Foster Dickson's Blog, page 79

Alabamiana: Fr. Michael Caswell, 1909 – 1971

The opening two paragraphs of the verdict in the convicted killer William Simpson’s appeal read like this:

December 12, 1971, the body of Father Michael Caswell was found in some woods near Our Lady of Fatima School in eastern Montgomery County. Father Caswell was in charge of the school which apparently boarded problem boys. His death was caused by strangulation. His body had abrasions, bruises and lacerations, as though it had been dragged. A green cord was around Father Caswell’s neck.

A tractor, belonging to the school, was examined and blood was found on the bushhog attached to the tractor.

It’s a gruesome thing to read: a white Catholic priest, who had dedicated his life to helping troubled black boys, was killed just before Christmas, and his body left in the Alabama woods.

This unseemly end is a far cry from the way The Southern Courier wrote up Father Michael Caswell’s efforts five years earlier. The Civil Rights-minded newspaper’s April 16-17, 1966 issue features the community on page four in “A Family of 40 Young Boys.” Fr. Caswell had begun building Our Lady of Fatima in 1949, the article says, and “it is the only orphanage in the state for teenage Negro boys.” At that point, the only orphanages in the state for blacks over age 12 were both Catholic, one in Mobile and the other, Our Lady of Fatima. Caswell’s operation was admittedly ill-funded and short-staffed, but it was full of hope and better than nothing.

Michael Caswell was born in Kentucky in 1909. His parents, Joseph and Louise (Vowells) Caswell, lived in Louisville. As a boy, he must’ve gone by his middle name, Eugene, since the 1910 and 1920 censuses list him that way. In 1910, his parents were living with his mother’s family, the Vowells, who were Irish immigrants; Joseph Caswell worked as a telegraph dispatcher for the railroad. By 1920, the growing family was in their own home on Bonnycastle Street with now six, rather than only two, children.

Caswell was ordained in 1937, and after serving as an assistant pastor at Holy Family Catholic Church in Ensley, a working-class suburb of Birmingham, he came to Montgomery to create what he hoped to be a “New Boys’ Town for Negroes,” according to an August 1950 United Press wire story.

In Alabama after World War II and before the Civil Rights movement, Fr. Caswell wouldn’t have gotten much help. However, for more than two decades, Michael Caswell managed to champion a cause that few others would: troubled black young men.

Though Rev. Robert Graetz is typically given the distinction of being the only white minister to support the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s, a search of Getty Images archives shows Caswell was in the mix, too. Likewise, the Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities’ entry on Montgomery tells us more:

Through his involvement with King, [Rabbi Seymour] Atlas came to empathize with the cause of the boycott. In 1956, as part of Brotherhood week, Atlas agreed to speak on a panel of clergy at WRMA, a local radio station. Reverend Roy Bennett, an African American minister, and Father Michael Caswell, a white priest at Gunter Air Force Base, joined him.  The broadcast occurred at the height of the boycott.

For a Southern man, Caswell had an uncommon lack of traditional racism, and was willing to speak out against Jim Crow and to harbor some of Jim Crow society’s lowliest cast-offs.

Yet, despite his belief that “even the worst kid needs a place to live,” a mid-December 1971 AP wire story tells us about the two young men who killed him: 18-year-old Harold Worsham, who lived at Our Lady of Fatima, and 20-year-old William Simpson, who had lived there but was now a janitor. The sheriff’s office told the media that “the slaying followed an argument over a tractor that the youth [Simpson] had been using to visit a girlfriend.” That above-mentioned appeals verdict explains that Worsham put the cord around Caswell’s neck and strangled him, and Simpson used the tractor to dispose of his body.

In that AP wire story, a local circuit judge described Caswell as “a godly man, quiet, unassuming, who would take the worst human being under his wing and try to help him,” and that “he would ‘take in any kid, no matter how mean or nasty. He in no way screened the boys he admitted to the school.'” In the article’s closing paragraph, the bishop who conducted the funeral acknowledged, “He did it all on his own.”

