My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  MERRY AND BRIGHT

  Southern Living, Southern Journal; December 2014

  Some things we cannot duplicate here; we will never celebrate Christmas inside a picture postcard. We have no winter wonderland, though once, inspired by a snowfall seen on the black-and-white television, I did scrape a handful of ice from the inside of the freezer to throw at my brother. By the time I got to him, all I had to fling was a handful of rain.

  What we do have is electricity. As long as the Tennessee Valley Authority can light up the Southern night with strands of color, shining from every mansion and mobile home, twinkling ’round the baby Jesus, they can have their white Christmas. I have seen lights encircling hay bales, hung on rusty tractors, and wrapped around mailbox posts. In the country, you need a whole lot of drop cord to electrify a mailbox.

  I have seen them strung across the grilles of Peterbilts. My mother never takes down her lights, strung on a cedar beam in the living room, though she does unplug them eventually. The rich folks have switched to white lights, a lot of them, to be elegant, I suppose. But it will always be lights of color, shining through a night that smells of cut pine and woodsmoke, that mean Christmas to me.

  I have written that I find it hard, as the years tumble by, not to live in the past, especially in a time of year when I would do anything to see the world again like a child. It is why I fill the refrigerator every December with chocolate-covered cherries and buy my brother fruitcakes at the day-old bakery outlet—fruitcake is impervious to time—and watch, for the hundredth time, those oddly animated, 50-year-old Christmas specials about Kris Kringle and the evil Burgermeister and the elf who wanted to be a dentist and the Island of Misfit Toys.

  It is important that some things stay the same, that, at some point this season, someone will say, “We’re goin’ to look at Christmas lights. Wanna come?”

  I go sometimes and sometimes just say no; it is enough to know someone is going. I have a fine memory stashed away of the lights; I do not want it to grow less than it was by heaping a Walmart’s worth of new lights on it.

  I remember it was first grade, and the big, ramshackle house we lived in, just for that winter, was haunted; but it’s really the people who are, I suppose. I was afraid of that house at night. It creaked, and the wind hissed around the eaves. One cold evening, my aunts came by to take us for a ride in an old Chevrolet, rescuing us.

  As we drove through the foothills, my face pressed against the window, I saw that the very dark had been conquered, chased away by miles of light, tracing the outlines of ragged trailers and leaning frame houses. Now and then, one of my aunts would mutter, “Their light bill’s gonna be high,” over the Christmas songs on the radio, and I went to sleep that way. Later, someone carried me inside. I remember I was embarrassed by that; I was a big boy. But the women in my family are strong.

  I wish you a merry Christmas, and a very hefty light bill.

  SHOPPING

  I knew, the day I saw my first pair of skinny jeans on a man, that I no longer have any place in this world, and should probably just go live by myself in a hole in the ground.

  I am immune to fashion.

  I am loathe to shop.

  If I cannot find a hole to crawl in, give me a shovel and I will create one. Just, please, Oh, Lord, do not make me wander one more day in the wilderness of the Belks or the Dillards or the Abercrombie and whatever the heck it is, there amid the endless racks of shirts sized for jockeys and gymnasts and the chicken-chested who actually like their shirts to fit tight. Do not abandon me to tunnel through mountains of pants designed for short, fat men and 7-foot-tall anorexic ones, only to find that the one normal-size pair, the single, lonely pair that will fit me, comes only in Kelly green.

  I do not love clothes, and you cannot make me. I do not believe, as a Southern man, that I am supposed to like them. The pictures of my ancestors all show men in worn-through overalls and battered fedoras and work khakis, in threadbare jeans and canvas shirts that look like they have been mutilated a million times in a Sears & Roebuck wringer washing machine, or beaten on a rock. But they by God look comfortable, like something a man could live in.

  New clothes are not comfortable.

  New clothes make me uneasy, the same way that snooty cocktail parties do. You know what I mean. Oh, the people there may look fine across the room, but when they get right up on you they make you itch.

