My Southern Journey (5 page)

I
have reached a place in life where I do not think clearly about the present, or the future. What I do, mostly, is remember, my thoughts triggered by some flyer flapping on a telephone pole, or a scrap of a song.

I was on a Tennessee interstate in the spitting rain, with two states behind me and a thousand miles to go, scanning a radio thick with yammering bullies whose mamas did not love them enough. Between bullies I landed on a preacher, a gentle man who sounded like my childhood, who said to love my brother. Then came a song I cannot precisely recall, but in a mile or so it erased the wet, gray asphalt and the miles ahead. The signal soon died, but not before—in my mind—I was home.

I was a little boy in Boutwell Auditorium, on a night without wrestling, munching on a hot dog that was the best I ever had, because we were in
Birmingham.
In my other fist was a can of Coke so cold it burned my hand. On stage, men in suits sang of clouds of victory. Next to me, my mother, her face alight, tapped her shoes, flapped a fan donated by a funeral home, and sang along. I recall this one song, about a wall around heaven, so high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it …

… so wide, you can’t get around it

You got to come in at the door

It was an all-night gospel singing, common in the Deep South of the 1960s and 1970s, though for Congregational Holiness “all-night” wrapped up about 11:45. I still remember the headliners: The Florida Boys, the Dixie Echoes, Happy Goodman Family, J.D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet, Blackwood Brothers Quartet, The Inspirations, Hovie Lister and the Statesmen, The Chuck Wagon Gang…

Faith was less political then. It had a beat you could dance to, if dancing had been allowed. We went every few months, to places like Sylacauga, where they sang in the football stadium and I ate a Wet-Nap—but that is another story—and Gadsden, where the Dixie Echoes had them praising and weeping in Convention Hall. I went mostly for the concessions, and because any time a car turned out of our driveway I flung myself inside. I do not recall listening closely to the music. But when I hear the songs on the radio, I find myself singing along.

My mother, after a 40-year absence, went to a singing not long ago at Young’s Chapel on Alabama Highway 278, in the hills between Piedmont and Gadsden. “It was The Chuck Wagon Gang,” she said, “but, you know, the younger ones. They still had their name on the bus. I know one thing. They sure did some awful pretty singing.” They did “The Church in the Wildwood,” one of her favorites.

Oh, come, come, come, come,

Come to the church in the wildwood

Oh, come to the church in the vale

It made her happy. I hope they read this, and know. She has never liked recorded music, she said, but I got her a CD player anyway. My sister-in-law, Teresa, got her some gospel music, and when my mother heard the songs she stood there and sang along.

I would have liked to have seen that.

But I guess I already have.

SAVING FACE

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: April 2014

I
will always remember the first time it happened. I was signing books in a deserted hotel ballroom, deserted except for me, a few nice people handing me volumes, and two thousand pictures of my mother’s face, the elegant cover of a 300-page story I had written about her and my people. The most important thing I will ever write, and closest to my heart.

It was a beautiful book—not the inside, I mean, but the outside. The cover, which had the feel of old parchment, showed a photograph of my young mother, taken about the time I was born in ’59. Her face was serene, peaceful, and lovely. I believe my mother was, and is, the most beautiful woman on this planet. I always will. But the photograph on the cover of this book had an almost otherworldly quality about it. I have seen people stop what they were doing and walk all the way across a bookstore to pick it up and look at it, closer. (That is what authors do for fun. They hang out in bookstores and stalk people through the aisles, trying to turn them, by mind control, to the memoir aisle.)

Anyway, that day in the ballroom, I had already worn out two fine-point Sharpies and was a few hundred books into the stack when I noticed, on every single beautiful cover, my mother had been defaced.

They put stickers on books when they are signed, that say, in
case anyone is confused, SIGNED BY AUTHOR. I do not know who else would have signed it, although, once or twice, when someone mistook me for another writer, I signed one of their books for meanness. I have also taken several sweet compliments intended for Rick Bass.

It was the placement that was unfortunate. On some books, they had covered up her left eye, making her look, vaguely, like a pirate. On others, it was on the right eye, which made her look no less the buccaneer. Some, and this was unfortunate, were plastered over her mouth, making her resemble the “Speak No Evil” monkey in that trilogy. The ones on her cheek made her look like an accident victim. The ones on her forehead made her look like Zelda Fitzgerald (use your imagination) or, if they happened to be round in shape, a coal miner. They have a lamp strapped to their… never mind.

