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Born May 18, 1953; got saved at Truett Memorial BC in Hayesville, NC 1959. On rigged ballot which I did not rig got Most Intellectual class of 71, Gaffney High School. Furman Grad, Sociology major but it was little tougher than Auburn football players had Had three dates with beautiful women the summer of 1978. Did not marry any of em. Never married anybody cause what was available was undesirable and what was desirable was unaffordable. Unlucky in love as they say and even still it is sometimes heartbreaking. Had a Pakistani Jr. Davis Cupper on the Ropes the summer of 84, City Courts, Rome Georgia I've a baby sitter, watched peoples homes while they were away on Vacation. Freelance writer, local consultant, screenwriter, and the best damn substitute teacher of Floyd County Georgia in mid 80's according to an anonymous kid passed me on main street a few years later when I went back to get a sandwich at Schroeders. Had some good moments in Collinsville as well. Ask Casey Mattox at www.clsnet.org if he will be honest about it. I try my best to make it to Bridges BBQ in Shelby NC at least four times a year.

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Faulkner, Andie Macdowell and her sisters

   Friends this blog is gonna be a little inchoate, random kinda free floating stream of consciousness. But it concerns race and deeper understanding, taking the deep dive with Faulkner and the latest attempt to unravel him. It appears to me the review in the Atlantic was correct, Michael Gorra in the Saddest Words gets it about right.

   Where Andie Macdowell comes in is, she like myself is from Gaffney. Lately last couple months her facebook wall reveals a syndicated radio interview where she is fairly explicit not only about the Firefly, but her remembrance of race in Gaffney , the town she left about her second year at Winthrop, about 1978. She has three older sisters, one Julia who graduated two years ahead of me at Gaffney High, and Babs about 1965.

   I didn't run in their circles. They probably vaguely know who I am or as a friend of friends of theirs or what not. Andie the famous one, was in first grade at Central Elementary on College Drive when I was in the 6th academic year of 64-65.

     Through a discussion among the sisters on facebook it appears Gladys Knight of the Pips played tennis on Andie's court when she lived in Asheville, where Roseanne was also a good friend of one of Billie Graham's daughters. But Andie, also a friend of Queen Latifah, lays it down in January about Trump and race and how she still loves but is a disappointed with many of her friends from Gaffney and allegiance to Trump; to which her oldest sister Babs, Miss Gaffney of 65, said and I paraphrase, Oh Lord Honey, Let it Go we're all just people and what you liked about em when you lived amongst us is still them and all of us can't go to California and get all the Light you got.

    Something like that.

    A Few years ago I noticed Rosalie had some entries in the Literary Journal of Gaffney High. So she has always been more than a pretty face. For that year's edition I got to go with our mutual friend Shirley Dawkins, who Andie when she sees Shirley's brother in LA, Willie, says is the brother of the basketball player. Shirley has poem about breakfast and Momma in the kitchen, gettin Daddy told.

    I spent the night at their house one October of 78. I'd hitchiked over from Knoxville to see the Gaffney Spartanburg game and missed a ride with my brother to Greenville.

    Okay, I don't have the ingredients to connect all the dots for you, you'll have to read the last four chapters of Gorra's Saddest Words and then we can talk. Otherwise we'll just be wasting each others time.

     I do have to say this before I quote a passage from Gorra for you. With all this Gaffney focus there has a revival of a 2019 thread of Central Elementary Gaffney people regarding my sister's second grade teacher Miss Brown. I didn't get there till third grade in 62 and never had Miss Brown but remember the fear she struck in my sister as she did almost everybody who had her. 

    Bill Peeler, whose Brother Bob was Lt Gov of SC and in the room with Karl Rove in Greenville in 2000 at the Hyatt when plans were made to go negative on John McCain and turn Bush 43 into the next President. Bill and Bob's older brother Harvey is now speaker of the House for the state of Strom Thurmond, and my state, South Carolina.

   Their sister Susan and I were citizens of the month, fall of 1968, first year of full integration of Gaffney high School. That year Strom Thurmond came to school to award an appointment to the Naval Academy for Lee Smith's Brother and most of the blacks kept their seats as the White Students stood for Strom's introduction.

