Foster Dickson's Blog, page 77

July’s Southern Song of the Month

Southern music is so much more than Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Lynyrd Skynyrd and their spiritual descendants. While the region’s musicians and singers did create what we today call country music, R&B, rock n’ roll, Southern rock, and zydeco, there are also strong traditions in styles that you probably don’t associate with the South, like jazz, which many modern listeners associate with New York or Los Angeles. This month’s Southern Song, a collaboration between two groups from New Orleans, takes sharp left turn away from last month’s more traditional offering, “Rocket 88.”

“Liquor Pang” is the eleventh track on Galactic’s 2010 album Ya-Ka-May. Galactic’s albums are loaded with guest artists, and this song features Josh Cohen and Ryan Scully from the Morning 40 Federation, another New Orleans band. I don’t even know what genre to call “Liquor Pang” – there are elements of rap, funk, electronic, and jazz here – but that’s what make it such a good song.

Filed under: Louisiana, Music, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #127

Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls—and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that—the clearer people’s inherent dignity becomes.

– from “The Middle of Things: Advice for Young Writers” by Andrew Solomon, published in The New Yorker on March 11, 2015

Filed under: Civil Rights, Education, Race, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing

July’s Southern Movie of the Month

OK, let’s get this straight right off the bat— pun intended. I’m not writing here about the stupid remake from 2004, the one with The Rock in it. (Shame on Hollywood for that movie and for the remake of “Shaft” with Samuel L. Jackson in it.) I’m writing about the original 1973 film “Walking Tall,” the one with Joe Don Baker. The real one.

When I was growing up in 1980s Alabama, there were movies that all boys talked about: “Smokey and the Bandit,” the original three “Star Wars” movies, the three “Superman” movies with Christopher Reeve. Those were the ones we talked about that we had actually seen. “Walking Tall” was one we talked about . . . that we had not seen. All we knew was: the badass dude in it beat the hell out of people with a big stick. Before Netflix or DVD players, even before VCRs and Movie Gallery stores, this violent movie was virtually inaccessible. Every once in a while, a severely edited version would come on one of the cable channels, but back then you had to catch it when it was on, and we didn’t just sit around flipping channels.

The original 1973 “Walking Tall” is still hard to find. When I went on Netflix and put it in my DVD queue, it went straight to Saved list, meaning that it is unavailable. When I got on my Roku and tried to find it that way, Netflix doesn’t even have it listed, nor does Amazon Video, nor does Hulu. Interestingly, Amazon Video has the 2004 remake and the old stupid sequel to the original, “Walking Tall 2,” but not the real thing. Trying to find “Walking Tall” through a regular video provider is like trying to find Pappy van Winkle on a liquor store shelf— it just ain’t gonna happen.

“Walking Tall” is based on the real story of Buford Pusser, professional wrestler-turned-sheriff in McNairy County, Tennessee. Pusser quit the ring in the early 1960s and returned home, ostensibly to lead a peaceful life there. But it didn’t work out that way.

“Walking Tall” opens almost like a placid afternoon-school special. We see a man and his family in a brown station wagon, pulling an old trailer, with the kids and the dog hanging out the open windows. They are barreling down a one-lane blacktop, surrounded by green and accompanied by Johnny Mathis’ crooning. As they pull up in the driveway of a white two-story farmhouse, an old man and his wife come over to see who is honking the horn so wildly. It’s Buford the Bull, their son, who is leaving that foolish wrestling business behind and coming home to do logging work with this father.

Now that Buford is home, everyone is happy! Buford has washed his hands of “being a trained animal in somebody else’s circus.” His wife is happy that they won’t be living on the road anymore. The kids are happy to be with their grandparents. The grandparents are happy to have their son home. And it will just get better. Soon, Buford has sold the old trailer and bought a nice new white house. The Pusser family has come to stay.

After the legal paperwork is done, Buford, his mother, and his wife are leaving the courthouse downtown, when he is spotted by his wacky old pal, Lutie McVeigh. After some shouting from his truck followed by a few crazy U-turns, Lutie incites Buford to come along to have a few beers and catch up on old times. There are some new places to go and have fun, Lutie tells him, just come along see . . .

