My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  One of the last holdouts from the old plenty of the grouper seems to be the Tampa Bay area, where the grouper sandwich is said to have been invented, where places like Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill, in Clearwater, and Dockside Dave’s, in Madeira Beach, and the Sandbar, in Anna Maria, still consider the sandwich a signature dish. Down in Miami, the grouper sandwich at Garcia’s is frozen only in time, a fresh slab of the way things used to be. Such places are often the first stop I make, to taste the past.

  I almost drowned once swimming off Bean Point on Anna Maria Island, within sight of the Sandbar. There was a hurricane in the Gulf and the waves were massive. I had always liked that phrase “storm-tossed,” and I felt big and brave, thrown into the air, till the undertow got me. I staggered into knee-deep water, finally, exhausted. That afternoon I had a fine grouper sandwich, to celebrate being alive, and at dusk joined a group of elderly ladies doing water aerobics in the shallow surf, which I often did then as protection from sharks.

  This was as much of a man of the sea, I decided, as I needed to be.

  I was in my final hour of hell at the big seafood restaurant, my final hour of toddlers apparently raised by wolves. My number was up and I shuffled like a man on a chain gang to a table made to look like one at a tiki bar. The sandwich, when it came, was not grouper, but then the menu had not claimed it was. I had not known, as I languished, that there was no grouper sandwich here, but it was too late. I do not know its origin, that fish, though it was fine enough. But I decided, then, to travel across the Gulf to Anna Maria someday soon, to see if they still make as good a sandwich there as they used to, there at the Sandbar or places near, and maybe see if any of the old mermaids from that water aerobics class still know my name.

  PART 3

  PLACE

  WHAT STANDS IN A STORM

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: May 2011

  Almost nothing stood.

  Where the awful winds bore down, massive oaks, 100 years old, were shoved over like stems of grass, and great pines, as big around as 55-gallon drums, snapped like sticks. Church sanctuaries, built on the Rock of Ages, tumbled into random piles of brick. Houses, echoing with the footfalls of generations, came apart, and blew away like paper. Whole communities, carefully planned, splintered into chaos. Restaurants and supermarkets, gas stations and corner stores, all disintegrated, glass storefronts scattered like diamonds on black asphalt. It was as if the very curve of the Earth was altered, horizons erased altogether, the landscape so ruined and unfamiliar that those who ran from this thing, some of them, could not find their way home.

  We are accustomed to storms, here where the cool air drifts south to collide with the warm, rising damp from the Gulf, where black clouds roil and spin and unleash hell on Earth. But this was different, a gothic monster off the scale of our experience and even our imagination, a thing of freakish size and power that tore through state after state and heart after Southern heart, killing hundreds, hurting thousands, even affecting, perhaps forever, how we look at the sky.

  But the same geography that left us in the path of this destruction also created, across generations, a way of life that would not come to pieces inside that storm, nailed together from old-fashioned things like human kindness, courage, utter selflessness, and, yes, defiance, even standing inside a roofless house.

  As Southerners, we know that a man with a chain saw is worth 10 with a clipboard, that there is no hurt in this world, even in the storm of the century, that cannot be comforted with a casserole, and that faith, in the hereafter or in neighbors who help you through the here and now, cannot be knocked down.

  I know this to be true because I came home to it the day after the storm. My street, a quarter mile of small, historic homes and lovely trees, had looked as though it were painted on canvas and hung on the air. It was ruined April 27, and also spared. No one died in Glendale Gardens, while, yards away in Rosedale, rescue workers pulled the dead from houses blasted as if in war. It is why, even as they piled their neighborhood into trash heaps two stories tall, my neighbors said, over and over, how fortunate they were.

  Our little white house, on the edge of a mile-wide tornado, was hammered by flying 2 by 4s, stripped of its shingles but, somehow, still standing when we returned from New Orleans. My wife, Dianne, cried when she saw it, and cried more as she looked down our street. A third of the houses were destroyed. Others will be torn down. The trees that gave this place its name were gone or splintered. In our yard, a single, ancient dogwood survived, my wife’s pride, a reminder of what this used to be.

