Long Time Leaving (35 page)

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.

T
o 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.