  New shoes feel like you are shuffling around in a box of saltine crackers. They even sound wrong. They squeak, and squeal. Shoes should not be heard. You should be able to sneak out of a cocktail party unheard, in the right kind of shoes. New shirts feel like somebody left the hanger and cardboard in them, and have too many sharp edges. Cloth, by its very nature, should not have too many straight lines. You can hear a new shirt, too. Think about it.

  New pants? I do not really know you well enough to explain why I am terrified of new pants. Let us just say that, on some of my pants purchases, the best thing I can say is there was no lasting injury.

  So, I have decided not to shop for clothes again, ever. I have examined the number of clothes in my closet and tried to calculate the amount of wear and tear they can absorb over the next decade or so, and have come to the mathematical conclusion that I can be dead and naked at about the same time.

  It is not just that I detest new clothes, but I detest going to get them. I do not love to shop, the way some men do, and no matter how many flyers you stuff in my mailbox or how many e-mails you fling at me or how much societal pressure you bring to bear through your endless loop of television ads, you cannot make me go to your store unless I have to go. I will go when I stare into my sock drawer and see only one lonely tube sock looking back at me, or when the posterior of my favorite jeans gets worn so thin that an elderly woman behind me sucks in her breath and shudders an “Oh, my!”

  I know what you are thinking. Few men do love shopping for clothes. I hear women say that all the time. “Scooter would just go naked if he had to buy his clothes.” I think that might have been true, back when all men could change their own tires and did not think an adventure was cheating on their golf score. Sneak a peek in their closet and tell me what man needs 47 pastel Polo shirts? What man needs 132 pairs of khaki pants … Dockers. With something called a forgiving waistband. You see men wandering the outlet malls of the Deep South loaded down with shopping bags from Eddie Bauer, arms straining under loads of Old Navy, and you know they ain’t never been nowhere near a battleship.

  I do not have such largesse. Well, there is plenty of largesse in my waistband, and I guess a little elastic never hurt anybody. But my point is that in the Southern man’s closet, there should not be pleated, unpleated, cuffed, non-cuffed, etcetera. Pick a damn style and ride it into the grave.

  Part of it, I admit, is the bleak truth told in the mirror. If I had the dimensions of a department store mannequin, and roughly the same intelligence, I might be more shopping-inclined. But there is no designer on this planet who has ever fashioned a garment with me in mind … and the camo rack at the Walmart does not count.

  My clothes are not selected with most of your finer aesthetics in mind, not your higher fashion. I follow a few simple rules:

  First, does it actually itch? That immediately excludes most wool and all polyester, and especially this frightening man-made thing called rayon. I will not wear anything that sounds like it was named for a death beam from a B-movie from 1952.

  Does it bind? Does it make me wish, after about two or three hours, that I was dead?

  Does it make me look like a doofus? Or, to be accurate, more of a doofus. This includes all relaxed jeans, golf shirts since the advent of time, fanny packs, sweaters from the fjords, and T-shirts without sleeves or T-shirts that advertise those bearded guys from Louisiana, the ones that remind you of a bunch of unshorn Kardashians.

  But I digress.

  I wake up in the morning and assess my wardrobe, and often spend long seconds deciding what to wear … actually, it
only takes that long because sometimes I have to look under the bed to locate the other shoe.

  I look in the drawer and assess the sock situation. Socks come in two varieties: white and black.

  The white socks are divided into two sub-groups: the comfortable ones, and the soon-to-be-left-behind at the first Hampton Inn I come across. It does not matter if the black socks are all that comfortable because I only wear black socks with suits, and I do not actually own a suit, so that solves that problem.

  I have two black jackets, one heavy and one light, and a khaki-colored one made out of something called “firehose canvas.” I think perhaps it would stop a bullet. I have two pairs of black dress pants, in cotton, to give me what seems to be a suit if you do not look too close. I only wear this somber black ensemble if I do a talk in front of rich folks or go to a funeral, because even in Florida they will not truly let you go to a funeral in a pair of flip-flops and a roomy pair of swim trunks and a faded blue cotton T-shirt from Panama City 1974.

