Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South

The Last Word

2010-05-02T06:00:00.002-05:00

"You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

I said that plenty of times, when I was a bartender in the 1990s. This time, I'm saying it to close this project, officially. The money is gone. The trips are all done. The videos and interviews are posted. This is blog #200. I have completed the post-fellowship paperwork and sent it back to the Surdna Foundation.

And while I'm on that last subject: Thanks, Surdna Foundation, for supporting my efforts on this project. You taught me some new things about art production, arts education, and about myself at the convening in New York City last October, and this Arts Teacher Fellowship allowed me to root out some old demons and expose them as what they were: little more than monsters under the bed. When I pulled the bed skirt up and looked, there was nothing there to be afraid of, just some old and dusty and forgotten remnants of by-gone days.

And thanks to everyone who participated. And to everyone who offered to. I couldn't make it everywhere, but as we say in Alabama, I put a dent in it.

Of course, there is still a book coming. I'm writing it now, don't know when it will be done . . . but I'm not one to start things and not finish them, so it show up eventually.

As Robbie Robertson said, as he walked off stage in The Last Waltz, "G'night! G'bye!"

Back to Lake Martin, and to Oskar's

2010-05-01T19:15:00.003-05:00

I have no clue why but it seemed fitting to have the last trip be to Oskar's Cafe in Dadeville, a seafood-shack-turned-destination on Lake Martin. The first time I went there, it was a dump; we sat in the back at what I remember to be a picnic table (though maybe it wasn't) and drank beer and ate fried fish, shrimp, and oysters. That was a couple of years ago. Now it's nicer than that. Notice that I didn't say that it's nice; I said that it's nicer. Tonight, I feasted on fried catfish and fried shrimp, fried dill pickles and cole slaw, and washed it all down with a Budweiser. Good eatin'. I've never left Oskar's hungry. There's only one other thing worth telling about Oskar's -- Oskar is a woman, not a man, a feisty redhead. Once you meet her, you'll believe she's named Oskar. If you're in eastern Alabama, stop there.

Tonight, we're at Lake Martin for the first time this season. We spent the day sweeping up dead bugs, cleaning spider carcasses out of dark corners, and airing the place out. I cooled off some Sierra Nevada Kellerweis and Dixie Blackened Voodoo for me, and some Abita Purple Haze for my wife. I don't let my kids drink beer, not even at the lake, so I didn't have to worry about getting them any. The sun is setting as I write this. I have a belly full of fried deliciousness, a bunch of good brew in the fridge, and my sweet wife to keep me company after the kids are in bed. What more could a boy from Alabama ask for. G'night.

Martin's Restaurant

2010-04-28T21:00:00.001-05:00

Tonight, I took my kids to Martin's Restaurant to eat dinner. Martin's has been around since 1948, and where it is now is the third location. When I was a kid, my mom used to take me to eat there, when it was located in a smaller place about a hundred yards away from where it is now. Martin's specialty is fried chicken. And for my money, their fried chicken is best -- at least when my mother's fried chicken isn't available, which is all the time these days.

Martin's is a home-style place, meat-and-three vegetables, waitresses that call you "Honey" or "Sugar," wacky folksy art on the walls, you name it. The place is old-school and it always has been. First thing you get is the "whachallwantuhdrank?" All one word. The cornbread and biscuits on the table after you order. There used to be ads on the paper place mats and on the menu, but there aren't anymore. Gave you something to read while you ate your cornbread. Then a plate heaped with food. Tonight mine was fried chicken, collard greens, fried green tomatoes, and butter peas. My kids split a kids plate that would have been enough for a lot of adults. We got a fried cherry pie on the way out. Sweet tea all around. And the check was about $13 before tip.

Every Southern city has the restaurant that's so good, and everybody knows to get there right when they open if you want a seat at all. I remember when I was out in the Black Belt last September and I asked somebody where to eat, she said, "Faunsdale Cafe, but you better get there early, if you want to eat." It was the only restaurant for miles out there. Well, that's Martin's, if you're in Montgomery.

When I was first on my own, right after moving away from home, I used to go there and eat dinner, because one plate of food would last me two meals and it only cost about seven bucks. So I could eat pretty fat for dinner and the next day's lunch for about what a fast food value meal costs. I've got a lot of good memories about Martin's. And now taking my kids there, I intend to have even more.

The Last Video: Travels #23: Huntsville

2010-04-25T20:09:00.001-05:00

The final video is posted on the fdickson channel on YouTube. This one is Travels #23: Huntsville.

The Map

2010-04-24T12:24:00.002-05:00

Here is a county by county map of Alabama, with the ones I visited during this project highlighted in red.

Gambling: The Shit Hits the Fan

2010-04-24T07:32:00.003-05:00

The below-linked article, posted on al.com from the Birmingham News, explains that a whole passel of Alabama legislators just got subpoenas to appear before a grand jury about alleged corruption in the attempted passing of a gambling bill in Alabama this past year. (It sounds extra shady when the words "alleged" and "attempted" get thrown in, doesn't it?) If you paid attention to anything about Alabama in the last year, you will know that the two big stories have been the University of Alabama's national championship football team and the political fighting over gambling's legality in the state. Thankfully, even though I'm not an Alabama fan, I will attest that the prior story had a happy ending. This one, apparently, will not.

In recent years, federal corruption cases against Alabama politicians have been prominent stories. Former governor Don Siegelman went to federal prison over a corruption charge regarding former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy and some rigged appointments to state hospital boards. Siegelman has since been released pending an appeal. More recently, former Birmingham mayor Larry Langford went down over stashes of cash in his freezer that had come from bribes, all amidst Birmingham's high-profile municipal bankruptcy. It appears that more indictments are coming.

As many times as I have proposed that purging the legislature of incumbents, thus eliminating their long-standing personal problems with each other, would be a good way to move Alabama forward. I never thought that it might happen like this. Also, because much of the support for gambling legalization came from the Democrats, this may well contribute the further "reddening" of Alabama, which will mean bad things may be to come for Alabama's poor people, public schools, and environmental conditions We shall see . . . .

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2010/04/dozens_including_alabama_lawma.html

Taking the Cake: Tim James for Governor

2010-04-22T15:56:00.005-05:00

This video posted on YouTube by gubernatorial candidate Tim James -- the son of former governor Fob James -- proposes the short-sighted "English Only" plan as a cost-saving measure.

This might be a good idea, if some of the biggest businesses to locate in Alabama in recent years weren't headquartered in South Korea and Germany, countries where English isn't the main language.

A Chronicle of Alabama in NEW South

2010-04-21T10:39:00.004-05:00

This term, the "New South," nests precariously between being an anomaly and an ideal, between a cruel joke and a wild hope, between a vicious lie and a half-hearted effort at improvement. As far as I know, the term came about from newspaper editor Henry Grady. He was trying to say that the South had changed . . . and that it should even more. Of course it became abundantly clear after Reconstruction was over that yes, the South had changed, but had only become less overt and more insidious in its racist ways. The next incarnation of the "New South" came after World War I, then again after the Depression, then again after the Civil Rights movement. The last time it seems to have stuck. Though nobody would surmise that our old problems have been solved completely.

I hesitated to subtitle this project with the term "New South." I don't like the historical connotations of its repeated failure to live up to its promise. But I do agree with people like Glen Browder who say that we are moving forward -- maybe just inching forward, but moving forward nonetheless.

There is an old saying, "Many hands make light work." I liken the changing of Alabama to moving a house. If you strap one guy to it and make him pull, he could work all day every day but it will probably never move. But if he goes around its foundation and loosens it up . . . and then if you add more people who are pulling . . . eventually slow progress will be made. And if you add even more people to pull, and the right leverage mechanisms are put into place, those people can move that house, without the help of a crane or a truck.

Alabama is the same way. If enough people sit back suspiciously and full of cynicism, saying "They'll never move that house," then those cynical people are probably right. But if the people who want to see something change will get onboard, abandon apathy and cynicism, and work for change, it can happen. The Civil Rights movement proved that.

I was pleased to hear it and didn't expect it, when I watched Conan O'Brien's last episode of The Tonight Show and he said that nothing pisses him off more than cynicism, because cynicism is completely useless. He said, if you're not going to work to do good things, then get out of the way for people who are, and don't bash them for doing it. He said that people who spent their energy impeding good work are the worst kind. Alabama is a lot like that, only it is masked by terms like "conservative" and "Alabama values." These coded messages mean: "We're not going to change anything." and "We're going to stand defiant against anything different from us." It's cynicism. In Alabama, we watch systemic failures in our state and refuse to change, and then many Alabamians bash the people who try to change it.

I wanted to write about the things I have been seeing for a long time -- a real "New South." I have known lots of people, born and raised in Alabama, who are not those cynical people. They are musicians and skaters and entrepreneurs, writers and teachers and organizers, artists and librarians and historians, architects and preachers and photographers, divers and kayakers and meth-lab busters. I have known these people who are working not to let those cynics ruin this state. But you don't hear much about them, because the national news media only wants to talk about our football teams, our corrupt politicians, and our weirdo-freaks. Well, I don't hear much about the good people of Alabama either, so spent a year out looking for them, and remembering the ones I had known for years, and thinking of a way to tell more people about them. That's the "New South" I'm talking about -- a place full of progressive people who want to leave all the bullshit of the past behind, but nobody has organized them all yet.

Huntsville

2010-04-20T13:00:00.001-05:00

This was the last one, the final trip in this year-long odyssey of exploring Alabama. I finished reading books weeks ago, and this trip, with its one scheduled interview, was the one outstanding task on the slate.

Huntsville is a city I had never been to. Well, at least not as an adult. Something in me thinks that I went on a field trip when I was a kid to the Space & Rocket Center, but I'm not completely sure. I don't have any solid memories but I think I went. The only other chance meeting with Huntsville is that my wife has a cousin who used to live in nearby Madison for a while, and we went to visit her once about ten years ago, but that's about it. This is a city I knew almost nothing about.

Huntsville barely gets mentioned in the state histories until Werner von Braun based his federally funded space program in the city, mainly because of Redstone Arsenal located nearby. As a result this city, which during periods has been larger than Montgomery, the capitol, has gone through booms and busts associated with defense contracts and aeronautics funding. Someone told me recently -- and I don't know if this is true -- that Huntsville has more Ph.D.s per capita than any other city in the nation.

I had to scrap my plan of coming up on Huntsville via a very rural route (for reasons that I'll explain in another blog post), in favor of a more mainstream route. I had originally planned on taking Highway 231 out of Wetumpka, traveling north through Sylacauga and up to Talladega, before threading through northwestern Alabama mainly on Highway 431. But I ended up taking that desolate stretch of I-65 northbound, right through the center of the state. I-65 between Birmingham and where I-565 splits off to Huntsville is a corridor that runs through the Appalachian foothills past almost no towns at all. Most of the names on the signs are not to be seen from the highway: Blount Springs, Empire, Hanceville. Only Cullman shows any semblance of life visible from the interstate, which is why I wanted to avoid this route.

North Alabama is my missing link in this project. I have not spent any time in northern Alabama in my life. I once went on a camping trip with friends to Dismals Canyon near a town called Phil Campbell in northwestern Alabama, back in the mid-1990s. Dismals Canyon is reportedly one of the only sites in the world with naturally occurring glow-worms. But there are so many places I have never been: Fort Payne, which calls itself the Sock Capitol of the World, and Scottsboro, the site of the infamous lynching. I have never been to Muscle Shoals, where so many famous bands, like the Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd, recorded great albums.

After going there, Huntsville strikes me as two different places at once. My hotel lay on University Boulevard, a thoroughfare lined with every national chain you can think of: Target, Olive Garden, Holiday Inn . . . miles of suburban sprawl along a three-lane highway full of too many stoplights. But the other Huntsville, the one I encountered on Sunday was altogether different. After a good breakfast at Mullins Restaurant, where I interviewed Wyatt Akin about his Skate Alabama project, he suggested heading down to Maple Hill Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Alabama, which sprawled for acres, too. And the nearby Twickenham homes were old and majestic, giant mansions piled side by side on curving, hilly streets.

I'm glad Wyatt suggested taking the scenic tour of the older part of Huntsville. I was prepared to come home and write something unflattering about a city where all I saw was a bland array of tech-company office buildings and chain restaurants, with the only bright spot being a glimmer of downtown nightlife. Passing by one alleyway bar on Saturday night, we heard a cover band blasting out a rendition of "Lay Down Sally" but decided not to stop. Huntsville seemed like a place I needed to spend more time to really understand, a widely spread-out city with way too many smart folks for their own good. When I inquired to Wyatt in the interview about how Huntsville seemed to be largely absent from the state's history, he replied that it was a town that more heavily relied on federal government decisions than state government decisions. Being from Montgomery myself, that's a little hard to fathom, but I think he had a point.

Gambling: Pushing the Issue Too Far?

2010-04-19T21:05:00.002-05:00

The below-linked article from the New York Times (April 18) is a nice summation to the whole gambling debacle that has taken place in Alabama over the last year or so. The end result: no laws have passed, almost nothing has changed for the average Alabamian, and now a slew of legislators are under criminal investigation by the US Justice Department. Remember what I wrote several months ago, that national news sources only ever cover sports, political corruption and freaks when it comes to Alabama . . . ? Well, they finally left the Amy Bishop story alone. Now this. Though I will grant that when the feds reveal an investigation that may lead to indicting state lawmakers on criminal charges, it is kind of newsworthy.

The New York Times does a good job of reporting this story. The writer's explanation of the events gets remarkably close to the truth of the matter. We even get a mention of Bud's, a bar near my house where I once hung out a little bit in my younger days, but which is now apparently the regular haunt of some legislators after-hours. They also do a good job of relaying that, now that the investigation is going on, a lot of legislators are scared shitless to vote Yes on the gambling bill, because they don't want to be seen as someone who might be guilty of corruption.

It's hard to tell which part of all this is political chicanery. It is a little fishy that when Roger Bedford came back after the last failure with a bingo bill that could actually pass, the feds showed up and started laying out possible charges. Keeping in mind that Gov. Bob Riley is a Republican who is die-hard against gambling and that most of the suspects in the investigation are Democrats who are die-hard for gambling, that might also be fishy . . . if the President wasn't a Democrat, too. What seems likely is that someone somewhere has gotten too big for his britches, and now federal law enforcement is stepping in to stop something. But do ordinary Alabamians have any clue what is going on? No.

What this means for all of us is simple: the big boys keep on in-fighting while the rest of us try to move on. The gambling operations, which are in the some of the poorest counties in Alabama, like Lowndes, Macon, and Greene, continue to be closed. Their employees continue to do without their pay checks. The people who never did gamble still don't. The people who really want to still do, just outside of state lines. I just hope the kids in other states appreciate the good education they are getting from all of the money Alabamians leave for them . . . it's good manners to say thank you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/us/18bingo.html

The Alabama Book Festival

2010-04-19T19:47:00.000-05:00

The fifth annual Alabama Book Festival was held in Montgomery on April 17. As usual the weather held up, quite warm but not hot, and the plethora of usual suspects were all attendance. Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg was wandering around, and Daniel Wallace, the author of the immensely popular novel-turned-film Big Fish spoke later in the day. Lots more local favorites were on the bill, too: fiction writers Kirk Curnutt and Julia Oliver, journalist Frye Galliard, and historian Mary Ann Neely. I ran into my friend Irene Latham who was speaking about her new book, Leaving Gee's Bend. While talking to David Braly I found out that my friend Joel Brouwer, a poet who teaches at the MFA program at the University of Alabama, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Amos Kennedy was there too, churning out prints and taunting the crowd.

This event is a lot like Alabama, a pleasant mix of old and new, of stereotype and originality. Where the Southern storytellers are counterbalanced by Jeanie Thompson's impeccable taste in poets for the Poetry Tent, the traditional and the modern commingle really nicely.

I always bring my students out to the festival, mainly under the guise of manning a display table of our works, but moreover to have them out and about in the festival, meeting people and hearing readings. One of my students, whose poetry placed in the High School Literary Arts Awards, got to read some of her poetry during the noon hour slot, a coveted time to read. But really what I want them to see is that "Southern literature" is alive and well, evolving into what the South is now.

On the friday before the festival, we had poets Sean Hill and DéLana Dameron come to class for part of the afternoon. Really cool people. DéLana did a pantoum exercise with the students, then Sean did a dice-rolling poetry game where chance decides the fate of the poem.

I spoke for about fifteen or twenty minutes about my book, The Life and Poetry of John Beecher, during the 10:00-10:30 time slot. Unfortunately the talk wasn't very well attended, but I'm trying to look on the bright side: making onto the schedule is a triumph in itself. Lots of writers around the state would kill to be on the schedule.

If you're interested in the Alabama Book Festival, check out the website, or become a fan of Facebook . . . pick your preferred digital media. Even in Alabama, we do have the internet.

