I used to stick out my tongue to lick my mashed
potatoes, not as an eater but as a cartographer.
To prove my world was measurable, I’d
slide my fat pink tongue along the steaming
mush, bulldozing it into lumpy mountains along
the corners of my plate and flattening it into a
smooth valley somewhere in the middle.
Eventually I tongued the topography of
Andalusia, my hometown in Magnolia County.
Mom’s hollering or smacking me with a
napkin or spoon almost always disrupted this
modest achievement.
Despite her interruptions, I maintained
the skill to actualize into small-scale the
enormous world I envisioned.
The place now known as Andalusia was once named
for the Etowah Indians whom the British and
Spanish, on the pretext of trading, gradually
and thoroughly dispossessed.
Andalusia’s first European settlers, all
Christians, didn’t record the Etowah name
because, the story goes, it signified
sun-worship.
They couldn’t have foreseen the long
stretch of highway that split the cotton fields
and brought truckers and hookers and other
unsavory characters to the rest stops and gas
stations on the outskirts of Magnolia County,
where hitchhikers gathered and poor black
families lived in shacks and shanties even
though it was, for heaven’s sake, the 1970s.
Words like “folks” and “yonder” still
circulated back then, and everyone was “fixin’”
to do something but never actually doing it.
The class divide was sharp.
It was déclassé to speak like a redneck
or a hick, though we all had strong accents and
used strange colloquialisms.
The aspirational and ashamed among us
spoke as we imagined refined Southerners to have
spoken a century ago: with Victorian vocabulary
and musicality, a ridiculous mix of
faux-aristocratic inflection with theatrical,
measured enunciation.
We didn’t know many Yankees and couldn’t
bear the thought of them labeling us
“uneducated” or “ignorant.”
So we overcompensated, making speech into
a differentiating form of recreation, a pretend
pedigree.
I sometimes wonder whether other small Southern
towns were anachronistic like ours: a simulacrum
of feudal plantation society disconnected from
the distant, daily machinations of President
Nixon, the political fallout from
Roe v.
Wade, the Kent State massacre, the hostage
crisis at the Munich Olympics, and whatever else
occupied the news.
Black folks were not, I’m sorry to say, part of
my quotidian experience as a boy.
They lived on the margins of town, in
isolated neighborhoods, and attended different
churches.
They had their own restaurants and little
leagues.
I saw black fathers and mothers walking
to and from work but did not interact with them.
The law, mind you, no longer permitted
segregation, which was accomplished instead
through habits and practices that amounted to
law in those days.
Left to their own preferences, the blacks
and whites at that time and place regarded each
other with polite and tactical distance,
avoiding at all costs the fraught history that
had hardened the hearts of their mothers,
fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers.
We wanted to understand each other,
perhaps forgive each other, but didn’t know how
and wouldn’t risk the effort.
We favored an imperfect peace over
disruptive improvement when it came to race
relations.
Few written records survived Andalusia’s
infancy.
The first settlers were either illiterate
or didn’t safeguard information.
Maybe they felt no need to document their
existence or connect with their posterity.
Whatever the reason for their
interminable silence, they left behind no
information about Andalusia’s early years.
Legend held that an old blind man, the
oracle in overalls, wandered Magnolia County in
the 1920s and prophesied that Andalusia would
perish if a local virgin murdered her one true
love. He
was found dead in a field with coins over his
eyes, possibly the victim of foul play.
I lived in the valley, the nucleus of the
county.
Some thirty miles east of my house were
the homogenous buildings of the gray and graying
city.
At night these lit up like a fluorescent
forest.
From town, on a clear evening, you could
see the distant glow of these colossal
structures as if they were teeny candles
illuminating the yawning divide between urban
and rural, cosmopolitan and country.
I never set foot in these towers but
heard that they afforded a full view of
Andalusia. I
pictured businessmen and elegant women gathered
on the rooftops and upper floors, looking down
on me and my house, all those miles away, with
disdain and aloofness.
Many were the twilights when, alone and
brooding, I would watch the sun set behind that
inadvertent sum of architectural ambition: the
gray and graying city.
During these moments of solitude I
learned that day is day and night is night, and
that the distinction between the two can be
beautifully ambiguous.
I also developed a notion that the vital
forces of the universe were not the result of
human choice but simply the given state of
things.
A city could spring up, unwieldy and
without design, to no one’s fault or credit.
Sure there were engineers and builders
and countless workers, but no individual purpose
could explain the disorienting energy of the
mighty metropolis with its incomprehensible
multitudes.
Little lay to the west of Andalusia besides
allegedly haunted forests and fields where goats
and cows groveled and grazed.
Etowah burial mounds—massive conical
heaps of dirt—gave the landscape there the look
of pregnant women lying prone.
Near those mounds, Michael’s dad and my
dad shared a law office, formerly a doctor’s
home with a Greek revival design and thriving
japonica bushes.
In warm seasons, cheerful Morning Glories
trained along the railing of its front porch.
You could hear the highway from its rooms
and see the huge wooden replica of a Coca Cola
bottle that lured tourists en route to the beach
or the mountains, depending on which direction
they were headed.
Michael Warren was my best friend.
Our fathers, too, were friends, not just
business partners.
They
drank scotch together every afternoon before
calling it a day.
Not far from their office was the public
library where I spent many hours and discovered
that I wanted to tell my story one day—whatever
that story turned out to be.
I wanted to be Ishmael, Huck Finn, Nick
Carraway, Jack Burden, Holden Caulfield.
But you cannot touch time.
You cannot grasp it as you can a
baseball.
I didn’t have a story yet to tell.
Not until Tommy Cox and Sarah Warren gave
me one.
West of Dad’s office and the library, the
arresting and lonesome splendor of the Blue
Ridge Mountains bent like an arthritic finger
pointing to England, the home of my Anglo-Saxon
ancestors.
