Dear Flannery,

Forty-three years after you died too young, a Georgia historical marker was stuck in the ground across the highway from the end of Andalusia’s driveway.  On a boiling Friday morning in July, in the shadow of the Badcock & More furniture store sign, just before the dedication ceremony started, a suntanned fellow in a red pick-up truck drove past and honked his horn. For an instant, I thought Parker was back.

The mayor of Milledgeville spoke about you in his Milledgeville accent. And then, a priest with an Irish name in a huge white robe from your old church, Sacred Heart, got up in front of everybody and moved his hands around and read some things from out of that book that’s not exactly the Bible. He said some things that a few of your fellow Catholics repeated with him and then the priest flicked the historical marker, while it was still covered with an official Georgia historical marker blue cover, with holy water. He flicked his wood water wand six times. I counted. The first time he flicked it at the cover you could see the cover quiver but it never did again. If there was a moment you would have loved the most, other than that redneck in the pick up truck blasting the earnestness out of the hot air, it was that holy water business. I’m not Catholic, but these were some moments I deeply understood anyway, especially since we were across the street from where you made literary history because of those hard, perpendicular intersections you designed in your stories and two novels—the perfectly timed crashing together of personalities and religion in all its strange forms … and its haunting aftermath. We were having some near crashing together of religion and personalities right there—right by a loud highway in a modern time as we quietly stood in the grass that belonged to your marker and a discount furniture store.

After that priest blessed your marker, the fellow who’s in charge of the Georgia Historical Society got up there and said he was pretty sure that was the first time in the history of Georgia historical marker dedication ceremonies that one’s been flicked with holy water. Everybody laughed and nodded at each other. God … did I think of you right then. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who got the literary and personal importance—to you—of that moment. I saw you smiling down at this one, too: after everyone stopped laughing I wanted to shout out, like Hazel Motes would at discovering a blasphemer … that the feller who’s in charge of the Georgia Historical Society is wearin’ a tie covered with the logo … of the state of South Caroliner!

After the roadside ceremony, we were invited to come across Highway 441—very carefully—for a reception in the main house. Your house and yard were populated with people speaking in only Southern accents and they were talking about how they knew you and when. Or how and when they knew your mother. On your front porch an old woman grabbed my arm and asked me if I was in church Sunday … that she saw me. I said I wasn’t ... I live one hundred miles from here ... but if my evil twin was there then good for him. The lady, tottering on feeble pegs, told me her name but I didn’t get it because she spoke in an accent so rich her words came out like syrup. She said she had moved onto the farm when she was fifteen and that you and her were opposites. She said she lived in that building over there. She pointed at it with a crooked finger … at the old shed where Andalusia’s caretakers keep an old donkey named Flossie. I wondered if she was drunk. Who cares. We were all drunk on you. Standing in your bedroom doorway gawking at your crutches, your bed, and your writing table. I’m sure you think that’s repulsive—a bunch of people crowded at your door like that. But I’m a respectful hick. I gawk with misty eyes but I don’t point.

Heading back home up Highway 441 in my truck, I passed a couple of Georgia roadside markers of another kind—those homemade crucifixes people and stick into the ground near where a family member was killed in a car or truck or motorcycle accident. You never know. When you see one, and you see a lot of them in the South, all you know is that death happened right there and somebody wants you to by-God know it. But it’s never at that intersection you write about. You always see those crosses on some long, straight stretch of highway or country road. I think of you as I travel my long stretch of road and across fields of living fire, sometimes in a straight line and sometimes real crooked … as your voice strikes up in my mind … your voice climbing upward, on key, into a starry field … and those who love you so much come to that moment of your grace on that road sooner rather than later if we’re paying attention and we thank you for it … whole companies of white trash and bands of black niggers and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs and those who have always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right … we all honk our truck horns in your honor and shout hallelujah.

Todd Sentell is a Georgia native and author of the social satire, Toonamint of Champions

If fiddling with old golf clubs makes memories, then memory lane at the Metro Atlanta Golf Shop is as wide as the ocean. Deep, too. As in spiritually deep. The old shop is a painted brick building on Cleveland Avenue on the south side of Atlanta, half of a mile from the roaring highway ... a former church itself, and it's next door to Greater Ephesus Missionary Baptist Church, just down the street from Lord of Life Church, which is across the street from St. James Overcoming Deliverance Church. The Noble Shopette on the corner is boarded up, closed for good, but the Hot Box Music store is hanging in there.

It’s a street and a place and a state of mind far away from the big-initiation private clubs on the north side of town, cathedrals to golf themselves, but different. So much different than this.

A sign that hangs in the shop captures the spirit of the place:

WE GIVE YOU

WHAT YOU WANT

WHEN YOU WANT IT

AT A PRICE YOU CAN AFFORD

WITH THE QUALITY YOU DESERVE

AND WE APPRECIATE SERVING YOU

NO SMOKING

There’s nothing new in this golf shop of wood woods and metal woods. Thousands of irons. Hundreds of putters and head covers. Countless golf bags. In all these clubs you see the evolution of golf club design, from the 1930s to some time last year.

The Metro Atlanta Golf Shop is a collector’s nightmare; you can’t look at it all fast enough. It’s overwhelming. Golf balls are piled in a large bowl. A floor fan by the door clicks. Relentlessly. Odd odors fill the air. A strobe light hanging in the corner of the room flashes constantly.

