Macon, where soul lives

“Gregg Allman proposed to Cher here,” reads the plaque at the Downtown Grill.

Nearby, “Little Richard often performed at Ann’s Tic Toc,” a nightclub that openly cultivated a LGBTQ  crowd even in the repressive 1940s. And around the corner, Otis Redding made his volcanic debut at the Douglass Theatre, which is surrounded by a Hollywood-style “Walk of Fame” honoring several Black artists.

Move over, Daughters of the Confederacy. Commemorative signs in downtown Macon just got a lot funkier.

Rock Candy Tours, working with other civic partners, has blazed the Macon Music Trail with 43 markers – and more coming — to showcase the city’s storied and tuneful history. You can walk it or drive it, with or without a guide.

“Nowhere else in the world has a soundtrack like Macon,” says Jessica Walden, who founded the tour group with her husband, Jamie Weatherford. “We’re big believers in using these stories and landmarks to inspire — not just the music but what it stood for. It changed the world. It was here in Macon, in a deeply divided, segregated South, that artists catapulted into the mainstream, against all odds, and integrated audiences. What happened here was the ultimate lesson in diversity and inclusion. If our walls could talk, they would sing.”

It is impossible to imagine modern popular music without those roots in the navel of Georgia. Little Richard is widely regarded as the “architect of rock n’ roll.” James Brown cut his first record here and invented funk. Otis Redding honed his distinctive vibrato to “worry a note,” as he put it, and define soul music. Then came Capricorn Records and its development of guitar-shredding Southern Rock. Two members of R.E.M., William Berry and Mike Mills, grew up here.

Macon, with its columned mansions, Spanish moss, and moonlight-and-magnolias vibe, seems an unlikely epicenter for a countercultural explosion, but it has been hippie heaven ever since the Allman Brothers breezed into town, slinging their axes and trailing long, cornsilk hair. Graying ponytails on men still abound, as does cannabis.

The hedonistic Capricorn era, from 1969 to the late 1970s, was Macon’s Camelot, and when it faded, the city struggled to define its identity.  One civic motto was “Sherman missed us, but you don’t have to!” – an oblique allusion to meticulously preserved antebellum architecture that escaped some visitors. In the 2000s, boosters decided to lean into everyone’s primary complaint with “It’s hotter here!” Today, it has settled comfortably on “Where Soul Lives.”

“Whatever the essence of soul food, soul ties, soul music, is – that’s Macon,” says Lisa Love, director of the Georgia Music Foundation. “It’s raw and unvarnished and imperfect, but that’s fertile ground for creators and characters, and Macon’s long been a wellspring for both.”

The downtown that languished in the doldrums of urban blight for years has sprung to giddy new life and now claims a 98 percent occupancy rate, with the addition of an estimated 2,000 loft dwellings. They have attracted young, sleek scenesters, who gather for drinks on the new rooftop bar, called simply “45,” and dine at high-end farm-to-table restaurants.

“I left Atlanta to come here, where a typical rush hour is only 15 minutes,” says preservationist Ennis Willis. “People who live in Atlanta think the only other worthwhile places in Georgia are Savannah and St. Simons and that the rest of the state is just a vast wasteland of rednecks and pottery. That simply isn’t true. Macon is exploding with energy.”

A prime mover in this renaissance is The Moonhanger Group, headed by native son Wes Griffith, which has purchased, one by one, several dilapidated music landmarks and restored them to their vintage glory. In 2020, the group teamed up with Mercer University to bring back Capricorn Sound Studios, where artists can use original analog equipment while channeling Duane Allman, or pioneer something new, amid the shag carpeting and groovy, psychedelic art.

At its interactive museum, visitors can listen through a vast digital archive of music recorded there.  A stone’s throw away is another Moonhanger project: Grant’s Lounge. Back in the day, it functioned as an informal, Black-run audition space for the studio, and features a “wall of fame” worth perusing – images of artists in the grip of dreams coming true. Griffith also bought the H&H restaurant, where Gregg Allman wolfed down collard greens to lube his prized vocal cords.

Another revamped stalwart from the 1970s is The Rookery, a restaurant and venue where Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones reportedly partied ‘til they passed out.

Whether your interest is music, architecture, or history, the city offers plenty to do on a weekend getaway, usually with some memorable Southern Gothic twist involved. The locals are friendly and notably given to stem-winding storytelling — savor that charming midstate drawl, with its taffy-like vowels and complete absence of the letter “r.” A few options include:

• White settlers only arrived in 1823, but the land along the Ocmulgee River was occupied for more than 10 millennia of continuous human habitation by various groups of indigenous people. They left behind seven mounds, built before 1000 CE, one of which you can enter and sense the eerie, goosebump-prickling weight of time.

It was the site of the largest archaeology dig in American history, yielding three million artifacts. The surrounding historical park recently has been expanded to create the first National Park and Preserve in the state of Georgia, enlarging the current 700 acres to nearly 3,000. 

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation was the last group to occupy the riverbank, until Andrew Jackson  forced them West.. Their descendants have not forgotten their homeland, though. The Nation has just dispatched a new advocate, Tracie Revis, from Oklahoma to Macon to strengthen ties between the eastern and western communities and to improve interpretations of this sacred space.

 “I grew up hearing stories about our homeland,” she says. “I believe there has been unintentional misrepresentations of our past, politically and culturally. My move to Macon is to help bridge the connection back to the culture and the tribe.”
Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park will host the Annual Ocmulgee Indian Celebration September 21-22, one of the largest gatherings of its kind.

• The sign on the instrument says, “Do not play Little Richard’s piano. He will know.” It is one of hundreds of artifacts at the Tubman Museum, among the country’s largest museums dedicated to educating people about the art, history, and culture of Black Americans. A detailed mural explores Black history in general, and Macon’s African-American history in particular. One touching exhibit is the uniform of Rodney Davis, who received the Medal of Honor. “We’re showing history though African-American eyes, but it is history for everybody, says executive director Harold Young. The Tubman also engages the community with arts-related events, including storytelling, movie nights, and a Pan-African Festival.
  
  
• The crown jewel of Macon’s historic district is the Johnston-Felton-Hay House, more commonly known as just the “Hay House.” It is 18,000 square feet and 26 rooms of Italian Renaissance Revival opulence. “We’re in a constant state of restoration,” says Willis, who is executive director. Magnate William Butler Johnston married Anne Clark Tracy, a polished woman from a prominent Macon family, and the two embarked on a lengthy honeymoon in Europe, where they collected fine porcelains, sculptures, and paintings as mementos of their Grand Tour. Inspired by Italian architecture, they constructed their home, which was finished in 1860. It would have made a rich target for Gen. Sherman on his wrathful “March to the Sea,” but he famously missed Macon.

Meet rock ‘n roll shutterbug Kirk West

In his 50-plus years as a photographer, Kirk West has never taken a selfie.

Some friends wish he would, though, because West is undeniably picturesque. His laugh lines run deep in a mug etched indelibly by a million late nights of mischief, excess, and good times. There is the telltale, throwback ponytail, a rainbow tapestry of fading tattoos swirling around his arms, and world of knowing in his benedictory grin. On a Mount Rushmore monument of scruffy, free-wheeling partiers who have somehow survived their lifestyles in extremis, West, who is 63, belongs up there with Keith Richards, Willie Nelson, and Gregg Allman. He just prefers to keep his lens focused outward, aimed at others in his rock ‘n’ roll tribe, and they have seldom enjoyed a more affectionate and canny documentarian.  

“The gift that photography is to me is the ability to see something, feel something, and share it with someone without saying a word,” he says, “and have that other person experience those same feelings.”

