Monday Music: Fun with William Tell

Here's some great fun from people practicing social distancing. We can all watch and listen as we continue our own social distancing.

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In the Summer of 2020

Turning Under (the Summer of 2020)

On the near edge of summer

things are dying.

The plague has been like a

great harvester

mowing and sifting humanity’s

stalks and branches

leaving sorrow, memory, and

accommodation

strewn about

for the combine to gather

as dry statistics.

Some deaths come

When people can’t breathe.

There comes a time of burning

to level those suffocating structures.

Things die in summer,

even when death goes unnoticed

amid the flourishing of green.

An age-old song

rises from the rubble

when there is hope for the lowly

to be lifted up

as the mighty are brought down.

A song sung by the women who

witness the end

and see the beginning.

A song of Hannah,

a song of Mary,

and a song

of Billie Holiday

because all celebration

is born of sorrow.

With promise laid waste

and cities in disarray

we quietly paint the streets

with words of hope.

                      ~ Charles Kinnaird

New York City chose a stretch of Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower as the location for a Black Lives Matter mural.
 (Mark Lennihan/AP Photo)

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Saturday Haiku: COVID Days

Today's haiku are written by guest poet, Tom Gordon, who also supplied the photo. Tom has other poems related to the coronavirus pandemic in the new anthology, The Social Distance: Poetry in Response to COVID-19.

Fifty years married,

they stroll in the twilight air.

COVID yields, for now.

In COVID’s desert

my oases are reruns,

grainy films, old books.

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Photo and haiku by Tom Gordon



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Friday Funnies:Fashion Trends

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Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 5)

From Town to Country

It was late autumn, 1960 when our family moved from Wedowee to Jackson’s Gap, Alabama where my father would pastor Jackson’s Gap Baptist Church. It would mark a major shift in my life experience as we made the transition from town to country life. There were many new things there for a six-year-old boy to see. There were woods, creek banks, ducks and chickens, pastures and fishponds. It was a place to explore the woods, catch crawfish in the creek and scoop up tadpoles from the pond using a discarded kitchen pan. It was also a place for a young boy to see a little more clearly how life was lived out in the segregated South.

Jackson’s Gap was not incorporated at the time, and it was just barely on the map. You could see the name on the road map, ten miles below Alexander City and 4 miles this side of Dadeville, but it didn’t merit a dot or a circle, much less a square to indicate its exact location. There was something of a town center with a small Post Office, Davis Hardware, Davis Grocery (each operated by two of the Davis brothers), and Railey’s Store. When you had to make a run to the store or the Post Office, you didn’t say you were going to town, you said, “I’m gonna run to the Gap.” This was long before a certain retail clothing chain confiscated the name.

Davis Grocery was a fairly modern grocery store where you could buy most of what you needed. There were at least a couple of aisles of grocery items and dry goods with a refrigerated produce section and a small butcher section in the back.  The store’s entry was a set of double screen doors with a crossbar proclaiming “Colonial is good Bread.” The candy section was in front near the cash register. You could get a Milky Way or a Three Musketeers bar for a nickel, bubble gum for a penny, and two cents would get you a Tootsie Roll Pop. There was also a Coke machine at the front of the store where a six-ounce bottle of ice-cold Co’-Cola required a nickel and a penny.

Often when you went to the Gap, you would see a few men gathered casually talking or just visiting. There were three places I recall seeing such gatherings. There was a small public building beside the Post Office that served as the local polling place on Election Day. Out in front, sometimes you would see old men sitting around a small table playing dominoes. In front of Davis Hardware, sometimes a few men would sit and talk with at least two of them having to turn a wooden Coke bottle crate on its end to make a stool to sit on. Sometimes people would meet just across the road at Railey’s Store. In fact, Railey’s Store is my earliest memory of the Gap.

First Glimpse

One Saturday before we moved, Dad drove the family over to see where we would be living. That day, we stopped by Railey’s Store which had a front porch where folks could lean against the porch rail and visit. We met a few people there that day. Mr. Railey's daughter came out with a snack from the store. She was a year younger than I. Mr. Paul was there and he struck up a conversation with Dad. He even reached down to shake my hand. Paul Nickerson was the principal of Jackson’s Gap Elementary School. He was an excellent teacher and everyone, including the school children, called him “Mr. Paul.” Jackson’s Gap Elementary was a three-room schoolhouse that held classes for grades 1 through 8. It may have been the last vestige of a time when grammar school went through the eighth grade. With three rooms (and only three teachers), that meant each teacher had to handle more than one grade in the classroom. After completing elementary school, children from the Gap took the bus into Dadeville for junior high and high school*.

