The Carpet Bagger's Journal — moving from NYC to Mississippi

February 8, 2012

On Going Native

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 3:35 am
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I may look relatively sophisticated, but like Kudzu, the redneck is creeping up on me.

In this photo, I believe I have a certain air of sophistication.  That scarf is Hermes, or at least the Canal Street knock-off version of Hermes.  I bought that coat on the Internet from a respectable retailer to women of taste.

However, and I say this cringing, knowing that some of my old friends in New York will get wind of this, I have developed some red neck habits.

Let me be clear.  I am deeply committed to a life of the mind.  As I type this, I am staring at a book in Middle English, a fourteenth-century play about Cain and Abel.  However, it is worth noting that this play has a reference to carnal sheep violation.  As I type this, I am listening to Buddha Bar tracks on my i-pod, but those are shuffled with Band Perry songs about lying like a rug and being buried in satin, stuff about which a gal might sob into a honky-tonk beer.  When I drink it’s either fine wine or Rebel Yell bourbon.

Two years into this life change, I seem to be straddling the Mason Dixon line in so many ways.  Let me show you:

NEW YORK ME SAYS,

“I just got invited to give a reading of my poetry at Middlebury College‘s gender studies program.”

MISSISSIPPI ME SAYS,

“I read from my poetry collection entitled The White Trash Pantheon.”

NEW YORK ME SAYS,

“I just bought a new pair of shoes.”

MISSISSIPPI ME SAYS,

“I needed new ones because the old ones got covered with animal manure and mud.”

NEW YORK ME SAYS,

“I just won a quiz prize at the University.”

MISSISSIPPI ME SAYS,

“It was for knowing that Florida State had penalties imposed upon them for NCAA violations, affecting their Big-10 football program.”

It’s stuff like that that makes me think warily of how all those Jeff Foxworthy jokes, the ones that seemed so alien when I lived in my Russian-mafia-negotiated-apartment-with-access-to-a-private-beach-in-Brooklyn-for-almost-no-money, are beginning to apply to me.

Moi?  Mais oui!

Here is a list of signs that I am beginning go native down here:

  • I wake up most mornings at 5 am, walk through mud, and chain up the hound dogs so that they don’t spook the neighbor ladies.
  • I find myself liking Elvis more and more with each passing month.
  • Grits don’t taste gritty.
  • Ham is the sixth food group for me these days.
  • It seems odd NOT to call people “ma’am” and “sir” every other sentence.
  • If Terry McMillan doubted I could, I am no longer waiting to exhale — I’ve exhaled.  Life down here operates at a slackened pace.
  • If I wore black every day, it would seem as if I were in mourning, not just hip in day-to-evening wear.
  • Even though I read mostly British literature (see reference to Chaucer’s era above), Faulkner and Twain make more and more sense to me.
  • I have said “y’all” and not felt self-conscious about it, y’all.

For those of you in New York who miss me, if you want to stem the tide of this, I recommend sending me emergency care packages from The Second Avenue Deli or from any Indian restaurant on Sixth Street.  Send me something of which New York Magazine’s “Approval Matrix” approves.

I am going native.  Next comes the drinking of pre-sweetened iced tea.  After that, there’s a whole slew of floral prints yawning their maws at me.

Help!  I’ve gone South and I can’t get up!

December 13, 2011

Measuring change one school hallway at a time

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 1:47 pm
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The founders of my step-daughters non-racist school were Klan in all but name and sheet

My stepdaughter’s school is a quiet Christian private school with good teachers and affirmative values of the kind that most any member of the political Left today could embrace, but its founders intended it to be a white supremacist enclave.  My husband and I sent her there because she is bright, and the local public school is run like a prison,  not a place to imagine a future.  The place where we have sent her is simple, with a building whose roof often leaks, no  state-of-the-art technology, but with instruction that emphasizes critical thinking, core academics — the very thing that makes some people going to school in dirt-floor school houses in the third world better prepared for American universities than our own students in schools with smart boards and WiFi.  It is now integrated, at least as much as most private schools in the country are integrated.  This means that there are a few African-American students on campus.  The school does nothing whatsoever explicitly to foster a spirit of racism in the community today.

However, the school used to be called a Council School, one of the schools founded immediately after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, by the White Citizens’ Council of Mississippi — you know, by those people who thought that something horrible would happen to white girls if they learned multiplication tables sitting at desks near black boys.  The White Citizens’ Council was secretly funded by a scary J. Edgar Hoover-ish organization that used to spy on pro-integration citizens in Mississippi — the Sovereignty Commission.  It was a horrible chapter of this state’s history, one that should cause any thinking person to shudder.  The school used to send out racist propaganda to school parents out of the PTA.  The current principal there tells me that the school at that time was Klan in all but the white sheets.

Today, however, the school is run by Christians who formally reject notions of racism as an anathema to their system of belief, whatever pockets of cultural bias they may still individually foster.  I could wish for more African-American history in the US History class, but that would also be true if we sent my stepdaughter to a Catholic school in Yonkers, New York.  I could wish for more titles by African-American authors in her English class, but the English teacher is fantastic, and she is focusing on good literary American classics, so I can provide perhaps a greater rainbow in the curriculum.  There are surely racists who attend the school, racist parents who send their children there because there are more black students at the public school.  However, the school’s mission teaches a spirit of service to the community, the imperative of putting character before career, principle before profit.

I consider this an air sample to test to show the progress that Mississippi has made over the past decades in terms of racism.  The Sovereignty Commission was de-funded in 1977 by the governor.  The Council School was disbanded and integrated the same year, reconstituted under a Christian board that changed the school’s mission statement and its actual mission.  Most of the people who felt the way the founders of the school felt are dead.  Their children may not have many, or any, African-American friends, but they have few enemies and draw no color lines in public life at least.

