Foster Dickson's Blog, page 28
June 3, 2020
New articles on “Medium”
Why the Whitehurst Case Matters
Looking back at the 1975 shooting of a black man by a white police officer
Listening
What I learned about taking part in the movement for social justice from a long-time Civil Rights activist
Writing & Teaching
The Driver’s Seat: Writing to Get Somewhere
You may have noticed that, in English classes, some parts of grammar are called “mechanics”
The Perfect Kind of Grouch (in The Startup)
Why On Writing Well became one writing teacher’s classroom bible
“Quit!”
I still say Yes . . . just not to everything.
5 Mantras from a Classroom Veteran
In the teaching profession, cultivating patience is a must.
May 19, 2020
Goodreads: “Love Letter to the Earth”
[image error]Love Letter to the Earth by Thich Nhat Hanh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I bought Love Letter to the Earth so I could finally read something by Thich Nhat Hanh. I’d seen him referenced or alluded to in other books that I’ve read, and I was looking forward to seeing what he’s all about. I think I should I have chosen a different book. While I saw the spirit of peace and compassion that he’s known for, this book’s sentiments were so elementary that it was dull and lacked weight. Most of the book was about how we should breathe, walk, and drink tea. Someone might read my sentiment, and say, “He didn’t get it.” Oh, I got it— and I was disappointed. I understand what this revered monk was telling his reader: that our attitudes about the Earth have to change before we will change how we treat it. I also agree with him that the essence of life resides in experience, even minutiae, which we should appreciate. And I also agree that communities of people working for positive change will achieve more than one person doing it alone. However, as a person interested in sustainability, the climate crisis, environmental justice, and conservation, I found Love Letter to the Earth unimpressive.
May 14, 2020
Two Months In: the COVID-19 Quarantine
For context, you might consider first reading “One Month In: the COVID-19 quarantine”.
So now, we’re two months – sort of – into this quarantine. I know that stay-at-home orders are being lifted and that Alabama’s rules were relaxed on April 30, but my family is still living along a fairly stringent degree of separation. We’re at home most of the time anyway, since I’m teaching from home and my children are schooling from home. The bright side has consisted of walks and bike rides, and takeout food from neighborhood eateries. On the other side, it has been hard seeing the date of the Alabama Book Festival pass, being unable to take my wife out for our wedding anniversary, and having to maintain distance on Mother’s Day last weekend. But I understand why we’re doing this and don’t want a relapse that could cause us to do this again!
I also never want to do school like this again. I’m not a fan of the sentimentalism associated with the teaching profession, but I have to admit that this quarantine has shown me that I really enjoy being with my students, in my classroom, and around my school garden. High schools in springtime are hives of furious energy, but this year, silence came in its stead. So many of the fun and celebratory events that we look forward to are held in April and May – prom, awards day, signing day, graduation – and cancelling those really stinks. It’s easy to get grouchy and ready-to-be-done in the spring, but I hadn’t realized how important those weeks are.
[image error]Of course, spring is also the best season for gardening, but instead of gathering students to dig in the dirt, I brought the tools, rain barrel, and other supplies into my classroom, and carried the rain barrel stand, the compost sifter, and the compost bin home for repairs. By the end of April, I had covered our two long vegetables beds. Four months of spring into summer – from mid-March through early August – is more than enough time for the grass and weeds to take over, and I’d kind of like for the beds to be there when we get back.
In the meantime, I have been able to get some work done on two of my projects. My book on the history of our local Catholic school is well underway. After nearly a year of researching and reading, I’ve got an overarching sense of what I’m writing about. The book will be ready by 2023 as the school’s 150th anniversary commemorations begin. Likewise, the planning is falling into place to do more oral history collection in Newtown and to compile a subsequent book publication about that community. Right before the school closure, I got a second education grant from the Alabama Bicentennial Commission to continue the work we did in 2019. That project will begin with baby steps this summer, then ramp up in the fall if responsible practices allow.
[image error]Alongside those two projects, I’m also continuing to develop level:deepsouth. The first queries and submissions are coming in, and from experience, I know that new projects start slowly. People look on the site and see scant content, and they wonder whether the project is viable . . . I heard a long time ago that “people want to be where people are.” That’s why starting something new requires patience, consistency, and stick-to-itiveness. I know that the project’s premise is solid, and that I’m the editor for the job, so it’s a matter of showing others that it’s worthwhile to contribute.
For reading, in April, I finished three books I had already started – Randall Kenan’s short-story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Stanley Fish’s writing-advice book How to Write a Sentence, and Abigail Thernstrom’s 1987 study Whose Votes Count? – and I just finished Sister Helen Prejean’s The Death of Innocents last weekend. For the rest of the spring and the summer, I bought Thich Nhat Hanh’s Love Letter to the Earth and compilations of writings by Catherine de Hueck and St. John of the Cross. Those latter two are, in part, for when the adoration chapel opens back up. I always read a lot of nonfiction, but it might time for a good novel.
