Speak to someone from Gadsden, Alabama. Talk kindly to them and, most likely, they'll speak kindly in turn. Don't get stressed worrying if it's just "Southern hospitality" or genuine kindness, it ultimately doesn't matter.
Once you've gained some momentum in the conversation, ask them about the best places around Gadsden to hike, where the nature is especially beautiful. If they get squirrely, start thinking too hard, narrow it down for them: ask for somewhere with a river. Where the water flows fast as it chases the days gone by and then, oh so suddenly, slowly, once it finds them, only to pick up again as they slip from its grasp once more. A Southern tragedy rooted deep in the land, found in the literature as their authors had been weaned on the clay. Remnants of days past, built in postbellum blues, shoved away into carpet bags, left behind to rot on the banks of creeks and streams until the fabric lets loose its prisoners, diffusing into the mud.
If they still don't give you a straight answer, unravel the final knot with a blade, cheating to the conclusion: "Waterfall."
Will they tell you of Black Creek Falls? No, not exactly. They'll tell you about Noccalula Falls.
Noccalula Falls is Black Creek Falls, but Black Creek Falls isn't Noccalula Falls.
Black Creek Falls has history, one long forgotten, eclipsed by the history of Noccalula Falls.
The famed tale of the infamously beautiful Cherokee Princess. Noccalula, the Native American who was married off by her father, the chief, to a suitor from another tribe in order to garner peaceful relations. Noccalula, the heartbroken, in love with a man from her tribe, in dismay that she not only was being forced to marry a man she didn't love but had also been betrayed by her own father. Noccalula, the desperate soul who leaped off the hundred-foot waterfall to her death, evading a life of misery apart from her lover, apart in the most cruel of fashions: alive and well.
Nine feet tall, bronze, and captured in a moment of sorrow and desperation. Standing at the edge, beginning her leap forward, gazing down at the frothing waters below. Never leaving the ground, destined to hang on the precipice before that sense of weightlessness that would herald a cold crashdown.
I'd seen the statue many times in my life, heard the story even more. Something about a tragic tale told to you from an early age over and over again makes it so much less that it truly is, ingrains it in your head before you can ever question it with the sound mind of maturity. So I was never bothered by it. I never thought twice.
Ride the little train around parts of the park on Christmas, hear the tale of Noccalula while staring wide-eyed at the trees that shimmer with lights mimicking snowfall that you'd be hard-pressed to see them covered with naturally. The mechanical Santas that wave, reindeer that dip their heads like the bovine do as you drive down back roads past vast pastures that somehow feel cramped. Either that, or horses. Pick your poison.
Walk through the petting zoo, get your fortune told by a mechanical "Indian Princess" for fifty cents, buy some rock candy from the giftshop while you're there. Minigolf, the Fat Man Squeeze, the botanical garden, the campground, the hiking trails, the path underneath the waterfall, the river and streams and creeks.
Look up at Noccalula leaping to her death. She's not a woman, she's just another attraction.
I worked for the local public library during the summers, still under the assumption that I wanted to be a librarian. I spent my last summer there scanning old newspapers and documents into a digital system. What we kept locked behind a cage on a dark and cluttered floor barred from patrons was to be digitized for posterity's sake.
Newspaper clips after pictures after documents, formal or otherwise, after articles after old history after old history. Until one caught my eye, one detailing a look into Noccalula and her tragic tale. The consensus was clear and definite: complete fabrication. Not only that, but it was a story created to attract tourists to Gadsden.
Can you really blame a town with as little to offer as Gadsden for creating such a myth? For creating its own Helen? Its own Juliet?
That very same library I worked at had a costume in a display case. It was meant to mimic a Cherokee dress, meant to denote royalty, but looked more like what you'd see in an old cartoon or in a cheap Halloween store. The costume had been worn by the woman who posed for the artist as the statue was made. I'm sure there's subtle irony to be found in that her sister-in-law posed for the Emma Sansom statue that also stands in Gadsden, a memorial for a woman who guided Confederate soldiers across the Black Creek river so they could fight Union soldiers. She points evermore.
The dress was a real piece of the town's history, one much more real than the woman it supposedly honored. I never took notice of it until I read that article.
So there she stands, and forever will stand, teetering on the edge. An endless purgatory of anticipation, the moment before the world goes silent and the water falling off the cliff seems almost still as she follows it down. But Noccalula will never land, she'll never break her spine on the concrete fluid, collapse her ribcage, her bronze blood washing down Black Creek as the metal degrades away, away, away like sugar in the pure catalyst of relief. No resolution, no ending for her wrenched heart.
But if she collapses, does she fall whole or does she break off at the ankle, leaving traces of herself behind? Of these two, which is better? Which is more realistic?
Why care? A metal heart pumps no blood, moves no oxygen, feels nothing.
Call it symbology, call it empathy, call it mania.
To tip over the edge is to move on, to leave behind the heartaches of yesterday and today.
Maybe, just maybe, I'll one day leave the past behind me.
Maybe, just maybe, Noccalula will one day hit the water.