Long Time Leaving (49 page)

Certainly Atlanta has pulled itself together since then. But it keeps tearing itself back down. Recently Susan Taylor, a lifetime Atlantan, was showing me around town. I asked her what was going up at a particular construction site. “Who the hell knows?” she said. “Atlanta's been in reconstruction since Sherman, I've been living here about that long, and I've been bitching about it all that time, and I'll keep on bitching about it till I get the hell out.”

Atlanta has new buildings the way other Southern locales have kudzu. Some of these buildings look like scarabs, some have a sort of tattersall look, some look like cinder blocks set on end, some are mirrored slabs. Many of them were designed by noted local architect-developer John Portman, whose Hyatt Regency Hotel originated, in 1967, the
atrium,
or lobby-all-the-way-to-the-roof, style, which spread like wildfire not only through Atlanta but to cities-on-the-go around the country. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas describes the Portman atrium as “a container of artificiality that allows its occupants to avoid daylight forever— a hermetic interior, sealed against the real …the cube hollowed out to create an invasive, all-inclusive, revealing transparency….”

Atlanta doesn't have kudzu?

Here and there, in less-developed areas, but Atlanta is one of the few Southern areas where kudzu has a hard time putting down roots,
because today's less-developed area is likely to become tomorrow's new cluster of tall office buildings. (“There is no center,” the aforementioned Koolhaas says of Atlanta as a whole, “therefore no periphery.” There is, however, a mall called Perimeter Center.) Atlanta has the Kudzu Cafe, which is a sort of fern bar, only the dominant fern is artificial kudzu. “I'll be taking care of you for the rest of your dining experience,” says a waiter, with tongue in cheek or perhaps not. The décor is arty photographs of things Southern: a rooster pecking on a watermelon rind, a pool hall wall with “Yo Baby Yo Baby Yo” painted on it. The food is quite good in an upscale-semi-Southern-eclectic sort of way: delicious black-eyed pea soup cheek by jowl with julienne of vegetables. The cornbread, un-Southernly fluffy and sweet, will never make anybody holler “Yo Baby Yo Baby Yo.” The doors to the men's room stalls have outhouse-inspired crescent moons cut into them.

How about peach trees? The streets are lined with peach trees, right?

No. Peach trees are not indigenous to the area. There are, famously, thirty-some-odd different streets with Peachtree in their names, and there's a Peach, a Peachford, a Peachwood, and five different Peach-crests. But that's not what's confusing about driving in Atlanta.

What's really confusing is this sort of thing: Atlanta's principal north-south noninterstate arteries are Peachtree and Piedmont. They start out, parallel, four blocks apart, headed northeast. Then they go due north for a while but only three blocks apart. Then West Peachtree suddenly arises to take over Peachtree's course, and Peachtree jogs to the right so it's only two blocks from Piedmont. Then West Peachtree disappears into Peachtree again. Then Peachtree veers to the northwest and Piedmont to the northeast so that they spread farther and farther apart, and then they swing back together and cross each other, Piedmont going off to the northwest and Peachtree to the northeast. Along the way they both cross Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Tenth streets (there is no First or Second), but neither of them crosses Ninth. Peachtree crosses Eleventh and Twelfth; Piedmont intersects with little spurs called Eleventh and Twelfth that aren't continuous with the Eleventh and Twelfth that Peachtree crosses. Peachtree crosses Thirteenth, Piedmont doesn't. After Fourteenth and Fifteenth, which both Peachtree and Piedmont cross, Piedmont crosses no more numbered streets. Peachtree crosses a couple of broken squiggles called Sixteenth and Seventeenth, but it manages to skip Eighteenth and Nineteenth; there are no Twentieth through Twenty-fourth streets. Twenty-fifth,
Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-eighth make faint impressions on Peachtree. There is no Twenty-seventh.

There is a Boulevard Drive that's perpendicular to Memorial Drive, and a Boulevard Drive that's parallel to Memorial Drive. And there's something about Monroe Drive—this is hard to explain, but if you stay on Monroe Drive long enough, you find yourself on Piedmont
crossing
Monroe Drive at a point where you were twenty minutes ago.

