Foster Dickson's Blog, page 8

Dirty Boots: A Joyous and Inexplicably Necessary Thing

Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

For an avid reader with eclectic taste, working in a college library is a gift beyond measure. Having access to thousands of books whose publication dates span recent centuries as well as to magazines like Commonweal, Harper’s, The American Scholar, The Atlantic, and Boston Review makes it possible to enjoy a variety of texts and topics. In the last six months or so, I have checked out and read a large-format hardback of artist Joseph Heller’s Papermaking, philosopher Jacques Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy, a collection of writings by and about the Japanese poet Ryōkan called The Great Fool, and two single-author collections of shorter works: novelist Alice Walker’s We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For and Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. And then there are the databases! The New York Times and JSTOR— the latter was where I came across the two articles on collective memory that I referenced in a recent Dirty Boots column.

Reading, to me, is a joyous and inexplicably necessary thing. Though it can’t substitute for lived experience, reading is an intellectual exercise that augments and improves lived experience. Reading about sex is no substitute for having it, nor will reading about a drunken fistfight make the same impression as being in one. But reading DH Lawrence or Charles Bukowski can offer one a different perspective on those things. Pablo Neruda wrote in his “Ode to the Book” that “my poems / have not eaten poems”— but poetry was the medium through which he expressed this. Looking at it another way, Mark Twain is quoted famously as saying, “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” Reading might not be real life exactly, but I will never understand how or why people would deny themselves the wonderful gifts that can be found by reading. The ideas contained in great works of literature, religious texts, time-tested works of philosophy, the best journalism, well-researched academic articles, thoughtful science writing . . . those ideas cannot be obtained or procured through an everyday life of mundane tasks, interactions, and conversations that are seasoned mildly with personality conflicts, mass media, spectator sports, alcohol consumption, and periodic tourism.

Having been a longtime English Language Arts teacher, I can also share that psychologists and educators agree that reading is one of the best activities for cognitive development. It is like jogging or swimming, but for the mind. Reading involves a complex group of mental functions that include recognizing and interpretating symbols (letters and words), utilizing systems (grammar and page layout), translating verbal messages into mental images, and paying attention in a sustained way. Anyone who has ever seen children learn to read has witnessed the first two in the rawest form. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a novel, a short story, or even the lyrics to a song has probably done the third. Yet, that fourth one is not so easy. That one involves discipline and self-control, something that can only be attained through practice— but it is so worth it. People have asked me how I can read in a roomful of loud students or at one of my children’s soccer practices. Because I have been reading so intently for so long that I can give my full attention to words on a page in almost any environment. That ability to focus my attention and evade distractions has served me well in an era when meaningless distractions are everywhere.

Like an old friend, too, reading has carried me through difficult times in my life. As a boy whose asthma kept me indoors, I loved first the Golden Books and later The Hobbit. As a teenager who hadn’t found my place, I was captivated by The Stranger and Ballad of the Sad Café. For a span of months in the mid-1990s, after I had transferred to a commuter college with scant campus life, the college’s library tower and Montgomery’s downtown library became my regular haunts. They were open seven days a week, the books were free to access, and interruptions were rare. During that lonely time, I spent hours and hours scanning the spines in the 850s – the literature and literary criticism – to pull books that looked interesting, to read randomly. No assignments for class, no papers to write, no pressure to continue if I lost interest. Books gave me what the people around me couldn’t— or wouldn’t. Reading was no substitute for life, but it strengthened me for what life is.

So it makes me sad to see reading devalued and in decline. Since the 1983 Nation at Risk report, more than forty years ago, scholars and educators have been noting deficiencies and declines in everyday Americans’ practice of reading literature. One of the points that this report had as going in our favor was: “the​ ​natural​ ​abilities​ ​of​ ​the​ ​young​ ​that​ ​cry​ ​out​ ​to​ ​be​ ​developed​ ​and​ ​the undiminished​ ​concern​ ​of​ ​parents​ ​for​ ​the​ ​well-being​ ​of​ ​their​ ​children.” I agree about these, even today. Furthermore, the study’s authors wrote, “People​ ​are​ ​steadfast​ ​in​ ​their​ ​belief​ ​that​ ​education​ ​is​ ​the​ ​major​ ​foundation​ ​for the​ ​future​ ​strength​ ​of​ ​this​ ​country.” Again, agreed. But there is no way to become educated without reading, and beyond that, there is no way to become well-educated without reading well. That factor is what has been lost. Twenty years later, the National Endowment for the Arts did a similar study and titled it Reading At Risk. One of their findings in 2002 was: “Literature now competes with an enormous array of electronic media. While no single activity is responsible for the decline of reading, the cumulative presence and availability of these alternatives have increasingly drawn Americans away from reading.” Another finding was this:

In 1990, book buying constituted 5.7 percent of total recreation spending, while spending on audio, video, computers, and software was 6 percent. By 2002, electronic spending had soared to 24 percent, while spending on books declined slightly to 5.6 percent.

I turned sixteen in 1990, when Americans’ spending on books was almost equal to spending on electronics, videos, and music combined. By the time I was approaching thirty, spending on electronics alone had it over books by a margin of four-to-one. Mine might have been the last generation – Generation X – to regard reading print books as one of the best and most viable ways to understand life, people, and the world.

Personally, I don’t see any way to turn this around. The two generations younger than mine do not believe, generally speaking, that black letters on a white page can be as exciting as the features of the digitized media that they want, purchase, and consume. The difference, though, is not in the object, the format, or even the medium itself. The difference is this: books allow readers to use their own imagination to conjure up the scenes as they will, while screen media makes many of the creative and intellectual choices in advance. To make this clear, it is the difference between engaging in fully absorbed ideation versus being provided with visual and auditory stimuli. I love movies as much or more than most people, and I still have to say it: the depth of experience involved in reading yields so much more.

Here, at the beginning of May, we have just left the vigorous hyper-defensiveness of National Poetry Month, and are thus approaching the end of another school year, when a handful of extraordinarily diligent moms will already be trying to coax their exhausted children into choosing which books to order from those dreaded summer reading lists. Both are necessary in this modern world, because reading is on the decline. Yet, why do these programs fall short of their goals, to instill a love of reading and literature in the wider community? Because they employ one of the worst persuasion tactics known to mankind: if we force it on them, they’ll realize that it’s actually good. (Behaviorist psychology has its limits.) I feel fortunate to have been raised in a world before digital media had taken, when books and reading were more important. This situation only reinforces my insistence that, just because things are changing, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re improving.

 

Southern Movie 68: “Murder in Coweta County” (1983)

The made-for-TV movie Murder in Coweta County is based on a true crime book of the same title, written by Margaret Anne Barnes. Set in 1948 in rural western Georgia – unlike Maycomb or Yoknapatawpha, Coweta County is a real place – the film dramatizes a murder case that involved a wealthy local landowner, the stubborn sheriff of an adjacent county, and an eccentric fortuneteller. Directed by a longtime TV director, the film’s cast is led by country singer Johnny Cash, and in a very unusual role reversal, Andy Griffith plays the bad guy.

Murder in Coweta County opens with a black screen and a two-paragraph text flows in from the bottom. We find out that we are watching a story set in 1948 and that its subject is “The Kingdom,” a petty empire run by a corrupt man who was above the law. After being given a moment to read this, we are brought to a rural field lined by trees. The first thing we see is a pistol tucked into the waist of a man’s pants. Then we meet John Wallace (Andy Griffith). He is standing beside an old pickup, and two men come out of the woods, loading boxes into the bed then covering them with burlap. They give him cash, which he counts. Just then, another car comes up, and the local sheriff Hardy Collier gets out. We see others in the car, but they stay put. We expect that Wallace and the two men might be in trouble – they are trafficking in moonshine, of course – but Collier greets Wallace casually, looks in the truck, and advises the drivers which route to take to avoid being caught. Wallace never shows any sign that the sheriff is a threat, and from this scene, we also know that he isn’t. Over in the car, the sheriff has brought a black man who they have caught making moonshine as well. The man is frightened at what will happen to him, and we see Wallace put a gun to his head then slam his hands in the heavy car door before the scene ends.

While the opening credits roll, we see the choir of a country church singing, then John Wallace and Hardy Collier are coming up the road in the sheriff’s car. Wallace is dropped off in front of the church, which has just let out, and he starts smiling and glad-handing. Here, we get another look at what a scoundrel this guy really is: skipping church to sell moonshine, then proudly handing over his dirty money to the preacher to buy new pews!

