Tamsin Bomar,  M.A./M.S.   205.902.2836
tamsinbomar@bellsouth.net

19 May 2012

What amazing educational and cultural legacy could Mayor Lowery leave the City of Fultondale in addition to the convenient and much needed commercial area and residential improvements? 

Fultondale can become the educational center for the 5 Mile Creek Greenway Partnership!  Thousands of school kids and college classes, as well as adult tourists, will come to Fultondale to learn about the story of mining as it is told in one town that found itself with a problem with the Lewisburg Mine #2 in this town...it was extremely dangerous. What a terrific way for kids to learn about how a town pulled together to save lives and turn their fate around, creating a community, and finding a way to get by after getting the mine closed.

Three or more exhibit locations will be featured on a tour of Fultondale. One located in a period house that describes life in the day. Another location down by 5 Mile Creek that features native plants;  schoolchildren and tourists will go to the community center to hear lectures about how native plants were used for health and healing in a time when all the medicines we rely on were not available. Maybe also in the community center will be a display of early doctoring in Fultondale.

Another tour will feature the coke ovens, openings of the former mine, etc.

The financial boon to Fultondale from making this city an educational and cultural focal point for mining towns that survived the closing of the mine of will be significant. Fultondale will also become known as valuing its own culture, its own amazing story - and in the process, acknowleging the amazing stories of other former mining towns that refused to die.




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18 May 2012     (once again as I attempt to post, the spacing instructions don't hold...technology!  You will have to    copy and paste this post about Fultondale and insert spacing, I'm afraid.)

What do motorists traveling I65 North or South understand about Fultondale just from passing by? That it is a mall. And a nice one with good stores. There is also probably signage for Chapel Hills, the subdivision "of choice" according to some people which locals and nonlocals consider one of the distinguishing features of Fultondale.  There are a lot of people who live in Chapel Hills, but you would never know it from the Fultondale Library traffic, in spite of the library's extended hours. Have some of those residents at Chapel Hills moved to Fultondale for the schools?  I don't know. I haven't ever seen any data on that question on the city website.
Also not on the website are the considerable achievements of Fultondale. There exists no historical signage anywhere in town indicating important events or former buildings of significance or buildings still standing which played so important a part in this town's coming-to-be. Even following the April 27th tornado of last year, when certain of the commercial structures in the older downtown section got destroyed, I passed by wishing I had my camera to preserve memories of what was obviously an important commercial location. Did the building department of Fultondale take pictures of those important locations and then mount an exhibit for nonnatives who live here at the library celebrating an important part of Fultondale history?
No.  

When the guy down the street from me refurbished his own house, which he told me dated back to the mining days as some kind of place of congregating, I went down there and took pictures of the exceptional wallpaper in that structure....how refined an aesthetic that wallpaper communicated!  I couldn't stop taking pictures of the beautiful border at the bottom of the kitchen wall covering; it was so different from the wallpaper in MY vintage house!  THAT would make an excellent basis of an historical exhibit that Jeff State Community College would have helped out with.
When the local doctor's house who had worked in this town for so many years went up for sale, I wrote a letter to the mayor protesting the loss of so historic a property and a beautiful 13 acre woodland setting. The doctor, I heard, had a clinic in the old downtown area. Has that original clinic been preserved or even recognized in any way by a plaque or a display in the Fultondale Library?  

No.  

When I wrote that first letter to Mayor Lowery, I personally offered to help find and apply for funding to preserve and commemorate the early medical story of Fultondale. The memorabilia, photos, and story of that time could have been displayed in doctors' offices around town on a rotating basis and then in the new Norwood Clinic. I never even got a phone call in acknowledgement of that letter!  
I finally went into city hall and asked about the old doctor's place. I was told that the city council was refusing to allow the low-income housing originally proposed. Instead what has gone in are row houses, that now are immediately adjacent to the new commercial strip along Walker Chapel Road. What little "town" experience those row house dwellers bought into is gone. They will now be living next to a tire store and look out on an empty lots left by former residents of Main Street in Fultondale. They ought to be enraged...I wonder if they are.
If you read about Fultondale downtown at the Birmingham Public Library and Archives, you will find that Fultondale presents a population interested in preserving its own memory and identity with lots to write about. The person who inadvertently got me interested in doing that research is Darryl Aldrich, building inspector of Fultondale, who was on the 5 Mile Creek Greenway Committee with me and who talked about creating an historical park around the coke ovens off 31N. That park never materialized. But I then started doing more reading about all the other achievements and notable events that distinguish Fultondale. There are a lot of them and they could all be recognized through historical signage.
First, there is the Mary Lee RR that was the reason for Fultondale even coming into being. THAT needs signage.