  People say it will never be the same. I don’t know about that.

  It had been a bad spring. The sirens screamed every few days, in Mississippi, Alabama, and beyond. In Tuscaloosa, just days before the big storm, Mary Kate Jemison Cochrane and her daughter, Emily, walked through the family house in Glendale, looking for a place the 91-year-old Mrs. Cochrane could shelter when the weather turned. They settled on a hall closet, removed two Electrolux vacuum cleaners, silent since antiquity, and put in a chair. When sirens did sound on April 27, Mrs. Cochrane stepped inside and shut the door.

  She passed the time by looking through things, forgotten and dusty. She picked up a cookie tin, and pried off the lid. Neatly rolled inside was her christening gown, the one she wore as a baby, almost 92 years ago. She had been looking for that.

  She is hard of hearing. Inside, with her memories, she did not hear the destruction. She felt the house shake, but it had shaken before. Then she heard someone calling her name.

  A neighbor, Michael Carr, had huddled as the storm tore at his walls. The first thing he did, when it passed, was break into her house, damaged but intact, and shout for her. It was the same all along the street, as people ran from house to house, shouting, hoping.

  Carr called for her again. The closet door swung open.

  “Well I am fine, Michael,” she said graciously, “and you are just so kind, to come check on me.”

  She stayed here because it was where she raised her children, where she once found a live horse in a bedroom, where every cardboard box bulged with history. It took the storm of a lifetime to move her. She walked through the ruin, and rode away. But she sent Emily back for the gown.

  There will be great-grandchildren to baptize. They must be properly dressed.

  Outside, minutes after the winds died down, people gathered in the street. Tammy Elebash—our boy took her daughter to prom—held a phone. “I see the Pittses…I see the Petrovics…yes, Mrs. Brannon is fine. She’s on my arm….” Inez Rovegno and John Dolly had grabbed their wedding album and crawled into the tub. Mary Pitts had hidden with her triplets in a hallway as flying glass stabbed the walls. Beverly Banks had held to her big, white dog as her house disintegrated around her.

  Then, one by one, people noticed the change. The once verdant place was laid open, stripped, flattened. You could see things you had never seen, like a water tower that used to be invisible behind the curtains of green. It was like the storm had picked these people up and set them down someplace ugly, broken, new. How awful it would have been, to have landed there alone.

  I have seldom felt helpless in my life. I hold to the hillbilly standard that there is no situation so hopeless that, through perseverance, I cannot make worse. It is why my wife will not let me have a chain saw—“You will cut off your own head”—and will not allow me on the roof. So there I stood, giant trees across my driveway, my roof naked, helpless. What happened next still seems like magic.

  Within a minute of stepping into my yard, I was met by a never-ending stream of neighbors, some I only slightly knew, who left their own crises to help me clean up mine. There are too many to list here—I would leave someone out—but they came, capable men who knew how to run a saw, or twist a wrench. Some came, worked like a dog, and vanished before I could thank them. I hope they are reading this, men and women who lifted and dragged tons of trees, and almost killed me and my stepson Jake, trying to keep up. Every church group in Tusc
aloosa, it seemed, clawed rubble out of my yard, or out of the playground across the street, meaning I can never again say anything mean about the Episcopalians. I came to enjoy the company. That first afternoon, I straightened up from tugging on an unmoving limb to see Allen McClendon, the husband of my son’s music teacher, saw through a tree that blocked my drive. He brought his father, Rick, and an old, brown dog named B.J., and we told duck hunting stories and I don’t think any lies, but it was hard to tell over the roar of the saws. And then they, too, were gone, to help someone else, somewhere down the road.

  There was no end to this generosity. Food just appeared. No one would take a dime. The college students on our street, the ones I had yelled at for driving too fast, cooked all the meat from our melting freezers, and let me pet their puppy. Mrs. Cochrane’s Emily asked if we needed a generator. Our boy’s friends brought gasoline. Folks with gas water heaters offered hot showers. That night, I went to sleep under the luxury of an electric fan. The next morning, my neighbors were in my yard before I was.

