Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
Читать онлайн книгу.
but it didn’t seem so; we – the two little blond boys, their mother, and I – were nestled securely in the center of our universe, just as the Polish and German artists had been. What we thought we saw revolving around us was just a reflection of our story, not history.
I left Cyclorama still awaiting its Copernicus.
I HAD ALL DAY TO GET FROM CENTRAL GEORGIA, where I had stayed at a Budget Inn after breaking out of Atlanta’s endless spaghetti junctions, to Hernando, Florida: a more or less straight journey of about four hundred miles. The air conditioner at the motel had tirelessly pumped a bad smell into the room (decaying rodent? dead body? sewage?), so after what would become my standard breakfast of bad coffee with non-dairy cream and a Krispy Kreme donut, I thankfully took to the road.
There wasn’t much difference between the Interstate and the secondary highways. The latter threaded through cultivated fields, watermelon patches, a few pecan orchards, pine groves baked to the scent of turpentine, and towns so small that only the change in speed limit – from 55 mph to 35 – affirmed their existence. Carwashes did a big business here in this dusty, rural world. I noticed that most of the large, formerly fine houses were in ruins; the smaller ones, without exception, brokered with the street through either open or screened-in front porches. (The architectural record in southern Georgia, and, as I was later to discover, much of the South, tells a tale of uneven wealth. The older housing stock – pre 1930, at a guess – consists on one hand of large, multistory homes and mansions, and, on the other, of small, one-level shacks and bungalows. Most middle-size, middle-income homes are post Second World War) When I stopped by the roadside to drink a Coke, the metal on my sunglasses holder got so hot in the sun it actually burned my skin.
Interstate 75, by way of contrast, offered cultivated fields, watermelon patches, a few pecan orchards, pine groves – and lots of signs. ‘Shelled Pecans!’ ‘We Bare All! Couples Welcome!’ (that from an ‘adult’ bar that seemed to have spent a fortune on advertising). ‘Jesus is Lord at the World Famous Catfish House. All You Can Eat!’ And, from a mysterious series of black billboards with white lettering, ‘You Think It’s Hot Here? – God.’
I tried to fill in the blanks between signs – together they held the makings of a spanking tale of sin and redemption – but my attention was ultimately claimed by the road itself. The Southern sun nearly beat the blackness out of the blacktop. It shone so hard on the macadam that every fleck of quartz or mica in the road surface glinted white, tinting the Interstate the glittering, grainy silver-gray of an old-fashioned movie screen. My parents had a screen like that when I was a child, on which they had shown slides for family entertainment on Sunday evenings. Now, from my mind’s eye, I projected the same images I’d once seen in our living-room onto Route 75: my grandmother wearing a visor hat, cotton dress blowing in the wind, squinting against the sun; my brother looking uncomfortable in a pair of tight Hawaiian shorts; me posing like Marilyn Monroe with a tiny fish I’d caught. All of us silent and still on a distant Northern beach.
Or maybe not so still. In my memory the family is gathered watching slides when – inevitably – one of the screen images waves to us. My mother nudges me and says, ‘There! Did you see? Wave back to yourself!’ And we all laugh and wait for the next small miracle to occur. It’s like a household secret, these ghosts of our living selves left behind to carry on being young and warm and on holiday, not just in memory but in the photographic record. My parents tell me this never happened. ‘You must have been dreaming,’ said my father. I don’t know. If it were a dream, wouldn’t the slides have spoken as well? In my memory bank of images, we are always silent.
I arrived in Ocala, Florida at the same time as a tornado warning. When I pulled off the Interstate the sky looked like bruised peaches, bluish-gray and yellow all at once.
