Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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What’ja think happened? Children: ‘He had an idea!’ He had an idea. He knew what to say to old Fox and Bear, didn’t he? He say, Brer Fox, I don’t care what you do to me. Just don’t fling me into that, ah, briar patch. Go ahead, BAR-beee-cue me, just don’t fling me in that, uh, briar patch …
Bear say, Wait a minute, wait a minute. If we start a fire, we gotta make sure it don’t get outta hand. Ain’t that true? Won’t you let me knock that here rabbit head off now?
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I want to hear him holler! I’m gonna haaaang you rabbit. Brer Rabbit say, Oh hang me, Brer Fox, hang me, please hang me, ooh please, don’t fling me in the, briar patch!
Hanging you a bit too nice a thing to do. Ought to just drag you down to the creek and drown you, Brer Rabbit. Old Rabbit say, drown me, Brer Fox. Won’t you just drown me? Oh please, please, just don’t fling me in the briar patch!
Think about it now. Think. What’s the worst thing I could do to a rabbit? Uh! I know. I’m gonna get my knife, then I’m just gonna peeeeeel you hide off right here. Old Rabbit say, Skin me, Brer Fox, pull mah eyes out, pull mah ears out by the roots, cut mah legs off! Boo hoo hoo hoo! Oh please, don’t fling me in the BRIAR PATCH!!
Well, after old Rabbit went on and on and on and on about not flinging him in the briar patch, old Fox looked over there to see what in the world he was talkin’ about. Ah ha! He saw him some thorns stickin’ up and twistin’ round every which-a-way, and he figured the worst thing he could do to that rabbit would be to fling him where he didn’t want to go. Do y’all think that was a good idea? Most of children: ‘Yes!’ The rest of them, ‘No!’
OK, that’s about seventy-five – twenty-five here. Let’s see what we got?
Fox grabbed him, and he gave him a great big old swing, and he just fling him, Woooooooooooooooeeeee! Ow!! Oooo! Ow! Well, when old Rabbit fell into the briars, he did so much screamin’ and hollerin’ and carryin’ on, that old Fox and Bear thought he was just about dead. And they all commenced to celebrating. But they couldn’t celebrate long. Um un, um un, um un.
After a while, way up on the hill, up popped old Rabbit. And when Rabbit come up out of the briars, he had a little piece of one of em, that he was using to comb the rest of the tar outta his hair. And he had to look back. He saw old Fox and Bear back there, shakin’ their fists and stompin’ and carryin’ on. Old Rabbit hollered back like this, Brer Fox! Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee! Didn’t I tell you not to fling me in the briar patch? Hee, hee, hee hee, hee! I was bred and born in the BRIAR PATCH! Didn’t you know I was born and bred in the BRIAR PATCH? And that old Rabbit skipped off to live almost happily ever after.
Akbar, the heat and I sat together in an improvised little amphitheater behind the Wren’s Nest. Beneath an canopy of mature trees, the late morning still smelled new as the vegetable scent of condensation evaporated slowly and sweetly. He told me that he’d got his start as a storyteller, by working as a travelling puppeteer. He used to set up a special suitcase as a stage from which he would manipulate his puppets. One day in the middle of a performance the legs he had rigged on the case had fallen off, and he wound up having to tell the story he’d intended to perform. And that was that.
I asked him if Atlanta ever played a role in his tales. ‘Not really,’ said Akbar, ‘but it keeps me from telling some.’ He explained that he was in the process of learning a new story called The Man Who Knew Too Much. I thought he meant the Hitchcock movie, but he was referring to an African tale that had been adapted into a short story by Julius Lester. Akbar condensed it for me. A woman works daily in the field, stopping now and then to nurse her baby. One day as she’s nursing an eagle appears, watching her closely. The next day after she’s finished nursing she leaves the baby in the shade of a large tree; the eagle reappears and to her horror heads straight for the child. But instead of killing him, the eagle strokes the boy gently with his wing. The woman is amazed, and tells her husband. He refuses to believe in the kindness of eagles, claiming he knows their ways, but agrees to accompany the woman the following day. When the eagle comes and begins stroking the baby, the man shoots an arrow at the bird, who quickly moves away. The arrow kills his son instead, and the eagle tells the man, ‘You are responsible. Now all men on earth will mistrust each other and fight because of you. Because you knew too much.’
