Foster Dickson's Blog, page 41

#ICYMI: Southern Movies

[image error]Over more than a century, mainstream movies have offered portrayals of the American South that range from the darkness of 1918’s Birth of a Nation to the fluffiness of 2002’s Sweet Home Alabama. Many Americans who have never visited the South (and know little to nothing about it) take their understanding of our complicated culture not from history books by Shelby Foote or C. Vann Woodward, but from the images, characters, and story lines in popular films, like Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump, The Help, and Fried Green Tomatoes. (Personally, I don’t know anybody who ever killed and barbecued an abusive husband.) Whether they are set in the South, feature Southern characters, or both, movies feed and fuel how Americans view and treat the South, and also perpetuate and protect misinterpretations. Below is a list of Southern Movie posts. Just click on the title to read:

Straw Dogs (2013) • tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . (1970)
Intruder in the Dust (1949) • Black Snake Moan (2006)
The Black Klansman  (1966) • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
Way Down South (1939) •  The Waterboy  (1998)
Greased Lightning (1977) •  The Green Pastures  (1936)
The Southerner  (1945) •  Down by Law (1986)
In the Heat of the Night (1967) •  The Phenix City Story (1955)
The Children’s Hour  (1961) •  Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973)
Norma Rae (1979) •  Walking Tall (1973) •  Radio (2003)
  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil  (1997)
Sounder  (1972) •  Sophie and the Rising Sun (2017)
Mud Bound (2017) •  Ode to Billy Joe (1976)
Black Like Me (1964) •  Shy People (1987) •  Slaves (1969)
Moonshine County Express (1977) •  Angel Heart (1987)
Wise Blood (1979) •  Baby Doll (1956) •  Preacherman (1971)
Southern Comfort (1981) •  White Lightning (1973)
Drums in the Deep South (1951) •  Paris Trout (1991)
Hot Summer in Barefoot County (1974) •  Free State of Jones (2016)
French Quarter (1978)
Coming: The Dynamiter (2011)

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Southern Movie 38: “French Quarter” (1978)

Let’s just start by being clear that 1978’s French Quarter is a weird, half-baked frame narrative whose dual-world, time-warp fantasy underpinning doesn’t make a lot of sense. But what the movie lacks in coherence it makes up for by . . . never mind, it doesn’t make up for it. What it does instead is patchwork together the seedier, jazzier side of early twentieth-century New Orleans history under the umbrella of life in a French Quarter brothel. The historical figures are there – jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, a young Louis Armstrong, photographer EJ Bellocq – and they are presented to us through a love story involving a virgin prostitute who will be auctioned off and a white piano prodigy who is in over his head.

[image error]French Quarter begins in modern times – the late 1970s, that is – with a young woman who is fleeing her small-town, bayou roots and heading to the big city of New Orleans. She is pretty and blonde and holding a suitcase as she weeps over an above-ground grave in a bayou. We hear a man’s voice flippantly explain that her father was deeply in debt, and thus left her less than nothing. She picks up her suitcase, hat, and shoes, and walks among to mossy trees to the road, as a new voice – a male voiceover – picks up narrating her plight: “She was one of those girls as rare as snow on the bayou,” the voice tells us.

The young woman boards a bus, pays her fee, and gets off in New Orleans as the voiceover continues to tell us about her. In his own stalker way, the voice explains that he knows about this young woman because he has seen others like her, the ones who arrive in New Orleans hoping to find something. As the young woman sits beside St. Louis Cathedral and browses the newspaper want ads, he tells us that that “those who wants something real bad . . . usually get it real bad.” The young woman gets up and tries in three places – a clothing shop, a candy shop, and a restaurant – to get jobs, but nothing doing. Meanwhile, the voiceover outs himself, showing us only his back among the crowds, as he follows her through the French Quarter. We already sense the tension: country girl come to town, all alone, followed by a strange man, flat broke and begging in New Orleans.

