A TWILIGHT REEL was some 25 years in the making. Three of the stories were written for my MA at Western Carolina back in 1995 (the early versions of “The Wine of Astonishment,” “Overwinter,” and “Grist for the Mill”). Another four were written around PhD studies, associate prof / Tenure & Promotion / full prof hoops (“The Flutist,” “The Invisible World around Them,” “A Poster of Marilyn Monroe,” and “Two Floors above the Dead”). The remaining five were written in the past 3-4 years (“The Loves of Misty Sprinkle,” “Decoration Day,” “Conversion,” “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel,” and “Witness Tree”).
I find it interesting that the first story written for the collection–“The Wine of Astonishment,” set in January–is the first story in the lineup, and the last story written–“Witness Tree,” set in December–is the last story in this order determined not by chronology of composition but by the calendar months.
Is Runion, North Carolina, a real place? Well, yes and no. It was a real place in the early years of the 20th century. The town was built around a sawmill, and when the sawmill closed near the beginning of the Great Depression, Runion soon after became a ghost town. Little remains of it today beyond some concrete foundations of homes and the mill buildings, the mill’s concrete paymaster’s vault, and concrete works related to the transport of lumber, pre- and post-production. A TWILIGHT REEL reimagines Runion in its historical place, at the confluence of the Laurel and the French Broad, and invests it with characteristics of Marshall, Mars Hill, and Hot Springs, with a little bit of UNCA thrown in as well.
Cover and spine of A Twilight Reel: Stories: design by Jamie Reeves, photo by Joey Plemmons, photo concept by Raleigh Cody
My new book, A Twilight Reel: Stories, is set for publication on May 25 by Pisgah Press in Asheville, NC. The collection is made up of twelve stories, each set in a different month of 1999. The physical setting for all is my imagined town of Runion, North Carolina, which is on the French Broad River between Marshall and Hot Springs in Madison County.
Here’s a list of the stories included:
The Wine of Astonishment
The Loves of Misty Sprinkle
Overwinter
The Flutist
Decoration Day
Conversion
The Invisible World around Them
Grist for the Mill
A Poster of Marilyn Monroe
A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel
Two Floors above the Dead
Witness Tree
I thought I’d share some writing I did a few years ago about the setting, the use of place, in these stories.
When “place” is mentioned in relation to fiction, the first thing that comes to mind is physical setting. This is the world of the story. It may be anything from a solitary room to an overcrowded neighborhood, from Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, to “dear dirty Dublin.” If the fiction is fully realized, we as readers will be able to enter this world, to see its colors and shapes, to hear its noises and silences, to smell its aromas and stenches, to feel its textures.
However, a sense of place in fiction is not achieved by the depiction of a physical setting only–its topography and wildlife and climate, its antebellum homes and filthy streets and glittering skyscrapers. There is a spiritual element to setting that is not inherent in the place itself but rather exists according to human experience of the place: an experience built up over time with thick layers of cultural, communal, familial, and individual histories.
I have chosen to place the following four stories in the environs of the fictional Appalachian town of Runion, North Carolina, “my own little postage stamp of native soil.” Appalachia is, I believe, a fertile subject for fiction that remains far from being exhausted. Jim Wayne Miller, a poet native to mountains not far from my Runion, says, “the Appalachian region of America, being neither north nor south exactly, neither east nor west, but a geographical, historical, cultural, and spiritual borderland, has an interesting and complicated past (and present)” (86). This quote implies that even though North Carolina may be considered part of the same “South” as Faulkner’s Mississippi, there is a sense that life in its western mountains is something other than life in what is traditionally known as “the South.” In fact, the spirit of the place, especially that of the more sparsely populated areas like Madison County (where I grew up and where I locate Runion), seems to make it as much the southern region of what some have imaginatively tried to create as “the state of Appalachia” as it is the western region of North Carolina. [Jim Wayne Miller was born in Leicester, NC, although he spent much of his creative life in Kentucky. Also, at the time I wrote this, I think I was unaware of the early American proposal for an actual State of Franklin that would have included at least some of western North Carolina.]
