Book review: Deliverance

DELIVERANCE : a novel, by James Dickey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. 278 pp. In writing about this novel, there’s no need to worry about spoiling the ending for those who haven’t read it. Almost everyone in these United States — or at least in the MSAs of the Sun Belt, where I’ve spent nearly all […]

A water-cure establishment

I’ve mentioned how the term “water cure” was used by U.S. troops in the Philippines as a sarcastic euphemism for water torture. Here is an illustration and excerpt from an 1855 description of a resort where the water cure, or “hydropathic system,” was in use. I’m quoting George White’s Historical Collections of Georgia: The above […]

Sylacauga, or the Buzzard Roost

Comrade Kevin mentioned (here) that the name Sylacauga (a city in Alabama) is often translated as “Buzzard Roost.” That reminded me of a historical tradition in Atlanta that the city occupies the site of “Indian towns” called Buzzard Roost and Standing Peachtree.

For now I’ll ignore Standing Peachtree and concentrate on Buzzard Roost.1

A historical marker near Atlanta spells the Muskogee (Creek Indian) name for Buzzard Roost as Sulacauga. That suggests a close tie between Atlanta’s Buzzard Roost and Alabama’s Sylacauga (pronounced “sil-la-caw-ga”).

And sure enough, a Creek-English dictionary derives the place name Sylacauga from the Creek sule-kake (sounds like “so-lée-gáh-kee”), “two buzzards sitting.”

Tobesofkee, a Creek Indian place name in Georgia

As a boy I camped out a time or two at Lake Tobesofkee Recreation Area, a nice spot beside a reservoir near Macon, Georgia. The four-syllable name [to-bə-SAF-ki] is a corrupt form of something in the Muskogee (Creek Indian) language. Recently I’ve done some reading on what the original Muskogee name might have been.

(The Muskogee name applied to a creek, not to the lake. Lake Tobesofkee is one of a series of reservoirs created by damming Tobesofkee Creek in the 1960s.)

First we have variant spellings of the name to deal with.

The Marine way of wisdom

My old school system (DeKalb County, Ga.) is planning to start a public military academy headed by a Marine commandant. This is the first such school in Georgia, but not in the country. The concept is likely to catch on, given that education secretary nominee Arne Duncan presided over the creation of six of these […]

Chicken joke: Flannery O’Connor

Time for another chicken joke. Today’s respondent, Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), was a Georgia author who had a thing for peafowl. Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? Flannery O’Connor: To make way for the peacocks. [More chicken jokes]