First fiction awards bring joy, happy dance

They called my name twice at the Alabama Writers Conclave awards ceremony at Fairhope Saturday night – second place for first chapter, novel, for my first novel, “Mojo Jones and the Black Cat Bone,” and third place for flash fiction, a new category for fiction 500 words or less, for a piece I called “Broken Dishes."

Someone told me I did a little sashay when I walked up to get my certificates and checks. I don’t recall a conscious happy dance, but I don’t doubt it, because the awards were affirmation that I CAN WRITE FICTION THAT SOMEONE LIKES. 

 

Appropriately, my fiction teacher and editor Carolynne Scott was in the auditorium along with class member Steve Coleman, whose suggestion “that part about him being in the tree with the blow gun belongs in the first chapter” resulted in the latest revisions to the first chapter of the novel I began in 2009. MY FIRST NOVEL is still “in revisions” as they say, a sixth draft (or seventh?), hopefully the final one before I go after an agent and/or publisher and/or self-publishing.

See, this life-long writer, reporter, editor, corporate communications manager, never wrote fiction before this novel and the flash fiction piece that started out as a possible short story. That I won fiction writing awards – among more than 500 entries overall from Alabama and across the U.S. – leaves me more determined than ever to revise, pitch and get Mojo to readers who I hope love these characters as much as I do. I won honorable mentions for humor writing and creative non-fiction from AWC in the past, but those were not FICTION; neither were my long-ago news writing and feature writing awards.

I winged it as I began this novel – based on a kernel of a true story I covered when I was a reporter in Selma -- after I lost by public affairs manager job to the recession and another restructuring in late 2008. My novel was pretty much “finished” by my standards when I met and started working with Carolynne, a veteran editor and fiction writer who taught fiction writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) for 30 years. She and members of our Wednesday night fiction writers’ class that meets at the Homewood Senior Center helped this reporter-turned-fiction-writer in countless ways.  One big lesson learned: revise, revise, revise. 

More than one published author (I'll name Mike Stewart and William Cobb) told me to "listen to Carolynne. She knows what she's doing." So, I have. 

Every Wednesday night, we read a section or chapter of something we are working on and get input from class members, and then Carolynne takes her red pen to what we turn in to her, returning the edited sheets back the next week. She’s had a time teaching this Associated Press style-trained just-the-facts reporter about the magic and mechanics of fiction.

This was my third try in the AWC contest for first chapter, novel, and third must have been the charm, as my oft-revised chapter placed and a snippet was read aloud to this room of writers, who applauded. No wonder I did a happy dance.

I won’t belabor the points – that I’m happy, excited and proud, and grateful for the expertise of Carolynne Scott and input of Wednesday night class members Yvonne Bennett Norton, the late Dr. John Norton, Willum Fowler, Mark Monosky, Steve Coleman and newest member David Roberts.

Instead, I’ll just do another little happy dance, make a copy of the checks to put on my bulletin board and share with you the current version of the first chapter of my first novel.  
(Note: My novel's chapters are named for songs, mostly blues songs.) 

I hope reading this makes you want to read more. 

MOJO JONES AND THE BLACK CAT BONE

A Novel by Jackie Romine Walburn

PART ONE: EVERYBODY’S TALKIN’

Chapter 1: Trouble Blues

I

t was early morning when the man with the coffee-cream skin and shining green eyes padded silently through the summer woods and climbed a moss-draped tree in front of Percy Williams’ shack.

He settled in the crotch of a water oak tree and reached for his side bag, feeling for the blow gun made of cane and palmetto, and for the dart with its poison tip. Later he’d wish he had brought a camera, but electronic surveillance had not been a part of his proclaimed mission for the Spirits.

Breathing deep and quiet and balancing catlike and still – in the way of his Native American ancestors -- the man stayed invisible as he became part of the waking forest.

The man who came out of the house – dressed in overalls over pasty white skin, barefoot and stumbling a bit – apparently didn’t notice the man or any other creatures outside his front stoop as he sat down. He opened a warm beer from the stack behind the bench, lit a cigarette and reached for the paper bag in his hiding place under the lard bucket.

The watcher in the tree saw two teen-age boys he knew – the ones he’d feared would be there – talking to Percy and sharing the sack’s contents. As Percy put a hand deep in his overalls and reached out to the boy closest to him, the man in the tree yelled a coyote call, “yep yah ah, yep yah ah,” and shouted, “DeMarcus and Anthony, run now!”

Already wired, then startled by the animal call and their names being shouted from the trees, the boys sprinted off the porch toward the woods and Chilatchee Creek.

