On the Leopards Eating Faces Party

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Tuesday

“But this last privilege I still retain;/ Th’ oppressed and injured always may complain,” writes the abused wife in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband.” There’s a lot of complaining going on right now by those who opposed Donald Trump and are now experiencing his wrath.

Others are looking for consolation in schadenfreude. When you yourself are suffering, there’s a temporary satisfaction to be gained in MAGA buyers’ remorse. They “fucked around and found out,” many bruised liberals are saying. Or FAFO, as the acronym goes.

Did Trump-supporting veterans really think that Trump was on their side? How about red-state Medicaid recipients, who are losing benefits, or West Virginia diabetes patients, who are seeing the cost of insulin shoot back up? Kamala Harris must wonder how they did not see this coming.

As someone, quoting from William Carlos Williams’s poem “At Kenneth Burke’s Place,” recently observed in the New Yorker, what we are seeing is “the rare occurrence of the expected.”

A New Yorker cartoon that is quickly becoming legendary has a large campaign sign of a wolf overlooking a field where sheep are grazing. “I am going to eat you,” proclaims the sign, to which a sheep responds admiringly, “He tells it like it is.”

An old Twitter joke is also making the rounds. In 2015 Adrian Bott tweeted, “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

With jungle cats on my mind, I turn to my favorite leopard story, which is Rudyard Kipling’s “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” While it doesn’t provide too much insight into our current mess, I use the occasion to revisit Kipling’s Just So Stories, which I loved as a child. I also refashion the leopard story as a modern political parable.

The stories, published in 1902, are wonderfully rhythmic, which makes them great for reading aloud. Kipling frames them as bedtime tales told to his daughter Josephine (“Best Beloved”), and indeed my father read them to us when we were growing up and I read them to my own sons. Applying a Lamarckian approach to biology, Kipling invents fanciful explanations as to how animals and occasionally humans developed their biological traits.

The leopard story originates from the passage in Jeremiah 13:23, “Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil.” Taking Jeremiah’s rhetorical question as a challenge, Kipling imagines a world in which Ethiopians were not always dark and leopards not always spotted. Once they presided over an all-white world.

Well, a sandy world anyway. Here’s Kipling:

IN the days when everybody started fair, Best Beloved, the Leopard lived in a place called the High Veldt …where there was sand and sandy-colored rock and ‘sclusively tufts of sandy-yellowish grass. The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Hartebeest lived there; and they were ‘sclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over; but the Leopard, he was the ‘sclusivest sandiest-yellowish-brownest of them all—a greyish-yellowish catty-shaped kind of beast, and he matched the ‘sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish colour of the High Veldt to one hair. This was very bad for the Giraffe and the Zebra and the rest of them; for he would lie down by a ‘sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish stone or clump of grass, and when the Giraffe or the Zebra or the Eland or the Koodoo or the Bush-Buck or the Bonte-Buck came by he would surprise them out of their jumpsome lives.

The world changes, however—let’s say it becomes more racially and ethnically diverse—which comes as a blow to those who have been living comfortably atop the food chain:

After a long time—things lived for ever so long in those days—they learned to avoid anything that looked like a Leopard or an Ethiopian; and bit by bit—the Giraffe began it, because his legs were the longest—they went away from the High Veldt. They scuttled for days and days and days till they came to a great forest, ‘sclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows, and there they hid: and after another long time, what with standing half in the shade and half out of it, and what with the slippery-slidy shadows of the trees falling on them, the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew stripy, and the Eland and the Koodoo grew darker, with little wavy grey lines on their backs like bark on a tree trunk; and so, though you could hear them and smell them, you could very seldom see them, and then only when you knew precisely where to look. They had a beautiful time in the ‘sclusively speckly-spickly shadows of the forest, while the Leopard and the Ethiopian ran about over the ‘sclusively greyish-yellowish-reddish High Veldt outside, wondering where all their breakfasts and their dinners and their teas had gone. At last they were so hungry that they ate rats and beetles and rock-rabbits, the Leopard and the Ethiopian, and then they had the Big Tummy-ache, both together…

In my modern retelling, I must depart from the story here since there’s no way in hell that the GOP is interested in doing what Kipling’s Ethiopian does:

“The long and the little of it is that we don’t match our backgrounds… and as I’ve nothing to change except my skin I’m going to change that.’

