Foster Dickson's Blog, page 3

Fifteen Years of Unapologetically Eclectic Pack Mule-ing

Fifteen years ago today, I put up that first post. I had just finished a Surdna Foundation Arts Teacher Fellowship, which I used for the Patchwork project, and had been blogging that year about modern life in Alabama. So, with a phrase from a poem I wrote in 2002 – “pack mule for the new school” – I started my own author website and blog. At that time, in 2010, I considered myself something of a writer and social-justice educator, having taken part in a variety of committees and projects mostly devoted to reviving or sharing the history of the Civil Rights movement. Many of my student projects had also used experiential learning to reveal more about local culture and often-untold stories to a new generation. The idea of being one simple, humble worker in an ongoing movement was what led me to that title. I saw myself then – and still do today – as a relatively unimportant person doing groundwork to create community and achieve social justice. My specialty: helping to create a more vibrant and more public recognition of the South’s actual history and current reality. 

During the 2010s, as this blog got going, the tenor of social-justice work was intensifying nationally but also becoming compartmentalized in my local community. In the 2000s, I had worked mostly among older people (Boomers), who were seeking to enshrine the Civil Rights-era history of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Yet, by the mid-2010s, the mantel had been taken up by groups and projects led mostly by younger people (Millennials), who were seeking to “reclaim the narratives.” Less interested in working with a diverse coalition of conscientious friends, these younger activists grounded their vision in identity politics to have female voices telling female stories, black voices telling black stories, LGBTQ voices telling LGBTQ stories, and so on. I had no problems with that approach – in fact, I understood and respected it – but it had real effects on my role in the kinds of social-justice work that I had been doing from my late 20s through my early 40s. The approach of the new generation meant that the attitude toward me as a participant in social-justice projects became: Thank you for what you’ve done up ’til now, middle-aged white guy, but we can do our thing without your involvement.

It took a while – perhaps too long – to recognize and accept that that phase of my career was coming to a close. The first sign was that the once-regular invitations to join committees and other planning efforts stopped coming. A second sign was the tightening of local school system policies for field trips. The procedures had become so stringent (out of fears about injuries and lawsuits) that I could no longer get my students out into the community during the school day. By the mid-2010s, those dual factors severely hampered the work that I had been doing in the 2000s and early 2010s. Then, I felt the impact of the new reality most sharply when, after the release of my book Closed Ranks in November 2018, local social-justice groups showed little to no interest in the story. The Whitehurst Case was a pivotal episode in Montgomery’s history, but the Whitehurst family and I struggled to get people to attend events or read the book. The last of my student projects, Sketches of Newtown, was undertaken just prior to and during the ultra-restrictive months of the COVID-19 quarantine, then it was published in 2021. During the research, writing, and compilation of the monograph, I could tell that, for me, it was the end of an era.

By the early 2020s, my work as a writer and teacher had taken on a markedly different shape. Picking up on the signals meant changing the name of the blog to “Welcome to Eclectic,” since that title better described my work at that point. My interest in the stories of Generation X grew as I moved away from movement-era subjects. The years 2020 and 2021 brought the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. In May 2022, after two rough school years, I left my job as a high school teacher to accept a teaching job at a small college. My next book project, which was published in 2023, was not a social-justice story but a historical monograph for our local Catholic school’s sesquicentennial. I haven’t been involved in any organized social-justice projects in quite some time, and many among the elder generations I once worked with have now passed away. 

Recent years have been spent re-imagining my work. During the pandemic years, I created Nobody’s Home and level:deepsouth, though the latter project was short-lived. Nobody’s Home is an online anthology that focuses on beliefs, myths, and narratives in the post-Civil Rights South (since 1970). What I have come to understand from reading critical theory and historical studies is that our actions are often based on what we believe, what truths we embrace in our own (sub)cultures, and what stories we tell ourselves and each other. Nobody’s Home, which proceeds from that understanding, is approaching its fifth anniversary and has more than fifty essays alongside lesson plans and other resources. Here, on the blog, I have been putting effort into the Dirty Boots column, long-form Welcome to Eclectic posts, and the Southern Movies series. Since the fall of 2022, my work as a teacher has shifted from a public (magnet) arts high school, where I taught creative writing and twelfth grade English, to a small liberal arts college, where I have provided writing assistance, led a peer mentoring program, and taught when needed. Through the peer mentoring program, I’ve also become an NASPA Certified Peer Educator trainer. 

With these fifteen years now in the past – a lot has changed between 2010 and 2025 – my beliefs about this state, its culture, the South, and the answers to the problems remain pretty solid. We need change. We need to base our decisions on facts, not myths. And we can only arrive at a better society if we embrace inclusivity and community, allowing contributions from all people of good will. The way I see it, all of us have to live together, so all of us should be involved in the giving, taking, talking, listening, cooperating, compromising, and creating. For now, I’m spending my energies in ways that I believe I can be useful, by serving students as a writer and educator, critiquing narratives in the modern South, and exploring the lives of Generation X in the modern South. As for another full-length book . . . who knows? Maybe.