As they disappeared into the underbrush, the man in the overalls scrambled down the crooked steps, looking for whoever had yelled; he moved toward the tree, out in the open. “What the hell?”

Then, the man in the tree brought the blow gun to his mouth, took a practiced breath and let the dart go, aiming for Percy Williams’ heart and hitting it dead on.

***

F

rederick Jones, 25 and at the wheel of his beat-up 1994 Toyota Corolla, was singing along with the radio tuned to the R&B station out of Birmingham and the Blues music his Uncle Mojo taught him to love. “Trouble, trouble, trouble. Trouble is all in the world I see,” he sang along with Lighting Hopkins.

But Frederick didn’t know about trouble. Not yet.

As he negotiated the curves on the road from Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama south to his home in Style’s Bend in Wilson County, Frederick looked again at the 8 by 10 envelope on the time-and-travel stained passenger’s seat – evidence of his having passed the Alabama bar exam on the first try.

I’ve done it, Frederick thought, just like Grandma Ruth said I would.

Frederick smiled his widest smile and pushed up the dark-rimmed glasses his nearsightedness required, glasses that always prompted his classmates to say he looked like Roger on the “What’s Happening?” TV show. “What’s happenin’ Rog?” they’d tease him. He smiled at the memory but wondered at the worry creeping into his mind, even as he headed home, successful, after seven years of college, many a dean’s list and his childhood dream of being an attorney coming true.

“Something’s wrong,” he said out loud.

Then, so quick that he slammed on the brakes and sent his law school letter flying into the floorboard, an owl flew across the road directly in front of him. The barred owl missed his car by a few inches and appeared to turn and aim its brown owl eyes at him as it banked to the left and flew past the driver’s side. Frederick glanced in the rear view mirror and saw no cars behind him, so he stopped in the middle of Highway 5 and watched the owl, its stripe-rimmed eyes, yellow beak and long tail extending from the crisscrossed striped body, as it circled his car and flew back into the thick roadside woods.

“Damn,” he said, “I wonder what Big Momma woulda said about that?”  But he knew what his late great-grandmother would say. “Owl crossing ya path…. means bad luck, bad things gonna happen. Somebody gonna die.”

Frederick breathed deep, clenched his shaking hands on the steering wheel, and slowly sped up, as he saw a log truck coming around the curve behind him. Better speed up quick or it’ll be my death, he thought as he got the car moving to 55 and then 60 mph. He knew there was no place to pull off the highway along this stretch of the highway, save a dirt road or logging trail

“Get yourself together son,” he said, mimicking his Grandma Ruth’s refrain.

But Frederick knew, just as certain as the curves and turns on the road back home, that something was wrong.

***

S

heriff Kingston Lewis peered through the Spanish moss that hung from the water oak tree, pushing aside the cool gray tentacles and looking at the dead body propped up against the old oak. He looked past the dead, dark eyes, to the tiny black bag pinned to dirty overalls and the book with underlined passages clutched in stiff white fingers.

Percy Williams had been dead and staring at his beer-can strewn yard for a day or more, Lewis figured. And as he noted the tiny blood stain at heart height on Percy’s overalls, the sheriff was sure that Percy’s body had been moved after death, posed for someone to find.

“The coroner comin’?” Lewis asked his chief deputy, as he reached his hand to close the dead man’s eyes, but then stopped, his training telling him to wait for the coroner and pictures and procedures. The sheriff studied Percy’s face, beginning-to-bloat, and thought that Percy’s eyes looked just as blank and dead when he was alive.

Kingston Lewis knew Percy Williams, everyone did, as what locals would call a “sorry ass white man” and generally unpopular neighborhood menace in the mostly black Style’s Bend community. The sheriff knew him, also, as a suspected drug dealer and community pet killer, but no serious charge ever stuck.

 “Whatya think this means?” the sheriff asked Chief Deputy Bender, who was leaning against his squad car, filling out paperwork. “Looks like whoever did it was sending a message, don’t you think? A message with a voodoo bag attached.”

Bender walked over to the sheriff, and together they peered down at the victim of what was the first homicide in Wilson County in five years. “Yeah, Sheriff, that’s a mojo bag. We’ve both seen ‘em before, livin’ here. I ain’t never seen a black mojo bag though, and all the rest of it, sure, somebody wanted him to be found like this. They’s some hoodoo involved in this here, you ask me.”

Sheriff Lewis looked again around Percy’s yard, at the tumble-down cabin, sloping porch and broken steps. “Yeah, and who around here knows about mojo bags and voodoo?”

“Madame Butterbean?” Bender smiled.

“Yeah, the root lady. She probably does, but I’m thinkin’ about Mojo Jones. This looks like something Mojo Jones could help explain.

