The Tobacco Farm (Momma Chronicles)

 My mother has been dealt a distinctly cruel hand. She grew up mean, in the hollers of Pennsylvania, my rustbelt madonna. They passed her and the seven other kids she shared peeling walls with home to home, from town to town, somewhere they won't be found. Nobody really looks for girls once they're gone, not poor girls like her, you know? It started when she was three. With small hands and feet, soft red lips and hair the same shade as mine. Maybe she was younger, it's been 68 years now. My mother's mother is the antichrist. Dead wrong and dead evil, the old bitch was. She's been dead for years but her restless soul keeps me awake at night, and I think of the grave, and I think of digging her up, and I think of putting a stake through her heart. Three is when my mother's mother first almost beat her to death. I can imagine my mother's frame, lilac bruises down her white legs, curled up that night with a spine bearing the walls of hell. Pennsylvania has always put a sour taste in my mouth, between the high-grass and the look in a baby's eye.

When my mother is furious, which is not uncommon, I can see something behind her rage. There is a craving to put her hands on me, which she never really does and I say a merciful prayer, and I know where that hunger comes from. Starving girls don't stay full for long. My mother's mother beat her half to heaven more times than either of us could count, with a hand on her throat or her ass against a wooden chair. Her father was there but her only raised a pinky when my mother was being laid in the grave. Then he'd stop her, carry my mother off, let her bleed on the floor. I cannot stop hating them all. Every single one of them, every parent and aunt and uncle and grandparent, who watched suffering before them and focused on the suffering in the bible. I hate them all, I want them all to see her. To see what she made, what she is now. My mother has never been well. I've never been well. Nobody in this house has ever been well, and it's what they did to us. It's this disease in our blood and they gave us it.

When I write I find myself in a state of realization, typically about how American I am. I know they kill their children overseas, and smoke packs of cigarettes, but I cannot find the words to describe Appalachia to anyone who has not stepped foot in the heart of it. For some Appalachia is an oral tale, for my mother it is her maker. It'll probably be her killer. Now about the cigarettes, my mother first took that habit up when she was thirteen. She wouldn't stop for what, 40 years? Once I was home sick from school, and my father urged me along on a car-trip to pick my mother up from the hospital. When she got in the car there was hushed discussion, then she said in this low-tone thinking I couldn't hear, "I can't believe it's cancer." I could believe it. They stuffed that nicotine down her throat and laughed when she couldn't breathe, and I knew that, even as young as I was. That happened to children out there, in the wild 60s, where nobody could keep their footing. There was nobody to stop them, either.

Let me tell you a tale. When was my mother was around my age now, let's say 14, they sat her down at the kitchen table. They hated her then, they really did, and I hate them for hating her. She was so small, then. I didn't stain her, nobody did, she was pure. They told her she'd being sent to a summer-camp. I can see the light in her eyes, the distant excitement, did she know? Did she know how much they hated her? They sent her to a reform camp, a 5-days of the week tobacco picking farm. Early waking hours, late shuteye. My mother sunburns easily, and that summer she must've been ripe as a tomato. When my mother works out in the yard I wonder if she remembers how the plants looked, blowing in the wind, while her heart ached. All the girls were thin then, small and light. She laughed when she told me the following story. At night the girls shared names, places of origin, stories of their own hell - all that. They'd have seances, try to speak to the dead. They'd whip out a makeshift ouija board, try to summon JFK. That made me giggle when she said they'd always talk to him, but he never talked back. Typical presidents. They'd make a girl levitate by each placing two fingers, their middle and pointer, beneath the girls hips and slowly raise her up. That's what she said the second best part was, you know. The girls she locked hands and hips with in the dead of night. I wonder if they sung, I wonder if they cried. I wonder who kept her warm.

When that summer came to a close my mother was sent back to Pennsylvania, without a dime to her name. Their labour wasn't unpaid, however all the earnings went straight back to the parents. They promised she'd see the fruits of her effort when she returned, but she never saw a lick of that money. Do you want to know what she said the best part of that summer was? My mother had three sisters then, and the place they were stationed at had a barn across the road. A fancy car in the loft, waiting upon it's repair. The two youngest girls climbed into that loft once night and struck it ablaze with a pack of matches. The car destroyed, the building in ruins. That's what happened, that summer, and my mother wasn't there to witness it. That's what she said was the best part, not being there. She couldn't be blamed for it. They couldn't take her by her hair and beat her blue. She was two states away on a tobacco farm. That's the best part she said, of that horrible summer, not paying for what they did. They couldn't get there. They couldn't kill her on the tobacco farm.