placing myself
If it is summer and you are near the bay in a thunderstorm, you will watch the sun disappear suddenly. You will face complete darkness except for the lightning. The storm will move quickly across the bay. The rain falls fast and hard. If you look into the water, you’ll see what looks like tornadoes as the rain hits harder and harder. You can taste the electricity in the air. It is said that if you stick your tongue out during one of these storms, the air will taste like copper, like pennies. The city is full of stories, myths, and its share of ghosts.
In Alabama, stories seemed to grow like vines; they get larger with time and when no one notices.
My family has always been full of storytellers. As a girl, I sat between my grandmother and her mother snapping beans and listening. Their conversations moved from discussing what they’d cook for lunch on Sunday to recalling how so-and-so loved a particular dish at the last church supper. Then one of them would ask how so and so was “getting along” since his daughter got married, and they’d move on to the wedding, describing the organza and lace in such detail I felt like I’d seen a photograph. Sometimes the stories were familiar. They spoke of living in Arkansas before moving to a landscape that was in their words, “more promising than all that damn red dirt.” Mobile, Alabama, a port city rich in its history of frivolity and yet traditional in its Southern customs, must have seemed like a strange contradiction in which to begin again. But if you’ve spent any significant amount of time breathing in the salty air coming off the bay, it would make absolute sense.
My brother and I spent hours in kitchens and screened-in porches snapping beans, or shelling pecans just so we could hear my great-grandmother, my grandmother and her sisters talk about the past. “I don’t think Mr. Pickens meant to shoot Ol’ Rex in the head. It just kinda happened. It was something about a bet, wasn’t it?” The women would argue about what happened until my Granny interjected, “Well, I guess it don’t matter. But sometimes late at night you can hear cryin’ from the fields and a voice, saying ‘What have I gone and done now?’ and then another voice sayin’ ‘Ya shot me you sonofabitch.’” And everyone would laugh. I loved Granny’s laugh, rumbling deep from her chest. When something was truly funny, she’d throw her head back and her whole body would shake. Granny lived through the Depression; she’d lost a son and a husband before she was forty. But she knew how to laugh. Perhaps it was because of her loss that she could appreciate humor.
Her small house always seemed full, full of people and their stories, their memories and laughter. It was always hot no matter how high she ran the fans or window unit air conditioners my uncle finally convinced her to let him install. The house was no match for Alabama humidity. I suppose there just wasn’t enough room for air.
Granny influenced much of my girlhood. My love of stories began with her. She encouraged my imagination and often gave me supplies like beads, satin, and cloth remnants, and boxes in various sizes, which I used to construct a number of scenarios and plays. She also influenced the ways in which I experienced place. Whenever I visited, she made sure to take me to somewhere in the city I had not been. As my guide, she showed me the Battle House where President Wilson once gave a speech about the war. The building was dilapidated, but as Granny talked about the hotel in its prime, I could imagine people bustling in and out. We explored stores, cafes, and pharmacies. Running errands with Granny took hours. Even the smallest, simplest location came alive with her voice. I never questioned whether the stories were true. It never occurred to me that she was building a mythology for me, one she constructed purposefully to place me, to help me feel as if I belonged to Mobile and it to me.
My father says Southerners are born storytellers. I have often wondered if he counts himself. He is steeped in the tradition of storytelling, as he spent afternoons with Granny while his mother, my grandmother, worked as an operating room nurse. Granny liked to joke that he was blessed to have been conceived beneath an azalea bush and raised in the shallow waters of Mobile Bay. As a native Mobilian, he loves the way the city contradicts itself. He can talk for hours about the moss-covered trees on Government Street. He knows the architecture of each cathedral and which ones seem more haunted than others. Religion and superstition live together in the South in ways outsiders cannot understand.
Though my father chose ministry as a profession, narratives are his great passion. He collects stories the way some people collect stamps, or figurines, or post cards. Sit in a room with my father for five minutes and you will hear any number of stories like one about the guy who, on crutches, robbed the gas station where he had once been employed and attempted to hobble away from the police. The gun he’d been carrying went off and shot him in his good leg. In jail, the man studied business law and sales, and he now sells cars at the local Mercury dealership but walks with a slight limp.
My father has been working on a novel for years. He writes on the back of paper napkins and the newspaper crosswords, collecting moments he might one day use. Attend the church where he preaches every Sunday and you’ll hear stories, often with the same hint of humor, depth and philosophy with which he tells every story I remember from childhood. When I tell him what I’m writing, the essay you are reading, he takes a deep breath.