Our Lady of Fatima was closed in 1972, after Caswell’s death. The fact that no one else took up the mantle says even more about his uncommon charity. And though it is easy to see the negative side of the tragedy, some good may have come of the closure. Even into the early 1970s, Alabama’s orphanages were still segregated by race. In Montgomery that meant that white orphans went to Brantwood, and black to Our Lady of Fatima. However, with the closure, there was nowhere to send black teenage orphans. Thus, a probation officer named Denny Abbott sued twice on behalf of black minors who had no place to go, and was consequently reprimanded then fired by an Alabama judge. Abbott’s legal efforts ultimately opened the way for the integration of orphanages in the state.

Fr. Michael Caswell is buried in Montgomery’s Catholic cemetery, St. Margaret’s, which is adjacent to historic Oakwood Cemetery.

Filed under: Alabama, Catholicism, Civil Rights, Local Issues, Social Justice, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #120

Poems, novels, stories, plays matter only if we matter. They give us the blessing of more life, whether or not they initiate a time without boundaries.

– from “Why These Twelve?” in The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime by Harold Bloom

Filed under: Literature, Teaching, Writing and Editing

TBT: Kennedy Prints in Gordo

Though Amos Kennedy has moved to Detroit and now operates Kennedy Prints up there, his letterpress shop used to be located in two downtown storefronts in the tiny town of Gordo, Alabama for some years. This picture is from 2010, when I went to visit Amos there.

Filed under: Alabama, Arts, Black Belt, The Deep South

The Old Agrarian-ness of a New Ethos

In “I’ll Take My Stand: The Relevance of the Agrarian Vision,” originally published in 1980 in Virginia Quarterly Review and re-published online in 2003, the critic Lucinda H. Mackethan writes about “a group of Southern Americans profoundly disturbed by the lack of humane values operating in their world.” She was referring to the contributing authors in the Southern classic I’ll Take My Stand, a small group of perhaps overly nostalgic academics, poets, and critics who looked on a Northern-dominated, heavily industrial country with disdain. But in that phrase, she could have been writing about a lot of modern Southerners, from gun-loving ultra-conservative neophobes to the Gen-Xers who’ve started organic CSAs, letterpress shops, and microbreweries.

Though I had known about I’ll Take My Stand as one of the classics of Southern studies, I hadn’t taken the time to read it until recent years. A weathered copy of a 1977 edition with a preface by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. fell into my hands, and I admittedly let it sit a while before I took it on. This collection of Southern “agrarian” essays has been regarded by some readers as the quaint visions of some hopeless romantics and by other readers as a group of diatribes that are basically racist and elitist in their Depression-era conservatism. By picking and choosing passages, a critical reader could justify either those perspectives.

In Part Two of her fairly lengthy essay, Mackethan writes:

It is thus demonstrable that the “historical sense” evoked in I’ll Take My Stand represents not attitudes toward an actual world that existed in the past but attitudes toward a world that reflects a people’s sense of who they are according to what they believe to have been the truths their ancestors lived by.

That old Southern Mythology— “the truths [our] ancestors lived by.” Mackethan’s idea is riffing on what WJ Cash propounded forty years before, in the early and middle chapters of The Mind of the South: this erratically developed sense “of the line which divided what was Southern from what was not” (104). Mackethan’s assessment jives quite nicely with, for instance, Richard Shelby’s 2015 “hometown boy made good” primary campaign ads, which portrayed Washington DC as a bad place, with President Obama as the powerful malefactor at the center, a place to be contrasted with Alabama, a good place, with Shelby as our righteous protector, a man who ventures to this distant hell to fight the demon in his own lair. These mythic Southern truths matter more than the far less glamorous “actual world,” where a man named Barack Obama simply disagrees with a man named Richard Shelby. It’s got to be about more than that, if you’re a Southerner. It’s got to be about good and evil, right and wrong.

However, to write off pro-Southern, anti-industrial ideals as nothing more than paranoid, backward-looking, overly poetic myth-making is to miss the basis of some important ideas that are buried within all of those heavily dated pronouncements. Case and point, Lyle H. Lanier’s “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress.” Though other authors in the collection draw more attention – John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren – for me, this essay warrants attention.

Lyle Hicks Lanier was born in 1903 in Tennessee, the son of a general store owner. He attended Vanderbilt University, and was later on the faculty there in the 1930s, before moving to Vassar College in the 1940s. The lamentable side of Lanier’s work shows in examples like the 1929 educational monograph, “Studies in the comparative abilities of whites and negroes.” Using  the fields of education and psychology, he intended to prove, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, that whites were fundamentally superior to blacks. Yet, to take that err-in-judgment and write off Lanier completely would be to miss something worthy of consideration.

