Foster Dickson's Blog, page 34

Closed Ranks: One Year Later

[image error]It was one year ago today that an overflow crowd came to the Read Herring bookstore in downtown Montgomery for the official release of Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post-Civil Rights Montgomery. In the months after the release, we had a hectic schedule of book talks at venues ranging from Alabama Department of Archives & History in Montgomery and the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in Auburn to libraries and churches around Alabama. The most recent event was at the History Museum of Mobile for their Learning Lunch series.

Closed Ranks tells the latter-day story of the Whitehurst Case, a police-shooting controversy in Montgomery, Alabama in the mid-1970s. The victim, Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. was a 33-year-old African-American man, married and a father of four, who worked as a janitor at a McDonald’s restaurant and part-time at a church near his home. Although initial reports claimed that Whitehurst had shot first at the officer who killed him, it was later charged that he did not have a gun that day and that the gun lying next to his body had been placed there by police. Inquiries led by the Montgomery district attorney and the Whitehurst family’s attorney uncovered a range of inconsistencies and irregularities, yet in the end, no officers faced criminal penalties related to his death, and a federal civil lawsuit failed in its cause. By the time the Whitehurst Case was over in the late 1970s, the victim’s family had been denied justice for his wrongful death.

Closed Ranks, which was written as a first-person narrative of my search for the truth, asks long-range questions about race, policing, governance, and justice in the post-Civil Rights era, questions which are still pertinent today. I spent the years 2013 through 2017 working with some members of the Whitehurst family to tell the story of Whitehurst Case and of the family’s pursuit of justice in the decades since, and the book was published by NewSouth Books in 2018.  The Crime Report‘s David Krajicek wrote that Closed Ranks takes “the first long retrospective look at the case, whose racial overtones resonate today in the #BlackLivesMatter movement,” and the Alabama Writers Forum’s review called the book “a powerful and methodical memoir.” It was an honor to write about this crucial albeit neglected aspect of Montgomery’s history, and it has been a continued honor to share this story with audiences over the last year.

To learn more about Closed Ranks, visit the publisher’s page on the book, or to schedule an author event or book talk, use the contact form on the About page of this website.

 

Dirty Boots: “ASAN’s Food and Farm Forum 2019”

[image error]The Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network’s annual Food and Farm Forum is coming up on December 5 – 7. While I have no role in the forum, I am a member of ASAN and intend to go for two reasons: first, it’s a good opportunity for anyone to learn more about our food, where it comes from, and where it can come from; and second, because this event is indicative of the kind of good work being done in Alabama. Though the bad news (about the state’s dysfunctional politics, failing schools, etc.) may spread farther and wider and yield more Facebook posts, the good news is that organizations like ASAN and people like its members are working to make Alabama a better place.

The Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network has as its mission: “to deepen relationships between the people of Alabama, the food we eat, and the place we live.” This should matter to all Alabamians for a variety of reasons, the chief among them being our health. According to the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH), our state’s obesity rate in 2018 was 36.3% – the fifth highest in the nation – which is alarming enough to state officials that we even have an Obesity Task Force, which “works through collaboration, programs, policy and environmental changes to support and promote healthy lifestyles.” Likewise, rates of both diabetes and high blood pressure in Alabama have steadily risen over the last two decades. It seems to me that eating more fresh, locally grown produce and meat would fit into that goal.

There is also the matter of our children. In another document published by the ADPH, titled The Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline, we learn that 85% of human brain development occurs during the early years of life, from birth to age 5, so – notwithstanding a general concern for every child’s well-being in our vehemently pro-life state – nutrition has to become a paramount concern when attempting to remedy problems in education, economic development, and prison reform. Farm-to-school programs could be an essential aspect of making positive change.

[image error]This will be my first year going to the Food and Farm Forum, and I’m aware that I have a lot to learn. I’ve had this school garden program for about five years now, and doing that has focused my attention more often to issues of food and farming, which in turn has yielded a greater understanding of how important food issues are. Trying to teach students about growing their own food in small plots, attending events at Montgomery’s EAT South when I can, and volunteering a bit in our neighborhood’s community garden have led me to make changes in my own life— changes that I’d like to see more people make. I’m ready now to step up my involvement, but first I’ve got to listen to the people who are closer to this work than I am. We’ve always got to start by listening.

