Sherry Chandler

The winners write the history

From Colin G. Calloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007):

America’s pioneer heritage continues to be credited with generating many of America’s core values, and its stories form a central part of the nation’s history. But the stories and the values they carry emerged over time. Elizabeth Perkins, in her study of historical experience and memory in the Ohio Valley, notes that as the original combatants died off, new generations of historians and writers “shaped their accounts along increasingly racist and nationalistic lines.” The settlers’ own stories were “often tinged with ambivalence or regret,” but “later conquest narratives breathed moral certainty.” Pioneers were heroes, Indians inhuman. A long and bloody war that sometimes hung in the balance now became “the inevitable triumph of a superior race.” . . . But what if our pioneer forefathers also butchered Indian families, stole Indian lands, broke treaties, desecrated the environment, and destroyed socieities that were truly free and egalitarian?

. . . Many historians . . . insist that it is essential to paint as full a picture as possible of the past and to consider multiple historical experiences; otherwise, we perpetuate a mythic past that offers little guidance for the real world. History and humans, even in America, have their dark sides. Indians had no monopoly on cruelty, vengefulness, and treachery, and no one has a monopoly on courage and love of freedom. [176]

Such a sane view, in what often seem to me insane times.

Now even the Native Americans are being co-opted in the name of propaganda and patrioteering. I understand that Glenn Beck found a couple to stand behind him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

A “common man writ large”

I must tell you about one more sequence of narrative sonnets I’ve been reading this summer, Richard Taylor’s Rail Splitter, Sonnets on the Life of Abraham Lincoln (Larkspur, 2009). This collection of 55 sonnets was begun in response to a call from the Kentucky Arts Council that each of the Kentucky poets laureate contribute poems for an anthology celebrating Lincoln’s bicentennial in 2009.

Occasional poems are notoriously difficult, especially about a figure as iconic as Abraham Lincoln. I would hazard that more books, plays, movies, have been produced about Abraham Lincoln than about any other figure from American history. However, I can’t think of anyone better qualified to write such poems about Lincoln. Richard Taylor is a poet immersed in Kentucky’s history. In addition to his several collections of poetry, he has written Sue Mundy (Univ Press of Kentucky 2006), a historical novel about one of Kentucky’s notorious Civil War guerrillas and Girty (Wind, 2006), an experimental combination of poetry and prose about the life of the Revolution’s “white Indian.” With Neil O. Hammon, he has co-authored a historical study of the American Revolution in the west, Virginia’s Western War 1775-1796 (Stackpole Books, 2002).

I have talked here about sonnets as a vehicle for strong emotion, but Richard’s sonnets strike me as more quiet and philosophical. These are not “voice” poems. Impossible to do poems in the voice of Lincoln, whose words are so widely recorded and whose life is so often enacted. The point of view in these sonnets is strictly third person. We are outside, looking in. We are two centuries on, looking back at a time of high passions through the calm lens of the historian. We look not just at Lincoln but at a range of characters: Frederick Douglas, Cassius Clay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Keckly, Walt Whitman. McClellan, John Wilkes Booth.

These are larger-than-life characters who talked a lot in their own right.

Richard uses his sonnets almost in the service of anecdote, of parable, of good-humored folk tale, almost in the way Lincoln himself is thought to have done. These poems don’t try to transform our view of Lincoln but they do try to show us glimpses of the real human being. The last five sonnets in the sequence, perhaps the best poems in the book, focus on our mythmaking. Poems with titles like “Theories about Who Knew Lincoln Best,” “The Shaping of an Icon,” “Losing the Diamond in the Stew,” and

The Tyranny of Myth

Lies and fabulations cling to the great of soul
like starlings to fresh excrement of crows. We thrill
in revelation, marvel at the gods we find in things,
each splinter of his natal logs a portion of The Cross.

. . . Myths father myths, Lincoln himself might
tell us, tall tales, tales taller. Truth, in the telling,
extends beyond what can with certainty be told.
The cabin he was born in was any cabin, crude,
the rails in question any that might serve to fence.

Larkspur Press has handset this limited edition book, which was then printed on a hand-fed C & P using Mohawk Superfine paper and handbound. Design, composition, printing and binding were done by Leslie Shane, Carolyn Whitesel, and Gray Zeitz. The book is decorated by wood engravings cut by Wesley Bates and printed from the wood.

Lincoln himself might have felt at home with this book designed, not just for slow reading, not by a great corporate press, but as a work of art made by common folk. Let me end this post with the last couplet in the sequence:

Lincoln, choking on “Great Captain,” might feel
more at home with “common man writ large.”

