Long Time Leaving (48 page)

Augusta is not a green town.

S
o you're going to Atlanta for the Olympics! Well, Atlantans are traditionally hospitable folks, happy to oblige visitors who have questions about the city. If you're thinking of going to Atlanta for the Atlantans, however, this is hardly the time. You may well not meet any, except in passing as they
escape
Atlanta for the Olympics’ duration. And since they will be busy brushing the Olympic construction dust off their clothes and counting all the yen and Deutschmarks they've received for renting out their homes, they may not be ideally disposed to explain Atlanta to you. In fact, they may be more inclined to ask
you
questions, like “How would
you
feel if people came to
your
town and wrapped a 1,996-foot-long weenie around and around inside
your
Georgia Dome and called it the official Olympic hot dog and then had to throw it away—
no one knows where
—because it went bad?
Where can you throw away a 1,996-foot-long weenie?”
Or, “Who would've thought that the capital of Georgia would become—even before the Olympics—the kind of town whose best-known residents include Elton John and John Ehrlichman?”

The truth is, anyone who thinks he can come up with any kind of unified theory of Atlanta hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty or thirty years. I grew up in the Atlanta area, and I went back recently to have a look around and ask Atlantans whether there is any there there. The most frequent response I got was perhaps most succinctly put by a young woman standing outside a club called Oxygen at two o'clock one morning:

“Oh, you're looking for the
there
here. Let me know if you find it.”

On that note, I open the floor for questions.

Will I be able to understand the Southern lingo? Should I try to speak Southern myself?

When I flew into Atlanta last month, the first voice I heard informed me, in an entirely unregional accent, “Please excuse the inconvenience. The train system is not completely operational. Please observe signs over the train entrance door for information involving train destination. The trains should depart at approximately ten-minute intervals.” This was followed, after a just-under-five-second interval (I timed it), by the same announcement. Altogether, as I walked a good mile and a half and saw no signs over train entrance doors, I heard that announcement thirty-nine times. I dare say the airport train system has been fixed and that voice has been throttled by now.

The next voice I heard was that of my cab driver, old reliable source of grassroots inside-skinny. I said to him, “You looking forward to the Olympics?” He made a kind of incredulous noise, like:
Hoonh!
After a long pause, I chuckled and said to him, “Does everybody ask you that?” He didn't make any noise at all. After we drove in silence for quite a while, I asked him where he was from. “Ghana,” he said.

The next voice was that of the man who took my bags at the hotel. He was quite friendly. I couldn't quite place his accent. He was from Eritrea.

The phone in my room woke me the next morning.

“Umf ?” I said.

A sprightly, businesslike female Southern voice said, “Information?”

“No,” I said.

I hung up. It rang again.

“Yuhf?” I said.

“I figured it out,” said the same voice. “You're in room 1212, aren't you?”

“Uh …uh-huh, but—”

“See, I was trying to dial New York information, but I forgot to dial ‘9’ first, so the only numbers that registered were 1212, which is your room. See? One, and the area code for New York…”

“Where are
you?”

“In another room. I'm from Charlotte, but I live in L.A. now. You sounded so abrupt, I thought I'd call and explain. Bye.”

The next person I talked to was another cordial bellman. He sounded local. He complimented me on the cap I was wearing. “Thanks,” I said. “It's from Nepal.” This seemed to strike no chord of recognition, so I said, more specifically, “Kathmandu.” He gave me a very strange look. After a moment, it occurred to me that he might think I was trying on some kind of bizarre hepcat jive talk with him—as if I might be expecting him to answer, “Man, a cat
sho nuff
do.” What he did answer, politely enough but a bit distantly, was “I know that's right.”

I proceeded to the public library. The quite helpful research librarian's face was decorated by what I took to be tribal tattoos. Turned out she was from Namibia originally.