The two old friends pass by the Pine Ridge Club and end up at The Lucky Spot, a white-and-red cinder-block club surrounded by little trailers. We see in his face that Buford is immediately suspicious, but Lutie is bent on some shenanigans. What Buford finds inside is a bar littered with prostitutes – those are their trailers outside – and they smell fresh meat. Buford sips on a High Life tall boy, while they circle him, but one in particular catches his eye, mainly because he can’t help it: the dark-eyed beauty is wearing see-through clothes!

Lutie can tell they’re getting to the good part way too fast, so he takes Buford back to the gambling tables. When Lutie is losing immediately, Buford sees that the dice are rigged and grabs the thrower, making them fall out of his hand and exposing the trick. A fight breaks out, and Buford kicks nearly everyone’s ass in the place, but finally their numbers get the best of him. He is beaten badly, and his chest and back are carved up with a switch blade knife.

The next frame shows us where Buford ends up: lying the weeds by the side of a country road, at night, in the rain, covered in blood, and barely able to crawl. He is passed over by a few drivers, before a trucker stops and picks him up.

Buford does recover – of course he does, he’s Buford the Bull! – and while he is convalescing, the sheriff comes to see him, but not for the reasons that Buford would hope . . . The brawl, it seems, was all Buford’s doing, and every witness said so. The growling, red-haired Sheriff Al Thurman tells Buford to learn his lesson, drop the issue, and move on with his life. Nope, Buford replied, that’s not how it’s going to happen. And when he pleads with the deputy, Grady, another old friend, Buford Pusser learns the harsh truth: everybody’s on the payroll.

Having regained his health, Buford goes back to working at the sawmill with his father. Then another old friend arrives: a young black man named Obra (Felton Perry) who comes to the sawmill looking for work. Buford’s father tells him that Obra is troublemaker who got educated and now agitates for civil rights, but Buford hires him on anyway.

Though, work is not the only thing on Buford Pusser’s mind. There’s that revenge thing. The folks at the Lucky Spot kicked his ass, stole his car, and emptied his wallet. The question here, which gets answered in one symbolic object, is: what do you do in mid-1960s rural Tennessee when local thugs cheat you, assault you, steal from you, leave you for dead, and buy off the local law man so he won’t help you? You get a big stick and go crack some skulls.

And that’s what Buford Pusser does. Buford peels the bark off a tree branch that Gandolf would be proud to tote, heads out to the Lucky Spot, and waits until they’re closing up for the night. The first poor bastard to get it is Bozo, the bartender, who Buford busts in the back of the neck and goes down bleeding, as that same dark-eyed beauty watches. Next are the gambling-operation goons who beat him up. (This scene is one of the hard ones to watch.) After making his presence felt, Buford goes to the cashier’s window and tells the wizened old man politely that he wants $3,630 for his car and his other losses. Buford even hands him a yellow receipt, asking the man to sign it. The frightened old man tries to give Buford stacks of bills, but Buford declines, saying that all he wants is $3,630 and for the man to sign the receipt. As far as Buford is concerned, they’re square.

But the Sheriff Thurman sees it differently. He comes squealing into Buford’s front yard the next day to arrest him on charges of assault and robbery, and then we find out how deep the corruption goes. The judge gives Buford one day to prepare for trial, citing his decision to defend himself, and soon he is in the courtroom, surrounded by battered men in casts and slings. After they testify, it’s Buford’s turn. And in a blast of working-class rhetoric, he rips off his red shirt to reveal the multitude of switch-blade wounds, declaring to the jurors that any of them could be next! The on-lookers are aghast, the judge freaks out, but the jurors return in five minutes with a verdict— not guilty!

As Buford is getting congratulated in the hallways by a small throng of people equally tired of the corruption and sin, Obra makes a suggestion, pointing to a re-election poster for Sheriff Thurman: Buford, why don’t you run for sheriff!

