Thomas Merton wrote the following on 22 July 1963, and I believe it to be as true — to me — today as it was — to him — then

How true it is that the great obligation of the Christian, especially now, is to prove himself a disciple of Christ by hating no one, that is to say, by condemning no one, rejecting no one. And how true that the impatience that fumes at others and damns them (especially whole classes, races, nations) is a sign of the weakness that is still unliberated, still not tracked by the Blood of Christ, and is still a stranger to the Cross.

A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals; reading for July 24.

I find “hating no one” to be a challenge. I’m pretty good at it in the categories of “races, nations,” but I struggle with the “whole classes” bit. If classes are upper, middle, and lower, I can say with a relative confidence that I don’t hate anyone because of their status. But I struggle with the stubborn ignorance, the grasping, self-absorbed greed that seems inherent at all social levels. This probably means that it’s human and takes conscious effort and hard work to overcome.

Recently a couple of Facebook friends — one a beloved cousin — sent me a link to a song titled “Here in America” or “In God We Still Trust” or maybe “Here in America, in God We Still Trust.” My cousin asked me to forward it “if so led,” but I can’t in good conscience do so. The lyrics of the song are flat and clichéd (worse even in this trait than Lee Greenwood’s career-killing “God Bless the U.S.A.”), and the images in the accompanying video are saccharine patriotic and religious sentiment.

The song is American Christianity at its most sappy and, I believe, despite the pretty music, at its worst — the putting of America before (or at least equal to) Christ.

The older I become, the crankier I become about religion. Not about faith, the teachings of Christ, and the attempt to walk in his way, but about American Christianity as empty religiosity laying claim to an all-but-forgotten Christ who has — absolutely against his will and the life he lived — become just another icon of American mythology.

In what remains of the summer, which for me is that space of time between the ending of spring semester and the beginning of fall, I’m going to try and blog more often. Maybe come up with some regular types of posts–a version of throw-back Thursday or a Mondays with Merton or some such ideas as these.

I read a lot, so I think I might try to come up with some posts focused on that reading. This is the first of those posts, not all of which will be as long as what follows.

My friend Vallory recently shared an article about Christian mission trips that included these words:

Why do we want to go on mission trips to Honduras or El Salvador and help those poor children but we don’t want to let those same children fleeing for their lives come into our country?

Here’s my answer: letting them come in, live near us, become citizens, and share in our resources requires more than a narrow, circumscribed version of acting good. We feel great about ourselves when we send out Samaritan’s Purse boxes. We helped feed hungry kids! But what happens when the hungry kids come to us? What happens when they have no way to support themselves but their parents have chosen to flee here so that they don’t starve or get murdered? A box isn’t going to do it.

Why So Many Christians Want to Go On Mission Trips to Help Kids But Don’t Want Them Here

We should, indeed, “feel great about ourselves when we send out Samaritan’s Purse boxes” (apart from the fact that the organization is connected to Franklin Graham, in whom his fathers — earthly and heavenly — would, in my opinion, would be sorely disappointed). But it can’t stop there. Jesus didn’t say, “Hey, John, give this box of healing to that woman over there, who can take it to that other guy around the corner, who might not mind getting it to the leper colony.” Jesus went to the lepers himself. And, perhaps, more importantly, he welcomed the lepers to come to him.

Vallory also shared a post from John Pavlovitz and his blog, Stuff That Needs to Be Said. Here’s my favorite excerpt:

No, Donald Trump wasn’t anointed by God.
He isn’t an instrument of Divine will.
He isn’t Biblically hastening Armageddon or Jesus’ return.

He’s just a hateful, indecent, predatory fraud who is destroying the environment, stripping people of their human rights, and making America a global laughing-stock.

