Reading Gone with the Wind

I began reading Gone with the Wind at the beginning of June. I am almost half way through. I'm an incredibly slow reader because I savor and make a study of text. I am amazed at just how much cultural information Mitchell's book contains. I am especially interested in what she suggests throughout her text, about class.

She helps us understand how it is that Gerald has come to be a slave owner and that, despite his success, he will always be confined to a certain class partly because of his Irish heritage. Gerald, she explains while giving the background leading up to his becoming a planter, didn't want to be "in trade" like his brothers. He didn't want a life of endless "bargaining."

I have been studying trade and bargaining. I am fascinated by these terms and their meaning in the context of nineteenth century America and, even more so, in the context of slave society. I first became familiar with this term, however, through my grandfather, a Mississippi expat, who always spoke of "trading" with certain grocers in Detroit. He had been a small grocer himself in both Mississippi and Detroit, but I suspect that he had learned the term in the South, where he had done much business with area whites in both the small town where he lived and in Memphis, where he traveled regularly to buy and sell cotton and cattle. Many times, I've come across historical writings in which trade and bargaining are mentioned. For instance, right now, I'm studying the Southern Claims Commission file of Cato Govan, a former slave who made a good deal of money during the Civil War hauling cotton to Memphis.

What intrigues me about Mitchell's commentary is that she places the planter far above that of the merchant. A good deal of Gone with the Wind is in fact spent telling a story that has this class problematic as its foundation. Gerald is not Ellen's social equal; Scarlett is not Ashley's equal, and Rhett, despite coming from a good family, is not received by any reputable families, so, in the end, he is not Scarlett's equal. I am interested in this issue for many many reasons as I have immersed myself in Southern culture of the twenty-first century, studying at the same time William Crump, who was an attorney but appears on the 1860 census as a grocer despite the fact that he was a relatively prosperous planter. What gives? Why would Crump self-identify as a grocer rather than as a planter, especially if the former was less respectable?

I have my suspicions about Mr. Crump given that I have read more than one account of his character and person. He appears to have been a Unionist of sorts. As I've been reading GWTW, I have compared him to the unforgettable Rhett Butler. Was Crump too all about profit? Was money everything to him? He was attorney for Elizabeth Hull, owner of my ancestors. Hull trusted him both to take care of her business and with her daughter, whom he married. It was apparently an unhappy marriage; Crump was thought to be uncaring. Elizabeth the younger died, it would seem, heartbroken. Neighbor Henry Craft's diary is one source for this view of the marriage.

My guess is that there were layers and dimensions to William Crump. These deserve to be investigated, for to do so would be to provide a more complex view of Southern society than most of us have received. This investigation may have capitalism as its foundation. Why was Crump Unionist? Was he simply the same pragmatist as the fictional Butler? Was he as dead set on survival as even our heroine Scarlett O'Hara Butler would come to be? How well did Crump come through the war?

In 1870, we find him living in a household led by Morris Anderson, a 32-year-old mulatto carpenter born in North Carolina. Crump, now 65, would appear to have a good amount of money relative to his neighbors. Perhaps he eschewed all social convention. This living arrangement would certainly seem to suggest such independence. I look forward to digging deeper to find out.

The Rose Hotel, 1812

Today began my annual trek from Mississippi to Indiana. In my new position, the school year doesn't end as neatly as it did when I was not an administrator, but I have managed to get away still the first week in June. As busy as I was, however, tying up loose ends, I had only a couple of hours to look for a nice play to stay overnight--as I had decided before taking off that I would not drive straight through. I've done it far too many times, and my constitution is not, it seems to me, better for it.

I looked online for a bed and breakfast somewhere between northern Kentucky and Southern Illinois. I must have looked at rooms in at least a dozen, but with the exception of those in Paducah, which seem very interesting, some even exquisite, others seemed too fru fru. I am really not that much into Victorian. It can be sweet but is usually not restrained enough for my taste. I did find one B&B in Harrisburg, Illinois--the Lafayette Inn--but I called them, and their phone just rang and rang. When the time came for me to hit the road, Highway 7 north out of Mississippi, I had not yet found a room. This was a little discomforting. I feel a little less desperately out in the world by myself when I know ahead of time where I'll be laying my head for the night.

So, the plan then was to stop in Paducah, Kentucky--a town whose name I've known for years only because I've seen signs for it off of the interstates I've traveled. I also traveled through Paducah last year although from Highway 45 one does not see the city's downtown, which must be where the snazzy inns are located. Things did not go as planned. I got a phone call while I was driving through Paducah, and then I somehow wound up off 45 and on 60. Despite having navigation, I also carry a road atlas, and my car has a compass, which has saved me many, many times. So, I saw that 60 travels northwesterly, and since I was headed to Indiana... Besides that, 60 also connects to 91, which connects back to 45...

I've forgotten how long I was on 60, but I wasn't the least bit worried since I still had over a half tank of gas, having filled up in Jackson, Tennessee. I'm also not sure how long I was on 91, but somewhere along the way I saw a sign that said that trucks of a certain tonnage could not take the ferry. Ferry? I know what a ferry is, but this water vessel that takes people and vehicles across rivers is not a part of my experience, which is likely the reason why I, despite forewarning, didn't think about what the message to truckers meant.

