Small Visions from a Timeless Place

These paragraphs are, quite frankly, an experiment. They are impressionistic vignettes--or, with luck, prose poems--having to do with the American South, the place where I was born and where I hope to die. My method, or lack of it, was simply to cut in particular memories and impressions and to go with them wherever they took me.

The general plan of these pieces demands a good deal of the reader. I ask him, first of all, to give up his external identity--that is, his body--but to keep his senses preternaturally alive. I ask him to become invisible and to be able to take any shape that gets him deeper into some aspect of the South, or Jericho, as I, with the help of the King James Bible, have renamed it.

I make no pretense of possessing Biblical scholarship. It is sufficient to my purposes that there was a Promised Land and that Jericho was the first city in it. Those facts and the fact that Jericho fell, as the South fell, in the American "Iliad" of the Civil War. Those are the only conjunctions I wish to make. The rest of what I am trying to do here is purely mine and, beyond the connections I have indicated, is no fault of the Bible's nor of King James's.

The idea of the reader's becoming invisible and omniscient, ranging unsystematically over the Southern land and through many types of Southern people, is fundamental here. I should like the reader to be able to become a horse, a pine tree, a house, a church, a stock car, a hen, a rattlesnake, a human prisoner, a blues player at night in his cell listening to a freight train, a raccoon in a tree, a revivalist in a tent in midsummer. I should like the reader to help me behold the South and not simply see it. And I should like him to behold with such intensity, with whatever help these paragraphs are capable of giving, that he will look into the nearest mirror and half-believe that if he concentrates strongly and imaginatively enough, in his individual way--one known only to him, and from birth--he will see himself fade out before his own eyes and become what these paragraphs most want him to be: a Spirit, the Essence of himself, a Beholder of Jericho.

Ruins, where a child was conceived. The great house is gone. Nothing remains of it but the four stone columns that were the chimneys. The rock stumps of aristocracy, the Jericho version of Greek, the broken Doric, are easily overcome by ivy and a recent invader from Japan, kudzu. But 200 yards away are slave quarters, 200 years old, still standing, though roofless, and the future of Jericho is boiling within them. Here was something wrong. A child of two bloods was conceived here. The owner, the Man of Columns, knew how and when, but he could not say why. His only son went out through his own children into the world. The house and the Old Jericho fell, but the blood went on. It has flashed a left and a right--another left and right and the opponent is down. A new heavyweight champion speaks quietly of the need to love each other, but he fights. Far from him, the shell-walled ruins of slave quarters seethe with meaning, and History refers to them at every moment.

• • •

Noise, and a huge racket assembling. Mass is producing, and the man turning frames in the foreground has come off the farm to produce it. He has a long wolfish face and bad teeth, but he's got the noise of making automobiles beaten: He sings at the top of his lungs. Not even a Spirit can make out the words, but we know that he is singing because now he is dancing long-legged, buck-dancing with the slowly whirling car frame.

• • •

Behind third base, and free of the looms. The girl from Ellijay, Georgia, watches the batter of the other girls' softball team. Her mind, a maze of shuttles and bobbins, concentrates meanly. We're gonna kill 'em. We're second in the league. Inside the mill, the looms fly in place, and we leave the field and drift inside, then flicker among the high-speed threads. In the waterfalling thunder and the shadowy haze of garment speed, in the hum of runaway geometry, we see faces, all faces of Jericho. One of the ways we rose from the ashes was into the mill. The faces belong to the land, the fingers to the thread.

• • •

Power-sawed from a pine forest, the marble quarry looks, at dusk, as though it might be the largest square hole in the world. With a beautiful dreaming motion appropriate for descent into the open country of gravestones, we go down to see the only man left from the day's work at the bottom. He is standing on top of a great oblong block, ghost-white with dust, and his eyebrows sparkle more than his eyes ever could. In a harsh net of cables he is waiting to lift himself. Overhead, the dim sky begins to groan, and he to rise. He sails upward through Time, from the Beginning to the Now. It is so dark that the strata of eons may well be shuffling geologic eras at will, or by chance, and may put the End in there somewhere, among the innocent ages. A few years more of this work and the man will buy a farm; he was born and raised on one. He steps off the block into the woods that stand around the place it was cut from. He washes his face at a washstand, and the dust of the graves runs off it. He and the crane operator get into his car, and the moonlight made for the four-sided woods around the unearthed quarry leaps into the huge hole in nature, prepared to seek the Answer of the Ages: prepared to find the square root of Time, and eat it.

