Where I’m from, fried chicken is a staple of any summer holiday. Ideally, one makes it oneself from a hallowed, historical recipe that involves soaking in buttermilk and secret spices and particular methods of breading. Every aspect of the methodology is hotly contested. And let’s not get started on the frying. An inch of oil so as to brown each side individually, or a gallon so as to totally submerge the pieces? Peanut oil or sunflower oil or just plain Wesson? Lard? Lid on or lid off? Is the proper oil temperature smoking or just below the smoke point? All methods theoretically lead to a gloriously seasoned, crispy piece of bird that is not the least bit oily. It is equally delicious served piping hot, at room temperature, or as refrigerated left-overs. Appropriate side-dishes include but are not limited to potato salad, three-bean salad, deviled eggs, pickles, and quartered tomatoes sprinkled with salt.

The slackers and other sad, small individuals go to KFC or the local grocery store, where they stand in a line that stretches out to the street and hope that the place doesn’t run out of inferior, mass-produced, greasy fried chicken before it’s their turn. This is the stuff you have to eat hot, because when it cools there’s going to be a film of grease all over it.

You can probably imagine what happened yesterday. I thought about conducting some sort of kitchen hoo-ha for a bit and then proceeded to spend the day alternately holed up in my study with the Chambers and in the living room whining at Mister Husband about the fact that I'd become One of Those People Who Works on Holidays. He scanned negatives all day. When late afternoon rolled around, we were surprised and mildly upset not to have any festive food around. I had thawed out a couple of chicken breasts with the thought of grilling them, but we both decided that did not count a bit. But fried chicken would! No time to marinate the breasts, though, and fried chicken really demands some variety in the chicken parts.

So we contemplated ... Kentucky Fried Chicken. Would there be a line? Would there be any chicken left? What if they ran out of chicken? It was Independence Day, after all. Mister Husband decided to risk it and set off.

He was back in 15 minutes with a full bucket. There had been no line whatsoever. The place was practically deserted. And then it finally dawned on us that of course nobody would have been at KFC. This is Minnesota, with its high ratio of Germans and Swedes and Norwegians. They were all out grilling bratwursts. If I went across the street to the grocery store, I’d bet there wouldn’t be a brat or hot dog to be found.

It never occurs to me to make brats. They exist down South, and I had one every few years or so, but there’s no emphasis on them. It’s not like you go to a cook-out expecting them to be served or anything. If they were, it’d be a novelty: “Oh hey, a bratwurst!” Maybe I should think about them, though, and serve brats and fried chicken.

An aside: It’s been years since I’ve really celebrated the 4th. (10, maybe? ) I went to bed last night before the fireworks, even, and I usually love fireworks. My rationalization is that I’ll see them every night for a week when the state fair is on near my house in September. I haven’t always been this way, though. When I was a kid, my parents hosted a massive 4th of July party every year, with at least 75-100 guests. When they eventually stopped, I quit observing the holiday. It’s compartmentalized in my mind, I guess — that was something we did then, and this is now. Or put another way: If I can’t have 100 people dancing and setting off bottle rockets in my yard, then I don’t want anything.

Posted at 8:50 AM | Permalink

A conversation from Saturday, when C. and I were driving around to the Farmer’s Market and then to get Thai for lunch. The topic turned toward Southern food, which I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with. I miss it sometimes, but only eat it once a year when I’m at home. Because I never eat it, it makes me ill when I do. You have to be in training for this much grease.

C: So what comes with catfish?
K: Hushpuppies. And french fries. And usually coleslaw, but sometimes green tomato relish and an onion slice.
C: So it’s basically an entire plate full of fried food, plus a vegetable covered in mayonnaise?
K: Yep. And it comes with tartar sauce, so most people dip the fish in mayo too. But I prefer ketchup. And you can order the plate in various combos, so sometimes it comes with catfish and chicken fingers, or catfish and fried shrimp, or all three.
C: Wow. You fry a lot of other stuff down there, don't you? Like okra?
K: Oh, yeah. Fried okra. My grandma used to make this thing that used eggplant or zucchini, too. Dip the rounds in egg, then in crushed Saltine crumbs, then fry them. And then melt cheese on top of them.
C: But that’s about it, right? I mean, what else can you fry?
K: Lessee. Fried okra, fried eggplant, fried zucchini, fried yellow squash, french fries, fried potatoes, hashbrowns, fried sweet potatoes, fried tomatoes, fried green tomatoes, fried corn...
C: Fried corn? How do you fry corn?
K: You just do. Fried artichokes, fried cauliflower, fried mushrooms, fried onion rings, fried pickles, fried broccoli, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, fried fish, fried shrimp, fried clams, fried oysters, fried bacon, fried apples, hushpuppies, fried biscuits, fried donuts, fried bread, fried dough, fried pie...
C: Fried pie?
K: Fried Pie.

