BOOKPATHS

Fairhope, Alabama, U.S.

In this month’s Smithsonian, memorist Rick Bragg explains why he likes living in Fairhope, Alabama.

I went to the Alabama coast, to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, to find a more forgiving soil, a shiftless kind that tides and waves just push around.

I found it in a town called Fairhope.

I never thought much about it, the name, till I saw the brown sand swirling around my feet under the amber-colored water ten years ago. A swarm of black minnows raced away, and when I was younger I might have scooped one up. This is an easy place, I remember thinking, a place where you can rearrange the earth with a single toe and the water will make it smooth again. – from “Fairhope, Alabama’s Southern Comfort, by Rick Bragg, Smithsonian

Alabama

Laura M. Holson follows the “path of Walker Evans.”

Few guidebooks navigate the highways that stretch from Birmingham to Selma. And as I listened to Ms. Hale I realized I had stumbled upon my own private tour. Conversation, it seems, is the best way to discover Walker Evans’s Alabama. – from “On the Path of Walker Evans,” by Laura M. Holson, The New York Times

Alabama; United States

Rosa Parks: My Story, by Rosa Parks, with Jim Haskins (New York: Puffin, 1999; first published in 1992)

Although written for young people, adults will also find Rosa Parks: My Story a rewarding read, reminding us of the importance of December 1, 1955, the day when Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery bus, not because she was “tired physically,” but “tired of giving in.”  Parks’ descriptions of life in the segregated south, the Civil Rights movement, moving to Detroit, and reflections on her place in history, not only pull us into her life story, but into the history of the United States, a history of the struggle for equality that must always be remembered.

Integrating the Montgomery buses did not go smoothly.  Snipers fired at buses, and the city imposed curfews on the buses, not letting them run after five p.m., which meant that people who worked from nine to five couldn’t ride the buses home.  A group of whites tried to form a whites-only bus line, but that didn’t work.  The homes and churches of some ministers were bombed, as I mentioned.  But eventually most of the violence died down.  Black people were not going to be scared off the buses any more than they were going to be scared onto them when they refused to ride. – from Rosa Parks: My Story, by Rosa Parks, with Jim Haskins

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

Rosa Parks Library and Museum, Troy University, Montgomery, Alabama

Rosa Parks Library and Museum, Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.

What one person can do is celebrated at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum, on the Troy University campus, in Montgomery, Alabama. Exhibits follow the life and times of Rosa Parks, including a replica of the public bus on which Parks, a “42-year-old African American seamstress,” refused to “yield her seat…to a white man” in December 1955. Four days after Rosa Parks was arrested and found guilty the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2005, the original museum and library expanded with a new children’s wing.

For visitor information, visit the Rosa Parks Library and Museum website.

Hale County, Alabama, USA

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: the American Classic, in Words and Photographs of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South, by James Agee and Walker Evans (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2001, and other editions; first published in 1941)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men combines James Agee’s challenging and haunting prose with Walker Evans’s unforgettable photographs to tell the stories of three overworked and impoverished Alabama sharecropper families in the late 1930s. While Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is specific to time and place, it’s reach widens as a touchstone for all human suffering.

“There are on this hill three such families I would tell you of: the Gudgers, who are sleeping in the next room; and the Woods, whose daughters are Emma and Annie Mae; and besides these, the Ricketts, who live a little way beyond the Woods….” – from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans

Publisher’s Website

Birmingham, Alabama

The National Academy of Writing comes to Birmingham.

“The National Academy of Writing, backed by many of Britain's leading authors, novelists and playwrights, has selected UCE Birmingham as its partner in running a vocational course for budding writers.” – Website

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

The Honors College at the University of Alabama sponsors a yearly essay contest for high school students. Their subject – write an essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. Each year, Ginia Bellafante writes in the New York Times, Harper Lee, “one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters,” attends the awards ceremony, including the one held recently. Read about this year’s event and Harper Lee in Bellafante’s article and in the University of Alabama News.

Monroeville, Alabama

It's time again to set aside a moment for The Thanksgiving Visitor.

