…and Barry Hannah visits an old house

Barry Hannah, the famous Southern author, lived briefly on a farm. The crops were leaf greens and pigs. He slept poorly in a Winnebago on the property. It was the winter South: the trees shuffled in close and in the morning his breath was wet and cold. He heard deer getting shot at in the wall of woods behind his trailer.

Barry had a routine that winter that he never stuck to: breakfast, drugs, the word, the farm, the bar. Usually, he’d skip the word and go straight to the bar, where he’d blaze out fast on bourbon and do the long dark slide. While he lasted though, he was a crowd unto himself, holding court at the long table on the porch, eager to tell people about the Fall of the South, which was still ongoing.

The Fall of the South was easiest to make out against the backdrop of the past. Once he’d visited an old house in the rain-strafed gullies by Cullman. Stepping past the rain and under the lintel, he saw a wide room with a cauldron hanging from a hook in the ceiling. The original house had no chimney, but every night the food in the cauldron produced a thick smoke. The children of the family took damp rags and rubbed the smoke into the wooden walls, and over the generations there accrued a very subtle burnish.

This house was a holdover from the South of objects. The pool hall, the writer’s block, the hunting season — this now was the South of movement. Accrual was limited, and less relevant. His Winnebago, Hannah liked to admit, had been pre-built in a factory and trucked to his P.O. box in installments. He went home to it after leaving the bar. It had two rooms and four wheels. The inside walls were fiberglass. He supposed it could travel, someday.