My review for Magic City by Burgin Mathews was just posted on the Alabama Writers’ Forum website. Magic City, to be released in November, explores the rich heritage of jazz that emerged from the Birmingham area and went on to have national influence. Here’s a preview:
Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America
Of clover and of noon!” – “The Bee” by Emily Dickinson
Trying to savor the summer while having some restraints on my activities, I have been thinking a lot about the bees. I have been watching them a lot, keeping in mind alarms about declining bee populations. Specifically, I have been staying at my mother’s house full-time, so I shifted focus from attracting bees to my own small yard in Rocky Ridge to observing the activity around her garden home community on the steep west slope of Shades Mountain.
A late freeze brought the demise of a large loropetalum shrub encircling a tall crape myrtle in Mother’s front yard. When the loropetalum was removed, we decided to plant a variety of blooming and leafy plants in its stead. It turned out to be a good move – with compact bidens, calibrachia, rosemary, vinca, and Japanese painted ferns putting on a frisky, flourishing show beneath the deep crimson blooms of the crape myrtle. I keep a careful watch over the volunteers – some are welcome; others will take over if left alone.
On the porch, a yellow begonia holds court in a hanging container, with lysimachia flowing toward the ground. The large blooms of a braided mandevilla in a unique coral and golden hue are a favorite of my mom’s, but the blooms drop after one day, leaving the plant leafy without flowers on occasion. It shields an always trustworthy heuchera which was joined this year by a lacy volunteer that was just too charming to eliminate. The lacy foliage will wither away in late-fall, but the heuchera, if it acts according to habit, will still be flourishing next year.
As you come into the entry space, a ruellia – commonly called a “wild petunia” and known for an invasive nature – stands confined in a container, grounded by impatiens and lysimachia. Its delicate morning blooms fall off daily, to be replaced by new blooms the next morning. The roses in a bed next to the house have seen better days, but they are hanging in there. Bees, butterflies, and the occasional hummingbird show up and regular rainfall and diligent watering are keeping everything happy so far in the stifling July heat.
But here’s the kicker: There’s a Rose of Sharon in my parent’s backyard that grew from a sprout and is probably in excess of twelve feet now. It’s covered with fuchsia blooms and – at any given time – hundreds of bees. I know Rose of Sharon is a common name used for a number of plants – this one is a hibiscus – but I like the tradition and antiquity of the appellation and plan to use it until the plant police come knocking. Bees have always loved this specimen, but this year seems to be a banner year for its bee population from early morning to sunset. There is a constant low buzz from the tree when we wander into the yard.
Slightly to the side of the Rose of Sharon is a raised bed my dad created. I haven’t had a chance to properly tend to it this year, but it is lush and beautiful in its wildness anyway. Purple heart and yellow lantana grow in a bed with four less-than-stellar rose bushes. The in-ground Easter lilies bloomed late and those plants have taken their time fading away. Like many other plants, the odd weather seems to have confused them; one healthy looking lily has developed three new bulbs (in the middle of July!) but I do not expect them to bloom.
It hasn’t been a great few years for the roses of any kind and my grandfather’s ancient rose bushes, grown from cuttings of the mother plant, have struggled to flower. The hummingbird feeders do not seem as busy as usual, but an occasional hummer is spotted at the feeders and among the bees in the Rose of Sharon. It’s a challenge to keep the bird feeders stocked; it’s a bigger challenge to keep the squirrels away, but Lulu, the prancing chihuahua, likes nothing better than to chase the squirrels. Mourning doves are the primary customers at the feeders, but a pair of cardinals are frequent visitors since late-winter, as are an occasional bluebird and blue jay and a red-headed woodpecker. Wrens and chickadees are also in evidence, I think, but I hesitate to say much since a reader pointed out recently that I don’t seem to know the difference. I pay my annual due diligence to the Audubon Society and the Arbor Day Foundation but I’m not always good at the identification part of the test.
These are the things that inhabit my alternate garden in summer 2023. 
I remember traveling as a young boy with my father and grandfather to the earthen dam being built on the Sipsey Fork of the Black Warrior River by Alabama Power Company. It ultimately created Lewis Smith Lake in 1961, a popular recreation spot and the deepest lake in the state, touching Cullman, Walker, and Winston counties. My grandmother, who grew up in the area, could point out places under the lake where farms used to be; she could also point out a spot where a covered bridge was somewhere “down there.” The tiny Winston County town of Fall’s City was entirely submerged, as were cemeteries throughout the area. Some families chose to move their loved ones, while others chose to let them lie in peace at the bottom of the lake.
A few years later, traveling with my dad to a business appointment in Anniston, I was confused when I saw a series of docks and rock jetties jutting out onto dry land off I-20. Dad explained that the area was about to be flooded to create Lake Logan Martin. These soon-to-be “lake homes” were getting a jump on their lakeside property. Another Alabama Power Company project.
I understand the reasons for these mid-century projects, and I have always admired Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” legislation during the Depression and the benefits those initiatives, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, brought to rural areas of north Alabama. But I have also been concerned about what was lost as we grow increasingly aware of costs to the environment from human intervention in the past couple of centuries.
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My reading has taken an environmental turn over the last few years. Some of it was from a commitment to read more of the writing of biologist / environmentalist E.O. Wilson. But the bulk of it is just a growing environmental awareness that has increased as the threats to our well-being from environmental abuse and neglect have become more obvious.
