Foster Dickson's Blog, page 74

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #138

Writing practice is simply something fundamental, like the colors black and white or moving on foot in front of the other when you walk. The problem is we don’t notice that movement of one foot in front of the other. We just move our feet. Writing practice asks you to notice not only how your feet move but also how your mind moves. And not only that, it makes you notice your mind and begin to trust it and understand it. This is good. It is basic for writing. If you get this, the rest is none of my business. You can do what you want.

— from the chapter, “Results of Kindness,” in Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

The Backstreet Store, Montgomery

Filed under: Alabama, Random

The School Garden, Year Three

This summer was hot. And the end of it was very dry. Which poses a major quandary for a small School Garden like ours: how do you take advantage of the best growing season when the students are out of school, when it’s near 100 degrees every day, and you have no water spigot near your plants? My answer this past summer was: you don’t.

Even though, in the Deep South, we usually mark the end of summer by the start of school or by the start of football, tomorrow is actually the first day of fall. The students who help with our School Garden have been hankering to plant something, but I’ve encouraged them to be patient. If we got out there in mid-August and planted some things that would normally thrive in the fall, this ongoing heat would just parch the plants, mainly since we have no way of putting anything like a soaker hose on them. For our little fledgling School Garden, we need it to cool off a little bit before we plant anything.

Even though we skipped the summer season this year – in 2015, we did grow a good variety of summer veggies – there are still good options for the fall. In our few raised beds, I can’t grow enough kale or collards to supply to all of the teachers and students who want some. Of course, we’re all-natural, chemical-free, locally produced— and free, so the demand exceeds the supply. But we’re glad to do it, and both the students and I enjoy growing and sharing.

In addition to those mainstays, I think we might try beets this year, and maybe rutabagas, too. I’ve not had much luck with root vegetables over the years – mainly because I can’t tell when they’re ready – but I learned a few things when we went to a Good Food Day at EAT South last spring, so I think I might can do it.

This is year three for our simply named School Garden, and in each of the previous two years, we’ve had a goal. The first year, we began in February, and the goal was to have the raised beds built by the end of school in May. The second year, which was last school year, the goal was to procure tools and a shed to house them, so we didn’t have to carry our equipment back and forth every time. We got everything we needed, but we didn’t finish assembling the prefab shed; it’s laying in pieces among some tall grass right now, to my great shame. For this year, I’m not sure what the goal will be— well, not completely sure. One goal is definitely to get that shed built, and we’re already planning on enlisting some dad-help to do that. The only other big construction task left is to have a water hook-up put in, but I’ve gotten quotes and that would cost a lot of money . . .

For now, there are simple things that need doing. I covered the beds with black plastic to kill the creeping grass and weeds so we can pull them. The compost needs to be shoveled into the beds after that. The grass still needs cutting, too. Then there’s planting. So, even without a long-term goal, we’ve got plenty to do for now.

Filed under: Alabama, Black Belt, Education, Gardening, High School, Schools, Teaching

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #137

When I listen to my students’ conversations, stresses, and obsessions, I am often reminded of my own adolescence. I spent painful hours as a high school student worrying about silly things like my haircut or finding the perfect jeans. I was regularly consumed with anxiety about what other people thought of me. It often astounds me that I chose to become a high school teacher when those years were so miserable. Developmentally, my students are not always walking through their days with wide eyes debating the news from abroad or homelessness and hunger here in Oregon. They – like many adolescents – are often consumed with Friday night games and dances, dating, music, and sports. At fifteen, I found it difficult to recognize or think about a world that lay outside my immediate range of vision. However, I remember the teachers and mentors who gave me opportunities to think and act beyond my experience and reminded me of the power of the small, yet significant acts. I want to believe that it is not naive or short-sighted for my students to have an abundance of skills, ideas, and questions to carry with them in the lives in order to influence the world for the better.

