Présentation de l'éditeur
Comic and tragic, unique and outlandish, CRAZY IN ALABAMA is the story of two journeys--Lucille's from Industry, Alabama, to Los Angeles, to star on 'THE BEVERLY HILL BILLIES' and her 12-year-old nephew Peejoe's, who is about to discover two kinds of Southern justice, and what that means about the stories he's heard and the people he knows.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
A FEATURED ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE LITERARY GUILD
Extrait
Peter Joseph
San Francisco, 1993
I am out here in California waiting for the walls to come tumbling down. We have had omens. Ten years of plague. Seven years of drought. Firestorms. Mudslides. Floods. Pestilence. Riots. Tremors. Visions of the Virgin.
The millennium is bearing down on us fast. Nobody knows if 1999 will bring the end of everything, or the beginning of something else.
I kick back in my junior-one-bedroom apartment and look out at the shimmering night-lights of Telegraph Hill and the East Bay. I wonder how it will look when it all falls down.
Remember Jimmy Stewart's house in Vertigo, where he takes Kim Novak to dry out after he's fished her out of San Francisco Bay? I live up the hill from that house. They've painted it slate-blue and the shrubs have grown up. Otherwise it looks the same.
I sit by the window in my rocking chair, where I can see Jimmy Stewart's house and my TV at the same time. I freeze the laserdisc on the wide shot of the house: Cool blond Kim Novak strides to her car, forsaking Jimmy on the front porch.
I compare the scene as it is now, in real life, to the forty-year-old view through Hitchcock's camera. I drink bourbon and sit for hours, studying the subtle differences.
Everyone else is worried about the future. I have this thing about the past.
One night I was running Kim on a continuous slow-motion loop from Jimmy's front door to her green sedan and back again, when the telephone rang.
A quavery voice said "Peejoe?"
Nobody calls me Peejoe anymore. "Aunt Lucille?"
"God, it sure takes me back, just to hear you," she said.
"Me too, Aunt Lucille." I hadn't heard her voice in years, except on late-night reruns. I glanced up at my face on the cover of that old Life magazine, framed and hanging on the wall, and suddenly I was back in the deepest summer of my life, the summer of 1965, when everybody went crazy in Alabama.
1
Peejoe
Pigeon Creek, Alabama, 1965
My grandmother used an old embalming fluid bottle at the ironing board. She said the rocket-shaped tip put out just the right amount of water for sprinkling clothes.
I loved to be in Meemaw's room while she ironed, that big friendly room with a four-poster bed and framed pictures of Jesus and George Wallace and Grandpa Joe Wiley. Meemaw didn't mind my climbing up in her bed with my red-stained feet. I loved the hiss and suck of the steam iron, the moist rising fragrance of starch when the iron's hot face met the fabric. I loved the mysteries of the ritual: wet the clothes to wash them, dry them in the sun, wet them with the sprinkler bottle, dry them with the iron--a ceaseless baptism of dresses and white cotton shirts.
Meemaw hummed "O, My Papa" while I sprawled among her pillows, sketching floor plans for the funeral home I dreamed of building one day.
"Looka here, Meemaw, look at this one." I clambered down from the bed. "See, this is the front door where people come in, and here's the casket parlor, and these are the laying-out rooms."
She pointed the bottle at a corner of my sketch. "What's this part with the cow?"
I rolled my eyes. "That's not a cow, it's a dog. That's the kennel."
"The kennel?"
"So people can bring their dogs to funerals."
"You've thought of most everything," Meemaw said. "What's this squiggly-looking thing out back?"
"A swimming pool."
"Well now what would they need with a swimming pool?" She smoothed a white shirt on the ironing board. "Folks coming to a funeral, seems like swimming would be about the last thing on their minds."
"It's no
