Politics and Medicine in a Small Southern Town

By Seth Borgos and Joshua Miller

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 11-12

The first time we heard of Dr. Wayne Smith he sounded like a character out of Ibsen or Sinclair Lewis. A courageous, reformminded doctor criticizes the corrupt local hospital and thereby incurs the wrath of the medical establishment because he violated the unwritten rule that doctors protect their own. He incurs the hostility of the community because the rate of patient attendance of the hospital rapidly drops.

What we found in Keber Springs, Arkansas, did not quite match the scenario. Wayne Smith is a combative man, a perfectionist. His criticisms are probably legitimate, but they’re conventional. The doctor may never be vindicated because the community may never reach a consensus on whether or not he was right, and there is no deus ex machina to supply the answer. The argument over Wayne Smith will go on for a generation. In the meantime, the town is bitterly polarized, and the hospital suffers.

Heber Springs is a pretty town. It sits 60 miles north of Little Rock and is the county seat of Cleburne County. Wayne Smith began his Heber Springs practice in July, 1968, deciding as he did to pursue a medical career after a decade of service in the Armed Services as a personnel counselor. It was his first private practice; after completing an internship in Little Rock he had moved to Heber Springs because his wife’s family was from the area. When Dr. Smith arrived in town there was no public hospital. A new county-owned hospital opened in October of that year and Smith promptly joined the medical staff.

Soon after Dr. Smith began taking patients at the hospital he witnessed a number of disturbing incidents. Once, he found the blankets supplied for newborn babies full of holes. Another time he rode out with the hospital ambulance to pick up a man and the door of the ambulance jammed and Smith had to tear it off.

On one occasion a Jehovah’s Witness was admitted to the hospital. The family of the patient informed the hospital staff that, because of his religious beliefs, the man could not receive any kind of blood or blood products. The nurses assured the family that they would not give the patient any plasma; instead they gave him “packed cells.” When the family discovered that “packed cells” were in fact a blood product, the family telephoned their physician in outrage. The doctor said in reply, “You’re damn fools.”

A major problem at the Cleburne County Hospital was the constant squabbling among the personnel. The medical staff was riddled with petty jealousies. The nurses found that many of the doctors were far from receptive to being called at their homes after hours for medical advice, even when the doctors were on emergency room call. Sometimes the nurses were subjected to abusive language; other times the doctors would simply refuse to take the call, or relay instructions through their wives. It got to the point where the nurses were drawing straws; the loser had to call the doctor. The doctors could be equally uncooperative when the nurses wanted them to come down to the hospital at night to deal with special problems. The nurses deeply resented the doctors’ attitude. As one of them said, “I take pride in knowing my job as a nurse. I ‘don’t call a doctor on small things, so if I do call him I expect him to come.”

In the Spring of 1974, Smith felt he could no longer accept

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the situation quietly. He decided to go to the hospital board with a list of specific grievances and proposals for improvement in hospital procedures. He showed the list to some of the nurses, one of whom showed it to another doctor on the medical staff. The doctor approached Smith and threatened to “stomp” him. Smith replied, “You may stomp me once, but if you do, you’d better kill me, because if you don’t kill me I’ll be back with a gun and kill you.”

After this incident Smith resolved to go along and get along th the rest of the medical staff. He intended to do his work quietly within the existing structure and not make waves.

“I tried this for about two years,” Smith said, and I found I couldn’t live with myself, knowing that patients were going into the emergency room… not being mistreated, but being ignored.” On July 2, 1976, Smith informed Sam Rector, the hospital director, that he intended to resign from the medical staff in the near future, and that he would no longer schedule anything other than emergency surgery at the hospital.

Smith stopped attending hospital staff meetings, and the medical staff invoked the hospital bylaw which automatically suspends doctors who miss three consecutive staff meetings.

Smith responded by joining with one hospital nurse, one former hospital nurse, and two of his patients in a one million dollar lawsuit against the hospital staff and the Board of Governors. The suit, filed on April 26, 1977, in Federal district court, listed 21 alleged violations of the Hill-Burton Act, the Medicare and Medicaid Acts, and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Three days after the suit was filed, Paula Penn–the hospital nurse who had joined in the suit-was fired by Sam Rector. She asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction ordering her reinstatement, but was turned down. The suit is now scheduled for trial this Fall.

While many of Dr. Smith’s patients are old-time residents of the area, his most vocal defenders are newcomers like Mrs. Helen Puckett, who moved to Heber Springs from Memphis, Tennessee, three and a half years ago. The Hospital Board, on the other hand, is an appendage of the local Democratic party, and is entirely composed of long-time residents. In the words of Mrs. Puckett, “These men grew up together …When this controversy began they stuck together sort of blindly.”

The hospital controversy is instructive for what it tells about the relationship between politics and medicine in any small community, including those which are far less dynamic than Heber Springs. The key to that relationship is the dependence of the community upon its doctors and its hospital. In a larger city, there is a choice of hospitals, and no one doctor’s opinion would carry so much weight.

“You’ve got to examine the doctor/patient relationship to understand all this,” said John Barnes, editor of the Heber Springs newspaper, The Arkansas Sun. “If you go to your doctor here and he says the hospital is no good, you’re going to be very reluctant to go to that hospital. If you go to your doctor and he says there’s nothing the matter with the hospital, you’re likely to believe him. You’d put your life in his hands. People are divided on this thing along the lines of who their doctor is. Dr. Smith’s patients believe Dr. Smith, and the other doctors’ patients believe their own doctors.”

Smith’s detractors consider him rigid, combative, and quite possibly paranoid. And indeed, Smith is a Puritan. He has ferocious contempt for medical mediocrity and political cowardice. He says, When a patient is sick and needs the care of the doctor and the doctor doesn’t come down because he’s too lazy, or ornery, or drunk–then he needs to be criticized.”

If there is a touch of arrogance in Dr. Smith, his patients are unaware of it. They describe him as a doctor of unusual warmth and concern for the dignity of the patient. “Most doctors treat the symptoms of disease; Dr. Smith treats the whole person. Most doctors treat high blood pressure by giving the patient a pill. Doctor Smith may prescribe the pill, but he’ll also try to deal with the problem which caused the high blood pressure in the first place,” said Helen Puckett.

One reason why many citizens are reluctant to criticize the hospital and are anxious to “put this matter behind us” is that the community cannot afford to see the hospital go under. With the next closest health facility thirty miles away, the dependency on the hospital is even more extreme.

In additicn to its medical value, the hospital is a potent symbol of community achievement, and that is why it has become a political football. Dr. Smith says that he does not understand the political connection. “I’m not conversant enough with politics to decide what their motive 5.1 smell a rat, I see it, but I can’t dissect it. I can’t see what makes it tick.” What he’s missing is simply an essential political dynamic, the peculiar process by which power becomes an end in itself regardless of its value to the person who pursues it. In a small comriunity like Heber Springs, there are only a limited number of political arenas.

“You don’t touch the church; that’s sacrosanct,” says Peter Miller, a former editor of the Arkansas Sun. “You can only screw around with the schools so much. So what’s left? Generally, you get politically involved in things that really don’t mean a damn, like whether to hire a new policeman. What under normal conditions would be a local, minor situation, becomes a major confrontation. It’s crazy, but it happens here all the time. That county gets polarized over anything.”

What lies at the center of this controversy is not opposing medical philosophies (e.g. professionalism vs humanism), but the paradox of professionalism itself. Professionalism has earned its bad name in medicine, law, and teaching. It has come to mean a cold, bureaucratic approach to personal, human tasks; protection of incompetence and mediocrity; mystification and elitism. Of particular relevance to the democratic citizens’ movement is the tendency of professionals to feel more loyalty to their institutions than the needs and demands of the community. They want to mask political decisions as matters requiring only professionals’ judgements.

Yet, Wayne Smith is a professional, and his fierce dedication to his work, his sense of a special calling, is responsible for bringing the issue out into the open. He looks at his work as a vocation, not a job. A vocation entails a set of standards, a sense of responsibility, and pride, and commitment. From his point of view his fight has been to prevent the erosion of professional standards in the face of the indifference of the hospital administration and the governing board. The problem, Paula Penn says, is that the members of the hospital board are “plain ordinary people” who “don’t want to admit that they don’t know what’s going on at the hospital.”

The solution to the problem ot making institutions responsive to the community cannot be as simple as the catchword “community control” or “deprofessionalization.” To deprofessionalize medical care in a town like Heber Springs is to hand it over lock, stock, and barrel to the local Democratic chieftans, some of whom take the attitude that running the local hospital is not different than running a warehouse. Community control in Heber Springs means placing medical care in the hands of a small segment of the community. In this matter, as well as in many other things, the answer may lie in finding the right balance between democracy and authority, and in not mistaking all politics for democracy.

When Shall We Overcome?

By C. Eric Lincoln

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 4-5

A man died. That was eleven years ago.

A man died who ought not to have died: not because he was a Black man, but because he was a good man;

not because he had a dream, but because the dream he had was so critical for a people who had forgotten how to dream; for a nation whose dreams had lost their meaning;

not because he was a Christian, but because in being truly Christian his love for his fellow man transcended all religions and all diviions of men;

not because his death was a personal loss for those who knew him and loved him, but because his dying was a national tragedy for those who believe in the promise of America; and because his death was a temporary triumph for those who would deny that promise. For the promise of America is the American Dream, but for too many Americans it is a Dream that was never meant to be. There are those who would be Killers of the Dream, and for them the routine expression of the American Way of Life is the consignment of the poor and the undefended to the American Way of Death through poverty, disease, deception and discrimination.