Lanier’s essay in I’ll Take My Stand changed the way that I think about the idea of being progressive. I still adore the word liberal for its actual meanings, though its historical connections to the accommodationist white Southern liberals of twentieth century, as well as the current moniker of liberal-as-epithet, have caused its use to be tinged by unwarranted addenda. I’ve preferred instead to refer to myself as a progressive. While I appreciate the positive meanings of the word liberal’s many cousins – liberated, library, liberty – the term progressive seems equally difficult to argue against. However, Lanier does argue against it, and quite effectively.

Progress was – and largely still is – thought-of as setting a social or personal trajectory toward something better. In the twentieth-century South, that meant moving away from the agrarian life and toward something industrialized, technological, urbane, and Lanier objects:

Men henceforth would be concerned not so much with saving his soul as with making himself comfortable, and with improvement of the world through cooperative social effort.

For Lanier, the term progress was too directionless and amorphous to appreciate, moreover because, for him, it also implied a life less individualistic. The idea of progress has had the consequence of aiming Man’s eyes at the future, which subsequently has us looking less at the past. While hope of a better life in times-ahead is understandable, a reliance on the wisdom and knowledge of times-gone-by is also necessary. For Southerners, that past rooted them in the land, in farming, in family, and in longstanding relationships with the other families who lived nearby.

After laying down his reasons that Francis Bacon is the philosopher at the root of our current thinking, Lanier proceeds to rip into the pragmatist John Dewey. Lanier takes exception with Dewey’s ideas about a communal kind of social evolution, in which people just sort of work together because they know they should. No, Lanier propounds, Man’s destiny is not to gather in large urban groups, to work in corporate environs, and to delight in a constant flurry of surface-level interactions with the masses also gathered there. And here’s why:

Man’s motivation to action will no doubt forever be “unmitigatingly private,” in a basic sense, and any plan for social readjustment will do well to proceed on this basis. (143)

Lanier slams Dewey’s notion that people would ever value cooperation over self-interest. We want what we want for ourselves first . . . always first.

Reading the latter portions of “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress,” as stodgy as they can be, means encountering a startlingly accurate prediction about what will happen when consumption and technology become not help-mates in a good life, but an end in themselves. Read this passage, and keep in mind that Lanier was writing in the 1930s:

As a matter of fact, the corporate form of our economic system makes possible a scale of exploitation unheard of in history [ . . . ] theoretically, it might appear to be the mechanism by which the ideal collective existence could be consummated; actually it is a form of legerdemain through which a stupendous concentration of wealth and power is achieved, along with a corresponding degree of exploitation of human effort.

That wasn’t written by a Bernie Sanders campaign operative, it was written by an education professor during the Great Depression. Now, get ready for the really spooky part, the sentence that follows that:

Centralization of political power and governmental regulation of industrial processes — far from being tendencies toward any real socialism – even offer greater possibilities for economic domination, because of the comparative ease with which control of government agencies is secured by industrial elements.

There’s that good old Southern conservative hatred of a central government! It had to be in there somewhere.

After a clear, though very wordy renunciation of what we should reject, Lanier’s essay ends with what we ought to accept anew: farming, family, and interpersonal relationships. Stay close to home, to loved ones, and to neighbors, and build a life based on those meaningful things. “The only reality which is ultimately worth considering is that of human beings which associate together,” he writes.

Lanier also acknowledges that a return to an agrarian society could remedy unemployment and decentralize institutional power. He tells us many progressive-minded people left farming because it was not a profitable business to be in, but “the answer is that agriculture is more than a process of ‘production.'” For him, agriculture is a way of life that offers two undeniable benefits: self-reliance and a connection to land. It was never meant to be a corporate endeavor where profits would be used to purchase material goods.

Although it’s difficult to get behind a guy who spent part of his career trying to scientifically justify white supremacy, “A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress” has distinct connections to modern times. Lanier’s value system is anti-materialistic and counter-revolutionary, sometimes smacking of the Occupy movement and at other times causing me to think of “tiny houses” and urban agriculture. The essay also decries the exploitation of workers and the dehumanizing effects of mass unemployment, something we have been experiencing since the Great Recession. Though Lanier’s racial ideals have been left behind in the dust, our modern culture is steeping toward his agrarian ideal, saying quietly but plainly “less is more.”

