Ghosts on the Move

Midway Plantation in its new setting

Last night your Head Trucker watched Moving Midway, which he recommends to all you fellas if you have any interest in Southern history and culture. It's a really well-made documentary about the moving of an old plantation house near Raleigh, done by a filmmaker who happens to be part of the family. And it shows very nicely how the ghosts of our Southern past linger in the present. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Your Head Trucker can relate to all this in a way. Having traced all my grandparents' ancestral lines back to at least the year 1800, and a few of them back to the late 1600's, in Old Virginia and Maryland - ten generations - I can imagine the sense of history and connectedness felt by the family at the center of this film. Although it appears that most of my ancestors were small farmers who lived and died in obscurity, there were a couple of branches that were in the planter class, with fine old homes like you see in this documentary. One well-to-do branch lived in Fairfax County, Virginia, where Martha Washington recorded having a certain Mrs. ____ to tea one afternoon at Mount Vernon - my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Descendants of those families followed the western movement of the cotton lands first to Georgia, and then on to Alabama and Mississippi. In addition to being planters, they were also army officers, lawyers, and judges.  One of my great-great-grandfathers, who was killed in the War, was first cousin to a Confederate general whose plantation house in East Texas still stands, and who by marriage was very well-connected indeed.

And of course, my planter ancestors owned dozens of slaves - duly recorded in 19th-century census schedules - who worked the fields and may have helped build them large, roomy houses like Midway - though in most cases not as imposing as you may think from watching the movies. (At the premiere of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell laughed out loud at the grand appearance of Tara - in the book, true to history, she describes it as merely a large, rambling farmhouse, "upcountry functional" as she later said - it was the Yankee David O. Selznick who transformed Mitchell's carefully accurate descriptions into the exquisite but preposterous visions you see on screen.)

My mama, however, swore that she remembered visiting the cousins in Mississippi as a girl and seeing the ruins of the big house, with the white columns still standing. Alas, my male forebears tended to be younger sons of younger sons, or in the female line, so they wouldn't have ended up with those places anyway; and then too, the War swept all the wealth and plantations away. But the memory lingered a long time in the familial memory, brightened and embellished in certain interesting ways.

According to my mother and my uncle, who both told the same story, there was one great-grandmother who, when the Yankees came, absolutely refused to leave her home, and neither guns nor bayonets could drive her out. So they set fire to it and burned it down over her head; but someone, friend or foe, must have dragged her out at the last moment because, as the story goes, her mind was so stricken by the terrifying experience that never thereafter would she sleep in a regular house again. The family had to build her a tree house in the yard, where she made her abode, perched in the branches like a bird, unconquered and defiant to the end of her days.

You have to admit, it does make an awfully good story, don't it? We Southerners have a talent for that sort of thing, or used to. Unfortunately, there is no actual record of such an event to be found, and from my genealogical researches, it does not appear that there was any great-grandmother who would have been the right age and in the right place for such a thing to happen to. But sometimes the myth is much more important than the history.

Continued after the jump . . .

Virginia Foster Durr: A White Champion for Southern Blacks

Virginia Foster Durr and Rosa Parks

Your Head Trucker once had the privilege to get a glimpse of a great civil rights champion whose name ought to be more famous than it is:  Virginia Foster Durr.

Back in the mid-1980's when I was dating a smart, sexy redheaded guy in Montgomery, we went to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival a few times to catch some plays.  On one of those occasions, as we were walking through the parking lot towards the theater building, he nudged me and said, "Look, that's Virginia Durr."  I turned and saw a very small, white-haired lady conversing animatedly with a friend as they strolled up to the entrance. 

No, I didn't go say hello or ask for an autograph or anything; I'm not that pushy.  Still, it was a memorable moment actually to see someone who, with her attorney husband, had figured so prominently in the civil rights struggle in Alabama.  Among other things, they are the ones who went and bailed Rosa Parks out of jail after her famous refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955, and he represented her in court.

Well, while sitting here tonight waiting for my supper to cook, I was surfing around here and there, and came across the wonderful oral history interview she gave in 1975, now available through the awesome Documenting the American South online history collection from the University of North Carolina.  Tons of great reading there, if you like history.  Lots of stuff that ought to be required reading in school.

