Sherry Chandler

Here is a little sampling of Lillian Smith’s writing at its most romantic. This passage is from pages 159 and 160 of Killers of the Dream, a chapter entitled “Distance and Darkness.”

While I have no doubt that what she is saying here has truth, I also feel as though we’ve strayed deep into the territory of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane or possibly a West Virginia holler movie (though they do have Yayho sightings on Droopr Mountain). Nobody is allowed beyond the confines of their stereotype:

ONLY A MAN or woman who has traveled in childhood the old sand or day roads of the South in buggy or wagon, who has stayed in the country after nightfall, can know what distance and darkness meant in the making of the rural mind of the South.

Distance was not a word but a force pushing a man hard against his memories and fears, isolating him from a world to which he had never felt securely tied. When the sun set, the night began. There were no lights; only a kerosene lamp or a pine knot burning. And always the swamp back of you or the dark hills, or empty fields stretching on, on. . . . Far off, the Negroes singing in dim lantern-lit churches, moaning their misery and shouting their joy. Sudden sharp laughter from nowhere.

City people, townspeople, have little idea what this meant and still means in parts of the lonely South. During the war they felt the wear on nerves of the blackout, but country folks have lived in a blackout since time began. Darkness comes. Sounds creep out: whippoorwill, tree-frogs, roar of alligator back in the pond, rustle of palmetto, restless, never-ending, as if an unseen hand brushes over it and it cannot let go . . . the scream of a cat in the swamp. Sounds like these weave in and out of lonely fantasies, pulling in hearsay tales, making a tight mat of facts and feelings and fancies and fears until one no longer knows the real from the unreal, and sometimes one no longer cares. The sweet things too: jessamine crawling on fences and trees, giving out a wonder of yellow fragrance, bays blooming white and delicate down in the swamp, and water lilies fattening on green pond water, making you love the loneliness you hate; making you want to stay even as you feel you must leave or die.

The chapter closes with this paragraph, which again is both insightful and patronizing (matronizing?), the paragraph stands with the “wool-hat boys and girls” but nevertheless keeps them a safely distant “they.”

Having lived my early life in a Deep South town and much of my recent life in the mountains, I have a bond with rural people which I cherish. The stereotypes built of them by those who are trying to manipulate them, are partly true, of course; but partly false. They do have little learning and can be stubborn as mules; but they have conscience. And they are close to nature and therefore close to the variables of life. They are less aware of large aggregates and samenesses than are urbanites; and more aware of differences and the unpredictability of things that breathe. They are also religious: primitively so, sometimes; but they know and feel deeply the teachings of Jesus. There is also a rough humor, bone-deep. This cannot be disregarded when we are appraising a peoples ability to change. I fear the wool-hat boys and girls far less than I do the educated leaders who fear them and therefore desert them in their need—and the demagogic leaders who shoulder the people intimately but exploit them ruthlessly.

Sweeping generalizations are dangerous things so I think I’ll just go ahead and make one. As one who identifies working class/redneck, I think part of the problem may lie in the fact that it’s easier to recognize patronizing attitudes than it is to recognize populist demagoguery. Populists tell you what you want to hear. Patronizing reformers, though they may be right, tell you that you’re ignorant and evil.

Smith recognizes that the evils of racism hurt the poor whites of the South nearly as much as the blacks. I give her high marks for pointing out that the people who benefitted most from Southern racism were the rich landowners, industrialists, and politicians who were able to exploit the cheap labor force. She is also good at deflating self-righteousness in all concerned.

On balance, Killers of the Dream was and is an important book. I just wish I didn’t find it so difficult to read.

Thomas Nast cartoon

The last Federal troops were withdrawn from the Southern states by the Compromise of 1877, which gave Rutherford B. Hayes the White House and ended Reconstruction. Radical Republicans withdrew with the troops and you might say the Redeemer Democrats bulldozed their way to enacting disenfranchising legislation. Wikipedia describes the Redeemers as the “conservative, pro-business wing” of the Democratic party. They cut back spending for public education and passed poll taxes, literacy tests, and residency requirements for voting. Sound familiar? Between 1900 and 1903, black voter registration in Alabama fell from 181,315 to 2,980. White registration fell by more than 40,000.

