A Long Day at the End of the World Read online

  We were middle-aged hipsters, literary types. We’d led the bohemian life in Portland—before Portland was the youthful mecca it is now—frequenting blown-out clubs to hear our friends play music, haunting neighborhood bars, blathering away about Nietzsche in old diners. A little pretentious, maybe, but God was it fun. And finally a bit frazzled, tired of the rain, we left the West Coast to live the quieter life of western Mass.—to live in the country among trees and bears.

  What did I expect from Tuscaloosa? Not much, really. Maybe a modest counterculture. Maybe a sustainable core of different-minded, broad-minded people. Maybe a couple of good coffee shops and a bookstore. Maybe a record store. At her job interview, one of Kate’s future colleagues had reassured her that unlike what Gertrude Stein had said about another place (“there is no there there”), Tuscaloosa did have a there there.

  But we never found it. If it actually existed, it was doing a damn fine job of hiding out. In fact, nearly everyone we knew at the University of Alabama—from creative writers, to artists, to scholars—wanted to get the hell out. Almost everyone, when the annual academic job listings appeared, scrambled to land a position elsewhere. True, a few friends in town had made their peace, and I don’t mean to subtract from their lives. But to us it felt like nothing was going on, or what was going on was the opposite of what we had going on.

  It was perplexing. It was as if the things you took for granted simply didn’t exist: a decent movie theater, a library, a good public school for our four-year-old daughter. And though we felt alienated, sometimes desperately so, I came to believe that our liberal Christian friends had it worse—mostly Episcopalians who’d experienced viable religious communities in cities like Memphis, Nashville, and Atlanta. We joked that the Enlightenment just hadn’t made it this far west down Interstate 59 from Birmingham—that Descartes was just some Cajun guy from Louisiana. A Catholic, no doubt.

  In dark resignation—or simply to survive—we embraced the war cry of the Crimson Tide, the vaunted University of Alabama football team. Roll Tide, we’d all say for no particular reason. It became our salutation, acclamation, and glorification. It became our filler phrase and our phrase for goodbye.

  —“Hey Abe, you want to have a beer on the porch?”

  “Roll Tide, brother.”

  —“Kate, honey, I’m running out for more milk.”

  “Roll Tide.”

  —“Did you hear Michael got a story in Esquire?”

  “Jesus Christ, Roll Tide!”

  A form of resistance, really, a phrase that meant everything and nothing, a couple of words that helped us get by.

  * * *

  As I traveled over the Black Warrior River, I liked to picture Hernando de Soto crossing the same river several miles to the south in a makeshift boat—not only the clanking helmets, chain mail, and lances, but also the manacles of slaves and spiked collars of war dogs.

  De Soto trooped through Georgia and Alabama in 1540, searching for gold. He left thousands of Native Americans dead on battlefields, with many more thousands lost to disease carried by his fellow explorers and an accompanying herd of European pigs. A man of customary conquistador habits, he tortured and mutilated his Indian captives for information and sport, enslaving both men and women as his army wandered through the countryside. And following his gory expedition, the conqueror left a large swath of land blighted and abandoned.

  Though our goals were essentially different, we both traversed the river here for a specific reason. The fact is that Tuscaloosa lies on the fall line, the geological boundary at which the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain meet. In past ages the area below the fall line comprised a vast sea, with the Piedmont forming a rocky and hilly shoreline. As the sea receded, the sandy underwater floor emerged to create the modern Coastal Plain. Today—without human intervention in the form of locks and dams—Southern rivers above the fall line remain difficult to travel, while the deeper water below flows more smoothly to the ocean.

  The practical effect of all this was that people tended to settle near the fall line. For de Soto it meant he found a Native settlement below that boundary in the lush land known as the meander zone, where the river slowed down and began to cut back upon itself, creating rich soil for farming and fertile backwater for fishing. He pillaged that town for corn and other necessities in late November 1540. Nearly three hundred years later, it meant that the first white settlers established a trading post (at the site of another soon-to-disappear Indian village) where they could ship deerskins and timber downstream to the port of Mobile. In time the city of Tuscaloosa came into being, and in time I had my bridge to cross over, gazing into the black water flowing smoothly in both directions.

