Since we got out of D.C., I have started noticing more and more clues that we are now in The South. We passed out first gunsmith just north of Richmond, Virginia—a standoffish cinderblock building with no windows called “Charlie’s Place.” Just west of Red Cross, North Carolina, we passed a roadside store selling hunting perches. On I-85 we passed a rig owned by a Christian trucking company (“Jesus is our driving force”), and in Albemarle, about an hour east of Charlotte, we found our first Christian bookstore.
Coming from Massachusetts, I had never been inside a Christian bookstore. The closest thing there is in my hometown is a Christian Science reading room, which can’t be as entertaining. I didn’t have time to peruse all the titles, but I did take time to leaf through the first volume of the God’s Creation series for kids—a primer on resolving settled science with Biblical scripture—and Align, a self-proclaimed “new testament for men,” which provides book-by-book Cliffs Notes for Christian scripture, while mixing in features on subjects like what Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians can tell us about stock-market investing.
Elsewhere in the store there were more examples of Christianity’s attempts to adapt its message to a new generation and its culture. This was especially true of the T-shirt rack. One shirt featured a bearded, white-robed Nintendo Wii avatar with the text, “Hii saved me.” “Jesus died for MySpace in heaven,” read another. A third simply said, “iPray.”
According to Hope, an aptly-named employee of the bookstore, the generational gap in Albemarle has not been as easily bridged. The last decade has brought about a number of changes in the town. The textile mills that had supported the county for a century had closed down. The Wal-Mart Superstore moved into town the same time Hope did, about two years earlier, and the strip malls grew like roots around it.
Ben, Rachel and I weren’t the only foreign things that had permeated Albemarle’s membrane. Largely due to the proliferation of internet access, not just people from away but ideas and culture too have begun to trickle into the erstwhile insulated town and take hold among the younger generation. Consequently, a number have broken from the ideological tradition of their parents.
“If they disagree, they’re much more confident now about standing up and saying, ‘you’re wrong,’” Hope said.
The old guard has not welcomed this blow to cultural continuity, she said, nor have they welcomed the chain stores that diverted business away from the smaller shops on Albemarle’s town center proper to fold. The three of us later drove down to the main street looking for the abandoned mills and had a hard time finding them, in part because every building looked like it might be an abandoned mill: brick structures with boarded up windows and pale shadows on the brick where there used to be letters. When we went into the county museum an hour before closing time, Ben noted that according to the attendant’s click-counter we were the only three visitors that day.
It is not an unfamiliar story, especially not in New England, where I am from. The mills close down, the malls move in, local business suffers, and the kids and parents can’t seem to understand what the others are saying anymore. Hope told us that Albemarle has always moved at a leisurely pace that she calls “Albemarle speed.” When she and her husband wanted to build a porch on their house, they called three contractors—two of which ignored their messages, and one sent someone to quote an estimate and hasn’t called back since. On the old main drag, I noticed the barbershop is open Monday thru Wednesday, closed the rest of the week. And maybe that’s the disconnect: The older generation has the patience to wait for next Monday, but the younger is increasingly along in the fast current of the information age. Anyway, that’s how Hope tells it.
On the way out of town, we stopped by a cemetery. It was the first I had ever seen with Confederate flags fluttering by the headstones of veterans. There were plenty. Five hundred men from the county saw action in the Civil War, and many didn’t come home. We noticed one headstone in particular that was flanked by both the Confederate and the Union banners. It was all the way in the back corner of the cemetery, and the only one we saw adorned with both flags. It marked the grave of an unknown confederate soldier who died by his own rifle when it misfired on Easter morning, 1865—seven days after General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox.
Posted from Appeley Mead Lane, Charlotte, North Carolina.
