From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Alabama Retail

Alabama Retail Alabama is about thirty miles from Chattanooga. It’s not the nearest neighboring state to downtown Chattanooga—that would be Georgia. The route to Alabama takes you through northwest Georgia. Traveling through three states in thirty minutes is a record for the Journey. Jackson County is the corner of northeast Alabama. Scottsboro, a town of 15,000 people, is the county seat. Locals here are tired of being reminded of their claim to fame. Back in 1931, nine African-American youths were convicted and sentenced to death for raping two white women, fellow hobos, in a freight car running between Chattanooga and Memphis. The initial convictions of the “Scottsboro boys” were regarded throughout the country as a prime example of the racist nature of the early twentieth-century southern judicial system. The American Communist Party then got involved and hired lawyers for the boys. Soon, the story of the Scottsboro boys went international. The boys continued to receive national and international attention for years mostly because two of their appeals reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Both decisions were significant. The first one established a criminal defendant’s right to the effective assistance of counsel and the second one held that people may not be excluded from juries solely because of their race. Supposedly the novel To Kill a Mockingbird is based in part on the Scottsboro boys’ story. A 2001 New York Times article “Scottsboro 70 Years Later, Still Notorious, Still Painful” reviewed the PBS documentary Scottsboro, An 155 American Tragedy and found that the present-day Scottsboro residents were leery of reopening the past. The article described the town: Today Scottsboro is a pretty place of about 15,000 people, nestled in the hills of northeast Alabama along the Tennessee River. It is the home of the Unclaimed Baggage Center, which sells unclaimed baggage from airlines. The town still celebrates First Monday, a monthly gathering in the courthouse square, a flea market and swap meet that has existed for more than 100 years. Schools are now integrated, although blacks and whites still live mostly in separate neighborhoods. Except for the housing part, I found this description to be a pretty good assessment of Scottsboro. African Americans comprise about five percent of the area’s population, and it seems a little harsh to suggest that Scottsboro’s housing patterns are any different than those elsewhere in the country. Downtown Scottsboro looks like a prosperous small town even though the new four-lane highway bypasses it by a couple of miles. Scottsboro appears to be one of only a handful of small towns in the country, southern or otherwise, which have maintained a vibrant town square after Wal-Mart or K-Mart locates on a bypass. The square looked much the same as during the 1950s: lots of activity, few vacant stores, and virtually no empty parking places, even on a rainy weekday afternoon . I was disappointed that Payne’s Soda Shop was closed for the day. Established in 1869, Payne’s is the oldest ongoing business in Jackson County, and I’d been told they still make a pretty good milkshake. One store dominates the east side of the square, occupying four store fronts. A modest sign hangs over the second storefront that reads Hammer’s. On a whim, I decided to enter. Did it bring back memories! If you spent any time in a small town during the 1950s or 1960s, Hammer’s transports you back to that time. Hammer’s describes itself as a department store, and I guess that’s technically true, but it’s more like a general store. Rather than leave downtown, Hammer’s expanded by taking over its immediate neighbors. Merchandise hangs from the walls or sits in oldfashioned bins. Hand-printed signs inserted into chrome-plated frame 156 sign holders advertise bargain prices. No new-fangled merchandising here—mostly bins full of stuff. Lined up in one bin were women’s shoes— one of each pair. You pick out the shoe and hand it to a sales clerk. She goes to the stock room in the back, finds the mate, and then returns to watch the customer try on the pair. If the customer doesn’t like them, she hands them both back to the clerk and repeats the process. You can get pretty much anything at Hammer’s. One storefront displays Oriental rugs. The second store contains...