From 1989 to 2010, West was tour manager for the Allman Brothers Band, a position he likens to “maitre’d for the best party in the world.” Since coming off the road, he has been taking inventory of his archive – several decades’ worth of hundreds of negatives from moments he mostly remembers. “There’ll be shit I scan that I don’t remember, but 98 percent of the time, the whole thing comes back to me,” he says. Some of these images can be seen at Gallery West, his chic exhibition spot which opened this spring in downtown Macon, and others will appear in Les Brers:  Kirk West’s Photographic Journey with The Brothers, a mammoth coffeetable book – more than 250 pages of 350+ images – scheduled for publication this autumn.

“Kirk West is one of the best photographers I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” says Chuck Leavell, keyboardist for the Allman Brothers and the Rolling Stones. “He has a keen eye for capturing the moment as well as the personality of his subjects. We’ve worked together in several different circumstances, and it is always a joy to see him behind his camera. I’m really pleased that he now has his own gallery in Macon where visitors can enjoy his work.”

Gallery West plans to hold revolving exhibits of the music-related photography of others, along with its standing, permanent collection of West’s work, a visual “who’s who” of seemingly everyone who has commandeered a stage and galvanized a crowd in the past half-century. There’s Bob Marley levitating, his dreadlocks standing on end like ecstatic snakes, and here is Tom Waits, wreathed in cigarette smoke and rooting around in garbage cans. “I could do the whole gallery in Tom Waits,” West says. Chuck Leavell looks doe-eyed and gentle in his portraits, while Keith Richards – labeled as “Keef” — is all gristle and taut sinew, and Iggy Pop glowers like some feral creature. You can see the perspiration dripping off hard-working Bruce Springsteen. Peter Tosh is smoking a blunt, and Sting is roller skating in a Mickey Mouse shirt. And, in one shot that captures two distinctly different artists at work, James Brown and Charlie Daniels share a stage in Nashville – “The Godfather and the Fiddler.” (A visitor suggested it be titled “Ebony and Irony.”) Most of these images are shot in black-and-white rather than color.

“I have a lot of great color work, especially in my recent travel photos, but black-and-white is my passion,” West says, “For 20 years, I saw the world in textures and shades of gray. I feel that the B&W prints create a more timeless feel of the image. It also demands that you examine or embrace the subject more intimately, rather than just be dazzled by the colors.”

All of his images consistently thrum with a sense of immediacy and in-the-moment closeness; you can hear, and feel, the music in them.

“What makes his photos stand out is that it’s not just some flat image of a guy with a guitar,” says Alan Paul, author of One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. “Kirk regards his subjects with great empathy. He has the vision to see past the surface and looks inside, into the heart and soul of his subjects, to see the whole person. Kirk is an artist himself, so he truly sees and appreciates the artist in others.”

And, as West phrases it, he has learned through long experience to “anticipate the moment of ejaculation” – the money shot, as it were.

West grew up in the town of Nevada, Iowa, of Norwegian descent, with some Pawnee Indian and “real cowboy” in his lineage. His grandmother gave him a Brownie camera when he was 10, and he began photographing cars – drag races, hot-rods, anything that moved fast. The first music act he photographed was MC5, and his first concert shoot was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He attended Iowa State, and in 1968 joined Students for a Democratic Society “for the reefer and girls” – an affiliation that led him to the notorious Democratic Convention in Chicago that year.

“I wanted to be in San Francisco where the revolution was going down, but Chicago was closer and therefore more strikeable for me,” he says.

West relocated to the Windy City and began honing his chops “down in the pit” at the sweaty blues clubs, where he photographed Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Willie Dixon and others. He also made his way to every rock club and music venue, which he breached easily enough by bribing the gatekeepers with a joint or two; security guards evidently like to toke, too. One night, at a Chicago joint called Beaver’s, he discovered an act that quickly became his favorite.

“There was this band of hippies playing loud as shit,” he recalls, “and they looked like us. Their ‘Blackhearted Woman’ knocked me upside the head. Their music changed my life.”

West had discovered the Allman Brothers Band. He made it his mission to become not just their paparazzo but also their friend. “For a long time, they didn’t know my name, but they knew my face and what I carried in my pocket,” West says, referring to the weed that functioned as a handy V.I.P. pass.

West began doing regular photography work for Capricorn Records, and he ended up touring with the band. When the members “realized I could talk loud and get people to move faster,” he says, they offered him a job.

“His official title was road manager,” Paul says, “but he was also called the ‘tour mystic’ and the ‘tour magician.’ He could make things magically appear or disappear. The empathy that makes him a great photographer also served him well as the tour mystic.”  

West was an associate producer of “Dreams,” the four-CD, 20^th anniversary project of the Brothers, and he handled the visuals for several projects and album covers, including “Seven Turns,” “Shades of Two Worlds,” and “An Evening with the Allman Brothers Band.” He also shot about 75 magazine covers and three dozen LP covers for artists such as Willie Nelson, Delbert McClinton, and Son Seals.

West married his wife, Kirsten, who was an insurance executive at the time, in a rocking ceremony at one of Buddy Guy’s blues clubs in Chicago. In 1993, the Midwestern couple relocated to Macon to move into the Big House, the Vineville Avenue mansion that was home to The Allman Brothers Band’s original members from 1970 to 1973.  They restored the place; enshrined their sprawling collection of memorabilia; and established the nonprofit Big House Foundation, which assumed ownership and management of the museum in 2007, when the Wests moved to Shirley Hills.

“Renovating the place was a massive undertaking, but it was all worth it,” he says.

He directed the critically-acclaimed Please Call Home documentary, which covered the early years of the Allman Brothers Band while living at the Big House

Nowadays, West is trying to get the hang of the digital revolution, but he remains a purist a heart.

“In this day and age, the photo has gotten convoluted,” says Adam Smith, a music photographer who plans to exhibit his work at Gallery West. “Kirk knows what it means to shoot film, to hold a roll in his hand to look through a loop and choose the right negative of a shot you think about long before capturing it, hoping it comes out how you imagined it would.  That is real photography. He knows what shutter speed, aperture, and shooting at ISO 3200 means. To smell the chemicals. To have those chemicals soak through his artistic hands. Kirk is old-school.”   

Adds Paul, “I didn’t realize just how deep his archive went, and I don’t think even Kirk realized everything that was right under his nose. Now that I’ve seen his body of work, I think it stands on par with photographers like Jim Marshall (who took the iconic photo of Johnny Cash giving the middle-finger salute) and Baron Wolman of Rolling Stone magazine.”

Before opening his exhibition space in Macon, West set up pop-up galleries around the Beacon Theater and festivals where ABB fans gather, and the response to his photographs was heartening. “Kirk is finally really getting noticed,” says Paul, “and I predict I he will really be ‘discovered’ now by a much wider audience with his gallery and this book coming out.”

Paul has written an essay for Les Brers, along with Sam Cutler, former tour manager for The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead, and John Lynskey, publisher of Hittin’ the note. Guitarist Warren Haynes has contributed the foreword.

“The book will be far out,” West says, of the project that he first started mulling in the early 1980s when he was establishing himself as one of the edgiest scrapbookers around. “Fans want to see candids, of course, and I have those from all kinds of settings — golfing, bow-hunting, eating sushi in a restaurant. And there are some bloopers and outtakes of shots people wish I hadn’t taken! That’s what I’ve been digging out recently, and it’s blowing my mind. By the time I was snapping these shots, they acted like I wasn’t even there. So there’s no self-consciousness. There’s a depth of trust and openness and intimacy. It has been a trip, reliving those times.”

West looks around his gallery and sighs with satisfaction.

“I guess I’m just a sappy, old guy who loves his life,” he says, “then and now.”

‘Blind Tom’ dazzled against the odds

Any writer would have to strain not to sentimentalize Blind Tom Wiggins as rhapsodically as he played the piano.

