Foster Dickson's Blog, page 62

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Southern-ness”

[image error]Maybe it’s all semantics, but the question always seems to be there: what does it mean for someone or something to be “Southern”? I am dealing with this a good bit in writing the introduction to Children of the Changing South. Geographically and historically, it is easy to oversimplify: the states that fought in the Confederacy during the Civil War. But culturally, it isn’t so easy. Of course, as the writer of a scholarly introduction, I want to be correct . . . but I don’t know if it’s possible to be correct about this matter.

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Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Value of a Poem”

As has been my habit lately, I have been reading lots of different things, jumping around a lot. In[image error] the last few days, I was reading Poetry and Commitment by Adrienne Rich – which I wrote about in another blog post– and in it she made references to a man whose ideas on a subject were defined by a poem he read and to how that domino effect can work.

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the #newschool: You get your values at home.

Back in December, I went to the Madison Park Community Center on a Saturday morning to assist with an effort to collect oral histories around Montgomery County. Madison Park is an African-American community north of Montgomery that was founded in the late 1800s by fourteen former slaves and their families. That morning, person after person who I interviewed said the same three things of Madison Park in their youth: everyone was expected to handle their responsibilities, everyone looked after everyone else, and everyone valued education as a way to personal betterment. Their teachers were also their neighbors, I was told, and their neighbors had the same authority as their parents— because all children knew that the whole community wanted the best for everyone in it. The people of Madison Park worked hard together, had fun together, learned together, and prayed together, no matter anyone’s income, occupation, or social status. Their values reflected their hopes that cooperation hard work combined with knowledge and skills could lift up both individuals and the community.

During more than fourteen years of teaching in a high school, I’ve learned that teachers can give students instruction in reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, foreign languages, the arts, and other subjects, but children get their values at home. The Catholic Church teaches that “parents are the primary educators,” and to that I would add: “whether the parents accept that as a responsibility or not.” Every day, the children in our lives watch and listen to us adults to gain their own sense of how they should behave, how they should treat other people, and what they should regard as important, and no influences are stronger than the ones at home.

Though my upbringing wasn’t perfect, I’m thankful for the values that my parents taught me with their lives and their actions. From them, I learned to take care of business first, and have fun second. Sometimes that makes me “a dull boy,” but I never regret the results of taking care of my business. They also taught me self-reliance, that anything I know how to do for myself will help me. Any skill will be useful at some point, even though I might not know it until the time came to need it. Finally, they taught me to know the people around me and to address the needs closest to home. My mother was active in our school PTA and was our room mother, my father was our scout master, and my parents led our neighborhood watch program. We were the people our neighbors called when they required immediate assistance. These lessons, learned not from words but from consistency and actions, taught me that life won’t always be easy or fun and that I can’t wait on somebody to do something. Furthermore, I learned that my actions on behalf of others are not done to benefit myself. If you ask me, no way of viewing the world could be any better: handling our own responsibilities first, relying on ourselves as much as we can, and looking to our community for what is beyond our own reach, knowing that the community will answer.

Beyond our duty to instruct students in our classes’ subject matter, teachers can meet society’s expectations that we are positive role models in their students’ lives— but only if there is value placed on education within the children’s own homes and communities. Unless the adults in a community, the ones that the children see every day, value education as something useful and transformative, and unless those same adults regard willful ignorance as  every person’s worst enemy, teachers and schools can only achieve so much. If education is regarded as mere job training, then everything that is not a job skill becomes irrelevant. Thus, if the school is regarded as a place full of irrelevant facts and skills, then what occurs there is only a compilation, not an accomplishment. But if education is regarded as a holistic method for widening one’s vision of the world, for becoming a better person, and for accessing a plethora of opportunities, then schoolwork and learning have value in real life every day.

The key to improving education is not to redesign a new curriculum nor to purchase new software, but for adults to value education so openly and so vigorously that children will, too.

Why isn’t George Dickel on Twitter?

Did you know that you can “Like” George Dickel on Facebook, and you can “Follow” George Dickel on Instagram, or you can “Subscribe” to George Dickel on YouTube, but you will not find George Dickel on Twitter? As an adult who partakes of both social media and George Dickel Tennessee Whisky, I’ve wondered why.