• • •

All over Jericho we like to hang around. When you hang around, in this land, you hear stories, and you make up your own. On country porches and in town squares, on hunting trips--for we are great hunters, here--even in the suburbs, the tongue matters. We are the most outrageous and creative liars in the world, and we take our time to make the lies a lot more interesting than the truth, in the strictness of its dreaming, could ever dream. You know that you are somewhere in the tingling and living Web of Jericho when somebody says to you--or you just overhear: Now, there was this old boy who drove for the governor. I knew him. Well. I didn't exactly know him: I knew a cousin of his. Anyway, he lived in Social Circle, Georgia, and he loved clothes. He worked in a filling station--Texaco. I think it was--part time, and he kind of doubled up on his money to go to Atlanta and buy clothes every year. So he saves enough for this one year, see, and he goes to town, right to Robert Hall's, and he's walking down them bare racks, and he sees this one suit he just about goes through the roof over. Spends all his money for it. So he goes back home to Social Circle and he's walking down the main street in this suit, and a buddy of his stops him and says. Jack, that is some kind of good-looking stack of threads you got on. Brings out the color in them strange eyes! Man, the gals around here are gonna mob you! But I've got to tell you one thing: The left sleeve is too short. Well, Jack looks at both sleeves and sure enough, his buddy's right. So he goes on back to Atlanta and says to the salesman, Look, can't you do something about this left sleeve? The salesman says, Don't worry about it. Just kind of pull your shoulder and your arm back up in the sleeve and the sleeve'll match up. So Jack says. OK, I'll try it. He goes home, holding that left arm just so. Then he meets another friend that says, Jack, I really like you in that new suit. Everybody's crazy about it. But, damn, the right sleeve is just too long. Back to Robert Hall's. This time the salesman says, You've got the thing licked on the left side. Now just take your right arm and kind of shoot that arm out a little more than you usually would. That'll do it. So he goes back to Social Circle and meets another buddy. Jack, the buddy says, that suit is great. But the doggone pants are too long. Poor Jack is in despair, but he feels like he's got to make one more trip to Atlanta. He does, and the salesman tells him that the solution to the whole problem is to hold his left lapel with his chin and then take his left hand and kind of hunch his pants up with it. So he goes home, and he's walking down Main Street. He's staggering along, trying to hold everything together, when he meets a man and his wife. The fellow and his wife go on by, and when they get where he can't hear 'em, the wife says. Did you see poor Jack Walker goin' down the street, all bent over with arthuritis? At his age, too! And the guy says, Yeah, but don't that suit fit him good!

Stories. We listen. They are the legends of Jericho, and everyone makes them. Good. I've got a good one for you. There was this old boy. . . .

• • •

If you want some of this stuff, the scabby-bearded man says to us as we appear out of moonlight, you got to pay the high dollar for it. This here is good corn likker: I done run the bead myself. It ain't from one of them ground-hog stills. I don't use nothing but copper. Have a drink of this and you'll materialize. We drink. We don't come out of invisibility, but invisibility shines more, and the hummingbird is more with us, especially in the stillness of flight, the vibrating center. There we see another bearded man, running a joyous bead. We reel around the still coils, ruby-throated, praising copper. No one can see us: We are sheer delight, pale beyond the pale, the law.

• • •

A bridge, and a caged rattle. An attendant at a tourist reptile farm is bouncing a red balloon off the spring-tensioned, back-coiling head of a rattlesnake. The snake strikes the balloon and the customers leap back from the cage wire and giggle.

In a lagoon are lying hundreds of alligators, sprawled on the land of Jericho over and under each other, lolling in the water, half-emerging from the locked scum as in the true, the evolutionary Eden. They bring the Everglades: The vast river; and the ponderous heads gaze up--only the eyes out of the water--with an aesthetic appreciation known only to the Lower Forms of life, for strangely shaped birds. Someone says, I can tell you. Jack, that the alligator is one beast of which it can truly be said that if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

• • •

This zigzags us into cowboys, and Florida. Here we are mixing with flies and attacking the Santa Gertrudis, half-Eastern beast from the markets of India, now switching at us between palmettos. We ride on Jack Feagan's shoulder, the sun blazing on him through us, still full of mountain moonshine. He pulls his carbine from the saddle boot, stops and sights down the shimmering blue barrel into sandy, shimmering water. O dusty vegetable excitement, all around! O the June-zooming light of insects! He fires through the sweat haze of salt, the pool jumps with gold scales, rolls with a sickening belly. The alligator spins as though he were tearing meat from the world itself. His teeth are closed like a jigsaw. His eyes open upside down. Jack holsters the carbine, and we go over. The prehistoric life dye is hanging slowly sideways through the sun's drying water. Brain matter floats around. One of the (continued on page 220) Small visions (continued from page 154) beasts of Jericho, here even before us. His thoughts are of the waters of creation, blown into fragments. Jack says to him, Well, now, Old Buddy, did I hurt yore head?

• • •

It's about time we stole a car, or went with somebody who did. We do, and rob a little bank. We cross a state line with our boy, Junior Spruill, get sentenced and go to the Atlanta Pen with him. We can leave any time, but he can't, and we stay with the good old Wilkesboro, North Carolina, boy to see what happens. He just likes cars, and wants the holdup money to put in a double-cam overhead engine. He talks to himself all the time about stock cars, about Cale Yarborough, Richard Petty, Donnie Allison. The Pen people make him shave off his sideburns and work in the laundry, where he talks to himself, talks to us all the time.

