I feel like Pappy is with Julian as he sits down to taste, not the legend but the man himself, Julian’s grandfather, who hunted and golfed with a dog named Thunder. If you dig back into the past, flip through old newspapers in the small Kentucky town where he grew up, you’ll find Pappy’s own history: a successful attorney, a father, a brother who owned his own empire of coal mines and led an effort to have a hydroelectric dam and electric plant built; a modern man looking to the future. But go one more generation back, to Pappy’s own grandfather, a man named Miciah Van Winkle who moved to Kentucky, to the very edge of civilization, where he sought and ultimately made a prosperous new life, enough to launch his sons and grandsons into the business world and the heights of Kentucky society. And he did it like so many first-generation dreamers: he was a farmer. That’s the life Pappy wanted to re-create, the life he did re-create at the Stitzel-Weller distillery he opened on Derby Day because, as his brother looked to the future and its new sources of energy and power, Pappy spent his life looking backward and selling the nostalgia he felt to other men who felt it, too.
8
LONGING FOR A VANISHED AGRARIAN PAST (that possibly never existed) dominates much of the American story. It’s human nature. I recently watched that Ken Burns Country Music documentary and wasn’t surprised to learn that the genre was invented and popularized by urban people who’d left an agrarian life behind. They were nostalgic for a world that had been lost. Baseball has the same roots, as do the meat-and-three country cooking places all over the South. Soul food and country cooking, the black and white expressions of the same traditions, emerged in cities when people left the farms and tried to live a new kind of life, working in factories and longing for the way they remembered the past, which often has little in common with the actual past they lived. Bourbon carries all those ideas, too. American whiskey was something farmers made when they lived too far from market to sell their grains. A bottle of bourbon with a tax sticker in a store is the creation of corporate America, often bought by people who instinctively know that if they believe the lie, then they can reclaim some of the country where those farmers once lived and plowed before mostly vanishing from the earth. Trying to hold on to that spirit drives our politics and culture and even works in our individual lives.
I grew up working on the sprawling cotton farm owned by Cliff Heaton, a hard job in the Mississippi heat, and I’ve gotten a lot of self-mythologizing mileage out of those hours in the sun. I get to say I grew up working on a farm, and that’s true as a biographical detail. Early in the morning, before six a.m., I’d get up and make my way to the gin to find out where we’d be working that day. Then a long line of us would park on a turnrow and get in the fields, carrying a long-handled hoe, moving up one row and back down another, looking for and eliminating weeds. I love to tell the stories. They reinforce my own self-image as a grinder and someone who outworked other people to get my job, but I often leave out other biographical details that might tell a different kind of story: I grew up the son of a trial lawyer and my mother’s family owns nearly ten thousand acres of prime Mississippi Delta farmland, some of the most fertile and valuable agricultural dirt in the world.
Both my mother and father grew up in farming families, and both those farms were in places that became known for the blues musicians who lived, worked, suffered, and played there. If whiskey comes from the land itself, then the blues is its close cousin, at least in the way that I thought about them. My dad grew up in Bentonia, Mississippi, which has its own eponymous style of music, made famous by Skip James. The epicenter of this world was a juke joint named the White Front Cafe. Growing up, my dad and his brothers could hear that music from their bedroom but weren’t allowed to go in. There was a white world and a black world. One summer, one of my uncles got recording equipment and did his own version of Alan Lomax and recorded some old bluesmen, some of whom worked on my grandfather’s farm. When Granddaddy found the reels and heard the black music on them, he took them all and burned them. I believe a lot of things died in that pile of melting tape.
We had a family funeral out on my dad’s land not long ago. My cousin Miller, a sweet young man, died of an accidental drug overdose. He was my uncle Will’s first grandchild and Will adored him. Even now, he weeps listening to Miller’s favorite songs on a CD his daughter made him, and when the last track “I’ll Fly Away” comes on, he is brought low and cannot listen any longer.
Music is often the kingdom the dead inhabit in our souls. The bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, a friend of the family, came out to pay his respects and brought another young bluesman with him to play some songs: Blues for Miller. I felt a lot in that music and in Mr. Holmes’s presence at our terribly sad gathering, which conveyed a bit of hope that we were all human beings, all Mississippians, and that if we correctly remember our past and the roles all our ancestors played in it—both mine and Mr. Holmes’s—then we have a chance to get it right. Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly. I was bringing a child into this world, and into our long history of trying to do the right thing while benefitting mightily from the wrong thing, and I wanted her to love our home and our family, but to see it clearly and without the nostalgia that so often softens my anger and desire to tear it all down and build a new world in its place.
Not long after the funeral for Miller, my uncles Will and Michael sold the farm and the cabin. I didn’t want to sell but so much of the responsibility for upkeep landed on Uncle Will that I didn’t have the standing or right to disagree. Deep inside, I believe that losing Miller left Will with too many painful memories when he visited the place, as if some sacred idea that lived there had died with him. Before we turned it over to the new owners, I asked for a favor. My dad and his brothers had built the cabin on the lake themselves and then written their names in the concrete foundation. Will understood my request and I feel like it pleased him. He got someone with a big saw to cut out the rectangle where my dad had signed his name and added the date: June 20, 1967. That was a Tuesday. One of the hottest songs was “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Muhammad Ali got sentenced to five years for refusing to fight in Vietnam. Three days before, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had commissioned the top-secret report that would show that the government knew Vietnam could not be won and sent young boys my dad’s age to die anyway. My dad joined ROTC in college and was headed to Southeast Asia when the US Army offered to let him trade his fifteen months’ active duty for a long stretch in the reserves. He jumped at the chance and instead of dying in a war the generals already knew was lost, he moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to start a career and a family. Five years later, I was born.
I just now stood up from writing and went outside and rubbed my hand over my dad’s signature, trying to feel close to him. The script is fading, a prayer to four brothers and the dreams their children now try to realize for them, as ours will do one day, too. That piece of the old porch is a treasure to me. When a house I am planning in Montana is finally built, I am going to drive the concrete north and make sure a piece of my family lives in this new home. Seeing it just now left me feeling empty and sad and protective. It’s the only tangible thing I have left of a once sprawling way of life. For perhaps the first time, I think I really understand how Julian feels about his memories of Stitzel-Weller that drive him when he sits down to choose the whiskey that will go into a bottle of Pappy.
9
MY MOTHER GREW UP IN SHELBY, Mississippi, daughter of a landowner who farmed many more acres than my dad’s family. Her family bought the land in 1927, and by the time my uncle took over in 1968, the farm had shrunk to seventeen hundred acres. My uncle, Rives, has spent five decades in his quest to return it to its original size. That farm is his life’s work. Rives is the most remarkable man I know, a human being of great empathy and courage—a staunch liberal in a state and profession where he is often the only person in the room with his views. He�
�s a financial wizard who has chosen as his craft the re-creation of our farm. He’s been successful in his foolish and beautiful goal, one that will take care of my children and my children’s children, long after all of us are gone. I’ve grown to love it more with time, as things like roots mean more to me. The farm sits along the right side of the road, headed south, between Clarksdale and Cleveland, Mississippi. That’s smack in the Mississippi Delta, where the famous Delta blues were born. The famous bluesman Big Jack Johnson worked for my uncle on the farm. My dad was his lawyer. When I hear the Delta blues, I feel like my father must have felt whenever he heard Skip James. That music was the soundtrack of the juke joints I went to in high school, places like Miss Sarah’s in downtown Clarksdale, or that bar out across Highway 61, past Lyon, and even now that music transports me to a specific place and time. On my last trip to Clarksdale, I went to Red’s near the Sunflower River bridge, one of the last operating juke joints, and the singer went around the packed room asking people where they were from. Soon enough, he asked me.
“Eight blocks that way,” I said, pointing.
He smiled. I think he smiled. “The other side of the tracks,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong. There are railroad tracks separating the two halves of Clarksdale. I nodded and when he finished, I realized I was the only person in the room from Clarksdale. Everyone else was a tourist, and it hit me that I, too, was a kind of tourist to the blues: I am from around the world that created that music, but I can never be from inside it. I am from the Mississippi Delta but not from the land of the Delta blues. That hit me hard. Wallace will inherit this world, and I mean literally. She will be a landowner in this place and I want her to understand what that means. There are two Clarksdales, two Deltas, two different ways to hear the blues. While I was making an episode of my television show in Memphis, focusing on the rural-urban interplay in a city so close to the suffering of the Delta, a woman talked about how her father carried the memory of Clarksdale and Coahoma County cotton fields with him long after he put down his hoe and moved to the city. She remembers him saying one night to her mother, his wife, “You don’t know what it’s like to work on a plantation.”
He didn’t mean just walking rows in the sun. I’ve done that. He meant the dawning hopelessness. The realization that there would only ever be another row. In that sense, no matter what I like to say or believe, I never worked on a farm, because I always knew it was a way station on the way to someplace brighter. I never once felt hopeless. So I never worked on a plantation, no matter how many hours I spent on one. This all makes me think a lot about what it means to be from the Mississippi Delta; to be from the South. For me and other white people of a certain social class, it means that I carry a legacy of a roguish and faded gentility, a love for whiskey and fast cars on winding roads, and a knowledge of roadside blues clubs that offered guitars and tall boys of beer. To the father of the woman we interviewed, and in the shorthand of one black Mississippian talking to another, or for two people in Chicago comparing family trees, being from Clarksdale means something different entirely. There’s a Muddy Waters quote in Robert Gordon’s essential biography that I can’t shake, because Waters is the most famous son of Clarksdale, and he has become a patron saint of the blues tourism that is at the center of my hometown’s attempt to survive. Muddy, the quote implied, would be fine if it didn’t survive at all, if it all died and turned to dust and blew away with that nutrient-rich topsoil that kept so many of his kin buried in the South. “I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way,” he said. “Go back? What I want to go back for?”
