Oh hell...

Happy Hannukah!

Here's the Theroux piece in full. (I assumed it would be online for subscribers only; this part about the Rosenwald schools was what I planned to excerpt in 7 or 8 typings.)

Read the whole thing though. Excellent writer... (pretty sly, for a white guy...)

The Gift
At the edge of County Road 16, ten miles south of Greensboro, an old white wooden building stood back from the road but commanded attention. It had recently been prettified and restored and was used as a community center.

“That’s the Rosenwald School. We called it the Emory School,” Rev. Lyles told me. “I was enrolled in that school in 1940. Half the money for the school came from Sears, Roebuck—folks here put up the difference. My mother also went to a Rosenwald School, the same as me. The students were black, the teachers were black. If you go down Highway 69, down to the Gallion area, there is another Rosenwald School, name of Oak Grove.”

Julius Rosenwald, the son of German-Jewish immigrants, made a success of his clothing business by selling to Richard Sears, and in 1908 became president of Sears, Roebuck, and Co. In midlife his wish was to make a difference with his money, and he hatched a plan to give his wealth to charitable causes but on a condition that has become common today: His contribution had to be met by an equal amount from the other party, the matching grant.

Convinced that Booker T. Washington’s notion to create rural schools was a way forward, Rosenwald met the great educator and later began the Rosenwald Fund to build schools in backlands of the South.

Five thousand schools were built in 15 states beginning in 1917, and they continued to be built into the 1930s. Rosenwald himself died in 1932, around the time the last schools were built; but before the money he had put aside ran its course, in 1948, a scheme had been adopted through which money was given to black scholars and writers of exceptional promise.

One of the young writers, Ralph Ellison, from Oklahoma, was granted a Rosenwald Fellowship, and this gave him the time and incentive to complete his novel Invisible Man (1952), one of the defining dramas of racial violence and despair in America. Rosenwald fellowships also went to the photographer Gordon Parks, the sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (who later created Ellison’s memorial in New York City), W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes and many other black artists and thinkers.

The schools built with Rosenwald money (and local effort) were modest structures in the beginning, two-room schools like the one in Greensboro, with two or at the most three teachers. They were known as Rosenwald Schools but Rosenwald himself discouraged naming any of them after himself. As the project developed into the 1920s the schools became more ambitious, brick-built, with more rooms.

One of the characteristics of the schools was an emphasis on natural light through the use of large windows. The assumption was that the rural areas where they’d be built would probably not have electricity; paint colors, placement of blackboards and desks, even the southerly orientation of the school to maximize the light were specified in blueprints.

The simple white building outside Greensboro was a relic from an earlier time, and had the Rev. Lyles not explained its history, and his personal connection, I would have had no idea that almost 100 years ago a philanthropic-minded stranger from Chicago had tried to make a difference here.

“The financing was partly the responsibility of the parents,” Rev. Lyles told me. “They had to give certain stipends. Wasn’t always money. You’ve heard of people giving a doctor chickens for their payment? That’s the truth—that happened in America. Some were given corn, peanuts and other stuff, instead of cash money. They didn’t have money back in that day.” Rev. Lyles, who came from a farming family, brought produce his father had grown, and chickens and eggs.

“My grandfather and the others who were born around his time, they helped put up that school building. And just recently Pam Dorr and HERO”—the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization—“made a plan to fix up the school. It made me proud that I was able to speak when it was reopened as a community center. My grandfather would have been proud too.”

He spoke some more about his family and their ties to the school, and added, “My grandfather was born in 1850.”

I thought I had misheard the date. Surely this was impossible. I queried the date.

“Correct—1850.”

So Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was younger than Rev. Lyles’ grandfather. “My grandfather wasn’t born here but he came here. He remembered slavery—he told us all about it. I was 13 years old when he passed. I was born in 1934. He would have been in his 90s. Work it out—he was 10 years old in 1860. Education wasn’t for blacks then. He lived slavery. Therefore his name was that of his owner, Lyles, and he was Andrew Lyles. Later on, he heard stories about the Civil War, and he told them to me.”

