Foster Dickson's Blog, page 94

April 24, 2015

Deep Southern Gardening Mystery #9

These beautiful flowers come up behind my house every spring in a little patch that was probably was once a garden— the air-conditioning units were placed there some years ago, before we bought the house. Sometimes, in cleaning out that little space in the spring, I forget these and mow down the first sprouts with the weeds that are peeking through.


These purple flowers look like a type of lily. That’s my best guess. They hang pretty heavily on amid long blade-like foliage. Does anyone know what these are?


2015-04-24 12.08.24 2015-04-24 12.08.19


 


Filed under: Alabama, Black Belt, Gardening, The Environment
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Published on April 24, 2015 11:30

April 16, 2015

My next book: The Whitehurst Case

whitehurst sign frontI am proud to relay that today I contracted my next book, which will be on the Whitehurst Case in post-Civil Rights Montgomery. After meeting the Whitehurst family back in 2013 and entertaining the possibility of a book on this subject, I did some preliminary research and foresaw a much larger book on the history of Montgomery in the 1970s and 1980s, which would interweave the many complicated events that peppered that time period. I dove head-long into that project through the latter half of 2013, all of 2014, and now into 2015. I’m been thankful for the cooperation I’ve gotten from quite a few long-time Montgomerians who have talked to me about Montgomery’s post-Civil Rights history.


However, after many hours of research, over 50,000 words of text, and lots of pacing around my office, a discussion with NewSouth Books editor-in-chief Randall Williams convinced me that what I actually had was two books: one on the Whitehurst Case that was nearly finished, and one on post-Civil Rights Montgomery that was well underway. So, Randall and I came to terms, and the book on the Whitehurst Case has been contracted! (The Montgomery book will go on hold for now, and I will continue it when this first project is complete.)


Writing a book is a strange endeavor, which can twist and turn through a variety of forms and structures. This project, after deviating in my mind into wider terrain, has brought me back to the original idea that idea that was proposed over a lunchtime meeting with a family I’d then never met before. The Whitehurst Case is a complicated aspect of Southern history, which changed many lives in Alabama’s capitol city.


As the saying goes, it ain’t over ’til it over . . . I’ve got plenty of work to do – some interviews, some more research, more writing, and lots of polishing – over the next few months to ensure that the book’s final manuscript is clean and clear, accurate and well-documented. As more news becomes available, I’ll share it here.


Filed under: Alabama, Civil Rights, Forthcoming, Local Issues, Social Justice, The Deep South, Writing and Editing
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Published on April 16, 2015 14:35

April 12, 2015

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #62

“All that education can do in any case is to teach us to make good use of what we are; if we are nothing to begin with, no amount of education can do us any good.”


– from “Education, Past and Present” by John Gould Fletcher, in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, 1977 edition


Filed under: Education, Literature, Reading, Teaching, The Deep South, Writing and Editing
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Published on April 12, 2015 08:03

April 7, 2015

April’s Southern movie of the month

The 1949 movie adaptation of William Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust” offers a different kind of race-relations narrative. In the story, we meet a white teenage boy named Chick Mallison who has been trying to repay the kindness of a black man – a landowner, which is a rarity in his day – who took care of Chick when he fell in a cold creek. The man, Lucas Beauchamp, is proud and dignified and will not hear of his hospitality being reimbursed, not even through gifts. However, when Beauchamp is arrested for the murder of a white man, he needs the boy’s help.


Predating the Academy Award-winning adaption of “To Kill A Mockingbird” by thirteen years, this story has both conventional and unconventional elements. By this stage in film history, we’ve seen the young white Southerner, baffled by a racist social order that makes no sense, carry us through a regional bildungsroman, and we’ve also seen the white lawyer who is willing to defy lynch-mob culture to defend an innocent (black) man. However, this lawyer is no Atticus Finch: John Gavin Stevens, Chick’s uncle, originally takes a much more foreboding stance on Lucas’ guilt. At first all he wants to know is: why did you shoot him? But Lucas confides in Chick, and as the mob outside is ready to overtake the supposed villain, the teenager has to solve the mystery of who really shot Vincent Gowrie.


William Faulkner regularly used the precarious nature of race in his plot twists: the weird black man in “Barn Burning” who warns the victims of Abner Snopes’ forthcoming actions, the stoic butler in “A Rose for Emily” who aids through his servitude in concealing a corpse upstairs, or the ever-faithful Clytie in Absalom, Absalom! who stands by her father until the last. Well, Lucas Beauchamp is the opposite of those characters— he is no servant, no aider, nor abetter. He stands on his own, even apart from the black community; Chick even remarks that it’s like the other blacks don’t even see him. In that, Chick is Lucas’ only hope.


