miles out in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of a series of low bridges. It is a small town – only around seven hundred residents in summer – given over to dissolute, late nineteenth-century buildings with peeling paint and sagging clapboards, columns staggering to support second-story porches. Palm trees and hand-lettered signs advertising bait and cold beer cheered the place up in a spirit of easy-going unconcern, rather than neglect. I drove the two blocks separating the last bridge from the Gulf and parked near the harbor. The sky over the water was the color of pigeons, smudged gray and white, and sheet lightning flashed offshore. The air was so heavy that the smell of beer from nearby bars hung in it like a net.
I wandered into one and sat next to an old man who was simultaneously smoking, drinking a Bud, and eating a Fudgesickle. He told me he was hiding out from the cancer that a doctor said was going to get him. I looked alarmed and he laughed. ‘Better wait for it in a bar than at home watching TV.’ In the next breath he said that a fishing ban had killed the commercial fishing industry in Cedar Key about five years ago, and now clamming was the big thing.
‘What do you get?’ I asked. ‘Cherrystones?’
His glance at me was the fastest I’d seen any part of him move. ‘Aw, you must be from Boston or somewheres up North, am I right? Nobody says cherrystones ‘round here.’
The bartender looked from me to the beer I had ordered (Newcastle Brown Ale), seemed to satisfy some internal inkling, then lost interest and returned to her phone call. ‘Storm’s knocked the power out at my mom’s, down by Rosewood,’ she yelled to someone in the kitchen. I’d seen the Rosewood highway sign on the road to Cedar Key, but it had seemed to apply only to empty acres of scrub forest. Beside it stood a hand-painted placard that read ‘Rosewood Memorial.’
Cedar Key relies on its wonderfully degenerate buildings to set the disreputable, rum-running mood of the place (residents did actually run guns and booze during the Civil War). Because Rosewood had no buildings, however, I had to call Dick Newman, who works in African-American Studies at Harvard, to find out why the name stirred an uneasy association with violence deep in my memory. He told me that in 1922 a white woman had accused a black man from Rosewood – a predominantly black town – of raping her (her accusation was reputedly false, covering up an affair). White vigilantes from the surrounding area retaliated by burning every structure in Rosewood bar one, a farmhouse owned by a white man, and massacred every black resident they found. With the help of the spared white farmer, the mothers saved some of their children by hiding them in a well on the farm property. A grand jury subsequently looked into the matter, but never brought any charges, and the town ceased to exist in all but name.
It had occurred to me earlier that morning, as I was driving through the rain, that while stories ideally link us to the past and to other cultures and traditions, opening the world wider, storytelling itself can sometimes be a way of narrowing experience, of not hearing. To tell (and tell and tell and tell) is not to listen. The teller effectively becomes like a television set, capable of disseminating stories but not of taking them in. Colonel Rod’s barrage of tales the night before had effectively kept me and my disruptive, feminist opinions at bay; I don’t think that shutting me up was his intent, but it had that effect. Like violence, which strips stories from the landscape or buries them with its victims, storytelling can occasionally be a reactionary device, a reflex of the fearful that may be wielded like a defensive – and now and then a deadly – weapon.
I drove out of Cedar Key in a dispirited mood, back past the town that was only a story, and retraced my route north toward Georgia.
‘EVERYBODY THINKS I’M A PENTECOSTAL, but I’m not, I’ve just got long hair.’
This last word came out sounding like hi-yar. Vickie Vedder was a striking woman in her early forties, tall, softly athletic, with an easy smile and what could only be called tresses of long dark hair. With her good looks went an accent that you could grow fat listening to, sweet and sticky-worded ear toffee. My own voice sounded brutally utilitarian by comparison.
I had met Vickie on the Internet, and she’d invited me to her home in Forsyth, Georgia, before she had stopped to consider whether I might be an axe-murderess. Later she told me she had been worried.
Forsyth is in Georgia red clay country, where the earth swells and bucks under the farmland. When exposed it is the color of raw beef; and on dry days, like this one, a haze hovers above the roadsides like rusty fog.
Vickie lived outside town in one of the quiet places I had been fretting about missing on the Interstate. To reach it I drove along a secondary road past woods and fields until I came to her signpost: an old barn half-consumed by trees. It would have had the look of a Dutch landscape etching but for the corrugated iron roof, which was painted with enormous letters that read, ‘See Beautiful Rock City.’ Or, as Vickie had warned, ‘See Beautif Rock Cit,’ because some of the iron slats had recently fallen off. Rock City is a kind of giant-scale rock garden in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Barns all over the South once advertised it, though Vickie’s is now one of the few that remain, making it a legitimate Southern icon.
Her farmhouse and out-buildings artfully married wrought and found, decay and care, in a way that suggested a relaxed appreciation of the visual world. Vickie kicked at the red dirt and said that the difference between ‘home’ – Wilkinson County, not far to the south – and ‘here’ – Monroe County, where her husband was from – was that the earth in Wilkinson County was white and chalky. ‘This,’ she said, scuffling it again with her foot, ‘is just red dirt.’
Vickie’s house was nicely cluttered, but her ‘office’, which was really a nook just wide enough to stand sideways in, looked more like an experiment in sedimentary rock formation than any part of an ordinary household. Her desk and bookshelves were barely visible, overlain by strata of photographs, trinkets and souvenirs, scattered overtop with scribbled notes and sheets of paper. The effect was of a secular altar, which it may very well have been. I peered into one photograph and met the eyes of an old lady who seemed as aware of me as I was of her. She had a neat nest of white hair, severe black-framed glasses, blue eyes, and a crumpled mouth set in a straight line. ‘Granny Griffin,’ said Vickie. ‘All cleaned up.’
I had been eager to meet Vickie, ever since I had learned she told stories in the character of her grandmother, but especially keen after phoning her the previous evening from my motel room. Rarely in the course of chatty conversations do people bother to dredge their hearts and intellects for their deepest opinions, especially on difficult subjects like race or religion. It’s too hard, and most people are out of practice in the discipline of thinking, much less translating thought to speech. Yet the latter skill had been Vickie’s inheritance, and in between giving me directions to her barn and laughing over the urban legends of the Internet, she had spoken like a true child of Faulkner’s talk-besotted South. ‘The North–South thing isn’t real anymore. It’s dangerous to perpetuate that stuff. But there are differences. The South carries a deep kind of pain, and the North a sense of moral duty. Both can cripple a person, or a family. Or a country, I guess.’ On race she was upbeat: ‘Look, we’re still a young country, we’ll work it out. We have to find a big porch to sit on and tell each other stories, and not try to solve everything immediately … You know, I grew up with black kids and we loved each other. We still do. Why don’t people ever talk about that?’
The following morning, in her living room, over an hour and a half, Vickie did something I didn’t expect. Instead of distilling her conclusions for me, she verbally recreated the world in which she had formed them. It was like taking a crash course in someone else’s life.
This strange new universe began with its people: Granny Griffin was tall, had big feet, and wore support hose held in place with