Our greater tragedy is that the people we seem to kill most readily are the people whose dreams we find most troubling: dreams that refuse to articulate with the prevailing way of doing things here in America. And so with the poor and the defenseless, we kill the Abraham Lincolns, the John Kennedys, the Malcolm Xs, the Martin Luther Kings and whomever else dares to dream against the grain of the waythings are. We kill the dreamers to get at the dream in the childish belief that dreams die with the man.

Not so. Dreams die hard, if ever they die at all.

For no matter the name of the dreamer, once a dream is spoken, it belongs to the people. It lives in the people, and it can only die if the people reject it, or if the people themselves are exterminated. So let it be known that whomever would kill a dream must be prepared to first kill all the people who believe in it; or else to so narcotize them with circuses, or dazzle them with counterfeits that they forget the dream and the dreamer, and succumb to illusion and deceit. The nations who have traveled that road have inevitably paid the price, for when the people lose their dreams, they lose their confidence. When they lose their confidence, they lose their self-respect. And when they lose their self-respect, their freedom can be taken away from them.

Today our cities are floundering in crisis and decay. Our jails are filled to overflowing. Our public schools have been turned into holding pens and battlegrounds; men and women who want to work, and who need to work to survive with dignity, walk the streets and haunt the taverns for want of jobs.

Those who challenge the way things are find themselves harassed and intimidated, or silenced with unjust incarceration. They are the political prisoners Andrew Young had the temerity to bring to the world’s attention. Those of doubtful and sober minds turn to introspection; and those who believe in the righteousness of God wonder at the limits of His patience and tremble in the anticipation of His justice. Though we search and re-search the accumulated records of our national comportment, we find in them no compelling reasons for solace or satisfaction. It seems clear that somewhere America has gone wrong! It is not so much the empty pews where God and man used to meet that mark the people’s disaffection and dereliction, as it is the empty faces, the empty hearts, the empty lives.

The divorce rate is astronomical; the suicide rate is unbelievable. The murder rate far exceeds that for any other “civilized” nation in the world. This is America. The showplace of democracy; the citadel of freedom. A nation under God. The place where dreams come true. What happened? What happened to America? What has happened to us, for we make America what it is?

Our tragedy is that the American Dream has been compromised by false visions and spurious promises of those who would demean that dream. Our hope, unsubstantiated by performance, is too often made the hope of children, or the hope of fools – uninformed, Uninquiring, and unassessed. The characteristic political art of our times is delusion by confusion – the diffraction and scattering of half-truths and un-truths to the end that reality is obscured under an avalanche of words which do not mean anything, and are not intended to mean anything. Their function is merely to confuse the real issues and thus to silence opposition and paralyze response.

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More than that, we have developed a frightening affinity for self-delusion, which is the art of putting an acceptable face on what is patently unacceptable through the manipulation of words and the meaning of words. We have become masters at persuading people to believe what they know isn’t so through the employment of a kind of lingual cosmetology. When spending what you haven’t got is dismissed as “a negative cash flow,” and when shacking up is explained as “experimental living,” or when the murder of innocent individuals becomes quasirespectable because it is defined as a “contract,” or “extreme social alienation,” we have gone a far piece down the road toward legitimizing the illegitimate, and blurring the lines by which civilizations have traditionally sought to order human existence and give it direction.

The ultimate objective of such casuistry is, of course, the avoidance of human responsibility. If up and down are indistinguishable, and if all corners are round, then morality has no meaning, and one act is as good as another, barring some temporary inconvenience. No one can be held accountable if the conditions of accountability are sufficiently confused, or if there is no way to determine the place where the good and the not-good, the true and the not-true, the beautiful and the ugly separate and depart from each other.

The immediate, practical benefit of a philosophy of moral indistinction is release from the necessity of making choices. If no ethical principles can be clearly identified, then the implications for restraint and circumspection in such traditional areas of high moral concern as religion, politics, sexual behavior, human and family relationships soon vanish, individual accountability becomes obsolete, and human relations are reduced to a state of nature in which life becomes increasingly nasty, mean, solitary, brutish and short.

In a swiftly paced society such as our own, there is increasingly less opportunity for reflection and introspection.

Decisions are ad hoc: choices involving the most serious consequences are made on the flip of a coin. Millions of Americans, who are otherwise rational and intelligent, have come near to giving up making choices altogether. They have accepted instead a pre-determined print-out of their behavior based on the doubtful projections of astrology, bypassing reason, science and experience in a childlike pursuit of fantasy and easy answers. Yet, our eagerness to consign to the stars the burden of rational choice is perhaps one more evidence of the increasing onerousness of human responsibility, the release from which we struggle so vainly to accomplish.

Our destiny is not in the stars. Neither is the truth we need to make accountability reasonable and responsibility endurable. Nor is responsibility the exclusive province of any particular race, or sex, or age group, or political party, or church or denomination. It is of critical importance now to realize that our destiny is where it always was, that our national greatness can never transcend our national behavior, and that our national responsibility begins with the earnest concern for the welfare of all the people. What is the people’s welfare? It was spelled out for all time in the founding documents of the commonwealth: It is life – which includes the means of earning a decent living at a decent wage. It is liberty, which means freedom of conscience and freedom from unjust restraint or incarceration. It is the pursuit of happiness, which means the right of equal participation in all of the common values of this society regardless of your race, your sex, or your religion. Too many Americans are penalized, not because they have done wrong, but because they have the wrong name, or the wrong address, or the wrong color, or the wrong sex, or the wrong attitude, or the vrong political opinion, or the wrong friends, or the wrong amount of money.

A man died eleven years ago.

A great man died with a dream that we would overcome the great wrong that makes it so wrong to be poor, or to be Black or to be without the privileges of status and power. It is time now to get on with the resuscitation of a dream that never was, but could have been, rather than to continue to live perpetually in the shadow of that dream, or in our weakness and despair consign in to destruction. It is time for the high principles which once distinguished our efforts and encouraged our success to be brought out of hiding. It is time to shake off the shackles of accommodation to chauvinism; time to lift a torch of conviction; time to get on with the process of humanizing our deteriorating social order. It is time to ask ourselves, “What happened to the promise that was America?” It is time to give substance to the Dream of the gentle Dreamer who eleven years ago surrendered his life on the altar of America’s racial intransigence.

C. Eric Lincoln is Professor of Religion at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Tribute to Gwendolyn Cherry

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 2-3

On February 7, Gwen Cherry, the Vice-President of the Southern Regional Council, died in an automobile accident in Tallahassee, Florida. Her death leaves the Council without one of its valued officers and a dear close friend.

As a state leader in Florida, Gwen Cherry set new standards and precedents for the discussion of issues in government relating to Blacks, other minorities, women and poor of her state. As a national leader, Gwen inspired many with her singular devotion and joyful energy. She raised issues, took positions, and conducted the business of justice without fear of personal loss or concern for monetary reward.

As an officer and member of the Council, Gwen led the organization from a time of increasing despair and disbelief to a beginning period of hard work, faith in human nature

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and potential, and no-nonsense judgment tempered by humor and tolerance.

While often overworked, under-regarded and too often unseen, Gwen Cherry was an example of accomplishment and belief in principled equality which many Blacks and women immediately emulated and admired. Yet for everyone of any race or sex–Black or White, male or female–she represented the virtue of patience untouched by hate, the belief in freedom unbridled by cynicism, and a very unique insight into the tragic-humor of people who resist the call for action.

As a lawyer, Gwen Cherry represented the interest of clients and causes in court. Still, she spent as much time developing the potential of cooperation as exercising the art of an adversary.

As the first Black woman in the Florida Legislature, she was the spokeswoman at home and elsewhere for feminism and equal rights. Yet, she was much more to many more. Gwen Cherry stood alone to say “nay” when the lynching mob of the Florida Legislature pushed through the death penalty. She stood alone in saying “nay” when boards and commissions were filled without Blacks and women. She stood alone and said “nay” when the state rushed helter skelter to push Black and poor students out of the schools in the name of competency. Gwen Cherry stood alone when she proposed numerous pieces of legislation to aid the afflicted, the aged, the poor, and the uninfluential.

Like most of us, Gwen Cherry lost too many of the battles which she fought as a state leader, an officer of the Council, a lawyer, and a national figure. Her victories were too few. So long as she took breath, however, she continued her struggle believing that people of good will would someday, somehow act.

The most fitting and lovely tribute that we as her friends and companions can pay to Gwen Cherry will be to endure beyond the conditions against which she fought and to take her life and friendship as a special gift which enables us to be more wise, loving, and devoted to the just and humane world of which she gave us a clear vision.

The Fears of Race Relations: Confessions of a White Pastor

By Paul F. Wohlgemuth

Vol. 2, No. 6, 1980, pp. 4-6

After serving 11 years as a pastor in two churches in racially changing areas I have concluded that nothing is more destructive to harmonious human relations than fear. I have analyzed my own feelings. I have observed and analyzed the words and actions of others. In all of these experiences and situations, attitudes and reactions, almost every time a racial problem is traced to its origin, it is found to be rooted in fear.

