Of South Carolina

By Tyla Parks

I saw my cousin get baptized in my aunt’s swimming pool in South Carolina.  After the white robes were stripped off, we disturbed the still waters that ran deep and created waves of chaos and fury.  I had chaos because I didn’t understand how my words jeered their ears.  “Ma’am” and “sir” were words that never crossed my lips when addressing my elders.  “What” was a word prohibited in the southern home, “hey” was seen as obscene and unfit for mouths that spoke order into existence.  My grandmother pulled me aside and asked that I adapt to these manners.  A big asking when you were raised with northern “heys” and “whats” and “hi’s.”  With “what ups,” “yeas,” and “okays.”  “Yea” was a word that got beaten out of me.  It’s “yes” not “yea.”  But the language your mother speaks while you are in her womb, gets absorbed by your tongue and becomes yours too.

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I was afraid that I was going to die in South Carolina.  Skull and bones tobacco blown in my face, the lighted ends like dying suns.  Me, trying to make sense of why cousins would want to inhale such things, trying to make sense that I could die from the second hand.  I swam underwater for the first time and thought about how the same hand that smoked out my lungs would hold me under until air was an invalid entity.  Death was a vapor in the ranch home.  I was barred from going to my great-uncle’s funeral.  Like the adults could censor death with games, I stayed back and played hide-n-seek, hiding and waiting for death to place its hand on my shoulder.

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An older cousin was my South Carolina twin.  Like our ancestors pooled together and made us out of the same clay.  He bickered and tried to raise a rise out of me.  Me, who hid under the ruckus.  His mouth rolled out witticisms that shone in the sky with brilliance and jabs that poked lips up into a smile.  My cousins and I, all tagged along behind him, like he was some Peter Pan that hid in the soggy pine forests of the Carolinas.  Adults talked about him in an air reserved for the black sheep.  I heard that he didn’t know what to do with his life.  I heard that he was meandering since he graduated high school, in a limbo.  Then Jesus spat into his eyes and rubbed sense into them and he went off into the military.  And his hair was scorched off into a burning buzz cut and his colorful mood reverted to stoicism.

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Tyla Parks is a sophomore creative writing and publishing & editing double major from Philadelphia. She enjoys watching films and trying out new teas. She lives at the library.