I left Memphis to seek insight into my Alabama heritage, drove 320 miles and arrived at Wind Creek State Park outside Alexander City, the town where my great grandfather died of senility at 86 years old. Dad was born and raised in a neighboring county. Located on the banks of Lake Martin in Tallapoosa County, the park biled itself as largest state park in the nation. When I called for a reservation, I was told, “Don’t worry, there’s always room.” I was surprised. Spaces in an Oregon park need to be reserved months in advance.
I got a lakeshore spot on a secluded cove with empty spaces all around. It was a choice spot—quiet, wooded and clean. Heat and humidity had not yet arrived, That evening, I burned the remains of the day listening to rain against my fiberglass camper. Mike left me in the Graceland crowd, and he wasn’t going to show up in Alabama while I chased family records. Alabama was my thing, and history never interested him.
Without a fishing license or tackle, I listened to country music on my radio and the storm’s drumbeat against my roof. If this had been late spring or summer, the clean air, rolling pastures, fishing, boating, produce stands and liquor stores, would make this a great camping place especially if one were born to heat, humidity, and tornado storms. Why would anyone further than their afternoon porch to eat fried chicken, drink bourbon, rock in a favorite chair, and listen to bug zappers electrocute insects. I had a conversation with Dad’s oldest brother, the one I visited in Birmingham when I was on my way to college, the one who asked how long I planned to stay. Travel beyond his state held no interest for him. He said there were plenty of places in Alabama he wanted to see. That was our last visit. I don’t think we missed each other.
Dad’s people settled between the Chattahoochee and Tallapoosa Rivers in the northeast quarter of the state known as the ‘hill counties.’ They arrived after Andy Jackson won the battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. He became President in 1829 and engineered the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Dad’s family farmed near the Chambers and Randolph county line, a place called Abanda, an acronym for Atlanta, Birmingham, and Atlantic Railroad. He was born in 1918 and left home in 1942. He was called an “Alabama hillbilly” when he was summoned by subpoena to face charges in King Neptune’s court during the Navy initiation of seamen into shellbacks when they first cross the equator.
Mike visited Alabama one summer when I was a student. I had a break between quarters, and he had vacation days. He drove south from Norfolk. It was a big deal. I didn’t get guests. I was living like a recluse in a cinder block cabin with a shower, toilet, bed, and kitchen. It was summertime in Alabama, and not a vacation destination. Recreation was swimming in a rock quarry and drinking in the local saloon. Shortly before he arrived, I slid my Mustang on wet grass and took out a corner column of bricks that supported the cabin’s roof over the slab porch that ran its length. The roof had a noticeable tilt—one corner was held firm a column of bricks, and the other balanced on a 4×4 post. The repair was mine. To call the accommodations rustic would be euphemistic.
I’m pretty sure he enjoyed his visit. The best day was spent on a field trip digging for fossils. My geology professor guided the adventure. We filled our pockets with fossils– shells and shark teeth–dug from a creek bank. I hope Mike enjoyed our trip to the shaded stream as much as I did. The professor wasn’t much older than either of us. He was married with child and career.
The professor and I had an awkward relationship. the college was small and known for graduating grade school teachers. All degrees required mandatory hours, and even though History and English were my chosen subjects, I had to take science course, and I was inept in science. I took biology twice in high school and waited until I was a senior in college to take the freshman course. Because of the university’s size, scheduling science courses I could pass was often difficult. I barely scraped through the professor’s “Physics for Idiots” course and knew the danger when I scheduled “Physical Geology.” A friend warned me, “That son of a bitch will fail you.” Another friend said, “Let’s study together and ace the course.” On day one, the professor asked me if I had taken a course in basic chemistry. I said I had not and he said, “Welcome to the table of periodic elements.” I knew I was screwed. English and history offered no benefit. The friend who supposed we could ‘ace’ the course read the opening question on the first test, laughed aloud, rose from his desk, and dropped the class.
I passed with a ‘D’ because I showed up for class, listened to the lectures, failed the tests, and volunteered to dig up a petrified tree. An Alabama soybean farmer had been breaking plow blades against the stone stump for decades. The tree had fallen millennia ago. Only its base could be seen. Our excavation would gain the university a petrified tree artifact, and the farmer would be free of the obstruction. Those of us participating in that excavation deserved failing grades. I was not alone in that summer ditch. As we shoveled dirt for a passing grade, the overburden increased inch by inch as the tree narrowed toward its top. We were shoulder-deep and sweating profusely before we delivered enough of it to satisfy science and the farmer.
