Tuesday, December 03, 2002
I'm writing this entry from the Linn-Henley Research Library at the Birmingham Public Library. I'm not sure when I'll be able to post it. Later today, I hope. At the moment, it's 12:18 p.m. Back at Liberty House, Jennifer is overseeing the movers. Here, I'm trying to get a little work done, amid the chaos. Well, there's no chaos here. Here is one of the very few places, one of the few things, that I will miss about Birmingham, Alabama. This long gallery with its seven tall windows facing south, its great mural of mythological and literary figures, painted by Ezra Winter in the late 1920s. The dark wooden shelves. The calm. This room appears in Threshold, of course. Chance and Dancy have a short conversation here. In Low Red Moon, Deacon walks past this room on his way to the pay phone. If you'd like to see the murals, visit the BPL website, at BPLOnline. There will be a photo of the mural in Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold. When I was a kid, before they built the ugly, angular new library building on the other side of Twenty-First Street, with its featureless, smooth, 90-degree walls and pointy glass atrium, this was the central portion of the BPL and on rare occasions I'd get to come here from Leeds. It seemed like a very long trip at the time. This place always felt, to me, like a church. Good libraries often feel like churches to me. When Poppy and I visited the old library at Trinity College in Dublin back in 1996, we both cried at the sight of it; awe and reverence and the weight of so many books and time and history stacked about us. This is becoming a rather long paragraph, isn't it? Sorry.
Hopefully, the movers will be done by 2 p.m. and, after a last check through the loft, we can be on our way to Atlanta.
I've spent 61 months of my life in Liberty House. When I was a kid, when this was the main library building, Liberty House was the factory for Liberty Overalls. It had been a sweatshop during the 1930s and '40s. There are still holes in the hardwood floors where the massive sewing machines and cutting tables and such were bolted. One wonders what ghosts haunt such a place, who the women were who spent their lives working in the heat and noise and air heavy with dangerous textile fibers and the stink of dye. Their callused hands. The place has its share of odd angles, as visitors have often remarked to me. Anyway, 61 months, more than five years. It's hard not feel a little sad, leaving the place for what will be the last time. This morning, I checked my e-mail in my eviscerated office, the last "work" I'll ever do from Liberty House.
There will be a few other things I'll miss about Birmingham, to be honest. I've gotten a good number of e-mails the last few months, chiding me for being so down on the "Magic City." Personally, I think I've been not half so hard on it as it's been on me, and many, many others. It's still not a friendly place, but there has been progress. This may yet be a good place someday. Maybe. I'll miss dining at Silvertron in Forest Park and at Surin West (Thai) at Five Points South. I'll miss the sight of the Red Mountain cut (again, see Threshold), with its spectacular layer cake of Palaeozoic sedimentary rocks. I'll miss some of the old buildings downtown — the Redmont, the Tutwiler, the Transportation Building. I'll miss cobblestoned Morris Avenue, which has figured so prominently in my writing. I'll miss the old Alabama Theater, one of the South's last grand movie palaces, with its "Mighty Wurlitzer" organ. I'll miss the Fourth of July fireworks over Red Mountain, and the rusting, Gigeresque hulk of Sloss Furnace. I'll miss the little parks along Highland Avenue — Rhodes, Rushton, and Caldwell — where I've spent many summer and autumn afternoons walking. I'll miss oddities like the water works tunnel, and the Temple of the Sibyl in Vestavia. But I think that's about it. A few good things, but nothing to keep me here.
I'll not miss the small-mindedness of so many of the city's inhabitants, their dogged unwillingness to let go of old hatreds and fears and ignorance. All the old prejudices that Birmingham likes to pretend are old, but which are still alive and well and obvious to anyone who doesn't fit the mold. Once, I thought that the whole wide world must surely be as fouled by this meanness of spirit, this hardness of soul and mind, but then I spent time in places where people have better things to do than try to mind the business of others. Someday, maybe the conformist Bible-Belt mindset and its accompanying xenophobia will vanish from Birmingham. I'd like to think so, because there are some good people here who surely deserve better. And please, don't bother e-mailing to tell me how I've not been fair to this city. I probably won't read whatever it is you write and I have been fairer to Birmingham than it has ever been to me. And I've lived here, on and off, since 1983, so I think it's safe to say I've given the place "a chance" to show me its good side. It's not my duty, as a writer, to heap undeserved flattery upon places I've lived. It's my duty as a writer to tell the truth, as best I can see it, even at the risk of being both wrong and unpopular for having done so. The City Council can deal with Birmingham's image problems.
I am moving on. Those who stay behind will make of Birmingham what they may, with whatever strength and resolve and insight they find to carry it foreword. I'm not burning a bridge, I'm only crossing one. It will always be there, behind me.
My film-rights agent at UTA in Los Angeles asked, a little while back, how leaving Birmingham would affect my writing, as so many of my books and stories have been set here. At the time, we thought I was going all the way to Providence, not just over the state line to Atlanta. But I couldn't answer him then and I still can't. All I can say is, "We'll see." The next novel, the one I'll begin writing this month (tentatively titled Murder of Angels) will divide itself evenly between Birmingham and San Francisco. And then I intend to set no more novels here. Maybe the occasional short story, but that's all.
I should go now, as there are other things that need attending to.
Posted Tuesday a.m. by Jennifer. We are in Atlanta
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