“Wait on the coroner for me, and probably need to call the ABI, so we can cover our asses on this one. I’ll be back in a little while,” Lewis said, as he climbed into his work car, Wilson County 1, and accelerated down the dirt road, kicking up dust and obscuring the legend written in gold script on the side of the vehicle: SHERIFF KINGSTON LEWIS, TO SERVE AND PROTECT.

As the dust settled, two young boys stepped out from behind a patch of privet hedge a hundred yards away towards Chilatchee Creek. They’d been hiding and watching most of the morning. The teen-aged cousins – one light colored, or “high colored” as his auntie called it, and the other a dark chocolate hue -- didn’t speak, for fear of being heard by the deputy who remained. Each knew what the other was thinking. He’s dead!

Then they smiled, perhaps for the first time in weeks, touched hands high in the air in a silent high five and turned and raced each other to the creek and back home.

Copyright © Jackie Romine Walburn. All rights reserved.

Song of the day: 

Hoochie Coochie Man, by Muddy Waters

“I got a black cat bone

I got a mojo too

I got the Johnny Concheroo

I'm gonna mess with you”

Me with AWC award certificates and my fiction
writing teacher and editor, Carolynne Scott.

Carolynne Scott's fiction writer class members
at Alabama Writers Conclave in Fairhope.
From left, me, Steve Coleman, Carolynne, Peggy
Carlisle and Stephen Edmondson, all of Birmingham.

Help! My blog is being "comment" spammed

It started slowly, the comment spamming of http://jackierwalburnwrites.blogspot.com.

More than 50 spam comments a day were being lobbed at me and my posts by the time I declared war – at least a major skirmish – on these robo-commenting sons of spam. 

The battle continues.

First, a definition.  Comment spam, also called blog spam or social spam, is a form of spamdexing, according to my online research. Think robo calls to a blog site.

Comment spam is automated, random comments that include links to commercial services of all stripes – from gambling to herbal mixes -- that are sent out en masse to blogs or any guestbook that allows open or anonymous comments.

The comment spammers’ goals are to increase the spammer’s website’s search engine ranking (online mentions), plus visibility, link clicks….and to aggravate the blogger. (I added the last part.) 

So, just like the spam that sometimes reaches folks’ e-mail and fax machines, even cell phones, comment spam is aggravating and inevitable in today’s cyber world. But it can be guarded against. I am learning about that, and battling comment spam takes more than a good, active computer security system (installed and working as I type). 

Stopping comment spam, I've learned, takes a little bit more. 

At first, comment spam came just once in a while to my personal blog. I'd get a random comment from “Anonymous," saying sometime general or jumbled.  Then the anonymous commenter added:  check out my website..best detox cleanse or…table top ovens or some site with the SEX word in it. 

The actual first comment spam came on a post about Spring Breaks past and invited me to their website to learn more about generic Cialis. Yes, Inappropriate…..and probably not needed on most Spring Breaks.

Here is a notice about comment spam I received, via e-mail, just this morning.  

“Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Learning from writers every day; Live forever Bill...": 

What's up, the whole thing is going fine here and ofcourse every one is sharing information, 
that's really excellent, keep up writing.
My blog post Sbobet 

Publish 
Delete 
Mark as spam”

I never click on the spammer’s website, but I Googled this name. Sbobet is an online gambling and bookmaking site, headquartered in Asia, which offers betting in all major sports in multiple languages. As if worldwide gambling isn't bad enough, it goes and promotes itself with comment spam. BAD website. 

That last part -- publish, delete, mark as spam -- comes with every e-mail notice about anonymous comments.  This comment won’t be posted unless I say so. Therefore, I mark as spam and/or just delete, but it’s time-consuming and …did I say aggravating?

That particular post, “Learning from writers everyday; Live forever Billy Joe Shaver” was written after an Alabama Writers Conclave meeting and included a Shaver quote and picture of me and Billy Joe taken when he was at Zydeco in Birmingham. That post holds my blog’s comment spam record after receiving more than 70 (and counting) anonymous spam comments. Most of these were and are being stopped by blogspot.com’s spam filter. 

Don’t ask me why so much comment spam targeted this post that included a prized picture of me and Billy Joe Shaver, my honky tonk songwriting hero. But, I know Billy Joe wouldn’t put up with it for a minute. He would write some clever rhyming response and back it up, like he did in "Wacko in Waco,'' when somebody messed with him and his.

But, me, I just kept thinking this comment spam would go away; instead it sped up.

When I finally sat down to address the issue, my already crowded e-mail was overflowing with anonymous comments notices, 10, 20, 30 a day, so much so I worried I would miss some real e-mail, like maybe news from a friend, a writing opportunity or job search response. Hey, it could happen.