At school, my stepdaughter has both white and black friends.  She socializes with both.  She has learned from me and from her father that racism is akin to Satanism in our system of belief.  The pictures still hang on the hallway walls of the old classes of Council School graduating classes.  Like all such photos, they appear dated.  It is good that the kids who walk the hall neither find that history buried, nor do they find it celebrated.  It is a truth, a sad truth, much like the truth of ruins left from the time of Sherman’s march.  Things were one way.  They are that way no more.

Mississippi is changing.  It does not change quickly.  Nothing happens here quickly.  As Dr. King said in his letter from Birmingham Jail, the time is always right to do what is right, and no one should be held back by others’ reluctance to be fair.  However, racism is something that does not only hurt the group that is oppressed directly by it; it hurts the character and the spiritual health of the perpetrators as well.  The only ones who are owed redemption are the oppressed, but the paradoxical truth is that in relenting from racism, a potential opens up for the oppressor to become whole again as well.  Like green shoots from a ruined antebellum mansion, I see this former council school, now a Christian academy, as a reason for Mississippi to hope for better things to come.

March 19, 2011

Health Care Is a Right in Mississippi — why the Affordable Care Act Matters Around Here

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 6:46 am
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When I was an activist with ACT UP in New York, we would often chant, “Health care is a right!” while picketing government official‘s fundraisers who refused to help men and women dying of AIDS or even acknowledge them with a comment more civilized than “good riddance.”  The thought that health care might indeed be a government-acknowledged right, not just a universal necessity, was relatively new in American discourse.

However, a year ago this week, I watched the congressional roll call on CSPAN on the vote for The Affordable Care Act, sometimes called pejoratively Obamacare, as if “care” were somehow a dirty word, and I remembered my dozens of friends who died from AIDS in the 1980s, sweet, young  gay men who might have been by now honest bankers, elected officials, scientists on the way  to important discoveries, and tenured faculty members.  I cried imagining how different their lives would have been if only there had been such a bill in place for them when they were in crisis.

But this isn’t New York — this is Mississippi, where I live now.  ACT UP is a distant memory.  The people around here, not activists, not fabulous urban gay men in the big Northeastern Cities, but ordinary working folks with families — they are the ones who are being told by the new Republican congress that the Affordable Healthcare Act is unnecessary, an invasion of their privacy and a stripping of their freedoms.  Can this be so?

Not according to a Mississippian named Kelly, who was kind enough to show me a  photo of her lovely family and  to allow me to tell a bit of their story in relation to this wonderful piece of landmark legislation.  Let me share with you Kelly’s family photograph right here  — a shout out to the Jacobs family, who are — Chase, Graham, Paul, the one the folks lovingly call “Mamasita,” Jennifer, and  Kelly herself :

The Jacobs family needs the Affordable Care Act passed by congress last year -- don't we all?

This typical, American heartland, apple pie family has benefited, Kelly tells me, from the Affordable Care Act in the following ways:

  • First, Paul, the fifty-something guy in the beige hat and sun glasses wearing a pretty hip t-shirt for a guy his age — he works full-time and has insurance, but he suffers from Lupus, which if untreated might end his life.  The so-called Obamacare has made him able to stay active and working because he has not had the Lupus called a “pre-existing condition” by an insurance company, and as such, he can afford medication and doctor’s visits that might otherwise be out of reach.
  • The despised Obamacare has also allowed him to have the kind of humane security we all need — to know that if we ever need to or want to leave a job, we can take our insurance with us or find other insurance in a manner that we can afford, even if we have suffered in that job change a drop in income.  This goes for Jenny and Kelly, too, of course.
  • Mamista, the lady next to Paul who looks beamingly proud of her tribe, holding the family kitty cat, she is still covered under her Medicare benefits — despite the rumors to the contrary fueled by insurance company activists, who see this law as a loss in profits, nothing at all has been taken away from her, and she has the peace of mind of knowing that these people who are literally surrounding her in love, her support group through her golden years, won’t have to give up their own health to take care of her in years to come.
  • Chase and Graham, both college students at the top of the photo, looking young and rowdy — their momma doesn’t have to worry — they can be covered on her insurance because the Affordable Care Act makes it so they can stay on her insurance until they are 26 , whether or not they are in school.  That means that the Jacobs family, which is doubtless making significant sacrifices to have two sons in college right now — Kelly didn’t tell me this, but that’s surely only because people from down here in Mississippi are a whole lot less whiny than they are in Brooklyn where I used to whine — they can better afford to pay tuition and college-related expenses and don’t have to worry about Chase breaking his arm on the hockey team (honestly, I don’t know if Chase plays hockey) or Graham slipping on an icy stairwell and hurting his knee because GOD FORBID these things should happen, they can see a doctor and get treated as needed.
  • Jenny is able to know that she can work freelance if she wants to and still buy into a community pool insurance, a whole lot cheaper than trying to buy insurance as an individual in the pre-ACA days, where a woman of childbearing years might as well have tried to insure a luxury yacht moored in pirate-infested waters near Somalia as buy herself some regular, don’t-make-me-lose-my-home-and-car-if-I-need-an-MRI health insurance.

Many people on the Left were hoping for a single-payer plan in the mix  of Obamacare — I know I was.  Many people on the Right have not fully absorbed the idea that — chant it with me — health care is a right, health care is a right — but ALL of us benefit from a healthy America, one where people don’ t go to the emergency room with a stroke because they didn’t have insurance to afford, say, cholesterol drugs.  We were the only developed country on the planet that had no particular governmental plan to handle this universal need, and now we do.

It is an important part of our evolution as a nation that Americans can get treated for ailments without losing the family farm now, and we have the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress (like my rep, who is just fabulous, The Hon. Bennie Thompson, D-MS) to thank for it.

I remember my friends who died of AIDS fighting for an evolution in our thinking about healthcare with a particular wistfulness this week, but I am glad that the law that has come about does not just benefit an urban gay male population — rather it is for every one of us, whoever we are, whether we would have picketed as I did or not.

