by Julia Reed
Now, as it happens, I have spent a large part of my life in this particular “area,” also known as the Panhandle. In fact, when I read the article, I was sitting in the living room of the house in Seaside my mother has owned for the past fifteen years. She’d spent much of her own childhood in an entirely different Florida, vacationing with her parents and grandparents in Palm Beach at the Breakers hotel. The “feel” there, as at so many of the other über-social, high-WASP (or at least formerly high-WASP) resorts along Florida’s South Atlantic coast, is not so much regional—Deep South or otherwise—as tribal. The Palm Beach Breakers is not all that different in look and provenance from the Newport Breakers (a lot of Mr. Vanderbilt’s summer houseguests in Rhode Island were also winter guests at Mr. Flagler’s hotel), or, for that matter, from the Andrea Doria, the cruise ship on which my grandparents also vacationed before it sank.
My mother hated the Breakers. She and her nurse had to dress up just to cross the lobby to the pool; she spent her afternoons playing shuffleboard with my great-grandfather. There’s a picture of him there, with my great-grandmother and my grandmother and some close family friends. The men are in tropical-weight suits with ties and pocket squares; my grandmother has on a printed silk day dress, white pumps, and a fair amount of diamonds and pearls. No one is smiling.
So it was that my own family spent vacations in Destin at the Frangista Beach motel. With her marriage to my father, my mother had already made one revolutionary move, from the plush confines of Nashville’s Belle Meade to the swampy wilds of the Mississippi Delta; the leap from Palm Beach to the Panhandle was sort of the same thing. At the Frangista, the screen doors of the linoleum-tiled “suites” opened directly onto the beach, we rarely wore anything other than bathing suits, and there was certainly no shuffleboard. Instead, there was a next-door RV park, temporary home of one of my earliest crushes, a guy named Larry who caught rays atop his Winnebago and whose straw cowboy hat featured a band made of Pabst Blue Ribbon pull tabs, which were in ample supply.
My brothers and I and all our friends fished and swam and made ourselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, and at night we went with our parents to restaurants like the Sand Flea or the Blue Room for pompano and stuffed flounder. The grown people stayed up late drinking whiskey they bought at the Green Knight, a package store named for the garishly painted figure out front, while we went crabbing with the help of flashlights and the beach-loving dog Dexter, who belonged to my father’s best friend, Nick. I’m sure that by the time July and August rolled around it was, in fact, plenty “muggy,” but we didn’t notice. That was what the water, and the ever-rumbling Frangista window units, were for.
It was easy and it was fun and I guess I’d been visiting for at least fifteen years when I discovered another photo of my grandmother at the beach, this time at a friend’s vacation house on the bay near Destin, a place I never knew she’d been to. She has on capri pants (then better known as clam diggers), a sleeveless blouse, and no shoes. She doesn’t know the photo is being taken, and she’s leaning forward on her toes laughing, with what appears to be an actual can of beer in her hand. The photo astonished me for a great many reasons, not least because in all the years I knew her I had never seen my grandmother refresh herself with anything other than Beefeater’s in a Baccarat glass, or shed her shoes in public for any reason other than to have someone paint Revlon’s Windsor on her toenails.
Maybe that “deep southern” pull was strong enough to get my grandmother, a woman who once took my cousin and me trout fishing in exactly the same getup she had on in the photo from the Breakers, to shed her shoes. Whatever—I was just so relieved to learn that at least once she’d had some fun in the sun. The rest of us are still at it, though when Destin got a tad too overrun with high-rise condos, we moved our base of operations about twenty miles southeast to Seaside, which brings me back to the article.
First, let’s get past the fact that the writer seems to imply that the same fate that’s befallen pretty much every luxury real estate developer in the entire country happened to St. Joe because its land happened to be in a place that’s hot and feels like the Deep South, and move on to the term itself. On this point, Mr. Whelan is right, at least historically. There are endless discussions about which states make up the Deep South, but by at least one definition they’re the seven that left the Union prior to the firing on Fort Sumter, which are, in order of secession, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.
