A Step Of Faith Part 41

Over the next five days my improvised route took me through a series of quiet, meandering roads-many through quiet little neighborhoods-south to Orion, then east at Troy to Clayton and Eufala before reconnecting with Interstate 82. In the end, I probably would have saved miles if I had just walked back to 82, but the road I'd chosen was worth the extra steps. The towns and suburbs I pa.s.sed through fulfilled my expectations of a South I had hoped to find-a place still slow and rich, with southern drawls as thick as praline, faded Coca-Cola signs, and hand-drawn placards advertising homemade pecan brittle and boiled peanuts.

On one of those long stretches I remembered something Falene had said to me a few months after coming to work at the agency. We were pulling an all-nighter on a campaign for a brand of clothing called Mason-Dixon. Falene's job was to keep us swimming in coffee. It was probably three or four in the morning, and we were getting pretty punchy when she said to me, "I should have been born a southern girl."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because I'm a rebel."

Maybe it was the hour, but I laughed for several minutes.

Thirty-nine days and seven hundred miles from St. Louis, I crossed the Chattahoochee River at Eufala into Georgia. I walked twenty-three miles along the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway and camped for the night just a mile west of Cuthbert. I was in a dark mood, and it wasn't until I was making camp that I realized why. It was the one-year anniversary of McKale's death.

CHAPTER Thirty-three

I'm beginning to pick up the language down here. "Jeet?" means, "Have you eaten?" A "far truck" is useful in putting out "fars." "Bard" is past tense of borrow. There are four "tars" on a truck and "did" is the opposite of alive. Shopping carts are "buggies," b.u.t.tons are "mashed" not pushed, and "Wal-Mart'n' " is a pleasant pastime.

Alan Christoffersen's diary

Cuthbert, Georgia, is famous for three past residents: former world heavyweight boxing champion Larry Holmes, former NFL defensive lineman Rosey Grier (who went on to work as a bodyguard for Robert F. Kennedy and was responsible for subduing Kennedy's shooter, Sirhan Sirhan), and Lena Baker, the only woman ever executed in the Georgia electric chair. There's a story there.

Lena Baker, an African-American woman, was born in 1901 in a slave cabin to a family of sharecroppers. She spent her life in dire poverty. At the age of forty-four she was taking in laundry to help support her mother and three children when a local gristmill owner and heavy drinker named Ernest Knight broke his leg and hired Baker to care for him.

Soon after taking the job, Knight, twenty-three years older than Baker, began forcing himself on her. When she tried to flee, Knight locked her in his gristmill. Baker escaped but was tracked down by Knight, who beat her and threatened to kill her if she left again. After weeks of living as his slave, she decided she couldn't take it anymore and one night, when he came for her, they "tussled" over his pistol. A shot was fired and Knight fell dead.

Baker was brought to trial under Judge William "Two Gun" Worrill, and it took the all-white jury less than a half hour to reach a verdict of murder. Baker was taken to Reidsville State Prison, where she was kept in the men's section until, less than a month later, she was executed in "Old Sparky," making her the only woman in Georgia to ever die in an electric chair. Her last words were, "What I done, I did in self-defense. G.o.d has forgiven me. I have nothing against anyone. I picked cotton for Mr. Pritchett, and he has been good to me. I am ready to go. I am ready to meet my G.o.d."

As I approached Cuthbert that morning, the city looked incapable of such a deed. It looked kind and welcoming and today I'm sure it is. Besides, I always liked a town where the first thing you see is a baseball field. I stopped for breakfast at the Ranch House Restaurant, drawn in by their advertised "Buffet Every Day."

Cuthbert is an old southern town and had survived the war with some of her colonial homes intact. The city center had a roundabout, a large clock tower, a tea parlor, and the not-so-vintage Dawg House, a hot dog emporium.

Leaving the town, I saw something I had never seen before, a billboard cautioning travelers of an approaching intersection.

