Linear Rendition of the 1775 Mouzon Map Coauthored with Reluctant Ancestors

When he imagined this South, his home was at the center.
(Deterioration along the folds)

“Pine Land the lowest in the Province”                [                         ]                    “Great Bay Swamp”

“Pine Land”

A tree falls in this forest. It’s likely pine.

To mention his home is to mention mine. Fallow fields I relinquished alongside the claim I haven’t made (use being the most valid interpretation of possession).

I’ve attempted to imagine Mouzon’s imaginings

of progeny. In the South, Daughters of
the American Revolution are synonymous
with Daughters of the Confederacy.
They raise money. Build monuments.
For their dead, they displace the living.

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¹
Johnnie Mae, great-great-granddaughter
to William Henry Mouzon, met my mother
and tried to poison my mother’s dog.

But when Johnnie Mae died, she asked her son
to look after my mother. I’ve told you this story.         My mother was pregnant then. Not quite a citizen.

On the map, the Appalachian Mountains are tufts of silkworms, strung together.

Strung together, a series of letters to immigration explains
my mother opened a PO box in 1988. Someone
had tampered with her mail, but she assured
the government, she still lived on “our homestead.”

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²

“Hell
Hole
Swamp”

One might go so far as to say, Mouzon outlined the state as he appraised it.
He loved white pines, which filled the backyard he bequeathed. He, too, was a second-generation
immigrant. For him, land was an easy grant he accepted from a king he later rejected.

The past tense effaces
          “deserted…and remov’d,”
                    but a past-past tense remembers.

“Pine Land full of Cane-runs fit for Cow-pens”

Once my father warned me, “A border makes every choice more illegal.
You have to pay attention to everything you carry.” We were leaving
the state on a weekend when he had custody. I’m glad. He made it ordinary
to fear apprehension along state lines.

Geography has always been my weakest subject. I thought I could show in a distinct manner—

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³

Reinvention is a vital art,
i.e., I want to survive another’s invention.

Today, officials affirmed they will deport residents at our county’s expense. The state imagines a bloodright to “all the mountains, rivers, swamps, marshes, bays, creeks, harbours, sandbanks, and soundings on the coast.”

Mouzon draws Boxon Hill
like a series of feathered fans,
balding heads, or many closed
eyes stacked together.

When I say, “I belong here,”
I still benefit from the closed-eyed
archive I point to.

“all Pine Land back from the Rivers”

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⁴

I can’t extend this country’s love for one side of my family to the other.

Feeling this deficiency, I withhold my own love.

I only talk to the Mouzons on Facebook. I post that I get nervous when my rabbit licks too long at her pink foot.

A few hours later, Aunt Kitty calls me

“heartless,” to love an animal when all my cousins are dead. My cousins, who were her children.

Reluctant ancestor,

Can you believe that? All my white cousins are dead.

¹ I feel some culpability about the granite soldier in front of the Kingstree courthouse. A Union order mixed up with a Confederate one and a sculptor unable to tell the difference. My father told me to have pride in our little spy.

² Often, this history makes me reach out to my mother. I ask her to send me her naturalization documents, just in case. When they arrive, I realize that the state that calls for reimmigration will not acknowledge the records I keep.

³ Please consider this paint chip I scraped from Johnnie Mae’s house.

⁴ The head of the Black River (Wenee Creek) looms over the High Hills of Santee. I learned to swim in the same stretch a cousin drowned in.