It’s a point of pride for natives that Mardi Gras originated in Mobile and not New Orleans, but it’s only been since 1994 that Dauphin Island has held Krewe de la Dauphine, their own Carnival celebration. The idea was to boost visibility for the island, but it’s a bit of a stretch. Mardi Gras is traditionally held on Fat Tuesday, the last hurrah before Ash Wednesday, so a Mardi Gras on January 9? Still, I have to give it up to the Dauphin Island city council for going for it, and I’ve planned my trip to coincide with the parade. Creepiness! History! Shellfish! And gumption!
On my way to the airport, I tell my Uber driver, Kanas, “I’m going home.” It’s an hour ride and I’m speaking so animatedly about my upcoming adventure that I’m afraid I’ll get a bad customer rating, so I turn my attention to him. I learn he was born in Fairouzeh, a village two miles outside of Homs in Syria, a city that’s been hit hard by war. Like our family, his people have worked to bring family members to America. Many from his village are related through intermarriage, own liquor stores, and live in an old-world-style tightly knit community.*
“We used to go back every summer, but it’s been five years since we’ve been home. It’s good that you’re going,” he tells me, in the perfect send-off. I promise to get in touch when I return and we award each other five stars.
The trip to Mobile takes a full twelve hours of travel time, and I’m anxious the entire time. What was I thinking? Will I recognize anything or anyone? But when I head out of the parking lot of the Mobile airport, I am instantly flooded with nostalgia. The terminal has been given a face-lift, but the airfield is still bordered by a chain-link fence, just like when I was little. On Saturday nights, we parked on the patch of grass in front of the fence and watched the planes take off for entertainment.
On the way to my cousin Sandy’s home, I pull my compact rental car up close to read a bumper sticker on the SUV in front of me. I Miss Ronald Reagan. There isn’t a speck of dirt on the sticker. It looks new.
It’s been thirty years since I’ve been here and I get lost on my way. “It’s a left turn at the Mitchell Apartments,” she tells me on the phone.
“Mitchell? As in our cousins the Mitchells?”
“Yep.” I’ve spent my life passing through cities, a stranger in a strange land, and have returned to the only city on the planet where my family has left a visible trace.
Sandy, who’s close to the same age as my mother, greets me with a big hug. She’s standing on a Shalom Y’all doormat, the calling card of my people. Hanging on the wall facing the door is a poster that reads I Really, Really Miss Ronald Reagan.
She’s got a picture of Great-Grandma Rose on her fridge. Our sailor-mouthed, card-shark moonshiner of a great-grandmother is surrounded by a gaggle of little Gurwitches, including Sandy’s daughters, my sister, and me. We are all holding hands. The same photo hangs in my home in Los Angeles.
There’s a bowl of gumbo waiting for me on the kitchen table. Sandy’s got my number. There have been few times in my life when there wasn’t a container of my dad’s gumbo in the freezer.* It’s his trademark recipe and I am powerless to resist a bowl.
Recently, scientists at Emory University trained mice to fear the smell of cherry blossom by pairing the smell with a small electric shock. Despite never having encountered the smell, the offspring of these mice had the same fearful response. If associations with scents can be inherited, why not other senses, like taste? Clearly, I am genetically predisposed to associate seafood from the Gulf of Mexico with a warm family feeling.*
Sandy and I gab about this one’s children, that one’s divorce, and people in the media who dress like nafkas (that’s Yiddish for “hookers”). We’re “thick as thieves,” as they say down here.
We go to bed to get an early start in the morning. Sandy is a member of the sisterhood of the shul, and they’ve arranged a morning coffee klatch for me. Though I’ve never met her, Manette, the president, has baked banana bread in my honor. Cousins show up, including the children of my pediatrician in Mobile, who was, of course, a relative. We who were pictured with Rose are reunited for the first time in over forty years. Bari, a cousin who lives in nearby Fairhope now, has created a family tree consisting of 291 descendants of Goldie and Sugar; he also has felt the pull of the ancestors, and we all search for ourselves on the tree. Manette shows me a framed tablecloth that hangs on the wall of the banquet room. The cloth was painstakingly hand-embroidered with Jewish stars by the Ladies Aid Society in 1952. Stitched alongside each angle of each star are the names of members of the congregation. I’m related to all of them. It’s like a Gurwitch Shroud of Turin.
Our cousin Shirley arrives. My mother’s grandfather and Shirley’s grandfather were brothers, Jewish immigrants from Russia who came to America around the same time as my dad’s family. One brother stayed in Philadelphia and the other went to Mobile. It was at Shirley’s wedding that my parents met. My mom, Shirley Maisel from Philly, met my dad when Cousin Shirley, Shirley Maisel of Mobile, married his cousin. That’s right, there are two Shirley Maisels who both married into the same family. Are you confused yet? I am.
Shirley and Sandy tell me stories about when my mother, whom it’s clear they have great affection for, first came down to Mobile.
