Ramblin' by Gail Roughton

Because evil never dies. It just--waits.

Some small amount of attention, more than normal anyway, has been focused on my little ol' home town of Macon, Georgia this past week.  Macon's never going to give Hollywood or Nashville or New York an inferiority complex, but in its own humble way, it's made a few small contributions to the world of entertainment. If you take a ramble through the city's trivia facts, you'll find the Fifth Street Bridge's formal name, The Otis Redding Bridge, is entirely appropriate seein' as how (Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay was inspired by said bridge and the hours Otis Redding spent fishing from it. Or so the story goes in Macon, anyway. He got a hand up from another Macon native by the name of Little Richard.  Lena Horne lived in Macon during a few years of her childhood. Jason Aldean was born and raised in Macon, and shot the video of Gonna Know We Were Here in downtown Macon and at his alma mater, Windsor Academy, using Windsor Academy students as his extras. Bet those kids are never goin' to forget that, don't you?

It's been a popular movie location over the past ten to fifteen years, and its vintage Minor League Ballpark, Luther Williams Field, helped with that for at least three movies, same being The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, Trouble with the Curve (okay, it wasn't big box office but it was Clint Eastwood, baby) and 42. It's very fitting Hollywood loves that ballpark, because it's figured in Major League Baseball history in its own right as the home of the Macon Peaches, farm team for the Cincinnati Reds. As such, it launched Pete Rose, Tony Perez, Lee May and Tommy Helms into the Majors. The Atlanta Braves organization took over and the park became home to the Macon Braves farm team, launching the careers of Chipper Jones, Andruw Jones, Rafael Furcal, Tony Graffannio, John Smoltz and Marcus Giles. But the Park hasn't been the only draw for Hollywood and we've hosted quite a few other movies, including John Huston's Wise Blood, The Rose and the Jackal (notable for featuring Christopher Reeves before his accident), The Need for Speed and The Fifth Wave. 

But more than anything, Macon was the hub of Southern Rock during the 1970's  and Phil Walden's Capricorn Records operated on Cotton Avenue, recording albums by several Southern Rock bands like Wet Willie and The Marshall Tucker Band. But the band who became legend in Macon, Georgia was, hands down, The Allman Brothers Band.

Duane Allman died in a motorcycle crash on Hillcrest Avenue in 1971, and was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, a Macon historical landmark of some note.  Less than thirteen months later, and within three blocks of the spot where Duane Allman died, the band's bassist Berry Oakley died in another motorcycle crash. He was buried beside Duane Allman in Rose Hill Cemetery. Now, I never personally attended, mind you, and so claim no personal knowledge, but stories are there were quite a few parties held at those graves in Rose Hill by some of band's fans. The band kept going until 1979, but trust me, the legends never died. Especially in Macon. 

And this past week, with the death of Gregg Allman at age 69 of liver cancer, the press descended on Macon, Georgia and Rose Hill Cemetery, where Gregg Allman was buried beside his brother. The funeral and burial were private but a pretty big crowd gathered on the hill overlooking the Allman graves to watch. And of course there were complaints among the hard-core Allman Brothers fans that Gregg's ex-wife Cher, in attendance at the funeral, took too much attention away from Gregg. (Duh! After all, Cher is Cher, people!) Be that as it may, the lyrics of the band's songs will always be part of the back beat of the memories that play in my mind whenever I think of my late teens and early twenties. "Got one morrre silver dollarrrr...but I'm not gonna let them catch me, no, not gonna let 'em catch...the midnight... riderrrrrr...." , "Lord, I was born a ramblin' mannnn...tryin' to make a livin' and doin'... the best I can...."  Happy rambles, guys. Happy rambles. And many midnight rides. To paraphrase the song, Rose Hill's got a hell of a band. 

I also have a special place in my heart for Rose Hill Cemetery. It opened in 1840 and was designed by Simri Rose for the express purpose of being a place to visit and gather for the people of Macon.  And seein' as how it's a cemetery, it also fed the imaginations of quite a few kids throughout the years. I don't know if one particular urban legend concerning Rose Hill is even an urban legend. It well might have been just a campfire story spun by my own admittedly peculiar group of friends.  I mean, we used to read palms and cast horoscopes. Be that as it may, one story we used to scare each other with involved a body buried in Rose Hill with a stake through the heart. So it follows as the night the day that when I got this crazy idea for a short satire involving a vampire about to be evicted from his mausoleum, I immediately set same in Rose Hill Cemetery.  Somewhere along the way, that short satire turned into a Southern Gothic family saga spanning a century in time. It ceased to be funny and damn sure ceased to be short, but the location of my vampire's mausoleum never changed. Well, the name did, my fictional cemetery became Rose Arbor Cemetery 'cause I didn't want to ruffle any historical society feathers.  But the inspiration? Oh, no, that remained the same. And in fact, the historical Rose Hill Cemetery holds semi-annual guided rambles through the grounds. They call them, appropriately enough, "Rose Hill Rambles". 

