Sunday, October 25, 2009

Article in NYT Sunday Mag: A Prom Divided



More ruminations on race... The May 24th issue of the The New York Times Sunday Magazine (yes, yes, I'm way behind in my reading) featured a photo-heavy essay called "A Prom Divided," by Sara Corbett and Gillian Laub, on the fact that Montgomery County High School in Georgia has two proms for its seniors: a white one and a black one. The two are held in the same place, a night apart.

Apparently, this phenomenon is not all that unique. And, according to the article, it has more to do with the parents of these kids than the wishes of the students themselves. I had no idea...I'm always shocked by both the persistence of blatant racism, and my ignorance of it. I'm reminded, all the time, that, as a white person, I have the privilige of not having issues of race forced in my face all the time.

It's uncomfortable.

I can't help feeling, as I look at these pictures, that the white kids look happy, and the black ones look kind of depressed. Am I just projecting? I don't know. But I find the pictures haunting. For some reason, my white prom picture showed up blurry...click on the link to the article to see them more clearly.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Was Atticus Finch such a hero?


I'm catching up with New Yorkers (Paul hoards, then passes them to me in a pile, where they sit, taking up space on my dresser, until I make a desperate plunge through them.)

One article that caught my eye--especially in light of our recent trip to Louisiana, and the earlier post "Someone's in trouble..."--was a piece by Malcolm Gladwell called "The Courthouse Ring."

In it Gladwell uses the work of legal scholar Steven Lubet to bring Atticus Finch, the beloved and seemingly just character from Harper Lee's classic "To Kill a Mockingbird," down a peg on the schema of literary figures deserving of reverence.

Finch didn't represent a new, non-racist shift in the south, says Gladwell (and the scholars he's quoting). He represents "Old-style Southern liberalism--gradual and paternalistic...." Whoa. Talk about a shift in perspective.

It's an interesting piece. And probably quite right. I, like many, I suspect, had just never thought of it like that before.

What cracked me up, being rather baby-name oriented these days, is the recent trend toward Atticuses at the playground...We're still struggling with a name, but Atticus isn't on the list.

Someone's in trouble....


Last week, Beth Humphrey, 30 and her boyfriend, Terence McKay, 32, both of Hammond, Louisiana, went to get married by the local justice of the peace. But Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward, refused to issue a marriage license to them because Humphrey is white and her boyfriend is black. He said he was doing it for the sake of any children who might be born of the marriage, and because, in his experience, these relationships didn't last.

It's a shocking story. I think one of my Facebook friends who noted it said something like "Helloooo 1950s!" Actually, we didn't manage to get this kind of racism off the national slate until 1967, when The U.S. Supreme Court tossed out racially based limitations on marriage in the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia case:

"In the unanimous decision, the court said that 'Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state.' (From CNN)

Guess Bardwell doesn't keep up with the law.

Meanwhile, I'm kind of blown away by Republican Governor Bobby Jindal's response: "This is a clear violation of constitutional rights and federal and state law. ... Disciplinary action should be taken immediately -- including the revoking of his license," he told CNN.

I double-checked his party status after reading that quote.

I think Jindal deserves some props from Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on this one.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Back to Louisiana

Paul and Henry touching the land.....


You wouldn't know it to look at this blog, but we (Paul, Henry and I) went down to Lousiana the first week of September. The main objective: To go look at a piece of land inherited by mother, which will, someday, be mine. I wanted to get a sense of what this whole attachment to land thing--a foreign concept to a born suburbanite, now urbanite apartment dweller--means. 

Would I just feel it? 

We started out in New Orleans, then drove to Baton Rouge, and from there, north to the outskirts of Clinton, Louisiana, where the land is. There's lots more to tell...but, for now, let's just say I'm still trying to understand the land thing. 

Meanwhile, I came across an interesting quote in the beginning of Diane McWhorter's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Carry Me Home: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. And here it is:

A landscape to be seen has to be composed,
and to be loved has to be moralized.

-George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty


What do you think it means?

Friday, July 17, 2009

Pat Boone comes to DeRidder!


Wow. Legendary crooner Pat Boone--and perhaps his white bucks--will be the headliner at The First Baptist Church of DeRidder's annual Southwest Louisiana Senior Adult Celebration on August 6th.

Here's a bit of the news report: "Boone will arrive at 10 a.m. for the two-hour gathering which will feature an hour of performance time for the award-winning crooner and then a time for him to share his Christian message, which will be followed by a short meet and greet session. Included in his performance will be several of Boone’s greatest hits such as Love Letters in the Sand, and April Love.”

According to Wikipedia, Boone is now about 75. But as my husband pointed out, it's possible that his age has been fudged along the way.

Meanwhile, do you think he'll still be wearing his white bucks?

Bad storm in DeRidder

My mother, when the whole Katrina thing hit, said DeRidder never really got hurricanes, they got tornados. So I sort of get the degree of alarm caused by this thunderstorm, last Wednesday. I was particularly amused by the last graph, which talks about a missing 6-year-old. (I'd be less amused, of course, if the child hadn't been found quickly.) Anyway, I was amused because, as a kid, my mother remembers walking home from school after a tornado had torn through town, eyeballing the desctruction. Meanwhile, her grandmother, who my mother lived with, was on the verge of a stroke wondering what had happened to her. Must have been one of those hug her? or kill her? moments when my mom finally sauntered in the door.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

A note from a former resident of DeRidder....

I got an email this week from Mike, who grew up in DeRidder. Here's what he had to say about the place:

"DeRidder was an interesting place. It was and is a small, backwater town, but had a suprisingly cosmopolitan population due to the influence of Fort Polk. The Army families who lived there brought a pretty decent cultural mix to the area. I was never particularly happy as child there, and couldn't wait to get away. After high school I moved to Washington, DC for college, then on to Chicago, San Diego, and finally settling down in Knoxville, TN. It is facinating to see the various paths that people travel to a particular time and place."

