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.