The Alabama Shakespeare Festival

2010-04-15T16:10:00.005-05:00

It may be hard for some people to believe but Montgomery, Alabama is the home to the nation's second largest Shakespeare Festival theater. (The largest is in Oregon.) The Alabama Shakespeare Festival -- ASF, as it's called locally, or just "Shakespeare" -- sits in one of two prominent positions in Blount Cultural Park -- the other prominent position being the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. "Red" Blount was a Montgomery businessman, a multi-millionaire construction magnate, a former US Postmaster General, and all-around philathropist. The land for Blount Cultural Park was at one time what you would call the "backyard" of his estate, and he built the theater for ASF in his wife's honor: the Carolyn Blount Theater.

ASF has been a big part of "my" Montgomery. It was built in the 1980s when I was in elementary school, and I can remember taking class field trips at St. James to see productions of Shakespeare's "MacBeth" and "King Lear" through their daytime SchoolFest program, which allows teachers and students to come see productions for a drastically reduced ticket price. This program is still in operation, and I took my students today to see a new Southern Writers Project play called "Fall of the House," based loosely on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe.

But for me, "Shakespeare" was a part of my life in other ways, too. The steps leading from the theater down to the pond in front and the amphitheater area in front of the the museum across park were favorite spots for my friends and I to sit and play guitars on warm nights. The dark and expansive park has a hundred nooks and crannies for young couples to hide in. On sunny afternoons, I have gone a thousand times to throw scraps of bread to the ducks and swans that live on and around the ponds. I have more memories than I can count of the place, from my boyhood in the 1980s until now when my wife and I have taken out two children to play there. Sadly, the safe environment and regular stream of charitable picnickers has caused a too-large and often aggressive population of birds, and the last time we went we had to pick up the children and make a run for it!

Additionally, ASF has meaning for me, because of my past work in the theater and because my older brother worked there for twelve years in the scene shop, building the sets. He spent the last few years as the Shop Foreman, in charge of shop. As for me, in addition to my other theater work, mostly tag-along jobs with my brother, I was in a production of "Titus Andronicus" in the summer of 1989, when they needed two "kagebito" for a post-apocalyptic interpretation of the Shakespeare classic. We dressed in ninja suits and stayed on stage until we moved scenery between scenes.

Not many people would guess that Montgomery was home to this impressive theatrical experience. Every time I read the program for a show, the actors' and actresses' credits are from well-known TV shows, Broadway, and other nationally recognized theaters. But we do.

Another reflection

2010-04-11T21:16:00.004-05:00

Though I don't know completely what to do with all of this knowledge and experience that I have been storing up for the best part of the last year, I do know that I am closer to Alabama than I was before, closer than most people I know. Rarely do we take the time to intentionally experience the things right in front of our faces, which I what I set out to do.

Last year, when I was showing a colleague the list of Surdna fellowship projects that were accepted along with mine, he looked at and said, "Dude, you're an idiot! These other people are going to Africa and Spain . . . and you volunteered to drive around the place you already live. For a year!" I saw his point -- he was joking and he wasn't, too. A lot of people I have talked to, both friends and people I met during this project, wondered why I was doing this. Sometimes, so did I.

These days, I have been listening to music a lot more lately. In the hubbub of raising kids and teaching, living the life of a responsible adult (cough, cough), one of the things I have sacrificed that I used to really enjoy is listening music. Music has always meant a lot to me. When I was younger and single, I used to spend hours listening to music. I used to put on an album or tape, and put on my headphones or sometimes just set the speakers on the either side of my head, and listen, for hours. I miss doing that, and I have missed it a lot lately, now that I find myself more and more often resorting to simple pleasures to relieve the stresses of daily life. I have started again making time to sit and listen to some of my favorite music.

Probably my favorite song of all time is The Byrds' version of "Wasn't Born to Follow," a tinny country-rock/folk song, with a Moog synthesizer break in the middle, whose last lines are:

. . . she may beg,

she may plead,

she may argue with her logic,

and mention all the things I lose,

that really have no value,

in the end she will surely know

I wasn't born to follow.

I have always liked that song, because it suits me -- the song, laid back and without anger or discontent or malice, says: I don't intend to live the way you think I should, because I am going to live the way I want to. And that side of me comes out in projects like this one . . . A lot of people seem to have wondered why I was traveling around Alabama, talking to people and seeing things, driving back roads and just looking around. Because I wanted to, that's why. If someone else doesn't want to do what I did, then don't. I say that without anger or malice. I did this for the same reason that I wrote books about Clark Walker and John Beecher. Because I wanted to and I believe in what I was doing. For the same reason that I have continued working on the book of Southern memoirs (that is now under contract with McFarland) even after the scholarly reviewers for The University of Virginia Press and the University Press of Mississippi totally bashed both my work and me. Because I want to and I believe in what I am doing. And that same part of me will cause me to write (and finish) this book about Alabama that I am working on now, the follow-up to all this traveling around. And all the people in Kingdom Come may wonder why I bother, or tell me about how I don't do things the way other people do, and the manuscript may get a few rejections letters, including some nasty ones. But I believe in what I am doing, so I intend to continue doing it.

Applying my own teachings to myself

2010-04-06T20:47:00.001-05:00

I push my creative writing students to write, just write, just sit down and do it, because "Writing is a tool for thinking," as one of the NCTE's Guidelines for the Teaching of Writing states. Teachers call it "reflective writing" -- to do something or read something, then write about it as a way to tell ourselves what we think. It seems strange, the idea that we might not know what we think until we tell ourselves. But it's true.

As I begin to reflect on my experience of exploring Alabama, I can say in all earnest that my mind is weary of the subject. I have been immersing myself in this subject for almost ten months now. Traveling, alone, then coming home to work some more on prepping some of the sights and sounds for other people to take in. Spending hours in the car, alone, often with the windows down, on remote roads in places I had never been. Listening to podcasts and reading books, getting into other people's ideas about this subject: Alabama. So what do I now think?

I think a few Alabamians sold our souls to way too many devils long ago, and that we are now begging not to have the sins of the fathers visited on the sons. No matter how many books I read or people I have talked to, I have not been able to understand why so many leaders and politicians in Alabama dug in so deeply to preserve a racist social system that was clearly destroying so much that could have been good. I get that the plantation owners wanted the free labor from their slaves, but why did they let that drive them so far as to engage in an un-winnable Civil War, to defy the kind and charitable principles of their religion, and end up totally annihilated politically and economically? Same with the Civil Rights movement/Wallace years. All the accounts I read said the same thing, that Wallace knew he was only stalling the inevitable, that he couldn't deliver what he was promising. But their hardheadedness set our state up to be so many negative things: a place with an abundance of poorly educated people who attract low-wage, exploitative, outside-ownership industries, a place that sells its abundant land and rivers as dumping grounds for other states' garbage, and a place where the governmental system is so ossified that substantial change is almost impossible. And for what? To gain what? Nothing, and often worse than nothing. Our unemployment rate is still among the highest in the nation, our already poorly funded schools are getting cut even more since unemployment shot up, we refused charter schools then lost out on "Race to the Top," and also shunned revenue possibilities from gambling, again.

But Alabama is not all bad either. A "place" is more than its politics, its schools, or its statistical standing. Somehow, within the worst possible circumstances, Alabamians keep on trucking. These proud people -- who are among the least educated, most obese, and most exploited in the nation -- exist daily in a complex culture that is mired in delicious food, quirky characters, deep-seated cultural misunderstandings, violence and murder, sadistic humor, great storytelling, and beautiful landscapes. Why else stay here? If the big picture is the worst case scenario, then the day-to-day living is among the best . . . except for the violence/murder thing, of course. However, I have always said, people are whole lot nicer if they know someone will kill them for doing wrong. Just the Misfit says in "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

I thought, when I began this project, that I was going to figure out Alabama. But Alabama beat me, hands-down, pretty quickly. Alabama knocked me out in the first round and put me in my place. For any modern-day Carl Carmer or wanna-be James Agee who might want to come down and figure us out, to explain it to the rest of the "civilized" world . . . good luck!

Another aspect of this project was teaching myself about new media. I almost died a few times when I lost control of my car on some rural road while trying to take video and drive at the same time. I don't think it's a skill I'll continue to use, or teach. About podcasting, it was okay . . . I like interviewing people, but I found that, when someone knows it is going to be published, he or she clams up and gives very guarded answers. So, I doubt if I will ever become a podcaster. But I will teach some of the skills I learned in video and sound, just the safe ones. On the flip side, I will admit that I have liked blogging, much more than I thought I would. It always goes back to the writing for me.

Reading: Finished "The South's New Racial Politics"

2010-04-05T16:00:00.003-05:00

I finished reading Glen Browder's book. Although it wasn't terribly impressive in scope, it was informative and thought-provoking overall. The beginning sections made it seem as though he was going to lay out some really heavy truth that no one had ever thought of before, but it seemed to me more like he gave a fairly systematic account of what everyone already knew down here.

Looking back through my marked up copy at my underlinings and margin notes, I noticed that most of the things I marked as really important were block quotes Browder provided from other sources, but here is one of his own writing near the end that struck me:

The new order [in Southern politics] is a more conventional operation, without base objectives of racial oppression, exploitation or discrimination. Clearly the game favors with white majorities and their conservative priorities, but black minorities now participate and their concerns often take center stage.

To put this quote in context, in the middle of the book Browder carries his reader through the 1970s and 1980s, which he characterizes as a transitional period populated by people (like himself) whose politically moderate-liberal brand of back-room dealing was appropriate to the times, then he goes into the 1990s and 2000s, which he calls a "halfway house" system of politics -- a system where race matters, where race is always factored in, but where racial oppression is not necessarily an objective. Browder also factors in the "reddening" (the rise of Republican Party, after Nixon and Goldwater) of the Deep South, which he sees as a positive transition, since it has actually allowed two-party politics to flourish in a normal, American way (unlike the Democratic one-party dominance that lasted from the 1870s until the 1960s). Glen Browder seems to see our current politics as healthier, but still dysfunctional in a more typical way, where majorities outvote minorities, and the author is sure to mention that, after all, Alabama's population is 3/4 white and 1/4 black, putting whites solidly in a numerical majority.

I'm glad I read this little book, but it did read like what he keeps calling it: a "thesis." I would say that its strengths were its clarity, its realistic tone, and its avoidance of posturing, while its weaknesses were its lack of energy and its classroom-lecture style. This is the classic problem that rationale, moderate people suffer -- they aren't "sexy" at all. There's nothing exciting here, just one man's version of the truth, and a pretty good one.

Gambling: The Issue that Refuses to Die

2010-04-04T12:50:00.004-05:00

Every time I write in this blog that the issue of gambling in Alabama is over, it isn't. In the last week or so, Sen. Roger Bedford reintroduced his gambling bill, but with certain specificities stripped out -- namely the ten locations that would be allowed to have electronic bingo -- and now the debate has turned 180 degrees: the opponents who before didn't like the ten-counties stipulation are now complaining that the bill is too open and vague. In addition, today's Montgomery Advertiser contains an op-ed by John Tyson, the governor's appointed leader of his anti-gambling task force, who was given the legal version of a dethroning by Alabama's Supreme Court recently; the state's highest court declared that only the attorney general had the authority to do what Tyson is trying to do, while Tyson contends that they are wrong and that he has no intention of stopping. (Sound like Roy Moore?)

While the legislators and lawyers duke it out, we all wait. Even the smartest people I know admit that they don't understand what is going on nor why it is happening now. None of us do. None of us get the sense of urgency that is flooding out of all of our governmental agencies -- the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and law enforcement.

I will admit that I began this whole debate as an anti-Troy King, pro-gambling guy who up until now had liked Bob Riley. Riley is one of the few Republicans I have ever voted for, but he has lost me on this one. Why this lame-duck took off on a two-bit law enforcement tangent, usurping the attorney general and arranging raids right and left, in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the early 1980s . . . I have no clue. And he is doing a piss-poor job of explaining to the people why he is doing it. That infomercial he ran on TV seemed like pure rhetoric, had almost no substance, and made me even more against him. Why did this pro-business, somewhat progressive governor all of a sudden blow himself back to the Stone Age of Alabama politics, where banter and petty squabbles supersede dealing with actual issues? At this point, I'm clueless about what the legislature or Troy King are doing, but I bear them no ill will at this point -- it seems to me that they are working all day long to fend off this weird power-grab by Riley -- and it will suit me just fine when Bob Riley goes back to Ashland for good.

Ah, Springtime!

2010-04-04T12:40:00.000-05:00

The Alabama spring is full-on. Too many of my students are beginning to slack off their work, some are applying for summer programs, and the seniors are beginning to talk about college like it was a real thing they will actually be going to do.

Trees and plants are budding, too. My crepe myrtles out front are getting tiny leaves, and the dogwood is in full bloom. The tall oaks are flushing with green and the Japanese maples are coming out in red. The purple wisteria is hanging everywhere I look. And everything is yellow, coated in yellow, even the air. Pollen has taken over.

I went to the baseball park for the first time yesterday, to watch my nephew play his first tee-ball game. My daughter ate hot dog and a ring pop from the concession stand, and eager parents shouted instruction and encouragement.

The windows are all open, but they have to be we're at that perfection temperature where neither the air nor heat runs. Besides that, why not invite this beautiful inside?

It is Easter today, and we all piled into one pew in church, then came home to eat a huge brunch. After we ate, the kids ran around, looking for easter eggs, until all of them were red in the face.

Springtime will all of the trimmings. If I could quit sneezing long enough to enjoy it, this would be one of my favorite times of the year.

Travels #22: The Wiregrass

2010-04-02T16:29:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately, no matter how many times I try, the video "Travels #22: The Wiregrass" will not load properly on YouTube. I made the video, and the file plays fine on my computer. It uploads without a hitch or hiccup -- I've done it three times now. -- but it gets stuck on "Processing" then tells me later that it failed. I even re-did it once, made a whole new file, and same thing happened. The file is about 350 MB, so I may soon make a lower quality version and post it here.

Reading: More on Browder

2010-04-02T16:17:00.004-05:00

This choppy, dense little book ended up being a good choice to tie it all together. Glen Browder is writing, in the middle of The South's New Racial Politics, about how modern politics formed in Alabama as an effect whereby the post-Civil Rights movement politics was the cause. He writes that back-room interracial politics became necessary, because if white voters found out that any white candidate was working with black leaders, the white votes went away. Browder states that, by the 1970s and 1980s, black leaders understood this, too, as a fact of it, at the same time that they used the system to their advantage when they could, being newcomers and a numerical minority into a true good ol' boy system; apparently black politicians used procedural strategies and other similar methods to tip the balance of power into their favor at various points, which explains the modern stereotype in Alabama that black legislators only want to be rabble-rousers and stop up the works. nitpicking over minutiae. Over course, these are things that all polticians do -- the Democrats who passed healthcare reform recently used procedure to get it though -- but Browder makes the point that it was one of their main weapons in a situation where they were always outnumbered and outgunned. Glen Browder makes the case that he got to see all of this as a white progressive, who understood both the need for getting elected and the need for working with black leaders to make real change.

I'm hovering around the 2/3 mark in this book, taking my time with it, plugging along.

Missed Opportunities and Other Regrets

2010-03-28T15:58:00.004-05:00

For everything I have done or gotten to do, there are four of five things I did not get to do. Some I am deeply sorry about and others not so much. Early on in this project, it became clear to me that the all-encompassing work that I wanted to do wasn't possible, with a full-time teaching job and two kids, and taking only one weekend-long trip a month to look around. So some things had to get cut.

The realization hit me at some point that this eventual book would be as much about me as about Alabama, since I was never trying to write a cold-hard-facts journalism piece. That factor sort of left me flapping in the wind sometimes, because I lacked a short definitive credential, like "Hi, I'm Foster Dickson of _____ magazine, and I'm writing a story about Alabama." Trying to explain to potential interview subjects that I am a writer . . . but that my fellowship was tied to my teaching job . . . and that I was writing a book but I didn't yet know what-about . . . and that I wanted to interview them and publish it, on the internet . . . well, let's just say that some people started off leery then were never heard from again. Others understood what I wanted to talk about, and publish their ideas about, and were never heard from again. Others still never could fit me into their schedules despite genuine efforts on both our parts.

One thing that I had intended to pursue but which slipped through my fingers somehow was the Alabama Wine Trail. I came to this through two sources: first, an early reading in Alabama Heritage about Fruithurst, a once-magnificent winery in the Fort Payne-area that was put out of business by Prohibition and never recovered; and second, when Stuart Carter of Free the Hops mentioned in our December interview that a "brewery trail" like the Alabama Wine Trail would be an eventual goal of their group. I did try to set up an interview with one winery on the trail that is near where I live, but never received any responses to my e-mails. This is one aspect of the state's culture that I'm really sorry I missed, but that I intend to experience even though this project is almost over.

Another regret involves some of the conferences and festivals that I could not attend. The Auburn Diversity Conference, the Economic and Community Summit at Auburn, and the conference in Mobile for writers of color all struck me as experiences I was looking for. In coming days, I'm also going to have to miss the Slash Pine Poetry Festival in Tuscaloosa and the Old 280 Boogie in Waverly, because both conflict with other commitments.

