Darlin' Neal
Introduction
Here are two stories I've heard that stay with
me:
When Emily Bronte died her dog, Keeper,
followed the procession to the grave and watched her coffin being
lowered into the ground. Afterwards he went home and howled in grief
outside her chamber door for days.
A group of elephants broke into a building
containing the bodies of their clan members, bodies whose parts were
being used to make things like jewelry and purses. They carried the
remains of their relatives from that place and buried them.
When I put out the call for submissions for
this issue, I mentioned Sister Mary Monica Boll of Holly Springs,
Mississippi encouraging me to keep a puppy I was searching for a
home for by saying, "Well, you'll keep him. After all, they are our
companions."
We were in the Marshall County Literacy Center
at the time reading the deeply insightful writing of students who
were discovering they had something to say for the first time.
Outside the front door of the center you could stand on the porch
and see Graceland, Too, just down the block, a little two-story
house where a man who'd been obsessed with Elvis for more than forty
years lives and gives five-dollar tours. If you take the tour three
times, you're a life-time member, and you don't need record of
having been there twice before, legend has it he remembers every
visitor. Students in the center told me about his family. Some said
his wife left him because she couldn't take it anymore. Others said
she tried to and was buried somewhere beneath that house. People
like to tell the story of how his son, Elvis, told his dad one day
he was going to buy milk and never came back home. People felt sorry
for that companionless Elvis fanatic. A woman named Leona also
worked with me in Holly Springs. I'd go over and teach some classes
in the Ida B. Wells Art Gallery which she managed and she'd tell me
of the Underground Railroad and passages and I'd imagine hidden
doors and tunnels all around as I planned my visit to Graceland,
Too, and watched the cats slink around and listened to the dogs
barking down the street. I was warned and made the promise and did
not visit that house with all the billboards and records on the wall
alone. Leona went with me and kept him from dancing his all-shook-up
dance too close to either one of us.
I also kept that puppy I'd found in the middle
of the road and though I've lived in six different towns in the
nearly six years since, because of him, every single one of them has
been home.
You won't find a four-legged animal in each
story that follows in this issue, but you will find that same
longing and profound love I see in the story of Keeper and in the
story of the African elephants. If the writers here have redefined
family they have done so by defining it as being full of secret
passages, as being without boundaries, as stretching from critically
ill children in Africa to birds nursed back to life and flying away
to brilliant teachers leaving indelible impressions to little girls
playing Barbie and longing for home to chickens guarding hippie
communes and leaning in for a whiff.
I hope you'll hold babies and dogs and cats and
partners close in your hearts as you enter these passages. I hope
that your family will become a little larger every moment you take
on these journeys all over the planet with all these treasured
beings.
Darlin' Neal's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in
The
Southern Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah and
numerous other magazines. Her collection, Rattlesnakes and the
Moon, was a finalist for The G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for
Short Fiction. She has a completed novel and short story
collection looking for homes and she is at work on a memoir. Darlin'
Neal
teaches creative writing and literature at Clemson University and
lives in Greenville, SC with the curator of the Greenville Zoo, her
dog, Catfish, and two calicos.