Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry

by Susan Vaught

  The way I see it, Dad and Grandma climbed mountains. And I intend to start climbing right where they had to stop.

  Don’t worry. I know mountains can be tricky. When I get to the top of one, I’ll see so many more. There will be big ones and small ones, close to me and far away, too. Some of those mountains will stretch so far into the sky, I won’t be able to imagine making it up their steep, rocky slopes.

  There’s only one thing to do with mountains like that: Start walking toward the sun, one step at a time.

  SEVEN WEEKS AFTER MY FATHER died, my grandmother passed away peacefully, at home in Oxford, at our house, in her own room. Mom and I were with her, and Avadelle, and Indri, and Ms. Wilson, and Cindy the Sunshine Hospice nurse. We held her hands and stroked her face and rubbed her feet, and we made sure she knew she wasn’t alone, and that we’d remember every wonderful thing about her, always. After she was cremated, we had a memorial for her and Dad at the same time, over on campus in the Grove, with pictures of them set on wooden picnic tables, tons of fried chicken and brownies, and items that reminded us of them.

  Dad’s table had a hoe and bandanas and his half-used bottle of spicy hair oil, his iPad and photos of him with Mom and me and Grandma, and pictures of him in his garden, and in his military uniform with all of its medals. Grandma’s table had pictures of her teaching in elementary school, pictures of her with her family, and pictures of her with Avadelle, and photos of her standing at lecterns at Ole Miss, and copies of all the books and articles she wrote.

  Dr. Harper had a talk with me after the service, about turning Grandma’s time line into a book called Mississippi: Putting It All Together. He showed me an outline, how we’d do it. It was Grandma’s time line, pulled right out of her version of Ghostology. One more book by Ruth Beans, with Fred Harper and Dani Beans contributing. I checked with Mom, and she didn’t have a problem with us taking on that project together. A nonfiction book about civil rights in Mississippi seemed like a fitting tribute to Grandma.

  At the same time, it didn’t seem like enough—or at least, not all I wanted to do. That’s when I started writing Ghostology. It’s a story about Grandma and Dad and me. It’s nonfiction, but fiction, too. I decided to tell our story my way, in my own words, and Grandma’s, too, and Dad’s. The writing has been easier than I thought. I may have finally found my special talent, something like Grandma’s, with a dash of Dad and a sprinkling of Avadelle, too. I never would have figured on that, or on Grandma turning out to be the muse I had been looking for.

  I think Dr. Harper knows I learned some things about the Magnolia Feud that I’m not sharing. Maybe he’s hoping I’ll tell him the real story behind the legendary fight. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll put it in Ghostology—and maybe not.

  Indri and Mac probably know I found out about the feud too, and Mom. Maybe even Ms. Wilson and Ms. Manchester. Nobody’s asking though. For now, the secret belongs to Avadelle and me, and it doesn’t feel like a bad secret at all.

  Like Grandma said, when the time’s right, I figure I’ll know what to do with it.

  * * *

  On the second Saturday in September, Avadelle, Ms. Manchester, Mac, Ms. Wilson, Indri, and I stood behind our house in the cornhole pit Mom had made for us last week. One board was painted red and the other blue—university colors.

  Indri made a toss. Her red bag sailed through the air and smacked down near the hole, but it didn’t go in.

  “How did I end up on this team again?” Avadelle grumbled, gripping her own red bag like she wanted to throw it at Indri’s head.

  “Random draw,” Mom, who was refereeing, said.

  Avadelle grunted like she didn’t believe that for a second.

  Mac tossed for blue team, a great big boarder—but his bag knocked Indri’s into the dirt. He lifted both arms. “Yes!”

  “Worm Dung,” Indri said, but she didn’t sound like she meant it.

  I tossed my bag in a high arc, and it slipped through the hole without a single touch. “Nothin’ but corn,” I announced.

  Ms. Wilson pitched a boarder, and Avadelle knocked her bag off with a solid overhand. Ms. Manchester tossed last, for blue, and she boarded too.