If you’re of a mind to attend the Forum in December, it’s very affordable and the price includes meals. There will be about thirty sessions on a range of subjects: fruit trees, chickens, race, history, flowers, worms. Some pertain mainly to food producers, but others pertain to all of us. Among the sessions, the section on community food systems is most interesting to me, the one on low-wealth community gardening in particular. And considering that everyone in Alabama eats, there ought to be something of interest to anybody.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Thank you, MMFA!

[image error]

Thank you to Elisabeth Palmer and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts for including me again this year in their Muses teen council’s In the Arts career night. I’m thankful for the opportunities to share my work with new audiences and glad to discuss career options in writing and literature with teenagers who are interested.

 

“And he said, My name’s Johnny and it might be a sin . . .”

Even though I’m well aware of how old I am now, it’s still hard to believe that it has been forty years since America first got to hear songs from my childhood like The Charlie Daniel Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and Kenny Rogers’ “Coward of the County” and “The Gambler.” I was only a five-year-old kindergartner in 1979 and ’80, but I remember those songs playing on the radio in the car. They were the first ones I remember knowing the words to and singing along with— those and Jerry Reed’s anthem “East Bound and Down,” Eddie Rabbitt’s “Every Which Way But Loose,” Waylon Jennings’ theme song for The Dukes of Hazzard, and Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love.”

The late ’70s and early ’80s were a good time for country music. The films Every Which Way But Loose in 1978 and Urban Cowboy in 1980 raised the genre’s profile a bit. Dolly Parton was the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year in 1978, and Willie Nelson took the honor in 1979. Waylon Jennings’ “I’ve Always Been Crazy” was released in 1978, and the band Alabama had a string of number-one hits in the early ’80s.

But it was Charlie Daniel’s dark and surly “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” that caught our attention most. Here we were, little-boy Baptists in Alabama, and here was Charlie Daniels, a barrel-chested singer and fiddle player with a big beard and a hat shading his eyes, and he was singing about . . . the Devil. And nobody seemed to mind. As a matter of fact, they seemed to like it. So did we.

[image error]Though I’m an avid music fan with eclectic taste, I’ve never heard anything like “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” The song’s mixture of country and bluegrass with rock that gets a little funky creates a shape-shifting style that allows a story to unfold. That unmistakable fiddle intro leads into Charlie Daniels’ swaggering sing-talking narrative about the Devil being desperate to bag a few souls down in the Deep South when he finds a “boy” playing his fiddle on a stump. Certainly, the Devil must’ve been thinking that this hayseed would be easy to beat, especially since Johnny’s arrogant reply is to accept the wager, knowing he will win it. As church-going children, we knew by the first verse that Johnny was making a dangerous decision: if he won, he got a golden fiddle, which was pretty cool, even though it was made by the Devil, but if he lost, he would go to Hell forever. Yet, we also knew why Johnny entered into this fateful bargain. The Devil doesn’t just tell Johnny that he’ll beat him in a fiddling contest, he adds something else that no Southern man will stand for: “‘Cause I think I’m better’n you.” Them’s fightin’ words, especially after calling Johnny a “boy”— twice.

I don’t care how many times I listen, I’m always sucked-in by that point. I don’t know if it’s the music or Daniels’ voice or the story itself, but I’m hooked. Even as a kid I was. At my house, we didn’t hear gritty music like this. My parents’ record collection consisted mostly of John Denver, Helen Reddy, Johnny Mathis, and also a few Beatles albums from my mom’s high school years. My older brother was only about ten at this point, so his musical tastes, which would later revolve around Van Halen and KISS, hadn’t evolved yet either.

After that enticing dare from the Devil, Johnny then answers: Yeah, I’ll take you on, and I’m fixin’ to whip you. And the music breaks into a furious segue, reminding us of what Johnny has just done. We think early in the song that this will be a cautionary tale, that Johnny has screwed up pretty bad. But that’s not what’s in store. The tempo then slows again, and here comes Daniels’ deep-voiced drawl to explain that the Devil will go first. His fiddle makes an “evil hiss,” and out of nowhere, “a band of demons joins in and it sounded something like this . . .” The music changes again into something dark and ominous, with a prominent bass line and a driving electric guitar. When the Devil breaks into his solo, it is chaotic and wild. To little boys in Alabama, it sounded like exactly like what the Devil playing fiddle would sound like.

