Сын отца-активиста осознал, что теперь он единственный хранитель памяти об утраченном сообществе

After Effects Sorting through belongings, or refusing to By Frederick McKindra August 26, 2026 My father was such a champion of the place where he grew up, he made it a part of his voicemail greeting, identifying himself humorously (you could hear the joke in his voice somehow) as “Freeman McKindra of the Union Chapel community.” He had not lived in Union Chapel full time in more than five decades, and yet he was fiercely loyal to that rural swatch of Conway County, Arkansas. There were many other ways he might’ve identified himself, as a citizen of the world perhaps, having traveled the globe at midcentury as a Black man from rural Arkansas, or as a resident of the South End of Little Rock, the neighborhood where he and my mom raised my siblings and me, the place he’d fought to return to after his last trips into the hospital, and another site of which he was profoundly protective. Working in community development throughout the Delta, my father knew all too well the danger of a poor or declining reputation to the promise of investment in an area. Often, the fates of the communities he parachuted into, staging workshops and trainings aimed at helping residents define their goals, depended on what the popular sentiment was about a place. So much of his work throughout the Delta depended on refuting narratives about the place imposed from outside: that it was a relic of its juke joint past, that communities were dying or being abandoned, that Big Ag was leaving once prosperous farming towns barren. And so, he became an unofficial member of the local convention and visitors bureaus for the communities where he’d lived and worked, which were often at risk of becoming some kind of desert, whether food or wellness, education or opportunity. Strange that the process of desertification, the encroachment of aridity, seemed to trail him across one of the most fertile regions in the United States. Perhaps such is the fate of the increasing corporatization of the American South. Like so much of the landscape he spent his working life traversing, trying to inflate the self-regard of places with the most bucolic names that were still often overlooked by outsiders and abandoned by the progeny of longtime residents, time caught him too, last September. My response to his passing, both in the immediate aftermath and in the months that followed, was like a caught breath. To me, grief has come to feel like bewilderment, a kind of “Idunno” shoulder shrug when trying to suss out my emotional responses. The clearest evidence of this flinched stalling has been my reaction to the various home improvement attempts my older sister has made in the house we all shared. I find myself reluctant to indulge in any of the sorting and tidying, the paring down of my father’s effects, that indicate a moving on from him being a physical presence in the space. He doesn’t haunt the home, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t somehow like him to. The indoor domain I want to remain a shrine, a place that would still appear familiar to him were he to inhabit it again. I’ve moved into his old bedroom but resolutely reject the idea of reorienting or discarding his bed or furniture. I reluctantly allowed my sister to erect a shoe rack and set it against a wall. It’s outside our home, though, where I feel him most readily. Sometimes, after our lawn guy has come through and cut all four of the lots my father bought on our block, I walk out into the center of them and look around. There’s a strange serenity I feel in those moments, not just pride in ownership but the cut lawns serving as proof of my stewardship of what my father gave me. A lazy stewardship, I can’t help but castigate myself, as I’m not the one, nor do I want to be the one, who cuts the grass; but it’s something to see it all uniformly splayed out around me and feel that, at least for the next week and a half or two weeks, rain and sun depending, that I’ve cared for something my Daddy wanted me to care about. (I am one of those Southern men who never grew out of calling my father “Daddy.” There was always something endearing about it, to still be able to dress him in the language of childhood.) But I had no indication, nor any forewarning, that traveling back to Union Chapel without him would occasion the kind of emotional onrush that was like an exhalation of what had been caught up inside me. You see, I wasn’t exactly sure I deserved to be able to grieve my father, certainly not in any operatic display. Our relationship had been fraught since my adolescence, much because of that aforementioned stubborn cheerleading he’d taken up for his various home bases and communities, a kind of pride that had felt to me sometimes like jingoism. I’d taken to mending my aggrievement in print, a habit that had come to seem one-sided and a bit unfair as he aged. After he died, when he was no longer here to spar with me, I was bereft in a wholly unexpected way, with no one around to take up his side of the argument. He’d left me holding all my finely hewn ripostes, which was incredibly lonely, and somehow stole my right to just be sad at the fact of his loss. My sister and I accepted an invitation to turn up in Union Chapel for a Fourth of July picnic, and as we drove up, I realized how soaked he was in the landscape. I’d only ever driven this stretch of highway alongside him, a vociferous ambassador for the place, and he subsumed the entire expanse. Union Chapel is incredibly green, and the light always seems to shine aslant and golden, no matter what time you’re arriving out there, as if a sepia-toned lens is being cast over everything. I began breathing quickly and clutching at my chest almost as soon as we turned off the highway, my body’s preparation for the onrush of tears. I didn’t boohoo then; I got control of myself and went on through the picnic, smiled bemusedly as my cousins shot off fireworks, as we’d once done in the same place, safely away from the city limits to avoid inviting the ire of law enforcement. (My cousin who lit them is a cop anyway, so we were not too concerned.) I even made it down the road, past homes that bear signs of family names my father had regaled me with stories of, names I might not ever hear again, onto the dirt road that turned toward the community schoolhouse, the 1937 W. P. A. building where my dad attended grade school back in the ’40s and ’50s, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The old baseball field was still there, where the community used to stage games on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, along with the building’s cornerstone where my grandfather’s name “R. F. McKindra” is chiseled, marking his time as School Board President. There were still folks out there selling fish plates, one of the rare treats of a trip “out into the country”—a fish sam’ich—fried catfish filets between two pieces of white bread with all the mustard and hot sauce you could want, accompanied by a jewel-toned, ice-cold can of soda. By then, I was a little weepy but still holding it together, clear-eyed enough to recognize, for the first time, that the fish sales were a community fundraiser to support upkeep on the schoolhouse. The structure had been struck by lightning, and I could see the effects on the deteriorating building. I bought two fish plates and moped through the old shop building, which was being refurbished, then dejectedly slunk back to my ride home. The saddest part was realizing how precarious this place was—its preservation dependent on a dwindling community of people who knew its significance, a smattering of families with homesteads carved out of the ever encroaching wildness of high grass and pine trees, a hodgepodge of land titles split into smaller and smaller parcels at each generation’s passing—and that my dad had spent his life fighting exactly against such a loss. I could feel the structures slipping away, my hold on his stories dwindling just a bit more. That’s when it happened. On the way back to my cousins’ place, I cried and didn’t wipe my eyes before I went inside to say goodbye. I wanted my family members to see my sadness, perhaps to talk about it, to say something profound or resounding about loss and memorializing and holding onto what one has. But nobody did. What, in fact, had we been doing all afternoon but just that, holding onto what we had, a day spent in a landscape shaped by our nostalgia? It’s just, my daddy wasn’t there with us this time, which was a completely unfamiliar sensation. I walked back to the car and buckled myself into the passenger seat. A sore consolation arrived in that moment, the cool from the car’s air conditioning making me shiver: if there were memories to be made in this place going forward, the task of making them was all mine. THE HOME MAKERS SERIES IS A COMPANION TO THE SUMMER/FALL 2026 HOME-THEMED DOUBLE ISSUE. Order Your Copy Now! Frederick McKindra Frederick McKindra is a fiction writer, essayist, and the Associate Editor of the Oxford American. His essay “Becoming Integrated” from the Fall 2017 issue of the magazine was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2018, edited by Hilton Als. He has also contributed to the OA’s online series The By and By. A 2017 BuzzFeed Emerging Writer Fellow, McKindra has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Lambda Literary Foundation. He lives in Little Rock.