A Real Horror Story

Today I opened up the free local newspaper, Dekalb Neighbor, and leafed through it before dropping it in the recycle bin in the kitchen. The Lifestyle section had  a special on locally "haunted" places, and one of the articles was about the Decatur cemetery:

In 1879, Capt. Edward Cox shot and killed Lt. Col. Robert Alston. The two Georgia statesmen and Civil War veterans were in a heated debate over the state's convict labor laws. Alston was trying to put an end to the practice of renting out prisoners for profit while Cox was becoming rich on the corrupt system. Cox was convicted of murder but later pardoned. Now Cox and Alston lie just a few feet apart in the Decatur Cemetery. Cox's grave is one of the stops on the new Decatur Ghost Tour, co-founded by psychic Boo Newell. Since beginning tours in September, Ms. Newell said visitors have reported feeling cold, touched, pulled and breathed on at the grave site. "Cox is still here trying to prove he's the man," Ms. Newell said. "He feels he never got the credit he deserves." (Dekalb Neighbor, 28 October 2009, B:1)

Ms. Newell may be a psychic, but I think she's misread the vibes at this grave site. More likely, Cox is unable to sleep well in his grave because of a guilty conscience. The convict labor laws were instrumental in re-enslaving black Americans after the Civil War, especially in the South. Draconian laws were passed, guaranteed to gather in African-American men who could not pay the fines the courts levied against them, and so their sentences, often for ridiculous non-criminal activities such as "changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight carts without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity--or loud talk--with white women," were lengthened (quote from Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name).

In this way, the white South continued to profit from the unwilling labor of African-Americans. The system was corrupt and brutal--and continued well into the twentieth century until World War II. As Blackmon writes in the introduction to his well-documented history of the re-enslavement of African-Americans,

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace--often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina--where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived. (Blackmon, p 7-8)

That people were well aware of the moral bankruptcy of forced convict labor is evidenced by the fact that Lt. Col. Alston, who fought in the Civil War, argued so strongly against its use that Captain Cox, profiting from just such a system, refused to hear those arguments, refused to countenance them so fiercely that he killed the man trying to convince him. That the whole society was complicit in the brutal system is illustrated by how long it lasted and by how that society viewed the man who murdered Lt. Col. Alston: Cox was pardoned. In fact, years later, when Lt. Col. Alston's widow died, The New York Times published a derisively dismissive obituary from Atlanta, GA., that not-so-subtly supported the murderous Captain Cox:

DEATH OF MRS. ROBERT A. ALSTON.

ATLANTA, Ga., Sept. 5--Mrs. Robert A. Alston died in Decatur to-night at 6  o'clock. She was the widow of the late Col. Robert A. Alston, who was murdered some years ago in the executive office by Capt. Edward Cox. The shock of her husband's death followed Mrs. Alston through life. Col. Alston was a liberal liver, and on his death left nothing, so that his widow's life has been much trouble. Capt. Cox, who was pardoned by Gov. Stephens, now occupies an official position here. (published September 6, 1884, from The New York Times archives)

No, I don't think that Capt. Cox is still trying to show "he's the man." More probably, he rests badly in his grave because he profited from murdering a man who was in the moral right, the man that the writer of that obituary sneered as being a "liberal liver."

And so here, I praise Captain Robert A. Alston, despite whatever faults he might have had personally, a man who tried to do what was morally right and was killed for it. The re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South after the Civil War is a real horror story that all Southerners should confront--or else sleep fitfully in their graves.

Cleaning the Creek

Early this morning we headed north to the Georgia Mountains, to Holly Creek, near Chatsworth. The Nature Conservancy was sponsoring a clean-up location for Rivers Alive, "Georgia's annual volunteer waterway cleanup event that targets all waterways in the State including streams, rivers, lakes, beaches, and wetlands," according to the organization's website. Our mission was to clean up a certain length of Holly Creek. We left home before dawn and arrived at Holly Creek a little after 9 a.m., along with several other people. I'm not sure how many people participated at our site because as soon as volunteers arrived, we signed the necessary paperwork, chose a partner, got a trash bag, and went to work. A Boy Sout troop of about eight boys arrived, with their adult sponsors, families with young children showed up, as well as couples and folks on their own. We trudged the creek from around 9 a.m. to noon, and by the end of that time, we had collected many bags of garbage, as illustrated in the photo.