It sounds like a terrible idea, but for the short time we’ve watched Buford Pusser, we already know that he has a penchant for terrible ideas. As he begins to campaign, Buford finds out that the corruption extends to the black community, too. While hanging up posters, we meet local bar owner Willie Rae, who is wrapped up in the scam with the sheriff, The Lucky Spot people, and the operators of another club called The Pine Ridge Club. At Willie Rae’s club, where we see an all-black clientele, Sheriff Thurman confronts Buford, taking down his posters, then begins to chase him (with Grady in tow) for reckless driving. Though Buford first refuses to pull over, he does so near a small bridge, grabbing his big stick for the fight that’s coming, but the angered sheriff tries to run Buford over and crashes his car into the creek. Buford runs down the embankment and saves an unconscious Grady from drowning, but cannot pull his nemesis from the fiery wreck.

The situation is now dire for the mobsters. Buford was acquitted on the trumped-up charges, and now he is the only candidate for sheriff. They try to buy off Grady, who refuses since Buford saved his life, and then they send an emissary from Nashville: a pudgy asshole in a baby-blue double-breasted coat and white shoes who explains that a Johnny-Come-Lately like Buford Pusser has no idea how deep the machinations run. Ever defiant, Buford tells the smarmy messenger with the scheming eyes that he can shove it.

Buford Pusser’s real problems begin when he is elected sheriff. Mainly, he has to contend directly with a violent group of pimps, madams, bootleggers and racketeers. Secondly, he has said he can clean up the county, so now he has to do it! On his first day as sheriff, he gets a call from another sheriff who welcomes him into office by calling him for help: they have eight dead civil rights activists who drank poisoned moonshine. Buford knows who he has to go to— a reluctant Obra, who gets enlisted as a deputy, and the pair head to the still to bust the killers, among them Willie Rae and one of the thugs from the Lucky Spot. But being totally ignorant of the law, Buford and Obra make huge mistakes: no warrant + no Miranda rights = everyone goes free.

This will be harder than Buford thought. It will take more than busting skulls with a big stick.

Once Buford is installed as sheriff, the plot moves along pretty quickly. The problems are many. Buford is working all hours of the day. The far-reaching corruption extends to the local judge and one local deputy. Obra must gain respect as the county’s first black deputy. For a while, we see the small force and its fearless leader play a game of tit for tat with the bad element, neither willing to budge, but with Buford whittling them down little bits at the time. Luckily, Buford Pusser has someone on the inside, too: that dark-eyed beauty.

As “Walking Tall” moves toward its ending, we think that Buford Pusser will secure his victory after possibly another fight or two. But there is one more tragic part of this story. One early morning, called anonymously to a supposed moonshining site, Buford gets up to do his thing. This time is different though: his wife, now feeling secure after all of her husband’s hard work, asks to ride with him, to see what it is that he does. He obliges her, and the two cruise merrily along, discussing the possibility of going to lunch later, when two cars speed out of nowhere and chase them. When the furious chase is done, Buford’s wife lays bloody and dead beside the wrecked car, and Buford, whose body is once-again nearly demolished, cannot save her.

In the movie’s final scenes, Buford Pusser is wearing a plaster cast that covers the lower half of his broken face. The governor has sent help, but Buford doesn’t trust them. No, this is personal! After his wife’s funeral, complete with his sobbing children, Buford loses it. He heads out to the Lucky Spot, which is almost deserted in the middle of the day, to finish off the bastards by ramming his sheriff car straight through the front door, killing two of the last (and most insidious) villains. As he emerges symbolically, having let the daylight into The Lucky Spot, crowds of funeral mourners are close behind. The credits roll, as the small group of a couple-dozen carry the tables and chairs out into the red-dirt parking lot and set them on fire.

After re-watching “Walking Tall,” I know why we weren’t allowed to watch it when we were kids. For its time, the violence was startling, and the nudity and depictions of prostitution would have easily prevented most parents of pre-teens from allowing a screening at a sleepover. Yet, despite its low production value, cheap gore, and somewhat plastic characters, “Walking Tall” captures a moment in time in the South. Slightly less hokey than 1958’s “The Phenix City Story,” this clean-up movie shows us the grittier parts of the gritty side. Back in the day – and really, still today – the men, husbands included, had a little place out in the woods to get into some trouble; everybody knew it was there, and everybody claimed not to go there, but somehow it stayed in business anyway. This was the South that earned its reputation as a place where people didn’t fuck around. And sometimes, if you drive down a rural highway, deep in the Deep South, you’ll see the remnants of one of those places, all covered over by weeds and kudzu.