“Your father thought he was marrying into the movie business because your granddaddy was a projectionist, and your mother had no idea what she was getting into. Ike was on hard times when your parents got married,” Sandy tells me. “But he showed up with three Cadillacs because he said he’d gotten a good deal.”
Everybody not only knows your name in a small town, they also know how much money you have in your bank account. On the other hand, my mother was quickly folded into the hectic social scene. “When someone had a party, you didn’t need to ask, you knew you were invited,” Shirley says.
Everybody has a story about Rebecca.
“When she was the president of the Mobile Women’s Business League, she took a class in Robert’s Rules of Order to prepare. She was ahead of her time.”
When I see the picture of Ike among the past presidents of the shul, which include cousins dating back to Meyer Mitchell, my namesake Annie’s father, I can see how my mother thought the Gurwitches were pillars of the community. I tell them I like to think I resemble Rebecca and that I inherited some of her flair.
“Here’s my favorite memory of your grandmother,” Sandy says. “We were visiting my mother-in-law in the hospital and all of a sudden, this amazing smell is coming toward us. Rebecca bursts into the room carrying bags of mouthwatering food. She’d been cooking all day for us. She had her stuffed cabbages, her sweet-and-sour meatballs, her fried chicken and banana bread. She even brought plates and silverware with her.”
“You know, I was Rebecca’s favorite.” Everyone laughs. “What?”
Becca told every single member of our family that they were her favorite. That might explain the puzzle of the steak knife in my care package. I picture her dividing her silverware up between all of the favorites on her mailing list.
I mention my conversation with my Uber driver and ask my family if they’ve heard that only three days before my arrival, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions sued the federal government to bar Syrian refugees from settling in the state. A federal judge dismissed the case, but even my cousins are concerned about an influx of refugees because we don’t know “their people.”
“What if we had been turned away?” I ask. The question hangs in the air.
Over coffee, I talk to Shirley’s son, Neal. He’s a few years older than me, has a successful law practice, and has lived in Mobile for most of his life. He’s also inherited his grandmother’s land on Dauphin Island. Sisters Becca and Freda bought adjoining lots. He only learned about the property when he took control of his family’s finances in 2005. Neal rarely goes down; he’s got a house on the beach in nearby Gulf Shores, which has developed into the kind of vacation destination envisioned by the island boosters.
We calculate that we’ve paid more in property tax than our grandparents paid for the land. “We have to do something about it,” I say enthusiastically. He looks at me like I’ve suggested we eat vegetables that aren’t fried. Or vote Democratic. But he chivalrously agrees to come with me.
My next stop is to visit the relatives who couldn’t make it to the coffee. Our shul’s cemetery is located on the edge of town, past the historic garden district with its plantation-style houses and wide front porches—ghosts of the gracious Southern living that was built on slave labor, of course.
There’s a joke that’s got its own version in almost every religion. It’s about how two Jews will build two different houses of worship on a desert island, and as relatively small a community as it was at the outset, that’s exactly what the Jews of Mobile did. Our shul, Ahavas Chesed, “Love of Kindness,” is the conservative synagogue, while the Springhill Avenue Temple attracted people who were less orthodox. The congregations insisted on two separate cemeteries as well.
Springhill’s cemetery has a wide entrance, the graves are spread out over a sunny expanse, and there are some rather impressively large mausoleums. Not our hallowed ground. Our eternal resting place, established in 1898, has been padlocked due to a spate of vandalism a few years back; to be in possession of the code to the combination lock makes me feel like I’m a member of a secret society. Our plots are well maintained but a world away from our neighbors’. It’s a narrow stretch of land. My people are buried as they lived, practically on top of each other. Even though many were extremely wealthy, they’ve re-created the shtetl of the old country and are in death as they were in life: thick as thieves.*
It’s customary to leave a stone on top of a grave as a reminder that the person is not forgotten. It may be that the shul’s Hebrew school kids place these markers randomly. I’ll never know if it is by chance or on purpose that the headstone of one relative has a pair of dice on it and another is adorned with Mardi Gras beads.
I’ve always been wary of tribalism, but this is the tribe whose genetic markers I’ve inherited, along with a tendency toward moles, outsized earlobes, and the overshare.
In the presence of the ancestors I feel awed by the hardships they endured for a future they knew they wouldn’t live to see. The day-to-day sacrifices made during their early years in this country are simply unfathomable to me. I find it intolerable when my browser takes longer than ten seconds to reveal the voluminous pleasures of the known universe in the comfort of my living room.
Both of my parents have told me in no uncertain terms, “Whatever happens, don’t send me back to Mobile,” and maybe it’s the gumbo talking, but I lie down on the grass next to my grandparents and for the first time in my life, I want to rest in the bosom of my family.
