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Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South
Pamela Petro
An enthralling, rollicking tour among the storytellers of the American Deep South.The story of the South is not finished. The southeastern states of America, the old Confederacy, bristle with storytellers who refuse to be silent. Many of the tales passed down from generation to generation to be told and re-told continue to change their shape to suit their time, stretching elastically to find new ways of retailing the People’s Truth. Travelling back and forth, from the Carolinas to Louisiana, from the Appalachians to Atlantic islands, from Virginian valleys to Florida swamps, and sitting before bewitching storytellers who tell her tales that hold her hard, Pamela Petro gathers up a fistful of history, and sieves out of it the shiny truths that these stories have been polishing over the years. Here is another America altogether, lingering on behind the façade of the ubiquitous strip-mall of anodyne, branded commerce and communication, moving to other rhythms, reaching back into the past to clutch at the shattering events that shaped it and haunt it still.
Copyright (#ulink_224990c5-bdc4-5393-915d-e031043e0f1d)
The author and the publishers of this work would like to express their gratitude to the following: Louisiana State University Press for permission to quote from Black Shawl by Kathryn Stripling Byer (Copyright © 1998 by Kathryn Stripling Byer); Copper Canyon Press for permission to quote from Deepstep Come Shining by CD. Wright; Vintage Press for permission to quote from North Toward Home by Willie Morris; J.M. Dent and Sons for permission to quote from ‘Eheu Fugaces’ from Collected Poems 1945–1990 by R.S. Thomas; and Universal Music Publishing Ltd for kind permission to quote lyrics from ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ (King/Vanzant/Rossington). Although we have tried to trace and contact all copyright holders before publication this has not been possible in every case. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary emendations at the earliest opportunity.
Fourth Estate
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Fourth Estate is a registered trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Limited
First published by Flamingo 2001
Copyright © Pamela Petro 2001
Copyright disclaimer: All of the material printed in optima retains the copyright of the storytellers featured in this book.
Pamela Petro asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007292295
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007391073
Version: 2016-02-17
Dedication (#ulink_ceb86c05-e40b-58ec-a1e5-9f73ec4d20f7)
For Marguerite Itamar Harrison,
who introduced me to the American South
and the Southern Hemisphere.
Contents
Cover (#u96a38b1d-b5ac-5c50-8f24-94178243de78)
Title Page (#u059a6dc5-cbd9-58ee-9394-b15b3b2f8e59)
Copyright (#ulink_07e584f4-4832-5fa4-8e8f-acb036417bf1)
Dedication (#ulink_c8080964-5605-55a3-895e-e30310952676)
Map of the American South (#ulink_71dfeb94-a7a0-5d92-9840-8fcb5c118fa9)
The Prologue (#ulink_23948d1f-6964-5ab6-9e45-4403939591c7)
JOURNEY 1 (#ulink_ebefd322-b028-5764-ab8b-e561aa462e1d)
AKBAR’S TALE (#ulink_4d9ab19c-9b4f-5f5a-b8b1-88084a956733)
Tar Baby (#ulink_948d760f-5fbf-5361-8d49-3d1c2ef429db)
COLONEL ROD’S TALE (#ulink_ff771ca8-bb38-521b-9f11-31f6eb352a14)
The Mule Egg (#ulink_995393fb-ac92-501a-920f-52680bafb153)
VICKIE’S TALE (#ulink_3d0bdb70-5d62-5f65-a6e5-aa79e8eae285)
ROSEHILL’S TALE
The KUDZU’S TALE
Grandfather Creates Snake
ORVILLE’S TALE
Jack and the Varmints
DAVID’S TALE
Ross and Anna
JOURNEY 2
VERONICA’S TALE
A Polar Bear’s Bar-be-cue
Taily Po
KWAME’S TALE
The Story of the Girl and the Fish
ALICE’S TALE
CORNELIA’S TALE
The Plat-eye
FOUCHENA’S TALE
The Flying Africans
MINERVA’S TALE
TOM’S TALE
The Story of Lavinia Fisher
JOURNEY 3
RAY’S TALE
JOURNEY 4
OLLIE’S TALE
KATHRYN’S TALE
The Grandfather Tales
DAVID JOE’S TALE
The Peddler Man
KAREN’S TALE
Rosie and Charlie
The Tale of the Farmer’s Smart Daughter
OYO’S TALE
MITCH AND CARLA’S TALE
How My Grandma was Marked
Wicked John
The Bell Witch’s Tale
ANNIE’S TALE
Shug
My First Experience with a Flush Commode
ANGELA’S TALE
ROSE ANNE’S TALE
The Song In The Mist
Granny Griffin’s Tale
The Dead Man
Keep Reading (#u12fa6c67-14e6-5142-b02a-6eedf5829623)
Index of Stories/Storytellers
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
Map of the American South (#ulink_04700d7a-9d15-5a62-8b38-68b25c8942a0)
(#ulink_04700d7a-9d15-5a62-8b38-68b25c8942a0)
‘In America, perhaps more than any other country, and in the South, perhaps more than any other region, we go back to our dreams and memories, hoping it remains what it was on a lazy, still summer’s day twenty years ago – and yet our sense of it is forever violated by others who see it, not as home, but as the dark side of hell.’