In particular, the extensive Durr interview is fascinating, and I hope some of my truckbuddies will dip into it.  Here I want to present just a little excerpt that illustrates what I was saying in my post the other day about how white Southerners felt about the blacks in their midst.  This excerpt and its continuation are about an incident in 1910, when Durr was a girl of 7, living on her wealthy grandmother's plantation in rural Alabama; but the racial attitudes illustrated by the story were still very much in operation fifty years later, when I was coming up.  Notice the part about venereal disease, which is something I was told, too, in all seriousness.

This time, I was seven years old and I was going to school the next fall. I always had my birthday in the back yard with the black children and we would have barbeque and they would let us barbeque over a little pit that they would dig for us. So, this time, my mother and grandmother and aunts and all said that I had to have it in the front yard and with just the white children, no black children could come to the party. Well, I got very angry about that and the main thing was that I wanted the barbeque. (laughter) You see, they would dig a pit in the back yard, which was sandy, and then the cook would give us chickens and we would build a grill over the hole and build a fire and then we were allowed to baste the chickens and turn them over and of course, by the time that we got through, they were full of sand, but to me, (this had been my usual birthday party) and to me, this was a great event. Here I was presiding over the chickens, you know. Well, anyway, I had a tantrum at breakfast and made strong protest about the party in the afternoon and no barbeque. So, they agreed that I could have the barbeque in the morning and the party in the afternoon. This was the compromise that they reached. . . .

Well, Elizabeth, Aunt May's daughter was there and Aunt May would bring a French maid with her when she came, if you can imagine. You can imagine how happy the French maid was. (laughter) Aunt May, as you could say, really put on airs. Anyway, Elizabeth was always dressed up in these beautiful dresses with sashes and everything matching and her hair curled . . . .

She was a little older than I was, about my sister's age. So, we had the barbeque and everything was going on fine and we were dividing up the chicken and one of the little black girls was tearing up the chicken and she offered a piece to Elizabeth and Elizabeth, who must have felt like an outcast in this group anyway, she all of a sudden said, "Don't you give me any chicken out of that black hand of yours. I'm not going to eat any chicken that your black hand has touched, you little nigger." . . .

Continued after the jump . . . .

The More Things Change . . .

African-American and white soldiers at a base in Italy during World War II.

Today there's supposed to be some further news from the Defense Department on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  Some blogs and news sources are already reporting what they think will or won't be said.

Whatever the case may be, don't expect anything to change overnight.  It always takes time.  To illustrate the point, look at this timeline from the Truman Library, which shows how long it took from Truman's 1948 executive order until the military was fully integrated.

And note also the many committees, reports, studies, and recommendations the military put itself through along the way . . . as well as the foot-dragging and bellyaching and protestations that the military was "not an instrument for social evolution" (Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, 1949).  Notice also the fulminating reaction in Congress:

[T]his proposed program would adversely affect the rights, privileges, and freedom of the people of all sections and of all walks of life in this country. It stabs at the very heart of the rights and freedom of all races, colors, and sections of our great country. For, if the Federal Government can repeal the poll tax in Mississippi and several other Southern States, regulate employment under the FEPC, punish innocent taxpayers under the Anti-Lynch Bill, and abolish segregation in the several States by usurpation of the sovereign rights of the several States of the Union, then we have indeed witnessed an end of constitutional government as conceived by the founding fathers. . . .

Is it any wonder then, Mr. Speaker, that a revolt has arisen all over our country, from Mississippi on the shores of the Gulf-kissed coast in the South to the stony crags of Maine in the North, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, by southern Democrats and those freedom-loving Americans everywhere, at this attempt to destroy the true civil rights of the citizens of our great and common country? . . .

But now, for the first time in the history of the country, and the loyalty of my section to the Democratic Party, a President of the United States has asked the Congress to enact such a devastating, obnoxious, and repugnant program to the people of that section and their Jeffersonian conception of democracy as this so-called civil-rights program. No President, either Democrat or Republican, has ever seen fit heretofore to make such recommendations. . . .

"Freedom-loving Americans."  Right.  Doesn't the tone of those remarks sound awfully familiar?  Can you say teabagger?

