Yachts
Tuscaloosa
2000
I had driven Honoree Fanonne Jeffers to North River Yacht Club where she would give a reading from her new book The Gospel of Barbecue. She had graduated from Alabama a few years before I arrived to teach. We sat in the car in the parking lot of the Yacht Club, the tony country club overlooking an artificial lake. The paper company had built it on paper company land in the 70s when it became more profitable to grow houses and golf courses than pine trees. Jack Warner, who owned the paper company, also owned the largest collection of American Colonial Art in the country. The Smithsonian asked him every year if he will will the art to them, I told Honoree. We talked about local barbecue. Tuscaloosa is located at the intersection of red and yellow sauces. And we were (are?) both Hoosiers. She was born in Kokomo. What did it mean to be a writer of “place” when writing in some other place? Inside, the Yacht Club’s walls were filled with 18th century American art, so many folk art renderings of Washingtons on white horses.