So I researched and got to work on my blog’s dashboard.  I found 841 comments in the spam comments section, more than 50 pages of comment spam that were never posted. I deleted all.

And then I deleted another 20 or more spam comments from the 80 or so published comments --the real published comments.  See, the real comments  from real readers are truly cherished by me and other bloggers. So, I hesitate to initiate one of the stop-comment-spam safeguards, which is disallowing anonymous comments. But I may have to.

The tainting of real comments (plus the aggravation) is what it so dastardly about comment spam. What is supposed to be real feedback, maybe even a compliment from a treasured reader, is a sideways, sneaky advertisement for anything and everything from little blue pills to work-at-home schemes.

Following online advice, I made changes to settings on my blog dashboard while I ponder initiating other changes. A few anonymous spam comments still show up daily in my e-mail, but not nearly as many as before the changes. I haven’t disallowed anonymous posting yet, but I turned on comment moderation, and I am researching how to install CAPTCHAS.

CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart” and is a term coined by group from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s the function that shows you a scrambled word or phrase to type in, to purchase tickets on Ticketmaster, for instance, and is aimed at cyber robots.  

I’ve found a website, http://www.captcha.net/ with information about downloading the CAPTCHA function. There are several types of CAPTCHAS, and, as part of the battle plan, I will figure out which will work on my blog site and install it if I can.

So, when you see more and more CAPTCHA prove-you-are-human deals these days, know that it’s not the blogger or the webmaster being too big for their britches. 

It’s the spammers' fault, and they are not backing down. So, we can’t either. I'll likely get comment spam on this post about comment spam. Sigh.

But, the battle continues. 

In the meantime, I monitor my e-mail for those notices from “Anonymous at noreply@blogger.com” saying I have yet another stupid spam comment.  Then, I curse it and delete it. 

And while I’m at it, I look back longingly to the good old days…when spam meant that kind-of-ham-in-a-can that fed the troops and families on budgets and that I recall being REAL and tasty when fried up crispy and placed on white bread with mustard. 

That’s my kind of SPAM, even though I doubt it fits in a low cholesterol diet.

All other spam better look out, and leave my little blog alone.

Song of the day:

Wacko in Waco

by Billy Joe Shaver and Willie Nelson

(Wacko in Waco was written in response to an altercation in a Texas bar that landed the songwriter in court. The jury of his Texas peers found Billy Joe not guilty, of course. Then, he and buddy Willie wrote and sang about it. I'll borrow a line to say to comment spam: you best not mess with me.)

"Anybody in my place

Would have done the same

I don't start fights I finish fights

That's the way I'll always be

I'm wacko from Waco

You best not mess with me."

Nurse Kathy: Never too late to dream your dream

When the job losses that we remember as the economic crisis of 2008 hit some people, like me, we hunkered down and applied for every job in our field we could find. We competed with young whippersnappers with fresh degrees, no wrinkles or even less experience.  We were communicators, dang it, and that’s what we were going to do, that or retire. It’s too late to change.  

Then, there are folks like Kathy Stacey, my region communications manager teammate and sister from another mother.  For a while after her job was eliminated by the big company we worked for, she, like me, applied and applied. We ranked as finalists for communication jobs that went to younger or connected folks or just other folks, instead of us.

But Kathy – in her 50s -- then decided to reinvent herself.  And today, this writer, communicator and my personal hero got pinned as a REGISTERED NURSE -- the end of a long, expensive and difficult reinvention that will be healthcare’s gain and corporate communication’s loss.

It helped that Kathy is smart, that deep down high IQ smart.  But probably more important, Kathy is determined and hard-working. Spending the weekends working at a Texas Wal-Mart’s checkout line for the low pay and benefits, and saying “thanks for shopping Wal-Mart” probably a trillion times, Kathy went back to school. She started with completing her undergraduate work and then entered a rigorous registered nursing program. She took courses that would make this writer-word person break out in a sweat. But Kathy, she aced them. Again, and again.

Back in the day:
Kathy Stacey and I shared
presidential suite in Washington D.C.
as we learned to be lobbyists, circa 2006.

I’m so proud of Kathy that I want to shout it and shout the lesson her success, hard work and smarts proved so true: It’s never too late to dream your dream.

Kathy reinvented herself, retrained and today she is living her dream of being a registered nurse. It's official today, as she got her R.N. pin along with (I’m guessing and based on the pictures I’ve seen) a bunch of younger people.

Kathy is going to be a great nurse, just like she was a great communicator and writer, and Wal-Mart checkout associate. Hard work, smarts, determination = dreaming your dream.