On the home front, we’ve got our raised bed at the Old Cloverdale Community Garden full with four yellow squash, one cucumber, a beef steak tomato, two sweet peppers, some mint, and some basil. Curious to try something long-term, I planted a Seedless Suffolk grape vine, and on the whimsical end, the kids and I planted a half-rotten onion that was sprouting on the kitchen counter— and it’s splitting and growing! For my next task, I’ve been assigned to build a worm farm up there, so we can make a little bit of compost and fertilize our plants with “worm tea.”
I hope and pray that I won’t be writing a post titled “Three Months In” next month. It seems to me that the country’s cooperative mood is fading. Though I’m still cooperating, I’ll admit that mine is, too. My family has been OK so far, but as a “victim” of the Great Recession ten years ago, I have been particularly concerned about the hard-working people who’ve gone without jobs and paychecks. While I don’t want people to get sick or die, especially not en masse, I am all too aware that financial repercussions from a crisis can hurt a family for years. I don’t want our hospitals to be overrun, but I also don’t want our food banks and shelters to be. And having worked for family-owned businesses in the past, I don’t want for any family’s generational blood, sweat, and tears to be wiped away when their business can’t sustain a months-long closure. I won’t try to become another amateur public health expert, but what I do know is: somehow, some way, we’ve got to balance the medical and the economic with the emotional and the psychological— all of it.
May 11, 2020
Goodreads: “The Death of Innocents”
The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions by Helen Prejean
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
[image error]It seems odd to say that I was surprised at what a good book this is. I had expected for the content to be compelling, even riveting, in describing the injustices heaped on people who get railroaded by the criminal justice system, but I hadn’t expected for Sister Helen Prejean to be such a good writer. I was familiar with Prejean in the way most people are – through the movie Dead Man Walking and through news stories about death penalty – but I had not read any of her work before. Prejean’s ability to weave her way through complex scenarios, to jump back and forth in time, to provide background seamlessly and without confusion were all impressive— which made the book’s content even more heartbreaking, because I wasn’t stumbling through her narrative. Prejean focuses first on two death row inmates who may well have been innocent, then Justice Antoni Scalia and his – according to her – misunderstanding of both Catholic doctrine and the law. In the final section, the reader gets an overview of the problems with the death penalty in America, attacking the issue piece by piece with statistics, facts, and anecdotes. The narrative does get a tad redundant in spots but not bad. Overall, The Death of Innocents contains a convincing, well-thought-out, and exceptionally humane perspective on a major problem in American culture and in the practical application of modern Christian ethics.
May 2, 2020
Goodreads: “Whose Votes Count?”
Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights by Abigail M. Thernstrom
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
[image error]I decided to read this after seeing it mentioned in Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot. I understood that Thernstrom’s study, published by Harvard UP, laid the foundation for conservative opposition to the Voting Rights Act. By the mid-1980s, the VRA was two decades old, and had been reauthorized in 1970, ’75, and ’82. Of course, times were changing, and so did the VRA, and this book elucidates one perspective on those changes. I approached the book knowing that I wouldn’t learn everything there is to know by reading one book of less than 250 pages – the last 65 pages are endnotes – but Whose Votes Count? does acknowledge need for the VRA due to longstanding injustices in the South and the impacts of the act, its alterations, and its court battles. On the one hand, Thernstrom asks tough questions about concepts like responsiveness, bloc voting, effect-versus-intent, fairness, and effective representation. On the other hand, she uses not-so-subtle persuasion tactics like periodically inserting words like “useless,” “odd,” and “excessive.” At the end, I agreed with some of her assertions and disagreed with others, which I expected, having come to it with an open mind. But what I gained from it seems more important than just my opinions: an increased understanding of the complicated nature of our democracy.
April 30, 2020
A Look Back at “Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South,” part two
*You should read “A Look Back,” part one first.
[image error]It was ten years ago this month that I concluded the year-long “Patchwork” project that had me reading, traveling, interviewing, and news-watching, all with an eye focused sharply on my home state of Alabama. What began with trips to Mobile, over to eastern Alabama around Lake Martin, then west into the Black Belt in August and September continued for seven more months and carried me physically, intellectually, and historically throughout the state.
Rounding out 2009, I was reading at home and traveling as much as possible. In October, I went to the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, outside of Tuscaloosa; in November, to the Turkey Day Classic Parade in downtown Montgomery and to the Iron Bowl game in Auburn; and in December, up to Birmingham to roam around a bit. Kentuck was a natural choice for this project. This annual art festival was founded in the early ’70s and is now ranked as one of the best in the nation. Since it was fall though, there had to be football. The Turkey Day Classic was then the annual game between rival HBCUs Alabama State and Tuskegee, but since I wasn’t going to miss my family dinner, I only went to the parade, which is an event in itself. That same weekend, I also went to my first Iron Bowl, but my Tigers lost a heartbreaker in Jordan-Hare from what is now called “The Drive.” Up in Birmingham, I was busy: interviewing Brian Scott Teasley (of Man or Astroman?) who then owned Bottle Tree Cafe, shopping at Charlemagne Records, eating at Pete’s Famous Hot Dogs and at Urban Standard, then interviewing the president of Free the Hops at the J. Clyde. By the time I got home from that last trip of 2009, it was time to give exams at school then go home for Christmas.