The next thing I knew, the Blazer and I were in a line of cars and a big truck. A guy at the shore beckoned for me to go around the truck, and that's when the reality that my car and I were about to cross the Ohio River, not on a bridge but on a ferry, began to sink in. I did go around the truck, and the same fellow directed me to get behind another car, very snugly I might add. I was scared, honestly, I was, first of getting too close to the car in front of me and, then, that I was going to suffer some kind of cognitive dissonance from not adjusting my mind quickly enough to the fact that my car was moving without my having to press on the gas. I started to turn the car off but was unsure that that was the proper thing to do, so I left it on and hoped that automatic pilot would not kick in and instruct me to press on the gas pedal. In other words, I was just a few minutes shy of freaking out.

Of course, I managed to remain calm somehow, and on the other side of the river, I landed at Rock-in-the-Cave, which I have since learned is a major tourist site. There is a cave. I drove maybe a couple of blocks--can't really recall how far, could've been more--then saw a sign for a lodge. Yes! I turned a corner, went less than a quarter of a mile and entered a state park whose signage directed me to the cabins. There was a restaurant as well, and I entered there to ask about the cabins. The price was incredibly reasonable, but they were all booked. The clerk could only offer a full house for $165, and I'm glad to say that, not needing a washer and dryer and three bedrooms, I was not tempted to rent it for the night. Still, I regretted that the cabins weren't available; they are situated overlooking the water. I asked the clerk if he could recommend other lodging and he told me that there were two beds and breakfasts in Elizabethtown about thirteen miles away. At that point, I was even more stubbornly committed to not trying to reach Indiana; it was around 3:00, and I wasn't interested in driving in the dark or of arriving in town exhausted.

I got to Elizabethtown in maybe fifteen minutes and found the B&Bs pretty easily. One need only go toward the water. As the clerk had said, there are two right across the street from each other. I had no idea which to choose. I started toward the one and then turned toward the Rose Hotel, founded in 1812. There was a vacancy sign (as there was at the other), and when I entered the front door, with the look of the road on my face--the innkeeper smiled. He showed me the rooms that were available, and I chose the Sarah Room, which is very nice, with a sleigh bed situated in the corner, a lilac chenille spread covering the bed. The room is carpeted and furnished with simple antiques, like a wooden rocker and a wardrobe. There is a nice clawfoot tub as well, equipped with shower.

So, the room is very tranquil, and this of course is not the point of this blog post, but I enjoy telling the whole story because I think how I came to this place is important. After arriving here, actually, before arriving here I began to think about journeys of our ancestors. The thing is I crossed at least two other rivers, and since I haven't checked my atlas I'm actually not sure that I wasn't crossing the same river in different places. I imagine that one of those rivers was the Little Wabash, which if I recall correctly figures in that awful story of the unsuccessful escape attempt by William Still's brother. But, more to the point, how can I stay at the historic Rose Hotel, which was open and running during the era of slavery, and not think about slaves who lived just across the river in Kentucky and hoped against hope one day to be able to cross the river to freedom. I didn't see any literature to this effect when I checked in. Maybe I will find some tomorrow. Breakfast is at 8:30. I will be sure to ask then.

If there is not such history, or if there is, but it has not been told, then I expect I'll be doing some writing on this. All day, I had been thinking about my trip, how eccentric I am to keep taking this annual slow jog through the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. On one level, I am consciously covering the steps of freedomseekers, and yet I struggle greatly to even approximate feeling what they felt. I may have worried about getting loss, having mistakenly gotten off 45, but they worried about being caught and sent back. I felt a little unsafe getting so far off the beaten path, but they must have thought it wise to do just this. As I crossed the Ohio, I was afraid; this is true. The journey seemed to take a long time. I wanted to speed it up. I worried, irrationally, that we might somehow tip into the water. Maybe I had a moment, a visit, an alignment of sorts.

Finally, curious about the Rose Hotel, I of course Googled it when I got a chance, after having a lovely meal at a floating restaurant that can be seen from the hotel. One website was of ghost-trackers. I didn't click on it. The innkeeper had earlier told me to call "if anything happens." Her assurances that nothing would did not erase the suspicion she had already aroused in me. From that point on, I pretty much accepted that the hotel is haunted; how could it not be? It's 200 years old! I decided I would sleep with the bathroom light on. My mother has always said that ghosts cannot harm you; only people who are alive can harm you. I believe she is right, but I have come to accept that there are intersecting spheres, and I have no doubt that there are here at this beautiful hotel remnants of the one-time presence of our ancestors who may very well have taken refuge here.

