Gum Road

Gum Road is a real backroad which separates the Great Dismal Swamp from the suburb in which I was raised. It represents a real and figurative border between the historically untamable swamp and suburban America. Gum also refers to the sap of the longleaf pine, which once dominated the southeast but was decimated by slave labor in the antebellum South.

The destruction of the longleaf pine forests and more damaging destruction of peoples haunts these essays’ background. Formally, the thesis’ four sections are named after the layers of a tree, presented in the order of moving from the bark to its inner core. Moving “inward,” the narratives become more fictional and move further into the past. While the first half is concerned with family and memoir, this aperture progressively widens into fictional stories about the region’s collective history.

Holding the strands together are a series of recurring images and questions about ecology, memory, and the effect of history on the psyche of the present. The most important of these questions regards the relationship between Virginia’s history and the prevalence of schizophrenia in my family. I ask whether there is a metaphorical, if not pathological, relationship between my family’s schizophrenia and our family’s implications by our history as white southerners. Rather than answering this question, the fiction in the second half provides different frames in which the question can be posed most honestly and fully.