He travels into the hill country and listens to fiddlers playing traditional tunes. He goes with a friend to witness a cross-burning by Ku Klux Klan members in white robes and hoods. He wanders down a little-used path and finds shanties and the black residents engaged in voodoo-style rituals and watches in fascination. In one scene, after playing the golf course at the Tuscaloosa Country Club, he hears a haunting chant emanating from beyond a wall of bushes. Given to judgmental generalities, Carmer writes as though he is an explorer in a foreign land. Carmer loves the place and enjoys the people, but he also is frightened of the people, place, and many of its customs.Įdward Steichen, Carl Carmer, and Charles Sheeler After, the echo of the man’s voice is heard in memory for six years. Late that first night, another professor whom he immediately liked told him bluntly to get out of the state before it was too late. His first section, “Tuscaloosa Nights,” describes his arrival in Tuscaloosa by train, his trip to his hotel, and a meeting with a fellow faculty member and an old friend from Harvard and several of his associates. Today, it would likely fall into the category of creative non-fiction, similar to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It was part memoir, part history, and part cultural analysis. Published by Farrar and Rinehart in 1934 and illustrated by LeRoy Baldridge, the story was so unusual that it defied conventional literary definition.
Carmer quoted Tartt extensively in the book through a character called Mary Louise.įor six years, Carmer travelled to every corner of the state, kept copious notes, and later turned them into Stars Fell On Alabama, referring to an 1833 meteor event that appeared as a shower of stars falling on the countryside.
Among the most interesting was a Sumter County woman named Ruby Pickens Tartt, who related numerous tales she had heard from the rural African American tenant farmers in her home town of Livingston. Carmer discovered almost immediately upon settling in west Alabama that although he did not like some of the food, the people he met offered as many interesting stories as his father had. In 1921, he accepted a position teaching English at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Army in World War I, he taught briefly at Syracuse University. After Carl graduated from Albion High School, he earned an undergraduate degree in English at Hamilton College and then a master’s degree from Harvard University. He sat at his father’s feet and listened to stories that centered on the hills and hollows of the area around Dansville and Albion, where Willis Griswold Carmer was principal of the high schools. More than 70 years after its publication, students, scholars, and the general public still read the book and enjoy the stories that Carmer heard during his years in Alabama.Īs a boy, Carmer enjoyed history and folklore. In it, Carmer relates his six years of living among the people and culture of Alabama in the 1920s. Stars Fell on Alabama Stars Fell on Alabama was written by Carl Lamson Carmer (1893-1976), who grew up in upstate New York.
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