If somebody were to ask me at this late date, why should I read your blog? The answer remains the same: For an independent perspective. I’m a liberally conservative moderate and a Southern Christian who isn’t Protestant. I am also among a minority of Southerners with a postgraduate level of education. You might also notice that there are no ads here, nor are there required subscriptions to read this blog. All in all, I’m likely to write things you won’t read everywhere else, and I don’t require anyone to pay or to join. That may not be the thing for folks who like single-issue politics with simplified platforms and agendas that rely on heuristics and stereotypes, but it’s the only way that works for me. 

Read More: Books  •  Nonfiction •  Poetry  •  Nobody’s Home 

Dirty Boots: In Praise of Old Movies

Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

It felt pretty good. A couple of weeks ago, my wife stopped me and said, “There’s this story I saw on CBS Sunday Morning, about movies, and you need to watch it.” It was Academy Awards weekend, and most of the news outlets were putting emphasis on the movies. What was the story about, I asked. “It was talking about how they just churn out movies now to sell tickets. It’s what you’ve been saying all along.” Exactly the kind of thing a husband likes to hear from his wife: It’s what you’ve been saying all along.

In that story, “How making, and watching, movies has changed,” we hear from industry folks about how the willingness to invest money in original, daring, or artistic projects has diminished and how that money is now more often spent on sure-thing projects involving known commodities, like franchises, series, and sequels. There is also an explanation of the enduring albeit scant presence of “indies,” films with smaller budgets whose stories deal with more complex and less flashy subjects. So we can’t say cynically, Nobody makes good movies anymore . . . Yes, they do. But that hard-to-find quality has morphed within the shift in viewing habits. Indies – which used to be made cheaply and independently – were once harder to find because theaters and video rental stores didn’t have the physical space for them; today, even more films are hard to find because the streaming services’ main pages don’t have digital space for them. The banner ads and sponsored listings are today being bought up the way that roadside billboards, prime time TV commercials, full-page ads in magazines, and end caps in stores once were.

As an old movies guy, and as a Southern Movies guys in particular, I wonder who is going to make today’s best movies. What filmmaker is going to bring us the zeitgeist of the modern South, whether those portrayals are mythic like 1958’s Thunder Road or supernatural like 1971’s Brother John or harshly realistic like 1988’s Mississippi Burning? If most of the production money is going to another Batman, another Marvel or DC, another shoot-’em-up, another rom com, then most of the marketing money is also going to those films . . . And we end up with portrayals of Southern culture that are plastic and half-true. Some films try to branch out, but you end up with stuff like The Death of Dick Long about two rednecks who try to avoid taking responsibility for letting a horse fuck their (male) friend to death. (This one was written by the same guy who made Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I was sorely disappointed in it.) I will say, regarding relatively recent films, that I think James Franco did a good job on his As I Lay Dying, Child of God, and The Sound and the Fury in the 2010s. But those aren’t about the modern South, and I also don’t think those are great films, because all three adapt literary works that are stronger on the page than on the screen. Oprah Winfrey’s Beloved has the same issue.

In the annals of film, there have always been plenty of blockbusters, handful of instant classics, and certainly a number of clunkers – drive-in features, exploitation films, and weak sequels – but the weaker movies get overshadowed by great ones then forgotten. If people mistook a bad movie for being good, that misconception didn’t last long. Today, I hardly see films set in the South that I believe will stand the test of time. Some I’ve seen that could are The Yellow Handkerchief, set in Louisiana; Queen & Slim, which takes us to Florida, and Netflix’s historical dramas The Devil to Pay and Mudbound. The most celebrated recent film, The Green Book, swept the Oscars in 2019, but I don’t hear people talking about that movie today. 2020’s Where the Crawdads Sing faded quickly into being the genre film that it always was. The clunkers that I see these days, coming out at the rate of a couple a year, are heavily reliant on stereotypes: moralistic racial-justice dramas based on either-or paradigms, romantic comedies set in small towns where almost everyone is polite and attractive, backwoods white-trash stories that feature extreme violence, horror films carried by flabby versions of regional monsters and mythologies.

I’ve also considered the idea that this isn’t the film industry’s fault, that the culture of the South currently doesn’t offer material for a movie, much less a great one. The Depression-era South offers a creative mind many opportunities for Man vs Nature stories. The Civil Rights movement is chock-full of Man vs Society stories. The ’70s and ’80s were just plain weird and quirky. Even the ’90s had some changing-culture motifs. But today . . . what is there to make a feature film about? Many scholars declare that the South’s regional uniqueness and separateness have been either diminished or eliminated by assimilation into the larger national culture. Beyond that, ours is a backward-looking time and one heavy on individualistic tendencies. On one side, some people are immersed in having “conversations,” in re-evaluating the past, and in changing what we memorialize. (I’ve been part of this trend too, in my work.) On the other side, we have people who want to “return to traditional values” and undo the changes of the last seven decades. We are also a people, today, who willingly sacrifice community to pursue personal goals and agendas. That troubling feature of our culture manifests as “school choice,” church splits, book bans, divisive politics, and myriad reasons for petty lawsuits. That’s a problem for a creative thinker who is crafting a story for a mass audience.