They say a good writer is someone who can inform you simply on things you don't know. And can bring something fresh, add something new to a topic you do. This part re. the renowned Emmett Till tragedy falls under the latter:

PART THREE: MISSISSIPPI
Hardly a town or a village, Money, Mississippi (pop. 94), was no more than a road junction near the banks of the Tallahatchie River. There, without any trouble, I found what I was looking for, a 100-year-old grocery store, the roof caved in, the brick walls broken, the facade boarded up, the wooden porch roughly patched, and the whole wreck of it overgrown with dying plants and tangled vines. For its haunted appearance and its bloody history it was the ghostliest structure I was to see in the whole of my travels in the South. This ruin, formerly Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, has topped the list of Mississippi Heritage Trust’s “Ten Most Endangered Historic Places,” though many people would like to tear it down as an abomination.

What happened there in the store and subsequently, in that tiny community, was one of the most powerful stories I’d heard as a youth. As was so often the case, driving up a country road in the South was driving into the shadowy past. A “Mississippi Freedom Trail” sign in front of it gave the details of its place in history. It was part of my history, too.

I was just 14 in 1955 when the murder of the boy occurred. He was exactly my age. But I have no memory of any news report in a Boston newspaper at the time of the outrage. We got the Boston Globe, but we were subscribers to and diligent readers of family magazines, Life for its photographs, Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post for profiles and short stories, Look for its racier features, Reader’s Digest for its roundups. This Victorian habit in America of magazines as family entertainment and enlightenment persisted until television overwhelmed it in the later 1960s.

In January 1956, Look carried an article by William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” and it appeared in a shorter form in the Reader’s Digest that spring. I remember this distinctly, because my two older brothers had read the stories first, and I was much influenced by their tastes and enthusiasms. After hearing them excitedly talking about the story, I read it and was appalled and fascinated.

Emmett Till, a black boy from Chicago, visiting his great-uncle in Mississippi, stopped at a grocery store to buy some candy. He supposedly whistled at the white woman behind the counter. A few nights later he was abducted, tortured, killed and thrown into a river. Two men, Roy Bryant and John William “J.W.” Milam, were caught and tried for the crime. They were acquitted. “Practically all the evidence against the defendants was circumstantial evidence,” was the opinion in an editorial in the Jackson Daily News.

After the trial, Bryant and Milam gloated, telling Huie that they had indeed committed the crime, and they brazenly volunteered the gory particularities of the killing. Milam, the more talkative, was unrepentant in describing how he’d kidnapped Emmett Till with Bryant’s help, pistol-whipped him in a shed behind his home in Glendora, shot him and disposed of the body.

“Let’s write them a letter,” my brother Alexander said, and did so. His letter was two lines of threat—We’re coming to get you. You’ll be sorry—and it was signed, The Gang from Boston. We mailed it to the named killers, in care of the post office in Money, Mississippi.
...
Though the Jackson Daily News editorialized that it was “best for all concerned that the Bryant-Milam case be forgotten as quickly as possible,” the paper also had published a robust piece by William Faulkner.

It was one of the most damning and gloomiest accusations Faulkner ever wrote (and he normally resisted the simplifications of newspaper essays), and his anguish shows. He must have recognized the event as something he might have imagined in fiction. He wrote his rebuttal hurriedly in Rome while he was on an official junket, and it was released through the U.S. Information Service.

He first spoke about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the hypocrisy of boasting of our values to our enemies “after we have taught them (as we are doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours.”

He went on to say that if Americans are to survive we will have to show the world that we are not racists, “to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front.” Yet this might be a test we will fail: “Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive.”

And his conclusion: “Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”

Nowhere in the piece did Faulkner use Emmett Till’s name, yet anyone who read it knew whom he was speaking about.

Forget him, the Jackson paper had said, but on the contrary the case became a remembered infamy and a celebrated injustice; and Emmett Till was eulogized as a hero and a martyr. Suppression of the truth is not merely futile but almost a guarantee of something wonderful and revelatory emerging from it: creating an opposing and more powerful and ultimately overwhelming force, sunlight breaking in...

And one more, a success story here:

“Where I could save my kids”
You hear talk of people fleeing the South, and some do. But I found many instances of the South as a refuge. I met a number of people who had fled the North to the South for safety, for peace, for the old ways, returning to family, or in retirement.