Chant it again, and call your Senators and remind them — health care is a right, health care is a right.

December 1, 2010

Searching for Kosher Chicken in Porkchop Country

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 5:26 pm
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One of my old neighbors in Brooklyn. Where would he shop around here?

Hospitality is a Southern tradition, but apparently only one that anticipates fellow Christian guests.  When Lylah, my fabulous feminist Muslim friend, came down to Mississippi to be my maid of honor last winter, I went looking for things to cook for her.

You see, Lylah practices Halal, the muslim dietary laws, outlawing pork but also outlawing certain forms of cruelty to animals in butchery.  Observers of Halal are free to eat not only things produced by Muslim butchers but also kosher ones, as the same butchering practices are observed in both Islamic and Jewish traditions.

Near my home in Vicksburg, there is a large Kroger supermarket.  It is stocked with numerous international foods.  I can get cornichons and wasabi there.  However, we went all over the store, to the fresh and frozen meat sections, and the only thing that Lylah could eat that was a dead land animal was found in a Hebrew National hot dog package.  I asked the manager of the store where he kept the Kosher products, certainly thinking that Halal was out of the question in the middle of the deep South but that Kosher products must certainly be available.  He asked me to repeat the question.  I did, and then he told me he had never heard of Kosher meat — what was it?

As a New Yorker, I had never once imagined that Kashrut would not be practiced by somebody in my community.  Here is a picture of a man from my old neighborhood, the Seagate section of Coney Island, standing near a plastic palm tree on the beach.  Brooklyn is a thriving and diverse place, but Jews are particularly numerous in the population.

When I visited Israel, I ended up touring the various sites with a British photographer.  People would stop us and ask us where we were from.  When he said he was from the UK, they nodded politely, but when I said I was from Brooklyn, over and over again, the response was, “Brooklyn!  Maybe you know my cousin!”  Truthfully, maybe I did.  Maybe, even if I didn’t know the individual’s Jewish cousin, I had ridden the same trains, eaten in the same restaurants, bought meat at the same counters. Kosher meat is clean meat.  I often bought Kosher chickens because they are less bloody.

Jews are part of the fabric of New York to the point where the mainstream culture gets a lot of its slang from Yiddish – plotz, schmuck, schlep, kibbutz, shmear, and schmooze are all words used by people from every ethnicity in town.  When I use those words here, I have a fifty-fifty chance of being understood.  Antisemitism, while it exists to some small degree in New York City, is a form of anti-New York self-loathing.  If a New Yorker happens to say he hates Jews, whether he is Jewish or not, he is really saying he hates himself and his whole community, because the town includes most distinctly all that is wonderful about Jewish culture and tradition — a profound commitment to commonweal and social justice for the poor, a raucous sense of humor that defies every hardship, a respect for learning as something sacred and inviolate, a complex system of negotiating shared space between diverse peoples who get along for the most part without any violence, a profound sense of busy and vivacious commerce that is supple and willing to negotiate to fit the needs of the customer — all these New York things are also first and foremost Jewish things, and anybody who doesn’t think so has simply not done his homework.  Likewise, New York foods are often Kosher foods — I spent months when I first arrived here salivating at the memory of a chopped liver bagel from the Second Avenue Deli, of their Kasha Varnishkes, of their soul-affirming chicken soup.

When Lylah first arrived here, I honestly thought it would be no problem to find her some meat, especially since I knew that Vicksburg had a history of having a certain number of Jewish residents.  One of the grandest buildings in town where one can host a wedding used to belong to the local B’nai B’rith.  One day, when we were driving through a town that is absolutely lovely and not far from where we live, I saw a synagogue of messianic Jews.  I heard that there was another one in town as well.  I have only recently discovered that these are supersessionist Zionist Christians, most of them people of African-American descent who have converted to a false Judaism layered with an odd, legalistic Christianity.

The Jews have mostly left Vicksburg.  They were there largely before the Civil War, back when Mississippi had more millionaires in it than New York did, and while there is no evidence to suggest that the Jews of Vicksburg numbered among those richest people of the nation, they were often engaged in an international commerce of cotton, one where Vicksburg was a hub.  However, today there are few Jews in town.  Most have moved elsewhere.  To the best of my ability to see it, I find no particular incidents of antisemitic discrimination drove them away, only the same forces of commerce that compelled lots of people to leave the South in the early part of the twentieth century.

That said, the Jews are missing.  Lylah is coming to spend Christmas with us.  I need a Kosher butcher.  According to Superpages.com, there is not one Kosher butcher listed within hundreds of miles from my town.  The Jews are missing.

This makes me sad.  It explains the total lack of Kafkaesque irony in humor around here.  It explains the total lack of haggling.  It explains the work ethic, which is, let us say, moderated by a sense that if one moves too fast one might bust a button of one’s work shirt.  No one would ever say, as one hears fairly frequently in New York in business, “You pay me enough, I’ll finish the job yesterday.”  This is a New York sentiment, one entirely compatible with Jewish business practices.  The Jews are missing, and commerce runs, to borrow a phrase from Scarlett O’Hara, “as slow as molasses in January.”  The Jews are missing, which means that any notion of commonweal is subsumed under what Republicans tout as Christian  family values — one that forgets the Bible’s admonition to care for the stranger in the land, something, according to my reading of the Bible, a nation does at its own peril, for God judges the nations, per my reading of all the prophets, according to the way it treats widows, orphans, strangers, and whoever else is vulnerable.  I am very sorry the Jews left Vicksburg, whatever it was that took them away.

