Your Weekly Hoodoo Thread: Washington edition

Ah, my friends, we have made it! We have traversed the holiday social calendar, we’ve regaled and celebrated our way through the birthday of the little baby Jesus in the manger, we’ve come to this decisive moment in Crimson Tide football history. Finally after a month long lay-off, our beloved Crimson Tide will once again take the field. Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Our men in crimson have earned themselves the right, nay, the privilege, of competing in their third consecutive College Football Playoffs, and of that fact we should all be proud as the Crimson Tide faithful, assembled. I’m not sure why our hopes and dreams hang on the doings of college age young men and their curmudgeonly head coach, but I’ll be damned if I’m not as excited as a virgin on prom night about the prospect of Alabama getting a return trip to the National Championship Game. 

This run we’ve enjoyed under Saban is unprecedented, and as I worked through my weekly pieces leading up to the game, it dawned on me just how fortunate we faithful are in regard to our sporting lives. Alabama has had nine consecutive 10-win seasons, four of which ended in national championships. If the Tide pulls it out this season, that will make five nattys. Five. Reflect on that for a moment if you will…in the dark days of the Mikes, did any of us ever imagine such a reality? I certainly did not, as I thought the days of Bryant were but a shadow on the program, and that Bama wouldn’t be fortunate enough to find the second coming of the Bear. 

We are truly lucky, fans of crimson giants who walk the football landscape and conquer all comers. Heady times, indeed, friends…enjoy them while you can.

Now as you know, in this here space each week of the season, I jot down some foolishness or other, some narrative of wanton youth or ribaldry soured by the biting pinch of authority. After all, Football Loki, our beloved patron, demands a sacrifice, and so a sacrifice we must offer. 

But in this week, I must admit to you, my faithful friends and readers, that I must take a slightly more somber tone. Not that there won’t be humor…as an officially licensed and certified Hoodoo Operator, I am contractually bound to root out the humor and folly in all things no matter how morose. But in this week, at this particular moment, my heart is heavy, friends. I cannot muster tales of ribaldry, I cannot speak in bawdy tones of mistresses deflowered or narcotics freely consumed.

No, a tragedy has stricken the OWB clan in this otherwise-joyous time of frolic and celebration. And I would be remiss if I didn’t take liberty to speak about it here with you, my friends and readers.

Now as loyal readers lo these many years, you fine folk have heard me describe various members of my family, both the loved and the outcast, the wise and the foolhardy. For you see, in my clan (as in many Southern families…you people know that of which I speak), things are, well…complicated. Long ago, when my mother and father split whilst your narrator was but a boy of five, it drove a deep wedge between family members, a schism that only grew wide ‘neath the ever-pounding hammer of time.

I became, through an unfortunate set of circumstances, estranged from my father over the years. In fact, until recently, I had not spoken with him in nearly 20 years. Our relationship, never very fruitful, withered and died on the vine without so much as the quenching relief of a single shed tear from either of us. He was arrogant and unremorseful about the way he had abandoned us, refused to admit any fault in the way things turned out. I, being a younger man full of piss and vinegar, refused to acquiesce without a patent apology and admission of guilt, which is something his pride would never let him muster. 

Though that relationship had long soured, I was still a member of his extended family, and I spent a great deal of time with his parents, brothers, and sisters. My grandmother’s house was like many old-school Catholic households in Mobile’s Cottage Hill neighborhood. With a large brood, there was a passel of young-uns in and out at any given time, a veritable hive of activity most days. There was always an opportunity to visit with one’s uncles, aunts, or cousins while taking in a hot meal, something my grandmother seemingly always had on the stove top. She was a fantastic cook, and her oyster stew is something one cannot find the likes of in any restaurant, even in a seafaring city like Mobile. (For you inland folk, oyster stew is a rich delicacy that must be hand made in well-worn steel pots and injected with a healthy helping of equal parts love and attention.)

