The South is changing. Mass media, cars, chain stores, urbanization, air conditioning, the Internet, etc., all have made it much more like the rest of the country than many people would ever believe. This is very good in many ways- moreso than most regions of the country perhaps our past is a chamber of horrors, more for the low grade simmering omnipresent inequities of plutocracy and systemic racism than for the atrocities that made headlines- I don’t romanticize the bygone eras at all. I’ll admit, however, that I can appreciate on a ridiculously provincial level what Maude says of the Europe of her childhood in Harold & Maude:
The same forces that drove out most of the open or societal horrors of the past also drove out much of the good, or at least value-free, unique “southernness” along with them. You just don’t have the eccentrics, the good aspects of “community”, the sense of heritage, pious irreverence, etc., that you used to as we became basically just a hotter part of America. Or, to put it another way and use my own area for illustration:
[Disembodied-Voice-of-City-Confidential-Narrator,-the-late-Paul-Winfield]Twenty-First Century Central Alabama, a place of much change and progress wearing out Reebok crosstrainers and developing great calf muscles in the ever onward march of corporate American brand homogenization.
In the capitol city of Montgomery, the red brick early 20th century buildings that lined the street where Rosa Parks was arrested have been torn down to build a structure of non-descript academic architecture called without irony The Rosa Parks Library & Museum in honor of its geo-specific significance. Eight stories above the soil where Creek Indians died of exposure and starvation on what was possibly the largest concentration camp on North American soil prior to Andersonville, pampered businessmen now yell about slow room service and drafty windows in a 3.5 star hotel that obstructs the view of the prettiest Gothic train station remaining in the southeast http://www.planetware.com/i/photo/montgomery-al010.jpg .
Across the river an important Muskogee red villagewas plowed up and overturned to build parking and concession space for a minor league sports team nobody on Earth gives a damn about, while the site of an even larger white village is now buried forever by recently poured asphalt crowed with a Target, a Gap, a Williams Sonoma, and other chain stores servicing the residents of $400,000 houses as bland as boiled mutton on streets where children with names like law firms (“Britt, Fitzhugh and Saunders- if you’re late from soccer practice again I’m blocking the HBO on your bedroom plasma screens!”) get together to shoot digital hoops and zombies on X-boxes.
In an older part of town the fantastic used bookstore in the old wobbly house run by the chain-smoking old crazy woman with the encyclopedic knowledge of her stock who made kids cry talking of Soviet war atrocities is now shuttered as e-Bay offered higher profits and Books-a-Million sucked in her customers.
On the highway that leads north of town one passes the land where a half-breed half-sane chief built the cabins for his slaves but is now a Starbucks and an Arbys, and the walls of the state’s first prison that survived from before the Civil War to the end of the Cold War at last fell like the price of off-brand light bulbs when they were razed to make way for a Dollar General and a BP station.
Here in the bedroom community of Montgomery, once a town said to be rivalled in potential only by Chicago, heart of the Black Belt, where cavalry regiments drilled on the yard of the Presbyterian church Sampiro attended as a boy, the privations of the Civil War conjure images to natives of Leigh & Gable, Law & Kidman, rather than dour sepia faces who stared from log wall Larariums of folks less-pretty-nekkid but real and genetically connected who really survived this and made the people who made the people who made the people who rent Cold Mountain at the Blockbuster built on the site of a plowed up Indian mound. It is a place where the descendants of former slaves and the descendants of former slave owners come together to exchange irked glances when hearing the animated foreign Spanish conversations of the increasing number of Mexican construction workers patronizing the same Chinese buffet, where the décor and the buffet items are identical to those in Chinese buffets in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire and the overly polite employees are really Laotian.
This is the urban New South, where the horrors of yesteryear are and so are the Technicolor eccentricity, where the newly rich build forgettable houses, drink latte, and order chicken-fried-chicken with no trace of irony, where New York accents are not as uncommon as most would realize and where few of the caramel-latte-with-double-espresso of either race sipping natives are more than three generations from the cotton fields. It’s a land where the summer heat and the dumbass demagogues are the only real unscathed survivors from before the land went from the unjust indignities of ‘No Colored Restrooms’ to the unmemorable landscape of colorless conformity.
But, just as the fires of Beltane burned in the mountains of Wales and the plains of Ireland long after the altars of Jove were lit in England, or closer to home, just as the Black Seminoles drank their black drink in the swamps of Florida long after their corn fields were covered in cotton, the southern mores and general weirdness found pockets where they could survive. And one of those places is South Alabama.[/ Disembodied-Voice-of-City-Confidential-Narrator,-the-late-Paul-Winfield]
And that’s what I love about stories like the two very short ones that follow, both of them together way shorter than the intro. TBC
This is a very short thread for my part, but I’m posting it in hopes you’ll share your own uniquely Southern stories.
You sure do spin a good yarn though!
I replied. But I’m not much of a story teller…
