Edgar Oliver - The Backyard on 36th Street

 

Hi, everyone. [audience laughter] I'd like to tell you a story from my childhood. I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, with my mother and my sister, Helen, in a house surrounded by beautiful old trees. One day, I think I was 10, so Helen was 11, we were all three on the back porch eating watermelon. Helen and I were having fun spitting watermelon seeds over the railing. 

 

We grew inspired by the many watermelon seeds, and we began planting them all over the backyard, digging holes in the dirt with kitchen spoons, and then pouring in watermelon seeds and then covering up the holes, thinking that in the fecund earth of Savannah, watermelon vines would sprout effortlessly and that by the end of the summer there would be huge watermelons all over the backyard. [audience laughter] We waited and waited. But at the end of the summer, to our great disappointment, no watermelons had sprouted. 

 

The next summer, we decided to set up one of those collapsible swimming pools. So, we got one and we set it up in the backyard. This huge drum of corrugated iron that came up to here on me, up to my neck with a bottom of swimming pool, blue rubber. And then, we turned on the hose and began filling up the pool, which took hours. [audience laughter] We watched in fascination as the water rose. Filling the pool was probably the most satisfying thing about it. [audience laughter] Before it was half full, we jumped in and let the water rise around us. 

 

But after a few days, we barely used the swimming pool. We were on the go in the car so much, driving to Hilton Head or to the beach at Tybee or to swim in the Ogeechee River. Sometimes we go downtown and get fried chicken at the Woolworths on Broughton Street, and go with our sketch pads to the colonial cemetery to picnic atop the family vaults that were all shaped like gigantic brick bedsteads. 

 

Helen and I loved to climb on these strange bed shaped vaults, and lie on the gently curved bellies of the vaults and play at being dead. [audience laughter] While we played, mother sketched in her sketch pad. It was beautiful to lie there feeling so alive, pretending to be dead. [audience laughter] Meanwhile, the water in the swimming pool grew opaque. [audience laughter] Ink black, leaves and branches floated across its surface and God knows what lurked in its depths. [audience laughter] It was more forbidding than a swamp no one in their right mind would have gotten into it. It remained brim full as well, replenished by the summer's many rains. 

 

All through that summer, the pool exercised a strange fascination over the backyard. It was tall and mysterious. The rain went across it, and its mystery was stirred and we wondered at its depths. I would gaze at the black surface of the pool and imagine strange monsters lurking there, ghastly things. I know Helen did too. I know mother did too. [audience laughter] 

 

Finally, one day, we destroyed the pool. [audience laughter] We attacked it gleefully, [audience laughter] bashing down its sides and watching in delight as the black water poured out in all directions. We kept waiting for monsters to be revealed. I think we were all three convinced there was a human corpse [audience laughter] hidden in those waters, but there was nothing in the pool. It was empty. But at the bottom of the pool, a mystery entirely unexpected awaited us. 

 

The rubber bottom of the pool, now, black with sludge, rose up in strange humps everywhere. [audience laughter] There were things underneath the pool's bottom, [audience laughter] what could these things be? [audience laughter] The thought was horrifying. [audience laughter] We all three grabbed the sides of the pool and began heaving it up, peeling it from the ground. What we saw was more horrifying than anything we could ever have imagined. [audience laughter] There were watermelons everywhere. [audience laughter] Huge watermelons. [audience laughter] [audience applause]

 

But they were white. [audience laughter] Absolutely white. Albino watermelons. [audience laughter] The watermelons we had planted had been growing there, trapped under the swimming pool. Trapped, growing blindly in the dark. [audience laughter] Their whiteness was as horrible as the horror of their fate. [audience laughter] We could not bring ourselves touch them. And the thought of slicing one open to see what it was like inside was unimaginable. [audience laughter] How we got rid of them, I don't remember. [audience laughter] Such was the fate of the albino watermelons.