Later, in the backwoods, two black men are working at a still, making moonshine. Just then a young white man named Wilson Turner startles them and laughs as he walks up. He is proud because he has been running moonshine on the side, and the other two warn him against such a bad idea. Turner is one of Wallace’s sharecroppers, and he is making extra money to support a wife and child. His mood is jovial, then John Wallace appears. At first, Wallace jokes about having seen the revenuer’s car turned over in ditch, knowing it was Turner who he was chasing, then his tone changes. He wants Turner’s money, since Turner didn’t get approval first. Turner pleads that he needs the money for his wife and child, so Wallace hits him, throws him on the ground, and takes the money. He tells Turner that he has gotten greedy and that he should leave Wallace’s land. Turner protests that he has crops in the field, but Wallace replies that it is his field. Wilson Turner has to go.

Next we see Turner, he is packing up his truck in front of an old tin-roof shack, while his sad-faced wife holds their young child nearby. Turner walks to the field and looks out at it. He has an idea. Come nightfall, he steals one of Wallace’s cows as repayment for the money that was taken. Too bad for him, though, he is soon arrested in an adjacent county as he is unloading the cow from his truck.

This begins the ordeal that will result in Wilson Turner’s death. His immediate concern on being arrested is that he will be returned to Meriwether County, where John Wallace will be able to get to him. Well, that’s exactly what happens. He is awakened in his cell to find out that he is being transferred, and John Wallace is there at the cell door with the officers. In that second jail, in Meriwether, he first begs the woman who cooks in the jail to call his wife, then he hollers out the window a woman walking by on the sidewalk to get her to notify his wife. The first woman denies his request, and the second woman ignores it. Soon, the woman working in the jail just comes and tells him that he is free, that she was instructed to let him out at noon. So, he can leave. Turner is frightened by this strange turn of events, but chooses to walk through the open door.

Outside, Turner’s truck is waiting, but he finds that it is out of gas. With no choice, he heads for a gas station, only to find that John Wallace and three other men are waiting for him there. He quickly realizes that this is an ambush and tries to get away. Of course, they chase him. Down rural two-lane roads, they speed past a gang of convicts doing road work – this will become important later – and over a bridge with a sign that reads “Coweta County.” This will also become important, but soon. Wilson Turner runs out of gas and barrels into the large dirt parking lot of the Sunset Tourist Camp. There, Wallace and his goons accost Turner, and during the struggle, Wallace pistol-whips him so hard that the gun goes off. He does this right in front the people who have come out of the cafe to see what is going on.

And it is these witnesses who call the law, and we meet Sheriff Lamar Potts (Johnny Cash), who is sitting in a town-square cafe with his deputy. He gets word about the attack and kidnapping, and they speed away to investigate. Potts hears the details of how the man was hit in the head and how the gun went off. A deputy then tells Potts that they got a partial license plate on the tan four-door that carried Turner away and that they ran Turner’s license plate to figure out his identity. All of the signs point back to John Wallace.

As the investigation continues, Potts finds out who at least one of the men was – Herring Sevill – and that he was involved another murder over a card game. John Wallace fixed those charges for him. Over in Meriwether County, Potts and his deputy talk to Sheriff Collier, who provides an alibi for Wallace and who says that Wallace is out of town on business. Potts assures him, however, that he has jurisdiction, since possible-murder took place in Coweta County, and thus he will not be deterred. Collier is to bring Wallace and Sevill to Coweta County the next morning. Seeking to investigate further, Potts goes to a nearby store, where a local woman would have been in position to see the events from her doorway. Yet, she repels Potts resentfully and insists that John Wallace is a fine, upstanding man.

At this point, Sheriff Collier knows that he has to warn Wallace. He rides out to a field, where Wallace has two black men helping him remove a tree. (This is the first of two keenly un-Southern scenes where men do heavy work while a mule just stands there.) Wallace is unabated, telling his friend/accomplice that Wilson Turner had to be killed; otherwise, every other sharecropper would be stealing property, too. He says that Potts ought to understand that. But Collier explains that Potts doesn’t see it that way. Wallace seems genuinely confused now, and Collier continues. He tells the story of a Potts tracking a black man, who killed his wife, all the way to Kansas. The way Collier puts it, If Potts can find that guy all the way out in Kansas, then he can certainly find Turner’s body nearby.

So John Wallace decides to visit the fortuneteller Mayhayley Lancaster under the cover of darkness. He arrives, driven by Herring Sevill, to the woman’s cabin, which is guarded by numerous unruly dogs. She lets him in to her dim shack, where her strange sister is giggling manically under the bedclothes. For a fee, Mayhayley will look into the fire to see the future. Wallace wants to know whether Potts will bring Turner’s body, and she tells him in half-riddles what he does not want to hear. Wallace then storms out and, in the car, tells Sevill, “He can’t find the body if there ain’t no body.”

Now, two things will go on at the same time, and the scenes will cut back and forth. Potts conducts his search, starting with Wallace’s house, while Wallace destroys the evidence of his crime. Potts and his men drive out of Wallace’s home down a long red-dirt road, but only his wife is home. She is very civil and ladylike, allowing them to search the house, while she waits. But Wallace is not there. She adds in a vague way that John Wallace has another woman that she sometimes stays with. But he’s not with a woman on that particular day. Out in the woods, Wallace has the same two black men from the still earlier, and they are looking for an abandoned well. It is where Wilson Turner’s body has been hidden. They throw a grappling hook down in the well, hook the body, and pull him out. (This is the second strange scene with a mule. Wallace’s brings a mule with them, walks it through thick woods, then he has the men pull the rope while the mule just stands there.) The two helpers are horrified, but Wallace instructs them to tie him to a pole, which they will hoist onto their shoulders. Wallace will make them carry Turner’s body through the woods to another location. They do this while Potts and his men are questioning Turner’s family, who fear for their safety. Meanwhile, John Wallace and his reluctant helpers burn Turner’s body and methodically put his ashes in a nearby stream.

By this time, Murder in Coweta County is near its halfway mark, and Sheriff Potts is beginning to tighten his grip on John Wallace. Sheriff Collier shows up in the morning with Wallace and Sevill, and Wallace is all smiles, sure he will beat the rap. But Potts has his bloody clothes from searching the Wallace home, and the jacket has blood down the back where he has thrown a body over his shoulder. Wallace thought he was coming in to laugh off the charges and go home, but now he and his accomplice are under arrest. Moreover, because the killers had the audacity to show up in the car they drove when they committed the crime, Potts has that, too. The only thing to do now is assemble a great big posse to go out and find the body of Wilson Turner.

They good guys search high and low, in fields and in woods, asking questions of people who may know something. Potts even visits Mayhayley Lancaster to ask her about whether John Wallace came to see her and wanting answers. The big break comes with the arrest of another accomplice, who is a member of Wallace’s family. He has his whole family guarding his front door, but Potts assures them that he will kill at least one of them if they try to act. Once three of them are in custody, the various things that each has said begin to work against all of them. In the jail, Sheriff Potts stands in front of their cells to explain how the evidence and their own statements have aid him in understanding Wilson Turner’s murder.

The only thing remaining is to find the body. With the help of a cagey old revenuer and tracker who has wanted to bust Wallace for years, a large posse searches high and low. While this search is going on, Potts finds himself alone in the woods and is met by spooky backwoods character who wants to share information. The man is wary of talking, since he knows that it can get him killed. But he has found Potts in an isolated location, where no one will know he did, so he spills the beans. The man points Potts to the two black men he is looking for, the ones at the still, the ones who helped to move the body, the ones who helped burn up the body and dispose of it in the stream.

With their help, Potts unravels Wallace’s scheme. Before long, Potts finds the two men, and together they reveal the site where the body was destroyed. And there is still evidence: ashes and bone shards. The final nails in the coffin for John Wallace come when the surly jail cook tells Potts about the instructions to let Turner out of jail and when the heart attack-prone Sheriff Collier is cornered in his office. The only thing left is a trial.