In analyzing fear, it is necessary to assess your whole life — from birth to the present. Most of us are not free of our past. We are, in a sense, what our pasts have made us. I am no exception.

I first became aware of my fear of Black people when my wife and I were hunting for a house in the early years of our marriage. 1 was in the army living in Battle Creek, Michigan. We had discovered the house we wanted, but I had also discovered that we would have Black neighbors. I cannot say that I was really afraid, but I didn’t want to live there because of the neighbors.

Some may question that fear was at the base of my reactions. Some may rather call it bigotry or arrogance or something else. I prefer to call it fear – fear because of ignorance. I had never lived beside Blacks nor even near them. I had had several in my classes while a public school teacher, but as neighbors, they were a totally “unknown entity” to me.

Early in my career as a White pastor in an area of racial change I recall being afraid to walk past Black teenage boys gathered to play in the public playground next door to my parsonage. They would glare at me silently as I walked by. Sometimes they would talk in low tones among themselves and then break into raucous laughter. One afternoon after a brief exchange of words, I saw one of the boys knock a White man to the ground and several of the others kick him. What had been said between them I didn’t know.

Later when I moved into a predominately Black neighborhood and groups of teenagers would walk by on the street and look at me, I’d wonder what they might be planning to do to me or my family. Of course, I didn’t know that they would do anything. It was fear of the unknown again.

Another fear I had to deal with was the reaction of White people because of my relations with Black people. In my first church in a racially changing

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community, I feared what my members would say and do if a Black person were to attend a worship service. Numerous persons had threatened to leave the service. Some said that if they did they would never return.

When a Black family moved in next door, I feared what the White people would say if I did what my religion demanded of me – to be a good neighbor, to visit the newcomers, to sit in their living room as I would with any White person, and, most importantly, to invite them to worship in our church as I would any White neighbor.

Every Sunday morning while in the pulpit of my church, I would anxiously watch the door of the sanctuary. Would today be the day a Black person would enter to worship? Would the offering be less? What would those who had threatened to leave the church do? What would I do?

These same fears followed me to my next pastoral appointment. They diminished my first year there because the community (parish area) was predominantly White. However even though business as usual in the church was”the order of the day,” there was an uneasiness in the community. An increasing number of “For Sale” signs were frightening the residents. As we saw our White members leave, the uneasiness developed into a nagging fear which was to last for several years.

How many would leave the church as they were leaving the community? Would enough remain to support the $85,000 annual budget? If not enough remained, what would happen to my status as a minister? Would my salary be reduced or would I be considered a “failure” and sent to a “small” church? Would I lose my influence among the leaders of our local church if I led them in the direction in which we were compelled to go? Would I be called “nigger lover” (which incidentally, I was)? Would Whites and Blacks be able to worship together, to study together, to eat together at fellowship suppers?

What if the church did actually become predominately or totally Black? That possibility led to another set of fears. Would I as a White minister be able to serve it? Could I, as a White person, minister to the needs of Black people? Could I preach to them?

These fears became crystalized during the sixth year of my ministry when the church had actually become predominately Black. My fear came not so much from the Black people in the local church, but from Black leaders in the General Black United Methodist Church.

While attending a Convocation on the Black Church, sponsored by Black Methodists for Church Renewal, I heard so much about Black preaching, Black music and Black worship that I became convinced that I was not the right person to serve a Black congregation. My fears had taken over. I must add, however, that through the kindness of some of the leaders of our local church, I was convinced that my fears were largely unfounded and that I should continue for another year.

I have seen changes occur in White families as they became the minority in the community and in the church. They had been the advocates of integration. They wanted an interracial church and worked diligently to make it so. I believe that they were sincerely dedicated to the cause. They worked beautifully with Black people in our church promoting them to positions of leadership. However, when they heard their small children assume some of the “Black” ways of speaking and saw Black and White little “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” coming home together, those deepseated, overwhelming fears of the ages emerged. Neither Black people nor White people on the whole favor interracial marriage. However, Whites fear it while Blacks simply oppose it. The opposition to integrating our churches came from Whites who feared that association of Black children and White children in church-school classes would ultimately lead to marriage. They saw the barriers which once had kept Black people “in their place” disappearing. They assumed that as the color barrier was being minimized the possibilities of inter-marriage would be maximized.

Now what are some of the fears of the Blacks? Although it cannot be said that all Blacks have the same fears anymore than it can be said of Whites, here are some which seem very real. These have come to me from Blacks with whom I have

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spoken openly and from my reading of Black authors.

Most of all, Blacks are afraid of being rejected by White people because of their color. Since every normal person may have the fear of being rejected by someone for some reason, we must see the distinction between the general fear of rejection and the specific fear of rejection because of the color of one’s skin.

It is difficult for White people to understand this, especially those of us who have never been a minority because of skin pigmentation. This fear is an indigenous part of the “Black situation.” Blacks have experienced it from birth to death for many generations.

“Rejection” is written all over the scenario of race relations. Although Black and White drinking fountains and restrooms are no longer seen in most of our country, they linger on quite vividly in memory. It is only within the past few years that the word “Black” on an application for a position has not been a barrier to the Black applicant. In many instances Black people with superior qualifications have been denied even the right for an interview because of color.

It must be admitted that many White people are sincerely trying to overcome their rejection of Black people. Yet, it is still evident in many ways. One of the most obvious of these ways is the rejection of Blacks in White churches. To be sure, very few churches have a “closed door policy”, but the “closed heart” signs are still up. The pious publicity of openness becomes only a goad when dampened by a halfhearted welcome. The forced smile and limp handshake can be more irritating to a person expecting a friendly greeting than the “Black” water fountains. Much of the rejection which Blacks once feared has only gone “underground” and has, perhaps, in this sense become more painful.

I recall a conversation I had early in the transition with a young couple who later joined our church. The young wife said, “Mother didn’t want us to move into this White community. She was afraid that we’d get hurt.”

This mother probably did not fear physical harm to her daughter, although that could not have been entirely ruled out. (She may have heard of the house which had been bought about a mile from where we sat and which before the Black family moved in was bombed.) Her concern was for the feelings of her daughter and her little grandchildren. She didn’t want them to suffer any more of the hurt of rejection.

Another fear is that of being cheated by White people. This fear might be a mutual one and in many instances may be unfounded, but real. This fear has been largely inherited. It is a well established fact that many Black sharecroppers have been cheated by the White landowner. Because of his lack of knowledge and understanding, he was often unaware of the false transactions in which his rights were violated until it was too late for recourse. Accounts of such flagrant dishonesty and abuse by the White man have filtered down from Black father to Black son. Is there any wonder that many Black people are suspicious of White people especially when many are still being cheated of their right as citizens to vote?

All of these fears, those of Whites and those of Blacks, have become barriers between the races. Fear undermines understanding. It blocks communication. It prevents a solution of the race problem.

Those who may still insist on ignoring fear as a barrier need only be reminded of the presence of racism all around us. To be sure, some progress has been made. Very few church doors are barred against Black worshippers today. Racial violence has subsided. But underneath the apparent calm there is still turbulence.

Paul F. Wohlgemuth is a retired minister of the United Methodist Church. His last church was in the Ben Hill community in the Atlanta area.

Changing the Politics of Bitterness

By Vernon Jordan

Vol. 3, No. 1, 1980, p. 3

The year 1980 was when we saw the growth of politicized religion—a heady mixture of fundamentalist gospel with extreme right wing political ideology. It converts political issues into moral absolutes; honest disagreement over the issues becomes a sin, and tolerance for minorities an evil. I grew up in the church, read my Bible, and pray to my God, and I know God is not a right-winger. The true message of Christianity is brotherly love and compassion, not the hate and hardheartedness of our home-grown ayatollahs.

Extremism doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it needs a climate that sustains it. Just as fish need water, extremism needs a social climate that fosters a new politics of bitterness.

And that’s what we have today. A once-dominant America has had to face the fact that it lost a war against a small Asian country; that it is dependent on other small countries for raw materials; that it no longer rules the world’s markets; that the once-mighty dollar is weak, and that social changes mean Blacks, women and other minorities claim rights and privileges once reserved for White males.

An expanding economy and a reasonable rate of growth would enable most people to accept these inevitable changes. Growing interdependence at home and abroad would make sense to people who could count on tomorrow being better than today.

But instead, America seems locked into a pattern of self-destructive recessions that weaken our productive capacity and throw millions out of work. We’ve had six major recessions in the past twenty-five years; three in the past ten years. No sooner do we climb out of one recession than another slams us down again.

Along with this kind of insecurity recessions breed is the insecurity that comes with high inflation. More income buys less goods. Dreams of owning a home dry up. Savings vanish.

Recession-bred insecurity results in a society that is anxious, unwilling to accept social changes, and nostalgic for older times and values. It is a society fearful of the future, and fearful of its neighbors.

But, America can change, and Black people need to help America to change. We may be the last people left who truly believe in the American Dream, in the principles of freedom and equality that made this nation so great. We’ve got to help other Americans regain their lost dream; we’ve got to help America overcome the selfishness and fear that grips it, and come back to the principles of justice and righteousness.