One of the more interesting things about late twentieth and early twenty-first century multiculturalism is the newfound acknowledgment that America’s ascendance was fueled not by Godly righteousness but actually by corporate greed and violence. From “Heaven’s Gate” to Howard Zinn, we have seen a new historical narrative slowly emerging, a more honest one, and as far as I’m concerned, I’ll Take My Stand serves in some ways as a forerunner to that harsh honesty. For all of the inherent evils of the agrarian system that these essays ignore – the enslavement of African-Americans, a sinister debt-driven form of sharecropping, class-based political corruption – they do get one thing right: Southerners didn’t want an industrialized economic system, and that system still doesn’t work very well for the region today.

Near the end of her VQR essay, Mackethan writes:

What the Agrarians condemned, as the creed of Cousin Lucius demonstrates, was not the technological system of American society per se, but the general weakening of faith in human dignity and worth that seemed to accompany a society’s increasing attachment to the products of a technological system.

Here we are now, in the twenty-first century, and what we see as progressive today actually seems regressive historically, yielding unknowingly to prescriptions offered by Southern agrarian writers like Lanier. What is the concept of “buy local” but a decidedly progressive stance that hearkens back to homegrown, handcrafted goods? What is “DIY” but a return to the craftsmanship exhibited by long-ago homesteaders? What are “slow food” and “farm to table” but a conscious decision to eat like our grandparents did?

I’ve heard older generations quip that their parents were “green” before “green” was a thing. They had to turn off lights, conserve water, and walk instead of car-riding. Before “green” was cool, it was just the way people lived. And there was dignity in it. There may be prestige in having a big house with a security system and a privacy fence, and it may be stylish to have our eyes constantly transfixed on a little screen, but neither one will do much to, as Lyle Lanier put it, save your soul.

Southerners are well-known for our stolid refusal to follow the national trends, preferring to draw “the line which divided what [is] Southern from what [is] not.” Though that the stubbornly self-righteous side of that character trait can often backfire, i.e. Chief Justice Roy Moore in Alabama or Gov. Pat McCrory in North Carolina, the fervent agrarian individualism of it can produce some really beautiful results, i.e. Alabama’s Frank Stitt or North Carolina’s Bill Smith. If only we could find a way to preserve the latter . . . while eliminating the former. That might be progress that even Lyle Lanier could agree to.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Literature, Reading, The Deep South, the South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #119

I saw this sign posted outside of Gray’s Tire & Auto in Wetumpka, Alabama, when I was driving up Highway 231, heading to Lake Martin. I couldn’t resist, I had to pull over and take a picture.

Filed under: Poetry, Teaching, Writing and Editing

The Passive Activist #8

We Americans are living with an unprecedented absence of leadership. In the Deep South, we have lived with this void for most of our history, so we’re a little more used to it than the rest of the nation— but that doesn’t make it OK. In the face of Congressional deadlock, soaring national debt, secular/religious strife, rogue policy actions by state legislatures, mistrust of the police, declines in public education funding, exorbitant college costs, internet predators and trolls, crumbling labor unions, global warming, and new questions about which bathroom to use,  the Passive Activist series offers ideas for how ordinary people can create and implement positive change in our own lives. Movements are made up of people.

8.  Compost.

Composting is one of the easiest way to keep garbage out of a landfill. It is so easy— in fact, it is painfully easy. Putting fruit and vegetable scraps, like potato peelings or black bananas, aside in a small, separate kitchen container, and then dumping them later into an outdoor compost bin requires almost no effort, just a change in habits.

In the chapter, “The Benefits of Compost,” Rodale Book of Composting">The Rodale Book of Composting explains:

Compost is more than fertilizer, more than a soil conditioner. It is a symbol continuing life. Nature has been making compost since the first appearance primitive life on this planet, eons before humans first walked the earth.

Discarding of natural materials in a way that nature can reuse them only makes sense.

There are different ways to compost – using one or multiple bins, for example – so finding a way that works for your home is definitely possible.  (Personally, I wouldn’t suggest composting inside your house or apartment, because compost has a very distinct smell.) The main things are keeping it warm, wet, and well-fed, all of which aren’t hard at all. Keep your compost covered, dump new materials regularly, and turn it over often.

