The Southern Culture Studies professors chosen to lead week-long seminars at Ole Miss-Taylor's one-year low residency master's degree program sat nightly around their plantation-house-turned fancy bed-and-breakfast, drinking bourbon and brandy, taking bets on which students would complete their theses and one day get published, bemoaning the virtual disappearance of Stuckey's pecan logs, Picayune cigarettes, street corner shoeshine stands, Billy Beer, the steel mills of Birmingham, the cotton mills of South Carolina, Yellow Dog Democrats, and Billy Beer. At least that's what I imagined. It also occurred to me that perhaps they made fun of us -- a dozen full-time low residency students, all adults, who normally lived scattered between Vermont and Texas, Minnesota and Key West -- as we sat around campfires on some land owned by Ole Miss-Taylor near the Yocona River. Dr. Theron Crowther, my supposed advisor and mentor, had said that we students needed to camp out in genuine Civil War tents once used by Lieutenant General John Pemberton's troops before getting creamed at Vicksburg. Dr. Crowther said it would make us better understand Southern Culture Studies. I, of course, realized that somebody made a huge profit when it came to the room and board portion of our semi-annual fees.
Our classes, if it matters, took place inside a catfish-famous restaurant called Taylor Grocery. I was immediately relieved that my wife decided to stay home in South Carolina during my first and penultimate ten-day excursion into master's-level academia, for I envisioned her sitting cross-legged in front of my fire, holding a hanger-skewered carrot, relentless on the subject of my misguided goals since giving up the family river rock business.
"I wish I'd've brought some binoculars," a woman from West Virginia said, looking up at the plantation house some three hundred yards from our encampment. "Hey, everybody look in your tent and see if there are some binoculars hanging." To me she said, "I'm Amelia Hammond," and stuck out her hand to shake. I placed my wire-handled Jiffy Pop self-contained pan down on a stump. "Did they send you a list of what you should bring here? A snake-bite kit might've been mentioned. Bug spray."
I said, "Stet Looper."
"Stet Looper?" an older man came up to say. None of us had met in any kind of formal get-together as might be protocol in other low-residency programs. Me, I drove down I-85 until I hit I-20 in Atlanta, then took that to highway 78 in Birmingham and drove until Tupelo. From Tupelo I drove into Oxford, then found the county road until the satellite campus, of sorts, for the University of Mississippi. Everyone else either flew into Memphis and got rental cars to drive the couple hours south, or jumped off the Southern Crescent rail route somewhere near Meridian and took a Greyhound across the state. Perhaps Dr. Crowther and his colleagues felt it necessary for us to establish friendships for a good twenty-four hours before being confronted with non-stop Southern Culture Studies lectures. Or maybe the professors wanted us to cool off somewhat before bombarding them with questions about our $5,000 a semester tuitions.
I looked up at the man, his face gleaming from my perfect fire made with the help of fat lighter I had found in some pine woods behind the catfish house/college classroom. I said, "Yessir."
"My first paper's about a little-known siege that took place right outside Forty-Five, South Carolina. The man in charge of the entire melee was one Colonel Kimbrough P. Looper. His men were good soldiers all intent on fighting for the cause. When Colonel Looper ordered his men to cut and run, they shot him in the back and killed him, before turning back around to fight the enemy and pretty much getting slaughtered. All but one old boy named Dill who ended up at Andersonville prison, living through dysentery, somehow escaping, and later writing up his account of what happened. According to Dill, this Looper boy ended up with so many bullets in his back from his own men, they didn't have enough ammunition left to fight the Yankees good." I shook my Jiffy Pop a few times and looked up to my classmate. "You related to Colonel Looper by any chance?"
"I see where you're going, Carnell," Amelia said. "Carnell's already got one master's degree in southern culture studies, and is working on his doctorate. Don't let him bully you 'cause he knows about the goddamn war."
The tin foil actually began to blister up on my pan. I said, "No sir. I don't believe that's my family. I come from a people so stuck between some rock sheers and a river they didn't even know the war took place," which was true.
"What did you write your first major paper on," Carnell asked me. "You doing the War Between the States, too?" He held out his palm and let his jaw slack open. "I ain't competitive, if you're picking one of my sieges or skirmishes. As far as I see it, we all in this together. We can learn from one another. We can trade off what research we uncovered and figure out what happened."
I shook my Jiffy Pop over the fire even though it seemed ready. I said, "Well, it's hard for me to say."
Amelia said, "I'm pretty proud of what I got finished. I did a study of one-eyed boys in the South. At first I had hypothesized that most of them got shot accidentally with either air rifles, .22s, or bottle rockets. What my research uncovered, though, was that most nine-toed men came that way due to such catastrophes. The one-eyed boys -- now some of them got shot in the face -- but most of them were either born that way, or fell down while running with sharp sticks, just like we know not to do. Especially in West Virginia, where the mining people were so poor they couldn't afford store-bought toys." She handed me an ex-pickle jar of a moonshine I had never encountered. It smelled like rosemary. Or kerosene.
I thought, I'm in trouble. I foresaw ridicule coming my way, starting the next morning when we all sat in on a lecture entitled "Heaven or Hell: How Old-Timey Gospel Song Themes Influenced the Either-Or Tradition of Nashville Musicians Vis-à-vis Being Home and Wanting to Be Elsewhere, or Being Elsewhere and Wanting to Be Home," by guest professor Harlan V. Chadwick from Vanderbilt University. Up to this point, over four months, I had begun and never completed research papers on the meteor fields of the lower Carolinas and their economic impact on small businessmen enthralled with the "Guinness Book of World Records;" the Modestine Duncans who thought hand printing the Book of Revelation on their house trailers protected them from tornadoes; a photographer who catalogued his giant collection of debutante ball pictures and tracked the success or demise of Republicans-to-be; a general store-owning amateur comedian who told jokes about his one-legged wife; a man named Hiram who might've been involved in killing an entire family, then eating a cat and a monkey; and how a small-town police force explained the skeletal remains found near a barbecue shack as that of gnawed rib bones thrown out from cars windows instead of a young lynched boy -- all prompts and exercises mailed to me from Dr. Crowther over our initial correspondences.
It took me six days to drive the five hundred miles between my house in northern South Carolina to Ole Miss-Taylor. Along the way I hoped to see something worthy of a Southern Culture Studies essay. Maybe, indeed, I came across such topics and didn't know it at the time. Outside of watching some woman cry uncontrollably while her husband took a leak off to the side on the foundation of Elvis Presley's childhood home in Tupelo, only one thing hit me, so much that I knew I had no choice but to make up some documentation before entering the hallowed halls -- or overgrown paths between Civil War tents and portable toilets -- of Ole Miss-Taylor.
I said, "I haven't made up my mind yet. I've been thinking about writing a paper that compares and contrasts river rock and bricks. And wood. Vinyl siding. In the South."
I tore open the Jiffy Pop container with a stick. Most of the kernels were burned up. Somebody four Civil War tents down yelled out, "Who needs to put his socks and shoes back on?"
