Joe Bageant

Vituperation

By Joe Bageant

Some people just cannot let a thing drop. Some people will sashay right in here with that smart mouth of theirs and run a subject right into the ground while other people are doing their level best to make this chicken house a home. Run a thing right into the ground and break it off at the nub! Mama Love and I were putting up contact paper on all the cabinets when Sister Ony marches in and throws herself down on a dinette chair. She says in that mouthy righteous tone of hers: "If Papa John hadn't a dug up old Colonel Davison from back yard so he could put is the new septic tank we wouldn't be living in the chicken house today. And if Papa John hadn't a dug up his old Confederate bones Papa John wouldn't have incurred God's wrath and our house would never have burned down," she says.

Whiskey, Snakes and Voltaire

By Joe Bageant

I called the old man Grandpap. But most of my mother's family called him a son of a bitch. Which never bothered me. I still liked him.

During the summers when I visited him in North Carolina I'd sit with the old man on the front porch of his cabin and plink away with a .22 rifle at whatever critters crawled out of the swamp. Sometimes if I got lucky it was a water moccasin snake. But more often it was a feral cat, a plain old housecat gone wild in the swamp -- which the old man pronounced to rhyme with stamp. Swaaamp.

Prince of a Different Peace

By Joe Bageant

In an ancient rural county in West Virginia on Christmas morning, a bent old man with a face like gentle twisted wildwood will raise the American flag in the frost. Then he will go back indoors, sit down quietly amid the smells of cooking, light his pipe and dream.

My Uncle Nelson raises the flag every morning at the secluded nursing home in the hills of Morgan County, West Virginia. If anyone in this world should have that right, it is he. Because Uncle Nelson, whom we called Nels, never left Morgan County in his life. Not even once.

Under the Wolf Star

By Joe Bageant

Christmas 1932 was as cold as the summer had been dry. The third straight summer of withering draught had dropped like a scourge across my Grandpap's cornfields. Dwarfed and twisted, the pale corn plants had struggled along hard before their brittle death. Bundling the knee-high stalks into pitiful shocks, Pappy looked like a giant on the land harvesting them. The shocks were saved back to feed the lone Poland China hog Pap could afford to feed that year. In a normal year there would have been six, maybe eight. One hog to feed a family of five. One hog and two hundred pounds of cornmeal. The family was not starving. But they could feel that mild gnawing hunger which cannot be put out of mind.

Lonzy Barker Is Missing

By Joe Bageant

Lonzy Barker is missing. Has been for several months now. Nobody noticed it until that smelly old hermit didn't show up here at Dalton Bayles' post office store for his sardines and rock candy. "He could be layin' over there in his pigpen dead or something," says Dalton. Did I tell you, dear reader, that Lonzy Barker lives in a pigpen? Always has. Anyway, after three months of Lonzy's government checks piling up in the pigeonhole, Dalton has decided Lonzy "just might be -- I ain't saying he is and I ain't saying he ain't -- missing.

The Panther in the Sycamore

By Joe Bageant

It happens perhaps once or twice every August. A violent red Virginia sundown drapes the land, the kind that bathes the farmhouses and ponds in reflected blood. It is as if the heat absorbed during dog days will erupt from the earth to set all the fields afire. Distant cars raise threatening dust clouds on the horizon that settle on the backs of copperhead snakes in wait of the night's coolness and the hunt. Eternity flashes in the eyes of old farmers setting out salt blocks for white-faced cattle.

Pert' near bit

By Joe Bageant

I suppose that, compared to some people's childhood, mine were days of chocolate cake and junebug glory. But it had its dangers. Our parents and relatives endlessly reminded us of the little girl who fell into the hog pen and was eaten, or the boy who drowned swimming in the quarry or got his hand cut off messing with the buzz saw on tractor's power take-off. Another more real danger was snakes. Snakes were a part of life. Everyone at some point in their lives "pert' near got bit" while hoeing gardens, cutting pulpwood, pulling down hay bales or bringing up a stringer of fish at night along the Shenandoah at night. Sometimes water moccasins swallowed the fish on the stringer and you would pull up a bundle of engorged moccasins.

Queen of the Skies

By Joe Bageant

As I drove through the decaying neighborhood in Winchester, Virginia the pain of growing up there came back -- the stabbing kind that only lasts a second but makes you flinch as you remember some small but stupid and brutal moment of adolescence. I have never known if everyone has them, but I've always suspected they do. Now that old neighborhood slid by my rental car window looking like it was painted by Edward Hopper, then bleakly populated with gangstas, old men with forty-ounce malt liquor bottles, hard-working single moms and kids on cheap busted plastic tricycles.

Blood and Poppies

By Joe Bageant

My family's ancestral home on Shanghai Road, a great sagging clapboard thing perched on a hill with its many filigreed balconies and porches like heisted antebellum petticoats, sat perched on a hill at the base of Sleepy Creek Mountain. Gnawed by the elements on the outside and woodsmoked by a thousand griddlecake mornings on the inside, where children ran the stairways and mice ran the cellars, my grandparent's house was stuffed and running over with life itself.

Whiskey, Snakes and Voltaire

Writing on things Southern and past

Websites are a wonderful thing in that they can house a lifetime of work if need be. I'm not up for the world to see all I have written. So much of it, both published and unpublished is so bad. However, I do think some of it documents or speaks to an America that scarcely exists today, one that was kinder, more mysterious and certainly more connected with the earth and its verities. In this section, "Things Southern," rests a collection of essays, notes, remembrances and mental shards of a Southern boyhood in Virginia. Some are absolutely true, some shift back and forth between truth and fiction and some are outright lies. I will leave it to the reader to discern the difference. I certainly cannot.