Sherry Chandler

Late in 1780, a workman dug up some big molars on Robert Annan’s farm in New York. A few miles away at West Point, General George Washington was encamped with the Continental army and on one December day he and some fellow officers decided to take a sleigh ride over to get a look at this find.

As Stanley Hedeen reports it in Big Bone Lick (Univ Press of Kentucky, 2008), Annan describes the visit like this:

His Excellency General Washington came to my house to see these relicts. He told me, he had in his house a grinder which was found on the Ohio, much resembling these.

This rather terse account was enhanced by that of Washington’s aide-de-camp, Colonel David Humphreys:

he recounted that Washington had told the story of a man who had observed the extraction of molars from an incognitum skull at Big Bone Lick: “when they raised up the Head out of which they took the Teeth, …it reached up to the middle of his Face.”

I’m more than a little pained, reading these accounts, by the casual way these guys dug up these “relicts” and carted them away. Not only did they make their way back to the East Coast, so that Washington had a tooth and Jefferson had some samples, but they also found their way to England and to France. Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing and these guys had no concept of evolution. Some thought the bones those of a giant human, others that it was some huge carnivore made extinct by Noah’s flood.

That the molars looked like those of a carnivore — having according to Annan

protruberances, rising in a pyramidical form, the perpendicular height of the highest of which was about an inch and one tenth

—confused these early scholars and curio collectors. Because they also found huge tusks at Big Bone Lick, many people argued that this creature was some big elephant but the molars were not at all like those of an elephant. Okay, they said, the tusks are from elephants and the molars are from hippopotami. But, said others, both elephants and hippopotami are tropical animals.

Then once upon a time the climate must have been much warmer here.

Still others thought that once they explored further on this continent, they were bound to find these giants, be they humans or elephants.

It took Thomas Jefferson to ask the obvious question:

Wherever these grinders are found, there also we find the tusks and skeleton; but no skeleton of the hippopotamus nor grinders of the elephant. It will not be said that the hippopotamus and elephant came always to the same spot, the former to deposit his grinders, and the latter his tusks and skeleton. For what became of the parts not deposited there? we must agree then that these remains belong to each other, that they are of one and the same animal, that this was not a hippopotamus, because the hippopotamus had no tusks nor such a frame, and because the grinders differ in their size as well as the number and form of their points. That it was not an elephant, I think ascertained by proofs equally decisive.

Similar skeletons having recently been found in Siberia, Jefferson posited a “cold-adapted, elephant-like animal with a circumpolar distribution,” a Wooly Mammoth.

By 1783, George Rogers Clark writes to Jefferson that all the fossil pieces that were lying around at Big Bone Lick had been carried away.

So popular was this idea of the Mammoth that it became a patriotic rallying cry for the young nation:

In contrast to the European nations that perceived their cultural legacy in the classical ruins of Greece and Rome, American nationalism soon came to be expressed by the relics of the mammoth in the New World’s unspoiled landscape …an early icon of American patriotism.

Says Avedon Carol:

…one really big reason why I regard the anti-abortion position as an anti-life position is that bans on abortion actually lead to more unwanted pregnancies and thus more abortions - but these are illegal abortions and therefore more likely to lead to the deaths of the mothers

What spurred her to say that? This post from George Mombiot in The Guardian (via Empire Burlesque)

A study published in the Lancet shows that between 1995 and 2003, the global rate of induced abortions fell from 35 per 1,000 women each year to 29. This period coincides with the rise of the “globalised secular culture” the Pope laments. When the figures are broken down, it becomes clear that, apart from the former Soviet Union, abortion is highest in conservative and religious societies. In largely secular western Europe, the average rate is 12 abortions per 1,000 women. In the more religious southern European countries, the average rate is 18. In the US, where church attendance is still higher, there are 23 abortions for every 1,000 women, the highest level in the rich world.

It still seems to me, as it always has, that the best way to reduce abortions is to teach our children, boy and girl, all we can about birth control methods, to make sure effective birth control is widely available. and to make abortions legal and safe.

Also, I think if everybody would read Avedon’s The Sideshow every day, I could just be quiet on political issues and get on with writing about stuff like poetry and culture.

For some reason, I had not seen the 1961 release of A Raisin in the Sun. I’m not sure why but I’d guess it was because I was sixteen years old when it was released, living in deep country a two-hour drive from any walk-in theater, and focussed on the burning issues that preoccupy most sixteen-year-olds.

And somehow, over the years, I did not go back and pick it up.

My loss.

The film has not dated. For good or ill, the issues it raises are still relevant. Some of them are timeless and applicable to those of any race who live in poverty.

The performances are gripping. Sidney Poitier’s is surprisingly athletic. For some reason I hadn’t thought of him as an athletic performer. In part, I think that’s because he belongs to an older generation of actors for whom physicality was more subtle.

For the most part, the film keeps to the single room set that the play uses but it really doesn’t seem like a filmed play. In part, I think this comes from the vitality of the performers and in part from smart camera work. But also, as my son observes, it is necessary that the play stay in the single room of the Chicago tenement apartment so that we can get the feel of just how cramped and hemmed in the Younger family is.

A plot synopsis here.

I have to tell you that I cried like a baby watching it, and I think there were some male eyes in the room that weren’t quite dry.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play out of some very bitter experiences in her own childhood:

“25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation’s ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German [L]uger [pistol], doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.”

All of this is in the future for the play’s Younger family. The play ends with their decision to move into the all-white neighborhood in spite of the offer to buy them out and in the full knowledge that they won’t be welcomes. I am impressed by Hansberry’s ability to work out of this personal bitterness to produce a play that is at base positive and expansive.