    A tense moment. Ive since read Strom Thurmond's America by Joe Crespino. Was I a person of color I think I woulda kept my seat with the Brothers.

    Bill reported, and I'd never heard this before, Miss Brown, was the grand daughter of Moses Wood, the Confederate Soldier who is monumented on Buford Street. That's a whole new angle on just about everything when you look at what two of Gaffney's best and brightest of the 60s, John Grooms and Jerry Shinn have said lately, Shinn in his must read book based on the Macdowell's fellow Gaffney Episcopalian, the Doctors wife on College Drive.

   Claudia Thomas Sanders. Google Dynamite and the Silent South, Tim Tyson or enliven this link:  https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780691216249-016/html

     Her house was bombed in 1956, a year after Rosalie was born, nine years before her oldest sister was Miss Gaffney. Shinn's novel is Dixie Autumn. The Macdowell's church is across the street from Central Elementary where Tommy Brittain and I stopped traffic for Rosalie, a pretty first grader the fall of 64.

     So here is what Gorra said about As I lay Dying, Faulkner's novel James Franco made into a low budget movie three or so years ago. I saw it. Dewey Dale, Cash and Darl with Delmar of the Gillian Welch Soundtracked movie as the Poppa.

   Oh Brother Where Art Thou

    Gorra on page 308:  The swollen river lies, its current thick and malign, its yellow surfaces dimpled by the water's swirl, whitened by the hillocks of its waves.Darl and Cash drive the wagon through and have begun to feel success when a log (could it be Donald Trump) suddenly shoots up, "reocketed from the bottom," and bearded with foam as though it were an old man or a goat. Then it hits, the log rears and surges and strikes; the wagon tips, the mules lose their footing and drown. Time is a river, and now it spews up an obstacle; un avoidable and incomprehensible, a blow with which they must learn to live.


   Gorra frames all this in a conversation about a much needed vergangenheitsbewiltigung for the south, a coming to grips with its shared past.

   Maybe the chaplain at Limestone, Ron Singleton,  can bring Rosalie to town to panel with Jerry Shinn, Groom, Sky Foster, Johnny Dawkins, trustee Tommy Martin, one of the Sossamon Daughters, and Chandra Goforth and lets talk the Gaffney experience through.

 

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Carolina and Clemson Republican trustees struck mute on Lindsey Graham, Trump and the Black vote Reckoning

   Last night I watched the PBS American Experience documentary on Marian Anderson, the black woman who stood up the Daughters of the American Revolution for their refusal to allow her to sing in Constitution Hall and was ushered with the Help of the Roosevelts and a strategist with the NAACP to sing at the Lincoln Memorial, a Free Concert, on Easter Sunday 1939 in front of 75,000 people. It was just twenty years after the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial when the Klan was most powerful and the few blacks were there were shuffled off into the weeds.

   It was a powerful documentary that coincided with a same day reading of a piece at religion dispatches of how Lindsey Graham is promoting the disenfranchisement of the Black vote with his coddling of Trump post impeachment

       https://religiondispatches.org/when-white-terrorism-goes-unpunished-trumps-acquittal-and-the-persistence-of-anti-blackness/  

    You can't miss the story at the site, Big picture of a sly grinning Lindsey Graham. Can't miss ie.

       I felt convicted to leave a message on the phone of David Wilkins, one of the most powerful Republicans in the state of SC, a recent chair of the Clemson Trustees. I also left a message on the phone of Furman president Elizabeth Davis, a good Baptist woman who is on an Upstate Committee with influential people about racial equity.

     I don't see how that committee comes to much without an earnest conversation with the likes of David Wilkins and his counterparts on the U South Carolina trustee board informed by the religion dispatches piece.

    Last summer I talked to both Darrien Rencher and Trevor Lawrence at the June 13 Clemson BLM march. They are "woke". The will read the religion dispatches piece and talk about it in the NFL, The ACC The ACC and looks like a reckoning coming.

    At same time I am reading the collection of essays on the Appalachian Reckoning, a 2017 response to JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.

