September 6. . . . all being compact together in one ship, they put to sea . . . with a prosperous wind, which continued divers days together, which was some encouragement unto them. . . .
William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation, Chapter IX. Of Their Voyage and How They Passed the Sea; and of Their Save Arrival at Cape Cod
As I’m writing this, it’s the afternoon of September 6, 2020 (a Sunday), four hundred years after the Pilgrims (what we call this band of Puritan Separatists) sailed from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower in 1620–the 6th being on a Wednesday that year. Around 100 travelers–some Pilgrims and some not–had set out a few hours or a day or so earlier in two small ships–the Speedwell and the Mayflower. But they hadn’t gotten far before they realized that the Speedwell wasn’t physically up to the trip, so they returned to Plymouth and repacked the people and what supplies they could into the Mayflower and set out again.
Every semester when I teach William Bradford’s history of the colony that was known as Plymouth Plantation, I’m impressed with the bravery and the commitment to their religious ideals that Bradford and his group showed. Our world in 2020 offers very little we could venture to replicate their experience in 1620, its particular unknowns (the so-called New World wasn’t nearly as unknown as popular history would have us believe) and the certain hardships they dreaded as they steered the Mayflower away from its English harbor and, finally losing sight of the coastline of home, turned their faces west to the Atlantic Ocean. Again, their bravery and commitment astound me.
Surely such bravery and commitment should be enough to remember them by, but, of course, American myth-making has made much more out of their story than was actually in their story. They have famously been mythologized as the originators of American ideas of religious freedom and democracy.
Neither is really true of them.
Religious freedom? Yes, to England they were Puritan Separatists. As the first part of that phrase–Puritan–suggests, they wished to purify the faith practices of the Church of England, ridding it of all the popery they saw as held over from Henry VIII’s split from the Roman Catholic Church. Ultimately, however, this group of mostly plain folk–Bradford was a farmer who taught himself Greek and Hebrew so that he could read scripture in its original languages–decided the Church of England couldn’t be purified, and so they separated from it–becoming Separatists. But to separate from the official church of the realm was to separate from the realm itself, which made them traitors.
The strength of their faith was committed to their particular faith practice. They wanted to show themselves as right regarding how God’s people should believe and the way church things should be done. Deviations from their way were not to be tolerated; this included other Christian practices that weren’t their own. In essence, their faith practices became the official practices of Plymouth Plantation–a state church like the Church of England.
The notion that the victim of child abuse often grows up to be an abuser of children can be adapted here. The Pilgrims and the Puritans that followed them in 1630 (to found Massachusetts Bay Colony and Boston) tolerated no deviations from their religious practices, even from other Christian sects. Just as they’d been persecuted, they in turn persecuted others: Catholics (of course), Quakers, Anabaptists, etc., sometimes carrying out these persecutions to the death of the deviants.
A truer character of religious freedom had to wait for the late 18th century.
And as for democracy among the Puritans, none existed among the Puritans. In fact, democracy was to be feared. It threatened community stability, which they understood to have been established by God. If an individual was poor, God made him that way, so he shouldn’t attempt to change his station in life. Such an attempt would be understood as contempt for God’s creation. In a 1630 speech or sermon delivered to the Puritans in the process of establishing the non-Separatist plantation of Massachusetts Bay, colony leader John Winthrop said,
God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.
In Winthrop’s understanding, community organization is not at all democratic. If you’re rich, congratulations are in order. Don’t be an ass. If you’re poor, that’s just your lot in creation. Don’t be an ass. But Winthrop suggests that God expects both rich and poor to “be knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.” All should be filled with and unified by God’s spirit, which works
first upon the wicked in moderating and restraining them, so that the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against their superiors and shake off their yoke. . . .
We could use a little of that moderation and restraint these days, perhaps especially from the rich. Winthrop tells them to take care of the poor so as not to tempt God to miracles for their care.
The Puritans had nothing to do with democracy and little to do with the notion of religious freedom. Certainly, they had many admirable qualities, but they had at least as many qualities that led to the devastation of America’s indigenous peoples and contributed to the false consciousness of American Exceptionalism.
Edith Ann (Lily Tomlin) from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
Busy day, this September 2nd of 2020, thirty-one years after that September 2nd in 1989. I turn sixty-two in a few months, as will Leesa, which means that we’ve been married half our lives!
We did make time for a great early anniversary supper at Red Meze!
We’re not big on cards and such, so I woke up this morning wondering how I might commemorate the anniversary this year. I didn’t have time to write a song, so I thought I’d share a bunch of the songs Leesa inspired in whole or in part. Most of them were written before September 2nd, 1989, so they’re not all happy songs. . . .
