My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  In the winter of 1993, in an attic apartment in Cambridge, Mass., I sat homesick and watched Alabama beat the trash-talkin’ Hurricanes—I mean beat them like they stole somethin’—to win its first national championship since Bear died. Late that night I walked through a deserted Harvard Yard, through snow and bitter cold, and I thought I might yell “Roll Tide,” though no one else would hear. I did it anyway.

  FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: September 2011

  I know why I love it. It goes back to nights in Paul Snow Stadium, where the Fighting Gamecocks of Jacksonville State whipped Troy, or Tennessee-Martin, or Delta State. In my memory we always won, as, in dreams, you never hit bottom when you fall. My uncles, good men, took me there as a boy in the 1970s and bought me hot dogs wrapped in aluminum foil. We always sat up high, so I could see the stadium fill with people I knew: the insurance man, the lady from the Five-and-Dime, and every pretty girl in five counties.

  The JSU school colors were red and white but might as well have been dark blue, from all the company jackets from U.S. Pipe or Goodyear. If it rained we hid under Caterpillar caps and programs, but not umbrellas. We did not believe in umbrellas. On occasion, one would unfurl in the seats in front of us, and my uncles would grumble that “We’d see some football, if it wasn’t for all these parasols.” Our heroes were Ralph Brock—he could throw a football from here to Edwardsville—and Boyce Callahan, who ran for his life. He’s a chiropractor now. He was like lightning, then.

  We never looked away at halftime. With a great pounding of drums and sounding of brass, the Marching Southerners, in perfect step, would sweep onto the grass. They played music from our history, and, if you listened close, you might hear a tuba player sing: In the sky the bright stars glittered/ On the bank the pale moon shone/ And twas from Aunt Dinah’s quilting party/ I was seeing Nellie home.

  And the beautiful Marching Ballerinas, in red velvet, kicked their white boots high in the air. Why do we love football? How could we not?

  I teach now in the shade of the great stadium at The University of Alabama, and though my joy of football has hardened in middle age it has not faded. On Sundays, after a rare loss, the air goes stale. It seems harder to move. I have friends who say it is the same in Auburn, Athens, anyplace people live and die on a holding call, and joke that their new state flower is a satellite dish with high definition.

  When Chris Roberts, an Alabama professor, explains our fascination “to the infidels,” he describes his route to work: “Past the Bryant Bank on the left, then over the Bryant Bridge. Eventually, I turn onto Bryant Drive, home of the Bryant Museum and Bryant Conference Center. I park near the northwest end zone of Bryant-Denny Stadium. Then I walk past the Bryant statue. If they’re not convinced, I show my ATM card—the one with Bear Bryant on it.”

  I do not know if I would love it as much if I had discovered it at an age of chat rooms, of anonymous bad-mouthing. I learned to love it in an age of newspapers, of fat Sunday sports pages filled with the lore of the game, all but lost in a time when every quarter-back’s tweet from behind a velvet rope sends ESPN all atremble.

  Would I? Probably. “How could a game be better?” said Alabama fan Ken Fowler, who, for seven decades, has suffered and exulted through Saturday afternoons. “People united in common interest, in the outdoors, against one enemy. And, it reminds us that all in this world is not hurricanes and volcanoes.”

  I hope your teams, at least in distant memory, always win. Unless they are playing one of mine.

  ALL SAINTS’ DAY

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: October 2011

  Maybe it is why this city is so hard to kill, even when drowned. New Orleans is too comfortable with death to be consumed by it.

  In most American cities, this is the season of the witch, though the witch may decide at the last minute to be a ballerina, or a fairy princess, or a Hannah Montana, though I am not altogether certain what that is, and am almost surely three years behind on what the cool kids are wearing. It is the same in New Orleans, where real witches, vampires, and such are said to convene, and not just on Halloween, but on Saint Patrick’s Day, Boxing Day, the third Monday in January, and whatever that odd, tacked-on day is in a leap year.

