Category: Artists

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A Divine Dressing

Why don’t today’s chefs create dishes in honor of performing artists like those who gave us Melba toast and turkey Tetrazzini? Where’s the Bowie sundae, the Madonna cupcake or the Star Wars souffle? The need, as I see it, isn’t so much for the dishes, which are admittedly key components, but for the stories they may tell.

In 1923, George Arliss took the stage as the Rajah of Rukh in The Green Goddess. Arliss was at the height of his career. He went on to repeat his performance in the film version of the play and received an Academy Award nomination for the role, ironically losing to himself that same year (1930) when he played British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in the eponymous film.

While in San Francisco, Arliss stayed at The Palace Hotel, and for a banquet in Arliss’s honor, the executive chef of the hotel, Philippe Roemer, himself a celebrity, created an original salad dressing with an assortment of finely chopped green herbs to suggest the name of the play. The dressing is a signature recipe in the hotel’s Garden Court Restaurant, most often served with the Dungeness Crab Salad.

The classic Green Goddess recipe usually includes anchovies, mayonnaise, vinegar, green onion, garlic, parsley, tarragon and chives in some form or quantity. Some cooks add sour cream or yogurt, and a popular contemporary version includes avocado (wouldn’t it just?).

1 cup parsley leaves
1 cup packed spinach leaves, stemmed
½ cup tarragon vinegar
1/2 cup mayonnaise/sour cream
1 garlic clove, roughly chopped
3 anchovy fillets
¼ cup vegetable oil

Combine to preferred texture in a food processor. Chill well before serving on fresh greens and vegetables.

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The Dixie Limited: Faulkner’s Global Echos

With The Dixie Limited, M. Thomas Inge fills a crucial academic niche in work on the Faulkner canon. Arranged chronologically from over the last eight decades in a collection of essays, articles, reviews, letters, and interviews by Faulkner’s contemporaries and their successors.

In his introduction Inge refers to a paper presented by Thomas L. McHaney at the 1979 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, “Watching for the Dixie Limited: Faulkner’s Impact upon the Creative Writer,” later published in Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha (University Press of Mississippi: 1980), edited by Dr. Doreen Fowler and Ann Abadie. McHaney stated that “writers seem to have more in common with one another than with their own native literary establishments.” He continues to say that “the literary establishment, especially in the sense that it constitutes the best-seller and the major book-reviewing media, did not have as much to do with him . . . as did the other creative writers in English. His impact on them was immediate and sustained . . .” Inge’s thesis echoes—and subsequently amplifies—this assessment: “The novel has certainly not been the same since Faulkner, that much seems clear, and the intent here is to document some of the reasons by surveying the exact nature of what Faulkner has meant to his colleagues both in the United States and abroad.”

The title references a famous quote by Flannery O’Connor that first appeared in a paper she read in 1960 at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. The subject of the speech, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Fiction,” notes a tendency to the grotesque in the “Southern situation” as well as the “prevalence of good Southern writers.” She then states, “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Inge notes that O’Connor took heed of her own advice, and developed an original vision and distinctive style of spiritual and gothic austerity. Eudora Welty also cultivated her own talents in Faulkner’s looming shadow. “It was like living near a big mountain, something majestic—it made me happy to know it was there, all that work of his life,” she wrote. “But it wasn’t a helping or hindering presence.” She also said—with characteristic modesty—that “[Faulkner] wrote about a much vaster world than anything I ever contemplated in my own work.” She was not intimidated by Faulkner; she learned from him.

We often lose sight of Faulkner’s earlier works, situated as they are behind the towering edifices of his Yoknapatawpha novels, but he attracted the attention of other writers at the beginning of his career. The Fugitive poet and future Agrarian Donald Davidson found Soldiers’ Pay (1926) the product of “an artist in language, a sort of poet turned into prose,” and considered Mosquitoes (1927) grotesque, too heavily influenced by Joyce, yet admirable “for the skill of the performance.” Lillian Hellman read the manuscript of Mosquitoes (for publisher Boni & Liveright) and in an enthusiastic review for the New York Herald Tribune likewise found Faulkner at his worst under the influence of Joyce in overwritten passages, but the novel demonstrated to her a genius “found in the writings of only a few men.”

Following the publication of The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), nobody with an eye to the landscape of American literature could ignore the emergence of William Faulkner as a dominant if not to say dominating presence. Sherwood Anderson, writing in an essay for The American Mercury in 1930—sixteen years after the editor, H. L. Mencken, published his searing denunciation of the state of southern literature, “The Sahara of the Bozart” in the New York Evening Mail—set the stage for the century’s most celebrated literary rivalry by saying, “The two most notable young writers who have come on in America since the war, it seems to me, are William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.” This comparison became even more unavoidable as the two barreled down, traveled the same track, or —in a perhaps more apt Hemingwayesque metaphor—faced off in the same ring.

As the century wore on, more and more writers, playwrights, and poets found it contingent upon them to weigh in on Faulkner’s looming stature. His impact in Britain was impressive, though mixed, with Rebecca West and George Orwell, who, as a champion of lucid style, condemning The Hamlet in 1940 as “fatiguing” and “certainly not worth a second reading to understand it.” Somewhat predictably, considering Faulkner’s own indebtedness to Proust in both style and theme, his reception in France was both spectacular and profound. Sartre declared in 1946 that Faulkner had “evoked a revolution” through his innovations in perspective, tonal monologues, and changing the “chronological order of the story” in behalf of “a more subtle order, half logical, half intuitive.” In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, Sartre wrote, “Pour la jeune France, Faulkner c’est un dieu.”

Inge delineates Faulkner’s deep impression on the literature of South America, saying, “By liberating these writers, and many others, from the traditional themes and methods of narration, and paving the way for new techniques in dealing with time and history and modern tragedy, Faulkner helped generate what may be the most vital writing in the world at the century’s end,” even going so far as to say, “It is indeed arguable that [Gabriel García] Márquez’s 1967 masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), could not have been possible without Faulkner’s fiction to serve as inspiration and master instruction.” Inge also describes Faulkner’s global impact with contributions from writers in South Africa, Japan, and China.

In addition to the two above-mentioned, Dixie Limited includes a generous portion of women writers: Kay Boyle, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Spencer, Lee Smith, and others. Excruciatingly appropriate on several levels are selections from black writers: Ralph Ellison, Chester Gaines, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Faulkner’s fellow Mississippian Richard Wright. Faulkner’s impact—and lack thereof—on political and social issues features prominently in Baldwin’s essay, “Faulkner and Desegregation,” and it’s also the theme of perhaps the most endearing essay in the collection, Roark Bradford’s “The Private World of William Faulkner” (1984).