But Johnny is not impressed. His reply lacks respect, and he writes the Devil off by calling him “old son” and telling him to sit down and learn something. “He played . . .” pause . . . “Fire on the mountain! Run, boys, run! Devil’s in the house of the rising sun!” It comes through like triumph: the triumph of old-time traditional country music over new-style acid rock with its untamed instrumental solos, the triumph of a good ol’ boy who was minding his own business over an evil power that comes from elsewhere, the triumph of an Everyman over the Father of Lies. Back in those days, without Google to look up the lyrics, you better believe we struggled in discerning what Daniels sped through next: “Chicken in the bread pan pickin’ out dough / Granny, does your dog bite? No, child, no.” I can’t even imagine how many weird interpretations we came up with, but the point was: this was cool. It was cool. We didn’t know why it was. But it was, and that was enough.

But the most scandalous part was still to come. After Johnny beats the Devil in the fiddling contest, the Devil is ashamed, and not only gives over the golden fiddle but puts it humbly at Johnny’s feet. This is the Devil who just called Johnny “boy” and told him “I’m better’n you.” Now, he’s just a loser. In victory as he was in the challenge itself, Johnny is not swayed to compassion or respect: “I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I’m the best they’s ever been.” He said a cuss word! We couldn’t believe it. We were both shocked by the fact of it and filled with joy by the mischief of it. That man said a cuss word . . . and it wasn’t bleeped out. But Daniels quickly moves on, and he ends his opus by repeating that triumphant verse: “Fire on the mountain! Run, boys, run!”

We don’t know what happens to Johnny next, but that doesn’t matter. He is the hero, who has slain the monster and won the treasure. We also don’t know what happens to the Devil, but we kind of do. He moves on, in search of more souls. He was still out there looking when I was a kid in the 1980s, and he’s still out there today.

As a comparison, the song’s story flies in the face of the old blues myth where the Devil’s bargains are trades, not wagers: gaining musical skill or worldly success for the price of one’s soul. No, Johnny already had the skill and a fiddle. In this one, a common man beats the Devil on his own terms, toe-to-toe, and sends Old Scratch off to find someone less savvy.

These narratives about strength, power, and manhood populated our boyish consciousness back then and provided much fodder for discussion. We understood from “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” that Johnny was daring and arrogant but also that he was victorious because the Devil must be faced down, beaten, and sent away empty-handed.  It might be a sin to take on the Devil in a wager for your soul, but in some cases, that’s just what’s got to happen when he’s standing in front of you. And a similar lesson is what had to be learned by a young man named Tommy in the song “Coward of the County.”

[image error]Long before the plastic surgery, even before he was the king of roasted chicken, Kenny Rogers was the cool old dude for my generation. Rogers was about the age I am now in the early ’80s, but that brushed-back gray beard and feathered hair, and the crow’s feet next to his eyes gave him that perfect combination of friendly and weathered. He looked like the kind of guy who’d say, “Hey, kid,” and flip you a quarter to buy some candy. Rogers’ career had actually begun much earlier, with the hits “Just Dropped In” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” but those were before our time, as were the hits “Laura” in 1976 and “Lucille” in 1977. We knew him from the early ’80s hits, “Coward of the County” and “The Gambler.” I believe in my heart that just about any Southerner over thirty-five could pick it up if you just walked up to him and sang, “You got to know when to hold ’em . . .”

“Coward of the County” tells an ugly, brutal story, though the package it’s delivered in is the sugar that helps the medicine go down. The song’s calm, mellow mood softens a story about an orphan named Tommy whose girlfriend-maybe-wife is gang-raped, an act that drives him to abandon his nonviolent attitude and go for some Walking Tall-style revenge. We meet Tommy after first hearing that “everyone considered him the coward of the county,” a fact made more bleak by the speaker explaining that he is the uncle who raised the boy after his father died in prison. And it is that deceased father who gave Tommy this fateful advice:

Promise me, son, not to do the things I’ve done.

Walk away from trouble if you can.

It won’t mean you’re weak if you turn the other cheek.

I hope you’re old enough to understand . . .

Son, you don’t have to fight to be a man.