  De Soto was also relevant for other reasons. In his bloody wanderings the explorer passed near the present site of the Tri-State Crematory, moving southward from Tennessee. He buried his dead, including Indian slaves that may have been my ancestors, in a valley not too far from the crematory where my father’s bones would later lie. And in leaving the ground around him disturbed, his gaze remained fixed on an absent thing—his dazzling piles of gold—just as I remained focused on the lost body of my father.

  * * *

  On the other side of the river, traveling north on Highway 69, I left Tuscaloosa and entered Northport—another small town within our tiny metropolitan area. Immediately I saw a glossy sign for the new Dreamland, one of several slick franchise offspring of the original dive barbecue joint still serving ribs up in the Tuscaloosa hills. On my left I could make out the roofs of Historic Northport, a beautiful block of ancient buildings that had been miraculously preserved and that now housed a range of expensive and down-home establishments. And ahead stretched a mile of dilapidated shopping centers and businesses—some with familiar names from the past (Piggly Wiggly) and others that remained poignantly anonymous (Desperado’s Gifts and Collectibles, Claws and Paws, Bama Cash Express). The obligatory strip-mall churches (Grace Ministries, Living Faith Worship Center) also appeared, as well as a couple of stand-alone churches. Many of the storefronts lay empty, though a few new national banks had made their first inroads.

  When I saw a Walgreens drugstore rise in the distance, signaling a shift in commercial and cultural development, I quickly pulled right onto a cross street in search of a local landmark—Archibald’s—by legend the most old-time African American barbecue place around.

  Ever since moving to town I’d heard about Archibald’s, but no one, including the phone book, could give an exact address, and no one could provide proper directions except to say that it lay somewhere east of Highway 69, over the river. All previous expeditions had left me wandering and bewildered. Today the brick houses I passed gradually became poorer, leading to a housing project, and then, following a sequence of turns I could not describe to anyone, I stumbled upon the place.

  A fire smoldered in a trash can and another, bigger fire blazed next to a broken shack. No indication it was a restaurant, except the smell of smoked pork that swept through my car and clothes. Satisfied and illuminated, I breathed it all in, as only an erstwhile vegetarian prone to backsliding might do. Here lay the real counterculture of Tuscaloosa County, the one white folks like me could only visit: a place for lunch—a cement shed with a few stools, languishing among the brush and vines of the floodplain.

  4

  ALL I HAD FOR A DESTINATION was a field in a picture, a bulldozed and flattened piece of land. After sifting through all those bodies, the pits and trash and heavy brush, after the long and sometimes failed process of identifying bodies—especially those piled high in the pits, whose flesh had been commingled and thus degraded—the authorities decided to raze the crematory grounds as a memorial to the desecration. It was agreed, among the parties involved, that the property would be allowed to return to its natural state, held in perpetuity as an undeveloped and wild place.

  In the photograph, which I had pulled off the Internet, the field had just been plowed under, leaving thick tread marks in ro
ugh lines. A single white pine and a single oak stood front and left of center; more vague trees rimmed the edge, but the rest looked as flat and empty as the moon. I wondered whose father or mother or child lay between those two trees, moldering below the earth or festering in the air, and how long that body had lain there, changing with the seasons. Soon, of course, the flowers would come to this field (the photograph was about two years old) and then most likely tall grasses and more pines. But the first flowers would be of the disturbed variety—black-eyed Susan, Venus’s looking glass, sweet everlasting—the flowers born of upheaval and big machines.

  * * *

  “In the eyes: dream…” begins Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem describing his father in a faded old photograph. His father, with whom he had a tumultuous relationship, was a failed imperial officer in the Austrian military. My father was an amateur photographer who took pictures to keep track of things—to remember them—but mostly because he liked the machines. “O quickly disappearing photograph,” ends Rilke’s poem, “in my more slowly disappearing hand.”

