Red, messy, slick, and a trademark of the American South.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
Drizzle drifted and spritzed as if it were January except it was October. Mists coated my camera. In its viewfinder red mud glistened in rain that slickened it to slip-sliding away status and that triggered my earliest memory of South Carolina.
Dad had driven the family to Calhoun Falls to visit my uncle. His home sat on a hill facing a valley of red mud that led uphill to the graveled road from whence we came. We stayed till after dark then left in rain, no ordinary rain, a deluge. Tires spinning, car skittering, Dad’s 1956 Plymouth inevitably bogged down. That’s when he summoned me.
“Take off your shirt”, Mom told me. “Pants too.” In my underwear I pushed as the wheels spun with a whirring noise. I pushed and pushed. When the wheels caught, the car shot forward and I clung to the chrome bumper to avoid splattering into red mud.
To this day I want to say it was winter and I must have been a sorry, freezing sight plastered in red mud. Eddie Rabbit loved a rainy night but not my rainy night I pray. I had no one to help me push against that bumper of chrome, not even a jack rabbit, Eddie.
I have never looked at red clay the same since that spinning, rainy night. At nine I was too young to know that iron oxide-dirt gives the American South a strong identity and inspires Southern writers. Cormac McCarthy wrote, “The red clay banks along the road are crested with withered honeysuckle, peavines dried and sheathed in dust.”
Lily Wilkinson wrote, “Our blood stains the red dirt under my feet, and the thought of leaving it behind makes my heart ache”.
And then Cormac wrote about a horseman getting a sip of water . . . “He squatted and dipped a palmful of water to his lips, watched the dace drift and shimmer. Scout waded past him, elbow-deep into the stream, lapped at it noisily. Strings of red dirt receded from his balding hocks, marbling in the water like blood.” Red clay gave Eudora Welty a sense of place and Flannery O’Connor tread red clay on her farm near Milledgeville.
Red clay is not restricted to highfaluting literary inspiration. Leonard’s Losers calls the Georgia Bulldogs the red clay hounds, and there’s a band called the Red Clay Strays. Perhaps they cover Muddy Waters songs.
As for me, I don’t recall being inspired so much as perspired that rainy night in Calhoun Falls once known as Saloon Falls. Dutiful, I did whatever Dad asked and under his tutelage we escaped the slippery red clay.
Home safe and sound I remember standing in the yard washing away red clay “marbling in the water like blood.” And despite my cold baptism by mud, I like red clay to this day. It’s a part of the Southland. Something that will last. I drive through a land red and green. Red clay and kudzu, which can make red clay vanish. Red and green. It’s home to me. Maybe home to you too.
Now, should you suffer red clay stains on your jeans, khakis, what have you, know that the South has put its mark on you. If you want to remove the mark, let the clay dry, then brush off as much as you can. Pre-treat the stain with a mix of white vinegar and salt or mix Dawn dish soap and hydrogen peroxide. Wash in the hottest water your fabric can survive, using a laundry detergent for good measure. Scrape away what remains with dried kudzu leaves.
See? You can wash red mud from your clothes, but you cannot wash it from the Southland. The rains have tried long and hard and failed every time. That’s why red clay covers the South. Once upon a time it covered a lad who did what his dad asked on a night when the Heavens opened up. That night taught me a lesson. You do what you must when you must no matter what.
(I was kidding about scraping with kudzu leaves, but you knew that.)