Throughout college, I worked near to their house, and had taken on the project of mentoring my younger cousin Bockle, who was himself fatherless and cast out on the sea of manhood, rudderless. Seeing a little of myself in him, I decided I could mentor him, help him find his way, contribute those manly tidbits to his upbringing that would serve him well as he grew into fruition. So each day, after work, I’d meet him at my grandparents’ house and we’d go running, then eat dinner with my grandmother and grandfather.

Now my grandfather, we’ll call him Bernard (pronounced in the Irish tongue as Burn-urd, not that high-fallutin’ Burn-Ard you hear from more Frenchified folk), was one of my favorite people on Earth, and I cherished the time I spent with him and my cousin around the circular dinner table in my grandmother’s kitchen. A WWII veteran who wore his pants up high-waisted and who cussed like the sailor he was (he was a Navy man), Bernard was the terror of neighborhood children who dared cross his lawn or sneak a satsuma from his abundant citrus orchard behind the “old house” as they called it (a one-room affair that served as his and my grandmother’s first home after marriage). He was a gravelly, blue-ink tattoo- marked, leather-skinned badass despite his 5’8” stature, a fireplug of a man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and could tear apart a motor and put it back together in a day flat. Despite his outward demeanor, he was a jovial fellow who wouldn’t even ask neighbors if they needed their yards cut, but would just swing his riding mower over the property line and take care of the job once done with his own plot. 

Now Bernard was a mechanic by trade, a craft he had learned as a member of the Navy deployed on the legendary USS Lexington aircraft carrier in the Pacific theater of World War II. On the ship, he tended to the beasts of the seafaring air combat, namely F4U Corsairs and F6F Hellcats, keeping them in top condition and performing his role as a critical cog in America’s war fighting machine.

He was on the Lady Lex during one of her sinkings. According to his recounting, as he ambled to his battle station on the third level of the superstructure, a Japanese torpedo struck true…the concussion flung him three stories to the main deck, where he landed squarely upon his knees (that injury would be mended some 50 years later with a knee replacement, but he lived with the damage for a half-century without uttering a grumble about it.) Despite that, he fought on in vain before he and his shipmates were rescued as the old lady listed on the high seas.

Later in life, he took great pride in having fought at the pivotal battle of the Pacific Theater, specifically Iwo Jima. He witnessed with his own stone-hued eyes the legendary flag-raising on Mount Suribachi from a landing craft as it muddled towards shore through the turgid water, red with the blood of so many young men unfortunate enough to find their eternal sleep just shy of those volcanic shores. He told me how the iconic photo was a bit of a PR piece, claiming that the first group of men to raise the flag atop the mountain were obliterated by the splash of Japanese artillery shells before a photo could be taken. The group that ended up in the legendary pic, Ira Hayes and that bunch, came after that original team met their Maker on the crest of that volcanic crag.

Though he never spoke publicly to others about the horrors he witnessed there on the shores of that speck of Japanese territory, he would confide small bits of the narrative in rare moments, such as over a pile of jointly-raked leaves, or the recently dissembled brake array of his pick-up truck.

“I hope your generation never knows the things I’ve seen,” he would tell me. “I was your age when I first saw a man blowed apart with a hand grenade. Damn Tojos would surrender with grenades hidden under their arms, pins pulled. When the GIs would go to frisk them, they’d let those grenades fall, saw ‘em kill ‘bout near a whole squad that way one time.”

He'd talk about the tenacity of the Japanese soldiers, about how they would refuse surrender, would hole themselves in Suribachi’s lava-tube caves and fire upon anyone who entered. The practical “American solution,” he would say, was to hose the caves out with flame-throwers, with the terrible screams of burning life echoing off the stone walls. He told me once he could still hear those sounds, slow-burning echoes of those men in the throes of a death horrific, as if it were yesterday.