During my fruitless trek to Taylor, Mississippi, aware that I needed to locate and recount some facet of Southern culture unparalleled in the remainder of the nation, I took the 285 Perimeter around Atlanta, certain that everything within the bypass had been discovered and revealed to the masses in at least the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I needed to come across not only traditions and unspoken codes outside Southern cities' limits, but outside the sprawling vinyl-sided suburbs. I planned on taking I-65 up to the outskirts of Chattanooga in hopes that I would encounter some mountain fool speaking in tongues, juggling vipers. Whittling corncob pipes, and granting personal tours of his melungeon relatives' abodes. I passed a hand-printed sign advertising one-of-a-kind jewelry made from bat guano, deer droppings, fox scat, and chicken squat, and made a mental note, but my cell phone rang and -- though I had read up on how idiot cell phone users drive like drunks reaching .20 on a breathalyzer -- I flipped it open. My wife said, "Where are you?"
I looked up at the green signs, arrows pointing left and right for road exits to downtown Atlanta and Cumming, Georgia. Above me spanned a digital sign that reported how crashed vehicles should move to the emergency lane, that a ladder was across the road ahead, that the estimated time to the I-20 exit was between ten and fifty-five minutes. I said, "Best I can tell from all the signs I'm in the middle of Cumming."
Abby said, "Hello? Hello?" She said, "You're breaking up."
The line indeed crackled. "I'm in the middle of Cumming," I said louder. I wasn't making a joke. It's where I drove, somewhere between Kennesaw Mountain and the Chattahoochee River. No Southern Culture-worthy essay notions abounded. "I've been taking my time, I guess, enjoying the scenery."
The connection cleared up enough for me to hear, "Are you driving with your knees?" She said, "What kind of scenery you looking at? Is there some kind of drive-through strip joint along the way?"
I got passed by about a dozen black SUVs, all with "W" bumper stickers on their back windshields, all plastered with "In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned," "Maybe Darwin evolved from an Ape, but we came from Dust and a Rib," "This Car Protected by Smith and Wesson," and "My Child is Home School Valedictorian," et cetera on their tailgates. I placed the phone on the passenger seat and told Abby she would have to yell, while I got over in the far right lane seeing as I only went about eighty. I yelled out, "Hey! That's a great idea! I wish there were drive-through places like that so I could find something to talk about in class." I took the exit ramp to somewhere and bellowed out, "Hold on and I'll pull over."
By the time I took a right turn, and drove a half-mile to a parking lot, rolled down my window, picked up the phone and stuck my head out for better reception, Abby was gone. I called her back only to get "Connection Failed" printed across the telephone screen.
Then I looked up to find, out here on the outskirts of the outskirts of Atlanta, a store the size of an old-fashioned roller skating rink, advertising "Trophies for All." And in about the time it would take a largemouth bass to realize it had a hook in its gristly lip, I underwent -- from opening topic sentence to conclusion -- the entire 180-page argument that would become my thesis for a master's degree at a low-residency Southern Culture Studies program, and rightly foresaw my thesis getting published at an established and reputable university press, then distributed to avid readers everywhere who were perplexed, amused, obsessed, and/or fascinated with all traditions and nuances Dixie, viz., New Yorkers, Canadians, the Japanese and the French.
I put my truck in park and locked the door. I left the cell phone on the bench seat, too, figuring that Abby wouldn't be able to reach me anyway. Unfortunately -- and this wouldn't occur to me until after I had gone inside Trophies for All, talked to the owner named Rodney who didn't mind going over some of the stranger engravings he'd glued to a small faux marble pedestal, and taken some notes -- I also left my keys in the ignition.
I came back inside and Rodney said, "Let me guess: You've decided to buy yourself a trophy for asking the best questions of a trophy salesman."
I said, "I locked my keys in the truck. I was wondering if you had a hanger."
Rodney smiled, but I was pretty sure that he didn't smirk. "You got an old push button lock, or is it on the side, in the actual door?"
I said, "Oh, yeah. I kind of forgot about that. I guess I haven't locked my keys in a car since I was a kid."
I locked my keys in my car on the very first date I ever had where I could drive, as a matter of fact, with one Roberta Vickers, whose father worked for mine as a river rock "inspector," which meant he, like my father, did everything from working a crane, manning a dredge, stacking pallets, and dealing with both landscape "architects" and individuals who wanted smoother paths across their yards. Roberta lived way up near the top of Nameless Mountain, where the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River begins as a spring, and it took some lucky driving to make it up the rutted path her father called a driveway. And when I ended up locking the keys inside back then, it was that driveway I blamed, not her gigantic breasts that bobbled up and down like river buoys during floodgate hour. I picked her up, said hey to her daddy, drove down the mountain until we hit a gravel road, then got out of the truck to retrieve two six-packs of Schlitz I'd stowed on the way -- and what I had to promise to bring along for Roberta to go out with me. She and I told our parents that we were going out to a restaurant near Jones Gap State Park, though she and I knew we would only back into one of the thousand deer hunters' paths that led to deer hunters' stands. Roberta jumped out of the pick-up with me and somehow hit her elbow on the lock, as did I. We ended up drinking the beer anyway, at the foot of her driveway, and made out for a good three hours before we both staggered to her house, snuck around to her father's workshed, borrowed a crowbar, half-rolled back down, smashed the window of my father's truck, et cetera. Because Roberta's father and mine drank so much, they never smelled anything on our respective breaths. I told my father that someone from Travelers Rest High School attacked the truck while we ate, and he said that the same thing happened to him one time, rivalries being rivalries. My mother, though -- while doing Saturday laundry -- asked if Roberta and I had a nighttime picnic at the state park. I said no, and made eye contact. I asked why. She said, "It looks like a hive of snails left their tracks in your underwear."
I ended up buying one of the cheaper winged trophies from Rodney -- I think it was a generic statue, used for a variety of awards -- and pried back the passenger window an inch. He snaked through a piece of rebar and unclicked the door lock to the driver's side. I said, "All right. Hey, you want this trophy back?" It held only a short scuff mark. "Maybe you can reuse it. Surely blind people get trophies, too."
"You keep it, friend," Rodney said. "Maybe it'll be a reminder. People need they trophies, in order to be reminded, I've always said. Trophies and tombstones."
I couldn't find my pen and memo pad fast enough.
One man from Indiana named Donald Perkins wanted to write a cause-and-effect thesis that involved learning how to cut grass on a riding lawn mower at an early age, then becoming a stock car driver before even getting an official permit for using the road. He wanted everyone to call him either Donnie or Junior. He told Dr. Crowther that he'd already talked to over a hundred NASCAR racers -- which I doubted seeing as most races only included forty-two drivers -- and that he had taken down all their information and started making graphs. Donnie Junior said, "I've gone back to the old days, you know -- I can already hear some of you fellows from the South saying there aren't a hundred drivers in a race -- and talked to those who have retired, or to family members of those who died in crashes early."
We sat inside Taylor Grocery at six tables shoved together. The owner had closed the place for a week in order to accommodate the needs of us "scholars." He cooked eggs and roe for our initial communal breakfast. I didn't say, "There were no riding lawnmowers in Randalman, Mooresville, Timmonsville, Hueytown, Spartanburg and Wilkes County back in the 1930s when those boys grew up." I didn't say, "My father made me memorize the winners of the Southern 500 like most kids have to memorize presidents, popes or state capitals."
Dr. Crowther said to Donnie Junior, "That's a great idea. I'll talk to you about it later in the week when we have individual conferences."
Amelia came out of the Women's Room with a towel wrapped around her head. The owner of Taylor Grocery had rigged a hose pipe to the sink in both bathrooms and said we could take showers of sorts, that although he'd never envisioned such goings-on, the bathroom tile floors sank down naturally, and the drains worked well. Amelia sat down next to me while another woman went to shower. I sat there hoping my armpits didn't reek seeing as A.) I hadn't washed up yet; and B.) I had sat right next to the fire sweating out either rosemary or kerosene all night.
Crowther looked down at his roll. He said, "Imogene Welty. Are you related to the writer?"
"She's an actress. Imogene Coco. My parents named me after her, but I'm not related."
Crowther didn't offer any corrections immediately. He said, "You're from Florida, right?" I looked at Dr. Theron Crowther closely. In the weekly emails I got from the guy, I kind of envisioned a little wizened man with white hair and a goatee. But Crowther might've stood six-three. He did sport a goatee, but the more I looked at him the more it seemed glued on. Maybe that's what he and his colleagues did the night before: They sat around the plantation house on the hill drinking brandy, taking bets, and gluing on facial hair.
"I'm from Tallahassee," Imogene said. She looked as though she weren't old enough for junior prom. "Not originally, though. I don't think anyone's originally from Tallahassee. People get sucked in there to work on their doctorates, and then they never leave. They sit around trying to figure out better ways to brag on things that don't matter, if you ask me. No, I'm originally from Tampa. Yes, I'll admit it, I'm a Tampan!"
Crowther said, "I want you to go read everything written by Eudora Welty before the end of the week. I'll give you a ride into Oxford, and we can go buy everything ever written by Miss Welty."
"So I've been thinking about the importance of corn. Everybody talks about cotton and tobacco in the South, but corn's important, too. You got your corn squeezings, of course. And you got your pipes. And then there's corn for putting out to entice deer so hunting's easier and everyone wants a big old trophy deer head mounted on the den wall down here." Do not get into my trophy territory, I thought. "And then from what I understand there were corn cobs in the outhouses, back before catalogs."
I didn't say, "And there are cheating trout fishermen who used kerneled corn for bait because it looks exactly like the eggs of a trout's nemesis, or if the trout came from a hatchery they think it's merely feeding time and nothing bad's going to happen." I didn't say, "Hey, I know a place in South Carolina where little kids shove corn in their nostrils and ear canals so they'll get to go to the doctor, get the kernels extracted, and then become part of the hospital museum for eternity. And probably get a trophy, too."
Dr. Crowther diddled his fake goatee. "Fine example of Southern Culture Studies, Miss Welty. Good job. I'm glad you saw the light." To the rest of the class present in the restaurant and not taking showers he said, "When I first started working with Miss Welty, she was all intent on going around Florida taking pictures of migrant workers. Been done before! You have to make a conscious decision here: Do you want to run with the deer herd, or huddle in a stand and shoot them one by one? You can't have it both ways. Do you want to gobble with the turkeys, or fly with the buckshot."
I thought for the first time that perhaps I had wasted my money. If this was Southern culture, I didn't want to be a part of teaching it to a younger generation later in life. I raised my hand, but Crowther called on a man my age named Wingard. Wingard must've been about like me, for he said, "I'm collecting all the Southern witticisms and euphemisms I can find that haven't worked their way into being clichés elsewhere."
Crowther said, "Give us an example."
" 'Do you want to run with the deer herd, or huddle in a stand and shoot them one by one? You can't have it both ways. Do you want to gobble with the turkeys, or fly with the buckshot.'"
"Perfect!" Dr. Crowther boomed out. "Not only do I see a publishable book that might make it to a rack right there in the Wal-Mart check-out line, but also calendars. You go bumping around like a blind bee in a perfume factory, there's no telling what pollen you'll gather."
Dr. Crowther looked at me. It was my turn to take a shower, I figured, from looking at who sat there with wet hair slicked down. Just as I was to regale him with how I wanted to write an in-depth scholarly treatise on the socioeconomic-politico-philosophico-psychological reasons why Southerners all needed trophies in and around their homes constantly -- even though I had not yet sent in any kind of preliminary essays on the subject, or others that worked out somewhat -- the door flew open and a man dressed like Colonel Sanders came in and said, "While y'all're eating breakfast I'm here to lecture on how to cook perfect fried chicken. As we all know, it's perfect fried chicken that sets us apart from everyone else."
I looked up at the high, punched-tin ceiling. A shelf made out of what appeared to be eighteen-inch wide heart pine ran across the north and south sides of Taylor Grocery, and on the shelves, of course, were trophies ranging in height from a half a foot to taller and wider than a wild turkey. I got up while Colonel Sanders talked about soaking thighs in buttermilk and wandered the restaurant, squinting to read all of the engraved bases, all of which proclaimed First Place: Men's Softball, Skeet Shooting, Junior Miss Taylor Pageant, Catfish Stew, Catfish Casserole, Catfish Storytelling, Junior Miss Catfish, Largest Fish, Men's Wednesday Morning Bowling League, Men's Horseshoe, Women's Horseshoe, Mixed Horseshoe, Barbecued Catfish, Civil War Reenactment and Most Cookbooks Read. There were others. I think one had to do with Giving Strangers Bad Directions, but maybe not.
The cook brought out what looked like Tater Tots but ended up being catfish nuggets. He placed two bowls of tartar sauce in the middle of the long makeshift table. Colonel Sanders didn't pause. I leaned over to another guy who didn't get to announce his project and said, "There's that bird flu thing going around. Ask him about the bird flu."
His name ended up being Ardel Crawford. He kind of winked at me and dropped his fork on purpose. I reached down, too, and he whispered, "I'm writing about how anybody and everybody can get a master's degree in Southern Culture Studies. I think it's a scam. I'm writing my thesis on Theron Crowther."
I didn't say, "They should give everyone a trophy."
I'm not sure why Ardel Crawford confided in me during that first of ten days at the residency part of the low-residency program. With all of the Civil War lingo thrown into every mandatory lecture -- the fried chicken, grits, pork parts, and hoppin' John gourmands all found ways to compare getting grease "hotter than bullets flying over" Fort Sumter, Vicksburg, Bull Run, Antietam, Franklin or wherever -- I could only think of Crawford as some kind of spy. We sat together at the campfire that second night, doing our best to cook down poke sallet while adding enough of about everything in order to give them a taste other than weeds. Our classmates worked on other entrees, ranging from twice-cooked groundhog to a bread that included pine needles.
"I got a grant," Ardel said out of the side of his mouth. "I was sitting around one day at work looking shit up on the computer, and came across how one gets monies from the NEH, the NEA, you know, Guggenheim, a Smithsonian Fellowship, a whole passel of places. Anyway, I took the next day off work and thought about what I might want to do for free, so to speak. I got this sister-in-law who has something like eight master's degrees from campuses she's never stepped hoof on. Then it came to me that I could do a study of all these places, seeing as I had a feeling that a new cottage industry arose in America, and that some people out there would pay about anything in order to say they got a master's degree -- hey, I hope I'm not stepping on the skin of your nose, you know."
I stirred the poke sallet with a piece of oak branch I'd broken off and half-whittled. I said, "You think this is all a scam? I don't want to be wasting my time if you think this is a scam. I'm really serious about a degree in Southern Culture Studies." Some kind of vapor came off the poke sallet -- Ardel and I had harvested the plants out of a ditch ourselves, while looking at a photocopied picture so as not to mistake poison ivy or poison oak or sumac for what Dr. Theron Crowther et al insisted was considered a staple of poverty-stricken blacks and whites living across the southeast.
"Anyway, the next thing you know, I took a week off work and filled out a bunch of applications. Some of them asked that I send in recent work, but of course I didn't have any to send in. I'd not written a word for more than a decade. I just wrote back saying that I feared to send off what I'd learned so far, you know, because the powers-that-be might come break my fingers. Next thing you know, I got every grant I applied for. I got more than a hundred fifty grand to apply to programs like this one, get in, check things out, then write about them. I filled out the application to Ole Miss-Taylor in crayon."
I didn't know which was worse -- realizing that some of the flatter rocks from the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River I dredged up in the family business in order to sell to landscapers could've applied and gotten into this particular low-residency master's program, or the conglomerate smell of what my first-year classmates cooked on open fires. I said, "What did you do for a living before taking that time off work and getting the grants?" I asked Ardel.
The fried chicken professor walked up to our tent and looked down into my pot of greens. Ardel didn't answer me.
"Do I smell spearmint in there?" the professor asked. "You get an A for this project. Way to go. That'll cut some tart out." He walked on, hands behind his back, over to Amelia and Miss Welty making some kind of casserole that included rabbit tobacco.
Ardel said, "You can't tell anyone, man. Don't tell anyone. I figured from the way you wandered around the classroom looking at the trophies that you'd already figured the ruse."
I said, "Uh-huh," though I hadn't, of course.
"I worked for the EPA. Environmental Protection Agency. There's been exactly no work since 2001, let me tell you. I just sit there and let the toxins emit. Let hog shit and fertilizer flow into nearby streams. Let factories do whatever they got to do in the name of economics, even if it means the ice cap melts and the waters rise. I hope you don't plan on writing about coastal Southern culture, 'cause there won't be any of those cities or wetlands or floodplains left in our lifetime."
I thought maybe he made fun of me. I thought about how maybe he followed me around, with help from the FBI and IRS. I said, "Well don't blame me. I gave up dredging rocks out of a river like my daddy and grandfather did. I realized that upsetting the ecological balance so landscapers could pay me big money wasn't worth the guilt I felt. I studied geology in undergraduate school. And communications studies. And some history." I shut up there. I didn't go into my weird tale about how my father allowed me to garner up all the undergraduate degrees that I wanted until I felt sated, that then I had to promise to return to Carolina Rocks and take charge of the family business.
Ardel said, "What?"
It got dark, and Dr. Theron Crowther announced, "Our boys in the confederacy, it is well-documented, enjoyed entertainment while they ate. Sometimes this meant a young boy would dress up like a woman and sing songs. Sometimes a storyteller would offer up a mesmerizing tale with an uplifting moral. So in that vein and tradition, while y'all eat that which you cooked so well, please enjoy the South's prodigal son of comedy..."
I said to Ardel, "You can't blame me for a hole in the ozone layer. You can blame me for upsetting the habitats of salamanders and trout, and crawfish and frogs. And I guess that makes birds and snakes go hungry and die." I tried to look ahead to where this long sad reductio ad absurdum might lead. "In the end, with more dead birds and snakes, there's more fossils, which means more coal and fuel, which means we'll dig that up and burn it, thus damaging the atmosphere. Okay, you got me."
Ardel said, "I'm not judging you, Stet. Believe me. I was just saying, my colleagues and I don't have anything to do anymore outside of finding new and better hobbies. This administration doesn't give a shit about the environment. I have friends at the FDA going through the same problem, just sitting around and feeling bad about getting pay checks from taxpayer money."
In the darkness the comedian -- who seemed to stand somewhere near the tent closest to Taylor Grocery -- said, "You might be from the South if you steal those little packs of grape jelly from Waffle House, but buy grape jelly in a jar at the store only to dig it out with a soup spoon and wash it down the kitchen sink so you got something to drink booze in during Saturday's game and Sunday's race."
I said, "Our poke sallet sucks."
"You might be from the South if the only thing you got to satisfy your sadistic ways is by naming your pit bull Stay."
No one laughed. "Y'all'll all get that one on the way home, I'm willing to bet, being southern culture studies scholars and whatnot."
He went on. I crawled into my tent and wondered if I should call Abby and tell her I'd made a mistake. I must've fallen asleep. I awoke to Ardel yelling out from a few tents away, "You might be in a Southern Cultures Studies low-residency program if you end up in the emergency room with food poisoning the first night of eating wood-fired field rats."
"If Hemingway had lived long enough, I'd be willing to bet he would've come down to south Georgia once a year to participate in the Running of the Pit Bulls," our Animals of the South professor, Dr. Dale McJunkin, said. "He'd've probably gotten killed, mauled, and pulled apart, but he would've enjoyed and understood the spectacle, I'm of the belief."
We'd been sitting there for two hours listening to him talk about the importance of venomous snakes in the Pentecostal church, as a food source, and in voodoo rituals. He told a story about one Randy Keane, an exterminator from Albany, Georgia, who trained copperheads into going into crawl spaces, fetching rats, then returning to their cages. McJunkin told us about mules, fighting roosters, opossums, the emergence of the armadillo, fire ants, alligators, snapping turtles, the nutria of Louisiana swamps, gar, bird dogs, and rare hummingbirds. "The running of the pit bulls has been going on long before the bulls at Pamplona," McJunkin said. "It started long before the emancipation took place as a way for slave owners to let their charges know what might happen if they tried to escape. Between 1865 and about 1914 there are no records as to organized pit bull runs, and southern culture studies historians believe that the tradition reemerged due to a certain fear that World War I might spill onto our continent, and so on, and that the sons and grandsons of slave holders needed to show off some of their feared ammunition, so to speak."
I had my tape recorder on the entire time. I looked at my colleagues seated around a shorter table inside Taylor Grocery -- some time in the middle of the night we lost two students, both from the northeast. They didn't leave notes or anything, but foul play got ruled out seeing as their belongings were gone, and both of them even stole their sleeping bags donated by Ole Miss-Taylor.
I raised my hand. "I'm sorry, sir. What's the name of this island where they run the pit bulls again?"
"The first time I ventured to the running of the pit bulls was in nineteen and fifty-seven. General and President Dwight David Eisenhower was there in the crowd. He'd been on a golf excursion with Bobby Jones, and they were standing there in the crowd wearing knickers and driving caps. Anyway, I believe it was ol' Colonel Fletcher Tybee who was in charge. He had rigged it so he could step on a lever and get all the pit bullses' cages to open up simultaneously. Let me tell you about the pit bull: You don't need no fake rabbit running around in a circle to get them to take off. Anyways, Colonel Tybee released the dogs, and they took off running through the streets. Mostly there was only a general store, a bait shop, a shack where the old women descendants of slaves wove baskets, and some of the winter houses of wealthy Atlantans. Well those dogs took off running like crazy, let me tell you. A couple kids were way up ahead, running for their lives. President Eisenhower and Bobby Jones teed up right there on one of the sand dune lookout points, and tried to nail the pack of dogs, but there was no way to be that good a marksman. Hell, you can't barely shoot a running pit bull. Plus, there heads are so hard a bullet ricochets right off."
