My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  And then it was gone, without warning, and I would go to sleep, grudging, and dream about oceans, and elephants, and trains.

  I miss the stillness. It is an antique in this shrill, intruding life, an all-but-forgotten thing of no real value, like inkwells. It is as if we have tried to fill up what stillness there is with all the mindless claptrap we can conjure, as if a little quiet or a patch of peaceful dark is a bug that has to be stomped before it gets away.

  In restaurants, I am forced to eat my meatloaf with the television tuned to two mental giants ranting about a topic they manufactured that morning, apparently from mud and straw. In a doctor’s waiting room, a televangelist told me I was going to hell, then Rachael Ray made me a tuna melt.

  At any given moment, on a plane, in a lobby, anywhere, I hear the TV at war with a dozen personal electronic devices. I am certain that, if I were sitting on a rug woven from palm fronds and dead army ants in the middle of the Amazon, I could hear the ubiquitous song of an iPhone.

  I miss the wind in the cedars. I miss that sifting sound. Sometimes in summer, we sit on the porch of our old house in Fairhope to watch the dark fall, but sometimes the neighbors get to hollering about, well, living, and how do you go over and say, “Excuse me, but you are messing up my dark”?

  It is enough to wish for a lightning storm. There’s that moment when the lightning flashes and thunder shakes the house. The power flickers and dies, and a dark stillness falls. And you’re swallowed up by a pure, old-fashioned silence, free of the hum of the refrigerator or the air conditioner, free from all the man-made background noise that makes you feel less human.

  I do not sleep any better now. I live most of the year with sirens and squealing tires. But someone, somewhere, is looking after me, and sent me another train. I hear it bump through the city of Tuscaloosa in the small hours of the morning, and I dream and wonder, again, though I know exactly where it goes.

  PART 4

  CRAFT

  WHY I WRITE ABOUT HOME

  Long Leaf Style, Summer 2008

  I write about home so I can be certain that someone will. It is not much more complicated than that.

  Home for me has always been as much a matter of class as location. My home is not the comfortable South, not the big churches, or the country clubs, or the giant waterfront houses on the lakes or the columned mansions on the main drags.

  Home for me is not a skybox at Alabama or Auburn, or good seats at Turner Field in Atlanta. It is not even the Kiwanis Club, or the Rotarians.

  Home is not a thing of position, or standing. My home is where the working people are, where you still see a Torino every now and then, and people still use motor oil to kill the mange.

  It is where the men live who know how to fix their own damn water pump, where the women watch their soap operas on the VCR because they will be at work at mid-day.

  It is where the churches are small, and the houses, too. It is where people cheer for a college they have never seen, where propane tanks shine silver outside mobile homes with redwood decks, where buttercups burst up out of mounds of red mud, encircled by an old tire.

  These are not the people of influence who have their names carved into the concrete of banks and schools and Baptist churches, whose faces stare back from the society page. As I’ve said, maybe too many times, these are the descendants of people who could only get their name in the newspaper or the history books if they knocked some rich guy off his horse.

  I do not, greatly, give a damn about writing about people who, by birthright, history will handle with great care anyway.

  I will write about a one-armed man who used to sling a slingblade out by the county jail, and a pulpwood truck driver who could swing a pine pole around like a baseball bat.

  I will write about dead police chiefs who treated even the most raggedy old boy with a little respect, and old men who sip beer beside the pool tables in Brother’s Bar, and then go take some money off the college boys.

  I will write about the wrongdoers, because sometimes doing right is just too damn hard, and the sorry drunks, and the women who love them anyway. I will write about mamas, not somebody’s Big Daddy. I will write about snuff, not caviar.

  I will write and write as long as somebody, anybody, wants me to, till we remind one more heartbroken ol’ boy of his grandfather, or educate one more pampered Yankee on the people of the pines.

