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.

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

Reality and its escape

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

Flannery O’Connor

I have been staring today. The occasion was a memorial service and it has yielded enough material for an outline for a connected short story collection, all orbiting around reality and attempts to escape its pull. The idea, literally and figuratively, begins with the splitting of atoms writ large we call Hiroshima. Hiroshima. Say it and you immediately feel the weight of civilization that crushed Miss. Sasaki in John Hersey’s brilliant 1946 account. 

More on this later as I sketch out the story ideas.

What books to bring?

OK - it’s down to packing. Books mainly. Even after culling the shelves of paperbacks and duplicates, there are still (perhaps literally) tons of books to sift through. It’s obvious that quite a few books will end up in storage for a while. And it’s equally obvious that while I own a Kindle, I don’t much use it. Given a choice between hardback, paperback or pixels, I chose hardback every time.

Obvious choices - anything by and about Flannery O’Connor. Anything by or about other Southern writers. Conrad Aiken’s poetry and short stories. Carson McCullers. Truman Capote. Harper Lee. Tennessee Williams. Maybe even John Grisham.

Other obvious choices - anything and everything about World War II - restricted to the European theater to get the book count down. Especially important are several books inherited from my Great Uncle Kris, including a first hand account by a Norwegian death camp survivor written just a few years after the end of the occupation. And a fascinating little book by Quisling published during the occupation and which bears a dirty boot print on the title page. (To be clear - that one was not part of my family library - but discovered on Ebay a few years ago.)

Anything and everything on Edvard Munch, who died during the last year of occupation and who refused to cooperate with the occupiers but whose corpse was given a grand Nazi funeral procession.

Less obvious choices - a collection of Faberge books and guides - because there’s a Quisling connection. By some accounts, Quisling owned an egg, perhaps purchased during a famine relief trip to Russia in the years before the war. When his widow died in 1984, it was listed in the auction notes for her estate though I haven’t yet been able to track its travels since then.