Faery’s story reached me in a very casual way. It read as if I had met her at a café/bar/class, we developed a friendship, and in the course of said friendship, she reveals to me this family puzzle. The story rounds out to be is the questions that follow a structuring question—questions through imagination. Honestly, sometimes I found myself confused. I had a hard time placing and seeing these four generations of Alabamians together. Who and where was Lonnie in this trip. What happened to Nettie? For a while I was following her mystery and am not sure if anything was revealed to me. It wasn’t till later in the story that I could place Lonnie in the family tree…Usually when stories are placed in the South, Race always weighs heavily atop of them. Feary hints at it in her description of her “hairitage” so it was nice to see that speculation flourish into the whodunit of the story. What surprised me the most was that this southern heritage was beyond black, and white, but the reveal of her grandfather’s native ancestry wrote an important piece back into southern history.
Structurally, I loved the way this essay is set up. The divisions add to the casual way in which we are invited to experience that author’s story. At the end of the story we end up where we started, with even more questions about identity, history, and American-ness.
