EPISODE 1 of “My Boys Are Back in Town: Joel Chandler Harris Backroads Edition” ended with my son Ned, who lives in Germany, and I-and-I embarking on a backroads trip to northern Georgia. It was Ned’s idea to see his mother’s sister Becky and her husband Dave during Ned’s two weeks in the States, and I volunteered to come along. My sister-in-law Becky is a Birdsong, and growing up, my boys were much closer to the Birdsongs than the Moores. The Birdsongs resembled the Brady Bunch, a prosperous blended family of non-smokers and non-alcoholics/drug addicts. The Moores, on the other hand, more or less resembled a mashup of the Addams Family and Tennessee Williams. For example, Becky had never vomited on Ned in a station wagon after picking her up from a halfway house to celebrate Christmas in dysfunctional Snopesville. Alas, the same can’t be said of his chain-smoking bipolar Aunt Virginia. 

As a bonus, when Becky and Dave’s son Scott heard we were coming, he decided to drive over from Atlanta to share the weekend with us.

With my bonus daughter Brooks in school, she and my wife Caroline couldn’t make the trip. Caroline, cognizant of Ned and my spaciness, made sure were had packed the essentials – tangles of electronic chargers, sufficient socks and underwear, gifts for the hosts, and a cooler of various malted beverages.

We took off on Thursday morning around ten, but there was a problem: when I punched Google maps, my phone informed me that I was not connected to the internet. Since Ned’s German phone was dataless, we turned around and retraced the block or two we had traveled on Hudson Avenue, Folly Beach, SC.  I climbed the stairs to my wifi-rich drafty garret to troubleshoot. No sooner than I had fired up the iMac, Ned called from below, “It’s ATT, dad. ATT’s down.” So I retrieved a venerable relic of a roadmap, and we were off.

Caroline and I had made this trip a couple of years earlier when I had introduced her to Becky and Dave, so I was somewhat familiar with the first leg of that took us to the fringes of Walterboro. On the previous trip, Caroline and I had made a pilgrimage to Blind Willie McTell’s grave outside of Thomson, Georgia, and headed back towards the Savannah River, Caroline caught sight of a truly weird roadside attraction, a junkyard turned art installation that included a crashed helicopter and a sexy mannikin in a telephone booth^[1]. Ned was eager to see it in person and share it with his friend Claudia, who is a prominent German artist.

This is what had caught Caroline’s eye

We headed down 17 South and stopped in the Red Top community to fill Caroline’s Prius with the cheapest gas in South Carolina. We were about a mile or so from Ned’s first childhood home in Rantowles, so we made a brief detour, noted the changes (or at least I did; Ned was yet not walking when we moved to the Isle of Palms). I noticed that the shrubs Judy and I had planted were still going strong, had, in fact, outlived her. Her ghost accompanied us throughout the trip, a pleasant though somewhat melancholy companion. 

At Jacksonboro, right past the now defunct Edisto Motel Restaurant, which had in the day conjured the best fried seafood I’ve ever eaten, we took highway 64 West towards the heart of murderous Murdaugh country, Colleton County. That’s where we discovered that ATT was back, and we need no longer rely on yesteryear’s technology to get us to Allendale, before we crossed the Savannah River into Georgia. 

Allendale is a lovely word, harkens back to Merry Old England, Robinhood and all that jazz, but the city nowadays is a decaying corpselike town of abandoned motels, convenience stores, and restaurants.^[2] Ned has perhaps inherited from the Moore side of his genetic heritage a morbid sensibility. Rather than getting the hell out of there, we tooled slowly, taking it all in, taking what used to be called photographs.

We decided to visit Blind Willie’s grave on this trip, and the art installation on the way back, since we had left late because of the ATT snafu. 

The grave is located in the yard of a small, red-bricked Baptist Church outside of Thomson. By the way, not only was Blind Willie a great bluesman, but he’s also the eponymous source of one of Dylan’s underappreciated masterpieces.

Here’s a snippet from “Blind Willie McTell”:

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Ned and stood by the grave, Ned tossed some German Euros on the slab, and with that mission accomplished, we made our way to Becky and Dave’s.^[3]

In the next episode, Becky introduces us to the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame in Eatonton where I learn some stuff and Ned buys me a book after I buy Becky a book.

Now that’s what I call a “cliffhanger” or maybe a “coat hanger.”

Here’s Dylan himself singing the above-quoted verse:

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^[1] Here’s a LINK if interested.

^[2] It makes the Trenchtown of the Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Fall look like Beverly Hills. It’s the opposite of Reynolds, where Becky and Dave live, a picturesque golf community of rolling hills and million dollar houses on and adjacent to Lake Oconee. 

^[3] Note to those who read episode 1. No, we didn’t pick up a blind hitchhiker, complete with red-tipped white cane. Never trust a teaser.