 Suddenly awaken from a peaceful nights sleep, Grayson gathers himself and looks at his phone only to see that it’s just 2:15 in the morning. Reaching over to turn off his CPAP machine, he removes the mask to see that his wife Pam sound asleep. So with his chest pounding he waits a moment to make sure it’s just a panic attack and not something worse. But his breathing feels fine, although he’s a little lightheaded. So as with thousands of other panic attacks under his belt, he pushes the chair aside that holds the CPAP machine, and quietly heads towards the bathroom. While standing over the toilet he’s grateful that he’s not having the adrenaline rush which usually occurs when needing to empty one’s bowels. A telltale sign that something bad is about to happen. So he empty’s his bladder, he rubs his eyes. and stumbles back to bed.
Pumped full of fear, it’s damn near impossible for Gray to go back to sleep quickly. So he does what he always does and picks up his phone, hits the Word app on the screen, and starts typing away. It’s his way of processing the fear and the pain that he so often hides. Yet as seen in his website of blog posts, books, and poetry; he often gives out too much information. Or at least that’s what his family and his demons tell him. Tonight’s dream was about watching his grandpa Joe slowly die, with one heart issue after another, 1970’s medicine could only do so much other then confine him to bed. But deep inside Grayson carried memories of grandfather who would take him fishing at the salt marshes just off US 17, where a family friend from the projects now lived. Riding down Dean Forest Road in grandpa’s shiny new 1967 AMC Ambassador, Grayson would sit tall in the front sent while his grandpa hit the turn at Dead Man’s Curve then turn right on Silk Hope Road to where “Aunt Lillian” lived on Salt Creek. They’d fish most of the morning, catching blue crab or whatever else they could hook. They’d often have lunch with Aunt Lillian then head back home to Bloomingdale with the days catch for Granny to fix. Those memories are quiet fuzzy now for Gray, but it’s does memories he holds dearest. Especially now that he sees a lot of himself in his grandpa and his physical condition. Holding on tight to the memory of that vibrant old man and not the shell that Grandpa eventually become. Raised two blocks away from his grandparents, Grayson’s young mother Missy was just 16 years old when she give birth to him. His father Grayson Sr. was 12 years older than his mother but was still in his late 20’s when Gray was born. With the birth of a sister and later a brother, Grayson was never a bully of a big brother. I mean his sister DeeDee could dish out whatever he could give. But his baby brother Martin would follow him around like a surrogate father, considering their dad lived at work more then he lived at home. But it was the 1970’s and things were a lot different than they were in the idolized 1960’s. Gray remembers all too well the oil embargo of the early 70’s and the struggles with high gas and food prices. He watched firsthand his parents struggle and fuss about bills and spending. He also remember the spot where’d they’d often make up embracing in front of the stove. He remembered the locked bedroom door and how his siblings would cry at the door. While getting hollered at by his father to take them two outside. A smile crosses his face now while thinking about those times knowing all too well what was really going on. Grayson’s high school years were typical late-70’s early-80’s suburban teen. The two things that made Gray’s teen years atypical were his grandpa’s health issues and his families fanatical embrace of the early Evangelical movement, known as the Pentecostal movement of the 1970’s. Apparently torn between heaven and hell, Gray remembered going to church at the local Southern Baptist Church as a kid. But it was his mother’s restlessness and curiosity with spirituality that took her from the Baptist faith to a more literal interpretation of “God’s Word”. Naturally Gray and his siblings were dragged to every Pentecostal camp meeting and tent revival in the coastal empire. At first it all seemed like a show, with all the congregation dancing and “speaking in tongues”. But in hindsight the emotional release was quite the aphrodisiac for a lonely hungry people looking for truth. But just as any impressionable young person, Gray got caught up in all the “hoopla” as it were. Spending most his waking moments worried if he was good enough to go to heaven or was simply headed straight to hell. Needless to say, this left an enormous impression on Grayson's psyche. Walking between sainthood and applying for an apprenticeship with the devil. Many years later left a bitter taste in Gray’s mouth. Which were the birth pains to the mental anguish he experiences today. In his grandpa’s world he to had been on a spiritual journey himself practicing the old folk magic practiced by his mother and his family. After the war and the boom of the 1950’s and 60’s many of the rifts between my grandfather and his family begin to heal. With the passing of Joe’s father and later his mother, the siblings united around the old homestead. Leading to many family reunions and many funerals at the family plot at Red Hill Cemetery outside Lothair, GA. After grandpa’s retirement from the papermill he and Granny spent lots of time at the old place in Lothair, two of Joe’s siblings, a siblings lived on either side of the old home place. At the time of their father’s death the house and the land went to my grandfather since he was the oldest. But without a thought Gray’s grandfather divided the property evenly amongst his siblings with him taking the plot the old house sat on. Gray didn’t quite understand some of his grandpa’s strange practices like keeping a straw broom hanging over the door. Or using blue paint on the porch but never the rest of the house. The little caskets his grandfather made and kept in his workshop with little dolls underside. Or the strange painting he kept on his study wall that Grey now knows was painting of a human chakra. But all this changed after his grandpa succumb to his heart issues and eventual slow death. The very thing that haunts Grey this very night.
