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Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South
Pamela Petro


An enthralling, rollicking tour among the storytellers of the American Deep South.The story of the South is not finished. The southeastern states of America, the old Confederacy, bristle with storytellers who refuse to be silent. Many of the tales passed down from generation to generation to be told and re-told continue to change their shape to suit their time, stretching elastically to find new ways of retailing the People’s Truth. Travelling back and forth, from the Carolinas to Louisiana, from the Appalachians to Atlantic islands, from Virginian valleys to Florida swamps, and sitting before bewitching storytellers who tell her tales that hold her hard, Pamela Petro gathers up a fistful of history, and sieves out of it the shiny truths that these stories have been polishing over the years. Here is another America altogether, lingering on behind the façade of the ubiquitous strip-mall of anodyne, branded commerce and communication, moving to other rhythms, reaching back into the past to clutch at the shattering events that shaped it and haunt it still.













Copyright (#ulink_224990c5-bdc4-5393-915d-e031043e0f1d)

The author and the publishers of this work would like to express their gratitude to the following: Louisiana State University Press for permission to quote from Black Shawl by Kathryn Stripling Byer (Copyright © 1998 by Kathryn Stripling Byer); Copper Canyon Press for permission to quote from Deepstep Come Shining by CD. Wright; Vintage Press for permission to quote from North Toward Home by Willie Morris; J.M. Dent and Sons for permission to quote from ‘Eheu Fugaces’ from Collected Poems 1945–1990 by R.S. Thomas; and Universal Music Publishing Ltd for kind permission to quote lyrics from ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ (King/Vanzant/Rossington). Although we have tried to trace and contact all copyright holders before publication this has not been possible in every case. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary emendations at the earliest opportunity.

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First published by Flamingo 2001

Copyright © Pamela Petro 2001

Copyright disclaimer: All of the material printed in optima retains the copyright of the storytellers featured in this book.

Pamela Petro asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007292295

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007391073

Version: 2016-02-17


Dedication (#ulink_ceb86c05-e40b-58ec-a1e5-9f73ec4d20f7)

For Marguerite Itamar Harrison,

who introduced me to the American South

and the Southern Hemisphere.


Contents

Cover (#u96a38b1d-b5ac-5c50-8f24-94178243de78)

Title Page (#u059a6dc5-cbd9-58ee-9394-b15b3b2f8e59)

Copyright (#ulink_07e584f4-4832-5fa4-8e8f-acb036417bf1)

Dedication (#ulink_c8080964-5605-55a3-895e-e30310952676)

Map of the American South (#ulink_71dfeb94-a7a0-5d92-9840-8fcb5c118fa9)

The Prologue (#ulink_23948d1f-6964-5ab6-9e45-4403939591c7)

JOURNEY 1 (#ulink_ebefd322-b028-5764-ab8b-e561aa462e1d)

AKBAR’S TALE (#ulink_4d9ab19c-9b4f-5f5a-b8b1-88084a956733)

Tar Baby (#ulink_948d760f-5fbf-5361-8d49-3d1c2ef429db)

COLONEL ROD’S TALE (#ulink_ff771ca8-bb38-521b-9f11-31f6eb352a14)

The Mule Egg (#ulink_995393fb-ac92-501a-920f-52680bafb153)

VICKIE’S TALE (#ulink_3d0bdb70-5d62-5f65-a6e5-aa79e8eae285)

ROSEHILL’S TALE

The KUDZU’S TALE

Grandfather Creates Snake

ORVILLE’S TALE

Jack and the Varmints

DAVID’S TALE

Ross and Anna

JOURNEY 2

VERONICA’S TALE

A Polar Bear’s Bar-be-cue

Taily Po

KWAME’S TALE

The Story of the Girl and the Fish

ALICE’S TALE

CORNELIA’S TALE

The Plat-eye

FOUCHENA’S TALE

The Flying Africans

MINERVA’S TALE

TOM’S TALE

The Story of Lavinia Fisher

JOURNEY 3

RAY’S TALE

JOURNEY 4

OLLIE’S TALE

KATHRYN’S TALE

The Grandfather Tales

DAVID JOE’S TALE

The Peddler Man

KAREN’S TALE

Rosie and Charlie

The Tale of the Farmer’s Smart Daughter

OYO’S TALE

MITCH AND CARLA’S TALE

How My Grandma was Marked

Wicked John

The Bell Witch’s Tale

ANNIE’S TALE

Shug

My First Experience with a Flush Commode

ANGELA’S TALE

ROSE ANNE’S TALE

The Song In The Mist

Granny Griffin’s Tale

The Dead Man

Keep Reading (#u12fa6c67-14e6-5142-b02a-6eedf5829623)

Index of Stories/Storytellers

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher


Map of the American South (#ulink_04700d7a-9d15-5a62-8b38-68b25c8942a0)




(#ulink_04700d7a-9d15-5a62-8b38-68b25c8942a0)



‘In America, perhaps more than any other country, and in the South, perhaps more than any other region, we go back to our dreams and memories, hoping it remains what it was on a lazy, still summer’s day twenty years ago – and yet our sense of it is forever violated by others who see it, not as home, but as the dark side of hell.’

WILLIE MORRIS, North Toward Home


The Prologue (#ulink_cba48dac-620a-5c86-bc6a-f5404c966fe1)

Chaucer said it was in April that people long to go on pilgrimages. I was two months late; the desire didn’t come upon me until June. His Canterbury-bound pilgrims were moved ‘to seek the stranger strands/Of far-off saints, hallowed in sundry lands.’ A nice idea, but again, my journey differed in the details. No sundry lands for me. Like a contented lodger taken in by a big, unruly family, I lingered in just one place, or one household, you might say, within the United States: the American South. And I wasn’t seeking saints.

What Chaucer’s pilgrims and I have in common is that we chose stories as our waymarks. I traveled from the Atlantic seaboard across the high country of Appalachia to the Gulf Coast, listening to Southern storytellers tell me their tales. Like the Knight, the Nun and the Wife of Bath, stories served all of us – listeners and tellers alike – as compasses of understanding to high country and low, to the past and present, to ghosts and the living, to right, wrong, and finally, to the way home. Chaucer knew that stories are the surest guides on any journey. They are, in fact, journeys themselves, leading out of the graspable, sweaty present into the vanished or imaginary worlds that support it. They give depth and shading to the here and now, comment on it, contradict it, and crosshatch all that we think we know about a particular place with the shadows of lives long gone and schemes of characters who never actually breathed, but flourish in communal daydreams.

Visit the old coal-mining region of eastern Kentucky these days and you’ll see the green hills roll by like a bright, inland sea, buoying up Interstate 64 and the service industries moved down from the Northeast to take advantage of lower taxes. Then find someone with a minute or two to spare, and ask him to tell you a local tale. Maybe over a cup of coffee, or lunch of tinned fruit and cottage cheese at a diner, he’ll spin out The Black Dog, which is about a coal-mine collapse and the heroic pet who protected his master even in death. It’s a tale about community and the fear of outsiders, even outsiders offering help; about trust and the habitual acceptance of death and the forgotten bond between men and animals. This is the heritage of the upland, coal-mining South, and it’s invisible to the eye. But stories like The Black Dog are able to unearth an older Kentucky, one that still has relevance because it lives in the memories of service industry employees who drive to work on the Interstate, even though it may no longer be reflected in their daily landscapes. Travelers can’t see it, but they can hear it if they listen.