In the film, we get some of the conventions of Southern storytelling: the despicable white family disdained by blacks and whites alike, the black man wrongly accused, the white youngster who values righteousness over custom, the lynch mob ready for blood. However, the story has no trite conclusions. Having an elderly lady stand off the mob while knitting in a rocking chair . . . we don’t see that too often. And unlike poor Tom Robinson of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Lucas Beauchamp gets away with his life.


“Intruder in the Dust” could have been a better movie if the acting wasn’t so plastic. As I watched it, I had no clue how it was going to turn out, and tried to look past the forced dialogue and melodramatic scene-setting. Having read several of William Faulkner’s novels, I know that you can’t depend on him for neat and tidy resolutions that warm the heart and soul. But this time, it turns out OK . . . for everyone except old Nub Gowrie, who escorts one of his sons to jail for killing the other, while a proud black man saunters off down the crowded sidewalk.


Filed under: Black Belt, Civil Rights, Film/Movies, Literature, Mississippi, Social Justice, The Deep South
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Published on April 07, 2015 05:07

April 5, 2015

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #61

“Yet, elsewhere, all over town, there were suggestions that something new was coming to the surface here, something never quite articulated with any degree of force or with the courage of numbers in many Deep-Southern towns, some painful summoning with deepest wellsprings. There were whites in town who fully intended to keep their children in the public schools, and who not only would say so openly, but who after a time would even go further and defend the very notion itself of integrated education as a positive encouragement to their children’s learning. At first this spirit was imperceptible, but gradually, under the influence of some of Yazoo’s white leaders and with the emergence of others of like mind, it became a movement with noticeable strength behind it.”


– from “Holding Our Breath: October 1969 – January 1970″ in Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town by Willie Morris, published in Reporting Civil Rights, Volume Two


Filed under: Civil Rights, Education, Mississippi, Reading, Teaching, The Deep South, Writing and Editing
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Published on April 05, 2015 07:55

March 31, 2015

As OPPA takes shape

*continued from an earlier post: “In the beginning, there was . . . gravel and sand”


Unlike many educators who start a school garden, I’m not a horticulturalist or science teacher— my only professional experience in this field is a summer of landscaping work right after high school, which consisted mainly of planting trees and lots of pansies, laying sod and shoveling fill dirt, and digging trenches and laying PVC for irrigation systems. No, my background in gardening – now fashionably dubbed “urban agriculture” – is purely DIY.


These localized practices were commonplace back in 1970s and 1980s Alabama. When I was growing up, my family had a garden plot in the backyard, and my dad, my brother and I were the yard crew for most of the elderly neighbors for a block in every direction. We also had a greenhouse off the back porch, where we could get our plants out of the cold and where my dad grew cacti and succulents as a hobby. From that experience, I learned when and how to plant and tend tomatoes, squash, peppers and cucumbers; I learned that mulched leaves and grass clippings raked into beds constituted fertilizer; and I learned to prune azaleas right after they bloom and that roses need acidic soil. I didn’t take classes to learn those things. My dad taught my older brother and me about them, as well as this very important lesson: anything you can do for yourself is something you don’t have to ask other people for.


That’s what I want the students to learn from this school garden— that and how to do things right. The intangible nature of good schoolwork = good grades isn’t enough to show young people how effort pays off. Sometimes, it has to be more than a symbolic letter on nine-weeks report card. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 10, verse 18 reads “Because of laziness, the rafters sag; when hands are slack, the house leaks.” If we plant the right things at the right time and tend them in the right way, we have a greater likelihood of our work paying off.


However, I also know that we’re going to plant some seeds that don’t grow, and that we will have some fledgling sprouts to wither, and that we will yield some seemingly healthy plants that bear no fruit. The purpose of a garden at a school is to figure out why we succeed sometimes and fail others, then carry that knowledge forward. If we succeed all the time, with every plant, the students will walk away thinking that’s how it goes— it’s just not.


With each construction day, we’ve made a little progress, and the students keep coming back the next day to make a little more. Gardening – or horticulture, or urban agriculture, call it what you want – isn’t a one-and-done activity. You have to keep showing back up, from seed to sprout to yield. That’s another good life lesson to learn from gardening.


Everybody keeps asking me, what are you going to grow? I answer simply, I don’t know. Whatever the students want to plant. One boy has been expressing a desire to grow sorrel since our first meeting. Others have stated a preference for more traditional Southern staples: tomatoes or collards. Whatever ends up being in our raised beds, we’ll consult the reference books to avoid doing something stupid, like planting tomatoes in February, and take it from there.


