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)
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.

To read recent posts, click the date below:

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.

The summer is just one long planning period.

In the teaching and writing life, busy-ness comes in peaks and valleys. Sometimes people ask me if I can help them with something but seem confounded when my answer is something like this: I don’t have time right now, but I will in about [number of] weeks, but you need to go ahead and tell me what I need to do because by [date] I’ll be busy again. When I’m grading papers or meeting a deadline, I might not even have time to answer an email, but there are also periods of time when I’m doing a lot less— that is to say, catching up on neglected tasks while waiting to be busy again . . .

[image error]Having Closed Ranks to come out last November was a long-awaited blessing, but promoting the book, conducting the Newtown oral history collection, rebuilding the school garden, coordinating the Fitzgerald Museum’s literary contest, teaching and grading papers, and writing this blog made for a busy six months from November ’til April! While those were all good things, it has been nice to slow down in May and June, after sending the seniors to graduation, finalizing everyone else’s grades, and closing up shop. Yet, slowing down is relative— it’s already time to start planning!

Moving into year two as the coordinator of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum‘s annual literary contest for high school and college students, summer is the time for me get the rules and timeline for the 2019 – 2020 contest set and finalized, as well as arranging for judging. I expect to have the upcoming contest’s details ready to share in August. The hint I can share right now is: where 2018 was the centennial of the Scott meeting Zelda in Montgomery, 2019 is the centennial of the couple’s wedding.

[image error]Also, now that the school garden has been rebuilt, there’s maintenance work to be done: cutting grass, watering, weeding. Later this month, I’ll be heading to Missoula, Montana for a week-long teacher professional development on sustainability. Aside from looking forward to working in the garden with students next year, it’ll be good to learn how I can help my school to incorporate sustainable practices, both on campus and in our students’ lives.  My goals are to reduce waste and to create a system of composting, but before I get my heart set on those notions . . . the whole purpose of the workshop is for them to tell me what might work best.

And since I haven’t been working on any major writing projects since Closed Ranks was finished, it also been nice to do some reading. I got copies of Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion, How Dante Can Save Your Life by Rod Dreher, and Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero by James Romm for Christmas and had read those by the time spring came. In February, a teacher at The Randolph School gave me a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, after we talked about teaching British literature; that novel and grading papers kept me busy through the spring. More recently, I’ve been letting my mind wander over different books: the first two essays from Mario Vargas Llosa’s Notes on the Death of Cult[image error]ure, parts of William H. Stewart’s Alabama Politics in the Twenty-First Century,  A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, and I just read the first essay in David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster. Additionally, last winter I started going weekly to spend an hour in our adoration chapel, and have taken that opportunity to re-read the four Gospels, as well as Ecclesiastes and parts of Proverbs and Wisdom. (I like the wisdom books particularly.) Right now, I’m reading Job, accompanied by Princeton University Press’s Literary Biography Series book on it.

Of course, no teacher or writer should spend the whole summer on work. I am finding time to sit by the lake, to drink some beer, and to throw the tennis ball to the dog. I spend mornings drinking coffee on the porch and watching the birds peck around in the yard. By late afternoon, the heat has subsided enough to return to the porch for a Fat Tire or maybe a Dickel. Sometimes I think I could get used to this life of leisure, and then I get real and think, Nah! It just wouldn’t do.

Southern Movie 37: “The Free State of Jones”

After writing a recent Southern Movie post about the sentimentalized Civil War movie Drums from the Deep South, it seemed appropriate to write one as well about an un-sentimentalized Civil War movie: 2016’s The Free State of Jones. Not only is this film brutal and stark, its scenario is an uncommon one for the mid-1800s South: a hard-working white man in Mississippi who understands the Civil War and the Confederacy to be nothing more than poor men dying in the service of rich men’s interest. Based on the true story of Newton Knight, the film combines a Civil War-era story with a latter-day Civil Rights-era twist.

The Free State of Jones opens with a gruesome battle scene. A cadre of stern-faced Confederate soldiers, most of them young, all of them scruffy and dirty, march in formation across a field. As they come to the top of a small hill, Union soldiers are waiting for them and begin to fire. During the smoky melee, we see the ugliness of this kind of war: the men upfront are cut down quickly, men’s bodies are mangled and torn apart by cannonballs and musket fire. Among the carnage appears Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), a battlefield nurse, who frantically collects an injured man onto a rolling gurney and carts him quickly from the front to the camp, as shots fly past. We get a sense of Knight’s character here, as he attempts to console the soldier while risking his own life. When they get back to camp and find the medical tent full of men with severe wounds, Knight then strips the soldier’s coat off and presents him illicitly as a wounded officer so he gets preferential treatment.

