Foster Dickson's Blog, page 86

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #97

“Our job as a parent is to put ourselves out of a job,” she said. “We need to know that our children have the wherewithal to get up in the morning and take care of themselves.”

– a direct quote from Julie Lythcott-Haims in the Chicago Tribune article, “Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation of children”

Filed under: Education, Teaching, Writing and Editing

Alabamiana: Richard Tyler, 1816 – 1877

It was Veterans Day, and I was walking with my daughter on the grounds of the state capitol building when a man in a rough-hewn dark-gray Confederate sailor suit approached us. We had been looking at the statue of J. Marion Sims that flanks the front steps, when the costumed man asked if we knew who that was. We told him yes, that we did, and had just been by his historic marker on Perry Street. The man was obviously not satisfied with his inability to coax us into hearing a recitation on certain historical facts – he quickly explained why he dressed up and why we should value our Confederate heritage – so he shifted gears then, asking us if we knew about Letitia Christian Tyler. No, never heard of that one . . .

A namesake of her grandmother who was the First Lady, wife of tenth US president John Tyler, Letitia Christian Tyler lived from 1842 – 1924 and gained notoriety when, as a young woman, she personally raised the Confederate flag over the fledgling nation’s capitol. She is buried, the sailor told us, in Oakwood Cemetery, and he pointed north across the capitol grounds toward the sprawling cemetery on the next hill.

Not much for Confederate history, I wasn’t terribly interested in this flag-raising granddaughter of a US president. We thanked him for his time then moved on and had a little chuckle about how we could tell that the re-enactor would have continued to talk as long as we had let him. Nice guy, I told my daughter; she nodded in agreement. That was the end of it.

Later that day, after we had come home, I remembered for a moment about Letitia Tyler, and thought, I’ll get on the internet and look her up right quick. Though there wasn’t much on her, I found something else that did interest me: her father, Robert Tyler.

Born in 1816, the son of man who would become president in 1841, one would think that Robert Tyler would have it made. According to his brief biography on The White House’s website, John Tyler was a US congressman from 1816 until 1821, then the governor of Virginia, before that “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too” slogan catapulted him into the nation’s vice presidency. When William Henry Harrison died, John Tyler became president. During the brief Tyler administration, son Robert worked as his father’s personal secretary.

Prior to all of that presidency business, in 1839, Robert Tyler published a book of poems titled “Poems Comprising the Last Man: The Elements of the Beautiful, and Death.” In its brief preface, the poet excuses himself from a certain level of scrutiny by admitting to the unoriginal subject matter and reminding his readers that he was only 19 when he wrote the poems. (That would make the composition date four years earlier, in 1835.) The book’s dedication reads: “To Robert Saunders, Esq. Professor of Mathematics, Etc. William and Mary College.” (Robert Saunders, Jr. taught math  at William and Mary from 1833 until 1847, then became the president of the college in 1847 and 1848. He later served as mayor of Williamsburg.)

During this same time period, Robert married Priscilla Cooper. Their wedding announcement, dated Friday, September 20, 1839 reads: “Bristol, Pa. 12th inst. by Rev. Mr. Perkins, Robert Tyler of Virginia to Elizabeth Priscilla, daughter of Thomas A. Cooper and grand daughter of the late Jame Farlie of this city.” The couple were married on September 12, and the news ran eight days later.

Robert’s wife Priscilla has an intriguing story of her own. An actress and the daughter of one-time prosperous theater owner Thomas Cooper, Priscilla got a job at the White House, acting as a stand-in hostess for the invalid First Lady Letitia Tyler. One source describes her

as America’s First Lady from 1842-1844, even though she was never married to a president. Instead, Priscilla served in place of her mother-in-law, Letitia Tyler, who was confined to a wheel chair and seldom appeared officially in public.

There, she met Robert Tyler, who was her same age, and they were married two months later.

After his father’s less-than-one-term presidency ended, Robert Tyler became chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee of Pennsylvania. The 1850 census shows 33-year-old Robert and 33-year-old Priscilla in Bristol with three children: Letitia, 8; Priscilla, 1; and Grace, 4. (The record on FindAGrave.com says that there was another daughter, Mary, who died in childhood, only living from 1840 – 1845.)

However, despite his prominent family’s political connections and his apparent successes, Robert Tyler chose the Confederacy over the Union in 1861. According to , he “fled to Richmond Va. during Civil War,” and two public stories on Ancestry.com claim that “an antisouthern mob attacked [Tyler’s] home” when the Civil War began and “he had to flee Philadelphia.”

