Let’s Eat Smoked Meat
Arrow Sign
Cullman County AL, 2020.
Prepping for Valentine’s Day
Prepping for Valentine’s Day!
Crafts:
I love you banner
Nostalgia V-Day card wreath
Recipes:
never go wrong with a great chocolate chip cookie
and buckeyes. goshamighty! buckeyes. yes.
***oh and this is the best/easiest way to dip buckeyes
Travel:
Go to Bentonville and take in Crystal Bridges’ Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room―My Heart is Dancing into the Universe now because it’s going off view starting March 24
Stay at the 21C
Shopping:
Not even kidding: new, wonderful bed pillows
It’s hard to beat pretty flowers in a pretty vase
Thrift for some really great art coffee table books
Reading:
From Christie’s: From 17th-century Antwerp to 1960s New York: the best art books to seek out in 2025
Extra credit:
Photoshop a hyper-local, cute Valentine
Alabama Faulkner
…where I go on & on about little bits of Faulkner’s life…
Late last month, I mentioned William Faulkner’s daughter, Alabama, who is not often spoken of (granted, she was born premature and lived only a few days).
Alabama was born shortly after Faulkner and Estelle moved into Rowan Oak. Born January 11, 1931, she came two months before her due date and died nine days later; her doctor indicated on the death certificate that he had attended her from the date of her birth and last saw her alive on the 20th, with “prematurity” being the principal cause of death. This was Dr. J.C. Culley, and Estelle had the baby at his hospital on Van Buren Avenue there in Oxford.
Being as little as she was and Dr Culley’s hospital being without an incubator, Faulkner decided to bring Estelle and Alabama home as he figured that he and Mammy Callie would be just as good in providing the care she needed.
Now the story gets really interesting! I mentioned before that Faulkner was on his way to Memphis to bring home an incubator. In that version, his brother Dean is with him and the baby dies at home while they’re on this trip. This is the version most all of us know and believe to be true.
In another version, the baby dies in the bed next to William Faulkner. Estelle was too unwell to help much and Faulkner was grief-stricken and enraged with the lack of help from the doctor in getting Alabama healthy. Faulkner gets up, goes up 11th Street to the Culley residence, and shoots the doctor in the shoulder. It would have been a ten minute walk. No doubt, Faulkner would have just cut through his backyard and been there even quicker.
Yet another version has Faulkner shooting the doctor through the screen door at Rowan Oak. A small handful of other stories still float around. No matter what, the doctor was well enough on the 20th to sign Alabama’s death certificate:
The death certificate lists the 20th as her burial date also, and it’s said that her father rode in the car to the cemetery with her little casket in his lap. She’s buried in the larger Faulkner section; William and Estelle are buried in the newer section.
Little Alabama’s place is there on the right-hand side of the tall center monument, that closest little oval with the broken vase. This pic is from a visit I made in 2018.
Y’all know I love little connections. The family who owns Neilson’s on the Oxford Square — the oldest store in the South as it’s been in business since 1839 — lives at the 1857 Greek Revival known formerly as Shadowlawn, the Neilson-Culley-Lewis house. The house sounds incredible. It was built by the founder of Neilson’s, purchased by Dr Culley, and now it’s back in the Neilson’s department store family. During the war, it was occupied by Union troops. Stark Young wrote about the story of a Union soldier shooting dead a black child who has been climbing a cedar tree there in his ‘So Red the Rose’ — and the home is most likely the model for the setting of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
Neilson’s on the Square
As to (possibly) why the house survived the war, from Memphis Magazine:
“I possess a friend here in Nancy Thompson, a most spirited young miss of sixteen. In her home some of Grant’s men ordered her to play ‘Yankee Doodle’ and she scorned to comply, so they tore up an Aeolian harp and a piano. I was there at the first when Grant’s troops startled the town by pouring in in large numbers. Their first target was a little negro boy who was perched in a big apple tree at the Neilson place. The Neilsons say he dropped to the ground like an apple falling. And Quit Wilkins . . . standing at a woodpile watching them pass, was shot in the leg and will be a cripple for life; he is fifteen. There is a good deal of smashing, but I tell my Oxford friend just to wait, we shall have worse later on . . . .”
The diary also reveals why the Neilson house was spared the torch while many others were burned to the ground. “It was written in Mrs. Neilson’s diary that the Kansas Jayhawkers [who were anti-slavery and pro-Union] set up camp in this yard,” says Patty. “We think this is why the house, and thus the diaries, were saved.”