After those failures, she wanders into the empty Storyville Lounge, past a black woman mopping the floor, and plops down at the bar. She tries to order an oyster sandwich but the kitchen is closed, and she doesn’t want a drink. After putting her head on the bar like a sad puppy, the female bartender asks her what’s wrong. Hearing that she needs a job, the woman points her to the one man at sitting the bar. The young woman introduces herself as Christine Delaplane and has a brief cat-and-mouse conversation, in which she tries to evade disclosing her desperation. The seedy man sees through her though and gets to the point: he is hiring topless dancers. He loans her a few dollars to get an outfit to audition in, and Christine heads for the lingerie shop to get some skimpy panties and pasties.

In the dressing room, Christine sits among the other barely dressed dancers, before going on. After a woman in red lingerie finishes, Christine goes out on the stage and performs an extremely awkward and un-sexy routine in her own black lingerie set. The voiceover comes back to say that this was the first time he really saw the young woman (even though we just saw him following her earlier). After proclaiming at the end of her dance, “I hope y’all liked it,” the crowd claps for her a bit, and she has the job.

The next we see Christine, she is irate and yelling at the owner of the club who just hired her. She has a check for $25, which she is sorely dissatisfied with, and he explains that that’s her pay— minus a room, bills, and rental of her costume. Christine responds angrily that she just wants bus fare home, and the man tells her that she has all she’s getting: a check for $25. Stuck, unable to cash the check, the bartender who took pity on her to begin with suggests that she go see a woman named Florinda Beaudine, who practices voodoo and lives above an apothecary shop. Florinda owes her a favor and should let Christine stay rent-free if she helps clean up. “She’s helped lots of girls like you,” the bartender says.

Christine goes down the street and into the empty shop, calling out but receiving no answer. She then wanders up the stairs and runs into Madame Beaudine, an ugly and strange woman who invites her in and tells her not to worry. Beaudine gives her a cup of tea that immediately makes Christine feel woozy, and the old woman helps her to the bed. As this is happening, the voiceover returns, telling us cryptically that he expected this to happen but that it will take time. “This is how I make my money,” the voiceover explains, but he won’t intervene yet.

From this point, the movie shifts to the inner frame of the story. In this inner frame, there is soft light and a soft edge around the screen. Now, Christine, who has become Gertrude “Trudy” Dix, is lying on a bed in the brothel of Countess Willie Piazza, who we recognize as the female bartender from the first part of the story. It is now the 1910s, not the 1970s, and flamboyant prostitutes are cackling, galavanting half-dressed, and jibing each other, as we meet them one-by-one in the kitchen. A newcomer to the place, Trudy is virgin . . . who will be auctioned off.

Next, we meet Jelly Roll Morton, the house piano player, as he is told that a new piano player is coming to audition. Morton is unhappy about this, but then Kid Ross is seen ambling up the street and meeting a little boy named Satchmo. Morton is black, of course, and Ross is white, and Satchmo is Louis Armstrong, of course, and when introduced, the two piano players have an immediate tension. Kid Ross is a prodigy from Asbury Park, New Jersey, and Morton is the one of the early inventors of jazz— and both men are trying to earn a living in the seedy Storyville section of New Orleans.

After Morton and Ross play a friendly but competitive duet, one of the prostitutes is brought in to perform a burlesque for the male customers. Her name is Lady Lil, and she wears a mask as she strips and writhes in a large glass bowl full of soapy water, which seems to be meant to imitate a huge champagne glass. As the panting men and grinning women watch, Morton goes behind a screen, explaining to the newbie Ross that black men aren’t allowed to watch white women dance, which he does anyway through a tear in the fabric.

At the end of the night, Kid Ross is told by Trudy that he has the job, and Jelly Roll Morton is friendly about his new co-worker but will not share the tip money. Trudy tells him that she has to go to bed, since they’re taking pictures of her tomorrow (for the auction), and as she ascends the stairs, Ross composes a sentimental riff for her.

