My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  —From The Prince of Frogtown

  I am only 52 years old but have been badly used and poorly maintained. I have worked since I was 11, digging in dirt, heaving hay bales around, loading pulpwood. Now I mostly stack paragraphs on top of each other, which I claim to be work, though no one believes me. Anyway, I have at best a few more raggedy pages left in me. So, I have decided to retire early.

  I used to say I planned to fish, but that is a bigger lie than I now have the energy to tell. The fact is, I am the worst fisherman in my family line. My grandfather came home from the Coosa too drunk to stand, coat pockets stuffed with fish. I couldn’t catch a fish standing over a washtub sober with a stick of dynamite.

  But I can loafer.

  I can walk to my truck, turn the key, and ride. I will dodge everything worrisome—my wife, traffic, the uncollected garbage under the sink—find a country road that leads no place in particular, and let it take me there. I can lie and say I am going to exercise or pick up a gallon of hateful skim milk, say anything to slip the surly bonds of home, and roam, till the wanderlust subsides.

  You may not be familiar with the word if you were born north of Fort Payne or in a bloodline that thinks a bad day is a flat tire on the million-dollar motor home. I come from a long line of loaferers, from semi-sorry men who vanished for days, if not years, in the highlands and deltas of the Deep South, sometimes with nothing more than two dollars and a Zippo lighter, men of beautiful, restless spirit and less-than-rigid adherence to jobs and spouses and other constricting things.

  I had two bachelor great-uncles who loafered a lifetime, from Tampa to Chattanooga, high-steppin’ alongside an accelerating freight train, a guitar case in one hand as they reached, reached for freedom with the fingers of the other. My great-uncle Fred reappeared just before his death in a college bar in Jacksonville, Alabama, dressed in a checked sport coat and brown-and-white wingtip shoes. He finished a beer, took a roll of money off some college boys at the pool table, and disappeared forever into the night. It may be he never left very deep footprints in the sands of this society, but by God he left a lot of them.

  I’d get too homesick to be like him, truly. Most of us loafer only in an afternoon. The descending sun sends us home to a woman’s worried face, or sometimes wrath. It may even be we were not greatly missed while we were gone. But at least, occasionally, someone will lie and say we were.

  HOLIDAY LIES

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: December 2012

  I’m dreaming of a Christmas free of the harmless fibs, gentle untruths, and little white lies that pile up like (fake) snow.

  The holiday season officially begins when they take down the Halloween decorations in the drugstore and start foisting off the fruitcake and the crème drops. It is what we have instead of snow. My brother Sam likes fruitcake; it is the only thing about him that troubles me. My mother told me she liked it, too, but that turned out to be a lie, a lie she told for 45 years to keep from hurting my feelings, dating back to the first fruitcake I gave her when I was a boy. I found out she foisted that one and every fruitcake that followed off on Sam, who, now that I think about it, may not truly like fruitcake either but may just be forcing it down, gob after candied, gelatinous gob, so as not to hurt her feelings. Either way, I guess, it is a lovely lie, in a season of lovely lies. How would we get through Christmas without them?

  Think about it, about the lies we have to tell—or just let drift along from year to year—just so we can have peace on Earth. In my family, you had better not dare tell an ugly truth for fear of eliciting the dreaded: “You have ruint my Christmas!”

  Invariably, it was because someone was caught in a truth.

  But I am done. I am out of holiday lies.

  We shall start with the weather folks. I am done pretending the blip on your radar on Christmas Eve is Santa. I am not saying Santy ain’t coming; I’m saying that blip over Fort Smith, Arkansas, ain’t him.

  Everyone knows the real Santa has magic powers that prevent us from seeing him, and if Santa can steer Donner and Blitzen across the December sky unseen by every child on Earth, I doubt your Doppler can track him. Maybe I can pretend, just one more year, if he brings me a fly rod.