And the whole town comes out for the trial! The old guys who play dominoes on the sidewalk are there, and Mayhayley Lancaster has come to testify. The gallery is packed. We know that Wallace is pinned down when he two accomplices refuse to testify in his defense. Their lawyers stand and announce their intention to stay in the gallery and stay silent. John Wallace’s last hope is to use his charisma and his standing in the community to weave an elaborate tale about how he isn’t guilty, though the facts might indicate that he is. But it doesn’t work. He is found guilty and sentenced to death.

Though the first ninety-percent of the movie are pretty trite and predictable, the final minutes make this Southern movie and its story more interesting. John Wallace e sits in a jail cell awaiting the electric chair, but he is all smiles. He isn’t worried, because they just don’t give white men the chair. He is just waiting on a pardon from the governor, when he will go home and resume his life . . . but the pardon doesn’t come. A shocked John Wallace’s face is covered with the cloth hood, and he is electrocuted. As the film closes out, we learn that Hardy Collier, the sheriff who saw these dark days coming for “The Empire,” died of a heart attack before his trial could happen.

Though I did not watch this movie when I was a boy in the 1980s, I had heard about the story prior to watching it as an adult. In the early 2000s, I was working at NewSouth Books during the time we published Dot Moore’s Oracle of the Ages, which tells the story of Mayhayley Lancaster, played here by June Carter Cash. Lancaster was a character no one could make up, if she hadn’t been real: a one-eyed woman who was a fortuneteller, a lawyer, a midwife, probably a bookie, and even a candidate for state legislature. June Carter Cash does a good job in her role, but I also have a hard time believing that anyone could accurately convey a person so strange and formidable. One significant problem with the portrayal is that the film’s description notes a one-eyed fortuneteller but June Carter Cash, even in somewhat ghastly make up, clearly has two eyes.

As a document of the South, the movie sticks to the facts pretty well, though its have a few moments when a Southerner would notice something and go, Huh? One thing is the way that Johnny Cash’s character speeds into downtown and burns rubber into and out of parking spots. Small  town Southerners would definitely not care for that kind of driving in an area where so many people are walking. The story is also a bit stranger and more colorful than this milquetoast TV movie allows for. So,for those who may be interested in the real story, Barnes’ book is still available, in both used and new copies. An online search will even turn up some results, including Georgia State University’s archives with an Atlanta Journal-Constitution photo of the real John Wallace and Lamar Potts walking into the courtroom.

The 2024 Open Submissions Period for “Nobody’s Home”

Starting today and ending June 15, I will be reading and considering submissions of creative nonfiction to expand the Nobody’s Home anthology. All submitting writers should read the guidelines thoroughly, then send a query and wait for a response about whether to send the work. I am particularly interested in works about or set in the states of Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Texas, as they are currently underrepresented in the anthology. Works accepted during this time will be published in August 2024.

This year’s Open Submissions Period is the sixth for Nobody’s Home. In the project’s inaugural year, the first three Open Submissions Periods were held in the latter half of 2020 and the first half of 2021. Subsequently, in 2022 and 2023, unsolicited submissions were read in the spring, with accepted works published each summer. Invitation-only submissions periods have been held in the fall of those two recent years.

Submissions of reviews and interviews will continue to be accepted during this time. Again, anyone considering a submission should read the guidelines thoroughly before sending a query.

Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is an online anthology of nonfiction works about beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture over the last fifty years, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The project, which was created in 2020, collects personal essays, memoirs, short articles, opinion pieces, and contemplative works about the ideas, experiences, and assumptions that have shaped life below the old Mason-Dixon Line since 1970. Today, Nobody’s Home features more than fifty essays and offers secondary-education lesson plans for English and Social Studies classrooms, suggestions for documentaries, and reviews of books, as well as Groundwork, my editor’s blog.

 

Dirty Boots: Tuskegee

Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Though I have no personal ties there, Tuskegee, Alabama is a particularly interesting place to me. I’ve been there enough to know my way around pretty well but don’t really know anyone who lives there. Perhaps it’s the fact that its quiet presence in everyday Alabama belies a significance that is sorely under-appreciated.

Tuskegee, which is the seat of Macon County, has just under 9,000 people living there today. Like many small Southern towns, its population is decreasing, and blight shows evidence of its past vibrancy. More than 12,000 people lived there in 1990, but the population has dropped by more than 25% in that last thirty years. Demographically, the city has a black-majority of about 90%, a majority that has grown in modern times. (In 1960, the “non-white” population of Macon County was 83.5%.) Macon County is also the state’s thirteenth lowest-earning county, according to an al.com story from October 2023, with a median household income that is “31.9% below state average, 45.5% below national average.” Among al.com’s statistics is this startling figure: one-fifth of households bring in $15,000 or less per year, which ranks Macon County 158th nationally. (There are 3,143 counties in the US, so Macon is in the lowest 5% for this category.)

Looking at Tuskegee historically rather than demographically or economically, this locale has also provided the setting for a handful of events that have deeply affected our nation. Of course, Tuskegee University is a prime factor in that. Founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute-now-University has long augmented this small rural community on the eastern end of the Alabama Black Belt with an outsized proportion of educated and politically astute professionals. Among them was Charles Gomillion whose voting-rights lawsuit changed American politics in 1960. Then, in 1964, the school desegregation case Lee v. Macon County Board of Education changed public education in Alabama forever. This area was also the home base of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, yet on a darker note, the 1972 exposure of the decades-long Tuskegee Syphilis Study shined a light on how a federal government program had mistreated and dehumanized African-American men.  If it were possible to tally up the importance of just Booker T. Washington, the Tuskegee Airmen, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it would be obvious what this out-of-the-way place means to America.

So, looking deeper into its demographic backstory seems worthy, and that exploration tells us about something more complicated. According to the 1950 census, Tuskegee’s population grew by 73.7% between 1940 and 1950 (from 3,937 to 6,840) while Macon County as a whole grew by 11% (from 27,654 to 30,696). This was the period of World War II, when Moten Field became the home of the Tuskegee Airmen. A decade later, the 1960 Census shows Macon County with a 12.6% decrease in population to 26,717, a number below the 1940 figure— probably caused by the end of the military’s large-scale mobilization. Yet, the 1970 census elucidates a different situation in Tuskegee. From 1950 to 1960, the city grew by 8% (to 7,240) then experienced a big surge between 1960 and 1970, growing by 52% to just over 11,000. Meanwhile, the county’s rural population declined. From 1970 to 1980, that trend continued as the city’s population grew by 21%, while the rural population in the county went down by another 3%. To bookend to this series of decennial statistics, Tuskegee’s population peaked at over 12,000 in the 1990 census, but has experienced net losses since. Considering eight decades instead of just four, we see that the population of Tuskegee tripled between 1940 and 1990— from about 4,000 to over 12,000. Today the figure is 8,800, which is midway between those two. What we are seeing may not be a place that is declining so much as a place that is deflating.

Within that modern history, several other events, factors, and people are remarkable albeit lesser-known. One among them was the attempted abolishment of Macon County in 1957. It seems that, when black political power was increasing as the movement picked up speed, one solution among white leaders was to dissipate voter strength by eliminating Macon County to scatter its land (and its black voters) among adjacent counties. Later, in the early to mid-1960s, the decline in white supremacist power was showcased within a series of articles in The New Yorker, when writer Bernard Taper visited Tuskegee amid the deepest turmoil of the movement. Here, Taper gave readers a street-level view of how a way of life was crumbling under the weight of social and political change. After the movement, there was the political career of Thomas Reed, who was elected to the state legislature in 1970, thus becoming one of the first black elected officials in Alabama since Reconstruction. In 1988, Reed got people’s attention when he attempted to climb the state capitol dome to remove the Confederate flag himself. Last but certainly not least, there is the saga of the Victoryland in the tiny community of Shorter. Though gambling is generally illegal in Alabama, this dog track and casino opened in 1983, operating with a special license, but was a constant source of controversy into the 2020s. Considering that anyone who worked or played there did so voluntarily, the most glaring problem with its repeated and mostly temporary closures was the negative effect on funding that it provided for Macon County’s cash-strapped schools.

