…from my favorite astronaut!
Happy Halloween
For Halloween: He Was Alright Until The Canoe Part
I have been meaning to put this pic up since December but have been unable to find the link to the story about it until just now. This is the Coosa River at Fort Strother, which is in St. Clair county, Alabama – closest to the town of Ohatchee (maybe inside Ohatchee?). This area of the river is called ‘Ten Islands’. Fort Strother was established by General Andrew Jackson in 1813 to fight the Creeks.
The story I found about it, though, has nothing to do with the Creek War – it was published in the New York Times in 1877, and was entitled:
Floyd Banks’ Castle
Earlier this month, we made it to Floyd (‘Junior’) Banks’ castle in Greenback, Tennessee. It’s an unfinished castle that he’s been building himself since 1992 when his brother passed away. He said he’d like to keep adding to it but he’s on beta blockers and isn’t feeling so great anymore.
Where to start…
The first thing Floyd said, after thanking me for coming, was if he could show me all the places that the castle had been written about:
…and then as we are going around the side of the building, he turns to me and says “you won’t be offended if you see some of my dead relatives around here, will you?”
Well, that’s not something you hear every day. See your dead relatives in what context?
Floyd started building the castle when his brother died. He sees ‘pictures’ of his brother, his mother, and several other relatives in the bricks, blocks, and mortar of his castle. Then he pulls out photographs and asks me if I don’t see the very same thing – doesn’t that look just like…and doesn’t this look just like…and can’t you see this person right here?
To Floyd, this is all very Divine-based. He’s very in touch with his interpretations of Biblical teachings. And he loves to talk about Jesus, and the devil, and how awful people can be, and how it all needs to be turned around, and who’s going to win, and this is how you get to heaven.
Woo.
That’s all pretty deep and Floyd has serious convictions. I came to meet him because I love to see how people express themselves through building/repurposing, especially if they do it on their own property. If you’ve read DFK for a while, you’ve seen my pics of environments by (I’m linking most of these to my Flickr photostream) Wade Wharton, Joe Minter, W.C. Rice’s Cross Garden, George Kornegay, Rev. H.D. Dennis’ Margaret’s Grocery, Finster’s Paradise Gardens, Charlie Lucas, L.V. Hull, Kenny Hill (gosh I think about Kenny Hill’s sculpture garden every single day)…and I’m leaving out several more.
So this is something I love. Something, and people, that I want my children to know and enjoy in a million different ways.
But Floyd’s message was pointed in a very adult way and when I got the first sense of it, Av took the kids off to enjoy visiting the castle as an adventure (yay! castle!), far out of earshot.
When we were done with the tour, we all met back up and thanked Floyd for his time. He invited us and any of our friends to come over any time whether he is there or not (email me for the address). So very gracious. But while I enjoy being positive, I also want to say that when it was time to leave, I was really, really ready to go.
(Floyd called this the torture room, for tormented souls:)
I try to think of the universe as a wonderful, happy place where we all work as G-d’s children for the good of others and our families and friends and ourselves and just try to make the best of everything. Floyd’s message came across as dark, confusing, and unappealing. Floyd’s believes he’s going to be in Heaven one day but I think he finds the outlook for Man – for people of the world – not very bright. And that’s such a contradiction to my rainbows-and-unicorns world (however naiive or unsophisticated my view may be) that I left never wanting to go back.
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So there you go. Happy Halloween. (ha.)
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Next week, I’ll post about another castle in Tennessee, but this one’s happier. It started out weird though. But it’s happy now. Okay.
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Oh, and this is Floyd talking very briefly about the castle in a documentary that came out last year:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3209904&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0
God’s Architects – Junior from Zack Godshall on Vimeo.
Knoxville: Eat In The Car
We were looking for somewhere to eat in Knoxville earlier this month and came up with Pizza Palace. It sounds pretty unremarkable, but it’s something of an institution there – it’s a vintage drive-in, and it’s not just grilled cheese sandwiches and hamburgers and hotdogs.
They serve shrimp, oysters, jumbo ravioli, spaghetti, pizza, even veal cutlet a la parmigiana. I know, that doesn’t sound like a good idea when you’re eating in the car, right?!
…which got even more interesting with the little ones having spaghetti in the backseat. It went pretty well, though…
The food was pretty good, and the service was really nice too. If your entree comes with a salad, they bring that out first, give you plenty of time to finish, then clear that and bring the rest of the meal.
