Amaziah Jocelin, also spelled Amasiah Josselyn, among other variants, was a privateer and war hero. As captain of the ten-gun barque The Firebrand, he was credited with the defense of Cape Fear. Following American independence, he became the US Navy Agent, or supply officer, of the Port of Wilmington, where he also established the city’s first chamber of commerce, which he called, funnily enough, the Intelligence-Office. The Jocelins and their descendants—the Moores and Halls and Meylands and Howells and Stevens and Restons and Stokleys—who comprise the rest of my mother’s side fought in every war in my country’s history, from the Revolution and the Civil War (in which the Carolinian relatives fought for the Confederacy against their New England/Union cousins), to both world wars. Mine is a family that has always answered the call of duty.
My maternal grandfather, whom I call Pop, is better known as Rear Admiral Edward J. Barrett. At the time of my birth he was deputy chief, aeronautical engineering division, Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, DC. He’d go on to hold various engineering and operational commands, from Governors Island, New York City, to Key West, Florida, where he was director of the Joint Interagency Task Force East (a multiagency, multinational US Coast Guard–led force dedicated to the interdiction of narcotics trafficking in the Caribbean). I wasn’t aware of how high up the ranks Pop was rising, but I knew that the welcome-to-command ceremonies became more elaborate as time went on, with longer speeches and larger cakes. I remember the souvenir I was given by the artillery guard at one of them: the shell casing of a 40mm round, still warm and smelling like powdered hell, which had just been fired in a salute in Pop’s honor.
Then there’s my father, Lon, who at the time of my birth was a chief petty officer at the Coast Guard’s Aviation Technical Training Center in Elizabeth City, working as a curriculum designer and electronics instructor. He was often away, leaving my mother at home to raise my sister and me. To give us a sense of responsibility, she gave us chores; to teach us how to read, she labeled all our dresser drawers with their contents—SOCKS, UNDERWEAR. She would load us into our Red Flyer wagon and tow us to the local library, where I immediately made for my favorite section, the one that I called “Big Masheens.” Whenever my mother asked me if I was interested in any specific “Big Masheen,” I was unstoppable: “Dump trucks and steamrollers and forklifts and cranes and—”
“Is that all, buddy?”
“Oh,” I’d say, “and also cement mixers and bulldozers and—”
My mother loved giving me math challenges. At Kmart or Winn-Dixie, she’d have me pick out books and model cars and trucks and buy them for me if I was able to mentally add together their prices. Over the course of my childhood, she kept escalating the difficulty, first having me estimate and round to the nearest dollar, then having me figure out the precise dollar-and-cents amount, and then having me calculate 3 percent of that amount and add it on to the total. I was confused by that last challenge—not by the arithmetic so much as by the reasoning. “Why?”
“It’s called tax,” my mother explained. “Everything we buy, we have to pay three percent to the government.”
“What do they do with it?”
“You like roads, buddy? You like bridges?” she said. “The government uses that money to fix them. They use that money to fill the library with books.”
Some time later, I was afraid that my budding math skills had failed me, when my mental totals didn’t match those on the cash register’s display. But once again, my mother explained. “They raised the sales tax. Now you have to add four percent.”
“So now the library will get even more books?” I asked.
“Let’s hope,” my mother said.
My grandmother lived a few streets over from us, across from the Carolina Feed and Seed Mill and a towering pecan tree. After stretching out my shirt to make a basket to fill with fallen pecans, I’d go up to her house and lie on the carpet beside the long low bookshelves. My usual company was an edition of Aesop’s Fables and, perhaps my favorite, Bulfinch’s Mythology. I would leaf through the pages, pausing only to crack a few nuts while I absorbed accounts of flying horses, intricate labyrinths, and serpent-haired Gorgons who turned mortals to stone. I was in awe of Odysseus, and liked Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena well enough, but the deity I admired most had to be Hephaestus: the ugly god of fire, volcanoes, blacksmiths, and carpenters, the god of tinkerers. I was proud of being able to spell his Greek name, and of knowing that his Roman name, Vulcan, was used for the home planet of Spock from Star Trek. The fundamental premise of the Greco-Roman pantheon always stuck with me. Up at the summit of some mountain there was this gang of gods and goddesses who spent most of their infinite existence fighting with each other and spying on the business of humanity. Occasionally, when they noticed something that intrigued or disturbed them, they disguised themselves, as lambs and swans and lions, and descended the slopes of Olympus to investigate and meddle. It was often a disaster—someone always drowned, or was struck by lightning, or was turned into a tree—whenever the immortals sought to impose their will and interfere in mortal affairs.
Once, I picked up an illustrated version of the legends of King Arthur and his knights, and found myself reading about another legendary mountain, this one in Wales. It served as the fortress of a tyrannical giant named Rhitta Gawr, who refused to accept that the age of his reign had passed and that in the future the world would be ruled by human kings, whom he considered tiny and weak. Determined to keep himself in power, he descended from his peak, attacking kingdom after kingdom and vanquishing their armies. Eventually he managed to defeat and kill every single king of Wales and Scotland. Upon killing them he shaved off their beards and wove them together into a cloak, which he wore as a gory trophy. Then he decided to challenge the strongest king of Britain, King Arthur, giving him a choice: Arthur could either shave off his own beard and surrender, or Rhitta Gawr would decapitate the king and remove the beard himself. Enraged at this hubris, Arthur set off for Rhitta Gawr’s mountain fortress. The king and the giant met on the highest peak and battled each other for days, until Arthur was gravely wounded. Just as Rhitta Gawr grabbed the king by the hair and prepared to cut off his head, Arthur summoned a last measure of strength and sank his fabled sword through the eye of the giant, who toppled over dead. Arthur and his knights then went about piling up a funeral cairn atop Rhitta Gawr’s corpse, but before they could complete the work, snow began to fall. As they departed, the giant’s bloodstained beard-cloak was returned to perfect whiteness.
The mountain was called Snaw Dun, which, a note explained, was Old English for “snow mound.” Today, Snaw Dun is called Mount Snowdon. A long-extinct volcano, it is, at approximately 3,560 feet, the highest peak in Wales. I remember the feeling of encountering my name in this context—it was thrilling—and the archaic spelling gave me my first palpable sense that the world was older than I was, even older than my parents were. The name’s association with the heroic exploits of Arthur and Lancelot and Gawain and Percival and Tristan and the other Knights of the Round Table gave me pride—until I learned that these exploits weren’t historical, but legendary.
Years later, with my mother’s help, I would scour the library in the hopes of separating the mythical from the factual. I found out that Stirling Castle in Scotland had been renamed Snowdon Castle, in honor of this Arthurian victory, as part of an attempt by the Scots to shore up their claim to the throne of England. Reality, I learned, is nearly always messier and less flattering than we might want it to be, but also in some strange way often richer than the myths.