Footsteps Through Childhood
By Susan Garrity, 2021
During a two-and-a-half-hour walking interview of a 300-acre site under development as an urban park, the narrator, Demetrius Hunter, muses about his many associations with the land. He reflects on the recent revelation that he is descended from enslaved people on a plantation formerly located at the site and his memories growing up on the campus in housing secured by his parents as employees at the state psychiatric hospital once located there. He recounts his employment as a supervisor at the psychiatric hospital, his eventual resignation, and returning to the campus as a produce supplier in his family’s agricultural business.
In this short edited audio piece, the narrator reminisces fondly about his childhood years when he was unaware of his ancestors’ history. He wonders if his ancestors might have been “calling to him” during his early years. The interview was the first occasion he has had to visit his former neighborhood in more than twenty years. At times, a windy day and masks made necessary because of the pandemic muffle the narrator’s voice but not his enthusiasm for his childhood spent on the site of a former psychiatric hospital undergoing transformation as Dorothea Dix Park.
Transcript:
(Sound of footsteps starts before voices and continues rhythmically throughout the piece)
Hunter: It’s just amazing to be back on this campus because it all started here and now I’m back here and I worked here. My father worked here, my mom worked here, all my siblings, aunts, and uncles. So it seems like the ancestors was crying out to let us know that this is land where we were from and we should address this at some time.
Hunter: Twenty- two twenty-eight Bender. I’ll never forget that address. I’ll never forget the family unity that we had there. Everybody was like family. I can see the vineyards, the muscadine vineyards, the apples on the, on the Catholic Church premises, walking to Mission Valley, going to Kerr drugs when Kerr drugs existed, when Burger King was built over there eating my first Whopper, Rock-Ola Cafe, Don Murray’s. There’s so many good memories.
Hunter: Football, when I got my injuries from the big guys, you know, five or six years older. My big brothers, they would hit me like I was in high school [laughter] but I was, I was only in the sixth grade, but it taught me to toughen up, get, get like a man or go home [laughter] and don’t come back out [laughter]. So, yes, we really had some good times over here.
Hunter: I remember when an inmate came over here in his orange uniform from Central Prison and ran through us while we was playing. So, you know, a lot of, a lot of memories, some scary, some fun. We had, you know, people call us, call us all kinds of racist names, and then we had to run. We, we – yeah, those were very scary times even in the eighties, early eighties we had to deal with that.
Hunter: But all of us would come together. We would meet up in the field, which is out further back, get a bowl about this big, shake the tree and eat [muscadine grapes] until I got sick. And then in a creek where we picked – we caught frogs and, and tadpoles and, you know, crawfish.
Hunter: One time I got stuck in one [oak tree]. It’s not here anymore, but I got stuck right over there. I climbed to the very top and I looked down and that was it [laughter]. I was like, I can’t get down. So one of the, one of my friend’s fathers, he came up and was like, hey, come down from there and he kind of climbed up a little bit like, hey, come on, come on, come on and I’m like, I can’t do it! And I think by the end of the night when it was getting dark, I said, I got to get out of here [laughter]. So I finally, he grabbed, he got closer to me and I — somehow, somehow, I can’t even remember how — but man I was sweating bullets. I was sweating, but yes.
Hunter: But I did feel as I got older that it was something about this place. I couldn’t really tell, but it was something about this place to make me want to always be here and, you know, just have these memories that I — as a child and now as an adult — I see why. I really do.
(Sound of footsteps gradually fading out)