You Gotta Serve Somebody

By Murphy Davis

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 1-5

I want to begin by saying a word about my life in the Open Door Community since this so deeply affects anything else I would say.

We are a residential Christian Community of 32 folks. We are African-American, white, Hispanic, young and old, women and men, formerly homeless, formerly prisoners and those of us who have always been housed, Ph.D.’s and illiterates, from backgrounds of the middle class, obscene wealth, and utter poverty.

As a family we live together, eat together, worship, work, and sing together, share our money and other resources, and try to understand, learn from, and love each other.

Out of our family life and shared faith we live a life of servanthood and advocacy among and on behalf of the homeless poor of Atlanta: many more than 10,000 men, women, children and families who have nowhere to go; and servanthood and advocacy among and on behalf of prisoners in our state: the many and increasing thousands of women, men and children who live in cages. We particularly work among the 111 people who are on death row in Georgia.

As a way of beginning to discuss the challenge of service, let me introduce you to three friends.

First there’s Charlie. When I left home yesterday morning Charlie was lying in the sunshine in our front yard waiting for the soup kitchen to open. He is, like hundreds of thousands of men and women and children across this land, homeless.

Charlie has been a working man since he was 17 years old. The last job he held was one he had for five years. He

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had worked his way up to four dollars an hour. But at age 45, Charlie was slowing down a little and the employer realized there were any number of 22-year-olds to be had for the minimum wage.

So Charlie was fired. He had no savings and no benefits. The weeks and months of job hunting were fruitless: “Sorry,” they all said, “but you know we’re really looking for somebody a little younger.” The strain on Charlie’s marriage grew to the breaking point. By the time he found himself with no job and no family and no home, he began to wonder what kind of a sorry excuse for a man he was anyway.

He gets an occasional job out of a labor pool. He crawls out of his cat hole at 4:30 a.m. and goes to sit in a dingy room full of hopeless humanity and prays for eight hours of work. Usually there’s nothing for Charlie. But if he does go to work, he goes out hungry, and the soup kitchens will be long closed by the time he gets back. The best he can expect, though his employer for the day might pay the labor pool seven dollars an hour for his work, is the minimum wage minus a few bucks for transportation, hard-hat rental, and all-maybe he’ll have $19 or $21 at the end of a day.

The only place that will cash his labor pool check is a liquor store across the street-with a purchase, that is. So by nightfall the best he’s looking at is a bottle, a pack of cigarettes, and sixteen bucks. Try to live on it.

Charlie gets locked up a lot. From time to time he does twenty to forty days in the City Prison farm for the terrible crime of public urination. We jail those who relieve themselves in public even though Atlanta has not one single public toilet. In other words, there is not a legal alternative. The money we spend in one year of punishing this

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heinous crime we could build and maintain public toilets all over the city. But for doing what every human body must do Charlie goes to jail.

Charlie also did ten months on a one-year sentence for criminal trespass. That was from the time he was caught sleeping in an abandoned warehouse. He has another court charge pending because he went into Underground Atlanta and walked down the street. The police told him he didn’t belong because he stank. So he was arrested.

When the pain gets to be too much for him, Charlie drinks. As he lay in the sunshine in our front yard yesterday a car drove by. A young man stuck his head out the window and screamed, “Get a job, you bums!” Charlie raised his head for a minute and dropped it on his arm again.

Next I’d like for you to meet Jerome. Jerome was young, African-American, poor and retarded. He was executed by the state of Georgia in June 1986. He was convicted of being involved with another man who killed a woman in Columbus, Ga.

When Jerome got his death warrant, the Georgia Association for Retarded Citizens got involved in his case. GARC examined him extensively, confirmed that he was clinically retarded, and made a passionate appeal on his behalf.

But our society had long ago given up on Jerome. I read one school record from the time he was about eleven. A counselor wrote this advice to Jerome’s teachers and guides: “Jerome is slow and probably unfit for anything other than simple factory work. He’s not worth your time.”

The admonition was apparently heeded. Nobody wasted any time on Jerome. His mama loved him, but her life was hard. She was a maid for the county sheriff end though she worked more than full time, she was paid so little that her family had to depend on government surplus powdered eggs and milk to keep from going hungry.

His life was one of degradation and neglect but Jerome, in his own simple way, tried to do right. When the state set his execution date they sent their own psychiatrist to examine him. Jerome tried his best on the intelligence test and he was very proud. The shrink said that he wasn’t quite retarded enough to be spared from the electric chair.

The doctor was paid and Jerome died with 2,300 volts of electricity through his body once, twice, three times.

Before he died Jerome said to me one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard. We had been talking about prison life and Jerome looked at me and said: “You know-peoples was not made to dog around. Peoples was made to be respected.”

Third, I’d like for you to meet Nancy. If you had met Nancy a few years back you would not have expected her to end up with a ruined life.

She was a school teacher and her second marriage was to a prominent lawyer in a small Georgia town. He had once worked for the state attorney general’s office and had friends in high places.

For all his prominence Nancy’s husband was a violent man. Soon after they were married he began to have outbursts that would leave Nancy bruised or with an occasional broken tooth or bone. Didn’t Nancy’s coworkers and friends and family wonder that she was “falling down the stairs” so often?

But we learn from Nancy that the problem of male violence against women and children cuts across every class line and every racial line. Our leaders like to talk about Willie Horton and stranger violence against women on the streets, and it’s a problem. But we most often avoid the most obvious truth. And that truth is that the very most dangerous place for a woman to be in the United States of America is in a relationship with a man.

The most dangerous place for a child to be in the United States of America is in a family.

Hear it! Most women and children who are victims of

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violence are victimized at home. That’s how deep our sickness is.

For Nancy the sickness was eventually fatal. One night her husband came across the room toward her with a 2×4 in his hand. She turned, picked up his gun and shot him dead.

She was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

She really and truly tried to make the best of her life in prison. She taught other prisoners to read. She wrote letters for the illiterate. She helped to set up a special program for mothers and solicited transportation for their children to be able to visit.

The prison doctor told her that the lump that developed in her breast was benign. When it grew he insisted that it was “nothing to worry about” and accused her of malingering.

When she finally got another biopsy, itwas too late. This “dangerous criminal” was sent home in a wheelchair to spend the two remaining months of her life with her teenage son and her elderly parents.

Now that you have met my three friends I can discuss the challenge of service. The title of this article should actually have been, “You Gonna Have to Serve Somebody.” Bob Dylan sings that song:

You might like to wear cotton
Might like to wear silk
Might like to drink whiskey
Might like to drink milk
Might like to eat caviar
Might like to eat bread
May be sleepin’ on the floor
or sleepin’ on a kingsize bed
But you gonna have to serve somebody…
It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you gonna have to serve somebody.

The point is: Everybody is serving somebody or something.

Not having made a decision does not mean we are not serving. I really believe that anyone, especially of the middle or upper class, who is not serving her oppressed neighbor is serving the status quo.

In other words, as long as our neighbors are being oppressed among us–and they are–and we are not serving them, then we are serving those who benefit because of our neighbor’s oppression.

We would not have homeless people if it did not benefit someone. We would not be spending millions, billions of dollars a year at every federal, state, county and municipal level to build prisons and jails if it didn’t benefit somebody. Don’t tell me we’ve got all these billions and we can’t build housing for people. Where do you think crime comes from? Despair! But prison construction is big business. Beware when you raise a question.

The oppression of some benefits others. Our government speaks, for example, of “acceptable levels of unemployment.” Meaning, of course, that a certain level of unemployment is actually good for the economy.

Tell that to the unemployed!

You gonna have to serve somebody. The question is who?

