Sherry Chandler

As a sort of follow-up (and possibly a rebuttal) to my discussion of Dorothy Allison the other day, I point you to this post on Windows Toward the World. Helen features an Allison quote and a “Seriously Dangerous” poem.

I was actually sort of disappointed that nobody stood up for Allison the other day. Surely some of you all have read her work.

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And while we’re talking about stories that must be heard, Susie Madrak features another one:

PINEHURST, N.C. A former Army medic made famous by a photograph that showed him carrying an injured Iraqi boy during the first week of the war has died of an apparent overdose, police said.

Joseph Patrick Dwyer died last week at a hospital in Pinehurst, according to the Boles Funeral Home. He was 31.

The photograph, taken in March 2003, showed Dwyer running to a makeshift military hospital while cradling the boy. The photo appeared in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts worldwide, making Dwyer became a symbol of heroism.

Dwyer laughed when a reporter told him of the photo and its widespread circulation, and he tried to deflect focus to his entire unit. His mother, Maureen, said then that the photo embarrassed her son because it singled him out while other soldiers were doing the same thing.

A review by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes today of Daniel Mark Epstein’s new book, The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage (Ballantyne Books):

One of Mr. Epstein’s primary goals, it seems, is to break with convention when it comes to the story of the Lincolns’ stormy domesticity. He takes a more generous, warmblooded view of this union than most biographers do. He appreciates the early attraction between the two of them, the sustained intimacy that lasted long into their lives together and the fond, even frolicsome nature of their shared communication.

Mr. Epstein is also mindful of the image-consciousness that they shared, a matter inadvertently underscored by this book’s cover image. It shows the Lincolns together, but it is a synthesis of two separate images; they always resisted being photographed together because of the great discrepancy in height between them. The president would joke about this as “the long and the short of it.”

“The Lincolns” relies less on new information than on a thoughtful, sometimes even presumptuous examination of existing material. For instance Mr. Epstein surmises that the abrupt hiatus in the couple’s courtship reflected Lincoln’s fear that he had contracted syphilis, rather than ascribing this breakup to Lincoln’s doubts about his love for Mary Todd.

If anything, according to this book, he loved her too much to marry her in 1840, not too little. She was described at that time, after all, as “the very creature of excitement” and “one who could make a bishop forget his prayers.”

There is even some novelty in Mr. Epstein’s willingness to write about Mary — or Molly, as her husband called her — as a mesmerizing creature rather than a harridan in the latter part of the marriage. Even after the Lincolns had been battered by the deaths of two sons and the immense public pressure of the presidency, he asserts, they were closely bound by Mary’s enduring (if sometimes troublemaking) involvement in her husband’s political career.

Epstein is atypical as a Lincoln biographer because he is less scholar than poet. He has published three books of poetry and biographis of Aimee Simple McPherson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lincoln and Whitman, and Nat King Cole.

Here’s copy from the publicity blurb:

She was witty, tempestuous, a Kentucky blueblood; he was brilliant, moody, a farmer’s son born in a log-cabin. They got married on a few hours notice in 1842, when he was thirty-three and she was nearly twenty-four.

…

Now Daniel Mark Epstein has produced an incisive and balanced portrait of the Lincolns, from their mysterious and troubled courtship in 1840 until his assassination in Ford’s Theatre in 1865. Of their twenty-two years of marriage, all but five were spent in Springfield, Illinois. This is the first biography to give due attention to the Springfield years: the close quarters of the Globe Tavern—their first dwelling; their joyful creation of a home together on the edge of town as Lincoln built his law practice and made his first forays into politics; their shared joys and sorrows as parents of four boys; their travels together to Washington, New York, Chicago, and Niagara Falls; their burning ambition as Lincoln achieved celebrity status during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and at last was elected to the highest office in the land.

The marriage that found a balance in small-town Springfield disintegrated in the cauldron of Civil War Washington. Epstein captures the glory and pathos of the White House years: the grandeur of Inaugural Balls and State dinners, Mrs. Lincoln’s social triumphs and failures, her susceptibility to mediums and sycophants after the death of their favorite child, Willie.

Here’s a sample Epstien poem at The Cortland Review.

I said the other day that I had given up on the short story, but that was twenty years ago and I think they may have changed since then. At any rate, I used to love the form and for years tried to write it.

