Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie by Allen Tullos (review)

The best thing about Allen Tullos's new book Alabama Getaway is the voice. At the end of the book, in a beautifully written passage called "Hospitality's Nutshell," Tullos visits the gift shop of a pecan processing plant. There, he speaks with a saleswoman "who could have been one of my aunts." They share memories of Alabama childhoods spent dancing in the trees to shake nuts onto bedsheets spread in the grass. Then she asks what he is doing in Montgomery. He replies, "I am writing about the state's image, its slow-to-change political climate, its largely fossilized legislature. Its unwillingness to educate many of its children." She bristles, "Alabama is doing all right." He replies, "Well, no, not really," and their earlier connection dissolves with the aching sweetness of the pecan divinity he has just described (278). Her laughter covers the mounting tension as she tries to defend Alabama and he backs toward the door. The weight of the book up until this moment supports Tullos's answer. Yet Alabama Getaway also explains, without excusing it, why many people from a state whose acts of ignorance, bigotry, and backwardness have served for more than a century as a national symbol might prefer a pride that perpetuates their problems rather than the truth.

Tullos writes about his native state with a wry lyricism that manages the nearly impossible feat of being moral without being self-righteous. His puns and jokes cut against both the awkward, defensive laughter of some locals and the easy, national practice of making fun of Alabama. "Stakes in the Heart of Dixie"—the vampire metaphor is apt—are people, images, and ideas which fight these seemingly immortal problems. "In the Jailhouse Now" refers to the mass incarceration of black men in the state, the holding of many of those prisoners in county jails, and the fact that a federal judge ordered an Alabama sheriff to remain in his own jail until he came up with a plan to adequately feed prisoners whose dinner consisted of "bits of undercooked, bloody chicken" (82). He is a master at the punning conclusion. At the end of a section describing a twenty-first century fight over the location of a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and founder of the KKK, he writes, "Unlike a tree standing by the water, General Forrest was moved." Concluding a section on Birmingham's problems, he writes that the merger of the rich, white suburbs with the poor and increasingly black city is about as likely as the residents of one of these suburbs "renaming their city Shuttlesworth." There is nothing more serious than a joke.

A book this full of squandered resources and wasted lives needs this voice with its perfect pitch to keep the reader from turning away in despair. Tullos's theme is "the Heart of Dixie." While the phrase originates as an Alabama state motto, here it also means "a retrograde political imaginary, mapped by a constellation of pernicious habits, that remains tenacious, dynamic, at odds with efforts to extend social justice, and subject to wincing reconfirmation with any morning's headlines" (1-2). Tullos mostly manages to deploy contemporary critical theory while writing broadly accessible prose, a considerable feat. He defines his subject, the political imaginary, as the emotional terrain that "configures possibilities and outlines limits," suggests "the boundaries of the legitimate and the outrageous," and highlights the contours of power (5). Alabama, like the bigger South of which it is a part, functions as the toxic site "of the gullible, disenfranchised, redneck, dumb-assed, feckless, soiled, and toothless" (22). In response, its people have all too often adopted a kind of "sez you" defensiveness.

The solution is an "undoing," in theorist Judith Butler's term, or what Tullos calls an "Alabama getaway." Individual escape—from lighting out for the territories to hitting the road—is an old story, however...