City of Valleys
I want to write something about the place where I was born.
Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama, but it is hard for me to think of it as a city at all. Here is a definition of a city: a place where the signs and efforts of human habitation have overwhelmed and defined the landscape. This is not what I feel when I am in Birmingham.
The people who built Birmingham were businessmen. Far from what was then considered civilization, it was discovered that the mountains contained iron ore. Railroads were built, and certain industrialists succeeded in getting them to intersect here, instead of somewhere else; and with an odd but characteristic mixture of simplicity and grand aspiration, they decided to name this conjunction for the greatest industrial city of the contemporary world.
Beginning as an aspirational Birmingham, England, it gradually transitioned into an aspirational Detroit, "the Steel City of the South." Now, the steel furnaces, mills, and factories that once darkened the sky have disappeared so entirely that it is difficult to believe they were ever there; and Birmingham has passed to presenting itself as an aspirational Atlanta.
All these urban and civilizational trappings sit lightly on Birmingham. When I am there, as I was recently, it is not these things of which I think.
The most immediately striking thing about being in Birmingham, for me, is the horizon. You look towards the sky, and see a sky made of trees lifted above you. It is utterly beautiful.
Birmingham is in the mountains; it sits at one end of the great Appalachians that have from the beginning formed the backdrop for the colonial drama of the Eastern United States. Birmingham falls in what is known as the Ridge-and-Valley part of that mountain chain, and indeed in the most literal sense it consists of two ridges and accompanying valleys. In truth, though, Birmingham is the valleys. It clings to the sides and slopes at every angle, sprawls and buries itself in every nook and cranny.
All this lends a unique perception that haunts me every moment I am there; that I am buried, hidden, concealed, shadowed, overgrown. Whether in the city or the sprawling suburbs, I feel surrounded by hidden people, places, worlds, always just around the bend, over the hill, on the other side of the slope, in the thickets, over the wall, behind the trees. Even when I get up onto one of the great ridges that dominate the horizon, and look across the valley below, I does not feel, as is usual when looking down from a great height, a sense of exaltation and exacting knowledge: the feeling described both by Orson Welles in The Third Man and by Matthew and Luke in the Temptation in the Desert. Rather than everything lying open and exposed to my gaze, the plan of a machine with its parts in order, it is if anything even more hidden than before: a thousand little hidden valleys, each with its face turned away from me, hiding a secret. I feel, not the greatness of revelation, but the greatness of mystery. It is like a thousand veiled faces.
Distance does not function quite normally in Birmingham. If Texas is the place where everything looks and feels (and is) large, Birmingham is the place where everything is large, but looks small. A hundred feet feels somehow like ten; a seven-story building feels like a small house. Like many places in America, Birmingham is built on a large scale, designed not for the slow, social life of villages and fields feeding and growing into towns and cities, but for the rapid, Imperial infrastructure of roads and railroads, commodities and depots. Yet unlike many such places, Birmingham holds something of the sleepiness, the buried, hidden life, of Europe at its oldest.
This is partly, I think, because the movements and angles of the landscape so thoroughly dominate the buildings and the trees, and partly because the movements and angles themselves are so strange and so various. Experienced up close, the topography suggests not so much a single landscape of a few great mountains and valleys, but an infinite, repeating pattern of ridges and valleys, hills and crevices, extending from the largest to the smallest scale without interruption.
It is not the landscape alone that grants a sense of isolation to me when I am there, though; it is also the vibrant, living flesh that wraps its bones. Birmingham is far to the South, somewhere around the latitude of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Its flora and fauna mixes the alpine and subtropical: a devouring growth of vibrant green surmounted by oak and pine. In the spring, the hills scream violent pink, green, and red, and the gutters run yellow with pollen, and in the summer, steam rises off of the roads. There is in all this much of the sense of violent, trespassing, overpowering, devouring life and growth ascribed by Werner Herzog to the Amazonian jungle; something also of the genial, creeping repose ascribed by Chesterton and other English authors to their own ivy-covered woods and hills. The overall effect of the two strains is cumulative, however: whatever is not hidden by the folds of the landscape is soon overshadowed by trees and overgrown with weeds and shrubs and creeping vines.
All this is, naturally, reflected in the customs and culture of the people. This is not civilized country. There is little or nothing of civitas here, let alone res publica. Birmingham has little of the Southern European sociability, little of the Central European candor, little even of the Puritan honesty and industry of the colonial American East Coast. It belongs rather to the true Deep South, the land of buried, overgrown enclaves. There are entire separate cultures, almost entire civilizations here, lost in the hills.
