Curled up on my side in the passenger seat of my boyfriend’s Jeep Cherokee, holding his hand across the console, I gazed unabashedly at him and the highway scenery that sped past his profile.
It was the last week of my high school career, and he was driving me down to Montgomery, Ala., to retrieve a driver’s license that had been taken from me for not having paid three speeding tickets.
The drive down was colored by the excitement I had for summer, for love and for freedom, which had been taken from me during the week when it was perhaps most coveted. Graduation was only a few days away, and every student and alum of my school was throwing some sort of party, all with my name on them, for the next five nights.
Without a car, I would be at the disposal of my friends’ generosity and, more fearfully, my parents’ last attempt to keep me at home with the family. I looked forward to this ride to Montgomery not only as a chance to buy my driving privileges back, but also as a chance to spend four hours alone with my boyfriend.
Having grown up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Montgomery was a place like none I had ever visited. It would probably seem much more familiar to people like my mother and grandmother, natives of Birmingham, Ala., from where I was driving, merely because Montgomery has made very few aesthetic steps forward since the 1960s.
On this Monday in early June, we seemed to be the only car driving down the main vein into town, a long steep hill flanked by antique shops with dark windows, and empty, broken-windowed gas stations with spotty, faded advertisements on their exteriors. There were no cars parked in front of the Hank Williams Museum, nor were there any in front of the banks and fast food restaurants. Montgomery, I thought to myself, seemed like many other downtown centers in the South, which are characteristically dead during non-business hours.
But this was two o’clock in the afternoon on a Monday, which to my knowledge was a normal business day like any other.
In addition to feeling like a ghost town, Montgomery was dated in appearance, in the same way that the items in your grandparents’ house seem to all be a variation of one pastel color. Indeed, one of the only cars I saw passing through downtown was a dated sedan in a mint green shade. If I had gotten a glimpse of the driver, I swear she would have had a beehive hairdo and horn-rimmed glasses.
As we pulled up to the area where the government does its dirty dealings (after all, Montgomery happens to be the capital of Alabama), an unsettling sterility drew itself over us. The buildings, which must have been built in or around the ‘60s, were all white, square and uniform.
My boyfriend and I stepped out of his Jeep, myself dressed all in black (a black spot, literally, on the eerie tranquility of the all white institutional buildings.) We saw in the distance a lone cop pacing back and forth along a sidewalk. I ran to him in a state of anxiety at the thought that no one was there to give me my license after our two-hour drive. Before reaching him I began to shout my questions:
“Where is everyone? Labor Day was last week. Is today some sort of holiday that I don’t know about?”
And he replied, with his thumbs in his belt loops and his big belly hanging over his britches, “Yeah buddy, Jefferson Davis’s birthday!”
