between the magnolias

Ode to the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union.

In the summer of 1934, a remarkable interracial protest movement arose among the sharecroppers and tenant farmers of eastern Arkansas--the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Battered by the Depression and by New Deal crop reduction programs that led to massive evictions from the land, black and white sharecroppers joined together to try to gain economic security from a collapsing plantation system. Aided by local and national leaders of the Socialist Party, they tried to lobby the federal government to win a share of crop reduction payments and to resist planter efforts to drive them from the land. The union, often led by black and white fundamentalist ministers, spread quickly throughout the region. In 1935 it organized a cotton choppers' strike to raise wages for day laborers; it sent members to lobby in Washington, and it maintained interracial solidarity in the face of fierce planter repression. By 1936, the organization claimed more than twenty-five thousand members in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, and had won national recognition for dramatizing the plight of sharecroppers under the New Deal.

More here.

Marion Montgomery on despair.

"We have to bear human foolishness, human absurdity, without resorting to making despair a virtue. Momentary despair- we can't escape that. It's as likely as indigestion when a new absurdity is being absorbed. I think I mean that the existentialists' absurd- which has frightened too many writers out of wit and humor- is a prospect of the world we come to again and again. We can't escape coming to it. But it can't be enough to just come to it: one has to go through.

The ticket to it is the tragic eye, which I suspect is innate. The passport that allows us to come back from it we have to be given or earn- the humorous eye. Humor is a necessary complement to the tragic, if one is to preserve what our age insists on calling "sanity". (I call it soul.) There are advantages of place and community and family to one's earning or being given that eye, I think. That is one of the gifts to the Southern writer that we haven't quite outgrown with our new arrogance.

Marion Montgomery in an interview with James Colvert conducted at the University of Georgia in September, 1970

No one coming from the Protestant tradition could pay such reverent homage to absurdity. Marion Montgomery must have been Catholic or Orthodox or agnostic- something with a heightened skepticism of power and an ability to laugh at the adventures of worldly authority.

Montgomery currently lives in Crawford, Georgia, where he has devoted much of his life to teaching, writing, and ponderizing.

• William Walsh interviews Marion Montgomery more recently for the Istanbul Literary Review. St. John of the Cross enters the discussion.
• Montgomery's bio on the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

A poem from Helen Blackshear's "Alabama Album".

Helen Blackshear served as Alabama poet laureate for almost a decade, her nimble voice lacing scraps of history together with the threads of lost sunsets. In "Heritage", she encourages us to embrace the living history in our midst- "To listening ears old things have tales to tell."

In "The Watchers", she mourns the exodus of little eyes from the world as she knew it. A darker poem, to be sure, but well-lit.

THE WATCHERS

Are we becoming like the dinosaurs,

Those of us who fell in love with words,

Subject to uncomprehending stares

From vacant eyes of video-conscious herds?

 

What magic will these modern children know

Who never rode the wind with Dorothy

Or sailed the pirate seas in Westward Ho,

Who greet the Brothers Grimm with apathy?

 

They sit within their darkened rooms and glue

Their eyes upon a flickering TV screen.

Heedless of sun and sky they laugh on cue,

Guided by prompting from the laugh machine.

 

For them there is no "Open Sesame!"

The world of wonders has no golden key.

Flannery eccentrics vs. Welty eccentrics.

I like to classify Southern eccentrics into two groups: Eudora Welty eccentric or Flannery O’Connor eccentric. If you are a Welty eccentric, your sister is called something like Cattie Paw because her name is Katherine and she walks quietly. If you are O’Connor eccentric, your sister is called Trampasaurus Oceanus because she gets around during Fleet Week. Welty eccentrics may leave a family dinner to go sit in the woods and sketch lichen. O’Connor eccentrics leave a family dinner after announcing they’ve ended the affair with the Methodists’ choir director to move to Hilton Head with the Piggly Wiggly produce manager and his spiritual guru.

In case y’all missed it, over in Union City, Tennessee a man assaulted his momma with a ham. Yeah, he shanked her. Now, the alleged ham chucker said he indeed did throw that ham, but was not expecting his momma to be walking down the hall and get smacked by his lofting of the pork. I’m sorry, but you don’t go willy nilly throwing ham around without hitting something unless it’s a spiral sliced ham. Then obviously it’s going to cut to the right and miss momma altogether. I know that assault with smoked meats can happen anywhere, but there’s just something so Southern Gothic about knocking momma out with dinner. And let’s face it, in the South, that’s the only way you’re gonna knock your momma out with dinner because your sweet potato pie will never be as good as hers. I don’t know what kind of eccentric that makes our ham-handed assailant. I’m leaning more towards O’Connor eccentric because the government-owned buildings Miss Eudora’s characters inhabit tend to be more of the post office persuasion than the jail persuasion.