The division of peoples here begins with, but goes far beyond, the basic juxtaposition of black and white (and people forget that even today, the South is the place where black and white are in fact closest together, socially and culturally, and are forced to meet and associate in the largest numbers and most frequently). There is not just the urban black poor and the suburban black professional class, but the old black rural culture, still preserved in the villages and towns, and the old, respected and respectable respectable black urban class. There are not just the cultureless white suburbanites and young professionals, nominally Yankee or nominally Southern, but the old, corrupt, and fashionable white Southern aristocracy, the gauche, grotesque, drunken white Southern nouveau riche, the angry, aspiring, conscienceless white Southern up-and-comers, the harsh, industrious, white Southern middle class, and the rural Southern white trash. There are not just the black and the white, but, especially in Birmingham itself, the immigrants, old and new: Italians, Germans, Syrians, Greeks, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese.
All these groups exist elsewhere; but it is hard to believe there is anywhere else where they have had such an ability to spread themselves out and hide themselves, to find friendships and alliances and grudges and prejudices and to retain them.
In such a land of valleys, one never knows when one will meet a bitter enemy around the turning of the next path. When they all meet in public, as sooner or later they all do, if not every day, every week, if not every week, every month, there is the famed Southern friendliness and hospitality, one of the most misunderstood cultural proclivities in the world. Put simply, it is a strong code of manners for a strongly divided society; outwardly amiable precisely because of the bitter memories and bitter conflicts which it is called upon, day in and day and out, to bridge and defuse and render harmless. There is a sense, a very profound sense, in which the whole South remains on perpetual, armed guard, with Southern hospitality as the terms of the armistice.
Yet behind the fear, behind the etiquette, behind even the conflicts themselves, there is a profound, genuine, intense pleasure in the experience and interaction and interplay of individuals and peoples and groups and cultures--an indulgence kept, barely, from danger by familiarity, by etiquette, and by the knowledge that, whatever happens, each party can and will retreat back to their own enclave. It is this combination of intense guardedness with intense pleasure that forms, I think, the core of the Southern character.
The government of such a people--a people lacking civitas and communitas on any sizeable scale--can only be partial, weak, divided, and infinitely corrupt: and so it is. The religion of such a people can only be communal and sectarian, projected outwards fiercely, bitterly, positively, inwardly held desperately if not despairingly, cynically if not corruptly, propped by the familiar artifice of sociable habit. Sixty years ago, Walker Percy, another Southern Catholic, pointed out the profound paganism of Southern culture; and it remains so, both in general outline and in a thousand separate details.
Bible Belt or no, Birmingham is not an environment that lends itself to belief in the High God encountered and proclaimed on towering, unveiled mountains looking down onto naked desert and raging sea. When you wander in twisting, overgrown byways, is difficult to believe that anyone, even an angry sky god, could really see into every buried enclave, let alone gather them all together for judgment. In the valleys of tree- and brush-covered ridges, the humidity is overpowering, and everything rots from within.
There is one saving grace for Birmingham, though, that is worth a thousand humid, torrid days: the tempestuous purity of its weather. Lost in the valley of a valley, shadowed by trees, it is easy to get lost in oneself. But then, without warning, the wind blows, the thunder sounds, the rain falls like a knife through the canopy, and you are brought face to face with reality.
Birmingham has one of the highest rainfalls in the country, yet the rain is not continuous, but intermittent and unexpected. When it comes, it comes not in drizzles, but in sudden, unexpected torrents, the heavens roaring and letting fall mountains of water onto mountains of earth. There are not only downpours, but storms; not only storms, but tornadoes. Many of these events are, metereologically, almost impossible to predict, and come with severe dangers to life and limb and property. The violence of the weather, however, has never felt to me at all excessive. It is the necessary counterpoint, the necessary corrective, to all the little, twisted, overgrown riddles of life in such a place.
I have always experienced these tempests, since I was a child, as simply and entirely liberating, as the sweet, clear mercy of the God of Truth, shattering every pretense and hypocrisy, lifting every veil, raising every valley.
Birmingham is a beautiful place, full of valleys; and more than most places, it shows both the need for judgment, and its inescapability. For that above all else, it remains with me always.
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