My Southern Journey (6 page)

It was the grease she needed, an essential. But the fresh, pure, white fat is harder and harder to find. She can usually only find it in tiny blocks in the cooler, never of a quality to satisfy her.

My mother is the best cook who ever lived; I will fight you over that. One of the reasons her food has flavor, she explained, is that most of her greens, beans, and other vegetables and all gravy and all egg dishes take on the flavor of that fat. I have seen her throw out dishes, not spoiled, merely bland.

I try not to repeat Southern clichés. No one, for instance, should eat a hamburger in a bun made from Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. But grease is good. It has shortened many lives, probably my own, but is a life of rice cakes really life, or just passing time?

So, we went on a quest. Finally, at a country butcher shop in Alexandria, Alabama, we found it, but too late. A gentleman at the counter was buying what appeared to be 50 pounds of perfect cracklin’ meat, an hour or two off the hog. My mother just stared, with avarice.

“I never have wanted what someone else had,” she said.

She asked if there was more, but the butcher said no, it was a rare thing, and I thought she was going to cry. The butcher, wondering how he would live with breaking an old woman’s heart, went to the back to check and returned saying he had found some. We walked out with $20 worth of pork fat.

My mother was giddy—she would have skipped, if she could. For two days, as she rendered it, the house smelled like what I like to think heaven is like, and she was happy, which is all a boy really needs, as her birthday nears. I think I’ll take her out to eat, just so she can tell me she isn’t hungry.

RED DIRT

T
he trains may seem longer in the city, as the traffic piles up at the crossings and the freight cars squeal and clatter but barely crawl, and all there is to do is sit, and sit, and maybe try and decipher the graffiti on the endless iron boxes from broad-shouldered places like Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, places that make you think of rust and trains. But I think they might be longer, truly, in the country, in those crossings where the train intrudes like a drunk uncle on the otherwise quiet landscape. Or at least, that is what I will choose to believe. When I was a boy I would sneak away from the watchful women in my family and walk the mile or more to the track that cut across the Roy Webb Road, and count those passing cars. There seemed to be a thousand, or more, but I was very small and arithmetic has never been my blessing, and I always knew I had to get back before I was missed, before the women piled in the Biscayne and came looking for me with hands twisting at their aprons and blood in their eye.

The trains hauled coal, and pig iron, and even people. And sometimes, in car after lumbering car, came whole mountains of the red earth. There was so much of it, it seemed to me then, that they would surely dig the very ground from beneath our feet, and we would just float away.

“Why do they want our dirt?” I asked, and the grown-ups just
told me there was money in it, son, and dismissed me to talk about important things, like how it was a bad year for feed corn, and whether Wallace would run again, and why they would rather push a Chevy than drive a Ford.

I would learn that it was valuable to outsiders for the same reason it was valuable to us. It held things up.

I knew they baked bricks from it; there was a brickyard on Highway 21. But my uncles and big brother would explain how the builders used it as foundations for houses in places with mealy, mushy, crumbly, inferior dirt. Why, even under the great buildings of this world, beneath the great edifices, lay our dirt.

We got good dirt, they told me.

It would be decades before I would hear the poets go on and on about it, about how they were sons of the clay and all that, like a poet ever held a shovel handle in his life.

I believe there are three establishments a Southern man should not be caught dead in, or four if you are a member of the Church of Christ caught doing the rumba at an Arthur Murray. A Southern man should not get turned around while searching for the fishing licenses counter at Walmart and wind up anywhere in proximity of the ladies unmentionables. He should not go in a bridal boutique, which should involve no explanation. And he has no business, ever, in one of those delicate stores wherein ladies with big purses lean over souvenirs of the Old South, sigh, and mumble, “Well, ain’t that just
precious.
”

I have stumbled into such places by mistake, and sometimes cannot get out before my blood sugar is permanently escalated by all that cloying sweetness wafting from the merchandise. There are little-bitty cotton bales, and soaps with a hint of honeysuckle, and incense sticks that smell like somebody has burned the peach cobbler. It happened again, not too long ago, but before I could retreat I was mesmerized by the T-shirt rack, not because of the usual clichés printed on them but the colors themselves. They were, according to the tags on them, dyed from the natural pigments of the Southern land. There was one dyed with iced tea—I swear I am not making this up—and one that appeared to be kudzu green. But the one that stopped me cold was a dull, rusty red. The tag proclaimed it to be colored by the honest-to-God Georgia clay.