‘What to?’ said the Leopard, tremendously excited.

‘To a nice working blackish-brownish colour, with a little purple in it, and touches of slaty-blue. It will be the very thing for hiding in hollows and behind trees.’

After undertaking his own transformation, the Ethiopian then dips his hands in the leftover pigment and, with the tips of his five fingers, imprints spots all over the leopard’s skin.

There was a time when the GOP considered “changing its skin.” George W. Bush prominently exhibited his Spanish skills to appeal to Latino voters, and from 2007-2009 African American Michael Steele served as the chairman of the GOP Action Committee (GOPAC). Since Trump, however, Republicans have doubled down on their identity as a “sclusively sandy-yellowish” party. As Jeremiah would put it, they are not prepared to do good when they are accustomed to doing evil.

But even if he’s not willing to change his kin, Trump—as a consummate salesman—convinced enough of the giraffes, zebras, elands, koodoos, bushbucks and bone bucks that he felt their pain and shared their concerns. In a razor thin election that came down to margins, he received a higher-than-expected portion of the vote from Latinos, Asian Americans, and Arab Americans. Whether because they worried about the price of eggs or because they dreamed of joining America’s racial caste system, enough of them chose not to vote for Kamala Harris to put Trump back in office.

And ever since (so Kipling’s story goes) the Ethiopian and the leopard have been feasting quite happily on the other animals.

Perhaps they even go on to establish a Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

Added note: I recently read Sylvia Garcia-Moreno’s The Daughter of Doctor Monroe, a spinoff of the H.G. Wells novel, where we see South America’s leopard equivalent actually eating someone’s face. The daughter is a woman-jaguar hybrid and, in a revenge fantasy moment, she takes a lethal bite out of the visage of a man bent on raping her.

I am woman, hear me roar. A number of American women are feeling this way these days.

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Flowers for St. Patrick’s Day

Irish peat blog flowers

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Monday – St. Patrick’s Day

For St. Patrick’s Day, here’s Patrick Kavanagh’s “The One,” about simple flowers blooming in a cut-away bog (where peat has been cut) in rural County Monaghan. Kavanagh grew up there, and although he was anxious to escape—which he did—the memory of the flowers returned to him years later.

I first was introduced to Kavanagh’s poetry when I came across a collection of his poems in a used Dublin bookstore. I became fixated on his lyrics, reading them obsessively as we traveled to Belfast and Magherafelt in search of Julia’s family roots.

Although Kavanagh for the most part isn’t that sentimental a poet, this poem seems an exception. It’s Wordsworthian in the way that it focuses on anonymous flowers in a humble setting. One thinks of “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways,” where Wordsworth compares a woman he has met to “a violet by a mossy stone/ Half hidden from the eye!”

In any event, reading “The One” seems a good way to celebrate Ireland’s national holiday.

The One
By Patrick Kavanagh

Green, blue, yellow and red –
God is down in the swamps and marshes
Sensational as April and almost incred-
ible the flowering of our catharsis.
A humble scene in a backward place
Where no one important ever looked
The raving flowers looked up in the face
Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has balked
The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet,
A violent wild iris – but mostly anonymous performers
Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet
Prepared to inform the local farmers
That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God
Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog.

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God’s Wonders in Appalachia

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Sunday

Our church this year has been hosting a weekly lecture series for Adult Sunday School entitled “This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home.” The phrase is taken from a prayer of thanksgiving, sometimes humorously called “the Star Trek Prayer,” which reads, “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanses of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile Earth, our island home.” Whenever I hear it, I think of Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot,” which shows the earth as a microscopic speck lost in space when photographed by Voyager 1 in 1990.

The series has drawn liberally from Sewanee College’s environmental studies faculty. As we’ve been introduced to everything from the flora and fauna of our Appalachian plateau to the intricacies of the human cellular structure, I find myself shaking my head at creation’s marvels. The more science discovers, the more wondrous it seems. “And God saw that it was good” would strike us as an understatement were it not God that was making the assessment.

I’ve already contributed one talk to the series—”Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a Christmas Tale”—and today I will discuss “The Environmental Vision of Barbara Kingsolver.” In today’s post I share that part of my talk that deals with how, in Flight Behavior, Kingsolver finds room for an environmental consciousness within a Christian fundamentalist congregation.