  Mom checked her totals, grinned, and gestured to my group. “That’s another victory for red. Blue, you suck. Maybe next week.”

  “This game is rigged,” Ms. Wilson complained.

  “In Dani’s favor,” Mac agreed.

  “Mad cuz bad,” I shot back.

  “Yeah,” Avadelle agreed, clapping me on the back so hard I almost face-planted in the pit dirt. “What she said.”

  Mom checked her watch. “All right. Everybody take a water break, then we have to get to work!”

  * * *

  Mom paced up and down in front of us, arms clasped behind her back and hands covered in too-big gardening gloves. She was dressed in frayed jeans shorts and a black tank top, with one of Dad’s red bandanas tied around her neck. Her voice rang like a drill sergeant as she barked, “Okay, ladies. And gentleman. We have nothing to fear. It’s an organic garden. Nothing in there can bite us.”

  Indri raised the hand not holding a gardening fork and harvest basket. “Wasps can. And bees and ants.”

  “And snakes.” I shivered, gripping the gardening fork and harvest basket I had been assigned as I studied the gigantic four- and five-foot-tall weeds clogging the rows between Dad’s raised beds. “Snakes definitely bite.”

  Mac, who was standing next to me, gave me a get-real look and shook his head, twitching his rake back and forth. “They’ll run from you,” he muttered. “ ’Cause you’re really scary.”

  “Shut up.” I menaced him with my gardening fork.

  “I’d be more worried about Mississippi mosquitoes,” Ms. Manchester said as she tucked a hoe handle under her arm and rubbed sunscreen with bug repellant on her freckled cheeks.

  “Big as eagles,” Avadelle muttered, leaning on a weed claw like it was a cane. “Carry off puppies and small children if you aren’t watching them close enough.” Her big floppy fedora hid her eyes, but I could tell she was smiling. Sort of. As much as Avadelle Richardson ever smiled.

  “Nothing will bite us,” Mom said—but she didn’t sound completely sure.

  The ground outside Dad’s fenced plot had been spread with bags of composted soil and stinky, stinky organic manure. On each of the bags lay one of the organic gardening encyclopedias Ms. Manchester had ordered through Square Books, open to key pages and sets of instructions. I had Dad’s iPad on the bench, playing Poco’s “Keep on Trying.” A whole cheerful playlist would cycle through until eleven thirty, when we went inside for the Ole Miss football game, because it was Saturday in Oxford, Mississippi, and, well—yeah. Football. Hotty toddy!

  “Weeders first!” Mom called, and she and Ms. Wilson and Avadelle squared their shoulders and approached the no-man’s-land of Marcus Beans’s untended garden patch. They went in with grim looks of determination, seized hold of the first row of intruding plants, and started pulling. For really stubborn ones, Avadelle used the claw, then Mom or Ms. Wilson yanked up the stalks.

  “Two piles,” Mac called to them. “Seedy-looking weeds on the left to burn or pitch in the trash, and green ones on the right for compost.”

  When there was enough of a path, Mac went in to help rake up the mess into one pile or the other, and Ms. Manchester hoed at stubborn weeds they had missed. Indri and I were deployed to the raised beds with our forks. We used them to loosen dirt around carrots, potatoes, and onions that had already died back on top, then we pulled up the vegetable, knocked the dirt off it, and dropped it in the basket. If the plants still had green on top, we left them alone. If they were yellow-looking or spotted with blight like pictures we had studied in the books, we pulled them and threw them into the trash weed pile.

  After a time, Indri moved a couple of beds away to pull up dead tomato plants and knock the dirt off those, too. Ms. Manchester hoed near my bed, and she said, “Next fall, we might be out her
e harvesting late lettuce, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage, if we follow our schedule and don’t screw it all up.”

  I wrinkled up my nose. “You can leave off the cabbage, thanks. That stuff stinks, and it tastes like green-flavored cardboard.”

  “Green-flavored?”

