Sitting Up with the Dead, page 27
I liked Birmingham, once archly known as “Bombingham,” better. The radio beamed optimism. As I drove into the city, a caller won a thousand dollars on “Oldies 109.” “We’re gonna go right out and buy a camper!” the winner declared. From what I overheard of conversations in gas stations and fast-food restaurants, an air of barely contained hysteria at the approach of college football season hung low over the city. When I asked some kids slouching around a street corner how to get to the Civil Rights Museum, they looked depressed at the prospect of my torturous afternoon. “Why don’t you go to the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame instead?” one suggested.
Accompanied by a chorus of “Oh no’s,” I chose the museum. Birmingham had been one of the cities targeted by civil rights leadership with marches and demonstrations. I saw Dick’s point about King inviting confrontation and suffering: in Birmingham he had chosen a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and a city ruled by police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor, who vowed that if the nonviolent demonstrations continued, there would be “blood running down the streets of Birmingham.” Both men got their wishes. As protesters ignored Connor and continued their marches, white supremacists went on a bombing spree, culminating in the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church — the movements headquarters — which killed four young black girls attending a Bible class. (A week after I wrote these words, in May 2000, the Alabama Grand Jury indicted two former Klansmen for the four murders. While no charges were brought at the time of the bombing, the case was reopened in the seventies, which resulted in the conviction of a third bomber who died in jail in 1985. A fourth suspect is also dead. The case was subsequently reopened in 1980, 1988, and 1997, the latter resulting in the current charges.)
The museum was packed with reminders of tragedies and victories: interactive exhibits, explanatory posters, even an old city bus and a couple of water fountains. A Dutch couple and I were the only white visitors. One clip from a newspaper caught my eye. In the spring of 1963, a group of white Birmingham clergymen had published a letter deeming the protests “unwise and untimely.” With a jolt I recalled Kathryn Windhams phrase: she must have been making a reference to this letter when she called racist members of her congregation “unwise and unchristian.” What courage that must have taken, but what satisfaction she must have felt as a reporter, turning the news on its head.
As I tried to find my way out — the museum was cunningly designed to prohibit a fast exit — I came upon a display of console-style television sets from about the time I was born, 1960, each blue-toned screen flickering with images of brutality. Time and perception telescoped then with a rush, and I flushed with heat despite the air conditioning. It was as if my personal memories were on public display. I had the uncomfortable impression that the country was trying to trap the ugliness of the era within these sets, to prevent it from leaking into the Technicolor daylight of the present. I peered at an image of “Bull” Connor, heavy-set, angry, and balding. His image didn’t roll, but it spawned a faint ghost just to the left of it, as if his memory were breeding in some unthinkable, televised afterlife. A cowardly part of me wished that he, like Jeffrey, were also a ghost without a story.
Sharply at 5 P.M., guards hurried me out of the museum, and I joined a foot patrol of well-dressed couples, both black and white, strolling from their parked cars to a concert at the civic center. Birmingham had too much to do — after all, football season was right around the corner — to dwell on ghost stories.
David Joe’s Tale
IT WAS A SOFT, SLOW DUSK, almost more tactile than visual, and it seeped through the open car windows straight into my pores. I was driving through northeastern Alabama’s lake country en route to Tennessee. At Gasden the pine and the kudzu belts temporarily collided, and for a few miles the roadsides were hung with curtains of topiary, shot through with branches of cool, green sparklers. Insects buzzed in wavering crescendos, and Kathryn Windham spoke quietly on the cars tape player about her two ancient aunts, who had sat on the back porch in summer and tried to pick names and memories out of unidentified family photos. As I listened, her voice wove into the steadily rising countryside, so that I came away with a double-exposed memory, one image of gentle farms and tilled fields entering through the eye, the other, of two old women in long black dresses studying photographs, through the ear.
