“Got interested in police work, but I was still unsettled and afraid of getting stuck on a ship. Afraid of drudgery. I like changes.”
“Changes? In here? Of all you could find here, I’d think change would be the least likely.”
“I mean growth and a change of pace. I work four hours as an electrician’s assistant. Watch out, this is going to be philosophical, but you could make some kind of analogy between being an electrician and a monk—the flow of energy from a greater source to smaller outlets. Still, the electrical work is different from the spiritual work, even if I try to merge them.”
“Two things don’t seem like much change.”
“I’m also what you might describe as the monastery forest ranger. They call me Smokey the Monk. I oversee the wooded part of the grounds. Try to keep the forest healthy. Just for fun, I’ve been cataloging all the wildflowers here. We’ve identified about two hundred species, not counting the blue unknowns and pink mysteries. Working on shrubs now. And I’ve taken to bird-watching since I came. I spend a lot of time in the woods reading, thinking. That’s when real changes can happen.”
“What do you read?”
“In the woods, some natural history, some Thoreau. Always scripture and theology. Reading about the charismatic movement now.” He was silent a moment. “Does any of this explain why I’m here?”
“It all must be part of an answer.”
“For years I’ve been fascinated by intense spiritual experiences of one kind and another. When I was seventeen—I’m forty-two now—I thought about becoming a monk. I’m not sure why, other than to say I felt an incompleteness in myself. But after a while, the desire seemed to disappear. That’s when I started traveling. I learned to travel, then traveled to learn. Later, when I was riding a radio car in Brooklyn, I began to want a life—and morality—based not so much on constraint but on aspiration toward a deeper spiritual life. Damn, that was unsettling. I thought about seeing a psychiatrist, but after a couple of months, I just stopped worrying whether I was crazy.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe I got cured when I started working part-time with the Franciscans in New York. They do a lot of community work at the street level, and that gave me a chance to look into this ‘monkey business,’ as a friend calls it. I joined the Franciscans Third Order for two years, to test whether I really wanted to enter a monastery, although their work is secular rather than monastic. Then I worked with the Little Brothers of the Gospel. They live communally, in stark simplicity, in the Bowery. That helped make up my mind. I liked what I could see of a religious life. I began to see my problem was not trusting myself—being afraid of what I really wanted.”
He pulled up his tunic and scratched his leg. “Understand, there was nothing wrong with riding a radio car, although I got tired of the bleeding and the shot and cut people I was bandaging up. Seemed I was a medic again. And delivering babies in police car backseats. Thirteen of those. The poor tend to wait to the last minute, then they call the police.” He stopped. “Forgot what I was talking about.”
“Trusting yourself.”
“Better to say a lack of self-trust. As a kid, I was always searching for something beyond myself, something to bring harmony and make sense of things. Whatever my understanding of that something is, I think it began in the cop work and even more when I was assisting the friars in New York. I was moving away from things and myself, toward concerns bigger than me and my problems, but I didn’t really find a harmony until I came here. I don’t mean to imply I have total and everlasting harmony; I’m just saying I feel it more here than in other places.”
He was quiet for some time. “Tonight I can give you ten reasons why I’m a monk. Tomorrow I might see ten new ones. I don’t have a single unchanging answer. Hope that doesn’t disappoint you.”
“Try it in terms of what you like about the life here.”
“I’ve always been attracted to hermitic living—I didn’t say ‘hermetic living’—but only for short periods. I go off in the woods alone, but I come back. Here, nobody asks, ‘What happened to you? You off the beam again?’ Living behind that front wall—it doesn’t surround us, by the way—living here doesn’t mean getting sealed off. This is no vacuum. We had a new kid come in. He left before he took his vows because he couldn’t find so-called stability—stability meaning ‘no change.’ I told him this place was alive. People grow here. The brothers are likely to start sprouting leaves and blossoms. This is no place to escape from what you are because you’re still yourself. In fact, personal problems are prone to get bigger here. Our close community and reflective life tend to magnify them.”
