Trespassing in Normaltown

 

            Today I took a step onto forbidden ground.  Or so it felt.

            My brother and I and one of my daughters were out for a drive in Athens, and we had come to the place where Prince Avenue meets Oglethorpe Avenue.  Every Athenian knows the name of that intersection:  Normaltown.  Like every other business district in Athens it is different from what it used to be.  No more Allen’s, no more P & M Army Store, but there’s still Normal Hardware and it’s still Normaltown.  At one corner of the intersection is a corner of the UGA College of Public Health, a large, self-contained campus, over 50 acres, old buildings, looking like a typical, charming little liberal arts college in the South.  This complex has had a number of uses over its 150+ year history.  For 40 years, starting in 1891, it was the state teacher’s college, the Normal School (to use the terminology from the time). That’s where the name “Normaltown” came from, as heard in “Deadbeat Club”,  the B-52’s affectionate elegy for their days of bohemian youth:  “Let's go crash that party down /  in Normaltown tonight.”  As one outpost of Athens avant-gardism, “Normaltown” had a wonderfully ironic name.

 

            To me, the campus that sprawls westward from the point where Prince meets Oglethorpe will always be what it was during my entire life in Athens: the Navy Supply Corps School.  That was its purpose from 1953-2005  The Navy School (as we called it) was behind a tall fence, under guard, to me a fearsome military fortification of sorts, populated entirely (I ignorantly assumed) by guys who talked like James Cagney and whose mission was to make sure the USS Yorktown had enough potatoes (I had watched Mr. Roberts too many times).  The buildings and uniformed people behind the fence  could be easily seen, but I kept my distance, averted my eyes.  It was a world apart, an outpost of displaced sea dogs among landlubbers, and definitely none of my business.  During one year of college I lived in an apartment off Oglethorpe Avenue, close enough to the Navy School that, at certain times of the day, I could hear a medley of patriotic songs, done calliope style, being broadcast over the base’s loudspeakers.  It was like living next to a cloistered monastery of mariners who, for their own obscure reasons, wanted their sacred music to sound like it was being played at a county carnival.

 

            To my daughter that place has nothing to do with the Navy or any other branch of the service.  Today she wanted to go in and have a quick look at what is now, and was during her entire undergraduate tenure at UGA (2017-21) the university’s Health Sciences Campus.  She and her best friend had really liked the dining hall there.  I consented to her request, but quickly wondered if I had made a mistake.  This brief sojourn, utterly natural to her, would be something of an earthshaking first for me. Since leaving Athens for good 35 years ago, I have made countless nostalgia trips back to my hometown.  I have laid eyes on the Tree That Owns Itself with a receipt from the Grill in my pocket an embarrassing number of times.   But not once had I dared to venture into the old Navy School, even though the gates have been open and the guards have been gone for many years.  I’m sure that omission comes entirely from a vestigial sense that it is off limits.  I don’t belong in there.  A civilian could get in a lot of trouble for being in there without authorization. 

       But that was a long time ago, right?  Today, not wanting to be a scaredy-cat, I put aside my outdated fears, steered our car through the gate, kept my breathing steady, drove cautiously to a well-marked parking area,  and let my daughter hop out to see whatever it was she wanted to see. The whole time my brother and I sat there waiting for her to return I had these vague feelings that some CPOs were coming for me, musclebound guys with anchor tattoos on their forearms, and that I would not have the credentials they demanded to see, and that I would be detained, not just detained but impressed into the service, like some poor schlub in a port city in the 18^th century, going to sleep drunk on rum and waking up at sea as a member of the British Navy because he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and not kept his guard up.  You can’t just shed a lifelong image of a place, no matter how illogical it may be.  My learned and ingrained wariness of whatever was on the other side of the fence at the Navy School made it impossible for me not to feel like a trespasser on military property, even though the generic UGA font I have known all life was on every building, reassurance that there really had been regime change, that I had nothing to fear. It didn't matter.  Some latter day Admiral Farragut was about to come out of nowhere and kick my ass, I just knew it.  

              But we got out without incident.

 

            And truly I was kind of glad to set foot in what had once upon a time been the Normal School because one of Flannery O’Connor’s greatest stories, “A Late Encounter With the Enemy”, is partially set at the graduation ceremonies of the Normal School in some unnamed Southern state (but it has to be Georgia).  One of the graduates, Sally Poker Sash, has brought along to the ceremony her grandfather, General Sash, a cantankerous, randy, wheelchair-bound fossil of a Confederate veteran (he was actually a mere private during the war), as a sort of historical relic to display on stage with the other dignitaries, a demonstration of her “heritage” to lord over everyone else.  The timeline doesn’t really work for the setting to be Athens – in the story, General Sash was an ultra-cringey center of attention at the already cringey Gone With the Wind premiere in Atlanta, which happened in 1940, and the Normal School at Athens closed in 1932 (O'Connor was certainly thinking of the Normal School in Milledgeville, but let me have my fun ).  As the story reaches its conclusion, General Sash has a stroke in the form of history catching up with him (or maybe it’s the other way around), and as armies of death overwhelm him internally (invisible to the audience) he squeezes his ornamental sword so hard that “blade touches bone."  

     This is how it ends, what I hope we were nearby to today:

 

The graduates were crossing the stage in a long file to receive their scrolls and shake the president’s hand. As Sally Poker, who was near the end, crossed, she glanced at the General and saw him sitting fixed and fierce, his eyes wide open, and she turned her head forward again and held it a perceptible degree higher and received her scroll. Once it was all over and she was out of the auditorium in the sun again, she located her kin and they waited together on a bench in the shade for John Wesley to wheel the old man out. That crafty scout had bumped him out the back way and rolled him at high speed down a flagstone path and was waiting now, with the corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine.

 

An ancient Confederate carcass, fully uniformed, in line at a Coke machine: that tableau may be weird eight ways to Sunday, but it’s normal for Flannery O’Connor, perhaps even normal for Normaltown.