My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  The trains hauled coal, and pig iron, and even people. And sometimes, in car after lumbering car, came whole mountains of the red earth. There was so much of it, it seemed to me then, that they would surely dig the very ground from beneath our feet, and we would just float away.

  “Why do they want our dirt?” I asked, and the grown-ups just told me there was money in it, son, and dismissed me to talk about important things, like how it was a bad year for feed corn, and whether Wallace would run again, and why they would rather push a Chevy than drive a Ford.

  I would learn that it was valuable to outsiders for the same reason it was valuable to us. It held things up.

  I knew they baked bricks from it; there was a brickyard on Highway 21. But my uncles and big brother would explain how the builders used it as foundations for houses in places with mealy, mushy, crumbly, inferior dirt. Why, even under the great buildings of this world, beneath the great edifices, lay our dirt.

  We got good dirt, they told me.

  It would be decades before I would hear the poets go on and on about it, about how they were sons of the clay and all that, like a poet ever held a shovel handle in his life.

  I believe there are three establishments a Southern man should not be caught dead in, or four if you are a member of the Church of Christ caught doing the rumba at an Arthur Murray. A Southern man should not get turned around while searching for the fishing licenses counter at Walmart and wind up anywhere in proximity of the ladies unmentionables. He should not go in a bridal boutique, which should involve no explanation. And he has no business, ever, in one of those delicate stores wherein ladies with big purses lean over souvenirs of the Old South, sigh, and mumble, “Well, ain’t that just precious.”

  I have stumbled into such places by mistake, and sometimes cannot get out before my blood sugar is permanently escalated by all that cloying sweetness wafting from the merchandise. There are little-bitty cotton bales, and soaps with a hint of honeysuckle, and incense sticks that smell like somebody has burned the peach cobbler. It happened again, not too long ago, but before I could retreat I was mesmerized by the T-shirt rack, not because of the usual clichés printed on them but the colors themselves. They were, according to the tags on them, dyed from the natural pigments of the Southern land. There was one dyed with iced tea—I swear I am not making this up—and one that appeared to be kudzu green. But the one that stopped me cold was a dull, rusty red. The tag proclaimed it to be colored by the honest-to-God Georgia clay.

  The superior look on my face, the armor a Southern man must wear into such a place to keep his dignity, slipped clean away, and I began to laugh, to laugh until parts of me not particularly well-toned began to shake. I am not prone to belly laughs, mostly because when I start I cannot stop and have been told I look ridiculous; there are many things a big man cannot do that a smaller man can, and apparently one of them is prolonged laughter in a public place. I have been told I alarm the children.

  But I could not help myself.

  I thought of Alabama, 1965, and a ground the color of dried blood.

  I imagined my mother as a young woman, standing over me, aghast at my condition. I imagined a little-bitty me, covered from the soles of my once-white socks to my blond eyebrows, in red mud, that of the Alabama variety. It had rained, and I danced and flopped and backstroked through every mud hole I could find across five square acres, including the vast mud hole that stretched just beyond my Aunt Juanita’s house. I had begun this celebration in a clean white T-shirt, a brand-new pair of Dollar Store jeans, and a pair of hand-me-down Converse tennis shoes. Now I was of one color, with two blue eyes peering out.

  “Where are your shoes?” she asked.

  “The mud hole got ’em,” I answered, and it was God’s truth.

  I had heard stories of monsters that lurked in deep pools.

  Surely there was one in a mud hole 14 feet across.

  She could not decide whether to smile or cry. We lived in that place together, her and me.

  Her head shook from side to side.

  Finally she just sat down, quiet, with a death grip on my skinny wrist. Not that we had a lot of nice things in our little house, but I could have begrimed them all if she had let me loose in there.

  You hate it, when your mama is quiet. Better she hollers. Better she raves.

  I waited.

  Finally, she spoke briefly to God, and reached for the Clorox.

  I can still see her standing over a dented, wringer-washing machine on the tiny back porch of the little red house, running those clothes through wash after wash, uselessly, hopelessly, because the red dirt is permanent, the stains it leaves on us, in us, are forever.

