Peachtree Road (7 page)

PEACHTREE ROAD / 45

client of Tom’s father, the owner of the city’s first advertising agency. Tom’s family has some money, but not enough, and some background, but not enough, and the house is not nearly grand enough to keep the Goodwins securely in the pantheon in which they teeter. But the location is beyond reproach, and that Habersham Road address and the prospects of one day commanding it will eventually win for Tom the birdlike little hand of Freddie Slaton. Better, I guess, that his father had gone on and bought an affordable bungalow safely across Peachtree Road in Garden Hills, and so beyond the pale.

Right onto the major artery that is West Paces Ferry Road.

It runs out to the river, where Hardy Pace did, indeed, operate a ferry, and has now become one of the Northside’s most lamentably snarled traffic arteries from west to east. But in the timestopped nights in which I run, all that can be seen in the darkling woods are the lights of the few big houses on either side. Where the new governor’s mansion—Greek Revival, it is not so fondly known as in some circles—sits now, these thirty years later, there is in my eyes only forest. The great pile of stone just down from it is still the Grant family home, and not the Cherokee Town Club, that unsuccessful pretender to the Driving Club’s throne. Woods, and the smell of honeysuckle and heartbreak, and warm tar in cooling night air, and late-mown grass…and ahead, the scattered lights and occasional sibilant, swishing traffic sounds of Buckhead proper.

Gaining the familiar intersection of Peachtree, West Paces Ferry, and Roswell roads is like coming out of black, raging Midgard into the eternal radiant whiteness of Valhalla. It has always been so to me. It is all there in that one shabby 1950s crossroads, life and succor and promise and a kind of secular immortality. What power those few dim, perfunctory, yellow and pink and blue neon lights have for the myriad ghosts who flutter like

46 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

moths around Buckhead! Jim Dickey wrote about it in

“Looking for the Buckhead Boys”; that poem took the top of my head off when I first read it, and I tried to find Jim to call him and tell him what it meant to me, but he was out of the state and the South, his sister said, and probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. Jim knew what it took to survive Buckhead: a kind of distance not measured in miles.

He wrote:

First in the heart

Of my blind spot are

The Buckhead Boys. If I can find them, even one, I’m home. And if I can find him catch him in or around Buckhead, I’ll never die; it’s likely my youth will walk Inside me like a king.

Yes! And I quicken my steps and run into Buckhead. On my right, Wender & Roberts Drugstore, and Lane’s, and just across the street in the arrow tip formed by the confluence of Peachtree and Roswell, Jacob’s Drugs and Madder’s Service Station and above it all the great moon of the Coca-Cola sign. Just past Roswell, the Buckhead Theatre, with the balcony upstairs for the Negroes lucky enough to have the nights off from the big houses all around. I don’t think, excepting servants, there was another black head in North Atlanta in those days. I can see us all, a flock of us, jostling and crowing and knuckling each other on the biceps, walking from Wender & Roberts across the street to the midnight movie.

Just up East Paces Ferry there was the taxi stand where even the smallest of us could reach far up to the counter with a penny and receive, in exchange, one cigarette. And Burt’s Bottle Shop, where a lank, depressed bear languished in a cage out in the weedy, cinder-block-littered back.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 47

Across the street where the monolithic and hideous Buckhead Plaza is going up now (unseen, unseen!) was a miniature-auto racetrack, on whose grassy infield Caroline Gentry, Charlie’s little sister, used to tether her pony and cart after driving it in from the Gentrys’ sprawling, stained stucco on West Andrews. From there she’d cross the street to Wender

& Roberts and meet, illicitly, Boo Cutler and have a fountain cherry Coke and a package of Tom’s potato chips, and they’d go to the afternoon show at the Buckhead Theatre and neck.

Nobody, not Mr. and Mrs. Gentry, not Caroline’s Sunday school teacher, not her teachers at North Fulton High, not Charlie himself, could break that match up.

Boo Cutler. With the drooping-lidded blue eyes and the spoiled, corrupted baby’s face and the bubblegumpink underlip and butter-yellow crew cut and the fastest ’48 Mercury in the South. Boo of the legends and the homeroom whispers: That he ran shine down from Hall County to South Georgia on weekends, and had been shot at many times by police and agents, but never hit. That he had laid more than fifty women by the time he was old enough to drive, and one of them taught at North Fulton. That he had a shotgun in the trunk of the Mercury with notches in it that represented the number of Negroes killed on back country roads in wire-grass South Georgia. That he had done it with a cow.