Here is a nice definition of what short story should do from the Introduction to the Raymond Carver/Tom Jenks anthology, American Short Story Masterpieces (Dell, 1987), which collects stories from 1953-1986. (I think they’re out to prove me wrong):

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself. At this moment, if the writer has succeeded, there ought to be a unity of feeling and understanding. Or, if not a unity, at least a sense that the disparities of a crucial situation have been made available in a new light, and we can go from there. The best fiction, the kind of fiction we’re talking about, should bring about this kind of response. It should make such an impression that the work, as Hemingway suggested, becomes a part of the reader’s experience. Or else, and we’re serious, why should people be asked to read it? Further—why write it? In great fiction (and this is true, and we mustn’t fool ourselves that it’s otherwise), there is always the “shock of recognition” as the human significance of the work is revealed and made manifest.

Back in the 80s, I got stuck on the “why write it” question, and well I should have. I don’t have the story-tellers imagination. Which is not to denigrate my imagination. Just to define it. Writing poetry suits me and satisfies me.

I know a number of writers who try to double, writing poetry and fiction. But I really don’t think one writer can do both.

I’ll have to say that I’m not sure the Dorothy Allison story “River of Names” will “become part of my experience.” It shocked me and horrified me but I’m not sure that it changed me in any way. Time, I suppose, will tell.

Here are the first three paragraphs of James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” from American Short Story Masterpieces, ed Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks, (Laurel/Dell, 1987)

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn’t doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream. This would always be at the moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done.

When he was about as old as the boys in my classes his face had been bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it; and he’d had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy. I wondered what he looked like now. He had been picked up, the evening before, in a raid on an apartment downtown, for peddling and using heroin.

“Sonny’s Blues” dates from 1948 according to the copyright information in the anthology, though internet sources say it was first published in 1957. This is Baldwin’s take on Harlem youth at risk and it is a much darker picture than Evan Hunter’s in The Blackboard Jungle.

The image of the ever-melting ever-renewing block of ice captures the way it is with a parent (in this case an older brother) when a child is at risk. It’s this kind of thing makes me think you can have your (moving) pictures. I’ll take the 1,000 words.

When my son left home, he left some things behind, including some of his bathroom reading: several books of The Far Side cartoons, Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (ed. Tobias Wolff, 1994).

Curious, and maybe looking for a way to feel connected to my wandering child, I picked up the anthology and turned to the first story. It was Dorothy Allion’s “River of Names.”

Oh my soul and whiskers. What to make of this.

We were so many we were without number and, like tadpoles, if there was one less from time to time, who counted? My maternal great-grandmother had eleven daughters, seven sons; my grandmother, six sons, five daughters. Each one made at least six. Some made nine. Six times six, eleven times nine. They went on like multiplication tables. They died and were not missed. I come of an enormous family and I cannot tell half their stories. Somehow it was always made to seem they killed themselves: car wrecks, shotguns, dusty ropes, screaming, falling out of windows, things inside them…

…So I made a list. I told her: that one went insane—got her little brother with a tire iron; the three of them slit their arms, not the wrists but the bigger veins up near the elbow; she, now, she strangled the boy she was sleeping with and got sent away; that one drank lye and died laughing soundlessly. In one year I lost eight cousins. It was the year everybody ran away. Four disappeared and were never found. One fell in the river and was drowned. One was run down hitchhiking north. One was shot running through the woods, while Grace, the last one, tried to walk from Greenville to Greer for some reason nobody knew. She fell off the overpass a mile down from the Sears, Roebuck warehouse and lay there for hunger and heat and dying.

This nine-page story has in it so much violence and abuse, so much waste of human life, that it made me feel zero at the bone. A rare accomplishment for a short story. I have come to think of the form as a sort of dessicated thing, artfully put together but appealing only to the intellect. Like a poem by Alexander Pope, except perhaps without the wit. Short stories, I thought, have become vehicles for expressing middle class angst.

“River of Names” is way too full of blood to be dessicated and there is certainly nothing middle class about it. Though there may be wit and even satire, we’re a long way from Alexander Pope here. But surely this isn’t realism. Perhaps what we have here is a classic unreliable narrator. She says

I tell the stories and it comes out funny. I drink bourbon and make myself drawl, tell all those old funny stories.