His ascension is not prophetic but pathetic, the result of:

Russian interference,
fake news,
gerrymandering,
voter suppression,
Hillary hatred,
Obama resentment,
Fox News brainwashing,
Democratic stumbles,
the votes of bigoted Evangelicals, whites terrified of losing market share, and third-party voters—and the inaction of 100 million Americans who couldn’t be bothered to participate in one of the greatest responsibilities of living here.

That’s it.

No Providence.
No Divine messages.
No Biblical prophecies.
No spiritual movements.

Just ordinary human beings who chose really, really poorly when they should have known better.

Pavlovitz, John, “God Has Nothing to Do with Trump Being President,” John Pavlovitz: Stuff That Needs to Be Said. Accessed 13 June 2019.

One thing that has become continually clearer to me over my years of reading and teaching American literature from early indigenous materials to Columbus, from John Winthrop to Emily Dickinson, is that “America” is in a perpetual state of decay. (I’ll write more on this later, as it’s something I’ve been tracking through the literature.) And the struggles the USA faces today are in one sense or another the same struggles the country has faced since its inception.

I’ll provide a handful of quotations below from thinkers and writers whose work sees behind the curtain of American mythology. First, Trappist monk Thomas Merton gives his take on what lies beneath the nation’s pimpled skin:

. . . I have undergone my dose of exposure to American society in the ’60s. . . . I love the people I run into, but I pity them for having to live as they do, and I think the world of U.S.A. in 1967 is a world of crass, blind, overstimulated, phony, lying stupidity. . . . The temper of the country is one of blindness, fat, self-satisfied, ruthless, mindless corruption. A lot of people are uneasy about it but helpless to do anything against it. The rest are perfectly content with the rat race as it is, and with its competitive, acquisitive, hurtling, souped-up drive into nowhere. A massively aimless, baseless, shrewd cockiness that simply exalts itself without purpose. The mindless orgasm, in which there is no satisfaction, only spasm.

Merton, Thomas, “May 28: On America in the Sixties,” A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. (Merton wrote this on 27 May 1967.)

So writes Merton in 1967, but this shade of the American character is, in part, the reeking residue of the rotten practice of slavery. Here’s Frederick Douglass, a self-freed man, speaking on 5 July 1852 to a mixed-race group continuing their Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York. The feelings of whites hearing this can easily be imagined, but I wonder about the freed or self-freed or free-born blacks, particularly those who were — perhaps mindlessly — caught up in the celebration. Douglass’s final paragraph should knock all of us to our knees and bears quoting in its entirety:

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless: your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgiving, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy–a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

“But slavery is over,” we might argue, and we would be technically correct. The racism, prejudice, and greed that supported the institution, however, remain with us. I know a white Christian woman who recently pointed to a magazine focused on a black audience and asked, “Why do they have to have their own magazine?” “Why not?” I’m sorry to admit I was unable to ask. How long has the black community in the USA had a public voice in comparison to the white community?

Similarly, John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, recently said this on The World and Everything in It:

If there’s a group right now whose expansion of rights—even beyond rights into privileges—is most evident, it’s the LGBT community. There’s not a systemic set of persecutions or dehumanizations against this group of people. It’s remarkable, in fact, whatever essentially it seems they want to claim, they can have.

“Culture Friday: Unalienable Rights and Stranger Things,” The World and Everything in It, 12 July 2019.

Likewise, how long has this group had any access to rights and privileges? If LGBTQ folks are excited and emboldened by the recent level acceptance in the public sphere, then where’s the blame? I’m sure Protestants did the same in the wake of the Reformation. I’m sure white American males did the same in the wake of the Revolution. The mistake — if I may be so bold as to describe it thus — this Christian woman and man make in their comments regarding race and gender is to be blinded by labels to the humanity behind the labels. To paraphrase Thoreau from “Resistance to Civil Government,” we should be humans first, and only afterward, if absolutely necessary, citizens of this country or that / adherents of this religion or that or none / members of this political party or that or none / persons of one race or ethnicity or age or gender or sexual preference or economic bracket, etc.

