Ellen Ann Fentress

Word Count 746

 My husband and I once owned a 1932 yellow stucco house in Jackson, Mississippi on what turned out to be a subterranean stretch of Yazoo clay. Neighbors and friends were kind enough to bring welcome muffins, a philodendron and—this being Jackson homeownership— the contact info of a church minister who did house foundation work weekdays. 

When a bulge erupted in our front hallway oak floor and the sheetrock cracked in vertical rivulets, we telephoned the minister. Let’s call him the Reverend Gerald Sims, Junior. It turned out the Sims family had a trademark legacy. Like his father, the Reverend Gerald Sims, Senior, Reverend Sims preached on Sunday and repaired clay-cracked foundations throughout town during the week. 

You have to question Jackson city founder Louis LeFleur’s site picking smarts. Millions of years before the fur trader opened his post in 1792 on the bluff of the Pearl River, the city’s fate was geologically sealed as one of the lousiest spots, besides a Pacific cliffside,  to build. It’s the presence of montmorillonite, the offending mineral in Jackson’s clay which sets house foundations in town to roiling and cracking.

Maybe perching his enterprise on the bluff above the mosquitoes and Pearl flood lands was a solid tradeoff for gooey soil. But buildings with more ambition and mortar followed LeFleur’s log quarters. Once the size of houses swelled, so did the foundations, unfortunately.

 In 1948, Yazoo clay punked Frank Lloyd Wright when he designed a dream house here for Edith and Willis Hughes. Wright had earlier made his reputation when his iconic Imperial Hotel withstood the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. But then Wright came to Jackson, where 7.9 on the Richter scale in Tokyo turned out to be less of a test than Yazoo clay. Wright’s low-slung Jackson hill hugger was built in fits and spurts between 1950 and 1954 as the Hughes’ oil business fluctuated. Word was that the 3,000 square-foot concrete house—the family named it Fountainhead— started to crack before the Hughes clan spent their first night. Eventually, a section of the Fountainhead floor broke, sinking nineteen inches down. The roof peak split. Rain poured in. (Also, Wright insisted air conditioning was only necessary if you didn’t have a genius architect to configure cross breezes correctly. No A.C. needed for the new homeowners. Not eager to melt, subsequent owners retrofitted the A.C. in.) 

 Reverend Sims arrived at our house (a few blocks from the Wright house) with his crew of deacons who addressed each other as Brother. The team bent down and into the house crawl space to get to work twisting our home back straight.  

 From the kitchen, I heard Reverend Sims three feet beneath my tennis shoes as he directed one of the deacons to coax a new piling into place below. 

 “Brother Edward? To the left,” Reverend Sims’s voice seeped up. “Brother Phillip? Over there.” By late afternoon, the crew reemerged in the carport. Reverend Sims squinted in the daylight in his muddy zipped coveralls. All was well again, he said.

 “You know, a house is no better than its foundation.” He was talking to me, but his delivery sounded like strong words to a congregation. It felt a little accusatory, in fact, although Reverend Sims had a kind smile above his gray goatee. I could see that the minister’s Sunday and weekday work weren’t totally at odds. In both capacities, he took on drift, either the humankind or house movement caused by clay. Clay was likely easier to fix.

 Our hallway was mended. As Reverend Sims had said, all was well. Ten years passed. Then the Yazoo clay shifted once more. When the hairline crack in the kitchen counter first started, I overlooked it. Then it widened to vein-size and made a sure trek across the midnight-black shiny stone surface. Same for the bulge that split the planks in the wood floor below. 

 To tell the truth, both cracks had been growing unnoticed— probably brightly and willfully unnoticed by me— for quite a while. The fix was too big for Reverend Sims and the deacons to manage by solely nudging a new wood piling or two into place from below. My husband and I hired a man with a jackhammer. The kitchen floor was shot. Not long after, so was our marriage. We sold the house. You can fight nature only so far, and then it’s time to accept what’s happening, going along with the earth’s awful, wondrous rumbles.  

Ellen Ann’s essays have been published in The New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Baffler, Oxford American and Bitter Southerner. Her memoir is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in fall 2023. She teaches in Mississippi University for Women’s low-residency creative writing MFA program. Follow her @ea_fentress on Twitter or through www.ellenannfentress.com