Homesick

by Ward, Sela

  But the real key to social life in my college days wasn’t dating—it was football. Oh, to be in Denny Stadium on a Saturday afternoon in the fall! Everyone dressed up, as fine as if they were going to church: the guys in jacket and sometimes tie, we girls in dresses. Families came from miles around to join their daughters at the sorority houses for lunch, and then we’d all walk ceremonially over to the stadium. The air would be crisp with autumn and anticipation. For the really big games, we all packed up and headed to Birmingham, which had a larger stadium to accommodate the overflow crowds. Cars and RVs streamed in from all over the state, decorated with crimson and white streamers, GO BAMA! scrawled in white shoe polish on the windows.

  There was a festival air to these weekends, and for most of the folks who drove overnight to get there I think it was a kind of a pilgrimage, too. Football was like a religion for so many of us, not just in the South but all over the country, and of course today sports is one thing we all still have in common—whether you’re rooting for the Dallas Cowboys, the Nebraska Cornhuskers, or the squad of local boys who scrimmage between the high school bleachers on Friday night.

  The boys we were rooting for, of course, were the Crimson Tide. The Tide was a national powerhouse, and being a part of the Alabama football program in the 1970s was like having a box seat at the eye of a hurricane. I’d always loved football; I’d been a cheerleader since forever, because that was the one way I could be a part of it all. And when I got to Alabama I somehow found the courage to try out for the varsity squad, and was lucky enough to be chosen. Come on, you’re thinking, it takes courage to try out for cheerleader? In those days, at that school, yes, absolutely.

  One of the reasons was coach Bear Bryant.

  Throughout the South, Coach Bryant was revered in the 1970s as pretty much the second coming of Robert E. Lee. He won more games than any coach in college football history, but that wasn’t really the reason. A child of sharecroppers, Paul Bryant had won a football scholarship to the University of Alabama, and when he returned to forge his winning career he became the best kind of hero—the country boy made good, who rose to the heights of national fame while remaining down-to-earth. Coach Bryant was stoic but feeling, plain but noble. To those of us who attended Alabama in those years he seemed to dwell on Mount Olympus. Yet everyone knew he was one of our own, and we loved him for it. He was as close to a secular saint as any Southerner is ever going to see. When he died in 1983, half a million people—half a million!—lined the road between Tuscaloosa, where his funeral was held, and Birmingham, where he was laid to rest.

  I’ll never forget the first time I met him. I had to go into his office all by myself to arrange a pep rally, and I was scared to death. But then he looked up at me and smiled. “If I’da known you were comin’ ovah,” he said, “I’da awduhed us up some frahd chicken.” I melted. It was as if I’d had an audience with the pope.

  Another time, a fellow cheerleader and I timidly went up to him on the field, and he jokingly said, “You gulls, you only come t’see me because you wanna get yo’ picture taken.” He probably wasn’t far off. Everyone who met him really wanted to connect with him somehow. He was a living legend. In the South we’re especially romantic and history-conscious, so we’re awfully good at creating these figures. But all across America we have them—favorite teachers, sports figures, even (sometimes) politicians we look to for inspiration. Somehow they help us to understand ourselves and each other; they tell us what home is.

  My college sweetheart was Bob Baumhower, one of the star defensive linemen for the Tide. He was everything you could want in a first love: tall and handsome, kind and loving, a big old bear of an Alabama boy. He’d take me out to Lake Tuscaloosa for barbecues, picnics, and band parties, and we’d have sunset cruises on his family’s boat. Now that I have a daughter of my own, I miss those innocent days, when it was okay for a girl to wait until college—when she was better able to handle herself emotionally—to lose her heart to her first real boyfriend. Today things move so fast for kids that it’s hard to imagine most girls could get to college without having their hearts broken by a string of immature bad boys. I hope my Anabella is fortunate enough to have as her first love a fellow as caring and grounded as Bob. (And as handsome!)