The most disgusting items I found were disposable diapers, especially one group stashed in a hole in a bank of the creek near a picnic area. Because the area had recently received rain, these diapers were not only full of human waste; they had also absorbed a large amount of rain water, so they weighed down one's trash bag quite a lot. Our daughter had the most disgusting experience of the group, however. Leaning down to pick up trash, she plunged her gloved hands into the putrefying remains of a small animal. She quickly returned to the rendezvous site to exchange her gloves for a fresh pair. Tom had the most exciting find: a dollar bill.

Despite the disappointment of discovering that such a pristine-looking area was so littered with human garbage, the clean-up was really quite enjoyable. The day was cloudy and very cool, and the woods created a sensory overload in colors and textures. I took photographs, but photographs cannot duplicate the experience or even a true image of the experience. In one shallow area of the creek, fall leaves had massed just below the surface of the water, creating an impressionistic image like a Monet painting. In another part of the creek where water rushed over and around several big rocks, the movement created a low rhythmic sound like distant, hollow drums. Staghorn moss covered slick areas of ground, fantastic mushrooms grew on the wet humus, bright red sweetgum leaves fluttered down from branches to catch on branches still blanketed with green leaves. Holly Creek is a beautiful place. Too bad people pollute such beautiful, soul-restoring places.

A Walk in the Woods

This afternoon we took a walk in the woods in Sweetwater State Park, up the blue-blazed trail through the shade of lollolly pines, American beech, sweetgum, slippery elm, and burr oak. The day was beautiful: clear, bright sunny skies and temperatures in the 50s (Farhenheit). I had tested the temperature at the sunny, south side of the house before we left home and thought the air warmer than it really was. When we arrived at the park, the wind was blowing cold off the water of George Sparks Reservoir. Canada geese, coots, and large white geese waddled across the lawn near the lake where we had parked first, but then we drove up to the interpretive center, re-parked, and began our walk through the woods.

Little streams ran through the woods, and once we stopped to turn over rocks, but Tom didn't find anything of interest beneath them. The blue-blazed trail switchbacked up a bluff and then down to the creek, where the remains of an old mill still stands. This mill was once part of a small creek-side settlement before the Civil War. Slaves made the bricks from which the mill was built, and poor white women did the mill work while their husbands were away fighting the war. In 1864, Union soldiers burned the mill, freed the slaves, and loaded up the women and children for transportation to prison in Kentucky. Many of the people never returned...but evidence of their work remains. The old millchase still channels some of the creek toward the mill, but the water returns to the creek through collapsed stone walls of the millchase before reaching the mill. Some walls of the mill stand, and piles of broken brick peek brightly from beneath their thick cover of earth.

Two weeks ago, a lot of countryside around Sweetwater Creek and the Chattahoochee River was underwater, and some roads still remain closed. The trail to the falls was closed with yellow tape across the trail, but we stepped over some of the yellow tape in order to get a closer look at the creek. There in the rocks that tumble downstream and pile up along the banks, I saw small pieces of brick, probably from the mill, that had tumbled and settled with the rocks. Some of the brick pieces were as round and smooth as the tumbled rock, and could have been taken for rock except that their red color stood out among the quartz, gneiss, and mica schist, as illustrated in the photo at the upper left-hand corner of this post. Given enough time, Mother Nature reclaims all that we have ever dared to call our own.

What We Cannot Deny: The Tangled Web of Ancestry

I’m not sure what, exactly, excites people about exploring their roots. Perhaps it’s an inherent urge to identify tribal connections. Perhaps it reflects an underlying need to establish one’s “worth” and to validate one’s existence. For some people, I’m sure, the excitement is in exploring rather than in identifying the branches of the genealogical tree, the “sussing out” of secrets and hitherto unknown connections. Others, such as I, just love a story; we’re caught up in the drama of individual lives almost submerged by the sands of time. Every person’s genealogical search is different, and nowhere is that difference so stark as the difference between the search conducted by a white person in the United States and that of an African-American. And nowhere is that search so fraught with tension as a search in one’s Southern background. If you’re African-American, you run up against slavery and the unpalatable truth that at one point, you’re going to be searching not through birth and death certificates but through bills of sale and property records. If you’re white, you’re likely to discover that no matter how humble your roots might be, there’s probably a slave-owning ancestor somewhere in your family history. (And if you have a conscience, that discovery is going to make you queasy rather than pleased.)