In this year of doubt and confusion, we must remind a forgetting nation that this land is ours too, that we have lived here since before the Pilgrims landed, and we are here to stay. This nation too often forgets that this land is sprinkled with our sweat, watered with our tears, and fertilized with our blood. It too often forgets that we helped build America’s power and glory, that we dug taters, toted cotton, lifted bales, sank the canals and laid the railroad tracks that linked ocean to ocean; that we’ve died in America’s every war.

We’ve seen American change. We’ve made American change. And to that end let us neither stumble nor falter, rather let us mount up with wings as eagles, let us run and not be weary, and walk together children, and not faint.

Vernon Jordan is president of the National Urban League, a native Southerner, and a former staff member of the Southern Regional Council.

Remarks in Memory Of Lillian Smith

By Gene Gabriel Moore

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 13-15

It is appropriate that we make what echo we can of Lillian Smith’s lifelong battle for those eternal lost causes–a classless society, uncompromised equality, and a democracy undiluted by the greed of corporations, by the saber rattling of the jingoists, by the cynicism of the politicians.

Today, perhaps more than at any time since the repressive measures of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, during the height of the antiwar movement, we Americans are the victims of a regressive regime whose threat to our common inheritance, to the rights we were promised that summer in 1776, is multiplied by the fact that it is the national government on the Potomac, not a motley cadre of slack-jaw demagogues down in old Dixie that seems unwilling to translate into the realities of this century the principles of Thomas Jefferson, of Thomas Paine, of Martin Luther King, Jr.

How do you characterize an administration whose priorities are blatantly in favor of the pitifully deprived rich–and blatantly against a child suffering from malnutrition, blatantly against that old woman in a head ag trudging beside the blacktop in Bolivar County, Miss., blatantly against the hopes of barely literate students in some woebegone high school in Monroe County, Ala., blatantly against warming the bones of the elderly in Terrell County Gal, when the cold of winter creeps into their houses?

They can be characterized only as classist, racist, as dangerous to the health of this nation and, heaven help us suicidal to the state of the world–because whatever the Russians are, they are neither weak nor easily cowed, a fact which should not cause Americans to quake in fear but it should give us pause. There is no winner in a nuclear exchange. There is no world left for a winner.

We are not sleeping sheep. We are not so much in love with the upholstery in our sedans. We are not so tied to the feasts on our tables. We are not so adorned and pampered and sweetsmelling and satisfied that we will allow the Reagan people to distort and lessen the nobility and the humanity and the morality of this nation. Look closely at the rhetoric of the Reaganites. Look very closely. For you and I and our countrymen are in trouble.

Lillian Smith knew about trouble.

Lillian Smith did not rest in the shade. Lil did not lollygag. She did not hem and hew. She told the bigots in her midst to take themselves on the short road to hell. She spelled out in language that rings with lyricism just how close to hellfire those bigots were, how rotted their souls were.

It was the day of the lynching tree, that day when Lil and Paula Snelling started their magazine in my mother’s own sweet county of Rabun. Lil stood up and she told the Talmadges and the Bilbos and the Rankins and the Heflins and the Byrds and the Longs and the Crumps and the Stennises that their ways were the ways of ruin and corrosion–and she did her telling in the face of ever-constant risk to herself. And you can be sure that those who disagreed with her–and they were most of the people on this continent, including some who knew better, who should have been her natural allies–were quick to threaten, to attack, to harass, to accuse. The ring of the phone in the night was a fearsome thing on Old Screamer Mountain.

From Southern trees hang strange fruit. The line is from a Billy Holiday song, but the words became Lil Smith’s–and the novel Strange Fruit awakened the conscience of the Nation. Lil hastened the dawn, as Dabbs said. Her first book gave her an audience. It established her as a serious artist, as a writer of large gift, as a thinker influenced not only by the ancient storytelling traditions of her own Southern origins but also by Gandhi, by Freud, by the music that had been an integral part of her life since girlhood in Jasper, Florida.

Lil was short in stature, but she wasn’t afraid to stand up and let her words be heard. They were clear words and her message was persuasive and it was heard not only in Cairo, Gal, but also in Cairo, Egypt–not only in Vienna, Gal, but also in Vienna, Austria–not only in Macon, Gal, but also in Macon, France.

For a generation of Southerners, Lillian Smith provided the words that had not been heard in the states of the old Confederacy because overlaying our reach of the world was a certain silence. It’s a terrible sleep when you can’t wake up, Lil said. It was an evil silence. It was an evil imposed upon the brains of white infants in the crib. It was an evil enforced in the bosom of the family. It was an evil ratified by lawmakers. And it was, as all great evils are, as has been said by a chronicler of another evil in this century, utterly banal.

Lil was a white woman. She was a feminist before the word won broad currency, a thinker to the left of center. She was all those things–and she was a Protestant Southerner. She was all those things–but in the main Lillian Smith was a writer. I am a writer, she said to me in a letter. How others see me is how they see me. I see myself as a writer.

I see by the papers that there are biographers at work on lives of Lillian Smith. and it can only be hoped that they will bracket their approach to Lil’s life and work with that fact clearly in focus. She was a writer. It is too convenient to critics, to the media, to her enemies and even to her friends to characterize Lil as a propagandist–certainly a talented one, but a propagandist nevertheless.

I cannot imagine taking Lil’s message to her homeland out of an account of her life, but the fact is that the woman

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put one word after another in a way that celebrates the language and advances our understanding of literature’s higher role in the human experience. She did not use words merely as a means of transporting to distant corners the particulars of her philosophy. She used words as a poet uses words, and there are exceedingly poetic, lyrical reaches in her work. That is especially true in her nonfiction–in Killers of the Dream, in The Journey, and that small masterpiece, Memory of a Large Christmas.

Even in casual correspondence, in her letters to friends and acquaintances, Lillian Smith made art. It is too easily overlooked, the art of Lillian Smith; it is too easily nudged aside in our rush to commemorate Lil’s courage, Lil’s early and often lonely crusade against the base instincts of the species. We must never diminish Lil’s stature as an artist. She gave us in her two published novels and in her two major works of nonfiction literature which reveals our human depth and reach and nobility and foibles and angst. Just as Lil instructed young Martin King, then hardly more than a country preacher down in Alabama, on the fine lines of Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience . . . she gave us a body of fiction and nonfiction which possesses the stuff of important literature.

My first encounter with Lillian Smith was Killers of a Dream. That book gave questioning feelings in me the words needed for me to discover answers. Multiply my experience by ten thousand and extend it into the next generation, as I have tried to do with my own children, and you begin to catch the impact which that brave woman on the mountain has had in our wondrous stretch of the planet.

We can expect no more than one Faulkner in a century, perhaps in two centuries. We can hope for no more than one O’Neill in a hundred years. A language can hope for no mare than one Eliot in a half-century. And whatever the challenges faced by our society in these closing years of the twentieth century–and they are true challenges–we cannot reasonably expect there to emerge a poet of Lillian Smith’s gift–a Lillian Smith to pit eloquence against the slick Hollywood rhetoric of the manipulators. We can expect no more than one Lil Smith, and she was here and she is gone.

Pat Conroy

I know well what the life and spirit of Lillian Smith represents–the transcendence of the artist over the unspeakable atrocities of her time. She was the word made fire. She was the writer who possessed the indissoluble courage to say “no.” She was the artist who loved the South with all her heart, but knew in her heart that the South was both glorious and completely wrong. She was the kind of Southern writer I tried to learn from and emulate–the kind who would throw up if they wrote Gone With The Wind.

I never cared that Scarlett O’Hara went hungry in the Civil War, in fact, I was glad. Because Scarlett O’Hara, and those fierce, abiding citizens like her, came out of that War and created the South to which I was born. Scarlett was true to her promise and rebuilt Tara and never went hungry again. Nor did she give a damn that millions of Southerners, black and white, would be hungry from the time they were born until the time they died. Give me Lillian Smith; let who will take Margaret Mitchell. Give me Nat Turner over Rhett Butler. Let me walk the long miles with Harriet Tubman instead of listening to Uncle Remus. Let me write love letters to the Grimke sisters of Charleston and say thanks to Abraham Lincoln. Allow me to tell General Lee that I’m delighted he lost the war and that I loathe any man, no matter how refined or cultured, who kills other men in defense of slavery. Thank General Sherman for me, for burning Atlanta, the city of my birth, the city I love, because slavery could only end in a blaze of horror and fire. Put a rose on the grave of Martin Luther King for me. Apologize for me that I once hated his guts and called him rigger. I was a white boy raised in the South and he will understand. Tell him it was people like him, people like Medgar Evers, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Will Campbell, Courtney and Elizabeth Siceloff and hundreds of others who made me look in the mirror.

When I looked in the mirror I saw Bull Connor, George Wallace, Birmingham, Selma, separate drinking fountains, fire hoses, and blood in the streets. I saw the whole bruised tragic history of the South in those Southern blue eyes. In the mirror I was seeing myself for the first time as an enemy of the family of man. When I was a teenager the South was at war again, but the most splendid and magnificent warriors in the history of America carried no weapons into battle. They carried only a single word, “Freedom,” and all the guns of the South, all the troops and all the sheriffs, all the governors and fine Senators, all the armies of the Klan and the death squads from the Virginias to Mississippi learned something of the magic and the grandeur of the English language. They were defeated by that one glorious word. I wish I had been old enough or wise enough to have used that word in my childhood, but Scarlett O’Hara and I were at the country club working on our tans when the horses stormed across the Selma Bridge.

