The Moth (18 page)

The house that my great-grandmother presided over was called Treutlen Hall, and it was in Waynesboro, Georgia. And as you entered the foyer, you looked up and there was this horrifying mosaic of Medusa looking down at you. Then you walked in, and there were these two enormous dining rooms, the ornate library, and the staircase that was so grand and went up to the seven bedrooms and the five bathrooms. On the third floor was the grand ballroom where my mother danced when she was a little girl.

There was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish Room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish Room. They were both named Inez. And on that day Big Inez gave Little Inez a plantation all her own.

Two thousand acres.

Then her little sister came running in and said, “Grandmother, can I have a plantation too?”

And Big Inez looked down and said, “Child, your name is Alice. You were named for your Yankee grandmother. Go ask your Yankee grandmother for a plantation.”

But after the stock market crash there weren’t any plantations
for anybody. Everything was lost, and my mother married a poor writer and knocked around the North for many years and then wound up living on a little island off the coast of Georgia called St. Simon’s Island, and she worked as a receptionist for an optometrist.

But she still had all her memories of Treutlen Hall, and she had all of these beautiful pictures, which I would not look at, because I hated all that stuff. I hated all that Confederate vamping. Mom wanted me to go to either Duke or Emory. And I dropped outta high school. I went to live on my own. Because I could not stand to be there.

I would go back for meals, and I was eighteen years old, and my mom would remind me to point my spoon away from me when I ate with it, because Big Inez had always said, “A little ship sails out to sea; I point my spoon away from me.”

I would say, “Mom, let me eat, and leave me the hell alone.”

I had a chip on my shoulder the size of the moon. And there was a guy who came down from Waynesboro, from my mom’s hometown. His name was Lewis Ross. His father had worked as the gardener at Treutlen Hall. Lewis Ross had grown up and become very wealthy, and he was coming down to St. Simon’s to build this huge resort for the middle classes. My mother reviled Lewis Ross. She said he was poor white trash. She said he was an odious little rodent.

So I went to work for him. Just to spite her. I worked on one of the construction crews building condos. One day we were out there digging footings, and Lewis Ross comes waddling up with his big bulgy eyes. And he’s with the on-site architect, and he points to me and says, “Jones.”

Now, my name’s not Jones. Jones was my great-grandmother’s name. And when he spoke he had a little bit of bitterness.
So I was a little afraid, but I came up and he said, “Son, go and put your shovel down, and go over there to that shed, and bring me back some J-bolts.”

I said, “I don’t know what a J-bolt looks like.”

He said, “Well, a J-bolt’s kinda crooked, and it’s about as long as your dick when it gets hard.”

He was laughing, and all of my colleagues were laughing. And you know, I loved these guys, and all I wanted to do was to impress them.

So as I walked toward that shed, I knew that if it turned out that a J-bolt was any less than six inches long that I was destroyed—that for the rest of my life, my name would be J-bolt. So I got to the shed, and I looked in, and it was dark and hot. And there were all these wasps batting around in that shed. And I looked down and saw the J-bolts, and thank God, they were seven inches long. Even better, there were these anchor bolts, and they were about sixteen inches long, and they were iron and as big around as my wrist. And I got a bunch of ’em and carried ’em back to Lewis Ross and said, “I’m sorry, Boss, they’re too small, but they’re as big as I could find.”

And my colleagues loved this. They were easy to please. And even Lewis Ross had to laugh. And later that afternoon I got summoned to Lewis Ross’s office, and I went there, and he said, “Jones, let’s go get a drink.”

And we got into his bright red Cadillac, and we drove up to Macintosh County, to a brothel. Or kind of a brothel. It was a double-wide-trailer-in-the-woods kinda brothel. And I had lots of Southern Comfort, which is vile. But I liked it. And I liked the girls.

And Lewis Ross at one point said to me, ’cause he knew that I had lived up North, “Did you ever have a Yankee girlfriend?”

And I said, “Uh, well, yeah.”

And he said, “Was she a hippie?”

And I said, “Sort of.”