It’s time for Neal and me to hit the road, so I drive back to Sandy’s. I’m following him down, so it’s me in my rental car and Neal in his Olds as we head out of Mobile. They are expecting forty thousand, the mayor has told the local news station, and we’re hoping to arrive before the Mardi Gras traffic hits. Neal and I haven’t seen or spoken to each other since we were kids, but we strike up the kind of intimate conversation you can have with someone who shares your people’s secrets. We talk on the phone as we drive.
“Neal, do you think it’s just geography that held our family together?”
There’s a long pause before he parses an answer: “Once the Jewish community here was able to integrate into the larger society, we could associate with people we weren’t related to. We didn’t have that luxury before.” No wonder he has a successful law practice.
A hard rain begins to fall. If it really starts coming down, that’s not going to help the crowds, and the island needs the business. There are currently twelve hundred full-time residents, with an average per capita income of $22,225, which is not much of an economic base on which to operate.
By the time we hit Rattlesnake Bayou, the rain is coming down in blinding sheets. I can’t see more than a few feet ahead of me. I pull to the side and tell Neal I need to wait it out, as my car is sliding across the road.
We’re on the corner of Hellfire and Legume. Those aren’t really the names of the streets but there are three churches on one corner—Baptist, Christian, Christian Youth—and a fruit stand with a hand-painted sign that reads Gloria’s Hot Boiled Peanuts. I have to get pictures. Dodging puddles, I hold a jacket over my head and dash across the street with my phone.
A woman in overalls, frizzy gray hair in a bun, waves me over to the stand.
“Hi, baby, I’m Gloria, what can I do for you?”
“Oh, I’m heading down to Dauphin Island for the night. I’m going to see my grandmother’s land for the first time.”
“Well, that’s just great, baby, you gonna love it. And come on back, people stop at Gloria’s from all over the world.”
“I sure will.”
We’re in low country now. That riveting first season of the HBO series True Detective, with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, was shot in Louisiana, and it looks a lot like Bayou Le Batre, the part of Alabama we’re driving through now.* There’s something dreamy about driving the flatness of the wetlands. The Dauphin Island Parkway is a two-lane highway that crosses low bridges over the Deer, the Fowl, and the Dog Rivers, but for the most part, you’re on the same level as the water, gliding across the landscape: it’s all sky and tall marsh grass. We pass through small fishing villages and spot a couple of roadside eateries that are exactly the kind of places you hope you’ll find there. I stop to take a picture of the front of Uncle Dave’s Sand Bar; the door has a large black silhouette of an absurdly curvy female painted on it, like the kind of pneumatic blow-up doll you see on mud flaps, only the lady is a mermaid. It’s the kind of place my dad would love. The menu includes red beans and rice and crawfish. There are also turnoffs leading to chemical and petroleum plants hidden behind the dense pines lining the parkway, including Exxon/Mobile and Evonik. Gulf seafood, when there is any, gets shipped all over the country and brings in the tourists, but for as much as the BP oil spill devastated the economy, six local mayors, two county commissioners, the Alabama governor, and the director of the Alabama State Docks are haggling over sixty million dollars in settlement money that they will use for environmental rehabilitation and economic stimulus. Aerospace, chemicals, and steel are the real engine of the economy down here.
Before I realize it, I’m on the bridge. Here’s how I’ve pictured the moment for the last ten years: I’m cruising in a Tesla roadster convertible. Sunlight is streaming down from the heavens, a warm gulf breeze blows, and Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” plays on the radio. In reality: the downpour has lessened to a light drizzle, but the sky is overcast and a dull gray. I’m gripping the wheel of a Chevy Spark and a local radio host is advising an acolyte that it’s okay to stop talking to his brother because he’s a homosexual, pronounced with a “T,” as in “homosextual,” as I cross the bridge to Dauphin Island.
Directly ahead is the old-fashioned water tower that went up in 1955. A hand-painted sign welcomes me to America’s Birdiest Island. It’s so quaint! Then I spot a rinky-dink carnival that’s been set up in a parking lot. It’s ten a.m. and already poundingly loud canned music is blaring, and I can understand how Dauphin Island got its current nickname: the Redneck Riviera.
The bridge takes you past the small harbor where fishing boats and the ferry from the mainland are docked and lets you off right on the main drag. Bienville Boulevard runs straight through from one side of the island to the other. Turn left on Bienville and you’re on the east end, where there are homes, an RV park, the golf course, Indian Mound Park, the Sea Lab and Estuarium, and Fort Gaines. To the right and you’re on the west end, with the schoolhouse; the public beach; the priciest vacation homes; lots that were lost to Katrina, now underwater; and a four-mile thin strip of privately owned beach.
Our lots are on the east end, the less desirable area, wouldn’t you know it. We slow down by the turnoff into Indian Mound Park, with its shell mounds and the famous “goat trees”—ancient live oaks dripping with Spanish moss that wild goats used to climb up and sleep in to evade the local gators*—but I can’t wait to see our land, so we take a second turnoff onto Hernando. There are modest homes amidst the empty lots and For Sale signs every few feet. We turn at the sign that reads Hunley Place. A second notice affixed to the post reads Dead End.