I grew up in the South and I hated riggers and Jews–in fact, I think I hated everybody. I brought remarkable skills to the art of hating. But I was granted a gift when I was taught the alphabet at Sacred Heart School on Courtland Street in Atlanta in 1950. I was taught to read and I learned to listen to the language. The learning of the alphabet began a slow revolution in my soul. I could hate riggers until Eugene Norris, a white English teacher in Beaufort, S.C., made me read Richard Wright and James Weldon Johnson and Countee Cullen and James Baldwin. I could hate Jews until the same teacher made me read The Diary of Anne Frank. I could hate everyone until synagogues were bombed, black girls were killed in church, and men and women were firehosed and bitten by dogs, beaten and clubbed at bus stations, and murdered and buried in levees in Mississippi. They taught me how to feel. Then they taught me to write and I learned that all writing is worthless without feeling; all writing is worthless without passion and faith.

In the late Sixties I became one of those tiresome Southern white changelings. You know the type. Blacks grew weary of the type very quickly, but I was irrepressible in those quickstepping days and my calling to the priesthood of civil rights, as I saw it, was to make my white brothers and sisters understand the spiritually crippling malady of racial prejudice. Always fear the convert–and at the same time I was one of the most zealously obnoxious converts to the cause of civil rights I ever encountered. I’m sure I did much accidental harm to the movement. I was perfectly ridiculous. It was at this moment in history I volunteered to teach on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina during the first year of teacher integration. This was 1969 and it now seems a

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thousand years ago. I had once argued persuasively with yankee classmates that the South had separate but equal school systems and still rather believed it on the day I reached the island. On the first day of school I learned that not one child in grades five through eight knew what country they lived in and my education as a Southerner was complete. I have never heard one Southern politician from Strom Thurmond to George Wallace to Herman Talmadge admit that they were monstrous, unconscionable liars when they claimed the separate but equal doctrine. They were all liars. I loathe them to this day because I once believed them. And they never had the grace to recant. They never even had the common decency to say they were wrong.

In closing, I want to tell you that the Great American South will never exist and it will always be waiting to be born. Dreams are almost never born; they are gently urged along. The Southern Regional Council has done much of this quiet gentle urging. You are desperately needed; you are required. Because of President Reagan and his administration the Southern poor and the American poor will suffer grievously. There will be hunger and sadness in the land again, in the world again.

Fight them.

The articles below were excerpted from speeches delivered at the Atlanta Biltmore Hotel on Nov. 6, when the 1981 Lillian Smith Awards for literature were presented by the Southern Regional Council.

The annual awards recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books about the South. The 1981 winners were Pat Conroy for Lords of Discipline and John Gaventa for Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley.

Atlanta writer Gene Gabriel-Moore delivered the keynote remarks.

Pat Conroy currently lives and works in Rome, Italy, and could not be present for the Smith Awards banquet. He sent his remarks, excerpted here, to Bernie Schein, who make the speech on Conroy’s behalf.

Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. By James H. Jones. New York: The Free Press, 1981. $14.95.

By Bess Beatty

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 17-19

In 1972 the Associated Press broke the story of the Tuskegee experiment, a forty-year study of the effect of syphilis on six hundred Macon County, Alabama, black men. Nine years later James Jones published Bad Blood, a history of what he describes as “The scandalous story of the Tuskegee experiment–when government doctors played God and science went mad.” Jones’ book is a thoroughly researched and dispassionate, although indicting, account of this experiment.

The story has a background imbeded in centuries of “racial medicine.” By the twentieth century syphilis had come to be considered by many physicians as “the quintessential black disease,” and, despite the insights of modern medicine, some continued to believe that it affected blacks differently than whites. Ironically the Tuskegee study grew out of changing attitudes, at least among public health officials, toward black health generally and syphilis particularly. By the 1920s contempt and neglect were beginning to give way to realization that scientific and medical insights should be applied equally to all races.

In 1929 the Julius Rosenwald Fund, renowned for its efforts on behalf of black education, began funding Public Health Service programs for blacks. The pilot program, planned to demonstrate control of veneral

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disease in five Southern rural counties, included Macon County, Alabama, which was eighty-two percent black and which had, despite the presence of famed Tuskegee Institute, the highest syphilis rate uncovered by the study. Although of short duration, the Rosenwald program eventually inspired a nationwide campaign to test and treat syphilis–an effort that excluded six hundred Macon County men who were involved in the original study.

The Tuskegee experiment, in which they were now involved, grew out of frustration at the termination of Rosenwald funding. Director Taliaferro Clark, who “would have preferred to . . . treat rather than to study syphilitic blacks,” settled for a less expensive project, The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which was to become “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.” Dr. Clark planned to study empirically the long held notion that syphilis affected blacks differently than whites by comparing his findings to a study of untreated syphilis in white males in Oslo, Norway. Clark expressed no ethical qualms as he prepared for the “unparalleled opportunity,” but neither did he envision that the men would go untreated longer than the six months he expected the experiment to last. To assure local black support, the Tuskegee Institute was made partner of the Public Health Service and its name was applied to the study. Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr was selected to be in charge of field work and Eunice Rivers, a black nurse, was appointed to assist him. Initially some minimal treatment was included which would eventually evoke the scientific criticism that the experiment was invalid as a study of untreated syphilis.

But it was the ethical dimension that would eventually condemn the Tuskegee study as the most infamous episode in the history of government medicine in the United States. The program was couched in deceit from the beginning. Patients were told that they had “bad blood,” not that they suffered from a particular disease that was contagious and transmitted sexually. Those brought in for painful and dangerous lumbar punctures which were strictly diagnostic were told that they were receiving “special treatment.”

When Dr. Vonderlehr, who was making a career out of the Tuskegee work, was named to replace Clark, the decision was made to continue the study indefinitely. His plan entailed low-cost examination of each man, facilitated by Nurse River’s personal contact, until each could be “brought to autopsy.” Their efforts to keep the men involved in the study were facilitated by continued deceit, non-effective medication such as asprin, burial stipends, and occasional certificates and cash awards. The support- of the Tuskegee Institute and area physicians, both eager to participate in a national scientific study, assured the experiment’s survival. Although poor blacks in Macon County could rarely afford to see a doctor, the cooperation of area physicians was still profoundly significant because men who were “potential patients” were made “perpetual subjects . . . placed beneath a microscope for scientific observation.” How callous the Public Health Service became toward these subjects is indicated by a letter from Dr. John Heller, field director of the study, complaining of the availability of Civil Works Administration jobs for blacks because it “disrupted the Ethiopian population as regards staying in one place very long.” Heller later recalled, “No one questioned whether the experiment was ethical; no one even came close to doing so.”

Initially, denial of treatment was rationalized (by those who bothered to rationalize at all) on the grounds that the treatment available for syphilis could be as hazardous as the disease. This justification was rendered more difficult in the 1940s when the discovery of penicilin offered a safe, effective syphilis treatment, but by then the study had acquired a bureacratic momentum, a self-perpetuation, that made it immune from challenge. Leadership continued to come from within, and no one involved considered ending the work.

It was not until 1966 that Peter Buxton, a venereal disease interviewer in San Francisco, learned about the study and protested. Officials, still convinced of the experiment’s scientific merit and moral intergrity, rejected Buxton’s criticism and vowed to continue. Finally in 1972 they were overruled when the Associated Press, proded by Buxton, told the story. A nine-member and it was disbanded. Out of court settlement awarded the surviving syphilitics $37,500, with lesser amounts to their heirs and to those in the control group.

Beyond the specific appalling story it tells, Jones’ book is important for offering insight into power relationships in American society. Despite the repeated denials of the officials involved, the experiment serves as an example of the power of racism and elitism and as an indictment of the limits to the paternalism and liberalism which have allegedly served to temper these prejudices. Jones describes the health officials who originated the study as paternalistic compared to “the real black-baiters of the day.” They were of the progressive or liberal wing in American society which counseled government sponsored improvement of the environment for blacks and the poor. But the book reveals the stark limits to a liberalism and paternalism which views the dispossessed as more subject than human.

Bad Blood also demonstrates the dangerous potential

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of a science without ethics. The Tuskegee experiment had almost complete support from scientists within the Public Health Service, and was not challenged from within even after the Nuremberg trials sensitized the world to the potential of science gone mad. When the study was uncovered in 1972, the scientific community was most vocal in its defense.

This example of “moral astigmatism” within the medical and science professions make a strong case for closer government supervision of medical activity, but the question remains–who will supervise the government? Most appalling to many people was the revelation that a federal agency had conducted the experiment. It was, the Providence Sunday Journal charged, “flagrant immorality . . . under the auspices of the United States Government.”

