In a car more suited to light grocery shopping or picking the kids up from soccer practice, our friends Conor Creighton and Kendall Waldman are travelling across the bottom half of the USA on a road trip from South Carolina to California. They’ll be trying to swerve the cliches to send us updates on all the cool stuff they come across. The series' name is From Sea to Shining Sea.
We came to Alabama on the hunt for a woman named Kathryn Tucker Windham. Apparently, Kathryn had a way with ghosts. Apparently, she met them and told their stories and even shared her home with one. Geoffrey – her house ghost – rocks chairs in the night and has the habit of pushing cakes off the edges of counters. I guess the ghost must live on, but unfortunately Kathryn died some months before we got there. So, having lost our mouthpiece to the dead to death itself, we met Kathryn's old love, Charlie "Tinman" Lucas.
It’s funny, but along the route so far we’ve been picking up on patterns. For all our attempts to avoid cliche, Southern charm isn’t a put-on: the "gee golly, Miss Molly" patter is as potent in the 24-hour gas station at five in the morning, as it is later on that evening in a fine antebellum home. The "You’re not from around here" line comes out at least once a day, but it’s not aggressive and so far hasn’t led to being hog-tied. But the most consistent pattern we’ve picked up on is that, if you meet a black man over the age of 50, he’ll try and pass on some advice, and nine times out of ten that advice will be about love.
“Protect the queen of your bloodline.”
“Never let a woman lie to you more than three times,”
or the favourite:
“Handle jealousy with as much care as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
The Tinman didn’t want to give us advice but he did tell us all about his love for Kathryn. This is a sweet tale, so don’t pull that face. The two of them got together in a time when mixed race couples might have existed in cities, but they certainly did not in backwoods Alabama. The Tinman was an illiterate outsider from a poor farming family, while Kathryn was a big-time journalist and an internationally respected author. They met by chance when a group of local Alabaman artists were brought to France for an exhibition. Kathryn was hungry. The Tinman fixed her a sandwich and from that day on they were – and they do actually say this in the South – "like peas and carrots".
“She bit into that tomato and she lit up like a Christmas tree and I knew then that she loved me,” says the Tinman.
They lived as neighbours for ten years. The Tinman asked Kathryn to pull her curtains wide open each morning when she got up so he’d know she was still breathing. “Else I’d have to come over and jump start her,” he’d say.
The Tinman and Kathryn used to go dumpster-diving, picking up junk that he’d then weld into toys.
“Me and her was always getting into something,” is how he describes it.
The Tinman may be seen as a great outsider artist but he’s broke. His studio is an old candy factory with holes crackling through the ceiling. The train blows by and the whole structure shakes like a house of cards on a waterbed. The studio’s falling apart gracefully and it’s not paid for yet.
Still, Tinman’s got other plans. He’s lonely for a woman.
“Oh, I’ll find her. I’ll meet her in the drugstore or on the sidewalk, at a stalled car. All that matters is that it’s cool.”Follow Conor on Twitter: @conorcreightonPreviously: From Sea to Shining Sea - Selma and Louise
Annons
Listen to Tinman telling the tale of his love for Kathryn by clicking on that funny little icon above.The Tinman travels through Alabama picking up bits of scrap and throwaways that he then magics into sculptures which he calls toys. He’s in about 40 books and is feted by big city galleries who pin him as some sort of backwoods Basquiat, but for the Tinman his art is nothing more than a chance to make the toys he couldn’t have as a child. You see, the Tinman’s parents had to keep him away from other people as he acted different, and they kept his creations hidden in case the neighbours accused him of witchcraft. Being a black witch back then was about as healthy for your prospects as running an abortion clinic is today.
Annons
The Tinman didn’t want to give us advice but he did tell us all about his love for Kathryn. This is a sweet tale, so don’t pull that face. The two of them got together in a time when mixed race couples might have existed in cities, but they certainly did not in backwoods Alabama. The Tinman was an illiterate outsider from a poor farming family, while Kathryn was a big-time journalist and an internationally respected author. They met by chance when a group of local Alabaman artists were brought to France for an exhibition. Kathryn was hungry. The Tinman fixed her a sandwich and from that day on they were – and they do actually say this in the South – "like peas and carrots".