Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South

I arrived in Ocala, Florida at the same time as a tornado warning. When I pulled off the Interstate the sky looked like bruised peaches, bluish-gray and yellow all at once.

Here, in the United States, the Road is supposed to be one of the big stories: the seduction of motion, of progress, of speeding away from the past. But today I felt the same as I did leaving the Atlanta airport – that the highway pulled me in and knocked the breath out of me, like an undertow with the force of a hundred oceans, sucking me into motion and away from all the stories nesting in the countryside. Maybe that’s because the last time I encountered the world-at-rest it was sunny and dusty and utilitarian. Now, leaving the same road, I found myself inside an extravagant purple storm that tugged at the Spanish moss on Ocala’s old trees. The pictures didn’t connect, and I wondered at the glue that held them together.

Ocala looked like a Southern town in drag. Everything there was exaggerated: the steamy heat; the campy Victoriana of the wood-frame houses; the trees! The trees were downright Gothic. Magnolias, palms, and best of all, live-oaks. The latter, characteristically shorn of fussy, incidental twigs, always look gnarled and old; dripping with Spanish moss they were biblical. It was as if rows of Old Testament prophets lined the side streets, waiting to convert paper boys and joggers.

As I headed southeast Ocala gave out onto a commercial strip, as tawdry and generic as any in America. This soon petered out into aluminum-sided, pastel-colored retirement villages, then horse farms, then swamps, and finally, a down-at-heel holiday community on a lakeshore, planted with a sign that read ‘Hernando’. I asked a woman in a beauty parlor which of the three motels I should stay in. ‘Go for the Mid-Florida Motel and Trailer Park,’ she concluded. I pictured the ranch-style units I’d just seen down the road behind a parking lot of slimy green puddles, shadowed by clumps of Spanish moss. ‘I might stay there if I had to. I wouldn’t set foot in the others.’

I had just time to take a cold shower – ringing Colonel Rod for directions from an outdoor pay phone had given me a prickly heat rash – before finding my way out of town through darkening, uninhabited stretches of piney outback to his large, Spanish-style ranch house. I had been eager to talk to a well-known Atlanta storyteller named Chuck Larkin: a real character, by all accounts. But Chuck was unavailable, so he gave me Colonel Rod’s name, and told me he was ‘a good ol’ swamp boy, and a helluva storyteller.’ I imagined a gruff military man with gruff military stories. One who would spurn white panama hats, Hawaiian shirts, and small poodles with jeweled collars. But these were the attributes of the person who answered to Colonel Rod.

‘Colonel Rod Hendrick of the Cracker Brigade, at your service, ma’am,’ he said.

He led me into a spacious, open-plan home with the world’s largest television screen in one corner. When we stood in front of it, the TV characters’ heads were three times bigger than our own. In his study, Colonel Rod sat down beneath a stuffed raccoon and a model airplane, locked me with his turquoise eyes, and said in a dreamy voice, ‘Once upon a time, on the far side of the moon …’ he paused, looked around, and winked, ‘these two crackers went into a bar … Ha! Gotcha! I hate that kind of vomity storytelling, don’t you?’

Colonel Rod explained that a local reporter had given him the nickname ‘Colonel.’ He was actually a retired salesman from Miami, who had also been a cop and happened to be a ‘pedigreed Florida cracker’.

‘I grew up dirt poor, south of Miami. You know what a cracker is, girl?’

I grimaced in half-knowledge. In Tom Wolfe’s novel crackers had been Georgia good old boys.

‘You’re eatin’ grits for breakfast; you know a couple a guys named Skeeter or Gator; you’re huntin’ white tail deer with a six-beer handicap; then you’re a cracker. Used to be a derogatory term, you know, like Redneck, or White Trash. But not anymore.’

