Sherry Chandler

We who were born in the South called this mesh of feeling and memory “loyalty.” We thought of it sometimes as “love.” We identified with the South’s trouble as if we, individually, were responsible for all of it. We defended the sins and the sorrows of three hundred years as if each sin had been committed by us alone and each sorrow had cut across our heart. We were as hurt at criticism of our region as if our own name had been called aloud by the critic. We knew guilt without understanding it, and there is no tie that binds men closer to the past and each other than that.

— from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (Norton, 1994, first published 1949)

When Lillian Smith wrote these words in 1949, I was 4 years old so that, by definition, I grew up in a world very different than the one she’s describing. In my world, the struggle to end racism was more open, thanks in part to people like her. Socially and geographically, my experience was also very different.

Kentucky was a slave state that did not leave the Union. Instead it split internally so that the old saw about “brother against brother” was often literally true here. Take what may be the most famous example, George D. Prentice,¹ a poet who was editor of The Louisville Journal and an ardent abolitionist but whose son died fighting with the southern cavalry under General John Hunt Morgan.

Kentucky saw none of the great slaughtering battles on its soil. Instead the war was fought here as an insurgency by raiders like Morgan and by others not quite so legitimate. In an insurgency, it’s often hard to distinguish friend from enemy. Richard Taylor’s novel Sue Mundy addresses the way betrayal leads to betrayal in such an atmosphere. (Addendum: See By Neddie Jingo! on brother against brother.)

And last, but most significant for my experience, Kentucky was never economically dependent on huge populations of field slaves. Slaves themselves were a cash crop in Kentucky, extra “stock” sold South to feed King Cotton. Read your Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or, for that matter, come to the Kentucky Derby and sing a verse of the now bowdlerized “My Old Kentucky Home,” once also called “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night.” Here’s some of the verses you won’t sing:

The day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart,
With sorrow, where all was delight,
The time has come when the darkies have to part,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darky may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow;

A few more days for to tote the weary load,
No matter, ’twill never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

Weep no more my lady
Oh! weep no more today!
We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,
For the Old Kentucky Home far away.

Not exactly a glorious Southern heritage, a slave pining for the paradise that was slavery in Kentucky, but one that leaves the state with a very small population of African-Americans, especially in rural areas. So that, in the part of Owen County where I grew up, there was not even an Aunt Sally tucked into a little cabin out of the way somewhere. You had to go to the county seat, Owenton, to see a black face.

My father, who was a building contractor, had one black hand in his crew for a while. He didn’t come in the house and eat with us but then neither did any of the white crewmen. “Dillpickle” Whitney was known as a smart-aleck but nobody in my life felt inclined to do more than laugh at his audacity. Scorn enough in that laughter, perhaps, but I didn’t realize it then. (No particular scorn in the nickname, however. Many men had nicknames where I grew up. My own grandfather was called “Hick.”)

When our consolidated county high school was integrated without incident in 1959, Dillpickle’s son Billy was one of three six African-Americans in our freshman class. We, the last of the war babies, graduated a whopping 73 kids in 1963. Billy Whitney became our star basketball player without much comment that I ever heard. Georgia Green Stamper tells the story here. Our basketball team was called The Rebels, by the way, and still is. Our mascot was a Confederate soldier.

So I grew up with lots of tales of Southern sympathy but innocent of the kind of racism Smith describes in her memoir. I did not experience the kind of epiphany described by John Crowe Ransom’s granddaughter, Robb Forman Dew, on Maud Newton’s blog:

Among other things, I wanted to understand the surprising bit of meanness I had seen my grandmother display one summer afternoon when she and I were sitting on the front porch waiting for the horse and wagon that belonged to the black “vegetable man” who made his rounds of Natchez neighborhoods almost every day.

He was late that afternoon, and she had gone inside, but I waited still, because it was thrilling and exotic to me to have our vegetable selection brought to our door by a man driving a horse and cart. When he came into view, there I sat, and I waved and called to him to stop. I ran inside to alert my grandmother, but she had heard the jangle of his wagon and I turned and followed her until all at once she came to a dead stop when she spotted the vegetable man standing on the porch outside the screen of the front door.