Later that day, after the furor has died down, Newton and his friend Jasper sit and talk. They see a group of men loading a wagon, and Newton asks Jasper who they are and what they’re doing. Jasper replies that the men are going home to Carolina; due to the newly passed Twenty Negro Law, any man who owns at least twenty slaves gets a pass from fighting in the war on the grounds that they have to be at home managing their business affairs. Newton Knight immediately sees the injustice in this privilege.

Later that night, a small group of men sit around a campfire, as Jasper reads aloud, explaining the Twenty Negro Law. Newton declares that they are all dying for the rich men’s cotton, though another man named Will declares that he is fighting for honor. Newton disagrees, grumbles, and goes into the woods to relieve himself. There he comes across his young kinsman Daniel, no more than a teenager; he is crying and tells Newton that Confederates have come to their home, taken all of the goods and food, and conscripted him into the Mississippi 7th. Already frustrated by the situation, Newton allows the boy to stay with him and says that they will escape the war tomorrow.

The next day, during the fighting, Newton leads Daniel against the tide of the fighting, and the pair try to scramble through the shelling and shooting to flee into the trees. The going is harsh, but it’s working until they run across a small band of Confederates who are trying to outflank the Union troops. Newton lies and says they’re the last survivors of their unit, so the leader tells them to join in. As the rush out of the trench begins, though, Newton holds Daniel back from the charge, so they can continue their run, but the inexperienced boy stands straight up and takes a bullet in the chest. Newton tries to bring the boy to the tent hospital, but it is full again, and he holds Daniel while he dies in the grass under a tree.

Now, Newton has suffered the double-whammy. He has witnessed rich men’s privilege and watched his poor kin die. The next morning, Newton loads Daniel’s body onto a horse to take him home. Though his friends understand, they worry for Newton. He is becoming a deserter and is risking being executed. Newton’s allegiance to his home and family are greater than what he now regards as a bogus cause. He returns on foot to Jones County, Mississippi where he buries Daniel and answers his wife Serena’s questions about what he will do next.

In Jones County, the confiscation of goods from small farmers’ homes continues in the absence of the men who would normally protect their families. Here, we meet our villain Lieutenant Barbour, whose half-dozen lackeys take more than the ten percent that the Confederate government allows itself— they basically take everything, leaving women and children to fend for themselves with no food, no blankets, and no tools. Adding to Newton’s frustrations, there is this iniquity, too, so he vows to a small group of women that he will be their protector now that he is back home.

The next piece in the puzzle is added when Newton’s infant son gets sick, and Serena is unable to get the fever down. Looking for a doctor at a nearby pub, they are referred to a slave woman Rachel, who is an herbalist. She comes and passes the night healing the young child. Newton then shows his gratitude to Rachel by giving her a small bit of gold chain, which is unusual for a white man to do for a slave during this time.

Here, the scenario shifts. As Rachel walks away through a field toward the tree line, the words “85 Years Later . . .” appears on the screen and a voiceover carries us into a late 1940s courtroom scene. The court clerk explains miscegenation charges against Davis Knight, the clean-cut great grandson of Newton Knight, for marrying a white woman when he is one-eighth Negro, effectively making him black in the eyes of Mississippi law. As Davis Knight lowers his eyes in shame, the clerk declares this fact to be so, since his great grandmother was Rachel.

Back in the 1860s, Newton has come to the aid of a neighbor and her three children, to stop the confiscation of her food and blankets by Lt. Barbour. Knowing he will be outmanned and outgunned, Newton arms the woman and her little girls, but also sticks the handles of farm tools out of the holes in the barn walls to make it appear that there is a small army inside. Lt. Barbour first laughs but then is aggravated by being thwarted, and recognizes that Newton is a deserter.

