Foster Dickson's Blog, page 26

Southern Movie 52: “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959)

Perhaps most well-known for its iconic scene of Katherine Hepburn descending in a wrought-iron elevator, 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer is one among a series of Tennessee Williams plays made into successful films, though this one was directed not by Elia Kazan but Joseph Mankiwiecz. The black-and-white film is set in New Orleans and deals with the aftermath of Sebastian Venable’s death, as his obsessively overprotective mother tries to erase any and all factual understanding of her son’s closeted life and unseemly demise. Starring Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor, this one is a classic that conceals a bizarre twist until the end.

Suddenly, Last Summer begins ominously with the credits playing in blocky white text in front of a very tall brick wall. Once the credits are complete, the camera pans slowly over to a small sign on this large wall, which reads, “Lions View State Asylum.” Inside the asylum, we see an assortment of haggard-looking women in a day room, some sewing, some catatonic, as one large woman shuffles across the room taking what she pleases, first an item from a table then a rocking chair from a woman already sitting in it. Once our focus leaves the silent bully, it moves to a young woman with a placid expression who is marveling at a baby doll as though it were her child. Two female nurses come in and kindly escort her out, but she is wary of them and clutches the doll to her chest. Quickly, we see her anesthetized for surgery and wheeled out on a gurney, the doll left on a bench.

She is going to a large room with a balcony encircling the upper part of it, a surgery table is at center, with people in white gowns prepping the patient. Above the operating room is a loud man in a suit, boisterous and bureaucratic, who is bellowing in his Southern accent that the room used to be a library, when the facility was a school, and before that, a sugar warehouse. But now it’s an “operating theater,” where spectators can watch the procedures. What the assembled men, all in suits, are about the see is a frontal lobotomy, the first ever performed in the state. The bureaucrat, who is Dr. Hockstader, introduces Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) from Chicago. He enters and gets ready to perform the surgery.

Dr. Cukrowicz works intently on the patient, but almost right away, one of the spectators in the gallery kicks loose a railing and mortar and dust sprinkle down onto the surgical area. Hockstader winces but doesn’t move to do anything about it. The surgery continues then, and as it is near completion, a light goes out. Hockstader winces again. As Cukrowicz finishes, he looks up to the watching men and tells them that they have just seen a delicate operation performed under very primitive conditions. 

Exasperated, Cukrowicz goes to confront Hockstader, who runs the asylum. He storms into his boss’s office and asks the secretary there to leave. The two men argue, the surgeon berating the conditions and lamenting unkept promises, and the administrator reminding him of the financial facts of their status as a state hospital. But when Cukrowicz mumbles that maybe he should just go work somewhere else, Hockstader stops him and says, “Before you go, read this,” holding out an already-opened envelope.

Cukrowicz takes out the letter and asks, “Who is . . . Violet Venable?”

Hockstader replies, “You reveal your ignorance of our fair city.”

Violet Venable is the widow of the richest man in town, making her the richest woman in town. And she wants something from them. Hockstader sees dollar signs, so Cukrowicz must go at 4:30 that afternoon to honor the invitation that Violet Venable has extended, to discuss a “matter of some urgency.”

Across town, Dr. Cukrowicz is let into a large, elegant and ornate foyer by a black butler. Cukrowicz waits alone for a moment when an older, matronly woman in cat’s-eye glasses comes down the spiral stairs, and he says, “Mrs. Venable?” No, this is Mrs. Foxhill, her personal secretary, who directs him where to sit. Within seconds, we hear an elegant voice begin to speak about a son named Sebastian, and we see Violet Venable come into the foyer via an elevator made for one. She is middle-aged, exquisitely dressed, and reclined on the seat. Cukrowicz is visibly charmed, and she explains that her son loved “the Byzantine,” then shifts seamlessly into an anecdote about how, unlike the Emperor of Byzantium ascends over his subjects, she, living in a democracy, descends to meet hers. This woman is at once aristocratic and enigmatic, talking nonstop.

Violet takes Cukrowicz arm-in-arm and invites him to the garden, though Mrs. Foxhill objects. Violet overrules her and explains to Cukrowicz that since her “tiny convulsion,” everyone is worried about her well-being. Cukrowicz inquires about the episode and is told that, since she had buried both her husband and her son recently, it should be understandable.

Cukrowicz is walked into the gardens, where a still-talking Violet leads him to a mass of jungle-like plants. She has picked up a small box and hints at feeding something, then moves them toward a Victorian glass cage, where she begins feeding insects to a Venus fly trap, before her segue into Dr. Cukrowicz’s specialty: the lobotomy. However, as Cukrowicz attempts to pick up what she has put down, she is off again, changing subjects and walking away. Violet is clearly in control here, and Cukrowicz is back on his heels, trying to follow where she leads, trying to discern why he is there.

After handing off the feeding duties to Mrs. Foxhill, Violet allows for a coherent conversation, for a moment, when Cukrowicz asks what Sebastian’s occupation was. She tries to explains that he was a poet, that “his life was his work,” but loses herself in despair and moves to the subject of the operation. Cukrowicz reminds her of the hospital’s financial needs, and she mumbles, “Yes, I know,” then reveals the “urgency.” Violet has a niece by marriage who has been struck with “dementia precox,” is institutionalized at St. Mary’s, and might be a candidate for a lobotomy.

Cukrowicz tries to reply, “But dementia precox is a meaningless . . .” but Violet’s loquacious rambling overtakes him. She begins to describe Sebastian again, ignoring Cukrowicz’s attempt to discuss the foundation she claimed in the letter to be founding, telling him that Sebastian was an artist who was above notions of commercial success or name recognition. So, in his wake, she will work to “memorialize” him.

After attempting to compare her son and Dr. Cukrowicz as people who use others, then procliaming that most people’s lives are nothing but “trails of debris,” Violet’s mood changes, lightens up. She then shares that her relationship with her son was not like mother and son, but more like they were a couple, as they gallivanted across Europe in style, always popular and always adored everywhere they went. This glimpse into the past is disconcerting because a mother and son are a pair we don’t think of as being a couple . . . But Violent seems not only insistent but happy about it. “Then, suddenly last summer . . .” she begins, her mood changing. “Your son died,” Cukrowicz says to complete her sentence.

Violet then becomes agitated, imploring the doctor to help her niece, who is mad, and finally getting to the detail that explains it all: she is saying terrible things about Sebastian. When pressed about what kinds of things she is saying, Violet is unable to produce an example, but instead refers to a he-said/she-said incident with the elderly gardener at St. Mary’s. Cukrowicz then admonishes Violet that the surgery is risky and that the pacifying effects could be permanent, and Violet seems to gets excited, almost licking her chops in anticipation. Take care of my niece, she intimates, and the money will come.

[image error]If Violet were not already frighteningly strange, she shifts her rambling banter to another anecdote about Sebastian seeing the face of God. Cukrowicz is captivated by now, his eyes wide, and she tells him that she has never told anyone the story before. The mother-son couple had gone to the Encantadas to watch baby sea turtles hatch and try to make it to the sea before being eaten by birds. She relays the narrative in the spookiest terms, turning an observation of natural phenomena into a life-changing religious experience that taught Sebastian about life and death. Sebastian saw the cruelty of the world there and translated into a theory of life. As she finishes, Violet and Cukrowicz are flanking a statue of Death, and she says again, “Suddenly, last summer,” she learned that her son’s ideas about the brutal experience were correct.

The pair leaves the garden to return to the house, and upon entering a study, find Mrs. Holley and her son George. The two are obviously simpletons compared to Violet. While George is loading suits out of a wardrobe, his mother is reading a letter that was left on a desk. They feign coy ignorance and greet Violet and Cukrowicz amiably, reminding Violet that she said that George could have Sebastian’s clothes. Violet is put off by the pair, asking them to get what they came to get and leave as soon as possible.

But Mrs. Holley just chatters and chatters, drawing tidbits and intimations out of Violet at Cukrowicz looks on. While George is gawking over his newfound treasures, Violet and Mrs. Holley banter about Katherine, the “girl” who Violet has called Cukrowicz about, and who is Mrs. Holley’s daughter and George’s sister. Mrs. Holley hears that Cukrowicz is a doctor and is concerned that Violet has had another of her “hysterical seizures,” but on finding out that he might help “Kathy,” she is glad (not knowing about his specialty, of course). Then, Mrs. Holley and Violet begin to discuss a picture that Cukrowicz has found, describing how it was the Mardi Gras ball and how lovely Katherine looked in clothes the Violet had lent her, but also acknowledging without details that it was not a happy evening. Violet soon grows weary of the mother and son, and tells them to leave. She calls them “neanderthals,” wonders out loud how such a family could have produced a jewel like Katherine, then begins again to praise Sebastian’s charm, wit, and sophistication.

It is in the moments after the Holleys leave that we get a better look into what happened to Sebastian. Cukrowicz remarks that Violet had not traveled with Sebastian that previous summer, and Violet retorts that Katherine did. And Sebastian died “of a heart attack,” she claims. Katherine was with him. She was not. And Violet returns the conversation to her primary mission: how soon can Cukrowicz see Katherine?

After the long conversation in the garden and the episode with the Holleys, we mustn’t forget that original issue of the money for Lion’s View. Before they part, Violet and Cukrowicz have one last conversation about the money. Cukrowicz wants to know that donation is not commensurate with his operating on Katherine, and Violet reminds him that people are always more interested in things that affect them personally. Cukrowicz understands. One last time, on his way out, Violet remarks on the garden and its prehistoric plants, using the fact to segue into this vaguely threatening comment: “The killers inherit the Earth. They always do.”

Next, we meet Katherine (Elizabeth Taylor). A weighty nun enters her little room, asks her to come along, then leads her through a medieval-looking building and into a library, where Cukrowicz is waiting but unseen. The two women sit but Katherine quickly jumps up, and the sister warns her for no apparent reason. Then Katherine sees something and darts toward it— it is a pack of cigarettes. She lights one and starts to smoke, but the sister tells her that smoking isn’t allowed. Katherine pleads to finish the cigarette but the sister demands that she hand it over, so Katherine sticks the lit end into the nun’s hand. Just then, Katherine see Cukrowicz who is watching calmly. The sister makes her case for being “deliberately burned” but Cukrowicz asks to be left alone with Katherine.

The two then engage in a conversation that is both bluntly honest and a cat-and-mouse game at the same time. Katherine finds out that he is from Lion’s View, a place she would rather not be, and he learns in bits and pieces about the conflict with Violet. Katherine calls her aunt “merciless” in the elder woman’s quest to keep her quiet and out of sight. New to the situation, Cukrowicz doesn’t know what’s going on, why this graceful and pretty young woman is being held as a raving lunatic, so he is all ears. Katherine weaves her way through the subject of Sebastian, who she describes as so charming that no one could resist him, and on to the subject of her Aunt Violet. She tells Cukrowicz that only recently Sebastian had decided to leave the world and become a monk; distraught, Violet had followed him into that life as a way to urge him back home, and while she was there, Mr. Venable had died, alone, asking only to see his wife as his last request. Violet had chosen Sebastian over her husband, a telltale sign of her devotion to him, Katherine says.

But since Katherine’s main problem is that her memory is gone, Cukrowicz asks to tell him about a memory, any memory, to get her mind going. she begins to talk about the Mardi Gras ball, an event that Violet had referenced with disgust, so Cukrowicz perks up. Katherine then sits and lazily begins to tell the story. She had gone to the ball with “a boy who got too drunk to stand up,” and when she wanted to go home, a man she’d never seen before appeared and offered to take her. But instead of taking her home, he took her to secluded place called the Dueling Oaks and had sex with her. Katherine claims that she hadn’t understood what was going to happen, but it did happen, then he took her home, remarking that they’d “better forget it” since he had a pregnant wife. Katherine didn’t accept that and returned to the ball, where she caused a huge scene— until Sebastian pulled her away.

Once that story is done, Cukrowicz tries to move her even further forward. Katherine explains in fits and starts that she and Sebastian were close, but she stops short of revealing what happened when he died in Cabeza de Lobo (Spain) last summer. She says that she doesn’t remember but also doesn’t believe that he had a heart attack. However, that fairly peaceful moment turns quickly into something more sinister as Katherine half-recalls the clanging music played on the streets, which she wishes away until she finally screams and falls crying in Cukrowicz’s arms. The sister comes in to intervene, but Cukrowicz tells her to leave, then Katherine kisses him tenderly. And the mood shifts. She becomes peacefully again and speaks to him in a sultry way, before leaving the room. Over at Lion’s View, she remarks, she can wear nice clothes and look pretty for her new friend, the doctor.

Across town at the asylum, Hockstader takes Cukrowicz out on the balcony to look over a vacant lot full of debris and trash. It will become the site of the new neurosurgery wing, paid for by Violet Venable. Hockstader is ready to move forward and is glad that Cukrowicz will operate on Katherine so he can get the $1,000,000 for the building. But Cukrowicz is not certain that he will operate, and Hockstader wrinkles his brow. The stodgy old administrator wants that money. They are interrupted when a nurse comes in to say that Katherine is in her room, not in the main ward but the nurse’s wing, and that she has had her hair done and everything. Hockstader reminds the young surgeon that Violet believes that he has committed to do a lobotomy on Katherine, and Cukrowicz assures him that he knows she thinks that.

In the hallway, Cukrowicz then runs into Mrs. Holley and George who are on their way in to see Katherine, who is all fixed up and wearing a black dress. Everything is pleasant enough, but George changes the tone when he tells his mother that they have business to attend to. Katherine can’t imagine what they mean, but it does come out: to accept a $100,000 “inheritance” from Sebastian, Violet demands that Mrs. Holley sign paperwork that will allow Katherine to be permanently committed and lobotomized. The mother and son want the money for George’s future. Katherine is horrified. 

She runs out of her room and into the hallway, but take a wrong turn onto an observation walkway above the men’s dayroom. Of course, the men go wild, some jumping up top grab her ankles. Katherine escapes quickly though, going back the way she came, and she is soon discovered by Cukrowicz and taken back to her room. There, they have a heart-to-heart about the plans as Katherine understands them, but Cukrowicz says that he isn’t sure whether he’ll actually operate. He asks her to hold on before making a  judgment about him, and has a male orderly to come in and sedate her. As Katherine is getting her shot, she is rambling about how blondes were next, how Sebastian described people like menu items, explaining that he was tired of the dark ones and was moving to blondes next . . . 

After Katherine has faded away, we see a long black limousine outside of Lion’s View, and we know that Violet has come. Cukrowicz escorts her into a sun room, and she gives him a give, a small bound volume of one of Sebastian’s poems. She explains that, every summer, he wrote poem. The rest of the year was simply preparation for that one poem.  He always wrote one, every summer . . . until last summer, when he didn’t. Violet claims that, without her he couldn’t write.

“Without me, he died,” she says.

Cukrowicz then pushes Violet about the facts of Sebastian’s death, including a letter that Mrs. Holley had seen, but Violet insists that there was no letter, only a death certificate. As she tries to lighten the mood and leave, Cukrowicz pushes her again, this time about Sebastian’s person life. Violet is offended and insists that he was “chaste,” and that she was the only one who could meet his needs. We sense the grotesque nature of the relationship, and Violet’s obsessive need to be the only person in her son’s life. 

Cukrowicz then suggests that she see Katherine, that it might help the young woman to remember. Violet is hesitant but agrees, feigning ease about it. In the little room, Katherine is waking up. She recognizes Violet and berates her for “forcing” her mother and George to sign the commitment papers to get the $100,000. Violet leaves, attempting at a graceful exit, but she is soon met again by Cukrowicz and Katherine in the sun room. The young woman again challenges Violet’s narrative of a maternal love that made their lives perfect. Katherine disagrees, at once talking at Violet and to Cukrowicz, saying that she and Sebastian simply used people. According to Katherine, Sebastian had asked her to accompany him in his summer travels because his mother was no longer attractive. Violet attempts to shut down this alternate narrative but Katherine continues, saying that Sebastian used them both as “decoys” to “procure for him,” to “make contacts.” Cukrowicz seems not to understand. It is never said, but still understood: Sebastian was gay and needed attractive women to help him meet men. Violet is appalled that her secret is coming out, but Katherine is relentless. After Violet faints, Katherine leaves the room, and Hockstader arrives to escort Violet out.

In the hallway, Katherine wanders for a moment, then lets herself into a door leading to the balcony above the women’s day room. The women slowly go into hysterics as she climbs over the rail, ostensibly to kill herself, but quickly a male orderly sneaks up on her and wrestles her back onto sure footing.

The bureaucrat Hockstader is now livid. He catalogs Katherine’s sins as evidence of her mania and implores Cukrowicz to agree to the surgery, We know: he wants the building, and he wants the money, and he wants Cukrowicz to operate on Katherine so he can have them. Cukrowicz, however, asks for more time, so Hockstader gets on the phone, trying to reach another doctor. But Cukrowicz stalls him. He wants to try something, tomorrow, at Violet Venable’s house.

That something is hypnosis. The final half-hour of the nearly two-hour film consists of Katherine telling the story of Sebastian’s death, which she witnessed. She is hypnotized by Dr. Cukrowicz and breaks into a dreamy story about her previous summer with Sebastian at Cabeza de Lobo, a term that means ‘head of the wolf.’ The whole cast sits on pins and needles as Katherine tells what happened in a breathy voice, heavy with anxiety. Going off Katherine’s earlier proclamation that she was there to attract men for her closeted cousin, she tells the onlookers – much to Violet’s chagrin – how they were at the beach and Sebastian had made her wear a white, see-through bathing suit. Additionally, Sebastian had drawn the attention of a group of boys who were street urchins and who played a raucous kind of “music” by clanging on homemade metal instruments. There, the combination of the heat, the tension over Katherine’s bathing suit, and the pressures of the begging boys had gotten too much for Sebastian, who fled the little restaurant where they had tried to take refuge. However, as Sebastian ran through the steep streets, chased by the boys, he eventually collapsed on a hill, where the hungry children pounced on him and chewed at his flesh— just like the birds had attacked the turtles in the Encantadas. Katherine, of course, is mortified by seeing her cousin cannibalized. We now know the reason for her madness, and the reason that Violet wants the memory of what happened to her supposedly celibate son erased. Sebastian did not have a heart attack, he was eaten alive in broad daylight. 

The film closes with Cukrowicz escorting Katherine out, and with Violet ascending in her elevator, back to that world-above where she does not have to face the truths of real life.

While the sensationalism of a story that ends in cannibalism may draw many viewers’ attention to that awful matter, as a Southern story, Suddenly, Last Summer is also a heady commentary on being a homosexual man in the South in the first half of the twentieth century. It is clear from each side’s version of events that Sebastian’s jaunts to Europe every summer were so that he could be himself, whether that meant being a poet (to Violet) or being gay (to Katherine). Certainly, in the episode at the Mardi Gras ball, where Katherine gives herself willingly to married man who she doesn’t even know, Sebastian saw a companion who could “procure” for him better than his aging mother could. And though it is never overtly stated, most critics agree that the street urchins knew him from his paying them for sex. Ultimately, it was this lifestyle that led to his death, though I wonder whether Tennessee Williams – a Southern gay man himself – wanted us to see that demise as his comeuppance. 

Suddenly, Last Summer had to be set in New Orleans and required the unseemly attitude of self-righteousness displayed by some among the upper classes. Unlike Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, this one couldn’t have played out in the rural idylls of a Mississippi plantation. It needed the seedy, lurid reputation of the Crescent City to prop up its back story. Here, too, we’re dealing with the privilege of very wealthy people to exercise their will on those without means. Violet didn’t earn the massive wealth that gave her such privilege, but her husband’s money allows her to have whatever truth she wants in her presence. She has protected her gay son from the harshness of a homophobic Southern culture by instilling in him a sense that people are simply there to be used, that their lives and their feelings don’t matter. However, when he is faced with desperate poverty (in the form of the starving street urchins) and with having to consider other people’s feelings (as he had to when Katherine did want to wear a see-through bathing suit), Sebastian Venable could not cope. With the façades created by his mother broken down, Sebastian Venable could not continue living. A harsh commentary on the attitudes of Southern aristocracy.

 

A Southern Movie Bonus: Yet Another Spooky, Scary Southern Sampler, the 21st Century Edition

In October, everybody loves horror movies. Even people who don’t like horror movies. All of the movies listed below are set in the South, are available on streaming services, and can satisfy a Halloween-time craving for a spooky, scary movie. Earlier this month, the sampler focused on older movies from the late ’60s to the early ’80s. This time, all four were released in the new millenium.

The St. Francisville Experiment (2000)

After The Blair Witch Project did so well in 1999, it was probably tempting to grab those coattails and hope that audiences would latch on to another film like it. That didn’t happen with this one. Roundly panned a bad movie, St. Francisville is set in southern Louisiana and attempts to capitalize on many of the stereotypes associated with that fabled place. (The real St. Francisville is north of Baton Rouge.)

With the subtitled, “This Ain’t No Walk in the Woods,” you’ll get what you’d expect from this film: flashlights in the dark, screaming college students, flying furniture, all the things.

2001 Maniacs (2005)

This sequel to 1964’s Two Thousand Maniacs! is very different film than its predecessor. The production value is better, but this improvement causes it to lose what the original had: the total DIY feel derived from stale acting and red paint as blood. The mayor is played this time by Robert Englund of Freddy Krueger fame, which also takes away the over-acting and loud guffawing of the earlier portrayal, which was like a sinister combination of Colonel Sanders and Foghorn Leghorn. But it stays true to the premise that a group of outsiders who are passing through must be sacrificed to Civil War-based quest for revenge.

This film is not going to be for everyone. Where the mid-1960s film was wild and raw, this one is polished and gruesome. Modern grindhouse films are known for blood and gore. 2001 Maniacs is not exactly a good selection for “Netflix and chill.” 

Hatchet (2007)

And Hatchet is more grindhouse. Based once again in Louisiana, this gory mess of a film starts with a group of twenty-something guys reveling in the French Quarter, until one of them decides to break with the beer-and-boobs motif and take a boat tour into the bayou. The others are against it, but one friend feels bad and decides to go along. Of course, they get stranded along with the varied group of pretty girls, tourists, etc. The problem is: out in the swamp is a deformed maniac who mercilessly murders everyone he lays eyes on. 

Most of the plot of Hatchet is people running, screaming, and getting killed in really nasty ways, but at the risk of making sound one-dimensional, it does start out with New Orleans, partying, heavy metal, and half-naked girls.  

The School in the Woods (2010)

For this year’s two samplers, we spend a lot of time in Louisiana, so we’ll end there, too. The School in the Woods takes on two familiar scenarios: paranormal researchers who go to find out if the stories are true, and young people isolated in the middle of nowhere. Once again, we’ve got flashlights and an abandoned building, but this time, we add tarot cards, little ghost children, and other elements that would easily scare a girlfriend into her boyfriend’s lap so he can make a move. 

The School in the Woods may be predictable but it does deliver what the Halloween scary-movie craving calls for. It plays on fears of the South as a haunted place, where the angry remnants of terrible events are more likely spring up and make you sorry you came looking for them.

See the Spooky, Scary Southern Sampler from last year or the more recent sampler from earlier this month.

“Sketches of Newtown”

The closures and quarantines associated with COVID-19 put a damper on thousands of events and projects in 2020, including our proposed work last spring that would have expanded the scope of the oral history collection that my students did in Montgomery’s Newtown community in 2019. But we’re not going to let this bad ol’ pandemic stop us.

[image error]The Sketches of Newtown project, which is funded by a (follow-up) education grant from the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, will expand on the work done in the original Bicentennial-funded oral history project, carrying forward these writing students’ involvement in collecting and examining our local history. The small monograph of “sketches” will begin with Newtown’s stated founding date of 1836, a year situated between the city’s founding in 1817 and the Civil War in the 1860s, and end with an examination of what the future might hold for the community. Chapters will look at such subjects as nearby Cypress Nature Park, the Hale School (formerly Cemetery Hill School), and the longstanding Newtown Reunion.

Of course, the writers are high school students, who are working almost totally from home, while they do their other schoolwork, so we’re not writing a definitive history of the Newtown community. This won’t be scholarly tome or an end-all be-all. What the project is, though, is an effort to connect students to a subject within their local community, to ask, what is this place? what has happened here? who are the people who’ve lived here? My class is not a history class, it’s Creative Writing, so our goal with both the 2019 oral history project and this current project is not so much to find and report the facts of the place, but seek out then share the humanity in the place, and in that sharing, learn something about what it means to be writers.

[image error]The entire time I’ve taught, I’ve conducted projects like this, because I believe in the value of experiential learning and in the value of community engagement. In 2004, my second year in the classroom, I applied for and received a Teaching Tolerance grant from the Southern Poverty Law Center to conduct a project (similar to this one) about the Civil Rights movement, because I wanted to connect my students to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Selma-to-Montgomery March during the important anniversary year 2005. That little book of reflective essays was titled Taking the Time: Young Writers and Old Stories. Since then, I’ve organized other one-time projects, like a student-written publication about our state constitution titled More than a Century Later, as well as ongoing projects, like traveling to Northport’s Kentuck Festival of the Arts for students to interview artists or visiting Montgomery’s historic Oakwood Cemetery to choose a subject for genealogical research.

For years, I’ve also been teaching from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and every year, I put particular emphasis on this passage: “Go with what seems inevitable in your own heritage. Embrace it and it may lead you to eloquence.” In a time where education is so standardized, the teaching of local history and appreciation of local folkways is sorely underrepresented in how we as communities raise our children. Our schools may be teaching math and reading, but we’re failing to teach them to value the culture that surrounds them. It’s no wonder that so many young people won’t detach from screens— why should they? Few people point out what’s in their immediate vicinity as worthy of attention. I can’t do anything about that sentiment for millions of teenagers all over the nation, but I can do something for the couple-dozen that I teach. And that’s what this project and others like it are about. One of my other favorite quotes comes from an avant-garde artist named Guy Debord, who wrote, “It is not a question of knowing whether this interests you but rather whether you yourself could become more interesting under new conditions of cultural creation.” All I’m saying is: let’s put down the phones and look at something close to home for a bit. If they’ll do that, they’ll see why I wanted them to.

The work of producing Sketches of Newtown has already begun and will take place over the next month, with plans for a second oral-history event to be held in 2021, if COVID allows. Once the writing, editing, layout, and design are complete, the books should be available in early 2021 and will be distributed free of charge. There will also be a photographic component to the project, undertaken by our school’s Photography students.

 

Watching: “Other Music” and “The Booksellers”

I love music, and I love books. I can’t get enough of either, and I’m also pretty opinionated about both. Which is why I recently watched the two documentaries Other Music and The Booksellers, both released this year. I actually started watching Other Music because I thought it would be about CBGB, the club in New York’s Bowery whose name also includes the acronym “OMFUG,” which stands for “Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.” But it wasn’t. It was about a great independent record store that shut down in this digital age of streaming. 

The other documentary I had heard about because it was supposed to show at The Capri, our local independent movie theatre, the week the pandemic shut everything down. I’ve written before and complain regularly about how there’s too little programming (films, TV shows) about books, literature, and especially poetry, and was glad to see this 99-minute homage to those who love books even more – much more! – than I do. 

I don’t know why but the term “material culture” has been coming up a lot lately in conversations that I’ve either been in or been privy to. Maybe the pandemic has had us all at home staring at all the stuff we own, causing us to wonder why we own it. Maybe I just hang out with people who like to let the latest intellectual jargon drip off their lips. Either way, these two were good movies about material culture, welcome discoveries in the endless “Watch Next” scroll.

 

A Southern Movie Bonus: Another Spooky, Scary Southern Sampler, Old School Edition

In October, everybody loves horror movies. Even people who don’t like horror movies. All of the movies listed below are set in the South, are available on streaming services, and can satisfy a Halloween-time craving for a spooky, scary movie. This time, we’ve got five that are a little older, from the late ’60s to the early ’80s.

The Witchmaker (1969)

Set in the bayous of Louisiana, follows the Satanic exploits of Luther the Berserk. With plenty of late ’60s kitsch and more than its share of maniacal laughing, this film is basically an exploitation film with all of the ingredients: scantily clad women, a creepy back story told by a local yokel, cheap special effects, city folks dropped off in the backwoods.

Though this might have a decent drive-in movie feature for a couple of teenagers on a double date, The Witchmaker wasn’t nominated for any Academy Awards.

Moon of the Wolf (1972)

This made-for-TV movie, set in a small Southern town, centers on the murder of a young woman, who looks like she has been attacked by dogs. But no wild dogs are in the area. As the town’s manly-man sheriff investigates the killing, he is also trying to build a love affair with a pretty, middle-aged, blue-blood who has just returned to town. Meanwhile, he is also being harried by the dead woman’s redneck brother, who wants justice, and to complicate matters, the dead woman was pregnant with the local doctor’s baby!

Also very dated, this general-audiences horror flick offers an option for viewers who don’t have the stomach for more gruesome films. Truthfully, it’s barely a horror film at all, but since the last half-hour or so leans that way, I’ve added it to the sampler for good measure.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

Made by Charles B. Pierce of Boggy Creek fame, 1976’s The Town that Dreaded Sundown is another docudrama about a frightening local mystery that came and went but was never solved. Like The Legend of Boggy Creek, this film is also low-budget and set in Arkansas, but unlike its predecessor, the story here is structured reasonably well. However, the charm that was achieved by that 1972 cult classic did not reemerge in this one four years later.

Set in Texarkana, Arkansas in 1946, The Town that Dreaded Sundown is based on the true story of what are called The Texarkana Moonlight Murders, which occurred in two adjacent counties: Miller County, Arkansas, and Bowie County, Texas.  At the time of the movie’s release, The Philadelphia Inquirer derided the movie as “indigestible,” yet the reviewer for Greenville, Mississippi’s Delta Times-Democrat called it a “powerful undertaking into physical and real world blunt mutilation, and man’s capability of destroying his fellow man.”

Eaten Alive (1976)

Being blunt, Eaten Alive – originally titled “Starlight Slaughter” – may be the worst movie ever. Made by Tobe Hooper, who two years earlier had given the world the now-notorious Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this grindhouse film gathers the same boisterous bad acting, cheap special effects, and off-kilter storytelling into all of the gory glory that one might expect, this time setting its weird narrative in a backroads Southern hotel where the proprietor has a scythe and a giant alligator.

As bad as it is, the movie is based on the true story of a serial killer named Joe Ball, who was dubbed the “alligator man.” Ball lived in tiny Elmendorf, Texas (near San Antonio) and committed suicide in 1938 after police were tipped off that he killed women and fed them to his alligators. I don’t really get the appeal of grindhouse movies, but I can say that there is nothing particularly (or realistically) Southern about Eaten Alive, even though its characters and setting are supposed to be. You could pick up the story and move it elsewhere, and it would be a cheap flick in the spirit of Psycho or slightly less surreal version of Motel Hell.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

This made-for-TV movie is billed as being set in the Deep South but the locale looks more like rural California. The story is centered on the wrongful lynching of a mentally challenged man named Bubba who is falsely accused to hurting a little girl. (The truth is that a dog attacks her and Bubba saves her and brings her body home.) Led by the town’s ill-tempered mail man, the cadre of yokels find Bubba where he has disguised himself as a scarecrow and riddle him with bullets and buck shot, before the call comes in that Bubba had actually saved the girl. Of course, the lynch mob is acquitted by the courts, but vengeance will come in another form.

As horror movies go, Dark Night of the Scarecrow is pretty light, considering it was made in the early ’80s to show on television. Much of the suspense is built on creepy music and slow pacing, but we get what we expect from a 1980s flick: the mean guys, who bully everyone, get what’s coming to them.

See the previous Spooky, Scary Southern Sampler from October 2019

Call for Submissions for “Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore”

[image error]Though the website has been up since the summer, today officially begins my Literary Arts Fellowship so it seems to follow that today is also the official start to my newest project Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore. The idea for the project came to me in recent years, though the experiences that led to the idea have come over the last twenty. Having grown up a white, working-class kid in the Deep South in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, then having worked on Civil Rights history and commemoration projects as an adult in the 2000s and ’10s has given me a firsthand look at how the beliefs, myths, and narratives about race relations, history, and the Civil Rights movement have changed. As mainstream views about neglected voices have become more open, the work that I began twenty years ago – asking what stories aren’t being told and trying to share them – has been adopted en masse by scholars, institutions, museums, and even in popular political movements. 

That mass interest is what prompts me to ask: what are the beliefs, myths, and narratives that have driven Southern culture over the last fifty years? I can’t answer that alone, and in any of my work, I’ve never tried to. As a long-time fan and almost-disciple of the late William Zinsser, what I know about writing on real-life subjects is: “His [or her or their] own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.” And there is no better medium or format for that sharing of voices than the anthology. The term itself comes from the Latin and means “flower-gathering,” literally— anthos being flower, and logia being collection. Nobody’s Home is an online anthology, not a literary journal and not a blog. Instead of new issues, works, or posts replacing old ones in the featured spot, each new work will stand alongside the others.

The project will accept only works of nonfiction – no poetry, fiction, or drama – which could include memoirs, personal essays, articles, opinion pieces, and contemplative works, as well as interviews and reviews. The goal is to reach general audiences with the ideas presented in the works, so this won’t be the right place for highly academic approaches to the subject. The works in Nobody’s Home should bring an aspect of this difficult question down to earth. In line with that goal of reaching a broad audience with important ideas, access to the anthology will be free, so no reader will have to choose whether to pay or do without. I’ve read that 70% of online sales are abandoned at the “cart,” and I don’t want money (or one’s attitude about it) to be an impediment. 

In addition to the works that will later appear in the anthology, I will be writing an editor’s blog for the project. Called “Groundwork,” the blog will contain project updates, brief ruminations,  excerpts from interviews, periodic travelogues, and other peripheral bits of interest. 

If you’re interested in contributing to the anthology, I would suggest reading my first two editor’s blog posts: “Myths and the truths we live by,” and “A Word from the Editor about Submissions.” Those two pieces augment the explanation provided in the submission guidelines.

To hear Foster talk about Nobody’s Home, as well as other projects, with the Alabama Writers Cooperative’s Alina Stefansecu, watch the video below:

Reading: “Woodrow’s Trumpet”

Woodrow’s Trumpet by Tim McLaurin
My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

[image error]Woodrow’s Trumpet was one of those novels that got some attention at the time – it was published in hardcover by Norton in 1989 – but which has kind of disappeared since. Its author Tim McLaurin, who passed away in 2002, was one of those mid-list Southern writers whose eclectic array of life experiences created a body of work that defies typical notions of Southern-ness. And that’s exactly what drew me to this book: descriptions calling it a work of the New South.

Set in a small farming community outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, the novel centers on the overly large and deceptively simpleminded Vietnam veteran Woodrow Bunce, whose landed-gentry family expects to keep up both wealth and appearances. Rounding out the main players are Ellis, an angry, orphaned teenager who Woodrow employs part-time, and Nadean, a black woman who returns to town after going astray in Washington DC and becoming a heroin junkie. The town goes nuts when Woodrow has Nadean shacking up with him, then the suburbanites who’ve infested a former plot of Bunce farmland nearby go even more nuts when Woodrow builds her a beachy paradise on their front lawn. The antagonist is Mary, a “Karen” from up North whose overzealous liberalism and amateurish penchant for public policy put her at odds with Woodrow and Nadean, as she tries to sure up the bedroom-community appeal of her very new homeplace. Sprinkled in are the pot-growing Lupo family, who oppose any new development, and the old-money Bunces, who are alternately embarrassed by Woodrow and plagued with troubles of their own. The novel’s story pits small-town ideals against modern progress, bringing together a variety of Southern types.

Woodrow’s Trumpet is not a great novel, but it is quite good. McLaurin weaves back and forth among the characters and their backstories, jumping among time periods and revealing just enough to maintain a little mystery. The narrative is built on people who are interesting and quirky but not so odd as to turn the novel into a cheap imitation of A Confederacy of Dunces. Appearing to be out-of-print at the point, used copies are available for folks who’d like to dive into a Gen-X era Southern novel that’s funny in spots but serious in general, not too deep but definitely not shallow either.

 

Southern Movie 51: “Murder in Mississippi” (1965)

Dogmatic, cheaply produced, and poorly acted, 1965’s Murder in Mississippi appears to be an attempt to rush out a pro-Civil Rights film at the height of the violence in the Deep South. Released the year after the 1964 murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, and directed by Joseph P. Mawra, the film follows a carload of Civil Rights workers who head south to help with voter registration. 

The opening scenes of Murder in Mississippi are mixed with joviality and tension. A group of young people ride down the highway in a convertible. There are five of them in all: two black men, one black woman, one white man (who we will find out is Jewish), and one white woman. They are all clean cut, nice-looking, and appear to be in their late teens or early twenties. As lively but frenetic music plays, the car rolls along with one of the black men driving and the one white woman in the passenger seat. Titling shows us the names of states they are passing through, and we know they are going south. As these first few moments go by, the credits roll, and they are pulled over by a police officer. Of course, despite their playful energy during the ride, the movie is titled Murder in Mississippi, and they’re an interracial group heading south, so we know that whatever happens won’t be good.

With the credits passed and the convertible back on the road, our attention is shifted to the sheriff’s office. The scene begins with a chubbyguy playing a nylon strong guitar and singing, for no apparent reason, then Deputy Bob comes in quickly and reports to Sheriff Engstrom what he has just seen. The sheriff says, “Better bring ’em in,” to which the deputy replies, “On what charge?” His answer is: “Any damn charge,” then he rattles off a list of possible options. The deputy knows what to do, and as he is leaving, the sheriff stops him and says that he ought to get Phil and Andy Loving to help him. After Bob is gone, the sheriff leans back in his chair and appears deep in thought.

Nearby, at a ratty-looking building, we see our young Civil Rights workers get their orientation. The man speaking to them, Paul, is handsome and muscular and very serious. He tells them that efforts to register black voters have so far been unsuccessful, for two reasons: the registration office moves both its location and its hours at random, and any new voter must be vouched-for by a registered voter. The pretty young white woman who has just arrived, Carol Byrd, muses, “I’d hated to be the first white person to vouch for a Negro voter.” The leader agrees and reminds them once again that it “will be no picnic.” They must reply with “sir” even to angry whites who spit on them, because they have one aim – to register black voters – and maybe, just maybe, a few local blacks will realize that they really do have some rights. The newbies get up and shuffle off, and the scene ends with the young black woman Sally telling Paul that they’ll be alright.

But really they won’t be. In the next scene, a police car pulls the convertible over, with only Carol in it. Though we don’t hear the exchange, she shows her driver’s license then motions back down the road in reply to the questions. We know that she pointing out where the Civil Rights workers’ office is. 

Next we see, the whole carload of them is being pulled into the sheriff’s office by the deputy and two other men, presumably the Phil and Andy mentioned earlier. As the five outsiders are lined up, the black man who was driving earlier tries to sit but is admonished to stand up. Once the five are told to sit, one of the white men takes the chair from the one who tried to sit, making him sit on the floor instead. The sheriff then comes over and  asks where they’re from. Philadelphia . . . New York . . . then Carol says, “Virginia.” The sheriff responds, “Ooh, a real Southern belle!” but he is not impressed, and tells the group that he can’t let them just walk into town, take over, start riots, and cause problems. He explains that his is a good, peaceful, Baptist community, and it will stay that way. One of the swarthy-looking men says he wants to quit wasting time and run them out, but the sheriff says that he’ll give them a chance to leave on their own.

As the others leave, Sheriff Engstrom, Phil, and Andy hold back the young black man Luther, who was driving the convertible earlier and tried to sit before being told that he could. They sit him down and surround him, making threatening insinuations, but Luther says that he will stay, that he has a job to do. So, Phil and Andy beat him up.

Back the Civil Rights office, Luther is bloody and being consoled by his friends. He says that he is OK, but Carol is appalled that this has happened. Tyrone, the other young black man who rode down in the convertible, says that he should have helped, but Luther reminds him that he was too scared. Tyrone objects to the characterization, then Paul steps in to warn Luther about being too strong-willed. He calls the small group over to the map and assigns them places to canvas. 

They don’t last long, and Phil and Andy are hauling three of them back into Sheriff Engstrom’s office again. This time, Engstrom takes out a clipboard and begins taking down their names and other information. We find out that Tyrone goes to Temple University in Philadelphia and that the young Jewish man Bernie goes to City College of New York. Carol, on the other hand, is a Virginia blue blood, the daughter of a judge in Richmond and the niece of the state attorney, and she breaks into a rant about being tired of apologizing for the bigotry of the South!

This really angers Sheriff Engstrom, who says never to apologize for him, then he proceeds to have Bob type up a confession for Bernie to sign, saying that Bernie admits to stealing a typewriter from a local stationary store. Bernie objects that the town doesn’t even have a stationary store, but the sheriff is undeterred. He then tells Bob to type up another confession for Tyrone, saying that he has been sharing a bed with Carol. These are the final incitements to leave town and can be rendered null and void if they clear out.

But Tyrone won’t sign. So Sheriff Engstrom begins to beat him, which leads Bernie to intervene, which leads Bob to jump up and pull his gun, which leads Bernie and Bob to struggle, which leads Bob to shoot Bernie dead! Carol flies out of her chair to him, but Bernie is already gone, and Tyrone shouts, “I hate it here! I wish all you white bastards where dead!” Carol objects to this affront against all white people, shouting back, “Bernie died for you!” But Tyrone is hearing none of it. Full of fear and anger, Tyrone proclaims that Carol is just like these bigots in Mississippi who regard all blacks in the negative same way. Carol disagrees, but Tyrone is unhinged and tries to fight his way out of the room. Yet, there are too many of them, and the four racists overtake Tyrone and choke the life out of him.

[image error]Though the term won’t become popular for decades, we see Carole as the embodiment of white privilege. Unlike Tyrone or Luther, or even Bernie, she has her whiteness on her side— and she knows it. After everyone leaves the sheriff’s office, Phil and Andy take Carole out in the woods, most likely to rape and kill her and to bury the other bodies. As they drag her through the woods, she struggle a bit then breaks into a diatribe about how they may have killed her friends, but they’ll be hanged for sure if they kill her, a white woman. Do you know I am, she asks, and reminds them that she is the daughter of a judge and the sister of movie star Dick Byrd.

When they seem swayed by the anecdote about her brother, Carol eggs it on, promising that he’ll bring them each $5,000 if they help her escape. Phil and Andy then weigh the options and decide that $10,000 would get them a long way from Mississippi, where Engstrom couldn’t touch them. The deal sounds good, so the trio goes to a phone booth and calls her brother. He is to bring $10,0000 and meet them in room 3B of a local motel.

Back at the Civil Rights workers’ meeting place, Sally is pacing around while Luther and another young black man clean up the space. As Sally begins to make a phone call, Sheriff Engstrom and Deputy Bob show up. The sheriff first asks the new character who he is, and he replies, “Carl Montgomery, sir” in a mousy little voice. With no provocation at all, the two lawmen arrest mousy Carl, and Luther asks forcefully, “On what charge?” The sheriff tells Luther that he needed to stay up North and that he can only find out the charge if he’s in a jail cell, too. Luther stares coldly, and the sheriff leaves. Sally watches the whole scene from behind the podium. Luther tells her to call Murray, the head man from up North, to get the FBI, then he tells her, “I’m not going to sit around on my butt.”

When Dick Byrd, Carole’s brother, arrives, he is surprisingly not agitated at all. Smooth and smirking, Dick checks into his little motel, which apparently has room service, and orders bottle, a rare sirloin, and the skins of two baked potatoes. 