So this son of a US president, a prominent player in the Democratic Party, returned to the South to take a leadership role in the “Lost Cause” of the Confederate States of America.  Tyler replaced prominent Alabamian Alexander B. Clitherall, who resigned, as the second Register of the Confederate Treasury. Tyler’s signature can be found on bonds issued by the government and on the Confederate dollar bill. But, of course, the South lost the war . . .

On August 7, 1865, about four months after the surrender at Appomattox, The New York Times reprinted a letter by Tyler to the Richmond Republic, printed on August 2, addressing the issue of former Confederate officials. Tyler’s temperate urging is that “no person who has held a commission in civil or military service of the late Confederate Government” should run for public office of any kind in the newly rejoined state of Virginia. No, he writes, “those citizens who were prominently identified with the cause of the Confederacy should exercise a rigid political abstinence at this time.”

Though he obviously returned to Virginia, most likely when the capitol moved from Montgomery to Richmond, the 1870 census has Tyler back living in Montgomery, though it incorrectly has his age as 51. With him are his wife Priscilla, and four children: 22-year-old Letitia, 18-year-old Elizabeth, 16-year-old Julia and 12-year-old Robert, as well as three domestic servants: Catherine Moore and what looks like her two children, Fannie and James. These ages appear to be generally incorrect, since for example Letitia has only aged fourteen years in the two decades since 1850.

According to William and Mary’s special collections page on him, Robert Tyler “was broke after the war and settled in Montgomery, Alabama where he became wealthy again as a lawyer and publisher of the Montgomery Advertiser. He was also a leader of the state Democratic Party in Alabama.” The Encyclopedia of Alabama explains, “During Reconstruction, the Advertiser continued to promote southern rights and the Democratic Party,” and also “[i]n the lead-up to a vote on a new state constitution on February 4-5, 1868, editor Robert Tyler called for its defeat.”

Tyler may have been “broke” but he had maintained a certain degree of power. That 1868 constitution was not ratified because of some astute political thinking and organizing. According to the Alabama legislature’s website:

At the expiration of the five-day voting period, the final tally was 70,182 “for” the Constitution, and 1,005 “against” – a clear majority of those voting, but the total of the two was woefully short of the requisite majority of registered voters.

The foremost reason for this deficit became increasingly clear throughout the five-day period of balloting. Those white voters still eligible to vote, simply did not show up at the polls. It was by no means incidental. Rather, it was the result of an intense effort of non-participation by white voters, in order to prevent the total voter participation from reaching the required majority. The immediate success of this effort is borne out by the numbers: Of approximately 95,000 registered black voters, over 63,000 participated in the referendum; of approximately 75,000 registered white voters, only 6,700 bothered to vote.

Certainly, Robert Tyler wasn’t personally responsible for this feat of maneuvering to thwart Ulysses S. Grant’s political will, though his party’s machinery was.

Robert Tyler died on December 3, 1877, the year that historians typically mark as the end of Reconstruction. Once the Old South was gone, and all hope of its resurgence lost too, Tyler went out with it. He shares a large, flat-lying marble tombstone with his wife Priscilla in Montgomery’s Oakwood Cemetery. In more recent years, a small white-marble CSA marker has been added. Unlike famous names, such as Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee, Robert Tyler is one of the guys you might know about . . . unless you get sidetracked by a Confederate re-enactor who is itchy to share.

Filed under: Alabama, Local Issues, Poetry, The Deep South, Writing and Editing

Unpublished Poem #10: “I Know”

I wrote this poem back in 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina ripped into New Orleans. By the time I was writing this, it had become clear what the storm had done to one of my favorite cities. New Orleans is only about five hours from Montgomery, so jumping in the car and heading down there wasn’t a big deal. Though I’ve never lived in the Big Easy; I have fond memories of the time I’ve spent there. I’m also a Louis Armstrong fan, and this poem riffs on his “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”

I Know

I stood

on a corner—

here came

the procession:

white shirts

and wild trumpets

and the

golden trombones

leading

a bride and groom

in their

horse-drawn carriage

and some

old black dude jumped

out and

joined the parade

swaying

with that band all

the way

down Royal Street.

I’m up

right now for some

old school

dixieland jazz

quintet

in the Quarter,

at the

Preservation Hall,

or for

the newer stuff,

smoother

like martinis,

maybe

to the Red Room

on stilts

over by St. Charles . . .

I know

what it means

to miss

New Orleans.