And he said, “Did you ever eat that thang?”

And I kinda had to nod, and he gave me this look of complete disgust, but he turned to the girl next to him, and he said, “Well, whyn’t you do it to her while I watch.”

And I looked at him and I realized that this man’s skull was full of boiling shit, and that he hated what he loved, and therefore was a true Southerner. And I guess that I am also a true Southerner because I confess that I actually considered performing for him. Now, it’s hard to say why. But I was eighteen years old. I wanted more than anything to impress him. He had a kind of bizarre grandeur. And he wasn’t anything like anybody in my family.

But the girl saved me: She said, “Oh, no way!” And so we just had another drink.

Then Lewis Ross’s eyes got very bulgy, and he told me that he had just purchased my family’s ancestral mansion, Treutlen Hall, and his engineers were going to break it into four huge pieces and roll the pieces down to the Savannah River and put them on barges and float them down past the city of Savannah, down the intercoastal waterway to St. Simon’s Island, where he would rebuild them as Treutlen Hall, his golf clubhouse and the crowning jewel of his resort. It would be like a beacon to tourists all over the world. And he wanted me to tell my mother that Lewis Ross would pay her twice what the optometrist was paying her if she would come and be the hostess at the house that she had grown up in.

He said, “I want to hire all you Joneses to work for me.”

That night I didn’t go right home. I went to Mom’s first to
tell her about this, and she seemed somewhat distressed. And she said to me she didn’t really want to put on a hoop skirt and a bonnet and go guiding grubby tourists all around her ancestral home.

And I said, “Oh, what’s the matter, Mom? You don’t like common people?”

She said, “I don’t mind common people. This was my home.”

I said, “Common people built Treutlen Hall.”

And she said, “Are you drunk?”

I said, “You should like this, Mom. You can tell your story of the stillborn twins a thousand times. You can sell coffee mugs engraved with the story of the stillborn twins. Then that story will be worth something.”

And she threw me out of her house.

I woke up the next day with the worst hangover that I’d ever had. I had this terrible remorse, and I called her to say I was sorry. But she said it was all right. She was gonna take the job, because Dad was sick, and they needed the money. But she wanted to go to Waynesboro one more time to look at Treutlen Hall in its real home.

So on Friday she drove on up. And on Saturday night around 3
A.M
., I got awoken by a telephone call, and it was my mother, and she said, “It’s all right. Treutlen Hall is safe.”

And that was the night of the great conflagration. You can Google it. It’s a famous night in Waynesboro, Georgia. The flames were seven stories high. And the gates were chained up so that nobody could get in there, and by the time they did, Treutlen Hall was gone. Treutlen Hall was chimneys.

And they determined it was arson, and that an accelerant, namely gasoline, had been used. Somebody had poured gasoline
in every room—in the Medusa Room and the great dining rooms, and the Turkish Room, and the grand ballroom upstairs.

And I sat up all night, and I felt a kind of grief that I have never felt before. It was shattering. It was like a piece had been torn out of my side.

And then I felt a kind of pride, and I thought,
My mother did this.

George Dawes Green,
founder of The Moth and Unchained, is an internationally celebrated author. His first novel,
The Caveman’s Valentine,
won the Edgar Award and became a motion picture starring Samuel L. Jackson. The
juror
was an international best seller in more than twenty languages and was the basis for the movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin.
Ravens
was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Wall Street Journal,
the
Daily Mail
of London, and many other publications. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

SHERMAN “O.T.” POWELL

I
n 1975, I was twenty-eight years old, and I weighed in at 120 pounds. I found myself on a bus, chained to a West Indian brother, headed upstate to prison.

I had been busted for the sale of narcotics in the first, second, and third degree. I had been given “four-to-life” under the Rockefeller Plan.

During that time, whether you sold a bag of dope, a bag of coke, or even your own medication, you were going to get a sentence, but then it was going to have “to life” tagged onto the back of it. So you might get “one-to-life,” “five-to-life,” “twenty-to-life,” etc. I knew that I was going to get some time one day because of the way I lived, but never in my wildest dreams did I think “life” was going to be at the end of my sentence.

