Why is Arkansas the driest state in America? Where do morality and geography crystalize?
by Alice Driver | Photographs by Liz Sanders
Wine is
Gun oil, graphitey, wet wool,
Water from the garden hose,
It's got fat running through it,
Blue plum skin,
Violets and lavender and heaps of dark rose
If I wrote this essay while picking beer cans out of the ditch on the road where I grew up in Johnson County, I fear it would never end.
In Arkansas, 34 of 75 counties are dry. The morality of a dry county, given how many people drive down the road drinking and tossing empty beer cans out the window, is lost on me. I wondered why dry counties continued to exist and why Arkansas has the most in the country.
When I started writing this essay a year ago, I wanted it to be about alcohol as a territory for exploration, about geography, soil, history, and the poetic language of wine and spirits. I wanted it to be about all the things I never learned growing up in a dry county where alcohol is sin. But my research took me in another direction. It led me to the Ku Klux Klan, to crystal collectors and anti-vaxxers. It left me even more puzzled about the spirit of this place.
I called Jake Lewis, a native of Texas and a sommelier, to get his perspective on dry counties. Lewis, who works as the beverage director for Momofuku, said of dry counties, “Our experience was, my grandparents lived in Lufkin, and it was, at the time, a dry county. It was a big Southern Baptist community, not a lot of drinking, temperance-forward-thinking people. When visitors came, they would all drive across the county, and there were three liquor stores on the line, and they would stock up. It never really deterred drinking.” Studies have found that dry counties in places like Arkansas and Kentucky have higher rates of alcohol-related fatalities than wet counties. For Lewis, “The history of all of this from Prohibition is wild and outdated. A lot of the blue laws left over from Prohibition make it difficult to sell alcohol in the United States because every state and every county has its own law.” He added, “It is weird and nonsensical.”
Lewis Liquor, located in a vacation town called Crystal Springs, in Garland County, has been owned by the same family for roughly three decades. It was previously the last stop for alcohol in the last wet county heading west before the Oklahoma line. More recently, a second liquor store has opened up right down the road, even closer to the county line.
I always picture
the Merlot
as the jelly inside
of the donut
I talked to my cousin Rachel, also a sommelier, who had grown up with me in Johnson County. She said, “Just think about it. Imagine if we started a campaign for adults to drink wine instead of soft drinks in the U.S.” She listed the benefits of drinking wine in moderation, like lowering bad cholesterol and increasing antioxidant levels. She mentioned obesity levels, tooth decay, and diabetes in relation to sugary-drinks consumption.
It has a beautiful brightness,
lots of sea salt
and oyster
In my early adulthood, Rachel had taught me to see drinking as a wild and creative territory. Traveling with Rachel, I began to keep a notebook that I titled the sommelier’s mother tongue. I took notes of how Rachel and her sommelier friends described wine and spirits, arranging their words into poetry. In the notebook, I wrote down her description of a Sauvignon Blanc we drank together: “It tastes a little bit like elderflower to me which is like licking a sweaty girl.” In high school, I had been a part of a group that preached to teens about the evils of alcohol. At the time, I wanted to fit in with my churchgoing peers. Sadly, those messages about alcohol and its evils stayed with me well into adulthood. When I began to drink in college, after my abstinent high school years, I drank like the rest of the students in our dry county — to get drunk. We drank Natty Light, Everclear mixed with fruit, or wine. For us, there were only two kinds of wine — white and red, and I knew nothing about either, nor did I seek such information.
After college, when Rachel began studying to become a sommelier, I observed her curiosity, her way of drinking, and her seemingly miraculous ability to do a blind tasting and identify the origin, region, climate, and age of a wine. Spending time with her, I became curious to try different wines and spirits, to map their regions, to trace their history.
Beer is
a sommelier's
water
Arkansas’ war on alcohol can be traced back to the 1800s, the Temperance Movement, and Bible-thumping preachers. When I started researching the origins of dry counties, I couldn’t get past this one fact: In Prohibition-era Arkansas, the KKK had over 50,000 members. They worked with local law enforcement to enforce Prohibition laws. For example, in the 1920s, when the U.S. created the Prohibition Bureau, agents in the bureau deputized volunteers from the KKK to enforce Prohibition laws. During that period, membership increased, driven by their ideas of cleaning up and purifying communities. Enforcement of Prohibition law disproportionately targeted immigrants, Catholics, and African Americans.