  On game days we cheerleaders would arrive at the stadium well before the game started, to get some practice in. Bob would be on the field warming up; we’d send flirtatious signals to each other on the sidelines, and I’d get all giddy with those butterfly love rushes. The big game, the roar of the crowd, the Million Dollar Band playing the fight song, my sweetheart in shoulder pads on the field next to me—I didn’t think life could possibly be more exciting than that.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my first experience of show business. Most of the important games were televised nationally, and the cameramen never missed the opportunity to get a shot of the cheerleaders. Mama would call and say, “Oh, we saw you on TV!” We started getting fan mail from all over the country; a little posse of younger girls even started standing outside the stadium, waiting for our autographs as we left.

  We cheerleaders weren’t only attached to the football team. We traveled with the Alabama basketball squad, too. And one trip we took with them—to the National Invitational Tournament, held in New York’s Madison Square Garden—would change my life forever. I’d been fascinated with the Manhattan skyline since seventh grade, when I first saw it in a photograph. New York City is frightening to a lot of small-town people, and back in the seventies there was good reason to be afraid of it. The jazzy metropolis of Cole Porter, Joe DiMaggio, and so many others had turned into a place of crime, filth, drugs, and chaos, and for every starry-eyed visitor like me there were plenty of born-and-bred New Yorkers who couldn’t get out of the city fast enough.

  But I couldn’t see that, or at least I wouldn’t. Sure, there were bums in the streets, hookers on the corners; but there were also fabulous street musicians busking for quarters (dollars if they were lucky), wide avenues choked with yellow cabs migrating uptown to spawn, and energy, everywhere energy, as if the streets themselves were electric cables pulsing with life. Once there, I never wanted to leave. I loved it, just loved it. I’d never seen a place that seemed so exciting and so alive. I don’t remember how Alabama did in that tournament; all I remember was making a vow to myself that someday I’d come back to live there. This skyscrapered island city, about as far away as you can get from bucolic Meridian, was calling me home—home to a place I’d never been.

  Was it strange being an art major in this tempest of sorority life, football, and cheerleading? I certainly didn’t think so at the time. I loved both; why should I give up one for the other? Yet at some point in my sophomore year, an art teacher asked me, “Do you really think you’ll pursue art seriously?” I said yes at the time, but I began to wonder if it was true. At that time Pop Art was very much in vogue, and it dominated my classes at Bama. I wasn’t drawn to its ironic, superficial style, and I began to worry that being out of lockstep with the art world would prevent me from doing anything as a professional painter. At some point that year, I decided practicality was the wiser choice, and expanded my major to include communications.

  This turned out to be a shrewd move. The year before I graduated, ABC was exploring the idea of having a college-age woman do color commentary from the sidelines. Sportscaster Jim Lampley was covering a Bama game, and he asked if any of us cheerleaders were in the communications school. I was! This was my first big break. I was all of nineteen years old.

  It turned out that Jim meant broadcast communications, which wasn’t my area. But it didn’t matter. ABC sent a twenty-four-year-old assistant producer to Tuscaloosa to tape me doing color pieces on campus. I must have done pretty well, because they sent the guy back a few months later to tape me summarizing the highlights of a basketball game. Trouble was, I didn’t really care for basketball. Sure, I’d been a cheerleader for the Crimson Tide roundballers, but I was a one-sp
ort girl—and football it was.

  Still, what kind of fool would I have been to withdraw from the audition when it just might be my ticket to success, or some new world? The producer and I went to a Bama basketball game, and I just sat there with a blank legal pad on my lap. I was supposed to take notes so I could summarize the game from quarter to quarter. But I didn’t know the difference between a pick-and-roll and a Pic ‘N Save—and halfway through the game, the legal pad remained sadly blank.