  Dislodging a stubborn onion, I shrugged. “You know, gardeny-tasting.”

  She laughed. “I’m totally not looking forward to stirring manure and compost into these beds when we get all finished cleaning up—or coming by once a week to stir the steaming, rotting compost. But I think I can get the hang of it. Maybe.”

  “Compost will make Dad’s famous ‘good dirt,’ ” I said. “If there is such a thing as good dirt.”

  Dad’s iPad switched to Patty Griffin’s version of “Up to the Mountain.” I dug up another plant, and the smell of onions and dirt and sweat made me smile, then made me tear up. I still cried a lot, and so did Mom. Sometimes it felt awful, but other times, crying felt good and right, and like plants in a garden might feel when rain falls after a dry bunch of days.

  “When I show my kids pictures of my dad,” I said to Ms. Manchester, “I’ll tell them how he smelled—all gardeny, like cabbage, and onions, and dirt. And then I’ll tell them how my Grandma Beans called me Oops. If that gives them chills and we feel Grandma and Dad there with us, that’ll be a ghost story, right? The remembering kind?”

  “Depends on how you tell it,” Ms. Manchester said.

  “Use a flashlight and yell to make ’em pee in their pants,” Avadelle offered from behind a bunch of dead sunflower stalks. “Works every time.”

  Ms. Manchester rolled her eyes. “The finish is important, yeah. But I don’t know about the pee thing, Mama.”

  I dug up another onion, and smelled my father, and got chills. I didn’t really think Dad was a ghost, or Grandma, either—and I didn’t know about Heaven, and whether or not it was real, or if people could look down on their loved ones after they died. What I did know was this: A bit of my father was in the onion in my hand, and would be in every onion we ever planted in his garden.

  “My finish will be easy enough,” I told Ms. Manchester as I loosened more dirt with my fork and found another onion waiting in the warm soil. “One day, when I’m ready to tell Grandma’s story and Dad’s story out loud, I’ll use Grandma’s own words to end Ghostology, and I’ll say them whenever I do a reading.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, fighting with an evil weed stalk that refused to be hacked by her hoe.

  “Maybe by the time I’m all old and grown up and stuff, I’ll be able to mean them again. I think Grandma used to mean those words. I really do.”

  Ms. Manchester waited. She liked hearing about Grandma, and all of her antics and sayings, so this was like practicing already with little pieces of stories. I didn’t have a flashlight, but I had onions, so I held one up under my chin, where the tang of it made my nose burn and my eyes water with rain-tears instead of sad-tears.

  In my best imitation of Grandma’s voice, I said, “Sooner or later, Oops, we’re aaaalllll gonna be okay.”

  Ms. Manchester stopped hoeing and gazed at me, sort of sad and sort of shocked. Then Avadelle peeked out from behind the sunflower stalks, her fedora tipped back where I could see her narrowed eyes and bright red nose and cheeks.

  “Hmph,” she grumbled. “Guess I have to admit you’re right, Naomi. The kid does have storyteller potential.”

  “Snake!” Mom yelled. “Big snake!”

  “It’s more scared of you than you are of it,” Mac said from somewhere behind a six-foot pile of pulled weeds.

  “Prove it,” Mom snapped.

  “Don’t move,” Ms. Wilson said. “I’ll chase it away.”

  “Somebody should make snake repellant spray,” Indri insisted from the plot’s far corner as she dropped dirt-covered carrots in her basket. “It’s way past time for that to be invented.”

  Mac groaned, and Ms. Wilson chased the snake, and Mom pulled weeds, and Avadelle and Ms. Manchester tackled the dead sunflowers together, and music played on Dad’s iPad, and I kept finding more of his onions.

  “Sooner or later,” I said, trying the words in my own voice this time. “Sooner or later, we’re all gonna be okay.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book was inspired by my early childhood in Oxford, Mississippi. I lived there until my father died when I was five years old. I started preschool there in 1968, and we stayed in Mississippi until I finished sixth grade. My early childhood played out against a tableau of societal change—the phase of the Civil Rights Movement that occurred between 1968 and 1976 (I consider the movement ongoing).