*I might add nicely that C. would admit she has no room to talk, since she comes from a place where people fry cheese. She was also a participant in the famed all-cream dinner.

Posted at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

“How you been doin’?”
“Fine as a frog hair split sixteen ways.”

Posted at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Today’s earworm is Koko Taylor proposing that we gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long. I’m cool with that.

It put me in mind of another expression I haven’t heard for awhile. In fact, I’ve only ever heard one of my grandmas use it: squealie worm. As in, “When he told her that, she ’bout had a squealie worm!” Or, “ She called up and was fixin’ to have a squealie worm, and I told her, I said BethAnn, calm down.”*

Mister Husband has never heard of a squealie worm. Google is particularly unhelpful. I should dig out my copy of Lyle Saxon’s Gumbo Ya-Ya, which contains many old Southern colloquialisms. Perhaps the squealie worm is a rare and wondrous thing, at least linguistically.

*For discussion of old-school southern echolalia, see Florence King's Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady.

Posted at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I went to the last sessions, and then said goodbye to everybody, and then off to lunch with the fabulous Miss SusanSinclair. Since then, I’ve been drinking mint juleps in the Peabody lobby and pretending I’m Truman Capote. (More Grass Harp Capote than In Cold Blood Capote. Today, anyway.)

Who knows what the evening holds? Dunno, but I bet there will be barbecue.

*The title refers to a fabulous typo once committed by a writer I’m close to. It involved a misprint of the word gentile for genteel, as in The plantation provides gentile surroundings. Not entirely incorrect, but still...

Posted at 3:41 PM | Permalink

For those of you who are appalled by my apparent yankeeness, don’t worry too much. I still speak pristine vernacular as well:

• Fixin’ to, as in “fixin’ to go to the store.”
• He ain’t a-gonna stop.
• I got to git.
• I ain’t a-gonna do nuthin’ about it.

Don’t aim to change any of that.

Posted at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

CNN has been on pretty much non-stop for the past week at our house. I don’t have words for what has happened to New Orleans, which has always been one of my dearest cities. Along with the rest of the world, I’m heartened to see so many states pitching in to help the folks from NOLA. One thing I can speak to is what Arkansas is doing, since I don’t see it mentioned so much on the news. Fort Chaffee has taken in 9,000 evacuees. So many people my parents know have taken in family and friends without any place to go. As Mister Husband noted earlier, tiny Leflore County, just across the Oklahoma border, has a median annual income of less than $14,000. Several days ago, they had already raised nearly $350,000 in aid and families were cooking food to take down to the Fort.

I’m proud to be from that part of the country, where people can usually be counted on to respond this way. And I’m really proud of my dad, who has been hiring workers from New Orleans this week. He too can usually be counted on for such a practical response.

Posted at 8:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At home, I picked up a copy of Soiree, a local society rag that wasn’t around when I lived there. Willie Oats was on the cover. She was the first woman elected to the Arkansas legislature and has spent most of her life working for one good cause or another. As the proper wife of a successful doctor, she donated her money as well as her time. Now 80ish, she won a special award awhile back for 50 years as a Razorback cheerleader; she was a squad member in her college days and led one annual cheer from the field after that. But what she’s best known for is her extensive collection of outlandish hats, and her portrait features her resplendent in one of them, complete with a huge pair of rhinestone glasses. She appears as a charicature of Rich Old Southern Lady. Dowager. Wealthy Elvis Fan. I snatched up that copy with the intention of blogging it, along with the ad in the back pages for a confederate flag bikini.