6. Brother Patrick Duffy at the monastery near Conyers, Georgia
“How did you finally make the decision to ‘come aside’?”
“A friend’s father told me, ‘If you don’t do what you want when you’re young, you’ll never do it.’ So I quit waiting for certainty to come.”
“A five-year experiment. Was it the right thing?”
“Right? It’s one of the right things. The best right thing. I believe in it enough I’m taking my permanent vows in October.”
“You don’t have second thoughts?”
“Second, third, fourth. I go with as much as I can understand. And I’ve gotten little signs. Like listening to Beethoven. I loved Beethoven. Been here two years, and one day I just went over and turned the stereo off. Beethoven was too complex, I guess, for me. My tastes have developed toward simpler things. Merton calls it ‘the grace of simplicity.’ Haven’t broken myself of Vivaldi though.”
I wanted to ask a question, but it seemed out of bounds. I decided to anyway. “I’d like to know something, partly out of curiosity and partly out of trying to imagine myself a monk.” He didn’t laugh but I did. “My question, let’s see, I guess I want to know how you endure without women.”
“I don’t ‘endure’ it. I choose it.” He was silent again. “Sometimes, when I’m doing my Smokey duties, I come across a couple picnicking, fooling around. Whenever that happens, when I’m reminded where I’ve been, I sink a little. I feel an emptiness. Not for a woman so much as for a child—I would like to have had a son. That’s the emptiness.”
“What do you do?”
His answers were coming slowly. “I try to take desires and memories of companionship—destructive ones—and let them run their course. Wait it out. Don’t panic. That’s when the emptiness is intense.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s the beginning. Then I turn the pain of absence into an offering to God. Sometimes that’s all I have to offer.”
“You mean what you’ve given up?”
“Does it seem like I’m giving nothing?”
“It seems like a gift of giving up a gift. For he so loved God he gave up his only unbegotten son.”
Brother Patrick smiled. “Just say I try to turn the potential for destructiveness into a useful force. In that way, the attraction of the outside reinforces. It’s another way to come closer to God.”
“Someone else today used that phrase about coming closer to God. It sounds like the Hindus who renounce the world and move away from things, including their own desires, so they can get closer to their god.”
“Simplicity reveals the universals we all live under. Material goods can blunt your perception of greater things. Here, the effort is to free yourself from blindness, arrogance, selfishness.”
The bells rang for compline. It was so dark I heard Duffy more than I saw him. He said, “I begin with this broken truth that I am. I start from the entire broken man—entire but not whole. Then I work to become empty. And whole. In looking for ways to God, I find parts of myself coming together. In that union, I find a regeneration.”
“Sounds like spiritual biology.”
“Why not?” After a pause he said, “Coming here is following a call to be quiet. When I go quiet I stop hearing myself and start hearing the world outside me. Then I hear something
very great.”
Three
South by Southeast
1
AMIDST a clangor of bells in the middle of the night, the brothers began their day. I heard shuffling along the walks as they went to morning prayers. Admiring men who can give thanks for a day still two hours from first light, I again burrowed down into the bed in deep sloth.
After breakfast, I put my duffel together, left a contribution, and shook hands with a surprising number of people before going back through the big gate. When I stepped into my rig, I thought for a moment I was in the wrong truck. It seemed small and enclosed like a cell—not a monk’s cell, but a prisoner’s. Even simple and necessary gear looked foreign. Dross.
On Georgia 155, I crossed Troublesome Creek, then went through groves of pecan trees aligned one with the next like fenceposts. The pastures grew a green almost blue, and syrupy water the color of a dusty sunset filled the ponds. Around the farmhouses, from wires strung high above the ground, swayed gourds hollowed out for purple martins.