    I hope David Wilkins will dive into that as well, because to paraphrase the Sheriff in No Country for Old Men when he came up on the bodies in the shootout early in the movie, if Jan 6 wasn't a Mess, it'll do till the Mess gets here.

     Today in the Cherokee Chronicle of Gaffney SC Janet Morris Belvin had a column about Central Elementary School where she was about ten years ahead of me. Her Father was pastor of FBC Gaffney of which my Dad's Bethany Baptist Church was a mission. It may be her father her contemporary in Gaffney Jerry Shinn had in mind when he wrote the novel Dixie Autumn, historical fiction based on the dynamiting of a doctor's home in Gaffney in 1956 on College Drive, just up from Central Elementary School, also the alma mater of actress Andie Macdowell.

    Rosie "Andie" had a January interview where she talked not only about some new revelations of her Firefly ad for Calvin Klein Jeans of the early 80s, but also her memories of race relations in Gaffney.

   I digressed, but as David Wilkins wife Susan Clary came of age with Janet Morris and Kit and Polly Sossamon, she knows of the incident as well.

     Janet on her facebook post of Jan 7 made reference to the Trump insurrection and was appalled by "thugs" encouraged by a "deranged president."

   Trump's daughter in law looks to aspire to become the second coming of a mashup of Jesse Helms and Phyliss Schlafy in a Senate Run in NC. It's time for this to stop, to end in Jesus name.

     The former Head of the UNC System, Bill Friday told leading progressive Baptist pastor Cecil Sherman in the early 90s, the most significant event of the 80s in North Carolina was the fundamentalist takeover of the Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, SEBTS. Cause As Friday said, Helms and his right wing republican fundy Baptist friends knew that with that seminary they could get in the heads of Baptist preachers in every hamlet, suburb and precinct not only in NC but across the SE.

    Now we have Trump religion across the Southern Baptist Convention as John Pierce shows today in a piece at Good Faith Media dot org.

    It is way passed time for the alumni of Furman, Wofford, Davidson, Mars Hill, Presbyterian College and liberal arts school across the SE, alums sprinkled in small towns and medium sized towns to caucus, call for public discussions with their school boards and defeat the likes of Mrs Trump in NC and where ever Trumpism raises its ugly head.

   The Reckoning is upon us, in Pickens and Cherokee County SC, Floyd County Ga, Dekalb County Alabama.

    It's here.


  PS Also google or url this piece by my friend Ron Rash

   https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/opinion/appalachias-sacrifice.html

    And google Digging in the Trash, David Joy, Bitter Southerner. 


     In my mind Lara Trump and Lindsey Graham are not the way forward for blacks , NOR the white children of Appalachia and the sons and daughters of textile mill workers left in Piedmont. Fundamentalism is not gonna heal the soul of America molested by the likes of Donald Trump and his enablers.


Thursday, February 04, 2021

What to do about our cracker friends who've lost their way in Trumpland

  My Dad's last Sunday in Gaffney SC, roughly June 30, 1978, from the third Sunday of January 1962,  he started his sermon from the text I thank God for every remembrance of you.

     I was in the choir that Sunday as a 25 year old with my Brother and Sister, thinking What The Hell. The last three years there had been pretty rough, lot of tension after my sister came home one for a weekend from Mars Hill with a party of 7 or so girls, a missionary's son, and a black friend of all of them a gregarious basketball player.

    One of my mother's best friends in the church came by her at the organ, saw the fellow of color, Said to my Mother, well Louise I guess you are happy now, you finally integrated Bethany; turned back and went home without staying for the morning service.

   For some time, before tensions were rising as our family welcomed people of color to play basketball on the paved driveway that had a goal.

     Ive told versions of this story before, a couple that got published in Christian Ethics Today. But been thinking about it lately and my Dad thanking God for every remembrance.

    I brought that up recently in some facebook exchanges of mostly Gaffney folks now in their late sixties and a former editor of Charlotte's Creative Loafing, John Groom, a GHS 67 grad, said good luck with that Stephen; Ive had it with these people. I'm tired with the frustrations of trying to rationalize with people who refuse to accept Biden won the last election by 7 million votes, not to mention folks who flirt with Q anon. They can go to Hell.