That first Saturday when we went to see the house where we would be moving and to see the small crossroads of a community stands vividly in my memory. Railey’s Store was more old-fashioned than Davis Grocery. It was more like a general store with bare wood oiled down floors and even a pot-bellied stove that Mr. Railey would fire up in the winter. There were two gas pumps in front where you could fill up with Gulf gasoline, regular or high octane (this was before the days of unleaded). Inside, a kid could get a candy bar, just like at Davis’s, and there was also a big glass jar full of oatmeal cookies, I think they were two for a nickel. Mr. Railey always had a big hoop of cheddar cheese in the store. If you wanted cheese, he would slice off a wedge and wrap it in butcher paper to put in your grocery bag. Mom and Dad thought he had the best cheese. I liked the oatmeal cookies.

Unspoken Rules

My Dad would become friends with store owner, Hugh Railey, and made a point to stop and talk with him whenever he was at the Gap. What I would come to realize was that anyone could stop by Railey’s Store, but if you were a Black person needing groceries, Railey’s Store was where you had to go. No Black people were allowed in Davis Grocery. It was not something anyone had to declare; not a thing to be written down somewhere. It was just a fact of life.

Throughout the South, communities were organized in similar patterns. Of course, Black people needed to shop. The merchants always made sure that there was a “colored grocery,” usually located at the edge of the Black neighborhood. In Jackson’s Gap, there was a road that ran just above Railey’s Store. If you followed that road around, it led to the Black neighborhood with mostly unpainted shacks. Those shacks were owned by white folks who collected the rent. I don’t know if the rent came due weekly or monthly. I did observe how rent payment could be enforced. One afternoon when I rode with Dad to take our maid Ossie home, there was a padlock on her front door. I remember feeling fear in the pit of my stomach at the very idea of being locked out of one’s home. Ossie took it in stride, though. She would stay with a neighbor until she could come up with the rent money. 

Shotgun shacks c.1950s.

< Part 4, White Christmas                                                                                             Part 6, Neighbors >

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* My older brother, Richard, has clarified my distant memory of Jackson's Gap Elementary School. He was there for fifth and sixth grade (he was five years ahead of me). During most of my time at Jackson's Gap Elementary, there were six grades, but he reminded me that there were still 8 grades when we began. His memory offers a helpful look at how rural education was accomplished:

I went to the last half of my fifth grade and all of my sixth grade there.  When I was there, the three-room school housed grades 1 through 8.  One teacher taught grades 1 and 2, one teacher taught grades 3 - 5, and one (Mr. Paul Nickerson) taught grades 6 - 8.  So, three grades were in one room taught by one teacher.  Each grade was arranged in one or two columns of desks in grade order.

The teacher would teach 6th grade English, assign homework, and then move to 7th grade English class. By the time the teacher got to 8th grade English class, some of us had finished the 6th-grade homework, and we were allowed to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom or even buy a coke from the machine.  Somehow, we knew when it was time to return to class for 6th-grade math.

At the end of my sixth-grade year, the school lost grades seven and eight, so I went to Dadeville High School for seventh grade.

______________________

Photo credit:

• Colonial Bread screen door found on Pinterest
• Gulf gasoline pump found at Barret-Jackson Auction website
• Shotgun shacks in Overtown, c. 1950s found in a University of Miami document, Miami Housing Policy Timeline.

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Monday Music: Social Distancing - Boy in the Bubble (Paul Simon)

For years I have loved the energy of Paul Simon's Graceland album, particularly "Boy in the Bubble." Happily, someone has added some animation to update the message that "these are the days of miracle and wonder.and don't cry baby don't cry!"

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Saturday Haiku: Sunflower

face of abundance

the circle upon circle

of a sunflower

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Photo by Charles Kinnaird

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Friday Funnies: Dog - Cat (The Far Side)

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Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 4)

White Christmas

In east-central Alabama, we typically don’t get a white Christmas, at least not like the one Bing Crosby sang about. When I was a kid, I looked at many a picture book with snow-laden Christmas scenes and saw Christmas cards come in through the mail that featured snow-covered villages. In the South, we could wish for snow, but we were more likely to get rain. Snow might come later (if only for a day) but never as early as Christmas.

As children, even without the snow we began to feel the anticipation of the holiday as the time drew near. Adults would start it. They’d say, “What’s Santy Claus gonna bring ya?” or “Have you been a good little boy this year? Well mind your Mama ‘cause Santa’s comin’.”