Second, there is the Mary Lee or Lewisburg Mine that sits under the older sections of Fultondale. 

Third, there is the former location of the country store and schools. Those require signage. 

What else sets the Fultondale mine apart and which would maybe get locals more interested in their own history to show some pride about their traditions?  The mine that operated in Fultondale was staffed by paid local workers instead of penitentiary labor (at least that's what I've read). That's a big deal when the big mine down the road, New Castle, refused to hire local labor in preference for penitentiary labor and then went to the legislature to talk about what worthless losers local white labor was compared to immigrants!  

So, there was a mine in Fultondale, which became the basis of this town's fluorishing. If you go to the Mine Reclamation Office and ask, you will discover that the problem of the mine was its methane content, which results in greater injury (through disorientation of workers who come into contact with the methane) or which literally catches on fire when dynamite goes off (resulting in obvious death). The mine was closed because of its lack of safety....that is a really, really big deal in the story of mining, as I discovered!  Most mines commanded such slavish, mindless devotion from free labor that in spite of safety problems, the mines just went on and on, killing and maiming workers who had no recourse through the justice system.  THAT closure of the Lewisburg 2 Mine is a wonderful story that deserves to be told and exhibited.
Part of my property on Main Street in Fultondale is bordered by Spring Street to the west. That spring was an important part of Fultondale. Why isn't there some signage about that?  Was that spring one of the springs that got fouled by the mining world and is that fouling one of the reasons that the local residents finally said no to the mine and did so successfully? THAT is a really, really big deal in the context of mining of the Birmingham area and in the context of a rural area dependent on local water.
Homegrown food or access to it is also a vital piece of the mining story and of the Deep South. Nutritional deficit illnesses are what killed a lot of mine workers who got suckered into living in a mining camp or law offenders who got put in jail and rented to mine owners. Access to real food made the difference between life and death for people back then. Fultondale distinguished itself for home gardening. Why hasn't Jim Lowery's tenure given as much respect to THAT aspect of Fultondale's heritage as getting his name on the mall along 65?
What, exactly, IS Jim Lowery's and the City Council's and Darryl Aldrich's problem with recognizing and celebrating or even recording historically their own heritage?  I would love to know the answer to that question, since it may explain to me why I have encountered so many problems in the building department when it comes to building my house back after the tornado of last year. My house was also a very significant house in Fultondale, as I discovered and not a single one of those yahoos up the street wants to talk about it. 
Oh, I forgot, there does exist ONE historical exhibit on Fultondale. It's on the wall of Whataburger on the corner of Main Street and Walker Chapel Road. The building of Whataburger involved the demolition of an older home. Recorded on the wall of Whataburger is that house and a piece of the story of Fultondale!  
WHO has degraded and tried to bury Fultondale's identity as a town, at least in the last 14 years that I've lived at 506 Main Street in Fultondale? 
The Jim Lowery administration, that's who. 

But I feel lucky that I have had the chance to watch the downfall of this town, because it has shown me that what I've read in sociology and anthropology books about mining culture seems to be true. What I've read is that mining culture degrades the self-esteem of mine workers so bad and makes them feel so small and helpless that they lose any and all respect for who they are as people. They lose respect for their own contributions to history, to creating a town and a community. When the degrading effects of how mines are run really take hold, the self concepts of the mine worker and families is replaced by the attitude of the mine owner and supervisors....that means that instead of you standing up for yourself and demanding safety or necessary food or equipment or medical services, you see yourself as totally dependent on the mine for your very existence. That means that mining culture often results in communities that can't function outside the mining context of oppression and deprivation - without a mine owner and supervisor exploiting you and making you feel like you don't deserve to live or thrive or be remembered for who you are, you don't feel like you are anybody. That means that the only way you feel like somebody is if someone is above you making you feel small and helpless and like a nobody unless you serve the mine owner and supervisor without question.
Is this what has happened to Fultondale? Have the nativeborn Fultondale people gotten suckered into wiping out every trace of their own history and finding hope in the glitz of the mall and the modern notions of a fancy subdivision? Is this why every trace of historical memory of this town is being erased - except for the Whataburger exhibit?  Has the Jim Lowery administration reenacted the historical phenomenon that most mining towns go through, covering up or erasing who they were and so losing any sense of who they are and what they have accomplished, and so their kids don't know about all the great things that Fultondale has accomplished?
....But in the part of Fultondale where I live there are some beautiful parcels of land that may or may not be for sale. This old part of Fultondale is what remains of a village anxious to be reborn or to continue its more notable history as a gardening town that somehow got that mine closed and hung together through some pretty awful times. THAT is the neighborhood where I chose to buy a house. And a lot of the original inhabitants who lived there have chosen not to build back or they didn't have home insurance or just didn't want to be there. 