Both in the opening and the closing to “Walking Tall,” the filmmakers are emphatic that this film is “fictionized,” being only based the stories about the real Buford Pusser. If you’re interested in the man himself, there is a museum dedicated to him in Adamsville, Tennessee. Pusser died in 1974 in a one-car crash, when his corvette hit a tree. And if you’re a music fan, and don’t already know the song, there’s “Buford Stick” by Driveby Truckers, on their “Dirty South” album.

So where can you find “Walking Tall,” if you wanted to watch it? For about $20 on Amazon, you can buy a three-DVD set of the original 1973 movie, the 1975 sequel, and 1977’s “The Final Chapter: Walking Tall” in it . Or you watch it for $2.99 on Google Play, which is where I finally found it after some searching.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Tennessee, The Deep South

The Allman Brothers at Atlanta Pop, 1970

It was forty-six years ago today that the Allman Brothers Band played the second of two live sets at the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival— they opened the festival on July 3 and closed it on July 5. Though the recording wasn’t released until 2003, the shows at Atlanta Pop predate the Fillmore East live show and gives us another example of the band at its peak, before the deaths of Duane Allman in October 1971 and Berry Oakley in November 1972. (The Fillmore East concert was about three months after Atlanta Pop, on September 23, 1970.)

The Atlanta Pop Festival was put on by famed Southern promoter Alex Cooley and was meant to be a Southern version of Woodstock. One 1995 looking-back article from Atlanta’s Journal-Constitution explains how it worked out even better than Cooley thought it would:

“We were expecting maybe 100,000 people,” says Atlanta promoter Alex Cooley, 56, who organized the festival and the first one at Atlanta International Raceway in 1969. “I remember going up in a helicopter on Friday afternoon before the first act went on. Traffic was backed up 90 miles to Atlanta. I was scared to death.”

The webpage for the Georgia historical marker that commemorates the Second Atlanta International Pop Festival says that the festival “remains one of the largest public gatherings in state history.”

For the band’s first set on July 3, the opening numbers, “Statesboro Blues” and “Trouble No More,” are as solid as any. Later in the set, the version of “Whipping Post” on this one is shorter, coming in just under fifteen minutes, but contains a great little guitar sequence at about minute ten. My personal favorite Allman Brothers song, “Mountain Jam,” which is also a little shorter here, starts out in a brief staccato-march, rather than with its customary lazy beauty, and is bisected after about ten-and-a-half minutes by a rain delay; the song comes on the recording as a longer “Pt. 1” followed by a six-minute “Pt. 2”

For the July 5 set, the band started out with a slower, swaggering version of “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’,” then proceeded into “Statesboro Blues.” They slowed it down a little in the middle of the set, with “Elizabeth Reed” and a cover of “Stormy Monday,” then ended with “Whipping Post” and a “Mountain Jam” that begins a little bit ragged but lasts over twenty-eight minutes.

After listening to the Fillmore live album more times than I can count, I was glad to have the two-disc Atlanta Pop album. Overall, the set list is pretty similar to Fillmore, though the two discs of Atlanta Pop have some duplicate songs, where Fillmore doesn’t. I’ve seen the Allman Brothers live three times now, and hearing different versions of these songs never gets old. (The best song I’ve ever heard them do was an extremely long version of “Blue Sky” at Oak Mountain Amphitheater in 1999, with Dickie Betts and Derek Trucks on guitars.)

If you’re interested in the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival beyond just the Allman Brothers’ sets, here’s a Flickr slideshow of images from the festival:

Filed under: Georgia, Music, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #126

The job of the newsman is not to make government easier, but at times to make it more difficult. He must begin with the premise that the more the people know, the wiser they will be. He must end with the conclusion that the role of the press is not to be popular with either the politician or the public, but rather to be honest with both.

