Read Online American Ghost by Janis Owens - Free Book Online

farm myths, asking if they were kin to any “granny-women”? This last was a loaded question, as it was the colloquial term for midwife, a profession half-blood women historically excelled in. Their extended families were quick to own up to such a relationship with a grandmother, or an aunt or a cousin, and with no encouragement at all would go on to describe in great detail their patented ways of treating the manifold complications of childbirth. They would recall with pride the names of the rich families in town who would send buggies out to get them in the old days because they trusted them more than any of them “high hats” in town. They had no idea how much of their cultural roots they were revealing with such stories, for granny-women were also practitioners of root medicine and a direct link to that vast subconscious ethnic heritage that these kinds of isolate communities both secretly celebrated and hotly denied.
    Sam soon amassed a quantity of data, the best of it from the Hoyt Diaspora, which stretched from south Alabama to the coast. There were originally nine Hoyt brothers, but only four still anchored locally: Ray, Earl, Ott, and Obie. Earl was the oldest—a bent octogenarian who suffered greatly from emphysema and seldom left the house; Obie, a widower with four sons; and Ott, the baby of the family and runt of the litter. He was plainly Jolie’s favorite, a lively little bachelor who’d survived rheumatic fever as a child and was about half the size of his older brothers, who treated her with the same delight her father did. He calledher Jo-lee, Cajun-style, and practically ran to the door when he heard her call.
    She was obviously the family pet, and as long as she was at Sam’s side, he was warmly welcomed into listing, old trailers and houses so dilapidated they could truly be called shacks. Ott’s bedroom walls were lined in Depression-era newspapers for insulation—a common economy practiced by tenant farmers in the South, which Sam had read about, but had never seen in real life. Jolie seemed to take great enjoyment in sharing it with him, not intimidated by either her kin’s poverty or their deformities—mementos of their early years working as child labor in the area turpentine camps and sawmills. There were many cast eyes and lopped-off fingers, and an almost universal deafness that meant that Sam’s interviews were held at a dull roar, Jolie shouting right in their faces, “Uncle Ott! Tell Sam about the Hart Massacre! Where the soldiers smashed the babies’ heads against the STONES! Weren’t they buried up at WEEK’S ASSEMBLY?”
    After taking a moment to understand her, the old man would smile a dim smile and agree, “Yes’sam—up thar in Alabamer. Kilt the younguns, babies and all. Come up on ’em in the swamp, Mamer uster say . . . ,” with Sam scribbling furiously at his side.
    It made for much excitement in the discovery, and in only one way did Brother Hoyt continue to disappoint Sam: in his steadfast refusal to own up to his own Native American roots. These were obvious in every way: his strange pidgin English; his mystic strain of American fundamentalism; his straight hair, straighter nose, and Asian shovel teeth (all of them, including Jolie, passed the click test). Even after Sam legally traced them within the legal parameters of tribal membership to the Creek Census, Brother Hoyt was loath to acknowledge the connection and dismissed any promise of minority status.
    â€œThet’s for people who need a laig up,” he argued. “We git by.” At breakfast one morning, he went so far as to trot out the famous old dodge, claiming that the Hoyts were Little Black Dutch.
    Sam was exasperated by his denial, and close enough by then to askhim point-blank, “Well, Brother Hoyt, tell me: What are the Little Black Dutch? Are they Dutch ? Are they black ? Are they even little ?”
    The