Such congregations are often “dominionist”—which is to say, they focus on human domination of the environment. Many of Trump’s Christian supporters appear to have no problem with his desire to “drill, baby, drill,” to give away the national parks to mineral companies, and to clearcut the nation’s forests. There are a couple of these Christians within Kingsolver’s novel.

When climate change shifts a large monarch population from Central America to the Tennessee mountains, however, religion trumps capitalism in unexpected ways. I borrow from a previous post on the book to describe how, when God’s glory takes the form of millions of gorgeous butterflies, some disciples of Christ begin to part ways with disciples of Mammon.

The novel begins with the feisty protagonist, Dellarobia, on her way up a mountain to commit adultery, even though she’s aware that it will blow up her marriage. Suddenly, however, she encounters a great brightness, which stops her in her tracks. As she is not wearing her glasses, she doesn’t know that climate change and giant landslides have forced monarch butterflies to relocate. To her, the butterflies resemble a forest fire without the heat or the noise. While not particularly religious, she turns to the Bible for ways to express the moment:

A small shift between cloud and sun altered the daylight, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The forest blazed with its own internal flame. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else present made sense. The sun slipped out by another degree, passing its warmth across the land, and the mountain seemed to explode with light. Brightness of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave like the disturbed surface of a lake. Every bough glowed with an orange blaze. “Jesus God,” she said again. No words came to her that seemed sane. Trees turned to fire, a burning bush. Moses came to mind, and Ezekiel, words from Scripture that occupied a certain space in her brain but no longer carried honest weight, if they ever had. Burning coals of fire went up and down among the living creatures.

 For the record, here’s the complete passage from Ezekiel (1:4-14):

As I looked, behold, a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing forth continually and a bright light around it, and in its midst something like glowing metal in the midst of the fire. Within it there were figures resembling four living beings. And this was their appearance: they had human form. Each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight and their feet were like a calf’s hoof, and they gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides were human hands. As for the faces and wings of the four of them, their wings touched one another; their faces did not turn when they moved, each went straight forward. As for the form of their faces, each had the face of a man; all four had the face of a lion on the right and the face of a bull on the left, and all four had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. Their wings were spread out above; each had two touching another being, and two covering their bodies. And each went straight forward; wherever the spirit was about to go, they would go, without turning as they went. In the midst of the living beings there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches darting back and forth among the living beings. The fire was bright, and lightning was flashing from the fire. And the living beings ran to and fro like bolts of lightning.

Dellarobia believes that she has received a sign:

This was not just another fake thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something.

She does not believe the sign is from God, however. Her view of God does not acknowledge God’s care for the sparrow, and her thinking reveals her low self-esteem:

By no means was she important enough for God to conjure signs and wonders on her account.

Nevertheless, Dellarobia has a “road to Damascus” experience, and she determines to turn her life around:

She could save herself. Herself and her children with their soft cheeks and milky breath who believed in what they had even if their whole goodness and mercy was a mother distracted out of her mind. It was not too late to undo this mess. Walk down the mountain, pick up those kids. The burning trees were put here to save her. It was the strangest conviction she’d ever know, and still she felt sure of it.

The vision can’t only be for herself. Her father-in-law, a money-grubbing farmer named Bear, is prepared to irresponsibly clear-cut the timber, and Dellarobia must keep him from doing so. Without admitting that she has been up the mountain (which would reveal her adultery plans), she suggests to her husband that he check out the forest first. When he and his parents discover the butterflies, they become convinced that God has sent her a vision. They receive further confirmation of this when she appears to be visited by the Holy Spirit. The passage evokes John’s baptism of Jesus:

She raised her eyes to the sky instead, and that made the others look up too, irresistibly led, even Bear. Together they saw light streaming through glowing wings. Like embers, she thought, a flood of fire, the warmth they had craved so long. She felt her breathing rupture again into laughter or sobbing on her chest, sharp, vocal exhalations she couldn’t contain. The sounds coming out of her veered toward craziness.

The two older men stepped back as if she’d slapped them.

“Lord almighty, the girl is receiving grace,” said Hester, and Dellarobia could not contradict her.

The following day Dellarobia’s husband announces to the church congregation that she has had a vision, much to her embarrassment.