I’ve been away from this progression through my old journals–my “Captain’s Log”–longer than I intended. Looking back, I see that I was chugging along fairly well through February. Then the pandemic hit, and I made no posts at all in March as I rushed up to spring break, went to Charleston for half of that week, and then had to come home early (because our favorite restaurants closed) to get my courses thrown up online for the remainder of the semester. I then made one more “Through the Years” post in April and one in May.
Now, here we are in August, and the pandemic is still going strong. Stronger than in March, actually. At least that’s the case here in east Tennessee. I’ve wondered if I should skip ahead and reboot with August entries, but I haven’t decided about that yet. If I could get my shit together well enough, I might be able to do two posts in a week. One coming up from the spring–this one gets into March–and one running along through the days we’re actually living.
I’ll think on that some more.
Captain’s Log: Stardate 022.878 (Tuesday, February 28, 1978)
Today was just like yesterday. I missed all of my classes and just stayed in bed. I’ll have to wait and see how I feel tomorrow before I decide about classes. I feel hot like I’ve got a temperature.
I guess I’ll get get some sleep now and try it again tomorrow. . . .
How unsettling it would be in this COVID-19 moment to “feel hot like I’ve got a temperature”!
I’m working on a novel that is based on the summer of 1979, which I spent in Europe with strangers-who-became-friends from all over the country. One of the things that I want to do with that novel is keep an awareness of the real world surrounding our fun and games and the actual events that took place in the world as I was living mostly carefree days in Europe.
Likewise, I’m going to try to find interesting things that go along with the lived days I’m transcribing from my journals. So, I’ll think about–I’ll google–what was happening in the world as I was doing this or that in my daily life.
Captain’s Log: Stardate 030.178 (Wednesday, March 1, 1978)
I finally got out of bed and went to classes today. I felt really bad this morning but I’m doing OK now.
Well, 48 hours from now I’ll hopefully be with Kelly, the good Lord willing. I pray that He’ll give me a good time down there. Now that I’m better physically I’m anxious to start practice again ’cause the Lord gave me these talents to polish and We’re gonna make it!!!! I think George and Betty are gonna meet me at the house tomorrow night for supper. . . . God gave you a mind, a body, and a soul so Be Yourself and at the same time be His
Cowboy flutist in the back room in Walnut
While I was living through this day–probably while I was sleeping through the night–Roman Wardas and Gantscho Ganev, Eastern European refugees, stole the coffin and remains of Charlie Chaplin from a Swiss cemetery and asked for ransom equivalent of $600,000 for the return of these. Chaplin’s fourth wife Oona refused to pay, saying that her late husband “‘would have thought it rather ridiculous’.” The grave robbers were caught in May.
Captain’s Log: Stardate 030.278 (Thursday, March 2, 1978)
Today the blizzard hit. That about cansells [sic] my plans for Greensboro this weekend.
I’m supposed to have a flute lesson tomorrow, but Dr. B probably won’t be here.
I think I may call Leesa and ask her out one night soon. . . . Ernie got a tape for accompanying the Alleluiah music . . .
As I’ve probably written in these pages before, Leesa was hard at work in Asheville’s Creative Hair Design and mothering Lane during these months when I was in my freshman year at Mars Hill College.
It’s been a nice easy weekend but I wish I could’ve gone to Greensboro. I reckon I’ll go over Spring break. I’m really not ready for another week so I’m gonna have to draw on the Lord heavily for this week. . . . George and Betty are in. . . .
On Saturday night the 4th, the Duke men’s basketball team–remembered as “Still Forever’s Team”–won the ACC basketball tournament, defeating Wake Forest 85-77. This was the first time the Duke men’s team had won the tournament since 1966. To my knowledge, the most recognizable name on that roster was Mike Gminski.
Captain’s Log: Stardate 030.678 (Monday, March 6, 1978)
Today has been a bummer but I’m still alive and trying not to complain.
Tomorrow night I’ll be going to Tweed’s for supper so hopefully tomorrow won’t be so bad. . . .
The Tweeds: Scott, Bobbie, Mike, and Brian
I have no memory of why this day was a bummer for me, but history tells us it was a greater bummer for Hustler publisher/pornographer Larry Flynt, who got caught in the crosshairs of a sniper in Georgia, a shooting which left him crippled.
Six trips around the sun later . . .
Captain’s Log: Stardate 8403.04 (Sunday, March 4, 1984)
I wish I wasn’t so lazy and would keep up with this as I should. Still, I guess when things are slow it seems futile to write it down. I [sic] going to try to do better.