Here, in the United States, the Road is supposed to be one of the big stories: the seduction of motion, of progress, of speeding away from the past. But today I felt the same as I did leaving the Atlanta airport – that the highway pulled me in and knocked the breath out of me, like an undertow with the force of a hundred oceans, sucking me into motion and away from all the stories nesting in the countryside. Maybe that’s because the last time I encountered the world-at-rest it was sunny and dusty and utilitarian. Now, leaving the same road, I found myself inside an extravagant purple storm that tugged at the Spanish moss on Ocala’s old trees. The pictures didn’t connect, and I wondered at the glue that held them together.
Ocala looked like a Southern town in drag. Everything there was exaggerated: the steamy heat; the campy Victoriana of the wood-frame houses; the trees! The trees were downright Gothic. Magnolias, palms, and best of all, live-oaks. The latter, characteristically shorn of fussy, incidental twigs, always look gnarled and old; dripping with Spanish moss they were biblical. It was as if rows of Old Testament prophets lined the side streets, waiting to convert paper boys and joggers.
As I headed southeast Ocala gave out onto a commercial strip, as tawdry and generic as any in America. This soon petered out into aluminum-sided, pastel-colored retirement villages, then horse farms, then swamps, and finally, a down-at-heel holiday community on a lakeshore, planted with a sign that read ‘Hernando’. I asked a woman in a beauty parlor which of the three motels I should stay in. ‘Go for the Mid-Florida Motel and Trailer Park,’ she concluded. I pictured the ranch-style units I’d just seen down the road behind a parking lot of slimy green puddles, shadowed by clumps of Spanish moss. ‘I might stay there if I had to. I wouldn’t set foot in the others.’
I had just time to take a cold shower – ringing Colonel Rod for directions from an outdoor pay phone had given me a prickly heat rash – before finding my way out of town through darkening, uninhabited stretches of piney outback to his large, Spanish-style ranch house. I had been eager to talk to a well-known Atlanta storyteller named Chuck Larkin: a real character, by all accounts. But Chuck was unavailable, so he gave me Colonel Rod’s name, and told me he was ‘a good ol’ swamp boy, and a helluva storyteller.’ I imagined a gruff military man with gruff military stories. One who would spurn white panama hats, Hawaiian shirts, and small poodles with jeweled collars. But these were the attributes of the person who answered to Colonel Rod.
‘Colonel Rod Hendrick of the Cracker Brigade, at your service, ma’am,’ he said.
He led me into a spacious, open-plan home with the world’s largest television screen in one corner. When we stood in front of it, the TV characters’ heads were three times bigger than our own. In his study, Colonel Rod sat down beneath a stuffed raccoon and a model airplane, locked me with his turquoise eyes, and said in a dreamy voice, ‘Once upon a time, on the far side of the moon …’ he paused, looked around, and winked, ‘these two crackers went into a bar … Ha! Gotcha! I hate that kind of vomity storytelling, don’t you?’
Colonel Rod explained that a local reporter had given him the nickname ‘Colonel.’ He was actually a retired salesman from Miami, who had also been a cop and happened to be a ‘pedigreed Florida cracker’.
‘I grew up dirt poor, south of Miami. You know what a cracker is, girl?’
I grimaced in half-knowledge. In Tom Wolfe’s novel crackers had been Georgia good old boys.
‘You’re eatin’ grits for breakfast; you know a couple a guys named Skeeter or Gator; you’re huntin’ white tail deer with a six-beer handicap; then you’re a cracker. Used to be a derogatory term, you know, like Redneck, or White Trash. But not anymore.’
Colonel Rod gave me an essay he’d written on Florida Crackers, which put the derivation of the term down to the cracking sound pioneers made with bull whips as they rounded up cattle from the palmetto swamps. These pioneers, Colonel Rod added, had headed south ‘to get away from Yankee oppression’ after the Civil War.
‘Now I’m a storyteller. Say the American Tobacco Company has a conference. I’m the entertainment. I get $500 a gig, and a dollar a mile for transportation. I also teach these workshops in storytelling. There was a teacher who took one of them. Afterward, every Friday afternoon, she held a storytelling