  I will put on my necktie and do my best to fit in the more comfortable places, and it may be that I have come to like that too much. But it will never last for me, there, and I will always go back to what I understand and admire, and love.

  And it may be that there will come a time when no one wants to know, when no amount of skill will make them want to know, or care. And then I will quit, and I will do something else, or just die, because all this jaw jutting will wear out a man.

  But the stories will last whether I do or not, count whether I do or not, and the rich folks will just have to get used to the idea that their stories are only part of the story, and not the only part worthy of the clay, and the pines, and the years.

  THE FINE ART OF PIDDLING

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: February 2012

  The obituary made me smile. Ellis Ray of Moundville passed away Saturday...he was a loving husband, father, and grandfather, who loved to fish and piddle. He will be greatly missed.

  I mean no disrespect. Quite the contrary, I smiled because Ellis, whom I never met, is my brother, bound to me not by blood but by a shared habit. We are piddlers.

  Or we were. Now I am left here, an earthbound piddler, to piddle alone. What is a piddler? It is hard to explain to begin with, because piddling is neither one thing nor another, but something in between. It is not rest, not something that can be done with your feet on an ottoman or as you recline in a Posturepedic. But then neither is it work, something that one toils at, sweats at, something one needs a break from, for lunch, coffee. It is certainly not something for which one should ever be paid, and absolutely not something that one does while watching a clock.

  The whole idea of piddling is to kill time, but without any great effort at all, or even really meaning to. If one piddles correctly, time just goes away, without regret on the part of the piddler, or even any particular notice. One does not march off to piddle. One meanders. And even when one heads off to do it, one may not go to piddling right away, because one might have to loafer a little first. But loafering is another story.

  A piddler does not fix a leaky washing machine, or a slipping transmission, or a hole in a roof. Such work is necessary, and the more necessary a labor is, the farther from piddling it becomes. A piddler may use tools, but only small, light ones, and only on things that are not needed right then. Changing out a car battery in the dead of winter is not piddling, because it is a necessity. But tinkering with a lawn mower in the middle of February is, especially if the grass is deader than Great-aunt Minnie’s house cat and buried under a foot of snow. Doing a load of laundry is, of course, not piddling. Organizing one’s sock drawer by color and fiber is.

  Fishing is not piddling. That is why Ellis Ray’s survivors made that distinction in his obit. But sharpening hooks and respooling line is, especially if the bass boat is covered in sheet ice. Going to a baseball game is not piddling. Retying the laces on your cleats is, but only if the only way you will ever again go fast down the first-base line is if someone shoots you out of a cannon.

  Some people have to retire to piddle. Dr. David Sloan, a venerated college professor who worked across the hall from me, seemed one of the least piddling men I ever knew. But he said he fully intended to spend at least some of his retirement piddling. I am not so disciplined. I rearrange books, sharpen knives—the ones I am certain not to use—and change knobs on dressers and cabinets, but only if the ones I am replacing were perfectly fine. I rearrange pictures on the wall, and re-rearrange them because my wife makes me. I spackle holes left from the first rearranging, but only the holes that are hidde
n by the paintings and do not really have to be spackled at all. To spackle a hole in plain sight would be necessary and therefore illegal under piddling guidelines.

  My wife does not piddle. She reads, gardens (successfully), and uses her time wisely. When I try to interest her in my own piddling she looks at me with disdain and says she does not have time to waste.

  Ellis Ray of Moundville was 68 when he died. I bet he never wasted a second.

  THE COLOR OF WORDS

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: February 2014

  The winter is bleak and gray down here, or at least it can seem that way. The sky turns the color of dirty cotton and it rains two weeks straight, then sleets. Wet leaves blow like old newspaper and stick to anything that stands still, like windshields and old, slow-moving dogs. The red mud turns slick, then freezes. The ice storms turn out the lights, and people raid the bread aisle as though this were the end of time.

  Often, I gaze at the scudding clouds and icy mist and think of fishing.