Faulkner’s critics are not ignored. In addition to Orwell, you’ll find disparaging statements—in varying degrees and often at different stages in their own careers—from Ellen Glasgow, Booth Tarkington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Ann Porter, John Barth, Truman Capote, John Steinbeck, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as a generous helping of bile from Hemingway. Inge includes “one of the most damning assessments perhaps ever written about Faulkner” from Irish short story writer Sean O’Faolain, who concluded in a1953 address at Princeton University, that Faulkner demonstrated “More genius than talent.”  You’ll find most of these in Inge’s remarkable introduction, which deserves reading and re-reading for only for those includes these poison pen remarks, but also for and also paeons from the likes of Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, William Styron, Shelby Foote, and Walker Percy, along with illuminating observations from Richard Ford and John Grisham.

Though The Dixie Limited is an academic work, it is important for the lay scholar as well, particularly those of us who grew up in the same milieu as that of the man many consider the most important writer of the Twentieth Century. Our proximity to Faulkner seems to have bred in us a nonchalant acceptance of his stature. This book provides perspectives for a balanced appreciation of a literary figure of global stature from the hills of north Mississippi.

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Paramount Records and the Roots of Mississippi Blues

In March 2014, Jack White’s Third Man Records and John Fahey’s Revenant Records released the second and final volume of its limited edition box sets, “The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records”. The first volume, issued in November 2014, documented Paramount’s origins as a furniture manufacturer (1888) on a Michigan river to nationally-distributed recording company (1917) that came to immortalize the names of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey and Fats Waller, among many others.

Paramount began its “race record” series in 1922 with a scattering of vaudeville blues by Lucille Hegamin and Alberta Hunter. These recordings quickly became a profitable sideline for the company, and when Blind Lemon Jefferson was discovered by a Texas record dealer and became Paramount’s stellar recording artist in 1926, Paramount shifted its focus to Southern blues, folk and spiritual music. This second volume of “The Rise and Fall” documents the label’s brief but incalculably influential final period between 1928 and 1932. These recordings established the foundations of Mississippi blues, the Golden Age of Gospel (1945-58), the swing bands of the 1940s, and documented a treasure-trove of sound that defies classification. In the introductory narrative to the art book included with the box set, Scott Blackwood asserts that Paramount “caught sounds more representative of the quality and variety of America’s vernacular music in the 1920s and ‘30s than anything being done by the Library of Congress or anyone else.”

Blues authority Edward Komara agrees. “The Library of Congress folk music division did not begin until 1928, and the Lomax father-and-son team (John and Alan) embarked on their first field-recording trips of consequence in 1933, one year after Paramount had closed. In the late 1930s, Alan Lomax recognized the Paramount 78s as relevant to the kinds of folk music sung and played before 1933. Furthermore, when Harry Smith compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music sets in the early 1950s for Folkways Records, he used quite a few of Paramount’s recordings. So for a lot of blues and a fair amount of other music before 1933, listeners will only find them on Paramount.”

Mississippi blues are first mentioned in Charles Peabody’s “Notes on Negro Music” in the July-September 1903 issue of “The Journal of American Folk-Lore”. He described the music, which he heard near Clarksdale, as “…weird in interval and strange in rhythm; peculiarly beautiful.” Around the same time, at a train stop in Tutwiler, W.C. Handy first heard a Delta slide guitarist playing and singing “Goin’ Where the Southern Crosses the Dog.” With the celebrity of Blind Lemon Jefferson, and building on the work of J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, who had marketed Paramount’s recordings to African-Americans through the company’s large mail-order operation, the label soon discovered a gold seam in the Mississippi Delta by way of H.C. Speir, who owned a furniture store on Farish Street in Jackson. Speir was Paramount’s premier talent scout in Mississippi. While the company was building its new recording studio in Grafton, Michigan in 1929, Paramount sent Speir’s recent discovery, Charley Patton, to the studio of Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana, where he cut 14 sides that established Patton as the “Father of the Delta Blues”. The year 1928 heard the first notes of a swan song for Paramount, but in the years before its demise in 1932 the label produced some of the most coveted recordings in the brief history of wax; a staggering playlist of 175 artists, including Skip James, Son House, Tommy Johnson, Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, The Mississippi Sheiks and scores of others.

The recordings on Volume Two span 800 newly-remastered digital tracks, all of them on a specially-programmed USB app, and 96 of the best on 6 vinyl LPs. Blues recordings comprise the lion’s share of this content, 580 tracks of blues, or 74% of the 800 tracks; 108 tracks fall into the category of sacred music, the rest, some 112 tracks, are of white dance or country/hillbilly music. Some defy classification, such as those of early southern fiddler D.D. Hollis performing songs that he had learned as a boy in the 1860s and 1870s and the sides by ukulele players Small and Hayes. Komara notes that among the tracks on the second Paramount set that Mississippians should know are Charley Patton’s “Pony Blues”, “Spoonful Blues,” and “High Water Everywhere”; Son House’s “My Black Mama”; Willie Brown’s “Future Blues”; Skip James’ “I’m So Glad” and “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues”; Geechie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues”; and Elvie Thomas’ “Motherless Child Blues”, but that is only scratching the surface. The LPs are pressed on label-less alabaster-white vinyl, each side with its own hand-etched numeral and holographic image; also included in the set is a first-of-its-kind music and image player app containing all tracks and ads, housed on custom metal USB drive.

Almost at par with the recordings are the printed materials included in the box set, two genre-definitive large-format books: a 250-page hardcover art book and 400-page field guide. The key words here are “genre-definitive”, since the bulk of information they contain as well as the level of scholarship and research they represent is with the exception of contributor Alex van der Tuuk’s Paramount’s Rise and Fall (Mainspring Press, 2003) the most complete and authoritative work thus far on the Paramount Record label. The art book is a sumptuous compilation in terms of both text and images. Blackwood’s narrative in Volume Two, a preface and 10 chapters, covers the label’s “final, furious push … a push for a kind of immortality, it turned out, though no one involved would have deigned to even dream of such a thing.” Blackwood, it should be noted, was nominated for a 2015 Grammy for his narrative in Volume One and this companion piece, as poetic as it is informative, scattered with images of performers and company personnel, should be savored and studied as a masterful assessment of the declining arc of an American musical and entrepreneurial phenomena. The 115 pages of plates include an astounding range of advertisements (over 90 from The Chicago Defender), labels on 78s, letters, invoices and other ephemera. The field guide though stark by comparison is nonetheless just as impressive with 400 pages of artist bios and portraits as well as the full Paramount discography.