Colonel Rod gave me an essay he’d written on Florida Crackers, which put the derivation of the term down to the cracking sound pioneers made with bull whips as they rounded up cattle from the palmetto swamps. These pioneers, Colonel Rod added, had headed south ‘to get away from Yankee oppression’ after the Civil War.

‘Now I’m a storyteller. Say the American Tobacco Company has a conference. I’m the entertainment. I get $500 a gig, and a dollar a mile for transportation. I also teach these workshops in storytelling. There was a teacher who took one of them. Afterward, every Friday afternoon, she held a storytelling hour … the kids were taking to it like, I don’t know, a fish to water or something like that. They loved it.’

‘That’s really great,’ I said politely.

‘Well, she called me later and told me about a little boy in her class called Leon, who is a fantastic storyteller. She said, “He can tell tales, and he tells them with a gift like Mark Twain. He’s fantastic. But what I think is, that he’s lost touch with reality. Now Leon is just lying. And I’ve created a monster. What should I do?”’

When Colonel Rod got to the part about Leon his voice changed. He started tugging on his vowels as if they were made of spandex, stretching out ‘lying’ to sound like ‘li-on’. It occurred to me that a story might have started without my knowledge. I was a little confused until he said he’d advised the teacher to tell Leon the silliest, most outlandish, ‘most lyinist’ story she could think of–‘maybe that will break him out of it.’ Then I knew I was right.

Colonel Rod held my eyes to his, almost without blinking; my peripheral vision caught a ceiling fan spinning directly above his head, like a whirligig hat. He was saying that the teacher could see Leon was getting worse. So she told him a tall tale about being attacked by an Alaskan bear on the way to school, on the corner of Alligator Avenue and Center Street. A little black-and-white dog had killed the bear and saved her.

‘Leon,’ Colonel Rod concluded, ‘just sat there goggle-eyed. Big-eyed as a bug. You got to believe me. And the teacher looked over and said, “Now Leon, do you believe that story?”

And Leon said, “Yes ma’am. That’s my dog.”’

Colonel Rod was on a storytelling jag. He’d told me he’d numbered his stories one through twenty-one as a fail-safe mnemonic for when he’s performing. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘Quick: what’s number seventeen?’

‘A cracker in a bus station!’ he roared, and he was off.

After dinner – a healthy, low-fat meal fixed by his wife Brenda – Colonel Rod had led me through a shoulder-sized gap in the electric cattle fence surrounding his house to a replica of an old Florida Keys fishing shack that he’d built out back. It looked like the retreat of a degenerate boy scout: kerosene lamps for atmosphere, even though it was wired for electricity; pots and pans hanging from the ceiling; two sets of bunk beds; photographs of people who had caught big fish; a makeshift bar stocked with gin and bourbon; old Southern state flags emblazoned with the stars and bars of the Confederacy (all since replaced as politically incorrect, except that of South Carolina, which is the subject of a bitter debate).

A violent thunderstorm had trapped us in the shack and Brenda in the house with our cappuccinos. ‘This,’ Colonel Rod had said, beaming, ‘is where friends of mine come and turn the monkey loose. Y’know, guys getting together to get drunk and fart.’

As the storm worked itself into a full gale so did Colonel Rod. I could feel him shrewdly calculating audience response – in this case, a captive audience of just one – judging if he had succeeded in his two favorite, occasionally incompatible, aims: to startle and to please. As I betrayed only pleasure (politeness is like a hormonal imbalance with me – I can’t help it), he got a little reckless. Not only did he slip into what he called his ‘cussin’ stories’, but others that took tired, if belligerent, pot-shots at women, gays, and a variety of other minorities. On cops: ‘There are no policemen left. Only social workers.’ On blacks: why there should be highway signs for exiting white drivers in parts of Miami that read, ‘Beware: Ghetto ahead.’ But then he added, ‘I guess the same goes for them, too. Man, I wouldn’t want to be a black guy made a wrong turn in South Boston.’