In the century and a half since the war, the makeup of Florida has changed dramatically, but the Panhandle, bounded by Alabama to the west and the Apalachicola River to the east, remains essentially—especially—Southern. Beginning as early as 1811, its citizens lobbied to be annexed to what is now Alabama at least seven times and finally passed a successful referendum in 1869. By that time, though, Alabama’s carpetbagger government rebuffed the annexation as too expensive, a blow happily remunerated almost a hundred years later by the opening of the Flora-Bama Lounge, which straddles the line between the states.
The problem is not that the Panhandle can’t be correctly called “deep southern,” I just didn’t know we were still being “derided” for it, and not just occasionally but “often.” With the exception of some pesky periods in our not-so-distant history when we could rightly be called inhospitable or far, far worse, our good manners and friendliness have generally been considered a draw. What I think Mr. Whelan really means by “deep southern feel” is “redneck reputation.” Let’s not forget that there’s an annual mullet toss at the Flora-Bama, or that Tom T. Hall’s song “Redneck Riviera” includes lyrics that recall the likes of my old friend Larry: “Nobody cares if Gramma’s got a tattoo or Bubba’s got a hot wing in his hand.”
But Mr. Whelan has clearly not visited in a long while, if ever, because I’m worried that the redneck aspect of things is dissipating at far too fast a clip. Were she still with us, my grandmother could find plenty of dry martinis to sip on as well as swanky restaurants in which to wear her finery. Within walking distance of my mother’s house alone there are three places to get sushi, an amazing handmade pizza place, an organic juice bar, two wine bars, a gourmet grilled cheese stand, a James Beard–nominated restaurant, and a “shrimp shack” that sells melt-in-your-mouth lobster rolls accompanied by splits of champagne. Then there are the facts that the New York Times regularly sells out by 8:00 A.M. and Sundog Books in Seaside is one of the three or four best independent bookstores in the whole country.
All of this is actually good news, especially since there’s still plenty of ingrained grit and goodness to go around. Seaside’s Modica Market reminds me of the family-owned Italian grocery store I grew up going to in the Delta. Charles Modica and his sister Carmel always greet me with a hug (and, usually, a draft beer on the house), but they also know to reserve some bottles of my favorite olive oil, which, until now, I’ve only ever found in Córdoba, Spain, and Charles’s hand-cut rib eyes are the best I’ve ever eaten. Likewise, the weekly farmers’ market features fresh eggs, collard greens, and pink-eye and purple-hull peas among the more gourmet offerings, and equidistant from the nearest sushi place is a diner that still sells deep-fried grouper on a bun. On balance this “deep southern feel,” if not flat-out redneck vibe, is still working for us. Add the clearest blue-green water in the world and the powdery white sand (made of quartz washed down from the Appalachians by ancient rivers), and I’m with Tom T.: “Down here on the Redneck Riviera there ain’t no better living anywhere.”
The Dry County Conundrum
When my friend Suzanne Rheinstein’s gorgeous book, At Home, was published, I hosted a shindig in her honor. Suzanne is a brilliant designer based in L.A., but she is from New Orleans, so to launch the book, she and her late husband, Fred, invited more than a hundred of their friends from points as far-flung as San Francisco and Paris to celebrate in her hometown. For three days, they shopped and toured and ate and drank, and by the time they got
to my house on Saturday night, they’d been fully indoctrinated in the habits of the locals, from five-hour lunches at Galatoire’s to “go-cups” filled with Sazeracs, everyone’s new favorite drink. At the end of the first hour, the wild-eyed bartender told me we’d already gone through two cases of white wine alone; after that it was a free-for-all. By the time we finally shut down, pretty much everything in the house had been drunk, including the disgusting raspberry Stoli someone had long ago left in my freezer.
Now, I’ve been accused of a lot of things in my life, but having an understocked bar has never been one of them. Still, I wasn’t so much embarrassed as impressed that my transplanted New Orleans friend had managed to locate such stellar running buddies. Also, there are worse things than running out of alcohol. You could, for example, live in a place where it is impossible to buy it at all.
