WE SHALL MEET AGAIN

Somewhere between Coal Fire and Reform

I am kneeling in this cemetery, as I have knelt so many times in the past decades and will kneel in the years to come, and I’m going to miss the shot.

It’s not that I want to miss it, it’s that I just know it’s not going to work. Nestled in my closet in shoeboxes and ripped film sleeves and archival folders are frame after frame of what looks like the same thing: a sun-burned patch of dirt rimmed with grass, the exposure blown out like you pointed the camera on your phone at the noon sun.

The hydrangea I planted last year, Polaroid SX-70 (all photos 2025)

There’s always a grave that’s just been dug, always a place where the grass hasn’t grown back, not enough payments yet for them to carve the headstone, or worse, that credit card got full up or cut off and there won’t be any more. I get on my knees and I try to preserve these fresh scars and I think about my family and I think about God and I think about the mosquitos hung in the blonde fuzz covering my forearm and I try to make a memory of the moment using a fifty year old piece of metal and plastic and leather and glass.

The Polaroid is supposed to fade into being and show a crimson clay mound rimmed with emerald blades, maybe a blurry merigold in the foreground for depth. But what it looks like is mostly nothing. Not even something you could pretend was an arty missed shot, like the one I have of the boy popping wheelies on his dirtbike on Christmas Day in South Pittsburg, or the rain droplets on my car window in Rising Fawn. You can’t tell that someone’s favorite cousin is in there, or their second best friend from tenth grade, their momma or their daddy, their only grandchild.

In Jefferson County in the summertime it’s just a hot patch of dirt, and you can’t see the tears or the ghosts or the IV bag or the halting love letters or the wrecked Chevrolet. It’s just red and yellow and blue, like everything else.

Morris Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama, Polaroid SX-70

Driving up I-55 from New Orleans the billboards chant a surreal pop song. One call, Mama Justice, Affordable Lots, new F-150s, slash your rates, Discount Vapes.

A new one surprises me and I almost swerve off the blacktop, try to drop a pin on a mental map so I can return: a stock clip art photo of a hand holding a glowing smartphone. SHACKLED BY LUST? it asks.

Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, Polaroid 600

I drove from Starkville to Birmingham for Decoration Day. I had been visiting momma and we had been working on her patio to arrange her new ferns and some little tubs of lantana, place some half-off mums from the hardware store in fresh dirt. There’s a craft store in Columbus and I spent as much on plastic roses as we did on real perennials. On the way there I poke around the pretty downtown and spend some time looking at old advertising you can more or less see covering a brick building by the Princess Theater. WIZARD OIL, the wall almost says. There is no pain it will not subdue. I had bought a new Alabama hat in a store in downtown Mobile and as I drove through Gordo and Reform I pulled it down low on my forehead to keep the sun out of my eyes. At the same place I had gotten momma a visor for a late Mother’s Day gift, a wine-dark red with a white elephant stitched on the brow.

Lowndes County, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70

The landscape shifted as I crossed the border and then was coasting through the hills and valleys of Jefferson County. The front yard of the house I’d grown up in was overgrown, weeds chest high. But the cherry tree we had planted in the front yard when I was little was huge and healthy, the branches of the pecans lush and free of webs. I was listening to a playlist my cousin made in honor of her daddy after he had passed. I just straight up didn’t like some of the songs but they all reminded me of my family and where I was from. No grown person needs to listen to Ted Nugent, but nonetheless, I had seen him shoot a flaming arrow into a giant poster of Saddam Hussein at Boutwell Audiotorium in 1992. The humidity was up so much between the raining and the heat that the lens of my Polaroid would fog when I got out of the car, but I didn’t need a map, could close my eyes and see houses and ballparks that were no longer there, passed the mall where there was a phone booth I ran into when I was seven and needed to get my eyebrow sewn up from the rip, the barbershop where I got bowlcuts and crewcuts, the church where my grandfather was baptized, where my parents were married.

I do not know what God looks like. I do not think it is the cloud-ringed old man with a white beard. Moses saw “flames of fire from within a bush,” and even “though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.” I have never seen that either.

But I have seen the pink blooms of mimosas fizz against the bright green climbing kudzu while sweating through my shirt after a surprise thunderstorm in late May in Alabama. I reckon this is close enough.