Jones also questions why none of the hundreds of individuals involved protested. Sidney Milgram, in his study Obedience to Authority, claims that “Pure moral autonomy in the form of lone resistance to an apparently benign authority is very rare.” His conclusion is upheld by the example of scores of people who could have protested medical experimentation but did not. Jones makes the frightening comparison of the Public Health bureaucracy to the military hierarchy of Nazi Germany which “reduced the sense of personal responsibility and ethical concern.” He is particularly interested in why so many blacks cooperated with the Tuskegee work and conjectures that black professionals were responding to “the dilemma of black middle-class professionals who wanted to succeed in a society dominated by whites.” This was clearly true of Nurse Rivers, the most poignant figure in the book and the one official involved who had genuine concern for the welfare of the men involved. She was bound by forces of race and class as well as a professional hierarchy that demanded obedience to doctors and sex roles that “reinforced her ethical passivity.”

Jones’ book can be criticized for leaving the men involved as lifeless as they were considered by the experimenters. Nevertheless, he has told their story well: “a forty-year saga of lies and deceit, of unlettered men who had trusted and been betrayed by educated men.” As the major indictment of “the scandalous story of the Tuskegee experiment,” this important book deserves to be widely read.

Bess Beatty is an assistant professor of history at Shorter College, Rome, Georgia.

The Color Purple. Alice Walker. Harcourt, Brace, 1982.

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 23-24

Speaking at the University of Florida in 1962, Lillian Smith observed that women were only beginning “to break the million year silence about themselves.” “Women rarely tell the truth,” she said, “even in their diaries, about their sex experiences, or their most intimate relationships; nor do they spend much time asking the unanswerable questions about the meaning of human life since they have never been sure they were human.” Smith linked in one sentence the necessity of women speaking the truth about themselves with their asking the unanswerable questions. In the same speech, she suggested that for women to tell the truth “might radically change male psychology.”

Although her own writing often challenged her culture’s rigid concepts of gender, Lillian Smith did not live to enjoy the literary flowering of the most recent phase of the women’s movement in America. For some fifteen years Alice Walker’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been-a major part of that flowering. In The Color Purple she has reached a new pinacle. You can rest easier now, Lil, the truth about women is being spoken.

Walker’s novel takes the form of letters between two sisters: Nettie, who is a missionary to Africa, and Celie, who is trapped in a brutally oppressive marriage in a Southern black farming community. Their correspondence spans the thirty year period ending in World War II.

A major theme in all of Walker’s writing has been the struggle of black women to create lives in the face of racism, sexism, and the inevitable self-doubt which accompanies generations of patriarchal oppression. In The Color Purple the struggle achieves fruition, but not through a gradual evolution over centuries or even decades, and not through mass organization of the oppressed against the oppressor. Furthermore, although the presence of white racism is quite evident throughout both sisters’ narratives, it is not the central theme. Of primary importance is the effort of black women to create their own lives with and without black men. The power to do so comes through the love and support of women for each other, expressed in a variety of ways.

Walker’s choice of form, letters between two sisters, allows each sister’s perspective to mirror and reinforce the other’s. Nettie’s description of life among the Olinka tribe echoes Celie’s accounts of her own life in rural Georgia. In both societies the “traditional” ideas regarding sexual division of labor and personal relationships between men and women insist on male dominance. Nettie writes:

There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face ” as they say. To “look in a man’s face ” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees. And what can I say to this? Again, it is our own behavior around Pa.

In both societies the real strength of the community can be found in women’s friendship with each other. Even as Nettie’s letters tell of the friendship among Olinka wives of the same husband, so Celie finds her greatest love and support from her husband’s lover, Shug Avery. The quality of the relationship between Celie and Shug is the key to Celie’s liberation from her role as “mule of the world.”

For Celie to free herself she must find her own voice, speak her own thoughts. Most importantly, she must replace the ideas of male dominance, the ultimate symbol of which is the image of God as male, with a new understanding of power. Shug is able to help because she understands the real power within every individual, part of the spirit of life itself. The turning point in Celie’s journey comes in her conversation with Shug about the nature of God:

Here’s the thing, says Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you rooking fort Trouble do it for most forks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.

It? I ast.

Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It.

But what do it look like? I ast.

Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture

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show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will he. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.

Echoing Shug’s understanding of God as key to liberation, Nettie writes:

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone–a roofleaf or Christ–but we don’t. And riot being tied to what God looks like frees us.

Freed from her old concept of God, Celie begins to view all of life differently:

Well, us talk and talk about God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that.?) not the color purple (where it come from.?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.

Now that my eyes opening, If eels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr.______’s evil sort of shrink. But not altogether. Still, it is like Shug say, You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall.

For Alice Walker, the power of sisterhood leads not to a separatist female community, but to a fuller life for both men and women. Under patriarchy men have feared women’s creative power and have sought to suppress it. In doing so, they have denied much that is creative in themselves as well. When women have managed to resist patriarchal definitions of themselves, the fruits of their love and support for each other have transformed the lives of both sexes.

As Celie begins to “chase the old white man from her head,” she is no longer subject to her husband’s abuse.

With Shug’s help, she finds the means to support herself. After Celie and Shug leave him, Albert begins to change his ways. Later, freed from former definitions of power, Celie and Albert come to know each other as friends, to work together, even to discuss the differences between men and women and ask the unanswerable questions:

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period.

So what you think? I ast.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.

And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.

They do, he say, surprise.

Alice Walker’s writings pay tribute to a heritage of black sisters and foremothers: artists all, whether named or anonymous, a great host of witnesses from the rural American South to Africa, from the unlettered and unsung, to famous poets, story-tellers, healers and musicians. A major source of Walker’s power comes from her faithfulness to the richness of women’s spirituality. In her fiction, varied African and American Indian religious traditions sometimes merge and sometimes conflict with the concepts and beliefs of Christianity, but spiritual power remains fundamental. The Color Purple contains Walker’s best writing on the nature of God. It is also one of our finest testimonies to the power of sisterhood.

Rose Gladney is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

“The Logic of the Majority”

By Xabier Gorostiaga

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 6-10

Xabier Gorostiaga: I was born in the Basque country in the north of Spain. My family was very persecuted at that time, after the Civil War (1936-39). In the confrontation between General Franco and the Basques, my father was very involved in the Basque fighting. Then we went into exile. Exile and persecution are part of my vital experience.

Kirkpatrick: You were in a Catholic family. Was the Christian faith a vital force in your family?

Gorostiaga: Yes. Especially with my mother, later also with my father. My father was not a good Christian at the beginning, but was transformed by the religious thinking of an atheist, the Basque philospher Miguel de Unamuno. Then when the Vatican put Unamuno’s writing on the black list of forbidden books, my father had to rethink his own atheism and his own religious beliefs.

Kirkpatrick: The condemnation of the Vatican caused your father to re-think the Christian faith.

Gorostiaga: Yes, but in a very dialetical process. Because instead of saying, “Well, I won’t have anything to do with the church,” my father said, “This man is a real Christian. I don’t know why the church condemned this fellow.” It forced him to rethink. It was a starting process to get closer to an evangelical attitude toward life. And in the last years of his life he was a very committed Christian.

Kirkpatrick: So did you become a Jesuit early in life? And leave home?

Gorostiaga: I came to Latin America very young to do all my religious studies here. The novitiate we call it. Then I studied in Cuba, from 1958 to 1960, in El Caballo, a small town close to Havana. And the Cuban experience was an incredible experience for me. At that time I realized that the role of the Catholic Church in Cuba was a very traditional, very conservative role. The Cuban Church was very rich and had no contact with the poor in Cuba. We were not allowed at that time even to hear Fidel Castro on television. And even though some Christians took part in the revolution, the church was not considered part of the building of a new society. And that experience, in the negative sense, also was important for me.

Kirkpatrick: So you stayed in Latin America after that training?

Gorostiaga: Yes, all the time except my final years doing theology studies. I did my theology studies in a university in the Basque country in order to be close to my mother and father who were very old at that time, and in order that they would be present at my ordination as a priest.
You know the Jesuit province is organized with five 1` small nations in Central America, from Guatemala to Panama. I lived one year and a half in Guatemala, a year in Salvador. In 1961 I was naturalized in Nicaragua. I had a Nicaraguan passport until Somoza took it away. At that time I was an economic advisor of the Panamanian government working on the Panama Canal treaty negotiations so I took the nationality of Panama.
I maintain my Panamanian passport, but I consider myself a Central American citizen. I have been living in all these countries. I have been involved in reform in El Salvador, working with my Jesuit colleagues in Guatemala. For me, Central America is a nation.

Kirkpatrick: So your spiritual formation is very clear then. Has that resulted in an attitude toward the faith that differed from your childhood faith?