Funny?

Surely this is a redneck personna pushed to the extreme of fable. Exaggerated and in your face. You want Southern Gothic. I’ll show you Southern Gothic.

I have a vague memory of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina being a sensation back in the 90s. It was a novel I always meant to get around to reading but somehow never did. A movie I didn’t want to see until I’d read the novel. Maybe I didn’t read it because I had small children then and lots of novels and movies slipped by me. Or maybe it was because I’ve become somewhat leery of Southern Gothic. What was art in the hands of Faulkner and O’Connor too often becomes formula in the hands of their heirs. If you’re a Southern writer, sometimes it seems like you feel an obligation to be more outrageous than the last guy. I can’t spend too much time in Baby Jane land.

Looking around for some way to add context to this disturbing story, I was sort of glad to find this hard-headed post, Bastard Out of Carolina Redux at Literacy, Culture, and the Teacher of Reading, reflecting on her reaction to finding “River of Names” on the school reading list:

When I was a teenager, I was a member of the Speech and Debate team. I competed in several categories, one of which was called OI - Oral Interpretation. We would stand with these little black binders and read prose and poetry pieces with dramatic effect and facial expression. I usually read Dorothy Parker stories (I was a sarcastic feminist in my teens, too), my teammates preferred the original Grimm fairy tales, and there was always a reading from Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

But Bastard Out of Carolina held a special place in the black mini-binders of the girls from St. Joseph’s High School, Brooklyn. It seemed that whenever a St. Joe’s girl was in your OI room, you heard a terrible story of rape, incest, beatings, poverty and the struggle for survival. I hated the St. Joe’s girls because their pieces were all alike, they all involved a gruff Southern man and a shrill girl begging for mercy, I knew there was the potential for fake tears, snot and gasping for air. It seemed so over-the-top, condescending to victims of the many separate acts of violence that all managed to sneak their way into ten minutes of prose, and it all sounded so melodramatic in a silent classroom.

I also hated the St. Joe’s girls because they usually won. I hated Dorothy Allison for writing for those pieces.

So when we read “River of Names” in class last night, I felt like a teenage girl in her Sunday best, shrinking back into my seat and saying goodbye to a Speech and Debate trophy. I wasn’t surprised by the content, or the fact it was “horrible” and “fascinating” in its depth. I knew what was coming. I heard the St. Joe’s version of the gruff rapist and the crying female in my head before the rape and crying began.

There is in fact rape and screaming in this story. Too much to comprehend almost. There is also lesbianism, though I wonder whether it might be lesbianism as refuge from the abuse of heterosexuality. And it does seem as though Dorothy Allison has got in the face of this New York teacher. Or maybe it was just those St. Joseph’s girls doing OI. She (I am assuming) continues:

So, how did I do with “River of Names” when we read it in class? Pretty well, actually. I began to see it for its structure, which I never fully appreciated when hearing it read. Reading it for myself allowed me to focus on the intertwining of past and present, creating a haunting feeling that focusing only on the horribly, fascinating events could never convey. I was able to connect the text, not to the St. Joseph’s girl standing before me. It wasn’t “her piece.” It reverted back to its rightful author and was something to be experienced by anyone that read it.

But still she has reservations:

Don’t think I suddenly want to start to the Dorothy Allison fan club, though. I still feel that the material can be too raw, and read melodramatically without understanding of the core of the cycle of violence, poverty and abuse. My relationships with my students, and the knowledge of their lives and stories, make these texts too real, and much less of the novelty they can become for the “fairy tale” reader. I’m far from the “fairy tale” reader.

I don’t enjoy reading these texts for the same reason I can’t watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I know Special Victims; they have names and stories and they sit in my class. To have them read these pieces may be cathartic, may provide them with strength, may even give them a starting place to understand themselves and the world. However, these pieces may reinforce their cycles, prove that these cycles are normal, and hey, if other people went through them and survived to write bestsellers, maybe others will be ok too having never broken the cycle. The use of literature as a tool to expose the reader to a familiar, new world does not work with some of my readers.

I don’t think “River of Names” is a fairy tale, though I can understand any teacher’s reservation in presenting this material to vulnerable students. It is beautifully structured and written. It is moving. It is shocking. It certainly shocked me out of my prejudices against the modern short story.

