Foster Dickson's Blog, page 82

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

Greg Gunn

I never knew Greg Gunn. I had never heard his name before it came on a local news broadcast that explained how he was shot and killed by a Montgomery police officer. Though I follow social justice matters, care very much about these issues, and am writing a book about Montgomery’s most infamous police shooting, that doesn’t mean that I understand this current situation. I’ve hesitated to write about Greg Gunn’s death at all.

The people of Montgomery, regardless of race or perspective, are anguished by this situation— each person for his or her own reason. While some people are worried,  others are angry, but all of Montgomery is tense and waiting to see what will happen. Untimely death is never a good thing, no matter the circumstances, no matter the victim, no matter from disease or from accident or from violence, so to be upset about Greg Gunn’s untimely death is right, absolutely right. Yet, there is a larger dimension to this untimely death, since it follows a string of incidents too much like it.

Last week, when I turned on NPR’s morning news as I was driving to school, the Greg Gunn story was being featured on their national broadcast. Whether we like it or not, Montgomery is now the focus of the unseemly attention that no city wants. In this time, we need truth. I hope that anyone who is interviewed by any media source will confine their remarks to what they know to be true, rather than resorting to inflammatory speculation or nuanced insinuations. These situations, as tragic as they are, are never improved by baseless public guesswork.

As a Christian, I mourn Greg Gunn’s death. Because I wasn’t there, I don’t know what he did or didn’t do that night, but I do know that he shouldn’t have died at the hands of another man, no matter whether that man wore a government-issued uniform or not. I hear all the time that Alabama is place of Christian values, and if that is true, then we need those Christian values now— by seeking truth and justice, and valuing kindness and peace. Tragedies can bring out the best and the worst in people, and we in Montgomery have the choice of what this tragedy will bring out in each of us.

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

The Deep South: A “Biodiversity Hot Spot”

Last month, the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund declared the North American Coastal Plain (NACP) to be “the World’s 36th Biodiversity Hot Spot.” The region they are describing encompasses most of the Deep South, as well as the mostly coastal regions of the Upper South. To qualify as a CEPF “hot spot,” a region must have a significant number of endemic plant species, ones which are not found anywhere else in the world, and must have suffered at least 70% habitat loss. According to their research, that’s us.

The mid-February release is quite clear about their findings:

The human population is exploding across most of the NACP, which combined with rapid sea-level rise and loss of historic dispersal corridors, places biodiversity in this region at high risk. Conservation priorities for this newly recognized hotspots include reducing population growth and urban sprawl . . .

Put in simpler terms, in the Deep South and on the East Coast, we’ve taken these really beautiful places with exceptional biodiversity, and overpopulated them, then built a ton of condominium high-rises and strip malls on them to suit that overpopulation.

And it has gotten so much worse in recent years. My family vacationed at Panama City Beach, Florida every summer when I was growing up, and if I pass through there now, I don’t even recognize anything.

So what’s my point? I don’t know. Because I have serious doubts that the EPA-hating politicians in the Deep South will heed this warning. They need the tourist dollars and lodging taxes too badly for their already crippled budgets. I’d like to think that somebody down here could do something about this, but if not . . . I’d say: go visit some of the most beautiful beaches in the world while you still can. That, and I hope those resort-hotel owners have a back-up plan for when their lobbies, parking lots, and golf courses are below sea level.

Filed under: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, The Deep South, The Environment

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #109

Anchises then, in order, thus begun
To clear those wonders to his godlike son:
“Know, first, that heav’n, and earth’s compacted f
And flowing waters, and the starry flame,
And both the radiant lights, one common soul
Inspires and feeds, and animates the whole.
This active mind, infus’d thro’ all the space,
Unites and mingles with the mighty mass.
Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain,
And birds of air, and monsters of the main.
Th’ ethereal vigor is in all the same,
And every soul is fill’d with equal flame;
As much as earthy limbs, and gross allay
Of mortal members, subject to decay,
Blunt not the beams of heav’n and edge of day.
From this coarse mixture of terrestrial parts,
Desire and fear by turns possess their hearts,
And grief, and joy; nor can the groveling mind,
In the dark dungeon of the limbs confin’d,
Assert the native skies, or own its heav’nly kind:
Nor death itself can wholly wash their stains;

– from Book VI of The Aeneid by Virgil. (In this passage, Aeneas has just found his father, Anchises, in the underworld and has begun to talk with him about his destiny.)

