I figured there was nothing mysterious about my family until the Christmas Day we saw the picture of the one-eyed man.
My grandmother’s bedroom, Forestdale, Alabama, Polaroid 600 (2019)
We were from a small community west of Birmingham, right outside the city limits, with more trees than concrete. Sandusky was filled with the homes of coal miners and steelworkers, modest two and three bedroom houses with yards full of dogwoods and azaleas. We lived only a few minutes away from the home my father had grown up in, where my grandparents, my Pop and Nana, still lived.
My family’s street was Tower Drive, named because it wove its way to the top of a great big hill, where all the local TV and radio stations had cloud-scraping towers. Right after the steel towers was a ridge which overlooked a great valley covered with kudzu. In the distance you could spot the skyline of the city. On a clear day you could even make out the statue of Vulcan. On Fourth of July we’d drive up the big hill and watch the fireworks they’d shoot off a dozen miles away on Red Mountain.
Vulcan, Polaroid SX-70 (2022)
My sister and I had red hair, redder even then the iron ore crusted within that mountain in the distance, the hematite which gave it a name. It was so shock-red, and our freckles so plentiful, that even though we were fifteen months apart strangers constantly asked my mom if we were twins. We walked hand-in-hand one block to our elementary school, the same one our father had attended twenty years before.
We had a growing gang of cousins our age. For a while it was just us and our two boy cousins, both of whom had huge grins and glossy black hair—the same as their mother, our adored Aunt Judy, and our grandmother, my Nana. Then the twins were born. They weren’t pretend twins, like me and my sister, but real ones. They were exactly the same in nearly every way, and both had the same nova-bright red hair as me and my sister.
The wood-paneled hallway at my Nana’s house was full of photographs of them and me and my sisters and all my aunts and uncles and cousins, as familiar to me as the alphabet.
Forestdale, Polaroid 600 (2019)
Our Nana with the jet-black hair loved her grandbabies’ red hair. She would say it just like that: I love my grandbabies’ red hair. I figured there was some wild Irish or Scottish strain from my grandfather that had been knotted with her family. Maybe she liked it when that red hair would flare up amongst the staid and respectable ebony hair she had always known. Perhaps her dark hair stemmed from my Nana’s grandfather, Jesu Maria, whom she called “Papa Jessie.” He had been born 1861 in Barcelona and immigrated to Alabama in times unknown.
My Nana hadn’t grown up in a suburban house with central air that was just a short walk from slides and monkeybars. She was from a mining camp, one of the company towns. She’d tell about how the man in the honey wagon would come by once a week to empty the outhouses. She married my grandfather right before he shipped out for France. She was fifteen.
The living room, Forestdale, Polaroid 600 (2019)
She is gone from this world now,
but you knew that already,
didn’t you. This is a memory.
It’s Decoration Day, and this is my way of placing flowers upon her grave.
But six years ago she was not gone, she was in her home, that ageless and unchanging place where it seemed all was right in the world, and where my childhood endured outside the passage of time.
But perhaps it wasn’t as unchanging as I had assumed. For the first time I could remember, there was a different photograph in that wood-paneled hallway. Towards her end, she had begun to change things, a little bit here, a little bit there: she set her grandfather’s portrait up in a place of honor in the living room, and a shelf in the kitchen was redecorated to feature my dad’s Roy Rogers’ lunchbox. She began to celebrate other things that meant something to her.
These changes were soft, gradual; but not the photograph in the hallway, which crackled like a lighting bolt. One of the twins was nearby, and I hissed at her to come here, like I had cut myself, or a ransom note tied to a brick had just smashed through the bedroom window.
In a golden art deco-style frame was a portrait of a man with short, jet black hair. An eyepatch covers his left eye, and a lit cigarette is perched on his lips. He’s holding an electric guitar, and it’s painted with what looks like tiger stripes. He’s wearing a bolo tie cinched up over his plaid shirt; staring into the camera with his one good eye, he is posed with his hand up, like he’s about to strum a chord.
Look, this is exactly what that moment looked like, in that hallway, in her home:
The one-eyed man looked both careful and careless, like he carried a knife in his boot. He looked dangerous, like somebody you would regret crossing paths with after midnight in a certain part of town.
