Original Introduction

By Carroll Dale Short

        To get to Shanghi, Alabama, you take Highway 78 West out of Birmingham. Some twenty miles later you come to the Graysville exit, which you take and then turn left onto Flat Top Road.

        In short order you'll pass Flat Top, Bessie Mines, Jonestown, Snowtown, and West Jefferson. A little beyond West Jefferson High School, when you see the reservoir for the power plant on your left, you take a very hard right—almost a U-turn—and find yourself in Twilleytown, a place which was signified at one time by a big railroad trestle which Bobby Adams once hit with his motorcycle. The trestle has since been torn down. Now you can see only the stumps of it and some scattered redrock.

        At that point you're almost home. It's a straight shot of about half a mile to Shanghi Baptist Church and Hardin's Grocery, which mark what is roughly the southern boundary of Shanghi. The northern boundary is my grandparents' place—or, if you go the back way called the Old Road, Tommy Howell's house is. Beyond there you've left Shanghi and are in Yerkwood, then Burnwell, and so on until you get to Dora and the main highway again.

        I was born and raised in Shanghi. Five generations of my kin have lived there off and on, over the years, in a circle of houses a few hundred yards apart. My grandparents still live there.

        How the place got its name is somewhat of a mystery. One version maintains that the community's first church was an architectural innovation, having such a steep, pagoda-like roof that jokesters from neighboring towns started calling it “the Shanghai church,” and the name stuck. The church was hit by lightning and burned. Nobody has explained how the second a came to dropped from its Chinese namesake, making it “Shanghi.”

        It's ironic to me that I spent the first twenty years of my life plotting ways to escape Shanghi for the more glamorous and trend-conscious climes of New York City or Los Angeles, and have spent the second twenty years of my life plotting ways to get back there—if only for a weekend, an afternoon, an hour.

        One day last summer I pulled into my grandparents' driveway at about sunset. There was a haze of pollen in the air that made the whole hillside soft and gold-colored, as the sun sank down into the pines and oaks beyond a pole of martin gourds my grandfather came around the house on his riding lawn mower, taking his time, eating a handful of blueberries he had pulled from the trellis of vines, a ripe plumb he had picked from a low-hanging limb.

        He saw me and cut the motor. “Sometimes,” he said, “this place seems like the Garden of Eden.”

        I've concurred with that view for years now. The turning point came at age twenty-one, when I found myself farther from Shanghi than I had ever wanted to be—in U.S. Army boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in the middle of bleakest January with a temperature of three degrees and thirty-five mph winds and, even worse, not a single pine tree in sight.

        When I lay down at night in my misery and contrition, the movie of remembrance I saw projected onto the back of my eyelids was not New York or Los Angeles or the paradise of some warm Gulf beach, but Shanghi, Alabama. I would walk all my old woods trails in slow motion and various seasons, one at a time, until blessed sleep came and then the nightmare of morning again, which I survived by counting the hours until I could close my eyes and be back in Shanghi. I promised myself, that terrible and interminable winter, that if I were fortunate enough ever to get back home I would never live more than an hour's drive away from it, if I could help it, until the day I died. So far I've made good on that promise.

        It astonishes and saddens me, now, to meet people who have never loved any place in particular, whose home is wherever they're receiving their mail at the moment. To go through life without loving a place seems as much a tragedy as not loving a person.

        When you love someone, you think of them at various times of the day and try to imagine what they're doing at that moment, what they're feeling, what they're looking at. You get pleasure and a strange kind of strength from it.

        It's the same with a place. Never a day passes, wherever I happen to be in the world, that I don't picture Shanghi and imagine what the weather is like there, try to gauge from memory the slant of light at that hour on its trees and houses and pastures, the sounds the birds and squirrels and livestock are making, the smells that are in the air.

        I've realized, just lately, that whenever I call my grandparents on the phone the first words out of my mouth after “Hello” are “What's the weather doing, there?” I ask it with an urgency that's surprising to me, the way a stockbroker would ask for the latest market report.

        What I'm doing, I've realized, is testing against reality the picture of it I've carried in my head all day—erasing lines and colors where necessary, adding others, so that the version I fall asleep with is as accurate as possible.

        There's a writer I admire a lot named Wendell Berry. He was raised in a small town in Kentucky which he writes about often. In one book Berry says of a boy growing up there:

        Since the beginning of his consciousness he has felt over and around him the regard of a fellowship of kinsmen and friends, watching him, warning him, fondling him, correcting him, teasing him, instructing him, not so much because of any ambition they have for him as because of where he comes from and because in him they see, come back again, traits and features of dead men they loved.

        That durable and loving regard is one of the beauties, maybe the chief beauty, of a place, and it's unfortunate that it's so often invisible to us until after we've gone away.

        It's possible to argue, though—an argument I use to comfort myself—that someone who leaves a place and then returns may love it even more (if that's possible) than those who've never left. When the boy in Berry's book grows up and moves away to college and then comes home, he sees the place in a new light:

        And so as he leaves the old house now he steps out into a changed and strangely radiant world, for he is walking now not merely in the place but in his knowledge of it, surrounded by the ghosts and presences of the ones who have cared for him and watched over him there all his life, and he is accompanied by earlier versions of himself that he has lived through. The ache of an exultant sorrow is in his throat.

        Having a place like Shanghi to come home to is a far richer birthright than I'm worthy of. Having the privilege of writing about it, and having people in Walker County kind enough to read what I write, is more good fortune than any country boy deserves.

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