Sherry Chandler

The plantation wife

Helen Deiss Irvin (Women in Kentucky) forwards a version of southern culture/economy that I’ve heard elsewhere: that however frivolous the plantation daughters might be, however dashing and high flying the men, plantation wives were in fact the ones who ran the big plantations:

. . . a distinction must be made among wives and daughters of the wealthy. . . . Wives of large landholders, however, had heavy responsibilities. They might work harder than their husbands, although this fact they self-effacingly concealed. While many landholders devoted themselves to gambling, hunting, and sometimes the pursuit of women, their wives saw to it that the farms produced and the the slave work force was healthy and cared for.

One such hard-working woman was Lucretia Hart Clay. While Henry Clay advanced his career in Washington, she spent most of the time in Lexington, running “Ashland.” A hemp and stock plantation, “Ashland” made use of fifty to sixty slaves, the responsibility of Lucretia Clay.

Graced by a free and easy attitude toward money, Clay signed notes for friends rather casually. He also gambled for high stakes, once losing eight thousand dollars . . . and winning it back in one evening’s play. Money did not worry him: that was Mrs. Clay’s problem, and she managed the plantation with skill and frugalilty. Mother of eleven children, she found time to sell—often in person—butter, egges, chickens, and vegetables to the Phoenix Hotel and other Lexington hostelries. Clay appreciated her industry, which was good political capital as well, and said of her: “Again and again she saved our home from bankruptcy.” [pp. 33-34]

(I’m not sure what’s with the quotation marks around “Ashland.”)

Rebecca Smith Lee provides us with a description of Mrs Clay in her biography of that Boston bluestocking Mary Austin Holley (University of Texas, 1962):

She liked Lucretia Hart Clay, a small auburn-haired, friendly woman, who was a little older than herself. Lucretia had been no beauty even in her youth, but the years had bestowed on her the poise and dignity that were her birthright. She had married for love at sixteen, and was still devoted to her famous husband in a realistic sort of way. Their house was set in twenty acres of native trees and shrubs, with a garden that L’Enfant had planned for them. . . . Mrs. Clay was more practical than her husband. On afternoons when Mary called, her hostess was likely to be busy with the small children or conferring with young Amos Kendall, the tutor for the older boys, while she directed the servants in preparations for a formal dinner. When she “rested,” she usually picked up her needlework frame. Her husband supervised the blooded cattle and the racing stock on his extensive farms, but it was she who made Ashland a home place . . . [p. 128]

Those trees are a Clay legacy that still graces Lexington, Kentucky. My husband has carved some pieces from pecan trees that were planted by Clay and brought down by the ice storm of 2003, the one that hit Kentucky just before George W. Bush invaded Iraq. The wood was a gift from Robert and Pam Sexton.

Mary Holley, by the way, was at first uneasy about having leased slaves for her householdservants. but she adjusted fairly quickly, finding

. . . her new servants were industrious and obedient and wonderfully kind, especially with the children [p. 120]

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.

Yesterday’s news

Sometimes when I am emotionally drained or intellectually exhausted from tedious work, I’ll pick up a random copy from my stack of old New Yorkers, leaf through them back to front, reading the cartoons and the poems and sometimes a few pages of an article that catches my eye. Sometimes the whole article.

These back issues are supplied me by a kindly friend. I have tried subscribing to The New Yorker but I feel too guilty when the issues pile up unread. All that great writing, going to waste. I have the same problem with Poetry. I guess I’m just not a magazine reader.

But there’s something soothing about reading yesterday’s news. It’s gone and it no longer has to cost us any anxiety (well, most of the time). Sometimes it’s even silly.

Like for example, this piece by Adam Gopnik in the issue for August 28, 2006, Read It and Weep. Do you remember when the White House used to issue George W. Bush’s reading lists to convince us that he was, in fact, a man of gravitas and not just wasting his summers fishing and skiving off? Sort of like all that brush cutting on his beloved ranch and trying to look Reaganesque. I don’t think he cut much brush this last summer.

Anyway, the reading lists were the silly part. The article was actually quite serious and engaging. It discusses Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which showed up on Bush’s reading list in the summer of 2006, and what Mr. Bush might have learned from it.