Here is some of the reading I have been doing over the past couple of years, illustrating the wide variety of environmental writing available. A good sampler is The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing (2021), edited by Tori Bush and Richard Goodman, with content stretching back into the 1800s. Salleyland (2023), by Whit Gibbons, documents the Gibbons family’s adventures on 100-acres of South Carolina land. The Overstory (2018), by Richard Powers, is a brilliant novel in which the trees become the protagonists.
Occasionally, there are peripheral essays that fit the bill, such as “Homewood’s Salamander Migration and Festival” in James Seay Brown Jr.’s Distracted by Alabama (2022), about a salamander crossing at a creek near me. A friend recently alerted me to “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946), a lovely essay by George Orwell that fits neatly into modern sensibilities about appreciating the nature around us.
My reading of E. O. Wilson’s 1994 autobiography, Naturalist, led me to move on to read and review Richard Rhodes’s biography, Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature (2021), which was a nice augmentation to the autobiography. That inspired me to seek out another Rhodes biography, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (2004), which, in turn, inspired me to finally acquire John James Audubon: The Birds of America, a collection of prints of the original watercolors from Audubon’s 1827-1838 series.
One novel is nestled among the over thirty books that comprise E. O. Wilson’s oeuvre. Anthill (2010) is a coming-of-age story set in Alabama, partially in an area that calls to mind the wilderness of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. It’s fitting then, that E. O. Wilson wrote the Foreword to Ben Raines’s Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System (2020) about the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
Lest that book title seems like hyperbole, consider these facts from the book’s first pages:
There are more species of oaks on a single hillside on the banks of the Alabama River than you can find anywhere else in the world … Thanks to the Mobile River Basin, the state of Alabama is home to more species of freshwater fish, mussels, snails, turtles and crawfish than any other state.
For instance, Alabama is home to ninety-seven crawfish species. Louisiana, famous the world over for boiled crawfish, has just thirty-two species; California, three times the size of Alabama, has but nine. There are four hundred and fifty species of freshwater fish in the state, or about one-third of all species known in the entire nation … When it comes to turtles, … the Mobile-Tensaw Delta has eighteen species … More than the Amazon. More then the Mekong. More than any other river system on Earth.
Here’s one more startling passage:
[T]he Cahaba River is home to one hundred and fifty species of fish, more species than you find in the entire state of California. Imagine, roughly one-sixth of all the freshwater fish species known in the United States live in a single Alabama river that is just one hundred and ninety-four miles long.
Raines complements his writing about the Mobile-Tensaw Delta with his stunning photography of the natural vistas throughout the region, parts of which can only be reached by wading long distances through swamps and wetlands. Raines knows the area well; his team found the remains of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to illegally enter the country, its charred remnants buried in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Raines’s 2022 book, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, explores that important find.
Much of what Raines writes about the Mobile-Tensaw Delta was gathered through his many years as an environmental reporter, documentary filmmaker, and executive director of the Weeks Bay Foundation. He speaks truth to the negligence of Alabama political leaders to rigorously enforce environmental guidelines and writes about the environmental damage caused by the dams that utility companies have built along waterways statewide. As Raines celebrates the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the vast river system that feeds into it, he also addresses the impediments to annual fish migrations that the networks of dams imposed – something I naively wondered about as a kid watching those lakes emerge.
With its lead in environmental riches and diversity, the state of Alabama spends less on environmental protection than any other state. Raines examines the state’s dilemma: Will Alabama continue to be the most ecologically diverse place on the continent, or will it lead the nation with the most species’ extinctions? It cannot continue to be both.
Raines exposes some ludicrous things: When an organization he headed won the Alabama Wildlife Foundation’s annual “Governor’s Conservation Award,” the award featured an image of a mountain goat that has never been found in Alabama and is primarily native to the Canadian Rockies. An award-winning documentary by an Alabama public radio station about Alabama’s beleaguered prison system was entitled “Deliberate Indifference.” That title could just as easily be applied to the state’s handling of our vast natural resources. Unfortunately, it’s normal for Alabamians who love the place to be constantly ashamed and embarrassed by our public officials.
Raines clearly loves the place, especially its abundance of natural, untouched resources. Saving America’s Amazon is his clarion call for us to work harder to preserve them.
Saturday – Montgomery
Court Square Fountain, Montgomery
My main purpose for going to Montgomery is to see a matinee at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, but I get there in plenty of time to hang out in Blount Cultural Park, the 175-acre sprawling English-style park that is home to Alabama Shakespeare Festival and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
I lived in Montgomery for three years when I worked at Alabama Shakespeare Festival and my apartment was on property that adjoined the Park. On days when I didn’t need to use my car, I could walk from my front door to my office in less than five minutes. A jasmine-covered arch marked the entrance to the parkland from my apartment complex and the moment of entering the park never got old. It’s still a special moment when the winding road through the park rounds a curve and you get your first view of the theatre across the lake.
New York Office (1962); Edward Hopper
Man, Woman; Bill Traylor
I have time to head to the museum and its eclectic collection of treasures. When I worked at ASF, the museum was a favorite place to go for a relaxing lunch or a quick break. The museum is larger now, and there is a significant sculpture garden. The collection is a somewhat quirky combination of American art of the 18th-21st centuries with a strong dose of vernacular art. One of my favorite Edward Hopper works, New York Office, is there, along with works by Montgomery artist Bill Traylor. Born into slavery, Traylor started making art works in 1939 when he was in his eighties and completed around 1500 works for ten years until his death in 1949.
