Genesis

The genesis of every story has to have a point of origin. Mine can be no different. Considering this story is about me, logically, it should begin at my beginning, shouldn't it?

The matter of this beginning I have carefully considered. As I am the narrator, the beginning has certain complications. I cannot recall the earliest events of my life, that is, as I am told they occurred. I have long taken so much on faith. I have absolutely no proof that they really happened. Was I really a baby? Was I really born? And to whom was I actually born if I was born?

You can see my situation at the least requires at its very beginning a dishonest narration. One that is not really mine. If you are to trust my story then I must be as accurate to the details of my life as I can, so at least for the purpose of the story let us share the most trustworthy conclusion. I was not born at all, but suddenly appeared at the moment of my earliest memory. I was somewhere around what must have been equivalent to the age of one year in a traditionally birthed child.

Lake Concordia, Ferriday, La.

At this time my memory takes me to a place that appears to be what older ages would teach me was a shack. It is an unpainted building which appears even to my small-sized perception to be quite small. I cannot see all of it, but only what I will learn is the porch of this building. Adjacent to this porch is the wall of the wooden building, and at its end appears to be a very small room in which is standing the woman I already recognize as my mother. Apparently she is cooking, for in the years to come wherever there is the type of furnishings I see beyond my mother, she will use them to cook. The third and fourth walls to this porch do not exist, for they open into the world beyond. It is a world of which I do not recall much until what will be 1 to 1 1/2 years later, had I been born in the usual fashion.

Of the little I do recall, I have memories of a handlebar mustached old man I am told was my mother's grand daddy, a church building near our little house (a church I am told my Grandpa John Wesley Tarver built), a house built on a slope in which I recall seeing a woman with one leg. This is my Grandma Marie Tarver, I understand. And then I do recall the dimmest memory of an aged lady I have long thought must have been Great-Grandma Lizzie Kelly. I believe this because in later years I would see her again in a different setting and she was the same woman.

Then there is the leap of life's memory. I am a little older...  Next