Behind Sandusky Elementary, Pratt Highway, Alabama

I headed first to Mulga, to where my Nana’s people are buried, headstones reading both Casary and Casaray. Her daddy and momma are there, and her grandparents, and her brothers and sisters. Joes and Jessies, Beulah and Victoria. There is a headstone for the family. Under their name, it says

WE SHALL MEET AGAIN
WHO HAVE LOVED EACH OTHER

Next I call my daddy because I can’t find the old family place in Walker County, haven’t been in years and it was last with him and my Nana. He plays oracle from Knoxville, and after only one false start, we find it, steps from the mining museum in Dora. But I still can’t find the plot, and he texts a photo of a photo of my aunt and uncles and a cousin from a Decoration Day fifty years before. Everyone is in these great pantsuits and flares and their dark hair brushes their collars. The family headstone gleams white in the square photograph. I try to triangulate with it and the location finally unlocks.

I see my name on a leaning stone underneath a towering cedar. I kneel and brush the dirt and grass away on the stones by the family name. They are pitted and blank. The headstone is nearly black with grime and sap and lichen and time. I didn’t see it because it blended into the shadows beneath the tree. It begins to rain. There are only two stones in plot with names. Daddy, I text. Who is Alsee? Who was Isabelle? One died when he was six, the other fifteen years before he was born. He does not remember their names. There is no one left to tell us who they were.

I wander Elmwood, where a kind attendent helps me find the grave of my mother’s grandparents within its endless garden maze, and when I leave I stop at the grave of my great childhood hero. And last, I drive to Ensley, where my grandparents are buried, and my grandfather’s brother.

This old boy is memorialized a few rows down from where my Nana’s brother Joe rests. There is a photo of him on the front and he looks familiar, even though he was a couple of years older than me. But maybe we met in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly in Hueytown, or he said hello when Pleasant Grove lost to McAdory that time. Maybe he just looks familiar because a lot of us looked that way back then.

GONE TO REST ON THE MOUNTAIN is what the stone says. Then, underneath, “FREE BIRD.”

At the corner of Sandusky Road and Tower Drive

I was driving up and down Red Mountain to see if there was an angle on Vulcan that looked good, but the rain had been fearsome, and not much was going to turn out. I wandered through Hoover on the way back downtown and was at a stoplight over around where we had my high school prom. A F250 that was hauling a trailer with a zero-turn mower and a bunch of weedeaters and blowers crossed in front of me, spewing smoke and stink. The back tire on the trailer was cambered in, and had burst, and the tire was screeching as the rubber burnt and shredded. The truck didn’t stop.

I got a text from a buddy I hadn’t seen in a while. If you’re around bham today, holler. I was thrilled because I had figured he was wandering around out West or in a desert someplace and it was a great surprise. We meet up for coffee. A kid is playing Mario Kart 64 beside us as we talk about Walker Percy and Utah, Dora and Sumiton, Rowan Oak and New Orleans. He is driving across Alabama in a Winnebago via a novel artist’s residency. The pictures he make fascinate and challenge me—they look like the unrelenting darkness of the coal mines worked by my grandfather and my daddy and my uncles, look like skipping dinner so you can fill up the tank, waiting in the lobby in your only clean shirt. They’re beautiful and sad, which is to say, they are real.

We clanked our porcelain cups down a few dozen feet from where I’d watched Waxahatchee bob and wave through the entirety of Saint Cloud in years past. It was a joyful and renewing patch of time with someone I look up to that I very dearly needed.

The artist and teacher Jared Ragland, in Birmingham, Alabama

Here are some stories we have told each other before:

After we finished our coffee I hopped back in the car and went back up Highway 78. I listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd as the rain beat on the sunroof. In the WalMart right over the county line I buy spray bottles and some Ivory dishwashing soap and a few jugs of water and a scrub brush. I had planned on heading back to Jackson, but something had been gnawing at me. Over eggs and absolutely boiling hot coffee at Fife’s that morning I kept thinking about that grave in Walker County, the one with my name on it. I thought about that photo of my family from when I was born, smiling in the sun on Decoration Day.

I squeeze an inch or two of Ivory into the bottom of one of the spray bottles and fill it with water, spilling some on the red dirt and the thick bed of cedar needles. I shake the bottle and spray it on the stone. I let it set for a while and listen to the woods talk. A red El Camino rumbles by as it weaves down the little access road that heads over to the Dollar General. I scrub the stone. It begins to rain again.

I pour water over the headstone, and like a Polaroid developing, I begin to see my name emerge from the darkness.

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GORJUS is 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 forwarding this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.

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I know you’ve got things to do but hold on, I meant to show you this—

Mulga, Alabama, on Decoration Day, 2025.

Don’t forget to remember where you are from. ROLL TIDE.