Back home, Newton and Serena argue while he gets ready to escape. Newton tells his wife that he cannot leave these women alone, to which she responds that he is effectively leaving her alone. As Newton flees the men and dogs who’ve come to root him out, a black German shepherd tears up his leg before he kills it with his knife. Now, with a wounded leg and having lost his gun, he goes to Sally, the local pub owner who pointed him to Rachel. She has a slave man who will take him into the swamps to hide.

Newton is then dropped off in the swamps, without food or a gun, to wait. He is told that “they” will be here to get him later. In the darkness, Rachel appears to lead him to a campsite where a handful of black men are clustered around a fire. Newton asks, “Are they runaways?” to which Rachel replies, “Ain’t you?” Of course, the men’s de facto leader Moses, who wears a large, metal harness-like apparatus around his neck and head, is skeptical of their white visitor, but they allow him in anyway.

As Newton gets settled among the men, the plot picks up a little bit. We see that Serena lives under a constant state of surveillance by Confederate soldiers. That transitions back into the 1940s courtroom, where a prosecutor questions an expert about Serena leaving Jones County, Mississippi in late 1863 or early 1864, and thus could not be Davis Knight’s (white) great grandmother. We also see that Rachel is teaching herself to read by observing the master’s children’s lessons, and that she is the object of her master’s salacious affections. Back in the swamps, Newton and Moses get to know each other; Moses explains that he fled when his wife and son were sold and sent to Texas. Newton asks if he wants the harness off his neck, to which Moses responds that the removal would make too much noise and would bring the dogs. Newton then tells Moses that he is a blacksmith and that the dogs and the men can be handled.

In the daylight, the now-armed men – five black and one white – wait for the slave hunters after Newton removes the harness with great clanging of metal. They set up an ambush, and Newton reminds the men that they will only get one shot— so don’t miss! They quickly kill the hunters and dogs in a flurry of gun blasts, and the newly empowered slaves are left briefly to deal with the emotional impact of having the ability to defend themselves. Meanwhile, the relationship between Newton and Rachel grows more romantic.

[image error]At this point, a series of black-and-white battle images and some accompanying text move the story forward. We see that it is the middle of the Civil War, 1863 and 1864, and that the South is not faring well . . . The last frame shares that desertions are increasing.

The next thing we see is Newton pulling his friend Jasper out from under a house, and we understand that Jasper has deserted, too. As they approach the swamp base with two other bearded men, we see a camp now full of scruffy white men, including Will, who at the beginning of the movie insisted that the South’s case was honorable. Now emboldened by having others on his side, and with so many men to feed, Newton’s banditry begins. He first preaches to a group of farmers that the Bible instructs them that what a man plants, he ought to keep, and so, he suggests, they should move into the nearby cornfields, pick them clean, and hide the corn from Lt. Barbour and his men. The resentful group agrees, and they get to work. However, Barbour does find some corn in one man’s barn and takes it, but a mass of a few dozen deserters meets Barbour and his men on the road; they take back the corn and steal Barbour’s clothes. Barbour is outmatched by the rebellious deserters in the swamps, and we’re glad that this arrogant and uncaring man is being given a taste of his own medicine.

By now, a new villain has also appeared, Barbour’s superior officer Colonel Elias Hood, who takes the news of the corn raid poorly then appears at Sally’s pub to make a deal to extricate the deserters from the swamp. He offers whiskey and flour and money, claiming that anyone who comes out will not be punished but will simply rejoin the Confederate army. Sally forwards the offer to Newton who turns it down outright, and the hostility is ratcheted up.

The harried Confederates begin burning farms, but the ragtag crew’s morale stays high. They throw a big party in the swamp to thumb their noses at the army that know can’t reach them effectively. We once again see Rachel’s master James Eakins, who takes his jabs at Hood for not being able to get the job done. We also see racial tensions beginning to take shape as the dozens of white Southerners live among the five freed slaves who originally took Newton in. In recognition that Rachel is being raped by her owner, Newton begins burning cotton, an offense that ups the ante. To culminate this part of the film, one farmer, who represents the unsettled element in the camp, convinces a few men and boys that they should turn themselves in. He arranges that, but Col. Hood breaks his word that they will get off scot-free and has them hung. Though Newton opposed the move, he blames himself for their deaths.

