My Southern Journey Read online

  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

  I. HOME

  The Roses of Fairhope

  Mama Always Said...Choose Your Words Carefully

  My Brother’s Garden

  Pretty Girl

  Crazy Cat Lady

  The Porch

  Take Your Medicine, Boy

  Time for the Year’s Best Nap

  My Time Machine

  All-Night Gospel

  Saving Face

  Endless Summer

  Happy As a Pig

  Red Dirt

  II. TABLE

  For a Vegetable, I’ll Have White Gravy

  Back to the Bayou

  Traveling Food

  Fully Dressed

  Your First Oyster

  Bad Slaw

  Never-ending Grace

  The Plane Truth

  Magic on the Plate

  Seasoned in the South

  Summer Snow

  The Impossible Turkey

  Honor Thy Matriarch

  Requiem for a Fish Sandwich

  III. PLACE

  What Stands in a Storm

  No Place Like Home

  Trade Day

  Lost in the Dark

  The Eternal Gulf

  Donkey Business

  Armadillo

  Dixie Snow

  Merry and Bright

  Shopping

  My Kind of Town

  The Lost Gulf

  The Yankee Mystique

  Cotton

  Stillness

  IV. CRAFT

  Why I Write About Home

  The Fine Art of Piddling

  The Color of Words

  The Blank Notebook

  Fish Story

  The Quill and the Mule

  Words on Paper

  Wood, Paint, Nails, and Soul

  Grandpa Was a Carpenter

  Stuck for Good

  V. SPIRIT

  Down Here

  For the Love of the Game

  All Saints’ Day

  When Fireworks Go South

  O Christmas Tree

  Wheels of Time

  The Gift of Loafering

  Holiday Lies

  O Christmas Sock

  Cowboys Are Her Weakness

  A Cast of Characters

  Nick of Time

  109 Yards Returned, Two Points Denied, and One Twist Left in the Road

  Long Time Coming

  Born Too Late

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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 time
s 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.

  I’ve lived other places, colder places, where the first snow does not send the population screaming out the door to empty all the bread aisles. I waded knee-deep in running slush in Boston, cursing, and saw whole cars vanish under walls of hard-packed snow. But even in the thaw I never felt at home anywhere but here. I got a $400 parking ticket in Los Angeles my first ten minutes in town, and tried to learn to surf, which was really just buying a really small boat and practicing to drown. I ate a $35 chicken salad sandwich in New York City, with a $4 pickle, and while it was a fine pickle it still left me feeling like I had been thoroughly had. I have, along the way, seen some lovely things. I got to see the elephants before they are all in fences, and a Cape buffalo under a lightning-blasted tree. I have seen vast deserts and deep chasms and rolling seas and camel trains on a horizon a world away, and sometimes I told stories about those places and sometimes I even made a little sense. But I think sometimes I told them the way a tourist would, because I knew, as I left, I might never see those places again.

  I am home now. If it snows, more than an inch, I will scrape it from the windshield into a mixing bowl, stir in some sugar and Pet milk, and make ice cream, not because it tastes all that good but because my grandmother did it that way. If I get a parking ticket, I will still have to pay it but pay it by mail, because I am always unsure about the statute of limitations on things I did in 1973, and people know me at the courthouse. It won’t be more than $20 anyway. If I want a $35 chicken salad sandwich, I can get one in the Atlanta airport.

  I am home.

  I am an imperfect citizen of an imperfect, odd, beautiful, dysfunctional, delicious place.

  But at least we ain’t dull.

  I hope you enjoy these stories, but more than that I hope you see value in the people whose lives are pressed between these pages. I have been told, a thousand times or more by kind people, that it can be like looking in a mirror, looking at people, places, and things that are more than familiar, and at feelings that seem lifted from their own hope chests, sock drawers, recipe books, and family secrets. Maybe that is what writers mean, when they talk about a sense of place.

  PART 1

  HOME

  THE ROSES OF FAIRHOPE

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: March 2011

  I made the trip with three old women, in a good time for roses. We had threatened to do it for years. We would pack a car with cold chicken and flip-flops and drive south like we used to, till the Alabama foothills faded into souvenir shops, shrimp shacks, and that first ragged palm. They had taken me there, when men still whistled at them and WALLACE stickers papered the bumpers of cars. How could I not take them now?

  But we never got out of the driveway, somehow. My Aunt Edna’s heart was failing, Aunt Juanita had to care for my homebound uncle, and my mother, Margaret, did not leave home unless blown from it by tornadoes or TNT. So I was stunned, two years ago, when my 72-year-old mother told me to come get them. I found the three oldest sisters in the yard, suitcases in their hands. Aunt Jo, the youngest sister, stayed home to watch the livestock.

  Edna barbecued 250 some-odd chicken thighs and made two gallons of potato salad, for the two-day trip. They packed pork and beans, raw onions, cornbread, a jar of iced tea, a hard-frozen Clorox jug of water, and not one cell phone.

  As we drove they talked of childhood, dirt roads where the dark closed in like a lid on a box, and a daddy who chased the bad things away the second he walked in. By the time we hit Montgomery, they had ridden a horse named Bob, poked a dead chicken named Mrs. Rearden, and fished beside a little man named Jessie Clines. They were remembering their mama, and a groundhog who lived under the floorboards, as we drove across Mobile Bay.

  I wanted them to see the sunset from the Fairhope pier, and as we rolled down the bluff, I heard them go quiet. But the sunset was just a light to see by. It was the roses. They were blooming in a circle the size of a baseball infield, more than 2,000 of them, with names like Derby horses or unrealized dreams—Mr. Lincoln, Strike It Rich, Touch of Class, Crimson Glory, Lasting Love. My mother, who never even liked roses much, said, “Oh, Lord.” Juanita, tough and tiny, made of whalebone and hell, looked about to cry.

  Their big sister stepped from the car as if in a trance. I had not known how sick Edna was. Her steps were unsure, halting, as she moved into the garden. The sisters moved close, in case she fell.

  Aunt Edna had sewed soldiers’ clothes at the Army base, raised five girls, buried a husband, worked a red-clay garden, pieced a thousand quilts, loved on great-grandchildren, and caught mor
e crappie than any man I have ever known. I believed she was eternal, like the red-clay bank where she built her solid, redbrick house.

  “So purty,” she said, again and again. She lingered in the rose garden a long time, till the sun vanished over the western shore. She saw the Fairhope roses six times on this trip. The last time, because she was tired, we sat in the car.

  A year later, I spoke at her funeral. I surprised myself, blubbered like an old fool. For the first time in a long time it mattered what came out of my head, but the words crashed together inside my skull and I lost the fine things I wanted to say, and stood stupidly in front of people who loved her.

  Her daughters just hugged me, one by one, and thanked me for the roses.

  MAMA ALWAYS SAID…CHOOSE YOUR WORDS CAREFULLY

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: May 2012

  When I cut my own hair, as a child, she did not castigate me, though I looked like I had done it with a Weedwhacker and my bangs made it seem like one of my eyes had dropped 2 inches down my face. “Maybe,” she told me, “you shouldn’t be pointing sharp things at your eyes,” allowing caution, not criticism, to stick in my mind. When I cut it again, as a grown man, she told me it looked nice and neat, when in fact it looked like I was on a chain gang in the Depression. I went to get it fixed, and the stylist said, “Oh, Lord,” then combed some hair over the gapped places, charged me $20, and sent me home. My point is, that stylist did not love me like my mother does, and so did not even try to spare me from myself.

  When I write a book, my mother reads it first. Your first critic should be one in your pocket.

  “That,” she always says, “is a fine book.”

  She points out the typos—she is good at that—and nonsensical things with a gentle, “Now, hon’, you need to look at this...”

  I guess I should not be surprised. Mothers, as a group, tend to know the thing to say. They know, when you come home from seventh grade with a red C- on your science project, it is only because ol’ Mrs. So-and-So is a good friend of Mrs. So-and-So, so little Elrod got an A because he has better connections in the high-stakes world of Alabama public education.