My Southern Journey (24 page)

Often, I gaze at the scudding clouds and icy mist and think of fishing.

“The fish won’t bite on a bluebird day,” my big brother, Sam, told me many years ago, looking up into a bright, blue sky. I hear it in my head every clear, blue day—and when it’s cloudy with a chance of fish.

Or, I think about Mrs. Mary Bird, of Waterloo, Alabama, who sees through the gray and cold. “Still enough blue in the sky,” she says, “to make a cat a pair of pants.” And I know that the real color and warmth in us, as a people, is not in the landscape or the sky but in our language, the way we lean the words against each other. We are the best-spoken people on Earth, not in the realm of grammar, perhaps, but in the pictures we paint and hang on the air.

If you ask my mother if someone told the truth, she will not answer, “Why, yes, they did.” She will answer, “Why, hon’, she was
tellin’ God’s sanction.” And that is just prettier. She also does not say people act a fool, which is cruel. “They play folly,” she says. I have been playing folly, she points out, for 54 years.

We have our own phrases for things, like our phrase for a good person. If a man is capable, sound, he is not just “steady.” He is, as Sam says, “gun-barrel straight.” A man who is not gun-barrel straight is “a chuckle,” which I think is short for chucklehead. I just know that is what he calls me before suggesting that perhaps I should go get me “some of that anger management,” like it was something they sold with salt licks down at the co-op.

“And if I tell you a rooster dips snuff,” he says, “you can look under his wing for the can.”

I think a lot of people think our language is a bunch of clichés, like “shut my mouth,” or “rode hard and put up wet,” usually spat out when we are “drunk as Cooter Brown.” This is not what I am talking about.

I think about my Uncle Ed, leaning on a shovel handle in the 100-degree heat of an Alabama summer, turning up an ice-crusted RC Cola before mumbling, quietly, “If the good Lord made anything better than this, He kept it for Hisself.”

Some things we say are just mysterious, like a friend’s grandmother who is prone to blurt out, “Well, I’ll be Johnny.” We do not know who Johnny is. I am tired of trying to explain us. I once wrote that a man had enough money to burn a wet dog. I got a call from animal rights activists who wondered why I advocated such. I told them it was only something we said, and I loved dogs, and…

I should have just told them to go see Johnny about it.

THE BLANK NOTEBOOK

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: September 2013

T
he long hallways—math to this side, science to the other, social studies down the way—were of ancient, gleaming wood, and always smelled of fresh wax and old misery. How many D minuses had fluttered down to those dark boards? How many “trues” that should have been “falses”? How many multiple choices that left no choice at all?

It was around 1966 or 1967, but September for sure, because September meant that summer was well and truly dead. It was still hot as seven hells outside, but with one halting step into the gloom of that hall you entered a whole other realm, where coaches and even math teachers kept order with long wooden paddles, and a second-grade teacher once kicked my cowboy boot clear off my foot, then, with a running second kick, knocked it clear into the hall. All this, because I left one leg sprawled out in the aisle during her elocution. Still, it was a fine kick for an old woman.

I should have hated that school, Roy Webb School, in Calhoun County, Alabama. I would have, maybe, if not for that notebook.

As much as I hated the end of those hot, free days of summer, I loved that notebook, loved the clean, unmarred lines. Every year I got a new one, divided by subject, and it was always somehow just enough to get me through the year, perhaps because math was completely blank. Except for pictures of hot rods. I used a
quarter to get the wheels right.

Mostly, I loved the smell of it. It smelled like… well, I couldn’t put words to it, then. Now I know it was the smell of a fresh start, the smell of possibility. I could learn something, if at the end of the year the pages were filled with ideas, maybe even answers. I would start writing on the third or fourth page, because surely there was some finer idea that needed to go first.

I wrote Mark Twain’s thoughts here. I wrote every line to “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” about how the hens laid soft-boiled eggs.

My books were wrapped in brown paper bags from the Piggly Wiggly, and on those rare occasions I got a new one, the spine would make a cracking sound, like snapping an ice-cream stick, when I first opened it. My desk was always carved at least once with the name of a long-lost third grader, always daubed at least five times with a petrified wad of Juicy Fruit. I puzzled at that. How did he expect to get away with defacing school property when he signed his work? And how did a school that had banned the chewing of gum since the first Roosevelt Administration have desks in such a state? Come to think of it, they had banned pocketknives, too.

But this was the key to my castle. I learned here.