It’s an incident that has haunted me all my life, even though I don’t remember exactly what she said, only that she berated him for being there, at her front door. Her voice and the words she said were stunningly harsh. So cruel, in fact, that I was frightened and also imagined that the man, in turn, would fly into a fury on his own behalf. But he backed down the stairs, literally with hat in hand, mumbling apologies, and he brought a selection of string beans and mustard greens and Kale around to the kitchen door where she met him again, still so angry that she said no more to him than to get out of her yard. He left the vegetables in a heap at the back door as a gift, and I don’t know if she ever bought anything else from him.

I experienced what you might call a more normal form of American racism, and so I had a gentler slower more intellectual awakening. I never had to see anyone I loved turn mean in quite this way. But I was warned that any venture forth to the really good schools of the North would see me ostracized for my accent and I did experience incidents like this in the years when I lived in Chicago:

Certainly I felt unappreciated and suffered my share of personal angst growing up within my immediate family. I had no idea, however, that I was universally misunderstood until I moved from Louisiana to Columbia, Missouri, where people actually asked me if in the South we had worn shoes when we went to school. At a dinner party my host turned to me suddenly and asked if it was true that the normal Southern diet was made up mostly of pork fat and greens. I was just married and only twenty-one years old, and so dumbfounded that I didn’t even realize the man meant to be rude.

Such experiences pushed me to identify Southern, to feel a bit of the fraught “loyalty” that Smith describes. To quote from Dew one more time:

To have loved people who were compromised by the nature of their society as well as whatever other demons besieged them is one of the remarkable conditions of being Southern.

Although anybody living in Louisiana or Alabama would no more consider Kentucky Southern than they would John Crowe Ransom’s Tennessee, I am nevertheless more at home in the world of Faulkner and O’Connor and Warren than in that of Hemingway or Updike.

So I have been making a big deal lately about identifying with The Other.² I will even admit to identifying a bit with Randy Newman’s Rednecks, though the vocabulary makes me feel antsy:

Now your northern nigger’s a Negro
You see he’s got his dignity
Down here we’re too ignorant to realize
That the North has set the nigger free

Yes he’s free to be put in a cage
In Harlem in New York City
And he’s free to be put in a cage on the South-Side of Chicago…

You can never take a Newman lyric at face value; he deals in compromised narrators. He gives voice to the voiceless, but it’s a voiceless we’d just as soon not have to hear. We often feel a little soiled just listening. Still, as By Neddy Jingo discovered several years ago, reading The Redneck Manifesto, rednecks see themselves as the last group in America it’s still politically correct to despise. “Class,” says Neddie. The culture wars are all about class. We’ve said it here, too.

Where does that leave me in dealing with my Confederate forebears? Or the members of my family who identify redneck. Stuck in ambivalence I guess.

Pity the human who feels no ambivalence. His name is Bush.

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¹Prentice was a Northerner who married a Southern woman. He’s a bit like Lincoln in that. I am wondering this morning if a case can’t be made that Lincoln’s marriage is somewhat emblematic of the whole culture war in the United States, a troubled but valuable union. Who knows how much calculation may have gone into Lincoln’s allying himself with the South this way. He did not want to go to war. But, for whatever reason, he was more or less married to the South. Mary Todd, whose family became her husband’s enemy, must have suffered terribly during the Civil War. Yet, it seems to me that history seems downright eager to heap comtumely upon her, to fault her for adding to Lincoln’s burden rather than standing stalwartly at his side.

²In How Publishing Likes Its Southerners, Maud Newton has another take on David Payne’s Oxford American article that started me off on this kick, including tales of Richard Ford (a man whose work I’ve not read) that set my teeth on edge. On this same subject, it’s worthwhile reading Robb Forman Dew’s post in its entirety for her explanation of why she doesn’t write about the south.

The battle escalates!

And it makes the NYTimes:

PORTSMOUTH, Ohio

An eight-ton rock rested for generations at the bottom of the Ohio River, minding its own business as time and currents passed. It favored neither Ohio to the north nor Kentucky to the south. It just — was.