Being a student of history, I’d sometimes ask him about his experiences in the war that saved humanity. During one such occasion, he told me of a Japanese kamikaze who approached the Lex’s starboard side, humming in low just a few feet below sea level on a suicide run to penetrate the carrier’s aircraft storage deck. Bernard and his counterparts turned the anti-aircraft guns on him (he was a mechanic, but in the heat of battle, everyone had a battle station on the ship, because everyone was vested in that ship’s survival). One of the gunners’ aim was true, and the low-flying Zero peeled down flat onto the surface of the sea a few hundred yards from the ship. Like a flat piece of slate skipped over a calm pond, that aircraft slid over the surface of the water, gliding up to the steel hull beneath Bernard and his fellow gunners. Expecting a surrender, they were instead confronted by “a Jap pilot as mad as a hornet,” who jumped from the cockpit onto the wing, snatched his pistol from its holster, and began firing up at the Americans above.

“We just turned those big guns on him at near point-blank range, cut that ole boy to shreds, nothin’ but pieces that the sharks lit into…” He laughed a nervous laugh, a laugh that evolved into something else when the tears welled up blue and heavy in his gray eyes like glaze. I never asked Bernard to talk to me about the war again, but rather would just listen and take mental notes when he brought it up.

Bernard taught me a lot about what it was to be a man in the absence of his son. You see, not only had my father abandoned me as a son, but he had largely abandoned his father as a dad. He only called on his father when he needed something: an oil change, a cabinet built, a pipe disjointed and unclogged. Otherwise, my father didn’t have time for the old man. It is the way my father chose to live his life, and it's a lifestyle from which I believe he has repented as the gravity of his own mortality sinks in, with cancer crawling insidiously through his body.

Bernard and I, we were just what the other needed. In the mutual void created by the same person, we built a bridge between each other that was wide enough to span the chasm created by my father’s inability to live up to his responsibilities as a father and son. 

In the time we spent together, I learned my ridiculous work ethic from that old man, in part, because he set that example. He’d never ask me to do something he wouldn’t do himself. I can remember in the wake of one hurricane or another, Bernard asked me to come help him rake his yard. I obliged, as he had fed me enough meals in my time on this earth that I had to do something to level that tab. But when I arrived, it wasn’t his yard that needed raking. It was the yard of an old friend, a widow who lived down across Azalea Road from St. Luke’s. She wasn’t any older than him, but without a husband or sons in the area, she had a mess on her hands that she’d never be able to clean. My grandfather promised her that he and his grandsons would get her place straightened up, free of charge. She insisted on paying me for my trouble, but he wouldn’t have it. 

“Boy’s gotta learn the value of hard work, and takin’ care of his elders,” he said. I remember standing by in semi-disgust, as being a child of the ghetto, I was loathe to ever refuse a dollar that was duly earned.

“I sure could have used that money,” I said to him later as we worked. “I got stuff to pay for.”

“You’ll find some other way to get that money, you’re smart. The reward you get for helping folks out is paid in Heaven, don’t worry,” he said. 

Before you go thinking he was saintly and as pure as the driven snow, I’ll tell you that minutes later, he raked up under an azalea thatch full of yella jackets, and the cascades of “gawd dammits,” “sumbitches,” and “sheeyuts” poured forth like cool water bubbling up out of an Artesian spring. That lady got a cussword education as my grandfather slapped and swatted around in her yard. 

I remember as a younger man, the worst whuppin’ I ever received came off of his belt. You see, I’ve always been the family sheepdog. As the eldest grandchild, I was duly appointed as caretaker, overwatcher, and tattler-in-chief for the collected group of my cousins and my brother, as I was deemed “responsible” and “muh-toor.” The older folks would leave us by the pool so long as I was there to keep everyone in line. The little ones were allowed to play in the acres-deep backyard out of sight of the house if I was back there with them. Hell, I was no older than 10, but they trusted me the way a shepherd trusts his sheepdog.

Well, on one occasion, I took advantage of my power. I had wanted to play the Atari in the house, but my cousins Bockle and Linny wanted to play outside. Being partial to her only granddaughter and youngest (at the time) grandchild, my grandmother commanded me to go outside and watch them.