In one of the world’s great underdog stories, he was born sightless, enslaved, and presumably autistic in 1848 in Columbus, Georgia, but he began playing the piano at age three, eventually becoming one of the 19th century’s most celebrated musicians and the first African-American to perform at the White House. A savant with an attachment to the ivories so consuming and rapturous that his hands had to be pried from the keys and distracted with sugarplums, he functioned as a sonic mirror, replicating, note for note, whatever euphonies swirled around him, from trains and birdsong to oratorios and concertos.

One account in The Washington Post describes a stormy night when the prodigy’s owners were startled to observe the child striking chords “until he had produced the exact harmony which he sought, then, springing from the piano stool would grope his way through an open window onto the veranda and, placing his ear close to the gutter, which extended along the side of the house, listened intently for a moment. Having caught the tone desired, he would hurry back to the piano and, after a few trials, reproduce it with wonderful accuracy.” These labors resulted in one of his most popular compositions called “Rain Storm.”

Tracing his biography through reviews, playbills, and other commentary, Deirdre O’Connell, an Australian documentary maker, reconstructs the life of this enigmatic musician with lyricism and annotated thoroughness. Her gimlet-eyed skepticism of certain narrators salvages the dignity of Wiggins from the exploitative hucksterism and ugly social Darwinism of the times as he was shuffled from master to unscrupulous manager. The grounding of her scholarship, though, does not prevent The Ballad of Blind Tom (The Overlook Press) from soaring into a dizzying aria, inflected by field hollers, the natural world, and the poetry — and rivening political bluster — all around him. In fact, it only affirms the marvel of his genius while placing it in the context of two exceedingly peculiar institutions: slavery and the culture of celebrity.

According to rural folkways, babies can be “marked” in-utero by a traumatic event that indelibly stamps them with a defining characteristic. Wiggins’ mother, Charity, attributed his gift to a black marching band that upheaved her soul when she was pregnant, and other enslaved people reverently diagnosed him with the “second sight.” Nevertheless, as a blind “runt,” Wiggins seemed useless to his master, who wanted him dead. Fortunately, another planter, Jim Methune, when beseeched by Charity, purchased the enslaved family on the auction block. Baby Tom was stashed in a box for a couple of years while his mother worked, and some theorize that sensory deprivation fostered his echolalia, but the more popular theory is autism. An unruly Tom could repeat an overheard, 10-minute, adult conversation, but he communicated his own wants and needs in grunts, whines, and tugs. “People on the autistic spectrum struggle to assimilate the sensory information bombarding them and many engage in repetitive behavior to deflect the overload,” O’Connell writes. “Music seems to have offered Tom this type of escape.”

Once the Bethunes realized they possessed a lucrative sideshow, they took him on the road, marketing him simultaneously as a Mozart wunderkind and “idiot Congo boy.” Reviews typically describe a blank-faced “baboon” lumbering toward the keyboard, only to produce a transcendent sound that transfigures his mien, and his stupefied listeners, with “ecstasy.” In fact, the words “ape” and “ecstasy” twine throughout this text, in which triumphs are always undermined by cruelties — and vice versa. One observer wrote: “We could plainly see, dancing in and out of the rose trees, a dark figure, leaping from bush to bush in perfect ecstasy and abandon. Knowing that Tom’s inspiration was upon him, we waited for his next move. He tumbled into the room: a confused mass of head, hands and feet, and only having partly regained his perpendicular, he announced: ‘I will now tell you what-what that stars have said to me.’ Seating himself at the piano, with a prelude of most exquisite chords, he suddenly burst into such brilliant, such wildly gay, at one moment, and at the next such heart-breaking melodies as never before or since.”

Wiggins liked to hurl coins into the fireplace, so predictably he was cheated out of the fortune he earned, the equivalent of $5 million. He no doubt had little understanding of politics, either, but he could recite the podium-pounding speeches of Georgia secessionists down to every gasbag mannerism, and his mimicry of musketry and martial marching, which produced a composition titled “The Battle of Manassas,” was used as Confederate propaganda.

“Blind Tom” appears in the writings of Mark Twain and Willa Cather. Along with his repertoire of classical masterpieces, soundscapes, hymns, and minstrelsy that was said to “out-jump Jim Crow” himself, another part of his shtick, if you could call it that, was to stand on one leg and leap across the proscenium while howling along with the audience. “The American stage had never seen anything like him,” O’Connell writes, and never will again.

Rumored to have perished in the Johnstown Flood, Wiggins made a brief comeback in vaudeville before dying of a stroke in 1908. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Brooklyn. A daughter of his former master tried to arrange for his re-interment in Georgia, but no one is certain today of the location of his remains. Like most virtuosos, Blind Tom deserved better management, wiser critics, and a more enlightened audience. But he trumped them all with his enduring compositions, and, yes, his “ecstasy.” The stars do not speak to everyone.

The woman who tamed Pat Conroy

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Cassandra King arrived hungry to a cocktail party and indelicately crammed some food into her mouth. When she saw Pat Conroy standing before her for the first time, she “choked, swallowed, and coughed before blurting out, ‘Oh, God Almighty!’” That unpretentious beginning in 1995, when both parties were in middle age, launched a sweeping tale of love and literature recounted with heartfelt grace in this memoir.

King, modest as a church mouse, believed she would never see the famous author again, but he got ahold of her upcoming debut novel and wrote an enthusiastic blurb for it — a coveted imprimatur and a classic way for one writer to woo another. Settle in for a long, tentative, old-fashioned courtship. Conroy called her every now and then to talk shop, always keeping things light. She was as reserved as he was exuberant, never revealing much about herself. She was so circumspect, in fact, that he nicknamed her “Helen Keller.”

King had a few secrets. At the time, she was separated from her husband, a preacher. Their marriage had turned stormy, and their split was acrimonious. (Her tires got slashed.) She was eking out a living teaching writing and composition in small-town Alabama, and she had grown to value her solitude and privacy after the “goldfish bowl” life of a minister’s wife. Conroy kept inviting her to literary conferences, and she was too embarrassed to tell him she could not afford the admittance fee; she was also too polite to crash the mile-long lines at his book signings. So it was two years before they saw each other again.

A fine romance

Conroy as suitor is as incandescently charismatic as Conroy the stylist. What appears to be King’s coyness suited him just fine. Groomed in chivalry at The Citadel, he knew better than to push. Their conversations grew more intense and revealing, though, especially when the topic turned to depression.

On their first few dates, King, wary of his reputation for romantic tumult and self-destruction, kept him at arm’s length.

“I led a blissfully quiet life, bound to be dull compared to his in the fast lane,” she writes. “How could I possibly know that after one lovely but platonic dinner date, Mr. Conroy was about to come storming into my placid life with the force of a category 5 hurricane, and that nothing afterward would ever be the same?”

The long-deferred consummation, rendered without any graphic details, brings a sense of relief. Now we can get on with the rest of the story: 18 years of loving, reading and writing together, until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2016.

King hails from a modest background in Lower Alabama, but her family proves just as colorful and page-worthy as Conroy’s. And, it turns out, she is no prude; she just has a hard-earned sense of consequences. In her youth, she was a cocktail waitress who became a single mother before her ill-fated marriage to the pastor. Conroy, ever the champion of cathartic autobiography, encourages her to write about all of her experiences, particularly her first marriage, which she resists at first. The end result, though, is arguably the best of her other six books: “The Sunday Wife.”

With her marriage, she entered a new phase of fruitful creativity. Until she met Conroy and moved in with him on Fripp Island, South Carolina, King had never enjoyed a room of her own for writing. He would make that a priority wherever they alighted, and thoughtfully decorate it with her favorite prints.