Occasionally, when water levels dropped, the boulder would break the surface long enough to receive the chiseled tattoos of mildly daring people seeking remembrance. But it stopped playing peek-a-boo nearly a century ago, leaving only ephemera in its wake, including a sepia photograph of a well-dressed woman in a frilly hat, standing in the middle of the Ohio, on this rock.

Now, because of one man’s obsessive good intention, the fabled rock sits on old tires in the municipal garage of this river city, awaiting the outcome of a border dispute …

Last month the Kentucky House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding the rock’s return to its watery bed, with one of its members suggesting that a raiding party to Portsmouth might be in order. Not to be outdone, the Ohio House of Representatives is considering a resolution that asserts the rock’s significance to Ohio, and its speaker has said he is ready to guard the boulder with his muzzle-loading shotgun.

With slideshow. Though it seems biased toward the Ohio side, it’s got some great pictures of the rock.

And Charlie, they didn’t even give you and me credit for our great coverage of this item.

I’ve spent most of my life in territory marked out by the Licking River on the east and the Kentucky River on the south and west (it curves), both of which flow north and debouch into the Ohio on the north. The Ohio is a huge river, receiving drainage of a large part of the Appalachians in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky before it reaches Cincinnati, where it swells to nearly a mile wide. It was a major thoroughfare for western migration and how to get across it still figures into any planning for a drive north.

It was with considerable interest, then, that I learned recently that both the Licking and the Kentucky Rivers are a million years or so older than the Ohio. As is Eagle Creek, a considerable stream that meanders through Grant and Owen Counties where I grew up and where my family now lives. Eagle Creek forms the northern border of Owen County as the Kentucky River forms its western border, and I spent a good part of my childhood in, on, and around these streams.

Eagle Creek and its bottoms are so important in the settlement and economy of contiguous counties that my friend Georgia Green Stamper says that when her pioneering family found land on the banks of the Eagle, they saw no need to go further or ever move again. (You will find this story and others about the Hudsons of Eagle Creek in Georgia’s book of essays, tentatively titled You Can Go Anywhere and due out soon from Wind Publications.) My own family didn’t live on the creek itself but on Elk Creek, a feeder stream for which the Elk Creek Winery is named. Occasional plans to dam Eagle Creek to provide water for the urban areas of Scott and Fayette Counties have always met huge protests from local farmers.

You can see the current Lower Eagle Creek Watershed below. I found the map and pictures of Eagle Creek here. The gray area at the top of the map is the Ohio River. The Creek curls back around into Owen County actually it arises in Owen County south and east of Owenton, travels east into Grant and then curls back around west and into the watershed area you see here. That is the part I lived nearer the headwaters.

According to Stanley Hedeen in Big Bone Lick. The Cradle of American Paleontology (University Press of Kentucky, 2008), plate tectonics threw the Cincinnati Arch (or the Lexington Peneplain) up out of the Ordovician Sea. At that time, say 4 million years ago, the area was a “rolling flattish surface,” somewhat like the Bluegrass Region that is a part of the Arch that wasn’t scrubbed by glaciers. The Old Kentucky and Old Licking Rivers, which even then flowed north, were formed by it’s drainage. About two million years ago, as the map below shows, these two rivers joined somewhere around Hamilton, Ohio, and continued northward perhaps into the Erie Basin or perhaps into another preglacial river, the Teays. Meanwhile Old Eagle Creek may have flowed into the Kentucky at the current site of Big Bone Lick (in Boone County).

Map from Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick, adapted from James T. Teller, “Preglacial [Teays] and Early Glacial Drainage in the Cincinnati Area, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana,” Geological Society of American Bulletin 84 [1973]:3679, and Frank R. Ettensohn, “The Pre-Illinoian Lake Clays of the Cincinnati Region,” Ohio Journal of Science 74 [1974]:215.

You can see the extent of the Cincinnati Arch in Kentucky in this map from the Kentucky Geological Survey. That horseshoe (ahem) around the Ordovician defines the Bluegrass Plateau.