Stories provide the connective tissues of a community, a region, or even a big, overgrown household like the South. They link the skin of the present to the unseen organs of the past, binding them into a continually shapeshifting body by turns beautiful and terrible and occasionally – disturbingly – oddly reminiscent of looking into a mirror. In my case, the glass reveals a surprise: a Northern woman, a Yankee who came of age in Britain, and now lives within the gravitational pull of Boston, Massachusetts – the geographic butt of nearly every dumb joke I heard in the South (‘Hey,’ the Texaco cashier would say, as I paid for the gas I’d just pumped, ‘hear the one about the guy from Boston who bought his girlfriend a mink coat?’ Or, ‘There was this guy from Boston with a chicken …’ in which case I’d affect a Southern accent and say I was from Virginia). It’s a fair question to ask what I was doing there.

Tony Horowitz wrote in Confederates in the Attic that, ‘The South is a place. East, West, and North are nothing but directions.’ When I read that my kneejerk reaction was to agree; I couldn’t explain why, but I wanted to find out. In my previous book, a journey round the world in search of Welsh expatriates – a group for the most part anchored by a concrete sense of identity – I had written of myself, by way of contrast, ‘To be an American, I sometimes feel, is to be blank, without a nationality or language.’ It was easy for me to write that sentence. I grew up in the suburban New York area, the heartland of the American communications industry that daily beams a facsimile of itself to the world. To be Northern, for me, is simply to be American. But Southerners – at least those in print – seemed to feel very differently, branded on the soul by the geography of their birth. Why? What place-bond did they have that I didn’t? In North Toward Home, Willie Morris, a Southerner from Mississippi, wrote of himself, ‘The child … was born into certain traditions. The South was one, the old, impoverished, whipped-down South; the Lord Almighty was another; … the Negro doctor coming around back was another; the printed word; the spoken word; and all these more or less involved with doom and lost causes, and close to the Lord’s earth.’ I had no such waymarks, and however fraught the Southern identity might be, I yearned for such a bond.

Growing up in the Sixties I had learned that the South was a scary place. Whenever I tried to conjure images of the things I knew to be there – tobacco fields, sharecroppers’ shacks, flat-roofed stores on Main Streets and old-fashioned buses – I saw them in my mind’s eye through an eerie blue light. These Gothic stage sets of mine had origin in a mundane reality: the fact that most of my childhood impressions were thrown into our safe, Northern living room by my parents’ black and white television set. Unfortunately, they were usually disturbing: blurred scenes of race riots and fierce men with firehoses, dogs attacking crowds of protesters and marchers in pointy hats and white sheets. It didn’t help that the picture used to roll a lot (usually set right by a whack on the side), making the images even stranger. The South looked like the site of a haunting: a dream world, not a waking one.

I was a dramatic child, given to extravagant musings – usually involving hauntings closer to home, principally in my closet – and eventually outgrew most of my darker impressions. But scratch the surface of nearly all Yankees and there remains a prejudice against the South – an unvoiced, but understood, moral superiority. We won the Civil War because we were right. ‘Be careful down there.’ I heard that advice from more than a few Boston friends. ‘Will you be safe alone?’ ‘You know, it’s still pretty rural down there. All kinds of things go on.’

Down There. The South has always been somewhere below my home. I have a strange semantic prejudice, probably endemic to the Northern Hemisphere, that North is ‘up’ and South is ‘down’. So to go down there was to descend geographically. And in many ways, I discovered that it was also to descend metaphorically, Orpheus-style, not so much into the Underworld as a kind of national Otherworld, an ornery, land-wedded, once-and-future counterbalance to the here-and-now America of my experience, the latter made generic through self-promotion. In much of the world’s oral literature – the old stories explaining the external world that lived through a spoken chain of memory – travelers went to the Otherworld because theirs was missing something, usually some critical means of reproducing itself (hence the ceaseless abduction of magic women in Celtic lore). They were thieves, to put it bluntly, but their plunder usually saved the day.

In my case, I was missing two things: a sense of my country as a place, not simply a well-oiled machine ceaselessly turning out the future, and, on a personal level, a voice. I am a relentless daydreamer. I tell myself tales so intricate and involved that they blot out whole days of my life. Like storytelling, like travel, like madness and violence, daydreams lead out of the known world into exceptional places – some of which no one in his or her right mind wants to visit, others wondrous and wise. But unlike those other means of transportation, daydreaming is a solitary sport in which stories are hoarded rather than shared. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard asked, ‘What is the source of our first suffering?’ only to answer himself : ‘It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.’

Who better than tellers – people whose role it is to share stories – to help me make a personal voyage from silence to speech (or in my case to writing, which is little more than speech’s shadow), and thereby ditch my accumulation of fictional silence? So I went down into the Otherworld of the American South and I came back with stories. With living, listened-to tales that would be my exemplars, and that also might help me understand the open-ended, unfinished place that Civil War historian Shelby Foote says gives us ‘a sense of tragedy which the rest of the nation lacks’ – not to mention why my sense of America is incomplete without it.

I should note that I opted to plunder spoken stories, as opposed to written ones, because they are chosen for their listeners, not by them, as is the case with readers. It was better, I thought, to have my assumptions made for me by Southern storytellers than to make my own, loaded as my selections would be with outsider’s baggage. I asked each teller for a story or a tale that revealed something of the nature of life in his or her corner of the American South. (These semantics mattered, as the word ‘story’ often invokes the private realm and ‘tale’ the public; this option left tellers free to choose the space in which they felt the most comfortable, or thought was the best cipher of the South). The orality of the stories was important as well. Oral tales are a plural endeavor; they’re the products of generations and geography and weather and all the other ligaments that bind a community together. Written stories, by contrast, are idiosyncratic and individual, and it was a public sense of the South I sought, not a private one. Besides, two covers, a spine, and a few hundred pages don’t have nearly as much personality as living, cussing, dancing, spitting, smoking, eating, drinking humans. Storytellers are often their own stories. They certainly became mine.


First Journey (#ulink_5927efed-f3c1-5140-91b1-d87cf5ea144e)

R.S. THOMAS, ‘Eheu Fugaces’

Between

One story and another

What difference but in the telling

Of it?


Akbar’s Tale (#ulink_0c5ba5b8-fa9b-59e9-920c-7ac008176c3b)

I WAS WEDGED INTO THE AISLE OF THE PLANE, waiting impatiently to exit, when a fellow passenger whispered uncomfortably close to my ear, ‘They say that when you die, you have to change planes in Atlanta to get to heaven.’

Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport is the second-busiest in the United States. Although it looks like every other airport in the world, the talk there is exceptional. As soon as I arrived in the main terminal, a short, squarish security woman called me ‘baby’, which I found unaccountably comforting (as in ‘You lost, baby’, after I’d attempted to retrieve my luggage from the wrong baggage carousel; my suitcase was doing figure-of-eights on another conveyor belt on the far side of the airport). A few minutes later a very tall African-American man questioned me about cigarettes in Japanese. When I looked confused he switched with great courtesy to chewy-vowelled, Georgia English.

The South is a famously talky place. The quintessential Southerner, William Faulkner, wrote, ‘We have never got and probably will never get anywhere with music or the plastic forms. We need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage …’ Even bones talk sometimes. Even when they’re in the ground. There is a story from the South Carolina coast called The Three Pears, or The Singing Bones, about a little girl who exasperates her mother by eating pears meant for a pie. Understandably peeved, the mother chops the girl up with an axe and buries the pieces around the farmyard. The head is packed off to the onion patch, which next spring bears a ‘fine mess’ of onions. Sent to pick them, the son hears the ground singing:

Brother, Brother, Brother

Don’t pull me hair

Know mama de kill me

Bout the three li’ pear

Eventually her bones testify to everyone in the family, and the mother gets so frightened she runs into a tree and dies.

When I first encountered this story I thought, imagine what a ruckus a Southern cemetery would kick up. So many bones prattling on about this and that, that you wouldn’t be able to hear yourself think. Strangely, this old rural tale is what surfaced in my mind as I was swept out of the Atlanta airport in my new rental car, into a twelve-lane funnel of life moving at top speed. ‘Such a metaphor,’ I scribbled on a note pad, risking annihilation as truckers passed me at 80 mph, and Highways 75 and 85 blurred together in a whirlpool of relentless motion. Atlanta is a city on the move, shamelessly advertising America’s infatuation with roads and size and moneymaking right in its freeway-bound heart. No time for death here, much less quaint talking bones. If there were any, I felt sorry for them: no one would be able to hear their chants in the din.

