Foster Dickson's Blog, page 60

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Eudaemonia”

Though I certainly don’t eschew enjoyment or joy or fun or leisure, I seldom consider whether I’m happy. At least not in the way that Pharrell Williams sings about in his pop hit “Happy,” whose message I don’t love: do what feels good to you. My kids dial up that two minutes of clap-along subjectivism on the iPod in my truck sometimes, and I am reminded of these interminable suit-yourself messages. (I’d be a lot happier listening to The Band or The Allman Brothers Band or Widespread Panic, personally.)

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “How Cool It Was— Back Then”

There’s been a lot of heavy stuff to write about lately in the Deep South . . . race in politics, controversial legislation, and the death of a talented writer. Here it is, the heart of the winter, nearly a full month into the dead season with more than two months still to go until spring, and I’m looking for something good to talk about.

So, what better way to take my mind off the mean ol’ present by waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ past. I’m about a half a year late writing about this one, but not too long ago I read that last May marked the 35th anniversary of the release of the classically zany film depiction of the Deep South in the late ’70s, Smokey and the Bandit, starring Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed and Jackie Gleason. If you’ve never seen this movie, shame on you! And frankly, the only thing I respect less than a Southerner who has never seen this movie is a Southerner who has only seen the censored TBS version that used to air on lazy Saturday afternoons, the version where Sheriff Buford T. Justice keeps using the overdubbed, heavily censored epithet “scum bum” (in the place of “sumbitch”).

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(Unpublished) #Poem: “Sabbatical”

I wrote this poem in 2012 after seeing an exhibit of paintings by Lois Mailou Jones (1905 – 1998) at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. I had taken my creative writing students to see the exhibit as part of an ekphrastic writing exercise and wrote this poem of my own.

Sabbatical

The colors of Lois Mailou Jones grab and clutch

at shape and at me, and the sign on the wall explains

that she took a sabbatical to Paris, out of Howard

in Atlanta, to live free of color and make art,

and I am standing in Montgomery, looking at

those colors and shapes, wishing I was on sabbatical,

in Paris, in a café on the Seine, instead of looking

at these colors in a place where color matters,

and I can marvel at the “Mob Victim” whose up-looking

prayerful face seems to me as peace and quiet

in a museum with my students, all of us safe

from harm, safe from the rain outside, safe

from feeling anything, and the strange gods

of Lois Mailou Jones become Southern

archetypes around the corner— and then Paris again,

and I am gone away again, knowing not to pause

at the nudes since my students will giggle and tease,

and that sabbatical is calling me to be free

of these students, free of the South, free of color,

just plain free.

About ten years ago, I all but quit submitting poems to literary magazines and began sharing a few here. To read previous (Unpublished) #Poem posts, each with its own mini-introduction, click on the title below:

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Southern Soil”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “I Know”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Common”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Zero”

(Unpublished) #Poem: [Untitled]

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Reading Kenko”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Five or Six”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Curb Market, Saturday Morning”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Cycle”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “The Greatest Unknown”

(Unpublished) #Poem: “Prairie Mud”

 

The Three-Legged Stool (#education)

Year after year, at back-to-school nights, open houses, parent involvement days, and school events, I preach, or at least allude to, the same sermon: the teacher, the student, and the parent must work together to properly educate a child. It takes teamwork.

I illustrate my point to the parents I’m talking to by asking them to envision a one-legged stool. How does it stand up, I ask. It doesn’t, they reply, usually with knitted brows. Exactly, and neither can a child be educated if only one of those three parties is working. If only the teacher is working, but not the student and the parent, not much good will come. Likewise, if it is only the parent, or only the student. A one-legged stool cannot stand.

Next, I ask them to envision a two-legged stool. Can it stand, I ask. No, they reply, usually after thinking about it for a moment. The only improvement with a two-legged stool is that it will fall in only one of two directions, not willy-nilly in any direction like the one-legged stool. But fall it will. This is the situation if only two of the three parties are working: teacher and parent only, student and parent only, or teacher and student only.

