WHOLE HOG:
All Photos Were Taken By My Own Family
WHOLE
HOG: A
Southern Butch's Early Experiences with Deconstructing Masculinity
by
Isabella Cornelius is licensed under CC
BY-NC 4.0
Jerry, my father’s step-dad, was always grilling, smoking, or deep frying some kind of meat out under the carport on holidays. I always thought it allowed him the privilege of feeling like a superior chef, while my grandmother was inside making appetizers, sides, entrees and desserts; the real whole works. He could sit out there and rotate a chicken leg in one hand, using the other to operate the beer bottle, while she was balancing multiple dishes and family members of the younger variety. I often spent more time helping my grandmother in the kitchen than I did on the patio, mostly because Jerry was irritated easily and small children and open flames are strong irritants, but also because I enjoyed to cook as a little kid and it was easier and much safer for me to learn in the kitchen. However, as I got older, I was often responsible for making sure Jerry didn’t pull his back out, or fall off a ladder, or fall victim to any of the other hazards he’d normally ignore during the course of his household repairs and hobbyist handyman projects; We developed a working relationship more than any other. My grandparents’ house still feels like an unreal place, like the facade of it all will fall any day now. I’ve witnessed nearly 2 decades of add-ons to the property that included everything from the carport, to extra rooms inside, to a radio tower that Jerry still hasn’t finished reassembling. In the back sits a seemingly endless barn of junk, tools, tools that should be junked, and hazardous materials. There are multiple Jeep chassis that have not touched engine, nor road since long before I was born. I called them the Jeeps of Theseus, a phrase which stuck itself into my father’s memory.
The environment seemed to embody Jerry.
Built
of incongruous parts and full of contradictions himself, Jerry
describes himself as Communist but he’s really just an old-school
union guy. He’s wrapped himself in anti-establishment notions but
still practices patriarchal superiority and his own brand of
conspiracy theorizing, like your average, elderly radical tends to
do. He believes oil companies created climate change to distract us
from something even bigger, and he always talked about how the moon
landing was real, but the one that was broadcast onto American
television was not. He wanted to be the master of his own domain. In
his eyes, the only thing keeping him from that was his
wife and his
“honeydew list”.
When I was merely 14, Jerry and my Dad had been devising a convoluted plan months in the making for Thanksgiving. Jerry had been wanting to dig a hole for a barbecue pit, but didn’t really have any place to break ground that wasn’t a trek from the house. Deep in the recesses of his barn was a whole load of cinderblocks. Like how most people I knew had to have above-ground pools due to the rock-addled, North Alabama soil, we had to have an above-ground barbecue pit. We stacked the cinderblocks in a deep quadrangle and put a big metal plate over it, leaving gaps for ventilation and for recording temperature. The two wanted to test their new pit out with a hog they ended up buying from Jerry’s neighbor. Of course, I got roped into Operation: WHOLE HOG, as they called it. I spent my fall break, and the weeks leading up to it, cutting dead trees in my neighborhood for extra fuel, building the pit, and spending late nights melancholic and silent at Jerry’s while they whittled away the details.
I remember feeling incredibly miserable in the leading days.
I kept telling myself that it would pay off, but a part of me felt it was a waste to work so hard during a period that was supposed to be restful. Ultimately, it wasn’t really my choice. Think of it as type-two fun, my Dad would always say. Type-two fun is fun you don’t feel until you look back on it. I never believed in that bullshit for a second. Jerry always called me his gopher, because he’d have me go fer this or that. I was just an extra pair of hands, if needed, and one that was often in the way when I wasn’t needed.
At least he was honest about it.
Dad was never honest about anything. He always spoke in double truths and ass-pulls. As a child, it seemed to me that he could bend reality. He manipulated my reality, not out of any seeming malice, but as a result of a misguided effort to make me not be the disappointment he was to his parents, and to hold on to some sort of stability through the hierarchy of the family structure. This was around the same age where I started to feel uncomfortable in my body, as well as the masculine role I was expected to perform.
Everything started feeling like nothing
When it came time to actually cook the beast, that time being 4a.m. on Thanksgiving day, we got the coals going by sunrise; it looked like we’d be done in time for dinner. Jerry, always mischievous, left the hog’s head on the tractor to scare the little ones as folks trickled in. I had been staring at it all day. It didn’t even look real to me anymore. I had become very prone to dissociative episodes starting around here. Memories of events after this age are blurry and hard to parse. It feels like most of it wasn’t even real. I struggled to pay attention in class or in any situation. I started to doubt my every thought, emotion, and urge for being not genuine enough. I was so deeply scared of being taken away if I showed any signs of mental unwellness, a fear seeded in me by my dad. That was how the masculine aversion to weakness infested itself in me.
