The Crimson Letter (On S-Town)
I finished listening to S-Town today, the new podcast spearheaded by This American Life producer Brian Reed. As anyone reading this knows by now, it's set in a tiny, rural town called Woodstock, in Alabama.
I know this place, although not well. My appearance in Woodstock, or anywhere in Bibb County for that matter, would certainly seem out of place. I was raised in Hoover, a suburb of suburbs, just outside Birmingham. Now I live downtown in Birmingham. Woodstock is about a 40-minute drive from here, but it still seems pretty close.
When I was little, my dad would take me for rides on his motorcycle. We'd always drive through the country, where there was fresh air and open, twisty roads and distance. No mall traffic, no stop-and-go, just riding. Even though Hoover, like I said, is a textbook suburb town, full of strip malls and chain stores and subdivisions and one large indoor shopping mall, it really doesn't take you long at all to find the country. Woodstock was one of the towns we'd sometimes drive through. When I was old enough to drive on my own, I'd go there, too, or at least get close, driving for the sake of driving, wasting gas in the summer of 2008 when it was over $4.00 a gallon. Bibb County wasn't far but it felt far. It felt like I'd found some kind of portal, a glitch where the map shrunk up and let me drive hours outside of my home in mere minutes.
My dad owned a machine shop for about ten years, and one of his shop floor managers lives in Woodstock, last I checked. I don't know if he knows anyone involved in the S-Town podcast, but hearing him talk all those years (especially in the year and a half that I worked in the office there) and knowing the troubled young guys my dad hired, who were similarly tattooed and tobacco chewed and who missed work sometimes because of oxycontin addictions or court appearances or trouble with their baby-mamas, all of S-Town felt eerily familiar.
But then again, there's me, half-British, raised in a suburb in an excellent school district with a master's degree in English. I felt the gulf between me and the guys in the shop when I worked there acutely. Our lives were nothing alike. I can't claim kinship to Woodstock, not really. So I feel odd about this assertion of familiarity, and I felt odd listening to the story unfold.
I couldn't enjoy the first episode for fear of what was to come. I was holding my breath, cringing, waiting for this to turn into the kind of rednexploitation we're all so used to down here. But it didn't do that, I don't think.
Sure, there's a part of me that wants to be a little salty. Okay, Brian Reed, New York reporter, you found your crazy redneck. Congratulations, you can pat yourself on the back for humanizing him. At times, it feels a little colonial/anthropological when I think about it.
But then I realize, no, that's not it at all.
The stereotype of the south is a difficult one to bear. Because it does exist. It obviously exists. S-Town didn't exaggerate anything about Bibb County; these people are real, living, breathing, people who aren't putting anything on to trick the rest of the world. This is how they live, and I really appreciate S-Town's treatment of it. But it's a bit embarrassing to think that everyone across the country listening to this hyped-up podcast is getting this picture. Yes, it's real, and it's true to what it is. But God, couldn't they have come to Birmingham? Couldn't they have shown the rest of the country what our city is like, our modern city, with its incredible hospitals and universities, our music scene, our food scene, couldn't they? Oh God, I keep thinking, now everyone's suspicions are confirmed. We're just as backwoods as they always want to believe we are. There's no way they won't paint this on the whole state.
Only, as soon as I get on this train of thought I realize that this is not Brian Reed's cross to bear, nor anyone else's involved. This story is not about Birmingham, it's about Woodstock, and about John B. McLemore. Don't these voices deserve to be heard, too? The voices of folks in the woods of Alabama, fighting against tradition while still feeling stuck in it. That's a lot of what Birmingham's about, a lot of what I'd want a story of Birmingham, a story of Alabama to be about. And that it certainly was.
That sense of fight—the kind that makes you want so desperately to choose flight instead though you never do—is one of the biggest things that struck me about this story. I've felt that so many times, and continue to. So many people around me do, too. We get so fed up with the rampant corruption (more on that in a moment), the racism (more on that in a moment), the dark sides of tradition that seem to hold us all back in a state of ruin—we swear we're going to get the hell out of here one day. Friends of ours who do it don't often look back. They tell us about the freedom of bigger, more liberal cities, their arms outstretched in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago. Or even just in Atlanta. Just as long as it's somewhere else, it doesn't feel so claustrophobic anymore, not like Birmingham always did. I've felt this, too. I swore up and down that the minute I turned 18 I was out of here, that I was applying to schools anywhere but here and would run and never turn back. I complained about Alabama to my family in England, disparaged it, disowned it, wore my embarrassment like a Scarlet Letter—or perhaps more aptly, a Crimson Letter.