Sights and Sounds of Christmas

One of the things that really set the stage for the holiday was putting up the Christmas tree. In rural Alabama back in the 1950s, most folks cut their own trees. Cedars grew wild in the pastures and farmland in the area. I remember going with Dad one year to look for a tree. We went to a farm owned by an older man who let us walk through the pasture to find the one we wanted. I remember Dad stopping back by the old man’s house to pay him, but the farmer just waved him off and wouldn’t hear of it. It was probably because my Dad was the preacher in town. In those days, churches paid their preachers a meager salary but people tried to make up for it in other ways. Someone might have a good day fishing on the river with too many fish to clean, and he’d take the preacher enough to feed his family. Someone else would have some corn or beans coming in and would take a mess of vegetables to the preacher’s house. Many merchants in town offered discounts for clergy.

At our house, by the time the Christmas tree went up, we had Christmas records playing. We had a little record player that played 45 and 78 RPMs and we’d delight in hearing “Up on the Housetop,” “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and the like. Of course, in Sunday School we would sing “Silent Night,” “Away in a Manger,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” 

And then there were the Christmas stories.  Dad would thrill us in reading Clement Moore's poem, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Mom would read Why the Chimes Rang, by Raymond MacDonald Alden to set a solemn yet magical tone for the holiday. Our excitement could hardly be tamped down because the next morning would be filled with drifts of wadded wrapping paper, stockings filled with candy, and the unmistakable Christmas aroma of new plastic from all of the toys gathered under the tree.

 Santa Comes to Town

We lived in Wedowee, Alabama from 1955 to 1960, so that makes it easy for me to place a relative time period on my early childhood memories since I was only a year old when we first arrived. I suppose in those days every community had its own way of marking the beginning of the Christmas season.  In Dadeville, Alabama, where I began the sixth grade, the local Girl Scouts sang carols on the courthouse steps on a Saturday afternoon as the town turned on the Christmas lights for the first time on Main Street.

In the small town of Wedowee, the county seat of Randolph County, the Christmas season was heralded by Santa riding into town on the back of a red fire engine. Children would gather at the town square in glad anticipation. Sure, New York City had the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with Santa and his sleigh as the grand finale, but we ushered jolly old St. Nicholas into town in grand style!

1955 GMC Pumper 

I remember when Dad took my brother and me to join the crowd of kids waiting to see Santa come to town. At the appointed time, we heard the siren wailing in the distance. Soon the fire truck appeared, driving through the town, Santa standing on the back and waving to the crowd. When the fire truck stopped, Santa began handing out bags of candy to all the eager children.

Christmas in the South was as segregated as all the other community activities, but there must have been some allowances in Wedowee for Santa’s visit. That day when we went to see Santa ride into town, it was an event for all children, both Black and white. It made such an impression upon me as a child that one particular image stands out in my memory to this day.  As I made my way up to see Santa who was handing out the candy to all the children, I saw a little Black girl walk up to get some candy. She was younger than I – I would have been around five, so she must have been around three years old. She had on a blue dress and pink bows tied up in her hair. The little girl walked slowly up to Santa at her mother’s encouragement, and what did Santa do?  He bent down and picked her up in his arms!  He then walked around, continuing to wave at the kids, carrying the little girl in his arms.


Of course, we knew this was not the real Santa. It was clear that he was a man in a costume. I have no idea who Santa was that day, but I never forgot the way that he carried the little Black girl in his arms. I was not accustomed to seeing Black children because Black people and white people lived separate lives and the children went to separate schools. While the little Black girl did not fit into all of the Christmas images and songs that I had in my head at that young age, that day a new image of Christmas was added to my memory. Throughout my childhood, though we never had snow, all of my Christmases were white, except for that one day.

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Photo credit:

• Vintage 1950s Christmas card was found on Pinterest
• "Unmanaged eastern red cedars" photo from Wildlife, a publication of The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation.
• The record player and fire truck images were both found on Pinterest with no credit attributed.

< Part 3, A Matter of Complexion                                  Part 5, From Town to Country > 

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Monday Music: Concerto for three harpsichords in D minor, BWV 1063 (J. S. Bach)

Concerto for three harpsichords in D minor, performed by the Netherlands Bach Society for All of Bach

From the YouTube notes:

In the Concerto for three harpsichords in D minor, performed by the Netherlands Bach Society for All of Bach, Bach plays with monophony and polyphony. It is a solo concerto, but then for three harpsichords. Sometimes all the instruments play the same melody, but then they go off on their own again. And even when they follow their own path, there are still always lines played by two, three or four hands together. When the harpsichordists are actually all playing something different, their instruments still sound like one big combined instrument.