***
Somewhere in the middle of the summer, a friend and I were emailing about cultural stereotypes surrounding Romania and the American South. She is particularly interested in and annoyed by vampire myths attached to Romania. In one exchange, I wrote:

It’s sort of like all those movies about the South that assume that every neighborhood has a resident voodoo queen/conjure woman/roots woman and a resident southern belle, and that all southern women are in fact belles or possibly steel magnolias, and all southerners are pleasingly eccentric, and there’s lots of spanish moss everywhere, and all Southern Baptist churches are full of good-natured fire and brimstone and hymn singing. And everybody eats a lot of gumbo and barbeque. All of these things are occasionally true but more generally not. The South is full of a bunch of mostly normal and/or boring people living normal and/or boring lives in a place that is generally hotter and more humid and poorer than the rest of the country. Sometimes we talk funny. That’s about all.

***
When I was assembling my Ph.D. applications in fall of 2003, I wrote about my teaching background and how it informed my teaching philosophy. I wrote about my students, who were mostly working and lower class, mostly nontraditional, mostly raising families, mostly first-generation students. I worked with many women who had been forced to drop out of school as pregnant teenagers and who were now coming back to get their educations while juggling babies and dealing with daddies who were or weren’t there. I held a lot of student conferences while children waited outside the door or sat under the conference table. I read essays written by a lot of fathers who came back not just for their educations, but to show their children how to be.
I wrote about what all of those students taught me, and how they changed my opinions about what first-year composition courses should do. Then I sent the essay to a colleague in Mississippi for review, and his response suggested that I was doing the South and all Southerners a disservice by portraying us as poor, as pregnant, as trying to do better. As an educated Southerner, it was my job to portray the South in the best light possible.
I rewrote the essay. When it went out the door in my app packet, it talked a bit about teaching in an urban university and social class. But not really, not much at all.
I wish now I hadn’t changed it. It — and all the people that made it — deserved for it to stand as it was.
***
Still, when I packed up everything of ours at my parents’ house, I threw away the copy of Soiree.
***
All through the twelve days of our trip, we photographed along the highway and in the little towns. Oddities and wierdities, plains storms, and each other. Many, many signs. In a little town outside Omaha, we found an Oddfellows Lodge with a wonderful, weatherbeaten sign. It was Americana, and it was picturesque, but for me it was mostly funny. And it reminded me of Oddbodkins Liquor in Edinburg, which I also found hilarious.
While I was waiting for Mister Husband to finish shooting, an older gentleman stood in the road and asked a question, and was nice enough to repeat himself and repeat himself until I could understand him. Were we lodge members? he wanted to know. “No,” I told him.
“Nobody is anymore,” he said, waving his hands. “There used to be 180 lodges around Omaha, and now there aren’t even 30. None of the young people are interested.” He was right; I’ve never been interested in a lodge, and I didn’t know what to say to him.
Finally, I said “Oh, I guess I always thought I was too young to join.“
“We have youth groups,“ he said hopefully. Then he wished us a good day and walked off down the street.
I wondered, then, if perhaps I ought not to find the lodge sign so amusing.
***
Somewhere in South Dakota, I began to wonder aloud about where the line is. When are we documenting the little things about America? When are we making a family record of the things we saw, and when we saw them? When are we making fun of them? When are we just wanting to show things to our friends? When are we being ironic, and what is the function of irony anymore? When should we talk about southern women in feathery hats and rhinestone glasses, and beef-fed Nebraskan lodge men?
In response, the husband reminded me of something Roy Harper said on a bootleg, that one day he would be good enough to write a song that meant six different things at once. And then he reminded me of something else an artist we both like told him, and which is also my own opinion about such things: it means whatever it means to you. And it means whatever it means to that person over there. You cannot limit meaning.
***
There is a strand of ethics and morality woven through this, but I have difficulty tracing it these days. Often, I can’t even find the thread.

Posted at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Christmas is coming, and it seems very important to the toymakers that parents know that all girls want is to be pretty, shopping, dieting princesses. It makes me grateful that despite the conflicting ideals I was given, when I was growing up little girls were at least left alone to establish our own playground rules of etiquette, only allowed inside our own homes to simulate sex acts between Barbie and Ken on rainy days, and I really don't think we did that badly.

Will you be my friend if I show you my outrageous nakedness?

Why, yes. Would you like some dirty underpants to put on?

Certainly. And may I suggest an acorn hat for your dogshit sculpture?

Oh, you're too kind.

Yep. Not bad at all.

If you don't read One Good Thing already, you really should.