The idea that Runion is a part of some borderland has colored my intentions in writing all of these stories. In addition, I have sensed in Runion the “interesting and complicated past (and present)” to which Miller above refers. All of the stories are set in contemporary Runion (the late 1980s, the early 1990s). This time of stressful change–when the portions of mountain culture not capable of being made “quaint” for tourists are being absorbed into the world at large–highlights the lines of difference between generations and individuals as well as within generations and individuals. The conflicts that necessarily arise in such a situation are what the stories included here attempt to portray. [By the time I completed the collection, its twelve stories had settled into a single year: 1999.]
It was once upon a time in the Appalachian mountains that accents could change from hollow to hollow and hill to hill. Once, the answer to the question “‘Whose boy are you?’ coupled with the name of the branch on which one lived was sufficient to give one a sense of person” (Sprague 23). And again, a person born in this county or that remained a native of that place no matter how much of his or her life was spent elsewhere.
All that is changing. Life in Appalachia is slowly moving from its traditional isolated state to a backwoods version of the global community. For example, satellite dishes pimple the hillsides behind weatherbeaten mobile homes. They stand among the mossy gravestones of hilltop family cemeteries, eyeing the heavens. They perch on the ridgepoles of dusty barns. They function as a sign that the isolation of the past is being stripped away, and along with it the traditions which it nurtured and preserved.
My purpose in writing these stories is to attempt to capture in fiction some portion of this far-reaching transition. As the older generations try to hold on to what their world used to be, the younger generations are trying to transform that world or escape from it altogether. Those generations in the middle simply seem lost. Connected to the old and attracted by the new, they either freeze and wait for what is coming or run to meet they know not what. The conflicts that exist among all these generations are the stuff of which stories are made, and it is my hope that I am able to write some of the “true” stories taking place among the hills and hollows and communities that surround my fictional Runion.
Such fertile fictional ground is incredibly attractive for a writer who feels strongly toward the real ground upon which it is based. In the early part of this century, the actual town of Runion hung on a hillside above the French Broad River between Marshall and Hot Springs in Madison County. A sawmill town of over sixty houses, it died when the mill shut down with the rest of the country in the early 1930s. Today some scattered concrete foundations, the ruins of a one-room wooden schoolhouse, and a single line of jonquils blooming in what once was somebody’s yard are all that remain of Runion. This collection attempts to recreate Runion as if it had never faded out of reality, piecing it together with certain characteristics of the real Madison County towns that surround it–the river town personalities of Hot Springs and Marshall, the small college town atmosphere of Mars Hill–as well as other places that are better labeled villages or hamlets. I realize that four stories cannot create a complete town–Anderson gave twenty-two to Winesburg, Joyce fifteen to Dublin–but I feel I have made a good start.
A view from an elevated vantage point of the lumber and pulp mill nestled along the river with a hill in the background; ramps in the foreground leading to buildings.
The ruins of a Runion house, probably that of a mill owner, on the ridge overlooking the French Broad River, December 2019
Place is the basic point of reference upon which the stories in this collection are built. Every layered aspect of each story is affected by it; the fictional modes of “conflict, symbol, tone, style, etc., are all intimately related to Place and mutually interpenetrated” in a “unity” that “can only be intuitively grasped” (Foster 76). The experience of these characters and their stories would not be the same–in fact might not exist at all–without Runion. However, as Leonard Lutwack says in The Role of Place in Literature, “the qualities of [Place] are determined by the subjective responses of people according to their cultural heritage, sex, occupation, and personal predicament” (35). Thus, Runion would not exist without the characters and their stories; they are its living elements, defining its qualities and making it visible.
In his poem “Anecdote of Men by the Thousand,” Wallace Stevens writes,
There are men whose words Are as natural sounds Of their places As the cackle of toucans In the place of toucans. (51-52)
Stevens concludes with these lines:
The dress of a woman of Lhassa, In its place, Is an invisible element of that place Made visible. (52)
It is the people of a place that make this invisible spiritual element visible: their language, the interconnected colors and themes of their lives that are the visible manifestations of that place. Consequently, it seems to me that fiction attempting to take these invisible elements and make them visible for us as readers must necessarily be fiction of the place as opposed to fiction about the place. It is the fiction of Runion and of an Appalachia-in-transition that I have attempted to create in these stories.
The author at the graffiti ruins of the paymaster’s vault, December 2019
Works Cited
Foster, Ruel E. “Sense of Place in James Still’s River of Earth.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 68-80.
Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1984.
Miller, Jim Wayne. “I Have a Place.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 81-99.