Colonel Rod was a storyteller caught between personae – Florida cracker or worldly businessman? – in the presence of a fastidiously indulgent listener who refused to offer directional signals. He veered all over the place, from cracker jokes to a troubling tale inspired by a Flannery O’Connor short story, and I liked him for having humility enough to lay bare the lifeline between storyteller and audience – or perhaps he just couldn’t help himself. During a long tale about a pulpwood truck driver and a psychiatrist, I decided that I would trust Colonel Rod with my life, but never my feelings.

After an hour and a half the storm grew worse, and I got too tired to consider anything but the sounds coming out of his mouth.

THE MULE EGG

It was the Depression. Everybody was broke all over the whole country. And in Atlanta, Georgia, there were two city slickers up there, worked downtown, lived in an apartment downtown, had never been anywhere except downtown. All they knew was asphalt and concrete. Well, when the Depression slammed in here, both of them lost their jobs. So they decided – they wasn’t too smart, but they was good old boys – they decided they was gonna pool their money, come to Florida and go farming. Now I wouldn’t think that was too smart, but they was industrious. So they bought an old black Model A truck, and here they come south with this Model A truck, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.

They was comin’ down Highway 27, which was a gravel road in them days, and they got just south of Ocala, and they seen a sign nailed to a live oak tree, and the sign said, ‘Plough Mule For Sale.’ Old Slem was driving the truck, and he said to his partner Clem, ‘Look at that, Clem! I forgot about that! We got to have us a plough mule.’ Said, ‘We can’t farm without a mule. Pull in there, we’ll see what that guy wants for it.’

So they pulled in this farmyard, and the guy was sittin’ there. He said, ‘Get on out, boys, get on down, come on in.’ And he said, ‘Sir, sir, we saw your sign back there says you got a plough mule for sale.’

Farmer said, ‘That’s right, and he’s a good ‘un too, son.’ Clem said, ‘Well, we want to buy a mule for farming. We’re from Atlanta.’ So the farmer heard opportunity knocking right away, see. He recognized these guys being city slickers. They said, ‘What do you want for that mule, sir?’ Farmer said, ‘I want two hundred dollars for it.’

TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS? They couldn’t believe it. Their eyes was bulging. ‘We just come from Atlanta wantin’ to be farmers. But two hundred dollars? We can’t afford that.’ Now I’m going to give you a little history here. During the depression, you could buy a ridin’ horse for five or ten dollars, but a trained, young pack mule was running a hundred seventy-five, two hundred dollars. Worked just like a tractor. Anyway, Clem said, ‘No, we just quit our jobs, we can’t afford that.’ Farmer said, ‘Well, how much money you boys got between you then?’ They said, ‘We ain’t got but twenty-five dollars.’

Well, the farmer said, ‘Boys’ – he had been peddling them old central Florida watermelons from his watermelon patch, and he had two of them left over, on a wagon over there where he’d been sellin’ em, and he was just fixin’ to bust ’em up because they was rotten, you know, and throw em over the fence and feed em to his cows – he said, ‘Boys, see them two green things over there on that wagon?’ They said, ‘Yessir.’ He said, ‘Do you know what they are?’ They said, ‘No sir, we don’t.’ He said, ‘Boys, you just happen to be looking at two of the finest mule eggs in the state of Florida, right there.’ They said, ‘Mule eggs? Never heard of such a thing.’

The storm was directly overhead at this point and the shack was shaking. Thunder followed lightning before I could start to count the seconds. About the time Colonel Rod pronounced the words ‘mule eggs,’ a lightning bolt lit up the window behind him, stinging my eyes with an instant image of cross-hatched tree branches across a background of seared white shards. I thought incongruously of the German Expressionists, and felt anxious.