1984 has been a very nice year so far. I’ve been home a few times, seen the folks in Knoxville, taken Geri out a couple of times (things are still feeling good there), and I’ve moved. I now live in the apartment that is upstairs in Earl’s office, where I stayed during my first prolonged trip to Nashville. It’s kind of tough living alone after Lynn and Cindy. We had such a good time. I still haven’t gotten settled in though I’ve been here for almost two months. I’ve stayed in the studio with Earl watching the progress of a new album he’s got on Bobby Lewis. They recorded one of my songs but it didn’t make the album as it was too pop to be consistent with the rest of the music. Still, just hanging out during the going’s [sic] on is a great learning experience. After that project was over Earl took Jim, JB, Danny, and me to Nassau, the Bahamas for some R&R before beginning my next album. It was a fun time between the ocean[,] the hotel life, and the casino. I got a sunburn the first day and didn’t get to spend as much time on the beach as I would have liked but it was still a great time. At one point Earl brought this hooker over from the casino for JB who is very straight and shy about girls and he ran. It was so funny! The girl’s name was Ivory, and she was from Milwaukee, Wi. When we returned from Nassau we went into the studio with musicians for a couple of days for rehearsals which went quite well. Tomorrow we begin tracks on “Blondie Goes Latin”, “Isabella”, “In Old Chicago”, “Can’t You Hear the Music”, “Waiting for the Night”, “The Friday Night Serenade”, “A Kiss in the Dark”, “Promises”, “A Rose for My Lady”, and “Madrid”.
My songwriting has fallen off seriously I think mostly because my mind feels so very cluttered with what I’m doing. I also feel very superficial, very shallow because I’m not staying as close to God as I want to. It just seems I keep my mind so occupied with nothing that it’s hard to think about anything. Then again I haven’t done enough travelling [sic] which always seems to spark me. Hopefully when this album is finished I’ll settle down and get some things done. I’m going to do better! I should say my prayers and get some rest now.
Clockwise from top: jb, Danny (whose last name I can’t remember), and Earl (striking his 1970s country starlet pose) . . . in the Bahamas
I have no memory of which song Bobby Lewis recorded. I do remember that Bobby’s schtick was playing the lute.
Earl, Bobby Lewis, and Jim Isbell
I noticed a couple of things about the songs set for the recording of my second album, which was to be titled Waiting for the Night. One is the presence of “Madrid,” a piano song that I wrote and, unfortunately, can no longer remember how to play. I think I actually had a complete song, but I’ll have to try to find the lyric for it to prove it. I don’t think I even have a recording of it.
The second thing is the absence of “Thunder and Lightning.” Those who know my music know how important that particular song has been for me. I think you’ll find it in the next cluster of entries that I post.
Potential album cover for Waiting for the Night, shot in Nashville, 1985
Captain’s Log: Stardate 8403.05 (Monday, March 5, 1984)
Today was a tough day, not really all bad or good, just tough. We started in the studio with problems this morning. Even though this caused bad vibes, we still got 3 good tracks down. I had a cloud hanging over me because of the vibes so I had a hard time finding good in anything but they must have been OK or we wouldn’t have left them. There was also a bad attitude toward the drummer we were using and I’m afraid Earl is going to fire him. It’ll be a shame because he is a good guy and a Christian. Maybe things will blow over tomorrow, who knows? Hopefully tomorrow will go much smoother technically, musically, and personally. . . .
Top: Joe Osborne & John Jarvis; Middle: Earl, Greg Jennings, & me; Bottom: Me, Earl, & jb
Earl had hired the already-legendary Joe Osborne to play bass on Waiting for the Night. Our drummer for the sessions was a young guy named Mark Hammond. I don’t remember exactly what the beef was between the two of them, but it’s likely that it could be boiled down to style: Old School versus New.
Captain’s Log: Stardate 8603.02 (Sunday, March 2, 1986)
It is Sunday and I’ve had a good time. Church was good, work was good and dinner at Anita’s with my friends was also good. My situation in general still feels the same despite indirect word from Goodlettsville that things are finally worked out and on their way. My reaction is still like those to whom the boy cried wolf. Show me something real is what I’m asking for. I know I sound like I’m from Missouri but that’s all I can do right now. Cindy heard Dickey Betts play “Thunder and Lightning” in Asheville a couple of weeks ago. She said it was pretty good and it got a good reaction. I’m playing the Bluebird Cafe a week from tonight but as usual I don’t know what I’m going to do so I’m not very comfortable with the idea. I’m thinking I’ll start with “Fiesta” but I don’t know. All else is as usual except that I’m not writing right now. I’m not afraid though as I’ve learned that it’ll be back when the well fills back up so I guess I’m actually gaining experience and becoming more accostomed [sic] to my music taking a vacation now and then. There’s not much happening in my life for me to react to and I’ve written enough for now about pain, depression and loneliness. So there you have it.