The interstates that encircle and crisscross the metropolitan area are, of course, less confusing. Rush hour on them, however, is no time to be in a hurry. Even without an Olympics in town.

What's the weather going to be like?

Atlanta's is one of the finest climates in the United States year-round. Except for this time of year. The last time I was in Atlanta in July, I looked out from my air-conditioned room and noticed a nice light sprinkling rain, so I ventured outside. Instantly I was seized by the sensation that I had become a freshly baked muffin, piping hot clear through except here and there on the surface, where, as the tiny raindrops hit me, I felt flecked by spritzes of mint. It was an
interesting
feeling, but hardly conducive to enjoyment of outdoor sports.

You don't make Atlanta sound very inviting.

Let me state my bias. I am from Decatur. People in Decatur will tell you that Decatur could have been Atlanta, but folks didn't want the smoke and the noise of the railroad, not in our backyard. When Terminus was founded, a Decaturite was quoted as saying, “The train don't start nowhere, and it don't go nowhere.”

Now Decatur is part of metropolitan Atlanta. But Decatur has something that Atlanta doesn't: a focal point, the Decatur Square, with the old courthouse on it. As it happens, the Decatur Square is also Roy A. Blount Plaza, named for my late father, a civic leader who was, among other things, chairman of MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, when the subway system it includes was being laid out, back in the early seventies.

The MARTA subway is quiet and clean, with helpful attendants and attractive stations. In the Peachtree Center station, I saw, at last, something indigenously substantial: the walls alongside the tracks are the rough-hewn solid granite that the tunnel was blasted through. If the Atlanta Olympics work out okay logistically, I figure MARTA will be the star. Unless the air conditioning in the cars is overwhelmed and mass suffocation ensues.

What you're saying is, you couldn't find any there in Atlanta except in a hole in the ground that you somehow connect with your father?

Oh, no. Atlanta also has the greatest fast-food place in the world: the Varsity, on North Avenue right across from the Olympic Village. I have traveled the world over, and I have never found a chili dog that
approaches
the excellence of a Varsity chili dog. Also, there is no more delightful fattening experience than pulling up to the Krispy Kreme on Ponce de Leon Avenue late at night, smelling and watching the fresh hot doughnuts coming off the assembly line in the back. I went into the Krispy Kreme not long ago and sat down next to a man who had tears in his eyes. He turned to me and said, “My mama used to bring me here.”

Isn't this getting awfully personal?

Embarrassing, isn't it? But there
is
something awfully personal about Atlanta. Dig down under the “We're just amiable businessfolk” surface and you find a volatile mixture of “This is one town where a black person can do well and I be damned if I'm missing out on that action” and “No other town ever burned down by Sherman's army ever had a Summer Olympics, by God!”

Furthermore, Atlanta may be essentially “postmodern” and “post-urban,” as Rem Koolhaas maintains (and finds rather exciting, in fact), but has anyone noticed the similarities between Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games head Billy Payne (who takes a bottle of Jack Daniel's and a loaf of white bread with him to Europe) and the wildly eccentric Georgia folk artist Howard Finster (who paints portraits of people with messages written on their foreheads like “
ONLY GOD OF
A
BRAHAM COULD
CREATE A BRAINE OF POWER. AND WISDOM TO CARRY ON A WORLD LIKE THIS
ONE
”
)?

Both men are outspokenly religious. Until they became worldfamous, neither of them had ever spent much time outside Georgia. Both of them are self-appointed and boundlessly enthusiastic. Both of them write strange verse. People say both are crazy. It came to Billy Payne one day out of the blue that he should bring the Olympics to Atlanta, just as it came to Howard Finster out of the blue one day (he thought he saw a face in a dab of paint on his finger) that he should start painting portraits of Elvis and Jesus and Coke bottles and himself.

Howard Finster was on the
Tonight Show
once. Johnny Carson asked him what inspired his art. Finster put his hand to his head and replied, “If you had a place itching up here, Johnny, you'd reach right up to
scratch it like you know right where it is. If you was to ask
me
to scratch it, I wouldn't know where to look.”