He enlarged her world in other ways as well. Conroy was a foodie and had a James Beard Award to prove it. He cooked lavish meals for her, especially the Italian recipes he learned while living in Rome. King had never traveled much, so he took her around the world and introduced her, with pride, to famous people. Perhaps most important, he taught her to love the Lowcountry, where she still lives today, and this memoir abounds with lush descriptions of nature.

Conroy’s friends all reached the consensus that he finally had shown good judgment after two failed marriages and a string of doomed loved affairs with neurasthenic women — many of them “Yankees.” Everyone, including author Anne Rivers Siddons, commented on his newfound serenity and sobriety. Conroy’s brand was family dysfunction, after all, and King lent novel sanity to his routine. She never crows about herself, but she does not have to — her salt-of-the-earth decency and dignity shine like mica in a creek-bed. She was just the down-home curative his tormented soul needed. “I need someone to rescue me for a change,” he tells her.

The ending is every bit the tear-jerker you see coming. Conroy’s cancer moves rapidly. In a picturesque metaphor that he could have written, a mysterious night nurse sings hymns at his death bed and tells the family that a “bridge” will open up from heaven to guide Conroy home. Sure enough:

“For a brief moment of gold, the sun appeared through an opening in a cloud, then a beam of light began to form a bridge directly over the creek, one that led up to our dock. Those of us in the sickroom froze in place and watched in awestruck silence … A few minutes before Pat died, a bridge appeared over his beloved creek as if to offer him a passage from this world to the next.”

Pastor, out and proud, preaches the Word

From Atlanta magazine

As the organ music swells, the Anointed Voices choir builds to a crescendo of hallelujahs with a backbeat of synchronized clapping and stomping.

Photograph by Jason Maris

Here and there, among the pews of Tabernacle Baptist Church, someone convulses into ecstatic “holy dancing” before swooning and falling to the floor. To an uninitiated newcomer, this exaltation, known as “getting slain in the Spirit,” can alarmingly resemble a seizure, heart attack, or fainting spell. No one raises an eyebrow, though, except the matriarch who dutifully waves her funeral-parlor fan over the faces of the fallen, and the male ushers, a small army wearing lavender vests, who carry them—horizontal and transfigured—out of the sanctuary.

If the Rapture comes, it well may resemble a bright Sunday morning at this African American church, established in 1917 in Atlanta’s historic Old Fourth Ward. Consecrated to Old Time Religion, with its jubilant, tambourine-rattling motions and emotions, it feels far away in tone, temperament, and demographic from the nearby Unitarian Universalist and existentialist congregations, where gay rights are a foregone conclusion and spectacular “crowns” do not bloom from matrons’ heads. Yet with around 85 percent of its 1,200 members professing to be gay, Tabernacle Baptist Church claims one of the largest LGBT congregations in the South, says its leader, the Reverend Dennis Meredith, an out-and-proud, fifty-seven-year-old minister. It is, in the coded language of church directories, an “affirming” faith community where “all are accepted,” and the flock finally is settling into a period of peace and cohesion after a tumultuous, soul-searching decade.

“I became a member specifically because Pastor Meredith reaches out to everybody with a simple but powerful message,” says Emmanuelle Thomas, a gay man in his twenties. He adds, with a knowing edge to his falsetto, “He’s, um, realistic in ways most preachers aren’t.”

Meredith, a Toledo native called to preach at age eighteen, studied theology at Samford University and Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. In 1994 he assumed the pulpit at TBC, which had dwindled to 120 congregants. A tall, virtuoso choir soloist who is charismatic in every sense of that word, Meredith shored up membership, finances, properties, and morale. His stance against homosexuality resonated with the elders, who traditionally perceive gay rights as a threat to the beleaguered black family.

In 2001 his then twenty-one-year-old son, Micah, came out. “My wife and I did some research, giving due diligence to the Scriptures, and concluded the condemnation of homosexuality is wrong,” Meredith says. “So I changed my tone and message to one of inclusion, which attracted a bigger LGBT presence.”

Drag kings in men’s suits and fine-boned young men still sporting body glitter from Saturday-night club-hopping began filtering into the pews, as well as middle-class gay couples with children. Many of the newcomers had grown up in charismatic churches where they no longer felt welcome, but they still knew the moves, still sought the “anointing.”

“Probably 90 percent of the congregation walked out just because they couldn’t accept my change in language,” the pastor says.

Like his church choir, though, Meredith was just ramping up to a barn burner finale. In 2007 he officiated at a lesbian wedding and then, after hearing testimony from some street-ravaged prostitutes, welcomed the transgendered. Another exodus ensued. Then the bombshell: Meredith himself came out to his church. “You can imagine how that went over,” he says, exchanging glances with his partner of six years, Lavar Burkett. (Meredith and his former wife, Lydia, divorced in 2007 but have remained close friends. “She knew,” he says.)

Some TBC members defected to the Lithonia megachurch of Bishop Eddie Long, who preaches against homosexuality, even criticizing TBC. Since then, four young men have sued Long over allegations of sexual misconduct. The cases were settled out of court. Meredith issued a formal response, and a clarion challenge, to the faithful. In a YouTube video, he urged his community to rally around the accusers. He exclaimed, with mounting frustration, “Something needs to be said to end this charade and the homophobia that comes from so many African American pulpits! . . . You homophobic, hate-preaching preachers, stop doing it! It’s time to speak truth to the lives of the entire community, not just those people who you think deserve it, but everybody deserves God’s love.”

Has Bishop Long responded to the video, which quickly went viral?

“No,” Meredith says flatly.

This summer Meredith tells his story in a memoir published by JL King, activist and author of the New York Times bestseller On the Down Low. Lacing his long fingers together contemplatively, Meredith says, “One of my friends told me, ‘You tore down this church, brick by brick.’ On the other side, I am building it back, brick by brick. Our numbers are up, but the economy is bad; we’re only a month behind in our mortgage compared to a while back when we were several months behind. Every week, though, people come to me and say they were suicidal, that this church saved their life. If the church has saved just one life, these struggles have been worth it.” 

Unorthodox Pastor 7 ministers to homeless

From Atlanta magazine

The embankment feels like a ninety-degree incline, but the minister strides purposefully up it as if hiking a switchback trail—”the trick is to take it sideways,” he says—toward the abutment of the I-75 overpass. Notched into this sunless elbow-crook of concrete, out of sight and largely out of mind for the commuters speeding above and directly below, are members of his congregation.

Photograph by Jason Maris

The nesting materials of tattered blankets and cardboard, rank bundles of clothing and potato chip bags, a stray flip-flop, and Mr. Boston empties surround those who are sleeping it off, each occupant allotted a “cubby,” or just enough ledge between buttresses to stretch horizontally—people stashed on a shelf. The minister and his team of four volunteers extend sacks of food and scoop up the willing recipients in bear hugs, cheerfully oblivious to any lesions, infected track marks, and, in one case, a concave depression where a homeless veteran’s nose used to be. Then they link hands, teetering in this precarious spot polluted with exhaust fumes and other odors, to pray.

Because bridges function as a powerful metaphor, Pastor 7, as this roving evangelist is known, named his ministry 7 Bridges to Recovery. Dedicated to rescuing and restoring “the last, the lost, and the least,” his bands of volunteers from all over the country, guided by a core group of trained regulars—most of them survivors of the streets and the strip clubs, with naughty old tattoos that have been painfully edited into church-friendly images—venture out several times a week, no matter the weather; under the bridges and into “the bluff” around Cleveland Avenue and Bankhead Highway.

