A Road Trip, West: Alabama’s Black Belt
Although the teams on the field are certainly important, high school football enjoys mythic status in the South for more reasons than seeing which group of teenage boys will emerge triumphant. When each season begins, school has just gotten back in session after the long summer break, and everyone is together again. (Some are happy about this, some are not.) Games are played on Friday nights, kicking off the weekend. The band plays, the cheerleaders dance and shout, more parents than would ever come to a back-to-school night are there— everyone has a role to play. Unlike a basketball gym, there is plenty of room to spread out at a football stadium, and fans young and old can choose whether to sit in the stands, hang on the fence, cluster on the field’s perimeter, play games in the grassy spaces, or meander out to the parking lot to refill the styro. High school football is about gathering and community, and nowhere is that more true than in the South’s small towns.
So, when my son’s team had an away game scheduled in Demopolis, Alabama, I decided to ride over there with my wife, my daughter, and her friends. Situated in the middle of Alabama’s Black Belt, Demopolis is largest town in Marengo County, a town of 7,000 that lies midway between Selma and the Mississippi state line. Getting there from Montgomery is a straight shot down the now-infamous Highway 80, which led the marchers eastward to the state capitol in 1965. (The route goes right past the state troopers’ station and over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.) In previous weeks, I had skipped the family’s jaunts down into the Wiregrass to watch our team face Slocumb then Geneva, but my affinity for Alabama’s Black Belt prompted me to knock off work a little early and go with them this time.
Alabama’s Black Belt is the place that most Americans think of when they imagine either the Old South or the impoverished modern South. Looking at a geological or topographical map, instead of a road map, one will see the crescent-shaped swath of once-rich land that loops from Tupelo in northeastern Mississippi down to Tuskegee, Alabama. This was “the land of cotton” in the old song. This area is squarely within Bible Belt, and these counties are the ones that declined from among the richest in the nation before the Civil War to among the poorest in the nation after it. This was also a key battleground of the Civil Rights movement. The black-majority population of the Black Belt belies the remnants of slavery, and these counties have stood as a small but reliable voter base for the Democratic Party since the Voting Rights Act. The Black Belt is the substance of the myths.
Leaving Montgomery in the late afternoon, I knew we would be staring into the sun most of the way there. Highway 80 is aligned due east and west, so the sunrises and sunsets are unavoidable. The highway is mostly four-lanes with few curves; some might say it’s dull, but I like US highways. After passing the Montgomery airport and a small National Guard post adjacent to it, the road is lined by small houses, small businesses, and a few small mills, some abandoned and falling down.
Then comes Lowndes County— Bloody Lowndes, a phrase borrowed by historian Hassan Kwame Jeffries to use as the title for his 2010 book about the mid-1960s there, which formed the basis for the founding of the Black Panther Party in California. A turn onto Highway 21, which threads its way south into Lowndes County, would take a traveler to Hayneville, where Civil Rights activist Jonathon Daniels was killed in August 1965, though continuing west would lead the car past the roadside marker for the murder of Viola Liuzzo, another activist killed a few months earlier. Equal Justice initiative’s Community Historical Marker Project has placed two markers here, in Hayneville and Fort Deposit, on the sites of lynchings in 1888 and 1935.
But driving Highway 80 on a Friday evening in 2023, one’s only reminder of that violent and seminal time is the Lowndes Interpretive Center, which was closed and quiet by the time we passed it. My wife tried to point it out to the teenagers in the back seat, remarking that I had worked on its development in the early 2000s, but they were discussing their Homecoming dates and dresses and only paused momentarily to wonder why they were interrupted. At that point, my wife joined their conversation, so I focused on the road. I had been curious to see what was going on with the White Hall Entertainment Center and found my answer: not much. The small gambling operation was that poor community’s effort to establish a revenue base and a few jobs, but it has been victimized by state politics for more than a decade now. It, too, looked closed and quiet. The conservative narrative in Alabama says that gambling brings a host of social ills, from organized crime to drugs and prostitution. The accompanying myths and beliefs apparently consider those ills to be worse than the ones brought on by desperate poverty, which is what the people struggle against now.
Highway 80 doesn’t pass directly through any of the Lowndes County’s towns, but it does take a traveler straight into Selma, which is the seat of adjacent Dallas County. Today a city of 17,000, Selma is declining fairly rapidly but those who remain have a strong sense of pride in their home, which yields genuine hope. The city had a population over 20,000 at the new millennium, but its people suffer from a sore lack of wealth and, thus, opportunity. Recent improvements have included a Civil Rights visitors center and a renovation of the historic St. James Hotel. However, as a visual reminder of the contrast, the new infrastructure that surrounds the Edmund Pettus Bridge is itself surrounded by blight, offering tourists a sense of the past and the present side-by-side. Selma’s city leaders and community have managed to revitalize the quaint downtown to some extent, but to describe those efforts as ongoing would be appropriate.