For me, since the job elimination Kathy and me (and a bunch of others) have in common, I’ve looked for communication work, worked, started a blog, spent a year caring for a critically ill son, been published and wrote and revised my first novel, a dream of my own. Being published after I finish the latest fine-tuning of my book with the help of professional editor Carolynne Scott -- that would be a real dream come true for me.

But, still, I did not have the gumption, want-to, forward thinking focus or determination of my Kathy. Oh, and all the while during classes and tests and clinicals and weekends at Wal-Mart, Kathy beat me at Words with Friends, our current constant connection, nine out of ten times (and I’m pretty good at WWF).

I saw this quote yesterday, and thought of Kathy, who I officially congratulate today.  C.S. Lewis, author of the play The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and apparently one of the most quoted authors on Twitter, said it well:

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”  -- C.S. Lewis.

Kathy Stacey, R.N., is living, working proof of this statement. I salute her and hold her up as a shining example for all those 40 and 50-somethings (or even 20 or 30, 60 or any number-somethings) who have had their worlds changed by the economy and life itself.

Dream your dream.  It is not too late. 

Picture of the day:

Kathy Stacey, R.N. in training, circa 2012.

Song of the day:
With a nod to Texas, where Kathy lives today and will work as an R.N., (She's lived in Great Britain, South Carolina and Oklahoma, among other places)  I'll quote Texas great Billy Joe Shaver, singer, songwriter, my Honky Tonk Hero and one who knows about dreaming dreams.

Try and Try Again, by Billy Joe Shaver

"If at first you don't succeed

Try, try, again

If at first you don't succeed

Just try and try again

If all you do is lose

You better find a way to win

If at first you don't succeed          

Try and try again

I know someday the world will learn to sing a better song

The blind will see, the deaf will hear; we'll all just sing along

The fighting will be ended and all hunger will all be gone

It's everybody's business 'til we get the good work done."

Wilcox County: Why on earth people live there

Wilcox County: Why on earth would you live there?

That’s what lots of media folks asked after Wilcox County, Ala., where I lived for 14 years and covered as a reporter for more than 10 years before that, led off Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley’s State of the State address in mid-January. My adopted home county made the governor’s speech for its poverty and the hope invested in new industry locating there.

 The governor pointed to Wilcox County (located south of Selma, smack dab in the middle of the Alabama Black Belt) as being the poorest county in the state and the United States. This didn’t surprise anyone in Wilcox or surrounding counties.  Still, the mention brought statewide and regional media attention and repeated listings of grim statistics and the pointed question: “What on earth would make you live in Wilcox County?”

I’ll answer that question in a minute, but first the list of statistics. Wilcox County has:

• The highest unemployment in the state -- more than 20 percent after the wood products facilities in Pine Hill and surrounds closed during the height of the economic and housing crisis beginning around 2008. Unemployment was hanging in at around 16.2 percent most recently, a downtick probably due to folks giving up or running out of eligibility for unemployment;
•  75 percent single mother homes;
•  Almost 40 percent of its residents (and more than 50 percent of Wilcox children) living below poverty level;
• A median income of about $23,000, about half of the state average;
• 44 percent of the population dependent on federal assistance of some kind, some on all kinds.

Yes, Wilcox County is poor, majority black and has dual mostly segregated schools. It competes with other poor Black Belt counties for the “poorest” and most regrettable statistics, and often wins. But it’s sometimes close.

You’ll find no shortage of issues and challenges in Alabama’s rural counties. Wilcox doesn’t have a lock on poor and rural. And, unfortunately, whether in L.A. (lower Alabama), north Alabama or middle Mississippi, poor and rural often go together, and the reasons are age-old and complicated and simple at the same time. 

Having lived and worked in Wilcox County (and its northern sister, Dallas County and Selma, Ala.), I know some facts that counter the grim ones Bentley and others have quoted. Even if they don’t cancel out the sad stats, they bring a balance in the vein of, “you can’t always get (everything) you want.”

Sure, I know the poor Wilcox County. I’ve seen and been inside tumble-down houses and seen lines at the banks and grocery stores at the first of the month when the federal money comes in. I’ve known and written about poor but proud blacks and whites who make do best they can. Some never break the cycle; others scramble out of poverty with the help of education and determination. I’ve seen similar ramshackle houses in my birthplace and current home of Birmingham; only in Wilcox and other rural counties, there was likely a garden beside the poor person’s rural house, and maybe a cow, goats or chickens in the yard.

I write the “what’s good about Wilcox” list not because I have the solution to Wilcox County’s poverty or think it’s not important or a challenge to be met, but because I know Wilcox, its people, its culture and its beauty. And I know many folks who have been working to improve Wilcox and surrounds long before the governor or others paid fleeting attention.  

