Sherry Chandler

Dr. Margaret Palmer on the Colbert Report

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/261997/january-18-2010/coal-comfort—margaret-palmer

Mud Mothers

This morning, Allison Hedge Coke posted to the Wom-Po list a poem by Lenelle Moïse, “Mud Mothers,” which begins like this:

Mud Mothers

the children of haiti
are not mythological
we are starving
or eating salty cakes
made of clay

because in 1804 we felled
our former slave captors
the graceless losers sunk
vindictive yellow
teeth into our forests

what was green is now
dust & everyone knows
trees unleash oxygen
(another humble word
for life)

This poem reminded me that back on December 2, I mentioned Margaretta Mason Brown, wife of Kentucky’s first U.S. Senator, who wrote,to her husband that

the Monster Slavery may destroy the people of Kentucky before long [p. 57]

As I wrote then, Margaretta Brown was an emancipationist, one who favored a gradual freeing of the slaves. She made this statement because she was afraid of an uprising like that in Santo Domingo. She was afraid that the incendiary language of abolitionists would incite such a rebellion.

Once upon a time evangelicals were on the side of the angels, and in 1834, a particularly fiery abolitionist sermon by “a young Presbyterian minister, Mr. Davidson” in a church “to Galleries overflowing with Negroes,” caused Mrs. Brown to write to her niece:

The cause of gradual emancipation is gaining ground daily in the West, but these premature and violent measures, will have a tendency to create such a spirit of insubordination amongst the slaves, as will render it necessary to rivet their chains more closely in order to our self preservation, or they will be stimulated to take their cause in their own hands and the tragedy of St. Domingo may indeed be reacted here.

The passage above is from Helen Deiss Irvin’s Women in Kentucky. The paternalism of it makes me cringe, but it illustrates how the institution of slavery enslaved a whole culture. Look at this story from Irvin:

. . . Kentucky owners dreaded slave uprisings. Like other slaveholders, they feared poisonings and the hand raised against an owner that might begin some frightful massacre. [john W.] Coleman [author of Slavery Times in Kentucky] tells of a Lexington woman from Massachusetts, Caroline Turner, despised by whites for her insanely sadistic treatment of slaves. While she was whipping a young coachman in chains early one morning, he broke free and strangled her. Sympathetic as they had previously been toward the Turner slaves, Lexington citizens quickly closed ranks to hunt the young slave down and have him hanged. [p. 57]

It pains me to believe that the people of Haiti are still suffering because once they took their fates in their own hands. And yet, here is Pat Robertson illustrating that the memory of ignorant whites is long. If there is a devil involved here, I would say it has a white skin. How did such a man as this become the voice of evangelism, evangelism that once was on the side of freedom for all? I wonder how Mr. Robertson would react to being whipped in chains.

To learn more about the Haitian Revolution and how Robertson got it all wrong, see Juan Cole who reminds us that these things are never simple:

As Charles Tilly pointed out, all revolutions are multiple revolutions

Read more about the deforestation of Haiti here at the Alicia Patterson Foundation:

No matter how many environmental, agriculture and forestry experts in American and international aid agencies one talks with, there are no illusions that even the best techniques available today can save Haiti. It will never be restored to the richest jewel that adorned France’s colonial crown in the 18th century. The French brought a million African slaves to clear the forests for sugar and coffee. As a result, a huge part of Haiti’s precious woods were felled. This was followed by a procession of lumber companies in the 19th century that paid large sums to landowners and corrupt government officials for access to the forests. The Haitian peasantry also was in need of fuel, building materials and crop lands. They cut down more forests and ended up being blamed for the devastation, now in epic proportions.

(My emphasis)

To read more of Lenelle Moïse at her blog, where you will find links to donate to the Haiti earthquake fund.

__________
Added: Another good explanation of how Haiti came to be where it is today from The Guardian:

As Stephen Keppel of the Economist Intelligence Unit puts it, Haiti’s revolution may have brought it independence but it also “ended up destroying the country’s infrastructure and most of its plantations. It wasn’t the best of starts for a fledgling republic.” Moreover, in exchange for diplomatic recognition from France, the new republic was forced to pay enormous reparations: some 150m francs, in gold. It was an immense sum, and even reduced by more than half in 1830, far more than Haiti could afford.