Our endless pitting of “us” against “them” — however “us” and “them” are defined — demands labels to identify the sides. But identity labels limit and undermine humanity; that is, labels are dehumanizing. Again, however, our politics and economics and religion work only in the context of labeling, which, I believe, works only in the context of dehumanization.

I’ll end this rant with a couple of quotations from Margaret Fuller’s 1845 essay, “Fourth of July”:

Much has been achieved since the first Declaration of Independence. America is rich and strong; she has shown great talent and energy; vast prospects of aggrandizement open before her. But the noble sentiment which she expressed in her early youth is tarnished; she has shown that righteousness is not her chief desire, and her name is no longer a watch-word for the highest hopes to the rest of the world. She knows this, but takes it very easily; she feels she is growing richer and more powerful, and that seems to suffice her.

Near the close of her essay, Fuller tries to imagine the individual — in the gendered language of her time — who would serve as a savior from all of this lecherous seeking and grabbing and hoarding that is such a big part of American life these days:

We know not where to look for an example of all or many of the virtues we would seek from the man who is to begin the new dynasty that is needed of Fathers of the Country. The Country needs to be born again; she is polluted with the lust of power, the lust of gain. She needs Fathers good enough to be God-fathers–men who will stand sponsors at the baptism with all they possess, with all the goodness they can cherish, and all the wisdom they can win, to lead this child the way she should go, and never one step in another.

Well, for one thing, I aged ten years in the spaces between and on either end of those dots. In 1979, I turned 21; in 2019, I’ll turn 61. Forty years of good life in those spaces, with very little to complain about–personally speaking, of course.

I’ve thought a lot about 1979 lately, the summer of that year especially. In the spring, I was a music major at Mars Hill College, and I’d just qualified to enter the performance track. So, the fall semester would be a lot to look forward to. And it would be a lot of work. I’m not sure exactly when I realized that I didn’t have the dexterity to be a great flute player, but in the compressed timetable of memory, the realization probably came close behind the success of making the cut for a focus on performance.

Meanwhile, back at the homeplace in Walnut, my folks sold my uncle some pastureland. I’m not sure how much they received for it, but I know they set aside $5,000 to divide between my brother and me. He took his and used it to set himself up with a place to live when he graduated from NC State. I decided that I wanted to take mine early, like the proverbial Prodigal Son, and go to Europe, so I signed up for a MHC study-abroad summer program that would have me studying somewhere in England for six weeks or so, after which I would have another two weeks to travel some on my own.

But sometime in the middle of that spring semester, somebody from Brevard College came through putting up posters for tours conducted by a company called American-European Student Union, Inc. (AESU). Their tours were just short of eight weeks long promised to take me to seventeen countries. No study, just travel.

“That’s what I want to do,” I said. And that’s what I did.

I left home in the middle of June and joined AESU 616 (so named because our tour began on June 16) in London, England. Between then and the first days in August, we traveled on a Mercedes bus–some forty-eight college students, an Austrian tour guide not much older than we were, and an Italian bus driver.

This summer of 2019, about a dozen from the ’79 tour celebrated our 40th year of friendship in Sicily, about which I will have more to say in the next few weeks — and more to show with lovely pictures. I’ve long thought that the trip — with the reunion added — would make a good novel, so I’m some forty-five pages into such a beast. More on that later as well.

For now, I’m just going to point out that the summer of 1979 was when President Jimmy Carter recognized a “crisis of confidence” in the American people and described two possible paths for America. One was “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.” I feel certain that he wholeheartedly believed that we Americans would rise to the occasion, as we had done so often in the nation’s history.

But we didn’t. We disappointed President Carter and ourselves by taking the other path, which, in a speech given on 15 July 1979, he described this way:

One is a path . . . leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

“A Crisis of Confidence”

Doesn’t that description seem unfortunately like the behavior that has brought us to July 2019 after culminating in results of the 2016 presidential election? (If interested, see Susan Delacourt’s “How Jimmy Carter Predicted Donald Trump — in 1979”).

