DOWN THE STEEP

When I was thirteen years old, in 1963, I realized
some people in this world are extras—born to be
peripheral—and I was one of them.
My parents had four children: boy, girl, girl, boy. As girl
number two, I served as a backup if anything happened to girl
number one. Worse, it was clear my parents had wanted another
boy. They’d planned to name the new baby William, without
bothering to choose a girl’s name, and when I turned out to be
me, they lazily named me Willa. After my little brother Billy was
born, they quit having kids.
We lived in southeast Virginia, in the low-lying coastal region
known as the Tidewater. Our town was small but bigger
than its neighbors, its industry hardy, thanks to lumber, hogs,
and peanuts. In summer the air hung thick as a swamp, rattling
with insects. The smell of sawdust and tree lilies mingled with
the rotting-cabbage stench of the paper mill. I used to fly my
bike up Main Street through our downtown—five blocks of
white-painted brick facades. Across the Blackwater River was
the lumberyard, where towers of skinny pine logs rose up
beside stacks of slender sheets of wood. That’s what will become
of you, I’d say out loud to the logs, then zoom past them
toward the peanut silo, embossed with its monocled cartoon
peanut kicking up a merry leg. Beyond the silo, hunched along
the railroad tracks, were shacks cobbled together with scraps of
wood, corrugated Plexiglas, and pieces of billboard sign. This
was where the most impoverished Black people lived.