All this was
before
the Olympics. So if I were you, I wouldn't try to fit into Atlanta culture by addressing everyone you encounter as
fall.
For one thing, you may have read a recent how-to-get-by-in-Atlanta article in which it was alleged
that fall
is singular and the plural is
falls.
This is sheer misinformation. Here is a rare opportunity to be definitive about a vaguely Atlanta-related point, and I am not going to let it get away:
fall
is always plural, although sometimes it may sound singular. For instance, someone may ask a waitress, “What kind of pie y'all got today?” That
fall
refers to the restaurant, as a collection of different people. To be sure, there is such a word as
fall's:
the plural possessive, as in “Y'all's little boy sure is cute,” addressed to a couple. Oh, don't worry about it. If you didn't grow up using
fall,
I'd stay away from it. Also, I wouldn't go around asking local people what grits are, or is. To someone who grew up eating grits, that is about as engaging an icebreaker as “What are potatoes?” would be to an Irishman.

Chicago is the city of big shoulders, New York is the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, Pittsburgh is a shot-and-a-beer-town, Los Angeles has no more personality than a paper cup—what is the word on Atlanta?

In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.

Void? Like empty void?

Well, I'm taking a bit of biblical license. But what more appropriate place to quote the Bible
and
to take license than Atlanta? Michael Musto, gossip columnist for New York's
Village Voice,
once wrote after a visit to Atlanta, “On Sunday mornings, the whole city shuts down for—get this— church.” This overstates the case considerably, but if you ask an Atlantan what he thinks of, say, Deion Sanders, he may well reply, “My mama and Deion go to the same church. And Deion's right regular.”

There are more houses of worship in Atlanta, in fact, than there are table-dancing establishments. Which is saying something, for Atlanta is the table-dancing-establishment capital of, at least, the Southeast. When a big church-going town is also a mecca for the kind of guy who likes to show what a class act he is by not laying a hand on—or even
ogling,
really—a succession of chipper if unsultry young women whom he is paying to gyrate stark naked at his table, within an inch of his nose, well,
void
may be a bit strong. But
a connection missing somewhere
is not.

What might be this connection that's missing?

Southern towns—Memphis, New Orleans, Natchez—generally exude a sense of sin, guilt, loss: the blues. Atlanta had been Atlanta for only eighteen years when General Sherman burned it to the ground in 1865. Not having accrued much karma, it started over from scratch. It has kept on starting over ever since. Atlanta wakes up to a new world every morning. You'd never catch Atlanta calling itself the City of Brotherly Love, because then it would always be letting itself down, like Philadelphia. Atlanta is slicker than that: it's the City Too Busy to Hate. You can always find some substantiation for a slogan like that. For instance, while it is true that one aspect of Atlanta's busy-ness is a beehive of violent street crime, it is also true that Atlanta has a black woman police chief.

You seem to be suggesting that Atlanta is predominantly image. Isn't it the home of major institutions?

Somehow
home
doesn't seem quite the word. There's the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a universal value that the city cherishes much
more than it did the man when he was alive. There's Jimmy Carter's center, which settles disputes in other countries. There's the Cable News Network, which is global, not local. There's Coca-Cola, which wants to teach the world to sing. There are the World Champion Braves, which the city shares with everyone who is hooked into the Turner Broadcasting System. There's the Centers for Disease Control, which is no more indigenous than chronic fatigue syndrome. Atlanta prides itself on having just about everything that any other American city has—as opposed to anything that other American cities don't have. Then there's the Atlanta airport. Do you have any sense of being anywhere in particular when you're in the Atlanta airport? No, you have a sense of being in Connecting-Flight Purgatory. Disembodied voices escort you from concourse to concourse. There used to be a sign in that airport proclaiming,

WELCOME TO ATLANTA, A WORLD-CLASS, MAJOR-LEAGUE CITY
. That was tacky enough to exude a certain local color, so it came down.