The long downward slide from 1979 to 2019 began with Carter’s defeat and the election of a B-movie actor, then hit what I hope is rock bottom with the election of an ignorant and arrogant reality TV star and 3rd-rate stand-up-comedian wannabe. Compare, if you dare, President Carter’s speech referenced above to Trump’s attempt to commemorate Independence Day on 4 July 2019:

The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis at Yorktown. Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports, it did everything it had to do and at Ft. McHenry under the rocket’s red glare had nothing but victory. When dawn came, the star-spangled banner waved defiant.

Check out the cogent analysis of how the above might have come about.

I will now close my eyes and think of Sicily.

twilight: the light from the sky between full night and sunrise or between sunset and full night. . . .; an intermediate state that is not clearly defined; a period of decline

reel: a flanged spool for photographic materials, especially one for motion pictures; to turn or move round and round, to be in a whirl; to behave in a violent disorderly manner; to waver or fall back (as from a blow); to walk or move unsteadily; a lively Scottish-Highland [or Irish] dance, also the music for this dance

On May 3, 2019, I finished the first draft of the final piece of a short story collection, tentatively titled “A Twilight Reel.” I’ve been working on it for more years than I care to mention. If any of you have read — or even heard of — my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook, then you probably know that Gabriel comes from a little (mostly fictional) place known as Runion, which is located where the Laurel River joins the French Broad River in Madison County, North Carolina. I’d say that at least a third if not half of the novel takes place there. (See my previous post on Runion for more about it.)

The whole of “A Twilight Reel” takes place in Runion and the surrounding area. Each story takes place in a different month of a single year. I think the first two pieces written for the collection were the January and March stories, but without looking it up in my curriculum vitae or checking the journals on my shelf, I can’t remember which was written first. (My guess is that March came first.) The year in which all twelve stories are set wasn’t finally settled on until the final story — final both in the sequence (it’s the December story) and in the creation. As that story developed, the year was obviously 1999.

This arrangement allowed me to portray lots of different kinds of people who live in Runion and also display the character of the Appalachian mountains through the course of their four beautiful seasons. But 1999 also suggests other changes. By that time a number of different kinds of people began to call the mountains of western North Carolina home. Even though the Y2K event fell far short of the fear it generated, it still hinted at significant transformations to come — bringing us Barak Obama and Donald Trump. In the creation of Runion and some of its stories, I deepened my understanding of this imagined community. (You can get a small sense of how I’ve arranged and kept track of the history and people and places here.)

I won’t say more about the collection at this time beyond giving you the titles and any brief descriptions I can think of.

• “The Wine of Astonishment” (January): the title is taken from Psalm 60:3 (KJV) — [O God, . . .] Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou has made us to drink the wine of astonishment.
• “The Loves of Misty Sprinkle” (February): this young woman works at Eliza’s Runion hair salon; she’s a romantic sensualist, who considers Valentine’s Day a religious holiday in much the same way that American pseudo-Christian zealots celebrate Independence Day.
• “Overwinter” (March): a blizzard hits the mountains just as the wife of a professor at Runion State University is preparing to leave him; she’s snowbound with him, but he’s more concerned with trying to keep the old woman up the hill from freezing to death.
• “The Flutist” (April): a popular flute professor dies in the middle of his spring concert, and the RSU music faculty has to find a replacement before the next school year.
• “Decoration Day” (May): three stories take place at once here — 1) a Decoration Day in a family cemetery across the river from Runion; 2) a Civil War reenactment at a local historical site; 3) a man’s attempt to avenge the death of a loved one in the Shelton Laurel Massacre of 1863.
• “Conversion” (June): a preacher in the Lonesome Mountain American Christian Church has run off with the church’s money and a member’s wife, and the building has been bought by the local Muslim community for its mosque.
• “The Invisible World Around Them” (July): a local legend and fiddle champion returns home to Runion to die.
• “Grist for the Mill” (August): a Runion neighborhood keeps an eye on a stranger who has just moved into a house on their street.
• “A Poster of Marilyn Monroe” (September): with his wife dead, an elderly man renews his obsession with Marilyn Monroe.
• “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” (October): local meanness erupts in response to unsettling changes, and another man dies while making music.
• “Two Floors Above the Dead” (November): when their older brother dies of cancer, two unmarried and estranged siblings have to imagine a way forward.
• “Witness Tree” (December): a middle-aged woman works in the RSU library and dreads the arrival of the winter holidays to be spent with her husband’s family and their Y2K fears.