  And now, like everything else in the modern-day South, someone had gone and turned it into fashion, right there beside an $18 box of Goo Goo Clusters.

  So I had my good laugh, a long and wobbly laugh, and put that $20 T-shirt back on the rack. I knew where to find something more original and a good bit cheaper than that, cheaper, and priceless all at the same time. The mud hole is still there, just on the other side of my Aunt Juanita’s house. At $20 a pop, there must be a billion dollars or more waiting for us down there, after a hard rain. And if it ever went dry, we would just pray for a good downpour; God could always make more mud. The T-shirts themselves, we would have to buy. It does no good to pray to Walmart.

  The red dirt covered the land. It was the land, the one resource we would never run out of, down here. It was a thing you fought with, that you turned and dug and moved from place to place, a thing that colored everything and everyone, from the knees of our jeans to our very skin, a pervasive thing, like the heat itself. In the wet, it was a slick, dangerous thing that could suck down a man or even a whole mule, and we were hearing of men who went down into the red earth for some construction or something as simple as a water or sewer line, and the red earth swallowed them whole.

  It was slick as butter on a linoleum floor, when it was wet. Pulpwood trucks slid sideways and pinned men against trees. When I was a teenager hired on to cut pulpwood, a rumbling chain saw in hand, I slipped on a downed, mud-slicked tree and almost cut off my own head. Another time, I slipped in that red mush and came within the width of a sheet of paper of badly hurting, maybe killing, another boy; in time, in the wet, the other boys worked safely away from me. For a long time, I hated the red mud; it was hard enough, that dangerous and dirty work, when the earth stood still beneath your boots.

  How could such a thing be good to build on, then? The smarter men explained that it set up firm and solid, deep underground, and even wet it was still firmer and harder and more waterproof than inferior soil, such as sand. All I knew was, if you let it set up around the axles of a ’69 Mustang mired in a ditch, you might as well plant flowers in it because you could not dig it out with an army of coal miners.

  In the drought, it took to the very air. I used to see great dust storms in the movies, in the great Sahara or the Old West, and make a tsk-tsk noise in my throat. We lived ringed by red-earth cotton fields, and the hot winds sent whole fields into the blue sky. It coated the cars in a red film, and broke my mother’s heart anew, when she put the damp, white sheets on the line, to be turned red in an unpredictable wind.

  I thought about it more because we were, as I grew older, in the business of dirt. My Uncle Ed owned great, yellow machines to do battle with the red dirt, bulldozers and front-end loaders and big dump trucks. We were the muscle, my brothers and me. We cut roads, dug lakes, fashioned neat, flat lawns from the ragged ground.

  We moved into a place, those great machines rumbling, growling, and tore away the green, uncovering the red earth in great scars, so that other men could build things in it, and when they were done we would come back and sew the green across it again, with grass seed. I came home, every day, looking almost as bad as that boy who fell in the mud hole. I had the red dirt in the pockets of my jeans, in my shirt pockets, even in the folds of money—$1 bills, mostly—I carried there. My hair w
as so full of it I could shake a cloud from it, and it rode in the creases of my neck, what the old people called sweat beads.

  But even when I was small, there was a beauty in it. In the spring, when the farmers turned the earth before planting, you could almost divine the future in it, in the smell of it, a smell I could describe if I was only better at what I do. I guess you could just say it smelled like promise, like the beginning of things. It was not that decayed smell of old bottomland, not that loamy smell of the Black Belt, where the dirt had the color of burnt trees. The red dirt of the Upper South was inferior, maybe, as a place for crops, a soil that lacked the richness of other places in the South, but it smelled clean.

  You never get away from it, even when you are. You will pull out an old pair of jeans or a raggedy sock, and there it is, the telltale trace.

