On the way to my cousin Sandy’s home, I pull my compact rental car up close to read a bumper sticker on the SUV in front of me. I Miss Ronald Reagan. There isn’t a speck of dirt on the sticker. It looks new.
It’s been thirty years since I’ve been here and I get lost on my way. “It’s a left turn at the Mitchell Apartments,” she tells me on the phone.
“Mitchell? As in our cousins the Mitchells?”
“Yep.” I’ve spent my life passing through cities, a stranger in a strange land, and have returned to the only city on the planet where my family has left a visible trace.
Sandy, who’s close to the same age as my mother, greets me with a big hug. She’s standing on a Shalom Y’all doormat, the calling card of my people. Hanging on the wall facing the door is a poster that reads I Really, Really Miss Ronald Reagan.
She’s got a picture of Great-Grandma Rose on her fridge. Our sailor-mouthed, card-shark moonshiner of a great-grandmother is surrounded by a gaggle of little Gurwitches, including Sandy’s daughters, my sister, and me. We are all holding hands. The same photo hangs in my home in Los Angeles.
There’s a bowl of gumbo waiting for me on the kitchen table. Sandy’s got my number. There have been few times in my life when there wasn’t a container of my dad’s gumbo in the freezer.* It’s his trademark recipe and I am powerless to resist a bowl.
Recently, scientists at Emory University trained mice to fear the smell of cherry blossom by pairing the smell with a small electric shock. Despite never having encountered the smell, the offspring of these mice had the same fearful response. If associations with scents can be inherited, why not other senses, like taste? Clearly, I am genetically predisposed to associate seafood from the Gulf of Mexico with a warm family feeling.*
Sandy and I gab about this one’s children, that one’s divorce, and people in the media who dress like nafkas (that’s Yiddish for “hookers”). We’re “thick as thieves,” as they say down here.
We go to bed to get an early start in the morning. Sandy is a member of the sisterhood of the shul, and they’ve arranged a morning coffee klatch for me. Though I’ve never met her, Manette, the president, has baked banana bread in my honor. Cousins show up, including the children of my pediatrician in Mobile, who was, of course, a relative. We who were pictured with Rose are reunited for the first time in over forty years. Bari, a cousin who lives in nearby Fairhope now, has created a family tree consisting of 291 descendants of Goldie and Sugar; he also has felt the pull of the ancestors, and we all search for ourselves on the tree. Manette shows me a framed tablecloth that hangs on the wall of the banquet room. The cloth was painstakingly hand-embroidered with Jewish stars by the Ladies Aid Society in 1952. Stitched alongside each angle of each star are the names of members of the congregation. I’m related to all of them. It’s like a Gurwitch Shroud of Turin.
Our cousin Shirley arrives. My mother’s grandfather and Shirley’s grandfather were brothers, Jewish immigrants from Russia who came to America around the same time as my dad’s family. One brother stayed in Philadelphia and the other went to Mobile. It was at Shirley’s wedding that my parents met. My mom, Shirley Maisel from Philly, met my dad when Cousin Shirley, Shirley Maisel of Mobile, married his cousin. That’s right, there are two Shirley Maisels who both married into the same family. Are you confused yet? I am.
Shirley and Sandy tell me stories about when my mother, whom it’s clear they have great affection for, first came down to Mobile.
“Your father thought he was marrying into the movie business because your granddaddy was a projectionist, and your mother had no idea what she was getting into. Ike was on hard times when your parents got married,” Sandy tells me. “But he showed up with three Cadillacs because he said he’d gotten a good deal.”
Everybody not only knows your name in a small town, they also know how much money you have in your bank account. On the other hand, my mother was quickly folded into the hectic social scene. “When someone had a party, you didn’t need to ask, you knew you were invited,” Shirley says.
Everybody has a story about Rebecca.
“When she was the president of the Mobile Women’s Business League, she took a class in Robert’s Rules of Order to prepare. She was ahead of her time.”
When I see the picture of Ike among the past presidents of the shul, which include cousins dating back to Meyer Mitchell, my namesake Annie’s father, I can see how my mother thought the Gurwitches were pillars of the community. I tell them I like to think I resemble Rebecca and that I inherited some of her flair.