“When I first started doing this, riding around on my Harley, the reaction was, ‘Who is this crazy, bald-headed, white man with a Fu Manchu telling me about Jesus?’” Pastor 7 says, in a voice that sounds like the growl of a loyal and loving watchdog. With his intense gaze, no-bull biker veneer, and beefy arms filigreed with Bible-verse tattoos, he is not your grandparents’ suit-and-tie preacher. In a dark alley, he looks, to put it bluntly, like a stone-cold badass who could mess you up. Indeed, Pastor 7 used to “put people in hospitals regularly, as a right-hand tool of Satan,” he says. Back then, the FBI knew him as “Dangerous Dan.”

Born Danny Wells, he ran away from an abusive home life when he was ten years old and lived in the woods around Jonesboro, where he foraged for food. “I was so beaten down, with a stutter and a learning disability,” he recalls, noting that he progressed only to the second week of second grade before dropping out of school. After hardening and bulking up, he drifted into crime and addiction, staying awake and crazy-eyed for up to ten days at a time on meth, and running drugs and guns for bikers’ clubs and organized crime syndicates.

Pulling a stretch in the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta, he was punished with solitary confinement in 1996. Sixty days into it, he experienced his Damascus Road conversion when God spoke to him, he says, renaming him 7, the numeral that symbolizes completion. Still imprisoned a couple of years later, he found himself jolted, ex nihilo, with literacy. For the first time in his life, he could read. “It comes in flashes, like a PowerPoint presentation,” he says, demonstrating by flipping to random pages in his dog-eared Bible and reading aloud, still marveling at this ability.

After his release, he lived in a halfway house and worked briefly for a furniture maker. By then dubbed Pastor 7 and brimming with agape, he roamed the southside to spread the Word, sometimes welcoming weather-beaten men into his own home. These converts started joining him on his rounds, along with urban missionaries, megachurch suburbanites, and earnest college kids talking of “social justice.” “Even if they’re secular, they all leave crying about Jesus,” the evangelist notes.

Today they hand out 7,000 meals a month. When someone decides to leave the streets, the volunteers will help him or her into a van conspicuously labeled “Go Jesus, Go Jesus, Go!” and, with high hearts, head back to one of 7 Bridges’ two, separate group sanctuaries: a residence hall for men in southeast Atlanta (with renovations under way for two additional men’s facilities) and the ministry’s headquarters in Smyrna. Dubbed “the Garden,” the Cobb County facility is a church with a dormitory, which, though it lodges about sixty-five traumatized women and thirty-nine children, seems remarkably quiet and serene. Kleenex boxes are scattered everywhere. “Emotions run high up in here,” explains Velma, a resident with a shy smile.

Pastor 7, whose left-hand ring finger is tattooed with a vine of thorns, resides at the Garden in a modest apartment plastered with the kind of snapshots and children’s artwork displayed by an exceptionally outgoing “people person.” He accepts no salary, he says, and his sprawling organization runs on volunteerism and donations, including a new, restaurant-scale kitchen.

“It’s a miracle that I, somebody who was destroying lives including my own, was called in this way,” he says, “and it just goes to show that God can and will use anybody.” 

The Life and Times of Chank

He was shining shoes, “trying to make a quarter,” at a barbershop when he first glimpsed members of the newly-formed Allman Brothers Band, trailing their long, cornsilk hair behind them, in the spring of 1969.

“That was the first anybody ’round here had seen of hippies, and all the brothers in the barbershop started running to the window and staring, yelling, ‘Look at the hippies!’” says Hewell Middleton Jr., wincing at the memory. “I didn’t go look. I figured if they were hippies in Macon, Georgia, they’d run into enough trouble and embarrassment without me gawking at ’em.”

 Middleton — better known as “Chank” — was right. These shaggy rockers who had ridden into town on some sort of rented mule from Florida were not welcomed. “Those guys would walk down two blocks lined by solid, hard-core rednecks at the pool halls and liquor stores,” he says, “and the rednecks would yell in high voices, ‘Hey, baby, what’s happening?’ Making fun of them ’cause they had that long hair, like they were women.” 

As it turned out, the invading hippies were loping directly toward Chank. That barbershop was fortuitously located next to a building owned by impresario Phil Walden, who had successfully promoted Otis Redding before his fatal plane crash, and now was chasing after a new sound and talking about starting a record company. Chank, who was just out of Ballard-Hudson high school, was a thoughtful young man, “heavy into jazz – Coltrane, Monk, Cannonball Adderley, those cats,” he says. So he shrugged at the newcomers.            

“Phil was converting an upholstery shop into a studio, and it didn’t have air conditioning or Coke machines,” Chank says. “Our shop did, so the band would come to our place, and we’d talk, laugh, bullshit. For weeks, Duane kept inviting me to listen to them rehearse; I wasn’t sure if he was serious about wanting me there. But one day, after he insisted, I finally went, and when I opened that thick-ass door, they were playing ‘Whipping Post.’ It was a sound I’d never heard before. I said to myself: ‘These white boys are playing this shit?!’  Wasn’t nobody anywhere in the world making that kind of music. I fell in love with that sound. From then on, whenever somebody needed shoes shined, I had to be dragged away from my spot in the studio.”

It is a testament to the virtuosic, insinuating,  and abiding power of the Allman Brothers Band that many of us have heard those spiraling, physics-defying jams (and their many imitations) so many times that we no longer even notice the music, or recognize how shatteringly original it was at the time. While those “rednecks” were making catcalls at the “hippies,” this young African-American man enjoyed a front-row seat at the birth of Southern Rock at Capricorn Records. Chank was reeling from other revelatory dynamics, too, though, that moved him at least as much as the music.

 “They had a black drummer,” he says, referring to Jaimoe Johnson. “What I really liked about them was – you have to know how prejudiced Macon was then – they took this black guy into their fold, and it was so obvious they loved him like a brother. I thought, ‘These are not your regular white guys.’”

In fact, during that divisive era, when Jim Crow laws still lingered like the smell of cordite, the Brothers sincerely revered the brothers. Their charismatic leader, Duane Allman, had been bending notes in the relatively colorblind Muscle Shoals studio, and the fair-haired younger one, Gregory Lenoir Allman, around 21 at the time and looking like a fallen angel – a Botticelli by way of Daytona Beach — would eat pork-lubed country cooking to lend “soul” to his vocals.

 “Pretty soon, all that bad feeling passed about the band and hippies and black and white,” Chank says, “and Macon and the rest of the world opened their arms to the Allman Brothers and other things. Between the Allman Brothers and the Byron Pop Festival, things changed. The band shook ’em all to the core, and things changed.”

Chank laces his long, coffee-colored fingers together, and nods, conveying a world of meaning – things changed for the band, the town, the country, for all of us. They changed for some of the reasons that he became a fan, and eventually one of the most enduring, and endearing, insiders in the tumultuous group’s inner circle. “Chank is an unusual kind of person,” says Newton Collier, who played horns for Sam & Dave. “He’s always been the glue that holds everybody together.” And it’s no secret that the Allman Brothers have required plenty of adhesive. Over the years, Chank has served as muse, crisis responder, aide-de-camp, valet, wing-man, and confidante, and today he cites his occupation as “personal assistant” to Gregg Allman – “G.A” to other members of the entourage, but the more formal “Gregory” to Chank. 

“I’m not a musician,” he says. “I can’t play, sing, or write songs. I was just a friend who got entwined and ended up on this ride, and I’m still on it because we were always more like brothers than friends.”

Hewell, pronounced “Hugh-ELL,” Middleton, 63, was born in the Bellevue neighborhood, where he still resides today, into a large and ambitious family (His sister is politico Terri Tripp.) “My granddad on my dad’s side is white, and my great-grandma was full-blooded Cherokee, and that’s a helluva mixture.” This lineage gave him vaguely Asian-looking facial features. “My paternal grandmother starting calling me ‘Chank’ because I look Chinese,” he says.

