Sherry Chandler

When we had the flap, a few weeks ago, about whether ’tis an honor or an insult to name a horse Sally Hemmings, I was reminded of one of Dr. Tom Clark’s anecdotes in The Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 1942). This one was about a group of women visiting Lexington, looking for Nancy Hanks’s grave. Asked for directions to such a shrine, a local directed the women to Hamburg Place where they solemnly placed their wreath beside the impressive monument that marked the grave of Nancy Hanks [1886-1915] – a trotting horse of some renown, one of those favorites, like Seabiscuit, who catches the public imagination. [Dr. Clark did say, if I remember correctly, that the women wondered why the monument to Abraham Lincoln's mother pictured a horse.] Nancy was the first horse to trot a mile in 2:05, but her record was a little controversial. She set the record pulling a bicycle sulky with ball-bearing wheels – one of the first – so some argued she had an unfair advantage.

Because Hamburg Place – or at least a hunk of it at Man O’ War Boulevard and I-75 – has been sold to developers and turned into Hamburg Pavilion, an outdoor shopping complex with some of the region’s worst design in traffic patterns, I spent a moment wondering what had become of Nancy Hanks’s grave. Last week, reading about how World Monument Watch has put the Bluegrass on its endangered list, I found out. Here is the lede from Chris Poynter’s article in the June 22 Courier-Journal:

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Under towering trees, surrounded by an old stone fence, the Hamburg Place Farm cemetery holds the graves of 18 famed racehorses, including 1898 Kentucky Derby winner Plaudit.

Soon, their remains will be dug up and the cemetery moved several hundred yards — to make room for a Super Wal-Mart and Lowe’s.

Such development has prompted the World Monuments Fund to name Central Kentucky’s Bluegrass landscape as one of the world’s 100 most endangered places.

Photo credit: Michael Clevenger, The Courier-Journal

[Addendum I: I drafted this post before Dr. Clark died on Tuesday. I can't help but think, as a man who was outspoken about Kentucky's need to manage "progress" wisely, that he must have felt as uncomfortable as I do about the outward creeping sprawl around Lexington.]

[Addendum II: Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham's wife, was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky. Nancy Hanks, his mother, came to Kentucky over the Wilderness Trail and settled down around Hodgenville. After she married Thomas Lincoln, they moved over into Indiana where she died at the age of 34. Her grave is at what is now the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Lincoln City, Indiana.]

The Green River Writers own Anna Lucas has achieved her first poem publication in issue seven of the online lit zine Right Hand Pointing. The poem is called “Church Dance” and you can read it by following the link.

The season has taken on a look of July, grass browning in the sun, rolls of hay the color and sheen of burnished brass lined up along the fence rows, day lilies blooming in every yard. The World Monuments Fund has placed the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky on its list of the 100 most endangered sites, and in my peregrinations around the state, I see only a few small fields of burley tobacco where once they were as common as grass and stretched for miles. Things change.

I sometimes feel like one of those Inuits who lived by killing whales. I find my culture not just obsolete but also declared evil. But while there is no arguing for tobacco the way it was used and abused in the United States, burley was always more than just a crop. It was a way of life and that is why several generations of Kentucky poets, from Wendell Berry to Davis McCombs, find it necessary to elegize its passing.

McCombs’s cycle of 16 poems, entitled “Tobacco Mosaic,” has won the Larry Levis Prize in Poetry and is featured in the current issue of The Missouri Review.

Like many of us, McCombs has had to struggle with tobacco’s mixed legacy. I had to nod in recognition when I read these words in his author’s profile:

… McCombs says that part of the impetus behind writing “Tobacco Mosaic” was to come to terms with the moral and ethical dilemmas posed by the formative role that tobacco has played in his life. “When, as a young man, I would rail against the evils of tobacco, my mother would remind me that, as she put it, ‘Tobacco paid for your education.’ She was right, of course—and for years I have carried with me the sense that every word I write is in some way sponsored by tobacco.”

