My Southern Journey (16 page)

You could see a change in the actors when they returned, some arriving from borrowed houses in cars patched with duct tape. The Wicked Witch was sad. The Munchkins had learned that not even the walls of their houses could keep out bad things.

“My kids saw trees knocked down they used to climb and saw the street where they used to ride their tricycles destroyed,” said Philip Pitts, whose triplets, Henry, Kate, and Anna, played Munchkins. “And they learned that their daddy can’t protect them from everything.”

But to abandon the play would have been admitting things might never be the same, said Maxwell Elebash, whose daughter, Augusta, played the bad witch. If not now, with this, then when? With what?

They set up chairs for 150 on opening night, but the people kept coming, 200, 300, more. The gym filled. People came who had nothing to do with Holy Spirit, to be part of something normal, too, and hear a 3-foot-high thespian squeak: “You’ve killed her so completely that we thank you very sweetly.” People said it was one of the best performances of
The Wizard of Oz
they had ever seen. Even the part where the Wicked Witch—circling the gym floor on her bicycle, shrieking—accidentally crashed into a baby carriage.

It will not fix everything. It will not raise walls. But Jake had worked like a man, digging stumps, hauling limbs, never complaining that his new car was now filled with broken glass. That night he danced across the stage with a girl in ruby slippers in his arms.

Sophie Petrovic, whose house just down the street from mine was ruined, cavorted in a blur of Munchkins, as if all evil winds were just props on stage.

The show does go on. Ding-dong. The witch is dead.

TRADE DAY

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: June 2011

F
ive years ago, my brothers and I drove to a vast flea market in Collinsville, Alabama, to buy a bantam rooster for our mother. We left with two ducks, two chickens, a Hamilton watch, two fig trees, a sack of green onions, a bone-handled pocketknife, a bushel of sweet potatoes, a four-way lug wrench, a goat named Ramrod, and a ball-peen hammer.

The goat, the size of a Shetland pony, butted my Ford Bronco so hard it rocked on its springs. That was why I bought the hammer. I was not riding back with that thing unarmed.

“Couldn’t find a pistol?” I asked my brother Sam. Sam, who has always been serious, said he could have found one, easy, in the endless stalls and milling throngs of people, if he had known I needed one—that, or a banjo, a croquet mallet, or a rhesus monkey. The goat just glared at me, kind of walleyed. “Ain’t he a dandy?” said my little brother, Mark.

It may have other names, this place. But for generations, my people have referred to it as Trade Day. Every Saturday, an eroded hillside explodes with color and sound, covering acres of gravel, rock, and mud with junk and treasure. If you want it, ever wanted it, or think you might want it someday, you can find it here. Quilt scraps and new and used clothes blow like banners, and ladder-back chairs and mule shoes sell next to Bear Bryant clocks, velvet
matadors, mood rings, top-water lures, Dale Earnhardt action figures, and Burt Reynolds commemorative plates. I could not conjure such a place even in a fevered dream.

There are others around the South, but this is ours, a kind of clearinghouse for the vanishing skills of my people. Old men in overalls stroll with bundles of carved ax handles sanded so smooth they would not snag a silk stocking. Old women unfold patterns first traced on flour sack dresses in the time of the WPA, or Reconstruction, or The War. Crab apple jelly shines in the sunlight next to jars of honey, the comb glistening inside. There is macramé so intricate it would make a spider quit his web, just steps from bins of rusted drill bits, crosscut saws, ancient cutting boards, sunflowers the size of truck tires, hammer dulcimers, hickory nuts, and gingham bonnets, just like my grandmother Ava wore every hot day of her life.

I can mark most years of my life with purchases here. A baby duck, when I was 6. I carried it home inside my shirt to keep it warm. At 10, a harmonica I would never play, except for one long, asthmatic moan. A ukulele, at 12. I never learned to play that either. At 17, it was a Creedence Clearwater eight-track tape (it stuck on “Run Through the Jungle”) and racing mirrors from a ’69 Camaro.

My cousin negotiated a pistol. “Does it shoot?”

“Oh, yeah.”

