Places No One Would Want to Settle

Photos by Scot Sothern

It’s 1973 and I’m somewhere in north Florida or maybe south Georgia, behind the wheel and stuck in the moment. A dirt road ambles along, throwing up dust and settling in places no one would want to settle. I pass tumbledown bars and markets with screen doors that slam in the wind. I drive by a little white church and two rows of shacks facing each other across the road. People old and young planted upright in the weeds watch me roll by like I’m pulling a funeral procession on a rope. Kids standing in the sun with no shoes and wavering smiles.

Between cypress trees, under Spanish moss, I expect to see a Civil War graveyard. I pass a woman on a chair in the dirt—her limbs twisted, her face distorted, a protruding tongue like a pound of severed flesh. I park and get the camera and spool in a roll of Kodachrome. She is at the outside edge of a low-slung house, old and unstable but clean with fresh paint. She watches me get out of the car and becomes overstimulated and kinetic, and I worry she might fling herself from the chair. I talk to her slow and low, like a good person. “Hey, how’s it going?” She ratchets her neck, and her head ricochets off invisible walls. A flurry of backlit motes whirl away like a magnetic storm. An older woman comes out. She tells me the girl is her granddaughter, and she would appreciate it if I don’t get her all excited. I ask does the girl understand us?

“Her name is Martha and she understands me,” the woman says. “That’s all she needs. What did you stop for? What’s your business here?” She goes to her granddaughter and puts a calming hand on the back of the girl’s neck.

“My name’s Scot. I’m a photographer. Can I take her picture?”

“So people can laugh at her?”

“No, no. Not at all. I don’t think so. I hope not.”

“God is watching you, son.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a first.”

When I was in high school—despite being a child running wild—my mother made me go to church. I hated the services, but I sucked it up every week and put on a tie, combed my hair, and sat brooding in the back pew. I had to draw the line at Sunday school, so I worked a deal that let me get a Sunday school room of my own where I took care of a mentally disabled teenager, Jimmy. At first I mostly ignored Jimmy and just hung out, smoking and looking out the window. Once I got a couple of girls to skip Sunday school and hang out with me, but close proximity to nubile babes gave Jimmy a boner that looked like it was going to blow out his barn door, and the babes went back to Bible study.

I liked Jimmy, and over the course of four years I taught him the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandants and the words to “Jesus Loves Me.” One Christmas I gave him a picture book of Jesus and his crew walking on water and chillin’ with the lepers.

Grandma gives me the all-clear to photograph Martha, and I pose them together and make an exposure. Martha sticks out her tongue, and Grandma tells me they had to pull out Martha’s teeth so she wouldn’t bite it off. She tells me Martha’s mother, her daughter, took off a long time ago following some cocksure rooster with a $100 bill. I tell her that’s a drag and ask how long has she lived here.

“All my live-long days, 67 years,” she says.

“Wow, I guess you’ve seen a lot of change.”

She looks around, up and down the road. She tells me no, she doesn’t see nothing much has changed at all.

I take a couple more pictures and tell Grandma thanks and I shake her hand. I get in the car, and 50 yards later I come upon a rickety one-car-at-a-time wooden bridge. I pull onto the bridge but stop when I see a giant turtle sitting between the rails, looking at me like I’ve just spoiled its afternoon nap. It’s big as a bean-bag chair, and I honk and it doesn’t move. I pull closer until it’s nearly touching the front bumper, and I honk some more. It doesn’t move. I put the car in park, and I get out and tell the turtle, "Come on, fuckhead, move out of the way." I’m a couple of yards away, calling the turtle names, when it hisses and jumps and snaps at me with the speed of a snake. I yell fuck, shit, piss, and run back to the car. I back all the way to Grandma’s house, where I turn around and go looking for a highway. In the rearview mirror I see the dust as it settles around Martha.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.