by Joan Didion
Off US 82-W, near Tuscaloosa, is Lake Lurleen. Bear Bryant Volkswagen in Tuscaloosa. Rebel Oil. Bumper stickers: “Yahweh vs. Evolution / Don’t Make a Monkey Out of Yourself.” Tiger Lilies. Red Tide, Crimson Tide, Go Tide, Roll Tide.
At the Ramada Inn in Tuscaloosa I sat outside by the swimming pool about five o’clock one afternoon and read Sally Kempton’s piece in Esquire about her father and other men she had known. There was no sun. The air was as liquid as the pool. Everything seemed to be made of concrete, and damp. A couple of men in short-sleeved nylon shirts sat at another metal table and drank beer from cans. Later we tried to find somewhere open to eat. I called a place on University Boulevard, and the owner said to turn left at the Skyline Drive-in. On the way we got lost and stopped in a gas station to ask directions. The attendant had no idea where University Boulevard was (the University of Alabama is on University Boulevard) but could give us directions to the Skyline.
Birmingham
When I called a friend in Birmingham to ask who I should see around the countryside, what was going on, and he asked me what I wanted to know and I explained, he said, “You want to see who’s sitting around the Greyhound bus station and who’s sitting around in a Packard car, is that right?” I said that was right.
The country way in which he gave me names: “There’s ole Rankin Fife, Speaker of the state House of Representatives, he pretty much runs Winfield. Over to Boligee there’s David Johnston, he’s got a big farm. There’s a union leader, the Haneys, they live outside Guin, and he’s a farmer and a preacher and a union leader. There’s the Hill family, they run the bank. There’s Boyd Aman in Boligee, number one hunter and fisherman—I reckon you could find him at the general store. And if you get in any trouble up there, you be sure to call me.”
The sense of sports being the opiate of the people. In all the small towns the high school gymnasium was not only the most resplendent part of the high school but often the most solid structure in the town, redbrick, immense, a monument to the hopes of the citizenry. Athletes who were signing “letters of intent” were a theme in the local news.
At dinner one night in Birmingham there were, besides us, five people. Two of the men had gone to Princeton and the third was, when he was traveling on business, a habitué of Elaine’s in New York and the Beverly Hills Hotel in California. They talked with raucous good humor about “seein’ those X-rated movies” when their wives were out of town. This was a manner of speaking, a rococo denial of their own sophistication, which I found dizzying to contemplate.
“You could almost say that all the virtues and all the limitations of the South are a function of low population,” someone said at lunch in Birmingham. “Cities, well, cities are melting pots. What we’ve had here was an almost feudal situation.” We had been in places in Mississippi and Alabama where there had been virtually no ethnic infusion.
“Leave ’em to their stamps,” someone said at dinner about the white tenants on his father’s place.
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Southern houses and buildings once had space and windows and deep porches. This was perhaps the most beautiful and comfortable ordinary architecture in the United States, but it is no longer built, because of air-conditioning.
NOTE: The curious ambivalence of the constant talk about wanting industry. Is not wanting industry the death wish, or is wanting it?
—
Talking about “a gentleman of the old school,” there was the familiarity with generations of eccentric behavior, scandals and arrangements, high extramarital drama played out against the Legion parade.
It is said that the dead center of Birmingham society is the southeast corner of the locker room at the Mountain Brook country club. At Mountain Brook everyone goes to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church or Briarwood Presbyterian, and it is hard to make the connection between this Birmingham and that of Bull Connor, and Birmingham Sunday.
Lunch with Hugh Bailey at the club, up high enough to see the smoke haze. “We got a pollution count in Birmingham now, which I guess you could say is a sign of progress.” On that day the Birmingham Post-Herald (June 18) reported the downtown pollution count at 205, or over the U.S. Public Health Service’s critical level, and the number of respiratory deaths in Jefferson County that week at six. There did not seem to be much pollution in Mountain Brook.
