“Where are you from?” is a question that I am not comfortable answering. I don’t feel a sense of loyalty to any one spot. I respond with trepidation, but still, everybody needs a place a place to call home – a place where they can find a key under the mat and a couch to crash on. Usually I say “around Vidalia” meaning Ferriday, Vidalia, and Natchez. My Vidalia is in Louisiana, it’s not the Sweet Onion Capital in Georgia. I have more relatives here than anywhere else, and if I’m more than a hundred miles away, people don’t know where I’m talking about. I moved away more than twenty years ago. Now the area in my memory is very different than the one that actually exists. In July, a fire reduced a nearby plantation, to a couple of chimneys next to a barren field. The people are different too. During the same month, an armed robbery suspect shot a deputy and ended his own life in the process. He was twenty-one. Most of my memories are composites of the general area more than one specific location. They’re half distorted by sentiment, but the other part is real. Some of the people I knew are still there, and somewhat recognizable, but they’re never the same. I know. I’m not either.
When I head home, the best point of reference is Natchez. It’s a southern town kept alive by selling its past, at least the pleasant parts. Located along Hwy 61, Natchez is the oldest settlement along the Mississippi River. Prior to the Civil War, it was also home to the most millionaires per capita. Howlin’ Wolf sang “Natchez Burning” about it. I was born here, but it’s not home.
I have to cross the bridge. Along Hwy 84, the ground flattens, and the air is full of catfishy funk. It comes from a river just past that levee on the right side of the highway. Instead of antebellum manors, Vidalia has trailer parks and subdivisions. There’s a Walmart the size of a postage stamp, a Dollar General, and a gas station that sells barbeque. There’s church for every three households and seven preachers in every church. Then there’s Hammer’s, the drive-through liquor store that proudly serves all denominations. Most of the populace is staunchly conservative, living in fear of both hellfire and democrats in the White House. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to be from this community, to breathe this air and walk this soil barefoot. This is a love letter not a social critique.
***
September was always sultry. Old folks sat on the white-washed porches beneath fans that stirred the dead air. They drank scalding coffee, listened to radio preachers while cursing about politics. They were only silent when a train crossed Main Street, red light flashing, traffic backed up to Rexall’s drug store. They smoked unfiltered Camels, using the saucers as ashtrays, remembering the thirties when Roosevelt made opossum’s good eating, when the cotton failed and the river flooded and the night was so heavy the moon glowed orange like the tip of a cigarette. They blamed it all on the carpetbaggers who took over the courthouse, believing, the real world was coming, more-than-likely at night. It would drive a hot rod Continental with pinstripes and flames, a fiberglass muffler, and a chrome skull on the gear shift. It would be dressed like an undertaker as it ran the red light, tapping the steering wheel to the beat of the rock-and-roll. It would bring real evil like in Jackson and Shreveport.
“People here may steal, but they don’t murder,” they said.
But really, it had been there all along, in their generation and the one before that. They had it good had it good but knew it wouldn’t last. Now the porches are vacant, languid fans no longer stirring, white-wash molded. No one remembers the last train to come through.
***
Surviving the war only to crumble with time, they lined the boulevard, Greek Revivals and Victorian’s, the old houses, southern belles past their prime, ostentatiously displaying stained-glass and spires. Once confident in their youth, they bragged, their yards damp green, weeded meticulously, facades of tiger lily and primrose. Now abandoned by beauty and fortune, they don pastel paint jobs like gaudy makeup, their reptilian shingles scaling off, and roofs curving like a bad back. They were built by old names with old money, entitled and out-of-touch, a running joke among us common folk. Think Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Their stagnant funds consumed by interest and depreciation. What was maintained by trust funds is now put on credit cards, and the bank always collects. Old names carry less weight. Aristocrats dethroned by the nouveau riche. Now inhabited by strangers, the first houses whither, ragweed claims the yard, briars overtake the flowerbeds.
* * *
Even back then, we locked the doors. We latched the deadbolts and propped the windows shut, chained our bikes and closed the blinds. We lived in the remnants of a burning house, heard our father’s stories of wars across the ocean, Korea and Vietnam. We were promised no new taxes and no new wars, but no promises for our children. We shared classrooms and movie theaters as a unified humanity, undivided by laws or labels, free from generations of separation from our brothers and sisters of common heartbeat and soul. We shared water fountains and proms despite a past protected by cowards, the recent decades, shameful and bloody, and left behind if only for a while. We had it good but knew it wouldn’t last.
In summer, we roamed without boundaries, beyond the ball park and through the cornfield, across the highway and underneath the bridge. We stared at oil-slick nebulas, swirls the color of absinthe and iodine. We smashed bottles against the concrete, dismantling atoms like billiards on green felt. We gathered fragments of glass with uncertain hands. We found marbles and peacock feathers, a hazy Polaroid and a splinter of bone, spent bullet casings and a test tube fashioned into a pipe. We divided these like strange currency and returned to the sunlight, eyes blinking in awe of a tiny world, vast only in comparison to our experience. We stood with an arrogance known only by the young, unaware of the distance that we were carried and how far we had to fall.
