Foster Dickson's Blog, page 81

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #113

This is an enviable life, to live in the terrain of one’s own heart. Most writers don’t – can’t – do it. Most of us are always searching, through our work and in our lives: for meaning, for love, for home.

– from “Finding My Way Home” by Lee Smith, in in the February/March 2016 issue of Garden & Gun magazine

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

Re-Run: “Patchwork,” April 2010

This post was originally published on the blog for “Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South,” my Surdna Foundation Artist Teacher Fellowship project in 2009 and 2010.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South

This term, the “New South,” nests precariously between being an anomaly and an ideal, between a cruel joke and a wild hope, between a vicious lie and a half-hearted effort at improvement. As far as I know, the term came from newspaper editor Henry Grady. He was trying to say that the South had changed . . . and that it should even more. Of course it became abundantly clear after Reconstruction was over that yes, the South had changed, but had only become less overt and more insidious in its racist ways. The next incarnation of the “New South” came after World War I, then again after the Depression, then again after the Civil Rights movement. The last time it seems to have stuck. Though nobody would surmise that our old problems have been solved completely.

I hesitated to subtitle this project with the term “New South.” I don’t like the historical connotations of its repeated failure to live up to its promise. But I do agree with people like Glen Browder who say that we are moving forward— maybe just inching forward, but moving forward nonetheless.
 
There is an old saying, “Many hands make light work.” I liken the changing of Alabama to moving a house. If you strap one guy to it and make him pull, he could work all day every day but it will probably never move. But if he goes around its foundation and loosens it up . . . and then if you add more people who are pulling . . . eventually slow progress will be made. And if you add even more people to pull, and the right leverage mechanisms are put into place, those people can move that house, without the help of a crane or a truck.
 
Alabama is the same way. If enough people sit back suspiciously and full of cynicism, saying, “They’ll never move that house,” then those cynical people are probably right. But if the people who want to see something change will get on board, abandon apathy and cynicism, and work for change, it can happen. The Civil Rights movement proved that.
 
I was pleased to hear it and didn’t expect it, when I watched Conan O’Brien’s last episode of The Tonight Show and he said that nothing pisses him off more than cynicism, because cynicism is completely useless. He said, if you’re not going to work to do good things, then get out of the way for people who are, and don’t bash them for doing it. He said that people who spend their energy impeding good work are the worst kind. Alabama is a lot like that, only it is masked by terms like “conservative” and “Alabama values.” These coded messages mean: “We’re not going to change anything,” and “We’re going to stand defiant against anything different from us.” It’s cynicism. In Alabama, we watch systemic failures in our state and refuse to change, and then many Alabamians bash the people who try to change it.
 
I wanted to write about the things I have been seeing for a long time— a real “New South.” I have known lots of people, born and raised in Alabama, who are not those cynical people. They are musicians and skaters and entrepreneurs, writers and teachers and organizers, artists and librarians and historians, architects and preachers and photographers, divers and kayakers and meth-lab busters. I have known these people who are working not to let those cynics ruin this state. But you don’t hear much about them, because the national news media only wants to talk about our football teams, our corrupt politicians, and our weirdo-freaks. Well, I don’t hear much about the good people of Alabama either, so I spent a year out looking for them, and remembering the ones I had known for years, and thinking of a way to tell more people about them. That’s the “New South” I’m talking about— a place full of progressive people who want to leave all the bullshit of the past behind, but nobody has organized them all yet.




Filed under: Alabama, Bible Belt, Black Belt, Sun Belt, The Deep South, Writing and Editing

Deep Southern Gardening Mysteries #10 and #11

Last week, my daughter and I went hiking in Chewacla State Park, near Auburn, and I stopped to look at both of these plants. Since I found the Pl@ntNet app, I’ve had help identifying things when I didn’t know what they were, but I’m not sure about the app’s answers this time.

The first one was scattered about on the floor of the wooded areas. Once or twice while we hiked, I did see it in clusters of a dozen or so, but it was usually by itself. Some were in shady areas and others in the sun. Pl@ntNet told me it is Virginia creeper, but it was wasn’t climbing anything, like that plant usually does, and in my yard I’ve never seen it flower. Anybody know what this is?