One person that I was sorry I did not to get to meet was Richard Newton, a lawyer in Birmingham who is active through the Left in Alabama project, a progressive political network. Newton and I had agreed to an interview when I was there in December, but it didn't work out. To know more about Left in Alabama, check them out on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/leftinalabamavid. Their political coverage bears shameless to the left-wing of the political spectrum, and I was curious to ask him about what effects he thought their work had on the state's politics.

During the course of the project other sites I either wanted to travel to or tried to arrange but which didn't pan out, mostly for reasons of time, were: Grove Hill, home of the Clark County Democrat newspaper, which has been published continuously since the 1850s; Scottsboro, home of the infamous Scottsboro Boys lynching; Fort Payne, the self-proclaimed Sock Capitol of the World; and Bayou La Batre, the shrimping town made famous by Forrest Gump's good friend Bubba. Sites that were often recommended to me but which I intentionally passed over for a variety of reasons were: Monroeville, of To Kill A Mockingbird fame; Huntsville's Space and Rocket Center; Childersburg, where DeSoto Caverns is located; and Talladega, the NASCAR mecca -- in the cases of the latter three, it was because space travel, caves, and and car racing don't interest me at all. Monroeville just seemed way too obvious.

That's a little sampling of what didn't get done. My friend Tom House has a song in which one of the lyrics says, "If you go waitin' for tomorrow, you'll wake up to find it true / that you're whole life's been measured by the things you meant to do." Though I wish I had the time and money to do more, I have to focus on what I did get to do and see and experience.

Reading The First Half (or a little Less) of Browder

2010-03-28T15:40:00.003-05:00

Over the last two days, sitting on my front porch, enjoying the seventy-degree sunny days, I have been reading on Glen Browder's The South's New Racial Politics: Inside the Race Game of Southern History, published by my former employer NewSouth Books in 2009. The book, which is quite slim -- less than 100 pages of body text -- was written by a political scientist who was deeply involved in politics in the 1970s and 1980s, as a state legislator, as Alabama's secretary of state, and as a US congressman. So he provides his view of modern Southern politics, mostly of Alabama politics, from the view of someone who began as an academic, then became a politician, then went back to being an academic.

One indicative passage in chapter 2 that struck a chord to me, and acted as something of a synopsis for his overall point, goes like this:

The pertinent reality of Southern political history has been a cumulative, combustible race game combining democracy with black-white tensions in a conservative society of overlapping class and caste and a stubborn political leadership coupled with irresponsible electoral and party systems, all within a regional hothouse of entrenched dysfunction and a national pattern of historical accommodation. As a result, the South has foregone rational debate about normal substantive issues of American democracy for most of its history; instead, it has diffused its energies in a troubling continuum of racial contention.

If you want the passage restated in English, here goes . . . Browder is saying that, in the South, we have decided to use our political energies on one "problem" instead of focusing on anything else: poverty, education, infrastructure, etc. When a problem needs to be solved, it matters whether it is a "black problem" or a "white problem," because there has been a total denial that anything could be everyone's problem.

Browder outlines Southern-history-in-short to begin his book, in which he often resorts to the first-person voice as though this were a transcript of a speech, and then proceeds by the third chapter to really get into some meat. By chapter three, he is giving examples and anecdotes of voter fraud schemes and other manifestations of post-Civil Rights political nuance.

Coupling this book with the other books I have read, it is easier to digest. After reading all of Bloody Lowndes and part of Carry It On, and understanding the twists and turns of mid-century political maneuvering to outfox federal mandates, what Browder is stating seems feasible at this point. It shouldn't take me long to finish the rest, with about forty pages down and about fifty to go.

The Home Stretch

2010-03-27T13:00:00.005-05:00

Even though the Surdna Foundation's Arts Teacher Fellowship technically lasts from June 1 until May 31, my project for the fellowship, "Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South," will be done in about two or three weeks, definitely by the end of April. (Many of the fellows' projects were done by the fall convening in NYC last October, but those were projects that involved residency and intensive study, like one guy who went to Africa to study drumming.)

So what's left? As the spring buds here in Alabama, one road trip remains: north to Huntsville, where my only scheduled interview is with a man named Wyatt Akin about his Skate Alabama project. My plan is still to stay off of I-65, going almost totally back roads to the state's northernmost metropolitan area. North Alabama is the region of the state where I have spent the least time. Huntsville is mainly known for its space program, which I don't really give a shit about at all. Never have. So I don't intend to visit the famed Space and Rocket Center -- people keep asking me if I'm going there -- because, frankly, I don't really care what's there. It has long bothered me that our country spends so much money on projects where guys leave our planet to go scrub around in the dirt on the Moon or see how it feels to piss in zero-gravity; don't we have too many problems on our planet to be funding this kind of thing?

I am about to begin reading the last book, The South's New Racial Politics by Glen Browder, soon. The book is pretty slim and, by comparison to the previous reads, will not take long. That doesn't mean that I expect it to be any less meaningful, but the page count of this last one measures a fraction of any of the other books I've read already.

I still have to finish and post the video of my Wiregrass trip to YouTube, and of course there will be at least one video about the last trip -- so at least two more -- and those will mean that Travels #22 and #23 should round out that aspect of the project. I may throw in another one or two, who knows.

This blog is entry #179, and I think I'll probably finish up with a nice round two hundred entries. So about twenty more blog entries will include my wrap-up thoughts. I have quit getting the Google Alerts now, but I'm grabbing a few news stories off Twitter here and there. The rest of the entries should do it justice and let it be done.

So, the book? I've begun now. It has taken its shape. I expect it to tell my story very well, which is all an author can hope for his book to do. Who knows if it will ever get published? I can't worry about that right now. When an author writes with marketing in mind, the artistry will be absent. I can't think about that yet.

Scott Street Deli

2010-03-24T17:10:00.007-05:00

Once, when I bought I sandwich for one of my students from Scott Street Deli, I had to warn her: "It's so good, it'll make you want to slap your momma for not taking you there before now." We were scheduled to take a field trip that day, for which they should have brought a lunch, and she had forgotten to bring one; I was going there anyway to pick myself up a sandwich and agreed to pick her one up, too. While she was eating it, I saw her look over at me, and she said, "I hope I don't get in trouble when I slap my momma later."

Scott Street Grocery in Montgomery, which is in a stand-alone, low-slung building near downtown, has this bread . . . "homemade bread," they call it, because it is. And from that knowledge came my slap-your-momma remark. Every town -- or more likely, most towns -- have those places, the ones that have been there forever, that locals know about and tourists don't, that aren't on any brochures, that don't look like much but have great food, and those are the real treasures worth finding.

Scott Street Grocery, though it has been around forever, is run now by a revolving crew of hippie-looking youngsters who appear to be in their twenties and are usually wearing tie-dyed shirts and head rags. The outer windows are now peppered with stickers bearing a variety of environmentalist and politically liberal messages. The old hardwood floors creak inside and the ambience is nonexistent, but the sandwiches are incredibly good. I used to be a kitchen manager for a deli once upon a time, and I'm a real son-of-a-bitch about how sandwiches are made, so if I say a place has good sandwiches then you can know that they do.

So, in my year-long search for a "sense of place" about Alabama, and how I have extolled that a sense of place is a personal thing, I would be remiss if I didn't brag on Scott Street Grocery. Every once in a while, the guy who teaches in the room next door to me comes into my classroom about 11:00, with a smile, saying, "You want to go to Scott Street today?" My answer is almost always, "Sounds good."

A Typical Backwards-Thinking Waste of Time

2010-03-23T18:56:00.004-05:00

I got this one off of Twitter, from a Huntsville TV station, WAAY, whose feed is entitled "huntsvillelife." According to this story, an Republican Alabama legislator from Gardendale (in north Alabama) has already introduced a bill that would at least partially block the "healthcare bill" that the US Congress passed last Sunday. The federal bill isn't barely even a law -- Pres. Obama signed it today! And some people in Alabama's legislature are already trying to fight it.

First, I have to say: How absurd! Second, doesn't federal law always trump state law? Third, does this legislator guy even know that Gardendale, the town he represents, was literally built by another massive federal program called the Works Progress Administration (WPA). If it weren't for the federal government, Gardendale wouldn't even exist.

http://www.waaytv.com/global/story.asp?s=12192336&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Waay-WaayNewsAndHome+%28WAAY+-+WAAY+News+and+Home%29&utm_content=Twitter

The Wiregrass

2010-03-21T19:05:00.004-05:00

On Sunday, I drove down to Dothan to interview Bill Perkins, the editorial page editor of the Dothan Eagle newspaper. This trip, the next to last one of this project, took me into southeastern Alabama, into the region of the state typically referred to as "the Wiregrass," named for a type of grass that once flourished there and made raising cattle particularly feasible.

I left Montgomery about 11:00 AM, taking Highway 231 -- which we usually call the Troy Highway -- southbound. The weather was really nice, on the last official day of winter, March 19, and the driving was easy. I stopped in Troy, the county seat of Pike County, about noon for lunch on the downtown square, at restaurant called The Pines. Though the food wasn't spectacular, the crowd was very local, the service very small town, and the square quite busy; everyone I passed said a hello and how-are-you. Troy has grown in size in recent due in part to the rapid expansion of Troy University -- once called Troy State -- a small college that has jumped on the digital-revolution band-wagon by expanding exponentially in recent years with offerings like online courses for soldiers overseas. The next stop was Ozark, before reaching Dothan in the early afternoon. I had taken my time, stopping any time I felt like it.

If you would like to hear my interview with Bill Perkins, the podcast is forthcoming.

As something of a twist to this trip, instead of turning around and heading for home, I head due east this time, (instead of north) to meet my wife and kids who were in Pensacola, Florida for the weekend. Leaving Dothan, I traveled across the southernmost parts of the state, across Houston County and into Covington County then Escambia County -- hopping from Dothan to Elba to Opp to Andalusia through the COnecuh National Forest to Brewton and finally Flomaton, before cross the state line into Florida. When I drove through the western parts of the state, through the Black Belt, I was prepared for the nothing that I encountered. Miles and miles of nothing. But down here, driving through places I had never had any reason to go, I was not so prepared. The greening landscape of coming spring was beautiful in its own way, but the total lack of civilization was disconcerting this time; in the Black Belt, there are at least clusters of homes lumped under some odd-ball name, but down here, there was nothing but periodic houses, here and there.

One impressive sight for me was, passing through Andalusia, a series of huge white-columned houses with long lawns and extensive white fences surrounding them. Each almost seemed like tiny barony, a minscule capital of a local kingdom.

Maybe it was my mood, but maybe what I experienced was true. This trip into the Wiregrass was unimpressive in every way. Historically, not much has ever happened in this region of the state, and not much happened to me on this road trip. I wish I had more to report, but I don't.

A $1 Billion Roads Bill

2010-03-17T14:36:00.000-05:00

I wrote a few days ago, in a blog entry titled "Fidding While Rome Burns," that the state's leadership was falling down on its job of moving the state into positive territory, with unemployment clmbing. I think with this new information, I may need to retract my statement.

In a what seems to me to be thoroughly unprecedented move, the state legislature recently passed an appropriation of $1 billion -- yes, billion with a 'b' -- for road construction and renewal projects that they intend to create more than 1000 jobs. And they did this of their own volition, and in a debate where they refused to consider to-date-unallocated federal stimulus money in the state's proposed budget. So, these guys voted to spend a billion dollars at point when they also agreed not to consider federal money as something-coming.

If I understand correctly, Sen. Lowell Barron of Fyffe seemed to be the driving force behind the legislation, which has been a talked-about item in recent months. Not as glamorous as charter schools or gambling, but forward-thinking leadership, nonetheless. With Alabama's unemployment rate above 11% now, we needed something to get some of those folks working again.

Now, I hope that the state highway department will get moving on DOING it.

Lots of Interviews Posted Now

2010-03-16T20:24:00.002-05:00

In recent months I have been doing a lot more intensive traveling and interviewing. Podcasts of my interviews with the following people are posted to the Patchwork website.

Scott Peek -- graphic designer, screen printer, concert promoter

Andrew Grace -- filmmaker and "Eating Alabama"

David Snow and Margaret Ann Toohey -- CSA operators (farmers)

Elliot Knight -- Black Belt 100 Lenses project

Amos Kennedy -- letterpress printer

Give 'em a listen!

Indian Mounds and Strips Malls

2010-03-14T11:36:00.005-05:00

The following story from the New York Times gives the wrap-up of a story that has been circulating around Alabama recently: in Oxford, Alabama, there is a huge dirt mound -- which archaeologists have declared a construct made by Native Americans probably more than 1000 years ago -- that was proposed to be used as fill dirt in the construction of a Sam's Club warehouse store nearby. I quote from the article:

But in a recommendation that raised objections from the Alabama Historical Commission, the report concluded that the site was not likely to be archaeologically significant, given that few artifacts and no human remains had been found. The city plowed ahead.

Where the real "story" comes in lies in the facts presented in the above-quoted paragraph. Despite realizing the historical significance, and despite the site being registered with the Alabama Historical Commission, local politicians want to move forward with their Sam's Club! Apparently no one has apprised them of the fact that Sam's Club (and Wal-Mart, their parent company) destroy local economies with their extractive policies and methods, among other systemic problems caused by these stores entering into small communities.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/us/14oxford.html

Fiddling While Rome Burns

2010-03-14T11:22:00.004-05:00

While Alabama's leaders are fighting about gambling's legality, the real problems in the state need their attention. Case and point: the below-linked article from the Birmingham Examiner references how Alabama is among the 18 states for whom unemployment INCREASED -- while 31 states had unemployment that decreased. In addition, Alabama's drop was one of the worst, plummeting to 11.1%.

http://www.examiner.com/x-18767-Birmingham-Economy--Examiner~y2010m3d10-Alabamas-employment-continues-to-decline-more-rapidly-than-elsewhere

This morning I was watching "Meet the Press" on NBC, and guest host Tom Brokaw put up a graphic that showed that Alabama's unemployment was 14.2% in 1982, during Ronald Reagan's second year in office. (His point was the high unemployment didn't ruin Reagan's political future, so nor will it Obama's.) I hate to say it, but I guess it could be a lot worse . . . but 11.1% means that right now 1 of every 9 people who are able to work are not working.

I'm a teacher and "pink slips" are very real right now. Taxes fund education, and when people aren't working they aren't paying taxes. Alabama is one of the few states who have tenure on the K-12 level; though I agree that the policy generally hurts educational quality, I am sure thankful for it right now. Lastw eek, when I saw the news report that 650 non-tenured teachers were getting pink slips the next day, my heart sunk for a second, then I breathed a little easier for my own sake.

Non-Partisan Judges . . . Ha!

2010-03-13T14:05:00.000-06:00

The below-linked story from WHNT (Huntsville) explains that a House committee rejected a bill to make local elections for judges a non-partisan affair. Apparently, the "no" votes came from the all of the Republicans and one of the Democrats on the committee.

God forbid we elect impartial judges with no political ties . . . That really would be terrible!

http://www.whnt.com/news/sns-ap-al--judgeshipelections,0,5337405.story

What Would Huntsville Do Then?

2010-03-13T12:17:00.003-06:00

Because I am traveling to Huntsville in about three weeks for the final trip in the "Patchwork" project, I was interested in the below-linked article from the Baltimore Sun. According to this report, President Obama would like to shut down at least part of the space program, which would devastate the local economy of Huntsville. The city has long been a boom-and-bust kind of place, and all of the hills and valleys have been tied directly to government contracts, first surrounding Redstone Arsenal and later Werner von Braun's space program.

The story explains in short that Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski heads the committee that could make the decision to keep or cut NASA's moon landing program. As such, lobbying efforts that begin in Huntsville are ending in her office. This is the governmental-economic version of "Please, Please, Please." The sad fact is that the program is massively over budget and ties to no immediate human need in a time of stark budgets and inevitable cuts.

Our pal Richard Shelby shows up again, steadily fighting for Alabama's economic interests, like he did with the Mobile-tanker ordeal.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-md.mikulski07mar07,0,2475802,full.story

Arne Duncan

2010-03-08T16:56:00.002-06:00

The blow-linked Google re-run of an Associated Press story outlines some of the details involved in Education Secretary Arne Duncan's visit to Alabama, where he first visited Selma to commemorate "Bloody Sunday" (March 7) then came to Montgomery to speak about improving dropout rates among non-white students and enforcing Civil Rights laws more effectively. Duncan's choice of venue in Montgomery -- Robert E. Lee High School -- angered some black legislators, because of the school's name, but Duncan retorted that Lee, as it's called, is a majority-black school today; only somewhat thwarted, the legislators wanted him to also visit a school in a black neighborhood, so Duncan also visited Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary.

During the discourse, Duncan asked why Alabama had not allowed charter schools. And now, it seems appropriate to quote directly from the report:

[Rep. Thad] McClammy said Duncan asked why Alabama legislators oppose charter schools — a measure by Republican Gov. Bob Riley to create charter schools was killed recently in House and Senate committees. McClammy said he told Duncan, an advocate of charter schools, that more assurance is needed that such schools will be available to all and not become private schools for whites.