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Saturday Haiku: Zinnias

volunteer zinnias

standing on a summer’s day

teach the way of life

_____________________________

Photo by Charles Kinnaird



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Friday Funnies: Looking for a Better Life

Some pigeons looking for a better life, perhaps?

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Poetry in Response to COVID-19

I am pleased to have three of my poems included in the new anthology, The Social Distance: Poetry in Response to COVID-19. I am doubly pleased that Alabama's Poet Laureate, Jennifer Horne, read one of my poems in her Midweek Poetry Break.

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Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 3)

Photo by Jack Delano, 1940 (Getty Images)

A Matter of Complexion

During my preschool years in the small town of Wedowee, I had been observant enough, perhaps heard enough conversations to realize that there was a difference between Blacks and whites. My understanding of race, however, was still in flux, as evidenced by the memory I now recount.

My father always had a dark tanned complexion, while my mother was of fair complexion.  In the summer, my father spent a lot of time outdoors. He tended a vegetable garden and he did a lot of walking about town in his role as pastor of the First Baptist Church. It must have been in the summertime when I noticed that it seemed that my father’s complexion was getting darker.

Preschoolers are naturally fascinated by stories of metamorphosis – tadpoles turning to frogs, caterpillars turning to butterflies. Perhaps that is what put a certain question in my mind. If my father continued to get darker, is it possible that he would turn into a negro? One night at supper, after my older brother had finished eating and had left the table, I posed the question, directing my query to my mother but glancing over to my father. “I’ve been noticing how Dad seems to be getting darker and darker. I’m just wondering, could he be turning into a negro?”

Mom and Dad chuckled at the notion. They told me no, that would not happen. Maybe they talked to me about how we all continue to be the same as when we are born even as we grow and change. I don’t remember if they elaborated further, but there is the memory of being relieved that my world was secure.

After that table conversation, I went back to the bedroom that my brother and I shared. He was four years older and knew a lot more than I did. Maybe I was still not completely settled on my question, or maybe I picked up on some uneasiness from my parents, but I felt like I had to mention it to him.

“I said something as supper tonight,” I told my brother.

“Well, what did you say?”

I ran through the conversation with my parents about Dad’s skin tone and my question of whether he might become a negro.

“Awww!” my brother said as he jostled me about the shoulders. “You should not have said that!”

  

Then we both giggled and went about our business. It had been a day of learning. I learned that day that race is a settled thing, you cannot change from one to the other. And I learned that there are some things you should not say.

As a small child watching and observing, I was trying to figure out the differences in the people of our town. The lesson learned about race that day was that while it was definitely about skin color, it was more than a matter of complexion. 


< Part 2, What's in a Name?                                                     Part 4, White Christmas >

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Monday Music: The Bricklayer's Beautiful Daughter

How I miss the Windham Hill record label, but how glad I am that we can still find the recordings from their catalog! "The Bricklayer's Beautiful Daughter" is an early recording by William Ackerman, who, along with Anne Robinson founded Windham Hill Records. The independent label specialized in acoustic instrumental music with flavors of classical, folk, and jazz.

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Saturday Haiku: Red Wheelbarrow*

so much depends

upon the repurposing

of broken things

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* Today's haiku gives a nod to William Carlos Williams

(Photo by Charles Kinnaird)

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Friday Funnies: Hog Heaven

Growing Up under Southern Apartheid (Part 2)

Downtown Wedowee as it looks today (photo by Courthouselover at Flickr)

What's in a Name?

When I was a year old, my family moved to Wedowee, Alabama when my father became pastor of the First Baptist Church. We lived there until I was six, so many of my first-experiences happened in Wedowee. It was where I had my first best friend, my first explorations of the Five & Ten Cent store, my first time to attend Sunday School and kindergarten. My understanding of family and community was honed during that time. I was happy and protected as any toddler or preschooler’s life should be.

Naturally, my first awareness of race emerged in those young years in Wedowee. One early encounter that I recall was when I was playing alone out in the front yard of the pastorium where we lived. It was a quiet neighborhood, and I was rolling about in the leaves near the street. As I sat there on the ground, I saw a Black man walking by. I was a shy, quiet kid, so I said nothing, but I watched the man as he walked by. He looked down at me as he walked and said, “I ain’t gonna hurt ya.” As he kept walking by he repeated, “I ain’t gonna hurt ya.”

