Counting the Overlooked
An excerpt from Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination, by Stephanie Clare Smith, centered on one summer in the young life of this North Carolina poet and essayist.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Stephanie Clare Smith was just a kid in 1973 when her single mother departed on a summer-long camping trip and trusted her to manage on her own in their New Orleans apartment. You won’t even want me to come back, she said. But the city was not a safe place for a child alone, and the unimaginable happened. Abduction off the street, rape, and held for hours in a truck, her life hanging on the whim of a knife-wielding man. That summer, with no way to reach her mother, no other adult to rely on, and no one to confide in, the child turned to her own imagination for companionship, connection, and a safe haven.
I readied myself just to ask her to stay or else take me along with her.
You’ll be fine. She rolled her eyes. Teenagers love being on their own … you’ll see. You won’t even want me to come back. I stared at her suitcase and nodded.
—from Everywhere the Undrowned
Smith’s experiences that summer, the trauma that she kept to herself for decades, in part led her to become a social worker and mediator. For years she has worked with at-risk families in the North Carolina court system. In this work, she sometimes sees children who remind her of herself at their age.
Salvation South is grateful to Smith and to the new series Great Circle Books, from The University of North Carolina Press, for allowing us to publish this excerpt from Everywhere the Undrowned, the imprint’s first book. Here, the fourteen-year-old Stephanie, alone in the apartment, spends her wakeful wee hours communing with ideas and objects through the medium of her expansive imagination.
From Part I
Even though I had failed algebra the first time, I understood the power of counting things. Some teachers counted to ten to hold it together. I counted things in plain sight that seemed forgotten or ignored—like a lopsided pink star made of paper and glitter that floated alone on a string in a third-floor apartment window. Whenever I walked by that apartment and looked up at that star, it seemed to come alive in front of my eyes and thank me and shine a shade pinker.
Michael Collins said he didn’t feel lonely or abandoned circling to the dark side of the moon where no one could see him and no one could reach him. He said he found ways to feel connected to everyone else while floating alone.
I stood on a chair in the kitchen at two in the morning. Keep it together, I told myself as I stood taller than a body ever thought it could be. Such a difference a couple of feet made to my wide-awake thoughts. I looked outside the kitchen window from my new giant height and noticed a strand of silver Mardi Gras beads caught in the top branches of the crepe myrtle tree. I added it to my list of overlooked things. If Brahmagupta had kept such a list, it would have included zero.
Plants have bodies. I found this out when I picked out The Secret Life of Plants from the living room bookshelf and brought it to my room for a week or two. Plants move their bodies and communicate like any other living thing. The only reason we don’t notice is because plants move like slow-motion dancers, and we move like rockets.
The apartment held its breath as I got ready to head out for another day in summer school. I couldn’t stand to leave the place again and again looking so forgotten. Hold it together, I whispered to the living room. I brought the asparagus fern from the kitchen and put her on the table. I brought the African violet and the jade plant from the living room windowsill to join her. There were no thorns in our group. I named the fern George after reading about George Washington Carver in The Secret Life of Plants. George, Violet, and Jade sat in a semicircle on the table. I could feel them feel me as I ate my breakfast cereal. I could feel them thank me as I watered their small circles of soil. We weren’t so alone clustered together in the middle with each other.
From Everywhere the Undrowned: a Memoir of Survival and Imagination by Stephanie Clare Smith. Copyright © 2024 by Stephanie Clare Smith. Used by permission of The University of North Carolina Press.
About the author
Stephanie Clare Smith is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. Her work appears inXavier Review,iamb,Raleigh Review,South Writ Large,The Guardian,Belleview Literary Review, and other journals.Everywhere the Undrowned, from Great Circle Books of The University of North Carolina Press, is her debut memoir. She is also a clinical social worker and mediator who works with at-risk families in the North Carolina court system.She lives in Raleigh.