Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Greetings from Brooklyn, Alabama

Greetings from Brooklyn, Alabama Brooklyn Y ou might think it’s in the middle of nowhere—down a two-lane Alabama highway lined with pine trees, farmhouses, and mobile homes— but to Janice Matthews and a hundred or so other residents of this crossroads with one general store and a gas pump, it’s Brooklyn. “Our Brooklyn ,” says Janice, petite, fair haired, and chatty, who runs Janice’s Fill-A-Sack store with her husband, Dale, lean and philosophical in a black cowboy hat. Ice cream, pickled eggs, stuffed olives, garden hoses, cap pistols, cat food: as I go down the rows, I’m put in mind of a back roads bodega, a southern version of a general store in the Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood where I used to live. But here you can buy chicken feed or catfish-skinning pliers. “Brooklyn’s the meeting point,” I’m told by Charlie Philyaw, who’s driven five miles from Johnsonville to buy supplies for a party. He chats with me while he pumps gas in front of the store, the “gallons” and “amount” columns slowly spinning. He tells me his buddy Anthony Williams has a special barbecue sauce that he’ll be preparing and invites me to the party. I decline but inquire about the recipe. “It’s a secret,” Charlie says. I reach for my cell phone to call my daughter, who spent her first years in Cobble Hill before we moved to the South. I’m eager to announce, “Hey, I’m in Brooklyn!” But the phone is useless. “We’re in a dead-cell area,” Janice says. Television reception’s not much better, which is why a radio plays in Janice’s store. “Fifty percent of the people around here have a satellite,” she tells me. 234 PERSONAL SOJOURNS “Satellite’s a must. It goes up there with a pack of cigarettes, a gallon of gas, and a six-pack of beer.” Dale, who left his hometown to work in shipbuilding but returned, seems like a worldly man. The Brooklyn up north seems daunting, though. “I’d like to go visit so I can see the town and meet the people,” he says, “but I think it would be confusing.” But Janice knows what she would do upon arriving. “I’d say: ‘I’m Janice. I run a convenience store in Brooklyn, Alabama.’” There is Rome, Georgia; Carthage, Tennessee; Toronto, Ohio; Manhattan, Kansas. America is full of place names that merge the great and the small. The director Wim Wenders made a movie, “Paris, Texas,” whose bleak lyricism seemed to play off the name of that locale. Brooklyns are plentiful. One only need punch a weather request for Brooklyn into an Internet search engine to be met with these choices: Alabama, Connecticut, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, and West Brooklyn, Illinois. But I find in the name Brooklyn, Alabama, the charm of opposites. Stickball versus pond fishing. Mean streets, red clay roads. Klezmer music, banjo. Coney Island hot dogs, pit barbecue. Youse guys, The U.S. Post Office in Brooklyn, Alabama, 2002. Photograph © Michael E. Palmer. GREETINGS FROM BROOKLYN, ALABAMA 235 y’all. These legends of place may not be wholly real—I have listened to banjo music on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, and eaten Nathan’s Famous at a fastfood franchise in Alabama—but the mythologies endure. My interest in this particular Brooklyn—in south-central Alabama some twenty miles north of the Florida line—may also spring from that I grew up in Mobile, about an hour and a half southwest of tiny Brooklyn, and lived for twenty years in New York City, eight in big Brooklyn, before returning to my hometown. When I watch the movie My Cousin Vinny, whose comedy turns on Joe Pesci’s deeply Brooklyn Vincent Gambino finding himself deep in Alabama, I wonder how the story would have played out had Vinny left one Brooklyn to arrive in yet another. My grandparents Morris and Mary, Romanian Jews, met as new Americans in Flatbush at the outset of the 20th century, and Morris proposed to Mary in Prospect Park, repeating the pun for generations to come that “she thought I was a good prospect.” In 1907, when they made their way to Alabama ’s Gulf Coast, they might have noticed Alabama’s Brooklyn on the map. In those days, the town hummed with activity. I learn that...