Meanwhile, until Moses’ impertinence, enslaved brick-makers had been
provided straw; now they would have to gather straw and meet the same
quotas of bricks in the same time (:). The dismayed Hebrews suffered;
but as we learn in later chapters of Exodus, Jehovah made Pharaoh and his
ilk suffer more, and at last the slaves were delivered out of Egypt. Difficul-
ties in making good bricks were compensated, then, by cataclysmic horrors
visited upon Egyptians that anticipate merciless vengeance upon sinners
in the last book of the Christian Bible. Still, details about good bricks were
obviously not forgotten. ‘‘Feet of clay,’’ after all—a poor foundation for a
building or a person—survives as a metaphor without mention of straw.
And the passing of sun-drying bricks bound by straw in favor of furnace or
kiln firing does not exactly antiquate the old usage either, because artifi-
cially fired clays become something other than mere crumbly earth. They
arebricks.
This helps mold our own final large question: Are the built landscapes of
the South merely clay, or brick? To be most inclusive, one might fairly say
both. New Orleans, the shocking-charming example—and no matter how
it is rebuilt after the deluge of —may be sinking into its own sewage
and-heavy groundwater and is, despite some recent reforms in the
police force, a scary place to walk at night. Yet central and old-suburban
New Orleans flaunts its diversity of population and land use, its distinc-
tive architecture and elegant plantings, and its music and food sublime.
One can walk the town (wisely in company) invigorated. Elsewhere, re-
gentrification may be working in a few places, too: in Norfolk’s Ghent sec-
tion; in the Shockoe waterfront in Richmond; in Main Street and environs
in Lexington, Kentucky; in Memphis’s near-downtown; and so on. And—
allowing for the annoying and dangerous necessity of driving for elemen-
tal needs—many suburbs are pleasant places to live. My own, on Anasta-
sia Island southeast of St. Augustine, is an assemblage of ‘‘Floridian’’ style
houses, most with balconies and all with verandas, from which neighbors
of various ages and backgrounds greet and meet. There are no sidewalks—
typical of American autocentric sprawl and developers’ parsimony—so we
take to foot on the street, morning and evenings during the long summer,
leading our mutts and holding what we call impromptu dog conventions.
There are other communities like this.
Yet many suburbs consist of isolated, tightly closed houses, their occu-
pants’ interaction with neighbors minimal, perhaps waving from car win-
dows twice each weekday. Everyone works hard and afar. The timetables
of such bedroom communities are the inverse of most downtowns and of