Filed under: Alabama, Education, Gardening, Local Issues, Teaching, The Deep South, The Environment
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Published on March 31, 2015 06:01

March 29, 2015

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #60

“I watch the political process pretty much as I watch baseball. I have a favorite team, but I know that ultimately it makes no difference who wins. I gave up on politics offering any hope for the world’s problems a long time ago. It’s an illusion, a mirage. Sometimes good comedy.”


– from chapter IV in Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher by Will D. Campbell


Filed under: Civil Rights, Literature, Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing
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Published on March 29, 2015 08:00

March 24, 2015

In the beginning, there was . . . gravel and sand

Back during this rainy winter, I started talk of what it would take to have a school garden where I teach.  For some time, I had had my eye on a plot of sunny ground near the back of an unused grassy lot; over the years, I had been keeping my eye on how the eastern sun from the morning rose over the campus, keeping this parcel bright all day, unimpeded by the nearby leland cypress to the south of the lot, only winnowing into shade late in the day when the scrub brush on the western fence stopped it. This little plot, which measure about 80′ x 80′ gets well over eight hours of sun a day, even in the winter. This was the spot.


IMG_0674


So I pitched the idea to our new assistant principal, who was a science teacher, and he told me that our Environmental Science teacher had already been thinking about it— so go talk to her, partner up, and see what can happen. Turns out that a pair of students, two seniors who have been volunteering at Montgomery’s EAT South Downtown Farm, had also been talking to the local Rotary Club who were enthusiastic about helping, too. We all talked and agreed on a course of action: I would oversee establishment, construction, and maintenance; the two boys and some other student volunteers would form an extracurricular to help out; and the Environmental Science teacher could use it at will. Pretty good deal, since I don’t really want to write school-garden lesson plans, and she doesn’t really want to pull weeds.


The two seniors were most interested in the possibilities of reforming the campus along models of sustainability. Wanting to use what they had learned at EAT South, they originally wanted to figure out how the lunchroom waste could become compost. Having composted for years, I advised them to price-compare biodegradable trays that could replace the current styrofoam ones, and ask the lunchroom to switch. They were thinking about composting the waste every day, but I reminded them: if the lunchroom were to use our trays 1-3 days a month, just for lunch, our worms and roly-polies would have over 1000 trays a month to munch on! Unfortunately, the cost of the biodegradable trays was over three times the cost of styrofoam, so we were back to the drawing board. What if we offered to buy them, I asked the boys. Would she use the biodegradable trays if we provided them at no cost to the lunchroom? Keeping it positive, I told them: In the meantime, let’s just build our compost bins, take it one step at a time, and figure it out . . . 


Next step: raising money. I worked with our school’s booster organization to procure construction funds for wood, soil and other necessaries, and our Environmental Science teacher applied for a local social-action grant program to get enough supplies and tools for her classes, as well as seeds and sprouts. We were in business! In our respective grant proposals, we both promised to use local suppliers for our purchases, so I worked with Bear Lumber for the wood and hardware, Harwell’s Green Thumb Nursery for supplies and tools, and Froggy Bottom Materials for soil and pea gravel. And through the generosity of our local Rotary Club, we would have a hand with ongoing needs like seeds and fertilizer.


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Before we did anything in that plot, the soil needed testing. Our campus sits right next to the interstate, which was built in the early 1960s, and I’m convinced that the soil is soaked in lead from decades of leaded-gas fumes settling on that ground. On a cold February morning, we got out there before school and dug up our numerous little bits to mix together and send to Auburn University’s soil lab. We got a good report a few days later; it mainly told us about our mineral levels, along with fertilizer recommendations, but not contaminants. Better safe than sorry, I still insisted on raised beds, separating from that soil from our bed with weed barrier. We’d just have to engineer the beds for good drainage so we didn’t have dirt soup after the first good rain.


The students and I tossed around a few names – some traditional like “Garden Club” and others not-so-much like “The Phytomaniacs” – but one student’s idea took root: OPPA, which stands for Organizing, Producing, Providing, Agriculture.


Finally, after about two months of talking and planning, we started building on a rare sunny morning in mid-March. It has been a little frustrating having to wait and wait on the rain to pass, but the enthusiasm for getting started just grew each week. When the time came, students measured out and edged our beds, laid the weed barrier and staked it all down. We also had time to throw out hay in the spaces between the beds.