Three beer-drinking professors looked down on our labor from the top of the ditch. They carried whisk brooms in their back pockets to dust off the residue. The petrified skeleton was later removed from the ditch and taken to a resting place beside the college’s maintenance shed, where weeds could grow around it without fear of being cut. No one in south Alabama gave a tinker’s damn about a stone tree.
Before Mike returned to Norfolk, we counted our money and went to New Orleans to watch naked women swing into the street from second-story windows. We would have enjoyed New Orleans more if we had ample money to pay for signature drinks and Dixieland jazz. Instead, we went to bars where waitresses danced on table. Granted, the female form awakens desire, but French Quarter strippers seemed as bored as those in Norfolk’s Ocean View. I spent the evening in a side street bar that had food delivered so I enjoyed a platter of fried fish. Content, toasted, and plopped on a stool, I waited for Mike while he searched for more excitement. When he returned, we left.
We drove his car from Alabama back to Norfolk. It was our last road trip.
My life in Alabama ended soon after I graduated. I worked a year for a weekly newspaper. It was a bad choice. The hours were long, and the pay inadequate. I asked the town’s banker why he bounced my checks. He said, “Put more money in, or take less money out,” a simple truth, but I couldn’t reconcile my income and expenditure. I was tired of being poor so I enlisted in the army for language school in California. I justified the action as patriotism, but Vietnam had ended. Room, board, and language training followed by a European tour sounded better than writing bad checks in small-town Alabama. Town and merchants would benefit as well. We were not well-suited.
At Lake Martin the next morning, the skies cleared, and I left camp to drive thirty miles to Dadeville, the crossroads of State Highway 49 and U.S. Highway 280, the Tallapoosa County seat. Its courthouse was a two-story brick building planted in the center of a rectangular lawn in the middle of the town square. Recently built, no shade trees lined the walk. Azaleas colored the foundation. A compulsory statue of a Confederate soldier stood erect, an armed and ready memorial to the gallant dead. Across the street were law offices open to anyone with business before the court. The weekly newspaper, quick copy, historical society, and café were sited in a row. Businesses shared walls. The stenciled glass offices sheltered underneath awnings. No parking meters collected fees, and benches were spaced on the sidewalk for conversations. Atticus Finch would love this place.
I burned a day yesterday. Today, with one day less, I wanted to fill family blanks. Stepping from my Dodge and curb, I walked the path, climbed concrete steps and pushed through the glass entry doors. No X-ray machines or metal detectors swept visitors as they entered clean, dust-free halls. A uniformed deputy approached. He walked with purpose, and I asked him where I could find family records. He smiled, pointed down, and said, “In the vault.”
In an older and worn courthouse, I accosted a deputy when I was a student reporter for my college paper. Our student editor was busted in the county’s first-ever drug sweep. Marijuana in any size, shape, or form—smoked, sold, packaged, or ingested—was illegal. The deputy was young, and I shared a psychology class with him. I touched his shoulder because I wanted to ask him a question. That was bad. He grabbed me by the shirt and threw me against the wall. Never again did I assume familiarity with a person wearing a badge and a gun. We were a small group of volunteer students who managed to publish the paper on a haphazard schedule. I never figured out how the editor and a couple of friends went to jail. None were proper drug dealers. Regardless, without insights or official statements, we printed a misspelled and ungrammatical issue focused on the fascist behavior of the local police. The town’s weekly newspaper reviewed our effort and called it “the potty issue,” a clever name. No one went to prison because all the miscreants were white, middle-class students. They received probation and continued classes. The university and the town had a symbiotic relationship.
In Norfolk drug busts had different outcomes. Fate was kind when Dad’s nephew suggested I attend that college in southwest Alabama, near Mississippi—a place I had not been nor ever thought to visit. It was time for me to leave Norfolk, and Alabama was a place to overhaul my image. The nephew’s suggestion came shortly after a girlfriend asked why I wasn’t in jail. Her question made me aware that all luck will eventually fail. I associated with too many people who had been jailed. Sooner or later, my name would be on a list published in the morning paper. Without family graves or compelling heritage to anchor me, escape was an easy choice. When I sold dope and enjoyed chemicals at a discount, I thought dealing drugs was money in the bank. I told that to a friend who starred in a nightly news report weighing hashish as if he were a drug lord. How he managed to be filmed, I do not know. He was convicted and sentenced to serve two years on the county farm. I didn’t want jail time or to be someone society avoided at night, so I tied my hair back, took a photo, and submitted my application for college.