Earl & me
So, two years on from my sense of panic about not writing, I’m okay with not writing, knowing that it’ll return–which it did. I remember that it was my friend Noel Hudson who passed on to me the idea–Mark Twain’s, I think–that the well will fill up and the writing will return. Anita, mentioned above, is Noel’s mom, and I’m sure the “friends” who came to dinner with me were Noel, T. Michael Scalf, and probably the women they were dating at the time.
Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke the famous words of my title during his 1933 inaugural address, as he began the first of his presidential terms. He stepped into the presidency at the height–or depth–of the Great Depression, when over thirteen million Americans were out of work and banks were closing. Roosevelt’s moment was not altogether different from the one in which we’re living, but his administration confronted it with a strength of conviction and daring that our current administration sadly lacks. We’re still awaiting the same level of resolve and creativity that slowly but surely lifted the United States of America out if its Great Depression.
Instead of policy to create strength and action in the face of the monstrous anxieties confronting us, too many of our leaders and would-be leaders are pushers of the fears that keep us awake at night and sitting up on the edge of our beds. Some of these fears are real, but many are only strategized and deployed for political gain of the scaremongers.
Yesterday (8/6/2020), Tennessee held its primary for federal and state elections to determine who will be on the ballot for Republicans and Democrats come Election Day in November. I don’t watch much live television, but in the little bit I watched during the run-up to this primary, I noticed that the nastiest political ads were largely among the supposedly Republican candidates for Phil Roe’s Tennessee District 1 seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Aside: I actually don’t like to use either Republican or Conservative for the politicians and politics doing business under these names. I have nothing against being truly conservative as long as it is forward-looking and not backward-looking, as long as it is compassionate in its thinking and policies and not meanly exclusionary and stingy to all but the wealthiest among us. My father and mother identified as Republican, as did I growing up. If I remember rightly, Dad even held on to being a Republican when changing to a Democrat in the Madison County of the 1960s and ’70s might have helped him get a local job; thus, he ended up commuting a good distance in order to find the work he wanted. But the party passing as Republican these days has absolutely no resemblance to that of my parents and their values.
The attack ads between the large number of candidates in what I’ll call the Trump Party, given that they all claimed him as their leader, were brutal. I was both surprised and not surprised that the only one actually labeled as dishonest and bent–Diane Harshbarger–won the primary. And it wasn’t a resounding victory, as she won with only 19% of the vote.
As expected, Harshbarger’s TV ads tend toward “fear-mongering,” racism, and the manipulation of these and so-called Christian principles. In another blog I ran across this description of a campaign video that she and her people titled “Salvation”:
Diana Harshbarger has a recent commercial that begins in black and white and . . . shows black people masked and committing violence. Then everything goes to color and a pretty little white family (daddy, mommy, and two kids) go skipping down a country lane. Racist? Yes. Christ-like? No. And yet as images of crosses and churches alternate in the visual, Harshbarger’s voiceover says, “Jesus is Lord, and his light fills our lives, even through the chaos, even as we’re attacked by our neighbor. His hand and our faith will guide us to salvation.” While she approves this message, I’m thinking that Jesus would not. This level of manipulation and drive to divide rather than unite leads me to hope that she suffers a resounding primary defeat.
I’m sure the blogger is disappointed with Harshbarger’s primary win, as am I. The “dose” of Tennessee fear and culture-war manipulation she’ll push over the airwaves and into the November election is to be dreaded. Dreaded, I say.
Mom walked on from this life to yonder on Tuesday, May 5, 2020, just three months before her 89th birthday– which is today, Wednesday, August 5. Eighty-nine years ago, she was born in the Walnut homeplace on the 5th of August in 1931, also a Wednesday.
At some point in the study I do to teach Native American literature the best I can, I ran across the notion of “walking on” as a euphemism for death. I liked the sound of that–“walking on”–better than our culture’s more widely used variations of “passing away” (as gently poetic as that may sound), and so I think about the dead as walking on and use the phrase whenever I can. I like to think of my mom as having walked on, because it’s a particularly comforting image for a woman who was bedridden and unable to walk in the final years of her life.