Though I see the points made by the legislators -- who in this case were black, and I don't want to seem as though I am demonizing our black legislators, because I'm not -- what bothers me about this is what has bothered me about most Alabama-related stories covered by the national media. The Secretary of Education came down here to attend the Bloody Sunday event and to speak about doing a better job of creating opportunities for people who need them, and it turned into an argument over what schools he would visit and what those schools were named.

I am glad that Arne Duncan came to Alabama to talk about improving educational conditions and opportunities for all people; I also think that Robert E. Lee High School ought to have been re-named years ago, for two reasons: 1.) everybody knows that the people who named it when it was built in the 1960s did so as yet another pitiful effort to defy integration, and 2.) Robert E. Lee was from Virginia and never lived in Montgomery. But instead of having 100% of the focus be on Duncan's message of progress, at least some of the attention was shifted to the lingering unresolved battles of the past. For Lord's sake, when the man comes down here to talk about making things better, let's welcome him.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hmILVel2zE76JZGnoDy72Vik4ctwD9EALRK80

Getting the Gardens Ready

2010-03-07T10:54:00.003-06:00

It's springtime again -- at least it is down here -- and I'm steadily cleaning out all the gardens and uncovering the compost piles. Every fall and winter I rake all my leaves into the beds, and this time of year I rake them out. My allergies are getting the best of me right this minute.

Things are beginning to come out or peek through. The yellow daffodils are in full bloom now, and my hydrangeas are have leaves peeking out of the dead-looking stems. The wisteria are getting buds on their spindly vines, and tiny yellow buds are starting on my caroline jasmine. The nandinas are covered in red berries, too.

I have two bushes at this house that I don't know what they are, that are both blooming right now. One is a wispy thing that I almost cut down, kind of ratty looking with tiny leaves, but right now it has broken out in tiny white flowers all over it. The other, out front, blooms the most vibrant pink-and-yellow flowers this time of year, but there's not a single leaf on it.

There's still a long way to go. The crepe myrtles are still bare, and the grass is still a dull light brown. The weeds are the only thing in the lawn that is green. I did see my first dandelion the other day.

A Southern springtime is something to behold. When I look on the TV and see people still buried on snow, I truly do feel sorry for them.

Follow-Up: The Clash over Ash, Part 2

2010-03-06T14:29:00.002-06:00

This story from Business Week follows up a previous blog of mine (September 3, 2009) about the dumping coal ash from Tennessee in Perry County near Uniontown. Currently, there is a proposed constitution amendment making its way through the legislature that would allow them to tax the coal ash at a rate of $5 per ton. The dump site is privately owned, though the air all around it is usually thought of as being public, since everyone breathes.

On the one hand, I'm thinking, "Great!" because the estimated revenue for Perry County will be $15 million, if it passes. On the other hand, I'm thinking, "What the hell?" because $5 per ton isn't squat. Perry County is one of the nation's poorest, with a jobless rate over 20%, but is losing clean air worth it?

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9E8IHSG0.htm

Dead in the Water: Gambling and Race to the Top

2010-03-06T14:07:00.004-06:00

It's now official: we talked a good game, but it was all for absolutely nothing, as usual. The two articles below are something like political obituaries, both inconspicuous as they may be.

The first article, originally run by the Birmingham News, explains that the Alabama Senate has officially killed the electronic bingo issue. The vote to continue debate was defeated 18-16 and the bill's sponsor, Roger Bedford, has thrown in the towel. It's over.

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2010/03/alabama_senate_rejects_plan_to.html

The second article, from the Montgomery Advertiser, gives the bad news that Alabama is out of the running in the federal Race to the Top program, probably because the state did not adopt charter schools. Once again, our leadership stubbornly chooses to remain at the bottom.

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20100304/NEWS/100304013/Alabama+loses+first+bid+for+federal+Race+to+the+Top+education+funds

The Christian Coalition Supports Gambling?

2010-03-06T13:51:00.002-06:00

This one is a must-read! This article from The Public Record states that members of Bob Riley's inner sanctum have threatened the head of the Christian Coalition of ALabama, Dr. Randy Brinson, because he supports gambling! Wait, what? The head of the Christian Coalition of Alabama supports gambling? According to this article, which describes the lawsuit that Brinson has filed, . . . yes.

The Christian Coalition, under former director John Giles (who supported Roy Moore in his Ten Commandments thing), was probably THE reason that former governor and now convicted felon Don Siegelman's gambling agenda got stopped.

The story in this article is such a tangled web of who took money from who, who threatened who, and who is in cahoots with who that I won't even try to unravel it for you. Read it for yourself, please.

http://pubrecord.org/religion/7072/alabama-threatens-christian-coalition/comment-page-1/

Personally, I had not heard of The Public Record before, but its About Us page states: "The Public Record (TPR) is a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and empowering the public through our groundbreaking news reports and cutting-edge commentary," whatever that means.

More from Stan Pate on Riley and Gambling

2010-03-06T08:23:00.003-06:00

Stan Pate is the same guy who paid for the anti-Riley banner that was flown over the Rose Bowl during the Alabama football game.

Reading: done with "Bloody Lowndes"

2010-03-03T20:02:00.006-06:00

I got sucked in. I had planned on reading Bloody Lowndes and Carry It On side by side, but Bloody Lowndes was a really good read. The book did two things for me: first, it did exactly what I hoped it would, which was to show another side of the Civil Rights movement that did not involve the most famous players (Martin Luther King, Albert Turner, Ralph Abernathy, etc.), and it also cleared up, for me, the differences between SNCC and other organizations like the SCLC. Jeffries also did a good job of explaining how the whole black panther thing started in Lowndes County, but was adopted by other people in other areas, mostly as an influence, not as a direct lineage. He also did well in explaining the Black Power movement, and the intended meaning and misunderstandings over the term "Black Power," all without running off and leaving the main narrative. The writing created both sympathy and tension, two things that make for great stories.

I have to admit that was surprised by the events in the end of Bloody Lowndes, when after years of organizing and struggling, John Hulett -- in some ways the main character of this story -- first took up sides with a white politician in a power-brokering deal and later joined the Democratic Party that had been his main political enemy. It has always been difficult for me to understand how the white-supremacist state Democratic Party and the Civil-Rights-proponent national Democratic Party coexisted in the mid-twentieth century. I still don't fully understand that, or what might have changed Hulett's mind to draw him away from the source of his success.

What I get more and more from my readings about organizing in Alabama, and in the larger South -- whether it involved unions, federal programs, or the Civil Rights movement -- and this book told much the same story, is that the major changes occur at very special moments in time, when extraordinary people are all in the right place at the right time under the right circumstances, all coming together under the right catalyst . . . but then the fire always dies down and everyone moves on with their own lives. It seems that many people don't like turmoil, even they know that it will benefit them. I do some work here and there with Civil Rights commemoration projects, and what always comes up is how to keep the movement alive. I don't know the answer to that question, except to say that as that special moment passes, the fiery hurrah fades, too. But the ideas and beliefs don't have to die afterward, in the same that they weren't born during those fiery times, but had existed already. And in Lowndes County it was no different. The folks with the LCCMHR made some major strides, and hopefully another time will come when more can be made. I drove through there not too long ago, and what I saw was: the poverty and lack of resources are still very real; a big sign for the Lowndes Academy Rebels stood right near the middle of Hayneville; and that big white courthouse still overlooks that little town square where Jonathon Daniels was shot in cold blood.

Another Road Trip: Auburn, Give or Take

2010-03-01T16:57:00.002-06:00

I’ve ended up going to east Alabama, to the Auburn area, twice, on very different trips – first, in the fall to the Alabama-Auburn football game, and then last weekend to Waverly and to a guest interview spot on WEGL’s “Dr. Rock and Captain Fantasy Show.” The Iron Bowl is, of course, one of the cultural-mecca events in the state, a contest that determines the shape, form, and outcome of many conversations and debates throughout the year. So my first visit to that crowded, high-profile football game was one side of Auburn, but this trip seemed to be about that other side.

As a very brief explanation: prior to modern times, Auburn University was the state’s white agricultural college – the two black ones being Tuskegee Institute and Alabama A&M – and it benefited greatly from the segregated educational system; according to Alabama in the Twentieth Century, during the Depression when federal funds were sent to Southern states for agricultural colleges to help farmers, Auburn received 80% of the money while the black institutions split the other 20%. Auburn used that money to expand tremendously and became vastly larger than Tuskegee or A&M, but the school’s focus still shows its heritage; Auburn has the veterinary school, the pharmacy school, large agriculture and horticulture programs, and a prominent Cooperative Extension Service presence, where the University of Alabama has more of the cultural programs like the state’s only law school, a nationally renowned MFA in Creative Writing, and the Center for Public Television. (Oh, and both schools have football . . . War Eagle!) Some people call Auburn a “cow college,” but to me their total agenda is more populist in nature, quite progressive, and generally pretty eclectic.

This trip, I drove to Auburn on kind of an odd route. I left I-85 at the Shorter exit and got onto Highway 80 eastbound heading into Tuskegee on a two-lane road that basically runs parallel to the interstate, just south of it. I went this way for a few reasons. First, I hate the interstate and prefer back roads. Second, it gave me an opportunity to drive past Victoryland, one of the “casinos” at the heart of the gambling controversy; it was still there alright, but three short buses with promotional art paint jobs blocked the long driveway to the complex. Third, I wanted to go to Tuskegee, because I had never seen the campus of Tuskegee Institute. Though I finally read Up from Slavery last year, I had never taken the time to go over and see the school. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s a beautiful college campus, full of majestic, perfectly-square brick buildings with white architectural accents and red roofs. Unfortunately the town all around it is a classic example of Black Belt dilapidation: too many hollow shells of houses, boarded-up businesses, and tattered streets. But there wasn’t enough time to get out and wander around, I had an appointment in Waverly.

Scott Peek, who I went to see this weekend, is a shaggy-headed, forty-something Auburn grad who has a screen printing and graphic design company called Standard Deluxe in Waverly, a tiny community of about 180 people in a loose cluster of old homes and a one-block-long “downtown.” Waverly is situated in a crux that puts it in three counties: Lee, Chambers, and Tallapoosa. As best as I can tell, there are three types of people in Waverly: a few old-money landed gentry, some working people, and an eclectic group of Auburn University overflow including professors and artists. According to Scott, the town is often mired in small-town controversies mostly rooted in personal grudges, perceived slights, and choosing sides. But Standard Deluxe, which is basically Scott and whoever is working for him at the time, produces what he calls “real Southern postmodern vernacular eclectic screen printing.” To see what he means, go to www.standarddeluxe.com, to see t-shirt and posters designs, and also about concerts and the Old 280 Boogie. You can also listen to the forthcoming podcast of my interview with him.

I left Scott’s place as the sun was going down and rifled down the four-lane Highway 280, then split off onto Highway 147, which goes straight into downtown Auburn. I had another appointment that evening, to be a guest on the “Dr. Rock and Captain Fantasy Show” on WEGL, Auburn’s student radio station. One of the hosts, Rivers Langley, a DJ and soon-to-be-graduated English major with long sideburns and a moustache, invited me to come on the show after hearing my interview with Brian Teasley, whose Auburn roots with Man or Astroman? Make him a local favorite. The interview at WEGL went really well, I thought, and about a half-hour into his show, I was shaking hands and heading out the door so he and his partner-on-the-air could throw some more musical curveballs at the Sunday night crowd.

Though Auburn was one of the places in Alabama I have visited many times, I wanted to go once more. Between talking to Scott and meeting Rivers, I went to one of my favorite restaurants in Auburn: Hamilton’s. I relaxed for a bit with some sea scallops over a fried smoked gouda cheese grits cake, with some kind of chile sauce, I don’t remember exactly. But it was good! Rivers asked me what I would tell people about Alabama, since I’m spending a year searching around in it, and what came to my mind was this: I began this short trip driving through classic rural poverty in Macon County, into a bastion of progressive Black education and culture, then over to tiny town where a skater-turned-screen printer makes oddball art, only to circle back and finish the day with a meal of nouveau fine dining in a white tablecloth place. Too many people think that Alabama is easy to encapsulate into a few stereotypes, and damn it if those people aren’t wrong!

Voting with a Photo ID

2010-02-27T10:55:00.002-06:00

The below-linked news story from WHNT in Huntsville explains that the Alabama House of Representatives has passed a bill requiring voters to show a photo ID to vote. According to the story, Republicans are for it, while black legislators are against it, claiming that it would make it too hard for elderly and poor voters to vote. While the short article doesn't explain the latter group's logic, I would think that requiring a picture ID would cut down on voter fraud, which benefits poor people as voters.

http://www.whnt.com/news/sns-ap-al--voters-photoidentification,0,3450926.story

Just Plain Unhealthy

2010-02-27T10:36:00.002-06:00

This article, posted on Top News (which I've never heard of before), points out some believably dismal statistics from a recent study, and I quote:

Perry County was ranked as the least healthy Alabama County, with 6 Black Belt counties taking up places among the bottom 10.

Other counties in the bottom 10 include Walker, which is at the third position, Lowndes, at fourth, and Bullock and Fayette, at positions five and nine, respectively.

http://topnews.us/content/211462-marengo-ranked-10th-least-healthy-county-alabama

Google Alerts: Alabama . . . again.

2010-02-26T16:39:00.001-06:00

I'm back on the wagon getting these Google Alerts with the keyword Alabama. Though the woman who shot her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville is getting way too much attention, here are some of the other stories getting reported:

This article from the San Jose Mercury (Feb. 26, 2010) explains that nine Alabama State University students, who were expelled in 1960 for conducting a sit-in, have now been reinstated. This event was one of many sit-ins that occurred around 1960-1962; the most famous, of course, occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina. http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14476420

This Montgomery Advertiser article (Feb. 26, 2010) explains that the state House of Representatives passed a bill that would save the PACT (pre-paid affordable college tuition) program. The leader of the move to honor the PACT contracts was poised for action if the legislation had been voted down. http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20100226/NEWS02/2260330/Alabama-House-passes-PACT-bill

Also from February 26, the Wall Street Journal reported the two prominent Alabama Democrats were sentenced to prison time for the bribery scandal involving former Birmingham mayor Larry Langford, who is scheduled to be sentenced soon.

A little news on "Patchwork"

2010-02-25T19:38:00.004-06:00

I am going to the Auburn area this weekend to interview graphic designer, screen printer and concert organizer Scott Peek, whose company Standard Deluxe is located in Waverly, in Lee County. Sunday night, I will be the guest of Rivers Langley on the "Hot Damn Radio Hour" on WEGL, Auburn University's student radio station. There was supposed to be more to this trip but Dr. Joe Sumner, director of the Economic and Community Development Institute at Auburn University, was only available during the week; and also, I tried to contact the owners of a winery in Notasulga called Whipoorwill but never got any e-mails back.

In the coming month or two, I'm heading out for the last two trips. In mid-March, Dothan -- to interview Bill Perkins, the editorial page editor of the Dothan Eagle. In early April, a long and wide swing through north Alabama, including Huntsville.

Dropouts, or Thank You, Dr. Morton

2010-02-25T16:34:00.005-06:00

The following article, originally reported the by the Associated Press, explains that the Alabama Department of Education has changed its method of reporting its graduation rate to the "4-Year Cohort Graduation Rate" that reports how many students graduate in four years, instead of just how many students graduate, period. The graduate rate immediately dropped from 86% to 65%. From the article:

A 20-point drop under the new formula is exactly what we would have expected," Swanson said of the state's new rate Thursday. "Alabama deserves credit for doing this. It's an important step to take, especially knowing that things are going to be looking kind of strange in the beginning.

Thankfully, Dr. Joe Morton, our state's schools superintendent, is in favor of the more realistic, more "accurate" statistic -- much in the same way that he was in favor of charter schools -- as a move toward honestly improving our state's schools. If 2/3 of our young people are graduating from high school in four years, that's a problem.

Dr. Morton and the assistant superintendent, Tommy Bice, are two men in this state who seem to understand that progress and improvement are necessary. Further down the article, it reads:

State Superintendent Joe Morton spoke at the State Board of Education's monthly work session on Thursday, saying it's clear Alabama needs to do better no matter the method of measurement.

"This state will be better off in the long run if we will refocus our attention on graduation rates," he said. "That's the holy grail. If you reduce the dropout rate and don't work on graduation rate, you may keep them in school but they don't finish."

http://www.al.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/base/national 108/1267131467289550.xml&storylist=alabamanews

Reading: The First 1/3 of “Bloody Lowndes"

2010-02-25T06:06:00.001-06:00

I have finished reading chapters one through three now, and I must admit that I am having trouble putting Bloody Lowndes down. The dynamics involved in that unique Lowndes County Freedom Organization movement are fascinating.

