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S T O R I E S
by Chantelle Rytter
Welcome to where the weird things are!
Tonight we stand at the heart of something ancient and alive, here in the belly of the Atlanta Beltline. We are inside the most glorious storm drain ever built by man. Look at the stone inlay marking the water level of the 100 year storm and the 500 year storm. This is Clear Creek Basin, a flood plain, a vale. The veil is thin in the vale tonight.
This vale is fed by Angier Spring and Ponce de Leon Spring, ancient springs from deep in the earth, water that might be a billion years old. This vale is also created by the water of storms. Storms are the energies of the unknown. Storms have eyes. Storms listen, collecting secrets, carrying whispers across oceans and mountains. What do they hear in the deep of the night as they sweep across the earth? And what have they brought here?
Our storms pass over the spirits of the Caribbean; Papa Samedi, Loup Garou, Anansi. And then over Florida’s Skunk Apes, Wampus Cats, Mahambas and Florida Man. Our storm waters also flow down from Appalachia. We share storm water with the Mothman, the Moon-eyed people, the Smoke Wolves, big foot!
Georgia is a perfect storm of storm water energy, blowing up from the southeast and draining down from the northwest. And this vale right here, where the storm water meets with the ancient water from the depths of the earth. Clearly, this is a natural vortex. And the Atlanta Beltline built a monument to it! They did not bury and hide the water, as is so common in our city. Rather, they honored it. What do you suppose got into the minds of the designers to approach this vale so differently? This beautiful park was obviously a great deal more work than burying pipes. Do you suppose they sensed that this spot is special? Or did some thing reach out to them?
Sometimes, if you do right by the strange and unseen you get a little something in return. Maybe the designers gave this place the reverence it demanded, and in return, the weird things… smiled. This park came in 17 million dollars under budget. Fact.
The weird things are here, my fellow ATLiens! And we are here to give them their night. Once a year, we will turn a parade upside down to call them, invite them to to dance and sing with us, and listen their tales.
Kudzulu, Lord of the Vines
Enoch Reid’s Clippers
In the dead of the summer of 1934, when Atlanta’s air hung thick and still, Enoch Reid had a problem. He was afraid to go home. His house was on the ridge, where the land dropped off into Clear Creek Basin. It was a shotgun shack by the railroad tracks, sun-bleached and sagging—but it was home. Enoch had once had a proud little garden and a pretty view of the creek. But since he’d gone to work the rails and was gone for weeks at a time, his land had changed.
It was the kudzu. The kudzu had been creeping closer and moving unnaturally fast. Just four years ago, strangers came and seeded the hillside with the stuff. Said they were government men, said it was to fight erosion. He had greeted them with a shotgun on the edge of his land. Enoch recalled that moment often riding on the train, watching the native flora losing the kudzu war all over the south. By the time Enoch returned from a two-week stretch on the railroad, the kudzu had grown as much as fifteen feet, covering his garden, smothering his blueberries, and stretching long tendrils toward the edge of his porch. He hacked it back with fury. He tore the roots from the ground. But the vine always came back and it came back stronger. Enoch kept his clippers sharp. Lately, he never left the house without his clippers in his pocket.
The last time Enoch walked down to the creek, the kudzu was thigh high. It made him nervous. Nothing in the vale was as he remembered. The monstrous monoculture was disorienting, infuriating. He glanced up at the approaching dusk and a vine caught his ankle. He and tripped and sprawled and found himself lying in a pile of trash hidden by the kudzu. Bottles, cans, rusted springs, and a heap of rotting chicken wings. He bolted up in disgust. Though there was no breeze, the leaves of the kudzu shook. He could feel it laughing at him. He balled his fists and snarled at the vine, “What are you doing here, you botanical tyrant? You invader, you unnatural trash dump vine, you do not belong here!”
