Also by Roy Blount Jr.

About Three Bricks Shy of a Load

Crackers

One Fell Soup

What Men Don't Tell Women

Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

It Grows on You

Soupsongs/Webster s Ark

Now, Where Were We ?

About Three Bricks Shy …and the Load Filled Up

First Hubby

Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard

Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor

If Only You Knew How Much I Smell You (with Valerie Shaff)

Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story

I Am Puppy, Hear Me Yap (with Valerie Shaff)

Am I Pig Enough for You Yet? (with Valerie Shaff)

Robert E. Lee

I Am the Cat, Don't Forget That (with Valerie Shaff)

Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans

All references to my “lady friend,” “sweet pea,” “inamorata of long standing,” and so on are hereby superseded. We got married, at sunset on Sunset Beach in Tarpon Springs, Florida, an old Greek sponge-fishing town.

So this is for the Mrs.,

Who knows what the meaning of is is.

The Southerner has no mind.

—Henry Adams

It's all either up South or down South.

—old African American expression

Contents

I. INTRODUCTION

Bringing in the Sheaves

II. SETTING THE TABLE

Why I'm Not an Outsider Artist

The Right Shade of Blue?

First, Tell Me What Kind of Reader You Are

Out-of-Pants Experience

Do You Know the Nothin’ Man?

You Hate Me Because I'm Southern

The Rapture: Lighten Up

Total Immersion, Up to a Point

Don't Force It: An Introduction to Up from Methodism

Can't I Be the Most Sophisticated Something Else?

Why Communism Didn't Originate in South Carolina

How about This Peculiar Institution?

The Worm Bubble

Gothic Baseball

III. EATING

Giving Good Gravy

The Way Folks Were Meant to Eat

Meat, Three, Wallace Stevens, and Me

Mammy's Little Baby Loves What, Exactly?

Food-Song Maven

Chicken

What Undid Uncle Bud

The Terrys Do It Right

A Grapefruit Moment

IV. READING

The Plurality of Y'all

The Peer Group That I Hesitate to Speak Its Name

Listen Up, Youth

Southern Humor: Love It or Leave It

So Many Writers. Why?

The Thwock and the Fury: Faulkner's Tennis

In Elysium

Confronting My Whiteness

Little Truman, Happy at Last

The Best of Gaynelle

Oh, Come on, Smiley

Fresh Mark

Bits of Twain for Brits

True Portis

Those Shakespeherian Blues

V. WATCHING, LISTENING

Brother Ray: What He Said

Violinist and Panther: Brother Dave

The Clampetts Never Got to Whack Anybody

No to Nashville, Yes to O Brother

When the Lights Go Down South

A Wang Dang Doodle Dandy?

Cruelty to Elvis

The King “Was in the Countinghouse, Counting Out His Toes

Love Those Bozzies

He's Crossed Over to Classic

Déjà Ahooey

Country Song Entitlement

Memphis Minnie's Blues: A Dirty Mother for You

VI. TRAVELING

Me and Bobby E. Lee

See the World But Don't Get Carried Away

Right out There with the Dogs

Dogs Whose Parents Got Out

Snakes Alive

Babel to Byzantium

Augusta Un-Mastered

Atlanta Explained

The Olympics: “Atlanta Will Be Done Away”

The Varsity Is Local

The Guy-Crowded Gulf (1993)

The Bottom Line (2005)

There Be Alligators

Hanging with the Klan

VII. POLITICKING

Double-Bubba Bubble (1992)

Briefly (1992)

Bill, You're Due

A Makeover for Uncle Sam? (1995)

The New Southern Manhood (1995)

He May Be a Dog, But He's Our Dog

Sometimes Higbe's That Way (1998)

Slick Willie and the Marble Model (2000)

Yellow-dogma

Looking Back on Bill (2000)

How Bad Could It Be? (2000)

The Story So Far (2006)

Bringing in the Sheaves

This was written before the midterm elections of 2006, in which, as we now know, America—even as far South as Virginia—began to take my advice. Much remains to be seen.

Down South recently I read a letter to the editor that sought a middle ground on glossolalia. Apparently controversy has been high among Southern Baptists as to whether speaking in tongues should be embraced doctrinally. The writer began as follows:

“I have never, as far as I am aware, been inspired to speak in tongues myself, but…”

As far as I am aware.

Aw, man, I miss that stuff.

Best I recollect, I have not personally been swallowed by a whale, as such, but…

I moved to the Northeast thirty-eight years ago. By now, you'd think I would have left the South. But I keep needing to get back down there. As long as I can get back out again.

In October 2001, an American flag was stolen in Massachusetts and another one in North Carolina. I know of the first from a photograph in the Berkshire Eagle, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in which a reproachful-looking elderly couple are holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says PLEASE RETURN OUR FLAG. SHAME ON YOU. I know of the second from a photograph in the Independent Weekly of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in which an angry-looking middle-aged man is standing beneath professional plastic-letter signage, bolted onto the front of his house and floodlit, that says, I HOPE THE SORRY PIECE OF SHIT WHO STOLE MY U.S. FLAG DISPLAYS IT WITH PRIDE.

The thinking is clearer in the Northern sign. There is more going on in the Southern one. And it's more flagrant. “Her lyricism can be flagrant,” writes Margo Jefferson (about Carson McCullers), in The New York Times. “But what Southern writer isn't flagrant about something?”

Generalizations about the South, unless I am making them, usually put me off, but that one is mannerly enough, for one thing, to be couched as a question. And I don't know where Margo Jefferson grew up, but I know she is African American and a Jefferson, therefore at least somewhat Southern rooted, therefore not a writer whom I suspect of retaining, autonomically, as a chicken does a piece of gizzard grit, this calcified given: “My cultural hegemony may be pretty well played out [or on the verge of succumbing to barbarism], but at least I'm not Southern.”

Anyway, I like flagrant. As we used to say in the army, with regard to the First Infantry Division, vaunting itself as “the Big Red One”: if you're going to be one, you might as well be a big red one. I am an émigré from a region that tried, a century and a half ago, to emigrate from the United States en masse. It may be that you can't love America (or Cuba, say, or Nature or the Promised Land) flagrantly until you and it have split.

Then, too, part of being an American is feeling like the child of a broken home. There is always some kind of schism going on, with an overlap that is rich and strange. For instance, you'd think hog wild and bird-watching would have nothing in common, but the ivory-billed woodpecker was sighted in a state that roots for the Razorbacks.

I root for the overlap. I keep trying to tell people in the Northeast that you can't be part of the solution until you accept that you're part of the problem. Thinking right is not enough. Different people hold different truths to be self-evident.

Speaking of evidence, right after 9/11, when citizens were asking what they could do to help, President Bush came up with this response:

“People need to be logical. If you find a person that you've never seen before getting into a crop duster that doesn't belong to you, report it.”

Hello, FBI? I was driving down Route 183 here and saw somebody I never saw in my life. I've seen a lot of people in my time, but not this one. And sure enough he was getting into a crop-duster plane—and it wasn't mine!

The difference between the president and the would-be glossolalia mediator is that the latter's suggestions just might work. Between the president and the North Carolina flag man, it's the difference between someone who has got where he is by not quite knowing what he means, and someone who has such a tight grip on what he means that it squooshes out in more than one direction.

I prefer the latter effect. It achieves a certain emotional balance. Me, I hover between Southern and Northern. Maybe I have a yen to prolong the transition, like the old boy who bought his wife five yards of material for her to make a new nightgown.

“This is going to make an awful long nightgown,” said the storekeeper.

“Yep,” said the old boy.

“I mean,” said the storekeeper, “real long.”

“Well,” the old boy confided, “I just so enjoy pulling it up.”

At any rate, I have sought to turn my regional ambivalence into a philosophical position (or dance). Trying to get Aunt Dixie and Uncle Sam on speaking terms.

When I was in high school, back in Decatur, Georgia, in the fifties, a select group of the girls would take a field trip every year to New York City. And the issue arose: If a boy tried to talk to a girl in that foreign city whose standards of decency were heaven knew how warped and minimal, how could a girl decide whether she should talk to him? How, in short, could she tell that he was nice?

This field trip was always chaperoned by the teacher of home economics. She was demure, elderly (as she seemed to me then), diminutive: a little old lady. Mrs. Clive Folger. And the rule for the girls was, when you meet a boy, tell him you want him to meet Miz Folger.

If he doesn't want to meet Miz Folger, he is not a nice boy.

One day my girlfriend told me, casually, about this rule. And …I don't want to overdramatize this—let's just say my blood ran cold. Because I was young, full of beans, and planning to become a rather worldly writer. And yet …the rule rang true.

It would have been different, had Mrs. Folger been like you may be thinking she was. No. She wasn't. Mrs. Folger looked at you straight. And she had a twinkle in her eye. She was, in fact, in a duly insulated sort of way, a live wire. I liked Mrs. Folger. I respected Mrs. Folger's opinion.

William Faulkner, on the other hand, once said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

A little old lady once asked Faulkner, “Mr. Faulkner, I understand that authors always write themselves into their books. In Sanctuary, which character are you?”

“Madam,” said Faulkner, “I was the corncob.”

He wouldn't have said that to Mrs. Folger. Then, too, she wouldn't have asked such a question. Mrs. Folger was a little old lady with sense.

Faulkner, when his daughter begged him to sober up so he could attend her graduation, responded to her as follows: “Nobody remembers Shakespeare's child.”

Faulkner never knew Miz Folger, so he felt entitled not to be nice. He stayed home, and created Yoknapatawpha County, where hell broke loose in all directions. I had to find a milieu in which I could be nice and think at the same time.

My tenth-grade teacher, a remarkable young lady named Ann Lewis, lent me a stack of New Yorker magazines. It was a revelation. As far as I could tell, there had never been a damn Civil “War in there. Or a Crucifixion. Nobody even seemed to go to church. People drank a lot and made cutting remarks, but they were civilized, funny, even high-minded in a cerebral sort of way. My teetotal, faith-based mother wouldn't have liked them, but you could imagine them passing muster with Miz Folger.

In those old New Yorkers I smelled a secular heaven. Well, no, there was scant emphasis on smells, except when Joseph Mitchell, a Southerner, was writing about the fish market, so let's say I glimpsed it. First chance I got, I went off up to New York. In 1968 I became a resident. Fatherhood, divorce, joint custody, and going freelance brought me further north to semirural Massachusetts, which looks a lot like north Georgia, and I like it (except in February and March), but I'll never entirely settle in.

Here's what happened when I moved to New York. I hadn't unpacked my bag before people started telling me, “You're not from around here.” Didn't I know that? “I see you haven't lost the accent,” they would say severely, as if I were willfully convicting myself of narrow-mindedness with every syllable I uttered.

That was awkward but interesting. As a white Southerner, I had come to terms, on my own recognizance, with being a heartily recovering Mr. Charlie. It kind of tickled me, as we say back home, to suddenly be an object of prejudice. Since I couldn't see that it would keep me from doing anything I really wanted to do, it even gave me a kind of edge. Years ago at a New York cocktail party, I was chatting with George “Jerry” Goodman, who wrote and spoke trenchantly about money matters under the name of Adam Smith. Nice guy. Evidently I said something that struck him as halfway cogent (so it couldn't have been about money), because he gave me a sincerely startled look and said, “You're not so dumb.” I have to admit, I was surprised. Not so much by his surprise, as by how unselfconsciously he expressed it. He seemed to have been caught more off-guard than I was, so I was able to think to myself, “You're not so broad-minded.”

It wasn't a matter of getting the last laugh. I think, in fact, both of us found the exchange amusing, in one way or another, but neither of us laughed. One reason it doesn't take much to get me back down South is that Southerners enjoy laughing more. Sometimes we will get to whooping when we laugh. We will build on each other's hilarity back and forth. On my way to a writer's conference in Oxford, Mississippi, not long ago, I stopped off south of Memphis to eat some fried things for lunch. Those fried things were good, and so were the simmered-with-a-little-fatback things, and the cornbread was crunchy and savory, not sweet. But the best thing was the noise coming from the next table. Eight people, about equally male and female and black and white, were laughing together so hard I thought they were going to fall out on the floor.

“I told him, ‘Well get down off the windshield, at least, 'cause I can't see to drive,’ ” one of them said, and the whole group got so uproarious they were crying.

Southerners vote crazy too. Conservatism, it is called.

By the way, if I do sound dumb, it's not on purpose. Alice Furlaud wrote in The Atlantic early in the George W. Bush administration that if Bush wanted to be well received on visits to England, he should “exaggerate his Texas-cowboy civility and talk like a character out of Hee Haw. (I admit that I act like Mammy Yokum, from Dogpatch, when in England, and it always goes down well.)”

To me, that is going down too easy. Or seeming to. If it weren't so disingenuous, we might call it the Stockdale syndrome—the invincible affability of the character Will Stockdale, an army draftee from backwoods Georgia in the fifties novel and movie, No Time For Sergeants. Andy Griffith played him in the movie, but Will is younger and goofier than Sheriff Andy in Mayberry. An army psychiatrist says to Will, “I don't think I would ever want to live in your rotten state. How about that?”

Stockdale replies, “Well, I guess you know where you want to live. Besides that, things is getting right crowded around home anyhow. Some folks moved in not long ago about two miles down the road from us and land ain't cheap as it once was. So it really don't make no difference to me whether you live there or not, not that we wouldn't be mighty glad to have you.” When the psychiatrist can't understand why he won't rise in defense of Georgia, Will says, “I don't live all over it, I just live in this one little place in it.”

That is Will's way, and it drives the psychiatrist nuts. When Will's only buddy demands to know why he doesn't get mad at the Northern GIs who rag on him nastily, Will says, “They don't mean nothin’ by it,” which is a nice piece of de-signifying.

But I went to college, and a little graduate school. I studied the arts and sciences, which are what I believe in today, every damn one of them. Even, say, dance, which I don't know or care anything about—I believe in it anyway. Physics, who knows what's going on there, but I figure those who do are keeping each other honest. There may even be people who can be helpful with regard to string theory in something like the same way that Baptist man may be as regards glossolalia. Different fundamentalisms for different folks. Let go and let science.

The Enlightenment is essentially what I left home looking for, and I found it. I'm pro-choice, happy for people of the same sex to get married (as P. J. O'Rourke once pointed out, it's not gay marriage that should be outlawed, it's first marriages), and against the teaching of creationism and the waging of preemptive war. But I can see how people might be opposed to the preempting of possible little babies, how people might be unable to feature two hairy men walking down the aisle, how people might feel better believing that God made us, and how people will be damned if they'll admit that so many of their young folks have died in a bad cause.

I spent a little over a third of my life, including the presumably most formative years, living in the South. Mathematically, that makes me just about exactly as Southern as the American people, 34 percent of whom are residents of the South. Both sides of my family have been Southern for generations, I sound Southern, and when my local paper in Massachusetts announces a festival to “celebrate the spirit of differently-abled dogs,” I react as a Southerner:

I believe I care as much about dogs’ feelings as anybody. I can't imagine that a dog with three legs minds being called, with all due respect, a three-legged dog.

And a one-legged dog would be too well grounded to rally behind either George Bush of Texas or John Kerry of Massachusetts. I voted for the latter all right, but the only people who derived any juice out of his candidacy were his wife and the Bush campaign, both of whom got off on his rigidity. And yet the Democratic Party still has its head up the Northeast. Which looks toward Europe.[*] In the circles I find myself in, people say things like, “Every European country has a national ID card, why can't we?” How can you realize that you're part of imperialism if you've never entirely gotten over being a colony?

The South is so not Europe. You get down South, you know you're not in old Vienna. These days, however, you may doubt that you are anywhere in particular. I just wish the South would let me decide what it should change and what it shouldn't. Without my guidance, country music and country comedians have gone smarmy and unfibrous. A Southern magazine is telling people that y'all is singular. A man at the University of Georgia has produced reconstituted chicken meat—all white, because that is supposedly what the market calls for today. Even when contemporary chicken retains some resemblance to the animal, it's as globby-breasted as a porn star. My mother said no chicken should weigh more than three pounds, so that none of the pieces is too thick— when you flour them lightly and fry them through, they come out crisp and chewy, browned down toward the bone. Her fried chicken had integrity. You could imagine it strutting around.

The South traditionally is a bodily place. Hold on to that, I would urge; just connect a little more directly to the head. I would not redesign the South along strictly Enlightenment lines. I believe in the Enlightenment. I just don't believe it covers everything. I don't even believe it would cover everything if everybody believed in it. And not everybody does. May I repeat: Different people hold different truths to be self-evident. I think blue-state people have trouble getting that through their heads. They want to think that Reason is universal (in politics— everyone knows it's not in personal relations). Red-state people don't care—God and/or Mammon has freed them from having to think about what they think.

These two casts of mind are not as radically different as they, respectively, think they are. You can't believe in reason without a leap of faith, and all the blind faith in the world won't help if you haven't got good sense. Let us consider the matter of national security: Redpeople want to take for granted that America is right; bluepeople, that America is strong. Deep down, everybody knows this: that there's no use being right if you aren't strong and nothing to be said for being strong if you aren't right. Redfolk and bluefolk overlap.

Did you ever see the 1938 movie Jezebel, set in antebellum Louisiana? Henry Fonda plays Preston (Pres) Dillard, a young New Orleans banker who breaks off his engagement with Julie Marsden, played by Bette Davis, when she defies convention and his better judgment by insisting on attending the Olympus Ball in a bright red dress. Okay, Pres can't talk her out of it, so he takes her to the dance and even makes her take an extended spin around the dance floor with him as everybody else clears out. Her reputation is ruined.

Pres goes off up north for a period, on business. When he returns, Julie in her magnetic way kneels in a white dress to beg his forgiveness. But it's too late. He has returned with a “little Yankee wife.”

“You can't get away from us, Pres,” Julie pleads. “We're in your blood. This is the country you were born to, the country you know and trust. Oh, it isn't tame, and isn't like the North. It's quick and dangerous, but you trust it. Remember how the fever mist smells in the bottoms, rank and rotten, but you trust that, too, because it's part of you. Just as I am part of you and will never let you go.”

Pres rebuffs her. Julie's willful heart is broken. She tries to start trouble between Pres and Buck Cantrell, a traditional drinking-and-gambling cavalier played by George Brent. Buck, no fool, suspects her motives, but Preston's kid brother Ted—who idolizes Buck—concludes that his family's honor has been impugned. There's a duel. Buck fires into the air. Ted kills Buck. Ted has enough sense to realize what Julie has done, and he hates her for it.

In the end, Julie selflessly redeems herself, as we knew she would. It's a good movie on the thwarted-romance level (Bette Davis got an Oscar), and, of course, we shake our heads over the dumb-ass codes and proscriptions of that old society. But what raises a broader issue, still critical today, is an exchange between Pres and Buck about politics.

Pres is rational. A banker. If it had been up to people like him, there would have been no Civil “War.[*] And, hey, Pres is Henry Fonda, so you identify with him. But Pres is stiff-necked and loose-rooted. A mensch—if I may use a less loaded term than, say, “good old boy”— wouldn't give Julie the rope to hang herself. When she tries to get Buck to escort her, he quickly refuses. Seeing her in that red dress, he tells her, “kinda gives me the all-overs”—a combination of the hots and the willies. He knows that she's trying to make Pres jealous, and he also knows that she's courting disaster. He knows what he knows, where he lives. In context, Pres is a liberal (more specifically, a Whig), Buck a conservative.

Okay, so the two of them get to arguing about the prospective War Between the States. Buck's thinking is, bring it on. Pres says the South would be foolish to go up against Northern industrial might. That sounds treasonous to Buck.

Pres invokes, without attribution, Voltaire:

“Buck, I disagree with everything you're saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”

That throws Buck for a loop.

“Pres,” he says, “that don't make good sense.”

Am I the only American to whom it seems that both of these men have a point?

These days, Buck's position dominates. The Enlightenment is a far cry from cutting edge. Brain-wave monitoring has established to psychologists’ satisfaction that everybody's politics, blue or red, is based on faith, not objectivity. People need something to root for, and whatever it is, it generally arises from their roots, not from analytical policy wonkery. As the old boy said when asked if he believed in infant baptism (this will come up again in this book), “Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it done.”

Red-staters hold their truth up high and wave it at everybody else. They're freed up to root. Blue-staters get huffy and point to logical inconsistencies. Deliver us, please, from an Age of Zeal, which obtains already in the Middle East and has suited the Bush administration's bloody mission. Deliver us, too, from an Age of Dither.

Me, I would advocate an Age of Allowances and Edging Ahead. An Age of Pushing the Envelope of Perceived Good Sense. That doesn't mean crossing science with religion—you've got to draw the line somewhere, and science has its hands full coming to terms with business. It does mean taking on board that there are a lot of practical-minded Americans who find that going to church regularly fits right in with their personal and business concerns. They aren't so dumb. And they have the right to vote.

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” said Kant, “no straight thing can ever be made.” In the Northeastern circles I generally find myself in, people find that objectionable. Back home, they find it obvious. To me, it's both. What is a golf shot or a field goal kick or a wedding vow, and what was, say, the Emancipation Proclamation, but a straight lick hit with a crooked stick? Maybe there's a religious paradox in there, along the lines of what the pregnant young wife in the movie Junebug says to her husband, who is terrified of growing up: “God loves you just the way you are but too much to let you stay that way.”

After Mark Twain turned his back on the South, he had a little flutter with the party of Lincoln, but then he became a Mugwump, rising above party loyalty. High-minded or market savvy? I am a hard-shell relativist Democrat.[*] And it has not escaped my attention that everybody elected president in the last forty-five years has either come from the South (which is okay with me but which I would just as soon not have to keep justifying) or condescended to it (which pisses me off).

The moment I knew Michael Dukakis would not be elected president in 1988 was when Bernard Shaw asked him, on television, what his reaction would be—given his opposition to capital punishment—if somebody had raped and murdered his wife. That was what I would call an obscene hypothetical. What Dukakis might justifiably have replied was, “Bernie …Your mama!”

At any rate, he should have taken personal offense. Then he should have pointed out that it's not up to the victim's husband to judge the perpetrator. That's why we have laws and courts. Having said that, then he could have explained the injustice and ineffectiveness of capital punishment. What Dukakis did, instead, was swallow hard (actually, not even all that hard) and reply abstractly. I swallowed hard and voted for him abstractly.

In 2004, I liked John Edwards of North Carolina, not because he was Southern but because he had been Southern and could move on from there,[†] whereas Kerry was Northeastern and had to keep hedging it. After hearing Edwards lay down a good line of talk to a small gathering in New York, I asked him how he would have answered that question, the one about, excuse me, rape and murder of wife.

“Yeah,” said a woman behind me. “I'd like to hear what he says to that.”

“I'd've said it didn't matter what I thought about capital punishment, I'd've killed him myself,” said Edwards.

The woman behind me seemed pleased. She turned out to be Mrs. Edwards.

Edwards had a distinct, maybe simplistic (so that's out of order now?), well-taken theme: that we should start favoring work over wealth instead of vice versa. He might not have won—people point out that he wouldn't even have carried his home state. But Kerry didn't carry North Carolina either. Edwards would have carried Kerry's home state, and maybe some others Kerry didn't—Ohio, for instance. As the Republican convention was celebrating their official nomination of the incumbent Bush, the network I was watching cut to an Edwards-Kerry rally in Ohio. Edwards had worked the crowd up to a palpable heat. Then he introduced Kerry. Who began his remarks by alluding to a local sports team and then saying how pleased he was, for his part, that his Red Sox were only a game and a half out of first place.

In Ohio. Kerry was happy for the Red Sox. Because they were running second. From there he droned on for a while, and the crowd unrallied. Kerry was the Democratic Thomas Dewey, the tall man on the wedding cake. Howard Dean had oomph, and he had a point when he advocated reaching out to the real interests of working-class whites (which are the interests of black workers as well), but he stated it badly—invoking the Confederate flag, which is sort of like a dude from the East dancing with the sheriff's sheep: you'd better really love her, and be prepared to face the sheriff, and hope word of it doesn't get back home.

The timber I grew up among was knotty, all right. People shrugged their shoulders at manifest racial injustice while fetishizing spotless-ness. Pressed and shamed, they yielded on civil rights. And the realization settled in that the local timber was, after all, like real chicken, a mixture of dark and light. But you know what made that movement go? Brave local black (and a few white) Christians, outside idealists, dumb-ass local opponents, national media relativists, and, belatedly, federal force. Strange bedfellows.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim see a house being swept downriver by floodwaters, so they paddle out to it and climb in through a window. The house is disorderly (there's a dead man in one room, for one thing), but, as has been said of many a disorderly book, there's a lot of good stuff in it. “We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher knife without any handle…, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bed quilt off the bed…, and a hatchet and some nails, and a fishline as thick as my little finger…, and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg. The straps was broke off of it, but barring that, it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn't find the other one, though we hunted all around.”

“The South,” to me, is like that leg. It's an artificial construct, and yet it strikes a chord. Most people don't really need it, it doesn't quite suit either black person or white, and yet anybody with sense would be loath to throw it away. I keep thinking—although in one sense this makes no sense—that it's part of a set.

This is not a book about the South. Nothing, except a book about the North, could be more boring. It's about the set. Half of the contents derive from the “Gone Off Up North” columns I have been writing for fourteen years in The Oxford American, the “Southern Magazine of Good Writing” edited by the redoubtable Marc Smirnoff. Most of the rest consists of considerably revised and expanded articles that have appeared in several other estimable publications: The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times (its book review, its magazine, and its op-ed page), Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post Book World, American Heritage, Life, Southern Living, The Southern Review, the Vanderbilt alumni magazine, Men's Journal, Best Life, Spy, Parade, the Web site Salon, Atlanta magazine (in which I wrote regularly under the rubric “The Blount Edge” for a few months, until Atlanta got the willies—“sounds like the Unibomber,” I was told—over the column that has evolved into the last chapter of this book) and Travel and Leisure Golf. How's that for strange bedfellows?

For lagniappe, I tossed in some things that have never appeared in print. This introduction includes remarks I delivered as the emcee of a PEN-Faulkner fund-raising event at the Folger Shakespeare Library (which made me think of Faulkner, Shakespeare and Miz Folger) in Washington. I worked on pulling this collection together during a balmy month at the Rockefeller Foundation retreat at Bellagio (see “Babel to Byzantium”). I was hoping to write this introduction there, so I could have a cool Continental note at the bottom:

—Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy, Europe, 2003

But then I visited Milan on Liberation Day, the annual celebration of Italy's being freed from dictatorship by American troops. People were selling T-shirts that showed Bush and Mussolini side by side, doing the Fascist salute. I still had a long way to go.

My title comes from the great Roger Miller song “I've Been a Long Time Leaving (But I'll Be a Long Time Gone)” (the one in which he's hitchhiking out of town and the trucks go by and make the legs of his Levi's go whup-whup-whup-whup). I met Roger, not long before he died, when we both appeared on my old friend Garrison Keillor's admirably reconstructive public radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which brings together ice fishing, the Grand Ole Opry, klezmer, gospel, the blues, Norwegian bachelor farmers, liberalism, and common sense. Roger went around backstage saying, “I need to get a second wind. I broke the first one;” “My father had the Midas touch. Everything he touched turned to mufflers;” “If I had my whole life to live over, I wouldn't have time.”

I don't know that the Enlightenment manifests itself in European politics. It does on European highways. In the passing lane, you go as fast as you want to, and if somebody comes up behind you going faster, you move over to the other lane. It's a simple principle, and people follow it. In America, some drivers believe in going exactly at the speed limit in the fast lane and not giving over for anybody, and others are most comfortable hovering right behind somebody else or even in his blind spot. Still others live to swerve from lane to lane.

So slavery, de jure, would have lasted longer. But that war was a bloodbath—neither glorious, as the South would have it, nor a solution to slavery, as the North would. When Donald Rumsfeld draws upon both of those assumptions to justify the killing in Iraq as “worth it,” like the carnage in the Civil War, it makes me, as my mother used to say, want to spit.

Will Rogers said, “I belong to no organized party: I'm a Democrat.” He also said a Republican president's motto was, “Boys, my back is turned.”

†A Southern man—and I specify “man,” I suppose, for no particular reason except that I am one—should by now have learned two perspective-lending things: (1) that otherwise sensible and good-hearted people can—in the eyes of history and, okay, in the eyes of pretty much everybody but themselves—be wrong (but not ineradicably wrong), because of the circumstances in which they grew up; and (2) that the most outrageous thing you can say to a person with whom you are intimate is “be reasonable.”

Why I'm Not an Outsider Artist

When it comes to ideal jobs, I fall between two pedestals: too little education to be a Supreme Court justice (not that this crowd would get behind another Long Dong Silver fan anyway), too much to be a folk artist.

I can almost see the visionary mural I'd paint: “Some Day the Lord God Almighty Will Take Notice of Some of These Things Going On and Say ‘WHAT? WHAT!!??’ and Then, Look Out! And Don't Look at Me, Then, 'Cause I'm Telling You Now.”

Title too wordy? Not for this painting: stark, big-brushy strokes, liberal in sentiment. Make the forces of darkness jump for a change. I'd toss Karl Rove in there, being rolled in crushed cornflakes preparatory to baking.

I never get going on it, though. One thing is, I can't paint. I just get it all over myself. It's like trying to work with Saran Wrap: I can never get the wrap around anything before it starts to self-adhere at various points, and soon, as if by magic, it is all wadded up unto itself. So go with that? Create a whole new medium? No, it wouldn't be right.

“That biggest glob there is interesting,” people would say. “It's a reductio ad absurdum of the role of packaging in the world today, isn't it? Is there …a decomposing body in there?”

And I'd have to say, “Aw, naw, I can't lie to you. I was just trying to wrap up a damn peach.”

It's hard to be an artist when you can't keep a secret. But my main shortcoming—here I go again—is that I'm not spiritual enough. We hear spirituality bandied about so loosely today. “My journey from eBay addict to luggage consultant has been an almost spiritual experience.” Almost? It's enough to make me think of spirituality as the feeling we get when something makes us really start to think, and then we stop. I may stop, too, but I won't feel good about it. Call this excessive spiritual humility—spiritual prudery, even—if you will, but when I feel revelations coming on, I tend to flinch and shake them off. No one would say of me, alas, what Peter Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker, has said of El Greco:

His art affirms spirituality—the awareness that glimmers at the headspring of consciousness, prior to thought and feeling—as the primary fact of life, always on tap.

I hear that. I keep trying to tell people up here in Massachusetts, we ain't ever going to reclaim the nation's imagination, assuming we ever had it, as long as we keep thinking that thinking will make it so. Even intellectuals should have learned by now, post-postmodernism, that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs. In the South—this is the region's key cultural distinction, for good and ill—nobody ever thought it was.

Civilized people have got to dig on down past the head to that headspring. And I keep thinking I should be able to get to that place myself— because I believe I know what got El Greco there. Astigmatism, some say. I'd say stigma. As I will explain by way of a parable:

Grasshopper goes into a bar.

Bartender says, “We don't get many like you in here.”

Grasshopper: “No?”

“No,” says the bartender. “But we do have a drink named after you.”

“Huh? I don't get it,” the grasshopper says. “Why would anybody call a drink ‘Steve’?”

It doesn't have to be a grasshopper. (If he goes into a grasshopper bar, of course, this doesn't happen. In that case, the dubious milky green drink known as a grasshopper might be called a Bloody Mary.) It could be a lawyer or an Arab American or a guy with a duck on his head.

You've been there, I dare say, in some category. You're walking along feeling more or less like yourself, and bang, you're reminded that other people have got you pigeonholed. For me, living as I do in the North, it's Southerner goes into a bar. For El Greco, living in Spain, it was Greek goes into a bar. Or, spiritual equivalent for that time and place, into a confessional booth. “Father—” says El Greco, and immediately the priest gets this clever tone in his voice and says, “So where in Greece are you from?” He's picked up on the accent, see. Can't get anything past him. “Crete, actually…,” says E.G. “Gimme thirty Hail Marys,” says the priest.

El Greco is not Spanish—as if that would make him a model of due process. So immediately, in Spain, he's seen as this wild and crazy Zorba guy. What is El Greco going to fall back on, logical argument? No, he just mumbles through the penance and then goes home and paints something as rich as three feet up a bear's ass, spiritual equivalent thereof. A swirl of local divines, looking like so many Raymond Masseys elongated and with a twist, reaching up after something in that Rottweiler-colored sky that is going to wrench 'em and wrench 'em till they dislocate every bone.

Outsider art. I could get into that, if I could find the right métier. I did once construct a free-form pile of firewood that caused more than one passerby to say, “Nice sculpture,” but “No, no,” I always said, “it's a woodpile.” And sure enough, bit by bit, I burned it. As art it was folkie, not folk. Like Janis Ian trying to sing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe song. It didn't cry out anything.

Once I visited the noted Georgia outsider artist Nellie Mae Rowe, now deceased. The works she left behind include busts fashioned out of chewed gum and, most impressively, Pig on Expressway, in crayon. I like the idea of getting a second, and higher, use out of Chiclets, but to tell you the truth those little heads looked kind of nasty. I've never lived with anybody who wouldn't have thrown those out. But that is a glorious pig. Where's your I-85 when you plop a multicolor, fully imagined pig down on it? It's the concrete that's out of place.

I have done a few things myself in felt-tip, on Styrofoam coffee cups. It's an unforgiving medium, but with practice you can get a firm, if slightly scraggly, intaglio groove going. Over the years, sitting around journalistically waiting for something to happen, I have achieved some striking abstracts and also faces. (When I was a boy, my grandfather showed me how to draw a whole head, in three-quarter or maybe seven-eighths profile—both eyes, one ear—with one continuous line.) Then I threw them away. You feel silly carrying around a used Styrofoam cup. And what was I trying to capture in it anyway?

Somebody took Nellie Mae Rowe up to a New York art museum, she told me, and the one thing that stuck in her mind was “the biggest picture of Jesus I ever saw.” I leave that to the Middle Ages. What in heaven's name kind of satisfaction did those people get out of those grisly Crucifixion scenes you see in the museums of Europe? There's often a dog present in them, I've noticed. Not in the museums, in the paintings. Giving the people a disgusted look. That art makes me want to say “Jesus!” all right but not in a spiritual way.

So—I'll be a secular humanist folk artist? Maybe when the TV preach-ers finally take over the culture as a whole, there will be a call for that. I'll fill my house and porch and yard with freehand quotations from Darwin and signs of the square root. Maybe if I took a deep big breath I could draw a picture of Jesus reading a copy of The Progressive, with an expression on his face like “Hmmm.”

But I never know what expression a face I'm drawing is going to have until it's finished. And I don't want the TV preachers to take over. That would be like wishing for another Depression (something educated people up here, in my presence but not to my toleration, have been known to do) so a certain kind of hat would come back.

Maybe I could be a folk art critic. I don't mean a critic of folk art, I mean a folk critic of art. I could have a blog—folk blogger isn't a stretch. The Internet bristles with folk criticism of movies and books. Here's a comment I copied down from somewhere on imdb.com: “Not having been born yet, I can only suppose that this film turned heads on their ears upon its release.”

I can't bring myself to violate canons of English usage enough to be as inspired as all that, but when some art caught my fancy I could post a reproduction of it and write: “Now this is what I call a picture. Pretty, too, pretty as a picture. This picture here would be the picture to put next to the definition of picture in the dictionary.” Then, too, I could be real picky, a gadfly, have a regular feature called “You Missed a Spot.” Or I could be a folk gallerist. Organize a show entitled “Off-Hand: Right-Handed Artists Painting with Their Left Hands and Vice Versa.” Or call up a lot of nonrepresentational artists and get them to paint pictures of the House of Representatives. But as soon as I say something like that, I know I probably won't get around to doing it. Not up here where I live, anyway. It would just give people another chance to think, “Ah, yes. El Necko.”

The Right Shade of Blue?

As a pre-baby boom liberal Southern Democrat residing in semirural Massachusetts, what am I? A quidnunc, a curio, representative of no time or place and possibly concocted by a hoaxing taxidermist? Or can I have been preserved, cryogenically, for some purpose? Will I thaw out, any moment now, and step forward as the one who finally figured out how to halt the spread of immoderate Republicanism before it devoured all other forms of life?

No, I can't take all that much credit. The antireality-based folks were hoisted by their own petards. I will say, however, that the 2006 elections were a ringing endorsement of a column I wrote in 2005, when most of the country still thought Dick Cheney knew what he was doing.

The blue-staters I know seem to feel that they can swing the political pendulum back by means of logical analysis. Big “family-values” states turn out to be big watchers of Desperate Housewives? Aha! A “disconnect”! Now watch the whole red house of cards collapse!

I don't see it that way. For one thing, Republican strategists make duct tape out of disconnects. For another thing, the one time I watched Desperate Housewives, I thought maybe Karl Rove was behind it. Why wouldn't red-staters want to watch residents of California act trashy and be miserable?

Another tack I run into a lot up here is people priding themselves on their utter inability to fathom how anyone can possibly support those barbarians. This from people who stress the importance of being open to other cultures. Me, I'm from Georgia. I'm not too fine to wrap my mind around the Bushy Juggernaut. But can I wrestle it down?

Maybe the best way would be to egg it on. Anything can be run into the ground, even extremism. Republican legal minds have covered up the semitopless Spirit of Justice lady at the Department of Justice and have fought to preserve courthouse monuments to the Ten Commandments. I bet there are representations of underdressed women—or, anyway, blindfolded ones—all through the justice system, nationwide. Maybe I could start a campaign to replace those floozies with tasteful graven religious images in every court in the land. Far be it from anybody, in this climate, to speak out against that on the merits. But it's going to be expensive. Might even require some rendering unto Caesar.

But no. Republicans would say, hey, this statue swap doesn't have to cost tax money, why not let churches take over the legal system—or, hey, why not privatize it? Worshippers and corporations might find it advantageous to underwrite the courts.

Anyway, how could I, a non-Republican, float such a proposal? Well, if Republican officials can create fraudulent journalists—actors introducing quasi-TV-news segments and oddballs asking kissing-up questions at White House press conferences—why can't journalists create fraudulent Republican officials? Actors playing undersecretaries of whatever could pop up here and there around the country floating proposals that push the envelope just a wee bit too far.

Of course, Republicans paved the way for creating fraudulent journal-ists by playing up the notion that “fraudulent journalist” is redundant. Creating fraudulent Republicans would be trickier. Since modern-day Republican governments are opposed to government, trying to create a fake official of such a government might leave a straightforward person such as myself more confused than surreptitious.

Maybe I could connive more honestly as a member of what we might call the postmature community. The Bush people want to semiprivatize Social Security, at a “transitional” expense to the taxpayers of however-many-trillion dollars? Well, a lot of people, including many in the Congress, are already drawing Social Security or about to start. If these proposed private accounts are going to be so great for future generations, how about some compensation for present generations? Or past generations—my mama would have loved to have had the government put her on to some hot stocks so she could have built up a nest egg she could have passed on to me. Say there are fifty million people in the sixty-three-and-older population. For one more trillion, we could toss us each twenty thousand dollars. And where would we get that money? Out of whichever pot those other trillions are supposed to come from.

What I am saying is, surely those who urge the country further and further toward tax-free, Deuteronomy-based world dominion can, in some way, be put on the defensive.

I would prefer, of course, a more constructive approach. I spoke recently with a man who was instrumental in creating the Republican Party in the South, pretty much from scratch (and abiding bad blood, of course) and high spirits. He was downright wistful. “It used to be a lot more fun,” he said, “before we got all these legislators.” I can't help suspecting that some Republicans are beginning to feel like teenagers acting wilder and wilder to keep up with bad-influence peers. They might appreciate it if the Democrats pushed back more effectively. What the country needs is a hardier strain of Democrats. The question is, more hybrid or more pure?

People say the GOP got where it is today by going pure, starting with Barry Goldwater in 1964. But it went on from there to elect Nixon, and I don't remember anything too pure about him. Reagan? An apparition. Is the incumbent pure? A base of fat cats and Pentecostals seems kind of hodgepodgy to me.

The Democrats, by making Howard Dean head of the Democratic National Committee, may be tending toward pure. But my Northern liberal friends give me the impression that pure, to them, means finding it unnatural not to have a president who is a Northern liberal. Even though we never have had one yet, at least since FDR. John Kennedy appealed to Northern liberals—and I'd take him back now, because just as Bill Clinton evidently gathered from Kennedy that adultery in the White House is a presidential perk, Kennedy, if he were still around, would surely have gathered from Clinton that it's not. But as to policies, Kennedy was no Dennis Kucinich. I like Northern liberals, but believing that one should be nominated for president is like believing Harvard should play in the Orange Bowl.

Kennedy was elected by a highly impure coalition of Northern liberals, Catholics, African Americans, labor, and the Solid South. What Democrats need now is some strange bedfellows. But we can't say so, because Republicans would make that sound kinky. Being liberal used to be sexy, in a favorable sense, but a big voting element today, overlapping all walks of life, is parents scared of what their kids might be getting into. And the Democrats still haven't lived down Monica and Madonna. That's probably why blue states watch Desperate Housewives: it's a cold shower.

Howard Dean is a doctor, so presumably clean. And liberals trust his bona fides, so maybe he can go into red states like Nixon into China. It was Dean, of course, who spoke of reaching out to “guys with Confederate flags on their trucks.” He had a point there, but he didn't know how to put it. He needs some diversity training. He needs to watch King of the Hill.

Whereas Desperate Housewives is real actors playing cartoon characters, King of the Hill is cartoon characters acting like real people: real Texans, in fact, who have hangups, who don't communicate well, and who do look after one another. And, yes, Hank cares about propane, because it's his living, but he's not imperialistic about it. I don't see why Hank and Peggy Hill, and maybe old Dale Gribble, can't be Democrats. Boomhauer, I don't know. But I say to Howard Dean: Before you start reaching out, picture yourself as a visiting character on King of the Hill, and ask yourself how you would go over. I'm not saying be fraudulent or desperate. I'm just saying—well, here's something Chet Atkins used to say to people of the North: “I'm not talking too slow, you're listening too fast.”

First, Tell Me What Kind of Reader You Are

When people of the Northeast ask what I do, I long for one of those professions that would certify me to respond as follows:

“Before I answer that question, I am ethically obliged to inform you that as soon as I do answer, our conversation will be billable at $200 per hour or portion thereof—and the answering of the question itself shall constitute such a portion, as will what I am telling you now, retroactively.”

That would dispense with a lot of the idle conversation in which I find myself bogged down in the Northeast.

“What do you do?” people ask.

I say, “I'm a writer.”

And people of the Northeast don't respond the way you'd think people would. They don't say, “I knew a writer once. He could never sit still in a boat,” or “Yeah, that's about all you look like being, too. “What do you do, make it all up, or do the media tell you what to say?” or “Uh-huh, well, I breed ostriches.” I could roll with any one of those responses. One reason there are so many Southern writers is that people of the South either tell a writer things he can use, or they disapprove of him enough to keep his loins girded, or they just nod and shake their heads and leave him to it. But people of the Northeast act like being a writer is normal

“Oh,” they say with a certain gracious almost-twinkle in their eye, “what kind?”

“What am I supposed to say to that? “Living”? “Recovering”? They'll just respond, “Oh, should I have heard of some of your books?” I don't know how to answer that question. And I'm damned if I'm going to stand there and start naming off the titles. That's personal! Can you imagine Flannery O'Connor standing there munching brie on a Ry-Krisp and saying, “Well, there's The Violent Bear It Away….”

People of the Northeast don't seem to think it is all that personal. They seem to think that you can find out about books by having a schmooze with the writer, in the same way they might think you can find out about whiskey by chatting up someone in personnel down at the distillery.

“What I want to do, when somebody asks me what kind of writer I am, is sull up for several long seconds until I am blue in the face and then, from somewhere way farther back and deeper down than the bottom of my throat, I want to vouchsafe this person an utterance such that the closest thing you could compare it to would be the screech of a freshly damned soul shot through with cricket song and intermittently all but drowned out by the crashing of surf. But I was brought up to be polite.

I was also brought up Methodist and went to graduate school, so I can't honestly say what I want to say: “Self-taught annunciatory. I received a vision out of this corner, of this eye, at about 7:45 p.m. on January 11, 1949, and since that moment in earthly time I have been an inspired revelational writer from the crown of my hat to the soles of my shoes. And do you want to know the nature of that vision?

“The nature of that vision was a footprint in the side of an edifice, and the heel of it was cloven and the toes of it was twelve. And how could a footprint be in the side of an edifice, you wonder? Especially since I stood alone at the time, stark naked and daubed with orange clay, in a stand of tulip poplar trees some eleven miles outside of Half Dog, Alabama, way off a great ways from the closest man-made structure in any literal subannunciatory sense. That footprint could be in the side of an edifice for one reason and one reason only: because—”

But then they'd just say, “Oh, a Southern writer. What are grits?”

I don't live in the South anymore. I maintain you can't live in the South and be a deep-dyed Southern writer. If you live in the South you are just writing about folks, so far as as you can tell, and it comes out Southern. For all we know, if you moved West you'd be a Western writer. Whereas, if you live outside the South, you are being a Southern writer either (a) on purpose or (b) because you can't help it. Which comes to the same thing in the end: you are deep dyed.

Whether or not anybody in the South thinks you are a Southern writer is not a problem. Englishmen thought of Alistair Cooke as an American. Americans thought of him as English. So he was in good shape, as I see it: nobody kept track of whether he went to church.

One thing to be said for being in the Northeast and you Southern is that it provokes you to keep an edge on your Southernness. Sometimes I'll bring up obscure examples of anti-Southern prejudice—“You ever think about the fact that in the book, the good witch is the Witch of the South, but when they made the movie they changed her to the Witch of the North?”

Also I make a point of taking no interest whatsoever in what passes in the North for college sports. When I was a boy in Georgia, college sports was Bobby Dodd versus Bear Bryant immemorial. Compared to that, the Harvard-Yale game is a panel discussion. When all the college sports you can follow in the local media are Nehi or Lehigh or whatever against Hofstra or Colgate or somebody, why bother? You know what they call the teams at Williams College? The Ephs. Let me repeat that: the Ephs. Pronounced eefs. Do you think that anybody who is willing to be called an Eph is capable of playing any sport at a level anywhere near root-hog-or-die? Caring about college sports in the Northeast is like caring about French food in South Carolina.

A good thing about being Southern is that it often involves getting to a point where you don't know what to think. People of the Northeast act like they have never been to that point before. Certainly they think they know what to think about Southern things. Whenever people try to prove they are down with Southern culture by professing love for, say, Garth Brooks, I look at them with a certain expression on my face and ask whether they haven't heard of the real cutting-edge genre, Faded Country—songs like “I Guess Fishin’ Is Sufficient, But I'd Like a Little Love” and “I'm So Lonesome I Could Go Out and Ride Around on I-285.” Or if somebody starts telling me how deeply he or she responds to B. B. King, I'll say, “You know they've isolated the blues gene.”

I let that sink in and then I add, “Now. What do we do with that knowledge?”

I bring up awkward racial questions whenever possible. For some years now, drastically bad race relations have been cropping up mostly outside the South, and I want to see some Northern white people sweat. I don't accuse them of being racist, because they know they aren't that kind of person. What I will do is say that anybody who claims to be “colorblind” or not to have “a racist bone” in his or her body is at best pre-racist and has a longer way to go than the rest of us. Back when the O. J. Simpson verdict was a hot topic, I would bring that up. A lot of enlightened-feeling Northern white people, who have never even suspected themselves of what we might call ethnocentric assumptions, are completely unself-conscious about blaming the whole thing on the jury.

The reason O. J. got off, people of the Northeast would feel fine about asserting, is that the jury was (a) too black to have any sympathy for the victims and (b) too dumb to get out of serving on the jury.

My response to (a) was to wonder aloud whether, if we stay humble long enough, Southern white people will ever be qualified to get away with bald-faced color-coded mind reading. My response to (b) was that it sounded to me like the sort of assumption that enabled noncombat-ants to feel cozy about blaming Vietnam on American draftees.

I wouldn't hear a word against the O.J. jury until I heard several thousand words against the L.A. cops and the prosecutors. I would point to all manner of bungling on the part of these professionals, and observe that the DNA doesn't prove anything if the specimens were planted.

“Oh,” people of the Northeast would say, as if they had me now. “Was the investigation-prosecution a conspiracy, or was it incompetent? You can't have it both ways.”

“The hell I can't,” I would counter. “Y'all never heard of an incompetent conspiracy?”

“But O.J. did it!” they would protest.

“Most likely. Chances are, so did some of the people who—as has not been forgotten down where I come from—used to get lynched.”

And whatever else you think about Johnnie Cochran, whether his client was the devil or not, the son of a bitch could preach,! Alive in his words—without needing impeccable high ground. I will presume to put myself in the mind of a given black juror to this extent: I believe if I were such a juror listening to Johnnie Cochran represent a black defendant, I'd be thinking, “Let's remake To Kill a Mockingbird with this brother here as Atticus Finch!”

I don't throw lynching at people of the Northeast lightly, but I do freely say y'all. The language needs a second-person plural, and y'all is manifestly more precise, more mannerly and friendlier than y'uns or you people. When Northerners tell me they have heard Southerners use y'all in the singular, I tell them they lack structural linguistic understanding. And when they ask me to explain grits, I look at them like an Irishman who's been asked to explain potatoes.

All too often in the Northeast, writers themselves seem to regard being a writer as normal. When people ask a Northeastern writer what kind he or she is, instead of expostulating, “What do you mean what kind? Getting by the best I can kind! Trying to make some kind of semi-intelligible sense out of the goddamn cosmos kind! If you're interested, see if you can't find a way to read something I wrote! If I knew it by heart I would recite the scene in Marry and Burn where the fire ants drive the one-legged boy insane (which I'll admit I think almost comes up to what it might have been, but it's not simple enough, there are too many of s in it; I couldn't get enough of s out of it to save my life!); but I don't carry it around in my head—I was trying to get it out of my head; and even if I did, reciting it wouldn't do it justice! You have to read it”—a Northeastern writer will natter away about being poststructuralist or something. And everybody's happy Writers fitting into the social scheme of things—it don't seem right to me.

Grits is normal.

Out-of-Pants Experience

Somebody called me a “niche writer” once, to my face. I was so taken aback I didn't tell him I wished to hell he'd tell me which niche he had in mind, so I could get a good foothold in it. It's true that back in the midsixties, when I was working for The Atlanta Journal, I would sometimes devote my op-ed column to a verse form I made up: the Georgia limerick, whose first line had to end in the name of a Georgia town. For instance:

A fellow from near Villa Rica

Got sica and sica and sica.

The doctor: “His heart.”

His wife, for her part:

“It isn't his tica, it's lica.”

That was a very popular feature, the Georgia limerick. Originally, it had a redeeming social purpose: to establish the right—the local—way to pronounce the Georgia town in question, as in this:

A wife asked her husband, in Winder,

“Are you happy?” The husband said, “Kinder.”

The wife exclaimed, “Oh!

Decide yes or no!” Said the husband, “I'm trinder, I'm trinder”

But the Georgia limerick didn't need that rationale. Many readers sent in their own, some of whose opening couplets, inspired by readily pronounceable towns, I still remember:

A lady who lived close to Mystic

Had only one characteristic.

An overlooked person in Brooklet

Endeavored to learn from a booklet.

There once was a woman of Leaf

Whose husband lacked several teef

There once was a housewife in Cumming

Who wasn't aware she was humming.

Lots of domestic tension in the Georgia limerick, as there was in my life at the time. I figured it was that way in everybody's. Maybe if I had managed to grit my teeth and hang in there, I might have become a miserable local institution. Verse sometimes popped up on the Journal's editorial page under the nom de plume of Georgia Keats. I could have been Georgia Keats. Author of Peach Fuzz (And Other Things You Just Have to Work Your Way through in Life, to Get Down to Where the Goodness Is).

Actually I guess you can usually find a faucet or spigot, indoors or outdoors, where you can rinse the fuzz off of a peach or more precisely, damp down the down. But here's the beauty of having a niche: my second book could have been Real Men Don't Rinse a Peach, which happens to be something I believe. My father wouldn't run water over a peach, he'd bite right into one, fuzz and all, and my mother would shudder, but you could tell she found it dashing. She freely admitted being impressed by another aspect of his audacity: how he would pass up any number of fairly close parking places in the confidence that he would find one right next to where we were going in the car. “I couldn't stand to do that,” my mother would marvel. There was niche-finding for you. When I was writing for the Journal, my father—after decades of frustration in the automobile business (Packard and Edsel)—had at last come into his own, in the Atlanta area. He was a self-denying, warmly appreciated savings-and-loan president pretty much à la Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. I don't recall any pagan namesake son in that movie.

I couldn't keep my column in the light-verse mode, at any rate, because there were people in Atlanta who, despite the city's motto, were not too busy to hate. Managed to find the time somehow. One night I was writing at home in the wee hours, typing away against bigotry, when the phone rang and a woman said in a slow sultry voice that she liked what I had written that day, she wanted to get together with me, why didn't I come over and see her. In that afternoon's paper, I had written something snide about a local man who'd been outed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The woman made a moist mouthy sound. “Mmm, scuse me, I'm eatin’ uh peach, uh good rahp one,” she said, “and you know how that juice'll jes’ git awl ovuh y’ mouth 'n’ lips, 'n’…”

My then wife, who had gone off me, pretty much for good (maybe because I put too much of myself into Georgia limericks), was asleep, and I was tempted. But, for one thing, I had not been brought up to depart from the straight and narrow anywhere near that abruptly, alas, and for another thing, it sounded like a setup to me. I often wonder, though. Maybe I should have gone out and met that woman, maybe she wasn't—come to think about it, she probably wasn't—a Klan seductress, maybe she would have rocked me till my back didn't have no bones just purely in appreciation of how much of myself I put into my column. And she and I would've moved to Mystic or Leaf, and I'd have made a bundle writing shamelessly inspirational lurid novels while she bustled around the house—all sweaty in just her slip—eating those peaches of hers. Or, say she was an operative for the dark side. Maybe that's where I missed the story of my life. I know I'm feeling around for it at the moment. The poet John Keats, England Keats, wrote:

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean d my teeming brain…

If Keats had lived to be my age, I guarantee he would have gotten over those particular fears. I have managed, somehow, to live four years longer than my father did, and I'm not saying I'm all gleaned out, but sometimes I feel like a pig snuffling around in the seams and corners of…

No, here's how I feel: like a turkey buzzard trying to make a meal of a squashed possum on the interstate. Slim pickings to begin with, but what's worse is all the interruptions. About the time I get my teeth into something, something happens to throw me off.

I woke up the other morning at 4:30 and ran through the quick orientation that peripatetics often requires. I was in …Massachusetts. At Joan's place. She and I have been a steady couple for eight years, and will be forever I hope, but we each still have a separate house. Hey, it occurred to me, maybe this time of day is a good time to root out a few gleanings. Why don't I go to my house and sit at the keyboard and see?

So as not to wake Joan, I got up quietly and looked in the dark for my pants. Said the great old Massachusetts pol Tip O'Neill: “All politics are local.”[*] Local, for me, is where my pants are. I keep my wallet in one back pocket, my notebook/address book/calendar in the other, and my change and car keys in the right front pocket. Skinny-dipping, once one of my favorite things in theory, has always been undercut for me in practice by concern for how my pants are getting along back there on the beach.

It hit me that my pants were in the car. On a tennis court, my essential pocket items make me feel lumpy. While Joan and I were playing tennis the previous evening, I had left my actual operational pants in the backseat. I'd spent the rest of the evening in empty-pocket shorts.

I donned those shorts in the dark. Went to my car and—no sense leaping headlong into creativity—drove to the Sunrise Diner for breakfast. The Sunrise Diner opens well before sunrise. There were only two other cars parked outside when I got there and groped in the backseat for my real pants, to get my wallet.

It wasn't there. Pants, yes; notebook-and-so-on, yes; wallet, no. I stood there in the darkness and cursed. I'll do that. I'll put too much of myself into being pissed off. But, man, I can't be misplacing my wallet.

I have had wallet misadventures over the years. Once during a downpour in New York City, my wallet fell into the gutter and was swept off toward the Hudson River. But I found it, soggy but still mine, wedged under a parked car's tire. I have never lost my wallet. In big cities, people frequently take it upon themselves to inform me that my wallet is sticking out. Actually it's my notebook-and-so-on. I scowl at these people. Scattered and distracted as I am on the whole, I keep in touch with the stuff in my pockets, thank you.

But not this time. I retraced my steps of the previous evening. Last place I remembered my wallet being out of my pants was a gas station just before the tennis, while I was getting my credit card out, and you've got your wallet in one hand and your card in the other, and maybe I had already taken the pump-spout-handle thing out, which I do sometimes though I know I shouldn't …Reconstruction! It always makes you realize how little attention you were paying at the time! Suffice it to say that I retraced hard, and exhaustively and furiously, and all the way back to when I was twelve and on a Boy Scout excursion, and one of my fellow scouts lost his wallet, and one of the dads riding herd on us proclaimed that God didn't allow people to lose their wallets for no reason—this scout must have done something wrong, of which this was the wages. Young as I was, I knew that was bullshit, and I felt myself beginning to turn agnostic. Which didn't bother me. But I can't tell you how deracinated it made me feel, fifty years later, to be at a loss as to what had happened to the wallet in my pants.

I canceled all the cards.[*] Drove forty-five minutes each way to where you have to go to get a replacement driver's license. Regretted the loss of the lucky two-dollar bill I inherited from my father's wallet. Descended into a mood of profound self-laceration. Switched on the TV just as Aretha Franklin was going into her “Think” number in the movie The Blues Brothers: the greatest musical moment in movie history. And not only is Aretha's skirt-twitching, word-up performance enough to make a dead man think—here is what she says when her husband tries to tell her, “Now don't get riled, Sugar”:

She says, “Don't you ‘Dont get riled, Sugar’ me!”

Aw, man. I got unriled. But continued to feel greatly diminished.

And then, just as I was beginning to get riled again because the guy playing Aretha's husband was, incredibly, deciding to go off away from her with Belushi and Aykroyd—then, belatedly but blessedly, a man called to say that his girlfriend, a waitress at the Sunrise, had found my wallet in the parking lot. It must have fallen out of my pants seconds before I stood there beginning to rack my brain, trying to imagine where I could have lost it the day before.

So is there a moral lesson here that might apply to loss of something else, like love or your groove? Could it be: Before you look back to where you last knew you had it, look around where you first found it gone?[†] Or maybe just: Don't go anywhere in the wee hours.

I'll tell you one thing. The Sunrise Diner is local.

Grounds that Robert E. Lee might have given, if he'd been more down to earth, for seceding along with Virginia. That's what I try to tell the occasional Massachusettsean who feels compelled, having learned that I have written a brief biography of Marse Robert, to buttonhole me and inform me with something approaching virtuous glee that the man should have been hung for treason. “But then seems like we'd have had to hang Abbie Hoffman, too,” I tell them, or I try to out-lib them with “Uh-huh, but I don't believe in capital punishment.” The only thing that they have to think about long enough for me to slip away, though, is Tip's tip. Then, too, not long ago I got off I-95 in southern Virginia to look for a nonchain restaurant and asked a man at a 7-Eleven or something where I could find a local place to eat, and he gave me a tired look and said, “Nuthin's local anymore.”

Which means you've got to bear in mind that when you get your new cards in the mail you've got to notify the various online emporia that you are registered with, assuming you remember your passwords for each of them, as to what your new numbers are, so that the next time you order something from them they won't get the notion—and remember it nonchalantly forevermore—that you're some kind of degenerate deadbeat. You see somebody walking down the street today, chances are he's not thinking about how that little redbud tree over there in front of the library is beginning to pop, he's trying to remember what it is that he's supposed to be bearing in mind that he's going to need to be sure to inform some virtual entity of.

†I don't know what that means, but I like the sound of it. With some work it might make a good country song, called “It Hasn't Hit Me Yet”:

I picture you yelling, “I'll call out the law, you

Son of a bitch,” in the dawn.

I'd rather remember that last time I saw you

Than the moment I found you were gone.

Do You Know the Nothin’ Man?

In September of 1862, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes got word that his son, Oliver Jr., had been wounded—shot through the neck—at the battle of Antietam. So “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” as Dr. Holmes called himself, set out from Boston (which he considered “the measure of all things”) to find his boy. Along the way, he took occasion to chat with some captured Confederates—“for whom,” he wrote in an account of his quest in The Atlantic Monthly, “I could not help feeling a kind of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of the Rebellion as one is likely to find under the Stars and Stripes.”

The prisoners struck him as unable to come up with anything like a principled statement of what they'd been fighting for. One of them was “a wild-haired, unsoaped boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who looked as if he might be about seventeen, as he said he was.” Holmes tried to draw the young man out.

“What state do you come from?”

“Georgy.”

“What part of Georgia?”

“Midway.”

This struck Holmes as remarkable, because his father had once been “settled for seven years as pastor over the church at Midway, Georgia.” He asked the youth where he went to church, back home.

“Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m'life.”

“What did you do before you became a soldier?”

“Nothin.”

“What do you mean to do when you get back?”

“Nothin.”

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed, this dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence but one degree above that of the idiot?

Well, now. Read today, Dr. Holmes's prose has a whimsicality to it that is about one degree above that of a silly person. When he hears that his son's wound is not mortal, he effuses as follows: “We shall sleep well tonight; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently narcotize the overwearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall,” by which he means that he had a smoke. In his day, however, Dr. Holmes was widely regarded—in Bostonian circles, anyway—not only as the nation's most eminent all-round man of letters, but also as its most enthralling talker. “Holmes talks very nearly all the time,” wrote a friend of his, “but the secret of the charm of the monopoly is the fact that he is, all this time, broidering on your woof—apparently dwelling only on what you have suggested, and reading your mind very truly to yourself, only that he makes it seem a good deal clearer than you thought it!”

Perhaps this was how he struck the “Nothin’ ” man, but I doubt it. I suggest that the “Nothin ” man was thinking, “They've caught me, and maybe they'll shoot me, but be damn if they'll broider my woof.” I believe that the “Nothin ” man might agree—substituting “Southerner” for “Irishman”—with Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley:

“ Tis a good thing to be an Irishman because people think that all an Irishman does is to laugh without a reason an’ fight without an objick. But ye an’ I, Hinnisy, know these things ar-re on'y our divarsions. It's a good thing to have people size ye up wrong. Whin they've got ye'er measure, ye're in danger.”

So maybe I should have accepted the invitation I received the other day. A message on my New York answering machine. A student at Rutgers University was going to give an oral report on “good ol’ boys” in her American Studies class and wanted me to come be a part of it. She thought it would be good to have “a Southern writer” there, as a sort of show-and-tell item, I guess.

I have had letters from students asking me, in effect, to write their reports for them, but this was the first time I had been urged to make my way fairly deep into New Jersey to serve as an exhibit. (“Are you sure he's a real one? He appears sort of testy. Could we look at his teeth?”) The caller's accent was regionally indeterminate, her tone neither seductive nor apologetic, just chipper. She left me both a home number and a work number—so she must not be entirely unaware that people have to make a living. I called the home number, during workday hours, and left the message that I had presentations of my own to work on but I wished her luck with hers.

She responded that evening with another message: “I appreciate your returning my call, and wishing me luck, but I'm kind of disappointed. I wrote in my report that a good ol’ boy would come. ”

So. Did my RSVP enable that Rutgers class to take my measure precisely? I would say not. The truth was, I didn't wish that presentation luck. But maybe I came too close to giving myself away. Maybe I should have showed up in jodhpurs and a beret, sworn that this attire was authentic, and offered to clear up or improve upon some other misconceptions.

“The good ol’ boy,” I might have informed the class, “properly pro-nounced guddleby—and deriving from the old English expression ‘God'll be with ye [in a moment]’—is a study in contradictions. He will daub himself with an aromatic blend of possum lard and peach juice après bain and yet has been known to gnaw off his own hand to avoid telling a lady that she is sitting on it. He relishes a Maypole dance as much as any frolicsome Vermonter, but in his version dogs are involved, and things don't start getting merry until someone is bitten. He does indeed talk and sing—and also prays, gargles, and woos—through his nose, but what is not generally acknowledged is that he reads through it, too. Don't address a good ol’ boy as ‘y'all,’ because he will get it into his head that there is more than one of him and will (1) drink accordingly and (2) demand to know what you have done with the rest of his hats. The first thing he is liable to tell you when you have gained his confidence is that he loves your mama, sight unseen, more than you do. Don't contradict him. But don't change the subject, either, for this will lead him to conclude that you lack (1) grit and (2) a kind of human sympathy. Above all, the good ol’ boy—far from being provincial—welcomes new acquaintances of all kinds because he is forever open to learning fresh wrestling holds. What say we go over to one of y'all's house now—I've brought a batch of chickadee gumbo—and take off our shoes?”

But I don't always feel hearty enough, in an academic setting, to pull off such a performance. More and more I am inclined to stay home and read up on things that challenge my own stereotypical notions. For instance, I found it remarkable that Dr. Holmes's father had lasted for seven years as a preacher in southeast Georgia. It had always been my impression that the Holmeses were a long line of Boston Brahmins, and I couldn't imagine such a type laying down the gospel, successfully, for folks way down there below Savannah. I turned to Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore and Louis Menand's recent book about the development of philosophical pragmatism in America, The Metaphysical Club, both of which are highly informative about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and his background. Midway, Georgia, was established as a Congregationalist religious center in the midst of plantation country. Abiel Holmes—Dr. Holmes's father, Holmes Jr.'s grandfather—went down there as a Yankee missionary.

And got influenced. According to Menand, old Abiel acquired from slaveowners in his congregation a prejudice against black people, which he passed on to his son. In a lecture in New York in 1855, Dr. Holmes attacked abolitionists as “ultra melanophiles,” by which he meant extremist lovers of dark pigment. Dr. Holmes held certain truths to be self-evident, and one of these—before the Civil “War, at least—was the natural superiority of white people.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for his part, was an ardent abolitionist when war broke out during his senior year at Harvard. He joined the Union army right away and served with distinction throughout most of the war, the wound at Antietam being one of three he received. The war turned him into a pragmatist. When he thought he was dying (“a gone coon,” as he put it) from his first wound, he wondered whether he should start believing in God but decided he didn't need to. As the bloody conflict went on, he lost his fervor for abolitionism or any other cause, as such. After Antietam, he wrote home that “the South have achieved their independence …believe me, we shall never lick 'em,” and that war was “the brother of slavery …slavery's parent, child and sustainer at once.” He declined to accept a major's rank in the regiment of black volunteers that would eventually be celebrated in the movie Glory.

But he kept fighting, through the horrific Wilderness campaign, because he had concluded that the right thing was to do one's job right, whatever the consequences. He held rigorously to that belief throughout a long postwar legal career. His opinions as a U. S. Supreme Court justice were crucial in bolstering and expanding application of the First Amendment—but he grounded his thinking not in divinely endowed rights or the brotherhood of man but rather in his procedural judgment, based on the Constitution and experience, that society is strongest when everyone can speak out.

Like the “Nothin ” man, he was uneffusive. (Henry James, who grew up with Holmes Jr., likened his demeanor to “a full glass carried without spilling a drop.”) He eschewed church, was skeptical of every absolute value, and saw that his father's broidery was but loosely wound into the woof of reality. He came to believe that we can never know for sure what is true, all we can do is bet on what will most likely work. This Brahmin learned a lot from getting shot at, and hit, by what might be thought of at Rutgers as good ol’ boys just trying to do their jobs right.

You Hate Me Because I'm Southern

In his power-building years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson figured that “he himself would likely never reach the presidency,” writes Marshall Frady, “owing to the Southern odor on him.” The political sensorium has changed since then, of course, but—I don't know about you—I still stink a little. I like to roll in it, some. But I can't entirely get over the apprehension that people smell me the wrong way.

See, I live in Massachusetts, among people who regard being liberal as perfectly natural, whereas it is in some ways a stretch for me, which is why I like it. I feel like a naked person in a nudist colony. A couple of winters ago I was wandering around my house wearing six or seven sweaters and muttering about the confluence of two things:

One: Senator Trent Lott's nostalgic tribute to the segregationist heyday of Strom Thurmond. If Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, “we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years,” said Lott with a twinkle in his eye. Here is a man from the same part of the same state as my mama, and he was born almost the same week I was, and he hasn't managed to inherit or acquire any better sense than that? Works for me professionally, of course. Enables me, on the radio, to thank the cowpaddy-coifed Lott for showing that there is, after all, a limit to how far a Republican can ride the wave of neo-peckerwood regressivism, and for proceeding, in apology after apology, to give new meaning to the formerly racist expression “world's sorriest white man.” But the whole thing is so retro it makes me feel tired.

Two: The attempt—which, thank heaven, I managed to squelch—by the publisher of my forthcoming biography of Robert E. Lee to assert, in marketing copy, that the book will appeal to “proud Southerners.” If, say, Italo Calvino had written a biography of, say, Columbus, would they have advertised it as appealing to “proud Italians”? If Joan Didion did Hillary Clinton, would they pitch it to “proud white ladies”? And can it be that they believe, or even would like to believe, that I home in on people who regard themselves as proud …? I am not an ashamed, not even a sheepish, Southerner. But …I feel tired.

So I turn on the TV and what comes boiling out at me? That moment in Raintree County when Elizabeth Taylor, voluptuously abed, hollers at Montgomery Clift, her long-suffering husband:

“You don't love me! You never did love me! You hate me because I'm Southern!”

And I think to myself, Yes! Why not! Why can't I have the option of going about in the world as a maligned Southerner, an object of unjust disregard?

This would not be an option that I would overexploit. For I bear no ancient grudges. The truth is, I think it was right sweet of the nation not to let my ancestors go. If the North had seceded, my ancestors might have said, “Fine. Get on out of here, then. See if we care. We've got our own fish to fry, which y'all don't even know how to do right.” And today the Atlanta airport would be even more of an ordeal, with all those passengers originating outside the Confederacy having to go through customs and who knows what extra layers of security.

But I would like to bear a contemporary grudge. Who wouldn't? I'm human, I sometimes feel disadvantaged, and mine is the added disadvantage of knowing it isn't so. Frequently insulted by otherwise multi-culturally scrupulous people, yes. But oppressed? No.

And now …You know Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, a.k.a. the thinking person's Satan? I mean the Tom DeLay whose explanation of the Columbine High School shootings was as follows: “Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.” That Tom DeLay. The medieval one. Well, his right-hand man in the Congress now is named Roy Blunt. My name, phonetically. I have been coming out for integration since 1961. And now, shades of Mandingo, people probably think I'm the majority whip.[*]

I met Roy Blunt once. Nice fellow. The fact that I think he will burn in hell for—Let me, in all fairness, rephrase that. The fact that I think I would burn in hell if I ever served, for one moment, as the sidekick of someone who blames teenage mass murder on Darwin, for God's sake, is of scant consequence. I hitched myself to the wrong wagon forty years ago.

I blame the liberal media. And literature. Do you suppose Tom DeLay has ever read any literature? If I'd majored in something besides Enlish, and had my finger on the pulse of the future, I would have skimmed some libidinous foam off the sixties and then devoted myself hand over fist to premodernism. It would have been more fun, rhetorically, and far more lucrative, than typing my fingers to the bone trying to achieve a fusion of—oh, never mind.

It is not a good movie, Raintree County. First of all, why would anybody ever want to marry Montgomery Clift? Or even—this may surprise Hollywood—Elizabeth Taylor. Very beautiful, sure, but the average person looks at Elizabeth Taylor and thinks: too much trouble. “Way too much. So, of course, she has to represent the South.

We don't believe for a moment, if we have any sense at all, that if by some chance any given character played by Elizabeth Taylor and any given character played by Montgomery Clift were to become a couple, the latter would be the strong one. And yet because Clift is the Hoosier and Taylor the Louisianan (her name is Susanna), she is crazy and he is the high-minded rock whom she seduces and tricks into marriage. So they move to Indiana and the Civil “War is about to start, and she wants to retain the retainers she has brought up from Louisiana, and he tells her, “You can't have slaves up here.”

And her response is, “Why do you keep picking on me?”

She runs away from him, taking the slaves with her. He joins the Union army so he can get down South to find her. He does find her, in a way substandard insane asylum. She is still attended there, though the war has ended, by her slaves. (The male one, Old George, is played by Bill “Walker, who between 1917 and 1978, according to the Internet Movie Database, played ninety-four movie and TV characters, only three of whom had more than a first name.)

Here's why Susanna is crazy: because, as her slave Soona (or maybe Parthenia) explains, “Long as I've knowed her there's been a war going on inside her.” “We've been led to believe, in fact, that Susanna's mother was black, but the case turns out to be more psychological. “When Susanna was a girl, another slave, Henrietta, was more motherly toward her than her mother was. (Susanna's mother went crazy because Susanna's father preferred the company of Henrietta.) So, according to Soona or Parthenia, “she wanted Henrietta to be her mother, only she hated wanting it because Henrietta was …like me.”

Clift doesn't care if she's suffering from hysterical miscegenation; he wants to save their marriage. “You don't think the foundation's too rikkitih, after awl this tahm?” Susanna asks. Aw, no, he says. So she returns to his bosom. (That's right, she to his.)

Then, after a bit, she runs off again and drowns so that he can finally marry the sensible Indiana woman who has always loved him: Eva Marie Saint.

In other words, only when the South is attached to the North is the South sane, and the South would rather die.

Shouldn't I be able to construct a cultural grievance from all this? As I look back over my life, however, I realize that something I said earlier, with regard to Elizabeth Taylor, was a lie. If fate had brought the two of us together, and made me the type of person she was interested in at the time, I might well—those lips!—have been her third or fourth hubby. In which case, that is where I'd be coming from. I would speak, whether I wanted to or not, as someone formerly married to Liz.

As it is, I speak as this Southern white guy. Condemned by every syllable I utter to be linked at least in retrospect with—how did Senator Lott put it?—“discarded policies of the past.”

So. No sympathy for me. Unless I go crazy.

In closing, here's what I think: The South started going wrong when it started getting so heavy into the cultivation of soybeans. Soy's not Southern. Ham is Southern. Everywhere you look it's soy milk, soy ice cream, soy meat, soy I don't know what all. Why can't there be ham milk and ham ice cream and ham this and ham that?

And here's another thought. It's high time we rehabilitated a Southern fruit that has for so long, through no fault of its own, been associated with prejudice. Why not go through culture replacing the word stone with the word watermelon?

The philosopher's watermelon, like a rolling watermelon, leave no watermelon unturned, watermelon walls do not a prison make, if you live in a glass house don't throw watermelons, John Ruskin's Watermelons of Venice, heart made of watermelon doody-wa doody-wa, bomb them back to the Watermelon Age, great watermelon face. Oliver Watermelon. Everybody must get watermeloned.

James Dickey put out a collection of poems called Into the Stone. And he was Southern! Let's make that Into the Watermelon. I can see the cover illustration now! A sword (as in The Sword in the Watermelon) stuck into Watermelon Mountain, which has carved into it Jeff Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Melonwall Jackson on horseback. Wouldn't that make a Southerner proud?

Poets think they are so hard and cool, getting down to stone all the time. Let's get hot and wet and sweet:

PSALMS:

He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all

thy ways,

They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy

foot against a watermelon.

EDWARD FITZGERALD:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Watermelon that puts the Stars to flight.

RICHARD WILBUR:

How should we dream of this place without us?

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,

A watermelon look on the watermelon s face?

JOHN KEATS:

Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,

Sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a watermelon.

T. S. ELIOT:

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! Take the watermelon from the watermelon, take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from bone, and wash them.

THEODORE ROETHKE:

Fear was my father, Father Fear,

His look drained the watermelons.

I'm not talking about charity toward the watermelon. What good is that? I'm saying, why not co-opt the watermelon, get the juice out of it, as we have the blues. And if any damn Yankee doesn't like it, let him who is without sin cast the first…

Or, getting back to my first thought, how about “lest thou dash thy foot on a ham.” That's not bad. “Hath flung the Ham that puts the Stars…” Maybe. Maybe. But “a ham look on the ham's face”? Nope. Doesn't work.

But I'll say this. If we had stuck by watermelon and ham, and the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years.

As I write this, DeLay has gone on to another stage of his career, too caught up in indictments to serve America in a leadership capacity. My evil homonym, having lost a vote to succeed DeLay as majority leader, is still that thing that so evokes flogging.

The Rapture: Lighten Up

Up here in the Northeast I spend most of my time in the company of Canadians, Quakers, secular Jews, alumni of progressive schools, media people, forlorn supporters of John Kerry, and consumers of artisanal bread. Let me say, categorically, that I hold these people, and the bread, in high esteem. (We don't sit around using the word artisanal. It just crops up lately on high-end menus and food-store labels. It means, I take it, handmade by people whose hearts are really into bread, or at least were when they started out.) I agree with these people that much of what holds sway in America today is deplorable. “What I don't always share is their consternation.

Take the Rapture. I mean the belief, as an appalled Bill Moyers has put it succinctly, that “once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands,’ legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.”

I don't find this scenario very credible myself. If you were almighty, would you want to sit around with all those pious people—each of them wearing nothing but a Reverend Jerry Falwell expression—stretching way off to one side? I have never met anybody who isn't almighty who would. How long would it be before the charm wore off even for the right-hand sitters? I know I would be too fidgety. I'd rather live with tribulations. But, hey, different folks hold different truths to be self-evident. I know that much, just being from the South.

Sometimes I run into someone who has just heard for the first time about the Rapture—and that 33 percent of the American people, according to a poll, already know about it and, what's more, believe in it. This person expresses outrage, in a “How dare they?” (how dare they already know about something this person doesn't, for one thing) sort of tone.

“Well,” I say, “it probably would relieve the tedium, come eternity, to be able to look down on people hopping around having even less fun. But I don't think you have to picture them picturing you, personally, covered with boils, sores, locusts, and frogs. They're picturing maybe Hillary Clinton. Who has dealt with worse. By that I mean, they're picturing their conception of Hillary Clinton, which is important to them. Their conception of you is important to them, too, more important no doubt than it should be, as yours of them may be to you. I don't think they would personally cover you with boils, sores, locusts, and frogs. Though they might think of you generically as the kind of person who, if they were covered with boils, sores, locusts, and frogs, would not lift a finger to flick off the first locust. And they might be right, there, because you—who think more along psychological than abominational lines-would regard any such boils, sores, locusts, and frogs as illusory, hence unflickable.

“Then, too,” I tell them, “33 percent of the American people—at least 33 percent of the American people—are liable to believe anything. Especially if they are asked whether they believe it or not on the telephone, by a stranger in a snide or scientific tone of voice.”

“But it's incredible!” a Northeastern person might exclaim. “It's beyond belief!”

“Not to people who believe it,” I point out. “And nothing confirms the beliefs of the credulous more than for disbelievers to tell them that their beliefs are unbelievable. After all, when you think about it, how would believers expect disbelievers to look at believers? In disbelief. The more you tell them they can't possibly believe such a thing, the more they enjoy looking like the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Where the drastically faithful have gained ground in recent years is in the area of being astounding rather than astound-ed. They have come to realize that a sanctified person who chuckles calmly can get a rationalist's goat. The more you demonize them, the less they have to strain to demonize you. Why should the wild-eyed be insecure, these days? They appeal to far bigger multitudes than the keen eyed do. When it comes to sheer popularity, their books are cheerleader captains and the ones we read are pimply nerds.”

“What I'd like someone to explain,” a Northeastern person may cry out rhetorically, “is how Israel can welcome the support of people whose express belief is that after Armageddon all Jews will either convert or be burned?”

I respond by way of a parable:

“Say you're running a business that is hard-pressed to stay afloat, and someone cordially offers you substantial backing, and the only catch is, this person subscribes to the prophecy that in due time you will sprout gills and become a fish. From your standpoint, the prophecy is crazy, the due time open-ended and the money for real. Are you going to waste time arguing with them?”

“But Christians,” says a Northeastern person who (like me) worships on Sunday morning by reading The New York Times (our faith in it has been tested, but testing to us skeptics is as mud is to pigs), “are supposed to be peace-loving, and inclusive, and…”

“Uh,” I respond. “Read any history of Christian civ lately? And speaking of inclusive, did you ever sing along with Bob Dylan, ‘Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mister Jones’? Not to mention, speaking of irrational beliefs, ‘Everybody must get stoned.’ Not that there haven't been times when I was in favor of getting stoned, voluntarily. And speaking of inclusive again, when Democrats have been elected president it's been by an illogical coalition of liberals, labor, African Americans, and the South. Whence, except from blind faith, cometh the assumption that the president of the United States ought naturally to be somebody who thinks like we do? Much as I would like to see it, I can't think of any examples. We need strange bedfellows.”

Lucid as this analysis is, it wins no converts. Up here, after all, I am someone who is from the South and probably still has a lot of red state in him. As back home I am someone who went off up North and turned blue. In an age of zeal, who can afford to be broad-minded about the more zealous? Sometimes people look at me as if I think I'm the only person who will get Raptured, which would explain why I evidently spend so little on clothes.

The Rapture, I say, is sort of like the revolution during the sixties. That doesn't get me anywhere.

I do believe I score a point against zeal, though, when I wonder whether there are any more readers of Rapture books who actually want to get Raptured than there are readers of Gothic romances who actually want somebody to rip their bodice. All this talk of Rapture reminds me of the preacher who cried out to his congregation, “Everybody who wants to go to heaven, stand up!”

Everybody stood up except one old man in the front row.

The preacher looked at him, and repeated, “I say, everybody who wants to go to heaven, stand up!”

The old man still just sat there.

“Brother Henry,” said the preacher, “didn't you hear me? I said everybody who wants to go to heaven, stand up!”

Brother Henry looked around and said, “Oh. I thought you were getting up a group to go now. ”

Total Immersion, Up to a Point

I was born Methodist. Then one morning in Sunday school we were singing “Red and yellow, black and white, we are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I looked around the room and noticed that—although we had a picture on the wall of Jesus being sweet to several easy-to-love-looking youngsters of every hue (shepherds’ offspring, judging by their outfits and the literal lambs in their midst)—the “we” of whom we sang was not the “we” who we were.

“Blond and brunette, also sandy, Jesus finds us fine and dandy,” we could have sung legitimately. But as to skin we were all pretty much the color of that Crayola (since discontinued) labeled Flesh.

This revelation did not convert me on the spot to either atheism or multiculturalism (I was only eight), but it did make me wonder why our elders insisted upon teaching us that song if they didn't mean us to mean it. Perhaps I was being too literal. I was loath to practice hardshell literalism, certainly, because that would have entailed giving up all my worldly goods and loving my neighbors—including Marcella across the street who sat on my brand-new drum and broke it Christmas morning—as myself. Over the years, I became a cumgranosalist: taking things literally but with a grain of salt.

You can't really call that religion. If cumgranosalism can be said to have a rite, it is a joke I told on A Prairie Home Companion back in 1995. “Do you believe in infant baptism?” one old boy asks another, who replies, “Believe in it—hell, I've seen it done. ” That joke set off a chain of e-mail to the Prairie Home Web site, beginning with this entry from the Tarheel State:

I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants, and my SO [Significant Other, presumably] said, “I don't get it.” So I explained it to him, losing of course any inherent humor. My SO thinks that I only get this joke because I'm a Southerner brought up Presbyterian amongst Baptists. So did this joke fall flat outside of North Carolina?

The first response to this query was from a man who identified himself as “a Lutheran Christian” born and raised in northern California: “I laughed out loud when I read your account. I guess I just never thought of ‘believing in infant baptism’ quite that way before. I doubt that my employer would get it either, so I don't speak for them.” The employer was not specified.

A “Lutheran raised Methodist in Oklahoma” wrote that the joke “cracked me up and also my husband (a Lutheran, raised Lutheran in Oklahoma), although it took him a little bit longer to ‘get it.’ ”

“I'm a Jewess from Chicago and I think it's the funniest thing Ray [sic] said all night,” put in a regular listener.

A man who was “born and raised in Texas to a Baptist mother and a Presbyterian father and attended Presbyterian church as a child” testified as follows:

The concept of infant baptism was foreign to my Southern Baptist mother and she refused to allow it to be done to me. She held out for years insisting on a full body immersion in a running river to carry my sins away, but finally relented to a ceremonial Presbyterian sprinkling at about age 12.

If she could do it again today, she'd hold out for the river and I doubt if she'd let me come up again.

I think the joke went best with Southern Baptists and is more regional.

“That's ridiculous,” came a quick response. “I'm a Roman Catholic from the Midwest and I laughed my butt off. *love is real* *imagine* *remember* John Lennon 1940-80.”

However, a man in Houston, who described himself as “not usually humor impaired,” was still puzzled:

From the responses, I don't think that “getting it” was regional, but some of us still don't see the humor even when you guys explain it. If this is a parallel:

#1: Do you believe in pizza

#2: Believe in it, hell, I've seen people eating it:

I would say, duh, what's funny about that? And so would you (I'm guessing).

Yet, you all go bonkers when “infant baptism” is substituted for “eating pizza.” Aren't infants commonly baptized in Christian sects? What am I missing?

Subsequent respondents pointed out that, as one put it succinctly, “some sects like the Southern Baptists only believe in full immersion, at an older age.” Another went into the matter at greater length:

Actually, the joke is at the expense of those of us that are of an Anabaptist persuasion (even though I'm Lutheran). Most fundamentalist denominations will argue that children are not to be baptized until (1) they reach an age of reason and (2) after conversion from the sinful life to the new life. They do not believe that Paul and Silas, in the story of the jailer in the Acts of the Apostles, baptized the children in the jailer's house. However, Scripture does not tell us if there were children in the house. Scripture only states that Paul and Silas baptized the jailer and his house, and no census of who was in the house was given. Therefore, the comments made were from the point of view of an Anabaptist.

A fine point was raised by a woman associated with a “newsgroup of synchronicity, amulets and talismans,” who weighed in as follows:

I am a Jew born and raised in Northern California and I too laughed so hard I almost peed when I heard it on the radio and I am having the same reaction to reading this thread …you folks are hilarious, even (especially) the ones who don't “get it” or who try to explain it to the rest of us!

One thing the jokologists have left out of their analyses is the additional theological oomph of the interjection, “hell.”

Any lingering notion that you had to be Southern to get the joke in question was dispelled by this response:

No, this Minnesota Mormon (Mormons don't believe in infant baptism either) thought that it was very funny as well. Mormons also believe in baptism by immersion (not sprinkling) and in baptism for the dead (by proxy that is—please don't flip out). Hence the Mormon joke:

“Did you hear that the Catholics have started practicing nepotism for the dead?”

“Yeah, they just installed a new lawn sprinkler in their cemetery.”

An outsider would definitely not get this joke.

I kind of liked hearing Southern Baptists referred to as a “sect,” but since none of them contributed to the Web site discussion (don't any of them listen to A Prairie Home Companion? If not, what do they do on Saturday evenings? “Water the lawn, thoroughly?), we cannot generalize about Southern Baptist response to the infant baptism joke.

Nor can we conclude that all Catholics laugh their butts off and quote John Lennon, that all Southern Presbyterians and synchronistic northern California Jews almost wet themselves, that all northern California Lutheran Christians laugh out loud, that all Chicago Jewesses get my name wrong, that all Lutherans raised as either Methodists or Lutherans in Oklahoma crack up, or that all Mormons pride themselves on their own humor's obscurity. A personal conclusion to which I am led—that you should never tell a joke to anyone who uses the word bonkers—may not be based on a broad enough sample either.

How about the equation of Baptists with Anabaptists? The latter term was originally a scornful one directed at sixteenth-century European Protestants who held that you couldn't rightly be baptized until you were old enough to know what was going on. The word baptize comes from the Greek for dipping. To anabaptize is to rebaptize. In fact, however, the Anabaptists didn't believe in double-dipping—they just held that if you were baptized as an infant, it didn't count. Having been sprinkled myself long before the age of consent, I find this tenet congenial.