How nice to know that in other cultures Eve was a man. I secretly felt sorry for the husband.
‘I told that story to a men’s group, and man, they hated it. Their reaction was, “Well, the husband did probably know more about eagles than the wife.” Can you believe that? They refused to put any blame on the guy. It got to be real sexist.’ Akbar went on to explain that there had lately been a rash of baby killings in Atlanta, which was why he felt uncomfortable telling the tale right now. ‘A story’s only half the equation,’ he said. ‘The context you tell it in makes all the difference, twists the meaning. Ignore the context and you’re being irresponsible. Look, if I were to tell that story in this city right now, who knows what message people would hear. I don’t even know what it means. The context,’ reiterated Akbar Imhotep, in Joel Chandler Harris’ garden, ‘is everything.’
When a billboard on the way to Cyclorama, just south of downtown Atlanta, told me ‘Jesus Was A Vegetarian’, I immediately resolved to keep a record of interesting highway signage.
During the morning I had become infatuated with circuitousness: everything I had encountered at the Wren’s Nest seemed to wind back up on itself. So I decided to conclude the day with a visit to Cyclorama. It seemed fitting to visit a narrative where the end literally merged with the beginning.
Cyclorama is billed as the world’s largest painting. It is fifty feet wide by nine hundred feet long, stretched on a circular canvas in the middle of which is a small, rotating auditorium. All of this is housed in a rather grand building in Grant Park, a leafy spot in Southeast Atlanta where everyone else seemed intent on going to the zoo. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cycloramas were authentic marvels. When they came to town with a circus – which is how this one wound up in Atlanta – people would come out in droves and spin around while the painting stood still: motion pictures with the onus of motion on the viewer. Once there were three hundred cycloramas cluttering the earth, now there are only twenty. This one, which was inexplicably painted by a troupe of Polish and German immigrants in the 1880s, depicts a bloody day (22 July 1864) in the Battle of Atlanta.
I crawled up into the rotating auditorium and immediately felt seasick. I fixed my eyes on a railing at the bottom and watched it move against the stationary backdrop of what looked like paint-by-numbers carnage. It was like being on board ship, except that Sherman’s army was standing in for the sea, the men’s blue jackets far outnumbering the Rebels’ nobly tattered gray.
‘Now, the blue is the Union, the gray is the Confederacy,’ explained a mother to her two little boys – my only cyclomates, but a welcome step up from stuffed animals. ‘Oh good,’ said one child, ‘we’re the gray.’
I guess I over-extended my metaphor. Cyclorama was pretty corny. The foreground was strewn with bushes and mannequins to lull us into seeing three-dimensionality (it didn’t work). When we stopped spinning I jumped out of my seat to leave, only to find we had completed just one of two revolutions. A voice on the loudspeaker told me to sit down. This time around – only because a guide pointed it out – I noticed something. Amongst the mayhem of bayonets and dying soldiers (one of whom had been touched up to look like Clark Gable) and dead horses and smoking ruins – imagine sixteen thousand feet of this – was one woman and one African-American man.
Now I happen to know that amid the six hundred and twenty-five soldiers and five hundred and five animals in the Bayeux Tapestry there are only two women, one of whom has a name: an embroidered nun named Aelthgyva, who appears to have done something untoward with a monk. Aelthgyva is far more interesting than the red blur in a dress depicted in Cyclorama. But having just learned that two hundred thousand black soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War in 1864 and ‘65, the inclusion of one token black man seemed grudging, to say the least.
The problem with Cyclorama, and with circular orbits in general, is that they