The other one was also low to the ground, always in sunny spots, and mostly near the edge of the little reservoir at the park. It appeared in clusters, but the individual plants were not close together. Any guesses?

Filed under: Alabama, Gardening, The Deep South, The Environment

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #112

Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next— life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was— a whisper.

What can we writers learn from lizards, life from birds? In quickess is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

– from Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

The Passive Activist, a recap

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 the ultimate insanity of all: the elementary-school child pick-up . . .  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.

Since last November, I’ve been writing these Passive Activist posts. In case you’ve missed any, here’s a recap. Just click on the red title to go right to it.

Passive Activist, an introduction: Vote.

Passive Activist #2: Join a parent-teacher organization.

Passive Activist #3: Read poetry.

Passive Activist #4: Don’t bag your leaves.

Passive Activist #5: Support and patronize public libraries.

Passive Activist #6: Stop using disposable razors.

Passive Activist #7: Understand the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

 

Filed under: Civil Rights, Education, Local Issues, Poetry, Social Justice, Voting

National Poetry Month: Three Mondays

April is National Poetry Month: that thirty days in spring that provided the time stamp for Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” that same thirty days that Eliot called “the cruellest month” in “The Waste Land.”

Here in Montgomery, for the last few years, a small group of us literary and professorial types put on a poetry program that features a different event each Monday. The schedule for this year’s program goes like this:

April 4: poetry workshop with Tony Crunk

Auburn University at Montgomery @ 7 PM, No cost

Participants should submit one poem in advance for consideration.

April 11: Jacqueline Trimble reading

Booker T. Washington Magnet High School @ 7 PM, No cost

Trimble will read from her forthcoming collection, American Happiness.

April 18: Readings by local poets

KRU on Mount Meigs @ 7 PM, No cost

Three local poets will read original works.

Filed under: Literature, Local Issues, Poetry, Reading

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #111

[ . . . ] “sounds better” is rarely justification for an editorial change. Because the author has the final say on all changes that are not actual errors — facts, grammar, spelling — the editor must state the case for his suggestions convincingly.

— from “Line Editing: Drawing Out the Best Book Possible” by Maron L. Waxman, in Gerald Gross’s Editors on Editing, third edition (1993)

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

TBT: Motley Crüe

Back in the early 1980s, my parents were among a small group who started a neighborhood watch program called the Normandale Association. They worked to get our neighbors organized, to keep a look out for suspicious characters , etc. Once the program was in place, my dad went and put the metal neighborhood-watch sign near the edge of the neighborhood, and almost immediately, someone came along with red spray paint and wrote “Motley Crüe” across the back of it. My dad was furious! Thirty years later, when I drove through my old neighborhood, that sign was still there— and so was Motley Crüe.

Filed under: Alabama, Local Issues, Music, The Deep South

Chasing Ghosts: The pre-Civil War Dicksons

[This is the 14th post in the Chasing Ghosts series. I suggest you go back and read at least the first post to get a sense of what it’s all about.]

Though I wrote the supposed “Last Word” in this Chasing Ghosts series back in April 2014, I’ve been thinking more about my family history in recent months, since the fifth anniversary of my father’s death just passed. It’s hard to believe that he has been gone for five years, and if you’ve read the first post, you’ll know that his passing was the main catalyst that sparked my interest in exploring this past.

Typically, when I’m tinkering with my family history, I tend to think of David Madison Dickson, Sr. (1811 – 1877) as a stopping point when I look back. He was my great-great-great-grandfather, and the first of our family to move into Alabama. (In a recent TBT post, I put up his and his wife’s gravestones, which are down in Pine Level, not far from where I live.) But of course, David M. Dickson, Sr. didn’t just spring up out of the soil. He was one in a line of pre-Civil War Southerners, men whose eventual lineage has come to me and my generation. I’ve been fascinated to learn how this slave-holding landowner came to Alabama, and how the Civil War changed my family’s fortunes. After growing up on the Pine Level homestead, his son David Madison Dickson, Jr., made his way as a fertilizer salesman, as an insurance salesman, and as a boardinghouse operator. Then subsequent generations of Dickson men, my forebears, worked in banking, in commercial equipment sales for the gas company, and as a service technician for the phone company; now here I am, a writer and public school teacher. I see all that and I wonder what these hardscrabble pre-Civil War men would have thought of all of us.