The collection is housed in a handsome polished aluminum and stainless steel Machine Age-style cabinet, upholstered in sapphire blue velvet. As Revenant owner Dean Blackwood elaborated in a December 2013 interview with Downbeat magazine, “The Rise and Fall of Paramout” leaves the world of box sets far behind. “Boxed sets are a ghetto, limited by their category. We didn’t want to imitate a form, but to achieve the form itself. It’s more like a piece of furniture, or a first edition book.” In order to achieve the form of a piece of furniture, Third Man and Revenant risked lowering the priority of the recorded music to equal standing with the visual and tactile materials, an appropriate gamble for Paramount Records since after all the label’s owner was a furniture company that rolled dice and came up with sevens.

Though Mississippi blues, Delta blues in particular, are globally recognized as America’s premier contribution to world music, the vast majority of the genre’s devotees in the state who canonize its artists and exploit its legacy have never heard its essential sounds. Komara asserts that there is “no better primer of early Mississippi blues (Delta and elsewhere) than what you have access to in the second Paramount set.” At $400, “The Rise and fall of Paramount, Volume Two” exceeds the budgets of many if not most people, but these recordings should be a serious consideration for any Mississippian who has an abiding love for the blues or Mississippi music in general, particularly those with an eye for stylish packaging. This set is also recommended as an essential addition to libraries in the state whose patrons would utilize it as a resource for entertainment as well as education.

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Ars Voces: Wyatt Waters and The Great Out Here

I started painting when I was 2 years old; my kindergarten teacher taught me to read and to paint the story. She was really interested in art, and when I started school she gave me private lessons. She’s probably the reason I started painting.

My dad fought in WWII, so his values reflected that: had to work, had to study. I can’t do just a little bit of something; I have to do a lot of it. I can’t do it for an hour and a half a day. If I don’t have a good immersion in it, it just isn’t going to happen. I went to Mississippi College, and we didn’t have aesthetics, but we had a creative writing class. It was so fun to be in that class: theme variations, tension, restraint; the big things. That was really my only aesthetics class, that and going to the truck stop to drink coffee after we’d dropped our dates off. You had to get your dates in by 10 p.m. back then.

I’m a dinosaur; I paint outside. I usually start to paint things based on what I call The Great Out Here, the reflected and atmospheric lights that are in the world. The more I paint, the more I look at something, the more it gets on my retina and creates an after-image when I look away from it. You know how a flash bulb goes off and you can still “see” this thing floating in your vision? Well, it’s that sort of thing. It’s why I work on location, because it happens when I’m working on location, and it doesn’t happen for me in the studio, at least not in the same way.

I carry a mirror with me. When I don’t know what to do, I look in the mirror, and the mirror tells me what it looks like to other people. It gives me some objectivity on what I’m seeing. And that probably is the trickiest thing that I use. Painting is considered kind of trick, you know, techniques and all that. I used to be pretty technique-y, but that takes the left-hand side of the brain and puts it on the right-hand side. When you’re writing something, and you come back to it the next day, it’s the same effect; you see how other people see it. When you’re close to it, you can’t tell what to do, so I use a mirror progressively as the painting develops. Like penicillin, I use it when I need it.

It’s also tied in to the idea that the real experience is a lost thing. We’re almost a virtual society now, and in a virtual kind of world, it becomes important for me to make a case for the real experience, or at least to be out there saying that here it is. So that’s what I do, paint on location, and let the real experience of being in front of something affect me, to let that to be my influence.

Invariably, though, when you’re working outside, all sorts of things are going to happen and you’re going to get into the zone, that hypnotic place, and you begin painting expressively. I try to let that happen; I don’t know how to make it happen, but when I paint, it seems to happen on its own. I’ve always loved how watercolor doesn’t do what you want it to do. It’s the only medium I can think of that moves while you’re painting; it drips and runs. It’s like dancing; It isn’t what you make it do, it’s taking advantage of what it’s doing in the first place. It’s like riding a horse. The horse knows something about the field; you don’t drive a horse, you listen to the horse.

I went to Paris, and here I was in one of the great centers of the art world, and I got really homesick. I figured out that the things I want to paint are all here. I didn’t think it would be that way, but all the things I want to do are here.

Anthony Difatta
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Mississippi’s American Rivers

The Rivers of America is an important series of books that started in 1937 with the publication of Kennebec: Cradle of Americans by Robert P. T. Coffin and ended in 1974 with the publication of The American: River of El Dorado by Margaret Sanborn. For the most part, the editors were successful in bringing the regional folk life of America to focus through the lenses of her rivers.

Constance Lindsay Skinner, a Canadian writer and historian initially conceived the series in the early 1930s. She was also the first series editor. In an essay that was included in early volumes of the series, Skinner stated, “This is to be a literary and not a historical series. The authors of these books will be novelists and poets. On them, now in America, as in all lands and times, rests the real responsibility of interpretation.” Skinner lived to edit only six of the volumes, but her criteria for authors and the freedom she granted them—a policy continued by subsequent editors—guaranteed not only the success, but the importance of the series.

The series’ editors sought out a wide cross section of poets, novelists, historians, and illustrators to produce living literary portraits rather than historical tomes. The illustrators included many famous and soon-to-be-famous artists, including R.E. Banta, Ross Santee, John Steuart Curry, Nicolai Fetchin, John McCrady, and Andrew Wyeth. George Annand and Rafael Palacios were the series’ principal cartographers. Annand drew the maps for nearly half the forty-nine Rivers books published in the first eighteen years of the series, including the two “Mississippi Rivers” The Lower Mississippi and The Yazoo.

Skinner wanted the Rivers of America books to create popular literature reflecting the regional history of America. For Skinner, it was imperative to incorporate a Southern region into her work, partially to confirm that a distinct and vibrant population still resided in the South. As she wrote to a potential author during the series’ planning stages, “I had been sure there was this solid ‘backbone’, a sound folk-core, or the southern backcountry would have gone back to timber and wild animals.”

For the South to work in Skinner’s series, its character had to stem from the people’s relationship with nature, specifically with the natural history of the rivers of the nation. Cecile Hulse Matschat’s Suwannee River: Strange Green Land (1938) remains a best-selling volume, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a landmark in American environmental writing.

Of Skinner’s original vision of twenty-four volumes, three focused on Southern rivers, the Suwannee, the Arkansas, and the Lower Mississippi, designated to portray the Mississippi River south of St. Louis. (The Upper Mississippi: A Wilderness Saga, by Walter Havighurst, the second volume in the River series, was published in 1937). All told, however, only seven rivers in the South are covered in the series: the Tennessee—two books, both by Donald Davidson The Old River, (1946) and The New River (1948), inclusive of the profound changes wrought by the Tennessee Valley Authority—the Santee, the Arkansas, the St. Johns, the French Bend, and in Mississippi, the Lower Mississippi, and the Yazoo.