A recent New York Times article discusses the roots of our First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose family history so tellingly reveals the tangled history of the South. Michelle’s great-great-great-grandparents were a slave girl, Melvinia, and an unknown white man. Melvinia took the surname of her slave owners, Shields. After the death of her original owner in South Carolina, Melvinia found herself in Georgia, one of three slaves owned by her former owner’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. This couple had four sons, still at home and ranging in age from 19-24, at about the time Melvinia became pregnant with her first of four children. Whether or not one of those young men or some other young white man visiting the 200-acre farm is the father is unknown. After the Civil War, Melvinia worked as a farm laborer on a farm next to that of one of the sons, Charles Shields, until she eventually moved further west near the Alabama state line.

Melvinia’s child, Dolphus Shields, from whom Michelle Obama is descended, was light-skinned enough almost to pass as white. What some white folks encounter when they search their family roots is a similar ancestor who decided to pass as white and thus was integrated into the white community in the South, the family’s losing in time the knowledge of their slave past.

I was struck, as I read the article in the Times that Melvinia Shields, the eventually emancipated slave, is a sort of African-American opposite to my husband’s great-great-great-grandfather, Paul Cook: black, enslaved, illiterate and great-great-great-grandmother to Michelle Obama; white, wealthy, well-educated, and great-great-great-grandfather to my husband. Born in Rhode Island, Paul Cook was not an original child of the South, but as a participant in the sugar refining industry in Louisiana in the 1800s, he certainly profited from African-American labor. According to his obituary, he settled in New Orleans in 1846, and went into the western produce business until, in 1866, he got involved in the sugar refining business. The history of African-American labor in the cane fields from which that sugar came is not a pretty story. And yet, four generations later, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the slave is First Lady of the United States, and the great-great-great-grandson of the Southern merchant works for a non-profit organization.

As I delve more deeply in the background of the Armstrongs, Nugents, Cooks, Whites, Robbs, Greenes and all the ancillary branches of my husband’s family, as well as my own, I know I will run up against this Southern dilemma: how to discuss—or, rather, WHETHER to discuss the relations between the white ancestors and their black slaves and servants and whether to reveal what we would now identify as bigoted attitudes. If one is honest and true to history, one will confront what one finds and reveal that information in all its tangled glory and infamy.

Further Information: Searching for Slave Ancestors

• Tamie Dehler, “Searching for Slave Ancestors Requires a Strategy, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 12 January, 2008.
  
• Tony Burroughs, “Commentary: Tracing Michelle Obama’s Roots—and Yours, special to CNN.

Prizes

First, congratulations to Barack Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. We all have a pretty good idea why the Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded him the honor: Obama has changed the tone of the White House by embracing the rest of the world as partners in arms rather than opponents to arm against. This is a good thing. The rest of the world--except the Taliban, Al-qaeda, and the usual fringe voices on the right (Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, those people)--think this is a good thing. Republicans who have not forgotten how to be gracious think that's a good thing. That being said, the award of the prize to Barack Obama, whom I support and for whom I voted for President of the United States, reminds me of when my son played Little League baseball one year in Waverly Hall, Georgia.

The person in charge of the Little League teams was a woman who also was going to coach a team. She made sure that she had a chance to see every child's baseball skills; then she chose the best players for her team. My son, who was enthusiastic but not skilled at baseball and who was also a little unconscious at times (looking at the sky, thinking of something else besides the baseball heading his way), ended up on a team of very unskillful players. It was a sad situation. The woman who should have made sure that every team had an equal mixture of skilled and unskilled players was looking out only for herself and a handful of children.

At the end of the season, my son's team had not won one game. (Wait, I think they may have been awarded a game because another team forfeited for some reason.) Anyway, the coaches of the team planned an end-of-season picnic, and we all showed up to discover that each child was receiving a huge trophy. My husband and I couldn't believe it. Sure, we weren't happy that the team suffered from a huge handicap due to the poor choices of the Little League leader; we were sorry our son's team didn't win one game; and we thought it was important to praise the boys for the work they had attempted. But huge trophies? Maybe a small gift or token to illustrate the importance of trying and to encourage the kids not to give up when faced again with such insurmountable odds.

I'm afraid that our son's trophy was a family joke. We told him that we were proud that he had done the best job he could have done but that we didn't think the team's efforts were worth such ostentatious rewards.