In traditional terms, when we talk about serving our neighbors, we really have in mind charity.

That’s a great word: caritas. Love; passionate caring; compassion; advocating love; stand-up love.

But charity is often taken to be serving somebody a bowl of soup and thinking that’s it.

The bowl of soup is critical. A hungry person has to cat and the sooner the better.

But let a love for justice walk hand in hand so that at the very same time we serve the food we ask, “Why is my neighbor hungry?” What’s going on in our system that creates so much hunger in a land where we throw away more food than any people in human history ever dreamed of!

Charity and justice together provide a night’s shelter while asking why? Why? Why are all these thousands of people homeless? Women and men and boys and girls and families?

We have huge quantities of construction materials–and buildings every where–church buildings, college buildings, government buildings, so many of them standing empty most of the time.

Why? Why are so many of our neighbors homeless?

At many points in history women have taken important roles in the struggle for justice for the oppressed. One group of our foremothers who are a resource for us today is the ASWPL–the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

After the Civil War, African -American people were freed from chattel slavery. But Southern whites were determined to maintain a tight social control. In three decades after the war it is estimated that more than 10,000 African-Americans were lynched.

Gradually the myth of the black rapist became the excuse for lynchings well into the twentieth century. And it was done in the name of Southern white women.

Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Tolbert: bold, courageous, outspoken African women, stood up, protested, pleaded with their white sisters to take up the cause. “Because it is done in your name,” they argued, “you are the very ones who can stop it.”

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It took about 35 years to get some real action. But in 1930, Jessie Daniel Ames joined with white church women from around the South to form the ASWPL.

Their motto as they picked up the crusade against lynching was “Not in our Names.”

They were tireless in their petition drives, meetings, letter writing, and demonstrations and in taking on their own men. Their effectiveness in bringing to an end the public acceptance of lynching is a reminder to us of the power of women working together to end oppression.

The crusade against lynching had its problems, but it was genuinely an interracial womens’ movement: the sort we need so desperately today.

Do you know? Do you have any idea how much the poor and your oppressed neighbor need you? Do you have any idea how much your life, your service, your compassion and love is needed by the many who suffer because of injustice?

Oppression in the form of racism, sexism, war and poverty is causing death and destruction around the world and right under our noses. The flagrant destruction of the earth and its precious resources and the destruction of human hope and human dignity are a part of the same death-dealing spirit that says: Serve yourself. Take what’s yours and then get yourself a gun and an insurance policy to protect it. Use up whatever you want right now and let somebody else worry about it tomorrow.

Our earth and the earth’s people (most of whom are in this very moment poor and hungry ) need us to give our lives to service of our neighbors toward the goals of justice and social transformation.

It is so easy to be blinded by our class, our privilege, and yes, even blinded by our educations and educational institutions.

But in these days our ignorance of our neighbors’ plight–whether willful or unwitting ignorance–our silence and our inaction mean, literally and powerfully, service to a public policy that is killing our neighbors at home and around the world.

You gonna have to serve somebody.

Murphy Davis is the Open Door Community’s Southern Prison Ministry Director. This article is adapted from a symposium talk in May 1990 at Converse College. (Open Door Community, 910 Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta, GA 30306-4212; (404)-874-9652.)

Driving Mr. Walker

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 5-7

I was taken for a ride on Memorial Day Sunday. At home without my family (off visiting relatives) I was sitting on my front porch when a stranger approached. Dressed in a golf shirt, shorts, and running shoes, the black man had a story–one I had heard dozens of times.

“My family and I were driving through Atlanta and our car broke down on I-20. I have been stranded with my wife and two little babies all night… ”

It’s a line that has been used by panhandlers and hustlers in Atlanta so often in the last few years that even the local radio talk shows have discussed the come-on. “The wrecker service has my car and we haven’t eaten all night…”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“I need a ride to my car and get it from the wrecker. . . ”

This time I said, “All right. Let me get my keys.”

We drove my car, a 1978 Chevy Malibu with a loud muffler, and he talked non-stop. He was from Boston…in the Air Force as a career man…had been stationed in Panama…now he wanted to come down South…his car had broken down late yesterday afternoon…he had been walking around looking for help all night. . tan older couple had taken in his wife and kids…a police lieutenant had helped him with some money until called away on an emergency…the wrecker repair shop wanted $120 and he had paid them all he had… “What’s your name, sir?”

“You look like a lawyer, are you, sir? Do you need to go by a money machine to get any cash?”

“How much do you owe for your car?” I asked.

“Fifty-seven dollars. Do you have it? Do you need to go by a money machine to get the cash?”

“I think I have that much.”

We were traveling down Memorial Drive where a Baptist hospital and the Martin Luther King Center stand as landmarks. I hadn’t expected him to ask for so much cash, whether his story was genuine or fake.

“Sir, don’t you wear a seat belt?”

Only then, as I pulled up my strap with a thank-you, did I realize how tense I had become.

Mr. Walker continued to talk and talk. About his car…about his life…he had bought the car from his lieutenant…He was “one of the lieutenant’s boys…We looked after him and he looked after us…” He talked about his family…about how hard it is to have someone help you when you’re in a strange place…

As we turned right, following his instructions, the monologue began to blur as I realized that the city wrecker service was actually in another direction. “I think we’re

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gonna like it down here. ..Atlanta is such a clean city. . .look over at that parking lot…there’s nothing there…no trash. . .nothing.. . ”

Finally, when he said to turn left, I asked him: “What was your name, again?”

“Walker. Robert Walker.”

We were now at the edge of Capitol Homes, one of the federal housing projects squeezed between the interstate highway and the Georgia government buildings. He asked me to stop.

“Where’s the lot-the wrecker service, Mr. Walker?” I asked.

“Oh, I have to call him first on his beeper…I just thought you might want to give me the money here so that we don’t do it out in the open. ..This is a rough neighborhood and I wouldn’t want folks to get the wrong idea. ..Do you have a pen or pencil and I’ll get your name and number and send you your money as soon as I get to the base. . . ?”

With no wrecker service, tow-truck, or family in sight, I ripped a piece of paper and wrote down my name and telephone number while Mr. Walker did the same.

“See, I even wrote down that I owe you $57.” He now had my money.

“I could just walk on over from here by myself, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.”

As I drove away, I looked back in the rear view mirror at Mr. Walker. He was walking away with the same brisk step, the same sense of purpose with which he had arrived on my porch. I tried to understand what had happened. Why had I given a not-so-perfect stranger $57 when two or three times a day I stubbornly turn down pleas on the street for a quarter?

Part of it was fear and part was comfort, I suspect. While listening to Mr. Walker’s monologue, I realized that there was something large, bulky, and sharp in his short pants. He kept his hand near it. The object could have been a knife or it could have been a long key chain. Sitting within two feet of me in the car, Mr. Walker left me more vulnerable on a deserted Sunday morning than do most panhandlers on the street.

Also, Mr. Walker didn’t appear to be entirely destitute of drive or ambition. A middle-aged black man, he was dressed just like my brother would have been had he been coming down from Chicago. He was articulate and talked clearly about values of family and work-all characteristics that probably made him seem all the more deserving in my eyes.

But, why did I allow myself to be put into that situation? Why did I let that chain of events happen in the first place?

Looking back, I think it was one of those moments in my life when I needed to risk something, a little money and perhaps my own faith in human beings, in order to see if I was really living in a community where people do help strangers in need.

This wasn’t an organized decision to witness my concern for the poor, as is volunteering at a homeless shelter. While important, that commitment could not touch the

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core of my need on Sunday. Then and there I could no longer go on turning down strangers blindly without knowing if I was truly able as an individual to do something meaningful about the suffering and distress that I see walking down the streets everyday near my office and home.