  I am through being nice to carolers. I have, for years, been one of the designated shut-ins on my street the carolers come to serenade. I do not sing well with others, and besides, it involves a great deal of walking. So I am left at home where I can cheerfully open the door and smile like a Stepford wife while everyone else on the street sings to me. Last year, I opened the door to be greeted by:

  “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch…”

  I’ll show them Grinch. We’ll see how jolly they are dodging rocks through Glendale Gardens. I wonder if Santa would hold it against me if I went upside their heads with a fruitcake.

  I usually do not have to spin any untruths when unwrapping presents. My people are wonderful gift buyers. They get me Carhartt shirts and good, thick socks and wrenches and screwdrivers and jeans that fit and 36 pairs of white undies from Fruit of the Loom, whom we have forgiven, apparently, for shutting down the plant and laying off the entire extended family. But I will NOT pretend to like a purple velour pullover with a V-neck collar, three sizes too small. I put it on and looked like a 300-pound grape. Don’t do that to me no more.

  And I am through pretending that my one, special Christmas wish will come true. I am a low-tech man, but have begged for an iPod loaded with the Allman Brothers Band, The Amazing Rhythm Aces (“Third rate romance/Low rent rendezvous”), and some Jerry Lee Lewis. The iPod did arrive under the tree, two years ago. Empty. Silent. Christmases and birthdays and Father’s Days have come and gone and it is still silent as a box of saltine crackers, because my family members who actually know how to insert music into the magical device do not love me enough to do so.

  Well I am through. From now on, during Christmas, I will celebrate in the warm light of truth.

  Guess I’ll go see what’s on the radio.

  O CHRISTMAS SOCK

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: December 2013

  I wondered, until I was about 21, why they called them “stockings.” They were not stockings. Stockings were something women wore to church or when they were “going out.” They came in a kind of nondescript tan, or, if you had completely forfeited your immortal soul, fishnet. I often wondered why they were called that too, because even a fool could see they were useless for fishing. Maybe in queen size.

  Anyway, what we hung by our chimney with care were not stockings. (Actually, we did not have a chimney, so Santa had to be let in at the front door.) What we hung on our wall, to the left of the cedar tree that we’d liberated from the state highway right-of-way, were socks. White. Knee-high. Three stripes at the top. Of the classification known as “tube.” Now, children call them “old-school.”

  They came from the Cloth Barn in Hokes Bluff, Alabama, for $3 a packet, and a packet had, like, 400 pairs. But back then you could also get a wheelbarrow of underwear for $5 and a Green Stamp. My point—and it has taken me much longer to arrive here than it should have—is that in my childhood you could not have Christmas morning without a tube sock swaying on a tenpenny nail driven into the Sheetrock. Imagine Christmas without fruitcake, or firearms, or tube socks. See? You can’t.

  My mother explained that the vast importance of the Christmas sock goes back to the Great Depression. It used to be all there was. Well, first, of course, came the baby Jesus.

  Let us explain further.

  The sock was the depository for Christmas cheer. If my grandfather had found carpentry work in the mountain South—or at least if he had been unmolested by the federal men long enough to run off some selling liquor—my mother and her siblings would find their socks bulging with an apple, an orange, Brazil nuts, walnuts, and a piece of peppermint candy. (This was, of course, an age before tube socks, but the wool socks of the age did fine.) To my mother and her sisters, it was all they could have wished, dreamed, or pr
ayed for.

  Me, I arrived about the same time as the tube sock, one size fits all, and it was bottomless. It held an orchard of tangerines, three chocolate Santys, 1,000 peppermints, and 4,236 walnuts, which was a little like giving a child a hunk of iron to open. The only way to do it was with a 9-pound hammer, otherwise used in railroad construction. I do not ever remember eating one piece of walnut, just looking forlornly at a smashed patty of obliterated shell and walnut paste. But I digress.

  Sometimes my mother even fit a small toy in there, like a plastic Indian chief on a rearing stallion. My point is, it would stretch to hold anything, stretch to hold the whole world, though they would stretch about 4 feet straight down until they brushed the floor.

  Sometimes inside the Christmas sock would be a new pair of socks, which caused me momentary consternation though I still cannot quite explain why. It must be how you feel when you slice into a turducken.

