From Kander and Ebb's musical version of The Scottsboro Boys
If the South is many places and many times running together, I wonder if my desire to defend it isn't is also the desire to mutilate it or mythify it. I can't criticize it until I can live in all those places and times. Would that cause me to internally combust? This is why I need Cornejo Polar.
Richard Wright and William Faulkner were Mississippi born contemporaries, and yet are shelved in different sections of U.S. literary history. They both make walls visible and immobility hurt. Faulkner's walls taste like molasses, and Wright's just taste like concrete with your teeth dug in. But the molasses and the dust come from underneath my tongue. Their books are stacks of ink stained pages. The way we choose to read or look or retell is what gives meaning to history and fiction.
Who sees the murals in the county courtroom? Who needs the obelisk in Linn Part to honor the obelisk in Linn Park? How much was Charles Linn's iron worth? Bibb Graves congratulated Jay Sandlin for shooting Ozie Powell in the head in 1946. Will someone someday write a vampy neo poco minstrel number for Oscar Grant?
article about Oscar Grant: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/9/outrage_in_oakland_transit_officer_convicted
4 comments:
http://jezebel.com/5572047/re+evaluating-to-kill-a-mockingbird
The borderline has come to the colorline in Alabama, and we are off to a bad start.
There should be no people in the country better prepared than Alabamians to step up with empathy, courage and humility to the issue of illegal immigration. Our history of slavery, segregation and debt peonage should have brought us the insight that what is legal is not always right.
Rosa Parks' momentous decision should have etched on our collective psyche the profound understanding that what is illegal is not always wrong. Strong histories of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments and Birmingham in 1963 should have taught us to respect the complexity of race and class.
The struggle to reverse our well-deserved reputation as a safe haven for demagogues should have made us leery of the politics of race, fear and confusion.
But frankly, there is not a dime's worth of difference between George Wallace using the N-word as he did and Gardendale Rep. Scott Beason's aggressive decision not to be "out-illegalled." There is not a dime's worth of difference between Wallace's "segregation yesterday, segregation today, segregation tomorrow" cry and local city councils proposing ordinances referring to a group of human beings as a "public nuisance."
There is not a dime's worth of difference between the arrogance of "whites only" and "English only," nor between the current crop of vehicle impoundment ordinances and the old voter literacy laws designed to harass and humiliate.
The racial cast of characters has changed in Alabama, but the old, ugly vilifications have made a comeback.
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http://www.galeo.org/story.php?story_id=0000004307
buck up, embrace interweb controversy and come back to the facebook, you snob. and.
http://www.studio360.org/episodes/2010/07/09
the right side of the page- listen to 'em all.
when are you coming back to the bham? i'm here a little longer.
im having withdrawals from facebook, which makes me certain that it is no good for me. i adore interweb controversy and i will not buck up, ms. clark. i am in a too long, too fast, too solitary, too cold, too rainy july far from home. thanks for your link. write me an email. jm
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