Without warning, the secondary road petered into a causeway, and led me to the town of Cedar Bluffs on Lake Weiss. The low, clotting sunlight whipped the chop of the lake as if it had been batter for a yellow cake. It was what Willie Morris called, “one of those sudden, magic places of America,” spoiled, unfortunately, by a fake log-cabin-style motel lying in wait at the end of the causeway. I was tired but avoided the place as an animal would an obvious snare, and drove on to Tennessee.
I spent the night at Marguerite’s brother Nat and his wife Tina’s house — they were away but had lent me a key — in Chattanooga, or Chattaboogie, as they called it. After two hours of fast driving while trying to follow pale, penciled directions in the dark — in a car that kept the mysteries of overhead light operation to itself— I had arrived so shaky that I thought I’d punched in the wrong code on their alarm pad and had tripped the system. But no screeching sirens, no lights, no wails ever came. Giddy with relief that I didn’t have to explain myself to the Chattanooga police, I began to explore the forbidden fruits of someone else’s home. Neon green Post-it notes covered almost every drawer or door in the kitchen with cryptic messages. “Cat Food Not Yours.” “Drink the Wine.” It was exhilarating to forage through other people’s decisions. Why did they put the silverware here? Why was there a folk art carving on top of the toaster oven? They had mint chocolate-chip ice cream: how much could I eat without them knowing? I studied the topography of scoops in the carton so I could exactly replicate it, albeit at a lower level. It soon became apparent, however, that the house and I had a disagreement about the time. I was living at the nine o’clock hour, and it at the ten. Somewhere, perhaps at the magic lake, I’d lost sixty minutes, and had returned to Eastern Daylight Time. Sometimes this country is just too big.
I spent the next day, the only day on my very garrulous pilgrimage, in absolute silence. Tina once told me that she had made friends with a neighbor, a kind woman who gave her recipes and plant cuttings. One day, the woman had excitedly shown her the autograph of her hero — the former KKK politician David Duke. Because Tina, whose best friend in Chattanooga is black, is still fretting about whether or not it’s possible to compartmentalize politics, morals, and neighborliness, I stayed inside to hide from the ethical dilemmas across the street.
*
Hazy mountains on the northeastern horizon and dead deer by the roadside; Uncle Buds Catfish, Chicken and Such; yellow-green fields of tobacco, egg carton hills and valleys; Swiss rolls; barns and silos, trailers and shaded farmhouses; Nanny Goats 4-sale. These were the way marks that led me to Jonesborough, Tennessee: Storytelling Town, USA. As I headed up the spine of Tennessee’s eastern border, it occurred to me with a jolt that I was probably only about an hour from Ray Hicks’s house, albeit approaching from the opposite direction.
About twenty years ago, Jimmie Neil Smith started a storytelling festival in Jonesborough as a last-ditch prod to economic development. It succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Every October the small town is now overrun by tens of thousands of visitors who flock to hear a panel of invited tellers (Ray Hicks is the only one with a lifetime invitation). While other little towns in the area struggle, Jonesborough almost indecently thrives. Its red-brick homes and businesses are in fine repair; coffee shops, B&Bs, and expensive gift shops dot the main street. As I sauntered around with David Joe Miller, a storyteller who lives in Jonesborough, townspeople called greetings and fond teases from their porches. “Watch out for him,” one well-dressed man yelled, winking, “he’s a storyteller/” Two sisters who run the local coffee shop gave us towering Orange Thistles (frozen concoctions of orange juice, sugar, and milk that left my teeth chattering with cold) just because they adore David and his dog Baybee. In Jonesborough I had stumbled on the South — the modest, pioneer-built, highland South — of a tour guide’s fantasies (there were even special parking spaces for tour buses). A town not so much found in stories, as existing because of them. It was also the oldest town in Tennessee, and once capital of a short-lived state called Franklin, which would have been the first new state to follow the thirteen original colonies after the Revolutionary War, had Congress not rejected it.