The battle is not yet won, however, as Bear is determined to use illegal DDT to wipe out the butterflies, which would otherwise clog the machinery of “Trees for Money. It takes the intervention of the pastor, who believes the butterflies are a sign from God, to finally save them. The intervention includes

–specially chosen hymns (“The earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord”);

–a specially tailored sermon (“May we look to these mountains that are Your home and see You are in everything. The earth is the Lord in the fullness thereof.”)

–a family conference in which the pastor speaks directly to the issue (“What I hear you saying is you want to log the mountain because it’s yours, and because you can. And my job here I think is to warn you about the sin of pride.”)

Bear’s family further pressures him, which takes a great deal of courage. First there’s his son Cub:

That’s true, Dad. When a man is greedy and gets too big for his britches, he pays for that. You’ve seen that.

Then Bear’s Wife wades in:

If you can’t live by the laws the Lord God made for this world, they’ll go into effect regardless….That land was bestowed on us for a purpose. And I don’t think it was to end up looking like a pile of trash.

Finally, after Bear calls the pastor a “tree hugger,” the pastor replies,

Well now, what are you, Burley, a tree puncher? What have you got against the Lord’s trees?

Bear finally capitulates and the pastor leads the family in prayer.

Kingsolver is neither religious nor unreligious. She does, however, have a spiritual vision of nature, and her book shows how the local culture uses its Baptist world view to process what is happening. In this instance, the forces of Mammon are routed.

I don’t know how hopeful to be from Kingsolver’s depiction. I know that, in my own section of Appalachia, a sand company has just gotten a permit to set up a large sand quarry, which will despoil hundreds of acres, with no opposition from local government (despite local resistance) and with few environmental checks. My neighbors are concerned about the impact on their wells and on the groundwater in general. In this heavily Baptist area, they are dismissed as leftie tree huggers.

Kingsolver is respected around here, however, with Tennesseans seeing themselves in works like Prodigal Summer, Demon Copperhead, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as well as Flight Behavior. Perhaps the novels can help open people’s eyes to what we stand to lose.

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Trump Christians and Child Abuse

From Oliver Goldsmith, “Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog”

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Friday

In a drearily predictable development, another Trump-supporting pastor has been indicted for child abuse. Robert Morris, founder of the Gateway Church in Southill, Texas and one-time member of Trump’s first-term spiritual advisory team, has admitted to “kissing and petting” a 12-year old girl when he was 21. The abuse continued for four years.

Sanctimonious Christians who declaim against liberals, it seems, are always the ones most likely to violate basic tenets of decency. The more fervently they uphold “traditional Christian values,” the greater the odds that they are violating them in private.

Which leads me to Oliver Goldsmith’s comic poem “Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,” which features a sanctimonious man of God. To establish his godly credentials, the poem tells us that he ran “a godly race” whenever he went to pray and that

A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad—
When he put on his clothes.

 This man is contrasted with an abject sinner—a cur “of low degree”—which everyone looks down upon.  It is clear that this dog is a reprobate when he bites “so good a man.”

The real toxicity lies elsewhere, however—as becomes clear in the poem’s unexpected conclusion. Goldsmith might be drawing on Jesus’s parable about the smug pharisee and the breast-beating tax collector in structuring his lyric: “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus contends (Luke 18:9-14):

An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
By Oliver Goldsmith

Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.

In Islington there was a man
Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran—
Whene’er he went to pray.

A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad—
When he put on his clothes.

And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.

This dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man.

Around from all the neighboring streets
The wond’ring neighbors ran,
And swore the dog had lost its wits
To bite so good a man.

The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
They swore the man would die.

But soon a wonder came to light
That showed the rogues they lied,—
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died!

A poem that Trump used to share with audiences was another lyric about biting, this one about a woman who saves a snake from dying. She is rewarded for her generous act with a death bite:

“I saved you,” cried that woman
“And you’ve bitten me even, heavens why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die”

“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin
“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!

. While, for Trump, the snake is a stand-in for immigrant “racists and murderers,” it’s clear to any objective observer that the real poisonous snake is Trump himself. America has twice taken him into the Oval Office, where he has done far more damage than anyone crossing the border.