I walk through stores and pick up notebooks and smell them, and I am sure more than one person has shaken their head at the odd man trying to snort up a stationery aisle. It does not smell the same. I think it is because my chance is used up, and the great possibility with it. Maybe only the young can sense it, the ones at the beautiful, unmarred beginning of things.

FISH STORY

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: July 2013

T
his is a fish story. That said, it is still mostly true.

“We need to go fishin’ out in the Gulf, on my boat,” said my friend Randy Jones.

“Not,” I said, “if you are driving.” I had never heard of any great seafarers from Sand Mountain, Alabama, and had this awful image in my head of him and me playing dominoes in a Cuban prison.

“I’ll get somebody good,” he said.

There were five of us the day we put out from Orange Beach on Randy’s 40-footer,
Earlie Tide.
“Because my daddy’s name was Earlie,” he told me, and if that is not the perfect reason to name a boat, I don’t know what is.

I do not recall the day. “Just say it was the hottest day of the year,” Randy said. It was me, him, and my stepson Jake. The skipper was Fred Williams, whom Randy described as “a car salesman and wannabe sea captain.” But I looked him in his squinty eyes and knew him to be a capable man. Crewing the boat was Dr. Wayne Hyatt, a pioneering laser surgeon and, Randy said, “the most expensive deckhand in maritime history.”

We went 27 miles into the blue, and when we stopped, the sun seemed to be trying to bore a hole through the deck of the
Earlie Tide
. “I got air-conditioning and a big-screen TV in the cabin,”
Randy told me, but I told him, “Naw, I came to fish like a man.” Besides, the TV wasn’t hooked up.

Jake was oblivious to the heat, and cranked in fish after fish. I lasted about two hours and began to perish. My face burned red and my mouth went white, and I began to see things in the water that were not there. “We can read your last rites right here,” my good friend told me, “ ’cause I ain’t givin’ you mouth-to-mouth.”

But I wobbled around the deck another hour. Hemingway would have, I told myself, and he would have been knee-walkin’ drunk at the time. Just about then, in my weakened state, I felt that pull on my line even bad fishermen dream about. I tried to keep the rod pointed at the sky, but whatever was on the line nearly pulled me into the water. Do red snapper get this big? Do Spanish mackerel? I fought and I fought till my stomach began to flop around inside me, and then with one last pull the hook, bait, and a portion of, well, something, came flying into the boat.

“It’s the jaw of a red snapper,” someone said, solemnly.

“Pulled his lips off,” I said, tragically.

It takes a man, I told my shipmates, to separate a fish from his lips.

Yeah, they said, that must be what happened. Then Wayne posed with it and got his picture made. Most likely, a shark took the fish as it rose on my line. I choose not to believe that. But it was a failure, I suppose, another failure for the worst fisherman in my family line. I asked Randy why we even try. He explained that it was natural, to try and fail and fail again. We have this man in our head we want to be, a fisherman.

“So,” Randy said, “we go.”

THE QUILL AND THE MULE

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: April 2011

I
n one of my most delicious daydreams, I stand at the gates of the Southern Writers’ Hereafter, wondering if my name is on the list. Suddenly the gates swing open to reveal a sanctum of velvet drapes, leather chairs, and a bar lined with bottles of brown whiskey. William Faulkner is here, spats propped on his Nobel Prize. Truman Capote drops names at the bar. Flannery O’Connor tells a bawdy joke.

The ghost of Erskine Caldwell takes my arm. “How did you get in?” he asks.

“I rode in,” I say, “on a dead mule.” We laugh. Zora Neale Hurston slaps my back.

“Son,” she says, “didn’t we all?”

Scholars have long debated the defining element of great Southern literature. Is it a sense of place? Fealty to lost causes? A struggle to transcend the boundaries of class and race? No. According to the experts, it’s all about a mule. And not just any old mule—only the dead ones count. Ask the experts.

“My survey of around 30 prominent 20th-century Southern authors has led me to conclude, without fear of refutation, that there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of Southernness in literature...whose answer may be taken as definitive, delimiting, and final,” wrote professor Jerry Leath
Mills, formerly of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, more than a decade ago. After some four decades of cataloging, he concluded that the true test is: “Is there a dead mule in it?...
Equus caballus x asinus (defunctus)
constitutes the truly catalytic element...”

I have written two dead mules in two books. That’s how I know I am bona fide. Southern writers were killing mules even before Faulkner drowned a perfectly good team in the Yoknapatawpha River in
As I Lay Dying
in 1930. The carnage has been written about in
The Southern Literary Journal
and debated at academic conferences. Mules have perished in books, plays, and stories.