For ten years I have negotiated with my conscience and with the homeless, hustlers, peddlers, and the distressed as I walk the streets. Telling most of them, “No, I’m sorry I can’t help you today…but good luck,” I have built an elaborate set of rules of personal conduct: Always give money to women and children who are homeless; If people say they’re hungry, take them to a nearby restaurant if convenient; Don’t give money to people who are drinking or drunk; Don’t give money twice to people who make a business out of begging. On Memorial Day weekend, I was tired of living by these rules that have no virtue other than convenience and compromise. I wanted to know if my own sense of Southern neighborliness, my own belief in a South of concern for all had become so narrowed over time that I can now count as my neighbors only those individuals I know in person. Simply, I needed to know if I could truly be a good Samaritan living in the heart of the South.

Apparently not. Mr. Walker took my money and I have not heard from him since. Don’t expect I will. Clearly, I was more of a sucker than a Samaritan. Suspecting as much, I called the phone number Mr. Walker gave me for the “naval air side base.” It was probably a random number–a phone recording for someone who tried to sound like W.C. Fields when asking that you leave a message.

Looking back, I know that I was willing to run a risk from the time Mr. Walker came to my porch to the time I handed over the money because I thought both he and I had promise. He was energetic and able-bodied. He was someone who, if helped, could prevent tragedy in his life, make something out of his life. My little act of charity could possibly make a big difference in his life, I hoped.

Of course, I didn’t get nor deserve such self-satisfaction. Had Mr. Walker’s family been sitting in a car as we turned the curve at Capitol Homes, I now see that I would have been the victim of a false sense of community, a bogus self satisfaction about what I alone can do in the face of societal homelessness and poverty.

Until the society in which I am an active, productive member acts in its own collective self interest, I am virtually paralyzed as a neighbor to stop the violence of poverty that empties the spirit, soul, and pocketbook of individuals and communities. My own individual need for neighborliness–my own need to be open and generous to those who are different and strange–cannot be quieted for now. I must live with convenience and compromise because I do not live in a city or region where neighborliness cares for all.

If Mr. Walker had returned my money, that would have been the real hoax.

A Walk on the Supply Side

Michael B. Katz

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, p. 6

“One of the most enduring and indivious social categories is ‘stranger.’ We engage the world as a series of concentric circles based on degrees of relation: family, friends, neighbors, community, strangers. The composition of the circles shifts over time, but strangers remain always on the outside. Not surprisingly, they are the primary objects of a continuing debate about, to use Michael Ignatieff’s evocative phrase, the ‘needs of strangers.’ As in England, colonial American poor laws were clear about the limits of social obligation. Parents and children remained responsible for each other; communities were to ease the suffering of their members. But the public owed nothing to strangers, who were to be shunted back to their community of origin.

“Within cities, poor people have almost always remained strangers. We pass their houses on a train or in a car; read about them as individual cases; study them as abstract statistics; and encounter them asking for help in public places. Most of the writing about poor people, even by sympathetic observers, tells us that they are different, truly strangers in our midst. Poor people think, feel, and act in ways unlike middle-class Americans. Their poverty is to some degree a matter of personal responsibility, and its alleviation requires personal transformation, such as the acquisition of skills, commitment to the work ethic, or the practice of chastity. This “supply-side” view of poverty, often despite powerful evidence, has coursed through American social thought for centuries.”

–from the introduction to The Undeserving Poor, by Michael B. Katz (Pantheon Books, 1989).

Cooked Food

By Roberta Bondi

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 8-12

When Benjamin was five, he looked down at his plate one morning at breakfast. Then he looked up at me and asked, “Mama, when you were a little girl, did they have cooked food?” “Are you kidding?” I answered, sympathetically, knocked breathless by the question. Who did he think his mama was? How many aeons of life does he think mine has spanned?

When my own Mama, in Louisville, Kentucky, moved from her big house on Willow Avenue into her tiny two-bedroom condo on Village Drive, my two aunts came to help. My mother’s sisters, Kas and Suzie, had awaken early to leave their farms outside Sturgis in Union County. They arrived after their four-hour trip shortly after I’d gotten up. It was late in the move, and most of the work of dismantling my mother’s household and reassembling it in a very small space was already done.

Immediately, they started in on wrapping the jelly glasses in newspaper. I tried to stay quiet and absorb caffeine as quickly as I could. I knew I was in for it when they started to talk about how hard life used to be, end how my great aunt Blacky who was eighty at the time still works, and how people just don’t work like they used to. Of course, they were right on all points.

Life on a farm is no picnic right now, but it is nothing like my memories of visiting my grandmother when I was a city child. Until I was eleven I grew up in Bayside, New York, within striking distance of my other grandparents who lived in Manhattan. Our home in Queens was a small, three-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a type of complex called “garden apartments.” To go from playing in the yard with a flock of assorted children in New York to a farm in western Kentucky for three weeks each summer was to enter a world that was at the same time intensely boring and amazingly terrifying.

My grandparents’ house was old, built around the time of the Civil War. It was one fairly dilapidated story, white frame, with four huge, high-ceilinged, long-windowed rooms, and two little rooms. The fixed rooms were the living room on the front, and the kitchen on the back. The other two shifted in use. Sometimes the dining room would be on the front of the house next to the living room, while my grandparents’ room connected the kitchen and the living room. Sometimes it was the dining room that lay between the front and back. My uncle Quentin and my Aunt Suzie were not married yet. The two small rooms were theirs.

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The central focus of the house, however, was the kitchen, and this is where I remember most of the household work being done. It had three windows. Two of them on the side almost overlooked a neighbor’s house, which was partially hidden by a rickety and overgrown trellis covered with sweetpeas. Through the window on the back, over the sink, you could see my grandmother’s grapes, also overgrown, a barbed wire fence against which blackberry bushes grew, the smokehouse (if you stood on tip-toes and strained to look to the right), and the chicken yard containing the terrible out-house beyond it. Straight out the window were open fields, and at a great distance beyond the fields lay the low ridge of Dyer Hills that enclosed the landscape.

My grandmother indeed did work hard in that kitchen. There was an enormous black coal stove she cooked on, with its kettles and skillets and dented-up enamelled pan. When she opened that stove, the red light of the fire looked like hell itself and scared me twice as badly. Under the back window was a sink with a hand pump for cold well water at its edge. I still remember the metallic taste of that water that was too cold to wash in. A great square table with a table cloth that always seemed mostly worn out stood in the middle. Off to one side of the kitchen was a cold room for storing canned and preserved foods, and in the floor of that room, a cold cellar you got to by lifting a trap-door in the floor and descending into the earth.

This wasn’t the farm my mother had grown up on. My grandparents had lost that one in the Depression. That former farm, however, was close enough to the farm of my childhood to make me wonder. How did my grandmother rear six children and feed all the farm workers? Nothing anybody ate ever seemed to come easily or cleanly out of that kitchen.

Every meal was a hot meal, including biscuits or rolls or corn bread. I remember taking turns with my little brother Freddie churning sour butter that I couldn’t eat in a tall tapered wooden churn from unpasteurized milk. My grandmother made wonderful fruit pies, but the apple pies were made of tiny wormy apples she had us pick up off the ground behind the house in the long wet grass where the dog played and the chickens ran. The peach pies had an unspeakable origin: the half-rotten freckled peaches had fallen from their trees into the dusty, bare dirt right inside the gate to the chicken yard. Her fried chicken was heaven, but I think I was nearly forty before the memory of the smell of boiling water poured over chicken feathers and the feel of those feathers coming off in my hands began to fade. Vegetables grown in the garden, eggs from the hen house, canning and preserving, the smoking of hams and the making of sausage all boggle my mind and memory.