George Dickel’s No. 8 has been my whisky of choice for more than twenty years. I started drinking it in the late 1990s – after turning 21, of course – at the suggestion of a guy we all called Pops. Pops was a portly Southern gentleman of the old ways, a cigar salesmen with a rolling deep-voiced drawl and a bad haircut that may well have been a bad wig, and he hung out at 1048 Jazz & Blues, where I worked after college. He was in the bar often when he wasn’t traveling, and he took his Dickel heavily poured and mixed with Coke in a rocks glass. What Pops considered a drink most people would consider a triple, and what Pops drank nightly would keep many people in the bed the next day. Taking my cues from his choice of drink, but not from his choices about volume, I tried Dickel-and-Coke and was hooked. (Not literally.)

[image error]On January 4, 2001, I became a member of the George Dickel Tennessee Whisky Water Conservation Society. After seeing a series of ads called “The Dickel Diaries” that was then running in magazines, I applied for membership and soon received a membership card and a proclamation acknowledging that I had been “declared, by virtue of unanimous acclamation, a valued member.” The latter part of the quasi-society’s name – Water Conservation Society – points to very important understanding of our preferred libation: “Water’s for washin’, Dickel’s for drinkin’,” a slogan that was perpetuated out of a 1980s ad campaign.

One reason that George Dickel is not on Twitter could be that he died in 1894. Unlike Frederick Douglass, who has a thriving following on the platform, I assume that the post-mortem Mr. Dickel has chosen to remain more low-key. His social media feeds tend more toward product-centered imagery than toward festering antagonisms about the president.

There’s one thing I’ve learned both from life and from teaching: if you don’t know something, and you want to know, then ask. So I did. The Contact Us link on the George Dickel website isn’t easy to find – it’s very small and at the bottom – and I sent the current distillers an email to inquire why George Dickel isn’t on Twitter. Sadly, that email came back undeliverable the next day, but you never know ’til you try. There’s a phone number I could call, but it’s really not that big a deal.

In the meantime, Old No. 8 will continue to suffice, tweets or no tweets, as it has for the last two decades. Though I will admit that, when I’m on my phone scrolling through Twitter’s electronic torrent of news stories, backbiting quips, concert dates, and taproom hours, I probably would miss old George Dickel— if he weren’t usually in my other hand.

The Boxes in the Attic: A Love Story

They’re these low, wide boxes that the Paperback Book Club used to send shipments of four or five books at a time. They’re sturdy and durable, and they hold tabloid newspapers and 13″ x 18″ posters laying flat. They’re perfect.

[image error]Today, these boxes languish and collect dust for most of the year in the back of the storage space in our attic— until some glint of a memory nags me badly enough that I have to go upstairs and dig out the item on my mind. At a time before internet bookmarking and favorites, I used to tear out pages from magazines and newspapers and keep them. Even though I near-refused to read what my teachers assigned me in school, my habit of devouring periodicals never dulled, nor waned. Whether from Rolling Stone or Ray Gun, Mother Earth News or Acoustic Guitar, the Village Voice or the Montgomery Advertiser, if I found something I wanted to access again, I put it in one of those boxes. Sometimes whole issues, other times just pages. No underlying raison d’etre, no long-range intentions, no meticulous organization, no finely tuned system— just pages and pages in those boxes.

Over the last twenty years, since moving away from home into bachelor-pad apartments then getting married and having children and moving a few more times, the boxes have come with me. I’ve done some purging from them, reducing the number from a half-dozen or more in my single days down to only two or three now. Our attic’s scant few pieces of plywood flooring haven’t been able to accommodate my pop-culture hoarding like it used to, what with Christmas decorations and the other accroutrement of family life. Perhaps, rather than purging the evidence of my past peccadilloes, I could have bought and put down more plywood, but . . . I didn’t. So, these otherwise-worthless keepsakes from my formative years have remained tucked away from our now-life, but are always available to sift through and recall what is now faded and withered.

Something like a hope chest, these battered cardboard boxes hold reminders for me of what I once wanted for myself, what I hoped my life would become. There are mementos from actual lived experiences (events I attended, shows I saw, music I liked), and there are dreamy tidbits that appealed mostly a deep, deep wishing well that I once harbored and nurtured. Those latter ones were what I intended to fill the hole in my heart with: they were proof that the eclectic and the interesting were out there and that the proprietors of these strange excitements offered general admission tickets. Within the pile may be a review of an Ani DiFranco album, an ad for a Paul Morrissey double-feature, some Keith Haring art, a photo spread of Drew Barrymore, a campaign for Gap khakis.