In the next scene, one of the young prostitutes goes in to wake Coke-Eyed Laura, another of the prostitutes who we’ve been told is a druggie. Laura is lying in her bed, has long scratches across her back, and winces as she moves. The young woman applies some water or medicine to the scratches, then for some unstated reason, as Laura rolls over, the two begin a lesbian sex scene.

The next two scenes move the plot forward in a disjointed way. First, three of the women are in the apothecary picking up an STD cure, when one of them apprises Laura that their competitor Emma Johnson is trying to obtain a virgin to have there, and insinuates that Laura is trying to help her and effectively sabotage their own employer. Laura replies flippantly that she knows nothing about it, then asks for some opium, but is reminded that no “dope” is allowed. Angered by the charges and by the rebuke, Laura grits her teeth in an animalistic way and leaves. Next, Kid Ross and Trudy are having coffee in the courtyard, and Trudy shows her naivete when Ross mentions Emma Johnson, too. Ross goes on to ask about Tom Anderson, the politician, gambler, and all-around rascal who sort of runs things in the Quarter. Trudy has never heard of him either.

The story then moves to an underground New Orleans jazz club, full or raw music and raw dancing. The place is jumping until the proprietor Aaron Harris stops one of his women for fighting, saying to her, “If you want to fight somebody, fight me.” When she won’t, he punches her in the stomach, then slaps her to the floor. But Kid Ross shouts from across the room, “That’s enough,” and the two men begin to fight. Of course, Kid Ross wins, but the mood has been soured. As that scene is ending, one of the prostitutes with him wonders out loud where Laura is, and we see a nearly naked Laura in a voodoo ceremony, with a very large snake crawling over her body. The juxtaposition of the two loud, raucous scenarios is obviously an effort to connect one side of the dark underbelly to another.

Back at the house, we meet Tom Anderson, who is caressing a marble statue salaciously. (Tom is played by the same actor as the topless bar owner that cheated Christie in the beginning of the movie, only this time he has a big fake mustache pasted on his face.) He has come to see Willie Piazza about Emma Johnson’s offer to buy Trudy. He believes that the offer is fair, but Willie responds that Emma’s house is a “cesspool.” The scene then cuts to Kid Ross and Trudy Dix having a nice ride in the country in Tom’s new Ford car. They are discussing Trudy’s future, just like Tom and Willie are.  After the scenes have bounced back and forth, we get Tom’s ultimatum that Willie has two weeks to sell Trudy to Emma Johnson, at the same time that Kid Ross shares his plan to move to Chicago . . . and wants Trudy to come with him. They end in a passionate embrace, kissing and rubbing together.

The next evening is the auction. Trudy is dolled up, and the men are duly assembled. The bidding begins at $300 and is quickly driven up and up to $650. It looks like one of the regular customers will win her, when suddenly Kid Ross shouts, “Eight hundred dollars!” Willie Piazza is confounded but has to concede to his bid. He wins the frightened, crying girl, who he is now in love with, and next we see the two, they’re relaxing on the morning after, talking about their plans, before they have another roll in the sheets.

However, the love-story happy ending can’t be here just yet. Nearby, Tom Anderson is in bed with Laura, telling her that she has blown his mind again. She’s very proud of herself and tells him, too, that he has lost his virgin, that Kid Ross has deflowered Trudy— there will be no sale to Emma Johnson. An angry Tom tells Laura to do away with both of them any way she chooses, with voodoo or otherwise, and to include Aaron Harris or anyone else. Laura relishes the opportunity.

In the daylight, Kid Ross and Trudy walk in a foggy cemetery, as somber music plays. They talk about what happens next. Kid Ross has spent the money (buying Trudy) that he was going to use to buy into a jazz club in Chicago, but he knows that he has to leave town. (He has pissed off Aaron Harris and now Tom Anderson, too.) Trudy knows that doesn’t bode well for her, but Ross insists that he’ll only be gone for a week.