As if it weren’t ominous enough to have earned the moniker Massacre Island, the committee that formed the original trust picked street names that held significance to Southerners. Some pay homage to local tribes, the Pascagoula, the Natchez, but not our street; no, Hunley Place is named for a submarine that played a small role in the Civil War. The Hunley successfully fired upon a Union warship, becoming the first combat submarine in history to sink an enemy vessel, but the entire crew was lost in the battle. Did that stop the Confederate Army from deploying the sub again? Nope, they launched it three more times. A total of twenty-one men, every sailor who ever manned the vessel, including Horace Hunley, the designer, met a watery grave aboard the Hunley.
Neal and I pull our cars to the end of the paved road, where Hunley Place dead-ends into pine trees, waist-high ferns, and Mexican fan palms. Across the street from our lots is the one house on our block. It’s a neat, freshly painted cottage built to post-Katrina code, on high pilings. Neal steps out of his car and does a slow hand pan, like he’s dumped out a very large load of laundry in front of the smallest washing machine in the world, as if to say, “Now, what are you going to do with this mess?”
The lots are packed thick with dense foliage. This land looks much the same as when my grandparents purchased it and probably not all that different from when the Mound Builders first began visiting the island. I look down and sure enough, I’m standing on oyster shells. I pocket one for me and one for my sister.
The grass on my lawn in Los Angeles, natch, is fashionably brown, so it’s a relief to be standing in such lushness. Our lots look like the set of Gilligan’s Island, only more improbable—it’s like the cartoony prehistoric landscape in Sid and Marty Krofft’s Land of the Lost.
“No way am I going in,” Neal states flatly when I suggest we make our way into the interior of the property. “It’s snake season.”
It does seem daunting, but I’m wearing tall boots and it took me ten years to make it here, so I head straight into the color green. I have to touch the ferns to make sure they’re not plastic. There’s a pathway that’s been cut through the property and I can just make out another structure toward the back of the lot. I yell to Neal, “It’s probably their meth lab!” but he’s returned to the safety of his car. I pivot, clearing underbrush with my hands, and find myself standing on scrubby sand dunes, gulf water sparkling just a few hundred yards away. It’s official: I am madly in love with our land.
Why? Why did I insist on that Cyndi Lauper hairstyle in 1983? The amount of hair spray I used in one day alone is probably responsible for a measurable amount of the depletion of the ozone layer!
Why? Why didn’t Becca and Ike buy directly on the beach? That land might be worth something to a climate-change denier with deep pockets. Still . . . We’re walking distance to the beach. I start pricing in my head: How much could it possibly cost to build a place? I could build a small cabin, or better yet, an artists’ colony! Gurwitch Grove. I imagine switching on the lights at the grand opening by plugging in the extension cord sent to me by Rebecca in 1991. The Grove will be a Gulf Coast version of the MacDowell Colony. That is, except for not having MacDowell’s thirty-five million dollars of assets, four hundred acres, and inaccessibility to the majority of the artists working in North America, and for the fact that every year from June 1 to November 30, hurricane season in the Atlantic, I’ll be holding my breath hoping that the Grove doesn’t flood. Other than that, it’s exactly like MacDowell.
Neal is amused by my excitement, but not so much that he wants to stay a single minute longer. We kiss good-bye, and I tell him, “I’m going to try and meet the neighbors. If you never hear from me again, bury me next to one of the other Annes in the family, and you better put Mardi Gras beads on my tombstone when you come to visit me.”
Our neighbors aren’t running a meth lab, but they did clear the path to the house on the next block, which is occupied by a reclusive, retired scientist. The neighbors are also responsible for the path to the beach. Sandy,* the woman who answered the door, is a retired teacher from Minnesota. “We like how quiet it is here,” she tells me, not opening the door more than an inch. Is it because she’s in a bathrobe that she doesn’t open the door or is it that they really, really appreciate a quiet existence, the kind that doesn’t include welcoming a potential neighbor? Maybe she’s pegged me as one of the island’s many absentee landowners and can’t be bothered. Or she thinks I’m serious about coming down and is imagining easy access to the beach disappearing. I sense I’ve overstayed my welcome on her porch and make a mental note that when I build the Grove I shouldn’t expect to be borrowing a cup of sugar from Sandy.