  So I wonder. If a street is made of people, not oaks and tulip trees, how can this place not be as fine as it ever was? I think the best I heard it put was by Mary Pitts.

  “I always thought we lived on a good street,” she said. “Now I know.”

  A few days after the storm, on a Sunday morning, I awoke to a tap-tap-tap on my roof. I should have gone to see what it was about, but after a while the rhythmic tapping got to be almost soothing, and I ducked inside a dream. Later, I learned that my neighbor James Mize had scaled the roof and tacked down some covering that had blown loose.

  He did not ask me where I went to church, or how I voted, or who my family was. He did not climb that ladder for money, or attention, or even thanks.

  He did it, he said, because it looked like rain.

  NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: August 2011

  Sometimes, to break a spell of death and destruction, you just have to drop a house on a witch.

  Our boy moped into the den last spring to announce, after much sighing, that his teachers had settled on The Wizard of Oz as the final production of his junior year. Over the years, Jake had swaggered across the stage as a tortured drifter in Picnic and mugged as the mad dentist in Little Shop of Horrors. He had hoped for serious theater, Tennessee Williams maybe, but instead got a “little kid’s play.”

  “I think I’ll try out for Scarecrow,” he said.

  “That’s the one looking for a brain?” I said.

  Holy Spirit is a small school. The stage is a plywood platform in the gym. There is no curtain, but that does not mean there are no curtain calls. For three years I perched like an elephant on a beach ball in those tiny plastic chairs, watching teenagers sing, dance, and emote their hearts out. I gave standing ovations, in part because it allowed blood to flow again in my legs.

  But this Oz, despite my boy’s grumpiness, promised to be a grand production. It would be a schoolwide showpiece, gathering older students into starring roles while providing unlimited bit parts for little children. You can have an Oz without flying monkeys—they give me the creeps—but how do you pull it off without Munchkins?

  They were churning through rehearsals in April when, on the 27th, tornadoes tore through the South and gouged into Tuscaloosa. Fifteen of the cast’s 65 students were touched directly by the storm, their homes damaged and destroyed.

  Annie McClendon, the music director, thought the play was finished. In a city so wounded, how do you put on a play about the house plucked from the earth that lands on someone, even a witch? It would seem insensitive. But Kelly Taylor, the drama director, convinced her that, if canceled, the play would be only one more normal thing the storm took away from these children.

  You could see a change in the actors when they returned, some arriving from borrowed houses in cars patched with duct tape. The Wicked Witch was sad. The Munchkins had learned that not even the walls of their houses could keep out bad things.

  “My kids saw trees knocked down they used to climb and saw the street where they used to ride their tricycles destroyed,” said Philip Pitts, whose triplets, Henry, Kate, and Anna, played Munchkins. “And they learned that their daddy can’t protect them from everything.”

  But to abandon the play would have been admitting things might never be the same, said Maxwell Elebash, whose daughter, Augusta, played the bad witch. If not now, with this, then when? With what?

  They set up chairs for 150 on opening night, but the people kept coming, 200, 300, more. The gym filled. People came who had nothing to do with Holy Spirit, to be part of something normal, too, and hear a 3-foot-high thespian squeak: “You’ve killed her so completely that we thank you very sweetly.” People said it was one of the best performances of The Wizard of Oz they had ever seen. Even the part where the Wicked Witch—circling the gym floor on her bicycle, shrieking—accidentally crashed into a baby carriage.

  It will not fix everything. It will not raise walls. But Jake had worked like a man, digging stumps, hauling limbs, never complaining that his new car was now filled with broken glass. That night he danced across the stage with a girl in ruby slippers in his arms.

  Sophie Petrovic, whose house just down the street from mine was ruined, cavorted in a blur of Munchkins, as if all evil winds were just props on stage.

  The show does go on. Ding-dong. The witch is dead.

