Hank Hung The Moon

On the road, I'm not particularly concerned about getting anywhere.  The Middle of Nowhere is the way and the destination.  Cities overwhelm me, but small towns and roadsides put everything in human scale--or at least in a scale I can manage to take in.

Those of us who grew up in small towns and rural areas love the symmetry of furrows and orchards, red dirt roads, ditches, old cemeteries, rusted tractors that remind us of our grandfathers'....

While we don't like to romanticize The South, and we never met a good Southern book by a non-Southerner, we love to encounter the real South put into words by someone who knows it like we do.

At Conundrums Book Store in St. Francisville, I bought a book called Hank Hung The Moon by a writer named Rheta Grimsley Johnson who lived a lot of her life in South Georgia, Florida and Alabama about the time Betty and Bob and I were growing up in Cochran.

It's about Hank Williams, who died at 29 and lives on and on in all of us who loved his music, but it's about a familiar time and place she describes so well it takes my breath away!

Especially to Nellie, Betty, Carlene, Lea, and Bob--this book might just be the next book you want to read!

Some cuttings I can't resist sharing, putting some lines in bold so you won't miss 'em.

       As children, my sisters and I would use a stick to draw a hop-scotch board in the white sand just beyond the front gate, using ubiquitous, small red rocks chock full of iron as our markers.  Often, we'd climb the mimosa that grew just outside the kitchen window, inventing elaborate games that made good use of its powder-puff pink blooms.  There were blackberries to pick all along the dirt road in the summertime, and at Christmas a poinsettia bloomed in the chimney corner.  By the time we came along it seemed an idyllic place to grow up, a cacophony of sounds and smells that blended together in some rural recipe and came out as "home." 

       In Chapter Two, the author tells us about the visiting music teacher at her elementary school:

      A special, visiting music teacher made the rounds, weaving her way down the hallway on stilettos, beaming a fluorescent smile at all of us expectant children tucked like crabs into the shells of individual blond desks.   Maybe she longed to be elsewhere, performing on Broadway, or at least on a stage not defined by a linoleum rug. You wouldn't have known it, though.  Southern women of the early Sixties were conditioned to act like they loved whatever they were doing, whether it was ringing a doorbell with your Avon order or dishing out fish sticks in a school cafeteria.  A Southern woman put her best foot forward, made lemonade from lemons, bloomed where she was planted.
       And so the poor woman smiled.


       From second grade through sixth, I attended Dalraida Elementary School in Montgomery, a typical red brick maze of an institution ruled by women and shaded by pines.  It took up a suburban block right out of Ozzie and Harriet, if Ozzie and Harriet had had a little less money and lived near an airfield. I loved the school, and felt exceedingly safe there, from morning til 3 o'clock dismissal....It was a forgotten time long ago, before bullies and bullets enrolled in elementary schools, and before the music died.