Sound and Fury

“There was a story about the James. A river fed by a hundred tributaries, that looped and curled in on itself so that midway through Virginia, near Baker’s Pond, the artery was more of a strait between two halves of the same river. It flowed east from the Appalachian Mountains over three hundred silky looped miles towards the Chesapeake Bay, an open mouth to the Atlantic. To the sea. The river’s purring sepia water had begun as a firm line back in West Virginia, a liquid arrow, headed fast like it couldn't wait to get inside the Commonwealth of Virginia. Except for that near circle at Hunnicutt’s Place the soft water ran in lyrical bends and sometimes opened out to receive the lush feathery capillaries of streams near Turkey Island, across from Shirley Plantation, or ‘Shirley Hundred,’ as plantations used to be known. A big brick main house, built to be three stories tall, sat at the neck of the Serpent’s Head, (if you looked at an old map where the James took on a serpentine shape.) Then a bulbous tom turkey snood lists out with some more circles inside the moist wetlands. This is below-sea-level country. Tidewater, like the name implies. Land with a pulse. Land that pulls the waters that soak it up into a gentle tide. Slow tides only perceivable by long-timers and frogs. The James gathers force around Pesky’s Corner, and it rounds out into a fire-spitting dragon’s body near Jordan’s Journey. The widest section, bloated, full of male copperheads coiling round each other turning the inlet into a near pink frenzy in summer, faces Berkeley Plantation, still inhabited by the Harrison family. From there it stays thick and heads further east towards the state capital, Richmond. 

Yeah, sure there are maps from Colonial days, ‘Curles of the James’ they’re named, listing the great houses and the smaller creeks that ran to fill the rivers surrounding marsh lands, but the story of those peculiar four days and three nights on the James, when mostly men, and a few tenacious young women, wandered out into the oozing mud with small-scale boats tied to their ankles, that story is un-recorded, not found in any documents, maps or otherwise.”

—excerpt from manuscript, Kissing Her Elbow