The Pavlov-to-Paula Deen Continuum

Paula Deen, High Priestess of Southern Cooking, presides at Communion. Image found here.

Some business took me to Mobile for a couple of days at the beginning of the week, and so I was thrilled to see my daughters, G. and C., one night over supper. They are well and happy . . . and, um, well, it's one thing to know your daughter has been driving by herself for a couple of months, but quite another to actually see her doing it.

This exchange took place after our waitress took our orders:

Me: I miss hearing Southern accents.

C: Hearing them makes me hungry.

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Flannery O'Conner: Already dangerous at age 9

A brief passage from Brad Gooch's new biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor:

A cartoon O’Connor drew when she was nine years old shows a child walking with her father and mother. In a balloon coming from the mother’s mouth are the words: “Hold your head up, Mary Flannery, and you are just as bad, Ed.” To which the girl, dragging along, snidely replies, “I was readin where someone died of holding up their head.”

This appears over in Front Porch Republic in Jason Peters' review of the book. Those of you interested in O'Connor should read Peters' review--in particular, the distinctions he makes between "place" and "region" (something I recall Eudora Welty saying is important to her as well) and the connection between that idea and her spirituality. Good, meaty stuff.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to plug Front Porch Republic generally, as I know I've done before. In its exploration of "Place. Limits. Liberty" it is deeply conservative, but most definitively not in the currently-prominent version of conservatism. As you'll see in my friend Russell's and my own comments on the post I linked to, it's possible for moderates and liberals to visit FPR and feel strong resonances with its writers' emphases on and celebrations of the Local, even as they might disagree on the means by which to best achieve those commonly-valued ends. In these days of both liberal and conservative blogs' and talk radio's and cable news' awful dumbing-down of political discourse, FPR is a welcome tonic for the intellectual and political soul, no matter one's own personal leanings.

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Lynn Westmoreland, His Songs and Sayings; or, Who says white folks don't know how to signify?

Bumped up because it has more stuff added to it:

A. B. Frost, 1851-1928. "Terrapin speaking to Brer Rabbit" Illustration for Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings: Folklore of the Old Plantation by Joel Chandler Harris. Image found here.

For a discussion of "signifying," go here

Lynn Westmoreland, Republican Congressman from Georgia, yesterday:

"Just from what little I've seen of her [Michelle] and Mister Obama, Senator Obama, they're a member of an elitist class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

When a reporter sought clarification on the racially loaded word, Westmoreland replied, "Uppity, yeah."

Lynn Westmoreland, today:

“I’ve never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of ‘uppity’ is ‘affecting an air of inflated self-esteem —- snobbish.’ That’s what we meant by uppity when we used it in the mill village where I grew up.”

Oxford English Dictionary (whose definition for "uppity" does agree with Westmoreland's, by the way), the four examples of usage given, oldest-known first:

1880 J. C. Harris, Uncle Remus, 86 Hit wuz wunner dese yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck. 1933 Times Lit. Suppl. 9 Nov. 776a Grammy is living contentedly enough with an 'uppity' young creature named Penny 1952 F. L. Allen, Big Change 11 viii 130 The effect of the automobile revolution was especially noticeable in the South, where one began to hear whites complaining about 'uppity niggers' on the highways, where there was no Jim Crow. 1982 B. Chatwin On the Black Hill v. 28 He had a head for figures and a method for dealing with 'uppity' tenants.

With the exception of Chatwin's novel, which is set in Wales, all these usages for "uppity" directly describe African-Americans not knowing their place, in the judgment of the speakers¹ (the Times Literary Supplement passage is from a review of Roark Bradford's Kingdom Coming (hat-tip: Edge of the American West, which beat me to the OED by a day).

Call me a skeptic, but I do doubt that the citizens of the Georgia mill-town of Westmoreland's formative years had their understanding of "uppity" shaped by Bruce Chatwin novels.

All words require other words around them in order to signify. But the language of race and of social standing, especially in the South, requires context as well in order for them to fully signify. Westmoreland may not know his fellow Georgian Joel Chandler Harris introduced "uppity" into the American lexicon in precisely the way he says it does not know it meant, but here he looks like nothing so much as Harris's Brer Rabbit avoiding becoming the main course of Brer Fox's barbecue.

I expect--and hope--that he will be less successful than Brer Rabbit. Figuratively speaking, you understand.