So you see, the decades roll on, but some attitudes just stay the same - only the names are changed.

One more thing I want to mention:  some people who want to keep gays out of the military talk about their disgust at the idea of straight boys having to take showers with gay ones, and all such as that; as if that's the most repellent idea ever, something no decent (heterosexual) male should ever have to be subjected to.

What some of my Yankee truckbuddies may or may not understand - something that is practically forgotten nowadays - is that white Southerners felt an equally strong aversion to fraternizing with blacks.  Speaking from my own personal knowledge and experience growing up in that legally segregated world, a great many white Southerners had an inward feeling - completely irrational, of course, but a strong one - that "Negroes" were somehow simply dirty, if not diseased, and therefore close contact was to be avoided - for example, eating together, or riding public transportation together.  Whites in that time and place felt contaminated by that kind of contact - physically so.

Which is utterly ridiculous - no, asinine - when you realize that they had not a shadow of hesitation about eating anything dished up by black cooks in the kitchen - either at home, or in a restaurant - and served to them by black waiters.  No, that never troubled anyone's mind for a second, not a bit.

You see how people are?

But to have a black person sitting at your elbow, eating off a plate next to your own - that was a horrifying thing, as much so as socializing with a typhoid carrier.   Plenty of people - including my own dear, kind, intelligent, college-graduate parents, I'm sorry to say - believed that "all black people have syphillis" or some such nonsense.  But even if you didn't think about veneral disease, still, as an ordinary Southerner, you usually felt the need to keep your distance from black people in certain public activities. 

I bring this up just to make the point:  no matter how the straight boys and girls foam on now about how awful it would be to shower with teh gayz, et cetera - and how amusing that attitude is, because it's a fact they've been showering with us all these years anyway, without knowing, right? - no matter how they carry on right now, it is a reaction that they can and will get over.

No one in the South now thinks anything about eating in a restaurant with blacks, or riding the bus with them, or sleeping in a motel bed a black person might have slept in the night before - or all the hundred-and-one other things that would have completely horrified white people down here, fifty years ago and more.  It's simply not an issue now, even if some other racist attitudes still linger.

And the homophobes of today will get over it too.  Once the laws are changed and enforced, attitudes will follow.  Just realize that, as with desegregation of the services, the process of dismantling DADT will probably take a few years, no matter what the President and the military chiefs say or do this week.  And just like with the Dixiecrats of 1948, there will be thunder and lightning in Congress too, no doubt - but it will all work itself out eventually, I'm sure.  Just not overnight.

On Maine, Marriage, and Democracy

Okay, your Head Trucker got on a tear here tonight and couldn't stop.  I'm posting most of it after the jump to save space on this page, but maybe somebody will read it and let me know what you think.

I'm a little pooped tonight but hope I can string these quotes into a coherent post here.  It's important to understand were we are, where we've been, and where we're going.  And by we, I mean not only gays but all Americans.

Sullivan, quoting David Link, points out the victories this week we should not overlook.

Tuesday was a great day for gay rights everywhere but Maine:

We won voter approval of (1) domestic partnerships in Washington; (2) an anti-discrimination ordinance in Kalamazoo; (3) an openly gay city council president in Detroit; and (4) an openly lesbian mayoral candidate in Houston. That seems to say something about the state of anti-gay prejudice in this country.

I agree with David that public opinion is now decisively inclusive of gay people - on every issue but civil marriage. But even on that last issue, we are now essentially neck and neck in California and Maine, the last two states to have referendums on the matter, and we are over 50 percent in Washington state for domestic partnerships that are identical to civil marriage on a state level, but without the m-word.

 Conservative blogger Rod Dreher, though, says we are barking up the wrong tree:

Unless I'm missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state. Even California, the national bellwether state on liberalizing social trends. Even Maine, in the most liberal region of the country.

You can come up with all kinds of theories about why this is, blaming the voters for being bigots, accuse the churches of playing dirty, whatever. The plain fact is, every single time it's been put to a popular vote (as opposed to allowing a tiny number of elites to vote on it), gay marriage has been a loser. . . .