I read it just before going to sleep last night. Said Gopnik:

Camus, the President should be reminded, did not come by this wisdom cheaply or at a distance; he came by it from the center of modern history. As “Camus at Combat,” a new collection of his editorials—he was a working journalist—makes plain, the experience, first, of the Nazi occupation of France, and then of the struggle of Algerian independence against France led him to conclude that the “primitive” impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of other people as a class of entities. Camus was no pacifist, but he deplored the logic of thinking in categories. “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology,” he wrote. Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking. The way out of Meursaultism [central character in The Stranger] is to think about particular people, proximate causes, and obtainable objectives—not an easy thing to do in any circumstance and nearly impossible in the face of those ideologies, left and right, for which, Camus writes, “fear is a method.”

And upon awakening this morning, I encountered this poem in my reading:

For the Unknown Enemy

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.

— William Stafford, The Way It Is. New & Selected Poems (Greywolf, 1999)

When stuff comes together like this, I think I should maybe pay close attention.

George W. Bush is no longer in the White House, but there are still those who want to retain control and power over us through our fear of the other, that abstract enemy, that ideological apostate.

This has been my constant drumbeat here on this blog: if you let them make you afraid, you let them control you.

__________

Unfortunately, our government is still sending us the message that, if your crime is egregious enough and your power great enough, you never have to be held accountable.

Stuff

Via Ron K. Jeffries, 12-year-old cat commutes by bus in England

Update: And this one: Florida man blames cat for downloading child pornography

You can generate your own Kenyan birth certificate at this link. And you can watch Bill Maher ridicule the birthers at this link. Thanks to The Sideshow.

Also via The Sideshow, A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush, in which James A. Haught describes how George W. Bush told Jacques Chirac that Gog and Magog were at work in Iraq and that’s why we had to invade.

Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs To Kill A Mockingbird in The Courthouse Ring.

Via Corrente, The Health Insurers Have Already Won or How UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit Meanwhile, via Hippy Steve, DN! Nine Arrested in Iowa Single-Payer Protest. And lies Republicans tell here and here.

From tinydoctor, it was Russia killed Twitter. Or was it Georgia? Update: More on this story.

And this may be my favorite headline of the day: Ky. jailer resigns after rape conviction

An unreliable narrator

Well, I was going to start today by posting some lovely poetic ode to spring, which begins at 7:43 a.m. EDT (yeah, right), and I for one am ready to celebrate that moment of the sun’s crossing the equator, dividing day and night into equal slices. It’s been a long winter.

But the poem will have to wait because I got distracted, and amused, by this from Hadley Freeman in The Guardian (causing me at least one more time to have to put George W. Bush in my tag line):

There have probably been more English literature PhD papers written on “the unreliable narrator” than the sexuality of Shakespeare, but the literary trope has a less straightforward appeal in publishing. The former and much missed (by comedians) president of the United States, George W Bush, is to receive a rumoured $7m advance for his autobiography, or what will otherwise be referred to as $5m less than Bill Clinton got for his. Fortunately, George knows someone who will be able to sympathise – his good lady wife who has reportedly received a mere $1.6m for her memoirs, almost $6.5m less than Hillary and less even than her mother-in-law got back in the last century.

Meanwhile, with the kind of synchronised timing that makes one think there is a divine plan after all, their literary superior Britney Spears has reportedly rejected pleas from three publishers to write her autobiography. If only George was a good guy, we could have turned this into a “what a world of skewed values we live in” piece.

Now, in the interests of clarity, George’s book isn’t strictly speaking an autobiography but rather a series of explanations of decisions he has taken, including why he gave up drinking and why he decided Dick Cheney was a good idea, without having to bother with that boring crap called “narrative”. Think of it, as one suspects George does, as the York Notes to his autobiography.

I’m going to leap to the conclusion that York Notes are the British equivalent of Cliff Notes. Unfortunately, as Hadley points out, the narrator of The Dubya Diaries will be all too reliable:

Also, I’d wager that George will do a lot less lying in his book than one finds in the average autobiography simply because he’s not lying – he is perhaps the last person in the world who actually believes what he says.

__________
BTW, The Guardian has a poll: Was Obama a hit on Leno? Go vote if you will. I don’t know how it’s going because I can’t vote. I never watch Leno.

And just in passing, I’ll mention that it’s the 157^th anniversary of the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

And here’s Obama’s book deal.

Why I love being a Kentuckian

NYTimes columnist Gail Collins is having great fun these days speculating on who is leading the Republican party. Is it Michael Steele or Rush Limbaugh or perhaps Kentucky’s own Mitch McConnell?