Blurred Lines II

So, in a previous post--Blurred Lines I--I asked why the song "Got to Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye (1977) came to me in a dream this week, and I implied that its surfacing is directly connected to my having heard Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" back in June of this year and again a little over a week ago. I didn't say in the previous post that I am not in the habit of dreaming of Marvin Gaye songs. Actually, my father wasn't that crazy about Gaye since he didn't like the sexual (read erotic) aspect of some of the later stuff; my father was a romantic in the more lovely sense of the word. So, either my father, whom I have called my psychic d.j., did not send forth this song, or he did but not merely for my listening pleasure.

What, then, does my subconscious self want me to do with the knowledge that Thicke's song is strongly influenced by Gaye's? Might I add that last night I gave some thought to other influences that I hear in the song and came up with Prince as the main influence on Thicke's falsetto? I went online and learned that not a few people have realized the same. Some think Michael Jackson is an influence as well, but I'm not yet able to discern anything beyond the "Hey," which I guess could be Jackson's "He he!" At a time like this, I need an ethnomusicologist. I know of two, and neither is available to me at the moment. If they were, I'd ask just how common this degree of influence is, which is beside the point of this post, or, well, maybe not. Okay, I know enough to recognize "Blurred Lines" as a pastiche, my term of choice for what others call a mashup. Again, there are in Thicke's recording several influences. It takes either a refined ear, age, or a little peace and quiet to tease them all out. Why bother? Well, one reason I can think of is that one is a fool if he or she thinks that there is anything new under the sun. What does it mean then to have a hit if that hit is a creative collage of old hits? I suppose it means that one has reassembled the old with the new very creatively, and I would admit that one is to be applauded for that. Most old heads would say that the originals were better. I dunno. I don't even know if I am an old head. What I do know is that the old music takes me back to a time, and I know that when I hear music from the past--an experience very much like Proust and the teacup or was it Didion and the teacups?--the essence of that time also comes back. When I first heard Thicke's song, I approached the past but did not become fully immersed in it, maybe because of the puzzle the music placed before me.

For months then, I think I suffered a bit of cognitive dissonance, a condition which may increase with age, but one which I suspect that more and more young people (am I young at 48?) suffer. (Incidentally, my mother, who is in her 70s, experienced such an episode recently, a sort of temporal confusion. She got stuck in her own constructed sense of time, which may actually mean that she's ahead in this game.) My own persistent dissonance has to do with living in, one, a culture that gives me much more to do and much more to consume than I reasonably can (which means I am cognitively overloaded all of the time) and, two, living in a culture in which truly nothing is original. My response to what I take to be postmodern facts of life is not to take on an air or claim of cultural superiority (I suppose Gaye's song wasn't pure either) but to feel disturbed by the possibility that most may not be able to tease out the differences for whatever reason--time poverty or choice to spend time on things that seem to matter more.

Take for instance last year's blockbuster slavery film Django Unchained. Now, I went in so hard on that film last year that I promised myself to give it a rest. Trying to get people to see that film as problematical was definitely a losing battle. Apparently, so long as you're Quentin Tarantino you can treat subject matter however you like, as bloody as you would like. It seems to me that a majority of people whose opinions I heard--that would include more than one man of the cloth--were not bothered very much by the violence, which was made acceptable by the "It's Tarantino" argument. I was surprised that these people did not offer (only a handful did) that slavery was violent every day. Had they done so, I would have countered with the fact that the violence of slavery was contextualized so that even in its barbarity, in the final analysis, one would be able to explain it, which is not the same of course as accepting or approving of it. With DU, the artistic and moral question is whether the violence made sense, as in, did it fit the specific context, or was it simply added for effect or pleasure. The latter possibility would be rightly called pornographic intent. (Decontextualized, obsessive, viewing is what pornography is I think.) About the time that I lost patience with the various ways in which people excused this very troubling film, I had even decided to hit below the belt, offering that Americans don't know enough about slavery to judge a film good or bad. This is a fact that is not in need of an argument, right? So, what have producers in effect done when they offer a historical film which precious few consumers have the knowledge to judge critically? In my opinion, this is an offense almost criminal, a compounding of ignorance. And what are the implications of that!? Worse than a compounding, however, is willy nilly exponential growth, multiple denominators whose only common thread is the refrain "It's just entertainment." Augh! Absent a critical thread, for example, "this film bears no resemblance to real slavery" or "why can't African American lives in film ever be given enough back story to create depth so that they might pass as something close to real?, Hollywood can produce just about anything it likes so long as we find it entertaining in one way or another--it make us mad, it cracks us up, puts us just briefly in touch with the past, in short, titillates rather than moves (us to action?) Amused to death (Postman), we are served up another slavery film this year.

And this folks it seems to me is the state of things and the state of our minds, overwhelmed with information, overloaded, hyper-entertained, which is why the whole idea of the "must see" film does make sense to us, and our friends--who, like us, have few critical bones left in their consenting heads-- tell us every other week that we simply must see movie x,y, or z, as though viewing films has become a life or death matter.