Across town though, Paul is very agitated and sweating profusely. He is in a small bedroom, presumably hiding from Engstrom, and talking to Sally, who reports what’s going on. Paul remarks that he has done it again, lost three more Civil Rights workers. Sally then tries to soothe him, first lighting him a fresh cigarette then turning off the light so they can smooch and whatever else.

In yet another location, Carole is being held in a trash-strewn, cobweb-covered shack. The scene begins with Andy telling his brother Phil that he won’t stand aside while Phil rapes her. Then leave, Phil tells him, reaching over and ripping off Carole’s shirt. The two brothers then bicker over who will go meet Dick, and Andy gets the job. Phil reminds him not to get any funny ideas with the money, and as soon as he leaves, Phil forces himself on Carole.

By now, there’s a lot going on in Murder in Mississippi, so our attention is shifted again. Luther is out on the dirt road with his clipboard, trying to talk people into voting. But he gets turned away over and over. Meanwhile, Sally is seen leaving the little shack where Paul is hiding, carrying a briefcase, and we see her working hard as well to get some black folks registered. Sally spends some time with a lady named Mrs. Moore on the porch of a ramshackle house training the woman how to answer the questions that registrars will ask.

Just as we see the Civil Rights workers out doing good in the community, Phil is back at the shack trying coax Carole into sex by offering the hungry, half-naked woman a bite of his greasy chicken. Carole is ruffled and pleading for food, but Phil says, “Naw, you ain’t hungry enough yet.” 

Back at his motel, Dick gets a visit from Sally, who reminds him that she is friends with Carole. Dick is on the phone with the mayor because the kidnappers haven’t shown up yet, when she knocks on the door. After Dick reminisces for a moment about his work in the theater, Sally tells him that, like him, she doesn’t know where Carole is. Dick says not to worry since the sheriff is coming over, and just as Sally begins to lament, Engstrom shows up. He sees Sally and murmurs a remark about her still being around, then she leaves. He talks to Dick, who asks how long this ransom business will take; he has an important part he is rehearsing. (Keep in mind, this is a guy whose sister has been kidnapped.) The two men go back and forth about the kidnapping, and Engstrom says that it’s best to leave it to him to handle.

Out on the road, Luther is still going door to door. He stops at a house where he has a heavily scripted dialogue with a shirtless, middle-aged farmer named Mr. Taylor, while his wife and child listen nearby. The farmer is wary, reminding Luther that they all have to live there after people like him leave. Luther remains obstinate in the face of the man who claims that the Civil Rights workers “make trouble for us.” After a few moments, Luther’s tenacity has angered Taylor, and he calls his wife and child into the house, putting Luther back out on the road.

Back again at the motel, Dick is visited by pretty, young black woman. He answers the door, and she says, “Sheriff told me to come up here and take care of you.” Dick responds, “Well, Southern hospitality.”  She quickly takes off her clothes and climbs into bed with him, as Dick is made to understand she does as the sheriff tells her. As they roll into the covers, Andy comes in through the hallway window to talk about the ransom. Dick has to get out of bed, and he casually hands Andy $10,000 in cash then asks about Carole. Andy says that she’ll be at the corner of Highway 1 and Route 41 at 6:00 the next morning. Dick plays it cool, points his finger, and says she’d better be. (Dick is obviously a complete idiot.)

Now, it’s time for some turnabout-is-fair-play. Luther has left the dirt road and is wandering in woods, when he stumbles on the shack where Carole is being held. Inside, she is gnawing on the remnants of the chicken, and a shirtless, sweaty Phil decides its time to make his move. But Carole bites his lip, drawing blood— and about that time, Luther arrives! He loses it like Tyrone did earlier and attacks Phil, calling him, “Animal! Animal!” At first Phil is getting the best of Luther, but Luther comes back and chokes Phil out.

Next we see, Phil is being smacked awake by Sheriff Engstrom who has obviously figured out the ransom scheme. But Carole and Luther are gone! They are running for their lives through the woods, while the bigots and their dogs searching diligently. This goes on for a few moments with excitable music playing, until Carole and Luther are exhausted. In something of a tender moment, Luther offers his white button-down to Carole , whose dress has been ripped open, and she accepts the kind gesture. She lays her head in his lap, and they kiss. However, they are discovered mid-embrace, and in a particularly disturbing scene, Luther is overtaken, held down, and castrated as he screams wildly. 

At the sheriff’s office afterward, there is a straight-laced FBI agent questioning first the sheriff then Carole. He is investigating the disappearance of Tyrone and Bernie, and doesn’t appear phased by the fact that Carole is dirty, wearing tattered clothes, and obvious distraught. The sheriff claims that she was raped by Luther. All the FBI man can do is say that isn’t over yet and leave. After he is gone, Dick sits slyly on the sheriff’s desk and makes a deal with Engstrom to have Carole testify in a way that will exonerate the Mississippi bigots and clear her of all charges.

In the movie’s last ten minutes, we find the whole gang appearing before the United States Commission. Bernie’s father comes in and speaks to Carole, asking where Bernie is, but Carole says that she doesn’t know. The commissioner (judge) is a woman who is very Southern, very rude, and very unfriendly to the cause of Civil Rights. She argues with every word the prosecutor says, then he calls Carole to testify. But going against the plan, Carole immediately begins to shout the truth: Engstrom killed Tyrone and Bernie and castrated Luther. However, the recalcitrant judge will not hear any of it, claiming that there is no evidence and that the law doesn’t cover what the prosecutor is alleging. It is clear to us viewers: the legal system in Mississippi is blind to justice. The bigots love it, and they cheer for the judge’s ludicrous ruling! Even Dick congratulates the sheriff, who tells Carole that he will forgive her for all of the lies she has told.

However, a befuddled Carole resists. Dick tries to take her home, but she wrinkles her brow and proclaims that she has now become fully involved. She will not return with Dick. She will stay in Mississippi after seeing what happened to Bernie, Tyrone, and Luther. Her brother can’t believe it, but she tells him, “Either you’re on his side, or ours.” Dick then asks Engstrom how he expects to win this battle over Civil Rights, and Engstrom replies, “You don’t win, you just hang on as long as you can.”

As he is saying this, Deputy Bob appears with an order from the mayor to sign a petition that allows a new group of Civil Rights activists to have a parade. Engstrom won’t sign it, but Deputy Bob says that “the big man” says he has to. Now, out of the blue, a turncoat Dick begins to have a laugh at the sheriff’s predicament, mocking the “dirty politics” of it all. Engstrom signs the document, and Deputy Bob asks him what he’s doing. Engstrom replies, “Hangin’ on.”

The film ends with scenes from the movement, including footage of Lyndon B. Johnson and the March on Washington. 

If you look on IMDb at the personal quotes attributed to director Joseph P. Mawra, you’ll find this: “We never set out to make anything that would be remembered— it was just about getting quick product into the theaters.” After watching Murder in Mississippi, I believe it. Looking up reviews and information on the film yields almost nothing, a fact that is underpinned by the Norman Rockwell painting on the same name and year and by the fact most search results bring up actual murders in Mississippi. 

While I understand the necessity of creating films that comment on social justice issues, I can’t understand this one, which couldn’t have contributed anything to the national dialogue in 1965. Its characters are mostly stereotypes, its plot is predictable, the dialogue is cardboard, the acting is terrible, all the things.

