Barbecue Runs Through It

I love Southern food. Barbecue especially. Smoky, salty tender bits of pork slathered in spicy sweet tomatoey goodness with a side of slaw washed down with a Coca-Cola (sugarcane edition,) It’s the sandwich the family in A Good Man is Hard to Find eat at the Tower, brought to them by the pale faced wife of the owner, all five plates balanced in her hands and on her forearm. Their last meal.
In O’Connor’s time, the Tower no doubt was a segregated establishment much like Ollie’s Barbecue, the restaurant in one of the original Civil Rights Act challenge cases the Supreme Court heard in1964. Ollie’s Barbecue was a small, family owned restaurant that seated 220 white customers and provided black customers with a take-out counter. Ollie argued that he wasn’t required to integrate his dining room because he had the contractual right to serve whom he pleased and was not engaged in so-called interstate commerce. The Civil Rights Act was premised on the Commerce Clause, which gave the federal government the power to regulate interstate - as opposed to intrastate - commerce.
The Supreme Court shot down Ollie’s argument. It reasoned that because African-Americans travelled the highways just like everybody else, they needed to stop to eat just like O’Connor’s traveling family. To deprive any travelers of any race of the joys of barbecue was unconstitutional and impeded their movement across state lines.
One of the ironies of Ollie’s Barbecue is that the cuisine has its origins not in the Northern European lands of Southern whites, but in the cooking of the Caribbean and from there to the United States with the slave trade. Soon, Southerners were enjoying their pig roasted and smoked at barbecues. In fact, in the opening scene in Gone with the Wind has Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of an Irish plantation and slave owner, attends a barbecue at neighboring plantation Twelve Oaks - all of it prepared by slaves.
Food and race are inextricably linked in the South. One need only look to recent revelations that Paula Deen harbored a nostalgia for times long gone with the wind when she told lawyers during a deposition that she had wanted a proper plantation wedding for her brother complete with servers dressed like those who had served Scarlett her barbecue. Those servers, by implication, would have pretended to be slaves. That this fantasy might have been misinterpreted was Paula’s stated reason for rejecting the idea.
So here we are, on the day the same Supreme Court that declared Ollie’s Barbecue open to all gutted a major piece of civil right legislation we are supposed to believe that the post-racial age has arrived. I beg to differ.

Modern Day Grotesques

I just spent some quality time with a deposition. Paula Deen’s deposition to be exact. It seems the queen of southern (vernacular) cooking said some things that were pretty offensive like admitting to having used at some time in the past the ’N” word and wasn’t too upset that her brother Bubba might be viewing porn at work and sharing it with his subordinate employees.

It’s actually fascinating reading and shows a truly dysfunctional relationship in which Paula appears to be not just her brother’s keeper but also his enabler. Sad really.

Putting aside for the moment why her attorneys didn’t better prepare the Queen of Butter for her deposition, all I can say is that family loyalty must truly be deaf, dumb and blind. Here’s a woman who has obviously overcome some obstacles like agoraphobia to launch a successful food empire only to be taken advantage of by a less successful and talented brother. We read that Bubba’s restaurant was financed with “Deen money” and that Paula keeps both Bubba’s and Lady and Sons afloat with cash infusions earned in her other endeavors like her Food Network shows and endorsements.

The lawyer in me wants to analyze all the classic mistakes - forming corporations and not holding annual meetings, not professionally managing restaurants as they grew and added scores of employees and perhaps most importantly - believing that employees are family or friends and treating subordinates as if they were her children (that’s how she described her feelings for her personal assistant).

Predictably, Food Network dumped her.

The writer in me is fascinated by the dysfunction that allows a successful woman who has paid her dues let it all slip away because she can’t believe a family member will let an opportunity handed to him courtesy of her success slip away.

And I wonder what Flannery O’Connor would have made of the situation. Paula feels like Julian to me - blinded to his own bigotry even as he criticizes his mother for hers. How would Flannery end this story?

Those Germans Kept Good Records

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that an Italian on the fast track to sainthood may in fact be no saint at all. Instead of being the hero who was allegedly Italy’s Schindler, this would be saint may have sent much of his area’s Jewish population to their death at Auschwitz. It appears now that records thought destroyed have surfaced that point to his willing cooperation in identifying and targeting Jews for death. (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/arts/an-italian-saint-in-the-making-or-a-collaborator-with-nazis.html?smid=fb-share)
Yes, those Germans kept good records - having perhaps no sense that things might turn against them and certainly no shame in recording the horrors of their policies.
As a child, I heard firsthand (practically at my grandmother’s knee or perhaps even literarily so though I don’t recall exactly) how German records exposed a shameful family secret. It seems the mother of two boys who had served in the resistance went, after the war, to collect payment due her for one son’s death at the hands of the Gestapo. Careful German records revealed they had released her son to his brother.
Capturing that moment when the mother discovers the awful truth proves tough indeed.