Back at the brothel, a wild party is going on! Loud music plays, and costumed prostitutes strut around with the men. The film stays focused for longer than it should on two people having sex in a rocking chair using pairs of roller skates to propel themselves. All the while, Trudy sits outside quietly in the dark— until the voodoo priestess (played by the same actress who was Madame Beaudine earlier) begins to cast a spell on Trudy. Now, the wild scenes interplay, and we see some of the same imagery as the voodoo scene with Laura earlier: half-dressed black people dancing and writhing, men spitting fire. Trudy is mesmerized and, with a black symbol on her forehead, wanders down the street to be chained down naked on the altar by the voodoo people.

As the scene culminates, Kid Ross is meandering down the street himself and speaks to Satchmo, inviting him to the upcoming wedding. Satchmo informs him that Trudy has been taken by the voodoo people. Shocked, Kid Ross has no idea what to do, and Satchmo tells him to follow the drums. In the dungeon-like voodoo locale, Trudy is screaming and the creepy old priestess is holding a snake to put on her . . . when a black handgun enters the picture. This continues alternating until the guns fires—

And we’re back in the 1970s, where two police detectives burst into Madame Beaudine’s little apartment and find Trudy/Christine still passed out on the bed. While the second detective unties an unconscious Christine, the first detective, who fends off an attempted stabbing by Beaudine, reads Miranda rights to the scowling offender. Through their banter, we find out that the old woman sells young girls to wealthy men in foreign countries and that the officer in the beginning of the movie had been following Christine since she got off the bus. When Christine says that she’d like to thank him, he enters the bedroom— and it’s Kid Ross AKA Inspector Sordik! (I’m not sure why they gave him the euphemistic name Inspector Sore Dick but they did.)

As French Quarter ends, the happy couple is shopping in a market where we see one or two of the players from the brothel scene. The voiceover returns and gives us a history lesson on where everyone ended up, but does warns us that some of the story is fact while some is “wild conjecture.” Though it makes little sense, the voiceover explains that he is a descendant of the story, and that’s how he came to be part of it. In the end, Christine and the two detectives ride away in a white convertible.

There aren’t many reviews or commentaries on French Quarter. Movie critic Leonard Maltin wrote that it is a “neglected drive-in treat [and] a genuine curiosity,” called it a “tongue-in-cheek melodrama,” and remarked that it “ended bizarrely.” All true, I think. In general, the movie is very dated to the late ’70s, the acting is not good, and the story is forced. Sometimes, with movies like this one, it’s better to leave well enough alone. (I couldn’t even find the movie’s trailer to share.)

One of the problems with presenting history in cinema is the time limit. Historians write four-hundred page books on specific and nuanced topics, and the French Quarter in the early twentieth century is a very nuanced topic. The movie French Quarter tries to cover the historical origins of jazz, the difficulties of race, and the realities of corruption in an hour and forty minutes of story that defies genre: is it sci-fi? fantasy? comedy? (Frankly, though the stories are dissimilar, its time-travel, parallel-reality approach reminded me a bit of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, which was published in 1979.) I can’t tell, after watching this movie, if it would be better or worse to know the basics of the history when you watch it, whether understanding what the movie is trying to convey helped or hurt. Overall – and I’ve written this before about several of the Southern movies – it’s important to remember that this is not a documentary, nor does it purport to be. If somebody were looking for a serious factual account of the time and place, this would definitely not be that. Personally, I took French Quarter as a somewhat hip, quasi-psychedelic, quite loose interpretation of an interesting episode in Southern history, one that added a tremendous amount of gratuitous nudity. But it’s not much more.