I’ve thought a lot about her over the past three months, but I haven’t had the heart or the mind to write about the loss of her, other than the obituary that my brother Jerry and I wrote. (Read it here.) I don’t know that I have a whole lot of heart and mind to write about her now, but I wanted to capture something of our last few hours with her. I’m approaching my 62nd birthday, so I need to write it before I lose it in my own aging.
The last time I saw Mom when she knew me and something of what was going on around her was on Monday, March 9, just before all the nursing facilities shut down. And the last time I talked to her was, I think, sometime in the last few days of March or the first few of April, when she was able to get one of the CNAs at the Brian Center to dial Leesa’s telephone. She sounded good and in good spirits, but while Leesa made other attempts through April to have a CNA help with the telephone, we weren’t able to talk with her again.
During the evening of Saturday, May 2, Leesa and I hung out with Sam and Sharon Barnett, the only friends we’d regularly been seeing since March. We’d just returned home later that night when Jerry called–around 10:30, I think. The Brian Center had reached out to him to say that Mom wasn’t going to last much longer. Jerry was on his way there, and I hit the road as well.
I’ve never been in the presence of somebody whose death is expected any moment, but that’s where I found myself late in the night on May 2nd and into the wee hours of May 3rd. Mom’s eyes were open but unseeing, as far as I could tell. She had an oxygen tube in her nose, which was easing her breathing but not breathing for her. She might have made some semiconscious responses to our voices or our touches, but it’s hard to say.
I stayed until 3:30 AM on Sunday the 3rd and then returned home to Tennessee. Leesa and I went back later and stayed much of Sunday. Jerry and Cathy were there Sunday evening, and Jerry slept there overnight. I returned on Monday–so that Jerry could go home and rest–and spent most of the day. That evening Jerry came back and again spent the night.
Mom’s doctor told Leesa and me on Sunday that the loneliness of the quarantine had, she believe, hastened a few deaths, and she implied that this could be part of Mom’s condition. Then on Monday, the doctor had a story for Jerry and me about an experience from early in her career. A mix-up occurred with a dying woman’s last wishes, and she had been resuscitated when she and her family didn’t want her to be. As a result, she lingered in a senseless state for two weeks, until, eventually, one of the family members asked if the oxygen tube was keeping her alive. The doctors didn’t think so, but the family asked that it be removed anyway. The woman passed within five minutes after the tube’s removal.
Of course, a question hung in the air of Mom’s room, but then Jerry said he wasn’t quite ready to take such a step.
This whole time, from Saturday night into Monday evening, I tried to work. We were coming into final exam week at ETSU, but that didn’t make much of an impression me in the moment. I didn’t get much accomplished. But I thought about some of the tremendous reading experiences I’ve had that assured me we weren’t alone in what we were going through and helped me understand that the complexities of such a moment are common to our humanity. I thought a lot, for example, about this poem from Emily Dickinson.
We living have our expectations about the moment of death–that the veil between this world and the next will briefly part, that our loved one will be transfigured into something glorious and be able somehow to transmit that glory to us before departing, that in the transmission those of us left behind will share in that transfiguration. This is not to say that these things don’t happen. This is to say only that despite our expectations the moment passes–for most of us–in mystery, and we’re left, again, to rely our faith.
I’m sure many deaths are more difficult to watch than Mom’s, but I wouldn’t want to witness worse. (A friend of mine might be going through a worse death even as I write this.) When I returned to the Brian Center on Tuesday morning, the 5th, Jerry didn’t go home as he’d done on Sunday and Monday, having gotten, he said, better sleep through the wee hours of Tuesday morning than he’d had on previous nights. So, the both of us stayed there with Mom.
I hadn’t been there long when Jerry asked what I thought about turning off the oxygen. I said I was okay with it. Rather than wait for the doctor or call for a CNA, Jerry got up, walked to the machine, and turned it off. I thought I noticed some slight physical reaction from Mom, but nothing really changed. Her breathing was just as labored–against the proverbial death rattle–but just as steady as before.
I was thinking, This hanging on is mostly the work of biology, the body struggling to live as it is created to do. Although the medical personnel had been draining fluid out of her airways every few hours since Saturday, they’d stopped doing so during the previous night. Mom’s eyes were open but showing only whites. A gray-yellow mucus periodically pooled in her bottom lip, and Jerry and I took turns wiping it away. Jerry had a last box of tissues, and I had a series of washcloths that I was rinsing out to do this work. (I’m sorry to describe these moments, but I think it’s important to the meaning of what was coming.)