Until recently, I hadn’t thought much about what such a grim reality might be like, but, unbelievably, 18 million people who live in dry counties covering roughly 10 percent of America’s landmass cope with it every day. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of these folks live in the South—in Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee mostly, with Kentucky and Texas pulling up the rear—in areas where evangelical Protestants outnumber all other religions. In 2009, two political scientists from Loyola University in Chicago presented a paper with “the fundamental objective” of explaining “why certain counties persist in being ‘dry’ at the start of the 21st century.” I can see why two guys from Illinois would be curious about this, but I could have saved them a bunch of time—“Be ye not drunk with wine,” says the Bible, and there are a whole lot of people down here who still take that stuff very, very seriously.
The good professors clearly don’t know any of them, because at the end of their report, they expressed profound “astonishment” over their “finding that the size of the evangelical Protestant community remains the dominant predictor of Prohibition in U.S. counties.” They also made the more interesting discovery that “the presence of larger concentrations” of African Americans, and especially of Catholics, “is a powerful factor inhibiting the adoption of prohibition in a county.” Since I had the good fortune to grow up in a Mississippi county which is majority black (and where Baptists were substantially outnumbered by Episcopalians and Catholics), I can happily confirm their conclusion. I had no idea that I’d been born not just in a dry county, but in a dry state, until six years after we’d legally gone wet.
Mississippi was the first state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, and the last to repeal Prohibition—in 1966, thirty-three years after the Twenty-first Amendment had already done so. The state legislature nonetheless found a way to tax the sale of liquor, and since nobody ever mentioned to me that it was, in fact, illegal to consume, I just assumed that liquor stores the world over delivered standing orders to your doorstep and that everybody’s mothers gave the mailman a fifth of Old Crow for Christmas. Thus it came as an enormous surprise to me in 1972, when, in a state-mandated Mississippi history class, I learned that the activities of pretty much everyone I’d ever known had been against the law.
But that revelation was nothing compared to the broadside I got a few summer’s back during an extended visit to Rankin County, Mississippi, whose population, it should be noted, is comprised of very few blacks and even fewer Catholics. My father had been injured in a car accident that required lengthy rehabilitation at a facility in Pearl, essentially a suburb of Jackson, the state capital, where he’d been initially hospitalized. In Jackson, the contents of a mini-fridge (some nice rosés and the white Burgundy to which my mother is partial) had not only taken the edge off the wait during the surgery that repaired his shattered hip and pelvis, but also allowed my mother and me to serve as gracious hosts to his many subsequent visitors. After he moved to Pearl, I arrived with a large ice chest I’d thoughtfully replenished on a trip home to New Orleans. I’d barely gotten back on the highway when my mother called, frantic: “It’s the nurses—they’re threatening to call the police about the wine.”
It turned out that only beer and “light wines” (really awful coolers and other weird concoctions with absurdly low alcohol content of around 4 percent) are legal to sell or consume in Rankin County; our “real wine” was almost three times that and the staff was good at math.
When I recounted this outrage to my good friend and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, I told him, “I’d never been to Pearl until this summer,” intending to finish with “And I’m sure as hell never going back.” But he reminded me that I had indeed made a prior trip to Pearl. He’d sent me there himself, in 1997, to cover a shooting at Pearl High. A student had killed two classmates and wounded seven others shortly after stabbing his mother. The memory of this—and the fact that the alienated (naturally) shooter had been a member of some phony Satanist cult—made me feel strangely vindicated. “See,” I said, “there you go.”
Though I don’t hold out much hope for Rankin County, other pockets of parched uprightness are beginning to see the light. In November 2010, for example, two counties in Arkansas voted to go wet, in part at least because of the mounting tally of fatal car crashes. In 2005, deaths related to alcohol in dry counties totaled 38 percent; by 2008, they’d climbed to 50 percent. Apparently, when people who want a drink are denied the privilege, they’ll drive pretty far to get one, creating an obvious set of problems. Also, even teetotalers can understand the benefits of watering holes. The Baptist stronghold of Athens, Alabama, seat of still-dry Limestone County, voted to go wet a few years ago, and the once-dead downtown has blossomed.
