Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Author

Introduction

Alabama Afternoons is a book of character portraits—from passing visits to full-scale profiles—of some of our state's remarkable people, famous or obscure. Culled from more than a decade of my roaming the state, present and past, to find people worthy of Sunday feature spreads, Alabama Afternoons is a collective portrait, too. From a day spent with Selma storyteller Katherine Tucker Windham and her friend artist Charlie Tin Man Lucas, to an afternoon with Montgomery Improvement Association president Johnnie Carr, to reminiscences about Birmingham area native Mel Allen, a broadcast legend who became the voice of the New York Yankees, Alabama Afternoons displays the wealth of compelling lives—and great storytelling—in the spirited, sometimes-melancholy, and always-involving Heart of Dixie.

This collection is not meant to be comprehensive—there are numerous source books, including the Encyclopedia of Alabama, for that—but reflective of my own curiosities and passions as a writer. Photographers and painters, novelists and journalists, civil rights figures, old people remembering way back when, ordinary folks with colorful stories to tell—these are some of my favorite subjects. While I am aware, of course, of the colorful traditions of Alabama in areas like sports and politics, I have bent my talents to venues not as much explored by contemporary nonfiction writers (though sports and politics do show as aspects of other pieces). Whether the profile be of New Jersey native Gay Talese, whose sojourn at The University of Alabama was the catalyst that propelled him into being one of America's most influential New Journalists, or Sara Hamm, the last Jew in Eufaula, determined to preserve the town's historic Jewish cemetery, my stories hope to turn up fresh angles on familiar folks or introduce little-known ones for the first time. Most of the people featured here have visibility within their community—or wider—but there are some famous just on their street corner, like the old domino players under the oak tree in Mobile, or the coon dog historians on a bench in Russellville.

Whatever the subject, I pay a lot of attention to how people speak, and do my best to retain idiosyncratic rhythms and colloquialisms. How we talk is sometimes as important as what we say. I'm interested in setting, too, so where these conversations take place is not just about geography, but often also about interior landscapes. My visit with E. B. Sledge, for example, author of the spectacular—and increasingly famous—World War II memoir With the Old Breed, occurs at his home in Montevallo, where he was battling cancer during what turned out to be his final days. That struggle, along with his joy in bird-watching through his bedroom window, became part of the story of this brave and sensitive veteran.

Most of the portraits are contemporary—people I can call up, travel to, sit with, or take a walk with—but I love history, too, especially in terms of how it shapes us today, so I have included here some stories about lesser-known figures who connect us to our state's past. While I have written sketches of world-known celebrities such as Olympian Jesse Owens, heavyweight champion Joe Louis, and the extraordinary Helen Keller, I have chosen here, instead, to include a few portraits of people who might otherwise be relegated to a footnote in the march of time: Abby Fisher of Mobile, believed to be the author of the first African American cookbook; Artelia Bendolph, who became an icon of the Depression-era South as a child from a photograph taken of her in a shack window in Gee's Bend. If I've been lucky enough to catch someone in their later years, like Bendolph—who has since passed away—I have spent time with them in person. If they are of an earlier era, like Walter Bellingrath, I try to capture a sense of them from those who knew them, in this case Edward Carl, at first Bellingrath's driver, but ultimately, it seems, his most trusted friend. My history is intended to have a personal feeling, enabling the reader to touch someone on the page who knew the person at the heart of the story.

Most of these pieces were originally written for the Press-Register, and my editors in Mobile have often given me ideas of where to look for interesting characters. The photographs that accompany each piece were, for the most part, taken by our newspaper's staff photographers, and show the talent of one of the best photography staffs anywhere.

The pieces were not written with categories in mind, but, in assembling them, I have put them into sections based on overt similarities, or undercurrents of connection: The Makers, The Tellers, The Journeyers, Witnesses to the Movement, Down Back Roads, Different Windows on Dixie, and Personal Sojourns.

The categories, in many ways, are fluid. I put novelist and journalist Howell Raines into Journeyers, because of the path his career has taken, though he is a teller, too. Stan Chassin and Tommy Tarrants, in the dramatic Deliver Us from Evil, are journeyers because of their transit over time—from two teens meeting in a violent confrontation, to their meeting up again more than forty years later in an emotionally heightened moment of connection.

The artist-photographer William Christenberry is in The Makers, but he could also be in Down Back Roads, since I traipsed behind him as he went exploring the Alabama countryside with his camera. Bessie Papas, the last survivor of the original Greek Orthodox settlers at Malbis plantation near Spanish Fort, is in Down Back Roads but could also fit into Different Windows on Dixie. That latter section highlights folks whose stories enable us to see an ages-old landscape and culture in unusual ways: through the eyes of Miss America 1951, Bebe Betbeze, or those of Alex Alvarez, a young man from the Poarch Creek reservation in Atmore, teaching Muscogee to Alabamians of Native American heritage.