  * * *

  I said look at this, and weirdly my own face reflected off the clear plastic case, merging with rows of crooked stripes. I looked like my father: we had the same black eyes and flat smile, the same high cheekbones. I smiled into the blue field of stars and glanced away.

  I said look at this because my father would have recognized the scene. He had dragged us to the new suburbs of Atlanta when I was twelve, in fact dragged us to a new home every two years because he worked for IBM. My older sister and I would shout “I’ve Been Moved” as we piled into the car for a new house, a new school, and a new set of friends. It was corporate policy, nationwide, meant to force promising white-collar employees to forge allegiance to the corporation and not to a place. It worked. We were the typical American family of a generation ago, dislocated and uprooted before any firm roots were put down. Tulsa, Oklahoma; Bartlesville, Oklahoma; Springfield, Missouri; Weston, Connecticut; and then Atlanta, Georgia. Each new home never really a home, and I was just going into the seventh grade.

  The land in my north Atlanta suburb appeared always under siege. In every direction the dirt lay exposed and piled up, making way for new, mostly treeless subdivisions with rows of fake-colonial box houses, with an occasional garage fastened to a different end of the same regular box for variety. New highways built, old country roads widened, chain gangs (real chains linking a gang of black men in white convict clothes) doing most of the digging and widening, filling in of streams, and chopping up of rattlesnakes, copperheads, and cottonmouths with shiny pickaxes. Farms converted to town houses and country clubs blooming among the subdivisions, more trees leveled for the eighteen holes and the tennis courts and the swimming pools. And then to service this blossoming civilization, another line of new roads and chain gangs and shopping centers and churches.

  On this day, I saw Queen Anne’s lace lingering along the roadside, kudzu devouring a stand of pines. And I saw what I’d seen years ago in Atlanta: the earth gouged out for gas stations and apartment complexes, and for new subdivisions with oddly similar brick houses seemingly dropped from space onto flattened lots. Daisies struggled in ditches and loose ground alongside LAND FOR SALE signs suggesting more digging to come. And then, as in Atlanta, some modest brick houses appeared that must once have been country houses, and near these older houses a trailer park (spent frames rusting with vines and dirty toys in front) that would soon relocate farther out.

  The most important feature of these developing neighborhoods lay hidden from view: the dead end. At my dead ends, often just cul-de-sacs surrounded by woods and half-finished houses, teenagers began arriving at twilight on their bikes. We’d sit on the backhoes and rustle through construction debris, careful to sidestep the poison ivy and pink briar. We’d stomp along subfloors and smoke cigarettes on the open stairs. We’d carry beers stolen from our parents’ refrigerators and chug them in unpainted kitchens. We’d kiss awkwardly in doorways, boys and girls playing games in giant dollhouses.

  After dark, the older teenagers took dominion. They (eventually including me) cruised through in Firebirds and Trans Ams, Volkswagens and Delta 88s, as word spread quickly about a newly carved-out cul-de-sac, a fresh breach in the thick pines and oaks. Always there was another dead end, in fact several of these oases—scaffolded and vacant, immune from adults and temporarily hidden from the law. Car radios blared in the night, generally pitting a gang in favor of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” which chastised the South for its flagrant racism, against those who preferred Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” which chastised Neil Young for chastising the South and which praised the blatantly racist Alabama governor George Wallace. (The Lynyrd Skynyrd album cover, like many of the Southern state flags at the time, proudly pictured the Confederate Battle Flag, the square X also known as a St. Andrew’s cross.) In general, the kids who’d Been Moved like myself fell into the Neil Young camp, while the native Southerners sided with the Confederates. For the most part, however, given our age and predicament, the political animosities never ran too deep and the groups pretty much got along. The New South was as strange to them as the Old South was to us. Thrown together in that altered suburban landscape, we shared a bewilderment that fostered camaraderie across cliques and politics.