“The long and the short of it is that Haiti was paying reparations to France from 1825 until 1947,” says Von Tunzelmann. “To come up with the money, it took out huge loans from American, German and French banks, at exorbitant rates of interest. By 1900, Haiti was spending about 80% of its national budget on loan repayments. It ­completely wrecked their economy. By the time the original reparations and interest were paid off, the place was basically destitute and trapped in a ­spiral of debt. Plus, a succession of leaders had more or less given up on trying to resolve Haiti’s problems, and started looting it instead.”

Forest as commodity revisited

Back in August, I did a post on forest as commodity. At that time, my friend Jeff Hess of Have Coffee, Will Write sent me a link to this article in the Washington Post about the struggles of a small independent logger in Alabama. Called Waiting for Work in the Silent Woods, the article shows another side to logging and to the farming of trees:

Everyone concedes that the days they’ve gone without work in May, June and July have been difficult.

“I thought I was gonna starve to death,” says Davis.

“I got a wife,” says Holloway. “I got a brand-new truck. And when we have to stay off a week at a time, I’m telling you, it hurts.”

“I got four young kids,” says Neal, digging his heels into the soft dirt.

“These last two to three weeks been rough,” adds Davis.

“You mean months!” Neal pipes in.

“Shoot, go back to Christmas,” says Benjamin. “Wouldn’t have been for Sunnyman, we wouldn’t have had any Christmas.”

“He put a turkey on the table and a couple dollars in our pockets,” says Neal.

Sunnyman slouches off toward a big tractor, checking its wheels.

“Wasn’t for Sunnyman,” Neal goes on, “whew, I’m telling you. We didn’t have but two days’ work last week and he still paid us.” For the whole week.

. . .

Experts say the downturn in the industry is cyclical, that it will come back around. It has been estimated that since the 1990s, this region has lost upward of 10,000 jobs in textiles and manufacturing to cheaper sites in Mexico. Unemployment in this area hovers at 22.5 percent. Alabama is the second-largest commercial wood-producing state in the nation, next to Georgia. The mills typically employ foresters who find landowners who want timber cut from their woods. Then the mill hires a logger such as Sunnyman, who is now saying, “I like being outdoors,” the Alabama wind on his face.

“I used to sell timber to six mills within a 100-mile radius of here,” he says. “But in the past year, three of those mills have closed. Harrigan Lumber, Browder Veneer and Weyerhaeuser. All those places took wood from me. It’s put the squeeze on me, I’m telling you.”

I wonder how many of those plants re-opened in China.

The last several months of 2009 were just a confusion of events for me and I lost track of this article. I found it while clearing things up in this quiet time between the Christmas celebration and the New Year — which will bring it’s own business.

I thought I’d just go on and share it with you.

It’s interesting to read the comments to this article. As one points out, these are not wild forest preserves, like the Daniel Boone National Forest, but managed pine plantations. On the other hand, I don’t think Weyerhauser was/is the most environmentally friendly of companies. Maybe an argument for online publication.

I wonder how things are for Sunnyman and his crew this Christmas.

A snowy woods in the 18th Century

In 1847-48, Daniel Drake, a prominent physician in the Ohio Valley, sat down to write a series of letters to his children about his life as an early settle in Kentucky. His parents came from New Jersey to Mays Lick, just a few miles down the road from where I now live, when he was three years old and he lived there until he left, at 15, to study medicine. The letters he wrote were subsequently published as Pioneer Life in Kentucky1785-1800. Drake was a charming writer, as many of these pioneers seem to be, if maybe just a little coy in apologizing to his children for rattling on about old times.

This morning I came across this passage, which seemed appropriately Currier and Ives for the Christmas season, and so I decided I’d share it here:

[In winter], my equipments were a substantial suite of butternut-linsey, a wool hat, a pair of mittens, and a pair of old stocking legs drawn down, like gaithers, over the tops of my shoes to keep out the snow which was quite as deep in those days as in later times and a great deal prettier. (Don’t smile, if you please, till you hear me out.) I do not mean that the separate flakes were more beautiful than at present; but that a snow in the woods in those days was far more picturesque than a snow in or around town as we see it now.