[image error]As the new year 2010 rolled in, I pointed my car back into the Black Belt. That September trip had sliced right through the middle, but these latter trips went well north and south of Highway 80. In January, I went down to Forest Home in Butler County; in February, I was back in Tuscaloosa; and March put me in Camden in Wilcox County. Forest Home is a place that you’d probably never go unless you had a reason, and my reason was that my aunt and uncle – my father’s sister and her husband – lived there on a parcel of family land. Up in Tuscaloosa, I had interviews set up with filmmaker (and now podcaster) Andrew Beck Grace, photographer (and now ASCA director) Elliott Knight, letterpress printer Amos Kennedy (who was then Gordo), and the Snows who operate the Snows Bend Farm CSA. I had also planned my trip for that late-January weekend so I could catch a Drive-By Truckers show at the Jupiter Bar & Grill on The Strip.
[image error]As winter faded and spring was coming, the trip to Camden centered around Black Belt Treasures, then I was in eastern Alabama again to visit Tuskegee, Auburn, and the small communities between. Back then, Fred’s Feed & Seed (and Pickin’ Parlor) was still open in Loachapoka, but that day it was quiet, so I went on to Waverly to spend the day with Scott Peek of Standard Deluxe (and the Old 280 Boogie).
Where the majority of my travels in the “Patchwork” project kept me in central Alabama, the last two trips, both taken in the spring, stretched out to opposite ends of the state, first to the Wiregrass in the lower southeastern portion, then to Huntsville, up near the Tennessee border. That run into the Wiregrass was the least structured of the bunch and involved a lot of driving, but it did include an interview with Bill Perkins, the editorial-page editor for The Dothan Eagle. Up in Huntsville, the highlight was an interview, at the old Mullins Restaurant, with a guy named Wyatt Akin, who used to maintain an archive of skateboarding pictures and footage called Skate Alabama.
[image error]By May 2010, I was worn out. Most of the artist-teacher fellows that year did one-time workshops during the summer prior, but I had slung my work all over the calendar. I found, at the convening in New York City, that I was the only fellow whose project wasn’t finished. But it was worth it. What I did couldn’t have been compressed into a continuous two- or three-week timeframe. To wrap my head around Alabama, I had to ramble and read and wonder and talk to people and think about things and ramble some more. Being alone in the car for those long drives was just right for thinking.
[image error]I did a lot in the time period between August 2009 and April 2010, considering that I was also teaching full-time and had a wife and two small children at home. The picture here shows in red the counties where I went, some of them multiple times. However, I do have a few regrets about where I didn’t go. I still can’t believe that I didn’t get up to Muscle Shoals, where all that great music was made, or to the Ave Maria Grotto near Cullman, and I wish that I had made a trip into northeastern Alabama, to places like Sylacauga, known for its beautiful marble, and Fort Payne, the sock capitol of the world. I also know now that I should have spent more time talking with editors and reporters from small-town newspapers. Those folks are treasure troves of knowledge about their local communities, and they could have told me about things I never even knew to look for.
Ten years later, as I think about those trips, which were meant to visit the places in Alabama that too few people talk about, I’ve been sad to learn how many are closed or gone: Charlemagne Records, Five Points South Music Hall, Bottle Tree Cafe, Jupiter Bar & Grill, Pete’s Hot Dogs, the Syrup Soppin’ Festival, Fred’s Feed & Seed, Mullins Restaurant. But it’s been good to know that others are doing well: Black Belt Treasures, Standard Deluxe, Snows Bend Farm. I guess the simple fact is that some things change and some don’t. ‘Bama and Auburn haven’t stopped trading Ws and Ls. The year of the project, Alabama’s politicians were fighting over gambling, and they still are now. Yep, I guess that’s it. Some things change, and certainly, in Alabama . . . some things don’t.
Here are few images from the latter portions of the project:
Though I was impressed by this woman’s hat, I’m glad I wasn’t sitting behind her.
Charlemagne Records closed recently, after being in business for 42 years.
This would probably look like a joke to many Americans,
but it’s a real place: the volunteer fire department in the
small community of Peckerwood, north of Alexander City.
I spent most of a day with printer Amos Kennedy, who has
since moved to Detroit. We also walked around the corner
so I could meet Glenn House Sr., who has now passed away.