     I'm tempted to throw in with him on occasion as recently as earlier this week when Facebook shut me down for hateful speech as I was in an online brawl with some Bama boys mostly 20 years my Junior Ive know for 30 years as far back as their 6th grade when I sub taught for them often. At one point I used the phrase Bull Sheet in defense of Jesse Jackson and John Lewis. 

    So where does the indulgence stop.

     I am reminded of the story I heard on NPR about three years ago of the black guy who had been up north and was coming back with a friend of color from New York back to South Alabama. As they got further south, through North Carolina, SC then into Georgia, he could sense the unease rising in his buddy. As the confederate flags and resonances of Dixie and other politically incorrect references to gun began to become publicly more evident, The South Alabama fellow said, relax, these white boys  are my friends, that's just how they roll. When I played High School football with them they'd fight any cracker from the other town who attempted to mistreat me and I would fight for them. I'm much more welcome in their home for dinner than you are in the condos of NYC.

    I don't think he was uncle Tomming. The same for the most part white boys in Collinsville Alabama who vote Trump and think MT Greene is on to something, and Tommy Tuberville is a decent man even though ignorant as dog poop; well he passed the down home test cause he went into the kitchen and spoke to the help  of my friend at Kelly's  Diner in Rainsville who used to run a tight ship administering the Cracker Barrell in Ft. Payne. Never saw her rattled.

    Her son at one time was a basketball coach at one of the blackest schools in Tuscaloosa.

    For me does that give them a pass on their voting dispositions. Heck no. But like Obama said of Jeremiah Wright, I could no more say I never went to church there than I could say my Mother wasn't a native of Kansas. (bad paraphrase).

   So my Dad thanked God for every remembrance, I guess even including the fellow who a month before came looking for his oldest son, Me, to stand on my toes and beat my ass in the ground, cause I had some reservations about his extended family influence in the Church.

   So What was my Dad, Sweet Billy, thinking. I guess he was going deep in the scripture cause it was the moments of conflict, gut wrenching differences that sparked insight into the human condition, and over time and accumulation erupted into the life of Jesus and what he did for all of us on the Cross.

   I think that's right. Russ Dean has just written a book, Finding a New Way Home which I gave the Steevie Treatment on this blog. His grades at Furman were better than mine. But I think we both understand Marney and Stewart Newman, Lolley and the Baptist roll call, Albert Blackwell, LD Johnson, Pitts at Furman, Will Campbell, that's the point.

    And my Dad Sweet Billy, he got it too. We were all alive. We were all there in the congregation that morning for yet another opportunity to figure where we were and how we got there, and there was a meal in the fellowship hall waiting for us, a home to go to after that meal, and for the Fox family highways to Knoxville Tn and the next chapter.

    So like most of you who read this, I'm pissed as Hell at Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the Birch Society fundamentalism of that Ga 14th District where my father and John Pierce were raised. I'm tired of the Bastard version of the Republican party we have now and John Danforth denounced last night on PBS Newshour, how they've whored themselves off to the dark money politics of the NRA and fundamentalism and shamed Alabama's Judge Frank Johnson and Abe himself.

     Ive known Tom Edsall now of the NY Times since 1986 and a strong chat at the Atlanta SBC. His piece a few days ago in the Times was an exhaustive exploration of how otherwise decent small town citizens of the 90s got bent toward Qanon and Trump salvation. And that after a scruting of the Ga 14 back in October in the New Yorker.

     Will Campbell said, you love one, you gotta love em All. And that includes members of my own extended family who over the years have extended grace to me when for instance LT Hartzog told my Dad in Gaffney, Billy, if it was my Boy, I'd kick his ass out.

     So they never stopped loving me, even some in the opposition faction of Bethany Baptist church that morning in 78 and likewise for me, at least for the most part not more than a week to ten days. Ha.

   But Marney said, we wrestle not against flesh and blood of any individual politcally looney and confused whitey in the Ga 14, but against powers and principalities and the rulers of darkness of this world.