All of this returns me to the other issue at hand--how it is that my and, I suspect, everyone else's, subconscious would pull up for us what has been suppressed. Is it to take to task the information overloaders, the Lords of the Media, who are the ones doing the overloading and to much profit I might add? The answers from Jung are balance and that the subconscious has something to offer all its own. In this case, I think it wants to point me and others to what is real, or more real, which is to say closer to the source of the original experience; Gaye's song is a reminder of a different reality, more deeply sensual I think, closely knitted to a more soulful, less consumeristic time, you know, that Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored? (Taulbert) That was a very modern time, which, as social critics explain, may have laid a foundation for and anticipated this present time in which everything is a mashup and we haven't the time either to discern or to reconnect with the past at deeper levels. But my dream suggests that whether you have the time or not the past is always with us and will pop up when it is good and ready. Now, it is a matter of whether we will hear, see, or recognize it for what it is, which is not simply another layer of reality--but a sensuality and a spirituality that perhaps cannot be experienced richly in the postmodern world of so many things--but within the space or place of dreams and other psychic phenomena. Be that as it may, I have to admit that Thicke's song did stimulate my psyche. This function of "new" music must be worth something. But the lines are in fact blurred, and there is a politics and an economics to various acts of blurring. I am these days constantly reminded of Melville's wisdom--this world pays dividends. This explains so much, but I'm willing to believe that Thicke and Pharrell Williams were as musicians inspired by the artistry of Gaye, which is probably why they should go ahead and admit the influence and pay accordingly. In this case, sampling and, in effect, tweaking black people's experiences of joy and pain is a real money-maker. Worse, are "Blurred Lines," "Django Unchained," or "12 Years a Slave," placebos? Are they vaccinations, periodic inoculations with the pain of the past, in order to stave off real despair, deep reconnections with the various deep pains of inhumanities suffered? The answers to these questions are answerable, yes?

Blurred Lines I

I'm not a Jung scholar, nor am I a psychoanalyst, but I have very slowly been reading Jung for the last two years, and I have come away with more than a few ideas including that Jung thought dreams (and the subconscious) provided a balance for the conscious. He also believed that the world of dreams is as much reality as what we perceive in our waking hours. I have been reading Jung out of an interest in understanding how humans perceive reality and what constitutes it; I have been naturally (it seems to me) led to this interest as I have sought to understand the world(s) of the ancestors. Take for instance this line from a document I came across years ago, which narrates early African American church history in northwest Mississippi. "He was one of our greatest divines." I gave a short talk last spring in which I considered this word "divine," and how it has been lost from our vocabulary including church jargon. Just the other day, in reading another historic document, I saw it used interchangeably with "seer." Divine is both an adjective, a noun, and a verb, and it means to know or to discern. I suspect that right along with the loss of this word we also have lost faith in the plethora of ways that the ancestors sought and found knowledge. The loss has been a result of scientific, "rational," thinking. I'm sure there are those who believe, and I think I would agree with them, that in adjusting to scientific thinking we have in fact limited our ways of knowing and, in so doing, given away power. Knowledge is power, right? I think Jung would say that certain kinds of thinking, primitive thinking, have not however altogether disappeared from modern humans; they have only gone underground so to speak. And I suspect that if too much is left to the underground, it comes bubbling up either because of overcapacity in our personal underworlds or because some piece of information or knowledge needs to surface to balance out something in the conscious. An example may clarify what I mean. Last spring, I was traveling from Mississippi back to Indiana (I live in both places). Because my car is old, I'd decided to take back roads all the way up, and being that I wasn't in any hurry (school being out for the summer)I decided to stop at every antique or junk store on the way. In one particularly junkie one, a radio was on, and I heard Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" for the first time. Even as I perused the shop, already certain that I wasn't going to buy anything, I was mentally stopped dead in my tracks by the song. It took me back, to the seventies, I felt. I asked the shop owner, a white man who looked to be in his late twenties, if he liked the song, and I cannot remember his answer though I think it was he who said it was Robin Thicke. The shop owner may have said he liked the song just fine, but he didn't seem especially taken with it whereas I was because, well, I could tell it was having an effect on me. I was being played somehow, emotionally. Honestly, I kind of liked the play even while I also knew that someone, Thicke or someone else, was doing some serious sampling and owed some serious credit. In truth, I felt like something had been stolen, but the first time I heard "Blurred Lines" I could not immediately identify who the artists of influence were. Over the next several months, because I seldom turn on the radio to listen to anything other than NPR and use Pandora's pre-selected oldies stations on my phone and computer, I didn't hear "Blurred Lines" again until Rust College's Founder's Week. Then, it was blared all over campus, heard all over the west side of town, and I refamiliarized myself with it and also realized that it was a hit among blacks. Its groove is just so festive; it's perfect, as I read from one critic, for family reunions. Even the old people ask for it. Perhaps the song rekindles something latent in us, again, something we've let go underground. But then... Two nights ago, I awakened to Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up." From time to time (once a month?), I dream of music, usually one particular song. A few years ago, I came to the conclusion that this is how my deceased father communicates with me. My father, born in the '30s, was not much for the Blues. Rather, he loved soul music and R&B, and this is the kind of music I dream most often. The first time I dreamed of music (that I can remember), Daddy played for me "Ouuu child, things are gonna get easier." That song and that time were a real affirmation. Now, when I dream of music I'm always trying to figure out what message my father is sending. Whether or not he is in fact the source of my dreamtime music, whether or not my father is my psychic d.j., I still wonder why a certain song will come to mind without it seems my own conscious control of its emergence. Yet, when I dreamed the other night of Gaye's song from 1977 I knew immediately that my subconscious was providing an answer to a question that I had not consciously asked: who the influences were of Thicke's anthem. I was amazed, amazed at how this answer had surfaced so easily without any hard thinking on my part. I was, however, somewhat concerned with the fact that the process had taken almost six months. Still, I was more interested in the why--why my subconscious felt I needed the information. My answer to this question goes back to what I've already stated of Jung's theory of the subconscious as a balance. It is easy enough for me to reason that the six-month period is proof positive that in the very modern life I lead I am entirely too busy. There is just too much going on in my conscious thoughts from day to day. Back in June when I was rambling through the junk shop, overwhelmed by so many dusty gadgets, I might have discerned the influences then had I wanted to take the time, or had I been relaxed enough to think clearly, or taken the time to stop and sit. But I did not feel I had the time, which is usually my evaluation of my life, and add to this the fact that I was crossing both time and space as I headed north. Some things, would-be thoughts, apparently chose to slip through the time/space gap--one made all the more convenient by the hour I gained between Mississippi and Indiana--until later. The question remains whether the surfacing of "the answer"--one that I may have needed without even realizing it--was neutral or whether it surfaced with intention. I think Jung would say whenever what is in the subconscious surfaces it is with intention. More musing on this in the next post.