Estelle was from a comfortable upbringing (btw, Faulkner invited her people, the Oldhams, into his home but would not visit them in theirs because they and in particular her father had been so ugly about him being a writer and not set to make a good living) and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle with her first husband, Judge Cornell Franklin.
Franklin was a territorial judge in Hawaii when their daughter Victoria was born, then he was in private practice in Shanghai when Estelle gave birth to son Malcolm there. Though they eventually amicably divorced, Judge Franklin mostly stayed in Shangai until the communist party granted him a visa in 1951. That’s because in WWII, Japan had him interned from 1941-1942 and then he spent a year or two in New York before heading back to China.
It really was a “good” divorce between Estelle and the Judge; she has fond memories of keeping up the relationship between their children and his family in Columbus. They’d take the train back and forth between there and Oxford, and when that got old, Faulkner would drive them. The Judge’s mother approved of Faulkner and the idea of Estelle marrying him. She even “lent” a cook for them on their beach honeymoon, a ramshackle Pascagoula house gifted for a while for the occasion from one of his friends, and the kids even came along. The wedding had been June 12, 1929 at the 1844 College Hill Presbyterian there around Oxford. BTW, the sanctuary there was destroyed by fire in 2022 but the congregation still meets.
In a terrible circumstance, Judge Franklin and his second wife also lost a baby in 1931 just as Estelle and William Faulkner had. That baby, named Cornell Swinton Franklin, was born in Shanghai and lived 15 days — dying of pyaemia and umbilical cord infection. Two years later, the Judge and wife had another boy and gave him the very same name.
The idea of whom Alabama William and Estelle’s Alabama was named after: his Aunt Bama who lived in Memphis.
I’ve been reading Faulkner and Women, published 1986, to see if there are more mentions of Alabama and/or Aunt Bama.
Paternal grandmother Sallie Murry Falkner was the matriarch in Oxford. Her equivalent in Memphis was Alabama Leroy Falkner McLean, “The Colonel’s baby,” of whom the family said, when she dies and goes to Heaven, either she or G-d is going to have to move out. Faulkner once inscribed a book to a kinsman with a reference to Aunt ‘Bama, “who owns both of us.”
Shine On
Candlelight Motel
Ozark AL, 2011.
This Week’s Various
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
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Paul Rudolph-designed Wallace Residence, Athens AL, 2020
NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting its first-ever major museum exhibition dedicated to the work of Paul Rudolph (“Materialized Space“) now through March 16th, 2025.
The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is getting political, seems. Or not and they got looped in without…realizing. And if you’re like oh is it that Hank Willis Thomas billboard thing? Yes.
George Washington Carver’s incredible blue.
George Washington Carver diorama of him in lab at American Village in Montevallo AL, 2022
Fraser Smith’s Olive Tallit at the Mississippi Museum of Art, from a visit last year. I messaged with him this week, and he’s done a series — six of these in 2007.
Lonnie Holley’s newest album, Tonky, coming out in March, will include a track with Joe Minter
from a visit to LV Hull’s home in 2009
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has added the L.V. Hull Home & Studio in Kosciusko, Mississippi and 18 other sites in the US to its Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios (HAHS) membership network. Ohters in the south in this round: the Beer Can House in Houston, and Pope’s Museum in Ochlocknee, Georgia.
The Crystal Bridges exhibit, KAWS: Family opens March 15
The exhibition takes its title and thematic jumping-off point from the sculpture titled FAMILY (2021), which brings together four of KAWS’ characters posed in the style of a family portrait. As witnessed throughout the show, the relationships between the figures can be complex, familiar, and astonishingly heartfelt entryways into human emotions.
The Eudora Welty Library in downtown Jackson, Mississippi — which has been in serious disrepair for years — will be town down and the space made into a park. A location for a rebuilt library has not been set and the library’s holdings will be in storage.
At Rooted:
Mississippi Native: Curtis Wilkie
“[Willie Morris] would write me letters and say, ‘It’s time for you to come home, boy.’ I eventually did.”
The home of the late artist George Dunbar is on the market in Louisiana
Thanks to the Super Bowl coming to New Orleans, apparently:
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George Rodrigue, We Stand Together, at the Besthoff Sculpture Garden at NOMA, 2016 visit
“Rodrigue: Before the Blue Dog” is on view at the Cabildo through Sept 28, 2025 Last year at the Carnegie Arts Center in Decatur AL we got to see ‘The River is the Road: Paintings by George Rodrigue‘ (for whatever reason, the Carnegie doesn’t allow photography of its hosted exhibits) with its emphasis on the river theme in his paintings.
