Blue Highways (15 page)

“You mean what you’ve given up?”

“Does it seem like I’m giving nothing?”

“It seems like a gift of giving up a gift. For he so loved God he gave up his only unbegotten son.”

Brother Patrick smiled. “Just say I try to turn the potential for destructiveness into a useful force. In that way, the attraction of the outside reinforces. It’s another way to come closer to God.”

“Someone else today used that phrase about coming closer to God. It sounds like the Hindus who renounce the world and move away from things, including their own desires, so they can get closer to their god.”

“Simplicity reveals the universals we all live under. Material goods can blunt your perception of greater things. Here, the effort is to free yourself from blindness, arrogance, selfishness.”

The bells rang for compline. It was so dark I heard Duffy more than I saw him. He said, “I begin with this broken truth that I am. I start from the entire broken man—entire but not whole. Then I work to become empty. And whole. In looking for ways to God, I find parts of myself coming together. In that union, I find a regeneration.”

“Sounds like spiritual biology.”

“Why not?” After a pause he said, “Coming here is following a call to be quiet. When I go quiet I stop hearing myself and start hearing the world outside me. Then I hear something very great.”

A
MIDST
a clangor of bells in the middle of the night, the brothers began their day. I heard shuffling along the walks as they went to morning prayers. Admiring men who can give thanks for a day still two hours from first light, I again burrowed down into the bed in deep sloth.

After breakfast, I put my duffel together, left a contribution, and shook hands with a surprising number of people before going back through the big gate. When I stepped into my rig, I thought for a moment I was in the wrong truck. It seemed small and enclosed like a cell—not a monk’s cell, but a prisoner’s. Even simple and necessary gear looked foreign. Dross.

On Georgia 155, I crossed Troublesome Creek, then went through groves of pecan trees aligned one with the next like fenceposts. The pastures grew a green almost blue, and syrupy water the color of a dusty sunset filled the ponds. Around the farmhouses, from wires strung high above the ground, swayed gourds hollowed out for purple martins.

The land rose again on the other side of the Chattahoochee River, and highway 34 went to the ridgetops where long views over the hills opened in all directions. Here was the tail of the Appalachian backbone, its gradual descent to the Gulf. Near the Alabama stateline stood a couple of
LAST CHANCE
! bars—those desperate places that run at a higher pitch than taverns part of the whole fabric of a town; there’s an unnaturalness in them, isolated as they usually are from the ordinary circuits of people. On into Talapoosa County and Alexander City (just north of Our Town), where I found a place for the night by the tennis courts of the community college. That evening was to change the direction of the journey.

T
HE
woman was an authority. Whatever there was, she knew it. Her face, pallid like a partly boiled potato, looked as if carved out with a paring knife. She was a matron of note in Alexander City. Two other women, dark in eighteen-hole tans, sat with her on a bench alongside the tennis courts, while their daughters took lessons under the lights. The discussion on the bench was Tupperware. The potato had just said, “For a shower gift, you can’t do better than a Pak-N-Stor.” Another explained how her eldest had received an upright freezer full of nesting food containers from the Walkers.

“That reminds me,” said the third woman, “how is Mildred?”

“How good can you be, taking cobalt?” the authority answered.

A daughter in pearl-mint lipgloss jogged up to a handsome man standing by the courts. On his shirt, a famous little crocodile was laughing at something. Her damp haltertop and tennis shorts clung to her like tattoos. She didn’t mind my staring. “Buy me a cola drink, Daddy.”

A sunburned man at the end of the bench said, “Doesn’t she get her share of the attention! Goes to school in the North. Nobody here can touch her.”

“North, South,” I said, “makes no difference.”

He said nothing. The girls returned to their lessons, the father went back to courtside, and the women talked about aboveground swimming pools. The sunburned fellow muttered, “That your green van?” I nodded and told him I was looking around the South. He asked, “You go through Atlanta?”

“Trying to stay out of cities.”