In Birmingham at dinner they were talking about catching rattlesnakes. “You take a hose, and go out in the fields, and take a few drops of gasoline down the hose into a hole—any hole—and that makes the rattlesnakes kind of drunk, and they come out for some air.”
At every social level, the whole quality of maleness, the concentration on hunting and fishing. Leave the women to their cooking, their canning, their “prettifying.”
A sign in a trailer camp in Walker County, Alabama: YOUR VOTE AND SUPPORT APPRECIATED/WALLACE FOR GOVERNOR. The thought that the reason Wallace has never troubled me is that he is a totally explicable phenomenon.
Most southerners are political realists: they understand and accept the realities of working politics in a way we never did in California. Graft as a way of life is accepted, even on the surface. “You get somebody makes eight hundred dollars a month as state finance director, he’s only got four years to make his stake.”
Inscriptions on gravestones:
THE ANGELS CALLED HIM
DYING IS BUT GOING HOME
MOORE
ELLIE JESSIE T.
1888–19 1887–1952
SANDLIN
RAND IDA M.
1871–1952 1873–19
JENNIE B., wife of J. R. Jones. She was a kind and affectionate wife, a fond aunt, and a friend to all.
In so many family plots there was someone recently dead—dead after World War II—who remembered the Civil War. This was in a graveyard in a harsh red-dirt hill town, plastic flowers on the plots, overlooking the bright lights of the ballpark.
At the St. Francis Motel in Birmingham I went swimming, which occasioned great notice in the bar. “Hey, look, there’s somebody with a bikini on.”
Winfield
Maybe the rural South is the last place in America where one is still aware of trains and what they can mean, their awesome possibilities.
I put my clothes in the laundromat and walked on down the dirt at the side of the road to the beauty shop. A girl with long straight blond hair gave me a manicure. Her name was Debby.
“I got one more year at Winfield High,” Debby said, “then I’m getting out.”
I asked her where she would get out to.
“Birmingham,” she said.
I asked what she would do in Birmingham.
“Well, if I keep on working while I’m in school, I’ll have enough hours for my cosmetologist’s license. You need three thousand, I got twelve hundred already. Then I’ll go to modeling school.” Debby reflected a moment. “I hope I will.”
An electric fan hummed in the small shop. The smell of hair conditioners, shampoos, warm and sticky. The only other person there was the daughter of the proprietress. I asked her if she was still in school. She giggled as if she did not believe anyone could ask such a silly question.
“I been married three years,” she said.
“You don’t look old enough,” I said.
“I’m twenty.”
She lives in a trailer with her husband, Scott, who operates a power saw. Trailers got hot, we all agreed. They cool down at night, Debby suggested. “Oh, sure,” the twenty-year-old said, “it cools down at night.” Her mother, who owned the beauty shop, was home “doing her bookwork.” She was in charge, and bossing Debby slightly. “You didn’t get her name? She couldn’t come any other time?”
They revert to the theme of the heat. The trailer does cool down at night, they agreed.
“Last night it was cool,” the twenty-year-old said.
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“I didn’t think so,” Debby said.
“I don’t mean when we went to bed, I mean late. I woke up, it was almost cool. ’Course I’d had the conditioning on in the trailer all day.”
Debby looked impassively out the open door. “So hot, Daddy had to come out from the bedroom to sleep on the couch.”
“Cooler in than out.”
Debby dried my hands. “I guess,” she said idly.
—
At the little concrete pool between the motel and the creek, two teenage girls in two-piece bathing suits were lying in the sun on the stained pavement. They had come in a pickup truck and a transistor radio on the seat of the pickup played softly. There was algae in the pool, and a cigarette butt. “ABC,” the Jackson 5.