  “The fish won’t bite on a bluebird day,” my big brother, Sam, told me many years ago, looking up into a bright, blue sky. I hear it in my head every clear, blue day—and when it’s cloudy with a chance of fish.

  Or, I think about Mrs. Mary Bird, of Waterloo, Alabama, who sees through the gray and cold. “Still enough blue in the sky,” she says, “to make a cat a pair of pants.” And I know that the real color and warmth in us, as a people, is not in the landscape or the sky but in our language, the way we lean the words against each other. We are the best-spoken people on Earth, not in the realm of grammar, perhaps, but in the pictures we paint and hang on the air.

  If you ask my mother if someone told the truth, she will not answer, “Why, yes, they did.” She will answer, “Why, hon’, she was tellin’ God’s sanction.” And that is just prettier. She also does not say people act a fool, which is cruel. “They play folly,” she says. I have been playing folly, she points out, for 54 years.

  We have our own phrases for things, like our phrase for a good person. If a man is capable, sound, he is not just “steady.” He is, as Sam says, “gun-barrel straight.” A man who is not gun-barrel straight is “a chuckle,” which I think is short for chucklehead. I just know that is what he calls me before suggesting that perhaps I should go get me “some of that anger management,” like it was something they sold with salt licks down at the co-op.

  “And if I tell you a rooster dips snuff,” he says, “you can look under his wing for the can.”

  I think a lot of people think our language is a bunch of clichés, like “shut my mouth,” or “rode hard and put up wet,” usually spat out when we are “drunk as Cooter Brown.” This is not what I am talking about.

  I think about my Uncle Ed, leaning on a shovel handle in the 100-degree heat of an Alabama summer, turning up an ice-crusted RC Cola before mumbling, quietly, “If the good Lord made anything better than this, He kept it for Hisself.”

  Some things we say are just mysterious, like a friend’s grandmother who is prone to blurt out, “Well, I’ll be Johnny.” We do not know who Johnny is. I am tired of trying to explain us. I once wrote that a man had enough money to burn a wet dog. I got a call from animal rights activists who wondered why I advocated such. I told them it was only something we said, and I loved dogs, and…

  I should have just told them to go see Johnny about it.

  THE BLANK NOTEBOOK

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: September 2013

  The long hallways—math to this side, science to the other, social studies down the way—were of ancient, gleaming wood, and always smelled of fresh wax and old misery. How many D minuses had fluttered down to those dark boards? How many “trues” that should have been “falses”? How many multiple choices that left no choice at all?

  It was around 1966 or 1967, but September for sure, because September meant that summer was well and truly dead. It was still hot as seven hells outside, but with one halting step into the gloom of that hall you entered a whole other realm, where coaches and even math teachers kept order with long wooden paddles, and a second-grade teacher once kicked my cowboy boot clear off my foot, then, with a running second kick, knocked it clear into the hall. All this, because I left one leg sprawled out in the aisle during her elocution. Still, it was a fine kick for an old woman.

  I should have hated that school, Roy Webb School, in Calhoun County, Alabama. I would have, maybe, if not for that notebook.

  As much as I hated the end of those hot, free days of summer, I loved that notebook, loved the clean, unmarred lines. Every year I got a new one, divided by subject, and it was always somehow just enough to get me through the year, perhaps because math was completely blank. Except for pictures of hot rods. I used a quarter to get the wheels right.

  Mostly, I loved the smell of it. It smelled like… well, I couldn’t put words to it, then. Now I know it was the smell of a fresh start, the smell of possibility. I could learn something, if at the end of the year the pages were filled with ideas, maybe even answers. I would start writing on the third or fourth page, because surely there was some finer idea that needed to go first.

  I wrote Mark Twain’s thoughts here. I wrote every line to “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” about how the hens laid soft-boiled eggs.