  October 31 is a wild night in the Crescent City, where voodoo priests in tall, black top hats glare from behind white greasepaint, and zombies wail and stagger along Bourbon Street, though that might have been just a bunch of frat boys on the way back from Pat O’Brien’s. I once saw a young woman dressed as a New York City taxicab, wearing mostly just a license plate. I blushed and looked away... eventually.

  But what makes New Orleans special to me this time of year is not the howling of October 31 but the traditions that unfold, peacefully, quietly, in her cemeteries the morning after. Much like Ash Wednesday settles, usually, calmly and quietly after the insanity of Mardi Gras, the day after Halloween reveals one of the sweetest traditions I have seen in my rapidly changing South.

  All Saints’ Day in New Orleans is a day to honor and visit the dead, not in some philosophical way by thinking about them while on the living room sofa or in line for café au lait at Café Du Monde, but by traveling to the place of their interment and sitting with them. Perhaps the oldest holiday on the Western calendar, it dates back to 837, when Roman Catholics began honoring all saints, known and unknown, on the first day of November.

  I am not saying there are caravans of people thronging through the Cities of the Dead, backed up six deep at a crypt, but if you pass by these old cemeteries you will see people, one or two or whole families, sprucing up the crypts—the water table requires that most New Orleans residents who can afford it be laid to rest in stone or concrete crypts above ground—and just generally being close to the loved ones who have gone on.

  I will never forget, years ago, driving through the city one November 1 and seeing a family, dressed as if for church, filing through a cemetery gate with what appeared to be a picnic basket and an Igloo cooler. Later, I saw people eating oyster po’boys and drinking root beer in the shade of a crypt. I saw fathers and sons toast grandfathers and great-grandfathers with a clink of Abita bottles.

  As I walked between the rows of stained granite and crumbling brick, trying not to look like a ghoul or an armed robber, I smelled something on the breeze that seemed odd here in such a holy place, a smell harsh and sweet at the same time. Only one thing smells like that. “Bourbon,” I said. I watched two middle-aged men, brothers, I guessed, take a drink from a pint bottle of brown liquor, pour a swallow into the grass and dust, and shuffle away, not drunk, but apparently feeling better than when they shuffled in.

  What a lovely notion, I remember thinking, that no matter what your faith, you really do live on and on, as long as someone, anyone, is willing to come see you.

  One fall I went to Holt Cemetery, a resting place for the poor, where generations are buried not in stately crypts but in this almost liquid earth, and watched old men get down on their knees and smooth the dirt the best they could in a place of wooden crosses and tinfoil angels. One old man could not remember the name of the little daughter he had buried there, but came to see her, anyway.

  WHEN FIREWORKS GO SOUTH

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: July 2014

  Southerners, I believe, should not be trusted with fireworks.

  It is not in our blood. The North had most of the artillery. The South, which does not always think things through, entered The War believing its officer class could merely hurl mint juleps at the encroaching Yankees and glare insolently. The Gallant John Pelham, Robert E. Lee’s vaunted cannoneer, may have been the last Southerner to be truly trusted with a lit fuse. Since him, there has been a long line of Southerners who light bottle rockets with a Camel Non-filter and shoot for the moon, only to see the projectiles blaze ankle-high through the Johnsongrass, scorching cats and burning worms.

  I love my people, but you know there is truth in this. Even when we
are sober, bad things happen. Even when we do everything right, things can still go wrong.

  Take the case of poor Rob Roy, a suicidal, wirehaired Jack Russell terrier in Valley Head, Alabama. He had a short tail. On the Fourth of July about 10 years ago, it got some shorter.

  “Mammaw named all her dogs Rob Roy,” said Elizabeth Manning, a graduate student at the University of Alabama. “I’m guessing this was Rob Roy number two…”

  This Fourth began, like most, with the lighting of short fuses.

  “At dusk, all the women would sit up on the porch, and all the men would go into the field in front of the house and shoot off fireworks. My Uncle Jeff was firing off one of the prettiest ones, and he had it lit and they backed off. Rob Roy, who had a reputation for biting wheels on cars, ran to it, and it shot off right before he got there.”

  A spark got caught in his tail, which began to smoke. Rob Roy ran in wild circles, as Jack Russells are bred to do, so fast that the flock of grandkids on his tail could not catch him to put it out.