It is trying to tell us something serious about the waste that is poverty and ignorance.

The question in my mind, I guess, is does it succeed? Or will most people approach it like those St. Joseph’s girls, as a tall tale to win prizes with.

Mike Graves’s conversation with Georgia Green Stamper, the one I mentioned recording last week, is now posted on WUKY’s tonic and you can listen to it via streaming audio at the link.

The blurb for the segment reads like this:

Join tonic’s Mike Graves, Georgia Green Stamper, and a host of others for a two-part discussion about the author and WUKY commentator’s roots and how they led her to explore the history that shaped them.

That would make Leatha Kendrick and me a “host,” a role we can probably fulfill on odd Tuesdays. We contain multitudes. Leatha most assuredly has power, presence, and spirit enough for several ordinary human beings. Through the power of skillful editing, I sometimes sound a little intelligent myself.

Anyway, better to be “a host” than “and others,” a category where I often wind up in publicity blurbs.

The title, by the way, is a pun on the name of a local town, Stamping Ground, in western Scott County. Many European settlers found their way into Kentucky by way of buffalo traces and Stamping Ground was the site for a confluence of buffalo. But of course a “stamping (or stomping) ground” is also, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “a customary territory or favorite gathering place.”

Georgia writes mostly about her stomping grounds in her new essay collection <em>You Can Go Anywhere from the Crossroads of the World.

That’s the question Ursula K. Le Guin asks in the introduction to her collection Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (Roc, 1987), for which she won a Hugo Award and an International Fantasy Award. (Hear her read “She Unnames Them,” the final fable from that collection here.)

She answers it, in part, like this:

People to whom sophistication is a positive intellectual value shun anything “written for children”; if you want to clear the room of derrideans, mention Beatrix Potter without sneering. … In literature as in “real life,” women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itself, phallologically. That they are Other is … the foundation of language, the Father tongue. If Man vs. Nature is the name of the game, no wonder the team players kick out all those non-men who won’t learn the rules and run around the cricket pitch squeaking and barking and chattering!

…

Why do animals in kids’ books talk? Why do animals in myths talk? …Why does the tortoise say, “I’ll race you,” to the hare, and how does Coyote tell Death, “I’ll do exactly what you tell me!” Animals don’t talk—everybody knows that. Everybody, including quite small children, and the men and women who told and tell talking-animal stories, knows that animals are dumb: have no words of their own. So why do we keep putting words in their mouths?

We who? We the dumb: the others.”

All this by way of announcing that you can find the first three chapters of Morgan S. Williams’s anthropomorphic first novel Oseille at this link, downloadable for free as a rich-text file.

Morgan S. Williams is my son. He’s looking for a publisher.
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Note: In a degrees-of-separation kind of connection, Ursula K. Le Guin has a small chapbook of poems, I Am My Inheritance, in volume 28 of The Other Voices International Project and I have a small selection, October Grass, in volume 19.

Haven’t we won that little altercation yet?

Capitalist nations not only exploit their workers, but ruthlessly invade, plunder, and ravage one another. The profit system is responsible for it all.

— Eugene V. Debbs, quoted in Ernest Freeberg’s Democracy’s Prisoner (Havard, 2008), p. 26

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, the Socialists had a plan for stopping war, which they saw as the ultimate capitalist exploitation of the working class. When war was declared, Socialists would call a general world-wide strike, and without workers or warriors, the war could not go forward.

This grand plan hit a small glitch in the form of World War I. When war was declared, German workers chose national security over solidarity, and they were soon followed by workers in France and England.

Socialists in the United States still had some hope. Woodrow Wilson wanted to be a mediator for peace, and there was a sizable peace contingent in the country. The famous Chicago social worker Jane Addams was associated with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which had 40,000 members. Henry Ford was an active pacifist, though his efforts were met with ridicule. The American Union Against Militarism “proposed public ownership of armaments factories to remove the profit motive from mass destruction” (Freeberg p. 27). It was this latter group that spawned what became The American Civil Liberties Union.

But the war escalated. Wilson’s efforts to bring peace were rebuffed. The Germans sank the Lusitania and made some overtures to Mexico to form an alliance against the U.S. Wilson decided to begin arming the nation, which at that time had very little in the way of a standing army. He called his policy preparedness.