Before the Orange Thistles, I had learned to make real Southern iced tea in David Joe’s apartment. I had complained to him about the obsession with sweet iced tea below the Mason-Dixon Line (there really was little escape from the stuff, so sugary it got into my gills and made me wince). David Joe calmly explained that I simply hadn’t had good sweet tea.
“First, see, you take your mama’s big old teapot — that’s the secret ingredient. It needs to have seasoned over years and years. Then add a cup of sugar; then pour in the boiling water. It caramelizes the sugar just a tad. Let it dissolve, then add five tea bags, and let it sit for two hours.”
He handed me a glass: I could actually taste the tea, but in my bad-natured, Northern way still imagined I felt it rotting my teeth. David Joe was a gentle bull of a man. Like Kathryn, he was from a family that liked to mythologize itself, though he was the first to actually call himself a storyteller. He was a big man with a thickset neck and a clipped, graying beard. I might have mistaken him for a bouncer, but for a calm gentleness of spirit and earnest brown eyes. He and his dog were soul mates.
Despite his mountain-moving looks, David Joe wore the storyteller’s mantle almost apologetically, or maybe his sweetness disguised his ability to take center stage. At least I thought he was shy until he began to speak.
“All right,” said David Joe, “this is an old Appalachian folk tale. I really hope you like it, Pam.”
THE PEDDLER MAN
There was once a peddler man who lived in a small cabin outside a village. The cabin had a very small front porch, and beyond that, a garden. In the middle of the garden was a cherry tree. Now, every year, the peddler man, he would grow a bountiful garden, and every year he would share his bounty with his neighbors and friends. What he didn’t eat he would give away, and what he didn’t give away he’d let the animals come and eat.
His friends and neighbors all told him the same thing. “Peddler Man, you give too much away! What you don’t need you give away, and what you don’t give away you let the animals come and eat. One of these days, Peddler Man, if you don’t save up, you’re going to come asking for a handout.”
I was astounded. Back in Beaufort, South Carolina, Ron Daise had said how important church-going was to storytelling. When the message is good versus evil, the preachers delivery had better be able to stand up to the subject matter. “Emulation is the key,” Ron had said. “My grandmother couldn’t read but she sure could perform. You even get little ten year olds sounding like Martin Luther King.” Here in the highlands, this big, gentle white man drove Ron’s point home. David’s whole persona changed when he launched into “The Peddler Man.” He sat erect; his voice took on a preaching cadence, rising and falling in the hilly patterns his hands traced in the air. He used repetition to create an almost stately delivery. The force of his performance was presumptive: it took over all other mental and physical options and left me with no choice but to listen. He was a changed man.
Well, the peddler man, he was living his life the way he wanted to, and he saw no reason to change it. And he didn’t. Why, he’d fill his pouch full of wares, and he’d take ’em into the middle of the village and he’d sell them. He’d lay them all out on a rock and he’d stand there as people would come and look at what he had to offer. There’d be the little girl who’d come up, and she’d see the red ribbons and she’d say, “How much are those red ribbons?”
“Well those red ribbons are two bits.”
“Oh, my daddy would never let me spend two bits for something as silly as red ribbons for my hair.”
And the peddler man would give those red ribbons to the little girl and say, “Now you go ahead and take ’em. They’d look a lot prettier in your hair than in my pouch.” And she’d pick ’em up and run off to show her friends as she was tying them in her hair.
Then a little boy would come up and say, “How much is that jackknife?”
“Well that jackknife is two bits too.”
“Ain’t got two bits.”
“Aw, you go ahead and take that jackknife. It’ll be a whole lot lighter in your pocket than it is in my pouch …”
Now, that summer came a drought. And the peddler man’s garden didn’t prove to be as bountiful as it normally does. So going into the fall of the year the peddler man was running low on food. He’d look into his pantry and he was very low on food. Then the winter hit. And oh, the winter hit that year with a vengeance. The snows flew in from the north, the temperature dropped, and the peddler man found himself one day opening his very last can of food. And he remembered what his neighbors and friends had all told him.