“Not seeing the South then. Better go back.” He moved down the bench. I smelled booze. “I went to Emory University for five years. Drove a city bus in Atlanta to pay for my schooling.” As he rambled, I watched the players chase tennis balls. He said something about a “martyr bus.”

“What’s a martyr bus?”

“M-A-R-T-A. Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, otherwise known as Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The blacks—you know, the domestics living in Buttermilk Bottom, the goddamn ghetto—they take buses to the suburbs to clean houses.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. You’re goggling the coeds in their cute tans. Listen, church in Atlanta, down on West Peachtree, had a signboard. Big letters.
WHERE THE FOLKS ARE FRIENDLY.
Same church that wouldn’t let a black preacher speak at a worldwide Methodist conference.”

“Nothing particularly Southern about that.”

He wasn’t listening. He was convincing me. “I can tell you about a boutique in Underground Atlanta that sold little plastic ax handles signed by a former governor. Even being a Yankee, you might’ve heard of Lester Maddox taking his stand in front of his Pick-Rick restaurant with a goddamn ax handle in his goddamn hands. I mean, he got elected governor because he got photographed with a goddamn ax handle. I wasn’t with MARTA then, but if I’da been, I’da driven my bus right into Lester’s fucking cream pies.”

The blue crocodile man turned to us. He said, “Easy, Marlin. Ladies about. We’ve heard all that stuff by now. Times have changed for ideas like that.”

“Changed?” He looked at the tall man. “I’ll tell you change.” He turned to me, his sunburn reddening. “Here’s change: a monument to the boll weevil in Enterprise, Alabama, because it broke King Cotton’s back so beans and corn could take over. Here’s change: Atlanta Klan rally, Klan as in KufuckingKlux, year or two ago. Little ad in the
Constitution
advertising the rally. At the bottom it says, ‘Bring your own robe.’ Organization changed from furnishing the stinking bedsheets.”

Looking at me, the handsome man put his hand on Marlin’s shoulder. “You’re the one needs changing, Marlin. Next thing, you’ll be spouting again about your great-grandaddy up in the quarry at Sylacauga cutting marble for the Supreme Court building. Hear yourself: it’s all old talk now.”

To me, Marlin said, “I drove a bus, and he drives a real estate office. You figure it out, Yankee.” He got up, knocked the man’s hand from his shoulder, and put his face close to mine. In a mocking,
Gone-with-the-Wind
accent, he said, “Why don’t y’all git youah fuckin’ eyes off the darlin’ belles’ butts and go ovah to Selma? See what Uncle Remus got to say since he done give up the cake walk.”

He went off up the hill. That was it.

B
Y
midmorning I was following route 22, as I had from the Alabama line, on my way to Selma. The truck license plates said
HEART OF DIXIE
, and I was going into the middle of the heart. West of the bouldery Coosa River, I saw an old man plowing an old field with an old horse, and once more I wasn’t sure whether I was seeing the end or beginning. Then an outbreak of waving happened—first at Maplesville, again in Stanton, again in Plantersville; from galleries and sidewalks people waved. Where folks are friendly.

It was late afternoon in Selma, and big trees along Broad Street, a clean and orderly avenue, shaded the way; citizens swept porches and talked over hedges. At the bottom of Broad, the Edmund Pettus Bridge arched high above the Alabama River. The span, named after a Confederate private who mustered out as a brigadier general, was the point where mounted troopers forced a halt to Martin Luther King’s first attempt to march to Montgomery. But the afternoon I saw the bridge, it looked silvery and quiet, more ordinary than historic.

Water Avenue intersected Broad Street and ran parallel to the river on the high, north side. West on the avenue was a boarded-up building of Doric columns and an inscription chiseled in stone:
HARMONY CLUB.
East stood two- and three-story brick buildings with ornamental ironwork supporting galleries that gave the street an aspect of the Vieux Carré in New Orleans. What little remained of Selma’s old commercial architecture—buildings Walker Evans photographed during the Depression—was here.