The Thanksgiving Visitor, by Truman Capote, in A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor (New York : The Modern Library, 1996; it is also included in The Complete Stories of Truman Capote)

"...a custody battle that, for involved reasons, had left me stranded in this somewhat eccentric Alabama household. Not that I was unhappy there, indeed, moments of those years turned out to be the happiest part of an otherwise difficult childhood, mainly because the youngest of the cousins, a woman in her sixties, became my first friend." -- from The Thanksgiving Visitor, by Truman Capote

Truman Capote spent the happiest years of his childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, living with a trio of elderly aunts and an uncle. The Grass Harp, A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, and The Thanksgiving Visitor look back on those years.

The Thanksgiving Visitor, a touching story of love and kindness, can easily be read between Thanksgiving preparations. Capote takes readers back to 1932. The Depression has hit Alabama, but Buddy, a nickname bestowed on him by Miss Sook, lives comfortably "in a high-ceilinged old country house situated where the town ended and the farms and forests began." Two of his aunts operate " a dry-goods store and several other business ventures." Uncle B owns "a number of cotton farms scattered around the countryside...." But, it is Miss Sook, his "sensitive shy-lady fern" aunt who becomes Buddy's "best friend." "Except for the hours I spent at school," Capote recalls, "the three of us, me and old Queenie, our feisty little rat terrier, and Miss Sook, as everyone called my friend, were almost always together." It is Miss Sook who helps Buddy with his homework, takes him on excursions, and calms him during his "nightmare upheavals."

The "nightmare upheavals" mostly revolve around Buddy's schoolmate, "Odd Henderson," twelve-years old, but in the same second grade class as Buddy. Odd "torments" Buddy. "It would take a page in small print to list the imaginative punishments Odd inflicted, but what I resented most and suffered most was the sense of dour expectations he induced." It is only when Buddy regains "the peace of the warm kitchen, where Queenie might be gnawing on an old dug-up bone and my friend puttering with a piecrust, that the weight of Odd Henderson would blessedly slide from my shoulders." Miss Sook knows what is troubling the young Buddy and, unable "to acknowledge that any human could be as bad as I made him out," thinks of a plan to bring the boys together, to encourage them "to know each other a little." With Thanksgiving a week away, she insists that Buddy invite Odd Henderson "here for Thanksgiving."

What happens in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, the "lively" day itself, and the aftermath complete the story. When "the Thanksgiving visitor" joins the warm family gathering, jealousy and revenge lead Buddy and readers to an important lesson, one worth remembering each year.

"A lively day, that Thanksgiving. Lively with on-and-off showers and abrupt sky clearings accompanied by thrusts of raw sun and sudden bandit winds snatching autumns leftover leaves." -- from The Thanksgiving Visitor, by Truman Capote

Monroeville, Alabama is proud of its literary heritage. Two other writers, besides Truman Capote, have ties with Monroeville, "the Literary Capital of Alabama." Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama, is a native of Monroeville, as is Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. The town in To Kill a Mockingbird is based on Monroeville, while Lee's childhood friend, Truman Capote, inspired the character, Dill. Visit Monroeville's website for information.

"Now listen to me Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin -- deliberate cruelty." -- from The Thanksgiving Visitor, by Truman Capote

BOOKPATH: Birmingham, Alabama

Four Spirits, by Sena Jeter Naslund (New York : Perennial, 2003)

When I was a college student in the early sixties in Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself, if I ever did become a novelist, that I would write about the acts of courage and tragedy taking place in my city. I would try to re-create through words what it was like to be alive then: how ordinary life went on, how people fell in and out of love, how family members got sick, how people worked ordinary jobs, tried to get an education, worshiped, looked for entertainment, grew up, died, participated in the great changes of the civil rights struggles or stood aside and watched the world change. -- from Sena Jeter Naslund's "Author's Note" in Four Spirits

In Four Spirits, Sena Jeter Naslund transports readers to Birmingham, Alabama of the early 1960s. Fictional characters and historical figures interact, bringing Naslund's novel to life. Places also pull readers into Birmingham's, and our own, history.

There are two Birminghams in Four Spirits. From high atop "Red Mountain," near the statue of "Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge," you look down on a quiet landscape, the "entire city of Birmingham filling the valley between the last ridges of the Appalachian mountain chain as it stretched from high in the northeast to southwest." On the streets below, however, fire hoses are being "turned on the Negroes peacefully congregating and marching for equality." Vulcan's presence is felt throughout the novel, but it is in Downtown Birmingham that history is being made.