  We have stockings now. They have garland, ribbon, and sparkles, and come from town. You cannot wear them. I am not ungrateful. I love my stockings. But they will not stretch a lick.

  COWBOYS ARE HER WEAKNESS

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: January 2015

  Now wait a minute, Shep. We don’t want to kill us no ol’ ladies, ’cause I like ol’ ladies.

  —The actor Dennis Hopper, just before shooting the train conductor

  My mother is not a panicky woman; she is a Southern one. She was born in the cold heart of the Depression and has survived things most people encounter only in the pages of Faulkner. She has propped up more than one sorry man, and lived through a real-world heart attack and the demise of General Hospital. When As the World Turns stopped spinning, she did not miss a step—though it almost killed Aunt Juanita. But there was panic in her voice, one bleak day, as she stabbed the remote control, searching.

  “I can’t find my Virginian,” is all she said.

  “Oh, Lord,” I said, and meant it.

  My mother loves The Virginian. She is, I believe, sweet on him—not on the actor who plays him in the classic television Western but on the tall man in the black leather vest who looked good on a horse.

  “I saw him the other day on the Western Channel, that Jim Drury, and he was old,” she said.

  They have been riding off into the re-run sunset, him and her, every day for as long as I can remember, usually after he shoots somebody. My mother does not like guns, but guns in the Westerns are not real; she knows this because a man who gets gunned down on Gunsmoke will be resurrected a week later on Cheyenne, killed again, reappear on Wyatt Earp, and killed again. Dennis Hopper was killed 5,000 times before his actual death, and still gets shot down twice a month in black and white; Ken Curtis was bushwacked and buried on a Gunsmoke cattle drive and reincarnated a week later, as Festus.

  But I digress. The Virginian was gone, cancelled, leaving my mother with a sorry choice between Bat Masterson and the hundredth replay of the Gunsmoke where Miss Kitty gets kidnapped. But even a sub-par Western is better than none, for us. Some people go south in the cold, the shut-in days. My mother, little brother, and I, we go west. The gray afternoons are a good excuse to do nothing, once the stock is fed and wood toted in for the fire. We sit down with a cup of coffee or some tea and unwrap a Little Debbie, and …

  ‘Have Gun, will Travel’ reads the card of a man

  A knight without armor in a savage land

  My mother loves the scenery, of the Plains, and Monument Valley. I love the horses. We know they are not historically accurate. There is no bullet wound that cannot be healed by putting the man’s arm in a sling. The Indians always, always ride in a circle around the wagons, to provide a better target. “I pull for ’em,” my little brother said, and I do, too.

  I am addicted now. I like them because they make me feel young again, especially when I hear a line from my childhood. “If whiskey cured something,” Miss Kitty told Marshal Dillon, “I could save the world.”

  My mother is, once again, at peace. She found The Virginian, a few months ago, on the Inspiration Channel.

  “My Virginian,” she said.

  A CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Best Life, September 2005

  I hunted for her the last time in a hot, wet, sticky gloom, mosquitoes needling the back of my neck. We had been blessed with blackberry winter well into May, cool and dry, but almost overnight the Alabama summer had smothered Bean Flat Mountain. The yellow pollen that had swirled on the springtime breeze now filmed the surface of the pond and caked the wet leather of my high-top work boots.

  As a boy, I had run barefoot and buck wild through pastures like this, chasing fireflies with a minnow net and a mayonnaise jar, unafraid of what hid in the waist-high grass. But now I armored my shins in leather, and I moved old-man-slow and easy around the pond, listening for the rasp of belly scales on the dead stems of last year’s weeds. The cottonmouths are surly things that will bite you out of simple meanness—no matter what the nitwit snake handlers on the nature channels say. Mature snakes had little to fear here in the Appalachian foothills except the big owls, the hawks, and of course, her. She would come at them from below as they glided across the surface of the pond, open her maw to the size of a Quaker Oats container, and suck them in. Only the biggest bass take a grown snake that way, and she was as big—for her kind—as I have ever seen.