Though they most certainly took place, I don’t remember large family gatherings of cousins, aunts and uncles, and great aunts and uncles before the big kitchen was redone as another bedroom and one of the small rooms was turned into a modern kitchen. The new kitchen was very long and narrow, and even when it was brand new I remember it as dingy and rickety, an old woman’s kitchen–though my grandmother wasn’t old when it was added–without the solidity and significance of the old kitchen. Nevertheless, it had hot and cold water with a real sink, a refrigerator, a gas stove, a washing machine, and a chrome and formica dinette set with the table still covered by a worn-out table cloth. I remember very well the family dinners that came out of the new kitchen when we visited in the summers as I grew older.

These dinners were complex affairs. Orchestrated by my aunts and my mother, they took place on Sunday after church. The assembled family included not only Panny and Papa Charles, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and my first cousins. They usually also included at least

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a great aunt or two and occasionally some second cousins as well.

These gatherings occurred in three movements. The first movement, of moderately quick tempo, was in three parts. Providing one part, the men-folk sat on the wide front porch staring toward the road and talking about the crops and other uninteresting subjects. The next was played by the children, who were almost all male. In the back yard, the side yard and the front yard the little ones ran around and whined, while the older ones teased each other, scuffled, and tussled. The third and central part came out of my grandmother’s kitchen, and the players were my mother, my aunts and my grandmother with an occasional female first cousin to set the table, pour the iced tea, and so forth.

The second movement was much slower and was in two parts. All the men and the younger children performed first, coming in off the porch to eat by themselves without the women. Men at one end, children at the other, they would assemble in the darkened dining room at the long white dining room table, while the overhead fan would stir the hot summer air.

Sometimes the meal would be pot-roast, new potatoes, and beans boiled forever with a piece of salt pork. Sometimes it would be ham or the infamous fried chicken and fried corn. Never were we without tomatoes from the garden, slaw, and little onions, and usually a white cake with caramel icing. falling apart in the middle with the icing running into the crack, and a fruit pie or two. Even the children drank gallons of the sweetened iced-tea, which was served in big round, stemmed glasses with little dents in the sides. But most of all, there were wonderful rolls or biscuits which would be provided by hovering aunts who kept them coming steadily, always hot, always crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. Only after the men and children had eaten, and the table was cleared did the women gather together their own meal and go to the dining room for the “second sitting.”

For the women, the major portion of the much more rapid third movement was again the kitchen and clean-up. Unlike the time before dinner, when conversation was fairly well restricted to discussion of food and gossip about the present, during clean-up time my good-natured, joking aunts, great-aunts and grandmother would tell stories of their own aunts, great-aunts, grandmothers, cousins, and great-grandmothers. All the while, the men smoked smelly cigars on the porch, continued to talk about crops, deals, and the weather, and the children played and napped around the house and yard.

How to understand these dinners from this distance, One key is in the breads. I’m not sure how old I was when I began to realize the special importance hot homemade breads held for me as a female family member, and how it was that I came to know that everything a woman is or is not is wrapped up in her rolls and biscuits. I know I learned late about chicken. I remember as a fourteen-year-old being mortified at my own gaping lack of womanly abilities when I heard my aunt Suzie exile a neighbor from the entire race of women by saying of her, “she’s a good woman, but she can’t pluck a chicken!” But there never seems to have been a time when I didn’t know that, whatever else my grandmother, my mother, my aunts, and my great-aunts were able to do, their power, their honor, and their mysterious authority lay in their ability to make those perfect biscuits like the women in the family before them, and bring them to the table throughout the meal, forever golden, full of buttermilk, and always hot.

I may not know how old I was when I began to understand about the significance of biscuits for a real woman, but I do know that it is only recently that I have come to begin to understand the real power structure of my family which was revealed in those Sunday dinners.

Although I lived in New York City as a child, and although I was the daughter of Kentucky on my mother’s side, the law of my father’s Yankee family prevailed in our household. A dazzlingly intelligent and entertaining so-

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phisticated Manhattanite, my father ruled our home with the same grace and power as any other absolute monarch. Obedience without argument or questioning was demanded and received from wife and children equally, and speeches detailing the moral, psychological, and physical weakness of women provided the justification for the law.

Naturally, therefore, on my grandmother’s farm, all I could see were the men on the porch rocking while the women worked, sitting to cat while the women stood up to wait on them. I was afraid of my big uncles. I knew they believed women should work while men played. Even on Sunday in their good clothes their hands were huge and rough and cracked, and the smell and feel of large animals as well as of intricate and spiked farm equipment enveloped them.

When I would come onto the porch Uncle Bob Wesley and Uncle Bo especially would tease me. “You talk like an Eye-talian! ” “Say ‘Pie in the sky when I die!'” And most humiliating of all, “Well, well, little lady, you ain’t nothing but a horse’s titty!” I thought they despised me and wanted to make me cry. Uncle A. D., my aunt Kas’s husband, was kinder and sweeter, and Uncle Bob, married to my Aunt Susie, was the quietest of all. I don’t remember much from then of Quentin, my then college-aged uncle who is now a lawyer. I did not know how grindingly hard my farming uncles worked. I could not see much of their relationships with my aunts, though I know now as an adult that the marriages in my family were remarkably happy, and were based on a kind of equality and respect that was invisible to me.

The truth is, as I have been able to work it out over the intervening years, the position of the men in the family is somewhat ambiguous. I know now, as I did not then, that my family is an intricately structured matriarchy. Living as I had with only a mother, an authoritarian father, and younger brothers in New York, the patterns of the larger family had escaped me, and so I could not see the smaller ones within the larger family, either.

Yet even then, if I had been asked to diagram the Wynns and the Wesleys, I would have known that my greatgrandmother Grammar, a Withers before she was married to Bob Wynn, was the center and source of power in the family. Only incidentally, it seemed to me as a child, was Papa married to my great-grandmother. When I thought about it, I knew that all Grammar’s children lived on farms close by, that when her daughters married, her sons-in-law came to live with her daughters close to their mother, and that her son John Bundy didn’t marry at all but continued to live with his mother. I knew that among my grandmother Roberta’s children, the same was true. They all settled around their mother. Only the oldest, my own mother, had broken that pattern.

I knew even as a child that within the hierarchy of the family, one’s status depended upon whether one was male or female first, and only after, whether one was born into the family or married into it. In the Wesley family, the aunts ranked first, followed by their husbands, then came the aunts-in-law, trailed by their husbands, the natural-born uncles. Among the cousins, the children of daughters were closer to the sources of power than the children of sons, and the daughters of daughters both were most favored and had the most expected of them.

Once when I was about ten, when it was the turn of the front room to be the dining room, I watched my mother ironing. I saw a little white pique skirt on the ironing, board. “Whose little tiny skirt is that?” I asked. Immediately, I received a shock. For the moment I asked the question I knew the answer. “Why, it’s yours, silly! Whose did you think it was?” “I knew that,” I said, pitifully. I had thought I was almost grown up.

When I see those childhood dinners, now, I find the players in them have changed size and shape as radically as I changed myself when I saw the real nature of that white skirt on my grandmother’s ironing board. From this distance the men in the family appear dull, living in a clumsy world of language made entirely of plodding ideas badly expressed. Although I was afraid of them I saw even as a child that to them, being a man depended on showing no softness, accepting no ambiguity, rejecting men who enjoyed the company of women. They ate first with the children because they were like the children. They were too simple for the company of women, and their memories were too short. They did not carry in their bodies and their minds the skills, jokes, and history of the family.