Here is my “what’s good about Wilcox” list, in no certain order:

• Two scholarship programs, founded by Wilcox ladies, use proceeds from timberlands they left in trusts to offer college scholarship funds to EVERY Wilcox County college student who applies and keeps a C average or better.  The Simpson Foundation and the Allyrae Wallace Educational Trust have helped hundreds of Wilcox young people graduate college – all because these two ladies valued education, loved their county and wanted all Wilcox students to have a chance.

• Black-owned businesses account for 66 percent of Wilcox County’s locally-owned businesses. Opportunity still exists for hard-working people of any color there. It ain’t easy, but folks in Wilcox County don’t expect easy. Also, most public offices in Wilcox are held by African-Americans. Overall, even though schools, most churches and funeral homes remain segregated, black folks and white folks there learned to work together and get along a long time ago.

• Catholic sponsored missions founded by the Selma-based Fathers of St. Edmunds and staffed by nuns from various orders serve the poor in Wilcox, Lowndes, Monroe and Dallas counties. The Edmundite missions in Wilcox are located at Pine Apple and Vredenburgh (actually at the Wilcox-Monroe county line) and include health clinics, elder care, housing improvement programs, preschool and summer education programs and food pantries. Three sisters from the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet order staff the health centers, including Sister Doctor Roseanne Cook. Called the “Mother Teresa of Alabama” and an Alabama rural health award winner, Sister Doctor Cook serves two clinics, makes house calls and still admits to the local hospital. She and others who serve “the least of these” have been an essential link between health care and the poor and rural, old, young, black and white -- long before Obamacare became a word or a worry.

•  J. Paul Jones Hospital in Camden is still up, running, and serving Wilcox County at a time when very few rural counties still have hospitals. A hard-working local board, administrator and staff – and a public that voted additional tax on itself to keep the hospital going – should be congratulated for the hospital’s continued service and for another statistic about Wilcox County that’s good and laudable.

•  In the God-given category, I have to mention natural resources and the unspoiled beauty of Wilcox County. The Alabama River (Lake Dannelly/Miller’s Ferry) winds through the county, providing more miles of riverfront areas than any other southern Alabama county, (and a rare river that runs north, south, east and west). Called “ridiculously diverse” by a state biologist, the Alabama River, with its Spanish moss-covered, wooded riverbanks, plethora of alligators, growing bald eagle populations and uncrowded waterways,  is recognized as one of the best bass fishing spots in the state; the crappie fishing (my angling of choice) isn’t bad either. Located in the middle of legendary deer and turkey hunting country, Wilcox proudly claims to be a “sportsman’s paradise.” Local folks welcome the camouflage-covered out-of-town folks at the Piggly Wiggly as they purchase their breakfast stuff, steaks, ice and beer.
• Hunting and fishing don’t have a direct payroll of the new $1 million Golden Dragon copper tubing plant Bentley was bragging about that’s going up in Wilcox near Pine Hill at a community called Sunny South or the International Paper paper mill, the county’s current top employer, but they bring money to Wilcox County businesses and tax dollars to the counties and towns.  Plus, with Roland Cooper State Park and Corps of Engineers facilities, the wonders of Wilcox’s great outdoors are available to everyone, rich or poor.

• Historic homes, Gee’s Bend Quilters, Black Belt Treasures and GainesRidge -- combining some of my favorites here.
• Because the Yankees were so busy burning and looting Selma and its arsenal, they never got to Wilcox County, so it’s believed that there are more antebellum structures – mostly well kept and loved – in Wilcox than in any Alabama county except Mobile. You can see some of these historic structures at: http://www.wilcoxareachamber.com/category/wilcox-history/historic-structures/ and at http://www.ruralswalabama.org/counties/wilcox/
• Originating as the Freedom Quilting Bee, the Gee’s Bend Quilters’ fame has spread with the appreciation for their artistry and sales of their designs and quilts, now on Amazon, in trendy shops and E-bay. Their designs have been displayed at the Smithsonian and on U.S. postage stamps. Heck, the quilters have been featured on Oprah. Enough said.
• Black Belt Treasures in Camden is a non-profit that sells artwork and creations of all types, books to jewelry to paintings to quilts, all handmade by Black Belt area artists. http://www.blackbelttreasures.com/
• GainesRidge, located in one of those historic homes (family home of owner and chef Betty Gaines Kennedy), is a restaurant with food that rivals any of Birmingham’s well-known and bragged-about restaurants. Miss Betty’s black bottom pie made the list of 100 Alabama foods to eat before you die. And, an evening at GainesRidge is a bit more like visiting a friend who makes you welcome and cooks really, really well than going to a business for dinner. And, ask Miss Betty and she’ll tell you about the ghost that lives (mainly upstairs) at GainesRidge.
• 
  