One of the original locations of Standard Deluxe in Waverly
April 28, 2020
Goodreads: “How to Write a Sentence”
[image error]How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I started reading this book in hopes of finding another book to use in my high school writing class. (I’ve taught Zinsser’s On Writing Well for years.) This one isn’t it. What led me to give it a try was the length – it’s short, high school students like that – so I read it quickly, in only a few days. But boy is it dull and repetitive! There are some excellent nuggets of wisdom in here, and Fish does make his point by selecting wonderful sentences from classic literature to use as examples . . . but his method gets old— fast. And it’s a problem when a book manages to get old in such a short space. As I was reading, I was thinking, “My students would hate this.” If anything, How to Write a Sentence is for adult writers, possibly experienced ones looking for new ideas to ponder. On the bright side, it’s erudite and intelligent and even funny in spots. On the other side, the cultural references are a little old – so, not for teenagers in the 2020s – and even this English-major-turned-writer/teacher doesn’t really want to read book of sentence explications. This isn’t a bad book, not by a long shot, but . . . well, yeah.
April 23, 2020
Southern Movie 48: “The Beguiled” (1971)
In 1971, when The Beguiled was released to American movie audiences, it would have been easy to buy into the notion that Southerners were crazy. For more than a decade, both television news and Hollywood movies had been providing a steady stream of true-to-life violent imagery showing stalwart bigotry and anti-Civil Rights violence. So, it was conceivable in the popular imagination that even a group of otherwise-demure women and girls in a Civil War-era boarding school would do something as outlandish as imprison and maim a wounded Union soldier. Directed by Don Siegel, who had also teamed up with Beguiled star Clint Eastwood on Two on Mules for Sister Sara and Dirty Harry, this “Southern gothic” movie combines regional history with war, sexuality, and suspense.
The Beguiled opens with a series of sepia-tone still images showing violent Civil War battle scenes as the credits roll. These images are overlain by the sounds of battle and punctuated by men screaming. This doesn’t last long, though, and our attention is refocused on a girl gathering mushrooms in a forest. She is wearing a long dress and braids in her hair, and is carrying a basket. Soon, however, her calm foray in the woods is interrupted by the sight of blood, and a man falls from the foliage to the ground. His face is bloody and charred, as are his hands. The girl is horrified, and then we hear a battle raging nearby.
Once the man is on the ground, we see that he is a Union soldier in a blue uniform. He can barely speak but manages to pull her into the bushes with him when a group of Confederate soldiers pass by. And it is in those bushes where he makes his first move, asking the terrified girl how old she is, then kissing her on the mouth after she answers, “Twelve. Thirteen in September.” The man tells her that he is Corporal John McBurney but everyone calls him McB (Clint Eastwood). After the Rebels have passed by, the girl, whose name is Amy, helps him stumble to get help.
Back at the house, we see a black woman, presumably a slave, crouching in a garden plot. A white woman comes outside with a basket, and they speak amiably. The black woman is Hallie, the white woman is Martha, and this large white mansion is the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Girls. Inside, we see a small classroom where a young teacher provides instruction to a class of four. One of the girls, who isn’t paying attention, admits that she is too frightened to learn, because she had heard that, if the Yankees win the nearby battle, they will rape all the girls there. Meanwhile, Amy is aiding McB and crying, “Miss Martha! He’s dying,” as she approaches the gate. The women and girls all run out to let them in, and Amy is scolded for leaving the grounds and for bringing McB there. Nonetheless, they pick him up and carry him to the house. As they carry him, Martha Farnsworth shows herself to be a true Southern patriot by remarking that if he were to die, he’d just be “one less enemy soldier.”
Once they have McB on the front stairs of the house, Martha tells Amy to tie a blue rag on the gate, a sign that will tell the Confederates to retrieve an enemy soldier. The younger woman who was teaching earlier, Edwina, protests that he is very weak and has lost a lot of blood, but Martha is unfazed. Inside the house, the girls twitter and lurk, wanting to know if he will die, but Martha tells them that he is doing better and will recover.
[image error]This is where the drama begins. In the sewing room, the girls discuss McB in quiet tones, and Edwina speaks fondly and defensively of the new arrival. In her thoughts, we hear Amy declare that she finds him handsome. Back in the music room where he is being held, Hallie washes his back, and Martha tries to put a nightshirt on him. The effort brings back a reminscence of a man who Martha is seen embracing and kissing, then we see him in an oil portrait on the wall. When Hallie mentions the man, whose name is Edward, Martha tells her not to speak of him. (At first, it seems as though this would be her husband, but it’s actually her brother.)
Outside, at the gate, the Confederates do arrive, but Martha does not give it away that McB is inside. The Rebels have a handful of blue-uniformed prisoners, one of whom is nearly shot, but Martha chooses not to hand over McB. She remains coy as the girls, who are looking on, wonder whether she will betray the Yank.
Back inside, McB begins his work to manipulate his way into a better position. He talks to Hallie, who is tending to him, about how they should be friends. They’re both prisoners there, each in their own way, he tells her. Yet, Hallie coldly rejects him and continues her work.
Once the Confederates are gone, Martha and Edwina are talking while they remove the sign on the gate that announces a house full of girls and women. Martha speaks about a time when the school was thriving and how she’d never intended to run the farm and the school. She would like Edwina to be her partner in re-establishing the school to its former glory. Edwina is, of course, pleased.
Once the women have nailed the windows of the music room shut, we sense the tension. So far we have seen McB try to influence Hallie, and we’ve found out that Amy, Edwina, and Martha all have a fondness for him. That is complicated further when Edwina catches young Carol trying to get into his room later. The next morning, the genteel teacher comes down to feed McB his breakfast, and by the end of their conversation, we see that she is flustered by her feelings for him. Then comes Amy to visit him. She won’t stay but does drop a hint that she told Randolph all about him. Who is Randolph?
Up on the roof, one of the girls is thinking to herself about how harboring McB is treason, and she tries to flag down Confedrates who are passing by. Inside, Edwina is playing the piano for McB and chatting with him. She lets him in on Amy’s not-so-secret: Randolph is a turtle. And we can feel the pair getting closer, but Edwina tells him that she doesn’t really trust men. This is something that McB will have to work on, but they are interrupted by an abrupt Martha bringing his dinner.
Next, McB works on Martha. He explains to her that he is a Quaker and was an unarmed field nurse with his regiment. He claims to have been trying to save a Confederate soldier when he was shot. However, as this tale is told, he also see flashbacks of the real story: McB is hiding among the trees, gunning down Confederates coldly until one of them shoots him, then as he crawls across the forest floor, an artillery shell explodes right by his face. At this point, we know he is a liar, and we’ve now seen him attempt to use his cunning on four different women: Amelia, Edwina, Martha, and Hallie. Yet, Martha is beginning to soften toward him and offers him some wine for his pain if the severe burns hurt too badly, but he oversteps his bounds when he tries to create a romantic opportunity out of it.
Yet, romance is what he may well get. McB gets his sure thing when Carol manages to sneak out of evening Bible study, claiming to have to use the bathroom. She comes in quietly and makes it known that he can have her if he wants. She kisses him lightly and sneaks back out just as she came in.
The next day, Martha is in the carriage and leaving the school grounds to get supplies. Given the plot so far, we know that all kinds of maneuvering will go on while Martha is gone. First, Amelia goes to his boarded-up window and asks if he wants the crutches that they have in the barn. Yes, he does. Hallie is out in the barn milking the cow, so she knows what the little girl is up to. The other girls are working the garden and complaining. Then, while Hallie is shaving McB, they flirt a little bit, and we find out that Hallie once had a man, Ben, who ran away. McB makes another effort to ingratiate her by claiming that he’ll look for Ben when he is free again.
Out in the daylight, a clean-shaven McB is ready to make his big move on Edwina. He is cleaned up and moving around on crutches. The two meet outside on the large porch, and he talks her into sitting with him before she has to teach class. He confesses his love for her, claiming that she is the first woman he has ever looked at this way— and she buys it, hook, line, and sinker.
However, Martha arrives home, and McB must now contend with her. So far he has managed to conceal his efforts with each woman by saying these things only when he is alone with them. Though Martha is surprised that he is out of the music room, she seems open to it. McB declares that he has most of his strength back, and he would be glad to help with the farm work. Without much fuss, Martha agrees, saying it would be nice to have the help. McB then goes on to proclaim how much he loves the land and how he hates what the war has done to it, but in another flashback, we see him setting fire to it.
So far, McB has done a good job of hiding his advances on the various women and girls, but he is about to screw up. As Edwina teaches an etiquette class, Carol sees McB walking outside. He is now in long pants and a shirt, and out of the nightshirt that he wore as a convalescent. She asks once again to use the restroom, and is allowed to go. Carol finds McB in the gazebo, playing solitaire, and offers herself to him again. She has her shirt open, and they make out a bit, hidden the vines that cover the gazebo. But when Edwina is told that Carol isn’t in the bathroom, she goes looking for her and walks up on the amorous couple. Edwina is terribly upset and lets it out that it was her father, who constant cheated on her mother, that was the cause of her mistrust of men. Nearby, as she walks away, Carol hears McB tell Edwina that she means nothing to him, so Carol goes and ties the blue bandana around the gate to alert passersby of a Yankee prisoner. Just then, three men amble by, see the rag, and come onto the property ready to seize a Yankee. McB hides for a moment but is discovered. He fights off the first man, but the others descend on him and he is trapped. Resorting once again to lies, McB tells them that he is from a Confederate regiment out of Texas, and when Martha appears on the scene, she confirms slyly that he is her cousin from Texas. The men admonish Martha that this is no time for jokes, and Martha retorts that whoever put that blue rag on the gate will be punished.
Now halfway through The Beguiled, McB’s real problems are emerging. He is walking freely around the grounds, eating at the table, and lounging to pass the time, but he has excited several women with several different agendas. The patient mother-hen Martha has her eye on him. The idealistic Edwina only half-trusts him but wants him nonetheless. The cunning Carol continues to seduce him. And the child Amy has her own naive kind of affection for him. All of this is about to catch up with him.