Finally, we get to a three-legged stool. Can it stand, I ask again. Yes, it can.  And moreover, those three legs can be arranged in an array of patterns and constructions. There isn’t only one right way. This is what happens when all three parties are working, and when all three are connected to each other with sure supports.

For the paradigm of education to succeed, all three – teacher, student, and parent – must be in place. Teachers must provide instruction, assignments, opportunities, and tutoring. Students must receive instruction and do their assigned work. Finally, parents and guardians are there to ensure that their children study, do their homework, and get adequate rest.

Yet, just imagine the potential for a student’s education if that stool had four legs. With his or her community, neighbors, extended family, and close friends also asking and insisting, a student could hardly fail if, everywhere that student turns, the value of education is reinforced.

Now, imagine if that stool even had a fifth leg. If adequate resources, staffing, and facilities were added to solid instruction, student effort, parental action, and community support for every child, that student’s only limitations would be the ones placed there by God Himself.

First must come the hands-on, daily support from people in that child’s life. I’ve learned from being both a teacher and a parent that children don’t do what we say— they do what we do. And when a parent or guardian only pays attention to the child’s schooling on report card day, the child learns two lessons at home: education and learning don’t really matter in daily life, and I only have to work hard enough to bring home letter grades that keep me out of trouble. When the marks become more important than what they symbolize, that report card is not a representation, but a facade, and education becomes not about learning, but about jumping through the proper hoops.

I know that many parents work long hours, struggle to get through each day, and don’t have the time to volunteer, to chaperone field trips, or even to attend monthly PTA meetings. But that isn’t the form that every parent’s support needs to take. (If every parent volunteered at the school, we’d be overrun!) Here’s what any parent or guardian can do: ask your child each evening what he or she learned that day. Don’t ask about grades or tests or deadlines— ask about learning. Parents who do that will know what their child is learning in school; they’ll know if the teachers are performing up to standard; and they’ll know that their child will be prepared for real life.

Asking questions about their studies shows children that they should care about learning. Educators call it “formative assessment.” It tells us, before it’s too late, what the child does or doesn’t understand or know. Ask your child what he is doing in math, then ask him to show you an example. Ask your child which book she is reading, then ask her, “What’s it about?” Ask your child what he or she is studying in history, then ask, “When did that happen?” If a student can’t respond the second part of those questions, a parent should worry. The answers to those questions will tell a parent more about a child’s education than any A, B, C, D, or F ever could.

It takes teamwork. I remind my students periodically that my job title is “teacher,” not “grade giver.” So, if I’m there to teach, then students should recognize that they are there to learn. Thus, parent involvement – the third leg on that stool, the one to ensure that it can stand – should center on the expectation of teaching and learning, not on periodic concerns over scores and letter grades on data sheets.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Apoplectic”

In my classes, I’ve sometimes called a student’s grade “that stupid number.” This periodic outburst has been borne out of frustration that some students obviously cared more about the numerical grade than about learning. When I would hand back papers, essays, stories, or poems that I had read multiple times, marked thoroughly and diligently, and scored as conscientiously as I could, I would see some of them look only at the final score and try to hand it back to me; others, usually fewer, would do what I hope they will all do: genuinely read my comments, and even ask for clarification on them. Incensed that my efforts at teaching could mean so little, so much less than the number that I am required to dole out, I sometimes have a minor conniption and call grades what they are: a stupid number.

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The great many Deep Souths”

[image error]I’ve lived in the Deep South my entire life— in the same city as a matter of fact: Montgomery, Alabama. After years of studying and writing about this region, I’m well aware that the names of places I love have ugly meanings for many Americans. I’ve become accustomed to my daily surroundings being often-cited cases of racism, poverty, and inequality . . . even though that dim view, however true, is also short-sighted.

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the #newschool: Know why.

Know why you believe what you do, know why you support what support, and know why you act as you act. A person who does not know why is no better than the toddler whose giggles or tantrums depend on whimsy and pleasure. A person who does not know why is also easily persuaded to do things that go against his own interest. Typically, we call these kinds of behavior foolish.