What would a filmmaker find in the South of the 2020s: teenagers in hoodies who stare at their phones? Republicans in legislatures who defund Medicaid? A small town that gets a new Dollar General? Sports dads in subdivisions who politick over little-league rule changes? Exciting stuff. In the South of the past, large social and societal concerns were addressed and their conflicts played out on public stages: dire poverty, racial strife, religious hegemony. The outcomes affected millions of people, and in ways, they affected whole nation. Today, not so much. We’re down here bickering over minutiae and trying to make sure that poor people have as little as possible. Perhaps one exception, an issue that might fit the bill for a great movie, is the clash over abortion rights. These are stories of life and death. If a filmmaker handled that cultural struggle in a complex way like, say, the 1999 film Magnolia or like 2004’s Crash, he or she might have something. It’s a better idea than trying to make another high school sports movie, this time about a kid who just wants NIL money so he can buy a big truck, sneakers, and video games.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep my righteous butt down here in central Alabama, pleased by the knowledge that it’s what I’ve been saying all along. And equally pleased to be sitting around, watching old movies.

The 2025 Open Submissions Period for “Nobody’s Home”

Starting today and ending June 15, I will be reading and considering submissions of creative nonfiction to expand the Nobody’s Home anthology. All submitting writers should read the guidelines thoroughly, then send a query and wait for a response about whether to send the work. I am particularly interested in works about or set in the states of Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Texas, as they are currently underrepresented in the anthology. Works accepted during this time will be published in August 2025.

This year’s Open Submissions Period is the sixth for Nobody’s Home. In the project’s inaugural year, the first three Open Submissions Periods were held in the latter half of 2020 and the first half of 2021. Subsequently, in 2022 and 2023, unsolicited submissions were read in the spring, with accepted works published each summer. Invitation-only submissions periods have been held in the fall of those two recent years.

Submissions of reviews and interviews will continue to be considered during this time. Again, anyone thinking about a submission should read the guidelines thoroughly before sending a query.

Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is an online anthology of nonfiction works about beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture over the last fifty years, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The project, which was created in 2020, collects personal essays, memoirs, short articles, opinion pieces, and contemplative works about the ideas, experiences, and assumptions that have shaped life below the old Mason-Dixon Line since 1970. Today, Nobody’s Home features more than fifty essays and offers secondary-education lesson plans for English and Social Studies classrooms, suggestions for documentaries, and reviews of books, as well as Groundwork, my editor’s blog.

Sharing the Good Stuff: Barack Obama at Hamilton College

Because we need to see reasons to have hope, too . . .

Barack Obama left the White House more than eight years ago, but he has remained an important presence in American life. Here, he shares his thoughts on our current situation,  this democracy, and what ordinary citizens can do to make things better. Perhaps the most important thing that he asks is: can we defend free speech even when we hear things that we don’t like? These remarks made during an open forum at Hamilton College, a liberal arts institution in New York, were shared by PBS News Hour.

A Quick Tribute to “Big Bear” RG Armstrong

The Southern Movies series explores images of the South in modern films as well as how those images affect American perspectives on the region.

The name of actor Robert Golden “RG” Armstrong may not be as well known as some, but fans of Southern movies will know him as Big Bear, the hardened moonshiner in the 1973 classic White Lightning. Even in a field of great actors giving strong performances – Burt Reynolds at Gator McCluskey, Ned Beatty as Sheriff JC Connors – Big Bear is still one of the memorable characters in Southern movies. Gator is introduced to this greasy and gruff leader of backwoods moonshine production by his friend Rebel Roy, and within a short time, the elder man has a large hunting knife to the new arrival’s throat. Ultimately, Big Bear will be one of the men who capture Gator, who has been let out of prison to infiltrate the operation. They intend to kill him, of course, but Big Bear is injured in the drunken melee instead. The last we see of him, he is sitting in JC Conners’ car at Dude Watson’s funeral and suggests that they go fishing some time.

RG Armstrong was born on this day – April 7 – in 1917 in Birmingham, Alabama. He later attended the University of North Carolina and did theater there before moving into an acting career. He had roles in the Southern classics Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Miracle Worker on Broadway. From the mid-1950s through the late 1960s, his acting work had him both on TV and in movies, often in westerns, and by the 1970s, he was landing roles in a wide variety of projects, even blaxploitation films. He played the sheriff in 1961’s The Fugitive Kind, which was set in Mississippi. In the 1970s, Armstrong had parts in other lesser-known Southern movies: 1972’s The Legend of Hillbilly John, 1975’s Dixie Dynamite, and 1979’s Steel. Later, in the ’80s, he was the town doctor in 1982’s The Beast Within and the mountain family’s patriarch in 1989’s Trapper County War. On TV, his work included roles on The Andy Griffith Show in 1960s and on The Dukes of Hazzard in the ’80s.

RG Armstrong died in 2012 at age 95. His New York Times obituary called him “a rough-hewed character actor known for playing sheriffs, outlaws and other macho roles.” Turner Classic’s website describes him this way: “A flinty, often imposing presence in features and television for over half a century, character actor R.G. Armstrong played men whose mere presence elevated the tension.” Aside from his prominent film career, Playbill magazine remembered him as a “Tennessee Williams Actor,” and the fan wiki for The Andy Griffith Show recounts his Farmer Flint character. 