After reading about the involvement of the KKK during Prohibition, I drove to Harrison, Arkansas. I knew I probably couldn’t figure out how the KKK is involved in the politics of dry counties, but sometimes just driving and listening to the people I meet along the way helps me sort out ideas. Harrison has served as the national headquarters for the Knights of the KKK since the ’80s, when Thom Robb took over as national director.
On my way into Harrison, I drove past a billboard featuring a white family sandwiched between words about “White Pride.” Businesses on the central square had signs in the window that read Back the Blue and Blue Lives Matter. I walked around town talking to locals. One white man who I met on the main square near a Confederate statue said, “I’ll say this about Harrison and racism — it has been known as a racist place; in fact, the most racist place in the country for a long time, mainly because of the Klan. But this is what people don’t realize — here’s the thing about it — there’s racism all over the place.”
Arkansans tell me it isn’t fair to write about Harrison and the KKK — that it reinforces negative stereotypes about the state. But the White Pride billboard still graces the highway. The Harrison Community Task Force on Race Relations did launch a petition to take down the billboard, but I am waiting to write about the successful movement that finally removes it.
It was heavy
ripe
like raw meat
had the quality of blood
Dave Irpino, a local alcohol sales rep, holds two half-empty bottles of bourbon he’s been taste-testing on clients. Irpino moved to Arkansas from Arizona and said that the “good old boy state” rules that limit the number of distribution licenses has benefited him as the only licensed bourbon distributor in the area.
I sat on this essay for months thinking about Prohibition and racism and what remnants of that relationship live on in dry counties. In July 2021, after talking to Arkansas photographer Liz Sanders about our shared struggle to honestly document our home state, we decided to drive to Mount Ida, which is both in a dry county and the quartz crystal capital of the world. The truth is, I wasn’t sure how to write about the KKK. Normally, when I write about a topic, I interview sources and read related materials. However, with the KKK, I felt stuck, because I didn’t want to interview KKK members or quote their publications. I hoped that by driving to Mount Ida to see crystal collectors, I would think of a way to write about the KKK that made sense. But perhaps the answer is that there is no way to write about the KKK that makes sense.
Arriving in Royal in Garland County, about 15 minutes from Mount Ida, we drove past a Baptist church with a sign out front that read: “ETERNITY SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING.” On Yelp, a customer who visited a liquor store on the county line in the area wrote that it was “the only beacon of alcoholic availability in a sea of dry counties.” When we reached Crystal Springs, we stopped at the first of its two competing county line liquor stores.
I asked a guy arranging bottles of bourbon outside the store why dry counties existed. He said, “I think because of the Bible.” And then he walked over to his car and pulled out two half-empty bourbon bottles. He explained that Arkansas was a “good old boy state” that issued a limited number of distribution licenses, which benefited him as the only licensed bourbon distributor in the area. “Even Walmart isn’t allowed to sell liquor,” he said. In 2012, Walmart had thrown its weight behind a campaign to turn dry counties in its home state wet — and even with more money than God, it lost.
It tasted like a bonbon,
candy-ish, sweet
and then shifted to savory
At the second liquor store we visited, the woman behind the counter was engaged in a deep conversation with a customer about how COVID was just like the flu and had always existed. We looked at moonshine flavors: apple pie, hunch punch, lemon drop, sour razzin’ berry. Liz told me, “My grandfather Lyman went blind drinking moonshine.”
I wanted to know more about her grandfather Lyman and how his drinking had affected her family. Liz recounted, “My dad was a social drinker. He would go to The Vapors and other popular clubs in Hot Springs. His favorite drink was a dirty martini with vermouth and two olives, and he had a glass of red wine with dinner every night. As soon as I reached the age of 2, he stopped drinking. He became a teetotaler.” Liz thought that he didn’t want her growing up seeing him drink. “He maybe had bad memories seeing his father drink and not be a good father. I never asked him,” Liz said. Her father died in 2020.