If newsmen were determined not to print anything until they were sure it would not offend anyone, there would be very little printed.

– from a speech given by the late Montgomery Advertiser editor and publisher Harold Martin to the Montgomery Baptist Minister’s Conference. The “Complete Text of Speech” was reprinted in the Advertiser on March 8, 1977.

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

Who suspends a preschooler?

Earlier this month, NPR reported in “The Civil Rights Problem in US Schools: 10 New Numbers” that the US Department of Education released its Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2013–2014 school year (Though times can’t have changed that much, the data is for two years ago.) As I browsed their bulleted list of ten factoids, the statistics were upsetting, though not surprising— even this one: “Black preschoolers are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than white preschoolers,” which did make me wonder, who suspends a preschooler?

One problem with quickie news reports on complicated issues– even ones on NPR – is that they can make us think we understand things that we actually don’t. Statistics on race and discipline in education do tell one side of the story, but they don’t necessarily tell the whole fleshed-out story.

What story these bulleted points do tell is: double-standards do exist in public education. The most disgraceful of the numbers, to me, was that a million-and-a-half US high school students have a police officer on campus, but not a guidance counselor. If I’ve ever heard a statistic that sounds indicative of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, that statistic does.

These summations of data sets from all over the nation – keep in mind that schools in Wilcox County, Alabama and schools in Beverly Hills, California can hardly even be compared – show a 21st century American student body with broad diversity and changing needs. If public schools are going to succeed, we’re going to have address that diversity and those needs with educational, not disciplinary solutions (like suspending four-year-olds).

Education is about lifting people up, empowering people, and sharing the knowledge and skills that improve access to the best things in life. Teachers, principals, counselors, and aides perform those functions, and support staff enable them to perform those functions. While campus police officers can serve an important function on campus – no one can learn in an unsafe environment – their presence, in the absence of necessary educators, works against all notions of “education as the practice of freedom.” Where there are officers and no counselors, where law enforcement practices supersede educational practices, notions of freedom cannot flourish. That’s when schools become warehouses, not institutions of learning.

Filed under: Civil Rights, Education, Multiculturalism, Schools, Social Justice, Teaching

The Summer of ’76

I would probably never have noticed the story of Sandra Dupree and Harry Lee Dickens, Jr. but for a brief write-up on it that appeared in a July 1976 issue of Jet magazine, right next to the story I was looking for: another brief write-up about the killing of Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama.

In the summer of 1976, as the nation’s bicentennial celebration was at high tide, the people of the small town of Scotland Neck, North Carolina had a racially charged killing to think about instead. In March of that year, a thirty-four-year-old white woman named Sandra Dupree, who was a mother of four and the wife of the local Free Will Baptist minister, had shot a twenty-one-year-old black man, Harry Lee Dickens, Jr., in the back (or the back of the head). Dickens died a few days later.

As with any crime of this sort, eyewitness accounts varied. Sandra Dupree claimed that she had shot Dickens in “self-defense,” [1] because Dickens “had attacked her and her son” Mark, who was fourteen. As with anything involving race and the South, there are many sides to the one story.

News stories explain that Mark Dupree had been selling copies of a rural newspaper called Grit, and there had been a confrontation:

A week before Dickens’ death, Mrs. Dupree’s oldest son, Mark, 14, had a scuffle with two younger black boys. He reportedly pulled a knife, which was taken from him by a large black man. [2]

On May 12, two months after the shooting, The Bee (in Danville, Virginia) reported that Dupree had stayed in jail until April 20, when she was bailed out. (Bail wasn’t usually granted in these kinds of cases.) Yet, more interesting is The Bee‘s telling of Mark Dupree’s altercation with local blacks while he was on his paper route. The way they tell it: on March 5, six days before the shooting, Mark Dupree was kicked off his bicycle by a group of black boys and he then pulled a knife on them. (This is a minister’s son, mind you.) During the fight, the black boys damaged Mark’s bicycle and took his knife away from him. One of the black boys was later sentenced to jail time by a local judge for assault— which is more punishment than Mark’s mother would get for shooting and killing a man. Yet, Sandra Dupree might have known what the outcome would be; as the newspaper reported it: she told the police, “If we couldn’t take care of the problem, she would.” [3]

Among the newspaper accounts that I read, Harry Lee Dickens was not mentioned as having been involved in that March 5 altercation at all, but the fight did occur “near the Dickens home.” One account said that Dickens was the Dupree family’s yard man— which, having been raised in the South, makes no sense to me: if you’ve got a fourteen-year-old son who is healthy enough to sell newspapers, why do you have a yard man?