I head toward Bienville, where the Mardi Gras will take place, and spot another neighbor. He’s a lanky guy, maybe late fifties, in jeans and a cowboy hat, and he’s staked out a prime viewing spot on his front lawn. He’s a bit early—it isn’t scheduled to start for another two hours—but he’s already sitting, day-drinking under a Confederate flag. I’m not sure what he and the other folks down there are going to think of my I’m the liberal, pro-choice feminist you were warned about T-shirt. I will need to wear a Crimson Tide jersey and keep a stockpile to issue to the artists staying at Gurwitch Grove to don when they go off campus. In the meantime, I cover my T-shirt with a vest.*
I make my way toward a white clapboard building with a wide front porch and a miniature red-and-white-striped lighthouse that is oozing with old-timey Gulf Coast charm. It turns out to be a small complex composed of a gift shop and an art gallery in which most of the paintings are of ibises—one of the birds that make this the birdiest patch of sand in the USA—and the lighthouse is a coffee joint. I amble up the few steps and peer into the coffeehouse. A piece of paper has been taped to the inside of the window, and a single word is printed on the sign: CLOSED in all caps. PERMANENTLY has been scrawled in pencil and underlined several times, in case the absence of furnishings and the fact that the lights are off doesn’t fully communicate the finality implied in CLOSED. I stop in the gift shop, purchase a leather necklace with a shark’s tooth, and tell the owner that I’m looking for a great cup of coffee. She is the mother of the barista who had the shop next door. “He has abandoned ship,” she tells me, “but you can get a good cup of drip coffee at the Quik Mart, the convenience store next to the gas station.” This does not bode well for me. I am on a strict regimen of espresso that must be administered twice daily. Her son, who was born and raised on the island, has moved to Los Angeles to become an actor and producer and find people he has more in common with.*
As the Mardi Gras revelers park their cars, I realize I have made numerous mistakes. First: never, ever, ever go to a Mardi Gras alone. There are families, couples on dates, students from the Sea Lab, all outfitted in colorful tutus and wigs, and not another lone straggler. Even my neighbor, the day-drinking Confederate, has a posse. I’m also the only person carrying a reusable water bottle. I stick out like a sore thumb. A Yankee sore thumb. Second: it’s all about infrastructure. Most folks are driving SUVs and trucks: they’ve got portable barbecues and are grilling up chicken and burgers within minutes, popping cans of beer, setting up stadium seats and boom boxes.
I am so little of a football fan that it takes me a half an hour to realize that I’m at my first tailgate party. There’s a group who’ve come in a motorized covered wagon decorated with University of Alabama banners. My father attended the law school for a year and never misses a game, but I haven’t inherited the Roll Tide gene. The covered wagon has a wide-screen TV tuned to the game and is pulling its own porta-potty on a small trailer. The bathroom has been covered in aged wood so that it resembles an outdoor latrine. These folks know how to laissez les bons temps rouler and then some. I have been plotting my trip down for the last ten years and I didn’t even pack an umbrella.
I stroll past the town square, where the town hall, visitor center, and police station look like those friendly forest ranger stations you see at national parks. Kids coast lazily on scooters and bicycling moms pedal right down the middle of the main street. Vendors hawking cotton candy and ice cream from pushcarts make their way toward me as the parade starts, led by the Mobile Police Department Mounted Unit, and it makes perfect sense that in an e-mail the mayor called the town Mayberry by the Sea.*
If you’ve ever been to a Fourth of July parade in a small American town, it’s a lot like Mardi Gras on Dauphin Island, except for the beads that are being hurled at your head, which will one day wind up, best-case scenario, I know now, on a gravestone. It doesn’t have that undercurrent of sexuality that infuses Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Instead, there are Shriners: old guys in fez hats perilously perched on an even older convertible with a toilet seat hanging off the back, the sagging trunk of the car scraping the asphalt. There are floats with the casts of the local school productions of musicals: Cats, Annie Get Your Gun, and The Wizard of Oz. Hamilton, the hip-hop smash-hit musical, hasn’t made it down here, and it seems doubtful it will be premiering in this zip code anytime soon.
Interspersed between themed floats, local bands like Mud Bucket and MT Pockets are advertising their hard-rockin’ sounds by offering up musical entertainment as they travel down the parade route on small platforms pulled by Ford Raptors. The musicians seem to have attended training seminars that recommend dressing for the job you want, because they are uniformly outfitted in a manner that screams, “I am in a band from south of the Mason-Dixon Line.” They sport mullets of varying lengths, a fair number of cowboy hats, sleeveless black T-shirts, jeans, and at least one bandana tied around an arm or ankle or worn do-rag style.
The Mardi Gras parade is over in maybe forty-five minutes and the crowd thins out quickly. I jump into my car and drive past Hunley Place, just beyond the trailer park to Fort Gaines. The fort overlooks the water at the far east end of the island. Before arriving, I studied maps, plotting out routes for my visit, and I understand why Neal looked at me like I’d grown a second head when I pressed him for exact directions to each of the island’s points of interest. The minuteness of the island was inconceivable to me.
I’m the only visitor. As I make my way inside the Civil War–era fort, I picture the starry nights when Boy Scout Troop 484 pitches their tents in the grassy courtyard, and I think on how my son probably wouldn’t have dyed his hair pink when he was fourteen if he’d grown up in Mayberry by the Sea. I stroll through the empty barracks built in 1851, shoes echoing loudly on the stone floor. It’s impossible not to feel like there’s been a zombie apocalypse and I’m the last person left on Earth. From the cannon bay atop the brick wall surrounding the fort, I’ve got an unobstructed view of both Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.*
During my youth in Miami Beach, entire neighborhoods were blighted by boarded-up kosher hotels. When the art deco district was first revitalized, one could leisurely enjoy stylishly restored low-rise elegance. Now towering condos rise out of the sand and nightclubs crank out pulsing electronic music 24/7. Here, there is nothing to mar the view between sea and sky and I’m so glad the island hasn’t been overdeveloped.
