My Southern Journey Page 13

  I lived two winters up there, among them. I learned a lot.

  I learned that, if you are a Southern boy, keep your behind at home.

  I think I was 7 years old before I knew it was not a bad word.

  I grew up just 20 miles or so from a big Army base, in the era of Vietnam, so the Northerners, though a distinct minority, were always among us. I would hear these accents I could barely understand, accents that sounded like the speaker was chewing on something that tasted unpleasant. I would look to the grown-ups for some kind of explanation.

  “Well, son,” my uncles would say, “they’re Yankees.”

  “Oh,” I would say.

  “They can’t talk no other way,” my aunts would say.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Bless their heart,” my aunts said.

  In time, I came to understand that the mysterious Yankees, bless their heart, were from a place far, far away, a frozen land where people cut holes in the ice to fish.

  But that part sounded made up to me.

  I was told by the grown-ups that the Yankees sometimes had to wait till spring to bury their dead, and were sewn up in their long underwear in September because it wasn’t coming off till July. I was told they did not sell grits in their stores and did not even know what the word meant, did not like cornbread of any kind, and looked down on us because of the way we talked, or at least some of them did.

  I was told they ate sardine-and-onion sandwiches and something called scrapple that was rumored to be even nastier than chitlin’s, and they drank heavily from a clear spirit called vodka, which was manufactured from the heathen potato and not the sacred corn, as God and my whiskey-making ancestors intended. I was told they wrapped their tires with chains to traverse the frozen earth, that the never-ending snows piled so high and heavy on their houses it crushed them to sticks, and they had to shovel it out twice a day just to back out of the driveway to get a loaf of white bread, which they ate three meals a day. I was told their cars disintegrated into piles of rolling rust, from all the salt they spread on the iced-over roads, and only a fool bought a Yankee car. I was told they sometimes got hung up inside their own heads when they tried to pronounce the names of their own places, like Baaaaa-ston, and Mine-soooooo-tah.

  I was told we fought a great and bloody war with them a long, long time ago, and lost because they had all the cannon, and that the rich folks down here never really got over that … though the rest of us had more pressing concerns, like college football bowl games, where teams from the tundra sometimes beat even the vaunted Crimson Tide, and the Devil quite possibly hailed from a froze-hard place called Notre Dame.

  I would learn it was a whole lot more complicated than that, this wonderment and animosity that swirled around the Yankee. But as a child of Alabama, in the insulated foothills of the Appalachians, it maybe took longer than it should have to figure it all out. In time I would discover that the Northerner was profoundly different yet still roughly the same species as me, even if they did sometimes wear cheese on their head.

  I blame my slow development on the first Yankee I ever met, who was, oddly enough, my distant kin.

  I might not have even met a Yankee, at least not until high school, had it not been for the great northern migration of working-class Southerners to Detroit, a migration that began even before I was born. By the time I was old enough to walk, in the early 1960s, it seemed every other family down here had a second cousin up in Michigan, living on white bread, searching hopelessly for grits and hanging bumpers on Cadillacs. They married up there, to women who had never even seen an iron skillet, and brought their funny-talking progeny home to mystify us at family reunions and sometimes Christmas.

  One of them, a cousin, came down to live among us.

  I was maybe 5 or 6, but intelligent for my age. You might not understand everything that is said, when you are so small, but you can feel unease, tension, the same way a dog can. I like to think I was at least as observant of the human condition as your average Golden Retriever.

  This young man, in his late teens, acted like he had fallen from the moon. He looked around this corner of the South, at us, at our small wood-frame houses and our food and the way we lived, and spent every moment after, it seemed, gazing longingly back at the moon.

  One day, after doing some work with other young men in the family for a farmer who lived close to us, the farmer paid them and told them, if they wanted, they could go into the garden and pick a mess of turnip greens to take home to their mamas.

  “I ain’t gonna eat them weeds,” the Yankee boy said.

  The old farmer nodded.

  “I’d rather eat manure,” the boy said.

  The old farmer nodded again.

  “Well, son,” he said after a while, “I guess it all depends on what you’re used to.”

  It was about then that my extended family gathered for a barbecue, and I remember it as one of the most elaborate I had ever seen. It had been a good year for hogs, and I can still see the clean, white butcher paper that was wrapped around what must have been fifty pounds or more of pork. The men of the family had built a pit out of concrete blocks and wire grate that seemed about as long as a Studebaker. On it, after the coals were cooked down, they laid on fresh ham and pork chops and about 1,000 weenies, basting the cooking meat now and then with homemade barbecue sauce they had mixed in half-gallon jars.

  I think I ate six pork chops and two hot dogs and would have had more but my mother was afraid I had injured myself; that, and the fact someone had prepared a banana pudding in an honest-to-God washtub, and it was calling my name. When I was done with my chops, my mother carefully raked them off into the trash, to the great distress of the hounds and beagles milling around, begging.

  You have to be careful with pork chop bones, which can be jagged, and brittle. Like chicken bones, they can splinter in a dog’s mouth, and choke them to death. My mother and aunts policed the bone disposal, since none of the men could be trusted with anything that required that much forethought and common sense.