Southern Movie 76: “Bad Georgia Road” (1977)

The 1977 hicksploitation film Bad Georgia Road is one among a slew of these from the 1970s that feature stories involving fast cars and illegal liquor. If you haven’t heard of these films, it’s probably because the majority were eclipsed by the monolithic masterpiece in the genre: Smokey and the Bandit, also from 1977. Despite its name, Bad Georgia Road isn’t set in Georgia at all. The story puts us in Alabama, where young New York City fashionista Molly Golden has come south to claim land that she has inherited from an uncle she never knew. Expecting to find a classic antebellum estate, she instead arrives at a dilapidated homestead— which comes complete with a moonshine operation. That latter part is initially withheld from her, but its continued operation means that the wild and crazy good ol’ boy Leroy Hastings will be coming around in his fast car. Starring Carol Lynley and Gary Lockwood, Bad Georgia Road was directed by John Broderick, who had produced Six-Pack Annie a few years earlier.

The opening scenes of Bad Georgia Road show Leroy Hastings evading two men in a car, as he flies down the backroads in his 1970 Dodge Roadrunner. The pair, who are in plainclothes and not flashing blue lights, are trying to keep up with him. The driver is a buffoonish type in a Civil War infantry cap, while the passenger giving orders and criticizing his performance seems to be a higher-ranking guy. Quickly, Leroy outmaneuvers them by running up ahead, hiding around a curve, then pulling out in front of them. This causes the unsuspecting men to end up in a field as Leroy drives away. As we watch all this, a raucous country tune about moonshining plays.

Soon, we find out about Leroy’s destination. There is a funeral going on in a small graveyard, and a few scroungy-looking people are gathered to pay their respects. The small tombstone reads “Elton Payne, 1897 – 1973.” The hardscrabble bunch amble off after a few words have been said, then Leroy arrives – late – in a pinstriped sport coat with his dirty jeans and t-shirt. Leroy looks like a thirty-year-old former high school football player, stocky with a shaggy non-haircut and an unshaven face. Talking to the elderly man who led the service, Leroy finds out that Elton’s heir “Molly something” is being notified by the local lawyer that she has an inheritance.

Next, we meet Molly in a big city office, where she and a few other women bicker and make catty remarks. She accuses one of them being a closeted lesbian who wants to get in her pants. After a moment, one of the women goes into another room and returns with a set of red padded toy bats, which they will apparently use to beat out their aggression on each other. Before they begin, Molly gets word of a phone call and leaves before the swinging begins. On the other end of the line is a fat country lawyer, who explains briefly that she has been given $100,000 in a bank account and her Uncle Elton’s land in Alabama. She seems elated.

Soon, she and her gay best friend Darryl are riding the two-lane highway in a Mercedes convertible, while Darryl reads out loud from Streetcar Named Desire. They fantasize a bit about what a romantic thing Southern life will be. Then reality hits! Up a long dirt driveway, there it is: old barns, an old house, junk everywhere. As they get out of the car, Arthur Pennyrich – the old hillbilly who officiated the funeral – emerges from the trees and fires his gun at them. Not knowing who they are, he can’t be too careful. But Molly is undeterred. She takes charge of the situation, bossing Pennyrich about his behavior, and retorting that his assistance will not be necessary. Meanwhile, Leroy comes pulling up. His tires throw dirt everywhere, while Molly yells at Pennyrich to stop him. Soon, Leroy comes to halt and gets out of the car. He is guzzling moonshine from a mason jar and throwing his weight around, while a pretty blonde in the car begs to come on and leave.

The aspects of the film’s story are now in place. Bad Georgia Road is one part Thunder Road and one part Green Acres, with the set-up of a romantic comedy. Leroy is a fast-driving wild man, and Molly is a city girl who has come to the country. Our leading man and leading lady are wildly different people, and they dislike each other from the moment they lay eyes on each other.

Back at the house, the portly attorney Depue drives up in his Cadillac to deliver the papers she’ll need to sign. Everything is amicable until she asks when she’ll get the cash. There is no cash, he tells her. She has just signed the papers saying that Uncle Elton’s debts can be paid out of his estate, which means the money was gone before she even came to get it. Molly wants to sell the land then, and Depue informs her with a smug smile that no one in the area will be interested or able to buy it. Molly is stuck in Alabama with no money. She has quit her job, thinking she will have it made. Now, she’s a stranger in a strange land. That evening, she and her pal Darryl discuss the options for how to escape the predicament— sell it to Arthur Pennyrich.

In the light of day, we see Pennyrich in an old blue truck hauling some hay bales across a meadow. In the trees nearby sits the sheriff with his binoculars. He is surveilling the old bootlegger, who picks up on him by the glare on the lens. So Pennyrich pulls out his rifle and shoots the sheriff’s hat off his head, chuckling about he has thwarted the meddling dummy. In the barn, a few moments later, he is loading jugs of moonshine out of the hay bales and into Leroy’s car . . . when Molly walks in. She demands to know what is going, and the men begrudgingly reveal the truth. Molly objects, on the grounds of wanting to avoid prison, but Leroy overrules her by getting in the car to drive off.

He comes back shortly, when Molly is in the yard wearing a green bathing suit and doing something like yoga. He rolls in slowly and, when he gets close to her, tosses a brown paper bag over the roof. It lands beside her. It’s a big stack of cash. Just then, gay best friend comes out to urge her into the plan – they had decided to leave in the morning – but she smiles coyly and declares that she’s starting to like it there. He is dismayed, but can’t do much about it. After he goes back inside, Molly saunters over to the garage where Leroy is cooking eggs. He is dirty and has no pants on. As she tries to speak to him in a friendly manner, he just stares back and eats in a way that is almost animalistic. She is trying to get on his good side, but when he nods his head toward the bed, she takes that as her signal to either go all in or get out.