WILLIE MORRIS, North Toward Home
The Prologue (#ulink_cba48dac-620a-5c86-bc6a-f5404c966fe1)
Chaucer said it was in April that people long to go on pilgrimages. I was two months late; the desire didn’t come upon me until June. His Canterbury-bound pilgrims were moved ‘to seek the stranger strands/Of far-off saints, hallowed in sundry lands.’ A nice idea, but again, my journey differed in the details. No sundry lands for me. Like a contented lodger taken in by a big, unruly family, I lingered in just one place, or one household, you might say, within the United States: the American South. And I wasn’t seeking saints.
What Chaucer’s pilgrims and I have in common is that we chose stories as our waymarks. I traveled from the Atlantic seaboard across the high country of Appalachia to the Gulf Coast, listening to Southern storytellers tell me their tales. Like the Knight, the Nun and the Wife of Bath, stories served all of us – listeners and tellers alike – as compasses of understanding to high country and low, to the past and present, to ghosts and the living, to right, wrong, and finally, to the way home. Chaucer knew that stories are the surest guides on any journey. They are, in fact, journeys themselves, leading out of the graspable, sweaty present into the vanished or imaginary worlds that support it. They give depth and shading to the here and now, comment on it, contradict it, and crosshatch all that we think we know about a particular place with the shadows of lives long gone and schemes of characters who never actually breathed, but flourish in communal daydreams.
Visit the old coal-mining region of eastern Kentucky these days and you’ll see the green hills roll by like a bright, inland sea, buoying up Interstate 64 and the service industries moved down from the Northeast to take advantage of lower taxes. Then find someone with a minute or two to spare, and ask him to tell you a local tale. Maybe over a cup of coffee, or lunch of tinned fruit and cottage cheese at a diner, he’ll spin out The Black Dog, which is about a coal-mine collapse and the heroic pet who protected his master even in death. It’s a tale about community and the fear of outsiders, even outsiders offering help; about trust and the habitual acceptance of death and the forgotten bond between men and animals. This is the heritage of the upland, coal-mining South, and it’s invisible to the eye. But stories like The Black Dog are able to unearth an older Kentucky, one that still has relevance because it lives in the memories of service industry employees who drive to work on the Interstate, even though it may no longer be reflected in their daily landscapes. Travelers can’t see it, but they can hear it if they listen.
Stories provide the connective tissues of a community, a region, or even a big, overgrown household like the South. They link the skin of the present to the unseen organs of the past, binding them into a continually shapeshifting body by turns beautiful and terrible and occasionally – disturbingly – oddly reminiscent of looking into a mirror. In my case, the glass reveals a surprise: a Northern woman, a Yankee who came of age in Britain, and now lives within the gravitational pull of Boston, Massachusetts – the geographic butt of nearly every dumb joke I heard in the South (‘Hey,’ the Texaco cashier would say, as I paid for the gas I’d just pumped, ‘hear the one about the guy from Boston who bought his girlfriend a mink coat?’ Or, ‘There was this guy from Boston with a chicken …’ in which case I’d affect a Southern accent and say I was from Virginia). It’s a fair question to ask what I was doing there.
Tony Horowitz wrote in Confederates in the Attic that, ‘The South is a place. East, West, and North are nothing but directions.’ When I read that my kneejerk reaction was to agree; I couldn’t explain why, but I wanted to find out. In my previous book, a journey round the world in search of Welsh expatriates – a group for the most part anchored by a concrete sense of identity – I had written of myself, by way of contrast, ‘To be an American, I sometimes feel, is to be blank, without a nationality or language.’ It was easy for me to write that sentence. I grew up in the suburban New York area, the heartland of the American communications industry that daily beams a facsimile of itself to the world. To be Northern, for me, is simply to be American. But Southerners – at least those in print – seemed to feel very differently, branded on the soul by the geography of their birth. Why? What place-bond did they have that I didn’t? In North Toward Home, Willie Morris, a Southerner from Mississippi, wrote of himself, ‘The child … was born into certain traditions. The South was one, the old, impoverished, whipped-down South; the Lord Almighty was another; … the Negro doctor coming around back was another; the printed word; the spoken word; and all these more or less involved with doom and lost causes, and close to the Lord’s earth.’ I had no such waymarks, and however fraught the Southern identity might be, I yearned for such a bond.
Growing up in the Sixties I had learned that the South was a scary place. Whenever I tried to conjure images of the things I knew to be there – tobacco fields, sharecroppers’ shacks, flat-roofed stores on Main Streets and old-fashioned buses – I saw them in my mind’s eye through an eerie blue light. These Gothic stage sets of mine had origin in a mundane reality: the fact that most of my childhood impressions were thrown into our safe, Northern living room by my parents’ black and white television set. Unfortunately, they were usually disturbing: blurred scenes of race riots and fierce men with firehoses, dogs attacking crowds of protesters and marchers in pointy hats and white sheets. It didn’t help that the picture used to roll a lot (usually set right by a whack on the side), making the images even stranger. The South looked like the site of a haunting: a dream world, not a waking one.
I was a dramatic child, given to extravagant musings – usually involving hauntings closer to home, principally in my closet – and eventually outgrew most of my darker impressions. But scratch the surface of nearly all Yankees and there remains a prejudice against the South – an unvoiced, but understood, moral superiority. We won the Civil War because we were right. ‘Be careful down there.’ I heard that advice from more than a few Boston friends. ‘Will you be safe alone?’ ‘You know, it’s still pretty rural down there. All kinds of things go on.’