The boy who collected those pages, who was at once scarily naive and wildly hopeful, would have hung his head and wept if he knew about the man that he would become: a high school teacher with thinning hair and a little belly that expands with every microbrewed craft beer. That shaggy-haired boy with his 29-waist blue jeans and his pawn-shop guitars couldn’t have imagined that the songs he wrote in his lonely bedroom would never be heard, that the internet would destroy the pop-culture rags that fueled his imagination, that his life would proceed uninterrupted in his hometown, and that his torn-out pages would, twenty five years later, illicit a strange mixture of pleasure and sadness.

[image error]You see, before he could leave, that boy fell in love with a girl. She had big blue eyes, and she smoked lazily on her front porch, so he stopped by one evening to take her out for pizza. A year and a half later, he married her, and that boy became me when I replaced my made-up narrative about the future, crafted from jagged-edged newsprint and brightly colored images of the faraway avant-garde, with a love story featuring a boy who left his lonely bedroom, got off his ass, and tried to building something meaningful where he stood. As it would happen, mine would not be a tale told from a trampoline leap, but one about a pair of boots planted firmly in native soil. What is perhaps most interesting to the middle-aged man who that boy would have hated is: I traded in an imagined journey for an actual life.

Yet, when I have the time and the inclination, I open those boxes, disregard the effluvium of youth, and delve back into the reminders about a font of hope that has since been covered over like an old well, one whose source went dry and which now functions as nothing more than a way for curious children to hurt themselves. I see in the contents of those boxes how youth can be a bizarre conglomeration of ignorance, desperation, wonder, and hope as clearly as I see in this middle-aged life how love, family, purpose, and a sense of place are worth more than all those angsty feelings and their unfortunate manifestations.

And who knows . . . maybe one day, I will leave this place, but at least I’ll know now what I didn’t know then: I will never this place behind.

the #newschool: Many hands make light work.

In his 1999 essay, “The Hermit and the Activist,” poet David Budbill wrote about a “religious urge” that incites “on the one hand withdrawal from the world for prayer, and hopefully enlightenment, and on the other hand engagement with the world in order to join in the battle for truth and justice and so forth.” This inexplicable yet always nagging “religious urge” involves our basic human desire for peace, wellness, and cohesion, which means two things: sometimes we have to keep quiet and believe in God’s plan, and other times we must actively work to make good things happen. While this need for harmony can lead to many approaches, from a knowing acceptance of social and political realities to a torrential resistance against certain ideas, the goal is ultimately the same: freeing the goodness in a world where it is often obscured from view or wearing strange disguises.

Since I converted to Catholicism, I have regularly gained new perspectives on the disharmony in the world around me; among those perspectives was the need for prayer. Prayer is not just “talking to God,” and it is not inaction. Prayer requires an attitude of selflessness, whereby a person must relinquish the need for control, then seek answers and solutions in humble silence. Action without that unselfish contemplation can be needlessly preemptive, completely pointless, or worst of all, based on assumptions that are wrong.

For much of my life, I have taken bitter pride in being an atypical Alabamian, and that pride has led me to harry the proponents of the status quo, mainly because us atypical Alabamians have our fortunes linked to our more typical fellow citizens. Yet, when I was baptized and took on the Catholic faith in my 30s, the teachings of Jesus, as they appear in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles, soon revealed to me that my penchant for derision and my newfound faith are largely irreconcilable. Put simply, I found that being a snarky, self-righteous naysayer not only isn’t productive, it isn’t compatible with being a kind, charitable Christian. (I still think I might be one among a minority of Alabamians who sees it that way, even though I’m a long way from living up to that high standard.)

Yet, relinquishing my snark won’t be that easy. While I consider David Budbill’s noble and thoughtful sentiment about prayer and enlightenment, I’m also reminded of a crass but meaningful scene in the 1980s movie Risky Business, when Joel (Tom Cruise) is admonished by his friend Miles that sometimes “you gotta say, ‘What the fuck,’ and make your move.” That’s the second part of Budbill’s assertion: the “religious urge” compels us not only to prayer, but to action, even against insurmountable odds, because . . . David and Goliath, that’s why. Despite the dim scene here in Alabama, it is still possible to transcend our last-place status through action. Last December, a whole bunch of voters did just that by casting a ballot for Doug Jones over Roy Moore— and the two-time supreme court chief justice, assumed to be a shoo-in winner, fell to the newcomer. Last month, Jones was sworn in to the US Senate – a win in itself – and he immediately co-sponsored a bill that Alabama needs badly to keep a vital children’s healthcare program alive. I’m not sure how many of us who cast those votes actually believed that Jones would win— but we made our move.

