In the Land of the Innies

My mama used to say I was born in the navel of the world. Even if that was true, it’s not there anymore. The earth got weighted down with more and more people and that belly button place slipped into a crease and got sucked right under the ground. Sometimes when I’m driving 65mph past where it used to be–ought to be–if I squint my eyes just so, I might get a glimpse of it, like one of those hologram things.

It’s a wild and swampy place full of a gracious plenty of the amphibian and reptile families, and a place where, I swear, the cicadas never stop singing. I think that’s just to keep folks’ spirits up until they’re far enough down one of them lonely tar roads to know they’re finally on their way to somewhere else. Those flat, black roads were, often as not, hotter than the kitchen fires of hell. And they always looked like they were moving, gyrating to some unheard devilish melody on account of the steamy heat rising from them. You never drove too far down one of them unloved state roads before you’d see something fried and half dried up just before something else higher up the food chain slithered up and ate it.

Anyway, it’s long gone; not the town itself, mind you, just the old straw hat and suspenders it used to wear. Now, as I whizz along I-75, the asphalt pipeline to sunshine, I’m thinking that Valdosta, once known as the “Valle of Beauty” is more of a Valley of Billboards, along with its big box stores and fast food exits. Mama wouldn’t appreciate me saying that but she’d be proud I told the truth. Of course, in all fairness, that could describe any number of cities and towns across the country. And why am I romanticizing this place anyway? Once upon a time, fifty some years ago it was just a flat crossroads of airplanes and alligators and turpentine blues; of long leaf pines full of overhead whines from F-86 Sabre jet fighters, and folks underneath them with the wits, songs and stories to endure it until they had the money or the moxie to move somewhere else.

Nevertheless, nostalgia’s diet has always subsisted in large part on legends and stories. My worlds, both real and unreal, unfolded on the knee of one of the great storytellers of all time – my mother, The Queen of Be, the Alpha and Omega of my view of the world and how I had dropped into the middle of it. And according to her, the stork had done a fine job and I had not landed on my head. More importantly, however, was the fact that I had been chosen for one of the greatest drop-off spots on earth: Valdosta, Georgia, the grand omphalos of the whole wide world.

Sitting on her aproned lap at three years old, I was completely enthralled. I loved the way her ruby red lips pursed together to say that word, omphalos. It sounded mysterious and magical, encrusted with precious jewels. Ten years later, the age I knew that I knew everything, I declared it to be more of a sexy word. But, in those first dewy years of life in the land of peaches, I came to believe that a white bird with a funny little hat and a long orange beak like a carrot had indeed set me down in the glorious center–the belly button−of the world. It was most definitely true because Mama said so and Mama didn’t lie. Why, she declared as she rocked me against her, our little town was the number one spot for navel stores. Everyone who was anyone came here to get their bellybuttons examined. Only the Innies stayed in Valdosta, mind you, the Outies moved away. She proved this by letting me examine mine, hers and my daddy’s−the only three belly buttons I knew, but that was a lot and proof enough.

And she kept me going on that for a while until we’d moved to Raleigh, up north at the shallow end of the Deep South. I didn’t care that we had left behind our Airstream trailer in the Land of the Innies with its singing frogs and bread-begging alligators. We had moved to the Land of the Queen’s Man and it was much grander. The realm of Sir Walter Raleigh was a fine place for a fairy princess to talk to trees and sing to the elves and listen to the angels while a baby sister sprang out of The Queen of Be.

I didn’t find out until several decades later the real truth about Valdosta’s connection to navels, and it was another thing altogether. Up until the start of the 21st century, this little swamp-side town used to be Ground Zero for the world’s production of naval stores used in the waterproofing of wooden ships, and for household items like soap, varnish, paint and paper. It was a vile and cruel business. The work was hard, the pay low, and the conditions abysmal for the poor men, mostly black, who were forced to eke out a living in this manner. The trees−hundreds of thousands of acres of them−fared no better; they were cut and stripped of their bark before having their insides ripped out to make naval stores, or rather, resin and turpentine. It was a far cry from belly buttons, but a much better story for a toddler than a tale of toil and woe.