 

Filed under: Gardening, The Environment

C’mon, Alabama, really?

The absurdity of Alabama’s political situation has always been the stuff that journalists dream of, but right now— the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” comes to mind.

By last Saturday, even the British magazine The Economist was getting in on the story. “Sweet Home” offers up a succinct telling of our current quandaries, under the auspicious heading “Disarray in the South.” The article covers our now tenuous situation in the Heart of Dixie: our Governor, Robert Bentley, has had articles of impeachment filed against him; our Speaker of the House, Mike Hubbard, is under indictment and heading to trial; and the Chief Justice of our state’s Supreme Court, Roy Moore, has been suspended and might be removed from office (for a second time). Beyond the obvious problems with each individual case, we in Alabama now have this perfect storm:

And, disparate as they are, the cases have collided. To recap: Mr Bentley could appoint Mr Moore’s successor, if he is not impeached first. Mr Moore could oversee Mr Bentley’s impeachment, unless he is defenestrated, in which case the governor’s appointee might preside. Mr Hubbard would refer the impeachment to the Senate, depending on the verdict of his own trial, which may feature testimony from Mr Bentley. Alternatively, of course, they may all keep their jobs.

Yeah, well . . . here we are.

Likewise, this short video segment provides a glimpse into the problems that have arisen because Alabama’s new voter ID law coincided with the closure of driver’s license offices in Alabama’s Black Belt region. The conflicts of interest were easily seen: the same Republican-led legislature that passed the voter ID law also crafted a budget whose shortfalls would cause cuts to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. What got “cut” were offices where many rural black people in the heavily Democratic western parts of the state would obtain or renew the ID that they needed to vote.

Even in Alabama, where we are so accustomed to political chicanery, at some point, you just have to look at things and ask, What are we doing . . . ?

Filed under: Alabama, Black Belt, Civil Rights, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #118

According to Christian Bök, there are four ways to be a poet. A lyric poet typically intends to express a thought or a feeling. It is possible, however, “to express oneself unintentionally—surrealist writing, automatic writing, and stream of consciousness,” Bök says. “Also, Ginsberg at his most rapturous, ‘first thought, best thought’—outbursts of feeling that aren’t meditative.” A third category of poet cares primarily about intention—having a plan, that is, and seeing it through. These poets use constraints to produce poems that aren’t necessarily expressive. An example is a poem written using the avant-garde technique N+7, in which a poet takes out certain words in a piece of writing and replaces each with the seventh word following it in the dictionary. A poet named Rosmarie Waldrop did this with the Declaration of Independence and produced a satirical piece that begins, “We holler these trysts to be self-exiled.” The fourth category includes appropriation—giving an existing text a new form.

— from “Something Borrowed” by Alec Wilkinson, in the October 5, 2015 issue of The New Yorker

Filed under: Literature, Poetry, Teaching, Writing and Editing

Tiny Glimmers of Hope

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, and while I am genuinely thankful for the kind group of parents who fix us a nice lunch or send some goodie bags, in Alabama their efforts are the icing for a cake that was never baked.

I teach in a state that has made some of the biggest education cuts in the nation since the recession— cutting funding by 17.8% from 2008 to 2015. Just last year, when the state’s General Fund budget was short, the legislature took $80 million from the Education budget to rectify it. (For this most recent budget, our governor proposed to move another $181 million out of education, but the legislature didn’t go for it.) Doing our everyday work, teachers can’t help but recognize these facts.

Beyond the classroom, this seven-year funding shortfall has yielded personal consequences, too. My health insurance costs have gone up and my required retirement contributions have gone up, causing my take-home pay to go down. Going by the numbers on my retirement statement, my annual salary went down by 10% in one year when the recession began. Like a lot of teachers, I have a family, and we live on my salary.

In addition to having our compensation go down, our workload went up when fewer teachers were left to handle the same number of students. Since 2010, I have heard parents lament class sizes of 25, 30, even 40 or more, but complaining to the teacher, the principal, or even the local board of education would never have helped. Class sizes are determined by budgets, which are determined by legislators, who are determined the people.

To illustrate the gravity of the situation, I can point to the example of a legislator who proposed in 2015 that Alabama eliminate its State Department of Education altogether. In a state that depends on federal dollars, it is absurd to think that individual school systems could coordinate separately with the feds for that money.