However, you will never catch me calling myself a Baptist. All the more so because Northerners assume that I am one, or at least used to be one (and was raised by a mammy), because I am Southern. Nope, I'm a firmly lapsed Methodist. But you can't call that religious either.

So here's what I'm thinking of becoming: a contemplative Anabaptist. The example of this faith cited by The Columbia Encyclopedia is Hans Denck, who, before dying in 1527, “submitted to adult baptism but believed the presence of the inner Word in believers precluded any visible organization of the Christian life.”

Because Denck did it, I hereby submit to adult baptism—retroactively, by proxy. The event occurred a couple of years ago when I saw the character Bunny Breckinridge, played by Bill Murray in the movie Ed Wood, allowing himself to be totally immersed in the interest of raising money from a religious group to finance one of Wood's ineffably terrible movies. Wood himself, played by Johnny Depp, also submits to baptism for this purpose (dip, Denck, dunk, Depp—you see how it all begins to come together), but Bunny—who keeps planning to go to Mexico for a sex-change operation but never quite pulls it off, so to speak—gets into the spirit of the thing most charmingly.

“Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” Bunny is asked as he is about to be dunked. He shrugs winsomely and says in a soft, maidenly sort of voice, “Sure.”

But what I like most about contemplative Anabaptism, as a living faith, is what comes after baptism: the avoidance of any visible organization.

I will tell the Final Scorer

When my earthly race is run,

“I believed in it only

If I'd never seen it done.”

Don't Force It

An Introduction to Up from Methodism

Few people have derived more vocational inspiration from church than Herbert Asbury, 1889-1963. The light he saw, however, was not the light intended. The hard-shell Methodism that Asbury grew up with in Farmington, Missouri, was all about sin—from harlotry to playing the phonograph on Sunday—and downright prodigal ways of repressing and suppressing it. “I was fallow ground for all these seeds of piety,” he writes, “for I was a highly emotional and excitable boy.”

A descendant of historically eminent Methodists, he did not, as expected, grow up to become a bishop. His attitude toward that prospect was neutral until the revival-service night in his teens when the church humiliated him—seduced him with music and induced him with tugs and shoves and heavy blandishment (he renders the experience almost as a gang rape)—into coming tearfully forward unto the altar and offering his soul to salvation, when in his mind he knew he didn't mean it, didn't want it. Thereafter, writes Asbury, he regarded religion “with a tongue in my cheek and a sneer in my heart.” He became a newspaperman, which for many lapsed Methodists would have been louche enough, but in 1926 an excerpt from Up from Methodism made him scandalously famous.

Asbury sent this memoir of his youth to H. L. Mencken, whom he idolized. Mencken was taken by the chapter “Hatrack,” about Farming-ton's treatment of its outstanding fallen woman. The woman in question, called Hatrack because she was so scrawny, lay with men in fields of stone for small amounts of money. As a character, she is young Asbury in reverse: She attends church longing to be saved, but the fold won't take her in. (Perhaps because who then would fill her civic function?) And so she sneers as he sneered, and turns herself out as the church did him. “Hatrack” appeared in Mencken's American Mercury, which delighted in mocking American sanctimony. The “Watch and “Ward Society, whose civic function was to keep sin out of Boston, took one look at “Hatrack” and banned that issue. Mencken made a point of selling a copy, and being arrested for it, on Boston Common. Mencken had his landmark press freedom case—he won in court—and Asbury had his launch. “Within the year, Up from Methodism was published.

Asbury went on to a career of reveling in sin, on paper. Most notably, he authored dark-side histories of New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Chicago. The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld with Particular Reference to Its Colorful Iniquities is the full title of the New Orleans one—on whose dust jacket Asbury's city-underworld series is summed up as follows: “These incredible accounts of violent life and violent death, and love both vile and violent, are as vivid as the red lights that sprinkled the streets he writes of.” In 2002, Martin Scorsese adapted Asbury's Gangs of New York into a film about corruption and street fighting next to which the bluenosed Methodism that soured Asbury's youth seems very nearly tolerable.

Mencken himself, having never felt religiosity's siren appeal, made merrier sport of it. Herbie Asbury had been hurt by the church, and he was determined to show it a thing or two. And if he lacked some of what it takes to make a bishop, he had the balls: His take on holiness was brazen in the twenties and remains so today. In fact, Up from Methodism sometimes reads like such a tract against religious hypocrisy that readers may wonder whether there isn't something to be said in favor of it.

Methodism began in eighteenth-century England as a socially conscious movement among the exploited working class, whose weakness for cheap gin and neglect of unplanned offspring the Church of England did not deign to address. When brought to the American heartland's shallow-rooted bourgeoisie—most pervasively by Herbert's ancestor, Francis Asbury—the movement continued to lean hard on the evils of drunkenness and lust. In retrospect the sins of joylessness and impacted prurience seem to have been closer to home. But shame and dread did provide considerable prophylaxis—in the days before antibiotics, twelve-step programs, and reliable birth control—against the wages of lower-class sin.

By the time I was growing up in and out of Methodism, half a century after Asbury, it had mellowed a great deal. (And today the United Methodist Church has officially opposed the bellicosity of its most prominent adherent, President George W. Bush.) The church brought my parents together with lifelong friends who, though abstinent, were much nicer, and jollier, than the churchfolk in this book. But the old devils lingered. The generation before me had known Methodism in something like the mode derided by Asbury and never entirely got over it. As I grew more latitudinarian—under the influence of literature, the sixties, and the sort of person that one meets (thank God) as a reporter— my parents and I lost the capacity to talk anything over civilly, much less jovially.

They died young, before we could get through that phase. I doubt my mother and I ever would have, because she was a literalist. So am I, in a way—I love slippery Southern literalism like that of the lady at the cash register in the Nashville airport who, when I told her it sounded like she was catching a cold, said, “Oh, Lord, I hope not. I've already got one.” My mother had that, but she was also afflicted—or comforted, according to her—by fundamentalist realism with regard to final things.

My poor mother's childhood had been blighted by her father's early death from alcoholism and syphilis, and I believe she was terrified for me. If she didn't fear quite literally that I would, as Asbury puts it, “hang throughout eternity on a revolving spit over a great fire in the deepest pit of Hell, while little red devils jabbed white-hot pokers into my quivering flesh and Satan stood by and curled his lip in glee,” she had no other way of imagining an infidel's posthumous years. She must have found it unfathomable that I would adopt a mentality that precluded her seeing me in the life to come. There had to be a heaven, especially after my father died, because she had to see him there and share the fountain of blessings that would justify her abstemious life on Earth. I wanted to get around a bit while above ground. The gulf between her expectations and mine, and yet the entanglement of them, was indeed a shame.

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine.” Those were some great old hymns, which Herbert Asbury loved in spite of himself and came to sing raucous parodies of. In them, the church afforded a not entirely sublimated alternative to the more straightforward forms of intoxication and eroticism. Once, in the seventies, I went, for journalistic reasons, to a church in Manhattan that had been turned into a dance club. People with spiked purple hair were prancing and dancing all over the pulpit. I hated it. I could see my decent parents out there in their pew, needing to believe.

But there was also a ferocity in their worship, and traces of the cankering, perversely prideful self-denial that Herbert Asbury finds in the heritage of his holy forebear Francis, who wrote in his journals: “I must lament that I am not perfectly crucified with God.” Perhaps the most empathetic and the best sentence in Up from Methodism is Herbert's final judgment on Bishop Francis: “He yearned for a constant religious thrill, and mourned because he could not satisfy his yearning.”

The inner Herbert Asbury we get to know less well. A shade is drawn, whose nature may reside in the “tongue in my cheek” and the “sneer in my heart” that his suborned conversion left him with. Whom or what does he love? He may have relished the company of black Farmingtoni-ans, but his way of using the term darky is unpleasantly flippant, even allowing for standards of the time. I wish he had told us more about his vaguely sympathetic, not especially sanctified parents and siblings, who may have helped give him the gumption to strike out on his own. Or maybe his parents were too easygoing to be rebelled against, so he took on bigger game.

There is something less than wholly persuasive in his assertion, here in his midthirties, that “without religion I thoroughly enjoy this business of living.” He says he still doesn't like the taste (“Aha!” I can hear my mother saying) of the booze he took up to spite the church. Whether he ever gave up the cigarettes that gave him bad-boy satisfaction, I don't know, but after World War I, when he was gassed, he suffered for the rest of his life from the pulmonary problems that eventually killed him. Most of his books, his chronicles of wickedness, he worked up from newspaper-morgue research. In this book he airily imagines having a child he'll expose quite rationally to the world's religions; he never had one. But he must have died secure in this belief: that he had nailed (pace Bishop Francis) the people who imposed their sacred will upon him when he was vulnerable. God knows (you'd think), there are more than enough such people in the world today.

Can't I Be the Most Sophisticated Something Else?

Itook part in a panel discussion the other day at the 92nd Street Y, in Manhattan. The first time I ever visited that Y, thirty-some-odd years ago, I heard Edmund Wilson read. One of my heroes. A squeaky little voice! Another time I heard Vladimir Nabokov. He might just about as well have been reading in Russian, his accent was so thick. Faulkner had an awful reading voice. So did Hemingway. I don't think an author can get away with a voice like that anymore. Maybe that's why authors don't write as well anymore. If you can stand up and make the welkin ring, passably, with your tonsils, why agonize overly at the keyboard?

But this was not a reading I took part in; it was a panel discussion. The topic was a grim one—humor writing—but the moderator was Leonard Lopate, who is well known for interviewing authors refreshingly well on WNYC, the local public radio station. He has been known to stimulate even my interest in whatever book I was hustling around the country, ad nauseam, at the time.

For alphabetical reasons, I was the first member of the panel to be brought out. Lenny introduced me as “the world's most sophisticated redneck.”

He meant well. But it didn't set well with me. Does anybody ever introduce Louise Erdrich as a sophisticated redskin? I took my place and tried to think what to say as old Lenny introduced—neither ethnically nor oxymoronically—the other panelists: Jules Feiffer, Joe Queenan, and Cathleen Schine, congenial people all. “When he called on me, to address some humor-writing issue, I was still trying to think what to say about the R-word matter.

If I said, “It never ceases to amaze me, how unself-consciously liberal New Yorkers toss the word redneck around,” the audience, I know from experience, would have chuckled at my touchiness. Even if the audience had been Southern. After all, the comedian Jeff Foxworthy, a Southerner himself, has put out several cheerful books of one-liners beginning “You Might Be a Redneck If…”

“…Your mama keeps a spit-cup on the ironing board,” that sort of thing. I think those books, like old Amos 'n’ Andy programs (which must have been a lot more work to produce), are funny. The first I heard about those books was in 1992, after I wrote a column in Spy magazine in which I quoted several such redneck-if's (“ …Your wife has ever worn a tube top to a wedding,” and so on), which Bill Arhos, a fellow white Southerner prominent in Texas public television, had sent me on a Xeroxed sheet.

In that column I raised this question: “Do members of other ethnic groups who work in public television circulate this type of material? Circulate it not in outrage but in a spirit of recognition? I don't think so.” The reason my ethnic group did it, I ventured, was that we had a tradition of cryptohumility, of establishing our self-esteem by not being too high on ourselves. I also mentioned that two New York men-of-the-street newspaper columnists had recently referred to presidential aspirant Bill Clinton as “this year's pet cracker” and “just another Southern cracker.” Another thing I could have mentioned is that white Southerners traditionally have a hard time knowing how to take offense if there is nobody around to hit.

A lawyer representing Foxworthy called Spy, hollered at my editor there, Joanne Gruber, and threatened legal action against the magazine for using material from his client's book, a book that we could not possibly have been ignorant of, he asserted, because it had been quoted from, on the air, more than once, by …Rush Limbaugh.

Well, what I wanted to assert was “You might be a redneck if …you think everybody has heard of your book because it was quoted by Rush Limbaugh. In fact you might be a redneck if …you want anybody to know your book was quoted by Rush Limbaugh.” But I didn't want Joanne to get yelled at anymore, and anyway I believe unreservedly in acknowledging sources as I become aware of them, so we ran a little box with my next column, saying that if I had known about those books I would have given them credit.

You probably aren't a redneck if …you sic lawyers on people, but Foxworthy is from Hapeville, Georgia, which happens to be the home of what used to be my favorite barbecue place, the Flying Pig. I used to take a cab over there every time I had a layover in the Atlanta airport, which is right near Hapeville. When I went to the Flying Pig during the Atlanta Olympics, however, it had been taken over by new management and the pork sandwich was no longer any damn good. It's a shame in this world.

The grill and the coals and all are right there behind the counter, you can see the meat cooking, and it used to be cooked right (I don't know what they were doing to it when I went there during the Olympics; it was a shame), and you'd ask for outside (crispy) or inside meat on your sandwich, or half and half, and you'd watch the man go back in there among the salubrious fumes and cut you the kind of meat you wanted.

“I bet you smell good when you leave here at night,” I told the man once. “Yeah,” he said. “My girlfriend's dogs jump all over me.”

Judging from where he is from, at any rate, Foxworthy comes by his redneck references honestly. You can't say that about New Yorkers. And to tell you the truth, I'm not sure how good an idea it is for Foxworthy to push this redneck thing.

Here is the American Heritage Dictionary definition of redneck:

Offensive slang. 1. Used as a disparaging term for a member of the white rural laboring class, especially in the southern United States. 2. One who is regarded as having a provincial, conservative, often bigoted sociopolitical attitude.

Both my grandfathers were Southerners who worked with their hands, and the next generation retained a certain salt-of-the-earth savor, I am pleased to say, as it established itself in the middle class. My maternal grandfather died young of dissolution, but all the other relatives I know about—except for one hard-drinking Wylie who served as a negative example—were respectable teetotaling Methodists. My father, who was so good at upward mobility that he became, among other things, head of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, was pleased to assert that his grandfather was “poor as owl dung,” but that didn't make great-grandaddy a redneck except to the extent that a farmer who worked his own patch of land got burned by the sun.

My father's father did chew tobacco, and so for years did I, from hanging around ballplayers (and because I thought my grandfather was cool), but I have quit, and I'm pretty sure none of my living relatives chews. My parents looked down on country music. I admire it, except that most of it these days is as slick and denatured as that barbecue in Hapeville.[*]

When I was growing up, my mother would often identify herself, only semijocularly, with Dogpatch characters—call herself “Weakeyes Yokum when she was looking for her glasses and quote Pappy Yokum's “As any fool can plainly see. Ah see.” She would also refer to herself (her name was Louise) as Loweezy, after Snuffy Smith's hard-pressed hillbilly wife.

Where does that leave us? Reruns of Hogan's Heroes are very popular in Germany lately. Let's talk about that some other time.

In this country, there's a book out called The Redneck Manifesto. Its author, Jim Goad, isn't Southern: “My mother was urban Philly garbage, my father was rural Vermont scum. Together they fled to a concrete Dog-patch five miles outside the City of Brotherly Love.”

But I guess Goad's po-white indentured-servant forebears were Southern originally, and he wants to argue that they were as enslaved as any black person. Yeah, well, maybe in the eighteenth century, but I think they've had a while to get over it and mix in. Goad is not a bad writer. In fact, he nicely deconstructs the facile ascription of prejudice to “hate.” Nor is he a stereotypical racist; in fact, he contends, persuasively, that folks who are regarded as white trash are far more likely to hang out with black folks than sociologists are. Some of his protests sound a lot like what I've heard covering Ku Klux Klan rallies, but then economic arguments at Klan rallies have made sense to me. Poor people get screwed, and poor white people can't even get any sympathy. Howard Dean tried to get Democrats to consider this, but the bien pensant recoiled.

Goad contends that he is not asking for any special consideration for having po-white roots, he just doesn't see why he should have to feel beholden to anybody else just because he is white. But he makes such a heated case for rednecks’ special grounds for feeling this way that I'm tempted to say you might be a redneck if …you start waving a whole new identity-politics flag at a time when everybody is tired of hearing about any ethnic group's hard lot. And when Goad gets off into defense of jack-leg militias, he loses me.

At any rate, anybody who puts me forward as a redneck is hard up for one. I spend a good deal of my time in the same neighborhood as Seinfeld. Right now I don't even own a dog. I don't want to go too far in saying how poor an excuse for a redneck I'd be if I tried, though. I will say this: I am less of a redneck than Michael Jordan was a baseball player. But that doesn't mean I am about to stand up in New York City and deny that I'm one. Don Logan, when he was chief executive officer of Time Incorporated, was interviewed by the New York Post. Logan is from Alabama. The interviewer asked him, out of the blue, if he'd ever eaten squirrel. If you're from Alabama, you may well have, if there's red blood in your veins, and even if you haven't, you're not going to deny it. You'll come off finicky. Logan said yes he had. The next day, a headline appeared in the Post that began like this: “Squirrel-Eating Executive Says…”

Once a friend of mine introduced me to a New York audience by quoting a book review that summed me up as “Bubba goes to Harvard.” That didn't set well with me either, but I didn't say anything. He meant well. So did the book reviewer. If only somebody obnoxious would call me Bubba or redneck or something….

The closest I have come to protesting has been to write this limerick, for my own amusement:

A man in Manhattan named Irving

Finds people named Bubba unnerving.

Not that he's met

Ary one yet.

He did try grits once—one serving.

All I said at the 92nd Y was, “There are a lot more sophisticated rednecks than I am.” (I was trying to think of good examples. Will Campbell? Cormac McCarthy? Somebody told me he saw Cormac McCarthy playing g-olf, at some literary retreat, in lime-green pants.)

“And one of them is in the White House,” said Queenan, and I just let it go. Humor was the topic. Folks hadn't come there to hear me be ethnically sensitive.

Listen. If I were the most sophisticated redneck in the world, I'd be a lot more interesting writer.

The same goes for the “Blue-Collar Comedy Tour” Foxworthy has led around the country. I watched the DVD of Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy and those other countrypolitan stand-ups, and they made me laugh a couple of times, but all of them put together couldn't carry Junior Samples's demijohn. Their hair is too nice, looks like it's got artificial highlights. They smile along with themselves too much. They mug to indicate that they're being funny—mark of the comedy hack. (A straight face needn't be impassive—Richard Pryor's was expressively volatile, and Sarah Silverman plays hers like a Moog—but it should never be the same face that the comedian wants from the audience.) They do a lot of potty and sex material, but there's no funk to it; it no doubt goes over well at corporate functions. They are to Jerry Clower or Brother Dave Gardner as Mountain Dew, the cloying soft drink, is to buttermilk or moonshine. The only notes you could call political, on the DVD, were an avid reference to capital punishment and “I disappeared like a set of rims at a Puff Daddy concert,” which might have been droll if there had been any sense that anybody present cared whether it was racist or not. The only envelope these “blue-collar” boys are pushing is the pay envelope, except the kind of money they make doesn't come that way. Recently Comedy Central announced a “Rednexploitation Weekend.” I thought it was going to be about Republican strategy, but, no, it was reruns of Foxworthy and company. My people, my people.

Why Communism Didn't Originate in South Carolina

Why it is that everybody who aspires anymore to head up the U.S. government—a government which the South only grudgingly acknowledges—must either arise from the South, or condescend to it? For instance, John Kerry started out suggesting that the Democrats ought to look away from the South, which made sense as far as numbers went, and the next thing you knew he was picking a Southern running mate and proclaiming himself a fan of NASCAR. And it seemed like every speaker at his nominating convention—all the good ones, anyway—were Southern. Southerners will make a convention, or a funeral, or any other kind of gathering, go.

And yet, the great majority of Southern voters looked at Kerry and said, Plppph. He was just exactly who they didn't want. For a hundred years, Southern voters despised the party of Lincoln, and now they predominantly love the party of Tom DeLay. So we're not talking good taste here. Or consistency: The Republican South keeps throwing up white national Democrats who get the black vote. “What kind of mojo does the South have working?

Personally, I love NASCAR about as much as I do hockey. The only thing that would get me to watch a car race on TV would be if they ran over a hockey player every couple of laps. But I covered the Atlanta 500 once for Sports Illustrated, and I liked the people. I was standing next to Richard Petty at a cocktail party when a diminutive old lady came up and said to Petty, admiringly but teasingly, “Look at you, you're way up there, and the rest of us are way down here.”

Richard Petty could have gotten defensive, or effusive. Lots of icons in other areas of culture would have grunted and turned away. “What he did was, without changing expression, he bent at the knee. He didn't lean over, he didn't hunker down, he just gradually lowered himself about fifteen inches until his and the lady's faces were at the same level. “While passing the time of day with her, he stayed like that, which looked silly and couldn't have been comfortable, but he acted like it was normal polite behavior. The old lady kept a straight face, but you could tell she was tickled. She moved on, and Petty resumed his full height. He didn't wink or anything—it was cool. The South has a feel for the common touch. But you know and I know, there's more to Southern politics than that.

One night I called in, as scheduled, to a radio talk show in the South. I was taking a break from a bibulous dinner with congenial Massachusetts liberals, and all I wanted to do was promote my anthology of Southern humor. But the host of this show was not amused. He took me severely to task for having written, in the anthology's introduction, that Southern culture had not produced much in the way of abstract thinking. He considered this an aspersion.

Well, I told him, I had tried but failed to come up with a single Southern theorizer of note between Thomas Jefferson and Edward O. Wilson.

“John C. Calhoun,” the host said.

This took me aback. The only idea I had ever heard associated with that craggy old antebellum South Carolinian was nullification—the theory that states of the Union could decline to go along with federal laws they deemed unconstitutional. That seemed to me a stratagem, rather than an idea, in the large, ethereal, egghead sense. For one thing, nullification never really caught on. An abstract idea doesn't have to work: Its proponents can always accuse its practitioners of not getting it right. But to count for anything as an idea, a notion really ought to catch on, for a while. For another thing, nullification was presented as a way to preserve minority rights and (by the way) slavery. I didn't think John C. Calhoun counted much against my feeling that the great majority of Southern homes could have a sign hanging in the parlor saying:

WE DON'T THINK MUCH

OF IDEAS, AS SUCH.

But I read up on Calhoun and learned that he was regarded widely— not just in the South—as the most brilliant political thinker of his day. Personally, he struck people as a thinking machine. Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, called him “a mental and moral abstraction.” He was haggard and unhealthy-looking, too, so who am I to question his bona fides. A century later, political historians argued that Calhoun's critique of Northern capitalism anticipated the thinking of Karl Marx. Maybe that's why Southern intellectualism ground to a halt: the twentieth century would have made even less sense if Communism had been from South Carolina, for the wealthy, and called Calhounery.

Was nullification a blind alley, then? I'd say it was something else, something even less practical and more foolproof than an idea. Nullification was based on the principle of “concurrent majority” rule, which boiled down to this: that a law, to be legitimate, must be supported not only by a majority of the people who are for it but also by a majority of the people who are against it. “Concurrent majority rule” is nullification's Möbius twist.

You know what a Möbius strip is. Take a strip of paper, give it one twist and glue the ends together, and run your finger along one surface, and the next thing you know you're running it along the other surface. You've got a strip of paper with only one side.

What does this mean? That you can't separate inner from outer, subjective from objective? That's postmodern, I believe. Or that anybody who tells you there's two sides to everything is just trying to get you to take his side? That's Southern. Eurocentric philosophy has come to realize only fairly recently, and with great ahas and alarums, that objective rationality is not the bedrock of human affairs. In the South, nobody ever thought it was. The South doesn't produce ideas, it produces rhetoricians, yarn spinners, visionaries, musicians, demagogues …all sorts of people Plato would have expelled from his Republic. And it produces Möbius notions.

Consider Robert E. Lee's most famous remark, as he watched his troops win overwhelmingly at Fredericksburg, slaughtering bluecoats by the thousands:

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”

A great utterance. But when you think about it, what does it mean? “Was General Lee saying that if war were less terrible, it would be worse, because we'd get too attached to it? A more logical, proactive utterance would have been “Boys, war doesn't get any better than this, and it's still too terrible. Let's quit.” But, of course, that wouldn't have done. (How often, in real-life situations, has sweet reason done?) The only thing I can figure is that Lee was warning us against big-time college football.

I'll tell you a Southerner who won over the world without any resort to pure logic: Elvis. He told an interviewer once, “There's not an intellectual son of a gun walking the face of the earth that could make me believe a certain thing unless I really thought it. So, I don't try to surround myself with a group of intellectuals.”

Oh, sure, intellectuals surround Elvis, now, when he is not around to stave them off, but the Southerners who have made great contributions to world culture—in the blues, jazz, rock and roll, country music, folk art, fiction, cuisine, and humor—have not sprung from an educated elite. They have arisen from people who, if they'd made it to deputy sheriff, would have been coming up in the world. Well, Mark Twain's father was a sort of jackleg judge but not much of one, and William Faulkner's paternal grandfather was a lawyer among other things, but the other things included killing people in brawls and getting shot to death himself. On both sides of his family, Faulkner came from roughnecks distinguished by drunkenness and absquatulation.

They probably absquatulated in part because they liked the sound of the word. Nullification has a certain rollicky ring to it, too, at least the ification part, after the part that means “nothing;” and remember what Paul Newman said in Cool Hand Luke: “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”

How about jury nullification? It richly earned a bad name in the South before and during the civil rights movement. But then there's the story about the jury that heard the case of a highly regarded, hardworking neighbor accused of stealing a rich, miserly, none-too-upstanding neighbor's mule. The jury brought in a verdict of not guilty, but he had to give the mule back. The judge said that didn't make sense. The jury deliberated further and came back and said, okay, then, he's not guilty and he can keep the mule, because he must need it worse than the owner does or, knowing him, he would never've stolen it. That's Möbius justice. (But that doesn't mean that “to each according to his need,” as a governing principle, would ever have gone over in South Carolina.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was from Massachusetts and fought in the Union army, but after the war, as a highly influential U.S. Supreme Court justice, he wrote: “The first requirement of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.” That principle has let the white South off the hook at times in history when de facto nullification was going on. It all depends on what the meaning of community is. I remember reading about a man convicted of robbing houses in California somewhere, who, when the judge asked him whether he had anything to say, said yes. He said he had not been convicted by a jury of his peers, as was his right, because his peers were burglars. Members of the housebreaking community. That didn't get him anywhere, even in California, but the man had a Möbius point.

In Virginia a while ago, I came upon a many-volumed encyclopedia of Southern biography printed in 1900. It said that John C. Calhoun “was upholding the rights of the Southern people against the assaults of the abolitionists. The charges made by the latter against the system of slavery he denounced as false. On the other hand, he never grew weary in the work of telling how the Southern people were generously lifting upward the entire body of negro slaves to a higher and nobler plane of life.”

On the other hand? What's “on the other hand” about that? Sounds like two sides of the same hand to me. But then “the one hand, the other hand” doesn't make any sense unless the hands are connected by a particular body and particular bodies tend to be partial to themselves. The body in this case was that of “the Southern people”—slaves not being considered, even after thirty-five years of retrospect, to be part of that category. We know better than that now, and heaven help us for what we don't know better than yet.

Heaven, in that connection, is the Möbius twist.

How about This Peculiar Institution?

Iwent with an old Mississippi liberal friend of mine to the shortlived Broadway musical The Civil War. Too pageant-y for my taste, but it fit his pistol, in large part because it stressed the fact that the Civil “War was about slavery. He was sick and tired of hearing people maintain that the real issue was freight rates or something.

It hit me, how far I had drifted from a Southern context. I am surrounded by people who believe the Civil “War was about slavery. I'm lucky if they don't assume too firmly that slavery was my fault.

Living in the Northeast makes me feel more Southern, if anything, than I felt growing up in the South, because so many people I meet say to me, as if it were perfectly mannerly, “I see you've kept the accent,” or “What are you doing up here?” A while back at a Manhattan cocktail party—in honor of my book—I met a woman in television with whom I had spoken several times on the phone. Her face fell. “You look too urban,” she said.

“Uh?” I said.

“You're wearing a suit. I thought you'd be chewing on a blade of grass.”

I believe, myself, that the Civil “War was about slavery. People who say it wasn't are like people who say that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was not about sex. They have a point—broader constitutional issues and narrower grievances were also at stake—but, hey, come on. No doubt it was morally convenient for Northerners (who hadn't gotten around to outlawing slavery in all their own states) to declare that they were fighting to free the slaves, as it was for Southerners to deny that they were fighting to keep them enslaved. But if all that blood was shed over tariffs, then secession was an even dumber move than I think it was.

To say that the Rebs were fighting to preserve “the Southern way of life” is euphemistic. What do people mean when they say they are opposed to “the homosexual lifestyle”? They mean they just can't accept that homophobia (pace Trent Lott) is a disease. I don't mean to classify the antebellum Southern way of life as a disease (someone, in fact, should come up with a catchy term for anti-Southern bias— Dixiephobia?), but Southern hotheads’ refusal to admit that slavery was carcinogenic (compounded by their dread of what was oxymoroni-cally referred to as “servile rebellion”—slave revolt) metastasized into bellicosity.

In the South before the war, there were several ways of life. One of them was that of being treated as property. Another way of life back then was that of treating some people as property and not wanting to admit that it was morally wrong. Another was trying to make a living on your own little hardscrabble farm. Those farmers may have wound up doing most of the fighting against the Northern invasion, but there was room in the Union for their lifestyle. It was slavery that brought out the self-righteousness on both sides, got the blood up, and reduced the Southern way of life to a war-torn commonality.

But I don't get any pleasure out of taking up such a position here, because I am surrounded by people who take some more simplistic version of it for granted. Nor do they get any pleasure out of hearing such talk from me. If they're going to talk to a cop (off duty), they want it be one who will admit to being trigger-happy. If they're going to talk to a white Southerner, they want it to be one who will own up to a vestigial affection for Simon Legree. I spent some time in London back during the Reagan administration, and seldom have I irritated anyone more than I did lefty Brit journalists by calmly agreeing with them when they informed me that my president was an ignoramus. At least over there I was regarded as an inauthentic American.

Not that white Northeasterners generally care much about slavery anymore. They roll their eyes, with, to be sure, considerable reason, when Larry Johnson of the New York Knicks, who has an $84 million contract, informs the media that he and his teammates are looked down upon as “rebellious slaves.” The Civil War, the musical, was, as I say, short-lived, and when I try to tell people, black or white, that the slavery-obsessed movie Beloved, though muddled and overwrought, is as incandescent as go-girl fluff like How Stella Got Her Groove Back is silly, I get the feeling that they think it's time I got over white Southern guilt.

That really gets my goat. I hated Mississippi Burning because of its despicable misapprehension of the civil rights movement (Pauline Kael, bless her, called it “morally repugnant”), but when I said so once on the radio in the North, the show's host remarked in a sympathetic tone of voice, “Well, you probably had friends in the Klan.” The movie version of The Color Purple made me cringe because it was so heavy-handed and cartoonish, but a lot of people seem to feel that a white Southerner has no room to talk.

I demand that room. It isn't paradoxical for a white Southerner not to be over slavery yet. It's natural. Slavery still colors non-Southerners’ generic attitude toward me, so I have a selfish interest.

What I would love to do is attach some comparable stigma to a Northeastern insitution. The stock market springs to mind. Its professed purpose, to provide capital for business expansion, is fine by me, but then slavery was regarded by slaveowners as a sound business proposition. Speculation in the stock market wreaked destruction in the thirties, and it may well be turning the economy into a bubble today. Thirty years ago people were well-advisedly content to build up a nest egg by investing in home ownership for themselves and others, via preinflation savings and loans. Now people are afraid not to help keep pumping up the Dow out of all proportion to the productivity of the companies they are investing in. The companies, in turn, are more intent upon keeping the price of their stock on the upswing than they are upon making good products. Call me a foot-shuffling country boy, but when I hear the stock market being referred to as “the national pastime,” it don't sound right to me.

“More than ever,” says Newsweek, “achieving the American Dream is a game of chance—and picking the right stock.” Gambling is a venial sin compared to owning human beings, but when the stakes are everybody's savings (prospectively, everybody's Social Security, if you please), well, there used to be general agreement that organized gambling should not get too powerful.

Of course, now, I don't know much about the stock market. Don't even have any money in it, if you can believe that. In fact, when a prominent Southern brokerage offered me a good deal of cash some years ago to appear in a series of commercials, I turned it down, because I didn't know nothing about broking stocks and also because the catch line I was supposed to deliver, “Southern and smart,” sounded a lot like “Southern but smart” to me.

I am no abolitionist, no warmonger either. But what if a consensus were to arise in the South that the stock market has become a corrupt institution antithetical to freedom? Sure would be gratifying to hear Northerners try to defend it on some other ground than how hard it would hit their economy if they had to give it up.

The other night a New York stockbroker told me the reason the market was all out of whack was that “every janitor has a 401(k) and chooses the riskier, high-income option.”

“Just as the only problem with slavery,” I said, “was the irresponsibility of the slaves.” It's nice to be dismissed as a dangerous radical for a change.

The Worm Bubble

When Krispy Kreme doughnuts arrived in New York City in 1996 I was pleased, and in fact wrote an appreciation for The New York Times. (See “Food-Song Maven,” p. 91.) But: “What if this fine old Southern institution got corrupted? Then one evening, sure enough, I happened upon the Third Avenue outlet, and saw that the neon HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW sign was lit. “Here, now you'll see!” I said to my Northern companion, whom I had been at pains to convince of hot Krispy Kremes’ divinity. “We went inside, my mouth watering for freshly risen yeastiness with the glaze still oozy, rolling off the line “Right at This Moment,” to quote the company's “Web site. And what did I find? For the first time in my life? The sign was hot, the doughnuts not. They sat there, having rolled some time before.

I expostulated. This just wasn't done! “The manager told us to leave that light on all the time,” explained the counterman, with, yes, a shrug.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Room-temperature Krispy Kreme doughnuts are not bad. If your tooth is sweet enough, they are quite good. They are just not heavenly enough, I find, to beguile a lipid-conscious adult into feeling that a few can't hurt you. “Whereas eating Krispy Kremes fresh off the line is comparable to eating sweet corn fresh off the stalk. One can no more expect that Krispy Kremes be hot all the time than that life be sweet all the time. That very element of serendipity is one reason people who grew up with Krispy Kremes are so fond of them. An honestly nonconstant HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW sign is the last vestige of unpredetermined marketing, neon or non, in America today. It is actual hard consumer information from the company—as if automobiles assembled on days when the workers were neither getting over a weekend nor looking toward one were so marked.

Now Krispy Kreme has been caught flirting with Enronism. In 2000, the company went public. Its stock soared by 400 percent …then began to decline. In February 2002, the New York Post reported that the company had moved debt off its balance sheet by means of “an accounting gimmick.” The very next day, according to a subsequent story in the Post, “The company backed off its unconventional accounting by saying it will move a $35 million expense …onto its books instead of trying to conceal it with a shell device called a special purpose entity.’ ” The “change was made,” reported the Post, “to keep investors from worrying that Krispy Kreme could wind up like Enron and its phantom debts.”

Remember that old expression, “I'll bet dollars to doughnuts”? If you ask me, high finance and doughnuts don't mix. And I'll tell you what I'm afraid the next revelation is going to be. Let us couch it in terms of testimony before a congressional committee by an old boy named Harlan Berry, say, as follows:

We were all right as long as we were in just worms, themselves. My wife, Ineta, had painted us a real pretty sign out front, inspired by the fact being that a worm has both sexes. Ineta's sign showed a circular worm with a male face on one end, winking at a female face on the other end, and that gave me and “Worley Pettus the name of our little old shop down by the lake: Familiar Face Bait.

And, okay, bobbers and so on, I could see the sense of diversifying that far. A man comes in, gets a couple dozen red wigglers, and says, “How they catching 'em lately with these?” And I'd say, “What seems to be working best here lately is, take you a bobber and put it about six inches up from your hook—weedless,” you know, and maybe we'd have an extra bobber or weedless hook we would lend them, and sometimes they'd be people not from around here that we'd never see again. And even people we'd known all our lives, they'd have lost the bobber and they'd say, “Oh, we thought you meant to give us that,” and you know good and well they knew better, but since they were regular, we'd mark those bobbers off to customer relations. So it made sense to start selling bobbers, and hooks, and light tackle generally. When it came to crickets, though, I put my foot down. I said, “Worley, we are staying away from crickets. I have worked with crickets and I know—they die on you, and when they don't, they get loose all over everywhere; don't tell me about crickets.”

But I didn't know enough about modern business practices to prevent what did get away from us: worm derivatives.

The problem was, Worley didn't like dealing with the general public. By that I mean people who actually come in and buy things from you. “I don't like customers,” he'd say. “I like investors.” And he didn't like investors in person, either. He liked them in the abstract. “Worley's just not a people person.

For instance, back in the old days Fielder Lomax would come in all the time and just hang around and come up with sayings. Like, “If somebody's buttering you up, watch out. They're fixing to take a bite.” Or, “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But don't let him soak too long.” I remember one day after Worley and I had gotten off into all these derivatives and instruments and one thing and another, Fielder came by and said, “Don't let the sizzle stray too far from the cow.”

I didn't know what he meant exactly, but I didn't mind it. Whereas Worley barred Fielder from the place. “He is not a quality individual,” Worley said. Worley had started reading a lot of business books, and referring to people as “individuals.” I'm not putting all this on Worley, but the truth is, he's not much of an individual person either.

So—well, it started back in the seventies. What we now realize was the “worm bubble.” Somehow the notion arose that there was a whole new ever-expanding global market in worms. Worms were going to solve the world hunger problem by being a source of cheap protein. And worm castings (that's what, excuse me, you call their manure) is, sure enough, rich fertilizer, which somehow gave people the idea that here was a great underexploited resource. And people were baking worm cookies for their novelty value, and zoos supposedly needed all the worms they could get to feed their animals with. You'd read about it in news articles: people were raising worms at home by tossing potato peels and so on into a box of dirt under their sink.

So Worley developed these worm-farm starter kits and set up a mailorder operation, and before you knew it, our main product wasn't bait as such anymore, it was what I guess you could call worm futures. And, of course, the T-shirts and hats with Ineta's familiar-face design, those were real popular, but before I knew it Worley had reincorporated us as Famfac. In Bermuda. With a logo that you couldn't even tell was a worm anymore. And he was selling shares.

“I liked it better when it was just you and me and Ineta's worm,” I said. “That was a pretty worm.”

“Beauty,” said Worley, “is in the eye of the shareholder.”

But it wasn't long before there were more people producing worms to sell to other people who had in mind producing worms for all the people who were going to be marketing worm products around the world, than there were people who actually wanted worms, themselves, in any form. The boom outstripped the demand, because it turned out there wasn't one. More worm farms failed in 1979 alone than at any time in our nation's history.

That didn't stop “Worley. He was already on to the next level. Worms per se, he said, and kits and shirts and caps—they were bricks and mortar. “We are in an age of conceptual equity,” he said, “and there's no reason why the bottom line ever has to bottom out.” He compared worms to solitaire. “You know what's wrong with solitaire?” he said.

“It's not social,” I said.

Worley gave me a look that I would come to know so well, which said I was a man of the old economy. “No,” he said. “What's wrong with solitaire is, there's not enough rows.”

“Rows,” I said.

“Rows of cards. You put down seven rows of cards, with one turned up, right? Not enough for you to count on winning. If you put down eight, nine, ten rows of cards, with two or three of them turned up to start, pretty soon you can't lose.”

“But then it wouldn't rightly be solitaire,” I said.

“You've got to think outside the box,” he said. “You're probably of the old school that doesn't believe in pounding sand down a rathole. But what if you're selling sand?”

“Huh?” I said.

“Look at solitaire again,” he said. “Say you've got some money riding on the game.”

“I don't see any way to gamble on solitaire,” I said. “It would be hard to tell whether I was betting on myself or against myself.”

Worley gave me a wink. Said something about hedges and “signaling tough-mindedness to Wall Street.” I didn't like that wink. I missed the wink that the female end of the worm was giving to the male one. So did Ineta. It was hard on our marriage.

But she and I went for counseling and stuck it out, whereas Worley got caught down at the EZ-OFF/ON motel by the interstate, banging on the ice machine. It's true that for what they charge by the hour over there it wouldn't hurt them to provide free ice. But they say if they did, people would get ice without staying there. That's what Worley tried to maintain he was there for—drive-through ice. And he got all worked up over a man at his level having to deal in hard currency and then for the machine to eat it. But that didn't account for him being naked. So it came out that he was there with some little old gal he met in the Wiggle Room. “Which was the lounge he had insisted we expand into. That quarter he was trying to get back cost him a pretty penny in divorce, which, of course, impacted on our balance sheet, and “Worley had all the family problems that have come out in the media—his daughter Melody, who was the promising athlete, got mixed up in this women's anticorporate collective called Ms. Ockham's Razor and was apprehended for snatching laptops, and his son Chipper joined a musical group called Crucifixion Figurine that took an oath not even to decide in their own minds whether they were kidding, or something.

By that time I didn't have any idea what we were selling. I'd ask “Worley and he'd get a faraway look in his eye and say, “Same thing country music's selling. Loss. It's a faith-based operation.”

And I just let things slide. So if I have to go to the penitentiary along with “Worley, well, anyway, it'll be social. I tell you what, though. I wish now I hadn't put my foot down when it came to crickets. At least when those little scooters get out of hand you know what it is that's keeping you hopping.

“We had to sell off our flagship, the old Familiar Face, to Fielder Lomax. I dropped by there the other day to see how the worms were looking, and Fielder said, “Well, y'all swam with the sharks.”

“I guess so,” I said. “Worley was always saying, A coward dies a thousand deaths.’ ”

“Yep,” said Fielder. “A brave man dies, but younger.”

Gothic Baseball

People call Southern culture Gothic. As in emphasizing the grotesque. So? “What's not to be Gothic about? Life? Please. Your own parents, two people who can't even legally use the same public restroom, perform an inconceivable act together—the upshot of which is, an invisible minnow bearing all of your father's traits plows headlong into an egg (there is no other word for it) bearing all of your mama's; and from this hodgepodge of fish and chicken, you begin to develop. Right on up through birth (don't ask), high school (where, in defiance of logic, most people are not popular), marriage (don't ask), and senility. And then, get this, you die. Literally. How can the South be significantly more Gothic than anywhere else?

As we ponder that question, let's look at an article that appeared recently in The Women's Times, which is published in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. An interview with the actress Sandy Duncan, turned fifty.

Let me just mention that nobody ever calls the Berkshires Gothic. A meeting of the Pittsfield Easter Seal Stroke Club features three local men performing “The Three Wise Men Present a More Positive You.” The Women's Times carries an ad for “Green Tara Healing Arts, Inc., a Holistic Health Center specializing in services for the adult survivor of trauma …Spiritually-based Therapy, Advanced CranioSacral Therapy.” No connection to Scarlett O'Hara's Tara.

Anyway, the Sandy Duncan story. “Sandy's journey begins in East Texas in the heart of the Bible Belt,” reports The Women's Times, and right away—I stifle my first reaction. No, you're not going to catch me defending (yeah, yeah, how 'bout the Holistic Belt?) East Texas. “Sandy explains that her mother, ‘trapped by the times and the locale,’ spent her own childhood following her family from oil field to oil field as Sandy's grandparents struggled to feed their children….”

The story goes on to say that Sandy made her “professional theatrical debut at eleven,” and thereafter her mother encouraged her to “market her talents” beyond East Texas. “Instinctively, Sandy knew the image of a forever young sprite with an unwavering sunny disposition would serve her well…. Slight in build, she moves quickly and gracefully, seeming to mirror such an image.” That image has stood her in good stead, the story reports, not only on Broadway as Peter Pan but also in Roots, for which she won an Emmy nomination. “The happy-go-lucky elf image was also supported by her starring role in …such film classics as Million Dollar Duck, The Cat from Outer Space, and the original Barney videos.”

But then she fell into a bad depression. “Sandy chose not to deny or ‘override the pain.’ Instead, encouraged to sit with her anguish, then to go through it, she courageously worked through several layers of fear. She gradually became aware that …‘I did not want to become a one-hundred-year-old elf.’ ”

Having discovered within herself “a penchant for putting pen to paper,” she has written a play entitled Free Fall.

“Yes,” she explains to The Women's Times, “Free Fall. Life is a boat with no bottom.”

Is that story Gothic? I know it's not Southern. I don't even think Sandy Duncan was actually in Roots. I saw Roots. If I had seen an elf wielding a whip, or even frying chicken, I would remember it.

But here's why that story isn't Southern: the boat metaphor.

Southern life may be Gothic (murky, irrational, fantastic), but Southern figures of speech are in touch with the physical world. Wilson Pickett, of Alabama, once compared musical styles and cars: “You harmonize; then you customize. Now what kid don't want to own the latest model? …You got no cash for music lessons, arrangers, uniforms, backup bands, guitars. No nothin. So look around for a good, solid chassis. This be your twelve-bar blues…. And once you get known for something special, that would be your hood ornament.”

The late Big Jim Folsom figures prominently in any history of Gothic politics in the South, but you never heard him liken life to a bottomless boat. Once, by way of addressing commencement at the University of Alabama, Governor Folsom stood up and modestly explained that he had no education himself and didn't feel qualified to hold up before college graduates any vision of their future. However, he did have something useful to pass on—inexpensive meals that people living alone could fix for themselves. He devoted the rest of his speech to recipes, including his famous poke salad.

Alex Haley, a Tennessee native and the author of Roots, once said, in accepting an award, that he couldn't take full credit for his success. “It's like a turtle on a fencepost. You know he didn't get there by himself.” A strange image of literary eminence. Never mind how the turtle got there, he would rather not be there. Maybe Haley, whose writerliness and veracity suffered some reproach, didn't feel good about where he was. Every time I'm tempted to resent not ever having had the opportunity to make an award-acceptance speech myself, I can just see that turtle there on that post.

But I can't see life as a bottomless boat. If it doesn't have a bottom, it isn't a boat. It might be something that floats, but then there wouldn't be any free fall involved. If it's something that you're born into and it immediately starts to sink—still it wouldn't be free fall, and how and why are you hanging on to it? Not to mention how you would breathe, unless you're some kind of aquatic animal, in which case…

I don't say Southerners can't lapse into the unvisualizable. A friend of mine in Atlanta says she heard somebody on the radio say, “Atlanta—it has seized itself by its bootstraps, and now it's standing tall.” Then, too, isn't that Atlanta all over? It's not in free fall, it's in free rise, a topless bubble.

That's what's so irritating about Atlanta, to Southerners and Northerners as well. It's not Southern; it's fluxational, like life. Unless you just live there and have money and think in terms of the nice street you live on, Atlanta will drive you crazy trying to come up with a figure of speech for it. Good solid Southern images are vehicles to drive people through crazy. (Also, a boat is a vehicle. How can a boat, even with a bottom, be life?)

Granted, the vehicle may get carried away with itself and make things worse. I remember once, in college, riding on the back of a flatbed truck in a float depicting Interfraternity Cooperation, or something. We who were riding were supposed to be shouting out invitations to a big charity do of some kind. Promoting brotherhood, I believe. But the driver of the truck found himself to be enjoying truck driving so much for its own sake that he went faster and faster, so that we clarion callers in the back were reduced to hanging on for dear life and shouting, “Bobby, slow down!” The medium is the message. The notion of fraternal organizations’ fostering breadth of brotherhood was flawed to begin with—there were separate Jewish and non-Jewish fraternities, there were separate fraternities and sororities, there was a separate organization for “independents” (people whom no fraternity wanted), and there were no black students in the whole college—so the statement we conveyed as we hurtled through the streets made sense, as a matter of fact. Instinctively, Bobby may have known what he was doing.

Probably, speaking of Gothic, so did the ancient German tribe of Goths, although they struck other early Europeans as barbarous, uncivilized. Not our sort. Outlandish. When the Visigoths (who were too Gothic even for the Ostrogoths) whipped Rome, that's when the Dark Ages began. Well, what came to be known as Gothic architecture “reflected the exalted religious intensity, the pathos, and the self-intoxication with logical formalism that were the essence of the medieval,” according to The Columbia Encyclopedia. Do the French get defensive about that Chartres cathedral?

Just a couple of months ago, a Frenchwoman told me, on first acquaintance, that she didn't trust Southerners because the South had oppressed black people so. What was I going to do, deny it? I said, well, I knew it was true and knew it was a shame. She was a guest in my country, and was probably born after France's Nazi phase, so I didn't even counterattack. It occurred to me later that I might have given her something to think about by citing Harold Bloom's assertion that since there are no soliloquies in classic French drama, the French don't appreciate “the extraordinary originality of the way Shakespeare's protagonists ponder to themselves and, on the basis of that pondering, change.”

Of course she could have come right back at me with, “So how rich is Southern culture in heroic inner bootstrap dialectic?” The French ward off bottomless free fall, layers of fear, all those things that Sandy Duncan went head to head with (“sit with her anguish”—that expression registers) by spinning out reductive abstract theories. Southerners prefer concrete figures of speech and anecdotes about life.

I found just such an anecdote the other day in a book called Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting and Gambling in the Old South, by Kenneth S. Greenberg. According to Greenberg, it took a long time for baseball to take hold in the South, because Southern gentlemen found it dishonorable to run after hitting a ball. I don't know about that, but—here's the anecdote. After the Civil “War, a Union veteran named George Haven Putnam recalled a baseball game “played by Northern soldiers outside their fortifications in the Deep South. While the ballplayers focused on fielding and hitting, Confederate skirmishers attacked them, shot the right fielder, captured the center fielder, and stole the baseball.”

That's showing 'em! And why should that anecdote make me feel defensive? Sure, I love baseball and hated being in the army. But it's not as if those Yankees were invited to come South and set up fortifications. Then to play ball outside the walls! That's insulting. I'd say the ball was in the Confederates’ court, so to speak.

The original Goths were invaders. I know invasion is in the eye of the invaded, but, still, calling Southerners Gothic could be projection on Northerners’ part. A lot of people would call burning down Georgia more Gothic than shooting a right fielder. Particularly one who was probably standing in the trampled remains of somebody's pea patch, or even on somebody's mama's grave.

Generally you stick your weakest player out in right field, in a pickup game like that. Lots of times a right fielder, realizing this, will become isolated and start brooding, pondering to himself. And all this time he's standing in the trampled remains of a pea patch that people planted around their mama's grave because she loved peas so much? And he knows it, too. I can just see it, sumbitch shot himself.

Giving Good Gravy

Iguess I am one of the go-to guys on grits, etc., because in the course of one day I got a letter asking me to tell “what is the weirdest thing you ever ate off a hog” (the best I could come up with was nuts, but I should have said, “Apricot sorbet—the hog went whooo!”) and John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, phoned to request a fond oral recollection of eating, for a big Southern cookbook he's putting together. I could have sworn there was nothing left in memory's pantry that I hadn't served already, but, tickled to be called upon, I tried to rustle something up. I started telling Edge about my mother's giblet gravy and then her other gravies, the word for which was fine: thin, as in nonglobby, but rich, as in sumptuous. For instance, her roast-beef gravy, with its delicate little glistening grease-bubble traces, “like halos,” I said.

And I thought to myself, “Why am I giving this away?

“I'm selling my pork chops, but I'm giving my gravy away,” sang Memphis Minnie, but she did get paid—not enough, undoubtedly—for singing it. As did Cootie “Williams and His Rug-Cutters for “Ain't the Gravy Good,” Link Davis for “Rice and Gravy Blues” (my mother made one kind of beef gravy to put over rice, another kind for mashed potatoes), Dee Dee Sharp for “Gravy (For My Mashed Potatoes),” Cisco Houston for “Beans, Bacon and Gravy,” the Ink Spots for “Pork Chops and Gravy,” the Nighthawks for “Lickin Gravy,” King David's Jug Band for “What's That Tastes Like Gravy?” Johnnie Temple and the Harlem Hamfats for “What Is That Smells Like Gravy?” and others too numerous to mention. All of whom sound, on recordings, like they are working up an appetite. So was I, on the phone there with John T. Edge, as I extemporized back over the years regarding my mother's gravy.

“Which God knows she gave away. Sometimes she'd say it did her a world of good to see how hearty I ate, but in another mood she'd say, “You give and give and give, and what do you get in return?” By “you” she meant herself. Money can't buy gravy that has that much going on.

If you were a ballplayer back in the old days you'd better not say, out of love for the game, “I'd play for free,” because management would take you up on it. So players went to court and formed a tough union and got agents, and now an ordinary person has to float a bank loan to take his family to see the Arizona Diamondbacks or whatever the hell they're called.

As far as negotiating leverage goes, what you want is for somebody to want, badly, for you to do something you don't want to do. So you say to yourself, “If I'm going to do something I don't want to do, it's only fair to ask them for more than they want to pay,” and eventually both of you are doing something you'd rather not. It's better than how Communism turned out, but it doesn't do anybody's heart good. Which is why I am sitting here writing this, instead of a seven-figure blockbuster. That's all right, you don't have to say anything.

You know the old expression: “He's got a handful of ‘gimme’ and a mouthful of ‘much obliged.’ ” To keep on showing generosity to such a person—who wants to take, take, take all the time without, in fact, feeling any obligation in return—is like pounding sand down a rathole. I have never pounded sand down a rathole myself, but I gather that people who have, have concluded either that a rathole is literally abysmal or that a rat can dig faster than anybody can pound sand.

These are stingy concepts, ill befitting a nation many of whose legislators have had to be restrained, over the years, from proclaiming it officially Christian. (To be sure, the person accused of having the aforementioned handful and mouthful has often been a preacher.) We may need something grander than folk wisdom to keep us on the generous path.

The epic of giving, I guess, is Les Misérables. I haven't read the novel or attended the musical, but in the 1935 movie version, Jean Valjean (Fredric March) learns from a saintly abbot that “Life is not to take, life is to give.” This belief makes Valjean (as opposed to his legalistic pursuer, Javert, played by Charles Laughton looking a bit like a joyless John Candy dressed as Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee) a beautiful soul.

So beautiful that I don't see how anybody in his or her right mind can identify. Let's face it: Valjean is in love with his ward, Cosette. He comes to realize, however, that he should suppress his own desire and let her go on and make a life with the young man she loves. Okay. I am willing to stipulate that a Frenchman (though not any Frenchman I have met) might be open-hearted enough, in prosperous middle age, to toss away such advantage over this young rival as he has. “Life is to give,” Valjean reminds himself—so even though he is just one step ahead of Javert, who means to make him a galley slave again, our hero races toward Javert to extricate this young man, a radical student, from a melee with the police. He finds the youth out cold.

Well. If the kid is going to get knocked unconscious at critical junctures, maybe he wouldn't be good for Cosette. There's another young woman—a sexier one, frankly, than Cosette—who is in love with this young man. Probably they would make a better French couple. And Cosette has already indicated, if sadly, her willingness to escape with Valjean, for his sake. Why not give her a chance to prove that life is to give?

But if that is what passes through Valjean's mind, even for a moment, we get no indication of it from Fredric March. He hoists the youth onto his back! Will any man, of any nationality, be unselfish enough to carry, bodily, a prospective foster son-in-law—let alone one who is apparently unemployed and might well need financial assistance to finish college-through the sewers of Paris in liquid filth (the opposite of gravy) up to his nostrils? That is what Valjean does. I don't believe Jesus Christ would have done it. If he had, no one with any sense would have organized a religion around him.

I am not denying that to live is to give. I am just saying that Les Misérables doesn't prove it.

What exactly is meant by “I'm selling my pork chops, but I'm giving my gravy away”? As I take it: I'm selling my body, but my essence has no price. The other lyrics don't necessarily drive this interpretation home. They are along these lines:

I met a man the other day,

What you reckon he say:

“You that lady giving gravy away?

'Cause if you is, I will be back today.”

The spirit conveyed, though, is of an artist who embraces the marketplace as best she can (that America is a commercial nation we needn't bother to proclaim, and Memphis Minnie never had enough of an edge on Mammon to worry about being corrupted by a gravy train) while keeping her soul by giving it freely.

Lewis Hyde argues in Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property that neither the talent nor the product of an artist is a commodity. It is a gift. The trick—the neat trick, as lives of artists all remind us—is to keep body and soul together long enough to bear this out. How about nonartists? Give to the arts until it hurts, I suppose, and cling to the faith that you are not pounding sand down a rathole.

Beyond that: Love somebody (not an artist, would be my advice).[*] But to what extent is earthly love a gift? “Would you still love me if I weren't the fine governor of the great state of Louisiana?” asks Paul Newman as Earl Long in the movie Blaze. “Would you still love me,” sensibly responds Lolita Davidovich as the stripper-artiste Blaze Starr, “if I had little tits and worked in a fish house?” (Once, in Baltimore celebrating the World Series, I squirted Silly String, loop, loop, around the real Blaze Starr's by-then-almost-overwhelming décolletage, although I didn't know her personally, and she seemed pleased; but that's just lagniappe.)

You know how the song “The Glory of Love” goes: “You got to give a little, take a little, let your poor heart break a little….”

A little? Measured heartbreak? Bo Schembechler, then the football coach at the University of Michigan, once told me that playing the game the way it's meant to be played requires “a certain amount of abandon.” Talk about neat tricks. When Sonny Liston, the doomed heavyweight fighter, was asked how hard he had hit a man on a given occasion, Liston replied, “I didn't have no gauge.”

Neither did my mother.

In general. Not a reflection on any particular artist I have known, including, God knows, the one I met and settled down with after writing the above.

The Way Folks Were Meant to Eat

These days people worry so much about their hearts that they don't eat hearty. The way folks were meant to eat is the way my family ate when I was growing up in Georgia. We ate till we got tired. Then we went “Whoo!” and leaned back and wholeheartedly expressed how much we regretted that we couldn't summon up the strength, right then, to eat some more.

When I moved to the Northeast, I met someone who said she liked to stop eating while she was still just a little bit hungry. I was taken aback. Intellectually, I could see it was a sound and even an admirable policy. Lord knows it kept her in better shape than mine did me. I just thought it was insane.

We have only so much appetite allotted to us in our time on this earth, was my feeling, and it's a shame to run any risk of not using it all. People I grew up with wanted to get on out beyond their appetite a ways, to make sure they used all of it. They wanted to get fu.ll. They intended to get full. If a meal left them feeling just a touch short of overstuffed, they were disappointed. I knew a man once who complained about little Spanish peanuts because they never added up to enough to give him any reason to quit eating them till they were all gone, and then he was still up to eating some more. “I can't get ahead of them,” he said.

But eating right is not just a question of quantity. Primarily it's quality. It's not letting any available good taste go unswallowed. The people I grew up with didn't just take a few of the most obvious bites out of a piece of chicken and then decide abstractly, “I have, in effect, eaten this piece of chicken.” They recognized that the institution of fried chicken demands a great deal of chickens, and my people felt honor bound to hold up their end. They ate down to the bones and pulled the bones apart and ate in between the bones and chewed on the bones themselves. And the bones that weren't too splintery they gave to the dogs, who were glad to have them. (Unless they're overbred, dogs are essentially Southern.)

Eating is like reading and writing. A book ought to be something that a person can read the way a person is meant to eat chicken: something with plenty of unabashed and also intimate flavor, ruddy and deep-dyed flavor, flavor hard to separate from the structure, flavor that is never really exhaustible. (Even the dogs don't get the last of it, because they eat too fast.) Getting all the good of it should be the determination of a reader (new school of criticism, maybe?), as well as an eater. And a writer as well as a cook should be determined to get plenty of good—more than necessary—into it.

Eating also goes hand in hand, so to speak, with talking. Folks I grew up with talked while they ate, about what they were eating. When several sides and generations of a family of such folks sat down together around a table, with ten or twelve generous platters of food in front of them, they sounded like this:

“…and us to thy service, amen.”

“Pitch in.”

“I don't know where to start first.”

“Mmmmm-m.”

“Big Mama has outdone herself tonight.”

“Well, I just hope y'all can enjoy it.”

“I BLEEVE I COULD EAT A HORSE.”

“Would you look at them tomaters.”

“Hooo, don't they look good?”

“Now, Tatum, slow down.”

“You let that child enjoy himself.”

“You'd think we didn't feed him at home.”

“He didn't get 'ny snap beans! Lord, pass that child some snap beans!”

“Lilah, how 'bout you over there? You need something more. Butter-beans!”

“Ooo, land, naw, I'm workin’ on this corn.”

“Come on, just a dab.”

“Well, you talked me into it.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Awful early, to be gettin’ this gooda corn.”

“Euline, would you send that okry back around?”

“Look at me, just aputtin’ it away.”

“I'M EATIN’ LIKE A FIELD HAND!”

“Little more tea, to wash it down?”

“Mm-m, these greens!”

“ANYBODY WANT ANYTHING?”

“I will have one more heppin’ of that squash, if nobody minds.”

“It's so goooood.”

“Little cornbread, to sop that juice?”

“One more moufful of ham, then I do have to stop, sure 'nuff.”

“Look at all that chicken left! Have a little more there, Ferrell.”

“Where would he put it?”

“And just a spoonful of that gravy, to put on my peas.”

“Ferrell! We didn't raise you to put gravy on your peas!”

“Celia, now you let that child eat the way he likes it.”

“Mm. Mmm. Mm. ”

“More rolls, anybody?”

“I think this is all I can hold.”

“You better eat some more of this good chicken!”

“No'm, I got to save room for pie.”

“There's pie? All this and pie?”

“Now, Neety, you know good and well we wouldn't let y'all go back home and tell folks we didn't serve you any pie.”

“Look at that pie.”

“What is in this pie?”

“This pie is so goooood.”

“Ah-mmm, m.”

“How do you get your crust to do like this, Big Mama? My crust won't do like this to save my life.”

“Aw, I've had your crust. Your crust does fine.”

“Mm, m, m.”

“Mmmmm-m.”

“Well, I have eat myself sick.”

“Mm-hm. Wadden 'at goooood?”

“I don't think I could …touch …another …bite.”

“I'M 'BOUT TO POP!”

“Mm.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Them tomaters was specially good.”

“Got plenny more now, I could slice right up.”

“Ooooo, no. I'd die.”

Meat, Three, Wallace Stevens, and Me

Iremember the first time I had lunch in the Elliston Place Soda Shop, in Nashville, Tennessee. It was my freshman year at Vander-bilt University, spring of 1960. That morning in Understanding Poetry, the anthology we used as a text in English, I had encountered a poem by Wallace Stevens entitled “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.” I didn't understand it. It was bleak, spare; a “hard” sunless sky, dry leaves scraping across frozen ground, a “rusty” crow with a malicious eye—I had never eaten possum (have since, of course), but I knew sop (pot likker) and I knew taters (everybody knows taters), and I couldn't see that this poem had anything to do, even negatively, with down-home country eatin. It was like seeing an old neighbor of yours pop up in a movie acting like somebody else.

I asked Professor Bennet to explain “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” to me. He said he didn't understand it either. Which didn't seem to bother him. He was a highly educated man, and yet he had accepted that there were things he would never get. I didn't get that. I was a good reader; I saw no reason why I couldn't get everything. I knew there were things that my parents would just as soon—would prefer, in fact—that I not get, but I hadn't come to college to stay within those parameters. Had I?

It stuck in my craw, that poem. The most interesting thing that had happened to me in my freshman year was the realization that poetry wasn't fancy, lah-di-dah writing, it was writing that had been simmered down to a mingling of essentials, like my mother's beef-stew gravy. (Which died with her, twenty years later.) And the thing was, I could tell that this “Wallace Stevens poem was good, somehow. I just couldn't tell anything else about it.

I decided to venture off campus for lunch. A block away from the campus was Elliston Place, where I found the Elliston Place Soda Shop. It is still there, with its neon ice-cream-soda sign out front. I revisited it for lunch recently and remembered that first time.

The Elliston Place Soda Shop is what is called today a “meat and three.” I wouldn't have called it that back in 1960, because “meat and three” wasn't a cultural term back then, any more than “good old boy” was. A good old boy was three words that came together every now and then, like “good old truck” or “good little ways.” The Elliston Place Soda Shop was a combination of a soda fountain, which you usually found in a drugstore, and a home-cooking restaurant, where it pretty much went without saying that you could get a meat portion and your choice of three vegetables for $1.95.

And you would know what you were getting when you ordered, say, squash casserole or candied yams or—well, take rice and gravy. It wouldn't be as good as my mother's rice and gravy, but it would be along the same lines, which is to say good, light, fluffy white rice, almost sweet in its clean unsaltiness, with good charcoal brown gravy, salty and slightly peppery, murky in a good sense, not in a bad sense greasy, made of flour and a little milk, I guess, and beef drippings.

In season, tender fresh yellow green lima beans such as I have never seen outside the Deep South to this day. In any season, turnip greens or collard greens. String beans cooked way down with pork so they were not at all fibrous anymore and yet had a chewy consistency by dint of which they gave a good account of themselves—deep down in there somewhere they were still green.

Cornbread. That would be in addition to your three vegetables. Here is something that tends to be lost sight of in Southern cooking when it leaves the region: Cornbread ought not to be sweet.[*] Or fluffy. Any more than a gravel road ought to be boggy. Cornbread is crunchy. And a little buttery, but you can always put butter on it: mainly it tastes and chews like cornbread, not like cake.

And your meat portion might be fish fried salty and cornmeal gritty, or chicken fried lightly, no greasy flaps of skin and no batter to speak of, just a flecky patina of expertly browned flour and skin.

Macaroni and cheese that wasn't just sticky yellow macaroni with a cheesy taste, it was marbled and layered like a trifle. Chewy orange, softer pale yellow, milky off-white, and noodles of a cleanness like the rice's in rice and gravy.

You find fewer and fewer meat-and-threes these days in the South. And, of course, not all of them were ever good enough to evoke my mother's cooking. The Elliston Place Soda Shop was, though. “Comfort food,” people call such fare today. That's condescending. Fiber-of-being food is more like it.

I love fine dining. But fine dining doesn't remind you of your grandmother, who would sit down at the dinner table and somebody would ask her, “Are you hungry, Mama, after all that cooking?” and she would say, “Well, I guess I can worry down a mou'ful or two,” and then she would pitch in as strong as the rest of us.

Or my mother's cousin Effie—no, I think it was Effie who always had to go to the bathroom when it was time to wash the dishes. Cousin somebody would always say no, she didn't want any watermelon, thank you, and then you'd offer her a bite of your piece of watermelon—which would be not a slice but a quadrant of a whole melon, because that way everybody was sure of getting some of the heart, the center, the very sweetest and least seedy part—and this cousin would come along and say, well, she guessed she would have just one bite of watermelon, and then she'd take your piece's very heart.

Anyway, I sat there in the Elliston Place Soda Shop, thirty-eight years ago, and ate a good lunch and decided I would get around to getting “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” in due time.

I get it now, pretty much. Partly because I don't expect to get things quite the same way I expected to back then. I don't expect cooking like my mother's anymore, either, so I wasn't too crushed to find when I revisited the Elliston Place Soda Shop recently that it wasn't as good as it used to be. I mean, it wasn't bad, but friends of mine in Nashville said yeah, it was a shame, they'd stopped going there lately—new ownership or something.

Actually I was crushed a little bit, way back down inside where I'm still green.

The other night on television Bill Maher propounded, as one of his “new rules,” that “cornbread is not bread. Cornbread is cake.” Which shows he doesn't know what real corn-bread is. Real cornbread is further from cake than bread is. Then there are corncakes, which are a different shape and a little different texture than cornbread but not at all sweet, except in the sense that Ruth Brown sings sweet. In Nashville, they have great corncakes at Jimmy Kelly's.

Mammy's Little Baby Loves What, Exactly?

Over the last few years, I have collected, on ninety-seven cassettes, 2,961 songs (by 1,760 different artists) prominently featuring food.[*] These include thirty-four versions of “Honeysuckle Rose,” twenty-three of “Jambalaya,” twelve of “Roly Poly,” and nine each of “Diggin’ My Potatoes,” “[I] Ain't Gon’ Give Anybody [Nobody] None of This [My] Jelly Roll” and “Saturday Night Fish Fry.”

About sex, most of them. But America's most-recorded food song, at least in my collection, is about a lot more. I have thirty-five versions of “Short'nin’ Bread.”

Everybody knows the song, I assume, but how many people have asked themselves, what exactly is short'nin’ bread? “When I asked myself, I realized I didn't know. Neither did several of my Southern friends—nor their mothers. I decided I had better get to the bottom of this.

You don't use shortening with cornmeal, only with wheat flour, which was scarce in the antebellum South. “What is this delicacy that Mammy's gonna make, in a skillet with a lid (“de led”), for her sick-in-bed chillun? Can this fabled restorative be just white bread?

In American Ballads and Folk Songs, Alan Lomax quotes an ex-slave's reminiscence:

“I was a house gal, and Mistress would tell me, ‘Go an’ pick up some chips for Aunt Fan to put on the lid.’ I would break out an’ run to get the chips because I was crazy about white bread, and when I got back there, Mistress would give me some…. I liked that because Mammy and them didn't get white bread but once a week, on Sunday. The rest of the time they had cornbread. I was so foolish. When Mistress died I just cried and cried, and Mammy say, ‘What is the matter with you, gal?’ I said, ‘Ol’ Missy is dead, and I won't get no more white bread.’ I thought when she died she carried all that white bread with her.”

Today the best African American rib places serve white bread, for sopping purposes. When I asked the great Alabama black outsider artist Thornton Dial what first inspired him to be a painter, he said, “It was when I was a little boy, first time I saw somebody with a whole loaf of white bread, sliced. I said I'm gonna do something so I can afford that.”

In his autobiography, The World Don't Owe Me Nothing, the blues singer David “Honeyboy” Edwards recalls from his twenties childhood in the Mississippi Delta: “The light bread man, Wonder Bread man, used to come through there. We used to get bread from him, and that bread was so sweet. It was a dime a loaf. We'd be out in the field and Daddy would look up and quit, saying, ‘Yonder bread man.’ And we'd go across the field and meet the bread man on the gravel road. And eat that dry bread, it was so sweet. Just a solid loaf, wasn't no sliced.”

Shortening, however, doesn't make bread fluffy and pale, it makes it darker, richer, more crumbly. Biscuits?

I called John Egerton, author of Southern Food, and eminent Southern cookbook authors Elizabeth Terry, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and Ruth Bronz. None of them had an exact definition of short'nin’ bread off the top of his or her head. But after checking Bill Neal's book on bread-making, and historical Charleston and Savannah cookbooks, the experts agreed that you combine brown sugar, flour, a pinch of salt, lots of butter for shortening (in the slave quarters it would probably have been lard); you roll it out thin; you bake it on top of the stove; and you cut it into squares.

In other words, short'nin’ bread is, and presumably was, Scottish shortbread. Crumbly, even sandy, tan cookies.

Now, how about the song? It became a pop hit in 1928, along with “Makin Whoopee,” “Button Up Your Overcoat,” “Stouthearted Men,” and “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” It was introduced by Lawrence Tib-bett, the operatic baritone who developed a sideline in what was called la manière negre. When George Gershwin settled on Todd Duncan as the right African American to play Porgy in the first production of Porgy and Bess, it was because Duncan was, in Gershwin's words, “the closest to a colored Lawrence Tibbett.” I haven't been able to find Tibbett's “Short'nin Bread,” but I do have his “Old Black Joe.” It gets down, in an operatic sort of way. The old boy could sing.

Who wrote “Short'nin’ Bread”? In his 1966 book American Popular Song, David Ewen calls it “an art song, in the style of a Negro spiritual, that entered the popular repertory by virtue of repeated performances by baritones in vaudeville and other popular media. It is possible that this number is a transcription rather than an original composition, since a number of Negro composers have come forward with the claim of having written it. One of them is Reese d'Pree, who insisted he had written the melody in 1905.”

Certainly credit for the words and music of the 1928 hit were taken by, respectively, Clement Wood and Jacques Wolfe. The latter composed a number of tunes à la manière negre, but Alan Lomax claims to have collected “Short'nin’ Bread” in the field (he doesn't say when) as “a genuine plantation song.” The latest scholarship, in Popular Music, edited by Nat Shapiro, concludes that “Short'nin Bread” is “an adaptation of a folk song first published in the Journal of American Folklore, under the title ‘Shortened Bread,’ and noted as a musical adaptation of a song entitled ‘Run, Nigger, Run!’”

Woops.

Did Wood's lyrics include the N-word? Is that why I can't find Tib-bett's version? Wood was a white Tuscaloosan who moved to New York and authored more than a hundred books. One was a 1922 novel entitled Nigger. Another was for many years the standard rhyming dictionary. It includes what Christopher Darden in the O. J. Simpson trial called “the dirtiest, filthiest, nastiest word in the English language” as a rhyme for bigger, chigger, digger, and snigger. Later rhyming dictionaries, quite properly, don't.

Wood took credit for lyrics

About bread enriched with shortener.

We could offer him panegyrics,

But maybe we ortener.

Unless he went shares with the NAACP.

Hard to say about Reese d'Pree.

I'll say this: I've thumbed through that novel enough to know that I want to read it. It follows an enslaved young man named Jake through Emancipation up to 1919. It doesn't seem to be condescending toward blacks nor soft on whites, and the frogs in the swamp where Jake has to hide from a lynch mob say, “Knee deep.” That's some pretty good frog sound.

The Skillet Lickers, a rousing bunch of hillbilly fiddlers and whoop-ers from Georgia, recorded “Short'nin’ Bread” in 1927. Before recording it, apparently, Tibbett sang the song on a concert tour through the South. Did the Lickers hear it then? Theirs is the only version I have with the N-word in it. It is also the only one that starts out (as best I can tell), “Hoecake and a mackerel's head, everything looks like short'nin’ bread.” Can “mackerel's head” be right? If so, some kind of double entendre? At one point in the accompanying banter, someone seems to be hollering, “Hand me that microfiche there!” Or …“mackerel fish”? It beats me.

Another leading popularizer of the song was Paul Robeson. The version he recorded in 1933 is the most straightforward one I have—also the only black one with “Mammy” and “gwine” instead of “Mama” and “gonna.” Robeson is powerfully tasty singing “Ol’ Man River” and “Ah Still Suits Me” as Joe in the 1936 movie of Showboat, but as himself on records—well, on “St. Louis Blues” he ain't no Bessie Smith. Dignity is the keynote. You can't discount the pressure on Robeson as a race man-he was the Muhammad Ali of the thirties, only more cultured and less humorous—but the gravity of his tone doesn't befit “Short'nin Bread.”

The overstuffed operetta star Nelson Eddy (from Rhode Island) took “Short'nin Bread” as his personal theme song. He treats it as a bagatelle—lightening up his operettic image, don't you know.

The Andrews Sisters were neither as inventive nor as juicy in their syncopation as were the earlier Boswell Sisters, who wove bluesy numbers into wonderfully intricate harmonies (the Boswells were from New Orleans, the Andrewses from Minneapolis), but I can't find a Boswell “Short'nin Bread.” The Andrews’ version is mostly doodly-ah-dah, doodly-ah-dah, and their pronunciation of dead, for instance, is cutesy, but, hey, I'd hate to have to do an unforced Minnesota accent.

Whoever worked up the lyrics for the Collins Kids’ rockabilly version wasn't thinking about shortbread: “I don't like cake, I don't like pie, I don't like sweets and I'll tell you why. 'Cause Mama's little baby loves short'nin’, short'nin’…” The Kids, siblings Larry and Lorrie, flourished prepubescently. They're fun to listen to, as long as we can assume that at their age they weren't thinking about the implications of “Ooo, you rock me, baby, every time you roll that dough.”

Lee Dorsey was a solid fifties R&B man, better known for “Workin in the Coal Mine.” His “Short'nin Bread” rocks.

Bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee do the tune instrumentally—acoustic guitar and juice harp. Very nice. Johnny Barakat and the Vestells’ “Surfin Bread” is a tumult of electric guitars. Awful.

The great Savannah songwriter Johnny Mercer was also an engaging singer of his own and other writers’ songs. I am not going to accuse such a likable fellow Georgian of quasi-Ebonics, but we might say of his “Short'nin’ Bread” what Margo Jefferson has written of Bing Crosby's dialect numbers: that “you can hear the pleasure” Crosby takes “in the musical resources of this language; you can hear him learning from it…. You can hear the smugness too…; it's the vocal equivalent of a smirk, a wink and an arched eyebrow, letting the audience know that he and they are above all this…. It is just this duality …that makes the descendants of white minstrelsy, from Crosby to Presley to Mick Jagger, so interesting.”

My favorite versions are Fats “Waller's (“two little Senegambians…”) and Mississippi John Hurt's (“Shoo that chicken off that led…”). Eyebrows arched over chops.

O. B. Jackson's hollerin’ version, from a 1972 Hollerin’ Championship competition, is verbal only in his introduction: “I been hollerin’ ever since I come in the world. I went to get my Daddy some 'bacca one day, got sick—took a chew of it—had to go to hollerin’ to get help. So ever since then I've been a-hollerin’.” Believe it.

From time to time on A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor sings, in a commercial for Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop Rhubarb, “Mammy's little baby loves rhubarb, rhubarb….”

In Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, Marshall Chapman tells us that her song “Betty's Bein’ Bad” was inspired personally by our mutual friend Betty Herbert (who never shot anybody so far as I know but back in the day might well be seen as, to quote Marshall's book, “a lady in a pink linen dress and pearls …standing on a table screaming, ‘Raise Hell in Dixie!’ at the top of her lungs,” and her husband, Bobby, would say, in a philosophical voice, “Betty's being bad”) but musically by “Short'nin Bread” (“A.45's quicker than 409 / Betty cleaned the house for the very last time”).

Bea Lillie picks up the refrain in “Something Is Coming to Tea,” as do Charles Rydell and the Boys and Girls in “Tennessee Fish Fry”—and there's a reference to the bread itself in Ella Fitzgerald's version of “Summertime in the Southland.”

I also have full versions of the song by Koerner, Ray and Glover, the Reaves White County Ramblers, John Mooney, Jean Ritchie, Vernon and Clyde Sutphin, Bob Catlin and John Hartford, the Tractors, “Big Sweet” Lewis Hairston, the Freight Hoppers, Neal Patman (with Taj Mahal on banjo), Leonard Bowles, Ora Dell Graham, Othar Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, Harmonica Rascals, Earl Johnson and His Dixie Entertainers, Paul Chaplain, Sara and Maybelle Carter, the Champs, Eloise Burrell and Eric Bibb and the Cultural Heritage Choir, The Astronauts, Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, Tom Prin and Quintet, and Maria Del Ray.

“Why has “Short'nin’ Bread” attracted such a diversity of performers? Most of the best of them, black and white, have given the song an erotic spin (“Waller comes closest to getting downright blue). H. L. Mencken in his second supplement to The American Language notes that “the obscene significance of many words commonly found in blues texts, e.g., jelly-roll, short'nin bread and easy rider, was noted by Guy B. Johnson in Double Meaning in the Popular Negro Blues, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, April-June, 1927, pp. 12-20.”

But I say it's a food song. If “Short'nin’ Bread” can be said to have a single progenitor, I'll bet she was turning “Run, Nigger, Run” into something that would comfort ailing children. “We're all mama's babies. I'd give a cooky, as my mother would say, to hear “Short'nin’ Bread” rendered by that great transethnic mama's boy Elvis—we get a whiff of it in the title song of his movie Clambake, when he interpolates this refrain: “Mama's little baby loves clambake, clambake, Mama's little baby loves clambake too.” (If she can love Clambake, she can love anything.)

But let's not get too misty or color-blind. Mammy didn't get no royalties. And here's the last line of the “Short'nin’ Bread” lyrics as recorded in American Ballads and Folk Songs:

“I'd ruther be a nigger than a po’ white man.”

A cultural history can of worms there. But I say it's a food song, and that all its elements, if we chew them up good, are digestible.

They now repose with the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford, Mississippi.

Food-Song Maven

One thing about being a Southerner in New York,[*] you can't help but have certain areas of expertise, at least as far as New Yorkers can tell. “When Krispy Kreme doughnuts came to Gotham a year or so ago, I was telling newspapers and TV programs right and left, “Oh yeah, I been eating Krispy Kremes my entire life. “Which is one reason my entire life may not last much longer—but good, aren't they? And listen, here's what's crucial: get 'em when the neon sign outside says they're hot. ” I was like somebody in the eighth grade who has had sex.

For instance, I wrote this in the New York Times:

When I heard that Krispy Kreme doughnuts had reached New York, and furthermore had become stylish, I hustled down to Twenty-third Street and ate five.

Don't do that. I was thinking I was twelve again. I grew up eating Krispy Kremes, in the South.

You owe it to yourself to eat two, though. While they're hot. And I don't mean while they're fashionable (inside the New York store hangs a poster autographed “All my love, RuPaul”), I mean while the HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW sign out front is lit, which means you can go in and see the original glazed, yeast-raised rings of sweetness coming off the conveyor belt behind the counter.

Even after they've cooled down, Krispy Kremes are the best doughnuts in creation. (They may be outclassed by French Quarter beignets, but those are beignets.) When they're hot, they are to other doughnuts as angels are to people. They're not crispy/creamy so much as right on the cusp between chewy and molten. Fried nectar. Pastry souffle. No ugh in these doughnuts, unless you eat five. Having been brought up on Krispy Kremes, I have bit into the various forms of doughnut available to New Yorkers over the years and thought, “Why so heavy? Don't they realize?”

After all, Krispy Kreme originated in 1937, in Winston-Salem, and its presence has long been established, in an unaggressively scattered sort of way, around the South. One always assumes that New York knows what it's doing and can have whatever it wants, so I have refused to harbor the suspicion that the nation's cultural capital was self-denyingly resistant to Krispy Kremes because, among things constituted of dough, they are the diametric opposite of good bagels. I figured there must be some climatic reason why Krispy Kremes had not come North.

Now they are a craze, on the same block as the Hotel Chelsea. It's as though a boyhood friend, whom one has come to think of as ineluctably regional, has suddenly made it in Gotham without changing a bit. I'm not jealous. I only wish I had changed less myself, and could still eat five.

And I hope that New York's acceptance of the Krispy Kreme is not ironic. Southern food in New York is often served up in quotation marks. For instance, at a restaurant called Live Bait. Like life, a hot Krispy Kreme goes by so fast that if your tongue's in your cheek you miss something.

That's in the newspaper of record, there. You could look it up. So you can imagine how authoritatively I chuckled when, at a grocery store on the Upper West Side called Gourmet Garage, I came upon a tray full of cold Krispy Kremes for sale beneath a sign that said FRESH FROM THE ANTE-BELLUM SOUTH.

“Well, now,” I said to the man behind the counter. “They can't be any too fresh.”

Since the man behind the counter, of course, spoke no English other than “Time for my break,” he just narrowed his eyes slightly like a pestered zoo animal.

“I mean, if they date back to circa 1859…,” I went on, looking around out of the corners of my eyes for somebody who might share my amusement. The only thing I descried in any of my fellow shoppers’ expressions was impatience.

Until, suddenly, a young woman with a plug in her ear leapt upon me out of nowhere and demanded, “How does the tune to ‘Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech’ go? We have the lyrics. How does the tune go?”

“Well, now, I'm not all that great at carrying a melody,” I said, “but I've been singing that song my entire life. In fact—”

“I'm a rambling wreck…” she prompted me.

“From Georgia Tech and a heckuvan engineer,” I sang. “A heckuva heckuva—”

“Helluva,” she snapped.

“Well, I was raised in a Christian home,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes slightly.

“Just an expression,” I said. “Well, not just an expression, but …What do you want to know for?” I asked in an undefensive sort of way.

“Shooting a film,” she said, and after glancing around out of the corners of her eyes to make sure people had noticed what business she was in, she was out the door.

I followed, thinking that I might fill the filmmakers in on some of the great Yellow Jacket broken-field runners of my boyhood—Billy Teas, Leon Hardeman …But she was gone and there were no signs that any principal photography, as they call it, was going on in the vicinity. She was probably a production assistant who had been sent running up and down Broadway jumping in and out of stores looking for somebody with my accent. No telling how many blocks she'd had to scour, to find somebody from Georgia. The budget of this movie was probably millions of dollars. And I didn't get a nickel.

I haven't profited from my doughnut expertise, either. The Krispy Kreme people offered to send me a free dozen, but they'd be cold, and I'd feel beholden, and anyway I can afford donuts. What I need is a retainer.[*]

As it happens, I have the greatest collection of food songs anywhere in private hands—including Andie MacDowell singing a little number that I wrote the words to: “Pie.” She sings it in Michael, a movie with a big pie scene. People make whole food movies—Soul Food, Fried Green Tomatoes, that one about the Italian restaurant with the Louis Prima songs. (The five most prolific recorders of food songs were Louis, Louis, Louis, Fats, and Slim: Armstrong, Jordan, Prima, “Waller, and Gaillard.) I'll bet somebody, somewhere, is about to embark on a film project that could use a highly paid consultant in the field of songs involving food.

Say you want something on your sound track to help make the transition from nighttime to breakfast. Depending on the mood and what your characters have been up to with one another, I could recommend Lee Wiley's “Chicken Today, Feathers Tomorrow,” Zuzu Bollin's “Why Don't You Eat Where You Slept Last Night,” Johnny Cash's “Beans for Breakfast,” Lightnin’ Hopkins's “Breakfast Time,” Dicky Williams's “I Want You for Breakfast,” or the Freight Hoppers’ “How Many Biscuits Can You Eat This Morning?”

Maybe your movie is set in Memphis. I've got King Curtis's “Memphis Soul Stew,” Dan Penn's “Memphis Women and Fried Chicken,” Memphis Slim's “Sweet Root Man,” the Memphis Jug Band's “She Done Sold It Out,” the Memphis Seven's “Grunt Meat Blues,” and twelve different Memphis Minnie food songs, including “Good Soppin’ ” and “Pigmeat on the Line.”

I don't claim to have every food song ever recorded. I don't even have Cecil Gant's “Owl Head Soup”—yet. But do I have Slim and Slam performing “Mama's in the Kitchen, But We've Got Pop on Ice”? Sure. Harry “The Hipster” Gibson's “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?” Absolutely. “Chocolate Porkchop Man” by Pete “Guitar” Lewis? “Anyone Here Wants to Buy Some Cabbage?” by women of Parch-man Penitentiary? Uncle Dave Macon's “Eleven Cent Cotton, Forty Cent Meat”? Yes, yes, yes. “Save the Bones for Henry Jones ('Cause Henry Don't Eat No Meat),” as sung by Ray Charles? Uh-huh, and also by Johnny Mercer.

And I have “Feast of the Mau Mau” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Hamhark and Limer Beans” by Champion Jack Dupree, “Sal's Got a Sugar Lip” by Johnny Horton, “Pizza on the Ground” by the Austin Lounge Lizards, “Gimme Some of That Yum Yum Yum” by the Harlem Hamfats, “Who'll Chop Your Suey When I'm Gone?” by Margaret Johnson, “In the Garden Where the Irish Potatoes Grow” by Dr. Smith's Champion Horse Hair Pullers, “Got No Bread No Milk No Honey but We Sure Got a Lot of Love” by James Talley (remember him, from during the Carter administration?), Clyde Edgerton's “Quiche Woman in a Barbecue Town,” Wynonie Harris's “Keep on Churnin’ (till the Butter Comes),” Buster Benton's “Spider in My Stew,” John Lee Hooker's “Onions,” Louis Armstrong's “Big Butter and Egg Man,” Jimmy Buffett's “I Wish Lunch Could Last Forever,” Nellie Lutcher's “Princess Poo-Poo-Ly Has Plenty Papaya,” Elvis's “Crawfish,” Z. Z. Hill's “Home Ain't Home at Suppertime” (it'll tear your heart out), Slim Gaillard's “Avocado Seed Soup Symphony,” Louis Jordan's “A Chicken Ain't Nothing but a Bird,” Fats Waller's and Jasmine's “Hold Tight (I Want Some Seafood, Mama),” and Gene Autry's “Methodist Pie.”