  In that hot Southern dark, the sweet smell of pot and honeysuckle collected around our asphalt circle. We’d laugh and goof off. Eventually a parent from a nearby box house would call the police and—with a sixth sense finely tuned from practice—we’d fly back into our cars, slipping away to another dead end on an endless circuit. And maybe later we’d roll back into those hidden places and park our cars, finding new ways to extend our fine new bodies and limbs. But that’s it. That’s all we had to do in our far-removed Atlanta suburb after cruising McDonald’s and the Pizza Hut parking lot.

  I think the corporate kids were disturbed the most. We’d come from Connecticut and Illinois and California—from suburbs, yes, but ones attached to large cities with established progressive cultures. Atlanta, at that time, had no real cultural identity that spoke to us, other than its historical role in the civil rights movement, which our white suburban schools emphatically downplayed. And anyway the city was so far away, nearly thirty miles, which prevented us from regularly enjoying, for example, the single block of counterculture that bubbled up in Little Five Points, a small outpost lying even farther south than Emory University. In its place we had Southern Pride, that Confederate flag. And we had the earth itself, always torn up and exposing its rich red clay and then grassed over into homogenous subdivisions.

  I have a friend whom I see sometimes, my only friend I still know from that period, and we always have to talk about it: the zeros, the wind of nothingness that blew through our brains back then. The howl that ached to enter all of us and overtake us, propel us toward fraternities and sororities, and later whip us into corporate beings just like our parents.

  Of course I blamed them for the whole thing, especially my father. I blamed him for the stress of moving every two years, for the new friends I had to make and then replace along the way, for hauling me into this particularly blank wind and leaving me there.

  And probably my frustrated response to Tuscaloosa reflected my prior troubles—I harbored a simmering rage against my old suburb that I instinctively projected upon the present and that, in its quickness, tended to uncomplicate the forces at play. Even so, I believed a region was forged by the big plates underneath, the seismic shifts that allow for relatively stable or unstable ground.

  And as for my father, he was just a man bound up in the lingerings of a certain time and place, whose connection to disturbance began much earlier, at his own beginnings upon our movable earth.

  5

  WHEN HERNANDO DE SOTO PLUNDERED the ancient valley that would later hold the Tri-State Crematory, he searched for a legendary hoard of gold. It was one way—the expensive way—to acquire that substance, involving the building of
ships, the outfitting of expeditions, and the arming of soldiers to subdue Native populations. But back in Europe, in quieter fashion, early scientists sought to transmute base metals into gold. They attempted, through research and experimentation, to discover the philosopher’s stone: the essential ingredient in transforming lead into gold, and water into the fountain of youth. Spiritual wisdom remained the ultimate goal of the alchemist, with infinite wealth and infinite longevity as manifestations of that wisdom. Unfortunately for the alchemists—as well as millions of indigenous people—marauding and pillaging the New World proved more effective in producing gold.

  Strangely, nearly five hundred years later, a man named Brent Marsh practiced a different kind of alchemy at the Tri-State Crematory. In fact, he grew quite successful at it, and his particular branch of the science never failed to work.

  * * *

  During the first days of the discovery of the Tri-State Crematory Incident, the press—including Newsweek, USA Today, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—ran stories that registered the widespread community shock at the desecration. Over and over, Brent Marsh’s friends, acquaintances, and business relations expressed the highest regard for his family and its individual members, making their collective fall from grace so precipitous.

  In framing the history of the Marsh family, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution searched the genealogical records at the Walker County Library and discovered a potential white ancestor dating to the late 1700s. Not surprisingly, the connection remained murky. But without ambiguity, the Marsh bloodline did lead back to the first black child born in the county, Willie Marsh, around 1830. For nearly 170 years, then, the family lived as black citizens—second-rate citizens—in an overwhelmingly white part of Georgia.