There By Faith I Received My Sight
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips on folk artists Thurman Powell and Mary Paulsen, everyday transfiguration and the physics of learning loss.
I can figure why Mr. Thurman Powell made a life size wooden woman to sit on his living room couch, carved her out of whatever pretty wood he wanted. It’s cause that woman is his wife that left him. And he misses her and loves her still but knows that if he calls her up she’ll only keep hurting him. So he wants to hurt her but he loves her, so he doesn’t really want to hurt her in real life. He just wants to stab a knife into something. Burn a finger off or two. I don’t know what the name of the wooden woman in his living room is. But that’s what he does to her. That’s why he made her. Because he’s in love.
But this is what I really know about Mr. Thurman Powell: He does have a life size wooden woman sitting on his couch in his assisted living apartment in Seaboard, North Carolina. He lived his whole life as a farmer and when he retired, he started making places in his memory that don’t exist anymore — listen to “House of Memories” by Merle Haggard or “The Grand Tour” by George Jones if you’re into music. But for example, Mr. Thurman Powell made the schoolhouse he attended as a child out of scrap plywood. He used a Barbie for the teacher and made shorter wooden people for students. Both school rooms inside have blackboards and working lights. He can show you the schoolhouse in an empty field.
Here’s another part of the story: My Daddy has been dying the past seven years of early onset Alzheimer’s. I had forgotten until today that I was just 20 and my sister was just 18 when he was diagnosed. Daddy was 62.
Daddy built his own BBQ grill out of an oil drum and taught me and my sister how to cook whole hogs on it. The last one we cooked was five Christmases ago and we did it as “the last pig Daddy’d cook.” He wore his apron and his gloves and pulled the meat off the hog like he always did with his hands. I wish I could remember something he said then. He probably said something like “Don’t even need to take a knife to it” as he put the meat on our plates, because that’s something he always said. But it was me and my sister keeping Daddy together while he cooked his last pig, telling him he was doing everything right.
I wanted to know Mr. Thurman Powell when I saw a picture of him on Instagram with a wooden BBQ grill he’d made with a wooden pig on it. The picture was taken at Rich Square Cultural Day, one of the only occasions Mr. Thurman Powell has to sell his art because where we live in Northeastern North Carolina is very isolated and probably no one around here would call what he does “art,” except for someone who knows enough to call what Mr. Thurman Powell does just that. The woman who took the Instagram picture also thinks Mr. Thurman’s work is art. I know the woman who took the picture because she’s the owner of the one bookstore here.
Growing up in Northeastern North Carolina the only bookstore was a Books-A-Million about an hour away in the Rocky Mount mall. I’d have to wait for Daddy to come home on the weekends from his construction jobs and hope that he’d want to go to Rocky Mount to eat at the Mexican restaurant in the old power plant. Any of my readers from Rocky Mount or the surrounding areas of Eastern North Carolina will know exactly what I’m talking about when I say there were two dummy people dressed in sombreros in a porch swing that hung above the entrance. But anyways, after Mexican food my family would always walk around the Rocky Mount mall for culture.
All of the places and stories in this essay come from North Carolina. I don’t know where Mr. Thurman Powell was born but he lives in Seaboard like I said and I am from Woodland and Daddy is from Murfreesboro and there’s another person here I would like to bring in now from Supply, North Carolina.
I’d been reading about Ms. Mary Paulsen. As a child she lost her daddy to the sea. He was a shrimp fisherman. Then she lost her first love and husband to the sea too. He was also a shrimp fisherman. Then she grew into an old lady.
But then one day God told her to build life size dollhouses in her front yard. And then God told her to start painting windows. And then He told her to let the people come see. So for my birthday I made a pilgrimage to meet her. I wanted to see the woman who heard this word from God.
I brought a bag of special offerings to give her: Two miniature plastic deer from my bedroom shrine for all the deer eating in the fields back home, sparkly stud earrings from Claire’s because Ms. Mary likes shiny things, and then also one of Daddy’s Bassmaster jacket patches. Daddy used to fish in bass tournaments all the time, in fact he won the state championship the year I was born. But this patch was a round green one. It said: Bassmaster Championship Southern Division 1983. It had a bass jumping out of a splash of water in front of a map of the whole United States.
I found Ms. Mary in a large glass lean-to. Like she’d strung together whatever windowpanes she could find to make a ceiling and walls. All the windows are painted with yellow and blue hearts and red haired angels and a pair of purple kissing moons. There’s smiling starfish and tulips and poppies. There’s butterflies with long eyelashes. There’s flamingos and hummingbirds, angelfish and mermaids. Pink seahorses, crabs, a turkey. Roosters, caterpillars, crosses, dancing ladybugs. Daisies, no petal the same.
The panes of those old windows, they’re covered with broken pieces of patterned tiles and mirrors, they’re covered with seashells and miniature babies and dragonfly wings, with gobs of glitter glue. And the floor is painted green with giant roses, lightning bugs and frogs. They’re jumping. Everything in here is moving. The sun’s shining through the colors reflecting off other colors making new colors and it’s creation and life.
God gave us a rainbow as a promise that He’d never destroy us again.
This is how I found Ms. Mary sitting in her white wicker chair: She was alone painting a picture frame. Newspapers were at her feet. I introduced myself, told her it was my 26th birthday.
