Maupin - Logical family: a memoir

WHEN I WAS A BOY IN Raleigh I was afraid of being locked in Oakwood Cemetery overnight. Every Sunday after church, when our blue-tailed white Pontiac cruised through the entrance, I fretted about the sign posted above us: GATES LOCKED AT 6 PM . I never voiced this fear to my parents, but it hovered over me like a threatening storm cloud all afternoon. What if we lose track of the time? That could easily happen as we plucked dandelions from my grandfathers grave or posed sullenly for Daddys never-ending slides, rigid as garden gnomes. Our family plot was on a rise with the other Nice Families, a respectable distance from the gate, so the caretaker, a runny-eyed old man who kept a spittoon in his granite cubbyhole, might overlook us when he left for home. That enormous gate would clang shut, and we would be trapped there all night, eating acorns for survival, drinking dew off the liliesmy brother, my sister, my parents, and meCemetery Family Robinson.

This was not your usual ghoulish graveyard terror, since I found the cemetery anything but spooky. I loved its winding lanes and tilting stones, the way its pale-green dells were flecked with pink in the spring. I reveled in its rich hieroglyphics, all those corroding angels and renegade jonquils, the palpable antiquity of the place. This was our family seat, after all, the ground to which I would return someday, permanently planted among my ancestors. So what was so scary about that? Folks in Raleigh might assume it had to do with the way my grandfather had died. But I wouldnt learn about that until later, when I was well into my teens and the matter of why we came to the cemetery every Sunday would finally be explained. Even then, though, my focus would remain on the writing on the stones, not on what actually lay in the boxes beneath them.

Oakwood Cemetery was not just the landscape of our past but also the very blueprint of our family for years to come. My father would eventually lay out the rules for his children in a self-published family history called Prologue, so named for a famous line in The Tempest: Whats past is prologue. Antonio uses the phrase to explain his intention to commit murder. My father used it to justify bragging about his ancestors, and he murdered the truth more than once in the process.

One thing is certain, the old man wrote after rattling off a roll call of all the lawyers, governors, planters, and generals in our family, is that wherever one of these men met success, there was a self-effacing and goodly lady by his side.

Back then I was still too young to realize that there would never be a lady by my side, goodly or otherwise. Nor would I have noticed how the old man had summarily reduced his wife and daughter to dutiful handmaidens. I felt only this shapeless longing, an oddly grown-up ennui born of alienation and silence. Some children experience this feeling very early on, long before we learn its name and finally let our headstrong hearts lead the way to True North. We grow up as another species entirely, lone gazelles lost amid the buffalo herd of our closest kin. Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us. We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.

So maybe I was beginning to understand something on those Sunday afternoons in the cemetery. Maybe I sensed I didnt belong there, now or forever, that my true genealogy lay somewhere beyond these gates, with another tribe.