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

The next morning I remembered I was actually in Florida, and decided to take a detour to the coast. Central Florida – actually the northwestern part of peninsular Florida – has no big hotels, no crowds, no Disney characters. The accents are rural, the land more inclined to scrub forest than cultivation or pasture. This may have been the Sunshine State, but I wasn’t in the playground part. It was still the South. And it actually looked like rain.

Colonel Rod’s cracker shacks dotted the landscape: tiny clapboard houses, often raised on cinderblocks to avoid flooding, leaning heavily on makeshift front porches. They were almost always half-hidden by shade trees, rarely exposed to the sun. I imagined dark rooms inside and mildew, windows democratically open to both breezes and mosquitoes in equal measure. In this climate it is air-conditioning that draws a line between real poverty and the lower rungs of middle-class comfort. Without artificial coolants, people still have to stop what they’re doing and sit in the shade, as they have for generations, and wait to cool off, and tell each other stories while the sweat dries (or maybe these days they just sit inside and watch TV). The majority of Southern stories aren’t about poverty any more than they are about heat or shade. They’re simply one by-product of a lifestyle that has either vanished – which is why tale-telling is so often associated with the elderly – or that we now call ‘poor.’

The sky began chucking it down. An unrelenting series of fierce rain squalls, really like thimble-sized monsoons, belted the car as I drove toward a small town on the West Coast called Cedar Key. Whenever one hit I was nearly blinded for about seven nerve-wracking minutes, and had to inch along Highway 19 at 25 mph; when it let up the windscreen revealed an unbroken flatness grown over in stumpy, grayish-brown scrub.

Cedar Key is marooned three miles out in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of a series of low bridges. It is a small town – only around seven hundred residents in summer – given over to dissolute, late nineteenth-century buildings with peeling paint and sagging clapboards, columns staggering to support second-story porches. Palm trees and hand-lettered signs advertising bait and cold beer cheered the place up in a spirit of easy-going unconcern, rather than neglect. I drove the two blocks separating the last bridge from the Gulf and parked near the harbor. The sky over the water was the color of pigeons, smudged gray and white, and sheet lightning flashed offshore. The air was so heavy that the smell of beer from nearby bars hung in it like a net.

I wandered into one and sat next to an old man who was simultaneously smoking, drinking a Bud, and eating a Fudgesickle. He told me he was hiding out from the cancer that a doctor said was going to get him. I looked alarmed and he laughed. ‘Better wait for it in a bar than at home watching TV.’ In the next breath he said that a fishing ban had killed the commercial fishing industry in Cedar Key about five years ago, and now clamming was the big thing.

‘What do you get?’ I asked. ‘Cherrystones?’

His glance at me was the fastest I’d seen any part of him move. ‘Aw, you must be from Boston or somewheres up North, am I right? Nobody says cherrystones ‘round here.’

The bartender looked from me to the beer I had ordered (Newcastle Brown Ale), seemed to satisfy some internal inkling, then lost interest and returned to her phone call. ‘Storm’s knocked the power out at my mom’s, down by Rosewood,’ she yelled to someone in the kitchen. I’d seen the Rosewood highway sign on the road to Cedar Key, but it had seemed to apply only to empty acres of scrub forest. Beside it stood a hand-painted placard that read ‘Rosewood Memorial.’

Cedar Key relies on its wonderfully degenerate buildings to set the disreputable, rum-running mood of the place (residents did actually run guns and booze during the Civil War). Because Rosewood had no buildings, however, I had to call Dick Newman, who works in African-American Studies at Harvard, to find out why the name stirred an uneasy association with violence deep in my memory. He told me that in 1922 a white woman had accused a black man from Rosewood – a predominantly black town – of raping her (her accusation was reputedly false, covering up an affair). White vigilantes from the surrounding area retaliated by burning every structure in Rosewood bar one, a farmhouse owned by a white man, and massacred every black resident they found. With the help of the spared white farmer, the mothers saved some of their children by hiding them in a well on the farm property. A grand jury subsequently looked into the matter, but never brought any charges, and the town ceased to exist in all but name.

It had occurred to me earlier that morning, as I was driving through the rain, that while stories ideally link us to the past and to other cultures and traditions, opening the world wider, storytelling itself can sometimes be a way of narrowing experience, of not hearing. To tell (and tell and tell and tell) is not to listen. The teller effectively becomes like a television set, capable of disseminating stories but not of taking them in. Colonel Rod’s barrage of tales the night before had effectively kept me and my disruptive, feminist opinions at bay; I don’t think that shutting me up was his intent, but it had that effect. Like violence, which strips stories from the landscape or buries them with its victims, storytelling can occasionally be a reactionary device, a reflex of the fearful that may be wielded like a defensive – and now and then a deadly – weapon.

I drove out of Cedar Key in a dispirited mood, back past the town that was only a story, and retraced my route north toward Georgia.

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