  TRADE DAY

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: June 2011

  Five years ago, my brothers and I drove to a vast flea market in Collinsville, Alabama, to buy a bantam rooster for our mother. We left with two ducks, two chickens, a Hamilton watch, two fig trees, a sack of green onions, a bone-handled pocketknife, a bushel of sweet potatoes, a four-way lug wrench, a goat named Ramrod, and a ball-peen hammer.

  The goat, the size of a Shetland pony, butted my Ford Bronco so hard it rocked on its springs. That was why I bought the hammer. I was not riding back with that thing unarmed.

  “Couldn’t find a pistol?” I asked my brother Sam. Sam, who has always been serious, said he could have found one, easy, in the endless stalls and milling throngs of people, if he had known I needed one—that, or a banjo, a croquet mallet, or a rhesus monkey. The goat just glared at me, kind of walleyed. “Ain’t he a dandy?” said my little brother, Mark.

  It may have other names, this place. But for generations, my people have referred to it as Trade Day. Every Saturday, an eroded hillside explodes with color and sound, covering acres of gravel, rock, and mud with junk and treasure. If you want it, ever wanted it, or think you might want it someday, you can find it here. Quilt scraps and new and used clothes blow like banners, and ladder-back chairs and mule shoes sell next to Bear Bryant clocks, velvet matadors, mood rings, top-water lures, Dale Earnhardt action figures, and Burt Reynolds commemorative plates. I could not conjure such a place even in a fevered dream.

  There are others around the South, but this is ours, a kind of clearinghouse for the vanishing skills of my people. Old men in overalls stroll with bundles of carved ax handles sanded so smooth they would not snag a silk stocking. Old women unfold patterns first traced on flour sack dresses in the time of the WPA, or Reconstruction, or The War. Crab apple jelly shines in the sunlight next to jars of honey, the comb glistening inside. There is macramé so intricate it would make a spider quit his web, just steps from bins of rusted drill bits, crosscut saws, ancient cutting boards, sunflowers the size of truck tires, hammer dulcimers, hickory nuts, and gingham bonnets, just like my grandmother Ava wore every hot day of her life.

  I can mark most years of my life with purchases here. A baby duck, when I was 6. I carried it home inside my shirt to keep it warm. At 10, a harmonica I would never play, except for one long, asthmatic moan. A ukulele, at 12. I never learned to play that either. At 17, it was a Creedence Clearwater eight-track tape (it stuck on “Run Through the Jungle”) and racing mirrors from a ’69 Camaro.

  My cousin negotiated a pistol. “Does
it shoot?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I have never seen a monkey for sale, but that doesn’t mean they never had one. High on the hill—upwind, inevitably—are fightin’ roosters and guinea hens (said to eat snakes), Poland China piglets, rabbits, and some of the finest dogs I have ever seen. I love to linger near the coon hunters with their redbone, bluetick, and black-and-tan hounds with bloodlines that reach back to the Bible, and listen to the lies...I mean testimonials. “Does he hunt?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I guess there is some junk here, but I never took any of it home. Only treasure. We secured the goat with logging chain. “If he gets loose,” I said as I turned the key, “I’m bailing out, and leaving him with y’all.”

  LOST IN THE DARK

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: October 2014

  I have always been haunted by wrong turns, by high beams on asphalt I have never seen before, in the Halloween landscape of the Appalachian foothills. Everybody is afraid of something, and this is the time of year that you can admit it and smile at your foolishness—then eat that half-pound bag of baby Butterfingers you hid in the shaving kit next to your blood sugar medicine.

  I grew up in the country, where rows of brittle cotton stalks rustle in the black of the evening and the wind hisses through the thick pines. They do whisper, as the old songs said. I have seldom been afraid of the dark; there is peace in it, when the cool evenings chase the snakes into their holes and send the spiders scurrying to wherever spiders go. In the evening you can hear coon dogs crooning on the mountainsides, and the far-off singing of a chain saw, and rusted-out mufflers of distant pulpwood trucks.