Biography

My father tells me I can’t possibly remember. But I do. The pickup truck had wooden railings around the back, and it came around the side of our house and headed down our driveway. It was late morning, and I was in the kitchen, looking out the window beyond the eating table.

He says someone must have told me those details.

But no one had to. Because of what stood in the back of that truck, inside those railings. It was our milk cow. It was Mama Red. And she was leaving.

I was three years old. And I loved her.

I knew it the first time I’d watched my father milk her. We were in the barn, him sitting on a bucket turned upside down, the right side of his face pressed against her belly like he could have loved her, too. I stood off to the side, watching his hands pull hard on her teats, yanking them as if they had misbehaved. I told him, “Daddy, stop! You’re hurting her.”

But he kept his fingers moving, alternating steady streams of her milk into a pail in a rhythm I did not understand. “I’d hurt her if I didn’t,” he said.

I didn’t believe him.  I stopped drinking milk that day.

I had no idea back then that what I had witnessed and felt would shape what would take many years to return to as a writer.  This idea of sacrifice that an animal makes.  And so willingly.

There’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell for a decade. The seed of it was handed to me one night in Atlanta, Georgia, when a neighbor told me a secret he’d been carrying around for 54 years, since he was a six-year-old boy outside Birmingham, Alabama. “I’m telling you,” he told me, “knowing you’re a writer.” I vowed that night to help him and his people find forgiveness, find redemption.

So I wrote this whole other draft of a novel, one that followed a more traditional route to salvation. Ultimately, though, it didn’t hold water. I let it sit for a couple of years, then pulled it back out and saw in it this one paragraph about cows, about how this one mama cow wore herself out, trying to run buzzards off from her newborn baby’s carcass. And then I went to visit my father, who that day had weaned his six-month-old beef calves from their mamas, putting them behind separate fences, thirty yards from each other. Their back and forth cries in the night became so loud, they woke me and drew me outside, where I saw the mamas all huddled together at the closest place to their babies my father’s fence would allow. They were looking towards their offspring and making these guttural sounds that made me shiver. I knew then that I had found the healing agent to get these people, who had become my people, back on solid ground.

Writer Albert Camus has written that “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

My heart first opened with Mama Red.

I’ve heard it said Write what you know. Others say Write what you want to know. I say Write what opens your heart.

Because you remember. You do.