  “He finally just sat down and dragged his butt through the grass,” Elizabeth recalled.

  “Mammaw just watched.”

  She is 88.

  “Well, goosey gander, goosey gone,” she likes to say.

  I, myself, am careful when it comes to fireworks. Before inserting an M-80 into a bed of fire ants, I follow careful safety protocols.

  1. Twist together two M-80s, for more “Holy smokes!” potential.

  2. Giggle.

  3. Run.

  I am qualified to opine on fireworks because The Gallant Pelham, killed by the Yankees as he tried to rally his troops, is buried in my hometown of Jacksonville, Alabama. His statue gazes down upon us—and on the loading dock of the old TG&Y. I have always believed the Fourth—because of all the booming that goes on—is also a celebration of his life, though he was fighting to dissolve the Union and all. But every year, as the sky fills with fire, I wonder what he is thinking.

  Probably:

  “Duck.”

  I know fireworks safety is a serious matter. That is why I now leave the shooting of them to professionals. In my hometown, we go to the field beside State 204, set our lawn chairs up in the back of my brother’s pickup and watch the falling dusk transform through the miracle of gunpowder. Or, if I am on the Gulf, we watch the colors rain into Mobile Bay.

  I think, some years, I would like to shoot one last bottle rocket into the dark, though I am too old to run away.

  But at least if my tail were to set on fire, I would be easy to catch and put out.

  O CHRISTMAS TREE

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: December 2011

  The Southern landscape, let’s face it, is not intended for Christmas, at least not the storybook Christmas we cut out of red and green construction paper and taped to the windows at Roy Webb Elementary School. Most of the snowflakes I saw, until I left home, were frozen in place on a cardboard sky with Elmer’s glue.

  I do not love snow—I lived in Boston and New York and came to regard snow as a hard-packed, car-obscuring, finger-numbing, gray and dirty substance—but it was nice at Christmas till the snowplow came along and shoved it over the top of your Subaru. Down here, I ride the highways and gaze out on the grass that has finally, grudgingly gone dormant, as the voices on the radio—Bing, Elvis, and them—try to assure me that it is indeed a time of white Christmas, and roasting chestnuts, and sleighs. And then a big ol’ boy in a tank top and a Santy hat waves at me from his mailbox, and I am more confused.

  That’s when I see it, there at the side of the road: a single, perfectly shaped cedar or pine, not too short, not too tall, and I think, for just a second, that I wish I had a saw. And I know that, for me and mine, it is truly Christmas, after all.

  There is no nice way to say it. We are Christmas tree thieves, or used to be (though I am not ruling it out if I see just the right one outside a rest stop near Tupelo). I know that larceny has no place during Yuletide, and before you think badly of me, let me explain. It is not like we were rustling sheep from the manger scene in front of the city auditorium, or absconding with the Three Wise Men, which I think would be hard to pawn anyway. It was just trees. And in that we had scruples. We were not skulking through the lot at The Home Depot at three o’clock in the morning, or robbing a Douglas fir from the Knights of Columbus. It was just that we were less than particular about property lines.

  When I was a child, we never bought a tree. We got an ax, or a handsaw, and went into the woods. It would have been a scene straight off a Christmas card, if we had actually gone hunting for one on our own land, which we did not have. I guess it was poaching in a way, but it seemed harmless. In the deep woods, it was more like we were just thinning the herd, rather than stealing.

  And, I doubt if a landowner ever walked up to a stump and said, “I’ll see them Bragg boys swing for this.” But we knew, my brothers and I, that there was something wrong about it. So we decided to steal them from the State of Alabama. We would cruise the bigger roads and highways until we saw one on the state right-of-way. Sliding to a halt in the loose gravel, car tires smoking, I would leap from the truck with my ax. Three to six whacks would do it, unless I saw a car coming. Then I froze, trying to look innocent—with an ax in my hands.

  That was a long time ago. I have not stolen a tree, from Alabama or anywhere else, for 35 years. We buy our trees now, and pay what feels like $900 for a tree cut last Fourth of July, a tree I am afraid to shake too hard, lest it look like something Charlie Brown would have. You got a much better quality of tree, when it was stole.