To me, the most compelling aspects of this film about the South are the troubling actions of Carole Byrd and her brother Dick. Neither Sheriff Engstrom, Deputy Bob, Phil nor Andy are surprising in any way. Frankly, neither are most of the Civil Rights workers. But knowing what we do about the rigor with which Civil Rights organizations vetted and trained volunteers – especially white volunteers – for service in the South, Carole’s entitled, privileged, half-baked noblesse oblige and her completely undisciplined approach to her work are impossible to buy into. Moreover, her brother Dick comes to Mississippi, after having been raised in the South, with an extremely flippant, la-tee-dah attitude about two rednecks who’ve kidnapped his sister. Moreover, when he is approached, unsolicited, by a young black prostitute who tells him that the sheriff basically has her bound to involuntary servitude, he has a la-tee-dah attitude about taking her bed, too. Perhaps Carole is the film’s changed character, when she faces the truth in the end, while Dick essentially sides with the bigoted sheriff and the two men who kidnapped his sister. If that’s the case, if our focus is on Carole’s growth from a naive do-gooder to real believer, then once again, we have a problematic film that focuses not on the brutality leveled on black Southerners but on yet another white conversion narrative. (I’ve written about this before in posts about The Klansman and The Liberation of LB Jones.)

Murder in Mississippi may be a throwaway film, but it goes without saying that somebody who didn’t know any better saw it and bought into what they saw. Sure, there are some grains of truth here – stereotypes don’t come from nowhere – but the devil is in the details. I just hope that whoever saw this film and was inspired (or disgusted ) by it— I just hope they took the time to look closer into what the facts were.

See more Southern Movie posts

Reading: “Black Elk Speaks”

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux
by John G. Neihardt
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

[image error]The road that led me to Black Elk Speaks was a circuitous one. Though I’m not indifferent to it, I’m not particularly interested in Native American history, nor in the history of American West, and this book is both. My introduction to Black Elk came instead through reading Sonny Brewer’s novel The Poet of Tolstoy Park, which tells the story of Henry Stuart, an Idaho college professor who retired to convalesce in Fairhope, Alabama in the 1920s. Stuart, who was a real person, was a devotee of Leo Tolstoy and, after hearing Black Elk speak, was influenced by the Oglala Sioux holy man as well. I enjoyed Brewer’s novel when I read it back in 2005, and it has always been my habit to look into things that people I like also like (as in discovering Charlie Parker’s music through reading Jack Kerouac.)

However, this book stayed on my reading list for about more than a decade before I bought a copy. As a collector of oral histories myself, I’m a fan of the genre, and that’s basically what Black Elk Speaks is: a book-length oral history told by a very elderly Native American and collected in the 1930s by a white poet. The narrative begins when Black Elk is nine, in the early 1870s; he has a religious vision that sets the trajectory for his life. The reader is then carried through the turbulent period when white Americans – who he calls wasichus – are settling/conquering/usurping the West. In his story, Black Elk relays with candor the love he has for his people and for a way of life that he saw disappear in the late 1800s, while remarking with equal candor about the violence it took to hold off the white soldiers who were enforcing unjust treaties made with a few tribal leaders who lacked the authority to make deals on behalf of all indigenous people who occupied those lands. The latter portions of the book also discuss his time traveling in Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and finally his settling-down into an undesirable way of life forced on him by the American government.  As a person largely ignorant to the specifics of this history, I’m thankful to have read a firsthand narrative from a person who both lived it and stood up bravely against it.

Although Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux, his story is one of many like it in American history. As Americans, we regularly insist on our own rights and freedoms, while simultaneously opposing others who stand up for their rights and freedoms. In Black Elk Speaks, one of US military’s first moves was to build a roadway through the land for wagons and carriages, but his people knew that would both disturb the bison and lead to more intrusions. Likewise, because all indigenous people hadn’t agreed the treaties, each side had to kill or be killed in battles that decided the very American question, whose rights win out when both parties can’t have their way? 

In historical retrospect, we know that Native Americans were mistreated – in Black Elk’s words, you can’t eat lies – but now, in the fact of the realization, a new question has to be asked, what do we do remedy those past wrongs?

 

level:deepsouth— for Generation X

Six months since the inception of this new project level:deepsouth— for Generation X, stories from our generation have been steadily rolling in. After the call for submissions began in late spring, the first inclusions to the anthology were published in July. The earliest submissions came from Kentucky and Alabama, then others came from Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. One book review has been added, and another is on the way in a few days. To read what’s already there, visit the long form, golden days, and reviews pages.

[image error]And the call for submissions goes on, and there’s not just one way to contribute to the project. In addition to publishing essays and memoirs about firsthand experiences, level:deepsouth is also open to works about favorite books, bookstores, and libraries for the in print section; and about favorite songs, records, tapes, CDs, record stores, TV shows, movies, or movie theaters for the watch & listen section.

I understand that some people, now between the ages of 40 and 55, may not want to write about personal stories from their lives in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, but that shouldn’t prohibit them from making a contribution. First, everyone should remember that not all of the stories are seedy or shameful or hurtful— some good things happened, too. I’d love to receive those works. Or Gen-Xers who grew up in the Deep South can contribute digitized photos to the images section or add a link to an article, video, or website to the lists.

Finally, to those people who have stories to tell but are thinking, “I’m not a writer,” I say you should type it up and send it. I can’t make any promises that it’ll get published, but I am an editor, and if there’s something worthwhile there, we’ll figure that out it, wash off the muck, and make it presentable.

The story of Generation X in the Deep South is rich, complex, and largely untold. What I’ve learned from doing oral histories and some public history is: if you don’t tell your story, someone else will. As a Gen-Xer from Alabama, I see our generation portrayed through The Breakfast Club and Say Anything and  “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and footage from Lollapalooza, but there’s a whole range of Southern experiences that are left out of that understanding. Right now, we can tell the stories that share our truths, and later, when the academics and historians finally come around, these narratives can be the primary sources that explain who we really were. Even though focus was put on New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle in the 1980s and ’90s, the South brought out acts like The Black Crowes, Arrested Development, Drive-by Truckers, and Lil Wayne. But during this time, there was no significant mainstream film or TV portrayal of the lives we were living down here. (The biggest mainstream movies about the South in the 1980s and 1990s were about our parents’ and grandparents’ generations: Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes, Driving Miss Daisy, Forrest Gump, and a passel about the Civil Rights era. Films about Generation X in the South were more niche: Crossroads, School Daze, and Sling Blade.) 

I came up with the idea for level:deepsouth years ago, but I knew that it was time for it when I realized that the youngest Gen-Xers were turning 40 this year. (You may have seen Macauley Culkin’s tweet the other when he hit the big 4-0.) In my work as a writer and teacher, I’ve interviewed quite a few older people who tried to answer my questions but could only say, “That was a long time ago, I don’t really remember.” The way I see it, we should collect the stories and get our truths down while our minds are still relatively sharp. We don’t want to leave our generation’s cultural heritage to some wistful, twenty-something Ph.D. student who is trying to interview us when we’re 70 to 85. Imagine explaining the 1980s in the 2050s to somebody born in the 2020s.

With that said, I’d be glad to continue receiving submissions from folks who were born between 1965 and 1980 and grew up in the Deep South. Some of us have spent our whole lives in these southern states, while others may have lived here for a short time. This project is for both groups, as long as the work that is submitted discusses that portion of a young life lived down here. What I’m saying is: check out the website, read the guidelines, write your story, and send it in.