As he begins the book by establishing the extremely high levels of violence and subjugation employed by white people in Lowndes County, Jeffries uses it as a basis for progressing through the mid-1960s in the area. According to the chapter one, the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War had little effect on the white mentality toward black workers; as far as whites were concerned, they still owned the African Americans who worked for them and often used violence to prove it. This situation, which continued through Reconstruction and up to the mid-twentieth century caused a few factors that allowed this movement to manifest in different ways: the absence of a black middle class that often were the leaders in urban settings, a deep resentment between blacks and whites, a dire poverty that disallowed paid preachers (who were also often leaders) to establish themselves in local churches, and a white reliance on violence and intimidation as their main control method. Then add these factors: the presence of local men who had union experience from their work in Detroit factories, the prevalence of firearms among black people for both hunting and personal protection, the presence of disillusioned SNCC workers who had seen the failures in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party , and the absence of the nonviolent SCLC who moved on from the area after the “success” of the Selma-to-Montgomery March. Stir all that together, and Lowndes County blacks had the makings of an armed resistance movement – also as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee shifted positions and gave up on nonviolence – especially with the absence of any law enforcement officers (local or federal) who would protect them during their activities. Chapter three ends with the bitter desegregation of Hayneville High School and the subsequent creation of Lowndes Academy, the “white academy” in the area.

Also, in chapter three, Jeffries writes about a student protest that was organized in Fort Deposit, a place well known for brutal and violent responses to any “uppity” behavior. He also explains in the book that another difference of the Lowndes County movement was that, instead of being a movement where the youth were a driving force, the youth actions here actually came after the adults were well underway. When the young people organized a picket line in front of local white-owned business with discriminatory practices, a group of local white men gathered nearby with weapons to assault them. Though they were gone by then, my maternal grandmother’s family was from Fort Deposit. By the mid-1960s, my grandmother was raising my mother and my uncle in Montgomery, here own brother and sisters had moved away, and her parents were dead. But it still makes me wonder about what was going on down there as I try to make sense of what all this means to me.

Hasan Jeffries does a good job of writing history in a way that creates tension for the reader. A lot of history books are too driven by proof and statistics, so that their narrative – if there is one – is not good reading, but this book is not like that. The proof is there, but the story gets told, too. It has both strengths. I’m moving through it much faster that I anticipated. I can’t decide right now whether to shift back to reading Carry It On, or to keep with Bloody Lowndes. I’m hovering around 1966 in Bloody Lowndes right now, and that’s where I was quit reading in Carry It On, in the chapter about Wallace and the War on Poverty funds.

Multiculturalism and Diversity

2010-02-23T19:30:00.000-06:00

One of the stereotypes of Alabama is that the place is unfriendly to outsiders, close-minded, and stubborn about staying that way. But two upcoming events highlight that Alabama is actually stepping into the cultural mainstream in some ways.

The first is the Spring Diversity Research Initative Conference at Auburn University on March 11-12. https://fp.auburn.edu/diversity/news.aspx#14. According to Auburn's press release:

The Diversity Research Initiative at Auburn University facilitates and generates diversity research that is current and relevant locally, nationally, and globally. By diversity, we mean differences among people that matter socially and culturally. These categories include, but are not limited to, race, sex, socio-economic status, belief systems, gender identity, age, geographic origin, physical abilities, and sexual orientation.

The second is the 2010 conference of the Multicultural Literature Advocacy Group (MLAG) that will be held in Mobile this year on March 19-21. http://mlag.web.officelive.com/2010conference.aspx. According to the MLAG conference website:

The purpose of the conference is to improve the acceptability and accessability of books written by and about people of color.

These two events -- while they don't point to the state being some kind of Eden with respect to tolerance and equality -- do fly in the face of the state reputation for intolerance.

Joe Louis Statue in LaFayette

2010-02-23T16:19:00.004-06:00

This LA Times story highlights an upcoming statue to honor boxer Joe Louis in his hometown of LaFayette. (The Alabama town's name is pronounced luh-fet, not luh-fay-et.)

http://www.latimes.com/sports/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-box-joe-louis-statue,0,1357253.story

I wanted to highlight this story to relate three things. First, it's about time that Joe Louis's hometown honored him. Why not sooner? Second, why is the LA Times covering the story while other state news sources are not? Third, to point out that Louis is among a host of Alabamians who went on to worldwide fame in sports and entertainment . . . Examples include Nat King Cole from Montgomery, Tallulah Bankhead from Marion, Hank Aaron from Mobile, Zora Neale Hurston from Notasulga, and Lionel Ritchie from Tuskegee. The list could keep going.

Lowndes and Wilcox

2010-02-21T14:17:00.004-06:00

Lowndes and Wilcox counties are two of the poorest counties in Alabama, and in the nation. Yesterday, I went to Camden, the county seat of Wilcox County, which is about forty miles south of Selma, to speak at a professional development for teachers on how to use the curriculum guide, Treasuring Alabama's Black Belt, for which I acted as general editor.

I left Montgomery in the morning and after a brief stint on Highway 80, the route of the Selma-to-Montgomery March, I veered off onto Highway 21, which runs through or near Hayneville, which is the county seat of Lowndes County, then the small communities of Mosses, Braggs, Furman, Snow Hill, and eventually Camden. As one bit of off-beat trivia, the Snow Hill community is home to Snow Hill Institute, a once-important source of educating poor, rural African Americans in the Black Belt; Snow Hill Institute was run for a long time by a woman named Consuela Lee, who is filmmaker Spike Lee's aunt. Unlike Tuskegee Institute, which thrived and modernized and is still a vivacious four-year HBCU, Snow Hill's significance today is basically a monument/memorial to what-once-was.

Because I am reading Hasan Jeffries' book, Bloody Lowndes, right now, the information in that book flitted in and out of my mind as I passed through. Jeffries wrote about how difficult it was for SNCC workers, among them Stokely Carmichael, to canvass in Lowndes County because the people were so spread out and the SNCC workers had little or no means of transportation, i.e. no cars. I have no idea how those organizers got to those people, with sometimes miles between homes; without a car, an organizer in 1965 would be doing good to make it to two households in day. I also recalled the brutality that occurred in Hayneville, including the murder of Jonathan Daniels, a young white Episcopal priest who was shot in the chest point-blank by a local white man. But other things struck me, too. Several times, I passed little country stores, like The Harris Place, where a handful of African American men all would be standing around out front and or by their cars, at these few gathering places.

Likewise, road names in particular caught my attention. Near Highway 80, there are a handful of residential streets, lined loosely with small houses and mobile homes in asymmetrical patterns, named for famous revolutionary African Americans: Langston Hughes Road, Frederick Douglas Road, and Harriet Tubman Road (where Barbara Evans lives). Further into the trip was evidence of the strong ties to the land, street named for people: Thomas Hill, Robert C. Ham. But by far the most intriguing came near the Furman community: Freedom Farm Road; I can only guess . . .

The teacher gathering at Black Belt Treasures in Camden went well. About twenty-five people came from as close as local area and as far away as Florala to learn more about the guide and to have short hands-on lessons in folk arts from a quilter, a potter, a woodcarver, and a weaver.

The road home went by quickly. It's about sixty miles from Montgomery to Camden. I had done all of my gawking on the way down, so tired and ready for a beer, I barreled down to the northeast and was home before dark.

Another Weirdo-Freak...

2010-02-19T17:25:00.006-06:00

I wrote in an earlier blog about how I discerned from Google Alerts news e-mails that the national media seems to focus only on a few types of stories in regard to Alabama: sports, political chicanery, and weirdo-freaks. Of course, the University of Alabama's football program is still riding high off an undefeated national championship season. Of course, our political chicanery continues with the gambling and charter schools issues. And of course, we have supplied the nation with another shocking ridiculous example of weirdo-freakish behavior -- following the woman in Birmingham who had her named changed to Jesus Christ and the teenage girl who set her friend up to be gang-raped -- Amy Bishop, who killed three fellow professors at the University of Alabama-Huntsville because she was denied tenure.

Never mind that Bishop is not from Alabama. Never mind that she killed her brother in Boston (where she is from) long before she ever considered coming to Alabama. Never mind the pipe bomb thing and the IHOP/booster seat thing. Amy Bishop is being inextricably tied to Alabama because she freaked out HERE. Of all places to freak out, she just had to do it here. But the national media is doing a piss-poor job of making sure that people know that she is not from Alabama. Her story may have ended here, but it didn't start here.

Those Bastards

2010-02-19T17:23:00.003-06:00

I don't fully understand this blog, which asserts that Fox News commentators Hannity and Beck have attempted to connect University of Alabama-Huntsville shooter Amy Bishop to a "left-wing conspiracy." I don't understand what this blogger was trying to say that they said, and for that matter I don't even know if either of them said anything, but I never want to miss an attempt to call Fox News a bunch of bastards who misrepresent facts. I think the facts here are very clear: Amy Bishop -- who is not from Alabama, but Massachusetts -- is simply a deranged person with a propensity for violence; though her history of violence is now becoming clear in full, her final and most heinous act of violence did occur in Alabama.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/alerts/790

Charter Schools, Gambling, Charter Schools, Gambling . . .

2010-02-19T17:22:00.005-06:00

Two topics dominate state and local news these days: charter schools and gambling. Sadly, the debate over charter schools is now over, since a House committee voted 13-2 to postpone indefinitely any work on a bill to have charter schools in Alabama, one of eleven states in the nation without them. Even more sadly, now the people who should have been talking them up all along are finally beginning to speak up in efforts to educate the public on what charter schools really are. The Montgomery Advertiser ran the editorial linked below, and the most recent issue of Alabama Education News (the state Dept. of Education's full-color glossy newsletter) has an explanation of charter schools as its cover story. Where were these pieces a few weeks ago when the issue need the public support to keep legislators on task with passing that bill?

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20100218/OPINION01/2180302/1006/opinion/Advertiser-Editorial--Alabama-Legislature-snubs-charter-schools

The other issue is gambling. (Heavy sigh inserted here.) Lame duck governor Bob Riley is going all out on this one. Every time it seems to have hit a peak, it just keeps climbing higher. The legislature, the Senate specifically, has countered Riley by proposing a bill that would take the issue to public referendum, but that bill has major flaws, including exempting casino owners from criminal prosecution. So Riley is even more hunkered down against it. Now, attorney general Troy King has re-entered the fight after a period of relative silence and is aimed most squarely now at Riley and his task force, not at the casinos. (Another heavy sigh inserted here.) Amidst job losses, increased unemployment, and the ripple effect through the state's economy, these "leaders" are waging the war over the moral high ground.

Lots of talk, and for what?

My Alabama

2010-02-17T19:00:00.000-06:00

Not long after writing my recent blog entry about reading Bloody Lowndes and Carry It On, I got an e-mail from Hasan Jeffries, the author of Bloody Lowndes, offering me a little advice on, if I were only going to read parts of his book, which parts I should read. In writing back to him about my interest in his book, I explained my own family’s roots in or near Lowndes County, and I want to take a few words to explain more.

Getting a “sense of place” is a personal thing. I think a lot of people may be expecting my work to create some overarching sense of place, something anyone could latch onto and say, “Yes, that’s what Alabama is.” But what I am doing – and what any person would have to do – is working toward a more appropriate statement: this is what my Alabama is. My work will create a statement or series of statements from one Alabamian: white and male, a life-long Montgomerian who has grown up in the shadow of the state capitol and who has come to learn about his own hometown’s brutal past and tenuous present. If this work were done by an African-American, for instance, or by someone from a small town, or by someone more politically conservative, it would be totally different.

My Alabama is or may be rooted in the basest stereotypes of the state. For instance, my father’s family hails from south Montgomery County, around the Pine Level community, and I know from my reading at the state Archives & History that my family owned slaves. In one fire-engine red book at the Archives that deals with the Dicksons’ history, I read a story about one of my Dickson forefathers who protected his slaves by keeping them in his own home at a time when local vigilante groups were running amok, trying to strike fear in black people that they thought might be planning a rebellion similar to Nat Turner’s. As another example, freemasonry runs way back in my family, on both my father’s and mother’s sides, and though that organization is benevolent, fraternal, and charitable in many ways, it is also true that to this day white lodges and black lodges are fully and completely segregated; unlike buses and lunch counters, not one lawsuit has ever been filed to desegregate Alabama’s Masonic lodges.

On the other side of my family, my maternal grandmother, who born Gladys Taylor before marrying Andrew C. Foster, was raised on a farm in Fort Deposit, in Lowndes County. (I know less about the Taylors than the Dicksons; the Fosters were from Virginia, not Alabama.) So my family has roots in “Bloody Lowndes,” as I explained in my e-mail to Hasan Jeffries – the early chapters of his book, the ones that describe the Reconstruction era events, relate roughly to parts of my family. However, the only two Taylors who appear in his book – Joe Frank Taylor and Leo Taylor – are both African American.

Likewise, the Dickson family figures prominently into Lowndes County history. People ask me from time to time if I’m related to the “Lowndes County Dicksons.” They were a very wealthy and powerful family of planters in the county, and one man in particular J.W. Dickson was the sheriff for quite a long time. The best determination I can come to about them and us is that we may be very distant cousins, since Pine Level is not far from Lowndes County; traveling from Pine Level to the area of Fort Deposit, Sandy Ridge, and Calhoun is about twenty-five to thirty miles. There is the real possibility that my people are the less prosperous branch of the same family.

So, for me, reading the first chapter of Bloody Lowndes is more than just a history of one Black Belt county in Reconstruction-era Alabama. These were things that would have described or affected my families’ lives. Whether or how the Taylors or my branch of Dicksons fit into Jeffries’ telling of the actions of the white community in that area, I’ll never know. But this is one more way of understanding what my Alabama is – being a modern-day descendant of slave owners and other stereotypically Alabamian characters.

Pilgrimage

2010-02-16T19:47:00.000-06:00

In one of my earlier blog posts, I likened this project to a pilgrimage. I would be traveling away from home, alone, to search for new things, to find out more, and possibly to change my own truth. Pilgrimages are meant both to test one’s faith and to rejuvenate one’s faith. I am not a very religious person in the traditional sense – though I have a strong belief in God’s daily presence in our lives, I have never enjoyed going to church – but I think back too to something I reading Patricia Foster’s memoir in Remembered Gate: that when faced with a crisis of faith, she sought truth in study and intellectual pursuits, instead of a church.

Here I am now, almost done with this project. I am going to meet Scott Peek, a printer and graphic designer who lives in Waverly, at the end of February, then onto Dothan in March to talk with Bill Perkins, the outspoken editorial page editor of the Dothan Eagle. So far, I only have one person to meet in Huntsville: a skater named Wyatt who has been collecting a history of skateboarding in Alabama in 1970s. My plan right now is to travel to Huntsville on rural roads that transect northeastern Alabama in the vicinity of the NASCAR mecca of Talladega and the town of Scottsboro, infamous for its alleged-rape trial and lynching of the Scottsboro Boys. I have driven the desolate strip of I-65 between Hunstville and Birmingham many times – it is the fastest way to get to Nashville then Louisville – so I don’t intend to take that road, or even to touch it all on that last trip.

I have spent the year pushing myself to know more about this place I have claimed to know well. I won’t act like I have suffered, but it hasn’t been easy. Cancellations have marred much of my originally slated work. Some road trips have been lonely, but intentionally so; I chose not to take friends with me on my road trips in order to be alone with my thoughts before and after meeting new people and seeing new places. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, my reward is not waiting for me at the end; I have had to find my rewards along the road instead. But like a pilgrimage, I have to ask myself what I will do with what I am learning.

But I’m not done yet. In addition to three more road trips, I am reading from Bloody Lowndes and Carry It On, with The South’s New Racial Politics yet to go. Though my time of reckoning is coming, too.

What will this rambling wreck of experiences shape itself into? What written work will be the result? I have been traveling all over the state, telling people that I am writing a book about Alabama in the 21^st century. And I am; that hasn’t been a lie. But what book? I have thought of a book similar in style and structure to V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic; I have thought of a book of poetry, something akin to John Beecher’s I-will-tell-you-what-have-seen poems; I have thought about something more ephemeral, like Anne Carson’s hybrid Plainwater. I have already begun writing some things, which may or may not make it into that final work.

"Bloody Lowndes" and "Carry It On"

2010-02-15T11:47:00.008-06:00

I have begun reading in two books at the same time now: Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt by Hassan Kwame Jeffries and Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 by Susan Youngblood Ashmore.

My original plan had been to read only Jeffries' book, because it came highly recommended by Barbara Evans and because it served on interest of mine for this project: to understand better how radicalism and the assertiveness of more disparate (non-King-associated) black groups affected the movement and the reactions to it. I found Ashmore's book in the Montgomery Public Library while looking for a copy of Bloody Lowndes, and it seemed really appropriate, too. Unable to decide between them, and admittedly a little too worn out with reading academic histories to plow through another one, I am going to read sections in both.

I have read the introductory sections in both books already and am almost done with Ashmore's chapter four about how, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the announcement of the War on Poverty that same year, the Wallace administration used covertness and political tricks to thwart real change, to avoid meaningful school integration, and to administer federal anti-poverty monies almost solely to white people, specifically his own friends and political supporters.

Snow, Again?

2010-02-14T12:21:00.003-06:00

It snowed again in Alabama this weekend. Parts of the state got from 3" to 5" with the most coming in the southern parts. The Weather Channel people keep talking about this El Niño thing. Whatever it is, we had record heat las summer, record rain this fall and winter, and now record snow. What's next, the Apocalypse?

