TURN AWAY FROM ME, DARLING

July on the backroads of the Hidden South

I meant to write you a letter but I had to shell some peas. I walked out into the backyard in the early morning, wearing some bootleg Crimson Tide Crocs, braving the little invisible things that gnaw on my ankles and wrists. A few months ago I had cut some bamboo and then strung together three fifteen foot pieces at the top to make a tipi. The Alabama blackeyed butterbeans had been crawling up its legs as the days stretched into the 90s and the 100s.

The heat made the world bold. Robins and cardinals perched on the thick vines of the millionaire tomatoes as wasps buzzed through orange zinnias. In broad daylight a raccoon posted up under the magnolia, just munching away on spilled sunflower seeds from the birdfeeder. Every day was more beautiful than the day before.

On the banks of Murder Creek, in McLellan, Florida, Polaroid SX-70 (2024)

I meant to write you a letter but I was driving on the backroads of Florida listening to Hank Locklin. I was trying to find a place I’ve never been but somehow dearly miss. I was trying to hear a pedal steel guitar at a country fair, trying to buy a paper bag of popcorn with a tablespoon of melted butter poured over it. Maybe it’s in the next town over, I wonder, as I listen to the old man laugh and sing you can only take the wrong road so long before you can't come back.

I reach up and brush my hand through the moss hanging from an oak as a dragonfly as big as a hummingbird wanders down the banks of the Aloochahatcha.

Monroe County, Alabama, SX-70

I meant to write you a letter but I was on my knees at an altar in the woods somewhere in South Alabama. I asked for peace for my family and for our country at the Prayer Log. Whoever maintains the altar now had mounted a customized mailbox right by it. On one side of the mailbox was stashed some loose pieces of paper and a few pens and pencils. You could write a prayer request on the paper and then slide it into the other side of the mailbox. I wanted to respect the place and its tradition, and so I gathered a little scrap to write down my request.

I found it was harder than I had figured to set down a prayer like that. I thought of my Nana after she passed and the dozens of notebooks and journals she had poured herself into as she prepared for the Sunday School class she taught for decades. She had a beautiful, fine cursive. Not for the first time I thought her muscles were so much stronger than mine. As I finally began to write, I realized the act of considering for whom to pray, and for what reason, was itself the prayer.

I had been in the woods for quite a while, sweating in the noon heat, when I left the altar formed around a fallen tree in Monroe County.

Monroeville, Alabama, SX-70

I would have written you a letter but I was down at the cemetery. A wonderful, caring friend had thrown a celebratory dinner in Destin and, as is common at some of these functions, invited us to take the table arrangement with us. Another guest demanded I take the fairly large spray of carnations and roses. She was kind of teasing me but I wasn’t going to fuss. The flowers looked beautiful in the setting sun of Florida but unreal under artificial light. They were unreal, of course, made from cloth and plastic.

When I had visited the resting place of Harper Lee in the springtime, I had not brought tribute. This time, I brought flowers, a spray of never-wilting blooms which could withstand the summer sun.

Meridian, Mississippi, SX-70

I should have written you a letter, and I meant to, I promise. I was thinking of you the whole time. Every time the peas tinkled as they fell into the glass bowl, as I snipped the red-marbled okra from the stem. Every time I knelt in a graveyard, everytime I tried to find the past painted on red brick. I meant to write a letter when I heard a country song, when I got bit by a mosquito or bled from where a thorn caught my wrist. I thought of you as I scrambled eggs and made coffee, as the razor scraped the back of my neck at the barbershop as they talked about how the AC was going out.

It was summertime and I meant to write, but I was drinking a Yoo-hoo in the parking lot of the Red & White, I was waiting for the freight train to pass in Ensley, I was trying to take a Polaroid of a sunset. I meant to, I promise.

“TURN AWAY FROM ME, DARLING” is a lyric from Hank Locklin’s immortal 1960 hit “Please Help Me, I’m Falling,” written by Don Robertson and Hal Blair. It is a chapter of GORJUS, a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film.

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.