The ground quaked, and a gravely voice rumbled “You brought me here. Mwa ha ha ha ha!” Enoch’s head swam, his vision blurred, then his reality shifted. Eyes popped open in all the kudzu mounds in the vale, and a humungous heap of kudzu rose up in front of him, it’s eyes opened, a mouth formed with jagged teeth. A tentacle of vine shot out and grabbed his coveralls and snatched him right up off the ground. “I am Kudzulu, the Lord of the Vines! I wormed my thought tendrils into the weak minds of your capitalist botanists with the words “sell erosion control”. Mwa ha ha ha ha! You planted me, you cared for me, and invited me to feast! And I am hungry, Enoch Reid.” Enoch grabbed the clippers from his pocket and cut the vine arm that clutched him. He landed square and looked face the monster, but Kudzulu was gone. The leaves of the vine shook though there was still no breeze. Enoch ran.
Back on the train, he spent two sleepless weeks rolling past hundreds of miles of kudzu and worrying that he did not shut his bedroom window. The kudzu was topping hardwoods now. Oaks, maples, pines - all turned to amorphous blobs. He stared at their swaying figures in the dusk, waiting for their eyes to open, the nightmare encounter with Kudzulu in the vale looping in his head. He clenched his clippers in his pocket all day long, and slept with them under his pillow. What in the name of god would he be coming home to? Did he shut the window? Kudzulu was consuming his home. Kudzulu was consuming his mind.
Enoch took another pull off his flask and offered it to his buddy, Earl. He and Earl sat by an open train car door watching a thunderhead over Atlanta in the growing dark. “What’s with the hound dog face, partner?” Earl said, “We’re almost home!” Earl stood, wobbled a bit, and leaned against the open door. “Look, there’s our pretty city, the lights of Sears & Roebuck and Excelsior Mill and… is that your place?” Enoch’s house looked mishapened. And his land…he couldn’t even remember what his land looked like before the kudzu. Kudzulu was strangling his memories.
A bolt of lightening cracked and Atlanta went dark. Startled, Earl lost his balance and tumbled halfway out of the train car door. Enoch snatched his friend’s coveralls and flattened himself on the floor, one hand on Earl and a death-grip on a hand hold in the other. While he pulled Earl to safety, Enoch watched his clippers slide out of his pocket, skitter across the floor and out of the train car door.
Enoch felt panic creeping up his spine. The train’s whistle howled, cutting through the thunder as the train slowed to a stop. Earl tucked a full flask of whiskey in Enoch’s front pocket, “Thank you, partner. I thought I was a goner there” and he ducked out into the rain. In the next lightening flash Enoch saw. His house was completely covered, his open bedroom window stared at him. Kudzulu’s laugh rose on the gusting wind, “I’m hungry, Enoch Reid.”
Enoch’s hand trembled as he reached for the flask. The weight of it was strangely comforting. He uncapped it and took a long swig. He looked out over the writhing horizon that was his path home. He balled his fists, “I’m coming for you, Kudzulu.” And with that, he stepped out into the storm.
Keep your clippers close, my friends, and shut your bedroom window.
Alice the Alligator
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union ladies were feeling deeply satisfied with their work. They’d defeated the repeal of prohibition in Georgia, again, and exceeding their girls scholarship funding goal. Mavis Jones crowed, “Pleasant Grove, Georgia where the women are educated and their men are sober.” “Amen”said the ladies. They’d celebrated with a fine peach cobbler and were walking home after dark. They reached the top of the creek bridge and stopped dead in their tracks. They were struck still by the devil red glow of the alligators eyes in the black water below, like a band of demons swimming towards the bridge. As they neared, Mavis Jones saw that a pair of those red eyes belonged to a white haired white girl. “Is that…Alice Freeman?” There was only one white-haired white child with red eyes in Pleasant Grove. Mavis Jones screamed and fainted.
“It is unnatural,” Mavis Jones told the Sheriff the next morning. “This Pleasant Grove, Sheriff. Our children do not swim with alligators! You know as well as everyone else that the Freemans are running a juke joint out there in the swamp. And now their daughter is half alligator. Go shut that abomination down, Sheriff, if you want to get re-elected. You shut that juke joint down and the church will send Alice Freeman to Riverbend Christian Academy for Girls in Atlanta.”