An hour-and-a-half into Free State of Jones, with an hour left to go, the movie has established itself as a power-to-the-people story. Newton Knight makes regular remarks that rich families have gotten rich off the hard work of poor people and through the docile acceptance of an unfair system. The film is also very clear that the Confederate representatives, who collect “taxes” in the form of goods and food, are not acting in the best interest of ordinary people. Really, we have yet to see anyone of decent moral character working for the Confederate establishment.

For the most part, Free State of Jones has kept its integrity up to this point, not turning itself into a Die Hard-style action flick (like Mel Gibson’s historical drama The Patriot does). However, for a just a moment, it kind of does. At the real private funeral for the men and boys who were hung, Newton gives a tearful, bitter sermon about how both white and black always seem to end up as “somebody else’s nigger,” and  he looks to Moses for an answer about why he is not one: “No one can own a child of God,” he says. Then, at the staged public funeral, the Confederates led by Hood and Barbour guard the cemetery, waiting to capture these now-fugitives, as a few mourners arrive with the coffins. A skirmish begins when one of the women, clothed in black, draws a pistol and blows a soldier’s brains out. Of course, the coward Barbour flees on his horse as men pop out of the coffins and out from under the church, shooting from all directions, and one black-clad woman even hurls over a stone wall Dukes of Hazzard-style while continuing to shoot. Thankfully, that kind of hokey thing doesn’t go on long, and when the battle is over, Newton kills a wounded Hood with a knife inside the church.

In the next scene, Barbour has brought a force to Ellisville, and a battle rages in the streets of the tiny town. We learn from the titling that it is March 1864. Of course, the Confederates are defeated by a cooperative effort, with all the men and women now involved. After their victory, Newton Knight and his ragged array of rebels celebrate, but now they have a new set of problems: infrastructure and supplies. They have prisoners of war to house and guard, and they need guns and ammunition to hold their position in Ellisville. Newton assigns Will to seek help from the Union army, and he himself takes Rachel to an upstairs hotel room, where they share a tender moment.

Though things seem to be going well for Newton and his crew, the Confederates will not accept defeat so easily and neither will his own men accept this situation. With Col. Hood’s body laid on a table, a report is given on the state of affairs in Jones County, Mississippi. A retaliation is planned, and as we watch marching soldiers, the text on the screen tells us that a new colonel is coming with more than a thousand troops. Shortly thereafter, Will returns with a few guns and the news that Gen. Sherman will not help them. Newton protests, but Will says that’s how it is and also tells Newton that some of the men want to flee rather than dig in to fight. Newton disagrees but accepts their will, then stands on the stairs of a white-columned building to declare to the group assembled that they are now – and have apparently always been – on their own. As such, they are forming a Free State of Jones in southeastern Mississippi. In perhaps the most important feature of this new state, Newton affirms racial equality by saying that all men are equal: “if you walk on two legs, you’re a man.”

Free State of Jones is a long movie – well over two hours – but there is a lot to cover. Right after this political declaration, we see that it is April 1865. The Civil War is over, slavery is over, and the Union is reunited, though the South is under Reconstruction. We see tearful reunion of Moses and his wife and son, followed by the swearing in of James Eakins, Rachel’s old slave master, back into the good graces. But, as Eakins fortunes improve, returning to his beautiful white mansion with his smiling family, the fates of Newton, Moses, and the other freedmen are declining. The freedmen want to know where their forty acres and a mule are, and Newton has to tell them that Eakins will keep his land because the federal government has backed away from its promise. Then, Rachel tells Newton, over their small table in the dark, that they must leave the area. He may have fought the powerful men last time, she tells him, but this time he won’t be able to. They and the other blacks must move up to Soso, an isolated patch of ground, and try to make a living there.

Soon after arriving in Soso, Newton gets another surprise. HIs wife Serena returns with his son, who is now a small boy. They have no place to go, and Newton offers to let her stay there. The problem is: Newton now has Rachel as his wife. Though, as Newton ponders what to do and how, Rachel comes out and makes the decision with him. There is another house on the property and they can fix it up. Serena will stay there, too.

Back in the 1940s courtroom, this situation is discussed. The prosecution in the miscegenation case says that Serena Knight left Jones County never to return, but census records show that she did return. The defense lawyer explains the enigmatic scenario: usually there is trouble identifying who the father of a child is, but in this case it is difficult to determine who the mother is. There were two women living with one man on one farm.