But then, I didn't. I attended one semester at the University of Alabama (the big one, the National Championship football team one), hated everything about it, and promptly transferred to... the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I graduated, and then I turned right back around and got my master's degree there, too. I still live in the city. I'm thinking about living here for the rest of my life. But why? I'm a liberal, in almost every way. I'm not an atheist by any means, but I'm not a Christian by just as many. None of my family lives here, aside from my parents. My boyfriend is half-Lebanese, fiercely proud of his Arab heritage. This place does not suit me at all, not at all.
And yet, it does.
Maybe sometimes when you grow to love a place so much, you love it because of the potential you see in it, the good in it. And when you see the major faults (which I do, every day, working in a library in a very affluent neighborhood full of traditional, privileged, rich, white Southern folks and living in a city run by corrupt men and women, home of the Civil Rights Movement where poor minorities are being pushed out of their gentrified neighborhoods by the day), instead of wanting to run from them you want to stay and fight the good fight.
There is a magic and a beauty to this part of the world. The natural environment is all around you, all the time. We joke that everyone raised in Alabama is a de-facto naturalist; I wouldn't have included myself in that until I spoke to some of my boyfriend's former classmates in New York about birds. Can you name 20 kinds of bird? 20 kinds of tree? I thought this was a joke, it was so easy, but they struggled. There is natural beauty, and in between the painful traditionalism, there is pure, endearing, astounding kindness. Southern hospitality is a real thing.
I don't know if John B. felt anything like this at all (it kind of sounds like he didn't, at least at the end, at least once he dubbed his home Shittown), but when I look at my Shittown, Birmingham, the place I used to hate, I find I really don't hate it at all. I love my home. I love it so incredibly deeply that I want to stay and see it become a better place. And I do see it happening all the time; my city is alive. I wish we could at least have gotten him here. I wish the man Brian Reed spoke to, the one who met John B. on a singles chat line, could have convinced him to come up to this city that is growing for the first time in decades, since its death in the 70's, a place that isn't stuck in time, where we are planning a march for science, where we have gay bars and regular bars and no one really cares who goes where, where Bernie Sanders came to speak last January, where a university is built into the grid, where people of all nationalities live together.
Okay, maybe he wouldn't have liked that too much, either. Too many rules, too much noise, ordinances and guidelines and people telling you what you can and cannot do on your property (as much as it can be said to be yours). There's a lot to be said for the country.
And I like that about S-Town. Because it does say something for the country, in spite of all of John B.'s outward vitriol for it. His description of watching the stars, of being out in the woods, spoke quite loudly to me. Being from Birmingham makes me a city girl, at least according to my friend's grandparents in Bankston, Alabama, in Fayette County; they wanted him to warn me when I went to pick vegetables on their farm last summer—"Make sure she knows she's gonna work." But when I was in my undergrad, my mentor took our class out camping one weekend to his property on the Warrior River, and I sat around the fire on land passed down through generations, where my mentor can run his fingers through the prints left when his grandfather was mortaring bricks together, listening to nothing but the sounds of nature—barred owls, the restless river, crickets, humans breathing in it—and I knew I was home.
Some of my friends have undertaken the task of "making a real Southerner out of me"—taking me camping and fishing, teaching me how to eat crawfish, explaining the excitement of football. But the thing is, whether I liked it or not, I was a Southerner all along. There's something intoxicating about it. That's why I never left. I'd like to think that's why John B. never did either, although it makes me so sad to think about how beat down he got by it, how he gave up on it in so many ways, how much he seemed to grieve over that.