These are certainly twilight days in our world, and the Appalachia in which I grew up is not exempted from the obscurity and ambiguity, even though many people think that their traditional home lives and religious practices safeguard them against change. We reel under the uncertainty as to whether this twilight world is that between evening and night or between night and morning.

Mississippi novelist William Faulkner once said of the place in which most of his fiction is set, “. . . I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. . . .” His “little postage stamp of native soil” was Oxford, Mississippi, and the surrounding Lafayette County. These he imagined as his town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County, where created people, entire families, local history, and more. I’m not a Faulkner scholar, so I don’t know how many novels he built on his “native soil,” but his oeuvre includes many of the greatest works of 20th-century American literature.

I make no claim at all in the direction of challenging Faulkner and his achievement, but I’m not above stealing his “postage stamp” idea. The first short story I wrote–“Jamboree,” for Dr. Jeff Rackham’s fiction writing class at UNC-Asheville, circa 1994)–was set in a place very much like Madison County, North Carolina, where I grew up after my parents “moved back home” in the early 1960s. The second story, “To the Moon, Alice,” was set in Nashville, long (and maybe still) my second home, but after that, all other stories, including Gabriel’s Songbook, are set in Madison County, specifically in and around my recreation of a town called Runion.

Runion was a sawmill town that existed on the French Broad River between Barnard and Hot Springs in the first few decades of the 1900s. But when the sawmill shut down (in the late 1920’s or early ’30s, I’m guessing), the town followed. When my brother Jerry and I went there a number of springs ago, we found a few structures remaining: a chimney and house foundation, with two lines of jonquils still blooming (probably on each side of a walkway up to the house’s front or back door); the foundations of the sawmill; the concrete vault for the paymaster’s shack; a pile of wooden rubble where the one-room schoolhouse had fallen in on itself. Besides the row of jonquils, the most haunting image in my mind is that of the grass growing beneath the trees. This wasn’t the variety of grass that would grow naturally in a wooded area. It must have grown in the front yards of a few streets’ worth of shacks in which Runion’s 1,000 or so people lived.

I recreated Runion as the place to set my Madison County fiction. As you can see from my hand-drawn map below, I made Runion mostly from bits of Marshall and Mars Hill. It has Marshall’s river setting, its Main Street and Back Street; it has Mars Hill’s university in Runion State University, which is in turn a mash-up of Mars Hill College (as I knew it), UNC-Asheville, and East Tennessee State University. I imagined an island similar to the one in Marshall, but right up against the town side of the river rather than on the other side — that’s Stackhouse Park, where Gabriel’s Songbook begins. Across the French Broad from Runion is Piney Ridge, which is mostly an indiscriminate mash-up of Sandy Mush, Little Pine, and Big Pine. Walnut (not pictured in the map), where I grew up, comes into the fiction some but wears its earlier name Jewel Hill.

I recently finished the first draft of my second book of fiction, a collection of twelve stories, each of which takes place in or near Runion a single month of the year 1999. (That is, a story set in January, one in February, and so on through December, but further info on that in another post.) Much more so than Gabriel’s Songbook, these stories bring Runion to life. So, I wanted to be able to see where my characters were when they were in town or on the RSU campus. I’d made a sketch of Runion some years ago, but the hand-drawn map below is much more detailed. If the story collection–working title: A Twilight Reel–finds a publisher, then it would be cool if a real artist could make this into something that could be printed in the book.