  Shirts are as close as I come to being particular. I have five white-cotton button-downs, soft and worn. I am ashamed to admit that some of them have that little horse and that stupid polo player embroidered on them, ashamed because, when the company made the uniforms for our Olympians a while back, the company saw nothing wrong in the fact the uniforms had been manufactured in China. Plus, I just feel stupid with a polo player stitched on my chest; I think if my grandfather knew I wore a polo player on my shirt he would claw himself from the grave and slap my jaws. But they are fine shirts, and I will choke down my shame so as not to itch.

  In fact, I plan to have a tailor either sew me a pocket over the polo player, to hide it, or just stitch a black line through it, in protest. The horse is fine. Horses, even ones subjected to the indignity of polo, look good on anything.

  That brings us to pants, and frustration.

  I have four good pairs of jeans, not skinny, not relaxed, just human-sized. Jeans should look like, well, jeans. It has taken me 11 years to find that many pair that fit.

  I sometimes take my brother Sam with me when I go to the store not to buy pants.

  I cuss, and I rave.

  I walk out muttering.

  But if I do not have him there with me, I fear that—seeing a man my size cursing into the surrounding air—the people at the Burke’s outlet store would call the law. I admit I may not shop at the finer establishments. Most of our mothers shopped the bargain stores, and so we do, now. As a friend told me once, he was almost grown before he knew his pants size was not IRREGULAR.

  Still, why is it that the manufacturers of pants think that all men are either 28-34, or 46-30. Are all men egrets, or beach balls? Is it too much to comprehend, to fathom, that some men are big men but not unusually wide, not thin, yet still tall. Is it too much to ask, for a 38-34? Apparently, it is.

  “You need to get you some of that anger management,” my brother Sam will say, as I grind my teeth.

  Do not tell me to go to Big & Tall. I am too small, for the Big & Tall.

  My brother Sam never gets mad in the store. The fact is he seldom gets mad at anyone, at anything. He has the same dilemma I do, but just rolls with it.

  Once, as he finished working his way methodically through a mile-long rack of jeans, I asked if he had any luck.

  “Naw,” he said. “They didn’t have nothin.”

  He held up a pair of pants that would have cut high water on the Keebler elf. Then he went to try on hats.

  But what really kills me, what really makes me go crazy mad, is the fact that the sizes on the clothes DON’T MEAN ANYTHING. A 38 in the waist can fit me like a pair of maternity pants; a 44 can be so tight it looks like I am auditioning for the Bolshoi.

  Do not tell me to try them on. My people were and still are Congregational Holiness.

  We do not undress in public behind a swinging door that looks less substantial than the one Miss Kitty hung on the front of the Long Branch. You can see people as you take your pants off.

  To make it worse, I am told by some rocket scientists at the men’s department that I have “a long torso,” which means I need to always buy tall clothes, tall shirts and jackets, even though my arms are regular length. This means that the sleeves hang 6 inches below the tips of my fingers, making me look like a 4-year-old boy playing dress-up in his daddy’s clothes.

  No, I will just wear what I have, for as long as it lasts. I will patch, and mend … or find someone who can patch and mend. My Aunt Gracie Juanita once re-covered the seats on my Uncle Ed’s 1967 Chevrolet dump truck; I bet she could easily re-cover the seat of a pair of Levis.

  I don’t mean to sound like a Luddite. But there are just indignities in this world I am no longer willing to endure. Do not ask me if I want a Nautica charge card, as I wander the mall, eyes watering from the cloud of toxins sprayed into the air in the beauty aisle.

  Just let me go smooth and ragged down through the years, my feet in soft leather, my soul at rest.

  Let me fray, and unravel.

  And use what is left of me for soft rags, to shine the bumper of an old, comfortable car.

