Riding a train down south, from Charlottesville to Atlanta, I didn't do an awful lot of thinking. Mostly I slept - from mid Virginia to the bottom edge of South Carolina I stayed fast asleep, lulled by the rocking of the train. And when I woke up, to a South Carolina landscape of fields and kudzu-covered forests, all coated in the golden light of a sunrise, I stared out the window in sleepy admiration. And promptly fell back asleep.
But when I woke up again, well and truly in the deep South, I did start thinking, train-centered thoughts, about three things: cotton, textiles, and Petersburg. Trains traveling from the South loaded down with raw cotton, trains traveling to the South bearing freshly-milled textiles, trains at the center of a bitter Civil War seige.
Then I chided myself for riding into the South and thinking like I was traveling into the past. Such a stereotype, to associate a lower latitude with an earlier era. Of course the South is not a time machine, no more than any other place with a history - off the train, driving through seemingly endless stacks of interstates, it was easy to remember. But now, as I go deeper and deeper into the country, I realize I might have had it all wrong. It's not that the South is a time machine, not that I'm traveling into the past. It's that no matter where you are, the past can be a slippery thing, and it doesn't always know to stay put. I wasn't driving back in time so much as driving into a place where the past lingers on like a mule-stubborn ghost.
Until ten years ago, the houses on these country lanes didn't have numbers. Letters were sent to a name on "Route 1" or "Route 4," and the mailmen knew everybody's name. The recently-invented addresses - "911 numbers," they call them, since they put them in for the ambulances - don't show up on my GPS, and I have to rely on an older kind of directions:
"Go down the road aways until you see a red brick church on the right - that's the church where your Aunt Judith's family is buried, you know, they were Baptists - and then the highway turns to the left, but you want to make sure you keep going straight. Go about three miles, and look for the sign that says "Hay for sale..."
It's not that Jakin looks like a scrap of the past. Sure, there are tiny old buildings on a quaint, ghosttown-like main street, but shiny cars and giant combines roll down that asphalt. The more I learn about this place's history, the farther away the past looks. Then, these roads were lined with tiny subsistence farms - now, farming is a multimillion dollar business. Homemade wooden kitchens have been replaced with granite countertops, dirt floors with smooth-paved roads, and seemingly endless forests of longleaf pine with massive fields of cash crops.
But even if the houses and the landscape look very different than they once did, sometimes it feels like the past hangs thick and heavy in the air, so close I can almost smell it, sour and stale. It smells like old smokehouses, hickory-scented, with a tinge of rancid meat. It smells like lye soap and sweat. Like pone bread straight out of a wood stove, fresh fish sizzling on a skillet, homemade sausages and just-picked corn on the cob. Like mule shit, and houses burning down in the night, and bodies rotting on ropes.
And at dinner, as the farmer comes in from the fields and his wife pulls pone bread from the oven, and talks about how awful she thought it was of their neighbor to bulldoze that old slave graveyard into the ground, the past feels like it's right behind my shoulder, ducking away when I turn my head, leaving only the ghost of a smell to remind us it has never really left.
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