing in a street flooded with waist-high water. We talked about the odds of a few homes surviving the storm without sizable damage. Much to my disbelief, she found a surviving home.
*
My family never had a traditional sense of place. As a child, I had dreams of living on a street which housed all of my family and closest friends. I kept note- books with diagrams of who would live where, and I said their names aloud before sleep each night. Some kind of incantation. My father was born in Sacramento, California, my mother was born in Ashland, Kentucky, and they met as college students in North Carolina. To pay for his medical school, my father joined the Navy. He completed his residency at a naval hospital in Oakland, where my older brother and I were born. My mother worked at a law firm in San Francisco, taking the Bart across the bay each day. Before I turned one, we moved across the country to New Bern, where my father would try his hand at another naval hospital. My younger brother, Kurt, was born there. Bodies of water folding into each other, Pacific into Atlantic.
*
When we moved just years later from New Bern to Racine, my mother’s hair began falling out because of the stress. Her southern accent somehow remained, as if in protest of the climate. My southern accent, only years old, faded away over the course of my elementary schooling. We needed better financial security, and the Midwest seemed to offer that. The Neuse River and Trent River of New Bern, the Atlantic Ocean, swiftly transformed into Lake Michigan, the Root River. Humidity-aged trees draped in Spanish moss transformed into unwavering pine. We had never lived anywhere cold in our lives.
*
During the winters of my childhood, I collected deposits of ice as if they were rare crystals, carving patches of snow to hold them like museum display cases. During the summers of my childhood, I collected rocks on the shore of Lake Michigan instead of seashells. Dolphins in the Atlantic became freighter ships on the horizon of Lake Michigan.
*
With each move my family enacted, space collapsed. I related to each new environment through memories of the last overlaid on the present. I paid less attention to the organization of streets, how to navigate practically, and attended instead to the color of the fur of the cows in the field (like amber with specks of near-black soil suspended in its formation), the density of wild honey, the disappearance of humidity in exchange for frost, what plants my mother filled her garden with, the movement of families on Main Street.
*
Still, I had panic. Some nights at the dinner table, I convinced myself that I forgot how to chew food; I felt my tongue defamiliarize in my mouth, my teeth grow soft, my lips slack. Some nights, I’d lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling, imagining it magnifying above me, shooting skyward. I didn’t know how to articulate this; even the act of talking became stunted in paralysis. I’d turn to sleep as an extension of the outdoors, turning back to foreign slopes and roadside cliffs, bodies of water. And before sleep, I’d call out to my mother from across the house, begging her to sit beside me in bed as we recited the names of our loved ones aloud, more spell than prayer. Only then would my voice come back.
*
As a six-year-old in Racine, I found my mother planting jasmine in our backyard. We used to have heights of wild jasmine in New Bern, our whole yard perfumed. If the flower could survive in both climates, I thought, surely the spaces were connected in a metaphysical way.
*
I turned, eventually, to favor the idea of space over place. Space echoed, and empowered, subjectivity. If you, reader, asked me to describe the space of Nashville, I’d say something about the freedom I felt and reverberant magnolia and (again) the yellow light before sunset. If you asked me to describe the place of Nashville, I’d say something about the neighborhoods, street names like Fatherland, public libraries off of Gallatin Road. If space was of subjectivity, place was of practicality.
*
My parents were lucky, to be sure, to find their new home in New Bern not beaten by the extreme weather. Since the city was founded in 1710, most of its homes reflected the architecture of earlier centuries. To maintain such a home, its owner had to be affluent enough to constantly tend to its interior and exterior, everything microscopic and everything macroscopic. My parents’ new home, built in the Victorian era, was the result of tireless care from its prior owners. Though past floods haunted the city, the wooden beams of the porch weren’t damp, the roof was metal and sloped to free the home from parasitic water. My parents could, thus, return to a space as safely as possible.
*
Nearly twenty percent of New Bern’s population lived in poverty. The lack of affordable housing, compounded by Hurricane Florence, displaced swaths of citizens. The historic homes that were affordable, converse to my parents’ new space, were the result of neglect. Foundations were unsteady, black mold took its grip on the water-damaged structures, roofs were weak. Homes like these, already vulnerable before the storm, became uninhabitable—if not destroyed—by the biblical flooding and hundred mile-per-hour winds of Florence.
*
During the storm, a shelter was discovered to have black mold. Its inhabitants, already displaced, were further evacuated. Even a shelter displaced. The question remained: should one find shelter in an uninhabitable place? The answer, always: not everyone had a choice, not everyone had an option to leave, not everyone had another space to return to.
*
Before the Civil War, New Bern was home to the largest number of free black people in North Carolina.** Beginning in 1881, George White served in the State Senate and in the House of Representatives, where he was the only black representative. He worked to appoint more people of color to federal positions. He introduced the first bill in condemnation of lynching.** He was swiftly driven out—not just out of Congress, but out of the South as a whole—by a white supremacist campaign against the purported “domination” of people of color in US politics. The next black congressman, not just from North Carolina, but from all of the South, wouldn’t be elected again until the 1960s. When George White left for Philadelphia, he said: “I cannot live in North Carolina as a man and be treated as a man.” He lived on the street my parents do now.
*
After Hurricane Florence, the New York Times published an article on a public housing community along the Trent River in New Bern called Trent Court. One of the building’s occupants, Keisha Monk, was pictured standing outside her front door, her one-year-old son in her arms. She looked down at a pile of her family’s ruined possessions. A mattress lay water-logged and bent on cement, its metal frame strewn atop it. Monk described her family’s pre-storm life as heaven. Still, even a year before the storm, the city housing authority deemed Trent Court uninhabitable. As Florence hit the coast, eight feet of water flooded through its apartments. Monk moved her children into one bedroom in the upstairs of her unit to minimize their exposure to mold. She wore a mask over her mouth around the home. While being interviewed for the Times, she asked: “Can you smell it?”
*
Some people wanted to seize the riverside land of Trent Court for redevelopment. Some people wanted to build new public housing further away from the river. Some people wanted to turn the site into a public park. A year after the article was published, Trent Court still stood. I walked toward it one afternoon, framed by the river and the moss in the trees, unsure of what would happen next. Whether demolished for new faux-Victorian homes, or the ideal of a public park, the evacuation enacted by ruin would shape the space of its future inhabitants. I imagined how else Monk’s question could be voiced, in erasures by roses or by trees, a park reaching toward the river, the sea—Can you smell it? The violence of development, the material waste necessitated by it, spatial memory forced into collapse, and replaced, the homeless flight.
*
In their new home, my parents could look across the street from their front porch to the small preschool I attended as a child. The playground, shielded by an aging wooden fence, had a forest green plastic slide. Monkey bars. I remember mulch underfoot. I remember thick and near-wet air. When I was young, my mother gave me a hippopotamus pendant necklace made of fake silver. At recess, I’d stand on the playground and hold the hippopotamus in my hands, whisper- ing secret messages to my mother.
*
I trusted that, no matter where she was, she’d hear me.
*Book of Mutter, Kate Zambreno 192
**Exploring Everyday Landscapes: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, Vol. 7
*** New Bern Historical Society