By the end of the first verse here too, we know that this was going to be a problem. Just like it was a bad idea for Johnny to take on the Devil, telling a ten-year-old boy to walk away from fights is going to leave him flapping in the wind. And then we meet Becky, the woman that Tommy is in love with, the woman who loves him, too. And then we are introduced to the Gatlin Boys, who come while Tommy is at work. Kenny Rogers didn’t need to be graphic or vulgar when he sings, “They took turns at Becky,” then with a lowered voice, “and there was three of them.”

Unlike “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” this song’s tempo, style, and feel all remain constant throughout this song, from the sad, sympathetic intro to the story’s setup, from the addition of Becky to her role in Tommy’s newfound manhood. When Tommy comes home to find the love of his life in a “torn dress” with a “shattered look,” everything must change. Of course, those Gatlin boys laugh at Tommy and call him “Yellow” when he comes to find them in the bar, but “you could’ve heard a pin drop as Tommy stopped and locked the door.” The way Rogers sings it, it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. In a different way than Johnny, whose manhood was challenged by a Devil who calls him “boy,” Tommy has reached his breaking point after shrugging off such name-calling for years. Here is a man who has never fought in his life, and he’s now mad enough to beat the hell out of three brothers all at once. After the last Gatlin boy is beat down, the chorus evolves from his father’s advice to the theme we must learn from the tale: “Sometimes you gotta fight when you’re a man.”

Both Johnny and Tommy were young men facing quandaries that allowed only one way out: straight ahead. There’s no out-talking the Devil, and there’s end-around when three men rape your wife.

For those who want to treat country music as wisdom literature, as “three chords and the truth,” Kenny Rogers’ life lessons from the early ’80s also included the mystical tale of “The Gambler,” a midnight rambler who dies after giving the tricky advice that “you got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” It may be true that hanging in there can be brave and that “sometimes you gotta fight when you’re a man,” but other times it’s wisest to haul booty! These songs, which we loved when I was growing up, taught us what life was teaching us: that nothing is ever simple, that there are people out there who’ll try to hurt you, and that dealing with them is part of it. We needed to know that the Devil was out there looking for dummies and that the Gatlin boys were everywhere. Dealing with them wouldn’t be easy . . . but not dealing with them would be much, much worse.

 

No, it’s here in Alabama. Like Kentucky, but with no ‘Y’

One difficulty in teaching a high school Creative Writing program in Alabama is the lack of a central event nearby, like All State Band or a Thespian conference, where students can see tangible evidence that other people who live where we do actually do what we do. Creative writing competitions are typically handled through mailed-off submissions, and the results usually come through mailed-back answers, so the Kentuck Festival of the Arts was an answer to my teacherly prayers. Students who work together as intensively as mine need a release from the monotony of write-workshop-revise-repeat, and moreover, nothing can gel a group of teenagers like an out-of-town overnighter. Besides, this festival, which is ranked as one of the best in the nation, is right in our backyard, features over 250 artists, and is ripe to be written about.

[image error]I started taking my Creative Writing students to Kentuck ten years ago, the first time in 2009. The idea came from our school’s then-photography teacher Andy Meadows whose students display there, a tradition that has been continued by his successor Emily Thomas. Before Andy mentioned it and suggested that we come too, I hadn’t thought of taking writing students to an art festival, but it has turned out to be one of the best aspects of the program: having students to meet, interview, and write about some of the most unique and creative people they could imagine.

Having been founded in the early 1970s, this year’s Kentuck Festival of the Arts was the forty-eighth, and my eleventh. (I wasn’t founded until the mid-’70s.) Kentuck calls itself “A Heaven of a Place” and has year-round programming at the museum and art center, which includes art nights and exhibitions. 1971 was the centennial year for the small town of Northport, Alabama, where Kentuck is located. A Selma Times- Journal article from September of that year explained that the town, originally called “Cane Tuck,” was hosting a celebration from October 10 – 16 that would feature “items of days gone by.” The little folk-life festival was then on its way, starting small and local. (The musical act in 1975 was the Tuscaloosa County High School Band.)

By the time I started going with my students, Kentuck was neither small nor local. Northport is a town of about 25,000 people, situated on the other side of the Black Warrior River from Tuscaloosa, home to the University of Alabama. Its quaint downtown, comprised of two short blocks of shops and galleries, sits almost right under state Highway 69/43. On the weekend of the festival, traffic is completely re-routed to carry cars through downtown, under a dilapidated railroad bridge with ROLL TIDE painted on it, past the old cemetery and a smattering of houses, and after a left turn at a little store, into Kentuck Park.

