Essaying into the Afterlife

Jack Burton: What does that say?
Wang Chi: Hell of Boiling Oil.
Jack Burton: You're kidding.
Wang Chi: Yeah, I am. It says, Keep Out.
from Big Trouble in Little China

I have ventured to the frorest depths of hell, where split gravity tears you at the gut. I have seen the dread circle Dante never grasped. It is in downtown Memphis. And it is called traffic court.

I'm not going to delve into the details or relate the frightful sociological conclusions from a day in the bowels of the Memphis courthouse. (Let's just repeat there's a definite inequality between the races in American society.) As I waited in an interminable line, a tiny black woman with a single giant tooth and a big bouffant—she looked like Dionne Warwick—pushed a pamphlet cart and entreated us to get with jobs and school in a street-corner sing-song worthy of the finest evangelists. I silently wended through and watched the accused (syllabic stress on -ed) hordes mass in a darkened bowels of a municipal building unrivaled in concrete monolithic ugliness. One man had half of his face literally falling of his head. Some kind of nerve damage I assume. Others swayed, still strung-out, as they waited for their particular unkind door to open and the judge to deliver them. I listened to two attorneys discuss a case that involved a crackhead mother, an abused daughter, and a child molester boyfriend—and then in the next breath, lunch, drinks, and Ole Miss football.

My spirit might have been irreparably wilted had I not been, to a degree, relieved to be there. I had driven the previously day from Atlanta to make this very court appearance. I had gotten detoured and "lost" on my morning drive from Olive Branch, Mississippi. I had already been panhandled on separate sides of the city. I had already been kicked out of Memphis' handsome federal courthouse. Late and confused, it seems I had run into the wrong building only to be detained and sent out on account of a weapon on my person.

Said weapon. About five cheez-its long.

I had simply hopped in the car and driven to Memphis. No accoutrements. No change of clothes except underwear and socks. All miscellany still in my pockets, even a miniature pocket knife. Realizing we were on the verge of discord, I played up my bumpkin in the city-ignorance act until the security guards suffered my departure. Sure, I can run a trotline. In retrospect, thank goodness it occurred in the wrong building.

As for my legal troubles, the case was summarily dismissed in light of the insane pedestrian on I-40. After waiting three hours to speak with someone, a pleasant sub-adjudicator dealt with me in seconds. Perhaps the law really comes down to patience and money, or the money to be patient.

"the spiritual post-sepulchral life even on earth of the individual, through the thoughts he transmits to his fellows"--Giuseppe Mazzini, "Byron and Goethe"

And off I went, gouging through the enchanted vacancy of northern Mississippi. Serendipity always arrives on a trip. John Steinbeck said a trip takes you. After trawling for quaintness and Southern home-cooking in Corinth, I found my way to the coon dog cemetery before you come to Tuscumbia, Alabama. I simply followed a sign until I was a ways off the main road and then the secondary one and then into the primeval (assuming, of course, the primeval includes off-roading and deer hunters). The windy country road took me into a vast wood, sparkling serenely on a crisp and cold day, and somehow as soft and inviting as clouds. And then to a miraculous little spot, with granite monuments, outhouses, a picnic pavilion, a fresh water spring, and a couple hundred graves devoted to beloved coon dogs.

Besides the care and effort spent upon the gravestones, some carved in wood by hand, my favorite thing was their ornamentation. They could be like Catholic shrines to the Virgin Mary. But protestant sobriety kept all inclinations toward the rococo in check. The one indulgence was commemorating the foe. Coon hunters are exceptional because of their respect for the intelligence of their quarry. It takes a damn good dog to be a coon dog. The raccoons engraved on this stone or sitting atop that one were a kind of obeisance and also signified that Old Blue and Dr. Doom and Loud would always be doing what they loved, treeing that great raccoon in the sky.

This raccoon seems a little too happy with himself.

Mental Floss actually covers the cemetery in their current Spinning the Globe section (topic: Appalachia). But it's rather cursory, has no pictures of the actual site, and is casually irreverent.