THERE ARE THREE THINGS YOU NEED TO know about this gloriously shabby Memphis watering hole. First, it is frequently touted as the best dive bar in America. Second, the Soul Burger, as it’s dubbed, is greasy nirvana at 2:00 a.m. after a night of getting soused on Beale Street. Fried in a squirt of pickle juice, the patty holds only onions, cheese, and “Soul Sauce.” Third—and this is where it gets weird—they say Earnestine & Hazel’s is haunted. Employees swear that the jukebox will fire up on its own, say like the time a group of women came in celebrating a divorce and Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” popped on. Upstairs lie a set of rooms with paint peeling off the walls that at one point were inhabited by ladies of the evening. Rumor is that some met an unfortunate demise between those walls. But not to worry. When it’s hopping downstairs, as it usually is come late night, the bar is just the thing to raise the spirits.
IN 1886, TWO DECADES BEFORE THE GREAT QUAKE of 1906 leveled San Francisco, Charleston, South Carolina, experienced the largest earthquake ever to hit the eastern United States (then or now). It would have registered 7.3 on the Richter Scale had that measurement been around at the time—a seismic disaster that wrought untold damage and prompted the widespread installation of earthquake bolts, metal reinforcements designed to brace buildings against future quakes. Earthquakes have plagued the South throughout its history, and since 1970, destinations as widespread as Alcoa, Tennessee, and Fort Payne, Alabama, have felt the ground shake at a magnitude of 4.6 or higher. Earthquakes still pose a real and persistent threat across the region: coastal South Carolina, for instance, averages ten to fifteen quakes a year, and though there has yet to be one that measures up to the 1886 disaster, experts say it could happen again.
REMOVED, REMOTE, A WORLD ALL ITS OWN, the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay is a 175-mile-long landscape of marsh and protected coves, bay islands, and barrier islands. Composed of seven Maryland and two Virginia counties, the Eastern Shore has a mash-up of colonial history and commercial fishing, sprawling fields of corn and soybeans, wild beaches, and maritime forests all within an oyster shell’s throw of each other. To get there most often involves one of two epic drives. From the south, you take the soaring—and at times, underwater—twenty-three miles of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. Or drive from the north via an island-hopping highway from the Washington, D.C.–Baltimore megalopolis to Annapolis to Kent Island and then the Eastern Shore proper. There, cultural icons are scattered like driftwood in a marsh: the wild ponies of Chincoteague and Assateague Islands, soft-shell-crab shedding shacks, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, and decoy shops from one end to the other.
IN THE WEEKS LEADING UP TO MARCH 7, 1965, tensions were running high in Alabama. Two civil rights groups—the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—had joined the Dallas County Voters League to help with a voter campaign in Selma, where only 2 percent of African Americans were registered due to discriminatory barriers such as literacy tests. Thousands of people had been arrested already, and at the end of February, a state trooper shot and killed a church deacon peacefully demonstrating in nearby Marion, causing the SCLC’s James Bevel to call for a march from Selma to Montgomery to bring attention to voter rights and police brutality. And so on what would come to be known as Bloody Sunday, John Lewis, then the chairman of SNCC (the acronym is pronounced “snick”) and now a U.S. congressman, and Hosea Williams of the SCLC took their places at the front of roughly six hundred people to march the fifty-odd miles to the state capital, many of them wearing overcoats and backpacks full of reading material and snacks in case they were arrested. As they approached Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge—named for a Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon—they couldn’t see the other side, because of the way the bridge arched upward at its longest span. They couldn’t see the line of 150 Alabama state troopers—some of whom had been deputized that day, just for the occasion—waiting with their gas masks and billy clubs on the orders of Governor George Wallace. When they did spot the policemen, Williams asked Lewis if he knew how to swim, indicating the Alabama River, one hundred feet below. Watching footage of what happened next is enough to make you weep, even more than fifty years later. The troopers advanced, beating and gassing the protesters, fracturing Lewis’s skull and causing him and sixteen other people to be hospitalized. As images of the violence raced across America, the nation largely was aghast. Two more marches and a little more than a week later, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a voting rights bill to Congress, and the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in August of that year.