The regular working folks of Pleasant Gove spent some of the best hours of their lives at the Freemans juke joint, laughing and dancing under the warm lantern light. Little Alice Freeman fell asleep to the sounds of good people having good times most every night. Good people that they were, Alice knew that she frightened them sometimes. Especially when it came to looking her in the eye. Alice was born with albinism. Her eyes were a light violet that occasionally flashed red. It comforted Alice to see the red eyes of the alligators on the creek from her bedroom window.
Alice’s favorite thing to do on any warm day was to thoroughly cover herself in mud and then go lie down on the creek bank and pretend to be an alligator. Her mother watched with concern, worrying that her extra white child was turning herself brown to be more like her family. But Alice wanted to be an alligator. Alice watched the alligators all day long. Once the juke joint got rocking, she’d slip back down to the creek after dark. With the laughter and music softly at her back, she willed those beautiful red eyes to come closer. And they did.
Alice watched the alligators springtime courtship, their bellowing echoing all across the river. She worried for the alligator eggs in the nest across the creek, watching the lady gator lunge at raccoons and sweep away snakes away with her tail. Alice knew all the alligators. And they knew her.
One afternoon, Alice fell asleep basking in the sun on the bank of the creek. When she opened her eyes, there was an alligator lying on the bank right next to her. They were eye to eye. Alice grinned her best alligator’s grin.
The alligator grinned back, “They say it’s good luck to see a white alligator. How old are you, child?”
“I’m ten years old,” Alice said. “How old are you?”
The gator chuckled, “250 million years. You are more like 300,000 years old, little sister. You just forgot. We don’t change, but we remember. You traded your ancient memories for evolution. It is maddening to the natural world that your species remembers nothing. All the power and can’t remember spit. But you my dear, you look like luck.”
The alligator tossed her head to the opposite bank and two lady gators swam towards them. Lying on her belly in the mud, chatting with the three alligator sisters, Alice was living her dream. She always knew she was an alligator. When Alice slid into the water with the three alligator sisters she felt her whole self expand.
Alice swam with the sisters all summer, mesmerized by their stories. The alligators had full-blown memories of being dinosaurs, “Mahambas”, 30’ alligators that dominated all the inland water ways sixty-five million years ago with even bigger cousins in the Congo. In the afterlife, Alligators were mahambas, dinosaur ghosts that could ride on storms. Every alligator family has tales of ancestor visitations. “Alligators are still the biggest creatures in the rivers,” the sister said, “but can you imagine being as big as that bridge?”
Alice could imagine.
The alligators spent the winter burrowed in the mud and Alice spent the winter dreaming of being a giant alligator. At night, she’d gaze out of her bedroom window and imagine a colossal white alligator with eyes like hers swimming into the creek and staring up into her bedroom window. And in a blink, she would be looking out of the eyes of the giant gator and up at her empty bedroom window. Then she was Alice the Alligator, big as a bridge, gliding up the Chattahoochee, all the way to Atlanta.
On their first spring swim together in the late spring, Alice excitedly told the sisters about her nightly outings as Alice the Alligator, how she swam the whole length of the river and heard the fish, the turtles, the snakes, and the gators whisper “mahamba” as she passed by. How she felt like a powerful protector, a mighty guardian, called to keep the river creatures safe and their water clean. The alligator sisters listened wide-eyed. “Alice, we saw you. The whole river saw you.”
And that is when Alice and the alligators heard Mavis Jones scream.
The sheriff did go shut down the Freemans juke joint and Alice was sent to Riverside Christian Academy for Girls in Atlanta. It was a tough time for the Freemans. But, in a way, Mavis Jones seeing Alice swimming with alligators was a stroke of luck.
Alice went on to graduate from GSU in environmental science. She studied water management, hydrology, and completed her Ph.D. at Stanford in Earth Science. Dr. Freeman was a commanding presence with her alabaster skin, her violet that flashed red, and her alligator grin. She helped found river keepers across the southeast, mystifying her colleagues with her astute and uncanny knowledge of what was happening in every waterway, as if she swam there herself. Sightings of Alice the Alligator continue to this day, most often where there is music and lantern light and the sounds of good people having a good time. It is always lucky to see Alice.