He went to bed that night hungry. And they tell me a hungry man will dream. And in his dream was a vision. And the vision told him to go into town. To look, and he will see all he needs to see. To listen, and he will hear all he needs to hear… Well, the peddler man pulled all the strength together that he could muster, and pulled himself up out of that bed. He got his big long overcoat on and he pulled it up high, over his neck. And he opened the front door and the wind came rustling in. He walked that pathway into the village like he’d done so many times before to sell his wares. But never had he been met with such force of wind. The snowflakes felt like needles stinging his cheeks as he walked into town, to do what the vision told him to do.
When he got into the middle of the village he found the spot where he used to sell his wares and he stood there, trying his best to keep himself warm. No one looked him in the eye. His neighbors, his friends, no one would look at him, because they were afraid if they made eye contact then he would ask them for a handout, just as they had told him. So they ignored him. At the end of the day the peddler man was so filled with despair that he couldn’t stand it any longer. He was too weak to make it back to his cabin. He decided the only thing he could do was to find an alley and lay down in the corner and give up. He chose an alley off the village square, and started walking toward that alley, but an innkeeper hollered out to the peddler man. He said, “Peddler Man, come over here. I’ve been watching you most of the day. You’ve been standing out there in the square in this weather not meant for man nor beast, and you’ve been waiting on someone. Tell me, who is it you’ve been looking for?”
Well the peddler man, he couldn’t speak, because he hadn’t had anything to drink or eat all day. The innkeeper saw this, and gave him food and drink. And when the peddler man could finally speak he asked him again. “Tell me who it is you’ve been out there looking for, waiting on all day?” The peddler man answered. “Not anyone in particular,” he said. “I just been standing out there because I had a dream, and the dream told me to come here and listen, and look.”
“Ha! The dream told you to come here in this terrible weather and stand around listening and looking? Peddler Man, you’re a bigger fool than I’ve heard you be. Well, Peddler Man, let me tell you something.
I have dreams all the time, and where would l be if I closed up my inn and chased these dreams that I have? I’m gonna teach you a lesson, Peddler Man. Listen to how silly this sounds. I had a dream the other night. And in my dream a vision came. And that vision told me that if I were to follow one of these pathways that led out from the village, I’d eventually come to a modest cabin. And that cabin would have a front porch on it. And beyond the front porch there’d be a garden in the middle of which would be a cherry tree. And that vision told me that if I took a shovel and dug underneath that cherry tree, ľd find a chest filled with gold. Ha, ha!! Do you think I’m going to close up my inn and go off following some crazy dream like that?” And he ran the peddler man out of his inn.
Well the peddler man got up and he thanked the innkeeper for the food and the drink and the advice. And he walked back down the pathway into the woods where his cabin was. When he got there, he went into the toolshed and he got a shovel, and he came back to the cherry tree in the garden and he started digging. And after he dug for awhile he hit something rock solid. And he dug all around it and brought it up on the ground, and he took the end of the shovel and he broke the lock. He opened it up and it was a chest. And that chest was filled with gold. All the gold he would ever need for the rest of his life. And the good that he did with that gold! — I can’t even begin to tell you. And that is the peddler’s story.
I clapped and David — I had begun to call him David because I felt silly saying “David Joe” — beamed. Baybee, a sweet old mutt with a lot of German Shepherd in her, thumped her tail against the back of her master’s giant sofa (sitting on it, my legs didn’t reach the floor). After he finished, David told me that one day he had gotten a call from the White House, asking if he were David Joe Miller, the storyteller. He thought it was a joke and almost hung up, but the man convinced him it was the vice president’s office calling: would he tell a story to A1 and Tipper Gore and a few thousand of their closest friends at a fund-raising picnic for the Democratic Party? David was stunned, but agreed. Like most of the storytellers I’ve met, he said he had no idea what he would tell until he stood on stage and took stock of his audience. “The Peddler Man” is what came out.