The LPB documentary Blue: The Life and Art of George Rodrigue extended trailer
The Washington Post: The Best Artworks of Our Time are in Video and they ofc mention Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors which was at the Frist in Nashville in 2016 and yes.
This $3.5M 1851 Greek Revival on the market south of Natchez retains its punkah over the dining room table
From a 2008 visit
Was fun to see my pic of Clayton, Alabama’s whiskey bottle tombstone in this article on the Encyclopedia of Alabama
The American Library Association’s Literary Landmarks by State listing is here.
Dedications have included homes of famous writers (Tennessee Williams, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, William Faulkner), libraries and museum collections, literary scenes (such as John’s Grill in San Francisco, immortalized by Dashiell Hammett, and Willa Cather’s Prairie near Red Cloud, Nebraska), and even “Grip” the Raven, formerly the pet of Charles Dickens and inspiration to Edgar Allan Poe and now presiding (stuffed) at the Rare Books Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia.
You can actually still go and see Grip.
Interestingly, one landmark was rescinded: Beauvoir.
Bringing Anne Frank’s Secret Annex to New York, and the World. Covered windows, peeling wallpaper: For the first time outside of Amsterdam, an exhibition reconstructs Anne’s hiding place during the devastation of the Holocaust.
The Louvre is a lot to deal with right now.
At Burritt on the Mountain, from a 2023 visit
From Daily Yonder: The Little Known History and Disappearing Architecture of Rosenwald Schools
Over the next three and a half years, Feiler photographed 105 of the approximately 500 surviving schools. He began with a mostly architectural interest, capturing exterior and interior images of the clapboard and red brick structures. He soon realized that while the buildings were interesting, the story was much richer when the voices of former students and their families were included. As a result, his book and exhibit, both called, “A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America,” integrate portraits and images of facilities. Each is accompanied by a short narrative explaining intersections with critical moments in history, like the Trail of Tears and the Great Migration.
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Pentecostal Explosion
(image, 2024)
(image, 2007)
Pentecostal Explosion Ministries
Vicksburg MS 2024 and 2007
Varmint Hater
Trespassing is Against the Law
Stay off this Road
Woodville AL, 2020.
Bernard Coffindaffer’s Roadside Crosses
I ran across a pic of some Bernard Coffindaffer roadside crosses — if you’ve traveled the rural South much, you’ve likely seen them on occasion. He (1925–1993) was a West Virginia-based businessman/evangelist and this was his “Crosses of Mercy” project whereby he’d install one gold and two blue crosses. At one time it was estimated that there may be over 1000 of these, maybe even over 1500 installations, and people still to this day take on the task of restoring these utility poll crosses as needed in many locations.
Above in Money, Mississippi and these below in Edwards, Mississippi I spotted last year:
There’s a very nice book available for preview on Blurb of more of Bernard Coffindaffer’s project.
Dwell Hotel & Extra Credit Chattanooga
Finally finally finally this made it to the Dwell Hotel in Chattanooga and it was lots of fun. It’s more grownups only (though I’m having a harder time finding it now, it may only be 12+), not because of any…reason but I think just to keep things a bit more sophisticated and careful around the fun design details.
It’s a 16 room boutique hotel set in a 1909 downtown building, part of the Design Hotels collection which is part of Marriott. Among the international hotels: Papaya Playa Project in Mexico; the 101 Reykjavik in Iceland; Hotel St George in Finland — plus it has an Ai Weiwei dragon; Le Collateral and Domaine des Andéols in France…
We had drinks one night at the hotel’s bar, Matilda Midnight.
Garden and Gun included it in its 2023 piece on Seven Southern Hotels for Midcentury Design Lovers
Ours was the Puzzle Room.
Extra credit: besides staying at the Dwell and having a cocktail their Matilda Midnight, we visited Company Chattanooga, a little speakeasy inside the Kinley Hotel:
Supper at Ernest Chinese which was mostly us checking out some small bites:
A visit to the Hunter Museum of American Art and walking around that neighborhood including a little something at pretty-pretty Rembrandt’s Coffee House
Frank Stella, River of Ponds III
Karen LaMonte, Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery
A visit to Shrine of Our Lady Virgin of the Poor in extreme NE Alabama
Refreshments.
Rickwood Field, America’s oldest baseball park
Birmingham AL, 2024.
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