On the Saturday morning of this year’s festival, it was cloudy and cool. It had rained hard the night before, but not hard enough to muddy the grassy fields where yellow-vested volunteers direct the car-parking. Though Kentuck Park itself isn’t very big, the shoulder-to-shoulder artist tents that line the walking path and wind through the middle make it seem that way. My habit has always been to walk the whole festival first, browsing and taking note of who I want to re-visit. While I admire so much of the art that’s displayed at Kentuck, there is a lot that I wouldn’t necessarily buy. However, I am a sucker for printers – letterpress, linotypes, block prints, screen prints, book arts, all of it – and those folks tend to get most of my attention (and money). I can’t really afford paintings or sculptures. Some of the craftier, mixed-media work is interesting to look at. I marvel at what some artists can do with wood. On a sentimental note, I also make a special trip to the booth of Jake Asuit, whose knives remind me of the collection my dad handed down to me before he died.

With my students scattered in all directions, seeking out the artists they selected to interview (and Lord knows what else), I made my rounds and spoke to a few people. My friend Randy Shoults, who makes pottery, was meandering around near his booth, waiting for customers. Charlie Lucas happened by while we talked, and he and Randy traded some wisdom on what it’s like to get old. Charlie, who is now 68, was pleased to report that he sometimes get carded when he asks for an “old-timer’s discount.” After that, I stopped by the Black Belt Treasures booth to say hello to Kristin Law, also a potter. I talked weather for a minute with a pair of ladies weaving baskets, and Kristin wanted me to meet a Sumter County journalist-turned-painter named Mike Handley, who was working on a small portrait of Bear Bryant nearby.

After my rounds and a bit of visiting, I headed first to the Green Pea Press booth. One of my favorites, this little collective is housed in Lowe Mill and has been at Kentuck for the last few years. I picked up t-shirts for my kids and a coozie that reads “Bama Beer is Better.” (True.) Then, I made my annual stop at the Kentuck tent to buy a festival t-shirt, so the souvenir-buying would be all done. I could get down to shopping for art— after I ate.

[image error]I had never heard of Archibald and Woodrow’s BBQ when I saw their metallic-gray food truck parked by the music stage among the picnic tables. The other options were Mexican and fair food, and although I’m also a sucker for chicken-on-a-stick, barbecue sounded best. Beside that, there was a line, and that’s a good sign when choosing a food truck. At the window, a young girl who looked ten or twelve took my order for a chicken sandwich and only replied, “That’s it?” without looking at me. I knew right then it was going to be good. People who serve killer food don’t have to be friendly, they just have to keep it coming. Thankfully, the wait was short. A teenage boy appeared at the little window, hollered my number, and handed me a box containing an overfilled chopped-chicken sandwich soaked in vinegar-based sauce. Me and my plastic fork made short work of it. No regrets.

By midday, a few excited students were appearing, as always, with good news to report. I interviewed So-and-So, and he was really nice! Some were also given small tokens from the booth, maybe a print or a button, or had bought something they were pleased to show me. There are two things that are hard for my students to grasp fully until they go and experience Kentuck for themselves: first, artists don’t go to crowded festivals to be stodgy and standoffish and difficult, and second, there is so much good art there. It’s fun seeing them realize that what I’ve been saying is true . . .  and getting excited about it.

With the time that remained, I doubled back to Michelle McLendon‘s dark little booth full of handmade journals to get one for a friend, then picked out a birthday present for my mother from Sarah Cavender‘s busy, busy booth with jewelry from her metalworks. I’ve told people before that I’d like to go to Kentuck each year with $20,000 and a U-Haul truck, but so far I haven’t found a way to make that happen. In the meantime, deliberate thrift dictates the purchases.

[image error]The afternoon came on, and while waiting for my students to re-convene for the ride home, I indulged another of my annual traditions: watching the folks from Birmingham’s Sloss Furnace melt and pour metal. When we arrive first thing in the morning, they’re just firing the coke, but by afternoon, they’re steady pouring up the molds that festival-goers can buy to etch-in personalized designs. What I’ve never understood about their work is: how do you make a metal apparatus that can hold a fire hot enough to melt metal? It’s fascinating to watch. But once we had everybody gathered up, it was time to go. Back down Highway 82, through the Black Belt, and home.

