MAYCOMB

To find the secret heart of Alabama

Sometimes when I drive into a place I’ve never been I circle around for a while, try to get my bearings. Not always—sometimes there’s a beautiful theater with a marquee that says HAPPY 50TH DEBBIE AND BOBBY or a rose bush exploding in blooms or a blue Camaro with rusted quarter panels that just makes you pull over. The days are getting longer now and so most of the time you aren’t going to blow your chance if you slow down.

But in Monroeville, I did it a little differently, knew where I was going first, even though I had never been there before. I was going to visit somebody.

Art has the ability to endure for years or even centuries, to shape our world long after the creator has passed. I have this need to seek out the places where the authors and singers and guitar players and painters and poets lived, where they bought a bottle of Coca-Cola, where they got mad at the dog, where they ceased living. The Old Man died thirteen years before I was born and visiting his house in North Mississippi, which I did the day before yesterday, removes me from the present world and transports me to his. Walking through that gantlet of red cedars is like mashing the buttons and toggling the chunky Bakelite switches of a time machine made when my daddy was still in junior high.

It’s a little different with the artists who walked the same planet as we do. Like I never met Ms. Welty, but I lived down the way from her in Belhaven, and lots of friends knew her, met her; the stories hang so thickly you have to brush them from your cheeks. I once heard Rick Bragg say she once drank him and Pat Conroy under the table at a catfish place on Highway 49. Maude Schuyler Clay has a Polaroid of her that Annie Leibovitz made as a test shot in 1997, even made a photo of them leafing through Eudora’s own tome of photographs from when she made visual art in the ‘30s and ‘40s. She’s real, she’s still present, I can almost catch a glimpse of her at the Jitney 14, whatever it is that they’re calling it now.

The resting place of the writer Harper Lee, called Nelle by her friends, made with a Polaroid 600 on a sunny day in April, in a town she imagined as Maycomb, Alabama, 2024

“When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” This is how she began the book. The whole universe of the South is in those sixteen words. If you are missing home that sentence will remind you of it. Jem didn’t break his arm when he was 12, Jem got his arm badly broken and it was When he was nearly thirteen. The line slips and slides between precision and fable, like a morning when there is a thunderstorm and then by noon it is ninety degrees.

Jackson is a lot bigger than Monroeville and so maybe there are a lot more stories. I know one person who grew up in Monroe County and she used to tell me stories of the author, how she would carefully inscribe her name in the front of a handful of books each year for a fundraiser. Maybe it was for the local fire department or school; I can no longer remember. People made pilgrimages, as I am making one.

Like any pilgrimage there is an element of the unknown. The first is what shall I see, but I had that planned out. Her resting place, and then the courthouse where it all ended. I am a famous photographer on assignment, that’s what I like to think to myself, as I stand and squint and make a photo of the courthouse, the place where Atticus was nestled like a little bird, with “little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama.” I am proud of angling the branches just so.

Monroeville, Alabama, Polaroid SX-70

The second is, what shall I eat. The best of towns make that an easy choice. A block of the town square is a place called the Dairy Dream. There is a line of folks at the walk-up window and the picnic tables out front are packed; both auspicious signs. Nonetheless the person behind me is loudly complaining that six bucks is too much for a milkshake. Her daughter is parked a few feet away and she keeps pacing back to the car to finish her thoughts. She’s not really talking to any particular person, just keeps muttering her displeasure as she weaves back and forth to the battered Camry. You can tell the car doesn’t have air conditioning. I’m not saying there’s a precise formula or anything but you can do the math based off the expired license plate and untamed hair. I didn’t ask but I will make a guess that their name was Haverford, or that they were Haverfords, regardless of born-names. I get a chocolate milkshake (they didn’t have any malt or I would’ve gotten that) and used two straws at the same time. I almost get a sunburn just standing in line. It’s good like all milkshakes are good.

My Pop is texting me that I absolutely have to stay and watch the play, which I almost call a re-enactment, the play set in Maycomb at the Maycomb Courthouse which they perform on the grounds of the Monroeville Courthouse and then, for the second half, inside in very courtroom, the very real courtroom where the imagined but very real trial occurred, the imagined Alabama which was so much more beautiful than the real one because there was a Jem, and a Scout, and yes maybe even a Dill, and for me—for me—a boy from Alabama—there was an Atticus. There was the possibility. There could be. There could be. You could be someone who cared enough to be there all night, someone to be there in the morning, when they waked up. Steady as the land.

I do not stay. I finish the milkshake and cross the street and crank the car and then I leave town driving West, towards Mississippi, towards my home.

“MAYCOMB” is a chapter of GORJUS, a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. This takes place the same day as “Two Slices of Pizza,” both part of the same journey. It’s all part of the same journey, I suppose.

If you liked what you saw and read, if you maybe felt a twang in your belly while you looked it over, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider sending this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.