  The gallant young assistant producer saw my distress. “I’m not supposed to help you,” he leaned over and whispered, “but I’m going to make some notes and you might want to glance over at them.” His notes saved me: they gave me something to read—a script to memorize, you might say—even if I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. In the end, I didn’t get the job; later it went to Phyllis George. But I kept in touch with the assistant producer after I graduated in 1977. We started dating after Bob moved on to play with the Miami Dolphins; he would fly in from New York to see me on the weekends, which I found glamorous and exciting. When Sundays rolled around, I so often wished I could get on the plane with him and move to the city of my dreams. And I did get there eventually—but not before a little detour. Just before I graduated, I was approached by a friend of Coach Bryant’s, who owned a Pepsi-Cola distributor in Memphis. Some Birmingham advertising agency had told him what he really needed was a Pepsi Girl to start making personal appearances representing the drink at golf tournaments and the like. This guy practically hired me off the sidelines: after my “interview,” which consisted of him taking me to some sort of Mardi Gras ball, he gave me a job in his public-relations department. I really think the guy just wanted a date, but he was a perfect gentleman, and I had my first job. I was twenty.

  On my first day, the general manager showed me my desk. “You need any help,” he said, “just let us know.” Well, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, none at all. I was a fine-arts and advertising major; I never cracked a book in public relations. All I knew was that one of these days, I was going to have to show up at some damn golf tournament.

  I called Mama. “You can always come home, Sela,” she said. “Your friend Patti just got a job at AT&T, with all kinds of benefits. What you have is not a real job.” Maybe Mama was right, but I wasn’t about to come home for supper the first time I was called. So instead I went to the nearest college bookstore and bought a public-relations textbook. I’d hide it in my lap under my desk, reading it as if I were searching for the secret code that would tell me what I was supposed to be doing. I had my head down so much I bet my coworkers thought I was in a constant state of prayer—which, given my desperate straits, I might as well have been.

  One day the general manager—a cocky young Yankee from Chicago—summoned me into his office. He looked grim.

  “You know,” he said, “I couldn’t help noticing that you have Coca-Cola bottles all over the floor of your car.”

  Well, yeah. Good Southerners drink Coke. Everybody knows that. But here I was, about to lose my job over it.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, then whispered, “I just hate the taste of Pepsi.”

  “Well, you’ve probably never drunk it on ice,” he said. He filled a glass with ice cubes, opened a bottle of Pepsi, emptied it into the glass, and had me taste it.

  “You know, that is a lot better,” I lied. I knew I was sunk. And there was really nothing more for me to do there. I stayed for a month longer, then slunk away. I never did make it to a single golf tournament.

  By now, I was out of patience waiting for my New York break. I applied to be a flight attendant, and Delta flew me to Atlanta for an interview. On the flight home I met a man who was with Jack Morton Productions, a Manhattan company that did synchronized slide presentations for corporate clients. When I mentioned I had a degree in fine arts, he started talking to me about a possible job drawing storyboards and producing audiovisual presentations as a freelancer. “If you ever move to New York, look us up, we’ll give you a shot,” he said.

  At that point, this was all the encouragement I needed. With only the promise of a nice man I met on a plane, I became a New Yorker.

  The man was as good as his word, and my arts degree earned me my first job in the city, making $6.50 an hour, illustrating concepts in pen and ink before they were put on film. As I quickly discovered, my salary would reduce me to near-poverty levels in Manhattan, the only place in the city where I could possibly consider living. I found a roommate and took a tiny apartment in the Andover, a building at Eighty-eighth Street and York Avenue on the Upper East Side. Nestled among the old working-class German and Hungarian parts of town, the Andover seemed worlds, not blocks, away from tony Park Avenue. But I didn’t care. After all, I was still writing home to Mama for help paying the bills; I knew I ought to make some kind of sacrifice—particularly since she wasn’t exactly comfortable with my move in the first place.