In the house, Molly does some figuring. Striding out, she beckons Leroy and Pennyrich into the barn, where she makes her offer. She asks how many runs they can make per week, and Pennyrich says five. Molly takes that bit of info and offers the two men 30% of the take, which would come to about $40,000 per year to split between them. She also asks to know the ingredients, which they reveal, and she tells them that buying all that will come out of their end, too. Leroy doesn’t think that’s fair, but Molly retorts, “Without me, you’ve got nothing.” With a sneer, he comes back, “No, without you, we’ve got everything.” However, Molly is undeterred and strides out the barn with confidence. She will get rich off of these two.

The next time Molly sees Leroy, he is pulling to the dirt driveway with a different woman in the car. He once again toss the paper bag over the car to her feet. She doesn’t look amused, and we can tell from her cold expression that she is falling for Leroy. Seeing him with another woman makes her jealous, but it gets much worse when he and this woman go into his little hovel and make a ton of noise. Molly tries to reciprocate, making a pass at Darryl who is still in bed, but not much comes of it.

Out in the yard later, Darryl is lounging on the swing while Molly has set up a place to sunbathe near Leroy’s car. He is tuning it up, and she has a mind to pester him. First, she asks him to adjust her umbrella then to put lotion on her back. She gives these orders with her back turned, so he uses the opportunity to put engine grease in her suntan lotion. Molly comments on the fact that he is always dirty, and he responds that what she really wants is not a man but trained monkey. She calls him a “sexual ghoul,” so Leroy says that, considering how she brought a “queer” down here with her, she must not even know what a man is. They have a quick back and forth about women’s rights and chauvinism, an argument that Leroy sees no point in. Soon, he goes back to his car as she rubs blackish lotion all over her face. Once Molly realizes what has happened, she storms inside silently. Darryl has been watching the whole time, and Leroy gives him a flirty wink to put an end the scene.

Bad Georgia Road is now at the halfway mark. There is nothing unpredictable. Both Leroy and Molly are “types”— he is the rural ruffian, only interested in speed, liquor, and sex, while she is a bossy, greedy feminist from the modern city. Neither one understands the other. Yet, here they are, put together unwittingly.

In the scene that follows, we find out about the two men in the opening scene, the ones who were chasing Leroy. The sharper one of the two comes walking through a parking garage and gets into a black limousine. He speaks to an older man, Mr. Larch, who is in the back seat with a pretty young woman. Larch is affable but tells the henchman that something must be done about Leroy Hastings. The young man has been too successful, and the members of their “cooperative” are considering leaving the fold. There are insinuations of organized crime here but nothing overt.

Back in the country, Leroy and Pennyrich are loading up again. Pennyrich tells Leroy to be careful, and knowing what we now know, the admonition is warranted. Leroy is cocksure and brushes off the warning. As he starts to drive away, Molly comes out on the porch to watch him longingly. But then she jumps in the car and demands to go with him. Out on the road, Leroy is flying down two-lane rural byways that are barely paved and not even striped. Molly asks where he is going, and he tells her they’re heading to Birmingham. She wants to know how long it will take, and his reply is to stop talking. Over the CB radio, Leroy talks in code to a man in an office, and that signal is picked up by the two guys from the beginning of the movie. Meanwhile, Molly is complaining about having to go pee, but they have bigger problems. Three carloads of goons are setting Leroy up for the takedown. Leroy evades them by driving through the brush and bushes, yet he creates another problem in his escape: Molly has peed herself.

That evening, they arrive at Simon’s Auto Shop. A grease monkey kid lets them in and banters a bit with Leroy, while Molly changes out of her wet clothes into some coveralls hanging nearby. Leroy tells her to wait around while the car is being worked on, but she disobeys and follows him to a nearby night club. Here, we get an overview of a redneck night out. A country band is playing, and people are dancing. Soon, Leroy calls for a redhead named Lu Anne, who has several men hanging around her. She is all made up and wearing a skimpy pants suit. She and Leroy begin to dance and kiss, until a man comes out of nowhere and snatches Leroy up. They begin to fight, and in doing so, the other man punches Molly in the face. This brings a third guy into the fight, and they all go at it. Until Leroy escapes to the parking lot, with Molly coming out right after him.

After this, it is time for our country boys to have a meeting of the minds. They have to figure out what to do about Larch and his “syndicate.” They have gotten more brazen with the attempt to kill Leroy, so something must be done. The five men who’ve gathered all agree that machine guns are the answer. One claims to have no money, but Leroy quickly corrects him by saying that he has thousands of dollars buried in tin cans all over the place. Pennyrich adds a Southern touch to the conversation but reminding them, “We place our faith in the Lord and our trust in them guns.” Soon, they scatter to set themselves up to go to war.