At a laundromat in Natchez, the friendly woman in charge changed some bills into quarters for the machines, and sold me some soap powder, and with a little encouragement from me, told me her story.

Her name was Robin Scott, in her mid 40s. She said, “I came here from Chicago to save my children from being killed by gangs. So many street gangs there—the Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords. At first where I lived was OK, the Garfield section. Then around late ’80s and early ’90s the Four Corners Hustlers gang and the BGs—Black Gangsters—discovered crack cocaine and heroin. Using it, selling it, fighting about it. There was always shooting. I didn’t want to stay there and bury my children.

“I said, ‘Gotta get out of here’—so I quit my job and rented a U-Haul and eventually came down here where I had some family. I always had family in the South. Growing up in Chicago and in North Carolina, we used to visit my family in North Carolina, a place called Enfield, in Halifax County near Rocky Mount.”

I knew Rocky Mount from my drives as a pleasant place, east of Raleigh, off I-95 where I sometimes stopped for a meal.

“I had good memories of Enfield. It was country—so different from the Chicago streets. And my mother had a lot of family here in Natchez. So I knew the South was where I could save my kids. I worked at the casino dealing blackjack, but after a time I got rheumatoid arthritis. It affected my hands, my joints and my walking. It affected my marriage. My husband left me.

“I kept working, though, and I recovered from the rheumatoid arthritis and I raised my kids. I got two girls, Melody and Courtney—Melody’s a nurse and Courtney’s a bank manager. My boys are Anthony—the oldest, he’s an electrician—and the twins, Robert and Joseph. They’re 21, at the University of Southern Mississippi.

“Natchez is a friendly place. I’m real glad I came. It wasn’t easy. It’s not easy now—the work situation is hard, but I manage. The man who owns this laundromat is a good man.

“I got so much family here. My grandmother was a Christmas—Mary Christmas. Her brother was Joseph. We called my grandmother Big Momma and my grandfather Big Daddy. I laughed when I saw that movie Big Momma’s House.

“Mary Christmas was born on a plantation near Sibley. They were from families of sharecroppers. My grandfather was Jesse James Christmas.”

I mentioned Faulkner’s Light in August and Joe Christmas, and how I’d always found the name faintly preposterous, heavy with symbolism. I told her the plot of the novel, and how the mysterious Joe Christmas, orphan and bootlegger, passes for white but has a black ancestry. Before I could continue with the tale of Lena Grove and her child and the Christian theme, Robin broke in.

“Joe Christmas was my uncle,” she said, later explaining that he lived in a nursing home in Natchez until he died recently, in his 90s. “It’s a common name in these parts.”

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Rowan Oak
Oxford, where Faulkner had lived and died, was the university town of Ole Miss. Off well-traveled Route 278, the town vibrated with the rush of distant traffic. There is hardly a corner of this otherwise pleasant place where the whine of cars is absent, and it is a low hum at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house, which lies at the end of a suburban street, at the periphery of the campus and its academic splendors.

The road noise struck an odd and intrusive note because, though Oxford resembles “Jefferson” in Faulkner’s work, the town and its surroundings are in all respects as remote from Faulkner’s folksy, bosky, strife-ridden, plot-saturated and fictional Yoknapatawpha County as it is possible to be. The town is lovely. The university is classically beautiful in the Greek Revival Southern style, of columns and bricks and domes, suggesting a mood both genteel and scholarly, and backward-looking.

And for a century this esteemed and vividly pompous place of learning clung to the old ways—segregation and bigotry among them, overwhelming any liberal tendencies. So, here is an irony, one of the many in the Faulkner biography, odder than this self-described farmer living on a side street in a fraternity-mad, football-crazed college town.

Faulkner—a shy man but a bold, opinionated literary genius with an encyclopedic grasp of Southern history, one of our greatest writers and subtlest thinkers—lived most of his life at the center of this racially divided community without once suggesting aloud, in his wise voice, in a town he was proud to call his own, that a black student had a right to study at the university. The Nobel Prize winner stood by as blacks were shooed off the campus, admitted as menials only through the back door and when their work was done told to go away.