– from the chapter, “Culminating Project: Choosing Issues of Activism,” in Stirring Up Justice: Writing and Reading to Change the World by Jessica Singer

Filed under: Critical Thinking, High School, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing

September’s Southern Song of the Month

I first heard Charley Pride’s “All His Children” as the song that played during the opening credits of “Sometimes A Great Notion,” film from 1970 about a family of loggers in Oregon. That old movie may have been all the way up in Pacific Northwest, but Charley Pride is all the way down in Mississippi.

Beyond this song’s obvious symbolism, its pertinence to the racial struggles of the 1960s might be a little more subtle. Charley Pride was basically the only black mainstream country singer of his day, and to have have this man singing that we’re “all His children” and that we’re all “a part of the family of man” can’t be ignored. Even beyond that, setting politics aside . . . it’s such a good song.

Filed under: Mississippi, Music, The Deep South

Adia Victoria @ Saturn Birmingham

I’ve got this friend who knows how much I like The New Yorker, but who is also aware that I don’t subscribe because I can’t seem to keep up with weekly magazines, so he passes on a stack to me after he’s piled up a few. When I get them, I thumb through each issue’s table of contents and fold them open to the articles I intend to read, relegating the others to the general-use stack in my classroom.

One morning, a few weeks ago, I grabbed one of those folded-back New Yorkers and hurried to the school bus stop for my monthly duty. I was flipping the pages and had just finished reading “Liberal-in-Chief,” Adam Gopnik’s piece about President Obama, when this woman’s stunningly solemn face appeared. Her glare was framed by a jet-black mod hairdo, and she was surrounded by tall wildflowers. This was Adia Victoria, the text below it explained.

Ever on the lookout for new music, I went home that afternoon and downloaded her only album, “Beyond the Bloodhounds,” and gave it a listen. Her scratchy-sweet, but sometimes dour voice betrayed a twinge of a Southern-cum-British accent, and the grim guitar-driven band came off as a cross between Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Black Keys— blues-influenced but not exactly blues. Between the music and the darkly playful cover image of the singer sitting girlishly in a hospital gown and striped stockings, my interest was piqued, especially after I read the bio on her website:

Any forces that tried to tell the former ballet dancer/telemarketer/French major to play small, failed. Growing up in Spartanburg, South Carolina and raised in a strict, Seventh Day Adventist atmosphere, she knows about feeling less than whole. But following her inner voice, and creating a new life for herself in New York, Atlanta, and now Nashville (with stints in Paris and Germany) honed a self-assured voice that resists the outside gaze.

Continuing to browse her website, I saw that she was finishing up some US dates and was soon headed for Europe. I’ve missed her, I thought. But I hadn’t— one of those last dates was at Saturn Birmingham, about eighty miles from where I live, on a Wednesday night, and was sponsored by one of my favorite Alabama breweries, Good People. (If you’ve not tried Good People Brown, you ought to.)

I asked my buddy Robert if he wanted to go, and we hit the road that evening, stopped at Bistro Two Eighteen for a bite to eat, then followed the railroad tracks to Avondale to the hear the show. As we walked up a side street toward Saturn, I looked at my watch – 7:57, three minutes ’til showtime – and because I’m getting cynical and a little intolerant in middle-age, I said out loud, “I don’t hear any music. That’s not good.” Robert laughed at me, and we headed through the coffee shop, past the youngsters in horn-rimmed glasses, to the bar.

It was 8:01, and waiting on my beer, I asked the bearded bartender, “Do you think the show’s going to start on time?” By now, Robert was laughing out loud at my curmudgeonly frustration. (I’m still traumatized by a Son Volt show at Five Points South in the mid-1990s, when the ticket said 7:00 PM and the band went on at 12:30 AM, by which point I had had far too much George Dickel.)  He said there would be an opening act, but Adia Victoria should start about nine, and – I’m sure, sensing my old-ness – then said, “We’ll get you out of here by eleven.”

I knew better than blow any and all of my cool-points by saying, It’s a school night, dude, I’ve got a long drive after this . . . You’ll probably sleep ’til two tomorrow! 