Skinner died in 1939. Nearly a year later, in 1940, the publisher, Farrar & Rinehart, announced the editors of the Rivers of America series, Stephen Vincent Benét and Carl Carmer. Four Rivers titles were published under their editorial guidance in 1940 (The Wabash, by William E. Wilson; The Arkansas, by Clyde Brion Davis; The Delaware, by Harry Emerson Wildes; and The Illinois, by James Gray). Three more titles followed in 1941, The Charles, by Charles Bernon Tourtellot; and the The Kaw, by Floyd Benjamin Streeter, and The Brandywine, by Henry Seidel Canby, which included the first illustrations of the young Andrew Wyeth.

The Lower Mississippi

A book on the Lower Mississippi is named on the first page of Constance Skinner’s “Rivers of America Journal,” a preliminary plan for the series, dated August 17, 1935. Written as “New Orleans & Lower Mississippi,” the author Skinner designated for the volume was Edward Larocque Tinker. Tinker today is best known as a scholar of Latin American culture, but he wrote several books about New Orleans, including Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days (1924) and Closed Shutters: Old New Orleans – the Eighties (1931), but for whatever reasons did not take on the Lower Mississippi volume.

The editors then committed to a contract with Lyle Saxon, writer and journalist who reported for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, who had written Father Mississippi in 1927. However, Saxon apparently reneged on the project (likely because he was directing the Federal Writers’ Project Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Louisiana (1941). Carmer came to New Orleans to cancel the Farrar & Rinehart contract with Lyle Saxon for the Rivers book on the Lower Mississippi where he met a family friend, Betty Carter, wife of Greenville, Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter II. At the time, Carter was in New York City, working for the progressive newspaper, PM.

While he was at Harvard, in response to an invitation and subsequent encouragement from an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Hodding Carter had written five chapters of a book which was to analyze the racial and political situation of the South. (Carter’s work was not accepted.) Showing Carmer the material Hodding had written for Knopf, Betty was able to interest Carmer in Hodding as the “perfect” candidate for the writing of the Mississippi work. In July, 1940, Hodding Carter signed the contract for Lower Mississippi, receiving a $400 advance. In September, he resigned from PM and returned to Greenville and his newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times.

The Carters did much of the research for the book at the Tulane University library. In November 1940 the National Guard was called to active duty. Hodding’s regiment was moved to Florida, and he became a correspondent for the Democrat-Times. He had offers for such work from two other newspapers and from the Associated Press, but he concentrated on writing the Rivers book. Reviewing its early chapters, Carl Carmer observed that the book would be one of the two most significant volumes of the series. He advised Carter not to worry about the June 1, 1941 deadline established in the contract, noting that the book was too good to hurry. The Lower Mississippi was published in the fall of 1942 to favorable reviews.

Writing in The New York Times (Dec. 6, 1942), noted critic Horace Reynolds—who also took a strong interest in Faulkner’s first novels as well as the early publications of the Lomaxes—stated, “By responding to the realistic rather than the romantic aspect of his river, Mr. Carter has written one of the best books in the Rivers of America series. His astringent approach is fresh and welcome. He has dug below the surface ease and softness of the delta life to the savagery and pain which lie beneath them.”

“No river in America has been more over-romanticized than the Lower Mississippi,” Reynolds wrote. “Fiction, popular history and popular song have all combined to give it a personality which does not exist. The Lower Mississippi doesn’t look like the pictures or sound like the songs. It is a wilderness of muddy water and deep sky, with a thin wedge of flat land in between. Its great beauty is not easily discernible. To that beauty, which has been best described by Lafcadio Hearn, Mr. Carter is articulately sensitive. But he is no exploiter of the Southern tradition. A man of thought and conscience, he is troubled by the social problems of a section to the intensity of whose plight the phenomenon of a Huey Long is an index. His book cuts deep into the life of his valley.”

The book was illustrated by John McCrady. In a letter to the Carol Fitzgerald, author of The Rivers of America: A Descriptive Bibliography (1991), Matt Martinez, a friend of John McCrady’s widow, Mary, wrote that he had spoken to Mrs. McCrady about her husband’s role as illustrator of The Lower Mississippi: “To address your questions, Mrs. McCrady felt that Hodding Carter approached McCrady, but this was fifty years ago or so, so it’s a little hazy. Mr. Mc and Carter were boyhood friends in Hammond, Louisiana, in the late 19teens. and early 1920s…. I’m not sure of any causal information in terms of who approached who at that time, but the two men who are a big part of The Lower Mississippi had a personal history together that preceded their professional association.”

In his foreword to “John McCrady 1911-1968,” a catalog issued by the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1975, E. John Bullard, the museum’s director, observed, “During the 1930s John McCrady was recognized as the most important exponent of Regionalism working in the South. In his paintings, McCrady visually captured the unique aspects of rural Mississippi and Louisiana with the same authenticity and insight that Benton and Curry brought to their depictions of the Mid-West.” Life published a five-page spread on the artist and commissioned him to paint “the second in a series of dramatic scenes in twentieth century American history.” McCrady chose to paint the assassination of Huey Long and produced perhaps his best-known, and certainly his most controversial artwork.

The Yazoo

 

The second Mississippi river included in the Rivers of America Series is the Yazoo, However important the Yazoo seems to Mississippians—and the Yazoo Basin undeniably has the richest cultural heritage of any other section of the state—its choice as a subject for the Rivers series gives us some food for thought. Three other rivers, the Atchafalaya, the Tombigbee, and perhaps particularly the Red River (of the South) deserved consideration.

So why the Yazoo? The answer is Hodding Carter. Carter’s friendship—if not to say influence—with Carl Carmer, who by 1949 had become the principal editor of The Rivers of America, and would remain the series editor until the publication of the final book (The American: River of El Dorado, by Margaret Sanborn) in 1974. Carter must also have already had in mind Frank E. Smith as the author. Smith was managing editor of the liberal-leaning newspaper Greenwood Morning Call in 1946 and 1947. He was a legislative assistant to United States Senator John Stennis from 1947 to 1949 and was elected to and served as a member of the Mississippi State Senate from 1948 until 1950, when he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional district.

In a June 1991 letter, Smith wrote, “I started on the Yazoo in 1947, when I was recommended to the editor by Hodding Carter, who had written Lower Mississippi a few years before. He was a friend and associate in newspaper work. I wrote two or three sample chapters, and Rinehart gave me a contract and a $1,000 advance.”