The woods immediately beyond our fields were unmutilated and not thinned out as you see them at present. They were, in fact, as nature received them from the hand of her Creator. When a snow had fallen without wind, the upper surface of every bough bent gracefully under its weight, and contrasted beautifully with the dark and rugged bark beneath; — the half decayed logs had their deformities covered up; the ground was overspread with a covering as pure and white as the souls of Nelly or Anna or Mary or Etta (sweet darlings, how I want to kiss them!). The cane as high as my head and shoulders, with its long green leaves made the alto relievo of the snowy carpet: — the winter grapes hung in what seemed rich clusters, from the limbs of many trees, which were decorated with tufts of green mistletoe, embellished with berries as white as pearls; while the Celastrus Scandens [Climbing bittersweet), a climbing vine hung out from others, its bunches of orange red berries, and the Indian Arrow wood (Euonymus Carolinensis) [E. Americanus, L., Strawberry Bush] below, displayed its scarlet seeds suspended by threads of the same colour. [pp. 76-77]

The bracketed interpolations were made by the editor, one Emmet Field Horine, M.D., of the old edition I found, published by Henry Schuman of New York in 1948.

Wild bittersweet used to grow in the fencerows of the country lane I lived on, but I haven’t seen it for years now. Farmers tend to clear out their fencerows. What he means by winter grapes I do not know. Back home in Owen County, I used to make wild grape jelly but we didn’t call them winter grapes. Cane, a form of bamboo, disappeared from Kentucky nearly as quickly as the buffalo.

For instance in central Kentucky in 1790, one canebrake was reported to be ‘‘15 miles long and nearly half as wide.’’ Today it is estimated that less than 2% of original habitat remains.

Overgrazing and cultivation are the primary culprits of native Arundinaria’s habitat loss. Decades of fire suppression have also been harmful in two ways: the canopy grows too thick for understory plants like river cane, and when fires do occur, they tend to be catastrophic and leave too much sunlight for the cane to reestablish itself.

I’m not sure what he means by Indian Arrow Wood, which is identified in my Google search as the wahoo (Euonymus atropurpurea), which is not the same as the strawberry bush, and neither is what we have in our yard and call a burning bush (Euonymus alata). Mistletoe is still around in abundance.

Butternut, I think, was a brown dye made from the bark of the butternut tree.

Links

First the heartbreaking: Dave Bonta on white-nose syndrome that is killing off our bats.

then the serious: David Ford’s interview of Helen Losse.

then the amazingly and amusingly techno: Quineau sonnets (via Matthew Lafferty)

And last, the just silly: Emergency Yodel Button (via Troy Teegarden)

Today, by the way, is the anniversary of the Gore vs. Bush election in 2000, the celebration of which puts us all in dire need of an emergency yodel button.

No business

Oh, it’s Saturday morning and I don’t have much to say except where’s my coffee cup?

And of course it’s in the microwave where I put it to warm it up.

You’d think I’d learn.

There’s a family in New York City who gave up microwaves — and toilet paper and heat, cars and even public transportation. I don’t know what to make of such experiments except that they make me feel vaguely guilty and depressed. I am in no position to do any such thing. In fact, it seems to me to be a gesture of the privileged.

The local Advertiser has a feature about a couple who have started a new business, Earth Positive Energy, LLC. They’ll install solar panels and wind turbines with the end of either going off grid or selling energy back to the power companies. They system “typically” pays for itself in 6-10 years. But before it pays for itself, I have to pay for it. In ten years, I’ll be 75. And in who knows what kind of hock to the medical system. Can I undertake that kind of debt?

So I hang clothes on the line when weather permits, recycle, compost, grow a garden, write micropoems and macropoems about birds. And feel depresses.

Anyway, we watched There’s No Business Like Show Business this week. It was sort of fun to watch Marilyn Monroe parody herself in numbers like “Heat Wave.” But of course she reveals herself to be just a sweet young thing in the end.

And what’s not to like about Ethel Merman belting out the title song.

Mitzi Gaynor is winning but Johnny Ray oversells.

Predictably enough, though, I preferred Donald O’Connor. Here’s his big solo number and not a mule in sight.

International Vulture Awareness Day Today

Every year in March our vultures return to the derelict tobacco barn to nest.  Here’s some photos from this year.

My Syphilitic Aunt, a Shandean and Southern Gothic presence in my childhood, warned me several times never to stand beneath a vulture’s nest.  The young will vomit upon any intruder they perceive as a threat.  So I am always very circumspect when our Turkey Buzzards are nesting.