My Southern Journey Read online

  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.

  ©2015 Time Inc. Books

  1271 Avenue of the Americas,

  New York, NY 10020

  Southern Living is a registered trademark of Time Inc. Lifestyle Group. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, excepting brief quotations in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in magazines or newspapers, or limited excerpts strictly for personal use.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8487-4639-1

  ISBN-10: 0-8487-4639-2

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2015936802

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing 2015

  Senior Editors: Katherine Cobbs,

  Erica Sanders-Foege

  Assistant Project Editors: Lacie Pinyan,

  Sarah Waller

  Designer: Maribeth Jones

  Assistant Production Director:

  Sue Chodakiewicz

  Assistant Production Manager:

  Diane Rose Keener

  Cut Paper Artist: Annie Howe

  Copy Editor: Susan Alison

  Indexer: Marrathon Production Services

  Fellows: Nicole Fisher, Anna Moe

  Essay Credits:

  • GQ, May 2002, “For a Vegetable, I’ll Have White Gravy”

  • Bon Appetit, November 2004, “Back to the Bayou”

  • Louisiana Kitchen, June 2012, “Magic on the Plate”

  • Garden & Gun, August/September, 2014, “Requiem for a Fish Sandwich”—© 2014 Rick Bragg, as first published in Garden & Gun

  • Smithsonian, June 2009, “My Kind of Town, Fairhope, Alabama”—From SMITHSONIAN Magazine, June 2009

  • Garden & Gun, August/September, 2010, “The Lost Gulf”—© 2010 Rick Bragg, as first published in Garden & Gun

  • Long Leaf Style, Summer 2008, “Why I Write About Home”

  • GQ, June 2002, “Wood, Paint, Nails, and Soul”

  • ESPN The Magazine, August 2012, “Down Here”—© 2012, ESPN The Magazine. Reprinted courtesy of ESPN

  • Best Life, September, 2005, “A Cast of Characters”

  • Sports Illustrated, “Nick of Time,” August 2007—© Sports Illustrated, August 2007

  • ESPN The Magazine, Jan 2014, “Last Weekend”—© 2014, ESPN The Magazine. Reprinted courtesy of ESPN

  * Disclaimer: Some essays have been edited slightly by the author si
nce their original publication.