Ultimately, the reader will create his or her own linkages among the pieces. An observation by novelist Sena Jeter Naslund, a reflection by journalist Diane McWhorter, an image captured by photographer Charles Moore, a story told by hairdresser Theresa Burroughs, lunch chat between Kathryn Tucker Windham and the Tin Man, a play of language and dominoes among old men beneath a weathered oak—certain moments, surely, will stand out for the reader and create new connections. Folks I've written about may not have met one another, or even lived in the same time period, but assembled here together their voices play off one another's in varying ways.

So what do all these profiles and conversations add up to? I would like to say that, at the end of it all, I have defined what it means to be an Alabamian. But I would rather that you, the reader from here or afar, fill in the blank. What I do know is that most of the people you will meet here have been shaped, in some way, by being from Alabama, or by having spent a pivotal time in their lives here. That defining experience may be because they love the state or hate it, can never leave or can only thrive far away—no matter. The sense of identity may not be as profound as one's religion or race, family lineage or professional calling, but it's an identity that has to be reckoned with, taken into account with all the others. Whether they embrace or wrestle with it, Alabama is part of who they are.

I have traveled all over the country and lived for twenty years in New York. In the vast world beyond the Deep South I rarely heard anyone ask a native of Topeka, What's it like to be from Kansas, or an Ann Arbor resident, What's it mean to be a Michigander? But I have been asked constantly—no, probed is the word—what's it like to be from Alabama? No doubt that the Civil War, the civil rights movement, movies, and famous (or infamous) politicians, athletes, musicians, and authors have generated a mythology about the state that, nationwide, cuts both ways. Alabama constantly lurks toward the bottom of the pack in literacy and high in rural poverty, but its accomplishments—the heart-piercing beauty of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the phenomenal expressiveness of Helen Keller, the simple yet history shaking defiance of Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus, the triumph amid bloodshed of marchers on Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge—are woven into the sensibility of the nation. Thus Alabama Afternoons, I like to think, is a small part of the even bigger question of what it means to be an American.

Answers and speculations aside, these visits are above all meant to be engaging, enjoyable, memorable, so don't stand there on the porch, but open the door—and come on in.

PART I THE MAKERS

A camera, a canvas, a sculpture, tales fashioned from ghost stories whispered at night—whatever the means, the tools of the artist are used, in this section, to render up a personal vision. That vision also reflects the time and place, and stays with us long after the artist has moved on.

My process of writing about artists involves my getting as close as possible to their act of creativity.

It is 100 degrees on a summer day, and I am tromping through a field in Newbern with artist William Christenberry, standing next to him as he sets up his box camera to take an exposure of a black barn. But that's not quite close enough for me. He steps aside and lets me duck under the hood so I can see the image of the barn on the camera's view finder.

I am in the living room of folk artist Bernice Sims in Brewton, talking about her paintings, but I want to see her in action, too. At my request, she moves by motorized wheelchair into her kitchen, mixes some acrylics, and touches brush to canvas.

Wandering through Tuscumbia and Florence with photojournalist Charles Moore, I see how he detects interesting images and quickly snaps them, continuing to converse with me the whole time.

What's made by storyteller Katherine Tucker Windham and sculptor Charlie Tin Man Lucas is a special friendship, too—artists of different generations and backgrounds whose sensibility is shared. Their sense of fun is shared, too, and one of my treasured moments in Alabama Afternoons came when heading out for lunch with the two of them. Imagine that: sitting down at a booth in a Selma bar-b-cue restaurant, listening to Windham and Lucas talk and laugh and inspire each other in their special and idiosyncratic visions.

William Christenberry

PILGRIMAGE OF THE HEART

Stewart

The pavement hot, the air close, the thermometer groaning past 100 degrees, the afternoon unfolds along a Hale County highway a half-hour south of Tuscaloosa where William Christenberry Jr., 63—one of America's most distinguished visual artists—is driving to his grandparents' home. By kudzu-filled ditches and dilapidated garages, by forgotten gas stations and repaired fences, the native son who's lived afar for forty years is making, yet again, a pilgrimage of the heart.

From the early 1960s, Christenberry has resided up north, having taught at the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, D.C., since 1968, but it is these landscapes—general stores with bright Coca-Cola signs, wooden houses with old Pontiacs out front, churches at the end of dirt roads—that beckon.

Growing up in Tuscaloosa, he'd visit his father's parents outside Stewart on weekends and for a week in summer, picking a little cotton, listening to his grandfather's stories, relishing his grandmother's biscuits served after the morning devotional. It was during these years, also visiting with his mother's parents in nearby Akron, when he grew to love the colorful tales of the Black Belt region; when he found, in the melancholy beauty of fading farmhouses, sheds, and barns, the source of his art.

He turns into a drive and parks deep in the shade to keep his camera equipment cool. He takes a swig of water for the crushing heat and snugs on a University of Alabama cap for the pounding sun.