In the decades since, Lewis has reenacted that march annually. The entire route is now designated as a U.S. National Historic Trail, which passes by the National Voting Rights Museum, and in 2013, the bridge was honored as a National Historic Landmark. In 2015, Lewis walked hand in hand with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as they led a crowd of forty thousand back over the span to honor and remember the fiftieth anniversary of that day. “That’s why a march is such a good metaphor, because the march is one that always has a new leg to it, a new twist to it, a new bridge to cross,” the president said in a speech that day at the foot of the Pettus. “Each generation, each successive generation, has to walk that mile.” See Lewis, John.
(1935–2013)
JOHN WALDEN EGERTON, BORN ON JUNE 14, 1935, in Atlanta, grew up in Cadiz, Kentucky, where his father was a traveling salesman and his mother was a shopkeeper. Egerton showed early talent for writing, covering high-school sports for the Cadiz Record while still in grade school. After serving in the army and earning two degrees from the University of Kentucky, he worked for the University of Kentucky and the University of South Florida before moving to Nashville in 1965 to write about school desegregation efforts for the Southern Education Reporting Service.
By 1971, Egerton had established himself as an independent journalist and author. Over forty-plus years, he wrote hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and ten books of history and literary nonfiction, focused on the American South. In The Americanization of Dixie, published in 1974, he foretold a future when the South would adopt the North’s brusque and industrial ways. The North, he wrote, would soon buy into the South’s worst instincts, born of slavery and nurtured by Jim Crow. He described the process as a mutual exchange of sins and predicted “deep divisions along race and class lines, an obsession with growth and acquisition and consumption, a headlong rush to the cities and the suburbs, diminution and waste of natural resources, institutional malfunctioning, abuse of political and economic power, increasing depersonalization, and a steady erosion of the sense of place, of community, of belonging.”
Egerton served the South as a moral bellwether, writing about cultural identity, race relations, and what we now know as foodways. At a time when most food books celebrated mint juleps and skillet-fried chicken, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History, published in 1987, read like a social history. Egerton paid homage to the working-class folk on whose backs Southern food culture was built. And he claimed food as a talisman for the region, arguing that “no other form of cultural expression, not even music, is as distinctively characteristic of the region.” As interest in Southern foodways accelerated in the twenty-first century, Southern Food served as a road map for the next generation of writers.
Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, published in 1994, was his second big book. As with Southern Food, Egerton focused on Southerners who had not previously gotten their due. Speak Now explored how progressive blacks and whites had conspired in the 1930s and 1940s to break the back of Jim Crow. A mix of personal narrative and deeply researched history, it won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Later in his career, Egerton emerged as a public figure, called to give talks about the state of the region. Dressed often in gray slacks and a blue button-down, looking like a rumpled college professor, Egerton extolled the virtues of Southern food and spoke truths about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. In that role as public intellectual, Egerton, along with forty-nine other cooks and writers whom he recruited to the cause, drove the 1999 founding of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi.
His belief in the possibilities of welcome table conversations inspired the nonprofit. “Even if this is the best regional food in America,” Egerton would say, “it’s still endangered by genetic modification, mass production, focus group marketing, modern technology, accelerated living, family disintegration, cultural homogenization, celebrity chefs, yuppie gazers, scientifically raised hogs, shellfish depletion, politically correct tofu, and instant grits.”
At times, Egerton seemed to pine for a time past, when smokehouse-cured country ham and skillet-fried chicken were birthrights, not artisanal goods. “When the chemistry is right, a meal in the South can still be an esthetic wonder,” he wrote, “a sensory delight, a mystical experience.” But he was no fabulist. Egerton was critical of this place he loved. “I’m not advocating a return to ‘the good old days’ of some mythic past,” he said. “For most people, they were never all that good to begin with.” In his writing and thinking, John Egerton, who died on November 21, 2013, challenged the region and its people to realize its long-deferred promise.