“Where are you from?” is a question that I am not comfortable answering. I don’t feel a sense of loyalty to any one spot. I respond with trepidation, but still, everybody needs a place a place to call home – a place where they can find a key under the mat and a couch to crash on. Usually I say “around Vidalia” meaning Ferriday, Vidalia, and Natchez. My Vidalia is in Louisiana, it’s not the Sweet Onion Capital in Georgia. I have more relatives here than anywhere else, and if I’m more than a hundred miles away, people don’t know where I’m talking about. I moved away more than twenty years ago. Now the area in my memory is very different than the one that actually exists. In July, a fire reduced a nearby plantation, to a couple of chimneys next to a barren field. The people are different too. During the same month, an armed robbery suspect shot a deputy and ended his own life in the process. He was twenty-one. Most of my memories are composites of the general area more than one specific location. They’re half distorted by sentiment, but the other part is real. Some of the people I knew are still there, and somewhat recognizable, but they’re never the same. I know. I’m not either.
When I head home, the best point of reference is Natchez. It’s a southern town kept alive by selling its past, at least the pleasant parts. Located along Hwy 61, Natchez is the oldest settlement along the Mississippi River. Prior to the Civil War, it was also home to the most millionaires per capita. Howlin’ Wolf sang “Natchez Burning” about it. I was born here, but it’s not home.
I have to cross the bridge. Along Hwy 84, the ground flattens, and the air is full of catfishy funk. It comes from a river just past that levee on the right side of the highway. Instead of antebellum manors, Vidalia has trailer parks and subdivisions. There’s a Walmart the size of a postage stamp, a Dollar General, and a gas station that sells barbeque. There’s church for every three households and seven preachers in every church. Then there’s Hammer’s, the drive-through liquor store that proudly serves all denominations. Most of the populace is staunchly conservative, living in fear of both hellfire and democrats in the white house. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to be from this community, to breathe this air and walk this soil barefoot. This is a love letter not a social critique.
***
September was always sultry. Old folks sat on the white-washed porches beneath fans that stirred the dead air. They drank scalding coffee, listened to radio preachers while cursing about politics. They were only silent when a train crossed Main Street, red light flashing, traffic backed up to Rexall’s drug store. They smoked unfiltered Camels, using the saucers as ashtrays, remembering the thirties when Roosevelt made opossum’s good eating, when the cotton failed and the river flooded and the night was so heavy the moon glowed orange like the tip of a cigarette. They blamed it all on the carpetbaggers who took over the courthouse, believing, the real world was coming, more-than-likely at night. It would drive a hot rod Continental with pinstripes and flames, a fiberglass muffler, and a chrome skull on the gear shift. It would be dressed like an undertaker as it ran the red light, tapping the steering wheel to the beat of the rock-and-roll. It would bring real evil like in Jackson and Shreveport.
“People here may steal, but they don’t murder,” they said.
But really, it had been there all along, in their generation and the one before that. They had it good had it good but knew it wouldn’t last. Now the porches are vacant, languid fans no longer stirring, white-wash molded. No one remembers the last train to come through.
***
Surviving the war only to crumble with time, they lined the boulevard, Greek Revivals and Victorian’s, the old houses, southern belles past their prime, ostentatiously displaying stained-glass and spires. Once confident in their youth, they bragged, their yards damp green, weeded meticulously, facades of tiger lily and primrose. Now abandoned by beauty and fortune, they don pastel paint jobs like gaudy makeup, their reptilian shingles scaling off, and roofs curving like a bad back. They were built by old names with old money, entitled and out-of-touch, a running joke among us common folk. Think Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Their stagnant funds consumed by interest and depreciation. What was maintained by trust funds is now put on credit cards, and the bank always collects. Old names carry less weight. Aristocrats dethroned by the nouveau riche. Now inhabited by strangers, the first houses whither, ragweed claims the yard, briars overtake the flowerbeds.
* * *
Even back then, we locked the doors. We latched the deadbolts and propped the windows shut, chained our bikes and closed the blinds. We lived in the remnants of a burning house, heard our father’s stories of wars across the ocean, Korea and Vietnam. We were promised no new taxes and no new wars, but no promises for our children. We shared classrooms and movie theaters as a unified humanity, undivided by laws or labels, free from generations of separation from our brothers and sisters of common heartbeat and soul. We shared water fountains and proms despite a past protected by cowards, the recent decades, shameful and bloody, and left behind if only for a while. We had it good but knew it wouldn’t last.
In summer, we roamed without boundaries, beyond the ball park and through the cornfield, across the highway and underneath the bridge. We stared at oil-slick nebulas, swirls the color of absinthe and iodine. We smashed bottles against the concrete, dismantling atoms like billiards on green felt. We gathered fragments of glass with uncertain hands. We found marbles and peacock feathers, a hazy Polaroid and a splinter of bone, spent bullet casings and a test tube fashioned into a pipe. We divided these like strange currency and returned to the sunlight, eyes blinking in awe of a tiny world, vast only in comparison to our experience. We stood with an arrogance known only by the young, unaware of the distance that we were carried and how far we had to fall.
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