Now I remember the plates of fried chicken with some of the best pieces saved back for the women. Though my mother was my father’s weak woman at home, I recognize now how articulate, self-confident and strong even my mother as well as my aunts were in that place. Their skills at sewing, quilting, gardening, laughing, and story-telling were enormous. Now I know how little and confused I felt

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about what I needed to be myself in the face of their competence. I had been raised to be obedient, but my aunts were not obedient, and neither was my mother in this place. They were in charge. My aunts and my great-aunts summoned me to take my place of authority as the eldest granddaughter in matriarchy that went back as far as I could see, but how could I even let myself know it? If I took a place of competence, I would betray my father. If I did not take it, I turned my back on my own strength. As it happened, I wanted my father too much. I chose the second option long ago, and only many years later did I begin seriously to undo that choice.

It is true that on me fall the expectations and responsibilities of the oldest daughter from all those generations of women whose memories I inherit. I suppose this is why sometimes I feel myself to be a failure in the family in some important respects. Though the biscuits I bake are as good as they come, and I can bake rolls from my great-grandmother’s roll recipe any woman in the family would be proud of, I don’t live in Union County. I am not a matriarch. I feel myself to be a branch still green but fallen off the family tree-the feeling Eve had, perhaps, as she made a life for herself and her family outside of Eden. Though I hang on to the memories of my great-aunt’s and grandmother’s generation, I don’t keep track of my cousins as I should. I’m a city woman. I can’t can. I don’t quilt. I certainly don’t know how to work like my aunts and my mother.

Even in that far off time, however, when I was twelve I began to cast in my lot with Kentucky women. I had a second cousin my own age named Sam. Sam was my great aunt Blacky’s son. He was mean and didn’t like my Yankee mouth and cringing shyness. One day, out in the yard behind his house on the hill he grabbed my two pinkie fingers and he starting bending, outward. “I’m gonna bend your fingers till you yell ‘uncle,'” he taunted. I didn’t say a word. “Say uncle!” he said. While I felt a fire in my joints, I gritted my teeth and said nothing. “Say uncle, say uncle!” he yelled, and he kept on bending. By the time he was finished my fingers were bent so out of shape they never recovered. They hurt all through high school, and they are still misshapen.

After my aunts and mama and I finished our morning packing to get her out of the big house and into the little condo, we had a lunch unthinkable from my childhood-fancy chicken salad, a green salad with an intricate dressing, and croissants. While we scraped the plates into the garbage disposal and put them into the new dish-washer, I mentioned my memories of Aunt Suzie’s biscuits. “Oh, no,” she laughed. “I never make biscuits any more. They’re not so good for you, you know. They have too much cholesterol, and we’re all too fat, anyway.”

Astounded, I mull over the meaning of what Aunt Suzie said. Earlier, and inexplicably, she has told me how proud of me my aunts are because of the work I do. For years within my own family, I have felt embarrassed by my university work. I have avoided talking about it, as though it were a not very good substitute for the practice of the real skills of the women of the family. What does it mean that she doesn’t make biscuits because they’re not good for you? Has she just taken away from me the power of my womanhood or has she set me free? Feeling a bit betrayed by the aunts I thought I had myself betrayed, I wonder over the mystery of time passing, and of cooked food.

Roberta Bondi is professor of church history at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. She is the author of To Love as God Loved: Conversations with the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). Illustrations with this article are from John Egerton’s Southern Food (New York: Knopf; 1987), photographed Al Clayton.

South of Art

By Henry Willett

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 14-15

In 1974, Walker Percy, with a bit of subtle equivocation, wrote, “Well, the so-called Southern thing is over and done with, I think.” Of course he was wrong. The Southern thing is as strong as it has ever been. This past year saw the publication of the 1,600-page Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and a major Hollywood revival of the cinematic “Southerns,” from Mississippi Burning, Heart of Dixie, and Great Balls of Fire, to In Country, Miss Firecracker, and Driving Miss Daisy. Steel Magnolias was the most popular stage production in America last year. Though often flattered, we know the Steel Magnolias audiences in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles aren’t laughing for the same reasons the Nachitoches, Louisiana, audience is laughing.

This regional ambivalence is typical when Southerners showcase their cultural expression for the rest of the world. Several years ago Atlantans had high hopes that So Long On Lonely Street, an Alliance Theater production of a new work by Atlanta playwright Sandra Deer, would be the play that would win over the New York critics to Southern produced drama. Lonely Street had received rave reviews during its pre-New York run in Boston, but the New York critics did not share their Boston colleagues’ opinions. Frank Rich of the New York Times concluded that “like that other recent Atlanta export, New Coke, this play is not the real thing.” The New York Post’s Clive Barnes called the play “preposterous hokum-Southern fried chicken without the chicken.”

The Atlanta critics responded to the New York critics in kind. Helen Smith of the Atlanta Journal referred to the “rigged mindset” that scorns Southern playwrights and characterized New York as “the most arrogant and the most provincial place in the world.”

We Southerners, it seems, have historically reacted rather defensively when confronted with criticism. In 1911, Georgia-born University of Florida professor Enoch Banks was fired after suggesting somewhat timidly that in the Civil War “the North was relatively in the right, while the South was relatively in the wrong.” Even Mr. Banks’s “relatives” weren’t enough to save his position.

When the Alabama Shakespeare Festival received criticism for its presentation of a country-pop musical based on life in rural Georgia, a production considered inappropriate fare and somehow beneath the dignity of the state Shakespeare theater, it relied on that tried and true New York legitimacy test–rave reviews in the Big Apple and a Tony award nomination–to justify its programming decision.

Southerners rely all too heavily on others to select, package, market and critically-legitimize Southern cultural expression, resulting in a commodity-marketing of Southern culture that avoids this culture’s power and complexity, instead capitalizing on the region’s stigmatizing stereotypes–poverty, parochialism, eccentricity and retrograde religion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fraudulent, profit-driven marketing of the so-called “outsider” artists from the South–Howard Finster from Georgia, Sam Doyle from South Carolina, Mose Tolliver and Thornton Dial from Alabama, Zebedee Armstrong from Mississippi, and a handful of others. Many of these artists are black. Most are poor, uneducated and from rural areas; but they’re making a handful of money for a handful of gallery owners. American studies scholar John Vlach, of George Washington University, has called the whole phenomenon a “fraud perpetrated by the New York art establishment, ‘The Finger-Painted Word’ (in reference to Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word) as commercial exploitation of the stereotypical view of Southerners as weird, as inbred, full of pellagra and cholera and any other disease, biological or psychological.” Vlach’s characterization of this phenomenon, I regret, is only slightly exaggerated.

In the current issue of Art and Antiques magazine Eleanor Gaver offers the following account of the opening of a recent show of Thornton Dial’s work at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York:

…a row of limousines waited, their engines idling. Inside, a well-heeled crowd of collectors, dealers and artists marveled at the paintings, though some were nonplused at the price list. “Fifty thousand dollars for work by an untrained Negro” asked one educated and successful neoexpressionist painter.

I stood back and watched the crowd gape at a prominently displayed black-and-white photograph misrepresenting the Dial family as poor, down-trodden and huddled together in front of a tin shack. Nowhere was it

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mentioned that this tin shack was not their home, but the painting studio behind their pleasant suburban house. I turned to gallery owner Frank Maresca and said “It’s too bad the Dials aren’t here for their opening.” Maresca just shook his head. “They shouldn’t be exposed to the art world,” he said, “it might corrupt them. It’s better they stay where they belong.”