I've got food songs sung by Little Richard, Little Milton, Little Jimmy Dickens, Little Feat, Little Temple, Little Sparrow, Mighty Sparrow, Little Joe and the Thrillers, Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks, Little Son Joe, Li'l Son Jackson, Lil’ Ed and the Imperials, Bea Lillie, Lil Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson, Jimmy Johnson, Pete Johnson, Earl Johnson, Sherman “Blues” Johnson and His Clouds of Joy, Eddie Johnson and His Crackerjacks, the Chips, the Box Tops, Buckwheat Zydeco, Gravy, Greasetrap, Stringbean, Peaches and Herb, Biscuit, Cracker, and Cake.

And Junior Brown, James Brown, Charles Brown, Ruth Brown, Greg Brown, Maxine Brown, Sterling Brown, Tiny “Bam” Brown, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Dennis Brown, Paula Brown, Les Brown and His Band of Renown (accompanying Doris Day on “Booglie” Wooglie Piggy”), Eddie Williams and His Brown Buddies, Roy Brown and His Mighty Mighty Men, Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, and Brownie McGhee. And Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Mamie Forehand, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Roosevelt Graves (and his brother, Uaroy), Blind Blake, and Blind Joe Reynolds.

Is it a family picture you have in mind? I've got the Andrews Sisters, the Boswell Sisters, the Chenille Sisters, the McGuire Sisters, the Pointer Sisters, Sister Carol, Sister O. M. Terrell, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The Holmes Brothers, McGee Brothers, Mills Brothers, Neville Brothers, Smothers Brothers (anybody know any food songs by the Louvin Brothers?), Carson Brothers and Sprinkle, the Beach Boys, Beastie Boys, Big Wheeler with the Ice Cream Boys, Famous Hokum Boys, the Happiness Boys (“I've Never Seen a Straight Banana”), the Sweet Violet Boys, Blue Scott and His Blue Boys, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Johnny Lee Wills and His Boys, Jimmy Revard and the Oklahoma Playboys, A. E. Ward and His Plow Boys, Buddy Boy Jenkins, Sonny Boy Williamson, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, the Nugrape Twins, the Collins Kids, the Bennington Children's Choir, and Rude Girls.

That was a good group, Rude Girls. I have their “Chitlin Cooking Time in Chatham County.” Not to mention “Peach Picking Time in Georgia,” by Jimmie Rodgers (and by Willie Nelson, and by Kenneth Threadgill), “Honeycomb” by the other, lesser Jimmie Rodgers, and Jimmy Rogers's “My Last Meal.” And speaking of picking: “Pickin’ Peas (Down the Long Pea Row)” by the Carlisles. “When It's Tooth-Pickin’ Time in False Teeth Valley” by Homer and Jethro, “Pickin Wild Mountain Berries” by Con-way and Loretta, and “Pickin Off Peanuts” by Seven-Foot Dilly and His Dill Pickles.

I've got “Good Jelly Blues,” “Jelly Whipping Blues,” “Jelly Jelly Blues,” “Hot Jelly Roll Blues,” “Jelly Bean Blues,” “Fine Jelly Blues,” “Sugar Blues,” “Sugar Mama Blues,” “Fat Mama Blues,” “Sizzling Papa Blues,” “Ration Blues,” “Food Stamp Blues,” “Red Cross Store Blues,” “Grocery Blues,” “Fort Worth Hambone Blues,” “Stewmeat Blues,” “Grunt Meat Blues,” “Meat Cuttin Blues,” “Butcher Shop Blues,” “Sweet Potato Blues,” “Yellow Yam Blues,” “Bakershop Blues,” “Baking Powder Blues,” “Dough Roller Blues,” “Custard Pie Blues,” “Candy Man Blues,” “Candy Store Blues,” “Honey Blues,” “Honey Bee Blues,” “Yellow Bee Blues,” “Stinging Bee Blues,” “Milk and Butter Blues,” “Milk Cow Blues,” “Milkcow Calf's Blues,” “Milk 'Em in the Evening Blues,” “Fisherman's Blues,” “Fishman Blues,” “Fish Girl Blues,” “Rice and Gravy Blues,” “Vitamin A Blues,” “Plain Food Blues,” “Your Greens Give Me the Blues,” “King Mackerel and the Blues Are Running,” and “I've Got the Yes! We Have No Bananas Blues.”

The great majority of food songs are Southern. The group called Southern Culture on the Skids has recorded thirteen that I know of, including “Fried Chicken and Gasoline” and “Too Much Pork for One Fork.” I also have “Hambone Am Sweet” by Four Southern Singers. And both Asleep at the Wheel's and Phil Harris's renditions of “That's What I Like about the South.” And Moon Mullican's “Southern Hospitality,” “Southern Deep-Fry” by someone named C. McAlister, and Margaret Johnson's “Folks in New York City Ain't like the Folks back South,” which is full of food references, for instance, “The horses and the numbers keep most of them alive. All they eat is hotdogs when eatin’ time arrives.” Maybe you're making a Southern movie about what folks in New York City are like. I could help you on that.

But not on a pro bono basis. I ain't giving any more of my gravy away. I can't afford to; I live in New York.

As I was when I wrote this. Now I mostly rusticate, in western Massachusetts.

I should have specified the limits of my venality. After my piece appeared in the Times, the Krispy Kreme people had asked me to come address their employees. I answered that it wasn't kosher to parlay a rave review into a speech fee. They came back with the idea of my addressing their employees for nothing. That, to me, was an even less appealing idea. After this piece here appeared in the Oxford American, the Krispy Kreme people sent me a dental retainer, such as you use for a while after your braces are removed. (Had somebody's child outgrown it? I didn't try it for fit.) All in good fun, and I did accept some Krispy Kreme glasses and a T-shirt (does anybody say no to a T-shirt?) but declined proffered doughnuts for the reason stated above. And see “The Worm Bubble,” p. 65.

Chicken

It was the late, great Roger Miller who asked: “How can a chicken eat all the time and never get fat in the face?” A different chicken koan occurs to me:

So many things are said to taste sort of like chicken. What does chicken taste like?

It's a question I hesitate to raise. I wouldn't want it to lead to gourmet chicken tastings—people sitting around nibbling on the formerly free-range drumsticks of a rather amusing Rhode Island Red and staring off into the distance, saying, “Hmmm. Undertones of kitchen scraps— mostly vegetal—with a tang of pokeberry, and what is that, watermelon seed? Maybe just a hint of other chicken, and a nice grasshoppery finish.” But what if chicken were to lose its savor? So many things would taste sort of like nothing.

It's been years and years since I had a chicken heart. Since I ate one, I mean; there may have been the odd moment, more recently, when I was chicken-hearted. But times of real fried chicken on the table, when I was a boy, were times when I was hearty, bold. I might even say plucky.

I wonder how the word pluck came to mean, as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it, “resourceful courage and daring in the face of difficulties; spirit.” I don't recall ever plucking a chicken myself. I did a duck, once, after shooting it, cutting it open, and reaching inside to pull out the guts—it was so hot in there! I haven't shot anything since. I do remember, from visits to relatives, the angry stench of scalded feathers after a chicken was dipped in boiling water to render it more readily pluckable. Food preparation was not for the faint-hearted back then.

Well, here you go. The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English defines pluck as “the internal organs of a hog eaten as food.” (“As food,” I guess, rather than for medicinal purposes, or for show. Or so as not to be suspected of lacking pluck, as when I ate a sliver of shark sashimi off a barely dead hammerhead because my friend Vereen did. Don't you do it. People weren't meant to eat raw shark.)

Pluck is guts, then. “Liver, lights, and melts, and sometimes sweetbreads” according to the aforementioned DSME. Lights being lungs. Melts being spleens. Sweetbreads being whatever the plural of pancreas is. We weren't country enough to dine that comprehensively on a hog when I was growing up. (Souse, which is congealed meat from all over a pig's head and maybe other parts, is something I sampled too late in life to be fond of.) But we sure didn't throw out the liver, gizzard, and heart of a chicken. The heart tastes a little bit like cardboard and a little bit like blood, maybe, but of course my mother's chicken hearts tasted primarily of how good she was at frying. The interest of the gizzard is mostly in the crunchy texture of it (you're chewing what chickens have instead of teeth), variable in density and approaching a funky softness in the thick part.

You know what a “chicken wobble” is? According to the DSME, it's “a party, usu[ally] of men, at which stolen chickens are cooked and there is drinking, music making, the telling of tales, and so on…. The chickens had to come from someone represented there, and they made the rounds choosing them from the different roosts. No one knew just when he was eating his own chicken, as they were stolen very quietly during the evening.”

Chicken dinners weren't quite that much fun at our house, but feeling did run high, and I could eat more chicken at a sitting than anybody else in my family. It says a great deal in favor of the other members that I was encouraged to feel proud of this. We were a family of four, my parents, my younger sister, and I. Just right for one chicken. If we had been six, I might have turned out to be a less latitudinarian person. If we'd been twelve, Louis Jordan's song “I Get the Neck of the Chicken” might seem more poignant to me—though there is meat worth gnawing after on a chicken neck, or a chicken back, if you can take it as a divertissement accompanying a drumstick and a breast and a “baby drumstick” (the meat part of the wing) and, if you're lucky (my sister and I, as I recall, took turns), the pully bone, which is what we called the wishbone, which lies between the neck and the breast (it's formed from the fusion of the collarbones—funny to think of a chicken having a collar) and is surrounded by what may be a chicken's sweetest meat. Pully bone, of course, because after you chew and suck all the meat off it (and maybe get a soupçon of the marrow that's close to the surface on the tab projecting from what we might call the prow), you and your sibling can each pull on a prong of it till it snaps and whoever gets the shorter end (or the longer, there are two schools of thought there, and if you're really thinking, you'll wait until after you see which end you come up with to declare which school you subscribe to), gets a wish.

You know what Blaze Starr and Robert E. Lee had in common? Fried chicken as a metaphor for ideal satisfaction. When a Richmond lady teasingly asked General Lee about his ambitions in life, he told her, according to Mary Chesnut's diary, “He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken.” And when I saw Blaze Starr dance in her Baltimore club, she asked a man in the audience if he would like for her to take off her ample brassiere, and he responded to the effect that, come to think of it, why yes, yes he would—she danced away saying, “Well, I guess you would like some friiiiiied chicken.” (I have made the acquaintance, in New Orleans, where they sometimes reside, of Ron Shelton, who directed the movie Blaze, about the romance of Earl Long and Blaze Starr, and of Shelton's lovely wife, Lolita Davidovich, who played Blaze. Once I asked Lolita whether her parents named her after the eponymous nymphet in the Nabokov novel. “No,” she said, “they just thought it went well with Davidovich.”)

My mother made great barbecued chicken, too, on the grill. (My father didn't cook, even out in the yard, but he would produce sugarcane chews for us with masterly pocketknifemanship. Taking each segment of the stalk at a time, he'd perform a precise circumcision just through the peel, then slice the peel off in four vertical strips, then cut the chunks from that naked segment with deeper circular cuts that somehow never injured his thumb.) She would use chicken that wasn't too plump, so that it cooked through without getting burnt, just crispy (and greasy only in the most elegant sense) and yet deeply sauce-tinctured and suffused with the taste of sauce and smoke. With homemade peach ice cream? Oh, Lord, that might have been better than her fried chicken. I could eat even more of the barbecued because, by the time we started cooking on the grill, I was in my teens, for one thing, and, for another thing, my mother had started using packages of chicken parts, amounting to two or three or four chickens’ worth of legs, breasts, thighs (second joints, we called them), and wings.

No hearts or gizzards or necks. Lord knows it's easier on the cook to work with chicken that's already been cut up, but you don't get giblets with that, and you don't get a pully bone either, because it is severed wishlessly in commercial dissection. And nowadays you can go to the store and pick up a package of chicken breast fillets, no bones. You miss out on all the breast's ossicular details, from which to worry off all the subtle sweet dribs and drabs of intimate flesh that hold the ribs together. But, okay. A chicken breast fillet is no bad thing. Nothing, however, can be said in defense of “chicken fingers” or “chicken nuggets.” Or worst of all, “chicken drumlets,” which are bits of white meat somehow stamped out in the form of gizzard-size cartoon-style drumsticks. In the process of turning chicken meat into illusory figments, you know a lot of chicken gets lost. Not only a lot of chicken substance, but the chicken.

I make no bones about being a carnivore. I wrote a little quatrain once entitled “I Like Meat”:

Cold meat or hot meat,

Sliced thick or thin.

I guess I've just got meat

Under my skin.

But don't serve me any of those drumlets. The chicken my ladyfriend Joan cooks for us now is guaranteed free-range. The chickens we eat may not have had a full, robust life, even for a chicken, but they have been able to stretch their legs and eat bugs. And they taste like something, because they have tasted things. Once I toured a plant that produced chicken parts. I went through the line backward, so that it appeared to be constructing chickens. That perspective was sobering to a degree, but it didn't put me off chicken. It just confirmed my belief that we owe it to chicken to eat it in acknowledgment of the bird that paid the ultimate price.

P.S.:

Daniel Fletcher of the Department of Poultry Science at the University of Georgia has announced that he can transform dark meat of chicken into white. So—who asked him to? Well, it seems the mass American chicken-eating market is so drastically breastcen-tric these days that most of our drumsticks and thighs are good only for export. Fletcher has come up with a process whereby dark meat is ground up into a “slurry” and then spun at high speed in a centrifuge until the darkness (and, incidentally, all the taste) separates out. The resultant pale, tasteless glop can be molded into nuggets and faux patties long enough to be frozen, in which form it can be cooked, immediately, in large quantities. But if you were to take a chunk of it home and let it thaw, it would melt into a puddle.

That is awful. Chicken is a bird, with parts, some of which— some of the best of which—are dark. If you can't deal with that, you have no business eating chicken. If I were not such a nice person at heart, I would say that I hope someone steals into this Fletcher's bedroom as he sleeps and puts a frozen processed artificial-fiber patty in each of his slippers, so that the first and second thing his feet meet in the morning is ersatz chicken slush.

What Undid Uncle Bud

Uncle Bud was never sick.

His appetite robust,

He took his steak two inches thick,

And onions were a must.

Potatoes, sweet or mashed with gravy,

Peas and buttered bread,

Beans—lima, green, and navy—

And cabbage by the head.

And out of curiosity,

Sometimes people queried,

“Bud, what serving might this be?”

And he would say, unwearied,

“Oh, maybe tenth, or twelf.

Another wouldn't hurt. ”

And yet …he never felt himself

Deserving of dessert.

No to pie or cake he'd say,

“There I draw the line.

After what I've put away,

Just coffee will be fine.”

Some called it a religious thing-

Said, “Bud's a Puritan.

You notice of an evening

He'll watch the setting sun

And then he'll say, We're only here

A little while and, puff

We're gone.’ The fact is, Bud's austere,

And meat is sweet enough.”

That seemed to be the case—but then

Grace Wages came to town.

Widowed. Fourteen local men

Proposed. She turned them down.

But Bud she took a liking to,

A challenge to her cooking.

To Bud she said, “Now I think you

Are right likely looking. ”

He loved her biscuits, loved her ham,

But when she mentioned pie,

He said, “It's just the way I am….”

She said, “But Buddy, I

Think it's time you left your shell.

You're tight. Let down your guard.”

“Well, if you put it that way, well…,”

He said, and swallowed hard.

For who could fail to want—to need—

What Grace urged him to savor?

She said if he would try it she'd

Consider it a favor.

And so at last Bud did indulge

In what he'd not before:

Her pie and ice cream topped with fudge

And hand-whipped cream, and more:

Yes. More. The thing he'd always known

Would in the end undo him.

A thing so sweet, no man could own

He had it coming to him.

She gave it, and it moved his heart

As nothing had before.

He rose and said, “Till death us part,”

And womp, he hit the floor.

And now our Uncle Bud's to bury,

Who never had a cough.

And yes, that maraschino cherry

It was that topped him off.

The Terrys Do It Right

This piece appeared in Mens Journal in 1994. Update follows.

People who know Michael Terry of Savannah well often call him “Mr. Elizabeth.” This does not faze him. His wife is such a great chef—her restaurant, Elizabeth on 37th, has been named one of the nation's twenty-five best by Food and Wine—-that he has given up the practice of law for produce shopping, schmoozing, enologizing, volunteering, parenting, and once-a-week fishing. At fifty-one, he freely proclaims himself “a happy man.”

Michael and Elizabeth met at a Kenyon College fraternity party in the early, pre-Aquarian sixties. Michael was sloshing a big container of Hairy Buffalo around and got it all over Elizabeths yellow slicker. She was visiting from Erie State, in Cleveland. Rather than invite dates to parties, Michael tended to wait and see what women remained standing after a few hours, and Elizabeth had in common with him a disinclination to fade.

Despite Hairy Buffalo's Hawaiian Punch base, it was supposed to be green, but for some reason the crème de menthe hadn't taken hold visually, so this batch—there were other ingredients—was no color you'd want to remember. Still, since Elizabeth had been prudent enough to wear a slicker, Michael couldn't see why she took so much offense. He threw a handful of money at her, for cleaning expenses. She did not welcome that gesture.

However, they found themselves upright together at future parties and got to be close. After spending a postgraduate year separately abroad, they realized they were meant for each other.

Michael has a ponytail and at medium height weighs 230, much of it around the middle. Elizabeth vaguely resembles Billie Jean King, only not really butch—though “martinet,” Michael says, is a good name for her in the kitchen. A couple of years ago, I encountered the Terrys walking peacefully home from church, across one of that city's eighteenth-century, ancient-oak-shaded squares, with their lovely daughters Alexis (now a painter in Montana) and Celeste (who at the age of six sat down in a Paris restaurant and ordered the beluga). I am not a churchgoer myself, and at the time I had just broken up with someone again. I thought to myself, “There's a family.”

When they aren't at their beach house, they live above the wildly successful restaurant, in the ninety-four-year-old mansion they restored together after Elizabeth bought it in 1980 with a small-business loan. It's on Thirty-seventh Street, hence the name. A while back there was speculation that this street would be renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard. The Terrys could hardly be opposed to this, as they are keen liberals. Their sous-chef is African American, they determinedly keep their staff rainbowish in various respects, and Michael, who used to be a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta, is the unpaid president of a Savannah organization that helps poor parents and children. But “Elizabeth on Martin Luther King” was not going to sound right. As it turned out, another street was named for Dr. King—probably not, Michael stresses, because he talked the matter over with local officials. But he has a knack.

“I used to go to the produce market,” says Elizabeth, “and the guys there—”

“They just drove her crazy.”

“I'd say, ‘What the hell, boys. Buy it when it's fresh, sell it when it's fresh—just organize, guys!’”

Now Michael goes to the market, and chews the fat. “And if they act up I threaten to send in Elizabeth: ‘She's not going to like this, guys.’ ”

Savannah is an old coastal city, an early seaport. Through historical research and insistence on fresh ingredients Elizabeth has developed a cuisine that is indigenous but not parochial. Both Terrys grew up in the Midwest, but they had Southern grandmothers. Elizabeth makes fried grits—seasoned variously with shrimp, onions, spices, bits of country ham—that melt in your mouth too fast, because you want to delectate them longer. She makes a crème brûlée and a chocolate mousse that are as good (their textures right on the razor edge between delicate and substantial) as any I've had in Paris. Another dessert she makes is burnt-sugar ice cream with bourbon-butterscotch sauce. She serves up black beans, seafood, pork, greens, and chicken that are lighter and yet more savory than your mama's, bless her, the best day she ever had. When Elizabeth's food is set before you (in one of the dining rooms painted Acanthus Leaf Green and Tomochichi Red), you want to shout to everyone in earshot, “Oh, Lord, here, smell this!”

In Harvard Law School's alumni records, Michael is pleased to say, his occupation is listed as “wine steward.” He is also the greeter and seater, and he is the one who got Elizabeth started cooking. Early in their marriage, when he was in law school and she was working in a Cambridge medical lab, he brought home two cookbooks and said, “You'd be good at this.”

She had grown up in a hardscrabble fatherless household with a working mother. Never had much interest in food. She did have, as she says, a “do-it-right complex” and, it turned out, a knack. “I'd put in a blueberry pie and go to bed,” she says, “and Michael would wake me up when it was done, and when it had cooled a little we'd sit on the bed and eat the whole thing.”

When they moved to Atlanta—after choosing it over Hawaii and Alaska because it seemed a good place to be involved in social change— they hosted notable dinner parties. But Elizabeth had no career.

Now. Listen to this, men. In Atlanta, in 1977, Michael made an inspired move. Their marriage was strained. He'd been obsessed with defending the indigent in court and she with being a full-bore housewife and mother giving herb lectures in her spare time. So here's what was said one night:

“You're getting a little boring.”

Here's the switch: It wasn't the mad housewife saying to the husband, “I'm bored and you're boring,” and him sulking and everything breaking down—it was Michael, jumping in first with a jujitsu move, putting Elizabeth on her mettle.

She rented some space in a mall. The two of them gutted it, replumbed it, fixed it up together, and Elizabeth opened a small deli, Thyme for You. Her soups and sandwiches went over big. In 1980, the Terrys sat down together and took stock. Why stay on in increasingly concrete-canyoned, big-bidness Atlanta when they could live more cheaply in a more colorful place?[*] They moved to Savannah.

Since Elizabeth had made a speech for Michael “and drunk about forty-nine gallons of coffee” while he was running unsuccessfully for public office in Atlanta, he agreed to work with her for a year setting up a restaurant, and then he would start a law practice.

Instead, he found a new niche: restauranthusband.

“A lot of my lawyer friends said I'd be so unhappy because there'd be no intellectual stimulation. But I can find that on my own. You do miss the wonderful feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you go into court. I get a little bit of that fishing—taking the boat out into the sea. But I had tried two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court before I was thirty-five. I feel about the law the way I feel about dieting—I'm not a very good dieter, but when I'm dieting I say, ‘If I live to be 104 and never have another piece of banana cream pie, I've had my share.’ ”

Michael grew up in a family that was “female-dominated. My grandmother, mother, and sister spent a lot of time with me. I remember vividly when I was nine years old, walking down the street with my mother, and she said, ‘Michael, I want you to go into this drugstore and buy me a box of Kotex. There's no reason why you can't.’ That was my liberation. Women think they have this secret mystery.”

He takes a good solid under-the-covers nap every afternoon. Then he stays up well past midnight, maybe playing poker with the staff, and he gets up every morning at 5:30 with Celeste because if she sleeps later she's too groggy to eat the decent breakfast he fixes for her.

Are any of us of the male persuasion beginning to resent Michael now? When he was practicing high-minded law while wearing clogs, other lawyer guys rolled their eyes. But as to yin and yang, Michael and Elizabeth are traditional. “I'm inordinately volatile,” she says. “He's totally calm.”

On the restaurant's opening night, she says, “we served a hundred and forty people. After the first hundred, Michael came back and said only forty more. I said, ‘I cannot lift another pan.’ It was a hundred and ten degrees in the kitchen. I burst into tears. Michael said, ‘This is what you wanted to do. You love to cook. You're having a good time.’ I had to go out back and run a hose over my head. My arms were shaking. But I did it.”

“We do whatever we want,” says Michael.

“There's a kind of giddy excitement in that,” says Elizabeth. “Michael allows me to be kind of hysterical and outrageous sometimes, which I think is good for—”

“You,” says Michael.

“For our marriage. In the kitchen, I feel so high—you have it set up right and it comes and comes and comes and you're ahead of it and it's so great and it goes on and on and on.”

She gets kind of flushed just thinking about it.

“I did have to educate Elizabeth on the art of argument one time. There was something she felt particularly heated about—”

“And he came up with blah blah blah.”

“And she says, ‘Fuck you.’ ”

“And he took me aside and said, ‘You cannot start an argument with ‘Fuck you.’ He is much more of a gentleman than I am. The reason he's never had a midlife crisis is I provide the tumult.”

“The best public fight we ever had was in Corsica. I was nursing Alexis and I wanted a big breakfast. Michael said, ‘It's not the French way. Let's eat croissants and coffee.’ I'm saying, Goddammit—”

“She was hungry and crabby and what she wanted was eggs and ham. I hadn't really focused on the fact that every nutrient was being drained from her body.”

“I handed Michael the baby and said, ‘You feed her.’ An elderly gentleman came over and said something to me.”

The elderly gentleman was offering, in a dignified way, to whip Michael's ass for her. Since Elizabeth had little French, Michael had to translate: “He says he wants to defend your honor. Sir, you can be of assistance here….”

The elderly gentleman directed them to a place where they could get an omelet.

Update, 2006, from Greg Jaynes, who introduced me to the Terrys:

They sold their restaurant to their employees, two couples who had made working for the Terrys their profession. The Terrys made them an offer they could not refuse, gave them a manageable installment plan, made themselves available for instruction, assistance, and emergency services—and moved to a fine rural retreat in North Carolina, where Michael singlehandedly gathered stones of the field and built a grand chimney, a fireplace you could roast a teenager in, were you of a mind to. Elizabeth potted and stuff.

The restaurant, under the same name, Elizabeth on 37th continues to prosper.

The Terrys grew restless in retirement. Michael became a sort of sommelier for the biggest wine importer-distributor in Atlanta. But living in two places didn't feel right. Meanwhile, the two daughters finished college and settled out West. The Terrys moved to the San Francisco area to be near the girls. Michael is still with wine in some income-earning way, though they do not need an income. Elizabeth is doing hospice volunteer work. Elizabeth called me about six months ago. They are still happy.

At least back then, before Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil caused Savannah real estate to skyrocket.

A Grapefruit Moment

The other day I offered my ball-of-fire granddaughter, Elsie, who is two, a bite of very crisp bacon crumbled up in some soft scrambled egg. Her response reminded me how dramatic things taste to a child. Elsie is not finicky, but, as an adult would say, she was not herself. The doctor had diagnosed “a viral syndrome, probably.” Something, at any rate, was causing her to reject foods she usually loves. She was hungry, and welcomed the bacon-and-egg at sight and smell, but when it hit her palate, she looked so pained. As far as she knew she was still herself, but bacon-and-egg, perhaps willfully, had lost its savor. Maybe it would never taste good again; maybe life would be yucky from now on.

I remembered, distantly, how much more than now I used to relish a bite of bacon, egg, toast, all together. Unless, of course, I had detected in the egg the least bit of underdone white. In that case, I would display such revulsion that my mother would sigh, with a pathos strong enough to counter nearly anything I could muster, “Don't pick at your eggs, son. They're good eggs.” And I would acknowledge, intellectually, and not without a backdraft of guilt, that they were good, to her. But nothing could make me sense that they were good to me, and therefore my position, though I wouldn't dare put it into words, was the hell with them. And as far as I knew, I was right. I knew it was crucial not to lose touch with gut reaction.

I had not yet developed a liberal cast of mind. In the South of the late forties, where injustice was hard—but certainly possible—to overlook, I had not begun to awaken politically. Eventually I did but not because any disadvantaged person touched my soul. I have thought about this a lot. I believe it was because of grapefruit at David's house.

There have been times in my adulthood when grapefruit was the only thing that tasted right. But not in my early childhood.

My parents loved grapefruit. My father put salt on it, which struck me as exactly the wrong way to go. He salted watermelon, too. Cantaloupe he salted and peppered. Today I can recommend those seasonings, without finding them at all necessary, but back then they heightened my suspicion that grown-ups were often pretending, or being perverse. My mother would put sugar on my grapefruit, to get me to eat it, but nope. She gave up on me and grapefruit.

My mother and I had some history with regard to eating. To hear her tell it, I refused all nourishment for several years. In desperation, she would tell me that the spoonful of baby food was an airplane coming in to land. My lips were sealed. As I advanced beyond toddling stage, she would go so far as to cut a boxwood switch and lay it next to my plate. I would eat what was put before me, or else. The threat of corporal punishment didn't work. In some ways, I was a tough kid.

“I couldn't make you eat, to save my life,” she would tell me later. Invocation of, yes, “the starving Armenians” did not move me. What did they have to do with my prerogatives?

Finally, heeding our family doctor's advice, she made herself stop worrying about wasted food or the possibility that I was starving myself to spite her. She backed off, and in due time I became a trencherman. Today, with pretty much the sole exception of Japanese red-bean desserts, I say yes to the comestible universe.

I even like fruitcake. Is there anything intrinsically bad about fruitcake? I suspect that hatred of fruitcake is something that broad-minded people can feel all right about sharing. Everybody needs a guilt-free aversion. But, hey, a free society is one in which you can't make people do what makes sense, even if it's demonstrably good for them, until they are ready. Ideally, at least. And, as a boy, I had a good deal of idealism with regard to myself.

What I remember of that early mealtime duress is probably from being told about it. What I richly recall is free and ready enjoyment of my mother's good cooking. As a result, I lack colorful memories of horrid-food avoidance. My fiancée, Joan, so hated lima beans, which still make her shudder, that she would by sleight of hand convey them to the underside of the drop-leaf table and leave them on the little ledge there, where she would see their desiccated remains when she looked up during games of hide-and-seek and feel no remorse.

But I do remember going over to someone else's house when I was a kid. How different the smells were sometimes and how strange the food. I remember supper at my friend Jack's house. “Yum,” he said, “riced potatoes.” This was a concept new to me, but, hey, I liked potatoes, baked, boiled, fried, mashed, or au-gratin'd. (My childhood friend Sally once embarrassed her parents at a nice restaurant by robustly telling the waiter, “I'll have some kernup greems and some bo-taters.”)

But the riced potatoes of Jack's mother, with all due respect, were way too salty. I toyed with them, couldn't dig in. And even though I could see the faces of Jack and Jack's mother fall, I knew I was right.

It was different at David's house. I spent the night there. At breakfast, there was grapefruit.

“Ew,” I said. “I can't stand grapefruit!”

There followed, as well there should have, an awkward pause. My mother would have killed me, figuratively, for being so rude. But there was something else in the air.

I looked over at David. “I mean,” I said, one boy to another, “have you ever tasted grapefruit right after milk?”

“Don't taste it right after milk, then,” he said.

It hit me that I was wrong. Not only had I hurt David's and his parents’ feelings, which carried a different weight with me than my mother's did, because theirs did not assert the force of fiat. I had also caught myself nursing a repugnance, with unjustifiable pride. A more enlightened gut response began to dawn. I could ride with difference, with strangeness even, into a more bountiful life.

That little experience may not strike you as dramatic enough to be seminal. For that matter, you may doubt the sensitivity of my granddaughter's tastebuds when I tell you that two days after her betrayal by bacon and eggs, I caught her licking the screen door. She didn't go yuck, she didn't go yum. She looked like she was filing a sensation away, without fear or favor. Atta girl, said the grapefruit.

The Plurality of Tall

When I brought up the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English recently in Greeneville, Tennessee, book-loving residents of the Smokies gave me narrow looks. “Is it one of those kitschy things?” they asked. “Is it a Cracker Barrel book?”

No, I assured them, you will not find this book next to the cash register in one of those chain providers of quasi-home cooking off the interstate. This book provides real home cooking, with the bark on. And that is nearly an unmixed metaphor. Under “splunge,” for instance, we read: “She would fill the kittel to the crack with muddy water and splunge chips and leaves down deep into it with her hands and watch it close till she said it was done enough to eat.”

Nor is this book all roughage. Under “wonderly” we read: “I have been thinking what a wonderly sight it will be to sit by the fire and look at the snow through all them new glass winders!”

The DSME is the product of sixty years’ work by two scholars. Beginning back in the thirties, Joseph S. Hall visited and revisited Appalachian communities in a top-of-the-ridge area along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, gathering distinctive bits of language. After Hall's death, Michael B. Montgomery edited the fruits of his research into a volume about the size of three good bricks. But this is no compendium of archaic expressions remote from contemporary usage. It's a gust of pungence, a loamy clump of roots, a big mess of pottage.

As opposed to potted message. Listen long enough to nattering heads holding forth on TV about, say, “wedge issues,” and you can lose touch with the core meaning of “wedge” (not to mention of “core”). “When you read that mountain folk, to this day, call a literal wood-splitting wedge a “glut,” you can feel the give of the American-English grain.

I'm writing too vividly, aren't I? It is this book's fault. But its influence, I believe, will be largely benign. Polluted as the meme pool is today by marketing slogans, maundering pieties, TV catchphrases, threadbare obscenities, affected emotion, and media self-regard (how's that for an ugly turn of phrase?); inured as we have become to hearing it said of a politician that he is striving to “humanize himself;” resigned as we may be to corporate executives’ or government officials’ invoking faceless personnel (not to mention terrorists) as “folks”—it should do us good to learn that people somewhere in this artificially flavored land refer unfacetiously to an easily swallowed morsel as “a slick go-down.” These are people regularly humanized by creek water that is “straddle-deep” (up to the crotch), wild flowers that are not “fotched-on” (store-bought or imported), and free-range bears (“I heered the old she [bear] pop-pin’ her teeth”).

Why would those people in Greeneville assume that the Hall-Montgomery work is kitsch? Because so many books, fond or snarky, that purport to explicate Southern manners and language assume that the subject is a hoot. Professor Hall, a Californian with a PhD in linguistics from Columbia, ventured into the Smokies with a receptive mind, and returned again and again with relish. Maureen Duffin-Ward, a Philadelphia native working there in TV, moved six years ago, for the sake of her husband's job, to Raleigh, North Carolina, with deep reservations. She has parlayed her resistance to local mores into a column for the Raleigh News & Observer, a monthly radio show called “Don't You Be My Neighbor,” and now a book: Suddenly Southern: A Yankee's Guide to Living in Dixie.

As a Southerner relocated more or less voluntarily in the North, I can relate, on the one hand, to someone who finds aspects of the South uncongenial and, on the other hand, to someone who gets tired of being told “You're not from around here.” But a change of address ought to give some perspective on where you come from, as well as where you landed. Duffin-Ward asserts (not without reason) that Southerners regard everybody from outside the South as a Yankee. That, she seems to feel, gives her standing to speak for the category as a whole, but in fact her perspective is narrower. For instance, she can't get over the fact that in the South giving money as a wedding present is a faux pas, which I would say is the case in more places than not, nationwide. A certain amount of unwitting provinciality is universal, to be sure, even among authors, and may add spice. But anyone who got such a hackneyed and unreflective book as this out of moving from Raleigh to Philadelphia (taking Philadelphia as “the North”) would rightly be dismissed as a rube.

In one part of her book, Duffin-Ward undertakes to analyze the DNA of Yankees vis-à-vis that of Southerners. To Yankees, she attributes a chromosome called “Ability to laugh at themselves;” to Southerners, one called “We'll tell the jokes around here.” To Yankees, “Sense of irony;” to Southerners, “Error, Error.” Will people who detect a lack of irony in other cultures never stop to consider that this may be a sign of their own irony deficiency? Maybe it's defensible when the apes detect a lack of irony in Charlton Heston, in Planet of the Apes, but not when, say, Brits detect it in, say, Americans as a race, and not when anyone as inattentive as Duffin-Ward detects it in anybody.

The point of irony, after all, is to say things behind people's backs to their faces. If you look around the poker table and can't tell who the pigeon is, it's you. That might explain Duffin-Ward's success in Raleigh media—but no, I think it more likely that she is part of a trend. Recently I became aware of an airy new Southern lifestyle publication—Y'all, the Magazine of Southern People—out of Oxford, Mississippi (a place of considerable cultural prestige), which might better be entitled Y'all, the Magazine That Doesn't Know What Its Own Name Means. In its premiere issue, in a little box inserted into a column about how to speak Southern, Y'all declared that “ ‘Y'all’ is singular. ‘All y'all’ is plural.” That bit of blatant misinformation also appears in the “Dixie Dictionary” portion of Suddenly Southern.

I don't know whether Y'all picked this up from Duffin-Ward, or vice versa. She is not the first non-Southerner to insist that Southerners may call a single person “y'all,” but to my knowledge she is the first to declare categorically, in the face of everyday evidence and all philological authority, that it is always a single person we so address. And now she is in league, on this point, with a Southern magazine—which in its most recent issue features her and her book enthusiastically. Well, she has a lot of pep.

But she isn't one to brook elucidation. With regard to the singularity of “y'all,” she writes: “Southerners will beg to differ here. They insist that even though they use it to address one person, it implies plurality.”

Something, either second-person-plural envy or hyperjocularity, has affected Duffin-Ward's ear. People in the South do indeed sometimes seem to be addressing a single person as “y'all.” For instance, a restaurant patron might ask a waiter, “What y'all got for dessert tonight?” In that case “y'all” refers collectively to the folks who run the restaurant. No doubt the implication of plurality is hard for someone who didn't grow up with it to discern. It may even be that Duffin-Ward has heard a native speaker, in real life, violate deep-structure idiom by calling a single person “y'all.” That would be arguable grounds for saying that “y'all” is singular on occasion. But how can she have missed daily instances of people unmistakably addressing two or more people as “y'all”? When a parent calls out to three kids, “Y'all get in here out of the rain,” does she think only one child is being summoned? (“All y'all” is of course an extended plural: “Y'all listen up! I mean all y'all.” Often it is pronounced “Aw yaw.”)

One reason Duffin-Ward can so breezily dismiss Southerners’ own explanations of what they mean is that she implicitly—and her illustrator, explicitly—takes “Southerners” to mean “white Southerners.” The Southern types she delineates by their attire and accessories are as follows: “Daddy” (pink golf shirt, wrinkle-free khakis, and so on), “Politico” (panama fedora, bolo tie with Confederate flag), “Redneck” (spit cup, Stars and Bars trucker hat), “Southern Belle” (peach blouse, bow ribbon), “Daughter of the Confederacy” (khaki skirt, clutch purse), and “Mrs. Redneck” (denim miniskirt, tattoos). This is not the full spectrum of people, or even just politicos, in the South, or even just in Raleigh. I haven't spent much time in Raleigh, but enough to know that its populace includes a variety of fully visible black Southerners, not to mention more and more Mexican and Asian ones. (When I was in Greeneville, Tennessee, I heard a white workingman hail a Hispanic one as “Bubba.”) Reducing these people to stereotypes, however sportively, would not do. But ignoring them, in even a superficial treatment of what it's like to live in the South, is bizarre.

There was a time—a long time—when white Southerners, generally, expected to be regarded as a people apart from black Southerners (but even then it wasn't easy), and on that ground they, the white ones, deserved no better. But if Duffin-Ward has found herself in a circle of Raleighites who still invite that assumption, well, for one thing, you'd think she would have found that harder to accept than sweetened iced tea or the plurality of “y'all.”

The traditional culture of the Smokies is anything but ethnically diverse. Scotch-Irish, German, and English stock has predominated, in isolation, since the late eighteenth century. And yet many of the expressions defined in DSME appear also, with essentially the same meanings, in Clarence Major's primarily urban-hip (now out of print) Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. For instance: “high blood,” “jump the broom,” “funky,” “sister,” “old lady,” “old man,” “poke” (meaning bag, though DSME says this is of German origin and Juba says Bantu), “pone” (meaning a swelling or growth on the body), “pot liquor,” “like” as in “like to laugh herself crazy,” “big” (meaning pregnant), “bodacious” (though DSME holds this to be “fanciful usage by outsiders, esp in comic representations of mountain speech”), “devilment,” “dog my cats,” “doings” (as in “big doings”), “biggity,” “blue john,” “booger bear,” “breakdown,” “fuss at,” “goober” (meaning peanut, of African origin, both books agree), “hisself,” “joy juice,” “setting up” (meaning a wake for the dead), “step out on” (meaning commit adultery), “store-bought,” “sorry,” as in no-account, and for that matter “no account.” Paging through these two books side by side is to some extent integrative and to a greater extent dissociative, and poignant both ways.

Hall and Montgomery's respectably fotched-in research may under-represent, as Major's surely does not, the language of sexuality, or maybe in this regard Smoky Mountain culture is far less articulate. What DSME abounds in is terms richly evocative of tightness, narrowness, meager-ness: “scrootch,” “scrouge,” “squidge,” “squinch,” “scringe,” “scription,” “skiver,” “scanty, “spindling,” “squez” and “squoz” as past tenses of “squeeze,” “swively,” “swimp up” (to shrivel), “piddling,” “toddick” (a small amount), “weasely,” “shadow soup,” “smidgen.” These groove in with the references throughout to hard physical work: “She went down that row like a hen a-peckin’.” “She's the workin'est woman!” “I don't want to hear that nary another time, boys. I'm a-showing you how to work, and I mean for you to know how to work.” A machine operated by hand is called an “armstrong machine.” To “grabble” or to “granny” potatoes is to dig them up by hand and then smooth the dirt back, manu-ally, around the plant. To “groundhog it” is “to live on the poorest rations.” No one will pass casually over the expression “hardscrabble farm” after perusing this dictionary.

Not that everything in the world of this book is straightened or straitened. There are plenty of deeply felt and hard-earned terms to do with wildness and messiness: “splatterment,” “sprangly” (sprawling), “wooly bugger,” “shagnasty,” “antigodling” (askew). A free-range bear can help keep the wolf from the door (“wild pork” means bear meat), but it can also give a person “the all-overs” (the shivers).

To a relatively epicene sensibility such as mine, the tang of this language is almost too sharp, like skunk smell or the lands and grooves of fingertips wet with kerosene. But some of it is familiar from rootsy popular music (“mess around,” “take a notion”), sports commentary (“snakebit”), western movies (“that-away,” “varmint,” “vittles”), biker or hippie slang (“old lady,” “old man”), politics (“that dog won't hunt”), and quaintsy gift shops (“gee-haw whimmy diddle”). My middle-class Atlanta-area parents—born in the Deep South just before World War I with close kin still on the farm—used many of these expressions, sometimes with implicit quotation marks around them but never condescendingly, for which I am as thankful as I am that I took three years of Latin. “Store-bought,” “frolic,” “feist,” “stob,” “I swanny,” “tromp,” “ask the blessing,” “barefooted,” “ain't no,” “all-fired,” “a many a time,” “right porely,” “pickalilly,” “piddling,” “shirt-tail boy,” “didn't say pea-turkey,” “pully bone,” “snake in the grass,” “poor as Job's turkey”—some of these, as I look at them written down now, do seem dated, but current discourse is the more spindling for that.

A dictionary of vernacular terms can be as grim an overload as a slew (great many) of jokes off the Internet. The MME is eminently readable. We get more and fuller examples of people's talk than are called for, lexicographically, because the authors love the quotes. For instance, under “sight”:

“I've studied about it a sight to figure out why the Lord made so much ivy and laurel, and I used to hate it in my young days, and then I just thought maybe hit wa'nt for no purpose but to be beautiful and that would have to be enough.”

You could say the same thing about why Americans have made so much language. The reason to hate mountain laurel would be that it's such a chore to get through and to clear away. Readers who hate, and dismiss, genuine dialect for its difficulty miss out on some beauty.

The dictionary includes a photograph of Hall looking undemonstratively sociable in the field. It is easy to imagine him chuckling drily along with people who told him things like “…the roughest country I was in. It was so steep the people had to look up the chimley to see if the cows was still in the pasture.”

Terror slips in under “awful to”:

“My daddy was an awful man to drink by spells, and I know once when the chimney hadn't got no further than your shoulder and no floor laid but enough for the bed to stand on, he went off and didn't come back when night come.”

Some of the expressions Hall brought back are poetically difficult, for instance, this double double-negative under “without”: “I never seen nary 'thout that wasn't one” (Literally, “I've never seen none, unless that wasn't one,” meaning “If that wasn't one, then I've never seen one.”)

And some of the characters in this book are as set in their ways as Duffin-Ward. For instance, the schoolchild who told the teacher, “Well, Miss Emily, here you're teaching us to say set and sit and sat…. At home we don't say nary one of 'em. Miss Emily, we just say sot. Hit don't matter if we're going to sot now or sot directly or sot an hour ago, still just sot.”

What a marvel regional speech is, for those who can get into it. People in Greeneville, Tennessee, assured me that there are still plenty of folks farther up in the hills, and even there in town, who speak Smoky English. But Southern talk doesn't have to be as rich as all that to be interesting. In Greenville's Sav-a-lot supermarket one afternoon, I was involved in a four-part conversation, of maybe three seconds’ duration, that illustrated the meanings of “y'all” and “all y'all.”

I was waiting to pay for pimiento cheese (something you can't get in the North) and soda crackers. In line ahead of me, a man was just reaching the register with what looked like a week's groceries for a big family. Behind me were two people holding as few items as I was: a young woman with a ring in her navel and a man wearing a housepaint-spattered T-shirt that said “The Savior: Stronger Than Nails.”

An employee showed up to open a second line. To the three of us holding few items, he said, “Couple y'all come over here.”

Partly out of politeness as to who would go first, and partly by way of time-and-motion assessment, we exchanged entirely sufficient glances and vocables without wasting a single syllable.

“Fact…,” I said.

“Time he's…,” said the T-shirt man.

“N’ more'n we've…,” said the pierced woman.

We were all three moving already as the new register man said, “Yeah, all y'all.”

The Peer Group That I Hesitate to Speak Its Name

Let's see if I can re-create my train of thought. I was reading a reminiscence of the late poet James Merrill, by Richard

At a literary festival in northern Minnesota, we had been placed side by side on a panel concerned with “regional poetry,” evidently displeasing our hosts (and our audience) by our distinctly lukewarm response to the primacy of the local product. We escaped the auditorium with no more immediate opprobrium than hisses, though tar and feathers were not far to seek. James, in that silvery murmur of his: “You see, my dear, what hap-pens when the Great Plains meet the great fancies.”

And I was thinking that, although I couldn't feature myself saying “my dear” to anybody, there must be a lot of fun in being a gay poet. La camaraderie. And then I thought how careful I would have to be, if I ever put such a sentiment in writing, to make it clear—given the loutishness of many people whose senses of humor overlap considerably with mine-that I did not mean to be at all deprecatory toward gay poets. (Possibly the most personable, and therefore one of the riskiest, of mid-twentieth-century poems is the late Frank O'Hara's “Autobiographia Literaria.” Check it out.)

And then I thought, what is my own tightest affinity group, when it comes to sense of humor? The more I thought about it, the more reprehensible this question became; surely every American should aspire to jokes so inclusive yet so multidirectional (e pluribus, y'all) as to leave no one entirely cold and no one wholly cozy. I believe in mixed company.

But if for the sake of argument I could isolate an ideal interactive audience, it would be…

If you snicker, this is not going to go well.

It would be literate Southerners.

Okay?

Readers, that is, who would appreciate a joke (of course, now that I say this, I won't be able to think of one) involving Kafka and a palmetto bug.[*] Or let's say Proust and a hush puppy. Such a person wouldn't have to have read Proust; I haven't, for example; but he or she would have to know (a) that—as I understand it—Proust bit into a madeleine and started remembering things and (b) that a madeleine is a baked good of some sort. Come to think of it, a hush puppy is a fried good, but there must be some sense in which a hush puppy and a madeleine are analogous. They're both made of batter.

But I'm off on another train of thought. What I want to get into here is what occurred to me next, after I finished toying with the notion of boiling my peer group of merriment down to a hard core. It occurred to me how careful I would have to be, if I were to pursue that notion in print, to make it clear that I did not mean the term literate Southerners to be intrinsically amusing.

There are people who would assume it to be. I once set an entire dinner party of New Yorkers atitter by citing the title of a thoughtful, in fact, scholarly, book: Cracker Culture. “Street-punk culture” or “mall-rat culture” would not have made them blink, but they were so heavily accul-turated to think of crackers as having no culture that they thought I must be pulling their leg. They laughed all the harder as I flew into what evidently struck them as a mock rage. People find it hard to take a humorist seriously when he is trying to get them to wipe smiles off their faces. I thought I was going to have to bite one of them to prove that I wasn't being tongue in cheek. At length they concluded that there was a gap in my sense of humor.

Another time I had the same kind of experience with a bunch of people in a New York restaurant, when I mentioned that I had written an indignant letter to the editor of The New York Times Book Review. Here is the letter I had written:

To the Editor:

In her review [in the September 1, 1996, issue] of several books about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Larissa MacFarquhar makes this observation: “The real Jackie could be delightfully bitchy. She referred to Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson as ‘Colonel Cornpone and his little pork chop.’ ” Let us stipulate that both Johnsons’ public utterances were, tonally, to wince over. No more so than First Lady Kennedy's (I know, she was a gallant lady, but have you heard her on historical video lately?), but still fair game for sarcasm.

To be delightful, however, sarcasm must be knowing. The Johnsons were Texans. To characterize Texans in terms of cornpone and pork is about as sophisticated as to characterize Bostonians in terms of bagel and lox. To the extent that any consistency of Texas speech and behavior derives from food, it would have to be from frijoles and beef.

Even if Mrs. Kennedy's cultural referents had been stereotypically apt, however (if the Johnsons had been, say, Georgians, like me), I put it to the audience of the Book Review that this instance of what Ms. MacFarquhar characterizes as bitchiness would not have been delightful. Would it be delightful to dismiss a Chinese-American president and his wife as “Charlie Chan and his little wonton”? MacFarquhar is a Scottish name. Would it be delightful to dismiss a discernibly Scottish-American president and his wife as “MacStingy and his little haggis”? Or—to set ethnic sensitivities aside-would it have been delightful for Lady Bird Johnson to dismiss the Kennedys as “Mr. Gotrocks and his little hors d'oeuvre”?

Lord knows the Johnsons (though they were serious people, as serious as any of their predecessors or successors in the White House) were mockable. But surely the particular expression of disdain quoted approvingly by Ms. MacFarquhar was no more delightful than one some vulgarian might have come up with.

I didn't have a copy of this letter with me in the restaurant, but I did state the gist of my complaint, and I did end up reading out those members of the company who persisted in laughing it off. Finally, reluctantly, they yielded to my ill humor. One of them handed me his card and suggested that I call him so we could talk this out over lunch. I hope he's not holding his breath.

I don't like coming off as touchy. On another recent dinner occasion, with a friend of mine in the movie business and a director friend of his, the director felt called upon to tell me, out of the blue, in an earnestly congenial tone, “A lot of people have disdain for Southerners, but I was in the army with some, and I don't.” And I didn't say, “Well, kiss my foot if that ain't broad-minded.” I just said, “Mm” and went on talking about movies. He is a marginal director—I say that approvingly—and he meant well.

But I do want to be able to say “literate Southerners” and not have whoever may be listening regard it as an oxymoron—or a reference to Southerners who merely can read. I mean Southerners who have read and do read a good deal. I don't even regard the category as limited. Come to think of it, I would narrow my aforementioned peer group down further, to literate Southerners who have always recognized Little Richard as more trustworthy than Ronald Reagan.

But here's a confession:

I never mailed that letter. I've never felt particularly Southern or un-Southern around the then-incumbent editor of the Times Book Review, Chip McGrath. He's good people; I don't want to be addressing a stiff letter to him. And although, or because, I spent a lot of time over that letter, I never felt sure that it hit the right note. Furthermore, it left a lot to be said, about exactly what I found grating about the mush-mouth way LBJ presented himself to the public—and about how irritating it is, in light of the former Miss Bouvier's aspersion, that historians tend to be so condescending about LBJ's apparent cultural insecurity vis-à-vis the Kennedy circle. It's hard to avoid cultural insecurity, not to mention mush-mouthedness, when Camelot folks are making heavy-handed cutting remarks about you and your wife that presumably literate representatives of posterity will find “delightful.”

Johnson was the second television president. He had the terrible luck to follow the first one, who still stands as the most telegenic. Partly because Johnson's chops (like Bob Dole's) were legislative rather than executive, but also because he had built them up in Texas rather than at Harvard, he sounded bogus telling the nation, “Come, let us reason together.” His chops wanted to say, “We got to quit running through the briars in all directions hollering ‘Rabbit rabbit rabbit!’ and settle on a rabbit we can git.” But that would not have been deemed presidential.

Also this matter of cornpone as a derogatory term needs to be deconstructed. Cornpone is gritty, tasty, and filling, and as someone once said to Mark Twain, “You tell me where a man gets his cornpone, and I'll tell you where he gets his opinions.”

There might even be something in the tone of my letter that would indirectly lead readers to believe that deep down inside I wish there were a lot more literate Southerners and that I were a tad more literate myself. Which I do, but that's not something I care to get into around people whose delights are as dim as Ms. MacFarquhar's.

And the truth is, there's not a lot of fun in being a Southerner who's sensitive about it. There is a lot of fun in boiling things down to the lowest common denominator (another term that shouldn't be automatically pejorative). My friend Greg Jaynes, who has covered Africa and New York City for the Times, e-mailed me a while back from northwest Alabama, where he was visiting his folks:

“My momma has sold her house here (she did it while my father was in Memphis last week) and now she is having a yard sale. She has already made $49. My father just came through the kitchen. My mother has just sold his wheelbarrow, for $3.

“ ‘Greg,’ my daddy advised, ‘don't sleep late or leave town or you won't have nuthin’ left.’ ”

Plain words meeting the plain truth. Anybody who hears good regional poetry and laughs at it is missing something.

A palmetto bug is a real big roach, big enough to relate to on a personal level. After Ka-trina, my friend Rosemary James in New Orleans said, “The palmetto bugs haven't come back yet. I kind of miss them.”

Listen Up, Youth

This month I will address a college commencement. I won't tell you which college.[*] If I did, people there might Google this up beforehand, and get the impression, as I make the speech, that I am plagiarizing myself. Because I may need some of this stuff—such stuff as I may dredge up here from the depths of my reservations about the speech.

Not that I mind public speaking. I am more relaxed at a podium holding forth at length to a crowd of strangers than when I am trying to get through one whole anecdote, among friends, in a restaurant. “Waiters abhor a raconteur. Invariably, just as I am reaching a crucial narrative juncture, a waiter—whose notice I could not have attracted with Roman candles one second before—will sprint across the room to inquire—in a leisurely, getting-to-know-us-better sort of way, though he must be aware that I am holding my breath in midsentence—whether there is anything at all he can do for anyone at the table. At a podium, I can feel secure that the worst…

Well, bad things can happen there, too. Once, years ago, before I had come to realize that there are venues in which you can't pay me to speak, I addressed a “motion upholstery” conference. I opened with several motion upholstery jokes, which I had prepared for the occasion. The jokes, I don't remember now—I believe one involved chasing a runaway chaise longue—but I do remember how they went over.

Flat. As I once heard Minnie Pearl say about her college career, “I got off to a grinding halt.” (Minnie Pearl, who went to Vanderbilt, my alma mater, was funnier than you'd know if you only saw her doing her Opry act. She told me that she asked Roy Acuff why he got Olivia Newton-John's name so garbled up when he introduced her at the Country Music Awards, and he replied, “Well, I didn't know the little lady. I wasn't acquainted with the little lady's work. The little lady as a performer was new, to me. And, then, I didn't give a shit.”)

It wouldn't have been so bad had the motion upholsterers turned beet red and shaken their fists at me—“Motion upholstery is my life! This mockery shall not stand!” I might have fed off that energy. But they did not react to my motion upholstery jokes at all. They saw nothing comical, intrinsically, about motion upholstery. I might as well have been telling H 2 O jokes to a roomful of fish.

So I could say take my word for this, Class of ’05:

Never make jokes about motion upholstery. When you are addressing a motion upholstery convention. Especially if you have only an outsider's grasp of what motion upholstery is. (In layman's terms, it is recliners, sofa beds—adjustable stuffed furniture, I would have called it, if the idea was to keep it from being in any way humorous, but what do I know?) Your best bet, probably, is to steer clear of motion upholstery jokes altogether.

But I may be behind the curve. These days, college students may take courses in Effectively Gearing Laughter-Oriented Marketing Techniques to Target Risibilities. At my alma mater, Vanderbilt (where forty years ago there opened up to me all the glories of the arts and the sciences), the most popular major today, by far, is human and organizational development, which prepares bright-eyed youngsters for employment in corporations. What are they thinking? Studying corporate relations in college is like getting married in high school. My only message to HOD people is what Robert E. Lee said after Pickett's charge:

“Too bad! Too bad! OH! TOO BAD!”

Which brings me to my reservations about the speech. It's a chance to point youth in the right direction. But even if it's not too late for that, I don't like the idea of sending a whole group of people off in the same direction. Even one on one, I am not good at advice. Advice tends to boil down to “If I were you, I'd listen to me”—when, in fact, I am not you, and if I were, why would I need to tell you anything?

Or else advice applies only to some ideal person. The other day I saw a newspaper photo of two men wearing what looked like slightly gussied-up blue jeans, and grinning as if they were doing something droll. “Wearing Their Pants,” said the caption. The men were clothing designers. They had shown up at a fashion show in their own trousers. Pants of their own creation. And this was news. Like fashionwear, advice so often fits only those special individuals on whom it hangs better than it does on its designers.

And why would a person of commencement age listen to someone who still reads newspapers? What I would really like to tell youth today is: “Learn to read! The kind of stuff I write! Printed stuff, on paper! Stuff you might want to linger over, reading, as I have writing. Mark my words, it will stand you…”

It would stand me, that is, in good stead. Not that anybody knows what “in good stead” means anymore. “In the beginning was the Word,” says the Book of John. Because it's a book. The Blog of John would have said, “In the beginning was the Pixel.”

There's an old rhythm-and-blues lyric, “Keep on churning till the butter comes.” When aspiring writers ask for my advice, that is what I tell them. They look at me in childlike wonder—wondering what in the hell is a churn, and why go to such lengths to produce a substance that is fattening? By the time anybody accrues any wisdom anymore, it's in the wrong operating system.

In my speech I could quote what Meryl Streep told a Vassar graduating class: “You have been told that the real world is not like college, and you have been reliably informed. The real world is more like high school.” But that would just bring the graduates down. Except for those who reached their prime in high school, and they aren't the ones you want to encourage. Also, it might not apply to the HOD people.

This will be my third time as a college commencement speaker. The first time, I began by saying, “Look at the person on your left. And the person on your right. And yourself. Of those three people, ten years from now, not one will remember anything I am about to say.” That was true, but too reductive. Young people want their elders to give them advice, so they can snort at it.

The second time, I addressed graduates of the Tufts University Veterinary School. I attended college, I told them, on an unusual scholarship, awarded each year to a prospective sportswriter. Along with the scholarship—because it was funded by the Thoroughbred Racing Association—came summer internships connected to horse racing. One week, I went around to bluegrass breeding farms with a gruff Scottish veterinarian. The first day, he pulled a mare's tail to one side and said, “Hold this.” He inserted a speculum into the mare, peered inside, and told me to take a look.

“Dilated cervix,” he said. “You'll need a mind's-eye view of that.”

Had I been training to be a vet, as he assumed, that advice would have been more directly useful. But a dilated cervix is receptive. When real life saps my confidence, I summon up that vision. Somewhere out there, I tell myself, there's a reader like that cervix.

For me, a reader. For you maybe a customer, an investor, a CEO…

But come on. There's nothing like a reader.

It was McKendree College, in Lebanon, Illinois, where my friend Gerald Duff is the provost. I am now an honorary doctor of humane letters. When I addressed the Tufts veterinary school commencement, they did not award me a degree. Canine letters would have been nice.

Southern Humor: Love It or Leave It

It wasn't a cat book or a Southern humor book or a co-dependent book.” So spoke James Finn Garner, according to an item in The New York Times, in explaining why he had fretted—needlessly, as it turned out—about the best-selling potential of his own book: Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.

I don't know what sort of reading can have led Garner (a Chicagoan) to regard Southern humor as a commodity more reliable than the spoofing of political correctness. He may have seen too many of those booklets with titles like How to Tawk Hillbilly next to the cash registers of highway oases that also sell foot-long pecan rolls. Or he may have had in mind the late Lewis Grizzard's best-sellers, which are to Southern humor as foot-long pecan rolls are to Southern cuisine.

My idea of Southern humor is broader and deeper than Garner's. Of course, it would be, since I am myself Southern and, among other things, a humorist. In fact I have been referred to as “the thinking man's Lewis Grizzard”—a description that neatly eliminates every possible market.

That is my ethnic row to hoe. But I'm damned if I'll sit still for my métier's being lumped in with codependent cats. Nor will I remain good-humored if I am asked one more time the question that two different New Yorkers asked me after I told them I had just finished editing an anthology of Southern humor. Here is what each of those New Yorkers asked me:

“Is it thin?”

If they had asked me is it in English, or, indeed, is it fat, I would have responded in a spirit of hearty ethnic badinage. But …thin?

To anyone similarly shackled by Northerncentricity, I would pose this challenge: Pick, from your perspective, the greatest American novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and musical genius. Let's say you name Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Ives. Okay, here is my question:

Did any of them write anything that would make a book of Northern humor thicker?

I know O'Neill composed a comedy, Hemingway bits of sardonic verse, Hawthorne a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce (a funnier concept now than then, probably), and Ives no doubt witty sequences of notes. My question is, did any of them write anything that's still funny to read?

Now, take Southerners. Out of regional graciousness, I will stipulate the word arguably in each case when I adduce the following: America's greatest novelist, William Faulkner; America's greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams; America's greatest short-story writer, Flannery O'Connor; America's greatest musical genius, Louis Armstrong. Each of these has left us with good solid still-enjoyable chunks of exemplary Southern humor.

So have America's greatest stand-up comedian, Richard Pryor (from Peoria, but his Mudbone character is from Tupelo, Mississippi); the greatest American blues singer, Bessie Smith; the inventor of jazz (to hear him tell it), Jelly Roll Morton; the quintessential New Yorker writer, Joseph Mitchell; the inventor of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe; and the greatest figure in country music, Hank Williams. Not to mention Charles Portis, Julian Bond, Jimmie Rodgers, B. B. King, Eudora Welty, Nikki Giovanni, Donald Barthelme, Alice Walker, Russell Baker, Cor-mac McCarthy, Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Nelson, Ishmael Reed, Lyle Lovett, Little Richard, and Richard Wright. I might also direct your attention to noteworthy humorous appreciations (fond, blistering, or mixed) of the South by A. J. Liebling, Garrison Keillor, and H. L. Mencken. As Dr. Johnson said of Oliver Goldsmith, the South has been both a source of wit and the cause of wit in others.

Furthermore, Dave Barry lives in Miami, which is south of the South, but in a letter to me Barry has written: “I think I qualify as at least possibly Southern. I have dogs, and dogs tend to Southernize a person. I do not mean this in any condescending sense. I mean it in the sense of, you can't be putting on elitist Northern airs if your house has dog snot smeared on the windows from the dogs trying to get at the UPS man.”

Loath as I am to put on elitist Southern airs, it would be remiss of me not to mention that all of modern American literature, according to Hemingway, comes out of Huckleberry Finn, which is about as Southern-humorous as you can get. And I will say this: Southern humor has got down and wrestled more familiarly than Northern humor has with the blues, slavery, the civil rights movement, Elvis, Lyndon Johnson, rock and roll, oysters, alligators, the Civil War, and, incidentally, Hemingway (see Katherine Anne Porter's droll account of having been thrust physically together with Papa, on a level of parity, to his consternation, by Sylvia Beach).

To be sure none of the people I have mentioned, aside from Grizzard and me, are regarded as Southern humorists. Nor, primarily, are James Wilcox, Lee Smith, Hunter Thompson, Harry Crews, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Barry Hannah, or John Shelton Reed. But they are all Southerners, and they have written very funny stuff.

Southern humor tends to be mixed in with violence, heartbreak, preachment, politics, libidinousness, gustation, anger, nostalgia, racial conflict, and adventure. In the South, humor (like argumentativeness in New York) is not so much a specialization as a requisite element in discourse; and Southern humor tends to work best when it isn't trying to be any funnier than life and death. Faulkner is a case in point. He can be rousingly comical when telling how horses ran through a house or Uncle Willy got killed trying to escape the mundane by giving himself flying lessons. But when Faulkner wrote a parody of his own style, it did not succeed in being funny. Nobody should try to write like Faulkner, including Faulkner.

Stick to strictly waggish Southern song and story, and you will soon find you have a surfeit of collapsing outhouses on the one hand and “the ladies, God bless 'em” condescension on the other. But there's nothing funnier, or more chilling, in American literature than O'Connor's story of affectless serial murder, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Blues lyrics are no less dark when jocular. The most humorous lines in country music are to be found in songs that are also genuinely painful, such as Mel Tillis's “Ruby” (“It's hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralyzed”).

I wanted to include that song's full lyrics in my anthology but concluded that the lament of a disabled veteran who is driven to shoot his wife because she “takes her love to town” is just too full of real agony to be called humor. Then Chet Atkins (America's greatest guitarist, also funny) told me that “Ruby” was the result of Tillis's attempt to write the most godawful maudlin song he could. But the mawkishness and the rage are so convincingly vigorous and unashamedly empathetic that the risibility intensifies the shock. What I'm saying is, if Oliver Stone had Mel Tillis's sense of humor (or any sense of humor at all), Natural Born Killers might have worked.

Another thing about Southern humor is orality. Melissa Fay Greene writes in Praying for Sheetrock:

A Georgia peach, a real Georgia peach, a backyard great-grandmother's-orchard peach, is as thickly furred as a sweater, and so fluent and sweet that once you bite through the flannel, it brings tears to your eyes. The voices of the coastal people were like half-wild and lovely local peaches, compared to the bald, dry, homogeneous peaches displayed at a slant in the national chain supermarkets.

Like the souths as opposed to the norths of other nations, the warmer part of the United States is disinclined to take much interest in sense unless it engages as many of the senses as possible. Southern writing abounds in phonetic relish. It may take Southern eye-ear coordination to appreciate some of Faulkner's dialogue (“I ghy tell um! Holting him up dar whilst whipper-snappin’ trash makin’ free wid Marsh Hoke Christian's sto. I ghy tell um!”) and Joel Chandler Harris's renderings of dialect (“He jump up, he did, en ‘gun ter grabble in de quog-mire des ez hard ez he kin”). But there is comparable, more accessible vernacular tastiness in Molly Ivins:

She said, “Dear, you're sprang.”

I said, “Do what?”

She said, “You're sprang. You can't have a winter color like silver next to your face, it won't go.”

In Portis:

“My oldest sister was bit by a mad fox. They didn't have any screens on their house and it come in a window one night and nipped her on the leg like a little dog will do. They carried that fox's head on into Birmingham in some ice and said it was mad and she had to take all them shots.”

In Hurston:

De 'gator run from side to side, round and round. “Way after while he broke thru and hit de watger “ker ploogum!”

In Clyde Edgerton:

“Young people nowadays will go to almost any length…. Who ever heard of so much burning, beating, and stabbing, and my Lord, I can't imagine what Papa would done to me had I come home with a blue lightning bolt tattooed on my kneecap.”

Southern humor may be tall talk. Nikki Giovanni:

I knelt and spotted. There was no stopping me. I shot marbles from between my legs and over my back. I put a terrible double spin on my shot that knocked his cat's -eye out and came back for his steelie. I was baaaaad. I shot from under my arm and once while yawning. Good God! There was no way to defeat me!

Mark Twain:

Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane; dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera; nearly related to the smallpox on my mother's side!

Or it may be very low-key. Gregory Jaynes:

The telephone rang, and a woman said, “Would you listen to my parakeet breathe on the phone? He doesn't sound right.” Dr. Smith listened but couldn't hear a thing.

It may even be lexicographical. You All Spoken Here, by Roy Wilder, Jr., is a guide to Southern locutions that is serious—too authoritative to appeal to the pecan-log trade, which is probably why it is genuinely funny and also out of print. Here's a sample:

Slaunchways, sidegartlin’: Slanchwise; antigodlin; slanting; on a diagonal; awry; askew; off the main track; out of square; out of plumb; catter-cornered; cattywum-pused; hip-sheltered; crook-sided; slanchindicular.

Contrarious: Same as above.

Whatever else may be said of it, Southern humor almost always sounds like people talking on the page, slanchindicularly. How else are natural people, let alone animals, going to talk on something flat like that?

So Many Writers. Why?

If you should attend a function at which I perform an “author reading”—especially if I have read for free in the fond hope that somehow my appearance will lead, however indirectly, to the sale of eight or ten scattered unused copies of my books, which will leave me, in the long run, no more than ten or twelve dollars in the hole for the evening if I have eaten carefully enough that I won't have to send my whole tux to the cleaners, and you are wearing an outfit whose cost exceeds my cut on the sale of, who knows, a thousand, two thousand, three thousand copies …Please don't come up afterward and ask me—nay, defy me—to reassure you that you would enjoy what I write if you had to read it yourself.

You don't have to buy a book. I'll get by somehow. Borrow a book. Steal it (actually, I might get a royalty on that). Read it in the store. Check it out of the damn library.

I'll go further. Read a book somebody else wrote.

Just don't lose sight of the fact that reading aloud to the wealthy, or—it goes without saying—to the needy, is not a writer's line of work.

I don't even know why people want to listen to a writer read to them, except that it's a relief to see that he or she is so unhealthy-looking, and it leaves their hands free for eating. But it's always for some good cause (literacy, say, ahem). And I enjoy throwing the floor open for questions. It's not often I get a chance to throw anything these days, since I am at that awkward stage in life when my son throws back too hard and my grandsons can't catch yet.

But when I do throw open the floor, here is what someone invariably comes back with, perhaps in a faintly prosecutorial tone: “Why does the South produce so many writers?”

The standard answer to this used to be “Because we lost the war.” But these days an African Southerner may well be on hand to raise an excellent question: “What do you mean we, kemo sabe?” An all-white Southern “we” is like a vegan Southern breakfast.

My own short answer has been: “Because it doesn't produce so many readers. You can write about your neighbors and there's a good chance they won't see it.” I'm tired of that one.

So. Alternative answers:

- Per capita, the South doesn't produce all that many writers, any more than kangaroos amount to a great percentage of prizefighters (or, for that matter, Australians). It's just that you can tell right away which ones are kangaroos.

- Conversely, there may be plenty of Northern writers, it's just that Northern writers are like Northern barbecue places: not all that good. A Northern writer might do, if you're hungry, but when you get hungry your first thought is not of a Northern writer.

- I read somewhere that El Greco had an astigmatism or something that caused him to paint people in strikingly elongated form. Either he thought his people looked like everybody else's, or he thought other painters’ people looked squat. In the latter case, seems like he would have asked some other painter about it. “Very effective technique, there, the way you squash the human figure down like that. I notice, uh, several of the other fellas also…” Maybe all he got in reply was a funny look. Anyway, maybe my mind's eye-ear coordination, being Southern, is distorted. But don't Northern fictional characters sound kind of flat?

- Maybe Northern people bring up the abundance of Southern writers so that I will feel better about being from the South. They expect me to blush and dig into the carpet with my toe and say, “Aw, y'all are just being sweet. I reckon we ain't any more writer-productive than y'all are, really. Not all that much more anyhow.” But I think they expect me to swell up and say, “Well, hell, we have a sense of place and loss and family and dirt and blood and sweat and pigmeat and alligators and dogs and woods and pelvis movement and the King James Version of the Bible and smash-mouth football, as I will prove, if any of y'all want to go out drinking or eating or wrestling or praying or reminiscing about our respective mamas after my talk.” Which will give them grounds to roll their eyes in a way that feels good to them. Which is why I say that deprecatory thing about Southern readers. Of course maybe that makes them feel good, too, but, hey, Northern people have to feel good sometime, which is why they “winter” in warm places.

- Writing is a way of getting in out of the hot sun. Once back in the late seventies I visited the Plains, Georgia, worm farm of Hugh Carter, which had found a place in the public eye because Hugh's cousin Jimmy had been elected president. This farm appeared to have one active employee, who was busy shoveling worm manure from where the worms left it into a pile for bagging as fertilizer. At the time, people were selling worm-farm starter kits like mad as a solution to world hunger, which was a Ponzi scheme if I ever heard of one, and yet to my surprise I couldn't get a national magazine excited about my writing an article about the phenomenon.

Anyway, I watched this employee work for a while, because the fine points of vermiculture proved interesting and I have a strong watching-people-work ethic, and then he stopped shoveling, said “Whew,” and asked me what I did for a living.

“Write,” I said.

He wiped his brow. “I reckon you can do that in the shade,” he said.

- Writing is a sublimation of the oral instinct, and certain Southerners like to eat and drink and talk and spit and whoop and smooch so much that we would just die if we ate and drank and talked and spat and whooped and smooched as much as we naturally want to. In fact, we do die, eventually, and that's why, but in the meantime writing is restful to the mouth.

- You have to be crazy to be a writer, and Southerners like being crazy. As a road lizard, as a June bug, as a hog that has got into the mash, as an outhouse rat. Ever hear Willie Nelson or Patsy Cline sing “Crazy”? That's a rhetorical question. I'll tell you one thing, you don't ever hear anybody say, “Don't mess with him. He's sane. ”

- Southerners have the names for it. Take a non-Southern name: Lorrie Moore. Wonderful writer. Imagine how much more wonderful if her name were Flannery, Eudora, or Zora Neale.

- Southerners don't take words for granted. I will be listening to a non-Southerner explain something to me for a while, and wondering what is wrong, and then it will dawn on me: he thinks words are like personnel, and he is their manager, whose role is to organize them into meeting the goals of his department. Southerners think words are like people. Peculiar people. Mix a bunch of them together and you can't tell what might happen. I am going to waltz over to the dictionary now and stab my forefinger at various pages and pick three words at random: pillar, innerspring, and slippery. See what I mean?

I peeked, picking those words. You have to. I didn't think about what I was picking, but for one thing all those short i's, peppery p's and ripply r's …There may have been another principle of selection there, too, now that I think about it; but my point is, you have to have some kind of subverbal sense about what goes together—for instance I don't care how many people tell me that pineapple is good on pizza, I am not going to have it. It might be good. I know a lot of people swear by it. It just don't seem right to me. My father got on with just about everybody, but I remember the pleasure in his voice (and my ears) once when he rendered judgment—his accent getting stronger for effect—on some man who stuck in his craw:

“I don't know that there's anything wrong with him, p'tickly. I jist …don't …lak …him.”

I guess that kind of judgment implies predisposition, which, Lord knows, that be a bad thing not only in Southern society but also in Southern writing (I never said I was talking exclusively about good Southern writing), but there is something to be said, at least literarily, for the fact that a Southerner's tastes reside deeper than explication.

- You notice I used the expression “Lord knows,” above. And yet I am not a person who worships. And unless you worship, in some kind of distinct adherent way, I don't see where you get off saying that you are religious. People go around talking loosely about being “spiritual.” They may just be moved by various coincidences of weather, water, mood, and natural light. In order to hang on to the page for very long, writing needs to be material, as in evidence. Church is evidence. Expressions like “Lord knows” are evidence-not that the person using the expression is religious but that he or she has been religious and knows what it's like.

- Southerners don't need a lot of evidence. As long as it's specific and relates to the mouth. For instance, here's something I learned from judging a barbecue contest in Cleveland, Mississippi (being untrained, I just helped judge the beginners’ competition): Barbecue judges trim their fingernails very close. Because, well, when you think about it, you can imagine how much sauce, and not only that but a lot of different conflicting sauces, would build up under them otherwise.[*]

- Southerners like to generalize, hard. That is the only way in this world that you are ever going to get down to universal truth.

Other people who have told me they make a point of cutting their fingernails short—for varying reasons, obviously—are baseball infielders, lesbians, and intensive-care nurses.

The Thwock and the Fury: Faulkner's Tennis

From Joseph Blotner's biography of William Faulkner we learn that in 1936, while in Hollywood rustling up film work, Faulkner attended a party at which he played tennis with Zasu Pitts. A witness to the game, Blotner tells us, “remembered that pairing vividly, Faulkner playing as well as he could after some serious drinking and his willowy oppponent fluttering about, waving her arms, and dejectedly murmuring Oh, my,’ whenever she missed a shot.”

I want to believe that Blotner's witness has this slightly wrong. No one can be fonder than I am of Ms. Pitts's performance as Charles Laughton's love interest in one of my favorite movies, Ruggles of Red Gap, so it's not that she strikes me as an unworthy opponent for a man who happened to be putting the finishing touches on Absalom, Absalom! at the time. I don't like to think of Faulkner, mean as he could be sometimes, being uncourtly enough (so to speak) as to pit himself one-on-one against such a sweet lady, especially one who was probably taller than he was. Or maybe I just don't like to think of either of them cleaning the other's plow.

I like to think Pitts was Faulkner's mixed-doubles partner. Against Clark Gable and Dorothy Parker.

Gable, who once asked Faulkner, “Oh, do you write?”

Parker, who, according to Blotner, found Faulkner vulnerable and took—for all her acerbity—a maternal interest in him.

I have a feeling that neither of these reactions to Faulkner set well with Faulkner. Especially, as we shall see, because of a certain property known as Gone with the Wind.

And this is how the game went.

Pitts is wearing something filmy but unrevealing, topped off by a maid's cap. Faulkner is in impeccable grey flannel trousers, a necktie, and a tweed jacket but no shoes, because he took his highly shined wingtips off to ease his feet during the drinking and now can't find them—can't find the shoes. In the feet he still has some feeling, so he has a pretty good general idea where they are. He also has the certain knowledge that his feet are small, size 6 1/2 B. Visibly far smaller than Gable's.

Parker, at a well-worn forty-three (four years older than Faulkner and Pitts, eight older than Gable), no longer has anything of the coquette about her, but she is little and quick, and her feeling toward Gable is not maternal. She's kind of peppery in a black tennis skirt with something obscurely magenta worn under. Gable, having come straight from the set of San Francisco, is dressed as a raffish turn-of-the-century saloonkeeper.

Now. Consider the cultural-historical context. It is 1936, remember, the year not only of Absalom, Absalom! which would get mixed-to-scathing reviews and sell poorly but also of Gone with the Wind—the novel, already a blockbuster. The movie is a couple of years away. The trades are reporting that Gable is under pressure from the studio to play Rhett Butler, a role he for some reason resists. Faulkner, although he would rather die than admit this, has read Gone with the Wind, twice. Why? Because he would love to be (a much better written version of) Rhett Butler. And Faulkner is under the impression—there is some resemblance—that Parker is Margaret Mitchell.

“Backhand or forehand?” the mannerly Faulkner asks Pitts.

“Oh, my word, I hardly have a hand at all,” she replies. “If it were up to me to get us back to deuce when it was their ad, why I don't know, ohhhh, I just don't know, that's all.”

Faulkner bows stiffly, in more ways than one, and takes the backhand side.

“Up or down?” rasps Gable brusquely, twirling his racket to see who gets first serve. Faulkner watches it twirl and cannot help asking himself whether he wants to serve:

You would toss it up and at the top of its arc you would reach back into the past with your stringed saber and you would know as your father would have known and your father's father would have known that you could hit it, Faulkner thinks, but you would not want to hit it, because it would not be it, not what you wanted to hit; that when you hit it you would just be hitting a child's toy balloon with a celluloid face on it, a face mustached and rugged and about to burst into laughter, and so you would not dare strike it because it would merely burst and you would rather let it drop all null and unserved than to have stood there in the irredeemable knowledge of a fault, and then the dread, the primordial…

The racket clatters down.

“Down,” Faulkner says in his aristocratic but, let's face it, rather too-reedy-to-be-Rhettian voice.

“Up,” Gable growls. “We'll let the little lady here get us under way.” He gives Parker an impersonal sort of wink.

Parker tucks one ball into her waistband and rolls the other one around in her fingers reflectively. “The fuzz,” she cracks, with a sly look at Gable, “is familiar, but, hmm …Funny, I seldom blank out on a testis.”

Gable winces. This is not the kind of dame he goes for. In fact, he doesn't go for Scarlett, that's why he's been resisting the part of Rhett, he likes 'em cheerful and forbearing, is currently dating Carole Lombard but has had two wives who were considerably older than he, and maybe, just maybe, Gable is jealous that Faulkner (younger than his own wife back home) is the one who brings out Parker's motherliness.

Parker, a bit unsteady on her feet, looks across the net. Faulkner is swaying under the influence, Pitts in the wind.

“They also swerve,” cracks Parker, “who only stand and wait.”

She delivers, crisply, to Pitts. Who emits a high-pitched wail, Ooooooohhhh, and slaps the ball right at Gable, at the net. He puts it away, zing, between Faulkner's feet. Whose nakedness all behold. Parker says, “Aww.” Gable gives Faulkner an alpha sort of wink. Faulkner's only reply is internal:

More than a Snopes perhaps yet more than abysmally less than a Sartoris this man not of the South who disdains to stand for the manhood of the South yet probably will win the Distinguished Flying Cross in the looming war Sartoris will be too old to serve in—

“Five-love,” says Gable.

“Mm,” cracks Parker, “but will even one or two call the next morning?” “Oooh, glory be,” says Pitts, “I'm afraid my whole game is pitty-pat.”

Pittypat the fluttery aunt, thinks Faulkner, and Ashley Wilkes the vapid cavalier and the silly Prissy and the doddering father and the cloying Melanie, these cheap confectioner's figments so easy to swallow that even I cannot get them out of my—

“Are you ready?” Parker asks Faulkner solicitously. He does not deign to answer, except in his teeming imagination:

Implacable in the black which she wears whether for sister, father, or not-husband none know, standing bolt upright on the hard dusty vivid clay with an air of static rage and cheaply won popularity and talking in that brittle commercial voice of unwanted concern until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the unwilling object of her attention be avatar of all frustrated blood-longing of poets immemorial constrained to churn out incidental dialogue in a colony of wiseacres lest the old home place of the fathers and the fathers’ fathers escheat to—

Having taken Faulkner's silence for assent, Parker taps one over to him, softly.

And Faulkner swings, wildly and yet with astonishing narrative drive, and the ball hums with unaccountable spin as it ticks off the tape at the top of the net, shoots over Gable's racket, glances off his widow's peak, and sails way, way up into the evening zephyrs, into the blue yonder where Gable a few years hence will indeed become the air hero Faulkner has claimed to be but never was: banking now this way, now that way; Gable racing back, back, whirling, scrambling to get his bearings; no such trajectory has been seen hereabouts; it's coming down, Gable goes for the volley, misses entirely, the ball lands behind him, just in, and then it rises again, in all its unprecedented transcendent English, way, way up and backspinning over the lurching Gable, who re-reverses course in pursuit, but the ball flies all the way back over the net, bounces on the Faulkner-Pitts side, and then goes back again over to Gable, who angrily whacks it into the net.

“Oh, my stars,” says Pitts. “Does that make us 30-5?”

“Pretty to think so,” cracks Parker, but her eyes are on Faulkner, with an expression speculative, urgent, and intent.

Faulkner is just standing there, glassy-eyed. Though this is his high-water mark in Hollywood, his inner voice is relentless in parabolic extrapolation:

It's because she wants it told, he thinks, so that ages hence people whom she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her once-famous name nor succumbed to her overcelebrated prose will read of this and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of this film-figment hero to whom is proffered our bled-for manhood by not-even-American moguls and the tears of the very harlot herself who has composed that massive pretense of a history which vouchsafes this insouciant interloper the opportunity to toy with the role of a lifetime can he stay this demon and efface his name and lineage not to mention the tacky spawn of the very soap-operatic mythos which she herself has wrought and now must see the treason of—

•••

“Are you feeling well, Bill?” says Parker, flipping her skirt. “As the Lady said to Peeping Tom, you look a little peek-ed.”

Faulkner winces.

Pitts picks up her maid's cap, which has fallen off and gotten dirty. Faulkner has a nostalgic vision of a different soiled item of clothing, the limb of a tree—

Then, then it was that I was really cooking, he thinks, and will my flame ever burn like that again, or has the tale told by this she-idiot usurped the myth that is spirit and material, bloodright and birthright and all, her Mammy blotting out my Dilsey her Scarlett expunging—

“Do you think he's all right?” Parker asks Gable.

“Frankly, my dear,” says Gable—but you know what he says.

In Elysium

WILLIAM FAULKNER TO MALCOLM LOWRY:

“You know, your prose was way too flow'ry.”

“Mine was? Bill, how about your—?”

“Il y a fleurs, et il y a fleurs.”

“Sorry, I don't speak Creole. Por que—”

“Spare me the Mexican. You and this Corky

McCarmack—

”

“Cormac McCarthy, you mean?”

“Why won't you call a frijole a bean?

Anyway, your main problem was booze.

All of your sentences fairly ooze—”

“Mine do! Bill, how about your— ?”

“Mine ooze whiskey. Yours, liqueur.”

“Pulque is not a cordial, my friend.

Pulque would put you on your rear end.”

Confronting My Whiteness

At a recent gathering of Southern writers at Vanderbilt University, my alma mater, I missed the panel on religion. For reasons impossible to reconstruct at this late date—they were not easy to reconstruct, in fact, that morning when I woke up—I overslept. Too bad, because I had prepared two limericks dealing with religion and Southern higher education:

At U. of Alabama

A wary Delta Gamma

When class was adjourning

Said, “I am not learning Anything Christ wouldn't, amma?”

At Bob Jones U., a professor

Said, “Which of these evils is lesser:

The Evil One

Or Evollution?

Going too fast for you?” “Yessir.”

I did attend the panel on race, however, because I was on it. And at one point during that discussion, I took a step that has somehow failed to attract widespread attention. I came out as a white writer.

I did so in response to a challenge laid down by the leader of the panel, Natasha Tretheway, a poet and a professor at Auburn University, who is African American. Black writers, she said, are always having to talk about being black. It was time, she said, for white writers to confront their whiteness.

Well, I usually confront my whiteness, with regret, in the context of dancing or basketball. Or by thinking of song titles like “I Got the All-I-Got-Is-the-Right-to-Remain-Silent Blues.” Never before had I stood up in public and stated, with simple dignity, “I am a white writer.”

It felt okay. A relief, in many ways. Now, when someone asks me what I do, and I say I am a writer, and he or she asks me what kind, I can say, “White Southern.”

Why is this good for me? Well, the other night I was in the midst of a congenial group of white non-Southern persons of literary and artistic bent. They started laughing about having heard someone on television pronounce the word longitude with a hard g.

“What's wrong with that?” I said. “That's the way I pronounce it. That's the only way I've ever heard it pronounced.”

They looked at me as from a great height.

I went to the hostess's dictionary. The preferred pronunciation was lonjitude. I honor dictionaries. So there I was, hung out to dry, the only person in the room who pronounced longitude unpreferredly. And I had been doing it for some fifty years, ever since I encountered the word as a child and naturally assumed…

“Of course, this dictionary isn't American,” I said, it being the Shorter Oxford one. (As it happened the American ones I consulted when I got home failed even to acknowledge any pronunciation but lonjitude.)

“Well, neither are you,” said the most outspoken member of the company (a native and lifetime resident of Manhattan). “You're Southern.”

There were no sharp intakes of breath.

All primarily in fun, of course, and although I did say yes, I was American, there was no point in getting on my high horse. For one thing, I might start yelling, which brings a horse down. For another, when I tried to summon my high horse, he looked at me as if he had no dog, so to speak, in this fight. I did take the position that the letter g was usually hard before the letter i. An argument readily refuted by both logic and magic.

I thought of pig in a blanket, and cited it, but I knew it wasn't really apropos, particularly since I thought of it and cited it somewhat later, with an unwinning suddenness, long after the conversation had turned to other matters. I thought about longing, but that would have been an ngas in stringiness. It was the next day before it hit me, what I should have thrown up to the New Yorkers present: Longisland. They would have disavowed Long Island as part of their heritage, but the necessity to do so would at least have put them slightly on the defensive.

For my part, I've had enough of Southern defensiveness. Everything about me that is still Southern is something that I have held on to because it is tasty. My maleness and whiteness and one thing and another can no doubt still stand some judicious reconstruction, but if I forgo any more Southernness, it will be because I have gotten too old to exercise it.

But how in the world, you are wondering, can I imagine that coming out as a white writer puts me in a position to confound Northern assumptions that I ought to be defensive?

Here is my thinking. Since I can't—don't want to, damn it—avoid being regarded as Southern, by coming out as a white writer I categorize myself as a white Southern writer. And since no one who manages to find himself in decent Northeastern company can be suspected, these days, of being motivated by overt racial exclusiveness, I can, in such company, go on the offensive. I can quite accurately accuse Northeast-erners of using the term Southern to mean white Southern.