Blessings

This morning, I went to Walmart to wire a small sum of money to someone who needed it. On my way there, I saw a yard sale on the left side of the street. As much as rummage sales of any sort pull at me, I kept on my way, knowing that I could stop on my way back. I did of course. Actually, I do not love yard sales. I seldom find anything really good. But, today was different. Right away I spotted several things and made a mental note of them before approaching the homeowner to ask about prices. I asked about three or four items, and the answer was the same each time: $1. I smiled, and said, "I like your prices." I spent about $7 with her, and as I was heading to my car, she told me that I could in fact have anything that I wanted. "I'm getting too old for this," she admitted. She obviously was trying to get rid of everything. I added three more items to my loot. I could have added much more, but, as I told her, I was beginning to feel greedy. As it was, everything I was toting away she'd actually or practically given me for free. I am now the proud owner of a Turkish Kilim bag (by Yun Art)and, more impressive, a wooden caddy on the bottom of which someone wrote: "This box is more than 100 years old as of this date June 18, 1985." And it was signed R.I. Moore. I hadn't turned the "box" over while I was still at the yard sale although I often do this--being a seasoned junker. I did make the mistake of cleaning the item as soon as I got home because I wanted to place it at the center of the kitchen table. Since the box had been sitting on the ground, I wanted to clean any dirt off there as well. My heart leaped when I saw the handwritten message. I am very analytical, so I began thinking about the message right away. I decided that the shaky handwriting was definitely that of an elderly person--perhaps an octogenarian. I did a quick Internet search for R.I. Moore then stopped, realizing that the name was too common, and although I'd purchased the box in the town where I live there was no telling where the person who sold it to me had gotten it. True, she may have gotten it from her own home. It may have belonged to a relative of hers but then I figured that if it had been a family heirloom she might not have sold it for so little. I can always go back and ask her. Do I dare? I remain intrigued by R.I. Moore because he or she bothered to leave the note. A very intelligent person, I thought, who knew the value of the item, the cultural and historical value--not monetary. And if the box was in 1985 more than 100 years old, would it not date to the slavery era? My guess would be yes. More than 100. In 1985, slavery was 120 years in the past. That would be about right. The person who left the note could have written: this item was made by a slave. It is in fact a caddy, more than a box but the language is important. A slave would not likely have called it a caddy. In fact, come to think of it, it may be a tool box, only it seems too decorated to have served that purpose. The handle has a carved detail. Then again, the wood is not rare, not imported. It would then seem to be a utilitarian item of a lower-class person if not a slave. It's joinery is dovetail, but it's center piece, the partition and handle, is attached with square-headed nails to the bottom. There is an appraisal show coming to town soon, and were it not for the $75 fee I would take this item. I may still, but my intrigue goes far beyond monetary value. I'm, rather, interested in how I got so lucky today. Why me, and why was the proprietor of these items so generous on this dsy when I decided to stop at her sale when there were a half dozen others that I didn't stop at? Anyone who has been reading this particular blog knows that I take notice of serendipity all of the time now. I love to watch how the universe just opens up sometimes, and, as some would say, pours out blessings. I need these kinds of affirmations. We all do. They let us know that we are not alone in the universe. There are always so many other things at work besides our mundane doings. And I so appreciate R.I. Moore for marking this item. He or she definitely is or was a historian in his or her own right.

Who's Afraid of Post Blackness? I am.