There is an invigorating majesty one can experience on the steep white cliffs of Dover, a sweeping epicness that rouses the soul. The flatness of the gulf shoreline has a different kind of beauty. It’s a relaxing mellowness that inspires kicking back and cranking up the Jimmy Buffett.* Coupled with that low Alabama minimum wage, it’s understandable why day-drinking in a lawn chair—not under the Confederate flag, but drinking a beer at eleven a.m.—might seem like a reasonable way to pass an afternoon.* I’ve never been much of a beer drinker, so when I explore the brick-lined ammunition storage areas carved deep into the cool earth, I can’t help but think that the fort would make a great wine cave. If I’ve traveled twelve hours to get somewhere, I would like to have a really good glass of wine waiting for me, and there is nary a wine bar on Dauphin Island. There is one sit-down restaurant outside of the numerous self-identified dive bars.
I wander into the original blacksmith shop, a small brick enclave at the base of the fort, where a blacksmith, costumed in a style worn in the 1800s, is sweating through his cotton smock as he hammers out an iron cross on a steel anvil. This part of Alabama is really churchy. I can just make out something penciled onto the wall above his head. Is that his name? “Ivan?” I ask in a total tourist move.
“No, I’m Ralph. That’s the mark where the water got up to during Hurricane Ivan in 2004,” he says, instantly snapping me back to just how precarious life is on a barrier island. I introduce myself as a landowner, and when I say that I’m meeting the mayor for dinner, Ralph asks me to tell him that it’s the dredging of Mobile Bay that’s the real problem for the island. Like everyone I meet, he has strong opinions about the potential fate of the island. He’s so worked up that I don’t mention I’m aware of the issue. The bay is shallow; that’s why the island had such a great value in the early part of the last century. Large ships would dock and unload at Dauphin Island and then the cargo would be moved by smaller barges across the bay to Mobile. Now dredging allows shipping to come directly to Mobile, but it’s robbing the island of sand, as if storms and sea-level rise weren’t enough! I nod, compliment him on his ironwork, and express my disbelief that the fort is empty; it’s so well preserved. The museum has a collection of letters written by Confederate soldiers while stationed at the fort. The stories of their laboring with no soap and no pay, chronic hunger, and the unrelenting heat make for fascinating and terrifying reading. You’ll never be more grateful for modern plumbing than when reading the soldiers’ accounts of the dysentery epidemic at Fort Gaines. But when you live near a historical site, you don’t stop in on a regular basis, unless maybe they’re serving a chilled rosé.*
It’s time for my scheduled dinner with the mayor but the island recently won the right to call itself “the Sunset Capital of Alabama,” another ploy to attract vacationers, and I have to check it out.
The sun is large and low on the horizon and the sky ribbons into bands of red, orange, and purple, right on cue. It is one of the most vivid sunsets I’ve seen in Alabama or elsewhere. I’m reading a sign along the beach about how the ibis was once endangered but thanks to the Audubon Society is making a comeback, when a baby bird scampers over to the water’s edge.
I snap a shot of the sprightly ibis and text it to my husband. Looks great! he writes. To get a dramatic close-up of three ancient tree stumps in the water, I zoom in on the smooth, bleached-out grooves. Widening my view, I notice water lapping at the roots of several live trees on the shoreline. Wait a minute. We’re on the ocean side of the island. These stumps aren’t ancient; they are recent casualties of the salt water. This is that beach erosion coupled with the sea-level rise that I’ve read about: the two to three feet that are lost each year, taking the trees and other vegetation with them. The island is only 1¾ miles wide; you can do the math. I look back toward the fort and try to imagine how different it would look with an added seven hundred feet of beachfront. That’s how much has been lost to date.
• • •
JEFF COLLIER is wearing khakis and a polo shirt, wardrobe left over from his former career as a golf pro. With his easy, friendly manner he’s every bit the mayor of Mayberry. I tell him that my cousins in Mobile knew his dad. “Isn’t he oyster people?” cousin Shirley had asked.
“That’s right, there’s a seafood business that’s been in the family for eighty years.” My people know his people. Over plates of blackened gulf shrimp, I gush that I’ve fallen for the island and I can see his problem: the very thing that gives the island its charm, its refusal to enter the twenty-first century, is the same thing that is threatening its economic future.
“When I added the one traffic light on the island a few years back, people were angry. They don’t like change.”
He just approved a building that is six stories high, making it the tallest building in town, and people are really pissed off.