Nothing seemed to be changing in Mom’s condition, but Jerry was running out of tissues. Along about 1:00 in the afternoon, I rinsed out a washcloth and took my place on Mom’s right, and Jerry stood on her left with the last tissues. We took turns leaning in and gently wiping her mouth.
When we each stood with a hand on her shoulder, ministering to her together, the moment came. Mom’s breathing eased. Slowed. Stopped. Although I’d thought her being alive was merely the body fighting to survive, that moment transcended biology when the three of us were together. Maybe that veil parted so that others were present. Dad. Papa and Mama Reeves. I like to think so. But in that moment, really, the three of us were enough.
And then we were only two, as Mom walked on beyond the walls of the Brian Center, beyond our beloved mountains, beyond the moon.
I started a new Facebook page focused on my first novel, Gabriel’s Songbook, which was published a couple of years ago by Pisgah Press in Asheville, NC. I know I shouldn’t have waited more than two years to consider this kind of promotion, but I guess I’m not much at business or self-promotion. Anyway, I’ll be posting various content related to the novel over the next few months or the next year or until my next book comes out, whenever that might be. Hopefully along the way I’ll learn some things that will help the next book along.
So, click this link – Gabriel’s Songbook: The Intro – to hear me read the opening section. And if you’re a Facebooker, check out (and like) my page named “Gabriel’s Songbook – A Novel.”
I’m taking part in a 21-Day Antiracism in the Curriculum Challenge, and the first day’s assignment is as follows: Reflect, in writing, on your own values, how you bring those values to the classroom, and why you are participating in this challenge. I didn’t follow the assignment exactly, but here’s what I wrote.
I grew up in rural Madison County, North Carolina, just across the NC/TN line from Unicoi County, which is just next door to Washington County, Tennessee, where I live now. My upbringing in the village of Walnut, NC, was on a small farm, in the house where my mother and her ten siblings grew up. Although I suspect that my grandfather’s first wife might have had some indigenous—probably Cherokee—heritage (although I don’t recall anybody in the family suggesting such), his second wife, the mother of nine of his eleven children and my grandmother, was a white woman from east Tennessee. Papa Reeves’s farm was more or less working up until his death in June 1968, after which my family moved into the homeplace with my grandmother. At that point the farm mostly stopped or was sold off, given that my father worked in Asheville, first for a furniture plant and then for the United States Postal Service.
In addition to being home to my family, Walnut is home to four churches within shouting distance of each other. My family, connected to the homeplace through my mother, the next-to-youngest of Papa’s children, attended the Free Will Baptist Church, while Papa’s only other child to stay in Walnut—his youngest—attended the United Methodist Church. Neither the Free Will nor the Methodist could afford a full-time preacher, so I grew up with this arrangement: each church met for its own Sunday School hour; then on first and third Sundays of each month the Methodists came to the Free Will for preaching, and on second and fourth Sundays the Free Will folks went to the Methodist for preaching. We had our weekly youth group and summer Vacation Bible School at the Presbyterian Church. The fourth church, the Missionary Baptists, involved themselves with the rest of us as little as they could, it seemed.
Bottom line: It was a very rural, very Christian, and very white upbringing.
Madison High School had a student body of some eight hundred students, which included just three or four black students. I played basketball with one of them, Eugene Dobbs, and considered him both a superstar and my friend, but I wonder now if I valued him for his skills on the court and our team or as a human being. I can’t say from this distance—more than forty years—how racist I might have been with Eugene and the others. Certainly, I was racist, not knowing any better, so the question is to what degree my racism extended. I hope it wasn’t overtly malicious or aggressive.
As a member of the high-school smart kids club—the Beta Club—I once traveled to an event held at Cherokee High School, on the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina. I don’t remember if I felt under any threat while on the platform there in front of the school audience. What I do remember, however, is that my white friend and I made fun of some of the names of the Cherokee students who shared the platform with us. What I didn’t know at the time was that in just a few years, I would have a roommate at Mars Hill College, who was—and is—an enrolled member of the Cherokee tribe. We became close friends. I sang at his wedding. He named his firstborn son Cody.
Good friendship and shared experiences strip away layers of difference and identifiers of otherness, humanizing people one to another. This is good and moves us toward antiracism, but it would be a long time before I would learn about and wrestle with the horrific injustices that the U.S. government (white men) inflicted upon my friend’s people, in stealing their land and destroying their nation. (Relations between the U.S. and indigenous nations is now different but hasn’t improved that much.) I think when I was ready to see this troubled history, knowing my friend and having a human connection with him allowed me to recognize, name, and condemn the brutal racism inherent in the dominant white culture of the United States, from its presidents down to members of the Madison High Beta Club.