On January 7, 1948, Frank Smith signed an agreement with Rinehart & Company which called for delivery of a completed manuscript of The Yazoo in its final revised form on or before January 1, 1951. He was to receive royalties of 10% of the retail price on the first 5,000 copies sold; 121/2% on the next 5,000 copies. sold; and 15% on all copies sold thereafter. He was to be receive an advance on royalties of $750, $250 on signing the agreement, $250 on delivery of the manuscript, and $250 upon publication of the book.

“I forgot about the contract when I became involved in some personal endeavors,” Smith later wrote, “but was reminded of it in 1953, when Rinehart wrote telling me to produce the manuscript in three- or four-months’ time or return the money. I was busy at that time as a member of Congress, but I didn’t have the money to reimburse them, so I produced the manuscript, and it was published the next year with no revisions or deletions.”

Reviews of The Yazoo were overwhelmingly favorable. Reviewing in the Chicago Tribune, (May 16, 1954) Harnett T. Kane, author of Huey Long’s Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship 1928-1940 (1941) wrote, “The author is something of a rarity, a politician who can write. The 36-year-old Mississippi congressman had a role in the ending of Bilboism; he represents a new south. His style is non-lyric, non-emotional, almost matter- of-fact. a novelty in certain circles of regional writing.”

Fellow Mississippian Hubert Creekmore, reviewing in the New York Times (May 9, 1954) states, “Since Frank Smith is a Delta native and a Congressman, it is not surprising that his best passages are those dealing with political, and economic problems. His discussion of the sharecropper-commissary system is concise and understanding, and the survey of flood control and the touchy subject of the four dams on Yazoo tributaries is sensible.” Finally, Hodding Carter himself, in his review of The Yazoo in his newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times (May 9, 1954), writes, “(Smith) is Mr. Yazoo, even Mr. Delta himself; attuned to and informed on its manifold problems.” Here it must be noted that both Creekmore and Carter take Smith to task, Creekmore “for the omission of a full and organized essay on the Delta planters” and Carter for Smith turning a blind eye to Parchman penal farm, “the nation’s worst such institution, where the lash, the convict trust system, and the lack of any real rehabilitation program conspire to breed worse criminals out of men who are to be returned to society.”

The illustrations in The Yazoo are by Janet Turner (1914-1988), a Missourian who graduated with distinction in 1936 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Far Eastern History. Her first postgraduate work was done at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied under Thomas Hart Benton and John de Martelly, the illustrator of The Wabash (1940), the eighth book in the Rivers series. In 1941, after five years of postgraduate work, she was awarded the Institute’s diploma. She attended Claremont College for two years, studying under Millard Sheets and Henry McFee, receiving a master’s degree in fine arts in 1947.

During her artistic career, Turner had more than two hundred one-woman shows, won more than a hundred awards, and saw her works displayed in every state of the United States and in more than forty foreign countries. Her works were purchased by prestigious museums and galleries around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seventy of her prints were purchased by the United States Information Agency for display in U.S. embassies around the world, and more than two hundred of her prints and paintings are held in some eighty college or museum collections.

In the early 1950s, Turner was living in Nacogdoches, Texas, teaching at Stephen F. Austin State College. In 1952, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to experiment with prints of Gulf Coast flora and fauna. She was primarily a printmaker at this time, utilizing different printmaking techniques in new and unique ways. Given her illustration of the Greenwood Leflore Hotel (below), it’s almost certain that Turner came to Greenwood sometime in 1953, though Smith wrote that they never met.

 . . .

The first edition of The Lower Mississippi received four printings between 1942 and 1959 (1942, 1945, 1947, and 1959) ranging in price from $2.50 (1942-45), to $3.50 (1947) and $5 (1959). The number of copies printed is unknown, but according to WorldCat, the book is held in 887 libraries worldwide. Almost all are the first (1942) printing,

The Yazoo had an initial printing of 5,000 copies, and a projected reprint of another 5,000. How many copies Rinehart actually published is unknown, however WorldCat finds the 1954 edition in 507 libraries. The Yazoo was reprinted (in paperback) in 1988 by University Press of Mississippi. According to Frank Smith’s son Fred, University Press printed 1000 copies in paperback, and printed 50 special edition hardback copies, all of which were signed by Frank Smith and sold at Choctaw Books in Jackson, Mississippi.

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Ars Voces: Thomas Wilson

I was always interested in art, but it wasn’t until 2000, when I was in my mid-thirties that I began going to galleries and taking a serious interest in painting. When I was living in Monroe, La., a local college was offering a painting class through their community enrichment program, so I signed up for a course, six hour-long sessions, and I became hooked at that point. I completed one painting in that course, and after that put it down for a while. Not long after that I was driving through my neighborhood there and saw an easel set up in a window. I found out a lady was teaching a class there, so I took that. We painted from photographs of old masters and I didn’t like painting from a photograph even back then. I learned how to mix paints, some composition, and basic things.

Shortly after that, I moved back to Jackson, this was 2007, I was painting on my own, improving basically by trial and error, still painting from images and still life, but I wanted to be legit, I didn’t want to be just basically copying somebody else. My uncle, who had taken art from Bob Tompkins, saw my paintings and said I should go see Tompkins. He was very helpful; he just didn’t go as far as I wanted to go. I wanted to paint the landscape. I asked him about that once, and he said that he was a studio painter.

But I wanted to paint outside; the artists I was drawn to painted on location from life. So I took a workshop from Roger Dale Brown in Nashville, who is a very well-known plein air painter, and I learned a ton from him about painting outside. After that, I struck out on my own and simply painted what I saw. My still lifes were very tight, very realistic; but when you’re painting outside, you don’t have a lot of time to fuss around because you only have like an hour or an hour and a half before the light changes. The painting of Fenian’s was different for me. I wanted to try painting at night, which has never really worked out well, but I was riding around, saw the rain, found a good place to stand, and really the subject isn’t so much Fenian’s as it is the atmosphere, the feel of the street, the clouds, the telephone poles.

The one in Vicksburg is different because it’s earlier in the day than I usually paint; I rarely paint in the middle of the day. It was also cloudy, and I couldn’t find a sunny spot to paint, and I like to paint when there’s a lot of sun. I like light and dark and shadow. I wanted to paint with the sky as the subject, the main part of the painting. The sun had come out a bit, but the light wasn’t as intense as what I normally paint. I visited Wyatt Waters recently, and I asked him about painting things that don’t really inspire me. I asked him if he had a hard time finding something to paint when he’s not inspired, and he said, “Inspiration is for amateurs; you’ve got to get out there and start painting and the inspiration will come.” So I’ve been trying to make myself paint even when I’m really uninspired.

When I moved to Belhaven, I wasn’t impressed and thought about leaving, but I kept putting it off. Then I started painting outside, and I fell in love with it. When I first moved here, I was thinking I simply wanted to paint landscapes. I didn’t want any man-made structures in a painting. I wanted it to look like an old master painting with nothing modern in it at all. There’s a dictum in art about not painting anything that’s beautiful, that you really can’t improve on it, and I think there’s something to that. I like stuff that’s funky and gritty. Now I really don’t want to paint anything unless it has a city street or a sidewalk or a telephone pole in it. It all kind of came together moving here. Being immersed in a locale, you see more.

I’m not much for change, and I’ve stuck with the same basic palette Bob Tompkins taught me; I even still set it up the same way he showed me. But Jarrod Partridge was a big help to me developing my palette because he studied under the colorists, like a of Mississippi painters. Sammy Britt, Richard Kelso, John Pat Marbury all studied under Henry Hensche, whose lineage goes back to William Merritt Chase. Jarrod helped me with my color, and I need good color because I want to make beautiful paintings, but still the most important elements to me are the light and dark, the contrast. I think someone would say I’m a tonalist, working with light and dark. I’ve heard it said that if the light and dark are correct, that the colors will work no matter what they are, but I consider myself just someone who paints what he sees.

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Mickler’s Revolt

By 1986 publishing was already wedded to celebrity so much so that the best-selling cookbook that year was by “The Frugal Gourmet”, an ordained minister who was convicted of molesting teenage boys some years later. But Smith, for all his faults, was an international media presence, while Ernest Matthew Mickler (God rest his sweet soul) who in the same year published White Trash Cooking, was a dying man with a vision.

Ernie insisted on the title, which left him an open target since his simultaneously unblinking and winking approach to the stereotype of the rural South confounded people across the country as well as people on the Redneck Riviera. The only thing even remotely resembling a precedent for White Trash Cooking was written by another Floridian, Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies in anthropology brought her back home, much as it did Mickler, who threw down a gauntlet, insisting that while the nation might profile Southerners as a whole as white trash, the behaviors that earmark anyone anywhere as decent and honorable hold sway in the American South as well, a region that is no more tragic than any other section of the country.

He also knew that people outside of the South consider us low and mean, but we are (as they are) a layered society undeserving of their unilateral condemnation; our culture, our manners, our morals all have as much a measure of  civilized imprint as those of our fellow countrymen, but instead of embracing our differences, they persist in considering the South and its people worthy of their disdain.

With White Trash Cooking, Mickler opened a portal of discovery into the essential character not only of the South, but of the nation; white trash cooking uses cheap ingredients, commercially frozen, dried or canned, few seasonings, packaged mixes, plenty of salt and sugar, lard and margarine in dishes that are quick and easy to cook, unsullied by any degree of sophistication. It remains the most basic form of cooking in the nation,  the cooking of people who don’t read Bon Appetit, people who work a forty-hour week (or more) at a poorly-paying job with little or no insurance, living from paycheck to paycheck, struggling to make a life for themselves and their children. They wouldn’t go to a Whole Foods store unless they lived next door and had to, which is good advice for anybody without an attitude.

White Trash Cooking celebrates a significant surface of our many-faceted country, one we should all recognize as uniquely ours and none others. Love it.

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Sambo Mockbee: Legacy, Community, and the Empowerment of Myth

When the American Institute of Architects awarded Samuel (Sambo) Mockbee the AIA Gold Medal in 2003, he joined an elite company of architects (including Thomas Jefferson) who received the award posthumously. “The AIA does not like to confer a gold medal on people who are no longer living,” says architect Tom Howorth. “It’s an award for those who have the potential to continue contributing to the field of architecture. The fact that it was conferred on Sambo confirms he is continuing to shape the architectural landscape.”

Sambo Mockbee died in 2001. Hailed as a visionary with designs such as the Barton House in Madison, the Cook House in Oxford and the Magee Church of Christ to name a very few, Mockbee set an even higher benchmark when he and D.K. Ruth co-founded the Rural Studio at Auburn University. There in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt, the studio continues to be a place where students learn the social responsibilities of architecture by creating homes and buildings with a spirit for poor communities.

“Sambo’s mission was to see about people,” Jackie Mockbee says. Jackie married Sambo in 1970. “We had two blind dates, we really did,” Jackie says. “The first was at a homecoming for Sambo when he was at Fort Benning. I’m sure he didn’t remember me; I just remember having fun watching everyone there. Two years later, my cousin called me and said they were going to a party and said there’s this guy that we all know who needs a date. They started telling me who he was, and. I said, ‘Wait a minute; I’ve had a date with him before.’

They asked me if I had fun, and I told them that we really didn’t get to know one another. That night, Sambo asked me if I went to MSCW, if I was a Baptist and if I’d marry him. I said, ‘Yes, yes and no.’ That was in August. We were married that December.” The Mockbees had four children, but Jackie remembers that at their home in Canton, “We had kids everywhere.” Jackie says. “They ran all around the neighborhood, but always ended up in our yard. Sambo was like the Pied Piper; he always had something going on, he was always the coach, and when he hit that door, the kids came running.”

“He was a gregarious, affable, lovable teddy-bear of a guy,” says Malcolm White, a long-time friend. “Once you became his friend, you were his friend for life. He loved collecting eclectic personalities. He was an engaging conversationalist and could sit up literally all night and carry on about Van Gogh or the Civil War or American history or Western civilization or anything else you might be interested in.”

Magee Church of Christ (photo by L. David Fox)“He believed in legacy, he believed in creating things that would last,” Malcolm says. “He wrote a check out of an account that didn’t have a nickel in it for the first float that I ever purchased, the very same trailer that the Sweet Potato Queens use today.”

“In the early 80s, Sambo had an office on North Street on a stretch of property that’s now parking lots,” Malcolm says. “On Friday afternoons, Sambo would gather people and would serve Heinekens, which he loved, and sausages or peanuts, whatever he had on hand. Sambo began to explain to us that he had this big idea that he was closing in on, this notion that was going to involve all of us,” Malcolm says. “He wanted to empower rural people of little means in the same way that wealthy people could empower him to design beautiful, elaborate offices. He wanted to incorporate not just architecture and design, but philanthropy and entertainment and recreation, all the components that build community. Basically what he was talking about became the Rural Studio.”

Former partner Coleman Coker first met Mockbee in Corinth. “I think in 1980 or 1981, and we hit it off, just sitting around and talking. Neither one of us had much work at the time,” Coleman says. “He was making a lot of collages, I was painting, and that’s where we found a commonality in translating the world as we saw it through our constructions and paintings into architectural compositions. We never were successful going out and marketing ourselves, particularly to corporate clients,” Coleman says. “Most of the work we were proudest of involved small residences for people looking for something different, looking for something that had a relationship to place, to locale. Most of those buildings were reflections of the clients, an extension of their personalities, and as we got more built, more people would see them and give us a call.”

