Notes on Becoming #1

A Message in a Bottle

Dear Someone,

Last time I wrote I announced a new name. I recommend it.

I am writing to you in chrysalis. I felt inclined to send out this digital letter in a bottle. This is the start of a series of letters on American inheritance; the kind that is incomplete and must be patchworked to save its fraying edges.

I’ve been practicing my new signature, feeling through the complications of calling myself something new. Even though it is just a pen name to write emails under, taking on a new name is to sever the self in two.

My new name is the name of my great-great grandfather, and I know little about him other than anecdotes and family folklore. What I do know paints a complicated portrait.

I do not know what he would think of his queer, city dwelling grandson writing under his name.

Hiliary Mathew Davis was a seaman and coxswain in the first world war. He lost his ear to a bite in a bar fight that developed gangrene. He cut off the remaining infected ear with a razor blade.

Despite this gruesome detail, he is described as a “gentle little man” in a newspaper clipping, and was never known to swear or boast about his conquests at sea.

I know him through small fragments in my mother’s memory as a little girl, when he told her stories about the ships and their masts. I knew his name through childhood as the other name I would have been called if my mother had chosen it.

Hiliary was also the keeper of an heirloom textile in my family—a weaving made by his grandmother when she was only 12 years old, a weaving that led to her marriage to a union army man. This textile would later accompany her and her 6 children on an 80 mile journey to the coast of Florida, fleeing her confederate neighbors.

Although my mother’s side of the family had occupied that area since the 1860s, somehow this place never felt like my own home. I grew up in a house built by 3 of my maternal grandfathers, I spent all my years there dreaming of a home somewhere else, waiting for pixels to load Neopets on dial-up internet. I wanted to be anywhere else but there. I had learned at an early age, as the land “developed” around me, to look for home in a screen.

In 2015 I boarded a flight from Pensacola to Chicago. That place was an easy one to forget.

On an especially frigid night this past winter, while waiting under the heat lamps on a Chicago Transit Authority platform, I saw an advertisement stretched across my train car as it arrived with a photograph of the white sand beaches, emerald water, and sea oats that I knew as a boy.

The sea parted, and I walked into the train car perfumed with Swisher Sweets, with a homeless man sprawled out across the seats. It took a decade to feel my first pang of homesickness, and I felt it here, holding onto the cold steel rod of a train car. Above the sleeping man, an ad entices me to the beaches of South Walton Florida.

My grandfather Hiliary knew that land as a quaint fishing village. My view of the same ocean was always obscured by cranes, condominiums, and outlet malls. I grew up loathing it.

When I was 17, working at Polo Ralph Lauren in an outlet mall, wearing the mandated double layered polo with the popped collars in 100 degree heat.

The steel doors of the train car part, letting in a gust of wind chill to bite at the sleeping man. I step out onto the icy platform. The image of the ocean rattles down the train tracks, away from me.

At home I see my grandfather as a signature on a military documents through my computer screen. At 17, Hiliary Mathew Davis enlisted in the US Navy, boarding a schooner built in the century before him. We can only assume the reasons for his leaving home: absent father, ill mother, the hunger of his younger siblings.

His ship left from Pensacola Florida, in the time that the sand dunes were like mountains and the Florida black panther roamed the wooded areas where my family lived.

I left from this same place by plane, after the wildness had been contained and dunes, paved. I have never heard the scream of the Florida panther.

My reasons for being in Chicago, where the wind bites at your face, remain unclear. I have signed my life away on documents to negotiate my survival, too.

I choose to write these letters under the name of my great-great grandfather to remember the wilderness of Florida, the land that I was born to. I choose to write to you as Hilary, because the name has a lineage of the word cheerful—something I am trying to be.

I need to cut off my own gangrenous parts.

I am writing these letters to sever myself from the bitterness of inheriting an aftertaste of the earth as an advertisement.

Yours,

Hilary M. Davis