If this looks like procrastination, then it isn’t, otherwise not.
Yesterday the book I ordered as research material for our Hale County/Greensboro Alabama documentary arrived. Tangentially, or nearly so, this documentary concept is a parallel to the Designing Change story that we started (un)covering on our recent trip to the rural south. We became enamored with the rural Alabama town that was our home for two weeks. On its surface, it displayed all the features of Southern small-town-ness. But one scratch, one glance behind a curtain and suddenly the place seemed to ask more questions that it answered. And what better way to discover a place than to tell its story – or, better, the story of its people.
And in that vein, came the book. Guarding Greensboro (Hubbs, 2003) is, on its surface, a history of the Greensboro’s militia – a company of men that served together during the American Civil war (or, the War of Northern Aggression, or The Great Northern Rebellion depending on which set of grandparents you’re talking to). But, like the town it describes, once into its depths, the book reveals much subtle detail about the lives, loves, deaths and driving ambitions of grandure of the town’s early citizenry.
At a third of the way through the book (really, too early to write a review, which this isn’t, by the way), I’m struck by how many names I recognize – great-grandfathers and grandmothers of people I’ve met in that small town. And what strikes me is that though the book was written about a time-span of 40 years over beginning of 170 years ago, the stories it tells and the characters it portrays seem incredibly similar to the ones I encountered just two weeks ago in that same little Alabama town.
No, I’m not saying the town is exactly the same as it was. Much has changed – slavery has ended, cotton is gone, many of the grand houses along Main street lie in disrepair, catfish is king – but still there is this feeling of a town that’s never quite hit its stride, that’s never quite come fully together, that’s never quite become the community it could have been. It’s both sad and uplifting. 180 years of striving.
Perhaps the town should have been called Tenacity, Alabama.
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Hubbs, G. W., Guarding Greensboro. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
