Previously: Mildred Frances Boones was born in Minot, North Dakota on March 12, 1914 … She died at home on March 11, 1986, one day short of her 72nd birthday … Millicent Dorthy Boones taught elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida for over 30 years … She is survived by a sister, Bernice Higgins, of Charleston, WV..
Take it from the top:
fernweh (fern-way) n.
1. An ache for distant places
2. Being homesick for anywhere but home
We sat in Neat!, in upholstered chairs, next to a bookshelf holding vegetarian cookbooks from the seventies. The coffee table in front of us was covered with coloring books from Romania, printed with the mission of educating the younger public about STD’s. I took a piece of paper out of my back pocket and unfolded it on top of the smiling police officer on the cover of Cine Poate Prinde Sifilis?
“Here’s what I’ve found.”
“Two paragraphs. Each about a Millie Boones who died years ago.”
“Yep, unless the kid is like Ghostface Fillah, these are not the Millies he’s looking for.”
“Ghostface Fillah” was another inside joke, a riff on Ghostface Killah, he of the Wu-Tang Clan. During our junior year, our sociology professor invited a medium to speak to our class. To fill time, as it were, making her a fillah. Who spoke of ghosts. With her face. Anyways.
According to Ms. Fillah, there is a window of opportunity after we die, literally a swirling porthole that we can choose to pass through or not. People (or I guess at that point ghosts) may choose to stay or go. Those who stay stay for various reasons, but usually they are attached to a certain person or place and they stick around “because” — and now I’m quoting from my class notes, which I remember because Ana and I used to make fun of this woman all the time — “they want to see what happens to said person or place, either out of benevolence, they want to make sure things end up alright, they want to be present for weddings, for births, for graduations, etc; or out of a malevolent need for revenge, to be present when the object of their attachment is dealt their final card from the divine deck of justice.” Of course, once they pass up the chance to pass through, they are eternally effed up the a (not from my notes) unless they can hook up with a medium who can facilitate the journey to the other side. That was our presenter’s job, to get them to the other side. She did it freelance.
“Maybe she really believed what she said. When she said there were ghosts in the room, maybe she really saw ghosts in the room, or at least believed that she saw them.” Ana refolded my paper as she spoke. “When she said there were ghosts attached to certain people, she saw ghosts standing next to certain people. Or what she thought we ghosts. Or understood as ghosts.”
I almost choked on my panini. Was she being serious? We had mocked that woman so many times. Ana has mocked her so many times, unprompted. Ana mocked every bit of religiosity, including and especially mine. Oh, did she mock my going to church and see it as proof of some sort of irredeemable backwoods rubishness! Didn’t matter that the minister was a picket-line-walking dyke, no, we might as well have been snake handling up in that motherfucker. It was all the same to Ana.
“Seriously?” I said and then swallowed. “Are you being serious? Now you believe what she said?”
“I believe that she believed.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Since when?”
“Since what does it matter?”
“Since you hate religion all the time everywhere!”
“No, I don’t. I hate religious bullshit. I hate the hypocrisy. She believed what she said and she lived accordingly. That’s better than most people. It’s more than you do, that’s for sure.”
This road I was on with Ana, I’d been on it before. “You have mocked her beliefs, on many occasions!”
“In her mind, she saw ghosts. She wasn’t lying to us or trying to trick us. She believed everything she said.”
This was on the road with Critical Ana. Critical Ana saw me as an enemy, or, at best, an untrustworthy associate. Critical Ana could strike without warning, without mercy, provoked by nothing, at least nothing I could understand. Critical Ana drew a straight line from Wallace to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Buchanan to Limbaugh to Bush to me. We were one and the same and she hated us all. I could argue the point, count the number of books by Baldwin, hooks, or Brooks (not David) on my shelf, or the number of times I sat through Vagina Monologues, or that it was I who told her about Hombres Con Armas, or that I would have gladly gladly gladly moved in with her and her mother and her sister in a crowded apartment in Pilsen or Little Village or Back of the Yards, and lived out my days learning Spanish and eating tamales. No dice. I was Bill O’Reilly, only worse, because at least O’Reilly was honest about being an asshole but I acted all sensitive and shit when all I really wanted was to get in her pants so I could tell all my hick friends that I fucked a big-ass Mexican chick. Critical Ana, while not entirely wrong, was not entirely right, and arguments with her never ended well.
“You believe in ghosts now? You think I’m provincial because I sometimes go to church.
Ana took a bite of her scone. “It’s not as simple as you think it is.”
“Come on, Ana.”
“There are ghosts and there are ghosts. Just because it doesn’t fit in your view of — ”
“Stop. You act like you know everything about me, yet I can’t begin to understand the first thing about you. I know where you’re from. I’ve been to your house. But you haven’t been within a thousand miles of mine.”
About that last point, I was right. She didn’t know anything abut the particulars of where I grew up. She knew the broad narrative of America, but she didn’t know — and almost never asked about — the details of my part in that mess of a story. Knowing I was right, but being constitutionally incapable of graciously manifesting such knowledge, Ana left her scone unfinished and walked out the front door. I finished her scone and paid our bill.
Thank you for reading. Next week starts like this:
What she did know about where I was from, she laughed at.
Then we have a longish, kind of story-within-a-story type chapter about where Jackson was from.