Unlike the characters in By Invitation Only, my family does not now and never did own a farm, except my brother-in-law who grew cotton and soybeans and slaughtered the occasional hog. When I was about eight, visiting my oldest sibling, Lynn, and her husband, Scott, in Manning, South Carolina, during Thanksgiving week he would go out into the country to the farm with a whole host of men. They’d dig a pit, build a fire, put the hog on a spit, and commence drinking bourbon and basting the beast for the next twenty-four hours. On Wednesday or Thursday morning they’d reappear smelling like wood smoke and booze, looking like who did it and ran. We say when it comes to pig we eat everything but the oink. We did. They had pounds and pounds of pulled pork, but there was a small mountain of sausage and hash, too. I think we had turkey on Christmas but Thanksgiving was the other white meat. To this very day, I can still taste the pork, silky and smoky and melt-in-your-mouth tender.
There was always a football game on the television as Scott’s brother-in-law was Alex Hawkins who played for the Baltimore Colts and who, by the way, helped me catch my first fish. A couple of years ago Alex turned up in Columbia, South Carolina, at a talk I was giving at the university. We marveled over how many years had passed and who knew then I’d be living a writer’s life now?
If there was time to walk you through my childhood and later years, you’d probably say that I was destined to do something like this, given my history of 1950s and ’60s classic Southern women’s oppression. We knew it! Sooner or later she was gonna blow! But I think that maybe talking about the here and now is more interesting as it relates to this particular book.
In the last three years, both of my children have married. Our most recent wedding in October 2017 for our son, William, was a breeze. The groom’s family gets off very easy. My husband and I threw a Lowcountry barbecue, including an oyster roast for the rehearsal dinner. The bride’s family had never had the pleasure of wild, fresh-caught shrimp and grits with andouille sausage prepared by Lowcountry chefs or wild roasted oysters that came from the May River around Beaufort. We were blessed with a balmy night in October, so we decided to have it in our front yard, which looks at Charleston Harbor. It would have been more picturesque if it hadn’t been pitch-black dark. Nonetheless, we hired a jazz trio to set the mood, put up a small tent, strung lights, and rented farm tables and chairs. There were lanterns and bales of hay topped with pumpkins and gourds everywhere. Our bride, Maddie Clark, is about the best thing to happen to our family in eons, so pretty and so smart. Except for my son-in-law, Carmine Peluso, who is handsome and wildly talented. And except for the child he and our daughter, Victoria, brought into this world last June. Ted. Ted is the true love of my life.
I had an occasion to serve on a panel with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes in April last year, right before Ted was born. We were at the Post and Courier Book and Author Luncheon in Charleston along with several other authors, talking to eight hundred people, chatting them up and signing books. My daughter was there and she was heavy with child. Lesley took one look at her and then back to me and said that we were in for the greatest thrill of our lives. Lesley was there to promote her book Becoming Grandma. She began to tell us the story of her daughter’s delivery of her grandchild and how we were going to love this child so much it would astound us. She was right.
I remember thinking, I have to be excited for my daughter’s sake, that I was sure to love this child, but I’d keep my wits about me. I swore I’d never be one of those pathetic grandmothers with a thousand pictures on my phone, making everyone suffer them and stories about Little Johnny’s tiny precious teeth.
So Ted came into the world last June and I lost my mind. I did. I have at least six hundred pictures of him on my phone and should we meet at a book signing or somewhere, please save a little time for Ted. And wait until you see the videos! And his precious tiny teeth. No, really! They’re two little perfect pearls! Just yesterday he broke the skin of a clementine with them and sat there sucking the juice. At eight months! Einstein!
Lesley was right. I didn’t even know there was this kind of happiness to be found on earth.
So many of the things I have just described to you can be found in this book but written in another way. Irma the sow of Diane’s barbecue is reminiscent of the pork I ate on Thanksgiving and how it came to be on my plate. The decorations from Diane’s barbecue look an awful lot like the decorations we had for Will and Maddie’s rehearsal dinner, as do the tent, strung lights, and pumpkins. But praise the Lord, I don’t have all of Diane’s drama in my life. Otherwise, I’d go off the grid and live in a cave. On the page, it’s hilarious. But in real life? Not so much. With the possible exception of Ramsey Lewis playing at a party. I’m such a fan of his!
This is how my books come to life. Current events make you remember your childhood. They make you muse and wonder how a singular event from your past would play out today. And what if you want to rewrite history? That, my friends, is one of the great joys of this work. You can