The farmer said, ‘You’re lookin’ at two of the finest mule eggs in Florida. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll let you have one of them mule eggs for five dollars.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what else I’m going to do. I’ll get some straw out of the barn, and I’ll make you a nest up the back of your truck. You put that mule egg in there, you throw a blanket or a jacket over it, keep it warm, and in about two weeks it’ll hatch out, and you’ll have yourselves your very own baby mule. It’ll be gentle as a housecat, and you’ll have a fine mule there.’

‘Boy, luck is on our side,’ said Clem and Slem. So he got the straw, and he made this big old nest, and they put that watermelon, I mean, ah, mule egg, up in there, and they put a blanket on it and paid the farmer, and they took off down Highway 27, comin’ south. And now I live in that part of the country. A hilly part. And they come to Clairmont, Florida. Now Clairmont is in a valley. A great big hill goes down in there, and up out the other side. Well these old boys wasn’t too smart. Here they come, they come down into Clairmont, and they did alright then, but when they started out the other side, the mule egg went, dumpty, dump, dump, dump, and it fell out in the middle of the road and – splat! – busted all to pieces. Big old pile of rotten red mess. And you know how them swamp rabbits get on the side of the road, late in the evenin’? Well, it was late in the evening, and there was a swamp rabbit standing there, and it spooked him when that watermelon hit the road, and he jumped out and got right in the middle of that red mess.

Well these two boys slammed on the brakes. Pulled over to the side of the road and jumped out, and looked back, and there sat that rabbit right in the middle of that mule egg. They said, ‘Look, he’s alive! He survived it! He’s OK! Get him! Catch him, catch him!’ And boy, they took off after this baby mule. They had five dollars tied up in him. They yelled, ‘Catch him, catch him!’

Well that old rabbit took off. He went through a briar patch, under a barbed wire fence. They chased him about a half a mile or so and they got in this kind of shape – Colonel Rod gasps like he’s dying – they just couldn’t even breathe. They couldn’t go another step. And as I said, old Clem was the smarter of the two, he was hanging on a tree, and Slem was sittin’ on a log. And Clem said, ‘Let him go, son, let him go. Just let him go. I don’t believe I want to plough that fast no-how.’

I desperately had to go to the bathroom. The storm had stopped abruptly, and Colonel Rod offered to direct me through the dark, dripping thicket of the backyard to his reproduction outhouse (also wired for light). When I got up to leave the shack, I noticed that behind me all along had been a framed photo of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., shaking hands. ‘One of my favorite possessions,’ said the Colonel, sounding like he meant it.

Back at the Mid-Florida Motel, around midnight, I sat cross-legged on my bed taking notes, thinking for some reason of Cyclorama. I had an uncanny sensation of motion. All of a sudden I realized that the floor was moving. I put my glasses on and a dozen immense, scuttling cockroaches resolved into focus. Having just read Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy, his saga of traipsing through Congo with God knows how many parasites attached, I tried not to panic. But then again, this wasn’t Congo, and I had a choice. I grimly packed my things and slept – or rather lay awake all night listening to rain pelt the roof – in the back seat of the car.

The next morning I remembered I was actually in Florida, and decided to take a detour to the coast. Central Florida – actually the northwestern part of peninsular Florida – has no big hotels, no crowds, no Disney characters. The accents are rural, the land more inclined to scrub forest than cultivation or pasture. This may have been the Sunshine State, but I wasn’t in the playground part. It was still the South. And it actually looked like rain.

Colonel Rod’s cracker shacks dotted the landscape: tiny clapboard houses, often raised on cinderblocks to avoid flooding, leaning heavily on makeshift front porches. They were almost always half-hidden by shade trees, rarely exposed to the sun. I imagined dark rooms inside and mildew, windows democratically open to both breezes and mosquitoes in equal measure. In this climate it is air-conditioning that draws a line between real poverty and the lower rungs of middle-class comfort. Without artificial coolants, people still have to stop what they’re doing and sit in the shade, as they have for generations, and wait to cool off, and tell each other stories while the sweat dries (or maybe these days they just sit inside and watch TV). The majority of Southern stories aren’t about poverty any more than they are about heat or shade. They’re simply one by-product of a lifestyle that has either vanished – which is why tale-telling is so often associated with the elderly – or that we now call ‘poor.’