Sunset Landscape (1899); Charles Warren Eaton
Sunset Landscape by Charles Warren Eaton reminded me of Hwy. 82 and I am always drawn to Christenberry’s Providence Church sculpture. I also like to pay homage to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, an artist, Montgomery native, and F. Scott’s wife, whose artwork is usually on view. It was missing on this trip, waiting to be re-hung for an upcoming exhibition. I always asked friends visiting Montgomery, “What other museum can you visit to see paintings by Zelda Fitzgerald?”
Providence Church (1976); William Christenberry
I could have lingered longer at the museum but it was time to take the short drive across the park to the theatre and the real purpose for being back in Montgomery. In the museum parking lot, I heard the cheerful song of a mockingbird. Moving toward the sound, I found the soloist perched in a tree; as I moved closer, the bird paid me no mind, just joyful in the day. 
I’ve lost track of how many years it has been since I was last at Alabama Shakespeare Festival to see a show, but it still felt familiar. When I was there, it was still a classically-based, Shakespeare-heavy theatre. There was a true repertory season that extended well into the summer, a brilliant resident company of actors, and a thriving graduate acting program affiliated with the University of Alabama. I had friends from near and far who would travel to Montgomery annually to spend a weekend seeing up to six plays in rep. I’m not sure we truly valued what we had back then. Over the years, Shakespeare titles are less abundant and the season is greatly reduced, but we’re fortunate it’s still there.
Alabama Shakespeare Festival
From the parking lot, I have to duck in to the Shakespeare Garden before going to the box office to pick up the ticket. The Shakespeare Garden is next to the theatre – a bucolic place with an intimate amphitheatre, featuring plants mentioned in the writing of Shakespeare. I would often take a respite in the garden during my time at ASF. A large statue of Puck is tucked away at the top of terraced levels for seating.
Outside the box office, a lone duck has decided to swim around a small fountain. People take out their cameras to photograph him. Occasionally, he steps up to the edge and quacks at bystanders. This is my place! he seems to say.
I stop for a moment to watch the audience assemble – another gathering. When I lived in this neighborhood, I would often come to the park an hour or so before a performance to watch the cars begin to arrive and the people eagerly go through the doors of the theatre. Like the night before in Tuscaloosa, this gathering takes on a new resonance.
Wandering through the lavish lobby, I catch site of the open door of the Patron’s Room at the far end. It is almost time for ASF’s resident dramaturg Susan Willis to give a fifteen-minute talk about the play we are about to see. The room is full. It’s good to see that Dr. Willis is still giving the talks. She was already there when I came to the theatre years ago; I’ve learned a lot from those talks over the years.
Pre-show is over and, ultimately, the play’s the thing … And today’s play is The Tempest, Shakespeare’s final and farewell play (although Dr. Willis would fine tune and clarify that statement a bit).
I have seen several productions of this play in various places over the years, and have seen at least three different versions at Alabama Shakespeare Festival. I am mainly here today because the actor Greta Lambert has announced her retirement from the theatre and is wrapping it up by playing the role of Prospero in The Tempest. Greta has been with ASF since its premiere production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Montgomery in 1985; she played Titania.
Over the years, Greta has gifted audiences with some of the most memorable performances of my life. She’s played most of the major Shakespeare women, along with Blanche DuBois, Hedda Gabler, Eliza Doolittle, Candida, The Glass Menagerie’s Amanda, and so many others. Coming full circle, she was Miranda to Philip Pleasants’s Prospero in a 1986 production of The Tempest.
Greta Lambert in Fair and Tender Ladies (2000)
But my most cherished role played by Greta Lambert was her performance as Ivy Rowe in Fair and Tender Ladies, a musical adaptation of the Lee Smith novel. In it, Ivy Rowe ages from a young girl to an old woman. The production Greta starred in was directed by Susan Willis. I had the good fortune to manage a tour of the show in the fall of 2000 and it was a thrill to watch audience’s response each performance. I had toured with shows in the past, but Fair and Tender Ladies is the one I never tired of.
Greta Lambert’s interpretation of Prospero was, of course, wonderful. She establishes an immediate connection with the audience and her presence on stage, even in scenes where she is just an observer, is mesmerizing. It always has been.
In Fair and Tender Ladies, after the audience has watched Ivy Rowe’s life unfold on the stage, there is the moment when the elderly Ivy Rowe slowly walks off the stage for the final time. On tour, I tried to never miss that moment and, after dozens of viewings, was always moved by it along with the audience seeing it for the first time. In The Tempest, Prospero’s final speeches took on another level of resonance in Greta’s delivery. Our revels now are ended …We are such stuff as dreams are made on …release me from my bands with the help of your good hands … Greta has announced her retirement from ASF, but not, necessarily, from the stage, so we may have future opportunities to see her act. But these moments seemed to signal the end of an era. I shall always remember them.
It’s hard to leave the theatre and I vow to come back more often. I linger in the park for a bit and finally leave, taking a drive through the grounds before turning toward town.