Thomas Nast cartoon from Harper’s Weekly, Dec. 30, 1876.

When bulldozers finish, the earth is scoured, scarred, and shaped to fit human purposes. The American Heritage Dictionary has an alternative definition of bulldozer: “an overbearing or bullying person.” Michael Quinion of World Wide Words says the original bulldozer was a chivalrous Southern Democrat (which is to say, a nightrider on horseback) with a bullwhip, bent on keeping African-Americans from voting Republican in the presidential election of 1876. That was Hayes-Tilden, a contest that makes Bush-Gore look mild. Florida was disputed then, too. In the end, Democrats cut a deal: Hayes wins but Federal troops are withdrawn from the South.

Lynching was once called the national crime of the United States, for the practice of seizing those accused or convicted of crimes and executing them without legal authority or due process of law has been peculiar to this country.

So begins Henry E. Barber’s article “The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942,” Phylon 1973;4:378-389.

Barber tells us that, according to the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Institute, 4,761 lynchings were recorded between 1882 (when recording began) and 1930, 71% of them were lynchings of African Americans, and 3,810 of them took place in the eleven Confederate States, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.

The most commonly used excuse to justify this extra-legal punishment in the South was “in defense of southern white women.” Lynchings were believed to be a “sort of natural outburst, in some vague way a strong man’s gesture, splashed liberally with knight errantry and designed to protect the blushing flower of Southern womanhood.” [Quoting John R. Clowes in the Courier-Journal for March 10, 1940.]

This “natural outburst of knight errantry” malarky reminds me very strongly of the backlash Susan Falludi describes in The Terror Dream. Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, when it was easier to fantasize the return of John Wayne than to deal with reality.

The nation’s men, from the inhabitants of the White House on down, were reportedly assuming a hard-boiled comportment last seen in post-World War II cinema. They were anointed “the new hawks” of the new consensus, “fighting a new Cold War,” as tough on terrorists as the old hawks had been on Communists. They were men prepared to mete out “torture” and “focused brutality,” take “nasty and brutish means,” and chuck the “niceties” of avoiding civilian casualties, as muscle-flexing columnists in Newsweek, Time, Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and other publications intoned. “We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting,” columnist David Brooks [!] wrote in the Weekly Standard, approvingly. A new John Wayne masculinity was ascendant …[and] women figured largely as vulnerable maidens. (pages 4 & 5)

William Bennet wanted to Kill! and David Brooks wanted veins in his teeth. Everybody wanted to rescue Afghan women from their burkas and supply them with the latest cosmetics. But all this posturing had as little reality in 2001 as it did in 1901. To return to Barber:

Tuskegee Institute, however, reported that only 16.7 percent of the victims between 1889 and 1929 were lynched for rape and 6.7 percent for attempted rape. [Quoting Arthur Franklin Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching, Chapel Hill, 1933.] Quite clearly, crimes against women were not the real cause of lynching. However, regardless of the crime, the accused Negro had to be lynched in defense of white women.

And in the twentieth century as in the twenty-first, some women weren’t buying it. A select group, lead by Jessie Daniel Ames, decided to take action. From the Handbook of Texas Online:

The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was founded in November 1930 in Atlanta, Georgia, by Jessie Daniel Ames, a Texas-born southern woman active in suffrage and interracial reform movements. She and twelve founding members established the ASWPL as an arm of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an organization working for racial harmony. The ASWPL’s founders, all active in Protestant churches and interracial organizations (they were later joined by members of Jewish women’s groups), wanted to prevent lynching by educating southern whites about its causes and prevention. They were convinced that lynchings were sanctioned murder and the result of “false chivalry,” the use by white men of white women’s virtue as an excuse for racially motivated violence against blacks. The ASWPL sought to convince white women of their responsibility to refuse to play a helpless role in that process.

By the early 1940s, Barber reports the ASWPL had pledges of support from more than 43,000 individuals and 109 churches and civic organizations. By 1934, all thirteen Southern governors had signed on. By 1939, they had recruited 1,229 local law enforcement officers. These women not only spoke in churches and meetings, they were also known to confront lynch mobs. Barber quotes one witness as saying

When white women appeared on the scene in a situation like that, these white men were afraid of them.

