My Southern Journey Read online

  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.

  “A dead mule was such a big thing my mind couldn’t really gather it in,” wrote Barry Hannah in Geronimo Rex. “I had to think about him in pieces...”

  They have been worked to death, bludgeoned, asphyxiated (by accident and on purpose), run over, shot (by accident and on purpose), bitten by rabid dogs, stabbed, starved, frozen, herded into the barren plain to perish of thirst, driven mad by erroneously administered castor oil (the less said about this the better), led out to be murdered on the blind curve of a train track, and, in Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, hung from a chandelier.

  They have been killed by Larry McMurtry, Richard Wright, Reynolds Price, Larry Brown, Robert Morgan, Jack Farris, Kaye Gibbons, Clyde Edgerton... everybody who is anybody. The most inventive is Cormac McCarthy, who had one beheaded by an unbalanced opera singer.

  In modern-day literature, whippersnappers who wouldn’t know a mule from a hole in the ground are killing mules by the caravan. Faulkner, at least, knew mules. “A mule,” he wrote famously, “will labor 10 years willingly and patiently, for the privilege of kicking you once.” A painting of one still sits on the mantel of his study at Rowan Oak, overlooking his portable Underwood, like an angel.

  I grew up on stories of noble mules. The mule meant survival for my grandparents in the 1930s. I hate to see the hardworking beasts herded off cliffs and broiled in wildfires. Then again, I can cast no stones. In my first mule story, my Uncle Jimbo won a bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on one.

  But that mule was dead when we found him.

  WORDS ON PAPER

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: January 2012

  Here, between the shelves, I escape everything worrisome, petty, mundane. In late afternoon, as the weak winter sun begins its slide, pale yellow light washes through the west-side window of my office in Fairhope, Alabama, and something like magic floods the room. I sit in a big, soft chair, and the words that are bound here come loose all around me.

  French cavalrymen on white horses charge through shifting shadows on the wall above my desk, as Lord Nelson, Fletcher Christian, and Captain Horatio Hornblower set sail across the floor. In one corner, Bedouins glide on camels across a void of Sheetrock, while, in another, Sherlock Holmes grapples to the death with Professor Moriarty on the lip of a high shelf. Here, Willie Stark sits with Atticus Finch, Ishmael leans against Ignatius Reilly, and the Snopeses rub elbows with Shakespeare. It lasts only a little while, this glow, until the sun descends toward the dark trees somewhere across the Mississippi line, but not before Woodrow Call keeps his promise to Augustus McCrae, George Smiley sends one more spy into the cold, and Elmer Gantry does a hook slide for Jesus in the last, fading light of the day.

  I know that the world of reading has forever changed, that, in this cold winter, many people who love a good book will embrace one that runs on batteries. I know that many of you woke up Christmas morning to find that Santa graced your house with an iPad, or a Kindle, or a Nook, or some other plastic thing that will hold a whole library on a doodad the size of a guitar pick. Some of you may be reading one of my books or stories on one today, which is, of course, perfectly all right, and even a sign of high intelligence. Someday, I may have to read The Grapes of Wrath on the side of a toaster myself. I am hopeful when young people say, “I read you on the Kindle,” because it means they are at least reading, and reading me, which means my writing life is somehow welcome in whatever frightening future awaits.

  But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

  Here, not far from the shores of Mobile Bay and the white sands of the Gulf, is a limitless world of Gallipoli, Sanctuary, Tennyson’s Poetry, The Comedians, Riders of the Purple Sage, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Of Mice and Men, The Last of the Mohicans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Christmas Carol, Brave Men, An Outside Chance, Cold Mountain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Blood Meridian, The Prince of Tides, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and a slightly molded flea market copy of Dixie City Jam.

  It is not just the stories, but the physical book, the way I feel when I see the spines, when I read the titles, the very feel of the paper under my fingers as I turn the pages. I see the words Lonesome Dove and I see the beauty and great cost of true friendship, played out in a wild, wild West. Every book comes alive in my mind. I like to be in that company.

  Cicero said a room without books is like a body without a soul, but I don’t know about that. I just know I like to have them close, when the sun goes down.

  WOOD, PAINT, NAILS, AND SOUL

  GQ, June 2002

  It has doves under the eaves of the back porch. I hear them, hear that lonesome, gentle sound, when I wake up in the morning and stagger to the kitchen over the 100-year-old pine planks and nail heads so old they have turned black as pitch.

  I stand there and just watch them, sometimes, at the French doors leading out to the plain brick courtyard that is my entire backyard, watch them dance around the barbs of the bougainvillea, the same bush that the winters always kill down to a stob in January but magically swirls out from that dead nub like a purple fountain by mid-May. Winter isn’t much in New Orleans, true, but cold is cold and dead is dead, and yet that plant rises like Lazarus without any help from me and does its duty, which is to be as pretty a thing as there is on this earth.