I had done a couple of stints at Rikers Island and various county jails, but I had made the big time now—Attica Penitentiary. I was walking around the prison yard, seeing bullet holes
still in the walls where the National Guard had shot inmates during the 1971 riot.

I was scared to death. I had heard about guys getting raped and stabbed, and I was just petrified. But as fate would have it, three of my old customers from the street that I used to sell dope to happened to be there, and they must have seen the fear in my face.

They said, “Sherman! Don’t worry about a thing! We’re going to look out for you, man, because you looked out for us when we was in the street.”

I said, “Thank you, Lord!”

And so one of the guys said, “Sherman, when you go to the assignment board, tell them that you want to get your GED, and that you want to get into some kind of vocational program. You don’t want no work assignment, you want to go to school, because that’s the only thing they understand. That’s what they call rehabilitation.”

Sure enough, when I went to the board, I told them that I wanted to go to school. So they put me in typing.

My friend was getting ready to leave—he was going home on parole—and he told the guards up front to make me the waterman. Being the waterman, I’d get up early in the morning and pass out the water to everybody, because you had to have hot water to start your day.

So I’m thinking to myself,
I got a pack-a-day cigarette habit, I got a candy jar with little Snickers in them, but I’m only getting $20 a goddamn month from the state. So I got to come up with some type of fucking hustle to get me some cigarettes and candy.
Right?

When I was in Rikers, I worked at the bakery. And I remembered this guy showed me how to make hooch. We would
get a big bucket and put a black plastic bag in the bucket, and we’d put yeast in there and several cans of concentrated grapefruit juice or orange juice. We would even put potatoes in there or grapes. I liked the grapefruit myself—it was much stronger. I liked to put the grapefruits and the grapefruit juice in there, put a little sugar with it, tie that baby up, and let it sit for about six or seven days, and voilà! You’ll be in heaven.

So I said, “Well this is what I got to do!”

I had to make some connections, so I found friends of mine who knew a friend who knew a friend, who got in touch with the guy in the kitchen so I could get the yeast. Now, they sold the juice and sugar in the commissary, and every third day we had grapefruits for morning breakfast, and I’d get all the guys’ grapefruit.

I started wheeling and dealing, putting stuff together. At first I was trying to figure out how I was going to distribute the wine. Then I figured out that everybody in the joint smokes or drinks coffee, so they have an old ten-ounce Folgers jar in their cell. I could put the wine in the coffee jars.

But once I made it, it started bubbling and stuff, and it started stinking. So I had to figure out a way to stop the smell.

In the commissary they had what they called Magic Shave. Now, Magic Shave was a paste you whipped up and put on your face (not only would it take the hair off your face, it would take the skin off too if you left it on too long). But it smelled like rotten fucking eggs—just stunk like hell.

So whenever the guards would come past my cell, they would say, “Shorty, I don’t know how you put that stuff on your goddamn face! That shit
stinks
!”

But they didn’t know I was whipping this shit up to keep
them from smelling the goddamn wine. I got the wine wrapped up in a blanket under my bed. I’m nursing this wine like I’m a nurse in the infirmary. I’m taking care of this wine, right? Because this is my livelihood.

The first batch was finally ready. Because I was the waterman, my cell was always open, so I collected everybody’s coffee jars, filled them up with hooch, and passed them back out. For every ten-ounce coffee jar, I got five packs of cigarettes. So my cigarette packs and candy were stacking up. I was eating Snickers like a motherfucker, eating M&M’S like a motherfucker. I was doing good, right?

Mr. Ronny Worth and Mr. Frank Yonkerman, who were the guards, they had taken to liking me because I was the smallest guy in the joint, but I was always in the face of someone who was many times taller than me, talking shit, you know?

So they’d say, “Shorty, you got a set of balls on you! We’re glad we chose you to be the waterman.”

Mr. Frank Yonkerman had this scar on his face, which reminded me of Al Capone.

So I’d always go to him and say, “Mr. Capone—I mean, Mr. Frank!”