Column for Gaffney's Cherokee Chronicle

    A Rafael Perez had a collumn in the Jan 30 Cherokee Chronicle of my hometown of Gaffney South Carolina. I do not know Mr. Perez on any family name like that but I have been away for some time.

     Perez column was an assault of the capacity of Joe Biden to succeed himself as President.

     Maybe Perez didnt see the Insurrection, nor the several legal entanglements Donald Trump is involved nor his connections to christian Nationalism. Maybe he missed the books by Adam Kinzinger and Tim Alberta and the January issue of the Atlantic magazine devoted to the case Donald Trump is a Rube and would be a disaster in a second term with his politics of Grievance, Vindictiveness and Resentment.

     The Bible, the Old Testament in Particular has a word for Trump and that word is Bastard.

      Joe Biden is not my first choice to lead the Democratic Ticket.  That Said America could easily survive a second term of Biden, even one Term of Nikki Haley though I have severe reservations about the Clemson trustee embrace of Charlie Kirk and his poisonous Turning Point USA.

     See Tim Aberta on that matter.

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer would find Trump Appalling. His likeness is in bust in Westminster Abbey with Martin Luther King and Oscar Romero as one of the three great Christian Martyrs of the 20th Century.

       The SC GOP primary will be a test of the character of South Carolina. I hope Cherokee County can pass it with a vote for Nikki Haley, to head the country slouching back in the right direction. 

     

George Singleton: The Dogs Keep Barking, but the Caravan Moves On

  I attended the authors confab at the Greenville SC Co Library Jan 20 before Henry's BBQ and the Fuman basketball game versus WCU. My friend Ron Rash was on panel with Furman alum George Singleton and a Ms Franks who is writing a novel about Copper Hill NC. She says should be out in a couple years. I'm excited about it.

      Somewhere I rubbed  Singleton the wrong way. There were two George Singleton's of the mid 80s grads of Furman, the writer and the basketball player. Singleton the baller was scouted heavily for the NBA

    The writer has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and other lofty climes. He's not Marshall Frady FU 63, but neither am I.

      After 45 minutes of a well moderated panel conversation with a lot of jocularity--I think you can find it online as was live streamed--I got the first question in the remaining 15 minutes. I said George my Dad was a Baptist minister and I remember about ten years ago in the Furman magazine you had a quip about some kid on your hall at Furman who repeatedly tried to tell you about Jesus and save your soul. By your own testimony your are somehing of a functional alcoholic and I just wonder if on occasion you second guess yourself and thought about forsaking the notoriety and yearn to have spent your days more quietly as a Baptist Deacon in some small Upstate SC town you often ridicule.

    He called me out and said Your Stephen Fox aren't you. I asked what does it matter  , you are on the panel and I am not, but yes I am that Stephen.

     I thought he had a good answer referencing somebody who said the dogs  bark, but the caravan moves on.

      George, a Furman grad, now teaches at the Methodist school, Wofford, in Spartanburg SC, a town he shares with Trey Gowdy.

        Then I asked Rash a question about Cormac McCarthy. Wanted his take on Hal Crowther's view Cormac McCarthy coulda mined East Tennessee more before he moved South west. After the program and a visit to another room with up and coming Upstate authors, I caught Rash in the hall with his wife as they were leaving. Turns out wife Caroline is from Belton Honea Path where she mighta known Lillian Ashley but I didnt have presence of mind to ask. Told Ron the Fox Store frequented by Lester Ballard in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God was actual store owned by the sons of my Grandfather's Fox's first cousin near the Walden's Creek UMC in Wears Valley Tennessee outside Pigeon Forge down the road from Chinkey Pen where Cousin Marshall Fox was cut behind the knee and bled to death in 1907. His grave is in the church cemetery. 

Howell Raines says North Alabama Union soldiers lit the first matches to burn Atlanta. Makes Bama Senator Katie Britt laughable with Trump endorsement.

      About 3 15 Jan 5 I was on the air with Paul Finebaum to talk about Howell Raines new book Silent Cavalry about the soldiers from North Alabama who fought with the Union in the Civil War. My Great Grandfather Jordan was among them. A Hundred Years ago his son, My Grandfather born in 1881, ran as a Lincoln Republican for School Supe in Dekalb County , Alabama and was soundly defeated .

    So I am enchanted and resonate with Raines when he writes about personal archaeology.  With some family anecdotes at end of Chapter Five Raines says:  "such are the chips through which defining traits marinate across generations of families that don't quite buy into the commanding culture. It's a mysterious process, difficult to calibrate, and especially daunting when it comes to rescuing unheralded difference makers from the scrap bin of history."

      There is a grand review of the book in the Guardian, and Raines has a long piece in the Wash Post you should be able to using facebook to navigate the firewall.

       With all Raines Bravado some historians I have already contacted say he overcooks his claim to be the only one out there to give the north alabama union story its deserved notice. Ed Bridges for long time state archivist of Alabama and a graduate of Marshall Frady and my Furman University has a grand thirty pages in his recent official Bicentennial of the state, with a superb brief paragraph on the damage of Daughters of Confederacy to the truth.

     And in the story telling style of Raines it should be noted while not directly a part of the North Alabama story, it was the voices of the Sacred Harp family of Dekalb County forty five first cousins  of the Iveys and friends on the soundtrack of the Oscar movie by Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain. . They are singing the Idumea to great effect at the battle of St. Petersburg where North Alabamian Lucas Black says we got us a turkey shoot. He was Confederate in the moment. 

     If some of his history is self serving, Raines does us all a great service with his story telling, even fast forward to current Winston County going ninety percent Trump. But there is a remnant of folks like him who are true to the best of North Alabama and Winston County, Judge Frank Johnson in particular.

     Raines before he spoke at Samford with Carl Elliott in the audience told me Frank Johnson was the second greatest man to breathe air of Alabama in the twentieth Century with ML King the first. About five years ago before he started his Sunday School class in Plains, President Carter said Johnson was the greatest American of his lifetime.

    My father was raised in Rome Ga, so Raines pages on Sherman's stay there in May 0f 1864 were of great interest as was his assertion the North Alabama soldiers coulda shut down the whole thing at Snake Gap Creek outside Resaca, Ga two weeks before they Burned Atlanta.

      Had some of Sherman's orders not been lost in Translation, Atlanta would been spared; but as it turned out according to Raines the North Bama Unionists were the first to light the matches on Atlanta.

     Raines takes great offense to Shelby Foote fame in Ken Burns nineties Civil War Documentary and he almost mocks some of the late 20th Century Confederates in Bama, one speech in particular at Auburn Montgomery in early 1990s with Frank Johnson himself in the audience.

    Even so there was not superior virtue among the rank and file soldiers of either side most of which fell in with the over powering tribe. Clearly Lincoln was superior to the cotton planters of south Alabama, but as Sam Hodges points out in his tribute to his Great great Grandfather Letters to Amanda , a confederate from below Macon Ga.; his dying thought was of the sacred harp phrase, Jesus can make a dying bed soft as downy pillows are.

     This book is fascinating. If you have any integrity to speak of and a hint of literacy and have ties to Alabama, get a copy. Call Katie Britt, the US Senator, former U Bama SGA President, whose blue blood family goes back several generations at FUMC Montgomery and invite her to the altar.

    Else the whole U Bama campaign Where Legends are Made is a bunch of Bull Sheet.