Everywhere the Undrowned by Stephanie Clare Smith

Throughout Everywhere the Undrowned, Stephanie Clare Smith releases a trail of messages like stones skipping across water:

This is a love story. Or at least a close synonym.

This is the story of thunder.

This is a love story that scatters me around.

Is it the story that marks me or the telling that does it?

Smith’s beautiful memoir, the first in UNC Press’s new literary nonfiction series Great Circle Books, leads us through her fourteenth summer and beyond. That summer of 1973, her mother went on a road trip, and she was left to spend six weeks at home alone in New Orleans. On the fifth of July, a man with a knife abducted her in his truck. Threatened to kill her. Drove her to a park. Did what he did.

The Smith of now—poet, essayist, mediator in the legal system for at-risk families—has done the hard work of looking, listening, feeling, caring for that child.

To tell about that summer and the long reach of its tentacles, to tell it in all its essential fragmentation, Smith calls on her poet-self, in short paragraphs that have the feel of being released from above, of swirling the waters of survival, obliquely like poems, each one rippling out into all the others. This is the book’s first paragraph: To have less than nothing, they created algebra. They made me take it twice. She explained to me that her memoir began life as a lot of poems—which was of keen interest to me because as a survivor, I’m doing the same thing: writing poetry as a comparatively indirect way of touching the trauma. She described to me how she eventually “spread out” the poems, relieving them of line breaks, and began to realize she might have something else—something that, all together, would flow.

Running through the paragraphs are many seemingly disparate thoughts: algebra, Jane Eyre, birds, kung fu, the moon, small objects, infinity, trees, the passing along of spiritual merit. These and many other thought-friends offer Smith sanctuary as she navigates her physical days and nights, keeping her company in her private dwelling, her imagination.

I’ll use what I can to bring my past forward where I can tend to it better, she writes in her essay “The Empath” (Bellevue Literary Review 2020 [online]).

Where there is trauma, there are implications for the survivor’s relationships. Family, friends, teachers, colleagues—any shared connection, whether major or minor, cherished or dreaded. Smith’s relationship with her mother is complex: love that survives tragic abandonment and endures as the truth of the past is brought forward.

There is a scene in the memoir where the adult Smith, social worker and mediator, witnesses a different parent’s legal relinquishment of her parental rights and guardianship of her fourteen-year-old daughter. The girl’s reaction is to take care of and protect her mother. This daughter’s story is all too familiar to Smith, who experienced the same reversal of expected roles in her childhood. In the aftermath of the hell of that fourteenth summer, having no safe person to turn to, she ruled out the police because she feared her mother would be marked as an unfit parent, an abandoner. 

Is it the story that marks me or the telling that does it?

Small and large figure in Smith’s story, not quite the same as in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Smith’s fourteen-year-old self rises to meet her mother’s expectation that she can be independent, take care of everything at home for the six weeks of aloneness, be strong in the face of it. She marks the bottoms of her feet with kung and fu to give herself power and secretly marks her name on the soles of her mother’s shoes before her departure, along with the number 8, infinity.

She makes herself small in the truck with the man with the knife, thinking [t]he way this rape could get worse if I shouted right now. She loses her own shoes in the truck. Days later she finds a lizard whose tail is gone. We both had been held captive in the very same park and escaped with our lives…. and we’d never be as large as before.

In time Smith finds the testaments of other survivors: Jaycee Duggard, abducted at age eleven and held for eighteen years; Elizabeth Smart, abducted at age fourteen and held for nine months. Smart speaks out, confronts the perennial questions. Why didn’t you run, why didn’t you fight, why didn’t you speak out sooner? Smith paraphrases her: Everything we do… we do to survive.

The term survivor holds so much, more than it has to hold. It can be construed as something bad happened to you, with the door open to all those questions—and to let it go, like that would be a good thing. It needs to be understood as you survived, whatever that took.

For survivors, the past is not something to be abandoned. What we need to let go of is the impulse to make ourselves forget it. The rule that floats in our air that says we should forget it. Everywhere the Undrowned is testament that the past is beside us, that we can listen, feel, care for it now, loving our whole selves. And that we’re not alone.

Using phantom limb pain as metaphor, Smith writes, Maybe every rape story told out loud in the world is a carefully placed mirror for something gone missing.

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Laurel Ferejohn’s fiction has earned a Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, an Emerging Artist Award, and a spot on the Lee Smith Prize longlist for her novel manuscript. Her writing is published in Southeast Review, Quiddity, Flash Fiction, and elsewhere. She is an independent editor based in Durham, NC. www.laurelferejohn.com.