My Southern Journey (37 page)

But Sylvester would no more bad-mouth Alabama than he would his family. Asked about not getting the job, he thinks a minute. Then he says, “I just remember something Coach Bryant said: ‘Go where they want you.’

“The interest Alabama showed probably opened this door for me,” he says of Mississippi State. “They wanted me. Not a black coach. They wanted me.”

The MSU athletic director, Larry Templeton, is not worried that Croom will leave for Alabama if things go badly for Shula and Mama calls again. “Not the least bit,” he says. “Mississippi State gave him the opportunity, and he will remember that.”

He will have every chance to succeed and will not be penalized for transgressions that may have been committed by his predecessors. His new contract would be extended for each year the school might be on probation. “If there are NCAA sanctions, his four years will begin when those sanctions are over,” Templeton says.

Any backlash to the hiring of a black coach has been minuscule, says Lee, the MSU president. “We got mail from Ole Miss graduates”
praising MSU—and some from Alabama, expressing regret that Alabama didn’t get him. The response “reaffirms that [people] just accepted that it is time. Private giving for athletics has increased. We’re quite happy.”

Mississippi State, at least for now, has more pressing problems than its place in civil rights history. “The program has to be above reproach,” Lee says. He felt Croom would guarantee that. But then, of course, he also has to win in the SEC. Recruiting has gone better than expected for a team under an NCAA cloud, but the players will have to line up against faster, stronger, more talented teams, such as LSU, and bleed. They need a reason to do that. They say they will do it for Bulldog pride and a place in history. Everyone says color doesn’t matter, at first. Then you ask them who they are, where they are from, and....

Deljuan Robinson’s mama mopped floors and drove a school bus and worked every other job she could find to give her four sons a chance. “She raised us by herself,” said Robinson, a 6'4", 295-pound defensive lineman from Hernando, Miss. “She made us finish school. Wasn’t nothin’ easy about that.” If growing up poor and black wasn’t a deep enough hole, the 19-year-old Robinson found out two years ago that he had a leaky heart valve. A scar from open-heart surgery bisects his chest. Now a black man will succeed or fail as a head coach in the SEC based in part on how Robinson performs. “I’ll be proud to take on a role like that,” Robinson says. “She’ll be proud too,” he says of his mom.

Quarterback Omarr Conner’s father is on dialysis, and his mother used to work at a chicken plant and now works at a fish plant in Macon, Miss., about 30 minutes southeast of Starkville. College football was supposed to be a ticket to something better. Conner watched his first season, under former Bulldogs coach Jackie Sherrill, collapse into a 2-10 agony.

Conner will never forget the first team meeting under Croom. “I thought, God has sent us someone to save us. I am fixing to play for Coach Croom, and Coach Croom played under Bear Bryant. And I can tell my child, ‘I was part of history. I made history with the first black coach in the SEC.’”

Croom knows how hard it is to keep believing when the things you want seem so far away. He is uncomfortable being a symbol. But there is no denying it, really.

Somewhere, in a backyard in Alabama or Mississippi, a boy is kicking field goals over the clothesline and throwing touchdown
passes to himself, lobbing the ball so high that he can be quarterback and receiver all in one.

“He needs to know,” Croom says, “that things do change.”

BORN TOO LATE

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: January 2013

T
he house is a century old. It towers into the treetops from its corner lot in Tuscaloosa, two massive stories of yellow brick with a porch so wide and deep I have watched little boys play football across it. The house is built around a massive staircase, the kind you see only in the movies. You expect to see an elegant woman descend it in her evening gown—I imagine Lauren Bacall. A ghost walks its upper rooms, people say. I was a guest here for months and never saw her. Still, something dwells in that house, something from another age.

The couple who welcomed me inside, Ken and Jessie Fowler, are true friends. They are almost a generation older than me, a generation of grace and civility. Their house has more rooms than a Marriott, but mostly we lived in the kitchen, talking about the places they had seen and the times they had lived, of Manhattan in an age of miniskirts, and Miami Beach when Gleason and Sinatra played, and glorious football teams that traveled by train.

It was there, beside a refrigerator filled with limitless pie, I realized I was a man lost in time. I had always been most comfortable in the past. But I had never really wrapped my mind around it till then, staring at a forkful of lemon icebox, talking about how, in a bad wreck, you really can’t beat a Lincoln.

I do not want to turn back time. Too many people want to do
that already. Too much good, too much justice has come to be, out of the darkness of our past. But I felt a comfort in that room, and in that company, I have seldom known. Maybe that is because by taking me into their past, they took me back to my own.