  Once, when I was good and grown, I gave a talk about writing to a gathering of people from mostly someplace else. It was a good, impassioned talk, and it seemed like, in my fervor, I had carried the people with me, the way any good preacher will do. It seemed as if they were dang-near aglow with the fire of the written word, and when the sermon was at its zenith, I asked if there were questions. A Yankee woman raised her hand, to ask me a question, I was sure, about the beauty of language.

  “Mr. Bragg,” she asked, “is it true that Southerners eat dirt?”

  I thought that she was making fun of me but she had read that it was so.

  The truth is that I have never eaten any dirt, not as much as a spoonful.

  But it is in me, ground in, from the outside.

  PART 2

  TABLE

  FOR A VEGETABLE, I’LL HAVE WHITE GRAVY

  GQ, May 2002

  I always wanted some washboard abs. But I also always seem to want some baby back ribs.

  Washboard abs are hard to get. Baby back ribs are $6.99.

  Washboard abs come with size 32 jeans, good overall cardiovascular health, and, if you believe the infomercials, beautiful women. Baby back ribs come with coleslaw and a Wet-Nap.

  Washboard abs come with… to heck with it. I am a man, what I like to believe is a real man, a Southern man.

  If God meant for me to have washboard abs, he would have left me in the hay fields of Calhoun County, slinging 50-pound bales up on the flatbed. He would have left me standing in the middle of a field of rocks, making—as the song goes—little uns outta big uns in the red-hot sun.

  That was when I was 19, the last time I had anything close to washboard abs, half a lifetime ago, when the sweat and the pain of making a dollar were brutal enough to fight off the ravages of the diet of my youth, a diet of cornbread and sweet tea and fried pork chops and pinto beans with ham and mashed potatoes and creamed corn and fried okra and fried squash and fried green tomatoes and my mama’s favorite dessert, a plate of home-canned blackberries with a tablespoon of sugar dumped on top, like snow on top of a purple mountain.

  No, I ain’t never gonna have me no washboard abs. One, I am a man, and men eat.

  Two, I am a Southern man, and Southern men, the real ones, eat badly.

  It’s not like I’m lying around the house eating Golden Flake Cheese Curls by the double handful until the orange dust obscures my vision of a better life. I am, in fact, in remarkably good shape for a man who thinks white gravy is a vegetable. I can see my toes. I can take long, long walks, even up stairs, without having to rest.

  I would like to do better. I would like to look like a model. I would like to walk through life with supermodels on my arm. And if I really thought I would be covered in supermodels, I would diet until my friends were scratching their heads.

  “Hey, you seen ol’ Rick?”

  “Hell yeah; he’s looking absolutely waiflike.”

  “Never thought I’d see the day when that boy was shopping for Armani.”

  “Yup. But his butt is fetching.”

  OK, my friends don’t talk like that. But they might if I ever got waiflike.

  Another reason I won’t diet is that then I might actually be tempted to buy the clothes in this magazine. I live in jeans and white Oxford shirts and scuffed cowboy boots, and I like it that way. I remember leafing through a magazine once and seeing a man in a leather jacket with what seemed to be a feather boa. It might have been a mink stole. I just remember marveling.

  That sunken-cheeked, rail-thin little fellow will probably live to be 100. He will probably be eating sushi and drinking dirty martinis when my biscuit-eating behind is feeding the worms. I can live with that. I can live with the fact he may be drinking dirty martinis with supermodels. I could not live with pointy shoes and pants that fall down off my butt. I am at the age where your pants just naturally start to fall down.

  I have friends who are in real good shape, and every damn one of them shops more than my girl cousins. I have one friend who actually goes out and gets his hair cut to look like the people in those magazines. One of these days, he is going to show up with a pageboy and I am just going to have to slap him.

  No, it is too big a risk to take.

  Thank God, I have—quite literally—bacon grease in my veins.

  The very first smell I can remember is the warm, rich, thick aroma of pork cracklings—we call them cracklin’s—being rendered down in big black pots over hissing, crackling outdoor fires.

  After the hog killing, after the old men disappeared into the killing pen with a .22 rifle and a curved butcher knife, the cubes of pork fat were dumped into the pots and cooked down, to make the lard.