  My books were wrapped in brown paper bags from the Piggly Wiggly, and on those rare occasions I got a new one, the spine would make a cracking sound, like snapping an ice-cream stick, when I first opened it. My desk was always carved at least once with the name of a long-lost third grader, always daubed at least five times with a petrified wad of Juicy Fruit. I puzzled at that. How did he expect to get away with defacing school property when he signed his work? And how did a school that had banned the chewing of gum since the first Roosevelt Administration have desks in such a state? Come to think of it, they had banned pocketknives, too.

  But this was the key to my castle. I learned here.

  I walk through stores and pick up notebooks and smell them, and I am sure more than one person has shaken their head at the odd man trying to snort up a stationery aisle. It does not smell the same. I think it is because my chance is used up, and the great possibility with it. Maybe only the young can sense it, the ones at the beautiful, unmarred beginning of things.

  FISH STORY

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: July 2013

  This is a fish story. That said, it is still mostly true.

  “We need to go fishin’ out in the Gulf, on my boat,” said my friend Randy Jones.

  “Not,” I said, “if you are driving.” I had never heard of any great seafarers from Sand Mountain, Alabama, and had this awful image in my head of him and me playing dominoes in a Cuban prison.

  “I’ll get somebody good,” he said.

  There were five of us the day we put out from Orange Beach on Randy’s 40-footer, Earlie Tide. “Because my daddy’s name was Earlie,” he told me, and if that is not the perfect reason to name a boat, I don’t know what is.

  I do not recall the day. “Just say it was the hottest day of the year,” Randy said. It was me, him, and my stepson Jake. The skipper was Fred Williams, whom Randy described as “a car salesman and wannabe sea captain.” But I looked him in his squinty eyes and knew him to be a capable man. Crewing the boat was Dr. Wayne Hyatt, a pioneering laser surgeon and, Randy said, “the most expensive deckhand in maritime history.”

  We went 27 miles into the blue, and when we stopped, the sun seemed to be trying to bore a hole through the deck of the Earlie Tide. “I got air-conditioning and a big-screen TV in the cabin,” Randy told me, but I told him, “Naw, I came to fish like a man.” Besides, the TV wasn’t hooked up.

  Jake was oblivious to the heat, and cranked in fish after fish. I lasted about two hours and began to perish. My face burned red and my mouth went white, and I began to see things in the water that were not there. “We can read your last rites right here,” my good friend told me, “ ’cause I ain’t givin’ you mouth-to-mouth.�
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  But I wobbled around the deck another hour. Hemingway would have, I told myself, and he would have been knee-walkin’ drunk at the time. Just about then, in my weakened state, I felt that pull on my line even bad fishermen dream about. I tried to keep the rod pointed at the sky, but whatever was on the line nearly pulled me into the water. Do red snapper get this big? Do Spanish mackerel? I fought and I fought till my stomach began to flop around inside me, and then with one last pull the hook, bait, and a portion of, well, something, came flying into the boat.

  “It’s the jaw of a red snapper,” someone said, solemnly.

  “Pulled his lips off,” I said, tragically.

  It takes a man, I told my shipmates, to separate a fish from his lips.

  Yeah, they said, that must be what happened. Then Wayne posed with it and got his picture made. Most likely, a shark took the fish as it rose on my line. I choose not to believe that. But it was a failure, I suppose, another failure for the worst fisherman in my family line. I asked Randy why we even try. He explained that it was natural, to try and fail and fail again. We have this man in our head we want to be, a fisherman.

  “So,” Randy said, “we go.”

  THE QUILL AND THE MULE

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: April 2011

  In one of my most delicious daydreams, I stand at the gates of the Southern Writers’ Hereafter, wondering if my name is on the list. Suddenly the gates swing open to reveal a sanctum of velvet drapes, leather chairs, and a bar lined with bottles of brown whiskey. William Faulkner is here, spats propped on his Nobel Prize. Truman Capote drops names at the bar. Flannery O’Connor tells a bawdy joke.