Posted at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When one speaks of greens (as I do below) one must also speak of hot peppers in vinegar*. "Hot Peppers in Vinegar" means just that - a jar stuffed full of sport peppers or chilis and then covered in white or cider vinegar. The jar must have a flip top so as to shake the vinegar over whatever food you're blessing with it - which in my case are greens, blackeyed peas, and rice. My grandparents kept a homemade batch on the kitchen lazy-susan all the time, and I never really liked it when I was young. Now I do, and I buy it from the store. Or at least I used to.

This stuff is common rice in southern markets. It's impossible to not find it at a grocery store for a couple of bucks. It's in the section with the po' people food. (Lots of good stuff there.) Up here in the tundra, peppers in vinegar do not exist. At all. (And neither does Zatarain's Creole Mustard, but that's hard to find even as far north as Arkansas**.) I've kept an eye out for both of these at various markets around town, and the closest thing I found was a $15 bottle of highly decorative artisinal peppers in vinegar at a local gourmet chain. It was next to the lemon-tarragon vinegar and rosemary-garlic vinegar and other lovely whatnots. Not far away was a 5 ounce jar of Creole Mustard for $7. (You'll notice the link lists it at $3 for 12 ounces.) One night I stood in the middle of the extensive ethnic food aisles at Cub Foods and loudly asked Mister Boyfriend why there wasn't an aisle for Southern People. An off-duty grocery stocker turned around and sweetly asked me what it was I was looking for. After I told her, she looked at me with great amusement and said, "Do you know where you've moved to?"

Yes, yes I do. I dearly love the Yankees, but they can be a little spice-shy. Years ago, a Minnesotan friend once served me chili that had no chili powder in it. Her spice rack mostly consisted of onion flakes and some long-dead garlic powder. It's not that bad most places I've dined around town, but my quota of spiciness is apparently above most non-Southern people's***. Back home, I'm a lightweight. Up here, I keep ordering chili and then asking for hot sauce to dump in it.

So I eventually called my parents and begged, and they sent me a lovely box with two big jars of mustard and a bottle of proper Louisiana Hot Peppers in Vinegar labeled "For the Poor People of the North." We've been luxuriously smearing mustard on sandwiches for the past few days, and I had a proper bowl of blackeyed peas for lunch today.

*Scott does not share this opinion, so apparently all Southerners don't feel this way. I don't care.
**There is also apparently no such thing as a hushpuppy up here either. Fried fish is always cod (which is fine with me) and comes with french fries and slaw. No pups. This has somewhat cured me of any hankering for fried fish, since the pups are half the point as far as I'm concerned.
***I took some visitors from upstate NY to a Greek place a few weeks back and they were commenting on the spiciness of the food. I didn't tell them that I had just been thinking that hey, another couple of peppers and it'd be about right.

Posted at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

This is an old folk song that I've never actually heard performed. I clipped the lyrics out of Paul Greenburg's column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette* about a decade ago and kept it on my bulletin board for years. It moved along with me to Minnesota, where I just put up my office bulletin board yesterday.

I had a dream the other night
I dreamed that I could fly!
I flopped my wings like a buzzard
And flew up to the sky.
St. Peter met me at the gate
At me he looked so neat
He invited me to dinner
And this is what we eat:
Turnip greens, turnip greens,
Corn bread and buttermilk
And good old turnip greens...

St. Peter says those Arkansas girls
Are awfully hard to beat
They always dress so pretty
And always look so neat
He says the reason for their beauty
Is plainly to be seen –
The precious little honeys
Have been raised on turnip greens,
Good old turnip greens
Cornbread and buttermilk
And good old turnip greens.

Too bad I'm the only person in this house who likes greens (although I prefer kale to turnip.) Mister Boyfriend should realize that he benefits from them regardless. Heh.

*An absurdly conservative paper, but the only one in town since it won the newspaper wars a dozen years ago. God rest the Arkansas Gazette.

Posted at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Growing up, I absorbed the Southern obsession with place, and place can seem to me somehow an extension of the self. If I am made of red clay and black river water and white sand and moss, that seems natural to me.

Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun, 266

Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way.

W.S. Merwin, Words from a Totem Animal

I would not be surprised to find that I am made of river silt and humidity, coming as I do from the Arkansas river valley. The thought of tiny whiskered catfish moving slowly through my depths seems natural rather than freakish.

I was born in the South, and lived there for 28 years and 3 months. For about half of those I was intensely aware of the fact, although I do not know when or how that awareness began. Some of my favorite hours are those spent reading through southern histories and biographies, and wading through regional cookbooks. My favorite journey for the past five years has been the 350 miles from Little Rock to New Orleans, through the lowlands and little towns, and my favorite thing to do there has been to sit on a low platform in the Barataria Preserve and watch the alligators float by. Once, one slowly surfaced about 10 feet in front of me, and we sat and looked at each other for an hour. Eventually, he turned and floated on; I turned and left.

And now I have left all of it, probably for good. I never meant to live there as long as I did, although for the last five years I was reconciled to it to the point of thinking that I didn't really want to leave. I assumed I would be homesick, and so went through a strange pre-homesickness during the last weeks before we moved. Since we have been here, I haven't had a twinge. Rather, there's been relief to be living elsewhere twelve years after I thought I would, a settling into something I had forgotten I wanted. I wonder if this is it for me, if I'll become one of the North Toward Home southerners who only visits and never moves back, or if I'll develop a hole inside that can only be filled with red clay.

Ask me again in January.

Posted at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Mom found this poll tax receipt while helping Grandpa clean out the old house. I'd heard about the old poll taxes all my life, but had never seen an actual receipt for one until now.* (I've edited this one to remove the voter's name.) What makes this one particularly interesting is its date of issue: April 1, 1957. I'm sure few people who paid their poll taxes on that day would have imagined that the Central High Crisis would occur in September of that year.

I did a little research on poll taxes, and found out that they had been adopted by all eleven of the original Confederate states by 1904. In order to vote, one had to save the receipts and present them at the polls, which would explain why this one was carefully tucked away. This article, by a Prof. J. Morgan Kousser at Cal Tech, notes that "in five states, the poll tax could accumulate for more than one year - in Georgia after 1877 and Alabama after 1901, indefinitely. One knowledgeable observer termed Georgia's cumulative poll tax "the most effective bar to Negro suffrage ever devised." Kousser also observes that most of the African-American population sharecropped at that time, which meant that while they had a low annual income in general, their cash income was even lower. If they bought most of their necessities on credit, then they'd be lucky to see even a few dollars in cash a year. A $1 poll tax was an impossible amount for them to pay.

Because everyone, regardless of color, had to pay the poll tax, the states claimed that it was a nondiscriminatory policy. Kousser writes that the Southern Conference on Human Welfare took action against the taxes in the 1930s, and their efforts continued on into the 50s. Several states repealed their taxes during this time, but it wasn't until the 24th Amendment in 1964 that the poll taxes were finally abolished in all Southern states.

*I'd also never seen anything that referred to any part of the city as "Big Rock."

Posted at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So yesterday was my 10,000th Day. It had become apparent that High Adventure wasn't in the cards (or in my checkbook, although that's becoming an adventure in itself) so I took Mister Boyfriend's suggestion and and headed off to the baths of Hot Springs for a bit of girliness.

I've been having massages since I was about sixteen, but I had never been to the baths. Figuring that one's 10,000th day demanded a new experience, I booked both a bath and a massage (for a surprisingly reasonable sum) and took off on the hour drive from Little Rock. The Arlington Hotel is the grandest hotel and bath on Bathhouse Row, and they've obviously worked hard to restore and maintain the 1920s architecture, both in the hotel proper and in the baths. That's where I went*.

Since I've always been a bath person (as opposed to a shower person), it was a foregone conclusion that I would be a sucker for the baths. They put you in a tub of very very hot water that has what looks like a 50-year-old outboard motor stuck in it, only instead of blades it has tubes that shoot out compressed air. (Swear to God, the thing really should say Evinrude on the side.) The whole contraption is plugged into the wall. Your first thought is "I'm a-gonna die of electrocution." Your next thought, a full five minutes later, is "I don't care. What an excellent way to go." You stay in the bath for 20 minutes, sipping the very very hot water they give you to sip, and you become very happy - so happy that you are inclined to protest when the very nice attendant named Annie comes to fish you out.

But you get out anyway, because the next step is to sit in your own tiny private steamroom and sip very cold water while the 130 degree air** billows around you and the hot marble seat gently roasts your bottom. The maximum stay allowed in the steam room is five minutes, and you stay every second of them. Then you lie down so you can be wrapped entirely in hot towels and have a cold towel placed on your face, and you stay there until you start to feel kind of soggy, and then it is time for the massage.

It was like they opened up a plug on my big toe (or possibly it was in my belly button) and drained out all the Extreme Grownupness of this summer and replaced it with fabulously clear water. I was so happy and light by the time they got done.