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I was honestly not thrilled to move to Montgomery in 1999. I loved the theatre and mostly enjoyed my job there, but the city itself, despite its historical significance, had never seemed to have much to offer. By the time I moved away, in 2002, I had grown to appreciate the place more. Now, though, after a couple of decades of more progressive leadership, the city is enjoying a revival of sorts and what used to be a dead downtown, where I am going to spend the night, is teeming with activity when I pull in to the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel, my address for the night.
My room is across from the city’s Riverfront Park and historic Union Station along the Alabama River and I am eager to go for a walk and see what the city has to offer these days. I’ve stopped in town a few times for a quick meal or to check out Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, but this will be my first time to explore on foot since I lived here.
Blues music greets me when I start my walk and the statue of Hank Williams has been moved from its previous location to a more prominent site on Commerce Street. Lots of tourists wander the streets, lots of dining spots and bars are open, and I realize what a difference has occurred since the city began to embrace its Civil Rights legacy and has become a prime location for Civil Rights tourism.
The fountain at Court Square, at the bottom of Dexter Avenue, now has “Black Lives Matter” painted on the sidewalk around its base and a quiet statue of Rosa Parks waits patiently across the street. The state capitol building is at the top of Dexter, while Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was the pastor in 1955 during the bus boycott, is just down to the right of the first capitol of the Confederacy. Montgomery has a complex and colorful history, to say the least, and this current embrace of the past somehow makes the city feel more forward-looking.
I’m liking Montgomery more and more. A memorable and imaginative dinner at Central Restaurant, a locally-owned and locally-sourced restaurant helmed by executive chef Jason McGarry on Coosa Street, is the appropriate topper for a pretty terrific day. A woman I met at the Hall of Fame dinner in Tuscaloosa gave it a glowing recommendation; she didn’t know that I already had a reservation. Her recommendation was spot-on and I’m glad that I sought this gem out.
There are lots of gems to discover in Montgomery these days, it seems. I head home the next morning determined to return for more. And determined to squeeze in more roadtrips.
Rosa Parks; Montgomery
Friday
Driving into Tuscaloosa at rush hour on a Friday, I remember why I avoided rush hour traffic during my years in Tuscaloosa. It was easy then, actually, since I didn’t own a car for most of my college years. Today, I’m running a little late and catching every traffic light between Cottondale and DCH, grateful that I stayed away from McFarland, where the traffic would be even more annoying.
After the April 2011 tornado devastated a large portion of the city, unexpected vistas opened up because the trees were gone. Even twelve years later, the changes to the city since the tornado are shocking, but the tornado is not the problem with the traffic which will likely never get better, especially as the university continues its unprecedented growth and building. As an alumnus of the University of Alabama, I have mixed feelings about all of it.
But it’s a quick trip and I didn’t come to complain. In fact, I came to celebrate Alabama authors at the latest induction of eight writers into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. And that makes it all worth the effort. This induction ceremony was postponed due to the pandemic so it was especially nice to be among a crowd gathering for a special purpose.
The purpose of my attendance was to write about the festivities for Alabama Writers’ Forum. I will share that piece on this site after it’s posted to www.writersforum.com.
I was struck, though, with the stirrings I had as I watched attendees of the Hall of Fame dinner and induction ceremony walk toward the gathering at the Bryant Conference Center. It has been three years since I was able to attend such gatherings; previous efforts have been tentative at best, with reduced crowds and caution dominant. A string quartet playing Vivaldi’s “Spring” as I entered the pre-dinner reception reinforced that sense of awakening; a violinist wearing a mask was a reminder that the threat is not quite over yet.
Saturday – Hwy 82
With fresh and inspiring memories of the Hall of Fame induction, I’m heading out of Tuscaloosa early to spend the day in Montgomery. To be honest, I think I’m most excited about traveling Highway 82 to get there. The Highway 82 route between Tuscaloosa and Montgomery was a well-worn path for me when I lived in Montgomery and my parents were still in Tuscaloosa. It takes you off the interstates and out of city traffic, past swamps, fields, and prairies through farmland in the southernmost Appalachian foothills. Best of all, it takes you along what I call the “Peach Highway” – a series of farm and peach stands along the two-lane stretch of 82 that goes through Chilton County.
Sandy Chapel Church; Bibb County
In years past, the highway took you through the Bibb County town of Centreville. A new section now bypasses Centreville after crossing the Cahaba River. That stretch was new to me and when I spotted the back of an old wood-framed church off the highway, I took the next road off the highway to check it out. I soon got to the church and saw that it was the Sandy Chapel Church – the church that inspired my series of country-church themed Christmas cards more than twenty years ago. In fact, it was the image on my first Christmas card of the series. I was used to seeing it from the front on the old road, but it also provides a striking glimpse as you travel down the newer highway.
Past Centreville, the highway looks the same, but there is more clear-cutting going on than I like to see (or think about). Abandoned and decaying buildings that always intrigued me are mostly still there, and some have disappeared altogether. They remind me of some of my favorite subjects by the artist William Christenberry, whose Hale County is not far away. Sedate farm houses and their attendant barns and outbuildings appear along the way, as do churches, mobile homes, country stores, and an occasional place to eat.
Harrison Fruit Farms; Chilton County
Peach orchards begin to pop up as the highway nears Chilton County. Peach season is still a couple of months away and an erratic winter may have spoiled parts of it, but there are trees in early bloom and I look forward to my first trip down to Harrison’s Fruit Farms’ roadside stand around Mothers Day.
