Prologue / Chapter 1

I have to write. I have so much bottled up in my head, which is ridiculous since I also have the problem of not knowing when to shut up. I constantly bombard people with my insane stories, even though it'd be obvious to most that I make the situation extremely awkward at times. But then again, there are several people who have been telling me for ages that I should write. So, I guess this is for them. It's also for my film professor that's two years younger than me. I have a bit of a crush on him, and I figured this would be one way to let him know. Also, since he teaches a film class, he would be a pretty good person to give me feedback, since I hope that one day this will become a movie, if only for the fact that my best friend Colleen and I always talk about how we want to see our 90s years re-enacted. Well, maybe that was my idea. I think she just wants to travel through time or be reincarnated or something. That'd probably much easier to accomplish.

So, where do I begin? That is the question. I'm kind of in between a weed and an opiate high right now. I was also born on a cusp, so there's that. Aries-Taurus. April 20th. Hitler's birthday and national weed day. I wonder if there's a connection? Of course there is. Everything is connected. Every-fucking-thing. I could do that. I could just write everything in my brain as it passes through my consciousness. Okay, that gave me writers' block. Existence is weird. The only theory that I have ever had that I believe in with every essence of my being is that due to the nature of infinity, everything that could happen has happened, will happen, and is happening.

Now back to this frame of time. What shall I write about? Where shall I begin? When shall I stop repeating words? Why has that even become part of literary etiquette? Who am I to judge?

IN THE BEGINNING

On June 9, 1862. Tobe Joseph Young was born, probably somewhere in Georgia. His obituary failed to mention anything about his family or origins. Even his son, my great-grandfather, listed his parents as "unknown" on the death certificate. There was only one Tobe Young that was his age living at the time, and he was listed as a Mulatto on the 1870 census. Tobe was an old-timey name for "mule". Apparently it was common on that side of the family to nickname their kids after animals. My grandfather was called "Duck", and his brother "Frog", although my mom seems to remember that they could've been named by their black "house boy". So Tobe ended marrying the daughter of a wealthy farming family named Ella Elizabeth Pusser. Her maiden surname was changed to Purser sometime in the beginning of the last century after what I would assume to be a family feud. But it carried own with her cousin Buford "Walking Tall" Pusser, the infamous sherrif who hunted the Dixie Mafia back in the 60s and had a movie based on his life.

Around the same time, Tobe's daughter Julia Young Lyles, my Granddaddy Duck's aunt, was murdered by her daughter-in-law Anjette Donovan Lyles. Anjette, according to the numerous reports, plays, and television shows written about her, was a blonde bombshell socialiate in Macon who inherited from her late husband (my cousin) a successful diner frequented by politicians and lawyers. She also poisoned, with aresenic, two of her husbands and her daughter. Growing up, my grandfather always seemed to get very annoyed when anyone mentioned Anjette's name. He even refused to go with us to see the play about her, The Shadow Behind the Flame. Oh yeah, allegedly she was into voodoo. A lot of people like to bring that up. It's pretty common around here, and I may or may not elaborate on it in the proceeding pages.

So around the same time as Anjette's escapades, my Granddaddy's cousin Linder Young was also prosecuted for murder in San Francisco. No one in my family knew about this until I found article about it while researching our genealogy. It's interesting to note that according to a witness, Anjette had secretly called someone in California after a nurse saw her putting something in her daughter's soup. Now, I'm not trying to say there's a definite connection, but it is something that I often wonder about. I also found it strange that Aunt Julia's sister received an anonymous letter stating that Anjette was her killer. The courts ruled that Anjette was only after Aunt Julia's money, which she inherited from my great-great grandmother Ella. The siblings ended up fighting against each other, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, as you can read in Young v. Young.  On a lighter note, Georgia decided not to break its policy of not executing white women, so she went on to become a cook at the State Hospital for the Insane in Milledgeville.

So Tobe's son, John Wesley Young, was a successful hog farmer. You can even read about him and his prize winnings in the American Poland-China Records from the late 1910s and early 1920s. According to my mom, Jesus cast evil spirits into swine, so raising them and eating them for this purpose was Christ-like or something. Strange. Anyway, John Wesley produced several children including my Grandfather, who bought a monument company from my Grandmother's cousin after the Second World War.

My grandmother came from a long line of preachers and the women who married them. They were so devout that even their surnames reflected their occupations: Lord and Pope to name a couple. She was a wonderful woman. I miss her every day. She passed away in 1993 from brain cancer. Our family fell apart afterwards, and my mother and I still haven't gotten over her death. Interestingly, while going through her things recently, I found an old porcelain water pitcher and basin with "Calif 666" stamped on the bottom. My mom says they got it on a trip to California back in the 60s. I can only assume that maybe 666 was the number of a Masonic Lodge they visited. Who knows, really. That side of the family has a ridiculous number of skeletons in its closets. It's a conspiracy theorist's wet dream, even without the knowledge that I come from a long line of Master Masons and Worthy Matrons of the Order of the Eastern Star.

My father's side, however, hasn't made the news nearly as much. He came from a long line of veterans of the American Revolution, Civil War (Confederate side, of course), both World Wars. He himself was a veteran of Vietnam, where he was exposed to Agent Orange and developed a nasty case of PTSD, which probably affected my childhood more than anything else. His mother's side was equally unremarkable, except that my Granny's mother was Indian. Incidentally, she was also thrown into the Insane Asylum in Milledgeville at around the same as Anjette. According to my father, it was because she was going through menopause.

So I suppose Insane Asylums, murders, and Indians make a decent segue into my own story, as the three subjects have featured prominently in my own life during the past few months.