Back in the early '90s, I read Shelby Steele's Content of Our Character. The book made my blood boil, and I pretty much decided that I would never read it again. And I didn't, yet I have assigned a chapter from it at least once in a beginning composition course, and the students--most of them white but a few of them black or Latino--have liked Steele's thinking. I have accepted their right to decide whether they think he is misguided or on to something. I still cannot myself much stomach his views, yet I have been glad that I have calmed down my response.

Lots of other black folk, of Steele's age cohort (which is a little before my own), didn't care too much for his perspective either, and so they pretty much quietly moved his ideas aside even while the media continued to give his thinking some attention. College textbook publishers, for instance, would continue to include essays from his popular book in their readers, and, for that reason alone, I went ahead and introduced them to a generation below my own.

The problem that I had with Steele's old argument then, as I do now, was that it didn't in my opinion include a critical race analysis, meaning hardcore sociological analysis. All of his evidence was soft. It seemed to me that he could easily blame, for instance, a black kid from the hood who dropped out of school on the person having made a poor choice. And, if anyone defended the outcome of this person's life by claiming that his or her environment had played a role, adding that racism had played a part, Steele might return to choice and ignore the social impact of race altogether. Race and racism just seemed to me something that Steele thought pretty easy to overcome. Too easy, yet transcending race seemed to be his cure for all that might be ailing African Americans at the time, and, by extension, today.

Steele's book sits in a cardboard box in my basement, a victim of a purge of my library a few years back. So, I hadn't actually thought of Content of Our Character until today while I was reading Toure's Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now. Let me say upfront this blog post is not a review of his book. I will not likely write a review, and anyway I am just getting into chapter two. So far, I have been listening to Toure's argument, introduced by Michael Eric Dyson, and I recognize how hard Toure is trying to say blackness has expanded without saying that race is no longer an issue. I can appreciate all of his attempts though I don't think I'm yet buying into an idea that the two are separate issues.

In some ways, his argument is based on quantitative thinking. That is, he sees as having multiplied exponentially the number of ways black people can express themselves today as black and the ways in which we can self-identify. He begins the book with his own story of trying skydiving even after a couple of brothas clued him in on the "fact" that black people don't do that or other similar crazy activities that obviously put one's life in jeopardy. The men's message called up the old phrase, "acting
white." I have always myself hated that phrase, and I, admittedly, have heard it a few times from people who claim to love me, responding to some of my doings. Heck, I just heard it last week when I went to a concert in the park featuring a local all-white band The Whistle Pigs, who sang some Motown classics among other numbers. I'm sure for Toure, cultural hybridity, borrowing and blending, appreciating and even feeling in some way other people's experience is also part of what is creating a new milieu of increased options for identification. Honestly, the Whistle Pigs were soulful enough for my taste on a Thursday afternoon. I wasn't looking for much however that day, and I wasn't in a serious critical mode. Had I been, I would have listened more closely to the music and maybe come to the same conclusion as Alice Walker's Gracie Mae Still. "One day, this is going to be a pitiful country." Gracie Mae Still, some might argue, is stuck in the past, but, Walker seems to be saying, she feels, she knows, and that's what she sings. Something, a lot, is lost in translation not necessarily because Traynor, the young rock and roll star who covers her music cannot really feel it, but maybe because the society in which her music becomes reproduced by industry alters profoundly both the life and the music.

I was stopped in my tracks by Toure's reference to a statement by UC Santa Cruz professor Derek Conrad Murray in which the latter expressed a difference between his generation and that of his parents and grandparents.

"...we honor the history of the struggle of black people in America but we still want to construct our own notion of Blackness that is separate from that of our parents and grandparents" (22).

 Of course we do. Is this therefore a straw-man argument? Who doesn't want to be an individual?

But, I'm reminded of my own grandfather, whose father was a slave, a fact which teaches me just how close I am to the institution. In 1945, having been a large landowner in Mississippi, my grandfather nevertheless moved his family--wife and six children--to Detroit. I had a wonderful childhood in the city, a gift I would say came from my grandfather's decision to migrate. As a result, there are no black and white water fountains and restrooms in my memory. But I'll bet there were many in my grandparents' memories and maybe as well remembrances of their elders' literal scars from slavery. Once, while I was visiting with my grandparents, my grandfather turned on the television, and I told him that I wanted to watch "The Brady Bunch." That's right; I told him, a haughty show of disrespect that already hinted at the kind of change that already had taken place within our family. And it suggests part of the difference that Toure may be missing even while he and Murray desire and/or see another difference. Well, my grandfather wanted to watch "Sanford and Son," so we had a conflict before us. The gentle giant that my grandfather was, he ended up letting me win the short-term battle, but my eight or nine-year-old ears heard exactly what he said as he returned to his seat. "You need to know something about your own people."