#ICYMI: Southern Movies

[image error]Over more than a century, mainstream movies have offered portrayals of the American South that range from the darkness of 1918’s Birth of a Nation to the fluffiness of 2002’s Sweet Home Alabama. Many Americans who have never visited the South (and know little to nothing about it) take their understanding of our complicated culture not from history books by Shelby Foote or C. Vann Woodward, but from the images, characters, and story lines in popular films, like Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump, The Help, and Fried Green Tomatoes. (Personally, I don’t know anybody who ever killed and barbecued an abusive husband.) Whether they are set in the South, feature Southern characters, or both, movies feed and fuel how Americans view and treat the South, and also perpetuate and protect misinterpretations. Below is a list of Southern Movie posts. Just click on the title to read:

Straw Dogs (2013) • tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . (1970)
Intruder in the Dust (1949) • Black Snake Moan (2006)
The Black Klansman  (1966) • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
Way Down South (1939) •  The Waterboy  (1998)
Greased Lightning (1977) •  The Green Pastures  (1936)
The Southerner  (1945) •  Down by Law (1986)
In the Heat of the Night (1967) •  The Phenix City Story (1955)
The Children’s Hour  (1961) •  Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973)
Norma Rae (1979) •  Walking Tall (1973) •  Radio (2003)
  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil  (1997)
Sounder  (1972) •  Sophie and the Rising Sun (2017)
Mud Bound (2017) •  Ode to Billy Joe (1976)
Black Like Me (1964) •  Shy People (1987) •  Slaves (1969)
Moonshine County Express (1977) •  Angel Heart (1987)
Wise Blood (1979) •  Baby Doll (1956) •  Preacherman (1971)
Southern Comfort (1981) •  White Lightning (1973)
Drums in the Deep South (1951) •  Paris Trout (1991)
Hot Summer in Barefoot County (1974) •  Free State of Jones (2016)
Coming: French Quarter (1978)

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#throwbackthursday: Big Ol’ Birds’ Nests at the Museum, 2009

Back in 2009, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts had this installation by artist Patrick Dougherty. When my kids were small, I used to take them to museum a lot in the summers, since it was air conditioned and far more enlightening and appealing than the playground at Chick Fil A. While we usually went straight inside to the ArtWorks area, they were super stoked about these big ol’ birds’ nests.

#ICYMI: About ‘Welcome to Eclectic’

[image error]Welcome to Eclectic – formerly Pack Mule for the New School – is a blog written by Foster Dickson, a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Montgomery, Alabama. The blog has taken on a variety of subjects during its nine years, since 2010, but its main ones are the culture of the Deep South, the arts & humanities, education, and issues of progress and social justice. You can follow the blog here by using the button the right side of the page, or you can keep up with new posts by liking Foster Dickson’s author pages on Facebook, Amazon, or GoodReads, by following him on Twitter or Instagram, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn.

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[image error]Foster Dickson’s work has centered mainly on subjects related to the American South, the arts & humanities, education, and social justice. His new book, Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post-Civil Rights Montgomery, about a police-shooting controversy in Montgomery, Alabama in the mid-1970s, was published by NewSouth Books in November 2018.

Foster’s previous book, Children of the Changing South, was published by McFarland & Co. in 2011. This edited collection (with Foster’s introduction) contains memoirs by eighteen writers and historians who grew up in the South during and after the Civil Rights movement. The Alabama Writers Forum’s review of the book stated, “Besides being a great read, this collection provides a valuable new perspective on Southern history.”

Foster’s other published books are biographical works on two often-neglected Southerners, The Life and Poetry of John Beecher (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009) and I Just Make People Up: Ramblings with Clark Walker (NewSouth Books, 2009), and a book of poetry, Kindling Not Yet Split (Court Street Press, 2002). He also acted as general editor for the place-focused curriculum guide Treasuring Alabama’s Black Belt (Alabama Humanities Foundation/Auburn University at Montgomery, 2009).

You can learn more about Foster and his work by clicking the links below:

education & the arts • press kit • image gallery • poetry • 101 movies • 101 books

[image error]Outside of writing and teaching, Foster’s other interests are Auburn football, his Catholic faith, cooking and eating, craft beers, gardening and urban farming; classic country, rock, and soul music; classic and independent films, family history, social theory and politics. Foster likes Levi’s jeans, Liberty overalls, Coca-Cola, Grapico, Miller High Life, George Dickel No. 8, a cup of black coffee with a spoonful of honey in it, Chilean cabernets and Argentine malbecs, and a good plate of homestyle food with one vegetable of each color. His turnoffs are bottled water, ice breakers and “team-building exercises,” bell peppers and black olives, sipping lids on coffee cups, traffic, and rudeness.