By the late thirties, early forties, the ASWPL had helped turn public opinion against lynching. In 1939, there were only three recorded lynchings. In 1942, the association, which had always been very loosely organized, dissolved as women’s concern about lynchings waned and the country’s involvement in WWII took their attention.

As women like Susan Sontag and Katha Pollitt (or perhaps more appropriately, Barbara Kingsolver and the Dixie Chicks) who spoke out against the post-9/11 excesses were called traitors and bitches and threatened with death, so the women of the ASWPL were called “nigger lovers” and sob sisters and were threatened with violence by groups like the KKK.

I had never heard of the ASWPL until I came to read Lillian Smith’s 1949 memoir Killers of the Dream. Smith buys heavily into Freud and her thinking, while admirably frank about miscegenation and violence, often manages to leave all clichés comfortably intact: neurotic white women in the front parlor, earth-mother mammies in the kitchen. Her treatment of the ASWPL is more remarkable for its emotion than for its hard facts. Nevertheless she is capable of eye-opening insights, as in her writing about the psychic cost for both white and black women when they decided that they would break one of the South’s central taboos and sit down to eat together:

It is difficult for those not reared as white southerners to remember how this eating taboo in childhood was woven into the mesh of things that are “wrong,” how it pulled anxieties from stronger prohibitions and attached them to itself. But we who live here cannot forget. One of these church women told me of her first eating experience with colored friends. Though her conscience was serene, and her enjoyment of this association was real, yet she was seized by an acute nausea which disappeared only when the meal was finished. She was too honest to attribute it to anything other than anxiety welling up from the “bottom of her personality,” as she expressed it, creeping back from her childhood training. Others have told me similar experiences: of feeling “pangs of conscience,” as one put it, “though my conscience was clearly approving”; or suddenly in the night awaking, overwhelmed by “serious doubts of the wisdom of what we are doing.”

The white women were not alone in these irrational reactions. Colored women also found it hard, but for different reasons. Sometimes their pride was deeply hurt that white women felt so virtuous when eating with them. They were too sensitive not to be aware of the psychic price the white women paid for this forbidden act, and yet too ignorant of the training given white children to understand why there had to be a price. And sometimes the colored women were themselves almost overcome by a break-through not of guilt but of their old repressed hatred of white people. One of the most charming, sensitive, intelligent Negro women I know, tells me that even now when she is long with white people she grows physically ill and has immense difficulty coming to terms with the resentments of her childhood.

Given taboos and resentments that ran so deep, these women of both races should be remembered with pride. Maybe the remarkable thing isn’t that, sixty years later, we still have our Jeremiah Wrights and Pat Buchanans but that we have so few of them.

Where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bed roll

No primary party hopping in Kentucky apparently No Democrats for a Day. No Operation Chaos. Kos indulged in some of this stuff, too, when he encouraged Michigan Democrats to cross over and vote for Romney. (I prefer not to link.) I think this stuff is unethical and I’m glad Kentucky has a law to prevent it.

The Political Mask

Hillary will do anything to win. Yeah, right.

Why Hillary should be president here and here.

You know how much I love that border fence.

National Pentagon Radio? My problems with NPR’s news coverage is twofold: they fired Bob Edwards and they didn’t fire Juan Williams. But they do host Le Show and Fresh Air.

Racism is not a black and white issue.

The lone red shoe.

The Jackson Purchase, or the Mississippi Embayment, is one of five geographical regions of Kentucky. It’s an alluvial plain at the western extreme of the state. Kentucky is said to look like a camel lying down, in which case the Jackson Purchase is its head. Andrew Jackson bought it from the Chickasaws in 1818, hence the name. The Eastern Coal Fields form the camel’s tail. The region is part of the Cumberland Plateau, which is to say it looks like mountains but is actually an eroded plain of sedimentary rock. It will be a plain, indeed, when the bulldozers finish.

Nicholson Baker has written a pacifist history of World War II called Human Smoke. The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster). Here is an excerpt of his interview with Charles McGrath in the NYTimes:

“I came to the Second World War with a typically inadequate American education.” Mr. Baker said, “and I was surprised to discover that Churchill had this crazy, late-night side. He was obviously thrilled to be in the midst of this escalating war. This is a man who wanted Europe to starve — he wanted to starve it into a state of revolt.”