On this March Day, the farm stand sits serene and quiet at the place where County Road 15 ends at Highway 82. Mr. Jimmie Harrison, the patriarch of Harrison’s Fruit Farms, passed away last fall. Because of my own family emergencies, I wasn’t able to make a “peach run” in summer 2022 but I still have baskets in the trunk from my visits in 2021. I stop by the abandoned stand and leave the baskets to be re-used in the next season. I remember “Mr. Jimmie” and look forward to seeing his family back there soon.
The road finally takes me toward Prattville in Autauga County. But first, I make the quick detour to see if W.C. Rice’s Cross Garden installation is still intact. Mr. Rice was inspired to create a garden of crosses and warnings of damnation (HELL IS HOT HOT HOT) on his property spanning what is otherwise a quiet suburban street. Rice died in 2004 but the rambling, weathered remains of his “garden” are mostly still there. I think about taking pictures, but not this time; I find Mr. Rice’s grim Pentecostal fatalism focusing only on the most frightening parts of scripture to be a little depressing, but I admire his commitment to his message and vision.
On to Montgomery.
Jimmie Harrison’s Fruit Stand; Chilton County
Malbis Memorial Church
Traveling through Baldwin County’s Eastern Shore near Daphne, be sure to find your way to AL Hwy 181 and the Malbis Memorial Church, a place of worship and devotion that is also a monument to the power and industry of immigrant culture.
Jason Malbis (born Iason Antonios Markopoulos in Doumena, Greece, in 1869) spent his early life in a Greek Orthodox monastery. He immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. After travels around the country, he settled in Mobile and worked mostly in the food industry. Malbis and a fellow immigrant, William Papageorge, bought 120 acres of land across Mobile Bay and started a self-sufficient plantation that became a successful colony for Greek immigrants. Malbis Plantation continued to grow in the coastal countryside and Malbis himself remained active in civic endeavors in Mobile. The colony’s popular Malbis Bakery became a mainstay in downtown Mobile.
Jason Malbis was in Greece on family business when the United States entered World War II and he was subsequently unable to return to his home in Baldwin County. He died in Greece in 1942. Prior to his death, he expressed his wish for his body to be returned to Malbis Plantation and for a church to be built there.
The Sacred Patriarchal and Stavropegial Monastery of the Presentation of Theotokos – better known as Malbis Memorial Church – was dedicated in 1965. Once surrounded by the plantation’s farmland, the impressive church now sits quietly at a busy intersection, the historic buildings and remaining property of the plantation threatened by residential and commercial properties close by.
photo (2016) by Carmen K. Sisson
The church boasts an impressive Byzantine Revival exterior, with domes, arches, arcades, pediments, and mosaics representing Christian icons. But the real splendor happens once you enter the building. Beyond the vestibule, two rows of Corinthian columns in red marble support a brilliant blue arched ceiling in the nave. White marble is used extensively in the apse, which is crowned by a full dome with a rendering of Christ floating above at the very top. It seems that every inch of the space is covered with paintings, stained glass, murals, mosaics, and carvings. It is an unexpected find in an unlikely location – a place of intense devotion and meditation.
Each time I go there, I find it hard to fully believe the level of profound magnificence in a relatively small house of worship.
A quiet cemetery is just to the south of the church, among the live oaks. It is the resting place for many of the Greeks who made a home at Malbis plantation. Back inside the church, the remains of Jason Malbis are interred in a crypt. Home at last. 
On this Christmas morning, as I walked across frozen ground to refill the bird feeder, I was reminded of Truman Capote’s autobiographical short story, “A Christmas Memory,” and his elderly child-like cousin’s declaration of “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather.” This is the start of an annual Depression-era adventure in which the boy and his cousin count their change and set out to buy the ingredients for thirty-one fruitcakes – including moonshine whiskey from Mr. Haha Jones – with just shy of $13.
On this Christmas in central Alabama, we’re far beyond Sook Faulk’s frosty fruitcake weather as the past few days have stayed well below freezing. This is clearly not a big deal to our friends in Buffalo and locales north, suffering mightily under feet of snow, but some records were set here in Alabama and the thermometer crept only a couple of degrees above freezing on Christmas afternoon. That’s enough winter weather to last me for a good long while.
I re-read “A Christmas Memory” at the height of our current freeze and was struck again by the moving prose of a young Capote. My own memory was stirred to remember the Christmas of 2014 – the last Christmas my ailing father was able to spend at home.
On that Christmas Eve, Dad was resting in bed and Mother and I had finished most of our last-minute preparations for the next day. I retired to a bedroom and started reading “Á Christmas Memory.” When I came to the part where the narrator describes his cousin’s reaction to chocolate-covered cherries – “I could live on them, Buddy, Lord yes I could – and that’s not taking His name in vain” – I glanced at the clock, saw that it was 5:40, and threw on a coat, telling Mother that I had to go out for a last-minute errand.
Dad loved chocolate-covered cherries, the cheap kind that you always find on drug store shelves in the Christmas season. His love for the sweets was well-known and over the years friends would gift him a box at Christmastime. He appreciated the home-made chocolate-covered cherry mice that my sister-in-law and nephew would bring; I tried to up the ante with annual boxes of the fancier chocolate-covered cherries ordered from the Harry and David catalog, but it was clear that Dad preferred the gooier, less expensive Queen Anne brand from a drugstore shelf.