Ask Atlantans where their civic
there
is, and they may well shrug. But then some little personal thing will crop up, like the fact that Deion Sanders and their mama belong to the same congregation, and …well, it's hard to put your finger on the principle involved, but somehow, collectively, Atlanta has an itch and knows where to scratch it.

R
eligious argument ought to be an Olympic event, at least the way it's practiced in the Five Points area of Atlanta. The day before the official games opened, I watched a pickup disputation involving a mixed company of eight or ten young male Muslims, Rastafarians, and Baptists. One of the Rastas began to spring higher and higher into the air, not in any showy or ritual way but just with the intensity of the point he was making.

“No
…‘I’…
about …it,” he cried, leaping with each word. “It …is …all …
‘we.’”

A Baptist said, “I'm saying,
I
know who
my
God is,” and as several people started quoting Scripture at once—point, counterpoint, and cattycorner—the Rasta came to Earth in a high-tensile crouch and froze, his eyes flashing. “Say you do or do not believe in Jah,” he demanded, and though his feet were touching the pavement, he somehow hung there the way Michael Jordan in
his
youth hung in the air.

The theology got too complex for me to follow after that, but the body language was something to behold. It was hard to find amateur competition in the Olympic ring last week but not impossible. You had to go to Five Points, an area that lies just to the southwest of the Olympic Center but squarely in the middle of Atlanta history.

Five Points is where Atlanta's five most important early streets, Peachtree, Marietta, Decatur, “Whitehall, and Edgewood, intersected. Off down along Decatur Street was where the dead and wounded Confederates lay stretched out as if forever, the living ones moaning and
begging for help, in the famous scene in
Gone with the Wind
where Scarlett just can't stand it anymore.

Five Points was Atlanta's main business district into the sixties. Rich's, long Atlanta's keystone department store, was here. After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, demonstrators confronted counterdemonstrators here over the integration of Leb's restaurant. (Dick Gregory peeked under a Klansman's hood and asked him, “Is you de Lawd?”) Vernon Jordan integrated Herren's restaurant one day at lunch. Fred Powledge, then a local newspaper guy, broke a century of ignominious decorum by shouting out across the room, “Vernon! It's great to see your big old black face in here!”

Since then, Atlanta's business nexuses have dispersed over an ever-broader metropolitan area. Downtown Rich's and Leb's and any number of former power buildings have been demolished. Herren's is a shell, and Five Points is an area that suburban whites have long been loath to venture into. Now the Olympics have brought the area back into focus. City, state, and private security forces are everywhere, abandoned buildings have been gussied up and pressed into service, and $1.5 million has been plowed into making a showpiece out of Woodruff Park, a patch of green right at Five Points’ heart. What do you know? Famously amorphous Atlanta
does
have a central core of street life.

“Yes, it's hot,” chuckles the erect eighty-two-year-old man whose handwritten name tag says “Bishop Craig,” as he stands where he's been standing several hours a day for ten years: on the corner of Peach-tree and Atlanta streets, right outside the Five Points MARTA station. Although the temperature is well up into the nineties, Bishop Craig is dressed in black suit, crisp white shirt, and striped necktie.

“But not as hot,” he is bound to remind us, “as Hell will be.” What is the Olympic cauldron compared to “that lake of fire”? He's holding a hand-lettered sign proclaiming, among other things,
GOD WILL CURE SUGAR CANSOR, TBS
and (though he himself is in heavy black leather footwear)
PUT OFF YOUR SHOES, FOR THIS GROUND IS HOLY GROUND.

A man suddenly swoops in and makes as if to grab that sign away from the bishop. The same man who has been making as if to grab it most every day for years. “A deaf-mute,” the bishop says. “He has a demon.” This man also has a ministry, although his only oral utterance is sort of a yodel, sort of a moan.

“I ain't afraid of your demon,” says the bishop. “Give me your hand!”

The man won't let him have it.
“Uhluh-uhl-uhl-uh-uhl,”
he cries,
maybe derisively, maybe merrily, it's hard to say. His name tag, impressed on plastic, says “Elder / H. Webb / Children / United States Army.” He's wearing a U.S. Marines T-shirt and an olive-drab military cap and waving a Bible. He makes a snatching motion toward the bishop's name tag, then toward his own, then toward my Olympic press credential.