And this is the way things stood until the first of the Pleistoscene Ice Age glaciers, the Pre-Illinoian, started pushing south. That devil really tore up jack. It was like a big dam coming down from the north. It filled up the Old Kentucky River and all the other north-flowing streams draining between Cincinnati and the Appalachians and turned them into lakes. And as the lakes overflowed into one another, voilá, the Ohio River. You can see from the map below that the peculiar curve of the Ohio in northern Kentucky is pretty much the same as the curve of the glacier. The glacier also pushed up some pretty big hills out of what once was the plain around Cincinnati.

The Pre-Illinoian covered Big Bone Lick and pushed Eagle Creek southward into approximately its current bed. The Ohio cut its present channel as the glacier retreated.

Map from Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick, adapted from Louis L. Ray, “Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology of the Glaciated Ohio River Valley—A Reconnaissance Study,” U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 826 [1974], plate 1

Through it all, though, Big Bone Lick stayed put. Somewhere in all the glaciation, it formed its own drainage stream, Big Bone Creek, and it was always a site that attracted mammals to its salt spring. Hence its name. It has also attracted Native Americans and colonists who distilled its salt, tourists who sought the healing powers of its waters, amateur paleontologists, including Thomas Jefferson, who carried off its fossils, and most lately, creationists who wanted to build their museum beside it to make some kind of point. Fortunately, that last scheme was thwarted.

No particular reason for telling all this except that it fascinated me and maybe illustrates the magnitude of change we may see as the globe warms. If you want more information, visit Kentucky Geological Survey’s Fossils of Kentucky and other links on the page.

Update: Harry says he’s already getting hay fever over there in England and links to this article in the Telegraph:

Traditional British winters no longer exist and spring should be brought forward because the seasons have changed so much in recent years, according to the curator of Kew Gardens.

While long, hard winter freezes which were once commonplace are now gone, trees traditionally seen as harbingers of spring are awakening months early.

Dr Nigel Taylor, curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, said the changes were significant this year because they had affected hardy, woody plants, not just bulbs.

English Hawthorn, also known as May for flowering in that month, was already in leaf in late January, two months early. It may now flower before the end of this month.

Both Blackthorn and Common Ash are already in flower. Daffodils, crocuses and snowdrops are also early this year according to the gardens’ latest data.

So. I got all that rant about Obama off my chest yesterday and woke up this morning feeling considerably more charitable toward the man. Obama is fine and I’m proud that he’s a Democrat.

But I am annoyed by the odor of sanctity that has grown up around him as though he were some sort of secular saint.

Well, maybe not so secular. A Hindu physician and naturalized American of my acquaintance was offended by Obama’s declaration of Christianity. He saw it not so much as Obama’s defending himself against the Astroturf accusation that he’s Muslim as a cave-in to the religious litmus test for any political candidate in the United States. Not every citizen in the country thinks just being Muslim, or even atheist, is treason. And the Founding Fathers were against any kind of religious test for politicians.

And I am becoming very annoyed with this whole Kennedy mystique, what one might call the Sword in the Stone test.

It’s incredible to me that nearly 50 years on, we’re all still looking to John F. Kennedy as our model of a hero-king.

I was sixteen years old when Kennedy was elected, and though I had kept my head about Elvis and Ricky Nelson and James Dean, I was madly in love with JFK. My father, who had lived through World War II and had more idea of the Kennedy-family history, was not so enamored but I only saw that as one more reason to hold him in contempt. I was a teen-ager after all.

Now I’ve become my father.

Even John F. Kennedy was not John F. Kennedy.

This same Hindu physician is wont to rant at me that the United States is sorely lacking in leadership. Well, I can’t argue with that. And I realize that that is what we’re all looking for in Obama, a hero who can inspire us the way we like to think we remember JFK did.

But while I think politicians are do very necessary work and are held to an unrealistic standard, I am becoming more and more convinced that leaders do not often come from among the politicians. Or the soldiers for that matter. Leaders come from the people. And they do not necessarily look like heroes. Men like Martin Luther King, Jr. Al Gore (post politics). Women like Susan B. Anthony. Rosa Parks.