  It frustrates me that less and less information about that turbulent time in history is passed along in textbooks and classroom discussions. I wrote this book to describe some of what I witnessed and experienced in my childhood. I also wrote this book because I fear we’re forgetting and beginning to dishonor the movement toward equality bought—quite literally—by the blood of those willing to give up their lives so that we, as a nation, could move forward and include all of our citizens.

  So much has changed in Mississippi because of those sacrifices since I was a child, and I wrote Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry from the present to look at some of those changes, but also to gaze without flinching at what hasn’t changed. Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry is full of ghost stories, a traditional way of remembering and uncovering the past, of making sense of terrifying and often very sad events. I hope this book starts conversations about the past and those many events, about “then” and “now,” about what we’ve gained, what we’ve lost, and the work yet to do to resolve inequality and dismantle institutional racism. I hope the story helps people remember and pay respect to the hundreds of names we don’t even know—people who tried to live and succeed and thrive, humans just like each of us, who died for no other reason than the color of their skin.

  Both friendship and betrayal comprise the core of this tale, and as I wrote it, I felt like I walked a difficult line, demonstrating how Avadelle appropriated Ruth’s story even as I told my own through Dani’s point of view. I’m very, very aware that as a white author in current times, my story still has a better chance of being published than Dani’s story would, or her father’s story, or Ruth’s many writings. I carry Avadelle’s privilege. I always have, and I always will. No matter how much I see or hear or know, that privilege will shield and protect me. I can step in and out of conflicts and struggles. I can get tired and walk away from many fights for equality. Dani, Marcus, Ruth, and Indri wouldn’t have my opportunities. They wouldn’t be able to quit the struggle, not even for a minute or a day.

  How well I walked the line in my writing, only time and readers will be able to judge. I hope people talk about that, and I hope I listen, and others listen. I hope people who read Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry have these discussions, debates, and even arguments. I believe talking about these issues and taking deliberate action toward positive change are directions we can take to be more complete, more inclusive, more fair, more loving, and just—

  MORE.

  The facts presented about Mississippi history, the Civil War, the University of Mississippi, William Faulkner, the Meredith riot, the Civil Rights Movement, Alzheimer’s disease, and the dying process are as accurate as I could make them given my personal experiences, clinical training, and available historical references. I also strove to be accurate about the appearance of the campus of the University of Mississippi and modern-day Oxford, though this was difficult due to the images of my early childhood in the 1960s and then my college years in the 1980s trying to peek through today’s topography. The ghost stories I reference are also actual tales related to the town and university, with the exception of the screaming in the steam tunnel, which I created for the book. I also did my best with gardening facts, but I admit that I can kill plants just by looking at them too closely.

  For those who wan
t to read more about the topics in Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry, the following resources may be helpful:

  NONFICTION

  Andrews, Kenneth. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

  Beals, Melba Pattillo. Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High, New York: Pocket Books, 1994.

  Bullard, Sara. Free at Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Choices Program, The. Freedom Now: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Providence: Watson Institute, Brown University, 2012.

  Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

  Doyle, William. An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, New York: Doubleday, 2001.

  Edmonds, Michael, editor. Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader, Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014.

  Freedman, Russell. Freedom Walkers, New York: Holiday House, 2009.

  Levine, Ellen. Freedom’s Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories, New York: Putnam, 1993.

  Levinson, Cynthia. We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March, Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 2012.

  Martinez, Elizabeth, editor. Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers and Freedom School Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer, Brookline: Zephyr Press, 2007.

  Rochelle, Belinda. Witness to Freedom: Young People Who Fought for Civil Rights, New York: Dutton, 1993.

  FICTION

  Crowe, Chris. Mississippi Trial, 1955, New York: Dial, 2002.

  Curtis, Christopher Paul. The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, New York: Delacorte, 1995.