1
ATLAS
Right off the thoroughfare between Edenton and Elizabeth City sat Grannylou’s small, blue North Carolina home. The land was as flat as loose-leaf paper and covered in a blanket of tiny purple phlox. I loved to walk on them with bare feet. They felt like fuzzy socks and made my soles smell like the wetlands I’d missed while finishing my freshman year at North Carolina A&T.
I took a seat on Grannylou’s front stoop and pinched their purple petals with my big toes, squeezing the dew from the delicate corollas. I let my head fall back and breathed in deep. Grannylou’s creeping phlox field smelled like sweet vanilla with a jasmine nip of swampy decay at the tail end. I released the bunch from my toes, and they instantly perked back to attention. I turned my gaze to the foggy skies above my grandmother’s cottage.
“I’ve missed you,” I called out to the muddled blue.
Then, I looked way off in the distance, about a half mile back, where the breathing woods of the Great Dismal Swamp began.
“You too,” I told my Grannylou’s swamp. “Especially you.” A warm, wet wind blew through the waterlocked cypress and pine—a reprimand. I bowed to them. “I’ll try not to stay away so long again.”
The winds calmed in response.
In the hustle of NCAT dorms, I’d forgotten the peacefulness of this place. The melodic lulls of fist-sized toads hidden in clover patches. Harvestman spiders making their slow, steady walks to terrifyingly large gatherings near shale rocks. Sweet cicadas screaming for their lives and lineages—as loud as train horns to regular people, but quiet as a whisper to us swamp folk. They’re better than us—the cicadas. We yell out over stupid things like tardiness and spilt Kool-Aid. The cicadas use their bellows for love.
I missed the sounds of salt pork dancing in Grannylou’s favorite cast iron skillet. And then, a few highly anticipated hours later, the taste of it among the collards. I missed the same people coming and going from Grannylou’s comfortable home. Great-Uncle BK bartering field peas for black swamp pole legumes on Tuesdays. Aunt Marsha coming on Thursdays to deliver however many eggs her finicky hens decided to lay that week. And Uncle Moonshine, sipping too much on his own product, stopping by to grab a bowl of something soothing and crash on the couch to sleep it off.
Every little house on Grannylou’s long street ran on the swap and switch, but her home was by far the most active. It was small, yes, barely a blip on the North Carolina map, but large in spirit.
Layered people with storied pasts and intricate connections to one another passing in and out of her creaking screen door. But also layered by history. Hard-fought battles and movements began and ended in this swamp. One fingernail scrape across the hydric soil could reveal the lifeblood of battalions of dead soldiers. But most of the history of our beloved swamp, like the rest of these United States, rested solely on the sacrifice of formerly enslaved people.
Grannylou had brought us up with stories of our people finding love and safety behind the treacherous shield of her swamp. She told us of raised isles within the swamp, charmed with peace and self-sufficiency and, most of all, freedom. Grannylou also mentioned magic, but she hated to speak that word aloud, so we mostly filled in the mystic parts ourselves as she told us of the shifty men whose goal it was to destroy her swamp.
In the distance, the Great Dismal Swamp let out a baritone growl of disdain. Grannylou said the swamp had been in a low lament since the 1760s, when George Washington sent enslaved people in to drain and pillage her, leaving behind dry, dangerous peat soil—a major problem for the health of her wildlife and trees and herself and us.
When I was little, Grannylou had told us the effects of the former president’s disregard for untouched nature. I loathed him like he was still living, and I longed to undo his destruction. So, at twelve years old, I decided to clear the wetland of unusable peat myself. If one white man could inflict such injury on such a tract, a determined Black girl could balm it.
I had gathered armfuls of twigs and branches that sat soaked on the swamp floor but never quite broke down and brought them out into the fields. When the first pile grew taller than my chest, I started a new one. One after the other after the other until one day, I lifted a water moccasin instead of a branch, missing a hang-on bite by inches. That was the day I realized I had to heal Grannylou’s swamp with science.
So, almost a year ago, I’d gone off to college with one purpose—to save my Grannylou’s home from the ground up. I read every assigned book alone in my dorm room while most everyone on my floor put on pink dresses and danced into the night. I showed up for weekly office hours to pick the brains of my professors. I was determined to break the code of our dying swamp.
Another low growl rose from the foggy distance, followed by an annoyed huff. The thick brush underneath towering pines began to rustle, and my cousin Pansy slowly emerged from the innards of the woods. Days earlier, she’d dipped her locs burgundy and left them white-gray at the root. Long, lean muscles in her bare back poked out like extra bones. Yoga, I thought, hours of it. We’d driven down together, Pansy and me. We were suitemates at university, and she’d never learned to drive.
