Alabama for Beginners

by Jean Ryan

Receptionists, store clerks, civil servants—many people here call me Miss Jean. Surnames are largely ignored, as if they are only a nuisance, something that gets in the way. They also use “Ma’am” and “Sir” for punctuation, a habit I’ve already picked up, courtesy being contagious.

The women, old and young, employ all sorts of endearments: Hon, Baby, Sugar, Darlin. The first time I ordered a sandwich at the local Subway, the girl behind the counter buckled my knees with kindness. The fact that she was brutally overweight and not blessed with movie star beauty made her benevolence all the more touching. Courtesy seems reflexive here, a trait bequeathed at birth.

Four months ago, my wife and I moved from Napa Valley to coastal Alabama (we are originally from states in the east and traveled west for more breathing room). Many of our friends worried about how we would fare in a red state, particularly as a couple. I was apprehensive too, having lived forty years in the San Francisco bay area, haven to the LGBT community and epicenter of progressive politics. Hurricanes, humidity—these we knew we could weather. But censure, malice? How could we defend against being unwelcome?

Well, it appears that a pair of gray-haired lesbians is not sufficient cause for alarm, at least not in this neighborhood, a new development poised between rural and suburban. Folks greet us as we greet them, with smiles and handshakes. There could of course be more to it. Maybe my wife has gained standing by way of her new John Deere mower, the Ford Ranger she drives, or the shop she is having built. Maybe they like my plantings, the shutters we put up, the well we had dug. Our neighbors seem to respect these things, practicality being the benchmark of worth in the deep South.

You don’t see many Jaguars or BMWs here. You see a lot of trucks, tractors and ATVs. The men driving these vehicles know how to fix them; they know how to fix and build all sorts of things. This is such a DIY kind of place that it can be difficult to locate a handyman for hire (forget about Yelp or Angie’s List—folks here express themselves in person).

If you do find someone to hire, understand that the job might take a while. Workers move with deliberation, keeping pace with the temperature, lounging cross-legged through the frequent squalls. When weather is not a factor, scheduling often is, the union of subcontractors, equipment and supplies hinging on equal parts planning and luck. Being okay with delays, with weather, with whatever does or doesn’t occur, is a southern artform. Urgency can get no purchase in this soggy, sultry expanse.  

This easy-going approach is also evidenced in Alabama’s municipal buildings, where matters are considered on a case by case basis, and homeowners are not harassed by punitive deadbolt rubrics. Clerks are merciful and will often bend the rules to accommodate citizens in a bind. If you’re a California transplant, and especially one who owned a small business, this clemency when you first encounter it, will undo you.

Bending rules, looking the other way—these tactics are not always useful, particularly in relation to larger issues. Habituated to a part of the country where eco-concerns dominate the culture, I am stunned by the shrugging disregard encountered here: the mindless distribution of plastic bags, the absence of curbside recycling, the store shelves bulging with herbicides and pesticides. Construction sites are littered with cigarette butts, beverage bottles and fast food cartons that blow far and wide in the wind. This trash accumulates as the building progresses and not until the sod is about to be installed is the property cleared, typically by a single laborer with a tractor. I think of the casual defilement, the builders dropping rubbish as if it is their right, and dismay engulfs me.

Reconciling the south’s contradictions—lassitude on the one side, benevolence on the other—is a pointless pursuit and I am learning to dwell on the advantages instead. Most everything, for instance, is cheaper in Alabama—utilities, products, services. Gas is at least a dollar a gallon less than what I’m used to paying and homes prices, compared to Napa, are ridiculously low. I don’t know if this is because sellers don’t realize they can charge more or if they actually care more about people than profits. There is an expectation of fair dealing in the south, a collective innocence that keeps surprising me.

There are plenty of businesses I drive right past, things that don’t pertain to me, like churches, gun stores, pawn shops. There is no shortage of enterprise and no shame if these ventures fail. People just toss the dice again and hope for a win; maybe a roller- skating rink next time, a snow cone shop. You see a lot of emergency clinics (all the DIYers?) and commodious hospitals, but I have yet to spot a plastic surgery center—I guess the demand is low. Perhaps people are easier on each other here; or maybe beauty, having little use, doesn’t have much currency.

Coming from a state where properties crowd each other, where the landscape is chronically imperiled by drought and fire, I am grateful for the abundance of coastal Alabama: the spacious yards, the endless lawns, the tangled woods, the unabating flow of creeks and bayous. Land and water for miles and miles, all you could ever want. Animals too. Creatures nearly mythic in my Vermont memories are popping up everywhere now: cardinals, blue butterflies, yellow-bellied turtles, tree frogs—fireflies! Those floating beacons of my youth. All is not lost, they assure me, each time I see them blinking in the woods.

While this area’s human population appears at ease, the flora and fauna are never at rest. Have you ever tried pulling a young saw palmetto out of a lawn? Don’t bother. All you can do is snip the savage thing at ground level and acknowledge its imminent return. It has no choice. All it knows is life. Greenbrier is another opportunist in the lawn. While this plant can be yanked out more readily than palmetto, doing so is like playing whack-a-mole. In the time it takes you to prize the long white root from your turf, another upstart appears. I still have a red scar on my ankle from an attack by one of these thorny vines, before I understood that in order to survive in this jungle, one must move slowly and focus on the ground.

Reaching for the hose faucet a few weeks ago, I glimpsed a flash of movement not two feet from me. I gaped, amazed to see a snake so close, and not an innocent garden variety, but something coiled and menacing. I could tell from the triangular head that it was venomous, but not until my spouse came out with the trusty Audubon guide did I learn that it was a young cottonmouth whose bite causes intense pain, bleeding, swelling, nausea and potential amputation.

Yesterday a katydid landed on my back door. I peered through the glass at the leggy green bug, gradually becoming aware that it was missing the lower portion of its body; then I noticed it was also missing one of its hind legs. I don’t imagine a katydid can live for long without these vital parts, and I realized the injuries were fresh, that somewhere in my big green yard there was a frog or toad or snake with half a meal in its mouth.

I am adjusting, wising up to the environment, making room for new hobbies and habits. Bringing my cans and bottles to a recycling center instead of the front curb is not that onerous, and the humidity is manageable now that I’ve squared off with it. Finding fresh lettuce is a challenge, but the veggie beds we’re building should solve that problem. My sister and brother-in-law are close by, which was a big factor in our decision to move here, and their company is a long-awaited comfort. I would of course like to unearth the gay community—there must be one, some brave little enclave waiting for reinforcements. On deeper reflection, maybe there is no enclave here, no separate community at all. Maybe these pockets are going the way of gay bars, no longer needed in this age of sexual fluidity, borders and labels all slipping away—now there’s a happy thought.

Which reminds me of a funny story. The day after we moved in, one of our neighbors came over with a welcoming smile and a basket of local jams. We exchanged pleasantries and then she asked if we had found our people. Wow, I thought, admiring her frankness; had we misjudged this place? “The Lillian fellowship is right down the road,” she continued, “but Mike and I go to the Presbyterian on 98.”

What I like most about the south is the simple, durable goodwill. I can feel it changing me, softening me. Each morning my wife and I have coffee on the back patio and watch the sun come up through the pines. As we often come out before dawn, I sweep a flashlight beam across the cement, making sure we don’t step on something that, like us, is not looking for any trouble, just a place to call home. The other day I saw a black wasp fly out of a small hole in the frame of my deck chair, reminding me of the swallows next door that made a nest in the open sewer pipe of the home under construction. You can find at least three wide-eyed frogs perched inside my hose reel box any time you lift the lid. Not for a minute does even the smallest crevice go to waste. There is panic in the air, the hum of a million creatures trying to stay alive.

I am just one of them, hoping my modest savings will last longer in Alabama than in California and that my new home will survive the storms I know are out there.

Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, lives in Lillian, Alabama. Her stories and essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. Nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, she has also published a novel, Lost Sister. Her debut collection of short stories, Survival Skills, was published by Ashland Creek Press and short-listed for a Lambda Literary Award. Lovers and Loners, her second story collection, was published in 2017. Her collection of nature essays, Strange Company, is available in digital form, paperback and audio.

Lessons in a Chitlin

by Carol D. Marsh

I’d had it.

No matter that I was the one who had dreamed of this place for years, had slogged through the building’s three-and-a-half year gut demolition and renovation using untold quantities of dogged determination and more yelling at the contractor than I’ll ever confess. I’d been ecstatic to move with my husband into our apartment on the second floor in December 1995 and prepare the building called Miriam’s House for its first residents—Washington, DC’s homeless women living with AIDS—in March 1996.

And no matter that I already had fifteen months as resident manager of a house for homeless pregnant women, where I’d been taught a series of painful lessons about the difficulties a middle-class suburban-raised white woman encounters when living with eleven street-wise black women. Why I underestimated the power of our differences after having learned it so painfully then, I couldn’t have told you. Perhaps I thought I had already discovered everything I’d need to know to live and work at Miriam’s House.

I hadn’t. And so, by June, I’d had it.

This resident hated the rules, all of them, and complained loudly every chance she got. That one snarled at my cheeriest greetings. And Tamara. Oh, goodness, Tamara. Who had walked up the front walkway, the first resident to move in on our first day, with a call that I knew immediately I’d remember forever. “I’m home!”

Home, a concept I’d formed while growing up in not-one-bit-integrated suburbia in the sixties and seventies, had become so fixed in my mind that there was little of the conceptual left in it. And though part of me knew this home would be very, very different from my pretty imaginings about how well we would all get along and how grateful they would all be, imagination dominated nonetheless.

Tamara—with what was to me a gleeful, sometimes spiteful, persistence that made a mockery of that cheery greeting on her first day—set about disabusing me of these notions and any others I might have had about myself and how I would be in Miriam’s House. And though most of the residents were friendly and willing to help me bridge our differences, I let Tamara’s combination of bold disrespect and sly baiting overshadow all that was going well.

At a house meeting: Why ain’t you piped purified water into the ice maker? Makes no sense to have good water to drink if we have to put that ice into it. You ain’t thinking.

In the dining room after dinner: You all shoulda heard Carol in the car on the way to the emergency room when I had that fever. (Taking on an overly sweet, childish voice) ‘I hope you’ll be okay. You know I’ll stay there for you.’

Before long, I was avoiding her. I’d slip away from the TV room or dining room when she came in. I’d brace myself for her onslaughts in house meetings and wait for her to be done, responding with just a few words if at all. I couldn’t figure out how to relate to her without incurring her contempt and getting my feelings hurt yet again. I gave up. Avoidance seemed the best policy.

But best policy or not, it simply was not sustainable in that small community.

I stop on my way down the stairs and sniff. Good lord, what stinks?

        What I’m smelling cannot possibly be food, at least, not in undigested form. So, in mystified ignorance, I follow my nose into the kitchen, where the nauseating odor seems to emanate from a pot on the stove. I lift the lid, take a whiff of the steam rising from the boiling mess, and gag.

        I look around and see Tamara, watching me and grinning. “Chitlins. My favorite.”

Oh. It is food. And that is Tamara, ever ready with the quick and slicing jibe. I rearrange the expression on my face. “Hmm. Chitlins. What are they?”

        “Insides of pigs. Don’t worry, I cleaned ‘em good. I ain’t triflin’.” She gives the pot a stir, sending another plume of noxious steam into the kitchen's humid air.

        Insides? I want to gag again. Watching me, Tamara's smile broadens. Something in me stiffens its spine against my too-easily hurt feelings and decides to try something new as she asks what I had for dinner.

        “Tofu stir fry,” I say.

        “Tofu? What the hell is that?”

        I risk a quick grin at her. Here’s my chance. “Sorta like fermented soy beans.”

        “And you think chitlins are bad? Fermented beans? Sounds disgusting.”

        “Not as disgusting as chitlins.”

I’m a bit shocked at myself for answering in kind, stiffened spine or no. This is not how I usually speak to the residents, especially not Tamara. I steal a wary glance at her to gauge her reaction: still grinning. Whew.

“No way my chitlins is worse than them beans.”

Once she has settled the lid back onto the pot, thank God, Tamara turns to send the spoon clattering into the sink and pivots back to me. “No way.”

        “You don’t know that. Have you ever tasted tofu?”

        Later, I realize this is what she’s been waiting for.

        “Okay, I’ll eat a tofu if you eat a chitlin.”

        Oops. This is not where I expected the conversation would go. But her knowing smile galvanizes my pride—it surely cannot be my stomach—into agreeing.  

        The women who taught me the most—about myself, about life at Miriam’s House and life in general—were the ones who fought me. Well, I saw it as fighting me, at the time. Averse to conflict and wanting to be liked, I wished we’d all just get along. Meaning, I realize now, I wished they’d all act like I needed them to act.

I came to see that women like Tamara, the ones who complained and resisted and stomped on my every frayed nerve, were waiting and watching. Too many well-meaning people had proved unreliable. Too many ill-meaning people had doled out injury. I believe those who struggled and pushed were those with the most to lose, precisely because they had lost so much already. And as the one with the power, with a lifetime of advantages they’d not had, it was for me to prove my trustworthiness to them. Not the other way around.

What finally worked, what finally broke through, was almost always some small, spontaneous gesture of mine that grew out of an otherwise mundane encounter in the course of a regular day. It was almost always something simple, yet that nonetheless set the stage for a moment of grace and generosity made possible because I relinquished a little bit of my desire for control.

Tamara happily goes to the cabinet for a plate as I leave, rather less happily, for my apartment upstairs to get “a tofu.” Belatedly suspicious of the alacrity with which she had proposed and been ready for the deal, I realize my sense of having the upper hand is an illusion. I look at the innocuous bit of tofu as I put it on a small plate. At worst, tofu is tasteless, but since my husband stir-fried it with soy sauce and a few spices, this has a pleasing flavor I couldn't imagine chitlins having. I’ve been had. But the tofu and I go downstairs to our fate.

        As soon as I enter the kitchen, Tamara grabs the tofu off the plate, pops it into her mouth and chews enthusiastically. Watching me. I stare at her, suspicious.

        “At the treatment center they only cooked vegan food. Never did get to like it, but I can eat it.”

        She swallows, turns to the stove and lifts the lid off the pot.

        “Okay, and now for the chitlin.”

        Dipping into the pot, she pulls out a pale, half-curled strip of something pale and limp. The now-familiar odor sidles toward me. She puts the thing on the plate. She holds the plate out. I put the chitlin into my mouth. My teeth close on it. Already anticipating the taste—as judged from that smell—I had firmly resolved not to allow my expression to reveal any disgust or, what was more likely, fear. But I had neglected to prepare for the texture, and it feels as though I've placed a slimy, hot rubber band in my mouth. My resolve, conquered by a chitlin, falters and flees.

        “Acccchhhh!” I spit out the offensive thing onto the plate. “It’s like rubber!”

        Brown eyes regard me slyly from beneath a wig's bangs. “You have to eat it. I ate the tofu.”

        She’s right. Very quickly, so as not to give my mind or stomach or taste buds a chance to protest, I throw the chitlin into my mouth, give a couple of ineffectual chews, and gag it down.

        Then we go into the dining room, Tamara and I, and we take chairs in front of the stereo where she fusses with the CD player so we can listen to some Yolanda Adams. The sun is setting, the room in dusk, but we turn on no light. It’s just the two of us, smelling of chitlins and finding the beat.

Carol D. Marsh is a recent graduate of Goucher College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction program. Her master’s thesis, from which this piece is taken, is a memoir of seventeen years as Founding Executive Director of Miriam's House in Washington, DC. Her stories have been published in Soundings Review (awarded Runner-Up in the 2014 First Publication Contest), Jenny Magazine, and the Chronicle for the American Chronic Pain Association. Readers can find her blog here.