My Southern Journey
For my Aunt Juanita and my Aunt Jo
and
to the memory of my Aunt Edna and my Aunt Sue
CONTENTS
Introduction: South Toward Home
Mama Always Said...Choose Your Words Carefully
For a Vegetable, I’ll Have White Gravy
109 Yards Returned, Two Points Denied, and One Twist Left in the Road
SOUTH TOWARD HOME
It suits me, here.
My people tell their stories of vast red fields and bitter turnip greens and harsh white whiskey like they are rocking in some invisible chair, smooth and easy even in the terrible parts, because the past has already done its worst. The joys of this Southern life, we polish like old silver. We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out like dinner on the ground. We talk of the bad year the cotton didn’t open, and the day my cousin Wanda was Washed in the Blood. We cherish the past. We buff our beloved ancestors till they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, though sometimes we cannot remember exactly which is who.
I wonder if, north of here, they might even run out of stories someday. It may seem silly, but it is cold up there, too cold to mosey, to piddle, to loafer, and summer only lasts a week and a half. The people spit the words out so fast when they talk, like they are trying to discard them somehow, banish them, rather than relish the sound and the story. We will not run out of them here. We talk like we are tasting something.
I do it for a living, which is stealing, really. Li’l Abner, another not-too-bright Southern boy, had a job once, testing mattresses.
This is much like that, this book.
People ask me, often, why I love a place so imperfect, where the mosquitoes dance between the lukewarm rain and the summer heat turns every stretch of blacktop into a shimmering river of hot
tar, where the football-mad fling curses and sometimes punches and forget their raising on call-in radio, and the politicians seem intent on a return to 1954. I merely answer: How do you not love a place where the faded beads from a parade six years before still hang in the branches of the live oak trees.
I love the big carnival floats that lumber through the streets of New Orleans and Mobile to rain treasure on the streets below, causing the people there to leap and snatch at the air as if it was real swag instead of aluminum money and Moon Pies. I love the mountain churches along the Georgia-Alabama line, love the hard-rock preachers in their Conway Twitty sideburns who fling scripture with the force of a flying horseshoe at congregations who all but levitate in the grasp of the Holy Ghost, and every old woman’s purse in every pew smells like a fresh stick of Juicy Fruit. I love the cry of a steel guitar on a makeshift stage in the Appalachian foothills, where a fierce old man who looks like he just walked out of a fire reaches for a shorted-out microphone to holler “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” His grown son does a buck dance on a concrete slab. How do you not love such as that?
I love tomato sandwiches and fried oyster po’ boys and pineapple upside-down cake and biscuits and sausage gravy, and love the Southern doctor who offers me antidotes, and prayer. I love roiling caldrons of pork cracklin’s on the first frost, and great pits lined with smoking, fat-dripping pigs, and jars of crabapple jelly that gleam like rose gold in my mother’s windowsill. I love old men who talk tools and transmissions over black coffee in the Huddle House and pass around heirloom pocketknives with more pride than they do pictures of their grandchildren. I love big-haired waitresses who call me baby, and fat Shriners who ride little-bitty cars in the Christmas parade, and stained and faded recipes for tea cakes passed down from the Yankee war. I love lightning bugs. I love winter without snowdrifts, grief, and pain.
I love the Delta and its empty, uncluttered land, love a recidivist guitar man named T-Model Ford, who, when asked how many men he’d killed, asked if it counted if he “done it with a Pontiac.” I love the music of Hank Williams, and the mockingbird of Harper Lee, and a Louisiana accordion player named Rosie Ledet. I love to see a speckled trout fight the line through the flats of Tampa Bay, love the black dirt of the lower South and blood-red clay of the highlands and the glittering white sand of the Gulf, love the smell of sawmills, and the ever-fading, irreplaceable shake and stamp of
the cotton mills and what is left of the broad-shouldered South of my boyhood. I love all-night gospel singings and flea markets four miles wide, and hounds that wail on the mountainside while the raccoons they chase double back on the trail and steal the cat food off the front porch. I love café au lait, and clanking, squealing streetcars, and boiled blue crabs too hot to touch, love the summertimes that smell of bourbon and orange slices and crushed cherries and that old, clinging waft of decay. I love the scent of a million flowers, a riot of flowers whose names I have never taken time to truly know.
