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Saturday, March 31, 2018

Makers

Southern people--whites and blacks and Cajuns--are makers of things.  As I was looking at, listening to, and eating some of the good made-things, I kept hearing Paul Simon's Graceland playing in my mind:

The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a National guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the civil war

Some Acadian women told their stories in a quilt I saw in the  St. Martinsville museum of Acadian and African-American culture:




Women have often made the practical beautiful in patchwork quilts, pieced with fabrics from old dresses:


People make rag dolls, musical instruments, wedding dresses, and paintings.  The old timers dyed their own fibers and spun them into yarns, then crocheted and knitted them into sweaters and hats and scarves--and younger people are reviving these arts.  Some build their own furniture, grow flowers and fruits and vegetables, and some paint murals on the sides of buildings.

Ocean Springs


a wedding gown
in a boarded up thrift shop by the side of the road

Dyed wool--using copper and indigo
Breaux Bridge

Made by a North Carolina man for
his sister, a weaver in Breaux Bridge

one of many Blue Dog paintings
in Lafayette

a necklace around a weathered building
made of crab trap floaters


A window display in New Orleans

A lunch restaurant just north of Natchez called Mammie's



Southerners make songs and sermons and screenplays.  They save old stuff.  Like this fire truck, all rusted out and Gautier.





Handmade Signs

My friend,Victoria, a painter and writer, makes wonderful paintings of hand-made signs that are fast disappearing in favor of chain-store and cookie-cutter ones.  You can see them in Southside San Antonio and on the back streets of towns and cities all over the country, but you won't find them on the Interstate.

They are often crudely painted wooden or cardboard signs in front of barber shops, donut shops, tire shops, and cafes.

When I see one I always think of Victoria's art work.









Church Signs and Other Southern Literature

The South has a cast of characters that, if you grow up there, you can't help wanting to write about it. It has its scoundrels and its saints, just like everywhere else.  It's filled up with liars and truth-tellers and a whole bunch of people in between.

William Faulkner said, "To understand the world, you first have to understand a place like Mississippi."

Most Southern writers are good at describing characters and places because they spend a lot of time looking at them, taking them in,  and being them.  Someone once asked Walker Percy, the Louisiana writer, why the South produced so many good writers, and he said, "Because we lost the war." (Hmmmm--not sure I agree, but okay, that's what he said.)

I could have spent days in Conundrum, the independent book store in St. Francisville that has an impressive collection  of books by Southern writers. I bought a couple of books by writers new to me, but I want to re-read the ones I already read. Only now do I have enough life experience to get them, really get them, not like I thought I did back in college.

Southern writers, like Flannery and William and Eudora and Alice and Walker, put their fingers right on the seeming contradictions of deep-South people and places--the seeming awful people who have some good in them, the seeming good people who could do you ill.

The South has its racists (I met one in Louisiana who told me that her hometown wasn't what it used to be now that it's been taken over by--[she whispered the last word:] Blacks) but it also has, I'm pretty sure, way more tolerant and big-hearted folks.

What you can't miss driving through the South are the steeples and stained glass and singing of  churches.

I started counting the little bitty Baptist churches on the backroads of Mississippi and Louisiana, but there were too many to count.  There must be one every three miles in the countryside, and bigger ones in the towns.

Their signs are so well thought-out, so reflective of the theologies of those who took the time to post them.

Some denominations announce Friday Night Fish Fries and Crab Boils and times of services.  But Baptist churches, and sometimes others, post mini-sermons.  You could do a whole trip just taking pictures of church signs.




                                          One sign said, in a Martin Luther King rhetorical style,
                                            "We do God's work, God's way, for God's glory."

                              Another announced that their God was a burning-up sort of God--
                                      though I whizzed by too fast  to capture the actual words.

                        I even  saw a road-side stand selling Cracklin'....and if you don't know what that is,
                                   you haven't missed much.  It's the skin of pigs, fried in lard.
                                   Beside the cracklin' stand was a wooden pig, in a red dress,
                                                            that said, "Praise The LARD!"

                                     A car wash business sign promises "Christ-Like Car Washes."
                                   

For all its quirks, because of all its quirks maybe, I have a real affinity for the South.  It's known for its food, music, laughter, and hospitality. Gospel and grits. Magnolias and gravy.

It's like a great big layer cake on the outside, but only if you grow up in it (like probably anyplace else) do you know what's stirred into the batter and what people mean when they say what they say.



The Fifth Annual Walker Percy Weekend 

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Good food, craft beer and bourbon, live music, and a great time talking about books and Southern culture under the live oaks: That's what the fourth annual Walker Percy Weekend has to offer when it returns to celebrate the acclaimed novelist's life and work.  For more information and tickets visit : www.walkerpercyweekend.org











Friday, March 30, 2018

Many and More

My first stop in Louisiana was unplanned but very special.  A little town called Jena pulled me off the road because Miss Georgia's antique shop (the only antique shop I visited on the trip) had such a charming window display, almost everything white with a few touches of turquoise and green.  I spent a good while talking to her about her niece's cake shop (Emily's Place) in Cibilo, Texas, and Georgia's mission trips to Mexico that always involve fun visits to San Antonio on the way back.



A framed piece in Miss Georgia's store


Miss Georgia.
"Don't you forget me now," she said--prompting this photo.
"I want you to come back to Jena real soon." 


