Dewey's Nine Lives

Carol Ann Riggs surprised me. Her short note about Church Cat, a stray cat adopted by the Camden United Methodist Church in Camden, Alabama, had piqued my interest, but after the first ten minutes of our telephone conversation, I must admit, I was completely flummoxed. Not by the things she said, but by the way she said them. Ms. Carol Ann Riggs (as her friends call her) had an extraordinary Southern accent, the kind full of slow, honey-dripping pronunciations, the “sugahs” mixing with the “small-town law-yas” and singing in “the church qui-ah.”

I must admit, I liked it immensely. And I liked Carol Ann Riggs, too. She was born in the tiny town of Bragg, Alabama, where the nearest high school was a thirty-mile bus ride away. (Even today, Lowndes County has only two public high schools.) When she married Harris Riggs at nineteen and moved to his hometown of Camden, she thought she was moving to the big city. Camden, after all, had two stoplights, two restaurants, two banks, and almost fifteen hundred people. But it was a wonderfully friendly place, despite the “large” size. There wasn’t much money in Camden, but when someone died, not only did all the neighbors bring food, everyone in town attended the funeral. “Almost everybody was kin to everybody,” Carol Ann told me, and that included her husband Harris’s “people,” who for several generations had operated the town’s hardware store. Carol Ann wasn’t a librarian—she worked for that small town “law-ya” I mentioned earlier—but she was a longtime member of the local library board. And despite my misgivings about library boards, I liked that. In fact, I liked everything about her. Especially that accent.

“I know, I know,” her friend Kim Knox said. “It’s that Southern accent you hear on television, and you say to yourself, That’s not real.” Kim was born and raised across the border in Laurel, Mississippi, so she knows Southern accents. “But that’s a Camden accent. Lots of people in Camden talk that way. People think its old Southern aristocrat, but people in Camden aren’t like that. They’re very down to earth. Not any kind of attitude or anything.”

It’s the isolation, Kim figures, that keeps the citizens of Camden so charming. The town is the seat of Wilcox County, a sparsely populated area in the hardpan hill country of southwest Alabama. The county has only thirteen thousand residents, less even than Clay County, Iowa, and the median income is only sixteen thousand dollars, a third of the national median and six thousand dollars below the poverty line. People think of south Alabama as plantation country, with sprawling mansions and fields of cotton. But you don’t see large farms in Wilcox County. You see the occasional small family farm, essentially a sharecropper’s plot, sandwiched between thousands upon thousands of acres of tall straight southern pines.

“It’s a town in the middle of nowhere,” Kim Knox said. “It’s a picturesque gem.” When I heard that, I thought of Spencer, with its wide sidewalks and blocks of locally owned, pleasantly thread-worn shops. I pictured a town where the generations have their own tables at the local diner and a cup of coffee lasted two hours at least.

But Camden didn’t work like that, as photographs of their threadbare downtown showed. In Camden, the social life wasn’t centered on the commercial strip. There weren’t any movie theatres, fancy restaurants, or chain superstores. The center of social life in Camden, Alabama, was the churches. The four largest were located, one after another, on a stretch of Broad Street that was as immaculately maintained as the nearby shopping district was ragged. The biggest was the Baptist church. Across the street, next door to each other, were the two Presbyterian churches. Down the block toward the town’s main intersection and next to the Exxon gas station that marked the unofficial entrance to downtown was Camden United Methodist. None of the churches were huge—between them they probably had seven hundred members, or about half the town—but they offered meals, prayer meetings, youth activities, and adult and junior “qui-ahs.” And when something important came along, like the yearly Christmas pageant, they all worked together to put on a show.

It was Camden Methodist’s newest member and part-time secretary, Kim Knox, who first noticed the cat outside the old parsonage that served as the church’s administrative office. The cat was a little gray tabby, and when Kim walked out for a short break, the cat was crouched in the shadow of the nearby bushes. She had an adorable round face with soft eyes, and when Kim looked at her, the cat didn’t turn away but kept staring right toward her. Then she started talking. When Kim talked back—“well, hey, kitty cat”—the cat jumped onto the porch, causing Kim to, quite naturally, reach down and pet her. The cat rolled over for a belly rub. When Kim opened the door to return to her office, the cat hopped up and jogged inside.

Hmmm.