     Like James Dunn and Bill Leonard said, America is and will always be a Mess. Azar Naifisi and Jill Lepore shed light for any HS Civics teacher worth their pay who will read it and provoke their students.  It's a bigger mess now than it has been in some time, but there is light in last years Gaffney High school Black History Month, the light is getting brighter at Furman with some initiatives there, there is light at Clemson with Trevor Lawrence and Darrien Rencher and the legacy of Chadwick Bozeman--I hope Rencher runs against Jeff Duncan and shines a little light up his Ass. There is light with Danforth and MAce and Rice and Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who had a challenge to Baptist preachers last week in the atlantic.

    Colin Harris is sharing light monthly at goodfaithmedia as are many others. Religiondispatches.org and Baptist news, even Mitt Romney and Sasse; can't bring myself to say Liz Cheney but she is showing some moxey.

     Even among leftover Betas and resistors on facebook from Gaffney High School, all twenty two something of us (ha)

      Obama and Marilynne Robinson had a good conversation at the end of the print edition of the essay collection The Givenness of Things. Read that.

    For now, otherwise take care, God Bless America, Send Marjorie Taylor Greene home and convict Mitch McConnell of his sins as the gravedigger of American democracy before he spends an eternity in political Hell with Jesse Helms.

          

Monday, February 01, 2021

Anniversary, one year in Upstate SC

  Last year on Feb 1 was a Saturday. Two weeks earlier I got knocked in a ditch on my bicycle on a Sunday afternoon in the narrows on 68 in Collinsville Alabama and was taking to the emergency room. Banged up and bruised but nothing broken; however did have some concussion issues that didn't go away for two weeks.

   So my brother and sister met me at the Zaxby's in Cartersville where I had been deposited on a rainy day by my UPS friend Andee and his wife about ten years younger n him. My bro and sister showed up in 15 minutes or so as they'd got stuck in traffic on North side of Atlanta. They wanted to go to Krystals which wasnt the best for my throbbin head but they were excited and promised to stop for me at Chic Fil a on 400 east of Gainesville in what by now has become Marjorie Taylor Greene Qanon land.

   Well I got up here intended to stay a month at the longest. But the NBA shut down their season and dawdling Trump about the middle of March conceded This Covid 19 thang was serious. So family thought it best, to make arrangements with the Catbus to ride it out up here.

   Most people who read this blog know I was in the Upstate from 62 in third grade, through High school and Furman and three years more till 78 then to Knoxville for three years and other wanderings, Rome Ga and what not and then Bama the last 30 and now back again.

   I had every intention on three separate occasions to catch Amtrak or meet somebody half way to get back to Bama to check on what is called in Child of God, "My Property." Lot of back and forth in an underappreciated movie in East Tennessee: " This is My property, by God,; no it ain't your property, Oh hell yeah it is my damn property" etc and what not. Well my property is my property in Alabama, that not in dispute I just need to give it some attention as I intended before I got bumped in the ditch.

   Other than imbroglios with the SC Dept of Motor Vehicles gettin a SC Version; I can't say I'm fluorishing but it's a little different, though I still yearn for a two state solution as I left rather abruptly with like I say, things untended.

    But it's been a tough year for a lot of folks according to the newspaper, the TV and the internet. And Then Trump wanted to do away with 200 years of transitional norms and stoked that insurrection and what not.

    When I get me a car that will run a couple months at a time without too much drama, can get back to Alabama and back and again etc; and a new dependable bicycle I should be good to go for another 7 years or whenever that great final exit comes.

   Lost some good friends and others whose welfare I had interest in; done some reading, gone deep with UNC TV catching up on some PBS docs I missed in Bama.

     Saw News of the World Saturday night. First time in a theatre in 18 months, so that was comforting and a good movie. I want to read the chapter where Hanks and the German Indian girl hook up with the youngster who is a little hardscrabbled and rough around the edges but likes good stories; Was interesting how that played out while thinking that part of the story was well done. Mused about LBJ, Moyers and Molly Ivins as only one of them still living.

     Nothing profound to say here other than the worn phrase Life is in the Livin of it.