Among all of these changes, though, the legacy of Booker T. Washington remains. Wikipedia lists sixteen schools currently operating in the US that are named for him, and I can’t imagine how many middle and high school teachers around the nation assign his autobiography Up from Slavery each year. The HBCU that he founded operates today behind a heavy fence that separates much of the campus from the blight outside of it. Just over 2,000 undergraduates and about 500 grad students are enrolled these days. Just as Washington himself did, three-quarters come from out of state. There is also the local Booker T. Washington High School, which people call “BTW Tuskegee” since there’s one in Montgomery, too. Recently, my son’s baseball team was playing their team, and the game was held at the university’s . . . you guessed it: Washington Field— except this time, the namesake was Booker T.’s brother James! (He started the university’s baseball team in 1892.)

Heading to that ball game, I left I-85 and took Highway 49, then turned toward town on the slightly hilly, generally nondescript route, which is lined by small homes and cow fields. For some reason, one of the maps apps marked the baseball field as being in the middle of the campus, so I (and several other parents in their cars) ended up taking an accidental tour of the campus via its hilly and winding streets. I asked for directions from two students who were looking at their smart phones in the back of a pickup with its hood lifted. They helped me to find my way back to the security gate, where the now-disgruntled guard who had waved me in casually seemed more concerned about my presence. The baseball field was across the road, he told me, and moreover, he couldn’t imagine why I had been led onto campus. After leaving his gate, I missed my left turn to go to the field and had to loop back around in the parking lot of . . . you guessed it: Booker T. Washington’s historic home, The Oaks.

Two of the best things about small towns in Alabama’s Black Belt are that important history is around every corner and that the people rally together to make the best of what they have. A change of venue for the baseball game – caused by a rain-soaked field at the high school – meant that BTW Tuskegee’s players had to find rides across town, and their coach was striding up and down the hill with a clipboard, trying to gather his scattered players as they arrived one-by-one. Another of the team’s coaches was a woman, who we were told was a school administrator. More vocal than the male coach, she yelled at their pitcher, “Bend your back and throw strikes!” and at their first baseman, “Why are you standing behind the runner!?” It is unusual to see a woman coaching a boys’ baseball team, but it was clear that her determined presence brought strength and support. The teams were slated for a double header that afternoon but only played one, because the university’s field had no lights.

What also drew my attention to Tuskegee this spring is the new Apple TV mini-series Masters of the Air. These periodic portrayals of those famed fighters draw viewers to the screen every couple of years. According to IMDb, there have been more than a dozen movies and documentaries about the Tuskegee Airmen, most made in the 21st century. Among them are a 1995 TV movie that stars Laurence Fishburne and 2012’s Red Wings. I hope that a few among Apple TV’s viewers will take a little extra time with the history after enjoying the handsome actors and the special effects. Certainly, the Airmen are symbols of great achievement and are role models for many, as is Booker T. Washington, but the context for their greatness is worthy of attention, too. Folks can watch the movies and name the buildings and read the books that keep these stories alive, but I hope that people will not forget that Tuskegee is a real place, nor that it should benefit more substantially from its heritage. This small town, which is struggling today, has given our nation educators, freedom fighters, and other examples of facing hardship with resilience. Speaking only for myself, I’d like to see the city and its people get more in return than lip service.

 

Throwback Thursday: The Haiku Year, 2004

In honor of National Poetry Month

Though the first edition of The Haiku Year was published in 1998, I didn’t know about it until the second edition came out in April 2004— twenty years ago this month. Created by writer, musician, etc. , who explains its roots in his foreword, The Haiku Year combined the concept of daily writing practice with the desire of some friends to stay in touch. The book’s page on Gilroy’s website explains:

This project was never intended to be a book. It started amidst an REM/Grant Lee Buffalo tour as a year-long creative practice between a group of friends. We all committed to snail-mailing each other one haiku a week for a year, no matter where we were. 

Though I didn’t know Gilroy’s name before coming across this book, other contributors’ names I did. As an ’80s / ’90s kid, I knew Michael Stipe and Grant Lee Phillips through their music. And then there’s Steve Earle, who wrote an introduction; his Transcendental Blues had fallen into my hands a few years before the book did. Of course, the publisher Soft Skull Press was one I had known about via Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth. This eclectic array would have been reason enough to pay attention . . . 

Yet, by the time I encountered The Haiku Year, I had been writing these compact little poems for years.  The form was a throwback to our elementary school days: five, seven, five, and all about Nature. (Steve Earle actually mentions that in his introduction.) It also seemed that the form lived on in random manifestations, like when some teenage friend would dash one off out of the blue. In college in the ’90s, when I started reading the Beat writers – both Earle and Gilroy mention them, too – I feel like some vague predilection took root and became actual practice. Later, in 2003, when I started teaching creative writing, I quickly added a daily haiku to our classwork. (That tradition held for years, and we published some of the better ones on a homemade website called hy-coo.com.) So, by the time that second edition came out in April 2004, me and haiku had been traveling companions for some time—so much so that my wife had a little table at my thirtieth birthday, later in 2004, where people could write them for me for a change!

By now, in 2024, I’ve probably been scribbling down haiku for somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years, and having this little volume has played a role in how I’ve regarded what is now a longtime practice. I still listen to these musicians, and I still pull out my copy of the book and thumb through it sometimes. Among the poems, there are pages with seemingly random images interspersed, while the contributors’ names are relegated to an index in the back. My favorite, which I can’t attribute using the index, is still: “you didn’t know / you liked it / ’til I did it.” There are some whose sentiment transcends the decades, like “While you talk / about yourself / I’ll daydream.” Then again, one of the more dated ones reads, “Midwesterners / intimidated by / ten variations of coffee.” Overall, they’re a mixed bag, but are well worth a Throwback Thursday mention, here on this twentieth anniversary.

Read more: Poetry

Reading: “Gospel of Life” by Pope John Paul II

The Gospel of Life:
The Encyclical Letter on Abortion, Euthanasia, and
the Death Penalty in Today’s World
by (now-Saint) Pope John Paul II

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I’m not a typical Catholic (if there is such a thing). I didn’t grow up in the faith, but eased in after marrying into it in my 20s then converting in my late 30s. Because I don’t have a lifetime of experience or a Catholic education to rely on, I fall back on what I do have – reading – when I want to better understand something about the faith. And it is in that spirit that I picked up a copy of The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) from 1995. Since the Dobbs decision – even before it – these issues, especially abortion, have been prevalent in the public sphere, while remaining a familiar refrain in homilies. It seemed a worthy endeavor to find out what this encyclical contains.

The Gospel of Life is organized into four chapters. The first discusses “Present Day Threats to Human Life,” the second “The Christian Message Concerning Life,” and the third “God’s Holy Law.” It ends with a call “For a New Culture of Human Life.” Though one might assume that the “threat” named here is primarily abortion – it is there in the text – but the opening chapter also contains criticisms of guns, war, environmental destruction— aspects of what the late pope calls a “veritable culture of death” that has a “self-centered concept of freedom,” which hampers “equal personal dignity” for all. Regarding abortion and euthanasia, criticisms allude to the notion that having a child takes away one’s ability to lead the best life, as well as the notion that disabled or terminally ill people are burdens from which no good can come. By contrast, the pope urges his readers to regard parenting or care-giving as opportunities to serve, to love, and to respect the humanity of others.

Thus, in chapter two, he writes, “Faced with the contradictions of life, faith is challenged to respond.” Combining reason with scripture, the text carries the reader forward into a defense of the idea that “Life is always a good.” This chapter is difficult to summarize, because it has many working parts. Points 29 through 51 lay down his philosophical basis, which is that life is a gift from God, the Bible says so, and reason confirms it. Thus, life should be preserved or protected in (almost) all situations.

In the third chapter, the text deals more concretely with the issues named in the subtitle. Pope John Paul II gives his answer to the difficult question of the death penalty by conceding that it is sometimes necessary to end the life of a person who poses a grave threat to society. This is the only point in the encyclical when the pope claims that a life could be ended intentionally for moral reasons. (Personally, I disagree.) Yet, he also acknowledges that with today’s modern prisons, that solution is rarely necessary. (With this, I do agree.) As one would assume, the bulk of his energy is spent on defending unborn children. Third, he argues against suicide and the practice of euthanasia, countering that suffering can have redemptive qualities for both the cared-for person and the caregiver. The chapter ends with an argument against the notion that political and governmental endorsement of any of these practices cannot be based majority-rule; falling back on that, he writes, would essentially mean that the people, not God, decide who lives and who dies.