So I proceeded to McClard's Bar-B-Q for dinner. I've been going there all my life, first with the parents and then by myself and with friends. I once introduced a German exchange student to Southern barbeque there. I've gone through phases of ordering - when I was a teenager, it was always a chopped beef sandwich and fries, no slaw because I was scared of slaw. Then I went through a long while of tamale spreads, until a couple of years ago when I became a devotee of the chopped beef plate. Last night, I reverted to the tamale spread, which is a rather curious beast: a layer of fritos and a layer of tamales, followed by successive layers of baked beans, chopped beef, onions, cheddar cheese, and barbeque sauce. And since I am now not only not scared of slaw but on a constant quest for the Slaw Epitome, I ordered up a side of their very excellent slaw. There was no way I could eat all of it - half of everything came home in a box, and I'm finishing it off now as breakfast while typing this.

Then I stopped by Mister Boyfriend's on the way home and watched Mr. Deeds, which I've never seen all of before, and then I went home and slept for 11 hours.

I feel much better now.

*In spite of the grandeur, they're very nice and not at all snotty. They'll even valet park a Kia for you.
**Yes, I am the sort of person who will sit in a 130 degree room in summer in Arkansas.

Are you happy now, Michelle? (Just so long as you know I would have written this anyway. Ha!)

Posted at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Mostly notes to self for future whatnot:

The Eugene Walter Collection resides at Auburn (as does the Truman Capote collection.)

There is also an Eugene Walter Archive at U Texas Austin, which includes issues of Botteghe Oscure, which he co-edited with the Princess Marguerite Caetani (about whom very little seems to exist in English.)

Backissues of the Paris Review are available. Not, of course, the 1950's ones that Walter was in - but they do have lovely thumbnails of the covers.

Besides being an author, playwright, actor, translator, lyricist and editor, he wrote cookbooks - including this one.

IMDB lists a mostly complete filmography and a totally incomplete list of credits as a lyricist.

Posted at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I took Sociolinguistics last semester from a professor who was raised in upstate New York. She moved to the South about 20 years ago, and is still amazed at the cultural differences. She said one of the hardest things for her to get used to was the preliminary formalities of Southern conversation. She would walk into someone's office and say "Hi, I need such-and-such," and the other person would become mightily offended. It took her a while to realize that down here you have to say, "Hi. How you been? How's your mama? How's your paper going? I went hiking last weekend and got into the biggest bunch of chiggers. Lord, they itch. By the way, I need such-and-such. Would you mind horribly?"

Reading Eugene Walter's account of his army service put me in mind of her:

When I was nineteen I was drafted and went off to basic training at Fort McPherson, Georgia. When I got to Georgia, they immediately put me to work. They had all these second lieutenants from New England who were supposed to be doing the registration. Of course, they didn't know how to deal with those backwoods boys. They would ask direct questions, like "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" and the backwoods boys wouldn't answer direct questions. So they got Private Walter, and they gave me an office. These boys would come in, and I'd say, "Well, howdy. I'm from Mobile. Where are you from?"
"Possum Hollow."
"Whoa, you-all got good hunting there. I been near Possum Hollow. I was at a place up the road called Richton. I was a CCC boy[*]."
"You were a CCC boy?"
"I was a CCC boy at Richton."
"My cousin went to Richton. He was a CCC boy."
And then I could say, "Now what's your name?" So I'd get the last name and I'd say, "Now I knew a J.T. Wideman up at Richton. That any kin to you?"
"I'm Billy Bob."
"What about your daddy? His name the same as yours?"
"No, Daddy's named John Ed."
"What was your mama's name before she married Mr. John Ed?"
"Well, she was a Muskrat."
Then they needed what church they go to, so I said, "Oh, Possum Hollow. They got that pretty little white church, got all the privet bushes around."
"Oh no, no, I went to the Methodist on the other side of the tracks."
So I could finally build their entrance form, from a conversation, you see, not from direct questions. But all those second lieutenants from New England were having nervous breakdowns because these boys would just sit there. They wouldn't talk to those Yankee boys. (Milking the Moon, 61)

*CCC stood for Civilian Conservation Corps. One of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the Corps enlisted young men to plant trees in exchange for housing, food and a structured existence. According to Walter, the Corps also functioned as a reform institute of sorts - "The one I joined was a forestry camp in Richton, Mississippi. I was the only non-reform school boy in my group of fifty" (51).