Maybe I'm just young and still naive. They say the young are always ideological, but that smart people learn to be realistic as they go on. I hope that never happens to me. I hope I never lose the sense of wonderment this crazy Shitstate stirs in me, the foothills, the flatlands, the beaches to the south, the heat and the storms and the unsettling feeling that not everything is as it seems. I don't have a great deal of hope for changing the minds of my fellow Alabamians; convincing them all that homosexuality is not a choice, and is not a sin, or being able to explain what we mean by white privilege to like guys like Tyler Goodson, whose fathers were abusive bastards and who have stacked up bad luck on bad luck their whole lives, being treated from the beginning as though they were doomed to fail.
But I can try. I do believe that Birmingham can be a sanctuary city for people like John B. in Alabama, who need some kind of escape from small town life. I wish our governor would let it be an actual sanctuary city, but that's another story for another time, Montgomery's vice-like chokehold on the rest of the state. I believe in Birmingham's ability to threaten that, and I believe in Birmingham's potential to be a great place, a humanitarian place, a place where things get done.
I would like S-Town listeners from outside Alabama to know this, that a fight is happening, in more places than a mercury-laden shed in the middle of nowhere. But at the same time, I don't really need them to know this. If they can listen to this podcast and feel anything for the people involved, for my neighbors, that is a victory.
In the meantime, there will be more of us trying to stand up to racism, homophobia, corruption. If they ever need another story to investigate, we can always throw Montgomery at them, we can always throw Jasper at them, places with conspiracies of corruption so huge I'm almost afraid to even pontificate about them. The small-town scandal John B. contacted Brian Reed about may have borne no fruit, but there's plenty of it here. Crooked, backward, awful things done behind closed doors. Systematic racism. But we have to confront these people. We have to question them, not combatively (as they'd surely beat us at that game), but honestly and directly. They dissolve so quickly when you do.
There are things I wish S-Town would, or could have been, but at the same time, I don't. I agree with Vulture.com writer Nicholas Quah that it's "one of the most sincerely human things I've ever listened to," and in that sense, I wouldn't change anything about it. It's made me think a lot about my own home, and opened my eyes to the complexities of the people down the street from me who I too often discount. Ignorant, redneck, white trash, hillbilly—we say these things, and try to scrub these people out of the public consciousness because so many of us are trying so hard to be better. But they're trying too, in their own ways. And their poverty, their disillusion, their hardship and hurt is real. It's why our country is where it is today. So of course, we should listen. We should always, always listen.
I know this place, although not well. My appearance in Woodstock, or anywhere in Bibb County for that matter, would certainly seem out of place. I was raised in Hoover, a suburb of suburbs, just outside Birmingham. Now I live downtown in Birmingham. Woodstock is about a 40-minute drive from here, but it still seems pretty close.
When I was little, my dad would take me for rides on his motorcycle. We'd always drive through the country, where there was fresh air and open, twisty roads and distance. No mall traffic, no stop-and-go, just riding. Even though Hoover, like I said, is a textbook suburb town, full of strip malls and chain stores and subdivisions and one large indoor shopping mall, it really doesn't take you long at all to find the country. Woodstock was one of the towns we'd sometimes drive through. When I was old enough to drive on my own, I'd go there, too, or at least get close, driving for the sake of driving, wasting gas in the summer of 2008 when it was over $4.00 a gallon. Bibb County wasn't far but it felt far. It felt like I'd found some kind of portal, a glitch where the map shrunk up and let me drive hours outside of my home in mere minutes.
My dad owned a machine shop for about ten years, and one of his shop floor managers lives in Woodstock, last I checked. I don't know if he knows anyone involved in the S-Town podcast, but hearing him talk all those years (especially in the year and a half that I worked in the office there) and knowing the troubled young guys my dad hired, who were similarly tattooed and tobacco chewed and who missed work sometimes because of oxycontin addictions or court appearances or trouble with their baby-mamas, all of S-Town felt eerily familiar.
But then again, there's me, half-British, raised in a suburb in an excellent school district with a master's degree in English. I felt the gulf between me and the guys in the shop when I worked there acutely. Our lives were nothing alike. I can't claim kinship to Woodstock, not really. So I feel odd about this assertion of familiarity, and I felt odd listening to the story unfold.
I couldn't enjoy the first episode for fear of what was to come. I was holding my breath, cringing, waiting for this to turn into the kind of rednexploitation we're all so used to down here. But it didn't do that, I don't think.