A tradition is something that you keep doing because it works. I had never expected to lead an annual pilgrimage to an art festival so that eighteen to twenty high school Creative Writing students could learn to write feature articles among this mish-mash of the quirky and the tame. This tradition just happened that way, in part due to what Kentuck is, but also in part due my writerly willingness to defy my teacherly caution, and to look at an unlikely, unorthodox opportunity and say, ‘Heck, why not?’ It’s still not a central event convening folks who do what we do, but it is an annual reminder that nobody really does what we do.

Note:

Of all the trips we’ve made up to Northport, my favorite memory of the festival field trips didn’t happen during one of the good years. It involves leading a group of students through the parking lot in the pouring rain. Over the last decade, we’ve gone in all kinds of weather, in the cold and in the heat, no matter— we do research and set up the interviews in advance, parents shell out money for hotel rooms and food, and there are articles to be written when we get home, so we can’t just bail when Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate. That year, as the date of the festival had approached, rain chances had fluctuated, but the radar clearly showed a line of severe storms coming our way. In Alabama, storms can break apart and fizzle out, though, so my attempts to galvanize the mood of the two-dozen or so students, mostly girls, centered on one outlier weather report that had rain chances at ten percent. Yet, as they moped through the pouring rain that morning, soaked to the gills, walking in what we had all seen coming, a few grumbled as a chorus, “Ten percent, Mr. Dickson. Ten percent.” I couldn’t say anything back, they weren’t wrong. That year, we did our interviews and left fairly early – and drove home in the clear sunshine behind the front – but from time to time, for the rest of that school year, someone would periodically murmur, “Ten percent, Mr. Dickson.” And that was OK, because they got to see that things don’t always work out for me either.

Other related posts:

Road Trippin’: #Kentuck47, October 2018

Kentuck and the Boogie, October 2016

Two Printers at Kentuck, October 2015

A Brief Word on Kentuck, October 2011

 

 

In the Arts @ MMFA, October 24

[image error]Next Thursday, October 24, I will be at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts’ annual In The Arts: A Career Event for Teens. This annual showcase, presented by the museum’s Muses teen board, features professionals in the fields of art, writing, theater, and music, who are available for middle and high school students to ask questions about educational choices and career options. The event goes from 6:00 ’til 7:30 PM.

 

Dirty Boots: “On the interstate, movement is good.”

[image error]I hate being stuck in traffic more than almost anything. I hate it so much that traffic is one of the prime factors that has kept me from moving to a larger city, like Birmingham, Atlanta, or Nashville. Once, in Atlanta, when I was getting onto the interstate and saw that it was backed up, I literally pulled to the side, let a few cars pass, and backed my way back up the on-ramp, ignoring the angry honks, to go another way. I hate being stuck in traffic.

But what bothers me even more than being stuck in traffic is when I finally see, after crawling along, that the cause of the glut is a small group of men who are standing there, doing nothing. Last week, on the way home from Mobile on I-65 northbound, a trip that began with a nice pace came to halt just south of the Rabun/Perdido exit. The orange signs had warned “ROAD WORK NEXT 7 MILES,” but I still had hopes for only a minor inconvenience. It didn’t work out that way. Since we were completely stopped, I took out my phone and looked at the Maps app, which showed red all along the stretch where I was.

The creeping and crawling along was pretty civil at first, but there were still no cones in sight, much less workers. The cones came a couple of miles later, and that proved to be one clog: two lanes narrowing to one. It had been more than a half-hour by that point, but once we got into a single file line, traffic did move a little. In these situations, I’ll take 35 or 40 MPH. The speed limit signs said 50, but hey, on the interstate, movement is good.

Nearer the exit, a couple of miles worth of cones blocked off areas of road that were clearly ready to be driven-on, but I tried to keep my mind on the car in front of me. We kept moving, and soon the dashed lines stopped. Okay, I thought, they haven’t striped this part yet. Eventually, I saw one worker, an older guy with a mustache walking down the road all by himself for no apparent reason. We kept tooling along.