I bought a large paper cup full of cracked ice in the drugstore (Hollis Pharmacy) for a nickel and walked back down the road to the laundromat eating it. Nothing had changed in the laundromat in the hour or so I had been gone: the same women, most with rollers in their hair, sat and stared and folded frayed flower-printed towels and sheets. There were two men in the laundromat, a repairman and an officious young man, straw-haired and rednecked, who seemed to be the owner. He regarded the women with contempt and the women regarded him in sullen impassivity.
“Hot ’nough for you?” a middle-aged woman said to me. I said it was. There was no hostility toward or even curiosity about me in the laundromat: by virtue of spending a summer afternoon in this steaming bleak structure I had moved into a realm where all women are sisters in misery. “Use this one,” the woman said a while later, pointing out a dryer to me. “This one’s dried her clothes and mine both, and she just put in one dime.” The woman glanced furtively at the repairman as she spoke, and at the owner, as if fearful that they might fix the machine, deprive us of our jackpot.
On weekday afternoons in towns like Winfield one sees mainly women, moving like somnambulists through the days of their lives. The men work out at plants somewhere, or on farms, or in lumber. When I left the laundromat there was a boy in a bike helmet working on the road. Bike helmets had come to seem a normal mode of dress. How the West Was Won was playing at the movie house.
In the Angelyn Restaurant in Winfield at lunchtime a number of men, among the few I saw in town in the daytime, sat around and watched General Hospital on the television.
Guin
A traveler in the rural South in the summertime is always eating dinner, dispiritedly, in the barely waning heat of the day. One is a few hundred miles and a culture removed from any place that serves past 7:30 or 8 p.m. We ate dinner one night at a motel on the road between Winfield and Guin. The sun still blazed on the pavement outside, and was filtered only slightly by the aqueous blue-green Pliofilm shades on the windows inside. The food seemed to have been deep-fried for the lunch business and kept lukewarm on a steam table. Eating is an ordeal, as in an institution, something to be endured in the interests of survival. There are no drinks to soften the harshness of it. Ice is begrudged. I remember in one such place asking for iced coffee. The waitress asked me how to make it. “Same way as iced tea,” I said. She looked at me without expression. “In a cup?” she asked.
The waitress in the place in Guin trailed me to the cash register. She was holding a matchbook I had left on the table. “I was looking at your matchbook,” she said. “Where’s it from?” I said it was from Biloxi. “Biloxi, Mississippi?” she said, and studied the matchbook as if it were a souvenir from Nepal. I said yes. She tucked the matchbook in her pocket and turned away.
On the outskirts of Guin the sign says GU-WIN/CITY LIMIT. At the Wit’s Inn in Guin, an MYF (I think) coffeehouse, there were a couple of kids with guitars entertaining. They were billed as Kent and Phil, and their last engagement had been at Tuscaloosa. They sang “Abraham, Martin and John” and “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and the children in the place joined in when asked, in clear sweet voices.
Some of the boys were wearing Guin baseball uniforms and one beautiful boy about sixteen was wearing a tie-dyed shirt and pants. Kids would drink Cokes and then drift out to the street and talk to somebody idling by in a car and then drift back in. The night was warm and there was fresh corn growing high along the road just past town. It seemed a good and hopeful place to live, and yet the pretty girls, if they stayed around Guin, would end up in the laundromat in Winfield, or in a trailer with the air-conditioning on all night.
When the program ended about ten kids all stood around in the street, making idle connections. A half an hour later the only people seen on the streets of Guin were twelve-year-olds wearing baseball uniforms. We drove between Guin and Hamilton on the George C. Wallace White Way, four lanes to nowhere, brightly lit. In Hamilton the street lights were turned off. We were getting Fort Worth and San Antonio on the car radio, gospel stations, “Rock of Ages” and “Lonesome Valley.” Drove into a drive-in to see the end of The Road Hustlers, starring Jim Davis, Andy Devine, and Scott Brady. The Losers was the next bill at the drive-in. We followed The Losers all over the South. Outside Guin the night shift was working at the 3M plant.
