Two Gardens

I recently visited Athens, Georgia, with family members, where we walked through the Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden on the University of Georgia campus and later along some of the pathways of  Georgia's State Botanical Garden. We had been to the State Botanical Garden previously, but there are always paths to walk that we haven't tread before. The Founders Memorial Garden is a much smaller garden, with concrete sidewalks and formally arranged garden areas; the larger State Botanical Garden has both formally arranged gardens and leaf litter trails that wander over ridges and under canopies of native and exotic trees. This time we stayed to the concrete paths and formally arranged areas.

Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden, Athens, GA

State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA

pond in Garden Club Founders Garden, Athens, GA

partial view of larger pond at the State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA

The weather was especially pleasant on the morning of our visit to the State Botanical Garden, as a cool front was blowing through, wafting away the clouds that had brought days of rain to the area. Tom and I noticed gardening techniques that we would like to transfer to our much more modest gardens (which are in great need of weeding and care at the end of a very wet summer).

Among the beautiful flowers and trees, the tiniest inhabitants carried on with their lives, largely unmolested and unnoticed.

This inchworm rolled up the loose threads of his silk thread as he climbed it to the canopy of a tree.

This spider hung suspended over an interpretive sign.

Every garden needs a yellow and black Argiope (garden spider).

This cricket was tucked head first between the stamens of this flower until I startled it from its bed.

Our walks in these gardens were among the highlights of the trip, as we lingered on benches and shared our reactions to the beauty of a natural world artfully arranged.  But the bitter sheen of history marbleizes these otherwise beautifully clear memories of our visits to these Southern gardens. As we were walking from the Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden and exiting the UGA campus, we passed two historical markers, one commemorating the desegregation of the University of Georgia in 1961, and the other memorializing the university's connection to the Confederacy.

Just steps away from each other, the signs attest to the bitter fruit of the South's "peculiar institution" and the pernicious effects of the hesitancy in acknowledging the culpability of one's ancestors in a bloody war. The second sign, as our daughter pointed out, was established in 1991, over one hundred and twenty five years after the end of the Civil War, and still the creators of this sign chose to designate that war as "the War for Southern Independence." These two signs represent the tension between two views of the South: graciousness and gentility, freedom loving and loyal; brutal and tribal, oppressive and paternalistic. So many fail to recognize the venom that remains in our failure to reconcile this dichotomy.

President Obama's Inaugural Speech

I listened to President Obama's inaugural speech after the fact, because I was immersed in 1884 and forgot the time while transcribing a letter written by Edward McCarty Armstrong, Tom's great-great grandfather. Edward McCarty Armstrong was  a "good" man in many ways but a man who was on the wrong side of history and steeped in the myth of the Confederacy for which he had fought, a man who, in 1884, wrote to his son, recently moved from Virginia to Texas, about his happiness that the Democratic party of the Old South had taken back the legislature. The man elected that year, Major Daniel, mentioned by name by EMA, was later to participate in the Virginia Constitution of 1902, which instituted Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising African-Americans who had been given that right in the Virginia constitution of 1870--other Southern states were doing the same.

And so the South stood -- segregated, resistant to Lincoln's Proclamation of Emancipation with its institution of  "slavery by another name"-- until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act which was avidly opposed by another Democrat and segregationist from Virginia, Chairman of the Rules Committee, Howard W. Smith. But President Johnson, a Democrat, too, from the South, used the bully pulpit of the presidency to help get the votes for the act, and an unprecedented parliamentary procedure enabled the bill to be moved to the Senate floor for debate.

With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democratic party lost the segregationists of the Old South (and over the next few years, much of its southern support). We would do well to remember this history in our time, when certain forces are again calling for the passing of laws that would disenfranchise particular populations of our citizens, using the same language of the legislators of the Old South--ostensibly to prevent voting "fraud."

With this history so vividly called to mind by my research and my reading of old family letters, I was even more moved by the words of President Obama:

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."

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.

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.

Blame all our woes on one region?