Jesus was suspicious of people who loudly proclaim their holiness while judging and condemning others. In his vision, the curs of low degree will inherit the kingdom of heaven.

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What Makes a Nation Strong? Not Fascism

Norman Rockwell, The Spirit of America

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Thursday

As Trump attempts to turn America into an oligarchy while targeting his domestic enemies and fantasizing about territorial expansion, it’s time to dust off, once again, William Ralph Emerson’s “A Nation’s Strength.” It works as a searing indictment of Trump, Elon Musk, the GOP, and Trump’s worshipful supporters.

Don’t look to wealth, military might, or arrogant boasting if you wish to be great, Emerson declares. Rather, look to the character of its people. “Only men can make/ A people great and strong,” he tells us. “Men who for truth and honor’s sake/ Stand fast and suffer long.”

And then:

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly…

Protesters resisting Trumpism are beginning to speak out all over America. As the president and Musk assault the Constitution, labeling anyone who disagrees with them as “traitors” and “domestic terrorists,” Emerson’s words remind us to remain true to America’s founding ideals.

A Nation’s Strength
By William Ralph Emerson

What makes a nation’s pillars high
And its foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor’s sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly…
They build a nation’s pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

The pillars are tottering at the moment but they haven’t fallen yet. Nor will they as long as brave men and women, drawing on America’s Enlightenment tradition, strive to make their voices heard.

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How May Justus Broke Racial Barriers

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Wednesday

As I comb through childhood memories for a talk I’m giving tomorrow, I’ve just reread, for the first time in 60 years, a civil rights children’s book that was dedicated to me and my brothers. New Boy in School (you can read it here) is about an African American boy who, attending a newly integrated school, discovers he is the only student of color in his class. The book is so close to the experience of the one Black kid in my own seventh grade class that I can’t help but wonder if author May Justus borrowed some of it from me. Maybe I shared my encounter with Ronnie Staten with her, or at least with my parents.

There’s no way I’ll ever know and it doesn’t really matter but it’s fun to think about. Here’s the story:

As I’ve reported in the past, I grew up in the Appalachian south—in Sewanee, Tennessee—and as a child I was one of the child plaintiffs in a landmark civil rights case. In 1961 four White families and four Black sued the Franklin County Board of Education on behalf of their children for failure to integrate. Citing the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, we won the case and integration took place in two stages. In the first year only a few of Sewanee’s Black children entered Sewanee Public School while full integration happened the following year. Ronnie was the one Black placed in my seventh-grade class.

On his first day, I made a special point of reaching out to him on the playground. While he appeared to appreciate it, he was more interested in joining the other boys playing basketball. I realized at the time that it was probably the best thing he could do to speed acceptance but was glad I made the effort.

Closely watching the progress of Sewanee’s integration was Miss Justus (as we called her), who lived 10 miles away. An accomplished author, Miss Justus had come to the area with fellow teacher Vera McCampbell in 1931 as part of a John Dewey-inspired educational experiment. Dewey’s philosophy is that practical and abstract education should go hand in hand so that, for instance, one learns arithmetic from buying groceries and reading from undertaking various life tasks. Miss Justus initially set up a one-room school where the kids cut firewood and cooked their own lunches, and later in life she wrote a Little Golden Book about the approach (The Wonderful School of Miss Tillie O’Toole).

Not long after Miss Justus and Miss McCampbell set up their school, Myles Horton established the legendary Highlander Folk School nearby. Originally established to support Appalachian coal miners, Highlander moved into civil rights activism in the 1950s. As the only integrated conference center in the south, Highlander became a hub of the civil rights movement with activists from all over the south gathering to discuss and share strategies and approaches. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson, and others attended the workshops, and Miss Justus, who appreciated what Highlander was doing, volunteered herself to be the organization’s secretary and treasurer.

Although the state of Tennessee eventually chased Highlander out of Grundy County, Miss Justus stayed. Looking back I’m surprised that she didn’t experience more flack for her Highlander association. Maybe she was too famous and too beloved. Her friend Vera, however—now teaching in the public school system—was fired a year before she was due to collect her pension in a particularly vindictive move.

In any event, the suit against Franklin County had been partly the brainchild of Septima Clark, an extraordinary African American woman who was Highlander’s education coordinator, so that she, Miss Justus, and the Sewanee families were all in regular contact. Out of these associations came New Boy in School.