Currently the most telling symbol of Atlanta's globality-wish is at the intersection of Peachtree Street and International Boulevard. (International Boulevard used to be Cain Street, but the mark of Cain has been expunged.) On two of the corners of this intersection are a Planet Hollywood, with its neon rotating-Northern-Hemisphere sign, and a Hard Rock Cafe, with its
SAVE THE PLANET
slogan. But you can find Planet Hollywoods and Hard Rocks in lots of cities. Only in Atlanta, at the intersection of Peachtree and International, can you find a globe—a flat globe, to be sure—set into the pavement. Covering the whole junction of the two streets is a big circle, within which various continents are depicted by different-colored pavement blocks. Even when this artwork was new, however, there was no way to get enough perspective on it from ground level to make out what it depicted, and now that traffic has been passing over it for a few months, you can only just faintly tell that it isn't all dark grey. This was supposed to be Ground Zero of Olympic Atlanta. And so it is. The world is there, and yet, it's not.

You're not denying that Atlanta is a world-class city, are you?

Certainly not. It is the city, after all, of the Atlanta Olympics—whose symbol is a little blue blobomorphic condundrum. The Whatizzit, this symbol was called originally; but the
What
and the
it
have fallen away. “Izzy is a teenager,” according to official Olympic postcards (a
teenager,
note: neither childlike nor mature), “who lives in a fantastic world found only inside the Olympic flame.” Izzy is without form, and void.

And Atlanta was this way from the beginning?

In 1837, somebody drove a stake in the ground: Zero Mile marker, where the terminus of the Western and Atlantic Railroad would be. Three miles to the west was a tavern, seven miles to the north was the Chattahoochee River, six miles to the east was the town of Decatur, but right there where the stake was, was nothing but the stake. Atlanta in its genesis was called Terminus.

Then, for a while, it was Marthasville, named for the governor's daughter, Martha Lumpkin. That might be a better name for the Izzy: the Lumpkin.

Then people started putting in improvements like board floors in the buildings, and it was felt that the town growing up around the train station ought to have a higher-flown name, so somebody decided upon the feminine form of Atlantic (an ocean that lay some three hundred miles to the east). Atlanta.

Polls show that many people confuse it with Atlantic City, New Jersey. Atlanta is known as the Gateway City of the South—a gate is neither here nor there. Atlanta used to call itself the Phoenix City, because it arose from the ashes, like the phoenix, after Sherman burned it. You'd think the phoenix would be sufficiently representative of flux to serve as the Atlanta Olympic symbol, but if you look at drawings of that mythical bird you'll notice that it has a definite, prickly shape. Then, too, there is another city in America called Phoenix (which never claims to have risen from the ashes like Atlanta), and just over the Georgia state line there's a town called Phenix City, Alabama, which was known as “the wickedest city in the U.S.” until reformers cleaned up everything about it but its spelling.

Aren't there any bits of raffish Atlanta historical lore you could pass on?

Yes, but it's remarkable how often impermanence and insubstantiality crop up. Atlanta's first jail was a twelve-foot-square log cabin. If there were enough prisoners inside, they could all get together and dump it over on its side and walk out. Once, when the inmate population could not quite manage this, friends of the incarcerated came along and lifted the jail straight up in the air so everybody could crawl out. In the early days, there were two bad neighborhoods, Murrell's Row and Snake Nation, where gambling, cockfights, and brawling went on. The denizens of these neighborhoods formed a political party, the Free and Rowdy Party. They were opposed by the upstanding business community:
the Moral Party. The Morals eventually carried the day by burning the bad neighborhoods down, leaving a new void to develop. One of Atlanta's earliest developers—for whom Williams Street was named— was a sort of proto-Izzy. His name was Ammi Williams, and he went around saying, “If I'm not Ammi, then who am I?”

So where do we go in Atlanta to see Tara and the other historic buildings?

There is nothing vaguely resembling Scarlett O'Hara's ancestral home in the Atlanta area.
^*
Anything antebellum Sherman burned. In the summer of 1865, a Northern visitor to the city recorded his impressions: “Everywhere were ruins and rubbish, mud and mortar and misery. The burned streets were rapidly rebuilding, but meantime, hundreds of inhabitants, black and white, made homeless by the destruction of the city, were living in wretched hovels which made the suburbs look like a fantastic encampment of Indians or Gypsies.”