That fateful spring when he met the band, he first bonded most intensely with Duane Allman.     

“He was such a natural leader, had so much presence that you and everybody else wanted to follow him,” Chank says. “He was always asking me and everybody else to look after his little brother, though. He was all about Gregory, not himself. It was like Duane had this sense that he wouldn’t live that much longer; he told me his days were numbered on this earth, and Gregory has always been so shy and vulnerable.”

Sure enough, Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971. Today, his kid brother still can’t talk about that tragedy without choking up.

“I fell apart,” Gregg Allman says. “Chank was the first person I met outside the studio in Macon, and we hadn’t known each other that long. He was right there for me, when…,” he pauses to collect himself, “I lost my brother. He was there, and I was lucky that he was there.”

About a year later, the band’s bassist, Berry Oakley also was killed on his motorcycle, near the scene of Duane Allman’s wreck.

 “There was a lot of weird shit happening,” Chank says, “spooky coincidences. It was a real struggle for all of us.”

In keeping with those hedonistic times and the longstanding proclivities of the music industry, drugs and alcohol were always plentiful, and Chank became addicted to heroin.

“I got strung out, had that spike in my arm,” “Look, we were all junkies back then, either selling it or buying it. I did both.”

Chank, though, got caught and spent more than a year in prison. “Seven or eight months in South Georgia, on a straight chain-gang, and the rest of the time in Buford.”

 His experience inspired the song and album title “Win, Lose or Draw.”

  “I’d been out of prison a couple of months in 1974, and ran into Gregory,” Chank says. “He told me to start talking about what I’d been through, so I did, and he started writing, and that song came out of that.”  

 That would not be the last album he inspired.

“I remember first meeting Chank, when he had this gigantic afro,” says quirky rocker Col. Bruce Hampton, who was part of the Capricorn stable and wrote the tribute song “Give thanks to Chank” – the title track of that album.  “Chank was always wise beyond his years. He’s a cross between Richard Pryor and Mark Twain. I wrote that song about him because he makes me smile — not laugh, but smile.”

Out of prison, Chank joined Allman for a spree in Los Angeles, where he played another pivotal role for his buddy: Cupid. They were at a nightclub where Etta James was performing when Gregory scribbled a flowery love note and instructed a reluctant Chank to deliver it to Cher’s table. Thus began a whirlwind romance, and an on-again, off-again marriage, that sent tabloids into a frenzy, resulted in a son (Elijah Blue), and brought the glamorous Cher to live for awhile in Macon before she and Allman split up

Around the mid-1970s, the band was unraveling messily amid substance abuse, artistic differences, and legal woes. Chank remained stalwart as always, and Allman rewarded him with a new Corvette. “I asked him years later how he knew I liked ’vettes, and he told me he noticed I would turn my head to look every time I saw one. Gregory pays close attention to everything, more than people realize.”

Nevertheless, Chank, a “homebody,” felt burned out. “The road is not for everybody,” he says. “The ones that it’s for, them people got Gypsy blood or something. Any time you spend that much time away from home, you’re living an abnormal life. I’m like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ – ain’t no place like home.”

He checked into detox, and then began using Methadone. He gradually weaned off it, he says, milligram by milligram, until he was clean in 1976. “I said, ‘To hell with that shit!’ I told the people at the clinic, ‘Y’all won’t be seeing me back here again.”  

And they did not. Chank settled into a calmer lifestyle and a job in the supply department of Brown & Williamson. Capricorn sound wizard Johnny Sandlin had introduced him to reggae, and he went from afro to dreadlocks and began amassing Bob Marley T-shirts – 300+ and counting. (His only casual-wear minus Marley usually features Nelson Mandela.)

Much to Chank’s surprise, Allman persuaded President Jimmy Carter – whose campaign had benefited from the band’s fund-raising support — to grant his friend a pardon for his drug sentence. “The whole time I was at Brown & Williamson – more than 20 years — Gregory and I talked every month,” he says. “He was always after me to come back on the road with him. I liked being home, though.”

Nevertheless, after taking early retirement from Brown & Williamson, Chank returned to his full-time role as personal assistant to Allman in 2005. “Back in the day, they called me their ‘travel director,’ but that was a sham – we were partying,” Chank says. Today, though, he helps Allman forge through the kind of health issues that come with a graying ponytail and rock ’n’ roll lifestyle — chiefly a liver transplant and its complications.

“The Blade – I call him that because he’s so skinny – is my dearest and oldest friend,” Allman says, over the phone from the Mayo Clinic, where his new organ is under inspection before he and Chank embark on a trip to Australia. “He’s one of those people-treasures you’re lucky to stumble across at just the right time in your life. Recently we were trying to think if we’d ever had an argument in the 45 years we’ve known each other, and we haven’t – nothing important enough to verbalize, anyway. Everybody needs a best friend. He’s mine.”

Adds Chank, “Even in this day and age, some people can’t believe a white man and a black man can be close friends. People call me his ‘driver.’ Shit! I was never his driver. This is not some ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ bullshit. We are friends who’ve been through a lot, and that runs deep.”

 After reflecting again on Duane Allman’s long-ago injunction to take care of his little brother, Chank says, “I didn’t realize that Gregory is actually older than I am until his 50^th birthday party. I always assumed I was older. Ain’t that some shit?”

Meet World Famous SamG

Sometimes the muse just has to nag.

Sam Granger had never taken a drawing class or even doodled in the margins of his school notebooks. He had never toured a museum or researched the differences between fine and folk art. But an online quiz changed that.

“My wife at the time was mad at me and fussing at me because I was laid off from work,” remembers Granger. “Really fussing. So I found this online quiz called ‘Find the Perfect Career for You.’ It was long, took, like, 45 minutes to finish. It told me to be an artist.”

So at the age of 37, Granger picked up a brush and went to work in 2007, painting some pastoral scenes from his childhood in Pike County and a portrait of his Uncle Speedy on a piece of plywood. He used his spare bathroom as his studio. When he began signing his work, he could not fit all of “Granger” into the corner of the canvas, so he shortened it to SamG.

“I started introducing myself: I’m Sam Granger, but most people call me ‘World Famous SamG’ for short.”

In the democratic, open-armed world of outsider art, his lark of a dream began to come true. People started buying his paintings, which grew increasingly self-assured and cheerfully eccentric. He charged $20 apiece.

“I realized that the folk art scene is really one big family where people look out for each other,” says Granger, who was living south of Griffin. “They also like to party!”

Granger became a popular fixture at the Doo-nanny, an annual folk art festival that, until it collapsed of its own storied excesses, was sort of a Southern Gothic Burning Man by way of Alabama.

“Sam became known for what he called his ‘Elvis Riding a Freedom Chicken,’” says Margaret Allen, referring to his painting of the jump-suited King riding a red, white and blue, star-spangled chicken. Allen is the author of “When the Spirit Speaks: Self-Taught Art of the South” and a collector who owns several of Granger’s pieces. “It’s been interesting to see how he has evolved and innovated. He’s very laidback, humorous and whimsical, and his message is a simple one: Love one another.”

Granger eventually split with his wife and moved to the mountains of north Georgia. Appalachian people proved clannish, though. Also, he did not care for the galleries that were sniffing around him, trying to exercise control.

“I really didn’t like the way the world was going, so I decided to make my own,” Granger says.

In 2016, he took his self-expression to an exuberant new level by creating World Famous SamG Land, a compound outside Clarkesville classified by creatives as an “art environment,” teeming with phantasmagoric creatures. You could think of Granger, who has shoulder-length hair, as Howard Finster’s groovy, hippie grandson, but that comparison rankles him.

“I’m not trying to be the next Howard Finster,” he says, standing beside one of many self-portraits that use peace symbols for eyes. “I’m trying to be the next me.”

