Colby said the two men settled their dispute like men, but they looked more like buffoons than men to me. They wrestled without grace, at least one of them under the influence of some substance. Their tussle quickly moved horizontal with one lucky thrust applied to a man unluckily caught off-balance. That left one of them laying on the ground thrashing his limbs up and down with the other on top of him, holding just enough of his sparring partner down to limit his limbs’ motion. Eventually the pinned and flailing loser admitted defeat.
The drunken pair stood and hugged. A bear hug. It lasted longer than either might’ve cared to admit in the morning. A third man, some sort of sanctioned observer, walked away the moment they embraced, understanding that this dispute had been settled—he’d done his duty, and it was time to go home. (He actually waltzed to the closest dive bar).
Are these men brutes undeserving of our respect? We teach children never to resort to violence. That violence doesn’t solve problems, but only creates new ones. Here, though, man through violence achieved what a court of law, with all its sophistication and civilization, struggles and too often fails to do: resolve a dispute. Through this episode I️ peered into southern honor culture as if through a warped and dusted mirror.
My own northern sensibilities—my native land of Arizona was under the control of the Confederacy for most of the Civil War but today it is a land of Yanks; my mother is the daughter of an Iowan and a Hoosier, my father’s family hails from upstate New York—led me to instinctually ask the other groomsmen whether or not I️ should call the police. “Let them settle it like men,” Colby, a native Alabamian, said. He responded not as if he sought to recite some stoic maxim, but out of second nature. It was said with levity, a gentle rebuke of my naïveté. No need to involve the authorities. If either was going to use a gun it would’ve been fired already. So we let them tango in the late evening, two southern gentlemen exiled by the passage of time.
This was my final night in Birmingham. I’d arrived early the morning prior. My roommate was married to his high school sweetheart at Hope Community Church, a formerly United Methodist church in Gardendale, a Birmingham suburb. It was formerly United Methodist because the church had recently disaffiliated itself from the United Methodist Church over theological disputes. They’d gone too liberal, Mr. Peacock, the father of the bride, told me. As it turns out, a lot of churches throughout the Bible Belt had followed the same path as Hope in recent years. Mr. Peacock would know: he insures about a third of Alabama’s churches. The recent split had proven good for business, if not for the unity of the body of Christ.
When I️ landed on Thursday morning, Nick, then the husband-to-be, picked me up from the airport in his then wife-to-be’s Honda CR-V. We had plenty of chores to get done before the reception in the evening, but first, Nick needed a hair trim. The barbershop smelled of shaving cream and bourbon. The kind woman behind the counter told me about how she’d married her husband — this was her second marriage, his third — thirty years ago in Las Vegas. It worked out for them, she said, and laughed. Her husband, a barber engaged in his craft, stood nearby. A bandage adorned his face, covering the place where his nose used to be. “She says we get along alright, but look what she did to my face!” he said, chuckling. I️ didn’t ask why he’d had his nose removed. The joke was good enough for me. More importantly, it was good enough for him.
My final night in the city, the evening of the peaceful duel between the southern gentlemen, was spent at a dive bar not far from downtown. The smell of cigarettes wafted in from the smoke-friendly backyard, mixing with stale beer and bad karaoke. Colby and I️ played cornhole in the yard with Josh, who’d been released from prison two months prior, and another man whose name I’m forgetting but whose thick accent and khaki overalls are unforgettable. Before I️ left to rest up before my flight early the next morning, I️ ordered a cup of water from the bar. A woman and her daughter shouted at me from across the bar top: “Who here got married?” “None of us,” I️ retorted. We learned that they both knew the bride, and that they’d driven past the wedding earlier that day.
“Were the bridesmaids the real pretty girls wearing the light yellow dresses?”
“Yes, ma’am, the pretty ones in yellow.”
A strange place. A wonderful place. Birmingham in June.
Image via Wikimedia