Anniversaries

It’s ours, today, but it’s also the anniversary of the first publication of Walden.

In which spirit you might want to read:

“Off the Grid”: The growing appeal of going off the grid

America Goes Dark

What the Great Recession Has Done to Family Life

Failed State

Hunters

From Colin G. Calloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007):

White hunters did not behave like Indian hunters. In Europe, hunting was the sport of gentlemen; hunting for subsistence was regarded as poaching. In North America, the gentry classes worried that it might indicate a reversion to an earlier, more “savage” state of development. Almost all backcountry settlers hunted, supplementing their crops and livestock, and they learned techniques from the Indians. In their dress, appearance, ways of living, ways of fighting, and the embryonic communities they erected, they displayed so many similarities to Indians that they worried eastern colonial authorities and sometimes shocked eastern travelers. For backcountry settlers as for Shawnee Indians, prowess as a hunter became an essential marker of manhood. But backcountry settlers rarely adopted or observed the morality of Indian hunting values. They paid scant regard to rituals and behavior the Indians said were vital if the game were to continue—game was so bountiful it was inconceivable that its supply might be finite. For Euro-American hunters killing game provided food and hides and demonstrated their mastery over the animal kingdom. They felt no kinship with animals as persons of other-than-human-form and saw no need to display respect, offer prayers, or give thanks to the animals they killed, let alone ask their forgiveness. [pp. 49-50]

As a result of all this hunting, the buffalo were wiped out of Kentucky before the end of the 18th century. The great herds that tramped the traces (essentially giant cow paths) that made the backwoods highways gave way to domesticated cattle. Today I find Kentuckians who are surprised to learn that buffalo ever inhabited Kentucky. They think of them as plains animals, I guess because of Hollywood images of great stampeding buffalo herds.

Fences and the European style of ownership changed the landscape and, as Calloway points out, changed also the meanings of the landscape.

Here is a selection from “Cottonwood” from Richard Taylor’s Girty (re-issued by Wind Publications, 2006):

I feel them before I hear them, hear them before I see them. Buffalo. Hundreds, maybe thousands of buffalo spilling over the rim of hills, thick as black bees when the locusts flower. I am filling my canteen at the spring when it happens. Ground under me begins to quake and tremble. I feel thunder in my ribs, a thumping as if my body were the stretched skin of a drumhead. Then the springwater begins to shimmy, just quivers in its pool, blurring the bottom out of focus. I hear something like the rush of wind through leaves before a cloudburst, a rumbling, troubled sound, but louder, tenser, charged with authority. It can’t be weather, for the sky is blank, cloudless.

Then off to the east I spot a puff of white dust on the horizon. It blossoms toward me, the low roar growing with the bloom which yellows as it nears. I can make out details now, the curly heads packed close to form an unbroken wall of hooves and humps, horns lowered and glossed among the black bodies, thick winter coats not shed yet. The size of them. Some bulls must be over 6 feet from hoof to hump, some the length of two ponies.

I am in the tree now, a cottonwood, 20 feet above them. I cannot see the ground for buffalo, for tons of hides and huffing steaks. . . . No grunts or whines come from them. Rather, the only sound is their weighted hooves, so many falling stones, and these crowd my ears to popping. Each is intent on motion, on keeping his place in the herd. A few feet away, the leaders swerve slightly, weave around my tree, and join again, still running, never once breaking stride. This is done routinely with that strange grace shared by bulky things and dancers.

Now I think of my horse, the stray I haltered a few weeks ago outside one of the river settlements, a sorrel mare socked white to her shanks. But too late. Before drinking at the spring, I tethered her to a sapling a dozen or so yards away. She is absolutely frantic. Her eyes are bugged out of her head and she is bleeding at the mouth where the bit has cut her. As the herd bears down on her, she whinnies her death song, a keening that cuts me like a woman’s shriek, like the first screeches of an animal in a trap. Shrill and terrifyingly human. It’s the last sound she makes as tree and horse drown in a black torrent.

. . .

Twenty minutes it takes them to pass.

Simon Girty was Daniel Boone’s evil twin in the mythology of the Ohio Valley frontier. Richard Taylor fictionalized the story of his life in prose and poetry. Girty is a brilliant hybrid from a man who has been immersed in Kentucky’s history most of his life. I strongly recommend it to you.

