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Dispatches from a Dry County - The daring and dangers of living under lingering Prohibition restrictions
 [Garden & Gun] Only in the South can the past be woven so passionately into the present. That salient bit of time bending inhabits every form of expression, be it food, architecture, business, music, art, or politics. It’s what Faulkner meant in Requiem for a Nun with his much-lauded epigram: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." Which is why, one crisp late-fall Saturday night many years back, it seemed I had something like an eternity to mull the many profound whorls in the sediments of Southern time that had brought me to my—I hoped temporary—stay in the Ardmore, Alabama, jail. Jail, or the close prospect of it, has a way of focusing the mind on immediate options and on larger cosmic issues at once. Specifically, I waited for Ardmore’s jolly desk sergeant, beleaguered with a raft of other Saturday-night miscreants, to be briefed by my arresting officers so he could decide whether my offense—the possession of one six-pack of (unopened) beer—merited an invitation to enjoy a night in his facilities, or whether the many bigger fish he had to fry in his rowdy little town might just allow me some bootlegger’s version of a hall pass. My bench in the anteroom to the holding cells provided an excellent vantage point from which to ponder the South’s apparently endless love of Prohibition. Technically the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933, but in the Deep South, in evocation of our wise Nobel laureate Faulkner, that disastrous piece of law got snapped right back up and re-legislated in a mad patchwork fashion across Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, and even in the South’s reputed no-holds-barred repository of "sin," a.k.a. Louisiana. The backstory: My home county, Limestone, in which the main part of Ardmore lies, is dry and has been for the almost nine decades since Prohibition’s repeal. Though in Alabama, the legal implementation of Prohibition in 1920 came less as a shock and more as a comfort and confirmation: Fifty-eight of the state’s sixty-seven counties had already voted themselves bone-dry by 1908. That means whole generations have been brought up in a liquor-running paradox. No matter how law-abiding a citizen might be, if he or she drank, that person lived on the far side of the law. Posted by: Besoeker 2021-10-15 |
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