Black Warrior Files: Bama’s Pluck and Grit

Type “college football museums” into Google and inside the first five hits, you get two for the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana, and three for the Paul W. Bryant Museum located right here in good old Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, right next to the Flagship State U conference center. The shadow of Paul William Bryant, known of course as Paul Bear Bryant (in local parlance, pronounced always as one word: Paulbearbryant, or phonetically, Pawburbri-an, with a long i), hangs over everything that is Bama to the point that I sometimes feel, walking around, like I’m living with a walking ghost. It’s a very different vibe to being on a campus with that other winning college football coach at Big State U in Pennsylvania. That other coach is no ghost, he’s a living legend. Literally. When you see him walking on campus, he smiles at you as you rush past to teach your next. He donates money to the English department and the library. He still runs out onto the field with the football team. Sure, he’s got a full-sized bronze statue to him out in front of the stadium, but he’s alive.

But Paulbearbryant’s ghost is bigger than any figure any living coach might cut walking across any campus to date. Case in point: Big State U has an All-Sports Museum; Flagship State U has the Bryant Museum. Granted, the Bryant Museum does cover the entirety of the Alabama football tradition, but the video at the heart of the exhibit is about Bryant’s life and his legend, about 1/3 of the museum space is dedicated to Bryant pictures and memorabilia (like his entire office right down to the Green Bay Packers mug on his desk), and shrines to Bryant appear around practically every corner. My personal favorite? The Paulbearbryant Coke bottles and the crystal replica houndstooth hat on the velvet revolving turntable in the lighted display case. I’ll bet the hat is even the right size. Nothing says “overkill” like crystal that would fit on your head.

I take a class to the museum every semester, partly because its very existence is bound to inspire a little writing, mostly because pretty much none of my students have ever been. This semester, I went with my Honors freshman comp class, which is focusing on living locally (I’ve cleverly titled it “Think Globally, Write Locally: Locavores, Rhetoric, and You”), among other things. Only one of my fifteen students had been before. I asked them to go, to take notes, to think about what it means or what it says about Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, that we have a museum dedicated to the Bear. Some of them might write about it on their blogs. See, we’re trying a little experiment this semester: each student will keep a comprehensive blog in place of a final paper. We’ll see how they work out. I’ll have them all linked to Scooter Nation by tomorrow. And I’m not going to lie. I’m shamelessly using my own blog space to (ideally) spur my students on to a little writing of their own. We’ll see how that will work out, too.

As for the museum, well, even an Auburn fan like yours truly has to give credit where credit is due. Bryant more than just defines the sports tradition here in Tuscaloosa. In a way, Bryant’s legacy defines the best of Southeastern Conference football: a sense of history, of pride, of deep-seated tradition that’s handed down from family member to family member. It’s the sort of stuff we like to trot out when we’re making fun of the South, and admittedly, the parents who name their children “Bryant” or saddle some poor unfortunate kid with the middle name “Bear” really do need to reconsider their priorities (and to be fair, so do those Auburn fan parents who name their kids “Aubie”). Tradition and custom in the South are a catch 22. On the one hand, let’s all agree that any state that does not make an effort to recycle glass and that, in response to recent school shootings, is considering allowing students and teachers to carry guns on college campuses (because obviously arming more unstable young adults is a good way to ensure everyone’s safety) is not the most “with it” of states. On the other hand, there’s something comforting about settling into a place where barbeque sauce recipes are handed down from one generation to the next, where family names get passed along like hand-me-downs and everyone who’s anyone belongs to the DAR or the United Daughter of the Confederacy or both, and where one man’s legacy has the power to inspire thousands long after he’s passed. Southerners are fearless in their pride. Then again, I guess it doesn’t really take a crystal houndstooth hat to tell you that.

Crystal you could wear on your head.

Gen-u-ine Paulbearbryant Coke.

Local News Tuesday: Fat Only Feels This Good Once a Year

Attention, attention! We at Scooter Nation have a very important PSA: Mardi Gras started in Mobile, Alabama. That's right. The Zulu Krewe might be strutting their stuff over in NOLA, but over in Bienville Square (could we sound more Frenchy?), the Mystics of Time are sending throws and moon pies out to the crowds, too. Not only that, but in case you're not from around here, Mardi Gras doesn't just stop with the big cities. Mardi Gras is part of the Gulf Coast identity. Every small town from Texas to the panhandle of Florida and beyond gets into the action. Public schools give everyone a four day weekend. The local Mardi Gras societies throw balls. The whole region buzzes with a collective on-your-second-beer-and-don't-you-feel-good vibe.