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Afternoon Movies: “Time Bandits” (1981)

Back in the day, laying on the couch on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, flipping among the only three or four channels we had, afternoon movies were unpredictable, often raw, usually cheap, and always edited offerings from the backwaters of cinema history. At a time when most people had TVs but on-demand was not yet a thing, weekend afternoon movies – as bad as they usually were – were about the only thing on, if you didn’t want to watch sports, Three Stooges reruns, or a Ronco infomercial. God only knows who was programming these selections, but whoever those unpaid young interns may have been, they added that offbeat, low-budget twinge to the otherwise boring hours that we wasted waiting for Saturday night.

Southern Movie #23: “Ode to Billy Joe”

On the surface, the 1976 movie Ode to Billy Joe seems like a simple teenage love story set in rural Mississippi. However, there’s more to this movie. Based on the 1967 Bobbie Gentry song of the same name and directed by Max Baer, Jr. – the son of the famous boxer, but best known for playing Jethro Bodine in The Bevery Hillbillies – Ode to Billy Joe is built around a desperate secret that comes to stand between the otherwise ordinary young lovers, and it is that secret that leads Billy Joe McAllister to jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Set in 1953, Ode to Billy Joe begins when Bobbie Lee Hartley, a naive farmer’s daughter, is pursued sweetly and at first harmlessly by a slightly older boy named Billy Joe McAllister. Billy Joe is no longer in school and works at the local sawmill, and she informs him curtly that, since she is only 15, his charming advances won’t be received well by her papa. The story begins where it will end – on the Tallahatchie Bridge – as Billy Joe scuttles and skips along with the teenage girl who is walking home from her rural bus stop.  As we meet the two, they are as un-worldly as can be: Bobbie Lee talks to her imaginary friend Benjamin, and soon after this scene, Billy Joe finds himself unable to behave anything but awkwardly when he goes to the seedy night club with his friends. However, Bobbie Lee is outgrowing her father’s insistence that she remain a little girl and spends her quiet hours reading smutty stories from cheap magazines. Things are about to change.

After these introductions, the focus shifts to a subplot that involves a trio of local ne’er-do-wells who nearly run Bobbie Lee’s father Glenn off the bridge. Carrying a load of milk and eggs to market, the father and daughter come to the one-lane Tallahatchie Bridge at the same time as the truckload of drunken sots who declare that the farmer must back up and let them pass. Unfortunately, Glenn’s truck has no reverse. That fact and his pride lead him to order Bobbie Lee out of the truck, so he can ram the other truck off the bridge— with his load of breakables in back. She then stands by helplessly while her father’s truck sputters and stalls, and the wild young men win the two-bit battle by pushing him half-off the bridge. They drive away, and as Glenn and the truck hang precariously over the side, Bobbie Lee has to run get her brother James, who works nearby at the sawmill . . . with Billy Joe. The small crew of young men save her father from falling into the river below, but the truck is torn up, and a feud is now brewing.

Feeling emboldened by helping the Hartley family in their time of need, Billy Joe then approaches Bobbie Lee after church in full view of everyone. He has been warned, of course, that the apple of his eye is too young to date, but he makes his move anyway. Billy Joe’s intentions are now out in the open.

However, her papa Glenn will not yield so easily. Though Glenn is basically a kind, hard-working man, he has no intention of budging on the boundaries he has set for his daughter. Of course, that doesn’t stop Billy Joe from stomping up the dirt road with a fist full of flowers, an act that leads to a puppy-love wander in the woods. The relationship between the two teenagers is solidified, and Bobbie Lee is just as excited about the prospect of a boyfriend as she is about the prospect of her family having indoor plumbing!

It is what happens next that changes everything. The whole community has been looking forward to the big Okolona River Bottom Jamboree that’s coming up, and once we see the scene, we know why. There is music and drinking, foolishness and frolicking— the otherwise good, Christian community is going buck wild! Bobbie Lee’s brother James runs into the drunkards who tore up his father’s truck and kicks the hell out of them. On a side hallway, someone has even brought in prostitutes for the local men who are so inclined, and we see a wide-eyed, obviously frightened Billy Joe being led into that den of sin. But what happens . . . we don’t know.

