South and West by Joan Didion

Author:Joan Didion
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

On the Road from Meridian to Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Signs: WELCOME TO ALABAMA! TAKE A FUN BREAK!

782,000 ALABAMA BAPTISTS WELCOME YOU!

Dixie Gas stations, all over, with Confederate flags and grillwork.

Boys working on the road between Cuba and Demopolis. Making measurements with fishing poles. Sumter County, Alabama, around in here, is 80 percent black. We crossed the Demopolis Rooster Bridge over the Tombigbee River, another still, brown river. I think I never saw water that appeared to be running in any part of the South. A sense of water moccasins.

In Demopolis around lunchtime the temperature was 96 degrees and all movement seemed liquid. An Alabama state trooper drove slowly around town. I put a penny in a weighing machine on the main street. My weight was ninety-six, and my fortune was “You are inclined to let your heart rule your head.”

In the drugstore a young girl was talking to the woman at the counter. “I’m gonna run off and get married,” the girl said. “Who to?” the woman asked. The girl crumpled her straw paper. “I’m gonna get married,” she said stubbornly, “I don’t care who.”

To get out of the sun I sat a while in the Demopolis library and contemplated a newspaper photograph of the Demopolis police force (nine of them) pouring out 214 gallons of confiscated moonshine. The moonshine had been confiscated after a four-hour chase and tracking with a bloodhound. The driver of the moonshine car, Clarence Bunyan Barrett of Cedartown, Georgia, was fined $435 and released.

At the desk a small birdlike woman about seventy was chatting with the librarian.

“The Nashville Sound in yet?”

“Still on order,” the librarian said.

“How ’bout The World of Fashion?”

“Still out.”

“Put me down on the waiting list for The World of Fashion.”

The French Lieutenant’s Woman was moving briskly that summer in the Demopolis library. The temperature at two was 98 degrees.

Greene County rolls gently, trees and grass, a light clear green. Pasture. The land looks rich, and many people from Birmingham, etc. (rich people) maintain places here to hunt.

The southern myth: a small bungalow named Grayfield, lots and lots of small one-story houses with two-by-four pillars.

Eutaw, Alabama, is a town the train goes through. Children were bicycling in town, barely moving in the leafy still air. There were tiger lilies everywhere, wild or naturalized. We listened to country music on the radio. There was a funeral taking place at the Eutaw Baptist Church at 4 p.m. on June 16, and the mourners made a frieze outside the church with a group of children on a penny hike. The coin spinning on the sidewalk and the children kneeling to see, with the adults in black around them. In Eutaw there was a white swimming pool and a black swimming pool, and an apartment house, the Colonial Apts., where the sign read APPLY JIMMY’S GRILL.

In the Eutaw City Hall I asked a clerk where the Chamber of Commerce was, but she could not, or would not, tell me. On a corner was a locked-up Teen Center, with posters inside that read GO TIDE and FREAK-OUT.

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