I sometimes wonder whether the rural Missouri town where I grew up is losing its individuality. I turned on the car radio yesterday morning and found myself listening to “Sympathy for the Devil,” which wasn’t exactly what I’d expected to hear on a small-town radio station at eight-thirty in the morning. As I drove to the hospital where my mother is recovering from spinal surgery, I found I had to go well out of my way to see the quirky homemade roadside signs that were commonplace when I was a boy: Hail Sale. Green Tomatoes. It’s Sweet Corn Season! Now that computer-generated graphics and franchise trademarks are increasingly ubiquitous, Smalltown, U.S.A., is looking more and more like Anyplace, U.S.A.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the local accent, a pungent brew of flat, twangy Midwestern vowels and soft-centered deep-South elisions like y’all. Some of the locals call it a “brogue,” while others refer to it less euphemistically (though by no means critically) as a “hick accent.” Call it what you will, it’s the way most folks talk down here, and I see no signs of its having been flattened out by the neutralizing effects of movies and network TV. As I waited for the elevator at the hospital the other day, I overheard two self-evidently gay men chatting away in the thickest of hick accents. I’m not quite sure what that proves–probably nothing–but I have no doubt that it’s a social detail worth recording.
Even so, the mass media have left their mark on Smalltown in other, more subtle ways. I ordered my breakfast yesterday from a girl whose name tag disclosed that she calls herself “Destinee,” a name that could only have been devised by a mother who spent her own childhood watching hours and hours of TV each day. A block or two down the street from the restaurant where I ate my biscuits and gravy is the Powerhouse of God Church, a local institution that doubtless would have been called something rather more sedate a quarter-century ago. Slowly but surely, my home town is being transformed by the urban world far beyond its borders, a world the Web has made instantaneously accessible to everyone everywhere, including here. (Maud learned yesterday that her blog had been hacked when my sister-in-law, who lives three blocks away from my mother’s house, pointed the damage out to me via e-mail, after which I passed the word on to Maud in New York, also via e-mail. That’s how plugged-in Smalltown is.)
How will our children know the way things used to be? America’s artists have tended either to demonize or sentimentalize small-town life. Even my own City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy occasionally errs in the latter direction, a fact I didn’t realize when I wrote it. I can think of several movies, Hoosiers and Sling Blade among them, that get some of the details right, and one, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, that conveys much of the essence of how it feels to live in a place like Smalltown. But I can’t think of any work of art that captures the flavor of small-town life more succinctly than a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter called “I Am a Town”:
I’m a town in Carolina
I’m a detour on a ride
For a phone call and a soda
I’m a blur from the driver’s side
I’m the last gas for an hour
If you’re going twenty-five
I am Texaco and tobacco
I am dust you leave behind
I’m a church beside the highway
Where the ditches never drain
I’m a Baptist like my daddy
And Jesus knows my name
I am memory and stillness
I am lonely in old age
I am not your destination
I am clinging to my ways
I’m a town in Carolina
I am billboards in the fields
I’m an old truck up on cinder blocks
Missing all my wheels
I am Pabst Blue Ribbon, American,
And Southern Serves the South
I am tucked behind the Jaycees sign
On the rural route
Smalltown used to be like that, and some of it still is, if you know where to look. But much of it has changed irrevocably. It says a lot about the nature of those changes that the Smalltown Depot, from which I took my first train ride forty-four years ago, is now a museum. I’m giving a lecture there next Tuesday, which I suppose makes me a museum piece. It said in the local paper yesterday that I’m “one of the East Coast’s elite critics,” but all I see when I look in the bathroom mirror is a middle-aged Manhattanite who wanders around his home town thinking about places that closed their doors decades ago: Blackburn’s, the War Drum, the Malone Theater, Buckner-Ragsdale, the Moore Company, all of them tucked behind the Jaycees sign on the rural route, visible only in the mind’s eye of a gray-haired, nostalgia-prone singleton like me.