If, as I am willing to bet he would, B. B. King were to pronounce longitude with a hard g, nobody would think of telling him that he was doing so because he was Southern. He would be doing so because it sounds better that way. (Lonjitude sounds like it goes with lassitude—like what you feel when you've been lonjing around too much.) I am, among Southern writers, one of the white ones.

People keep wanting to say that there are so many Southern writers because the South lost the Civil “War, but the black South didn't lose it, and neither, incidentally, did I. Maybe I would have helped lose it if I'd been around at the time, but that was a long time ago. I didn't lose the civil rights movement, because I was for it.

And say the Confederacy had prevailed. Would Faulkner have been content to have a career in its post office? Would Carson McCullers have been just a typist? Maybe the Confederate army lost because it had too many writers’ grandfathers in it. Probably a big percentage of whom got killed before they had a chance to continue the family line— the war no doubt nipped quite a few Southern writers in the bud. If we must invoke that grotesque intersectional bloodbath, we might rather say that Southern literature derives from what caused the war in the first place: the volatile mix of black and white in the South, and the cultural differences—the largely resultant differences—between the South and the North. But I would rather leave the war out of it, and observe with pride that Ray Charles and Flannery O'Connor jump out of the same bag.

A Southern writer is a product of the bodacious social and moral stew created when Africans and Celts or Anglo-Saxons found themselves in the same regional pot. It was, to be sure, white Southerners who, with the help of black Africans, brought black Southerners in, and the institution under which they were brought in was abominable. But in the long run, didn't slavery do more for American culture—however undeserving, and ungrateful, the culture may have been—than Hitler even? I am privileged, as a white Southern writer, to be a direct inheritor of the orality, earthiness, emotional juice, metaphorical fluency, rhythmic relish, and improvisatory looseness of Southern American English, whose black and white ingredients vary as to proportions but are inseparable.

The difference between Southern and Northern diction is the difference between “Ebbody talkin’ 'bout Heaven ain't goin’ there” and, oh I don't know, here's something from Ralph “Waldo Emerson (a Northern white writer): “The test of a religion or philosophy is the number of things it can explain.” Thank you for sharing that, Ralph, but do you have anything we can dance to?

I realize that the bag image and the pot image I used above entail any number of potentially divisive snags. So does every other image of white and black Southerners together. Mark Twain and Richard Wright were both great integrators of European and African culture; the blend is a lot darker in Black Boy than in Huckleberry Finn. As Ernest Gaines pointed out a while back in the Oxford American, “Faulkner knows Dilsey from his kitchen, and I know Miss Jane from Miss Jane's kitchen…. She can be freer in her own little place, and she can tell you much more than Faulkner would get out of Dilsey in his own kitchen.” I would add that Faulkner told us things about the rest of his house that Dilsey wasn't studying. The Sound and the Fury is a white Southern novel. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a black Southern novel.

We will read, say, To Kill a Mockingbird less fondly, I think, but with more interest, if we take into account that it is a white writer's sentimental story of white courage (and meanness, and innocence), with black people as a backdrop and a particular black victim as the MacGuf-fin. Compare The Color Purple, which has a different cultural skew. To call both books racist, however, would obscure the virtues of each and get everybody's back up. I would like for the different ethnocentrisms within Southernness to be de-pejoratized sufficiently for black and white Southerners to thrash them out together openly. If it ever gets lukewarm in that pot, though, we'll know that Southern lit hath lost its savor. Or maybe I should say if it gets cozy in that bag, nobody new is going to jump out.

Something like that is what I was going to say during the Vanderbilt panel on race. But Tretheway was right—first I had to be candid about my whiteness. Not to pin myself down but to gain latitude.

Little Truman, Happy at Last

Lord help a writer, we may think, whose aunt writes a book. But wouldn't you read a book by Shakespeare's aunt? Bound to be something in it. In Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him, there is, for instance, this, about Capote's mother, Lillie Mae:

“Whenever she came to a puffball, she kicked it impatiently. “We watched the small clouds of mustard-green smoke that erupted each time she stepped on one.

Suddenly Lillie Mae whirled around, her skirt lifting up and exposing her slim brown thighs and calves. Her feet were small and highly arched….

“I swear, Clay, wouldn't this be a perfect place to take our pleasure?” Lillie Mae said saucily. “Why, every move we'd make would explode a puffball!”

So they took it, “among the bloodroot and puffballs.” Clay was Lillie Mae's Monroeville, Alabama, beau for the afternoon, Truman's father being in New Orleans. The narrator is Marie Rudisill, the aforementioned aunt, who accompanied her sister Lillie Mae on trysts for appearances’ sake. She wrote this book with James C. Simmons, a scholar. Mustard-green smoke erupts on every page.

Here are some of the other things that Aunt Marie (hereinafter referred to as Rudisill) confides:

- Truman's mother was some number. Once she tried to seduce a Catholic priest during communion. “When she knelt at the railing, she strained every muscle in her body, so that her breasts looked as though they were ready to pop right out of her blouse.” The man she always preferred, but would not marry because he was a Creek Indian, was Tecumseh” Waterford. Rudisill would often accompany Lillie Mae to meet this romantic figure in the woods, where the lovers would “talk and act as though I were not ever there.” She was, though.

- Truman's mother didn't love him. He once overheard her telling the cook, “I just can't stand the sight of my son…. He's just like his father sometimes—Little Miss Mouse Fart.” Most of the time, she left little Truman in the care of his aunt and his four grown-up cousins, one of them a lifelong bachelor and the other three spinsters (as then they were called), in their house in Monroeville. Sometimes Lillie Mae stayed there, too, but when she did, Truman drooped.

- Truman's mother didn't love Truman's father, either. His name was Arch Persons.

- If Arch Persons loved Truman, he gave scant evidence of it. He was usually out of town doing things like selling tickets to the burial and resurrection of a down-and-out Egyptian named Hadjah, who could control his breathing but was dead when last dug up.

- Truman's mother constantly berated her son for his effeminacy, but just before her death Truman felt that the two of them were approaching an understanding. “My contacts with Grace Kelly and Princess Margaret,” he told his aunt, “were so important to her.”

- The surname by which we know Truman came from his mother's second husband, “a chubby little Cuban gentleman” named Joe Capote, who was on the way to Sing Sing for embezzlement when Truman's mother, on discovering that Joe had pawned her full-length mink coat, took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills.

- The strongest figure in Truman's childhood was his middle-age cousin Jenny Faulk, a ladies’ clothing entrepreneur who ran the household in Monroeville with an iron will, who caused a fence of animal bones to be erected around the garden, who horsewhipped her sister Callie's fiancé out of town, and who had discreet affairs. “In the front yard hidden beneath the rose bushes was a small tombstone that read simply, ONE DAY OLD.’ Jenny would never answer our questions about it.” We might call that Gothic discreet.

- The person who showed young Truman the most affection was his childlike grown-up cousin Sook. She joined him enthusiastically in fantasizing, kite making, and dressing up in women's finery, but she wouldn't let him ride his bike except right around the house. “Youse gonna make a man-chile into a split-tail chile if yo ain't careful,” complained the cook. (For the most part, this book evinces a good ear but not here. The contraction of you is should be written you's, to distinguish it from the Northern youse as in youse guys. More important, yo is a shortening of yore, meaning your. No one, in or out of the South, has ever said yo for you. Yuh, more like it, or y. Capote, whose ear was fine, used yuh to convey the way a popcorn-selling midget said you in “The Headless Hawk,” a story he wrote from the viewpoint of a man in New York who strains, unsuccessfully, to be truly in love with—not to be evil to—a ghostly, waifish, boyish, artistic, insane young Southern woman with short “fawn-colored” hair. Personal pronouns stand out in this story. At one point the male character awakes and cries, “You, where are you?” Another time his cry is “I am not him! Only me, only me!” Ah, we might say, a story about Capote trying and failing to love himself in all his gender confusion. But this story isn't psychology; it's dreams within dreams.

- Those readers who know of Sook as the lovingly portrayed character in Capote's celebrated, insistently heartwarming story “A Christmas Memory” may be taken aback to learn that her bedroom stank because she wouldn't let any fresh air into it and that she hated black people and Yankees. She informed Truman with relish that her father once punished a ham-stealing field hand by nailing him up in a rain barrel with long nails driven into its sides and rolling him downhill.

- Truman's elderly cousin Bud was fond of him, told him wholesome stories, and predicted he would become famous. Bud was in several ways a Negrophile, and a nice man. (I don't know about you, but I never met anybody named Bud I didn't like.) But Bud never worked or married. Except presumably with regard to black people and Yankees, “Sook's influence,” says Rudisill, “eventually proved the stronger.”

- Monroeville also offered Truman great soul food, spooky neighbors, cool places to sit alone and think, and family retainers who did voodoo and said things like “Don't y'all spit in de fire. It will dry up yore lungs.” There were also friends his own age, notably including Nelle Harper Lee, who later, as Harper Lee, wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Nelle is Scout and Truman is Dill. (Interesting how many Southern women writers of note have dropped their first names in their bylines: Mary Flannery O'Connor, Lula Carson McCullers, June Bailey White.) Nelle and Truman would get out a typewriter and a dictionary and play writer for hours. Nelle could knock Truman flat and jump up and down on him like a rooster, he was so tiny, but Truman's imagination, energy, and flair for tall tales made him Tom Sawyerishly dominant among the kids.

- When Truman came back to Monroeville as a famous writer, a prominent local banker invited him to lunch. Truman told him to shit up a stick: “simply because he was a nobody,” Truman explained to his aunt, “and he only wanted to be seen with a somebody.”

Okay. Rudisill is an aunt, with an aunt's perspective. To her, Capote remains a nephew, and one who has refused to take her phone calls for fifteen years. A person's development may be more mysterious and advanced than it seems to his aunt. Give Capote credit. His need to see himself as “a somebody” by regarding others as nobodies is unpleasant (which is not to say he should have gone out to lunch with the banker in question), and his writing did over time tend to break up in the opposite but complementary directions of mistiness and nastiness (until all the romance was gone and he was reduced to a mode we might call desiccated indiscreet), and he did, like Elvis, bloat and kill himself with toxic substances. But Humphrey Bogart did call him “a ballsy little guy,” Marlon Brando was not immune to his charm, and he did cut an international figure as a quintessentially arch person. And he had mature literary achievements. Neither your therapist nor Rudisill nor I could have written “The Headless Hawk,” for instance, to save his or her or my life. Unlike so many things called magical, it is. High as its gossamer quotient is, it lives up to its epigraph from the Book of Job.

And yet Truman comes through more appealingly in his aunt's stories than in his own. When we pull back from the magic to see him in his aunt's eyes, he is somebody, forget the “a.” She recalls walking into town with Truman and Nelle on hot sidewalks. “Occasionally Truman would step over into the dirt street and dance a few steps of the Charleston to cool the bottoms of his feet in the warm dust.” Her most nearly recent recollection is of Truman at age thirty, crying over his mother's death “as a small boy cries, pressing his mouth hard against the white knuckles of his fist.”

God damn parents who don't love their children.

The Best of Gaynelle

At the time Gaynelle Howe left The Standard-Messenger two years ago, after thirty-four years of service to this community as a trusted staff member, the management of Southwise Media Corporation felt an obligation to be transparent as to why. As was disclosed, Gaynelle had been found for the third time to have fabricated from scratch odd human-interest items for the “Only in Our Southland” column. Her explanation, as before, was that she did it “only when there weren't any good ones otherwise.” In these days of media coming under attack for issues of believability, we felt we had no recourse but to let Gaynelle go, despite the fact she had been under stress since the death of her mother, Mama Pearl, whom she had tended at home during many years of illness.

Last Saturday night, Gaynelle passed away. On her kitchen table were found two files. One, labeled “Good Gaynelle,” contained a certificate from the county commission commending her for twenty-five years of fair and accurate reporting of commission proceedings, a letter offering her a scholarship to Wellesley College in Massachusetts (which she declined), a yellowed photograph of an unidentified young man in a perky straw hat like men used to wear, and the program from her mother's funeral. The other file, labeled “Bad Gaynelle,” contained a “note to posterity” and several dozen clippings of “Only in Our Southland” items she had made up over the years, most of which, frankly, no one caught. The “note to posterity” stated simply, “If these aren't good reading, kiss my foot.” As a memorial to Gaynelle we reprint a selection of the best of these items.

—the editors

When Ridley Chivers of Love Falls, Kentucky, took the first load of clothes from his brand-new washer recently, he was dismayed to find them all yellowish and oily. “When he called the appliance store, they dispatched the man who'd installed the machine. The man ran his finger along a windowsill, found dust, and said, “Your whole house is dirty. “Where's your wife?”

Chivers said he was recently widowed.

“Well,” the man said, “there's your problem,” and he began to leave. “When Chivers remonstrated, the man said, “Okay, show me some clothes that aren't completely filthy to begin with, and run them through.”

Chivers said he wasn't about to ruin any more of his clothes. So the repairman took off his own shirt and pants, threw them into the washer, and turned it on. When Chivers tried to call the store to complain of this behavior, the man wrestled him for the phone. Chivers got loose, locked himself in his bathroom, and called police, who took him for a prankster until they heard the man banging on the bathroom door and shouting, “IT'S NOT THE MACHINE, IT'S YOU!”

A squad car intercepted the man as he tried to drive away, in wet clothes. The store has apologized to Chivers and given him a new washer, which he hasn't had any problems with yet.

•••

We know that a major pollutant of the atmosphere is methane gas emitted by livestock. We also know that methane is the major constituent of natural gas, widely used for heating and cooking. Well, finally someone has put toot and use together. Agronomists at the University of Virginia have designed a fixture that can be humanely strapped onto a cow or sheep, which allows for solid waste elimination and yet captures most of the gas arising from the animals. Methane is absorbed in highly concentrated form by cells composed of a material developed by NASA for recycling air in space capsules. The agronomy department's experimental kitchen recently produced a dinner for eight cooked with gas produced in one twenty-four-hour period by a single cow. The entree was chicken.

•••

Oklahoma legislator D. W Washburn is a big Clint Eastwood fan. So, at a dinner in Washburn's honor during his recent fact-finding trip to the African Republic of Mali, he was delighted to hear a Malian official bring up the director Sergio Leone. Washburn launched into a spirited critique of his favorite Clint Eastwood shoot-em-ups directed by Leone: A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Unfortunately, the Malian official had, in fact, brought up not Sergio Leone but the neighboring nation of Sierra Leone. What with the vagaries of translation from Oklahoma English to West African French, Washburn seemed to be boasting that he had promoted bloodshed in Sierra Leone for a paltry amount of money and intended to do so in Mali at only slightly greater expense. By the time the misunderstanding was cleared up, most of the Malians present had walked out.

•••

Celeste, Alabama, has declared itself the sister city of Heaven. This June, Celeste will hold its first annual Pearly Gates Festival, with a parade of heavenly floats, a Mr. and Miss Littlest Angel pageant, an ambrosia competition, and an essay contest on the topic, “What Heaven Is Like and Why.” Long-range goal: a honeymoon and conflict-resolution center. Asked about potential church-state problems, a Celeste spokesperson said, “Oh, it's not just a religious thing. We want Celeste to be a mecca for everybody who dreams of heaven.”

•••

Just outside the Nashville, Tennessee, airport, a little hilltop parking area affords a good view of planes taking off and landing. But now it's closed, and not for reasons of airport security. Police, routinely driving by to make sure nothing more nefarious than light petting goes on there, noticed that the number of parkers was way up, and that the great majority of them were elderly men.

It seems that word had got around among heart patients that you can somehow upgrade your pacemaker, and your own physical vigor, by sitting for extended periods near the big rotating radar screen situated near the parking lot. Devotees of this folk therapy claim that after an hour or so they begin to “feel the beam” every time the screen comes around.

Cardiologists, however, say radar has no medical value and, what's more, that so-called “beaming up” may account for a recent surge in fatalities from overexertion among area men with pacemakers. So authorities have blocked off the lot.

A protest organization has been formed called HORSE: Hearts Operating on Radar-Screen Enhancement.

•••

Bruxism. Nocturnal dental gritting and grinding. For two out of five Americans today, it is a chronic complaint. Dentists and psychotherapists do what they can to treat it. But for a growing number of communicants, bruxism is a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy: “There shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.” In Louisiana alone there are now more than a dozen Bruxist congregations. “We are not, quote, ‘Holy Grinders,’ ” says a spokesman for the sect. “We do not, quote, ‘speak in teeth.’ We do take widespread nighttime gnashing as a sign. That the last days are at hand.”

•••

“I'll tell you where I got the idea,” says “Wade Beacham, the Midland, Texas, oilman who founded Rain Forest Fellowships, Inc. “I took a fishing trip on the Amazon, and saw how our native guides lived. I came back to Dallas and a friend of mine said he was worried about his son, he was off in college and wanted to be an environmentalist, devote his life to saving the rain forest. I said, ‘Tell you what. Let's set up a program.’

“So now any Texas college student who's developing these environmental leanings, and whose daddy has $18,000 to spare, can go spend a semester IN the environment, and see what it's like—with these Indians down there, who kill and eat everything they can and chop down anything they feel like. In other words the rain forest is just as much a jungle as the bidness world. Those kids go down there wanting to hug a tree, and they come back mean as snakes. It's refreshing.”

•••

At Fernbank High in Philatobia, Mississippi, Howard Nitze—four foot nine inches tall at age sixteen—wasn't bullied, just treated as a mascot.

“Itsy Bitsy” Nitze, they called him. They would put him up on top of things—the trophy case, a flagpole—and he was a good sport. On the bus coming back from the basketball game in Vestal Springs last week, they had undressed him and were painting him blue and gold, the school colors, when the bus slid down an embankment and got wedged in so the door would barely open. And who was able to slither out, climb to the highway, and flag down a passing truck?

“I saw this tiny blue-and-gold guy, wrapped in this gold thing, turned out to be a cheerleader's skirt,” says the driver. “I started not to stop.”

“Itsy Bitsy came up huge,” says head cheerleader Jacey Pepperell. “Oops, I mean Howard.”

•••

The following item appeared last week in the “Corrections” column of the Marcell (Florida) Dispatch-Citizen: “A headline in yesterday's early editions, Overholzer Naked to Ceremonial Post,’ should have stated Overholzer Named to Ceremonial Post.’ The first sentence in the accompanying article, ‘Miriam H. Overholzer was naked Mistress of Revels yesterday in a ceremony at the Senior League Arts Center,’ should have stated ‘Miriam H. Overholzer was named Mistress of Revels yesterday in a ceremony at the Senior League Arts Center.’ The photograph that appeared above the headline was not of Mrs. Overholzer. It should have accompanied a review of the Episcopal Dance Society's presentation of Eve Embracing the Tree of Knowledge which appeared on page twenty-eight with a photograph of Mrs. Overholzer holding a gavel. The dancer, who is from Chicago, was wearing a full body stocking. The Dispatch-Citizen regrets any confusion these errors may have caused.”

•••

It was Flonny'n'Ward's against Mom'n'PopCo, eyeball to eyeball, and Mom'n'PopCo blinked. In “Ward's Words,” his weekly paid-advertisement-column in the Goforth (Georgia) New Era, Ward Dukeheart took it to the tristate chain of convenience stores—Mom'n Pop's—that threatened his and his wife's family store, Flonny'n'Ward's.

“This soulless corporate entity,” wrote Ward, “thinks it can render extinct my wife and I. But we have served this community's short-term food and notions needs for thirty-seven years and will prevail. The little heads in that Mom'n'Pop logo? They aren't anybody. The little heads in Flonny'n'Ward's logo? Me and Flonny. And in the area of live bait, well, they'll have a vending machine. ”

Last week, after a deluge of angry mail, Mom'n'PopCo announced it had abandoned plans to open a store right across the road from Flonny'n'Ward's.

•••

At last someone has harnessed the vexatious powers of that minute reddish larva of the harvest mite known as the redbug or chigger. A chigger gets on your skin and begins to break down and ingest your cells with its saliva, which makes you itch. Well, scientists at Clemson University have shown that the key element of chigger saliva can be isolated and re-engineered to focus on hair follicles. Is Madame's down getting dirty? A little bit of chigger spit whisks away those unwanted whiskers for good. Since chigger saliva is almost unbelievably difficult to gather in bulk, the commercial potential may seem limited, but the researchers expect they will find a way of creating a synthetic form of that key element soon.

•••

Remember back in 1961, that country record “I Saw Right Through You So I Filled You Full of Holes”? In Hot Springs, Arkansas, a rumor arose that Miss Mae Swan, the high school band teacher, had written that song.

No crime in that. Trouble was, the lyrics—“You stepped fat and sassy out of room fourteen. The blast flung you up against the drink machine,” and so on—fit to an uncanny extent the quite recent shotgun slaying of a local man named Haskell Feathers.

When you and that machine were gushin’

Blood and Mountain Dew,

You realized I knew some things

You didn't know I knew.

The song came out right after the slaying. If Miss Mae did write it, she would have had to have written it before the slaying.

Asked about this, Miss Mae confessed. “Yes, I planned it, and I did it like I planned it,” she said. “And I'd do it again.”

And she served her time, and came back home, and hasn't shot anybody else, or written any more songs, since.

And she was Bill Clinton's band teacher, and used to run with his late mama. And by all accounts, Haskell Feathers was just about, barely, worth shooting. Last week President Clinton pardoned Miss Mae so she could vote again.

Asked who she would vote for, for president, Miss Mae was mum.

•••

Somebody has dug up a secret Philip Morris file concerning an attempt during the late sixties to bolster the appeal of flavorless filter-tip cigarettes by lacing them with what was referred to in one document as “human nature's prime motivator”: that is, pheromones, derived from “the sweat of an average eighteen-year-old North Carolina girl,” who was unnamed. This experiment—which of course reflects not only the laboratory's location in Durham, N.C., but also certain age and gender biases on the part of the scientists—was called off because another prominent North Carolinian got, so to speak, wind of it: the Rev. Billy Graham—who informed the head of Philip Morris (at a Nixon prayer breakfast) that the young woman in question had come forward at one of his rallies and tearfully confessed her involvement. If this research was pursued further, Graham said, he would be forced to break with the tobacco industry.

•••

Eighteen years ago, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, a letter to the editor appeared in the Anniston (Alabama) Herald-Advertiser. It was a very brief letter, but it expressed so many people's feelings so well that it began a tradition at the paper. Whenever news was especially unsettling, that same letter would appear in a box on the front page.

“Dear Editor,” the letter said simply, “Sometimes, there's just nothing we can say. Sincerely, Ellenora Yancey Byrum.”

Miss Ellenora's letter ran again on September 12, 2001, of course.

And then last Thursday it ran once more. Miss Ellenora—who was in fact a great talker, friends say, but only ever had the one thing published—had passed away at eighty-six.

Oh, Come on, Smiley

Frankly, it does not do me a lot of good, as a Southern white boy in New York, to be defending another Southern white boy against a Northern woman. However, when Jane Smiley jumped on my man Mark Twain, was I in the middle of it, interjecting calmly, “Got your back, Mark”?

I was. “If necessary, I'll wear a dress,” I said when invited to take part in a panel discussion with William Styron, Shelby Foote, Justin Kaplan, and Stanley Crouch. The reason I said that is, I was invited to be on the panel only if they couldn't get a woman. But that's all right; they couldn't get one (Smiley herself declined, as did Toni Morrison and, no doubt, many others), so there I was, boogity boogity, defending The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn against the charge—leveled by Smiley in Harper's— that it is not a great or even a serious book, that it can't hold a candle to Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The site was a big Barnes and Noble store in Manhattan. The occasion was a new edition of Huck Finn incorporating some hitherto unpublished passages from the recently discovered manuscript of the first half of the novel. But what was foremost in our panelizing thoughts was Smi-ley's attack, to which we responded as three old Southern white boys (Styron, Foote, and me) and one vested male Twainist (Kaplan) would respond, you might say.

Crouch canceled, so the sole non-white-guy element was the moderator, Brent Staples, who took Smiley's side, for the sake of argument. And did it well, too, but you could tell deep down inside he was no Northern woman. Well, I vote like a Northern woman, pretty much.

When he has to, Huck wears a dress. Tries to pass himself off as Sarah Williams, then says his name is Mary, then, when challenged, says it's Sarah Mary Williams. Huck also identifies himself as George Peters, George Jackson, Adolphus, Tom Sawyer, Charles William Albright, and Aleck James Hopkins. Sam Clemens himself tried several pen names— W. Epaminondas Blab, Sgt. Fathom, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Quintus Curtius Snodgrass, and Josh—before he settled on Mark Twain. I question whether distinguished literary panelists, even white male ones, would still be rallying behind the man's reputation, frankly, if he had kept on as W. Epaminondas Blab. Or as Snodgrass either; as either Snodgrass. Mark Twain is good, bing bing, like Babe Ruth. A good name for an author is regular in meter. William Faulkner. Emily Dickinson. Edna St. Vincent Millay. I doubt that Shelby Foote's family went so far as to consider naming him Metrical, but check this out:

Want a well-received discussion?

On your panel you should put

William Styron, Justin Kaplan,

Stanley Crouch, and Shelby Foote.

Whereas you try fitting “Roy Blount Jr.” into a poem. Free verse, even. As Royal Bunting or Rory Block, I might have been the first person asked to be on the Huck Finn panel. But when I was getting started as a writer, I couldn't become Royce Bolt or Arroyo Blue, because my father, Roy Sr., was alive, and it would have hurt his feelings. He wouldn't have said anything to me himself, but my mother would have let me know: “Do you realize what the other businessmen are saying to your father? ‘What's your boy calling himself now?’ It has broken his heart.”

Mark Twain didn't have that to contend with. Nor did he have the handicap, when he was getting started as a writer, that someone had already not only gotten dibs on the Mississippi River but also figured out how to get the most humor out of American English. When I came along, people were calling every new funny American writer “the next Mark Twain.” Mark Twain, Jr., in other words.

So you see I have some issues to work through with Mark Twain myself. But you don't catch me comparing Huck Finn unfavorably to Pluck and Luck, by Horatio Alger, Jr. People would just say, “Well, he would say that. Juniors stick together.” I hate being dismissed categorically.

I make an effort, accordingly, not to sound like a generic Southern white male person. During the panel discussion, I averred that Jim would have been a fuller character, and harder for sentimental white readers to like, if a black author had imagined him. I volunteered that I could see how Huck Finn would bother a black reader. I came out against compelling anybody to read it. I cited Shelley Fisher Fishkin's recent revelation, in her book Was Huck Black? of how deeply the art of Huck Finn is rooted in African American culture. I announced that everything worthwhile in American culture is a mixture of black and white, and that Huck Finn was like rock and roll in combining black rhythm and blues with white adolescence and marketing.

And I resisted the temptation, undoubtedly prejudicial, to cry out for the world to hear: “Jane Smiley would like Harriet Beecher Stowe's book better than Mark Twain's! Because Jane Smiley is, as Harriet Beecher Stowe was, a Northern woman!”

Twain, Smiley says, is unable to “reconcile the felt memory of boyhood with the cruel implications of the social system within which that boyhood was lived.” Fair enough. On the other hand, “Stowe, New Englander, daughter of Puritans and thinkers, active in the abolitionist movement and in the effort to aid and educate escaped slaves, had no such personal conflict.” My reaction to that is, no doubt, the reaction I would have: How can anybody claim to know anything about race in America—at least to know the kinds of things you have to know to write fiction—when she has no personal conflict about it? When I think of someone who has no personal conflict about race, I think of Ronald Reagan (especially now), that little blue-blob symbol of the Atlanta Olympics, and, yes, maybe a kind of generic puritan New England woman….

There I go again. Is there no one who won't try to categorize another person in such a way as to render his or her opinions suspect? If you ask me, of course, opinions are inherently suspect, especially to the extent that solidarity is involved. And yet the more solidarity there is behind an opinion, the more confidently people tend to act upon it. As Mark Twain once wrote, “During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the church …imprisoned, tortured, hanged and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been.”

One thing about Huck Finn is, it's not a book of opinion. Here's a passage from it:

“He come rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle bundles where I was, and put his hand on me. I was warm and soft and naked; so he says Ouch!’ and jumped back.”

Huck Finn, to be sure, does not do justice to the atrocities of slavery. That's because it is even less about slavery than Moby Dick is about whaling. I think Huck Finn—a story told by a child whose father beats him viciously—is about how people feel to themselves and to other people, and about the adjustments people make to the differential involved.

Another thing about Huck Finn, its publication didn't lead to carnage. Smiley mentions that when Stowe visited the White House in 1863, Lincoln said to her, “So this is the little lady who made this great war.” I don't know what Stowe said in reply. “You bet your ass, big gent” would have been what Abe had coming, or at least so it seems to us today. Whether that's what she should have said, I am in no position to say, because I wasn't around at the time. Mark Twain wasn't, strictly speaking, around at the time either; he was Sam Clemens and he was out in California dodging the war. One thing Mark Twain wasn't was a warmonger. “Two or three centuries from now,” he wrote, “it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian—not to acquire his religion, but his guns.” Even if my Confederate sympathies were as clear to me as they may be to a Northern woman, I would have a hard time deciding whether going AWOL from the Civil War was nobler or less noble than starting it.

Nor am I disposed to say that Smiley is prejudiced against Twain because he is not a Northern woman. For one thing, I cannot look into her heart. For another thing, if I did say that, people would just say I would say that, because I would prefer the novel by the Southern man. And I, irritable old ambivalent Southern liberal that I am, would be so self-conscious about their assumptions about my assumptions that I'd be liable to play right into their hands.

Whereas Smiley is too sharp to present where she is coming from as an issue. “White Americans always think racism is a feeling…,” she writes. And it's hard, or at least confusing, to say, “She would think white Americans always think that,” because she is a white American herself.

Even so, she has a point. The trouble is, she's got too tight a grip on it. She goes on: “To most Americans, it seems more honorable and nicer to reject [the feeling that they are racist], so they do, but they almost invariably fail to understand that how they feel means very little to black Americans, who understand racism as a way of structuring American culture, American politics, and the American economy.” And since all Huck ever does about racism is to show that he's relatively good-hearted about it, “to invest The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with ‘greatness’ is to underwrite a very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is and to promulgate it.”

By that reckoning, there we sat, we panelists, just a-promulgatin’ racism to beat the band. We three Southerners even agreed with the following statement that Robert Penn” Warren once made to Styron: “Let's face it. Everybody's a racist.” Of course, we would agree with that. And maybe I would disagree with Smiley's racism argument, but I do anyway, as follows:

To regard racism as a feeling is simplistic and evasive, all right, but it's no theory at all. It's not even thinking. Smiley is the one who's theorizing, and she's doing it simplistically. To be sure, racism is less subjective than a feeling, but it's also less mechanistic than “a way of structuring.” Which is not to deny that racism pervades the American culture, politics, economy, and most anything else Smiley cares to name. In fact, I, for my part, would feel racist, or at least silly, if I were to toss off a brisk declaration of what “means” what to black Americans and what black Americans “understand.” Staples, the panel's moderator, is a black American. He took Smiley's side for the sake of argument, as I say, but in closing he stated that Mark Twain was one of the few people he regarded as “seers.” Of course, you could say he would state that: he's a man.

But even if it's true, as Smiley says, that “most readers intuitively reject the last twelve chapters” of Huck Finn, so far as I know Smiley is the only reader who doesn't reject all of Uncle Tom's Cabin. So why would anybody in her right mind proclaim that Stowe's is a better book than Twain's?

For the national good, perhaps. Hemingway (“thinking of himself, as always,” puts in Smiley) declared that all of modern American literature grew from Huck Finn. Even if it did, Smiley says, it shouldn't have. Since Stowe analyzes slavery more extensively and righteously, “it undoubtedly would have been better for American literature” to have grown out of Uncle Tom's Cabin. To me, that's like saying it would be better for people to come from heaven than from sex.

I could say that Smiley's is the voice of the Widder Douglas, always telling Huck what would be good for him, which is always the absolutely last thing he is going to do if he can help it. The voice of the Widder Douglas, only more Northern and theoretical. But I won't say that. Some of my best friends are Northern women.

I'll tell you the truth, there has been so much solidarity in favor of Mark Twain in recent years that I'd like to see somebody come along and outdo him, even if it's not going to be me. From the way she writes in Harper's, it won't be Smiley. I've never read any of her acclaimed novels, only the reviews, which I'd love to have for my books word for word. Here's the last paragraph of a review in Newsweek, by Laura Shapiro, of Smiley's Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres:

“In the end Smiley does what Shakespeare himself never did: she creates a female heroine who grows through her own anguish until she towers over the hero and conquers him.”

There you go. That's something Shakespeare wouldn't do. (They say his wife was a lot like that, so maybe he didn't feel a need to.) But I'm not going to say it's something a Northern woman novelist would do.

So. Let's accept that Smiley in good faith prefers Stowe (after reading whom, Chekhov wrote, “I had an unpleasant sensation which mortals feel after eating too many raisins or currants”) over Twain (who wrote in a notebook, “‘Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm.’ Don't be fooled by this absurd saw; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him”). And let's rule out any broadly generic explanation. What conceivable explanation does that leave?

It leaves this one: Twain first hit it big nationally with a sketch called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” That sketch refers to a Jim Smiley as “infamous” and to a Leonidas W. Smiley as “a myth.”

It was small of me to refer to Jane Smiley, however uninvidiously, as a Northern woman. She is something far more distinctive: an avenging Smiley.

Here's the tipoff: she never once mentions, even just in passing, that there's anything funny about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

If there is a movement afoot to decanonize Mark Twain, all I can say is, woooooooo. He's had canons to the left of him and canons to the right of him, and he's still like Miss Rudolph the conjure-woman's monkey in one of Richard Pryor's Mudbone stories. Mudbone is in the conjure-woman's house and her monkey is jumping on his neck and messing with his ears and Mudbone tells her, “Miss Rudolph, please, will you do something about this monkey!”

“I ain't got to do nothing about the monkey,” she says. “The monkey live here.”

Fresh Mark

In Mark Twain's first best-seller, Innocents Abroad, a rhapsodic Italian guide exposes him and his traveling companions to a bust of “Christopher Columbo.” The Americans drive the guide to distraction by refusing to be impressed—by professing, in fact, never to have heard of the gentleman. “Which is the bust and which is the pedestal?” they ask (a distinction that needs clarifying with regard to so many works of art), and “Is—is he dead?” Mark Twain himself has been dead now, in the narrowest sense, for over ninety years. He is, if anything, more solidly empedestaled than Columbus. Somehow, though, he is alive and kicking. Having become a Ken Burns television series, Mark Twain stands preserved beside the Civil “War, baseball, and jazz. Among these institutions, he was least in need of mixed-media restoration. He is still fresh.

“I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves,” he said, “until we are dead—and then not until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.” Ralph “Waldo Emerson seemed determined to produce an aphorism in every sentence, and his today are beaded with sweat. Twain's float. Like the best-turned bits of Scripture, his observations (including many that he never in fact made) are quotable by most everyone to most any purpose. He also survives visually, as a distinct white-suited image on the sentimental cultural retina. A great self-marketer he was and still is. His characters and some of his novels are irresistibly, if seldom satisfactorily, adaptable to the screen. His life and his place in history—he discovered a great deal more of America than Columbus did—continue to energize scholars and popular biographers.

But you could strip him down to his words on the page, and he would still be “full of animation,” like the aforementioned Italian guide, who “fidgeted about as if he had swallowed a spring mattress.” In part this is because Mark Twain was so meticulous in his choice of words. Long before E. E. Cummings described poetic language as “the precision that creates movement,” Mark Twain wrote that the “intensely right word” has an effect that is “physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”

Prompt! Electrically prompt! The phrase itself is the effect it describes. “My usual style of ciphering out the merits of poetry,” Mark Twain wrote, “…is to read a line or two near the top, a verse near the bottom and then strike an average.” But how many passages of even good poetry can match the pith and savor of Mark Twain's best flights of prose? “Probably there is nothing in the world so suggestive of serene contentment and perfect bliss as the spectacle of a calf chewing a dishrag, but the nearest approach to it is your reedy tenor, standing apart, in sickly attitude, with head thrown back and eyes uplifted to the moon, piping his distressing solo.”

In his day, Mark Twain made Sigmund Freud, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rudyard Kipling laugh and presumably, because he was friendly with them, Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, and the president of Standard Oil. His jokes still make both highly and lowly literate people chuckle and whoop.

And ponder. And protest. His microjokes are impeccable, his macro-jokes enduringly strange, conducive to consternation, open to argument. The prime example is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which will not settle down. It continues to be denounced as racist and sanctified as antiracist. Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Mark Twain's postbellum neigh-bor in Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe (who in her dotage would slip up behind him while he was musing and let out “a war whoop”), provided an incisive analysis of the economics and horrors of slavery at a time when that peculiar institution was still legal. Stowe the New England abolitionist had the thing all figured out unimpeachably in then-radical terms, and there her now-archaic contribution sits. Twain grew up in slave society and never got its taint, or the influence of African American culture, out of his system. The rich, bitter joke of bondage in the land of the free, of palpable asymmetrical affection and heartless-ness, persists in Huckleberry Finn to be read differently by each reader in every generation so far.

Who, in Mark Twain's works, is the innocent and who the culprit, who the trickster and who the tricked, who the enslaved and who (if anyone) the master? The culture-resistant Americans abroad, or the Europeans they subject to put-ons; the Connecticut Yankee, or King Arthur's Court. Conscience is a villain, Young Satan is a hero, the Almighty is irresponsible, the funniest storytellers are the least humorous people, labor-saving devices are albatrosses, wealth is a boon that leaves its recipients spent.

Mark Twain's involvement in the national and international life of his time was both ebullient and ambivalent. He was often outspokenly in love with the prospect of easeful death. He seethed and erupted in work that danced and work that plodded, in celebration of what delighted him and to stave off bankruptcy and muddled personal despair. His corpus remains volatile, vulnerable, provocatively unstable—jokes within jokes, which the author himself is not securely in on. The jokes are not entirely gettable, but readers keep trying to get at the heart of them. The heart is a pump that keeps juice going and coming around.

Bits of Twain for Brits

People often ask me what they should read of Mark Twain, aside from Huckleberry Finn. I tell them to find one of the many collections of his short humorous pieces. I wrote introductions for two such collections published in the United Kingdom. I'm aware that the second one ends with a phrase I cited in “Fresh Mark,” but what a great phrase it is.

I: A Treasury of Mark Twain

What is so great about Mark Twain? Here, from one of his several accounts of an earthquake in San Francisco:

The Pastor of Starr King's church, the Rev. Mr. Steb-bins, came down out of his pulpit after the first shock and embraced a woman. It was an instance of great presence of mind. Some say the woman was his wife, but I regard the remark as envious and malicious. Upon occasions like this, people who are too much scared to seize upon an offered advantage, are always ready to depreciate the superior judgment and sagacity of those who profited by the opportunity they lost themselves.

Mark Twain wrote that in 1865. I submit that it is still funny. From another of his stories about that earthquake:

A young gentleman who lives in Sacramento Street rushed down stairs and appeared in public with no raiment on save a knit undershirt, which concealed his person about as much as its tin-foil cap conceals a champagne bottle. He struck an attitude such as a man assumes when he is looking up, expecting danger from above, and bends his arm and holds it aloft to ward off possible missiles—and standing thus he glared fiercely up at the fire-wall of a tall building opposite, from which a few bricks had fallen. Men shouted at him to go in the house, people seized him by the arm and tried to drag him away—even tender-hearted women, (O, Woman! …in our hours of ease uncertain, coy, and hard to please—when anything happens to go wrong with our harness, a ministering angel thou), women, I say, averted their faces, and nudging the paralyzed and impassible statue in the ribs with their elbows beseeched him to take their aprons—to take their shawls—to take their hoop-skirts—anything, anything, so that he would not stand there longer in such a plight and distract people's attention from the earthquake. But he wouldn't budge—he stood there in his naked majesty till the last tremor died away from the earth, and then looked around on the multitude—and stupidly enough, too, until his dull eye fell upon himself. He went back up stairs, then. He went up lively.

Am I going to tell you that Mark Twain is so great because he could in the same breath both mock and sympathize, by virtue of a homespun aestheticism transcending all conventional sentiment, or because he could evoke both stasis and hullabaloo, prudery and lubricity, microcosm and macrocosm, at once, offhandedly? Or am I going to clarify him psychologically in such terms as these (resorted to by a severe academic critic named Guy Cardwell): “By temperament and as a jokester …he had strongly ego-syntonic as well as syntonic tendencies. Jokes are among the devices which make the resulting stresses bearable”?

I am not.

I put it to you simply that the most impressive thing about Mark Twain is, he is still funny.

Aside from his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, none of Twain's books, taken as a whole, is a triumph of form. Life on the Mississippi, magnificent in stretches, is more irregular altogether than the river. Innocents Abroad and the other travel books are padded-out congeries of tangents and digressions. Puddin'head Wilson still shows odd traces of what it started out to be, a shaggy-dog tale of Siamese twins. And what makes Huckleberry Finn the template of American narrative is not the novel's construction but its voice—an unprecedented, brilliantly seamless e pluribus unum of formal English and several varieties of vernacular American. The voice of a humorist coming to grips (inevitably not to everyone's, indeed perhaps not quite to anyone's, complete satisfaction) with the most indigestible matter of American history: slavery. As a whole, this coming-to-grips is problematic. Needs constantly to be reconsidered. Which means we can keep going back to enjoy its parts.

Consider the perfectly straightforward-sounding sentence I quoted earlier. “The Pastor …came down out of his pulpit after the first shock and embraced a woman.” In neither the choice nor the sequence of words is there anything like an elbow in our ribs, but as the period falls into place, do you not share with me a frisson of anticipation? We can dip into Huckleberry Finn at any point and hear Huck's voice setting us up in the same way again and again.

I wonder, in fact, how often any of Twain's books are read straight through today. It is at the level of sentence, paragraph, observation, episode, and sketch that he is a great and abidingly popular writer. And yet his short humorous pieces usually get short shrift in assessments of his work. He himself, as a young man, deprecated his essential gift: “I have had a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order—i.e., humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit …to excite the laughter of God's creatures. Poor, pitiful business!”

Comedy is one thing. Aristophanes is still, and even in uninspired translation, great comedy. But there is virtually no such thing as classic humor. Humor almost always travels badly from culture to culture and perishes fast. What writing in English has remained funny on the page, on its own terms, as long as Twain's? Much of Dickens. Bits of Swift and Sterne and Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. When we read passages of Shakespeare, we may smile but mostly in admiration of how rollicking, how intricately offhand, great iambic pentameter with the touch of nature can be. Mozart may tickle us comparably, and indeed humor may somehow be a matter of music. When Twain's wife tried to show him how horrid his language around home sometimes was by repeating back to him a string of profanity he had uttered, he told her that she had the words right but not the tune. The harmonics of Mark Twain's prose…

At this point, despair begins to creep in. How much can be said about how funny anyone's writing is? Or should be said. Introduce something by going on and on about how funny it is, and the reader may well begin to think, irritably, and quite rightly, “Perhaps I should be the judge of that.” Laughter is so gratifying because it is autonomic. “Nothing is so hopeless,” Dr. Johnson observed, “as a scheme of merriment.” Merriment bubbles, or not.

But let me quote from Twain's essay on his friend William Dean How-ells, a passage about Howells's humor. The tribute seems overgenerous as applied to Howells but not as it might apply to Twain himself:

I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as [Howells] does, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and he was not aware that they were at it…. His is a humor which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood.

How universal is this refreshment? Is Twain's humor less accessible to non-American readers of English?

Widely traveled as he was, Twain's sensibility was not cosmopolitan. He took unalloyed pleasure in Francophobia (the very word French, as he uses it, seems to glow with distaste). The only thing that delighted him about German culture, aside from the manure piles of the Black Forest (“Manure is evidently the Black-Forester's main treasure—his coin, his pride, his Old Master, his ceramics, his bric-a-brac, his darling, his title to public consideration…, and his first solicitude when he gets ready to make his will”), was the national sentence structure:

An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech—not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary—six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam…; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which re-enclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens; finally, all the parentheses and re-parentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it—after which comes the VERB, and you can find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb—merely by way of ornament, so far as I can make out—the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

England, however, was one of his favorite countries. To be sure, he damned Sir “Walter Scott's novels for inflating aristocratic romanticism in the antebellum South (a part of the country that Twain seldom regarded with anything approaching fondness after he left it, heading westward, as a young man, two weeks of highly irregular military service having been enough of the Civil “War for his taste). He mocked chivalry and royalty in Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. But he spent nearly three years altogether in London, where he was lionized. After Oxford granted him an honorary degree, he seized every opportunity to wear the robe that came with it. He absorbed a great deal of English literature in his youth, some of it while learning to pilot a riverboat from a man who interspersed recitations from Shakespeare with imprecations and instruction:

“Approach thou what are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the there she goes! meet her, meet her! didn't you know she'd smell the reef if you crowded it like that? Hyrcan tiger…”

And yet that acute and droll English critic, V. S. Pritchett, in a collection of essays published in 1942, reduced all that was valuable of Mark Twain to one book: “Out of the mess which Twain made of his life, amid the awful pile of tripe which he wrote, there does rise one book which has the serenity of a thing of genius. Huckleberry Finn takes the breath away…. Twain has …become the channel of the generic American emotion which floods all really American literature—nostalgia…. D. H. Lawrence called this feeling the longing of the rebel for a master. It may be simply the longing for a spiritual home…. And once Mark Twain passed this exquisite moment of his maturity, he went to bits in that morass of sentimentality, cynicism, melodrama and vulgarity which have damned him for the adult reader.”

Certainly there is “sentimentality, cynicism, melodrama and vulgarity” to be found in Twain, but is it to be found in Jim Baker's blue jay yarn?

There's more to a blue-jay than any other creature. He has got more moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creatures; and mind you, whatever a blue-jay feels, he can put into language. And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book talk—and bristling with metaphor, too—just bristling! And as for command of language—why you never see a blue-jay get stuck for a word. No man ever did. They just boil out of him! And another thing: I've noticed a good deal, and there's no bird, or cow, or anything that uses as good grammar as a blue-jay. You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does—but you let a cat get excited, once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw…. Now on top of all this, there's another thing: a cat can out-swear any gentleman in the mines. You think a cat can swear. Well, a cat can; but you give a blue-jay a subject that calls for his reserve-powers, and where is your cat? Don't talk to me—I know too much about this thing.

Does “Taming the Bicycle” fit into an “awful pile of tripe”? “The contrast between [the instructor's] muscles and mine was quite marked. He wanted to test mine, so I offered my biceps—which was my best. It almost made him smile. He said, ‘It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding, and rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers; in the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag.’ ”

If Twain was longing for a spiritual home, it was not for a place too stuffy to appreciate extravagant yet closely observed empathy with a blue jay or affectionate deprecation of one's own right arm.

But then Pritchett may not have read many of Twain's best short pieces. Only over the last several years have many of them been brought back into circulation. In 1993, Clive James, another English critic acute and droll, took the occasion of the Library of America's issuance of two volumes of Twain's Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays to observe, in The New Yorker, that “you could just about convince yourself that Huckleberry Finn was a work of literature in the Old World style, aimed at a refined public—after all, it certainly has the rank, if not the manner. But Twain's journalism is a daunting reminder that he was ready to lavish everything he had on everybody, every time…. For Twain, there was no division between democracy and creativity. They were versions of the same thing: exuberance.”

James, however, goes on in this review to extol Twain as a paragon of American decency Twain was so blameless that he is likely to make us uncomfortable.” Twain himself was full of discomfort and self-blame. His life may not have been the mess that Pritchett called it, but there was a great deal rotten in America when he flourished, and in his own life fiasco, terror, and grief ran high. He was not untouched by the rottenness, and he lived with more than a tortured inkling that much of the grief was his fault. He didn't cherish God, mankind, or available polity; if there was anything he had a soft spot for (aside from his wife and daughters, whom he loved and arguably blighted), it was death.

Yet he strove and gloried. Tension finding release at unexpected junctures in sentence after sentence.

“It may be claiming more than a humorist could wish to assert,” wrote the aforementioned Howells, “that he is always in earnest; but this strikes us as the paradoxical charm of [Twain's] best humor. Its wildest extravagance is the break and fling from a deep feeling, a wrath with some folly which disquiets him worse than other men, a personal hatred for some humbug or pretension that embitters him beyond anything but laughter.”

Howells also wrote that Twain “used English in all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground,” and that he “writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it, or German or French beside it.”

At any rate, his language is intimately his own and yet vigorously extroverted. His spiritual home is on the page, and you can still find him there, pretending not to be expecting company but relishing it in fact. His first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, told of finding Twain in bed (where he often wrote), looking for a newspaper clipping. The two of them kept digging around under the covers until finally Twain cried out, “One could lose a dog in this bed!” Which means, too, that a dog might turn up.

II: Cannibalism in the Cars:

The Best of Twain's Humorous Sketches

In an interview, the movie director Oliver Stone condescends to praise another director's heavy-handed baseball comedy for “telling a story in a big, broad, Mark Twain kind of way.” No. If anyone's way of telling a story is big and broad, or anyway broad, it is Stone's. Mark Twain's way was fine.

You might say that a man's claiming to have been shot nine times, beaten with a cowhide whip, stripped nearly naked, scalped, hit by a brick through the window, thrown through the window himself, and injured by shrapnel from a stove exploded by a hand grenade on his only day at a Tennessee newspaper is a broad way of depicting journalism in that state. But delicacies are involved:

“Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this mangy sheet?”

“You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is gone. I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Col. Blatherskite Tecumseh?”

“Right, sir…. If you are at leisure we will begin.”

“I have an article on the ‘Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual Development in America’ to finish, but there is no hurry. Begin.”

Then, as one gentleman to another, they start blazing away in each other's general direction with large pistols, in the process thrice clipping the narrator. “I then said, I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter, and I had a delicacy about participating in it further. But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat, and assured me that I was not in the way.”

If this is broad, it is broad as Monty Python is broad, not as Benny Hill. There is, in fact, a Python sketch in which starving mariners argue over which of them should be eaten by the others—the captain is offended when none of the crew regards him as toothsome; they settle on making a stock of him. The Python sketch is deft, but Twain's “Cannibalism in the Cars” is at least as amusing, is sustained longer, and offers more (I venture to say, never having had dealings with the Royal Navy) in the way of verisimilitude.

You could call it broad for a man to complain that his watch, after a repairer of watches worked on it, performed as follows:

For half a day it would go like the very mischief, and keep up such a barking and wheezing, and whooping and sneezing and snoring, that I could not hear myself think for the disturbance; and as long as it held out there was not a watch in the land that stood any chance against it. But the rest of the day it would keep on slowing down and fooling along until all the clocks it had left behind caught up again.

The watch “averaged well,” but this “is only a mild virtue in a watch.” If this is broad, it is broad as Borges is broad.

You might harbor the stereotypical notion that any sort of glass-eye humor, on the face of it, is broad. But what of glass-eye humor that crops up naturally in the course of things, as it does in “His Grandfather's Old Ram”:

She was a good soul—had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss “Wagner, that hadn't any, to receive company in; it warn't big enough…. She could never tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody would have to hunch her and say, “Your game eye has fetched loose, Miss “Wagner dear.”

Crops up naturally, and keeps on topping itself, without ever undermining Miss “Wagner's aplomb. I don't call that fine, because fine is too broad a term. I call that delicate.

Not broad, then, are Mark Twain's distinctive effects. Nor, except in the ripples they continue to make, are they big. The Mississippi River is big and broad, and so is the issue of American slavery, but The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is distinguished not by sweep or cumulative power but by moments, episodes, bits of dialogue or description, and, most important, a boy's narrative voice.

Like Twain the first-person humorist, Huck Finn the first-person moralist is absolutely straight-faced. I was going to say “adventurer” instead of “moralist,” but Huck (unlike Tom Sawyer) is not seeking adventure; he is trying to do the right thing—and trying, to be sure, to preserve his own personal freedom but not out of a sense of entitlement. He feels guilty about being unable to tolerate conventional strictures. Similarly, Twain's own persona in his sketches is not looking for humor; he is just trying to get by in a crazy world. Bowing out of bloodthirsty Tennessee journalism, he does not claim the high moral ground. “I like you,” he informs the editor, “and I like your calm unruffled way of explaining things to the customers; but you see I am not used to it…. Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger.”

Huck is an unreliable narrator in that he never quite sees things the way the reader does, but his taking outrageous comic rapscallions at face value makes those characters all the more comic, just as his judging himself a dark sinner for going good-heartedly against established mores makes the enormity of those mores clear without sermonizing. Twain is a salubriously unreliable essayist. His way is matter-of-fact, which enables him to go surreal, as if against his will. His way is plain speaking, which enables him to be set upon by wonderfully resounding and tawdry rhetoric. If he had his way, life would be simple, peaceful, unfunny. No barber would have “made a handle of my nose, to assist him in shaving the corners of my upper lip, and it was by this bit of circumstantial evidence that I discovered that a part of his duties in the shop was to clean the kerosene lamps.”

You don't leave as many epigrams and celebrated paragraphs to posterity as Mark Twain did (“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them”) by being big and broad.

He made his name in the first place by means of comic sketches. In the mid-1860s, he wrote a number of them for newspapers in California and Nevada (whence he had traveled after giving up the Civil “War as not his sort of shooting match). Other periodicals around the American states and territories circulated these widely. He couldn't make a living out of short freelance humor (who, alas, has ever been able to?), so he turned his hand to books and lecturing, thereby becoming a major writer and a beloved public character. But he continued to write sketches throughout his career. The best of these, along with Huckleberry Finn, are the works of his that are most read and quoted from today.

Mark Twain enjoyed coming off as an old gold miner, a failed one at that, but his style was lapidary. He might rather have been describing his own style when he wrote of his friend William Dean Howells:

He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain of gold, the right word. Others …are miners working with the gold-pan—of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle—no grain of metal stands much chance of eluding him…. “Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words …the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt; it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry.

Howells is scarcely read anymore. Few people today could tell you how a sumac-berry tastes, or precisely what mining process is alluded to in “quicksilver raiding down a riffle.” But as long as any form of written English is intelligible to anyone, I'll wager, the best bits of Mark Twain will be “electrically prompt.”

True Portis

The risk you take trying to convey your enthusiasm for a book by Charles Portis, of course, is that you will sound like Dr. Reo Symes on With Wings as Eagles, by his hero, John Selmer Dix. According to Symes, Dix wrote With Wings as Eagles, his masterpiece, while riding back and forth from Dallas to Los Angeles on the bus (the noon one out of Dallas) for a whole year. “He was a broken man all right,” says Symes, “but by God the work got done.” Compared to With Wings as Eagles, says Symes, all other writing is just “foul grunting.”

Dr. Symes is a character in The Dog of the South, which many regard as Portis's masterpiece. I have this negative to say about The Dog of the South: I think Norwood, also by Portis, is a little better. But The Dog of the South is the Portis book that at the moment I will try not to go overboard on—which, you are inclined to suspect, is what Dr. Reo Symes does on With Wings as Eagles. You hate to doubt Symes, because he commands a breadth of experience. “We learn in The Dog of the South that Symes “had sold hi-lo shag carpet remnants and velvet paintings from the back of a truck in California. He had sold wide shoes by mail, shoes that must have been almost round, at widths up to EEEEEE. He had sold gladiola bulbs and vitamins for men and fat-melting pills and all-purpose books and hail-damaged pears. He had picked up small fees counseling veterans on how to fake chest pains so as to gain immediate admission to V.A. hospitals and a free week in bed. He had sold ranchettes in Colorado and unregistered securities in Arkansas.”

I'm not even sure I want to keep on quoting from The Dog of the South, because maybe these excerpts won't be delightful to you if I take them out of context and jump up and down about them too much. It would be a shame to thrust Portis's work upon people when the work itself is so bent on minding its own business. When somebody asks me for advice about how to write humorous fiction, I say take a look at Portis's characters. The last thing in the world they have in mind is being funny. Some of them are loud and some of them are reticent, and frequently they are less than straightforward (or clear in their own minds) about what they are up to, but they are all taking on the world as seriously as they know how.

And they are taking it on in apt (pale word!) detail. Here is a passage from The Dog of the South that is famous among Portis devotees: “When the beer came,” says Raymond Midge, “I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous.” Maybe you can't see why that would be so famous. Well…

Here's something. Midge is talking to a Mexican hotel owner. The owner has just said that he's made a mistake and booked Midge into the same room that Midge's runaway wife, Norma, and her paramour, Guy Dupree, stayed in when they came through. (Midge is tracking them down by following the trail of receipts from his credit card, which they stole along with his car.) “Did I wish to be moved? I said no, it made no difference. Then there was a disturbance in the kitchen and he went to investigate. When he came back, he said, ‘It was nothing, the mop caught fire. All my employees are fools.’ ”

The mop caught fire! But never mind details. The Dog of the South has themes. Raymond Midge recalls the unsuitable houses he looked at to buy with Norma, when they were still together:

The last one had been a little chocolate-brown cottage, with a shed of the same rich color in the back yard. The real-estate fellow showed us around and he talked about the rent-like payments. In the shed we came across an old man lying on a cot. He was eating nuts from a can and watching a daytime television show. His pearly shins were exposed above his socks. A piece of cotton covered one eye.

“That's Mr. Proctor,” said the real-estate bird. “He pays fifty a month for the shed and you can apply that, see, on your note.” I didn't want an old man living in my back yard and the real-estate bird said, “Well, tell him to hit the road then,” but I didn't want to do that either, to Mr. Proctor.

Midge at twenty-six is a prematurely old man himself in many ways, and he is afraid of getting older. (“Think about this,” someone tells him. “All the little animals of your youth are long dead.”) But he is staunch. Strength of Materials was his favorite subject in engineering school, which he didn't finish. “Everybody else hated it because of all the tables we had to memorize but I loved it, the sheared beam. I had once tried to explain to Dupree how things fell apart from being pulled and compressed and twisted and bent and sheared but he wouldn't listen…. He would always say—boast, the way those people do—that he had no head for figures and couldn't do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.”

Portis's characters, in their various often seemingly feckless ways, are staunch. His central characters, furthermore, though overtly insensitive and narrow in various male ways (this would include Mattie Ross, the female protagonist of True Grit, a tough little nut), have finer qualities. They are full of cranky, unwilled generous-heartedness. One reason I like Norwood better than The Dog of the South is that Norwood Pratt is a more appealing fellow than Ray Midge, who is not upset when somebody calls him “rat face,” because “it was old stuff to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I look more like a predatory bird than a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year.”

But that is just narrowness on my part. On rereading The Dog of the South I gained a new appreciation of how staunchly this rat-faced man persists in not being a rat to anybody, even to such a conscienceless rat as Dr. Reo Symes, an old man (“There were dark bags under his eyes and he had long meaty ears”) who, even as his own very old mother is dying (apparently—she rallies), is figuring the angles on how to get his hooks into the little island off Ferriday, Louisiana, that she doesn't want him to turn into something profitable like a Christian boys’ ranch or a Civil “War theme park. (“Every afternoon at three Lee would take off his grey coat and wrestle an alligator in a mud hole.”) Ray Midge would never kick Mr. Proctor out.

In fact Portis set himself the task, in The Dog of the South, of writing a novel with a boring narrator. That's about as unshowy a tour de force as I can imagine. Unshowy I say, not unpretentious. The Dog of the South contains the only bit of theology that has struck me as cogent since I was a child. Reo Symes's mother asks Midge whether he believes that Heaven and Hell, as places, exist. After hemming and hawing under further pressure from Mrs. Symes (who has “the same raccoon eyes” as her son), Midge says, “It's just so odd to think that people are walking around in Heaven and Hell.”

“Yes,” counters Mrs. Symes, “but it's odd to find ourselves walking around down here, too, isn't it?”

Those Shakespeherian Blues

Carl Perkins, interviewed by the Oxford American, said this about his wife: “I never thought she would be my sweetheart.” Wouldn't that make a good line in a song?

I never thought that you would be my sweetheart,

For you had too much sense between your ears,

And I was just a rawbone awkward cowhand,

And now you've been my wife for thirty years.

Songs that spring from how people talk. Jimmie Rodgers: “Everybody does it in Ha-wa-ya.” Roger Miller: “You took my young head and filled it full / Of pure-D B-U-Double-L bull.” Someone who has written in interesting conversational rhythms is Tom T. Hall. If “A Week in a Country Jail” were a poem, you'd have to scan it as alternating seven-foot and five-foot lines. Here is my favorite seven-footer: “That part about me being who I was did not impress him.” For one thing, the sentiment. If you try to be who you are in order to impress somebody, here is what you are: unimpressive. But the great thing is the movement of the words.

I was at a writers’ conference in Arkansas with Tom T, and he told me he was going down the road in a carful of musicians once, along about 7 p.m., and all was quiet, when suddenly the bass player of the group sat up bolt upright, stared out through the windshield, and cried:

“I hate to see it! I hate to see it!”

“What?” the others demanded.

“That evening sun go down.”

“I hate to see that evening sun go down.” What would you give to have written that? You can hear and see Bessie Smith sing it (brace yourself first) in a 1929 film short with the same title as the song St. Louis Blues. Bessie Smith singing toothpaste ingredients could stop a person's heart, but even on their own, on the page, the words are moving. Those long, long e's; those down, down n's. The sentiment universal (some evenings, anyway), the rhythm inevitable. You don't have to make any effort to read it. Just ride it along.

W. C. Handy wrote it. When he was trying to get started as a musician, he said, “I had to sleep on the levee of the Mississippi River, on the cobblestones, broke and hungry. And if you've ever slept on cobblestones, or had nowhere to sleep, you can understand why I began that song with “I hate to see that evening sun go down.”

Elizabeth Bishop called it her favorite line of iambic pentameter. Remember when there was lots of agitated discussion of Ebonics, pro and con? I kept waiting for someone to make the point that if you acquire white English, you can become Clarence Thomas, whereas if you acquire black English, you can become Quentin Tarantino. Anyway, isn't it good to know that Shakespeare and the blues come in the same meter? I am not a good enough shade-tree musicologist to examine how twelve bars twine together with five feet of bah-dum bah-dum, but it can't hurt to quote Robert Frost: “I like to drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle.”

I gave a talk at the New York Public Library in which I tried to bring literary criticism down home by maintaining not only that the word text has the same root as Texas but also that it first appeared in a cowboy poem entitled “I Feel Like I Been Read Hard and Put Up Wet.”

Then I tried to illustrate my sense that Southern African American English has a rhetorical savor, a fluidity and sense of linguistic fun, that hearkens back not only to Africa, presumably, but also to Elizabethan English. I quoted the definition of buzzard's luck: “Can't kill nothin and nothin won't die.” Comparable to Shakespeare's “Death once dead, there's no more dying then,” and “A bliss in proof—and proved, a very woe,” and “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

Last summer, I heard a black kid in Atlanta deliver a line of downright blank verse. He was addressing a couple of smaller kids who were having trouble dealing with Atlanta's transit system:

“Y'all like y'all never rode no bus befo’.”

A word about the word y'all. I remember twenty-some-odd years ago, I hadn't been living in New York long, and my first wife told me she had addressed some new feminist friends as “y'all,” and they had turned up their noses. I thought this over for half a second. It was clear to me there was nothing wrong with the word y'all except other people's prejudices, and I'd be John Brown (as my father used to say) if I was going to give any consideration to not using it, and I haven't. “What are y'all doing tonight?” I asked a couple of Northern black people (that is to say, first-or second-generation Northern) I had just met at a writers’ conference recently, as I would have asked any other group of more than one person who looked like they might know where the interesting party was, and they looked at me, and it occurred to me, “They're thinking for a moment that I'm trying to talk black.” Then they saw I was just from the South.

I don't guess y'all is Shakespearean, but the expression did her wrong is. “Lucrece swears he did her wrong,” in The Rape of Lucrece. “He done her wrong” is just a refinement.

For the library crowd, I tried to find a couplet from a Shakespeare sonnet that would make a good blues stanza. Best I could do was the last two lines of Sonnet 50, in which a man laments that the horse he is riding is carrying him away from his lover (so you might say it's a cowboy poem). It's not the horse's fault, of course—the man has to make the trip, for business reasons—but the man gets angry at the horse and jabs him with his spurs, which makes the horse groan. That groan, the man says, hurts him more (easy for him to say) than the spurs hurt the horse,

For that same groan …doth put this in my mind

(Lord, Lord),

For that same groan …doth put this in my mind

(My …mind):

My grief lies onward …and my joy behind.

That effort suffered, as I knew it would, from how badly I sing. So I tried going the other way, with a sonnet proceeding from W. C. Handy's line. It's spoken by an old boy whose good woman has gone West, lured by the bright lights of Hollywood:

I hate to see that evening sun go down,

For though the moon doth thereupon arise,

That's cold comfort, when you're not around

For warmth. Moonbeams touch not skin, just eyes.

Although I thought for us 'twas hardly noon,

You left me—set to be a star out west.

I'd send you heliotrope; but the moon

Won't tell me how it ought to be addressed.

Perhaps “in care of Sol”—that ball-of-fire

Producer (so he said) in Hollywood

Who promised you the world would you admire.

And are you hot? That heat does do me no good,

For since you left me, headed toward the Coast,

Our love, my daily bread once, now is toast.

The crowd liked it well enough, but I came home from the library unsatisfied. Worked up another sonnet, starting off this time with the first line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 7:

Lo, in the orient when the gracious light

Began to rise and we began to yawn

And stretch and blink and find to our delight

Ourselves beside each other still at dawn,

The same as when we drifted off to sleep,

And you inquired how sweet my dreams had been,

And I said, smiling, “No one dreams that deep.”

And you: “Perhaps it's different for men.

“I dreamed of you nonstop the whole night through. ”

And I said teasingly “What did I miss?”

“Why, if you don't dream, should I tell you?”

“Here's why,” I said. As we began to kiss,

Then did the driver o'er his shoulder go:

“Y'all like y'all never rode no bus befo.”

Brother Ray: What He Said

I've been trying to write up Ray Charles since I interviewed him in 1983. We were in his dressing room at Lincoln Center, where he was to appear in the Kool Jazz Fest. As we shook hands, he felt up my forearm, his way of getting a first impression. “If you're a woman,” somebody told me, “he'll keep going up till you stop him.”

It was his way—since he couldn't look you in the eye—of checking the cut of your jib. He didn't say anything about my arm. “What would you want Ray Charles to say about your arm? I didn't expect anything like “Yeah! The boy has got it”—as he says to Jamie Foxx in a bonus track on the DVD of the movie Ray, after they play on separate keyboards till Foxx gets the signature harmonics right. Anyway, he gave no sign that he found my arm lacking. “We had a pretty good chat, although he got distracted. “What he was distracted by is one reason I've never managed to write him up. Another reason was the slush he had lately been recording.

“Where's Ray Charles?” I had asked the woman in the record store. “I can't find Ray Charles.”

“Ray Charles,” she said, “is Easy Listening.”

And there he was, tucked away with Tom Jones and Engelbert Hump-erdinck. Maybe that didn't bother him, but it did me. I could remember, from my teens, the first time I heard “What'd I Say.”

Ohhhh. Uuunh. From deep down in the pool whence springeth everything from gospel to boogie-woogie.

It was 1959, the year I graduated from high school. Rock and roll had not bowled me over. (I still say that after Bo Diddley, everything is commentary.) Elvis was somebody trying too hard to impress the girls. But my jib never started coming into its own until I heard “What'd I Say.” Since time immemorial people had been singing about misery and about jelly roll, but this was getting down to the things themselves, together, redeeming the one with the other, in church. This was what Jesus, the Founding Fathers, and Big Mama Thornton had been getting at. Ray

Charles hit it on the nose, and there was something profoundly droll about it, the way he did it. “Wasn't tending toward the overwrought, like that Marvin Gaye song “Sexual Healing.” Ray was singing well Well, well, well. And then I came to find out he could play jazz. He could sing country.

Easy listening? I didn't want to grumble about Ray Charles. So I didn't write anything.

Now he's dead, but the biopic has restored him to his prime. “Oh, I see, now, yes,” I have heard several people say, whose teens are ten or twenty years more recent than mine. Now maybe I can write a little something.

First of all, who came up with the title “What'd I Say”? What'd? What kind of arhythmic unpronounceable clogged contraction is that? Slipped that in on a blind man. He's not singing-shouting, “What did I say?” It's “What I'm saying,” with a self-delighted touch of “What am I saying?” It's a piece he improvised (as dramatized in the movie) with the original Raelettes, most notably the sublime Margie Hendricks. In Brother Ray his excellent autobiography written with David Ritz, which Ray meticulously proofread in Braille, it's always “What I Say,” and Ritz states explicitly that Ray meant it to be that. So let's get that straight from now on.

Now, about Margie. In the movie, she is played with feeling by Regina King, who has said, however, that she had a hard time getting a sense of the character because so few images of her survive. When, in the movie, the news of Margie's death by overdose comes to Ray over the phone, you know it's awful. But you don't know how awful until you hear and see the real Margie singing. You can do that now, on a recently released Rhino DVD: Ô-Genio: Ray Charles Live in Brazil. It was recorded in 1963, one day before he turned thirty-three. In a liner note, Ritz says of Margie:

She's among the most underrated of all soul singers, yet Ray placed her in the highest category. “Aretha, Gladys, Etta James—these gals are all bad,” Ray told me, “but on any given night, Margie will scare you to death.” This is one of those nights. Both in rehearsal and onstage, her attitude is irresistibly feisty, uncompromisingly funky. If Ray intimidates other singers, he sure as hell doesn't intimidate Margie. Vocally, she stands toe-to-toe with the boss, never gives an inch, pushes him to the edge. Her facial expression says, “I'm sassy, I'm salty, I'm singing this song to death.”

Yes. Or rather, “ Yas indeed. Yas indeed.” And it's too bad none of that got into Brother Ray, in which she receives way too little credit. She and Ray were lovers, and it's a blot on his life and career that he let her slip away. “What kind of mannn are you? What kind of mannn are you?” the Raelettes sing on “Busted.” Genius that he was, that question must have stumped him in the night sometimes after Margie was gone.

In Brazil in ’63, Margie, like the other three Raelettes (she's second from the left), is wearing a perky taffeta party dress with a big flat bow at the waist. Demure, except for her mouth. She's not very big and not very pretty (she has Michael Jackson's original nose; in fact she looks a bit like him when he looked real), but you can't take your eyes off her, the confident, slightly lopsided curl of her lip as she goes Wow'r. She works her mouth around as if she's winding up, and pooches her lips with zest on the let-go. If you have a hard time picturing two people twenty feet apart turning “You Are My Sunshine” into carnal knowledge, then you owe it to yourself to check out this CD. On “Don't Set Me Free,” Margie lets out a “No-n’-no-no-no!” that will make your blood run several directions at once.

When Ray sings “Margie,” about there being only one and “Margie, it's you,” the Raelettes aren't onstage, so we don't know whether the other three are giving her jealous looks, or …Oh, well, I'm going to let Margie go now. I feel partly like I'm her father and partly like I wish I could have gone out with her in high school. But here's a question: When Ray sings, whom is Ray singing to? A good deal of the time, I'd say it's his mother, his only parent, and it's about having to leave her when he was still a boy so he could learn to be self-reliant. However warmly he may have felt toward his wife when he was at home, he was too much a habitué of the road to be feeling profound separation from her when he sings with such longing, “Now if I call her on the telephone / And tell her that I'm all alone…,” on “Hallelujah I Love Her So.”

I talked to David Ritz back in 1983, and Ritz did grumble about Ray Charles: “He's an interesting American businessman. His entire life is music, touring, and pussy. That's it. He's only written five or six tunes— once he made a lot of money he let other people write for him. He should deal more autobiographically with his art.” But that was back then, when the man was coasting. When he was cooking, he could turn anything— “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” even—into a personal grievance, over primal love lost, sunshine taken away. He recorded lots of songs about light, vision, and tears: “I Can See Clearly Now,” “Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin’,” “I'll Be Seeing You,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” “Ma,

She's Making Eyes at Me,” “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “Show Me the Sunshine.” Just a few of them. He didn't sing “Hear the gal with the red dress on.” On his rendering of “Till There “Was You,” Ritz says in his notes to Brother Ray, “If you listen closely you'll hear him cry.” That's a song with lines like “There were birds in the sky / But I never saw them winging….”

Don't want to explain a man by his songs, of course, nor the songs by the man. Here's one he sings with great conviction: “You Don't Know Me.” When I tried to sound him out about the kind of work he was doing in 1983, he said, “I ain't never been so sure of what I was doing. But I've always been one of those people had the balls or, what they call it in sports, confidence. My mother's training. I've been out here performing thirty-eight years. If I'm going to die, I'll kill myself. You've got some people want to tell you what to do, who are accountants, lawyers, who can't tap their feet to hardly anything—I hope you don't make that sound nasty.”

I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be able to make it sound like much of anything. I asked him how he felt when Elvis came along.

“I think in all fairness about that,” he said, “at the time, families were not about to let their young girls go out and swoon over a black guy. And Elvis the cat that came along at the time. Doing everything that black people had been doing all the time. Get out on stage and wiggle his behind, the white version. You had a lot of white artists doing clean-up versions. Like …who was it? He covered a lot of Little Richard—it was like food with no seasoning in it. Can't think of his name. Had a daughter who sang, too.”

I didn't know who he was trying to think of. He got a faraway look on his face, as I tried to press him on why he carried seventeen musicians around with him, when his earlier work with a small combo had been so fine. “When you got a big plate, you can put as much as you want on it. If you want just a little bit to eat, just put a little bit on, but if you want a lot, you can have that, too.” He said a number of things that he'd said in interviews before. When I asked him why he thought he hadn't self-destructed like so many great American musicians, he said, “I have never let anything, anything—I have never let nothing come between me and my music. I have never been so out of it that I couldn't get up on stage and sing ‘I Can't Stop Loving You.’ And the fact I'm blind, that's bad enough—I better keep my senses about me.”

Meanwhile, I could tell he was doggedly trying to remember something. The name of that other white guy besides Elvis.

“The key to survival is know what you're doing. People may not like it, but some people don't like sex, far as that goes. “When it's time to start singing, you just—Pat Boone!”

Nearly the whole time of my only conversation with Ray Charles, he had been trying to think of Pat Boone. I didn't much want to share that with the world.

But, hey. Tell the truth, I sort of liked “Love Letters in the Sand” back when that came out—which was before “What I Say.” I met Pat Boone once, a nice fella. We were in a green room, waiting to go on TV. Pat's topic was how Christians could have better sex and feel good about it. Pat Boone is part of America.

If it hadn't been for Ray Charles, though, there wouldn't have been any America. According to Flip Wilson on one of his comedy albums, this is what happened when Christopher Columbus asked Queen Isabella to finance his voyage:

“Chris say, ‘If I don't discover America there's not going to be a Benjamin Franklin or a Star Spangled Banner or land of the free and home of the brave—and no Ray Charles!’

“When the queen heard no Ray Charles she panicked. Queen say, ‘Ray Charles? You gon’ fin’ Ray Charles?’ Queen running through the halls saying, ‘Chris gon’ find Ray Charles!’ ”

Violinist and Panther: Brother Dave

In Brother Dave Gardner's version of Scripture, Goliath tells Little Davy he will come down on him so hard his head will “hum like a ten-penny finishing nail hit with a greasy ballpeen hammer.” That is how my head is humming, dear hearts (Brother Dave said “dear hearts” a lot), as I try to figure out what to say about the late—and all-time one and only—peckerwood hipster comedian.

Check the “Customer Reviews” of The Very Best of Brother Dave Gardner CD on Amazon.com. “A music fan” from New Orleans says:

Brother Dave was politically incorrect before politically incorrect was cool. This is not for the bleeding-heart victim crowd. So, if you're not a prissy, liberal, pseudo intellect who feigns “PC Outrage” at all humor directed at any group except rednecks, you will love Brother Dave. And, he does a redneck better than any person on the planet.

“A music fan” from Birmingham says:

As a child, I remember the adults listening to Brother Dave and howling with laughter. In a moment of nostalgia, I ordered 3 CDs—Brother Dave, Jerry Clower and Andy Griffith. Andy was even funnier than I remembered, Jerry was great. I found Dave Gardner's racist “humor” to be very offensive. So much so, that I threw the CD away. I was ashamed that I'd ordered it and embarrassed at the thought of someone seeing it in my home.

I don't know which of those reviews is more depressing. I do know that Brother Dave deserves them both. The first reviewer would seem to be unbalanced by a chip on the shoulder, but Brother Dave was all for cashing in those chips. The second reviewer's taste is a lot closer to mine—in particular with regard to Jerry Clower, a finer and funnier conscious artist (and more sympathetic portrayer of rednecks) than Brother Dave—but I am not about to throw away any of my Brother Dave albums. He's embarrassing, all right, and toward the end of his career he was worse than that. But he'll drive some resounding nails into your head.

He wasn't a traditional Southern storyteller like Clower; he was a far-out, polyphonic spritzer, in the urban, jazzy, stoner tradition of his predecessor Lord Buckley and his contemporary Lenny Bruce. He was way out there, like the more inventive but less trenchant Jonathan Winters. Like Robin” Williams's, Brother Dave's rap is often more sound than sense. Williams has considerably more range vocally, but Brother Dave had more theme. Alas.

In the anthology of Southern humor I edited a few years back, I made a point of including several Brother Dave bits that might, in fact, be called liberal. For instance, the one about a man who went to hell and saw the horror of people forced to sit at dinner with nothing to eat with but spoons, permanently affixed to their arms, that were too long for their mouths to reach. Then he went to heaven and saw that the blessed were limited to the same long spoons—the only difference being that they were feeding each other.

Brother Dave can be delightful, though, without being charitable. From his second album, Kick Thy Own Self (1960):

BROTHER DAVE: Somebody said, “Well, let's do this again.” Now how you going to do that?

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: What?

BROTHER DAVE: Again. You can't do anything again, brother. Once it's done, it's gone, man. You can do something similar.

He dwells so intently upon generally taken-for-granted words (one of his albums was called It's All in How You Look at “It”) that you wonder whether he didn't have a formative influence on Bill Clinton. But that's not what is enduringly embarrassing about him.

Brother Dave was born poor in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1926. Though ordained as a minister in his youth, he found his vocation while moonlighting as a drummer in nightclubs. The comedy lines he would toss out from time to time—giving himself his own rimshots, presumably—were so well received that he developed a stand-up act that he honed for a decade in Southern strip joints and bottle clubs until, in 1957, he suddenly hit the high national cotton on Jack Paar's Tonight Show. He did Paar and The Ed Sullivan Show a number of times and in 1959 came out with a groundbreaking comedy LP, Rejoice, Dear Hearts. It was a big hit. He followed it with several more albums, and college audiences embraced him North and South. During the early sixties he made enough money to set himself up in a twenty-three-room Hollywood mansion, with a boomerang-shaped swimming pool.

You probably ought not to shape your first swimming pool like a boomerang. But it wasn't just sudden wealth, and lots of drugs, and chain-smoking (“I'd smoke in my sleep if I had somebody to hold 'em”) that brought Gardner low, it was politics. In 1970, Larry L. King published a great piece in Harper's Magazine entitled “Whatever Happened to Brother Dave?” King had been a long time tracking him down. His mansion was boarded up, he was off the celebrity-search map, and the companies that had put out his records had no idea where he was. Finally King found him at the Pecan Grove Club in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was still doing his classic bits: Davy slaying Goliath with a smooth stone “wrapped up in a blue-suede tennis-shoe tongue,” Brutus stabbing Caesar with a knife so sharp it “cut the little microbes in two, and they screamed as they fell on each side, eek, eek, ” and death on the highway for the Alabama motorcyclists Mr. Chuck and Miss Baby. He was titillating the home folks, as always, with remarks like “I ain't got nothing against sex education in the schools, dear hearts, except it makes us parents feel like we didn't do it right.”

But now he was mixing off-color with disdain for the aspirations of colored folk: “Can you imagine the vanity of that civil wrongs song, ‘We Shall Overcome’? Now, beloved, how can any mortal do that?” He had always moved in and out of various exaggerated Southern accents black and white, and that had bothered a lot of people. (Flip Wilson's Geraldine character sounded a lot like Brother Dave's basic female African American voice, but Wilson was black himself, and Geraldine was triumphantly sassy, whereas Brother Dave's black women tended—like his white characters—to be none too swift.) Now, in Charlotte, he was saying things like “The ole Yankee newspapers put the ugly mouth on those good people down in Lamar, South Carolina. Yeah, man, said they'd beat up on some New Citizens’ little schoolchildren. Naw, beloved, that ain't true! They didn't hurt them lovely children—all they did was take some chains and whip up on some old school buses.”

And some of his Charlotte fans were whooping and cheering, and others, thank God, were walking out. Before his week-long gig at the Pecan Grove club was over, he was working crowds recruited by Ku Kluxers of his acquaintance. He was referring to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as “Dr. Junior,” and going so far as to say, two years after King's assassination, “God, wasn't that a clean hit on Dr. Junior?” He apparently never repented of such sentiments, but in 1983 efforts were being made to revive his career when he died of a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven, on the set of a movie he was to appear in called Chain Gang.

You won't hear anything that Klan-pleasing on the CDs you can order from Amazon.com. But let's just run through the last couple of minutes of Kick Thy Own Self, which is available on a double-album CD with Rejoice, Dear Hearts:

This violinist loved to play the violin, that was his own kick, he dug that stroke…. I mean he had his own serenity going …and he practiced and practiced …up until where he could play this violin to where it sounded like one. And even beyond that, oh, it was so beautiful …humans couldn't understand or perceive the depth of fine quality he was getting out of this here musical instrument…. So he went out yonder to the jungles of Africa, got up on this stump …and he started to play, and …all the animals grouped around: great big fear-ocious lions, and the rhinosteruses, and all kinds of things, tigers, and giraffes, and little monkeys, and great big go-rillas, and I mean bad mean-looking creatures all come …and started seeping in these …vibrations from the violin. And they was all so happy 'cause you know those animals’ ears are sensitive, tired of hearing all them old gunshots and everything, all them barbarous folks over there shooting them animals— ain't right—animals don't shoot humans. So they was sitting there digging his music—and here come a great big black panther, and come running out from behind the weeds there and he say, Urraaaagh-Zap! And he pounced on this violinist, and ate him up, and the violin and the bowstrings and everything, chomp chomp chomp. Wiped his mouth, and you could just hear all the other animals say, “Awwwww.”

He started to trot off …and the lion went over to him and said, “Aw, man, Good Lord, what in the world did you do that for?”

And the panther say, “Hawnh?”

The panther's voice is what you would call Southern black. The other animals sound sort of generic-country-Southern. The tone of that Hawnh? is a mixture of prelapsarian innocence and invincible ignorance. The Awwwww sounds a genuinely poignant note of innocent disappointment.

Then Brother Dave goes off on a series of tangents:

I'm tired and sick of poor folks…. I was brought up in that stroke, and the first piece of light bread I ever seen was th'owed off the back of a CCC truck…. I've been through it, and I know what it is, and actually that's why I have come to entertain the rich—the poor already have something to look forward to. I think the only way to eliminate poverty, friends, is …never mind the rich-tax the poor folks. Give 'em an incentive to become something….

I still say if it wasn't for Thomas Edison we'd all be sitting around watching television by candlelight. Them cavemen sitting in them caves beating on the rocks, saying, “We ain't ever going to have radio.”

“James Lewis! Get away from that wheelbarrow! You know you doesn't know nothing about machinery!”

Done in his voices, the material is dazzling. It also reeks with a deep feeling for, and just as deep a fear of, poverty and ignorance and primitivity. The roots of po-white racism. Brother Dave has a lot of the violinist in him and a lot of the panther.

I have a vinyl album on the Capitol label, It Don't Make No Difference-undated, but you can tell from the Kennedy-administration references that it's from the early sixties—on which Brother Dave lays down some friendly racism. “Out in California I miss 'em, you know what I mean? There ain't no way that you can grow up with anybody and not miss 'em sometimes.” He says he was up in the Hollywood Hills recently when “There he was, bless my soul, an Afro-American citizen—I just got elated, flipped outa my skull. Said Oh, happy day, here's somebody to talk some trash with. I say, ‘Yeah, man, how you is?’ He say, ‘Very well, thank you, and how are you?’ ” And Brother Dave is disappointed. And that is his whole point.

When I first began to travel in the North, back in the early sixties, black people reminded me of home, and it struck me as unnatural when some of them sounded like Yankees. Articulated more distinctly than I did. (In 1853, in Philadelphia on his first trip away from home, Mark Twain wrote to his brother Orion that he would “like amazingly to see a good, old-fashioned negro.”) But it wasn't too long before I began to think to myself: Well, maybe I better expand my sense of what's natural. I guess some people would call that my first step down the slippery slope of PC. But how about the first time Brother Dave stood up in front of an audience and referred to black people as “ 'em”—as if there were no chance that any of “ 'em” might be listening, and if they were listening, who cared? What if somebody from that audience had come up to him afterward and said, “Man, you need some diversity training”? Might have averted a lot of deep ugliness down the road.

“You know,” says Brother Dave on one of his albums, “I don't know what I'm doing half the time…. I figure if I did figure out what I was doing, I'd prob'ly go hide.” He didn't hide, and that made him embarrassing in the way of an artist. But he didn't do much constructive figuring, either, and that made him embarrassing in the way of a crazy dumb-ass from home.

The Clampetts Never Got to Whack Anybody

Members of New York's Gambino crime family are distancing themselves from the Clinton pardon scandal, calling the former president's family “low-rent, trailer-park trash.” Thomas Gambino, 72, son of the late mob boss Carlo Gambino, is fuming at reports his family had something to do with Roger Clinton's effort to get a pardon for a New Jersey heroin dealer named Rosario “Sal” Gambino.

—New York Post

Okay, now I am going to do a little impression, of sorts, in which—I don't usually do this. I believe in quoting people the way they actually said it, or the way they actually would have said it if I weren't making it up. But in this case, I am going to euphemize something. It is something that people where I come from do right often, thank you very much, but they don't rely upon it quite so much in conversation. I am going to replace that with something that people in the South would do even more often than the other thing, if they had time, and which has the same number of letters and begins with the same one. Here we go.

“What—I don't love The Sopranos? The fish you talkin’ about? Listen to me: fishin’ Tony Soprano should fishin’ run for fishin’ president, you hear what I'm tellin’ you? So he's fishin’ seein’ a fishin’ shrink, so fishin’ what? You think Al fishin’ Quaida's gunna get outta line, they know the guy we got over here in the Oval fishin’ Office is a made man? Git the fish adda here. Tony Soprano's fishin’ mudduh, when she was on, like, oxygen support, coulda fishin’ handled Al-Quaeda. “What am I, a fishin’ grabotz or some kind of corrupted Sicilian word like that? I fishin’ love The fishin’ Sopranos so much, it's fishin’ afishin'fectin’ my fishin’ prose style hee'y.

(That last is my best effort to spell the sound of the “here” that often ends a sentence in The Sopranos. As in, “Waddayathink, that's going to impress me, a fishin’ bullet in the eyeball, hee'y?” It's not so much like the affirmative “hee” in “hee-haw” as it is like the derogatory middle portion of “peee-yew.” By the way, in The Sopranos nobody ever says “there.” Everybody says “over hee'y,” with a thumb point, as in, when somebody tries to make a serious sociopolitical point, “Oh, listen to Mr. C. Vann fishin’ Woodward over hee'y.”)

I have seen every episode of The Sopranos and wish it would go on for years and years. I just wonder why, if a Mafia clan can become “America's favorite crime family,” to quote the billing for that popular Home Box Office series, how come a Ku Klux Klan family can't? Mafia guys are just as dumb as Kluxers, they don't like people of different races either, and they are every bit as vicious. They are just as likely to have an Uncle Junior, and the outfits they wear are, if anything, tackier. Yet they have cachet.