Perhaps Maresca really meant that the art world shouldn’t be exposed to the Dial family, for it might shatter some of those Southern stereotypes that he markets so lucratively.

Like many other resources of the region, Southern culture has chiefly been an export product, something sturdy, beautiful and fine which has often contributed richly to the shaping of American culture. But Southern culture has also often been expropriated, marketed in a package of stereotypes, and sold for profit. And it will no doubt continue to be so expropriated until the region develops the will and the mechanisms for assuming the critical proprietorship of its own culture.

Hank Willett is the former regional representative to the Southern states for thc National Endowment for thc arts. He has recently left that position to organize and direct thc Alabama Center for Traditional Culture.

A View from Death Row.

Reviewed by W.W. Finlator

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 16-17

Last Rights by Joseph B. Ingle (Abingdon Press, 1990).

Seldom do I have the honor to review a book written by a personal friend and respected colleague, and I welcome the opportunity to identify myself with the prison ministry of Joseph Ingle and his eloquent presentation of it in Last Rights.

Dr. Frank Porter Graham, former president of the University of North Carolina, U.S. Senator, and U.N. Ambassador, used to tell us that when a person, born and bred in the South, steeped in and loyal to the best in its traditions, yet possessing the capacity for transcendence, emerges with an open mind and a heart of compassion, you have the true, the authentic liberal. In Joe Ingle, behold the man! The brief account of his spiritual pilgrimage in the first two chapters is worth the price of the book. Southern Presbyterian background; graduate of St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, N.C. (religion and philosophy); the wretched and anguished stint at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, which has long been a solid institution to prepare solid ministers to serve the solid South and during the years of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, no fit place for the likes of Joe Ingle; Union Theological Seminary in New York where at last he could breathe a freer air and indulge his social conscience; the assignment to the Bronx House of Detention where he came to the realization that his “call” was not to the parish but to the prison ministry; and, finally, his growing conviction that it was in Dixie Land that he must take his stand and hence his return “home,” to take part in the founding of the Southern Coalition of Jails and Prisons. Quite a pilgrimage.

The jacket of the book describes the author’s involvement with twelve men and one woman who have been executed since 1976 as “13 fatal encounters.” The phrase is on the mark. There is a sad inevitability in each story, for the reader is painfully aware that in spite of all the heartaches and hopes and heroism the curtain of doom will fall at last and that in no case will there be an “and they lived happily ever after.” Knowing too well the tragic endings, I don’t want to see King Lear or Othello again, and though Joe’s friends on Death Row show genuine character development through his loving ministry, their tragic ends don’t bring cleansing to my soul, as such dramas are reputed to do.

But there are unforgettable services Last Rights offers. The state refers to capital punishment as execution. Joe Ingle always terms it “killing,” and he calls governors, judges, and D.A.s murderers–in our name. However legal the case, no matter the quantity of due process and exhaustion of appeals, the governor who will not grant clemency, the judge who will not set aside, the D A. who will not relent, is a killer.

This hard ball stance by a tender hearted man can only be understood in light of the life affirming nature of Joe Ingle. Throughout the hectic, frenetic pace of the narratives there is time to notice the laughter of little children, to hear the song of identified birds at morn or eve, to admire the lush produce of the fertile soil of eastern North Carolina, to listen to, smell and feel a Mississippi night, to remember to carry two roses to Velma Barfield during her last hours on Death Row. Just the man to affirm with a passion the lives of those who have been condemned to die.

Without exception he demonstrates in each fatal en-

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counter the humaneness of his approach and wins the love and confidence of every prisoner by embracing their full humanity. Our government, whether in war with the Vietnamese, or combating drug lords, or dealing with unfriendly dictators, or executing the men and women on Death Row must first strip these people of their humanity. He and his colleagues, standing almost alone, force the world out there to see these victims, as he would call them, as human beings, as God’s children who, regardless of the heinousness and atrocity of their crimes, which he neither denies nor dwells upon, have come from backgrounds of emotional disorders and faced daily deprivations with which they were unable to cope. Yet, despite their sad and sordid histories, they can and do change and mature and love and forgive. Joe Ingle is a man of simple Christian faith and the grace of God is in his book. As a subtitle I would suggest “The Humanization of Death Row.”

I am uncomfortable, however, when he uses the Christian faith to pressure judges and governors, reminding them of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery or of their Presbyterian backgrounds, etc. In the first place it’s ineffective. These “Christian” magistrates are far more aware of votes and constituents and their political futures than they are of the Bible. In the second place such a practice can be counter productive.

If I were Catholic, I would deeply resent the threats Cardinal O’Connor would visit upon me if I failed to vote “Christian” on the abortion issue. And should the Fundamentalists some day come to outnumber the rest of us may Heaven and the Constitution preserve us from a “Christian America.” I dare not presume to counsel Joseph Ingle in his prophetic and courageous ministry, but I hope he will put a major emphasis upon justice and equity and due process and, yes, outrage.

And indeed the author could counter my reservations by pointing to those frequent passages in his book that tell me that 90 percent of all people on Death Row are too poor to hire lawyers to defend them, that court-appointed lawyers are not given to hot pursuit and often tend to incompetence and neglect, that blacks who kill whites are eight times more likely to be executed than whites who kill blacks, that the number of executions is disproportionately high in the South, and that the majority of those on Death Row are poor, unschooled, and have serious emotional disorders–figures to suggest that the death penalty is used as a method of social control.

Some day the pendulum will swing. Some day America will reclaim its conscience and refuse to stay in company with South Africa and Iran as the nations with the largest number of executions. Some day we shall live under a government that refuses to kill its citizens. And a major factor in this return to sanity and humanity could be these 13 souls who were put to death by the state and who Joe Ingle has here kept alive.

W.W. Finlator, preacher, prophet, man of justice, lives as he long has in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Black and White and Rosy.

Reviewed by Charles J. Bussey

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 17-18

Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present by David R Goldfield (Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. xviii, pp. 321.)

The American South reminds me of ancient Sparta. Both were entrapped by their past, by their fear of change, and by their using every means at their disposal to keep outside ideas and people away. The charge “outside agitator” was prevalent in Sparta, as it was in the American South. David Goldfield’s book, Black, White and Southern, reinforces this analogy.

“Appearances are important in the South,” writes Goldfield, “and white Southerners have a great capacity for ignoring unpleasant things…. But at some point it is no longer possible to pretend.” Goldfield has written a book using religious metaphors. “It is,” as he says in his preface, “. . .a book about redemption, a Southern story that begins by defining the sin of white supremacy and how it poisoned a region and its people; it continues by relating how that sin came to be expiated, and how the sinner and the redeemer managed to be transformed without destroying their unique land, the South…. ”

Goldfield’s analysis of “racial etiquette” is provocative, and I think correct in the conclusion that it “was, above all, a system of control.” Southern racial etiquette bolstered the notion of white supremacy and strengthened the concept of black inferiority. By treating blacks as less than human, white Southerners turned the American Dream upside down. Blacks got their small rewards when they lived down to low expectations, were punished when they attempted to secure an education or to develop landowning ambitions. Loud protests to the contrary, white Southerners like my Mississippi family never knew or understood their black neighbors.

In fact, they only rarely saw them. William Alexander Percy understood that, and wrote in 1941 “that whites and blacks live side by side, exchange affection liberally, and believe they have an innate and miraculous understanding of one another. But the sober fact is we understand one another not at all.” The Mississippi Delta aristocrat was right, but was as trapped as the rest of the white South and could take no action.