After a presentation of his ideas on what the problems are, the final chapter devotes itself to solutions. Readers familiar with modern Catholicism will find what they expect: have faith, engage in service, build strong families, be active in protecting life. We read about the duty of both individuals and society, as well as the need for “a contemplative outlook” to “see life in its deeper meaning, who grasp its utter gratuitousness, its beauty and its invitation to freedom and responsibility.” Nearing the end, in point 85, he writes:

In celebrating the Gospel of Life, we also need to appreciate and make good use of the wealth of of gestures and symbols present in the traditions and customs of different cultures and peoples. There are special times and ways in which the peoples of different nations and cultures express joy for a newborn life, respect for and protection of individual human lives, care for the suffering or the needy, closeness to the elderly and the dying, participation in the sorrow of those who mourn, and hope and sire for immortality.

How will this happen? Through providing good education to all people, through responsible decision-making by civil leaders, through achieving work-life balance, through enabling societal structures and expectations that respect people in ways that go beyond their utility.

One good thing about reading English translations of papal encyclicals is that they are generally pretty accessible in terms of word choice and style. It’s not like trying to dive into theology or hermeneutics, where the discourse is dense and heavy. These are meant, it seems, to be read and understood by people with a reasonable education level. (I learned that when I read Laudato Si back in 2015.) The main difficulty about reading them is that, lacking narrative and having few concrete details, they get kind of boring and repetitive by the end.

What I was particularly glad to read in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical was his condemnation of cultural creeds that are built on the business community’s ethos of efficiency and productivity. He has real criticism for a personal value system that says that the best life is one that packs in everything it can, earns and spends as much as possible, where not one moment is left open for rest or contemplation. I agree with him that too many people regard their own lives, even their friends, children, and parents, in the way that a business owner would regard a business— every aspect must be useful and efficient, and it all must center on peak earning potential for me. It’s no way to live, collecting people and experiences like a savings account. And when that business-like creed is the basis of a life philosophy, it certainly is easy to decry or discard anything that seems inconvenient or that seems not to have practical use.

Where the late pope and I disagree are the real-world applications. As the head of the global Church, one of John Paul II’s goals was for governmental leaders to embrace Catholic positions and codify laws and statutes that reflect those values, while I, as an ordinary American Catholic, understand that the freedom to practice my faith is dependent on my country’s religious pluralism and toleration. As far as I’m concerned, religion and politics do overlap but should not merge. When one group starts turning its religious creeds into laws, which require criminal penalties to enforce, everyone is in deep trouble. I agree that all people should value life, but we really, really don’t want to open the political can-of-worms that would be necessary to define these matters in worldly legal terms. Love of humanity and respect for human dignity can and should be embraced, but they can’t be legislated, because they are matters of faith and conscience and should be lived as such.

Read More:Henry Nouwen’s The Prodigal Son Pope Francis’s Laudato Si Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness, Part One, Parts Two and Three

Congratulations to the Winners of the Fitzgerald Museum’s Literary Contest: “The Best Postman in the World”

Congratulations to this year’s winners and honorable mentions in the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum’s sixth annual Literary Contest!

Grades 9 – 10:
Chelsea Zhu, “Custom Postcard, Undelivered”

Grades 9 – 10 Honorable Mention:
Claire Guo, “For the Moon”

Grades 11 – 12:
Ziyi Yan, “Becoming a Magician”

Grades 11 – 12 Honorable Mention:
Bella Rotker, “Elegy for the fish my brother buried at the top of Slayter Hill”

Undergraduate:
Grace Yu, “Immigration”

Undergraduate Honorable Mention:
Gracelyn Mitchell, “Reveries of Dried Ink”

The theme for 2023 – 2024 was “The Best Postman in the World” to honor the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable. The Fitzgeralds’ literary and artistic works from the 1920s and 1930s are still regarded as groundbreaking, and The Fitzgerald Museum is pleased to honor these young writers as daring and revolutionary writers of their generation. Thank you to Jim Hilgartner for judging the high school entries and to Zestlan Simmons for judging the undergraduate category.

About the two high school winners, judge Jim Hilgartner had these remarks:

Chelsea Zhu’s poem “Custom Postcard, Undelivered” takes First Place in the Grade 9-10 group. It is, at every turn, clear, precise, and intensely relevant, with fresh and surprising juxtapositions, like the one that opens the poem (“You told me you forgot whether the Dogwood tree in the front / yard or my pronunciation of “Lún” made you sneeze in April”) and a deconstructive approach to both the assigned theme (ambition) and the hard emotional truths that parental ambition sometimes imposes on the children in immigrant families. The poem’s final juxtaposition, parental expectations vs. the child’s “falling behind, like [she] didn’t care about responsibility” is, absolutely, revolutionary. The poem’s final words, “In another poem, I will be enough” left me breathless.   

Ziyi Yan’s poem “Becoming a Magician” takes first place in the Grade 11-12 group.  Revolutionary at its core, this poem turns the ambition to survive a hard breakup into a triumphant victory. By naming the ex, breaking the name down into component syllables, then redefining the ex in terms of these new syllables, the speaker realizes that they have taken the ex’s power for themself. In the end, the speaker has become the magician, and has made the ex “melt . . . like rice paper. . . .” Like a magic act, the poem abounds with showmanship and transformations. Fundamentally innovative, dependent on wordplay and on linguistic one-upsmanship, the poem invites us to wonder whether it will slip and tumble, letting us see the card up the sleeve, the false bottom in the rabbit hat. But it doesn’t, and the tension builds. The images feel at once incongruous and inevitable, and the stakes just keep getting higher. When the speaker finally says, “I am nothing if not my own / magician,” we know they are right. And when they conclude, “even you / cannot touch me” we want to stand up and clap.

About the undergraduate winner Grace Yu, judge Zestlan Simmons had these remarks:

The winning entry, “Immigration,” adeptly reflects the theme of ambition and pursuit of a goal by juxtaposing phrases from a rule with images of adversity from the accompanying poem. The poem intricately navigates through the lines of the law, revealing the speaker’s determination to excel despite formidable obstacles. It skillfully weaves together Korean symbols, historical events, and personal anecdotes, resulting in a multifaceted and innovative form and style. This clever approach effectively conveys the speaker’s dynamic tenacity and hope, emblematic of the immigrant experience.

In its six years, the contest, which is open to high school students and college undergraduates, has received submissions from around the United States and from Europe and Asia. This year’s honorees attend schools and colleges in Michigan, Maryland, California, Connecticut, Alabama, and Illinois. The three grade-level winners will receive a monetary prize, and all honorees will have their works on the Fitzgerald Museum’s website.

This year was the fourth year for the Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Young Writers Award. Montgomery, Alabama native Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was daring and revolutionary in her life, art, and writing, and award that bears her name seeks to identify and honor Alabama’s high school students who share her talent and spirit. This year’s judging yielded no recipient for the award.

For more information about the Zelda Award, visit the Fitzgerald Museum website. Guidelines for next year’s contest will be posted on the museum’s website in August 2024.

For information on the winners of past years’ contests, click the year:
2019  •  2020  •  2021  •  2022  •  2023

Dirty Boots: Who Knows . . .

Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

I have long told students and would gladly tell anyone else, You don’t know what you don’t know until you find out that you don’t know. Often we don’t even realize, in various situations, that there is more to know. And so we go on with our decision-making, presuming that we’ve got all we need to make a solid assessment. Epistemologically, though, it is one thing to be aware of not having all the facts, but it is something else entirely to proceed – even unwittingly – under the incorrect assumption that all relevant facts are in-hand. That’s when it gets easy to err in judgment— to think we know everything, when we don’t.

This conundrum garnered my attention recently when I was reading a journal article titled “Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks.” In it, social psychologist Barry Schwartz asks why this Civil Rights icon became über-famous and mega-symbolic, while so many others now occupy a murkier space in the public conception of our history. It’s a good question: why is Rosa Parks remembered so widely, but someone like Aurelia Browder not so much? His explanation says that our brains only have the desire to remember a scant few things within a given area of life, so unless someone is a scholar or is personally connected to a certain subject, the brain will probably remember one or two facts – or people – and be satisfied with that. A problem arises, though: to make good decisions, we often need a base of knowledge that exceeds a few vague (and possibly misremembered) factoids.