Unusual for 1963, the book has a Black protagonist, Lennie, whose family has just moved into the area. Terribly unhappy, Lennie hides from the other students but is befriended by Terry, who reaches out. The following day, Lennie brings a ball to class, which evolves into a collective game. Finally, after one final bout of shyness about performing for a school program, Lennie realizes he can contribute a song his father has taught him and all ends well. Maybe Miss Justus saw me as Terry.

I’m wondering if New Boy in School captures at all how Ronnie felt on his first day. (The book probably should have been dedicated to him, but Miss Justus didn’t know the Statens as she knew the Bateses.) While all the Whites are unrealistically nice—the n-word never makes an appearance—the book is good at capturing Lennie’s intense anxiety:

Lennie said nothing. Somehow he was a little afraid in this fine new school. It all seemed so strange to him. Most of the faces about him were friendly–Miss Baker’s and those of the children—but they were white faces.

“There are so many of them,” said Lennie, “and only one of me.” Yes, Lennie was the only Negro boy in the room.

And further on:

When it was time for reading class Lennie paid no attention. He just sat there behind his book. When it was time for recess, and all the children ran outside Lennie stayed in the schoolroom.

Finally Miss Baker took him by the hand, and tried to get him to join in a singing game. As soon as she turned him loose though, Lennie ran off. When the children laughed at him, he hid behind a big bush that grew in a corner of the schoolyard.

As I say, Ronnie was not this shy and I recall an extraordinary moment when a student called him the n-word directly to his face. Ronnie just looked at him and smiled, deflating the student utterly. It’s a moment I will never forget. Years later, I learned that Sarah Staten, Ronnie’s remarkable mother, had coached her kids to do just that.

I am keenly aware, now that I have grandchildren of color, how vital it is to have book protagonists that one can identify with. My grandchildren take it for granted that, of course, book characters will be of multiple races and ethnicities. At the time Miss Justus wrote New Boy in School, however, such books were very few in number. Even Black schools were using the white suburbia Dick, Jane, and Sally books to teach reading.

Of all her books, Miss Justus always said she was proudest of New Boy in School. I myself am proud to have played a role in its creation.

Additional note: Rereading how Lennie wins over his class by his singing, I am reminded of my segregated Boy Scout troop as I was growing up. In one of our summer jamborees—perhaps in 1962—we encountered an all-black troop. My fellow scouts had many unkind things to say about them until we heard them sing, at which point their harmonics put everyone to shame. We had never heard such singing.

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Caught Up in a Flood of Remembrance

My mother and brother David in 1956

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Tuesday

On Thursday I will be giving a talk on what it was like to grow up in Sewanee, Tennessee, where Julia and I have retired. Sewanee is one of those places that reminds people of Mayberry, the idyllic small town in the 1960’s sit-com The Andy Griffith Show. After all, everyone knew each other back then, and as a kid I could bicycle to school, to my friends’ houses, to the swimming lake, to the baseball field, to–well–just about anywhere.

It wasn’t perfect, the biggest blight being segregation. Now, of course, we’re no longer segregated but we might just as well be as most of the African American community has migrated to the valley, where there’s cheaper housing. High house prices are also discouraging families with children from living here, which means that it’s lost some of its vibrancy. I’ve learned that, in Thomas Wolfe’s immortal words, one can’t go home again.

For my talk, however, I’m putting that aside and recalling early memories. To that end, I have been going through my mother’s old scrapbooks and also old slides and strips of film, all of which she preserved.  D.H. Lawrence’s “Piano,” which has long been one of my favorite poems, captures some of the emotional roller coaster I’ve been going through. The fact that my mother was a piano player adds to the feelings.

The Piano
By D. H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Okay, so I haven’t been weeping. Nevertheless, my heart is being pulled, especially since I have now lost both parents and one of my brothers. And then there’s Chris Mayfield, the girl I was attracted to in third through fifth grade and whom I’ve long ago lost track of. As they look out at me through old photographs, “the glamour of childish days is upon me.”

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Percy Shelley’s Cry for Freedom

George Cruikshank, detail from The Massacre of Peterloo

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Monday

Imagine that you’ve just watched the military responding to a peaceful demonstration of 60,000 with murderous force, killing a dozen or more and wounding anywhere from 400-700. The crowd is demonstrating over high tariffs, which are pushing up the price of staples. And although the poor are struggling with cost of living, political Christians don’t appear to care.