My wife, Joan, who is from various places in the North, says she knows why. Because Italians gave the world pasta and the opera. Okay, grits don't come in as many forms as pasta—which to me is a plus. You ever try to find regular spaghetti on a menu anymore? Who needs flat spaghetti? Who needs bow-tie spaghetti? Who needs spaghetti in the form of little spirals? And you know what baked ziti is, that they make such a big deal about on The Sopranos? We cooked some the other night, to see. It's macaroni and cheese. A friend of mine from Georgia who raised her daughter in Virginia took the daughter, at age seventeen, to dinner at some neighbors’ house, and the neighbors served macaroni and cheese. The daughter took a bite and said, “Mm. This is some interesting pasta.” My friend couldn't believe it. You think you've grounded your children in basic values, and then, boom, you realize you somehow neglected to acquaint them with macaroni and cheese. You know what the Sopranos call tomato sauce, by the way? Gravy. Okay, I once got spaghetti sauce in a Georgia restaurant that was essentially catsup. But that is because tomato sauce is not our gravy. Our gravy will make a puppy pull a freight train.

And, okay, I will stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Hank Williams wasn't Puccini. So the Met will charge $200 a ticket for a lavish production of Madame Butterfly, but with a ten-foot pole it won't touch “Your Cheating Heart,” which is the same story boiled down and less expensive.

Maybe that's the problem. The Mafia has done a lot better financially. The Klan, because it is so desperate to find somebody to look down on, doesn't know which way upscale is. But there's more to it than that.

People in this country do not think evil Southerners are cool. Our bad guys are not cable ready. Okay, kleagle is sillier than godfather, but—

See, I have to live with this. If our evil people are not as cool as evil people in New Jersey, it follows that whatever I am writing about is suspect. At dinner the other night, a New York man got out of me that I was writing a book about Robert E. Lee. He gave me a narrow look and asked, “Is the South going to like it?”

This is the flip side of what I came up here to get away from. Now instead of Southern people looking at me and asking is the South going to like it, I've got Northern people looking at me and asking the same thing, only demanding the opposite answer. Ideally, I told this New York man, nobody is going to like it. That confused him, which was the most I could hope for.

The truth is, just about the only thing Robert E. Lee and I have in common, besides the South, is that the Lees and the Blounts are both of Norman extraction. We come from people who came to England by way of Normandy from Scandinavia. The Norse, or, ironically enough, Northmen. The name Blount derives from Guillaume le Blond, who came in with the Norman Conquest. Normans have been the effete bad guys all the way back to Ivanhoe and The Adventures of Robin Hood and, I think, Henry IV, both parts, though I have other things to worry about than keeping all those Henrys straight. In Mississippi, you've had the Percys; they've been good guys, for Normans. The Percys fought the Klan, in a condescending Norman sort of way. In my case, Norman blood is mixed up with Scotch-Irish and Welsh and Dutch, so I don't have that aristocratic, cavalier thing going—but my point is, even mongrel-Norman guys and Klan guys are two different crowds.

So if you think I am raising the question of why the Klan has no pop-entertainment cachet (hasn't had any, really, since Birth of a Nation) in hopes that it can regain some and I can get in on it—no. I spent some time with Klansfolk back in the early eighties, to write a magazine article, and the only time any of them touched my heart was when I was riding in an elevator with some of them to the top floor of a four-story building in Nashville (to visit their lawyer), and one of the women looked giddy and said, “This is the highest I've ever been.” I contribute to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has just about run the Klan, as such, out of business. I don't even want there to be a hit TV series about an appealing family that, say, makes speeches at Bob Jones University. I don't even want to vote for anybody in such a family.

I just don't want to have to pick up The New York Times and read, as I did the other day, this from Maureen Dowd:

When my mother was in law school, in the mid-1930's, a fellow student from southern Virginia expressed surprise when he learned she was a Catholic. Why, he wondered over beers, didn't she have a mark on her forehead? “Some Southerners,” she recalls, “thought priests wore cassocks to hide their tails.”

Okay. I am not denying that there were Southern law students in the 1930s who were prejudiced against Catholics (who have a mark on their foreheads only once a year). I am not denying that there are such Southerners now. If I accidentally see Bill O'Reilly or Mel Gibson on TV one more time, I might even—never mind.

Nor do I want to talk bad about Maureen Dowd's mama. I am just saying, maybe Maureen Dowd's mama's interpretation of some Southerners’ remarks was a tad more literal (and I like literalism, in its place) than the remarks themselves were. My goal in life is to make some tiny headway toward lifting from Southerners some tiny bit of the burden of having to prove that we are being tongue in cheek. For Southerners, the price of irony is eternal vigilance. Okay. I accept that. I just want to shift a reasonable amount of that burden northward.

Here is a novel that I highly recommend: For the Love of Robert E. Lee, by M. A. Harper. Harper, according to the dust jacket, “is the daughter of a South Carolina farmer. After 19 years in New Orleans, she recently returned to her family seat in Columbia.” The narrator of this novel, which was published in 1992 by the Soho Press of New York, is a spunky South Carolina high school girl named Garnet Laney, who falls in love, in 1963, with an early portrait of Lee, back when he looked a lot like Cary Grant. This narrator's school has recently been integrated. There are racial incidents, in which some of her white classmates behave badly. In these matters, she is a two-fisted liberal—at one point, she bloodies the nose of a bad white boy. Meanwhile, she is drifting back into the past to imagine—on plausible historical grounds—a love life for poor, unhappily married, incredibly foxy Marse Robert.

The only teacher who comes close to understanding Garnet is her debate-team coach, Mr. Damadian, an Armenian American Peace Corps veteran from Queens, New York. “I really like you people,” Damadian tells her. “Frankly I expected Tobacco Road. Weekly lynchings, I don't know. But you guys aren't as vicious as you're cracked up to be.”

Damadian means well. He and Garnet genuinely like each other. And here he is being sort of tongue in cheek, of course. But he is also presuming to express a measure of surprise that white Southerners lack a visible mark of Cain. Here is Garnet's reaction:

I couldn't look at him, I felt my cheeks hot, thinking: I hate this place but it's my home. It's for me to criticize. Don't discuss it in front of me like this with no idea that I might want to contradict you. I won't contradict you, but I am embarrassed by your assumption, Mr. Damadian.

Yes. Can I get an “A-men,” There was, in fact, a TV series about Southerners of that period, I'll Fly Away, which I'm told was pretty good, but for some reason I never watched it. Not enough people got whacked in it, I guess. If For the Love of Robert E. Lee were turned into a series, by the right people, that I would watch.

But you know how that phrase, “the right people,” sounds to the wrong people, North and South. So let me be clear: by “the right people,” I mean those who will like my book about Robert E. Lee.

No to Nashville, Yes to O Brother

Inever met a Southerner who didn't hate the movie, and it's hard to understand…. There is a kind of reaction, as if the movie is meant to be critical of them,” my late friend and hero Pauline Kael is quoted as saying in The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece. I would be one of the Southerners who have given her that impression. And if there's anything I hate, it's the notion of hating something that's good, or being regarded as hating something that's good, because of where I'm from.

I have, in fact, met a number of Southerners who loved Nashville. I've argued with them till I was blue in the face. “What if it were a movie called Harlem?” I have exclaimed. “Could it have gotten away with casting Ronee Blakley as a character loosely based on Billie Holiday? Singing the songs of Ronee Blakley?”

Then, of course, I have to add, “Not that there is anything wrong with the songs of Ronee Blakley. She has a pretty voice, and that's an interesting song she sings in the movie, about growing up in Idaho. It is just not a country song. It's too damn lilting. And you know, and I know, that the character she plays, an ethereal hysteric said to be based on Loretta Lynn, conveniently lacks what is most essential about Loretta Lynn: her grit and humor. Loretta Lynn is about as ethereal as …as…”

But now, I believe, I am finally able to speak of this movie calmly. In part because I am mature and tired, and in part because I now have another movie to love, which many other Southerners hate.

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nashville. It is also the year that O Brother, Where Art Thou? has appeared. Both films are set in the South, were shot on location in the South, and have much to do with Southern music. Both were directed by non-Southerners—in the first case, Robert Altman of Kansas City, in the second, the Coen brothers of Minnesota. I always go to an Altman movie rooting for it to be good, and Nashville is widely regarded as Altman's best (actually, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is). I always go to a Coen brothers movie expecting that at least something about it—something sour, arch, and chilly blooded—will put my teeth on edge, and when I saw a preview of O Brother, Where Art Thou? I thought to myself, “Oh, right, wiseacres meet Green Acres.”

I couldn't wait to see O Brother so I could denounce it as a crude, heartless caricature of persons representing my ethnic background. I sat there scowling at it for fifteen minutes. And then…

It's a funny movie. And it's got feeling. You may think that John Tur-turro is the last person in the world that you would want to see playing Southern, and I would have been the first to agree with you, until I saw him with a fake beard and this hard, intense look on his face, yodeling, to “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” Lip-synching, of course, but there is something distinctively skanky about Turturro's looks that seems right natural in an escaped convict of my ethnic background. And Charles Durning does just enough of a little dance to retain his title as the best-dancing fat man there ever has been. I would sit through a musical tribute to Newt Gingrich by Billy Ray Cyrus if I thought that at some point Charles Durning would get up and dance. And I like George Clooney in movies. Did you see him in that movie where he's locked into a car trunk with Jennifer Lopez? If I didn't begrudge him that, I'm not going to begrudge him anything.

Maybe you think I have forsaken all vigilance. Well, maybe I just have bad taste. Let me confess that I have found much to enjoy over the years in Hee-Haw and also in Amos 'n Andy. Then, too, maybe I like a little

Northern smart-ass mixed in with my country pleasures. Purely Southern funnin -of-ourselves sometimes gets too cozy. Sharp as Mrs. “Minnie Pearl” Cannon was as a person, check out some of her old Grinder's Switch monologues if you want to hear Southern people being portrayed as embarrassingly dumb. “Mr. Turturro's performance,” writes A. O. Scott in an otherwise enthusiastic New York Times review, “is obnoxiously broad, as though he had prepared for the role by studying tapes of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, a recurring minor character on ‘The Simpsons.’ ” Well, are you offended by Cletus? No, because Cletus is pointedly heavy-handed. Like Andy Kaufman calling Memphis wrestling fans stupid to their face, Turturro takes the slack-jaw thing straight-facedly over the top, with no “I'm-on-yall's-side” wink to taut-jawed Southern folks. That's what would have been offensive, that wink. He's not an interesting enough actor to pull off that wink. Let's face it, there have been quite a few echt-Southern comedians who have not done tongue-in-cheek slack jaw all that well.

But the main virtue of O Brother is how lovingly and respectfully it involves real, weird, ecstatic, piercing, rootsy Southern music—from “You Are My Sunshine” and “I'll Fly Away” to the wonderfully spooky-erotic (and new to me) folk lullaby, “Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby.” You might well say that any movie with any sense set in the South would take advantage of the good music. But that is what Nashville, the music-filled movie, does not do.

Of course, neither does Nashville, the music industry. If only Altman had been grounded enough in the music to give that disjunction the business, so to speak. But Nashville is like a movie set in English pubs that takes for granted beer should be cold. As soon as Nashville came out, I rushed to see it. The other day I watched the DVD of it, to make sure I hadn't just been in a bad mood when I saw it in 1975. That movie still puts my nose out of joint.

It has some great stuff in it, to be sure. Lily Tomlin's Nashville housewife has what the Lorettaesque character lacks: character. Her scenes with Ned Beatty playing her husband and with Keith Carradine as the young musician who seduces her (it is she, however, who comes out on top), and Beatty's scenes with Gwen Welles as the aspiring, untalented singer who has to strip for a political smoker, all flow together the way only a semi-improvised, actor-friendly Altman syncopation can, when it's got some fiber to it. And, hey, it's not as though I expect a movie called, say, Dodge City to be a scrupulous travelogue. But you can't flambé fried chicken. The concept Nashville has too much literal and metaphorical specific gravity, good and bad, to be served up just any old whichaway à la Altman.

The other day I was in an Italian grocery in Manhattan. A young woman immigrant from the Middle East was slicing tomatoes too slowly to satisfy the proprietor, who snapped: “Whaddaya think? This is Oshkosh, Tennessee?” There is something of that in Altman's attitude: Nashville, Shmashville. There is also his notion—as he puts it in the directorial commentary on the DVD of the movie—that Nashville “is a microcosm of the Hollywood problem.” This is an excuse for him to fill out his cast of characters with a mélange of L. A.-ish drifter types looking for fame. After Nashville came out, the documentarian Ray Farkas made a brief film that captured the sort of obsession that, in fact, draws dreamers to Nashville instead of to Hollywood: it seemed that every third Nashvillian he met, beginning with the rent-a-car lady in the airport, had a song that he or she had written and was happy to sing, badly, for Farkas's camera.

These days, creative Nashville may indeed think of itself as a microcosm of Hollywood, but what that amounts to is road-show Hollywood, a contradiction in terms. For Altman, generally, “the Hollywood problem” has been how to finagle financing for one of his sometimes inspired, sometimes impenetrable pipe dreams. The Nashville Chronicles (by Jan Stuart) traces, about as clearly as possible I guess, how Altman managed to parlay United Artists’ urging him to direct a country-music vehicle for Tom Jones (based on a script called The Great Southern Amusement Company, which Altman disdained), and some intermediate mogul-schmoozing after a John Denver concert, into a deal with ABC to direct his scattershot vision of the midseventies American zeitgeist.

In his DVD commentary, Altman readily admits that he knew nothing about Nashville or country music and that his screenwriter Joan Tewkes-bury didn't either, except what she picked up in two atmosphere-gathering visits. He keeps insisting, however, on the movie's “realism”— for instance, when one of the actors playing a singer got a frog in her throat in the middle of a song, they left that in. Altman didn't want to deal with record companies (understandably), so his actors wrote their own songs. Carradine's are catchy, but they don't smack at all of Nashville or of Jerry Jeff “Walker, the hell-raising outlaw-country icon who supposedly inspired his character. (Carradine seems to spend most of his time lounging around. Jerry Jeff devoted the seventies to staying up.) Henry Gibson's songs are droll, as is his performance as a Hank Snow sort of fella, but they aren't as country-funny as Snow's explanation of why he wouldn't go to the movie: “I have better things to do than to go see a movie where somebody's supposed to be playing me…. And I'm not pompous at all. I'm just a quiet, bashful country boy.”

When Vassar Clements appears on the screen, Altman in his DVD voice-over commentary identifies him as “a great jazz violinist.” No, he's a great country fiddle player.[*] As is Johnny Gimble, who pops up a couple of times gamely trying to play along with whatever the hell is going on, and who isn't even mentioned in the credits. Johnny Gimble is a man who has played and hung out with, and can tell you great stories about, Bob Wills and Willie Nelson—and who also played, in the kitchen at night, with Anne Rapp's daddy. Altman's recent movies from scripts by Anne Rapp, Cookie's Fortune and the underrated Dr. T and the Women, capture aspects of Southern culture well and freshly, and his Gingerbread Man gets old Savannah down a lot better than Clint Eastwood's hokey movie version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But in Nashville he was shooting for something wiggier.

He was after making some kind of grand political point that, as a British reviewer of Nashville put it snottily, “looks stuck in for a significance that it could never have in a place so traumatized by its self-importance that minutes after gunshots have left a bloodied body onstage the townsfolk are nodding and clapping again in time to their staple industry.” This is really infuriating, because that indifference to reality seems to be Altman's theme, when, in fact, it is a matter of his own indifference. If Nashville were interestingly critical of Southerners, I'd be downright flattered. What offends me is that Nashville doesn't recognize us, or our music, as any particular kind of people or music at all, other than fodder for Altman.

The supposed Loretta Lynn character breaks down while singing at Opryland, and her audience responds by groaning nastily. “Those are the faces of the audience,” says Altman on the CD. “You can go there today and that's what you'll see.” We learn from Stuart's book that a number of the extras portraying this audience were from a convention of Shriners that happened to be in town, who kept drunkenly interfering with the shooting. Any realistic country music audience witnessing anybody as beloved as Loretta Lynn breaking down would respond, as Greil Marcus has written, “with sympathy, compassion and fear.”

Then, in the final, climactic scene of the movie, the one alluded to

by the British reviewer, this same character is shot by an uninterestingly unmotivated assassin, and her audience responds by singing over and over the refrain of a catchy but far from even contemporary country song written by Carradine, “You may say that I ain't free. Well, it don't worry me.”

The production had gathered a big crowd at Centennial Park by advertising ten-cent hot dogs and, more significantly, a chance to be in a movie. That's what I came for. I don't know that I even got a hot dog. I happened to be in Nashville at the time (covering a Protestant ministers’ golf tournament), and some friends and I joined the multitude. We saw an actress get shot a couple of times, and then all we were directed to do was sing along, for over an hour, with this mindless ditty. What were we going to do, act? I tell you what, if it had been Loretta Lynn shot, we wouldn't have been nodding and clapping. We would have been weeping and looking to kill the son of a bitch. But since it was a movie, we were smiling and playing along with whatever the gag was.

“We couldn't stage this,” says Altman on the DVD. “So that's the …the faces of Nashville.”

It was the faces of Nashville trying to be helpful to the Hollywood folks, is what it was. At one point, the camera passed through us and the resultant crush knocked an elderly woman next to me off her feet. “Wait a minute,” I said, “this lady's about to get trampled!”

“Don't stop 'em,” she said from the ground, her eyes alight. Maybe that was a microcosm of Hollywood, but was it art?

No, I am not visible in the movie. If there's anything I hate, it's being accused of hating a movie because I got cut out of it.

A violin is one thing, and a fine thing in its way, but a fiddle—you can hear it talk; you can hear it sing.

When the Lights Go Down South

What I enjoy talking about most, I'd say, is movies. That's how far I have gotten away from my raising. Last Christmas night, I was in New York City, with mostly Northern people, doing what? Praying? Caroling? No, watching a DVD of Closer, a critically acclaimed movie about extremely chic and trashy people. Let me say this for us, though: we all hated it. Any movie so sour and mean that it manages to render Natalie Portman unappealing is not the kind of thing I was

brought up to like, nor have I learned to like it later. The Yuletide air was filled with cries of “Soullllll-dead!” and “Lacks emotional depth!”

Closer is set in London. Judging by this movie, people in London will pretty much have sex with anybody they meet who looks like a movie star, even when they look like movie stars themselves. And the tragedy of it is, they don't seem to get much of a bang out of it, even when they look like Julia Roberts, who is from my home state of Georgia! One thing about movies set in the South, people tend to break a sweat in them, and that includes Julia Roberts. In Something to Talk About, which a lot of people didn't like but I did, she brought up adultery at the Junior League, poisoned her husband (Dennis Quaid, Texas) to within an inch of his life, and then later fast-danced with him, good and hard and nifty, like back in high school. And I believe all that was supposed to be taking place no farther south than Kentucky.

Hey, I know! How about a Down Memory Lane Southern Film Festival!

Remember when heavy-handed Dixie-bashing was Hollywood courage? Return with me now to 1967 and the worst high-minded race-relations melodrama of all time: Hurry Sundown, directed by Otto Pre-minger, with Michael Caine and Jane Fonda as miserably degenerate upper-Louisiana gentry (he defiles her when she fondles his saxophone) and Robert Hooks and Diahann Carroll as noble, if colorless, persons of color. Hurry Sundown was so startlingly bad, wrote Wilfrid Sheed, that “to criticize it would be like tripping a dwarf.” And yet an Australian reviewer named Peter Thompson looks back upon Hurry Sundown now as “a landmark film, one which set a precedent for later examination of racial issues.” According to Thompson, the film is

set in Alabama, Georgia where, in 1967, its sympathetic treatment of its black protagonists enraged sections of the white community. Undaunted, Preminger was determined to shoot there, making Hurry Sundown the first movie made in the South with African-American actors in leading roles. But Alabama was out of the question so he moved down the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

So if you are chatting with an Australian cinephile, and you happen to mention that you are from Alabama, and the response is, “Oh, yes, that town in Georgia up the Mississippi from Louisiana that tried to obstruct the humanitarian vision of Otto Preminger,” blame it on Thompson.

In our festival, let's chase that turkey with an unpretentious 1992 comedy, My Cousin Vinny, that actually makes Southern justice look amicable. Fred Gwynne plays a well-educated, judicious judge, and even the sheriff (Bruce McGill) is a man of goodwill. Vinny (Joe Pesci) comes from Brooklyn to a small town in the Deep South to represent his young cousin (Ralph Macchio), who's being tried for a murder he seems to have confessed to because of interregional linguistic confusion. Vinny is accompanied by his girlfriend, Mona Lisa Vito, fetchingly played by Marisa Tomei. More interregional confusion arises. (“What is a grit?” asks Pesci at breakfast. “What is a ‘yoot’?” asks the judge, nonplussed by Vinny's pronunciation of “youth.”) Grits, and how to cook them, play a key evidentiary role in the trial. In fact, the whole movie is a tribute to the universality of hard evidence. The intergenderal arguments between Vinny and Mona Lisa are delightfully rooted in, to quote Mona Lisa (who grew up in a family of garage mechanics), “dead-on balls accurate” definitions of terms. Okay, it's a fantasy.

Speaking of relationships, how about a double feature of Summer and Smoke (1961) followed by Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962). In the former, set in early twentieth-century Mississippi, Geraldine Page is an outwardly pious preacher's daughter named Alma who inwardly teems with desire for local rakehell Laurence Harvey, who finally gives her a highly ungratifying semitumble (he prefers, as who wouldn't, handy spitfire Rita Moreno). In the latter, Elvis, a tuna-fishing guide, is pursued by lots of such people as are mentioned in the title, though his heart is on the ocean among gills, gills, gills. (He does not sing “Tuna! Tuna! Tuna!” however, but “Song of the Shrimp.”) Of Summer and Smoke, Pauline Kael wrote, “There's supposed to be something on fire inside Alma…, but …'taint smoke that rises—just wispy little old tired ideas goin’ to rejoin the Holy Ghost.” Imagine my surprise, then, to learn from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) that there is a reference to Summer and Smoke in Girls! Girls! Girls! Does Elvis put off insensitive club chanteuse Stella Stevens by singing, “Oh, yeah, you're hot, girl, you couldn't be any faster. But I'll tell you what you're not, girl: the daughter of a pastor”? There's only one way to find out.

I never tire of being weirded all the way back to Sunday school by arrant evildoer Robert Mitchum singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” in Night of the Hunter. Let's follow that with The Apostle, a holistic portrait of an earnest, adulterous, violent-when-cuckolded, engaging, genuinely religious rogue preacher. Robert Duvall wrote it, directed it, and played the preacher. (With Texan Farrah Fawcett as his wife, June

Carter Cash as “Mrs. ‘Momma’ Dewey Sr.,” and Billy Joe Shaver in a bit part.) I watched this with Pauline Kael, who said afterward, “The son of a bitch pulled it off.”

Another double feature: Tomorrow, a poignant Faulkner story adapted by Horton Foote and starring Duvall. Followed by Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade (this one made Pauline shudder—to me it's hokum, but enjoyable), in which Duvall appears and Thornton adapts the mentally challenged mumble that Duvall used in Tomorrow. It used to be in movies that a grit accent was a way of showing dumbness or meanness. With Billy Bob's voices in various roles, you get real texture.

In Mildred Pierce (1945) Zachary Scott plays a quintessentially shallow slimy-rat playboy (“With me, loafing is a science”) who dies like an egg-sucking dog, deservedly. Why show that? So we can follow it with Scott's startling departure in his very next film: Renoir's best American movie, The Southerner, in which Scott (a native of Austin, Texas) loses the pencil-thin mustache and gets his hands affectingly earthy as a hard-scrabble farmer.

Laura Dern as the innocent sexpot (opposite daddy-figure Duvall) in Rambling Rose might be set off nicely by Ashley Judd (is she not fine?) as a luminous innocent in Ruby in Paradise.

Two movies about children and tough love: The Yearling, in which careworn Jane Wyman is pitted against her boy's beloved garden-raiding fawn, and Conrack, in which Jon Voight is the young Pat Conroy getting some learning into unruly rural schoolkids. (With Conroy's bullying father, played by Duvall in The Great Santini, lurking in the subtext.) Program note: Voight has played a number of Southern characters well despite being from Yonkers. Incidentally he has also portrayed Noah, FDR, and Howard Cosell; he's the father of Angelina Jolie, hence Thornton's father-in-law; and his brother, under the name of Chip Taylor, wrote the Troggs’ immortal hit “Wild Thing.”

Good old Jezebel, starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda—crackerjack antebellum stuff. I've always thought of George Brent as a stiff, but he's got something going here as the drinkin’-and-duelin’ Buck Cantrell. When he says, “Seein you in that dress, Miss Julie, kind of gives me the all-overs,” you can see why he and Davis had an affair during the filming (after she dumped the director, William Wyler). You could pair Jezebel with the lavishly inferior Gone with the Wind, but I'd rather follow it with a reading of a fugitive humor piece by Veronica Geng (who was born in Atlanta—her father was stationed at Fort McPherson). “My goal,” Geng wrote when her piece was finally published in an anthology of authors’ favorite bits of jetsam, “was to write something that would actually be embarrassing to read.” It climaxes in an extraordinary riff on the famous Jezebel scene in which the formerly prideful Davis throws herself at the feet of her old flame Fonda, only to learn that he has married a Yankee. I have room here to present only a severely truncated version of the riff in question. When “you and your sophisticated Yankee fiancee” are relaxing after dessert at a restaurant in New York called Dixie's Home Away from Home, writes Geng,

all at once a woman from a neighboring table comes over and sinks to the floor at your feet…, her white organza dress and petticoats floating and frothing around her like a sea of beaten egg-whites …as she says, “I can't believe it's you here…. It must be an eternity since that first night you kissed me…. The most sublime kiss of my life …That's why I said that silly thing about my hatpin and ran away. Because I was lackin’ in courage …I learned my lesson, all these months when life was supposed to go on as usual and all I knew was knowin’ I'd find you again. I'm wearin’ this dress for you. I wear it every night, prayin’ I'll run into you and you'll say I look nice…. And now I'm on my knees to you, so you'll know how humbly, how completely I'm offerin’ myself to you…. I was too proud…. And spiteful and mean. But now …I'm pleadin’ with you from the bottom of my heart—tell me you know you love me, just as I'm tellin’ you right out where everybody can see and hear, includin’ your little nose-in-the-air Yankee…. You inspire me and give me courage to face the truth. You make me see how I can be all grown up and still as trustin’ as a child…. I'm beg-gin’ you—don't say it was nothin’. It will never, ever be nothin’. And that's why I know it's right to give my love to you now, tonight, with all the tenderness and abandon and loyalty you know you see here in my eyes. Cat got your tongue?”

Song of the South. I saw it and loved it when it first came out, in 1946, when I was going on five years old. I saw it and loved it again the next time around in 1956. It's Disney doing Uncle Remus. Vivid cartoon renderings of the Brer Rabbit stories—bits of which I can still see and hear in my head—mixed with live action reflecting 1946 white mainstream racial sensitivity. Disney last released it, probably for the last time, in 1986. Although no video version of this artifact is available in this country, Amazon.com has wistfully listed the nonexistent DVD as a magnet for would-be customers. Ninety-three of these have logged in with comments reflecting scant recognition that a largely cheerful evocation of slavery can be offensive. (“What could be more beautiful than a black lady breast-feeding a white child?” writes one decrier of political correctness. “Think that child didn't grow up to love that lady?”) I can see why Disney is wary of this briar patch, but I still had a craving to see Song of the South again—and I discovered that you can go on the Web to Songofthesouth.net and find a link that enables you to order it from the United Kingdom for $72. The U.K. video won't play on U.S. machines— but the company, CCNow, gets around whatever legalities are involved by throwing in (from another address) another tape, converted to a form compatible with American VHS, for free. Mine arrived within ten days. The movie dissolves into mush at the end, and the black folks are too consolingly cheery to reflect the period (post-Reconstruction) or any other period; but I'm still going on five, Brer Rabbit is still my hero, and I still love the movie.

Interesting to note that James Baskett, who plays Uncle Remus in Song of the South, also does the voice of Brer Rabbit's archfoe, Brer Fox. The voice of Brer Rabbit himself is by Johnny Lee, who played lawyer Algonquin J. Calhoun on the TV version of Amos 'n Andy. That of Brer Bear is by Nick Stewart, who as Nick O'Demus played the shiftless errand boy Lightnin’ on that series. Our festival could trace a wider range of African American film work by devoting a couple of days to a Rex Ingram retrospective. Ingram, who was born in Cairo, Illinois—which is where Jim and Huck plan to get Jim into free territory (but they drift past it in the fog)—played Jim opposite Mickey Rooney in the 1939 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He also appeared as Teetot (the street musician who taught Hank Williams to play the guitar) in Your Cheatin’ Heart, as the voice of John Henry in the Oscar-nominated “puppetoon” John Henry and the Inky-Poo, as somebody named Uncle Felix in God's Little Acre, as a wondrous Southern-accented genie in The Thief of Bagdad, as both Adam and De Lawd in Green Pastures, as Lucifer Jr. in Cabin in the Sky, and, yes, as a Professor Thurlow in Hurry Sundown.

Speaking of which, I felt I should see whether there was anything at all to that Aussie's account of the production difficulties Hurry Sundown encountered, so I consulted Michael Caine's autobiography, What's It All

About? I recall his Southern accent in Hurry Sundown as Cockney-tinged (Vivien Leigh advised him to prepare by pronouncing “four-door Ford” over and over as “foah-doah Fohd”), but his memoir seems as reliable as his acting has almost always been. He went South assuming that the movie would be good and folks would be folks, but to his dismay he learned different. If Preminger ran into trouble anywhere around Alabama or Georgia, it was during preproduction, because Caine reports that filming began somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The first night, the interracial cast went swimming in the motel pool. Caine was awakened by a loud explosion—someone had tried to blow up the pool. “The Ku Klux Klan had dubbed us ‘the nigger picture’ and tried to make life as awkward as possible for us, with little things like waiting until night then pumping our dressing trailers full of holes…. There was one small town where they actually came in their white hooded gowns and told us to get out. Otto for once listened to what someone else said and we all obliged.” Caine found New Orleans much to his taste, and persuaded Robert Hooks to attend an all-black musical production with him there. Hooks was told to leave. There were other nasty incidents.

A movie set in Dixie may,

Even though it's rotten

(Look away, Look away!),

Help keep old times unforgotten.

P.S.:

Among recent movies, here's one that would lead off a stimulating festival evening: Junebug, written by Angus MacLachlan and directed by Phil Morrison. I think it's the most painfully funny and telling movie about visiting the F.L.O.[*] back home that I have ever seen. George, who moved five years ago from North Carolina to Chicago, has brought his sophisticated new wife, Madeleine, down to sign up a local outsider artist for her gallery and incidentally to meet his family.

I don't know how I would have acted watching this movie out in public, but on DVD at home it made me jump and flinch and cry out and go get another drink. The dialogue is good, the visuals are striking, there's one great subtle touch after another. Amy Adams (whose mouth alone will break your heart) as the back-home sister-in-law, Ashley, and Celia” Weston as the mis-loving mother, Peg, are almost unbearably fine. Ashley immediately loves the new wife and repeatedly tells her so. Asked where she comes from originally, Madeleine says, well, she was born in Japan.

“No, you weren't!” exclaims Ashley, in wide-eyed delight.

Scott Wilson, who many years ago played the killer Dick Hickock in In Cold Blood, is oddly riveting as George's father—absurdly muted but benignly insightful (not that anyone is listening). When Madeleine confides to the father that she finds the formidable Peg awfully “powerful,” the father murmurs, “She's not like that inside. She hides herself. Like most.” As we all know from the business and political news, it's the cover-up that's actionable.

There are things about this movie, however, that put me off. I didn't buy what we see of the outsider artist's work. Faking naive art is a tough assignment, and Ann Wood (according to the credits) has pulled it off, as to the look. Content-wise, though, I am skeptical. For a male Southern visionary, huge malevolent penises are not a likely motif. Or, actually, penises at all. If you ask me, women think that we men dwell more on literal penises (as opposed to missiles, hot rods, and clubs) than we do. Straight men, anyway. A boondocks Mapplethorpe? I'd have to have a little more information.

A boondocks Leonardo, maybe, but never mind that. What bothers me about Junebug is the central figure, George. He gets off too easy. Talk about hidden selves—we hardly ever see George doing or saying anything. When we do, it's George singing “Softly and Tenderly” softly and tenderly; George screwing with Madeleine well and truly (though at one point he loses the thread, inferably, under homecoming pressure); and George coming through in a pinch as poor brave Ashley's only sympathetic listener. It's cool that Madeleine doesn't come off predictably snotty and superficial, and, okay, you can see how George takes after his father—but if you're going to lay the homefolks open, you've got to expose, or at least characterize, the wandering boy, too. I'm not talking about leaning over backward to level the playing field, but it oughtn't to be such that one side gets to coast.

Every story is suspect, right? That's part of the fun of it. Every family story, especially—from Hamlet to “Why I Live at the P.O.” (and check out V. S. Pritchett's “When My Girl Comes Home,” whose last sentence—a great punch line—bears on this issue). And you just know every family story is suspect to the extent that it seems to assume, or to be out to prove, that one member of the family—the one by whom or through whom or in reflection of whom the story is told—is the sane one.

He or she may in fact be. May have gone off somewhere and gained perspective as to what is wrong with everybody where he or she comes from. But he or she has got to show it, and in the process he or she is probably going to show a flash or two (case in point, Hamlet) of his or her own ass as well.

After writing the above, I had several Junebug discussions with friends Northern and Southern. One Southern friend demanded to know “what is George LIKE? He has no attributes, no dialogue, except the sanctimonious part about ‘family’ when he's trying to get Madeleine to go with him to be with Ashley for the birthing instead of going to lock in the deal with the painter, which is what they had come there for in the first place. Then he tries to make her feel guilty because she wasn't there and even seems to imply that if Madeleine had been there to talk Ashley into using the whatever it was that she didn't use, the baby might not have died. Meanwhile, Ashley's in-laws—George's real family, who OUGHT to be there— and her slug husband (where was HER family by the way?) have gone home and left her to grieve with George for a while and then the next day totally alone…. What kind of real people—especially real Southern people—act like that?”

A good question. My response is this:

Dubious as it may often be to defend a movie's unrealistic aspects by calling it dreamlike, Junebug—which spookily takes its name from what Ashley was going to call the baby—does have a nightmarish semicoherence. For instance, when the brother hits George glancingly, ineffectively, with a jack handle, it reminds me of the ghoulish patriarch's feeble efforts to dispatch the innocent hero with a hammer (as I recall), at the dinner table, in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In Junebug the brother and the father are ghostly, the mother a witch, and the sister an angel. The father's obsessive search through the house for a missing screwdriver (“What woodworking hobbyist with his own shop would only have one Phillips head screwdriver?” my friend wants to know), and the heavy-handed joke in his muttering, “I have done some screwing in here I guess” are like the brother's feckless attack: unsettling passivity or at least ludicrous inconclusiveness on the part of the male element, which presumably the male dreamer needs to connect to or bounce off against (and which the artist's phallic imagery brings grotesquely to the fore). Having had an inconsolable mother myself, I don't have much trouble imagining one like George's, whose counterproductive resistance to Madeleine might be exaggerated by George's apprehensive (and semi-creeped-out, but, hey, it's Mom!) perception.

We don't get outside of George's perceptions enough for the situation to make realistic sense. If the whole family had gathered around Ashley's hospital bed for some resolving confrontation, we would have a sense of George's objective place in the family circle-but what the movie evokes is his subjective place. When you go back home and you don't fit in anymore, it's disorienting. You aren't exactly like anything anymore. You can still sing in church, but your folks have become folk art.

When Madeleine pursues her business with the artist instead of going with George to the hospital, where she would just muddle the nuclear psychodrama, she does the sensible thing, from her point of view and also from the viewer's, and when George halfheartedly tries to lay a guilt trip on Madeleine (as his mother would wholeheartedly have done), Madeleine doesn't take it to heart and he doesn't persist. There is, in fact, a kind of naturalism in both his and her behavior in this regard, and also in the irresolution of the ending: Ashley persists in being too good to be true, Madeleine remains secure in her own concerns, and George abruptly departs with her for Chicago. He hasn't worked through his home-folk issues, but he's taking a pragmatic jump away from them. Madeleine, without taking on the burden of being a heroine, has facilitated his adjustment, but she is also (without taking on the burden of being a siren) leading him away from the roots of his personality. Given her baggage-free taste for backwoods products, those roots may be what she saw in him to begin with, but she'll never see what he feels in those roots. And he'll always have a long way to go from home.

En famille, people don't necessarily act like real people. Anyway, they don't necessarily seem to, to each other. A small-town Southern family may be more patently folk, but, hey, why did all those sixties suburban kids take up the dulcimer? Everybody's blood kinfolks, turned up just a notch or two, are primitive.

If Madeleine goes back to her home with George, I'll bet their roles will reverse. Everything will hit too close to home for her to have any personality.

Still, George gives me a pain. So I recommend balancing June-bug (after an intermission during which we can all disagree about it loudly) with a second feature in which peculiarity is distributed equitably.

“I had that rascal for over eight years. He was so abused when I got him, he had cigarette burns on his body …he was hooked on cocaine. It took thirty days of giving him a beer every day so that he could get over the shakes, so he could live a normal life—best dog I ever had. And he died Christmas Eve. And I had no place to put him. I put him in the freezer.”

So says Annabelle Lea Usher (her real name, I'm told: she married an Usher) in Mule Skinner Blues. And she opens the freezer to reveal the late bulldog, looking slightly cramped but not uncheer-ful, considering. You can tell from the look on his face that he died loving Annabelle Lea.

Many a documentary would have ruined that moment. But not Mule Skinner Blues, directed by Stephen Earnhardt and shot by Victoria Ford over a period of four years in and around a trailer park outside Jacksonville, Florida. Since it is about some strange people who are determined to make a low-budget horror movie, this documentary has been compared to a better known but less wonderful one, American Movie, which is about some strange people who are determined to make a low-budget horror movie in Wisconsin. American Movie got a lot of attention and wide distribution and is worth seeing. But—no offense to Wisconsin—there is a lot more to these people outside Jacksonville.

Mule Skinner Blues manages to do justice both to how these people seem and to how they see themselves. “Hopefully,” says guitarist Rickey Lix (a professional name, but he lives by it), “I'll be recognized and get a chance in life—do some entertainment on a real level.” He says this while dangling from a crane, thirty feet in the air, with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, as his fellow movie-within-a-movie makers set up to shoot a scene in which a gorilla gets vengeance on him.

Mule Skinner Blues also recognizes Miss Jeanie, a seventy-year-old country singer who confesses, “I can't yodel without schnapps.” She died on the operating table once. “I don't recall being dead. So far as I know, being dead is just being dead. I didn't even know I was dead till somebody told me.” She doesn't say this regretfully. “What worries her is that the best song she ever wrote, “DUI Blues,” has never caught on with the public. “If that song doesn't make it,” she says, “I ain't going to make it.” This pays off downright lovably at the end of the film, but I'm not going to tell you how.

Among several other indelible characters is the movie's prime mover, Beanie Andrew—a former shrimper, a born organizer, a recovering alcoholic, and a nifty dancer, whose dream has always been to play a gorilla coming up out of muddy water in search of his severed arm. “I've got to get down in the mud some kind of way and bog down and get horrible,” he muses chipperly. “I like gorillas because they're so powerful. They stand for what they are.”

A documentary is a tricky thing. Somehow it needs to create truthfully the illusion that the people in it stand for what they are, and more. This one does that, in due collusion with the people, and it's not just funny but, well, powerful.

P.P.S:

On Imdb.com, someone was inspired to weigh in as follows: “Mule Skinner Blues labors mightily to uncover the astounding depth of simple folk. But I just don't buy into this cracker-barrel-wisdom concept.”

Yep, old Aunt Effie sittin’ round the old hot stove allowing as how sometimes a gal's just got to freeze her bulldog.

“We need an audience that doesn't assume that everything is meant to be a concept.

It's probably best not to mention the name of the country music figure who, when asked how his Christmas was, said, “Fine, except for the F.L.O.—the Fucking Loved Ones.”

A Wang Dang Doodle Dandy?

To me a Garth Brooks song is about like a “Waffle House waffle, except that every now and then a “Waffle House waffle hits the spot. Only once have I felt any sense of solidarity with old Garth—back here recently when he gave a concert in Central Park, and a quarter of a million people turned out, and a New York cop (who apparently didn't recognize anybody) was quoted as saying, “I'm sure he's very big back in his own country.”

New York, of course, has long been regarded as its own country, but I keep being reminded that there are people all over America (not the world—the world can't tell one American from another) who feel that way about the South. And it's not because I haven't gotten over the “War Between the States. I take the position that it was sweet of the North not to let us secede. Had it been their idea to cut loose from us, I expect we would have let them go (saying, “Y'all come on back any time,” for a visit). And in the long run, everybody would have regretted it. The Union might be thought of today as Lower Canada. The Confederacy? Left to itself? Oh, Lord, who knows. It might—like in those transitional days when Southern high schools had two different homecoming queens-have copresidents. Liddy Dole and Herschel “Walker?

That's just hypothetical, though. I believe “World “War II would have brought the U.S.A. and the C.S.A. back together. “World “War II and Hollywood. In 1942, Paramount Pictures put out a star-studded studio revue called Star Spangled Rhythm, which culminates in an all-American production number. Bing Crosby is serenading the red, white, and blue when a captious Northeastern-urban type interrupts him, accuses him of putting on a patriotic show.

“Man says I'm flag-waving,” Bing observes in a tone just too mellow to be arch. “How 'bout that, Georgia Boy? That mean anything to you?”

Cut to folksy-looking fellow, who—no, he doesn't start whaling away at the dissenter with an ax handle. This Georgia boy responds to Bing as follows:

“Sure does, big boy. Specially them thirteen stripes. One of 'em stands for Jawja. And …a lot more.”

“Such as?” prompts Bing.

“Such as red clay hills. Folks say Confedrit blood stained 'em. And marsh grass, big oak trees with moss on 'em, watermelons in the hot sun, spiritual singin’ in the evenin’….”

Sure enough, here comes a Negro choir, a-favoring us with “Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile. Sometimes I feel…”

“That's it!” says Georgia Boy.

And now here come several young white men and women in tailored suits, giving us a little higher education:

“I'm a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech and a heckuva engineer. A heckuva heckuva…”

“That's right,” says G.B., “that's it, too. Oglethorpe and Bobby Jones and Ty Cobb and ‘Come on in and stay a while, we're delighted to have you.’ ”

Then we hear from other loyal ethnic groups. New Englanders, Italian Americans, et cetera.

Back then, that's what Southerners were in the movies: just as good as any other red-blooded American type. Georgia Boy was as staunch and lovable and more-or-less-white as Abie or Luigi or Mrs. Muldoon. (And the colored girls—this was back before Lou Reed—went “Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawd.”) Even those of us who were out-and-out ignoramuses (Grady Sutton, Sterling Holloway, and whoever played that gangly towhead cavalry private who would frown with the effort of trying to finish a complete word, let alone sentence) were generally right-minded. Bing himself was at home in at least semi-Southern contexts in Mississippi, Rhythm on the River, Dixie, and Birth of the Blues.

Then it began to dawn on people that Bing didn't have a whole lot to do with the blues, and slavery did.

Today you can buy computer software called Redneck Rampage, which empowers you to assume the identity of Leonard, a resident of “Hickston, Alabama,” which has been invaded by aliens. “The object of the game,” reports the New York Daily News, “is simple. Basically, buckshot everything in sight—alien vixens, clone townsfolk, pigs, chickens….

“Sure to rile more than a few feathers down South, the game is swathed in nearly every redneck, Big Billy Jim Bob jibe you'll be able to stand short of litigation.”

Oh, right, who's going to sue, the United Daughters of the Confederacy? Anyway, it sounds like the rednecks are the good guys in this game. They represent earthlings, don't they? I am not going to go into a rant about portrayal of Southerners in the media, because lately, it seems to me, we are actually getting more human. I yield to no one in my lack of enthusiasm for Forrest Gump but not because he's nominally Southern and an idiot. Because he's an unreal idiot. Whereas the cartoon Texans of King of the Hill are salt of the earth. They're sympathetic, contemporarily recognizable ignoramuses, the kind of folk-signoramuses who help make this country what it is today. In The Apostle, which I highly recommend, Robert Duvall plays a genuinely religious evangelist who generates interracial rejoicing. Maybe diversity consciousness is inching the culture toward a Star Spangled Rhythm that would actually rock.

“Flag mean anything to you, Georgia Boy?”

“I have a dream, that all God's children…”

We have a ways to go, though. Consider this assessment by Christopher Caldwell, political columnist of the New York Press, a resolutely jaded giveaway weekly: “Republicans seem content to let the Northeast fall off the edge of the Earth…. The Democrats seem to be thinking the same way. The Hotline newsletter this week issued a list of venues that Democrats are considering as the site for their 2000 national convention: Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Antonio and San Diego—except for Philly, all of them cities in the Expansion Team belt.

“Ah, well. To paraphrase Nixon, we are all crackers now.”

Now the people of Charlotte may be roughly interchangeable (at least in their own eyes) with those of Atlanta, but to sum up even just those two populaces as crackers—let alone to lump them in with New Orleanians, San Antonians, and San Diegans generally—is to purvey demographics that are considerably less sophisticated than any cartoon graphics you could get by with today.

In an interview some years ago Tracey Ullman, portrayer of many characters on her TV specials, described one of those characters, Birdie Godsen, as follows: “My husband and I looked at some pictures of ourselves and we looked like some kind of white, middle-America, intolerant couple. So we developed this wonderful character, probably the only unlikable person that I do…. I think she's from Atlanta; it's that courtly thing.”

Fine. Birdie works for me. But you can't call her a cracker any more than you can call Nancy Reagan one. And you can't put Birdie in the same barrel with, say, James Carville. “America is an odder country than we can normally remember,” wrote Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, “and the attic where we store much of our national oddity is the South. Carville, a Cajun, rises from some remote lagoon of the mind, as if he had walked out of a Flannery O'Connor story.”

I've never had any trouble normally remembering that America is odd. Is that because I hail from an attic on a remote lagoon? If this had been a matter to which Wills was really putting his generally quite discriminating mind, he would have brought a Cajun up from a bayou of it. And he would have expected of his readers that they recognize the difference between, on the one hand, a hearty Democratic operative from Louisiana who is unabashed about being not only odd but, ahem, liberal and, on the other hand, the great O'Connor's brimstone-sniffing crackers.

This was back in 1994, a low point of the Clinton administration, and

Wills was, in fact, treating Carville and the Clintons sympathetically and damn near perceptively. “What is it about the Clintons that infuriates people?” he asked. “They are a peculiar blend of the Sixties and the South, the pious, the secular, the folksy, the sophisticated. Some clearly believe that no such mix is possible, that one or more components of it must be phony…. They are a walking compendium of culture clashes.”

How about of “stereotype clashes”? And who do you know worth knowing who isn't hard to bring into stereotypical focus? Would the Clintons have gotten anywhere nationally if they could have been categorized as Arkansas Boy and His Little Yankee-Gal Wife? Wills begins to get his head up out of that mental lagoon when he notes that “the Clintons are both flawed and preachy, like the rest of us—but,” he can't resist adding, “a bit more dramatically.”

Well, hell, they were in the White House. For better or worse, the rest of us would be a sight more dramatic if we found ourselves in their position.

That's as much as we can expect of the Clintons, in the way of breaking down stock notions of the South (or, for that matter, of the sixties): that they don't try to be typical or atypical. Jimmy Carter tried too hard to be uncrackerish, while his brother Billy tried too hard to be whatever the cracker equivalent of more Catholic than the pope is. They will forever-more be regarded as Georgians.

What gets me is that nobody has ever had any trouble regarding Newt Gingrich as a representative Southerner—I guess just because he is anti-government, Strom Thurmond didn't give him the willies, and he is odd. But Gingrich was born in Pennsylvania, spent his childhood in army bases around Europe, and tends to shoot himself in the foot in a distinctly un-Southern way: by coming off as a smarty-pants. My position is that Gingrich is Pennsylvania French. And you know what they're like.

Southern culture vis-à-vis America needs clarification. What's called for is a grand, gallant gesture. Not on The Nashville Network—the only message TNN conveys is that Southerners have some kind of plastic hair. Maybe on CNN. A big production number. Lyle Lovett in the Bing role?

Let me just toss this out. If I were a civil rights organization, I wouldn't demand that the government apologize for slavery. I would put on a big festival whose theme is forgiving America for slavery. For spice, I would single out certain Americans for special forgiveness: George Bush (either one), Clarence Thomas, Trent Lott, Terrell Owens, Bill O'Reilly. And let them figure it out.

Cruelty to Elvis

The day after this review of Albert Goldman's Elvis appeared in The New York Times Book Review, in 1981, I walked past a New York magazine editor's office as he was saying, “You know those Southern boys, they won't hear anything bad about Elvis.” In fact, I had been at some pains not to overreact—had, indeed, maybe underreacted—to the book's contempt for white Southern culture. When, in the Village Voice, Greil Marcus, a northern Californian, denounced Goldman's book for reeking of that prejudice, I felt bad that I hadn't come down harder. Over the years, I would brood from time to time about having let an enemy of my people off the hook, especially after Greil, with whom I have cordially performed, sort of, in an authors’ rock and roll band, informed me that I had actually liked Goldman's book.

Did I fail Elvis's memory, in the clutch, and was ethnic self-hatred a factor? If so, I forgive myself now. At the time the book came out, maybe it needed to be pissed on harder in the newspaper of record, but since then Peter Guralnick's biography of Elvis, in two magisterial volumes, has blotted out Goldman's, blind spots and all, and nobody who knows anything about American music belittles the Southern white working-class contribution to it. Can we be certain that Elvis himself would have abhorred sufficiently the juicy stuff in Goldman's book, if it had been about somebody else? Elvis died, reportedly, reading a book about the discovery of Christ's skeleton. From my ethnic standpoint, Elvis could have been a little less adorable and sharper.

But then he wouldn't have been Elvis. I saw him in the coffin, you know. Slick Lawson, photographer, and I were right there. Elvis looked bad in the coffin. He didn't look like he'd gone to heaven. He looked like—maybe this is just my bias talking, but he looked to me like he wished he'd gone to college.

I know my parents wished they could have. They weren't entirely thrilled about how college affected me, but—but this is about Elvis.

Then, too, Elvis is about each of us. One last note: “Mr. Fike” is Times style, not me being snide.

Elvis Presley, the paragon of something nobody had been a paragon of before, whose motto was “Taking Care of Business,” who turned white America on to undulation, was completely out to lunch. Didn't have a clue. Frittered away his talent, let his manager shortchange him and shuffle him off to the Third Armored Division, saw himself as a Master in the line of Christ and Madame Blavatsky, ate a hundred dollars’ worth of Popsicles in one night, became an abject “medication” junkie while carrying Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs credentials and denouncing dope smokers, wore mascara and eventually diapers (because he was frequently incontinent from taking drugs), relished snuggly quasi-orgies with teenage girls who were enjoined to keep white panties on, pettishly threw a knife and a watermelon and a pool cue at various women (injuring one for life with never an apology), paid a stripper to wrestle his chimpanzee, was ashamed of his penis (“Little Elvis”), spoke icky baby talk to his mother's corpse, lost his wife because he couldn't stand to have sex with a mother, liked to shoot off pistols in his bedroom, got disgustingly fat and didn't even have the sense to pay his toadies and strong-arm boys enough to keep them quiet.

These are among the affirmations—many of them new, and all of them fleshed out more fully than could have been expected, much less desired—of Albert Goldman's morbidly fascinating biography. It does no disservice to the book's substance or tone, I think, to say that it renders history's most popular singer as an enormously babied creep.

Mommie Dearest, next to Elvis, is an encomium. Indeed, Christina Crawford's memoir makes her mother, Joan, more interesting. Goldman's book makes “Love Me Tender” or even “That's All Right, Mama”— hard to listen to without queasiness. After Elvis, can we reclaim our pleasure in the curled-lip insouciance of all those old (old!) photographs, or in what Peter Guralnick calls the “pure joyousness,” the “sense of soaring release,” that still bubbles out of this monstrosity's early songs?

Not all of this book's unpleasantness is Elvis's fault. Goldman has done an extraordinary job of breaking down the secrecy that surrounded (and no wonder) the King of rock and roll and his legendary manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Too often, however, Goldman is irritatingly unforth-coming about his information's provenance.

It seems clear that many of the dismaying private-life revelations come from former Elvis flunky Lamar Fike. “Poor Lamar,” or “the fat boy,” as he is called in the text, shares the copyright with Goldman and someone named Kevin Eggers (“who first conceived this project”). Goldman also adduces a host of other sources, from whom he has gathered an imposing lot of goods. But he, too, seldom cites Mr. Fike or any other witness in connection with particular details of portraiture.

The only part of Goldman's account that he concedes to be “a rough reconstruction” is one of the few scenes that may some day be checked against hard evidence: “Future generations will howl with laughter when the tape-recorded [White House] interview of [President] Nixon and Presley is finally released as the comedy album of the year. Meantime, we have to make do…” with Goldman's imagination.

Elvis would be far less off-putting if more chapters were as good as the one on Colonel Parker, which entertainingly recounts how Goldman established that this supposed West Virginian mastermind is, in fact, a Dutchman (original name, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), who not only took too much of Elvis's money and mired him in schlocky projects but also kept him out of tax shelters and foreign countries (except for the army duty in Germany, which damaged Elvis's spirit and from which a manager with fewer apprehensions could have saved him) for fear, most likely, of attracting federal attention to his own murky provenance. “Myth,” says Goldman, “is what we believe naturally. History is what we must painfully learn and struggle to remember.” History is also what we need sources for.

Documentation is not Mr. Goldman's only vulnerable suit. When a writer has no real grasp of the subjunctive were, would rather use two adjectives (“ugliest and most repulsive”) than one and takes evident pride in his ability to refer heavily, at the oddest moments, to Zarathus-tra and “Eliot's Fisher King,” it ill behooves him to dwell gravely on anyone else's vulgarity.

From such previous books as Freakshow; Grass Roots: Marijuana in America Today; Ladies and Gentlemen—LENNY BRUCE!! and a study of Thomas De Quincey, Goldman brings to Elvis what should be an ideally cross-fertilized background in the study of music, show biz, drugs, and degenerate personality. And he can write well about all four things. (For instance, his reconstruction of the sort of gospel show that inspired the young Elvis is, if somewhat condescending, vivid and pointed.)

But Goldman has an unsettling fixation on words like nausea, horror, disgust, and putz. His way with hippicisms like dude and you'd have yeseff sumpin, wouldncha? and can you dig it? is less than felicitous. And he is not the ideal chronicler of a career that began and ended in the Deep South.

Goldman tends to take a gratingly anthropological tone toward “southern men.” (“He would experience what southerners have always been best at experiencing: the ecstasy of self-destruction. They call it ‘Going to Jesus.’ ”) He thinks buttermilk and corn pone (probably the healthiest thing Elvis ate) is “soggy, infantile food.” He seems to think that anything he didn't grow up with himself—the song “Bye Baby Bunting,” for instance—is peculiarly Southern. He says Elvis's tacky funeral “was about right for some cornball country yodeler destined for the Hall of Fame in Nashville.” The truth is that most members of the Country Music Hall of Fame are considerably more adroit stylistically than either Goldman or Elvis.

Goldman is out to debunk the Presley myth, which he says derives from American mass culture's “deep atavistic yearning for royalty.” But there can be few literate Americans who take the myth as seriously as Goldman does. Goldman provides evidence that Elvis himself, when not besotted by pills, money, and readily exploitable or exploitative people, knew that his life/career/art was a profound, astounding American joke.

Within one year, 1956, as Goldman points out, a twenty-one-year-old kid, recently scorned in high school, was transformed from an obscure country singer into the king of a new, culture-shaking music, a king who had already done his best work. He wasn't as good as Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, or, God knows, Ray Charles, but he never wanted to be a great singer. He wanted to be the new Valentino. Maybe in another time he would have been.

A joke is at least as hard to live as a myth, especially when your life is as full of real grief and hardship as Elvis's was. One of the many peculiar things Goldman turns up is a “fatal hereditary disposition” on the maternal side of Elvis's family tree. Bad genes aside, there is something moving, as well as pathological, about the raw feeling that mother Gladys pumped into Elvis, and about the way he mourned her and twisted his sexuality around her memory. I would like to read a book about Elvis by someone who writes more venturesomely than Mr. Goldman does about mother-son love. Something about Elvis's grin appeals to the mother and the kid in us (Goldman, apparently, excepted), in a strange, mortifying but highly ponderable way.

Rotten as Elvis's forms of recreation could be, I think Goldman misses the humor in some of them. Foolish it was, to be sure, that Elvis and a couple of his boys flew from Memphis to Denver on the spur of the moment to get a certain kind of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, at a cost of sixteen thousand dollars. But I don't know why Goldman feels compelled to call it “a self-destructive stunt.” It sounds like the kind of thing a person ought to do when a certain kind of sandwich means more to him than a certain amount of money.

Surely any manner of sandwich seeking is more of a contribution to society than tax sheltering is. The Colonel ill served the eventual Presley estate (Elvis himself was able to buy ninety-seven thousand dollars worth of trucks when he felt like it, so why should he complain?) by diverting so much of the King's money to the IRS, not to mention himself and Las Vegas casinos. But better Elvis should pay those multimil-lions in taxes (thereby doing as much for the “War on Poverty as anyone except Lyndon Johnson, who was also, as they say, no bargain) than you or I. The Colonel remains—all the more so after Mr. Goldman's exposure—a hell of a character. “If he had sheltered his income from the taxman and invested it intelligently,” sniffs Goldman, “Elvis Presley could have been as wealthy as Bob Hope.” Well, I ask you.

Elvis is an ill-focused but undismissable book, which even such fullblown appreciators as Greil Marcus (see his Mystery Train for an altogether kindlier slant on the man who did so much with the words “Don't Be Cruel”) will have to read. But I think we can still be grateful to Elvis— if more sadly so, after this book—for his grin, his pelvis, his leap, and for the callow, punky, awful, presumptuously biracial, engaging, ineluctably erotic, still mysterious “specious tenor” (as Goldman describes it on its first professionally recorded take) of his voice.

The King Was in the Countinghouse, Counting Out His Toes

This was an Oxford American column that came out on the cusp of 1999/ 2000, before I finished the brief biography of Lee that took me, off and on, longer than the Civil War lasted.

Ishouldn't be doing this, I should be writing my biography of Robert E. Lee. But narrower concerns keep crowding in. I've spent six weeks on and around the Mississippi River working on a documentary film, and this question nags at me:

Since a towboat pushes barges rather than pulling them, why do we call it a towboat? No one seems to know. A retired riverboat captain told me that it's because the barges that a given towboat is pushing are called, collectively, a tow. But why are they called a tow? He didn't know. It didn't bother him. It bothers me.

I have talked to several active and retired towboat captains who didn't know either. One of them told me he used to keep a pet pig on his tow- boat, and when I asked him what the pig ate, he said, “If we were towing grain, he'd eat grain.”

“What if you weren't towing grain?” I asked him.

“A pig'll eat coal,” he said.

That satisfied me. As long as it satisfied the pig. But I don't see how a man can spend a lifetime on towboats without worrying about why they're called towboats. I should drop it, I know, I know.

From the Oxford English Dictionary, I gather that the verb to tow, meaning pull, derives from the noun tow, meaning flax (as in towheaded), from which ropes were made, which makes sense, but…

“Wait a minute! Talk about synchronicity! I hear Elvis singing about tows right now on my stereo! Something about “the two-tow connected to the three-tow and the three-tow connected…”

Oh. Never mind.

What I just now did, I ran into the next room and rewound…

Hmm. In fact, a compact disc doesn't unwind, rightly speaking, so it's an anachronism to say that we rewind it. Maybe barges were originally pulled….

But no. I've already tried out a theory along those lines: that the first Mississippi towboats were side-wheelers so they pulled barges, but then when they became stern-wheelers you couldn't hook anything on to the back, so …Everyone I have tried that theory out on has pooh-poohed it.

And do you know what I found just now when I “rewound” that song Elvis was singing?

It was a song from Elvis's film Kissin’ Cousins. A song called “Barefoot Ballad.”

Elvis sings, “Big toe connected to the two-toe, two-toe connected to the three-toe, three-toe connected to the four-toe, four-toe connected to the five-toe,” and the Jordanaires come in with “That's a live toe. What's a live toe? That's a jive toe. What's a jive toe? That's a drive toe.”

My people, my people.

“Ironically,” according to the liner notes in this CD, “the producer of ‘Kissin’ Cousins’ wanted the soundtrack to be recorded in Nashville to re-create the authentic ‘country’ sound. However, the songs were pure Hollywood and could have been recorded anywhere.” You can say that again. The musicians included the great Boots Randolph and Floyd Cramer. I don't know how long it took them to plow through such profound portrayals of their culture as “Barefoot Ballad” and “Catchin On Fast.” It took just over two weeks to shoot the movie.

“This new Presley concoction,” said a reviewer in Variety, “is a pretty dreary effort…. He needs and merits more substantial material than this.” You can say that again. Included in the liner notes is a drawing that was used to publicize the movie: old Elvis skipping along with one hound dog and seven, count 'em, Daisy Maes, six of them barefooted as yard dogs.

That movie came out in September of 1963. That was right when I was arriving at Harvard Graduate School. Is it any wonder that two or three of my fellow students expressed jovial surprise that I showed up in shoes?

Elvis didn't have to do that to me. I have been thinking of starting a Dixie Hall of Dumb, featuring otherwise distinguished Southerners who played into stereotypes by getting off into various kinds of bad dumbness—D. W. Griffiths (scapegoat-seeking dumbness), Shoeless Joe Jackson (mooncalf dumbness), Lewis Grizzard (mean-spirited dumbness), Newt Gingrich (smarty-pants dumbness), Bill Clinton (gotta-have-it dumbness), and, yes, Elvis. Southerners have an honorable affinity for certain kinds of dumbness—quixotic, salt-of-the-earth, hardheaded, crazy-ass, open-handed, over-the-top (or under-the-bottom) dumb. But then there's weak, lame, unnecessary dumb. Elvis had the world by the tail, and when they gave him songs to sing about his bare toes right out in front of everybody, he sang 'em.

So now I have an ethnic burden. People in New York may not expect me to be barefooted, but when New York beats Atlanta in the World Series, they do expect me to be a Braves fan. I explain to them that I am from Decatur, which, to be sure, has become enfolded by metropolitan Atlanta, but Decatur was there first, so I think of Atlanta as an embarrassing rich family that moved in next door. If it hadn't been for Atlanta, Decatur wouldn't have been subjected to General Sherman or Mariano Rivera. Furthermore, the Braves didn't move to Atlanta until I was in my twenties—growing up, I was a fan of the Atlanta Crackers. If the Crackers had ever played the Yankees, I would have been in the stands doing the chicken-leg chop. The Crackers were a powerhouse in the Southern Association, and incidentally several Southerners who had been Brooklyn Dodgers—Dixie “Walker, Whitlow “Wyatt, Hugh Casey—were Cracker managers and coaches. That doesn't satisfy people in New York. They want me to be heartbroken. They think I'm a turncoat.

In fact, I have something to confess: when I was a kid, I kind of liked the Yankees. Not the army, the ballplayers. Hey, the closest big-league team to me geographically was the Senators, yuck, and the Yankees won all the time. They had the great Joe DiMaggio. The eponymous Cuban of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea loved DiMaggio, why couldn't I?

Many years later, when I tried to interview DiMaggio, he was as aloof as Lee would have been (well, more aloof—he pretty much told me to piss off). I wrote something balanced about him: what a great player he was, the jerk. And classy—which he was, he was classy, as a player, certainly, and classy in the sense that he could get away with not talking to anybody who might get, and convey, the impression that in certain nonbaseball respects Joe was, maybe, a little …dumb.

When DiMaggio died, I was quoted in his obituary on the front page of The New York Times: “He was the class of the Yankees when the Yankees outclassed everybody else.” I thought that was cool. A boy from Georgia with the last word on the greatest New York sports icon. It would have been more gratifying, of course, if I had died and DiMaggio had been quoted, but I felt pretty good about our close association.

You could, of course, accuse me of sucking up to New York. I haven't forgotten where I come from, though. When I told a New Yorker that I was biographing Lee, she said, “Isn't he the one they trot out to show they weren't all bad?” I said, “What do you mean, ‘they’?”

A New York publisher is putting out a series of brief biographies of icons. Penguin Lives, the series is called. Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse, Edmund White on Proust, Peter Gay on Mozart. Cool. I was asked to do Mark Twain. Cool, except I couldn't think of anything new to say about Mark Twain. “How about another Southern icon?” I was asked.

Who would pop into your head, if you heard “Southern icon”? (Bobbie Ann Mason already had dibs on Elvis.)

“How about Robert E. Lee?” I said.

There comes a time for every Southern boy when he has to deal with Robert E. Lee. And you know what, Robert E. Lee is hard to deal with. Robert E. Lee's fellow students at West Point called him the Marble Model. How can I get my teeth into somebody like that? Edmund Morris, struggling for years to pull off a biography of the Teflon president, Ronald Reagan, finally turned himself into a fictional character Reagan's age. It got the book written, but …dumb.

After Lee surrendered at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth was offered a drink. He said, “Yes, anything to drive away the blues.” I guess that drink didn't get the job done. And Booth was a Shakespearean, too high-flown to write a blues song. So, hey, here's an idea: shoot Abraham Lincoln! That'll show 'em! Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Lee stuck with his home state when he knew it was on the losing side, but that's a gallant kind of dumb. He was dumb at Gettysburg, but he was tired. After the war, he had sense enough not to write a biography of himself. He'd have been as hung up as I am.

Ulysses S. Grant was just dumb enough, in the sense of hardheadedness, not to be spooked by Lee, but then he was dumb enough, in the sense of softheadedness, to surround his presidency with thieves and then to lose all his own money on “Wall Street. While dying from the effects of cigar addiction, he heroically saved his family's fortunes by writing his memoirs. Mark Twain published them, to enormous success. As far as I can determine, Mark Twain in all his myriad writings mentioned Robert E. Lee only once, an offhand humorous reference to a famous painting of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Mark Twain, after two weeks in the Confederate army, turned squarely against the South, but at the height of his popularity he refrained from publishing his long fulmi-nation against lynching for fear of alienating Southern book buyers. Twain got great effects out of various kinds of dumbness, but sometimes he was smart in the sense of chicken.

I'm just dumb enough to think I can deal with the Marble Model. As soon as I get a handle on this towboat thing.

P.S.:

As to how the tug got in tugboat: Greg Jaynes says that “a barge is so much wider in the beam than a towboat it is more efficient to let the barge make the wake. If the skipper towed the barge, the barge would have to override the wake of the tug, thus burdening the engines unnecessarily, burning more fuel, and taking longer to reach the destination.” Okay, that's why they push instead of pulling, but why are they called towboats? “I have no proof,” says Jaynes, “but my guess is the barge used to be skinnier. Take a look at your Erie Canal, which transformed New York City by opening up the bounty of the nation's breadbasket to the East Coast. But the canal, now: not wide today. I suspect even narrower in the beginning.” The Oxford American ran a letter to the editor from a Captain D. Greer suggesting that I was dumb for not being able to get to the bottom of this matter. “They still ‘towed’ barges in our grandfathers’ day, when the boats were made of wood and the men were made of steel. The bow of the boat went into a notch, towed from the quarter, and had a void space, or ‘duck pond,’ the boat and the tow—you would not have wanted to run a coal tow hard aground with a wooden boat pushing directly against it at full throttle.”

Love Those Bozzies

Iwish I could write about music like some people. Nick Hornby on Steely Dan in The New Yorker:

Rather than opting for some sort of phony bebop Beat shtick, they adapted contemporary music—the pseudo-sophisticated jazz-funk that gave such a sheen to “Aja,” their best album, and ‘Gaucho.’ This, they seemed to be saying—once one has gone backward and forward through all the retro-futurism—is what the faux-luxe late fifties would have sounded like now. Or something like that. Of course, the levels of irony were lost on some people….

All I know is, the Boswell Sisters tickle me no end. And I have done some research. Though many a musical reference book will tell you differently, the facts are that the eldest sister, Martha, and the middle one, Connie, were born in Kansas City in 1905 and 1907, respectively, and baby sister Helvetia (called Vet) in Birmingham in 1911. “When they were still girls, and already well-trained classical musicians on various instruments, they moved with their white middle-class parents to New Orleans, where they heard jazz and went for it. With Connie as the lead singer and principal arranger, they became in their teens a good enough close-harmony trio to win local talent contests, entertain flood victims, impress local jazz musicians, and get a weekly gig on a local radio station. Then in their twenties—Vet in her teens—they went on the road. “Oklahoma, Texas—Indian country,” said Vet. “We'd be catching a train at 2 or 3 a.m., nobody there but a potbellied stove. Have to flag the train down.” A childhood spinal injury, caused by a fall from a wagon, had left Connie unable to stand or walk unsupported—and then on their first performance tour, recalled Vet, “she fell out of a window playing hide-and-go-seek in a hotel in Kansas City, and we had to carry her all the way to the coast—didn't have a [wheel]chair then, couldn't afford one.” After the first take of their first professional recording session, the band stood and burst into applause.

By 1930 they were enormously popular national radio stars, but in 1935 the trio broke up, harmoniously. One reason their mother had encouraged the sisters to go professional early on, Vet recalled after Connie died, was to provide the handicapped Connie with something to hold on to. After Connie married the group's manager, who wanted to focus on her career, Martha and Vet married outside the business and retired. Connie changed the spelling of her name to Connee, for some reason, and went on for many years as a highly regarded solo act.

The sisters’ distinctive sound had something to do with their trying, as a threesome, to capture all the harmonies that their parents and their aunt and uncle (who all lived under the same roof, two sisters married to two brothers) achieved as a barbershop quartet. Connee would cite Enrico Caruso (from whose records she learned breath control) and the blues singer Mamie Smith as individual influences. Louis Armstrong undoubtedly had an impact, and Louis Prima was a childhood friend. But the sister trio's great formative moment came early on when they were in a California hotel room recording themselves for their radio show back in New Orleans. As Connee recalled it, “We were going to cut our transcription one week, and I had a terrible cold and couldn't hit the high notes strongly and clearly enough, so Martha covered the piano with burlap, I dropped all the songs an octave or two and the three of us got very close around the mike and sang, sweet and low, into it. Of course, we had no idea what we sounded like, but the next week we heard the playback and knew we were onto something that no one else was doing.”

In time the Andrews Sisters and the McGuire Sisters would do very well by copying, but never equaling, the Boswells’ blend. The Bozzies and Bing Crosby influenced each other in developing intimate ways with a microphone. And Ella Fitzgerald would cite Connie as the only singer who ever influenced her. But their place in musical history aside, there is something about how much fun the Bozzies sound like they are getting out of weaving their voices together, amicably and niftily, that makes me want to jump up on the table and wave my hat. (I have thought of them as the Bozzies ever since I heard the bandleader Jimmie Grier say, on one of their recordings, “That's mighty fine, Bozzies.”)

Sometimes they sound like bees. They sing pop songs mostly, but they turn them into jazz by—well, here's what Fitzgerald's biographer, Stuart Nicholas, says about Connie's arranging:

In the space of a three-minute arrangement she might completely recast a tune by altering its harmonic framework, change its rhythm characteristics with up to six or seven tempo changes, insert completely new interludes of her own, and introduce an infinite number of highly original vocal devices that might include the “instrumental” use of voices, scat singing, and elements of blues and gospel music. The Boswells were so far ahead of their time that the breakthrough quality of their art is still apparent from their recordings today.

We can thank the Bozzies for Ella Fitzgerald's debut as a singer, in 1932, when she was fifteen. Young Ella lived with her mother, who signed her up for amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem—as a dancer. Then the mother jumped in front of a car to save a kid from being run over and was hospitalized with a brain injury. So Ella had to go to the Apollo alone. When she went out onto the stage, she froze. “You're up there, do something!” someone said. So she sang. She and her mother loved the Boswell Sisters and often sang their songs around the house. Already an excellent mimic (she could do Louis Armstrong, too), Ella sang like Connie on “Judy,” “The Object of My Affection” (“can change my complexion / From white to a rosy red”), and “Believe It, Beloved.” She won the contest. Her mother died. Her professional career began.

As good as Ella Fitzgerald is, I get more of a kick out of the Bozzies. Ella always sounds like she is fresh from an advanced elocution lesson. In her lead-in to “Jail House Blues” (“This house is surely getting raided. Yes, sir”), she enunciates every letter, and when she's swinging her way through the rough and rowdy lyrics to that song, you can tell she has to remind herself to drop a g, because she pronounces tickling with it first and then as ticklin the next two times. The Bozzies pronounce darling, for instance, as doilin, the way they do in N'woilins. I don't know how I can justify criticizing Ella Fitzgerald for not having any accent (she and her mother moved from Virginia to Yonkers when she was a baby), but the Bozzies’ regional tinge helps make them sound a lot more personal. Except at those very rare moments when they push the accent to stagey, bordering-on-blackfacey effect, they might be jamming, wel-comingly, around the family piano.

And all those changes of key and tempo and so on bounce you around almost as much as that story about how young Ella became an orphan and a chanteuse by way of a failed dancing debut. We might infer that the Bozzies’ sisterly closeness, cozy upbringing, and seasoning in the classics gave them the security to innovate and diversify while sounding like where they came from. They didn't write their arrangements down; they thrashed them out in spirited vocal disagreement. Connie is considered to have been the primary arranger, but the process generally entailed each sister advocating a different approach to each chord. “We wouldn't let our own mother and father in the room when we are rehearsing,” said Martha. “And the funny thing is we have done our best numbers when each one of us was so wrought up she wanted to slay the others. When we haven't fought we don't get the tricky harmony. Then about 3 a.m. we go to bed.” Connie once said she never sang a song the same way twice, and the Bozzies often sing every stanza and every chorus of a given song differently. They slow down when you think they're going to rattle along, and vice versa.

They seem to be extemporizing merrily, all three of them together, with inimitable fuzzy precision. “Funny thing,” Vet once recalled of their early days, “we could be in different rooms in the house. I'd be in the bedroom, Martha'd be in the kitchen, and Connie in the living room, and we'd all start singing the same song at the same time in the same key.” On recordings, you can hear them trading parts and combining seamlessly in various swinging permutations of one alone, any two together, all three together, or one up front with the other two behind. Their scheme of harmony, according to Vet, was “whoever gets to a note first, hold it, cause that's where you belong.” The Bozzies worked memorably with Bunny Berigan, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, and Glenn Miller, and they were happy to let good male musicians toss in tasty instrumental solos. But if they were thrown together with a band that wasn't up to their inventiveness, they could cook with no accompaniment except Martha on piano and anybody on drums and bass. Personally, the Andrews Sisters feuded, but the Bozzies got along. In conversation among themselves they constantly interrupted, bounced off of and picked up on each other. They had a standing bet of $500, Vet recalled, payable “if anybody ever finished a sentence. Nobody ever won.”

Mel Torme writes of Connie: “What set her scat singing apart from others is that she sang absolutely in tune. It is difficult to hold pitch when the notes form in your head at lightning speed and come tumbling out of your mouth in scat syllables a micro-second later. With Connie, that was never a problem.” But scat singing can get awfully arty. Bozzie gibberish is like Lewis Carroll's or Roger Miller's: so close to language as to seem an improvement upon words. And when they do stick to the lyrics, they do so conversationally, and yet they render every word distinctly, fondly. I learn from Will Friedwald's Jazz Singing that their scat was in fact a family language, picked up from their parents, in which “the word ‘boy’ becomes ‘boggledoy,’ ‘swing’ becomes ‘swiggleding’ and a whole chorus of ‘Yes, Sir, That's My Baby’ sung in ‘Boggleswellese’ can appear in ‘Everybody Loves My Baby.’ ” Gunther Schuller, the composer and conductor, refers to that song, understatedly, as “quite remarkable.” Friedwald calls the Bozzies “the greatest of all jazz vocal groups.” I would go further. There's a little “dat'n-da-da-dat'n-doddle-a-dah” riff that one of the sisters tosses in, fifty-four seconds into “Roll On, Mississippi, Roll On,” that I would call the high-water mark in American culture.

All I can say is, if I weren't only one man, I would break my neck to be able to write the way the Bozzies sang. And call me old-fashioned, but I find the Bozzies sexier than, say, Hole. In an era that, compared to ours, was chaste and euphemistic, they were sweetly, but by no means stickily, spicy and naughty. These days we can only be faux-naughty, spicyesque.

The Boswell Sisters seldom get their due in histories of jazz or pop, but in the eighties several groups, including the Pfister Sisters, the Manhattan Rhythm Kings, and the Sweet Hots, revived their sound, and you can order several Bozzie collections from Amazon.com. My favorite numbers include “There'll Be Some Changes Made,” “Don't Let Your Love Go Wrong,” “Heebie-Jeebies,” “Was That the Human Thing to Do?” and “There's a Wah-Wah Gal in Agua Caliente.” Driving with Pauline Kael to a movie a while ago, I had a Bozzie CD playing. The sisters took Pauline back. “Music used to be so good-natured,” she said.

He's Crossed Over to Classic

Though where immortals go, it ain't

Always brother-brother,

Now and then the late and great

Groove on one another.

At such a moment Homer cried,

“Glory be—Hank Williams!

Shake my hand. No line of mine

About old bloody Ilium's

Half as sad as your ‘My hair's

Still curly, eyes still blue,

Why don't you love me like

You used to do?’”

“Well,” said Hank, “that line of yours,

‘The wine-dark sea,’ is deep.”

“Oh, not compared to ‘Did you ever

See a robin weep.’”

“Nice of you to say so, Homer.

Me, now, I'm not partial,

By and large, to epic-type

Recitals that are martial,

But once I heard you holding forth

About the fall of Troy:

Good stuff—but look who's coming here.

Do you know this old boy

Hails from ancient Rome and sings

Of arms and of the man?”

“Ah,” said Homer, “Virgil.” Then

They both said, “I'm a fan.”

Those two, somehow, had never met—

Hank introduced 'em.

And now up there in Armstrong-Bach-

Tintoretto-Proustdom,

Three pals swap licks of tears and things,

Kaw-liga and a horse,

Of faith and sons and dads—and Helen,

Dido, and Audrey, of course

Homer, Hank, and Virgil daily,

Strumming lyres and lying.

So any time you start to feel

Too bad about Hank dying,

Bear in mind that he's not lonesome

On that radiant shore, He's pretty much quit drinking, and

His back don't hurt no more.

And as to reputation—you

Have seen what kind of stead

He's standing in. In Glory, Hank's

A far cry from dead.

Déjà Ahooey

Do you ever have a sense that it's all coming together? In calling it “it,” of course, we are presuming that it's already together in principle, we just have to apprehend it. “When you're in love you feel like you've got it, then you realize she doesn't eat meat or something, which doesn't mean it isn't love—it may even make you a more holistic person—but there's no sense kidding yourself; there aren't going to be any sausage patties in it. And if you're the kind of person who always has a sausage patty somewhere in the back of his mind…

My friend James Seay wrote a poem, “It All Comes Together Outside the Restroom in Hogansville,” in which the poet looks through a hole that someone has presumably made for peeking into a gas-station rest-room. But the poet peeks out. He sees pretty much the sort of vista you might expect from that viewpoint, a guy working on a car and so on, but you get a lot more depth of field looking out than looking in, and there's something about the way it's framed….

But if you think what comes together is peace of mind, you haven't been reading the right kind of poetry. Perhaps you would like it if that probably foul-graffiti-covered restroom were suffused, all of a sudden, with soft effulgent light as choreographic angels sing:

Boogie-woogie-woogie and shoobie doo—

Want a good time? Go to

Dubya-dubya-dubya-dot-Dot-dot-com

Dot, as you know, is your Mom.

Don't hold your breath. The world that we know, let's face it, is not what we have in mind. Sometimes, though, we may get an inkling….

Recently in New York I was at dinner with several artistic people. One of them asked if the rest of us ever experienced (as she did) “moments of brilliant clarity,” in which the course of things for the foreseeable future came clear. Each of the others said, Oh, yes, and described such a moment. One spoke of giving up sculpture for the dance. Another spoke of realizing in a flash that she would move to Rome and meet someone with whom she would have two children, both of whom would have trouble in school, but…

I said no. (What I didn't say, having learned better over the years, was that I didn't believe they did, either.) The other day, though, I did get a whiff of eureka. I was reading Attack and Die, by Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, which argues that the Confederacy was brought down by the tendency of Southerners to fling themselves gallantly (as it seems to Southerners) or dumb-assedly (as it may seem to others), at any rate more high-spiritedly than advisedly, at the foe. I came upon this passage:

Available evidence suggests that the Rebel yell was a variation on traditional Celtic animal calls, especially those used to call cattle and hogs and hunting dogs. “Who-who-ey! who-ey! who-ey!” is the way one man remembered it with “the first syllable ‘who’ short and low, and the second ‘who’ with a very high and prolonged note deflecting upon the third syllable ‘ey.’ ” One thing is clear: it was totally different from the Yankee “cheer” that repeated the word “hurrah,” but pronounced it “hoo-ray,” with emphasis upon the second syllable.

So the Yankee cheer was simple and upbeat, and is still around today. The rebel yell was complex and bluesy and is lost to history. (Except in a faint and, if I may say so, highly unbloodstirring version offered by a Confederate veteran at nearly the end of the Ken Burns documentary, in footage from the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The old man's yell goes, roughly, “Whuh-huh-wooo-ooo! Whuh-wooo-woo-ooo!”)

But here's what really pricked up the ear in the back of my mind: how much “Who-who-ey” resembled …something in some great Southern song.

It hit me. I quote from Will Friedwald's piece in last year's Oxford American music issue:

“In ‘Blues in the Night,’ Mercer had introduced a ‘sound effect’ (the famous ‘a-hooey-da-hooey’) with the line ‘hear that train a-callin’.’ ”

Aha! Not quite the same, but …Could it be that Johnny Reb was imitating a train? No. Could some ghostly influence have inspired Johnny Mercer, all unknowingly, to preserve something very like the Rebel yell? No. But there did seem to be a connection here between the blues and the grey.

And maybe… Could I have stumbled upon the figure in the carpet of all human culture? A thread linking the Arkansan soooey pig, the Jewish oyoyoy, the British hear ye (or Oyez), the Latin aiyiyi…?

I thought of “What's Your Name,” the only major hit by the duo Don & Juan, Brooklynites: Ooo-ee, oo-oo-ee, oo-oo-ee.

And “Sea Cruise”: Oo-ee, oo-ee baby

Who wrote “Sea Cruise”? Huey (Piano) Smith. I thought of Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louis (that's the American language for you, three different ways of spelling ooey). And the album known as The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul Complete and Unbelievable, whose liner notes include a glossary defining such terms as “ou-yea: to give in; a reply to get what one wants,” “ou-ni: to hurt so good,” and “ou we ni: getting gooder by the minute.” Johnny Mercer also wrote “Hoo-ray for Hollywood,” whose opening rhyme is “screwy” and “ballyhooey.” But let's go to our basic text.

According to Our Huckleberry Friend: The Life, Times and Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, by Bob Bach and Ginger Mercer, Harold Arlen's tune to “Blues in the Night” came first, as was almost always the case when Mercer collaborated with a composer. The book reproduces Mercer's handwritten draft, annotated. His original opening was “Whenever the night comes / I'm heavy in my heart….” Arlen recollects that he scanned several other phrases Mercer had jotted down until “I saw those words, ‘my momma done tol’ me,’ way down at the bottom and I said, ‘Why don't we move this up to the top.’ ” Inspired choice, but more to the point of my search was that Mercer wrote down the train sound like this:

“A-whoooeee-duh-whoooeee.”

Simpler to have spelled hooey as Friedwald did. Yet Mercer put in the w. So did the man quoted in Attack and Die. Makes you wonder whether there was not, in the rebel yell and Mercer's sense of the blues as well, an element of “Who we?” (No, not “Duh, who we?”)

Maybe that's American culture for you. A barely stable compound of “Who we?” and hooey. Maybe that's what caused the Civil War—each side saying, “Here's who we are,” and each side replying, “Hooey.” Note that “Blues in the Night” is cleverly worded so that either a man or a woman, with minimal adjustments, can sing about how two-faced the other gender is.

Johnny Mercer, say people who knew him, was a lovely, lovely man but a mean, mean drunk. Hey, he hung with Billie Holiday, which is more than I can say, and I would love to have done the work he did (just to have written “Glowworm”!), but if there is anything a shade irritating about his melliflous-yet-friendly singing accent, it is that he seems to be rather too comfortably putting on a tinge of minstrelish blackness. His lesser contemporary Phil Harris could rip through a nominally embarrassing number like “Darktown Poker Club” with no condescension in his tone of voice, but a rude whimsicality discolors several otherwise enjoyable songs in which Mercer refers explicitly to the African American roots of swing. Check out “Mr. Meadowlark,” “The “Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid,” and “The Old Music Master.” That last number is a duet sung by Jack Teagarden, as a classical composer of the nineteenth century, and Mercer, as “a little colored boy” from the twentieth who startles the old composer by singing, “You got to jump it, Music Master, / You got to play that rhythm faster.”

And in “Mr. Crosby and Mr. Mercer,” Crosby sings:

Swing is really too ancient to condemn-

In the jungles they would play

In that same abandoned way.

Mercer:

On the level, Mr. Crosby?

Crosby:

No, on the downbeat, Mr. M.

It's meant to be duly integrative, but does it take sufficiently into account that Louis Armstrong (whom they both worked with) might be listening? And asking himself, “Can it be that these cats think I'm the novelty act?” Arthur Schwartz—the eminent composer of “Dancing in the Dark” and many another standard—is quoted in Our Huckleberry Friend as declaring that “Blues in the Night” is “the greatest blues song ever written, and that includes ‘St. Louis Blues.’ ” Hooey. He must have thought “Love in Vain” and “Trouble in Mind” were cave paintings. No wonder Elvis blew those old guys away. It's a miracle of American dissociation that Robert Johnson didn't, twenty years sooner.

Surely Mercer himself, being Southern, realized that “Blues in the Night” was a terrific popular song, but the greatest blues song? It took Yankees forever to realize that the blues were more primary than Tin Pan Alley. For years you could hear them calling Frank Sinatra the greatest living singer—with Ray Charles right there all along. Get it together, North.

But listen to me talk. I have assembled momma, the oral tradition, trains, lonesomeness, the blues, the Lost Cause, Natchez, Mobile (“from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe…”), hogs and dogs. And what have I got? I haven't even addressed the issue of how the Wh in Who-who-ey was pronounced. As an h, as in the word who? Or as hw, as in the word why? The latter is the sound I was going for in attempting to phoneticize the old man's Gettysburg-reunion yell. But that can hardly have registered on those readers who pronounce the wh in why as a w—which I have always thought of as an odd (Northern?) form of h-dropping. It, whatever it is, is a far cry from all coming together.

I'm not saying it's not out there somewhere. On a CD entitled An Evening with Johnny Mercer, he has this to say about lyric writing:

It's elusive. It's like you're going out looking for the Snark, or something you never heard of, the Golden Fleece. 'Cause you don't know where it is, it's up there somewhere and you can tune in on it, and you get a little glimmer, and you say, ahhh—you don't even know if it's a word, and then it's like you're tuning in to a musical instrument that's miles away, and you say, “Oh yeah, there's something there, if I just dig hard enough, I know it'll come.”

Then he sings “Blues in the Night.”

Country Song Entitlement

Iguess I'd give just about anything to have written the Bellamy Brothers’ “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?” Not the song, just the title. I have, in fact, come up with the following title, which may be deemed more appropriate in these times of political sensitivity: “If I Said ‘If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?’ Would You Hold It Against Me?”