Tensions among locals grew, and Dupree’s trial had to be moved to nearby Henderson, the county seat of adjacent Vance County, because the tiny community where the incident occurred was, as one newspaper put it, “not equipped to handle the trial.”

Whether or not race was factor in the killing depends on whose version of events you believe. Sandra Dupree said that race had nothing to do with it; she was quoted in one article as saying, “As far as I’m concerned this is not a racial thing . . . the color doesn’t enter in . . . I’m not prejudiced at all.” [4] However, one of the black boys involved in the fight with Mark “said Dupree called him ‘a black-assed nigger.'”

Contrary to Dupree’s claim of self-defense, Dickens’ sisters testified that, when he was shot, Harry Lee Dickens, Jr. was running from Sandra Dupree, trying to get away from her and into his house. [5] His older sister testified that Dupree had approached Dickens with a gun while he was chopping wood in their yard, then hit him in the face twice before the two struggled over the weapon. His younger sister, who saw this happening from the porch, said that her brother ran from Dupree when she dropped the gun. Then she picked up the gun and shot him.

By the time Sandra Dupree went on trial in the summer, the controversy was boiling over. There were protests, led by Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizer Golden Frinks. One report estimated the crowd at 250 people, though only twelve were arrested. [6]

The Evening Telegraph in Rocky Mount describes jury selection in the trial, in its July 6 issue, right below its coverage of the nation’s Bicentennial, complete with a great big full-color American flag. It was still America’s 200th birthday, after all.

At trial’s end, Sandra Dupree, it seems, swam through the proverbial river of you-know-what and came out clean on the other side. By July 11, the AP reported the outcome: “Sandra Dupree acquitted in murder trial.” She was found not-guilty by a jury of “11 whites and one black.” In his lengthy charge, the judge had told the jury that “to find her innocent, [they] would have to find she acted in self-defense.” [7] So, it seems they did. But that would not be all.

After Dupree’s acquittal, there were firebombings in Henderson and Scotland Neck, which law enforcement believed to be related to the verdict. In one location, an oil tanker was ignited by a bomb, and at a manufacturing company, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a trash container. (A third attempt was made elsewhere but it didn’t ignite.) The wire story on the fires reports that the Dupree family had been out of town “since the trial.” [8]

The story of Sandra Dupree and Harry Lee Dickens made national news from March until July 1976, both for its inflammatory basis and its outcome. No one seemed to dispute that a white minister’s wife got angry, got a gun, and got in her car intending to deal with the black people she believed had abused her son. That day, as a result of her ire, she shot and killed a black man in his own front yard, in full view of his two sisters.

In something of a strange twist, the September 1976 annual report of the Free Will Baptists, Contact, ran a short news piece on Dupree’s acquittal. There, in the twenty-page pink-and-blank newsletter, among news about the Bicentennial Convention, youth honors, and creative writing contest winners is “North Carolina Pastor’s Wife Acquitted of Murder Charge.” The telling is simple and matter-of-fact.

Among other news outlets to cover the story, the politically liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal includes tidbits of it in “Bicentennial on Death Row,” from August 1976. The writer, Lois Spear, is discussing racial injustice in North Carolina more generally, but brings in Dupree-Dickens as a case and point. Near the end of her piece, Spear writes,

In the South, you can see the contradiction laid open on the pages of the newspaper. In the long run, that may be more open and honest than in many northern cities.

Given the brutally matter-of-fact coverage that I read, Spear might be right.