I could and should keep writing, but I’ll break for now. My experience with my friend from Cherokee, along with some kind of unexplained, lifelong attraction to such others,* led me to the development and teaching of one of my favorite courses here at ETSU, which is ENGL 3070: Native American Literature. The intensive study of this literature for this course has, in turn, made me much more conscious regarding issues of race—and not just that of American Indians—in other courses I teach, such as ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865 and ENGL 3280: Mythology
* When my cousins and I were children and would go out into landscape of the Walnut farm to play Daniel Boone or Jonny Quest, I always wanted to play Boone’s Cherokee friend Mingo or Jonny’s Indian friend Hadji—an Indian from India.
A girl I went to high school with—she’s an old woman now, just as I’m an old man—recently posted a meme supposed to be about white privilege that said something along the lines of never having had any such privilege and having had to work for everything she has. I’m sure she’s had to work to get and maintain her stuff over the years, but her meme reveals a common misunderstanding of the notion of “white privilege” as it arises in the context of racism—that is, money and the finer things are not what white privilege is about.
We poor and middle-class whites have a difficult time understanding our privilege in any context other than that of socio-economic status. The reason for this is that the kind of privilege we have is invisible—which is the nature of privilege rightly understood—we incorrectly relate any reference to privilege to wealth, to some silver-spoon-in-mouth quality and ease of life to which our wallets and our purses and our bank accounts reveal we weren’t born.
So, yes, my high school classmate has worked hard now for over forty years, and I hope that she lives as comfortable a life as it’s possible for poor and middle-class whites to live these days. But even if she isn’t comfortable or even close to it—living hand-to-mouth and paycheck-to-paycheck—she’s still white and still privileged in these United States of America.
Her invisible white privilege is in the things that are absent from her life, the things to which she is immune—that she probably hasn’t been pulled over by the police for driving in a neighborhood that for a variety of merely physical appearances is obviously not her neighborhood; that she has probably not been followed around a department store by wary clerks and store security guards who suspect that she’s most likely intending to drop a few items into that big bag of hers; that “the talk” she might have had with her parents before she ventured out into the world on her own probably was about “the birds and the bees”—i.e., sex—and not about how to behave around unfamiliar white people in general and the police in particular. That these things—and things like them—are absent from her life, that she is, in a sense, immune to them, is white privilege. That she can drive most anywhere she wants to go without being stopped is a privilege. That she can shop until she drops with nothing more than the ever-present security cameras on her—as they are on us all—is a privilege. That she can interact with the police on equal footing, if she ever has to interact with them at all, is a privilege.
And all of these privileges are the product of racial whiteness.
I’m smack dab in the middle of teaching a five-week summer session of ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865. The difficult time of national tension we’re currently experiencing in the United States of America has intensified the students’ reading experiences and allowed them to make a number of connections with American history through American literary history.
At this point, two and a half weeks in, we’re exploring materials from the first half of the 19th century. Students have just read and begun to respond to William Apess’s “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833). Apess was descended from the Wampanoag tribe of eastern Massachusetts. His grandfather was apparently a white man who married the granddaughter of Wampanoag chief known to white New England as King Philip. Apess’s mixed-blood father joined the Pequot tribe and married a a tribal woman who might have been a mixture of Pequot and black American. Apess himself converted to Christianity and eventually became an ordained Methodist minister. He believed that race prejudice had no place in the practice of the true Christian faith, and he wrote “An Indian’s Looking-Glass” as an admonition and exhortation to his fellow — that is, white — ministers, to chastise them for their racist practices and encourage them to better, more Christ-like behavior.
Several of the students who have commented on this piece have been struck by its clear importance to this moment in the United States of America, as citizens–outraged and sickened by the murder of George Floyd and the realization that this is one of the latest (and not the last) acts of its kind–protest in support of “Black Lives Matter” and against our president’s and our nation’s racism.
Here is a collection of what I refer to as Apess’s zingers:
“Now if [the Indians of New England] are what they are held up in our view to be [i.e., ingenious, men of talents], I would take the liberty to ask why they are not brought forward and pains taken to educate them? to give them all a common education, and those of the brightest and first-rate talents put forward and held up to office. Perhaps some unholy, unprincipled men would cry out, the skin was not good enough; but stop friends–I am not talking about the skin, but about principles. I would ask if there cannot be as good feelings and principles under a red skin as there can be under a white? (emphasis added here and below)
If black or red skins, or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal–for he has made fifteen colored people to one white, and placed them here upon the earth.
Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it–which skin do you think would have the greatest? . . . Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of its whole Continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature and God require them to have? And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds, and welter out their days under the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun?