The bad news is that the opening act – a rapper from California named Phillip the Human – had the charisma of flat Coca-Cola and was embarrassingly bad. So bad, in fact, that I was actually embarrassed for him, as he seemed genuinely confused about why he couldn’t rile the small crowd . . . at all.

The good news is that Adia Victoria came out right after him— and she was incredible! Unlike the somewhat-catatonic look of her album cover, the singer came out in a black dress, sporting a pulled-up mass of hair a la Lisa Bonet in “Angel Heart,” and started tuning a white semi-hollow body guitar as her band got themselves set. Watching her tune up was itself a scene of raw power.

Though her one-hour set only consisted of the tracks on her album, plus a spooky off-kilter cover of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues,” Adia Victoria ripped it up live in a way that her album doesn’t. While the album is quite good, the live set was so much better, louder, harder. The distortion on the guitars made the crashes crashier, and the thickness of electric piano added depth to whole sound. “Dead in the Eyes” was more harsh, and “Mortimer’s Blues” – about her recently deceased cat, she told us – was more eerie. She and her band filled that small, low-ceilinged room with the blues.

The only downside of Adia Victoria’s show was its brevity. She played for about an hour, and while that appealed to my old-man need to get in the bed before midnight, I could have easily listened for another hour. Toward the end of the show, she reminded us that “Beyond the Bloodhounds” was for sale on CD and on vinyl in the back of the room, admonishing that she’d be back there too and would see us if we left without buying a copy. Luckily, I’ve already got mine, so I paid my bar tab and hit road for home.

Adia Victoria is another one of these acts whose presence make me wonder what has gone wrong with the mainstream. Here is woman who has been written up in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker as one to watch, but watch her where? As with late-starting bands and overpriced beers, I am also growing increasingly impatient with bad music— and even more impatient with mainstream acceptance of it.

Thankfully, these indie gems are still there, buried among the fool’s gold in the mountain of music. As Adia Victoria herself sung, that we have to search for them is a “howlin’ shame.”

Filed under: Alabama, Music, South Carolina, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #136

Occasionally, people show me their new babies and ask me if that peaceful innocence is not just like that of the Buddha. Probably not, I tell them, for within that baby rest all of the latent seeds of worldly desire just waiting to sprout as the opportunity arises. On the other hand, the expression on the face of the Buddha, who has seen through the impermanence and suffering associated with such desires, reflects the invulnerability of true freedom.

– from Ram Dass’s “Introduction” to the 1981 edition of Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing

“Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads,” 1991

It has been twenty-five years since the 1991 release of music writer and critic Robert Palmer’s seminal documentary, “Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads.” Palmer was a native of Arkansas whose talents in both writing and music earned him the music critic job for The New York Times, and his band, Insect Trust, remains one of the wonderful and eclectic gems of American music. For anybody who enjoys blues music, this document of Mississippi’s rural culture is a captivating reminder of where so much American music began.

Robert Palmer was a brilliant music writer, even though, in “Deep Blues,” he sounds a little like an academic who is trying too hard in some of his narration. He cuts a strange figure here, a middle-aged guy with scraggly hair and a neon green ball cap, lurking among blues greats RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, but he’s not nearly as awkward as Dave Stewart, of the Eurythmics, who directed this film. (Stewart’s overly polished bad-boy look and hands-in-pocket sway-dancing are really hard to watch.) But, hell, just overlook that stuff and enjoy the music.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Mississippi, Music, Race, The Deep South

Alabamiana: 30 years since Baxley-Graddick

It was 1986. Ronald Reagan was halfway through his second term, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded before our eyes, and the Atlanta Hawks’ Spud Webb – who was only 5’7″ – won the NBA’s slam dunk contest.