I was in Dadeville because my great-grandparents lived, died, and were buried in this county. I wanted to put a rock on their graves. Rocks last longer than flowers, and I wanted to find a place to put the stones. Into Dadeville’s vault, I went. The antiseptic staircase led to a subterranean den of recorded land patents, deeds, marriages, births, and deaths. It was a windowless archive of family ancients. Two ladies sat at desks. I went to the nearest one and asked if she knew where I should start. I hoped my age would make me seem harmless. Having been a stranger in southern communities more than once, I knew that asking people questions too fast or too direct could be rude, and I knew my demeanor could irritate people. She raised her head and sat upright. She looked to be a guardian. Bible verses scrolled across her computer screen in a pink font; papers cluttered her desk, and I saw no welcome in her look. I saw no area that invited strangers to stop, read, and take notes. No cobwebs swung from the ceiling. None floated in the corners. No dust particles spotted the fluorescent light. No scents could be smelled, and flat surfaces were dusted clean. Wood cases held maps. Steel file cabinets lined the walls.
I was a transient, here today and gone tomorrow; I did not live in this town. I told her I was researching family names and asked her about cemeteries, death records, and asked how I might find graves. Asking questions told her I didn’t live nearby or have living relatives in her community. She would find no profit for any effort expended on my behalf. I stood in front of her desk waiting for directions, and both of us knew she was not my civil servant. Custom dictated courtesy, and she said, “I don’t know.”
Bible verses scrolled on her computer screen. At a desk spaced a few feet away, her colleague shuffled papers, tapped her keyboard, and stayed silent. She heard the questions but did not speak. Neither of them were reference librarians, and they had no interest in my quest. I judged them fortunate to have a county job. Why else would they entomb themselves in a county vault without windows, skylights, or any distractions? No family photos were pasted anywhere. Down there, nothing from the outer world could be seen or desired. No wall held their diplomas or certificates. In fact, there were no interior walls, not even a cubicle. Square pylons kept the courthouse erect. No family photos were pasted anywhere. Dadeville’s records were too scattered to tell me about grandparents planted in the county’s dirt. No eureka moments were here to be found. The clerks stayed at their desks, and I disturbed no documents. Bible verses continuously scrolled large pink admonitions and platitudes across the screen. The phone rang. When she answered, I quickly said, “Thank you,” and she looked at me briefly to say, “You’re welcome,” and I left. On my way out, I realized if I fell to the ground, hit my head, became befuddled, and for a moment thought this place could be my home, the locals would hasten to correct my disorientation
Jesse and Mattie were my great-grandparents. They were buried here. Dad called Alabama home. His family walked, rode, or floated a river to arrive in the territory between the Chattahoochee and Tallapoosa Rivers after Indian lands were sold by the United States Land Office. I figured his family’s money crop was whiskey.His father eventually owned 400 acres of timber, ranch, and farm. This country was home to half of my genetic code for more than 100 years. Dad never talked to me about this place, if he did, I didn’t pay attention, and I’d never call it home. I drove a Dodge into a Chevy town, and Oregon plates showed me to be an alien from an alternate universe.
It was not yet noon on the second day. Looking into almost noon’s sunlight, bright in the spring sky outside Dadeville’s courthouse, I decided to drive from the town square into the surrounding hills and pastures. I wanted to go to Horseshoe Bend National Battlefield Park, where General Andrew Jackson defeated the Creek Nation’s Red Stick Confederacy. Our blood and gore nation-building had a significant moment not far from Dadeville’s Dollar General Stores. The Creek Indian Nation, the Muscogees, were one of the ‘civilized tribes’ driven from their forests so European immigrants could spread Western civilization from “sea to shining sea.” Roadside signs pointed the way to a welcome center smaller than an Oregon Ranger Station.
On this Friday, I was alone in my visit to the killing field. The Tallapoosa River bent around a grassy field, quiet and still, but no kites flew. Eearly afternoon, on a school day, no field trip buse, no senior tourists in motor homes competed for space. Mock revolutionary cannons guarded glass entry doors, and I entered alone. Eighth-grade students crowded in Soulville’s auditorium in Memphis heard the music of a turbulent time, studied history, and enjoyed a play date out of their classroom. Here in Tallapoosa County at Horseshoe Bend, no bands played.