Gorostiaga: I was very traditional in my faith when I was a child and even when I became a Jesuit. But what moved me to become a Jesuit was my experience with shantytowns, immigrant towns in the Basque country. People from Andalusia, from Galicia, the poorest part of Spain came to these towns and were living in incredible conditions. Every Sunday for more than three or four years I went with two or three Jesuits to help build houses to teach these people. I think that was the experience that converted me to a real Christianity, the experience that induced me to be a Christian, and also to imitate two or three of these Jesuit priests that I saw working for so many years with these very, very poor, oppressed people.
Later my experience in Cuba, in Ecuador with the very poor Indians, and in Panama with the campesino movement in which Father Hector Gallego, a martyr, was killed in 1971. That experience changed my life. I realized that as Jesuits we had spent four hundred years teaching, assuming, that the rich people would be the creators, the builders of a new society. I realized that we were absolutely wrong. That these people will receive some training, some Christian feelings, but that they will not fight against a society that they are the builders of. I consider that only the oppressed can build a new society. The rich have no interest in a new society because they are the owners of the present society.
Then at the beginning of the 60s, before Medellin* and after, there was a generation breakthrough in the lives of many Jesuit priests, nuns and laymen in Latin America. We said what Monsignor Romero said’ “I was converted.” We found a new way of reading the gospel, a new way of praying, a new way of looking at the different values of society. That was a real conversion. We went to work with the poor, trying to convert the poor and the funny thing is that the poor converted us.
From 1969 to 1971 I did undergraduate studies, and later on post-graduate studies, at Cambridge University. It was a fascinating experience, but very hard because I had in my background in Latin America the sufferings of the people and here I was living in that incredible, marvelous town of Cambridge. I really had to convince myself every day that that was useful for the poor. And that was my full commitment. I was thirty years old and the only thing that forced me to carry on five years work in economics was my purpose to give a new tool, a new instrument, to the poor of this part of the world. And now I realize that they were five worthwhile years.

Kirkpatrick: Xabier, as an economist you have been the motivating force behind a research institute that is based here in Nicaragua but is for all Central America. At a workshop held in Holland, that group has recently (June of 1983) issued this Alternative Policy for Central America and the Caribbean. Could you talk about the main points in the Alternative.

Gorostiaga: The basic one is the logic of the majority. We realize that the logic of capital, the logic of transnational companies has created underdevelopment, exploitation, poverty, misery and nowadays, a social and political explosion. This logic doesn’t solve the problems of the majority in this part of the world. Everybody nowadays talks about the basic needs, but they don’t talk about a new logic. The basic needs can be accomplished through a very paternalistic way: “We the rich will provide some things.”

Kirkpatrick: Sounds like you’re talking about Reagan’s Caribbean Basin. . .

Gorostiaga: . . . Initiative. The key point of the logic of the majority is that we need a new historical subject to build a nation. And this historical subject will not be the rich, will not be the transnational companies, will not be the logic of capital, but will be the logic of the majority of people–illiterate, oppressed. Let’s put all the power, the resources, the land, the education, the health, in the service of the majority. I think that this is the key purpose of a social revolution. And I think the Sandinista Revolution has taken the logic of the majority as the basis of the new society. It is becoming a term of reference for many, many small poor countries of the Third World.
Our proposition is: Let’s satisfy basic needs. Let’s satisfy even artificial needs but with a logic of a new society, a much more egalitarian society. Instead of having a trickling down effect, let’s have a trickling up effect. Let’s start building an accumulation model, a growth model that is based on the needs of the population, the priorities of the majority. And we think that this is real democracy. Other-

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wise propaganda dominates the market, not the real needs of the population.

Non-alignment is another very important aspect in our Alternative. Our international relations have been linked to the United States in a sort of umbilical cord. Seventy to eighty percent of our technology, our production, our exports and imports were linked to the United States. Then the pattern of production and consumption, the model of United States’ society was transferred to the very poor, underdeveloped small countries.
When we are talking of non-alignment, we are talking of diversifying our dependence. We are very small, poor underdeveloped countries. We cannot be independent, but we can diversify our dependency and maintain one-quarter of our relations with the United States, one-quarter of our relationships with Europe, one-quarter of our relations with the rest of Latin American–especially with our big neighbors in Latin America such as Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia. And the quarter that is left is the non-aligned countries–the African and Asian countries (the South-South relation) and the socialist countries including Russia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria. Instead of walking with two legs–one big leg with the United States and one with the rest of the world–let’s have four legs and walk as a mature animal. This diversification of dependency is part of the non-alignment and it creates the basis for an international plurism and is the way in which we can break our dependency from the United States without breaking our friendly relations with it. We will treat the United states as we treat the rest of the world. We cannot be independent countries in the backyard of anybody.
I think there’s a possibility of having a much more friendly, efficient, productive relationship between these small countries of Central America and the US people. The problem is that you have your own oligarchy there that doesn’t agree with this model.

Kirkpatrick: Let’s talk about popular participation. What do you mean by democracy?

Gorostiaga: I don’t think there can be a human model, a Christian model, unless there’s a democratic model. What does democracy mean–in a very developed society such as the United States and in a very undeveloped society?
Democracy has an important component of economic participation. I don’t know why–and I asked David Rockefeller in our last meeting–in the Inter-American Dialogue–why democracy in the United States stops at the door of the factory. Because we think, in terms of the productive system, there is no democracy in the United States. We think that democracy has to start in the productive system. That is why in Nicaragua we have built 3,500 cooperatives. And the people decide what to produce, decide and discuss the cost of production, decide what will be the price. And there’s a tremendous fight between the ministry of planning and the cooperatives–that’s democracy.
The basis for democracy is literacy, the satisfaction of basic needs and a sort of national identity in order that elections will not legitimate oppression. In the last forty years in Central America we have had more elections than in any area of the world. Elections here have justified and legitimized oppression. Elections may be a tool of anything. When you have a terrorized country like El Salvador or Guatemala, elections will represent terror and fear.
Elections should be tools of democracy. First you have to build democracy in order that the elections can be a representation of democracy. In Nicaragua the constitution gives us six years (from 1979 to 1985) in which to hold elections. In the first year after the Revolution we began a literacy campaign. A year later we had decreased illiteracy from fifty-five percent to twelve percent. In our health campaign we have eradicted polio and almost eradicated yellow fever and malaria. We have been able to decrease infant mortality forty percent without doctors, without hospitals–only through popular mobilization. Literacy and malnutrition are not technical or financial problems, they are political problems.
For me it is a legitimate sign of the democracy of a country when the government provides 150,000 machine guns to defend the country, the people take the arms and there is no shooting, no killing in the streets. The people return the arms to the government after training. Can you imagine Pinochet distributing arms to the Chilean people? This is the only country in Latin America where the US Ambassador can walk at night without bodyguards.
At the moment I consider, without any doubt, that the main enemy of democracy in this country is the administration of Ronald Reagan. The war might make it impossible to create the basic conditions for elections. It is a very difficult problem to solve.
You ask me, “Is the Sandinista Revolution a Marxist revolution?” I will say, “No.” “Is it a Christian revolution?” I will say, “No.” “Is it a nationalist revolution?” I will say, “No.” Because it is a mixture of these three. This is a very nationalist revolution Sandino symbolized the nationalism of this revolution. Obviously, this is a Marxist revolution in the sense that a lot of Marxist thinking is going on, and not the European Marxist thinking of Cold War, a much more Creole Marxism–much more Latin American, with lot of indigenous roots in the culture and history of Latin America and with lot of Latin American thinking–philosophers, poets. This is a Marxism of poets. And this is also a Christian revolution.

Kirkpatrick: This is such a central fact that I am surprised that the press and the politicians of the US ignore it.

Gorostiaga: It is very good when thousands of Chris-

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tians from all over the world come to this country and they see the vitality and the originality of this church. The new ways in which the people pray, the new way in which the church is organized, the new role of women within the church, the new role of laymen within the church. Obviously, some people in the church, some members of the hierarchy, see all this as heresy. But I think that what is going on here is the maturity of these Christian people who are very poor and they are getting a new maturity in the Christianity. This revolution has been one of the most important spiritual experiences of my life. I think that the kingdom of God is not something that will happen in heaven, but something that we have to start building on this earth as the human beings that we are.

Kirkpatrick: In this report on an Alternative Proposal you state that “the United States commitment to preserving its hegemony in the region has given the struggle for social justice in Central America an anti-imperialist character.” What you’ve just described, will the United States agree to it?

Gorostiaga: I would say that the majority of the people in the United States will agree if they get knowledge of what we mean with that. These countries of Central America are the countries in the world that have suffered more intervention from the United States than from any other part of the world. Twenty-eight military interventions. In the case of Nicaragua we were occupied twenty-five years by US marines. Then, they left us the gift of Somoza.
The breakthrough in Central America is a historical breakthrough. The small countries in Central America are fighting for independence, for sovereignty, are trying to break down this model of banana republics. The problem is that this social revolution against the five percent rich people, the oligarchies in these countries, in order to create a much more equal and just society, at the same time it is a social revolution, it is a geopolitical revolution. Because this five percent, the oligarchies in these countries, the military are the natural allies of the US interests in the region.
We will not become part of any bloc. Not the Soviet Union, not any bloc.

Kirkpatrick: How can you avoid that?

Gorostiaga: That’s difficult. But this is our definition, our project. And I will say that the Soviet Union at the moment has been generous. Cuba has been generous with us. The pressures that these governments have created on Nicaragua is minimal, I will say nil, in relation to the pressure that has been created by the United States, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund.

Kirkpatrick: Xabier, if we go back to the years before 1979, I knew Nicaraguan people in exile and others who were studying the Bible. It was easy to find signs of hope for the struggle in those years because they could see in the biblical message that God is on the side of the oppressed. Then in 1979 the victory came here and in my several visits in the two or three years after that it was so easy to feel the joy and exuberance. The people seemed to feel that the victory gave vindication to their hope. Now, it’s a very different situation. We’re under the pressure of aggression from the United States. Would there be in the biblical message any sign of hope if the United States overthrew the revolution?