On the way out of Selma, the American narrative of progress is on full display. I have written before about this, but no matter what small city or town I pass through, the same evidence is available: shuttered and declining local businesses alongside bright, shiny chain places all lining a four-lane highway. Leaving Selma and heading toward toward Uniontown, one could indulge in all manner of fast food, fill up at a twenty-pump RaceTrac, all the things. What makes me sad about it is the belief that these national chain retailers represent progress. Certainly, the Wal-Mart offers greater variety than any locally owned general store, but what about the Smiths who owned the general store— their family ran that store for generations, and they (and their employees) don’t want to work at Wal-Mart. Narratives about progress always neglect to mention the costs, what we lose in gaining something else. We see what small towns and communities lose when big retailers move in. Even though our well-intentioned politicians and activists are pushing to get broadband internet into far-flung rural areas, I know what they will lose when that innovation finally makes its way out into countryside. In places where resources are limited, the cost of joining the mainstream will be paid by neglecting the local. A generation or two down the line, people won’t miss what they never knew.
But if one were looking for a place lost in time, a few miles west is Uniontown, the home of RC Hatch High School, formerly Perry County Training School. If anybody recognizes Uniontown’s name, it might be because the town’s landfill was involved in a coal-ash dumping scandal so heinous that even The New York Times covered it. I recognize it as being a stop on the easiest route home to Montgomery from the Rural Studio in Newbern. I’ll admit that, during my first experience driving into Uniontown, it was one of the few places I’ve been where the extent of the poverty and dilapidation was startling. I got a few more side-long glares and unfriendly postures than I liked that time, and it had me moving along quickly. That was years ago, and now I think of it as having a Piggly Wiggly where I can stop if I need anything. Passing through on this Friday evening, I could see that things were picking up as the sun went down. The fellows were hanging around in small clusters outside the little convenience stores and auto garages, probably popping a top on the first ones of the night.
It’s not far from there to Demopolis. On the way, we passed the catfish farms and the processing plant, relatively recent developments in the effort to jump-start the local economy. I was driving, so I trusted my wife to be the navigator, but her search terms in the maps app led us to the town’s middle school, not the high school. That worked out OK, though, because I got to point out Gaineswood, which was right by the deserted middle school field. Gaineswood was a grand Southern mansion and is now a tourist destination of historical importance. When I remarked on it, my fellow travelers just kind of went, “Oh, okay,” because it was getting on toward dinnertime, and the nearby McDonald’s was occupying their thoughts. We had passed a local barbecue joint or two, but I was overruled, so that’s where we ate.
What we had driven over there for was, after all, the game. Demopolis High School’s football stadium is a nice venue, and the tailgating locals were particularly friendly. I did take note during the announcer’s introductions that Demopolis has a city school system, meaning that the economic prosperity of the town’s residents was separated from the poorer residents out in the county, a method of funding education that leaves rural people with even less. (The only other town of any size in Marengo County is Linden, which is the county seat but has only 2,000 residents.) Nonetheless, it was Homecoming for the Demopolis Tigers, and as we walked to our seats on the visitors’ side, a cluster of finely dressed teenagers were sitting in a corner of the end zone, waiting patiently for lead-out at halftime. My wife couldn’t resist remarking to the girls how pretty they looked, and they smiled back giddily at the unexpected compliment. While they did look good in their gowns and suits, what I was glad to see was perhaps one of the most indisputable signs that times are changing: of the nine or ten couples there, almost all were interracial.
The game didn’t go so well for them, though. Our boys routed the Tigers 42–0, which I learned from the newspaper the next morning was Demopolis’s worst loss in more than fifty years. It must have stung, because it yielded several unsportsmanlike conduct and late hit penalties against the hometown boys in the game’s final minutes. A banner on the concession stand declared that they had been 5A state champions twice in recent decades, so it must’ve been hard to get beat that badly by a 4A school from out of town on Homecoming. Whatever the ire may have been during the game, both teams knelt in their respective end zones afterward to watch the two bands perform. (The lead-out had taken the time that would normally have gone to the bands, so they performed afterward.)
The road home was uneventful. It had gotten dark, of course, and that prompted me to re-tell my old story about the time I drove that highway completely in the dark. It was in the mid-1990s, when a friend’s employer needed someone to go over to Jackson, Mississippi and pick up his daughter’s car and some of her belongings. The guy, who was quite wealthy, gave us a classic 1970s Mercedes to drive over there, which we thought was really cool. But after we loaded everything up and were coming back, I discovered somewhere around the Alabama-Mississippi line that the Mercedes, which I was driving, had no headlights or dashlights. I had to maneuver that old car by following my buddy’s taillights through the pitch black, through the winding sections of Highway 80 in Sumter County then down the straightaways east of Demopolis, all the way back to Montgomery. Couldn’t see nothing! After many travels have I been glad to be home, but never so glad as that. This time, in 2023, coming home from a big win in Demopolis, my wife was driving and we had headlights, so my biggest problems were being tired and not liking my kids’ music. No matter what challenges life brings, I seem to find a way to survive them.
Read more from the editor’s blog Groundwork.
Originally published at http://modernsouthernfolklore.com on October 12, 2023.