*This translation comes from MIT’s Classic Archive.

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

Unpublished Poem #11: “Southern Soil”

I wrote this poem about nine years ago, in the summer of 2007. I hope that its message is obvious, but looking back on the poem now, I see different things than I did then. The poem was written as a riff on the Jimi Hendrix lyric, “I’m the one that’s gonna die when it’s time for me to die / So let me live my life the way I want to,” from the song, “If Six Was Nine.”

Southern Soil

If one day I am to lay down in your red clay,

let me define my defiance. Close the definite

escape routes, then face me further out than

you might otherwise. My native eyes see too

few wars on poverty, only races between races.

You have no strategy now for new nightmares,

no new Dixie to whistle or wave wildly, no

Ku Klux in the flux of the new main stream.

Southern soil, you will take me down. You

won’t regret it, I know. But don’t apologize,

don’t proselytize, don’t allude to my delusions.

Just have someone dig a deep ditch and drop in

in my hollow carcass, while my blood is still

fresh on the jaws of the lip-licking mongrels.

Filed under: Literature, Poetry, The Deep South, Unpublished Works

March’s Southern Movie of the Month

1955’s “The Phenix City Story” was produced to tell the story of the June 1954 murder of Democratic nominee for Alabama attorney general, Albert Patterson. A lawyer who had served on the local Board of Education and in the state’s Senate, Patterson had run for AG because he wanted to clean up the rampant crime and corruption in his small town, which is right across the state line from Columbus, Georgia. In the early to mid-twentieth century, Phenix City‘s name was synonymous with corruption, gambling, prostitution, and organized crime. The movie, which is black-and-white, begins with a faux news reel featuring a distinctly 1950s TV reporter, complete with Bryl-Creem hairdo and neatly trimmed mustache, then it transitions to its fully fictionalized story.

The opening news reel in “The Phenix City Story” smacks a little of a half-rate effort to emulate the opening of the classic “Citizen Kane,” sans the typewriter sound effects. (“The Phenix City story is mid-1950s, where the other film came out in the early 1940s). The stern anchor interviews a series of locals, including a newspaper reporter who broke the story and a local janitor/deputy sheriff who was set to testify against the organized crime folks. What impressed me immediately about “The Phenix City Story” was its use of real Alabamians. I get worse than aggravated at listening to fake Southern accents, and to hear the real thing roll off of these people’s tongues was refreshing.

Then we shift our attention, and the main part of the movie begins with a highly expository panoramic view of the town, which soon hones in one of its shady operations. The room is packed with soldiers who cheer and jeer at a scantily clad lady doing a suggestive cabaret number, and then we meet three of our villains: the mean blonde floor-walker Cassie, the thug Clem Wilson, and the proprietor Rhett Tanner. Yet, we also meet some of the minor-character good guys: Mary Jo Patterson, a sweet girl who is trying to earn a decent living by working in the club, and her boyfriend Fred Gage, who wants his girlfriend out of there. In a particularly surprising move, one of the people we see in those early moments is Ma Beachie, a local strip-club owner whose kind-hearted attitude toward her clients earned her some degree of notoriety; in that brief street scene, the real Ma Beachie is who we are watching as she greets passers-by.

Next, we meet Albert Patterson when Rhett Tanner goes to visit him one more time to ask Patterson to be his syndicate’s lawyer. Patterson politely declines, citing his desire to stay out of other people’s messes, and the two have a friendly chat, until it’s time for Tanner to leave. In the hall outside of Patterson’s office, Tanner runs into the local man who is organizing the a grassroots movement, a la Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” against the seedy vendors on 14th Street. Now, we have real tension. The upright citizens of the Phenix City will take on these harbingers of sin— right at the same time that Albert Patterson’s son John arrives home from military service.