Susan Wilson, "Embracing My Inner Flannery"

A Union Springs ghost story.

The Rainer-Lewis home in Union Springs, Alabama. Built in 1904.

It was only one of many similar occurrences, back in the shadowy age in the South before the Civil War, that were never inked in spidery script into the front-leaf dynastic chronicles of the parlor Bibles. In this instance, it was the young heir of a thorny and grizzled old patriach who presided over a plantation with a multitude of slaves down in a south-Alabama Black Belt community called Union Springs, and who, having already exhausted and buried several wives, was preparing to take yet another. A few days before the wedding, his son notified him that he was in love with one of their slave women, and meant to make his life with her. The father, in a reeling fury, dispossessed him, and promptly dispatched the female slave to another owner. The youth lingered until the day of the wedding. Then, during the marriage feast-- he poisoned his father-- and fled, vanished, never to be seen again.

Excerpted from Marhall Frady's Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey

I can't help but wonder which plantation was the scene of this family crime. Perhaps the Sedgesfield Plantation? If you know any more about this bit of local history, please share.

More to wander in historic Union Springs:

• A map of downtown Union Springs plus a historic building tour.
• Some fans of the paranormal have taken an interest in the Josephine Hotel and the Pauly Jail.
• More hauntings.
• Thom S. Rainer, President and CEO of Lifeway, the Christian bookstore chain, comes from Union Springs. It seems that he must be somehow related to Frances Rainer (the ex-wife of African-American mayor Johnny Ford), who also hails from Union Springs, though nowhere in Thom's magnificent online opus have I found any mention of Frances. Does Mr. Rainer have a living ghost he'd like to mention?
• More Union Springs.

Interracial marriage in Union Springs, Alabama.

In 1972 Johnny Ford became the first African American elected mayor of Tuskegee, Alabama. His historic victory was heralded as a sign that a new generation of young, well-educated black politicians was stepping into leadership in the years following the civil rights movement. When he took office, he was quoted by the New York Times as saying that "the South is the new frontier for black accomplishment."

Ford served as mayor until 1996, when he was elected to the state legislature. He was reelected mayor of Tuskegee in 2004. Born on August 23, 1942, in Midway, Alabama, Ford was adopted at age four by his uncle, Charlie Benjamin Ford. They moved to Tuskegee, home of the Tuskegee Institute, which was founded in 1881 to educate the children of freed slaves. During Ford's youth the famed Tuskegee Airmen—the first all-black corps of military pilots, who had compiled a noteworthy record during World War II—were a source of both local and national pride for African Americans. Yet Tuskegee, like the rest of the South, was a deeply segregated place, and Ford attended the city's all-black public schools.

A few weeks later the New York Times ran another story, "The Tuskegee Mayor and His Wife: A Very Visible Interracial Marriage," which noted that mixed-race marriages were still technically illegal in the state. Ford and his wife, Frances Rainer, a social worker from a well-connected white family in another town, had started dating during Ford's tenure with the Model Cities program. They often met in the larger city of Montgomery, about forty minutes away by car. Theirs was the first interracial marriage in Macon County. Even though antimiscegenation laws had been declared invalid by the U.S. Supreme Court three years earlier, Alabama's law was still on the books, so the newlyweds, the minister who married them, and the clerk at the county office who had issued the marriage license were subject to criminal penalties. "A lot of people marry for money," Ford told Ray Jenkins, the New York Times reporter. "A lot of people marry for class. Maybe some people marry for political reasons. But we married for love."

I love Johnny Ford and his (former?) wife, Frances Baldwin Rainer, for insisting on the right to remain Southerners while loving each other and raising a family. Journalist Marshall Frady tells their story in his excellent book, Southerner's: A Journalist's Odyssey. 

Unfortunately, like many modern couples, Johnny and Frances divorced in 1970. Ford married and divorced two more times before marrying Joyce London Alexander (a judge) in 2006. Ford has three children-- Johnny, Christopher, Tiffany. 

Rural decay near Tuscaloosa.

From company town to labor rights precedent: Brownville, Alabama.

The dying town of Brownville, Alabama contributed more than wood poles to American history. I found an article in the Spring 1994 issue of Southern Historian detailing the role of Brownville in the labor rights movement. Jon Chalmers' insightful "Pickets in the Woods: The Strikes and Conciliation Behind Thornhill v. Alabama" (pp. 68-77) concludes that the interests of local Brownville workers "were sacrificed so that the national union could win a great victory" in Thornhill v. Alabama.