Meanwhile, the collective memory is ever-evolving via our experiences, observations, conversations, interactions, and decisions. The often-remembered things are mentioned or discussed more often, while the lesser-known naturally appear less. This latter group then falls away from public discourse and ends up clinging to longevity within textbooks, museum exhibits, archives, academic journals, or family photo collections. These resources with limited audiences result in limited exposure for the mass of people, and because they exist out of view, rarified conversations about them can lead to the idea that their obscurity equates to “silence.”

So . . . while some may assume that “silence is often tightly coupled with forgetting and talk with memory,” it’s not necessarily that simple. A 2010 Social Forces article titled “Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting” tells us this, which we certainly know: “absence and silence have often resulted in protest by groups who have shared the assumption that recollection is impossible without talk and representation.” These protests result from “distortions in what had hitherto been perceived as the truth about the past as well as to processes through which people and events were excluded and forgotten from collective memory.” But there’s even more to it . . . Silence is not simply “the complete absence of talk, ritual or practice.” Just because it’s quiet doesn’t mean that nothing is happening.

Silences can be useful or meaningful themselves when it comes to our narratives— as we each decide when, where, and around whom to discuss certain aspects of our lives or beliefs.  The processes of crafting narratives and making meaning necessarily involve the exclusion of some things, and part of that exclusion is deciding not only who gets to participate in crafting a narrative but also in who gets to receive it. Put simply, there are some things that I (or you) don’t know because the people who do know make sure that I (or you) don’t know. And that practice doesn’t just go one or two directions; it goes in every direction, all the time. (Think about Michel Foucault’s entangled web of power relationships.) What I understand these things to mean is: some silences may be exclusionary, yes, but others may be gestational or even protective. 

Telling or highlighting forgotten or neglected stories has come into vogue these days, and I’m all for it. Our modern American society is opening up a bit more, and we seem more ready to embrace the lesser-known, the nuanced, the complicated, the myth-busters. Books like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and movies like Milk have brought previously lesser-known stories into fuller view. Other books and movies have tried and failed to gain their subjects a similar notoriety. I’ve been part of this vogue myself, in a smallish way, having written books about poet John Beecher and artist Clark Walker, about the killing of Bernard Whitehurst, Jr., and through student projects like Taking the Time and Sketches of Newtown. These projects have been generally gone well, but I have learned something from them that I hadn’t expected: people with a story to tell often want it told, only to realize that once it is told, it doesn’t fully belong to them anymore. The decision to eschew silence and let a story out does not mean that the tellers will get to determine how the story is received, how it is interpreted, how it is repeated or shared, how it used, who embraces it, who rejects it, who ignores it. And that, for some people involved in these stories, can yield disconcerting emotions. What we think is going to happen or what we want to happen when our tale is told . . . isn’t necessarily what will happen. When silence is protective, speaking out means that we relinquish that protection. 

As I was reading the academic articles I cited above, both of which deal with collective memory and collective forgetting, I couldn’t help but think about the current state of our politics and our society. These days, myriad discussions surround public memorials, school curricula, book bans, and news coverage, many of which involve and affect the collective memory. Narratives are being crafted, with varying inclusions and exclusions, because there is no way that all of us can remember all of the things, people, and events that might warrant attention and respect. If Schwartz is correct, our brains just can’t hold it all. Which means that a great many someones and somethings will recede into the murky spaces. Despite our current fervor to document, record, photograph, notate, and save darn near everything we do, say, and see, some things are just going to fade away.

Being idealistic about it, if more – or even most – people understood our history and our culture more thoroughly, our society would be better off. But that’s not going to happen. We each pick and choose what is important enough to remember, to discuss, to affirm, and to validate. I know more about Southern history, culture, and politics than just the names of Rosa and Martin; on the other hand, the only professional hockey player I can name is Wayne Gretsky. We all do this, decide what is worth remembering. Among these acts of remembering and forgetting, our individual and collective narratives swirl all around, and sometimes they crash into each other. That’s when people get pissed. Yet, as individuals, we will never fully know what we don’t know. So the least we can do for each other is know that.

 

tidbits, fragments, and ephemera 40: the bad weather edition

Originally published on level:deepsouth— for Generation X, tidbits, fragments, and ephemera is a sometimes substantial but not making any promises glimpse at information and news related to growing up Generation X in the Deep South.North Alabama Ice Storm, February 1985

This twenty-minute video, which contains slideshow of photos and a voiceover, shows Huntsville right after an ice storm. Though the northern portions of the state see more than the southern portions, Alabamians rarely see these kinds of conditions. (I’m sure all the schoolchildren were happy— no school!)

“‘The coldest day ever’ in South Carolina” on WMBF news

This local TV news story from 2020 about severe cold weather in late January 1985. It was so cold across the whole eastern half of the country that Presidents Reagan’s second inauguration had to be cancelled and rescheduled.

The Wrath of Hugo: South Carolina, September 21, 1989

This book, whose publication dates is listed within the same year as the events it documents, shows the devastation left after Hurricane Hugo. The hurricane made landfall in the middle of the night, near Charleston. Though not all of them were in South Carolina, the storm cause an estimated four-dozen deaths.

“Archival images from Georgia’s 1993 blizzard”

This thirty-second news clip offers a look back at one of the South’s heaviest snowfalls in modern memory. For a lot of GenXers in the South, this was the only time in their young lives that they got have an actual snowball fight!

The Tuscaloosa tornado outbreak, January 24, 1997

This National Weather Service webpage is more informational than anything else, but it gives a solid description of how tornados destroyed portions of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

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Southern Movie 67: “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012)

Set in coastal Louisiana, 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild is a beautiful movie, a heart-wrenching movie, and a unique movie. Its story centers on a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy who lives with her terminally ill father in The Bathtub, an unorthodox and free-spirited community that sits in a low-lying, flood-prone area. Hushpuppy is often left to take care of herself. Her mother is not with them, and her father’s oddly protective style of parenting is punctuated by periods of drunkenness or absence. However, she does have some quasi-parental support from other adults, like her teacher Miss Bathsheba. The ultimate challenge, though, for the little girl and those around her is posed by rising waters caused by storms and climate change, a silent antagonist that is represented metaphorically by a herd of ice-age monsters. Of course, we should understand the symbolism, post-Katrina. The film won a slew of awards, including several Oscars, and its star Quvenzhané Wallis has been hailed and praised for a stellar performance.

Beasts of the Southern Wild opens with a view of Hushpuppy’s life, starting with a view of the dilapidated mobile home on stilts where she lives by herself. She is a small African-American girl who stomps around a large overgrown yard strewn with rusted metal, debris, and discarded items. She has wild, messy hair and wears a dirty tank top, orange underpants, and white galoshes. We watch her play with small animals and with mud. An overdubbed monologue plays alongside eerie, childish music; in it, Hushpuppy elucidates some of life’s truths that she believes she understands. There is no adult in sight until a man appears in an adjacent thrown-together building. He is also African-American, probably middle-aged. He moves around, wearing jeans, boots, and a white tank top under which we see his wiry build. The structures that he traverses also appear to be abandoned or makeshift. Eventually he goes to a cooler and removes a whole chicken, plucked and gutted, to throw on an outdoor grill.

Next, we see the duo riding in water in a boat made from the bed of a pickup truck. It is also makeshift, though the father – whose name is Wink – and daughter seems satisfied, even pleased. They drift up to a dam-like structure and beyond it, on the land, are huge industrial facilities. The father speaks first, remarking that the facilities are ugly and that they have the most beautiful place on Earth to live. In her overdubbed monologue, Hushpuppy explains to us that these are “the levees,” which cut them off – from what we don’t know yet – but we are beginning to see: this is coastal Louisiana, and the encampment that serves as their home is in the flood plain beyond the structures that keep the city dry. An aerial view confirms this for us, and as her monologue continues, we get to zoom out and survey the larger situation. Hushpuppy tells us that her people, living in a place they call The Bathtub, have holidays constantly, live as they please, and openly reject the world “on the dry side.” We watch them party and drink and yell, people of all races and ages, as they hold bizarre parades, play music, and run around with fireworks. This is no ordinary community, and if the people were doing anything wrong, we might call them outlaws. But here, they appear to be living in relative harmony, together, having fun and living off the land and what few dollars they may have among them.