He added: “I’ve always had pacifist leanings, and so one of the things I wanted to learn was how do you react to the Second World War if you’re a pacifist. That war is always held up as the great counterexample, the one that was justified. And I got hungrier and hungrier to answer the question: Did the Allies’ response to Hitler really help anyone who needed help? One of the things I discovered, for example, was that the most impressive opponents of the war were also the people most actively arguing that we had to help the refugees. There was a complete overlap.”

Talking about starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto during the British blockade, Mr. Baker became so worked up that he had to pause, take off his rimless glasses and rub his eyes, and then he went on: “What are you going to do when Europe is threatened by Hitler, this paranoid, dangerous person? My feelings about the war change every day. But I also feel that there is a way of looking at the war and the Holocaust that is truer and sadder and stranger than the received version.”

Here are the opening two paragraphs:

Alfred Nobel, the manufacturer of explosives, was talking to his friend the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of Lay Down Your Arms. Von Suttner, a founder of the European antiwar movement, had just attended the fourth World’s Peace Conference in Bern. It was August 1892.

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses,” Alfred Nobel said. “On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

William Grimes wants none of it.

But I look at the troubled aftermath of WWII and wonder if there might have been another way.

We have been watching Terry Jones’ Barbarians, which though it may be couched in commercial bombast nevertheless leaves me feeling a bit less than sanguine about the glories of western civilization.

See Lance Mannion: It’s not serious foreign policy if it doesn’t kill people.

Ice, a 160-square mile chunk, has broken off the Antarctic Wilkins Ice Shelf. (Video at the link). I can’t quite envision 160-square-miles of ice. The Washington Post says seven times the size of Manhattan but I’m not an East Coast gal so that doesn’t give me a clue. Owen County, Kentucky, where I was raised, is about 350 square miles, so I reckon we’re talking about half of Owen County falling off into the ocean. Or maybe like Carroll County sliding off into the Ohio River. The entire Ice Shelf is the size of Connecticut, comparable to the Jackson Purchase.

VIDEO: Winter Soldier Mike Prysner testimony, Pt1 Watch at YouTube.

VIDEO: Winter Soldier Mike Prysner testimony Pt2. Watch at YouTube.

via

From Winter Soldier.

On the subject of racism and torture, you might also read this review of Taxi to the Dark Side.

Read this: Players not Cheerleaders

Look past the rhetoric and it becomes clear that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has a real plan to end the occupation. They could, however, be forced to change their positions–thanks to the unique dynamics of the prolonged primary battle.

Despite the calls for Clinton to withdraw in the name of “unity,” it is the very fact that Clinton and Obama are still fighting it out, fiercely vying for votes, that presents the anti-war movement with its best pressure point. And our pressure is badly needed.

For the first time in 14 years, weapons manufacturers are donating more to Democrats than to Republicans. The Dems have received 52 percent of the defense industry’s political donations in this election cycle–up from a low of 32 per cent in 1996. That money is about shaping foreign policy, and so far, it appears to be well spent.

While Clinton and Obama denounce the war with great passion, they both have detailed plans to continue it.

…

Crucially, the candidates have already shown that they are vulnerable to pressure from the peace camp: When The Nation revealed that neither candidate was supporting legislation that would ban the use of Blackwater and other private security companies in Iraq, Clinton abruptly changed course. She became the most important U. S. political leader to endorse the ban, scoring a point on Obama, who opposed the invasion from the start.

This is exactly where we want the candidates: outdoing each other to prove how serious they are about ending the war. That kind of issue-based battle has the power to energize voters and break the cynicism that is threatening both campaigns.

Let’s remember: unlike the outgoing Bush administration, these candidates need the support of the two-thirds of Americans who oppose the war in Iraq. If opinion transforms into action, they won’t be able to afford to say, “So?”

Also, you might want to sign on the A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq.

Circumstances alter cases, so
the daffodils may grow
in a garden border
or in a wood
wild as poke, disordered.
Rank in ranks, stood
the nodding yellow heads
like children needing beds.

Years ago the state road department asked permission to “daylight” the uphill curve of the road that runs by our place. In doing so, they uprooted several large old trees and, for reasons known only to them and God, set them in an old pond bed beside our tobacco barn. There they still stand, while many of their living brothers have been laid low by wind and ice.