It was the literal truth, I think, that he ran shine; at any rate, I remember one night when I was fifteen and he was sixteen the word went out that Boo was coming through Buckhead from up in Hall at precisely midnight with a load, and that he had vowed to be going a hundred and twenty when he did it, and that he didn’t care what cops were waiting for him, the Merc could take them all. It was in the late fall, I remember, on a Friday night after a home football game, and we all told our parents we were going to the show, and we went and stood

48 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

out of sight around the corner on East Paces Ferry and Peachtree in the silent cold, waiting for him. There was, as usual for that time of night, virtually no traffic and few lights except for the marquee farther up at the movie house, and the wind was high and prowling, abroad in the sky, and the silence rang with our efforts to hear his engine. At first, when we did, it was so high and keening that we just thought the wind had intensified. And then Snake Cheatham said, “It’s him. That’s him.”

And we came out of the lee into the full stream of the wind, eyes tearing, and we heard and saw Boo Cutler coming like a devil out of Hell down the empty middle of Peachtree Road, the few sickly streetlights catching the flying Mercury and flinging it along, its engine screaming full-throated and terrible and wonderful.

We did not speak. He was past us and gone down Peachtree Road before we could comprehend the splendor and speed of him, the Merc riding so low that the exhaust bit great fountains of sparks out of the pavement, and before we could even turn our heads to test the new sound, a DeKalb County black-and-white flashed past impossibly far behind him, its siren sounding thin and mewling in contrast to the Mercury’s Valkyrie cry. Both were gone into the silence in an eye-blink, and we did not speak for a moment.

“Jesus Christ, he must have been doing a hundred and forty,” Tom said weakly.

“I just creamed my jeans,” Charlie said reverently.

I remember that I cried, silently in the sheltering dark, and was ashamed of it, but not so ashamed that the memory of that perfect moment does not still have the power, all these years later, to bring tears of joy and thankfulness to my eyes.

It was, in its fullness, as round and whole as an egg.

Boo Cutler, Charlie…

Buckhead is called that because a man named Hardy PEACHTREE ROAD / 49

Ivy mounted, in 1838, the head of a buck on a tree over his tavern and crossroads store, and the name stuck among the settlers who met there. The tree on which the grisly trophy hung still stands in the parking lot of a liquor store. Hardy paid $605 for the land that makes up the core of Buckhead, 202 acres where the racetrack sat, and then Sears, and where now Buckhead Plaza is going up. We always heard that there was gold buried in a box under that earth, put there by an old man and his slave during the siege of the city to the south, “out yonder so the damn Yankees won’t get it.”

It was an auspicious omen. Buckhead has always been known, proudly, as the wealthiest unincorporated suburb in America, whether or not the appellation was true. It remained unincorporated only because a stubborn little town also named Buckhead, in Morgan County, refused to surrender its charter and let Buckhead have the name officially, else it would have, early on, been a town proper. It has always considered itself apart both in spirit and in fact from the pushy giant directly to the south, and fought annexation tooth and nail. I remember that when I was ten, the community trounced one attempt and staged a mock funeral, featuring three caskets labeled Mayor Hartsfield, the Atlanta
Journal
and the Atlanta
Constitution
, and bore them proudly down the middle of Peachtree Road to the strains of
Finland-ia
played falteringly by the North Fulton High marching band. It wasn’t until 1950 that the city got us, and it remains to many Buckheaders still alive a catastrophe of only slightly less magnitude than the one wrought by General Sherman.

Well. I run out of the beneficence of central Buckhead, then, and back into the dark, pounding south on Peachtree Road. In that earlier country, a dying straggle of stores and businesses stood on either side, and directly beyond them on my left, the subdivision of

50 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Garden Hills: firmly middle-class, agreeable and substantial, but another world entirely from the kingdom on the other side of Peachtree Road. It was not until I began high school at North Fulton High, off to my left down Delmont, that I came to know anybody who lived in Garden Hills, and though we children were not, that I remember, snobs in particular—at least not about where people lived—it was as if, in my early childhood, Peachtree Road was as impenetrable and decisive a dividing line as Hadrian’s Wall. Later on, I got to know and like many of my schoolmates who lived Over the Line, and one, A. J. Kemp, became, after Charlie Gentry, perhaps my best friend. But in that first country of childhood, none of us crossed—or wished to—the Rubicon.

