I don't know if it's obvious to you we're on a strange child okay, so I had
like dual citizenship growing up. I was born in Macon, Georgia and would spend my
summers there and then during the school year I'd be in Detroit, Michigan.
Wow let's establish my life for a second right, so I went to a private German
school, the Detroit Waldorf school, so though everybody in my school spoke
German, the Waldorf Rudolf Steiner method of teaching is from Germany, I would come
home speaking in German and my own father who was paying the bill
called me a communist. Now then I would go to Georgia and visit my grandma who
we all called Nenanny and she had a cousin who owned a jackass that used to
wear pants and I like a straw hat and no one seemed to notice that that's what
was happening. I'm sitting there he's got on nobody saying anything so I didn't
say anything and then when I leave school and come home I was in Detroit
like I didn't live in the outskirts like some people say they're from Detroit and
they're like 70 miles out, no I was in Detroit. So there's, so I had this kind of
weird multicultural upbringing and so things never quite made sense to me.
Case in point I'm in Georgia and we lived in Macon and Macon at the time had
not zoned itself yet to exclude farm animals. Now we couldn't have large
animals, we could have something small. So my grandfather was a hog farmer but in
the city. Now I'm gonna paint a picture. So I-75 cuts
through my granddaddy's backyard, I-75 south. If you happen to drive through
Macon and see Mercer University Drive there's a storage facility, there's this
weird-looking house that looks like somebody put it together from a kit,
there's a barn that does not look like a barn but is the color of a barn and that
is my grandfather's house. Now when I was little I go down and I stay
for the summer and my mother wanted me to have a traditional southern
upbringing. She wanted me to understand my family, my roots, where I came from. So
that meant a lot of sweet tea a lot of yes ma'am no man pretty much being
southern is just eating a lot of food and thanking people for it like that's
90 percent of the job. That's all you do. You just go to somebody's house and they
hand you a plate or something and you say "Thank you ma'am" and you eat it and
you don't know what it is and it's best not to ask and you that's why that tea
is so sweet like just eat it, slam the tea, and get out. You know and that's
that's the job. So by my parents we lived in a two family flat so I could
never have a pet and I always wanted a pet and the lady across the street,
she was I'm gonna getting into that that's another story, but she raised
chickens and cats together, so she had like these gigantic chickens and these
big sort of alley cats and then she had these little chicks and little kittens
and everybody got along. Cat never tried to kill the chicken, chicken never tried to
kill a cat. It was pretty good life. And I called my mother said that the lady
across the street told me I could have a kitten. And my mother was like "No you
can't have a kitten." I said "Well but I want one." She's like "I understand that
but we don't live in a kind of place where you can have a kitten." I said "Okay."
My grandfather's listening to this and he says "Well your mama won't let you
have a kitten but you could have a hog."
and I'm like "Yeah, that yeah like a hog." Now all the hogs
had had babies right, so we got the little piglets right, and they're all I
mean have you ever seen a piglet piglet not two weeks in because two weeks
in they look like monsters but they went a little little little
it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could move it to a two-family
flat with this little pig I never thought it was gonna grow up I thought
they just had sizes like you get a little one and then there's a bigger one
and then there's the one gigantic ones that I mean. I didn't understand anything.
Now these hogs were, we were already in trouble because they were smarter than
us. Like every day of my grandfather's like was a battle to outwit the hogs so
they'd stay in the pen. And he'd win that battle about 80% of the time, but 20% of
the time, usually around 3:00 in the morning, you'd be in bed and you hear and
that lets you know the hogs were on the freeway, that's how you knew that's how
you knew. So we wouldn't even like we wouldn't there wouldn't even be a
startle. The first time it happened you know I'm a little kid I'm
like "Oh my god" it's like "What's going on?" you know and after that you just get
used to it's like "Oh the hogs got out." So you get up and you put your clothes
on that you had the day before because you keep them out because the dogs
might get out and my grandmother would go in the kitchen and start making
coffee because it was gonna take a minute to get them off the freeway and
the truck drivers would come off the freeway walk, down through the hollow,
come up through the backyard, come sit in the kitchen, and drink coffee. And my
grandfather would go out there say "Well boss man we got to
get these hogs off this freeway, you might well go in the house and have some
coffee with my wife cause it's gonna be a minute."
