“Blacks can move here any time they want to,” people would say. The Days of George Wallace and Bull Connor were gone. But lots of folks who nodded approvingly or, just as malignantly, said nothing, while Connor and Wallace treated their fellow citizens like animals were still around. So, when it became apparent that things weren’t warming up to the degree one might have hoped for in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, blacks chose to steer clear of Arab.

Frankly, pockets of Alabama have long been frozen in a time warp. Journey and Styx are forever playing on the radio, football fans still worship at the altar of “Bear” Bryant, and you’re allowed to be slightly dismayed by the presence of black people when they show up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Whether the general population wants to admit it or not, it’s caught in the crevices of the state’s psychological building blocks.

The problem with discussing this sort of thing is that there’s an Alabama mentality that says everything’s fine down here; other people’s smug misconceptions of who we are is our real burden.

That mentality seems to have loosened up over time, but you can still find it without really trying. Suggest that the place is a little too backwards for the year 2008, and you’re hit with the old chestnut, “If you don’t like it, then you can leave.” Well, I did leave, but that doesn’t change the underlying self-delusion of a population that, to a large degree, is still playing catch-up with most of the country.

There were wonderful people in Arab, of course. The ridiculous ones weren’t a majority. I established lifelong friendships growing up there, and I’m still in contact with a couple of my high school teachers. They made a huge difference in my life; I’m not sure I’d be a writer if it wasn’t for them. But you knew where things stood.

The day Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington, D.C., the principal announced what happened over the speakers at my high school, and the substitute teacher in my sociology class said, “It was probably one of them niggers that did it.” Most of the students just nodded in silent agreement. That was in 1981.

Talk about your sociology lessons.

                                                ***

One of the more absurd things about Arab, when we first got there, was that you couldn’t purchase alcohol within its city limits. Arab was “dry,” as they say. The Baptist Church, in particular, would campaign against legalizing the sale of alcohol whenever the referendum to go wet came up for another vote, because, they said, booze would only generate “honky tonks” in our pristine village. Voters shot the referendum down over and over again. What this meant, of course, was that no one in Arab drank alcohol, and their children grew up pure as the driven snow, ripe for the picking in the eyes of Jesus.

Just kidding. What it actually meant was that there was a bootlegger who did major business on weekends, especially with high schoolers. Everyone knew he was there, even the cops. Everybody else drove down to Huntsville or Guntersville to buy their booze, then came back to Arab with it. Those tax dollars, of course, didn’t end up in Arab, where they could have been used in any number of useful ways. The only thing Arab got was the empties...and the people who did the emptying. So self-delusion didn’t apply solely to race relations. Remember— no problems down here in Alabama.

This high-minded and highly-effective no-alcohol policy, which promised to turn Arab into a fount of reality if it were ever dismissed, stayed in effect until…