Filed under: Literature, Louisiana, Poetry, Unpublished Works, Writing and Editing

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #96

The approach to structure in factual writing is like returning from the grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. If something is red and globular, you don’t call it a tomato if it’s a bell pepper. To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to extent it does not. Where you have a free hand, you can make interesting choices.

from “Structure: Beyond the picnic-table crisis” by John McPhee, published in the The New Yorker‘s “The Writing Life” section in the January 14, 2013 issue

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

The Passive Activist #3

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 an unceasing barrage of Law & Order re-runs, 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.

#3. Read poetry.

Poetry is one of the oldest art forms in the world. Its origins in oral recitation predate literacy, and many of the earliest poems that we know, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, are so old that authorship cannot even be determined. Poetry may have evolved over time, each successive generation with its own incarnation and stylistic preferences, but the fundamentals are always there: rhythm, nuance, insight. Human beings love poetry . . . always have, always will.

Yet, mainstream American culture seems to have relegated this important form of expression to the subculture of its stolid institutional supporters.  Our perpetual stream of omnipresent digital media has music, drama, art and dance being utilized and broadcast far and wide . . . but poetry has left itself out in the cold. (However, poetry on the web did make The New York Times‘ front page recently.)

I could cite rationale after rationale for an interested reader to chase down – Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” or the AWP’s response to it, or the April 2014 Atlantic article “Why Teaching Poetry is So Important” – but in the interest of brevity, I’ll just say that, despite the debates about its relevance, people who actually understand poetry and what it does actually know that human beings value it. (If you want the devaluation argument, you can easily find one from a “job creator” of some sort or from a chamber of commerce-sponsored education program somewhere.) The simple truth is: poetry has very little “value” as a commodity in the modern American economy, but its real value within human nature is immeasurable, and the people who want us to ignore poetry are the ones who are more interested in us as workers than as human beings.

In this video, poets Jane Hirschfield, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Naomi Shihab Nye talk about why poetry is so important:

For those people who think about poetry as something that is too complex, over their heads, I propose that stylistic differences among poets old and new, foreign and domestic offer such an incredible range of choices that anyone – anyone! – can enjoy poetry. If Dante or Wallace Stevens is over your head, then read something more modern and accessible. I suggest that Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 book is a good place to start.

It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Filed under: Civil Rights, Education, Literature, Poetry, Social Justice

December’s Southern Movie of the Month

1945’s “The Southerner” is a highly sentimentalized portrayal of the Southern sharecropping life. This isn’t the sallow-faced Gudgers, but it is Hollywood’s Bryl-Creem version of them. Set in the cotton-producing region of eastern Texas, the story follows one family through a laundry list of daily and long-term struggles faced by the (white) working poor in the early to mid-twentieth century South.

Our protagonists in “The Southerner” are the Tucker family, led by the calm, easygoing and forthright head-of-household Sam Tucker. As the film begins, we watch Sam (played by ) and wife Nona (played by ) picking cotton by the pound with Sam’s Uncle Pete, as the elder man falls down from the heat and dies right there among the cotton rows, muttering at Sam to get his own place, to work for himself. Inspired, Sam speaks to the boss man and inquires about a place he’d heard of but that no one has rented or worked in years. The boss man says yes, of course, adding in that he’ll feel free to break the deal if he so chooses, but Sam is a hard worker, ready to take his shot at independence.

So Sam Tucker loads up his lovely wife, two children, and the horneriest Granny that anyone has ever seen (played by , who you might recognize from “It’s a Wonderful Life”) and he heads for his new homestead . . . which is no Garden of Eden. The house is in shambles, the land is overgrown, the well is shot, and the neighbors are assholes. But that won’t stop the stolid Sam Tucker or his ever-optimistic wife from building a new life here.

Over the course of a year, which the film carries through seasonal shifts – autumn, winter, spring, and summer – these poor people face every kind of problem that a family can face. In the autumn, they’re trying to clear the land; in the winter, there’s no food and the drafty little shack won’t keep them warm; in the spring, their son gets pellagra from malnutrition. And if the normal natural obstacles weren’t enough: the family’s nearest neighbor, the grouchy Devers, is trying to sabotage them so he can buy the previously unwanted land; and when Sam’s brother shows up to take him for a beer in town, they damn near get killed by a swindling bartender and his whorish daughter.

But it works out for the Tuckers in the end . . . sort of. After a fist-fight with Devers, the near-death of his moaning child, and a prayerfully humble scene of askance, Sam’s cotton crop comes up, ready to be harvested and sold. Well, it would have been ready, if a rainstorm hadn’t come along and ruined it, flooded everything, and even destroyed the improvements to their ramshackle home. Yep, by the end of the film, the Tuckers are right back at square one— dead broke, but smiling, hopeful, and convinced that everything will still be OK.