From here, the scene gets testy. As the righteous little group tries to get organized, the bad guys answer first with a small violent skirmish behind a local café. John Patterson, who had caught a ride into town to buy diapers, jumps in, and it becomes his fight, too! He has brought his family to his hometown, and he can’t yield to his terrified wife’s pleadings that they get away from there as fast as possible. Now empowered by the younger Patterson’s participation, the do-gooders approach his father to run for attorney general to push the corrupt element out. However, the elder Patterson still wavers on whether he should get involved.

As the conflict between the do-gooders and the seedy types escalates, we also meet Zeke, the black janitor at Tanner’s club, who joins the fight against his employer.  Yet, Zeke is in a particularly tough spot, being black in a Deep Southern small town, and quickly the bad guys show him how tough. His young daughter is kidnapped, killed, and thrown from a moving car onto a front lawn! Ultimately, after the efforts to clean up the town have drawn this kind of violence, Albert Patterson does agree to run for Attorney General.

Yet, the corrupt businessmen and politicians won’t give up that easily. They scheme and plan, often with dour faces and knowing looks. A campaigning Albert Patterson is assassinated, and his son John has to step up. After an impassioned speech to the crowd that has gathered after the killing, John Patterson enters Alabama politics. And, as they say, the rest is history.

This moment in Alabama history is pivotal to the whole state’s trajectory through the latter half of the twentieth century, and up to today. (Having already known, the story of John Patterson‘s political ascendance after his father’s death, the outcome of the movie was not a surprise to me.) The murder of Albert Patterson, which led to his son John’s notoriety, ultimately paved the way for John to move beyond the AG’s office and into the governor’s office. John Patterson’s victory in the 1958 election over a field of candidates, including George Wallace, was due in large part to his vehement Civil Rights-era segregationist stance, which was vigorous enough to win him the support of the Ku Klux Klan. The standard set by Gov. Patterson was then expanded by George Wallace, whose infamous antics in the 1960s garnered national attention.

Notwithstanding the slightly cornball feel of it, “The Phenix City Story” is a better movie than I expected it to be. I began the movie expecting a Hollywood fabrication full of stereotypes and half-truths about the Deep South. Considering the film’s genre is “docudrama,” what we’re really watching is a heavily sensationalized, somewhat noir version of the history: the basic story with some soap-opera thrown in for mood and tone.

For someone who really wants the history, there is Alan Grady’s book When Good Men Do Nothing; for those who are just looking for a good old movie, there’s “The Phenix City Story.”

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

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #108

Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil, less is said about the evil that can come out of good, such are the contradictions of this world of ours, some warrant more consideration than others . . .

— from the novel Blindness by José Saramago, translated from Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero

(*This passage is punctuated by ellipsis because Saramago’s style often connects complete sentences by commas, as can be seen here, yet what follows this section carries forward another set of ideas.)
Filed under: Literature, Teaching, Writing and Editing

Reading: WAPO’s “A Region Left Behind” series

In case you missed it, The Washington Post‘s Chico Harlan ran this wrenching story, “A lonely road,” in late December. While many of us were cleaning up after Christmas, maybe driving those relatives to the airport, this long-form story about job-hunting in the Atlanta area may have slipped by you. Its subtitle reads: “For the poor in the Deep South’s cities, simply applying for a job exposes the barriers of a particularly pervasive and isolating form of poverty.” It’s a good read for anybody who suffers from the illusion that poor people are lazy and just don’t want to work.

“A lonely road” is the fourth in a so-far four-part series, all written by Harlan, on the poverty of the Deep South. Part one, published last July, was titled “An opportunity gamed away.” The woman profiled in this bleak narrative, set in Tunica, Mississippi, is a retired schoolteacher with a bad hip. She lives in a falling-down shack, one among many in a neighborhood that once housed the town’s rising black middle-class. Tunica had briefly enjoyed a financial windfall from gambling operations in recent years, but those have now closed down, and the residents are now wondering where the money went.

Part two, “Graduating, but to what?” from October, follows a graduating senior in tiny Drew, Mississippi. From the pitiful ceremony in the high school gym, when his grandmother gets locked out for a lack of seating, to his arrival after graduation at a trade school, the stark outlook for the young man is emblematic of larger issues in the region. The Deep South may finally be pushing its young people to finish high school, but what’s left unanswered is: what opportunities will there be when they do?

