by William Boyd
“Stars at Tallapoosa”
It turned out to be a 150-mile detour. Shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon I saw the first sign. “Welcome to Tallapoosa.” It had an unreal familiarity: Tallapoosa revisited, almost. Then there was another sign. “Lions Club of Tallapoosa welcomes you. Meets every Thursday at Tally Mt. Country Club.” And then, a little way up the road, “Tallapoosa city limit. Welcome. City of Tallapoosa. Please obey all ordinances. Population 2,869. Drive carefully.” The familiarity, I realized, was a poetic one: “Stars at Tallapoosa” by Wallace Stevens:
The lines are straight and swift between the stars.
The night is not the cradle that they cry,
The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.
The lines are much too dark and much too sharp.
The mind herein attains simplicity.
There is no moon, on single, silvered leaf.
The body is no body to be seen
But is an eye that studies its black lid.
“Stars at Tallapoosa” was published in Wallace Stevens’s first collection of poems, Harmonium, in 1923. It’s a perfect example of how he manages to be at once opaque and entrancing. I had read the poem many times and for some reason, when I knew I was going to the South, I looked up Tallapoosa on my Rand McNally road atlas and was disappointed to discover that it was on the Alabama-Georgia border, some considerable distance away from the rough circle of contacts that was going to take me from Atlanta to Augusta, to Charleston, South Carolina, Beaufort, Savannah and back to Atlanta again. My disappointment was mitigated by the consideration that, if I didn’t ever get to Tallapoosa, then at least it could be preserved intact in my imagination; that the Tallapoosa Stevens’s poem had conjured up for me—the quintessential hick town, but also somehow magic and potent—would never be undermined by reality.
To drive from Savannah to Atlanta you take Interstate 16. It speeds you directly through the rather monotonous countryside that prevails in this corner of Georgia, monotonous because all the trees seem to be of one type—a rather tough-looking average-sized pine. The only relief from this homogeneous landscape comes with each junction or intersection. Here there are gathered the fast-food franchises, the twenty-four-hour supermarkets, the motels, the gas stations. Steak ‘n’ Ale, Starvin’ Marvin, Econo-Lodge, Scottish Inns (the cheapest), Bi-Lo, Wife-Saver, Wife’s Nite Off. These huge plastic signs tower high over the countryside, a hundred feet tall, like giant cocktail-stirrers stuck in the earth.
In the big car, a chill cell thanks to the air-conditioning, there’s nothing to do apart from listen to the radio. Every town has its radio station. You pass them from time to time, a concrete blockhouse below a teetering aerial. I search the wavebands, trying to escape the plangent moralizing of country and western music, but in vain. If the station isn’t broadcasting keening guitars and sobbing voices telling of adultery, divorce, alcoholism, mental and physical cruelty, then it’s pumping out religious homilies, sermons and hymns interspersed with advertisements for waterproof Bibles “for poolside reading” or the Bible on tape “while you’re travelling, working or relaxing at home.”
Macon, Georgia, marks the halfway stage. After the pine forest I was looking forward to Macon—reputedly a grim, featureless industrial town—but Interstate 16 whisked me around it promptly. I was due in Atlanta that evening but had wildly overestimated how long it would take me to get there. By late morning I found I’d covered most of the ground and needed to kill some time. I turned off the highway and drove to a small town called Jackson.
Jackson was nondescript, a typical long, thin town that straggled along the road for a mile or so. A red sandstone courthouse stood in the middle. A notice warned that “anyone using this building as a comfort station will be prosecuted.” Outside was a cement statue of a soldier. “Our Confederate Heroes,” it said on the plinth.