Foster Dickson is available for freelance assignments and contract work in both writing and editing, and for speaking engagements or guest artist presentations related to Southern culture, education, and social-justice subjects.

For more information, you can contact him using the form below:

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*The Foster Dickson who writes this blog is not  the same person as the Foster Dickson who works in a global youth ministry. 

 

#ICYMI: Dirty Boots, an introduction

Lots of my family and friends, my wife among them, have never understood why I wear boots all the year round. Especially in the summer when, in Alabama, it gets mighty hot and breaking out some running shoes or flip-flops might seem more appealing. But the explanation is simple, even if it is unacceptable.

[image error] I’ve always worn boots. When I was five, I wore cowboy boots with my shorts. As a skinny, squirrelly boy, to me they felt tough and mannish . . . two things that I wasn’t at all. As a teenager, the rock bands I liked were all pictured in boots—from Guns N’ Roses to the Allman Brothers Band. As a young man, I wore boots when I worked in restaurants and bars, because it didn’t matter if I got grease and other mess on them. So, when I was finally a grown man, who had become a writer and a schoolteacher, I was set in my ways and had no desire to transfer my allegiances to English-teacher loafers or dress-for-success patent-leather or even old-dude cool Converse All-Stars. No, it was going to be boots, no matter whether lace-up steel toes or pull-on brogans— it was going to be boots.

Read the whole post

“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 read find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

 

#throwbackthursday: 25 Years without Lewis Grizzard

I can remember my dad going into these long-winded, side-splitting, barely breathing fits of laughter when he listened to Lewis Grizzard, the humor writer from Georgia whose columns, books, and monologues wove through Southern culture in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Grizzard couldn’t have looked any more like Southern newspaper columnist, with his oversized glasses and mustache, which added dimension to his sardonically expressive face. His subject matter included odd observations about life and the South, about language use, about family and women and divorce, seemingly about anything that rattled around in that peculiar head of his.

Lewis Grizzard died twenty-five years ago, in 1994, of complications from heart surgery at Emory University Hospital. Though he was only 47, Grizzard had already had three prior heart surgeries in 1982, 1985, and 1993. News reports in ’94 explained that doctors basically knew that, if he survived this one, he wouldn’t live long afterward.

Grizzard was born into a military family at Fort Benning and later got his journalism degree from the University of Georgia, an alma mater of which he was very, very proud. Throughout his career as a columnist, he amassed a large and devoted following, but he also offended plenty of people with his off-color and insensitive remarks. In addition to his columns, of course, there were his uniquely titled books, like Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun, and comedy albums, like Alimony: The Bill You Get for the Thrill You Got, which gave longer form to his ideas and expressive abilities. Grizzard was one of the last vestiges of a pre-politically correct media landscape. A 2016 remembrance of Grizzard by the Journal-Constitution reminded audiences that he was an “equal-opportunity offender,” but that he also “gave voice to the region through changing times.” 

While Pat Conroy may have found Grizzard to be loathsome, and where one of his co-workers at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described him as “racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic, [and] suspicious of anything that’s different from himself,” but all I know is this . . . Lewis Grizzard made my hard-working, blue-collar father laugh ’til his sides hurt, and that made life a little easier and more pleasant around the ol’ Dickson household.

 

Dirty Boots: “Matthew Antoine’s Quandary”

As this post is publishing, two dozen or more teachers from Alabama – me among them – are checking in and gathering together for the Alabama Humanities Foundation’s SUPER Teacher workshop titled “Reflecting on Our Justice System,” which centers (obviously) on teaching justice issues. Today and tomorrow, we will visit the Equal Justice Initiative‘s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, and will also discuss Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, Anthony Ray Hinton’s The Sun Does Shine, and Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying.