Sure, there's a part of me that wants to be a little salty. Okay, Brian Reed, New York reporter, you found your crazy redneck. Congratulations, you can pat yourself on the back for humanizing him. At times, it feels a little colonial/anthropological when I think about it.
But then I realize, no, that's not it at all.
The stereotype of the south is a difficult one to bear. Because it does exist. It obviously exists. S-Town didn't exaggerate anything about Bibb County; these people are real, living, breathing, people who aren't putting anything on to trick the rest of the world. This is how they live, and I really appreciate S-Town's treatment of it. But it's a bit embarrassing to think that everyone across the country listening to this hyped-up podcast is getting this picture. Yes, it's real, and it's true to what it is. But God, couldn't they have come to Birmingham? Couldn't they have shown the rest of the country what our city is like, our modern city, with its incredible hospitals and universities, our music scene, our food scene, couldn't they? Oh God, I keep thinking, now everyone's suspicions are confirmed. We're just as backwoods as they always want to believe we are. There's no way they won't paint this on the whole state.
Only, as soon as I get on this train of thought I realize that this is not Brian Reed's cross to bear, nor anyone else's involved. This story is not about Birmingham, it's about Woodstock, and about John B. McLemore. Don't these voices deserve to be heard, too? The voices of folks in the woods of Alabama, fighting against tradition while still feeling stuck in it. That's a lot of what Birmingham's about, a lot of what I'd want a story of Birmingham, a story of Alabama to be about. And that it certainly was.
That sense of fight—the kind that makes you want so desperately to choose flight instead though you never do—is one of the biggest things that struck me about this story. I've felt that so many times, and continue to. So many people around me do, too. We get so fed up with the rampant corruption (more on that in a moment), the racism (more on that in a moment), the dark sides of tradition that seem to hold us all back in a state of ruin—we swear we're going to get the hell out of here one day. Friends of ours who do it don't often look back. They tell us about the freedom of bigger, more liberal cities, their arms outstretched in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago. Or even just in Atlanta. Just as long as it's somewhere else, it doesn't feel so claustrophobic anymore, not like Birmingham always did. I've felt this, too. I swore up and down that the minute I turned 18 I was out of here, that I was applying to schools anywhere but here and would run and never turn back. I complained about Alabama to my family in England, disparaged it, disowned it, wore my embarrassment like a Scarlet Letter—or perhaps more aptly, a Crimson Letter.
But then, I didn't. I attended one semester at the University of Alabama (the big one, the National Championship football team one), hated everything about it, and promptly transferred to... the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I graduated, and then I turned right back around and got my master's degree there, too. I still live in the city. I'm thinking about living here for the rest of my life. But why? I'm a liberal, in almost every way. I'm not an atheist by any means, but I'm not a Christian by just as many. None of my family lives here, aside from my parents. My boyfriend is half-Lebanese, fiercely proud of his Arab heritage. This place does not suit me at all, not at all.
And yet, it does.
Maybe sometimes when you grow to love a place so much, you love it because of the potential you see in it, the good in it. And when you see the major faults (which I do, every day, working in a library in a very affluent neighborhood full of traditional, privileged, rich, white Southern folks and living in a city run by corrupt men and women, home of the Civil Rights Movement where poor minorities are being pushed out of their gentrified neighborhoods by the day), instead of wanting to run from them you want to stay and fight the good fight.
There is a magic and a beauty to this part of the world. The natural environment is all around you, all the time. We joke that everyone raised in Alabama is a de-facto naturalist; I wouldn't have included myself in that until I spoke to some of my boyfriend's former classmates in New York about birds. Can you name 20 kinds of bird? 20 kinds of tree? I thought this was a joke, it was so easy, but they struggled. There is natural beauty, and in between the painful traditionalism, there is pure, endearing, astounding kindness. Southern hospitality is a real thing.
I don't know if John B. felt anything like this at all (it kind of sounds like he didn't, at least at the end, at least once he dubbed his home Shittown), but when I look at my Shittown, Birmingham, the place I used to hate, I find I really don't hate it at all. I love my home. I love it so incredibly deeply that I want to stay and see it become a better place. And I do see it happening all the time; my city is alive. I wish we could at least have gotten him here. I wish the man Brian Reed spoke to, the one who met John B. on a singles chat line, could have convinced him to come up to this city that is growing for the first time in decades, since its death in the 70's, a place that isn't stuck in time, where we are planning a march for science, where we have gay bars and regular bars and no one really cares who goes where, where Bernie Sanders came to speak last January, where a university is built into the grid, where people of all nationalities live together.