• Community and people rank high on my “what’s good about Wilcox” list. This county of quality people, wide-open spaces, four (or is it five now?) red lights has intangibles that the dire statistics sometimes mask. That was the conclusion of Al.com columnist John Archibald who visited Wilcox and asked that question, “What on earth would make you live in Wilcox County?”
•  “It is a place to love and to lament, where charm struggles as a counterpoint to circumstance and the weight of history,” he concluded, after hearing from residents, white and black, who returned or never left this county with devastating statistics but where family, community, land, natural resources, safety, and, yes, just caring for each other, provide the whys.

I understand the whys and the why nots that rural counties, particularly Wilcox, struggle with. 

We came to Camden as “mill” people, meaning the big paper, building materials and forestry complex on Highway 10, then MacMillan Bloedel, brought us there. Even though we “weren’t from around here,” we soon found lifetime friends and a safe community where, literally, we didn’t lock our doors (and had to look for the keys when we sold to follow another job back to Birmingham), where we knew the children our children were with, their parents and probably their grandparents and where, when we heard the rare police or ambulance siren, we called said children’s cell phones and asked, “you okay? I just heard an ambulance.” Seriously.

One more reason: People do come home and stay. Rural counties like Wilcox are decreasing in population and sometimes bemoan a perceived “brain drain” caused when a county’s best and brightest don’t come back home to work and raise families, because of the lack of opportunity. This is true to some extent, but I can attest that many of Wilcox’s best do return home to raise their families in the same slow-paced, community-oriented way they were raised. Sometimes, it’s family land or family, period, that brings them back, or opportunities for well-paying paper mill or other jobs. Sometimes, it’s just the call of home that brings folks back.

And, even for folks like me, who just adopted Wilcox and its people, it’s still like coming home. Born and raised in Birmingham, one of the prettiest of Southern big cities and where my people have lived since the turn of the last century, I am back living where there are conveniences galore and my family nearby. But I still know and understand the lure of Wilcox and other rural counties, and why on earth people live there, and the answers are not found in statistics but despite them.

Picture of the day:

 

This House top design (Half-log cabin variation) quilt is a
Quilt of Gee's Bend designed by Lillie Mae Pettway in 1965

Song of the day:

Do Re Mi by Woody Guthrie

In this song released about 1940, Guthrie was singing about poor folks trying to find fortune in California back during the dust bowl times. However, the refrain is still so true.

“But believe it or not you won’t find it so hot

If you ain’t got the do re mi.”

Spare me, and Dylan, cries of SELLOUT

As a self-proclaimed expert on Bob Dylan -- who made headlines this week, again, for SELLING OUT, with his two-minute Chrysler Super Bowl commercial -- I declare myself qualified to comment on the non-controversy.  

I admit to being a bona fide Dylan nerd. Ask my family. I probably could qualify as a Dylan expert in a court of law, but this is the court of public opinion, the media, social and otherwise, that tweeted, posted, talked and wrote headlines like:  “Bob Dylan’s Super Bowl commercial draws cries of sellout…”  

I knew Dylan had done a Chrysler commercial for the Super Bowl (and another ad for yogurt featured “I Want You” and a hungry organic-loving bear), but the game was so one-sided and boring that I gave up and got jammied-up with a book before the commercial aired. But, since I’m part of several communities that study, admire and write about Dylan, I saw the commercial the next morning.

I loved it, of course, and posted it on my Facebook timeline. Not a surprise. I was surprised, however, surprisingly, that people still talk about Dylan SELLING OUT.

The commercial featured guitar music and a couple of sung lines from “Things Have Changed,” the Oscar-winning song from the movie, “Wonder Boys,” and one of my top favorites of Dylan’s. When I lost my “big, good” job in 2008, I quoted "Things Have Changed" ad nauseam, in particular:  “People are crazy and times are strange. I’m locked in tight. I’m out of range. I used to care but things have changed.” But, I digress.

In the commercial, Dylan talked (and not Bob Speak but clear as a bell) about America... and cars, dreams and pride, all built in America.  As scenes of the American road, baseball, kids, mothers and children and an auto assembly line flashed by, we saw a few flickers of young Dylan and other American icons. “You can’t import the heart and soul of every man and woman working on the line,” he said. And, “you can fake true cool.” He should know since he has been true cool for a long, long time.