It’s hard, in Alabama, not to lose faith in goodness, in part because it’s so easy either to relegate “mostpeople” to the Thoreauvian slush pile of those who “live their lives in quiet desperation” or to cast the Other into a murky backwater among the Grendels who oppose justice and happiness. The truth is, no matter one’s social and political ideals, all of us here live with the severe poverty, the efforts to address it, and the counter-efforts that perpetuate it. Poverty, material and spiritual, has and still does cost us dearly. We spend many hours doing the proverbial gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothes over matters national, local, and personal, and I now see an Alabama that is exhausted with trying to make sense of subterfuge, manipulation, excuses, and blame. My prayerful side tells me that goodness is here; it’s just not being relied-upon heavily enough. And the side of me that knows action is needed— it says that “many hands make light work,” and Alabama has enough good people with strong hands to make some real progress.

First, we have to step away from the world, from our minor myths, and from “alternative facts,” to gain some perspective before acting. The buzz-words and stereotypes cloud the air, and we’re too busy swatting at the smoky dissonance. We spend a great deal of energy bumping into each other blindly and asking, “Friend or foe?” But our quandary is not one of dichotomies: Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, black or white, immigrant or native, LGBTQ or straight— our one unified truth centers on the real need for peace, wellness, and cohesion in Alabama, where we all live together.

Alabama can do better.

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Filed under: Alabama, Black Belt, Civil Rights, Education, Social Justice, Voting Tagged: #alabamacandobetter, Alabama, progress, progressive [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]

#happynewyear

As we end 2017, which has been a raw and unwieldy sort of endeavor, I have a lot of hope for what can happen in 2018. I know that I’ve learned over the last year not to ask, “How much worse could it get?” And I know that many Americans have learned this year what is meant by the old adage: “Be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it.” Maybe in 2018 we can do better— all of us.

Please have a safe and fun New Year’s Eve celebration this evening. Cheers to something of a fresh start tomorrow!

Filed under: Alabama, Critical Thinking [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]

Disrupters & Interlopers: Will D. Campbell

It is hard to say whether Will D. Campbell is more well-known as a Baptist preacher or as a writer, or whether it would be impossible to separate those two aspects of this unorthodox Southerner. Born in 1924, the son of Mississippi cotton farmers, Campbell became a Baptist preacher when he was seventeen years old. He first attended the small Louisiana College, then served in World War II; after the war, he went to Wake Forest, Tulane, and Yale Divinity.

As a preacher, it was Campbell’s nontraditional, progressive views on racial justice that made him stand out on his native Mississippi. In the mid-1950s, while Campbell was serving in a pastoral capacity at Ole Miss, his supportive stance toward the burgeoning civil rights movement caused him to have to leave that stalwart institution. He next worked with the National Council of Churches offering pastoral support in racially tense situations all over the South, and he continued that kind of work for various organizations during the 1960s and 1970s.

In addition to his work with the church, Campbell was also a prolific writer. Among his seventeen books, his autobiography Brother to a Dragonfly was a finalist for the National Book Award. (Though I’ve read that one and his novel The Glad River, I’m partial to two nonfiction books that contain his wonderful examples of his almost-whimsical, folksy wisdom: 1986’s Forty Acres and a Goat and 1999’s Soul Among Lions.)

 About Campbell, The New York Times explained him this way:

A knot of contradictions himself, he was a civil rights advocate who drank whiskey with Klansmen, a writer who layered fact and fiction, and a preacher without a church who presided at weddings, baptisms and funerals in homes, hospitals and graveyards for a flock of like-minded rebels that included Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dick Gregory, Jules Feiffer and Studs Terkel.

(In addition to his books and articles about him, which offer plenty to muse upon, Campbell’s papers are housed at the University of Southern Mississippi.)

Will D. Campbell may be one of the lesser-known figures of the civil rights movement, but his steady courage, kind heart, and unorthodox sensibility allowed him to reach people who may have been averse to traditional activist methods. Will D. Campbell died in 2013 at the age of 88.