Faulkner died in July 1962. Three months later, after a protracted legal fuss (and deadly riots afterward), and no thanks to Faulkner, James Meredith, from the small central Mississippi town of Kosciusko, was admitted, as its first black student.

Fair-minded, Faulkner had written in Harper’s magazine: “To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” But he asked for a gradual approach to integration, and, as he wrote in Life magazine, he was against the interference of the federal government—“forces outside the south that would use legal or police compulsion to eradicate that evil overnight.” We’ll do it ourselves, in our own time, was his approach; but, in fact, nothing happened until the federal government—the South’s historical villain—intervened.

Restless when he was not writing, always in need of money, Faulkner traveled throughout his life; but Oxford remained his home, and Rowan Oak his house, even when (it seems) a neighborhood grew up around the big, ill-proportioned farmhouse previously known as “the Bailey Place.” He renamed it Rowan Oak for the mythical powers of the wood of the rowan tree, as the docents at the house helpfully explained to me.

This street—orderly, bourgeois, well-tended, tidy, conventional—is everything Faulkner’s fiction is not and is at odds with Faulkner’s posturing as a country squire. On this road of smug homes, Rowan Oak rises lopsidedly like a relic, if not a white elephant, with porches and white columns, windows framed by dark shutters, and stands of old, lovely juniper trees. The remnants of a formal garden are visible under the trees at the front—but just the symmetrical brickwork of flowerbed borders and walkways showing in the surface of the ground like the remains of a neglected Neolithic site.

He was anchored by Oxford but lived a chaotic life; and the surprising thing is that from this messy, lurching existence that combined the asceticism of concentrated writing with the eruptions of binge drinking and passionate infidelities, he produced an enormous body of work, a number of literary masterpieces, some near misses and a great deal of garble. He is the writer all aspiring American writers are encouraged to read, yet with his complex and speechifying prose he is the worst possible model for a young writer. He is someone you have to learn how to read, not someone anyone should dare imitate, though unfortunately many do.

Some of Faulkner’s South still exists, not on the land but as a racial memory. Early in his writing life he set himself a mammoth task, to create the fictional world of an archetypical Mississippi county where everything happened—to explain to Southerners who they were and where they’d come from. Where they were going didn’t matter much to Faulkner. Go slowly, urged Faulkner, the gradualist.

Ralph Ellison once said, “If you want to know something about the dynamics of the South, of interpersonal relationships in the South from, roughly, 1874 until today, you don’t go to historians; not even to Negro historians. You go to William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.”

I walked through the rooms at Rowan Oak, which were austerely furnished, with a number of ordinary paintings and simple knickknacks, a dusty piano, the typewriter and the weird novelty of notes puzzling out the plot of A Fable written by him on the wall of an upstairs room. Notes clarifying the multilayered, if not muddled, plot were, for Faulkner, a good idea, and would serve a reader, too. Nothing to me would be more useful than such handwriting on a wall. Baffled by seven pages of eloquent gabble, you glance at the wall and see: “Charles is the son of Eulalia Bon and Thomas Sutpen, born in the West Indies, but Sutpen hadn’t realized Eulalia was of mixed race, until too late...”

“We’ll be closing soon,” the docent warned me.

I went outside, looked at the brick outbuildings and sheds, a stable and meandered past the plainness of the yard, among the long shadows of the junipers in the slant of the winter sun. From where I stood, the house was obscured by the trees at the front, but still it had the look of a mausoleum; and I was moved to think of Faulkner in it, exhausting himself with work, poisoning himself with drink, driven mad in the contradictions of the South, obstinate in his refusal to simplify or romanticize its history, resolute in mirroring its complexity with such depth and so many human faces—all this before his early death, at the age of 64.

No other region in America had a writer who was blessed with such a vision.

Sinclair Lewis defined the Upper Midwest, and showed us who we were in Main Street and Elmer Gantry; but he moved on to other places and other subjects. Faulkner stayed put, he achieved greatness; but as a writer, as a man, as a husband, as a delineator of the South’s arcane formalities and its lawlessness, his was a life of suffering.