Downstream, the river fills Lake Martin’s impressive reservoir with the marina and state park where I camped. Riverside, on a summer’s day in this battlefield park, I imagined fishing poles, picnic baskets, and families on the field where Jackson sited his cannon.
An ethnic minority dispossessed of human rights, Creek militants aligned with Britain in the War of 1812. They attacked Fort Mims in present-day Alabama in 1813 and massacred the inhabitants. General Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee militia with United States Army regulars–over 3,000 men—and allied Indians, marched against 1,000 Creek warriors who built a log barricade acrooss a narrow peninsula created by a bend in the Tallapoosa River. Creek families–women, children and elderly–camped behind the log wall as well. Jackson sited his cannon, bombarded the wall, and his infantry attacked frontally while his Indian allies crossed the river in canoes and made an amphibious attack in the rear. In a fight that lasted five hours, Jackson’s forces were victorious. The Americans killed 800 Creek warriors, women, and children. Jackson lost 50 men. Proclaimed a hero, Jackson burnished his fame when he commanded the forces that killed thousands of British soldiers in the Battle of New Orleans in 1814. The Red Stick Confederacy of Creek Warriors ended at Horseshoe Bend. Over 23 million acres of land opened for American settlement. Alabama became a state in 1819. The United States passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. “Manifest Destiny” was coined in 1845. John Gast painted American Progress in 1872.
Thomas Jefferson, chiseled alongside George Washington on Mount Rushmore, wrote a letter to Congress in 1805 encouraging trade with native peoples so that encumbered with debts they would pay with land. Alabama legislators passed laws so that native elders to sell the forests, streams, and fields. Tribal members thought the land was a fundamental to tribal sustenance. Private property—the concept of an individual holding title to farms, livestock, people, timber, and anything of value that could be labeled “mine”—was not well understood by Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes. Some of the more adept natives tried to assimilate, but cultures eventually clashed.
European nations—England, France, and Spain—dominated commerce and colonization in the New World. When colonists freed themselves from their restraints, they identified themselves Americans, ignored obstacles, climbed mountains, penetrated gaps, floated rivers, girdled trees, built cabins, planted corn, and fattened their livestock on forest mast. Thousands of American migrants traveled into frontier Alabama. Game trails and wilderness paths became roads. All of the invaders believed their actions were justified as long as their hunger for land was satisfied.
“It’s good to be shifty in a new country,” said Captain Simon Suggs of the Tallapoosa Volunteers, a comical frontier scoundrel created by Johnson Jones Hooper who was a newspaperman, author, politician, racist, and secessionist in Lafayette, Alabama, the county seat of nearby Chambers County where Dad was born. Hooper’s character was drawn soon after Alabama’s statehood. Fair play seldom mattered in American history. Men were merciless in their self-interest. Historian Frederick Turner published an essay in 1893 that reasoned the American frontier was closed. I read his essay so I could pass history exams. Turner never imagined Star Trek Captain James T. Kirk, who said, “Space: the final frontier.” Like Suggs, Kirk was a fiction, but his team had better uniforms and equipment than Captain Simon Suggs and the Tallapoosa Volunteers.
Personally, I never argue with John Calvin’s “total depravity of man.” It’s a fact. I came back to Alabama impelled by my link to people who lived and died here. Much of what I know derived from supposition. My father was the fourth of six children. His family raised cattle, corn, beans, cotton, and distilled whiskey. His father owned more than 400 acres—a successful life for a man whose parents were orphaned by our country’s Civil War. Dad’s people made homes between the Tallapoosa and Chattahoochee Rivers. To get there, they followed migration lanes on the Atlantic Plain, over mountains, and through gaps from Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. Fathers and older sons were first to arrive. They cleared forests into fields, planted crops, built cabins, and sent for families to build churches and communities. Dad was born in Chambers County, a short drive to the east, and Lafayette is the county seat named for the famous Frenchman after he made a grand tour of America that included a horse-drawn trip through Alabama. Dad never told me stories. He never told me about Tallapoosa County, Andy Jackson, Horseshoe Bend, or Marquis de Lafayette. He told Mom to bury him at sea, not in the nearby Primitive Baptist churchyard where his parents, siblings, and family generations are planted. After the war, he left the farm, reenlisted, became a sailor, and never adjusted to civilian life. Alabama wasn’t his land, and neither was it mine.
I missed the company of friends to share my thoughts. Tomorrow is Sunday—a travel day—and rain pattered me to sleep in the nation’s largest state park where lakeside trees dripped in the downpour.