The Disrupters & Interlopers series highlights individuals from Southern history whose actions, though unpopular or difficult, contributed to changing the old status quo.
Filed under: Bible Belt, Civil Rights, Mississippi, Race, Tennessee Tagged: Civil Rights, Disrupters & Interlopers, Mississippi, Tennessee, will d. campbell

Southern Movie #22: “Mud Bound”

Like the last Southern Movie that I wrote about, “Sophie and the Rising Sun,” the new Netflix movie “Mud Bound” also deals with life in the Deep South during the era of World War II. Set in Mississippi, “Mud Bound” follows two families – one white, one black – through the inherent difficulties of the mid-century Southern farming life: land ownership, racial tensions, and post-traumatic stress.

After an ominous foreshadowing scene that has two brothers trying to dig a hole and bury their father before a looming storm arrives, “Mud Bound” introduces us to two families in Mississippi, each with its own dynamics. The white family, the MacAllans, are middle-class landowners who have leased the land for some time to black tenants, among them the Jacksons. Their lives become intertwined when elder brother Henry MacAllan decides to pack up his wife, his two children, and his father and move from their home in Memphis back to their land in Mississippi, where Henry will become a farmer. This poses two problems: first, Henry has little to no experience in farming, and second, he is a stranger in this rural community and is coming to exert his authority. To exhibit his naïveté, we first see Henry get duped when he arrives at their new home to find that the homeowner has taken his down payment and sold the house to another man. This leads the MacAllans to a falling-down shack on their own farm, a living arrangement far below the expectations of his wife Laura, a refined and sensitive woman from a well-to-do family.

However, the complexities in this story go deeper than simply showing us the travails of an inept novice farmer. In the early portions of the film, we get the sense that Laura is attracted to her husband’s wild and free younger brother Jamie, who will soon leave the Deep South to fight in World War II as a bomber pilot. Further, we have the Jacksons, a hard-working African-American family who have long been tenants on this land and who have aspirations of moving away to own their own land. Husband and father Hap Jackson is the community’s preacher, and like Jamie, his son Ronsel is also leaving to fight in the war when we meet them.  Thus, the tightly woven narrative is rooted in the racial disparities of the Deep South with its nuanced social system based on privilege and land. “Mud Bound” is a stark and unvarnished look at a fabled locale: the Mississippi Delta of the early to mid-twentieth century.

After the characters and the situation are established, the early portions of the story move back and forth between the hardships of rural Mississippi and the brutal experiences of World War II. While Jamie is an airman, Ronsel is part of a tank corps, an assignment that leads him to an interracial affair with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Dutch woman. Both young men witness the horror and violence of the conflict, each losing friends and compatriots during bloody battles, and both narrowly escaping death themselves.

It is when first Jamie then Ronsel return home that the already-present tensions escalate. During the war years, the MacAllan and Jackson families have become further interconnected, mostly due to the MacAllans exerting their white privilege. Seeking some remnant of the life she was accustomed to, Laura MacAllan hires Hap Jackson’s wife Florence to be her domestic helper, a situation that leaves the Jacksons without a homemaker for most of the week. However, Florence must come back home when Hap falls off a ladder while working on the roof of their half-finished church and breaks his leg. As he convalesces, bedridden and helpless, his family must operate their small farm without his help. Adding to the situation are Henry MacAllan’s bullish way of handling even the most day-to-day interactions and his father Pappy MacAllan’s dark, sinister misogyny and racism.

As the film progresses, Pappy MacAllan becomes the X-factor that carries the two families to the edge. When Jamie arrives home, the father and his sons are enjoying drinks when Pappy casually asks Jamie how many men he thinks he killed in Europe. Perturbed by the question, Jamie’s post-traumatic response takes him aback: More than one, he says. We find out here that Pappy also fought in war, but as an infantryman who had to fight and kill at close range, and the two begin to spar over the dignity of their respective experiences, one on the ground and the other in the air. Pappy’s powers of deduction also shift the tide in their small household when he apprises Jamie that he has recognized the sexual tension between him and his brother’s wife Laura. The brooding nature of Pappy’s hate reveals itself through his perceptive, though dogmatic approach to life. Yet, it is his take on Ronsel Jackson that will shift the tide of the whole community and change the two families forever.

Unlike Jamie MacAllan, who comes home from the war frazzled, uncertain, and dependent on alcohol, Ronsel Jackson comes back emboldened and proud. He has not only survived the conflict, he has seen how life can be after spending years in Europe where a man’s skin color was irrelevant. He has gone where he pleased and consorted with who he pleased— however, Mississippi has not changed during his absence. On his first day back, before he has even gone home, Ronsel stops in the general store to buy gifts for his family. Leaving the store, he runs into Pappy MacAllan, who does not know him, but who informs him curtly that black people do not use the front door. Ronsel then snaps back at the old man – a segregation-era no-no – before conceding to the ugly situation and leaving out the back door.

