Sherry Chandler

do something green.

It’s the eve of Earth Day and I don’t know about you but here in Bourbon County it’s a beautiful sunny blue-sky day with temperatures in the mid-sixties. A few hardy flowers that survived the big freeze are making a comeback. And Gin, I think some of the dogwood blooms survived. The beautiful white bracts are all brown and withered but a number of the actual blooms seem to have made it through. There is bee activity. Though no honey bees.

Congratulations to Gin Petty, by the way, for being picked as one of eight earth-friendly artists to be featured by the Kentucky Arts Council on the Kentucky Earth Day page. But I can’t find the right page. Can you help me?

My activity is low-key. I’m hanging out laundry. Because I can. I don’t live in a suburb or housing development with ordinances against anything as sloppy and alive as laundry flapping on the line. And because I like to. No part of housekeeping is more cheering as the smell of sun-dried laundry.

In lieu of anything really significant to say, I’ll give you a poem:

Behind The Blackberry Thicket

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock –
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

What seems motionless is growth and what
seems still is motion. Even my house
moves westward half an inch a year.

Originally published at the New Voices International Project.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first. This movie has Stepin Fetchit in it and that’s an embarrassment to all concerned.

Some praise Fetchit (born Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry) for managing any kind of film career in the Jim Crow 30s. It was a time when, to quote Langston Hughes, “On the screen, we are servants, clowns, or fools.” Fetchit managed to embody all three, whining and bumbling his way to superstardom (and a lot of money). It’s an uncomfortable reminder of our racist past to have to watch him. On top of that, he doesn’t really seem to be trying very hard in the role of Jonah, born out of the mouth of a papier maché whale. Possibly that’s the point. He is an impressive physical actor (and bigger than I remembered), making amazing stunts look easy. And, according to Jon C. Hopwood in the IMDb bio, the whining was a strategy:

Often, while making movies in which he found the lines offensive, Perry would skip or mumble lines he did not like, pretending to be too stupid to comprehend the script.

To be fair, there are plenty more stereotypes this movie. There’s Efe, the drunken Irish deckhand, played by Francis Ford, director John Ford’s brother. And fat southern Sheriff Rufe Jeffers (Eugene Pallette) runs his jail on a sort of Andy Griffith honor system. Easy enough when your prisoners consist of members of the Hall Johnson Choir* and the juvenile lead. John McGuire, the juvenile, spends his jail time wisely. He learns to play the musical saw.

The film stars, of course, Will Rogers, who plays that popular American mythological figure, the kind-hearted con-man. In short, I guess he plays himself. He ropes a steamboat in this one, as well as a robed and bearded evangelist called The New Moses.

So the movie presents us with a sort of prelapsarian America where everybody knows his place, everybody plays his part (I choose my pronouns deliberately), and we can all relax in the knowledge that everything will work for truth, justice, and the consummation of young love. Within those parameters, it’s an excellent film and a lot of fun to watch. And there is, of course, the culminating steamboat race.

It is rather famously Will Rogers’s last film. He was killed in a plane crash shortly before the movie was released. Coincidentally, the DVD copy of Captain Blood we rented recently had newsreel footage about the crash. Rogers and John Ford worked together on two previous films, Doctor Bull (1933) and Judge Priest (1934). The latter is set in Kentucky.

This film’s Kentucky connection is considerable. Its story was taken from a novel by Covington-born Ben Lucien Burman (more on Burman here and at the blog Living with Legends). It features Paducah-native Irvin S. Cobb as a rival steamboat captain. His boat is called “The Belle of Paducah” as Rogers’s is called “The Claremore Queen” after his birthplace in Oklahoma.

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*I can’t authenticate this but certainly there is a chorus in the jail and I’m pretty sure Scott Eyman, in the commentary track on the DVD, mentioned the Hall Johnson Choir. He may have been speaking metaphorically. It’s a very good commentary.