Sprague, Stuart S. “Inside Appalachia: Familiar Land and Ordinary People.” Sense of Place in Appalachia. Ed. S. Mont Whitson. Morehead: Office of Regional Development Studies, Morehead State University, 1988. 20-26.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954. New York: Vintage-Random, 1990. 51-52.
Today, 13 April 2021, is the 278th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, so I thought I’d share some of his best moments from his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1782). He wrote this book in response to a French friend who asked him to answer twenty-three questions about Virginia–about its history, geography, economy, and so on. Jefferson, at the time, was the initial drafter of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and governor of Virginia, resigning from the latter position in 1781. According to the editors of volume A (Beginnings to 1820) of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (9th edition), Jefferson
wanted especially to counter the notion, prevalent among European naturalists . . . that North American species, human and nonhuman, had degenerated and were inferior to Old World types. (711; emphasis added)
Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts from Notes:
on the idea that “our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them”: “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (718; emphasis added). I have written elsewhere that we could replace the bit about “twenty gods, or no god” with the idea that “it does me no injury for” the ETSU men’s basketball team to take a knee during the national anthem; this respectful protest–during the playing of a song that was written when Africans in America were considered only 60% of a person–“neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
“I doubt whether the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or a three years’ imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of the Trinity. But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a permanent reliance? Is it government? Is this the kind of protection we receive for the rights we give up? Besides, the spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war [the American Revolution] we shall be going down hill. . . . [The people] will be forgotten, . . . and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion” (720; emphasis added). My reading of American literature and literary history, from Columbus’s first letters of discovery to now, have recently suggested to me that Jefferson was insightful–even prophetic–in his idea that from the American Revolution forward “we shall be going down hill.” The entire, the overarching American experience, beginning with Columbus, has been an experience of decay. Are we now arrived at the point of “convulsion” and expiration?
This is a haunting painting, I think, because the United States of America–represented here by the image of Thomas Jefferson, a white man–is haunted by a troubled history that has become its troubled present. Jefferson’s time was known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Age of Science. In Notes, he attempted to evaluate the slave population at his Monticello according to the period’s reliance on observation and experiment: sensory observation. I won’t repeat what he has to say about his slaves, but, in my opinion, he reveals a racist ignorance that is in stark contrast to his general political brilliance.
Just a few years beyond the setting of THE PRETTIEST STAR by Carter Sickles, sometime during the mid-‘90s in western North Carolina, which is a few miles south of THE PRETTIEST STAR’s Chester, Ohio, my wife had a good friend whose son was in a hospital dying of AIDS. Leesa went to visit him, taking our younger son with her. In the hospital room, while Leesa visited with her friends, Raleigh climbed up on the bed and sat feeding Allen one round Cheerio at a time.
Reading THE PRETTIEST STAR, I was reminded of those panicky days in the ‘80s and ‘90s that come to life so vividly in Sickles’s novel. The horrors of Chester were all around us throughout those days—whether the product of an ignorance weaponized by the fear at the root of hate or by simple, thoughtless ignorance alone. The Chester recreation folks drain the public swimming pool after the sick man, Brian, enjoys a momentary, ecstatic float on a hot day. His grandmother is kicked out of the town’s only sit-down restaurant for bringing Brian along for a meal. A passerby throws a soft drink in his face from the window of a pickup truck. Anonymous people call Brian’s home and whisper hate speech—the period’s version of hateful social media posts. The church joins in the fearful persecution, of course, smiling benevolently all the while. The universe of family, from the satellite cousins to the near moon of a father, fall away into the dark distance. Hospital staff won’t touch him.
In the midst of this, especially the abandonment by the caregivers (so different from many caregivers in the current COVID-19 devastation), I remembered Raleigh and Allen and the Cheerios. I’d always thought that a sweet story, but while on my deep dive into the world Sickles revives I suddenly realized that this simple gesture of a child must have shaken the world of Allen’s hospital room. I imagine Allen in Brian and his mother Suzy in Brian’s mother Sharon, and I begin to understand that such a kindness was beyond sweet. Far beyond sweet.
I mentioned this to Leesa after I’d finished reading THE PRETTIEST STAR, and she reminded me of a young nurse that day, who pulled her aside as Raleigh sat picking out one Cheerio at a time and said that she’d been afraid to go near Allen—afraid to treat him as a patient, afraid to treat him as a fellow, suffering human being. After seeing a child’s innocent act of feeding the sick and hungry, she said, she would no longer be afraid. I hope she followed through with that. I want to believe that she did.