Based on the novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry, which won a National Book Award in 1941, “The Southerner” falls one tiny step short of docu-drama. The film is complete with plenty of diatribes and truisms about working life in the South, which with historical hindsight fall short of inspiring. The story is true to the realities of sharecropping and Southern poverty, but the Hollywood handling of them – complete with non-stop orchestral background music – makes a modern buy-in more difficult.

However, “The Southerner” has been praised by multiple sources, from then and now. The Museum of Modern Art speaks highly of this film:

Jean Renoir (1894–1979) made six films during his American exile—all of them worthy projects—but the consensus is that The Southerner is the best.

Though MoMA’s critical commentary focuses mainly on Renoir’s use of river imagery, not on historical accuracy.

About “The Southerner,” New York Times critic Hal Erickson wrote:

Told at a leisurely, unhurried pace, the film is the one American Renoir effort that comes closest to his “slice of life” dramas of the 1930s. The Southerner was not a box office hit, but did win the effusive praise of critics, not to mention the Venice Film Festival “best picture” award.

More recently, we have this commentary:

It was the most uncommercial project of all [of Renoir’s American films], the story of a sharecropper who tries to make a go of it on his own place, some waste land his neighbors have dismissed as unworkable acreage. The sharecropper struggles against disease, the weather, even the hatred of other farmers. A surprise hit, The Southerner is one of the finest films about rural labor between John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Elia Kazan’s Wild River.

For its time, “The Southerner” succeeded as an Everyman story. It brought World War II-era audiences to some acknowledgment of what the Southern sharecropping life looked like. Every day was tenuous. Even though we don’t like the neighbor Devers in this story, his description to Sam Tucker of the daily perils facing a Southern sharecropper are accurate, as is the ending of the film: you can work your fingers to the bone and still have nothing.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Social Justice, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #95

If he is a worth a damn, any poet teaching poetry writing constantly and often without knowing it is saying to the student, “Write the way I do. That’s the best sound you can make.” The student who shakes this, who goes on to his auditory obsessions and who writes the way the teacher never told him, may become a poet.

– from the chapter “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching” in The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo

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

The Passive Activist #2

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. As we try to make sense 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 TV shows like “The Voice,” 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.

#2. Join a parent-teacher organization.

A school is a community institution that centers on cultivating our most precious resource: children. Schools can’t educate children alone, and whether they’re paying taxes or tuition or both, parents have a role to play beyond simply opening their wallets from time to time to buy cookie dough.

The Catholic Church emphasizes this central idea: the parents are the primary educators. This inarguable and inviolable concept is the basis of all parent-teacher organizations. Children may learn their three Rs at school, but at home, they learn their values. Thus, for a school to be able to educate the children, parents must instill the sense that schools have value, that teachers are worthy of respect, and that learning is important.

One way to do that is by joining (or starting) a PTA, PTO, PTSA, PTC— call it what you will. The PTA (Parent Teacher Association) is the largest organization of its kind, but they aren’t the only option for parents who want to organize in support of their school. The PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) offers another option. Some schools add the S for Student, creating a PTSA, while others have independent groups – call it a Parent Teacher Council, maybe – which may not be affiliated with any national organization.

Participating in these supportive groups is often not very cumbersome. Membership fees are usually under $10 per member per school year, and general meetings are often held only once per month. Certainly, some members who choose leadership positions may have more duties, but those are choices that individuals can make for themselves.

In addition to the benefit of showing the school’s children that the adults are actively involved, a parent-teacher organization can be used very effectively for fundraising, of course, or for advocacy behind the scenes. When school funding is cut or staff is reduced, what better group to contact legislators or school board members than a parent-teacher organization?

Whether the community being served by the school is geographic, as in a zoned school, or socioeconomic, as in a private school, that community can only be enhanced by having its parents and teachers organized.

Moreover, if you’re a “what’s in it for me?” kind of person: national groups often have member benefits, like discounts at certain stores or businesses.

A person can typically join a parent-teacher organization for a year for about the cost of one fast-food combo meal, and could attend every meeting by showing up on fewer than nine evenings a year. That’s not asking much to gain more knowledge of what is going on at your child’s school and to know that you’re making an effort to ensure quality there.

Filed under: Education, Social Justice, Teaching

Collards! Woohoo!

OK, so you start with this:

And then, even though you don’t use chemical pesticides, you do this:

And while you’re doing that, do this:

Which brings you to this part:

And when you put them together, you get this:

Then what you’ve got left are these:

And what you do with those . . . is this:

And finally, voila!

 

Filed under: Food, Gardening, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #94

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, ye they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

— from the chapter, “The Country of the Blind,” in The Outsider by Colin Wilson

Filed under: Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing