David McRaney  |  Journalist

A bomb siren lullaby

Every year, between May and June, something sends my mind tumbling backwards through every memory I've ever had about summer.

It usually happens late in the evening, after a day almost too hot to bear. Just as the sun is making its exit, and most of the fugitive heat in the ground has escaped, the locusts will start to hum.

It's an impressive and bizarre sound that comes around every year. Like a thousand tiny bomb sirens, the locusts wail through the hollows and out into the woods all around the Pine Belt and signal another season has begun.

Of course, they aren't really locusts; we've always called them such.

The truth is what we are hearing is the sound of the cicada. They're the strange red-eyed insects that leave behind those opaque brown husks my uncles used to pluck from the bark of the trees in my grandmother's back yard and put down the back of my cousin's shirts.

And, they don't really come back every year. It's a different batch each time the weird alien, lawn mower sound starts to vibrate from somewhere deep in the forest.

Each year a brood digs its way up from under the ground near a tree, then the nymphs climb up the bark to molt. An adult cicada emerges and gets to the business of mating. The males sing all day to attract females, and the females cut slits in deciduous trees to lay their eggs. The adults don't eat; they just mate and die. The nymphs hatch and fall to he ground, then they burrow into the soil and suckle underground roots anywhere from eight to 17 years. Then, the strange life cycle starts all over, a different year's hatchlings emerging after a long, dark slumber.

I didn't know all that growing up, I just knew the sound they made was a familiar, haunting melody reminding me each year of where I grew up and how much the South had infected me.

Today, when I hear the locusts singing, I think about my grandmother shelling peas and my grandfather making tomato sandwiches. I taste boiled peanuts and smell the acrid aroma of busy ant beds. I see glossy green fields overexposed by a noonday Mississippi sun, and I feel the breeze coming swift and clumsy through pine trees and oaks.

It made me a little sad when I learned the cicada is part of the folklore of many different cultures around the world, and I wasn't the only writer to put down words about these mysterious insects.

Goethe, Browning, Tennyson, and Anatole France all wrote poems about the cicada. Certain places in China collect the husks and ground them up to make a tea that is given to noisy, crying babies in hopes of quieting them. Similarly, the shed skins are also used to treat ringing in the ears. The cicada nymph burrowing out of the ground has been a symbol of rebirth or reincarnation in a number of societies.

American Indians of the Oraibi tribe believed that cicadas had the power to renew life and made a medicine from them which was used to treat wounds received in battle. The Maya and the Aztec carved Jade cicadas they placed on the tongue of a corpse prior to burial so the deceased would some day re-animate In Navajo mythology, the cicada-god fought the birds and rescued the Earth for humans.

Of course, we've only been in America for 200 or so years, so we don't have as intricate an affection for them.

The only bit of trivia about cicadas in Mississippi other than this article, as far as I can tell, is the strange habit we have of calling them locusts. When a brood of cicadas emerged a few years after the first colonists arrived in the New England area, they thought a biblical plague had been spawned. They called them locusts, and the name has stuck in a handful of areas around America.

I know no matter where I go or who I associate with, the South I grew up in has already settled in my bones. My accent spills out at awkward times, and I look at skyscrapers like children look at clowns. I own a compound bow, and I am willing to drive for hours to get to my momma's corn bread and black-eyed peas.

Somehow the locusts are mixed up in all that, and just as soon as I think I've lost some of my childhood, they will sneak out of the soil and tell me everything is still working like it ought to.

I suppose if I lived in New Orleans it might be the sound of a clarinet by the river, or maybe if I grew up in an affluent suburb it would be Christmas carolers. But, for me, the sound that reminds me of who I am and where I learned everything I truly know, it's the sound of a slender green bug with red eyes and creepy wings that hides in the dirt.

Originally published in The Student Printz on March 28, 2006