This [holding the 41 Republican senators together] will certainly require all the moral suasion available to the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, a man with the natural charisma of an oyster. He�s currently trapped in a feud with Jim Bunning, one of the 41 and a fellow Kentuckian. Bunning, a man with all the natural charisma of an arthritic pit bull, has grown increasingly eccentric even by Senate standards, and McConnell would like him to retire at the end of his term before he does something really strange. Stranger than announcing that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will die within nine months, which Bunning has already done.

Bunning is one of a number of Republicans who have shown remarkable capacity for alienating voters even in red states.

One thing can be counted on. When Kentuckians hit the New York Times, it is almost certain to be an occasion of ridicule. Unfortunately, the ridicule is usually deserved. Take the matter of Jim Bunning, for example. He made the Times of Friday like this:

WASHINGTON � One of the entrenched narratives in American politics is the case of the guy who refuses to quit, even though a lot of people on his own team want him gone.

While the Democrats are preoccupied with Senator Roland W. Burris and his ties to a tainted Illinois governor, the Republicans are trying to rid themselves of Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, the former baseball star who clearly has little use for some colleagues and party leaders, and who keeps exhibiting what one senator calls �behavior issues.�

Key Republicans are gently (or not gently enough) trying to dissuade Mr. Bunning from seeking re-election in 2010 out of concern that his paltry fund-raising, declining approval ratings and irascible conduct have made him something between vulnerable and unelectable.

But in recent weeks, Mr. Bunning has shown no sign of stepping aside and delivered a string of incendiary pronouncements that have fed an impression that he is, to go with a baseball metaphor, a bit of a screwball.

. . .

�You never know what a cornered animal is willing to do,� said Al Cross, a University of Kentucky professor who writes a political column for The Louisville Courier-Journal.

I guess us Kentuckians should thank the fates for Bobby Jindal and maybe even Rush Limbaugh. To return to Collins:

The Republican Party is not going to be cool. The Democratic Party is barely cool, and it has Barack Obama. The Republicans have Rush Limbaugh, a man whose popularity among Americans under the age of 60 is lower than a share of Citigroup stock.

The party was so desperate for a youth patina that it shoved Bobby Jindal into the spotlight when the governor of Louisiana was still a political newbie � like a tiny bud that can one day become a peach or an apple. Unless some desperate person yanks it off the tree and stuffs the bud on national television where the whole nation can watch it shrivel, leaving nothing behind but an interesting dispute on how much of Jindal�s story about pointy-headed bureaucrats interfering with Katrina rescues was pure fiction.

So who does Collins nominate?

Let�s float the rumor that it�s George W. Bush.

Go read Collins.

Juan Cole says good-bye to W

and reminds us that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves:

Bush is my slightly older contemporary. I knew guys like W. in college, the frat boys who painted the local lighthouse windows red in the middle of the night after binging on cheap beer and chasing skirts instead of cracking their books. The guys who were rude and arrogant because they did not know how to wear their inherited wealth gracefully, the loudmouths who parroted Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley without having the integrity of the former or the eloquence of the latter.

He asks a question that I ask frequently:

Why is it that wastrels who find faith are so insufferable?

And concludes:

W. wasn’t up to dealing with the Middle East. It is a complex, vital, fractious place and is notorious as the graveyard of modern presidencies. Carter was done in by Iranian hostage-takers. Reagan embroiled himself in Iran-Contra. Bush Sr. imprudently took on the Israel lobbies over loan guarantees for Israeli colonies on the West Bank, and that misstep helped cost him reelection.

W. is a frightful combination of ignorant, dull, and pigheaded when to succeed in the Middle East he needed to be well-informed, bright and intellectually agile.

Koshembos, I know all of this is well known. But if feels good to say it one more time.

And in the end, Juan brings it back to Shakespeare:

Our nation renews itself, and makes small revolutions with its political campaigns. We have the opportunity now, to choose truth over propaganda, responsibility over recklessness, compassion over brutality, altruism over self-interest, and ability over incompetence. We have the opportunity to repudiate the past 8 years, and to transcend them once and for all, to redeem ourselves as a nation. The persons we choose to serve us as first among equals in our republic can bring us shame or honor as a nation. But it is our choices as individuals that make us shameful or honorable in ourselves. We must never again allow a crew of crooked bullies to make us underlings, lest we be laid to rest in dishonorable graves.

Read all of Juan’s good-bye and good riddance.