This Be the Place: A Water Tower in the Swamp

In the sleepless summer between high school and college, I would slip from my bedroom and follow the snaking path of the river downtown. I’d sneak past the knobby-kneed cypresses, the dilapidated boatyard by the waterfront, the expanse of dead grass in the square where we’d gather to watch fireworks every Fourth of July. I’d creep past the faded murals proclaiming our North Carolina town the “Harbor of Hospitality,” past the history museum where I used to volunteer, past the boarded-up husk of the old library, and the new library ominously situated across the street from the police station. In 10 minutes, I could walk from one end of downtown to the other.

Behind the library, I’d lift the latch, squeak open the gate, and climb the 25-foot ladder until I was balancing along the walkway of the water tower, wide and emblazoned with the town’s blue-and-yellow seal. There I’d sit—sometimes for an hour—watching boats twinkle across the harbor, breathing in the stultifying mid-summer humidity. In the distance, I could just make out the bridges leading to the northeast. The Pasquotank River seemed almost directly below me, darkened by night from its usual sweet tea hue to something closer to molasses. Feeling the coolness of the tank against my back, I’d think about the swamp and how much I wanted to leave.

The rural South, where I grew up, is a place of almost unnatural beauty. Elizabeth City, my home, was nestled between the barrier islands of the Outer Banks on one side and the Great Dismal Swamp on the other, bearing the marks of both: the sandy shores of the beach, the moss-draped trees and tannin-saturated water of the swamp. Elizabeth City was the county seat, and a local metropolis at just over 18,000 people; beyond the town, what wasn’t swamp was mainly waterlogged farmland, potato fields, and peanut farms. Everything was green or deep amber. I was miserable, dreaming daily of living anywhere but there.

In eighth-grade art class, another student jumped me for being queer. The teacher laughed as it happened. This was one incident in a long series of queerphobic attacks I experienced, mainly in middle school but stretching before and after too—beatings, curses, one excoriating act after another. But you’ve heard this narrative before, no? The homophobia of the rural United States; the acceptance found in the big city. Maybe you use this trope to cast aspersions on those living below the Mason-Dixon line. Or maybe you’ve used it to justify leaving somewhere, too.

“Queer identity, at least as I know it, is largely urban,” the disabled queer scholar and activist Eli Clare writes in Exile and Pride (1999), a book partly about his own rural upbringing on the Oregon coast. The majority of the book is about community, the frictions and joys of sharing space with others. The thing about my upbringing, the way I talk about it, is that I shut myself out of the possibility of community. I suspect this is common for anyone who grows up Southern but not Southern, bearing the raced, classed, and encultured privileges to be able to depart from the places that shaped them. Instead of my coastal town, I found homes in the fully-funded boarding school I went to in the urban core of the state; then in the liberal enclave of Asheville, where I attended college; and now in Brooklyn, where I live. I didn’t build any friendships in Elizabeth City that I still maintain. I loved the South, but I left it. I think I always planned to.

***

I’ve written a lot of poems and prose about Elizabeth City and suspect I will continue to for some time. I write about it because of the relative absence of the rural South—a place both physically beautiful and economically marginalized, microcosmic of America and fully unique—in the contemporary literary mainstream. But I also write about it because I miss it, and, alienated from most of my ties there, have no real reason to visit anymore. I write to keep it alive in my memory.

So, this isn’t a celebration of my home or how I found life in the South; after all, the beauty there took me years to embrace. Neither is this a sketch of the intimacies of small-town life: the swimming deck the local fitness center built out into the river, the combination gun-and-pawn-shop where I bought my first acoustic guitar, the diner downtown where we’d always stop after dentist appointments to eat coconut cream pie. This place, like all places, was more complex than that, resisting the narratives we can tell of being purely good or bad. At night, I didn’t feel love as I crept along the deserted and frequently flooded streets of downtown. The water tower doesn’t encapsulate what I cared for in the place. Rather, it’s where I decided to leave.

What I left, after all, could be surveyed from that rickety deck high above the slumbering town: the school where I was jumped; the sprawl of the two segregated cemeteries, one for Black residents, one for white; the middle school, abattoir-like, sitting in a field halfway to the Walmart. There were the poorly repaired streets and, huddled near the water, small mansions owned by the town’s bourgeoisie. My contempt formed a shell, insulating me from the town that shaped me. Elizabeth City isn’t my home, I repeated again and again, until I looked out for the final time from my perch on the tower—and at last it wasn’t.

I don’t even know what Elizabeth City is like now, 14 years later. But surely there’s been another child there who has crept from her home at night to sit on the tower, too lonely to sleep. Maybe she’s walking down the street even now, dreaming of a life that the place can’t contain. Perhaps she can be contained by the town, through circumstance or her own intention. But she’s more likely someone like me who will linger and drift, then eventually leave that tower behind, steady as steel.