Two weeks before my seventh birthday, my family left the sandy red dirt of the wiregrass region of Lower Alabama and moved to Birmingham, a roiling city built in the shadow of Red Mountain in the southern Appalachians. The move should have been a shock—I was leaving a town untouched by open conflict for a city notorious for its racist convulsions of water cannons and police dogs and church bombings—but I was six. I knew nothing of that. I missed the pine trees.
We returned to Lower Alabama often because my grandparents still lived there, in the house where my grandfather was born, and our long family history and frequent visits might explain why I imprinted on that landscape so wholly. Or perhaps it was the open windows, a time when what happened outside the house was felt indoors, or the innocence that sent children outside to play after breakfast, not to return till hunger drove them home again. I am a creature of piney woods and folded terrain, of birdsong and running creeks and a thousand shades of green, of forgiving soil that yields with each footfall. That hot land is a part of me, as fundamental to my shaping as a family member, and I would have remembered its precise features with an ache of homesickness even if I had never seen it again.
It would take all the words in Remembrance of Things Past to catalog what I remember about the place where I was born, but there are three things that can bring it all back to me in startling detail: the sight of a red dirt road, the smell of pine needles, and the sound of a blue jay’s call. And of those three, by far the most powerful is the call of the jaybird.
I love the blue jay’s warning call, the jeer-jeer, jeer-jeer it makes when a hawk is near. I love the softer wheedle wheedle wheedle and please please song for its mate. Blue jays have an immense range of vocalizations—whirring and clicking and churring and whistling and whining and something you’d swear was a whisper—but the sound they make that takes me right back to 1968 is a call that mimics a squeaky screen-door hinge. I hear that sound coming from the top of a pine tree, and instantly I am in the wiregrass region of Lower Alabama, where the soil is red sand, and pine needles make a scented bower fit for all my imagined homes.