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 Waysider

We were told we had to eat there. It was the cheese grits, the kitten-shaped pancakes for children, the fluffy biscuits, the red-eye gravy and center-cut ham steaks crowding out the dish of poached eggs, the bottomless cups of strong coffee and tall, beaded glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

In the fall of that year, I wasn't so sure that waiting on line for nearly an hour just to enter the Waysider for its locally famous breakfast was worth the hooey. We stood outside as the brutal morning sun, already yanking the thermometer on the side of the bank building into the hundreds, beat down on us.

The place was on Greensboro Avenue, a family-run diner opened in 1951 in a converted Victorian house butting against the busy rails of the Southern railroad line, where the Crescent took Yankees through Tuscaloosa, over the rolling countryside to Memphis on the river, down to the city of New Orleans. You could drive past the Waysider any number of times without seeing the small Alabama-crimson-and-white sign or the sudden turn to the driveway where hackberries jut into narrow parking lanes. (At the end of your breakfast, there would be leaves and bird droppings all over your car).

Word is that coach Bear Bryant himself was once a frequent diner, helping himself to the endless refils of coffee and plate after plate of hot, feather-light biscuits. Certainly the walls surrounding the two dining areas that held the 15 tables were covered with Bamabilia, photos of the football team, of white Southern families of local note, pictures of Tuscaloosa when cotton wagons and horse buggies rolled along the dusty streets.

And so you stood for upwards of two hours on some Sunday mornings to take one of the 15 tables, browsing through The New York Times or The Tuscaloosa News, depending on your cultural bandwidth, mopping up the sweat that trickled down your neck, wondering if the wait was worth the worry. Southerners lined up in their Sunday best, just arriving from services, men in light-colored summer suits and women with flowers in their bonnets, bibles in hand, and their youngsters squirming in the heat.

Once inside, you sighed in the sudden chill and the heady swirl of fresh coffee and bacon in air. You could take your newspaper with you, but it made the tiny space on your table even more challenging, with the immediate arrivals of iced water, orange juice, and coffee, and the first round platter of biscuits. When a writer like Margaret Atwood or Tobias Wolff came to town, you took them to the Waysider during the week, when the wait was brief. But the food somehow tasted better on Sunday morning, with reverent people chattering at the tables and dabbing napkins into the glass of ice water to pat away morsels of biscuits or grits from their lips.

The biscuits had no specific density and went down like buttery puffs of joy, until you realized you had eaten too many of them. Still, the waitress, frenzied between the packed tables, came back with a bright smile, a pot of coffee, and a fresh plate of biscuits seconds from the oven. You could dip them in your red eye gravy, in your coffee, or smear them with fresh strawberry preserves, put one up your nose, another under an armpit, and a half dozen in your purse or backpack for later. You had sex with them at the table, toasting your triumph with another cup of coffee before rolling into them again.

And on such a Sunday in the fall, days before Ronald Reagan was to make his only campaign visit to an American college campus--choosing Tuscaloosa for its ardent reborn conservatism and Saturday church of football--we were talking about him. I blamed him for all the resurgent woes of neanderthal behavior: the burning of a cross on campus to protest a Black sorority, the dangling of the Stars and Bars from a house on Bryant Drive, the huge American flags flown from masts erected in the beds of passing pickup trucks--all responsible somehow for the moronic utterances by the students in my Introduction to American Literature class.

My girlfriend Diana was giving me The Look. Self-justified, I rolled right through the red light; on I went, egged ever into my glory by too much coffee, pent-up vitriol from centuries of pogroms and disenfranchisement, and in the midst of my tirade I had said something along the lines of "That Fuckdog Reagan" with the delight and amperage that a Bama cheerleader might have uttered, "We're gonna beat the hell out of you!"

The waitress stopped filling my bottomless cup and went on to more deserving tables. My sweetheart looked down at the grits hardening in her plate. All about us the room fell silent as the congregation eyed the brute Yankee at his bloody hate pulpit, spewing negativity in what had moments ago been a sanctuary of gentility and well-intentioned words measured out in spoonfulls from a sugar bowl.