In my time, I have also written “I'm Just a Bug on the Windshield of Life,” “Oh, I've Broken a Whole Lot of Hearts (And Several of Them Were Mine),” “I'd Give My Right Arm to Hold You in My Arms Again,” “She Ain't No Bigger Than a Minute (But She Can Go Like an Hour and a Half),” “Things Had a Way of Evening Out (Till I Spent One out with You),” and many others. These were all strictly amateur titles, but I'll say this: I was up till four in the morning one night writing one with Jack Daniel's and Tom T Hall. If you can't write a country song title with those two, you can't write a country song title with anybody.

We were attending a conference on Southern autobiography at the University of Central Arkansas. I've been sitting here trying to come up with an autobiographical song title inspired by that song-title-writing experience—along the lines of “Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me” and “Hank Williams, You Wrote My Life.”

“Me and Tom T and Jack” comes to mind. Trouble is, it requires a song. The best country music titles are poems in themselves. Like “How Come My Dog Don't Bark When You Come Around?” or “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy,” or “It Was Always So Easy to Find an Unhappy Woman (Till I Started Looking for Mine).”

The title Tom T and I wrote required a song, too, and we wrote one. Trouble was, we couldn't read it the next morning. Our title, “Pockets of Poverty,” seemed to offer all kinds of possibilities, since the word pockets was so susceptible to being turned inside out. A poet, Judson Mitcham, helped us until 2 or 3 a.m., but then, after coming up with a line that seemed at the time to entail a great imaginative leap (“If I had some money, I would give it all away”), he gave out. Maybe Tom T. and I should have called it a night then, too (how about this one: “How Can We Call It a Night, This Close to Next Afternoon?”), because although Tom T.'s guitar playing and bridgework (“But that don't mean that me and mine / Can't have three squares a day, / Hm-hmmm-hm-hmmm…”) held up fine, my handwriting got worse.[*]

Some day, though, the very fact of that song's evanescence may give rise to a great freestanding title. Here's one Reba McIntyre or Kathy Mat-tea could sing: “But He Knew No Words This Morning to the Tune He Sang Last Night.”

Anyway, you know what I did last night? I dreamed I went to Hillbilly Song Title Heaven. Actually it was more of a think tank: CITI, for Country International Title Institute.

“Why ‘International’?” I asked E. Kenneth Hicks, the director, who seemed (you know how dreams are) to be showing me around.

“Subtitles,” he said. “We have a whole division working full time translating classic titles into the languages of the world. It's one thing to come up with ‘Blutige Maria Morgen’—”

“‘Bloody Mary Morning,’” I said. “Not bad. Sounds more headachy than the original.”

“—or ‘Les Rues de Laredo.’ But try turning ‘Can't Have Your Kate and Edith, Too’ into Farsi, or ‘I'm Gonna Rent a U-Haul and Haul You All Away’ into Japanese.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Especially getting the rhythm right and all.”

“And people who are experts in foreign languages don't always get American connotations. We had a Swiss whom we had to let go. You'd think he'd be the man to translate Ray Stevens's astrological yodel song, ‘O Leo Lady,’ but he sweated over it for weeks under the misapprehension that it was about margarine.”

“But surely you do more here than translate?”

“Indeed. Our main purpose is research and development. We break existing titles down into formulae, program those formulae into computers, and generate new titles scientifically.”

“How does that work?”

“I won't go into the technical aspects, but for instance in this room here, we are producing titles that are about songs, along the lines of ‘Sad Songs and “Waltzes (Aren't Selling This Year)’ and ‘I Stopped Loving Cheating Songs Today.’ Here, here's a readout,” he said, and he showed me a long list that went on for pages and pages like this:

“If My Life Had a Title, It Would Be a Country Song”

“Your Title May Be Chairman, but Not from Where I Sit”

“If My Name Ever Escapes You, ‘Hold Me Tight 'll Do”

“Hmm,” I said. “I guess you have to generate lots and lots of them before one…”

He looked peeved. “You didn't like that last one?”

“The thing is, all those titles seemed to be about titles.”

“Yes,” Hicks said, “well, this work does get pretty specialized. Here, this is the OMSEID division, for Oughtn't Make Sense, Except It Does. Famous examples would be ‘One More Last Chance’ and “Your Wife Is Cheating on Us Again.’ Hey, Wayne, got any new OMSEID?”

A droopy-looking man wiped his brow with the back of his hand, got up from his workstation, and came over to us. “This one came through this morning: ‘Let's Be Together Forever Till Bobby Gets Out on Parole.’ ”

“I hear that,” said Hicks.

Wayne looked pensive. “Coley,” he said to his assistant, “anything new involving hearing?”

“ ‘I Can't Sleep for Hearing All the Things I Never Said,’ ” Coley said without even looking up from his console. “ ‘You Never Even Told Me We Weren't Speakin’ (I Had to Hear It from Strangers in Town).’ ‘I Try to Tell You You Don't Listen, but—’ Well, that last one still needs some tweaking.”

“That's enough, that's fine,” said Hicks. “Thanks, guys, keep up the good work.”

As Wayne shuffled back toward his cubicle, we could hear him muttering, “ ‘I Keep Keeping the Good Work Up

Coley finished for him: “ ‘…But It Keeps On Gettin’ Me Down.’ ”

“Your OMSEID people seem blue,” I said.

“Comes with the territory,” said Hicks. “And, of course, personnel of all departments are constantly coming up with songs about work.”

“Like ‘Take This Job and Shove It,’ ‘Nine to Five,’ ‘Working Man's PhD’?”

“This is not a game. And let's face it, ‘Whistle While You Work’ is not a country song.”

“That's almost a country title there,” I said. “ ‘ “Whistle While You Work” Is Not a Country Song.’ ”

“As a matter of fact, that's our motto. But don't think we have no fun around here. Let's look in on Noises and Spelling.”

“As in ‘I'd Write You a Letter but I Can't Spell [Plppp]’ and ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’?”

“Yes, and ‘The Last Word in Lonesome is “Me.”’ Shh. Just listen.”

He held open the door, a crack, to Noises and Spelling. At first, bedlam. Then as my ears became attuned, I could make out wisps of title— “‘Commitment’ Ain't a Four-Letter…,” “…N-O in My Book…,” “…Takin’ Dictation but Thinking [smooching sound]”—and, finally, whole titles:

“The Only Thing Our Kids Can Spell Is [sobbing noise] S-O-B.”

“I Miss Bein’ Mrs. B. N., But Billy Nix Don't Miss Me.”

“My Son Has Got This Eastern Religion (and Lost the First ‘M’ from His ‘MOM’ Tattoo).”

“But aren't those titles,” I said, “sort of …complicated?”

“Complicated? Complicated? After all, country music has been going on for quite some time. It ain't exactly a snap, coming up with one new title after another. Especially in these high-tech times. We are constantly updating: in the field of psychology, okay, we follow ‘(Call Me Cleopatra) I'm the Queen of Denial’ with ‘You Wouldn't Call Me Passive-Aggressive If You Knew How Much It Hurts.’ In the field of drinking, we follow ‘The Letter That Johnny Walker Read’ and ‘Rednecks, White Sox, and Blue Ribbon Beer’ with ‘Last Night I Forgot You Absolut'ly (It's Another Stoly Tonight)’ and ‘Your Name May Be Chardonnay (But There's Moonshine in Your Eyes).’ But it isn't always easy. You try working ‘information superhighway’ into an uncomplicated title.”

“ ‘That Long Lonesome…’ I see what you mean. But still, a lot of the best country titles are—”

“Simple,” said Hicks. “Yes, yes, yes. One or two or three words that speak volumes. We hear that all the time. ‘Come up with another “Almost Persuaded,”’ people say. ‘Give us something along the lines of “Mama Tried.” ’ ”

“Or ‘There Stands the Glass,’” I said, “Or ‘Born to Lose.’ Or, simplest of all—”

“I know what you're going to say! I know!” cried Hicks, and he began to grow irate and wobbly and vague. In a nightmarish sort of way, he became a terminal that began to rock, his face became a screen over which indecipherable pixels began to scroll, and then, just before the entire dream imploded, one single word pulled itself up by its bootstraps:

BUSTED.

The dream was over. I lay there and pondered. “Busted.” John Conlee wrote it. And sang it, and so did Ray Charles. About being broke. Nothing tricky about it, and yet it's a better title than “You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” or “I'm Going to Hire a Wino to Redecorate Our Home,” or even “Don't Come Home a-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind).”

Enough titles! Somehow I felt that my dream had brought me tanta-lizingly close to the secret of great country music, and yet…

Then I remembered another brush with country music immortals. Back years before that title-writing night with Tom T., I had watched George Jones and Tammy Wynette record together, in Columbia Records’ famous Studio B in Nashville. I couldn't remember what they sang that day—something about how they weren't ever going to get back together again, probably. I did remember that George kept earnestly trying to talk Tammy into letting him give her a ride home, and she kept earnestly saying no.

And afterward I asked Tammy how she managed to get that little heart-wrenching break into her voice sometimes.

And Tammy astounded me. She said it was just something that happened in her vocal cords, after certain combinations of consonants and vowels.

Can that be all there is to vocal country greatness? Hardware and software interacting automatically? And great country titles just words rubbed against each other, one after another, until some of them get hooked?

Then I remembered something George said that day.

George, not a great one for being interviewed, had wound up giving me, not Tammy, a ride. Which wasn't at all what he had in mind. But he was brought up in the country—he may be crazy, but he isn't rude.

And I had asked him: how did he manage to get that magically sad quality into his voice, whereby every sounded sort of like elvery, and so on?

And here, after a moment, was George's reply:

“I just put myself in the place of the old boy in the song.”

I savored those words. And then: a flash of inspiration. Not only a great country music song title, but the last two lines of the chorus. See if you can't hear old George singing it:

And you may say ahh'm dooin’ it wraawwwng—

But ahh'm the old boy in the song.

Since then, Roger McGuinn and I have managed to collaborate on the title to a song, “I'm A-Sharp Dude but I B-Flat Broke,” and Kathi Kamen Goldmark and I have actually finished a song, with a tune (by Kathi) and everything—the “Twelve Bars 12-Bar Blues,” one stanza of which goes like this:

In Bar number six I threw up in my hat.

(Lord Lord)

In Bar number six I threw up in my hat.

And sat there thinking, Now why did I do that?

Memphis Minnie's Blues: A Dirty Mother for You

She was coal black beautiful, they say, with soft black hair she could fix any way she wanted to, and all gold teeth across the front. In joints, on the street, at house parties and fish fries, she picked and sang while chewing Brown Mule tobacco and sitting in such a way as to show off her pretty underpants. She swore freely, dipped Copenhagen snuff, shot craps, gambled at cards, and bested Big Bill Broonzy in picking contests. In blues circles, she was rumored, respectfully, to have shot off the arm of a man who tried to mess with her, or she chopped it off with a hatchet. (“Some say shot, some say cut.”) Her song “I Don't “Want That Junk Outa You” applied to one and all, but she was openhanded with money, home-cooked meals, and mentoring, and people held her in high regard. “When she came down with what was diagnosed as meningitis and yellow fever, and the doctors gave up on her, she wrote “Memphis Minnie-jitis Blues,” drank a quart of whiskey her husband brought to the hospital, and just sweated whatever it was out. She drank hard—gin, corn whiskey, potato-and-yeast homebrew, and “Wild Irish Rose wine—but lived to be seventy-six.

Among the more than a hundred songs she wrote and recorded indelibly herself is “What's the Matter with the Mill,” which has been covered (sometimes as “Can't Get No Grindin’ ”) by everybody from Muddy “Waters to Bob “Wills and His Texas Playboys. Others of her songs have been recorded by Milton Brown and His Brownies, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Bonnie Raitt, Jefferson Airplane, and Led Zeppelin. Rock and roll owes a good deal to the influence her music had on Chuck Berry.

As well as we know anything about the great early blues musicians, we know those things about Memphis Minnie.

“We also know she began to perform for people before 1910, before she reached her teens, and was still cutting records in 1959. She held her own from Mississippi to Chicago, right through the Depression, in country blues and urban blues, acoustic and electric. She performed, composed, and life partnered with at least two considerable blues guitarists (Kansas Joe McCoy and Little Son Joe Lawlars), always played lead herself, and partook of considerable sexual action (some of it for money) with other fellows, though maybe not after she got good and committed with Little Son Joe. She wrote any number of songs that stirred food, rue, relish, and sex together in roughly equal parts: “Keep On Eatin,” “Banana Man Blues,” “Lean Meat Don't Fry.” She wound up getting along on welfare with the help of devoted protégés and relatives. The relatives called her by her childhood name, Kid.

In 1973, the year she died, the readers of Blues Unlimited magazine voted her the greatest female vocalist, ahead of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. “She was about the best thing goin’,” said Bukka White, “in the woman line.”

And yet she's not an icon. Bessie Smith is as vivid as Mickey Mouse or Marilyn Monroe, but Memphis Minnie is her own person, not ours. She grew up in rural Mississippi near Memphis, started performing in that city, and moved back there in old age, but where the Minnie came from, nobody knows—she was born Lizzie Douglas and first performed as Kid Douglas. We do have several engaging photographs of her in her lengthy prime, but she never appeared on film, she wasn't taken up by trendy patrons, and by the time anyone took much interest in interviewing her, she'd had two strokes and couldn't talk much.

The only biography of her, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues, by Paul and Beth Garon, available in paperback, is one of the goofiest damn books I have ever read. It's valuable for its discography, for its attentive transcription of twenty-four Memphis Minnie lyrics, for having gathered and scrutinized such information and anecdotes about her as have survived, and for reminding us how starkly racist and sexist was the America she made her way in. Among the book's cogent points is that Minnie's image is indistinct because she flourished not in the so-called classic blues mode, a female vocalist fronting a male band, onstage, like Smith and Rainey, but rather in the self-accompanied, small-venue country and later Chicago blues, generally the purview of males, from Charley Patton to Broonzy and Waters.

However. Only 87 of the book's 255 pages (not counting discography and index) are devoted to Memphis Minnie's life, and even that part is marred by repetitive stylistic tics (like “it is noteworthy that,” before something is noted); whiffs of inadvertent condescension (“There is considerable evidence that Minnie was acutely aware of the unusual aspects of the life she chose to live”); fan-clubbish exclamations (“How else to explain the fact that everyone in Memphis in those days called her Aunt Minnie!”); and dime-store-academic jargon like “characterologi-cal principle” (a reference to her toughness).

In the rest of the book, the authors first set forth their critical method: a vaporous mishmash of transmutational femino-Marxist “paranoiac-critical” Franco-Freudian-surrealistic theory. Then they provide interpretations of the lyrics. These interpretations, by and large, are either numbingly obvious and verbose (“So many of Minnie's songs deal with food or cooking that we would be justified in calling it one of the most significant and strategically important registers through which the meaning of her songs is transmitted”) or wildly far-fetched and belabored.

The Garons describe the “paranoiac-critical” approach, or “vehicle,” as “the imposing of a systematically deranged ‘delusion’ on to a hostile, ‘realistic’ frame.” Apparently this is meant to describe both Minnie's music and the authors’ approach to it. I am tempted to say that once you put delusion and realistic in quote marks, everything is up for grabs. But, if I may be excused for lapsing into italics as the Garons do occasionally when they seem to be losing track of Memphis Minnie entirely, I am not necessarily opposed to everything's being up for grabs, as long as we don't lose track of Memphis Minnie. “The paranoiac-critical method,” the Garons go on, “will often seize on a single ‘exterior’ manifestation to ‘explain’ or interpret aspects of life commonly thought to be separate from (or internal to) the manifestation itself. The confusion between internal and external is itself the clarity of the explanation.”

Well now. Clarification through confusion of inside and out is by no means something I reject out of hand. It has long been my contention, after all, that the quintessential Southern joke is about the old boy who, when asked whether he believed in infant baptism, said, “Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it done.” Have you ever made one of those Möbius strips, by taking a narrow slip of paper, giving it a single twist (thereby evoking Isaiah Berlin's phrase “the crooked timber of humanity”), and gluing its ends together? Presto: one surface, inner and outer the same. Another example of this sort of thing is the Bellamy Brothers’ “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?” And perhaps Robert E. Lee's “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” Many things that a hastily judgmental person might dismiss as self-contradictory can be appreciated only if considered subjectively and objectively at once. How can country music songs so often be weepy and yet sportive? Well, they're maudlin-wry. By the same token, fifties rock and roll is crazy-keen. Southern white religion: evangelical-discriminatory. Faulkner: dipsomaniacal-formal. The women of Tennessee Williams: delirious-constrictive. And the thinking of André Breton, as best I can make it out on brief acquaintance: psychoanalytical.Psycho as in screw loose. It's lively, that thinking (in a systematically deranged sort of way), but does it have anything to do with the woman who wrote “I'm Talking 'Bout You #2”?

Well looka here, what you expect for me to do?

Want me to be your mammy

And your doctor too.

I'm talking about you,

I'm talking about you,

I'm talking about you,

I don't care what you do.

“Paranoiac-critical” is a term coined by Salvador Dalí, with an eye toward “the total discrediting of reality,” while hanging out with Breton and other French surrealists. In “Man, You Won't Give Me No Money,” Minnie sings: “You won't buy me no clothes to wear. “Want to take me over in France, and know I ain't got no business over there.” I'm not convinced that the Garons have got any either. I would describe their critical approach as giddy-stodgy. (I can't help noting, even though it is not noteworthy, that Garon was the middle name of Elvis's stillborn twin.)

“We view the blues as a totally authentic medium,” the Garons assert, which is big (in the old days, we might even have said “mighty white”) of them, but they also declare, “For us, the product of the artist and critic is not only the work of criticism but the work of art itself.” Minnie had no patter, didn't even introduce her songs, so the Garons feel the need to jump up onstage with her. In the first half of a sentence, they'll make sense enough: “First, we can see Minnie's songs as the eruption of the female and female desire into the typically male country discourse.” Then, in the second half, they will proceed to horn in on Minnie's act: “and we hope our entire book will function as an illumination of this mode of intervention, just as we see it as a structurally similar example of disruption itself.” They use the words us and we so often and obtrusively that this reader's fascination began, unwillingly, to drift away from Memphis Minnie toward the dynamics of the Garon-Garon relationship. Since Paul Garon's liner notes to the Columbia CD Hoodoo Lady 1933-1937, which is one of the best samples of Minnie's work, are straightforward and well written (he is also the author of a book about Peetie Wheatstraw, which I should have read but haven't), I am evilly tempted to ascribe the biography's hystero-theoretical quotient to Beth Garon. But that might just be because I am testosteronic-detached. Let me say in my behalf, however, that when the authors attempt to make it “clear that women hear the blues in ways that men do not,” by citing the difference between what “the male author of this work always assumed” about a cited lyric and what “the female author assumed,” the female's assumption seems, to me, simply the more perceptive.

Tous les deux, at any rate, the Garons have heaped upon the supremely no-nonsense Memphis Minnie, of all people, a load of flummery. They present us with an enormous wad of tulle and bubble wrap and tell us there's a wildcat in there. As they perceive it, their agenda is radically political: “A new reading, a new hearing, a new understanding transforms the consciousness of the listener/poet, and it is the politicized consciousness that is most capable of accomplishing the revolutionary project of changing the world.”

Well, maybe ditsy-stuffy interaction with the blues will render people less bourgeois and the world less phallocentric, and not a moment too soon. But surely one of the striking things about Minnie's lyrics is that they are so untendentious. It may be, as the Garons assert, that Minnie is engaging in tongue-in-cheek mimicry of “men's fetishization of penis size” when she dwells upon certain images. I would rather say that when it comes to stingers, bananas, rats caught by her kitty, butcher knives that slice a person's ham “from the fat on down,” and other examples of “something that I need,” she has a lot of good edgy fun with them. As she does with a female metaphor, so to speak, in “Socket Blues”:

Down in my old hometown,

Put the irons on the stove,

But I got to have a socket

Everywhere I go.

I need a socket, oohhh, I need a socket.

Babe, I've got to have a socket

If you want me to iron your clothes.

She certainly voices hard-earned plaints about the fickleness of men, but she also sings of getting caught fooling around herself. And “I've been treated wrong, / But that's all right, I believe I'll get along.” Minnie can moan with authority, in “Moaning the Blues” and “Crazy Crying Blues,” but to me the voice of Bessie Smith is more affecting, in part because it carries a richer sense of heartbreak and of injustice more profound.

Minnie's voice is penetrating in a different way. It's insistent, without being nagging, and sharp, acrid almost, without being shrill. Minnie can wrap her herself around a good insult song—hers is the first recording of a transparently euphemistic number called in various male versions “Dirty Mother for You” (Washboard Sam) or “Mother Fuyer” (B. B. King):

Won't you look here, baby,

What you done done,

You done squeezed my lemon,

Now you done broke and run.

Awwww, dirty mother fuyer,

He's a dirty mother fuyer,

He don't mean no good.

He got drunk this morning,

Tore up the neighborhood.

Precious little pathos there, and no vindictive overkill: he got her off, and then he ran off. To do something stupid and destructive. She's got him nailed, all right, but coolly.

Minnie's “Killer Diller Blues” is like that song Carly Simon sang some years ago, “You're So Vain,” but more sportive. It doesn't seem to imply resentment or hurt on her part—if anything she seems tickled by her target. She can make fun of a man in a wonderfully unsticky way, calling him an “awful little creature” for three verses and then letting him say it for himself:

Well he walk in the hotel, ever'body left;

He looked in the glass and he smiled at his self.

Say, “I'm a ugly little shaver on a scout,

I'm a terrible little somethin hush your mouth,

I'm a awful little creature,

I'm a killer-diller from the South.”

In life, Minnie got pretty fair use out of men, considering. Instru-mentally and vocally, her duets with each husband are more than the sum of their parts. “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” which she recorded with Little Son Joe in 1941 (he got the writing credit, but that conferred no monetary value, and she undoubtedly wrote their songs), is a bit of romantic realism: she likes the way he drives so much, she's going to buy him a Ford V-8 in order to corner his services. It's the same tune as the blues standard “Good Mornin’ Little School Girl,” which Sonny Boy Williamson recorded four years earlier, but the latter's lyrics are about seduction of a minor. (“Tell your mama 'n’ your papa, I'm a little school- boy, too.”) Minnie's song is more even-handed. “Going to let my chauffeur …drive me around the world,” she sings, with considerably more tenderness than usual in her tone. “Then he can be my little boy, yes, I'll be his girl.” It may be noteworthy, though the Garons don't note it, that Memphis Minnie never had children. She recorded this song with the significant other of her middle and declining years, Little Son Joe.

“I'm so glad,” Minnie sings, “that I ain't nobody's tool.” Capitalist nor paranoiac-critical. Many a song by her is sharp enough to be Kafka's ax for the frozen sea inside us. The ax that the Garons have to grind is some other, duller, one.

To me, blues music doesn't seem so exotic that it requires recourse to France. It may be surreal, but it's not trying to be. It's not surrealist. I'm talking about the blues back before the sixties, back before blues-esque folkies and rock idols started coming on like shamans with disdain for the mundane. At its roots, the blues isn't jaded. It's as pretty as it can be, under the circumstances.

But that's just my theory, which is no doubt conditioned as much as anybody else's is by what I need from the blues. The Garons assert that “white critics and fans cannot bear the thought that the blues singers often despise them, and see them, correctly, as the architects or at least the accomplices of so much of the squalor in which they are forced to live.” And I think of biscuits. I want to believe that in Memphis Minnie's later years, after she's settled down some (haven't we all?), but before she's had the strokes (knock on wood), I get a chance to visit her at home, with some whiskey. We hit it off. She serves me some of the (literal) biscuits she was famous for among those who knew her. Biscuits just crusty enough, I imagine, to hold in the steam that comes when you open them to put in butter. And I get from her what nobody else ever did: the story of her life.

I don't see it as coming out squalid. I've just been listening over and over, and over, and over, to the five different takes of a never-released song Minnie recorded with Little Son Joe in 1946. By then she was forty-nine and he had been her mate for ten years or so. They would live together till he died in 1961. “The Man I Love” is a challenge to decipher, but here is the gist:

She is with a man whose “hair is turning grey. He understands life, no time to waste away. We get together and talk it over, the life we want to live. Hold my hand and talk love—boy, oh boy, what a thrill.” Then comes a line which, in all its variations and conceivable readings, might be “Our hard life together throws Mama off her smile,” or it might be “Our hardly-together throes this summer offer smiles.” Or maybe “Of us holding together through this hobble-off-us mile.” Or “Of us heartily together though it's horrible, awful. Smile.” Or “Our holding together threw the bubble off Ismail.” Or my personal preference: “Of our hearts late to gather this hardly obvious smile.”

Not obvious, no, but not surreal either. And the next line, clear and consistent in every take: “Well I have found a friend, have made my life worthwhile.” Then a line that goes something like this: “Well the new year step in, I believe I'll do right awhile.” And finally, “The man I love treat me like an angel child.” Or in another version, “I have found me a baby, treat me like a baby child.”

They say she threw whiskey in Little Son Joe's eyes when she saw him sitting with other women, would even turn evil on him while they were playing—“She'd work Son Joe over right on the bandstand, right in front of the whole audience. Bang, bop, boom, bop! Ha, ha,” recalled Johnny Shines. They also say she was faithful to him—people wondered how he held on to a beautiful woman like her—and she looked after him when he was old and sick.

She would wrangle with fellow musicians over money or how the music ought to be played—she even got to where she would badmouth her old friend Broonzy. But according to a mutual friend, “Big Bill would never do anything unless'n he called Minnie. ‘Let me call Minnie on the phone and see what she say about it,’ he'd say. And she'd say, Aww …well, all right, Bill …I'll come over …I'll see,’ in her gruff way. But she would come over because she was big in her heart, even though she could be rough.” She was a tough mother for you.

And for herself. So many musical icons have burnt out before they had a chance to grow up. I have had the opportunity to ask two great American musicians the following question: “Why do you think you didn't die young?” Ray Charles said, “Well, I know you've heard about me, I did a lot of things. But when you're blind, you have enough trouble getting home, without getting blind drunk. And I never got so fucked up I couldn't go on stage and sing ‘I Can't Stop Loving You.’ ” Willie Nelson said, “I guess I was too chickenshit to ever entirely self-destruct.” I think Memphis Minnie might have answered that question in her song “In My Girlish Days”:

Late hours at night, trying to play my hand,

Through my window, out stepped a man.

I didn't know no better, Oh boys,

In my girlish ways.

My mama cried, Papa did, too,

Ooh, daughter, look what a shame on you….

I flagged a train, didn't have a dime,

Trying to run away from that home of mine….

All of my playmates is not surprised,

I had to travel fore I got wise.

I found out better,

And I still got my girlish ways.

Neither her seducer nor her parents can tell her what to make of herself. She is who she is, though willing to learn, and she knows it. She isn't singing for sympathy, nor is she preening her bad self, as I am inclined to suspect Salvador Dalí was. When she saw some comforting, everyday thing to be doable, like being half of an old married couple, she believed in it. She could get some satisfaction.

Me and Bobby E. Lee

Ithought I'd run into a lot of flak, promoting my unidolatrous Robert E. Lee biography in the South, but even at “Washington and Lee, where he died while serving as the college's president, folks were quite receptive. At his birthplace, a young woman reporter did ask if I considered myself an honorable person, and remained skeptical after I said that I did, yes, but not in the ante- or even the postbellum sense. And in a Louisville bookstore an older woman told me, “I am a descendant of General John Hunt Morgan, and I want you to know the Confederates were not fighting for slavery.”

“Okay,” I said, “what were they fighting for?”

“Freedom,” she said.

“Freedom to do what?”

“Freedom to decide whether to have slavery or not.”

I do what I can to keep my finger on the pulse of evolving Southern culture. At this very moment, I am sitting out a spell of bad weather in “Wakulla County, Florida, where I go fishing every year. The Wakulla News reports that “a local painter who sold his work on the roadside was found not guilty of obscenity in a jury trial last week.”

Brent Stevens, the painter, had set up “a roadside stand selling ‘Hot boiled art’ at the intersection of U.S. Highway 319 and Bloxham Cutoff …One of Stevens’ more controversial works was a reimagining of The Last Supper with a female Christ figure. That painting showed a man and woman in an embrace at one end of the table and a nude woman at the other end of the table.”

The reason the art was marketed as “boiled,” of course, is that other roadside stands in the area advertise hot boiled peanuts. I love boiled peanuts. In that regard, I'm hard-core son of the South.

But when I discovered that the publisher of my Robert E. Lee book, Penguin, had sent out copy identifying me as “the quintessential Southern commentator,” I objected strenuously. Maybe I'm the only Southerner Penguin could think of, so I was bound to be quintessential. Or maybe Penguin thought they had come up with an expression that would sound so pretty to Southern book buyers that what it might mean wouldn't matter.

The copy also said my book would appeal to “proud Southerners.” Oh, man. Don't people in the Northeast realize anything? I move up there for the civil liberties, and I make it plain that I'm not a shameful nor a shame-faced Southerner, but in fact you could pretty much say that I moved up here to get away from people who enjoy putting themselves forward as proud Southerners, and I spend five years off and on—way, way more than would have been cost-effective—trying to get a sufficiently skeptical yet sufficiently sympathetic handle on the quintessential Southern icon (an attribution that, to give him credit, would have made him shudder), I finally produce a book that I feel pretty good about but that in fact is bound to piss “proud Southerners” off, and my publisher sends out promotional literature one glance at which will cause the sort of reader this book needs to say “Ick.”

“Well, it's marketing,” Penguin told me.

Like “it's Chinatown,” in the movie of that name. You don't want to inquire into what goes on there, regular human scruples don't apply.

Maybe I should have gone with the flow, set myself up in earnest as the q.S.c. on the side of the highway, if necessary.

He's a hoot, he's a sage, he's a summer theater,

His mama was a saint and his daddy was a satyr—

What do quinces have in common with a tater?

Ask the quintessential commentator.

Southern, that is…

Nope. These days, I'd have to become a Republican, and that I will not do.

I'm not too honorable to hustle a book I wrote, but I do have a hard time getting into an unconflictedly hustling state of mind. Ideally, you would go around talking about your book on the radio and TV and in bookstores and so on before it's too late. That is to say, at a point when you can still fix it. By the time the publisher does send you out on a promotional tour, the book is a published widget, and there have already been a couple of reviews, favorable or unfavorable, that miss the point of it, and you sort of hate to pull off the bandages and reopen the creative process, because it's almost healed over now, what's the point; but you do. You start telling people about your product, so they'll buy it, and the next thing you know, in your own mind, it's back in development.

Sometimes this is because you get so tired of talking about your book over and over that you begin to make up a version of it that is fresh enough to pique your own interest. Say you're William Faulkner being interviewed on drive-time radio about As I Lay Dying.

Never mind. I'm not saying he couldn't have done it, though he did have that squeaky little speaking voice more befitting the postal clerk that he was, incidentally, than the epic progenitor he was down inside.

I'm saying he wouldn't. You would have had to shoot him before he would go around the country trying to explain, repeatedly, to drive-time radio hosts and bookstore audiences of three, what in the world inspired him to write about people trying to get their mama, in her coffin, to her ancestral burial ground by way of a swollen river.

Have you read that book lately? My God, what a book that is; it comes at you like a family of strangers, everybody all this-side-that-a-way and in the middle of things, blown in through your kitchen window by a hurricane. That is a book by a man who wasn't concerned with marketing. That is a book by a man who thought of the writing and the consequent reading as the primary transaction.

But it isn't anymore, marketing is, and presumably the author who doesn't promote doesn't stay in business, which is what I want to do until I die—even though I know in my soul it is generally better for your self-esteem to have a book in you than to have it brought out.

But that's my problem. What I want to share, with no promotional intent whatsoever, is that the promotional process can also enlighten me, belatedly, as to what I had in mind when I was writing. Or should have had in mind. The first few times I talk about a book of mine that has finally just come out—after all kinds of pulling and hauling and worrying about commas—I think to myself, “Hm. This book's not such a dead letter after all. This might actually be a pretty intelligible book for somebody who would just go away and read it.”

And then, as I trudge from interview to interview, I get so desperate to stop boring myself with that very same book that I start departing from the text. I come up with throwaway lines that wouldn't really fit in with the tone of the book, as such, but that will undoubtedly be remembered by more people than will ever open the book, as such.

Here are two things I repeatedly remarked with respect to my Robert E. Lee book: that if I had to pick a contemporary person who is most like Lee it would be Colin Powell, and that I was disappointed with the portrayal of Marse Robert in the movie Gods and Generals because the movie was so static and talky it should have been called The Virginia Monologues.

So I'm on the road boiling my book down to things that aren't in it, and gradually …uh-oh. I begin to suspect that when I wrote the book, I missed the point of it myself. I have just now figured out what the central insight of my book would be, if only I'd had the foresight to keep it from being published until after I presented it to the public.

For instance, after my memoir, Be Sweet, came out, I was making a thinly attended bookstore appearance in, let us say, Sopchoppy, Florida (it wasn't there, but isn't that a nice name for a town?), rattling on in public about this personally embarrassing book of mine for the umpteenth time, when I heard myself saying something new: that it wasn't just because I was made of something other than sugar and spice and everything nice that I found it so hard to respond when my mother told me, “Be sweet.” It was also because whenever anybody complimented my mother on anything, she would say, “Oh, you're just being sweet.” Would say it in a sad, tolerant tone that implied pretty clearly, even to someone whose capacity for true sympathy was as stunted as, say, mine: “You just don't know how much it would mean to me if you really meant that, but I realize, of course, that you're just …saying it.”

And right after I had that Sopchoppy epiphany, I noticed that a woman I grew up with, hadn't seen for thirty years probably, had showed up to hear my talk. We had a drink afterward, and she told me, “That was interesting, how angry you said your mother was. My mother was always furious at home.”

“No. Really? But we thought she was always so cheerful.”

“That's what we thought your mother was.”

Wow. Could it be that all the mothers I knew growing up were perkily lightsome to their neighbors and friends and convolutedly inconsolable by their loved ones at home? If the As I Lay Dying family, the Bundrens, had, in fact, been blown into our house by a hurricane, would they have been as startled by what we were really like as we by them? Maybe my book could have been as good as As I Lay Dying, if I'd just dug a little deeper….

We just don't know. We just don't know.

Nor do we know what Robert E. Lee was like inside. Listening to The Sound and the Fury on a long southerly car trip recently (it's surprisingly comprehensible when read well aloud), I was struck by how much Jason Compson had in common with Lee. His brother got to go to Harvard; he had to stay home and look after Mama. But Jason turned mean as a snake. Seemed to derive some satisfaction from being that way. Lee was self-punishingly earnest about being benign. Was involved in the slaughter of lots and lots of people, of course.

Here's something else I realized about Robert E. Lee, belatedly—after I'd finished the book, as such, and was going around trying to live down the “quintessential Southern commentator” thing and at the same time woo people into believing I had something worth $19.95 to say inside the book.

I was at Stratford Hall in Virginia, the ancestral home where Lee was born. Before I spoke about my book at a luncheon there, they gave me a tour through the estate. In what was little Robert's bedroom, I saw the angels. When Robert was not quite four years old, the family had to give up Stratford Hall because his profligate father, Light-Horse Harry Lee, had thrown away the family fortune. As they were about to close Stratford's doors behind them for the last time, according to a family story, little Robert ran up to his bedroom to say good-bye to the angels in his fireplace. I didn't include this story in my book because, I don't know, I'm not exactly an angel buff, and it all seemed just a bit cutesy, not to mention undocumented.

But then I went into little Robert's bedroom and saw that his fireplace was quite low to the floor. I got down on my knees to look into it from a not-quite-four-year-old boy's viewpoint, and I saw the angels. They weren't the full-figure winged creatures I'd imagined. They were two little cherub faces, not cute but conceivably companionable. I thought about little Bobby telling those little faces good-bye, and for the first time in all my researches, my heart went all the way out to him.

I started rewriting my book in my head, thinking of the Killer Angels connection, and—it hit me: the connection I should have made between Lee's life (my notion of it, anyway) and my version of mine.

But you may not have read either of the actual physical between-covers books in question yet. Go do that first—you don't have to buy it, but, come to think of it, that is a good way to get ahold of one. I say “it.” By that I mean both of them. And then I think you will see why, when the angels gave me that flash of recognition, I realized what made Robert E. Lee's life so unhappy. Slavery, of course, was a factor. And his awful father. But the psychological reason, I'll bet, was that his mother told him to be sweet, and he was.

See the World But Don't Get Carried Away

(And If You Swing by Sweetlip…)

Goings-on abroad they may amaze ya,

But always remember who you are.

Don't forget your raisin’ in Eurasia

Or any of those areas afar.

Never mind what Robert E. Lee named his horse, I don't think of travel as a Southern tradition. “When I was growing up in Georgia in the forties and fifties, it would no more have occurred to us to visit, say, Europe, just to see it for some reason, than California or some place like that. Or …Charleston, even. “We weren't related to anybody in Charleston, why would we go there?

My father traveled a lot, but that was for business and—though in retrospect I wonder about this—a cross he had to bear. For his two weeks of vacation every summer, we would drive off in the family car not in search of refreshing new vistas but “back home” to visit my parents’ folks in Jacksonville, Florida, where it was even hotter.

Mainly we'd visit with the relatives, and there were never any kids on either side of the family close to my age, but one day we'd go to the beach and the boardwalk (fiddler crabs and saltwater taffy), and another day the men and I would go out in a comfortably grotty, congealed-bits-of-old-bait-lined skiff and catch an abundance of whiting and croakers (the latter made a croaking noise, a mating call perhaps, as they died in the fish well) and bring them back to my grandparents’ house to clean and fry them up, with hush puppies. That, I want to tell you, was some good eating. And we actually did authentically give an occasional literal hush puppy to the dogs, not at all self-consciously, didn't think anything of it, though of course we saved plenty of hush puppies for ourselves. But it wasn't the kind of thing a travel magazine would devote an article to, not a hot new getaway destination. “Which was okay with us.

Then I went away to college and liked it. By it I mean college, and I also mean away. I've been traveling ever since. And not feeling quite right about it. I keep hearing my mother's voice saying, “We don't have any business in this world going off somewhere for something something when there are plenty of perfectly nice something somethings right here at home.”

Here are some travel rules. They derive, as everything else derives, from some combination of where I come from and why I came from it:

1. Before you try a strange barbecue place, roll down your window and make sure it smells good from the car. But then if your attention wasn't caught by the aroma in the first place, why did you stop?

2. Never try a down-home restaurant whose sign is misspelled on purpose (VURNUN'S CAFFAY), nor an imported-cuisine restaurant whose sign is misspelled by accident (L'BONN FORMAGE).

3. Abroad, carry enough bottled water that you won't have to drink any unbottled water but not so much that you will have to use the restrooms.

4. If, after trying for days to be patient and forbearing in a foreign-speaking country, you are tempted to scream, “WILL YOU PLEASE STOP SPOUTING THAT INFERNAL GIBBERISH!” at people who live there, just for your own relief, remember this: they may understand what you are saying and may take it personally. If they live in a part of the world that is at all suitable for tourism, they will at least have figured out that gibberish is English for, say, French, or whatever. In a pejorative sense. They may go into a shell, or misdirect you disastrously in weird near-English, or disappear for a few moments and then come back and run into you on one of those nasty little motorbikes. Then you have to go to foreign court—and if you think you heard gibberish before …!

5. Never hand your expensive camera to an indigenous person and ask him to photograph you and the rest of your party, if he looks like he can run faster than everyone in your party. (Even if he doesn't look like it, he can.)

6. Don't show the slides of your trip to anyone who does not appear in them. Slides, unless they are salacious, gruesome, or of museum quality, and usually even if they are of museum quality, are endurable only by people who appear in them. Or whose children appear in them. (Young children. Sensible parents do not want to see candid snaps of their teenagers away from home.) People who owe you money? They will sit through your slides. But if they are not in your slides, and they don't have a child, a young child, who is in them, they will consider their debt discharged. All this goes double for video.

7. Don't worry about remembering whether a dromedary has one hump and a camel two, or vice versa, because whichever one you tell people you rode, they will give you a surprised look and say what a shame, you really should have ridden the other.

8. While you are away, the weather at home will be unseasonably fine, the team you root for will win its most unforgettable victory, and the emperor and empress of whatever exotic country you are visiting will pay a surprise visit to your neighborhood and invite your next-door neighbors to come see them any time at the castle, though preferably not this time of year, when all the tourists flock to the more obvious attractions and everyone who is authentic clears out.

9. If you decide to swing by the town of Sweetlip, even though it will make your drive much longer, on the assumption that it must be a charming town with such a name, you will find that it was named after Garner W. Sweetlip, who founded the town in 1951 around its principal industry, a plant that converts catfish viscera and old mesh caps into eleven hundred tons of commercial fertilizer an hour, not to mention by-products and effluent, samples available. It's pronounced “Swillup.”

10. Never make eye contact with someone else's young child on a plane. That is what the parent prays for. A parent of a young child on a plane is liable to open up the emergency hatch and bail out if he or she can justify it by thinking that somebody else has accepted even a split-second's responsibility for the child. “No one will blame me for leaping to my death if it was clear that I knew that someone was there to look after little Rachel as she was wallowing on the tray table rubbing pudding in her hair and screeching”—we, who have been parents of young children on airplanes ourselves, have all been there.

11. Don't heave yourself up out of your airplane seat by jerking down on the back of mine, for God's sake. Just because you don't know me from Adam and we are both happy to keep it that way, doesn't mean you can treat me like a part of the furniture. You wouldn't do that at home.

I need a travel rule that is less defensive.

My sister, Susan (who is considerably younger than I am and therefore was still growing up when a kind of sea change occurred and my parents started going to the Cotswolds and places like that), has called to say she's back from Egypt. Now that—as part of the Holy Land—might have been a place that people I grew up with would have considered traveling to, if they were going to travel to any place foreign, which they weren't, but at least there would be scriptural authority for it.

Susan went there, though, because she has an Egyptian friend. She was surprised, as I would have been, to note that parts of Egypt still look like the Bible—well, no, what she said was, the men still wear those things that look like nightgowns, as in the illustrations. But now they have motor vehicles, so camels are butchered and sold to poor people for meat. Seems a shame. I'd like to go to Egypt, but by the time I get there it probably won't look any more like the Bible than California does. Southern California, that is, which by then may look like a desert.

Cuba is where I always wanted to go, if only because the federal government (post-Carter) doesn't want me to. Then one night I talked to some people who had been there over Christmas. That is the kind of company I find myself in, in the Northeast: people who will just up and spend their family Christmas in a Communist country, and not because they were abducted and forced to and are writing it up for the Reader's Digest either, and they don't even smoke cigars (not that we did either, growing up). Anyway, do you know what these people said? They said the food in Cuba was terrible. As good as Cuban food in Miami is. Because, basically, there isn't much food in Cuba.

Because our politicians and Cuba's maintain pissing-match relations, to the politicians’ mutual advantage—Castro can blame his people's poverty on the American embargo established by that great Southern statesman Jesse Helms. Up with Enmity! There are people out there who are against us, and whatever's wrong is their fault! That is so Southern, I thought, until I moved to the Northeast and detected there a similar sentiment toward the South.

Then I went to Cuba. With my inamorata Joan Griswold and her sister Mary and brother-in-law Geoffrey. Havana was like an abandoned wedding cake that ants have moved into. Blocks and blocks of fancy architecture—columns and balconies and arches and porticos— thoroughly inhabited and crumbling. People living in the first floor of a row house whose second and third floors were all gone except for the façade. Billboards with heavy-handed revolutionary slogans all around, and bright-color-clad, hip-swaying people (a ghost town full of live wires) getting by on rationed food—eight eggs (but five pounds of sugar) a month.

We ate in tourist-oriented restaurants where the food wasn't bad and the live music was rousing. The hip request is for a song called “Hasta Siempre.” Ask for that and they look at you like you understand—they really get into that song, which celebrates the martrydom of Che and the foreverness of the revolution. It reminded me of things I sang growing up in church like “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, oh what a foretaste of glory divine.”

But we never found a good local hole-in-the-wall eatery. Just plenty of holes in the walls. We were walking through a neighborhood where structures that used to be nightclubs or theaters had become improvised tenements. We were peering at a santería effigy in a dark foyerish space behind a sagging antique front door that looked like it had been ornate but had undergone heavy sandblasting, when suddenly a walleyed man thrust his head out at us. He had a scar running from his sideburn to his lip that drew up one corner of his mouth. Oh Lord, I thought, a pirate; what is he going to want?

He wanted to know whether we would take a package back to the States and mail it to his relatives in …some place we couldn't quite make out at first, not having any Habanero Spanish to speak of. His relatives in …? Kentucky? Kentucky. When we conveyed our polite reluctance to get involved in whatever traffic that might entail, he asked us if we had any soap, for his children.

Well. We had, in fact, brought a couple of suitcases full of staples, notions, and wash-day products that we had heard people needed over there, but we had given all that to a neighborhood Communist committee to distribute. Which my mother would have regarded as the sort of thing we could have done just as well back home. The kind of thing she did do, through the church. To her, doing it abroad (since we weren't missionaries) would have been exoticism.

But then she was a person who, when she came to visit me in New York in her fifties, looked out the car window at some Puerto Rican women yakking at their children and shook her head and sighed—it was the sigh that got me—and said, “I reckon they love 'em just like we do ours.”

“Well …yes!” I sputtered at her, and she jumped like I'd turned against her, had turned inexplicably foreign myself.

With regret, we told this man in Havana we didn't have any soap on us. He didn't respond the way you'd expect somebody with a face like his to respond. He said all right, said he loved the people of the Estados Unidos, smiled so that the other corner of his mouth came close to matching the drawn-up one, and faded back inside. Where he didn't have anything to wash his children with. He was making do, though.

Chugging and smoking through the streets of Havana were American cars of the fifties, like the ones my family used to drive down to Jacksonville in, only rebuilt under the hood with juryrigged miscellaneous parts from Mexico and sporting multiple hood ornaments, say, a Packard one on top of one from an Oldsmobile. Substitute for the Communist slogans the old hymns I grew up singing—which I'm inclined to believe we put as much flavor into as people in Havana do into their colors and hips—and large personal-history areas in the back of my mind are like Havana, decomposing but layered and homey.

I know, I know, there is such a thing—tell me about it—as deep-rooted unresolvable difference. But what a shame to lean in that direction. “What would Jesus do?” is a trendy question in some quarters today. But surely not in the highest corridors of American government, because would Jesus insist on keeping a window open for torture? Perhaps Che Guevara, whom Cubans are urged to emulate, would not have done that either—he left Cuba, to take the revolution abroad, when he saw Castro nailing the revolution down dictatorially at home.

Che was killed before long. To deeply rooted people, martyrs are most useful dead. You don't see Castro's face iconically displayed in Havana, you see Che's face, and the face of José Martí (already a martyr when Castro took over), and the face of a hero who was new to me: Camilo Cien-fuegos, the happy revolutionary in a cowboy hat, “who,” according to a caption in the Museum of the Revolution, “was always trying to improvise a kind of joy.” It is widely suspected that Castro arranged for his old comrade Camilo's plane to be blown up because he'd become too popular to stay alive.

I never heard anybody say “What would Jesus do?” when I was growing up. We knew Jesus would most likely do what he did do—something crazy by community standards, some far-out-liberal, crucifiable offense, something we weren't about to do. In the Bible, Jesus refers to the salt of the earth as the select, the righteous, as opposed to the widespread sinful. But when I was growing up, people used salt of the earth to mean pretty much the same thing as good old boy, only ungendered. Just good plain solid folks. We saw no virtue in hobnobbing with people who weren't plain and solid.

How can I travel and still stay in touch with such roots? Well, the parts of abroad that make me feel like I'm getting somewhere—okay, now, this is Peru, or whatever—are the parts where people live who don't gad about the globe themselves. Don't you imagine that applies in reverse? Say you're a Moroccan visiting the United States. Do you want to meet Ameri-cans who are eager to tell you about their favorite hotel in Marrakesh, who run into the house to get the fezzes that they got in Fez, who are in fact rather shocked that you yourself have never tried the camel's-eye soup at that great little place in Rabat? Or would you want to meet Americans who will steer you to where you can get funny-named free-range fish of the vicinity fried the way they are fried by local people? I had some fish in Venezuela once that were so freshly gutted that they were dropped into a pot of oil still wiggling, so they came out in suspended animation.

If American foreign policy upheld the values I grew up with, we'd be trying to get relations going with down-home Cubans, so they could afford to share with us some beans and rice that hath not lost their savor.

Because here is something I think we can say, generally, about Southern travelers: if we are going to pack up and find somebody to look after the dogs and the cats and the plants, and go to the damn airport and wrangle our way over to some damn foreign place where the airports are even harder to get through than ours, and figure out different money, and spend a lot of it that turns out to be worth more in real money than it looked like, and miss the Tangerine Bowl, and give the opposing faction on the Board of Stewards a chance to ram through some kind of crazy damn scheme involving the design of the porte cochere outside the new Sunday school building—I tell you what. The eating. Had better. Be good.

P.S.

One afternoon I was in the library of a small town in Mississippi, in need of some information, so I went up to the lady behind the desk there. Ahead of me were an elderly white man and a young black woman. The white man was saying:

“…just hit me suddenly, you know, that I wanted somethin’, and then …it hit me what it was. That I wanted. It was pie.”

“Well,” said the lady behind the desk.

“A piece a pie. It's funny 'cause u-sually I don't want pie, this time a day. But I did, that's exactly what it was, that I wanted. But I couldn't think who would have pie …this time a day.”

“Uh-hmmm,” said the librarian.

“Miz Boyd a course serves extremely fine pie. But a course Miz Boyd wouldn't be open…”

“I was goin’ to say,” said the librarian.

“…this time a day. So I said to myself, I said, ‘Now “Wawltuh, where in town would they be liable to know… where a body could get a piece a pie.’”

“Mm-hm,” said the librarian, looking thoughtful. “This time a day.”

“I said, ‘Well, I tell you where somebody is liable to know. At the li-berry.’ So I told myself that what I would do would be to just come on over here and…”

“I declare, Mr. Owsley, I don't believe I know… where…” She raised her voice: “IOTA?”

A faint voice came from back in the stacks: “Uh-huhhhhh?”

“DO YOU KNOW WHERE MR. OWSLEY COULD GET A PIECE OF PIE?”

“You mean …this time a day?”

At that point, the young black woman stepped forward and said, “ 'Scuse me, do you have anything about the army? 'Cause I got to get out of this damn town.”

Right out There with the Dogs

I wrote this, for Men's Journal, in 1994. I don't know whether the trials have gotten less crazy since then. I sure hope not.

All I know about top-notch bird dogs is, you're not supposed to pet them much; they're more serious than that. All I can say about myself as a horseman is, I guess I am just not gaited.

Yet in February I risked—for the third time—being trampled under several hundred hooves and Garth Brooks hats to ride behind elite dogs (Quicksilver Pink, Willie Freedom, Red-Necked Woman, Reedy Fork Reb, Miller's Crossbow, and Chinquapin Bisco Buck) as they competed in the National Field Trial Championships at the Ames Plantation in Grand Junction, Tennessee.

I rode to the bird dogs partly because no American boy wants to pass up a chance to die with his boots on, so to speak. But mostly I did it for the figures of speech.

The first time I attended the field trials was in 1979, at the invitation of my old college friend Ruff Fant. Ruff grew up in Holly Springs, Mississippi, which is just over the state line from the Ames Plantation. Ruff's Holly Springs friend Jerry Bolden keeps horses that he rents to rodeos and kindly lends to us for the field trials.

It was raining, in 1979, and a good many people were drinking quite a bit, and Jerry put on an exhibition of riding that—well, do you remember Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou? How he, or his stunt double, would reel along at all angles to his horse until you thought he was bound to topple?

Jerry Bolden did topple, and his horse toppled with him, and the two of them rolled, together, through deep mud. Jerry is a big man, and he was wearing one of those long dark green all-weather coats like they wore in the movie Long Riders. The sight of Jerry and his horse rolling together, now one on top and now the other, and coming up all jaunty and looking like they'd both been dipped in chocolate, Jerry still wearing his good non-country-singer hat, was just one of the highlights of that sporting event.

Before I get to the figure-of-speech highlight, let me explain what I mean by the expression “I am just not gaited.” I mean I can go, “Git up,” and I can go, “Whoa,” but I have never mastered the body language for, say, “Let's break into a nice lope.” At various times over the years, I have been up top a cutting horse, a bulldogging pony, a Brooklyn rent-ahorse, a Dorsetshire moors pony, a thirty-year-old gelding named Ollie who let cats and chickens climb on his back (not while I was on him), a blind Florida farmhorse, and several different Texas cow ponies.

I have stayed on all of them. (The bulldogging pony and I were mostly separated for a moment, but I hit some cactus and bounced right back up into the saddle without ever losing hold of the reins, an extra-equestrian feat that several observers, as they picked quills out of my back that evening, called one of the most striking, I think is the term they used, that they had ever seen.) And I have generally been able to exert considerable influence over direction, as long as it meant going some way that made sense to the horse.

But whether it was the cutting horse jumping entirely over the rump of another horse stumbling crosswise in front of us as we negotiated a rushing stream, or the rental horse electing to break into a gallop at Grand Army Plaza, I have largely deferred to the animal in the matter of gear selection.

The horse I rode in 1979 was used to leading brisk rodeo processions. His preferred pace was the surging walk. He wanted to be at least in the avant-garde of horses—ideally, I believe, he would have liked to get out ahead of the dogs and maybe the quail. Certainly ahead of me. So he and I would forever be getting up too close to the marshals, who would therefore be saying to me, and to ten or twenty other hard chargers, “Hold your horses, boys.”

I love it when a figure of speech comes out literally. It doesn't happen too often in modern life. Maybe someone will compliment you on your shirt and you'll say, “Oh, it's just run-of-the-mill,” or you'll be in the Easter parade with someone who starts whacking at her headdress and you can say, “Got a bee in your bonnet?” But usually when you say, “Hold your horses” in today's world, you mean, “Don't crawl off till I get your Pampers fastened.” No wonder today's young people have such a tenuous grasp on language.

I got into an argument the other day with a college student. She had heard someone say, “You can't beat that with a stick,” which struck her (so to speak) as an inappropriate way of speaking—beat in that connection just meant do better than, she said; it didn't have anything to do with sticks.

No, no, I said, language is a physical thing; it is right and proper for beat to pick up a stick. She couldn't grasp, so to speak, my point. She should have been at the field trials.

At the field trials, the marshals say, “Hold your horses” every few minutes. And back in 1979, I heard some other old expression used quite literally. But then it slipped my mind. For thirteen years I tried to remember it. Last year, I went back to the field trials looking for it. That year, Jerry was a staunch and responsible figure who jumped into a pond where somebody else's horse was drowning and pulled out his knife— what was he going to do with it?—and slashed the girth so he could pull off the saddle and the lightened horse could get his head up above the surface. I was there last year on the Friday afternoon when the all-time field trial gallery record was set: 1,511 people, many of them full of beans.

So there was plenty of “Hold your horses” last year, but I never heard that second figure of speech. It kept bothering me. I went back again this year.

Let me explain how the field trials work. Well, I don't know how they work, but I know this much:

The national championship—this year's was the ninety-fourth annual—is the culmination of a year of field-trial competition around the country, during which thirty or forty dogs qualify to vie for a $13,000 purse plus sizable side bets and possible future enshrinement in the National Bird Dog Museum and Field Trial Hall of Fame, which is down the road from the Ames Plantation. The national championships begin in the middle of February and go on for as many weekdays as it takes for all the qualified dogs to go out and demonstrate, over a fifteen-mile course, how classy and efficient they are at pointing coveys of quail. Two dogs go out at a time, one brace in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The dogs are accompanied by their handlers, their owners, the judges, the marshals, and any other fool who shows up on a horse. Me, for instance, and Ruff. This year, we were joined by my friend Vereen Bell, who teaches English at Vanderbilt University. Vereen says that from now on when his students demand to know his basis for grading their papers, he is going to read to them what is known as the Amesian Standard.

Mr. Hobart Ames was a sportsman who owned the Ames Shovel and Tool Company of Easton, Massachusetts. In 1901 he bought a 13,000-acre Tennessee plantation for a country place and established it as the site of the championships. He also set down his standard, in plain words (big shovel-and-tool men wrote better back then):

The dog under consideration must have and display great bird sense. He must show perfect work on both coveys and singles. He must be able quickly to determine between foot and body scent. He must use his brain, eyes, and nose to the fullest advantage and hunt the likely places on the course. He must possess speed, range, style, character, courage, and stamina—and good manners, always. He must hunt the birds and not the handler hunt the dog. No line or path runner is acceptable. He must be well broken, and the better his manners, the more clearly he proves his sound training. Should he lose a little in class, as expressed in speed and range, he can make up for this, under fair judgment, in a single piece of superior bird work, or in sustained demonstration of general behavior. He must be bold, snappy, and spirited. His range must be to the front or to either side, but never behind. He must be regularly and habitually pleasingly governable and must know when to turn and keep his handler's course in view, and at all times keep uppermost in his mind the finding and pointing of birds for his handler.

I have to tell you that I would not know superior bird work if I stepped in it, so to speak. That's why the marshals have to keep telling the front-running members of the gallery to hold their horses, so they won't ride right through the superior bird work. But not many members of the gallery ever see the bird work. Most of them are way back in the rear engaging each other in impromptu races and occasional fistfights. Most of us gallery riders, in fact, do not come anywhere near meeting the Amesian Standard ourselves.

Two fine-looking dogs (almost all pointers these days, setters having largely been eclipsed) are unleashed. Their handlers ride along behind emitting lightly directorial yips. Then come the judges, steeped in Ame-sianism. Then the marshals (for years, the most prominent “Hold your horses” man was named Hamlet Yarbro—I hope someone said “Good night, sweet prince” at his funeral) and the registered nurse, who often has her work cut out for her. (From the herd.)

For the event's direct participants are followed by—depending on the weather—either a cloud of dust or a froth of muddy water, which encloses more people doing more different things on horseback—or muleback, in some cases—than you are likely to see anywhere else in our culture. Through creeks and thickets and bottoms and up and down hills we ride: a beautiful young woman riding bareback and barefoot (when it's warm); a man afflicted like Richard III loping smoothly although his spine is canted at a forty-five-degree angle to the right of his horse's; a soft-spoken Morgan Freeman-looking person named Rayfus Jenkins who has gold teeth all across the front and calls himself “the last of the black cowboys;” and a plethora of young bloods in the aforementioned Garth Brooks hats, some of them chasing runaway horses whose riders are nowhere to be seen.

Each morning or afternoon outing lasts three or four hours, and…

“Wait a minute, I don't want to give the impression that up around where the dogs are working, it is chaotic. Not there. No, there it is Ame-sian. A wild-eyed youth in a Van Halen T-shirt may ride to the fore and holler, “Let's turn our hats around back'ards and LET IT LOOSE!”

But if he does, a marshal (who may well be a pistol-packing deputy sheriff) will say something quietly to him and he will say, “Oh. I didn't recognize you there,” and the marshal will say, “You do now,” and that will be that.

At the end of the ride, however, nobody but the judges knows how the dogs have scored. And the judges aren't telling until after the last day, when they quietly announce which dog has proved most Amesian. Back in the gallery, all we hear of the competition is an occasional laconic rumor: “unproductive” or “dogs backed each other.” We do eventually learn which dogs have found how many coveys, but chances are that the gallery has shaken the earth so much that most of the birds have dispersed before the dogs got to them.

Until recent years, the gallery seldom amounted to more than a hundred or so enthusiasts. But what with increased local affluence and exposure to the Country Music Association awards show, or something, more and more people these days manage to show up eager to exercise their horses and to ride out from under their hats and then dash back to pick them up and maybe shoot a bird (in the figurative sense) at another rider who then starts yelling, “What's yourproblem?” to which the traditional answer is, “I ain't got no problem, what's yours?” And so on.

There's a little country church along the afternoon-course route; people congregate there to take a few nips among the tombstones; last year Nita Howell and Duane Lax got married in the churchyard, on horseback, and then “did what all field trialers do,” according to the Field Trial Review, “they finished the course.”

The National Field Trial Champion Association has been trying to come up with ways to limit the crowd. If it charged a fee for riding in the gallery or even for parking a van on the premises, the association would have to pay through the nose (so to speak) for liability insurance. As it is, the gallery is warned that it is riding at its own risk, which seems to please the gallery greatly. “It's a wonder,” Jerry Bolden observed last year, “that more don't get hurt than they do.”

Let me say that my figure-of-speech quest this year was no day at the beach. The first morning we rode, the temperature was 14 with a wind-chill factor of 6 below. And that was a wet, bone-chilling cold, my friends. We weren't riding appropriately gaited walking horses, we were riding Jerry's rodeo quarter horses, former bucking horses, in fact. They were used to rodeo turf and did not savor frozen mud. And they were used to going like lightning or not going at all. I was forever either urging my horse not to fall farther behind or restraining him from flinging me up and down, and he was forever responding to me the way people in France do when I try to convince them I am speaking to them in French.

At one point, Ruff and I shakily dismounted to ease our bladders. My feet were so frozen that I couldn't be sure when they hit the ground. As for my hands, I had to hold on to my horse's reins with the left one, and when I got my other glove off, my right hand was so numb that I couldn't tell whether I had ahold of my zipper or not. That hand was objectively icy, however, as I became aware when at length it blundered into contact with the requisite member—it, the latter appendage, proving quite capable of registering sensation, and…

Sometimes a dog will completely disappear in the middle of a field trial, according to Billy Fitch of Holly Springs, a co-owner of The Hitchhiker, the 1992 national champion. “Generally somebody will call to say they've found him—but only after he's been bred to every bitch in the county.”

(And I guess when he gets back home the other dogs ask him, “Where you been?” and he says, “Being bred.”)

But I'd like to see the man or dog who could be bred, outdoors, on a day like this one. I stood there shrinking, fumbling, coaxing—and Ruff's horse got loose, and I grabbed its tail, and my horse started moving in another direction, and if there is a figure of speech for such a crisis in “sustained demonstration of general behavior” (see Standard, Amesian) as I found myself caught up in then (“on the horns of a dilemma” does not suffice), I had just as soon you keep it to yourself.

At the beginning of that first morning ride, one of the marshals had come out with a good one: “This is the kind of weather,” he declared, “that separates the kindling from the cordwood.”

Moments before, Vereen had employed a simile I'd never heard: his horse, he maintained (not having ridden it yet), was “as sweet as an angel eating pie.”

Those references, however, were figurative. No actual firewood or angels were in the picture. I might say that I awoke the next morning feeling like cordwood, except that cordwood, so far as we know, does not ache all over.

That second morning we just parked on one of the roads that cross the course and watched the procession go by. “When you see top-notch dogs from the front, as they go by, they give you a look like “Hooo-eee, it's cold. Y'all seen any birds?”

But we rode again that afternoon. Got to get back on that horse.

That wasn't the expression I was looking for, though. I decided I'd better go to the extreme journalistic length of interviewing someone. Mr. Joe Hurdle, president of the National Field Trial Champion Association. I asked him whether the quality of the competing dogs had changed over the years.

“No,” he said. “Looks like there's a few good dogs and a lot of sorry ones every year. But, then, you see a dog, and you say, ‘That's the sorriest dog in the state,’ and—we had one here a couple of years ago. Bluff County Mike. “Wouldn't think he had a chance. But he went out in the last brace and went and won the thing.

“Every dog has his day.”

Dogs Whose Parents Got Out

People—and by people here I mean veterinarians and poodle owners—keep telling me, get a poodle. Not the little toy ones named Bijou or Etienne but the large standard ones, who all seem to be named something like Robert. These poodles, I am told, are smart, cordial, healthy, and brave. I believe it. “When I meet these poodles, I like them. Robert, and Howard, and Margaret. But I have been unable, so far, to find a very gratifying petting surface on a poodle. Where a poodle is fluffy, I can't get any traction, and where it's close-cropped it's like petting a nubbly carpet. I prefer a dog that is somewhere between a chicken and a baseball to the touch.

The most overexposed breed, in recent years, is the Jack Russell. Now I love a Jack Russell. Sixty-four ounces, or so, of concentrated dog. You would have to soak one for several generations in molasses or eggnog to plump it out into a Lab. Which is also a nice breed of dog, if you like a big smile on a dog, which I do, certainly, but a Lab is so on-the-nose. I like an edgier dog, which, heaven knows, a Jack Russell is. When I say Jack Russells are overexposed, I mean on television and in movies. Jack Rus-sells are irresistible, in photographs or on the screen. But to live with one is like living with a movie star who seems to be able to handle quite a lot of cocaine. You become Jack's sidekick, if, and this is a big if, you can keep up.

It comes down to this: every breed of dog has its pros and cons. So why not mix and match?

The most overrated dog is any purebred dog. Your purebred dog is an exception, but aren't a lot of the others sort of generic? You get a cairn terrier pup, you know it's going to be a cairn terrier. And let me say quickly that I have met some extremely engaging cairn terriers. But say you had a baby. Would you want to know already what it's going to look like when it grows up? “How about a Scottie child?” “I don't know; they're so chunky.” See what I mean?

And, of course, when a breed gets highly popular, it tends to become inbred and overbred. You have to get one from the right source, who I guess is somebody who weeds out the flawed ones, and who wants to be a party to that?

The most underrated dog is the hardy hybrid. Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all dogs are created different. Offspring of a pug, say, who's had the gumption to go find romance with an open-minded bichon frise. That's not illegal is it? In America? Or a poodle-beagle mix. You don't have to call it a poogle or a beadle, call it Buster.

Even richer mixtures are readily available. My own practice has always been to visit the animal shelter and check out the polymorph puppies snoozing and tumbling there. Half the pleasure will be in wondering how in the world the one you choose is going to turn out. Gerard Manley Hopkins put it best, in “Pied Beauty” (I had a dog once named Pie, who must have had as many different roots as the English language has):

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow…

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

Snakes Alive

Some day, I have been telling myself for years, I am going to visit the annual rattlesnake roundup in “Whigham, Georgia. Probably there is some big event that you have always been meaning to attend, but somehow every year you see in the paper that, for instance, Swine Time in Climax, Georgia, or Mule Day in Calvary, Georgia, or the Okra Festival in Bells, Tennessee, has slipped past you again. That's how it's been for me and the “Whigham roundup. I even wrote a poem, nigh onto forty years ago (oh, man), in the Atlanta Journal:

At the rattlesnake roundup in Whigham,

One man was scared when a ligham-

Ent moved in his leg.

With that he said, “Heg,

You round up snakes. I don't digham.”

That was sour grapes. I just never got around to going down there. Life intervenes, you know how it is. Then my friend Vereen Bell, the English professor, who grew up not far from “Whigham in Thomasville, Georgia, mentioned that he had never been to the rattlesnake roundup either. He had, as a young man, escorted Miss Gum Spirits of Turpentine to a dance. But that wasn't hunting snakes.

If I had spent as much time talking to people about investments as I have about what to do if a rattlesnake bites you, I would be a rich man today. I haven't had all that much to invest, but I haven't ever been bit by a rattlesnake, either, and yet I have kept right abreast of current thinking on what to do when it happens.

As a Boy Scout I was taught to cut little X marks on the bite holes and suck out the venom orally—as long as you didn't have any sores in your mouth—or with that little suction cup in your snakebite kit. It saddened me to throw that kit away. Eventually I gathered that the current thinking was, you weren't even supposed to suck out the venom, at all. End of an era.

But that didn't quench my interest in snakes. I had a boa constrictor around my neck once at a flea circus in Times Square, back in about 1961. Years later, I visited a snake and animal farm on a highway in Virginia just one day too late to watch the python eat his monthly piglet. I bet it was an awful sight. And I came so close. I couldn't wait around another twenty-nine days.

Timing is key. Vereen and I had in mind going to the rattlesnake roundup in Whigham last year, but we started looking into it too late. For eleven months, however, while to all the world he appeared to be focusing primarily on William Butler Yeats, Vereen was, in fact, bearing this year's roundup date in mind. That's what you have to do. At the New Year, he called the town hall of Whigham to ask about the roundup, and somebody there advised him that a Mr. James Cox was “most involved in the snake end of it.” I called Mr. Cox and he recommended his son, Joe Cox, but then Joe had to work, so it was his friend John Lodge who took us— Vereen and his wife, Jane, and me—out gathering diamondbacks on the day before the thirty-fourth annual roundup festivities.

John Lodge lives alone in his ancestral home—nice big old place, needs some work—with a cowbell on the front porch for a doorbell. But he didn't hear us ring it because he lives only in the back part of the house. We went around back there and found him. He has been rounding up rattlesnakes since he was a boy. In 1971, he caught the second biggest snake ever registered at the roundup, thirteen pounds four ounces, six feet long.

And, of course, you know how it is so often, one of the first things John told us was “This is a terrible day to hunt rattlesnakes.”

But we walked for four or five hours through stands of fifty-foot pines and through knee-high sawgrass, and although I can't claim to have rounded up a rattlesnake personally, I can tell you how to.

There had been torrential rains so that all the holes were full of water. “I've seen a hole full of water and there's a big puddle of water all around and the snake'll be sitting right at the top of that hole with his head just out of the water,” said John. “But they will go down into that water, too.”

Snakes hibernate in holes. That's why the roundup is held in January, when they're just beginning to stir but you know where they are. A snake won't dig his own hole. He will either get down into a stump hole—where a tree has been blown over, uprooted—or into an abandoned rat hole, or a gopher hole.

Now let's get clear what we're talking about, when we talk about gophers, down South. We're not talking about those rodents that the University of Minnesota names its athletic teams after. We're talking about land turtles, tortoises. Why are they called gophers? Well, according to a Florida man quoted by Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men, one day God was making animals down by the water's edge, and he made a turtle out of mud “and throwed it in de water and it swum on off. Devil says, ‘Ah kin make one of those things.’ ” And God argued that he couldn't, and the Devil insisted, so God told him to go ahead and try it, and the Devil went off by himself and made something out of highland dirt and showed it to God, and God said that was no turtle, and the Devil said yes it was too, and finally God said, well, he would blow the breath of life into it but it was no turtle, and he inspired it and threw it into the water several times and it kept swimming back out, and God said, “See, Ah told you dat wasn't no turtle,” and the Devil said, “Well, anyhow it will go for one.”

Or you may prefer the dictionary version. The rodent gopher is of the genus Ciberius, whereas the land turtle is of the genus Gopherus. The Latin name comes from the eighteenth-century word for a land tortoise, magopher, of obscure origin. May have something to do with gopher wood, an unknown material that the Bible says was used in building Noah's ark, but we just don't know. Anyway, reptile gophers were gophers before rodent gophers were.

“We used to have a pet gopher,” John Lodge said. “Go stomp our feet and he'd come out of his hole and we'd feed him. 'Course I was just a little boy, but you'd stand on him and he'd rise up and walk with you.”

Rattlesnakes and gophers seem to cohabit all right. “Lot of times,” said John, “to get to the snake, you got to get past the gopher.”

Here's how you do it: you take a fifteen-foot length of black three-quarter-inch plastic pipe, and you stop up one end of it with a twelve-gauge shotgun shell (because it fits exactly), and you make two holes in the pipe just above the shell, and you stick the stopped end of the pipe into the hole, and you poke and whirl, and, well, snake the pipe around until it gets ten feet or so deep, and then you put your ear to the unstopped end and listen.

If you hear a rattle (you'd recognize it from the movies, a shiver-inducing cross between a flutter and a sizzle) or a slithering noise, or a sound like a basketball being pumped up, you have gotten past the gopher and are listening to an irritated snake. The basketball noise is the snake swelling himself defensively. If there's no noise, you blow through the pipe and listen again.

But what happens when there's been a big rain is that the gophers and the snakes get up onto ledges—holes that the gophers dig off to the side and then upward, so that the water doesn't get into them. That's what makes for a bad day for hunting rattlesnakes. Also, you keep getting mud in your listening ear.

Vereen and Jane and I did get to hear a gopher breathe. “Way down under there. Sort of like a beachball being inflated.

Although John worked a lot of holes, hard enough to unclog every drain in Whigham, he couldn't pick up a single snake sound. But here's how we were going to catch them if we heard them: we'd stop up the hole with a rag and come back when the snake had come up to see why he didn't have any air. I say that's what we were going to do, because that method is legal. What isn't legal anymore is pouring just a bit of gasoline into the pipe so the fumes will bring the snake rushing out. This, however, is the traditional, reliable, and still most common method. Environmentalists say that while gas fumes won't kill rattlers, they may endanger other snakes down in there, or maybe the gophers. I don't know. I'm just telling you how it's done.

And if we had flushed a snake, John would have pinned its head to the ground, with his old Ping golf-club shaft with a hook welded onto the end of it. Then he would have grabbed the snake by the tail or got the hook around its body and flipped it into a plastic bucket.

A lot of people had been doing just that around Whigham. John himself had caught forty over the previous three weeks. Altogether 446 snakes were brought in the next day for the festivities out back of Whigham High School.

We passed up the crawfish fettuccine, the shark kabobs, and the alligator kabobs, and even what was announced on the loudspeaker as “some of the finest fried mullet in the world,” because we wanted to have room for fried snake. We waited in line half an hour for that.

It comes in segments. It tastes, yes, sort of like chicken—but maybe more like frog legs, which is to say like chicken wings if they were green. Here is the last part of the recipe contained in the official Whigham Rattlesnake Roundup program: “Place in oil heated to 400 degrees and cook until brown or until meat floats.”

People who brought in live snakes (dead ones don't count) were paid, by the Whigham Community Club, seven dollars a foot for diamond-backs, four dollars a foot for timber rattlers. Just a few snakes were cooked. Most of them were sold to a venom company: Bioactive, a one-man business operated by Ken Darnell in Portal, Arizona. Snake venom is useful not only in the manufacture of antivenom but also as a coagulant or reactant in various processes involved in pharmaceutical research. Darnell was on hand milking snakes—tossing them around briskly. He would take them back to Arizona where they can live a life of regular milking, like cows only less willing and more linear.

How Darnell got into venom was, “I was standing on a corner in Opp, Alabama, and somebody asked me if I wanted to milk a snake. After that, that's what I wanted to do. I started up my company because I was worried I couldn't support a wife, but it turned out nobody'd marry me anyway. The first venom business was started forty-five years ago by Bill Haast, who's eighty-three now, has been bit forty-seven times, and has a forty-year-old wife. In Punta Gorde, Florida.”

Darnell asserted that “the number of snakes brought in to roundups in Georgia is very small in proportion to the population of the state. But in Texas, where people are riding the roads all the time buying all the rattlesnakes they can, the snake population is threatened and the rodent population is expanding.”

“I never tried to feed a big rattlesnake but I have fed baby ones,” John Lodge said. “What I do, I go to Tallahassee and purchase little mice. Well, once I put a big old field rat in a cage with a snake and went to look later, and the snake and the rat were dead. Looked like the rat had tried to eat the snake and the snake had bit the rat, but I don't know.”

After a while, you got used to seeing big old fat six-foot rattlers hooked up out of red wooden boxes marked DANGER and deposited by the dozen into plastic garbage cans. But it was something to see. Little children would be yelling, “Ooo!”

I'm sorry to say there was no Rattlesnake Queen.

Now I've been to the rattlesnake roundup. On my deathbed, I won't be berating myself for never getting around to it. The way John Lodge's Uncle Sport berated himself, in conversation with John and his brother, some years after Sport allowed the family land to get away: “If I'd had one ounce of intelligence, you boys woulda been millionaires.”

It's good to be reminded of what all may be down in holes in the ground. While we were in Georgia, there was a story in the Atlanta paper: radar equipment had indicated that something, perhaps the body of a woman who had been mysteriously missing for nearly thirty years, lay beneath a certain Forsythe County garage's concrete floor. “There are items beneath the earth,” an investigator was quoted as saying, “items that are not consistent with the earth.”

But do you want to know what I saw that weekend that was stranger than snakes? The nearest newspaper to Whigham is the Cairo Messenger. This is the Messenger's motto, emblazoned on the masthead:

“The man who wandreth out of the way of advertising shall remain in the congregation of the dead.”

Babel to Byzantium

Igo back to the manual typewriter—so unassumingly connective and responsive it was, like an acoustic guitar. But I am not a cyber-moron, despite what you might hear from two different Microsoft voices named Anouk, three widely differing PC Connection voices named Keith and Steve and I forget, a nameless and particularly unpleasant anonymous voice of Toshiba “tech support,” and one actual bodily person at the authorized Toshiba service location (which, yes, was separated from my house by no more than thirty-six miles but also by a slippery, steep, winding goddamn mountain road), followed, later, by an utterly contradictory telephonic voice from that same location. Ten days and several rediagnoses later, there is only one thing clear: no one can say why my two-month-old laptop lost its mind. It has a new one now—for how long, who knows? And I am out $260.

You may say my problem is I'm Southern, so I expect service people to say, “Oh, Lord, I know how it is. Lemme see if I can't he'p you out a little bit with this thing.” Yes. I do think that would be a normal attitude for a service person to take. All I'm saying is let's talk. “When I am dealing with the machine itself, I can sort of force myself to accept that “computer help” is an oxymoron. As a writer composed of flesh and blood, I feel obliged to put things in terms a reader can understand. The machine addresses me in terms that it can understand: “Warning: You are about to download something that contains executable code.” If the machine were a poet, it would be Ezra Pound, not Billy Collins.

And so, when my computer abruptly stops doing what it is supposed to do, for reasons of its own, it not only disdains polite apology but informs me that “this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.” The first time I saw that on my screen, I braced myself to hear sirens. Then I thought about suing for slander. Now I know that “an illegal operation” or, how about this one, “a permanent fatal error,” is the uncivil equivalent of “Woops, sorry, I'm afraid you'll have to back up and start over.” Once on Amazon.com I accidentally clicked where asked to (“Check Out Our Advertisers! Click Here!”) and got this response: “The HTTP request was in an invalid format or contained invalid data. Reason: Invalid cookie checksum. For further assistance contact the server administrator.” I like that further assistance. I have no server administrator, and I resent the implication that I do, though not as deeply as I resented the message that jumped into my face once when I was trying to print out something that I myself, with my own two hands, and with absolutely no administration or assistance, had written. “You don't have permission,” the message said, “to modify this print job.” I understand the purpose of all this. It is to induce me to smash the machine with my fists and feet so that I have to buy another one. But when tech support is a fellow member of the human family, why should my not knowing any more about what's wrong with my computer than tech support does be grounds for tech support treating me like dirt?

As it happens, my own mind is capable of gathering, processing, storing, and retrieving disparate information. Pick a topic. Legs and feet, say. Just offhand, I can download a string (or pack, or bunch—unlike computer techs, I can roll with different terms) of recently acquired leg-and-foot-related items.

In Detroit, I heard of a man who had one leg so much shorter than the other that, as my informant put it, “he was known as Mister Step-and-a-half. And what a beautiful dancer! He had an operation to even them out, and after that he was never the same.”

At “Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia, I heard a sad story about Robert E. Lee's great grey horse Traveller. After Lee's death, Traveller had the run of the campus. Today the door to his stable is kept open, so that his ghost can—and, they say, does—return from time to time. Traveller died, I was told, in great prolonged agony because he stepped on a nail, got lockjaw, and nobody was man enough to put him down. The responsibility surely lay with Marse Robert's eldest son, Custis Lee, who succeeded him as president of the college. In that capacity, Custis was a doleful, barely functioning figurehead—that is well established—but you know that he knew that his daddy would have wanted him to put poor Traveller out of his misery.

I may not pervade the universe as thoroughly as Microsoft, but I do get around. At Bellagio, the exclusive retreat for writers, scholars, and artists on Italy's Lake Como, I learned something memorable about kangaroo legs. Joan and I hobnobbed there with a Mexican artist named Lourdes who painted bits of English roadside terrain. I don't mean she painted pictures of hedges and hillocks, I mean she painted vivid Latin colors on the hedges and hillocks themselves and took photographs of the result. Also in our group was a wonderful fellow named Habib who staged plays of Shakespeare and Molière, back home in Bhopal, with local actors who were illiterate. He would read out their parts to them, and they would take it from there improvisationally.

When it came time for Habib to give his presentation to the assembled residents at Bellagio, he gave a talk entirely in Urdu. Joan and I and our new friends Harold (avant-garde composer), Don and Doris (authorities on Gambia), and Teresa (Italian scholar) had plotted with Habib. As he spoke, we nodded and looked thoughtful, as if we were following his every word. Then we asked him complicated questions—Joan delivered hers in Japanese. The assembly listened gravely, until finally Habib confessed, in English, that what he had just been saying at length was that he hadn't gotten any work done on his autobiography because he couldn't stop looking out his window at the ferryboats going back and forth across Lake Como. The vista from that villa! Whenever anyone bids me behold anything through any window in the world for the rest of my life, I will be able to say, “You call that a vista?”

Habib's petite round wife, Moneeka, would sing, when urged, “All of Me,” very much like Ella Fitzgerald. Habib was eighty-something and tended to mutter and cough through his pipe, but we got to know him during an excursion to the town where Mussolini was arrested. (Il Duce tried to sink down into his greatcoat, but then someone cried, in Italian, “Melon head!”) As we got into a cab at the end of our stay, Habib held the door for Joan and murmured, “You should get those legs insured.”

But that's not the leg item I had in mind. A retired British seaman named Robert Brewster was at Bellagio with his wife, an American who studied Swedish immigration policy. In the course of seeing the world with the Royal Merchant Marine, Brewster told me, he took time off to live among Australian aborigines and study their ways.

And did he learn to play the didjeridoo? Indeed he didjeridid. But it was kangaroo hunting that he found most interesting. The bushmen set out on the hunt barefooted, he said, and armed only with boomerangs and knives.

“Can you run a kangaroo down?” Brewster asked them.

Of course not, they indicated with a look. But see, that was all right. That was not like how the computer experts reacted when I reached out for help. They reacted by hanging up (both Anouks) or giving me misery-prolonging advice that they did not expect either me or themselves to understand. The aborigines knew what they were doing. And they were willing to educate Brewster. All in good time.

“Can you knock a kangaroo out with a boomerang?” he asked.

Get serious, said the look they gave him.

A kangaroo hopped into sight.

Whoosh! The best marksman of the group flung his boomerang. It hit the kangaroo in the left leg. The kangaroo sped away more or less rightwardly. And what did the bushmen do but speed off in the opposite direction.

“Well,” said Brewster, “I was young and quite fit then, and the aborigines were small. I kept up, to be there when their curious strategy paid off. Obvious, really, when you think about it.”

I thought about it.

He gave me a look no doubt not unlike those the bushmen had given him. But that was all right, that was part of his narrative strategy; it was not a way of making me give up and go away, which is the hope of every “tech support” voice.

“A kangaroo hit in one leg,” Brewster went on, “will hop around in a circle. As he came around, they met him head-on and dispatched him with the knives.”

So what did I do with that information, you may ask. The next day at Bellagio, I learned that the universe is now believed to be in the shape of a doughnut. In a twinkling of infosynthesis, I wrote the following:

The universe is a doughnut, run

By a one-legged kangaroo.

Either counter- or clockwise, one

Or the other of the two.

So let's go rolling right along

Around with the kangaroo.

Don't be afraid of stepping wrong,

He is stumbling, too.

He knows that he can never stop.

His wound helps him to steer.

He learns anew with every hop

That everything's a sphere.

I put this forward not as a cosmological breakthrough. My work is my work; take it as it is. But must I do it on an instrument that disappears under my fingertips with no provocation? And when I appeal for help, must all technicians start with the assumption that I, never mind the instrument, am beyond redemption?

I know, many of the people we turn to for help are in Pakistan or somewhere. But as we have seen, language barriers can make communication more interesting.

Joan's late father, the inimitable Thomas Griswold, Sr., would enliven family gatherings with favorite recitations. One of his best was what he heard an infuriated Japanese man say to the train station agent in New Haven when his luggage had gone missing:

“It's mighty damn seldom about my bag. You no more fit to run station than to see fit. You can kiss my ass and I'm just the one to do it. That's all I hope.”

Maybe that's how I sound to tech support people. I know it's how they sound to me. So let's cherish that in one another. At the end of the day, we'll have material to share with folks at home.

P.S.

Now, after years of being urged to by my woman and my son, I have changed over to an iMac. It is better, more humanistic somehow. Every now and then my new writing console gives a great heaving sound—alarming, but I'm assured it's not a portent of incomprehensible trouble for me but rather of effort on the part of the machine, a summoning of strength that I need not worry about— it's a computer's problem, that the computer is dealing with. With a sigh it subsides, and lets me get on with my end of the job.

Augusta Un-Mastered

In Augusta, Georgia, you can get a world-class bagel and world-class grits on the same plate. And, of course, there's the Haunted Pillar. Another thing, it's a good town for listening to people talk. Last time I was in Augusta, I overheard a young woman on the phone saying, “Back when my brother was a thief?” and I couldn't help lingering to hear her go on:

“He broke into these people's house through the kitchen, and they were home. There was still food warm on the stove. He peeked in the living room, saw the people eating dinner, watching TV. My brother just sat down in the kitchen and fixed himself a plate. He didn't even get caught, that time. Mama said, ‘That's my boy. He a sweet thief. Steal the sweetness out of cake and it won't fall.’ ”

If it's golf you're interested in, when you're in Augusta, by all means drive by the Augusta National Country Club. There's a wall around it, but I'll tell you how to look for the gate. After you've had your boiled-on-the-premises bagel and your stone-ground grits at Mally's, “Where North and South Meet in Perfect Hominy,” head west on Broad Street till it turns into “Washington, and go on past the sign that says REVEREND ANGEL, READER PRAYER FOR HAPPINESS SUCCESS LOVE ADVICE IN BUSINESS MARRIAGE SPIRITUAL LOVE—but don't go too far west, or you'll wind up in Martinez (pronounced Mar-tin-ez), Georgia, where the road is lined with a lot of dining establishments that are not unique. You know, there's a drive-through Italian place and a Chinese superbuffet and a Hooters, and several places where you can get all the buffalo wings and chicken fingers anybody could ever want. It's no wonder you never see a buffalo that can fly anymore, or a chicken that can pick guitar.

If you get out that far, turn around quick and head back on “Washington, and now you're looking up to your left—you'll see a little cinderblock place with a sign on it that says MASTERS CORNER. MASTERS OF CONVENIENT SERVICES. ALL YEAR TANNING, OPEN M-. At least that's what it said when I was in town last. I don't know whether “Open M-” means the all-year tanning is available just on Monday, or whether a W and an F may have fallen off the sign. And next to Masters Corner is a parking lot and on the other side of the parking lot is “The Master's Plaza,” which used to be a shopping center featuring a Piggly Wiggly but has been transformed into a Whole Life Ministry, Hispanic Fellowship and Christian Bookstore. The bookstore doesn't have just books—I found a T-shirt there with a big picture of an iguana on it that said “Iguana Be More Like Jesus.” The iguana is a big, beautiful green thing.

And so is Augusta National. You'll see the gate to it there on your right, across the road from Masters Corner and the Master's Plaza. They won't let you in without a badge, but I have been there in the past, for the Masters Tournament, and I can tell you that just about everything is green. And mannerly. Though they do say in town that at the last couple of Masters some guy was going up to women in the galleries and asking them, “Do you want to have your nipple pierced? For free?” And all he was after, really, was a chance to see their breasts.

Which is certainly not reflective of the general tone of the Masters. The Augusta National folks may not even know about the nipple man, but he is a matter of concern to Augusta's reputable tattooing, piercing, and scarification parlors, like Allan Bates's. He runs several of them, including Rage Tattoos, which he says is “across the street from my ex-wife,” but we were talking in his Broad Street parlor, Tribal Urge, which is catty-corner from the Haunted Pillar, when he told me about this guy—who apparently doesn't even know how to pierce nipples right. But I guess a lot of women think, well, anybody who comes up to you at the Masters ought to know what he's doing. And then they're sorry.

