Paul Hemphill - The Ballad of Little River: A Tale of Race and Restless Youth in the Rural South

Other books by Paul Hemphill

NONFICTION

Wheels

The Heart of the Game

Leaving Birmingham

Me and the Boy

Too Old to Cry

The Good Old Boys

Mayor (with Ivan Allen, Jr.)

The Nashville Sound

FICTION

King of the Road

The Sixkiller Chronicles

Long Gone

Small wonder how pitiably we love our home, cling in her skirts at night, rejoice in her wide star-seducing smile, when everystar strikes us sick with the fright: do we really exist at all?

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

B ANANA? S AUSAGE B ISCUIT? V-8? Got some tomato juice back there somewhere, if you can find it under the worms and crickets and stuff. Long ways betweengrocery stores around here. Gotta be prepared. Speaking of which, if you dont mind my saying, looks like you cant affordto be missing any meals. What you need is a woman to cook for you. Wearing sandals and gray double-knit slacks and a gailyembroidered white guayabera he had picked up somewhere in his travels since retirement, jawbone clopping away like Howdy Doody,teeth rattling like castanets, fingers lifting in salute to the drivers whizzing past, James Witherington was manhandlinghis big white Chevy pickup truck over the wild landscape where he had been born nearly eighty years earlier. He had calledat daybreak to say he had some time if I wanted to go for a spin, get the lay of the land, and so now we were off on a bone-rattlingtour of the Alabama swamps on this steamy morning in early spring.

Rushing past old cemeteries and barns and cornfields and freshly plowed furrows just seeded with cotton, slowing only to givewide berth to the monstrous logging trucks careening in both directions on the undulating macadam state road or to point outsome site of historical interest stuck back on dirt roads the timber companies had gouged through the forests, he was singingin his high nasal twang like a tour guide on speed. The battle of Shomo Creek was about as close as we got to the Civil War,and there wasnt much to it. My grandpa was a teenaged scout for the volunteers, and when they heard some shots they turned and ran like hell, and that was about the sizeof it. Funny how everybody claims to be kin to Red Eagle, the Creek chief, man that tried to kill off the white folks Lord,I dont see how some of these niggers can stand living like that Lot of the problems with the sorry whites is cousins marryingcousins. Theres one family with eight kids you might call slow, and thats a lot of welfare checks every month. The daddywas asked to go count the hogs one day. Cant read or write, understand. Came back and told the boss, You got a bunch This one old boy claimed he had the biggest dick in Baldwin County, kept this nigger whorehouse in business, back in the forties,accounting for some of the half-breeds you see Look at that pile of trash, would you, old mattresses and refrigerators,right on the side of the road. People dont have much pride anymore

It went like that for three hours. To a city boy like me, fresh on the scene, visions of Tobacco Road and Yoknapatawpha Countyflashed through the windshield of James Witheringtons pickup as it bumped along the back roads of northern Baldwin Countyin the dank southwest corner of Alabama. It didnt take a dreamer to conjure up black folks bent over rows of cotton, redneckyahoos stirring corn mash in black kettles beside fetid streams, humpbacked old grannies in sunbonnets hoeing their pea patches,George Wallace thundering from a flatbed trailer about pointy-headed intellectuals that cant park their bicycles straight,or crude kerosene-soaked crosses blazing in the night. If not for the late-model pickups and the television satellite dishessprouting like pop-eyed toadstools in the rich black earth, this could have been the 1940s; or earlier, even, back to theDepression years of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which, in fact, was centered little more than a hundred miles north of here on land much the same as this.

A S THE MILLENNIUM approached, in an age of computers and intergalactic travel and maybe even the cloning of human beings, I was curious aboutwhat life must be like deep in the American outback, in some little hardscrabble corner of the most powerful and advanced nation n the world. I had completed what one critic glibly referred to as my Bubba Trilogy, accounts of country music andstock-car racing and truck driving, and now I was threatening to stretch my Southern oeuvre, as it were, to a tetralogy if I could find the right place. It had to be distinctively Southern, blue-collar, thoroughlyisolated from the mainstream of American life, and there had to be an issue involved to merit my going therea storyas my lost colony was dragged into the twenty-first century.

It was in the summer of 1997 that I first heard of Little River, Alabama. Not much had happened in those parts since the massacreof five hundred settlers and slaves in the early 1800s by renegade Creek Indians, but 1997 had turned out to be somethingelse. The short version was this: A young black man had been killed while trying to break into a white familys trailer, thena black man had nearly bludgeoned a beloved white store owner to death, and finally a marauding band of white kids had torcheda black church and vandalized another during a drunken night of caterwauling only forty-eight hours following a rare Ku KluxKlan rally. This seemed to be the place, all right.

The nearest motels being thirty miles away, I had rented a stuffy little two-bedroom house refitted as a hunting and fishingcabin, with bunk beds, a pool table, heart-of-pine walls hung with stuffed buck heads and wild geese and largemouth bass.It was a weekend retreat where James Witheringtons middle-aged son and some of his friends could shoot pool, drink beer,talk about women, and instruct their boys in the manly arts during the hunting season. My plan was to make the three-hundred-miledrive from my home in Atlanta to Little River about twice a month, trying as nearly as possible to blend into the scenery;becoming, as Marshall Frady once fancied it, just another citizen who happens to have this secret eccentricity to write getting up every morning and pretending to write letters to Dickens and Shakespeare and Balzac and all the rest, as thoughto say, Heres what went on around here yesterday. To know the past, I figured, would be to understand the present; specifically,I might discover what circumstances had created an atmosphere that would allow the destruction of a church and severely alterthe lives of five young people.

Would they talk to an interloper? Rural Southerners are notoriously hostile toward outsiders, and I heard, early on, thatthe blacks in the area were asking if I were the Klan, while whites suspected I was a federal agent of some sort. Any reluctancethey might have had dissipated in due time, and indeed, I soon began to imagine that they had seen me coming and were puttingme on; had observed this writer hanging around, had held a meeting at, say, the Dixie Landing Cafe, and had come up with aplan. Lookie here, now, yall, we might get a sit-com out of this thing, one of them Dukes of Hazzard deals, start get-tin checks from Hollywood instead of Washington. George, how bout you spendin the summer tryin to get your crazy checks? We need a jealous husband to set fire to his wifes boyfriends trailer. Want yall women lollygaggin around the tannin salon at Peanuts while the men are out workin Oh, yeah, and Raymond, tell him bout the shootout at Butterfork Hill. We gotta give em what they want: Klansmen, moonshiners, pot growers, itchy wives, the whole shebang. Hell, we pull this thing off, we may never have to work again.