Dangerous Intersection Ahead

There must have been more than a few accidents, because, in addition to the billboard, I pa.s.sed four more warning signs, three with flas.h.i.+ng lights, all contributing to my general excitement to cross the "intersection of doom."

To my dismay, the crossroad looked identical to any other intersection. I walked through it without even stopping, wondering what all the excitement was about.

The road from Cuthbert took me along miles of pecan trees intermingled with fields of cotton. Shortly before noon I stopped at a lone, ramshackle roadside store called Bruce's Country Corner. An A-framed sign out front read:

Cooking Today:

Muscadine & Scuppernong Jelly

From what I could see, I was the store's only customer, so I lay my pack down on the open porch and walked inside. Just inside the door was a woman sitting near a cash register reading a romance novel. She looked up as I entered. "Mornin'."

"Good morning," I said. I glanced around a moment, then asked, "What is muscadine and scuppernog?"

"Scuppernong," she said. "They're grapes. They grow wild around here."

I surveyed the store, a long, narrow hall of a place stacked with jams, jellies and preserves, handmade wooden knickknacks, pecans, pecan logs, pecan ice cream, and pecan candies.

"There's more in back," the woman said. She pointed toward a narrow door as her eyes returned to her book.

I went to explore. The items in the back room were as eclectic as those in the front: Christmas decorations, saddles, farm implements, hard candies, boiled peanuts, and, most peculiar, carved walrus tusks and whale teeth. I asked the woman about the latter and she said, "Once a year a man comes by and trades them for pecans."

She offered me a sample of pecan brittle that, in all honesty, was the best I had ever had. I purchased a half pound, then, before leaving, doubled it.My afternoon walk was pleasant, made more so when a parade of antique and vintage cars drove past me. There were Model A's, Model T's, Studebakers, LaSalles, Thunderbirds, Cadillacs-eye candy, all of them. Most of the drivers were men my father's age or older.

I reached the town of Dawson around six. I learned something about myself in Dawson. Priding myself, as most Seattleites do, for being racially "color blind," I realized that it's easier when you're in the majority. This was the first town I'd walked through where I hadn't seen a single other white man. Outside of my foreign travels, for the first time in my life I truly felt like a minority.

I stopped at a gas station for bottled water and on the way out asked a man idling near the gas pumps in a Dodge pickup truck if he knew of a nearby hotel.

"You want the cheap one or the special one?" he asked.

"The cheap one," I replied.

"Hop in," he said. "I'll give you a ride."

I put my pack in the truck's bed and climbed inside.

As he pulled out of the station he asked, "Where you walking from?"

"Seattle."

He looked at me like I was pulling his leg. "You come all the way from Seattle?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why would you go and do a thing like that?"

I looked at him for a moment, then said, "I guess I was bored."

He laughed the rest of the way to the hotel, a Budget Inn, where he wished me well on my journey. I thanked him, retrieved my pack from the back of his truck, then went inside. The rooms were just $24.99, and I ate a dinner of a T-bone steak and halibut at the Main St. Steak & Seafood restaurant, then went back to my hotel and to bed.

It took me two days to reach my next destination, the town of Sylvester. Nuts are big business in Sylvester, and the town has proclaimed itself the Peanut Capital of the World, although it was pecan stores and brokerages that lined the main thoroughfare.

I ate dinner at a Pizza Hut and booked a room at the Worth Inn, a small hotel with Pepto-Bismol pink room doors. The hotel had a Laundromat and I spent most of the night eating pecan brittle while doing my laundry and reading from a paperback book someone had left in the laundry room, The Secret Life of Bees by author Sue Monk Kidd. I thought it curious that the abandoned book was autographed, until I read on the book's back flap that Sylvester was Kidd's hometown.

CHAPTER Thirty-four

I'm not a fan of boiled peanuts. Just because you can boil something doesn't mean you should.

Alan Christoffersen's diary