According to Allan. Whose wife, Jill, posed for us out in front of the Haunted Pillar in a spiked bra and black thigh-high boots and a G-string, because we wanted to be sure her dragonfly-and-tribal-markings tattoos would show (she used to dance naked at the Discotheque lounge there a few doors down on Broad, but she got fired because of the tattoos, which is like firing somebody for the roses in her cheeks). The Haunted Pillar is fascinating to me as a student of history and the supernatural, but just in and of itself, standing there on the street corner physically, it doesn't look like much, in a photograph, without Jill in front of it. And, well, the police came.

Four patrolmen and a paramedic. A neighbor had complained of indecent exposure, which the police (I'd say reluctantly) had to concede was not the case, even though it was Sunday morning, because, as one of the officers put it, Jill's “indecent parts are covered.” But when I tried to explain to the first officer who arrived on the scene that the reason we needed somebody pretty in the picture was to compensate for the fact that the Haunted Pillar itself just looks like a slightly out-of-whack stack of rounded bricks covered with cement, he just kept looking at me funny.

I thought maybe he was dumbstruck to hear anybody cast anything resembling an aspersion, even purely on visual grounds, about such a firmly established landmark in its own hometown, as if I would come to “Washington, D.C., and suggest that the Lincoln Memorial didn't work visually without some skin to spice it up. But then the other officers and the paramedic told me, “He's from California,” and took him aside and filled him in on the Haunted Pillar.

Local people tend to call it the Whipping Post. They tend to say that the reason there is a curse on it—anybody who touches it will die—is that it's what remains of the old slave market.

But that is not the official story. According to a plaque that was placed in the median strip of Broad Street at Fifth by the “Reverend Pierre Roberts Chapter of the National Colonial Dames XVIII Century” in 1996:

“On this site stood The Lower Market …a center of agricultural and livestock trade. A freakish cyclone blasted the structure in 1878 and local citizens moved the only column left standing to its present location…. According to local tradition, a wandering ‘exhorter’ predicted that anyone who pulled down the pillar would be struck dead by lightning.”

The pillar is 150-some-odd years old now, and nobody has pulled it down yet. Some people do make a point that they are not afraid of it. Allan Bates says, “Give me a high-track D9,” which I believe is a form of earth-moving heavy equipment, “and that pole is toast,” and some people may mess around with it for religious reasons. I was talking to a man who works right across the street from the Pillar, in Bill's Package Shop, which has a big mural featuring Bobby Jones and the Masters painted above it, and this man told me, “There's people out here constantly, not constantly but every day, there'll be several of 'em, climbing on it. Church groups. It's one of their requirements. I don't know what church—maybe it's not church groups, but sometimes they'll all be on bikes, and sometimes they'll all be in coats and ties.”

As he was saying this, we were standing out in front of Bill's, where we were approached by a young man who looked like he might have taken advantage of the “Suit Deal” advertised by a haberdashery a few blocks up Broad (“Starting at $119.95. Suit, Shirt, Tie Set, Shoes, Socks”). He offered to sell us a whole basket of lotions and bath oils for twelve dollars, “and this bottle here alone,” he said, “would cost you twelve dollars in the mall.” When we said we weren't interested right then, he said, “Well, to be fair, I'm going to show you this teddy bear, it plays a tune, the battery is included, and in the mall it would cost—” We told him we weren't interested. He went on off. A man who had pulled up in a 1981 Plymouth got out and came up to us and said, “That boy trying to sell you something?” We said yes. He chuckled. “Somebody always got a deal on Broad Street,” he said. We chuckled. He said, “I've got car radios, X-ray detectors, and triple-X movies, got 'em in the trunk.”

We said we weren't interested. He got back in his car and drove off. Bill Prince, the Bill of Bill's, came outside. I asked him about the Haunted Pillar. “A man came in here and told me, ‘I'm gonna knock it down,’ and he went to a pawn shop and came back with a brand-new sledgehammer. I called the police—he went to jail and I got the sledgehammer.”

You never know what kind of transaction you might get involved in on Broad Street or what you're liable to see. Buffalo Bill Cody paraded down Broad with his four wild Indians in 1878, bearing aloft the alleged scalp of Chief Yellow Hair, which he claimed to have taken in single combat. Bill was announcing the arrival in town of his Wild West Show, which included a melodrama in which he rescued his sister from the evil clutches of the dread polygamist Brigham Young. In 1882, Oscar Wilde appeared at the Opera House, looking out into space with hand on hip and foot out-thrust and holding forth on such topics as the necessity of letting children use fine china at an early age so they would appreciate beauty. Try finding a show like that in the mall at any price.

Malls that arose in outlying areas like Martinez nearly killed the downtown back here about twenty years ago, because lots of the independent mom-and-pop stores, many of which had been Augusta fixtures for years, moved out to the new malls, then couldn't compete with the chains out there, and went under. But it's a tough old Broad, and lately it has been coming back. You walk down the street and it's not all green, no. It's like being out in the woods somewhere; you see dead things, and things that are still going strong, and new green things pushing up around them—

You might well see James Brown, resurgent. He lives in Augusta, because Augusta is where he grew up—shining shoes and dancing, clicking his brushes like castanets, on the corner of Broad and Ninth, which is now the corner of Broad and James Brown Boulevard. (Though, typically of downtown Augusta's layeredness, the latter street has three different names, all of which are still represented, one on top of the other, by three street signs: James Brown Boulevard, Ninth Street, and Campbell Street.) The Godfather of Soul's radio station, where one of his daughters and one of his daughters-in-law work, is on that corner now, and the name of that station is the only name that a station owned by James Brown ought to have: WAAW.

Here's another example of Broad Street's layers: the Soul Bar, which was voted the number-one singles spot in Augusta last year by the readers of Augusta magazine (number two was “Church”). It's a great space for dancing and hanging out, with the original twenty-two-foot-high pressed-metal ceiling and lots of musical memorabilia on the walls and classic seventies video games. The proprietor, a Honduran-American deejay named Coco (“Cuthbert, originally,” he says, “but…”) Rubio, rented it for $250 a month from the Historic Augusta foundation a couple of years ago, and he got a “façade grant” to restore the outside, and he scraped together $10,000 and now he owns the building. From time to time James Brown stops by, and every night at midnight they play his songs. There is a Soul Bar sign out front, of course, but the façade also still says SAFETY LOAN OFC, DISCOUNT PAWN, ZIPPERS REPAIRED, only the UNT OF DISCOUNT is painted over.

Broad Street has golf stuff, too. Check out Neil Ghingold Antiques at Twelfth and Broad—but you have to knock at the door to get Neil's attention because “wholesale's always locked to the public,” he says, and the place is primarily the wholesale clothier establishment he inherited from his father: there are stacks and stacks of men's slacks for $19.98— “we're wholesale,” Neil says, “but we are flexible to the point where we don't mind accommodating you with a couple pair of pants retail, but you do have to pay the tax.” Other clothing, too—I scored a package of twelve pairs of socks, only nominally irregular, for twelve bucks. And arrayed all around the schmattes are collectables (“My wife says she always knows where I am,” says Neil—“out chasing junk”), from a 1917 book Diseases of the Dog and How to Feed to dozens of 1920s hickory-shaft mashie niblicks and brassies and cleeks and pitchers and jiggers, some of them left-handed, all polished up and labeled, for $25 to $95 apiece, and several Masters caddie hats, and a 1914 Goodrich “All-One” iron whose loft you can adjust by loosening or tightening a sleeve down on the hosel. For that last item, mint, Neil is asking $2,200.

Moving along: “And did you have to break your money down into little yens and things?” I overheard a waitress asking a friend of hers who had been in Korea.

“Won.”

“One?”

“Won.”

“Oh, Marcie Lee, honestly. One what?”

The ground of Augusta is bright red clay. Alongside the downtown runs the tree-lined Savannah River, itself a nice strong hazel color, on which races between everything from two hundred-mph hydroplanes to rubber ducks are staged in the spring and summer. Alongside the river is an esplanade, originally a path worn by mules towing barges, on which, by all accounts, young couples are able to stroll in perfect safety at all hours of the night. Just inland from the river is a nine-mile canal, currently under restoration, that dates back to 1845 and leads to fishing holes, wildlife, and the 176-foot chimney that is the last vestige of the Confederate Powder Works, which turned out more than two million pounds of gunpowder during the Civil “War.

But there's plenty of history just along Broad. Many of the storefronts are nineteenth-century commercial townhouses (shops with apartments upstairs) of the same style found in Philadelphia. Many of these have been restored as artists’ studios, but others are still surviving doggedly as, for instance, New York High Style Mens Wear, which offers a complete-ensemble deal twenty dollars pricier than the $119.95 one at Our Shop Mens Wear. (Across the street, just before Thanksgiving last year, you could get an entire living-room suite for $788, or $39 a month, with a free turkey thrown in.)

Many of these Broad Street buildings have been or are being restored by Bryan Haltermann, a student of architecture and real estate who comes from an old Augusta family and whose firm also owns the Lamar Building, a seventeen-story 1913 office building with a Doric portico and a combination of Commercial Gothic and Italianate details cast in terra-cotta, that has been through several bankruptcies and sports at its pinnacle “The Toaster.” That's what local folks call the two-story penthouse commissioned by State Senator Eugene Holley—”a two-and-a-half-million-dollar ego trip,” as Haltermann puts it—in 1973. I. M. Pei's firm designed the Toaster—all angular slabs of marble and glass. It looks like a postmodernesque party hat on the head of a late-Victorian banker. But that wasn't enough for Senator Holley. As what he called “a Christmas present to Jesus,” Holley had the Toaster topped off with a thirty-five-foot illuminated cross. But then the senator went to jail and the cross was taken down. Pei never got paid. “Here's how slick Bryan is,” says a friend of his. “He wrote his Harvard Business School thesis on why the building's [subsequent refinancing] deal wouldn't work, and then he bought it.”

Then there's the Commerce Building, which is haunted. The elevators go up and down sometimes with nobody in them. And every business that people try to set up in it fails. Which is understandable since its address is 666 Broad, the sign of the beast.

I know that from talking with the Bateses, the tattoo folks. Allan's father, Aaron, can tell you a lot of stories. “My father was a millionaire; he didn't believe in tattooing, or anything else. But one day I saw a man coming into his bank wearing a short-sleeve shirt and sleeves tattooed on his arms—the coolest thing I ever saw. From then on, when they tried to get me to do algebra in school, I'd say, ‘Naw, I want to draw on myself.’ We were living in Japan when Allan was a seven- or eight-year-old kid, and I took him to meet one of the masters, Mr. Nakano, better known as Horioshii III. Allan was more interested at the time in parlaying my cigarettes on the black market to get American candy—”

“And I was good at it, too,” says Allan.

“—but I made notes, and years later, after his mother and I were divorced, he found those notes in the attic—

“Yeah,” says Allan. “I found a lot of notes you made.”

“My downfall,” says Aaron, “has been writing things down.”

Have father and son ever done any skin art on each other? “Yeah,” says Aaron, “once. Both of us looked at the other and said, ‘You're too heavy-handed. You can't do me anymore.’ ”

Another thing I learned from the Bateses is that one of the new wrinkles in body modification is horns. At first, people were implanting stainless steel, nylon, Teflon nubs, and gradually replacing them with larger ones as the skin grew around them, “but the way it's leaning now,” says Allan, “is to take a piece of bone material, or horn material from an animal, which will adhere to the skull and become a legitimate horn. Anybody who's serious about implants now is going toward organic materials.”

Has anyone ever asked for a tattoo of the Masters logo? No. It probably wouldn't be legal anyway—the Augusta National people are very protective of their copyright. But the Treybon! restaurant, located in a former heavy-equipment warehouse on Reynolds Street, between Broad and the river, sells a T-shirt with a logo that includes the outline of the United States (“which is pretty hard to copyright,” observes Steve Mitchell, the proprietor of Treybon!), a star where the Masters logo has a golf ball, and a chili pepper instead of a flagstick.

Treybon's décor features a NO CHIPPING PLEASE sign from Augusta National and a flag from the eighteenth green. Also, an old beaver skin and “just mostly things people's wives wouldn't let them hang up at home,” says Steve.

The most famous barbecue place in town is owned by the mayor, Larry Sconyers, but I didn't care for the sauce—its dominant ingredient seemed to be burnt cookie crumbs or something. Treybon! is the place to go for gumbo, Brunswick stew, red beans and rice, chili, and, especially, barbecue ribs and sandwiches. Steve gathered his recipes and techniques during years of research around the South back when he was a traveling medical-equipment salesman. Once near Tunica, Mississippi, on his way from Memphis to New Orleans, he saw a sign on the side of the road, painted on a piece of board, BBQ and an arrow. He was running late, but he couldn't resist. He drove off up a side road a couple of miles until he came to an old church “with six or seven cars parked outside, and nine or ten guys, all black—there was smoke coming up from the pit and they were chopping meat on big plywood tables. I had a case of beer—I traveled with beer all the time—and we started talking. It was a Thursday. They said they were going to serve the barbecue on Saturday.

“I said, ‘You're going to wait two days?’ Man looked at me and said, ‘That's just like white folks—always want to serve green meat.’ ”

See, they were chopping the meat while it was still hot, and working in a mixture of spices while they chopped it, so the flavors would set in while the meat cooled. And then, when they heated it up again on Saturday: seasoned meat. Meat with overtones and undertones.

Augusta is not a green town.

Atlanta Explained

This appeared in Sports Illustrated just before the 1996 Olympics.

So you're going to Atlanta for the Olympics! Well, Atlantans are traditionally hospitable folks, happy to oblige visitors who have questions about the city. If you're thinking of going to Atlanta for the Atlantans, however, this is hardly the time. You may well not meet any, except in passing as they escape Atlanta for the Olympics’ duration. And since they will be busy brushing the Olympic construction dust off their clothes and counting all the yen and Deutschmarks they've received for renting out their homes, they may not be ideally disposed to explain Atlanta to you. In fact, they may be more inclined to ask you questions, like “How would you feel if people came to your town and wrapped a 1,996-foot-long weenie around and around inside your Georgia Dome and called it the official Olympic hot dog and then had to throw it away—no one knows where—because it went bad? Where can you throw away a 1,996-foot-long weenie?” Or, “Who would've thought that the capital of Georgia would become—even before the Olympics—the kind of town whose best-known residents include Elton John and John Ehrlichman?”

The truth is, anyone who thinks he can come up with any kind of unified theory of Atlanta hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty or thirty years. I grew up in the Atlanta area, and I went back recently to have a look around and ask Atlantans whether there is any there there. The most frequent response I got was perhaps most succinctly put by a young woman standing outside a club called Oxygen at two o'clock one morning:

“Oh, you're looking for the there here. Let me know if you find it.”

On that note, I open the floor for questions.

Will I be able to understand the Southern lingo? Should I try to speak Southern myself?

When I flew into Atlanta last month, the first voice I heard informed me, in an entirely unregional accent, “Please excuse the inconvenience. The train system is not completely operational. Please observe signs over the train entrance door for information involving train destination. The trains should depart at approximately ten-minute intervals.” This was followed, after a just-under-five-second interval (I timed it), by the same announcement. Altogether, as I walked a good mile and a half and saw no signs over train entrance doors, I heard that announcement thirty-nine times. I dare say the airport train system has been fixed and that voice has been throttled by now.

The next voice I heard was that of my cab driver, old reliable source of grassroots inside-skinny. I said to him, “You looking forward to the Olympics?” He made a kind of incredulous noise, like: Hoonh! After a long pause, I chuckled and said to him, “Does everybody ask you that?” He didn't make any noise at all. After we drove in silence for quite a while, I asked him where he was from. “Ghana,” he said.

The next voice was that of the man who took my bags at the hotel. He was quite friendly. I couldn't quite place his accent. He was from Eritrea.

The phone in my room woke me the next morning.

“Umf ?” I said.

A sprightly, businesslike female Southern voice said, “Information?”

“No,” I said.

I hung up. It rang again.

“Yuhf?” I said.

“I figured it out,” said the same voice. “You're in room 1212, aren't you?”

“Uh …uh-huh, but—”

“See, I was trying to dial New York information, but I forgot to dial ‘9’ first, so the only numbers that registered were 1212, which is your room. See? One, and the area code for New York…”

“Where are you?”

“In another room. I'm from Charlotte, but I live in L.A. now. You sounded so abrupt, I thought I'd call and explain. Bye.”

The next person I talked to was another cordial bellman. He sounded local. He complimented me on the cap I was wearing. “Thanks,” I said. “It's from Nepal.” This seemed to strike no chord of recognition, so I said, more specifically, “Kathmandu.” He gave me a very strange look. After a moment, it occurred to me that he might think I was trying on some kind of bizarre hepcat jive talk with him—as if I might be expecting him to answer, “Man, a cat sho nuff do.” What he did answer, politely enough but a bit distantly, was “I know that's right.”

I proceeded to the public library. The quite helpful research librarian's face was decorated by what I took to be tribal tattoos. Turned out she was from Namibia originally.

All this was before the Olympics. So if I were you, I wouldn't try to fit into Atlanta culture by addressing everyone you encounter as fall. For one thing, you may have read a recent how-to-get-by-in-Atlanta article in which it was alleged that fall is singular and the plural is falls. This is sheer misinformation. Here is a rare opportunity to be definitive about a vaguely Atlanta-related point, and I am not going to let it get away: fall is always plural, although sometimes it may sound singular. For instance, someone may ask a waitress, “What kind of pie y'all got today?” That fall refers to the restaurant, as a collection of different people. To be sure, there is such a word as fall's: the plural possessive, as in “Y'all's little boy sure is cute,” addressed to a couple. Oh, don't worry about it. If you didn't grow up using fall, I'd stay away from it. Also, I wouldn't go around asking local people what grits are, or is. To someone who grew up eating grits, that is about as engaging an icebreaker as “What are potatoes?” would be to an Irishman.

Chicago is the city of big shoulders, New York is the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, Pittsburgh is a shot-and-a-beer-town, Los Angeles has no more personality than a paper cup—what is the word on Atlanta?

In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.

Void? Like empty void?

Well, I'm taking a bit of biblical license. But what more appropriate place to quote the Bible and to take license than Atlanta? Michael Musto, gossip columnist for New York's Village Voice, once wrote after a visit to Atlanta, “On Sunday mornings, the whole city shuts down for—get this— church.” This overstates the case considerably, but if you ask an Atlantan what he thinks of, say, Deion Sanders, he may well reply, “My mama and Deion go to the same church. And Deion's right regular.”

There are more houses of worship in Atlanta, in fact, than there are table-dancing establishments. Which is saying something, for Atlanta is the table-dancing-establishment capital of, at least, the Southeast. When a big church-going town is also a mecca for the kind of guy who likes to show what a class act he is by not laying a hand on—or even ogling, really—a succession of chipper if unsultry young women whom he is paying to gyrate stark naked at his table, within an inch of his nose, well, void may be a bit strong. But a connection missing somewhere is not.

What might be this connection that's missing?

Southern towns—Memphis, New Orleans, Natchez—generally exude a sense of sin, guilt, loss: the blues. Atlanta had been Atlanta for only eighteen years when General Sherman burned it to the ground in 1865. Not having accrued much karma, it started over from scratch. It has kept on starting over ever since. Atlanta wakes up to a new world every morning. You'd never catch Atlanta calling itself the City of Brotherly Love, because then it would always be letting itself down, like Philadelphia. Atlanta is slicker than that: it's the City Too Busy to Hate. You can always find some substantiation for a slogan like that. For instance, while it is true that one aspect of Atlanta's busy-ness is a beehive of violent street crime, it is also true that Atlanta has a black woman police chief.

You seem to be suggesting that Atlanta is predominantly image. Isn't it the home of major institutions?

Somehow home doesn't seem quite the word. There's the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a universal value that the city cherishes much more than it did the man when he was alive. There's Jimmy Carter's center, which settles disputes in other countries. There's the Cable News Network, which is global, not local. There's Coca-Cola, which wants to teach the world to sing. There are the World Champion Braves, which the city shares with everyone who is hooked into the Turner Broadcasting System. There's the Centers for Disease Control, which is no more indigenous than chronic fatigue syndrome. Atlanta prides itself on having just about everything that any other American city has—as opposed to anything that other American cities don't have. Then there's the Atlanta airport. Do you have any sense of being anywhere in particular when you're in the Atlanta airport? No, you have a sense of being in Connecting-Flight Purgatory. Disembodied voices escort you from concourse to concourse. There used to be a sign in that airport proclaiming,

WELCOME TO ATLANTA, A WORLD-CLASS, MAJOR-LEAGUE CITY. That was tacky enough to exude a certain local color, so it came down.

Currently the most telling symbol of Atlanta's globality-wish is at the intersection of Peachtree Street and International Boulevard. (International Boulevard used to be Cain Street, but the mark of Cain has been expunged.) On two of the corners of this intersection are a Planet Hollywood, with its neon rotating-Northern-Hemisphere sign, and a Hard Rock Cafe, with its SAVE THE PLANET slogan. But you can find Planet Hollywoods and Hard Rocks in lots of cities. Only in Atlanta, at the intersection of Peachtree and International, can you find a globe—a flat globe, to be sure—set into the pavement. Covering the whole junction of the two streets is a big circle, within which various continents are depicted by different-colored pavement blocks. Even when this artwork was new, however, there was no way to get enough perspective on it from ground level to make out what it depicted, and now that traffic has been passing over it for a few months, you can only just faintly tell that it isn't all dark grey. This was supposed to be Ground Zero of Olympic Atlanta. And so it is. The world is there, and yet, it's not.

You're not denying that Atlanta is a world-class city, are you?

Certainly not. It is the city, after all, of the Atlanta Olympics—whose symbol is a little blue blobomorphic condundrum. The Whatizzit, this symbol was called originally; but the What and the it have fallen away. “Izzy is a teenager,” according to official Olympic postcards (a teenager, note: neither childlike nor mature), “who lives in a fantastic world found only inside the Olympic flame.” Izzy is without form, and void.

And Atlanta was this way from the beginning?

In 1837, somebody drove a stake in the ground: Zero Mile marker, where the terminus of the Western and Atlantic Railroad would be. Three miles to the west was a tavern, seven miles to the north was the Chattahoochee River, six miles to the east was the town of Decatur, but right there where the stake was, was nothing but the stake. Atlanta in its genesis was called Terminus.

Then, for a while, it was Marthasville, named for the governor's daughter, Martha Lumpkin. That might be a better name for the Izzy: the Lumpkin.

Then people started putting in improvements like board floors in the buildings, and it was felt that the town growing up around the train station ought to have a higher-flown name, so somebody decided upon the feminine form of Atlantic (an ocean that lay some three hundred miles to the east). Atlanta.

Polls show that many people confuse it with Atlantic City, New Jersey. Atlanta is known as the Gateway City of the South—a gate is neither here nor there. Atlanta used to call itself the Phoenix City, because it arose from the ashes, like the phoenix, after Sherman burned it. You'd think the phoenix would be sufficiently representative of flux to serve as the Atlanta Olympic symbol, but if you look at drawings of that mythical bird you'll notice that it has a definite, prickly shape. Then, too, there is another city in America called Phoenix (which never claims to have risen from the ashes like Atlanta), and just over the Georgia state line there's a town called Phenix City, Alabama, which was known as “the wickedest city in the U.S.” until reformers cleaned up everything about it but its spelling.

Aren't there any bits of raffish Atlanta historical lore you could pass on?

Yes, but it's remarkable how often impermanence and insubstantiality crop up. Atlanta's first jail was a twelve-foot-square log cabin. If there were enough prisoners inside, they could all get together and dump it over on its side and walk out. Once, when the inmate population could not quite manage this, friends of the incarcerated came along and lifted the jail straight up in the air so everybody could crawl out. In the early days, there were two bad neighborhoods, Murrell's Row and Snake Nation, where gambling, cockfights, and brawling went on. The denizens of these neighborhoods formed a political party, the Free and Rowdy Party. They were opposed by the upstanding business community: the Moral Party. The Morals eventually carried the day by burning the bad neighborhoods down, leaving a new void to develop. One of Atlanta's earliest developers—for whom Williams Street was named— was a sort of proto-Izzy. His name was Ammi Williams, and he went around saying, “If I'm not Ammi, then who am I?”

So where do we go in Atlanta to see Tara and the other historic buildings?

There is nothing vaguely resembling Scarlett O'Hara's ancestral home in the Atlanta area.[*] Anything antebellum Sherman burned. In the summer of 1865, a Northern visitor to the city recorded his impressions: “Everywhere were ruins and rubbish, mud and mortar and misery. The burned streets were rapidly rebuilding, but meantime, hundreds of inhabitants, black and white, made homeless by the destruction of the city, were living in wretched hovels which made the suburbs look like a fantastic encampment of Indians or Gypsies.”

Certainly Atlanta has pulled itself together since then. But it keeps tearing itself back down. Recently Susan Taylor, a lifetime Atlantan, was showing me around town. I asked her what was going up at a particular construction site. “Who the hell knows?” she said. “Atlanta's been in reconstruction since Sherman, I've been living here about that long, and I've been bitching about it all that time, and I'll keep on bitching about it till I get the hell out.”

Atlanta has new buildings the way other Southern locales have kudzu. Some of these buildings look like scarabs, some have a sort of tattersall look, some look like cinder blocks set on end, some are mirrored slabs. Many of them were designed by noted local architect-developer John Portman, whose Hyatt Regency Hotel originated, in 1967, the atrium, or lobby-all-the-way-to-the-roof, style, which spread like wildfire not only through Atlanta but to cities-on-the-go around the country. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas describes the Portman atrium as “a container of artificiality that allows its occupants to avoid daylight forever— a hermetic interior, sealed against the real …the cube hollowed out to create an invasive, all-inclusive, revealing transparency….”

Atlanta doesn't have kudzu?

Here and there, in less-developed areas, but Atlanta is one of the few Southern areas where kudzu has a hard time putting down roots, because today's less-developed area is likely to become tomorrow's new cluster of tall office buildings. (“There is no center,” the aforementioned Koolhaas says of Atlanta as a whole, “therefore no periphery.” There is, however, a mall called Perimeter Center.) Atlanta has the Kudzu Cafe, which is a sort of fern bar, only the dominant fern is artificial kudzu. “I'll be taking care of you for the rest of your dining experience,” says a waiter, with tongue in cheek or perhaps not. The décor is arty photographs of things Southern: a rooster pecking on a watermelon rind, a pool hall wall with “Yo Baby Yo Baby Yo” painted on it. The food is quite good in an upscale-semi-Southern-eclectic sort of way: delicious black-eyed pea soup cheek by jowl with julienne of vegetables. The cornbread, un-Southernly fluffy and sweet, will never make anybody holler “Yo Baby Yo Baby Yo.” The doors to the men's room stalls have outhouse-inspired crescent moons cut into them.

How about peach trees? The streets are lined with peach trees, right?

No. Peach trees are not indigenous to the area. There are, famously, thirty-some-odd different streets with Peachtree in their names, and there's a Peach, a Peachford, a Peachwood, and five different Peach-crests. But that's not what's confusing about driving in Atlanta.

What's really confusing is this sort of thing: Atlanta's principal north-south noninterstate arteries are Peachtree and Piedmont. They start out, parallel, four blocks apart, headed northeast. Then they go due north for a while but only three blocks apart. Then West Peachtree suddenly arises to take over Peachtree's course, and Peachtree jogs to the right so it's only two blocks from Piedmont. Then West Peachtree disappears into Peachtree again. Then Peachtree veers to the northwest and Piedmont to the northeast so that they spread farther and farther apart, and then they swing back together and cross each other, Piedmont going off to the northwest and Peachtree to the northeast. Along the way they both cross Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Tenth streets (there is no First or Second), but neither of them crosses Ninth. Peachtree crosses Eleventh and Twelfth; Piedmont intersects with little spurs called Eleventh and Twelfth that aren't continuous with the Eleventh and Twelfth that Peachtree crosses. Peachtree crosses Thirteenth, Piedmont doesn't. After Fourteenth and Fifteenth, which both Peachtree and Piedmont cross, Piedmont crosses no more numbered streets. Peachtree crosses a couple of broken squiggles called Sixteenth and Seventeenth, but it manages to skip Eighteenth and Nineteenth; there are no Twentieth through Twenty-fourth streets. Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-eighth make faint impressions on Peachtree. There is no Twenty-seventh.

There is a Boulevard Drive that's perpendicular to Memorial Drive, and a Boulevard Drive that's parallel to Memorial Drive. And there's something about Monroe Drive—this is hard to explain, but if you stay on Monroe Drive long enough, you find yourself on Piedmont crossing Monroe Drive at a point where you were twenty minutes ago.

The interstates that encircle and crisscross the metropolitan area are, of course, less confusing. Rush hour on them, however, is no time to be in a hurry. Even without an Olympics in town.

What's the weather going to be like?

Atlanta's is one of the finest climates in the United States year-round. Except for this time of year. The last time I was in Atlanta in July, I looked out from my air-conditioned room and noticed a nice light sprinkling rain, so I ventured outside. Instantly I was seized by the sensation that I had become a freshly baked muffin, piping hot clear through except here and there on the surface, where, as the tiny raindrops hit me, I felt flecked by spritzes of mint. It was an interesting feeling, but hardly conducive to enjoyment of outdoor sports.

You don't make Atlanta sound very inviting.

Let me state my bias. I am from Decatur. People in Decatur will tell you that Decatur could have been Atlanta, but folks didn't want the smoke and the noise of the railroad, not in our backyard. When Terminus was founded, a Decaturite was quoted as saying, “The train don't start nowhere, and it don't go nowhere.”

Now Decatur is part of metropolitan Atlanta. But Decatur has something that Atlanta doesn't: a focal point, the Decatur Square, with the old courthouse on it. As it happens, the Decatur Square is also Roy A. Blount Plaza, named for my late father, a civic leader who was, among other things, chairman of MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, when the subway system it includes was being laid out, back in the early seventies.

The MARTA subway is quiet and clean, with helpful attendants and attractive stations. In the Peachtree Center station, I saw, at last, something indigenously substantial: the walls alongside the tracks are the rough-hewn solid granite that the tunnel was blasted through. If the Atlanta Olympics work out okay logistically, I figure MARTA will be the star. Unless the air conditioning in the cars is overwhelmed and mass suffocation ensues.

What you're saying is, you couldn't find any there in Atlanta except in a hole in the ground that you somehow connect with your father?

Oh, no. Atlanta also has the greatest fast-food place in the world: the Varsity, on North Avenue right across from the Olympic Village. I have traveled the world over, and I have never found a chili dog that approaches the excellence of a Varsity chili dog. Also, there is no more delightful fattening experience than pulling up to the Krispy Kreme on Ponce de Leon Avenue late at night, smelling and watching the fresh hot doughnuts coming off the assembly line in the back. I went into the Krispy Kreme not long ago and sat down next to a man who had tears in his eyes. He turned to me and said, “My mama used to bring me here.”

Isn't this getting awfully personal?

Embarrassing, isn't it? But there is something awfully personal about Atlanta. Dig down under the “We're just amiable businessfolk” surface and you find a volatile mixture of “This is one town where a black person can do well and I be damned if I'm missing out on that action” and “No other town ever burned down by Sherman's army ever had a Summer Olympics, by God!”

Furthermore, Atlanta may be essentially “postmodern” and “post-urban,” as Rem Koolhaas maintains (and finds rather exciting, in fact), but has anyone noticed the similarities between Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games head Billy Payne (who takes a bottle of Jack Daniel's and a loaf of white bread with him to Europe) and the wildly eccentric Georgia folk artist Howard Finster (who paints portraits of people with messages written on their foreheads like “ONLY GOD OF ABRAHAM COULD CREATE A BRAINE OF POWER. AND WISDOM TO CARRY ON A WORLD LIKE THIS ONE”)?

Both men are outspokenly religious. Until they became worldfamous, neither of them had ever spent much time outside Georgia. Both of them are self-appointed and boundlessly enthusiastic. Both of them write strange verse. People say both are crazy. It came to Billy Payne one day out of the blue that he should bring the Olympics to Atlanta, just as it came to Howard Finster out of the blue one day (he thought he saw a face in a dab of paint on his finger) that he should start painting portraits of Elvis and Jesus and Coke bottles and himself.

Howard Finster was on the Tonight Show once. Johnny Carson asked him what inspired his art. Finster put his hand to his head and replied, “If you had a place itching up here, Johnny, you'd reach right up to scratch it like you know right where it is. If you was to ask me to scratch it, I wouldn't know where to look.”

Ask Atlantans where their civic there is, and they may well shrug. But then some little personal thing will crop up, like the fact that Deion Sanders and their mama belong to the same congregation, and …well, it's hard to put your finger on the principle involved, but somehow, collectively, Atlanta has an itch and knows where to scratch it.

This is no longer true. Somebody built a replica, originally to live in, I believe. I went to a cocktail party there.

The Olympics: “Atlanta Will Be Done Away”

This appeared in Sports Illustrated during the Olympics.

Religious argument ought to be an Olympic event, at least the way it's practiced in the Five Points area of Atlanta. The day before the official games opened, I watched a pickup disputation involving a mixed company of eight or ten young male Muslims, Rastafarians, and Baptists. One of the Rastas began to spring higher and higher into the air, not in any showy or ritual way but just with the intensity of the point he was making.

“No …‘I’… about …it,” he cried, leaping with each word. “It …is …all …‘we.’”

A Baptist said, “I'm saying, I know who my God is,” and as several people started quoting Scripture at once—point, counterpoint, and cattycorner—the Rasta came to Earth in a high-tensile crouch and froze, his eyes flashing. “Say you do or do not believe in Jah,” he demanded, and though his feet were touching the pavement, he somehow hung there the way Michael Jordan in his youth hung in the air.

The theology got too complex for me to follow after that, but the body language was something to behold. It was hard to find amateur competition in the Olympic ring last week but not impossible. You had to go to Five Points, an area that lies just to the southwest of the Olympic Center but squarely in the middle of Atlanta history.

Five Points is where Atlanta's five most important early streets, Peachtree, Marietta, Decatur, “Whitehall, and Edgewood, intersected. Off down along Decatur Street was where the dead and wounded Confederates lay stretched out as if forever, the living ones moaning and begging for help, in the famous scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett just can't stand it anymore.

Five Points was Atlanta's main business district into the sixties. Rich's, long Atlanta's keystone department store, was here. After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, demonstrators confronted counterdemonstrators here over the integration of Leb's restaurant. (Dick Gregory peeked under a Klansman's hood and asked him, “Is you de Lawd?”) Vernon Jordan integrated Herren's restaurant one day at lunch. Fred Powledge, then a local newspaper guy, broke a century of ignominious decorum by shouting out across the room, “Vernon! It's great to see your big old black face in here!”

Since then, Atlanta's business nexuses have dispersed over an ever-broader metropolitan area. Downtown Rich's and Leb's and any number of former power buildings have been demolished. Herren's is a shell, and Five Points is an area that suburban whites have long been loath to venture into. Now the Olympics have brought the area back into focus. City, state, and private security forces are everywhere, abandoned buildings have been gussied up and pressed into service, and $1.5 million has been plowed into making a showpiece out of Woodruff Park, a patch of green right at Five Points’ heart. What do you know? Famously amorphous Atlanta does have a central core of street life.

“Yes, it's hot,” chuckles the erect eighty-two-year-old man whose handwritten name tag says “Bishop Craig,” as he stands where he's been standing several hours a day for ten years: on the corner of Peach-tree and Atlanta streets, right outside the Five Points MARTA station. Although the temperature is well up into the nineties, Bishop Craig is dressed in black suit, crisp white shirt, and striped necktie.

“But not as hot,” he is bound to remind us, “as Hell will be.” What is the Olympic cauldron compared to “that lake of fire”? He's holding a hand-lettered sign proclaiming, among other things, GOD WILL CURE SUGAR CANSOR, TBS and (though he himself is in heavy black leather footwear) PUT OFF YOUR SHOES, FOR THIS GROUND IS HOLY GROUND.

A man suddenly swoops in and makes as if to grab that sign away from the bishop. The same man who has been making as if to grab it most every day for years. “A deaf-mute,” the bishop says. “He has a demon.” This man also has a ministry, although his only oral utterance is sort of a yodel, sort of a moan.

“I ain't afraid of your demon,” says the bishop. “Give me your hand!”

The man won't let him have it. “Uhluh-uhl-uhl-uh-uhl,” he cries, maybe derisively, maybe merrily, it's hard to say. His name tag, impressed on plastic, says “Elder / H. Webb / Children / United States Army.” He's wearing a U.S. Marines T-shirt and an olive-drab military cap and waving a Bible. He makes a snatching motion toward the bishop's name tag, then toward his own, then toward my Olympic press credential.

“He'll shake everybody's hand but mine!” cries the bishop. “He knows I'll take out that demon! One day, I run him all the way around that MARTA station, but he wouldn't take my hand!”

“He ain't no revund,” huffs the Reverend I. (for Inez) Will, who has been preaching on this corner herself for six years. She and the bishop get along, but brother Webb (if that is his name) is forever plaguing them. “I'm a prophet,” says Reverend Will. She shuffles three densely hand-lettered signs, hard to decipher linearly. The word WOE stands out, and THE OLYMPICS IS NOT OF GOD.

“Atlanta will be done away!” she says. “I been tellin 'em for six years! But people'd rather it snuck up on 'em!”

A young couple bop by, grinning. “That's right, you laughing,” she says. “I know you ain't praying, 'cause you got that nekkid gal!” The gal is wearing a scarcely daring skirt and tank top. The Reverend Will is wearing a white hat, a white sweater with lace trim, and a long high-necked bright-blue-red-and-green flowery dress. She's been arrested four times, she says. For coming down too hard on long-haired men and underdressed women, her colleague the bishop explains.

She gives me a steady look. “God showed me a storm coming down that street! He showed me a jail building blowing up! He showed me a train climbing steps! A train can't climb steps!” A couple of stairway-levels below us, a MARTA train rumbles.

“This Olympics is the end,” she says. “I know it is. All Atlanta care about is money! Atlanta with her attitude going to blow up! I been trying to warn 'em and they laugh. It tears me up! I can't stand it!”

The nonverbal man swoops in again, holding up a newspaper clipping and pointing to a figure quoted in it: $297,640. Then he gestures inclusively toward himself and the bishop and the Reverend Will and shakes his head. (I'm going to say it's merrily.) None of them is getting any of that money.

Nor do they ask their listeners for any. They get by. They have places to live. Lots of other Five Points people don't. For years, Woodruff Park has been bedroom to the homeless. Twenty-four men and three women were sleeping there during Friday night's opening ceremony.

Uncounted others have been driven away from the downtown by police pressure (there's a local ordinance forbidding “acting in a manner unlike a law-abiding individual in a parking lot”), by the new sprinkler system in Woodruff Park, by the demolition of three or four shelters during Olympic construction, by the conversion of the soup kitchen at St. Luke's Episcopal Church to Big Al's 50s Cafe, which wasn't pulling in anticipated Olympic revenues at lunchtime Saturday. I was the only customer. Nine dollars for a bad hamburger, a package of potato chips, a pickle, and a cold drink.

Word in the street is that military vans have been rounding up homeless men and stashing them in warehouses at Fort McPherson for the Olympic duration. None of the homeless advocates I talked to could confirm that rumor, but Anita Beaty of Atlanta's Task Force for the Homeless says the Olympics have caused a net loss of “hundreds of beds, when we already had thousands too few.”

She also says that 28 to 38 percent of people who call her organization's twenty-four-hour hotline in immediate need of a place to sleep are working men. Many of them have helped build Olympic venues. But they're being ripped off by temporary “labor pools” that contract out the men's work at $11 an hour, then pay the men minimum wage—less deductions for food and transportation. “Our modern slavery,” says Beaty.

“I didn't want to be in Atlanta,” says Anthony Knowlton, “I was extradited here. That's how I lost everything.” He does have a place to sleep, at St. Luke's, and he keeps busy informing other dispossessed people of their rights. “IT'S LEGAL TO BE HOMELESS” says a paper he carries. “Police can't arrest you in a public place if you: Sleep. Smell bad. Talk to yourself. Eat garbage. Police can arrest you in a public place if you: Beg. Cause a Disturbance. Obstruct a sidewalk. Spit on a sidewalk. Urinate.” He says, “Georgia will give you food stamps. But how can a man use food stamps if he's living in a parking lot? The concept of that criteria is fundamentally polluted. So he'll sell the stamps.”

“Then, if you get on drugs,” an affable but vague-looking young man, who was on them, told me in Woodruff Park, “then they really got you. Atlanta's a nice town, though. I helped build where they're holding the boxing.”

“Folks in our office waiting for shelter watched the opening ceremony on TV,” Beaty says. “They loved it. They're very docile people. They're used to waiting for a place to sleep. I step over women and little children's bodies on our floor, and I look down the street and see the new stadium lit up and the fireworks going off, and I can hardly stand it.”

Standing things ought to be an Olympic event, at least the way it's practiced around Five Points. It would restore an element of amateurism—maybe not in the highest tradition, but amateurism has always been a function of what people can afford. A man I talked to in Five Points would be hard to beat in that competition. He declined to give me his name, partly “for security reasons” and partly because I had never interviewed Mike Tyson, “and if Mike don't trust you, why should I? See what I'm saying?” He did tell me a story.

“Somebody come after me trying to tell me I owe him money. He's got a pool cue in each hand. I said, ‘Man, I ain't got no money. Come after me with two pool cues in each hand, I still won't have no money. Do I look like I got any money? I hate to think how many pool cues you'd come after me with in each hand if I did look like I had any money. But I ain't ever looked like I had any money. And even if I did look like I had any money, I still wouldn't have no money. I ain't never had no money.’ I got him to where he gave me one of them pool cues, finally.”

The Varsity Is Local

Iknow, as an abstract proposition, that the Atlanta area is where I grew up. But when I go back there, I wonder. “When I was a boy, did Atlanta even have a skyline? Not that I recall. Now it bristles with skyscrapers, in various far-flung clumps. Decatur, my hometown, used to be on the outskirts of Atlanta, but now it's way inside the perimeter highway, I-285, which itself can't contain the sprawl. Everybody's back-home area changes, but when I go back to mine, I have a hard time getting my bearings, even.

Driving in from the airport on I-75/85, I could be anywhere—until I exit on North Avenue, across from Georgia Tech, and arrive at the shiny curvaceous red-and-yellow exterior of the Varsity: “The “World's Largest Drive-in,” established 1928. Maybe the peg that you hang your recollections on is a church steeple or a tree carved with certain initials. For me, that peg is a chili dog, and trimmings, at the Varsity. “When I go back to my old high school or one of the houses I lived in, it's spooky, it's different, I don't know what to do there anymore. At the Varsity, I know. Eat.

Daddy would drive the family there. When we pulled into the parking lot a carhop—isn't it fine when people do something literal? A carhop would hop onto our car. He'd stick the card with his number on it under our windshield wiper and ride us to our slot.

We knew, as everyone knew, that those carhops had at one time included Nipsey Russell, who went on to become a star of stage, game shows, and Car 54, Where Are You? We knew that the sashaying carhop with the crazy hat—a hat that might have fruit or tennis shoes on it—was known, though he was a man, as Sophie Mae.

Our carhop would take our order and hustle away and hustle back to hook a tray into the driver's window. And Daddy would pass the food out item by item as the aromas filled our car and our mouths watered. Don't spill it now, my parents would caution, as if anybody would.

When you reached dating age, you'd go to the Varsity after the movie. Nothing was sweeter than a pretty girl's lips flecked with traces of Krispy Kreme, but that didn't match the full sensorium of kissing after the Varsity. And after taking her home, you'd get back in your car and receive a bouquet—hints of domestic perfume, a base of relatively innocent musk, and, pervasively, essences of good things well and truly fried. Life was going to be endlessly appetizing.

Later, when I worked in Atlanta, I would lunch at the Varsity alone. Walk there, a mile or so, or, if I drove, I'd park in the lot and dine inside. That's what most people do these days. The carhops are fewer and less flamboyant. Inside, though, the atmosphere is essentially as it has been for as long as I can remember.

“What'll ya have?” Red-and-white tiles, chrome, shiny-clean mirrors, and sociable anticipation. The main room is aswarm with kids in Catholic school uniforms, dusty workingmen in gimme caps, rangy youths wearing letter jackets, hip-hoppy boys in wear endorsed by Out-Kast, businessmen in white shirts and ties, a bedraggled white-bearded man wearing mismatched sneakers. Altogether a dozen or so people at each of the seventeen indoor stations, lined up and moving along briskly, because the people taking the orders are rattling off the time-honored question: “Wuddle-ya-have, wuddle-ya-have?”

They are enforcing the equally time-honored Varsity injunction, “Have your money in your hand and your order in your mind.” But you don't feel harried, you feel that you are sustaining a tradition. Out of courtesy to those behind you, and respect for the institution, you do your part to help the Varsity function. And while you're doing it, you chat with your fellow pilgrims. In the line next to mine, a willowy young black woman with Condoleezza Rice hair is marveling at the sight of a teacher keeping a busload of field-trip kids focused. “I could not do that,” she says. “My nerves are too bad.”

“I know how you feel,” responds a blockish white man in coveralls. “I got five grandboys from three to eight, and I can't stand 'em more'n an hour at a time. That's some list you got there.”

“I work out in Buckhead, and I said, ‘Anybody want anything from the Varsity?’ I shouldn't have said anything.” She reels off her order: “Nine chili dogs, five chili burgers, three BLTs, a burger with pimento cheese—”

“I never tried that,” the man behind her says. “I'll have to try that.”

“…a chili slaw dog—”

“Oh yeah, now my stomach's growling.”

“…three fries, three rings, three frosted oranges, and three apple pies.” Within four minutes, it's there for her, piping hot, in “walking boxes.” I notice the bill is $52.16 with tax.

The Varsity is to a great extent transparent. When you give the “wuddle-ya-have” people your order, they call it back behind them to the Hole, where you can see people slicing buns, assembling sandwiches, and scooping fresh rings and strings out of fresh grease (canola oil, these days). The Varsity has its own lexicon. “Gimme a naked dog and strings.” “Gimme a glorified steak and rings.” “Yankee dog and an F.O.” A naked dog doesn't have anything on it. Why anybody would order that “is beyond me,” says the Varsity's owner, Nancy Gordy Simms, but some people do. A Yankee dog, also known as a yellow dog, has just mustard on it, a yellow streak. Hey, a little retro regional humor.

Here is what I have. Main course, a chili dog. All the way, which means accompanied by a big handful of chopped daily-fresh wax-paper-wrapped onions.

The bun of the chili dog is so fresh and yeasty that, when sliced (on the premises, bun by bun as called for), it embraces the fresh-cooked weenie cozily. Back in the Depression, Louis Bryan, who would marry my mother after my father's death, delivered buns to the Varsity. They were unacceptable if they couldn't be wrapped around the finger of the Varsity's founder and proprietor, Frank Gordy, without cracking. That is still true with regard to the finger of his successor, his granddaughter, Nancy.

Atop the weenie is a neat yet generous layer of beanless, fine-textured, just-spicy-enough chili, cooked from scratch that day, which if it exceeds the bun does so just slightly, so it's fully sufficient but won't ooze off.

Precisely down the middle of the chili is a stripe of yellow mustard. Frank Gordy insisted on precision here, and so does Nancy, who runs the place, hands-on, with her son, Gordon Muir. “I broke down a bunch of dogs just now,” she says, “because they didn't look pretty to me.”

And these are my sides: order of fries (“strings”) and order of onion rings.

In one respect, the fries are like snowflakes: each individual fry is different. Unlike snowflakes, they are almost (but not quite) too hot to bite into right away, and they have bits of skin on them here and there, and …Well, they look like they have been cut from an actual potato on the premises that day, which is the case.

As to the rings: elsewhere, one of two things is wrong with onion rings. Either they are frozen abominations in which the onion has disappeared into the batter, or they are sloppy and fall apart as you try to get them in your mouth. Varsity rings are fresh onion slices in a creamy batter that holds the slices as lovingly as the bun of the chili dog holds the weenie. My one complaint about Varsity onion rings, historically, has been that they were too salty. They aren't anymore! Nancy has changed the batter's formula—her father's tastebuds in his last years demanded a bit more salt than most people would prefer. As happens in so many families.

It may surprise you that Nancy has a permit from the city of Atlanta to demolish the Varsity, which she renews every six months. But that is just so the city can't register it as a historic building. So the city can't tell her how to preserve it. Good. You want your talismanic chili dog to stay fresh, not get calcified.

This is my drink: a large Varsity orange. You think any orange drink is like any other. No. This one has a secret formula.

(And this, when I finish the above, will be my dessert: a scoop of black walnut ice cream and a scoop of lemon custard ice cream and a scoop of banana ice cream. Separate. Very creamy. And I know nowhere else in the world where you can count on getting those flavors.)

My order is always the same. You have to stick with what gets you centered. I carry my order to the room where CNN or ESPN is playing. (Personal preference over the room where Fox News is playing.) I distribute about two-thirds of the chopped onions (there are always more than enough) carefully so that they cling to the chili and therefore to the dog as a whole. That way my every bite of chili dog will partake of all of its elements.

I take the first bite. Yes. I did grow up in this area. My youth was not a dream.

Later, I am standing out in front of the Varsity with Nancy. There is nothing stuck-up about her. She works in a cubbyhole on the premises whose door is marked “Janitor's Closet.” Emerges frequently to make sure the Varsity is still being itself. She is slender. She eats lunch at the Varsity every day.

“What is that huge pointy building over there looking down on us?” I ask.

“C and S Bank Tower,” she says. “Or Nation's Bank, or whatever it is these days. Banks! I can't keep track of banks.”

But the Varsity can keep track of me. “I want to leave this place right here,” Nancy said once when an interstate expansion threatened it. “I want it to be the one thing in Atlanta where, when people see it, they know they are home.”

The Guy-Crowded Gulf (1993)

Y'all's mascot is a mullet?” the extremely young waitress at Angelo's asks us, with—as Dan will put it later—“a mixture of pity and disbelief.”

Yes, we tell that sweet young person. There are no Alligator Point Fighting Mullets in your generation, we tell her, because Alligator Point High School was blown out to sea by a hurricane long ago, but we remember; and we, old Fighting Mullets one and all, are back for a reunion.

The reunion part is true. Every year since 1980 we have convened at Alligator Point—which is in the Florida panhandle, on the Gulf, near Sopchoppy, Medart, and Panacea—to fish, eat, drink, swim alligator-infested waters, tell stories, and argue.

The school and the Fighting Mullets are figments of the annual T-shirt. This is Gerald's year to bring commemorative T-shirts for everybody, and his shirt has a mean-looking fish in a boxing stance on the front, and on the back the following:

CLASS OF ’93 MOST LIKELY TO:

CRITICISE:

Vereen Bell

JEST:

Roy Blount

COMPREHEND:

Gerald Duff

ROOF:

Bobby Herbert

FLOOR:

Dan Mayfield

RUSTICATE:

Cliff Probst

NARRATE:

Jim Seay

That's us. Vereen teaches English and writes critical works, Gerald is a college dean and writes novels, Bobby is (to oversimplify drastically) a roofer, Dan is in the floor-covering business, Cliff runs a communications-consultancy firm from his country house, and Jim teaches creative writing and writes poetry. We live in six different towns, but we are all Southern and overeducated, and we have known each other for close to thirty years. Vereen's mother and stepfather, Flonnie and Bill Long, own a house on the beach at Alligator Point, where we get together for a week every June to disagree with one another. This year we argued about what should be the Fighting Mullets’ fight song:

“Float like a dead mullet, sting like a—”

“No. Sting like a bullet, cackle like a pullet: mullet, mullet, mullet—”

“No. Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, / Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd.’ ”

“Keats. ‘Lamia.’ What does that have to do with mullet?”

Keats's poem “Lamia” has to do, in fact, with a woman who turns out to be a multifariously patterned serpent, which is not to suggest that our annual outing is gender-biased; it is just an experiment in same-sex cohabitation.

Vereen and Jim get the main bedroom with the large beds and keep it very neat; Gerald and I get the other bedroom with the single beds and keep it messy; the others sleep on the porch and leave vitamins lying around. Jim and Vereen, the rest of us concede (because it is not important to us), are more serious sportsmen than we are. Whether that confers upon them anywhere near as much authority as they seem to think it does is one of many bones of contention.

Some of us (or at least one: Cliff) maintain that the best T-shirt is Cliff's from 1980. It says, “See You Later, Alligator. Harvey-Young Funeral Home, Crawfordsville, Fla.” That comes from a joke played on Gerald the year before. We told him that the funeral home on the road to Tallahassee was giving out T-shirts, so he went in and asked the lady-of-hushed-tones at the desk if he could have one. She looked at him as if that were the most morbid thing she had ever heard in her life.

Others of us (anyway, Dan) favor Dan's T-shirt, which brings out our common background as English majors. (Bobby went to MIT so I guess he majored in something else, but he is the author of Roofing, the definitive text.) Dan's T-shirt has a leaping fish on the front with the legend “but at my back I always hear” and, on the back, what may be the only visual rendering anyone has ever seen of time's winged chariot (which in Marvell's poem is “hurrying near”) with someone fishing from it.

Jim's favorite T-shirt may well be his, which simply bears a map of Alligator Point. Jim has a certain austerity. His wife is a scientist. (Which does not mean, as one of us pointed out heatedly this year in an argument about synapses, that he is a scientist.)

I personally admire the economy of my T-shirt, on the front of which Albert, the alligator in Pogo, is pointing. I have a certain austerity, too, which has led others of us to accuse me of being afraid of sharks when, in fact, I am afraid only of sharks that are bigger than the boat.

Next year Bobby is in charge of T-shirts. There is no telling what Bobby, who is a member of the Roofers’ Hall of Fame, will come up with. At the banquet following his induction into the hall, he danced, for some reason lost in the mists of roofing social history, with Chubby Checker.

Vereen hasn't done a T-shirt yet. My hope is that when he does, it will depict what happened when he came to Panacea as a boy and left two rods and reels with baited hooks outside overnight. In the wee hours, he was awakened by a terrible uproar. Free-range hogs had come along and swallowed the bait and were running around dragging the tackle. Free-range hogs used to be common in the area, which is still pretty interesting. There is a big realty-company billboard up the highway that says SELLING FLORIDA'S LAST FRONTIER. Panacea, incidentally, is where Angelo's is. Probably the best right-off-the-boat grouper restaurant in the world.

But what you are wondering is, do we catch any fish?

Well hell yes we do. Stingrays (Vereen cooked one once and ate it) and catfish and squirrelfish and snakefish and toadfish, but we also catch good fish. For instance, in June of ’85:

What they caught: 20 grouper, infinite grunt, several black sea bass, 2 bonita, 2 fugi expertly maneuvered by Jim, assorted trash.

That is a direct quote from Jim's chart: a maritime map of the area around Alligator Point. Vereen has for some years maintained a spiral notebook of observations, on the cover of which someone has written “Vereen's Petty Little Alternative to Jim's Chart Which He Thinks Is So Great,” but everyone except maybe Vereen knows that Jim's chart is the official record. For we have covered this chart with historical notes in various hands—sometimes several different hands within a single entry. Here (with my own parts italicized to give you some idea of the truth of the matter) is the composite account of the time a shark got on Gerald's hook and then a bigger shark started chasing it, and I started yelling, “CUT IT LOOSE”:

Shark attack. Precipitated by Gerald's hooking little bitty hammerhead. (Hooked shark in fact huge, pursuant shark huger. A point that needs to be made.) Roy—being nobody s fool—panicked, under guise of being sensible (and the father of two). Others (being just about anygod-dambody's fool) fairly calm. Gerald played shark until the beast called in surrender.

In fact, we cut it loose, finally. The big one was bigger than the boat. Here are some other entries:

V. Bell lost a great fish here somewhere way off the chart and way under water. 6/8/86.

6/19/89 [in the margin, with arrow pointing east]: Tornadoes kill three in Eastpoint only minutes after we leave that town. Trip included stop at pawn shop. Heavy woman can't sell ring because, according to pawnbroker, “acid would eat it slap up.” She last seen leaving pawn shop, dejected, with mother and sister, all fat. Good chance they were the three taken in the storm, i.e. eaten slap up. Related twister item: horse flung into swimming pool in Sopchoppy. Vereen says he has seen the actual swimming pool (and maybe the horse). I do not think God wants us to go off this chart again.

Gerald caught so much fishweight his stomach heaved; he lay down, rose, and killed again.

Mr. Brent, our scoutmaster, took us fishing. He showed us an eagle. He put us on some trout. He told us he had an alligator pet who he fed ham fat, chicken fat, and marshmallows (things that float) and who let him pet his stomach. He took us swimming in a new spring. (Mr. Brent had another troop who left him waiting in the woods for six or seven hours because they did not feel like tracking him. They were eating the Vienna sausage, and said it was too hot to track.)

Mr. Brent is one of the several guides who have taken us out on the flats for sea trout and redfish, or thirty miles into the Gulf for grouper and mackerel and cobia. Fishing is, of course, a guide's medium, as football is a coach's and TV a marketer's. Our guides sometimes tell us things like “You've come on a $500 fishing trip with three-dollar tackle” and grow irate when we don't snatch grouper quick enough to keep them from scooting under rocks and cutting our lines, but we try not to let them get us down.

Here on 5/31/88 we ran aground with Capt. Bobo, who still felt good about himself. We had not caught any grouper (Capt. Bobo had), and we were tired. We sat for hours looking at a blue moon, as Captain Bobo waited for the water to rise and get us off the sandbar. “Y'all all right?” we kept hearing on the radio. “Just fishing,” Captain Bobo would reply.

6 June 83. Bud's Marina at Shell Creek discovered. A good find—“authentic” according to Bobby. Bud's loss attributed to “high voltage” by dock attendant. An arm and a leg. We like Bud. Bud will be our guide on 11 June.

5 June 87. We discover Bud's name is Hubert. A dearth of chihuahuas now.

Hubert, who never changed the name of Bud's Marina after taking it over from Bud many years ago, is an inspiring fisherman. A power line burnt off both limbs on his right side. To fish, he straps on an appliance that a rod handle fits into. He closed the marina last year, but he took us out fishing this year and put us on to some reds that were so heavy they broke our lines. He also told us that when a terrible screech arises from the marshes in the night and a child asks him what it is, he says, “That's one 'em nine-foot jumpers.”

“Will they bother you?” the child will ask.

“Eat you up. Seems like they get worse every year. I've never seen 'em so bad as they are this year.”

Hubert also said he drank so many beers the other afternoon that he woke up in the night craving a glass of water. “That water was the best I ever tasted. Tasted so good I woke my wife and got her to try some. She didn't appreciate it.”

The chihuahua reference is to a discussion we had with Lib, Hubert's wife, about her chihuahua, of the semihairy variety. She told us that having a chihuahua around will cure your asthma, that wild chihuahuas roam Mexico in packs, and that you don't see many chihuahuas in this country anymore. She repelled an intruder with a.22 once. We all admire Hubert and Lib. Jim worries, not without reason, that some of us give them the impression that we aren't serious enough about fishing.

Stuart and John Kirven stayed in Buck's house in air-conditioned comfort, ate and drank enormous amounts, and thought their fathers quaint. Much bonding work remains to be done.

Buck's house is next door to Flonnie and Bill's. Buck used to play minor-league ball. Stuart and John Kirven are Gerald's and my sons. We have stopped inviting sons because when they come we fathers spend all our time wrangling over getting the sons into the best boat with the best guide and the best bait. We have never invited wives. We talk to wives regularly on the phone, though. Here is an entry from the chart (which no one can explain today, but that's Bobby), in reference to a call from Cliff's wife:

Bobby to Adelaide 6/5/85: “Naw, he and Vereen and three young boys have gone to jump in an Artesian well.”

We talk about the differences between men and women. This year one of us brought up something he had read somewhere, a woman writer's complaint: that whenever women want to talk to men about feelings, men think they are trying to start an argument. Discussion followed, which actually produced a rough consensus: that whenever a woman wants to talk with a man about feelings, it does—whatever the man says-start an argument. However, one of us refused to endorse the consensus, so that, in case it got back to the women that we had reached such a conclusion, we could each claim to be the dissenter.

Once Vereen said a conceivably profound, if rather uxorious, thing: that the reason men find women so difficult to understand is that women are the only people men ever really get to know.

“The mackerel-crowded sea,” one of us said on our last day this year, and another of us responded, “Yeats.” We were bouncing along over choppy water in a haze of sunblock, fish scales, beanie-weenie juice, beer, and long familiarity, returning from way out in the Gulf in Coach Metcalf's charter boat. He is a good guide, though he tends to treat us as if we were on one of his high-school teams. He is proud that his son, who is white, went to a predominantly black college because he could play football there.

The wake of a deep-sea-fishing boat, one of us mentioned, looks a lot like the delta of Venus. A whole lot, the more you look at it. And here we were, beating on against the Gulf, as if borne ceaselessly away from that image.

Then we all went home.

The Bottom Line (2005)

Doc is our guide but not our daddy. In fact, though we would rather not dwell on this, we are old enough to be his. So we try not to be too respectful when we ask:

“How come, when you cast, you just flick your wrist and your line shoots out so straight and far?”

“It's got no memory,” he says.

A line that doesn't remember! “What a notion! Imagine if bloodlines had no memory; if heartstrings; if the bottom line!

“We're out from Shell Island fish camp, in the marshes off Ochlocko-nee Bay, off the Gulf of Mexico, in a scow, fishing live shrimp or artificial shrimp or cut bait (people say, “You got to fish or cut bait,” but you can fish cut bait) for redfish.

Doc, when he isn't maneuvering us into the right places to drop the anchor (“Reckon we could take a boat back up in here ourselves?” “Without running aground? Naw”) is catching them, redfish. “We aren't. But we're picking up the occasional keeper sea trout, or, regrettably, a ladyfish or skipjack or catfish (which we can wrest off the hook ourselves without getting finned), and I have brought in a nice little black sea bass (best eating of all, even Doc agrees), so we know what it's like to have something live on the line, the jittery provisional tug of it—and before that, the expectational drag of the bait, and sometimes the slackness of a line whose bait is gone, taken away, like all the years we've left behind.

We have come down here, six of us (used to be seven but Bobby died,[*]) once a year for the last twenty-six. We have caught great messes of delicate-lipped trout, and—when we go out into the deep sea in a bigger boat—grouper, grunt, cobia, and shark. Our lines do have memories. They are monofilament; they hold old kinks and bends and traces of backlash, coil, and convolution. Doc is using state-of-the-art braided line, which never loses true linearity.

Except for Doc, we have all, at Vanderbilt University, either taught or studied English. So we are bad to get metaphorical. Citational, even. We value lines of writing.

Ben Jonson: “Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.”

Jimmie Rodgers:

Any old time

You want to come back home,

Drop me a line

And say you'll no more roam.

Every year, on The Chart, which lays out the waters, coastland, and islands of our shared experiences, we jot memorial notes:

Vereen nearly wrapped two roped-together boats around a pole. You had to be there. 6/6/86.

Jim empathizes with a one-footed pelican that gets phantom traction on one side. 6/3/99.

Bobby's grandaddy's ring is right around here somewhere. 5/25/98.

In 1993 Gerald learned that it is kinder to a released fish to let the hook rust out in him.

Cliff, who cannot sleep with vituperation or snoring going on, has moved to a motel, 1999.

Among us we have published, I don't know, maybe thirty books, thirty-one counting the lamented Bobby's definitive Roofing. And have fathered fourteen children and weathered ten divorces. Dan, the youngest of us, and the only one with just one marriage, is a nonauthor, but Vereen, the eldest, once said (with scant regard to my feelings) that Dan was the most interesting student he ever had, and back during the go-go eighties Dan wrote a prophetic cautionary letter to the editor that The Atlantic Monthly published. Maybe Dan would have gone into the writing game himself, rather than money management, had it not been for something that happened to him in high school English, back in Bells, Tennessee.

Write a descriptive paragraph, his teacher said, using the phrase “trolling lazily for bass.” Dan worked up a good one, felt right proud of it. Teacher commended it, bade him read it aloud in class, which he did.

And other boys in the class hooted and snorted: “You don't troll for bass! Anybody knows that!”

“I was totally humiliated,” Dan says. “Obviously I didn't know anything about what I was writing about.”

In fact, he probably knew you don't troll for bass. He just got carried away temporarily by school. Following a line of thought. Which is what I am doing in the marshes, thinking:

Line. Wonder what culture first used it to fish with. It connects us to unseen depths and separates us from the gulls and the bears.

Once, for a documentary film, with two old men showing me how, I went down into river water up to my neck and reached into a hollow log (well, a culvert pipe) and felt blindly for a flathead catfish, and it bit down on my hand, and I pulled it out and strung it through the mouth and gill and held it up! A nice one! Even grabbling, you've got to have a bit of line, a fish is so slippery.

Telephones all used to be line-linked. Maybe the sadness of the Internet lies in its linelessness.

Then, too, Emerson: “Line in nature is not found; / Unit and universe are round.”

The backlashes I used to get when I was a lad, with the old cloth line, and Daddy patiently unsnarling them for me. Jimmie Rodgers again: “In my memory lingers / All you once were to me. ”

Maybe lines aren't so much memory, as karma…

And suddenly I've got something big on. A chunky old drum, maybe— no, we catch those next to bridges—anyway, look at the bend in my rod-it's something that “will really stretch your string,” as Doc has put it, in a different connection. Whatever it is, I'm not going to lose it. I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer!

“Don't think you're gon’ be able to turn that one,” says Doc. “Got the bottom.”

I knew that! Just a split second before he said it, I knew it. But there's no way to prove it.

Well, I know how to get off the bottom. Take my line in hand, beyond the rod tip, and tug it from different angles till it comes loose, and now it's slack, and when I reel it in—what goes around, comes around—my whole rig is gone, broke off, hook, split-shot, and leader.

“I'll make you a new leader,” says Doc.

“Leaders are not made but born,” I say. A poor rejoinder, but mine own. With a nod to whoever, in some other context, said it first. I don't remember who that was, offhand, but maybe I could dredge it up. Writing, wrote Eudora Welty, entails “a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.”

R.I.P. One of the “Notes to posterity” entered on the chart, before his passing, is “Bobby was real.”

There Be Alligators

Everything, in the world,” wrote Stéphane Mallarmé, “exists to wind up in a book.” I am not that literary. I like to think an alligator ate my notes. Ate the small pocket notebook, that is, in which I recorded the impressions that came to me as my friends Vereen, Slick, and Hal and I canoed through the Okefenokee, whose name derives from the Creek for “Land of the Trembling Earth.” I always feel that there is something I'm not quite getting at in my books. I had reason to believe I might get at it way back up in that particular swamp, which was Pogo the possum's home and which is way down upon the Suwannee River.

Pogo meant a lot to me as a boy—the animals had much more oomph than the stuffed British ones in Winnie the Pooh, the writing was highly phonetic, allusive and free-wheeling, and unlike the Brer Rabbit stories, Pogo was free from plantation stigma. Pogo himself was a liberal Southerner, which couldn't be said for Li'l Abner, or Snuffy Smith, or, for that matter, Pogo's friend Albert, the alligator, who was forever swallowing smaller characters more or less by accident. As for “Old Folks at Home,” the sentiments that stick with you are the ones that you're deeply ambivalent about. But the feature of the Okefenokee that gave me dreams was the quicksand that swallowed Jack Elam in Lure of the Wilderness, the 1952 remake of Jean Renoir's first American movie, Swamp Water, which came out in 1941, the year I was born.

Elam was a bad guy, but still. One moment you're on supportive ground, the next you're in glop that you sink into beyond all hope. Quicksand gave you two options: thrash and struggle and go down faster, or remain calm, try to think, and die inch by inch. Elam thrashed, until the last few inches when all he had to thrash with was his face.

My notebook was not without food value. The last time I remember writing something in it was after I had scaled and gutted a string of bluegills, stumpknockers, and catfish we had caught on red wigglers and an artificial bug called a Yellow Sally, and you know how your hands get when you clean fish. (Slick fried the fish in a fancy copper pan he brought, and that was some eating.) Wherever I had touched the paper, it wouldn't take ink well. I wasn't about to wash my hands in the black unripply water alongside our shelter, because we knew that down there lurked an alligator, as big as any one of us, named George or Georgette.

There are seven different two- to five-day Okefenokee canoe routes. Unless you love sweaty, buggy nights, summer and early fall are not the time to take any of them. November, when the cypress needles turn golden and the sweet-gum leaves red, is one of the two best months of the year. April, when we went, is the other; March is nearly as popular. To make a trip at any time of the year, you have to apply for a permit.

You call the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, near Folkston, Georgia, and tell the cordial person who answers (Karen, when I did it) that you want to canoe the Okefenokee. She will tell you that you're welcome if your party is no larger than twenty people and ten canoes. (Ten dollars per person per night. You can rent canoes and equipment there.) But if you want to embark on, say, November 1, you must phone for a reservation first thing in the morning exactly sixty days ahead of that date. First thing in the morning means 7:00 a.m. And a lot of other people will be calling then, too. It doesn't matter who you are, a writer, say, or a congressman: first come, first served.

So you and all the other members of your party who can speak intelligibly at that time of day will have to start dialing at 6:59 a.m. EST, with fingers crossed. (If you think this is awkward, wait till you have to make a pit stop in terrain where the only place to stand is either your canoe or a patch of mush and roots.) You will get a great many busy signals, and when you finally get through, you will most likely be told that all the trails are taken for that day. So you'll have to try again the next day, for November 2,. On the third day of calling, we were lucky to get the trail we wanted—“the red trail,” Kingfisher Landing to Maul Hammock, Big “Water, and Stephen C. Foster State Park.

You could, of course, avoid all this uncertainty by renting a motorboat and taking it ten or twelve miles up into the swamp—and make a lot of noise, and incur the disdain of us deep-swamp canoeists returning from way back up in there where we could entertain the notion that we might conceivably never get back out again.

The shelters along the canoe trails, at intervals so explorers will have a place to spend each night, are roofed wooden platforms set on piles. They may be the only surfaces in the swamp that don't quiver or give. The Okefenokee, which occupies almost seven hundred largely unspoiled square miles in southeast Georgia and north Florida, is generally referred to as a swamp but strictly speaking is not one, because it is too far above sea level and because a swamp is stagnant. “Water flows constantly, though very slowly and circuitously, through various channels in the Okefenokee

I say the Okefenokee water is black. From canoeside it is, but a sample in a clear bottle is tea-colored. The fish you catch from it are sepia. It tastes slightly like Scotch whiskey; the Okefenokee is a peat bog. The unstable clumps of soil from which huge cypress trees grow (also the hooded pitcher plant, the golden trumpet, the bonnet lily, the neverwet, the sweet pepper bush, and the lather leaf or poor man's soap) are, in fact, islands of peat that float above the sandy bottom.

So where is the quicksand? You'd think I would have asked Vereen about this, because his father, Vereen Bell, Sr., wrote the novel, Swamp Water, that both of those Okefenokee movies were based on. The elder Vereen was a great outdoorsman who died in World War II, when Vereen was ten. The road into the Okefenokee National “Wildlife Refuge is the Vereen Bell Memorial Highway. I said to Vereen the other day, it's funny we didn't talk about his father much, when we were in the swamp. He said yes, it was. In an introduction to the University of Georgia Press edition of the novel, Vereen writes about his father:

I remember riding on his back, terrified, as he walked us through a cypress swamp—perhaps in an edge of the Okefenokee—across a sagging and meandering “bridge” made of single eight-inch planks anchored end to end against the cypress trunks…. In a cherished family photograph, he is gallantly and casually poised upon a sleek chestnut gelding with black mane and tail, named Pat…. We hunted and fished together, though never even close to enough for me….

After big Vereen went off to war, he came back home only once, Vereen remembers:

I was afraid to see him. He had been away long enough (in child time) to become a mysterious figure to me and an intrusion into the comfortable small-town routine I had settled into. But I also felt guilty about this, and after managing to not be on hand when he arrived …I persuaded my grandmother's maid to bake a nickel into one of her famous biscuits and to see to it that the mystery biscuit went only to him.

“How did your father react to the mystery biscuit?” I asked Vereen. “Seems like he might even have swallowed the nickel.”

“I don't know,” said Vereen. “I just remember conspiring with Leila,” the biscuit baker.

Wouldn't we all like to send a mystery biscuit way back up into the past, to our old folks at home. Stephen Foster wrote that song in 1851, so it's not an emancipated slave who is “longing for the old plantation.” He must have run off, and the old folks he escaped from are not the ones he misses.

For me, they're the same. They wanted me to have everything they never had, except the lure of the wilderness. The Depression had been more than swamp enough for them. They gave me to understand that one false step—taking a drink, for instance, or going too far before marriage, or thinking you can find the truth by thinking—and the next thing you know you're up to your neck, begging for some kind of, any kind of mercy—from Whom? And you're going to get rational now? …got to think …If I can …just…pull my arms out with my teeth—

And that good head of yours, too, goes under, gurgling. And some bubbles. One last bubble. And on down to the bad place. For good.

The old folks felt abysmal dread underfoot, and they sang, “How firm a foundation is Jesus Christ My Lord.” Faith-based but also empirical: my parents had been poor and scared and unable to go to college, and church helped them rise in the world. Me, I keep jumping to empirical tuffets. My mother said this, devoutly, about liquor: “Nobody really likes the taste of it.” Apparently people drank purely for infernal reasons. I found that hard to believe. Case in point, here in the swamp: peaty water is tasty. Though it could use more kick.

Pogo's creator, “Walt Kelly, looked, as cartoonists tend to, like his protagonist, roundheaded and mild, but he was a heavy drinker. I knew a man, Morrie Werner, who knew Kelly in New York newspaper circles back in the early fifties. Morrie said Kelly in his cups got crazily argumentative. For instance, Kelly once found, to his horror, that he was drinking with a man who had voted for Thomas Dewey for president. Implacably Kelly undertook to disabuse this man of everything he professed to believe, eventually going so far as to bet the man a hundred dollars that he hadn't voted for Dewey.

There was no quicksand in Pogo. Every animal was invincibly illogical, a paragon of unenlightened but unsinkable self-interest—except for Pogo himself, who would break in with a cry of “Albert! You suspects one man, catches the WRONG one an’ so you claims the one you IS GOT is GUILTY! Jus’ CATCHIN’ a man don't prove he's a CULPRIT!” It was good that Pogo was on hand (would that he had influence in the White House today), but the thoughtless animals provided the fun and the motor. Albert might have his foot stuck in the muzzle of a small cannon for several days, but he would carry on right along. Churchy LaFemme, a turtle, had no perspective to speak of, even when his head wasn't stuck inside his shell, as it was for several weeks once (a bug and then a frog and briefly a bird served as his “seeing-eye head”). But he would sing, to Miz Groundchuck, the turtle version of “Old Folks at Home”: “Wade on a pond a swan he rover, / Farf farfa weigh…”

Sometimes Kelly got topically political. Deacon Mushrat and Mole, busybody promoters of suspicion, were local; they blended in with the prevailing hubbub of mutual misconstrual. But outside ideologues, mean enough to have broad agendas, occasionally showed up in the swamp. The pig and the goat who looked like Khrushchev and Castro just seemed out of their element, but the McCarthyesque lynx or wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey was a genuine threat, his squinty eyes all the more sharply focused for their lack of pupils. He had a sidekick who looked like Richard Nixon.

The regular Okefenokeeans—even the Marxist cowbirds, who claim to be doves and justify moving into Pogo's house and eating his cookies by accusing him of “thriving only under the thralldom of thrift”—were too full of themselves, too wary of one another, and too just-the-way-we- are-down-here gregarious to live by precepts or ideals. They would, however, wax philosophical. “Every man's heart is eventual in the right place,” said Pogo in one of his quiet chats with the counterintuitively soppy Porky Pine. But Pogo's most famous saying, which environmentalists in the real world took up, was “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” To be a Southern liberal, you have to believe both those things at once.

You also have to know that no ism covers everything. In Lure of the Wilderness, there's a point in the swamp past which none dares venture but the deepest-dyed half-feral swampwise or the insane. That point is marked by a pole with a cow skull on it. The sound track at that point …The music is by Franz Waxman, who also did Bride of Frankenstein and, creepier, Tod Browning's The Devil-Doll. When I'm writing something I aim to get past that point.

In the movie, Tom Keefer, the swamp rat who holes up way back in there beyond the pole, because the police are after him, is a Hollywood notion, an innocent fugitive played by pre-hitch-in-his-gitalong Walter Brennan. In the novel, as Vereen points out in his introduction, Keefer is “like the swamp itself, adapted to it because he is by nature wild.” He never wears more than a layer of buckskin. “I can stay warm,” he says, “if I just put my mind to it.” I believe my mother stayed religious in that way.

One night in the Okefenokee, I lay on the platform shuddering. It had turned cold, and I had brought just a light thermal blanket, some new material that was supposed to be better than a heavy sleeping bag but wasn't. I turned my mind, or it turned me, to this question: was I feeling miserable enough to sympathize with my mother? I'll never be quite as tall as Dad but close enough. I'll never be anywhere near as deep as Mom, orphan girl from Mississippi. To the extent that I am rational today (too great an extent, women have told me), it is in defense against her depths. “He survives a cottonmouth bite in his cheek,” to quote Vereen on his father's character Keefer again, “by going into himself and waiting it out.” Cold reason enabled me to do something like that. But there was no demystifying my mother out of her own morass, as I saw it.

We got to arguing once and she demanded of me—I can't remember what. I just remember saying, as Pogo might have said to her, more vividly, if she'd been a cartoon character, “That's a loaded question, Mom. Any way I answer it will hurt your feelings.”

She did not respond as follows: “Hm. Interesting point. Maybe I'm setting my feelings up to be hurt.” No more than Albert did when Pogo said catching somebody doesn't make him a culprit. What Albert did was give Pogo a skeptical look and say, “It's a good START, ain't it?”

What my mother did was look at me as if I'd slapped her and say in a horrified little voice, “What a thing to say to your mother.” You couldn't get around her sense of herself. She had put her mind to it. So much of the mental energy of the old folks at home was devoted to defense. Now everywhere I roam…

As Vasco da Gama

Went off and left his mama,

“After all I've bindia,”

She demanded—“India?”

Maybe Vasco was looking for an experience—an experience he could handle—that was as powerful as growing up under you, ma'am.

I was still cold. I focused on alligators grunting. Alligators and frogs.

G'nuh. Big old bull alligator.

Gunk. Maybe a gator, maybe a frog.

Pweep pweep. Frogs.

Worked up a little song:

Would you rather be a gator, or rather a frog?

Little jumpy green thing, or more like a log?

Lost the rest of it with my notes—should've written it down in the logbook. Each shelter had one, where people passing through could register their comments. I remember a couple of them.

At Maul Hammock: “This place is yellow-fly hell.” Followed by, in another hand: “The flies live here. We are visitors. We come to see all the inhabitants, not just the cute ones.” However, in the same hand: “We are making this trip with two over-sixties people. We don't recommend this.”

At Big Water (the next night), “The ‘over-sixties’ are hanging in there.”

Big Water was where George or Georgette lived. It's a tradition, I gathered from the logbooks, for male commenters to call him or her George, female ones Georgette. It is a violation of federal law to feed Okefenokee alligators. And I dare say it is bad practice to encourage them to look to human beings for sustenance. As Slick put it at Maul Hammock: “If an alligator can climb on a log, an alligator can climb up here in our sleep.”

“ing bags,” Hal added.

And yet, I halfway accidentally let George get a catfish head. I couldn't help myself—he begged and begged. Rested his head on the edge of the shelter floor the way a dog will on the edge of your bed, only with his mouth wide open, and looking at us with his good eye. (My mother loved feeding animals, how appreciative they could be. And—it just hits me now—my mother lost an eye.) Clearly he had figured out what campers find appealing.

Not that alligators can't shift for themselves. Here, from Okefinokee Album (alternative spelling), by Francis Harper and Delma E. Presley, a book I recommend, is a story told to Harper in 1930 by Uncle Lone Thrift, an old folk for sure, who lived on the edge of the swamp:

Why it was just as much like putting your foot on a plank an’ letting it slap in the mud, as anything you could think of. When I first heard it, I didn't know what it was. And it passed on for a number of years…. Eventually I saw him laying out on the batteries or logs or wherever he's supposed to lay out of a day, with his mouth open. An’ when his tongue would get covered with muskeeters, he'd slap his mouth together like that [slapping his hands together], you see. He'll chew a little bit, it look like. An’ then he'd open up again an’ keep repeating that.

It wasn't George that got my notebook, because I still had it the next morning when we set off on the last leg of our thirty-one-mile trip through what would be, if it were a swamp, the largest freshwater swamp in America. The notes may have disappeared in the confusion after Slick's and my canoe rammed the log another alligator was lying on. Slick, in the back, was trying to take this alligator's picture, and I—in the front, and therefore inches from the alligator when we hit the log-evidently did not do the right thing with my paddle. In fact, this trip was the first time I had been in a canoe without falling out. The alligator didn't even give me a look, just sighed and slid off the log.

You do feel when you paddle back up in there that the world you know is far, far away. There are stretches where you have to fight your way through lily pads, and stretches where you glide over water that looks like black glass with trees and flowers laid onto it by some kind of photographic process, and you dip your paddle and its blade disappears as the flora's mirror images swirl around the handle. And you find yourself gliding into the cypress-lined Big Water, a huge open space in the middle of nowhere. It feels like a cathedral, only not fraught with interpretation.

Because the reservations system keeps the trails so strictly apportioned, we didn't see anybody for the whole trip but alligators and ourselves, and turtles, sandhill cranes, egrets, great blue herons, white ibises, and anhingas, also known as water turkeys. And occasional water moccasins, but they don't fall down on top of you from trees, as I recall they did in Lure of the Wilderness. They shy away from canoeists. As to the alligators, here's another story from old Lone Thrift:

Henry Bennett went down there to go in swimming— him and his brother. They climb up on this stump to jump off in there. And one of 'em jumped off ahead of the other. And he waited for him to rise before he jumped in. He wouldn't jump in because his brother wouldn't rise. And directly he saw his brother's foot come up. He jumped in then an’ gathered his brother by the foot. He knew there was something the matter with him. And he drug him, 'gator an’ all, out to dry land. The 'gator had the boy by the head, but turned him loose when they got out to the land. Then they went to the house and got a gun an’ shot him. And I see that boy many a time with the scars on both sides of his head 'bout three inches. An’ there weren't no hair on the scars.

We didn't go in swimming. I asked Jim Petty, a local tour guide, whether anybody gets eaten by an alligator anymore. He said aw, naw, they've never been known to eat people; they prefer turtles and frogs. And mosquitoes?

Petty looked at me funny. I recounted the Lone Thrift story. He said alligators lie around with their mouths wide open “in lieu of perspiring.” They lack sweat glands, so that's how they cool off: by gaping.

Okay, so: the quicksand. Petty said that was a Hollywood concoction— the Okefenokee footing will never go so far as to suck you deeper than your knees or so.

(Later I Googled “Hollywood+quicksand” and found that it's generally oatmeal, sometimes cream of wheat. Somebody reminiscing about his work on a movie called Satan's Children said they used $138 worth of oatmeal, and that was 1975 dollars. The place where they shot the quicksand scene “was near a cow pasture. After we finished the cows got in there and had a feast. The owner had to keep his cows out of there in case they overate and got sick.”)

I asked Petty whether people still get lost forever in the swamp.

“That's just something you read about,” he said.

What a thing to say to a writer.

Hanging with the Klan

Back in 1981 Parade magazine asked me to go get a sense of the “new” Ku Klux Klan. My photographer friend Slick got a phone number from somebody, and then next thing we knew…

Cheap Klan labor” was the term Slick and I came up with. For access to most surefire story subjects, you have to wade through agents, managers, and aides who wonder exactly what kind of story you have in mind and exactly how much time you'll need, and whether they'll get the cover….

But the Ku Klux Klan, these days, is easy. They will put on their robes for you and light crosses for you and take you out into the woods and show you their guns and maneuvers, and they will come out with unguarded quotes.

So rather than try to infiltrate the Klan, I thought I would see whether it could infiltrate me. I'm a white Southerner, and I tend to like what you might call redneck institutions. I don't even consider myself too pure to spend time with people, of any race, who harbor vestiges of racism. I figured that if today's media-savvy Klan was rapidly attracting decent people across the nation, as it claimed to be, I would recognize its new appeal. I wouldn't be happy about it, because I don't see how anything could make me stop feeling ashamed of the Klan, but I have often told liberal Northerners, “You know, Klansmen are people.” Liberal Northerners have refused to agree. Many people love to hate Klansmen, from a distance. Hate, as we all—well, most of us—know in principle, is always too simple.

(I don't mean to suggest that Klansfolk are just like everybody else deep down inside, but I heard a Klansman say on TV that what he wants to inculcate in young (white) people is “the truth that their race is their nation.” That's about as clear-cut a definition of racism as I can think of. And it's something that a lot of people in many nations are inclined to believe, I'll bet, without admitting it to themselves.)

Okay. I might as well tell you the most disgusting part of this story first. With photographer Slick Lawson, who shares my ethnic tastes, I made contact with Roger Handley, Alabama Grand Dragon of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and Terry Tucker, head of Special Forces. They arranged a special cross lighting for us. The Invisible Empire is the most visible of the nation's several Klan factions and also the most militant. Handley and Tucker have received a lot of national publicity for their insistence that a race war is coming and that the empire is going to be ready because of its commando training in the woods.

Personally, I can't recall the last riot that took place in a forest setting, but there is no denying that lonely dirt roads—when you are driving at night near Cullman, Alabama, with a Klan car in front of you and a Klan car in back of you—can give you a sense of enemies lurking. The lead car pulled over to the side, and so did we, and so did the car behind. It was a scene out of TV movies. The scene where somebody gets shot. Slick and I jumped out, Slick armed with his camera, me with my ballpoint.

It was a clear night, but all I could see were pine trees that didn't want to get involved. Nothing happened. We waited. I couldn't even hear any crickets.

Finally, Handley called to us from the lead car: “Uh, if y'all are ready, we can go on.” It turned out we had just stopped for Tucker to pee.

At the cross site, everybody seemed nice enough at first. There were maybe sixty people around, a number of whom, including Tucker, were dressed in Green Beret camouflage fatigues and carrying M-15 assault rifles. The Imperial Night Hawk had a long sword with a decorative blade that he was proud of. I was not fond of it, nor of the assault rifles, myself, but there were several women and children around, and people were chatting. “What you been up to?” “Nice night for it.” Nobody minded being photographed. Handley, a sheet-metal worker disabled by a bad back, observed that “lynching's not needed anymore.” People were complaining about affirmative action and blockbusting, and claiming that integration was ruining the public schools. Nothing you couldn't hear at a country club, I imagine. Every now and then, someone in a camouflage suit would dash off to check the perimeter, wherever that was, but that reminded me of scout camp except for the rifles.

Nobody said anything funny. That was astounding. Slick told a story— I think he made most of it up on the spot, from his army days—about the time he parachuted and landed on a picnic table, got potato salad all over his shoulder…. Klansmen chuckled but didn't come back with any tales of their own. They hefted their rifles and looked edgily toward the perimeter.

That's when I met Bill Riccio, twenty-four, a Birmingham car dealership sales manager. Riccio said he was Alabama Grand Chaplain but shortly was introduced by Handley as the Great Titan, so he said he guessed that's what he was now, but at any rate he had held a religious post, and he was a pudgy, blond, rational-seeming guy. Even though his assault rifle was fully loaded and he said the FBI's file on him was 6,300 pages thick, I didn't feel threatened. He mentioned something about murdered black kids in Atlanta.