There's also some (distinctly unSouthern) discussion of colloquialisms and formalities over on Lost in transit.

Posted at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been reading Eugene Walter's Milking the Moon lately, instead of other things I should be working on. Walter grew up in Mobile, Alabama, served his WWII army duty in the Aleutian Islands, moved to Greenwich Village in the '40s and then went on to Paris in the '50s, where he was part of the group that started the Paris Review. He was in Rome during the '60's, and appeared in several Fellini films. He seems to have somehow known everybody - Judy Garland to Isak Dinesen to William Faulkner. He wrote several books - including Monkey Poems and Singerie-Songerie - that were published by Gaberbocchus Press. He did a lot more besides, and then went back home to Mobile and died a quiet, obscure death.

His autobiography is a wonderful thing. I've enjoyed it immensely, although I didn't think I would on the grounds that it's an "as-told-to." This book has turned out to be the one exception in that genre. But then, I'm a total sucker for memoirs, especially one as varied as this. And anyone who claims the best sex is "in a phone booth, naked, with a lot of butterflies," is my sort of person. I'm only about halfway through this book, and I'm sure I won't be able to resist at least one more post on it.

For instance, Walter grew up with Truman Capote, who he knew as a short kid named Bulldog:

On Saturdays at the Lyric Theater there would be a matinee for children. That's where I met Truman Capote. We were never pals. We were acquaintances called Southerners. He came to Mobile on Saturdays to have his teeth straightened and go to the doctor and various things like that. He was Truman Persons from Monroeville, but he was called Bulldog. He had some funny underbite where the lower jaw sticks out, and he looked exactly like a bulldog. One night at this party in New York, suddenly, I looked across the room and there was Truman. And I said, "Bulldog! What are you doing here?" And he said, "Sh, sh. I'm Truman Capote now. " Well, see, I knew him as Bulldog Persons. …

In the Sunday Register there was the Sunshine Page. This lady called Disa Stone had this children's page and this Sunshine Club where children wrote and sent in what they wrote and vied for prizes. The grand prize was a pony. For his contribution to the Sunshine Page and for the contest, Truman had spied on this old man who lived up the street in Monroeville and was a real old crank. Even then he was already mixing fiction and reportage. Why not? But let's not say he invented the reportage-fiction, fiction-reportage style. Daniel Defoe would be giggling in his grave at the thought, not to mention a dozen French writers. And some of his things are so full of Gothic narrative impossibilities that one wants to say, "Now, Cousin Truman, come down outa that tree!"

Continue reading "celebrate all wayward things" »

Posted at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I met author Rick Bragg briefly this morning at a book signing. He's a big man, about 6'2" and 270 pounds, with the deepest Alabama accent I've ever heard. The first thing he asked me was "Where you from?" I told him I was from here, done lived here all my life. "Well, I couldn't place your accent," he said. "You don't sound like you're from Arkansas."

I guess it's true, since so many other people have said the same thing. I've lived in the South since the day I was born, but I also went to speech therapy three times a week between the ages of three and eight. (I was relearning to talk after an early-childhood bout with spinal meningitis.) I sound more like someone who grew up talking TV-anchor accentless speech and then moved down South and picked up a tiny wee bit of accent and a lot of colloquialisms. I've got the native rhythm but not the native twang.

So it is what it is. But I'm frustrated by it, because I grew up in this culture. I love it. I study it. I write about it. And now I've been informed by a Big Daddy of Southerness that I don't sound like I'm from these parts.

Bragg certainly meant it in the nicest way when he said it. We were just chatting while he was signing our books. I liked him on first sight, because his type of guy is home for me. I'm related to about 20 men just like him. Big and rough, smart, hard-working. Ornery and a little dangerous, but also sweet as can be with the people they love.

My friend who went with me is from a very ethnic enclave of Chicago, and she couldn't find one comfortable thing about Bragg that she could relate to. She thought he might as well have been from the moon. We went to lunch afterwards, and I spent most of the time trying to explain this particular breed of man to her. I don't think I ever did manage to do that; perhaps the only thing I managed to make clear is that there are no distinct polarities in them, only a muddle of contradictions. There's the street-fighting, fried-chicken-eating, dead-loyal, straight-talking and tall-tale-telling aspects of it all, but there's more than that to them, and it's largely undefinable. It's a toughness and a sweetness and Lord knows what-all complications mixed up and poured into a big, sturdy container. I guess all I really know about it is that there are few things I like better than literary blue-collar men and smart good ole boys.