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 Image: Artem Horovenko Despite the security of Bernard’s state park job and Suzanne’s growing internet fame. They both knew it was all fleeting without a permanent place to call home. The State’s Parks Authority was willing to overlook the many violations that were being broken by their extended stay on the park grounds. But the country was in the middle of a pandemic and having a fulltime employee on the grounds was at the time an asset. But now that the park up and fully operational again. There were rumors that the SPA and the state’s environmental regulators were ready for the family and the Airstream to move on.
It's not that the was willing to fire a long time employee, but they were applying the pressure for the family to move. So to avoid being formally evicted and possibly losing their main source of income the Case family moved their Airstream into a nearby trailer park. Forcing Bernard to commute to work, while Suzanne and the kids lost their little garden paradise. With the two oldest kids going to primary and pre-k school, it now meant riding the bus, such Benard needed the truck for his commute. It also meant getting used to a whole new set of neighbors. With the youngest still too young for school, daycare was out of the question due to the cost. So Suzanne kept to herself while continuing to post content and take care of the little one. But the trailer park wasn’t without its distractions, first there was the trailer park hierarchy of drug dealers , gang members, the old, the sick, and the worker poor. It wasn’t nothing to see an ambulance and load of police cruisers every night and especially on the weekends. Plus having them all crammed into the Airstream wasn’t any fun either. Although they were out at the park as much as they could, still at night you lived in fear that one day a stray bullet wound come flying in. the one small ray of light was the one neighbor a few trailers down Annette who had two young children with her boyfriend Ned. Annette much like Suzanne was white trash poor born in a nearby town. Her and Suzanne would often sit on the trailer steps drink coffee and watch the kids play in the dirt. There they would talk about their lives and their situations and how they ended up here. Suzanne being a bit cautious, letting Annette do most of the talking, because she sounded like she really needed a friend. Everything was good till Ned showed up from wherever he showed up. In a ratty ball cap greasy t-shirt and jeans, he’d simply pull up practically stomp into the trailer and yell for Annette to get him a beer and fix him a plate. A few months have passed and was the usual routine Ned would drive up and holler for his beer. After a typical weekend of police calls and screaming matches between couples. Suzanne noticed Annette or the kids weren’t around. She also noticed Ned’s pickup was gone as well. After a few days the landlord was making the rounds for the rent, rather weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly she as out like clockwork. As Suzanne and the baby awoke from a nap, she noticed the police and an ambulance parked over at Annette’s trailer with the landlord looking distraught talking to the police. Apparently Ned got especially violent one night over the weekend and killed Annette, leaving her body in the trailer and taking the kids. It was alter learning he dropped off the kids with a relative in Florida and was caught in Daytona passed out drunk in his truck. After a few weeks the tragedy that made headlines and had long faded from the regional TV news and newspapers. The landlord had the crime scene quickly cleaned and rented out again. No one in the park spoke of the tragedy out loud, only in hushed whispers. The police did step up patrols and busted some of worse of the worse in the park. But nothing really changed. Annette and children’s things were picked through after being dumped in the dumpsters. With nothing ever mentioned of her kids again. But as Suzanne pulled a wagon full of trash to the dumpster, she noticed a small shiny object on the ground near a dumpster. As Suzanne bent over for a closer look, she discovered it was a broken silver locket that Annette once wore with a picture of her girls inside. Suzanne quickly put the locket in her pocket and moved on.  After a long dusty 3 hour drive Joseph and Dottie arrive in Savannah, they were hot tried and a little bit afraid. Dottie had never seen a city any larger than Soperton before, other than pictures in magazines. But unlike the skyscrapers of New York City, Savannah was a busy port city with its oak lined streets thick with hanging Spanish moss. When they planned their escape they heard of a boarding house on Jones Street that welcomed farmers coming into the city to find work. Once they settled in Joe quickly discovered his 1931 Model A truck was a handy tool for finding quick work around town. While Dottie found work sewing and doing odd jobs at the boarding house.