The military, meanwhile, has the full support of both the government’s chief executive and the ruling party in the Senate.  All the while, the executive head appears checked out, except for when it comes to leeching off the public purse.

In other words, Percy Shelley’s sonnet “England in 1819” could be describing America in 2025—and America as it may become given how Donald Trump has long fantasized about the American military shooting demonstrators in the legs.

Shelley’s actual targets are the mad King George III and his soon-to-be successor, Prince Regent George. In 1819, British cavalry charged Manchester demonstrators calling for universal male suffrage and an end to the Corn Laws, which maintained tariffs on cheap foreign grain imports. What landowners regarded as economic protection, however, led to scarcity, famine, and unemployment.

The Tory government’s response to the massacre was to pass “the Six Acts,” which “were aimed at suppressing any meetings for the purpose of radical reform” (Wikipedia).

Poetry Foundation’s Christopher Spaide describes the poem as “two breathless, run-on sentences, running on rage, racing through reasons to despair about “the actual state” of England before veering, determinedly, toward a cautious optimism.” The poem was too revolutionary to be published in 1819 but saw the light of day after Shelley died. Here it is:

England in 1819
By Percy Shelley

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,—
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.

Since many of us are wondering what it will take to stop leech-like Donald Trump and Elon Musk—along with their Christless Christian supporters—from carrying out their own liberticide project, does the poem offer any hope? When Spaide says “cautious optimism,” he’s looking at the word “may.” It’s possible that the glorious phantom of liberty may arise from the graves of the political martyrs.

Shelley is right about one thing: the desire for liberty never goes away. Shelley’s once suppressed poem has become one of those enduring works that have inspired generations of patriots dedicated to freedom. We can continue to turn to it as resistance to Trumpism grows.

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A Mary Oliver Poem for Lent

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First Sunday in Lent

In the past when observing Lent, I’ve shared Madeleine L’Engle’s poem “For Lent, 1966,which opens, “It is my Lent to break my Lent,/ To eat when I would fast.”  In writing it, she is distancing herself from the tradition that Lent is a time to invite suffering. As the 14th century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sees it, Lent is a time to deny the body. As the poet puts it,

After Christmas there came the cold cheer of Lent,
When with fish and plainer fate our flesh we reprove.

Now, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written at a time when Christians had a tortured relationship with nature and the body, the Black Death having swept through England a few years earlier, killing a third of the population. Perhaps hair shirts and self-flagellation were coping mechanisms, a way of showing contempt for the vulnerable body. For our own Lenten discipline, L’Engle chooses rather to focus on social activities that feed the soul. As I wrote in my post on her poem, she vows

to listen—really listen—to others, and she will talk when she’d rather retreat into herself. To truly belong to Christ, she will try to “turn from none who would call on me.” In other words, she will take seriously the Sermon on the Mount.

It is in this spirit that Mary Oliver writes “Wild Geese,” which can also be regarded as a corrective to the medieval vision of Lent. “You do not have to be good,” she writes before clarifying that, by being good, she means, “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert.” Jesus of course entered the desert to fast and meditate immediately after his baptism by John the Baptist (Luke 4:1-13 in today’s Gospel reading), but like L’Engle, Oliver is not interested in reproving the flesh.

Instead, she tells us, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.” In my reading of Sir Gawain, the Green Knight is a nature spirit trying to tell the knight something similar. That Gawain is more interested in beating himself up—and doing his own version of walking on his knees through the desert—shows us what a challenge this can be.

Oliver tries to make her challenge to us sound as appealing as possible with gorgeous images of fertility:

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Somewhat like L’Engle, Oliver mentions communicating with others—Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine”—and then she provides a counter to this despair. We can have a connection with creation by opening ourselves to it. When we feel lonely, we can listen to the wild geese, whose “harsh and exciting” call comes to us out of the “clear blue air.” Perhaps, like the Holy Spirit who visited Jesus in the form of a dove, they too remind us that we have a transcendent home. “The family of things” awaits us.

If you are searching for a Lenten discipline, consider regular walks in nature. With your phone turned off.

Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.  

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