ALABAMA GIRL-Memoir of a Writer-Part 1: ALABAMA GIRL, #1

Copyright @Billie Sue Mosiman 2013, All rights reserved.

 PREFACE

This is my life and I'm going to tell you of that life the way I lived it. Every life is a novel. Every single one. The life of a writer is often only of interest to other writers who love to learn how one writer was influenced by her life. This autobiography may be useful to those readers. But I'm a novelist. That doesn't mean I'm going to gussy up this story with fiction—even when it might serve to make me look better or more compassionate or brighter. It does mean I hope to use fictional elements and make it read like a novel so that it has wider appeal than to my colleagues. Truman Capote wanted to do that with non-fiction when he wrote IN COLD BLOOD. He did it so well he set a precedent. I'd like to do that for the autobiography.

Also, this autobiography may be the first ever written by a writer and shared on a blog in serial form and then compiled in this volume. Part 2 will be coming along soon.

There will be one caveat for you, dear reader, to keep in mind. When I write about the people living in the years before my birth, I'll be relating to you what was told to me. I have no reason to think what I was told was other than the truth. It's been my experience many people in the South of my youth were fine natural storytellers. In fact, that's one of the reasons I became a writer. I'd heard so many stories and tales that they fired my imagination. When it comes to family history, people will color it the way they see it, of course, and we have to take their word for how they saw the world and what they did in that world of the gray past. I trust the emotion behind the facts. When relatives told me of those years and those members of the family who lived before I was born, I listened with my heart and I gleaned all the truth behind the words. I may create dialogue when I never heard it. When I do, trust it as you would if I had been there.

In this autobiography, once I am old enough to think and be self-aware, I can tell you about my life. Why, that's awfully egotistical of you, you might think. Why would you believe your life is worth reading about? Well, I can tell you my reason. It's because I paid attention. Writers develop great powers of observation. Often they admit they feel as if they are standing aside and watching themselves as they live their lives. I watched and I observed and, having been blessed with a fine memory, I stored it away. I used some of it in my fiction as all writers do. But it's a different thing when it's the truth—the life itself.

I am not so old I'm decrepit and not so old I am yet losing any of my memories. I am old enough, however, to realize I'm not going to live forever. I want to share my past sixty-odd years with you. This is the life of a writer—how I became one and what and who influenced me. This is the peculiar life of a writer. It's only one, for all lives are peculiar, and really not one of them is worth more than another. I just happen to have the skills and the honesty to tell you of this one. I hope you find it worth your time because I want to give it to you. So without further talky talk, this is the novel of my life.

  NOVELS by Billie Sue Mosiman

  WIREMAN

  BLOODLAND

  STILETTO

  MOON LAKE

  NIGHT CRUISING

  KILLING CARLA

  BAD TRIP SOUTH

  GOLD RUSH DREAM

  LEGIONS OF THE DARK

  RISE OF THE LEGEND

  HUNTER OF THE DEAD

  BANISHED

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  CHAPTER 1

  SEVENTEEN AND SAND IN MY SHOES

  Just seventeen and wild to grow up. It was Alabama, where I'd been born, and it was the muggy summer of 1964. Bigdaddy sat with me on the concrete porch. Bigmama was inside the house puttering around, making peach cobbler, or figuring what to make for supper that would go well with cornbread.

  I looked out at the piney woods, wishing I were anywhere but stuck in South Alabama with nothing to do. Bigdaddy had peach leaves in his hands, scrutinizing their merit as musical instruments. I waited for him to find a leaf and play me a tune. He possessed a singular talent I’d never seen anyone else do. Who knew you could make music from the leaves of a tree? But it had to be peach. Not every leaf carried the notes.

    If he didn’t do something interesting soon, I’d die of boredom. I would graduate from high school the next year and my plans were in place. If the University of Alabama would have me, I was going away to college and start my real life. Until I felt so grown-up, I loved it here at my grandparent’s home. Now all I wanted to do was run away. The world felt like a fantastic playground waiting on the other side of a razor-wire fence. If I ever managed to get there, I might end up cut and bloody, but even the prospect of damage didn’t deter me. Alabama country living was slow and comfortable, oh yes oh yes, it was home. I just wanted more and I could hardly wait to get to it.

    Bigdaddy must have sensed my anxiety. I was bouncing on my feet and swinging around the wrought iron corner post, kicking out into the air and landing back onto the porch with an ungraceful thump.

    Though he hadn’t yet picked the correct musical leaf, he looked up from behind thick glasses that reflected the sun and obscured his blue eyes. He said, You've got sand in your shoes.

    Not a beach around here for a hundred miles, I said. What could he mean? I even glanced down at my sneakers.

    You’re going to travel, you’ll itch to do it. You can’t wait. I know because I was that way too.

    He’d pegged me. Even I didn’t know that secret about myself, but it sounded perfectly true. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to ride a camel in Egypt, wear a sari in India, steal a banana from a monkey in Africa. I wanted to see Wyoming, the green rivers of Oregon, the shores of Maine. I had to see it all and no one knew that about me until now.

    You used to hobo during the Depression, didn’t you?

