By Anita Garner

 

 

New book.  New tour.  We'll get there.

 

We just clicked "live" on this new website built to introduce my book, "The Glory Road: A Gospel Gypsy Life." It's less than three weeks til release date. Thanks to Steve Bradford and Authors Guild for their help.

 

I'm published and vaccinated and ready to travel if the good Lord's willing and the crick don't rise.  I've been planning a trip from California to the east coast this fall to combine book appearances and visits with friends in New England. I'll rent a car in Boston and ramble around for a few days.

 

I had in mind taking the train one way and then flying home. I pictured me in a little roomette on Amtrak with lots of magazines and coffee and snacks and waving out the window at places I used to live and working when I feel like it. It could be a leisurely and productive and celebratory kind of journey all in one.

 

Then I learned from Amtrak that wifi isn't consistent on the train.  They make that clear.  I like my work and with all the connections I need to pursue, wifi is necessary.

 

My relatives were all train people.  Gramma K migrated from the Deep South to Southern California making several trips by train before enlisting all her Southern relatives to drive cars and trucks in caravans to move her belongings. She never hired a moving van.  We were the van.  Every fall, she trained back from Glendale, CA to Arkansas to be with her kinfolks during leaf season. Arkansas trees are spectacular  and worth the trip.  She  came off the train at Union Station in L.A. every time with a list of names and addresses and phone numbers from people she met onboard.

 

Mother never flew either, even when it would have been expeditious to do so.  We moved to California when she signed a recording contract, then the record company sent her back to Nashville to record with the backup singers and musicians they'd selected.  They said get here as soon as you can. She said, sure, I'll be right there – on the train.  Later she went out on a tour but got homesick for Daddy, quit part of the way through and cried all the way home – on the train.

 

Here I sit with my hopes for making this book launch/friend visiting trip, but no set plan for travel yet. No sense buying a super-saver airline ticket months in advance if the savings will disappear due to travel insurance and change fees.

 

I'll get there in person one way or the other. Meanwhile there are virtual appearances to plan, which is how most books have been launched recently. Mother was an early adopter of innovation  except for airline travel.  She'd have been the first to understand my wifi dilemma.

 

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By Anita Garner

 

My brother, Leslie Ray, and I were the new kids in school all our lives.  We'd enroll, stay a short while,  then hit the road to tour the gospel circuit with our parents, sending homework back in the mail.  At every new school, I'd stand in front of the class while the teacher introduced Nita Faye Jones, just moved here from…fill in the blank.

 

In California in 1957 I was new again but this time shouldn't be as hard since Leslie Ray had been there a year already, living with Gramma K because he and Mother couldn't occupy the same house without eruptions. Similar dispositions, Daddy said.

 

Mother signed a record contract and we headed out west. This time it wasn't just a new school.  This time the language was also unfamiliar.  Nobody else drawled.  The clothes were different.  Even tougher to understand was California culture, where teens seemed to have so much control.  No yessum and yessir.  These kids were in possession  of more than just spending money. They were confident.  By the time I arrived, Leslie, who was already tall and good looking to start with, had shed his Southern accent, was a big man on campus and evidently expert at assimilation.

 

Observe the ritual of Senior Spring Break, 1957.  The talk in the halls among seniors was, "Are you going to Bal?"  That would be  Balboa Island (also Newport)  where groups of seniors piled into rented houses for a full week of drinking and tanning all day, partying all night, and capped it off at the end of the week by bleaching their hair blonde to prove, on returning to class, that they'd really been to Bal.

 

Leslie Ray and I were  both redheads with fair skin.  Not meant for tanning.  Not safe on California beaches.  In the Deep South, tanning wasn't done on purpose. It happened because of work.  We saw tans in churches and in the crowds at revivals and Singings, hard-working tans with shirt-sleeve marks.

 

Tanning for a redhead happens only through a lengthy process, if at all, and often involves a couple of trips to the ER on the way.  Both of us had over-sunned more than once and paid the price. It must have taken Leslie a long time to build up that color a little bit at a time, but he did it. The very thing we'd avoided in the South was his Southern California Senior Spring Break badge of honor. Of course he bleached his hair.  He had to prove he was at Bal.

 

I was invited over to Balboa just for the day if I could find someone with a driver's license and a car to get me there.  I lied to my parents about where I was going.  Leslie's friends treated me like a mascot as long as I didn't cramp their style or tell stories later.  For my day at Bal, I didn't even pack what we then called suntan lotion.  I packed a hat.

 

 

 Nitafaye and Leslie Ray Jones 1957 high school Spring break

 

 

 

 

 

I never tanned until self-tanning lotion became manageable years later, and then I applied it mostly for events.  But I bleached as soon as I got out of high school, blonder and blonder for several years.  I think the bleaching part made me half-assimilated and you can shorten that last word if you want to.

 

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