Learning Freedom Again

Reading an article on life in India á la Covid-19, it occurred to me that, once we unburden the world of this hateful virus, large parts of the world will have to relearn free speech the hard way. One right at a time.

They will need to be wrenched back from the grips of dictators, just when we thought that they were inalienable if not forever birthrights grudgingly granted by kings and other despots, perhaps only tolerated for a time up until no one was watching, “nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.”

“In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, the independent press has all but vanished. Journalists go out of their way to praise the party line; those who do not are dealt with summarily… Violence against journalists, intellectuals, and opposition figures has been part of the strategy against the party’s critics for some years now. Earlier, shadowy assassins carried out right-wing vendettas against a number of writers and activists: Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and M.M. Kalburgi. Of late, the full machinery of the state has been brought into play, as if the government no longer needed to disguise its intent.”

from the Pandemic Journal, published by the New York Review of Books by Jeet Thayil

The Pandemic Journal is a weekly collection of short pieces by writers living through this long night of fear and isolation. The writers are from different backgrounds and professions, predominantly from the Northeast of the country.

Facebook promised the world new freedom in an open society: the Zuckerbird promised. Or as Bill the Cat used to say, AWK!

I’m reading that in Hong Kong the national Chinese government is using the world’s distraction over the pandemic to choke off dissent and complete their takeover. Those clever mandarins–when you arrest an 81-year old protester, it’s only commentary on what’s coming. In the middle of China’s modern renaissance, their leaders are reverting to drawing back into the shell they best know–authoritarianism.

But the Chinese invented officious bureaucracy–so we have a word for it in English. May they go the way of their antecedent Imperial brethren.

Russia–that fable of sadness–is back to rotting internally from totalitarianism as it was before the fall of the Soviet Union, as it was in Czarist times before World War I…

Venezuela, Brazil, Congo, Hungary, Poland, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the list of this political pandemic is ever expanding. Even Europe is being pulled toward the dark side, and as for the U.S., saying we’ve lost our way has become a cliché.

A friend says that the times of misery and unrest produce the greatest music–his example is the flowering of rock and roll during the Vietnam protests and the Civil Rights movement in the 60s and 70s. I’ll grant him that, and expand it to include the jazz explosion as well. If his theory holds, we should expect a spectacular burst of creativity coming on the heals of 2020 with its twin pandemics of virus and the shrinking dreams of freedom.

As for the Pandemic Journal, I can’t say if it qualifies for what my friend is yearning for, but it’s certainly a novel experience reading of all these people existing in the same lockdown around the world when all they have are words to describe it.

When we get out of this corona virus shit, I’d like to hear stories written about a march—like the jazz funerals down south in New Orleans, only taking it nationwide. This one would be drumming the whole way to Maine, trombones leading and timpani coming behind. I’ll cover Virginia with a kazoo and a guitar with old strings I can still strum.

There are people we need to remember.

We’ll need a lot of serious musicians–those horn players especially. It’s a big country and marching that far is going to take time. The whole damn country needs to march.

On last Friday’s ‘Shields and Brooks’ segment on PBS’s News Hour, David Brooks reported that surveys are showing something like 80 percent of the country is sheltering in place per the pleas of politicians and health experts. (you can find his statement at 3:20 minutes into the segment) “We are amazingly united right now.” Brooks is the segment’s right-ish moderate–he used to be a conservative before that word was corrupted. My take is that he’s working to raise morale, saying that, in spite of arguments to the contrary, it demonstrates we still are a people who can unite in a common cause.

The aphorism goes: if you weren’t a radical in your youth, then you had no heart, and if you’re not conservative in old age you have no head. I’d reverse that in Brooks’s case; as he’s matured in his writing, he’s seeking more the spiritual heart of the matter.

Clinging to any ideology past time when one has lived past teenage years is either a habit or mean spirited idiocy. There, I feel better already.

Indian Tribes of Carolina  

My mother spent her working career with the American Red Cross in a tiny, clapboard house converted into an office in my hometown of Sumter. Sumter was not a wealthy town. Most of South Carolina wasn’t. The Red Cross office had a front parlor room where an assistant worked, her office was in the second room with something like a narrow kitchen in the rear. I think there was a bedroom somewhere, but I can’t visualize it. There was space in the back yard to park three cars, max.

Evenings after work, she’d tell us stories of her social work. Shaw Air Force Base, just outside town, was a good part of her responsibility. So we heard stories of airmen’s family trials and tribulations, some self inflicted, others just sad stories of people with illnesses, personal tragedies and not enough money to support themselves. Poor blacks in Sumter County (a redundant phrase to be sure), were another source of clients, though in retelling some of these ‘hardship cases’ as she called them, distinguishing between black and white wasn’t something she felt mattered to the story. Poor was poor in Sumter.

When we were still little tikes (or at least I was, being the youngest) Mother’s stories were told to our grandmother more than to the wee folk, passed on as stories between adults and we just happened to be sitting at the formica table listening. Later as we grew up, she’d address the stories directly to us, undoubtedly as object lessons.