That year, I finished the sixth grade and started the seventh. As a prepubescent smart aleck who was too immature to grasp anything of significance, I remember my classmates and I being annoyed that our substitute teacher ended PE early to have us watch the news coverage of the shuttle disaster. Despite my righteous indignation at having our four-square game interrupted, the world kept turning. That summer, as I waited anxiously to begin junior high school, political history was being being forged out of the discord within the all-powerful Democratic Party of Alabama.

Right about the time that school was starting, the mid-August AP headline, which must have been shocking to Alabamians who understood its significance, read: “Poll: Hunt as a chance.” Guy Hunt was the Republican Party’s candidate for governor, and at that time, running as a Republican in Alabama was pretty pointless. However,

A statewide survey indicates that the Democratic Party’s post-primary battle between Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley and Attorney General Charlie Graddick has given republican gubernatorial nominee Guy Hunt a shot at becoming Alabama’s first GOP governor this century.

Earlier that summer, the primary elections had been held. (Alabama’s gubernatorial elections occur on mid-term years, not during years when we choose a president.) In late June, The New York Times reported that Charlie Graddick had “won a razor-thin victory” in the Democratic primary, but Bill Baxley “would not concede and may demand a recount.” Of Graddick as a potential governor, the Times said this:

Mr. Graddick, 41 years old, a former Republican from Mobile who switched party allegiance 10 years ago, is a staunch conservative. His support Tuesday was described by political experts as nearly identical with the constituency of the suburban and rural, upper- and middle-income white voters who carried Alabama for President Reagan in 1984.

The article goes on to quote an Auburn University professor who said that the Baxley-Graddick primary was not at all a choice between two Democrats, and it has the state’s then-GOP chairman as saying that Alabama’s Republicans were “panicked that a liberal like Baxley might win.”

Baxley had been a mainstay of Alabama politics since the early 1970s. He had served as attorney general and was now a lieutenant governor trying to be governor. But his successor in the AG’s office stood in his way. In Alabama: History of a Deep South State, historian Wayne Flynt wrote:

Rallying blacks, unionists, and north Alabama farmers, Baxley locked in a photo-finish runoff with Attorney General Charles Graddick in the Democratic primary election. Although Graddick won by a few thousand votes, the supreme court threw out the results because Graddick had actively solicited Republicans to vote in the Democratic primary. In a state where citizens were not only unaccustomed to party primaries, but, in fact, did not know what they were, voters expressed their fury in the November election . . . (602)

It is called “crossover voting” when voters from one party cross over and cast ballots in the other party’s primary for the purpose of  affecting which candidate will run in November. Whether organized or happenstance, it basically sabotages a party’s chance of running its best candidate. And it’s also against the rules. So Bill Baxley took it to court and challenged the results.

By early August, Baxley’s claim to victory in the Democratic primary was sealed by a three-judge panel who, the LA Times reported, “declared that Graddick violated federal election laws in his quest to succeed Alabama’s long-time political boss, Gov. George C. Wallace,” who had been elected again in 1982. The ruling said that the Dems either had to declare Baxley the winner or start the whole process over. They chose the former option. The story also explains that there were about 930,000 ballots cast in the Democratic primary, while Guy Hunt won the Republican primary, in which about 33,000 ballots were cast.

So, Guy Hunt should have had no chance to win Alabama’s top office. The ratio of Democratic voters to Republican voters in the primaries was 28-to-1. Moreover, the Democrats had controlled the state government for more than a hundred years, since the end of Reconstruction.

Yet, cracks in the dam were showing. As evidence of waning Democratic influence, a few more Republicans were coming into the state legislature by the 1970s. In the same section where he described the Baxley-Graddick election, Wayne Flynt also explained the Republican ascension of the 1980s:

In 1983 only three Republicans served in the senate and only eight in the house. By 1989, eight of thirty-five senators and 22 of 105 in the house represented the GOP.

By November 1986, the people of Alabama found out that Guy Hunt had more than a chance— he won, defying Southern history, state political realities, and any reasonable person’s expectations. Again, Wayne Flynt put it well: “Guy Hunt smashed Baxley with a vote of 696,000 to 539,000 to become the first Republican governor of Alabama since Reconstruction.” Just like Spud Webb, Hunt hung in there with the big boys and beat them at their own game.