Charter Schools Bill Killed in Committee

2010-02-12T16:09:00.003-06:00

Well, at least for now, charters schools won't be happening in Alabama. Though several news sources ran this story, I will refer to the Shelby Country Reporter's telling of it, which echoes every other story I read:

The Alabama House Education Appropriations Committee voted 13-2 to indefinitely table a charter schools bill led by Mary Sue McClurkin, R-Jefferson and Shelby, effectively killing the bill for the current session.

Stephen Frey, legislative director for the Shelby County legislative delegation, said the bill was tabled primarily because of politics.

So we won't be having charters schools . . . In Alabama, the legislature meets twice a year, and this fall, when election season is hot-and-heavy, won't be a time that the legislation will pass, if it didn't now. Regardless of who endorsed it (the state schools superintendent and the governor) and who didn't (the teachers' union, AEA), what it kills is providing a progressive option for some educators to transcend the perpetually inadequate status quo of Alabama's public schools.

Everybody Hates Richard

2010-02-12T16:07:00.005-06:00

The below-linked New York Times story explains that the Obama White House is very upset with Alabama's senior senator, who has placed a "blanket hold" on seventy nominees to government positions because two decisions on government projects didn't go his way. Shelby is apparently angry over decisions involving Northrop Grumman tankers being built in Alabama and a counter-terrorism center that he wants put in Alabama. The NY Times article explains that stopping the approval of nominees is a common political tactic in the US Senate, but that "Mr. Shelby's overarching 'blanket hold' is considered rare."

Obama's press secretary Gibbs made the following comment about Shelby in the story:

“I guess if you needed one example of what’s wrong with this town, it might be that one senator can hold up 70 qualified individuals to make government work better because he didn’t get his earmarks,” Mr. Gibbs told reporters today. “If that’s not the poster child for how this town needs to change the way it works, I fear there won’t be a greater example of silliness throughout the entire year of 2010.”

He added: “It boggles the mind to hold up qualified nominees for positions that are needed to perform functions in a government because you didn’t get two earmarks.”

Near the end of the article, the New York Times writer explains that Alabama's other senator, Jeff Sessions also placed holds on nominees, but only on two, mostly over concerns about the tanker business. He also gives some lip service to Shelby's side, which is that Obama may withhold funding for the counter-terrorism center and that he may appoint his nominees while the Senate is on break, thus bypassing them in the process.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/white-house-blasts-shelby-hold-on-nominees/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Done with "Poor But Proud," for now

2010-02-07T13:18:00.005-06:00

In an effort to fit in all of the reading that I want to do, I skipped some parts of Wayne Flynt's Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites. The chapters that I did read are:

1. "Unknown and Forgotten Ancestors"

2. "A Poor Man's Fight"

3. "Looking for Something Better: Alabama's Farm Tenants"

4. "A Sight to Gratify Any Philanthropist: Alabama's Textile Workers"

8. "We Ain't Low Down: Poor White Society"

9. "Out of the Dust: Poor Folks' Culture"

10. "The Fight Is Not Social: The Politics of Poverty"

12. "The Poor You Have With You Always: The Enduring Legacy"

If I were to distill a hundred or more dense pages of heavily researched historical writing, what I got out of it was how the state began as a place to get cheap land and the strong survived; some farmers achieved very large tracts of farmland, and thus became the planters of legend. The Civil War changed everyone's fortunes, especially what Flynt calls "yeoman farmers" whose absences (and often deaths) put their families' means of living into harm's way. Without male heads of household to work the farms and make the business deals, women and children were often unable to make ends meet or were cheated out of their crops, money, then land. In the late 1800s, Reconstruction's emphasis on punitive policies added to the agricultural state's misfortune at the same time that mining and textile manufacturing were taking off in Alabama. So the fortunes of poor whites had shifted from self-sustaining landownership to one of several modes of living: sharecropping, mill life, or mining life. Due to their fierce independence and pride, Southern poor whites resisted unionization often as hard as mill and mine owners did, and deep-seated racial tensions further disallowed a unified effort to improve conditions. Child labor was common, and a prevalent convict lease system allowed a job-loss threat to hang over workers' heads all the time; this situation flourished until the Progressive era. The Depression exacerbated many of the existing problems. With a new wave of massive federal intervention, suspicions of outsiders and about communist plots made relief efforts more difficult in Alabama. Life began to improve for poor whites in the 1940s and did so until the 1970s. Unfortunately, in the 1970s and 1980s, the state government began its most intense efforts at attracting new manufacturing jobs to the state at the same time the national trend was to move factory work to third-world countries where labor was even cheaper.

What I liked about what I read in this book was to read a history of Alabama in which another side of the story gets told. For instance, Flynt never ignored racial tension; but where most histories of the state focus on the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s, Flynt focused on post-war prosperity in this book. He also put information about labor abuses and poverty near to descriptions of vivacious, ecstatic religious practices and craftwork customs now called folk art. He also explains long-held stereotypes, like the lazy, sallow "white trash" -- the truth was that so few people could afford shoes that many of them had hookworms, which they got from walking barefoot in the dirt; so they probably were listless and pallid, from parasites they were too poor and uneducated to prevent. Also, in the book, statistics were listed next to personal stories, like oral histories. Wayne Flynt even used stories from his own family, mostly notably Homer Flynt whose story mirrored many men of his era.

Even though I didn't read the whole book, I got a lot out of it. I also believe that history books like Poor But Proud were never intended to be read like a novel, start on page one and proceed. Maybe I'll go back this summer and read the chapters I skipped. We'll see . . .

Neglected Issues

2010-02-06T16:03:00.004-06:00

Am I discussing every issue that faces Alabama today in my project? No. Am I aware of it? Yes. Am I avoiding any topics intentionally? No. Here are my ideas on a few of the issues that I see going on in Alabama, unresolved and omnipresent, that I will admit I have not been giving my full attention, in the way that I have for others.

1.) Gay rights. With respect to this, Alabama's track record and even our current attitudes are abysmal. In recent years, Alabamians added a constitutional amendment to out already-outrageously-long state constitution that reiterates our political commitment to refusing to acknowledge gay and lesbian couples. Despite the diligent work of groups like the Birmingham-based Equality Alabama, no headway is being made on this issue. The prevailing attitude in the state is that preventing "gay marriage" is necessary to "uphold the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman." Though I am optimistic about many issues changing in this state -- environmentalism, race relations, or even beer -- I don't see this one budging at all. Though our younger generations tend to be more live-and-let-live than our older generations, I still hear even from young people that they have no desire for same-sex couples to be allowed to get married, the primary reason being religious beliefs. Fact of the matter: there is less separation of Church and State in Alabama than in other places; religion does affect politics here. I, for one, believe that banning gay marriage is pointless and that a same-sex marriage does not devalue my man-woman marriage in any way.

2.) A changing racial makeup, in state and nation. Although Alabama is still a Black-White state, the number of Hispanics and Asians is rising steadily here, too. The major change I see is not race relations here but a change in politics. I don't see or hear about anti-Hispanic or anti-Asian sentiments. What is see is more subtle. So much national political emphasis was put on Southern African-Americans from the 1960s through the 1990s, especially in the form of Civil Rights legislation and programs like Affirmative Action, because with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 African-Americans were the new voters to capture. Now, with Hispanics overtaking African-Americans in numbers, the times are changing and the focus is shifting. Many people in America believe that the work has been done, we have a Black president, and so let's move on. (We saved the Black people! Our work is done here.) Now, forty-five years after the Voting Rights Act, the inequalities -- especially socio-economic ones -- are still very present, but the national political focus on amending them is waning or gone. After learning a new way to live in the wake of the movement, Alabamians are having to yet again remake the political landscape without a strong federal presence guiding the way. The racial ideas of the Civil Rights movement shaped the thinking of many of the older political leaders in our state, but the 21st century social situation is not fertile ground for that type of politics. Today's politics are a politics of results, not rhetoric.

3.) Taxes and state government revenue. Alabama desperately needs a new constitution. Our current constitution, written in 1900-1901 by openly bigoted elitists who concentrated power in their own hands, set limits on taxation (especially of the rich) at shockingly low levels. Our property taxes are a joke here, especially on agricultural land, and our regressive tax structure causes wild fluctuations in revenue. For instance, Montgomery's sales tax is 10% and most areas of the state have sales tax at or above 7%. As a result, almost all government services, including schools, are operated well below national averages and mainstream ideals. The problem: in order for it to change, the legislature must approve a public referendum to rewrite the constitution, BUT the current constitution concentrates power in the legislature -- so we need the people with power to relinquish it voluntarily in order to modernize the system. The secondary problem is that the political rhetoric surrounding the issue has succeeded in convincing the average Alabamian that a new constitutional convention would be riddled with influence from lobbyists and out-of-state corporate interests. THE TRUTH of it is that that's what's going on NOW, which is why ethics reform also never passes. I don't see this issue changing either. Sea changes only occur in societies when something so shocking happens that it momentarily jolts people into good conscience, like the beatings at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965. I don't see that happening in Alabama, also because the process for legislating set by the current constitution is so slow that any momentum would be lost by the time a public referendum could even occur in June or November, when elections are held.

(Sigh) . . . Gambling.

2010-02-05T12:48:00.001-06:00

The shit has hit the fan. Officially. The legality of gambling has been a political issue in Alabama for years and years, though there was always a delicate balance that was struck between the state laws forbidding gambling and the gambling operations that did business in the wide open, like Macon County’s Victoryland, owned by Milt McGregor. Gambling has been a political issue over one dichotomous controversy: on the one side, the Christian right-wing stance that gambling is wrong coupled with the law enforcement view that gambling brings in organized crime against the views that gambling could bring in much-needed revenue to state government and that Alabama’s citizens are pouring money into casinos in neighboring states and Native Americans’ reservations – paranoia versus progressivism. Georgia for instance uses its gambling money for schools, and their schools far surpass Alabama’s.

The recent fight began in some ways with former governor Don Siegelman, who ran on the promise of a lottery that would fund education, and thus improve the schools and consequently the quality of life, economy, and more. Siegelman won the governor’s office on that promise and even got the measure to the stage of public referendum, but the state’s Christian Coalition mobilized a tremendous number of voters and defeated his measure, which left Siegelman’s plans in tatters.

Victoryland, which began in the late 1980s as a dog track in poor, majority black Macon County – the home county of Tuskegee Institute – later expanded tremendously, adding simulcast horse racing, then electronic machines, and eventually a large resort-style hotel. Its founder Milt McGregor, whose helmet-like quaff is possibly as famous in the state as his dog track, somehow operated this huge business out in the wide open, and many of us never understood how.

Later, in the last ten years, the tiny Lowndes County community of White Hall opened a “gaming facility.” This occurred in the midst of Alabama’s Native American tribes taking off with gambling facilities on their reservations, the largest of which being the Poarch Creeks’ Wind Creek Casino near Atmore. White Hall was modest by anyone’s definition, about the size of the average department store or strip-mall anchor store, the place was a stand alone facility on Highway 80, right near the Selma-to-Montgomery March Interpretive Center. For some reason, Alabama attorney general Troy King, who had always left Milt McGregor alone, went after White Hall in 2009.

By the time the smoke cleared, White Hall’s gaming center was decimated, obliterated – whatever word means wiped out. State law enforcement raided it, shut it down, and used its owners as the test case to go before the Alabama Supreme Court, whose decision they have now used to go after Victoryland. They also prosecuted and convicted the small town’s mayor on criminal charges of corruption. With this relatively minor victory in hand, it’s probably no coincidence that the next target was Milt McGregor, notwithstanding that he had the former head of the state’s anti-gambling task force followed, discredited, and outted as a weekend gambler himself. Now you are up to speed, dear reader, except for the debacle with the Houston County “entertainment complex,” Country Crossing, which the state government allowed to be built and to advertise, only to shut them down almost immediately.

So the people of Alabama are beholden now to a political barroom brawl over gambling, in the midst of a recession that has several Alabama counties with unemployment over 20%. Instead of working on job creation or school funding, Gov. Bob Riley focusing on gambling. He is taking the moral high ground, proclaiming the right of law and order, while Milt McGregor’s and Country Crossing’s now-unemployed employees beg on TV for their jobs in the middle of a recession. Country Crossing owners, including Randy Owen, the lead singer of the band Alabama, are doing their own version of “WTF” on TV, too, since they are now watching their capital investment sit idle, shuttered and wilting. White Hall’s mayor is facing years in prison and the White Hall Gaming Center’s parking lot is barricaded by state trooper cars. All the while, the state legislature seems to be trying to save the day by working on passing legislation that would legalize the very machines that all the raids are moving to stop.

So what do we learn from all this? My guess is that Alabama might have gotten legalized gambling, except that it is an election year. Riley is a lame-duck governor, and Troy King has gotten very quiet lately. The multimillionaire Milt McGregor is not one to sit on his hands while his empire crumbles, and the state’s leaders can also look up in the sky at the bright orange Wind Creek zeppelin flying over their towns, too. The people who want their jobs back are getting on TV everyday to plead their case, and the Christian Coalition has lost a tremendous amount of political clout since pushing away many moderate-conservatives when they backed Roy Moore’s extremist efforts in 2005. The forces that have always aligned to stop gambling are weaker than ever. I would even hedge a bet that the people who would vote in a public referendum understand the issue of jobs (in a recession) and the possible economic benefits that gambling may bring. Unfortunately, the legislators have to campaign for re-election this year and don’t want to be pegged as pro-gambling, i.e. immoral and anti-family. I don’t know what will happen, but my guess is that Alabama’s politicians and wealthiest businesspeople will continue to quibble and bicker over gambling while the rest of us will continue to face real issues, like education and unemployment, with no substantial leadership to guide us.

Snows Bend Farm: Community Supported Agriculture

2010-02-02T16:22:00.000-06:00

The life of a farmer must be different than any of us who aren’t farmers could ever imagine. I heard on an ALFA commercial recently that “45,000 people in Alabama call themselves farmers” in a state of about 4.67 million people -- so about 1% of the state’s population. These people work and live according to nature’s dictates and are subject to rain, drought, cold, and heat in ways the many of the rest of us aren’t, especially in our working lives. I have to show up and teach my classes no matter what the weather is like outside, and if it doesn’t rain for a month my students don’t wither and crumble.

Meeting with David Snow and Margaret Ann Toohey, who run a CSA called Snows Bend Farm, proved a little harder than I anticipated. Margaret Ann called me while I was driving from Gordo to Tuscaloosa to say that she had been watching the weather to see where we might meet and that actually going out to the farm wasn’t likely, given the cold and recent rain. As farmers, they had to use all of their time wisely, including scheduling their morning visit from me in January when the workload is less. However, this January day had not been a good one for being outside, so we met at the Crimson Café on University Boulevard.

The couple farms about 1100 acres of David’s family land near Tuscaloosa in a “community supported agriculture” – or CSA – arrangement. In a CSA, customers buy shares in a farm before the growing season commences, and as such both parties benefit: the farmer does not have take out bank loans for up-front costs and the customers get freshly picked produce. Margaret Ann explained that, like stockholders, the customers take the risk alongside the farmer, hoping for a good harvest and taking what comes.

I was curious to talk to them because of the growing debates about organic foods versus processed or chemically-treated foods and about the environmental benefits of buying food from local growers versus consuming trucked-in produce from large agribusinesses and grocery chains. David and Margaret Ann surprised me at one point by both almost jumping in reaction to one of my questions about “organic” growing methods, being explicit about the terminology and its implications. They explained to me that they have not gone through the government’s process of becoming “certified organic” and don’t see any sense in tying up their resources and time in bureaucracy and paperwork, despite the fact that they do use those methods. If people want or need proof of the quality of their products, consumers can know that they themselves eat everything they grow, too. This came from two people who, when asked why they became farmers, replied, “The food,” first and without hesitation.

Snows Bend Farm represents something I had been looking for in my treading around Alabama: something unexpected and even gratifying to know about. Surely we all have our desire to get away from eating at McDonald’s (fast food) and to have more fresh, healthy food (“slow food”) in our diets, but David brought up something that I had not thought about before. Unless someone was wealthy already, buying a farm big enough to grow our own food and then having enough time to work it is almost impossible. 99% of us in Alabama have to rely on so many other people, to be able to live our modern lifestyles, to get us the food we eat. And by the time we get it, it is has passed from the farmers to middle-men-a-plenty before going to the grocer or restaurateur and then our plates. These are people who found it worthwhile to grow and provide fresh food, not only for themselves but others too, with a resource few of us have: a substantial plot of land, the time to work it, and the willingness to devote one’s self to leading a healthy lifestyle, not just talking about it.

To hear my interview with David and Margaret Ann, listen to the podcast at www.alabamapatchwork.com.