The land rose again on the other side of the Chattahoochee River, and highway 34 went to the ridgetops where long views over the hills opened in all directions. Here was the tail of the Appalachian backbone, its gradual descent to the Gulf. Near the Alabama stateline stood a couple of LAST CHANCE! bars—those desperate places that run at a higher pitch than taverns part of the whole fabric of a town; there’s an unnaturalness in them, isolated as they usually are from the ordinary circuits of people. On into Talapoosa County and Alexander City (just north of Our Town), where I found a place for the night by the tennis courts of the community college. That evening was to change the direction of the journey.
2
THE woman was an authority. Whatever there was, she knew it. Her face, pallid like a partly boiled potato, looked as if carved out with a paring knife. She was a matron of note in Alexander City. Two other women, dark in eighteen-hole tans, sat with her on a bench alongside the tennis courts, while their daughters took lessons under the lights. The discussion on the bench was Tupperware. The potato had just said, “For a shower gift, you can’t do better than a Pak-N-Stor.” Another explained how her eldest had received an upright freezer full of nesting food containers from the Walkers.
“That reminds me,” said the third woman, “how is Mildred?”
“How good can you be, taking cobalt?” the authority answered.
A daughter in pearl-mint lipgloss jogged up to a handsome man standing by the courts. On his shirt, a famous little crocodile was laughing at something. Her damp haltertop and tennis shorts clung to her like tattoos. She didn’t mind my staring. “Buy me a cola drink, Daddy.”
A sunburned man at the end of the bench said, “Doesn’t she get her share of the attention! Goes to school in the North. Nobody here can touch her.”
“North, South,” I said, “makes no difference.”
He said nothing. The girls returned to their lessons, the father went back to courtside, and the women talked about aboveground swimming pools. The sunburned fellow muttered, “That your green van?” I nodded and told him I was looking around the South. He asked, “You go through Atlanta?”
“Trying to stay out of cities.”
“Not seeing the South then. Better go back.” He moved down the bench. I smelled booze. “I went to Emory University for five years. Drove a city bus in Atlanta to pay for my schooling.” As he rambled, I watched the players chase tennis balls. He said something about a “martyr bus.”
“What’s a martyr bus?”
“M-A-R-T-A. Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, otherwise known as Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”
“I don’t get it.”
“The blacks—you know, the domestics living in Buttermilk Bottom, the goddamn ghetto—they take buses to the suburbs to clean houses.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. You’re goggling the coeds in their cute tans. Listen, church in Atlanta, down on West Peachtree, had a signboard. Big letters. WHERE THE FOLKS ARE FRIENDLY. Same church that wouldn’t let a black preacher speak at a worldwide Methodist conference.”
“Nothing particularly Southern about that.”
He wasn’t listening. He was convincing me. “I can tell you about a boutique in Underground Atlanta that sold little plastic ax handles signed by a former governor. Even being a Yankee, you might’ve heard of Lester Maddox taking his stand in front of his Pick-Rick restaurant with a goddamn ax handle in his goddamn hands. I mean, he got elected governor because he got photographed with a goddamn ax handle. I wasn’t with MARTA then, but if I’da been, I’da driven my bus right into Lester’s fucking cream pies.”
The blue crocodile man turned to us. He said, “Easy, Marlin. Ladies about. We’ve heard all that stuff by now. Times have changed for ideas like that.”
“Changed?” He looked at the tall man. “I’ll tell you change.” He turned to me, his sunburn reddening. “Here’s change: a monument to the boll weevil in Enterprise, Alabama, because it broke King Cotton’s back so beans and corn could take over. Here’s change: Atlanta Klan rally, Klan as in KufuckingKlux, year or two ago. Little ad in the Constitution advertising the rally. At the bottom it says, ‘Bring your own robe.’ Organization changed from furnishing the stinking bedsheets.”
Looking at me, the handsome man put his hand on Marlin’s shoulder. “You’re the one needs changing, Marlin. Next thing, you’ll be spouting again about your great-grandaddy up in the quarry at Sylacauga cutting marble for the Supreme Court building. Hear yourself: it’s all old talk now.”
