At the lovely new Shelter on Van Buren in Oxford tomorrow night (June 11) will be an affair to remember, and also one for the history books. Salt Zine, an
Source: Suanne Strider: No Place in Particular – A Celebration of Southern Poetry and Music
Southern supermodel and ex-wife to Mick Jagger Jerry Hall told reporters about her looks, “My momma always used to say, ‘honey, there are no ugly women, only lazy ones.'”
“Momma always said there are no ugly women, only lazy ones.” — Southern model Jerry Hall
Southern women are not lazy; after all, look how carefully groomed they usually are! No Sarah Lawrence College bohemian tousled bobs on their heads — Southern hair is always intentional. Neither are Southern men lazy, though they are less carefully groomed on the whole than their sisters and wives. However one might say all those well-groomed Southerners are in much less of a hurry than Yankees tend to be.
When I moved from Brooklyn down South, the hardest thing for me to absorb was the Southern concept of timing. I itched for the whole first year down here for a New York minute, and honey, while there are no ugly minutes down South, there are plenty of lazy ones. That New York minute never came; it wasn’t even unimaginably delayed coming on the Northbound F Train because of extensive trackwork; it never existed and never would. I mourned the New York minute the way I mourned the chopped liver bagel from the Second Avenue Deli. Both New York phenomena are hard to explain to outsiders as charming. You have to take a bite of one to know how good they are. I am at an Irish wake in permanence for the New York minute. As anyone who has attended an Irish wake can tell you, such events involve tears, off-color tales, prayer, and a little bit of whiskey while nobody else is looking. New York minute, we hardly knew ye, at least down South.
These men are fixing to get up and go back to work.
Instead, down South, we don’t bound out of seats to do things as much as we are “fixing to” do things. For those uninitiated to that grammatical structure, “fixing to” do something means one really may get around to it eventually. If one is “fixing to” pick up his friend at Memphis International Airport, for instance, that means one is watching the last five minutes of an episode of Designing Women on DVR, wondering if the shirt one is wearing has a stain on it requiring a change of clothing, and looking under the coffee table for one’s other flip-flop. Maybe in fifteen minutes, the one who was fixing to go to the airport will have fixed himself, applied a little designer impostor cologne under the armpits of the shirt with the stain on it, which one has decided to wear despite the small splotch of barbecue sauce, found the flip-flops, and sauntered over to the car to open the driver-side door.
To their credit, Southern cardiac surgeons are usually never “fixing to” perform a balloon angioplasty; they operate as emergency requires with a brisker pace. But the cardiologist usually nods understandingly when the patient says he is “fixing to” start an exercise regimen, no riot act read. It’s just the way things eventually get done around here.
Anyway, I am fixing to do something myself tomorrow. I am fixing to give a reading of new poetry as part of an important New Southern literary event.
There is a marvelous avant garde literary journal called Salt down South; they are as experimental as anything coming out of literary Brooklyn in recent memory. They are so avant garde they have rejected old paradigms and rebooted themselves. They are now Salted 2.0, and they have published a work of fiction I wrote about Irish-American identity and cultural expectations within that community, to which I belong. They have asked me to read at a literary reading, art show, and harmonica and steel guitar folk extravaganza tomorrow night in Oxford, Mississippi. The event is fixing to go from six-ish to ten-ish tomorrow evening at the Shelter on Van Buren, directly adjacent to Oxford Square and across the street from Off Square Books. There will be beverages and snacks for sale. There will be bonhomie. There will be me reading poetry commemorating the smashed glass ceiling of Tuesday night, another Irish wake with off-color tales of the highest literary caliber. The editors of this journal are not just good editors; they throw a wonderful Southern beaux-arts party (or bozart party, as H. L. Mencken would have it). Prepare to feel happier and hipper leaving than when you arrive.
This is also the launch party of the rebooted avant garde journal. The honour of your presence is respectfully requested. Again, that’s Saturday, June 11, 6-10 pm, at The Shelter on Van Buren, 1221 Van Buren, Oxford, Mississippi. I sincerely hope you are fixing to attend.