When Lylah comes, I’ll have Kosher meat flown in from Long Island — Kosher.com has a site that will FedEx me some good chicken, lamb sausages, and beef good for stewing.  Then, she’ll go back, and ham will again be on my table.  When I want a certain kind of ironic humor, I’ll watch The Daily Show.  When I want things done more quickly, I’ll have to take a breath and remember that a New York minute is something I left above the Mason-Dixon Line.  When I want justice redolent with mercy, I’ll pray.  I pray for the peace of Jerusalem, just as the Bible instructs us to do — all of us, Jew and gentile alike.  I pray for peace.  Lots of families around here have young people in the military sent overseas to Afghanistan.  I pray for peace.  As for any complex negotiation with other peoples of shared space — not a problem in a black-or-white-divided community where people stick to themselves.  No space needs sharing — we all have room.  My husband and I integrate an otherwise black church.  I pray for peace.  I miss the Jews.

November 10, 2010

Drinking an “Autumn Collins” at Snackbar in Oxford, Mississippi

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 4:52 pm
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Autumn along the Mississippi River

Every New Yorker knows that there are times to worry, or at least where worry might be a first impulse.  In Mississippi, I am learning that there are times to relax, and autumn is definitely one of them.

As I drive down Interstate 55 toward Memphis, my I-Pod plays me this lyric sung by the Dixie Chicks:

Who doesn’t know what I’m talking about
Who’s never left home, who’s never struck out
To find a dream and a life of their own
A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone

By the time they hit the three part harmony for “Wide Open Spaces,” I’m singing along with them, and yes, in a state that has only 62 people per square mile, I do indeed have room to make my big mistakes, as the song goes, but I don’t think I’m making any big ones right now.

I hit the cruise control button on my husband’s new car — he has given it to me to drive because he loves me — and I take my foot off the gas.  I take a deep breath.

I see trees everywhere I look.  The trucks on the highway are distant.  I motor through a canyon of gold, brown, touches of red, some splotches of green.  The cows ignore me as I whizz past.  The haystacks, rolled round and bound with wire, stand sentinel in the field but don’t fire.

The Dixie Chicks continue:

She traveled this road as a child
Wide eyed and grinning, she never tired
But now she won’t be coming back with the rest
If these are life’s lessons, she’ll take this test

I don’t have any tests to take, but I am leading a panel discussion at a conference this Saturday morning at the University of West Georgia.  I need to turn in about 50 pages of text in a week or two, and every time I think I’ve finished my research, I find more to read on my subjects.

While this feels a little pressureful, it honestly is a walk in the park compared to other experiences in my life.  It is a cruise toward Graceland and Sun Records compared to a bad day in Brooklyn.  While there are certainly days in Mississippi where everything goes catastrophically wrong for some individuals, usually one at a time, in comparison to a semi-annual disaster that almost every New Yorker experiences — a burglary, a near-rape, a you-just-got-fired-right-before-Christmas, a your-husband-is-sleeping-with-your-friend and she sees no reason to hide this from you — in Mississippi, where there is right and wrong, where the roads are empty, where lines in government offices are short, where if you failed to fill out form 42 that was required, they might actually have a copy on hand that you can fill out right now, don’t worry — a bad day is not often a catastrophic day.

In Mississippi, my colleagues go out for drinks and tacos.  Last night, after a class discussing the implications to Victorian mores of the novel Dracula, instead of fearing rustling in the dark that might be from vampires, I joined a group of them around a long table at Snackbar on North Lamar, and I had an absolutely delicious cocktail they called an “Autumn Collins.”  Actually, I had two of them.  They had some kind of artisanal sweet potato liqueur in them.  I used to take vodka martinis at Dorothy Parker‘s old haunt — the Algonquin lounge — and I miss the dry martinis there, the tuxedoed waitstaff, and the cat named Matilda.  However, I wonder if the Autumn Collins might not become my seasonal drink from now on.

The Dixie Chicks wrap up:

She knows the highest stakes
She knows the highest stakes
She knows the highest stakes
She knows the highest stakes

The words are ominous, but the melody of the song, the song of my open road, it is blissful, and I stretch my leg out.  The cruise control works fine.  I am thinking deep thoughts and writing them down.  However, I might just find my way to a good conversation in Georgia, a juke joint, a falling leaf, a sizzling catfish in a pan, a hug, a hymn, a “momma says it’s gonna be alright.”

I’m learning to relax.  I might just set a spell.

November 5, 2010

A Farewell to Freak

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 5:27 pm
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Freak --we hardly knew ye

I never shot the Freak, and now I never will.  I loved him too much to open fire.   To the Freak, I turned the other cheek.  He is my brother.  And now he’s out of a job.

Whenever I had complicated problems to solve when I lived in New York, I would take the N Train to the end of the line, buy a hot dog at the original Nathan’s on the corner of Surf and Stillwell on Coney Island, and walk down the boardwalk with it.  I liked this especially when it was cold and windy, when nearly no one else was around.  I would walk to the Aquarium or Brighton Beach, turn back and walk down to where there used to be a roller rink that used to be a beer hall before that.

If I ever had a moment where I thought, given the sound of the ocean, that I was in a natural setting, fostering romantic reflections like a cloud of blooming daffodils, I was reawakened to how urban my setting was by the booming voice on a karaoke-purloined microphone set, with a man who shouted, over and over again, “Yo!  Shoot the Freak Ovah Hee-yah!  Right Hee-yah!  Come on!  Ya gotta Shoot the Freak!  He’s Freaky!  He’s Beggin’ for it!”

This man, shouting in a vernacular that let me know that Brooklyn was in the Freakhouse, had a partner — a man wearing an X-File alien rubber mask, who would wear a little bit of protective gear and allow himself, in cold weather and hot, daytime, evenings and weekends, to get shot at with paint balls.

Here we see him on his vacant lot by the Boardwalk, a few junk yard items to hide behind, some milk crates, an old washing machine, and a pastel splatter of sublimated aggression from people who needed to let off some steam.