This is what great and simple acts do to and for us. And this is how great stories powerfully told, stories like THE PRETTIEST STAR, connect us to our humanity and that of all—all—around us.
I try every year in late December and early January to read two things: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and James Joyce’s “The Dead.” I try to finish Dickens’s story of Scrooge and his ghosts before midnight on Christmas Eve. Last year–last month–I finished it around 6:30 PM that evening. Then I try to finish Joyce’s story of Gabriel Conroy and his ghosts by midnight on January 6th (aka Epiphany and, I just learned from Silas House’s blog, Old Christmas). This year I finished it around nine o’clock. (I would have finished it much earlier, but I was distracted by the attack on the U.S. Capitol by domestic terrorists: #AmericanTerrorists.)
The last piece in Joyce’s 1914 story collection Dubliners, “The Dead” is often praised as one of the greatest short stories written in English. It’s a wonderful narrative of Dublin life as it convenes at the home of elderly Julia and Kate Morkan and their niece Mary Jane. The evening is experienced most vividly through the perceptions–and misperceptions–of the Misses Morkan’s nephew Gabriel Conroy. Joyce brings to rich life the social event that swirls around Gabriel and then follows this central character to a solitary ending, including one of the most beautiful paragraphs in all of English literature:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
This is the kind of literary beauty to which many of us who write aspire. One form such aspirations can take, at least initially, is that of imitation. New York Times bestselling author Silas House, for example, took up Joyce’s “The Dead” and adapted it to an Appalachian setting and called it “Another Country.” On his blog, A Country Boy Can Surmise, House writes of Joyce’s story and his,
“The Dead” by James Joyce is one of my favorite pieces of writing to have ever been written. A few years ago I was teaching the story in Ireland and it struck me that many of the issues being explored in the short story are still pertinent in my homeland today. Themes such as the complications of being loyal to your own place in the world, choosing sides, homesickness, and the way a culture can become so immersed in the past that it threatens to impede its own progress. I do not think there is any way to improve upon Joyce’s story but I did think it’d be interesting to pick up the story from early 1900s Ireland and move it to contemporary Appalachia. . . .
As I mentioned above, I finished my mostly annual reading to “The Dead” yesterday, January 6, 2021, and I was pleased to learn of House’s “Another Country” today. I read it and enjoyed the way the adaptation works in its migration from a big house in Dublin, Ireland, to a farmhouse just outside Manchester, Kentucky.
Recently, I had a similar impulse to capture something of Joyce’s “The Dead” in a piece of my own. My imitation took the form of a song that I titled “Michael Furey Is Dead.” The lyrics and the music attempt to recreate–to transfigure–the feeling I always have while reading the story from the moment Gabriel is watching his wife Gretta, where she stands on the stairs and listens to an Irish tenor sing “The Lass of Aughrim,” to Gabriel’s final moment at the window in their hotel room.
Michael Furey Is Dead
She stands on the stairs and listens to the song floating down from above– her face half hidden in shadow, half in light. The ghost of a sad smile trembles on her lips freshly colored with care. I tremble at the sight, and I wonder what she might be thinking.
She doesn’t know that I saw her as we walk side by side on the street, both acting just like we didn’t feel what we felt– my tongue tripping over her mystery, hers trying to cover it up. I ask her if she’s well. Then I beg for her to tell what she’s feeling.
Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo
Deep in the days of a cold and wet autumn, they took waltzing walks through the woods. A delicate boy and a handsome young woman they were. She was an orphan with her aunt until winter, when she’d pack up and go back to school, and he worked in the mines and coughed all the time they were dancing.
[brief waltzing interlude]
The weather turned black before she was to leave; the rain fell without taking a breath. The last twilight she saw Michael Furey alone ‘neath the trees. She’d been back at school for only one week when the letter arrived from her aunt. And it brought her to her knees with its news of Michael Furey’s passing.
Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo
I stand in the dark by the window and listen as her sobs subside into sleep and look for the ghost of the boy who died for love of my wife. The stars hang in heaven like the caught breath of snow or like sparkling rain in dark hair. And I tremble at the sight, and I wonder what she might be dreaming. And I tremble deep inside, and I’m afraid of what she might be dreaming.
Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo
I wish that I could post these words with their music, but I haven’t recorded it yet. It’s in a suitably minor key, I can assure you. And when I get around to recording it, the Ooos will likewise be suitably ghostly.
Recently, a group of friends and I were sitting around–masked and socially distanced–and talking about favorite Christmas memories from the pre-pandemic life we all once lived. One of my favorite Christmas memories was from back in the mid 1980s (probably ’84 or ’85), when I was living in Nashville and had to work Christmas Eve at Cat’s Records. After the store closed, I went back to Goodlettsville, north of Nashville, where I lived alone in an apartment that was inside the office building of my producer and publisher Earl Richards. I went to bed when I got there after work, thinking as I fell asleep, that I’d already missed the annual Christmas Eve gathering with Pansy Cody Wallin, my dad’s sister, her husband Edison and my cousin Donna. I woke up around two or three o’clock Christmas morning, showered to wake myself, loaded a bag and my guitar into the orange Mercury Bobcat I drove, and headed for Walnut, North Carolina.
An “orange Mercury Bobcat . . .”
I made my way south to I-40 and drove east into the stilly darkness of Christmas morning. I remember stopping here and there along the way, at convenience stores mostly, and noticing the deep quiet of the night and the interstate and the brightly lit pumps and parking area of the stores. I stopped maybe three or four times through the night, and it was such an old-time treasure of a feeling to go inside for a Mountain Dew and a Moon Pie and to wish the sleepy clerk a Merry Christmas on my way out.
I rolled into the driveway in the morning light that heralds the sunrise. I’d love to say that the old Reeves place was covered in snow like a Christmas card. But Mom and Dad and Jerry were there, and from the time I walked in, Christmas morning carried on as it always had.
A Gift
Given that Leesa and I didn’t marry on Christmas Day, given that Lane and Raleigh weren’t born on Christmas Day, I can easily name some of the best earthly Christmas gifts I ever received — from Santa, a football uniform with a Dallas Cowboys helmet when I was small; from my uncle JD, a solid gold Star Trek insignia ring when I was in my twenties. Those and others were incredible gifts. Yet they and so many others are now lost to time and living.
But THE GIFT? I received it in 1975, when I was seventeen years old, forty-five years back from Christmas 2020 when I’m writing this. Ever since, it has been my constant companion, over many miles and across many years, and much of the life I’ve lived and much of the man I’ve become are bound up in this one extravagant gift from my parents.
Back in the days of the White Water Band, guitarist Jim Stapleton and bassist Harlon Rice worked at Dunham’s Music in Asheville. I’m fairly certain that the two of them gave Mom and Dad the employee discount and that Harlon delivered it to the house on Christmas Eve. I was, I recall, in my room and was only vaguely aware of a visitor stopping by after we’d returned from the Wallins’ house.
Then, in the wee hours of the morning, I awoke and knew I wouldn’t be going back to sleep. So, I got up quietly and slipped out of the room Jerry and I shared when home. I continued as quietly as I could into the living room and made my way, by a light that shone in from out by the highway, to the tree and poked around until I got the lights plugged in.
It was in this way that I first saw the gift by the light of our Walnut Christmas tree at three o’clock in the morning, looking much like this —
Guild F-40
After forty-five years and untold miles–one end of the USA to the other and east to the Czech Republic–its finish no longer shines as it did that Christmas morning in 1975, but I’m certain that the music coming from it sounds better now than then (with little thanks for this to my minimally improved guitar skills).
I could recall hundreds of memories of moments with this guitar in my arms–writing, recording, performing. So many songs! I remember a beautiful, moonlit Montana night, sitting on a stump in the Thompsons’ yard during my visit to their caboose Bed & Breakfast in Stevensville, south of Missoula. I played my songs for the Thompsons and a group of their neighbors.
When Gary Morris recorded “The Jaws of Modern Romance” in the late ’80s, the Nashville studio musicians had a bit of trouble getting the right feel for the song. Gary or somebody called to ask if I could come to the studio and play during the tracking session. I grabbed my guitar and headed to the studio. My guitar track ended up making it on the record. You can hear it best at the beginning.
One more. This is my guitar and me on stage in Vimperk, Czech Republic, singing a song we wrote called “The Bells of Vimperk.”