[image error]Earlier this month, I re-read that last book – Gaines’ novel – and had forgotten about the figure of Matthew Antoine, the narrator’s teacher when he was young. Matthew Antoine, as he is described, is an embittered realist whose only wish for his students is that they escape from this place where they are sure to meet violent deaths, where they will be “brought down to the level of beasts.” (If you’ve never read A Lesson Before Dying, the novel is about an African American teacher named Grant in 1940s Louisiana who is required by his aunt Lou and her best friend Miss Emma to counsel Emma’s son Jefferson, who has been convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and who sits in a six-by-ten jail cell awaiting the electric chair. Grant does not relish or even want the task.) About his teacher and his own goal to become one, Grant tells us of Matthew Antoine, “And when he saw that I wanted to learn, he hated me even more.” The teacher’s teacher only wanted to impart one lesson: get away from there, go where you’ll have a better chance to live. As the Book of Ecclesiastes puts it, all else is vanity.

In the story, Matthew Antoine dies of an unnamed illness at age forty-three. As he becomes more and more frail, Grant goes to visit him regularly and faces a constant stream of criticism from his unlikely and unwilling mentor. As the elder man is dying, Grant has told him that he too will become a teacher and asks, “Any advice?” Antoine replies, “It doesn’t matter anymore. [ . . . ] Just do the best you can. But it won’t matter.”

Being a teacher and trying to affect issues of social justice can be disheartening, and Matthew Antoine symbolizes that. Of course, his plight in early twentieth-century rural Louisiana would have been different, and much more severe, from a modern teacher who wants to guide young people away from the pitfalls of life in the twenty-first century. Where I agree with Antoine that we can only “just do the best [we] can,” I disagree that “it won’t matter.” Matthew Antoine fails to recognize the change that he made in Grant, and we teachers shouldn’t fail to recognize our students who learn, stay, and struggle against the status quo of Deep Southern poverty, backwardness, and inequality. Rather than do what Antoine did – encourage someone like Grant to leave or give up – teachers in the Deep South need to pour our best efforts into the ones who will pick up where we leave off.

It takes fortitude and conscientious effort not to become Matthew Antoine. As one teacher in one classroom, working with a couple-dozen young people, trying to aid them in averting systemic iniquity and injustice, there can be the temptation to throw one’s hands into the air, to yield to the behemoth’s immensity, and to proclaim bitterly that it doesn’t matter. But then, why should a teacher do the best he can? It has to be one or the other: either it doesn’t matter, or we do the best we can. It can’t be both. All I know is: any person, be they teacher, student, or parent, or citizen, or voter, will act according to which they believe to be the case.

“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 read find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Disrupters & Interlopers: Bayard Rustin

There is one clear and unequivocal reason that you have probably not heard of Bayard Rustin: he was gay. Though Rustin was active in the Civil Rights movement well before Martin Luther King, Jr. was around, he was often shuffled out of the limelight by his own co-workers. In the 1977 book My Soul is Rested, Howell Raines described Rustin this way: “He is white-haired, a man of elegant diction, an old lion of the Movement, and he was the first of the Eastern civil-rights professionals to discover the young preacher in Montgomery.”

Born in Pennsylvania in 1912 to an absent father and a teenage mother, Bayard Rustin’s beginnings were inauspicious. He was raised by his grandparents, who were Quakers. After graduating from high school then attending various colleges, Rustin went to New York City and, while there, joined the Young Communists League, which led to involvement in civil rights organizing in the 1940s and ’50s.  During this period, he worked with A. Philip Randolph, joined the Fellowship for Reconciliation, was one of the founders of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), and helped later to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with Dr. King.

It was Bayard Rustin’s commitment to nonviolence, though, that may be his most important contribution to the movement. In his oral history in My Soul is Rested, Rustin claimed that it was he who convinced Martin Luther King, Jr. to embrace nonviolence. (He said that there were “armed guards” at King’s house when Rustin first met him.)