So if the mood should strike you and you'd like to ramble through Rose Hill, er, excuse me, Rose Arbor Cemetery under the moonlight some dark night, it's right there waiting for you, right inside the pages of The Color of Seven.  Where evil never dies. It just--waits.

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Say What, Now? By Gail Roughton

Visit Gail Roughton at Books We Love, Ltd.

Has it ever crossed your mind that a lot of problems are caused by folks unnecessarily complicating things? We've all got folks in our lives who're masters of that.  You know, like the people who, when hanging a picture, first pull out their handy-dandy stud-finder and locate a stud (regardless of whether the picture weighs a few ounces or whether it's in an ornate frame and weighs a ton), and then pull out the tape measure and measure top to bottom and side to side before picking a spot.  This was my husband's preferred method when he was younger; nowadays, he's more apt to follow my method of eyeballing the wall, hammering in the nail and hanging the picture. I've always been a "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" type of gal.

But the prize-winners among the folks who unnecessarily complicate things are English teachers, especially senior high English teachers and college professors.  Please let me state here that I have the utmost respect for teachers, truly I do. However, I'm afraid teachers, especially those who teach in the aforementioned upper levels of the educational system, might have a bit too much respect for just how complex and complicated a writer's mind is.  We're really not that complicated.  What am I talking about?  

This.  This little diagram is what I'm talking about.  We're writers. We're not rocket scientists.We're telling a story. We're not making comments on the inequities of society.  Well, we are, but that's because any story we write is, of necessity, reflective of the society in which it's set. In other words, we write what we know because guess what? It's what we know.  Unless of course it's science fiction or fantasy. But it's not like we're sending out hidden messages visible only to those who sit and analyze our wondrous words. 

For instance, when my youngest son was in college, one particular assignment required him to discuss the significance of Bram Stoker's use of the Three Sisters in Dracula as an allegory for the social inequities in the treatment of women in Victorian society. Or something similarly esoteric to that phraseology, it's been a while.  And really. Say what, now? 

We're talking about Dracula here.  Truly one of the masterpieces of literature. I read it when I was in the eighth grade and I didn't sleep for three nights thereafter. I didn't sleep without a cross and a St. Christopher's medal around my neck for the next ten to fifteen years, either. Was that the effect Bram Stoker was going for? Oh, you betcha it was. Was he disappointed it never crossed my mind that the Three Sisters weren't being treated fairly as equals to the Count, just as women in 19th Century England weren't treated as equals to men? Well, I can't exactly ask him but I really doubt he'd have lost any sleep over it. I think if anybody asked him what was going through his mind when he created the the Three Sisters, he'd say "I was trying to scare the bloody hell out of anybody reading the story." And if anybody asked him for his thought processes in creating such an allegory for the social inequities of his society, his response would be "Say what, now?"  In an English accent of course.

Because evil never dies. It just--waits.

I write to entertain. To be honest, I write to entertain myself. That's honestly my primary motive for writing. I've written books widely disparate in style and genre and usually the bottom-line motive is I'm bored and I need some entertainment. That being said, of all my books, The Color of Seven is the one an English teacher would be most apt to find full of hidden allegories and parables and comments on society (not that I think any English teacher would ever be using it in an English class). That's because it spans over a century in time, beginning in the 1880's and extending to the present as it tells the story of a family living in Macon, Georgia in the post-Civil War South. Racism, mixed marriages, and prejudice are all elements of the plot. And then there's the eternal battle of good versus evil, light versus dark thing, I've always been a sucker for that, it gives me the excuse to throw black magic and voodoo and vampires in. I call it my Southern Gothic family saga horror, and my unabashed and unashamed motive in writing same was to scare the hell out of my readers while making them fall in love with some of the characters and totally loathe a few others, which is the pinnacle of success for any writer. (And at the risk of sounding as though I'm tooting my own horn, feedback from readers indicate I was successful in that endeavor, at least with a few folks.) 

As to the more serious social issues I admit are an integral part of the background and plot of this book--trust me, I didn't set out to write a novel highlighting those issues. They're in the book because I'm southern, born in 1954. I cut my teeth on Civil War history, I grew up in the 1960's. I never did a lick of research on anything in that book (unless you count copying the street names and business names off an old 1888 map of my hometown of Macon, Georgia which is why the story starts in the 1880's in Macon, Georgia--I wasn't about to waste that treasure) except for the voodoo black magic elements involved. I didn't do any research  because I didn't need to. And why not?  Because we write what we know, what's already there, burned into our brains and woven into the very fibers of our being. There's not always a hidden agenda.

Therefore, if any English teacher ever did ask a student to discuss the use of vampirism in The Color of Seven as a statement on the post-Civil War dichotomy between the races, trust me--the only appropriate response would be "Say what, now?" Everything doesn't have to be complicated, folks. You know what they say.  "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck--it's probably a duck." Enjoy the simple pleasures! (Including a good scare.)

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