joined by their equals born in South Alabama. All were welcomed. They were the spearpoint of the New South.
Yet hereditary privilege and its aura persisted. In Marcia and her parents and many others of their class, a residue of antebellum glory still lingered. It could be summarized by the Three Graces of Southern Nobility. First, there was Old Family and Money; next, Gracious Living, including spacious houses surrounded by sumptuous gardens that displayed large showy flowers, and indoors featuring antique furniture passed down, not bought; and finally, the gray wool of the Confederacy. For this last, forebears were better remembered if they had been officers. If that was fortunately the case, portraits would hang in the library or along the center hallway. A general was a treasure for the ages, and lower-ranked officers were certainly acceptable, while enlisted men were best left as add-ons during postprandial conversation.
Marcia Semmes was a modern young woman but her roots were in an antebellum ghost town. People there, if they accepted you socially, delighted in telling you their family history. More than the members of any other American subculture, they wanted to discourse on their "people"--their forebears, back more than three generations, back to participation in each war in turn, back, if their phylogeny could be so documented, to the English-speaking pioneers who had settled the land. And they wanted to show you their homes, if those homes were sufficiently large and grand, and the better if built not by themselves but a long time ago, by their people.
Marcia's branch of the Mobile Semmeses was descended from a cousin of the Confederate "Sea Wolf," Admiral Raphael Semmes. Although direct descendants of the great man were also present in her generation, and her own line was only collateral, she was later to say to Raff more than once, "Remember, son, you are what your people are." And, "You need all of the help you can get in this life, and down here a great name means a lot." She never admitted to herself the possibility that Raff might eventually settle elsewhere in the world, like some ordinary person looking for a job up north, or that the treasured memory of the great man for whom he was named might someday be reverently folded and put away for good in some safe and remembered place along with the stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag.
8
THE FLORABAMA RESTAURANT was a famous establishment located on the coast precisely at the line between Florida and Alabama. Out back lay a sugar-white beach and shallow turquoise water that stretched unbroken from Perdido Bay on the east all the way west to Fort Morgan at the entrance to Mobile Bay. It was already famous in the 1970s as a center of Redneck Chic, where families could eat piled-up shrimp off paper plates, and men could drink American beer directly from longneck bottles. Young lawyers and stockbrokers squeezed in at the bar among truck drivers and oystermen--among real people, in other words, the ones who actually produce and fix things for a living.
On a Saturday afternoon Marcia came to the FloraBama with a group of other Spring Hill College coeds. One of the real people present when Marcia arrived was Ainesley Cody of West Pirate Beach, Alabama, a graduate of Fairhope Senior High School and an expert automobile mechanic and part-time persimmon and strawberry picker. He was seated at a table next to the bar with four of his friends, sipping beer and rating young women as they came through the entrance. They were assigning scores from zero to ten for overall attractiveness, and planned to confer a crudely made imitation gold medal to the first one given a unanimous vote of ten. After an hour and a half without a winner, the impatient judges were arguing over whether the requisite score should be lowered to nine.
When Marcia walked in, Ainesley was startled, then riveted by the look of her. First was her petite size, matching his own. She was even smaller than Ainesley. This was an increasing rarity in the well-fed South. Most young women were his size or bigger, and they had big feet. Marcia's were much smaller. Her clothing size, he was to learn later, was petite small. Then, in the two-second survey hard-wired in males, he saw in sequence: nice shape, lovely face, well-groomed hair, neat clothes, graceful walk. Summary: a really great-looking young woman. Moreover, she was talking with animation, flashing an orthodontically corrected perfect smile.