  I remember the sound of the wicked blade as an old man scraped it across his whetstone, remember how it was so sharp that we were not even allowed to hold it for fear we would cut our own throats by accident. I remember the sound of the single bullet—a flat crack, like a dead branch breaking—and the sight of the gutted hog as it was hoisted up by its hind legs and bled with that knife, then scalded and scraped till it was naked. I guess I should have been horrified by all that. I just thought it was interesting.

  But mostly I remember the smell. Like a million mamas had got up early and fried a million skillets of bacon. The chunks of fat boiled in their own grease, and eventually little nuggets of cracklin’s, the world’s most savory by-product, floated to the top. The old men would pass them around and munch on them as they worked, and the children would hover around, begging.

  Later, my mama would take the cracklin’s and mix them in a skillet of cornmeal and then bake it. As the meal cooked, the essence of the cracklin’s would melt through the pone of bread, and when it was done she would cut it into triangles and serve it with pinto beans and stewed squash and sliced Spanish onions and pickled pepper so hot it would blind a baby if he rubbed it on his eyes.

  No, it wasn’t good for us, at least not for our bodies. I don’t even really know if it was good for our souls. But it was, by God, interesting.

  It was Southern.

  I guess, in the dieting world, we don’t stand a chance.

  Our mamas put sweet tea in our baby bottles and gave us Coca-Cola to settle our stomachs. They made us candy by pouring corn syrup into a hot skillet and letting it get hard. They sent us to school with bacon and biscuits wrapped in waxed paper.

  They made us sheet cakes with peanut butter icing. They fried so much damn chicken that it is a wonder there is a chicken left in this world.

  One time, I went to visit my mama and she told me how sorry she was that there was nothing cooked and that all she had was some fried okra and some fresh creamed corn and some cornbread that was still sweating under a dinner plate on the stove.

  Another woman tried to save me, once.

  She had me eating bagels. A bagel is a fine thing, for some people, but it is a biscuit without sin or indulgence. It is a biscuit that has been saved.

  I wondered, once, how a bagel would stand up under cream gravy. It was not a thing I want to think about very much.

  The woman also tried to save me at lunchtime. We ate salads and fruit and whole-wheat everyth
ing, and I was not happy, but I did it for love. I lost a pound.

  She tried to save me at dinner. She tried and tried.

  It may be that it is a genetic thing, like sandy hair and blue eyes. I may not be able to diet for the same reason that some people are redheaded or can play the piano.

  More likely, it was just that being Southern, I have spent most of my life in places where sin lurks behind every tree, on every stoop.

  In the country outside Jacksonville, Alabama, it was my aunts who made it impossible to diet. My Aunt Gracie Juanita fried chicken in an iron skillet and told me it was buzzard. I was 8 years old before I realized she was having a lot of fun at my expense.

  My Aunt Jo made cornbread dressing in a pan the size of a Ford F-150. My Aunt Edna always had an entire meal sitting on her stove, even at 3 a.m.

  At my first newspaper job, I ate spareribs from God at Dreamland on the way to Tuscaloosa and peanut butter pie at Betty’s Bar-B-Q in Anniston. In Birmingham there was a place called Friar Tuck’s Fried Chicken that summoned me every day at lunchtime. I used to eat the four-wing special, telling myself the wing could not possibly have as many calories as the rest of the bird, being little and all.

  I felt like crying when it closed.

  In Florida I discovered the grouper sandwich and the bacon-wrapped stuffed shrimp. Then, in Miami, it was roast pork and black beans with rice and fried plantains and yucca swimming in garlic and ham croquetas and café con leche. The Cubans could give my people a close race in making sinful food.

  It was in Miami that I finally found pause at the sinfulness of food. It was the first time I ever had a dessert called tres leches, a sheet cake of yellow color, topped with icing and drenched in, among other things, sweet condensed milk. Who thought this up? I heard it was a Nicaraguan, but I could be wrong. Whoever he was, I bet he also munched on some pork cracklin’s.