“Who is this,” I demanded of my cousin—one of the twins, although I wasn’t sure which one, as age hadn’t shifted a millimeter of difference between them. Her mouth hung open, and she whispered “I haven’t the faintest idea.” Like we were still little, we cried for our Nana in unison.
She almost snarled at our question. “That’s my brother Joe.” I didn’t know she had a brother named Joe; how could I not know that? “You’ve seen that photo before, it’s been there.”
She didn’t lie, but that for sure wasn’t true. I knew it wasn’t true because I was pretty sure I would have remembered a photo of a musician with an eye patch, since it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. “He was a guitar player,” she continued. “He moved out West. He passed away a long time ago now.”
And that was it.
Forestdale, Polaroid 600 (2019)
Baffled, my cousin and I retreated back to hallway. On a hunch, we popped the gold frame open. Written on the back of the photo was the name of the photographer who had taken the portrait, and when: December, 1965. And there was a Christmas card tucked behind the photo.
I’m fine and I hope all of you are. Maybe I’ll write a letter one of these days, I don’t know what to write but I think about all of you any way whether I write or not. Love you Joe.
P.S. Linda and her family are fine and so is Joey.
On the printed side of the car it said “Wishing you all the joys of Christmas.” Underneath the slogan was written, in careful script, Love you all. Joe Casaray.
So there wasn’t just a brother—so gone he signed his full name to his sister in a Christmas card, so far gone he promised to write but didn’t know how—but also a daughter, Linda, and a son, Joey.
I thought I knew my family—but all of a sudden it seemed like there was something different in us now, a mystery woven in our DNA. I wanted to know more about the one-eyed man, and what I really wanted more than anything was to hear what type of guitar he played. That short hair in ’65 and bolo tie didn’t say rock and roll, but that wild looking guitar didn’t holler Nashville, either.
It has to be rockabilly, doesn’t it? something in my belly mumbled, and I suddenly thought about my Nana’s love of Elvis. I wondered if Joe’s guitar was painted up with stripes because he was an Auburn fan, like my Nana.
Hydrangea in her yard, Polaroid SX-70 (2019)
I had never asked her, you know. She has been passed on now for—oh, I don’t want to say how long. I don’t want to think about it. But here I had never asked her, a thing you would ask somebody you worked with for like five minutes, maybe even in a job interview, do you have any brothers or sisters. The thing you ask to triangulate what kind of a person they might be. But you don’t ask a mountain if it has brothers or sisters, don’t ask an eagle where it grew up.
Here is what I learned: Joseph Casary played guitar, was good at playing guitar, played at big shows and parties. He went out West to make a go of it, had the guts to take his guitar and stake his fortune on those six strings. He made a living teaching Spanish guitar in Oakland under a method he called Casatone. He created a slide-rule type tool that you could use to tell what key to play in, what notes went with what chords. In 1953, the year my Nana and Pop moved into their home, the home in which these photos were made, Joe wrote a song with his wife, Doris, called “Angel of Mine.”
But I figured Doris was gone by the time of the Christmas card, as there was no mention of her. And Joe himself was gone not three years after he mailed that card, not yet 47 years old. Maybe I’ll write a letter one of these days, he told her, I don’t know what to write but I think about all of you any way whether I write or not.
My daddy took me to his grave, once. There is a guitar engraved upon the stone.
That feeling when—, somewhere in the South, it doesn’t really matter where, Polaroid 600 (∞)
Oh, I miss her so much, but you knew that. Don’t you just know what I would ask her, now, the same thing we would ask of all those who are no longer with us:
Tell me, tell me, tell me about,
tell me about that time,
tell me,
Come Back,
I never asked you, please tell me,
Come Back.
Tell me.
“TIGER STRIPES” is this week’s installment of GORJUS, an occasional dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, preserved as best I can with instant film. It is dedicated to the memory of my Nana, called Dot by her friends, and to her brother Joe, the guitar player.
A version of this essay was first published in Southern Glossary, and I am grateful to Ryan Sparks for supporting me in telling it. I finally worked up the courage to ask her how Joe lost his eye, Ryan, thank you for challenging me.
If you liked what you saw and read, if you maybe felt a twang in your belly while you looked it over, then I am proud of it, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider sending this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.
so beautiful
Oh my goodness. What a story. I laughed out loud when I scrolled as far as the one eyed man. Of course I jumped to imagining more secretive secrets but still a really great story and the better for being real.