The Baxley-Graddick scuffle has been cited as the reason that Guy Hunt broke through, but truthfully, Alabama’s politics had been changing since the 1940s. The pro-civil rights positions of Democratic president John Kennedy didn’t help, and the “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon urged Alabama to be a little redder.

This series of rumblings in the 1970s and 1980s set a trajectory. Though he was elected governor as Democrat in 1978, Fob James had been active in the Republican Party throughout the early and mid-1970s. That year, James beat . . . you guessed it, Guy Hunt. So even in 1978, the general election for governor was really a choice between two Republicans. And if Graddick had been granted his Democratic primary win in 1986, the choice that year would have been the same.

Since the election of 1986, Republicans have held the governor’s office for more years than the Democrats. Hunt was re-elected to a second term in 1990, but was convicted on ethics violation in 1993, so Democratic Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom, Jr. took over the brief remainder of his term. Fob James returned to office in ’95 as a full-on Republican, then Democrat Don Siegelman had his turn from 1999 to 2003. Since then, it’s been all red: Bob Riley from 2003 to 2011, and Robert Bentley is currently in his second term. Democrats Folsom and Siegelman had a combined six years, compared to Republicans Hunt, James, Riley, and Bentley who have (or will have) served for a total of twenty-six.

When al.com interviewed Charlie Graddick in 2014 for its series on pivotal moments in Alabama politics, Graddick said, “I’d like to say it was me, [ . . . ] But it was more the Democratic Party hierarchy. They shot themselves in the foot.” He also was quoted as saying this:

“That was a dark day for how things should be done in the election process,” Graddick said. “But it was a bright day in many other ways in that it created a healthy two-party system.”

For a while in the 1970s and 1980s, it looked like Alabama really might have a “healthy two-party system.” Sadly, that didn’t last long enough. That Republican trajectory continued and turned into the more of the same one-party dominance. Now a  “red state,” Alabama has a Republican governor and lieutenant governor, a Republican super-majority in both houses of its legislature, and an all-Republican Supreme Court. Obviously, the state is polling heavy toward Donald Trump. That’s not exactly a “healthy two-party system.”

Although recent books like After Wallace by Jim Stovall and Daniel Cotter and The South’s New Racial Politics by Glenn Browder describe that period of transition, I have no recollection of it. I have vague memories of George Wallace being governor, of Emory Folmar’s unsuccessful run in 1982, and of the Baxley-Graddick hubbub, but I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on back then. I am old enough, however, to remember the bad old days when Fob James acted like a monkey on TV and when Don Siegelman’s lottery efforts got stuffed. I was almost thirty when the last Democratic governor left office, and working from my adult political consciousness, that has meant that everything since Siegelman has been a living nightmare of stasis and mismanagement.

Oh, if a “liberal like Baxley” had’ve won . . .

 

“Poll: Hunt has a chance.” AP. Anniston Star. August 14, 1986. Page 10A.
“Results of Alabama Primary May Be Challenged.” William A. Schmidt. The New York Times. June 25, 1986.

“Judges Rule Crossover Vote Affected Governor’s Race : Alabama Primary Runoff Invalidated.” David Treadwell. Los Angeles Times. August 2, 1986.

Filed under: Alabama, The Deep South, Voting

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #135

In honor of Labor Day:

As a teacher, I want to acknowledge the wisdom that resides in my students’ homes. Because I live in a society that honors the wealthy and tends to hold in great esteem “high status” formal knowledge, I must find ways to honor the intelligence, common sense, and love that beats in the hearts of my students’ families. In my classroom, I want every student to feel pride in where they come from, in their heritage, and the people who clothe, shelter, and teach them

— from the chapter, “Sweet Learning,” in Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching about Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word by Linda Christensen

Filed under: Education, Multiculturalism, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing