Who Goes There?

Oh Alabama.
Can I see you and shake your hand -- Neil Young

On Sundays we would have eggs, bacon, grits, and biscuits with redeye gravy at the Waysider, then we'd head off on the country roads of Alabama. Often we'd have no plan at all but to wend through the rolling hills of baked red clay and thick kudzu vines, pulling into small towns with fabulous names (Smut Eye, Mulga, Moundville, Tishabee) and less-than-fabulous panoramas. In places, strip mining cleaved ugly wounds in the ground. Just a mile outside most any small town there were shotgun shacks, piled atop brick foundations above ground that flooded when the rivers and creeks rose in the winter, homes with dirt floors and Black children sitting in cutoff shorts, barefoot on the stoops in the morning sun in a glade of willows. It was the landscape of Faulkner's a Yoknapatawpha County, where heat and poverty were a synecdoche for a great theme of endless strife.

It was uncanny reading fiction and history of the South while living in the heart of Dixie. One fraternity on campus insisted on flying its Rebel Stars and Bars out the window despite university policy. When a Black sorority applied to move from the ghetto of off-campus Black greeks to a vacant white portico mansion on frat row, a small cross was set afire on their lawn. The college president, an Alabamian educated at Harvard, called it a "college prank".

It was 1984, but at times felt like 1894 to me. In the blistering sun and humid weight of an autumn afternoon, we passed a road crew near campus where shirtless Black utility workers labored in a ditch while their white foreman sipped from the thermos in the cab of his truck. Once I held the door open for an elderly Black man at the telephone company office and he lowered his eyes and said, "Thank ya, thank ya." In the stores, the clerks would say, "My, you'll not from around here are you?" Even if you only bought a stick of gum, they'd offer, "Come back, now!"

We had come from a California beach town and couldn't piece all the parts together in a coherent way when we were turned down for apartments for not being married. I refused to wear the Duck Head slacks and tasseled loafers the Alabama men wore on campus or at the office, pushing my differences in their face as some kind of political statement. When I won a teaching award, I put on some of my sweetheart's make-up, donned a single, jangly earring, and went to the President's Mansion. It wasn't working for me.

And yet, and yet, there was an unmistakable energy beneath the tangle of history and culture that pierced your heart. The full moon a-sail in a sky of puffy clouds, the dense air fragrant of honeysuckle and four o'clocks and magnolias. It could stop you like a bullet. But so could the supper house near the racetrack in Green County where heavyset Black women in white aprons and Aunt Jemima scarves brought you plates of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and okra and canning jars filled with sweetened tea.

So we took our weekend drives with delight and dread across country that looked like a runny watercolor painting, shimmering in three-digit heat through the windows of our air conditioned car. One Sunday we headed west out of Tuscaloosa on Route 82, switching to a smaller road in Gordo, wending along fields and ponds toward the Mississippi line.

The road ran into the intersection with Road 17 at Carrollton, a town with less than a thousand residents, with all roads linking to the town square. We had a habit of stopping at historical plaques and we found one at the base of the Pickens County Courthouse, the centerpiece of an otherwise unremarkable town. Most of the plaques we found celebrated the founding of a mill or mine, a scene of a Civil War battle, or discovery that led to cotton-trade efficiency.

But in Carrollton, the plaque celebrated the portrait of a lynched Black man, etched by lightening (so legend has it) into the upstairs window of the courthouse. A sign with an arrow was mounted on the side of weathered brick wall, pointing at the window where, with binoculars, you could make out a dark face in the windowpane.

Carrollton held little distinction during the Civil War, save for its elegant courthouse, the epicenter of commerce and law for a modest land of farmers and slaves. But the Union Army found the best possible means of humiliating residents when it torched the courthouse to the ground in November of 1876. Two years later, residents charged a local Black man, Henry Wells, of trying to burn down the new courthouse. Someone certainly had set fire to it.

Wells, who had a criminal record, was being charged--depending on folklore and conflicting newspaper accounts--of arson, burglary, and carrying a concealed straight-razor. An angry, drunken crowd assembled at the same intersection where we stood looking up in the heat, bent on a lynching. Wells, according to reports in The West Alabamian looked down in horror from his garret window, proclaiming that if he were hanged, his face would scowl down upon Carrollton for eternity.