It’s July hot outside the shop. They turn on the lights as you venture further back. It’s boiling back there, too. And still. Sweat inches its way down your back. A life-size cardboard statue of Lee Trevino in tight, polyester pants stands behind a rack of irons. His Top-Flite golf cap rises up like a chef’s hat, and he’s smiling so hard he’s squinting. Lee startles you for a moment.

Back up front, a slick-looking Northsider eyes the old, plastic, leopard-skin golf bag: a bona fide, one-of-a-kind find with a name. The metal medallion reads, “El Dorado, by Seward. For Your Golfing Pleasure.”

“How much, Smitty?” he asks the owner, the curator, the spiritual manager, Thomas “Smitty” Smith. “Well,” Smitty says, “a woman was just in here. She wanted the thing, but she went up the street for something. Better get it out of here before she comes back.”

They look at each other. Smitty finally answers, “Twenty-five.” The city slicker would have paid $200. His heart thumps as he scoots out the door.

Back inside, Smitty sits in an old, black, executive-style chair. His wife, Ernestine, reclines in her chair, and between them is a makeshift desk. It’s a chair with a pine board laid across the armrests. A phone sits on the board and next to the phone lay pieces of paper with people’s names and phone numbers scratched on them.

A copy of the King James Bible also rests on the board, and during the long days in the shop Smitty and Ernestine do their Bible study. Above their chairs hangs a picture of John F. Kennedy. Tiger Woods is up there, too. In the corner, way up high, Bill Clinton.

Smitty and Ernestine oversee the “liquidation” sale that’s currently, as always, under way. They even have a few things on e-Bay. The Smiths entertain people who don’t buy anything and watch golf tournaments on Saturdays on an old television. One of their five daughters helps out from time to time. Another daughter was the next Tigress, but Smitty says she fell in love. Smitty shakes his head as he looks at her yellow newspaper story.

The customers who buy are serious about finding old golf clubs. Metro Atlanta Golf Shop is a secret shop more for the possessed than the obsessed. There’s the guy from Oklahoma who flies in for Wilson 8802 putters. Then, the fellow who collected anything Macgregor. He and his wife separated and while he was off with some religious group, she sold it all. “He was devastated,” Smitty says.

Smitty has helped black golfers and follows the young ones, especially the girls. He used to give young black golfers motel money, pocket cash and bus fare. He once held a clinic for kids with Tiger Woods at the public golf course around the corner from the golf shop. Now, Smitty gives clubs to kids for free.

He was the first black golf professional of an 18-hole club in Atlanta, Adams Park, and was head pro of the nine-hole Candler Park course for more than 20 years – both at the same time. In 1971, he founded the North American Golf Association, a huge name for such a humble gesture: Smitty made sure that in towns like Macon and Asheville and Columbus that black golfers could play in a golf tournament and maybe win some money. White golfers were invited, too. It lasted 10 years.

Smitty’s a member of the Black Golfers Hall of Fame. When asked how old he is, he says, “Four scores,” but he doesn’t look four scores. He hasn’t played golf in years.

These days, Smitty “experiences” golf at his shop. First-timers to the store gawk and ask themselves where Smitty gets all this stuff. “It’s kind of my secret,” he says without smiling.

It’s the perfect place to build a beginner’s set from classics. Sets of persimmon woods still housed in their original boxes. Hogan. Tony Penna. Brands you’ve never heard of. There’s a set of irons with boron shafts.

“Pawn shops,” he finally says. “Pawn shops. And flea markets. You wouldn’t believe how many clubs people come by and give me,” he adds. “People die and someone cleans out their basements and brings the clubs over.”

There are very few price tags in the store, so don’t be afraid … you will negotiate with Smitty. “I tell my customers I can take that price off of it and put another one on for you.”

Inside, over the door, there are three signs you see as you exit with what you just scored. They read: “Jesus Is My Provider,” “Jesus Works,” and “Show Me The Money.”

Smitty says you can have it all, building included, for $400,000. He prays to the Lord that He’ll send a buyer.

Todd Sentell is the author of the social satire TOONAMINT OF CHAMPIONS

I have money in my hand with blood on it.

It’s a check for $25 from the Fulton County, Georgia Juror and Witness Account. And all I did to get it was to answer a jury summons by showing up at the county courthouse in downtown Atlanta early one Friday morning to learn, with two hundred other summoned citizens, how we might get picked to be jurors in a murder trial.

If picked, we were told how we were supposed to act and how tough it would be on us and our families and jobs. The trial might last six to eight weeks. And did we know what “being sequestered” meant? Some citizens audibly groaned.

We sat there listening to the judge assigned to the case coolly explain all this to us as I stared at the man who the state of Georgia believed to have arranged the murder nineteen years ago: James Vincent Sullivan. America’s Most Wanted profiled him on its television show and then kept the story alive on their web site. Sullivan fled the country. Big news when they finally found him in Thailand. The state of Georgia, the judge said, says he paid a man to kill his estranged wife. You’re here to decide, if you’re picked, if he did or not.

I remember when the murder happened. I’m watching the local news on TV. A reporter said that a Buckhead socialite answered the door to her home early this morning and after she opened it a man carrying a box of flowers shot her. Nineteen years ago I was horrified. I was more horrified now. Sullivan sat at a table with his three lawyers, just feet away from me, facing us. I couldn’t look away, and I tried. But not guilty at this point the judge said to us.  He's not guilty.

The case came to trial and a man’s guilt or innocence was decided by my fellow Fulton County citizens who were chosen to be jurors. By those who got sequestered.

Todd Sentell is the author of the social satire TOONAMINT OF CHAMPIONS