Gorostiaga: I recommend you do two things that helped me very much. The first would be to go to a militia training and see how the militia does the military exercises. Look at the eyes of these people. Do you see hate in the eyes of these people or happiness, confidence, hope. Do you see camaraderie? You see how the social relations change in militia training. And how the people in the middle of this very difficult situation, this US intervention, are happy, they don’t fear. They are confident that they can destroy an intervention in this country.
I don’t consider that this revolution can be destroyed at this moment. This revolution may be corrupted in some years. The US marines may come here. They may occupy Managua. The majority of the people will go to the mountains and a fight of three, four years will occur and after that a victory will occur. My fear is not US intervention. My fear is the problems of internal corruption. That this revolution will lose the originality, the freshness, the commitment to the people, the participatory democracy. I fear the US marines may produce a lot of suffering and destruction. But I feel that this revolution cannot be destroyed as a social revolution. Maybe, as it is happening nowadays, Reagan is consolidating this revolution, and unifying the people. Polarizing the people that are not happy with the revolution–the rich, some members of the Church hierarchy. But I will say that a substantial majority, from seventy-five to ninety percent, are behind this revolution.

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The problem of a revolution is that it is human. The problem of a revolution is internal, another story.

Kirkpatrick: So this is not the kingdom of God?

Gorostiaga: No. It may be part of the process to build the kingdom of God. And I believe in that. But the sin is within us. But it may be part of the process of building justice, and equality among us and with the rest of the world.

Kirkpatrick: What would you say to Christians within the United States?

Gorostiaga: That this is an incredible opportunity to establish Christian relations between your people and our people. I consider what is happening in Central America something very important for the United States. I consider that the Reagan Administration and some economic and political leaders in the United States are trying to cut the relations between this new phenomenon and the US people. Distorting this phenomenon. Presenting this revolution as totalitarian, as Marxism-Leninism in the worst sense of the phrase. Because I consider that maybe for the first time there is the possibility of having Christian relations between the churches here and the churches of the United States without paternalism. And more than that, maybe even a teaching position from our side with relation to the US church. Transforming the old relation of colonialism. I think the vitality of these churches, the conversion of these churches is essential for the United States. And also, I think this is biblical, as you have said, the poor, the rest of Israel is here. Maybe in twenty years you will have to come back to missionize, but at the moment I think we have a role to preach to the rest of the world, to Europe and the United States. I think that the genuine Christianity is here, more than in the very developed rich nations of the world.

Recommended Reading

Ministers of God, Ministers of the People: Testimonies of Faith from Nicaragua by Teofilo Cabestrero. Published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545. Interviews with Ernesto Cardenal, Fernando Cardenal and Miguel d’Escoto.

Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution by Margaret Randall. Published by New Star Books, Vancouver, Canada.

On his most recent visit to Nicaragua (November, 1983) Dow Kirkpatrick spoke with Xabier Gorostiaga, chief economist of the Sandinista Government, Jesuit priest and head of the Central American Institute for Economic and Social Research. In the following interview, Gorostiaga talks about the formative influences upon his commitment to Central America and about the Alternative Policy for Central America and the Caribbean, a report recently issued by the Institute as a result of an international policy workshop held in The Hague during the summer of 1983.

John Egerton. Generations: An American Family. University Press of Kentucky, 1983.

By Will D. Campbell

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 23-24

For too long we have cataloged, systematized and categorized the places and ways of learning. And too often we neglect, ignore or fail to see resources near at hand.

I sometimes spy on the Steeples by riding around in one city or another surveying what the outside billboards and electronic marquees are promoting. Aerobic dancing, weight watchers clubs, and Mother’s day out programs have been big the past few years. A few of them, the better ones I suppose, announce that the Koreans also worship there, though at a different time. (I saw one with the words: TEMPORARY WORSHIP CENTER. I guess I knew what it meant but it seemed sort of funny.) The other day I was riding from Fancy Gap, Virginia to Mt. Juliet, Tennessee and asked my friend and driver to get off the big highway and drive through one of the cities between Fancy Gap and Mt. Juliet so I could do my research on the billboards in church yards. “Marriage Enrichment Seminar” was the winner. Two were announcing a series of lectures on Human Sexuality, to be given by someone with several degrees behind his name, the most of which I didn’t recognize. I kept wondering where they got their material, who the experts in those fields are.

I have never been invited to conduct a seminar on marriage enrichment nor give a lecture on human sexuality. It is highly doubtful that I ever will. But if I should I would not begin by researching the materials listed in the latest cataloging of those subjects. I would begin by reading a passage from a book I have just finished. Generations: An American Family, by John Egerton, a man no more known for his expertise in those areas than I. His words I would read are of a passionate love scene. Two lovers are lying in bed, lying close together. It is a balmy Kentucky evening and the room is dark and quiet. Suddenly the woman speaks.

“Burnam, are you awake? I love you.
There was no answer. Addie spoke louder: “Burnam? I said I love you.”
“Huh? What’d you say?”
“You can’t hear thunder! I SAID I LOVE YOU! I never did love anyone but you.”
After a pause, Burnam replied, “I love you too, Addie. I must have loved you right from the first. You’re the only one I ever did ask to marry me.”

I would read those words because this marriage must have been enriched from the beginning or gained enrichment somewhere along the way for it had lasted seventy-nine years. The groom was 106 years old and the bride ninety-eight. And certainly it was not devoid of romance and sexuality. What could be more romantic than a wedding the day after the first flying machine was launched at Kitty Hawk? And by the time their thirteenth child was born one would begin to assume that a healthy and conjunctional sexuality was part of the union.

In the Seminar I would lead the participants back over the years as Egerton does, across peaceful Bluegrass landscapes and hostile mountains and rivers, out of the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina, over the Cumberland Gap and on into Cranks Creek in what is now Harlan County, Kentucky where the marriage began and never ended. For though the clinicians. finally declared one of the lovers dead it is not within their power to say the marriage is over. To Addie, Burnam is still “my husband.” Not “late” nor “departed.” Present Tense. These two knew what it meant to be “married.” John Egerton has written it down and I would use it in my seminar on Marriage Enrichment as genuine, unscientific reality.

Or “Death and Dying.” That’s big these days and appeared on one of the churchyard signs. Discussions groups gather. Theological schools offer courses on it and preachers preach on it.

“Everyone has told me how sick you’ve been, ” I said to him. “I’m glad you’re better. It’s a good sign that you’re able to sit up.”
He shook his head. “Uh-uhm. I’m not going to get well. It’s time for me to go home now, John. I ‘m ready to go. I feel like I’ve done all I can do in this world. I thank God for letting me keep my mind right up to the end, but I don’t want to stay any longer. I ‘m getting out of life now, before I get old and lose my mind.”

A 106-year-old man is grateful that he will never be old, knowing that the mind is the core and compass of age and life itself. John Egerton is not the detached and objective journalist. He has come to love these two as he loves his own flesh and blood. He tries to redirect his friend’s thoughts. They talk of other things, tell funny stories and look at the finished book John has brought him, a book two lives spent more than a century in writing. All that time Burnam has resisted death when it threatened, clinging tenaciously to life and living, missing none of it, winning out over diseases, pestilence, tragedy and misfortune of many kinds. Now a nurse comes into the room, smiling, humoring, trying gently to win his acceptance of the pills she has brought him, pills gladly accepted in other years and times.

“No more medicine! he exclaimed. “I won’t take any more! No more pills! I’m done with pills! They’ve been a curse to me! I’m trying to die and go home! You tell that doctor not to send me any more medicine.”

His tone is neither hostile nor maudlin. But emphatic, final and convincing. He continues to talk to his friend and scribe when the nurse is gone.

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“I said to her, ‘Addie, I’m ready to go home, ready to die. Are you ready to go with me?’ She said she wasn’t. So I asked her, ‘If I go on ahead and then call you to join me, will you come?’ And she told me she would. That put my mind at ease. I feel a lot better now, just knowing that she would come if I sent for her.”

That was almost a year ago and Burnam has not yet sell for his beloved Addie. But we know that it won’t be long.

“Death and Dying.” A course offered by Burnam and Addie Ledford. I’m glad I signed up for it Genuine, unscientific reality.

Despite all that, to suggest that Generations is a book about Marriage Enrichment, Human Sexuality or Death and Dying would be to deceive you. It is not. Yet if we have ears to hear and eyes to see all those things are there.

And a lot more. Egerton started out to write a simple story of a little known American family. He has left us with a complex, detailed and compelling history of the nation. While about it he learned that the history of America is not the story of generals and admirals, famous battles in big and little wars, assassinated Presidents, Monroe Doctrines, Louisiana Purchases, invasions of Grenada. It is the stories of the Ledfords of the land.

But more than history. Sociology and Anthropology. Theology and Geography. Conflict Resolution and Inter-group Relations. Civics and Republican Politics. Philosophy and Folk Lore. None of those things show up in the table of contents or index. It is not the kind of book that needs an index. For it is a Romance.

Read it aloud to someone you love if you like to see her laugh. But don’t read it aloud to someone you love if it bothers you to see him cry. There is a lot of both in this good book.

Will D. Campbell live in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. He is the author of Brother to a Dragonfly and The Glad River.