Family Trees

Although, admittedly, I take some enjoyment in satirizing some of the more absurd behavior of the American Shintoists, I must also confess that we do share an area of common interest—family trees.

I guess the most significant one for me was a huge mulberry in my backyard when I was a child. It's trunk had the girth of three, maybe four, John Candys (who has unknowingly, but deservedly, replaced Orson Welles as the international symbol of immenseness), and its three main branches formed a comfortable pocket in the middle of the tree, where an eight-year-old boy could sit unperturbed, far away from all the monotonous insanity of the adult world. It was white-washed up to about four feet, because my grandmother said it would keep the ants away. It did work; however, there were always little worms all over the ripened mulberries that I had to thump off before I ate a berry. Sometimes, I'd bring some mulberries home and put them in with my corn-flakes and milk. Sometimes I'd forget and leave them in my shirt pocket. Perhaps I was the unwitting inspiration for tie-dying. But most of the time, the mulberry tree served as a sort of natural hideout when I played cowboys, soldiers or pirates. It once even became a real-life sanctuary, after I, in Calvinistic fashion (the evil cartoon character kid, not the religious philosopher) blasted by friends' annoying cousin with my dirt shotgun. This weapon was a BB gun with the inner barrel removed, filled with dry, dusty dirt. I can remember how cool ("cool maybe be historically inaccurate, since it was 1948, and unless I was a jazz enthusiast , which, of course, I wasn't, I probably said something more like "nifty" or "keen") I thought it looked when I pulled the trigger and the dust could billowed out of the barrel just like in the movies. I also remember how scared I was when I realized I had actually shot someone, albeit a mere granular stinging on the legs. She, of course, complained to the parental authorities. (Yes, I shot a female, and no, I did not become a serial killer, a wife beater or a professional wrestler.) Eventually, I had to come down from the tree (I was starving and a man can't live on mulberries alone). I confess to my transgression, but I cannot even remember my punishment. My mother's discipline strategies were so mild and ineffective, that until I experienced the pain and degradation of my first year at The Citadel, I thought I was a sociopath since I had absolutely no fear of the consequences of my actions. Still, I never shot anyone else after that and have only an intractable writing style as the most salient legacy of a permissive upbringing. I enjoyed many more afternoons in the mulberry tree and even now cannot think of the house without also envisioning the tree. I sometimes feel an urge to crawl up in it in stressful times, and, in fact, checked it out a few years ago—out of nostalgic curiosity of course—only to find asphalt and cars where it had been.

My father's side of the family also had an important tree. It was an enormous chinaberry in my grandmother's back yard in the rural town of Summerton, South Carolina. It didn't have a natural sitting area in the middle of it and I wasn't able to climb very high in it. I did sample one of its berries once and found out right away why no one ever bakes chinaberry pies or puts up chinaberry preserves. Roseanne Barr coming off a five-day fast wouldn't eat one.

Unlike the mulberry, things happened under the chinaberry tree instead of in it, and they were usually of the painful growing experience variety. Two have always remained wedged tightly in my memory bank, and they both involve my grandmother's black cook, Ethel, a wonderful, ebullient person, who, because of yellowish skin, almond-shaped eyes and bowed legs, I always thought looked more Asian than African. I was about four years old and was playing with some of my toy soldiers under the tree when I noticed Ethel coming out of the chicken yard holding a chicken by the neck and a large machete-type knife in the other hand. The chicken was squawking loudly (and perhaps nervously in hindsight), when Ethel suddenly stopped and started swinging the bird about over her head like some sort of a living noise-maker. The poor creature eventually became silent, thought it did not seem dead, as Ethel placed it on a tree stump and then, without hesitation, whacked off the bird's head. I'm sure it's one of those cases of recalling a child's imagined perception of an event rather than the facts, but I can re-envision the chicken's headless body fluttering about the yard, spewing blood and feathers everywhere.

In my later years of memory delving I have recreated the Ethel under the chinaberry tree, with her Asian features, as a Samurai warrior, in full battle armor, emitting some sort of Kung Fu Theatre scream as her gleaming sword chops into the stump and the poor chicken begins its death dance. (Sometimes during late November reveries, the chicken becomes a Gamecock.)

I ate fried chicken that night at my grandmother's house, my guilt and remorse for the chicken quickly succumbing to Ethel's superlative culinary skills (more fodder for my sociopathic personality diagnosis). Ethel ate heartily, too. Perhaps we were both sociopaths.

The second impressionable event that occurred beneath the chinaberry tree, as I mentioned, also involved Ethel. Emerging from the kitchen door one day (the tree was right outside the kitchen), I noticed a grey galvanized tub (the kind people used to wash clothes in prior to washing machines. We used them mostly to put crabs in when we went crabbing) on the ground. Upon closer investigation, I discovered the tub was filled with water and swimming around in its one foot depth were three or four frightening looking fish. They had long whisker-like appendages and they, too, had a sort of oriental Fu Man Chu (Fish Man Chu?) appearance. Anyway, Ethel told me they were catfish and to stay away from them because they might hurt me. A warning from the imperial chicken executioner should have been sufficient for any five-year-old, but still I wanted to get a real close look at these things. Retribution for my disobedience was quick and semi-voluntary, as in bending over the tub too far, I lost my balance and fell face first into the vat of lethal fish. I instinctively closed my eyes and waited for the lash of poison-barbed whiskers and the tearing of flesh from my face. Instead, I only felt the powerful hands of the Samurai cook (No, I don't know if that's where John Belushi got the idea) as she yanked me, gasping, from the water. Fortunately, my mother waived her most draconian punishment—the reduction of my dessert from cake and ice cream to cake or ice cream only (I was given the choice)—conceding that the accident was punishment enough and the only untoward side effect of this happening was my new sobriquet of "Fishface."

Briefly, I pondered why Summertonians don't have glass aquariums with goldfish—like people in Charleston—but my excogitation was interrupted by Ethel once more as she deftly grabbed each wiggling fish out of the water, flopped him on a picnic table and whacked off his neckless head. Just as with the luckless chicken, their crispy remains appeared on our plates that night. Ethel and I again ate every morsel—remorselessly. The chinaberry tree is still there. Ethel isn't, but I still cannot think of one without imagining the other. I don't really understand the significance of my family trees and the interconnected human phenomenon—I'll leave that to my analyst, or even more properly, my psychogeneologist, but then I'd have to be completely deranged to go to a psychogeneologist—Does anyone know a good one? I can only assert that they are important landmarks in my life.

But now that I have revealed this erstwhile latent fixation with my ancestral arbors, Middletons, Rutledges, Pringles and others of their illustrious ilk can be assured (or as Hans and Franz would say, "Hear me now and believe me later") that I will never cast rebuke upon theirs.