It looks like a terrific little town, like some place where I would love to live!

Yesterday, 6 May 2019, at the stroke of high noon, I uploaded my final grades for Spring 2019, so there’s another one in the books — the 18th of my academic years at East Tennessee State University.

It was a busy one! As teacher, writer, reader, editor, graduate program coordinator, colleague, etc., my life on campus scrambled headlong through the calendar from the Tuesday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in January through the graduation ceremony on Saturday, May the Fourth (and some intensive grading on Sunday and Monday).

Here are the highlights:

• Teacher: Two sections of ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865. Because I was picking up management of the English Honors-in-Discipline Program for a colleague who was on Non-Instructional Assignment (NIA or sabbatical), I was scheduled to teach only one section, but when budget problems arose just before the semester began, I picked up a second section of the same course to help out. I say they were the same course, but that’s not exactly true; one was live in the classroom, and the other was online. I had a good semester with sixty-some students; the live class had seven or eight students more than the online class. Both classes had terrific students in them. And, of course, some not so terrific. One observation from the semester (certainly not a blanket statement): the most disengaged, apathetic students (thankfully, only a few of them) tended to be white and Christian and male. I don’t know what that says, but sharing these characteristics myself, I found it more than a little disappointing.
• Writer: Early in the semester, I did the final edit of “Brown’s Early Biographers and Reception, 1815-1940s,” an essay that I wrote as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. Throughout the semester, I also worked on the final three stories that completed the first draft of the short story collection that I have in progress. The collection, tentatively titled A Twilight Reel: Stories, is made up of twelve stories, each one taking place in a different month of 1999 and all set in and around historical and fictional Runion, NC (the “home” setting for Gabriel’s Songbook). I finished drafting “Decoration Day” (May) on 2/1/2019, “Conversion” (June) on 3/16/2019, and “Witness Tree” (December) on 5/3/2019. I continued rewarding work with other writers, who help me in various ways: Tess Lloyd, Tamara Baxter, Robert Kottage, Cate Strain, and Jeff Mann.
• Reader: I read some great stuff this semester. I continue to work through a couple of things by Thomas Merton: daily readings from his journal and nightly readings in his spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. In addition to these and all that I read for ENGL 2110 (from indigenous American creation stories and trickster tales to the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson), I was able to read Possession by A. S. Byatt, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, Blood Harmony by Lana Austin, Chenoo by Joseph Bruchac, and The Overstory by Richard Powers.
• Editor: My co-editors (Karen A. Weyler and Robert M. Battistini) made it through two intensive rounds (January and April) of “final” editing for The Literary Magazine and Other Writings, 1801-1807, volume three of the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, which will be published sometime this summer. It’s a career project coming to what I hope is a graceful (and final) end; Karen, Robert, and I have been working on this scholarly edition for a dozen years (maybe more).
• Assistant Chair for Graduate Studies: I managed and mentored and tested and signed off on a tremendous group of young colleagues in our Master of Arts Program in English, ten of whom graduated this past Saturday, May the Fourth. Congratulations to all!

• Colleague: We were all caught up in the whirlwind of Spring 2019, but we managed a couple of good meals at El Charolais, some good meetings (as meetings go), many good moments, a terrific Spring Literary Festival, and more. I hope I was a good to and for my great colleagues. In my not-so-humble opinion, I work with the greatest group of people on the ETSU campus. Now, if we could only convince the administrative moneybags of that fact.

Gabriel’s Songbook by Michael Amos Cody
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oh my, it’s good. In fact, it’s so awesome that I have half a box of copies that I keep near the desk in my home office. I remember thinking that it was going to be too autobiographical, but I find it surprisingly fictionalized. That’s good, I think.