Bayard Rustin was also one of the key organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. Though the event was envisioned by Randolph, and though it was King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that is most remembered, it was Rustin who “guided the organization of an event that would bring over 200,000 participants to the nation’s capital.”

Rustin continued to be active in civil rights causes throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Later, in the 1980s, he was prominent in the cause of gay rights as well. Though he died in 1987, Bayard Rustin was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by President Barack Obama.

About Rustin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote:

Yet of all the leaders of the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin lived and worked in the deepest shadows, not because he was a closeted gay man, but because he wasn’t trying to hide who he was. That, combined with his former ties to the Community Party, was considered to be a liability.

The common conception is that those in the Civil Rights movement struggled against oppressors and bigots, but Bayard Rustin also had to struggle against those with whom he worked. To know more about Bayard Rustin, there is a collection of his writings titled Time on Two Crosses, as well as the documentary Brother Outsider. His work is continued to today by the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice in Princeton, New Jersey.

The Disrupters & Interlopers series highlights lesser-known individuals from Southern history whose actions, though unpopular or difficult, contributed to changing the old status quo. To read previous posts, click any of the links below:

Clement Wood • Charles Gomillion • Myles Horton • James Saxon Childers •

Joan Little • Will D. Campbell • Ralph McGill • Juliette Hampton Morgan

Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige

If you read this column often, or even seldom, you know that I have a strong interest in finding, researching, and sharing previously untold and neglected stories. Whether it is a 1975 police shooting in the Whitehurst Case or the sinking of the illegal slave ship Clotilda in 1860, these stories are the mortar that hold together the bricks of our history. Without them, major events seem disconnected and without context, floating in the historical air without roots.

[image error]Which is why I was pleased to see NPR’s new White Lies podcast that examines the 1965 killing of a white preacher named James Reeb. Created by Andrew Beck Grace (of Eating Alabama fame) and Chip Brantley (author of The Perfect Fruit), White Lies takes on the matter of Reeb’s death in Selma in the lead-up to the Selma-to Montgomery March. Reeb was a Unitarian minister, originally from Kansas and living in Boston, who came south to join the march after Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. However, he didn’t get to march because he was beaten down in the street on March 9 and died soon after. Along with Jimmy Lee Jackson and Viola Liuzzo, Reeb’s name remains well-known among those close to this history, but widely neglected in more surface-level discussions, which tend to focus on Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gov. George Wallace, Judge Frank Johnson, and Pres. Lyndon Johnson, and sometimes Jim Clark and Al Lingo.

The podcasts has four episodes so far, with one more coming out today. The first covers the basics – of Selma, the march, Reeb’s presence there, and his death – combined with commentary about why the story is both obscure and important. The second, third, and fourth have delved into the contradictions and the obfuscation, while remarking on the challenges of researching long-obscured history. Grace and Brantley narrate, tying together archival audio with recent interviews, which bring us nearer to the time and place – the Black Belt of Alabama in 1965 – where resistance to the Civil Rights movement led to violence and killing.

[image error]At one point, in the first episode, Andrew Beck Grace says, “Spending time in Selma is like this – a nearly constant technical and often bitter relitigation of the minutiae of the past.” He hits on one of the reasons that the South’s history of racial injustice has yet to be untangled, much less reckoned with. Trying to deal intellectually with this history, which is not only legal and social but also emotional and personal, raises all kinds of issues: with nuance, with cooperation, with honesty. What makes sense is not necessarily going to be allowed to prevail by those with a vested interest in the silence and forgetting.

I’m thankful not only that Grace and Brantley have taken on this story, but that NPR is airing it with such prominent placement. Every time I open their app to check the day’s news, there is the podcast’s logo right below the first three news items. If you haven’t yet listened to the podcast, or more importantly if you don’t know about James Reeb, I can relay that White Lies is well worth the time and attention.

“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.

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June 4, 2019

May 28, 2019

May 21, 2019

May 14, 2019

May 7, 2019

April 30, 2019

Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.