Goldfield is especially articulate and convincing in

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analyzing change in the South. He argues persuasively that change had to come from outside the region. There was too much accommodation within, even from white Southern liberals, for change to have occurred unaided inside the region. “White Southern liberals,” he said, “were not only marginal to the process of change, but in some cases actually inhibited it; and the intrusion of the outside world did not set back the cause of racial equality but, to the contrary, enhanced its chances for success.”

One thing particularly disturbing to me, a white Southerner, was the “respectable resistance” movement led by white intellectuals and members of the aristocracy. A key figure in resisting the 1954 Brown decision to integrate the school was James Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick, today a respected conservative and syndicated columnist, wrote editorial after editorial in the 1950s and early 1960s in support of the dual school system, offering arcane arguments to support an anachronistic way of life.

Although this is not a history of the civil rights movement, Goldfield provides an adequate account of that era. But though he emphasizes the role of school desegregation in bringing change to the South, he fails to mention the role of Head Start. From the beginning, key administrators of that most successful of the “Great Society” programs viewed Head Start as a tool for integration. Julius Richmond, the first Director of Project Head Start, said that Head Start began “with a very conscious determination…to…develop integrated programs.” Although not always successful, Richmond said, Head Start at least “highlighted the issue, and we kept working toward this and communities kept learning that we were serious about this.”

Goldfield is not very convincing in his argument that Southern mores have shifted regarding race. He believes that “the debate over black poverty has shifted from race to class issues…. ” And that “for the crusade against economic injustice, Southern blacks and whites are likely to be partners.”

There is considerable evidence that race remains vitally important as a Southern dynamic and as an inhibiting factor in the fight against poverty. Likewise, there is a significant debate going on right now concerning the effect integration has had on improving the quality of life for blacks in both the North and the South. The July 1990 issue of Sojourners magazine, for example, is devoted to that very question; one of the authors argues, for example, that integration was co-opted by whites. Goldfield is, I think, more optimistic than current circumstances warrant. His desire, along with mine, is that black and white together can descend from “the mountaintops of hope” to “the green valleys of complete equality and justice.” That, however, remains a dream, not a foreseeable reality.

Nonetheless, Goldfield’s book is an important contribution for people who seek to understand being black, white and southern. His bibliographical essay is thorough and provides a key starting point for any reader.

Originally from Mississippi, Charles Bussey now is on the History faculty of Western Kentucky University. He is researching the life and work of Julius Richmond, the architect and first director of Head Start.

Feud

Reviewed by Suzanne M. Hall

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 18-19

A local, essentially family-based dispute arose after Ranel McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield, who was “Devil” Anse Hatfield’s cousin, of stealing a hog. The two families, however, did not resort at once to the bloody vengeance for which they are famed. Like other good citizens of the Tug Valley community in nineteenth century Appalachia,

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they took their grievances to county court. When the jury reached a decision, both Hatfields and McCoys obeyed. The violence popularly associated with the Hatfield-McCoy feud legend did later occur, but the reasons for the violence stem from deeper economic and social changes in the region than the myth suggests.

People often prefer myths to historical explanations. Myths do many things. They obscure contradictions and disturbing aspects of the past, and depict events as people wish they had happened. After the passage of time and the telling and re-telling of the myths, recall of the “real” events of the past becomes almost impossible. Can the historian determine what is historical fact or truth and what is myth? Moreover, are not myths as well as histories to be understood as strategies people devise to comprehend and survive the past?

Altina L. Waller does a fine job of extracting the history and meaning from the notorious late nineteenth century Hatfield-McCoy feud myth. The story compellingly reveals the complexities of Appalachian life at a time of great change from what Waller calls a pre-modern traditional culture to a modern class society tied to national and world economies. Her analysis is not a mere simplified description of poor, backward mountain folk railing against the forces of modern, industrial exploiters. Rather, it is a careful explanation that shows the varied facets of change in the Tug Valley of adjoining Kentucky and West Virginia.

The Hatfield-McCoy conflict was not one interminable, violent exchange between two families but a feud with two major, and contrasting, phases. The first phase, 1878-1882, began before industrial capitalism exerted its power in the region and involved a conflict between local citizens. The second phase, 1887-1891, was within the context of and characterized by the encroachment of the timber and railroad industries. Waller’s second level of analysis focuses on the traditional community and its relation to the state, nation, and world. Besides the gracefully written narrative, Waller provides a photographic essay which adds another dimension, dramatically showing the growing contrasts between the rural traditional culture of the Tug Valley dwellers and the rising middle class town people.

Waller challenges the view that mountaineers were inherently prone to violence. She shows that the feudists did not have an ancient heritage of violent behavior. Instead, she argues that economic and social exploitation by both industrialists and townspeople initiated cultural disruptions that forced the feudists to violent action as a last resort during the second phase of the feud. Previously, in the first phase, both sides had used the court system to adjudicate their disputes. They had also respected the court decisions and abided by them. The mountaineers, such as “Devil” Anse Hatfield, turned to violence only when the legal system, as they understood it, changed to support the interests of the industrialists and their town boosters.

The South has a strong violent tradition, one which includes numerous manifestations from dueling to Iynching to wife-beating to capital punishment. These varied forms of violence undoubtedly require different analyses and explanations. It seems probable that a violent South must be so from some cultural underpinnings that historians can discover. From where, then, does the Southern–and not only Southern mountain people’s–proclivity for violent behavior stem? Does it arise solely from the upheavals of cultural transformation or does it come from a deeper source?

Waller exposes the social conflicts within the Tug Valley. For instance, she finds that Anderson Hatfield, former Confederate and leader of the Tug Valley home guard, began to threaten traditional ways when he entered the timber business. People considered that enterprise “risky, speculative, and conducive to dishonesty,” and a challenge to the value system and way of life. “Devil” Anse forged an economic niche for himself and his family while he alienated many of his neighbors. He used the legal system to acquire timber land, thus making enemies of such men as Perry Cline from whom he won thousands of acres in a law suit. Later, in the second phase of the feud, the cantankerous Ranel McCoy no longer led the attack on the Hatfields. The vengeful foe was none other than Cline and his new powerful allies.

Cline’s personal vendetta against Hatfield could only be successfully waged during the second phase of the feud when he could ally with Pikeville merchants, who sought outside investors and catered to the timber and coal interests, and the governor of Kentucky who planned to attract capitalists to the eastern mountain country. In fact, Waller argues, “Cline and the governor literally recreated the feud in order to suppress it.” By doing so, Kentucky would be seen as a strong law and order state that could suppress the violent tendencies of its inhabitants and thereby attract capitalists.

Hatfield, ironically, becomes a symbol as preserver of the independent mountain culture, even though he had been a pioneer of industry himself. Cline and the Pikeville townspeople represented the Republican, pro-industrial order with their middle class values buttressed with evangelical religion. Ranel McCoy hung onto the old feud with its themes of honor and revenge. Waller tells a complex story in a captivating style which satisfies the needs of scholars and the general reading public. Her account of the feud is vastly more thought-provoking and entertaining than the Hatfield-McCoy myth. K

Suzanne Hall is a member of the History faculty at Kennesaw State College in Marietta, Georgia.

Mississippi and the WPA

Reviewed by Will Campbell

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 20-23

If I were asked to name one agency of government which has done the most good in my lifetime I would not hesitate. The Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression. The WPA.

For proof, I offer the newly republished Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, with a new introduction by Robert S. McElvaine. This volume, first published 52 years ago, is about a lot of things. But to me, for the University Press of Mississippi to consider it important enough to publish a golden anniversary edition is a tribute to the agency that made it possible in the first place. So I wish to join the applause for the WPA. It seems appropriate, so that the majority of Americans who were not even born when the book was first published might know from whence it came.