The scene then breaks to the classroom of the matriarchal teacher Bathsheba. She has a few children gathered in her school, and she is rather harshly informing them of the facts of life. Every living creature is meat, she tells them, as she prowls among cages and aquariums with animals and jars full of slimy grasses. The children stare as though they are being scolded. She also tells them about the Orax, starting the story from a tattoo on her upper thigh; this creature from the days of cavemen, which resembled giant razorback hog, would eat little human children right in front of their parents— but the parents didn’t sit around feeling sorry for themselves. No, they got work on survival. They, too, must think about survival, she tells them, because when the polar ice caps melt, where they live will be underwater.

As Bathsheba delivers this life lesson, Hushpuppy drifts off into her imagination. She combines the imagery from a poster of the snowy South Pole with Bathsheba’s descriptions, coming up with a scene of these Orax trapped and frozen within the melting icecaps. Soon, they will emerge from the icebergs that break off and drift away into warmer waters.

Back at home, Hushpuppy is now fully dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and she is searching for her father, who doesn’t answer. She shouts that it is “feed-up time,” yells for her father, even squeals. But he still does not come. In the scenes that follow, we understand that Hushpuppy is sometimes abandoned for days. She explains in her overdubbed monologue that she might have to eat her pets, if her father doesn’t come home soon. However, this isolation also allows her to reveal to us why her mother is not around. As Hushpuppy bounces around her extremely messy trailer, she tells us that her mother loved her so much she couldn’t stand it, and then “swam away.” This is the tale that her father told her, one that she enshrines on the wall using a crude drawing, some lights and beads, and a number 23 basketball jersey. Missing her mother, she takes down the jersey, lays it across the a chair at the dinner table, and begins to cook them dinner (what looks like dog food sauteed in the bottom of a pot).

In the daylight, we hear her father’s voice, and Hushpuppy goes running for him. This series of scenes is full of tension as the true nature of the situation is revealed. Wink appears, walking through the tall grass, and he is wearing a hospital gown and ID bracelet. He tries to ignore Hushpuppy, but she won’t let him, so he yells at her to go away. Returning to her own house, she turns up the propane gas on her stove to full blast in an attempt to blow it up. When it does, though, she scurries into her den and under a cardboard box. We know that this box won’t save her from a certain house fire, and her monologue provides her own mythic narrative of how she will be remembered by future children after she is dead. But her father bursts in to save her, and she runs away. Outside, they argue and yell at each, and he hits her. Fiercely angry at this, Hushpuppy hits her father and wishes death on him, and he falls on the ground in what looks like seizure. As thunder booms in the sky, Hushpuppy believes that she has killed her father. Watching, we know that he is obviously very sick and has overexerted himself after fleeing from medical treatment. Absent his explanations and any real world experience, she creates her own conclusions out of the little she knows. Juxtaposing the thunder and her mental images of the crumbling icebergs at the poles, she runs to the shore and shouts to the sea, “Momma, I think I broke something.”

Yet, this is not her fault. A severe storm – probably a hurricane – is coming. The community’s families are piling into cars that are lined up to evacuate, and people are encouraging her to do that, too. Instead she wants to save her father. She has sought Bathsheba’s help, and the woman makes a concoction of plants or herbs (or something) and gives them to the girl. However, when she returns, Wink is gone, so she hides the medicine jar in a tree and begins to search. And there is her father, wandering by the roadside, watching the evacuation but encouraging his fleeing neighbors to stay and ride out the storm. We know now that he will do just that, keeping his daughter by his side and endangering them both.

Amid these difficult scenes, Hushpuppy continues to imagine the icebergs that contain the Orax. She narrates for us, so we understand her worldview: the world is cracking up, and she must save herself. We see the long, warlike tusks of the beasts suspended in ice. The fierce creatures are bound up now, but will soon be freed.

The fierce storm rattles their home, while Hushpuppy’s irrational father yells threateningly about how he will defend them. He puts her in a life boat inside of their home on stilts and tells her that, if the water gets that high, they will push through the roof and sail away. She is not comforted, however. In a bizarre effort to console his child, the wild man gets his gun and begins to shoot into the sky, proclaiming to the storm that it can’t scare him. His antics only serve to scare his daughter even more.

In the morning, we see that nearly everything has been wrecked. Waterside homes are submerged and destroyed, and even trees are torn from their roots. Among the devastation, we see Hushpuppy’s father burst through their metal roof and lift her out as well. Their house on stilts now has water higher than its doorway, which gives us a sense of just how much the tides have risen. No one is anywhere in sight as they ride in their truck-bed pontoon boat, calling for friends. Here, we see more of Wink’s unorthodox parenting style as he teaches his daughter how to fish in the murky water using only bare hands. He leans over the side of the boat, sifting through the water, until he snatches catfish out, then explains that you have “whack it with your fist.” He gloats over his catch, then urges Hushpuppy to punch the fish, to kill it, but it cuts her as it writhes and flails. She winces at the pain, but her father tells her that she can’t worry about that— You got to whack it! he repeats. Though his method of parenting this little girl seems harsh, we also know that he is teaching her to survive in the harshest environment imaginable.

In the night, as her father sleeps, Hushpuppy is playing pensively. She goes to father after being frightened by some bumping noises and see the burst-open veins and capillaries under his skin. Rather than bother him, she sits in the doorway of the house, looking out at the light on a faraway buoy, wondering out loud if that is her mother. She says out loud to no one that she thinks she has broken everything. To reinforce this point, we then the terrible Orax – several of them – trotting through the mist, grunting and huffing. By now the symbolism is clear: this looming threat is coming to overtake Hushpuppy and destroy everything she knows.

The next day, they arrive in what was the main drag of the community, and their friend Walrus splashes into the water as he walks out his door, expecting to step onto his landing. He and his wife Little Jo have the local bar and liquor store, and two others Jean Battiste and Peter T have weathered the storm with them. They have been drinking all night. There are beer and liquor bottles strewn everywhere. Wink and Hushpuppy come in and join them. Wink begins drinking, and Hushpuppy lies around eating crawfish and crabs, all of which must have come from the chemical-dense water that has flooded their little world.

In the darkness, Wink asks Hushpuppy if he has told her the story of her conception, a strange question to ask a child. She remains silent but watches and waits. Wink then tells a strange story about his love affair with her mother. He shares that they were so shy that would barely talk. Until one day when we see her come out with a shotgun and save him from an alligator that was stalking him while he slept in a lawn chair. Wink claims that her mother was so pretty that water would boil when she walked past. After their union, Hushpuppy was born four minutes later. He punctuates the fantastical tale by insisting, mostly to himself, “I got it under control.” We know that he doesn’t, and we also know that he knows that he doesn’t. But he has a child depending on him, so he has to tell himself that he does.

The scenes that follow offer a montage of the group’s efforts at survival. Hushpuppy takes the boat over to Miss Bathsheba’s floating house, and there are her classmates, three other girls who appear to be alone. Using what they have, they rebuild as best as they can from the detritus left behind by the storm. Jean Battiste makes a little garden on the porch, and buckets of seafood are dumped out onto the long table. They are all laughing and smiling, living just as freely as they had before the devastating event. Bathsheba interjects a dose of reality into the conversation when she reminds them that the salt water will kill everything that it has covered, but Wink shrugs her off by insisting once again that he has it under control. The scene is punctuated by another instance of Wink’s bizarre parenting style. When one of the party people tries to open a crab for Hushpuppy to get the meat, Winks interrupts by demanding that she do it herself and yells harshly at her to smash the crab’s shell without help. Once she does, she flex her tiny muscles and screams triumphantly as the others cheer her on.

In the following day (or days), the ragtag crews works toward survival as Hushpuppy narrates in her overdubbed monologue. She explains to us that they weren’t going to “sit around like a bunch pussies.” They were going to get up, work, organize, and scrape together what they had.

Amid this new communal life that is based in Bathsheba’s house, Wink and the other men decide to execute an idea, after surveying the total destruction of the place they love. They load up quietly in Wink truck-bed boat and head for the levee, where they intend to blow a hole in it, which they hope will allow the water in their area to recede. Bathsheba wakes up as they are leaving, and she knows that what they are doing will be disastrous. The little half-baked – and probably half-drunk – militia that they are, the effort to stuff a dead alligator carcass full of dynamite is stymied by the failure of their friend Peter T to hold on to the switch. Peter is an older man who dresses sharp and seems to mind his own business passive, and rather than push forward with the others, he floats passively and only apologizes for his error. However, it is Wink to dives for the witch, as Bathsheba pulls up in her own boat, screaming at them stop, because they all know what will happen if they succeed. It is Hushpuppy who pulls the trigger. (We cannot tell from the visuals exactly what happens, but using its own style of cinematography, we know that the water goes down.)