Late that evening, a small group of Confederate soldiers come to the house to tell Martha that their regiment is leaving the area. The three men offer to stay behind and protect them, but it is obviously from their demeanor that what they really want is to get at the females housed there. Martha deftly outsmarts them and shows them the door. Meanwhile, McB is hiding upstairs and uses the opportunity to make out with Edwina. Once the soldiers are gone and everyone comes out of hiding, the girls are sent to bed, and Carol stops McB on the stairs to offer once again for him to come to her room. He realizes what has happened: Carol tied the blue rag. He calls her out on it, and she replies that he shouldn’t do things to make her jealous.
As McB descends the stairs, Martha is waiting with a bottle of wine to offer him. He accepts and as they talk, Martha asks him to stay on and run the farm. McB says yes, and after consuming their wine, she intimates that the two of them can become a couple. In flashbacks during this scene, we learn a bit more about Edward, first that he is dead and won’t be coming home, and second, that he and Martha had a passionate incestuous relationship. Of course, McB doesn’t know this, and he and Martha make out at his bedroom door, which she leaves open. Now, McB has a choice: three women – Martha, Edwina, and Carol – are all waiting in their beds for him, and he has to go to one of them.
After a kinky dream sequence where it looks like he goes to bed with Martha and Edwina at the same time, McB is heading upstairs. He stands in the hall between Martha’s room and Edwina’s room, looking back and forth, when Carol appears. Perhaps knowing that she could be the death of him, he half-shrugs and follows Carol to her room as quietly as he is able, but he still makes a noise. He goes into Carol’s room, and she graciously allows him to climb in bed— but they are caught by Edwina, who has an absolute screaming freakout! Edwina throws him down the stairs, and he breaks his leg severely.
By now, all of the girls are up, and they work together to carry him downstairs. They lay McB on a table, and Martha declares that she will amputate his leg. She claims that it will gangrene if she doesn’t. Hallie and Edwina protest the decision, but Martha replies that she’ll be saving his life.
When McB wakes up a one-legged man, he is both horrified and furious. He berates Martha for her vindictiveness and tells a sobbing Edwina to get away from him as well. But he has to face that the fact that Amy, who weeps as she tells him, thought that he loved her. For the rest of movie, he is no longer a suave trickster navigating delicately but a fierce antagonist terrorizing the house and everyone in it. Carol comes to his window at one point to say that she hopes he will continue to want her, but all he wants is to get out of his room. She frees him, and McB goes to Martha’s room where he steals Edward’s letters, Martha’s locket, and a one-shot pistol.
While the girls eat their lunch, McB fires the pistol to announce himself, and Martha and Hallie run out to see what is going on. McB is at the top of the cellar stairs, telling them that he wants wine and that if anyone tries to lock him down there he will shoot them. He also informs Martha that he will, from now on, get in bed with anyone who wants him to. After she walks away, he tells Hallie that he might start with her, and she replies, after a flashback of a rape attempt by Edward, “Then you better like it with a dead black woman, because that’s the only way you gon’ get it from this one.”
After drinking some wine in the cellar and reading Edward’s letter to Martha, which presumably let out their incestuous secret, McB comes back upstairs and berates the hypocrisy of the women and girls as they eat. Hallie hisses at him to just leave, but he won’t. He explains to all of the girls why Edwina got angry, why he was in Carol’s bed, and why Martha left his door open. McB blows the whole thing wide open, in part because he has renewed confidence after finding out from Amy that a Union regiment is camped nearby. But McB makes a huge mistake when a pleading Amy comes to him, holding Randolph the turtle, and he takes the small animal and chucks it onto the floor, killing it. Here, he divests himself of his last ally, and Amy screams at him that she hates him. He tries to apologize but she isn’t hearing it.
McB leaves the room, and Edwina tries to follow him, but Martha stands in the way. Edwina slaps her to the floor, though, and follows her man anyway. Back in his bedroom, McB lies on his back quietly, and Edwina comes in and blocks the door with a heavy couch. McB is confused by this, but Edwina smiles at him, professes her love, and presumably they sleep together.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Martha tries to figure out what to do. None of them will be safe until he is gone. They can’t shoot him because he has the only gun. A few other ideas are mentioned, and they finally decide that Amy should gather his favorite mushrooms so they can poison him. When Martha asks Amy if she can do that, Amy replies coldly, “I know exactly where to find them.” We have returned to the place where we started, with Amy gathering mushrooms in the forest.
That night at dinner, McB and Edwina come in together. As the uncomfortable groups eats, they pass the mushrooms to McB, who chows down on them. Edwina sits beside and him, and they tell everyone they’re leaving together . . . to get married. Martha questions Edwina’s decision, but Edwina intends to go forward with it. Finally, the secret is revealed when Edwina serves herself some of the mushrooms. Martha shouts at her to stop! Everyone freezes. Then McB understands that he has been bested. He begins to sweat and leaves the room.
In the final scene, we see the women and girls sewing him up a cloth tarp. Edwina, who has been crying, puts a white handkerchief over his gray face, and they carry his body outside the gate. The tone of the film becomes sepia once again, and “THE END” appears on the screen.