I looked along Broad Street for a beer to chase the heat and furnish opportunity for conversation; two places appeared to be bars, but signs outside gave no indication. Water Avenue, down where Confederate shipfitters had built ironclads to fight Farragut at Mobile Bay, was quiet but for an old cotton warehouse with a buzzing electric sign:
MICKEY’S PLACE.
A second sign above showed a champagne glass, a plus symbol, and a human figure either dancing or falling over dead.

Mickey’s was, in fact, a tavern and the sign a Bible Belt hieroglyphic to say that. I was the only customer. The barmaid, in her early twenties, wore a see-through blouse that surrendered transparency at the last possible point of decency; at the center she had pinned a Made-in-Taiwan red plastic rose, which matched another stuck into a pair of black lace underpants nailed to the wall. She stood looking forlorn, I thought, twisting a highball glass on stacks of joke napkins, turning them into little ziggurats.

In the dimness, the bar mirror, only a few feet away, returned no reflection, and I checked to see if I had on sunglasses. I didn’t, but she wore hers. Perfume stuck to the wet bottle of beer she set down. “What’s with the sign outside?” I said. “Wasn’t sure this was a bar.”

“Cain’t advertise bars or liquor in the city. About the most you can get away with is ‘cold beverages of all kinds.’”

Four new, antiqued Pabst Blue Ribbon wall lamps behind the bar were mounted upside down with the name smeared over. “What’s with the lights?”

“That’s advertisin’.”

“I can read ‘Pabst’ on the bottle in my hand but not on the wall?”

“You catch on fast. Where you from? Chicago?”

I told her. She took off her sunglasses to get or give a better look, then put them on again when a man came in for a bottle of beer to go. She rolled it carefully in a paper sack, but the outline was unmistakable. It looked like a little mummy.

“Where are
you
from?”

“Right here,” she said. “Selma, everlovin’ Alagoddamnbama, Heart of D-I-X-I-E.” I smiled. “Don’t laugh, Chicago. Here’s the only place I ever been ceptin’ Montgomery. And Biloxi once as a baby. But I’m headin’ for New Orleans soon. This little number is on the move. Look away, Dixieland!” She removed her sunglasses. “So, what’s Mr. Chicago doin’ in Selma?”

“Mr. Chicago was encouraged to come to see what the march changed.”

“What march?”

“King’s march.”

She lowered her voice. “Touchy shit, Chicago. You’re two blocks from Brown’s Chapel. That’s where it all started.”

“Still touchy? How long’s it been?”

“Don’t know. I was just a little kid.”

“Do blacks come in here now?”

“
Here?
They got their clubs, we got ours.”

“Doesn’t sound like much has changed.”

She turned to a sharp-edged man who had just sat down. He loudly said, “Can I get me a Tom and Collins or is lollygaggin’ all that gets done in here?” She mixed his drink and talked with him. Every so often he turned on me his small, round eyes. She walked back up the bar.

“Thirteen years ago Ray says the march was. Want another?”

“Sure, if you mean a beer.”

“Why don’t you talk to Ray? He saw it both times.”

“Ray doesn’t look like the chummy sort.”

“He’s all right, usually. I cain’t tell you anything.” She looked down the bar. “Hey, Ray. I was tellin’ Chicago about that night those dudes came in here and saw there wasn’t any of their kind and left.”

“So?”

“So, like he wanted to know if things changed.”

Ray, a jagged man, sat down beside me and looked hard at the woman. He said, “How’s it his concern?” Still talking to her, he turned to me and in my face opened a smile like a jackknife. “All these Northern boys wanna know is ‘How’s your nigger problem?’ Don’t they think we get sick of that? Won’t they let us rest? Ain’t they got nothin’ new to say?”

“I got accused last night of ignoring it.”

“Okay, sonny-jim. I’ll tell you about change.” It came out like a threat. “Change ruined this town. Bar I just came from, three of them sittin’ in there big as sin. Fifteen years ago you couldna hired a nigger to go in there. You talk about change, and I say to you, ‘Go to hell.’”