Indeed: Haste the day when Westmoreland's more-than-a-little-disingenuous professed ignorance of this adjective's racial and racist origins indeed comes to pass and we can all indeed be ignorant enough of those origins to use it to pejoratively describe any person, regardless of color, who is in some way too big for his britches. That time may in fact be occurring among younger people, judging from some comments at other sites regarding Westmoreland's comment. In the meantime, though, even granting Westmoreland the benefit of the doubt here, his implied ignorance of his own state and region's social and cultural history is breathtaking. I of course have no direct proof that Westmoreland is lying, but as this rhyming couplet from a toasting poem that Henry Louis Gates Jr. quotes in his book The Signifying Monkey makes clear, there's another--and better--reason to be angry with Westmoreland:

[Lion] said, "Monkey, I'm not kicking your ass for lyin',
I'm kicking your hairy ass for signifyin'." (57)

__________
¹ A slight modification to my comments on the usage of "uppity" above:

The Harris story the OED usage example comes from is "The Fate of Mr. Jack Sparrow"; a fuller context for that passage follows:

"Lemme tell you dis," said the old man, laying down the section of horse-collar he had been plaiting, and looking hard at the little boy-"lemme tell you dis-der ain't no way fer ter make tattlers en tailb'arers turn out good. No, dey ain't. I bin mixin' up wid fokes now gwine on eighty year, en I ain't seed no tattler come ter no good een'. Dat I ain't. En ef ole man M'thoozlum wuz livin' clean twel yit, he'd up'n tell you de same. Sho ez youer settin' dar. You 'member w'at 'come er de bird w'at went tattlin' 'roun' 'bout Brer Rabbit?"

The little boy didn't remember, but he was very anxious to know, and he also wanted to know what kind of a bird it was that so disgraced itself.

"Hit wuz wunner dese yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck," said the old man; "dey wuz allers bodder'n' longer udder fokes's bizness, en dey keeps at it down ter dis day-peckin' yer, en pickin' dar, en scratchin' out yander.

Tattling, as I know I had, um, impressed upon me when I was a child, is a form of not minding one's own business, of not knowing one's place. And since the Uncle Remus tales aren't overtly racialized (by that, I mean that the different characters don't appear to stand for black or white people but just for people), neither is this first in-print usage at all "racial" but, rather, social in its immediate context.

That said, I and, I suspect, most Southerners would recognize that that context becomes much blurrier when used by a white person to describe a black person. Here's an example of what I mean, using the first part of Westmoreland's statement above: "Just from what little I've seen of her and Mister Obama, Senator Obama." Note the emendation from "Mister" to "Senator." I don't think anyone would have objected to his simply having left the title as "Mister." Perhaps, as a fellow elected official, Westmoreland simply, as a matter of instinct, corrects himself in favor of the title indicating Obama's elected position, as other Congresspeople and Senators do when speaking of each other in public--in Westmoreland's defense, "Michelle's" presence in the statement complicates matters, making it harder to be automatically officious when he comes up to "Obama." But, as anyone who has seen that great scene in In the Heat of the Night between Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier knows, how whites and blacks address each other was (and for some, I suspect, remains) a vexed issue. So perhaps Westmoreland has all that in mind as well as he's speaking. But, again: if the latter is the case, then for him to plead ignorance of how "uppity" traditionally signifies when whites speak of African-Americans is disingenuous.

One last thing: Westmoreland's saying "they're a member of an elitist class individual that thinks that they're uppity." Setting aside what the word signifies, "uppity" is a judgment others place on a person. People, as the OED examples make clear, don't think that about themselves.

Of course, there is a last possibility, as suggested by the tortured grammar of the statement: that Congressman Westmoreland is, um, not terribly bright:



LAST UPDATE (I promise): The phone conversation reported between a commenter and Westmoreland's office here (scroll down a bit) demonstrates quite elegantly how two can play Westmoreland's game.

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"Blankness": On unselfconsciousness in narrative

"Acting naturally" is an odd phrase, no?

"Unselfconsciousness" in any sort of art, even that which purports to allow for chance, is an impossibility: at some point in the making, someone makes a choice that results in the eventual preservation of the whatever-it-is. It's that choice-making, I would argue, that is at the core of the making of Art. (Note: "choice-making" doesn't make something "good" art; it's simply the least common denominator for those objects which someone asks an audience to consider as Art.) That said, an artist can certainly seek to create the illusion of unselfconsciousness, via spontaneity, candidness, shaky camera shots, etc.

Or, in the case of Show Boat (the Edna Ferber novel, not the musicals or its film versions), what, in this post, I referred to as "blankness."

Randall and dd both mentioned this word in their comments on that post, for which I thank them:it caused me to think some more about that word and what it might mean within the larger context of ideas about the work of narratives. What follows is in part a response to them and in part a talking-things-out to myself.