Based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan, The Beguiled plays hard on stereotypes of Southern women to create its intended effects. Mainly, we have the schoolmistress Martha, who we see in flashbacks as committing incest; Edwina, the goody-goody teacher who wants idealized love from a man who wants to be physical; and the sex-starved Carol, a seventeen-year-old who throws herself at McB. Then, we also have the duped twelve-year-old Amy, who poisons McB over a combination of sentimental notions about her first kiss and deep anger over a murdered pet, and the ever-present slave Hallie, who presents a mix of obedience and strength and who may be the only round character among the females.
About this, Brian Eggert, writing for the website Deep Focus Review, asked: “Does the viewer see McB as an innocent victim imprisoned by a group of women, physically incapable of escaping his exceedingly jealous, fatherless, husbandless, and sexually repressed captors?” That’s one way to see it. However, The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody wrote:
[The soldier] is given shelter in her small rural-Mississippi girls’ school, where the middle-aged Miss Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) teaches the ladylike virtues that are quickly forgotten in the presence of a virile man. Teacher and students alike pant after the strong but soft-spoken enemy, and their jealousy and pride lead to horrific spasms of violence that Siegel plays for shock value.
While The New York Times‘ Vincent Canby had this assessment:
The film thus begins as a quite odd Civil War romance, evolves into a battle of the sexes in which the man is more vanquished than victor, and then turns into the kind of grotesque character comedy that might—mistakenly, I think—be identified as gothic horror.
Whatever the genre or sub-genre may be, The Beguiled is very much a story about the character of the South. McB may a damn Yankee, a liar, and a lecher, but on a human level, he is still a victim, and we can feel a little compassion for him. The girls and women, on the other hand, are basically aggressors, who either want to see McB imprisoned or executed or seek to use his condition to manipulate him. They are confused by conflicts between the ideals of Southern culture, the lessons of Christianity, and notions of basic human decency. Young Amy helps the wounded man even though he is a “blue belly” and is scolded for it. More than once during the film, when it is suggested that McB be handed over for prison or left to die, someone retorts that Jesus said we should even love our enemies. This very South conflict – between the politics and the religion – pervades the whole story: did Amy err in judgment by bringing him there? should the Southern cause be held above the teachings of Jesus? is a Yankee beneath human decency? The main question being this: are you a Southerner first, or a Christian first?
The Beguiled also portrays other complexities of race in Southern culture. For the white women and girls, Hallie straddles the line between one-of-us and not-one-of-us, which is a longstandining Southern approach to African-American slaves and later servants, i.e. “the help.” Of her volition, Hallie also rejects McB’s notion that they are on the same side, as the liberator and the potentially liberated. Of course, we don’t know whether she does so because she values and loves Martha Farnsworth and the girls, or whether she is biding her time until freedom becomes a reality, or whether she fears what may wait on her outside the gates, or all of those things. Whatever her ideas and feelings, she does know that she has no reason to trust a white man, not even one who claims to be fighting for her.
Finally, there is the issue of social class, specifically the hypocrisy of supposed upper class. Notwithstanding Edwina’s prudishness or Carol’s coquettishness, Miss Martha Farnsworth, the aging Southern belle who passes on the traditions of her dying way of life, is easily the most despicable character in the movie. She has little compassion for the man she nurses back to health, until she sees that she could use him: to work the farm and be her sex toy. She has committed incest with her brother. She uses McB’s accident on the stairs to cut off his leg, probably as punishment for preferring the younger women to her. And ultimately, it is Martha who devises the plan to poison the man who has put himself completely outside of her control. While she claims to be protecting the girls, she is really ensuring that her own aristocratic power is maintained. Though McB was cunning and strong, he was no match for that.
April 21, 2020
Goodreads: “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead”
[image error]Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As short story collections go, this is a strong one. I read about this collection from the 1990s in a more recent critical work called Apocalypse South, and was prompted to get a copy and read it. The voice is definite, the stories are compelling, and the sense of place is strong. Another good thing about this collection is that the stories aren’t so similar style that it feels repetitive. (In my experience, some short-story writers have their literary cake-mould and aren’t afraid to use it.) “Clarence and the Dead” is not like “Mabel Pearsall,” which is not like “Ragnarok.” There is solid infusion of the supernatural but not so overpowering as to put the stories into the fantasy genre. In fact, in the intro to the title story at the end, there is a brief discussion of the role of the fantastic in good storytelling. And it’s that last story that’s the kicker, employing faux-oral history and epistolary that wind around each other. There’s just not a weak story here. This is a damn good book of stories, especially if somebody likes Southern fiction.
April 18, 2020
One Month In
It was just over a month ago, on March 13, that Alabama’s governor Kay Ivey got on the TV late in the afternoon to announce that all of our state’s schools would be closed until April 6. For my students and I, it was the Friday that led into spring break, and we had our 14th annual Sketch Show that night. They’d been working on it for a month and had been in dress rehearsals all week. Earlier that day, the scuttle-butt had already begun when our local superintendent sent word that all athletic events were cancelled— our city, Montgomery, had its first confirmed case of coronavirus. My students were quickly pulled into the frenzy: will our show go on? is it safe to be there? Yes, it will go on, I told them throughout the afternoon. But I was wrong. No matter that we had only one confirmed case in a city of a quarter-million, the tension and anxiety quickly increased, then the governor’s announcement was the kicker. A simple truth had emerged: the arrival of deadly virus severely diminishes people’s desire to attend a comedy show.