To me, Marlin said, “I drove a bus, and he drives a real estate office. You figure it out, Yankee.” He got up, knocked the man’s hand from his shoulder, and put his face close to mine. In a mocking, Gone-with-the-Wind accent, he said, “Why don’t y’all git youah fuckin’ eyes off the darlin’ belles’ butts and go ovah to Selma? See what Uncle Remus got to say since he done give up the cake walk.”
He went off up the hill. That was it.
3
BY midmorning I was following route 22, as I had from the Alabama line, on my way to Selma. The truck license plates said HEART OF DIXIE, and I was going into the middle of the heart. West of the bouldery Coosa River, I saw an old man plowing an old field with an old horse, and once more I wasn’t sure whether I was seeing the end or beginning. Then an outbreak of waving happened—first at Maplesville, again in Stanton, again in Plantersville; from galleries and sidewalks people waved. Where folks are friendly.
It was late afternoon in Selma, and big trees along Broad Street, a clean and orderly avenue, shaded the way; citizens swept porches and talked over hedges. At the bottom of Broad, the Edmund Pettus Bridge arched high above the Alabama River. The span, named after a Confederate private who mustered out as a brigadier general, was the point where mounted troopers forced a halt to Martin Luther King’s first attempt to march to Montgomery. But the afternoon I saw the bridge, it looked silvery and quiet, more ordinary than historic.
Water Avenue intersected Broad Street and ran parallel to the river on the high, north side. West on the avenue was a boarded-up building of Doric columns and an inscription chiseled in stone: HARMONY CLUB. East stood two- and three-story brick buildings with ornamental ironwork supporting galleries that gave the street an aspect of the Vieux Carré in New Orleans. What little remained of Selma’s old commercial architecture—buildings Walker Evans photographed during the Depression—was here.
I looked along Broad Street for a beer to chase the heat and furnish opportunity for conversation; two places appeared to be bars, but signs outside gave no indication. Water Avenue, down where Confederate shipfitters had built ironclads to fight Farragut at Mobile Bay, was quiet but for an old cotton warehouse with a buzzing electric sign: MICKEY’S PLACE. A second sign above showed a champagne glass, a plus symbol, and a human figure either dancing or falling over dead.
Mickey’s was, in fact, a tavern and the sign a Bible Belt hieroglyphic to say tha
t. I was the only customer. The barmaid, in her early twenties, wore a see-through blouse that surrendered transparency at the last possible point of decency; at the center she had pinned a Made-in-Taiwan red plastic rose, which matched another stuck into a pair of black lace underpants nailed to the wall. She stood looking forlorn, I thought, twisting a highball glass on stacks of joke napkins, turning them into little ziggurats.
In the dimness, the bar mirror, only a few feet away, returned no reflection, and I checked to see if I had on sunglasses. I didn’t, but she wore hers. Perfume stuck to the wet bottle of beer she set down. “What’s with the sign outside?” I said. “Wasn’t sure this was a bar.”
“Cain’t advertise bars or liquor in the city. About the most you can get away with is ‘cold beverages of all kinds.’”
Four new, antiqued Pabst Blue Ribbon wall lamps behind the bar were mounted upside down with the name smeared over. “What’s with the lights?”
“That’s advertisin’.”
“I can read ‘Pabst’ on the bottle in my hand but not on the wall?”
“You catch on fast. Where you from? Chicago?”
I told her. She took off her sunglasses to get or give a better look, then put them on again when a man came in for a bottle of beer to go. She rolled it carefully in a paper sack, but the outline was unmistakable. It looked like a little mummy.
“Where are you from?”
“Right here,” she said. “Selma, everlovin’ Alagoddamnbama, Heart of D-I-X-I-E.” I smiled. “Don’t laugh, Chicago. Here’s the only place I ever been ceptin’ Montgomery. And Biloxi once as a baby. But I’m headin’ for New Orleans soon. This little number is on the move. Look away, Dixieland!” She removed her sunglasses. “So, what’s Mr. Chicago doin’ in Selma?”
“Mr. Chicago was encouraged to come to see what the march changed.”
“What march?”
“King’s march.”
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America Page 11