In the summer, on a clear day, these wide
ranges looked like giant green broccoli bulges
cast up on the horizon by some fantastic film
projector, above them a long reach of white
clouds across a bright blue sky.
Folks referred to the heart of Andalusia simply
as “town.”
Town was a geometry of eclectic shops, aromatic
bakeries, quaint restaurants, and ostentatious
law offices.
Its centerpiece, withdrawn from the
bricked streets and manifold statues, was the
courthouse, a commanding structure announced by
wood-mold brick and a stately, neoclassical
colonnade of imposing height and width.
Behind the courthouse, away from the square,
pine trees steepled above a copper cranium dome
where a clock, forever stuck at six, stared down
like a panoptic cyclops.
Dad used to say that the courthouse was
so daunting that William Tecumseh Sherman
couldn’t bring himself to burn it.
Others said that Sherman spared the
building, and much of the town, because he had a
girlfriend there.
The belly of the courthouse was no less
astounding. Beneath
a vast rotunda the tip-taps of loafers echoed
off marble floors, up to the cupola above.
Adorned with handsome antiques and oil
paintings and patterned in floral arabesques,
the hallways led to various courtrooms and the
judges’ cloistral chambers.
Busts of Washington, Jefferson, Story,
and Kent guarded the ornamentally carved doors
within these semi-sacred corridors that led, at
length, to an oil portrait of Sir William
Blackstone, a Bible in his right hand and a law
book in his left, who greeted visitors, or so it
seemed, with a mischievous smile.
Georgian revival oak paneling lined the
courtrooms.
Unfinished sketches of Andalusia’s legal
legends—judges, prosecutors, government
officials—filled the unpatronized rooms down the
dark hallways leading to the judges’ chambers.
In the atrium, people of distinction, and
some of disrepute, scuttled here and there,
indifferent to any children, like me, who might
have been wandering without supervision.
The courtrooms were eerie when vacant.
This, I suspect, had to do with Dad’s
telling me once that if you listened closely,
when no one was around, you could hear the faint
echoes of long-ago closing arguments sounding
from the rafters.
Dad also claimed that, because Sherman
had spared the courthouse, these disembodied
voices belonged to lawyers living before the
Civil War, or, as he called it, the War Between
the States.
They alone of their generation endured as
apparitions to monitor the halls of justice, he
said.
Outside the courthouse, each weekday, around
noon, lawyers in tweed and seersucker filled the
town square, smoking pipes or cigars, conversing
about politics and recent cases, the noisy
industry of sparrows and crows convening at
their feet.
Sometimes lawyers would grab a bourbon at
Bar Noon, or at the rowdier Y’all Come Back
Saloon.
Because drinking was considered out of
keeping for a lawyer, most of the bench and bar
carried flasks or didn’t drink at all.
Those who didn’t drink lost the most
cases.
A funny feeling overtook me if I walked by these
bars in the mornings, their lights off and doors
shut, the smell of beer in the air.
Hours before, they were full of
conviviality, conversation, energy, ambition.
But sleep had set in.
The sun was up, but sleep had set in.
The floors had been mopped, the chairs
were stacked on the tables, and the doors were
locked.
And sleep had set in.
The taps stopped flowing.
The malaise of the workaday world
presented itself just as the sleep had set in.
And it had set in.
On one corner of the square was a butcher shop
owned by a Turkish man who had immigrated to the
United States and, however improbably, settled
in Andalusia.
When he saw how pleased people were to be
eating turkey on Thanksgiving, a holiday he had
never experienced before, he decided that, each
and every holiday thereafter, he would sell a
particular item suitable for the occasion.
Easter arrived.
He saw chocolate bunny rabbits and eggs
in the shop windows where turkeys had been
during Thanksgiving.
So he slaughtered some rabbits in the
back of his store and displayed their raw
carcasses in the window of his shop.
Children were horrified.
Some cried.
One stood outside the window weeping, “He
killed the Easter bunny.”
The butcher didn’t make that mistake
again.
Little new besides happened in Andalusia.
Our perceived novelties were
reformulations of old manners and methods of
living.
No two days were alike.
Yet everything was the same.
We were indifferent to Watergate, removed
from bellbottoms and flower power, and thrilled
when Hank Aaron broke the Bambino’s homerun
record.
The Babe, after all, had been a
philandering, potbellied Yankee with bad manners
and a loud mouth.
No matter what news arrived by print or
television, we favored ourselves over alien
outsiders, especially Yankees.
We were irrationally loyal like that.
These details about Andalusia are important—they
must
be important—because I remember them and
consider them necessary to my story, which, as I
say, is chiefly the story of Tommy and Sarah,
who made me who I am.
Knowledge is an awareness of truths you
create for yourself from images your mind
retains.
The mind processes facts, in other words,
but truth emerges only after you’ve pieced them
into narrative. It
took me a long time to realize the truth about
Tommy and Sarah.
I understood, when I was looking through
photographs I’d taken from Dad’s drawer, that
Magnolia County was fixed in time and space; the
natural rules of temporal succession—of moment
followed by consecutive moment—didn’t apply to
us.
I remember looking at the images in my hand and
thinking how the town appeared no different
today than it had a century ago.
I fingered the faded, busy outlines of
folks in the square, tracing their dark suits
and flowing dresses with my thumb, they being so
alive, occupied, and unaware of me, a boy they’d
never know in an era they wouldn’t reach.
Then I remember wondering whose face was behind
the camera.
Why had he or she taken these photographs
in what must have been, in those days, an
explosive flash of smoke and lamplight?
I gazed down into the palm of my free hand and
imagined time slipping through my fingers as
would water.
I shaped the words, to no one in particular,
Give me
something new.
And something new came.