Twelve Sweetpotatoes is an Americana reflection of the author’s life on her mother’s hardscrabble tobacco farm in Eastern North Carolina in the mid-60s. The reader joins the author as she tells her stories along her ultimate path to healing from life-shaping family alcoholism, mental illness, loss, and suffering. It is a dark story and an inspirational book for anyone wishing to change their life from the drama and chaos of dysfunction to a life of peace and, perhaps, joy.
“I realized that I had to own my childhood and not try to hide in the darkness. I don’t have to be ashamed of my beginnings. I am not my drunken father or my crazy brother, or my suffering mother. I don’t have to pretend that I came from some wealthy gentleman’s Southern plantation. I was raised in a poor Southern family riddled with violence. I chose to live my life differently. I am no longer living with poverty and violence. I live in peace and joy instead. I am who I am, though, because of those beginnings, those experiences, those people.”
Twelve Sweetpotatoes is an Americana reflection of the author’s life on her mother’s hardscrabble tobacco farm in Eastern North Carolina in the mid-60s. The reader joins the author as she tells her stories along her ultimate path to healing from life-shaping family alcoholism, mental illness, loss, and suffering. It is a dark story and an inspirational book for anyone wishing to change their life from the drama and chaos of dysfunction to a life of peace and, perhaps, joy.
“I realized that I had to own my childhood and not try to hide in the darkness. I don’t have to be ashamed of my beginnings. I am not my drunken father or my crazy brother, or my suffering mother. I don’t have to pretend that I came from some wealthy gentleman’s Southern plantation. I was raised in a poor Southern family riddled with violence. I chose to live my life differently. I am no longer living with poverty and violence. I live in peace and joy instead. I am who I am, though, because of those beginnings, those experiences, those people.”
When my three brothers and I were children in the city of Norfolk, Virginia, in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, Mama always promised that everything would be perfect when we moved from the city to the farm. She claimed we would be so happy. Mama frequently spoke to us about her happy childhood living on a tobacco farm in Wilson County, North Carolina, with her parents and five brothers. She wrote several memoirs. Two were published in local history books: one in Black Creek: The First One Hundred Years and one in History of Wilson County. Her dream was to buy a tobacco farm there herself and return to her home and that happy life. She fulfilled her dream, but it did not result in the happiness that she promised. Our family violence and dysfunction continued for the rest of our lives. I am the only one of my immediate family who survived what I have begun to call “Carolina Soap Opera.”
Morning Pages: A Dream of Twelve Sweetpotatoes
March 4, 1997
Dream – February 26, 1997
Farmland: A farmer talking about his 12 children. He shows them to me. They are sweetpotatoes. Each of them is diseased – a black fungus on the inside.
My therapist Lee Hayes helped me through an interpretation of this dream yesterday. What an experience! I don’t know that I can even come close to describing it here. My work on dreams with a previous therapist was never so probing, in-depth, or fruitful. Lee had me become each thing in the dream, one at a time.
She asked me to describe what I saw, felt, and understood, beginning with becoming the farm. Once I had worked that view to its conclusion, Lee had me become the farmer with the same tasking, and then the sweetpotato. Finally, she had me become the dreamer again to see my perspective of the whole scene. It was compelling. I was amazed at what we revealed in that short but symbolic dream. This entire interpretation took about 30 minutes, I would guess.
As the farm, I saw death, dead bodies everywhere – in my soil, in the farmhouse. This farm view greatly surprised me. I was angry and disappointed – my soil was rich and meant to be nurturing, but all it had was blighted fruit and dead bodies. The hope and promise of life had only produced death. And, as the farm, I knew I was going to die too – neglected, treated inappropriately, and I was going to die. I was despondent.
As the farmer, I was upset that the sweetpotatoes were all blighted. Felt I didn’t know what I was doing. I was supposed to know how to raise vegetables; after all, I was a farmer. But I was inept and had screwed it up. I also knew that my farm wife would be angry with me, and I needed some of the sweetpotatoes to be okay. I was opening one after another, frantically searching for one that was okay. As I looked around at the farmland, it was a barren wasteland. I was anxious and upset.