Okay, maybe he wouldn't have liked that too much, either. Too many rules, too much noise, ordinances and guidelines and people telling you what you can and cannot do on your property (as much as it can be said to be yours). There's a lot to be said for the country.
And I like that about S-Town. Because it does say something for the country, in spite of all of John B.'s outward vitriol for it. His description of watching the stars, of being out in the woods, spoke quite loudly to me. Being from Birmingham makes me a city girl, at least according to my friend's grandparents in Bankston, Alabama, in Fayette County; they wanted him to warn me when I went to pick vegetables on their farm last summer—"Make sure she knows she's gonna work." But when I was in my undergrad, my mentor took our class out camping one weekend to his property on the Warrior River, and I sat around the fire on land passed down through generations, where my mentor can run his fingers through the prints left when his grandfather was mortaring bricks together, listening to nothing but the sounds of nature—barred owls, the restless river, crickets, humans breathing in it—and I knew I was home.
Some of my friends have undertaken the task of "making a real Southerner out of me"—taking me camping and fishing, teaching me how to eat crawfish, explaining the excitement of football. But the thing is, whether I liked it or not, I was a Southerner all along. There's something intoxicating about it. That's why I never left. I'd like to think that's why John B. never did either, although it makes me so sad to think about how beat down he got by it, how he gave up on it in so many ways, how much he seemed to grieve over that.
Maybe I'm just young and still naive. They say the young are always ideological, but that smart people learn to be realistic as they go on. I hope that never happens to me. I hope I never lose the sense of wonderment this crazy Shitstate stirs in me, the foothills, the flatlands, the beaches to the south, the heat and the storms and the unsettling feeling that not everything is as it seems. I don't have a great deal of hope for changing the minds of my fellow Alabamians; convincing them all that homosexuality is not a choice, and is not a sin, or being able to explain what we mean by white privilege to like guys like Tyler Goodson, whose fathers were abusive bastards and who have stacked up bad luck on bad luck their whole lives, being treated from the beginning as though they were doomed to fail.
But I can try. I do believe that Birmingham can be a sanctuary city for people like John B. in Alabama, who need some kind of escape from small town life. I wish our governor would let it be an actual sanctuary city, but that's another story for another time, Montgomery's vice-like chokehold on the rest of the state. I believe in Birmingham's ability to threaten that, and I believe in Birmingham's potential to be a great place, a humanitarian place, a place where things get done.
I would like S-Town listeners from outside Alabama to know this, that a fight is happening, in more places than a mercury-laden shed in the middle of nowhere. But at the same time, I don't really need them to know this. If they can listen to this podcast and feel anything for the people involved, for my neighbors, that is a victory.
In the meantime, there will be more of us trying to stand up to racism, homophobia, corruption. If they ever need another story to investigate, we can always throw Montgomery at them, we can always throw Jasper at them, places with conspiracies of corruption so huge I'm almost afraid to even pontificate about them. The small-town scandal John B. contacted Brian Reed about may have borne no fruit, but there's plenty of it here. Crooked, backward, awful things done behind closed doors. Systematic racism. But we have to confront these people. We have to question them, not combatively (as they'd surely beat us at that game), but honestly and directly. They dissolve so quickly when you do.
There are things I wish S-Town would, or could have been, but at the same time, I don't. I agree with Vulture.com writer Nicholas Quah that it's "one of the most sincerely human things I've ever listened to," and in that sense, I wouldn't change anything about it. It's made me think a lot about my own home, and opened my eyes to the complexities of the people down the street from me who I too often discount. Ignorant, redneck, white trash, hillbilly—we say these things, and try to scrub these people out of the public consciousness because so many of us are trying so hard to be better. But they're trying too, in their own ways. And their poverty, their disillusion, their hardship and hurt is real. It's why our country is where it is today. So of course, we should listen. We should always, always listen.
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