It’s an odd place, in many respects, tucked away behind a gas station in thick woods. The only way in and out is a ramp near the diesel pumps. Visitors are immediately assailed by naked mannequins with bucket heads (“my mail-order brides”); large insects made from farm implements; glassy-eyed, moldering doll heads; and lots of signs, some with salty language like “Stop the Dumbassery.”

“Look, I’m a smart (aleck),” he says. “But I believe God is love.”

Granger is also a cuddly egotist and mischievous contrarian. “I can talk about myself all day,” he says, “and I can out-flirt anybody.” His politics are left-of-center; he made a “portrait” of Kelly Loeffler, the Republican politico known for her long mane, using a mop.

“There’s such a sweetness and silliness to his work,” says collector and fashion designer Anita Shegog. “Nothing is trash to him. Everything has a purpose – a joyful purpose.”

Granger’s outsized installation artwork reflects his boyish enthusiasms, using reclaimed materials: robots, dinosaurs, snakes, preachers, toilets (more on that later), aquariums, mermaids, Willie Nelson and devils, which he says “represent the women in my life”. There is “Gnome Henge”; the “Nipple of Hopefulness” made from a large ice bucket; a six-foot Coca-Cola bottle used in the Atlanta Olympics; and a weirdly poignant “graveyard of coffee mugs.”

“People kept telling me I needed to do a bottle tree, so I just dumped a bunch of bottles out and named it ‘future bottle tree,’” he says.

The magic happens in his studio, the “Mothership,” designed to look like what he calls a giant space slug. A trail spiked with unsettling eye candy winds behind the house he shares with his girlfriend, potter Lorri Penn, and a three-legged poodle named DooDoo. There is, seemingly, no unadorned surface, no swatch of beige anywhere. Think psychedelic “Sanford & Son.”

Granger also likes labels; he appends them to everything, even naturally occurring features – “tree,” “dead tree.” “The naming of things makes them epic,” he says. In fact, one piece of mysterious “found art” – some might say garbage — bears this legend: “I found this on the side of GA 400 on Christmas Day 2017. I figured I would paint some sort of deep spiritual revelation from the universe on it or something … but … nope.”

“Being around Sam is a happy, colorful experience that is translated into all he creates,” says Clarissa Starnes, associate director of the Hickory Museum of Art in North Carolina, which features Granger’s work in its permanent collection. “He is always producing, always considering and hunting new materials for his creations, even living in an environment that has become a tourist attraction.”

His compound was also just included in “A Guide to The South’s Quirkiest Roadside Attractions” (Arcadia Publishing, $16.05) by Kelly Kazek.

In 2017, after a regimen of consuming several pots of a coffee a day and chain-smoking menthol cigarettes, Granger suffered an aortic rupture. “I damn near died on the (toilet) just like Elvis,” he says. He immediately incorporated the toilet lid into his art.

“It slowed me down,” he says. “Today I’m less work-horse than show pony.”

One thing that sets Granger apart from other creators of art environments is the ephemeral nature of his work. “Most self-taught artists have a message, often a religious message, and want their work to live on after they die,” says Fred Scruton, a professor of art at Edinboro University. “Sam really doesn’t care about that; it’s all about the experience to him. I would call him a second-generation postmodernist. He’s a wise-guy amusing himself, and us along with him, just for the pleasure of a chuckle.”

The highfalutin mantel of postmodernist may not rest easily on Granger’s shoulders, but he doesn’t disagree with Scruton’s assessment. Sweeping his hand toward his crazy kingdom he says: “This is not the art. I am the art. This stuff is just souvenirs. After I’m gone, tear it down.”

IF YOU GO

World Famous SamG Land. Generally open all the time, but call first if you want a tour. Donations welcome. 1390 Tom Born Road, Clarkesville. Traveling north on US 23 from Clarkesville, exit at Tom Born Road and turn left, then take an immediate right into the gas station. Take the small ramp to the right, next to the diesel pumps, and follow the road into the woods. 706-949-3504.

Coming out with Carson

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 10, 2020

Queer history is framed in ellipses. You just have to read with knowing eyes.

Jenn Shapland is determined to fill in those blanks in her sleek, elegant first book, “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.” It is both a memoir of her own coming-out and a nuanced exploration of her magnificent obsession with the Georgia author known for her sensitive portrayals of misfits.

“Many of the details of Carson’s lesbian life are right there, in plain sight. It’s just that they are housed within another narrative: the straight narrative, the one in which inexplicable crushes on and friendships with women surface briefly within the confines of an otherwise ‘normal’ life,” writes Shapland.

Now based in New Mexico, Shapland was working as an intern in the Harry Ransom Center, a collection of documents at the University of Texas, when she stumbled across a letter that raised her eyebrows. It was a fulsome note to McCullers from Annmarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a glamorous Swiss silk heiress known for seducing women and “not wearing a brassiere.” It reads: “Carson, child, my beloved, you know that, leaving the day after tomorrow, feeling half-afraid and proud, leaving behind me all I care for once again, and a wave of love … “

In response, Shapland mused, “I had received letters like these. I had written letters like these to the women I’d loved. It was very little to go on, and yet I felt an utter certainty: Carson McCullers had loved women.”

For decades, the sexual orientation of McCullers, who died in 1967, has been a question mark, with scant evidence to prove anything definitively, one way or the other. She married and divorced the same man twice, and friends characterized her stints with Reeves McCullers as “tortured.”

Born in Columbus, Lula Carson Smith was a frail, wide-eyed waif who looks poignant and pensive in just about every extant photograph. Her debut novel, “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” published when she was 23, was a literary sensation. She went on to write seven other books, including “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (dedicated to Clarac-Schwarzenbach), “The Member of the Wedding,” and the novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” She made the bohemian rounds, retreating to Yaddo, hanging out with Tennessee Williams and shacking up with luminaries such as W.H. Auden and Paul Bowles in the fabled “February House” commune in New York. She suffered several strokes; she drank too much. Above all, McCullers wrote with marked sensitivity, humanity and originality.

Shapland’s enthrallment came at a fortuitous time. For psychological therapy, McCullers had consulted with Dr. Mary Mercer, who preserved her records with the caveat that they not be released until after her death. The transcripts surfaced in 2014 and wound up at Columbus State University.

Shapland made a beeline there and devoured every jotting.

McCullers had been nervous about starting therapy in 1958, but she saw it as a tool for memoir. In her second autobiography, “Illumination and Night Glare,” dictated from her sick-bed and published posthumously, she recalls worrying that “Dr. Mercer would be ugly, bossy and try to invade my soul’s particular territories.” Instead, she quickly concluded that the doctor “was and is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen” and started addressing her as “heartchild,” and signing her moony letters with “I kiss your little foot.”

Shapland moved into the artist-in-residence apartment in McCullers’ homeplace on Stark Avenue in Columbus, the better to ruminate over the talismanic objects preserved in the museum part of the house. She caresses McCullers’ kimonos, sits in her favorite blue chair and takes long soaks in her bath — literally immersing herself in the world of her kindred spirit. In her research, she learns about other women who were important to the author: her piano teacher, Gypsy Rose Lee, a student she courted with homemade fudge. But Dr. Mercer appears to have been the love of her life. Doctor and patient traveled together and presented the dynamic of a couple; McCullers left her psychologist a third of her estate.

All of this Sapphic intensity emboldened Shapland herself to step out of the closet. She cut her hair as part of this declaration. No more joyless affairs with male professors, no more girlfriends described as “roommates.” She found some old love letters and in them found herself.