  The Yankee cousin had eaten the pork chops like they were going out of style, like there would never be another pork chop on this earth. He was a big boy to begin with, in a white tank top that might have covered his belly five pork chops ago, and what little had missed his mouth, he was wearing on his shirt. I say this not as indictment, since I was wearing barbecue sauce in my eyebrows. Bless my heart.

  “What did you do with your bones, son,” he was asked, as he presented a paper plate all but licked clean.

  “I eat ’em,” he said.

  Then, to demonstrate, he sucked all the meat off a good-size pork chop, and then went to work on the bone with a sound like breaking sticks.

  The story is legend. It was told year after year, as testimony to the strangeness of Yankees.

  But now that I have had a lifetime to think about it, now that I have lived among them, I now feel a little sorry for that boy. Was he not as displaced as I had been, my years in the tundra? How he must have felt, being dropped into this caldron, this swamp? I wonder if he ever looked into a Southern sky, a sky so hot, so thick with haze, that it was more white than blue, and felt a long way from home?

  Instead of sliding out into traffic on the hard ice, did he walk out into the air as thick as cotton and feel as if he could barely breathe, feel as if he could barely lift his arms? Did he stare out across fields of empty? Did he stare up into mountains of silence? Did he dream of the crash and bang of assembly lines?

  Did he stand in the middle of a crowd of Southerners and wonder why some of us talked as if we had a mouthful of seedless grapes, others grunted their words and still others were so in love with the language that they told stories without end … and sometimes without purpose, just to talk, just to tell?

  Did he wonder why every old man had a jaw full of Brown Mule?

  Did he recoil at the stifling clouds of snuff?

  Did he almost hurt himself the first time he heard a rebel yell?
Did he even know it was a human sound?

  Did he wonder if his head would explode, in conversation with a Southern belle?

  People are strange, when you’re a stranger. I think that’s a song.

  Still…

  I guess it just depends on what you’re used to.

  COTTON

  We go looking for the young woman, from time to time. We know where she lives, but she only appears in September, around picking time.

  We know where the old woman lives. The old woman lives in the mirror, although my mother remains unconvinced, even after all this time, of her true identity. “Where did that old woman come from?” she says, and though it is something she says all the time we still smile, because it is so odd to hear this woman talk about vanity. She is beyond it, I believed. I guess I believed she was above it, too. She had first heard about the old woman who lives in the mirror in a poem, or a story, but it is an old joke now and she cannot remember how it started, and like a good hat she appropriated on a stormy day and forgot who she borrowed it from, she wears it comfortably, often, and without regret.

  “I don’t know how that old woman got in my house.”

  But the young woman, now …

  We know where we left her.

  We find her, year after year, in the cotton.

  It is a myth that you pick cotton in the broiling heat of summer. You pick it in the early fall, usually after the first frost. The great machines pick it now. They tear through the fields and devour the bolls atop the dry, brittle stalks, stripping a field in a day. The men and women of the fields, the ones who worked hunched over in the rows, are a thing of antiquity.

  But my mother can still see a solitary figure there. We seek her out every season, riding past field after field here in the small, pocket crops that still survive in the foothills of the Appalachians along the Alabama-Georgia line. There are fewer and fewer of them, it seems, every year, but as long as there is even one left, the young woman will be there. It doesn’t matter that no one else can see her in those fields; my mother can, and over time, so can I.

  I guess we all see something different when we look across it, across this most Southern of things. I know there is little romantic about it for some Southerners. Some look out across that sea of white and bitter green and see a history of human bondage; others see great wealth, see the bedrock of a failed society, as if they were looking at the foundation of a house that no longer exists.

  My mother looks down the rows and sees youth, sees a serene and beautiful woman that time had not yet torn down, that hard work and sorry men and needy, grasping children had not seemed to mark at all. When I was a baby, she dragged me up and down those rows season after season, and I even slept there on that canvas sack as she pulled, and picked, trading the extra pain, the weight, to have her baby close to her, to sing to, to talk to. When my baby brother took my place there on the sack, I played in the cotton wagon and listened to old women, black and white, sing about streets of gold. At quitting time I would stand at the edge of the field and wait for her blonde head to reappear over the rise in that field.

  That is who she sees now, as we roll past, sees that young woman there under the sweat, inside the whorls of wind-whipped dust, and she says the same thing, a hundred times or more.

  “Ain’t it beautiful.”

  People who do not know any better would think she was just talking about a cotton field.

  For my people, the working-class whites of the highland South who picked it across the generations for a handful of dollar bills, it has always been complicated, this crop.

  My big brother, Sam, sees the industry in it, sees the science, sees the history in this plant that made fortunes for the big people and broke the little people’s hearts.

  “You don’t remember the year the cotton didn’t open?” he asks me, like asking if I remember the plague years.

  He cannot recall the year, but in his childhood, when drought and other factors caused a perversion in the bolls. Instead of bursting open after the first frost, the boll, hard and thick and guarded on the end with needle-like spikes, remained sealed, and the cotton began to rot in the fields. People took big sacks home with them, built fires in the hearth, and pried them open by hand, burning the bolls in the flames. The stunted cotton came out in tightly pressed wedges, like orange slices. People who pick cotton make their money by the pound. This was a bad year.