The first thing we are to look at, are [Jesus’s] precepts, of which we will mention a few. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. The second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two precepts hang all the law and the prophets.’–Matt. xxii. 37, 38, 39, 40. ‘By this shall all men know that they are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.’–John xiii. 35. Our Lord left this special command with his followers, that they should love one another.
Now my brethren in the ministry, . . . [d]id you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples they they ought to despise one because his skin was different from theirs? Jesus Christ being a Jew, and those of his Apostles certainly were not whites. . . . And were not whites the most degraded people on the earth at that time . . . [?]
Jesus Christ and his Apostles never looked at the outward appearances. Jesus in particular looked and the hearts. . . .
By what you read, you may learn how deep your principles are. I should say they were skin deep.
As the United States of America struggles to recognize and realize–to make real–the truth that black lives matter, as our nation continues its 244-year struggle to live up to its principles, I hope that “Native Lives Matter” will also become part of the conversation and healing, part of the way forward. Apess recognized the horrors of the institution of slavery and, by extension, of institutionalized racism, but the USA as a nation has never–with any depth of feeling or meaning–recognized the atrocities committed against the indigenous peoples who were here first.
Somebody I don’t remember ever learning about: Harold Ickes. Here’s a passage in Episode 5 of Ken Burns’s series The National Parks – America’s Best Idea:
No one was more willing to take on entrenched interests than the president’s irascible Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a self-described old curmudgeon. A Chicago lawyer and former Republican stalwart known equally for his explosive temper and his fierce devotion to New Deal policies, he had become one of Roosevelt’s closest and most controversial advisors.
“The meanest man who ever sat in a cabinet office in Washington,” Horace Albright said, “and the best Secretary of the Interior we ever had.”
Ickes fought battles on every front. One of his first acts was to abolish the department’s* segregated lunchrooms. Then he told the national parks in the South to simply ignore local Jim Crow laws requiring separate facilities for blacks. At Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, signs segregating campgrounds or picnic areas were quietly taken down. . . .”
To end the episode, Burns and author Dayton Duncan return to the notions of freedom and equality.
In the midst of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the world renowned contralto Marian Anderson had been denied the opportunity to perform in Constitution Hall, the 4,000-seat auditorium controlled by the Daughters of the American Revolution, because of the color of her skin.
At the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, who had once been the head of the NAACP in Chicago, quickly issued Anderson permission to sing at a different venue, the Lincoln Memorial, a recent addition to the national park system. The concert was free and drew a crowd of 75,000 of all races and creeds.
HAROLD ICKES: “Genius, genius draws no color line, and so it is fitting that Marian Anderson should raise her voice in tribute to the notable Lincoln, whom mankind will ever honor. Miss Marian Anderson.”
After being introduced by Ickes, Anderson stepped to the microphone and began her program.
She sings: “My country, ’tis of thee / Sweet land of liberty / Of thee we sing / Land where my fathers died / Land of our pilgrims’ pride / From every mountainside / Let freedom ring . . .”
As she sings “Ave Maria,” the voiceover returns:
ICKES: “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. When God gave us this wonderful outdoors and the sun and the sun and the moon and the stars, he made no distinction of race or creed or color. . . .”
And “Ave Maria” continues. . . .
This seemed an appropriate bit of information for these days through which we’re living and learning.
Postscript: And in the same episode, beautiful black & white images fill the screen while a lone fiddle plays and a man provides a voiceover:
[“]Fortunate he is who may see Mount McKinley against the summer midnight sky, the lush fern forests of Kilauea, the white jubilance of Yosemite’s waters, and the somber rock and surf of Acadia National Park. To record and interpret these qualities for others, to brighten the drab mood of cities, and build high horizons of the spirit on the edge of plain and desert, these are some of the many obligations of art.[“] — Ansel Adams
In 1938, a book arrived at Harold Ickes’ office, entitled Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. It was filled with stunning images of the mountainous Kings River Canyon region of the souther Sierra, captured by an aspiring photographer named Ansel Adams. This was his first book of landscapes, and since he knew that Ickes was interested in making the area a national park, Adams had sent it along with his personal compliments. Ickes took it to the White House to show President Roosevelt, who liked it so much he quickly appropriated it for his own. Ansel Adams was on his way to becoming the most influential photographer for the cause of national parks since William Henry Jackson‘s images of Yellowstone had helped persuade Congress to create the world’s first park in 1872.
[“]There is this unending argument about whether art can affect human affairs, and I think Ansel is one great example of how it did.[“] — Kenneth Brower