    He went back to studying the handful of peach leaves.

    Come on, Bigdaddy, tell me about it. I want to know. I want to know everything. You rode the rails before you married Bigmama, right?

  I did want to know about the romantic life of a hobo because as a youngster that’s what it sounded like to me—pure romance, an adventure story.

  He had hopped trains all across the country to look for work.  That was all of the story I knew.  Even then I was dreaming of becoming a writer and hoboing sounded to me like just the thing a young person would love to do. Think of it. The breeze coming through the open train car doors. The spans of bridges across deep rushing rivers. The vista of mountains that kissed the clouds. Of course it was romantic. So you were a hobo once...right?

    He nodded, said nothing, and bent a peach leaf over his index finger and began to blow a tune.  I didn’t recognize it as a song I knew, but I did recognize it was pretty music.

  He didn't want to talk about it.  Hoboing.  But I had a curiosity wider than the Conecuh River where they (he and my grandmother, Bigmama) made me get dunked by the Pentecostal Holiness preacher so I'd be saved.  My curiosity hardly ever caused me to rag a person with questions.  Usually I was just the real quiet girl sitting off looking dreamy and disconnected while paying particular attention to every single word anyone said.  And committing it to memory.  Even as a small child I recognized I had a phenomenal memory.  It was like one of those big tacky patent leather purses Southern women of a certain age used to carry to church.  It held everything, important or not. 

    After a short interval where Bigdaddy tore off a few more peach leaves from the tree and showed me how to get a pithy whistle from one, I returned to the matter at hand.  I hoboed a bit, he said finally, seeing that I wasn't going to let it go.

    Tell me about it.  I had never taken a journalism class (in Alabama? in 1964?  Please.)  But I knew instinctively the simpler the question, the more leeway you allow your subject to ramble.  And if a person goes rambling sooner or later you'll get to the truth nugget you're after.  If you prod it or try to apply pliers, the thing just shatters like a rotten tooth.

    Well, I hopped the trains 'cause there weren't no work 'round here.

    I knew that, but I said nothing.  Let him ramble, that was my tactic.  Tell what he wanted, keep the rest to himself if he had to.

    I got all over the place on the trains.  It was a hard way to move around.  Everywhere I went there were men like me, hopping trains, looking, hoping for work.  I went up north.  Out east.  I even crossed the Continental Divide.

    Well, that did it right there, one of the more pivotal moments of my life.  You can only see a thing clear sometimes after years have passed.  He had just used magic words; that‘s what it felt like.  Continental Divide.  These were words big enough to split a continent right down the middle. 

    Oh, I want to do that!  Cross the Continental Divide!

    It popped out like a cherry bomb and I meant it from the roots of my hair to the nails on my toes.  I tingled with the deep lowdown longing to cross that mythical Divide.  I didn't know where it was or what it was, but I had to cross it nevertheless.  By seventeen I had lived in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.  Any state beyond those seemed like worlds away.  And the Divide had to be in another galaxy.  In my mind it was atop the tallest mountain in the United States and there was a big line there dividing East from West—or was it North and South?—and I knew it must be high and cold and so far away that it wouldn’t look like any place I’d ever been. I'd go there in a split second if I had a machine that could whisk me that very minute from the porch shadows.

    That’s why I said you've got sand in your shoes, girl.

    He had left Alabama a long time before the Depression, a long time before he married my grandmother, long before the country and its people were so dirt poor they had to hop trains to get anywhere.  He had gone up north and no one ever told me why.  The closest I ever came to understanding it was when Bigmama told me, He took off after I eloped and was married.  Worked up north, maybe Chicago.  Then he came back home when he heard I was a widow with five children.

    Tell me more, I prodded my grandfather. I had vague ideas about railroad camps and knife fights and hard men with desolate eyes.

    He shrugged again and played his tune. He wasn’t going to give me much. He was a most unwilling and closed-mouth interviewee.

    Bigdaddy was my step-granddaddy, like my father who raised me was my step-daddy, and I was damn blessed to get either one of them, but to have both was like hitting a lottery.

    Looking at a few old sepia photographs of Bigdaddy (Billie—for whom I am named) back when he was a young man I found him in a pinstriped suit, wearing spats and a bowler hat.  He looked jaunty.  Dangerous.  Fierce.

    He looked like a Mafia hit man who did jobs along riverfronts on nights with no moon.

    I fancied he'd been a gambler or a hit man up in Chicago before the Wall Street meltdown in 1929.  He could have been anything, done anything, I can’t prove a word of it.  He wasn’t a talkative, bragging sort of man.  He kept what mattered to himself.  But he had crossed the Continental Divide in a rattling train car, looking out and down, full of wonder even as his pockets were empty.  And I would cross it too.  Someday, somehow, that's absolutely what I would do. Whatever it was I had in my shoes, it would see me on the road.

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    I was traveling in the womb.  My mother was fifteen, married, and pregnant.  She’d left Alabama with her new husband, Henry Francis Stahl, to live with him at his parents’ home in Nebraska. 

  What will you do there for money? she asked him. He was going to trap mink. It was a high-paying