2015-03-20


Because we couldn’t seem to get two consecutive days of dry weather, we still have to paint boiled linseed oil onto our untreated 2x12s, then bolt together the frames for our six 8′ x 4′ beds. We also still have to build our compost bin from old pallets, a trick I learned from the Growing a Greener World TV show. One of our teachers donated a rain barrel and bamboo for bean poles, too. With everything measured and prepped, and wheat straw down in our six-foot-wide walkways, all we need to do now is build the frames and shovel 200 cubic feet of topsoil into them!


OPPA’s new school garden is nearly up and running. I’d like to think that we’ll be ready to plant something before the end of the school year. Our seniors deserve to see little green sprouts in that dirt before they graduate. As for the lunchroom/composting project, that’s a long-term goal, and we’ll figure it out, too.


Filed under: Alabama, Education, Food, Gardening, Local Issues, Teaching, The Deep South, The Environment
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Published on March 24, 2015 12:45

March 22, 2015

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #59

“And the real values [the Agrarians] were asserting in 1930 were not those of ‘material well-being’ or of neo-Confederate nostalgia, but of thoughtful men who were very much concerned with the erosion of the quality of individual life by the forces of industrialization and the uncritical worship of material progress as an end in itself.”


– from Louis D. Rubin, Jr.’s preface to the 1977 third edition of I’ll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners


Filed under: Bible Belt, Reading, Sun Belt, Teaching, The Deep South, Writing and Editing
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Published on March 22, 2015 10:45

March 17, 2015

Jim

Every year, I take my creative writing students to Montgomery’s historic Oakwood Cemetery, where they each choose a person whose tombstone stands out to them for some reason, then we go to the Alabama Department of Archives & History for most of two weeks where they do the research to write a short narrative autobiography of the person. The assignment, which asks them to create a literary character with a distinctive voice out of a real person, walks the line between creative nonfiction and historical fiction, as the students sift through census records and microfilm, record books and news articles to piece together a life-long past. [1]


Jims graveEach year, when we go – we’ve been doing this for seven or eight years – I’m drawn to one particular grave, near the entrance to the cemetery: an above-ground bricked-in grave with a metal plaque that reads: “Here lies JIM, slave of S. Schuessler, died June 14, 1854, aged 30 years. Remembered for his virtue.” What strikes me about Jim’s grave is its placement. The African-American section of Oakwood Cemetery is much further back and down a hill; Jim was placed amongst white company.


Stephen Schuesslers graveNearby, across a small road and over about twenty yards, is the grave of a man named Stephen Schuessler , who I presume to be the S. Schuessler from the plaque. The German name is fairly unique among names in Montgomery, Alabama. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to find on either man.


The 1860 census shows Stephen Schuessler in Montgomery, 42 years old, working as a butcher. His birthplace is listed as Germany. His wife, Mary, who was 33, was born in Alabama, and the couple has two children, a three-year-old son and a one-month-old daughter.  (Jim had passed away by this point.)


Living next door to them in 1860 were a 23-year-old man named Adam Schuessler and a 21-year-old man also named Stephen Schuessler, whose professions were a butcher and a blacksmith, respectively; the two of them are listed as being from Boden, Germany. They are probably related, though it is unclear as to how.


Ten years earlier, in 1850, the census has them all living together, sans the two young children, who were of course not born yet. There’s the elder Stephen at age 32, and his wife Mary at 23, and Adam and the younger Stephen as boys. Another woman was there with them too: Catherine Schuessler, age 37— considering that he had a wife . . . maybe she was a sister of the elder of Stephen, and mother to the two boys. But no Jim. No slaves or servants listed at all.


The only other record I’ve found on this Stephen Schuessler is a marriage record shows that him and Mary Sagar in August 1845 in Autauga County, Alabama, which is adjacent to Montgomery County. One German marriage record, which I can’t access, involves a man by the same name, but it wouldn’t do any good to dig it up to find more about a slave who died young and was buried among white people in Alabama.


So who was Jim? I’m far more interested in him than in the German-born butcher who held him as property. I’ve seen slave holdings listed in census records before, but in this case, no. In 1850, the younger Stephen was only a child, certainly too young to own a slave, when it is much more likely that his grown namesake was the man described in the plaque. “Remembered for his virtue,” and buried in the white section of the cemetery. Jim must have been, despite his circumstances, one hell of a guy.


[1] In all fairness, the idea for the cemetery project came from an article that novelist Philip Gerard wrote in Writer’s Chronicle in 2006 called “The Art of Creative Research.”
Filed under: Alabama, Black Belt, Local Issues, The Deep South
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Published on March 17, 2015 07:35