Writing About Your Infamous Hometown
When I first began practicing the art of Creative Nonfiction (before that genre became so nominally highfalutin’), I didn’t intentionally set out to write about Bessemer, Alabama, my hometown. I did consciously write about my neighborhood where, when I was nine, someone had written the word “fuck” (all in lower case), in orange chalk on the sidewalk near our house.
It was a Holden Caulfield moment, though I wouldn’t read The Catcher in the Rye for another six years. When I did, I appreciated Holden’s anguish, for my daddy slapped me when I informed him of this new word I had learned. My essay about this experience — an essay that I began in 1982 — finally got published by moonShine review in 2011. Here’s to perseverance and protecting innocence.
I wrote other essays about my family’s strange eating habits (my daddy once tried to find a place to pour his habitual ketchup on a plate of homemade Chow Mein). I wrote about our old-fashioned neighborhood barbecues and about my extended family, including my uncles Leon and Shirleigh, names they never used and which I only discovered upon their deaths. I wrote about Alabama football, my first experience going to an Alabama game being the fall after I discovered that “f-word.” My daddy felt so guilty for slapping me.
In fact, these themes will form my next essay collection, which I am tentatively titling, “We Might As Well Eat: How to Survive Tornados, Alabama Football, and Your Southern Family.” My southern family is also half-composed of Jewish members, so there’s that, too.
At some point, though, as I was writing essays about home, I began thinking about the small city where I grew up: Bessemer, fifteen miles southwest of Birmingham. I thought of its once thriving downtown, its neighborhood schools, its rich eateries, and Sunday church life. Then, I thought about how all these often beautiful and loving experiences got tainted by racial animosity and by my growing awareness that many of my friends and neighbors didn’t always act responsibly or morally. For instance, we believe that our former next-door neighbors set fire to their house intentionally, and that while they waited in the alley behind their house watching the flames rise and devour their old wood and tarpaper, our house caught on fire, too. We were displaced for a month and could have easily been killed.
To my knowledge, they never said they were sorry.
These stories are collected in Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warnings from My Alabama Mother (Third Lung Press). It’s still out there, just in case you haven’t finished your Christmas or Chanukah shopping.
A funny thing happened, though, as I continued researching the history of Bessemer. I knew that Bessemer had racial problems, and I had heard that at one time, the KKK had placed a sign on the outskirts of the city, welcoming one and all (or maybe not all) to our town. My mother told me about the sign, and I believed I had even seen it, though imagination often absorbs true memory. So, in my first collection, I confronted the hatred that accompanied me as I fought to understand why our public swimming pool closed; why people moved from their homes when darker-skinned people moved into the community; why some people chose to attend school in a reconverted chicken coop rather than with black kids. I didn’t confront Bessemer’s Klan, though, because I didn’t know much about it, nor did I think I wanted to find who or what was hidden under those sheets.
And then I discovered Moose Park, a reference and maybe a place in or near Bessemer. It was a casual reference in a history of Alabama’s last public lynching in the 1980’s, The Lynching, by Laurence Leamer. Leamer mentioned a Klan rally in Bessemer, and I wanted to know where that rally, in 1963, might have taken place. Through my research, I discovered that True Grit author Charles Portis reported on that very rally for the New York Herald Tribune. You can find his article in a collection of Portis’s writing, Escape Velocity. You can see that he refers to Moose Park. You can try, as I did, to find someone who remembers this place, this time, and you will be stymied because few people know, or will admit to knowing, that such a rally took place, and especially that it took place in a park associated with the Loyal Order of Moose. Most think a Moose might also be an Elk, but they’re not the same thing. Truly.
I read and researched and spoke to legions and haunted the Bessemer Hall of History. If Moose Park existed, it could have been in any of these locations: in the back of a business on 19th Street — Bessemer’s busiest business locale; out on Highway 150 near Y-Wood Field where I once played fast-pitch softball; in the northern neighborhoods of McNeil, toward Hueytown (home of the Allison brothers and Jameis Winston); or on Highway 11 (the Bessemer Superhighway).
The Loyal Order of Moose in Bessemer disbanded in the mid-1960’s and no one knows why. The national Moose office won’t say, nor will they tell me—if they do in fact know—where the Moose Lodge was located. I found everyone’s reticence confounding and compelling, until I began to see that the probable location of the Klan rally was at the Moose Lodge. And that underneath a pair of antlers, there might lurk other horns, or crosses. And maybe a governor or two.
So I published my findings, and these appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of storySouth http://www.storysouth.com/2017/09/moose-park.html.
Did my research into Bessemer’s darkness set me free? I can’t attest to that here, but I hope if you read the essay, you might find that answer, and many others.
I like to think that I set the fire to a renaissance in Bessemer literature. So call me Ishma-El or something. But as I was finishing my essay last spring, two things happened:
First, Brian Reed and Serial came to Bibb County and into Bessemer, chronicling the story of a lonely horologist in the podcast, “S-Town.” John B. McLemore, the subject of “S-Town,” was neither a Moose nor a Klansman. That didn’t matter as much as the fact that people began stopping me and calling me and telling me that my hometown was famous. I think they meant “infamous,” but no matter. Brian Reed is sort of my hero, and I also “know” one of the lawyers trying to settle John B’s estate.
Secondly, in May, Samford University historian Jonathan Bass published his account of a wrongful racial crime, He Calls Me By Lightnin’. The crime takes place, of course, in Bessemer, occurring four blocks from where I lived. Six blocks on the other side of where I lived, there also lived an infamous Bessemer Klansman. I knew nothing of these people, places, houses, facts until I decided to see what lay underneath my town, up the alleys, in the dark corners.
And beneath the sheets.
Oh, and that Klan sign? The one my mother told me about? The one at the start of the essay? Bass found it.
Cool, right?
So why do I feel so low.
“Living is easy with eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see.”
I used to hate researching my writing.
Now it’s like wandering the sidewalks near home.
Alone.