It wasn’t until later that we found out that they had been on an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. The host has even mentioned it as one of his six favorite places in the country, saying “everything they make, they make from scratch.”
I’ve seen a few episodes (not a criticism because it’s almost funny, but I think the host’s favorite year was 1985 and he never wanted to leave, i.e. the sunglasses, hair, and “Dude!”) and some places do look pretty interesting. There’s a map of all of them here.
Low & Slow: Southern Sushi
Interesting placement of that sign.
Jeffrey’s New Play, And More KTW
13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey
He didn’t say anything.
But we were told it was most certainly Jeffrey.
That teacher also loved to tell us (multiple times) that she grew up and went to school with Polly Holliday, another Alabama native, who played the waitress ‘Flo’ on ‘Alice’. I remember thinking that I wasn’t terribly impressed because Polly Holliday said “kiss my grits” and a lady should never say something like that! Especially on television for the whole world to see and hear! My sixth-grade sensibilities were offended.
Well, back to Jeffrey. Red Mountain Theatre Company in B’ham has turned ’13 Alabama Ghosts…’ into a musical, and it’s being performed this weekend. Some of the performances are already sold out.
This is the show art they developed – a pic of Kathryn visiting Live Oak Cemetery in Selma:
My favorite thing is the article that came out about KTW earlier this month in the B’ham News that read in part:
“My father was the greatest storyteller that I’ve ever listened to,” she says. “He told Bible stories that were so wonderful. The people he talked about — they loved and they hated and they sinned and they repented and they were good and they were bad.
“They were real people. I used to go to Sunday school and hear these little namby-pamby stories about Bible characters, and I thought, ‘I don’t believe you read the same book my daddy did.’”
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Jeffrey — named by one of her children — “stirred up my interest in ghost stories,” Windham says. “I went back to Huntingdon, where I had a marvelous folklore teacher named Margaret Gillis Figh, and I went and bragged to her about maybe having a ghost in my house. We began to talk about famous ghost stories in Alabama and lament the fact that they hadn’t all been collected and put in a book for everybody to read.”
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That audience included Rick Bragg, a young fan who would become a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and author.
“It’s funny that you can read something that’s intended to be scary, but it’s also reassuring and kind of staples you in place,” Bragg says. “It’s one of those things that is so inherently Alabama. It’s one of those things you just recognize, and if you mention it to people of my age, or any age really, they say, ‘Oh, yeah.’”
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That audience included Rick Bragg, a young fan who would become a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and author.
“It’s funny that you can read something that’s intended to be scary, but it’s also reassuring and kind of staples you in place,” Bragg says. “It’s one of those things that is so inherently Alabama. It’s one of those things you just recognize, and if you mention it to people of my age, or any age really, they say, ‘Oh, yeah.’”
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So humble that it makes Hydock’s job easy when she’s asked, as she was last weekend in Jonesborough, to introduce Windham, whose many accolades include induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor. Novelist Harper Lee, now one of Windham’s best friends, nominated her.
“Kathryn,” Hydock says, “does not allow the emcee to say anything in an introduction, except: ‘This is Kathryn Tucker Windham, she’s from Selma, Alabama, and she tells stories.’”
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Windham laments the loss of storytelling in families and chalks that up to a number of factors, including air-conditioning (“It moved people off the front porch and into the house to watch television”), the disappearance of country stores (“People would come and go and tell stories, and I don’t hear them telling any in Walmart”) and funeral homes.
“When people died, you used to go to their homes and sit up with the dead,” Windham says. “Different people would come in and tell stories about the dead person. These were wonderful stories told all through the night, but we don’t do that anymore.”
Windham does. She often takes guests out to Selma’s Live Oak Cemetery and sets up a picnic on one of the slabs in the graveyard, which she did with Hydock.
“We took out our sandwiches and iced tea, and she referred to the name on the tombstone,” Hydock says. “She said, ‘I just think the .¤.¤. family would love that we’re here enjoying this.’”
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“One of my favorite stories about that is from my son, Ben,” she recalls. “Someone said to him, ‘Ben, your mama writes those crazy little stories and surely you don’t believe in ghosts.’ Ben said, ‘Well, they sent three of us to college.’”
| Kathryn Tucker Windham |
| http://tribeca.vidavee.com/advance/trh/embedAsset.js?width=470.0&height=313.0&wmode=transparent&skin=v3AdvInt.swf&dockey=9099B95FD7A36483C4F6D6331B0E8485& |
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