I went into a cafe, ordered a coke and a doughnut and wondered what to do for the rest of the day. I was meandering through the South—Georgia and South Carolina—looking for hick towns, one-horse towns off the beaten track with no touristic allure. I had seen dozens—Smyrna, Bamberg, Denmark, Crawfordville, Madison, Smokes, Apalachee, Walnut Grove, Tyrone. I stopped long enough to mooch around, take some photographs or have a bite to eat. Some were beautiful places, the azaleas blooming fiercely outside immaculate ante-bellum frame-houses, the lawns in front of the courthouse and post office cropped like cricket squares, the shops in the malls bright and fresh with new paint. Others were mean and forgotten, consigned to a slow decay and oblivion now that the network of interstate highways so efficiently linked the main centres of population.
In many ways the rural South fulfilled all my expectations. People were poor, attitudes were confined or frozen, and yet I’ve never encountered such candid friendliness. The first old woman I talked to said “Ah do declare,” and the Civil War lived on in people’s memories as if it had happened only a decade before. But the towns had disappointed me. They were either too frothily perfect—porches, rocking-chairs, coruscating flowers—or drab and banal, lacking any frisson or atmosphere. One caught it occasionally—a group of old black men sitting motionless outside a store in Madison, a shop in Beaufort with a display of trophies from the Little Miss Teenage South Carolina pageant—but it was fleeting or too localized. I wanted something more. I wanted to go to Tallapoosa.
I took out my map and spread it on the table. I was a somewhat alien presence in the cafe, filled now with Jackson ladies who had interrupted their shopping for a chat. I told myself, not tempting fate, that Tallapoosa would now surely be a smug dormitory for Birmingham or Montgomery, or else have been transformed from what it was in Stevens’s day by the erection of some steel mill or sprawling chemical plant, but the urge to see it for myself was too strong to resist. I left Jackson, with its “comfort station” ban and chattering ladies, with a feeling of elation.
“Tallapoosa city limit. Welcome. City of Tallapoosa. Please obey all ordinances. Population 2,869. Drive carefully.” City of Tallapoosa?
The day was hot and the sky cloudless. Soon, on either side of the road, were small wooden bungalows with porches carrying the usual freight of azaleas. At first it all looked too pretty. Then there was a grain silo—a silver cigar—and the houses seemed to fall away as the road climbed quite steeply. Then you hit the brow of the hill and it turns into the main street.
The road is straight. For a hundred yards it runs alongside railway-tracks. A railroad running smack through the centre of town, freight trains passing cars in the main street. It looked very strange. I parked the car and got out. Across the tracks was a wide tarmacked area that fronted a modest mall of shops—flat-fronted, two-storey, flat-roofed buildings. Black cable power-lines, that ubiquitous feature of all American townscapes, looped haphazardly here and there. “Tallapoosa Drugs” said a big sign above one store. A Coke machine stood outside. The plate-glass window of the shop seemed to contain no items for sale. On the other side of the road were rutted lanes leading to more shops: Tallapoosa Auto, Electrical Goods, Dr Tire, Tallapoosa Seed Merchants, Tallapoosa Home Center. The name was everywhere. Tallapoosa Baptist Church.
It was hot and the sun spangled off the railway-tracks and off the windscreens of the large matt and battered cars and pickups parked in front of the mall of shops. There were very few people out and about. Occasionally a car roared through on the way to Bremen down the road, but it was generally very quiet. The town sat low and squat beneath the sun, the pavements were cracked and weeds sprouted freely from the cracks. The fat cars stood squarely on their patches of shadow. I felt no foreboding, only a sense of relief and pleasure.
The mind herein attains simplicity …
The body is no body to be seen
But is an eye that studies its black lid.
Let these be your delight, secretive hunter…
There certainly was no body to be seen. I stepped up on to the raised wooden sidewalk. On this side of the road, op
posite the mall and the railway-tracks, there was a bar. Standing in the doorway behind a mosquito-proofed screen was a man holding a can of beer, wearing dusty denim overalls and a wide, manic smile on his face. I walked by, following the sidewalk to its end. Beyond that there were some sheds, a gas station and an auto shop. Beyond them stretched Alabama and a whole dry country.