“Here’s my favorite memory of your grandmother,” Sandy says. “We were visiting my mother-in-law in the hospital and all of a sudden, this amazing smell is coming toward us. Rebecca bursts into the room carrying bags of mouthwatering food. She’d been cooking all day for us. She had her stuffed cabbages, her sweet-and-sour meatballs, her fried chicken and banana bread. She even brought plates and silverware with her.”
“You know, I was Rebecca’s favorite.” Everyone laughs. “What?”
Becca told every single member of our family that they were her favorite. That might explain the puzzle of the steak knife in my care package. I picture her dividing her silverware up between all of the favorites on her mailing list.
I mention my conversation with my Uber driver and ask my family if they’ve heard that only three days before my arrival, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions sued the federal government to bar Syrian refugees from settling in the state. A federal judge dismissed the case, but even my cousins are concerned about an influx of refugees because we don’t know “their people.”
“What if we had been turned away?” I ask. The question hangs in the air.
Over coffee, I talk to Shirley’s son, Neal. He’s a few years older than me, has a successful law practice, and has lived in Mobile for most of his life. He’s also inherited his grandmother’s land on Dauphin Island. Sisters Becca and Freda bought adjoining lots. He only learned about the property when he took control of his family’s finances in 2005. Neal rarely goes down; he’s got a house on the beach in nearby Gulf Shores, which has developed into the kind of vacation destination envisioned by the island boosters.
We calculate that we’ve paid more in property tax than our grandparents paid for the land. “We have to do something about it,” I say enthusiastically. He looks at me like I’ve suggested we eat vegetables that aren’t fried. Or vote Democratic. But he chivalrously agrees to come with me.
My next stop is to visit the relatives who couldn’t make it to the coffee. Our shul’s cemetery is located on the edge of town, past the historic garden district with its plantation-style houses and wide front porches—ghosts of the gracious Southern living that was built on slave labor, of course.
There’s a joke that’s got its own version in almost every religion. It’s about how two Jews will build two different houses of worship on a desert island, and as relatively small a community as it was at the outset, that’s exactly what the Jews of Mobile did. Our shul, Ahavas Chesed, “Love of Kindness,” is the conservative synagogue, while the Springhill Avenue Temple attracted people who were less orthodox. The congregations insisted on two separate cemeteries as well.
Springhill’s cemetery has a wide entrance, the graves are spread out over a sunny expanse, and there are some rather impressively large mausoleums. Not our hallowed ground. Our eternal resting place, established in 1898, has been padlocked due to a spate of vandalism a few years back; to be in possession of the code to the combination lock makes me feel like I’m a member of a secret society. Our plots are well maintained but a world away from our neighbors’. It’s a narrow stretch of land. My people are buried as they lived, practically on top of each other. Even though many were extremely wealthy, they’ve re-created the shtetl of the old country and are in death as they were in life: thick as thieves.*
It’s customary to leave a stone on top of a grave as a re
minder that the person is not forgotten. It may be that the shul’s Hebrew school kids place these markers randomly. I’ll never know if it is by chance or on purpose that the headstone of one relative has a pair of dice on it and another is adorned with Mardi Gras beads.
I’ve always been wary of tribalism, but this is the tribe whose genetic markers I’ve inherited, along with a tendency toward moles, outsized earlobes, and the overshare.
In the presence of the ancestors I feel awed by the hardships they endured for a future they knew they wouldn’t live to see. The day-to-day sacrifices made during their early years in this country are simply unfathomable to me. I find it intolerable when my browser takes longer than ten seconds to reveal the voluminous pleasures of the known universe in the comfort of my living room.
Both of my parents have told me in no uncertain terms, “Whatever happens, don’t send me back to Mobile,” and maybe it’s the gumbo talking, but I lie down on the grass next to my grandparents and for the first time in my life, I want to rest in the bosom of my family.