Suddenly, accounts say, lightning struck the side of the building, etching his anguished silhouette into the glass. Shortly afterward, the crowd had its way. It was the evening of September 26, 1877.

The story remains uncontested on the plaque, and I admit to seeing something in the glass window, a shadow, something. Meanwhile, folklore insists that the image won't be washed away. That new glass in the pane assumes the image shortly after it's installed. A curiosity.

Even more curious is The West Alabamian report that windows had not been installed in the newly constructed Pickens County Courthouse until February 20, 1878, five months after the lynching. Like most of what we found, the parts never quite added up in a way would could digest them comfortably. And afterward, when I lived in the Midwest and discovered more virulent racism and antisemitism than I had expected in the South, I began to notice that pictures never quite added up anywhere. Three minutes off the country road where I live in California, you'll find pickup trucks with Rebel flags. On warm evenings, you can hear gunfire down the ravine.

On that summer day in 1984, we walked around the courthouse, bought cool cans of soda pop from a liquor store -- "You cain't buy beer on Sundays out of deference to Our Lord," the clerk told me-- and we climbed back into the air-conditioned sedan. We didn't speak much on the way home. We had seen something.

Catch and Release

We were having a rough time--me with life, you with me--and we took a day out of the struggle to go swimming. I suppose I could undergo years of therapy to understand why I took out Alabama on you, but let's just say I was a mean fool. The relentless heat and humidity, the overbearing pace of grad school, the rapist that came to the screen door that day, the cockroaches marching in the leaves at night, the acrid fog of mosquito spray in the air, the relentless questions about whether we were married and which church we attended, the seemingly endless parade of objectionable morons with guns, including the idiot in the yard next door who shot bee-bees into a writhing squirrel he had locked in a cage... . It was all too much.

So it was off to Lake Nicol and the cool water we had heard so much about north of Tuscaloosa proper, out beyond the yacht club, tucked between the quarries along New Watermelon Road. We had a cooler of soda pop and sandwiches. We were planning a soft day. I left the books at home, the novels for that survey in modern British literature, my half-drafted short story about dog racing. What was it you left behind that morning?

Was it the resentment that you had followed me out to Alabama and its withering heat from our lovely home in the woods overlooking Monterey Bay and 65-degree summer fog? That you left the comfort of a loving family and a decent-paying job to take your place in the Women's Study department with its office in, of all places, Manley Hall? You must have left a lot behind that morning on our drive to Lake Nicol, because you were loving and kind and happy.

You had your new car with its moonroof and bright paint and the sun danced between the kudzu vines and dappled the road in shadows. We stopped at a country store at Sexton Bend for ice and laughed uneasily at the Rebel flags and fishing worms in the cooler, the Styrofoam cups of nightcrawlers stored right beside foil-wrapped sandwiches and microwave burritos.

By the spillway we stopped and watched the columns of heat rising off the water and the rooster tails of speedboats crisscrossing the lake. It was a struggle to get out of the air conditioned car, grab the blankets and food from the trunk, and head down the dirt track to the picnic area. Before we had gone 50 yards, we were soaked in sweat and your hand was wet when I took it in mine. Lord knows we needed a break.

But once we were under the shade of the pines and changed into our swim trunks, we saw that swimming would be impossible. Out on the landing, where the sand sloped into the cool green lake, hundreds of cottonmouths sunned on the rocks and darted through the water. You flushed and looked for a place to sit, but they were everywhere around us, and even as we went back under the pine trees, we saw them under the tables and curled around the fire pit, slithering through the brush, moving through the shadows, all around where we had left our clothes.

That night, back in our hotbox apartment, trapped in the bedroom where we had the single window air conditioner, we lay in bed watching bad television, rushing out for a quick dip in the bathtub we had filled with cold water, and back atop the towels we spread out over the sheets. At 3am it was still 103 degrees out in the dark Tuscaloosa night, with two more months of summer stretching out before us, venomous. It was a very small room and that night the kitty brought a cockroach into bed as a prize between her teeth.