So these guys all did all the northbound southbound traffic some of the
northbound traffic would come over get in the kitchen, drink coffee, my grandma
started making breakfast. She just we always have eggs we go like
it was just that was normal and then all of us who weren't making breakfast would
go out with the buckets of slob walk through the backyard go down the holler
get up on the freeway so yeah you start trying to get him to come off the
freeway. Now if I had, I know that was good wasn't it? That's how you know this is
not a lie. But it was just normal like that was a normal thing and I would go
to school and when I got back home and I'd say "Hey you know we had to get those
hogs off the freeway" and my friends you know my Detroit City friends would say
"Your family is country as hell." I'm like "Yeah I know, you don't have to tell me
that." But anyhow I called my mother and I said "Well granddaddy says I can have a
piglet" and my mother said "Your granddad is a liar" and I said "Well he said I
could bring it home." She said "Your granddad is a damn liar put him on the
phone." So the two of them get into some sort of heated conversation and I'm not
even there because I'm in the backyard at the fence picking out my piglet and
granddaddy comes out of talk to my mother and says "Now your mama is right.
You can't have no pig in the city, they won't let you have it. But if you leave
him here with me you can have them but he'll still be yours but he'll be with
me." And I'm thinking this feels like a divorce parent thing but it's the best
I'm gonna get cuz this is the closest thing I'm gonna get to a pet so he said
"Go ahead and pick him out" so I picked out this little piglet that's all black
and I named him Blacky because that's what you do when your child. simple
things. What's the name of your black pig? Blacky. Simple and easy to remember.
And I stay for the rest of the summer and Blacky started to get a little
bigger and I can't wait cuz it's gonna be about nine months and
then I'm gonna come back to see Blacky. So I go to school and tell everybody
about Blacky, I'm going on about Blacky, I'm telling my mother and father bout
Blacky, I saw Blacky, Blacky do this, Blacky he did that. I called my granddad
"How's Blackie?" "Blackie's doing real good" "Okay so tell me something else about
Blackie." "Blackie is good and getting real big." Okay so that's all he keeps saying, I'm
like yes, Blackie is getting good, again I'm going to school every day my pig is
getting bigger so he's so smart you know, the pigs get out get on the freeway
"Your family's countries as hell" you know it's just this cycle just keeps
happening. So long before anybody really trusted the post office because there
was a minute when no one trusted the post office this is like the late 70s,
you didn't mail nothing, you put stuff on them, don't lie to me y'all did it, you
put it on the bus. If you were sending something serious you put it on the bus
and you go down to the Greyhound station and pick it up. So my grandfather calls
and tells my mother and my father that he's sending us a package and I am I
know I'm in the future with you ,I know. And I am you know, he's my grandmother
had crowded peas or purple hills and she would shuck all these peas and send us
peas and okra and anything out of her garden, they would freeze it and send it
to us. So I hated peas so I was already uninterested in what might be coming. And
we get down to the bus station, we pick up this cooler and it's like double wrap,
there's all kinds of tape and stuff on it. So we bring the cooler home and my
dad pulls out his pocketknife and he cuts open the cooler and he
starts taking out all this stuff wrapped in butcher paper and it's you know it's
obviously meat and I'm like "Oh granddaddy sent to us meat" and then my dad
gets through the first layer of papers and then as he starts pulling stuff out
each package says Blackie. Now I'm too young to read but the look of horror on
my mother's face pretty much let me know what that said.
And there are sausages and smoked pork chops and ham hocks and tons of bacon,
like lots of bacon because Blackie got real big. I'm mortified, I'm at the
kitchen table petting the paper. Really in my mind I decided my
grandfather was a cannibal like there's nothing wrong with him. My grandfather
was mentally ill. And I'm pet I'm just petting this paper and my mother looks
at me and she says "Damie, granddaddy doesn't really know what pet means. Like
if it's a dog he thinks that's a pet. If it's a cat he thinks that's a pet. Now
just about anything else that you can cook with a bucket of peas he probably
doesn't think as a pet." And I was done. I was a vegetarian. I'm like "I'm done. I'm
done with you savages. I'm done. I'm not eating I'm not eating no more pig. I'm
done." I don't want to tell you that I held that line, I want to tell you that.
My dad in the middle of March in Michigan dusted off the grill on the
back porch of that second-story flat and he put a couple of rounds of sausages
and a couple of slabs of ribs on that grill and by the time he brought it in
the house and put some Mrs. Griffith barbecue sauce on it which you could
only get in Macon, George and my granddaddy sent along with the pig,
I pretty much just said "Well here's the you Blackie" and I ate everything on that plate.