The unholiness of holy war

I have been reading old New Yorkers again, as is my wont when my friend sends me a care package. This week, in addition to some fascinating archaeological study of the Donner party and some surprising revelations about the Little House books, I was absorbed by Jill Lepore’s Plymouth Rocked, an article that is basically a review of historical treatments of the Pilgrims.

Given my interest in the interaction between indigenous peoples and the European settlers of North America, it will come as little surprise that I was most interested in this article’s take on King Philip’s War, one of the bloodiest and least known of our American history. I deal a little bit with King Philip’s War and how it contributed to our national mythology and the literature of captivity myths in this post.

What interests me in Lepore’s article is the role King Philip’s War played in our sense of what you might call Manifest Destiny as holy war.

In proportion to population, King Philip’s War was one of the deadliest wars in American history. More than half of all English settlements in New England were either destroyed or abandoned. Hundreds of colonists were killed. Thousands of Indians died; those who survived, including Philip’s nine-year-old son, Massasoit’s grandson, were loaded on ships and sold into slavery. Because the conflict was, for both sides, a holy war, it was waged with staggering brutality. New England’s Indians fought to take their land back from the Christians, mocking their praying victims: “Where is Your O God?” One, having killed a colonist, stuffed a Bible into his victim’s gutted belly. Puritans interpreted such acts as a sign of God’s wrath, as punishment for their descent into sinfulness. Not only had they become, over the years, less pious than the first generation of settlers; they had also failed to convert the Indians to Christianity. The Boston minister Increase Mather asked, “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us, when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”

Reading those scarlet letters, Puritans concluded that God was commanding them to defeat their “heathen” enemies by any means necessary. For the English, all restraint in war, all notions of “just conduct,” applied only to secular warfare; in a holy war, anything goes. Ministers urged their congregations to “take, kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption, &C which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus, and not to pity or spare any of them.” Such a policy, then as now, breeds nothing if not merciless retaliation. As a Boston merchant reported to London, the Indians, in town after town, tortured and mutilated their victims, “either cutting off the Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head of Skin and Hair, and hanging them up as Trophies; wearing Men’s Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks, and Stripes of their Skins which they dresse for Belts.”

After the blood bath was over, Lepore says the Pilgrim’s repented of their savagery.

I suppose in those days as in these, the brutal over-reaction was born out of terror.

But the lesson to be learned here is one we never ever seem to learn. Or one we have to learn over again with each generation.

May 4, 1970

Let me also bring Charles Whitt’s poem up out of the comments:

Kent Revisited

There was a lengthy inquiry,
and when it was over
they said no one was to blame.
It was just one of those things.

Like when the old woman
was found frozen to death
and her electric meter in custody
in a warm room.

—Charles M. Whitt

I was 25 years old. I was newly divorced. I had lived through the assassinations of John F and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Watts Riots. The Civil Rights Marches. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I had seen most of the boys and young men in my life living under that Sword of Damocles called the draft and the Vietnam Police Action.

My entire youth was marked by tragedy. I don’t think I realized at all what a tragic event occurred at Kent State.

&

As a graduate of the University of Kentucky, College of Arts and Sciences, I am wont to receive their slick promotional magazine, called “&” (For A&S, I think). Sometimes I read it, most times I just page through and look for people I know. For example, the latest issue, Spring 2010, announces that Frank X. Walker has joined the Department of English as an associate professor to teach Creative Writing. He will bring Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture under the UK aegis.

I hope it has better luck than Wind, the magazine. UK took Wind under its wing a few years back, after which it became a student publication and now it seems to have disappeared.

But that isn’t why I’m here.

I’m here to tell you that & for Spring 2010 also has a short item about Ron Eller’s new(ish) book from University Press of Kentucky, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. The book won the V.O. Key Award for the outstanding book on Southern Politics in 2009 & the Weatherford Award for Nonfiction in 2009

And I’m here to pass on this quotation from Eller:

The idea of Appalachia has played a major role in how public policies have been establilshed over time. Appalachia has always been a foil for how urban Americans want to define society and culture. It allows those who view urban life as a positive outcome of American’s scientific and technological progess to represent Appalachia as backward and unsophisticated. On the other hand, for those people who don’t like urban life, Appalachia is rural bliss, something to be preserved and valued for its rusticity.

Both these “ideas” are wrong, of course.

Eller continues:

Appalachia, because of the way that it has been mythologized, is a place where we see flagrant injustice to land and people. It’s a representation of how we’ve chosen to develop society and how we’ve chosen to interact with the natural world around us.

And it’s a representation in which we don’t fare very well.