The Birth of a School

The fall in Tuscaloosa seemed an odd amalgam of earthly effects: the leaves burned with color and curled to crackling on the ground. The late afternoons felt like New England with a refreshing breeze, while the sun in its mid-day arc leaned down on the dry, baked ground so that you thought that summer with its humid swelter might go on forever.

We gathered in Morgan Hall for orientation into the graduate writing program, sizing each other up as we sat in neat rows of student desks, tuning our ear to the spoken tongues from New York and Chicago and the small towns of Dixie, wondering what our peers would sound like on paper.

The poets were an odd lot, easily given to maudlin sentiment, while fiction writers fell by turn to the mimicry of suburban prose, the K-Mart fiction of drunks, hypochondriacs, used-car salesmen, and adulterous wives that populated the fictional worlds of Ray Carver, Anne Tyler, Bobbie Ann Mason, or John Updike. I had read too much of it all, with its facile repetitions of brand names and parking-lot angst. And the poets, with their gnashing and wailing about poor dead John Berryman (a suicide) or the sad Montana taverns of Richard Hugo just seemed a bit over the top for me. I trusted neither.

That year, too, the writing world was reveling in what later came to be called "Sudden Fiction", works several paragraphs in length that mapped the immediate launch of a skyrocket without the fuel and oxygen sufficient to sustain your interest. They once might have been called "tone poems", but to me they were examples of Fiction Lite. It was like leaving town under the cover of darkness after selling snake oil to the locals.

That fall -- and perhaps always -- our writing faculty believed in the shorthand of drinking and adultery, and they led by example. In my first semester, I knew of at least four professors who were walking a sloppy line. One writer was sleeping with a current student and another wooed a married departmental secretary. A literature professor had a casting couch in his office and students delighted in speculating who was attending his darkened seminars.

That fall as we crowded into the seminar rooms of the writers' workshop, our fiction teachers championed two themes regarding our stories: the avarice of puerile prose and the requisite pearl of literary verisimilitude.

Let's examine each, shall we?

puerile
French or Latin; French puéril, from Latin puerilis, from puer boy, child; akin to Sanskrit putra son, child and perhaps to Greek pais boy, child; 1 : juvenile 2 : childish , silly

Don Hendrie, or Red Don as we called him, could make you cry in front of the workshop. He had a crimson beard and spatulate thumbs. He would do anything for you as a writer. But his face flushed raw and you could see him building up to an outburst when he found a line you wrote that was objectionable; he jabbed at it with his finger, then slammed his palm on the table and stammered. He called your writing "puerile".

Hendrie was sleeping with one of his students--a dark foreigner who would goad him during workshop and once remarked quite proudly that while he trashed her prose in the small classroom with the large table, he'd call out her name in religious fervor in their bedroom later that night.

verisimilitude
from Latin verisimilis; 1 : having the appearance of truth : probable 2 : depicting realism

Meanwhile, our other fiction professor, A--, was all about the baroque possibilities of language, was soft-spoken, and insisted that while the prose might reflect the complicated observations of the emotionally charged mind, it should bear verisimilitude on the page. He was wooing a fabulously stunning English Department secretary (whom he later married). But her divorce wasn't quite final and so A-- fearing that the ex was stalking him -- brought a loaded pistol to workshop in the briefcase which bore our stories for discussion. He asked the men in the fiction workshop to surround him with our bodies as we escorted him to his car in the parking lot. Got verisimilitude?

On one afternoon, after school let out, I was privileged to see both workshop expressions brought to bear at once in a convincing way. Hendrie asked me if I could help out in a delicate matter. As I was brand new to the school and invested in presenting a helpful, eager facade, I agreed.

I climbed into A--'s pickup truck and we drove out in the fall light to the secretary's former residence where A-- was to help her remove some possessions before her ex returned. Hendrie held a loaded shotgun as he guarded the driveway against demons. And when we had spirited the marital artifacts into the pickup, Hendrie put the shotgun into his Honda, and I climbed in for a drive to the tavern. A-- went his own way, having squired the last of Helen's finery to his personal Troy.

It was nauseating and delicious at the same time, for that night a fresh genre--Sudden Nonfiction--was born pink and screaming into the deep heart of Dixie.