The next few scenes move quickly among the various aspects of the plot. Out on a dirt road, we see the sheriff with a man who must be his superior or boss. He is being told that they’ve received word about the possible use of machine guns, which means that the goofy little country sheriff will be off the case. He insists that he can handle it, however, by knowing Pennyrich better than anyone. In another area, Molly is skinny-dipping in a pond, and Leroy shows up to request that she rethink his percentage, considering his level of risk. After their conversation, he walks off with her clothes. Back at the house, the sheriff shows up in women’s clothes, claiming from a distance to be a traveling evangelist named Sister Bessie, but Pennyrich sees through the disguise and sets him up to be had. Unfortunately, Pennyrich’s plan to scare the sheriff goes too far, and his car goes off a hillside, crashing into the brush. Pennyrich is scared that he has killed him, but the sheriff secretly scurries into the woods and escapes before the car blows up.

Back at the house, everything is coming to a head. Leroy is drinking on an old seat outdoors when Molly finds him. She made it home from the pond and has put on her silk nightie. The two begin to fuss and fight, which takes them into the house, where Leroy forces himself on her. To her surprise, he stops short of assaulting her and leaves the house laughing. Molly grabs the shotgun and follows him to his little place in the garage, barging in the door to shoot him. Leroy tells her either to admit that she wants him, or to lie to herself and say she doesn’t then shoot him. She answers his dare by pulling the trigger, but he has already taken the shells out of the gun. Half-angry and half-lustful, she storms across the room and jumps on top of him. It is in this awkward way that the two finally get together.

Later, after they’re done, Pennyrich shows up drunk as a skunk. He is having remorses about killing the sheriff, which he didn’t really do, and will no longer be making moonshine. After he leaves the little shack, rambling like a mad man, Leroy tells Molly that they will have yet another new deal. With Arthur gone, she will have to start working at the still with him.

Out at the still, Molly is quickly tired of working. She tries to lay down, but Leroy drags her off the a stack of feed sacks by her feet. As they tussle, she attempts to hit him, and he warns her, “You’re about to eat your teeth.” It keeps on going, so he punches her in the face, knocking her to the ground, and then picks her back up and exerts his authority. From there, he is a tough boss, kicking Molly in the seat of the pants and yanking her by the arm.

The final scenes of Bad Georgia Road resolve the little bit of tension that remains in the story. After being forced by Leroy to drink some of the moonshine, Molly is falling down drunk. But they’ve got a run to make. She insists on going with him. Out on the road, we see one last attempt by the syndicate guys to trap Leroy. And once again he evades them, leaving them in a field just like he did at the beginning. Right before the credits roll, Leroy and Molly are still negotiating their percentages, arguing over how to split the money.

Watching movies like this one reveals why Smokey and the Bandit was more successful than most in this genre. Audiences in the 1970s – and audiences today – can enjoy an outlaw story, a tale about two good ol’ boys eluding the police, generally having a good time doing it, even a story that includes a little love component with a pretty woman added in . . . but audiences are not so fond of men who never bathe, who attempt rape, and who rely on domestic abuse to maintain control. Because of those harsher elements, it’s hard to say what we’re supposed to take away from this story. Molly arrived in Alabama as a citified young woman with a professional career and a gay best friend, then she ends by becoming the girlfriend of a greasy redneck moonshiner who recently punched her in the face. Are we supposed to understand that Leroy showed her the error of her ways or that she likes this new life better? Hopefully not. But there is no moral judgment here, definitely not against Leroy. As for other male characters, they get off scot-free, too. Darryl just abandons Molly without a word, even stealing her car, and the Southern lawyer DePue tricks an unsuspecting woman and cheats her out of her inheritance. But this seems to be where Molly wants to stay. What the hell . . . ? 

As a document of the South, Bad Georgia Road combines several elements that are or have become well-known. One is the Simon Suggs figure, that character in the lore of the Old Southwest made famous by Johnson Jones Hooper. Simon Suggs was the early nineteenth century’s backwoods trickster who, in each tale, outsmarts educated and urbane people through a mixture of wily cunning and extreme naiveté. He is the embodiment of a kind of humorous wit that has pervaded Southern culture in works ranging from the novels of Mark Twain to the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard. It is easy to see features of Suggs in both Pennyrich and Leroy. Another element is a generalized Southern locale that gives few or no specifics. There are only a few references to the story being set in Alabama; one is Leroy’s statement that their destination is Birmingham, but when Molly asks how long the trip will take, he doesn’t answer. So how far from Birmingham were they? It’s important to point out here: this movie definitely wasn’t filmed in Alabama. The landscape is obviously California; when they arrive in “Birmingham,” there are palm trees. Just sayin’ . . . Moreover, there’s the title: Bad Georgia Road. There really is an Old Georgia Road in central Alabama, as well as an Atlanta Highway. But not once did anyone in the movie reference such a road that would lead to Georgia. I understand the temptation to put the story in “the South,” but a particular setting matters. South Georgia is not like north Alabama, which is not like the Mississippi Delta, which is not similar to coastal Carolina. I realize that exploitation films are not known for their accuracy, but many Americans do take their conceptions of what the South is from films.