Ever tell you about the first time I got caught? I was running these country cops crazy. I knew every damned back road in every county, and the ways in and out of 'em, and the ways to cross the highways from one to the other. They just couldn't catch me in the country. My mistake was to rob one country bank in a little old town in Tennessee and then come on over here and try my first city job. I looked all over town for a branch bank I liked, and finally found one in a shopping center. I parked my car and stuck my cap pistol in my pocket. I buy those things at Woolworth's. The Government makes you fancy 'em up with a lot of curlicues and junk, so people'll know they're just for kids. But--listen here--you can take and file that stuff off. That's what I do, and then dye the gun black. I never use an automatic, because when you lay that thing up on the counter and pull that hammer on a revolver back, and they see that cylinder turn around, it does something to 'em. Anyway, I went into Kroger's and got a couple of cnddy bars so I could have the paper sack, and then went into the bank with my cap pistol under my coat. I didn't have no trouble gettin' the sack filled up--when I drawed back that hammer she started throwin' money in with both hands--but just about time I got to the door, somebody had an idea I was gettin' away with something. I started walking down the street faster than I should'a done. When I got to my car, damned if a lady wadn't blocking me off with a car where they'us two little girls and a police dog and no momma. I turned around, and a squad car was pulling up. I heard the sireen of another one, and I reckoned the best thing would be to try to get into one of the big department stores and ride the elevators around just like I used to ride them back county roads: You know, confuse 'em. I figured to get in the back way, so I started down an alley right next to the nearest big store. But the damned door only opened toward the outside, and when I looked back they was about three squads of cops coming down the alley, carrying riot guns, rifles, tear gas, billies, pistols, God knows what-all! And there I was, down to my last roll of caps! And I will tell you. I do believe to this day that if I'd'a had another roll, I could'a scattered the whole bunch.

Goodbye, Junior Spruill. We're going through the Great Gray Wall as though it were nothing but damp, unpleasant fog. Goodbye and get out. Let's go for those country roads, that Firecracker 500.

• • •

Here is the Other River: not the Mississippi, but something best observed from the position of a butterfly on a stone. The water is too dangerous for you not to have given yourself a way out that has nothing to do with water. This is an Appalachian mountain river in the fall, in the afternoon. The stone is a big, smooth boulder where the North Carolina river falls out of the mountains with such fury that all systems of thought are made impossible. The white water crashes continually on all sides, and a delicate, insane spray fills the suicidal and exciting air. On each side of the river are deep woods, and through the haze of water is a bobcat, who understands why this place is like it is.

• • •

A slain whale-hump hill, hairy with pine trees. Twilight. This is Kennesaw Mountain, where Joe Johnston held off Sherman's army for weeks. We come in like a wide-screen film camera on a man in a sweatsuit, climbing up pinestraw-covered ground. There was plenty of fighting here, over 100 years ago, and Joshua Hawkins comes here to hear the singing. It is for his ears and no others, for he is seeking out, with a World War Two-vintage mine detector, the War under the Pine Straw. Hear, now, the beginnings of a metallic scream. It is louder as we approach part of an old breastwork. The eye moves forward from Joshua Hawkins and picks out a place on the ground. In slow motion, a surplus Army foxhole- and latrine-digging shovel strikes in, as the buiried War shrieks unbearably. Hands go into the hole, and a mud-encrusted cannonball is laboriously and tenderly lifted out. Cradling the unexploded shell, he heads back for Atlanta, down the way that Sherman took.

• • •

Beer. A little, isolated country juke joint. Two young men in a booth.

How come? one asks.

I told him I'us gonna do it, if he didn't keep from messin around with her. I told him twice't. He didn't pay no 'tention to me. I went on home and got my shotgun.

You're crazy, J. W. His people are gonna come after you. So are hers.

I just walked up to the window. They'us in there dancin'. Just them two. I said, Look out chere, Lonnie. Mary Frances hollered and backed off. I just want both of you to see who done it, I said, and let drive with both barls. I throw'd the gun in the car and come right on downtown to the sheriff's office.

What's gonna happen now?

I don't know. And I don't care. But I'd do it again. Wish't I could. I'd like that.

• • •

Another city. Coffeehouse night, underground. An old black man tunes the only new guitar he's ever owned. His discoverer says, Aren't you nervous, John? All your life you've been playing just for field hands.

Tha's right. But them boys knows good music. Everybody down around Teoc and Avalon--them Delta boys--they knows what's goin' on when a man picks up a guitar.

Yes, but, I mean, these people are different. There're even maybe a few music critics out there in the audience. And you're not nervous, this first time? Not at all?

Nawsuh. I knows what I know. I knows it, and I been knowing it.

• • •

We nest among the snakes. Their membranes sense something and they strike through us. The box opens and a hand reaches in, picking up two snakes and us with them. The rattles are chirring like June bugs, and we start to crawl up the bare arm of the worshiper. We slide in bewildered fury and coil around his neck. Still striking at us, still hammering their heads against phantoms, they use the preacher's body as the base from which to strike at the Angels, at Ghosts, at the Sprits of Jericho. The preacher takes us in his mouth, to show more faith. The snakes begin to speak a flickering language, and talk of the River Jordan.