Not everybody was on board with the policy. Socialists still hoped for a universal disarmament overseen by some version of international governing body, a “United States of the World.” In May, 1915, they sent a delegation to meet with Wilson on this subject:

When the Socialist delegation called on Wilson, they were delighted to hear that he was already working on a “similar plan” to end the war and build a new international order founded on a league of nations. The president offered the same assurances to other pacifist groups. When a committee of liberals and socialists from the American Union Against Militarism visited the White House, Wilson disarmed them by taking them into his “intellectual bosom” and sympathizing with their fears. “I am just as opposed to militarism as any man living,” he told them, but he argued that the arms buildup was a tool that would allow America to lead the postwar world in the creation of an international peacekeeping body. The petitioners warned him that the “reactionary” forces of big business would use America’s new military force to pursue the “aggressive grabbing for the trade of the world.” Wilson professed to share their concerns, but insisted that a strong American army would have just the opposite effect, empowering the country to lead a “world federation” for the “international enforcement of peace.” Guns, bombs, and battleships were the unsavory means to a beautiful end, one long cherished by conservative peace advocates, liberal Christians, and Socialists alike.

“We all liked him,” the socialist editor Max Eastman reported, “and we all sincerely believed that he sincerely believes he is anti-miliarist.” (Freeberg, pp. 32-33)

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was famously tried for sodomy, convicted, and sentenced to two years at hard labor. He just as famously refused to flee England and escape the sentence that killed him. Peter Gay, in Modernism, asks why? And what did it mean for Modernism, of which Wilde was so vocal an advocate:

That art for art’s sake had originated in France did not make it any more acceptable to those not fortunate enough to be French. But in the end it is significant that Yeats, that powerful modernist poet, wanted Wilde to stay and face his accusers. That self-sacrifice, Yeats believed, did much for Wilde’s reputation: “he owes to that decision half of his renown.” This is not very convincing. Wilde’s lasting fame rests on his writings, far more than on his willingness to accept suffering he could have escaped. But Yeats had a point: the stake of avant-garde thinking in Wilde’s history was considerable. Granted, his martyrdom, like many martyrdoms, was largely in vain. Neither the autonomy of art nor the sovereignty of the artist was much advanced by it. But Wilde’s consistent aestheticism, his courage to be pilloried as an eccentric, became a wry kind of model for a few choice spirits who would carry their defiant modernist individualism into the twentieth century.

Wilde died, significantly enough in this context, in 1900.

And Robert Peake, if you read here, you should know that over time I have reconsidered my opinion of Stephen Fry’s portrayal of Wilde. He did rather sigh a lot, and whine. It was my affection for Fry clouding my judgment, I think.

And yet, I find when I picture Mr. Wilde in my mind these days he often seems to wear Mr. Fry’s rather distinctive physiognomy.

A poem from Mr. Wilde:

Impression du Matin

THE Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a Harmony in grey:
A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses’ walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and S. Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.

Then suddenly arose the clang
Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.

But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone

— Oscar Wilde, from Poetry, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)

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Note: The French title strikes me as a little precious but the poem itself is effective, if a bit romantic. Isobel Murray, in her introduction to the Oxford edition of Wilde’s Complete Poetry, says

Wilde the poet is rarely a metropolitan sophisticate: when he is, the metropolis has a flavour of Paris, rather than London.

Certainly true of this poem, which as it turns out is one that Murray singles out as being particularly Parisian in mood. Though the poem describes London, it is a London that sounds a lot like an impressionist painting of Paris. To me, anyway.

A certain irony in Oxford putting out a complete Oscar Wilde because the Oxford dons in their wisdom refused the gift of Wilde’s only volume of verse, Poems, that he self-published in 1881. Plagiarism was their cry, an accusation that followed this volume down into the late 20th Century, when critics decided to redefine it as “echoing.”

Certainly Wilde himself never apologized or acted in the least guilty about his verse. In a typical Wildean gesture, he is said to have used this “attractively” published volume as a variety of visiting card, especially in France.

Kentucky poet and novelist, Wanda Campbell, has written to announce the publication of her science fiction novel, Dragon’s Heir.

