Red and White Checkered Culture

Details. We thought we'd find lots of random elements of Southern culture in Russellville, Alabama. According to our trusty Road Atlas, Russellville was a county seat, the largest city around. A city. A hotbed of cultural detail. An orgy of local color.

But our first glimpse of Russellville disappointed us. Electric signs from a few chain restaurants glowed dully on the side of an otherwise dark hill. In lieu of streetlights, a few hundred watts of "PIZZA HUT" lit the roadway.

We didn't want to eat at Pizza Hut. When you enter a Pizza Hut, whether you work there or you eat there, you sell you soul. You join the One-Culture-for-All Club, and maybe that's not so bad, but you give in to the unsettling homogeneity in America's lifestyle. We refused. No red-and-white checkered tables for us.

Still confident that we'd find a mom-'n'-pop diner more indicative of the Southern lifestyle, we drove on. But our quest for the soul of Russellville ended at a gas station in the middle of town. Laughing at us, the attendant suggested one of the chains. Nothing else was open.

So the decor at Pizza Hut became one of the only cultural details we saw that Tuesday night. And, lo and behold, the tabletops at that Alabama Pizza Hut boasted a red-and-white checkerboard under a layer of thin plastic. Commercialism had strangled the South. Give me familiarity or give me death.

Strange, then, that a waitress in such a post-cultural institution would so unsubtly point out the regional contrasts between us and herself. But the ideal of the South remains strong enough to force its way under the red roof of a Pizza Hut.

"So what are y'all doing here in Russellville, Alabama?" the waitress, whose name didn't catch, asked us. She was our age, maybe a few years older. She spoke pleasantly enough.

"Well," we said, "we're from Boston, and we came down for spring break. We just left Memphis today."

"Memphis? You came to see Elvis?" In the South, Elvis' memory sometimes seems so palpable that people act as if he still exists. We didn't see Elvis' former home. We saw Elvis. Dead 15 years, Elvis lives, if only as a cultural detail.

"Yeah we went to Graceland yesterday, and then through Mississippi today."

Then she cracked a faint smile and in the same friendly, half-joking tone asked, "so here to see all the hicks and rednecks, huh?

Half-joking. But what was the other half?

We considered one possibility: envy. After all, a 22-year-old waitress in a Pizza Hut probably wasn't leaving Russellville at any point in the foreseeable future. As we described our trip, her eyes betrayed a near-fascination with our small adventure.

But maybe her smile and her friendly tone hid a more likely alternative. We'd heard that people down South often feel embarrassed about how Northerners perceive them. Maybe she was politely asking, "Are you slumming?"

We were: until that moment we hadn't realized that we were. The waitress had asked a harsh question, and no one responded. She smiled broadly and left with a quick, friendly goodbye. "God, are we that transparent?" John asked.

So the Bostonians, the Northern invaders, left Russellville with their tails between their legs. We'd stopped in Russellville because we were looking for quaint details, for contact with real people. But we found a Pizza Hut, not a down-home diner. And even though we found a true Southerner under that red roof, we couldn't stomach what her question told us.