I had no fear of being hurt, and I remember wondering why he was saying that. Later I went to my mother and I mentioned the Black man walking by and I asked her he kept saying he wouldn't hurt me.  As I recall, my mother said something like, he probably wanted to make sure I wasn’t afraid of him, that I need not worry.

In our small town, there was never any sense of danger that I can recall. My older brother has said that on any given Saturday when he went off to play with friends, the only direction he got from our mother was, “Just be back by suppertime.” Everyone knew that everyone else would be looking out for the kids.

Careful with the N-Word

It would have been in the late 1950s when my brother was riding his bike to meet friends and I was at play in my yard. Having contact with Black people was common, whether it was a worker walking to a job, or a maid in a household. In those days, the word we used to refer to Blacks was negro. It was the accepted term that even Martin Luther King used in his speeches in the early 1960s. When we used the term, however, with our southern dialect it was pronounced “negra.”

One day when I was playing with one of my friends, I'll call her “Jane,” who lived just up the street, a Black man was walking by. In those days there was a lot more walking, especially since there were so many who could not afford a car and also given the fact that Wedowee was too small a town to support any kind of public transportation system. I said to my friend, “There goes a negra,” simply commenting on the man I saw walking by.

“Uh-oh!” she exclaimed, “You’re not s’posed to say that word! I’m tellin’ ” With that she went skipping off into her house to report to her mother. Her mother came straight out to inform me that I was never to use that n-word, that I should say “colored” instead. My bashful self tried to explain that I didn’t say “that word,” but all I could do was to swallow my words and say, “Yes ma’am.”

Jane’s parents were always kind and generous. On that day, they wanted to make absolutely certain that I did not use any derogatory term when talking about Blacks. Even though I was not using “the n-word” that they thought I was using, the conversation was not lost on me. By the time I started school as a first-grader, I had decided that it was easier to avoid any confusion by saying “colored people*” instead of “negro” (or negra) so that my dialect did not communicate something unintended, to show I meant no disrespect.

Jane’s father was an Alabama State Trooper. He went on to become part of Gov. George Wallace’s private security detail. Serving as his primary bodyguard, he was injured by gunfire during the assassination attempt on Wallace's life. He was then appointed by the Governor to be the director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety. Years later when he died by suicide while being treated for terminal cancer, the AP news story ran in The New York Times and The Washington Post. George Wallace personally lamented the loss saying, “He was almost like a member of my family.”

~   ~   ~

< Part 1, The Long Shadow of Jim Crow                           Part 3, A Matter of Complexion >
 

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* As the Civil Rights Movement unfolded in the 1960s, finding the proper terminology to use when referring to Black people began to evolve with some terms falling in and out of favor. While "negro" was used in official writing and discourse, "colored" was seen by many as the polite term for everyday use in the 1950s and early 60s. Soon "Black" became the accepted term ("colored" and "negro" were out), and then the term "Afro-American" was in vogue for a while. In recent years, "African-American" and "Black" have both been in use. It was just last week that the Associated Press announced new writing style guidelines to capitalize Black "when referring to people in a racial, ethnic, or cultural context." The New York Times has followed suit, and I have chosen to follow those guidelines in my writing about segregation here.

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The Social Distance: A New Book

I have some poems in this new anthology that some friends and I have put together, The Social Distance: Poetry in Response to COVID-19. This collection gives voice to our struggles, questions, and hopes as we make our way through this pandemic.

The paperback comes out in September, but you can pre-order now. Check it out at Amazon.

Poetry and photographs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, sheltering in place, and related trials. The poets, who include doctors, lawyers, journalists, and other professionals open themselves up in non-sentimental, beautiful and often painful verse that seeks to capture these odd and often difficult times.














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The Bells Of Rhymney (Jakob Dylan)

"The Bells of Rhymney" was first recorded by Pete Seeger. Seeger wrote the music to accompany the words of Welsh poet Idris Davies commemorating the coal mine disaster in Wales in 1926. The Byrds recorded the song in 1965 and gave it their own unique pop/rock flavor which influenced the California rock sound of the '60s.  Echo in the Canyon is a documentary about the evolving music industry in LA's Laurel Canyon during that era. Jakob Dylan offers a fine rendition of the song. 

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Saturday Haiku: Clouds at Midday

a bright summer's day

white clouds hanging in stillness

with midday repose

_______________________

Image: "Houses at Auvers" (1890)

Artist: Vincent van Gogh

Medium: Oil on canvas

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