It’s time for Neal and me to hit the road, so I drive back to Sandy’s. I’m following him down, so it’s me in my rental car and Neal in his Olds as we head out of Mobile. They are expecting forty thousand, the mayor has told the local news station, and we’re hoping to arrive before the Mardi Gras traffic hits. Neal and I haven’t seen or spoken to each other since we were kids, but we strike up the kind of intimate conversation you can have with someone who shares your people’s secrets. We talk on the phone as we drive.
“Neal, do you think it’s just geography that held our family together?”
There’s a long pause before he parses an answer: “Once the Jewish community here was able to integrate into the larger society, we could associate with people we weren’t related to. We didn’t have that luxury before.” No wonder he has a successful law practice.
A hard rain begins to fall. If it really starts coming down, that’s not going to help the crowds, and the island needs the business. There are currently twelve hundred full-time residents, with an average per capita income of $22,225, which is not much of an economic base on which to operate.
By the time we hit Rattlesnake Bayou, the rain is coming down in blinding sheets. I can’t see more than a few feet ahead of me. I pull to the side and tell Neal I need to wait it out, as my car is sliding across the road.
We’re on the corner of Hellfire and Legume. Those aren’t really the names of the streets but there are three churches on one corner—Baptist, Christian, Christian Youth—and a fruit stand with a hand-painted sign that reads Gloria’s Hot Boiled Peanuts. I have to get pictures. Dodging puddles, I hold a jacket over my head and dash across the street with my phone.
A woman in overalls, frizzy gray hair in a bun, waves me over to the stand.
“Hi, baby, I’m Gloria, what can I do for you?”
“Oh, I’m heading down to Dauphin Island for the night. I’m going to see my grandmother’s land for the first time.”
“Well, that’s just great, baby, you gonna love it. And come on back, people stop at Gloria’s from all over the world.”
“I sure will.”
We’re in low country now. That riveting first season of the HBO series True Detective, with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, was shot in Louisiana, and it looks a lot like Bayou Le Batre, the part of Alabama we’re driving through now.* There’s something dreamy about driving the flatness of the wetlands. The Dauphin Island Parkway is a two-lane highway that crosses low bridges over the Deer, the Fowl, and the Dog Rivers, but for the most part, you’re on the same level as the water, gliding across the landscape: it’s all sky and tall marsh grass. We pass through small fishing villages and spot a couple of roadside eateries that are exactly the kind of places you hope you’ll find there. I stop to take a picture of the front of Uncle Dave’s Sand Bar; the door has a large black silhouette of an absurdly curvy female painted on it, like the kind of pneumatic blow-up doll you see on mud flaps, only the lady is a mermaid. It’s the kind of place my dad would love. The menu includes red beans and rice and crawfish. There are also turnoffs leading to chemical and petroleum plants hidden behind the dense pines lining the parkway, including Exxon/Mobile and Evonik. Gulf seafood, when there is any, gets shipped all over the country and brings in the tourists, but for as much as the BP oil spill devastated the economy, six local mayors, two county commissioners, the Alabama governor, and the director of the Alabama State Docks are haggling over sixty million dollars in settlement money that they will use for environmental rehabilitation and economic stimulus. Aerospace, chemicals, and steel are the real engine of the economy down here.
Before I realize it, I’m on the bridge. Here’s how I’ve pictured the moment for the last ten years: I’m cruising in a Tesla roadster convertible. Sunlight is streaming down from the heavens, a warm gulf breeze blows, and Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” plays on the radio. In reality: the downpour has lessened to a light drizzle, but the sky is overcast and a dull gray. I’m gripping the wheel of a Chevy Spark and a local radio host is advising an acolyte that it’s okay to stop talking to his brother because he’s a homosexual, pronounced with a “T,” as in “homosextual,” as I cross the bridge to Dauphin Island.
Directly ahead is the old-fashioned water tower that went up in 1955. A hand-painted sign welcomes me to America’s Birdiest Island. It’s so quaint! Then I spot a rinky-dink carnival that’s been set up in a parking lot. It’s ten a.m. and already poundingly loud canned music is blaring, and I can understand how Dauphin Island got its current nickname: the Redneck Riviera.