She lifted her glistening hand in a wave, and I did the same with my dull, ashy one. Then she sat cross-legged facing the swamp and began to meditate without a mat.
Pansy and I couldn’t have been more different. She stood about five five with an unshakeable, quiet confidence while I was five nine but hunched myself shorter. I wanted to slice off a sliver of my cousin’s poise and bottle the tiny glints in her skin, but her specialness came from the inside.
Likely sensing my stare, she slowly opened her eyes and nodded once again before resuming concentration. I looked away quickly and ducked inside the house.
2 ATLAS
An intense aroma of gamey deer meat nearly pushed me back as I crossed the threshold, only to leap backward at an unexpected dusting against my bare ankle from the tail of Aunt Marsha’s extravagant Maine coon, Great Lady.
“No!” I told Great Lady, but she just meowed in reply and began rubbing against me more aggressively. “Aunt Marsha, please get Great Lady.”
I heard a distant whistle; Great Lady shot me an outraged look and ran off with her feather-duster tail high.
Grannylou’s home was cozy, if a bit cluttered, with family photos spilling from every crevice. She’d recently had Uncle Camden install a nearly ceiling-high shelf just to pack with additional pictures of babies born and new friends found along the way.
In the nook of the living room was a strategically placed leather chair. The family member who snagged that chair got the view of both the kitchen and Grannylou’s rocking chair. I was lucky enough to claim the spot that day. I watched my auntie and mother as they bickered their way through the endless prep duties of the cookout and Grannylou as she actively ignored them from her own chair.
I tried to ignore them too. I felt Grannylou’s eyes watching me over her specs. If I was not mistaken, I caught a quick smile.
“What?” I asked her, feeling both self-conscious and excited to have her attention. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You’re just about nineteen, chile.” Grannylou gently rocked back and forth in her chair. “Change coming.”
“That’s right,” I said to my grinning grandmother. “Never just me for Bornday, though. Five birthdays tomorrow, and that includes yours. What do you want most for your birthday, Granny- lou?”
“Oh, dear chile,” Grannylou said. “I’ll tell you what I want.”
Grannylou planted her feet firmly onto the hardwood and closed her eyes. Her long gray eyelashes curved so far up that they swept at her eyelids. Even though she’d turn eighty tomorrow, her shiny cheeks glowed with youth and vigor. Wisps of her salt-and-pepper hair peeked from underneath her leopard bonnet, framing her cheekbones beautifully. When she finally opened her eyes, Grannylou reached into her housedress pocket, pulled out a flask, and held it in my direction.
“Drink with me,” she told me.
“I’ll be nineteen tomorrow, Granny,” I said, laughing. “Not twenty-one.”
“I know that,” she replied with a sly smile. “This is not liquor. Liquor is pitiful in comparison to what’s inside this here flask. This, chile, is Dismal Tea. Herbs ground from plants found so deep within our swamp that no man could duplicate them. I’ve been holding this flask tight for hundreds of years, dear gul. Holding on for a day such as this—Bornday—when four of my grandbabies turn nineteen together. The rest of them will sip tomorrow, but you, Atlas, can do so right here and right now, if you so please. A shared sip with your ole Grannylou is birthday wish number one.”
Worry shot through my chest. Hundreds of years?
I watched Grannylou kick off her fuzzy pink house shoes before lifting herself from her chair. She slowly made her way through the screen door leading to the back porch of her home. I hung back. She’d been saying things like this for a few weeks now, leading up to Bornday. Referencing a life longer than her eighty actual years. I worried she was losing her grip on what was real and what wasn’t.
I followed my barefoot grandmother out back. She’d chosen to sit in the dirt rather than on the porch swing. She held her tea flask in one hand and swirled the earth underneath her with the other. I took her in for a moment. Grannylou wore housedresses so long that they picked up dirt around the bottom edges and frayed. She glowed with uniqueness and eccentricities, loving all things natural and from the earth—remedies, herbs, waters, roots. But time was catching up lately, and she was beginning to show signs that concerned me.
Grannylou was the root of my family’s mystique—our great banyan tree—spanning my lineage further than anyone else could do. She held the troop together like gravity held items to the ground. Without her, my family would surely crumble. We needed her to survive.
“You’ve been staring at the back of my head for a time,” Granny- lou said quietly but with more strength than the loudest among us. “Say what you need to.”
“You said hundreds of years before. That doesn’t make sense, Gran,” I told her, taking a seat at her side in the dirt.
“You fear my mind going?” she asked, and I nodded in response.