The man who built the house I bought in the original section of Fultondale belonged to the United Mine Workers of America back at a time in history when it really did make a difference in making your voice as a laborer heard and when repercussions could be extreme. I know that Louis Haler belonged to the UMW because he left a piece of mail for me in the wall behind the sink, a section of the UMW publication mailed out for UMW members in Central Alabama. It has Louis's name on it with his address and it lists some of the atrocities committed against "union agitators" committed in certain counties and towns in Central Alabama....like being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and being forced to watch your house get blown up, or getting pulled over by the police without just cause and having your vehicle searched and the car possibly impounded, or getting put in jail on few or no charges and having an enormous bail posted that your family can't afford. THAT is the information Happy Haler somehow left in the south facing wall waiting for me to find when I chose to find out what a great house he had built following the tornado last year.

Isn't it too bad that city hall in Fultondale cares so little about its own leaders from way back or its own amazing history that my efforts to build back have been made inexplicably impossible for over a year now?





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In the Company of Wild Things 


I seek the company of wild things 
to be ravished out of ordinary time. 
Plodding (sub)urban civility unzipped, 
stripped of my pretensions to control 

I lie naked:  whole body listening 
to archaic warnings from mafic rock. 

Somehow this shifting red dirt knew and felt 
the devastation coming from millenia away, 
heard rumors of our destructive century 
echoing in reverse from the future. 

Now soft rock crumbling deep inside me 
names the messenger and the message, 
my body in earth's body commissioned 
to tell what is really no secret 
just inaudible to most.


2007/08




* Environmental Theology remains something of a hardsell in the Deep South, but I can't really figure out why. 
Original Sin includes, or so I thought, disdain for loving and accepting the creation. 

Training Muscadine



About an hour from my house a nursery dedicated to bringing all plants heirloom to peak perfection had designer muscadine for sale, scientifically improved varieties of the wild vine

that will overtake your property in a single season, get as big around as your arm and run all the way up an oak or yellow poplar to get sun.

The woman in the monogramed pink apron at the heirloom plant shop told me those wild vines make grapes too, up there in the sun. But if you expect those unbridled natives to work for you, 
binding is all that has ever worked. 

And not some "girly" kind of bondage your grandmother may have figured out, but the real thing with posts sunk in concrete and cattle wire for domesticating the untamed grape of Alabama. 

Then the woman wearing the monogramed pink apron took me over to the vineyard at the nursery. I had to shade my eyes with a hand to witness disappearing into the sun row upon row of disciplined wild vine.

'Supreme' is what I got sold that day and then let sit an entire year. Every couple of months in winter I checked on the cultured Muscadine sitting under the deck. Yeah, they were still alive, the guy and the gal, wondering when I would plant them. But I was going to have to make some kind of trellis, according to the woman at the plant shop. 

When spring got here, I finally cleared a sunny embankment, pulling weeds, uprooting privet and poison ivy seedlings teetering above rocky soil. Two year old seedlings of Red Mulberry and Cherry Laurel too dense for the saw were left standing on the stripped ground.

I drove to Lowe's and looked at the trellising directions in one of the garden books there, lounging in some of the new patio furniture, then drove back and sat rocking on the porch.

Wed your grapes to elms, the author of the Georgics advises in the second line of a great poem noone reads anymore. That will delight and tease out the earth goddess' mood for wine.

Two young Mulberries and a Cherry Laurel will have to do.

Here's a fun photograph from the ever unfolding world of my garden...a "Bumbling Borer" (or "Boring Bumbler") seeking food from the Climax Blueberry on the north side of the property. See the hole on the side of the bloom -- that's how this pollinator gets at the nectar hidden inside a bloom to which its girth does not allow it access.

At the Other Public Garden *


For seven days I ate lunch out by the muck. It was 95 in the shade.
I went anyway and watched turtles slosh up out of the depths.
Maybe a few bass lumbered by making currents.
Dragonflies hovered and landed, 3 times inclining their wings
toward breeding beds layered in pine, seedcones, and cicada carcasses.

