There is another edit.<\/p>\n
Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a world where I would walk out of my dormitory at Owenton College, head down to the corner by the main gate, and catch the #7 streetcar downtown, from which I could head to the stadium with the other Elyton Ultras to cheer on Birmingham Legion while wearing my Black Barons cap and drinking Good People\u2019s brown ale on draft.<\/p>\n
The last time I lived around Birmingham was 1997. The Barons were still in Hoover, and the guys I watched them with were scattered to the four winds. I hadn\u2019t been in touch with anyone else from my high school in years. There were no professional sports teams in the city at all, save for Bulls hockey which wasn\u2019t really a thing in the heat of Alabama summer. I was commuting in every morning to a Mad Men-era skyscraper, to a temp job with a dress code, and while I had no idea what my future would hold, I was pretty sure that this wasn\u2019t it. Or rather, the notion that I would live out my days in area code 205 loomed like a yawning chasm of abject failure.<\/p>\n
Half a lifetime later, there are four professional teams playing in the city limits of Birmingham, as many as three simultaneously. There\u2019s pro soccer at the second highest level in America. There\u2019s craft brewing all over town, in a city that bills itself as \u201cthe Dining Room of the South\u201d and can say it with a straight face. Then again, a whole lifetime ago, there was the second largest streetcar system in America, and you could ride out to Rickwood and watch a Negro League team that was on a par with some major league squads even before adding a 15-year-old Willie Mays in the outfield, and a Beaux-Arts train terminal that was a jewel from which you could reach Atlanta or Nashville or New Orleans or points far beyond.<\/p>\n
My timing was impeccable. Almost everything worth experiencing in Birmingham was either long before my time or well after it. Or else happened in a way that makes it difficult to embrace, in the case of a certain small college with Division-III athletics and its own football team. When I visited Railroad Park in September of 2012, it was the first time I\u2019d spent any time at all downtown in fourteen years, since my last trip to City Stages – the one cool thing I was actually there for \u00a0– and the thing that echoed in my mind over and over was \u201cI can\u2019t believe this is the same !-ing city.\u201d In the ensuing decade, they\u2019ve added new teams, new stadiums, new eateries and experiences, and I\u2019ve visited\u2026twice. Haven\u2019t been back in seven years.<\/p>\n
Because the problem, as always, is that Birmingham is trapped in Alabama. Until we can find some way to saw around the back end of Red Mountain and up to the hills behind Carraway and choplift the whole thing to Foster City or Pacifica, the Magic City is stuck in a state that is bound and determined to rule through white supremacy filtered through Southern Baptist prejudice. It means that for as much as I admire what is happening, as much as I wish I could have experienced it when I was young and present, I can\u2019t go back for good. Ever. And it also diminished my ability to identify with it – not least because in doing so, it feels like stealing valor from those people who stayed and fought, who spent their adulthood trying to wrestle the city onto the path to the 21st century kicking and screaming. The ones who put up with and pushed back against not only the bearded-pickup bigotry, but its lightly filtered smug sister in Vestavia and Hoover and every megachurch with a parking lot full of three-row SUVs, the one that mocks high-tax California while fattening its coffers on federal largesse. I hate performative redneckery with a fiery passion, but fiery welfare<\/em> redneckery really makes me see spots.<\/p>\n And yet, there is the Stallions shirt. And the Black Barons and Squadron hats. And the Legion scarf. And the advocacy for Good People and Trimtab and Avondale, and Highlands and Bottega and Hot & Hot and Chez Lulu and the like, and a 205 number parked in Google Voice that I can\u2019t bring myself to delete. Of such things do we attempt to jury-rig a patch over the black hole of insufficient belonging.<\/p>\n Nashville will be worse, though. Of which.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is another edit. Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a world where I would walk out of my dormitory at Owenton College, head down to the corner by the main gate, and catch the #7 streetcar downtown, from which I could head to the stadium with the other Elyton Ultras to cheer on Birmingham … <\/p>\n