I started to peel them off, then looked at the boxes and boxes of books and just sighed.

It got worse over time. I would walk into a store and see, stuck to my mother’s lovely face, 20 PERCENT OFF. The most unpleasant were the stickers that said nothing, just blue or red or yellow dots, which I’m sure meant something in secret bookstore code but made my mama look like she had measles, or a bad case of pinkeye. I cannot always peel them all off. But most of the time, I try.

My mother told me, once, that the cover sometimes makes her a little sad because, “I don’t look like that no more.” I think she does. But at least she does not walk around the house with REMAINDERED stamped across her head.

Happy Birthday, Mama. I love you.

ENDLESS SUMMER

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: August 2013

I
t was a magnificent mud hole.

It was an inland sea, as much like any other mud hole as the Erie Canal is to a ditch. It was hip deep on a small boy, 40 feet long, and spanned the entire dirt road that linked the blacktop of the Roy Webb Road to the creeks, forests, and fields behind our house in Calhoun County, Alabama.

I spent a whole summer contemplating that mud hole. I waded in it, threw rocks at it, caught snakes in it, threw rocks at snakes in it, and, as the hot days crawled by, studied the entire life cycle of frogs. I built a great vessel and sailed across it (well, mostly I just sank into the muck while trying to balance on an old sheet of plywood) and forever ruined the resale value of my G.I. Joe. There may be nothing more forlorn in this world than a G.I. Joe with no pants and one plastic shoe.

My brothers thought I was wasting time, and—not for the first time—wondered if perhaps we had different daddies. But time was different then, as I have said before. Time came in big buckets. It was not only summer, in a time before jobs locked us in chains and girls robbed us of our sense, but it was August, the most endless month of those forever summers, and August just never ran out.

It stewed and simmered in that nearly liquid air, and lasted.

It should have flown, for when it ended came that hateful season of shoes. And school, where the air always smelled like floor polish and chalk dust and the second-grade teacher was rumored to have cooked and eaten at least two boys, that we knew of.

But it didn’t fly. It lolled.

I caught a million fish, and survived a million red wasps, doctored with a truckload of wet snuff, one daub at a time. I hit a million home runs, till the baseball, socked so many times it was only round in a metaphorical sense, finally vanished into a blackberry bush rumored to be inhabited by a 4-foot-long eastern diamondback. We just waited him out. There was time.

So how did it all change?

When did the summers grow short, truncated? When did the endless month of August become not even a month at all but a jumping-off place for the season to come? They sell Halloween candy in the drugstore, in summer.

The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it. I think a bunch of people who were not allowed to stomp in a mud hole when they were young—who were never allowed to hold translucent tadpoles in their hands and watch their hearts move—decided to make sure that no child would ever have the necessary time to contemplate a grand mud hole ever again.

Well, I hope they’re satisfied. People ask all the time, what’s wrong with kids today? I have long held that they have been brain-mushed by too much screen time, but as summer races past me now I think it is something else. I think they do not know how sweet it is to feel the mud mush between their toes.

HAPPY AS A PIG

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: April 2015

F
or a woman who grew up in the mountain landscape of the Great Depression, my mother is irritatingly hard to please.

I got her a big, soft, leather easy chair. She said it cost too much, and it made her uneasy to sit in it.

I bought a big-screen television with a thousand channels, so she could watch every TV preacher who ever wept for a love offering. She said the old set was fine and she only watched two channels anyway.

I purchased a new washing machine. She claimed it was harder to operate than a rocket ship and said, “I reckon I could learn to use it, but I’d have to go back to school.

“Wadn’t nothin’ wrong with the other one,” she added. “You just have to bang the lid down three or four hard times to get it to click on.”

“Is there anything,” I asked, “you do want?”

“Well,” she said, “I need some grease.”

What she meant was lard, and not store-bought lard, which has not been made right since the Johnson Administration; you might as well try to fry an egg in Dippity-Do.

She needed what she calls cracklin’ meat, slabs of fatback with a sliver of lean, something that can be rendered into delicious,
crispy nuggets. The cracklin’s could be used to flavor cornbread or greens, or be eaten at the side of a plate of peas or beans or, well, anything, yet they are just a by-product.