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Andy Borowitz (1:22)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Andy Borowitz. The Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories on the Moth Podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York and Los Angeles and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org the story you are about to hear by George Dawes Green was reported live at the Moth mainstage.

George Dawes Green (1:50)

So how many of y'all here are from the South? Well, you will know that in the south we sometimes have too many stories. And there was a story that my mother used to drill into me about when my great grandmother was a little girl during the Civil War. And one day Sherman's troops came to visit their family plantation. And the troops found outside in the front yard, they found an area of the front yard that had been where the earth had been disturbed. So they decided that this is where the family was hiding the family silver. So they commenced to dig. And a woman came out on the veranda. She was very beautiful, but very frail. And she said, y'all won't find it. She said, we sold it all long ago. And all that lies there are the remains of my boys, my twins, who died stillborn. And if you dig them up, you'll be seeing their faces for all eternity. But they didn't believe her. So they dug. And when they found the bodies of the two infant children, they were so ashamed and remorseful and fearful that they just rode away. And that's why our family plantation house was left unburned when Sherman marched to the sea. However, I once talked to a cousin of mine who told me that he'd heard a rumor that the family silver had never been sold. That it had been, in fact, hidden underneath the bodies of the two stillborn boys. And when he told me this, the expression on his face was a mixture of delight and a horrible loathing for everything that that was our family. And this. And this conflict of emotion is, I think, the mark of a true Southerner. The house that my great grandmother presided over was called Truitland hall, and it was in Waynesboro, Georgia. And as you entered the foyer, you looked up, and there was this horrifying mosaic of Medusa looking down at you. And then you walked in, and there were these two enormous dining rooms and the ornate library and the staircase that was so grand and went up to the seven bedrooms and the five bathrooms. And on the third floor was the grand ballroom where my mother danced when she was a little girl. And there was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish room. They were both named Inez. And on that day, Big Ines gave little Ines a plantation all of her own. And then her little sister gave. Came running in and said, grandmother, can I have a plantation, too? And big Inez looked down and said, child, your name is Alice. You were named for your Yankee grandmother. Go ask your Yankee grandmother for a plantation. But after the stock market crash, there weren't any plantations for anybody. Everything was lost. And my mother married a poor writer and knocked around the north for many years, and then wound up living on a little island off the coast of Georgia called St. Simon's Island. And she worked as a receptionist for an optometrist. And she still had all her memories of Truitland Hall. And she had all of these beautiful pictures, which I would not look at because I hated all that stuff. I hated all this Confederate vamping. Mom wanted me to either go to Duke or Emory. And I dropped out of high school, and I went to live on my own because I could not stand to be there. I mean, I would go back for meals, and I was 18 years old, and my mom would remind me to point my spoon away from me when I ate it. Because Big Inez had always said, a little ship sails out to sea. I point my spoon away from me, and I would say, mom, let me eat. And Leave me the hell alone. I had a chip on my shoulder the size of the moon. And there was a guy who came down from Waynesboro from my mom's hometown. His name was Lewis Ross. His father had worked as the gardener at Truitland Hall. And Lewis Ross had grown up and become very wealthy. And he was coming down to St. Simon's to build this huge resort for the middle classes. My mother reviled Lewis Ross. She said he was poor white trash. She said he was an odious little rodent. So I went to work for him just to spite her. I worked on one of the construction crews. And, you know, we were just building those condos one day we were out there digging footings and Lewis Ross comes waddling up with his big bulgy eyes, and he's with the on site architect and he points to me and says, jones. Now, my name is not Jones. Jones was my great grandmother's name. And when he spoke, he had a little bit of bitterness. So I was a little afraid. But I came up and he said, son, go in now, put your shovel down and go over there that shed and bring me back some J. Bolt. And I said, I don't know what a J Bolt looks like. He said, well, jaybolt's kind of crooked and it's about as long as your dick when it gets hard. And he was laughing, and all of my colleagues were also laughing. And