Behind the scenes - Beneath the Black Oak
Rush
I have lived most of my life in the South, surrounded by a very intriguing family history. I grew up listening to stories from my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncle—but my grandmother’s tales from her childhood have always been my favorite. Perhaps that is because she spoke them so often, up until the day she died. She shared many experiences with me that she lived through, as well as those that had been passed down from her own grandparents. Over the years, she would tell me these stories so many times that they became part of my own story and something that I tell my children now. Generational tales of horror, humor, romance, and most of all, the perseverance of the many who came before us.
The tragedy of my great-great-grandfather, the bit of family history that originally inspired Beneath the Black Oak, was one of her stories that has always stuck with me. The details of his life as an iron worker and farmer, and how he never owned a vehicle and walked everywhere that he went. He was an indigenous man who came to be the victim of a known racist—a murder that was publicized as an accident, though my family always knew the truth. His story has been told and retold over generations in our family, from 1935 to the present day—a story that has haunted my family for nearly a century.
The house in Beneath the Black Oak, where they lived, is still in our family and has been for well over a hundred years. In my story, there’s mention of an outhouse still on the property years later, and that is just one of the many truths tucked into this book. Around 1995, as a teenager, my family all gathered for a reunion in Alabama—cousins as far as the eye could see! After the gathering, some of us went to the family homestead to see my great-uncle Fred, who still lived there at the time. I was absolutely enchanted, walking in my ancestors’ footsteps: the property that surrounds the little ranch-style cottage, the old peanut fields, the remains of a wagon that had been left to fall apart right where it last sat, the old well, and yes, the outhouse. I asked why it was still there, along with a big metal wash tub on the back porch. My grandma told us that up until a few years before—around 1992—there had never been running water in the house. Uncle Fred still took baths on the back porch, used the deep well, and the outhouse. I was shocked.
Inside the house, we walked over the creaking wooden floorboards into a living room that had doubled as my great-great-grandma’s bedroom. There was also a small kitchen with a wood-burning stove, a newly added bathroom, and two small bedrooms. I could almost see the shadows of generations moving through the space, remembering my grandmother’s many stories that had taken place right within those walls.
One room in particular caught my imagination. We walked through the door, and the first thing I noticed was a high shelf that went all the way around the room, lined with various preserves in old mason jars. My grandma explained how they had used every bit of space in that house, and that preserves had been a very important part of keeping food safe, since they didn’t have a refrigerator back then. She also told us that these preserves had been there since her mother had died, the same year that I was born, 1978. No one would eat them—but apparently they couldn’t throw her hard work away either.
When we visited, no one mentioned anything about the place being haunted—and unlike my book, no bodies have been buried on that property—at least not to my knowledge. Though there have been jokes behind hands about the possibility.
There was something else buried in that place though: a deep vein of family history, scattered relics from our past, the spirits of our ancestors, and the story of my great-great-grandfather still echoing like a tune on the record player, captured in the very bones of the place.
I don’t know what ever happened to the man who killed him. The newspapers gave very little information on that subject. He probably went on about his life as if nothing had ever happened, while my great-great-grandfather took three days to die, leaving my great-great-grandmother to go on with her broken heart, raising their six children all alone.
My visit there was in 1995, but I didn’t start writing this story until 2022. I was always intrigued by the details I’d collected, but it was never enough— until my curiosity was sparked further by seeing it all printed in black and white years later.
A dear friend of mine who was studying genealogy asked if she could use me as a guinea pig in her research, to which I excitedly agreed. I gave her my great-great-grandparents’ names, asking if she could focus mostly on them, though I didn’t expect her to find much. She surprised me though. She found actual census reports, newspaper articles about the incident, as well as his obituary and an article about my great great grandmother suing the man responsible for $100k—though I don’t know what the outcome of that was.
From there, my imagination went wild, and a fictional version of the story began to take form.
This tale that I’ve written, Beneath the Black Oak, is a quilted patchwork of both truth and fabrication, facts and gossip. I’ve stitched this family tale together with others and with my own personal and supernatural experiences, embellishing with the shiny black gems of my own imagination. You’ll find so much of me and my family in this book: the mason-jar preserves, the peppermint sticks, the outhouse, the dog, and even the mysterious owl. These are things that really happened. I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty mix of fact and fiction—a quilt of many varied fabrics, worked together into its final pattern.
In the end, I think some part of me has always just needed to travel back there, to walk in their shoes, to sit with my ancestors a while and make sense of something that was so senseless. It feels good to hold space for them, to give their story a conclusion, answering unanswerable questions— even if only through the work of fiction.