Actually, that is not quite true. Atlanta discovered some of its own old bones a few decades ago, and they shout their message – ‘Make Money!’ – loud and clear, which is probably why the story came to mind in the first place. In the center of the city is a four-block grotto of unearthed, nineteenth-century cobblestones called Underground Atlanta, excavated and rebuilt as a tourist mecca of glitzy shops and restaurants. These skeletal streets were the foundations of the original city, begun in 1837 and first called Terminus, appropriately enough, for the railroad speculation venture that it was. The district wasn’t burned by General Sherman’s Union troops in the Civil War; it was buried to make way for a railway aqueduct. What began as a commercial venture died as one, only to be resurrected over a century later on behalf of yet another kind of commerce. It is the Atlanta way.

Those who don’t hear the call of money beneath the city chase it toward the sky. Office and shopping towers sprout in clusters throughout the metropolitan area like so many galvanized steel ladders to the future (getting from one to another means that Atlanta residents spend more time commuting in cars than any other Americans, each logging around thirty-five miles a day). It is no accident that Tom Wolfe’s recent novel, A Man in Full, hinged on the fortunes of a reckless Atlanta speculator who built a skyscraper too high for his wallet. Not so much fiction as parable, Wolfe’s story of success-run-rampant tells the tale of the city’s recent history. In the 1990s metropolitan Atlanta saw the greatest population increase in America. It currently consumes fifty acres of forest land per day to pave way for new construction. The city is, in fact, the epicenter of an economic boom so great that if the eleven states of the former Confederacy were lumped together as a separate nation, they could claim the fifth largest economy in the world (equivalent, so I’m told, to Brazil).

This is the ‘New South’ that so many speak of: socially liberal and friendly to big business – an attractive combination paid for in road congestion, air pollution, and overdevelopment. Yet Atlanta was on the make long before CNN, Coca-Cola, and the 1996 Olympics arrived. It has always been what some are complaining it has now become: a work-ethic driven, live-and-die-by-the-dollar, Northern kind of city, noisy and fast and flush with money.

Atlanta was the first stop on my first trip to the South. Over the course of the summer I planned four separate journeys, with brief rest stops at home in New England in between. I knew that my travels would generously overlap themselves and one another: because I was using storytellers rather than states or cities as my coordinates, I expected to leave a messy trail on the map, but gather a rich earful en route. On this first trip I took Georgia for my base, with forays planned both north and south of the state. The other journeys would take in the eastern seaboard, Appalachia, and ‘the Deep South,’ which included Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. More immediately, however, navigating Atlanta was my chief concern.

None of the people behind the desk at the Super 8 Motel in the heart of downtown had ever heard of Ralph David Abernathy Jr. Boulevard, which disturbed me. Abernathy was Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand man throughout the Civil Rights Movement. While nearly every town in the South with more than one stop sign has an Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, or at least an Avenue, most of the major cities have named something after Abernathy too, and it’s usually a pretty significant street. Atlanta is no exception, but it took two painters suspended on scaffolding in the motel lobby to shout directions down.

‘No one’s ever asked for Abernathy before,’ said one of the clerks.

I soon discovered why. Abernathy proved a conduit to Atlanta’s West End, an old African-American neighborhood of bungalows with sagging porches, pawn shops, fast-food restaurants, and corner stores hidden behind anti-theft grills. Conversational half-circles of chairs were set up here and there on the sidewalks but were all empty: already at 10 am steamy, near-tropical heat had a stranglehold on the day. Here, at last, was a restful nook in the city – a little ramshackle, but pleasantly quiet. I was no longer surprised it had been so hard to find: this neighborhood was the Atlanta anomaly, more Old South than New, where time was to be had in greater quantities than money.

All the bigger buildings seemed boarded-up, except one. Marooned on the shabby street was a well-kept monument to Victorian whimsy: a many-gabled Queen Anne-style cottage with yellow patterned shingles, tall chimneys, and a giddy wraparound porch that looked like a carnival train of painted wagons. This was the Wren’s Nest, former home of Joel Chandler Harris, the nineteenth-century newspaper man who gave the world Uncle Remus, and wrote down the Brer Rabbit stories.

I made my way onto the tangled grounds and a teenager named Matthew ran up and shook my hand. He lived nearby and was a summer intern at the house, now a museum. We traded confessions of childhood fears. He’d been afraid of hockey masks because the killer in Friday the Thirteenth had worn one; I’d thought pink paint could only be achieved by mixing white paint with blood, and one day insisted (on pain of sleeping elsewhere) that my room be painted blue. After these confessions we were buddies, and he showed me around the musty Victoriana: a full set of Gibbon in the library, windows shuttered against summer heat, tasseled lamps lit in the gloom, and 31 five-year-olds racing up and down the long, ‘dog trot’ hallway, the electric heels of their Nike sneakers flashing red. The five-year-olds and I had come to listen to Akbar Imhotep, a storyteller who had not yet arrived. While I waited for Akbar, I watched a slide show about Harris’ life, slightly unnerved that the rest of the audience consisted of a stuffed bear and rabbit – both dressed for church – and a fox in need of a taxidermist’s touch-up.

At thirteen, Joel Chandler Harris had been packed off to learn the newspaper trade at Turnwold, the only antebellum plantation in the South to publish its own newspaper. He had spent Saturday evenings there with the owner’s children, listening to two elderly slaves tell stories about cunning animals who lived by their wits, sometimes comically, often violently, usually successfully. These were ‘trickster’ tales that had come from Africa with the slaves, and had adapted over generations into a grand, elastic body of oral literature. Later in life, working for the Atlanta Constitution, Harris hit on the conceit of having a fictional former slave named Uncle Remus recount these stories in a newspaper column, which Harris would write in ‘darky dialect.’ Remus became such a hit that Harris collected his stories in 1880 in Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, making both their names – as well as that of the trickster hero Brer Rabbit – famous worldwide.

Harris died in 1908. In 1946 Walt Disney Pictures released Song of the South – the animated musical based on the Uncle Remus tales that brought the world the Oscar-winning song ‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, my oh my, what a wonderful day’ – which struck many as paternalistic, at best. For the first time Remus began to look like what he had been all along: a white man’s projection of the grandfatherly, accommodating, unthreatening, forgiving jester he wanted all black men to be. Though he never fell out of print, Harris fell out of favor with a thud. In the late Sixties Disney withdrew the film from circulation. Then slowly, a decade later, the tide started to turn. Harris’ ‘darky’ speech was pronounced authentic African-American dialect; had he not chosen the vessel of Uncle Remus, it was declared he would have been the father of American folklore. As it was Harris saved a body of oral tales that otherwise might have been lost. Disney released the film again in 1980 and 1986, and has made an estimated $300 million from it to date.

Akbar had arrived, damp with the same summer sweat that had turned my cornflower blue shirt cobalt under the arms. Solid, strong and rounded all at once: he was a comfortable man to look at, with close-cropped, graying hair and a goatee to match. He swept into Harris’ ‘good’ parlor (reserved for company) followed by an unruly wake of black and white children, who settled into a kind of bobbing pool at his feet. I joined them cross-legged on the floor. In his pink and black African-print shirt, flanked by a pair of drums, Akbar seized the Victorian room by its own good taste, setting off a chain reaction tremble in the drapery tassels, lace curtains, dried-flower arrangements, even a marble-top table, with his seated gyrations. A tall carving of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, arm in arm, watched from a corner.

Listening to the slide show in the dark, empty room I had been aware of a white voice condensing and interpreting Harris’ life. Now, here in his parlor, where Harris had been too pathologically shy to tell stories even to his own children, a black voice was conjuring new life from the briar patch for the children of strangers.

TAR BABY (#ulink_38ac985f-ec35-585b-97e8-9022b4bede4c)

One time, old Brer Fox and Brer Bear was out sittin’ around in the woods, and they was talkin’ about all of the things the rabbit had done to ’em, to make ’em look saaad. Old Fox, he looked at Brer Bear, he said, ‘You know what, bear? That rabbit, he always was a little bit too sassy for me. You hear me?’

Bear said, ‘Yay-yuh, I hears you Brer Fox. What we gonna do about it, huh?’

Fox says, ‘Bear, I don’t know about you, but if I ever get my hands on that cotton-pickin’ rabbit, I’m gonna take his little whiskers, and nick ’em out one by one.’

The bear says, ‘When you get through with that, hee, hee, hee, you give him to me, so I can just nookie him – Bam! Boom! – clean out cold. Let’s go get him now.’

‘No. You wait here till I get back. I gots myself an idea.’

As Akbar spoke my knees ached to stretch out, but I was penned in by cookie-scented children on all sides, effectively stuck in a kind of perceptual briar patch of my own making: a white man’s house built with money wrung from the stories of slaves, now administered by a black foundation – which, word had it, faced an uphill financial battle because of the see-sawing of Harris’ reputation – principally visited by white tourists who made their way to an off-the-beaten-track black neighborhood, where, if they were lucky, they could hear a black storyteller spin ancestral tales preserved by the intercession of a white man.

Well, old Fox, he left Bear sittin’ there. He went down the road to his house, and he got him a bucket. He got that old bucket and he went on down in the woods and he filled it up with some of that old sticky, yucky, mucky, ooey, gooey tar. And he come back out there to where the bear was waitin’ on him. When he got back he showed it to old Bear. Then he went and got some turpentine and he poured that over it, kind of softened it up a little bit. Then he went ahead and stirred it. And when he got it good and stirred up, he started scoopin’ it up and shapin’ it up, and after a while he shaped up a little old head. He worked up some shoulders, and chest, some arms and some legs, and when he got through with it, it looked just like a little bitty person. Some folks say, a little bitty baby. Y’all got any idea what he might a called it?

Kids: ‘TAR BABY.’

Well, after he got this tar baby thing all shaped up, he knew that he had to catch that old smart rabbit. And he didn’t know if this old tar-shaped thing was gonna do it. See, one thing that fox knows about, he knew that little rabbit ain’t nobody’s fool. So he figured, he gotta dress this thing up to get that old rabbit to stop and be friendly with it.

So he looked around to see what in the world he could dress it up with, and he noticed the buttons on old Bear’s jacket. He called old Bear a little closer. The old Bear got close to him and he just, Pluck! Pluck! He snatched off a couple of buttons and he stuck them on the tar baby for eyes. He got him a piece a coal and he stuck that on for a nose. Hee, hee, hee, hee! He went on and shaped up a little old mouth. And, aaah, he squeezed some ears on the side of the head. Hee hee, hee, hee, hee! Hooo-EY! He looked at all the hair on Brer Bear’s neck, and he just … aaaah!!! … stuck that on top of the tar baby’s head. Then he took his jacket off and he wrapped that around it. And to top it off, he got old bear’s straw hat, and he stuck it – eek! – right on top of the head.

Now. He knew that if that Rabbit saw this little dressed-up tar baby thing, he was gonna stop and try to be friendly. Then he and old Bear would see what would happen when the tar baby didn’t say nothin’. Now, to set the trap, they got that old dressed-up tar baby thing, and they took him out to the big road. And when they got out there, they set it up right by the side of the road, then they went out into the bushes to hide. Now, what I want y’all to know, is that right over there (Akbar points; children all look) on the left corner of the imagination, was a thing called a briar patch …

Now, that tar baby thing was just sittin’ up there just as quiet as could be. Old Fox and Bear, they out in the bushes tryin’ to hide.

Harris’ shyness prevented him from reading from his own collections in public (the public, in 1900, meant the middle-class, white public). The curious thing is that he lost his inhibitions in front of black people. There is a story about him hiding from crowds behind a railroad station while he waited for a train. There he met a group of black railway workers on their break, with whom he immediately fell into an easy-going, storytelling swap until his train came. Caution tells me this is a psychological quagmire I should leave well alone. But the fact is that Harris exclusively communicated with white audiences in print, as Uncle Remus, and with black audiences in his own voice, as himself. Did he simply take the Remus character to heart, and only feel comfortable with ‘kin,’ or did Harris have an inkling that Brer Rabbit – ‘Brer,’ by the way, means ‘Brother’ – was really a guerilla?

‘Brer Rabbit,’ wrote Robert Hemenway introducing a recent Uncle Remus collection, ‘is black from the tip of his ears to the fuzz of his tail, and he defeats his enemies with a superior intelligence growing from a total understanding of his hostile environment.’ Brer Rabbit – the incorrigible trickster – was born prey rather than predator, yet he triumphs through his wits again and again. Passed on within the confines of slavery from one African-American to another, these stories held a kernel of revolution: they conveyed strategies, allowed for vicarious victories, and promised that organized systems could be overcome by cunning. Brer Rabbit doesn’t always win – or when he does, it is often at great cost, through the sacrifice of allies or the unnecessarily cruel torture of enemies. Intelligence allows him to choose freedom by whatever means available, if he wants it badly enough: a message of hope, heartbreaking in its moral ambiguity.

Now look! Who’s comin’ down the road just as happy and sassy as can be? Was our friend Brer Rabbit. Old Rabbit, he skipped along there, and when he saw that tar baby thing he stopped. Screech! And he tried to be friendly. First thing old Rabbit said was, ‘HEY THERE!’ But what did that tar baby say? Children: ‘Nothing.’ Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaaay loooow.

Now, Rabbit say, ‘I see you!’ What’d that old tar baby say that time? Children: ‘Nothing.’ Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaay loooow.

Rabbit say, ‘Can you hear me? No, looks like you cain’t!’ Did he say anything then? No, didn’t say nothin’. Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaaay looow.

Rabbit say, ‘Wait. Now don’t you know how to SPEAK? Round here we all speaks to one another.’ Did the tar baby say anythin’? No, didn’t say NOTHIN! Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaaaay loooow.

Rabbit says, ‘Wait. Now, if you don’t take that hat off and tell me ‘Hi!’ by the time I count THREE, I’m gonna blip you on the nose!’ Was the tar baby scared? Children: ‘Noooo.’ Did he say anything? No, he didn’t say nothin’. Old Brer Fox and Brer Bear, they just laaaay loooow.

Brer Rabbit was serious. Rabbit say, ‘One. Two. Two and a half. Three! Eeeeeeh … Blip!’ (Rabbit tries to free himself) ‘Unh! Unh! Unh!’ Right there’s where things got sticky, didn’t it? Cause his fist stuck. He says, ‘Hey! Let go! Let go! Let go right now, before I hit you with this one, and … Blip! Unh! Unh! Unh!.’ That one stuck. He says, ‘Hey! Let go! Let go! Let go before I kick the natural stuffin’ outta you! And, Unh! Unh! Unh!’ Did any stuffin’ come outta that tar baby? Children (sounding superior): ‘Nooo.’ ‘Let go! Let go! Let go! Let go right now, before I butt you with my head. And … Blip! Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah!’ I think we know what happened to the head, now don’t we?

Well, old Rabbit looked up and he was stuck completely to the tar baby. Old Fox and Bear, they peek out of the bushes and see that old Rabbit was stuck. They eased up behind him and old Brer Fox, he say, Mornin’, Brer Rabbit, don’t you look kinda stuck up this mornin’? Ha, ha, ha! We’ve been lyin’ here for a mighty long time, but we got ya now. This is gonna be the last day that you see!

