My grandmother, Esther Lee Corley Stewart, was more terrified of water than she was of lightning.
I found out why when her fear became my pre-adolescent shame.
One hot summer day when I was ten, a friend invited me to join her swim team. I couldn’t wait.
“Show me what you can do,” the coach said.
I jumped in the pool and swam my very best stroke down the length of the pool, just like my mother taught me.
I surfaced at the end to the sound of laughter, and the coach’s eyes, wide as saucers.
Imagine Phelps swimming the freestyle with his head held high above the water, like a puppy paddling for land. That’s how my mom taught me to swim.
My mom inherited her fear of the water from my grandmother. But in her inimitable style, my mother conquered her fear and learned to swim. Still, vestiges of her mother’s fear of being under the water modified her stroke, and by imitation, mine. We swam with our heads raised high.
“Why was Mommee scared of the water?” I asked my mother.
“When she was a little girl a man named Ben Ganey (who I later discovered was Mommee’s birth father) held her over a well and threatened to drop her in.”
“Who saved her?”
“I don’t know,” my mother said and turned to her weeds, pulling them with a new vigor.
The story haunted me.
Why would Ganey want to kill his own daughter? Wasn’t my grandmother adopted by Sarah Elizabeth and John Sebring Corley? Why was Ben Ganey even there?
I’ll never know the real answer to those questions, but in Annie Laura’s Triumph, I reimagine that scene.
On a hot, Florida afternoon a girl hangs suspended over a well, afraid she will never see daylight again.