Well, it seems that our experience with the nice lady in northern California (see this post) was just a precursor to what Southerners could expect from more prominent voices. Kathleen Parker, a conservative writer whose column I read yesterday, blames the GOP's problems on Southern Republicans who have a lot of wing-nut ideas. I don't disagree with this. "Southern Republicans," she writes, "have seceded from sanity." Okay, I'm up with that. Sure seems that way to me, too. But now we have progressive columnists taking up the flag and condemning Southern whites and Southern culture. Well, again, I see plenty to criticize about the South, but I don't think the South is monolithic; nor does the region today deserve the scathing scorn that commenters to Kevin Drum's post heap upon it. The South today is not just a remnant of Scots-Irish culture, as many seem to believe. It has been influenced by many cultures. I, myself, am descended from Acadians who left Nova Scotia in the 1700s when the British kicked out the French; pockets of the South are vitally influenced by Acadian culture. I am also descended from Germans who immigrated to Texas in the 1800s. German culture influenced Texas. We knew people born in Texas whose first language was German; they didn't learn English until they began school. Many immigrants from old Czechoslovakia clustered in towns in Texas, giving us one of my favorite desserts, kolaches, as well as polka (not my favorite music). African slaves influenced the South, too, even the white South.

So when Kevin Drum--whom I keep hoping is parodying prejudice--impugns Southern white culture, I'm not sure just what he means. There are plenty of Southern ideas left over from the old-slave South that need criticizing. But Southern white culture? That's an imprecise term, and inflammatory in its impreciseness.

Wing-nut ideas are not confined to the South and to "Southern white culture," whatever that means.

Oh, and how could I have left out the Hispanic influence?

Regional Bias

Most people feel at least a little faithful to the region in which they were born and in which they grew up. We want to defend our "home," even when that defense might seem wrong-headed. If we are thoughtful people, we recognize the shortcomings of our birth home, and, when we do, wish for improvement. And, of course, we get defensive when people from other regions spout ill-founded judgments about the region with which we most closely identify. Southerners, particularly, seem to have to work hard to overcome negative images some people have of the region and its people. I was reminded of this bias on our trip to the northern California Pacific Coast to visit very dear friends who had moved from the South (Louisiana) to Crescent City, California.

We had been in the area for about a day when one of my friend's new local friends dropped by to meet us. This well-spoken, lovely woman in her sixties had grown up in Oregon. Within only a few minutes, she expressed her ambivalence about the South. "I think I would like to visit the South," she said, "but I'm a little afraid of the South. It's prone to violence, isn't it? Several years ago at a conference [she was a counselor until she retired], we discussed a study that concluded that Southerners tended more to violence because the South was settled by Scots-Irish."

Oh, yes--the study that proves Southerners are more violent than other Americans because the majority of them are descended from Scots who settled in northern Ireland where bloody war continued between the Protestant Scots and the Catholic Irish--these "Scots-Irish" later immigrated to the United States in great numbers, many of them moving to the Appalachians and further south. That study continues to be used by otherwise thoughtful folks to bolster their bias toward the South. My husband encountered the study when we lived in Minnesota; folks at a Minnesotan university brought it up in an interview with him. Behind the reference to that study is the suggestion that the Southerner in the room is therefore suspect: he can't be trusted because he might have heretofore unexpressed violent tendencies. It's used as an excuse to condescend to and to judge an individual based on his or her place of birth. And it encourages the undiscerning to judge a whole region of individuals, many of whom have very mixed genetic heritage.

Of course, some information coming out of the South makes even me wonder what's up with us. Take the "birther" movement. Although it's not just Southerners who question Barack Obama's birth--despite hard evidence, including a birth certificate (!) that proves the man was born in the U.S.--an astonishingly high percentage of Southerners question Obama's right to the presidency based on this "birther" conspiracy. As Steve Benen discusses in this post, a recent poll indicates that some 20% or so of Southerners think Barack Obama was not born in the United States and 30% are unsure. How can that be? Is that 20% of ALL Southerners or 20% of Southern REPUBLICANS? Can it be true that about 50% of Southerners either believe Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. or that perhaps he wasn't? Statistics like that make me want to enroll in a voice class to eliminate my Southern drawl.

The bottom line is, however, that we shouldn't judge individuals based on statistical studies. We should judge them by their own character.

Update: Steve Benen addresses more birther nonsense today: "They'll never stop," Washington Monthly, 3 August 2009.