I'd love to hear from anyone else who lives or has lived in DeRidder...

Saturday, February 14, 2009

This is sad


Seems like the lumber industry in Louisiana is in distress....there's less call for pine and pulp these days. Sad that a state that used to boast some of the biggest pines around is now having a hard time peddling pulp for liner board, whatever that is. I can't help feeling a bit like they deserve it.

Monday, February 2, 2009

DeRidder, Louisiana--Cleanest City?

That's what they're aiming for. Yes, DeRidder, with the help of a new $50,000 grant, is entering The Cleanest City Contest. First one the agenda: Cleaning up the east side park (I don't know which one they're talking about) and putting street signs on antique posts in the historic district. I sort of make fun of the sprucifying going on in DeRidder, but the truth is...it is a historic town. A classic company town in the era of sawmills. It deserves to survive, and be proud of its past--and I hope it finds its way forward. There is certainly someone with a will pushing it in that direction. I wonder who it is?

Friday, January 30, 2009

Creel Family Motto--I think I Dig It

So I was just aimlessly googling the name "Creel," which was my great grandmother's maiden name, and struck open a site that had the Creel family crest (still working on a picture), a little history (name first appeared in England after the Norman Conquest), and the family motto: Nil Morer Ictus." Translated (are you sitting down?) that means: I do not care for blows. Hell, me neither!

Monday, January 19, 2009

What happened to the long leaf?


The longleaf pine used to be the dominant tree over 60 million acres of the Southeast. And they were the dominant tree in western Louisiana, for a time. Lawrence Earley, author of Looking for Long Leaf, describes the tree’s demise this way:

“Long leaf’s decline has been attributed to a great many things but is most easily explained in three words—need, greed, and mismanagement. People cut the forest, burned it to farm and make spaces to live, exploited its resources, and changed the natural processes that had evolved and maintained it.”

Among the culprits were farmers, industrial turpentiners, lumber companies, paper companies, foresters and others. “All of them in some way made their livings from the forest and tried to shape it for their own ends.”

Taking the trees

(This picture is of a now defunct steam engine at the Southern Forest Heritage Museum in Alexandria, Louisiana)

I’ve been reading a book called Looking for Longleaf, by Lawrence Earley.

Why write a book about one type of pine tree? Because it used to cover most of the eastern United States, before the lumbermen took them all. And by accident. Early started out researching a book on the history of turpentining. “But I soon realized that this history would be told most effectively in the context of a book on the longleaf pine ecosystem.”

I’m interested because it’s this pine tree that drew the lumber companies to my family’s part of Louisiana, and that actually built DeRidder. DeRidder was almost entirely a company town.

One of my favorite spots in the book is where Earley visits The Southern Forest Heritage Museum near Alexandria, Louisiana, which Paul and I also visited a few years back. The “museum” is a group of buildings on a 56 acre parcel of land that includes the remnants of the Crowell Long Leaf Lumber Company, established in 1892.

What you see when you go there is a nice visitors center, with a lot of information on the trees of the region (which I now wished I’d paid more attention to), along with the skeleton of a steam-powered sawmill (that must be how my great-grandfather got scalded), planer mill, dry kiln, steam skidder, tracks and a steam-powered logging locomotive.

When we went, we took the tour with three REALLY old guys, wearing overalls, who’d made the drive over from Texas. They’d actually worked in the mill as young men, and filled in the tour with their memories of the place. Among the tidbits they contributed: they used to offer to work ten minutes extra for a chunk of ice thrown in the water bucket, and that near the saws, they used to use hand signs to communicate, because the roar of the saw was so deafening.

On Earley’s visit, he interviewed the director of the museum, Don Powell. Here are some of Powell’s comments:

“You know, people don’t understand the South. They think of plantations but less than two percent of the people participated in that. I’m doing some genealogy for my family and everybody—and I mean everybody—was a farmer. They grew cotton but their land got its fertility depleted—there ain’t nothin’ that eat up land like cotton; it sucked the nutrients out of it. Now the sawmill people come in. Some of them are pretty tough business people, but they were willing to risk their capital and that says a lot. ‘I’m willing to put my capital out here, build this mill, and believe that I can hire people and buy enough timber to make it and sell it at a profit.’ And by doing so they provided the means by which southerners had their first real opportunity to participate in the Industrial Revolution. There was no industry down here, a little textile in the Carolinas, and there was a splash of it in Mississippi, but not much. You can’t really say a cotton gin was the Industrial Revolution because it only operates two months out of the year and it didn’t take that many people to do it—ten people could run it easy—wheras it took 250 to run a sawmill and logging operation."

“So here we are in just this area right here, ten mills just a few miles away from each other. That’s 2,500 jobs. The people came from all over, from all these worn-out farms. They were leaving a house where they were feeding the chickens through the cracks in the floor almost, coming to a warmer house, a tighter house, a nicer house, in a community.”

My family didn’t start out as lumbermen. They started out as farmers. But once the lumbermen brought the railroads and the lumber mills to western Louisiana, there was no question what constituted the better career choice.

Here's where DeRidder is....


I've tried to describe it (north of Baton Rouge, western part of the state, etc etc) but a picture is much more effective, isn't it? 

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Now this is a cool use of an old Christmas tree


DeRidder and nearby town Merryville are collecting old Christmas trees to help combat erosion in Calcisieu Parish. "The trees will be collected after the holidays and will then be placed in fences built along Calcasieu parish coastlines to help rebuild and salvage the wetlands as well," according to this article in The Beauregard Daily New. It's so refreshing and surprising when government actually does smart things....

Holiday Hijinks in DeRidder....

The welcome sign returns!