All Over but the Shoutin' (38 page)

One by one the soldiers flip through them, then they go sit quiet. Some of them sit alone. I have never seen them do that before. No one looks at anyone else. “I knew they killed people,” Harris finally says, “but I didn’t know they done that.” He looks disgusted, like he needs to hit someone. “I never seen nothing like that.”

I remember that Brady did not say anything, not for a long time, that he just stared off into the trees. As we left the children ran alongside the Humvees, as they always did, but one little boy, as I wrote in my story, ran longer and farther than the rest, shouting, “Hooray.” I wanted to go home.

I
left before I finished the story. I did not wait for the triumphant return of Aristide. I flew to Miami, closed the curtains on a hotel room in Coconut Grove, near my old house. I slept a long time. I did not dream of Haiti, then, but sometimes I do.

The phone woke me up. It was the national editor of the
Times.
She told me they were promoting me, to national correspondent. I was going to cover the South, from the Atlanta Bureau. I was going home.

I called my momma. She asked me how my cruise had been, and I told her, “long.” She told me, funny, she thought she had seen a picture of me on the news, in a crowd of terrified, running people. But she forgot all about it when I told her the news, that I was coming home. “Thank God,” she said. I told her I would see her at Thanksgiving, I would see all of them. But I was only partly right.

M
onths later, I got a letter from Private Brady’s momma. She thanked me for the story, for explaining her sons mission, how important it was. I meant to write her back, but I never did. I did not know what to say. Maybe I would just write:

Dear Mrs. Brady:

Your son seems like a fine boy. I hope he gets home to you, safe. And I hope he doesn’t dream.

3
GETTING EVEN WITH LIFE

34
Gone South

I
t happens a lot, especially in places where the people live far apart, separated by a few miles, a few fields, a few hundred fence posts. I knock on their door, and tell them I am a reporter for the
New York Times.
I see the doubt and sometimes even suspicion in their eyes.

“You don’t sound like no
New York Times
,” a state patrolman down in south Georgia told me.

“You sound like me,” a woman told me in a courtroom in South Carolina. She was paying me a compliment, I believe.

Sometimes, I have to show them my identification. It is not always good to be home—my homecoming brought as much sadness as joy—but it is an honor, by God.

To work in the Southern Bureau of the
New York Times
is to grab on to the flapping coattails of newspaper history, and hope your hands are clean. Legends did this job, in times of national crisis, in times when hatred and night riders ruled the region where I was born, and their stories helped define it for the rest of the world. To be a Southerner in this job is to live a dream, even if you never really dared to dream it. I am not going to poor-mouth too much—I wanted this job because I felt I could do it with some insight, without asking some college professor what I should feel—but it is as daunting as it is satisfying, to cover your home for strangers.

There have been many Southerners in the job before, of course, but it was a little odd, being the offspring of poor, white Southerners, working for the newspaper that had been so unpopular among my people for its often unflattering depictions of them. The
Times
was the ultimate pointy-head establishment, the ultimate outside agitator, the target of our hatred, and here I was, a modern-day extension of it.

But it feels right, doing this. I know how this part of the world is, how it works, and I know how it used to be, how it used to work. I thought, as I walked into work that first day, that I had an understanding of its meanness, its insecurities, its fragility, and its great good. I had lived much of it.

I had gaps in my knowledge, of course. I knew a good bit about poor whites and poor blacks and working people of all colors, but all I knew about the gentility was that I didn’t like them much. Yankee reporters love to hobnob with the gentility, and the gentility love to have them around. They secretly despise each other, over the crab puffs, but not nearly as much as they disdain the nasal-voiced crackers who keep their cars running and their houses clean. I don’t find the rich folks down here to be very interesting, and, they talk funny. If I have to hear one more penny loafer-wearing, pink-jowled, bow-tied geek who doesn’t know how to pronounce his
r
’s talk about how his “mutha” grew up in the Big House in “Jaw-ja,” I will bust. We may sound like trash, us up-country peckerwoods, but at least by God you can understand what we’re saying.

Anyway, except in politics and business, rich people seldom make news. Their money, like wings, carries them above the hardships and dangers of normal folks, and keeps them out of the newspaper between cotillions. If I should ever own a newspaper I shall set the society page on fire. I shall chase the society matrons out of my newsroom with a cattle prod when they come in with pictures from the debut. I shall …

It is nice to dream.

My understanding of those beneath the gentry helped me, and no place did I use that knowledge, my own life, more than in the story of the old washerwoman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Miss Oseola McCarty. She became famous when, in anticipation of her own death, she gave her life savings to the local university as an endowment for scholarships earmarked for poor students. The wizened, gentle old woman had made her living washing and ironing for the rich folks, saving her dollar bills and pocket change over a long lifetime. In the end she had more than $150,000, and, at age eighty-seven, she just handed it to strangers in the belief that her money could do good.

As we talked, in her little house on Miller Street, I had a hard time keeping my mind in the here and now. Her house was filled with clothes, other people’s clothes. They surrounded us, in bundles, in neat rows on hangers, as other people’s clothes had surrounded me in our own little house, a long, long time ago. As she talked about making them look nice, for parties she was never invited to, weddings she never saw, I heard a voice in my head telling me not to play in the piles of laundry. I smelled the clean, strong scent of bleach and soap and starch, again.

When I sat down to write my story, I closed my eyes and saw not an old black woman but a young white one. Like Miss McCarty, my momma had worn old tennis shoes with holes cut out, or worn through. Like her, she had sweated for hours in hot, airless rooms for dimes and quarters. I let some of the admiration I had for her creep into this story of a stranger, but I don’t think it hurt it much. It was, some people told me, the best story I ever wrote, in this job I was born to do.