I feel a little the same way about our President's award. I'm happy and pleased that important people think our president is doing a good job, that he has begun to lift the dark cloud of hubris and suspicion that the Bush administration created, that he is really pushing for nuclear disarmament, that he is engaging the world in diplomacy. But the peace prize seems a little premature. Oh, I know there is an argument for it. The prize shows support of his efforts. But it's such a big prize. Couldn't a smaller prize have done?

I just hope the Nobel Peace prize doesn't become a family joke and that the President lives up to the expectations it raises. Good luck to him. We should all support him.

Note: I think that James Fallows provides a good analysis of the President's speech this morning in which the President acknowledged the Nobel Peace Prize: "Obama's Nobel Remarks: Four Very Skillful Paragraphs."

I Had a Friend

Last night I received a telephone call from my best friend, who now lives on the coast of far northern California. We met twenty-five years ago--in 1984--when I was teaching at Louisiana State University and she was teaching in a local high school east of Baton Rouge. Although my husband and I moved from Louisiana in 1987, my Louisiana friend and I have been best friends ever since, through highly dramatic times and more peaceful, settled times. For years, I did all the moving, from Louisiana back to Texas, to Minnesota, to Georgia, back to Texas, back to Georgia, while my friend stayed in Louisiana. Now she has moved, and an entire continent separates us.

My friend and I rarely talk on the phone. The only people I frequently call are my mother in Texas and my husband and children for short conversations on the cell phone. For years, I was a prolific writer of letters, and this is how my friend and I kept in touch, as well as how I kept in touch with other friends. The other friends, eventually, quit corresponding, but this friend has remained a faithful correspondent since 1984. We write fewer letters, but we keep in touch by e-mail. Letters are best, I think, but it seems that few people these days are letter writers.

Not too long ago, letter-writing was an art and a blessing. It was how people who loved one another yet who lived far away from one another kept in touch. We have boxes and boxes of letters written by my husband's ancestors and their friends, some going back to the mid-1800s. I have begun going through those letters again and all the ephemera attached to them: the recipe clippings of a grandmother, the postcards of a great-aunt who was epileptic and who collected postcards as a hobby, the valentines collected by another great-aunt, the religious pamphlets and tourist guides someone collected and filed in a drawer somewhere to be discovered again 70-100 years later, the photographs of people long forgotten. I went through these boxes when we first received them in the late 1980s, but the remnants of these once engaged and eager lives filled me with sadness. They reminded me too well of the eventual fate of myself and all that I have ever loved.

Last night, after talking with my friend for a hour or so, I returned to the pile of family records I have here in my study (boxes are stacked elsewhere). In one basket I had placed a number of those memorial booklets provided by funeral homes. The geographic stability of a family can be established by looking at such booklets. The oldest one in this particular collection is dated 1943; it's the memorial record for my husband's great-grandmother, Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong (Sr.--one of her daughters had the same name), who was born in 1864 and died in Houston, Texas, in 1943. Next comes the memorial record of Edwin Oscar Cook, a cousin of the family, who was born in New Orleans in 1880 and died in Houston in 1955. Next is the memorial booklet for the great-aunt who was epileptic: Helen Frances Armstrong, born in Houston, Texas, in 1898, and died in Houston in 1962. Finally, the latest memorial booklet is for Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong (known as "Mimi" to her family, the daughter of MONA Sr.), born in Houston in 1896, died in Houston in 1986. Every one of these remembrance booklets have the stamp of Geo. H. Lewis & Company or Geo. H. Lewis & Sons. From 1943 to 1986, George H. Lewis and Sons Funeral Directors have prepared the final services for the elderly members of my husband's family. The company still exists in Houston, Texas: George H. Lewis and Sons Funeral Directors.

Having in her possession when she died most of the family materials, Mimi lived all her life in Houston, with summers spent in Boulder, Colorado, and she taught first grade in Houston for 30 years. As old as she was when she died, a number of friends and family remained to write their signatures under the "Relatives and Friends" column of the remembrance album--sixty of them, including me, an in-law. Edwin O. Cook, however, the cousin who died 350 miles from his New Orleans home, at the age of 75, has no signatures of friends left behind--though the booklet does contain a typed list of eleven floral remembrances. Finally, we outlive every friendship, and some distant relative sends chrysanthemums to the funeral home, or, these days, donates to the American Cancer Society.