As we approached something that appeared to be actual road work, the pace slowed again, this time to about 25. C’mon, I hollered at no one in particular, get moving! I was sick of it. It had been over an hour. Why? To accommodate a crew of a dozen men on a fifty-yard stretch of the highway— where only the two on the big, yellow paving machine were doing any work! The rest were standing roadside, leaning on shovels, talking, strolling, cooling off . . . (Several miles back, I had seen a crew on the opposite side of the road who were fixing a guard-rail, and only half of those six were doing anything. The others stood by, hands on hips, talking and laughing. I was in stand-still traffic and had plenty of time to watch.)

It’s not like what I was doing was terribly important – driving home to pick up my kids after a lunchtime book talk – but my common sense tells me that road work could be handled better. What if those guys standing around were to get in a truck, drive down to the finished parts of the road, and move the cones to shorten the one-lane area? Or what if they quit standing around, got the striping machine, and did the part that wasn’t striped? Or if they have guys waiting on the paving machine to do its work, maybe they could bring more than one of those machines to the site. We hear regularly about highway speed and worker safety in the situations, and I agree wholeheartedly that everyone who works on our roads deserves to be safe on the job site. But in the situation I just described, no one could have hit a worker on 98% of that seven-mile route— there weren’t any!

Because we lack strong public transportation systems in the Deep South, our cars are very much part of our lives. Which means that our roads are a big part of our lives, too. That’s how we get where we’re going to do what we do. We need those roads to serve us efficiently, and that isn’t happening when a couple-hundred vehicles lose an hour or more of travel time tiptoeing through a seven-mile stretch where only fifty yards worth of work is being done.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Southern Movie 42: “The Legend of Boggy Creek” (1972)

[image error]In May and June 1971, the headlines were a regular occurrence in newspapers across Louisiana and Arkansas, even into neighboring Missouri: the monster had been seen again! The large, hairy, and elusive Bigfoot-like creature that seemed to live in the backwaters of southwestern Arkansas had attacked a man at a home near the tiny town of Fouke, Arkansas, south of Texarkana, then had disappeared. But now it was back, and by the fall of that year, the story had spread across the country, appearing in newspapers in Connecticut, Ohio, Tennessee, and Idaho. The creature was typically referred to as the Fouke Monster and had been seen on-and-off since the late 1950s.

So it was no surprise that, by early 1972, some of that news coverage was about Charles Pierce’s forthcoming documentary, originally titled with the distinctly un-creative Tracking the Fouke Monster, but later renamed The Legend of Boggy Creek. Pierce was quoted in a February 1972 Associated Press wire story as saying that the Fouke Monster was “no laughing matter,” despite the sensational promotions that included a t-shirt giveaway from a Little Rock radio station. The AP coverage also explained that some people who had heard the story found it to be comical to the point of unbelievable, though Pierce had no intention of subjecting the small-town residents to that kind of “humiliation.”

The Legend of Boggy Creek is hard to encapsulate because there really isn’t any plot. It begins with a scene of a little boy in overalls running across a grassy field to find an old man who he has been sent to fetch. The boy’s family have seen a big, hairy monster at their place, and they want the man to come check it out. Instead, the old man laughs with his friends, saying he’ll come tomorrow, and they shoo the boy away. A section of narration follows that explains how the adult-that-boy-became has come back to tell the story of the Fouke Monster, who lives in the swampy terrain along Boggy Creek, off the Sulphur River. The film, which runs just under an hour-and-a-half, contains mostly disjointed testimonials and re-enactments of encounters with the creature, most of which have no significant outcome. The majority of the people who say they have seen the Fouke Monster made no claim to it being aggressive or violent, beyond finding animal carcasses that appear to have been mutilated.

The first section of the film, of about a half-hour, captures a variety of narratives about the earliest sightings of the Fouke Monster around the time of the boyhood incident that opened the film. The re-enactments, we learn from the opening credits, mostly involve the real people who had the actual sightings. Their tales are strange and compelling, and there is lots of mood music, but nothing of import occurs from them. They saw the monster, were afraid, and it either took no action or snuck away. Then, we’re told, the monster disappeared for about eight years.