I raised my hand again. He made eye contact, then looked away. I said, "We should take a field trip. What's the name of the island?"
"Another time I went down there -- this would've been 1979, I know for a fact. Maybe y'all have kept up with the music, but personally I gave up trying right when that Elvis made his splash. So anyway, I was down there with some friends of mine from Tuscaloosa. We brought along a couple card tables, and had us giant pitchers of gin and tonics, and bloody Marys, maybe even some mint juleps. Yes, I believe we had mint juleps. The running of the pit bulls might be compared to the Kentucky Derby, as far as pomp and tailgating goes. I should mention, too, that those dogs run around a good six hours, looking for something to clamp their jaws into, and for the most part they end up clamping on to each other. When they do that, it's like a snapping turtle and how you got to wait until sundown before it releases. So there's time to do some drinking and eating, but you don't want to have, say, overly rare roast beef on your table or the pit bulls might get distracted and try to crawl their way up to the viewing stations."
One of the women I had not met at this point didn't raise her hand. She said, "What does this have to do with Elvis?" because, I learned later, she wanted to write her southern culture studies thesis on the rhinestone industry and its debt to country and western music superstars, Elvis Presley, and some kind of rhinestone attacher manufactured by Ronco.
Dr. McJunkin held out his palm. "We noticed these young hooligans earlier and thought that they might have misunderstood the running of the pit bulls for the running of the sheep dogs. These fellows came out looking like no one else in south Georgia. Or like no one else between Virginia and Texas -- hair in their eyes, holes in their blue jeans, blue jean jackets even though it might've reached ninety seven degrees out there on the dunes. Have y'all ever heard of some outfit calls themselves the Lynyrd Skynyrd? That's who it ended up being. The Lynyrd Skynyrds. At first I foresaw trouble, but as it ended up, they were just like us, but maybe more so. They enjoyed a good running of pit bulls. They enjoyed their cocktails. They mingled, and laughed, and said they liked to come back down to Earth with the regular folks, that they spent too much time either driving by in a bus or flying above in the airplanes. They said they was about to go around the world playing their music, and that they'd tell all the world about the running of the pit bulls, and maybe even write a song about it."
I thought, Okay, this guy's making everything up. First off, most of Lynyrd Skynyrd died in a plane crash between Greenville, South Carolina and LSU on October 20, 1977. I knew this fact because flags were flown half-staff each October 20 in my part of northern South Carolina. I said, "I have to say that I'm respectfully finding this all hard to believe, sir. I'm sorry. Please tell us the name of the island. I want to do some research on this place."
Dr. Dale McJunkin coughed into his hand a few times, then leaned over. He stared down from the far end of the table, clearing his throat and looking down at the ashtray he'd been using throughout the lecture. I swear to God he intentionally muffled out what sounded like, "Bowling Alley," then he stood up and said, "Bowling Island. It's a tiny little place. Over the years most of the island's dunes have been swept out to sea, but people still come from the mainland and let loose their dogs. Everybody knows about it. If you're a true southerner, sir, you would know about Bowling Island."
I had never heard of Bowling Island, nor the "running of the pit bulls," and knew that -- with the way the media either made fun of the South or held it in reverence and fascination -- somewhere along the line I would've come across such a spectacle. I looked down at my open notebook. I said, "Thank you."
"Now. On to more important things." McJunkin looked at the clock. "Well, I guess that's about it for now. Y'all are scheduled to have lunch, and then Dr. Crowther will come in and give his famous lecture on the difference between Gullah and Geechie. Class dismissed."
He took off. I'm talking you couldn't have duct taped Roman candles on McJunkins's cheap suit and rocketed him out of Taylor Grocery any faster. I looked at Ardel and raised my eyebrows. I said, "I think that guy made all that part up about the dogs. Maybe he dreamed about the running of the pit bulls."
I got up and walked over to where he bent over earlier and looked down. I tipped the cigarette butts to one side and read from what was obviously a stolen advertising ashtray, "Eagle Lanes Bowling Alley -- West Memphis, Arkansas."
Ardell said, "We should've had that lecture on southern animals before we tried to cook last night. That might've helped with some of the recipes."
"Bowling Island, my ass," I said. I turned to the other students and said, "I think that guy made it all up," and explained my take on what went on. It kind of embarrassed me that I knew Lynyrd Skynyrd's entire discography, but it helped me prove my point.
A couple of my peers looked as though they would go tell on me. Amelia said, "Well. That's it for me. I don't want to judge y'all for hanging on, but I think I'm wasting my time, personally."
We were scheduled to eat lunch and then have time to work on our projects. I wandered down the road, waving at people seated out on their front porches, trying to get "Sweet Home Alabama," "Gimme Three Steps," "That Smell," and "Saturday Night Special" -- Lynyrd Skynyrd songs I encountered, more than likely, one semester in undergraduate school when I thought it necessary to visit every roadside bar in the Carolinas, like an idiot, out of my head. Fucking "Free Bird."
Abby called me up at noon on the fourth day. We were down to five desperate students in the program. Abby said, "So what's going on? I hope you haven't fallen in love with another graduate student. Why haven't you called me?"
She said some other things in between: For some unknown reason a half-dozen landscapers had shown up at our house on the banks of the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River, all wanting me to crank the dredge back up and uncover some nice flat rainbow skippers rocks, some medium rounds, some fist-sized pieces of glacier jax, rainbow cobbles, and milky quartz for paths, fancy gardens, chimneys, walls, and waterscaping. Abby told me that she'd gotten a call from a real, honest-to-goodness TV station in Asheville, which would be within commuting distance, wanting her to come in for an interview for a job as a "special projects" reporter. I tried not to sound overly-surprised, but what with my wife's slurry speech impediment, I couldn't understand what kind of special project a small market TV station might want to consider, outside of a series on drunks, people with overactive salivary glands, people born with cleft palates -- anyone who would feel more comfortable getting interviewed by a person whose ess sounds came out hearty shhs every time: "Shomeone at the Shtation thought I'd be shenshashional, Shtet," she said.
I said, "We're living in tents. I've learned a bunch, Abby. I'm going to come home with about a hundred different recipes for grits, and an appreciation for three folk artists who spoke directly to God. One professor came here and talked about some behind-the-scenes goings-on at Sun Records. I'll tell you all about it when I get home."
I stood outside Taylor Grocery awaiting another lecture, this one by a fellow who worked full-time at one of those state-supported universities down in Louisiana. I held the syllabus in my hand and looked down at the man's topic: "Atlantis and Gulf of Mexicas: Submerged Civilizations and Their Impacts on Man's Imagination." Already I foresaw an old bearded professor telling some lie about how wandering Aztecs, Incans, or Mayans once lived in golden-domed haciendas that now lay hidden far below the Gulf of Mexico, how said civilization got buried due to a hurricane or earthquake, how pirates, booty-hunters, and National Geographic underwater explorers all worked singly to discover and lay claim to the treasures that have escaped the curious for a thousand years. How deep was the Gulf, something like ninety feet? None of those ultrasonic machines have been able to uncover golden haciendas buried beneath a skim of sand only ninety feet below the surface?