As I said, I never shot the Freak.  I loved him too much.  If I ever thought my existence was the worst one out of eight million people in the Metropolitan area, I looked to him for affirmation that things weren’t as bad as they might be, my job was not the worst one in town.

After a walk down the boardwalk, after a greasy and delicious hot dog, after the Atlantic had spat its salt in my face, and after a harangue about shooting the Freak, I inevitably had the answer to my most pressing and complex problem, whatever it was.

When problems in my life became legion, I moved to Coney Island.  I loved its delicious seediness, its tattooed-artist-and-carny-Bohemia, its bubblegum-and-rusting-cog ambience, and the Freak was my neighbor.  I loved him as myself.  The salsa music blared off the pier.  The bells rang on the carousel.  A few screams emanated from The Cyclone, and always, always a man sounding like he was straight out of a DeNiro art film shouted at me, “Yo!  Ya Gotta Shoot The Freak ovah Hee-yah!  What are you — chicken?”

The New York Times reported this weekend that certain businesses on the Boardwalk near the now-defunct Astroland will not receive a renewal of their leases.  I’m sure that running the Shoot the Freak sideshow in the vacant lot it occupied was not expensive.  However, real estate developers intend to gentrify the Boardwalk, charge more money, and create a more upscale environment than the man asking for cash for his next fix in the nearby parking lot, the old portly woman muttering to herself in Russian as she wrestles with a rubber swim cap, the skate rats trying to jump the iron-arm-wrest benches, and the Freak and his business associates.

They misunderstand their own investment.  The Freak is the holy icon of Brooklyn, her martyr.  The crier of the Freak is Brooklyn’s prophet.  The Freak is begging to be shot at in bright colors.  His alien mask is a metonymy for corporate facades required by the employed in middle management.  The vacant lot is the spiritual wasteland of an American dream turned to wig heads and mismatched bowling pins.  They have bought the cornerstone of what it means to be an American.  They cannot read the cuneiform in which the message is written.  Let me translate — it is begging for you, begging for you to try better, to know you will survive the catastrophic, to imagine smashing your idols and starting over with better intentions, a watchword that the mighty have fallen, that all is lost — long live all, and you are still standing.  You are not the freak. He has taken the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune upon himself for you, and by his paint splatters, you are (at least in part) healed.

One day, I was walking by the shoot the freak show in the morning with my husband Chuck, before we got married.  The haranguer’s microphone was on the ground.  He was getting himself a beer.  The paintball guns were not loaded yet.  There was no Freak in sight.

“This is where the guy with the worst job in New York City works,” I told Chuck.

A man, shirtless, wearing padding on his legs, but no alien mask, jumped up from under the boardwalk’s edge.

“Speak for yourself!”   He shouted at me.

“Man, I’m telling my fiance you’ve got the hardest job in town!”

I really didn’t mean to insult him.

“No!” He told me emphatically,”I’ve got the best job in the whole world ovah hee-yah.  I’m in show business.  Nobody ever seen anything like me.  I give them something to remember forever.”

Freak, you spoke truly.

I will remember you forever.  Thank you for the chastisement of my peace upon your recycled football gear.  Thank you for dovetailing with my recovery from 9/11, from midlife crisis, from domestic violence, from wishing I were dead.  Thank you for bearing  the malice of capitalism, of divorce, of all things embittering.  Thank you for taking one, for taking a million and one, for the team.

Freak, without you in Brooklyn, I can return to see a gentrified Coney Island, but it will not be the same without you.  One may never enter the same river twice.  One may never shoot the same Freak twice.

I can never go home again, Freak, if you are not there getting shot.  Brooklyn will go on, but it will be someone else’s Brooklyn, not mine.

Freak, I will remember you forever.  Long live the Freak.  Blow out your candles, Freak, and so good night.

 

 

The Carpet Bagger’s Store is now open!  —
http://www.cafepress.com/TheCarpetBaggersShop

October 27, 2010

Freedom of the Pressure — on being pushy down South

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 4:46 pm
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Confederates don’t haggle.  They rarely wag their fingers.  They walk demurely toward the end of the line, rather than trying to find their way around it to the secret back entrance.

In New York, I was never the pushiest woman I knew.  I was always somewhere toward the sixtieth percentile in pushiness — not a wimp, not Ophelia drowning, but neither boorish nor crass.  I was tenacious but not a bulldog.

a graphic for my 10.0 on the Richter Pushometer down here in Mississippi

Down here, I’m so darn pushy in comparison to others that I might as well be belting out, “I had a dream, and I dreamed it for you, Rose!”

An example — I went to my local Home Depot.  The website of the franchise was offering free delivery for yard furniture last spring, and I wanted to buy some.  My local Home Depot had a policy of charging an $80 delivery fee.  I talked to three managers, was never rude, but I insisted that the policy didn’t make sense, that they should waive the fee so that the store could get credit for the sale locally, keep everyone employed in town by having such sales, just give me the discount.

As I said before, people down South don’t haggle. They think it’s impolite, pushy, to ask for any kind of a discount.  Never mind that they are underpaid in comparison to their professional equals up North, never mind that capitalism is always, always the art of the deal, and they believe in capitalism.  Never mind that in New York, people just know that only chumps pay retail, that asking, re-asking, and re-re-asking for a bargain doesn’t cost a penny.

Solemnly and reluctantly, the head manager finally gave me the nod after two hours of tense negotiation — tense on their part, not mine, because for me, this was just business as usual.

Whenever I come in there, store clerks still, almost a year later, tell me, rather in awe, “I remember you! You’re the lady who got free delivery!”

They don’t say it admiringly.  They say it respectfully, fearful I’ll ask for something new once more.

I ask for jobs.  I learned this in New York.  I walk up to people who have the power to give me work and just plain ask, whether there has been an advertisement or not.  If they say no, I’m surely no worse off.

