My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  I would rather be awake, to find out whose garden did well and whose didn’t, and whose foreign car isn’t running good—because you know they should have known better—and whose children have misbehaved. I would like to know what is happening to our kin across the state line—my Aunt Juanita calls them “the Georgia people,” like they are a new species—and who last killed a snake. They will say that the snakes seem to have stayed out longer this year, and no one will say it any more but we’re pretty sure it’s because those men walked on the moon. I want to hear it all, swirling around me, assuring me that no matter what happens in this uncertain world the things that truly matter, things here, are all right.

  But the same peace of mind that settles on me as that talk drifts around the room is the same peace and comfort that tugs me into the calm darkness. My mama will look at me from across the wood floor and say, quickly, “Let him sleep.” I know this because sometimes I am not quite out, and it is the last thing I hear.

  It would be all right with me if it was the last thing I ever hear.

  I will blame the chair. I bought it out of a catalog a quarter-century ago, what the catalog called a British club chair, but it just looks like a leather chair to me. It is firm and soft at the same time, and there is some kind of drug in it, I swear, that makes my chin droop and makes me begin to snore softly. The talk continues around me, and I would like to tell you what it is all about but of course I do not know. I just know I love the idea of it, of the stories being told with me and yet without me, at the same time. The old white dog sleeps, too, across the room. In human years she is…well, a miracle.

  I am not a napper, and do not even sleep well at night. But here, in this chair on Thanksgiving Day, it is automatic, certain. Maybe I should steal the chair from my mama’s and take it to live with me all the time. Then, at least, I could hear all the news at home.

  But I do not believe I will. They tell me sometimes I am out for only a few minutes, but that cannot be. I wake feeling restored, feeling alive and happy to be. It is almost enough to make a person believe in magic, because I know there are hours and hours worth of good things happening as I shut my eyes.

  MY TIME MACHINE

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: April 2013

  They say we Southerners live in the past. That, they say, is our problem; the past is dead, Faulkner or no Faulkner.

  I guess I could try to explain, to tell them that for us memory is not an inventory, not a catalog of events, but a time machine. It lifts us off the dull treadmill of grown-up responsibilities to a time of adventure and wonder. The past is not dead, and so the dead are never really gone. We resurrect them, daily, for one more story, one more buck dance or ball game, or one more cast into the cool water. I could try to explain this, but instead I think I’ll take a boat ride.

  I recently suffered through two weeks of agony from a kidney stone, cursing the air around me. Prescription drugs finally dulled the pain, and I drifted. I could have gone anywhere in that pleasant fog, but found myself on a floating house in the middle of the vast, brown Coosa River near the Alabama-Georgia line, waiting as my Aunt Edna tied an orange life jacket around my chest. I was 7 or 8 years old, and if she did not hurry my girl cousins would catch every crappie on the Alabama side.

  “I got to go,” I pleaded.

  “What you got to do,” she said, “is stand still.”

  It was a homemade boat. A great, towering box of a thing that Aunt Edna and Uncle Charlie and other kin built in the yard. They worked their shifts at the army base in Anniston, and then worked another shift on this, drills whirring, welding rods arcing blue flame into the night. Back then, every man welded, every man could run a wire, and Aunt Edna could outwork most of them.

  “What is it?” I asked, between pulls on a Nehi orange.

  “It’s a houseboat, dummy,” said my cousin Linda, who was prone to say what she thought.

  When it was finally done, the vessel had an enclosed main cabin with chairs, a table, and a gas stove. It had a second deck up high, where you could see the entire world, but I was deemed too mentally unsound to go up there once they dragged the boat off dry land. Once in the water, we discovered one structural flaw. It was so tall it was bad to hang up under bridges. I sometimes wondered if they asked me along just so it would ride a little lower in the water. But I have had less noble purposes in this life than ballast.

  We fished all day and sometimes all night on the backwater, always for crappie. Aunt Edna would fry them in iron skillets and save the hot grease for the best hush puppies I have ever had, not a daub of plain meal but a hoecake-like disk redolent with green onion, white onion, and Cheddar cheese. Once, I came into the main cabin to see her standing over a skillet of frying quail. We ate it with biscuits and gravy, right in the middle of a river.

  But the best of it was the ride. I would find a place in the sun and just watch the banks glide by. Now and then, Uncle Charlie would shout to the old men fishing from the banks.

  “Got the time?”

  “Alabamer time?” the old men would ask. “Or Georgie time?”

  They have passed on, of course—Charlie, Edna, even Linda. The houseboat is in ruin.

  But they are not gone.

  Nobody is, on Alabama time.

  ALL-NIGHT GOSPEL

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: March 2014

  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

  It 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

  For 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.

  It was the grease she needed, an essential. But the fresh, pure, white fat is harder and harder to find. She can usually only find it in tiny blocks in the cooler, never of a quality to satisfy her.

  My mother is the best cook who ever lived; I will fight you over that. One of the reasons her food has flavor, she explained, is that most of her greens, beans, and other vegetables and all gravy and all egg dishes take on the flavor of that fat. I have seen her throw out dishes, not spoiled, merely bland.

  I try not to repeat Southern clichés. No one, for instance, should eat a
hamburger in a bun made from Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. But grease is good. It has shortened many lives, probably my own, but is a life of rice cakes really life, or just passing time?

  So, we went on a quest. Finally, at a country butcher shop in Alexandria, Alabama, we found it, but too late. A gentleman at the counter was buying what appeared to be 50 pounds of perfect cracklin’ meat, an hour or two off the hog. My mother just stared, with avarice.

  “I never have wanted what someone else had,” she said.

  She asked if there was more, but the butcher said no, it was a rare thing, and I thought she was going to cry. The butcher, wondering how he would live with breaking an old woman’s heart, went to the back to check and returned saying he had found some. We walked out with $20 worth of pork fat.

  My mother was giddy—she would have skipped, if she could. For two days, as she rendered it, the house smelled like what I like to think heaven is like, and she was happy, which is all a boy really needs, as her birthday nears. I think I’ll take her out to eat, just so she can tell me she isn’t hungry.

  RED DIRT

  The trains may seem longer in the city, as the traffic piles up at the crossings and the freight cars squeal and clatter but barely crawl, and all there is to do is sit, and sit, and maybe try and decipher the graffiti on the endless iron boxes from broad-shouldered places like Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, places that make you think of rust and trains. But I think they might be longer, truly, in the country, in those crossings where the train intrudes like a drunk uncle on the otherwise quiet landscape. Or at least, that is what I will choose to believe. When I was a boy I would sneak away from the watchful women in my family and walk the mile or more to the track that cut across the Roy Webb Road, and count those passing cars. There seemed to be a thousand, or more, but I was very small and arithmetic has never been my blessing, and I always knew I had to get back before I was missed, before the women piled in the Biscayne and came looking for me with hands twisting at their aprons and blood in their eye.