Montana, Nashville, and Vimperk represent many wonderful and rare moments. Many, many more are the moments of just sitting around the house with the guitar in my arms and listening to it sing for me and sing with me.
Maybe it’s a single word–socialism–or a phase–Defund the Police or Black Lives Matter or Stop the Count or Stop the Steal!
A knee jerks. Eyes and ears close and go mostly inactive except for seeing and hearing only what they want to see and hear. The mind closes, too, but behind the slammed and locked door the brain-on-fire burns hot inside its echoing silo. With no further information or misinformation needed, the mind will run with what little it has a grip on and build around it a belief system, a world, a plan of action, a limited reaction of likes-loves-hates-etc.
The system of likes-loves-hates-etc. as it appears on Facebook
Here’s an example.
Back in the summer of 2020, sometime after the murder of George Floyd, I engaged in a brief conversation with a friend on Facebook. While Leesa and I were mostly on lockdown, the online environment was charged with reaction to the Floyd murder, as well as other similar situations. This friend–with whom I’ve shared a worktable at a Rise Against Hunger event and Christian mission in the Czech Republic (although we weren’t there the same summers)–shared a happy plantation story about an east Tennessee ancestor and the slaves who loved him. That was beyond my knowledge, of course, but I couldn’t help but think of my experience reading Frederick Douglass, who wrote at one point in his Narrative, “I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart.” Happy or not (and that’s a perception largely from the slaveholder’s point of view), the condition of “a slave for life” or even that of being black in America is one that white people can’t imagine or dismiss.
But then my friend threw out this gem as a response to the issue of racial violence: In American history, he wrote, “As many whites were lynched as blacks. You won’t see that in the books at school.” Now, this is exactly the kind of (mis)information I referred to above. Fact or not, a mind such as my friend’s takes hold and reacts. The knee-jerk reaction. The easy spark of satisfying anger over the outrage of whites being lynched in Christian Euro-America ignites the brain that then burns not to seek the truth but to spread the fact without knowing if it’s true or not (and how it’s true or not), if it’s information or misinformation.
“As many whites were lynched as blacks. You won’t see that in the books at school.” Having no relevant information in my own mind, I don’t think I responded with anything more than a “Really?” (not sarcasm but as in “Hmm, I wonder if that’s true”). What was his response but a prime example of deflecting responsibility or recognition with a mindless, heartless “Both sides!” dismissal of racial violence. I could have done the easy thing, which would be to accept that violence occurred on both sides–“you also had very fine people, on both sides”–so that my friend and I both walked away with a “Fine!” or a “Whatever!” and our respective (mis)information–or no information–intact. But because I don’t like not knowing things and because I wanted to model what I think is right behavior when faced with something I don’t know to be a fact, I decided to do just fifteen minutes worth of research.
Here’s what I learned.
From the 1830s through the 1850s, the majority of people lynched were white, making my friend correct as far as that simple, unqualified fact goes. But if that’s as far as knowledge reaches, it’s easy to manipulate the fact to the typical bullying, shallow “Both sides!” argument. Crack open an eye–crack open the mind–just a little bit, and a couple of qualifying facts present themselves. First, 90% of white lynchings took place in the West–Arkansas (which was West then), Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Montana). There, white posses caught and lynched fellow whites for crimes such as murder and rustling cattle. White men were on both ends of the rope, so to speak. Second, almost all blacks during that same period–1830s-1850s–were slaves and therefore valuable property, everywhere through the South generally too valuable to be destroyed by lynching except at the utmost fever pitch of white insult. So, yes, “[a]s many whites were lynched as blacks,” but I hope you can see that’s nowhere near the whole story my friend’s mic drop suggested.
After the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, between 1882 and 1968 (yes, year of our Lord nineteen hundred sixty-eight, a mere fifty-two years ago), 4,743 lynchings were recorded; given the nature of the act, however, it’s almost certain that not all incidents of lynching made it into the records. Of the 4,743 lynchings recorded 1882-1968, 3,446 (73%) were blacks while 1,297 (27%) were whites. Almost all black lynchings (90%) took place is four Southern states: Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. It’s safe to say that near 100% of these black lynchings were carried out by mobs of white men. While black crimes probably included actual crimes, such as murder, theft, and so on, they also included such behaviors as not being respectful enough to whites, especially white women, or just being perceived as being not respectful enough.