It takes, as Hillary Clinton so infamously said, a politician like Lyndon Johnson to implement a dream like Martin Luther King Jr’s. But it’s wrong to expect politicians to be the heroes.

Look where that got us with George W. Bush.

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Third thoughts department: Here’s an interesting look at Obama’s Kenyan roots. I’m not real sure what to make of this but apparently Kenya is more than just an exotic backdrop to Obama.

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Fourth thoughts: Sometimes I think most of the pundits and media types would rather have any man, be he black, white, or purple, than a mature woman for president.

Thanks to Rebecca Clayton at Pocahontas County Fare for finding out that another creationist museum seems to have financial troubles:

DALLAS, Texas (AP) — A Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction.

The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder.

“If it sells, well, then we can come another day,” Joe Taylor said. “This is very important to our continuing.”

Heritage Auction Galleries says the skull is estimated to be 40,000 years old, and projects it will fetch upward of $160,000. The artifact discovered in La Grange in 2004 is believed to be the largest of its kind, Heritage spokesman David Herskowitz said….

Claims on the museum’s Web site include that Noah took dinosaurs aboard his ark….”We’ve struggled so long here just to keep this thing going,” Taylor said. “We’re kind of losing interest. You can just tread water for so long.”

As Rebecca said, it’s a case of natural selection. No ark in sight to rescue these drowners.

Though I hate to think of a mastadon head going on the auction block to keep this place open.

from May Sarton The House by the Sea: A Journal (W. W. Norton, 1977):

Sunday, July 18^th [1976]

…We did stay up to hear [Jimmy] Carter’s acceptance speech [at the Democratice National Convention] and I’m glad we did. In bed afterward I thought that what he represents is the gentle revolution I talked about in my commencement address at Clark last year. The words “simple” and “compassion” were often used by him, and simple compassion is something we have not seen in government for a very long time, since Lincoln. It is hard to imagine what it will be like, if he is elected—the sense of a real new beginning.

I happened upon this passage on Tuesday morning, when the narrative of Obama’s inevitability was at its height, and reading it, I couldn’t help but pause to reflect how many of these shining men we’ve elected (or tried to elect) in my lifetime. How many gentle revolutions. How many mornings in America.

And how, in the end, it has usually not been the President who shaped events but events that shaped the President.

I don’t love my country any more or less now than I did when I was sixteen and star-dazzled by John Kennedy. It’s like family. I was born into it, I’m in it and of it, for good and ill.

But I have lost my faith in and my need for heroes.

The woman who moved Hillary to tears, a woman of my own age, said she voted for Obama because he moved her to tears with his promise of a new beginning.

I’ve been moved to tears by an episode of “Laverne and Shirley.”

I want some reason to vote for Obama other than his youth and golden tongue. Something more than sentiment and nostalgia.

Or, for that matter, the fact that he’s a socially acceptable black man, one we could elect and pet ourselves on the backs for our liberalism without too much fear that we’ll have a White House full of dreadlocks and rap lyrics.

What’s more I want some reason not to vote for Hillary other than press-corps schadenfreude. Something more than the conventional narrative of a cold manipulative bitch who can somehow cry on demand.

I don’t know whether it was Hillary’s emotion or her good ground organization, or maybe a little bit of both, that won her New Hampshire but I’m glad she won it.

I’m glad the woman showed that she could stand up to the fight. I’m glad we’ll have no coronation this year. I’m glad we’ll have a real primary. I’m glad we’ll get a longer look at the candidates before one is chosen. I may even have some hope that I’ll get to cast a meaningful vote this year.

I don’t want the press corps choosing my presidential candidate. And neither, apparently, did the people of New Hampshire.

The Creation Museum is in the red? Financially? From Answers in Genesis:

As the year draws to a close, I’m asking you to pray diligently about how large a gift you can give to support AiG’s year-end ministry and start 2008 strong.

We need to raise $400,000 by December 31 to finish the year on-budget—armed to stand as effective witnesses for Christ against Satan’s attacks while 2007 closes and a new year begins. I have no doubt we can reach that goal, if every person who truly wants to see the world acknowledge the truth of God’s Word will reach out with one final, generous gift in these last few weeks of 2007.