Bear looked at him and said, Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, I’m gonna nuggie yo’ head clean off.

Fox say, Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Quick! We gotta make him suffer. Let’s start us up a FIRE. Let it get good and hot, drop old Rabbit in it and let him BAR-BEEE-CUE for a while.

Well now, Brer Rabbit, you know he was stuck. But two things about this Brer Rabbit I want us to never forget. Number one, even though he was stuck, he didn’t lose his head. And number two, he never ever, never ever, never ever gave up. And out of the corner of his eye he saw that old thorny briar patch, and … Bing bing bing bing! BING! What’ja think happened? Children: ‘He had an idea!’ He had an idea. He knew what to say to old Fox and Bear, didn’t he? He say, Brer Fox, I don’t care what you do to me. Just don’t fling me into that, ah, briar patch. Go ahead, BAR-beee-cue me, just don’t fling me in that, uh, briar patch …

Bear say, Wait a minute, wait a minute. If we start a fire, we gotta make sure it don’t get outta hand. Ain’t that true? Won’t you let me knock that here rabbit head off now?

Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I want to hear him holler! I’m gonna haaaang you rabbit. Brer Rabbit say, Oh hang me, Brer Fox, hang me, please hang me, ooh please, don’t fling me in the, briar patch!

Hanging you a bit too nice a thing to do. Ought to just drag you down to the creek and drown you, Brer Rabbit. Old Rabbit say, drown me, Brer Fox. Won’t you just drown me? Oh please, please, just don’t fling me in the briar patch!

Think about it now. Think. What’s the worst thing I could do to a rabbit? Uh! I know. I’m gonna get my knife, then I’m just gonna peeeeeel you hide off right here. Old Rabbit say, Skin me, Brer Fox, pull mah eyes out, pull mah ears out by the roots, cut mah legs off! Boo hoo hoo hoo! Oh please, don’t fling me in the BRIAR PATCH!!

Well, after old Rabbit went on and on and on and on about not flinging him in the briar patch, old Fox looked over there to see what in the world he was talkin’ about. Ah ha! He saw him some thorns stickin’ up and twistin’ round every which-a-way, and he figured the worst thing he could do to that rabbit would be to fling him where he didn’t want to go. Do y’all think that was a good idea? Most of children: ‘Yes!’ The rest of them, ‘No!’

OK, that’s about seventy-five – twenty-five here. Let’s see what we got?

Fox grabbed him, and he gave him a great big old swing, and he just fling him, Woooooooooooooooeeeee! Ow!! Oooo! Ow! Well, when old Rabbit fell into the briars, he did so much screamin’ and hollerin’ and carryin’ on, that old Fox and Bear thought he was just about dead. And they all commenced to celebrating. But they couldn’t celebrate long. Um un, um un, um un.

After a while, way up on the hill, up popped old Rabbit. And when Rabbit come up out of the briars, he had a little piece of one of em, that he was using to comb the rest of the tar outta his hair. And he had to look back. He saw old Fox and Bear back there, shakin’ their fists and stompin’ and carryin’ on. Old Rabbit hollered back like this, Brer Fox! Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee! Didn’t I tell you not to fling me in the briar patch? Hee, hee, hee hee, hee! I was bred and born in the BRIAR PATCH! Didn’t you know I was born and bred in the BRIAR PATCH? And that old Rabbit skipped off to live almost happily ever after.

Akbar, the heat and I sat together in an improvised little amphitheater behind the Wren’s Nest. Beneath an canopy of mature trees, the late morning still smelled new as the vegetable scent of condensation evaporated slowly and sweetly. He told me that he’d got his start as a storyteller, by working as a travelling puppeteer. He used to set up a special suitcase as a stage from which he would manipulate his puppets. One day in the middle of a performance the legs he had rigged on the case had fallen off, and he wound up having to tell the story he’d intended to perform. And that was that.

I asked him if Atlanta ever played a role in his tales. ‘Not really,’ said Akbar, ‘but it keeps me from telling some.’ He explained that he was in the process of learning a new story called The Man Who Knew Too Much. I thought he meant the Hitchcock movie, but he was referring to an African tale that had been adapted into a short story by Julius Lester. Akbar condensed it for me. A woman works daily in the field, stopping now and then to nurse her baby. One day as she’s nursing an eagle appears, watching her closely. The next day after she’s finished nursing she leaves the baby in the shade of a large tree; the eagle reappears and to her horror heads straight for the child. But instead of killing him, the eagle strokes the boy gently with his wing. The woman is amazed, and tells her husband. He refuses to believe in the kindness of eagles, claiming he knows their ways, but agrees to accompany the woman the following day. When the eagle comes and begins stroking the baby, the man shoots an arrow at the bird, who quickly moves away. The arrow kills his son instead, and the eagle tells the man, ‘You are responsible. Now all men on earth will mistrust each other and fight because of you. Because you knew too much.’

How nice to know that in other cultures Eve was a man. I secretly felt sorry for the husband.

‘I told that story to a men’s group, and man, they hated it. Their reaction was, “Well, the husband did probably know more about eagles than the wife.” Can you believe that? They refused to put any blame on the guy. It got to be real sexist.’ Akbar went on to explain that there had lately been a rash of baby killings in Atlanta, which was why he felt uncomfortable telling the tale right now. ‘A story’s only half the equation,’ he said. ‘The context you tell it in makes all the difference, twists the meaning. Ignore the context and you’re being irresponsible. Look, if I were to tell that story in this city right now, who knows what message people would hear. I don’t even know what it means. The context,’ reiterated Akbar Imhotep, in Joel Chandler Harris’ garden, ‘is everything.’

When a billboard on the way to Cyclorama, just south of downtown Atlanta, told me ‘Jesus Was A Vegetarian’, I immediately resolved to keep a record of interesting highway signage.

During the morning I had become infatuated with circuitousness: everything I had encountered at the Wren’s Nest seemed to wind back up on itself. So I decided to conclude the day with a visit to Cyclorama. It seemed fitting to visit a narrative where the end literally merged with the beginning.

Cyclorama is billed as the world’s largest painting. It is fifty feet wide by nine hundred feet long, stretched on a circular canvas in the middle of which is a small, rotating auditorium. All of this is housed in a rather grand building in Grant Park, a leafy spot in Southeast Atlanta where everyone else seemed intent on going to the zoo. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cycloramas were authentic marvels. When they came to town with a circus – which is how this one wound up in Atlanta – people would come out in droves and spin around while the painting stood still: motion pictures with the onus of motion on the viewer. Once there were three hundred cycloramas cluttering the earth, now there are only twenty. This one, which was inexplicably painted by a troupe of Polish and German immigrants in the 1880s, depicts a bloody day (22 July 1864) in the Battle of Atlanta.

I crawled up into the rotating auditorium and immediately felt seasick. I fixed my eyes on a railing at the bottom and watched it move against the stationary backdrop of what looked like paint-by-numbers carnage. It was like being on board ship, except that Sherman’s army was standing in for the sea, the men’s blue jackets far outnumbering the Rebels’ nobly tattered gray.

‘Now, the blue is the Union, the gray is the Confederacy,’ explained a mother to her two little boys – my only cyclomates, but a welcome step up from stuffed animals. ‘Oh good,’ said one child, ‘we’re the gray.’

I guess I over-extended my metaphor. Cyclorama was pretty corny. The foreground was strewn with bushes and mannequins to lull us into seeing three-dimensionality (it didn’t work). When we stopped spinning I jumped out of my seat to leave, only to find we had completed just one of two revolutions. A voice on the loudspeaker told me to sit down. This time around – only because a guide pointed it out – I noticed something. Amongst the mayhem of bayonets and dying soldiers (one of whom had been touched up to look like Clark Gable) and dead horses and smoking ruins – imagine sixteen thousand feet of this – was one woman and one African-American man.

