Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
A couple of weeks ago I flew to Atlanta, rented a car, and over four days drove around; to Montgomery, Birmingham and back to Atlanta. I’ve been to New Orleans before, Tennessee and Texas a few times, but this was my first real look at the US South proper. I went mostly to visit the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites, which I’ve written about for an upcoming magazine story. More on that later. But I took some extra time to explore. I’m glad I did. Here are some things that I saw…
In Atlanta I visited a cocktail bar above a restaurant. A date or quiet chat kind of place. I sat at the bar and kept to myself. It was called Ranger Station and had a heavy woodsy, National Park aesthetic. My bartender was aesthetic to the threshold of comedic. He seemed almost AI-generated. Complete with suspenders, Peaky Blinders haircut, handlebar mustache and strong feelings for the coupe glass. You might picture him chewing on a toothpick, but he took that particular garnish one step further, chewing on a hat feather. His name was Parks.
In the morning I drove by a restaurant named Kale Me Crazy, which is up there with a personal favorite business name at our local mall; Socks To Be You.
On the way out of Atlanta I turned onto the freeway only to stop dead in traffic. Down the way a silver pick-up truck was turned over in the right two lanes, resting precariously on its roof, wheels motionless in the cloudy morning air, as a worker swept debris from around it. My regular car is a silver pick-up. For a second it felt like I was passing by another, more tragic version of my life. I tried to drive carefully the rest of the trip. Tried.
Between Atlanta and Montgomery, over the border with Alabama, I saw a sign for the town of Tuskegee. I recognized the name from the legend of their airmen, it’s also the birthplace of Rosa Parks. Curious, I took the exit. Google Maps seemed more lost than I was, but I found the center of town eventually. On the way I passed a motel being torn down by a backhoe, with a small group of locals looking on. The old town square, on the corner of Rosa Parks Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr Highway, was abandoned, but for two men on park benches. I hopped out. Shuttered shops stood precariously in every direction. In the center of the square was a statue, only the base of its plinth visible, the rest bound in a blue tarp, like a mob body. Later I read it represented a Confederate soldier and was supposed to have been taken down over a year ago. Maybe once the motel is done.
During winter in the South, most of the lawns turn the color of straw, I noticed. They remain intact, not dead exactly, just dormant. Brown blankets beside homes and roadways.
At another cocktail bar, in Montgomery, I drank an Old Fashioned so spicy I thought the barman was trying to kill me. Turned out he was very friendly. “How long you in Montgomery?” he asked.
“Just a night,” I replied.
“That’s long enough,” he quipped.
“I take it you're from here then…?” I said.
He nodded and laughed, then gave me some brewery recommendations in Birmingham.
I did like the town, though. Their baseball team plays in a beautiful little stadium by the river. They’re called The Biscuits. What more do you want?
The drive out of Montgomery was made memorable by Air Force jets, from a base by the highway, buzzing over the skyline, in and out of sight in an instant. The sound was frightening. I felt like I was in a war movie, trying to keep track of “bogies”.
Selma, Alabama popped up out of nowhere and was gone again before I knew it. I walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the only pedestrian. A work truck accelerated hard passing me by, as if to force me off. I moved closer to the railing, so low I wondered if any civil rights marchers fell right over it and into the Alabama River far below, all those years ago. Google Maps failed the BBQ restaurant test, so I doubled back to a roadside joint I’d passed earlier, pieced together with tin, old restaurant gear and a couple of black iron smokers. As we chatted, the proprietor dished my meal into a styrofoam take-out container, then placed that in the microwave to heat it up. So if I die of cancer, kids…
Up and down Alabama the roads cut through forests of tall pine trees, and trucks roar past with sloping stacks of felled trunks, piled up like matchsticks. I found a renewed appreciation for the old, oft-covered, traditional song “In The Pines”.
In most towns I like to find an independent record store or bookshop. Not only do I never know what gems I might find inside, they’re generally located in interesting, up-n-coming corners. I visited a great record store in Birmingham, with non-stereotypically friendly staff, called Seasick Records. If you’re wondering how Alabama’s largest city compares to the rest of the South, Seasick was in a strip mall, wedged between a storefront that read “Tattoos + Comics”, and another called Kombucha Taproom. Eat your heart out, California.
At a brewery in Birmingham, I chatted with a personable barman. Almost every time one of us mentioned a town, he’d say “I lived there once.” He couldn’t have been older than thirty. How long do you need to stay somewhere before you can say you “lived” there? I silently wondered.
On my last day in the South I saw two very different collections of folk art. At Joe Minter’s African Village In America, in the suburbs of Birmingham, the artist’s work spreads across multiple front yards, down and either side of a street of both occupied and abandoned houses, which dead-ends at a graveyard. Free for anyone to enjoy. Its calculated chaos alone is an amazing feat. Old toys, furniture, machine parts, shoes, cinder blocks, doors and anything else you might find left for dead, are transformed into powerful statements on god, gun violence, racism and America. The pieces hum with an unexpected, raw passion, unlike much else I’ve seen. My friend Tag told me to visit and I’m sure glad I did.
From there I drove up to the town of Cullman, Alabama. On its outskirts, deep in the tall pines, is the enormous St Bernard Abbey. Beside it, an elaborate gift shop and visitors center sits perched above a dramatically sloping hill, and nestled in that is the Ave Maria Grotto. 125 small, stone and cement, eerily childlike sculptures, built between 1912 and 1958 by Brother Joseph Zoetl, dot the hillside. Most are famous Christian landmarks, almost all of which Brother Zoetl never laid eyes upon. Wandering through, the otherwise idle hours Zoetl must have spent, immersed in this task, at the expense of the order’s generous parishioners, played on my mind. If you’re ever down that way, have $10 to spare, and want to see a literal concrete representation of the utter pointlessness of organized religion and false idols; look no further.
Driving back to Atlanta airport on a rainy morning, somewhere near Talladega National Forest, I saw the one Confederate flag I can recall. Standing limp in a grassy ditch beside the highway, not a soul in sight, with a TRUMP flag only feet away.
Great read. It reminds me of our trip from El Paso to Nashville. A fascinating part of America where in many places it's as if time has stopped still.