“But I was just gonna…”

“It don’t matter, I’m standin’ in here cookin’ dinner for you, least you can do is watch your cousins for a while,” said my grandmother. Guilt: the broadsword of the Southern grandmother.

I shuffled outside as my cousins jumped on the tire swing.

“SWING US, OWB, SWING US!”

Ugggh. This was getting worse by the moment. As I started pushing them, I could feel the Dark Side welling up in me. I started swinging them harder, and harder, and harder.

“AHHH, TOO HIGH, TOO HIGH!”

I laughed maniacally. They screamed. Teach them to make me come outside. I continued to push them higher and higher while they caterwauled, until…one of the chains inexplicably snapped, dumping my cousins to the ground from the peak of the pendulum arc.

The screaming that ensued would curdle the iciest of blood. Immediately, my grandmother burst from the house.

“WHAT IN THE WORLD?...”

Linny spoke before I could leverage a word in.

“HE PUSHED US TOO HARD AND MADE IT BREAK!”

“Dangit, Linny…so it’s like that?” I thought. Straight up under the bus.

I started to offer my rebuttal, but felt the sting of flat leather across my hindparts unexpectedly. Dazed, I turned to find Bernard winding up for another lashing with that black leather strap of a belt, lighting into me with ferocity while hollering, “GAWD DAMMIT OWB, YOU’RE SMARTER THAN THAT!”

Now, I have lived a solid 42 years, and I can tell you, as a young boy there are few things more embarrassing than one’s grandfather whuppin’ that ass right in front of one’s cousins and every set of eyes in the neighborhood. My face was as red as my behind by the time it was over. 

Afterwards, he told me he had been in his shop the whole time (where he spent most of his time) and had heard the escalation but figured I was responsible enough to stop short of getting anyone hurt. He was disappointed in me, and truthfully, that hurt a hell of a lot worse that the belt-whuppin’ (which itself was quite painful).

Pain. That’s another chapter I could write pertaining to my grandfather, as I’ve never seen a man so resistant to the tug of hurt than Bernard. In my whole life, I only ever heard him shout out in pain a single time, after his knee replacement surgery, as the physical therapist worked to keep scar tissue from setting up in the joint. That fact is even more amazing when one considers that, as a man who in retirement worked with his hands eight to 10 hours per day in his shop, he was constantly banging, slashing, crushing, tripping. 

I remember once, he decided that he was going to begin making toys for his grandchildren in his woodshop. He loved woodworking, his second hobby behind tending his citrus trees. He made templates that resembled a classic WWII-era fighter, the P-51…he freehand drew the stencils and cut them out to spec for assembly and painting on his own little assembly line. I had dropped by for a visit and decided I would lend him a hand. He was running the table saw, and chatting with me casually about the Dolphins, his favorite professional team. A good many of our conversations (when we weren’t talking about Bama) revolved around the Dolphins, Dan Marino, Don Shula, Bob Baumhauer. From the way my grandfather talked about Shula, you’d have thought they were close friends.

“That Don, he is a man of his word, I tell you what. If he says it’s so, you can believe it’s so! Ain’t a better coach, neither, I remember back in ’71 when….”

As he talked, I noticed from my vantage point that he was shaving awfully close to his fingers. But being a good acolyte, I assumed he knew what he was doing, as he’d earned the benefit of wisdom from all his years working with wood. Hell, he’d forgotten more about runnin’ a table saw than I knew.

It was at that moment that a spurt of crimson sprayed across the white plane of plywood. Stunned, it took a moment for him to cut off the saw, but he never yelped out or cried. His only response to SPLITTING HIS THUMB DOWN TO THE KNUCKLE WITH THE TABLE SAW, was as follows:

“Well, gawd dammit, now I’ma have to go to the damn emergency room. Sheeyut.” Just matter of fact. Untucked his ever-tucked white tee, wrapped the bottom of it around his thumb, and ambled up into the house to get my grandmother to drive him to the hospital down the road. 

I, on the other hand, was totally unsettled by the mangled thumb, split like an overcooked sausage at the end of his hand. I wasn’t a squeamish kid usually, but I’ll be damned if the spurtin’ blood didn’t get the better of me that day. I felt my vision slide, my knees got weak, and next thing I knew, my grandmother was standing over me, dabbin’ my forehead with a wet washcloth.

“OWB, OWB, wake up, we gotta get your grandpa to the hospital.” 

Apparently, I had fainted, which of course delayed departure for the emergency room. I expected Bernard to be aggravated to the point of hollerin’. But he wasn’t. He was sitting in the open car door, just a’chucklin’ at me as I sat up. 

“Boy, you fainted over a lil’ blood,” he said. His chuckle became a laugh that persisted throughout the ride to the hospital. After arriving in the emergency room, he told everyone the same joke after showing his wound to onlookers.

“I’m the one split his finger open, and this one over here is the one that fainted, how you like ‘at?” Then he’d laugh. 

No, that wasn’t embarrassing…not embarrassing at all. 

All of these recollections I store in the treasure chest of memory (even the shameful ones), but ultimately, it is Bernard’s love of all things Alabama that shaped my lifelong affinity for the Crimson Tide. He loved Coach Bryant, and it is through his stories about the Alabama teams before my time that contributed to my knowledge of Tide lore. As I grew up, I spent many Saturdays with Bernard, either watching the games or listening to the radio broadcast with him. I’ve watched or listened to more Bama games with him than any other person other than my mother. He’d crack open one of his Miller beers as the game began, and we needed nothing fancier for game day treats than saltine crackers and cheese.  

He was one of the primary drivers of my fervent fandom, as he not only instilled a love of Alabama in my young heart, but he taught me how to be a fan. If Bernard was a fan of something, he was a fan for life. He never bought a vehicle that wasn’t a Ford, because that’s what he liked. He always wore the same style of slate blue work trousers, because that’s what he liked. He didn’t care that people would tell him his brisket was too tough, because that’s the way he liked it. 

With Alabama, he lived through the highs and lows of the last half-century, celebrating the victories, and maintaining decorum in defeat. In victory or defeat, he was ever loyal to Bama, and his fandom and enthusiasm for the season never waned, even in his advanced years. When we’d lose, he was gracious but analytical, pointing to technical errors or low morale in explaining away the loss. When Alabama won, he’d never rub it in with his Auburn friends (of which he had a very few), but he was always confident in the Tide’s ability to win any game.

I remember well the lead-up to the ’92 Championship Game. I honestly believe that Bernard and I were the only two people in Mobile who thought that Alabama would prevail…and I had my moments of doubt after watching Miami march through their schedule, a juggernaut that appeared unstoppable. Alabama was tough and rugged, and that defense was the stuff of quarterback nightmares. Still, many people doubted the Tide had the offense to overcome the Gino Toretta fireworks show that had torched Hurricane opponents throughout the season. But Bernard never wavered in his faith in the Crimson Tide. After hearing scuttlebutt about how Rohan Marley had taunted big ole Rosie Patterson the night before the game, he confided in me that he had no doubt.

“Mark my words, Alabama is gonna kick their smart-aleck asses. Those punks have a reckonin’ comin’, and Alabama is gonna give it to ‘em.”

We didn’t watch that game together, for whatever reason. I watched it at home with my mama, with whom I’ve watched many momentous events in Crimson Tide history over the years, that national championship game being only one of them. But that didn’t mean my grandfather and I didn’t celebrate together. When Rosie Patterson absolutely destroyed Marley with a brutal block to spring Derrick Lassic to the edge, my phone rang almost immediately.

“Did ya see that,” said the voice on the other end. “I told you they done pissed ole Rosie off, that bastard is gonna feel that tomorrow, ain’t he!” Bernard cackled before saying he’d talk to me later and hanging up.

Later on, in that ephemeral moment…the play that wasn’t the play, when George Teague chased down Lamar Thomas and relieved the Miami receiver of the ball, it was my turn to ring the phone.