The bridge takes you past the small harbor where fishing boats and the ferry from the mainland are docked and lets you off right on the main drag. Bienville Boulevard runs straight through from one side of the island to the other. Turn left on Bienville and you’re on the east end, where there are homes, an RV park, the golf course, Indian Mound Park, the Sea Lab and Estuarium, and Fort Gaines. To the right and you’re on the west end, with the schoolhouse; the public beach; the priciest vacation homes; lots that were lost to Katrina, now underwater; and a four-mile thin strip of privately owned beach.
Our lots are on the east end, the less desirable area, wouldn’t you know it. We slow down by the turnoff into Indian Mound Park, with its shell mounds and the famous “goat trees”—ancient live oaks dripping with Spanish moss that wild goats used to climb up and sleep in to evade the local gators*—but I can’t wait to see our land, so we take a second turnoff onto Hernando. There are modest homes amidst the empty lots and For Sale signs every few feet. We turn at the sign that reads Hunley Place. A second notice affixed to the post reads Dead End.
As if it weren’t ominous enough to have earned the moniker Massacre Island, the committee that formed the original trust picked street names that held significance to Southerners. Some pay homage to local tribes, the Pascagoula, the Natchez, but not our street; no, Hunley Place is named for a submarine that played a small role in the Civil War. The Hunley successfully fired upon a Union warship, becoming the first combat submarine in history to sink an enemy vessel, but the entire crew was lost in the battle. Did that stop the Confederate Army from deploying the sub again? Nope, they launched it three more times. A total of twenty-one men, every sailor who ever manned the vessel, including Horace Hunley, the designer, met a watery grave aboard the Hunley.
Neal and I pull our cars to the end of the paved road, where Hunley Place dead-ends into pine trees, waist-high ferns, and Mexican fan palms. Across the street from our lots is the one house on our block. It’s a neat, freshly painted cottage built to post-Katrina code, on high pilings. Neal steps out of his car and does a slow hand pan, like he’s dumped out a very large load of laundry in front of the smallest washing machine in the world, as if to say, “Now, what are you going to do with this mess?”
The lots are packed thick with dense foliage. This land looks muc
h the same as when my grandparents purchased it and probably not all that different from when the Mound Builders first began visiting the island. I look down and sure enough, I’m standing on oyster shells. I pocket one for me and one for my sister.
The grass on my lawn in Los Angeles, natch, is fashionably brown, so it’s a relief to be standing in such lushness. Our lots look like the set of Gilligan’s Island, only more improbable—it’s like the cartoony prehistoric landscape in Sid and Marty Krofft’s Land of the Lost.
“No way am I going in,” Neal states flatly when I suggest we make our way into the interior of the property. “It’s snake season.”
It does seem daunting, but I’m wearing tall boots and it took me ten years to make it here, so I head straight into the color green. I have to touch the ferns to make sure they’re not plastic. There’s a pathway that’s been cut through the property and I can just make out another structure toward the back of the lot. I yell to Neal, “It’s probably their meth lab!” but he’s returned to the safety of his car. I pivot, clearing underbrush with my hands, and find myself standing on scrubby sand dunes, gulf water sparkling just a few hundred yards away. It’s official: I am madly in love with our land.
Why? Why did I insist on that Cyndi Lauper hairstyle in 1983? The amount of hair spray I used in one day alone is probably responsible for a measurable amount of the depletion of the ozone layer!
Why? Why didn’t Becca and Ike buy directly on the beach? That land might be worth something to a climate-change denier with deep pockets. Still . . . We’re walking distance to the beach. I start pricing in my head: How much could it possibly cost to build a place? I could build a small cabin, or better yet, an artists’ colony! Gurwitch Grove. I imagine switching on the lights at the grand opening by plugging in the extension cord sent to me by Rebecca in 1991. The Grove will be a Gulf Coast version of the MacDowell Colony. That is, except for not having MacDowell’s thirty-five million dollars of assets, four hundred acres, and inaccessibility to the majority of the artists working in North America, and for the fact that every year from June 1 to November 30, hurricane season in the Atlantic, I’ll be holding my breath hoping that the Grove doesn’t flood. Other than that, it’s exactly like MacDowell.
Wherever You Go, There They Are Page 6