Some of these stories were of the Lumbee Indians living in the Carolinas. I gathered back then that the Lumbees were creole–mixed race, mostly poor and living like gypsies, so it seemed. The memory I carried away from that was that the Lumbees were considered ‘white trash’–on account they weren’t black but just as poor. And it seemed were to be pitied. It’s possible whatever disparaging remarks I heard came from our grandmother, a woman in her seventies who saw life in stark, black and white terms.

Something about the Lumbee tribe stayed with me, remnant Native Americans centered in southern North Carolina–Lumberton to be exact. The Lumbee tribe is recognized by the state of North Carolina as a distinct tribe, though not by the U.S. The Lumber River flows through the region.

Lumber River State Park photo by Gerry Dincher, 2007

“Iroquoian, Siouan, and Carolina Algonquian-speaking peoples were among the historic tribes who live in the coastal and inland region prior to European encounter. Archeologists have identified 47 sites of potential importance, 20 of which are eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places.

“Early English surveyors named the river "Drowning Creek." In 1749, British colonial records identified the river as a branch of the Little Pee Dee River. In 1809, the North Carolina state legislature changed the name of the river to Lumber, most likely to symbolize the thriving lumber industry in the area, and its use of the river for transporting logs. They wanted a name more positive than Drowning Creek.”

from Wikipedia article on the Lumber River 

So all of this is preamble to an article I came across this week: “The Day a Native American Tribe Drove the KKK Out of Town” The subject line ran “The North Carolina Klan thought burning crosses would scare the Lumbee tribe out of Robeson County. That’s not how things went down.”

Klansmen’s Cross Burning Photo courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina

It’s known locally as the Battle of Hayes Pond. I would have been nine at the time.

“Two crosses burned in Robeson County, North Carolina, on January 13, 1958. One was outside the home of a Native American woman who was dating a white man, the other outside the home of a Native family who had moved into one of Lumberton’s all-white neighborhoods. The blazing signs were clearly the work of Klansmen—not that the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in the county had ever been subtle. Caravans of Klansmen had been driving around the segregated county (where the local population included blacks, whites and Native Americans) every Saturday night, terrorizing the Lumbee Indians.”

from “The Day a Native American Tribe Drove the KKK Out of Town” by Ilena Peng

This post originally appeared in Narratively.com published October 14, 2019.  

There’s a monument marker on N.C. Highway 130. “Battle of Hayes Pond: The Lumbee and other American Indians ousted the Ku Klux Klan from Maxton, Jan. 18, 1958, at rally 1/2 mile west.”

They kicked some Klan butt that night.

Charlie Warriax (left) and Simeon Oxendine (right) wearing the captured KKK banner around their shoulders symbolizing the Lumbees’ victory over the Klan. Photo courtesy of the Charlotte Observer Photograph Collection, Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County

“Based on legend, some people said that the Lumbee tribe, based in North Carolina, were descendants of the Croatoan and survivors of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. For over a hundred years, historians and other scholars have been examining the question of Lumbee origin. Although there have been many explanations and conjectures, two theories persist. In 1885, Hamilton McMillan, a local historian and state legislator, proposed the “Lost Colony” theory. Based upon oral tradition among the Lumbees and what he deemed as strong circumstantial evidence, McMillan posited a connection between the Lumbees and the early English colonists who settled on Roanoke Island in 1587 and the Algonquian tribes (Croatan included) who inhabited coastal North Carolina at the same time. According to historical accounts, the colonists mysteriously disappeared soon after they settled, leaving little evidence of their destination or fate. McMillan's hypothesis, which was also supported by the historian Stephen Weeks, contends that the colonists migrated with the Indians toward the interior of North Carolina, and by 1650 had settled along the banks of the Lumber. It is suggested the present-day Lumbees are the descendants of these two groups.”

from Wikipedia article on Croatan Indians

When I first began kicking around ideas about what eventually became the novel, Kill Devil, I had an image of an aristocratic person of color with fabulous wealth–who eventually formed the character, Lucius Purvis. It was a single scene to begin with and I had no idea how it fit the rest of the story. I wanted to sculpt this character as one who lived apart from mainstream American life, above it all, invincibly from a culture that predated the United States even.

As I saw him n the beginning, Lucius Purvis was from a family born in slavery, but as the story developed, his history needed to go back further than slavery. Eventually, it seemed clear that he needed to be a Native Indian. There was no correlation to the Lumbee; that came later when I researched Indian American tribes in the Carolinas. Makes me wonder whether it was just a memory fragment from my mother’s stories. But the descriptions in Kill Devil of the low country came from years I’ve traveled through that part of North Carolina–and my own youth in South Carolina.

In a long piece of fiction, sometimes your characters insist you write them the way they see themselves–crazy, huh?

John Gorman Rocks Some stories just write themselves–like this one. When writing into the ether, I might as well be talking to myself, Layla sleeping nearby or on the porch keeping an eye out for the neighbor’s cat.

Now and again I’ll take a break and read through the latest on Medium. I’ve been reading Gorman for a while. I like his just this side of berserker style. I have no doubt he’d be a crazy neighbor, but suspect some say the same about me.

And Layla just dreams about a piece of that damn cat before she’s done.