Tuscaloosa

The Druid City lies along the shoals of the Black Warrior River at the convergence of 19th Century trails used by Muscogean-speaking tribes led by Chief Tuskaloosa. When I arrived in the fall of 1983 the city had become home to 80,000 frenzied members of the Bryant tribe, typified by packs of crimson and white-painted devotees of the Church of Saturday Football. They arrived by recreation vehicles in the middle of the week, posted up revelry headquarters in the parking lots astride Bryant-Denny Stadium, and got their barbecue on.

For the rest of us--yankees and interlopers of confounded cultural identities--the pilgrimage resembled a tent meeting of elders from stratified sects as disparate as Birmingham (decked out in duck-head pants and expensive loafers) and Cottondale (casually attired in blue bib overalls, huntin' boots, and bright red ballcaps). Sunday you went to church. Saturday you prayed at the Shrine of the Everlasting Bear.

To fully attend a football game at Bryant-Denny you had to drink the Coach Bear Bryant kool-aid amidst a horde that doubled the city population for an afternoon. Not everyone was liquored-up to their Dixie gills, but most were. Certainly the sorority goddesses in their pastel formal gowns despite the raging heat and bone-melting humidity had a little bourbon at breakfast. By halftime, many would sport patches of sudden vomit at their breast. Fraternity lads, dressed in Sunday go-to-preachin' finery, would leap across sections of rooting fans to rip the dress tie off a real or imagined foe. And locals would craft clever stadium totems, such as the red and yellow box of detergent and toilet paper mounted on a staff of wood, a tale told by an idiot signifying: Roll Tide!

Along University Boulevard at dawn the merchants had already set out tables of iced beer and red and white pennants, the crackling loudspeakers playing "rama-jama, yellowhammer, give em hell, Alabama". You could dine from plates of biscuits in red-eye gravy (a tincture of ham fat and coffee), breakfast slices of pepperoni Bamabino pizza, trays of iced donuts, quadruple-shot tumblers of Long Island iced teas, throat-cauterizing delicacies from Wings n' Things, or purchase celebratory Bear Bryant effigies on coke-cola bottles and license-plate frames that read: "American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God". Say, hallelujah!

At kickoff time, you could drive 80 miles an hour down the deserted city streets, hearing only the sound of squealing tires and a cresting roar from the stadium. Tables were deserted with Bryant relics and platters of ribs still sitting on them, the merchants departed for their own stadium seat or tucked back into their shops where they listened to the game on the radio. Rag-pickers walked along under the hot fall sun in near solitude, plucking up recyclable cans, or sitting on the curbs under the hackberry trees with their scavenger's bounty.

We writers, out-of-towners, grad students with portfolio typically met up for cheese grits and eggs, then strapped plastic flasks of bourbon to our calves with duct tape, pulled down our cuffs, and walked undisturbed past distracted guards into the brilliant sunlight of the stadium, heat shimmering from the grass, all in a blur of crimson bunting and plastic pompoms. Loudspeakers blared "Sweet Home Alabama" as wave upon wave of footballers took their drills across the turf.

It is simply impossible to over-write the splendor, the fanaticism, the crowd rising as one to the kickoff with a growl that began in your belly and rose like the scream of some freshly pole-axed hog as the ball was struck. Roll-Tide-Roll. Stand up, my brothers, rise up sistern, feel the recollection of the blood of the lamb, see the bright parallax of angels guiding you skywards, light-headed in the blood-red sauce of barbecue and sweet nectar of warm bourbon in God's own humidor of fun, the smiting of foes, the crushing of heathens, the urpage of slight cheese-grit bouquet on the back palate of a scream, waves of helmeted seraphim a-flow across the turf where the ghastly visage of Barry Krause is forever staunching the goal-line plunge of Penn State, where the shadow of the Bear, dearly departed, still prowls the sidelines, frowning Gibraltar in his houndstooth hat...

... and in the end, you had a brutal headache.

You walked with friends in silence--no matter the outcome--having tithed more than you earned. Cars began to stir again along Bryant Drive, then the Tuscaloosa bars and cafes once again swelled to life and patrons burst out onto the sidewalks. But along Hackberry Lane or 10th Avenue there was just the sound of fall leaves crunching underfoot and the pulse of your heart pounding into your temples, and the hope of cool weather someday coming to the South. And that night, if you stayed awake, the line of lights from vans and campers still streamed toward the interstate en-route to Thomasville, Demopolis, Alabaster, and Selma. You could hear car horns blaring the Bama fight song, then the final whoops of desperate revelers and, much later, just the sound of cockroaches as they marched beneath the dried up leaves in the windless night. But you would have to sleep soon enough, dreamless toward Sunday, when the chimes rang from the steeples of Tuscaloosa and the rest of the world was deep in prayer.

Undefeated

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. -- Hemingway

Though he has fallen into so much disfavor over the last 50 years, Ernest Hemingway remains the most accessible and immediately emotional author of contemporary American prose. Most of us who wander sideways into literature from journalism identify with his lean and muscular style, although our university professors hammer home his brutal sexism and defiance of more textured literary conventions. When I taught at the University of Illinois, I loved to use his short story, Hills Like White Elephants, as a brilliant example of how setting amplifies character. The protagonists share an oblique argument over abortion. For the man, anyway, it's an idea. A baby would crimp his style. For the woman, it's real and she has heard enough. They wait on a station platform, railroad tracks moving off in opposite directions. In the end, he believes he convinces her, but what he has done is kill off any remaining love she may have had for him.

In his time, Hemingway's language introduced a wide American audience to the experience of literature. There is little doubt that Hemingway became a caricature in the end, crippled from successive concussions and alcoholic depression. His suicide is deconstructed as a death wish, but anyone who feels his prose -- the rhythms of Bach beneath repetitions of sentence structures, the vivid Cezanne brush strokes in Hemingway's landscapes -- understands that he had a thirst for life. His prose ignites the Now-ness of things.

While in graduate school, I wrote about Hemingway's homage to painting and classical music. and my professor sent the paper to the New York office of the International Hemingway Society. I was invited to present the paper to the society's annual meeting in Lignano Sabbiadoro--a small beachfront resort near Venice.

I landed in Milan and took a four-hour train to the sea, speaking my poor Spanish with fellow riders, sampling Italian cheese and bread, and chocolate laced with liquor. I reached Lignano at dusk. The following morning, the convention met in a conference hall shaped like a conch shell at the end of a pier that stretched out into the Mediterranean. To each side of the pier women from northern Europe sunned topless on the strand while Italian men scurried about indelicately with cameras. In the afternoon, racing boats raised their dazzling sails against the sky.

On the afternoon I was scheduled to appear, I was terrified. I was the only graduate student selected to read a paper. All around were full professors and authors who had written critical books and biographies on Hemingway. I was certain I was a fraud. Local dignitaries filled the tables, sipping regional wines and working through plates of cold cuts and melon, city elders who wore their suit coats draped over their shoulders and pinky rings that caught the overhead lights.

I worked through the paper without much flair, but in a steady voice, looking my public in the eye. And when I was done, there was great applause and two professors I had met at my hotel spirited me off for cocktails.

We were seated at a seaside cafe in the blush of sunset, aperitif saucers piled neatly in the center of the table, and I praised the mighty gods for carrying me across the prickly seas of academe. My two table-mates, Roger and Mary Grace taught at Canisius College. Roger suggested that I consider pursuing my PhD immediately. I was beaming.

The night settled down about us and the lights came on the masts of idle boats in the harbor. We had finished the antipasto and settled on our dinner order when two critics marched up under the arc of the table lights.

"You know," one of them said rather drunkenly, "everything you talked about has already been done."

The other pointed his finger at my chest. "Been done," he said. Several critics at the conference who had written books on the subject, he said.

I looked down at the plate of olive pits. Mary Grace put her hand on mine.

Just as suddenly, the critics turned and walked arm-in-arm into the night. If there was more to say on the subject, neither I nor my dinner companions choose to bring it up.

We had four more days in Italy, traveling to Harry's Bar, where Hemingway had held forth with peach bellinis, toured the countryside in WW1 trucks courtesy of the Italian army, and I shared laughter with one of Hemingway's granddaughters at the villa where Hem had written Across the River and Into the Trees. She had his high forehead and melting smile. And I got to tell her that I loved her grandfather for other than the obvious reasons. That I heard the footfall of his sentences in my ear. That I dipped my hands into his icy rivers and threw water on my face when it felt too damn hot to walk on.

And when I flew back to Alabama, I vowed to shun literary criticism for the rest of my days.

Three Plagues

"These are unclean to you among all that creep: whosoever doth touch them, shall be unclean until the evening." -- Leviticus 11:31.

Plague by Air
We were living in a small house near the beach in La Selva, a quiet, lovely place set in a grove of pines, fringed with flowering bougainvillea and ivy. In the stillness of morning and the dark, foggy eves you could hear the waves breaking on the beach below. On days when the fog backed out, the sun baked down on the houses and you could hear the wooden beams swelling and moaning in the still air.

One Sunday we were having coffee on the deck when we noticed a few bees darting among the trees. Then we saw more coming, sifting in between the pine needles in the dappled light, growing slowly in number until there were quite many of them. Diana went back into the house. It wasn't long before I followed, as a single bee sting can send me to the emergency room.

Shadows appeared out the windows over the tops of the hedges. Then thousands of bees circled the house and we raced to shut the flue on the fireplace. You could see out the windows, but the day had turned into dark ribbons of yellow and brown. I phoned the police, who referred me to the firehouse, where I was given the phone number of a bee keeper from Aptos.

That night, in the cooling dark, the keeper came out and shook the solid mass that had roosted in the tree in the center of the yard, and all the bees fell into a box and were gone.

Plague by Land
I was traveling across America in a Greyhound bus, maximizing my journey between California and Florida through a special fare that allowed you to move about for several weeks without restrictions. When you ride the bus, you're treated to desert way-stations in tiny shacks under a brutal sun, to inner city slum-terminals where panhandlers lean into you, or gas stations lit by a single lamp in the icy mood of a mountain snowflurry.

This particular night, we had stopped in a small Texas store and post office outside San Angelo. It was hot and stifling, and we waited just long enough for two riders to depart and an elderly Black woman to climb aboard with a shopping bag filled with clothing and a lunchbox. She took the seat directly behind my own and after a while she was asleep.

The next stop seemed further out in dark spaces of prairie, at a gas station flooded by arc lights where the bus pulled up with a whoosh of brakes and the driver opened the door. "Ten minutes," he called out.

I was in my stocking feet, half asleep, and went out to find a restroom. My socks got wet. Only when I had reached the sidewalk that fronted the store did I notice that the surface swarmed with dark brown beetles. Not only was the walk a sea of pulsing bodies, the wall itself was stuccoed with living, hard-shelled varmints. Around the side of the building, an attendant used a push broom to carve a path between the beetles and the doors to the restrooms.

I decided to hold my water and tiptoed back to the bus. I found a clean pair of socks in my backpack and put them on. A short while later, we were heading down the dark highway when the woman behind me screamed. A stowaway had found a home in her hair.

Plague by Stealth
We had been driving all day, following days filled with drives, when we gave up on reaching Alabama and took a motel room in Coldwater, Mississippi. It was hot and muggy and crickets filled the air with their cadence. We chose the motel because it had a swimming pool. So said the sign out front.

After unpacking, we went into the cafe and ordered sandwiches. In this part of the world, maybe only in this part of Mississippi, they served barbecue pork on white bread with a scoop of cole slaw plopped directly on the meat.

I couldn't wait to get back to the room, change into my suit, and cool off in the pool. I should have noticed the smaller signs of trouble, but walked right past them. The pool area was fenced in, set up against a forest of kudzu vines that looked like green frosting on the trees. I tossed my towel to the chair and dove straight in.

The pool was thick with tiny green frogs. Hundreds of frogs. Thousands of frogs. Chock-to-jaw with frogs. I had jumped into a vat of frog-flavored pudding.

On my way back to the room and the shower, I paid closer attention to what I had seen all along: the hallways and narrow paths of the motel were filled with the little guys, scampering around in the dusk, doing their froggy things.

In the Wiregrass

I visited two high schools as a teacher of writing in the fall of 1985 in rural Alabama. One was located in Abbeville, in the southeast corner of the state, just across the Chattahoochee River from Georgia. The other was in Wicksburg, less than 20 miles from the Florida State Line. It was called Wiregrass Country because the vegetation that poked through the plains could slice open your ankle.

The towns -- and their schools -- were separated by less than a half hour’s drive by automobile but, as I visited them in a two-day period, they seemed to be cleaved by a intellectual and spiritual chasm that was unfathomable.

On the first day, I walked up Abbeville’s main street, walked along the raised wooden sidewalk outside the Rexall Drug, then passed beyond the courthouse, down along the scattered leaves beneath the oaks and hackberries, finding my way to the broad grass lot where the students, all of them African Americans, sat on the fenders of their cars and talked and smoked cigarettes, their stereos blazing. Several couples pressed up against their cars, or leaned up against the hackberry trees.

The classroom windows were taped across the cracks, and the boy’s bathroom was lighted by bare bulbs, the sinks broken and faucets leaking. In the library, I waited for students to come and show me their writing. One girl had crafted a marvelous story about magic and superstition, about the spirit of a murdered seamstress who inhabited the shadows beneath the football bleachers. Another told how you know the moment an illness steals its way inside you.

I attended an afternoon English class and while I was midway through a lecture on metaphors, a bumblebee blazed through the open window and nested in my beard. The students leaped from their desks, shouting, laughing, singing, and their teacher, a gaunt, middle-aged Caucasian woman leaned against the rear wall of the classroom and buried her face in her hands. Class dismissed.

I spent the evening in Wicksburg, a hamlet just west of Dothan, a flat Alabama town with a military base and a sky filled with the drone of jet helicopters. I dined at the home of the high school principal, a burly white man who wore a red college ring on his right hand. We sat in his living room before a coffee table strewn with Baptist tracts. When told I had spent the day in Abbeville, he remarked that their football team had “a nigger guard that’d rip your head off.”

The next morning as I waited for my students in the Wicksburg school library, I found in the stacks a first-edition copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls that had not been checked out--recently or ever for all I could tell--with crisp pages and binding. These white students arrived punctually for their conferences bearing rather blasé and sanitized tales of hunting and fishing and cheer leading.

The hallways were scrubbed, and posters of football heroes painted in tempera hung from the rafters. The boys and girls did not touch each other, although a fellow in a varsity jacket and a girl in a plaid skirt and sweater held a pen between their fingertips just before they parted for separate classrooms. It reminded me of two people sucking at opposite ends of a strand of spaghetti except, of course, that the gesture lacked any real suggestion of sensuality. Rather, it seemed desperate.

At the bell, the students in the English class sat erect in their desks, pencils held tightly to their writing tablets, eyes forward. “If they’re not in their seats at the bell,” the teacher informed me, “they’re sent to the vice-principal’s office.” The paddle was a common remedy. The teacher was a robust, round woman with bright eyes behind thick metal glasses. When I began to speak to students about images and metaphorical language she informed me, “Honey, I have my hands full with the basic R’s, let alone you bring up anything difficult.”

I was invited to attend the pep rally after lunch, but I declined. I drove home to Tuscaloosa, where I’d been teaching composition and creative writing to university students who had been graduated from the high schools of the cities and towns of Alabama.

What I want to say -- what I need to say -- is that rationalizing away my experience simply by saying, “Well, that’s Alabama,” is insufficient. It would be negligent. My experience played itself out over and again across heartland Illinois, the Alaskan north, the Tidewater of Virginia, and other places where I taught over the years. In college-town Illinois, my best friend was told that because she was sporting a New York Mets baseball hat, she obviously liked "Hebrews".

But everywhere I went amidst the monstrous idiocy I found a resiliency that simply isn't attached to justice or an equitable distribution of money. The creative mind flows like water seeking its own level beneath the hardpan of ignorance.

There’s an awful lot of Alabama everywhere you go, far outside the Heart of Dixie. American schools and communities are but an organic outgrowth of behavior and belief, embodying the best and worst of the families that send their sons and daughters out to the world.