And before you turn your mainstream Mardi Gras nose up at those small town parades, consider this next point very carefully: Mardi Gras is not about getting drunk or even about flashing your boobs at every Tom, Dick, and Bubba--Mardie Gras is about catching free stuff. Never mind that you don't really need two pounds of silver Mardi Gras dubloons; purple, green, and gold thong underwear; inflatable bananas the size of a German shepherd; or piles of moon pies of varying quality (good = Lookout; so-so = small foil-wrapped no-name ones; stellar = Lookout double-decker moon pies zapped for 20 seconds in the microwave. Amazing). Mardi Gras isn't about need. It's about glut and decadence and catching obscene amounts of cheap plastic shiny beads that smell like motor oil because let's face it, whatever they're coating those things with can't be good for the environment and yet we allow small children to chew on them anyway.

Catching obscene amounts of beads that smell like motor oil requires focus and strategy. You can get drunk on cheap beer and show your boobs to random men any day of the week, but that's not going to help you map out a smart way to catch the Knights of Ecor Rouge parade four times in one night or make the crucial dive at just the right moment to scoop up that one perfect strand of elusive aqua blue beads. And in small towns, you can find a place to park and you can walk to the parade without the fear of being shot or mugged and no, I'm not exaggerating. And at the end of the parade, when you've caught more than you can hold and you don't really need or want any of it because where will you put it when you get it home and what could a grown person possibly do with beads that smell like motor oil, you can hand your entire plastic grocery bag stash to the nearest passing grade schooler and he will smile shyly and take it all and you can walk back to your car whistling to yourself, sated. The thrill of Mardi Gras is in the hunt, the chase, the perfectly timed dive.

But save a few moon pies. And try them in the microwave, just once (unwrapped on a plate, people). And if you get a banana one--one of those ones with the impossibly orange coating--mail it to me. God knows I love a banana moon pie.

The Black Warrior Files: Nature Trumps Nurture—Again

What sets the South apart from the rest of the nation—and I mean really sets it apart—isn’t the drawl. Texans have that, too, and as any good Southerner will tell you, Texas is its own country and ain’t no friend of mine thank you very much. It’s not in the manners either (Midwesterners are quite a lovely and polite people, too), or the overuse of Cool Whip as one of the top five dessert ingredients (Jell-o pudding, sweetened condensed milk, Karo syrup, and butter, for you curious types). It’s not even the religious devotion to SEC college football, the prevalence of lifted trucks with oversized tires, or the “Honk if you love Jesus” and “W: The President” bumper stickers. What really sets the South apart isn’t something we’ve bought or created, rather, it’s a part of the region just as much as kudzu is a part of the landscape: Humidity.

You might think that you know about Humidity—that everybody knows about Humidity. She fills your bathroom, fogs the mirror, and wraps around you when you step out of a hot shower. She sits on your skin like plastic wrap when you walk into the locker room after your daily workout. These little, tentative brushes with Humidity might make you think you understand her, but really, you’re just flirting, waving to her when you think about it. Ignoring her when you don’t. We who live in the southeast, though, we passed flirting sometime between when Jesus walked the earth and the Baptists came to tell it on Red Mountain. We’ve long since married Humidity, divorced her, married her again, and resigned ourselves to the idea that she will always, always sprawl over more than her fair share of the bed and want to cuddle when you just want to sleep.

Such is Humidity’s presence in the South that I can write about her at the beginning of February because she waltzed in today without so much as knocking and plunked herself smack down in the middle of winter. My first clue came as I stepped from this morning’s shower and the residual drops of water left behind by my towel didn’t instantly evaporate into the thirsty air. My second was the practically audible sucking sounds of my skin rehydrating after two months of forced air central heating. By the time my hair burst into a frizzy halo and all the ringlets around my hairline came out to play, I was already past caring. trudging across campus somewhere around 11AM, I lost my will to be a productive and engaged citizen of the world and instead found myself longing for clichéd and vast veranda, for a Cracker Barrel rocking chair, and for a tall, clinking glass of sweet tea. The rest of the nation might think that we're just lazy and can't move at a normal pace, or that it’s the heat that slows Southerners down, and we let them think what they will because we don’t want them to know. In truth, we yearn to give in to Humidity’s seductive caress. To feel her warm breath on our hair. To hear her contented sighs as she bathes our glistening skin and sinks into our very bones until we are drunk with moisture, shedding coats and scarves without cares and driving home slowly, dreaming of cold fruit and cold drinks in tall, clinking glasses. Even at the beginning of February.

The camelia buch outside of Gorgas House on U of A's campus also likes the humidity.