On down Peachtree Road I run, past North Fulton High and Garden Hills Elementary, both out of sight on my left; past, on my right, Saint Philip’s Church, where we went in perfunctory piety each Sunday when it was still a small parish church; past Second Ponce de Leon (Baptist and just a bit below the salt) and the Cathedral of Christ the King (Catholic and resoundingly so); past the last commercial lights and down into the dark of, now, only sleeping houses. Big houses in a line on my right, like the ones on the cloistered streets behind them; houses that could and did shelter princelings and sit out, for an incredible number of years, the siege of the city to the south. Mostly mellow, rosy brick, these few Peachtree Road houses were, two-and three-storied and black-or green-trimmed, some with columns and some with Adam fanlights and fine Georgian facades. Safe, sleeping there in the dark. Safe and dignified and beautiful.

And the last before you reached Muscogee Avenue and the safest and most dignified and, to me, always the most beautiful…my own: 2500 Peachtree Road.

Looking back, it might seem that, in light of my PEACHTREE ROAD / 51

hungry and strictured childhood in that house, my passion for it borders on self-destructiveness. The sane thing to do, for anyone with the slightest bent for survival, would have been to draw in his head and deny in spirit the walls that starved and imprisoned him until the earliest possible opportunity for escape presented itself, and then to leave them behind with no regrets and a singing heart. But those stout, sheltering brick walls were never oppressive to me in themselves; indeed, they were sanctuary and solace whenever my eye or mind fell upon them. And though I did leave them at an early juncture, it was with—for the house, at least—an almost physical stab of sorrow. And when I came back, even though the return was not initially of my own choosing, my heart gave the same small, glad wing-waggle that it always did when I rounded the long curve past Peachtree Battle going north and saw again those soft-rose bricks and the sweetly hipped roof.

It always seemed to me in that house of infinitely lovely proportion and abundance of clear light that, no matter what miasma of disharmony prevailed at the moment, anything so beautiful could not be in and of itself hurtful, but was merely sleeping under some spell soon to be broken, and when it waked, the happiness that would come flooding in would be mythic in its scope, out of my small imagining entirely. I think the reason I was never really unhappy there is that I waited with such absolute conviction for joy. What child dares see his primal danger plain? Even now, when whatever future I might have imagined for it is past, the house at 2500 Peachtree Road still smites my eyes with its beauty whenever I look at it. I do, several times each day, from the summerhouse.

“Lordee, but it’s big, ain’t it?” I remember Lucy saying on the first full day she spent in the house. We were standing on the half-moon front drive, looking up at it.

52 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Her blue eyes had a dazzle in them not entirely from the sun.

“Do y’all charge admission for folks to come look at it?”

“Why would we do that?” I asked, honestly puzzled.

“Mama says people do in New Orleans.”

“Well, nobody does here,” I said, defensively.

“I bet you could make a pot if you did,” Lucy said. “I’m gon’ ask Aunt Olivia if I can do that. I bet lots of folks would pay to come see this house.”

“Don’t do that,” I said quickly, knowing instinctively that my mother would be outraged by the idea. “If you want some money I’ll give you some. How much do you need?”

“A nickel,” she said promptly.

“Wouldn’t you rather have a dime? I’ve got one.”

“No, silly,” she snorted. “Nickel’s twice as big as a dime.”

I gave her the nickel.

The house was designed in 1917, not by Neel Reid but by a young architectural student cousin of its first owner, a physician who made one of the early fortunes investing in Coca-Cola bottling equipment, as did so many of the men who built the first of the great Buckhead houses. Indeed, the intersection of West Paces Ferry and Roswell roads is still called Coca-Cola Corners. The young architect died a year after the house was finished, during the obligatory year’s study in Florence after graduating from Georgia Tech, attempting to swim the Arno after staying up all night drinking and reading Lord Byron. My mother told me the story when I was barely three; it is one of the very first memories I have: sitting in her lap in a rocking chair in front of the coal fire in her and my father’s big upstairs bedroom, rocking back and forth, back and forth as the red firelight leaped over her hands and the dark, seal-sleek curtain of hair that fell over her face and mine together.