I love, I guess more than anything, the ghosts of my people, spirits who are always close, always riding in my memory like a good luck charm in my pocket, like the late aunt who will forever walk between rows of red and yellow roses on the Alabama coast, whispering to her elderly sisters, who hold tightly to both her hands, that they are the most beautiful roses she has ever seen.
It is the South, and so spirits are welcome here.
You have to love that, too.
Because, despite what they believe in Savannah, the party does sometimes end, no matter how deep your to-go cup might be as you warble down the street. There are times when I cannot escape the melancholia of this place, like when I drive the seemingly endless blacktop between walls of dark, between the curtains of the pine barrens and silver-white glow of the vast cotton fields and other lonely stretches where even the glares of Atlanta, Raleigh, and New Orleans are snuffed out by the sheer breadth of the empty miles. To be a Southerner, or to live Southern, is to feel, well,
something
special even in the quiet, something fine in itself after all those rebel yells and fight songs have finally faded into silence. The great Texas writer Larry McMurtry once wrote of a man born beside a river of melancholy, and I have always loved that line. To be a Southerner, born or re-planted here by fate, is to drive through that stillness of landscape and spirit and
feel
it, and we mumble a few lines of a song from childhood, to gather the ghosts of our tribe around us.
When I was a little bitty baby
My mama would rock me in my cradle
In them old cotton fields back home
Last fall, on the last night of a book tour that had taken me from
New York to Miami and much of the in-between, I rolled through the Tennessee Valley, across a bleak landscape of fallow fields and black trees already stripped by the winds and rain of the season. It is not real work, writing books, not like roofing, or carrying concrete blocks, or swinging a hammer, but I was tired and a little gloomy and, in this rare time, saw little beauty in this region that had nurtured my life and my livelihood. Then, just before the thinnest sliver of red sun sank below the flat horizon, the gloom around the speeding car erupted, exploded, with a million blackbirds, whirling first left and then right in a great column of black wings before vanishing into the dark that fell, right then, like a heavy curtain. It was like they just winked out, just, in a blink, claimed the air around me, and then ceased to exist. Maybe I am easy to impress, but it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I grinned, and laughed out loud. I guess they have blackbirds everywhere, but I will stash that memory away with all those things about this South I love, there in that imaginary box with all the rest of it, next to my grandfather’s fedora, and the little scraps of silvery chewing gum wrapper that my grandmother saved, for some unfathomable reason, between the pages of Deuteronomy, the
Farmer’s Almanac,
and a decades-old edition of
Life
magazine.
This book is a collection of Southern stories, but it is not a litany of pig pickin’s and frat parties and cutthroat beauty contests. I have always tried to write of this South in a way beyond clichés, and that is why, most often, I have pulled my writings from the memories and stories of my own blood. The most interesting thing about my South is not juleps on the veranda and sweet tea in a Mason jar (though I have enjoyed both). There is more to us than deer hunting, or NASCAR; the Yankees have all but wrested that from us, anyway. There is more to us, even, than football, and no matter how many sportscasters might say it, it is not
truly
our religion; it engenders far too much cursing for that, though we have prayed to our Lord and Savior on third down and three, and like to tell that joke about St. Peter walking on water in Bear Bryant’s hat. I have never seen a Confederate saber over a mantel, though that may just be because I’m not invited to the good parties. But to me, the actual South, the actual adventure, is so much better than clichés. My Uncle Jimbo never challenged a man to a duel to defend his honor, but he did win a $20 bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead mule. My grandmother prayed a
tornado away, and punched a city woman in the eye.