A quick Google search reveals more than a dozen articles, opinion and otherwise, about the Dylan commercial, including from CNN, The New York Post, The Detroit Free Press and Houston Press.  He was criticized for SELLING OUT, for the phrases, “let Germany brew your beer, let Switzerland make your watch, let Asia assemble your phone. We will build your car.”

Okay, some great beer gets brewed in America, so I get that one.  And yes, Chrysler is now owned by Italian company Fiat. Still, the point of the commercial was Detroit and American-made cars, American workers, American pride. “What’s more American than America?”

A few years ago, Eminem did a similar Super Bowl commercial about his hometown of Detroit and I don’t recall a controversy or cries of SELLOUT. But then Slim Shady didn't sing as warm up for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or pen “Blowing In The Wind” either.

Dylan’s been accused of SELLING OUT so many times it’s a wonder this one even counts. (Or, to quote Dylan, “my back’s been to the wall so long it seems like it’s stuck. Why don’t you break my heart one more time, just for good luck.” (Summer Days, from Love and Theft album, 2001)

One of his most famous SELLOUTS was when he went electric with “Maggie’s Farm” (and then “Like a Rolling Stone”) at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. The audience jeered and yelled, and it’s said that Pete Seeger tried to pull the power plug. On the tour that followed, Dylan was met with shouts of “Judas” and boos so often that drummer Levon Helm (Dylan's back-up band would soon be THE BAND) couldn’t take it anymore, quit the tour and went to work on the Louisiana oil rigs instead.

Some called Dylan a SELLOUT when he went country, with “Nashville Skyline” and “John Wesley Harding,” and when he had the nerve to record in Nashville in 1966 for the wonderful “Blonde on Blonde” album.

Others called him a SELLOUT during his Christian phase in the early 1980s. I guess he was SELLING OUT for Jesus, after the Jewish Dylan famously converted to Christianity and recorded and sang only Christian music for several years – albums including “Shot of Love,” “Saved” and “Slow Train Coming” (recorded in Muscle Shoals and producing his only song Grammy, for “Gotta Serve Somebody,” another favorite, the Dylan nerd said.)

   

The SELLOUT lists goes on and on, through a half century of reinventions as the Minnesota native went from young genius folk singer to legendary singer-songwriter with a long list of honors, including a meeting with the Pope, an honorary Pulitzer, and in 2012, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Dylan and his music are not new to commercial use. Kodak used “Forever Young” for a TV commercial years ago. I remember it from before I became a Bobcat. 

Just within the last few months, Jeep used his recording of “Motherless Child” as background for a four-wheeling advertisement, and Target used a cover of “Forever Young” in a Christmas ad. He’s been in a Cadillac commercial, and the forever ladies’ man also sang “Love Sick” and appeared in a Victoria’s Secret commercial.

If I’d written only one of his hundreds of masterpiece songs, I’d sell the right to use it, in a minute. I'd have that choice. In fact, sorry, Bob, but I’ve quoted “Forever Young” ("May your hands always be busy. May your feet always be swift. May you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift…”) so many times for milestones in the lives of people I love, (and in Facebook happy birthday messages to friends who will get the connection) that I probably owe him some money, too.  But we’re good. I’m pretty sure.

As a writer, who has been paid, to one degree or another, for writing my whole life and who has a 100,000-word novel for sale as we speak, I don’t get the criticisms. It is his work, his music, his art. He can use it and his name and image however he chooses, and for someone in the business a half a century, he’s chosen pretty carefully.

When he put out his Christmas album, “Christmas in the Heart,” in 2009, Dylan chose to give all proceeds to Feeding America (U.S. sales) and internationally, to United Nations’ food programs.  How about that for a SELLOUT.

A final criticism I heard about the Chrysler commercial, and this was more just talk among we Bobcats, that in it, Dylan looked younger than his 72 years. Has he had “work done”? or was it makeup? Who cares?

For an artist with 50 years in the business who tours almost constantly (he and his rocking band will be in Japan in late March into April), he still looks pretty good, still has his curly hair, trim profile and signature silhouette. He puts out a new album every year or so, for a total of 59 albums. So, give him a freaking break.

To me, he’s an American legend, and if he wants to SELL OUT and get paid $5 million to do a TV commercial about America and American-made cars, well then Bob, just don’t think twice, it’s alright.

Song of the day:

Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35, by Bob Dylan (1966, Blonde on Blonde)

“They’ll  stone ya when you’re trying to make a buck

They stone ya, then they say ‘good luck’

…

They’ll stone ya when you’re riding in your car

They’ll stone ya when you’re playing  your guitar

But I would not feel so all alone

Everybody must get stoned.”

Link to Dylan "America" Chrysler commercial