Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie

CHAPTER ONE: The Sez-you State

21 chapter one The Sez-you State “They can’t do that, can they?” “This is Alabama,” I said. “Who’s going to say they can’t?” —joey manley, The Death of Donna-May Dean By the time I became aware of the concept of Alabama, it sickened and shamed me, for it seemed a place where knowledgeable people colluded with buffoons to promulgate an intolerable society based on racism and narrow, xenophobic interpretations of Scripture. —rodney jones, “A Half Mile of Road in North Alabama” It’s easy to make fun of a place where you can find To Kill a Mockingbird on the library’s how-to shelves. Across the years, Alabama dependably delivers headlines and punch lines that fade into the next boldfaced outrage or televised fiasco. A reputation so constructed out of historical predicaments becomes easier to sustain than dismantle. Humiliations , obsessions, and grim revelations pile up, rendering a long list of bunglings , neglect, everyday iniquities, malfeasances, and atrocities: Jim Crow and the convict lease, lynchings, racist bombings and beatings, killings of homosexuals , church burnings, book bannings, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, interpositions, laughingstock politicians, whipping posts and chain gangs, toxic dumps, Ten Commandment judges, abortion clinic terrorists, governors impeached and imprisoned. In a perverse balance of trade, the state pays in reputation for one of its leading exports—laughs at its expense—a dependable source of disdain for many beyond its borders. “For Georgians,” clucks the Christian Science Monitor, “Alabama is the big tom at the turkey shoot.”1 “Can’t we just go back to picking on Alabama?” ask Atlantans, bored with the latest celebrity scandal.2 During the 2008 Pennsylvania Democratic presidential primary, residents of the Keystone State resented political strategist James Carville’s recycled 22 • chapter one characterization, first made in 1986: “Between Paoli [a Philly suburb] and Penn Hills [a Pittsburgh suburb], everything else is Alabama.”3 “Like so many frontier locations,” complains a Canadian newspaper, “the natural beauty of Alaska is sensational; what man has added is mostly ugly. Think redneck Alabama with permafrost.”4 An Australian journalist writes of his country’s taxpayers being as easy to bilk by politicians as “an Alabama redneck at a Las Vegas blackjack table.”5 Worse than the jokes are the no-jokes. “Birmingham resident Bernard Jones remained in guarded condition as of Monday after suffering a gunshot wound to his abdomen. . . . According to his cousin and barber Alex Jones, the victim was shot outside a barber shop after arguing unsuccessfully with another patron about ‘what opossums eat.’”6 Except they would have said “possums.” They would have agreed on that. A full-page, back-cover ad in the Nation magazine for Working Assets, a long-distance service that donates 1 percent of customers’ phone bills to nonprofit groups such as the Children’s Defense Fund and Planned Parenthood, recruited customers in the 1990s by pitching, “Phone your narrow-minded, self-righteous, abortion clinic picketing sister in Alabama and thank her for helping you support a woman’s right to choose.”7 How many years’ wandering in the wilderness is enough? Jokes about Alabama crash into that mythical-historical mashup called the “South,” now more than ever an entropic imaginative terrain. “The South,” wrote Adrienne Rich in the mid-1980s, “has heavily borne the shame of the omnipresent racism of this country.” It has served as “the scapegoat of white supremacism and terrorism.” The South, “Dixie,” and Alabama—when it is perceived (and when it behaves) as the Heart of Dixie—function as dumping grounds for abject imaginaries, toxic sites of the gullible, disenfranchised, redneck, dumb-assed, feckless, soiled, and toothless. “When we allow a piece of the world to remain exotic in our imaginations,” adds Rich, whose childhood runs to Georgia and Alabama, “we dehumanize its people and collaborate in our own ignorance.”8 Playing upon Alabama as a designated reservoir of racism can conveniently shift self-scrutiny away from other places with their own egregious habits. “When it comes to racial disparities, and how to correct them,” observes the Economist, “America remains closer than it thinks to the Alabama it still affects to despise.”9 In South of Haunted Dreams (1993), African American writer Eddy L. Harris The Sez-you State • 23 comes to question his received impressions of blacks in the South only after a slow motorcycle journey below the Mason-Dixon Line. “It seems very often that blacks...