A Crazy Trip

It was a crazy kind of trip. 

No direction. No destination. A car and not much else.

We mostly wanted to spend time with Mike and Roberta Starbird, good buddies whom we liked hanging out with. So we flipped a coin. It sent the four of us east, from our home in Nashville.

What would we find? No clue.  

Then Yvonne and I remembered something. Our friend Linda Anderson, a folk artist in North Georgia, took us to an art shop near her home and introduced us to the work of North Carolina folk artist James Harold Jennings.

His work, painted on slabs of wood, was primitive and funny. Linda owned a couple of them, and we were eager to see more. .

We had our direction. We had our car. And now we had our destination: Pinnacle, North Carolina, where Jennings lived in two school buses by the side of the road. We had been instructed to bring a six-pack of beer.  

We found the buses, which were parked by the road, and got out of the car, holding the six-pack and waiting. We were about to give up when Jennings emerged wearing a favorite style of art: clothing, if you could call it that, in a vaguely Indian style.  

“We’d like to buy some of your art,” I told him.

He took the six-pack and said, “Go to my sister’s house. She keeps it there.”

He gave us an address, and we drove into town to meet his sister. She took us into her basement, where we picked out a handsome-looking whirlygig and a wooden plaque covered with lettering: “Big Jack gits the devil beat out of him after church by a city girl.”

We still didn’t know much about our direction or our destination. But we had our car and, most importantly, we had a unique day’s experience with James Harold Jennings and his art.