My Southland, Maybe Yours

By Tom Poland

 

April, along a back road to Athens, G-A, I saw ghosts. Amid new homes a shed and barn cast blue shadows across brilliant-green grass. Then I saw a handsome rock store, a stonemason’s pride. It never gets old, writing about my Southland. And Pat Conroy acknowledged that. “Tom Poland brings the fading and forgotten rural South back to life with a deeply felt reverence for the power of story to preserve our shared past. We ride shotgun with Tom past covered bridges, tenant homes, country stores, and sweetgrass basket stands into a rural south that, like the Goat Man, we may never see again.”

Ride with me yet again where I drift into recollection, my archive of places and things, sounds, and fragrances. First up, old African-American graves plastered with seashells. The shells preserve a ridge of dirt and symbolize crossing the ocean of air to Jesus.

Now appears a handsome hand-dug well lined with snow-white quartz rocks. Like the seashells, those rocks serve a practical and aesthetic purpose. Again … if you follow my work.

One summer in the boiling breath of the South, I lay me down to rest on a rusted cot in a chain gang camp. A chain fixed that cot to a massive eyebolt set in cement. From unmarked graves behind the granite jail came a chant … Uh ah, uh ah, uh ah … the sound of the men working on the chain gang.

Crossing o’er a rocky creek I conjured up the rocky shoals spider lilies at Anthony Shoals. Babylon had its hanging gardens and the South has her billowing river gardens.

Rolling across the face of Mother Earth I look away. Against a cottony cloud I spy buzzards wheeling, seeking. Something’s time is up. The poet wrote of buzzards in “heavy, heavy summer. Tell me black riders, tell me what I need to know about my time in the world.”

At woods edge rich with the understated sweetness of honeysuckle I walked up on do-it-yourself gravestones, the necessitated work of the poor. Sentiments etched into cement contrast with horses’ granite gravestones, engraved in a Roman font … “Bessie, Driving Mare, Brown, White Face, 1908-1937.”

I was describing a barn over Pawleys way when a woman with a grating accent interrupted me.

“Just why are you so hung up on the back roads?”

“You asked. I’ll tell you. Where I grew up, back roads were all we had. When I’m on a back road, I’m home once again.”

I drive south on Highway 45 to Red Bluff Bay where blue flag irises embroider flashes of blue into sedges. The hum of bumblebees and clatter of dragonflies join the whisper of wind in 400-year-old pond cypress. Above it all, sharp and clear, the call of the bobwhite.

I roll down a dirt road where dust pales leaves. Through the leaves I see a house. Windows long gone. Interior walls relieved of their fine longleaf boards. Next to a whitewashed fireplace sits an old recliner, its cottony innards spilling out. For a moment it rocks …. Perhaps a breeze flowing down the hall.

There’s the house kudzu swallows come July and there’s Newford Baptist Church with its blue window shades and white facade. The sun comes out from behind a cloud and the fine old church’s face, at first just ghostly, turns a whiter shade of pale.

My mood darkens. I know I’m driving over long-gone wonders. My wheels roll over ancient springs, through green meadows, and across ancient prairie where bison, elk, and wildflowers once lived. That and more. Change is the weapon. Time is the enemy.

One final memory. Another book event … inland among hills and vales … I’m talking about my grandparents’ days of swept sandy yards. An elderly woman raises her hand. With a decidedly Southern accent she speaks.

“I’ve lived what you write about,” she says to herself more than others. “I’ve lived it.”

My Southland was hers before mine once upon a time but the years took hers away. For now it remains mine, if only in my thoughts … maybe yours too.