Liz wanted to photograph individuals with their crystal collections. The lady behind the counter at the liquor store told us she had a large crystal collection, but she said she was worried her dogs would bite us if we went to her house to see it. She recommended that we visit the place across the road. Outside the store across the road, I saw an outhouse, wagon wheels, and all kinds of knickknacks. Inside, I found a room covered in bear rugs and stuffed snakes, another of pickled vegetables for sale, and one filled with display cases of Native American artifacts, crystals, and the head of a Black child — the type of object some people in the South used as a lawn decoration. The woman working behind the counter said that the founder of the store, now deceased, had collected the objects over 40 years from all over Arkansas.
Entering Mount Ida, we passed by Geode Place, Holistic Hollow, and Broken Rock Road. We stopped at every house or business that had a crystal collection outside. I talked to the owner of a crystal shop who had once been a truck driver, and he said, “What got me into this business was desperation.” He didn’t want me to interview him because, he said, it would be better for me to read two volumes of the history of Mount Ida.
He then pulled the books off a shelf and handed them to me, saying, “I could get it all wrong, so don’t talk to me.” Instead of reading the books, I followed him around the store as he showed me blush-colored rocks from Oklahoma shaped like tiny roses and phantom crystals where it looks like there is a ghost inside the crystal but it is where the crystal stopped growing. I thought I would talk him into an interview; instead, he talked me into buying some rock roses.
Outside his store, I met several crystal collectors who were traveling around the country in an RV to buy crystals. They talked about how COVID-19 was invented by scientists and drug companies so that they could get rich. I told them that in July 2021, only 35% of the Arkansas population was fully vaccinated, and the Delta variant was killing people in record numbers. I wanted to talk about dry counties, and, as someone who had survived COVID-19, it was hard for me to listen to conspiracy theories.
When I asked people about dry counties, they seemed to accept them as a fact and talked about making beer runs or driving to the county line. Although some people mentioned the Bible, nobody said they didn’t drink, just that they had to drive farther to do it. We all agreed that we had been drinking more during the pandemic, and the liquor store owners and workers who I spoke to said that sales had never been stronger. According to a 2021 study, Arkansas liquor stores in select counties saw their sales tax revenue grow 35.9% between September and November 2020 on a year-over-year basis.
Aperol Spritz
is the sommelier's Gatorade.
You can drink them all night
and get up and go running.
When we stopped to get a Dr Pepper at a corner store, an older woman who was demonstrating a country line dance move and had manicured peach fingernails told us, “You look like the kind of girls who drive around and sleep in a tent.” Liz and I looked at each other and laughed. A woman who came in the store told me that she had sold even more crystals during the pandemic, explaining, “If you ever have to sell your crystal collection, it’s kinda like guns — they don’t depreciate.”
“Self-healed” and manganese “phantom” crystals for sale at Blue Moon Crystals in Mount Ida. While most crystal sellers in Arkansas have always had outdoor crystal displays, since the pandemic local crystal businesses have brought even more of their large collections outdoors so that customers can view, learn about, and buy the local crystals safely.
I was too busy
drinking sparkling wine
and didn't feel
the earthquake
Late in the afternoon, when we stopped at a house with crystals spread across the yard, we met a Reiki master who offered to speak to us in the language of light. Listening to her chant, I thought about the strange bedfellows that anti-alcohol sentiment produced — during Prohibition it was the police and the KKK, and during the era of dry counties, it has been county line liquor stores in wet counties protecting high profit margins and conservative churches. The messaging around alcohol — that it should be approached with fear and not curiosity — had shaped my Arkansas childhood. But despite growing up in the driest state in the U.S., I discovered alcohol in all its poetic glory.
The Syrah is a velvet curtain
almost envelops you
and makes you feel safe
like you are in a library
with old, well-handled books.
Alice Driver is the author of More or Less Dead and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez. Her long-form reporting, radio, and essays have appeared in National Geographic, Oxford American, The New York Review of Books, Time, California Sunday Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, CNN, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, CBC Radio, PBS, and Longreads.
Liz Sanders is a freelance photographer based in Arkansas. She is a recipient of both the Magnum Foundation and the Rita and Alex K. Hillman Foundation fellowships for her documentary work. She is currently continuing work on a personal project on her father, dementia, and the bond of family during illness.
Header image: The Little Red River, seen from the top of Bee Bluff, in Stone County, Arkansas. At 102 miles long, the Little Red flows through a total of five counties (Stone, Van Buren, White, Searcy, and Cleburne), all of which are dry.
“The Driest State” is available in Issue No. 2 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.