Abby said, "Are you still there?"
I thought, Man, that would be cool if someone discovered the lost civilization of the Gulf of Mexicas, and there were trophies scattered all over the place. I said, "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
Ardel walked by and nodded. The other students were inside already, finishing up some kind of catfish fondue for lunch. I barely made out my wife saying, "I think we're breaking up." Then I heard a voice that came out clearly: Dr. Theron Crowther. I couldn't make out whoever he talked to on the other end, but without a doubt I heard him saying, "The Looper boy might be the only one. Stet Looper. I don't think he'll ever come up with anything that'll endanger our being the preeminent southern culture studies scholars, though. But maybe."
Then the telephone went dead. I looked at the screen to see "Call Ended." I thought, What the fuck did he mean by that? I thought, Just because I've never seen the ghosts of Lynyrd Skynyrd hanging around sand dunes somewhere on a make-believe island off the coast of Georgia while imaginary pit bulls run the streets doesn't mean that I can't become a southern culture studies professor at an average state-supported college of university somewhere between Virginia and Texas. Probably. Maybe.
We dwindled down to four students by the end of the sixth day. I didn't want to admit that-- and I had been no scholar or authority on higher educational pedagogy or hermeneutical procedures, even though I had a few bachelor's degrees I "needed" in order to stay out of the family river rock business as long as possible -- the low-residency master's program in southern culture studies at Ole Miss-Taylor was only one step away from one of the matchbook art schools, maybe two steps from a "college" advertising in the back of a music magazine where one could buy a lifelike diploma. Ardel; a man named Prentiss who, somehow had spent most of his time in the restroom during lectures; a woman named Ginny who sucked up to the professors and, I was certain, snuck off for the Big House at night in order to do whatever it is that suck-up low residency master's students lower themselves to do; and I showed up, looking like runaway confederate soldiers. Well, except for Ginny who nearly sparkled from what I took to be her leisurely baths every night and morning. She also spent most morning lectures using her left hand to push her jaw joints back together.
Dr. Crowther sat down at the end of our table and said, "This is not unusual. Attrition is natural in our environment. Those who are meant to be professors of southern culture studies remain, and those who aren't meant to be in the field -- they go elsewhere. It's the same with the low-residency writing programs out there, from what I understand. Anyway, today I would like to spend some time talking to y'all about your interests. Your fields of interest." Dr. Crowther looked over at Prentiss and said, "This might take some time. Do you want to go wash your hands before we start?"
Prentiss shot up from his seat. He said, "Thank you for understanding." It didn't occur to me that he was a mere germaphobe.
I sat there wondering how I could pull off my "Trophies for All" hypothesis, or theory, or maxim, or whatever it might be called. I looked up at the shelves and noticed how the owner of Taylor Grocery had added a few trophies since we arrived.
When Prentiss returned, Crowther said, "And why don't you begin, sir."
Prentiss stood up. I noticed how his hands were chafed miserably, as if he scrubbed them with a Brillo pad. "I've decided, with the committee's permission, to write a biography of Dr. Woodrow Moxley, the last known -- and perhaps only -- Christian Scientist family practitioner in the United States, if not the world, living right in the middle of Nashville, Tennessee. He started out as a regular internist, but then God came down and spoke to him, and the next thing you know he's got his patients praying all the time to deliver themselves from the diabetes and whatnot. Shingles. The whooping cough. Polio. Spinal meningitis. From what I've gathered from him so far, he's got about a two percent healing rate, which isn't that far off from regular doctors loading people up with pills."
Maybe I daydreamed about giant trophies presented to participants at the Gar Fish Festival, or the Wild Hog Hunt Festival, or the Pee Dee River Cottonmouth Roundup. It took me a second to think about how a Christian Scientist physician's day might go. I thought, Damn I wish I'd've come across Dr. Woodrow Moxley instead of those Modestine Duncans -- the zealots who printed the Book of Revelation on their trailers to protect them from tornadoes.
I didn't raise my hand, but said, "Hey, what kind of..."
"I know about Moxley, and it is time for someone to write his biography," Dr. Crowther said. "His wife's a funeral director, you know. I guess what he can't cure, his wife makes up for it." My mentor took down some notes, then looked up at Ginny. He said, "Tell us all about your brilliant idea, Virginia."
Ginny took a deep breath, smiled, exhaled. "I'm focusing on an inventor down in New Orleans who has found a way to destroy wetlands, make land developers happy, and still keep the coast from eroding during hurricane season." She took another deep breath. I figured that the humidity got to her. Ginny hailed from somewhere out west. "I've been corresponding with a man named Jinks Coomer who has invented the Sponge Tree. He's got it in his head that you can harvest sponges out of the ocean, then tie them on manmade platforms right on the shoreline. Platforms, telephone poles, those giant metal structures used for electrical lines. When a storm comes up and it rains like twelve inches in twenty-four hours, the sponges will soak up what water would normally inundate storm sewer systems. And on top of that, by taking sponges out of the ocean, water levels will drop, thus inhibiting tidal surges. Mr. Coomer has gone all the way to the White House with his idea, and the president's a hundred percent behind the idea. The president says it's ideas like the Sponge Tree which proves he's interested in the environment."
I couldn't hold back saying, "Oh good goddamn. That's the most stupid thing I've ever heard."
Crowther held up his palm and said, "Let her talk."
Ginny sighed a few times -- or hyperventilated -- and said, "I know! Not only is it stupid, but it'll be ugly. People won't pay good money for condos if their view is going to be row after row of Sponge Trees, if you ask me. But I want to zero in on the inventiveness of the New South inventor."
Dr. Crowther looked at me, and was about to ask for my ideas, but Ardel's cell phone rang. He got up and said apologetically, "I have to get this, believe me." He walked to the front of Taylor Grocery restaurant and only said, "Uh-huh" twice before cursing, then hanging up. Back at the table he said, "I have to drop out of the program, too. That was my financial planner. I just lost my entire savings."
Like I said, I had majored in a variety of areas, one of which happened to be psychology. The look on Ardel's face wasn't one normally associated with a man who lost his retirement. Crowther didn't seem to be in a hurry to continue the day's lesson. I said, "What happened?"
"Oh, I got talked into investing into a books-on-tape scheme. Or I guess they were books-on-CDs, really. The guy in charge wanted to get a good southern actor to read all of Faulkner's novels. And then he decided to add Marcel Proust to the list, seeing as French writers like Proust are so similar to Faulkner, in a way. Production costs, I guess, led to the inevitable downfall of the project. It was taking too long."
Crowther nodded, and stroked his maybe-fake goatee, and squinted one eye, and held his head back halfway. He said, "Who was the southern actor reading?"
"Mel Tillis."
I felt like I was in the middle of a one-liner. Ardel sat back down, then stood up. "Listen, professor," he said to Crowther. "I know that I'm probably not the most influential man in the room right now, but I got to speak my mind. What started off as a little joke on my part got out of hand: I ended up telling everyone in the program that I was a spy of sorts, that I was doing research on these low-residency programs all across the country. In reality, I wasn't. Or I'm not. But I told everyone to keep quiet about it, and I know for a fact that Ginny here told y'all. And I know for a fact that the graffiti in the bathroom that goes 'Don't trust Ardel' was written down by none other than Prentiss here. So for what it's worth, I think I would give those two students big Fs, seeing as they can't keep secrets. Southerners haven't always been the best at keeping secrets to themselves, so in the New South maybe we need to put our trust in people like old Stet Looper here."
Again, I had no clue that this little scene would take place. As a matter of fact I had to think back hard at Ardel even saying that stuff about his grant proposals and whatnot. I believe I drank moonshine around the campfire those few nights before when he blurted out everything to me. I said, "I don't have anything to do with this, Dr. Crowther," embarrassed to have my name called out such.
Crowther said to Ardel, "I think you're right, sir."
The Prentiss dude ran back to the bathroom. Ginny made some threats concerning sexual harassment. Because I could think of exactly nothing else, I said, "Hey, do I get a trophy for this?"
Ardel said, "Everyone except Stet agreed with me. They told me they believed that the low-residency master's program in southern culture studies at the University of Mississippi-Taylor was a sham, a con game, a way to make easy and possibly illegal money by the administrators. Ginny thought that Dr. Crowther and his cronies had secret bank accounts stashed away in one of the Caribbean islands not too far from the Lost Colony of Mexicas."
"Sabers up!" said Crowther, though Prentiss still hid in the bathroom, and Ginny collected her notebooks and bookbag while leaving. The owner of Taylor Grocery appeared at the table and said, "For lunch, I thought I'd try out my secret recipe for roasted goose on y'all. Does that sound good?" He said, "I won a prize for it at the Yocona River Goose Cook-off." He turned around and pointed at the shelf above the kitchen door, at a large trophy that appeared to hold a bird in a chef's hat, a shotgun under one wing, a spatula under the other.
I arrived early and sat alone with Dr. Theron Crowther during the last two sessions at Ole Miss-Taylor, after waking in the upstairs guest bedroom of what, up until that point, had been visiting professor and staff territory solely, and after staying up late on the wraparound porch drinking brandy, anisette, port, small-batch bourbons, single malt scotches, and, toward midnight, banana daiquiris. Crowther sermonized, pontificated, made threats and predictions, and halted in the middle of every joke, unable to conjure punch lines. He didn't patronize me, as far as I could tell.
He didn't suffer hangovers, either, evidently.
Me, on the very last morning of my residency, without another class to attend, I could barely brush my teeth without going off into dry heave arias that deserved seal- or wood duck-calling trophies. I eased downstairs at the old Howorth plantation confused as to whether the creaking emanated from pine planks, worn knees, or vital organs. Dr. Crowther might've slept in the kitchen, for he sat straight upright drinking mimosas and reading the Memphis newspaper by the time I arrived.
"Says here an old boy from Tupelo of entrepreneurial bent tried to train his beagles to be bomb-sniffing dogs. Things escaped one night and they found them all the way up in Tennessee surrounding the local fireworks store," Crowther said as I poked my way toward the table. We were supposed to go over my required reading list for the next six months.
I said, "You better pour me one of those things. I'm glad these residencies don't last a month."
Crowther snatched ice out of a Griswold skillet, using spaghetti tongs. "I guess if that boy trained them to be cadaver dogs and they got loose, you could find them running around manic atop the closest graveyard confused, digging up plot after plot."
I knew I couldn't laugh.
And I knew that I was obliged to tell Crowther that I would be dropping out of the program, that I appreciated his counsel and advice and direction, that even though I may never be an official qualified southern culture studies scholar, I would do my best to read what tracts he suggested, that I would make it my avocation to keep up with the various and disparate facets and offshoots emerging daily in his chosen field. I wished to tell Crowther that, since hearing Ardel's tale of losing money in a suspect books-on-CD project, I'd only been thinking of Proust and Faulkner, though I didn't plan on doing more than reading the long-winded, sentence-convoluted masters of developing characters on unending, limp-filled pilgrimages into their own psyches, souls, hearts, and/or voyeuristic and adventuresome animas and animuses. Maybe. I needed to confess that I would be returning to northern South Carolina, that within the week I'd be running my one-man dredge on the banks of the Unknown Branch of the Middle Saluda River, pulling up river rocks to stack on pallets and sell to men I didn't respect, men who talked politicians out of representing defenseless acreage in favor of gated communities filled with identical houses and their requisite river rock paths and low walls.
I said, "Is there coffee?" I said, "Are we meeting at Taylor Grocery this morning? I hate to admit it, but I lost the syllabus. Is there some kind of exam on what all those people marched in to tell us? 'Cause I took notes. Lynyrd Skynyrd at the Running of the Pit Bulls. Copperheads living in a communal setting. Poke sallet thriving in roadside ditches. I'm ready for a final."
Dr. Crowther folded his newspaper. He got up from the kitchen table, opened the cabinet door beneath the sink, pulled out a mousetrap holding a snapped-neck mouse, opened the window above the sink, and threw both trap and rodent out. "Fire ants will clean it down to bones. I collect the skeletons and donate them to the art department over at the university in Oxford. They've been having a hard time of late affording supplies, you know, what with cutbacks in general and the arts in particular. Easier to add a mouse skull for a miniature still-life than a nice-sized pear, apple, or bull's head."
I said, "Sponge tree. I remember what other people talked about, too." I tried to think of more. I wondered how I could bring up suavely how men shouldn't call people from Cumming, Georgia and announce that they're in the middle of the place. "Cook grits in cream for the best shrimp and cheese grits. Don't use Limburger."
Crowther washed his hands, then wiped them off on his pants legs. "I need to tell you that, every semester, I dwindle down to one student, Stet. This is not unusual. I'm of the belief that it's my duty not to send out twenty graduates every year. There ain't enough jobs out there, and it would be immoral of me to give out false hope. Mother blue jay doesn't kick out her chicks before any of them have sufficient feathers, you know what I mean. Oh, they's some low-residency programs out there that pack them in and spit them out still green and naïve and aimless -- and I've witnessed how these graduates turn on one another proving Darwin right, all talking themselves into self-importance. It's shameful."
I got stuck imagining that dead mouse alive, rummaging through foods I'd eaten. Then I daydreamed about the thing in cap and gown, its diploma rolled up on the trap's bait bar, et cetera. I said, "Well I'm pretty much packed up and ready to go. I need to give my tent one more look-over." I thought, Tell him. Tell him your decision.
"One more lecture, and then you can go," Dr. Crowther said. "I'll walk you down the path to Taylor Grocery, and then you can take off till June."
I said, "That soldier named Kimbrough P. Looper who chickened out near Forty-Five, South Carolina. I remember that story, also."
We shuffled out of the kitchen and into the dining room, then into the parlor, and finally out onto the front porch. Crowther took my elbow as we descended the steps, and didn't release his grip when we hit firm ground -- on the pea gravel probably scooped out of the Pacolet River by my near-competitors at Carolina MicroRock -- and began the downward serpentine path toward what, at the time, I wouldn't ever get to consider my alma mater. "Are you good at impersonating people, Stet?" Dr. Crowther asked me. I noticed that he wore tweed loafers.