The gas station had a small cafe that operated a drive-thru window. Three cars were parked outside. In each, two women sat in the front and children lounged in the back. Everybody was eating. A girl hung out of the drive-thru window, talking to the women in one of the cars.
As I approached, they stopped talking and turned and looked at me. I changed course, crossed the street, stepped tentatively over the thick, burnished railway-tracks, through a strip of knee-high, sun-bleached grass and weeds, and on to the broiling parking-lot in front of the mall. Dusting my trouser legs free of seeds and grass burrs, I saw the red neon rosette of a Budweiser sign glowing palely in the sunlight. Bars at Tallapoosa. I went in.
It was very dark. And full of men—white men. Drunk men.
A long bar stretched back into the depths of the room where there was an antiquated mechanical skittle-machine. Dusty plastic beer signs advertised Miller, Budweiser, Pabst. There were racks of old bottles of what I took to be country wines. A hand-printed sign said “No credit. No personal checks,” but some drunken good ol’ boy was loudly trying to persuade the taciturn, impassive barman to break his own house rules.
I asked politely for a beer and was given one in the can. Looking around, I saw that everyone drank direct from the bottle or the can. There wasn’t a glass in sight. I stood there, one hand in one pocket, and tried to drink my beer as fast as possible. No one spoke to me or showed the slightest curiosity. They were just waiting patiently for me to get my drinking done and get out. I didn’t belong here, I was an irritant in the melancholy life of the bar. When I put my empty can down, the barman muttered the obligatory Southern valediction, “Y’all come back and see us again some time, heah?” but his heart wasn’t in it.
Outside I was dazzled by the glare of the sun. Then I saw a big maroon car cruising very slowly through the mall. A girl was driving and another sat beside her in the front. It slowed to a crawl as it passed the bar. The girls—eighteen going on thirty—were smoking and had dyed blonde hair. The car had a hubcap missing. It looked too big for the girls to drive. I let it pass and walked across the car park, stepped back over the railway-lines and across the main street. The car pulled out of the mall, bumped across the tracks and accelerated away in the direction of Bremen. The girls were laughing at something.
Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold …
Making recoveries of young nakedness …
The town seemed stuck in its hot midday stupor. Where was everybody? I wondered. In the bars? I walked down towards the white Baptist church, wooden, painted white. The Baptists have Georgia sewn up. I saw a pawn shop and next door another drugstore. I went in, hoping to find a soda fountain or some kind of snack-bar but with no luck. Instead, I bought another reel of film from the little mustachioed man who worked inside. He asked me where I was from. I told him. He said, maybe to make me feel less of a stranger, that there were two or three European girls who lived in Tallapoosa; German girls who had married Tallapoosa men serving in Germany and who had been brought back to the States to live. I wondered what the German girls must have made of their new home. The promise of a new life in the USA. The reality of a lifetime in Tallapoosa.
I asked the little man if there was a nice restaurant in town where I could get a bite to eat. He thought for a while—it was clearly something of a poser—and said that I should head out of town on the road to Bremen; then turn left, following the signs for Interstate 20. There was “quite a decent little place” about two miles down that road.
I followed his instructions. Turning off the Tallapoosa-Bremen road, I saw a large factory: the Tallapoosa Rubber Company. Perhaps its presence explained the paucity of men on the streets. I drove on, looking for the restaurant. Then I saw it: the “Big O” hamburger house, on the Tallapoosa exit of Interstate 20. So this was the best restaurant in town.
Inside it was empty, not a solitary trucker. Greasy formica, battered, chipped chairs, drab curtains. The “Big O” offers that day were Mountain Man stew and steak sandwiches. I chose a steak sandwich.
Two bored girls took my order. They looked like younger sisters of the girls in the car: heavy make-up, streak jobs, glinting jewellery. My sandwich came—a small steak fried in batter, a leaf of iceberg lettuce and a squirt of mayonnaise. I hankered vaguely for Mountain Man stew.