“But is there a place for Mayberry in the future?” I ask. It’s a Mayberry that is expensive to maintain.* They are not only trying to hold back time, they are literally trying to hold back the tide. He has successfully funded beach renourishment for Fort Gaines and hopes to do the same for the west end, but it seems like a long shot. Hank Caddell, secretary and treasurer of the Alabama Coastal Heritage Trust, has called such interventions in nature’s plans “folly,” even invoking Joni Mitchell: “We’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot!”
“Hey, if a hurricane takes out the west end, will that make my east end land more valuable?” We both laugh. He tells me my land is probably worth now just a bit more than what my grandparents paid for it. Or not. He has land there as well. Who wants to buy now, anyway, when the sea is rising? We’re in the same boat.
There’s the briefest pause in our conversation. We’re exactly the same age. If I had stayed in Alabama it’s likely we would have met years before. We are both invested in and enamored with the island’s history, appreciate its natural beauty, and my people know his people. I admire his advocacy and he’s a good-looking guy. Am I Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama?
In that rom-com, Reese, who has been living the high life in New York City, comes back home to Alabama to resolve some unfinished relationship business. Essentially Reese must choose between her childhood love, who flies a crop duster, Pilot McSixPack, played by hunky Josh Lucas, and her big-city boyfriend, played by Patrick Dempsey, aka Dr. McDreamy. Both are blessed with shiny white teeth and are great-heads-of-hair-over-heels in love with her. Decisions, decisions! In the end, Reese chooses Pilot McSixPack, who conveniently is able to pick up and move to NYC, successfully merging her past with her present and future.
The check comes and we’re informed that a local businessman at the bar is paying the tab. Damn, they take that Southern hospitality seriously. Only it turns out that it’s just the mayor’s check that’s being picked up, not mine, and Jeff doesn’t offer to pick up my tab. I’m no Reese; he’s more interested in how I’m going to portray his beloved home than getting into my pants. When I say, “Can’t you guys just have one wine bar?” he shrugs it off dismissively. He knows that “wine bar” is code for someone who does hot yoga, marches in gay pride parades, thinks her kid looks great with pink hair, and will ultimately find the slow pace and solitude of the Gulf Coast oppressive.
I’m emotionally exhausted from the day, so I skip the local nightlife—trivia game and darts night at Fins Bar—and head for the Willow Tree Cottage.*
Bill Harper built and owns the cottage, which is adjacent to and is a twin of his own. The cottages, on nine-foot pilings, overlook the marshland on the bay side of the island. Bill is a little younger than my dad but went to Murphy High School in Mobile with my cousins. Mobile really is a small town.
Bill is retired but has worked all over the world with the Red Cross and Red Crescent and met his wife in Montenegro. Bill and Slavica welcome me into their home and promise to make me an espresso in the morning with their Jura Giga 5, one of the best machines in the world. I settle in, and just as I’m wondering how they occupy themselves, Bill’s knocking on my door to tell me that he needs to move my car; the tide is surging and there might be flooding. Residents must be vigilant at all times. It’s not even hurricane season. Is this nature’s way of reminding me how expensive flood insurance is going to be for Gurwitch Grove Writers’ Retreat?
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I sleep that night the kind of satisfying sleep you have when you’ve been away for a long time and you’re so glad to be home.* In the morning, I enjoy an exquisitely tight espresso with Bill and Slavica, but how many mornings in a row can I stop in before I wear out my welcome and a PERMANENTLY CLOSED notice goes up on their front door? I send my sister a shot of the view of the marshes. Don’t you want to move down with me? She writes back, Sister, I hate to break it to you, but it’s going to be you and fifty cats, you know that, right?
On the drive back to Mobile, I’m the only car on the road. I stop when I see the Hot Boiled Peanuts sign.
“Hi, baby, did you like your gamma’s land?” Gloria has remembered me!
“I loved it, I really loved it.” I buy some blueberries and we chat about how healing the beaches are here.
“Of course you love it. I lost my husband to mesothelioma, and my girlfriend and I, we walk the beach every morning. It helps. I just had surgery on my leg.” She shows me the scar and we commiserate about getting older and talk about our kids.
“My granddaughter is twenty-three and she still has her purity ring,” she tells me, beaming with pride.
It seems like a good time to make my exit.
“It really brings them in,” she adds, pointing to the Hot Boiled Peanuts sign. I nod in agreement, but I know that “them” means the tourists and that “them” includes me.
Sandy’s got a bowl of gumbo waiting for me in her kitchen. My plane leaves in a few hours, so I eat slowly. I want to return to Los Angeles with the taste still in my mouth.
I ask her if she knows why my family left Mobile. “Of course. Your daddy didn’t have two pennies to rub together. He had an idea to sell health insurance for pets and open a pet cemetery. He went to everyone in the family to raise money but he’d gotten the reputation, like his daddy, of being someone who wanted to make a fast dollar. Leaving was tough on your mother; she loved it here. We all felt badly; Billy wanted to help, but I said no. We were just starting out.”