Again, almost all white lynchings during the same period, 1882-1968, took place in the West and North. In fact, these states lynched only whites: Maine, Vermont, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona. It’s likewise safe to say that near 100% of white lynchings were carried out by mobs of white men not only for those crimes previously listed (murder and livestock theft) but also for helping blacks or just being anti-lynching.
“As many whites were lynched as blacks. You won’t see that in the books at school.” Okay, this contains some surface truth, but even if you don’t have the details my research revealed above (again, about fifteen minutes of research), it’s easy to understand how this fails miserably as a “Both sides!” argument. The fact of white lynchings works as a “Both sides!” argument only if those white people were lynched by mobs of angry blacks. That’s only fair, right? But then how likely is it that between the 1830s and the 1850s, and again between 1882 and 1968, more than 1,297 whites were lynched by blacks? It isn’t at all likely. It simply isn’t.
So, in this time when social media, conspiracy theorists, and politicized news media tend to spit up all kinds of nasty one-liners that come ready-made for chant-able slogans, before we join the chanting we should take a breath, first, then just expend a bit of energy to think about what we’re being invited to chant, maybe even research it. And before we cut off an argument–or allow our argument to be cut off–by the whining cry of “Both sides!” let’s just stop and think, ‘Really?’ Then make sure it is truly the condition or equally faulty behavior of both sides before we do the “Whatever!”-walkaway or engage in friendly debate as citizens of a democracy–or democratic republic, if you prefer–should.
My aunt Ernie walked on last Saturday at the age of 85 (some three months shy of her 86th birthday). She was the last of eleven children of Papa Reeves, three and a half years younger than Mom, who walked on some six months ago).
Ernie’s younger son, my cousin Mark, wrote this obituary:
On November 14, 2020, Ernestine Reeves (Ernie) Plemmons drew her last breath on this earth. After six years, the disease of pulmonary fibrosis had robbed her lungs of the ability to sustain her earthly body, but her family rests easy in the knowledge that she now breathes freely in heaven.
Ernie’s 85-year life was marked with a love of God, family, chocolate, Braves baseball, her work, gospel music, laughter, serving others, practical jokes, Duke basketball and more chocolate.
After graduating from Blanton’s Business College in 1954, Ernie started working at French Broad Electric Membership Co-op as a teller. Over her 42-year career, she saw her job and the world change greatly. On her first day, one of her duties was to send a telegram to co-ops in eastern North Carolina to let them know that French Broad was sending help in the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel. By the time of her retirement in 1996, she held the position of Director of Member Services and Public Relations, and she was responsible for publishing the monthly newsletter, The Electrifier, for French Broad Members. Long gone were the days of the telegraph; a desktop computer and publishing software had become the tools of her trade.
In 1957, Ernie married Cloice Plemmons. The two settled down in a new house they built a literal stone’s throw from the house where she was born in Walnut. The new home became a center of activity as Ernie mothered not only her two sons, Joey and Mark, but her nephews, Jerry and Michael Cody and Stevie Davis, as well as the any other boy who might wander through the doors.
Ernie’s love of God led her in the service of others. First at the Walnut United Methodist Church and later at the Walnut Presbyterian Church, Ernie was a church leader. She taught Sunday School, played the piano, sang in the choir and served as an Elder. In the community, Ernie gave of her time and energy to organizations like the American Cancer Society, Hospice of Madison, The Walnut Community Center, and the Hot Springs Health Program.
During all this time, for more than half a century, Ernie mixed her soprano voice with the alto voice and piano skills of her sister Dot. They sang at church services, revivals, family reunions, funerals and weddings. Thousands heard them sing through the years, and they now sing together once again in the choir of angels.
Ernie is survived by her husband of 63 years, W. Cloice Plemmons of Walnut NC; son Joey Jay Plemmons of Weaverville, NC; son Mark Cecil Plemmons and wife Kimberly Rudisill Plemmons of Kingsport, TN; granddaughter Amanda Plemmons Lively and husband Joshua Ryan Lively of Price, UT; granddaughter Hannah Plemmons Adams and husband Robert Joe Adams III of Dumfries, VA; and granddaughter Grace Wilson Plemmons of Greenville, SC.