It turns out that Athens is not the only place among Alabama’s dry counties where you can get a drink. There are also insidious little loopholes called Community Development Districts: private residential communities with a golf course and a social club, which are allowed to serve liquor—if they have 600 members who have each paid a whopping $2,000. Surely, these insular havens of mini-Taras threaten the social fabric far more than the occasional nip of demon rum. It’s no accident that in The Second Coming, Walker Percy, our most astute chronicler of the dangers of the New South, had Will Barrett suffer a “petty-mall” seizure on the links in precisely such a place. After briefly contemplating suicide, he “comes to himself,” fleeing from his churchgoing neighbors, who were “without exception well-dressed and prosperous, healthy and happy,” preferring to take up with an escaped mental patient in a greenhouse instead. It should also be noted that Percy recommended a slightly less drastic antidote to the “anomie” of “the pretty exurb” in the form of a couple of shots of Early Times. In this, I am reminded of a close family friend, the late Anne Ross McGee, whom my mother had pressed into duty to enliven a party of visiting Presbyterians. About an hour into it, I found her alone in the kitchen, determinedly knocking back Scotch. When I asked her what she was doing, she shot me an exasperated “isn’t-it-obvious-you-idiot?” kind of look. “I am trying,” she said, “to drink myself some energy and personality.” I am endlessly grateful that I live in a place where it is possible to do so.
The Politics of Lust
Every month or so (if I am lucky), I head from New Orleans to Seaside, Florida, a journey that requires me to drive (always faster than I should) across the bottom of Alabama. But on a recent trip, I was slowed down—if not altogether stopped—by the sight of a very scary billboard. Filled with screaming red letters and leaping orange flames, it did not mince words: LUST DRAGS you down to HELL. Beneath the warning, there was an 800 number to call FOR TRUTH, which presumably includes advice on how to avoid eternal torment.
It turns out that this same outfit, Christian Aid, puts up similar billboards in all fifty states, not just Alabama where I sort of expect such sightings. (According to the most recent Gallup poll, the state is tied with Mississippi as the most Protestant in the country, at 77 percent.) On its website, the group says its messages are meant to be “thought-provoking statements and questions,” as well as providers of an intro
duction “to a God that is both loving and holy.”
I have to say that the messages seem a tad more fear-inducing than loving, though I’m sure the folks on the other end of the 800 number might gently suggest that if that’s so, it’s because I have a lot to be afraid of. Still, another of the billboards, containing the inarguable stat that “10 out of 10 die,” includes a red EKG flatline and the question “Are YOU prepared?” This is not the kind of thing that promotes highway safety. When I told my friend John Alexander about my encounter with the flames, he said he’d almost run off a Texas road a few years ago when a radio preacher repeated the question “How hot is hell? How hot is hell?” The answer: “Hell is so hot your eyeballs will melt and roll down your face.”
But let’s get back to lust. I’m not qualified (nor even remotely inclined) to comment on whether or not it will send you straight to hell (or toward the certain “failure and death” also promised on the ministries’ website). But the facts show that it almost always sends you out of office. Take, for example, Wilbur Mills, the late former congressman from Arkansas, a state that ranks just behind Alabama and Mississippi as the most Protestant. Mills was the all-powerful, chain-smoking (Salem 100s), hard-drinking (whiskey and, it turned out, champagne) chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee when the U.S. Park Police pulled over the Lincoln Continental in which he was riding (with no headlights) around 2:00 A.M. in 1974. In the backseat, the officers (whom the congressman threatened to “demote”) discovered a scratched-up Mills and his companion, Annabel Battistella, an Argentine stripper known onstage as Fanne Foxe (and forever after in the papers as “the Argentine Firecracker”). Foxe promptly jumped into the nearby tidal basin, and Mills went into hiding for a week before he appeared before the Little Rock Junior Chamber of Commerce and announced he’d learned a valuable lesson: “Don’t go out with foreigners who drink champagne.”