Another aspect of McCullers that resonates with Shapland: illness. McCullers had suffered rheumatic fever that left her heart weak, and Shapland, too, has a cardiac defect. They both have produced much of their writing in bed. “I think this is one thing that drew me to Carson’s fiction in the first place. … Carson is at pains to articulate the inarticulable to find a way to express feelings of isolation, loneliness, and longing that I associate with queer life, with life as a sick person, and with life as a writer,” Shapland writes.

“My Autobiography of Carson McCullers” is rendered in taut, short, spiky chapters. Shapland plainly feels possessive and protective of McCullers. The final chapter is titled “Euphemisms”: “To her husband, whom she married twice, Carson called her woman lovers ‘imaginary friends.’ Her biographers called them traveling companions, good friends, roommates, close friends, dear friends, obsessions, crushes, special friends. I’m over it. I, for one, am weary of the refusal to acknowledge what is plainly obvious, plainly wonderful. Call it love.”

Planting her rainbow flag in this Southern Gothic territory, Shapland makes a rousing and compelling case. It is time we bring McCullers to a new generation of readers, in a fresh light.

Civic portrait of Atlanta

This was my first story for Garden & Gun, in 2008. So… it’s old and dated, but I had fun writing it.

The Brazen City

By: Candice Dyer
Aug 12, 2008

Not long ago, an ill wind swept through the corner where Peachtree meets Sweet Auburn, the intersection of white and black thoroughfares that symbolizes Atlanta’s racial unity. Or some might call it a breath of fresh air. ¶ It was blowing from a few blocks away at the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum, where Alice Randall stood on the veranda and condemned its late occupant—the South’s best-known novelist—as a racist.

Randall had just published The Wind Done Gone, her postmillennial rewrite of Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind from the point of view of a feisty new heroine, a biracial slave named Cynara, Scarlett O’Hara’s half-sister.

Impassioned denunciations flew back and forth in a debate that was not clearly black and white. Mitchell, a flapper who loved a good hissy fit, might have relished the scene.

Ultimately, however, after much to-do and legal wrangling, a spirit of reconciliation prevailed. Randall’s publisher made a hefty donation to Morehouse College, and it was revealed that Mitchell had anonymously underwritten dozens of scholarships for African Americans to study medicine at the historically black school. All was forgiven, and everybody gained something.

Mary Rose Taylor, the unflappably gracious director of the Mitchell House at the time, was pleased with the events and their outcome, saying the goal was “a dialogue of building bridges and not one of tearing down.”

And that is what Atlanta is about: a dialectic that often achieves the balance, harmony, and good fortune of a yin-yang symbol. The tradition dates back to the 1880s and Henry Grady, the managing editor of the then Atlanta Constitution, who rallied Northern investors with promises of a “New South” and “sunshine everywhere and all the time.” That relentless boosterism, shellacked in social conscience, has never dimmed and, some dark days notwithstanding, has shaped Atlanta’s peculiar character as a boomtown where wheeler-dealers substitute gumption for bigotry (which is bad for bidniss). Mayor William Hartsfield coined that semantically loaded slogan “The City Too Busy to Hate.” To prove it, Ivan Allen, Jr., who succeeded him as mayor in 1962, took down those unseemly water fountain signs two years before the Civil Rights Act. When our homegrown prophet Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, other American cities went up in flames. Atlanta, miraculously, did not. Instead, it became the “black mecca,” and it kept right on working and innovating with companies like Delta, CNN, Home Depot, and—granddaddy of all hustlers—Coca-Cola, peddling carbonated sugar to an increasingly diabetic world.

“How did we get the Olympics? Confidence and salesmanship—after all, it’s not like we had great architecture and the Mediterranean,” Joel Babbit, an aptly named adman who had been the city’s marketing director, told the New York Times in 1996. “Atlanta’s business is self-promotion. We have always sold first, then kept the promises afterward.”

On the Move
Dixie’s City on a Hill owes its dynamic spirit to the potency of Bubba Babbittry, which climaxed with the 1996 Olympics and spawned another fat novel in A Man in Full.

“To have someone of Tom Wolfe’s stature hold you up to scorn is really the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” historian Frederick Allen gushed to reporters.

The city’s preening progressivism has always set it apart from the rest of rural, conservative Georgia. “Atlanta’s a diamond on a cow chip,” quips Tom Crawford, one of the pundits who gather weekly at Manuel’s Tavern, a politico hangout where much of the city’s backroom horse-trading still takes place.

Atlanta was born from the expediency of transportation. Originally a railroad nexus with the unlovely name Terminus, it was briefly called Marthasville and then rechristened a truncated version of Atlantica-Pacifica, another nod to the rails. Highways followed, and Atlanta grew into its role as hub. And grew, and grew. By 2009, the metropolitan area is expected to exceed 5.5 million people, and it straddles twenty-eight counties—like a colossus doing a split.

Whether you’re going to heaven or hell, you have to pass through Atlanta, went the rural saying. Today, many commuters point out that they are already in hell. Atlanta ranks second only to Los Angeles in gridlock. “I can remember a time when people in Atlanta could converse without ever bringing up traffic,” author Pat Conroy observed.

Happily, the sprawl is reversing course. “There was a tipping point in commuting that sent people back toward town,” says Jeffry Scott, a journalist who bought a fixer-upper in Kirkwood. “This used to be a neighborhood of crack houses. When we saw someone out walking a dog that wasn’t a Rottweiler, we knew the place had changed.”

Flipping houses ITP (Inside the Perimeter) has become the bourgeois-bohemian pastime, and industrial wastelands along Howell Mill Road, Krog Street, and Edgewood Avenue are morphing with mixed-use makeovers into playgrounds of condos, art galleries, recording studios, and restaurants that astonish even the most jaded foodies. The multi-culti crowds look fit, purposeful, and casually fashionable; diversity, to them, was always a blithely foregone conclusion.

The neighborhood that most dramatically reflects this transformation is Cabbagetown. Once a heartbreakingly downtrodden mill village, it is now a hive of BlackBerry-wielding loft dwellers with a buzzing café society where Jane Fonda holds court. And Lake Claire Community Land Trust is a rolling greensward with a community garden and twenty-five campsites hidden away behind a nimbus of dogwood blossoms just five miles from downtown. There you might cross paths with a church group or with Malik the Mystic, a regal dreadlocked gentleman, leading a drum circle.

In a city often criticized for not supporting the arts, the High Museum of Art has more than doubled its space with the help of superstar architect Renzo Piano, and the new Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre showcases the Atlanta Opera with crystalline acoustics. Absence of music is never an issue anywhere in the South, and workhorse Atlanta, dubbed by hip-hoperatti the Motown of the South, is the birthplace of “crunk” and “snap style” (see your teenager’s iPod).

Business Rules
Because of its image-conscious bustle, Atlanta does not cultivate eccentricity like Savannah, or decadence like New Orleans, except for the throbbing adult entertainment industry. With more than forty “gentleman’s clubs” titillating conventioneers, Atlanta has long furnished the lace garters for the Bible Belt. “I’ve always liked Atlanta,” said comedian Jon Stewart. “And not just for the strip clubs, but the shopping and the food.”

Expect more discerning praise for the shopping and the food with the development of the Midtown Mile, one million square feet of chichi retailers and bistros spanning fourteen blocks of Peachtree Street, modeled on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.

I tend to agree with Anne Rivers Siddons’ narrator in Peachtree Road: “In Atlanta, if it is good for business, it is as good as done. I have never particularly liked that about Atlanta, but I concede that it has given us an extraordinary vigor, and I have certainly feasted on its fruits…It’s…uncultivated, vulgar, even soulless…but it’s alive! God…the energy in this town! And it’s just so beautiful, parts of it.”

Atlanta’s genius may always have the unmistakable air of commerce, but it puts on that most hopeful of shows: a work in constant progress.