What about Christian charity? –

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
– Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, published posthumously in 1940

The “singing” Tennessee River by a campground: Glynn Wilson

Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –

MUSCLE SHOALS, Ala. – After enduring a night of pounding rain in a campground by the Tennessee River, little gusts of wind woke me up a little late Friday morning, making a whistling sound in the pine trees and the cracked window of Gwyneth Ford, my deep forest green van that is now sometimes my traveling home and office.

At one point, as I began stirring and preparing to rise and get the coffee going, I could swear I heard a woman’s voice singing in the wind there for a minute. I’m sure it was my vivid imagination, but it sounded to me a little like my friend Wayne Perkins, a card-carrying member of the Cherokee Nation, in that high voice singing Jimmy Cliff’s song “Many Rivers to Cross.” It’s one of my favorite traveling theme songs these days.

That made me think back to the story of Te-lah-nay, a Cherokee woman who was forced out of her homeland on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma by President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. As the story is told, she was unable to settle down in Indian Territory because none of the rivers or streams there could sing to her like the river she knew, so the young girl decided to walk all the way back to North Alabama all alone, guided only by the rising sun in the morning. She made it back to her homeland and beloved Tennessee River, but it took her five years of walking.

Thinking About An Honest Life by the Singing River in Muscle Shoals

Te-lah-nay’s Wall just off the Natchez Trace Parkway: Glynn Wilson

As I got the coffee going and cranked up the Apple computer hooked up to the internet with an iPhone hotspot, went through emails, Facebook notifications and text messages and read The New York Times online, I got to thinking about what Thomas Wolfe wrote about going home again. This got me to thinking about the experience of Southern writer Willie Morris in Mississippi. And then my friend and former colleague at the Times, Rick Bragg.

Quite frankly, I never planned to be here again, thinking Wolfe was right. But sometimes Providence has a way of stepping in with a guiding hand. So here I am.

For background, I pulled up the special tribute issue of The Southerner magazine online dedicated to Willie Morris back at the turn of the century, and recalled some of the things he said about going back home to the South, and especially what Linton Weeks wrote about Willie.

The Southerner: Willie Morris Tribute

When he heard Weeks wanted to write for a living, his first words were: “If there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know.”

“Hollow vow, usually,” Weeks wrote. “But not in Willie’s case. He was true to his word.”

Does The South Still Exist?

“So, does the South still exist? True to his word, again, in the first issue of Southern Magazine, which appeared in October 1986, Willie Morris addressed head-on the question he raised along with a glass of red wine on that long, heady night in Oxford. In the answering, he also spoke of the way he chose to live his own life.

“One has to seek the answer on one’s own terms, of course,” Willie wrote. “But to do that I suggest one should spurn the boardrooms and the country clubs and the countless college seminars on the subject and spend a little time at the ball games and the funerals and the bus stations and the courthouses and the bargain-rate beauty parlors and the little churches and the roadhouses and the joints near closing hour….

“Perhaps in the end it is the old devil-may-care instinct of the South that remains in the most abundance and will sustain the South in its uncertain future,” he wrote. “It is gambling with the heart. It is a glass menagerie. It is something that won’t let go.”

The Glass Menagerie was, of course, a play by fellow Southerner Tennessee Williams.

Even in the 1980s, that magazine staff felt they had to deal with the much homogenized landscape of the region, where every intersection along the federal and state highways looked the same everywhere, from the Golden Arches of McDonald’s crappy hamburgers (loved by this president) to the same brand name gas stations with prices fixed by corporate capitalism and greed no matter what region of the country you find yourself passing through. A shower at a truck stop costs $17 in Alabama and West Virginia.

For Willie, he wrote: “There is much of the South … that I wish I could escape forever. I wish I could escape the smoldering malevolence behind a coed’s prolonged racial tirade among students at my house one recent evening. Escape the tenacious righteousness of the ‘seg academies.’ Escape the images of the catastrophic destruction, physical and communal, of places like my beloved Austin in Texas. Escape every manifestation of institutionalized, right-wing, fundamentalist religion, richer and more pervasive than it ever was. Escape the ennui of the morgue-like Sundays. Escape the fruitless spleen and irrelevant innuendo of the intellectual discourse.

“To escape the South, however — all of what it was and is — I would have to escape from myself,” he concluded then.

Is There A South Anymore?

Some critics liked to refer to Willie Morris as a “Southern writer,” in the vein of William Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren. But in his book New York Days, Willie tried to distance himself from his regional heritage. He wanted to be remembered as an “American writer.”

At least after he got fired from Harper‘s magazine and came home to Mississippi, the academic community embraced him, giving him a teaching job.

I’ve often told friends that Rick Bragg is the “last of the Southern writers,” and also “Alabama’s Mark Twain,” because not only does he write eloquently of the region. He’s also a great talker, who can stand up on a stage and entertain an audience the way Sam Clemens did late in his career to get by financially when bad investments left him broke.