On Public Spaces

My new home faces a very public square. On one of the trust lots facing Lafayette Square sits The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, its twin spires two talisman guiding my return home when I venture out. The Andrew Low house faces from another trust lot, as does the Hamilton-Turner Inn at the opposite end.

On my first Saturday afternoon, as we returned from a walk city officials were busy unloading a truck full of folding chairs in preparation for a wedding on the public square. Later than evening, we shared a bottle of wine while sitting on one of the park benches under a moss draped live oak. Passersby stopped and spoke with us, sharing a joke or observation as they walked dogs or just strolled on a warm early summer evening. Although it was still fairly early after sundown, there were parties well underway in two houses also facing Lafayette square. I watched as three young women clad in attire appropriate for the season parked their (or more likely, their parents’) Mercedes SUV and scampered up steep steps to the parlor floor apartment.

Clearly, Savannahians live life in and within sight of the public square.

In Turkey this week Istanbulites have been doing the same in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, one of the last bits of green space in the great modern and Byzantine city of Istanbul. There have been piano concerts and tango competitions and tear gas attacks and water canon blasts and fireworks as the government of Turkey tries to push out a group of protestors who originally simply didn’t want the trees razed to build an Ottoman inspired shopping mall. Since that first group was tear-gassed and pummeled with high pressure water, the entire country has erupted into mass protests that go beyond the building of yet another mall by the mercantile Islamist governing majority. That public square is now a daily battleground between the forces of modernity and the Ottoman past. Just today, the Istanbul governnor called on mothers to pick up their sons and bring them home. They didn’t. Instead, a parade of middle-aged women showed up and arm in arm encircled the protestors, daring the police to gas and water blast them away.

For me, this is personal. My baby brother is one of the protestors, at the square by night and at work by day, pushing back against the slide into the past.

Public spaces are crucial to democracy’s survival. Eliminate the square and you eliminate visible opposition.

Digital deprivation

I am looking forward to a simpler life. A private life on at least some level. A less digital life in which connection to the greater world relies on actual interactions.I am by no means a Luddite or anti-technology - but today’s headlines have left me feeling less inclined to share every digital bit of my being with bureaucrats at the NSA and other federal agencies. The next few days will be an experiment in digital deprivation much like nights during the occupation were.

No sense reading if it won't make you a better person?

Today, I came across an essay, Does Great Literature Make Us Better by Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy. He decries the lack of empirical studies to prove that indeed, reading what he calls literary works makes us better human beings - as if this is yet another think to monetize, compartmentalize, sanitize.
The subtext is that if literature does not do something our philosophy professor deems valuable, it does not have value. Apparently we need endless studies to answer his question. And this, largely, is the problem with the state of liberal arts today. Literature departments face cuts, core curriculum planners question the need for courses like literature or anything that smacks of elitism like music, art and other ‘soft’ topics. It reminds me of something my husband’s ex-mother-in-law told him years ago about teaching English to farm boys in rural Pennsylvania. She asked a young man in her class why he didn’t want to learn to speak and writer properly. His response - “Don’t need no good English to milk no cows.”
Or, I suppose, to design computer circuits, plumb houses, practice medicine.
The professor ends his essay thus:
“Many who enjoy the hard-won pleasures of literature are not content to reap aesthetic rewards from their reading; they want to insist that the effort makes them more morally enlightened as well. And that’s just what we don’t know yet.”
That’s a nice dig at those nasty intellectual elitist still left. To which I say, long live elitism.
You can read the essay here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/does-great-literature-make-us-better/?hp

What is a writer 'entitled' to write?

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

Today, I read an unedited short story by Welty that she wrote for the New Yorker shortly after Medgar Evers’ death. (Thank you Adrienne for bringing it to my attention.) Written in the days following the murder, Where is the Voice Coming From? is raw - and horrific.
Welty was, of course, white. Which leads me to the question of whether the race (or any other immutable characteristic) of the writer is relevant to telling the tale. Welty’s story is told through the eyes of a white supremacist narrator. This is the same tactic that James Baldwin uses in Going to Meet the Man.
Welty’s story, though full of graphic images, still feels to me somewhat sympathetic to the narrator. That’s never the reaction I have to Baldwin’s take. Perhaps this is because he so brilliantly takes a bigot’s perception of the target of his rage’s most frightening characteristics and turns them around. Baldwin’s white supremacist monster is impotent - as if his target took his sexual prowess away. (Sexual prowess seems a common feared characteristic among the ‘other’ a bigot hates - it also figures prominently in anti-semitism.) I think this approach feels more ‘true’ than the pent up frustration of Welty’s narrator.
Is either writer ‘entitled’ to tell the story? O’Connor never shied away from race relations, though I think she largely stuck with using white character points of view. Or perhaps the question is whether Baldwin succeeds so magnificently because he gets into the “other’s” head.
Again, I will trust that O’Connor is right - that simply by surviving childhood I have enough information about life to tell stories I might not be ‘entitled’ to tell.

You can read the story at http://preview.tinyurl.com/k3aewe3