The
hog didn't take much work after a certain point, aside from a bit of
a scare that we wouldn’t
be able to
get the coals up to temperature
I thought the payoff, the sweet catharsis promised in the very concept of type 2 fun, was finally arriving after a day of minor disputes between my dad and Jerry. It’s always strange to see the direct lineage of maladaptive behavior that runs in my family. Jerry and Dad fought like Dad and I fought. It allowed me a lot of insight. I never felt closer to my dad than when we both had to put up with Jerry, but it always felt a little scorched to me. My dad was aware that there was a cycle he was perpetuating, and he always told me to just be grateful that he was choosing to perpetuate it less than he could. It always made me so mad that he seemed to be so aware that he was hurting me, yet couldn’t stop himself.
I wish I knew then,
that I wanted,
so deeply and so intensely
to be anyone else...
We smoked that pig sun-up to sun-down, slow and low, making sure we didn’t roast anything too well. Taking it out of the pit was the one thing I wasn’t roped into. Jerry didn’t trust me; he had been fussing at me all day for having my hands in my pockets when we were just standing around, so I was told to just stand out of the way. However, on the way up, somebody slipped and the grate fell, smashing Jerry’s thumb between one of the cinderblock and the hot grate. He jerked up and popped something in his back, dribbling thumb-blood across the concrete. The rear end of the hog smacked into the coals and Dad and I were left to salvage it. Pouring out the coals with water bottles, we lifted the charred pig up and over to the carving table. Understandably, there are no recorded images of this current moment.
Jerry yelled for my
grandmother
to get out the kitchen,
and to get
the first aid kit.
After things settled down, I stood outside while Dad carved up that which remained. I asked him about growing up there with Jerry, when there were more trees and less carports, more open land and less of his projects. When the barn wasn’t quite as endless and hazardous, and when the Jeeps of Theseus got daily use. He was distant and didn’t want to answer. He loved to talk about running through the woods behind his parents house as a kid, but real conversations about growing up were only had when the two of us were pushing each other’s limits. This was the time in my life where Dad and I had started to butt heads as he always said teenagers and fathers inevitably do. I could never see why he’d want to win that game. He had been on the losing side of it throughout his whole adolescence. To my father, proper discipline in a reactionary, momentary, fleeting form was a makeshift anathema. A quick-fix he balanced his parenthood upon precariously. Jerry was a control freak, and my father inherited that. He wrote it down in different handwriting, but the work was still copied.
I wanted nothing more
than to be completely different from them.
I
wanted to break those cycles of masculine trauma and violence and
anger and doubt, somehow. I know now that I’ve received a lot, good
and bad, from them. I learned a love for cooking, for working with my
hands, and for the natural world. I have my own conspiracy theories I
subscribe to, some that were adapted from Jerry, and some from my
Dad, but I also inherited their overly critical nature, internalized
it and kept it with me to the present. Jerry kept telling me that if
I had reacted quicker his thumb wouldn’t have been smashed, even
years later when he tells this same story in his own way, he makes
sure to incriminate me. While the meat we could save ended up tasting
just fine, it still felt like a slap in the face due to the
commitment towards Operation:
WHOLE HOG that
Dad and Jerry demanded of me. I probably ate more charred meat that
day than I really should have or ever have. All three of us did.
We
wanted
to save
as much
as we
could
stomach.
As I assembled my dinner plate that night, I thought about something Jerry said earlier in the day when we were deep in the barn looking for god-knows what. Jerry knocked some junk off of some shelf to startle us and snidely looked back at my Dad, saying “One day, all of this will be yours.” My dad looked back at me and said the same. It contextualized the cycle my dad was perpetuating on me in my child-brain. I knew I would be different from them, I wouldn't let their hoard of decrepit boards, bolts and coping mechanisms. Before I made the decision to be as true to myself as possible, before I knew myself by my own name, and long before I learned how important and necessary it was for me to understand myself as a butch, I made the decision that I wouldn’t act the same way as the men who had hurt me and stunted my growth. That was the beginning of deconstructing my relationship with masculinity, an endeavor that will span my entire life. That’s what makes it so heartbreaking that gender non-conformity is so stigmatized for trans people, trans women especially. We receive so much scrutiny for continuing to deconstruct and experiment with our relationship to masculinity. The pressures to pass and assimilate become louder and louder as our existences are stigmatized more and more, pushing us into new little boxes instead of the ones we were socialized under without thought to our own choices.
That’s why the freedom
provided by butch
as a label and an identity
feels so warm in my soul.