Wanda has established a new web presence to celebrate this publication. She can now be found at Wanda Darlene Campbell

Wanda Darlene Campbell wrote her first story in the back of a Bible at the age of nine. “I thought the blank pages were for me to add my story,” she says.

…

Dragon’s Heir was born as a result of a discussion started with a handful of students during an English lesson.

I first met Wanda at a Kentucky State Poetry Society meeting, where I got to hear her strong and moving poetic voice. It was a voice I could not forget. I’ve featured several of her poems here. Others can be found at The Other Voices International Project.

Later, we cemented our friendship when I sat in, the lone poet, on Lee Maynard’s most excellent fiction session at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. We’ve been friends ever since, and I am pleased as punch about this novel.

I am glad to see that Wanda’s poetry blog, Raven’s Shadow, will continue active. I’ll leave that link in my sidebar and update my link to Wanda’s web page on my Kentucky Writers page. I recommend you browse that list often.

I would like to take this announcement as an opportunity to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, that is, to share with you Wanda’s prose poem from the Mexico in the Heartland issue of New Madrid. I’ve talked about that important publication here and here, and about Cincos Maestros Michoacános, the art exhibit that inspired the issue. It was also this issue that got me started on my months-long contemplation of the other, in my response to Fred de Rosset’s interview in the issue.

Wanda’s poem is called “The First Mexican Hillbilly,” and she has graciously given me permission to reprint it here.

People talk about how Mexico is infiltrating the south now but Mexico has been infiltrating my family for a hundred years, ever since my great-great-grandfather José Massinario Pablio turned up in Gradyville, Kentucky, at the age of thirteen. An old newspaper clipping says he came back with a preacher who had served during the Mexican-American War. My father says that he lived with the preacher until he was grown, making shoes and bowls to sell just like he had in his homeland. He married Black-Irish Nancy. All we know about her is that she had two brothers, Abdolonomous and Isaac. On his wedding day, José changed his name to Joseph M. Franklin and signed his marriage license with an “X.” The clerk wrote “White” in as his race, but filed the document under “Coloreds” in the local courthouse, where it is still located.

None of us ever knew why he came here, only that he did and that he brought Mexico with him, then handed it down for five generations. My grandfather’s sisters were named Viola and Suez, and his brothers, Jim Isaac and Junis, were as brown as the soil they tilled, with not a hair on their bodies to speak of. Great-Uncle Junis, who is now eighty-six, tells me that he is hairless because he is Indian. “Yeah, Grandpa came from Mexico,” he says, “but he was Indian.” I think about what Uncle Junis says, and I understand how so many have robbed Mexicans of their Indian heritage. I can’t imagine Mexico without Native American ties. I can’t imagine my family without Mexico. My daddy has never seen Mexico, yet it has been beating in his heart for sixty-seven years. Mexico set the tone for my grandfather’s life, for my father’s life, and ultimately, for mine.

For me it was a piece of treasured heritage. For my father, it was a stigma. He was brown at a time when everybody in the south was black, white or Cherokee. There weren’t any categories for Mexican Hillbillies in those days, so his family got the shaft, not being excluded as blacks were but not being included as whites either. They were always the hired hands, the servants, playing second fiddle. Daddy used to get spanked by his uncles if he said any “Mexican” words or did anything “Indian.” They were trying to eradicate the label from our family. When I got to be a teenager, I tried to stick it back on because I felt we were being robbed of our identity. Maybe I believed that because my great-great-grandfather had kept his mother’s maiden name, some part of him didn’t want to completely forget who he was or had been in his youth. Or maybe it was just that in a nation of mixed people, I needed to identify with a group. I needed to belong. As far as I know, there weren’t any other Mexicans in these parts back then, and maybe just maybe, my great-great-grandfather was the first Mexican in the state. At any rate, he was here, and because he was, I am too.

Three years ago, I went to Mexico and gave a speech at a church in Spanish. I told the people there the story of my great-great-grandfather, and of how without Mexico and all of its culture, my family would never have existed. I told them about the wildflowers of southeastern Kentucky that had sprung from one stray seed the wind blew our way. Now every time I see a Mexican man working in somebody’s field, I think of my great-great-grandfather and wonder if he was a prophet, a foreteller of what would one day be commonplace.