I read Gone with the Wind as a required book for my summer reading list between seventh and eighth grade a private girl’s school. At the time, I was hoping, like almost everyone who is going to turn thirteen years old, for a great romance, proving somehow I was desirable, affirming my blossoming powers of female charm, a romance that would serve my ego. I had no conscious thought of love by any adult definition, and I had limited information on sex, but I knew this much – the idea of a good-looking boy who would parade around with me in public, letting the other girls at my school know, most of whom I found milquetoast and cruel, that he thought I was awesome, one who would slow dance with me and neck with me at a co-ed party, the kind I was rarely invited to, that appealed to me more than I could say. Boys often get criticized at that age for only having “one thing on their mind,” but truly, though I did not have a clear picture of that “one thing,” my motives for wanting a boyfriend in the abstract were no less selfish and shallow than any boys at that time of life would have had. My chief object in this pursuit, one mostly in a state of total fantasy in my sex-segregated life, was to outdo the girls who made fun of me for being nerdy and not obscenely rich the way they were.
Given my summertime agenda, reading about Scarlett at the Twelve Oaks Barbeque, where she stole other girls’ beaux and threw a vase at Rhett Butler while wearing a big, flouncy dress – that was my idea at twelve-and-a-half of a pretty impressive afternoon, if I could get over the Civil War getting declared that day, which I mostly did. The later descriptions of Rhett Butler’s hot-lipped kisses on Scarlett’s palm sounded pretty good, too. And as a role model for gumption, Scarlett probably continues to influence me, though her purely self-interested modus operandi is something I hope I have overcome at this less adolescent time of life.
Required Summer Reading for my Eighth Grade Class
I was already literary enough in junior high school to understand, as I read the section of the book that describes the siege of Atlanta, that I was in the presence of a master artist in Margaret Mitchell’s pages. In rereading the book this summer, decades later, I find myself enchanted by her astonishing narrative structure for this section of the book, the way that certain phrases become refrains. The scene where the battle is within earshot of the dark city of Atlanta, and in the night, various Southern men knock on Aunt Pitipat’s door, each with different manners of speaking reflective of a diversity of region and class of these Confederate soldiers, where because of the dark, Mitchell confines her evocation of scene to non-visual descriptors only – I actually applauded that scene in my rereading. I remember at twelve-and-a-half, I was awestruck by the idea of a whole yard filled with wounded soldiers, and with Doctor Meade being forced to alleviate suffering as best he could nearly single-handedly and with limited supplies. In rereading the scene years later, I still see the mastery of Mitchell. She was a genius of a writer, clearly influenced by Vanity Fair and the works of Tolstoy. Let me say we have never had an author in America who was very much better than Mitchell, and perhaps we never will, as far as structuring a complex narrative goes.
But what I learned about my adolescent self, my junior high school, and American culture as a whole while I reread Gone with the Wind horrified me, and I need to share it here.
How is it that in remembering the lush descriptions of Northern Georgia, the hot lips of Captain Butler, the wounded soldiers, the balls and ball gowns, the effete Ashley, the noble Melanie, I nevertheless forgot the horrible, horrible racism of Gone with the Wind as I read it at not-quite-thirteen for my school, a school in Yankee territory? How did I, who remember vivid details from readings I did years and years ago – how did I not truly grasp and retain the enormity of Mitchell’s racism in reading this book?
Margaret Mitchell’s story tells us that the North attacked the South for more or less no reason – no reason! For slaves were uniformly happy unless they were of very bad character, according to her. Masters were benevolent and unabusive, though occasionally an overseer of trashy and Yankee-friendly ways might commit violence entirely independently of slave masters’ knowledge. For Mitchell, people of color were bug-eyed, lip-jutting children, not merely ignorant by lack of education, but naturally ignorant the way a dog is ignorant of algebra, not because junior high school failed to teach him but because dogs can’t handle problems that solve for X. For Mitchell, the Klansmen were heroic gentlemen, rather than terrorists. For Mitchell, people of color shouldn’t vote because they would only be beguiled by slick white Yankee carpetbaggers who didn’t want what was best for the African-Americans, namely slavery. Why didn’t any of this shock me as a school girl?
Understand that my parents were in the civil rights movement, and they took me to civil rights’ rallies when I was a child, so I absolutely knew that Margaret Mitchell’s understanding of the capacities of people of color was wrong, and if asked, I know I would have said so. I did not know that the Klan had a present-day existence, and if I had known, I would have been horrified, aware as I was in some measure of what they had done to thwart Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man I considered a hero. So again, why wasn’t I shocked?
My teacher who assigned the book to me never mentioned the problem of race in relation to the book, not once. Who would assign this book to adolescents and not discuss racism? He wasn’t much of a teacher, anyway. He flirted with me inappropriately, and again – I was twelve going on thirteen. I don’t think he harbored any proactive racist views, not that I could tell, but as a current teacher of literature, I find his lack of discussion on a topic central to understanding a text wildly irresponsible. My parents knew I was reading the book and only asked me if I thought Rhett Butler was a better character than Ashley Wilkes for Scarlett to marry, and they reminded me that my great-great-grandfather had been in the Union navy as a navigator, though not in combat in the war, it seems. They got a video of the movie and let me watch it to help me write the paper for my class, and nobody mentioned the difference to me of how Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel behaved on screen so differently from our family’s actual, real-life friends of color, and while I remember noticing that their on-screen behavior seemed unrealistic, I also noticed that when white people I knew in real life kissed, no violins swelled as the sky turned red, as they did when Clark Gable kissed Vivian Leigh, and I chalked the mawkish acting of those portraying slaves in the film not to a form of institutional racism but the overall absurd melodrama of the film in general. Why didn’t anybody mention this problem of wildly blatant racism to me, and why didn’t I reflect more deeply upon it? How could I forget it?
This is not the way a real woman looks or acts; this is the way a white fantasy of a black woman looks and acts.
This revelation of past impressions makes me reflect on how deeply ingrained white privilege must have been in the ambient culture of my youth. Just as few enough people question why models have to be rail-thin in order for designers to think they will help sell clothing, nobody around me, not even my activist pro-civil-rights parents, saw a problem worth discussing with me when I read this book. I think like anorexia is a tacit expectation of female youth today, my life in late twentieth-century American culture was so steeped in racism that much of it was invisible from notice. My parents wanted laws to be fair for all people and cared as much about friends of color as they did about anybody else, but I think they thought little about daily acts of racism that were not specifically mandated or forbidden by law. It wasn’t illegal, after all, for Margaret Mitchell to write her political message into her book. It was not unfair that she should be allowed to express her point of view. But the truth was, I must conclude that nobody was really offended by the tone of her fiction, by the implications of diminished humanity of so many characters in her book, of her book’s justifying a genocide of such a magnitude that it will never likely be wholly documented.
I must admit that young person that I was, I had already absorbed intensely racist ideas through a culture that was Northern, not Southern, and therefore I was not shocked or personally offended, though I would have told anyone who asked that racism was wrong and that I did not think I was better than a person of color. I hung out with two twelve year-old girls at school who were African-American, Dionne and Rueisha. I remember one day – my thirteenth birthday – during lunch hour, we turned on some music in the yard of the school and danced, and some white girls turned a hose on us, and we had to run off the lawn not to get wet. Nobody got in trouble for this, though the next day, other white girls approached me, but not Dionne and Rueisha, and asked me to never dance during lunch hour again, that I was embarrassing them because we were in the same class. I remember thinking it odd that they thought I was embarrassing for dancing to R & B, which I still love, but that it wasn’t embarrassing to them that my two friends, who were also in our class, did the same. I remember pondering whether it was that they were black that made it “predictable” that they would dance, or if even my hilarity-filled friendship with these two girls were the source of eighth-grade embarrassment. But I thought Gone with the Wind’s message of racial dishonor was merely fictional. The book made me want to be a great writer. It made me want to own a beautiful home and treasure it like Scarlett did Tara. It made me want to see the South. I don’t believe it made me want to own slaves or see any group of people as less than fully human. But it somehow contributed to my discounting outrageous assertions about race in our culture, and largely because I as an adolescent was not compelled by any adult authority to question the assertions in a required reading assignment. Like Scarlett, I wouldn’t think about that now; tomorrow was another day.
Dionne and Rueisha and I still danced sometimes after this incident, though not on the lawn in front of our classmates. Dionne and I transferred in ninth grade to a big public high school, and our circles of friends became largely segregated, as the currents of the culture pulled us apart. I wish we had had the discussion about the book in class, in my living room, that Dionne and I, who had both been required to read the book, had discussed the racism in it. Instead, like Rhett going off to fight the Yankees in the last battles of the war, Dionne and I were abandoned like Scarlett on a perilous road with dangers and no clear sense of what to do next.
But this is how white privilege takes itself for granted, how cultural oppression is hard to see to the group that benefits from the oppression. Even if I had had no friends of color at my snooty girls’ school, I would have been robbed by this education without educating, this reading without contextualizing. The keys to what we need to know about ending the hegemony present in American documents lies in the discourse of the establishmentarian authors as least as much as it does in those in revolt against that hegemony. We need to raise our political consciousness so that Twelve Oaks burning makes sense, so that Frank Kennedy’s death makes sense, so that Scarlett’s pathological selfishness makes sense, so that America makes sense. And then we need to change America into a place where the few oppressing the many is a wholly unimaginable occurrence, something only in the pages of historical fiction, not a present-tense struggle of any kind. And this is how we get there – not just by revolting against the bad idea but examining it on its own terms to expose its fallacies.
One day I will teach Gone with the Wind to my students next to The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacob’s narrative, and Whitman’s poetry about wounded soldiers. I will hold the long-overdue discussion, and while this will not stop the deaths of people like Eric Garner and Sandra Bland, it will make us ready to shout “no,” to tell those white preppy girls that they are the embarrassment, that black women don’t act like Mammy, nor are they named “Mammy,” nor do they crow smilingly at the idea of some white slave owner asking them to lift up their skirts to show off their red petticoats, and no, just no – we need to unpack it all, admit to it all, and finally be able to renounce it all, truly all of it.
Calling all fans of this blog,of cultural assonance and dissonance between North and South — Monday, April 20, 7 pm, at the Powerhouse Theater in Oxford, Mississippi, on the corner of University Avenue and Fourteenth Street, I am inviting you all to a word party.
My book, The White Trash Pantheon, which sets the ancient Greek myths in the Deep South, decries idolatry and excesses of white privilege, and is above all, filled with fun and humor, with prosody and twang, is being released by Vox Press.
My book is having a party on Monday, April 20, 7 pm! Come on down!
The party is being called “A Moonshine Cotillion.” I will neither confirm nor deny the presence of actual moonshine, but the moon will be shining, I can guarantee that.
If you attend, there will be refreshments, bonhomie, and a dash of ribaldry. There will be reasons to laugh, hopefully not at me but with me. I have written these poems with a heart for the heartland. I promise that my intention is to enjoy the South, to slap the snooty off classical literature while retaining its edifying qualities, and to uplift an American vernacular, all in the tradition of Mark Twain, who like me, had an existence both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. His Huckleberry Finn is an edifying book, but it also found light-handed ways of telling the truth about people’s hypocrisies, about injustice, about Southern paradox.
I hope The White Trash Pantheon approaches Southern living in a parallel way. There are times where I am making fun of somebody’s momma, but it isn’t your momma. It is Oedipus’ momma, though she talks with a drawl when she interrupts her own funeral like Tom Sawyer did.
I promise to bring the funny. I promise to bring the delight I take in this magnolia-strewn landscape. I hold the people I have met down South in high esteem, I promise you. I have listened to — well, to be completely honest, I have eaves-dropped on — salient conversations down here, and I have found in them the cadence of Tennessee Williams divas in the church hall kitchen, the gritty twang of Faulknerian figures in the garages on the county roads.
The South is too beautiful to burn.
I have seen what Ulysses S. Grant saw in Port Gibson, Mississippi, a town between Vicksburg and the bayoux, a town he encountered on his march to conquer the Confederacy, but in the midst of his scorched Earth policy, destroying all sorts of settlements in his army’s wake, he came upon this sleepy, white-boarded, colonnaded oasis between cornfields and cotton, and when his colonels asked him if they should torch the place, he looked at the church steeple — the one in the photo here, with a golden hand atop it pointing an index finger heavenward, and he declared, “No, don’t burn it. It’s too beautiful to burn.”
I, the Carpetbagger de tutti Carpetbaggers, I, too, declare that the South is too beautiful to burn. I am in this world of twang and Tabasco, but I am not of it. That said, when I look at the springtime trees in bloom, at the gilded glove pointed heavenward, I, too, may stand to admire this landscape. I would change injustice. I would open eyes. But I am not a practitioner of scorched Earth. I have gone native, as native as a non-native can in the New South.
I am not of the South, but I am in the South. I am making my official debut Monday, April 20th, as a Southern writer, not of Mark Twain, but after Mark Twain.
Come have a slice of corn bread and some bacon-wrapped sugar sausages. Come have a glass of a substance I will neither confirm nor deny. All y’all, y’all are cordially invited. The inestimable honour of your presence is requested.
My participation in a Southern Tradition
The PhD students in English and American literature at Ole Miss have a tradition of drinking at William Faulkner‘s grave — a stone’s throw away from the campus. It is germane to everything that department does — the specter of Faulkner, though he dropped out of the school and went his own way — haunts the halls. Who is the next immortal among us, he seems to ask.
However, despite the lovely, rich prose, Faulkner, were he in fact a king-maker, would never point his scepter at a woman or a person of color to indicate that we were smart or interesting in any way but perhaps sexually. I’m sure I would have scared the crap out of Faulkner, so in going to his grave at Saint Peter‘s cemetery, I had no problem trying to spook him. I am the kind of woman who would have wanted to scare the crap out of him, anyway,when he was living — a Yankee feminist who worked as a speechwriter and pamphleteer to end apartheid. To Mister Faulkner, whose worst nightmare I am, I say “Boo!”
One does not drink alone at Faulkner’s tombstone. Apart from the shade of the author himself, his longsuffering wife is buried next to him, his parents across from him. One wonders who chose the inscription “Go with God,” which must be read ironically, if one has ever read the guy’s work. Not only did I drink with the former Faulkners, I also drank with my pals in the PhD program Victoria, Thomas, and Ebony, who are all very cool. Thomas provided the booze (see the Maker’s Mark in my hand). Victoria provided much of the prose from Faulkner and the photos. Ebony brought the fabulousness. I just brought the bad attitude.
We had trouble finding the grave. Saint Peter’s cemetery is not next to Saint Peter’s church, and it was cold and dark outside. We wandered the streets of Oxford, Mississippi, following the confused navigator function of Victoria’s phone. I think we were bamboozled by it because of the magnetic waves emanating from the tombstone. The waves are a transmission from the next dimension, which declares in a garbled text message:
OMFG — you will never have immortality as writers. Post-modern criticism has killed the cult of the author. Give it up. I am more fabulous than you will ever be. Even Satan bows to me in Hell.
I knew it was a lie from the pit itself. We disregarded it. We climbed into Ebony’s car for warmth and listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Whatever is true about the so-called cult of the author, the cult of the diva is alive and well, as evidenced by Ebony’s i-Pod play list, as evidenced by Ebony and her fabulous diva self.
I care about the Pulitzer. I care about the Nobel. I care about the National Book Award. I care about authors. I care about Divas. No tombstone can talk me out of this. All it can do is lend perspective on the notion of authorial immortality.
I once saw a graffito that went like this:
“God is dead” — Neitzche
“Neitzche is dead” — God
Shakespeare is an immortal writer. His bones are turning to powder as we speak. It is not good enough to be an immortal writer. One must actually go with God, not just have relatives, who would burn every copy of one’s heretical books if they could, inscribe such a thing on a tombstone that they never meant to be ironic. There is truly only one kind of immortality — the resurrection kind. That said, without the other kind, how will I explain to future generations why I thought the giraffe-print furry hat and giraffe-print furry bag I had with me the night I did shots at Faulkner’s grave were really cool? I intend to be an immortal writer who is immortal indeed, not like the godless, misogynist, racist genius at whose grave I poured libations a few days ago.
Here’s a picture of me with Ebony, wandering around looking for the grave:
Hunting for Faulkner's grave; finding the fabulous
Ebony is a brilliant woman who is funny, hilarious, and — despite all Mississippi siren calls that might have drawn her away from this — always impeccably dressed.
If Faulkner were living and breathing, he wouldn’t like either of the women in this picture — one he would utterly dismiss, and the other he would just loathe. Faulk him and his genius, I say. We’re fantastic.
Finally, the four of us found our way to the grave. We all took a shot, and Victoria read a lovely passage of prose from the man in the grave about the enduring quality of words.
As the moon stood in a sliver against the black of the night, and the wind rustled in the breeze, I couldn’t allow myself to make this a worshipful experience. I don’t believe in ancestor worship, even of really fantastic ancestors, but while Faulkner was fantastic as a writer, he wasn’t such a great antecedent.
After Victoria finished reading, I took what was left in my glass and splashed it on the grave.
“Bitch, give me your talent!” I shouted.
Ebony, Victoria and Thomas are used to such outbursts from me — not so much the cursing as the incongruity — and they just took it in stride.
Thomas read a passage from “A Rose for Emily,” one which involved the repetition of the n-word over and over again. I took the bottle and poured out half of it on the engraved name beneath us, interrupting Thomas to say, “That’s what you get for saying ‘n*gger’ so many times. You’re just lucky it’s not my urine.”
We went afterward to a reading of living writers. It was time to go. Let the dead bury the dead. We were out of booze, anyway.
Insulting Faulkner while taking note of his talent seemed appropriate — not worship, just acknowledgment. The cult of the author, per Derrida and his sychophants, is dead. Perhaps it should be. Instead, long live the diva, I say. Long live Ebony. Long live you, whoever you are. Go with God.