The newly drained land reveals just what Bathsheba described. The trees are dead, and mud is everywhere. Standing on the roof, Hushpuppy screams at the buoy light, “Momma! Momma!” With her father sick and her mother absent, Hushpuppy makes an attempt to fix what she believes she has broken. She goes to an old tree and gets the jar of medicine that Bathsheba mixed up when her father fell down earlier. The medicine is a tepid-looking mixture of water and grasses, and she takes a handful and puts it into her father’s mouth while he sleeps. Of course, he wakes up spitting and cussing. He fusses at his daughter, but she informs him forcefully that she can see that he is sick. What follows is another episode of Wink’s strange parenting style. He repeats his main rule – No crying! – several times then pours them both some liquor from a bottle, teaching her to wash down her pain with alcohol. She asks him if he is going to die and leave her alone, but insists that he won’t. The scene ends with the two of them flexing their muscles in a show of power. But the Orax are still coming, and now they are running at full gallop.

What comes next, instead of the mother she has been calling to for help, is a search party enacting a mandatory evacuation. Groups of men appear and search the houses and structures. They come to Wink’s house, and he tries to fight them but he is subdued. He, Hushpuppy, and the others are taken into custody. Yet, instead of any kind of jail, they go to a shelter in small building that appears to contain a medical clinic. There are people all over, some sleeping on the floor, all appear to be as destitute as they are. Wink and Hushpuppy are separated as he is being given medical treatment, while Hushpuppy is bathed and put into a smocked dress. She and the other children are housed in a small playroom, and it is obviously that Hushpuppy does not know what to do in this situation. We also know that the workers and doctors must believe that they are helping the evacuees, but we know that this not help that they want. Severely weakened Wink fights the doctors, Hushpuppy rails again the discipline in the playroom, and they all marvel at the people who are “plugged into the walls.”

But this situation cannot hold them, and Wink, Walrus, and Jean Battiste stage a riotous escape. They raise a ruckus, sneak toward the doors, and begin running toward a bus that is carrying other evacuees away. We sense that they are heading back to The Bathtub, then Wink puts Hushpuppy on the bus and closes the door behind. He remains standing in the parking lot after saying to the bus driver, “Put her somewhere good, okay.” Once Hushpuppy realizes what he is doing, she bursts out of the bus to stay with him. Hushpuppy is angry with her father, because she believes he is trying to abandon her. He pleads, however, for her to go. “I’m dying . . . My blood’s eating itself. You know what that means,” he yells back. This is Wink’s first show of weakness, and it is also in this scene when we understand why he has been such a harsh parent. Wink knows that his daughter will be a very young orphan, so he has shown that he loves her by making sure that she will never lack the skills to survive. His methods may have seemed strange, even abusive, but ultimately, he understood that it was necessary.

Rather than getting on the buses, though, the group heads back to The Bathtub. Wink wants to go home to die, and they take him. Hushuppy sees her father coughing up blood, then walks among the ruins, surveying the corpse of a dog whose entrails have been ripped out. She explains in overdub that this is what happens in Nature. Suffering and elimination are real.

Then, Hushpuppy makes her move. Suddenly, she runs to the waterside and begins to swim to the buoy light that she has been calling to. The other three girls follow her into the water. We know, watching, that this is terrible idea and that they are in real danger of drowning, by underestimating the task. The girls swim and swim, then are picked up by a man in strange type of vessel. One would hesitate to call it a boat; it looks more like a watchtower set atop a truss with a barge-like platform underneath. The man is older and white, and he is dressed in black with a black fedora. We first expect that he might be a danger to the girls, but he just gives them a ride and talks to Hushpuppy as he drives. The little girls asks where they are going, and the strange man only replies that it doesn’t matter; his boat will take her wherever she needs to be. He also offers her a chicken biscuit while explaining that he eats them all the time. He throws all of his wrappers onto the floor, because they remind him of who he used to be.

Soon, they arrive at a floating bar called Elysian Field, whose sign says “Floating Catfish Shack” and “Girls Girls Girls.” The place appears to be a backwater house of prostitution, in addition to being a bar and grill. When they arrive, a host of women in negligees greet them, and within the dimly lit place, we see men dancing with these women to slow music. Some of the women begin to dote on the girls, but Hushpuppy is not looking for them. After a moment, she finds who she is looking for. Though we never do know for sure whether it is her, Hushpuppy believes that she had found her mother, who is a cook in the place’s kitchen. (This particular women resembles the woman we saw when Wink was describing her mother, and among the four girls, she takes Hushpuppy up especially and leads her into the kitchen.) Aside from the others, we see more evidence that this is her mother. The woman swills Miller High Life, just as she did in the scenes we saw from the past, and she speaks to Hushpuppy just as harshly as her father does. As she prepares to fry some seafood, she tells the little girl that some people try to say that life will be all “hunky dory” but “you better get that shit out ya head.” For a bit, we see the girls slow-dancing with the other women, and this mother-figure embraces Hushuppy, who hangs on her and soaks up the affection that she has clearly been missing.

However, this scene cannot last, and before we know it, the four girls are stomping their way through the high swampy grass back at The Bathtub. Hushpuppy is holding a paper sack in her fist, and in a moment we will see why. Yet, there is another arrival, too: the Orax are here, wading through the stream that winds among the grass. As the girls come over a hill, the beasts are upon them, and the other three girls run away screaming. Hushpuppy, however, continues to traverse the mud and debris toward the makeshift hovel where her father lay dying, surrounded by his few friends. As she walks a gangplank, she turns and confronts the animal, staring it down, her tiny figure in stark contrast the Orax’s immense size. The tense scene continues, and finally, she says, “You’re my friend, kind of . . . I got to take care of mine.” All of the Orax, which have all knelt to yield her strength, turn and leave. Hushpuppy has faced her greatest fear.

Inside, she shares the fried fish with her father, and we understand that he knows: she has found her mother. Though they are both shedding tears, they remind each other one last time, “No cryin’,” and she falls onto his chest. Next we see, Wink is getting a Viking funeral, set aflame in his truck-bed boat and pushed away. The film ends with a note of hope. The hardscrabble crew – Hushpuppy, Walrus, Little Jo, Peter T, Jean Battiste, Bathsheba, and the girls – stride across the washed out road as Hushpuppy explains to us that hundreds of years from now children will study history and know about her, her father, and The Bathtub. This crew will not be able to restore and rebuild what was here, because the destruction from the storm is too great, but they will survive.

Beasts of the Southern Wild takes a mythic approach to a real situation: the threats to coastal communities on the Gulf Coast, particularly those in Louisiana. The Bathtub would certainly represent an extreme example, showing us people on the fringes of society, living – possibly squatting – seemingly without property rights or law enforcement in an environment that might be called Edenic if it wasn’t so filthy. They are happy, though, and we know that societal restraints will not hold them. For any of the flaws or faults that we see in The Bathtub – lack of hygiene, alcohol abuse, etc. – the people don’t want a mainstream life in modern America. They want to live free of what most of us would consider preferable, even if it means facing the dangers of their chosen lifestyle. This, in itself, is quintessentially Southern.

As a document of the South, the film succeeds in several ways, too, but these successes come to us as metaphors that point to actual characteristics. The first, of course, is the fierce individualism of the community in The Bathtub. This mythic handling creates a portrayal that strikes at the heart of two important features of Southern life: self-determination alongside the value of community. Another is the closeness with Nature. The film critic Roger Ebert wrote that “Hushpuppy is on intimate terms with the natural world, with the pigs she feeds and the fish she captures with her bare hands; sometimes she believes animals speak to her in codes.” For their meals, the father and daughter rely heavily on what they produce nearby, yet they do enjoy some products from the industrialized food system. And third is the acceptance of eccentricity. Though Southerners are often derided for intolerance, within our own communities we are often exceptionally tolerant of those whose personal tendencies are odd or even strange. Finally, the little microcosm of The Bathtub is a multiracial community, just as the larger culture of Gulf Coast is. If this little cluster of people had been racially homogeneous, the message would have been a very different one. In The Bathtub, everyone is in it together.

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