Now I happen to know that amid the six hundred and twenty-five soldiers and five hundred and five animals in the Bayeux Tapestry there are only two women, one of whom has a name: an embroidered nun named Aelthgyva, who appears to have done something untoward with a monk. Aelthgyva is far more interesting than the red blur in a dress depicted in Cyclorama. But having just learned that two hundred thousand black soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War in 1864 and ‘65, the inclusion of one token black man seemed grudging, to say the least.

The problem with Cyclorama, and with circular orbits in general, is that they confuse the eye, and the eye confuses the mind. Is the painting spinning around us, or are we turning while the painting stands still? This afternoon we were the ones in motion, but it didn’t seem so; we – the two little blond boys, their mother, and I – were nestled securely in the center of our universe, just as the Polish and German artists had been. What we thought we saw revolving around us was just a reflection of our story, not history.

I left Cyclorama still awaiting its Copernicus.


Colonel Rod’s Tale (#ulink_a788d862-c384-56b9-bc4e-907a880f867b)

I HAD ALL DAY TO GET FROM CENTRAL GEORGIA, where I had stayed at a Budget Inn after breaking out of Atlanta’s endless spaghetti junctions, to Hernando, Florida: a more or less straight journey of about four hundred miles. The air conditioner at the motel had tirelessly pumped a bad smell into the room (decaying rodent? dead body? sewage?), so after what would become my standard breakfast of bad coffee with non-dairy cream and a Krispy Kreme donut, I thankfully took to the road.

There wasn’t much difference between the Interstate and the secondary highways. The latter threaded through cultivated fields, watermelon patches, a few pecan orchards, pine groves baked to the scent of turpentine, and towns so small that only the change in speed limit – from 55 mph to 35 – affirmed their existence. Carwashes did a big business here in this dusty, rural world. I noticed that most of the large, formerly fine houses were in ruins; the smaller ones, without exception, brokered with the street through either open or screened-in front porches. (The architectural record in southern Georgia, and, as I was later to discover, much of the South, tells a tale of uneven wealth. The older housing stock – pre 1930, at a guess – consists on one hand of large, multistory homes and mansions, and, on the other, of small, one-level shacks and bungalows. Most middle-size, middle-income homes are post Second World War) When I stopped by the roadside to drink a Coke, the metal on my sunglasses holder got so hot in the sun it actually burned my skin.

Interstate 75, by way of contrast, offered cultivated fields, watermelon patches, a few pecan orchards, pine groves – and lots of signs. ‘Shelled Pecans!’ ‘We Bare All! Couples Welcome!’ (that from an ‘adult’ bar that seemed to have spent a fortune on advertising). ‘Jesus is Lord at the World Famous Catfish House. All You Can Eat!’ And, from a mysterious series of black billboards with white lettering, ‘You Think It’s Hot Here? – God.’

I tried to fill in the blanks between signs – together they held the makings of a spanking tale of sin and redemption – but my attention was ultimately claimed by the road itself. The Southern sun nearly beat the blackness out of the blacktop. It shone so hard on the macadam that every fleck of quartz or mica in the road surface glinted white, tinting the Interstate the glittering, grainy silver-gray of an old-fashioned movie screen. My parents had a screen like that when I was a child, on which they had shown slides for family entertainment on Sunday evenings. Now, from my mind’s eye, I projected the same images I’d once seen in our living-room onto Route 75: my grandmother wearing a visor hat, cotton dress blowing in the wind, squinting against the sun; my brother looking uncomfortable in a pair of tight Hawaiian shorts; me posing like Marilyn Monroe with a tiny fish I’d caught. All of us silent and still on a distant Northern beach.

Or maybe not so still. In my memory the family is gathered watching slides when – inevitably – one of the screen images waves to us. My mother nudges me and says, ‘There! Did you see? Wave back to yourself!’ And we all laugh and wait for the next small miracle to occur. It’s like a household secret, these ghosts of our living selves left behind to carry on being young and warm and on holiday, not just in memory but in the photographic record. My parents tell me this never happened. ‘You must have been dreaming,’ said my father. I don’t know. If it were a dream, wouldn’t the slides have spoken as well? In my memory bank of images, we are always silent.

I arrived in Ocala, Florida at the same time as a tornado warning. When I pulled off the Interstate the sky looked like bruised peaches, bluish-gray and yellow all at once.

Here, in the United States, the Road is supposed to be one of the big stories: the seduction of motion, of progress, of speeding away from the past. But today I felt the same as I did leaving the Atlanta airport – that the highway pulled me in and knocked the breath out of me, like an undertow with the force of a hundred oceans, sucking me into motion and away from all the stories nesting in the countryside. Maybe that’s because the last time I encountered the world-at-rest it was sunny and dusty and utilitarian. Now, leaving the same road, I found myself inside an extravagant purple storm that tugged at the Spanish moss on Ocala’s old trees. The pictures didn’t connect, and I wondered at the glue that held them together.

Ocala looked like a Southern town in drag. Everything there was exaggerated: the steamy heat; the campy Victoriana of the wood-frame houses; the trees! The trees were downright Gothic. Magnolias, palms, and best of all, live-oaks. The latter, characteristically shorn of fussy, incidental twigs, always look gnarled and old; dripping with Spanish moss they were biblical. It was as if rows of Old Testament prophets lined the side streets, waiting to convert paper boys and joggers.

As I headed southeast Ocala gave out onto a commercial strip, as tawdry and generic as any in America. This soon petered out into aluminum-sided, pastel-colored retirement villages, then horse farms, then swamps, and finally, a down-at-heel holiday community on a lakeshore, planted with a sign that read ‘Hernando’. I asked a woman in a beauty parlor which of the three motels I should stay in. ‘Go for the Mid-Florida Motel and Trailer Park,’ she concluded. I pictured the ranch-style units I’d just seen down the road behind a parking lot of slimy green puddles, shadowed by clumps of Spanish moss. ‘I might stay there if I had to. I wouldn’t set foot in the others.’

I had just time to take a cold shower – ringing Colonel Rod for directions from an outdoor pay phone had given me a prickly heat rash – before finding my way out of town through darkening, uninhabited stretches of piney outback to his large, Spanish-style ranch house. I had been eager to talk to a well-known Atlanta storyteller named Chuck Larkin: a real character, by all accounts. But Chuck was unavailable, so he gave me Colonel Rod’s name, and told me he was ‘a good ol’ swamp boy, and a helluva storyteller.’ I imagined a gruff military man with gruff military stories. One who would spurn white panama hats, Hawaiian shirts, and small poodles with jeweled collars. But these were the attributes of the person who answered to Colonel Rod.

‘Colonel Rod Hendrick of the Cracker Brigade, at your service, ma’am,’ he said.

He led me into a spacious, open-plan home with the world’s largest television screen in one corner. When we stood in front of it, the TV characters’ heads were three times bigger than our own. In his study, Colonel Rod sat down beneath a stuffed raccoon and a model airplane, locked me with his turquoise eyes, and said in a dreamy voice, ‘Once upon a time, on the far side of the moon …’ he paused, looked around, and winked, ‘these two crackers went into a bar … Ha! Gotcha! I hate that kind of vomity storytelling, don’t you?’

Colonel Rod explained that a local reporter had given him the nickname ‘Colonel.’ He was actually a retired salesman from Miami, who had also been a cop and happened to be a ‘pedigreed Florida cracker’.

‘I grew up dirt poor, south of Miami. You know what a cracker is, girl?’

I grimaced in half-knowledge. In Tom Wolfe’s novel crackers had been Georgia good old boys.

‘You’re eatin’ grits for breakfast; you know a couple a guys named Skeeter or Gator; you’re huntin’ white tail deer with a six-beer handicap; then you’re a cracker. Used to be a derogatory term, you know, like Redneck, or White Trash. But not anymore.’