The sky began chucking it down. An unrelenting series of fierce rain squalls, really like thimble-sized monsoons, belted the car as I drove toward a small town on the West Coast called Cedar Key. Whenever one hit I was nearly blinded for about seven nerve-wracking minutes, and had to inch along Highway 19 at 25 mph; when it let up the windscreen revealed an unbroken flatness grown over in stumpy, grayish-brown scrub.

Cedar Key is marooned three miles out in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of a series of low bridges. It is a small town – only around seven hundred residents in summer – given over to dissolute, late nineteenth-century buildings with peeling paint and sagging clapboards, columns staggering to support second-story porches. Palm trees and hand-lettered signs advertising bait and cold beer cheered the place up in a spirit of easy-going unconcern, rather than neglect. I drove the two blocks separating the last bridge from the Gulf and parked near the harbor. The sky over the water was the color of pigeons, smudged gray and white, and sheet lightning flashed offshore. The air was so heavy that the smell of beer from nearby bars hung in it like a net.

I wandered into one and sat next to an old man who was simultaneously smoking, drinking a Bud, and eating a Fudgesickle. He told me he was hiding out from the cancer that a doctor said was going to get him. I looked alarmed and he laughed. ‘Better wait for it in a bar than at home watching TV.’ In the next breath he said that a fishing ban had killed the commercial fishing industry in Cedar Key about five years ago, and now clamming was the big thing.

‘What do you get?’ I asked. ‘Cherrystones?’

His glance at me was the fastest I’d seen any part of him move. ‘Aw, you must be from Boston or somewheres up North, am I right? Nobody says cherrystones ‘round here.’

The bartender looked from me to the beer I had ordered (Newcastle Brown Ale), seemed to satisfy some internal inkling, then lost interest and returned to her phone call. ‘Storm’s knocked the power out at my mom’s, down by Rosewood,’ she yelled to someone in the kitchen. I’d seen the Rosewood highway sign on the road to Cedar Key, but it had seemed to apply only to empty acres of scrub forest. Beside it stood a hand-painted placard that read ‘Rosewood Memorial.’

Cedar Key relies on its wonderfully degenerate buildings to set the disreputable, rum-running mood of the place (residents did actually run guns and booze during the Civil War). Because Rosewood had no buildings, however, I had to call Dick Newman, who works in African-American Studies at Harvard, to find out why the name stirred an uneasy association with violence deep in my memory. He told me that in 1922 a white woman had accused a black man from Rosewood – a predominantly black town – of raping her (her accusation was reputedly false, covering up an affair). White vigilantes from the surrounding area retaliated by burning every structure in Rosewood bar one, a farmhouse owned by a white man, and massacred every black resident they found. With the help of the spared white farmer, the mothers saved some of their children by hiding them in a well on the farm property. A grand jury subsequently looked into the matter, but never brought any charges, and the town ceased to exist in all but name.

It had occurred to me earlier that morning, as I was driving through the rain, that while stories ideally link us to the past and to other cultures and traditions, opening the world wider, storytelling itself can sometimes be a way of narrowing experience, of not hearing. To tell (and tell and tell and tell) is not to listen. The teller effectively becomes like a television set, capable of disseminating stories but not of taking them in. Colonel Rod’s barrage of tales the night before had effectively kept me and my disruptive, feminist opinions at bay; I don’t think that shutting me up was his intent, but it had that effect. Like violence, which strips stories from the landscape or buries them with its victims, storytelling can occasionally be a reactionary device, a reflex of the fearful that may be wielded like a defensive – and now and then a deadly – weapon.

I drove out of Cedar Key in a dispirited mood, back past the town that was only a story, and retraced my route north toward Georgia.

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