“We didn’t sit around talking about the work of other architects; we’d talk about literature—Welty and Faulkner—looking for roots, connections to place, and we found that so much more directly through Southern writers,” Coleman says. “There’s no long tradition of Southern architecture outside of the classical, which comes from Europe, and we weren’t looking for that. We were trying to build on what was just beneath the surface here in the Deep South, whether it was black culture or the culture of the landed gentry, whatever mythology could be unearthed.” Mythology, Coleman admits, is “difficult to talk about.”

“Sambo, through the paintings that he did, was building a whole mythological world,” Coleman says. “Characters would repeat themselves throughout the paintings, and they started telling a narrative. It’s easier to render a narrative through literature, even through painting, than it is through architecture, yet you strive to expound those roots and reprocess them through design. Our concern with social responsibility in professional ethics fell in trying to reach out to a group that was estranged otherwise,” Coleman says. “We were trying to design in context with this locale, the locale in a social sense, when the abject poverty in much of Mississippi was virtually ignored by the great majority of designers and the great majority of people who could afford architects.”

“Eutaw: Children of Eutaw Pose Before their Ancient Cabin” (Mural, photo by L. David Fox)

In 1993, Mockbee and D.K. Ruth founded the Rural Studio. “Prior to the Rural Studio there were a few notable construction-focused, hands-on learning opportunities in architecture schools in the country, notably at Yale,” says Tom Howorth, also a former partner. “But there was nothing on the scale, level of commitment and pedagogical continuity that runs through the Rural Studio. Now there are those sorts of programs across the country. So much of what we do is picked from catalogues that the work of putting buildings together becomes a matter of picking the systems that exist and putting them together in a way that you solve the client’s problem,” Tom says. “That wasn’t what Sambo was interested in; he was interested in creating from scratch. He challenged students to think originally.”

Daughter Carol Mockbee recalls that “Papa (Sambo) first started talking about the Subrosa Pantheon in 1999. In the summer of 2001, they started digging in the Alabama clay. D.K.’s mother had died, as well as two young professors at Auburn, and that was probably when they came to the decision to build a memorial space for the Rural Studio, a place to remember and meditate and reflect. So they started digging out the site for the Pantheon in Newbern. By August, they’d poured the first slab. Papa got really sick that fall and passed away in December.”

“The project was suspended for two years,” Carol says. “After I graduated from Auburn in interior design I applied to the Rural Studio as an outreach student to finish the Pantheon. I knew the idea, knew my father’s mythology behind it, and knew that he loved the project. Had I known then what I know now, I don’t think I would have touched it. But, luckily, I was ignorant, young and energetic. For the first few months, I worked on other projects. I had to find my own way, find my role and boundaries. Everyone was skeptical; one engineer at Auburn said, ‘You know, if you were my daughter, I would not let you do this.’ I left that meeting thinking that I am Sambo Mockbee’s daughter and he wouldn’t want me to be doing anything else. I completed it on August 27, 2005. I was so preoccupied with my last pour three days before that I had no idea Katrina was coming.”

“Every June 21, you can go into the Pantheon and stand at different points, align yourself with stars and planets, then sit on a bench next to someone, lean away from them, whisper into a pipe on your side, and the secret travels back to them.”

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Valley of Dry Bones: Howard Bahr

In 1951, author S. Skip Farrington, Jr., bestirred himself to see how America’s railroads were faring in the years following World War Two. What he found was a thriving industry open to innovation and dedicated to customer service. In his classic Railroading the Modern Way (Coward-McCann, 1951), Farrington extolled the virtues of the great companies whose heralds, maps, lists of officers, and intricate schedules fattened The Official Guide to the Railways, that indispensable yearly publication, the size of a Chicago phone book, that every ticket clerk and agent in the Republic consulted for the routing of freight and passengers. Farrington raised hymns to powerful diesel locomotives, all-steel cabooses (with electric lighting!), cushion couplings, centralized traffic control, end-to-end radio communication, and luxurious new passenger equipment. Reading Farrington’s work now, one is struck by his implicit conclusion: everything about the railroad was going to stay the same, but it would all be faster, safer, and shinier than ever before. The traveling public could rejoice, and small shippers could rub their hands in glee.

Two decades later, Farrington’s cheery prophecy had collapsed like a washed-out trestle. Those of us who were railroading in those twilight days witnessed changes in the industry far more radical than anything Farrington could have imagined in the money-green glow of the ‘Fifties. From our decrepit yard offices, grimy locomotive cabs, and generic all-steel cabooses (with electric lighting!), we watched as the old resounding road names celebrated in Farrington’s book were gobbled up by mergers. We saw the sale or abandonment of entire districts, the consolidation of agencies, the ruthless encroachment of job-killing technology, and the surgical excision of labor-intensive commodities like perishable fruit and passengers. The government got involved, then it got uninvolved, and then–well, who knows? Traffic agents like my old man– those stalwart, hard-drinking, fiercely loyal drummers who pounded the pavements in search of business–became as anachronistic as link-and-pin couplers and finally disappeared altogether, their once-busy offices abandoned or used for storage.

Railroads, it seemed, had found other interests. Our beloved Illinois Central, for example–once the Main Line of Mid-America–yearned for greater profits, so it redefined itself as Illinois Central Industries and wrapped its tentacles around Pepsi Cola and Whitman Candies and left the now-unprofitable railroad property to wither on the vine. By the mid-Seventies, the Official Guide had shrunk to the size of an L.L. Bean catalog. On our Gulfport District, the maximum main line speed of freight trains had been reduced to ten miles an hour over crumbling lightweight 1930s rail affixed to ties that could be pulled apart in the hand. Three-man crews, with radios that rarely worked, risked their lives trying to switch behemoth tank cars and piggyback flats in yards designed in the 1890s. Almost overnight, the old craft became unrecognizable to persons like myself, who remembered footboards and forty-foot cars and coal-oil switch targets, who had penciled switch lists in the rain, who had passed lantern- and hand signals along a cut of cars and waved at pretty girls from the cupola of a caboose or the cab window of a growling GP-9.

But surely some revelation was at hand. Surely the Second Coming was at hand. The new railroad model, slouching toward solvency with relentless efficiency, was a desperate attempt to survive in a world that had swiftly left Farrington’s ideal behind.