  It has ornate, curving spandrels—I call them buttresses but I am ignorant of the finer points of architecture—that support the front porch, and that, along with the wooden, slatted shutters, adds character to this shotgun double that was built for working people 100 years ago. From a distance, and with a bit of imagination, those carvings—what some people call steamboat carvings—make the front of the house look like a ship pushing its way up the black river of Annunciation Street. It is painted yellow, but not a pale, sissy, dollhouse kind of yellow. It is a dark, golden yellow, trimmed in olive and some traces of red, and it looks a little bit Caribbean and a little bit Southern, but mostly it just looks like Uptown, New Orleans.

  It has a back porch that runs the length of the whole house, sheltered by a lean-to roof,
and I would sit out there a lot more if it wasn’t for the mosquitoes that seem to thrive in every season except ice storms, and we haven’t had one of them since I’ve been here. But I ignore them sometimes and sit outside with my friends and tell lies and stories while they sip on Abitas and I nurse a glass of watery iced tea, which has been about the strongest thing I’ve had to drink in a long time. I don’t want to be a drunk writer in New Orleans. I would miss too much. The porch shelters some old, sun-blasted banana leaf chairs that I bought in Miami a long time ago, a cast-iron barbecue grill in the shape of a pig, and a punching bag that I beat the mortal hell out of when I am mad at life and editors and my own damn self. It does not have any wind chimes, hanging plants, garden trolls, welcome mats that say my name (because if anybody ever comes in my house through the back door I had better by God have invited them), ship’s bells, cat scratching posts, and hummingbird feeders. I love hummingbirds, but my eyes are getting weak and they are hard to enjoy without squinting. It’s like having to bend over to pet a short dog.

  It has six fireplaces. It has ceilings so high you have to have a serious ladder to change a lightbulb. It has ceiling fans that spin half-heartedly through the summer heat doing no good at all, and an air-conditioning unit strong enough to chill the world squatting on the roof of the porch like a big Buddha, which does do some good—some heat-spanking good. It would be more picturesque to sweat like a hog in a parking lot, I guess, dripping sweat onto the keys of my Underwood and into the tepid brown lake of my bourbon glass, but as long as I can pay the robber barons at the power company my monthly ransom, I think I’ll chill.

  It has termites, and though I know it is silly I lie in bed sometimes at night and listen to munching sounds. I only hope that, if they ever do eat the support beams out from under me, I kill a few of them as I fall through the floor. It has, once a month, a palmetto bug the size of a small kitten that darts from under the refrigerator and makes a crazed dash across the kitchen. I chase. I slip. I stub my toe. As far as I know it’s the same damn bug making the same damn dash for… for what? All the little @#%!#*% ever does is run out into the middle of the floor until he is certain that I see him, then heads back in the same direction. He may just be messing with me.

  It has the pictures of my people, the books I love, the music I hear. I guess it is really just a wooden box to hold a life in, for days or decades, until someone else takes it over. But in my little house at the corner of Joseph and Annunciation Street I have found something good, something solid, even if it does sit 7 feet below sea level in a termite-haunted city that every meteorological expert in America swears is doomed as soon as the next big hurricane comes barreling at us up from the Gulf of Mexico.

  It is the same feeling I get when I walk in my mama’s kitchen in Alabama, or when I knock on my Aunt Juanita’s door and hear her Feist dogs growl, or climb the steps to my Aunt Jo’s porch with an armload of Christmas presents on December 24.

  I guess it just feels like home.

  It is not a rich guy’s house. It was built around the turn of the century—that other one—by real craftsmen who did not have nail guns or snarling power saws or prefabricated anything.

  Every nail in it was driven with the force of a strong man’s hand, and I don’t really know why that matters to me but it does. Every piece of wood was handled and measured and cut with that same strength, and that matters, too.

  It may be foolish to think it, but I think maybe it is a better house, a tighter house, because of that. I wish I knew who built it. I would like to shake their hand, as if I could divine the artistry there in the calluses and the thick, blackened nails that every good carpenter has.

  They built it on the pudding-like ground of the gentle slope of the levee in a time when sweating men still unloaded the massive freighters with pure muscle, built it on piers of red brick sunk deep into the shifting earth that is dry as salt in droughts and gummy, even mushy, when the rain comes down too hard and too much. They did not get fancy, just dropped a frame of good wood on those piers, and over the century the ground shifted under and around it the way the ground does here, but the house stayed mostly level—which makes it a damn good and lucky house.

  They hung cypress strips—some people would call them shingles—on the outer walls, and put on a slate roof that someone replaced with Seal-Tab a long, long time ago, and built a gently sloping porch on the front that lets the rain roll off into the bushes. It was a smart man who built it, a man—I’m guessing it was a man—who built it to last in a place where the rain falls down in sheets and the earth crawls.

  Now, most likely, he lies under this same shifting earth—the wealthy and middle class lie above ground in crypts here, but a simple workman may have been interred in the soil itself, and I wonder if he, too, is nudged gently back and forth by that movement. This may be the one place on earth in which the dead do not ever really, completely, lie still.