"Guess breakfast's over," I said.

"Guess so," said Diana.

It was not the first time I had diminished her by my outbursts, but it was nearing the last. I could see that now she had moved into new territory where she had unalterably decided on something that did not include my company. We left the Waysider, giving room to people who had waited as long as we had for the opportunity to come in out of the sun, and then, driving home in the ruthless, animal heat of the afternoon, I had become a Yankee writer who had temporarily run out of bright things to say.

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.

Lucky Life

Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows. -- Gerald Stern

On days when I have nothing, I hold the yellow pad in my lap and look out the window and remember days up the upstairs classroom in Morgan Hall with Bad Gerry. We called him that behind his back because, in the mid 1980s, the word "bad" meant great, and because he made you feel that poetry, while written by devoted madmen channeling God through quirky filters of discipline and learning, was accessible to all of us.

And Stern tempered his rage at Reaganism and its echoes of McCarthy with a heart that bled like a great viola. In the late afternoon in Tuscaloosa, Stern--bad sciatica and all--would lie on the classroom floor and read Howl aloud. He wore glasses with soda bottle lenses and with his thick lips was often mistaken for Allen Ginsberg. When I later met Ginsberg, I saw there was no true resemblance. For Ginsberg's was the syncopated flurry of Coltrane, a cool hipster rap sung in crowded bookstore reading rooms thick with tobacco smoke and a counterpoint of cheap Mexican weed. Bad Gerry was sung to Vivaldi played on a sturdy hi-fi set as you gazed out a dormer window across the Monongahela River where black sparrows alit like a puff of factory smoke in a tree laid nude by winter.

Big-Head Tom, Devens, Chilly Willy and Dr. Z (of the spider-wife-nerve disorder) would fill our overcoats with cans of Dixie Beer and walk across the quad to appease the writing faculty whenever poets came to town. You went through the darkened first floor of the natural science building, past fossils and dioramas of nocturnal riverbank critters, up the marbled stairway to the room reserved for the reading.

If you sat in the back of the hall, you could sneak sips off the beer between poems. Poets would often spend more time weaving a listless tale about the poem (Life, friends, is boring, we must not say so!) than it ever took to read it. Or you'd get the personal poet who used their finger to trace the meter of the poem as they read aloud, assuming you either lacked auric acuity or that you had a secret love of mimes.

One night Phil Levine raised his water glass in homage to the tire plant that spread its stink across the Black Warrior River. "Good year," he proclaimed after taking a sip.

Afterward, we'd retire to a student's apartment or faculty house where the reception coursed on the heavy tide of whiskey as we watched the visiting writer finesse a student to bed. If we made fun of the poet on Friday nights, the sing-song rendition, the absolute fawning over a well-honed article, we drew ourselves up with genuine glee when Bad Gerry's class reconvened the following week.

Stern was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Poland and studied in Paris in the early 50s. If there were honors in the craft--the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lamont Prize--he certainly snagged them. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. But in our upstairs room, he was simply Bad Gerry, ranting about "that bastard Reagan" who chose Alabama for his only campus visit during his re-election campaign.

I'd stop by Stern's office every time I walked through the English building, just to see his face, to share a complaint about throwback idiocy and racism after a cross was burned on campus to protest a Black sorority petition to have a house on frat row, to talk about the Beats, to sit where I was never judged or unliked for my threadbare poetic bandwidth.

Years afterwords, I'd read Lucky Life or Paradise Poems, or Lovesick to my students, showing them that poems entered the soul through the ear, not the brain. That everyone could have poetry. That on the most droll days of our lives a beam of crepuscular light could part the clouds and raise us from the shit of mediocrity.

And on days when I have nothing, nothing to say, and the yellow pad looks like an impossible list of demands from my kidnappers, I can turn to Bad Gerry and think how nice it is to think of you, kind father, tears running as polliwogs down your face, my favorite cardinal hopping in the Tuscaloosa dirt, the red dust rising like an arpeggio where the pain had been.