  But I am too old and stiff now, too fat to jump a ditch or climb a bank. The police would get me, sure. Still, I see the trees there, at the side of the road in that balmy air, and it makes me happy.

  I guess, to be truthful, those stuck-on paper snowflakes did, too.

  WHEELS OF TIME

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: June 2014

  The Pontiac, ragged, dented, rust-flecked, means it was ’74, since cars are the way working-class people of the Deep South truly mark time. Listen to them, when they are groping for a memory, and they will find it beside a yellow Oldsmobile, or baby-blue Malibu…

  —From The Prince of Frogtown

  Ever since I was 16, I have kept track of my life in an almanac welded from tail fins, fender skirts, and chrome. I think many people do. The other day, as my mother and aunts sat trying to remember the date of some trivial thing, Aunt Juanita finally asserted she knew, exactly, because it was the year Uncle Ed “got that red truck.” Her sisters nodded yes, it was. It seemed to me they were all red, his trucks, but I do not argue with women who were around when the Italians hanged Mussolini.

  They recall the Depression, how their family left a rented house in early morning dark, sneaking out on the landlord. A pig they were trying to load up panicked and ran head first into the tailgate of their Ford, and fell dead. That was ’39, maybe ’40; the Depression lingered long down here. They do not recall the pig, much, but the Ford was a cut-down Model A, black, bad to rust.

  My daddy’s whole life passed to the hiss of turning tires. He worked the chain gang in ’54, and it almost killed him, watching cars pass him by. He courted Mother in ’55, in a black-and-pearl ’49 Mercury. It burned a lot of oil, as she recalls. He went AWOL from the Marines soon after; drove off in a ’54 Hudson Hornet, the law close behind. He wrecked it in Georgia, steered it off the asphalt into much of the adjoining countryside, in ’56. Even when he was sitting still, he was in a car, listening to the radio in the shade of a cedar tree. It was a gray Chevy, so it was ’65. I was in first grade.

  My brother Sam broke his leg in the fall of ’73; hit a tree in a powder blue Willys. I won the Calhoun County 4-H Club speech championship that year. I spent the day rubbing pinesap off a white ’66 Corvair, hoping it might get me a date someday because being an award-winning public speaker did not. In summer ’75, Uncle John bid $540 at auction on a ’69 Mustang he could have gotten
for $400 if I had not been jumping up and down, hollering “Git it!” But I hit a guardrail and warped the front end, and took my driver’s test in my Aunt Sue’s car, in fall ’75. I borrowed it again for prom. I wore a white tuxedo and my date dumped me, but I rode home, stylin’, in a green ’75 Monte Carlo. It was May ’77.

  The first time I truly flew was in a ’69 Camaro; wrecked it in August ’76, a week before senior year. It was 92 degrees in the dark. I moved on to a ’70 MGB, but no one knew how to work on it so it sat under a tree. My buddy Mike Ponder finally wedged a transmission in place with a 2 by 4, and we motored. We were big boys; people said we looked like circus clowns riding around in that tiny car.

  We buried Mike last year, but every time I see one of those cars I think of June ’77, my friend, and British racing green.

  THE GIFT OF LOAFERING

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: June 2012

  Old women call it loafering, and I’ve always loved that word. I guess it is just how we say the word “loafing,” but the way we say it makes you think of loafers, of wearing out your shoe leather for no good purpose. Old women like to sniff and use it as a condemnation. “He ain’t here. He’s off loafering.” It means you are shirking work and responsibility. To the men who loafer, it means they are free, free to waste time, to count mailboxes, and wave at other old men who, as the rear bumper vanishes in the distance, wish they were loafering, too....The one thing you cannot do is loafer with a heavy heart...Bill Joe rolls down his window and just drives, sometimes as far as the Georgia line. The mountains and hills are at their prettiest now...the hardwoods, the pines, even the weeds take on a luminescence that will shimmer into summer, till the heat itself makes the landscape fade. But for now it all just shines. His heart is light. His conscience is clear.