Purlieu
A dreaded errand, dye-making with black walnuts & reclaiming space for creative living
Vol. 1, Issue 13
A few days ago, I went to Target to buy some spoons. In my home state of Wisconsin, this would have been a benign, even fun, weekend activity. But here in Tuscaloosa, few things inspire more dread in me than the realization that I need to go to Target.
Here, getting to Target requires surviving a harrowing drive along two of Tuscaloosa’s most traffic-clogged thoroughfares, only to pull into a massive parking lot infamous for the aggressive, erratic CRVs and SUVs preferred by the city’s middle class. And the parking lot is merely a warm-up for the store itself, where college students and over-dressed middle-aged women jockey against each other for Joanna Gaines-endorsed throw pillows and table linens. If any particular woman takes too long to make her selections, another will unapologetically nudge the offender’s cart out of the way.
If you can’t tell, I despise the experience, from start to finish. Trips to Target force me to confront the elements of my adopted city that I dislike, intensely. Structurally, Tuscaloosa is essentially a concrete rectangle of big-box chains and fast-food restaurants that prioritizes the movements of trucks over human bodies. Every time I cross the Black Warrior River and venture into the deep-fried heart of the city, I have to hold my breath as cars zoom like hornets around me, all of us speeding indignantly toward the same generica available in every other mid-sized city across the country.
These outings serve as a dismaying reminder to me about how different my present purlieu is from where I imagined spending the prime years of my life—and about how different I must be from other Americans who seem to like living this way, so isolated from each other in the gray, concrete prisons of our own making. In fact, I was feeling so down about it that I thought maybe this would be all I’d have to say in this week’s little letter, that my despair would be all I’d have to offer you.
But a couple of days after I went to Target, a postcard arrived from a writer friend here in town, with a lighthouse on the front. It was just a note to say hello, but the postcard truly felt like a beacon of humanity from the dark sea of asphalt across the river. And then, as I started to look around for the music and readings to flesh out this newsletter, I quickly remembered that, of course, there are lots of fellow creatures of light and creativity here in central Alabama. These artists and writers and makers of all kinds are working to make this place a little more beautiful, a little more interesting and strange, a little better for the future. Right now, it’s almost impossible for me to meet and spend time with these people in real life, but through the screen, I can catch glimpses of their lives and feel some measure of comfort that I’m not the only one of my kind here.
Maybe you, too, are feeling isolated or alienated as a creative in your particular neck of the woods. Whether you’re based in the South or somewhere else, I hope this week’s newsletter reminds you that even if you don’t see any fellow artists in your day-to-day life, I promise you, you’re not the only one. And your very existence, wherever you are, matters to others.
You too are a bright beacon in the sea of asphalt. You too are a creative light in the generic dark.
Listen
This song came on the college radio station during my drive home from the demoralizing trip to Target.
Read
From Seed to Cloth, The Bitter Southerner. “In his studio and dye garden in Greensboro, Alabama, Aaron Sanders Head coaxes blues, oranges, and browns out of indigo vats, boiled Osage orange wood, and rainwater-soaked black walnuts … Not all artists can or should commit to living in a small town like Greensboro, where Aaron points out there’s no grocery store or symphony or even a movie theater. ‘It’s a decision you make to live in a place with less … so you have more space for other things.’”
The Strolling Walker. Jack Casey is a graduate student who takes a lot of walks around Tuscaloosa. His unique eye finds natural beauty in the most overlooked corners of the city.
A Welcome Port in the Storm: Special Moments at the Waffle House, The Incidentalist. “It’s my firm belief that quintessentially Southern things are exponentially more likely to happen at Waffle House … despite whatever progress we’ve made over the years, Southerners still have a tendency to repress our less pure motivations behind a mask of gentility and inhibition. At Waffle House, that mask is more likely to slip.”
Consider
A couple of years ago, I published a short story about a dying small town that offered cash, housing, and other benefits to lure young people away from big cities. In a very odd coincidence, I happened to stumble onto a website, MakeMyMove.com, that has compiled all of the real-life “offers” that American cities are now making to remote pandemic workers who might be looking for a permanent change of scenery:
Perusing the site conjures all sorts of imagined parallel lives. We could spend our evenings drinking cocktails on a large wraparound porch in French Lick, Indiana. We could become salmon fish-mongers in Juneau, Alaska. We could open an art gallery in Montpelier, Vermont.
The “Millennial recruitment” trend fascinates me. It’s entrepreneurial and clever, yet it’s also deeply worrisome that such efforts are becoming necessary for some non-coastal cities to survive. At its most fundamental, it’s a shared municipal acknowledgment of the growing disconnect between the lifestyle that many creative young Americans want … and what we can afford.
First/Last Words
He sees the twentieth century loom before them.
Buildings rise and fall. Great crowds cross
borders. Capitals change names. Call of birdsgone extinct. There are no cities, he says, only this
pedaled cartography of unbelonging.
The blue distills into granules of starsand the air is hymnic, honeyed
with last light. He has not said what he meant.
—From “The Spinning Place” by Chelsea Wagenaar
The word purlieu dates back to fifteenth-century England when parish boundaries were established, in part, by perambulation ceremonies (also known as “beating the bounds”). Parish members would walk the perimeter of their communities as witnesses watched, and those “verified” lines were important during border disputes with neighboring parishes. Sometimes, the disputes were with the royal family, which claimed most of the country’s forests. Whenever a dispute was resolved in a parish’s favor, the reclaimed royal land was dubbed a purlieu.
Over time, the word broadened to refer to any sort of surrounding environment, but I’m drawn to the original definition—and the audacity required to simply walk along a path in the woods and declare it one’s very own. Yet equally crucial was the consent of the rest of the community; witnesses had to agree with the perambulator’s interpretation in order for the land claim to hold.
As someone living in a city that doesn’t meaningfully prioritize many artistic, intellectual, or entrepreneurial ventures, I feel a particular urge to stake out my own territory and define clear boundaries between myself and the broader community I’m still struggling to identity with. Yet I also know that my own creative practice flounders in severe isolation; I need contact with other creatives, in some form, to stay motivated.
And so, this week, I plan to prioritize reaching out to the purlieu of my network, to re-establish a sense of community with some of the creatives I’ve fallen out of touch with lately. I’ll write overdue emails to friends, make a phone call or two, and, of course, return the favor of that all-important postcard.
I invite you to do something similar, in whatever form makes sense for you. Reach out to a fellow creative and say hello. Be someone’s beacon from the sea of asphalt.
Connect
You can find Sandra on Twitter, Instagram, and at sandrabarnidge.com. As always, thank you for being here.