I have been working on a book about our family, and I have reflected many times on what my grandfather said under his breath that day when I told him that I wanted to watch a story about a family of blond-haired little white girls, their dark-haired brothers, and their parents living the American Dream, which I and so many other kids experienced vicariously every evening after the show had gone into reruns. Who among those who grew up on "The Brady Bunch" didn't want to live in that all-American family's modern, split-level house, take a pretty picture by that long stair rail, and have Alice the Maid set out cookies after school while waiting for Sam the Butcher to bring fresh meat? Did I ever stop to ask why the Bradys needed a butcher when fresh meat probably could have been had from a nearby grocer? Did I ever connect the Brady's privilege to one that was not my own? That was not obviously the point of my watching the show. The Brady life was a fantasy for black kids and I'm sure poor white kids alike. And what's wrong with fantasizing, especially if it becomes motivation for success, or for getting a fabulous house and a maid to boot? Sitting, I thought safely in my grandparents' paid-for home on the northeast side of Detroit enjoying some '70s styled fantasy, why did my grandfather think that I needed to know about black people's lives? Was this a requirement simply because I was black? Did the "skin I was in" lay upon me such a burden? And was his the identity politics that Shelby Steele would deride twenty years later?

Maybe these questions are difficult to answer. But, I'm reminded of something that one of my grad school classmates said one day when I was still in the throes of hating Steele's perspective. We weren't reading him in our rhetoric class that semester. Instead, we were reading pragmatists--including Cornel West whose identity as a Marxist and a pragmatist confused me at the time."If you're not a socialist before thirty you have no heart; if you're a socialist after thirty you have no head," I suppose settled things for me. Anyway, in seminars, I was usually of few words, choosing instead to meditate on others' thoughts, and, as I recall it was rare for my Latina classmate Renee to say much either. But one day, somehow bringing to my mind my grandfather, she said in reference to the pragmatists: "They don't care about our pain." Obviously, I haven't forgotten her statement. I have used it in the last twenty years as a way to measure people's humanity, society's. Do "they" feel our pain? Does Toure feel his ancestors' pain? Did and do I feel my grandfathers'? Did he think that I should?

Perhaps we are most fully human when we do feel each other's pain. I think this is what Carol Gilligan et al were after in Mapping the Moral Domain, which we also read previous to the pragmatists. What Gilligan and her colleagues seemed to be asking was what should be the quality of our relationships with others who inhabit the world with us? Procedural justice, most of us in class seemed to agree, is a high principle, but is it the highest? Mama Lee Younger gives her daughter Beneatha an answer to this question maybe when she makes her daughter repeat: "In my mother's house, there is still God," But, I think this question is answered even more directly when Mama asks Beneatha if she has cried for her brother today. Even if you hate Walter Lee for his selfishness, for almost wrecking the family's dreams, he remained human, and to understand both his choices and how the society had a role in helping him to reach the place where he would err required intellectual understanding, but for Mama Lee that wasn't enough. She wanted her daughter to feel her brother's pain like James Baldwin wants brother to feel Sonny's pain, as well as to acknowledge--rather than run from, ignore, or deny--his own. After all, Baldwin's story implies, it is not that the upstanding citizen and teacher brother doesn't have pain nor that he doesn't try to mask it. His mask and the act of dealing with pain are simply different than Sonny's.

I find myself then rejecting Conrad's statement because I have found, since the death of my grandparents, ways to connect to their pain, and in fact feeling a certain misery when present generations don't feel is part of my experience Likewise, there was pain I think even in my grandfather's realization that one of the byproducts of having brought his family to Detroit was that his grandchildren became disconnected from the family's past. My siblings and I grew up not knowing much of it, and, given our consumption of reorienting media, we felt even less.

I'm not done with Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, but so far I'm lumping it in with similar perspectives that fall under the social construction theory I also had great problems with in grad school and after. It's an intellectual mythology that downplays significantly if it doesn't outright ignore hard-core social realities and, yes, pain.

I may change my mind later, but at this point my answer to Toure's question: Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? is that I am. I'm afraid for my children in the same way that my grandfather must have been afraid for me. The fear is that our very own descendants as they "construct [their] own notion of blackness...separate from that of '[their] parents and grandparents," will, as cultural critic Nelson George might agree, do so sin alma, without soul.. But, according to George, it would seem that we arrived at a place of soul-less-ness at the very time he and I were coming into adulthood, in the gap, between the late '70s and early '80s, when black folks' artistic expression of their experiences, having gained mass appeal, became highly marketed products.

Sometimes they felt like motherless children...a long way from home

I love Saturdays. Every Saturday is for me a holiday, and this time of year--since it's warm in Mississippi--I love to take to the roads though I usually try not to venture too far since my 1996 Chevy Blazer is seventeen years old. Yesterday, however, it being Saturday, I threw caution to the wind and set off on what I expected to be a 150 mile journey (an estimated 2.5 hours) through the back roads of Mississippi and Arkansas.

Now, I knew that I was taking the road (or roads, as it were) less traveled. (I could have driven to Memphis and taken Interstate 40 all the way.) I tend to opt away from interstates whenever possible both because I like driving slowly and because I feel safer on back roads with my car. Help just seems more likely. (Perhaps this is very naive considering the South's history. Sorry, but I have a beyond middle age colleague who grew up in Holmes County, and you can hardly pay him to get off of the Interstate.) On I-40 or any Interstate for that matter I feel unprotected, anonymous, and minds and bodies are just moving much too fast. So, the day before my trip, learning that I could avoid the bridge to Arkansas in Memphis, I easily chose an alternate route in which the bridge to Arkansas is gotten in Mississippi across from Helena.