  He was the last in my family to pull a sack. There was no romance in it, just great uncertainty. He went to work in the cotton mill in my hometown when he was older, in the nerve-stripping crash and clatter of the machines that filled the workers’ lungs with dust and bacteria that cut short their lives. “Made more money than I’d ever made,” he said, and the day it shut was the first and only time in his life that I think he almost, almost cried.

  Me, I looked across those fields as a little boy and saw everything.

  I had never seen what was on the other side of that field, not when I was so small. Back then, when I was still playing in the dirt with a borrowed spoon, I believed it was all there was. The cotton field, just steps from my bedroom window, was the first thing I saw when I woke up in the morning, and the last thing I saw at night. I have never slept all that much, not even as a boy, and from my tiny bedroom at the back of the quiet, sleeping house I would stare across a field that seemed to have no end, that rose from the edge of the backyard in a gentle slope that blocked out everything beyond. In the daylight we played hide-and-seek in the stalks and beat each other bloody with the red-dirt clods that had baked hard as stone in the Alabama heat, but in the dark I sent my imagination out into that field to play. Between those rows lived all the ogres and elves and howling beasties that I could conjure, all the tigers and bears and biting things my imagination could invent. Here, Indians in lurid war paint crept through the green-black, chest-high plants, and whole battalions of goose-stepping Germans stomped through the moonlight and the rising dust. I could hold them off till morning with my lever-action Daisy BB gun, as long as my ammunition held out, and I had a three-year supply of that; you could buy a million BBs at the Western Auto and still have enough change left over from your dollar to buy a lead sinker, a Sugar Daddy, and a week-old edition of The Jacksonville News.

  Sometimes, looking out across those rows under a full moon, I barely had to squint at all to see what I wanted to see. I cannot reach that far back anymore, to most things in my childhood, but I can still see how the moonlight washed across the rows and turned the whole field a shining, ghostly silver-white, more like something from another world, from the black-and-white B movies on the television screen. You expected a flying saucer to wobble from the stalks, expected little green men with helmets like goldfish bowls to glide across the tops of the cotton bolls to stare bug-eyed through the still blades of your shorted-out electric fan. I could not tie my shoes properly yet, every time, but there was nothing wrong with my five-year-old imagination in 1964.

  Once, twice a season, the crop dusters came to spray the fields—and us, I guess—with cotton poison, what I now know was DDT. The planes looked like something from forgotten wars, and probably that was true. They swooped in ridiculously low, almost to the height of the stalks themselves, it seemed to me, before pulling back and climbing, climbing, only to plummet again and again. It was death-defying work, I was told. But in my imagination it was even more dangerous up there in those clouds of cotton poison. In my imagination there was not one plane, but two, and the endless cotton fields became a bombed out row of hedges, in war-torn France. The clouds of DDT were gunsmoke from the chattering machine guns of the Red Baron as he chased the other pilots from the sky. The dogfight, somewhere over Walter Rollins’ chicken house, seemed to last all day. I remember that the crop dusters always waggled their wings at me there on the earth, jumping up and down, as they flew away, and I took that to mean that only them and me knew what really happened up there in the sky.

  I will always remember the day I snuck awa
y from my mama and walked a single row, determined, till I reached the other side, remember how I pushed through the ragweed at the edge of it all and found not one dragon. Here was not the drop-off into nothingness you would expect at the end of the world. It was just more dirt, and more Johnson grass, and a fat snapping turtle the circumference of a hatbox, which was impressive enough but not much to look at if you were expecting crocodiles. I could even hear my mama calling to me, faintly, from the other side. “Well,” I remember thinking, “this is disappointing.” But it wasn’t, really. It was exactly what I needed it to be, that field, when I needed it to be that way. My imagination, my dreams and daydreams, grew in that rust-colored ground, crop after crop.

  I look for those things now, those ridiculous things, and I cannot find them. I see just the white, the lovely white.

  But the young woman, now…

  We know she is real.

  STILLNESS

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: May 2013

  I remember a quiet so complete a lone cricket was a cacophony, a single drop of water boomed like a stick hammering a bass drum. I remember space, vast and long, remember cotton that stretched to the end of everything, interrupted only by ribbons of blacktop that led to exotic places like Leesburg, Piedmont, and Rome. I remember a darkness complete, not only the absence of light but a thing that could swallow light altogether, the way a mud puddle does a match tossed from a passing car.

  It was the early 1960s, in a place called Spring Garden, Alabama, where I would lie in my bed in a big, ragged house and wonder if the whole world had stopped spinning outside my window. I would have asked my big brother, Sam, about it, but he would have just told me I was a chucklehead, and gone back to sleep. I have never slept much; I think I was afraid I would miss something passing in all that quiet dark.

  Then, sometime around midnight, I would hear it. The whistle came first, a warning, followed by a distant roar, and then a bump, bump, bumping, as a hundred boxcars lurched past some distant crossing. They were probably just hauling pig iron, but in my mind they were taking people to places I wanted to be. A braver boy would have run it down and flung himself aboard.