The superior look on my face, the armor a Southern man must wear into such a place to keep his dignity, slipped clean away, and I began to laugh, to laugh until parts of me not particularly well-toned began to shake. I am not prone to belly laughs, mostly because when I start I cannot stop and have been told I look ridiculous; there are many things a big man cannot do that a smaller man can, and apparently one of them is prolonged laughter in a public place. I have been told I alarm the children.

But I could not help myself.

I thought of Alabama, 1965, and a ground the color of dried blood.

I imagined my mother as a young woman, standing over me, aghast at my condition. I imagined a little-bitty me, covered from the soles of my once-white socks to my blond eyebrows, in red mud, that of the Alabama variety. It had rained, and I danced and flopped and backstroked through every mud hole I could find across five square acres, including the vast mud hole that stretched just beyond my Aunt Juanita’s house. I had begun this celebration in a clean white T-shirt, a brand-new pair of Dollar Store jeans, and a pair of hand-me-down Converse tennis shoes. Now I was of one color, with two blue eyes peering out.

“Where are your shoes?” she asked.

“The mud hole got ’em,” I answered, and it was God’s truth.

I had heard stories of monsters that lurked in deep pools.

Surely there was one in a mud hole 14 feet across.

She could not decide whether to smile or cry. We lived in that place together, her and me.

Her head shook from side to side.

Finally she just sat down, quiet, with a death grip on my skinny wrist. Not that we had a lot of nice things in our little house, but I could have begrimed them all if she had let me loose in there.

You hate it, when your mama is quiet. Better she hollers. Better she raves.

I waited.

Finally, she spoke briefly to God, and reached for the Clorox.

I can still see her standing over a dented, wringer-washing machine on the tiny back porch of the little red house, running those clothes through wash after wash, uselessly, hopelessly, because the red dirt is permanent, the stains it leaves on us, in us, are forever.

And now, like everything else in the modern-day South, someone had gone and turned it into fashion, right there beside an $18 box of Goo Goo Clusters.

So I had my good laugh, a long and wobbly laugh, and put that $20 T-shirt back on the rack. I knew where to find something more original and a good bit cheaper than that, cheaper, and priceless all at the same time. The mud hole is still there, just on the other side of my Aunt Juanita’s house. At $20 a pop, there must be a billion dollars or more waiting for us down there, after a hard rain. And if it ever went dry, we would just pray for a good downpour; God could always make more mud. The T-shirts themselves, we would have to buy. It does no good to pray to Walmart.

The red dirt covered the land. It was the land, the one resource we would never run out of, down here. It was a thing you fought with, that you turned and dug and moved from place to place, a thing that colored everything and everyone, from the knees of our jeans to our very skin, a pervasive thing, like the heat itself. In the wet, it was a slick, dangerous thing that could suck down a man or even a whole mule, and we were hearing of men who went down into the red earth for some construction or something as simple as a water or sewer line, and the red earth swallowed them whole.

It was slick as butter on a linoleum floor, when it was wet. Pulpwood trucks slid sideways and pinned men against trees. When I was a teenager hired on to cut pulpwood, a rumbling chain saw in hand, I slipped on a downed, mud-slicked tree and almost cut off my own head. Another time, I slipped in that red mush and came within the width of a sheet of paper of badly hurting, maybe killing, another boy; in time, in the wet, the other boys worked safely away from me. For a long time, I hated the red mud; it was hard enough, that dangerous and dirty work, when the earth stood still beneath your boots.

How could such a thing be good to build on, then? The smarter men explained that it set up firm and solid, deep underground, and even wet it was still firmer and harder and more waterproof than inferior soil, such as sand. All I knew was, if you let it set up around the axles of a ’69 Mustang mired in a ditch, you might as well plant flowers in it because you could not dig it out with an army of coal miners.

In the drought, it took to the very air. I used to see great dust storms in the movies, in the great Sahara or the Old West, and make a tsk-tsk noise in my throat. We lived ringed by red-earth cotton fields, and the hot winds sent whole fields into the blue sky. It coated the cars in a red film, and broke my mother’s heart anew,
when she put the damp, white sheets on the line, to be turned red in an unpredictable wind.

I thought about it more because we were, as I grew older, in the business of dirt. My Uncle Ed owned great, yellow machines to do battle with the red dirt, bulldozers and front-end loaders and big dump trucks. We were the muscle, my brothers and me. We cut roads, dug lakes, fashioned neat, flat lawns from the ragged ground.