The next benefit to be threatened was our job security, if we don’t manage to, as some like to put it, “do more with less.” The RAISE Act, which became the PREP Act, would have changed the rules of tenure by instituting an evaluation system. The PREP Act, which stalled in its committee in March and was then put to rest by its sponsor, was touted as a way to reward good teachers for high-performing results. But what was to happen to the teacher whose students’ test scores weren’t so hot? After one year, that teacher would be required to do professional development in the denoted areas, and after the second consecutive year of being “below expectations,” he or she would be subject to “personnel action.”

Sadly, many Alabamians favor eliminating teacher tenure. Too many of these well-meaning people don’t understand that tenure is not a “job for life,” but is a guarantee of the right to due process before “personnel action” can occur. Put simply, a tenured teacher can’t be put out of a job arbitrarily.

I’ll be among the first to agree that the education system in Alabama needs to change. However, we can’t improve education by reducing staff and resources, increasing class sizes, and cutting employee benefits, while continuing to require those remaining employees to teach and to meet federal regulations and state law.

As an alternative plan for improving education, I proffer this: raise property taxes, which are among on the lowest in the nation, and fund schools properly, in order to achieve viable teacher-student ratios and to supply needed resources. Here is why I believe that plan will work.

Every study that I’ve read says the same thing: Alabama’s education system will never improve until its schools are adequately funded. I’ve never read a study whose conclusion was that austerity really works. Voters may like to hear that the solution is not to raise taxes but to work teachers harder, yet that doesn’t address the real issues.
Because core subjects must be staffed in order to offer the credits needed for students to graduate, job cuts often occur in the paraprofessional areas (counselors, aides for disabled students) and staff positions (custodians, lunchroom, secretaries). The loss of these support personnel reduces the effectiveness of classroom teachers, who may have to take over peripheral duties, like cleaning or supervision. If teachers are adequately supported, then they can focus on their main mission: planning, teaching, and grading.
Finally, if you’re a proponent of teacher evaluations, then evaluate us once the schools are adequately staffed and resourced. As it stands now, teacher evaluations would be based on students’ test scores that are affected by factors beyond teachers’ control. (If you don’t believe that, look at this New York Times graphic that correlates median income and academic performance by school system.)

During Teacher Appreciation Week, it is fair to point out that teachers in Alabama are struggling. We serve hundreds of thousands of children, but when we need the people to stand up for us . . . it’s just not there. To show some serious appreciation for teachers, here are my suggestions:

 When you hear legislators speak on the news about a major education reform bill, ask your child’s teacher what its passage would mean for the everyday work in the classroom.
During severe periods of under-funding, like the years from 2009 through 2012, help your child’s teachers (if you can) to offset the loss in classroom supply funding.
When severe staff cuts occur, contact your state legislator to protest the overcrowded classrooms.
Research what tenure really is, using reputable and non-partisan sources, to find out the truth about what that commonly used term means.
Finally, spend some time learning about the real effects of the budgets and reforms crafted by Alabama’s legislature. Read studies or news articles. I suggest this in Newsweek, this from the NEA, and this from National Center for Education Statistics.

Teachers in Alabama want to build this state up, and we want to do our best for your children, but we need support to do that.  Back in January, the Montgomery Advertiser‘s Ken Hare wrote a brief but thorough exposition of the problems, which included this little nugget:

Alabama cannot prosper economically over the long haul unless it invests a reasonable amount in public education.

We’ve had some tiny glimmers of hope in 2016. The new budget allows for hiring more teachers, though not nearly enough. Now-retired state schools superintendent Tommy Bice and the Alabama Board of Education proposed a 5% raise for teachers last fall, though the legislature passed a 4% raise that came with amendments to how we are paid. That 4% raise could have given some relief from the recession-era cuts that affected our families but— more on that in a moment.

As one last real-world example, consider this. Last month, al.com ran “Why current and retired teachers will remain underpaid” by columnist Ben Baxter, and one of the first things he lets his reader know is: the number of young people going to college to become teachers has “dropped 45 percent since 2008.” The students who have gone to college since 2008 attended our schools during the recession and since the reforms, and now many of them don’t see teaching as a viable career. The state government must have recognized that drop too, since the governor’s office just announced the “Grow Our Own” program, which seeks to encourage young people in Alabama to enter the teaching profession.