(1939–)
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY was considered trash, good for nothing more than snapshots. Then came William Eggleston. By shooting the very things that made up snapshots—parking lots, teenage girls on a sofa, an exposed lightbulb against a red ceiling, a tricycle in an empty suburb—Eggleston turned color photography into high art. When the Museum of Modern Art first featured his work, in a 1976 solo exhibition, his distinctive dye-transfer colors and Delta vernacular subject matter flipped the art world upside down. Reportedly proud to have never owned a pair of blue jeans, Eggleston was born to a wealthy family in Memphis and raised in Sumner, Mississippi, and by the time he was a teenager was cruising around town in matching baby-blue Cadillacs with his girlfriend, Rosa, who later became his wife. He attended Vanderbilt, Delta State College, and Ole Miss but refused to take tests and never graduated from anywhere. Now the ultimate art-world insider-outsider, Eggleston is known for an aloof Deep South elegance attuned to the region’s grit—but not so much grit that he’d ever need to wear denim.
ÉTOUFFÉE IS A DISH SO GOOD IT STRADDLES Cajun and Creole cuisines—surfacing everywhere from the small-town Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, to the New Orleans fine-dining mecca Galatoire’s. The original French étouffer means “to smother,” in this case in a gravy that often begins with a tan roux and ends in a buttery stew of well-seasoned crawfish, shrimp, or crab; the holy trinity of bell peppers, onions, and celery; and chopped parsley and green onion, all served over rice. Other ingredients, such as tomato or cream, vary from family to family and arouse passionate debate.
DEEP IN THE LARGEST SUBTROPICAL WILDERNESS in the United States, the great fishing guide Steve Huff tells me it’s time to reel up and stow the rod. He eases the boat down Lost Man’s River, headed for the wide-open Gulf of Mexico. But when we reach the boca, we are blasted by the wind. The once-drowsy Gulf—our fastest route home—is now frothed by rolling whitecaps. Huff’s flats skiff is the perfect vessel for stalking laid-up tarpon—stealthy and shallow-drafting. It’s not much good, however, in an angry sea.
“We’ll take the back way,” he says. By that, he means traveling through the mangrove-lined backcountry of the Everglades, that seemingly inscrutable labyrinth of creeks, rivers, lagoons, and black-water lakes. Huff navigates it all without a map or GPS. Going this way adds an extra two hours to the trip, but the time passes unnoticed, as if in a dream.
We stop once. Deep in a tangle of mangroves, Huff points out a nearly extinct type of vanilla orchid. Its hanging vines are adorned with buttons of startlingly white petals. It is the Everglades in microcosm: beautiful, rare, and threatened.
The Everglades are true, unbridled nature, where Melville’s “great floodgates of the wonder-world” swing wide open. Swallow-tailed kites, man-o’-war birds, great horned owls, ospreys, and roseate spoonbills, in their psychedelic pink, own the skies. Insects thrum in the mangroves. Nine-foot-long crocodiles sun on the beach, unnerving in their serene nonchalance. A copse of tall skeletal trees, bleached by the sun, stands decades after Hurricane Andrew swiftly slayed them.
Then there are the fish, the reason that many of us visit the Everglades and swing open those floodgates. The ever-willing sea trout. The flats-cruising redfish. The surly snook hanging tight to the mangroves. And, of course, the tarpon—glowing like a precious metal in the sheet of ever-moving brackish water, a jungle fish entirely in its element.
The Everglades are the last true frontier in the American South, and one of the last in the country. They are a sanctuary in more ways than one: your cell phone will not get service in the backcountry. Even the towns—Everglades City and Chokoloskee—have an outpost feel, their legions of mosquitoes having successfully defended them from high-rises and resorts. It’s no accident that self-reliant people like Huff call this place home. He’s never had an email address.
Despite the mosquitoes, the Everglades remain under siege, in ways both substantial and petty. Pollution from the sugar industry poisons the headwaters. Politicians have been known to shirk their duty as stewards of this public land, one of the last best places on earth. Orchid thieves selfishly poach beauty. But nature persists, for now, anyway.
The Everglades matter. They are worth fighting for. “Man only cares for things he knows,” said Aldo Leopold. Go there, and lose yourself within the wilderness.