Pamela Petro - Sitting Up With the Dead - A Storied Journey Through the American South

I arrived in Ocala, Florida at the same time as a tornado warning. When I pulled off the Interstate the sky looked like bruised peaches, bluish-gray and yellow all at once.

Here, in the United States, the Road is supposed to be one of the big stories: the seduction of motion, of progress, of speeding away from the past. But today I felt the same as I did leaving the Atlanta airport – that the highway pulled me in and knocked the breath out of me, like an undertow with the force of a hundred oceans, sucking me into motion and away from all the stories nesting in the countryside. Maybe that’s because the last time I encountered the world-at-rest it was sunny and dusty and utilitarian. Now, leaving the same road, I found myself inside an extravagant purple storm that tugged at the Spanish moss on Ocala’s old trees. The pictures didn’t connect, and I wondered at the glue that held them together.

Ocala looked like a Southern town in drag. Everything there was exaggerated: the steamy heat; the campy Victoriana of the wood-frame houses; the trees! The trees were downright Gothic. Magnolias, palms, and best of all, live-oaks. The latter, characteristically shorn of fussy, incidental twigs, always look gnarled and old; dripping with Spanish moss they were biblical. It was as if rows of Old Testament prophets lined the side streets, waiting to convert paper boys and joggers.

As I headed southeast Ocala gave out onto a commercial strip, as tawdry and generic as any in America. This soon petered out into aluminum-sided, pastel-colored retirement villages, then horse farms, then swamps, and finally, a down-at-heel holiday community on a lakeshore, planted with a sign that read ‘Hernando’. I asked a woman in a beauty parlor which of the three motels I should stay in. ‘Go for the Mid-Florida Motel and Trailer Park,’ she concluded. I pictured the ranch-style units I’d just seen down the road behind a parking lot of slimy green puddles, shadowed by clumps of Spanish moss. ‘I might stay there if I had to. I wouldn’t set foot in the others.’

I had just time to take a cold shower – ringing Colonel Rod for directions from an outdoor pay phone had given me a prickly heat rash – before finding my way out of town through darkening, uninhabited stretches of piney outback to his large, Spanish-style ranch house. I had been eager to talk to a well-known Atlanta storyteller named Chuck Larkin: a real character, by all accounts. But Chuck was unavailable, so he gave me Colonel Rod’s name, and told me he was ‘a good ol’ swamp boy, and a helluva storyteller.’ I imagined a gruff military man with gruff military stories. One who would spurn white panama hats, Hawaiian shirts, and small poodles with jeweled collars. But these were the attributes of the person who answered to Colonel Rod.

‘Colonel Rod Hendrick of the Cracker Brigade, at your service, ma’am,’ he said.

He led me into a spacious, open-plan home with the world’s largest television screen in one corner. When we stood in front of it, the TV characters’ heads were three times bigger than our own. In his study, Colonel Rod sat down beneath a stuffed raccoon and a model airplane, locked me with his turquoise eyes, and said in a dreamy voice, ‘Once upon a time, on the far side of the moon …’ he paused, looked around, and winked, ‘these two crackers went into a bar … Ha! Gotcha! I hate that kind of vomity storytelling, don’t you?’

Colonel Rod explained that a local reporter had given him the nickname ‘Colonel.’ He was actually a retired salesman from Miami, who had also been a cop and happened to be a ‘pedigreed Florida cracker’.

‘I grew up dirt poor, south of Miami. You know what a cracker is, girl?’

I grimaced in half-knowledge. In Tom Wolfe’s novel crackers had been Georgia good old boys.

‘You’re eatin’ grits for breakfast; you know a couple a guys named Skeeter or Gator; you’re huntin’ white tail deer with a six-beer handicap; then you’re a cracker. Used to be a derogatory term, you know, like Redneck, or White Trash. But not anymore.’

Colonel Rod gave me an essay he’d written on Florida Crackers, which put the derivation of the term down to the cracking sound pioneers made with bull whips as they rounded up cattle from the palmetto swamps. These pioneers, Colonel Rod added, had headed south ‘to get away from Yankee oppression’ after the Civil War.

‘Now I’m a storyteller. Say the American Tobacco Company has a conference. I’m the entertainment. I get $500 a gig, and a dollar a mile for transportation. I also teach these workshops in storytelling. There was a teacher who took one of them. Afterward, every Friday afternoon, she held a storytelling hour … the kids were taking to it like, I don’t know, a fish to water or something like that. They loved it.’

‘That’s really great,’ I said politely.

‘Well, she called me later and told me about a little boy in her class called Leon, who is a fantastic storyteller. She said, “He can tell tales, and he tells them with a gift like Mark Twain. He’s fantastic. But what I think is, that he’s lost touch with reality. Now Leon is just lying. And I’ve created a monster. What should I do?”’

When Colonel Rod got to the part about Leon his voice changed. He started tugging on his vowels as if they were made of spandex, stretching out ‘lying’ to sound like ‘li-on’. It occurred to me that a story might have started without my knowledge. I was a little confused until he said he’d advised the teacher to tell Leon the silliest, most outlandish, ‘most lyinist’ story she could think of–‘maybe that will break him out of it.’ Then I knew I was right.

Colonel Rod held my eyes to his, almost without blinking; my peripheral vision caught a ceiling fan spinning directly above his head, like a whirligig hat. He was saying that the teacher could see Leon was getting worse. So she told him a tall tale about being attacked by an Alaskan bear on the way to school, on the corner of Alligator Avenue and Center Street. A little black-and-white dog had killed the bear and saved her.

‘Leon,’ Colonel Rod concluded, ‘just sat there goggle-eyed. Big-eyed as a bug. You got to believe me. And the teacher looked over and said, “Now Leon, do you believe that story?”

And Leon said, “Yes ma’am. That’s my dog.”’

Colonel Rod was on a storytelling jag. He’d told me he’d numbered his stories one through twenty-one as a fail-safe mnemonic for when he’s performing. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘Quick: what’s number seventeen?’

‘A cracker in a bus station!’ he roared, and he was off.

After dinner – a healthy, low-fat meal fixed by his wife Brenda – Colonel Rod had led me through a shoulder-sized gap in the electric cattle fence surrounding his house to a replica of an old Florida Keys fishing shack that he’d built out back. It looked like the retreat of a degenerate boy scout: kerosene lamps for atmosphere, even though it was wired for electricity; pots and pans hanging from the ceiling; two sets of bunk beds; photographs of people who had caught big fish; a makeshift bar stocked with gin and bourbon; old Southern state flags emblazoned with the stars and bars of the Confederacy (all since replaced as politically incorrect, except that of South Carolina, which is the subject of a bitter debate).

A violent thunderstorm had trapped us in the shack and Brenda in the house with our cappuccinos. ‘This,’ Colonel Rod had said, beaming, ‘is where friends of mine come and turn the monkey loose. Y’know, guys getting together to get drunk and fart.’

As the storm worked itself into a full gale so did Colonel Rod. I could feel him shrewdly calculating audience response – in this case, a captive audience of just one – judging if he had succeeded in his two favorite, occasionally incompatible, aims: to startle and to please. As I betrayed only pleasure (politeness is like a hormonal imbalance with me – I can’t help it), he got a little reckless. Not only did he slip into what he called his ‘cussin’ stories’, but others that took tired, if belligerent, pot-shots at women, gays, and a variety of other minorities. On cops: ‘There are no policemen left. Only social workers.’ On blacks: why there should be highway signs for exiting white drivers in parts of Miami that read, ‘Beware: Ghetto ahead.’ But then he added, ‘I guess the same goes for them, too. Man, I wouldn’t want to be a black guy made a wrong turn in South Boston.’