Last week – the week before Teacher Appreciation Week – the PEEHIP Board of Controls, which governs teachers’ health insurance, voted to raise our required contributions. So that 4% raise isn’t really going to be a raise at all, since the cost increase will swallow the pay increase.  Just when we thought they were going to throw us a bone . . . 

I enjoyed my lunch today. The moms at our school brought us barbecue and lots of sides to go with it. In fact, while I was eating my strawberry cake for dessert, I almost forgot I that I had to be back in class, where we’re finalizing grades, thinking about next year, and of course, looking forward to summer. I have no doubts that my students and their parents appreciate what I do, because they tell me, and sometimes show me. What bothers me, though, is simple enough to understand: I know how effective I could be, if my mind weren’t constantly diverted by all of the pressures that I just described.

 

Filed under: Alabama, Education, Teaching

May’s Southern Movie of the Month

The 1970s were an awesome era for bizarre, low-budget horror movies, and the strange “Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural” from 1973 is a part of that tradition. This one has it all: bad acting, a storyline that makes little sense, cheap sound effects, methodically slow walking, too many camera close-ups. Supposedly set in 1930s Georgia, the only things Southern about “Lemora” are the forced accents and the evangelist-preacher male lead. TCM Underground’s webpage on “Lemora” describes the film this way:

Set in the Depression-era South, it opens like a rural gangster movie and detours into a drama of religious hypocrisy before becoming a sinister Alice in Wonderland.

That’s pretty generous.

The film opens in black, and at first all we hear are two voices, one male and one female, discussing how the woman’s husband is out of town on business. Just then the lights come on, and a gangster in a fedora and pin-striped suit opens fire on two middle-aged lovers, splattering red-paint blood on the bed and wall. As the killer-husband rushes from the scene in his black sedan, he also runs over an old woman who, for some reason, is standing in the middle of the road at night and does nothing to get out of the way.

After a slow-paced escape through the California hills— uh, I mean through the Georgia pines, the gangster pulls up to an abandoned-looking house where a woman in a black hooded cowl is standing in front of the door. As the gangster gets out of the car, presumably to deal with this wiccan-seeming person, two pale goons in all black jump him, pin him to the hood of the car, and hand something to the woman. Is this a pagan shakedown? No, it’s not his wallet, just a newspaper clipping.

The scene shifts quickly and we meet the “singing angel,” Lila, whose soprano solo leads into a sermon on “good and evil” by a preacher wearing – no lie – a white suit and black string tie, a la Colonel Sanders. (The preacher is played by the film’s director, Richard Blackburn.) His sermon to the all-female congregation gives some exposition on what exactly that gangster business had to do with a blonde teenager singing in church: the local newspaper has revealed that the cold-blooded killer is the father of the pretty songbird, who was taken to be raised by the church three years ago. And though just last night her father killed her mother, the gossipy church ladies in the front row need to be reminded that this sweet, innocent girl has done nothing – absolutely nothing – wrong.

Later that evening, as the preacher and young Lila sit at dinner, discussing their faith, she oversteps her bounds, gets excited, and gives her guardian a neck-hug. There’s an Oh no you didn’t! and he sends her to her room. After his defensive sermon about the girl’s perfection and his awkwardly angry response to an embrace, we have to wonder: is there sexual tension between these two?

Soon, Lila gets a letter from someone named Lemora (who is the woman in the cowl). The letter tells Lila that her father is sick and needs her; she must come very soon and come alone. Lila sneaks out of the house that night, stowing herself away in the back seat of a car, where she listens to two lovers laugh and jibe at her innocence and at her situation. When they stop to neck in the middle of a dirt road, Lila bolts and runs into town, witnesses its lascivious cruelty, and goes to catch the bus that the letter told her to take. This town is so rough that the creepy late-night ticket seller even has the audacity to offer her chocolate as he is telling her that the bus she asked for doesn’t exist.