"Not really," I said. I could do Elvis, Nixon, Jimmy Stewart, Reagan, Jack Nicholson, the entire Deputy Dog cartoon cast of characters, my wife and her drunken parents, Julia Child, Bill Clinton, Johnny Carson, Tarzan, Bill Cosby, Bing Crosby, Barney Fife, Gomer Pyle, Patsy Cline, W.C. Fields, Amos and Andy and Kingfish, Laurel and Hardy, Dean Martin but not Jerry Lewis, Strom Thurmond, Don Ho, Slim Whitman, Flipper, Mr. Ed, John Wayne and Johnny Cash. I said, "No sir. Well, I can do some bird calls. Crows, ducks, and quail, pretty much."
We stepped over a dead harmless garter snake pulverized by one of the midwestern ex-low-residents. Theron Crowther said, "I used to be the best impersonator in the country. Better than Rich Little. If I'd've been born ten years earlier I'd've mopped up vaudeville. Oh, I did some little local amateur hours, you know, and the radio up in Memphis and Nashville and Atlanta. As a child I could do FDR, and I could do Gene Autry. And everyone in between."
I said, "Blue jay. Mockingbird. I can call wild canaries. I feel as though we've already talked about ducks and blue jays this morning. Have we?"
"When I got older my specialty got to be the southern politicians, you know. George Wallace. Lester Maddox. This was in the nineteen fifties and early sixties. By this time I was already twenty-four, twenty-six years old. I had a degree in American history from Vanderbilt, and a good job back in Greenwood working at my daddy's saw mill. Anyway, I got called up by these politicians all the time -- back then they only had to contact the radio stations and ask who it was that shined them so well."
We walked slowly by some torn-out notebook pages. I made out, "Boil raccoon twice to take the wild taste out." It looked like a woman's handwriting -- maybe Amelia's -- and she'd written, "As if I'm going to eat a raccoon, make a hat from its body, and walk around like Daniel Boone. The South will never rise again."
I said, "Did they want you to stop?"
"That's what I figured right away! But no. Not at all. To the contrary. They wanted to hire me out. They said it was like having themselves two places one time! And they paid good money. I'd go on some station run by, say, George Wallace's cousin -- so he isn't going to tell folks who was really talking -- and I'd read off some speech they had written up beforehand."
"I'll be damned," I said. I felt my cell phone vibrating in my front pocket. It stopped, then started again. I pulled it out slyly and saw "Abby." I said, "I hate to ask you this, Dr. Crowther, but do you mind if I answer my phone? My wife hasn't been calling much since I've been away."
He stooped down and picked up an old slave ID tag on the ground. "Tell her I said howdy."
I answered, my wife said, "I'm pregnant," and then I took one step and lost contact. I said, "Hello?" eighty times.
"It's hard to get a connection out here. 'A bad cell,' they call it. Back when I was growing up, if you were a white boy with a bad cell, you probably had some black relatives you didn't know about. Sickle cell, you know."
I said, "Well in a way it was a good connection, I guess. In a way. In an unexpected, surprise kind of way."
"So they hired me, and I put on the voice, said I'd improve roads, schools and taxes. Said that I'd fight crime, unemployment, and corruption. In the history of all things politic, I didn't see my little charade as all that bad, considering."
"You were just saying what they would say, eventually, somewhere."
"You got that right, son. But then, things started changing -- I'd say right about the time the Supreme Court rightly concluded that blacks deserved equal higher education. Next thing you know, they're having me make these speeches -- here in Mississippi, in Alabama, Georgia, both Carolinas, you know -- just about two days from elections, saying 'Now remember, voting's important and a God-given right. Just make sure you ain't in no trouble with the law.' And that scared off half the black voters. I could do a mean Martin Luther King, Jr., and they paid me to go on the radio and belt out 'If you attended church on Sunday, then there's no need to vote this Tuesday. God saw you in the pew. God knows all, and He knows your vote.' Stuff like that."
These moments in southern politics didn't surprise me, and I understood how lucky I was to hear first-hand from one of the participants who unknowingly played a roll in keeping honest, good-hearted, rational candidates outvoted in the polls. But I kept trying to think of what Abby might've said -- what cold possibly sound like "pregnant" over bad lines, or lack of lines. More than likely she called to announce "I'm indignant," then hung up on herself.
We neared my ten t-- which I knew would be vacant, for what I hadn't taken up to the big Howorth house I had already packed up in my car -- before Dr. Crowther said, "Are you listening to me? Do you absorb what I'm saying? What I'm saying is this: Just like you, Stet, I went off and got an education, and just like you I came back home to run the family business. And when I figured out that my sideline job directly hurt the civil rights movement, it was at that moment I told my daddy goodbye and went back to school in order to immerse myself in southern culture studies. Six months ago I read your long-ass personal essay as part of the application process into Ole Miss-Taylor, and I thought right away 'He's just like me.' And when you weren't able to finish any of those projects I made you start, I remembered how I, too, in the beginning of my academic quest, ricocheted all over the place in search of research."
I looked down at six spent camp fires. Crowther reached down and pulled out a catfish carcass. I said, "You going to give that to the art department?"
"Listen to me. Listen to me," he said. Crowther dropped the skeleton. "I don't know what you've done wrong in your life that'll make you understand how you got some mending to do. But I'm hopeful that you'll figure it out, and fix your wrongs, and then one day forty years from now stand in the middle of some vacant fake Civil War tents and recount how you fell into southern culture studies, landed on your feet obsessed, and took off running in a single direction."
He raised both arms, grasped my shoulders, and shook me twice. There was no way I could let Dr. Crowther down, no way I could announce my decision to quit the program. I looked in my once-empty tent to find a gift-wrapped box. I crawled in to get it, and came out to find Dr. Crowther already at the entrance of Taylor Grocery. I said, "What's this?"
"I'll be sending your assignments for next semester directly. Read them over. Take a day or two thinking about them before writing willy-nilly something that won't matter in the future history of the South."
The box must've weighed twenty pounds. Crowther went inside the restaurant. I sat down on the ground and took off the paper, unflapped the box, and found copies of Dr. Theron Crowther's life's work: university press-published tomes on all the politicians he once mimicked, a fatback cookbook, a scholarly work tracing delta blues singers and their influences on contemporary television advertising, and a book on some rogue city bus drivers in Atlanta who took padding out of front bench seats and added it to back bench seats.
I turned to find Crowther gone. Later that day, at a rest area outside of Birmingham, I would dig down in the box to see if he slipped some moonshine in a cranny. I'd find a memo pad, open it up, a read a long list of topics he wanted to research: How Duke Power executives have the lowest IQs of any Fortune 500 company; how every southern governor had a relative who owned a paving business; how there might be a direct correlation between teachers no longer having smoking lounges on their campuses and the downfall of public education.
I thought, I need to call Abby and ask if she was more than ten days pregnant, or if it happened during my low-residency stay. I thought, I wonder if I'm getting punished for hailing from a river rock business family who more than likely upset an ecological balance.
There was no stowed booze. I drove on, and didn't exit the interstate in search of a liquor store or roadside bar. At the Cumming exit I thought about going back to the trophy store and handing back my nondescript window-prier. I thought of how, later on, at home early, I would give myself a prize for my patience, stamina, and focus. Atop the base of my imaginary trophy would be golden images of Job, Sisyphus and a champion bird dog.