The film next takes a turn away from the personal life of Newton Knight and toward the broader history of the South after the Civil War. One afternoon, Moses’ wife comes running to Newton’s house to tell him that Moses has gone to retrieve their son— from what we don’t know. When Newton catches up to Moses he is angry and armed, striding toward the cotton field where his son is being forced to work. Newton joins him, and they are quickly confronted by armed men. In court, we find that the justice of the peace is that old coward Barbour and that the “apprenticeship” scheme is being perpetrated by James Eakins. Though the lieutenant/judge tries with a smirk to suppress Moses and Newton with statutes, Newton will have none of it. He stands up and calls the bluff! Ignoring Barbour’s bashing of the gavel, he throws seven dollars at Eakins, declaring the matter done, and Eakins takes it, shamelessly and with his own smirk.

The last twenty to thirty minutes of Free State of Jones show us the history that we (should) already know, interspersing those scenes with the conviction of David Knight for violating racial codes. After some more black-and-white images and more explanation of how former Confederates connived their way back into power, leading to Radical Reconstruction, we see the formation of the Union League, led in this story by Moses . . . which leads to the Ku Klux Klan, the burning of black churches, and midnight violence against blacks. While Moses is working on voter registration, he is chased down and lynched: castrated and hung from a tree. After this, Newton takes it upon himself to lead nearly two-dozen black men into town to vote Republican. We see a dramatization of how white Southern men engaged in voter suppression and intimidation, though Newton meets their threats with his own, and the defiant outsiders cast their ballots. Text on the screen explains that this continued until the late 1870s. Newton, of course, never gave up on what he believed in, no matter the cost. And though Newton and Rachel were never able to get married, he does leave his 160 acres of land to her. In the middle of the twentieth century, though, his descendant did not fare well for their union. The film does relay that his conviction was overturned, since Mississippi did not want his case to go to the Supreme Court.

Notwithstanding this completely unconventional side of Southern history, Free State of Jones elicited mixed reactions. The film critic Roger Ebert found the screenplay to be flawed, an assessment I agree with, though he found the mid-twentieth century subplot to be a distraction, which I disagree with. He also wrote this:

There’s worthwhile history here, to be sure, but some of it’s tedious while other parts are dubious (e.g., a title tells us that in 1875-76 federal forces were withdrawn from Mississippi even as “Klan activity was on the rise”; in reality, the Klan was effectively suppressed by actions the federal government took in the early 1870s). Eventually, the film’s story feels like it just peters out, without reaching any discernible dramatic or thematic point.

I don’t know how true it is that the “Klan was effectively suppressed” in the decade after the Civil War, though I do I agree that the movie “just peters out.”

The Guardian called the movie a “startling, fiercely violent, superbly photographed and structurally audacious civil war drama,” and “a movie that with enormous confidence operates outside the traditional story arc.” However, the Hollywood Reporter shared my sentiments about the movie’s shortcomings:

But just as the film seems like it’s about to really click into a higher gear, it loses momentum midstream and ultimately becomes didactic in its time-jumping final act. There is much incident: Families are shattered, innocents are hanged, farms and churches are burned and the hell that is war and the fundamental unfairness of life are on abundant display.

And that writer also added later that Free State of Jones “devolved from an engaging historical drama into a compendium of regressive racial developments.” Sadly for this compelling story, Rolling Stone saw it the same way:

If you think a thick, juicy slab of Civil War history can’t be boiled down to 145 minutes of speechifying, stultifying cinema, then grab a seat at Free State of Jones. Like the worst civics lesson, this movie bores away at you till your reactions are dulled.

What I’m driving at is this: everyone seems to agree that the movie presented a compelling story that most of us never knew, but its shift from a bluntly honest action film into a text-driven educational video leaves it with structural/creative schizophrenia. In short, Free State of Jones couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be. Perhaps this story was too big to be told in one movie.

As a portrayal of the South, the movie contains elements both conventional and unconventional, though one reviewer pointed out correctly that there is so much going on that the characters don’t really have room to develop. One disappointment for me was that there was not one single pro-Confederate character who had redeeming traits or who showed any kindness—all of them were all bad, which isn’t accurate or true. Overall, it’s good to have Free State of Jones among available narratives about the Civil War. Too few people read these days, and even fewer read academic histories, so having an approximation of the story of Newton Knight put on the screen is, I would say, a generally positive thing.