These dual and contradictory views of the same place define virtually every story told about this part of the world, including the story about whiskey. Especially the story of whiskey. Kentucky brands itself clearly and proudly as Southern, home of fried chicken and brown liquor. A lot of people don’t know that Kentucky wasn’t part of the Confederacy. It never seceded and yet now clearly defines itself as the South. Why would a state pretend it lost a war it actually won? More than one hundred thousand Kentuckians fought as Americans while only thirty thousand fought as Confederates. After the war, the winners went on with their lives while the losers, and later their children and then grandchildren, fought hard to redeem the people and the world lost in defeat. A historian we interviewed for our Kentucky episode of TrueSouth named Charles Reagan Wilson told us that the losers of the Civil War had to make sense of having been defeated in what their leaders called a “holy war,” and he said something that resonated with me: “Winston Churchill said that the Irish remember the defeats long after the English have forgotten the victories. And in a sense, that was true of the Union sympathizers in Kentucky. They went on to other things. But the people who lost, their cause became the Lost Cause. And so, they’re the ones, the white Kentucky Confederate sympathizers, after the war, who decide they’ve got to put the Confederate stamp on Kentucky for the future. . . . The ministers had told them they were fighting a holy war. How do you lose a holy war? The typical wording on a Confederate monument in Kentucky, and in other places, was, LEST YE FORGET. It’s on almost all of them.”
It’s important to know our past, all of it, the beautiful and the ugly, and it is also important to value our families and carry their memories with us, which often creates the urge to polish and clean and erase. Those competing needs—to look clearly at our home while also sculpting our past into a carrying case for familial identity—are at the heart of nearly every part of Southern life. When I tell my daughter, Wallace, the story of the place she’s from—when I play Muddy Waters or Son House or Skip James—I want her to see the complete picture. I want her to hear that music and know that people like us—planters and landowners, which we are—often caused the pain these musicians turned into beauty. Let the sound flooding out of her speakers carry both histories: the memory of when she first heard that beautiful music living side by side with the knowledge of what trauma summoned it from the earth. If both can exist to her at the same time, then we just might find a way to keep walking toward the light.
10
JULIAN BECAME SOMEONE I KNEW I’D CONSULT if I ever had to make a big decision. I trusted him, and so one evening sitting at my kitchen island, with a question really working away inside, I impulsively pulled out my phone and sent him a message. Do you believe in God? The next day, he gave me his answer in the form of a few stories, which is the way Julian often makes a point he cares about.
On March 13, 1979, Sissy gave birth to three identical girls who were born perfectly healthy. They’d read all the literature about how the odds of complications go up with two babies and go up again with triplets. Julian thought they were incredibly lucky, and that there was the hand of the Almighty at work. That could be luck, though. So he told another story.
They’ve got friends who also go to Michigan in the summer. Years ago their small child found his way out of a window onto the second floor roof. Below, a grouping of round lake rocks anchored a landscaping feature. The boy fell off the roof and hurtled toward the ground, and his head just missed all those rocks and he landed soft and unhurt. His mother had a sister die at a very young age and so she and her family and friends, including Julian and Sissy, believed that an angel had been watching over them all these years and, on that day, made sure the boy found his way down to the one place where he might live. But that could just be coincidence, as could all the times Julian did something stupid and should have died, like when he rolled that car with Frances, but those could be luck. But Julian knows that faith is always the belief in the unseen, and the unseeable, and so he believes that there are forces at work somewhere beyond the curtain. I want to believe my daddy sees me live my life and is around, just out of my vision, and that I will watch over Wallace one day.
I want to have Julian’s faith. He believes Pappy and his father know the road he’s walked. He believes we are watched over. That we all have angels. Two close friends of his, a fath
er and a son, died several years ago in a hunting-lodge fire—Edward Chesley Greene Sr. and Edward Chesley Greene Jr. of Mobile, Alabama. Julian keeps their picture in his wallet, with a prayer attached to it. Yes, he told me, there is a God. I don’t know what I think but it does make me stop and consider, knowing that every time I’ve ever been with him, he’s carried a prayer in his wallet, a talisman to summon guardian angels, and he’s never mentioned it to me.
11
I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THE SAME KIND OF ROOTS. Lately I’ve felt a bit lost, waiting on my daughter to be born, wondering if I am up to the task in front of me. I’ve been reading Thomas Merton. His writings offer the best path I can find for my own return to the church—or to God, really, since I believe I’m done with church—and I find comfort and peace in his worldview. I want to believe in something larger than us, and the closest I come is when I’m reading Merton. There’s a sign in Louisville marking the spot where he had a vision of how humans on this rock of ours should live together. He later wrote: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”
Writing about bourbon meant a few visits to the Maker’s Mark distillery in rural Kentucky, and I discovered that Merton lived and wrote at a monastery that is a thirteen-mile straight shot down Highway 52 from Maker’s Mark. There’s a honky-tonk in between that has a mural of Hank Williams painted on the front, so the Hillbilly Shakespeare can watch over the people who come inside for escape. I got to know that road well. One afternoon I left the distillery with John T. Edge. We passed shiny new farms with gleaming grain silos and abandoned farms with weathered and collapsed barns. People rising. People falling.
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