Part three, “A grim bargain,” provides an equally desolate picture of what life is like for low-wage workers in the Deep South. Set in Sunny South, Alabama, the piece glimpses into a Chinese-owned copper operation in extremely poor Wilcox County. In a not-so-coincidental connection to the previous article, Harlan writes, “In wide swaths of the Deep South, public schools struggle, turning out workers who lack basic skills,” which causes the need to low-skill jobs. This treatment comes from my part of the country, the Black Belt region of Alabama, and Harlan describes what we here are well aware of:

In a county that is 70 percent black, the historical inequities have dovetailed with a more modern inability to adapt economically. Between 2000 and 2010, Wilcox lost 30 percent of its jobs and 25 percent of its businesses. Its unemployment rate went from 8.7 percent to 26.3 percent.

However, not so many people are aware of the giveaways that bring these foreign-owned factories:

In Alabama, [the copper plant’s owners] Golden Dragon wouldn’t pay taxes for 20 years; it would get free roads and land.

Reading Harlan’s articles – all four of these were posted before I noticed any of them – brought on plenty of sickening reminders. Despite slick public relations about economic development, the underlying truths are still there: quality of life in the Deep South falls way below any acceptable standard. In both small towns and big ones, a cycle of almost inescapable poverty is so prevalent that it will take more than a couple hundred industrial jobs to fix it.

No, the Deep South needs a vigorous combination of educational improvement, industrial recruitment, and infrastructure building, all of which can’t be accomplished by low taxes and evangelical grandstanding. The cash-strapped job applicant needs a viable public transit system. The near-disabled retiree needs help repairing her dilapidated house. The recent graduate needs a range of job opportunities to find the one that suits his skills. And the politicians need to stop eliminating underfunded state services while simultaneously inviting non-tax-paying foreign companies to underpay our most desperate citizens.

Filed under: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Reading, Social Justice, The Deep South

The Passive Activist #7

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 too many white people winning movie awards,  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.

7. Understand the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

In an August 2004 article in The New Yorker titled “The Unpolitical Animal,” Louis Menand describes at length how most people, even the ones who do vote, don’t understand politics. Menand references a 1964 article, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” by Philip Converse, which became a political industry standard, and wrote of its author’s conclusions:

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system.

The other ninety per cent, it seems, are flapping in the wind:

About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible “issue content” whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.

A particularly naive response to these assertions might be, We’re more sophisticated now. To anyone who thinks that – I hate to break this to you – we’re not.

Despite the fact that most adults in America are eligible to vote, most adults in America have very little comprehension of what – or who – they’re voting for. Just to be clear, the following things have nothing to do with the ability to craft good public policy: witty comments, a nice smile, kissing babies.

A good start is to understand what each political party stands for. That determinant is the heuristic many of us rely on. So what’s the difference?

The platform of the Republican Party – that’s the red one with the elephant that isn’t the University of Alabama – leans more heavily toward the rights of the individual. However, the GOP, which stands for “Grand Old Party,” doesn’t have a straight party line that way. For example, their embrace of “pro-life” politics stands in direct contrast to the notion of individual liberties, which would be embodied by a “pro-choice” stance.

By contrast, the Democratic Party’s platform could be summed up by this passage on one of its About pages:

There are several core beliefs that tie our party together: Democrats believe that we’re greater together than we are on our own—that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.

So it isn’t as simple as you might think. If you judge too quickly, you might think you’re a a Republican when you read their platform, which has components that declare our “Country is exceptional” and that the “Constitution should be honored, upheld, and valued.” Yep, I’m for that. But, not so fast. The Democrats’ platform says that “this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.” I agree with that, too.

Read up on the parties and candidates, and find out which one you really prefer. If you want to have a little fun with it, try PBS News Hour’s political party quiz. See where you land on there.

No matter which end of the political spectrum you occupy, know what your beliefs would mean to real people if they were enacted. Politics shouldn’t be a game of hypotheticals anymore than that it should be a popularity contest.  Your vote – or lack of it – determines public policies that affect real people.

Filed under: Alabama, Civil Rights, Social Justice, The Deep South, Voting