Ernie is preceded in death by her parents Amos Stackhouse (Stack) Reeves and Charlotta (Lottie) Barnett Reeves as well as her 10 siblings Leta Reeves Ledford, Albert (Al) Reeves, Aubrey (Doc) Reeves, Evoline Reeves Baker, William (Bill) Reeves, Harold Reeves, Amos Kenneth (June) Reeves, James Dedrick (JD) Reeves, Joseph MacDonald (Joe or Mack) Reeves and Dorothy Lee ( Dot) Reeves Cody. As Ernie’s nephew Michael Cody put it, “I don’t pretend to know what Heaven is actually like, but if it is indeed a place of homecoming and reunion, then I love the image of the Reeves table being complete with the arrival of the youngest.”
Due to concerns about the spread of Covid-19, the family will be holding a private ceremony and will not be receiving friends. The family asks that you celebrate Ernie’s life with fond memories, smiles, a prayer, laughter and maybe even a piece of chocolate. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to either the American Cancer Society or Hospice of Madison.
Have you wondered what’s been going on out in the world while we practice our “America First” policies–that is, in the absence of longstanding American international leadership? If so, here are three sources you might want to check out:
Friends on my Facebook page are going back and forth and back and forth about the value of the current White House Administration. What’s apparent is that America now is divided between two completely separate and irreconcilable realities. You know what they are, so I won’t go into them here.
Honesty is clearly crushed under the heel of political agendas and the personal desires of weak wannabe strongmen. So, the truth, while always still hoped for, is no longer to be expected, and that’s on all of us for being, like our politicians, so invested in our particular reality that we no longer value or even understand what is truth–or what truth is.
Out the proverbial window with honesty has gone integrity:
I’m sure that lots of examples can be cited from “both sides” (although I despise the constant call of “both sides, both sides, both sides,” which tends toward mitigating the often important differences between real good actions and real bad actions).
The most obvious example of this is the current bad action being undertaken to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat on the Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016–an election year, yes, but certainly not in the final weeks of the campaign and even long before the national party conventions had selected their candidates. When President Obama brought forth a nomination to fill Justice Scalia’s seat, Mitch McConnell’s Senate refused to consider the nominated. Here are a few quotations from GOP Senators of the time:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas): “It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year. There is a long tradition that you don’t do this in an election year.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): “I don’t think we should be moving on a nominee in the last year of this president’s term – I would say that if it was a Republican president.”
Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.): “The very balance of our nation’s highest court is in serious jeopardy. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I will do everything in my power to encourage the president and Senate leadership not to start this process until we hear from the American people.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa): “A lifetime appointment that could dramatically impact individual freedoms and change the direction of the court for at least a generation is too important to get bogged down in politics. The American people shouldn’t be denied a voice.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.): “The campaign is already under way. It is essential to the institution of the Senate and to the very health of our republic to not launch our nation into a partisan, divisive confirmation battle during the very same time the American people are casting their ballots to elect our next president.”
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.): “In this election year, the American people will have an opportunity to have their say in the future direction of our country. For this reason, I believe the vacancy left open by Justice Antonin Scalia should not be filled until there is a new president.”
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.): “The Senate should not confirm a new Supreme Court justice until we have a new president.”
Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Col.): “I think we’re too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision.”
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio): “I believe the best thing for the country is to trust the American people to weigh in on who should make a lifetime appointment that could reshape the Supreme Court for generations. This wouldn’t be unusual. It is common practice for the Senate to stop acting on lifetime appointments during the last year of a presidential term, and it’s been nearly 80 years since any president was permitted to immediately fill a vacancy that arose in a presidential election year.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.): “I strongly agree that the American people should decide the future direction of the Supreme Court by their votes for president and the majority party in the U.S. Senate.”
[And last but not least . . .]
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky): “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
Thanks to Jon Anderson (probably not the lead singer of YES) for collecting these quotations and the one below.
Of course, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a politician of disabled integrity, from my birth state of South Carolina, said this in 2018:
“If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait to the next election.”
Obviously Graham and the rest of Mitch McConnell’s Senate have tossed these convictions to the wind, and with a full-throated “Screw you, stupid old me!” they’ve entered into the 11th-hour process of confirming a newly nominated conservative judge to what should be an apolitical entity–the Supreme Court.
Integrity loss confirmed. Again.
In an 1841 essay titled “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” While the “little minds” of the “little statesmen” quoted above have changed (avoiding “consistency”), their loss of integrity remains.
The loss of the nation–the loss of our democracy, at least–will surely follow it into a dis-integrated future.