Down South, this is rare.  And yet — let’s look at their absolute all-time favorite archetypal heroine:

"As God as My Witness, I'll Never Go Hungry Again," (and I don't mind being pushy wherever it suits my purposes.)

Katie Scarlett O’Hara Wilkes Kennedy Butler is the most pushy woman in American fiction, barring no Yankees.

Here are some pushy things that, just off the top of my head, I recall Scarlett doing:

  • She demands Rhett Butler take her out of a besieged Atlanta and slaps him when he tries to kiss her.
  • She shoots a Yankee renegade.
  • She throws dirt on Emily Slattery and her Carpetbagger husband (I forgive you, Scarlett, and I would have done the same).
  • She steals her sister’s beau (and a bunch of other girls’ beaux as well).
  • She starts a lumber mill and beats the male competition by starting a rumor mill about them as well.
  • She gets convict laborers to make her business more profitable, because the overseers of the convicts can legally push them to work harder. (not nice, but incredibly pushy.)

That’s just off the top of my head.  I’m sure if I re-read the novel, I’d find out another dozen examples worth mentioning. Scarlett seemed to believe the axiom “Nice girls go to heaven; pushy girls go everywhere.”

So why — if this is the idealized and celebrated picture of a Southern belle, are all the people around here not pushy, often even push-overs?

Older people say around here, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

The New York Yiddish diction in me comes out and I say, “What?  You want I should catch flies?”

Flies are attracted to garbage.  Forget flies.  Give me a job.  Give me a discount. Pay attention to me.  Take me to your leader.

I am honestly trying to adapt here, but if there are people in the South who think that it is better to be forever Miss Congeniality rather than Miss I-Got-Exactly-What -I-Wanted, I’d like them to explain to me why.

I see people down here who are surely better liked than I might be –although I think honestly that most people think I’m an interesting character and are very, very kind to me — who are never insistent or aggressive in going after particular rewards or restitution.  Honestly, they remind me of the Reconstruction-era dowagers depicted in Margaret Mitchell‘s novel in contrast to Scarlett — the women who starved in gentility, who lost everything but their demure penury, trying to make a lady-like living by hand-painting china.  And yet, perhaps I am more like Scarlett O’Hara than any of the ladies I meet in that I insist, I demand, I just won’t take no for an answer.

If this is wrong, I hope someone writes a comment here and explains to me what I’m missing.  If someone can explain to me why pushiness isn’t Southern but Scarlett O’Hara is so celebrated, I want to know that, too.  It is my general observation that those who ask not receive not.  Why don’t Southerners generally go after things the way New Yorkers do?  The motto of the State of New York is Excelsior — “Forever higher,” where we want our profits and hopes to go.  In Mississippi, it is Virtute et Armis — “By valor and arms,” but what by valor and arms?  Which victory? I don’t think passivity is very valorous, and arms can be borne, but what are you shooting at?

Wasn’t it a Southern Civil Rights worker who said, “If they’re shooting at you, you must be doing something right?”

I exhort you, Mississippi.  I had a dream, and I dreamed it for you, Scarlett!

October 13, 2010

The Land of Cotton — and other mythical landscapes

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 3:38 am
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Old times here, apparently, are not forgotten

 

When European writers imagined the Orient — a distant place, vaguely understood, rarely visited — they invented a landscape in their minds, invented customs and people unlike the  real residents of the lands to the  East of Europe, and what they invented said a lot more about their own feelings than the reality of the lands to the East of them.

I am reading a great deal about problems of orientalism in literature, am writing about imaginary versions of Japan concocted by Anglo writers.

As I drove this Monday through landscapes of rolled haystacks bound with wire and cotton — fields and fields of it, stretching with loden green and tufts of white everywhere — I wondered if there might not be a similar mystical landscape version of the South popularized in the North.

And so there is:  Dixie.

Dixie the song was written by a Yankee from Ohio — Daniel Decatur Emmett in 1859.

The song was first publicly sung in a minstrel show in  New York City that year.  White men from the North pretending to be black men from the South sang these words:

Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton!

Old times there are not forgotten!

Look away, Look away, Look away Dixie Land.

I have not written it in the offensive imitation of ebonics that was the original language of the minstrel show because it makes me unhappy to do so.

Within a few years, this song about happy ex-slaves nostalgic for a life of slavery in the South became part of the mythology, fully adopted, mind you, by rebel troops as their fight song in the Civil War.

There was an imagined South — one where slaves happily sang as they picked cotton.  There were happy women in hoop skirts.  There were white men with suits and string bow ties and goatees.  There were, in this imaginary South, no real poor white people suffering as the  real poor white people did as subsistence farmers.  The imaginary South was a fun Broadway show South.

Here I stand in the real South, overlooking real and quite lovely cotton fields with a greyish tinge and gritty dirt clods.   I am glad I have no picking to do  of these tufts.  I much prefer this South, the one with the real people who are not always happy but are usually smiling anyway.

In Orientalist fantasies, there are often despots.  Despotism, according to a scholar named Grosrichard, is an important part of the fantasy.  In the fantasy of the South, there are despots, too.  The reality of a history of despotism cannot be ignored.  The South did hold slaves longer than the Northern states, and there have  been many incidents of violence against people of color.  However, in the North, the image that the Klan is pandemic in the Bible Belt — that is a fantasy that absolves the North to some degree of its present hate crimes.  Earlier this month, a horrible hate crime was committed in the Bronx against a man who was assumed by his  attackers to be homosexual.  New Yorkers understand this horrible crime within the context of a much larger community where not everyone is filled with hate, not by a longshot.  However, the idea persists in New York City that hatred is more universal here in Mississippi.