[image error]Since that time, the COVID-19 global pandemic has cancelled or postponed virtually everything I would have been doing this spring. Two weeks after the first announcement of a temporary closure, a second announcement told us that classes would not resume on campus, but would be moved completely online. Alabama’s seniors in “good standing” were told that they would be considered “graduates” as of third nine-weeks. (That reduced my teaching load by about three-quarters.) Not long after that, churches and even our adoration chapel were shuttered, and the cultural events fell like dominoes: the High School Literary Arts Awards ceremony, the Alabama Book Festival, the Flimp Festival, and the Durr Lecture . . . In the creative writing program that I teach, spring is when we enjoy the fruits of our fall and winter labors. Our literary magazines had arrived on March 12, the day before the first closure announcement, and today, they’re still sitting in the boxes. Then, of course, there’s the school garden, where those students and I were getting ready to plant for spring, where the blueberry bushes were blooming, and where the muscadine vines were greening back up. The only thing to do there was carry the tools and equipment inside, and cover the beds.
Teaching online is OK, but I don’t love it. Relying heavily on technology can create attitudes about life that are transactional— okay, I pushed the lever, give me the food pellet. To me, education is personal, not transactional. As a teacher, I make it clear to students, to parents, to everyone, that I’m not there to hand over commodified information to stack on their mental shelves; I’m there to help young people grow and evolve, think and critique, find themselves and be better people. While teaching online is fine for commodified information – webinars, etc. – it makes that personal aspect more difficult. However, that’s where we are right now. The school-closure decision was made for the sake of students’ health, not because anyone thought this way of educating students would be better. Alabama is a poor state with underfunded schools and a well-known lack of broadband access, and those problems, which were apparent before, are glaring now.
One month in, I’ll admit: I miss my work, I miss my students, and I miss the energy of a high school in springtime. For eleven years of teaching high-school seniors, I’ve listened to them grumble all during April and May, “Can’t we just be done? Can’t we just go ahead and graduate now?” Well, the Class of 2020 got that— and it stinks. We didn’t get to close out the year and say goodbye properly. There will be no celebrations, formal or informal: no senior teas, no proms, no graduations, not even a little dancing in the hall after that last exam.
[image error]I’ll also share this: my heart is with the people who are suffering through this silently. While we all distance ourselves in order to protect the most vulnerable, there are millions of people who were living paycheck-to-paycheck but who’ve lost that paycheck. No amount of social distancing will help them, and it’s not enough for government programs to plead technology failure. A hard-working person with a hungry family can’t go to the grocery store, fill a cart, and tell the cashier, “The unemployment website crashed.” I was also a food-service worker in local restaurants for four years in the 1990s, and I know what those cooks, servers, managers, and owners are going through. No work means no money. I keep hearing on the news that Americans are maintaining a good attitude about this whole thing, but there’s a lot of heartbreak going on privately in people’s homes right now. Small businesses are crashing, bills are stacking up, credit card balances are growing, and those facts will alter the lives of whole families for decades. Those debts and backlogs won’t disappear when the country “opens back up.”
We’re told that we’re saving lives by doing all this, but even in our data-obsessed culture, we’ll never know how well it worked. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry who gets a little TV time makes another prediction or estimation, but nobody knows anything solid. The honest ones admit that. My main concern now is that we don’t whip ourselves up into a long-term frenzy based on a short-term barrage of highly publicized guesses that all seem to include the word “could.” I’ll keep doing what our leaders ask, because plans only work if people cooperate, and because I don’t want anyone to get sick. Yet, I refuse to accept that this is “the new normal”— a society homebound or six feet apart, visiting through live streams, without festivals and ball games, without big family gatherings, without going to dinner or to the theater. Or to school! I’m no anthropologist, but I doubt if such a culture has ever existed. And frankly, I doubt if it could.
Today, my students and I would have been at the Alabama Book Festival, displaying and selling those magazines that sit in boxes in my closed classroom. And tonight would have been our school’s prom. I would have spent the day behind the display table at the festival – a tradition we’ve had since 2006 – then I would have run home, showered, ate a bite, and scurried over to the venue. (I always do my shift at the door from 7:00 ’til 9:00, because I don’t want to be the guy watching the dance floor from 9:00 ’til 11:00!) After a day of seeing my literary pals and sharing my students’ annual offering, I would have gone early to watch the juniors and seniors arrive, boys in their tuxes and girls in their fancy dresses, all proud and smiling. Were it not what it is, today would have been frantic and exhausting, full of nice weather and good friends and new books and loud music and sparkly evening wear. Today . . . would have been a good day.
