Look Away Dixieland: A Carpetbagger's Great-Grandson Travels Highway 84 in Search of the Shack-up-on-Cinder-Blocks, Confederate-Flag-Waving, Squirrel-Hunting, Boiled-Peanuts, Deep-Drawl, Don't-Stop-the-Car-Here South

3 Sweet (Almost) Home Alabama

74 3 Sweet (Almost) Home Alabama I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. —alabama governor george c. wallace, 1963 inaugural address A s we drove into Alabama I sensed something change. It looked as if we had dropped into a new chart with new coordinates. I felt dispirited. This place was rough. There was more trash on the highway, less pride of ownership in the places we saw along the road, more sense of a grind of unremitting poverty. Stars didn’t fall on Alabama, junk did. From Dothan to Enterprise to Opp, it framed the road. Mary made up a poem: The novelty of poverty is slowly wearing thin The only way to compensate is a double shot of gin. Iwasmorephilosophical.Icontributed:Doyoubelievewhatyoureyes see or do your eyes see what you believe? I had predicted mid-Alabama, the heart of the Heart of Dixie, was going to be harsh—maybe that’s why it was. But she trumped me. This place was bedraggled. And only gin would set us free. Forget philosophy. But the gin we favor—Bombay Red Top—was nowhere to be found. That’s because the state liquor bureau0 75 sweet (almost) home alabama cracy decides what can be stocked on the shelves, and this brand of gin is apparently verboten. A Country Boy Can Survive We learned about Alabama from gin. Here’s what we found: there is a state liquor store system, and then there is a parallel market of private package stores. The package stores charge a bit more, and they can carry only what is mandated by the liquor commission in Birmingham. One private storekeeper, black, told me she simply goes across town to the state store to buy her replacement supplies. She smiled as she said this, aware of the nonsense. And she said I’d have trouble buying Bombay Red Top in the entire state. She was right. As far as I could see, this duplication was a way to keep the liquor stores separate and almost equal. The private package stores seemed to be in poorer neighborhoods. No one would admit this, and again maybe it’s my own prejudice at work, but the private stores serve the blacks and hence keep the state stores white. It’s Plessy v. Ferguson applied to booze. Not all was lost. We had purchased a Garmin GPS device to help us find our way. I didn’t think we were ever going to use it since I was dedicated to sticking close to the X axis of U.S. 84. Our major interaction was to change the voice from American female to English male. That’s because my wife found the woman, I think she’s called Garmina, especially grating when she announced, “Recalculating.” She sounded like a pouty Valley girl suffocating the last syllables to make it seem that we had made yet another mistake. Since we were making quite a few mistakes en route to package stores, we changed the voice to BBC English. The English dude we called Cecil, and his tone of voice was far more forgiving. Cecil’s forte was that he could find liquor in Alabama. If you asked someone in the street, as I did, you often heard an answer like, “Don’t know; don’t care.” I heard that at Walmart outside Dothan, Alabama, which was disturbing because if I had to work there liquor would be on the daily schedule. But if you asked Cecil for a package store, he’d find it even if it meant you had to cross the tracks and enter a world you might have otherwise passed by. look away, dixieland 76 There just seemed to be little esprit in central Alabama, at least as we entered it from the east. Everything seemed tuckered out. It needed to be ginned up. Somehow this was typified by what was dotted in the splatter of bottles and Styrofoam on the roadside: hundreds of signs imploring us, “Don’t Litter. Keep Alabama the Beautiful.” Many signs were pockmarked with bullet holes. If ever there were an argument for a bottlereturn bill, it was here. Ditto the outlawing of fast-food Styrofoam. (Well, and maybe gun control too.) I had originally planned to stop every day at, say, two in the...