Sherry Chandler

Every man is free

I think they call those hymn chords.

Bobby Darin does it too.

Louisiana

Rain

Sunshine (not turpentine) and dandelion wine

I was doin’ pretty fine around my own particular Old Kentucky Home late yesterday but all I shot was these photos.

If I could save time in a wineglass...

Sunshine, paper clips, and rainbows

A book of verses underneath a bough / a loaf of bread etc.

Only in this case, it happens to be William Stafford’s Writing the Australian Crawl, which does have some verses in it. (BTW, Robert Peake on Writing the Australian Crawl)

And the wine is Barefoot merlot, which I recommend as a good cheap red. (I sort of suspect that dandelions would make a whitish wine.)

You may note that everything outside the window looks pretty brown and shabby. Some of it is needle fall from the pine, but we haven’t mowed the grass for weeks. No rain, no growth.

Considering white southernism

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 Union supporter 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.

___

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 contumely 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.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

from one of my favorite poets, Randy Newman, in the NYTimes:

I’d like to say a few words
In defense of our country
Whose people aren’t bad nor are they mean
Now the leaders we have
While they’re the worst that we’ve had
Are hardly the worst this poor world has seen

Let’s turn history’s pages, shall we?

Read the rest here.