Drive-By Truckers at the Jupiter

2010-02-01T16:17:00.004-06:00

I immediately remembered why I don't go to bars to see concerts anymore. Standing in the will-call line in the cold, being bullied by meat-head security assholes, more smoke and beer than anyone should have to endure, and shaggy headed frat boys whose party days are in full swing all added to the atmosphere ad nauseum. It had been a long time since I had put myself through it when I went to see the Drive-By Truckers -- a Southern Rock band that was founded in Muscle Shoals -- last Saturday night at the Jupiter Bar & Grill on University Boulevard ("The Strip") in Tuscaloosa.

I was up there anyway on my trip for "Patchwork" to interview a handful of people when my friend Ray told me that he and his wife and some friends were going to see "the Truckers" on January 30. Hey, I'll be there that weekend, too, I said. Tickets were not bad at all: $25 with fees and everything.

We only saw the last part of the Dexateens, the band who opened for them, and after a quick change, the Drive-By Truckers were on the stage a little after 11:00. The crowd was a weird mix of drunk bowl cuts, old biker-looking dudes, and a few sport coat types here and there, all swirled together with a healthy dose of unfriendly blonde bartenders and an ambience built from black lights. I had seen the Drive-By Truckers a few years ago at Montgomery's Jubilee City Fest. I like their music but am not a die-hard, though Ray and his friends definitely are. It's guitar driven Southern Rock, but thankfully without too much posturing and phony bravado. Overall, just a good rock show in a big, crowded, smoky bar. There's nothin' like it.

Making an Impact

2010-02-01T16:16:00.003-06:00

I didn’t know it until I sat down with them in back-to-back interviews on that cold Saturday afternoon, but Elliot Knight and Andy Grace are friends. Knight is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alabama who is working on a project called Black Belt 100 Lenses, which has him working with both public and private high school students on taking photographs of their lives and surroundings. Grace is a filmmaker and professor in the university’s New College, who also works with the Center for Public Television; his film work has centered on Alabama topics ranging from craftspeople to Civil Rights, as well as unfinished works on the band The Dexateens and on the late activists Clifford and Virginia Durr.

During our talk earlier in the afternoon, Elliot Knight said several times, “Andy and I talk about this all time . . .” The two young academics – particularly non-stereotypical academics – have an affinity for Alabama culture, particularly its food. Elliot Knight looks like a cross between a rugged outdoorsman and the neighbor kid next door. This thick shaggy black hair and full beard complimented his heavy work shirt, blue jeans and boots, but his youthful, artistic exceptionality lay in a pair of modern-looking, heavy rimmed glasses and the braces on his teeth.

After talking for a while about the work in his 100 Lenses project, Elliot took me to his computer where we watched some video footage of his interviews with some participating students; in this case, four girls, two white (from the local private school) and two black (from the same community’s public school), all fidgeting with their hands and squirming uncomfortably as they waited for their turn speak. As they explained how there are no African-Americans in the private school, and only two white students – a pair of brothers – in the public school, all four insisted uneasily that they didn’t suffer from the racism of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but that they had no opportunities to meet each other and get together. They explained that with no places to go, no hangouts, and no common social events that everyone hung out at people’s houses, and at their own school and church events, leaving them no chances to know each other. They further asserted, still uneasily, that they would like to get to know each other, if they could.

Even though I hated to run off into the cold dusk, I had to leave and go meet Andy Grace at his office in a nearby building on campus. Andy had intended to go deer hunting that weekend, in accord with his choice to eat primarily food from the state of Alabama, but had not gone because of the bad weather. (I had come to Tuscaloosa on the last weekend of deer season.)

Andy Grace is thin 31-year-old of medium height with a mop of curly black hair, and it is immediately evident that from talking to him for only a few minutes that his many projects swirl around his head all the time. It was also immediately apparent that the hour or so that we had to talk wasn’t going to be nearly enough. After looking through some of his work on www.moonwinxfilms.com I realized that he and I do very similar work, only he with film and I with writing. Our mutual affinity for the state's underappreciated people and culture had led us both to Civil Rights commemoration projects and to documenting the lives of neglected artists. We also grew up in similar circumstances, culturally curious and intellectually dissatisfied in a typical Southern environment, his in Huntsville and mine in Montgomery. Here we were, two Southern men in our thirties who had both stumbled almost accidentally into teaching and who spent most of our time looking for the next interesting story to chase, not for our own gratification but to show as many other people as possible

I mainly questioned Andy Grace about his work with films that have documented Alabama culture, but one other significant aspect of what he has done relates to food. About two years ago, Andy and his wife agreed to only eat food that came from within Alabama’s borders for a period time, which inevitably got extended over and over again as they make a documentary film about their lives experiencing the local fare only. For more about that, see www.eatingalabama.org

About six, I left Andy to his work and headed down to “The Strip” nearby to Buffalo Phil’s for dinner. A Farmer Brown burger – with bacon and cheese – and an Abita Purple Haze were calling for me after a long day of running around.

(For more about Elliot Knight and Andy Grace, listen to the podcasts of my interviews with them on www.alabamapatchwork.com or on iTunes.)

Amos Kennedy in Gordo, Alabama

2010-02-01T16:15:00.007-06:00

On my trip to the Tuscaloosa area last weekend, my first stop was Gordo, in Pickens County, to talk with letterpress printer Amos Kennedy. Though I didn't know him really, I had met him on several occasions: at the Alabama Book Festival where he sets up his press and makes prints on-site, and at Kentuck where he does the same but puts on a much better show about doing it. I mainly knew Amos Kennedy as a consummate showman and as a biting wit. Some of his posters proclaim in big black block letters: "FUCK YOU!" and "COFFEE MAKES YOU BLACK!" while others have more delicately put-together quotations from such notables as George Washington Carver and Gustave Flaubert. So I was prepared for anything, walking into the lion's den.

I was pleasantly surprised, even after arriving in Gordo about twenty minutes late, how kind and amiable Amos Kennedy was. Highway 82 can throw anybody a curve ball, and the distance from Montgomery to Gordo spans only about 100 miles but it took me two-and-a-half hours to drive it. Amos Kennedy throws curve balls, too: he didn't respond to my letters -- he requests to receive snail mail instead of e-mail -- but he had acknowledged at Kentuck last October that I was coming up to see him in January. I didn't hear from him again until the day before I was due to leave for his part of the country, when I got an e-mail that simply said "see you this weekend." When I clicked Reply and wrote to him that we hadn't set a time and that I didn't know where I was going in Gordo, his response was to turn left at the only stop light and drive "10+ miles" to his shop; the actual distance was more like one mile than ten . . .

When I got to Gordo, I rolled into the tiny downtown and rambled among dilapidated warehouses and classically small-town houses until I notice some storefronts with letterpressed rectangles of paper hanging from strings in the window and a mosaic reading "Studio 150" between the two doors. I parked and knocked on the wrong door -- a bright orange door on the side that belonged to Book Arts founder Glenn House, who had essentially brought the small artistic community to Gordo with him. Amos Kennedy came out of the other door, greeted me kindly, invited me in, and we proceeded on our interview, sitting on stools amidst his Vandercook presses.

After we got done chatting about what Amos Kennedy sees going on in Alabama these days (which is definitely worth hearing, so listen to the forthcoming podcast), he took me out in the gray cold and across the intersection to the local bookstore to meet Gordo's mayor, Craig Patteron, a burly man with a bald head and handle-bar mustache who was lounging among the books in his Carhartts, Crocs, and a grey sweatshirt. An immensely friendly guy, Patterson offered up repeated invitations to come back for any of the town's many goings-on, including a flight show by a local airplane collector on Veteran's Day. Next, we crossed the street for Amos to introduce me to Glenn House, an 80-year-old artist and all-around character who reminded very much of Pete Seeger with his mischievous smile, thinly cropped white beard and work-style clothes. He and two other local artists were thumbing through some old photographs they had "saved" from curbside trash pickup, thrown there after the only man in town older than Glenn House had died. We stood in the dim back room of House's studio and shop, talking about the possibilities for my eventual final product and glimpsing vaguely into each other's lives as artists.

I genuinely hated to leave when I did. I had scheduled interviews nearly back-to-back so I had to get back to Tuscaloosa to eat, check into the hotel, and get to the next meeting. Although I was only there about two hours, it was easy to sense the magic in Gordo among this small community that included some of the state's best (and possibly most reclusive) artists, these people who had come to live in a small town in northwestern Alabama in order to make art and live unique lives uninterruptedly.

The end (for now) of Google Alerts

2010-02-01T16:12:00.002-06:00

I have (for now) cancelled my Google Alerts for the keyword Alabama. I may pick it back up again in the future, but I felt like those entries were dominating this blog, in comparison to writing about other experiences I am having.

Two Alabama Arts Radio podcasts: Freear and Bice

2010-01-29T19:55:00.003-06:00

Today, driving home from Tuscaloosa, where I took my students for a workshop with the Book Arts folks, I listened to two Alabama Arts Radio Series podcasts from last fall, interviews with Andrew Freear of the Rural Studio (November 8, 2009) and with Deputy Superintendent of Education Dr. Tommy Bice (October 11, 2009). To listen to either go to http://www.arts.state.al.us/actc/1/radioseries.html.

Though his interview came later, Andrew Freear came first today. I met and interviewed Freear myself back in late September, although the format I was using then was very different that a typical Q&A on what-is-it-you-do. This interview was thirty minutes of letting him talk about his work, directing this Auburn University Outreach program that has architecture students living in Hale County and conducting hands-on building projects that range from one-family homes to public buildings. One of his statements that really grabbed was how both he and the students learn from their rural, and often uneducated neighbors; he said with great respect that so many people out there are "can-do" people who can make or fix almost anything because their lack of resources necessitates it. It really grabbed me that one great facet of the Rural Studio is that it is a formal academic program where students learn from people with almost no formal academic background, while being guided by a trained architect. This reversal, like when the student becomes the teacher, occurs when the receivers of the Outreach teach something to the givers of the Outreach. For me, it was one more reinforcement of the underestimated greatness of working people.

The other podcast I listened to was an interview with Alabama's second in command for education, Dr. Tommy Bice. I have to admit that I had paid little attention to having this interview and had even been avoiding listening to it, since I teach in a high school; the bureaucracy at the top is often one of teachers' biggest frustrations. But Tommy Bice shocked me incredibly with how progressive his thinking is. What first caught my ear was that he encourages flexibility in scheduling and giving credits and also increased arts education as counter-moves against the high dropout rate. Then he proceeded to say that policies forbidding students from having their own electronic devices, like iPods or cell phones, should be changed and that teachers should utilize, not outlaw what the students are carrying anyway, even going so far as saying that the fears of the older generations are the causes of these policies! I could have kissed him on the mouth when I heard these things.

One note that I heard from Bice that rang very true for me was one he made about Alabama's ACCESS distance learning system. After touting its far-reaching and other positive qualities, he went on to say that online classes are not a substitute for face-to-face teaching, that an ACCESS teacher should mix the online with the in-person. For two semesters in 2007 and 2008, I taught creative writing classes through the ACCESS system, and was very disappointed in how limiting the system was. During the latter term, I had as many as 40 students at one point in 6 or 7 different schools, in addition to my own students in Montgomery. There was no way to give my online students any face time, because I would have had to abandon my traditional students regularly to do it. That frustration, of feeling like I was doing the online students a disservice, caused me to discontinue my willingness to teach through ACCESS. I was glad to hear that one of the people in charge knows this and understands it and is trying to fix it. It seemed to me that ACCESS should have its own set of teachers who have no brick-and-mortar obligations to hamper them.

For all of the leaders we hear about in Alabama who seem backwards or ignorant, these two men -- Andrew Freear and Tommy Bice -- both of whom are doing significant work in Alabama, get too little press. I would love for the national media to get hold of either of these men. I'm proud to know that they're working in our state, trying to fix some problems.

That Ain't Good

2010-01-26T16:24:00.000-06:00

This brief news story explains that a north Alabama nuclear power plant was cited for a safety hazard: their emergency shut off switch is not fire protected. Which means that if a fire breaks out there, they might not be able to shut the thing down. Oh Lord, please give them the wisdom to fix this, instead of denying it.

http://www.wral.com/news/state/story/6855064/

Alabama Unemployment hits 11%

2010-01-26T16:00:00.000-06:00

Along with football and Bible-thumping, another Alabama tradition is being first in the bad categories and last in the good ones. Our unemployment rate has topped 11%, with some of the Black Belt counties having some of the worst unemployment numbers in the nation. It's no wonder that gambling proponents keep citing job creation as one good reason to have casinos.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9637180

A Turncoat Finds Mistrust on the New Team

2010-01-24T11:21:00.003-06:00

This Fox News article explains that, even after switching political parties to the GOP side, Parker Griffith now faces their mistrust, too. He can't find any shelter in the storm. The Democrats are pissed, and the Republicans are skeptical. One state level Republican operative is quoted in the article as saying:

"His ideology has not changed," said Jim Burden, chairman of the Limestone County GOP. "He supported Nancy Pelosi. He contributed money to her. He supported Howard Dean."

Cardinal sin of cardinal sins: Griffith supported the dreaded Nancy Pelosi! The north Alabama Republicans also want him to give back, or at least not use, the $619,000 in Democratic campaign he still has. What will this mean for Parker Griffith's political career?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/22/party-switching-congressman-faces-gop-distrust-alabama/

"Gadsden Times" runs an "Editorial Roundup"

2010-01-23T16:02:00.005-06:00

This article run on the website of the north Alabama Gadsden Times is surprising in two ways: first, because these three editorials are all progressive, each in their own call to the people and government of Alabama; and second, because the paper chose to couple all three progressive editorials into a place where they could be read together.

The first of the three editorials comes from Birmingham and begs for a moratorium on the death penalty, mainly for the purpose of bringing Alabama's policies in line with the modern America. For instance, the piece cites the racial "disparity" among death row inmates -- that proportionally way too many are black -- and that Alabama does not forbid giving the death penalty to the mentally handicapped or to offenders under 18 years old.

The second of the three, from Fort Payne in northeastern Alabama, commends Bob Riley for some aspects of his ambitious political agenda, namely ethics reform and charter schools. The writer calls on the legislature, who really hold the power in Alabama, to take on some of Riley's agenda in order to improve life in the state.

The final one comes from the Dothan Eagle and it berates the utter stupidity of Pat Robertson's remarks about Haiti, specifically that they deserve this calamity for throwing off French colonialism. Robertson claims that the Haitians made a deal with the Devil when they sought to rule themselves. Thank you Jesus that a writer from Alabama took the time to condemn a religious zealot whose ideas are that ludicrous!

And thank you too, Gadsden Times!

http://www.gadsdentimes.com/article/20100119/APN/1001192300

"Black Belt 100 Lenses" at MMFA

2010-01-23T15:46:00.004-06:00

I went today to see the new exhibit of "Black Belt 100 Lenses" at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The project was created by a graduate student at the University of Alabama named Elliott Knight, who I am going to interview next weekend, in cooperation with the Black Belt Community Foundation and the Community-Based Partnership outreach program of the university. Knight worked with 55 high school students in both public and private schools in the Black Belt counties like Sumter, Perry, and Hale, having them document aspects of their lives with photos, film, and oral recordings.

Though only a handful of the photographs were on display at MMFA, the quality and range of the selections was impressive. Images included expected ones like farm equipment and dirt roads, but also more unexpected scenes like a huge Tin Man standing in a field. The aim of the project was to have the students use their photos to tell people about their lives, and I think they succeeded. As I inched down the hall, taking a few minutes with each picture, I was caught by the subtle nuances like the family feast being doled out onto styrofoam plates and a boy getting onto a school bus in the bleak early morning half-light.

I'm looking forward to interviewing Elliott Knight. I'm sure he'll have a lot more to say about the project. The exhibit runs at the MMFA from today, January 23, until mid-March, and a reception will be held on March 11.

A New Hybrid Car Plant

2010-01-23T15:40:00.003-06:00

These two reports by ABC News and Cars.com explain the possibility of a new hybrid automaker, Hybird Kinetic Automakers, having its factory in Alabama. The ABC News story states: "HK Motors is looking at opening an Alabama plant in 2013 that will provide 4,000 jobs."

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9606150

http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2010/01/hybrid-startup-hopes-to-build-cars-in-alabama.html

When I have mentioned to people my hopes about Alabama possibly being on the forefront of environmentalism, most have responded with skepticism. My hope is that Alabama will be THE state that builds the first viable car that is environmentally friendly.

"Race to the Top"

2010-01-23T15:02:00.001-06:00

This story, originally run by the Mobile Press-Register, explains Alabama's attempts to take part in President Obama's educational program called "Race to the Top," which rewards states with stimulus money for improving education.

http://blog.al.com/learning-curve/2010/01/alabama_racing_to_the_top.html

On the Cover of the . . . “Relix”?

2010-01-21T16:09:00.003-06:00

When did Alabama become an epicenter of the jam band scene? On this month’s Relix magazine, the Drive-By Truckers, who are originally from Muscle Shoals, are on the front cover, and Bama Jam, the summer music festival, has a full color ad on the back cover. Crazy!