Standing here near a cotton field — admittedly being white, being blonde with blue eyes, hence not as easily a target of such forms of hatred as if I were an African-American woman — I’m not sure that this is so.  I tend to think that while there are still some people who are hateful, the vast majority of people behave more like their neighbor’s keeper in a way that New Yorkers do not, can not, given the vast number of neighbors New Yorkers have.  People say hello to strangers all the time.  Churches feed people and visit the sick (something they also do in New York, when they know who is sick in the community).   There are haters here, to be sure, but in New York, I think some of that is just more suppressed, not extinguished.  Look at the awful things the Republican candidate for governor of New York said this week.   New York is not hate-free.  Neither is the South.  However, the despotism is muzzled at least down here to some degree in the real contemporary South, at least compared to the imagined South of the song Dixie.

In his book Orientalism Edward Said talks about Gustave Flaubert‘s  interaction with a courtesan in Egypt — Flaubert had a few imaginary ideas about the way women were different in Egypt than in France.  To be fair to Flaubert, in strictly external and superficial ways, the women did look different and sound different.  That said, his ideas about Egyptian women were crude and reductive.

The ideas that Northerners have about women of the South are a bit silly.  They imagine Scarlett O’Hara saying, “Why fiddle dee dee!”  They certainly imagine every Miss America contestant from below the  Mason Dixon line.  There are women who cultivate the pageant and the belle images, to be sure, but it would be crude and reductive to imagine there are no feminists down here, no thinkers among women, no hilarious, goofy interesting and individualistic women.  I do think it is harder to be that way down here than up North, as I see a greater pressure to conform to the artificial standards of the cult of Southern womanhood.

So as I look at the field in the land of cotton — are old times forgotten here?  Look away – no, but perhaps they will be overcome yet.  Look away – no, but the South is reinventing itself.  Look away — but why would you look away?  These fields are beautiful, aren’t they? – Dixie Land.

July 5, 2010

Tar balls — but no great balls of fire

Filed under: Southern blog posts,Uncategorized — annebabson @ 12:57 pm
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before the tar balls hit the beaches in Mississippi, Governor Barbour shows the President around

One of the ways I know I live in Mississippi and not New York or Paris is that the people — not individuals but groups of people — don’t seem inclined to mass demonstrations.  I find the calm of the people of the State of Mississippi astonishing in the wake of a disaster where there is a yachting, snooty British face to make into a mask to put on a doll to hang in effigy.

Why are they not more feisty, more pitchfork-waving?  Why do I not hear the click of the cocking of the myriad guns that they fiercely claim the right to bear?

In 1986, when I lived in Paris and participated in the student strikes of that year with the other students at the Sorbonne, the news came on the radio one early morning that the cops had killed one of the kids demonstrating, beating him to death with billy clubs.  Within a half hour I heard shouting underneath my apartment window.  A hundred thousand people awakened by the news had gathered with signs and were shouting the name of the mayor of Paris — they called him a bastard, and shouted, “Le peuple aura ta peau” — The people will have your hide.

In New York, during the nineties, I worked organizing demonstrations for a human rights organization, and I promise you that New Yorkers, too, have a clamor that comes out relatively quickly from within them whenever the city’s troubles bubble up, like — I don’t know, so much uncappable oil from the Gulf.

Yet here we are a month into a disaster of Biblical proportions which, unlike a hurricane, cannot be blamed on an act of God, but quite simply an act of over-ambitious man, in support of the coffers of a foreign country, to the detriment of Americans, local Americans, Americans who qualify to belong to Sarah Palin’s short list of “true” Americans, Mississippians, no less, and right here, right here in Mississippi — I hear no shouting in the streets.

On the air waves, I hear right-wing radio pundits lamenting the imagined “judicial activism” of Supreme Court Nominee Kagan and the horrors of Brown V. Board of Education admiration in thinly veiled racism and by obtuse arguments like: if the founders didn’t predict the Internet, then the Constitution cannot apply to it.  On the local airwaves, I hear no grand outcry for the head of anyone on a platter regarding British Petroleum.  The silence would make one think that no such spill had affected anyone in the region.

On the local left-wing radio, I hear practical discussions about pragmatic steps that people can take to join wildlife rescue teams, about problems long-term related to the environment.  No cries for the death of a corporate Satan.

The governors of the affected states called (surprisingly late in the game) for a day of prayer.  My church prayed.

Admittedly, the effects of the disaster have not yet been fully felt.  Tourism on the Gulf in Mississippi, a source of income for the cities there, is at an absolute standstill, but  one bad season might not kill off such tourism entirely.  However, no one can say with certainty the long-term consequences to those communities.  Fishing along the coast has been prohibited, but no one knows for how long, nor can anyone say with certainty how long the fishermen will have nothing viable to catch there.

Admittedly, I live inland, hours away from the disaster, and I don’t have an eye-witness account to offer here.  However, this state feels itself as one, unlike New York State, where upstate and downstate are constantly at war.  So why have I yet to see a single sign that demands anything, anything at all, related to this disaster?

I have a few ideas why it may be that they have not responded with the elan I might have expected (or desired).  Possible explanations include:

  1. Everyone — even The New York Times — hails the posture adopted by Governor Haley Barbour in the wake of this catastrophe as a non-partisan promoter of this state’s industry.  Barbour is a Republican with ambitions, and he is habitually criticized by the Left for having his priorities wrong regarding state expenditures, for adopting policies that disenfranchise the poorest Mississippians, but here, in this instance, I hear little criticism locally on the Left of the Governor’s actions.  The people generally think that the state government is on the right side of this question.
  2. The fishing industry on the Gulf had dwindled to a shadow of its former self already for reasons wholly unrelated to this disaster.  Inland operations — cat fish and craw fish farming — are more common and profitable sources of fish these days in Mississippi.
  3. While  I doubt that many people on the Right around here would say so, Obama’s insistence that BP put 20 billion in escrow over time to address claims against the company, coupled with BP’s grudging but voluntary participation in said escrow fund, has put people’s minds at ease regarding the immediate needs of those most affected by the spill.  On right-wing local radio, I heard a whining complaint about Obama demanding this from BP, but the speakers were quick to point out that BP was honoring the government’s request without seizure of their assets.  They apparently like it when corporations volunteer for things.
  4. People around here believe that God is on their side.  They believe that God is going to see them individually and collectively through whatever they have to face.  This is not a posture that generally engenders mass demonstrations in the streets of the capitol.
  5. The capitol itself is not very big.  Unlike Paris or New York, a crowd would hardly pour into any grand town square and overflow.  There are more people living in the Brooklyn than the whole state.  A demonstration would be smaller necessarily than the ones I have seen in the past.
  6. These folks recently survived Katrina.  Whatever BP’s destruction has wrought, it feels less catastrophic than the last disaster.
  7. The people in Mississippi realize that the oil industry is one of the larger employers of people locally.  Even though BP’s practices were negligent, not the norm, many people in the oil industry realize that an accident could conceivably  happen at the company for which they work, too.  Everyone in Mississippi benefits to some degree from the revenue the oil industry generates.  Hence, the posture of the oil-company-demonizing environmentalist feels like something that local people cannot afford.
  8. Among employers in Mississippi, there are a large number of foreign companies.  This state provides some of the cheapest manufacturing labor in the country, and many foreign companies build factories here.  Hence, the foreignness of British Petroleum feels familiar, not like an attack by foreigners off the coast.
  9. People in Mississippi consider shouting bad manners.  They consider complaining bad manners.  They have good manners, on the whole.
  10. The media has been prevented in certain instances, from what I have heard through the grapevine, from going on certain beaches with cameras, from taking certain photographs, and perhaps, despite the non-stop media blitz, they have not seen the image — the girl running while napalm burns her, the firemen, policemen, and EMT workers raising the flag in the rubble — that will provoke a greater outrage.  However, the people have eyes to see for themselves.  This is local news.

Another idea that I have considered but rejected — perhaps the passivity of the people of Mississippi regarding this matter has more to do with the time in which we live, where people are more likely to join groups on Facebook than to march down the street, but then I think that no — that doesn’t make sense.  Martin Luther King, when he was visiting another Gulf state, Alabama, while he sat in Birmingham Jail wrote that the argument that a particular time has come or has not come yet for justice is false, that time itself is neutral, that people make the time do whatever they will make it do.  Hence this quiet, which I do not believe to be some sort of calm before a storm, remains mysterious to me.

Maybe it’s just too hot outside to demonstrate.

December 13, 2009

New York, baby, this is the kiss-off

Filed under: Uncategorized — annebabson @ 1:48 am
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New York, we have to talk.

My ex, for whom I will always hold a certain sentimental je ne sais quoi

You and I have been living together now for twenty years, and that’s common-law, but I know you were always double-booking with eight million other people.  You never wanted to get hitched, not with me, anyway, because Manhattan is not the marrying kind.

You were always sexy, even when you smelled like sulphur and ash, and your sky scrapers — well, they say size doesn’t matter, but with all that concrete-hard loving, I beg to differ.  Your muscle and your attitude, even when I wanted to hate you, well, you always got the best of me, and I found myself seduced again by you.

But see, now, I have found someone who really understands my tender side, my need for permanence — with you, the fashion always changes, but with him — he loves me no matter what the hemline.  I always felt like you were edging me out the door with your increasing rents and your perpetual gentrification of the neighborhoods where we would sleep together,  not that you ever sleep, New York.  And I began to think about how I gave you the best years of my life, how many people I knew who are now sleeping in your cemeteries too young, and I realize — you don’t like growing old with people.  You’ve replaced me a million times with the latest “it” girl, I know it.  I’ve seen your telephone directory, and it’s filled with others!  I see the younger women with the impossibly short dresses this season — again with the hemlines — and I know it’s time to end it here and now.

New York, we’ll always have Paris.

I know that we’ve shared some amazing moments together, and here’s a list of the ones I know I’ll remember you by, knowing that we were lovers:

  • I once gave a passionate speech in Times Square with over ten thousand people watching me, and I made them cry and cheer with my words.
  • I ate elegant cake on Park Avenue with a Czech duchess in exile.
  • I was an honorary docent in the Egyptian collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art one morning.
  • One evening at Merkin hall,  a Chinese woman with a British accent screamed words I wrote over an atonal brass orchestra.
  • I got tipsy one evening on champagne with the US poet laureate.
  • I made out one night in a club with a man who had beaten up a movie star who got mouthy with him.
  • I once shouted at an angry NYPD captain, “You want to arrest us?  Go ahead!  Make our day!”  and got away with it.
  • Jackie Mason once called me a “yenta.”
  • George Plimpton once wished me a good evening.
  • Quentin Crisp once told me I was very kind.
  • I once broke up a fight in a project school between two tough boys.
  • I went to cocktail party after cocktail party.
  • I attended a world debut at the Metropolitan Opera.
  • I saw the ring at Madison Square Garden, all deflated and folded up backstage.
  • I performed a mock-exorcism on the steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral with drag queens.
  • I saw Aretha Franklin after a concert at Radio City Music Hall get in a limo and watched the paparazzi chase alongside her block after block.
  • I did tequila shots with a professional dominatrix, who explained her professional techniques to me.
  • I have marched down your streets in nothing but leather and lingerie.
  • I held an altar call at a drag bar poetry reading.
  • I once made Rudolph Giuliani grimace.

New York, I have written about you as if our affections were always mutual, but you are fickle beyond belief.  I have finally found someone who will never change his mind about me, so I am leaving you.  See me packing in my apartment?  It’s over.

New York, I’ll never stop loving you, player, but I’m a player hater.  Talk to the hand, the one with which I used to hail your cabs.

Here’s looking at you kid.  And so, New York, as Plimpton did, I wish you a good evening.

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