We're Going To Florida!

With Mom, Aunt Juanita, Grandma Ava, brothers Sam and Mark, cousins Jackie and Jeff. And a mean Chihuahua named Barnabas.

by Rick Bragg
illustration by James Bennett

It always started with chicken frying. That was how you knew.

I woke to delicious smells when I was a boy, to bacon and sausage frying, biscuits baking, coffee brewing — coffee so strong it was almost thick, so dense a fly could do a soft-shoe across it on the way to the jelly jar.

But if you woke to chicken, it meant Florida.

There was never more geographic designation than that, just Florida, which we pronounced Flar’da. It did not mean the pastel beachfront of South Beach or the glimmering water of the Keys or the fish-rich flats of Tampa Bay.

Florida was the Panhandle, Pensacola, Fort Walton, Destin. The rest of the state was a dangerous unknown, what you fell into when you reached the end of the known world, and my Aunt Juanita would have just as soon piloted her 1963 Chevrolet Biscayne to the moon as nudged it 1 mile past Panama City.

No, our Florida was a day’s drive away, and it began with that smell and the sound of aluminum foil tearing off a roll. If we didn’t starve until we got to Montgomery, we’d have chicken at a roadside concrete picnic table under the Spanish moss. That was how you knew you were halfway there, when you saw that Spanish moss. All my life, when I saw it, I started to smile.

It was the 1960s when we first started to go. We were part of the great blue-collar migration, if a migration means a day travelin’ to it, a day there in a $14-a-night Castaway Cottage, and a day back. It was always, always, the day after school let out. The men worked at pipe shops or steel mills, on pulpwood trucks, or in the dirt, and did not have time for foolishness such as Florida.

The women commanded this trip. Aunt Juanita drove, slapping through the gears — three on the tree — with barely enough room to shift, the car was packed so tight. There was my mother, in her pedal-pushers and discreet dip of snuff, and my Grandma Ava, who was prone at any time to break into “Uncloudy Day.” There was my brother Sam, capable, quiet, who could keep the Biscayne running with a pocketknife and a twist of wire; my baby brother Mark; teenage cousin Jackie; and toddling cousin Jeff. And a mean little rat dog Chihuahua named Barnabas, who was bad to bite.

There wasn’t a lot of luggage. My mother folded some shorts and shirts into a paper bag with Piggly Wiggly on the side, and we went south.

Even with Aunt Juanita driving at a pace that was barely faster than you turn the page on a calendar, it did not seem like a long trip, yet it was the greatest distance I had ever gone. We started in Calhoun County, Alabama, north of Jacksonville, and followed the pulpwood trucks south on Alabama 21 through Anniston, Oxford, Talladega, Sylacauga and finally into Montgomery, where, although we took the same damn route every damn year, we got lost.

We did not do well in a big city, and Montgomery was at least the size of Los Angeles, it seemed. But we always got headed right somehow and pulled over for a sack of RCs. Then, just when it seemed like our bellies would just sink into our very backbones, we saw our picnic table and pulled over again, to eat.

We overflowed the table so we ate standing up. There was cold fried chicken, sweating into that foil, still the best fried chicken I have ever had. And there would be a plate of cold biscuits and another plate of deviled eggs. And someone would slice a tomato and a hot Spanish onion, and if we were lucky there was some potato salad, served from Tupperware.

“My God,” someone would always say. There was not much else to say after that.

Barnabas had to stay in the car because he was brain damaged and would have chased an 18-wheeler into the Promised Land. But when we were all done, someone poured him a shot of cold water into a jar lid from a Purex jug someone had frozen solid overnight. Then we all took a pull, the water so cold it took your breath, and we were off again.

And there it was, the moss. Exotic. We were someplace special now.

The water in the creeks changed from jade and muddy brown to an enchanted black, and the banks turned from pedestrian red clay into white sand. We watched for alligators in every mud hole, in every ditch. We never saw one, but we saw a lot of chewed-up truck tires, so we lied to ourselves and said we did.

The hills vanished, and the land began to gently roll. Beautiful, beautiful land. Herefords and Black Angus watched us pass, uninterested. We passed the jug around inside the car and sang gospel and country and nitwit songs we made up, and I would like to say we listened to the radio but that would be putting on airs, since there was no radio.

The heat always got us somewhere south of Troy. The steam spewed out from under the hood, and we rolled dead to the side of the road. But with some black electrician’s tape and some mumbled curses, Sam always had us rolling.

The sun would be giving up on us when we rolled into Pensacola or Panama City. We rarely unpacked or even checked in, but went straight to the beach. We never stayed on the beach — that was for fancy people — but stayed instead on the bay, where the rents were cheaper. But we headed for the beach first, because lookin’ don’t cost nothin’.

We went to the public beach, and I fought out of that crowded car like I was drowning in relatives. I ran to the edge of the water and stopped, right there, because my heart had decided to freeze up on me.

I think I’m a pretty good writer, better than I am a plumber, or a roofer, or a fisherman. But I am not good enough to describe how beautiful that was, how the colors of green and blue shifted and ran together, how the patches of clouds turned it dark and dangerous, how the sky turned blood red off my right shoulder, off toward Mobile, Pascagoula, and New Orleans.

I can’t really tell you how cool that water felt, sneaking through my raggedy Converse shoes, or how I almost leapt for joy when I saw a pelican glide across my line of sight, like a postcard, free of charge.

We never ate out, never dined on shrimp or grouper, never bought much of anything in the souvenir shops. I always kind of wanted one of the pirate heads carved from a coconut. But everything I needed I got in that moment, in that perfect moment, with my shoes in that sand. I still feel it, though it is not as strong now. It is harder to glimpse the water now, in the clutter and rush.

But I feel it.   
          
              
Rick Bragg is the author of two best-selling books, Ava’s Man and All Over but the Shoutin’. He lives with his family in Alabama and teaches writing in the journalism department at the University of Alabama. His new book, The Prince of Frogtown, will close the circle on family stories from the foothills of the Appalachians. “I've been writing for magazines and newspapers for 25 years,” he says, “and am the worst fisherman in my family.”