you know, I love these guys. And all I wanted to do was to impress them. So as I walked toward that shed, I knew that if it turned out that a jbolt was any less than 6 inches long, that I was destroyed, that for the rest of my life my name would be J. Bolt. So I got to the shed and I looked in and it was dark and hot. And there were all these wasps batting around in that shed. And I looked down and. And saw the J Bolts. And thank God they were seven inches long. And even better, there were these anchor bolts, and they were about 16 inches long and they were iron and as big around as my wrist. And I got a bunch of them and carried them back to Lewis Ross and said, I'm sorry, boss, this is as big as I could find. And my colleagues loved this. They were easy to please. And even Lewis Ross had to laugh. And later that afternoon, I got summoned to Lewis Ross's office. And I went there and he looked at me and said, jones, let's go get a drink. And we got into his bright red Cadillac and we drove up to McIntosh county, to a brothel or kind of A brothel. It was kind of a double wide trailer in the woods kind of brothel. And I had lots of Southern Comfort, which is vile, but I liked it, and I liked the girls. And Lewis Ross at one point said to me, because he knew that I had lived up north, and he said, did you ever have a Yankee girlfriend? And I said, well, yeah. And he said, was she a hippie? And I said, um, sort of. And he said, did you ever eat that thing? And I kind of had to nod. And he gave me this look of complete disgust. But he turned to the girl next to him and said. He said, this girl would like for you to eat her thing, and I would like to watch. And I looked at him, and I realized that this man was so full of boiling shit inside his skull and that he hated what he loved and therefore was a true Southerner. And. And I guess that I'm also a true Southerner, because I confess that I actually considered performing for him. Now, it's hard to say why. I was 18 years old. I wanted more than anything to impress him. He had a kind of bizarre grandeur, and he wasn't anything like anybody in my family. But the girl saved me. She said, oh, no way. And so we just had another drink. And then Lewis Ross's eyes got very bulgy. And he told me that he had just purchased my family's ancestral mansion, Truitland Hall. And his engineers were going to break it into four huge pieces and roll the pieces down to the Savannah river and put them on barges and float them down the Savannah, past the city of Savannah, down the intracoastal waterway to St. Simon's island, where he would rebuild them as Truitland hall, his golf club house and the crowning jewel of his resort. And it would be like a beacon to tourists all over the world. And he wanted me to tell my mother that Lewis Ross would pay her twice what the optometrist was paying her if she would come and be the hostess at the house that she had grown up in. And he said, I want to hire all you Joneses to work for me. And that night, I didn't go right home. I went to Mom's first to tell her about this, and she seemed somewhat distressed. And she said to me she didn't really want to put on a hoop skirt and a bonnet and go guiding grubby tourists all around her ancestral home. And I said, oh, what's the matter, Mom? You don't like common people? And she said, I don't mind common people. No, this was my home. And I said, common people built Truitland Hall. And she said, are you drunk? And I said, you should like this, Mom. You can tell your story of the Stillborn twins a thousand times. You can sell coffee mugs engraved with the story of the Stillborn twins. Then that story will be worth something. And she threw me out of her house. And I woke up the next day with the worst hanger that I'd ever had. And I just had this terrible remorse. And I called her to say I was sorry. But she said in it was all right, she was going to take the job because dad was sick and they needed the money. But she wanted to go to Waynesboro one more time to look at Truitland hall in its real home. And she didn't think her car could make it that far. So could she borrow my car? So I said, of course she could borrow my car. So on Friday we made the switch and she drove on up. And on Saturday night, around 3am, I got awoken by a telephone call and it was my mother. And she said, it's all right. Truitland hall is safe. And that was the night of the Great Conflagration. And you can Google it. It's a famous night in Waynesboro, Georgia. It's the night when Truitland hall burned down. The gates were chained up so that nobody could get in there. And by the time they did, Trueland hall was gone. Truitland hall was chimneys. And they determined it was arson and that an accelerant, namely gasoline, had been used. Somebody had poured gasoline in every room, in the Medusa room and the great dining rooms and the Turkish room and in the grand ballroom upstairs. And I sat up all night and I felt a kind of grief that I have never felt before. It was just like it was shattering. It was like a piece had been torn out of my side. And then I felt a kind of pride. And I thought, my mother did this. Thank you.