Kelly Ingram Park "is the heart of it." TJ, one of the book's characters, remembers the Kelly Ingram park of his childhood as a place of "no importance." "Now it was the beating heart of the protest movement in Birmingham, and Birmingham was the heated-up heart of Alabama, and Alabama was the Heart of Dixie." And Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site of the bombings that killed the four little girls, the "four spirits," is "right across from the park." These locations are at the center of Four Spirits, places of violence and change.

Other places, too, are important to the novel. The Birmingham Jail; Phillips High School; Oak Hill Cemetery; the Birmingham Public Library; Birmingham-Southern College; and the gardens, "the most beautiful spot in Birmingham," Stella thinks, at the Cathedral Church of the Advent. Miles College is one of the center points of Four Spirits, a place where black and white teachers come together as colleagues and become friends. Christine Taylor knows that this threatens some, saying to the class, "'We already doing what they trying to stop...We integrated. Yes, we are. Say the word, class.'"

We learn about some of Birmingham's neighborhoods and the streets leading in and out, the Cahaba River, and the importance of the Gaston Motel. Owned by A. G. Gaston, for many years it was the only first-class lodging for African Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr. stayed at the Gaston, as did Reverend Ralph Abernathy. Occasionally Four Spirits remembers other places, such as Montgomery, where it all began. "Rosa Parks was the start of it all. Christine wanted to remember that. One brave, middle-aged Montgomery, Alabama, black woman." The places in Four Spirits, along with the lives of the fictional characters and historical figures, linger in your mind after leaving the book's pages.

Birmingham is worthy of a pilgrimage, a place to remember how far we've come and how far we have to go. You can visit places mentioned in the book. You can join a worship service at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, or reflect in Advent Gardens at the Cathedral Church of the Advent. The A. G. Gaston Gardens occupy the site of the former A. G. Gaston Motel. Miles College still provides training. Kelly Ingram Park is "distinguised as 'A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation.'" Park sculptures recall the attacks on demonstrators, children jailed for protesting, and "the clergy's contribution to the movement." Park paths converge at the center, a place of hope. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute invites you on a "journey through the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement and human rights struggles." The Institute not only looks back at Birmingham's civil rights struggles, but also looks at current human rights issues around the world. And you can still experience beautiful and tranquil views of Birmingham from Vulcan Park atop Red Mountain.

"'What's happening here in the South. King's courage. Shuttleworth's. This rising of the South, it's a Christian movement. Oh, I know, plenty of Eastern intellectuals down here. You guys. Maybe some Buddhists, for all I know. Gandhi was a Hindu, and he's the fountainhead of all of it; he's immensely important to King. But the rise of the Negro in the South is really a Christian story. It has to be told that way.'" -- from Four Spirits, by Sena Jeter Naslund

"...Yes, the city did change. There was death, but there was rebirth. There was the seed of equality sown in pain, but there has been and continues to be the harvest." -- from Four Spirits, by Sena Jeter Naslund

Websites

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
bcri.bham.al.us

Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau
(Includes a guide to "The Birmingham Civil Rights District...a six block tribute to the monumental fight for human rights in our country," and an audio walking tour of Kelly Ingram Park.)
http://www.bcvb.org/index.asp

Vulcan Park
http://www.vulcanpark.org/

Sena Jeter Naslund Official Website
www.senajeternaslund.com/

Of course racism is still an issue in our country. I hope that in its own way, this book will continue to honor the courage of the leaders and participants in the civil rights movement and to encouage people to come together and to share ideas about how to move forward. I hope people will speak about their own journeys toward an understanding that transcends race and other artificial barriers. For, after all, what can we do with our stories, but tell them? -- from "A Note from Sena Jeter Naslund" in Four Spirits

Advent Gardens, Cathedral Church of the Advent
2017 6th Avenue

A. G. Gaston Gardens
1510 5th Avenue North

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
520 16th Street North

Kelly Ingram Park
6th Avenue North at 16th Street

Miles College
5500 Avenue G, Ensley

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
Intersection of 16th Street and 6th Avenue

Vulcan Park
20th Street South and Valley View