Going through these old papers, photographs, and memorials can be depressing as one remembers that they represent people who once lived and loved. Years ago I read Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford and was struck by the profound insight revealed by the main character, Miss Mary Smith, when she and her elderly friend Miss Matty sit down one evening to read old letters:

I never knew what sad work the reading of old-letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be - at least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth. I should have felt less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been more so.

Yes, the reading of old letters is a sad enterprise, as the letter writers rise up before us as apparitions of their corporeal selves. And it seems very appropriate, as I was having these thoughts by going through old letters, that this morning I opened a book I've been reading, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and encountered this poem by Buson:

Mourning for Hokuju Rosen


You left in the morning. Tonight my heart is in a thousand pieces.
Why are you so far away?

Thinking of you I go to the hillside and wander.
The hillside--why is it so saddening?

Yellow of dandelions, the shepherd's purse blooming white.
There's no one to look at them.

A pheasant calls and calls without stopping.
I had a friend. We lived with a river between us.

Smoke rises, the west wind blowing so hard
in the fields of bamboo grass and sedge
it doesn't linger.

I had a friend. We lived with a river between us.
Not even the birds call out hororo.

You left in the morning. Tonight my heart is in a thousand pieces.
Why are you far away?

By the image of Amida I light no candle
and offer no flowers. I sit here alone,
my heart heavy, filled with gratitude.

Gratitude. Yes. I have still a friend. We live with a continent between us.

New Blog--Left for Texas

I have started another blog on which I will post historical information. Most of the posts will be about my husband's family, from whom we have inherited many boxes of letters and ephemera, but I will occasionally include information about the history and times of my own family. I have begun the blog with descriptions of some of my husband's ancestors and will include images of advertising, copies of family photographs and other clippings that the family gathered over the years. That blog is called Left for Texas. At this point the blog is open to any reader. Feel free to visit it!

Oops! I just repaired the link to my new blog. I had inadvertently mistyped the link.

Cozy, Cozy, Cozy

Matthew Yglesias links to a Frank Rich column today in The New York Times, in which Rich describes the lobbyists' cozying up to Democrats. Those of us who cheered--especially those of us who care a lot about health care reform--when Barack Obama promised in his inaugural address that under his leadership Washington would "do our business in the light of day" are cheering less these days as it seems as if business is being conducted as usual in Washington. Just a few highlights from the Rich column:

• Heather Podesta, the high-profile lobbyist for "health care players like Eli Lilly, HealthSouth and Cigna"? She is married to "Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Clinton White House chief of staff who ran the Obama transition."
  
  
• How do these close connections to the White House work out for the lobbying duo? Tony's "business was up 57 percent from last year in the first six months of 2009. Heather Podesta’s was up 65 percent."
  
  
• During the last administration, the place to meet, greet, and influence was Jack Abramoff's restaurant Signatures. These days, it's Ristorante Tosca, where the likes of Heather Podesta (lobbying against health reform for big healthcare companies) and Steve Elmendorf (former chief of staff for Dick Gephart now lobbying for financial clients such as Citigroup and Goldman Sachs) meet their clients and government officials they hope to influence.
  
  
• "[I]n early August...the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business." Those lobbyists whose clients include UnitedHealth Group? Steven Elmendorf (Elmendorf Strategies), Tom Daschle (ummm, not officially a lobbyist, but a "special policy advisor"...), and "a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader."
  
  
• Of course, the Republicans may be out of power, but they're just as easily influenced as those in power. Eric Cantor and John Boehner "are big recipients of UnitedHealth campaign cash." And, of course, there's John Ensign (R-Nevada), who used his connections to provide clients for his mistress's husband--a special category of lobbyist influence all of its own.

But then, we knew that...and those of us who voted for Barack Obama hoped that he would deliver on his promise. As Frank Rich says, "If the Olympic committee has the audacity to stand up to a lobbyist as powerful as the president of the United States, then surely the president of the United States can stand up to the powerful interests angling to defeat his promise of reform."

Quotations from Frank Rich's op-ed column, "The Rabbit Ragu Democrats," The New York Times, 3 October 2009.

See also: Thomas Franks' column in The Wall Street Journal, "Obama and the K Street Set," 30 September 2009.

Haiku for an early-fall day

This morning glory
blooming with chrysanthemums--
Summer waves goodbye.