Grannylou placed a gentle hand over mine, her red undertones catching the sun exactly like Pansy’s had while exiting the swamp. “I recognize that worry stewing in your gut. It’s a familiar one to me.”
I wanted to inquire further, but something shut my mouth. All I said was, “Really?”
“Really,” Grannylou replied in a whisper before forcing a half smile. “My favorite sister had her mind overtaken.” Grannylou took an inattentive swig from her Dismal Tea. “Watching someone you love lose track of understanding is more than a notion.”
Grannylou held the flask high, and I took my first swig from her Dismal Tea. The tea tasted like black compost smelled—fleshy dirt strained down to concentrated liquid. My eyes rolled back unexpectedly.
“Open your eyes,” Grannylou told me with a grin on her voice.
I leaped from my seated position when I saw a line of translucent figures standing at the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. “Do you see them?” I asked Grannylou, stunned. She sat calmly in her place. “Am I the only one to … What’s in this tea? Who are they? Am I trippin’?”
“Tell me what you see, chile,” Grannylou started. “And I’ll tell you if you’re trippin’.”
I removed my flip-flops, longing to feel the phlox. “I see people.”
“Our people?” Grannylou asked tranquilly.
“How do I know if it’s our people?”
“You’d know, chile,” Grannylou said. “Are they our people?”
I took another step toward them, squinting.
“You’re looking with your eyes,” added Grannylou. “You feel for kinfolk. Do they feel like our kin?”
I closed my eyes and opened my palms toward the swamp. The shadowy figures felt like Carolina swamp folk. I sensed regional similarities, and I could feel bloodline from them, but not much.
Still unsure, I answered in an uptalk. “I’m not sure.”
“What do they want?”
As she asked, I felt a rush of adrenaline shoot through me. “They want a way into Dismal, but there is no one to show them.”
“Ahh,” Grannylou replied in a huff. “They’ll never learn.”
“Who are they?” I asked. “I feel them lost.”
“Only someone who knows the way feels the wanderers from the inside,” Grannylou said. “You’re nearly nineteen, Atlas. They will seek you out.”
“Who?” I asked, staring at the adrift line. It stretched the length of the Dismal, and I could not see any holes or an ending. “Who will seek me?”
“Eventually,” Grannylou began, with pity on her voice, “all of them.”
I sat next to her, still watching the figures in my periphery. “How can I help anyone? I don’t even know which way to go myself. I…” I stopped myself.
“May as well tell it,” Grannylou said with a kindness thick on her twang.
“I don’t know how to heal our land.” I said the sentence so quickly I thought the words jumbled into one another. “And I can’t seem to find any answers in my classes. I feel closest to truth when I’m here, Grannylou. This bog draws me to it like a horseshoe magnet. I don’t know.”
Grannylou grabbed hold of my hand and squeezed slightly. “I’ve got a secret, dear gul. Nobody knows nothing. Not one knows. Not me, not you, not nobody.”
“Well.” I paused to take it all in. “How can anyone expect guidance when there is no point?”
“I never said there was no point, now, did I?” she replied, almost in a snap. “Knowing is for gods and fools. You and me, though, we are guided by the promises of our ancestors. Every soul standing in that file-line awaiting entry to our swamp knows that they know the way. That’s why they refuse to stand down.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Braggarts. Windbags. Know-it-alls,” she listed, and I watched a few of the figures perk as if she mentioned them by name. “They think they know better than those who actually know, so they wait to no avail whatsoever.”
“And you’re saying…” I turned to meet her gaze. I always had trouble looking into Grannylou’s eyes—pupils rimmed fuzzy gray with age, but the irises crisp amber and nearly glowing. “You’re saying I do know?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “You know the way, and the lost ones will claw mountains to nubs to get to you. I’ll be here with you if I can do, but you are the key to many coveted locks, Atlas. Guard yourself accordingly. The favorite sister I mentioned earlier, Greeny was her name. She possessed a similar power to the one I sense in you.”
“And she lost her mind because of it?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she replied. “Greeny could handle power more than any being I’ve met on my long journey.”
“What happened, then?”
Grannylou exhaled hard. “Too many lost souls asked her for directions.” She paused. “One too many, to be sure. If you don’t remember but one bit of advice from this sit-down, remember this: showing the wrong person the right path ends badly every time. My Greeny found that out the hard way. And Dismal took its sweet time letting another somebody have a stab at setting things right.”
“You mean…” I started, and a nervous hiccup interrupted. “You mean me? I’m the second stab at setting right for the Great Dismal Swamp?”
Copyright © 2024 by Randi Pink
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