References

“Minister’s Wife Pleads Self-Defense.” AP. July 8, 1976.
“Minister’s Wife Accused In Death Says It’s Torture.” AP. June 6, 1976
“Pastor’s Wife Free On Bond in Shooting.” AP. May 12, 1976.
“Minister’s Wife Pleads Self-Defense.” AP. July 8, 1976.
“Sisters testify against Dupree.” UPI. July 6, 1976.
“SCLC Picketers Are Arrested.” AP. June 1, 1976
“Dupree Acquitted in Murder Trial.” AP. July 11, 1976.
“Henderson Plant Firebombed.” High Point Enterprise. July 14, 1976.

 

 

Filed under: Civil Rights, North Carolina, Social Justice

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #125

Most readers are content to stay readers, which is probably best. Writing, like drug use, escalates.Not every constitution can stand it, especially when you resolve to make writing a job. That usually entails making reading a job, since most writers make a living off some form of professional reading: reviewing, translating, editing, teaching. If this would have sounded dreamy to my zealous 14-year-old self, the reality, I discovered, was less electrifying.

For me and for many writers, the problem is not that things one does for a living are less fun than hobbies pursued in the off hours, or that the more one has read the higher one’s standards become— though both are true. The problem is that the deeper you go into your own writing, the harder it becomes to enter someone else’s. If pursued seriously, writing demands a kind of obsessive concentration that came, at least for me, to preclude reading.

– from Benjamin Moser’s answer to the Bookends page question, “Is it harder to be transported by a book as you get older?” in The New York Times Book Review.

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

Progress on my Whitehurst book

It’s funny how the “final stages” of a book take so long. Though I have been working on this book about the Whitehurst Case since the summer of 2013, the process of researching and writing it can be described in one word: waiting.

When the tasks involve digging up records and stories and facts from the past, nothing is simple. The now-historical events that are called the Whitehurst Case occurred from December 1975 until April 1977, in Montgomery, Alabama. The situation began with the shooting of Bernard Whitehurst, Jr., then went through a series of investigations and a federal civil case, and resulted in the resignation of Mayor Jim Robinson and subsequent election of Emory Folmar. That was forty years ago, during a time of paper record-keeping, of carbon paper and hand-cranked mimeograph machines, of notes scrawled on legal pads. Before modern computers and databases, paper records were bound, boxed, labeled, and stacked. As matter of course, just the way that time works, records get lost, thrown away, destroyed, or buried under mountains of other records, so when I have asked people to find those records for me . . . I could see it in their faces and hear it in their voices: This is going to take some digging.

In this age when “Google” is a verb, we like to type in a word or two and get what we want— but researching the Whitehurst Case couldn’t be done that way. Instead, there has been a lot of waiting. I’ve asked for records, then waited. I’ve requested interviews, then waited. Sometimes fruitlessly. But other times, the wait has paid off. The book is getting done, the story is coming together. With each positive response, with each unearthed document, with each unplanned epiphany, with each personal interview, a little more gets revealed, another puzzle piece is put into place.

In a wild twist of fate, just as I was about to give up struggling to obtain the federal case files for Whitehurst v. Wright, I got a break!  After nearly a year of requesting information, then waiting, then trying again, then waiting some more, I was describing my predicament recently to a lawyer friend, who was simply asking about this book I’ve been writing. Within two days, he had an order arranged, and I was down at the federal court clerks office, paying the fees to get the case files. Now I’m waiting again. Maybe that’ll yield something, maybe it won’t . . . I’m still a firm believer in something my mother used to say when I was growing up: I’ll believe it when I see it.

The raw manuscript is now over 70,000 words – well over 200 double-spaced pages – and I’m writing and editing every day. There are few more interviews to do, too. In probably two months, after some good revisions for clarity and style, I’ll be turning it in to NewSouth Books in the late summer. The plan is to have a book that reads really well, with everything you need to know and nothing you don’t. Of course, there will be a period of editorial work, followed by design and then production, so the book won’t be out for while. When there is a release date, I will shout it from the rafters!

Filed under: Forthcoming, Local Issues, Race, Social Justice, The Deep South, Writing and Editing

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #124

It’s not the word made flesh that we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.

— attributed to writer William H. Gass

Filed under: Poetry, Teaching, Writing and Editing