Southern Legitimacy Statement: My family moved back to South Carolina from New York State when I was two years old. I grew up with and maintain a love for peach orchards in the springtime, lightning bugs, and sweet tea. Though I never truly developed a southern accent, my mama had one that entranced people until the day she died.
Instincts
It was a hot South Carolina summer, 1990. I was working at a produce stand a mile down the road from the ramshackle old house where I lived with my mother and brother.
My mother drove me to work each morning to meet Mrs. Williams, the owner, to open the stand. According to my mother, Mrs. Williams was part of the “country club set” with her diamond earrings and her marriage to one of the town’s preeminent peach farmers. Our family was on a rung farther down the social ladder.
Every morning I’d stumble out of our beat-up Toyota and help set out the baskets of peaches, tomatoes, and squash. Mrs. Williams would give me the cash box before leaving me to run the stand for the day.
Mama would drive back home to lie on the couch and read murder mysteries. She’d drink iced coffee and smoke Salem Lights, eventually turning her attention to household duties like mowing the lawn or weeding one of her many flower gardens. She’d been a high school English teacher for years and had perfected the art of relaxing on a hot summer day.
Back at the produce stand, the days were slow. The stand stood just off the road with a wide dirt parking area. Behind it a pasture stretched back as far as the eye could see. Across the highway was a deep pine forest. The nearest houses were a quarter mile in either direction.
I was sixteen and completely alone.
Customers ran the gamut from families on their way to the lake for the day, people traveling the two-lane highway to some other small town, or locals who preferred the Williams’ peaches and came to get them once a week. They all thumped watermelons and asked about the plums or chatted with me about the heat.
Business was unpredictable depending on the day of the week or the weather. Sometimes for whole hours no one would stop, and I’d just sit on the junky old couch in the back in a drowsy haze. Despite the oscillating fan on a shelf, the air was an oven of warmth. I’d eat refrigerated Snicker bars and bags of chips, drink Cokes, and watch the little black and white tv – Price is Right, Young and the Restless, Donahue. I’d write in my journal. I’d doodle about boys I thought were cute but would never be brave enough to talk to.
On a quiet Tuesday afternoon during one of these lulls, a man with dirty blonde hair pulled up in a big boat of a car and climbed out. An adult of indeterminate (to me) age, he was slender and slight yet menacing somehow. He seemed jittery, overdressed for the summer heat in shiny slacks and a dingy button-down shirt. He wouldn’t meet my eyes at first. When he did look at me, my internal alarms started to ring for the first time in my life. It was just me and him and before I knew it, he came behind the counter and asked me a question, ignoring the natural boundary most customers honored. I didn’t know why exactly, but I felt afraid.
I went to the back with an excuse and called Mama on the rotary phone. I don’t even know what I said. Help? Or Mama, there’s someone here, can you come? Nothing specific, but she must have heard it in my voice.
And she came. Tearing down the highway from our house in what felt like two minutes. She got out of her car and came into the stand next to me.
“Git,” she growled at the man, one hand on her hip, the other pointing to his sagging Oldsmobile. Immediately, something shifted. Suddenly he seemed like a serial killer in a horror movie, looking at cantaloupes but plotting how to kill you, a little smile on his face. Mama had no time for niceties. She started yelling at him like he was a rabid dog. “Go on. Get out of here. Get in your car and go. Now.”
As if coming out of a trance, he slowly left the stand and meandered back to his car. He got in and stared defiantly at us both through the window. Mama’s hackles were up, her instincts exploding with fear and unbridled protection.
“Call the police,” she told me. He slowly leaned across his front seat to the glove box as she and I stood frozen side by side, preparing for the worst. Everything felt off kilter and dangerous. My mouth was dry with fear; my forearms tingling with dread. I don’t remember now what it was he reached for, but thankfully it wasn’t the gun I was certain was coming. He looked disgusted with us, put out by our behavior, and finally drove away in a strange, deafening silence.
I felt embarrassed with the police on the phone, ashamed of our overreaction when I told Mrs. Williams as she picked up the cash box at closing. I could see the confusion and criticism in her eyes, like… my mama was crazy. And I was too. Nothing had happened. That man hadn’t touched me. I was alive and intact, unscarred.
But that was probably because my mama came so fast and fearlessly down that highway to save me, flying into the face of God knows what, a single woman in her forties with skinny legs and freckles who planted herself in front of her daughter and told that man to “git” before something bad could happen.
That evening, as Mama and I drove home with the windows down, I saw her with new eyes. She was brave, maybe a little crazy, but ultimately unafraid to trust her daughter’s gut and her own despite how it might seem to the rest of the world.
“I’m glad you trusted your instincts” she told me, stubbing out her cigarette in the car’s ashtray as we pulled into the drive. “They’re always right.”
