Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Introduction

Introduction A labama Afternoons is a book of character portraits—from passing visits to full-scale profiles—of some of our state’s remarkable people, famous or obscure. Culled from more than a decade of my roaming the state, present and past, to find people worthy of Sunday feature spreads, Alabama Afternoons is a collective portrait, too. From a day spent with Selma storyteller Katherine Tucker Windham and her friend artist Charlie “Tin Man” Lucas, to an afternoon with Montgomery Improvement Association president Johnnie Carr, to reminiscences about Birmingham area native Mel Allen, a broadcast legend who became “the voice of the New York Yankees,” Alabama Afternoons displays the wealth of compelling lives—and great storytelling— in the spirited, sometimes-melancholy, and always-involving Heart of Dixie. This collection is not meant to be comprehensive—there are numerous source books, including the Encyclopedia of Alabama, for that—but reflective of my own curiosities and passions as a writer. Photographers and painters , novelists and journalists, civil rights figures, old people remembering way back when, ordinary folks with colorful stories to tell—these are some of my favorite subjects. While I am aware, of course, of the colorful traditions of Alabama in areas like sports and politics, I have bent my talents to venues not as much explored by contemporary nonfiction writers (though sports and politics do show as aspects of other pieces). Whether the profile be of New Jersey native Gay Talese, whose sojourn at The University of Alabama was the catalyst that propelled him into being one of America’s most influential New Journalists, or Sara Hamm, the last Jew in Eufaula, determined to preserve the town’s historic Jewish cemetery, my stories hope to turn up fresh angles on familiar folks or introduce little-known ones for the first time. Most of the people featured here have visibility within their community—or wider—but 2 INTRODUCTION there are some famous just on their street corner, like the old domino players under the oak tree in Mobile, or the coon dog historians on a bench in Russellville . Whatever the subject, I pay a lot of attention to how people speak, and do my best to retain idiosyncratic rhythms and colloquialisms. How we talk is sometimes as important as what we say. I’m interested in setting, too, so where these conversations take place is not just about geography, but often also about interior landscapes. My visit with E. B. Sledge, for example, author of the spectacular—and increasingly famous—World War II memoir With the Old Breed, occurs at his home in Montevallo, where he was battling cancer during what turned out to be his final days. That struggle, along with his joy in bird-watching through his bedroom window, became part of the story of this brave and sensitive veteran. Most of the portraits are contemporary—people I can call up, travel to, sit with, or take a walk with—but I love history, too, especially in terms of how it shapes us today, so I have included here some stories about lesser-known figures who connect us to our state’s past. While I have written sketches of world-known celebrities such as Olympian Jesse Owens, heavyweight champion Joe Louis, and the extraordinary Helen Keller, I have chosen here, instead , to include a few portraits of people who might otherwise be relegated to a footnote in the march of time: Abby Fisher of Mobile, believed to be the author of the first African American cookbook; Artelia Bendolph, who became an icon of the Depression-era South as a child from a photograph taken of her in a shack window in Gee’s Bend. If I’ve been lucky enough to catch someone in their later years, like Bendolph—who has since passed away—I have spent time with them in person. If they are of an earlier era, like Walter Bellingrath, I try to capture a sense of them from those who knew them, in this case Edward Carl, at first Bellingrath’s driver, but ultimately, it seems, his most trusted friend. My history is intended to have a personal feeling, enabling the reader to touch someone on the page who knew the person at the heart of the story. Most of these pieces were originally written for the Press-Register, and my editors in Mobile have often given me ideas of where to look for interesting characters. The photographs that accompany each piece were, for the most...