When millions of people were idle in the mid-1930s they were given jobs. Thus few “street people.” Not high paying jobs but something to do for pay. My father, a yeoman farmer, among them. Because of his work for the WPA he was able to save the family farm when crops failed from drought, when what corn as did grow sold for five cents a pound, shelled corn was worth a can of Prince Albert for the men, a Baby Ruth for the children with nothing left over for the women, and the bank came calling. I remember it well. This summer, at 92, my father died, leaving the small Mississippi acreage to his children and grandchildren.

I also remember that the WPA built two ten-hole outhouses for the East Fork Consolidated School which we attended. I was never allowed to see the one for girls but the one for boys is vivid in my mind. I was in the fifth grade. The day it was completed my friend, J.D. “Wart” Pray, and I meandered down to look it over. The urinal, a V-shaped cement trough, stretched the length of the back outside wall. J.D. suggested that we scratch our initials on the glistening surface of the still soft cement so that all the world would know we had been there, sure that this sturdy structure would be there at least as long as the world stood.

The proud proprietor of this facility, the school principal, appeared in the fifth-grade room shortly after we had resumed our places. He moved directly to J.D.’s desk, bellowing with each stride. “And who is H.B.?” I had feared at the time that leaving our mark on the WPA outhouse might be considered a major infraction. So instead of W.D.C. I had inscribed the initials H.B., meaning nothing. J.D. answered that he didn’t know who H.B. was, that he had been “down the hill”-our euphemism for the outhouse-by himself. I sat frozen in terror, certain that Mr. Stuart would soon exact from J.D. the name of his accomplice. He knew that J.D.P. stood for Jefferson Davis Pray, and that he had defaced this near holy place. There had never been such an elaborate facility at East Fork before. The inevitable five hefty licks of the rubber tube Mr. Stuart carried did not persuade J.D., two years older than I, to betray the trust of his little friend. The irate principal jerked J.D. from his seat and fiercely directed him to the office. I knew that more severe punishment awaited him there. I considered confessing that I, WDC, was the erring HB. But I quickly convinced myself that J.D.’s swift glance was saying that since he was going to get a beating anyhow, why both of us. We heard the hard licks

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and J.D.’s loud yells. But the loyalty held firm. He never told. And J.D. “Wart” Pray is still one of my dearest buddies, despite serious ideological differences during the civil rights days in Mississippi. Such is the stuff of friendships forged by the WPA.

But the WPA did more than save small family farms and build outhouses. They built parks, theaters, museums, roads, bridges, gymnasiums, and many other projects of long-range public benefit.

There were also arts programs known collectively as Federal One. Under this umbrella were the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Art Project, and the Federal Music Project.

In addition to my father’s road building job and the East Fork outhouse I was further introduced to the work of the WPA through Federal One, the parent of this volume. There was a program for people in the various communities to read and study literary works as well as to produce them. We were a close knit neighborhood, most of us related by blood or marriage. The idea was for someone in the community to organize and lead discussion groups among their neighbors. There was a small stipend involved. Aunt Ruth organized such a group in our neighborhood. On the appointed summer evening we-men, women, children, and babies-gathered at Aunt Ruth’s house. We had been told that a supervisor of the project would be present and that it was important that everyone enter into the discussion so as to impress her. The adults sat in chairs in the parlor, yearling boys and girls sitting on the floor, babies on pallets or in mothers’ arms. Aunt Ruth announced that we would be discussing a passage from the Bible, the book with which we were most familiar and the only book to be found in may of the households. She read from the eighth chapter of The Acts of the Apostles. It was the story of Philip encountering an Ethiopian eunuch, a man who was treasurer for Candace, rich queen of Ethiopia. Philip found the eunuch sitting in his chariot, climbed up on the chariot with him, converted him to the new Christian faith and baptized him in a nearby stream. After reading the story Aunt Ruth did a brief exegesis and opened the floor for questions and discussion. Uncle Bill, Aunt Ruth’s husband, having been coached on the importance of lively discussion, was first to speak. Raising his hand to be formally recognized, and given permission to

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speak, not generally a part of marital mores in Amite County, Mississippi in this rural depression era, he asked his question.

“Yes, yes,” he began. “I have a question. What is a eunuch?”

Aunt Ruth, embarrassed by her husband’s question, looked at the visiting supervisor, a woman none of us knew. The woman nodded that it was the discussion leader’s responsibility to deal with any inquiry.

When vexed Aunt Ruth pronounced her husband’s name as “Beale.” “Now Beale!” she pleaded.

Uncle Coot, as we knew him, had been urged to participate, to ask questions. So he persisted. “What’s a eunuch?”

A few of the older boys and girls snickered. The adults sat in squirming silence, waiting for Aunt Ruth to answer. “Beale. Now Beale. You know what a eunuch is.”

Uncle Coot, getting impatient and sensing that he had asked an inappropriate question, asserted himself further. “No, Ruth, I understood everything you explained except what a eunuch is. Now if you know yourself, just tell me what it means.”

Aunt Ruth, seeing that he wasn’t going to let go, made answer. Soft but awkward. “A eunuch is like an ox.”

Uncle Coot was on his feet, roaring with incredulous laughter. “Now Ruth, you know damn well no ox didn’t get up in a chariot with a man! Now what the hell is a eunuch?”

That pretty much ended our literary evening but I lived it again as I examined the new edition of Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State.

With a helpful new introduction by Professor Robert S. McElvaine of Millsaps College the book takes the young back in time half a century. At the same time it reminds my generation of how many things have changed in, to us, so short a time. And how many things have remained the same.

It is a one volume history of one of our most complex states, going as far back as history can go. It is an archaeological and geographical study, an outline of four centuries, a treatise on religion, folkways, education, architecture, music, arts and letters. It is also a detailed guide of twenty-four interesting tours, from the Delta to the Gulf Coast. And it is a fascinating reading experience.

Young readers will be appalled to learn that in a serious book of the 1930s it was written of black citizens:

As for the so-called Negro question-that, too, is just another problem he has left for the white man to cope with. Seated in the white man’s wagon, and subtly letting the white man worry with the reins, the Negro assures himself a share of all good things.

But it was written, and yes, believed, and the WPA did us a service by having it recorded so that we never forget.

Maybe it is a weakness of the book that we know the names of none of the researchers and writers. A few of the photographers, like Eudora Welty, are named but not the wordsmiths. They were people who could write but were not well enough known to make a living at it. So the WPA paid them small amounts to weave their patterns of beautiful words about what they knew best–Mississippi and

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her people. Did some of them, like Miss Welty, go on to become celebrated authors? We aren’t told. And maybe it is just as well. Still and yet, maybe there should have been a byline for the men and women who put these words to paper and received in return a small check from the WPA. Words such as these:

The earth is not ours, and if we should doubt, we need only to look to the clean, unsodded plot flanking the church-house. Here sunlight by day and moonlight by night glide down cold marble headstones and are absorbed in dark, oval-shaped mounds; and here we gather once a year to hold Memorial Services for our fathers, who came over the mountains and down the wilderness with just such a zealous preacher leading them. We came out of the land and we will return to the land, and, the preacher’s voice drones on, we will be contented there.

It would be an ambitious project for someone to search the records. From Harry Hopkins, administrator for the WPA, to county courthouses, bank and family records and elsewhere to let us know what happened to the hundreds of Mississippians who strung pretty words together because that was what they did best and because there once existed a federal administration that believed in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. As for me, I will be content knowing that the words were written and are once more available to us.

Will Campbell’s most recent book is Covenant, with photographs by AI Clayton. Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, with a new introduction by Robert S. McElvaine, is available from the University Press of Mississippi.