Chalmers surveys how Brownville was the "birth place" of the Thornhill decision, the first U.S. Supreme Court Case where picketing was recognized as a constitutionally protected free speech activity. Essentially, Thornill set the precedent that federal and state action restricting the picketing process must not infringe on the constitutional right of free speech. Picketing was determined to be a form of speech. 

At the time, the governing Alabama Code of 1923 contained a section 3448 which made picketing on the job a violaton of the Code. The events that culminated in the Supreme Court case began in 1937, when all 96 members of the Creosoters Local 19974 refused to work. Of the 100 men working in the plant at this time, 96 were union members. Since only four men were left to work, this strike shut down the plant.

In particular, the workers wanted the following:

• a pay raise for all those making $0.30 per hour to $0.34 per hour
• a 20% increase for all those making $0.35 per hour
• an eight-hour day
• four holidays per year
• time and one-half for overtime

The Tuscaloosa courts ordered the union to comply with the state Code and stop the strike. Judge Henry Foster of Tuscaloosa provided an injunction against the picketing. An arbitration produced agreement by both parties to a 10% general wage increase with no mention of the other labor demands. Later that year, the company fired fourteen of the Creosoter's Local 19974 leaders and imported workers from a Brown railroad subsidiary into the Brownville plant. The imports were making $0.22 per hour as opposed to the agreed company minimum of $0.28 per hour.

The union leaders requested intervention by the US Conciliation Service, a forerunner of the Meditation and Conciliation Service dedicated to defusing labor-management conflicts. By the time J.C. Howard arrived in Tuscaloosa, the union had ordered another strike. Howard stepped into a mine field. The union hired the Tuscaloosa firm of Mayfield & Mayfield, and James Mayfield immediately challenged the injunction against picketing that was issued the previous spring.

The local contended that the injunction applied only to the strike of the last spring while the company held that it was still binding. The company was represented by Hyman Rosenfeld and Judge Fleetwood Rice... The hearing on its merits was put off until December 20.

On December 9, 1937, 38 workers were arrested for contempt. While the strikers admitted they were picketing in violation of the injunction, they insisted that they were peaceful and had a right to picket. These 38 workers were fired for violating the injunction. The strike was resolved by mediation, but the labor battle was far from over.

Byron Thornhill, the leader of the local union, was again arrested for picketing. He was tried under the criminal provisions of Section 3448, and found guilty. James Mayfield began preparing his case for the US Supreme Court, since he knew the state courts could lean towards ruling in favor of the prohibition in the state code. 

At first, Mayfield planned to challenge the injunction as a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. But the NLRA determine that "creosoting was not a large enough industry to warrant fair working conditions and wages". In other words, there weren't enough creosoting unions to force a national hand. Thornhill's case followed a torturous route to lay foundation for future appeals that would take him and the picketing statute to the US Supreme Court. In the end, the anti-picketing statute was struck down as a violation of the constitutional right to free speech. 

But the Brownville Creosoters did not have their labor demands met. The reasons the strikes were called in the first place were never resolved. 

An Alabama slave narrative given by "Uncle Charlies Aarons".

What follows is a slave narrative from the Works Projects Administration released in 2011 and now available on Guterberg. It is an interesting perspective from an Alabama slave. Thank goodness for the WPA's recordings of local history. Oak Grove is a town located in Talladega County.

Personal contact with Uncle Charlie Aarons

Oak Grove, Alabama— Written by Mary A. Poole

Some friends driving to Oak Grove, Ala., gave the writer the opportunity on August 4th to interview an old ex-slave, Charlie Aarons, who is quite venerable in appearance, and who, when asked his age, replied:

"Madam I don't know but I sure been 'round here long time", and when asked how old he was at the time of the Surrender he answered:

"I was a man able to do a man's work so I 'spects I was eighteen or twenty years old."

Uncle Charlie, as he is known among his own color and the white people who know him, told the writer he was born at Petersburg Va., and his parents, Aaron and Louisa, were owned by a Mr. J.H. White, who had a store in the city, but no plantation. His parents had three children, two boys and one girl, and when Uncle Charlie was about ten years of age, he was sold by Mr. White to a speculator named Jones who brought him to Mobile. He recalled being placed on the block, at the slave mart on Royal and State streets, and the anxiety of hearing the different people bidding for him, and being finally sold to a Mr. Jason Harris, who lived near Newton Station in Jasper County, Miss.

