Hold On Magnolia

Hold On Magnolia Michael Metivier (bio) Winner of the 2022 Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, judged by Jerald Walker My oldest daughter, Sadie, has recently started learning some of the tree and bird species that surround our Vermont home: basswoods with leaves as big as her belly, nuthatches clinging upside down to the feeders. If she can’t yet remember all their names, they are imprinting on her nonetheless. To this day, I associate hemlocks and chickadees with the house I grew up in, in Massachusetts. Someday when my girls are older, I hope they will hold similar affection for black cherry trees and common yellowthroats. If you were to look straight down at our property, the yard might resemble an eye, with the house its rectangular pupil. Or maybe the deck of a tall ship viewed from the crow’s nest. The previous owner planted flowers all around the ellipse, between the yard and the woods, selecting species so that at any given time during the growing season, something blooms—bee balm, bleeding hearts, goatsbeard, phlox. On either side of the house, she planted an ornamental magnolia tree. In the spring they are the first trees to flower and in the fall the last to drop their leaves. Magnoliaceae is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, families of flowering plants in the world. It has spread so far around the globe and for so long that many of its more than two hundred species barely resemble one another. In the United States, the most recognizable might be the evergreen Magnolia grandiflora, known as the southern magnolia. It can tolerate sandy soil, while the sweet bay, Magnolia virginiana, prefers a bit more moisture. Both are common enough in the South to be quotidian and striking enough in beauty and fragrance to be iconic. I didn’t grow up with magnolias of any kind, and as far as I once knew no one in my family ever did either. I imagined my experience and relationship with the landscape—the belonging produced in me by stony hills dotted with birch and red oak and pine—was similar to that of all [End Page 9] my ancestors born on this continent, from Nordic millworkers to French Canadian farmers. I was wrong. One afternoon a decade ago, I received from my uncle an email whose subject line read “FW: William B. Gould IV: Diary of a Contraband.” Because Gould is a family name, I assumed that some relative of mine had typed up his autobiography and it was getting passed around. Instead, the link took me to the official page of a book called Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor. Its author was William B. Gould IV, who I now know is my late grandmother’s cousin Bill. The Black sailor in question was the first William Benjamin Gould, my great-great-great-grandfather, and his photograph graced the cover. I saw in his face and expression those of my mom, aunt, uncle, and grandmother. I felt as if I knew him even though, truly, I did not know him at all. I wept. Three months later I would visit his birthplace of Wilmington, North Carolina, a city full of magnolias. ________ Located on Market Street in Wilmington’s historic district, the 150-year-old Bellamy Mansion is considered “one of North Carolina’s most spectacular examples of antebellum architecture.” Visitors come not only to tour the mansion itself but often its gardens, which were originally planned as a symmetrical series of elliptical and circular beds of daffodil, thrift, crepe myrtle, and more. Behind the gleaming white neoclassical mansion is the blunt, brick, two-story structure that points to how the ornateness of the main house could exist or function at all—the slave quarters. William Benjamin Gould didn’t live in the Bellamy quarters but likely in a similar building on Chestnut Street. Born sometime around 1837, William was the son of Elizabeth “Betsy” Moore—who was enslaved on the peanut plantation of Nicholas Nixon just north of Wilmington—and Alexander Gould, a man listed on William’s death certificate as white and England-born but...

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