The Appalachia in it is the one in which I grew up, but Gabriel’s Runion doesn’t really exist (although such a place did exist once). The novel’s Runion is part Marshall, part Mars Hill, with maybe a dash of Hot Springs added in. Gabriel’s Nashville is the one in which I spent most of my 20s, only hints of which remain in today’s Nashville.

View all my reviews

Gabriel Tanner was born on 8 March 1959. He’s a fictional character, of course, so you needn’t worry about sending him a card or buying him a gift. (If you’ve read Gabriel’s Songbook, however, I’m sure he would like it if you gave the novel a rating–or even wrote a word or two about it–at its page on Amazon and/or Goodreads.) I know a lot about Gabriel that wasn’t in the novel, like what grade he entered in 1971 (7th) and the date he and Eliza remarried in 1992.

I have a file on him.

In January 1995, late in my Master of Arts program at Western Carolina University, I traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to present a paper on Salman Rushdie at the Annual Conference of the Southern Humanities Council. My drive back home to Asheville included a stop at William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, his estate near Oxford. I was inspired by the way in which he plotted the chronology of his novel A Fable (1954) on the walls of his study.

At some point during the writing of Gabriel’s Songbook and the collection of short stories that is now nearly complete (working title “A Twilight Reel”), I decided that I needed to keep track of the people and events about which I was writing. Granted, Leesa would likely have frowned on my writing all over the walls of my study, so I decided to keep a written timeline in a computer file titled “Runion & Its People.” Although the timeline gets much busier later in the chronology, at the time of Gabriel’s birth it looks like this:

Why the 8th of March for his birthday? Some few of you might know the history of my song “Thunder & Lightning”: its original 1984 recording for the never-released album Waiting for the Night, the inclusion of a Cody band “T&L” on Asheville’s 1991 local band compilation River Rock, lots of airplay on KISS-FM, and so on. It was on the 8th of March in 1984 that the song came to life, recorded almost as an afterthought, at Bullet Recording in Nashville. An important day for me, and so I decided to make it an important day for Gabriel as well.

Anyway, I thought a lot about him yesterday on the eve of his birthday as I was playing some of his songs at Cindy Saadeh’s Fine Art in Kingsport–“Catch That Train” and “Siren Sing,” for example. I thought I should record these and other new songs for an album–probably a last album for me. And I wondered about his story beyond the end of Gabriel’s Songbook and how that might look as a new novel.

So, happy birthday, Gabriel Tanner! Celebrate well, my friend!

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I was in the midst of reading Brown’s book, I was beginning a course in American Literature to 1865. The first pieces we read are American Indian creation stories and trickster tales. We follow these with a couple of letters Columbus wrote about his voyages. I wanted the students, when they finished reading Columbus, to consider the validity of our having a Columbus Day. Looking around Youtube, I ran across a video arguing against those who would do away with the holiday and against the idea that the American Indians were victims of genocide. The video basically builds its arguments on selected moments and actions–when Indians successfully fought back, when they did bad things to other Indians, and so on. The argument is that the American Indian wasn’t a helpless victim but just became a beaten opponent.

Certainly the American Indians were not helpless and certainly they were often skilled in brutality. Just as certainly they won many battles. But reading through Dee Brown’s 1971 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I couldn’t put aside, then couldn’t get out from under, the weight of hopelessness that metaphorically crushed the American Indians of the American West. The so-called winning of the West is a legacy of Euro-American greed for land and gold and silver, a litany of lies and broken promises and broken treaties that runs through tribe after tribe throughout the West, and a plague of racial prejudice. These are the dark and devastating elements that are the reality of Manifest Destiny.

Dee Brown’s book is indeed an American Indian history of the West. But what it implies as well is that Euro-America — white America — had already perpetrated the same crimes against the Wampanoag and others in New England, the Cherokee and others in the American South, the Ojibwe and Osage and others in the Midwest.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a brutal and beautiful book.



View all my reviews