Posted at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My brother, S., moved back home right before Christmas. I hadn’t seen or talked to him on any sort of regular basis for ten years, and wasn’t sure what to think. I’ve been sort of a pseudo-only-child all this time – ever since I was seventeen and he was eighteen. (OK, so that’s hardly a “child” by any stretch of the imagination. But you know what I mean.)

It turns out that he’s fabulous to have around. He doesn’t do dishes much, but he does something better: he helps with the remembering. We’ve sat around talking during the past weeks, and we remember things together that I haven’t thought of in years – like the Crawdad Incident.

When we were kids, we both kept aquariums all over the house. Once, when I was off at piano lessons or something, he went down to the creek and caught a bunch of crawdads for us to keep as pets. He gave the very biggest, most lobster-like one to me, and solemnly christened it Jolly Wolly Holiday. I don’t remember what happened to the rest of them, but Jolly lived with us for longer than any crawdad should. He rummaged around in the floor of his tank while guppies and angel fish swam above his crawdaddy head, and seemed quite satisfied with the situation. Eventually, though, maybe it wasn’t so satisfactory for him – he developed wanderlust, and figured out how to slide the top off the tank just enough to crawl over the side and drop onto the floor. He’d skitter around in the carpet until one of us noticed and tossed him back in.

My mother has rather poor eyesight, which she has passed on to me. Then as now, it was her habit to arise at five and wander, bleary and contact-less, into the kitchen. It was while in that state one morning that she heard a clacking behind her on the linoleum, and turned around to find a large, blurry crustacean clicking its way toward her, waving its pincers. Her screech woke the rest of us, and S. ran into the kitchen to save her and Jolly from each other.*

In fact, that’s how Jolly eventually met his Maker – he climbed out and went gallivanting one day, and got lost behind the couch, where there was no water. His was an arid death, and a stinky one. But he lived a noble and adventurous life. Jolly made the most of things.

***

S. is a year and a week older than me, almost to the hour. Happy 28th, bubba! I love you.

*My mother would probably like for me to point out that she is not the type who usually needs saving from crawdads, or reptiles, or bugs. But who can be expected to react well to such a thing at such an hour?

Posted at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My lovely godmother lives in Metairie and teaches theology at Loyola in New Orleans. I try to make a point of imposing on her at least once a year, as I did last August. She always takes it well.

I spent my last day of that trip in the Tulane Louisiana Collection, researching Louisiana lycanthropy myths. (We had been playing Exquisite Corpse in the evenings, which somehow generated a story about the Virgin Mary living in the swamps and hooking up with the Loup Garou, so I needed to know. Doesn't everyone do this sort of thing?) Anyway, it's long been my habit to scribble down the little unrelated oddities I find in the course of research. I just ran across the piece of paper from that day, and thought I'd set them down here for some sort of future reference. God only knows what use they'll be, but one never knows, do one?

The following come from Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales, by Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer and Robert Tallant. (Bonanza Books: NY, 1965)

TRANSEXUALISM:
If a girl kisses her toe, she will become a boy. Kiss your elbow and you will change your sex (p. 558).

SOUTHERN COLLOQUIALISMS:
I feel so feelsy. I love I. I'm going wild crazy. I feel like a stowaway. I wouldn't give a pinch of snuff for my life. Big I and little you (p. 559).

MYTHOLOGY:
In this section of the state [Ponchatoula River] Jack O' Lanterns, the elusive phosphorescent swamp lights, are common and are here believed to lead to buried pirate gold (p. 265). (I had never seen swamp lights referred to as Jack O'Lanterns before.)

Down in Terrebonne Parish the children talk as familiarly of mermaids as if they were their daily companions. And the age-old tale of the sirens, whose sweet music attracts men and costs them their souls, is as alive among the Cajun fisherman today as ever it was in Ancient Greece (p. 191 - 192).

BECAUSE I LIKED THE NAME:
Vermilionville.

BEST JOURNAL-ESSAY TITLE IN A LONG TIME:
"Down In Your Mustard-Seed, Kool-Aid Pumping, Marshmallow-Filled, Twinkie-Eating Heart," by Shawn Mitchell. (Louisana Folklore Miscellany, Vol. VIII, 1993, pg. 57)

Posted at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)