Chewing the Heat of Summer
Last Winter, my mother drove us back to her childhood home in Conway, South Carolina; it was the first time I had seen my grandfather in years, and the mood was surprisingly cheerful. We convened on the Hyman’s tobacco farm, comprised of nothing more than soft dirt rows, and the occasional soy bean sprout. It’s nothing like it once was. I remember the bright-star stalks of green tobacco leaves, the yips and screams of slurs that drove through those rows. I remember the first time my grandfather laid his hands on me; it was after my cousin convinced me to grab a hen's egg, and I was only a child. I remember my grandmother’s stories of the domestic violence her husband perpetuated, and I remember the things he told my mother.
The images presented in Chewing the Heat of Summer directly engage with my own understanding of the American South and the cyclical seeds of hate within agrarian communities, all in conversation with those who cultivate it, my own family.
I owe it to my mother, who denounced it, my grandmother, who escaped it, and I owe it to the little boy I once was: a child who cried underneath that lamplit porch in South Carolina, not understanding what surrounded him, and how he was not so different from it.
But that’s the scariest thing about hate, knowing how easily it could’ve consumed you too.
In bruised color, you wait 3 shots through the (his) Monte Carlo door. where you demand to be let in.
from what was left
to what’s remained
from whence it came
and back again.
to the honorable men who tend dirt roads
Reach down and sweep out dusted hands, scrub out your oiled palms,
though they will always smell of tobacco.
And tonight, when you choke your wife, as you always do, the hands that wrap her neck will be much older than your own.
It’s unbearable musk of tanned leaves that fills her lungs,
choking on the plant that keeps her here—and you there.
You’re out of breath and she can no longer hold onto tiled walls,
so wash yourself and forget the prints left on her body; they are not yours to clean.
You’ve had a long night; step outside where retching cries bind to silence; close the screen door.
Roll no filter and take to your harvest. You deserve it.
Look out to the eyes that meet your own, hidden between the gaps of brazen stalks, a windowless spire draped in kerosene,
lonesome hooded men.
Throw a cigarette to it, reveal their cross underneath. Does god call upon this land too?
Come morning, it’s only a five-minute drive to that white house, draped in damnation, to be greeted like the hero you are,
a bible-bound man and his politely quiet family.
Now the body of christ half-chewed in your mouth,
“forgive me father, it was not I who bled you.”
But the wine had already stained your bottom lip.
Does the reverend know whose hand he shakes? Or does he too blame his son’s black eye on happenstance
Bands of soy, cotton, and corn encircling a darkened lumber floor, where the old barn once stood. The same barn that hung tobacco every summer—your little cousin that winter after.
Did his body make it any warmer?
Your wife and daughter escaped soon after, maybe it was the smell that drove them off.
The nauseous odor of tobacco, unable to leave their palms.
noun:
1. a doorway, gate, or other entrance, especially a large and imposing one
Judy, age 13
Karen, age 59