“DID YOU SEE THAT! Teague ran him down!”

“Sure did, I told you boy, I told you. These Miami punks don’t know what hit ‘em. Roll Tide!”

Good times…I can remember it like it only just happened. 

He loved the Crimson Tide, and his home was a shrine to Alabama’s favorite sons. I can remember watching many a game with him during the glory years of the Stallings tenure, during which he’d tell me how he had always hoped Bebes would return to Bama after Coach Bryant passed. I remember the time I brought my Aubie girlfriend over to watch the Iron Bowl with him. This was a tragic error in judgment, as usually a gracious host, he scowled and growled at her every time Auburn did anything positive (or when Freddie Kitchens did something negative). Together, we suffered through the DuBose era, and talked many times about how Alabama was just one coach away from returning to dominance in the early 2000s.

This is illustrative of the influence this silly game played on a grassy grid with a sack made of hog flesh has on our culture. It is a critical part of our lifeline, of our collective memories of time passed by. Sure, it’s just a game, in one reality. But it’s also something more than that. Here in Alabama, the home of the greatest people on the face of God’s green earth, it is a binder, a cable of common experience interwoven throughout our lives, concurrently and individually. We all share these same collective experiences…these events that transpire between young men on the football field belong to us all and hold shared meaning for those who follow our beloved Crimson Tide. 

But they also have individual meaning significant of time shared with loved ones, conversations enjoyed with friends, moments of jubilation in which we celebrated, bouncing like spun tops while singing the Rammer Jammer and grinning like Chezzie cats. Alabama football is not the canvas of my life per se, but rather it’s one of the many acrylics with which I’ve shaped the colors and contours of the life I’ve lived with those I love. 

While we all share these moments in Tide history in a communal context, so too are there special meanings and memories attached to them. It is the latter (in part) that I’ve recounted to you today in this Hoodoo space usually reserved for frivolity and fun. But today I had a different story to tell, a narrative that I believe many of us who were born in this Great State share. We all have our stories, and what I have relayed here is but one of many.

The reason for this particular writing at this particular time is that Bernard went home to his reward in the early morning hours of December 25^th, on the day celebrating the birth of his Savior, just a week shy of the day his beloved Crimson Tide will take the field in pursuit of another national championship. He had a special love for defensive football, and I have no doubt that this Alabama team was one of his favorites because of their hard-nosed, relentless style of physical play. He won’t get to see them dominate Washington, at least not on this plane. But he did get to witness Alabama’s return to its rightful place at the top of college football, and as an unwavering supporter of the Tide, it’s fitting that the last teams of his lifetime were some of the best teams he ever watched play the game.

I’m thankful for that, to be quite honest. After all, it’s just a game. But it’s something bigger than that to me. Alabama football is the bridge between generations, between races, between the rich and the poor. It is the tie that binds us here in the Great State, whether we are at home wedged in between the Mighty Tennessee River and the Gulf of Mexico, or elsewhere beyond her borders as a member of the Alabama diaspora. It is a thread woven through the tapestry of our individual and collective lives, a kind of shared timeline, and I’m damn proud that God thought enough of me to make me an Alabama fan. Thank you, Jesus.

As I look on to the horizon, I am hopeful that the boys from Alabama have it within them to finish what they started, to drive the final nail in a project they began erecting way back in September. I know my grandfather Bernard is confident they’ll win, as he always was. But in the event that confidence proves unfounded, he’ll also forgive them if they don’t, so great was his love for the Crimson Tide.

Thanks for indulging me, my friends, as I aired out this less-than-humorous chapter of OWB’s ever-twisting narrative in this here Hoodoo ledger. I appreciate your patience, and am glad we too are joined by this crimson tether that links us. 

Now, the time for mourning is over…the time for kicking ass has arrived. To quote the 18^th century Reconstructionist scholar Greg “The Fightin’ Ginger” McElroy, “let’s go be champions, boys.”

Let’s send Bernard out on a win. 

And Roll Tide, old man, I still love you.