By 2014, many of those friends who could always be depended on to send over a box of chocolate-covered cherries were themselves ailing, or gone, and Sook’s declaration reminded me that there were no boxes for Dad on Christmas Day. I rushed into the closest pharmacy just minutes before its Christmas Eve closing time of 6:00 p.m., grabbed a box of chocolate-covered cherries, went back to the house, and placed the box under the tree.
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Late in Truman Capote’s life, I attended a reading he gave at the University of Alabama. The selections were a sample of writings from his career, delivered in that simpering manner that was always his trademark. He ended with “A Christmas Memory.” Finally, gone were the affectations and snarling attitude Capote was famous for, replaced by a middle-aged man’s simple recitation of an authentic cherished memory. That performance has become a cherished memory for me, too.
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A few days before Christmas this year, I stopped at a drugstore to pick up a prescription. As I was getting out of the car, Mother said, “If you see a box of chocolate-covered cherries, get them.”
“Why?” I asked. “You don’t eat them and neither do I.”
“Just for old times’ sake,” she said.
As we pulled away from the drugstore, Mother asked, “Do we have time to go by the cemetery?”
We headed a few miles to Elmwood and to my father’s grave, decorated already with Christmas greenery and a University of Alabama flag. As we sat in the car, Mother said, “Let’s put the chocolates at his grave.”
Done. 
Grand Hotel Sunset, December 2022
Point Clear, Alabama. Alabama State Route 225 in Baldwin County connects the towns of Stockton and Spanish Fort. On my annual trip to the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, just south of Fairhope, I leave I-65 to travel 225 to its southern terminus at U.S. 31. Just before arriving in Spanish Fort, there is a bridge at a fish camp and, if one looks to the right across the brackish waters that mark the start of Mobile Bay, the Mobile skyline appears – dream-like and fuzzy in the distance on a foggy day.
Sense memory is an acting technique that I taught through the years. It basically requires the actor to store up personal emotions that can be triggered to create an authentic emotional response onstage. I have taken this trip to Point Clear so many times that I have sensory triggers practically every mile of the way. I have written about this trip so many times that I realize there’s not much else to say. I have documented the sights and smells, the sunsets and fog horns, flora and fauna, my favorite culinary haunts (food memory is a very powerful tool), the churches and vernacular architecture to the point that the archived essays pretty much tell the story.
I started making this annual escape to Mobile Bay in 2003. In 2004, the resort was still recovering from Hurricane Ivan and services were severely curtailed. The property was closed in 2005 in the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the COVID pandemic forced me to regretfully cancel my 2020 reservation. This year’s trip was iffy due to personal demands, but family members rallied to the cause and I was able to make the trip.
I suspect that if I had started coming here when I was younger, I would have found the place a little staid and boring. But coming here at a time when I craved a respite and a more relaxing pace made me a fan forever and I will probably continue the December tradition for as long as I am able.
It has become a standing tradition that never gets old, providing memories that see me through challenging days. When I was teaching, I would have to sit through endless faculty meetings and faculty-staff convocations – ask almost any teacher and you’ll learn that faculty meetings are the worst thing about the job. At one particularly grueling convocation, as the university president was droning on with an acrostic, a colleague leaned to me and said, “How are you staying so calm and content during this?” I leaned back to her and said, “Oh, I’m replaying my last trip to Point Clear and just got to the warm stone massage. I haven’t heard a word he’s saying.”
A college friend, tiring of my natural skepticism, once demanded, “I insist that you become sentimental.” He didn’t realize that I harbored sentiment all along – the skeptical cynic I presented myself as was, I’m sure, a defense mechanism, forged in my teenage years when I was the perennial “new kid” in a succession of schools. A school bully in Nashville, impressed, I guess, by my riposte to an insult he hurled, warned me that I was a “small man with a big voice” and that I better watch out as that mouth would get me in a lot of trouble one day. My dad gave me the same warning back then. He didn’t realize what the Nashville bully did – the smart mouth was there to waylay abuse.
I wonder if people who knew me back then remember the cynicism I used to affect and if that’s how they think I’ve turned out (if they even remember me). I was hosting a small get-together at an apartment in another city many years ago and remember overhearing someone who knew me in my college days tell another guest, who had complimented my apartment, that “You should’ve seen where he lived while he was in grad school – it was a dump.”
She was right. But I wonder if people who haven’t seen me since grad school envision me still living in a hovel in some student ghetto somewhere.
My reflective driving soundtrack on this holiday trip is always George Winston’s classic piano solo recording, December. I only listen to it in its titular month – another sentimental habit stretching back over decades, and it inevitably conjures a memory of a cold December midnight, sitting on a dock in New London, Connecticut. It had been a challenging day on a theatre tour of A Christmas Carol; we had to let a technician go that day and I needed a chilly late-night walk and George Winston’s calming music to fortify myself for the next days to come.
These are some of the memories that come to me every December on my trip to Point Clear. The Grand Hotel was an aspirational goal for me when I first heard about it as a teenager from a neighbor in Jackson, Mississippi. She and her husband had been there for a business conference and her photographs of the place were spectacular. I vowed to go there one day, but I never envisioned its necessity in my life.
It’s a place where I still feel compelled to dress for dinner, even though the dress code has loosened and almost anything goes. That hovel-dwelling cynic that some may remember from my college days would have sneered at the idea of being required to dress up for dinner, and probably would have avoided any place that enforced a code. More recently, however, having dinner at Arnaud’s in New Orleans, I bristled when a party came in with one of their number wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts; they let him in and I was appalled.
So, I still dress for dinner (but, alas, no tie) at the Grand’s fine Southern Roots dining room as a sign of respect and as a nod to the tradition of a resort that has existed in this same spot on Mobile Bay for 175 years. When I first started coming to the Grand, each room still had a valet stand – a handy piece of furniture for setting out your day’s wardrobe. I used it even if it was just for jeans, a tee-shirt, and sneakers, and I miss it in these spiffily updated rooms now. A piece of furniture called a “valet stand” – these are the kinds of things that those who never learned cursive writing will never even know to miss. But it’s their loss, I reckon.
This trip is so tradition-bound for me that I always stay in the same room in the spa building. When I arrived at my building a few days ago, I unwittingly parked next to a couple misbehaving in a Corvette in the parking deck under the building. I noticed and then made a great effort not to look their way as I unloaded the car. Out of the corner of my eye, I sensed a different state of deshabille each time I returned to gather my things from the car. On my last trip down, they were walking toward me in the corridor on my floor. I glanced back as I turned the corner, hoping that they would not be in the room next to mine. To my relief, they continued down the hallway past my room. On the elevator down, I wondered If they had a room, why were they compelled to utilize the Corvette for playtime?
I’ll never know, but that’s one memory of this place that I’d rather not trigger in the future.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Christmas at the Grand
When I was taking a shower the other morning, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” started playing in my head. You know, the one with the refrain that goes “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” (Actually, it was the Byrds’ version of that Dylan song that was playing in my head.) I can’t remember the last time I actually heard that song so it’s strange that it started playing in my head in the shower on a Saturday. I’ve been thinking about it since, though. Many consider the lyric to be a turning point and Dylan’s rejection of sorts of the more strident protest lyrics of his early career.
Pondering “My Back Pages” made me recall Billy Joel’s “Angry Young Man,” a lyric that I once identified with. The title character martyrs himself “With his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand,” and “he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell.” The song’s narrator confesses that “I once believed in causes too, / I had my pointless point of view, /
And life went on no matter who was wrong or right.”
In Lanford Wilson’s play Fifth of July, June Talley – a former ‘60s activist, tells her daughter, “You’ve no idea the country we almost made for you. The fact that I think it’s all a crock now does not take away from what we almost achieved.”
Be warned, I need to vent now.
I’m not sure why these thoughts (and songs, and lines) are coming into my head, but I have a hunch: With all of the news about gun violence, a frightening activist conservative Supreme Court wreaking havoc with gun control, the environment, and women’s rights, and the general divisiveness in the country, I wonder what I can do about it and previous history tells me not much. Of course, I can vote, but we are now plagued with a generation of Alabama Republican politicians that would make George Wallace look progressive and I am finally acknowledging – after decades of preaching to students that their vote does count, that my vote in Alabama no longer counts for much. The Republican women running for Alabama state office feel the need to show themselves with firearms in their commercials and to demonstrate regrettable misinterpretation of the second amendment. The concept of separation of church and state is equally misinterpreted by those same people; they don’t seem to realize that its intent was to protect their religious freedom. Even though a known January 6 insurrectionist was defeated in his bid for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from Alabama, the chirpy, gun-totin’ woman who defeated him managed to seem even worse.
I love Alabama and my family’s roots run deep here. I realize that my politics don’t align with the conservative majority, but I also know a lot of Alabamians whose politics align with my old-fashioned liberalism. What irks me is the way these politicians talk is if they represent all Alabamians; for the record, they don’t represent me. Even more galling, perhaps, is the fact that national progressive and liberal politicians seem to write off Alabama as hopeless to their politics and ability to gain votes. I feel overlooked and ignored from both sides of the spectrum.
I watch the protests on television and usually think bless their hearts. I’m with them in spirit, but I’m not sure I have much confidence in what they’re accomplishing other than looking a little silly with their rote chants and their predictable signs. I’ve seen it all before and, beyond the Civil Rights era, I’m not sure it’s still effective. Maybe it makes the protesters feel better at the end of the day; I certainly understand the desperation that drives them there.
I notice that we Baby Boomers seem to catch the blame for all of the evils in the world today, especially in snarky online posts, and especially among Generation Z types. But I have a different take. The three Supreme Court justices appointed by the previous occupant of the Oval Office, all of whom lied or misled during their confirmation hearings, are all post-Baby Boom (one of them, born in 1965, is on the cusp, actually). My theory is that the current regression of American culture is being fueled by the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who was idolized by many of that post-Baby Boom generation and whose political tenure was the beginning of all the things that so many of us are lamenting right now.
I have always taken comfort in the aspirational phrase “in Order to form a more perfect Union” in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. It always seemed to mean we’re not perfect yet, but this is what we’re working toward. Throughout my lifetime, progress has been made – slowly but surely – toward that ideal. Today, though, it feels a little like we’re going backward and the conservative unbalance in the Supreme Court is going to plague us for a long while.