It wasn’t long before Joe found work at the ports loading cotton, timber, and turpentine onto ships. It was there that word started getting out about the government getting ready to build “Liberty Ships” in Savannah and Brunswick and many other ports for the fledgling war effort. Joe quickly got a job at the shipyard down from the ports on President Street. Working alongside hundreds of others in the same situation as millions of other Americans trying to feed their families. Joe found himself working alongside other farmers, out of work construction workers, and even minorities. Starting out as a Rivet Cooker, Joe worked in the ground heating the rivets to wield the steel to the ships frame. Once heated up Joe would throw the hot rivets up to the Catchers, who in turn handed them off to the Riveters. It was dangerous work all around with many bearing the burn marks to prove it. There he worked with one Black man in particular named Peterson Louis. Pete as he was known was of Haitian decent with a French/English accent much thicker than even Joe’s own hillbilly draw. Blacks and unskilled poor whites were relegated to the lowest and most dangerous jobs. So after a few weeks on the job, Joe and Pete formed a bond working in a synchronized rhythm or cadence. This made them a particularly effective cookers for the Riveters putting the ships together. As they continued to work together the two man discovered they had a lot in common. Including having wives that were raising their young children. They both had mothers that practiced folk medicine and magic, and they both wanted a better life then their sharecropping roots. It was at this time when Dottie started coming out of her shell. With no outside schooling, Dottie could barely read. But with Joe now bring in a steady income, it gave Dottie the chance to teach herself to read. With a daily newspaper and various magazines laying around the boarding house; Dottie wasn’t shy about asking anyone what a word she didn’t understand. And soon she was able to read and write, to the point she was able to send letters back home to her beloved cousin and Pastor Stephens. Creating for herself a lifelong love of reading, learning, and storytelling. It was also during these years their little family began to grow with one boy, then another, and another. But it wasn’t until the end of the war that they finally had a little girl. A tall lanky little dark haired girl who would grow up to be my mother. During the war the family moved from the boarding house to an upstairs apartment on Broughton Street. Then into a WPA housing project built during the Great Depression on the east side of Savannah. It was there that the kids grew up through the late 1940’s and into the 1950’s. Their house soon became the Grand Central Station of the neighborhood. With Joe, Jr’s gang of friends leaning under the hood of his old Hudson, while his brother Harold was hanging out somewhere with his latest girlfriend. And young Gabe, ever the outdoors man, spent hours exploring the nearby marshes and old civil war ruins. While Michelle “Missy” and her gang of Puddle Skirt wearing friends were either pretending to her mother or in her bedroom listening to that nerve wracking rock-n-roll. Of course this left Dottie to referee all the fights or manage all the gossip going on throughout the house. While Joe worked every waking hour at the local paper mill on the Westside of town after the war. In the late fifties Joesph, Dottie, and the crew moved again only this time buying their first home on the rural west end of Chatham County. The community was nothing more than a whistle stop for the Georgia Central Railroad called Bloomingdale. On the end of Oak Street lay a tract of five wood framed houses built on concrete pillows during the 1940’s. Each house looked the same on the inside with small deviations on the outside. They each had three bedrooms, a kitchen dinette, a small living room, and one bathroom. With now two teenage boys sharing a bedroom while “Missy” had a bedroom of her own. The oldest brother Joseph, Jr. had recently joined the Air Force before the family moved. Moving from the crowded low income community on the Eastside of Savannah, to woods on the other side of the county was a bit of a culture shock for the young teens. But for Joe and Dottie it was almost like going back home with room for a garden and the peacefulness of a quiet suburban community. As the early sixties came to light Bloomingdale had grown from a whistlestop for the railroad; into a modern community with a department store, with a couple full-service gas stations and even its own to Post Office. Still for decades to come Bloomingdale was nothing more than an afterthought for most Savannahians and the rest of Chatham County. But it turned into a thriving simple suburban paradise for thousands of locals the paper mills and other manufacturers employed. With it’s dirt streets and plenty of woods to explore these factory workers children played endless hours on those dirt streets…till the porch lights came on. The Joe and Dottie Higgins family lived next door to a young couple the Barnes, who had recently moved there from rural Wayne County. Wendell and Lucy Barnes had only moved to Bloomingdale several months before Joe and Dottie. Much like the Higgins, the Barnes’ were looking for a better life for themselves and their two small children, Carol and James. Lucy’s brother () had moved to Savannah several years before and it was his stories of the opportunities there that inspired his younger sister and brother-in-law to move. And it wasn’t long before Wendell was working at a local manufacturing plant, making enough money to buy their home on Oak Street. So with an extra bedroom available the young couple invited her quiet bachelor brother Grayson to move from the boarding house into their home. It was there that my mother and father became neighbors on Oak Street... |
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