Colonel Rod gave me an essay he’d written on Florida Crackers, which put the derivation of the term down to the cracking sound pioneers made with bull whips as they rounded up cattle from the palmetto swamps. These pioneers, Colonel Rod added, had headed south ‘to get away from Yankee oppression’ after the Civil War.

‘Now I’m a storyteller. Say the American Tobacco Company has a conference. I’m the entertainment. I get $500 a gig, and a dollar a mile for transportation. I also teach these workshops in storytelling. There was a teacher who took one of them. Afterward, every Friday afternoon, she held a storytelling hour … the kids were taking to it like, I don’t know, a fish to water or something like that. They loved it.’

‘That’s really great,’ I said politely.

‘Well, she called me later and told me about a little boy in her class called Leon, who is a fantastic storyteller. She said, “He can tell tales, and he tells them with a gift like Mark Twain. He’s fantastic. But what I think is, that he’s lost touch with reality. Now Leon is just lying. And I’ve created a monster. What should I do?”’

When Colonel Rod got to the part about Leon his voice changed. He started tugging on his vowels as if they were made of spandex, stretching out ‘lying’ to sound like ‘li-on’. It occurred to me that a story might have started without my knowledge. I was a little confused until he said he’d advised the teacher to tell Leon the silliest, most outlandish, ‘most lyinist’ story she could think of–‘maybe that will break him out of it.’ Then I knew I was right.

Colonel Rod held my eyes to his, almost without blinking; my peripheral vision caught a ceiling fan spinning directly above his head, like a whirligig hat. He was saying that the teacher could see Leon was getting worse. So she told him a tall tale about being attacked by an Alaskan bear on the way to school, on the corner of Alligator Avenue and Center Street. A little black-and-white dog had killed the bear and saved her.

‘Leon,’ Colonel Rod concluded, ‘just sat there goggle-eyed. Big-eyed as a bug. You got to believe me. And the teacher looked over and said, “Now Leon, do you believe that story?”

And Leon said, “Yes ma’am. That’s my dog.”’

Colonel Rod was on a storytelling jag. He’d told me he’d numbered his stories one through twenty-one as a fail-safe mnemonic for when he’s performing. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘Quick: what’s number seventeen?’

‘A cracker in a bus station!’ he roared, and he was off.

After dinner – a healthy, low-fat meal fixed by his wife Brenda – Colonel Rod had led me through a shoulder-sized gap in the electric cattle fence surrounding his house to a replica of an old Florida Keys fishing shack that he’d built out back. It looked like the retreat of a degenerate boy scout: kerosene lamps for atmosphere, even though it was wired for electricity; pots and pans hanging from the ceiling; two sets of bunk beds; photographs of people who had caught big fish; a makeshift bar stocked with gin and bourbon; old Southern state flags emblazoned with the stars and bars of the Confederacy (all since replaced as politically incorrect, except that of South Carolina, which is the subject of a bitter debate).

A violent thunderstorm had trapped us in the shack and Brenda in the house with our cappuccinos. ‘This,’ Colonel Rod had said, beaming, ‘is where friends of mine come and turn the monkey loose. Y’know, guys getting together to get drunk and fart.’

As the storm worked itself into a full gale so did Colonel Rod. I could feel him shrewdly calculating audience response – in this case, a captive audience of just one – judging if he had succeeded in his two favorite, occasionally incompatible, aims: to startle and to please. As I betrayed only pleasure (politeness is like a hormonal imbalance with me – I can’t help it), he got a little reckless. Not only did he slip into what he called his ‘cussin’ stories’, but others that took tired, if belligerent, pot-shots at women, gays, and a variety of other minorities. On cops: ‘There are no policemen left. Only social workers.’ On blacks: why there should be highway signs for exiting white drivers in parts of Miami that read, ‘Beware: Ghetto ahead.’ But then he added, ‘I guess the same goes for them, too. Man, I wouldn’t want to be a black guy made a wrong turn in South Boston.’

Colonel Rod was a storyteller caught between personae – Florida cracker or worldly businessman? – in the presence of a fastidiously indulgent listener who refused to offer directional signals. He veered all over the place, from cracker jokes to a troubling tale inspired by a Flannery O’Connor short story, and I liked him for having humility enough to lay bare the lifeline between storyteller and audience – or perhaps he just couldn’t help himself. During a long tale about a pulpwood truck driver and a psychiatrist, I decided that I would trust Colonel Rod with my life, but never my feelings.

After an hour and a half the storm grew worse, and I got too tired to consider anything but the sounds coming out of his mouth.

THE MULE EGG (#ulink_98de1805-e894-56ec-8903-72ade58ca661)

It was the Depression. Everybody was broke all over the whole country. And in Atlanta, Georgia, there were two city slickers up there, worked downtown, lived in an apartment downtown, had never been anywhere except downtown. All they knew was asphalt and concrete. Well, when the Depression slammed in here, both of them lost their jobs. So they decided – they wasn’t too smart, but they was good old boys – they decided they was gonna pool their money, come to Florida and go farming. Now I wouldn’t think that was too smart, but they was industrious. So they bought an old black Model A truck, and here they come south with this Model A truck, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.

They was comin’ down Highway 27, which was a gravel road in them days, and they got just south of Ocala, and they seen a sign nailed to a live oak tree, and the sign said, ‘Plough Mule For Sale.’ Old Slem was driving the truck, and he said to his partner Clem, ‘Look at that, Clem! I forgot about that! We got to have us a plough mule.’ Said, ‘We can’t farm without a mule. Pull in there, we’ll see what that guy wants for it.’

So they pulled in this farmyard, and the guy was sittin’ there. He said, ‘Get on out, boys, get on down, come on in.’ And he said, ‘Sir, sir, we saw your sign back there says you got a plough mule for sale.’

Farmer said, ‘That’s right, and he’s a good ‘un too, son.’ Clem said, ‘Well, we want to buy a mule for farming. We’re from Atlanta.’ So the farmer heard opportunity knocking right away, see. He recognized these guys being city slickers. They said, ‘What do you want for that mule, sir?’ Farmer said, ‘I want two hundred dollars for it.’

TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS? They couldn’t believe it. Their eyes was bulging. ‘We just come from Atlanta wantin’ to be farmers. But two hundred dollars? We can’t afford that.’ Now I’m going to give you a little history here. During the depression, you could buy a ridin’ horse for five or ten dollars, but a trained, young pack mule was running a hundred seventy-five, two hundred dollars. Worked just like a tractor. Anyway, Clem said, ‘No, we just quit our jobs, we can’t afford that.’ Farmer said, ‘Well, how much money you boys got between you then?’ They said, ‘We ain’t got but twenty-five dollars.’

Well, the farmer said, ‘Boys’ – he had been peddling them old central Florida watermelons from his watermelon patch, and he had two of them left over, on a wagon over there where he’d been sellin’ em, and he was just fixin’ to bust ’em up because they was rotten, you know, and throw em over the fence and feed em to his cows – he said, ‘Boys, see them two green things over there on that wagon?’ They said, ‘Yessir.’ He said, ‘Do you know what they are?’ They said, ‘No sir, we don’t.’ He said, ‘Boys, you just happen to be looking at two of the finest mule eggs in the state of Florida, right there.’ They said, ‘Mule eggs? Never heard of such a thing.’

The storm was directly overhead at this point and the shack was shaking. Thunder followed lightning before I could start to count the seconds. About the time Colonel Rod pronounced the words ‘mule eggs,’ a lightning bolt lit up the window behind him, stinging my eyes with an instant image of cross-hatched tree branches across a background of seared white shards. I thought incongruously of the German Expressionists, and felt anxious.