Since I have largely digested the facts of six generations of my line of Dicksons in Alabama, from my father back to my great-great-great grandfather, I’m interested in working even further back now . . . and the most logical place to start is with David Madison Dickson, Sr.’s father.

Michael Dickson was born in 1788 in Troup County, Georgia to Gen. David “Long Pat” Dickson and his second wife, Martha Cureton Dickson. “Long Pat” Dickson was a South Carolinian who fought in the Revolutionary War, then commanded a Georgia militia. According to records I’ve found, his mother Martha was also from South Carolina, born there in 1764; she had also been married before, and had four children already. The couple married in 1788, the same year that their only child, Michael, was born. Martha died  in 1796, when her son Michael was about eight years old.

This great-great-great-great-grandfather of mine, Michael Dickson, married Rebecca Aubrey in Georgia in 1810, and their son, David Madison Dickson, Sr. was born in 1811. One undated Georgia tax record, presumably from the 1840s, shows father and son side by side in Troup County, each with five slaves, and with land that is regarded as “2d rate” and “3rd rate.” (Nothing appears in the “1st rate” column.) My best guess is that the low-quality land is what prompted the move to central Alabama. Michael Dickson died in 1853 in Alabama, having probably followed his son there.

Moving backward in time, David “Long Pat” Dickson (1750 – 1830) must’ve been quite a character. Though he was from South Carolina, he also fought in Georgia and around St. Augustine, Florida during the Revolutionary War. According to one book, The History of Early by Ruth Hairston Early, he “was a terror to the Tories” during the Revolution. Later, he owned land throughout Georgia, having been given hundreds of acres for his service.

Prior to that David Dickson – there are lots of David Dicksons – we’re looking at Scotch and Irish immigrants. “Long Pat” Dickson’s father, William, was born in 1710 in County Down, Ireland, and came to America. He lived first in North Carolina, then moved west into South Carolina.  William’s father, also named Michael Dickson, was also born in Ireland in 1682, though both father and son died in America. Moving back in time, the elder Michael’s father, Joseph Dickson, was born in 1657 in Ireland. If you keep following that line, the furthest back anyone seems to be able to go is a man named Simon Dickson, a Scotch Presbyterian born in 1607, who “followed Cromwell in the conquest of Ireland in 1649,” and thus received land as a reward. (Of course, that Oliver Cromwell thing didn’t work out so well, which may be why my folks came to America.)

Agree with their causes or don’t, this line of strong, adventurous and brave men – Dicksons – carried their heritage out of Scotland and Ireland to America, eventually taking part in the American Revolution. Where Simon Dickson was giving the British throne a kick in the seat of the pants in the mid-1600s, and a century later, David “Long Pat” Dickson gave them another one.

A century later, the American Civil War was fought over the habits and practices of men like Michael Dickson and his son, David. Slavery, that “peculiar institution,” had been revealed as the crime against humanity that it is, and their way of life would be stopped, by force, in the early to mid-1860s. Unlike previous generations, this generation of Dicksons didn’t fight in the war. Neither David Madison Dickson, Sr. nor Jr. fought to defend “states’ rights.” It’s impossible for me to say why they didn’t go and fight, though when the war began, Sr. was fifty years old and had a passel of children, and Jr. was only eleven.

Looking back into one’s family history will inevitably bring up subjects that are both proud and shameful. Since I have the benefit of historical hindsight, I am able to see  Simon Dickson siding with Oliver Cromwell as an ill-fated move and Michael Dickson’s owning slaves as an inhumane act. However, these men couldn’t have known then what I know now My attitude is: this is who they were. Regardless of their flaws or their errs in judgment, they can’t be changed now. These Dicksons did what they did and were who they were. What matters to me is: these are the men who made the Deep South our family’s home.

Filed under: Alabama, Georgia, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #110

Writers, we know that you are the true backbone of the industry, and we love you for it.

– spoken by Charlize Theron, introducing the “Best Screenplay” nominees at the 88th Academy Awards, two weeks ago

Filed under: Film/Movies, Teaching, Writing and Editing