As a last word, other components of this movie are also just plain odd. For example, not one black person appears in this film at all. I realize that it is a racist trope to throw in a token black character or two, usually in a minor role or as extras, but the absence of black characters is notable in a movie that is supposed to be Southern. Second, it was hard to tell whether it was hot where they were. There were scenes when Leroy was in a t-shirt while Pennyrich was in two shirts and an overcoat. And neither man was sweating or shivering. In Alabama, heat and humidity matter. Beyond that, in some parts but not all, the steering wheels of cars are on the right side like they are in Europe, and at about the fifty-minute mark, the sign for Simon’s Auto Shop is clearly backwards. For a movie that centers on cars and driving, it made me wonder what was going on with that. I’ll give them this: the film was a cheaply made drive-in feature, so it is what it is. 

Reading: “Smokehole” by Martin Shaw

Smokehole
Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass
by Martin Shaw

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Somehow the necessary things aligned to land Martin Shaw’s Smokehole in my hands. This isn’t a book I would have normally chosen. But about a year ago, I watched a documentary Woodland Dark and Days Bewitched about folk-horror movies and was for a while ensconced in the subject of the folk. These films reminded me of studying archetypes in literature during my days as an English major, then as I dove in, they yielded a larger interest in the subjects of folktales and folklore (albeit in a half-baked/novice/hobbyist kind of way). It was subsequent searches for books on these subjects that led me to this one, which was published by Chelsea Green.

The main part of Smokehole, which is framed by an introduction and conclusion, is divided into three sections that each contain a folktale and a commentary on it. The first tale is about a girl whose hands are cut off after her father inadvertently promises her to a mysterious man he meets in the woods. The girl then goes on a journey that leads her into the woods, into womanhood, into a marriage, and into motherhood. Using the tale, Shaw teaches about the dangers of lies and greed, as well as the ways one can find support and recovery. In the story, the wilderness – in this case, the forest – is a multifaceted place whose remarkable characteristic is uncertainty. It is where the father meets the trickster with a half-obscured face, and after the trickster has altered their lives, it is where a distraught daughter goes alone to escape. Later, once the girl has grown into a woman and had a child, she must flee from danger by going back into the forest but, the second time, meets a group of older women who love and support her and her child. Shaw’s message centers on the idea that, throughout our lives, we may have to leave our comfortable lives and venture into uncertainty, where we will not always find the same things.

The second tale has elements of the parables of the prodigal son and of the good Samaritan in the Bible. Here, a young man takes his inheritance early and leaves home, but this time he loses everything not through self-indulgence but by helping someone. As a naive traveler, he finds a dead body on the road to town, hoists it onto his back, and tries to find the man’s family or friends so they can give him a funeral and burial. This story allows Shaw to comment on unexpected outcomes and burden sharing. We see a scenario similar to the one that Jesus used in his story about the Samaritan, who receives help from the person most wouldn’t expect to give it. A young man passing the dead body of an unknown person would have no reason to seek a decent burial for a stranger, much less be willing to pay for one, but in this tale he does. Once again, there are lessons about how life may not lead us where we think it will.

In the third tale, we meet a woodland hunter who lives with his mother. Normally, the hunter would use his skills to keep them fed, but one day he finds that he can’t. In his search for prey, though, he encounters four animals and accepts promises of future aid from them in exchange for mercy. Although he and his mother are starving, he looks to the possibilities in the future rather than the needs of the present— delayed gratification. Later, he uses their assistance when he is trying to win the hand of a princess by outdoing a riddle/challenge. In this last one, we encounter the spyglass, which the princess uses as an all-seeing eye, and Shaw likens this spyglass to the internet. Shaw uses the metaphor to share his thoughts on how we have let a powerful tool become a thing that we yield to, rather than a thing we control.

I’ve read Smokehole twice since getting a copy last summer. It’s not a long book at all, and its style is conversational, which makes for easy reading. Moreover, the author offers some valuable lessons here, perhaps chief among them that our lives may not turn out as we planned but may instead involve a journey with many twists and turns. In this reading, we don’t get an technical lesson in folktales as a genre, how they’re crafted, whether they’re from, etc. Instead we are given a practical lesson in their uses. We experience folktales in action, which illustrates that life in any age may involve lies, deceit, regret, pain, mistakes, misunderstandings, resolutions, support, compromise, and joy. Even in our age of constant surveillance and material convenience, Shaw reminds us, if we look to what has worked for human beings longer than recorded history has documented us, we can find more solace and comfort than if we place our faith in modern rhetoric and in technology. I couldn’t agree more. Smokehole reminds readers that, no matter how we try to tame life, it remains wild.

 

The Open Submissions Period for “Nobody’s Home” begins in a month!

Starting April 15 and ending June 15, I will be reading and considering submissions of creative nonfiction to expand the Nobody’s Home anthology. All submitting writers should read the guidelines thoroughly, then send a query and wait for a response about whether to send the work. I am particularly interested in works about or set in the states of Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Texas, as they are currently underrepresented in the anthology. Works accepted during this time will be published in August 2025.

This year’s Open Submissions Period is the sixth for Nobody’s Home. In the project’s inaugural year, the first three Open Submissions Periods were held in the latter half of 2020 and the first half of 2021. Subsequently, in 2022 and 2023, unsolicited submissions were read in the spring, with accepted works published each summer. Invitation-only submissions periods have been held in the fall of those two recent years.

Submissions of reviews and interviews will continue to be accepted during this time. Again, anyone considering a submission should read the guidelines thoroughly before sending a query.

Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is an online anthology of nonfiction works about beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture over the last fifty years, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The project, which was created in 2020, collects personal essays, memoirs, short articles, opinion pieces, and contemplative works about the ideas, experiences, and assumptions that have shaped life below the old Mason-Dixon Line since 1970. Today, Nobody’s Home features more than fifty essays and offers secondary-education lesson plans for English and Social Studies classrooms, suggestions for documentaries, and reviews of books, as well as Groundwork, my editor’s blog.

Sharing the Good Stuff: “Our Towns” featured on PBS News Hour

Because we need to see reasons to have hope, too . . .

As a part of Judy Woodruff’s “America at a Crossroads” series on PBS News Hour, this segment features San Bernadino, California to discuss the problem of declining communities that were once thriving. Woodruff interviews not only locals to the southern California city east of Los Angeles, but also James and Deborah Fallows, whose Our Towns journalism project and subsequent book highlight the state of America’s mid-sized and small cities and towns. The Fallows once covered San Bernadino as writers for the local newspaper.

This segment’s focus is the need for people to invest in themselves and to regard community organizing as a viable solution. Here, we see a man who uses his boxing gym to help young people with everything from meals to tutoring and an artist has organized a public art project. Other subjects that are covered briefly include the need to diversify a local economy instead of relying on one or two big employers.

The Passing of Clark Walker

It is sad news to report, but artist Clark Walker passed away last month at the age of 84. Clark was the subject of my 2009 book I Just Make People Up, though I had not seen him in-person for some time. My understanding from those who were closest to him was that he did not want a funeral or memorial service. He was survived by his one sibling, a sister who I heard about and wrote about but never met.

Clark Walker never got the attention that he deserved as an artist, and just about anyone familiar with his life and career would agree. He showed a natural aptitude from a very young age, cultivated it as best as he could as he grew up, and made a career with it locally. That career lasted from the 1950s through the 2010s, when the arthritis in his hands inhibited his ability to work. His style is easily recognizable, and his figures’ faces and expressions are remarkable for their loneliness. 

That was Clark the artist. Clark the person was another matter. My experience with writing about Clark in the 2000s, when he was in his mid- to late 60s, was tenuous, on again and off again. When we began our interviews in January 2004, Clark was basically playing a game because he didn’t believe I was serious about actually writing a book, then getting it published. Once he realized that it was really going to happen, his insecurities took hold— what would people say about him, once the book was out there? I gave him opportunities to pull the project back, even after it was contracted; before the publisher NewSouth Books had invested in printing, etc., I could have asked to revoke the contract. There were possibilities for turning portions of my text into a long magazine article, or maybe a couple of shorter ones. No, he said, I’d done too much work, he wouldn’t ask for that now. But Clark remained nervous, and even went through short periods when he wouldn’t speak to me. To put his mind at ease, during the collection of art for the color plates, Valerie Downes and I went to the homes of every person whose painting Clark wanted to be included. We made sure that the plates would be representative of how he wanted to be remembered as an artist.

Once the book was finished and published, we had a strong showing at the release event, and Clark was proud and glad. His art flew off the walls that night, and the book was well-received. But we hit three snags after that, and all proved to be significant. First, he had agreed to autograph 500 limited edition copies, and the task proved difficult with his arthritis. He regretted saying yes to that. Second, there were people who wanted to know from Clark why their painting had not been included, and third, there were people who urged him to believe that I had cheated him by not paying him. Clark and I talked about money several times during our process, and he insisted that he did not need to paid. If the book did well, the interest in his paintings would increase, he said. I didn’t expect any money from his art sales, and he never expected any money from my book sales. Unfortunately, there have been people in Montgomery who encouraged Clark to regard me in uglier terms, as a person who didn’t understand which paintings to include and who exploited him for monetary gain. He and I talked about those people, what they said, and what they wanted him to feel, but Clark and I never once fought or argued. Years later, the times that I went to see him in the nursing home, he had a copy of I Just Make People Up on his nightstand, displayed upright so the cover’s bright colors stood prominently against the blandness of his room.

Clark Walker and I started out as friends and neighbors, and it makes me sad to share that the business of producing a book about him did not improve our friendship. Ultimately, he was proud of I Just Make People Up, and so am I. The world needed for Clark Walker to be written about, his life and work demanding  a retrospective that could stand as a testament. On the one hand, I’m thankful that he didn’t believe I was going to actually write and publish a book, because he was his real self during those “ramblings.” I’m also thankful that he was a kind enough person to allow the project to go forward even when he was nervous about its effects on him personally. But everything has a cost, and in this case, that cost was our friendship, unfortunately. After the publication, we just couldn’t be good friends like we were when we were just two guys having drinks on a porch at some party. He and I never said that to each other, but we both knew it. I had crossed a line into that private territory that Clark didn’t want breached, though he had invited me into it . . . Later, he simultaneously wished he hadn’t and was glad he did. There’s an old saying that takes some form like “nothing was ever the same after that,” and the sentiment applies to our friendship. We had shared something intimate – not sexual or romantic, but deeply personal – and neither of us really knew what to do or say next. All I can say, now that he is gone, is: I will miss Clark Walker very, very much, and if you never got to know him, you missed something really special. 

The image above is of Clark and I signing copies at Capitol Book & News in early 2009.