The farmer said, ‘You’re lookin’ at two of the finest mule eggs in Florida. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll let you have one of them mule eggs for five dollars.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what else I’m going to do. I’ll get some straw out of the barn, and I’ll make you a nest up the back of your truck. You put that mule egg in there, you throw a blanket or a jacket over it, keep it warm, and in about two weeks it’ll hatch out, and you’ll have yourselves your very own baby mule. It’ll be gentle as a housecat, and you’ll have a fine mule there.’

‘Boy, luck is on our side,’ said Clem and Slem. So he got the straw, and he made this big old nest, and they put that watermelon, I mean, ah, mule egg, up in there, and they put a blanket on it and paid the farmer, and they took off down Highway 27, comin’ south. And now I live in that part of the country. A hilly part. And they come to Clairmont, Florida. Now Clairmont is in a valley. A great big hill goes down in there, and up out the other side. Well these old boys wasn’t too smart. Here they come, they come down into Clairmont, and they did alright then, but when they started out the other side, the mule egg went, dumpty, dump, dump, dump, and it fell out in the middle of the road and – splat! – busted all to pieces. Big old pile of rotten red mess. And you know how them swamp rabbits get on the side of the road, late in the evenin’? Well, it was late in the evening, and there was a swamp rabbit standing there, and it spooked him when that watermelon hit the road, and he jumped out and got right in the middle of that red mess.

Well these two boys slammed on the brakes. Pulled over to the side of the road and jumped out, and looked back, and there sat that rabbit right in the middle of that mule egg. They said, ‘Look, he’s alive! He survived it! He’s OK! Get him! Catch him, catch him!’ And boy, they took off after this baby mule. They had five dollars tied up in him. They yelled, ‘Catch him, catch him!’

Well that old rabbit took off. He went through a briar patch, under a barbed wire fence. They chased him about a half a mile or so and they got in this kind of shape – Colonel Rod gasps like he’s dying – they just couldn’t even breathe. They couldn’t go another step. And as I said, old Clem was the smarter of the two, he was hanging on a tree, and Slem was sittin’ on a log. And Clem said, ‘Let him go, son, let him go. Just let him go. I don’t believe I want to plough that fast no-how.’

I desperately had to go to the bathroom. The storm had stopped abruptly, and Colonel Rod offered to direct me through the dark, dripping thicket of the backyard to his reproduction outhouse (also wired for light). When I got up to leave the shack, I noticed that behind me all along had been a framed photo of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., shaking hands. ‘One of my favorite possessions,’ said the Colonel, sounding like he meant it.

Back at the Mid-Florida Motel, around midnight, I sat cross-legged on my bed taking notes, thinking for some reason of Cyclorama. I had an uncanny sensation of motion. All of a sudden I realized that the floor was moving. I put my glasses on and a dozen immense, scuttling cockroaches resolved into focus. Having just read Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy, his saga of traipsing through Congo with God knows how many parasites attached, I tried not to panic. But then again, this wasn’t Congo, and I had a choice. I grimly packed my things and slept – or rather lay awake all night listening to rain pelt the roof – in the back seat of the car.

The next morning I remembered I was actually in Florida, and decided to take a detour to the coast. Central Florida – actually the northwestern part of peninsular Florida – has no big hotels, no crowds, no Disney characters. The accents are rural, the land more inclined to scrub forest than cultivation or pasture. This may have been the Sunshine State, but I wasn’t in the playground part. It was still the South. And it actually looked like rain.

Colonel Rod’s cracker shacks dotted the landscape: tiny clapboard houses, often raised on cinderblocks to avoid flooding, leaning heavily on makeshift front porches. They were almost always half-hidden by shade trees, rarely exposed to the sun. I imagined dark rooms inside and mildew, windows democratically open to both breezes and mosquitoes in equal measure. In this climate it is air-conditioning that draws a line between real poverty and the lower rungs of middle-class comfort. Without artificial coolants, people still have to stop what they’re doing and sit in the shade, as they have for generations, and wait to cool off, and tell each other stories while the sweat dries (or maybe these days they just sit inside and watch TV). The majority of Southern stories aren’t about poverty any more than they are about heat or shade. They’re simply one by-product of a lifestyle that has either vanished – which is why tale-telling is so often associated with the elderly – or that we now call ‘poor.’

The sky began chucking it down. An unrelenting series of fierce rain squalls, really like thimble-sized monsoons, belted the car as I drove toward a small town on the West Coast called Cedar Key. Whenever one hit I was nearly blinded for about seven nerve-wracking minutes, and had to inch along Highway 19 at 25 mph; when it let up the windscreen revealed an unbroken flatness grown over in stumpy, grayish-brown scrub.

Cedar Key is marooned three miles out in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of a series of low bridges. It is a small town – only around seven hundred residents in summer – given over to dissolute, late nineteenth-century buildings with peeling paint and sagging clapboards, columns staggering to support second-story porches. Palm trees and hand-lettered signs advertising bait and cold beer cheered the place up in a spirit of easy-going unconcern, rather than neglect. I drove the two blocks separating the last bridge from the Gulf and parked near the harbor. The sky over the water was the color of pigeons, smudged gray and white, and sheet lightning flashed offshore. The air was so heavy that the smell of beer from nearby bars hung in it like a net.

I wandered into one and sat next to an old man who was simultaneously smoking, drinking a Bud, and eating a Fudgesickle. He told me he was hiding out from the cancer that a doctor said was going to get him. I looked alarmed and he laughed. ‘Better wait for it in a bar than at home watching TV.’ In the next breath he said that a fishing ban had killed the commercial fishing industry in Cedar Key about five years ago, and now clamming was the big thing.

‘What do you get?’ I asked. ‘Cherrystones?’

His glance at me was the fastest I’d seen any part of him move. ‘Aw, you must be from Boston or somewheres up North, am I right? Nobody says cherrystones ‘round here.’

The bartender looked from me to the beer I had ordered (Newcastle Brown Ale), seemed to satisfy some internal inkling, then lost interest and returned to her phone call. ‘Storm’s knocked the power out at my mom’s, down by Rosewood,’ she yelled to someone in the kitchen. I’d seen the Rosewood highway sign on the road to Cedar Key, but it had seemed to apply only to empty acres of scrub forest. Beside it stood a hand-painted placard that read ‘Rosewood Memorial.’

Cedar Key relies on its wonderfully degenerate buildings to set the disreputable, rum-running mood of the place (residents did actually run guns and booze during the Civil War). Because Rosewood had no buildings, however, I had to call Dick Newman, who works in African-American Studies at Harvard, to find out why the name stirred an uneasy association with violence deep in my memory. He told me that in 1922 a white woman had accused a black man from Rosewood – a predominantly black town – of raping her (her accusation was reputedly false, covering up an affair). White vigilantes from the surrounding area retaliated by burning every structure in Rosewood bar one, a farmhouse owned by a white man, and massacred every black resident they found. With the help of the spared white farmer, the mothers saved some of their children by hiding them in a well on the farm property. A grand jury subsequently looked into the matter, but never brought any charges, and the town ceased to exist in all but name.

It had occurred to me earlier that morning, as I was driving through the rain, that while stories ideally link us to the past and to other cultures and traditions, opening the world wider, storytelling itself can sometimes be a way of narrowing experience, of not hearing. To tell (and tell and tell and tell) is not to listen. The teller effectively becomes like a television set, capable of disseminating stories but not of taking them in. Colonel Rod’s barrage of tales the night before had effectively kept me and my disruptive, feminist opinions at bay; I don’t think that shutting me up was his intent, but it had that effect. Like violence, which strips stories from the landscape or buries them with its victims, storytelling can occasionally be a reactionary device, a reflex of the fearful that may be wielded like a defensive – and now and then a deadly – weapon.

I drove out of Cedar Key in a dispirited mood, back past the town that was only a story, and retraced my route north toward Georgia.




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