Grenada, Mississippi
Driving over from Oxford to Grenada to have dinner one night with Bob Evans, Jr., and his wife, I noticed the shadows on the kudzu vine, the vine consuming trees, poles, everything in its range. The kudzu makes much of Mississippi seem an ominously topiary landscape. And the graveyards everywhere, with plastic sweet peas on the graves of infants. Death is still natural and ever present in the South, as it is no more in those urbanized parts of the country where graveyards are burial parks and relegated to unused or unusable land far from sight.
On Highway 7, Buck Brown & Son filling station. The rifles slung across the back cab windows of pickups. The Yalobusha Country Club just south of Water Valley. In Water Valley, blacks hanging around the main street, the highway, leaning on cars, talking across the street, the highway. In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.
On Margin Street in Grenada, as we drove in, a girl in a yellow bridesmaid’s dress and a tulle headpiece, her husband in a cutaway, walked home from a wedding carrying their daughter, a baby two or three.
At the Evanses’ house, there was a framed Christmas card from The President and Mrs. Nixon, and what appeared to be a framed slave deed. We had drinks, and after a while we took our drinks, our road glasses, and went for a drive through town. Mrs. Evans had grown up in Grenada, had been married once before, and now she and her second husband—who was from Tupelo—lived in her mother’s old house. “Look at all those people standing around in front of that motel,” she said once on the drive. “That’s a cathouse,” her husband told her. We went out to a lake, and then to dinner at the Holiday Inn, this being another of those towns where the Holiday Inn was the best place to eat. We brought our drinks and a bottle in with us, because there was no liquor served, only setups. I am unsure whether the bottle was legal. The legality or illegality of liquor in the South seems a complication to outsiders, but is scarcely considered by the residents. At dinner some people were watching us, and later came over to say hello to the Evanses. They introduced us as friends from California. “We were wondering where you were from,” one of them said.
—
On our drive we passed a five-year-old in baseball pajamas playing catch with a black maid in a white uniform, the ball going back and forth, back and forth, suspended in amber.
The Evanses had a little baby, their child, and a sixteen-year-old daughter, her child. “She only comes out of her room when it’s time to eat or time to go out,” he said about her.
About the bottle at dinner: actually we brought three bottles, Scotch, bourbon, and vodka, and it was not legal to bring them inside in this dry county, because Mrs. Evans had them i
n a large handbag she carried exactly for this purpose.
About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.
Oxford
In the student union at Ole Miss they were watching General Hospital on the TV, just as they had been in the Angelyn Restaurant in Winfield.
In the student union there was an official calendar for May, on which was printed “May 28—Vacation—Raise Hell.” Below this someone had scribbled, “An appropriate preoccupation for an Ole Miss student.” The self-image of the Southern Blood as Cavalier very apparent here.
In the university bookstore, which appeared to be the one place in Oxford to buy a book (with the exception of a drugstore on the square which had several racks of paperbacks), the only books available other than assigned texts were a handful of popular bestsellers and a few (by no means all) novels by William Faulkner.
At the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn, the musical dialogue:
“Get that penny, it’s down there yonder.”
“Hurt my toe.”
“I hurt my toe climbing a plum tree.”
“How’d you hurt your toe?”
“Climbed a plum tree.”
“Why.”
“Get a plum.”
“Hey, Bruiser, drop my sneaks down?”
“OK, Goose.”
In the parking lot at the Holiday Inn one afternoon a police car was parked, its door open, the police radio breaking the still afternoon air the whole time I was sitting by the pool. Later when I was swimming a little girl pointed out to me that by staying underwater one could hear, by some electronic freak, a radio playing. I submerged and heard news of the Conservative victory in Great Britain, and “Mrs. Robinson.”
When I was driving in the afternoon alone on the Ole Miss campus the wind came up, sudden and violent, and the sky darkened and there was thunder but no rain. I was afraid of a tornado. The suddenness and unpredictability of this shocked me. The weather around here must shape ideas of who and what one is, as it does everywhere.