As the sweetpotato, I had more difficulty describing what I saw and felt. I looked perfect on the outside but ruined on the inside. I had not received care. I was in a basket left in the sun. I no longer thrived in the nurturing soil, and instead of being put in a cool, dark place where I could remain whole, the hot sun had turned my insides to dust. I was angry with the farmer for being stupid and uncaring.
At that point, Lee asked me why there were 12 sweetpotatoes, and I did not know the answer. She said she thought it was significant.
As the dreamer looking back on the whole, the dream reminded me of my mother’s goal of returning to the farm. The whole time we were growing up in the city, she promised that everything would be better, okay, when we finally moved back to the farm. That was going to solve all our problems, all our unhappiness. The reality is, it didn’t change anything. It just became the graveyard to all the people who lived there.
Last night, I tried to figure out what the number 12 in the dream could represent, and I stumbled upon the answer. Twelve is the number of people, other than me, who lived on our farm, many of whom have died (not all literally, but certainly some figuratively). 1. Daddy, 2. Mama. Plus my three brothers and their families: 3. Albert, 4. Albert’s wife, 5. Albert’s daughter, 6. Johnny, 7. Johnny’s wife, 8. Johnny’s son, 9. Johnny’s daughter, 10. Paul, 11. Paul’s wife, 12. Paul’s son. It blows me away.
Now I realize that when I experience a loss, I re-experience the losses on the farm.; all 12 of them. No wonder I have such a hard time with losses. I am carrying around a tremendous burden of grief and, somehow, guilt. Am I going to be able to let that go? Can I heal that blight in my core? Is taking an antidepressant the answer? Or is it letting go of the responsibility for it all? Perhaps that is the solution.
My codependency keeps me feeling responsible for the failure of the farm to bring us happiness and the loss of all of those lives. I had no control over that. All I could do was save myself. I could not save the others; they had to protect themselves. Some of them chose not to do that. I have to gain acceptance of that. And that is what will heal me.
In Twelve Sweetpotatoes: Escaping from a Carolina Soap Opera, the author Joan Barnes Copeland bares her soul in this bold family memoir of hers. She outlines her journey from her chaotic childhood in Eastern North Carolina of the 1960s to her seemingly normal adult life of marriage, work and kids. By outlining her history, Copeland unpacks the dysfunctional elements of her childhood home and family and the impact it had on her and how it shaped her as a person and her personality traits. Within this narrative, Copeland also intersperses her growth and understanding of herself through her therapy and how it revealed to her the impacts from her childhood and her relationships with her family members.
The memoir is replete with unique anecdotes, such as her and her family's involvement in growing tobacco on their tobacco farm that her mother penny pinched and eventually bought for their family or her own experiences at University of North Carolina at Greensboro that opened up a different world to her and let her soak in myriad perspectives too, which vastly varied from her own upbringing and environs.
Having recently read Alison Bechdel's tragicomic graphic family memoir, Fun Home, I couldn't help compare the two and there were quite a few similarities in terms of the events of their lives and the style in which both the books are written. Twelve Sweetpotatoes: Escaping from a Carolina Soap Opera is no Fun Home but it was interesting to see how Copeland wove in varying timelines and aimed at a more non-linear plot too. Copeland sometimes delves into her past and then at times moves into her present moment or even looks back at her therapy sessions and it is engaging for the reader to try and build these different parts of her story together. The weaving in of photographs, news reports and memoirs written by her mother and Copeland's own diary or Facebook entries layer the narrative like a jigsaw puzzle one has to unravel. The style also mimics Copeland's own unravelling of herself as she learns to comprehend her own true self and let go of childhood and other baggage.
Though a tad bit descriptive in places with a touch of preachy, Twelve Sweetpotatoes: Escaping from a Carolina Soap Opera is still a a raw piece of writing that allows both the author and the reader to come to terms with the past, with who we are as individuals, to make peace with the ups and downs of life, who remains and who shapes our lives as well as with asking for help in terms of therapy or otherwise. :)