Pray to find how God wants to use you in this situation…

I fear that God wants to use me to laugh uproariously.

Mad Magazine apparently finds the museum risible, too. They’ve listed it as #14 in the 20 dumbest people, events, and things of 2007

Links from Bluegrass Report.

Here’s a holiday tradition you might like to share. It’s The Scotsman’s Haggis Hunt:

The temperature is plummeting. The frosts of winter nestle on the moors. And the steam is rising from massed ranks of the haggis hunters.

At haggishunt.com we are reviving a fine old Scottish tradition: the hunting of the haggis.

The American Heritage Dictionary (how would it know?) says a haggis is:

A Scottish dish consisting of a mixture of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal.

Not so, says The Haggisclopedia:

The most common mistaken belief about the haggis is that it is some kind of pudding made from sheep innards. This somewhat macabre idea dates back many centuries. Its origins lie in a Pictish fertility ceremony which featured a parade of creatures known to produce large numbers of offspring. The haggis was one such animal. However, as hunting techniques were not as sophisticated as they were then and - for reasons explained in The Haggis in Scotland’s History - haggis numbers were low, the Pictish priests often had to make do with a model for these ceremonies. Said model haggis was made from an inflated sheep bladder, hence the myth.

To facilitate the hunting of the haggis, The Scotsman has mounted ten web cams in places like Loch Ness (you might see Nessie, too), Princes Street in Edinburg, Leicester Square in London, and Times Square in New York. So now you can hunt the haggis in your pajamas. When you spot one, report it and your name will be entered into a drawing for prizes like a weekend at the Gleneagles Hotel (think golf) or a full line of Haggis merchandise.

Tired of hunting, you can play haggis games, like Farquhar’s Revenge (Shockwave), otherwise called bash the haggii, and Drop the Haggis (Flash), in which you have to help Farquhar catch the falling haggii while avoiding the drops of rain.

Or you can just have fun watching the web cams.

I stole these neat graphics from the haggishunt.com

Brian McLaren, author of Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope had this to say recently at the TPM Café bookclub discussion:

…those of us who are Christians have too often lost the plot of the Bible and the life of Jesus.

…

It’s as if religious people, among whom I guess I would be counted, have got a boxful of puzzle pieces (the stories and verses of the Bible), but somebody switched lids on us so we’re trying to assemble them according to the wrong picture. As a result, we read the Bible and articulate our faith primarily as an answer to the question, “How do we get individual souls into heaven after we die?” Instead, I’ve become convinced that the primary question that lies behind the Biblical text, and the life of Jesus, is more like this: The world is in a mess because of human ignorance, greed, lust, pride, bigotry, injustice, and so on. What is God doing, and what can we do, in response?

…

So, working from the puzzle-lid they’ve been given, many religious folk, when they enter the public arena, predictably crusade about primarily personal sexual issues and tend to ignore systemic issues like institutional racism, economic injustice, militarism, and environmental plundering. And that infuriates – rightly, I would say – progressive people who see how important these social and systemic issues are. They resent – rightly, I would say – the implication that the religious people are “moral” and “values-oriented,” when really, the progressives are no less concerned about morality and values: it’s just that they’re tending to focus on more social and systemic dimensions of morality.

But if “religious people” have got off track a bit, according to McLaren, so have those who are secular:
Read the rest of this entry…

The Ship of Fools is offering a line of gifts for the Twelve Days of Kitschmas, including the St. Sebastian Pin Cushion, the Maria Memory Stick, Christ on a Bike, and the post-ultimate gift, for the 13th day of kitschmas the walled nativity:

We give you the Walled Nativity, a none too gentle reminder of the 230-mile, six-metre high wall, topped with barbed wire and lined with guard towers, that encircles Palestine – and Bethlehem. As its purveyors, the Amos Trust, say, with not a little understatement: “This is a nativity set with a difference. In 2007 the wise men won’t get to the stable.”

At £12 for the small version, and £50 for the large, church version, the Walled Nativity is made all the more poignant for being made by impoverished wood-carvers in the town where Jesus the carpenter was born.