I saw Drive-By Truckers a few years ago at Jubilee CityFest, Montgomery’s downtown street festival, when they were right before Martin, Medeski and Wood. They put on a good show. I’m going to see them again in late January, when – as coincidence would have it – they are playing at Tuscaloosa’s Jupiter Bar & Grill on the weekend that I will already be there interviewing filmmaker Andrew Grace, photographer Elliott Knight, and David Snow and Margaret Ann Toohey who an organic CSA called Snows Bend Farm. The DBT show is just icing on the cake.

I’ve never been to Bama Jam though. What started out as a little podunk redneck music festival has very recently blossomed into more. Last year, they had the Black Crowes and Kid Rock, if I remember right. Maybe a little trip down to the country this June might be in order . . .

Environmental News

2010-01-20T07:29:00.002-06:00

These two stories, run by NBC affiliate WSFA and ABNC News respectively, explain two of Alabama's many environmental dilemmas. Most people who are conscious of environmental issues agree that the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) is pitifully underperforming in its duties to protect the state's ecological well-being, most often in the face of the desire of manufacturing companies to pollute. The WSFA story explains that one environmental group wants to see to it that ADEM is stripped of its rights to regulate water pollution, mainly because the agency is horribly underfunded in the state's budget. The other story regards Alabama's land conservation efforts and the possible renewal of a program called Forever Wild, which essentially creates preserves. It appears possible that the program will not be renewed.

http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=11837937

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9535436

For a state whose slogan is "Alabama the Beautiful," there seems to be a real discrepancy between idea na action.

A Frickin' Huge Error in Judgment

2010-01-19T16:23:00.005-06:00

The Huffington Post -- a notoriously and egregiously left-wing/liberal online news source -- has reported: (I have to direct-quote this . . . because I have to . . .)

David Barber, the head of Alabama Governor Bob Riley's Illegal Gambling Task Force was compelled to resign last week after winning $2300 gambling at a Choctaw Indian Tribe casino in Mississippi.

That's the first sentence in the article. Ignoring the comma splice that their editor missed -- there should be a comma between Force and was -- this faux pas by a government employee leaves even me saying, "Oh Crap!" This story reminds me of that "Saturday Night Live" sketch on the news portion called "Really?" -- "So you thought you could take the weekend off from your anti-gambling task force job and go gambling? Really!?"

Of course, the quasi-apologetic offender's resignation letter was quoted as well, sadly declaring:

I am convinced that the forces that operate illegal casinos in Alabama will focus on my actions as part of their continuing effort to smear you and your task force. The work of the Task Force is too important to allow it to be impeded by such a distraction.

Really!?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-abrahams/governor-bob-riley-gambli_b_427328.html

Alabama's literary scene

2010-01-18T17:11:00.000-06:00

Southern literature is a fabled thing. And where Mississippi has its Faulkner and later Grisham, Alabama has its Harper Lee, Fannie Flagg, and later Rick Bragg.

I have read that To Kill A Mockingbird by Alabama's Harper Lee is the most widely read novel in the world, which is a blessing and a curse for the state, because the novel reinforces (and for some readers may have created) the stereotypes: that white people in the South are either like Atticus Finch or Bob Ewell with no in-between, that all black people in the South just want to work hard and be left in peace; couple those then with the lynch mob that comes for Tom Robinson and the stereotypical trifling Southern white women characters, and you have the common perception of Alabama. The problem with that conception is that the novel was published in 1960 (fifty years ago) and was set during the Depression (seventy to eighty years ago), when all of those things may have been true. The other problem is that Harper Lee wanted us to see things like the difference between the total brutality of Bob Ewell, who was "poor white trash," and the social stigmas that caused the jury to find an innocent Tom to be guilty, but too few readers do. Furthermore, the world has changed drastically in the five decades since To Kill A Mockingbird was published, but the too much Southern literature has changed only slightly, often relying on the aren't-we-charming brand of Southern storytelling to sustain itself, whether by that I mean Fannie Flagg and her novel Fried Green Tomatoes, the popular books of the Sweet Potato Queens, or the disgraced Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg.

There is actually more going on Alabama today than that brand of literature. The state has a significant literary output on the national and world scene. The University of Alabama's creative writing MFA program is recognized among the best in the country and publishes Black Warrior Review. Troy University also publishes the Alabama Literary Review, and Auburn University publishes Southern Humanities Review, both of which are modern literary journals of new writing, translations, and criticism by writers from all over the world. Birmingham also has its share of literary goings-on: Red River Review put out by the creative writing faculty of the Alabama School of Fine Arts and a consortium of higher-ed English professors as its editors; Jim Reed publishes Birmingham Arts Journal; and the University of Alabama-Birmingham publishes Birmingham Poetry Review. Other nationally recognized literary journals that are no longer in publication are Negative Capability, which was based out of the University of South Alabama and edited by state poet laureate Sue Brannon Walker, and Amaryllis, published in Montgomery.

In addition to the state's literary magazine, a few literary publishers make their mark nationally. Montgomery's two houses, River City Publishing and NewSouth Books, are very different. River City publishes, along side more local writers, the science fiction writer Robert McAmmon. NewSouth Books, while specializing in Southern nonfiction, has also published poetry by greats like Andrew Glaze and Thomas Rabbit. While over in at the University of West Alabama, Livingston Press publishes a wide of variety of fiction.

In addition to print media, Alabama venues also host events and festivals. The state's main festival, Alabama Book Festival, hosts a range of both Alabama and national authors. Other events include the Montevallo Literary Festival held at the University of Montevallo in the small tow of Calera, and Writing Today held at Birmingham-Southern College. The Birmingham Area Consortium for Higher Education (BACHE) funds and organizes a literary reading series for the colleges in Birmingham, like UAB, Birmingham-Southern, and Miles College, and I have gone to see poets like Ken Waldman and Li-Young Lee there.

I'm afraid in this blog post that I'm cataloguing, not really getting to the heart of the greatness I'm trying to convey. Partly because this my "turf," the literary scene. There are so many great writers in Alabama who are nothing like the old clichés. There are some writers in the vein of Faulkner, others in the vein of the ladies' parlor lighthearted storytelling . . . but more, too. Tom Franklin, from south Alabama, writes gritty fiction in the tradition of William Gay or Cormac McCarthy -- what I've heard called "redneck lit," because it glorified the worst sort of violent, backwater characters.

This is another one of those subjects that is too much to encapsulate. To try to describe Alabama-native writers ranging from Sonia Sanchez to Brad Watson is impossible. Maybe you get the point, maybe you don't.

Two Poets in "The Remembered Gate"

2010-01-18T15:07:00.005-06:00

Last weekend, I sat back down with The Remembered Gate and read two more selections from it, trying to cleanse my palette of Poor But Proud. The two memoirs, both by poets this time, deal heavily with reminiscence of youth, much as the ones I had read before did, but being by poets I read them as much more imagistic and sensory than narrative or explanatory. Andrew Hudgins and Rodney Jones both take a dark tone -- Hudgins tidbits are more violent and brutal while Jones' piece is more steeped in history and religion -- as each man reaches back to explore the "place" of his youth.

Within the first pages of Andrew Hudgins’ “Alabama Breakdown” – a particularly doomsday sort of title – there are two passages I read I want to quote here. The first regarded his first encounter with being faced with being a Southerner:

I raced through characteristics I’d memorized ten years before in a Southern lit class: a sense of the living presence of the past; love of landscape and the natural world; cruel humor; and a preoccupation with religion, family, violence, race, and the grotesque.

His list added an element to Southern-ness that I hadn’t really thought of before: “cruel humor.” The rest had all occurred to me: the past, the outdoors, church, kin, race . . . but Southerners really do take a greedy sort of pleasure in meanness. When I was writing I Just Make People Up, its subject Clark Walker talked to me about how he worried that people were going to read the book looking for ways to be mean about what they had learned – he called it schadenfreude, the German word for taking pleasure in other people’s misery. Southerners really do have a collective case of schadenfreude; just look at Simon Suggs, Alabama’s oldest literary character who is somewhere between a trickster and a buffoon. I have long acknowledged what I have called my “malicious sense of humor,” which comes out even more when I drink, but I never though of it before now as Southern.

The other passage was shorter, but no less telling, as Hudgins describes his initials ideas about Alabama before moving here with his military family: “My impressions of Alabama were almost exactly those held by the nation as a whole: virulent racism and good football.” Hudgins moved to Alabama in 1966, the heyday of both George Wallace and Bear Bryant, and the year after the Selma-to-Montgomery March. What a time to arrive! Talk about culture shock, and they had moved from Paris, after living in California. But the passage struck me, because that is what I’m finding in reading the daily Google Alerts news summaries; the stories are ALL about sports (football in particular) and political chicanery, which sometimes revolves around race. It’s what we’re known for . . .

Rodney Jones takes an altogether different tone in his “A Half Mile of Road in North Alabama,” a recollection of his rural younger days. Jones very craftily builds his piece on using the common to build the personal; he tells his reader that everyone was doing these things, and he was, too. Maybe the names were different – A Jones instead of a Smith – but it was basically the same. Two passages also struck me in his piece, mostly because he reminded me about the power of stories as mythmaking; it reminded me of something my mother used to tell me when I was young: “It doesn’t matter what you are, it matters what people think you are, because that’s how they treat you.” The objective truth, Jones also allays, matters much less than the version(s) of the truth that survives:

The form of the story was a mystery, and it was not exactly handed down, but added to and subtracted from and totaled differently by every citizen as the sum and account, so that it could be further revised and debated. The story went on inside each solitary head, as beans were strung and hay was baled and it never ceased, never went away, or located itself precisely on the sorts of oratorical occasions and in the places that scholars would like to imagine as the mainstays of the oral tradition.

Then he continues two paragraphs later:

We young overheard what we were not capable of interpreting, but the truths of fiction were hardening in us like bone. The story was the road that traveled almost to the interiors of lives, the human presence in what was still held to be a wild place, and its scenes were the ones that we knew.

It is this factor in our lives in Alabama that make for a scenario where “facts” can be strange bedfellows. I can remember times as an adult when I have reiterated to my parents a story or fact they told me as a kid, only to get the response, “I never told you that. That never happened.” It used to bother me, because I felt like I was wrong for remembering incorrectly, but it doesn’t anymore. It’s actually kind of fun. I’ve reached a point where I don’t care if it’s true – not a bitter sort of don’t-care, but an okay-I’ll-play-along sort of don’t care. It’s like living in a place where everything becomes a big fish story. Schadenfreude or not, it makes life more interesting.

Reflecting on my reading in The Remembered Gate has made me aware too of something about myself. Choosing what I thought to be random pieces to read, I have noticed a pattern. I read Lincoln’s piece first because it came first, and then Patricia Foster’s because it was second. Then I skipped over to Andrew Glaze (whose work appears sixth) because I met him once, and then I read James’ Haskins work (which comes before Glaze) because I thought it coupled nicely with Lincoln’s. I put the book aside for a while, and picked it up recently to read again, and this time chose two poets: Andrew Hudgins and Rodney Jones, both of whose poetry I enjoy and admire. I have also met Hudgins before. But out of the six pieces I have read so far, only one was by a woman. If I had to get into a defensive posture about it, I would say flippantly that maybe I identify more with the male stories since I’m a man. If I were a spineless person, I might apologize for my political incorrectness and inadvertent chauvinism and get to reading Mary Ward Brown or Nancy Kincaid immediately. But I’m something in between, so my next readings will be by women writers, for whatever reason, I don’t know.

Alabama's online checkbook

2010-01-18T10:00:00.000-06:00

This interview with Alabama's Chief Information Officer (CIO) Jim Burns appeared online at govtech.com and it describes the state's new website where the general population can see how the state is spending money, all of its money. I have always said that Bob Riley was more of a businessman than a politician -- to my knowledge he never held elected office before becoming governor seven years ago -- and this is one more proof behind my belief. His move, through Burns, is to create "transparency" in government in the same way that a business has to be transparent for its stockholders. In this case, the citizens of Alabama are both customers and the stockholders -- the same basic idea behind a co-op -- paying in to receive services for their money and being stakeholders in the success of the venture.

The downside of this public information tool is that all state employees' salaries are listed on the site, too, which caused a HUGE uproar when it came online. There is a debate between the public's right to know and the employees' right to privacy. Do state employees forfeit their right to privacy about their pay rate when they become state employees whose salaries come from taxpayer dollars? As a teacher, it doesn't bother me, because now people have the ability to know how pitifully we are paid.

http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/737428

"Seattle Times" travel writer on Civil Rights history

2010-01-17T13:32:00.004-06:00

If you have ever wanted to a read a heavily romanticized, way too short summation of how wonderful Civil Rights history can be, read this travel piece from the Seattle Times. While everything the writer put in his piece is true -- the facts of the movement, the dignity of the people who now work to commemorate it -- he oozes it all out with the tone of a guy in a bar trying too hard to get laid.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/travel/2010786279_tralabama17.html

As an advocate of more people knowing Civil Rights history better, this article both makes my heart glad and makes my skin crawl at the same time. At bottom, the guy is trying to get more people to come down here for vacations and tours, to see the great institutional support for the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, which I am grateful for, but he is such a slobbering panderer about it. I don't know anything about Scott Ivers, the writer of this article, but his byline says The Washington Post . . . for whatever that's worth.

Reading: "Poor But Proud," Part One

2010-01-16T12:24:00.003-06:00

I have finished reading the first section of Wayne Flynt's Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites. The book was published in 1989 by the University of Alabama Press and won the Lillian Smith Award. As it is the third book by Wayne Flynt that I have read, I am used to his style now: assertion, followed by proof (either statistics or the story of an indicative case or person), and finally a summation before moving on to the next point, which has the same pattern.

When I told my friend who teaches history and whose graduate degree focuses on Southern history that I was reading this book, he said, "I'm sorry." Though Flynt is very informative and his style is much less cluttered than other historians works I have read, it's still reading history. The historians I have known take great pride in writing in a dry and clear style, unlike literary writing that pulls the reader along using tension about what will happen next. In history, what will happen next is already over. It isn't fun to read, but I'm not reading it for fun, so that's okay.

Part One is titled "Origins" and traces poor and working-class white people from the frontier days to early statehood. I was surprised to find out that, in the early days of Alabama, working-class whites had a lot of political power, because most white people were rural and the planter class had not yet established itself. I also learned that mills were put in very rural areas in order to avoid what would later be called unionization; if all of the mill workers were concentrated in a few cities, it would have been much easier for the common plight to be apparent. Putting a mill in a small town, whose only jobs would have been farming or that mill, created a power structure that was hard for workers to break through. Flynt also takes the time to explain the roots of Alabama's conservatism: low taxes, minimal government interference, minimal social programs, strong religious fundamentalism, opposition to women's rights, and a belief in "white supremacy" all were planks in a platform that served their frontier and later farming lifestyle. On the frontier, people took care of themselves, plain and simple; and anyone who couldn't needed to pack up and leave.

Flynt wrote, "Because all whites could agree essentially on the significance of equality, independence, and white supremacy, the full implications of class conflict were not realized in antebellum Alabama." He also wrote that, in the early days, "most Alabamians disdained wealth and education" as signs of snobbery. In a frontier society, with little central government involved in people's day-to-day lives, what Flynt call "equality" meant that everyone had the same chances and success often depended on hard work.

I wanted to read this book, because I came from a working-class family. However, through education and my career choice, I have separated myself from the blue-collar culture that I knew growing up. As an adult, I have trouble making sense of working-class culture, but I feel more comfortable in the company of working-class people than in "higher" social scenarios. I wanted to read this book to get a better sense of why working-class Alabamians are the way they are. My parents worked hard and sent me to private school, then to college, and I later pursued a teaching certificate and a masters degree on my own. I went to a panel at AWP one year about working-class people in academia, and this writer-professor (whose name I don't remember) talked about how academia is essentially a middle-class and upper-class pursuit, that working-class people who choose teaching often find it difficult to assimilate into the culture, where they don't know the norms for propriety. I, for one, often find that academics don't like my accent and some of the expressions I use, and sometime don't even know what I'm saying when I use colloquialisms. In her piece in The Remembered Gate, Patricia Foster wrote about trying to find a satisfactory solution to her dilemmas through an intellectual, rather than spiritual, pursuit, because it was the only way she knew; and I guess that is what I'm trying to do by reading Poor But Proud.

I am just beginning to read further, so more is coming . . .

An Agenda for Tuscaloosa

2010-01-15T22:01:00.003-06:00

In a few weeks, I am heading for Tuscaloosa to meet with the following folks:

Andrew Beck Grace: a filmmaker, activist, and professor at U of AL

http://www.moonwinxfilms.com/

http://www.eatingalabama.org/

Elliott Knight, grad student in art at U of AL

http://www.blackbelt100lenses.org/about.html

Going to see a Drive-By Truckers show (who are from north Alabama) at the Jupiter on Saturday night

David Snow and Margaret Ann Toohey at Snows Bend Farm, an organic CSA

http://www.snowsbendfarm.com/

Unfortunately, though Amos Kennedy had previously agreed to be interviewed when I was up there, but he recently not been answering my letters.

It should be a great trip. After I get back there will new interviews and videos to share!