He doesn’t know it, but I helped him get that teaching gig at the University of Alabama, when I urged my old mentor and dean Ed Mullins to get in touch with him about teaching. He was really down in the mouth when I talked to him on the phone after he moved back from New Orleans to Anniston to be with his sick mom. This was around the same time that my close friend and photographer Spider Martin shot himself in the heart with a sixteen gauge shotgun shell in a rigged up old flair pistol from the first World War. I was worried he too might kill himself, after the way things went down at the Times.

Fast forward 20 years. So now it is my turn to try to deal with these questions in a very different world. The nagging episode and question that has plagued this region and this nation since Twain’s century now lingers over our national lives like nothing since 1861, when this country was torn apart by war. Somehow the worst instincts and attitudes of the Old South have now taken over the land, elevating a deeply disturbed man into the Oval Office, who seems to want us all to go back to the days of “slavery time.”

He’s never read enough or thought enough about this to realize that “you can’t go back again.” It just served his purpose to use fear and chaos to create political division, to “divide and conquer” and make himself America’s first dictator. Is that what the American people really want to try? Are we that desperate in the face of the exponentially accelerating nature of change in technology and society?

It appears so. I tried to warn people. They didn’t listen, many too glued to watching Fox News or following the fake news memes on social media to even find out how their world was about to unravel under their feet.

So now what is to become of us, and me?

There was a time when you could count on a little “Southern hospitality” and a little “Christian charity” when down on your luck. In this new, crazy world, do these concepts even have any meaning anymore? Or were they just lip service all along? Something people told themselves to feel better about a bad situation?

I’ve actually heard those terms used quite a few times in the past six months. But in the end I found them to be strained at best. I don’t blame individual people, my friends. I know it has to do with people no longer being willing to trust a stranger due to the stresses of this mixed up world. The Covid pandemic taught us to stay away from other people and self-isolate. To continue socializing with others might be the death of us all, even as social networking in person is actually critical to human psychological health.

People still feel isolated and lonely in our society. Doctors say this is an epidemic all its own. I’m human. I feel it too.

As for myself, if I can’t find some people willing to help me out of Southern hospitality or Christian charity or both at this critical juncture in my life, I may not make it. I do not have the luxury of a suburban house paid for by years of work or a retirement plan with enough benefits to get by on. I must still find a way to work, and this means writing, since there is no job I could get at my age to pay enough to earn a living. Do y’all realize that the minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour? For all of Bernie Sanders’ talk about raising it to $15 an hour back in 2016, it never happened. And it’s certainly not going to happen with this do nothing Congress. There is no way to pay rent, utilities, buy food, a car, pay for insurance, and all the rest on $7.25 an hour, even if you could find a 40-hour-a-week job.

The same is true of my good friend and brother from the Allman Brother’s era of “Brothers and Sisters,” guitar slinger, sideman and singer-songwriter Wayne Perkins.

On Sunday, I made my way to the Shoals for Dick Cooper’s 79th birthday party at the Alabama Music Hall of Fame Museum. In doing my best to network around town for research on the book, I remembered something I learned from Dick a long time ago. He explained that he stopped trying to get people to pay him in his early days in the area, after quitting a job writing and taking photographs for the local newspaper, and started helping people in the music business. He produced the first Drive By Truckers record, and managed the band on its first tour, for example. His philosophy of life became the ways of a “volunteer” to simply find ways to help people, hoping that someone would see fit to compensate him along the way so he could survive. It seems to have worked.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years or more, volunteering to help people in exchange for a place to stay, including the National Park Service. If you don’t have to pay rent and utilities and keep your other bills down it’s not been that hard to survive, until now. The park service staff in Washington, D.C. presented me with an award last summer when they discovered that I had 1,000 hours of volunteer service helping to run campgrounds in Maryland and Virginia. But when it came time to consider me for a job as a park ranger, they balked. Now working for the federal government is NOT an option due to the outcome of the election.

So now I am trying to help my friend Wayne Perkins. His brother Dale agreed to put me up out of the cold for a couple of months back in December, and I vowed to build him a new website, an official Facebook fan group, to begin archiving his song library on a YouTube channel, to put up a GoFundMe campaign to help pay the expenses, to conduct research into the timeline of his life and career, and to write a book proposal to see if we could get it funded. All totally free, mind you, for a place to stay for a couple of months.

Now let’s see if there is any Southern hospitality, Christian charity or at least some literary acumen left in the region to help us both out by funding this Music Legacy Project. It is a story I’m singularly equipped to tell. It is right in my “wheelhouse” so to speak. But considering the state of the news business these days, the book business, the music business and the world at large, maybe people would be content with a bot written piece of Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence to tell this story. If that’s the case, I’m a goner, and so is Wayne.

Is there anyone out there with the resources to fund this work to make sure this story gets told? You can read about it here, if anyone is still reading anything that is not a meme on Facebook or a political discussion on cable TeeVee news talk. I’m just putting this out there in the universe to see if people will pick up on it and share it with the right people. I’ll be waiting down by the river as long as I can make it. Please get in touch ASAP. We don’t have long.

Wayne Perkins: A Ramblin’ Heart

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Help fund the continuation of the Music Legacy Project here.