The latter half of the story in “Mud Bound” builds on this spider web of rural connections. Surprising to Ronsel, Jamie recognizes him as a fellow veteran and strikes up a cozy friendship with him that contrasts the terse, business-like relationship between Jamie’s older brother Henry and Ronsel’s father Hap. Jamie spends most of his time drinking and seldom helps on the farm, a fact that bothers Henry and Pappy. Instead, he often takes the family’s truck to pick up Ronsel so they can ride around and share a whiskey bottle, which makes Hap very nervous (for good reason). The tension is racheting up.

And the two breaking points come almost simultaneously, when Ronsel receives a letter from his Dutch lover that she has born him a son and when Henry tells his drunken brother to leave the farm. From here, all hell breaks loose. Ronsel shares his news with Jamie but forgetfully leaves the letter and picture in the MacAllan’s truck after Pappy sees the two friends riding together in the front seat. Back at the MacAllan’s home, an exasperated Henry berates Jamie and instructs him to be gone by the time he returns from handling some business. Though while he is away, Laura comes to Jamie’s makeshift bedroom, and the two give in to their mutual attraction. Pappy’s frustration with his wayward son’s behavior comes to a head when finds Ronsel’s misplaced letter, which confirms that this black man has fathered a child with a white woman. That evidence leads him to gather a lynch mob.

The climax of “Mud Bound” shows the violence that supported segregation and other types of white-male dominance in the Deep South. Ronsel is taken by a mob of Klansmen to a barn, where he is beaten and tortured as severely as one might imagine, and Jamie is brought to the scene to face his own infraction: treating a black man as his equal, and as a friend. Here, we see Pappy’s allegiance to hate and domination, and we see that he even prefers it to his own son’s safety. In a final horrifying scenario, Jamie is made to choose whether Ronsel, who is strapped on the wall and listening, will have his tongue or his testicles cut off.

Though we assume that the ultimate results of the vicious ordeal will be the victory of white supremacy – Jamie’s exile and Ronsel’s death – “Mud Bound” does not take the story in that direction. The movie’s final scenes hold even more surprises. Rather than being defeated by his own father’s cruelty, Jamie answers it. Late in the night, still battered and bloody, he enters the small lean-to where Pappy sleeps to overpower him and smother him with his own pillow. Though Laura has no role in the murder, the two agree to explain the old man’s death to Henry, when he comes back, by saying that Pappy died in his sleep. As for Ronsel, the victim who Jamie was avenging, he lives. He is found by his family, nursed quickly, and smuggled away beneath the seats of their horse-drawn wagon. The family is leaving for good.

Yet, as the deeply injured Jackson family passes by the MacAllan’s home, they find Henry and Jamie struggling to bury their father. (The movie begins with this scene and has thus come full circle.) The Jacksons, who are harboring the near-dead Ronsel, attempt to pass by in stony silence, but Henry calls to Hap for assistance with the task. Hap attempts to stand against his white landlord, because he knows what Henry does not: Henry asking for help with burying the man who lynched his son.

Ultimately, Ronsel is nursed back to health and does what we might never have expected him to do: return to Europe and join the family he had already begun. However, Ronsel must make that journey not only as a black man with little money, but also without the ability to speak. The bittersweet ending answers for us which choice Jamie MacAllan made in that barn: what part of Ronsel was to be cut off? It was his tongue.

The depiction of the Deep South in “Mud Bound” offers little in the way of hope or solace or redemption. If we survey the white characters in the story, each has his or her own way of coping with the unseemly situation: Pappy through strict adherence to racist hate and male domination, Henry through stolid hard work and privilege, Jamie through excess and alcohol, and Laura through obedience and a scant few refinements. And if we look at the African-American family, we see few options for them as well: Hap Jackson’s apocalyptic Christianity and hope of land ownership, Florence’s patience with her burdens, Ronsel’s attempt at manhood in a place that will not allow him that. In this place, there are no winners, not even the ones who put themselves on top and remain there by compromising their morals and committing atrocities. As a description of the people who are depicted, “Mud Bound” lives up to its title.

Filed under: Civil Rights, Film/Movies, Mississippi, Race, Social Justice, The Deep South Tagged: film, movie, Mud Bound, Netflix, Southern movie of the month