By Neal Wooten
On Wednesday, August 23 (a day before this article runs), a reporter from AL.com and This Is Alabama is driving up from central Alabama to interview me for a story. Cool beans. It will be about me, my memoir With the Devil’s Help, and about my childhood growing up in Blake on Sand Mountain and how those roots influenced my writing.
He emailed to ask me if I could take him to Blake. I emailed back and wrote, “Sure, I can take you to downtown Blake. Hopefully, the traffic won’t be too bad.” This will be the first tour I’ve given. I will show him the fire department, the community center, and Westley’s Chapel. The church is important because the murder that takes place in my book happened at the house next door.
I will show him the old convenience store, which, when I was a kid, was run by my family members, Gene and Juanita Timmons. I miss Timmons’ Groceries. Later it was bought out by Junior Winkles, who is also mentioned in my book, because he gave me a job working for him on the Coca-Cola truck. That was a great summer. Even later, it became Chambers.
Just down the road, the old building is still there, albeit not for long by the looks of it, where R. B. Shrader’s store used to be. He and Dad were old friends, and I can’t count the number of times I went to that little store with Dad. He would always get the same thing: an RC Cola and Moon Pie. He would devour them right there in the store as he and Mr. Shrader reminisced about the good old days.
I’ll show him where our little house used to be, and then I’ll drive him to Sylvania High School. He wants to see where I went to school since Blake Elementary closed right before I started first grade, and he wants to see the math trophy I won, which I just discovered is still in the trophy case at Sylvania.
Maybe someday I’ll put Blake on the map, literally, since it doesn’t show up on all maps. And the crazy thing is, I’m far from the biggest name to hail from the giant metropolis of Blake. James Dean, the author of Pete the Cat books, is also from there. He’s older than I am and actually attended school at Blake before it closed.
I’ll be sure to let everyone know when the article runs. As I tell students when I speak to schools – if a former poor, scrawny, shy, pig farmer, from Blake, Alabama, can accomplish a few things in life, imagine what you can do.