I figured this might be a point at which a new media-savvy Klansman might slip up and say something embarrassing. Something like “I, of course, deplore the idea of children dying, but.”

“What do you think about that whole thing?” I asked casually.

“Well,” he said, “some people might think my opinion is kinda morbid. I don't think I better say. I'll say this: Little niggers grow up to be big niggers. And that's twenty of 'em we won't have to kill later. I'm not one to do anything to a child, but.”

There I was, standing out in the woods with this guy, feeling nauseated. Ashamed of myself for listening. Riccio went on: “I've taken a sales course; I've taken psychology in college. And I know what stimuli make people respond. There's gonna be a race war. And the white man will stand up.

“I got caught in the Birmingham riots when I was six. If it hadn't been for Bull Connor, who people call a brutal policeman—Bull Connor's police protected me. I've seen what animals niggers can be.” Is what he said.

Then the Klansmen who weren't in camouflage donned their robes-only one or two with face-covering hoods—and the speeches began.

Handley, a stolid type who looked like his back was bothering him, invoked Jesus and told us that Jews and “the ape nigger” were out to destroy white civilization, which he was proud to represent. It was a fine thing that the Klan had helped put President Reagan in office, he said, but when the new administration cut back on all the giveaway programs, the minorities were going to loot and burn. And this time white people were going to take up the gun against “this festering sore ape that's around our feet holding the white man back.” The Klan wouldn't be satisfied, he said, until the last minority person was either dead or jumping into the ocean to swim back to Africa.

Then he brought on Riccio. “Look at these little children!” Riccio cried. “These little blond-haired, blue-eyed children!” Actually only one of the three small kids who were standing in front of him, looking only mildly fascinated, was blond. “If it hadn't been for the Klan, there wouldn't be any white children. Just be little brown kinky-haired animal-looking things crawling around.” Is what he said.

He denounced the TV show Diff'rent Strokes, in which “a white man takes in two nigger children, and these animal-looking things call him Daddy. These festering-with-hate ape niggers.”

A person said that, sure did. And the gathering's reaction—well, I've never been to a black sabbath, but this was not what you would expect the reaction of a black sabbath's gathering to be. More like a pep rally. At a small school.

Forty-two robed figures circled the cross, which was over twenty feet high and wrapped with rags soaked in diesel fuel (which was getting too expensive, Handley complained). They raggedly executed a cross-burning ceremony. “We do not burn the cross, we light the cross, that the forces of light may drive out the forces of darkness,” said Handley.

Foom!—the cross went up, and twenty or so onlookers went “Ooo” and “That's a good one,” and as the blaze died down, people took off their robes and chatted and rounded up their kids. Riccio, looking flushed, said: “Some other Klan groups don't have a real clear creed. They say niggers are all right just as long as they stay in their place. We say either they go back to Africa, or they can be fertilizer for our farms. One of the two races is going to be extinct from North America.

“And the Jewish problem must be settled, a Final Solution. I'm not going to hang up my robe until the last Jew is deported to Palestine or executed.” Meanwhile parents within earshot were, as I say, rounding up their kids.

Slick and I drove to Nashville and got drunk. We were not brimming with ethnic pride. I almost felt that I never wanted to hear country music or chew tobacco again. “I feel like putting on a tux and listening to chamber music,” Slick said.

“These people ought not to be out loose,” I was thinking. I remembered, with satisfaction, a high incidence of low foreheads, slack jaws, bad teeth. And rifles. And grins. They worked well for Slick visually. “These people are scum,” I thought.

That was the first time the Klan got into me.

Later, Slick and I spent time with the Tennessee branch of the Invisible Empire and with Bill Wilkinson, the empire's founder and national head: the Imperial Wizard. And our impression of the Klan became more humanized.

Wilkinson was visiting Tennessee from national headquarters, his home in Denham Springs, Louisiana. He wore conservative grey suits, smoked decent cigars, and pretty much exclusively used the term Negro. In context, I almost began to feel fond of him, because he never once made me want to throw up. I've met people in, say, the entertainment business whom I liked less. I was willing to believe him when he said the Klan no longer condoned corporal punishment. It was with real embarrassment, I think, that he admitted having to banish a couple of Klans-men recently for tarring and feathering a couple of previously banished Klansmen.

Wilkinson is smooth on the radio. He looks a bit like George “Wallace, only considerably less pugnacious. His chin's not his strongest feature, but he's got some charisma, and also he's been on national television. When he showed up at a big Klan rally in Pulaski, Tennessee, people oohed and ahhed and clustered around for autographs. Young girls stole kisses from him and came away saying to each other, “Ain't he a fox?”

He also articulates a clear economic argument—a story—based on white lower-middle-class self-interest. The Klan, especially in the South, which has long resisted labor unions, is the party of people who aren't supposed to have any self-interest but do. They feel, with some justification, that they are being forced out of jobs—by blacks who are favored under affirmative-action programs, by Mexican laborers who slip over the border, by Vietnamese who are resettled in this country and given a helping hand by the government. They are people whose kids can't make the basketball team anymore, whose neighborhoods are changing character, who are threatened by street crime. People who have never had much money or education but have always prided themselves on being white and knowing how to handle a gun. They resent the fact that their kids pick up black-culture mannerisms and phrases (“fox,” for instance) from TV.

The Klan today also prides itself on taking in women, Catholics, and longhairs. Both Riccio and Tex Moore, the Grand Dragon of Tennessee, described themselves as Catholics who've moved away from the church because it has turned its back on segregation. Of course, if the Klan were to exclude the long-haired, these days, it would be missing out on some of the scariest old boys in the world. For instance, the two hulking, stoned-looking perimeter guards at the Pulaski rally who identified themselves blearily as “extremely lapsed Mennonites.” They carried heavy-gauge guns and a stick with a circular saw blade set in it.

The Klanswomen we spoke to weren't shrinking violets. Mary Stickle, a former marine sergeant, said, “I'm proud to be a Klansperson” but said she believed that the Equal Rights Amendment was “from the pits of Hell.” If women would stay home satisfying their husbands, she said, they wouldn't be out getting savaged by blacks. She told of a life of constant scrapping—from her childhood among five rough brothers (“They say I hit them with rocks, with the coal-oil bucket”) to her current life of harassment in a tough East Nashville neighborhood, where somebody had burned down her store and ransacked her house. She and her son had recently fought two women and a man and put them all in the hospital, she said, adding that she felt fortified since she joined the Klan—a number of fellow Klansmen, robed, had massed in front of her house. She is the Great Titan of Tennessee. I know I shouldn't have, but I liked her.

I also liked Phoebe Wair, secretary of the Tennessee Klan, who said that in the two years since she and her husband, Tommy (Grand Klaliff), had joined the Klan, “our marriage has been better than in the other fifteen. We're meeting good white people who don't drink. And it's something my husband and I can do together, that we can talk about.” She also said, “You know the Jews don't believe in Jesus? That's something I didn't know till not long ago. That kind of threw me for a loop.”

The Pulaski rally was held on the property of a cheerful silver-haired lady whose name I didn't catch. She believed that Adam was not the first man but the first white man, an improvement over the “pre-Adamic” races—that is, “the Egyptians, the Asiatics, the niggers.” The Bible, she said, “is the history of the white man. The Jews claim they're the people of the Book, but they're Canaanites and Edomites, not Aryans.”

While I was trying to sort that out, I overheard a conversation between two thirtyish men:

“You know, Teddy Kennedy is straight Communist.”

“I was in 'Nam. I don't like no Vietnamese. Hate 'em. Spent two years getting shot at by them people, and now they're bringing 'em over here and giving 'em a house.”

“And you don't get anything.”

“I believe fast as they build those houses, I can tear 'em down.”

All day before the Pulaski rally, a Japanese TV network crew followed Wilkinson around interviewing him. But when they showed up at the rally, the Japanese among them were kept out because they weren't Aryan. The American woman who was working with them got in, but two old boys cornered her at one point and said, “Are you taking things to them Japs? That can be stopped, you know. 'Cause if you can't stick to your own race, you're in trouble.”

Throughout the rally, security men with rifles and semiautomatic tommy guns and just-barely-legal sawed-off shotguns were contacting each other via crackly walkie-talkies. “Check over there. I think them Japs are sneaking in.”

In Pulaski, the speeches were considerably less loathsome and, in fact, evoked sympathy for the marginal white worker. But I wasn't feeling infiltrated.

It seems to me that any organization in this day and age that speaks out for free enterprise but can't relate to the Japanese is not what you would call upscale. The Klan's rank and file like to talk about being better than “minorities” because they don't feel better than anybody else, and the leaders like being around the rank and file because they wouldn't appear to have much leadership potential compared to anybody else. Wilkinson is smart, but that is to say smart for a Klansman. He is not very smart compared with, say, Vernon Jordan, or Morris Dees, the Alabama lawyer whose Southern Poverty Law Center has organized a Klan “Watch that is building cases against Klansmen involved in violence.

Wilkinson doesn't hate anybody, he says, and he may have too complicated a mind for that. He reads Black Enterprise magazine on airplanes to keep up with the other camp. “Of course I'm not saying you won't find some Klansmen who hate Negroes’ guts,” he says with a you-know-how-folks-are chuckle. I would say that Wilkinson almost, but not quite, knows how folks are.

He's willing to share his thinking, though. The Klan today frightens me less than the secret Klan of the sixties, which was lodged deeper in the infrastructure. Wilkinson says his empire is emulating the civil rights movement—parading, clashing with the publicity-seeking Communist Workers Party, getting on TV. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease. White Americans have got to learn to squeak.”

Wilkinson feels that his wheel is gathering momentum as the nation bears right. But I can't see that the Klan has the pervasive potential of the blander Moral Majority, or even of Diff'rent Strokes. If you want to be racist and complain about people on welfare, as Slick pointed out, “There are many other things you can join.”

True, those robes and crosses remain a marketable, revivable quantity, like the word jaws when it comes to movies. But for all its modification of image, the Klan's distinction—and its usefulness—is still that it reflects raw racism and reminds us how real and nasty that is. The Klan is also counterrevolutionary, as always, because it helps divide the American proletariat into white and nonwhite. The Communist Workers Party does the same thing by taking the Klan as a target.

Cheap Klan labor.

There are, however, all those guns, which squawk louder than words. A majority of all American households now are armed, and the Klan is out there in public, brandishing the most lethal legal weapons and urging all white people to stockpile ammunition. Recently Tennessee Grand Titan Stan King was creased by two bullets fired at him point-blank through his screen door by a disgruntled banished Klansman.

Along with King, the “Wairs, Tex Moore, Mary Stickle, and several other Klanspeople we got to know, Slick and I went on a support-your-local-police march in Clarksville, Tennessee. The marchers were armed only with sticks, but there were raunchy-looking security men driving along behind with heavy firepower in their trunks. Supposedly, the local media had been advised that members of the Communist Workers Party were going to be on hand, ready to clash.

As it turned out, the CWP didn't show. And only minimal curiosity was aroused in Clarksville as we paraded through the streets past Mack's Cafe (“Bean Soup. Vegetable Soup. Special Breakfast”) toward the courthouse. But we were all scanning the horizon for Reds, and our buddy Tex Moore said to me, “I don't know. You might be a minority sympathizer. And we'd shoot you quicker than anybody. Because it's the sympathizers that have caused the trouble.”

Caught up in the drama of covert minority sympathy and imminent exposure to crossfire, I was hanging in there next to Tex, and I was up. I was thinking, “This must be what combat is like. Sort of.” Maybe Slick and I would get shot together and get an award. I was even thinking that if I got wounded in the line of duty, I wouldn't have to worry about certain pressing personal matters for a while. I was aware that these were stupid thoughts, but I had them anyway.

That was the other time the Klan got into me.

(It occurs to me now that if I was going to end that story on an up note, I might have quoted something a Klan wife said as we were riding in an elevator with her and her husband and Wilkinson to a lawyer's office on the third floor of a maybe six-floor building in Nashville: “Ooo. This is the highest I've ever been.” Wilkinson gave her an avuncular “stick-with-me-kid” smile. Right after the story came out in Parade, the Nashville Tennessean reported that Wilkinson had become an FBI informant. He denied it, but that was it for him in the public eye. In 1984, thanks to evidence gathered by Dees's Southern Poverty Law Center, a federal grand jury indicted Riccio, Tucker, Handley, and other Klansmen for conspiring to attack civil rights marchers—several people were injured by gunfire—in Decatur, Alabama, in 1979. The Justice Department called me to “Washington to discuss my testifying as to, I guess, the defendants’ character. I said I would—I didn't have any confidential sources—but that everything I knew was in my story. Eventually, all three pleaded guilty to misdemeanors. Riccio did some time. Fortunately Klansfolk can't afford the best lawyers. Lawsuits brought by Dees against Klan groups have pretty much bankrupted the brand. There are still people out there who are as blatantly hateful, but they don't get much media exposure these days. Imagine the envy they must feel toward Al-Qaeda. I met Dees when I went down to his home in Montgomery, Alabama, to do a story for a women's magazine about his then wife, Maureen. She said something that struck me as the ultimate in Southern liberal hip: “Good Suthun food always tastes better when you've had a cross burned on your lawn.”)

Double-Bubba Bubble (1992)

Wags are calling Bill Clinton and Al Gore the “Double-Bubba” ticket. Clever. Will the first all-Jewish ticket be Double Bubbeleh? The first all-black one (assuming both parties will be male), Co-Bro's? And what are Bush and Quayle, just white? The Blank Slate?

As a matter of fact, I was sometimes called Bubba, by family, when I was younger. A familiar form of Brother. Maybe people of my ethno-genderal category are seen, by the culture at large, as jes’ naturally brotherly. Okay, I'm grasping at straws. But who isn't?

A USA Today cartoon depicts Clinton declaring from a podium, “Ich bin ein Bubba!” The implication would seem to be that he's a slick, Kennedyesquish or gentleman bubba, a bubba wannabe with a heart of wonk. Isn't that a bit much, to give somebody an ethnic-stereotype nickname and then suggest that it's a pretense on his part? In time, no doubt, he'll be denounced for being no bubba after all.

It's all about core, really. Voters today are seen to crave core, and commentators are probing for it. Margaret Carlson in Time: “Clinton has shown that there is some iron in that core.” Peggy Noonan in Newsweek: “One wonders: at the core, where it counts, what is there?”

Let us not forget that Richard Nixon had core, and was rotten to it. John Kennedy had core, and couldn't keep it in his pants. Jimmy Carter's (pious) and Lyndon Johnson's (ass-kicking) cores were their downfalls. Harry Truman had core in retrospect, but that is partly because historians are looking for core at this juncture.

Will perceived core do, as long as it's sustained? I picture the perceived bubba as an old boy who, whatever else he may have going for him, at least doesn't have his head in the clouds. (“These are not goofy liberals,” says Clinton-Gore campaign manager David Wilhelm. “These are the guys who are in touch.”) Whatever else a bubba is deficient in, he has core. Or anyway, cob. But can any core be genuine, yet marketable-core worn on the sleeve—to a plurality of the voters?

I think it was during the Reagan administration that commentators started worrying about politicians’ cores. And I think it had something to do with the growing suspicion that anybody who looked as calmly resolute as Reagan on TV must have at his core a rock-solid sense of which camera to look into. Then, because they were awkward on TV, we could be quick to disdain Bush and Quayle as hollow. Now, because Clinton seems unnaturally outgoing on camera and Gore unnaturally stiff, they must both be hiding something. If it's core, why would they hide it? They must be just mannikins (or as Republican senator Jake Garn has put it, “pretty boys”) who tell us what we want to hear. So what? We don't want to hear what we want to hear anymore?

What lies at either a voter's or a politician's core of cores, after all, but self-interest? If you think you're voting for somebody who's going to help somebody else, you silly liberal, you're just doing it to feel better about yourself, seems to be the working assumption these days. It's hard to see how any president can manage not to be cored by the current electorate's core values, which set in deep during the Reagan years and which may be stated as follows:

We are entitled to everything, and taxes are bad.

Briefly (1992)

A quote in The New York Times:

Bob would make a series of points, and then rather than just ask a question that might logically follow, Bill would synthesize all the information and make that leap and come up with the bottom line.

The speaker is some congressman who was present when Robert M. Gates, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, gave Bill Clinton a national security briefing six months before the presidential election.

That's why you want to be president, right? So the CIA has to tell you what the real bottom line is. But then when you find out, do you wish you hadn't? And if you're still only running for president, and the guy who's slipping you the skinny is serving at the pleasure of your opponent—who himself used to be the CIA head…

I figure it went like this:

GATES: Well, Governor Clinton, one thing you should know is that your effectiveness, should you win, may be just a leetle bit affected by the fact that the Iraqis have in their possession certain photographs. Of…

CLINTON: Me?

GATES: Cut to the chase, don't you? Let me answer that question with a question. You know the, ah …false rumor spread by, ah …Republicans when you ran, ah …unsuccessfully for Congress in 1974? The rumor that the young man who stripped naked and climbed a tree during an antiwar demonstration in Fayetteville in 1969 was, ah…

CLINTON: Me?

GATES: You got it.

CLINTON: I am aware of that …false rumor.

GATES: Wellll, it seeeems that, ahhh …Now we don't know how enhanced these photos might be, but—

CLINTON: Photographs? They have …You have …So. What you're telling me is, the bottom line is, the world is a cheesy-TV-movie-conspiracy kind of place.

GATES: You're quick!

Or, else, it went like this:

GATES: One thing you should know, Governor Clinton— the reason we can't really go into Bosnia and kick butt is that there is a tiny holy man over there—literally, he's eighteen inches tall—who is very close to the Serbians (at the moment), and he has certain powers over global weather pattterns that could disastrously—

CLINTON: So. You're telling me the world is like one of those Bergman movies in which God appears in the form of an enormous spider and you hear a lot of Swedish and the subtitle says, “Anything can happen”?

GATES: Bingo.

Bill, You're Due

An Inaugural Ode

I

(Preamble)

Maya Angelou I know

Is doing this officially.

I'd just like to say hello,

Though I'll be using the national “we,”

As is my right, just as it's each

Native or immigrant daughter's or son's.

You said in your acceptance speech:

No “them” among Americans.

So …may we call you Bill?

Well, anyway, we will-

Also assuming that right.

Bill, you have a cat, right?

So here's a doggerel

Quasi-inaugural

Owed.

I mean ode.

(If only I could preface it

Without invoking the deficit.)

II

(Hail to the Chief, with Some Biographical Speculation)

Just like Lincoln! Being sworn in!

Just like Ike and FDR!

Back on Imus in the Mornin

Did you think you'd get this far?

When you did Arsenio,

Larry King, and MTV,

And nearly ev'ry other show,

Did you feel, somehow, “It's me”?

Yes, we do believe you did,

And further back than that. Some poign-

Ance now: When you were just a kid

Did a ray of light come, boing,

Down into your wond'ring eyes?

Did a ghostly voice advise:

“Boy, I'm sorry I died.

But you be Blythe inside.

What you intuit:

Go 'head, towhead,

Do it”?

Not that all your daring came

From a man above you:

Maybe Mama'd changed her name,

And hung out at the track,

But she'd be back,

And win or lose she'd love you.

“The rest is history!” we cry.

“The future will be, too!

May it be bright for us and by

Association, you!”

III

(Long Stretch in the Middle, Complicated by Multiculturalistic Considerations Accounting for Rhyme Discrepancies)

I speak as a liberal son of the South

Recalling 1976:

Before we lose this grin on our mouth,

Let's start proving we're capably bent,

Whatever it takes, this side dirty tricks

On govern- (not just McGovern-) ment.

What a country! Melting pot?

Egg of multiplicit yolks?

Ev'ry metaphor seems not

Exactly right to fit a nation

Made of such a range of folks.

So seems each administration.

Some sail in high-mindedly

Each one ends with broken heart.

Part of the problem seems to be,

When we say, “Stop telling us what

We want to hear, ” we don't mean start

Telling us what we'd rather not.

And what do we hear, since we're Shoshone,

Hispanic, Jewish, Asian, Greek,

And tony Bostonian, and Toni

Morrison and Tony Danza?

We vary in tone and shade as we speak.

What rhymes with what differs, stanza to stanza.

The Carter crew—too rude, too pious,

And too determined to disprove

The widespread anti-Cracker bias-

Failed in their time to mobilize what

It takes to get our land in a groove

Conducive to kicking some serious butt.

Reagan leapt into the breach

And filled it with a vacuum,

Which Bush (a sort of black-hole leech)

Inhaled. Now I with motley rhyme

And hope for our republic come

(Ring inaugural bells!) to chime

In with this ode to outwit the pneu-

Maticity rife in the U.S. today.

(Pneumatic meaning “pertaining to

Air, gases, wind.”) I mean, really—

Blow driers, saxes are fine in their way,

Now we want concrete achievements, Slick Willie.

IV

(Aside to the Vanquished)

As for the party of Quayle and Hatch,

Spector and Sununu,

You were always full of flat

Ulence, but even you knew

Better than that Convention of yours.

How did you expect

To win an election rolling in sewers

Anointing yourselves elect?

If we had no GOP,

Do you think we all would be

On the dole?

(Lowercase d.)

Here is what is clear to me:

If youguys were the only we,

There d be no rock and roll.

But I'm not saying your persuasion

Has no role in the whole equation-

Democrats as well exhale

Bad hot air on which they sail.

But do you hear 'em

Advancing the theorem

“Only we're red white and blue?”

That's what you guys said of you.

V

(Analysis of the Current Crisis, Tentatively Optimistic)

Gennifer Flowers in Penthouse hit

On something, in stating

“I knew it [datingMarried men] was wrong, but it fit

My lifestyle so well.”

Does that ring a bell?

Haven't we all been running through

Uncle Sugar's credit

As if we were wedded

To someone else? We don't feel tru

Ly right about it,

But, without it…

Meanwhile, loving our freedom, we

Tend to disparage

The notion of marriage

To fat old doddering D.C.

We're individual.

He's so …residual.

But maybe it's time for vow renewal,

Time to throw

Away our co-

Dependent grudges. Maybeyou'll

Get us back

Together, black

And white and young and old and rich

And poor and gay

And straight. We may

Have scrambled to a juncture which

Finds us sensing

A recommencing

Two-hundred-plus-year itch.

VI

(Wedding Toast)

And will untamed Democracy

Take Capital as lawful spouse?

The Money and the People be

Joined, and not like cat and mouse?

Looks all right on paper, yet…

Will each accept the other's debt?

Lots of water is over the dam,

The dam itself is showing saggage…

People! Smile for the PortaCam!

Money! Pack trousseau and baggage!

Freedom, Investment! Get your heads

Together! No more sep'rate beds!

And Bill, regarding us and you:

We by clear plurality

Have formally declared, “We do,”

And you've looked good postvictory—

In fact, shown signs of being that

Rare thing, a lucky Democrat.

It seems that you have always had

A knack for matching up with many

Of course, chameleons on plaid

Wind up at length not turning any

Color. But even that must be

Kind of interesting to see.

Hey every marriage is mixed.

Though sorely tried, the Union ain't

Quite broke and never will be fixed.

Neither we nor you're a saint.

You barely won, we're not all lost.

You know what bread and blue jeans cost.

Fleetwood Mac, are you in tune?

Judy Collins, good and folky?

Let's all have a honeymoon!

No point now in being pokey.

Hillary, Chelsea, Al, and Tipper-

Boogie out the Age of Gipper.

The Great Includer's come to town!

Pitch a multiethnic frolic!

Gravity, as in trickle-down,

Is not enough. Let's get hydraulic!

Spirits rise! This matter lingers:

We aren't giving centrism a chance

Unless the marginalized can dance.

Pump from the heart to the toes and the fingers.

Let's remember, in our dizziness,

Elvis. Not his life, his motto.

Sing it out, and not just sotto

Voce: Let's TAKE CARE OF BUSINESS.

VII

(Envoi)

Bill, this ode is yours receivable.

Will be when I've faxed it out at least.

One more thing. That unbelievable

Deficit—we've maxed it out at least?

A Makeover for Uncle Sam? (1995)

In the Louisiana bayous recently, a friend of mine[*] was discussing the state of the nation with a wiry local man in the snake and alligator business. The man belonged to a football pool, to an old, widespread, if not strictly speaking prominent family down around in there, and that was about all. “Uncle Sam,” he boasted, “doesn't know I exist.”

No Social Security number to pull this old boy into the FICA Bubble, no vote for him to regret throwing away on palpable misrepresentation, no satanic tax obligation, and no reason to worry about interest rates because his standing was good in the underground economy. A buddy of his had unofficially connected his dish to the satellite in return for certain hands-on considerations, including a bluetick puppy, so many gator-tail filets a month, and an unregistered fully automatic weapon.

The wholly unfederal life. The nineties American dream.

What other dream is feasible in America today? Certainly no self-respecting fin-de-siècle American aspires to be president anymore. There's no more territory to light out to (you need generational roots to make it in the swamp). Even if you caught the eighties high-roller greed surge, where are you going to ride it? The dollar doesn't hold up abroad, if you ever get good and footloose, you'll never catch up when you get back, and if your Porsche hasn't been carjacked it's in the shop. It's hard to say what the seventies dream was, because nobody wants to admit having been even around in the seventies. The Age of Aquarius (and of integration) is in its dotage. And if there is any dad or mom living in a cozy fifties Leave-It-to-Beaver house in the suburbs today, both of them are fighting a two-hour commute while Beaver is downloading spread beavers from the Web.

So I guess the only way to feel free and empowered is to manage a kind of Kato Kaelin Americanism—living in a nice place without being implicated in the big picture.

Sooner or later, however, you're going to hear loud thumps on your bedroom wall, and the next thing you know you've become a world-renowned dipshit: you're lying in court on national television, and the only way you can pay your lawyer is either to costar with John Wayne Bobbitt in a dirty movie or to author a book in which the fool publisher wants you to tell all.

Or else you'll succumb to the urge to start stockpiling chemical fertilizer. You've become a projectional survivalist. You have met the enemy-got to get him before he gets you—and he is Uncle Sam.

Which strikes me as a shame. Sixties rebels mocked “Amerika,” but you always felt that Abbie Hoffman, for instance, wanted to be Uncle Sam. Wanted to bring him up to hip. A misreading of the American grain that no one but the prolongedly adolescent and the media (temporarily) bought into, but at least it was an earnest effort to advance Yankee Doodlism.

Then the Oval Office Ogres, Johnson and Nixon, gave way to Jimmy Carter. Today Carter may be the last true believer in Uncle Sam, at least as defender of freedom. But Jimmy didn't make all that great a case for American power when he was in power. And then Ronald Reagan assumed the mantle of head of the federal government, more or less in the spirit of a man wearing a woman's hat, to make the hat look silly.

Then, the Bush era. Well. Tie a yellow ribbon.

And now there's Clinton. In theory, an Arkansas peacenik might pull a lot of things together. A postsegregation Fulbright. Or …Bear Bryant was from Arkansas—what if Clinton's Arkansas element were more visionary and his sixties element rawer-boned? But I am trying to imagine a hybrid whose sire and dam are too far apart, each from the other and both from the present. You, the reader, are probably too young to have heard of Fulbright and Bryant. They probably took no notice of Abbie. None of the three ever heard of you.

Today we have what people call a caretaker president (taking care of what, is not clear) and a federal government dominated by a Congress that is capitalizing (to what end remains to be seen) on anti-federal government chic.

When it comes to restaurants and bookstores, I go for local. Otherwise, hey: I have a soft spot for the national level. The international level is largely beyond me—depends on who's translating. But surely the state level is the least enlightened of all. I got away from the state level (and not just because my state happened to be Georgia) as quick as I could. Republicans now are harping on the notion that government ought to be close to the people, but the further away the government is from me, the better. To whom, specifically, are state and local levels of government close to? The wheelers who make deals with the guys who hold the purse strings at those levels. Maybe I was overinfluenced in my youth by all those old cowboy movies—the town sheriff is in the crooked saloon boss's pocket and the U.S. marshal has to come in and righteously kick ass and take names. The civil rights movement, the most inspiring chapter of American history in my lifetime, was a matter of nongovernmental people reaching beyond state and local levels to the national. To be sure, the national level is disproportionally influenced by Manhattan and L.A., but who would rather live on a level dominated by Albany or Sacramento?

I acknowledge that people who prefer to operate at state and local levels are not only entitled but essential—somebody's got to do it. And the personal level is my personal favorite. But we do need a national level. Call me a sentimentalist, but I want G-men, GIs, the National Guard, the national media, the first lady, the Supreme Court, mail carriers, and, yes, even regulators to be at least conceivably good guys again. Let's rehab Uncle Sam!

Not just give him a more contemporary hat and lose the goatee. That's cosmetic. We need to restore the federal government's human face. We envision Uncle Sam as a snoop (when he is way behind business interests in that regard) because we begin to see our national confusion exposed, and we envision him as a tyrant because we feel trapped, don't want to move on ahead into accepting that a believable figurehead for us wouldn't be red-white-and-blue, it would be red-white-black-brown-yellow-pink, and just as much aunt as uncle, sensitive to, say, Islam, within reason—keeping at least one foot in the Enlightenment. It's a hard image to bring into focus.

The obvious thing would be to call on Tom Hanks. Say what you will for Newt Gingrich or your militia commander, Tom Hanks is the closest thing we have to a national touchstone figure, nowadays. What he has done for sodomites, morons, and even astronauts, in Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, and Apollo 13—why can't he do the same for that other despised type, the federal bureaucrat?

Call the movie Washington, maybe. Or Forrest for the Trees—a saga of environmental wonkism. Or …let's call the movie OSHA 13-1313-b.— capturing the drama inherent in a government regulation.

We open on the character played by Tom, a deviant simple-minded desk-jockey at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. His name is …R. S. Bump. He is at his desk, studying someone's file, and he's in a quandary.

BUMP: I kin’ see this feller's po-int.

Life is like uh box o’ choc-lits: it

would-n't be so in-ter-est-in

with-out some nuts. But—

Nope. It's not going to work. I suppose we might shift from Uncle Sam to Uncle Sham, a national figure that everybody could agree to mock and revile. We already seem to be heading that way with regard to the presidency.

I think we've got a problem here. It's one thing when somebody can boast that Uncle Sam doesn't know him. It's another thing when nobody knows Uncle Sam.

Slick. I didn't want to bring the feds down on him or Mr. X. Now Slick exists only in memory.

The New Southern Manhood (1995)

Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Jimmy Carter of Georgia are vying to out-dove each other in Haiti. Forrest Gump of Alabama has become a national hero for his imbecilic sweetness.

Bull Connor must be turning over in his grave. “Which, as far as that goes, is fine with me. Connor of Alabama made a national name for himself by sicking dogs on peaceful civil rights demonstrators. But Bear Bryant of Arkasas and Alabama must be turn, turn, turning, too. The Bear got his name by wrestling a bear. He drove country boys to ferocious glory in football. “Whither Dixie virility now?

In the 1960s, when I was embarking upon white Southern manhood, just about all the nationally prominent Southern white men aside from the Bear (whose charges didn't use cattle prods) were identified with hapless, violent, dumb-ass resistance to peace and love. Lester Maddox of Georgia and Ross Barnett of Mississippi stood firm and stupid against integration. President Lyndon Johnson of Texas and General “William “Westmoreland of South Carolina escalated the war in Vietnam to the point of destroy-this-village-to-save-it insanity.

Yet now, in the nineties, Southern white guys in the public eye exemplify extraordinary aversion to bloodshed. Not only do they go out of their way to avoid killing anybody, they can't even bear to drive a hard bargain. Clinton sent Carter and his fellow Georgian Sam Nunn down to Haiti to arrange for the gentlest possible armed intervention, and they came up with a deal that catered to the dictator's wife. Carter was apparently swept off his feet by Mrs. General Cedras. She struck the former leader of the free world as being so slender, attractive, and basically such a good old girl, he couldn't find it in his heart to demand that her husband get out of Haiti.

Even that was too invasive for Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia (a man who served his wife with divorce papers the day after she underwent cancer surgery). Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, voted against the Gulf “War.[*] Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, is accused by Northerners of being too protective of Mother Earth.

And that bizarre cinematic figure Forrest Gump is leading people to believe that success comes naturally—in football, war, entrepre-neurship, sexual and racial relations, and even parenthood—through simple-minded (not the same, apparently, as dumb-ass) niceness. All of these white men are Southern. And Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern aren't. And none of today's male country singers look like they would just as soon shoot you (or drink themselves to death) as look at you (or at themselves).

Will bubba become a synonym for peacenik? Will some such term as pinkneck enter common parlance? Will people come to believe that the Rebel yell was “I feeeeeel your pai-ai-ai-ainnnnnnn”? What is the percentage in being an agreeable, enlightened Southern white man, like me, if all the old boys with the highest profiles are so egregiously benign that they make me want to go around saying, “Life …is …lak …a …box of …chock-lits. Sometimes …you reach in …and …find a dawg turd”?

“They're all in touch with their female side!” cried Doug Marlette, the white North Carolinian Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, when I asked him what he made of all this. “It's that New Age kind of thing. It's all backward! Clinton is always hugging people. Jimmy Carter was always saying, ‘I love you.’ Talking like girls—that kind of personal stuff. Carter started it. Remember when he got chased off the water by a rabbit? …Southern guys used to be the primitives, and they're getting away from it. I said this in my book Faux Bubba: Their wives used to have two first names, now they've got two last names. Betty Sue became Rodham-Clinton. Meanwhile, Minnesotans—Robert Bly, Iron John, all that—are getting in touch with their inner Bull Connor.”

“And how did the world learn about Robert Bly, and Joseph Campbell, the mythology guy?” Marlette went on. “On public television. From Bill Moyers. All these guys—Moyers, Clinton, Carter, Gore—are Southern Baptists. My theory is, they grew up with all this hymn singing and foot washing, then got intellectualized out of it, and now they miss it. So they find a pop, secular way of expressing their religion. In the process, they've all become Bobbittized. Whereas Minnesota guys grow up in whine country; they're trying to find their dicks, through their heads— they're talking about emotions, looking for the love scene in Deliverance. Which came out in the early seventies, along with Carter and Bly.”

In other words, Southern white guys are moving away from the stereotype, because it was so out of fashion in the sixties, and non-Southern white guys have moved toward it so embarrassingly that the good-ol’-badass image is doubly mocked. Rush Limbaugh is like Dom DeLuise trying to do George “Wallace—I want to say, “Hey, I've heard all this shit before, in its original form.”

And what is going on at the Citadel? Faulkner is trying to get in. Not William but Shannon: a woman. And what is the key objection leveled against this one small step toward heterosexualization of the cadet corps? According to Susan Faludi in The New Yorker, the fear is that this tough-as-nails military school will be spoiled if a woman is added to the mix, because then the guys won't be able to get naked together and cry. I'm not saying Faludi is what you could call a primary source here (projection, thy name is, sometimes, woman) but still: Feh.

I'll tell you what, I am getting tired of blushing for my people. Some years ago, Pat Conroy—the Citadel-educated, Citadel-bashing Southern novelist—and I were on a Memphis television show with another Southern novelist, Mary Lee Settle. One of the frustrations of being a Southern woman, she said, was that ever since the South lost the “War Between the States, Southern men have been (in various, by no means always straightforward, ways) apologizing all the time.

The host of the show turned to Conroy and me. All we could think of to say was, spontaneously, in unison:

“We're sorry, Mary Lee.”

As a matter of fact, Southern white guys have a lot in common with women, in general. Take the case of Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson case. She popped up on Court TV looking the way you'd think a male prosecutor would: mean. People didn't like it. So she took counsel from image consultants and started doing her hair differently, wearing softer fabrics, smiling, and talking about her children and her grocery shopping. “Whereupon the press started referring to her with terms like girlishly and giggled and motherization. “At times,” wrote The New York Times, “Ms. Clark lurched between her new and former self.”

Maybe there's no way us gals and good old boys can win. So we might as well lurch forward. The pendulum may jerk us back, but for now my boys are in the front lines of sweetness and light, and I'm damned if I'm sorry. Damned if I'm not, too, probably, but what the hell, chaaarge. Let's be hard-nosed, balls-out softies.

I'm proud of the way we went into Haiti. Especially compared to the way George Bush, that eminently un-Southern faux-Texan, went into Panama and Kuwait. In Panama, we blew up a lot of the wrong people and didn't improve anything after all. And we might not have had to wreak such destruction in the Gulf if we hadn't built up Saddam's armaments and then led him to believe that we wouldn't object to his expanding his borders. In Haiti, we seem actually to be isolating thugs, jerking them around, and (as the saying goes) making Christians out of them.[*] And we're actually on the side of a downtrodden majority for a change.

As Alabama football fans are wont to exclaim, “Rolllll Tide!”

(Note: If I do say so myself, I wrote the above before the Times, even, started admitting that the Haitian venture was looking downright effective—and before Clinton decisively confronted Saddam at the Kuwait border with a preemptive, therefore bloodless, show of force. Then too, in case things start taking turns for the worse on those fronts, let me say that I wrote the above before things started taking turns for the worse.)[†]

I have a soft spot in my heart for Haiti, as it happens, because I got nonviolently—even lawyerlessly— divorced there. Back in 1972, my first wife, Ellen, and I had worked out an amicable parting with no disagreements over property or custody. Then we went to a lawyer. In Brooklyn, where we lived. Here's what he told us:

“Your best bet is physical cruelty.”

So we went to Haiti. A Haitian travel agent drew up our separation agreement, and after we straightened out the typo that seemed to provide that no one Ellen might marry in the future would be entitled to adopt me, we never referred to it again. For the same amount of money that the Brooklyn lawyer would have charged to finagle a divorce justified by imaginary battering, she and I and our two children were able to go to Port-au-Prince together during Carnival. I stood in line a while at some official's office and told him that my wife and I were incompatible He gave me a nicely embossed decree. We four broken-homers embarked on a successful joint-custody venture by swimming at the hotel, eating a nice French dinner, and observing Mardi Gras in the streets with a lot of cheerful, brightly dressed folks drinking quite passable local dollar-a-bottle rum. It wasn't a frolicsome occasion for us; it was, after all, a divorce. But it reassured the children in some measure, and it made me feel an affinity with a populace that was able to put the best possible face on misery.

Furthermore, I can't help identifying with Carter and Clinton, heirs of the civil rights movement. In the sixties, people of my ethnic and genderal stripe saw hard-nosed white authorities bamboozled by nonviolence, and we learned various lessons. Liberal journalists like Marlette and me learned to make fun of white authorities. The Ku Klux Klan learned to demonstrate quasi-peacefully, to attract angry counter-protest, and to assert its First Amendment rights. Carter, Clinton, and other progressive Southern politicians learned that Jesus was far more likely to want them for a sunbeam, and the national electorate to want them for president, if they came on as unbullyish as possible.

And as I write this, Americans are doing to the thugs of Port-au-Prince what too seldom got done to Southern white thugs during the sixties. We are flat kicking their ass. Some of these Haitian military “attachés” broke up a peaceful demonstration and, according to The New York Times, “found a cage of doves the protesters had planned to release over the Caribbean in memory of people drowned trying to flee” and “bit the heads off the doves and threw their bodies in the street.”

But a couple of days later, American soldiers, again according to the Times, “were grabbing the gunmen, sometimes wrestling them roughly to the ground,” and “Haitians crowded around, reaching up to slap and shake [our boys’] hands, shouting: ‘Good job! Good work! Thank you! Merci!’”

I just hope Carter doesn't meet those dove biters’ wives. As some Southern politician—I think it was old “Kissin Jim” Folsom, ex-governor of Alabama—once said: “Women has always been the weakness of us leaders.” But hey, as long as we're tromping the bad guys, what's wrong with being in touch with their women's female sides? Maybe we can get Mrs. Cedras a no-fault divorce and a role in Forrest Gump II.

Thereby honorably ending—we would learn in the next senatorial election—his political career, thanks to Republican demagoguery. And leaving future congressional Democrats gun-shy, so to speak, when they had a chance to vote against the second Iraq war.

Figure of speech. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone would, in future, literally advocate forced conversion of Muslims, as did what's-her-name, the right-wing columnist.

Things did, of course. In Haiti, where the preponderance of have-nots makes stability elusive, and in Iraq. This column was written six and a half years or so before September 11, 2001, which you may say rendered the New Southern Man obsolete. But the NSM (for example, Al Gore, whose earth-fondness now seems prescient) would argue that things turned worse in Iraq because the second Bush administration refused to believe, or to care, that Saddam had been effectively contained by Bush I's war, Clinton's limited military moves, and the U.N. inspectors. To the extent that Bush II is Southern, he hearkens back indeed to Bull Connor, who allowed himself to be drawn into self-defeating violent overreaction. A truly old-school role model would have been Bear Bryant, who stressed defense over offense and, when he did attack, stuck to prudent ground control rather than undermanned forays falling back on imprecise assault from the air.

He May Be a Dog, But He's Our Dog

Idon't care what anybody says, Paula Jones would be a good-looking woman if it weren't for her nose. I saw her on TV recently, in a replay of an up-close-and-personal interview. No, her voice was not becoming, nor her mind, but she seemed to have pretty skin, and her mouth was actually pretty—under soft questioning she didn't have that harsh defensive grimace you often see in press photos of her. Even in those photos, she might not look so sour if it weren't for that pickle. Furthermore, I happened to run into an old copy of Penthouse recently, and there she was with next to no clothes on. And hey. I know people-naming no names—who have bought drinks for worse-looking women. Several drinks. In vain. The Penthouse shots were provided, I believe, by a venal ex-boyfriend. The president would not have done her that way.

I stress the above because—all moral, legal, mental, and political questions aside, for the moment—I am tired of hearing national commentators assert that Bill Clinton, as far as looks go, has terrible taste. The last time I saw Gennifer Flowers in closeup on TV she was as eyecatching—and let's face it, this is saying something—as a mature Donna Rice. And how about that Miss America? Or Miss Arkansas, anyway. Eat your heart out, Kenneth Starr.

“Which is not to say that repression motivates the people who are most outraged by the president's presumed philandering. One of his most dogged prosecutors, W. Hickman Ewing, Jr., of Arkansas, was a college fraternity brother of mine, and in those days he had more fun than I did. After Joey Dee and the Starliters (remember “The Peppermint Twist”?) performed at one of our parties, Hick and a couple of other Sigma Chis formed an impromptu group, Hicky Dee and the All-Niters. Twisting till dawn. “We have not been in touch since then, we were never close, he has reportedly become more deeply religious over the years, our politics differ considerably, and the only time I have ever come anywhere near defending his current fervor was the other night after I mentioned to a New York media person that I had known him in college and the N.Y. m.p. said in a certain tone of voice, “Mm. I understand he was known to his friends as …Hick.” But I am not one who would argue that every Republican seeker of the truth about the president's affairs can be dismissed as simply envious of the president's background in Southern womanizing.

For one thing, that term, womanizing, has always struck me as tendentious. There can be no womanizer without womanizees, formerly known as mantraps. It is time to discard these invidious terms.

I am willing to posit that the president has engaged in some trashy fooling around. He seems to have been more romantic about it than the Kennedys—have you ever heard of a Kennedy talking on the phone at any length to loose women, or bringing them souvenirs from Martha's Vineyard? But just as Nixon's meanness and paranoia undermined his political strengths (and Nixon without his personality would be an extraordinarily progressive Democrat by today's standards), Clinton has let down all of us who voted for him by the way he apparently behaves when his goober gets red.

The first time I ever talked to anybody who knew Clinton was during his first term as governor. “He's smart, funny, a good guy,” a reporter who had been covering him in Arkansas said. “He's bad to stay out late and chase women,” the reporter added, by no means entirely disapprovingly. (The reporter and I were out late ourselves.) Arkansans tried to warn us from the beginning that a Clinton administration tended to boil down to an astonishing exercise in the preservation of eligibility. Now that there is nothing more for him to be elected to, and he no longer entertains—surely—any hopes of undercover quasi-bachelor-type eligibility in the foreseeable future, I am tired of his personal issues. I even find myself thinking that either the presidential or the spousal role in this situation would have been handled better, somehow, by Liddy Dole.

So why is part of me, still, on his side?

The best part of the movie Primary Colors, Clinton's story fictionalized, is the first third or so, when Jack Stanton and his people are still young and in the running. There's a wonderful scene late at night at a black barbecue place, when Stanton and the proprietor and the character-played-by-Billy-Bob-Thornton-who-is-like-James-Carville get to drinking and talking about their mamas—get rowdy, in fact, arguing over whose mama was the most sainted. Playing the dozens in reverse—“my mama,” positively, as opposed to “yo mama,” negatively. And I appreciated Emma Thompson's portrayal of a woman who holds her own, loves her husband—with due and witty rancor—as he is, and derives credible satisfaction from something like Hillary Clinton's presumed marital lot.

The whole Kathy-Bates-as-suicidal-moral-center thing, however, is a travesty on Southern womanhood. Have you ever known a Southern woman of fiber to do away with herself? On political principle, yet?

And John Travolta's Stanton is a mellow mushmouth fellow with nothing of the star-quality voltage to him that all the people I know who have been around Clinton (women in particular) say he has in person.

Movies by Mike Nichols tend to lack a positive erotic charge. Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson and Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf are scary. Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge is a cautionary case of Don Juanism. The Birdcage lacks the at least semierotic fondness that makes La Cage aux Folles much the more winning entertainment. The Remains of the Day made no sense to me. Anthony Hopkins can't quite get it together to go for Emma Thompson? Why?

The closest thing to a Bill Clinton movie may be Nora Ephron's Michael, in which Travolta plays an overweight, messy-eating angel who is catnip to the women. Nora tells me that in directing this movie she absolutely did not have the president in mind, but she has known the Clintons for quite a while. Her college roommate was Susan Thomases, formerly a top Clinton aide. Pete Dexter wrote the original script, but Nora and her sister Delia rewrote it considerably, and Travolta's Michael is an angel whom no female would sue. The scene in which a dozen or so start dancing with him in a roadhouse, to Aretha on the jukebox singing “Chain of Fools,” is womanism in the sweetest possible light. And when the angel and the best-looking waitress whirl off to his motel room, and the next morning she emerges drowsy and happy—that must surely have struck many people, of both sexes, as the dream Southern waitress moment.

Unrealistic, no doubt. It was another Southern politico of note who shared with me, late one night, a truism of the nightlife: “You can't stay up until the barmaid goes home.” Or if you do, you're too drunk (unless you're in the band) to whirl like much of an angel.

And if you're married, of course, you ought to devote your erotic energy to phoning home. No doubt about it. Especially these days.

And yet …Breathes there a man with goober so dead that he has never, ever, been tempted to whisper deep down in his heart to Slick Willie, “You go, boy”?

One more thing. To all those commentators who have wondered aloud in the media why Clinton doesn't just tell the truth about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and clear the air:

Hello?

If he didn't commit any infidelity, he has already told the truth. And if he did…

Clear the air? “What is he going to say, “We just, uh …It didn't mean anything. And it wasn't right in the Oval Office, it was …And just once or twice, at the most. No more than a few times. And we didn't, you know, go all the way….”

The next thing he knows, he is Oscar “Wilde in the dock, only straight. Even if he didn't violate any federal laws, he is going to come off as a dog. A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell. Much less a married gentleman.

A Southern pro football player once told me that his wife kept asking him whether he ever carried on at all on the road. He kept denying it. She kept saying she wouldn't hold it against him, she understood the temptations that must come his way, she just wanted to know the truth, for her own peace of mind.

So, finally, he fessed up. Every once in a while …Nothing that affected his feelings for her in the least. But, okay, sometimes a woman would just throw herself at him, and, you know-She didn't know. All hell broke loose. Their marriage was over.

“Never testify,” he told me. “It breaks they heart.”

Sometimes Higbe's That Way (1998)

Show me a clean breast and I'll show you a whited sepulchre. Accordingly, I was hoping that Bill Clinton might hang tough after the example of Kirby Higbe, the old Dodger pitcher, a native of South Carolina, who (according to High Hard One, the book he wrote with Martin Quigley) came home from golf one day to find his wife holding a letter from a woman that had been forwarded to their house by his team, the Dodgers. It was addressed to “Kirby Higbe, Brooklyn Baseball Team, Brooklyn, N.Y. Dear Kirby. I can't wait till the season starts and you come back to Cincy. You are the best I ever had.”

“Well?” demanded Mrs. Higbe.

“All I can say,” said Kirby, “is there must be some other Kirby Higbe.”

In Higbe's day, though, nobody knew about DNA. Might there have been another way for Clinton to save his dignity?

“It depends on what the meaning of the word is is,” he said at one point in his testimony, and all the talking heads on TV chortled.

That's because they didn't want to think about it.

There is no word in existence that anybody is justified in taking the meaning of for granted. Is least of all.

I used to know a man named Raiford who would respond to any assertion of fact or opinion with one of two expressions:

“Is that right?”

Or, simply, “Is?”

Modulated in various ways. For instance, you might say to Raiford, “Well, you know, it says in the Declaration of Independence, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”

Raiford would allow a moment of silence to pass, to make sure you were finished good, and then he'd give a little grin-and-chuckle that was just narrowly on the good-natured side of condescension—so that you couldn't tell whether he was responding to something that was palpably untrue, or to a truism, or to something that might conceivably be true but it was the first time he'd heard of it—and then he would say, calmly, perhaps reflectively, certainly slowly: “Is thaaaat right?”

Or you might say, “Well, I got to get up from here and pack so I can catch a plane to visit my sister in Houston,” and he would blink and even sort of shake his head a little bit—as if to suggest that the notion of catching a plane was either outlandish to him or not anywhere near as impressive as he gathered you were trying to make it sound, or both— and then he would say, “Is that riiiiight?”

But if you were to make a statement whose verb was is, that's when Raiford was really in his element. You might say, “This is the best pie I ever tasted,” or “The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides,” or “Sho is hot,” and Raiford would lean back and take in what you had put forward—pausing just long enough so that you couldn't be sure whether he was really taking it in, or he was putting on a tongue-in-cheek show of having to devote some time to taking it in—and then he would respond:

“Izzzz?”

Or, “Eee-uz?”

Or, “Is. (?)”

That last variation was his best—his most irritating. It seemed for a moment to be an affirmative statement, an endorsement of what you had observed; but then, just before he quite rounded off that period (I wish there were such a punctuation mark as a semiperiod), he would double-clutch, effortlessly, and slip in that little rising intonation that you came to realize after a moment was the bottomless question mark of either a skeptic or a moron.

Clinton has no such command of inflection. But he is attentive to words, as he proved when he focused in on is.

People say, “What will be, will be.” What would be the point of that, if both of those will be s were the same? And if every is were equal, would there be such a song as “Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby”? Would there be such an anecdote as the one about the man who asked his friend, “Are you going to pay me that twenty dollars you owe me?” and the friend replied, “I ain't said I ain't,” and the first man replied back, “I ain't asking you is you ain't, I'm asking you ain't you is”?

Check out the verb to be. In the Oxford English Dictionary you will find that as late as the sixteenth century is rhymed with kiss. Seems a shame to have lost that connection, but the post-Renaissance pronunciation enabled Cole Porter to couple this is with kisses.

In Webster's Third you will find, to be sure, that the first definition of is is “to equal in meaning: have the same connotation as (God is love, January is the first month).” But that is just definition one-a, which is followed lengthily by definitions one-b-through-j, two a-through-h, and so on. Here's one example: “to show oneself as an outstanding example of—used with main stress in spoken sentences (The doctor pleased the parents by commenting, ‘That is a baby’).”

Sounds like faint praise to me. Maybe a doctor has to be careful. On the other hand, maybe it's such high praise as to make all other babies within earshot wilt: “I keep delivering 'em, one after another, hand over fist, and I keep hoping to turn up an authentic one, and now, finally, here is one that I can without fear of contradiction call the sort of thing I had in mind when I first said to myself, ‘Leonard, you are going to go out into the world and deliver babies. ’ That, there, at last, is a baby.”

At any rate, anybody who takes a Southern, organic approach to language knows that the proposition “is is is” is by no means always true.

It's hard to distinguish what is from what might be. How might things have gone if Bill Clinton were the sort of man who exploited the potential of language not for evasion but for affection? What if the independent counsel had discovered that Clinton had written something like the following:

Who's a constant font of fizz,

Who's as raven-haired as Liz,

Who's a coiner of phrases, viz,

“I see the South again has riz, ”

Who's an emotional IQ whiz,

Who's as moving as the end of Les Miz,

Who's my sweet patootie? Ms.

Monica Lewinsky is.

Not that that would have gotten him off. But what if he had faced facts in a Song of Conjugation:

Woe to him in middle life

Who finds this quand'ry his:

Who is a man, his love, his wife?

I am, you are, she is.

He might even have worked through his predicament by way of a sonnet:

Is there, in this White House, no darkened room

For chemistry's development? No slot

For her who eases me and, in turn, whom

I can charm like Elvis? Is there not,

For this poor Baptist guy, a basis

For a more permissive faith, whose yoke

Gives slack for ecstasies as well as stasis?

Is there no mystic way I can invoke

The goddess Isis, bringer of consolation?

But she brings issue, too: fertility

Which isn't what I need. I've wed a nation.

Since we two I s can never be a we,

The answer, lissome Miss, to all these is s

Is, to save my kisses for the Mrs.

Whether he had taken his own poetic advice or not, he would have left himself a better lie, so to speak, on the golf course of history. And he might not have been reduced to quibbling, in a legal context, about the meaning of sex and the meaning of alone.

Slick Willie and the Marble Model (2000)

We mustn't compare viable presidential candidates with ourselves. Apples and oranges. If they had as much character as we do, they wouldn't be in the running. It is our responsibility, however unpleasant, to compare them to each other.

Then, after the winner takes office, we are free to find him wanting absolutely. And when he leaves office, the question of his legacy arises. That presents a more elevated exercise. We get to compare him to Jefferson and Lincoln and all.

So, let's see. Bill Clinton's middle name is Jefferson. And we may rearrange the letters of his name to spell “Lincolnbilt.” Otherwise…

Maybe it is too soon. The big galoot still tugs at us personally, like a two-year-old trying to drag us over to the candy counter. And as soon as I say that, I know it's unfair. Clinton worked. He strove. He made Newt Gingrich look like a real baby. He deserves to be compared to someone of stature.

The person I am thinking of may seem unlikely. But I have been considering this ever since the Monica Lewinsky revelations, when a Northerner took the occasion to inform me snidely, “I thought Southerners were gentlemen.”

I drew myself up and, having only a split second to cast about for a riposte both urbane and airy, I fell back on that odd colloquialism “Bite me.”

Undaunted, the Northerner went on to inquire, rhetorically, “Would Robert E. Lee have”—and here he cited an example of Clinton's inappropriate behavior toward a subordinate that I (unlike Kenneth Starr) am too much of a gentleman to go into the specifics of in print.

“No,” I told him, “he wouldn't have. Lee didn't use tobacco in any form. Though his agenda, too, was thrown off somewhat by a cigar-related incident.” I had in mind, of course, the discovery by a Union soldier of a copy of Lee's plan to invade Maryland, which some Confederate had wrapped around a couple of cigars and lost.

So there's that.

Then, too, Lee referred to the enemy as “those people,” and to General Pickett (at Appomattox) as “that man.” Clinton referred to Ms. Lewinsky as “that woman.”

Lee was an uncannily successful tactician, adept at snatching advantage from the jaws of recklessness, who was less effective—perhaps because he lacked the requisite leverage—in overall strategy. You could say the same about Clinton.

Lee's father was an illustrious scapegrace whom he never saw again after he was five. Clinton never knew his own father, and his stepfather was no damn good.

You can see the differences between Lee and Clinton in their mothers, but each man was extraordinarily close to her, to some extent filling in, from an early age, for the steady husband she never had. Lee's mother was an impecunious aristocrat who stressed religion and duty, whereas Clinton's was a good old girl who loved to play the horses, but each man still spoke feelingly of the gap left by his mother long after she died.

Each man had, or has had so far, one difficult, long-term marriage, to a woman widely regarded as uncuddly.

Both of them relished the company of women other than their wives. Lee confined himself to flirting, dancing, corresponding passionately, and gossiping with them, remaining physically faithful to his wife. Clinton came of age during the sexual revolution.

Both men were, in their respective ways, attentive and nurturing fathers—Clinton to one child on a pretty regular daily basis, Lee to seven children mostly from a distance, because duty took him far afield.

Lee was an ebullient, fun-loving sort until, roughly, his fifties, when duty weighed him down. Clinton was an ebullient, fun-loving sort until, in his fifties, personal scandal weighed him down, though nowhere near as much as might have been expected.

Neither man was much concerned with making money. Lee's wife inherited property, which was lost in the war. Clinton's brought home a good deal of bacon, which became a political liability.

Lee spent most of his adult life employed by government and living in housing he didn't own. Same goes for Clinton so far.

Strapping, charismatic presences, both of them, and tending toward corpulence and rubicundity in middle age. Prominent noses—Lee's being the considerably more classical.

Both of them fought against radical Republicans. Clinton outslicked them; Lee didn't.

Clinton, when a war he disapproved of was thrust upon him, avoided military service. Lee, when a war he disapproved of was thrust upon him, rejected the chance to fight for the Union he believed in and sided with the people he was closest to.

Clinton, distrusted by the military, dispatched bombers from a safe distance, at times on dubious grounds. Lee, an intrepid American war hero as a young man (in, however, the historically less than reputable Mexican War), sent thousands of men who idolized him to their deaths in the Civil “War and kept trying to get up into the forefront himself, but the troops kept shouting him back to where it was safer. Of the two men, Clinton, a thoroughgoing civilian, has been less scrupulous about killing civilians. But by any standard, there was lots more blood on Marse Robert's hands. And in old age he said his greatest mistake was getting a military education.

Both men had a tendency to fall out with once-trusted subordinates.

Lee disapproved of slavery philosophically but identified with Virginia slaveowners, readily averred that blacks were inferior to whites, and could get no cooperation from the slaves his wife inherited. Clinton has great rapport generally with African Americans, who have provided him with his staunchest base of support. Toni Morrison even called him the first black president. Lee did make a point of kneeling next to a black man who came to the altar of his church after the war.

After the Civil “War, Lee championed reconciliation and national unity, at least in spirit. After the Reagan revolution, Clinton pulled something approximating the traditional Democratic coalition back together and reconciled it to the American mainstream, at least in effect.

Lee was a neo-Federalist “Whig and a grimly devout, self-mortifying Virginia Episcopalian. Clinton is a semiliberal New Democrat and an upbeat, sin-acknowledging Arkansas Baptist.

Lee detested and eschewed politics and speech making. Clinton lives for both.

Lee adhered to honor. Clinton, to “triangulation.”

Lee's hero was George “Washington. Clinton's are John Kennedy and Elvis.

Lee most dreaded and avoided scandal and besmirchment, determined as he was to live down his father's. Clinton will be striving to live down his own.

Hard, dedicated workers, both men, of keen—if not, except in maneuver, original—intelligence.

Lee was called the Marble Model. Clinton, Slick “Willie.

Lee became an icon of the South, to which he always belonged, and eventually even of the country as a whole, though not so much anymore. Clinton won't likely get confined to a region or a niche.

Lee ended his years as a dutiful, rather enlightened college president, inspiring young men and disdaining proffered easy money. Clinton may accept a university gig; he's evermore a fund-raiser.

The closest equivalent to Lee today? Maybe Colin Powell. The closest equivalent to Clinton in Lee's day? Maybe—not an insult—P. T. Barnum.

We might think that Lee would not have liked Clinton. Would not have approved of his presidency, anyway. But Lee sometimes had a soft spot for a hardy scamp. Clinton would have found a way to enjoy Lee.

And all I can say is, it takes all kinds.

Yellow-dogma

Don't mess with Texas,” said George W. Bush at his nominating convention. By that I believe he meant don't mess with Texas Republicans. Like those Texas delegates who knew just what to do when addressed by a gay speaker.

I'll bet their mommas taught them that. “Now, child, sometime in your life you will be addressed by one who sins against all [Republican] decency. You're going to get all awkward and won't know what to do with your hands. So here's what you do. Just take off your cowboy hat and pray.”

When confronted by old Satan,

Who comes in many forms—

A speaker who is gay, perhaps,

Or an intern who is warm,

Just do like our Savior would if he were here today,

Just take off your cowboy hat and pray.

Yes, take off your cowboy hat and pray,

Ya-hoo,

Just take off your cowboy hat and pray.

We're Republicans of Texas,

Got it straight about the sexes,

And we get it pretty nearly every day.

But only with our spouses,

And only in our houses,

And then we take off our cowboy hats and pray.

You're gonna want to stone 'em,

But that is not the way.

You might break out a window,

And then you'd have to pay.

Just do like old Roy Rogers did in Sunset Serenade:

He took off his cowboy hat and prayed.

(Chorus)

And if your stone should kill someone,

Then by the laws of men

You'll have gone too far, and might be

Sentenced to the pen.

And if your cellmates fancy you, then all I have to say

Is take off your cowboy hat and pray.

(Chorus)

You could tell the Grand Old Party was getting more tolerant of diversity, though, because no delegates took off their cowboy hats and prayed while being addressed by a black person. And Colin Powell was speaking not just for himself but for the entire Jamaican American retired general community. Having mastered inclusiveness now, Republicans may move on to economic populism—they'll pledge that by the year 2004, every child born in America will be an Initial Public Offering. The market takes care of everything else, why not babies? As Joe Lieberman said in his speech at the other convention, Republicans think the best way to feed the birds is to give more oats to the horses. Doo-doo economics.

Ah, there I go again. Tipping my hand. I am a yellow-dog Democrat. So are almost all of my friends, especially the Southern ones. We feel free to scoff at Democratic nominees, too, but we vote for them because we regard them as bad enough. The Republican ones we regard as egregious. Relativists that we are in most respects, in this we come close to absolutism: we would rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican.

I'm not saying Republicans are bad people, necessarily. I can see where east-Tennessee-and-around-in-those-hills Republicans are coming from, also black Planned Parenthood Republicans. But those are isolated pockets. Speaking of pockets, Republicans in general are to corporate capitalism as MTV and its devotees are to mindless rhythmic kineticism: I'm okay with corporate capitalism and mindless rhythmic kineticism, within reason, but do they need my help?

Maybe Republicans in government are such dorks because Repub-

licans don't believe in government—all the cool Republicans are in business. Well, fine. Where would America be without that mad-dog dollar drive? But what makes the economy work is collaboration between two highly compatible but not identical interests, capitalism and democracy. Government needs to accentuate democracy to keep capitalism from leaving folks behind. (And pricing itself out of the market.)

How can anybody who campaigns for a government job have the gall to denounce government support? I interviewed Dick Armey once, got along with him okay in person, and bent over backward not to write about him from some kind of predictable anti-defense-spending, pro-social-welfare perspective. And yet I did two years of military service; he never did any. I've been a small business for thirty-two years; he's always been employed by state universities and the Congress. Any career politician knows as much about free enterprise as a hooker who caters to doctors knows about practicing medicine.

Democratic politicians, however, do tend to push the tax burden upward toward the more highly compensated—toward me, for instance, which I believe is healthy. They also tend to shift the burden of lifestyle accommodation toward straight white males—toward me, for instance, and I believe that is healthy (though I am not above incidental rearguard resistance).

The yellow-dog Democrats of a previous generation were that way because they still resented the party of Lincoln. Those of my generation come from the opposite side. We are yellow-dog Democrats because we resent all those old-style yellow-dog Democrats who, when the Democrats started getting the black vote, became Dixiecrats, then Wallaceites, then jumped to the party of Nixon. We are yellow-dog Democrats because it feels good. We can embrace the earthy hardheadedness of our forebears, while eschewing the taint of peckerwood separatism.

Maybe we should get over it. Some of our children—not mine, by God—regard yellow-dogism as quaint. They can understand, they say with more than a touch of condescension, how we might draw such a line, having come of age way back during the civil rights movement, but they are ready to be colorblind and to get in on Nasdaq heaven. They want to opt out of Social Security, on the grounds that they aren't going to get a good return on it—and they don't want to hear it when we tell them it's our generation's return they'd be opting out of. They don't feel strongly enough about religion, one way or the other, to see why Pat Robertson puts our teeth on edge.

Then, too, black voters— especially those who have already had all the affirmative action they need, and those who don't think they'll ever get enough—are often quoted as saying that they won't be taken for granted by the Democrats. (That way they can justify either aspiring to Republican officialdom themselves or not voting at all.) There's not much point in being a yellow-dog Democrat if you can't count on voting with black people. I have always gone along with the great majority of black voters, except when Jesse Jackson was seeking the Democratic nomination. You might conclude, then, that my philosophy is to vote with black people unless it means voting for a black person. (What if Colin Powell had got the Republican nomination? Well, he didn't. For Republicans, Colin Powell is like Marlene Dietrich for a lifelong bachelor I talked to once: he'd have married her, if she'd been available.) My defense is that Jesse Jackson is more valuable—almost anybody is more valuable—in some other capacity than that of wooing the swing vote.

Swing low, sweet candidate. It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing: all those trendy people in the middle who go back and forth between Democrat and Republican. As if every four years you could swing between being a dog person and a cat person. I'm not saying you can't like dogs and cats both, because I do myself. (Just today my heart went out to a cat I saw trying to take a walk with two people and a dog—the cat would scurry along behind, and then the dog would turn and sneer at him, and then the cat would pretend he wasn't interested. Cats see they can't hang with other species, so they become cat-centric; I can respect that, and I can respect Republicans.) But surely you've got to prefer either cats or dogs. What the swing vote wants is a dog that is enough like a cat, or vice versa.

Every candidate courts those swingers, and chases big-interest money, so why should I cling to those cani-felines who are nominally the party of Jefferson and Jackson? I favor mixed-breed dogs. However close a Republican comes to looking like man's best friend, you can always hear him purring. It could be, though, that my caninity needs remixing.

There are conservative Democratic congressmen who vote with the Republicans and call themselves blue-dog Democrats. My term for them is Republicans. But maybe I could see my way clear to becoming some other kind of dogged Democrat.

Green-dog Democrat: Would vote for a dog over a Republican but only if the dog is an environmentalist.

Purple-dog Democrat: Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog only if he has a flair for rhetoric.

Bird-dog Democrat: Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog only if he can make a good point.

Red-dog Democrat: Would vote for a dog who makes sudden unexpected attacks on Republican quarterbacks.

Seeing-eye-dog Democrat: Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog if he has vision.

Junkyard-dog Democrat: Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog if he's mean enough.

Three-dog-night Democrat: Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog if he has lots of fur and it's cold enough.

Bitch Democrat: Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog if she's mean enough.

Feist Democrat: Would vote for Ross Perot if he were a Democrat.

But I'm going to be some kind of Democrat. Some day Democrats may have catered to the black vote to the point that there are lots of black Republicans, and that will be a kind of progress. Some day Republicans may realize that gay is a human thing to be, and they will leave their hats on. If I live until that day, I'll see who has room in their tent for an old yellow dog.

Looking Back on Bill (2000)

Strange to have had a president who cites as one of his signal achievements his acquittal. But maybe Bill Clinton was sent from heaven to preserve us from those who would present themselves as unimpeachable.

He hath lied to the American people! Remember that? Well, I guess they didn't actually say “hath.” But that's what they meant. Every time I heard this pronouncement, I tried to picture this American People. A soiled dove, righteous in her vengeance? A toddler staring open-mouthed at one of its parents as the other rages, “You do not love Baby!”?

The American people like being lied to. Hence Ronald Reagan. But even for a president who is not a professional actor, misrepresentation is part of the job. Commentators who do not bear this in mind are like critics in the audience shouting, “Tell us what you really think” at any actor who is trying to bring off a drama.

Commentators—part of whose job, to be sure, is to point out lies— ought for the sake of intellectual honesty to bear in mind that it is easier to be right than president.

I'm right—although not everyone will agree, and not many people (I won't go so far as to concede that I care how many) will care. I am trying to be right, secure in the knowledge that if I am, or if I'm not, people will little note nor long remember. When a president says something, it is a form of high-stakes marketing. The president is betting that a majority, or at least a plurality (or, for the moment, just certain target groups) will agree, and he wants everyone (though he hopes certain nontarget groups aren't paying close enough attention) to care. Not only is a president's life not his own, neither is his integrity. That is to say, he is less like the strawmen of punditry than like people in business or other areas of real life: richly imbued with conscious and unconscious ulteriority. It makes no more sense to wax indignant about a president's telling lies than about a wrestler's faking falls. Well, that analogy may be too pejorative. Let's say it makes no more sense to wax indignant about a president's lying than about “trick photography” in the movies. Well, that analogy may not be pejorative enough. At any rate, the media tend to judge politicians, favorably or unfavorably, by a Platonic ideal that is easier to apply than to justify. If we thought of a president less as a role model than as a character in fiction, we would see him more clearly. Clinton may not have had great character, but he has been one.

Voters—part of whose job, to be sure, is to hold certain truths as self-evident—ought to bear in mind for the sake of civic responsibility that politics is relative. As Henny Youngman would say when asked, “How's your wife?”: “Compared to what?”

Presented with two ruthless, pandering white men who believe expressly in God and necessarily in Mammon, and each of whom is bound to be overcompensating drastically for something in his childhood, we ought to vote for whichever one strikes us as marginally more likely, by dint of personal verve or just party affiliation, to slow down or to speed up the nation's drift toward wherever we fear or hope it is heading. We should, of course, harbor the expectation that he will surprise us (by us is meant the decent minority within his plurality) by doing something courageous, that is to say, something decent but unpopular—it being his problem that most of us (by us is meant the body politic as a whole) are, by definition, more likely to vote against him next time because he did it. We must resist the temptation to dismiss all candidates for president as beneath us. Otherwise we'd never forgive ourselves for voting for any of them. We must compare them not to ourselves but to each other. One of them is always less deeply beneath us. If there is a third-party candidate for whom we would rather vote than either of them, we should vote for our second choice. Third-party candidates have the luxury of being relatively unpopular. If you are going to vote for one of those, because he or she is right, you might as well vote for yourself.

We can't help but realize during campaigns that politicians are relative to each other. After the election, however, we begin to consider the winner as someone who is, or who we want to make clear is absolutely not, an extension of our ideal selves. It astonished me to hear men of the world rigidly denounce Bill Clinton for yielding to temptations of the flesh (not that I condone it), and women of the world just as rigidly denounce Hillary Clinton for remaining married to him (not that I would have held it against her, myself, if she had dumped the son of a bitch, except wouldn't it have been awfully quixotic of her, to divorce a man who didn't even own a house?), until I realized that these were husbands trying to make it clear to their wives (and congressmen, to their idealized constituents) that they would never mess around with an intern (neither would I), and wives trying to make it clear to their husbands that they wouldn't tolerate it.

The only way a president can survive and stay focused long enough to get anything done is to be robustly relativist himself. Relativism is his Teflon. (Those swing voters who preferred George W. Bush over Al Gore did so, I would say, because they made out Bush's back to be more like a duck's.) Reagan and Clinton, each in his different way, managed to keep us from getting his goat. Reagan would say, when asked whether he wanted to go into outer space, “Some people think I've been out there for years.” Clinton would emerge from his Starr-chamber grilling to tell staffers that he rather liked Kenneth Starr, wanted to invite him to sleep over in the White House sometime. Each man, we might say, managed to pull off a cable presidency in a major-network market. Reagan's was the Bible Network, Clinton's HBO. I'll take Clinton's.

Part of a president's job, to be sure, is to amount to more than just Teflon. But did you see the pictures of Clinton in Hanoi, dwarfed physically but by no means psychologically by a monumental bust of Ho Chi Minh? There he stood, who in his youth wiggled out of a military obligation—smiling like the very essence of handsome Americanism and paying honor to the soldiers on both sides of “the conflict we call the Vietnam War and you call the American War”? Call it effrontery, but what if Lyndon Johnson had had something approaching that sense of perspective?

At a dinner party back during the campaign of 1992, I was speaking up for Bill Clinton on a faute de mieux basis when someone at the table exclaimed, “Don't you want a president who believes in something?” “What I said was “No.” If I'd been as quick-witted as I tend to deplore a president's not being, I'd have said what occurred to me later: “No, I want a president who caters, effectively and constructively, to the right people.” I believe Clinton came relatively close, under the circumstances, to doing that. I also want a president—and here I may approach absolutism—who outslicks the Right. So I tend to agree with Bill Clinton that one of his signal achievements was his acquittal.

How Bad Could It Be? (2000)

Worst-case scenario: faith-based judicial system. Does this automatically mean, wooo-ooo, Inquisition? Hardly. This administration has invited a diversity of believers to have faith in it. On certain charges, a Rasta court could be a blessing. Or a Mormon one. And even if we draw an evangelical venue, it's our sin that's condemned, not us, so why get our nose out of joint?

Let's review. “We voted for Gore. And it didn't work out. And not one single tank was sighted in one single street. How many countries’ defense establishments, if any had tanks half as snazzy as ours, would resist the temptation to bring some out just to see if they work? And yet when fresh-faced incoming vice-presidential employees sat down, aglow, at their new Old Executive Office Building computer terminals, what did they find? Out-transitioning vandals had …done things …to the Ws on the keyboards. As if that weren't enough, they had left graffiti saying …what?

“REDRUM”? “HELTER-SKELTER”? “OLD POOPY REPUBLICANS ARE NOT MULTICULTURAL”?

“We don't know, exactly. The new administration has graciously respected the public's and Matt Drudge's right to use their imagination. But according to one newspaper account, “The destruction was so vast that a telecommunications staffer with more than a quarter-century of service was seen sobbing near his office one night.”

Also, okay, the Clintons stole furniture.

“When they had to know full well, Mr. and Ms. Political Genius, duh, no way they had it wired with the Supreme Court.

So. Now we realize what kind of clueless smarty-pants hooligans our extorted tax dollars were lining the pockets of. And yet …some of us still seem to be hanging back from a freely proffered era of Republican good feeling.

What are we afraid of?

Let's say our new attorney general does tend to break the ice by asking, “Do you have the same sexual preference as most men?” Don't forget, this administration has a sense of humor. Ever hear of something called a straight line? Could be, the AG wants us to come right back at him, with some kind of too-snarky liberalesque one-liner that we clearly don't really mean:

“I'll say! And the funny thing is, I used to be a man.”

“Not really, but it's better than nothing.”

“Now that Tom and Nicole have split?”

“I should say so! But I'm married.”

“In detention, or out?”

“As long as it's furtive and anonymous, I'm your huckleberry.”

“Oh yeah. Heck yeah. Can you give me a hint?”

“Yes, but a Methodist woman will do in a pinch.”

And, of course, with tongue firmly in cheek, the number-one answer to give the attorney general when he asks whether your sexual preference is the same as most men's: “Most? So all the votes have been counted?”

All right, maybe that would be pushing our luck. Then, too, who among us (even if we, personally, have been spared the actual sight of a telecommunications veteran in tears) can honestly say, under oath, “There is nothing whatsoever I could learn from a chance to take a hard look at my sense of humor”?

Maybe it's true, as Republican turncoat (what was he thinking?) David Brock writes, that Republican stalwart Tony Blankley did write that Gore supporters “might as well be Martian reptiles for all the moral kinship they have with us.” Well, gee, I think we might want to show old Tony that he in all good faith has got the wrong impression, don't you? Republican journalist (see, not an oxymoron) David Brooks writes that the Grand Old Party is divided into two camps: Reaganite academic antiliberal ideologues who regard the other camp as “hapless anal-retentives,” and Bushite nose-to-the-grindstone corporate-managerial types who regard the other camp as “hapless geeks.” Anyone who can't find a place for himself, or even herself, somewhere along that rollicking spectrum might want to give some thought to coming down off of whatever.

Speaking of which, aren't you glad you weren't a parent in the sixties? Or a hall monitor?

In our hearts, we must know that nobody really wants every non-criminal in America to have an assault weapon. But if we don't demand that every noncriminal in America have the right to an assault weapon, then what happens the next time Gore zealots start desecrating keyboards? What are we going to do, reason with them?

Can it be that some of us, deep down inside, worry that we have neglected to develop the marketplace chops that Republicanism rewards? Well, then, let's put our raggedy-ass shoulder behind the voucher concept. Not just private-school vouchers, but country-club vouchers, third-car vouchers, tax-attorney vouchers, margin-call vouchers. Okay, maybe a $500 personal-dietician voucher will be of scant use to anyone who cannot pretty well afford a personal dietician already. Vouchers will, however, get a certain amount of public money into the private sector, and that will put fat-cat public-schoolteachers’ feet—for example— to the fire. Figure of speech.

This administration intends to bring back the missile-shield defense, which cultural trendies—and isn't it interesting, how they sentimentalize Mutual Assured Destruction?—have mocked for so long. Did it ever occur to you that “Star Wars” just might be a misnomer? If every visionary defense program must have an old-movie tag, okay, why not “Star Spangled Rhythm”? Check it out: Paramount, 1942, big musical finale has Bing Crosby backed by choir and Mount Rushmore mockup. Mellowly, Der Bingle puts a sour antiflag skeptic in his place as representatives of every undivisive American walk of life, including the Confederate dead, hum spirituals and tell what the Stars and Stripes means to them: “tracking rabbits in the snow” …“throwing pop bottles at the umpire” …“You know any other country where a Brooklyn girl can become a movie star?” Crosby, you may have noticed, is cool again. Okay, early Crosby. So what are you into, trip-hop? Can't we all get along? Star Spangled Rhythm, incidentally, was made for under one million dollars.

Pollution bother you? That's where Republicans “speak softly, but carry a big carrot.” Do you think Republicans love pollution? In fact, it's a loaded term. Perhaps we who have expended so much capital on politically correct phraseology—i.e., “freedom of expression” for “smut”—can help unpack this term pollution. Call it environmental influence. Do Republicans love environmental influence? No. But we're not talking about filth here; hydrocarbons aren't immoral. Here's the thing: little as Republicans enjoy effluents, they hate taxes (and we love taxes?) more. So if a petrochemical plant gets a tax credit for willingly influencing the environment less than it might, then both an irritant and an evil have been reduced. Now. Who is in a better position to know how much a plant is influencing the environment than the plant itself? Let the plant be the judge, and we reduce what is the greatest evil of all in a civil society: government.

But wait. Is it the government's money? No. The government has no way of making money—except in the very limited sense of minting it. The money is the plant's. “Who is the government, then, to give anyone a “tax credit”? So let's get this straight: the plant charges the government a tax debit.

That leaves the whole “wilderness” thing. Please. If we get lost in that wilderness, we'll be mighty glad to see a derrick. And let's face it: wildlife bites.

This land can be our land. All we have to do is apply to the office of Representative Dan Burton, 2185 Rayburn House Office Building, “Washington, D.C. 20515, phone 2,02,-2,25-2276, fax 202-225-0016, for a pardon.

The Story So Far (2006)

Iheard this old boy on the radio—didn't catch his name, but I can't feel too bad about that, because a name is just a fact, and what this old boy was saying was, we don't want facts. There is no way we can catch all the facts, much less sort them out and add them up to get the truth. “What we want, he said, is a story. And that, he said, is marketing. And that, if we buy the story, he said, is truth.

He was promoting a book he'd written about all this, and I didn't catch the book's name either. So, let's say I buy his story. (If it is a story; seems more like a theory to me.) I'm still not going to buy his book. So if marketing is truth, he lied.

But hey, I like a good story. And I'm Southern, so stories ought to roll off my keyboard like …like similes off an ad campaign.

Listen to that. That shows you why I am not the natural storyteller that by birthright I should be: In college I majored in English. Literature. Stories that have no selling point. Novels like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which a big scene might be two college students arguing about what a simile is like. In contemporary terms:

A simile is, like, a figure of speech. Like that Coke commercial: “Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.”

Actually, although everyone remembers that as a Coke commercial, which means Coke gets the good of it for free, it was never more—according to the archivist at Coca-Cola—than a commercial for true love. Furthermore, unless you want to get into the double-negative aspect, which strictly speaking makes it mean “Something is like the real thing, baby,” which would raise the question, “What is?” (and the answer: “A simile is”?)— unless, as I say, you want to take the double negative as intended to mean what it denotes instead of (as is clearly the case) to intensify the opposite—that statement is in fact an antisimile: comparison defied. As Husserl, the phenomenologist, would say, the perception itself.

I know, I know. That is going nowhere, slow. Even if I had enough of a grip on phenomenology myself to pass it on, this country ain't going to be hustled by Husserl. (Though I do believe Husserl would have liked what the old boy said when he was asked whether he believed in infant baptism. “Believe in it?” he said. “Hell, I've seen it done. ” And also what, according to my old friend Slick Lawson, another old boy said: “I saw Jesus in a dream last night. And I thought he was taller than that.”)

What this country needs is a new story. A story just as slick as the one that has dominated the market for quite a while now, about how Bushypublicans stand with Jesus and freedom against liberals, taxes, Al-Qaeda/Gore, and other forms of evil. Because that story is getting stale.

So let me see if I can spin you a yarn about how, it seems to me, things have gone in this country since I finished majoring in English, back in the sixties. A Fable, like what Faulkner won the Pulitzer for, though it wasn't real-thing Faulkner, because it had a message:

Once upon a time there were these Backward, Uptight people who had three things wrong with them:

They put down People of Color.

They feared the Natural Human Body.

They loved War.

And these were the Forces of Hate. And up against them rose Enlightened Youth. And these were the Forces of Change. This made for a good story.

And the Stronghold of Evil lay to the South, in places like Georgia and Texas, and the Wind of Freedom came from the North. Yet there were among uncolored people of the South some who:

Not only liked people of color but also ate the same food.

Not only weren't afraid of the natural human body but felt about it this way: Hot Damn. Not only didn't love war but were willing to admit that their great-grandaddies had lost one, and probably should have lost it, but you probably shouldn't Press Them Too Hard on that.

And these were Southern Liberals. And although these weren't exactly what the North had in mind, still they recognized a common ground. And in return, the Southern ones introduced them to Willie Nelson.

And the Enlightened ones said, “Well, of course we don't like Country Music, but he's all right.”

And lo and behold, the South began to produce Presidential Candidates who pushed aside those of the North. A Hero of the North was martyred in Texas, which was terrible, but it gave juice to the forces of change. However, the martyr's place was taken by a Texan. The Texan liked people of color. He was so comfortable with the human body that he displayed unto the media the operation scar on his stomach. However, he also liked war, and so his place was taken by…

Well, by a Dark-Jowled Embodiment of Evil. This development seemed dire, but the dark-jowled one overreached and was brought down by Hero Storytellers, Sir Woodward and Sir Bernstein. That gave the forces of change more juice.

And a great Man of Color from Georgia was martyred, which was terrible, but it gave the forces of change yet more juice. And yet somehow the place of the Dark-Jowled One (after a brief irrelevant Upgraded Sidekick from Upper Michigan interlude) was taken by a Georgian not of color.

Which was a Bit Much. But the Georgian did not love war—naturally not (as it seemed in those days), for he was a former military man, and a Christian. And not only did he like people of color but they liked him, and in his heart, at least, he embraced the natural human body. So the Enlightened forces had to go with him.

But he did not make for a Heroic Story.

“Give us a story!” the people cried. And there arose, from the West, a force of Aged Geniality.

“What a Doofus,” chuckled the forces of Enlightenment. “Indeed, an Extreme Doofus!”

And yet, the Aged Genial One loomed large.

Gallantly, a brother of the Northern martyr stepped forward, to take up this new challenge in the Georgian's stead. But the Georgian did not make way. He pushed the martyr's brother aside (yea, verily, going so far as to boast that he could “kick his ass”), which caused the forces of Enlightenment to sull up.

And the Georgian debated, and the Aged Genial One chuckled, and prevailed.

And so there came to pass an Age of Aged Geniality, presided over by one who was himself a Great Storyteller (if you like a certain kind of country-club story) and certainly not Hung Up on Facts, so although the Enlightened forces did not like him, most of the American People did. The juice was flowing in Another Direction.

And the genial one was succeeded by his Sidekick, who told a Glorious “War Story in the Televised Sky.

But he did not have the Vision Thing. He did not Capitalize. Yea, verily, he got Hung Up on Fiscal Facts, to the point that, though Such Things Cannot Happen Today, he even …Raised Taxes.

And lo, a man from Arkansas arose, who was an Avatar of the Northern martyr. The Arkansan so did not love war, that he didn't even Salute Right. He was Downright Enthusiastic about the Natural (or in a pinch even the Bouffant-Haired) Human Body. And lo, it came to pass that a great Storyteller of Color, Lady Morrison, proclaimed him as, in effect, an honorary man of color.

But he didn't switch the juice back very much. For one thing he had gone Overboard with regard to the natural human body (so had the Northern martyr, we came to find out).

And various Plagues had befallen the natural human body.

And the American People had begun to wonder (as in the past) why there was Anything Special about people of color.

And lo, some new Forces of Evil arose. These, though they sprang from the Holy Land, more or less, were not Christian by a long shot. They attacked a Great Northern City, which was terrible, but it generated a lot of juice. “Which flowed to people who looked a good deal like the forces of hate from before, but now they were the Forces of Faith. And their Stronghold was in the South.

And the American People were sore afraid and felt that a little Righteous “Warfare might not be so bad along about then, and there arose a Knothead of the North, processed through Texas, who said unto them: “You are Right to be afraid, but behold I am a Better Man than my Father of the Same Name”—who happened to be the vision-lacking Sidekick of the Genial One—“for I am a Christian Texan, and I have Appointed Persons of Color, and my natural human body is Happily Married, and I will Smite the Evil Ones.”

He wasn't hung up on facts. He stuck to his Story.

And where were your Southern liberals now?

Some might be found dwelling in a Blue State and being dismissed as Guilty Southern White Boys. And they would fain have brought change, as in the Old Days, but they lacked juice. Lo, there arose a Young Candidate from North Carolina, but he was able to rise only to the station of sidekick, to a Northerner who was a “Warrior. That is, had been a warrior once. But since then had found Antiwar Enlightenment. Still, he said he could Vanquish the Evil Ones. But he could not vanquish the Knothead, even. For the antiwar warrior did not make for a good story.

And, hell, I know, you don't have to tell me: neither does this fable. It doesn't have a moral. Doesn't have anything to sell. Just raises questions:

What happened to that alliance between Southern liberals and Enlightened forces? Did the Southerners denature the mix? Or did the Enlightened ones fail to pick up on what the Southern ones brought to the party? Maybe the Southern liberals should have said, up front, that people who think it's enlightened to say, “Of course, we don't like country music” need diversity training. As they do.

Let me make it clear, however, that I think (and this is why I have so much trouble trying to tell a great story: I'm always worrying about making clear what I think) that people who do like most contemporary country music (what we might call post-nasal-drippy pop-quasi-country), need diversity training real bad.

But, wait, this just in:

The forces of Enlightenment huffed, and puffed, and said unto the rest of America:

“We're Enlightened, why aren't you?”

And the forces of Hate or Faith sniffed, and snorted, and said:

“Don't hold your breath till we turn blue.”

And then the Lord sent a Great Flood. To the South. And the Knothead did not Get It.

About the Author

Roy Blount Jr. is a columnist for The Oxford American, a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait …Don't Tell Me, and president of the Authors Guild. A Georgian who lives in Massachusetts, he has contributed to The New Yorker and The Southern Review, has written books set in Pittsburgh and New Orleans, and has been named a Literary Light by the Boston Public Library and elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. This is his twentieth book. You can visit his Web site at www.royblountjr.com

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2006 by Roy Blount Jr.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by

Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.,

New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada

Limited, Toronto.

www.aahnopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered

trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blount, Roy.

Long time leaving : dispatches from up South /

by Roy Blount, Jr.—1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-49660-7

1. Southern States—Civilization. 2. Northeastern States-

Civilization. 3. Group identity—Southern States.

4. Group identity—Northeastern States. 5. North and

south. 6. National characteristics, American. 7. Blount,

Roy. 8. Southern States— Civilization—Humor.

9. Northeastern States—Civilization—Humor. I. Title.

F209.5 B58 2007

975—dc22 2007006799

v3.0