Out my door in Holly Springs (North Mississippi), I went through town and caught highways 4 and 7, which led to a 4 cut-off, which I took all the way to Senatobia in Tate County. Btw, Marshall County needs to work on 4 badly! I am ashamed at how much the road improves at the Tate County border. The countryside along 4, which I have taken a few times now to visit the courthouse in Senatobia, is interesting enough--with a few old churches along the way. Leaving Senatobia--having ignored the directions and instead hanging a right at the first major road in town--it wasn't too long before I came to a junction with Hwy. 3. When it split off again, I remained on 4 for who knows how long, well, until I finally arrived at the infamous Hwy. 61, which takes one to the Mississippi Delta region.

I was excited to be in the Delta. It was foreign country to me although when I was nine years old our family took a trip deep into the Delta--to Mound Bayou--that all-black town familiar to so many African Americans, founded by the Montgomery family. I was on 61 for what felt like a really long time, and--just when I was about to conclude that my having ignored directions (to look for Panola Rd. in Senatobia) placed me perhaps too far south of the next highway--I came upon it--Highway 49. I was glad to see 49 not just because I had worried I was lost and not just because I expect that the Blazer is going to quit on me one of these days but because 61, beyond the casinos of Tunica County, was so desolate it was eerie. Folks who live out west may be used to huge expanses of undeveloped land, but I am a Midwestern girl. Prairie in Michigan comes with tall prairie grasses. Along 61, the land is covered in what look like stationary tumble weeds (an oxymoron I realize).

Highway 49 wasn't much better in this respect, at least not until I was ten miles or so into Arkansas. There was an occasional house along the way, and of course I was wondering what I would do if my car stopped. I had packed my gym shoes in a backpack, but I wasn't sure just how far I could walk in the hot sun. It was only in the 70s yesterday, but I knew that the sun would feel as hot as fire on my head if I were forced to walk in it.

Into the third hour of my journey, I came to Highway 17, which I was supposed to take but didn't because I had already seen a sign indicating I wasn't far from my final highway--70, which would take me to DeVall's Bluff, Arkansas, where I believed they were holding the Lincoln Freedom Festival. Well, I haven't looked at a map, but Highway 17 appears to loop back, which may mean it's a shortcut, but I kept straight on 49 and then got 70, ten miles down the road. I still felt rather lost because I seemed to have been on 49 far too long, causing me to worry in the same fashion I had when I'd skipped the other suggested route. I thought about turning around. Thank God, I had a tank full of gas--not something I'm known for having (or I should say I had a full tank when I left Holly Springs. Near the end of my time on 49, I was already down a half tank.) Do I exaggerate when I say that in the entire trip (with exception of Senatobia) I saw less than a half dozen gas stations and only two really, really, tired looking grocery stores, the second from which I bought a big yellow onion--reminding me of the food that sustained Zero in the book Holes. (Really, I bought the onion because it was the only fresh produce in the store, which had about five drink machines full of every soda known around the country. I don't say this to talk down about the grocer, only to give readers an idea of what has happened to the South.) Well, anyway, I left there, and it wasn't long before I reached my final destination, and when there were no people milling about Sycamore St., where the festival was to be held, I suddenly realized my error--I was a week too early. I thought about going to visit my sons in Little Rock, another hour and a half away, but decided the Blazer had had enough and still needed to get me back across the state line. I deliberated the option of returning the way I had come, more or less, maybe the second time following the directions to the letter, but decided instead that as much as I hate interstates I could not stand the idea of going back through the Delta.

Maybe in a newer car I would not have minded the Delta so much. Then again, maybe the landscape engenders fear. How many times have I read about the horror with which African American enslaved people contemplated being sold to the deep South, meaning Mississippi and Louisiana? The expanses of barren land certainly were once, and still may be, cotton fields on which our ancestors toiled without the shade of trees. When I'd passed into Coahoma County, I thought about Lucien Bailey, brother of Africa Bailey, who having been bequeathed in 1844 to a son who would find his fortune in Coahoma, had had to add another journey to that which he'd already experienced between Virginia and Mississippi. How alone had he felt in that wilderness? Flat land offers no nooks, or crannies, no curvatures of the earth into which one may escape mentally if not physically. And spying that land, casting one's eyeballs upon it must have made it hugely difficult to contemplate escape or to envision returning to one's mother or father back in Virginia.

Moving too quickly is what made me take to the road yesterday without consulting a calendar or double-checking the date of the Festival, but I gained an important lesson, an experience of the land that cannot be learned either from a history book or even from a friend, a white Clarksville, Mississippi native who tried in vain some years ago to explain to me the difference between hill country and the Delta. I realize now that one has to drive it; our ancestors may even have walked it. Little wonder that they sometimes felt like motherless children...a long way from home.