Uncle Charlie never saw or heard of his parents or brother and sister again and never knew what became of them.

Uncle Charlie said Mr. Harris was a pretty rough master, and somewhat close. All rations were weighed out and limited. He had a white overseer and a negro driver, who was the meanest of all.

Mr. Jason Harris had about sixty slaves, and a large plantation of a hundred acres, the men and women worked in the fields from six to six, except on Saturday, when they had half day holiday to clean up generally.

The home of the Harris family was a large two story house and the quarters were the regular log cabins with clay chimneys. They cooked in their cabins, but during the busy season in the fields their dinners were sent out to them each slave having his own tin pail marked with his name. Water would be sent out in a barrel mounted on an ox cart. The old men and women looked after the children of the slaves while their parents worked in the fields.

When the writer asked Uncle Charlie, if his master or mistress ever taught him to read or write, he smiled and said:

"No, Madam, only to work".

When asked if they had any special festivities at Christmas or any other holiday, he replied:

"No, we had no special jolifications".

Saturday nights they would sing and dance in the quarters and have prayer meetings, then on some Sundays, they would hitch up the mules to a big wagon and all go to the white folks church: and again there would be camp meetings held and the slaves from all the surrounding plantations would attend, going to same in these large wagons, sometimes having four mules to a wagon. They then would have a jolly time along the way, singing and calling to one another, and making friends.

Uncle Charlie, said, he drove many a load of cotton in the large mule wagons from Newton Station to Enterprise, Mississippi.

When asked if that wasn't a chance to run away, he replied:

"Git away, why Madam, those nigger dogs would track you and all you got was a beating."

Uncle Charlie seemed to look off in the distance and said: "You know, Madam, I never saw a slave rebuked until I came to Mississippi," and I just couldn't understand at first, but he grinned and said: "Lordy, Madam, some of those niggers were onery, too, and a nigger driver was a driver sure enough."

When the Master's son John Harris went to war, Charlie went with him as his body guard, and when asked what his duties were, he replied:

"I looked after Marster John, tended the horses and the tents. I recalls well, Madam, the siege of Vicksburg."

The writer then asked him if he wasn't afraid of the shot and shell all around him

"No, Madam," he replied, "I kept way in the back where the camp was, for I didn't like to feel the earth trembling 'neath my feet, but you see, Madam, I loved young Marster John, and he loved me, and I just had to watch over that boy, and he came through all right."

Uncle Charlie said when they were told the Yankees were coming through from their headquarters in Meridian, Mississippi, and warned of their raids, they all made to the swamps and staid until they had passed on, but that the Yankees did not disturb the Jason Harris plantation.

After the Surrender Charlie came to Mobile and worked at the Yankee Camp, living in the quarters located in Holly's Garden. He drove their wagons and was paid $14.00 a month and his keep. After his discharge he worked on steamboats and followed different lines of work, being employed for several years at Mr. M.L. Davis' saw mill, and is at present living on the Davis place at Oak Grove, Ala., an old Southern home, with quarters originally built for the employees of the mill and still known as the "quarters", and like other ante-bellum homes they have their private burying ground on the place.

Uncle Charlie was married four times, but now a widower. He had four children, two boys who are dead, and two girls, one Carrie Johnson, a widow, living in Kushla, Ala., and the other, Ella Aarons, a grass widow, living in Mobile, Ala.

Uncle Charlie says he saw Jeff. Davis as an old man, after the war at Mississippi City, Miss., and then his face lit up, and he said; "Wait a minute, Madam, I saw another president, let me think,—Yes, Madam I saw President Grant. He came through Mobile from New Orleans, and my! there was a big parade that day."

When asked about Abraham Lincoln, Uncle Charlie thought awhile, and answered:

"According to what was issued out in the Bible, there was a time for slavery, people had to be punished for their sin, and then there was a time for it not to be, and the Lord had opened a good view to Mr. Lincoln, and he promoted a good idea."

When he was asked about Booker T. Washington he replied:

"It was traversed out to him until the white folks took part with him and helped him carry on."

Uncle Charlie thinks the present day folks are bad and wicked, and don't realize anything like the old folks.

Charlie is a Baptist, became one when he sought the Lord and thinks all people should be religious.

The Alabama meteor that wasn't.

Glynn Wilson made me giggle and curtsey all over myself today:

This may come as a surprise to some, but the so-called meteorite near the No. 8 green at Audubon Park is a chunk of iron ore from Alabama, most likely Birmingham’s Red Mountain. It didn’t drop in from space. It was dropped there by a fool public relations man, and sat there too heavy to move after the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition ended in 1885.