The button bush at the far end of the lake, rooted in marsh, 
brings swallow-tails to feed. You'll want to creep in close to see them.
Then your feet are in the mud too!

It's basically one huge back yard that got turned into a listening place.
Just enough artful edge to give you a way out, for now.
Or maybe you rush into the innocence of it,
eager for the dream, 
but there's your old life waiting to meet you in the boathouse.
It can be that unexpected.



* Aldridge Gardens in Hoover, AL

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Arugula in Late Summer, Zone 8


Even months gone and utterly inedible, pulled arugula still smells good.
Basil too, the rootball sacredly aromatic and knotted in fascinating ways.

Without irrigation or mulch, a garden in zone 8 can be a pitiful sight by now.
I run around with the hose as long as I can stand the heat,
then stand at the window wondering about the lush hidden there.

Brown Turkey figs hang off the branch in waves.
New leaves on the tifblu-berries appear cream even without water.
Free-seeded vines make soft mounds of the rosemary.

It's why I keep at it: 
scented roots from hard baked dirt,
blue convolvulus to wake up to.


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October Figs


Figs in early October happen here.
They give back an unexpected sweet
and cool pulp formed over shorter days.

The fallen leaves crunch underfoot as I lean in
or reach up to bend a tall branch down.

Red berries called Snailseed wrap around on one side.
The Choctaw used them to stun fish that would fill the net.

It's the beginning of a different kind of dreamtime.

   ...from June 1, 2009 in the studio. 

From within the heavens they come, 
The beautiful flowers, the beautiful songs. 
Our longing spoils them, 
Our inventiveness makes them lose their fragrance. 

~ Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin of Tecamachalco
(Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, León-Portilla, Tr. 1980, 257)

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A beautiful quote from Gabriela Mistral [www.poetseers.org]...

No maguellers a la tierra
no aprietes a la olorosa,
Por el amor de ella abájate,
huéla y dale la boca.

Do not trample the earth, do not crush the sweet-smelling fruit.
For love of it, bend down, smell it and give it your mouth.

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Asking for Love


There's the way you brush your hand down my side
as I lie stretched out beside you on the bed,
from shoulder to hip, then slide our hand under me
to fall asleep under the fan while the bugs whine.


Or how you splay it out on my head and then pull the fingers together.
I like that one a lot. It does the entire surface between the ears.
A chest rub while you write. 
The traditional body hug.
Messing with my ears.
Rubbing right in front of the tail
or fingernails along my spine makes my back legs dance.
Cheek circles, both sides at once.
A leg massage, the squeezing kind.
Thumping my ribs while I lean against your legs. 

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Yardwork (beginning of a longer work)


I'm raking up three years of winter leaves
and limbs scattered by city tree trimmers.
Oak, sumac, cherry laurel, yellow poplar
and an old dogwood that goes on and on
sheltered beneath an 80 year red oak.

I'm going to sink rain garden plants in that ditch
along the south side of this enviable estate
above an infamous mine on the Mary Lee coal seam.

Somewhere beneath all this bringing forth
men died in a union dispute over scab labor
to cut pillars full of methane:
penitentiary workers rented to the company
by the much esteemed State of Alabama.

Juz niggers, gaw!


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Keeping Company with Broken Ground


The northern edge of the potted mum out front
is blooming. Three of the buds, to be exact, are opening.
The rest of the plant remains dormant;
as nights get longer, it waits.

Helenium hidden away on the porch blooms basal leaves.
It also waits for autumn's longer reach
when I'll find a place for it under that dogwood
over there, or maybe another deciduous tree out back.

All the plant sale items wait out the hot ground and air to become part of this place.

It's how I keep company with this broken ground
and help it laugh again, because this place took me in
when we both needed someone to talk to about what had happened.

Fitting in


I finally quit fighting it:
between 7:30 and 8 with office traffic whizzing by;
or even when the churchy folks are piling on
across the street and me looking up to wave;
Sunday morning is the best; maybe right after work.

I thought, Hey now! You go girl, you just do it.
You're in a WPA house on Main Street for chrissake!
Tomato vines and muscadine even.

Someone said: Oh, no! How ridiculous. You aren't really going to do that, are you?

Oh, yes. I am going to do it.
I've seen pictures of it being done
in houses exactly like this one;
they weren't art photos, it's true, 
but they documented someone doing it
and it appeared quite natural, you know, very much the norm.

So the behavior is consistent with the culture
that once supported a dwelling very much like this one.

It may not reflect our sense of decorum,
but it goes with the place.

I am going to pluck my eyebrows on the front porch.