  “Why, Sela, why?” Mama protested when I told her I was moving to the city. “Why, of all the places in the United States, would anybody choose to live and work in New York City?” To many Southerners, especially of my mother’s generation, Manhattan is Babylon on the Hudson, the kind of place where a young lady might fall victim to all manner of danger and ruin. My thinking was: Mama, if you have to ask, you’ll never understand. New York has always been a magnet for misfit young Americans from small towns, who migrate there to find themselves, to test themselves, to be the selves they couldn’t be back home.

  My Birmingham girlfriend Becky understands. She’d come to know New York as a child herself, having traveled there several times with her musician mother. Still, Becky knows the mental blocks that separate Southerners of our generation from the idea of New York. “Sela, girl, I don’t know how you found it within yourself to move up there,” Becky told me the other day. “When we were growing up, so many people had the idea that going to New York was only slightly less scary than going to Russia.”

  I had to laugh, because she was right.

  “Don’t you remember? Our mother’s friends thought it was the kind of place where you could fall down dead of a heart attack smack in the middle of Saks, and no one would do anything for you,” she said. “That there were so many people there, and nobody was going to look out for you like they would back home, and how you weren’t going to make any friends?”

  That’s true, I told Becky, but I don’t understand why our mothers—our whole culture, really—raised us with such a distorted idea.

  “You have to remember, honey, our side lost the Civil War. And the South had a big ol’ inferiority complex about the North that took more than a hundred years to get over,” Becky said. “But I think it might be something deeper, too. You know how we are down here. If I announced to all my friends that I was moving with my family from Birmingham to Memphis, or Atlanta, or somewhere else down South, by the end of the day I’d have a hundred names and phone numbers of relatives, sorority sisters, and friends of my friends who live in the new city. My Birmingham friends would call them up before we got there, and they’d take us in like long-lost cousins, because that would be the right thing to do. You and I know New York isn’t as bad as most older Southern folks think, but you have to admit you sure didn’t find anything like that when you went up there.”

  She’s right, of course. When I left the South for Manhattan, it was like going off the grid—that regional network of family and friends that might have served me well as a safety net. But somehow, at that moment in my life, I guess I’d had enough safety. The prospect of New York was intimidating, of course. But I don’t remember ever doubting that I could make it there. I never stopped to think about how far I’d come. Where once I’d been too shy to confide in anyone but a mimosa tree, I was starting to become more surefooted, even outgoing; I suppose I was becoming a woman. Mama had no idea what to make of me, but just recently Daddy told me he saw a change that she might have missed. “Were you worried about me when I went off t
o New York?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said in his matter-of-fact way. “I worried when you went to Memphis, though.”

  So what was it that changed between Memphis and New York?

  “Well, you’d been away from home some time. And I could see the difference. It just seemed like you knew how to meet people, get along on your own.”

  Did I have an easy time of it in New York? Did everything fall right into place? I don’t think so—not at all. Nobody has an easy time of it when they first get to the big city. New York only seems easy to the young, whose idealism and lust for life cushions the heavy blows, and to the old and wealthy, whose money insulates them from the city’s daily grind. But I was so in love with the city that the struggles I had there seem today only to have intensified what was for me an exhilarating experience. As Woody Allen once said, “It’s not peaceful or easy, and because of it you feel more alive.” Yes, absolutely, and if my memory has softened the hard edges of my New York years, it’s because New York gave far more than it ever asked of me. It was the place where phantom dreams I only faintly knew I had began to come to life.

  Of course, the friendships I’d made along the way also helped. Jim Lampley of ABC Sports and his girlfriend, Joanne, were so kind, taking me by the hand and weaving me into his network circles. Suddenly I found myself sitting at tables with Ivy League types, some of them reporters and producers from ABC News in Washington, up for the weekend. One of the men was dating a woman from the Kennedy clan. I didn’t dare open my mouth for fear I’d say the wrong thing, or have nothing to say at all. Instead, I decided to keep my mouth shut and hoped I’d seem mysterious. I still remember the night I went over to Jim’s apartment and heard John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk for the first time; I felt as if I’d entered some exotic new land, full of exciting sounds and challenges.