Joe Bageant

Blood and Poppies

See the introduction to this series of posts: Writing on Things Southern and Past

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By Joe Bageant

My family's ancestral home on Shanghai Road, a great sagging clapboard thing perched on a hill with its many filigreed balconies and porches like heisted antebellum petticoats, sat perched on a hill at the base of Sleepy Creek Mountain. Gnawed by the elements on the outside and woodsmoked by a thousand griddlecake mornings on the inside, where children ran the stairways and mice ran the cellars, my grandparent's house was stuffed and running over with life itself.

It was also a place where people died as well as lived. Died and were "laid out" in the parlor. My great-grandfather Old Jim was the last one to be laid out there. At the time I very young and was among the last in my family to see the embalmer dump the white enameled bucket of blood over the roots of the wavering red poppies that grew hard by the front yard. In those days and in those hollers the embalmer sometimes came to your house and laid out the body in the parlor. Low lamps burned all night and Old Jim was so still in that satin-lined box, like some ancient felled tree. Then that first realization of mortality struck, killing that innocence it kills in all of us. Maw leaned through the kerosene lantern glow and said, "Joey, be real still and you'll hear the angels sing." I did. No angels sang. Not a sound except the breathing of Old Jim's great black dog whose green eyes flashed from under the bier. I also remember a strange chemical smell. They say Old Jim had already picked out his burying suit years before and he smelled like mothballs when he went into the coffin.

Writing on Things Southern and Past

When visiting Joe and his wife Barbara six years ago in Winchester, Virginia, I convinced Joe to show me some of his unpublished writing. He was reluctant, appearing almost embarrassed, and said the writing was not good and that was why it was never published. He gave me a file folder containing nine essays, typed with handwritten changes and corrections.

These essays were beautiful. Maybe essays is not the right word. Short stories might be better.

I wanted to start posting the essays on this website. Joe argued, of course. Several months later when Joe was visiting me in Mexico, I finally got his approval to post the nine essays -- but he insisted that they not be displayed on the home page. His logic on this made no sense to me, but rather than belabor the point, I told him I would back-date the posts and make a separate category called "Things Southern". 

Then, Joe's agent negotiated a film/TV option with HBO and part of that agreement was that the Things Southern essays would be taken down. The HBO deal fizzled. So now, five years later, I have pulled the nine essays from my files and I will repost them over the next several weeks.

Below is Joe's introduction to Things Southern.

-- Ken Smith, [email protected]

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Websites are a wonderful thing in that they can house a lifetime of work if need be. I'm not up for the world to see all I have written. So much of it, both published and unpublished is so bad. However, I do think some of it documents or speaks to an America that scarcely exists today, one that was kinder, more mysterious and certainly more connected with the earth and its verities. In this section, "Things Southern," rests a collection of essays, notes, remembrances and mental shards of a Southern boyhood in Virginia. Some are absolutely true, some shift back and forth between truth and fiction and some are outright lies. I will leave it to the reader to discern the difference. I certainly cannot.

-- Joe Bageant