She smiled and told me she’d died twice, once when she was 26. Something about being struck in the head by a falling object I think, but I can’t exactly remember what she said. Then there were other stories about building the bottle chapel and sisters and brothers and speaking in tongues in church. So that’s when I asked her one of the questions I had come to ask: What’s some of your favorite hymns?
She’d say the title and I’d say I didn’t know it. Then she’d start to sing, and I’d remember it, and join in right along.
“See, you do know them,” she said. She liked that I knew the “old hymns” as she called them. She wanted to know how and I told her I was raised in an old country church. That’s one of the questions she asked me.
I told her that I wanted to come hear her preach in her bottle chapel. Then I told her I needed prayers. And I found myself crying telling Ms. Mary that I couldn’t remember the last time my Daddy said my name. That he can’t make words anymore. And that when I’m alone in bed at night, I know he’s alone in his bed too. And just like me, when he’s afraid, there’s no one there to say, “It’s alright.” There’s no one to ask, “Please hold me.”
When she held Daddy’s Bassmaster patch in her hands, Ms. Mary asked me Daddy’s name. She said she was going to paint a bass and name it LaVerne. She put her hand on my head and said a prayer for me. Then she took me in her arms and told me she loved me.
A few months later, I was about to take my first creative nonfiction workshop in my MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington so I sat down to write some nonfiction. I wrote: My Daddy is a bass.
But another part of the story is that Daddy wants his ashes spread in the Chowan River. Right now he’s not dead yet but we just talked about this at the funeral home this morning.
I’ll say again, he’s not dead yet because I want to tell you my sister’s latest tattoo is the coordinates of the Chowan River. Here’s my notes about it:
My sister just told me she can’t afford her medicine but tonight she’s going to get a tattoo of the coordinates of the Chowan River because that’s where Daddy said he wanted his ashes to be spread. And I feel guilty for forgetting that, pulling my hand out of the street light on my carpet thinking about texting my friends to see who wants to come over and talk to me until I can’t hear Daddy saying how a big bass likes to stay near the edges, dark patches of weeds, an old log underwater.
Two of my earliest memories are associated with my Daddy.
- I stuck my finger in the flame of the gas heater in the bathroom. Daddy was there to pick me up and stick my hand under the cold water.
- I got to stand up on the pew to see Daddy get baptized.
A song that we’re going to sing at Daddy’s funeral is AT THE CROSS AT THE CROSS WHERE I FIRST SAW THE LIGHT AND THE BURDEN OF MY HEART ROLLED AWAY ROLLED AWAY IT WAS THERE BY FAITH I RECEIVED MY SIGHT AND NOW I’M HAPPY ALL THE DAY because he liked singing that one. It’s a fun one with parts. Even when Daddy couldn’t read the hymns anymore because he couldn’t decipher letters and words, he still stood up and made sounds, loud and joyful. He loved music, always yelled “Here it comes!” right before the do’s of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” so me and him could sing it together.
Now Daddy’s brain is becoming a rock and he can’t even move his head. It’s stuck in a looking down position. He wears diapers and can’t walk either. He bruises at anything and his cheeks are sunken in. And one time when I went to go see him it went like this:
He was out of his wheelchair and propped between the tall arm of the couch and the nurse. He kept picking his legs up constantly, convulsing. Restlessness is what the nurse said. His arms kept reaching in front of him. He was gnashing his teeth. I got there beside him and tried to hold him still. I had one arm holding him across his belly the best I could to keep him from falling into the floor and I had my other arm wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him close to my side. And I repeated “It’s alright” like it was all I knew how to do. But Daddy didn’t really change. He still didn’t look at me or where I was touching him, and he didn’t say anything. I was hoping that he wasn’t there because whatever was there was very scared and in pain because it was gnashing its teeth, reaching. I was holding it with all my muscle trying to get it still when then the nurse came and held a cracker in front of its face where it could see it. And it said, “Thank you.”
I know that we haven’t been talking about Mr. Thurman Powell for a long time now but I have some more to say. If no one is there to hold him, at least he can hold something life size. We’re not designed to be solitary animals. I mean back when we were fighting to survive and living in caves, we went to sleep to the sound of someone breathing.
One time when I went to see Daddy I was sitting next to him and he had not looked at me or said anything but I’d been patting his knee and telling him about the new kittens on the farm. And then he put his hand on mine and said very slowly, “You and me…” And that’s all I heard him say that day.
Every body of water we’d cross Daddy would say, “I’ve fished every bit of this river. I’ve fished every bit of this sound. Tell me now, what’s it called?”
Chowan. Roanoke. Meherrin. Pasquotank. Croatan. Pamlico. Albemarle.
I want to be holding Daddy when he goes, telling him the names of the rivers, where he’ll be going, swimming in the water. Swallowed by a bass, absorbed into its bloodstream, becoming again — an entire being.
But if you go to Ms. Mary’s house anytime soon, look for my Daddy there too. A bass named LaVerne. And send me a picture, a letter, I want to see him.
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from Woodland, North Carolina. Her work appears in The Tusk, Bull, and Show Your Skin Journal. It’s also been featured on public radio. Find her on twitter or instagram or say hi at miss.abphillips@gmail.com.