But out in the alley, there sits her bus, just as Lemora’s letter said it would be. The driver, a googly-eyed wretch played by , narrates the dangers of their route as he weaves along the bumpy roads. The people out there in the stinking salt marshes have had some disease that turned them into . . . something awful. Soon, the bus is chased by a pack of the humanoid creatures who growl like dogs, and the driver explains that those are the really bad ones that have gone completely wild. (The creatures look like Frederick Douglass with leprosy.) The driver and passenger get away that time, but of course the bus breaks down, and the driver is attacked and overtaken by the beastly things. Lila jumps in the driver’s seat and coasts through a few bends in the road, but hits a tree— and here come the things! Right as we’re sure that Lila’s jig is up, the goons in black from the beginning of the movie appear to fend off the monsters!

Lila then finds herself alone, locked in a stone outbuilding. She is awakened a cackling, toothless old woman who brings a plate of food and scares her with a nursery rhyme. A day or more passes, and Lila goes a little stir crazy, her only interaction being with a small group of children who come to giggle at her through a barred window. However, the sweet Lila shifts gears into a necessary worldliness. When the old woman returns, the girl pushes her down and escapes! But she doesn’t get far, only into the crawl space of the big house nearby. And that’s when she overhears Lemora sucking her father’s blood.

When Lila comes out from under the house, Lemora is there waiting on her. At this point in the movie, any normal viewer is thinking, Why am I watching this? But walking away isn’t that easy. (As with all bad movies, there’s this hope that something cool might happen . . . if you just give it a little more time.) Lemora brings Lila into the house and has her change clothes, alluding to “a ceremony” that will happen later. For a naive young goodie-goodie, Lila reacts with unusual coolness to her bizarre surroundings, even when offered “spirits,” i.e. blood, in an awkward little gathering in the parlor with those giggling children. With grinding slowness, Lemora ushers Lila around the house, accomplishing little to nothing in each new scene.

However, Lila does encounter her father, the man she came to forgive and hopefully save, but he has become like one of the beastly things in the woods, and he scratches her up a little bit, before Lemora burns him with a torch, causing him to run off.

As Lemora prepares to make Lila her new . . . what do I call it? . . . girlfriend, lover, co-vampire person, Lila escapes out the front door, urged forward by a barrage of whispers coming from the portraits on the walls. Once she is out of Lemora’s house, Lila is unprotected and being chased by the pasty vampire goons in their Amish puritan garb and by the growling, misshapen victims of that unnamed diseased. After running through and climbing around what looks like the ruins of an old factory, Lila is cornered by Lemora, who speaks her spooky diatribe about destiny and everlasting life.

At the ceremony, the Amish vampire goons and the ugly beasties lock up, fighting to the death, as Lila hides under the stage. Just as Lila thinks she can escape, one of the beasties has survived— and it is her father! As he tries to reach for her, she kills him with a wooden stake, only to realize too late that he was trying to to embrace her. So sad . . .

After all that, Lemora finally bites Lila’s neck, and she does becomes a vampire. While all of that fussing and chasing and fighting was going on, the overzealous preacher had been riding around in his car, looking for his sweet Lila. Self-righteous loser that he is, not only does he not save the day, he is discovered, sleeping, by Lila. He is so happy and relieved to see her. The two embrace and kiss passionately, right before the now-evil Lila bites his neck! The joke is on you, young Colonel Sanders.

“Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural” fails on lots of levels. From its total-misses on Southern culture to its pitiful male lead, the flaws are striking. (This is one of those movies that’s so bad, it’s got a cult following.) As any kind of indication of what the early twentieth-century South might have been like— no. Just no. But I don’t think that the makers of “Lemora” were really going for that. The TCM Underground site explains:

They turn Pomona, California into a small southern town of the prohibition era with little more than carefully chosen locations, a few period cars, well-dressed sets and evocative costumes, and create an eerie, dislocated atmosphere deep in the woods, where ghouls prowl and prey upon anyone who wanders into the haunted forest.

It was more about the horror-movie stuff.

What might be more interesting than the film’s questionable link to the South or its now-revered awfulness is the fact that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ film board, once called the Legion of Decency, condemned the film. I hate to think that a group of Church leaders had nothing better to do in the mid-1970s than criticize a low-budget horror movie like this one. The world has bigger problems. As a Southerner, I’d tell anyone: Don’t get your ideas about the South from this movie. As a Catholic, I’d tell anyone: Don’t get your ideas about religion from this movie.

Clear enough? Good.

 

Filed under: Bible Belt, Catholicism, Film/Movies, Georgia, The Deep South