She recommended a lunch place right across the street--which was excellent.

Alway ask the locals where to eat in small towns!

Miss B's is owned by Bonnie--she and her sister moved there from California a few years ago to be with their father when he retired. The food was delicious (farm to table style) and the farmhouse decor was really beautiful, mostly whites and naturals and tin.






After Jena, I drove to Natchitoches, the oldest town in Louisiana, on the Cane River.  Carlene and I spent a fun day there three years ago.

Then following The Camino Real, I drove  west on Highway 6 until it turned into 21 and got me almost all the way home.

Just before driving into Texas, I saw some bird houses and did a U-Turn.  Here's Shirley who makes and sells these roadside houses near Many, Texas.

It's rare to find a town with an adjective for a name, and I'm curious about the origin of that name.  Loved the sign and thought about it for miles: "Welcome to Many!"




Two things that really enhance backroad travels: Stopping to talk to locals who make what they make (from cupcakes to bird houses to pottery to meals) and visiting local visitors' centers that will give you bags of brochures and maps and tell you what's happening in their towns.

What they don't tell you, because they don't know, is how many times you'll have to stop along the way to meet people who are makers of beautiful things and to enjoy the cretaions of the natural world in all kinds of different lights.

So much rain from the night before gave me beautiful reflections of
flowers and trees.

Crocket, Texas 

This may be my best nature photograph of the entire trip.
No color re-touching--this was the vivid blue of an
unrepeatable moment in time! 

Creature Comforts

Driving out of Natchez yesterday, crossing the Mississippi, I switched on NPR and found this delightful local affiliate and a program called "Creature Comforts."  It's a call-in show wherein Mississippi people call in and ask questions, yesterday's program featuring questions about pets.

http://www.mpbonline.org/blogs/creature-comforts/2018/03/29/creature-comforts-you-and-your-pets/

This has to be one of the most quintessentially Southern collage of voices I've heard on radio, and I loved hearing it--even though I have no pet.

The people answering calls (the host of the show and a veterinarian) reminded me of the people in first grade reading books--Fireman Fred, Policeman Bob, The Doctor--everybody so kind and innocent.

One Southern gentleman said he was "heartbroken" about his dog's cataracts.  One caller insisted that her dog foretold the weather with his tail.  Another sounded like he came right off the pages of Rick Bragg's books.

If you want a taste of Southern Creature Comforts, check out this one!




Home At Midnight!

And that, for now, is all she wrote....

So good to be safely home, in my own bed, with memories of a really special 2903-mile road trip through the South!




Thursday, March 29, 2018

All Around St. Francisville

Driving backroads to St. Francisville from Covington was beautiful! I passed abandoned sharecropper-type houses so dilapidated they looked like they might cave in any minute.  Antebellum houses with giant pastures and white fences. Horses, ducks on ponds, roadside memorials in red clay and grass, fields of cows, old cemeteries, giant old trees, wildflowers.  This is a place I'd like to stay for at least a week, just looking around!  Looking is my vocation.







When I arrived in St. Francisville, I had lunch here--a crawfish salad. 


I spent an hour in Conundrum, a beautiful independent
book store in an old garage--with Missy, the owner,
and Buster, her sort of partner

And Another Hour here in Grandmother's Buttons,
a store and museum of buttons from the 1800s
and early 1900s. 


After a good night's sleep and no tornadoes or hail, I'm heading out now, over the Mississsipi Bridge, west, to San Antonio.


Natchez

When I got here last night, all the people in the lobby (all but Carolyn--I'll get to her later) were glued to the TV watching the weather channel.  Candy (the young one who served us all red rice and beans) said when a twister came to their neighborhood once, she and her mama just got in the bathtub and pulled a mattress up over them.  She's young and Black and beautiful--but she doesn't know she's beautiful.

I passed on to her my mama's words, "My mama didn't teach me to be afraid," which I could say of my mama herself, and she took that in, I could tell.  She told me she could also get me some iced tea, sweet or unsweet, and told me to go ahead and get me some spaghetti and cornbread and have a good trip.

Carolyn is the desk clerk--a hoot!  She's 67 and getting her associates degree "finally" at the junior college, in hospitality.  I didn't tell her, but she needs no degree--she's hospitality personified already.  We talked for half an hour and I invited her to come spend the night in the casita sometime, gave her my card, hope she will.

"Don't worry about the weather, Baby," she said. "Everything is going to be fine.  You're going to get home tomorrow before dark, no problem, but first come on in here and have you some breakfast."

"The problem with getting a degree at sixty-seven is that nobody might want to hire me.  People think just cause you're older, you're gonna have arth-a-ri-tis and be sick, but I can tell you that's not me.  I have perfect health and I want to do this!"  Her dream is to have a Bed and Breakfast of her own.

The Mississippi River, Natchez view

After rice and beans, drove into Natchez
to see the Mississippi Bridge--which,
weather permitting, I'll be crossing at daylight

Carolyn

"Here--get my good side!" 

On the way here from Covington, I stopped at a cupcake shop in the middle of nowhere--not because I wanted a cupcake, but because I wanted to meet these folks:



Brown's Cake Shop.
Be Still Let Go
Let God Psalms 46:10
Cupcakes

I ordered one pink one just for the chance to take pictures
and talk--but they gave me another one for free and said I MUST see St. Francisville,
which
is exactly where I was heading...