The
Times
had never made me a hard promise that I would get to do it, but the editors had hired me specifically for it, I would learn some time later. First I had to prove myself in places where I was not part of the landscape, but after just a little over six months in that crowded, frenetic newsroom in New York, and a couple more in the dark, miserable twilight of Haiti, I was as close to home as I would perhaps ever be. It was a marriage so perfect, in my mind’s eye, that I was almost surprised when I got a cold, or stubbed my toe, or got a parking ticket, because such things do not belong in dreams.

From the eleventh-story window of the bureau office on Peachtree Street in busy, sprawling Atlanta, you cannot see forever, but on a clear day you can almost see Alabama. Some nights, as the sun sets over the hills that border my state from this one, so close, I stand at that high-up window and lean my forehead to the cool glass. It is not a prayer, really, only something like it.

I
t was fall of 1994, when I finally got here. I rented an apartment in midtown and became an urban Southerner, again, because Atlanta has Los Angeles–class traffic and I am not going to waste big chunks of my life trying to get home to a house I would rarely see. I had not been in the city of Atlanta for more than ten years—you don’t have to get anywhere near the downtown to get to the airport, the first leg on my journeys home—and I found it to be as I remembered it: big, new, gleaming, at least on first glance, till you found its warts. I knew, from reading about it, that it was about as Southern as a snowmobile, a pretentious city striving for some kind of ridiculous national or international acclaim, or—as one native son once said—just a lot of really nice conventions. I have always been uncomfortable around people who are somehow ashamed of their heritage, who went to speech school to get rid of their accents. Atlanta is like that. It tears down its history with wrecking balls, and builds something bland and homogenized in its place.

But that is harsh. Atlanta is a good place. You won’t get shot here nearly as quick as Miami or New Orleans, cities I love, and it is much warmer than Manhattan and Boston. It has green, that lovely green, and nice, safe neighborhoods, if you can afford them and don’t mind the drive.

The place I settled into was an old four-unit apartment building where passersby were prone to steal the mail—the mail police told me so in a letter, which they mailed to me at home, risking it—and the washing machine danced back and forth in the closet like a mentally deranged great-aunt. But it had a fireplace and hardwood floors you could slide across in your socks and a good shower, and I spent a day just putting books on the shelves. I guess it is a form of mental illness, but I am careful about it. I put the good, old stuff—Robert Penn Warren, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Capote, Dickens, Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Steinbeck—on the top shelf, in case of floods. It does not matter that I am on the second floor, the ritual continues. I did it in Los Angeles and I was on the eighteenth floor, with not a river in sight. They didn’t even have time to get dusty, there.

From the stoop in my apartment in midtown Atlanta, I can hear the distant roar of high school football games on Friday nights. It is not a real football state, this Georgia, not like Alabama, but it beats nothing. For lunch, sometimes, we walk down to Thelma’s on Luckie Street and get some collards with pepper sauce and sweet potato soufflé, or drive out toward the federal prison to Harold’s, for barbecue and cracklin’ corn-bread. Because it is Atlanta they charge you twice what it’s worth, but it is mighty good barbecue.

I live precisely two blocks from the Krispy Kreme doughnut factory, and I can smell them from my front yard. Trying to explain how good they are to someone who has never had one is like telling a celibate priest about young love. Four blocks away is the Kentucky Fried Chicken. I have all I need to sustain life, well, almost. Love flies in for the weekends, sometimes, on Valujet.

My neighborhood is a potluck supper of a place: white, black, straight, gay, rich, poor, peaceful, violent, nuts, punks, homeless and some just a paycheck or two away from it. Over on Ponce de Leon, a dysfunctional parade of crack dealers, emaciated prostitutes and transvestite party boys remind you that you live in a big city, but there are crickets at night in the summertime. I like to go to sleep listening to them, unless it is Saturday night, when their fiddling is often interrupted by young men in leather chaps and no shirts engaged in a slap fight. Some nights you are serenaded by nature, some nights you are jolted awake by cries of “Bitch.” But that’s life in the big city, isn’t it.

I am seldom here. I ride the whirlwind of my newspaper’s travel budget, doing things and seeing places I could never afford on my own, living a life I could never afford. I live for sweet, long days—weeks, if I can swing it—in the elegant old Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans, where the sound of the rattling old streetcar rocks you to sleep and, if you are good, they put pralines on your pillow at night. I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo’s over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world. In Baton Rouge, in Jackson, in Nashville, in Charlotte, in Columbia and Spartanburg and Macon and a hundred smaller places at the side of the road, I have learned how to feel at ease in a borrowed bed. On the Gulf Coast, I sit by myself on the beach until well after dark, until the sunset is just a memory over Mobile. You learn not to mind being by yourself, doing things by yourself, when you are on the road as much as I am. It is loneliness, maybe, but it is a warm and fuzzy kind. I used to not mind it at all. I mind it a little more, the older I get. But just a little.

There is a sense of urgency in me, a sense that time is running out, but it has to do with the life I left behind, not the one I would begin, if I was so inclined. I am running out of time to keep my promise, to buy her the house, to try and rewrite history so late in the volume of our lives. I have saved forty thousand dollars, which is enough to buy or build a small house in Alabama, but not nearly enough to buy her the nice house I want, a house she would be proud of. I am too ignorant to realize that she would be proud of anything. I decide to save some more, at least enough for a decent two-bedroom cottage, and in the meantime my momma just gets a little older. I kick myself, mentally, for not saving more, sooner, for realizing so late what I should do. I soothe myself the same way I always do, by telling myself I was just young and stupid. I still refuse to buy it on time, because I am so unsure that this dream will last. I am older now, and the conformist in me tells me I should start building a real life of some kind, any kind, but that cannot happen yet, if ever. It has to wait, until my debt to the old life, however ridiculous it might sound, is paid.