Though most of Show Boat is set in the southern basin of the Mississippi River and is thus steeped not even in Southern culture so much as the more-ephemeral Southern atmosphere, I would argue that Show Boat is not directly concerned with "saying something" about the South. "The South" is scenery, a backdrop for the novel's real preoccupation, the telling of the story of Magnolia Ravenal née Hawks. Or, rather, it's intended (I think) that "The South" remain in the background, as background. Part of what I hope is at least implicit in my last post on the novel is that the Mississippi and, by extension, certain historical and cultural realities (not all of which are "Southern," by the way), intrude upon and are awkwardly ignored by the narrator. His/her ignoring those realities and, in the case of all the material about Magnolia's relationship with Julie, not reflecting on an event that gets an entire chapter to itself in the novel--that ignoring and absence of reflection seem especially odd to me in this novel--which does, after all pose as a biography.

It's that absence of reflection on the part of the main characters and the narrator that I meant when I used the word "blankness." Southern--and, by extension, U.S.--culture and history is, of course, not at all a blank, but you almost wouldn't know that from reading Show Boat--and that, of course, is Lauren Berlant's argument with regard to the stage and film versions that I referred to in that post.

It's that "almost" that I'm picking at here. The fantasy-world combination of the river and the show boat cannot forever keep out the Real World, as evidenced by the expulsion of Julie and Steve from the Cotton Blossom. Here, surely, the South is something much more than a setting--you'd think. But once that chapter ends, the narrative says nothing more about the incident; the narrator reports no one, not even Magnolia, musing on it. There is, of course, such a thing as characters being able to keep things from narrators--that's certainly true in this novel, in any event. But here, aside from the fleeting glimpse of Julie that Magnolia will have years later in Chicago, the novel is done with that. It's as though, in the world of this novel, even human suffering and injustice are also performances that, once they're done, can be packed away, with no further need to ponder them.

What I want to do, then, is tease out what it is that the narrative and its characters seek to ignore--to make it seem a bit less blank, in other words. You lucky people, on down the road, will be treated to another post in which I'll claim that this blankness is in large measure intentional but that, like lots of psychologically-repressed stuff, we can find more than a little projection of certain anxieties in Show Boat.

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Home by Dark: A speculative reading

Eudora Welty stands in front of the ruins of Windsor, Port Gibson, Mississippi. Taken by by Frank H. Lyell. And yes: those are small trees that have taken root on the tops of the columns.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned in passing what might be Welty's most familiar picture, Home by Dark, Yalobusha Co. I can't find a decent-sized online image to link to, so I refer you instead here. I invite you to go there and have a good look at it. I'll wait for you below the fold.

Seeing as I own two books on which this picture appears (and, now that I've added One Time One Place to my Amazon Wish List, will someday own three), I know this photo well. Or, rather, I thought I did. My realization that more is going on in this picture than I had assumed didn't dawn on me at the museum yesterday. Slow of study as I am, it was only some time after I put up yesterday's post and then ran across the image again that I really, you know, looked at it.

Welty's photos' titles tend to be descriptive of their subjects: Here It Comes! Crowd on a Boxcar, Watching a Circus Being Unloaded, for example, pretty much lets you know what you're looking at. Others, like Window Shopping, Grenada, which I described in yesterday's post, are ostensibly descriptive, but as I noted there I think that the title points us in the direction of a more figurative way of thinking about the picture. Still, though, such titles don't make us wonder why they've been given to the image.

Home by Dark, though, is another matter, I think. On its surface, this picture could not be a more simple or tranquil, even clichéd, rural southern scene: a mule-drawn wagon bearing a family on a plumbline-straight dirt road through a field, some woods in the distance forming the horizon. Its title refers to a time of day; more than that, though, it suggests both a destination and a hoped-for arrival time . . . or, perhaps, a deadline.

That latter possibility first suggested itself when I realized for the first time, while noting the twist in the woman's torso as she looks back toward the viewer, that the family on the wagon is African-American. Suddenly, the image's title, its surface tranquility and even clichéd nature were replaced in me by something else--not menace exactly but, certainly, tension. Another, more ominous set of clichés.

As with Welty's other pictures, I cannot say what was involved in its being taken, how much directing Welty engaged in with her subjects prior to taking it. But this one, like the others, has a sense of matter-of-factness to it. Like the others, it simply seeks to portray its subjects as people . . . and it was simply so that, for African-Americans in certain places in the rural South during the Jim Crow era, where one was in relation to one's home as sundown approached had an urgency to it that it did not for whites. This is not opinion but fact; lamentable though that was, the fact remains that, for black people, surveillance was a condition of existence.

Welty's photograph depicts this fact; just as she so often does in her fiction, here she lets us observe this slice of the world without dictating how to think about it. Welty herself, on the back cover of One Time One Place, puts the matter thus, and I'll let her eloquence conclude this post:

I wished no more to indict anybody, to prove or disprove anything by my pictures, than I would have wished to do harm to the people in them, or have expected any harm from them to come to me.

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