  I had another house, once, a Florida bungalow with a tile roof and terrazzo floors and leaky sliding glass door that I used a dump truck full of caulking trying to seal up right. It was my pride and my joy and I bought it with a future in mind, as all people do. It was a lovely white house covered in ivy, a house on a street lined with oaks and flowering shrubs. It was in Coral Gables, a rock’s throw from the Miami city limits, and the backyard crawled with lizards and hummed with insects and was home to a mangy black cat that I ultimately named “Come Here You Fuzzy @#%!#*%.” I named him other things, but that was the one that stuck. He never let me pet him and I didn’t much care. But he lived in my backyard and decimated the lizard population, living on fried chicken and spare ribs and McNuggets—and lizards I suppose. He was fat as a volleyball some days and other days looked half-starved, had a broken tail and chewed-up ears and didn’t take stuff from nobody. Sometimes when I sat in the backyard he would come and sit just out of reach and was content to just be there, close, unless I tried to pet him or made any sudden moves. Cats are funny, that way.

  It was a mighty fine house, too. But the future I had in mind when I first planned on moving to Miami just didn’t ever firm up—one that had once included a beautiful Cajun woman from Morgan City, Louisiana, a woman with eyes like chips of frozen sea, who was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen when she smiled. But that future just wore out over time, from circumstance and neglect and bad damn luck that was every bit my fault, and I sold the house and left there for New Orleans, which is where a lot of people go when they need a new future.

  New Orleans is forgiving, and lets a man pick a future—sometimes even a new identity. I hated the day I sold that house in Florida, I guess for all the feelings of loss that it entailed.

  I also hated it because, just as I was getting ready to move to New Orleans, the 2000 election somehow failed to elect a President and Florida was the reason, so I lived in hotels for months as the democratic process worked itself out in a dignified and orderly process that involved a whole lot of “spokespeople” and finally it was done and I was free and headed to the Easy and the future and a mustard-colored house on a street just steps from the dock.

  It was everything the Florida house wasn’t. It was not built of brick and stone and concrete, and was almost flimsy in comparison, and looking at it I wondered if it would hold up through a hurricane or even a good washing.

  My real estate agent, Linda Roussel, just nodded sagely and pronounced: “That house has stood the test of time.”

  I signed the papers and left for a few days and, when I returned, discovered it was also the neighborhood dumping-off place for the buggies from the Winn-Dixie.

  Ain’t no place perfect.

  But in the days that followed, I found in this house an antidote for imperfect futures. There was a warmth in it, in the wood, in the high air of those tall ceilings, in the very feel of the floors that glowed yellow when you turned on a lamp.

  Of course, that might have been because the air conditioner soon died, but even after $6,000 and change, the air
was cooled but the house still had that warmth.

  I painted, I sanded, I tacked down floorboards that popped up with a twang when the earth moved, but mostly I lived in it.

  I sit on my front porch and watch, over my left shoulder, the endless trains that run between the levee and Tchoupitoulas, watch the conning towers of the massive freighters as they glide by. I watch the cars that slow to a crawl, when the children are too engrossed in their cross-over dribble to hear them coming. Some people pass by and wave and I wave back, which is an Alabama thing to do, really, but it’s nice to see, nice to do. Almost nobody gives me the finger, and the garbage men only drag my garbage can a half-block down the street before leaving it there, which is not bad for New Orleans, I am told.

  I sit for a long time, sometimes, just living.

  It leaks a bit. When the winter rains pound for three days at a time, stripping the cypress tree of its dead leaves—more like needles, really—and clogging the gutters, a little water will slip down the wall and drip over my stove or inside my cabinets, and I curse the house and the weather and cypress trees in general, and then feel guilty, as if I had verbally abused some great-aunt or a well-meaning Bible salesman.

  That is when I know I love this house. I do not talk to it, yet, but I may, maybe when the first hurricane trembles its foundation, or when I am so damn old that all I have left to talk to is the walls.

  GRANDPA WAS A CARPENTER

  The place is immaculate, the cleanest building I have ever seen that smells of grease and oil and rust. My brother Sam pretty much lives in his workshop, the place he goes when he gets off work from the job he is paid to do, or, as Mark Twain writes, obliged to do. Here, in his shop, he works to unwind from work, and finds peace in that. Work is the true value of a man, in his mind, and a man cannot work without tools. He is surrounded by them here, floor to ceiling, and I believe their proximity makes him feel the way that stacks of books comfort me. The difference, in his mind, is that it is hard to plane a door with a first edition of The Great Santini, or drive a nail with The Mystery of Edwin Drood. To him, a man without tools is a pitiful thing. He had to bring me a lug wrench and a jack one time when I had a flat tire on my ’69 Mustang on Alabama 204, and he has had little respect for me since. That was 1974.