I've been a Tide fan since I was a baby, he remarks of his alma mater.

He gained his bachelor's degree in fine arts there in 1958, then a master's in painting in 1959. He received an honorary doctorate in 1998, when he returned as commencement speaker. In his fantasy life, he jokes, he would have been a star quarterback on the football team.

Slowly, deliberately, he steps toward the battered walls of the farmhouse, cocking his eye toward the shower of light, noting the shadows, the vine-tangled eaves. It's a dying place, he reflects, and you can't help but be attracted to the fact it's dying. Memory and ghost forms become very important to me.

He comes to a buckled porch with cedar tree columns. I remember my grandfather, D. K. Christenberry, in his bed in the front room. He had one of his canes, carved in 1942. When he was well, I'd walk beside him.

His voice takes on wonderment, a boy again imagining his grandfather's strength with the cane: "He'd knock a scorpion out of the way, or a rock. One day, he slayed a dragon right before me.

At night, we'd have cornbread and sweet milk and a lot of iced tea. There'd be Bible readings, and he'd call on different family members to pray. I always prayed he wouldn't call on me.

He reaches a sun-leached, blue-green wall at the back of the house, a onetime interior wall facing a wing of the house with a kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. The wing is gone, sawed away by a family down the road and reattached to their own place. The wall now turns to the silent yard.

Christenberry touches it with his hand. It is an image—the wall, the paint, the haunting sense of lives gone by—he has captured many times.

He walks back to his van, takes out a large tripod, and sets it up near his grandmother's tattered bedroom window. Then he lugs out a big, brown box—an old-time portrait camera—and attaches it to the tripod.

Wiping the sweat from his forehead, taking his hat off, and neatly combing his straight black hair, he readies for the shoot. He takes out a photographer's dark cloth, drapes it over the camera except for the lens, and ducks beneath it. He stays there a long moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dark.

On the grid of the viewfinder, in an upside-down image, is the window to be photographed, its pale wood, its forgotten view, its pane no resident has peered through for forty years.

He sets the controls, hurries back to the van, brings back a negative in a light-sensitive sheath, drops it into the holder and . . . click. Lord, he exclaims, going back to the van with his prize, the negative carrying memory's imprint deep in its grain, I don't know how many pictures I've made of this place.

* * *

In the old days, the house, like the fields around it, was anything but silent.

D. K. and Eula Christenberry had thirteen children, some livestock, a patch of cotton, a few pecan trees, and lived near the train tracks that thundered with freight every afternoon. Their eldest was William, who had a knack for whittling toy scissors and jackknives from the balsa wood of cigar boxes. The young man married Ruby Willard Smith, who'd grown up only a few miles from the Christenberry home. They named their first of three children William Jr.

William worked for a bakery, driving a bread route from Tuscaloosa to nearby Greensboro, then took a job with an insurance company in Clanton, in peach country. When William Jr. was in high school, William Sr. took a job with Dairy Fresh, stationed first in Tuscaloosa then in Chickasaw outside Mobile. William Jr. stayed in Tuscaloosa, living with his maternal grandmother, Caroline Smith, while finishing high school and continuing on to The University of Alabama.

For the years his parents were in Chickasaw, he'd take the Greyhound bus from Tuscaloosa to Mobile to visit. One summer, he stayed and worked at a bookstore and bindery on Government Street.

One of the things I'm proudest of, Christenberry says of his parents, is that they never discouraged me from becoming an artist.

In 1944, when he was 8, his parents unwittingly gave him his first artistic tool, a Brownie Holiday camera—the Santa Claus Brownie, art critics would later dub it—to be shared with his younger sister.

While Brownie cameras were common gifts for kids in those days, in his hands, as he matured, Brownie snaps became a cornerstone of Christenberry's work. When he started taking color shots of rural Alabama as a way of recording impressions and as a basis for his paintings, he was encouraged by critics and colleagues to make more of them.

Christenberry's visionary Brownie images, as the critic Allan Tullos called them in Christenberry Reconstruction, made up a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1973. He currently uses a Brownie Bull's-Eye camera he bought at a Goodwill store in Memphis, getting film from a man who spools it for the out-of-date device. He believes that the Brownie lens has afforded him some of the most honest work he's ever done, simple, direct.

For a similar reason he favors the portrait camera that requires a black cloak and a tripod to keep it absolutely still. (Usually, his exposures are a quarter-second at F/22, he says.) I want my pictures to be a direct response to that which I see. There are no frills to it.

Richard Gruber, author of William Christenberry: The Early Years, 19541968 and director of the Ogden Museum of Southern art in New Orleans, says that several generations of Christenberrys have influenced the creativity of William Jr. Christenberry's grandfather was a cane-maker, his father a carver, and his mother a seamstress and quilt maker, setting the tradition of art making in the