  I raked at the mosquitoes with one sweaty hand, slid my index finger under the line of my spinning rig, and lofted a steel-gray rubber worm into a pond I could no longer see. Some people would have called it fishing, but fishing is a random thing—you fling a hook into space and wait for something dumb enough or hungry enough to bite. This was more specific than that. I hunted one fish, as I had for a year, going on two. I cast over and over well into the night, the mosquitoes humming in my ears, fluttering up my nose. I twitched the rod up to make the worm dance from the bottom, then cranked it in, slow, slower.

  Then again and again and… until it seemed like someone was tightening a crescent wrench onto the nerves between my shoulder blades.

  She is bigger now, I thought, than the last time she was caught, when my big brother, Sam, the consummate, patient fisherman, set the hook hard and watched a brand-new rod bend double under her weight. I remember the surprised look on his face as he tried to reel and wound up having to tap-dance along the rim of the pond, wearing her down. I remember how this man who has caught untold thousands of fish hooked his thumb inside her lip, hefted her, and caught his breath.

  “Lord,” he said. “What a fish.”

  I ran one finger down her green scales, a little boy again. Six pounds and more—from a stock pond.

  The eye I looked into, as he showed her off, was as big as mine, cold and blank.

  You have to read your own story into an eye like that, because it gives nothing away.

  In it, I saw my own failure.

  I have never caught a fish like her. In this place I was born, a place cut by rivers, drowned by massive man-made lakes, and dimpled by ponds, if you’re not a fisherman, you’re not much of a man.

  But I could set it right if I could catch that one fish, that amazing fish. It didn’t matter that she had already been caught. That only proved that she was real, not just another hopeful lie told over a creek-bank banquet of beans and weenies and saltine crackers.

  You, I thought, staring at the yellow-scrummed surface of the pond, are my redemption.

  I remember that first time, how Sam had to reach his whole hand into your jaws to work loose the hook, how he reverently eased you into the shallows, and even rocked you back and forth a little, like a baby, filling your gills. You scraped silt off the bottom with your thrashing tail and vanished. Sam straightened the rubber worm on the hook and flicked it back into the water, and as soon as he took the slack out of the line, a smaller bass took it. As he cranked it in, the rod shattered into three pieces, and he stood for a minute, wondering.

  “The big ’un ruint it,” he said. The fiberglass had cracked
like a spiderwebbed windshield, and then shattered, a moment later, when the little fish thumped it.

  I learned to fish with a cane pole in baby-size hands, staring at the red-and-white plastic bobber. I graduated to a Zebco 202 closed-face reel by the time I was old enough to read. On any given Saturday, my people caught enough crappie from the Coosa backwater to fill a washtub, and I can still see my Aunt Edna mixing cornmeal with diced green onion and commodity cheese, then dropping them into iron skillets for the best hush puppies I have ever had.

  Fishing was our birthright. My grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a folkloric figure, hunted for the giant catfish below the Guntersville dam with a massive snag hook screwed into the end of a pool cue. He simply stood on the rocks, waiting for the turbines to churn to life, bringing the big cats to the surface. And then he would swing the cue down, hard, and sink the barbs into the fish’s head. There wasn’t a whole lot of sport in it, maybe. But you could feed a lot of people with a fish as long as a love seat. His boat was made from two car hoods welded together, and he never wet a line sober. But when he came from the river and took a nap, his wife, Ava, would find fish in his coat pockets. My own gentle Mama, with a cane pole and a snuff can full of cow manure and red wigglers, is a bream-catching machine.

  There was not a bad fisherman in the whole damn bloodline, male or female, until me. I could cast beautifully into open water, but if there was a tree to snap up in, I would find it. And once I cast, I cranked too fast and jerked the rod tip too high, and made the fish work to catch the lure.

  A patient man named Joe Romeo took me fishing for trout on the flats of Tampa Bay, and I caught a cormorant. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to remove a hook from a live bird. I don’t drink much, hardly at all, but on a trip to Destin, Florida, as a young man, I got knee-walking drunk and waded out into the bay with a saltwater rig and a bowl of boiled shrimp. The Coast Guard was not amused.