As I composed these thoughts, word came across that a seventh victim of the mass shooting at the Highland Park, Illinois, 4th of July parade, has died. Three people were gunned down a few weeks ago at a potluck supper at an Episcopal church just a few miles from my house in Birmingham. There are reports that the white supremacy domestic terrorist group, Patriot Front, is making its presence known in Birmingham on the eve of the opening of the 2022 World Games.
I may have to hit the streets in protest yet.
Ensley High School
I got a brick for Christmas. And it was one of the more meaningful presents I received.
It was a brick from the ruins of the demolished Ensley High School, my father’s alma mater, on Birmingham’s west side. The building held its first classes in 1910 and closed at the end of the 2005-2006 academic year. A fire gutted the abandoned school in 2018 and its final demolition began in 2021 to make way for a multi-use complex.
Grover Journey graduated from Ensley in the early 1950s and was student body vice-president in his senior year. Mother and I always marveled that, wherever we might be, Dad could sniff out an Ensley grad from his era.
Listening to Dad’s stories, I always had the impression that their bitterest high school rivals were in Woodlawn, across the city on the east side of town. The Woodlawn community is having a resurgence these days and Ensley, which went into a rapid decline when its steel mills closed in the ‘70s, is now looking forward to its own renaissance. It has a long way to go. Dad’s boyhood home is one of only two houses still standing on the once crowded block where he grew up and met Mother.
Along with the pink-ish tan exterior brick, my special Christmas gift included a well-worn and annotated copy of Shakespeare’s King Henry the Eighth from what was once a voluminous Ensley High School Library. The card in the book has signatures of withdrawals dating from the 1920s to the 1950s. A student named Charles Ingram checked it out seven times in succession in 1956. My mother also received a brick and a Shakespeare volume and I now worry about the fate of all of the other books from the EHS Library. I’m hoping there is an effort to preserve them.
That precious Ensley High School brick now joins another brick from a long-gone Birmingham landmark. The Tutwiler Hotel, opened in 1914 on Twentieth Street downtown, was the grande dame of the city’s hotels until it closed for good in 1972. It was imploded in 1974. The implosion did not go quite as planned; one part of the building crumbled to the ground – I remember watching it live on television – and another part stayed up and was eventually demolished by more conventional methods.
Not long after the demolition, I made my way through an opening in the fence at the construction site and grabbed a brick as a keepsake of the place. It has now been with me spanning six decades and many moves. In fact, I am looking at it as I write these words.
Tutwiler Hotel
The Ridgely Apartments, near Linn Park and a few blocks from the old Tutwiler, were refurbished and re-christened as the “Tutwiler Hotel” in 1986. The Ridgely building was actually built a year earlier than the original Tutwiler with the involvement of some of the same developers and architects, so I guess it’s a fair enough trade-off if the original had to go. I’ve stayed there a few times, but when somebody tells me they are staying at “the Tutwiler,” I am quick to point out that there was once a grander, “real and original,” Tutwiler.
Preservation efforts in Birmingham have never fully recovered from the loss of Birmingham’s magnificent Terminal Station in a 1969 demolition. The building’s elaborate Beaux-Arts design featured two 130-foot towers and an elaborate dome covered in tile and a decorative glass skylight. Its loss opened eyes, spurred other cities’ preservation efforts, and made Birmingham preservationists more tenacious.
Birmingham’s Southern Research Institute (SR), an affiliate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), has dealt a blow to Birmingham preservation with its acquisition of and plans to destroy Quinlan Castle, a medieval-inspired, stone-clad former apartment building on a rise in Birmingham’s Southside, built in 1927.
SR’s CEO, in a sketchy, badly-composed justification of the institute’s decision to demolish the building, describes the proposed bland replacement building as a “castle for the 21st Century.” He also has the bad taste and gall to cite the collapse of the Surfside condo in Miami as a motivating factor for the decision to destroy the castle.
Nobody is fooled. It is clear to anyone who knows that building that it could never have become a research laboratory and I’m not sure why Southern Research has to use that ruse as a justification for the demolition of a historic element of local urban architecture. UAB and Southern Research have the clout to do about anything they care to on the Southside. UAB already blighted part of the Southside skyline by erecting an eyesore – an oversized parking shed that they refer to as the football team’s “practice field.” So I think the big question for many of us now is why the SR expansion has to happen on the Quinlan Castle site.
In 1990, when I was moving to Birmingham to take a theatre job, my apartment hunting began with Quinlan Castle. It was already pretty run-down, and closed a few years later, but the charm of the building was intact and it had mighty potential. The small apartments, which would have been quite snazzy in the Roaring ‘20s, opened onto a central courtyard. There were even cannons in a couple of the turrets along the crenellated roof. It would have been perfect for me as a college student, but I had moved on and opted for a more modern abode up the mountain. Still, the castle gave me a smile each day as I passed it on the way to work.
I went to Quinlan Castle around Christmas, just to see if it is still standing. As of a couple of weeks ago, it’s still there. A part of me hopes that cooler heads have prevailed and that SR is considering other sites for its “21st Century castle” of innocuous sterile labs.
If you’re in the area, go over to 2030 9th Avenue South and pay homage to another endangered part of Birmingham architectural history while it still stands.
Quinlan Castle, December 2021
Professional Southerner 