The third poem in “Tobacco Mosaic” is reproduced below:

Lexicon

The people are talking about budworms; they are talking
about aphids and thrips. Under the bluff at Dismal Rock,
there where the spillway foams and simmers,
they are fishing and talking about pounds and allotments;
they are saying white burley, lugs and cutters.
Old men are whittling sticks with their pocketknives
and they are saying Paris Green; they speak of topping
and side-dressing; they are whistling and talking
about setters, plant beds and stripping rooms.
At Hedgepeths, under the shade of the Feed Mill awning,
in that place of burlap and seedbins, of metal scoops,
they are sitting on milk crates; they are drinking from bottles
and they are talking about pegs, float plants and tierpoles.
At the Depot Market, they say blue mold, high color;
they are nodding and saying sucker dope; they are leaning
on the counter and talking about Black Patch, high boys, flue-cured.
They are arguing about hornworms and buyouts.
They are saying come back, come back, come back.

from the Lexington Herald-Leader

Thomas Clark, a historian who lived long and came to be valued as a state treasure in Kentucky, died early today. He was 101. He would have been 102 on July 14. He died at 3:45 A.M. after a brief illness, said his stepson, Robert Brock.

His body will lie in state at the State Capitol in Frankfort.

The Herald-Leader obituary is here.

While on the subject of Dr. Thomas Clark, I should mention that there are big doins over at the Kentucky History Center on July 9, when the museum will be officially re-named in honor of Dr. Clark. In particular, I’d like to draw your attention to this gathering of poets and writers:

Of Pen and Place: Kentucky Authors Reading

Saturday, July 9, 10 a.m. to noon, Kentucky Historical Society

Celebrate the rich literary traditions of Kentucky with the Kentucky Historical Society! Join moderator James Baker Hall, George Ella Lyon, Maurice Manning, Crystal Wilkinson, Richard Taylor, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Frank X. Walker as they share both their own work and also the work of a Kentucky writer from the past who inspired them. A discussion panel with the authors will follow, debating what it means to be a Kentucky author, and what role ’sense of place’ plays in their own work.

This reading is part of the “Hats Off to History!” day-long event to celebrate the renaming of the Kentucky History Center in honor of Dr. Thomas D. Clark, historian laureate. A book signing will follow the program.

There will be free admission to the Kentucky Historical Society’s three museums, including the newly named Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History, and on-going activities throughout the day.

For a complete schedule of the day’s events, visit http://history.ky.gov/hatsoff.htm . For more information regarding the “Of Pen and Place” program, contact Joanie DiMartino at joanie.dimartino@ky.gov or (502) 564-1792 ext. 4467. For more information on the “Hats Off to History!” event, contact Alice Rogers at alice.rogers@ky.gov or (502) 564-1792 ext. 4476.

The edition of The Kentucky that I read was a special re-issue for Kentucky’s bicentenniel in 1992. It closed with an added chapter entitled “The River Flows On.” In this chapter, Dr. Clark catches up on 50 years of river history (the book was originally published in 1942):

Now in this sophisticated scientific age the Kentucky River is burdened with an obscene amount of physical and chemical pollution. In flood season it strikes blows of vengeance for the neglect by thrusting its silt-laden waters into living rooms, stores, and warehouses in Frankfort and elsewhere. In dry season it seems puckishly to delight in raising the ever-growing specter of water shortages. … In flood season and out, its channel is littered with plastic jugs, cast-off automobile tires, discarded household appliances, and even an occasional over-age highway department truck. After every high-water stage trees and bushes are left adorned with litter intimately related to motherhood – plastic diapers….what whimsical newspaper reporters in front-page stories labeled “spreading Kentucky hanging moss.” … Far more burdensome than diapers are the countless thousands of tons of silt which wash down regularly from the stripped highland coalfields.
…
For unnumbered centuries the Kentucky River has responded to the rhythmic pulsations of changing seasons. In recent decades, however, it has struck back more furiously because of the stripping bare of lands about its headwaters, the dumping of sewage, garbage, and the detritus of wastrel humans into its channel, and because of indifferent public administration. All along the river and its myriad laterals human beings have mowed down the forests, spewed poisonous chemicals into streams, discharged cesspools and sewers over its banks, and festooned its shores with plastic jugs and every other piece of waste human denizens had strength and will power enough to haul away from their overlittered premises. In due seasons the river has fought back.

This passage, written in 1992, reminds me of a passage written in 2005 by Erik Reece. In the concluding passage of his article “Death of a Mountain: Radical Strip Mining and the Leveling of Appalachia” (Harper’s Magazine, April 2005), Reece observes:

In the end, the natural world does not need conserving. The planet has survived five great extinctions; it can survive the one we are bring on. And given time, it will grow back. No, it is we who need conserving.

Back in early June I was making some tongue-in-cheek comments about Thomas D. Clark’s history of the Kentucky River, The Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 1942), and how all he had to say about my home county, which has about a tenth of the river’s length as its western border, concerned its “colorful” elections.

I have, you’ll be delighted to know, long since finished the book and I did have some problems reading it. It wasn’t so much that it was anecdotal – for which read filled with tall tales that pander to all the stereotypes about Kentucky – as that it reflected social attitudes with which we are no longer very comfortable. It is not PC. Reading it was sort of like trying to go back and read The Bobbsey Twins.

The Kentucky was published in 1942, before World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, the Civil Rights Movement, or the Women’s Rights Movement, before television, satellites, the internet, before widespread rural electrification. It was written when the name Cassius Clay referred to a white abolitionist and not to a black champion. The book was written before I was born. So it probably isn’t fair to hold Clark to a standard that has had sixty years to develop. And it does have its moments.

Compare, for example, these two excerpts. The first is from the chapter “Born to Be a Princess,” a portrait of Sally Ward (Lawrence Hunt Armstrong Downs 1827-1896), a Southern Belle who easily outdoes Scarlet O’Hara:

It did not take the young widow Lawrence long to get back into the social whirl. She made her first public appearance at the famous ball given in honor of Madame Octavia Walton Le Vert, daughter of the governor of Florida. No one could tell from her frolicsome manner that she had undergone “that horrible experience at Boston.” It seemed that divorce had only increased her attractiveness. She now drew men to her because they, perhaps, found her as a divorcee more exciting than before. Outwardly she was the same lively girl who had dashed through the Louisville market house on her pony, or the one who had presented the colors to the Louiville Legion.

Her indulgent parents gave a grand coming-out party in her honor. Again Sally was the center of attraction. At ten o’clock the Ward house was fully lighted, and Cunningham’s band struck up the grand march. The gay dance kept up until one o’clock, and then dinner was served. After the dinner the band played again, and the ball continued in a lively vein.

Never before in all her experience of dazzling hilarious Kentucky parties had Sally reached the grand heights which she attained that night. When the evening began she appeared as Nourmahal from “The Light of the Harem.” She wore “a pink satin shirt, covered with silver lama, the bodice embroidered with silver and studded with diamonds; the oriental white sleeves adorned with silver and gold; the satin trousers spangled with gold. Her hair was braided with pearls and covered with a Greek cap; her pink slippers were embroidered with silver,” and splendid jewels formed extravagant decoration for the whole costume.

When the ball began once again after supper, Sally appeared in a second dress, this time as Nourmahal “at the Feast of the Roses.” The dress was “white illusion dotted with silver, with a veil of silvery sheen and wreath of white roses, and white silk boots with silver ankles. She bore the charmed lute.”

The second from “The Lion of White Hall” — Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903):

Dresses were shocking. They were one- and two-story affairs. Cassius said that there were some of brick, of stone, and of mud. Skins of all sorts were to be seen: old leather, chalky, brick dust, and indigo. Dropping into the lingo of the frontier, the Kentuckian shouted, “Wolf in camp!” Philadelphia’s stream of female caricatures provoked him to swear by the “Mammoth Cave, the wild Crab Orchard, the raccoon dog, the best rifle, the snapping turtle, and the half horse and half alligator, and the small touch of an earthquake that there was not a pretty woman out of old Kaintuck.” There was one of the passing throng, however, who caught his eye. In rapturous prose he described a delectable angel who glided past him wearing a dress which closed at the waist and widened at the shoulders. It widened in the skirt and closed sympathetically about the feet and ankles with the undulations of the lady’s walk. In the exact descriptive language of a Kentucky horseman, Cassius wrote of her features “not classic, but passionate, and full of poetry and soul; the large expressive mouth; eyes large, wide apart, and wide awake, under seeming sleepy lids; rich auburn hair, so judiciously braided as to fill out to perfection of outline, a most beautiful head.” This was the female ideal of a man who spent much of his energy lambasting the bustle.

Cassius tied up his fight against slavery with his feminist reform movement. The fair southern woman was not to escape a scathing from his tongue. He was free with advice in his famous “forked radish” speech in which he commanded the southern belle to give up her slaves. “If you want a drink,” he wrote, “go to the pump or the spring and get it; if to bathe, prepare your own bath, or plunge into the running stream; make your own clothes, throw away your corsets, and nature herself will form your bustles. Then you will have full chests, glossy hair, rosy complexions, smooth velvety skins, muscular, rounded limbs, graceful tournures, elasticity of person, eyes of alternate fire and most melting languor; generous hearts, sweet tempers, good husbands, long lives of honeymoons, and no divorces.” The woman who was waited upon hand and foot by her slave servant was compared by Clay as being an owl, “when stripped of its feathers its skin is flaccid,” and its form that of a “forked radish.”

He had a point. I learned while reading Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) that the whalebone stays women wore in the 18th century made it impossible for them to dress themselves and impossible to bend at the waist once they were dressed. The corsets of the 19th century amounted to the same thing. We all remember the scene of Mammy lacing Scarlett up while she clung to the bedpost, and I’ll remind you that 18th and 19th century women were prone to the “vapors” — fainting spells brought on by lack of oxygen. Still, Sally Ward seemed lively enough.

The report is from USAToday. I found the link on Political Animal.

WASHINGTON (AP) — With barely a word about it, workers at the Justice Department Friday removed the blue drapes that have famously covered two scantily clad statues for the past 3 1/2 years.

Spirit of Justice, with her one breast exposed and her arms raised, and the bare-chested male Majesty of Law basked in the late afternoon light of Justice’s ceremonial Great Hall.

The drapes, installed in 2002 at a cost of $8,000, allowed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to speak in the Great Hall without fear of a breast showing up behind him in television or newspaper pictures. They also provoked jokes about and criticism of the deeply religious Ashcroft.

I assume somebody has also quietly undraped the copy of Guernica at the United Nations – the one that was covered when Colin Powell made his famous argument there.

from The Mother on the Other Side of the World

the stray’s tail was all I saw
of her when she got out of there
that night beginning the plot of this story
I was to see about that much of her
again the next night in my headlights
at the side of a narrow road
a half mile away
yellow eyes
echoing outward the darkness it was
gonglike and out there in the expanding middle
I was to see more and more of her
in the days to follow
she hangs out in the culvert
I pull off the road and climb down
with a plastic cup of food
emptying it out on a scrap board I took down there
she stays at the other end of the culvert
as though she’d never ever come closer
sweet talk doesn’t run her off
but she prefers quiet it seems
occasionally she’ll have a dead mouse
or chipmunk prominently displayed
a gift for me perhaps or maybe
a reminder of the role
she allows me to play
she never lets me see her
lick herself or sleep

— James Baker Hall, The Mother on the Other Side of the World (Sarabande, 1999)

No graphics with the poem this week — adding a snapshot to a James Baker Hall work seems like sacrilege.

But so that you can get a look at cats this week, I’m including a link to Friday Cat Blogging Science Nerd Style, a diary at The Daily Kos. Warning – lots of graphics to load in if you’re using a modem.