The next day, the big party is over, but the drama is not. The local lawman comes around, with Billy’s Joe father, asking questions: some bad stuff went on the night before, and Billy Joe is missing. Unaware of what could have gone wrong, the whole town wonders where Billy Joe McAllister may be. And no one worries about him more than Bobbie Lee.

After three days of hiding in the woods, Billy Joe turns up, and he and Bobbie Lee have the necessary heart-to-heart. After some crying and pleading and big promises, Billy Joe admits that he has had sex with another man, a sin that he believes makes him unfit for a relationship of any kind. Even though Bobbie Lee wants to help him get past it, he will not accept any kindness, nor will he reveal the name of the other man involved. Billy Joe McAllister is inconsolably grief-stricken, and now we know what the song doesn’t tell us: why Billy Joe jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

As Ode to Billy Joe comes to a close, Bobbie Lee is in a bad position. The community – her brother, in particular – believes that she is pregnant and that is why Billy Joe committed suicide. Responding in archetypal Southern fashion, the locals shun both the McAllisters and the Hartleys. Unwilling to reveal her dead lover’s secret, Bobbie Lee – a virgin who could not be not pregnant – even remains silent during her angry brother’s tirade about how she should get an abortion.

Reconciled to her new position as a pariah, Bobbie Lee Hartley packs her suitcase and leaves home one sunny morning. To her surprise, as she crosses the Tallahatchie Bridge, she encounters Dewey Barksdale (played by James Best, well-known as Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard.) Barkdale owns the sawmill where James, Billy Joe, and others worked, and he is walking to her family’s house to admit that he is the man who had sex with Billy Joe. When he learns that Bobbie Lee is running away, he asks her not to go, insisting that his confession will make things right, that it will become clear that she isn’t pregnant when people know the truth. However, after this peculiarly Deep Southern ordeal, Bobbie Lee has changed, and leaving is what she will do.

Ode to Billy Joe stands as one of the few films to deal directly with issues related to homosexuality in the Deep South. (The Children’s Hour and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil are two others.) Where there have been many movies made about issues of race in the Deep South, depictions of the intolerance of same-sex relationships remain muted, appearing as undercurrents of this cultural norm that is an open secret. (For example, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the nature of Brick’s too-close relationship with his dead friend Skipper is never fully revealed.) In this film, Billy Joe is so immediately and thoroughly repulsed by his own actions that he regards himself as no longer fit to participate in human society. After we see their town’s reaction to assumptions about an unplanned pregnancy out of wedlock, we know why Billy Joe might have anticipated their reaction to he and Dewey Barksdale having sex.

Back in the summer of 1976, when the movie was new, the reviews were not so hot. Famed critic Roger Ebert gave it a lukewarm review, though The New York Times‘ review was not even that kind:

‘Ode to Billy Joe’ is a movie to lament. Its authors have ruined it. To say so is praise as well as regret. You can only ruin something that has some quality to begin with . . .

The problem, which reviewers alluded to, was that the song was so haunting and alluring because it withheld the reason that Billy Joe jumped— and the movie takes that mystery away!

As a document that portrays life in the Deep South in the mid-1950s though, Ode to Billy Joe has some degree of success. Its Mississippi backdrop avoids anachronisms and misnomers with reasonably accurate details: rural schooling and bus routes, the hardships of inadequate roads and bridges, a conservative culture that has church at the center of social life, the much-anticipated annual festival, and the arrival of modern conveniences like indoor plumbing. And certainly the movie’s title character is correct that, in 1953, rural Protestant evangelicals would have seen his same-sex one-night stand as nothing other than a sinful transgression, an attitude that hasn’t changed much in the Deep South in the six decades since.

For a listing of all the Southern Movie posts on Pack Mule for the New School, click here.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Before their Eyes Adjust to the Light”

Working with teenagers, I regularly get to hear expressions of ideas that I too once held: adults want to ruin all fun because they are dead inside; learning is pointless when the subject matter has no direct connection to one’s life; and life will always be like it is right now. These sad and unenviable presumptions, which have come to define the teenager á la Holden Caulfield, arise from a simple lack of life experience and from their disappointing interactions with adult authority figures.(Recall the darkly transparent lyrics to Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen.”) Looking up at the world from their distinctly un-powerful position, life must really seem that way.

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