In due season–another ten years perhaps–the railroads accomplished their vision and their survival. The result, as John R. Stilgoe so beautifully illustrates in Train Time (U of Virginia P, 2007), was a tectonic shift in the American industrial landscape. Stilgoe’s book, in perfect counterpoint to Farrington’s, demonstrates how, in less than a half-century, the old clanking, colorful, individualistic railroad companies of folklore and romance vanished like a dream, and in their place rose a new paradigm: the single trunk line, a silvery welded-rail turnpike over which computer-controlled trains with two-man crews hauled inter-modals or bulk commodities. Yard switching became a matter of mere pulling and shoving, and along the main line, switching was minimal or nonexistent. Depots were sold for restaurants or gift shops, freight houses were demolished, and only the most reluctant accommodation was made for Amtrak passenger trains.

Out of the chaos, finally, rose a single indisputable Gibraltar of fact: for the Post-Modern age, no better method exists for the transportation of bulk commodities than a well-maintained, high-speed, computer-controlled, heavy-rail corridor over which fuel-efficient motive power hauls the goods. American mega-railroads have achieved their goal, and American mega-business–not to mention highways and Interstates choked with eighteen-wheelers–will be the better for it.

Like most revolutions, however, that which I have just described was not without its cost. A way of life disappeared, and with it the loyalty men and women felt for the companies that had sustained them, often for generations. Countless jobs were abolished as shops and yards “modernized,” trains were cut off, and maintenance and damage control were hired out to private companies. Small shippers found they were no longer courted; indeed, they were ignored, even bypassed, as the railroad companies pulled up branch lines and spur tracks. Train crews no longer learned on the job, but attended centralized schools like truck drivers or heavy-equipment operators. People, especially poor ones, who still found it expedient to travel by rail were shuffled off to poor old Amtrak, for years the red-headed stepchild of the new empire.

Today, railroads have all but disappeared from the American imagination, where they once held center stage. Through four years of Naval service, I was sustained by the idea that, when I was released at last, I could go and be a railroad brakeman–somewhere, anywhere. I would walk the tops gaily and ride the caboose; I might even get to wear the uniform of a passenger trainman. I could do it for as long as I wanted, for the railroads, of course, would never change, a prodigious delusion as it turned out. In latter years, I have met not a single young person whose ambition was to work for the railroad.

When the family SUV is inconveniently blocked at a grade crossing–OMG! Josh will be late for soccer practice!–or when a derailed ninety-foot tank car of ammonia exterminates a congregation, then the citizens pay attention, a little. Otherwise, most people are only dimly aware of the big, graffiti-plastered objects that lumber past on the edge of their vision. In an age when, for example, the Canadian National operates in Mississippi and Louisiana, the public can hardly be blamed for losing their sense of regional affiliation. Crewpersons, buttoned up tight in their air-conditioned locomotive cabs, do not wave much anymore, and the caboose, the public’s most cherished railroad icon, has long been replaced by FRED, the Federal Rear End Device. FRED is an air-pressure gauge with a blinking red light fixed to the last knuckle of the last car. FRED does not wave, he cares nothing for pretty girls, and trains pass like sentences without punctuation, gliding on their way toward destinations no one can name.

With the exception of amateur rail enthusiasts, most people born after 1970–even most contemporary railroad persons, I expect–have little sense or patience for what the old craft meant, or how important it was in the daily life of generations. My students do not know what a caboose is. They have never heard of the Panama Limited or the Pan American. They think The City of New Orleans is a corny old song their grandparents listened to. This is our collective consciousness now. It is where we need to be if we are to have a viable rail system in the context of the Twenty-First Century. A hard truth, perhaps, but, as old Major R.K. Cross used to say, the truth is a stubborn thing.

And yet. And yet. Some ghosts are hard to shrive from blood memory, and not for nothing do people have a sense of something lost, though they may no longer be able to articulate just what the loss involves. When a person, by chance meeting, discovers that I was once a railroad man, he or she will more often than not voice a familiar lament. “Isn’t it a shame,” the person will say, “that we let our railroads go.” Then, inevitably, he will press on to sing of the supposed glories of European systems, or how, as a child, he rode to grandma’s house on the beautiful Sunset Limited and drank from Waterford crystal in the dining car as the scenery reeled past like illustrations on an SP calendar. I never know how to answer the complaint, nor how to respond to the memoir, so I nod my head and remain silent, wondering if the person understands what he is saying. He is unaware, I think, that the guilty collective pronoun included the railroads themselves. He forgets, perhaps, that the complexities of modern life offer no alternative. He forgets, most of all, that one can no longer expect Waterford crystal in a culture that has agreed unanimously on the Styrofoam cup.

Nostalgia has little virtue save for them who have earned it. In the end, Nostalgia, and its consort Romance, are an insult to the old ones who spent half their lives in cheap hotels; who saw their comrades cut in half or mangled under the wheels; who felt the loneliness and isolation of flagging behind in a ghostly fog; who understood that a steam engine, for all the mournful poignancy of its whistle, was a hard taskmaster and a deadly one. Nostalgia and Romance conceal, and therefore dishonor, the fact that old-time railroading was a real bitch, a dangerous and lonely and demanding craft, and those who followed it, especially in train or engine service, dwelt always on the edge of catastrophe. To paraphrase my old friend Frank Smith, a switch engine foreman of thirty years service, if you got home after the job without having killed someone or turned something over, your day was a success.

And yet, for those of us who lived the old craft, no coldly efficient, high-speed computer game can replace it. Perhaps too much happened for too many years out there in the night when the old trains ran. There was too much death, too much honor and meanness, too much tragedy and glory and fun, and too many souls were moved by the distant cry of a locomotive–steam whistle or diesel horn, no matter–for it all to be erased by corporate ukase. Something of the old life remains, something deeply human and therefore messy and dramatic, to haunt the memory of the Race.

Once, Frank Smith and I were talking to a gentleman who had worked his whole life on the now-vanished Columbus and Greenville Railroad. Beside him sat his wife, a gentle, silver-haired lady whose eyes glowed with the knowledge that she and this old rascal had been married sixty-one years and had made it work. The old man patted her knee. “Ever’ time I’d leave on the job,” he said, “my wife would make me a bucket of fried chicken. I used to throw the bones right out the cab window, a lot of bones all down the main line, years and years.” He thought a moment, then smiled. “Lord,” he said, “wouldn’t it be funny if them bones was to rise again.”

Funny, indeed, and an irresistible image: hundreds of white leghorns rising from the dust, gazing about, puzzling how in the world they ever got there, all wandering forlorn along the weed-choked iron of the old C&G. Meanwhile, all across the Republic, outside the trembling windowpanes of restored depots and freight house museums, the big anonymous trains roll on, the cone of their headlights pointed toward tomorrow.