“Southerners,” he says “We’re driven backwards. We’re always looking to the past. You can’t ask for directions without someone telling you to take a turn where something used to be. The past lives in our present. It’s like Faulkner says, ‘The past is never dead; it’s not even past.’”
Read anything by William Faulkner, Flannery O’ Conner, Tennessee Williams or Thomas Wolfe and it becomes clear; Southerners love words. We love the way they feel in our mouths, rolling over our tongues, falling in slow drawls. We take time telling stories, often pausing for dramatic effect, or sometimes to take a sip of whiskey, catch our breath or tell a different story altogether. Southern writers do not write about the South, or family, or landscapes, music or love. They write around it. Readers of Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner are often frustrated by their lengthy sentences that can go on for pages. But it is this rhythm, the breaths or sips between the lines where the story lies. I have spent my life trying to get at what lies between the lines.
In Writing a Woman’s Life Carolyn Heilbrun (1989) wrote,
Let any woman imagine for a moment a biography of herself based upon those records she has left, those memories fresh in the minds of surviving friends, those letters that chanced to be kept, those impressions made, perhaps, on the biographer who was casually met in the subject’s later years. What secrets, what virtues, what passions, what discipline, what quarrels would, on the subject’s death, be lost forever? How much would have vanished or been distorted or changed, even in our memories? We tell ourselves stories of our past, make fictions or stories of it, and these narrations become the past, the only part of our lives that is not submerged. (p. 51)
How does one tell the stories of her life? I do not know. I have struggled with my remembrances both submerged and surface. I can no longer tell where I stop and start. Whenever I think of a specific time in my life, I categorize it by where I was living at the time. Place orients me; it fixes me. When I first moved from the Gulf Coast to the Midwest I told stories about home to keep it close. When I called Alabama I joked about living among corn and told stories about the Midwestern pace of life, the misunderstandings that occurred when someone didn’t hear me clearly because of my accent or word choice. These stories kept me both connected and at a distance, simultaneously.
I lived in Illinois only a month before I returned to the South on a hot September afternoon. The air felt different, heavy. Storm clouds brewed overhead, and I became aware of how little sky I could actually see. I watched row after row of moss-covered trees disappear as I drove beneath them. I stayed in a small hotel in downtown Mobile where Flannery O’ Conner had once slept. The story was she’d left a bag with one of her manuscripts in it, and when she frantically returned weeks later to her room, it had been untouched. The maids had cleaned around the spot on the floor and no guests had been assigned the room. The owner liked telling this story along with ones about Eugene Walter passing out in the lobby after drinking too much with his friends. Southern writers, it seemed, inspired stories from everyone with whom they came in contact.
My room overlooked the courtyard, which housed a huge fountain and seating area. It was unbearably hot, and I hated the thought of leaving the confines of the room. Nights spent downtown drinking with friends no longer held the allure they once had, and I began to long for the coolness of Illinois nights and the wide expanse of sky. Something was different. Something had changed. Rebecca McLanhan wrote in her essay “Goodbye to All This”, “Home is the place, where, once you have left, you cannot return” (p. 189). Though I revisited where I had once lived, it was obvious in the way friends and family treated me that I was and would remain a visitor. I moved away, and the place I loved held it against me. The South was too noticeably different, and in my absence, it had grown less romantic, less nostalgic. I called no place home. I no longer belonged anywhere.
My longing was palpable. I wanted to cling to the familiar smell of cornbread baking in my grandmother’s kitchen. I wanted to taste fried pickles, fresh shrimp, and sweet iced tea. I wanted to ride my bicycle to the honeysuckle vines, pull off the flowers and breathe them in. But the familiar had changed; my leaving had altered the meaning behind the smells and tastes of my girlhood. I longed for home but no longer knew what or where home was. I created icons of honeysuckle, my grandmother’s kitchen, and the taste of sweet tea on a hot day. These narratives became my past. Fiction collided with the home I thought I’d known so completely. I was in-between, submerged under a heavy blanket of secrets, of nostalgia, and of the past.
And in many ways, I am still in-between: in-between what I remember and what I see in photographs; in-between the photographs and today's changing roadsides, towns, and landscapes; in-between two homes: Alabama and Illinois; my past and present. Because place is so integral to who I am and how I see things, it makes sense that I would recognize connections between identity and place, between composing place stories and composing the self. For me, it is the same thing. As I write about Alabama, I write about who I am via Alabama, and how Alabama is represented via me.
July