If the pro-SSM left can't convince people of the rightness of their cause, they're perfectly prepared to see their views imposed from on high. Honestly, folks, I understand the case for same-sex marriage, though I don't agree with it, but look, if you're reduced to having to tell the public that they have no right to be consulted about the radical redefinition of a bedrock social and cultural institution, then you have a big, big problem.

Ah, but here is the crux of the matter.  As someone who grew up in the segregated South and remembers it vividly, I can tell you positively that the vast majority of Southerners forty years ago right now, probably 90-something percent in most places, would most certainly have considered segregation a "bedrock social and cultural institution" that absolutely had to be preserved.  The races had to be kept separate.  History, custom, law, and even scripture all showed the necessity of it.   Tamper with that, and the whole structure of society would collapse into anarchy and barbarism and racial warfare.  Seriously.

And besides, after all the fancy talk was done, it always, always, always came down to this remark, and with my own ears I heard it said many a time among the grown-ups:  Yes, but would you want one of them to marry your sister?  End of discussion.  Nothing could follow that unthinkable, utterly repugnant thought.  (Notice how often throughout history the great questions of the day come down to sex in the end.)

Read more of this post after the jump . . . .

Wanda Sykes: Out, Proud, and Pissed Off

Actress Wanda Sykes just became your Head Trucker's favorite comedienne. She came out last Saturday at the Prop 8 protest rally in Las Vegas with this up-front, in-your-face speech to the 1,000+ crowd:

You go, girl! "They pissed off the wrong group." You got that right. "We shouldn't have to stand here and demand the rights we should automatically have as American citizens." Amen, sister.

Local journalist Steve Friess caught an audio interview with Sykes immediately after her speech, which you can hear on his blog, Vegas Happens Here. In the interview,

Sykes also disputed the much-reported claim that 70 percent of black voters in California voted to ban gay marriage. Several prominent writers, including Dan Savage here, have railed against homophobic blacks. Wanda said the exit polls were wrong and admonished me, "Please stop spreading that 70 percent of African-Americans voted Yes on Prop 8 because it’s just not true."

What I say: Ms. Sykes is right. The infamous 70% figure is, as far as I can tell, based on one and only one exit poll done by CNN; one poll does not establish an absolute fact (you remember all the thousands of polls done during the presidential campaign?), and even more importantly, this one exit poll does not include the record turnout of early voters before November 4. So it is not, cannot be an accurate picture of all voters.

By comparison, the same CNN poll also purports that 82 percent of Republicans voted Yes on 8; so did 81 percent of white evangelicals; 64 percent of Catholics; 61 percent of mothers with children at home; 59 percent of suburban residents; and 54 percent of heterosexuals.

And of course, nobody is required to answer an exit poll; so even though I'm not a statistician, I realize these numbers reflect voters who selected themselves for the exit poll to some degree.

So does it make any sense to single out one particular group as the scapegoat for Prop 8's passage? Should we villify all Republicans, Catholics, mothers, and burb dwellers? Hell no, of course not. To do so would be to estrange the many people in those groups who did vote for equal marriage. Veteran gay-rights activist David Mixner has this to say about the subject:

Now in relationship to the African-American community, much has been made of a CNN exit poll that show 70% of that community voting "Yes On Eight". Dr. Fernando Guerra of Loyola's Levy Center for the Study of Los Angeles did a far more extensive poll than CNN and found that the 70% figure was way too high. The figure is closer to 57% (still not acceptable) but a long way from the 70%. Other models that I have been running in an attempt to get the facts and not the emotions show the latter a more likely figure.

The other data that appears to be emerging (BUT yet to be totally verified) is that African-Americans who early voted (which was a huge number) voted YES while those on election day voted NO. Remember we did not do extensive campaigning in many of the African-American precincts until the final week or so which was long after tens of thousands had already voted. Our campaign was slow to use Obama's opposition to Proposition Eight which he gave the day after the initiative qualified five months before the election.

So let's move on here, folks, and cut out the mudslinging and racism. Our job is clear: we have to meet, talk, educate, and campaign even harder now, and follow the example Obama has set of effective grassroots organizing. And now the queer community is fired up, ready to go! Next time it comes to a vote, we will win.

Yes. We. Will.

P.S. - California is still counting absentee and provisional ballots; final results will be released on December 9.