  MY KIND OF TOWN

  Smithsonian, June 2009

  I grew up in the Alabama foothills, landlocked by red dirt. My ancestors cussed their lives away in that soil, following a one-crop mule. My mother dragged a cotton sack across it, and my kin slaved in mills made of bricks dug and fired from the same clay. My people fought across it with roofing knives and tire irons, and cut roads through it, chain gang shackles rattling around their feet. My grandfather made liquor 30 years in its caves and hollows to feed his babies, and lawmen swore he could fly, since he never left a clear trail in that dirt. It has always reminded me of struggle, somehow, and I will sleep in it, with the rest of my kin. But between now and then, I would like to walk in some sand.

  I went to the Alabama coast, to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, to find a more forgiving soil, a shiftless kind that tides and waves just push around.

  I found it in a town called Fairhope.

  I never thought much about it, the name, till I saw the brown sand swirling around my feet under the amber-colored water ten years ago. A swarm of black minnows raced away, and when I was younger I might have scooped one up. This is an easy place, I remember thinking, a place where you can rearrange the earth with a single toe and the water will make it smooth again.

  I did not want sugar-white sand, because the developers and tourists have covered up a good part of the Alabama coast, pounded the dunes flat and blocked out the Gulf of Mexico and a large number of stars with high-rise condominiums. You see them all along the coast, jammed into once perfect sand, a thumb in the eye of God. What I wanted was bay sand, river sand, colored by meandering miles of dark water, a place tourists are leery to wade. I wanted a place I could rent, steal or stow away on a boat.

  A town of about 17,000, Fairhope sits on bluffs that overlook the bay. It’s not some pounded-out tortilla of a coastal town—all tacky T-Shirt shops, spring break nitwits, and $25 fried seafood platters—but a town with buildings that do not need a red light to warn low-flying aircraft and where a nice woman sells ripe cantaloupe from the tailgate of a pickup. This is a place where you can turn left without three light changes, prayer, or smoking tires, where pelicans are as plentiful as pigeons and where you can buy, in one square mile, a gravy and biscuit, a barbecue sandwich, fresh-picked crabmeat, melt-in-your-mouth beignets, a Zebco fishing reel, a sheet of hurricane-proof plywood, and a good shower head.

  “Now, you have to look pretty carefully for a place on the coast to get the sand under your toes without somebody running over you with a Range Rover,” said Skip Jones, who lives on the same bayfront lot, just south of Fairhope, his grandparents built on in 1939. “We may be gettin’ to that point here, but not yet.”

  It would be a lie to say I feel at home here. It is too quaint, too precious for that, but it is a place to breathe. I have a rambling cypress house five minutes from the bay and a h
alf-hour from the blue-green Gulf—even a big cow pasture near my house is closer to the waterfront than I am—but every day I walk by the water, and breathe.

  It is, as most towns are, a little full of itself. Some people call it an artist’s colony, and that is true, since you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a serious-faced novelist. And there is money here, dusty money and Gucci money. There are shops where ladies in stiletto heels pay Bal Harbour prices for outfits that will be out of style before low tide, but these establishments can be fun, too. I like to stand outside the windows with paint on my sweat pants, tartar sauce on my T-shirt, and see the shopgirls fret.

  It had to change, of course, from the sleepy town it used to be, where every man, it seemed, knew the tides, when the air smelled from big, wet burlap bags of oysters and the only rich folks were those who came over on a ferry from Mobile to watch the sun set. But everybody is an interloper here, in a way. Sonny Brewer, a writer, came here in 1979 from Lamar County, in west central Alabama, and never really left. It was the late-afternoon sunlight, setting fire to the bay. “I was 30 years old,” said Brewer. “I remember thinking, ‘God, this is beautiful. How did I not know this was here?’ And here I stay.”

  It is the water, too. The sand is just a path to it.

  Here are the black currents of Fish River, highways of fresh and salt water, big bass gliding above in the fresher water, long trout lurking below in the heavier, saltier depths. The Fish River empties into Weeks Bay, which, through a cut called Big Mouth, empties into Mobile Bay. Here, I caught a trout as long as my arm, and we cooked it in a skillet smoking with black pepper and ate it with roasted potatoes and coleslaw made with purple cabbage, carrots, and a heaping double tablespoon of mayonnaise.