I ate my sandwich and thought about Tallapoosa. It had been the evocativeness of the poem that had lured me here. But in my reading I had imagined something entirely different from the banalities of smalltown America. Now the lines between the stars were merely the haphazard loopings of electric cable spanning the street and alleyways. The stars themselves were reduced to sunbursts off windscreens and dusty chrome. To a significant extent the topography of the poem is redundant—no doubt Stevens never expected any reader to check it out. Its power resides in the potency of its phrase-making: “secretive hunter,” “recoveries of young nakedness,” “the lost vehemence the midnights hold.” And yet it wasn’t all disappointment. Even though I had no idea what Wallace Stevens was doing in the place, I sensed an understanding, some sixty years or more later, of the entrancement he seemed to have felt, or at least a rendered-down, displaced 1980s version. Tallapoosa was so tawdry and down-at-heel and yet here, undeniably, I had found the very frisson I was after, that formed a bridge, albeit a flimsy one, between the experience of the poem and the reality of the present. The atmosphere on the main street had been a kind of brazenness, a flashiness, a self-confidence manifested in the constant reiteration of the name: Tallapoosa this, Tallapoosa that. Perhaps it was the name alone that had attracted Stevens—some incantation in its utterance that infected the citizens and the environment. Or was I merely wishful-thinking, investing the place with my personal designs on it, my eye studying its own black lid?
I left the “Big O” and drove back to take some more photographs. I wandered uneasily around, snapping shots covertly. The girls in the maroon car were back, parked at the drive-thru, eating something, but the streets were as quiet as ever.
Let these be your delight, secretive hunter,
Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever-mingling,
Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic.
These lines are swift and fall without diverging.
The melon-flower nor dew nor web of either
Is like to these. But in yourself is like:
A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight,
Flying and falling straightway for their pleasure,
Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold;
Or, if not arrows, then the nimblest motions,
Making recoveries of young nakedness
And the lost vehemence the midnights hold.
I didn’t stay to see the stars at Tallapoosa. I left for Atlanta long before night fell.
1984
The Wright Brothers
Ninety years ago this week, on a cold blustery Thursday morning on 17 December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright carried their flying machine—the Flyer—from its wooden shed and set it carefully on the forty-foot launchway of pine two-by-four planks and prepared it for take off. Their camp was on the Outer Banks, long thin islands, 90 percent sand dunes, off the coast of North Carolina. The nearest hamlet was Kitty Hawk, a small cluster of clapboard houses that sheltered the seasonal fishermen and the crew of the coastguard station. If you didn’t fish or work for the coastguard there was nothing much to bring you to Kitty Hawk. All around them was sand and a few huge dune hills, the Kill Devil Hills, thrown up by the scouring winds that blew in off the wintry Atlantic. It was the winds—their constant presence, their reliable force—that had drawn t
he Wright brothers from Dayton, Ohio to Kitty Hawk where, over the previous three years, they had spent the autumn and early winter months testing their big man-carrying soaring gliders and perfecting the controlling mechanisms that allowed them to steer.
The wind that December day was gusting between twenty-two and twenty-seven miles an hour, a little too strong for their purposes but, as both the brothers were determined to be back in Dayton in time for Christmas, they decided to press on. So they hung out a signal on their wooden shack to alert the men in the coastguard station at Kitty Hawk some four miles away. They needed witnesses for what they hoped was about to ensue. Three surfmen duly strolled down the beach from the station: John Daniels, Adam Etheridge and Will Dough. Two curious hangers-on accompanied them, a lumber merchant called W. D. Brinkley and a teenage boy, Johnny Moore.
Orville Wright set up his glass-plate camera on a tripod some way off aiming at a point towards the end of the launching rail. John Daniels was invited to take the photograph, a simple matter of squeezing the rubber bulb that activated the shutter. The small four-cylinder petrol engine that powered the two pushing propellors on the Flyer was started and was run for a while to allow the motor to warm up.