I have never seen a monkey for sale, but that doesn’t mean they never had one. High on the hill—upwind, inevitably—are fightin’ roosters and guinea hens (said to eat snakes), Poland China piglets, rabbits, and some of the finest dogs I have ever seen. I love to linger near the coon hunters with their redbone, bluetick, and black-and-tan hounds with bloodlines that reach back to the Bible, and listen to the lies...I mean testimonials. “Does he hunt?”

“Oh, yeah.”

I guess there is some junk here, but I never took any of it home. Only treasure. We secured the goat with logging chain. “If he gets loose,” I said as I turned the key, “I’m bailing out, and leaving him with y’all.”

LOST IN THE DARK

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: October 2014

I
have always been haunted by wrong turns, by high beams on asphalt I have never seen before, in the Halloween landscape of the Appalachian foothills. Everybody is afraid of something, and this is the time of year that you can admit it and smile at your foolishness—then eat that half-pound bag of baby Butterfingers you hid in the shaving kit next to your blood sugar medicine.

I grew up in the country, where rows of brittle cotton stalks rustle in the black of the evening and the wind hisses through the thick pines. They do whisper, as the old songs said. I have seldom been afraid of the dark; there is peace in it, when the cool evenings chase the snakes into their holes and send the spiders scurrying to wherever spiders go. In the evening you can hear coon dogs crooning on the mountainsides, and the far-off singing of a chain saw, and rusted-out mufflers of distant pulpwood trucks.

But here, there is no stripe down the side of the asphalt, just the wall of black trees, and the voice of the GPS is just one more Yankee lost in the woods. You are fine as long as you stick to the roads you know, past the fields and rolling pastures. Even at night there is enough moonlight to hold your imagination in check.

But now and then you tell yourself you will try a new way to get over the mountain, and make that turn that changes everything. It is worse this time of year, when the weather does not know
whether to be hot or cold and storms transform the trees from sunbursts of orange and gold into naked, jagged spikes.

I blame my people, who will not use main roads. They insist on the shortcut, as if anybody has ever really been late to the dollar store. Are they going to run out of onion dip, or Roll Tide-themed polyester shorts? They say it is because they are saving time, but it is really because our ancestors could not drive through town or down a main highway because they did not have a driver’s license, or a tag, or more than one headlight, or sufficient sobriety to do anything except creep along a forlorn road, drifting till they hear the whippings of Johnsongrass against the bottom of the Rambler.

I have my people’s proclivities, but no sense of direction. Plus, I have been gone from here a long time. So I drive, forever, headlights on high beam, so I can see the ghosts peeking from the ditches, and though I have lived in these hills all my life, I do not recognize a thing, just trees and black and an occasional sign that seems to read “Dead Lake,” or worse.

But I do not panic, because I know my part of the scary world is only so big, and I know that at least some of the spirits swirling around me have my last name, because where else would they wander but on some road to nowhere, and they would not let anything happen to me.

It is foolishness, but sometimes I even smile when I see a car with a missing taillight far ahead, or a one-eyed truck rattling toward me. And I always find my way home.

THE ETERNAL GULF

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: July 2012

T
o pick one day on this water, one above all the rest, is like trying to hold on to the white sand with your scrunched-up toes as the receding waves pull it from beneath your feet. The Gulf occupies a shining place in our memories, of rushing, crashing blues and greens against a shore so white it hurts our eyes, of flashes of silver through shallows clear as branch water, of pink babies screaming with laughter as they outrun an inch-deep wave onto safe, dry sand, as if winning that race was the most important thing in their lives, till the next one. And when they are old it will still be that way, because waves are always waiting, one more summer, to race again.

I wondered if we would lose it all that spring and summer of 2010. Some old men, who know things like tides and the habits of fish, told me not to fret, that there was too much water out there to be killed by even such a gout of oil. Other old men, tears in their eyes, told me the Gulf only seemed eternal, that mankind could kill it like any other living thing. Now, two summers after, the crisis fades in our memories: The highways south are busier, the waits for a shrimp platter drag on a little more. And it is easy to believe again that it will always be there, a cradle for the fish, or just a place to ease our souls.