The middle section of the The Legend of Boggy Creek is an awkward, very-1970s twist into . . . building sympathy, maybe? The creature has disappeared from view for the rural Arkansans, and we listen to a folksy song about its loneliness. That section is followed by the brief story of a teenage boy who likes to go out into the bottoms alone to hunt, and his little section has a folksy-balladeer song to accompany it, too. At the end of that bit, he arrives at the home of a hermit named Herb Jones, who has lived in the bush for more than twenty years and has never seen this creature. Jones doesn’t believe that it’s real. In terms of storytelling, this portion of Boggy Creek is anticlimactic.

The latter half of the film then focuses on more anecdotal evidence of the Fouke Monster, all of which culminates in the attack of a man named Bobby Ford. The narrator explains that two young families had moved into an isolated house near Fouke. The couples were living together in the house to save money, and because the husbands would be working long hours, the wives would be there for each other. That set-up leads to a visit by two family members, Bobby Ford and a young nephew, who’ve come to visit and to do some fishing in the creeks. However, the monster, which had been lurking nearby, came and attacked the families in the night. Though no one was hurt physically, Ford had to be taken to a hospital for shock, and the two families soon moved out and left the area.

The Legend of Boggy Creek ends with the narrator re-visiting his old homeplace, which is now abandoned. He recollects the story of the monster and closes by wondering out loud if it is still out there in the woods. That was in the early 1970s – nearly fifty years ago – so some of the impact of that approach to suspense is lost with time.

As it stands today, this movie – call it a “docu-drama” – is slow-paced, awkward, and disjointed. It could easily have been about a half-hour shorter than it was, especially since the sections about the monster’s supposed loneliness and about the teenager and Herb Jones served little to no purpose. But it does document a slice of local Southern history, which drew national attention for a moment, that would have otherwise been lost to time. The re-enactments came off as sincere, and the locals were not held up as types, but as people. As cheesy and amateurish as it can be in places, that sincerity is this movie’s strength. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas‘ entry on the first film:

The film, shot as a faux documentary-style drama, centers on the real town of Fouke (Miller County). Since the 1940s, many sightings of a creature known as the “Fouke Monster” have been reported. The film presents an interesting portrait of Southern swamp culture in the 1970s by juxtaposing interviews with local citizens, ranging from a police officer to hunters, talking about their experiences with the creature with dramatic recreations of some of these purported encounters. According to witnesses, the creature is similar to Bigfoot, standing more than six feet tall and covered with hair. Many claim to have fired upon it, and although some say it is dead, others think it is alive.

Some efforts were made to keep this story going, but mostly failed. Return to Boggy Creek, released in 1977, was a fictional story that piggybacked on the original. It featured Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann in Gilligan’s Island, and Dana Plato, who played Kimberly on Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life. It has the feel of an after-school special. Seven years later, in 1984, Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues was released, and unlike Return, it had Charles Pierce involved again. This latter-day treatment centered on a University of Arkansas anthropology professor and a trio of students hiking around in the woods and trying to verify the myths. This last one employed the use of the narration like the original documentary, and appears to bring in more of those real-life anecdotes, but it still falls pretty flat. The professor comes off as wanting to be a tough-guy Indiana Jones figure but he is a long way from it, being a middle-aged academic in knee socks and smoky sunglasses.

Evaluated separately, it is clear that the first movie is the best and most original of the three Boggy Creek movies, even despite its awkwardness and weaknesses. You might call the original film a “cult classic.” The latter two are attempts at riding the coattails of that initial surge of public interest, and what results is not good. I’m sorry to share that another one, a horror film simply titled Boggy Creek, was added to the list in 2010, though on the upside, Charles Pierce’s daughter did a restoration of the original 1972 film for release in 2019.

 

#throwbackthursday: “The Fearless Rise of the New Black Southern Progressive”

A year ago today, as the 2018 midterms were approaching, The New Republic ran “The Fearless Rise of the New Black Southern Progressive” by Bob Moser. Today, as we dive deeper and deeper into the election-year politics that will culminate in November 2020, this long-form piece is worth a read (or a re-read). The South’s first primary, in South Carolina, is set for February 29, 2020, four and half months from now.

 

Thank you, History Museum of Mobile!

[image error]Thank you to the History Museum of Mobile for having me today as one of the Learning Lunch speakers! The education staff Jennifer Theeck, Scott Corcoran, and Brandi Agnew were all wonderful hosts, and the group in attendance asked thoughtful questions after the talk about Closed Ranks. I appreciate the opportunity to share the story of the Whitehurst Case with folks who value history.