The past we spoke of had music that did not make you want to murder the radio. It poured sweetly, static and all, from big console sets and Art Deco Bakelites, flew as if on a magic carpet from the orchestras in the Blue Room in New Orleans. Hank Williams played the VFW then, and rode a big Cadillac a thousand miles to an American Legion to do it again. I would have liked to have seen that. Now, country music sounds like pop music in a bad cowboy hat from Stuckey’s. The radio seems mostly to consist of men hollering about how people do not belong. When I was a boy, we listened to Swap Shop, hoping someone was unloading a hubcap for a ’66 Corvair, and heard Merle Haggard sing, “That’s the Way Love Goes.”

I used to love television. We had two channels—three if the antenna was turned toward Anniston—but there was always something on. Now I flip through banality till my thumb is sore. Used to be, the worst thing on TV was wrestling. Now they tell me I can watch every football game being played on this planet on my phone. I do not want to watch a football game on my phone. How silly would I look, hollering at my own palm?

I used to love cars. I loved tail fins, loved the sculpture of Detroit steel. My first Mustang cost $542. Last summer, my car’s catalytic converter went out and it cost me $2,500.

Sometimes it seems I do not like anything anymore. I do not like outsourcing, or multitasking, or fusion restaurants.

But I remember a night when I stayed in that house. I came in very late, and eased quietly through the big rooms, every ancient board creaking underfoot. As I started up the stairs, I heard the faint sound of music. Big Band, maybe? Glenn Miller? And as I eased up the stairs I heard, I believe, the sound of two people dancing.

I liked that.

AFTERWORD

I
spent a large part of my life writing about places far from here. I once banged out a story in Peshawar, Pakistan, while eating a chicken salad sandwich, as demonstrators shouted their displeasure of all things American in the glow of burning flags and some steel-belted radials.

I was told, by well-meaning people, that I should tell the angry crowds that I was, in fact, Canadian.

I just looked at them.

How in the world do you pretend to be from Calgary, when you talk like me?

I thought, briefly, I would say I was from Alabama, and hope they did not know exactly where that was, but I am pretty sure that, if I had, someone would have answered back:

“Roll Tide!”

I am a Southern man, for better or worse. It is not a suit of clothes I can change when I feel like it.

I wish, at times, we were different. I wish we cared more about the working poor. I wish we acted on logic more than passion. I wish we were more open-minded, at least just a little bit. I wish that.

But you can’t go ripping off pieces of that suit. You would be naked in time. It is a sometimes ragged, ill-fitting suit, but it really is the only one I have.

I was honored to do this book, which is a kind of love story to the South, and I hope you liked it. I have loved writing about our food, our ways, our proclivities. It is the softer side of my writing life, the side my own people seem to love more than anything else. I once did a story about Japanese junk bonds. That pretty much passed unnoticed in Calhoun County, Alabama.

But you write a story about a good pan of cornbread dressing, or a good dog, or football of any kind, well, you have got what we here in the business call a reader.

Loving this part of the world requires a sense of humor, and if you made it this far, you obviously are equipped with one.

It takes a sense of humor, too, to put up with me for any time at all.

I have been writing for a living since 1977. Many of you have been with me that long.

I can only assume that the 100 percent humidity, and the clouds of mosquitos, and the relentless heat of too many dog days of summer have affected your judgment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to begin by thanking family, because without them there would be no foundation, nothing to hold up the world of stories that have given me my writing life. First, let me thank Dianne and Jake, who not only gave me that support but provided me with inspiration and kindness and sometimes even some much needed criticism. For a decade, you have been in so many sentences, as inspiration or ideas, or in spirit. In that same light, I would like to thank the members of my Calhoun County family, both the living and those who have done gone on. I still don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I believe in memories and I think it amounts to the same thing.

But to want to tell a story and to get to tell a story are sometimes two very different things, and for that I would like to thank the people of
Southern Living
and Oxmoor House: Sid Evans, Lindsay Bierman, Katherine Cobbs, Jennifer Cole, Kim Cross, Nellah McGough, Susan Alison, Maribeth Jones, Anja Schmidt, Margot Schupf, Lacie Pinyan, Sarah Waller, Erica Sanders-Foege, Diane Rose Keener, Carol Pittard, Bryan Christian, and Courtney Greenhalgh.

For the same reasons I want to thank Amanda Urban and Liz Farrell and the other kind people at ICM. If it were not for y’all, I’d probably still be on the end of a shovel handle.

There are so many other people who have helped prop up my writing life—friends and sometimes strangers—who had a tale to tell me, or just helped pry something loose in my memory. Y’all know who you are.

And I guess I need to pay my respects to the place itself…to the brown mules knee deep in the yellow broom sage, the black cats suffering in the heat, and that sifting sound in the pines. I would miss this place if I were ever taken from it.

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