Pet cemeteries and pet insurance? Just like Rebecca, he was always ahead of his time.* Even though we’re talking about something that happened more than forty years ago, I can see how much it still pains her.
“Maybe it was all for the best. The bosom of your family can be comforting but it can also be smothering,” I tell her, wondering if she considers me to be one of those people who work in the media and dress like a nafka.
“Sometimes your family can know too much about you,” she says, and we kiss each other good-bye on the Shalom Y’all doormat.
I call my dad on the drive to the airport and ask him to fill in the blanks of the story.
He and a business partner were funding a small housing development in Toulminville. Dad’s partner discovered that my grandfather Ike, who also had a stake in the business, was funneling a considerable amount of supplies and workers to make improvements on his home. You might call it embezzling. It’s so horrible that I try to make up a clever axiom about this, but I can’t think of any word that rhymes with “embezzling.”
Mobile was burned for him. No wonder he said, “Whatever happens, don’t send me back.”
When he tells me this, I remember that someone, maybe my mother, once told me how just after Dad graduated from Vanderbilt, where he made money by leasing pinball machines to his fraternity, he started law school at the University of Alabama. He received a call from Becca. Ike had suffered a heart attack and he needed to come home and help his family.*
“I didn’t know you were in business with Ike,” I say, and he explains that he’d always been in business with his dad in Mobile. Ike had raked up so many debts that when he turned sixteen, all of his father’s assets had to be put in his name.
Our cousins climbed that crooked ladder, but my dad had gotten stuck with his father on a lower rung.
I tell him that I learned that I wasn’t Rebecca’s favorite. “You know, Rebecca wasn’t exactly anyone’s favorite,” he says. “People thought she was putting on airs. Uncle Sam felt responsible for taking care of his baby sister, Rebecca, the youngest of his siblings, who’d been left behind in Russia all those years before. They’d underwritten Ike’s business for years, ponied up for her fashion sprees in New York. They even paid for the membership to the Standard Club in Atlanta. After they died, she tried to cash a check from them for three thousand dollars but the family wouldn’t honor it. She carried that check in her purse for years after that, hoping they’d change their minds.”
I tell my father that everyone was kind to me, that I might have even experienced that elusive “sense of place,” that I love him and I will call him soon. I return my rental car and pull up the picture of Rebecca, the one my cousin Michael and I found in Bert’s microwave, on my phone, only she doesn’t look eccentric and glamorously dramatic. All I can see is the damage. Ahead of her time? More like behind the times, caught between the old world and new. A Blanche DuBois who depended on the kindness of family.
It takes me all of three minutes to clear airport security, so I send shots of Dauphin Island to the cousins who couldn’t make it down. I think of how proud I am of all of us who emerged from a small town on the Gulf of Mexico. My sister and cousins are do-gooders who work for charitable organizations, the majority of us are on speaking terms, and none of us have served time. Yet. Having gone into showbiz and with a proclivity for putting on airs, I have the most in common with our huckster ancestors. I’m the black sheep of my generation!
Waiting to board, I get a text from my husband: Are we moving to Dauphin Island?
I text back: Only the ibis can go home again.
Huh? he writes.
I’ll explain when I get home, I dash off before the plane takes flight.
• • •
A FEW DAYS LATER, Kanas and eight others, representing three generations of his family, and I are digging into homemade Syrian delicacies at his townhouse in Burbank.* Fadwa, Kanas’s sister-in-law, explains that her family and Kanas’s are intermarried in as confusing a configuration as my own family. Most of the family lives close by, except for a few of the first generation of American-born who have moved to Northern California. Nahla, his wife, explains how to make her signature dish; it’s intestines stuffed with ground beef, tomatoes, and rice, and is not unlike the stuffed cabbages Rebecca regularly sent to my dorm in New York City.
“I love masareen,” Amanda says. She’s Kanas’s niece, one of the first generation in the family to be born in America. She’s twenty-one, impeccably groomed, and between bites is sucking on a hookah filled with strawberry-flavored tobacco. When Nahla explains that it takes four hours to prepare the dish, Amanda sheepishly protests, “But you know, I’m studying to become a dentist. I’ll never make it myself.” Another of the aunties pipes in, “No, you can do it! You’ll come home at night . . .” and as she talks through the preparation of the rice and beef, Amanda listens and nods with a smile frozen on her face and I realize that for all my claiming to love gumbo, I’ve never once attempted to make Dad’s recipe. She’s never making that masareen, I think as I smile and nod assurances.
Things move slowly in the South and even slower in my family. It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever get that will probated. Wouldn’t that be just like my family, if I passed on to my son property taxes for a piece of land he’ll never visit? Maybe it will be the ocean that ultimately brings resolution.*
Meanwhile, there are second- and third-generation things to attend to. Sandy’s grandsons are becoming B’nai Mitzvah in a month in Las Vegas, and the descendants of Goldie and Sugar, Rebecca’s favorites, all of us, will be there to witness the occasion.