Live oak in Carville, Louisiana.
Rising Tide, by John M. Barry.
18-Mar-09When I heard that many in New Orleans (especially blacks) believed that the Army Corps of Engineers had dynamited the levees protecting the city’s black neighborhoods just after Hurricane Katrina hit, I dismissed the notion as yet another conspiracy theory. These seem to proliferate wherever the powers of the human mind languish unfertilized by action or empiricism, and fasten on any sufficiently inaccessible object – the Vatican, the American Military, Jewry, the Ivy League, whites, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Skull and Bones Club, the publishing industry, the oil industry, you name it. I still believe the Katrina rumor is idiotic, like most of them. But now I see that it grew in the shadow cast by a series of real events which still shape our country today.
The story of these events is told by John M. Barry in his book Rising Tide. The general topic of the book is the 1927 flood of the Mississippi. It turns out that during this flood, the government of Louisiana did dynamite the levees protecting St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes (parishes are counties, in Louisiana lingo) – not black parishes, but certainly poorer ones – in order to protect the city of New Orleans. There was nothing secret about it – there was an evacuation, the press was there, and the action was ordered by the governor – so it was not a classic “conspiracy,” though several influential people pushed it through. And unlike dynamiting the levees after a hurricane, this action made sense from the engineer’s perspective: a large outlet just below New Orleans would reduce the flood level at the city, and it worked as planned. Barry furnishes expert opinions indicating that this action probably was unnecessary: that there were so many levee breaks above New Orleans that the river would have gone down of its own accord. Barry makes a great deal of hay out of this, claiming that New Orleans did it just to boost investor confidence in the city, but seeing that the city was facing something like complete destruction – river floods are many hundreds of times more destructive than hurricane flooding, because the water does not merely rise but flow and scour – I can easily see why the men in authority were in no mood to gamble with the lives and fortunes of half a million residents of New Orleans.
One of the many interesting things about this story is the way that crises reveal our society to be much more traditional, and far less rational and rights-based, than we like to believe. Government action, in this instance, led to tens of thousands of citizens losing their livelihoods – in order to protect others who were both more numerous and wealthier. Barry focuses almost entirely on the latter fact – that the bankers of New Orleans could flood out the fur-trappers and farmers of St. Bernard Parish – while barely considering the broader utilitarian side to the equation. But under any circumstances, the utilitarian arguments prevail over questions of rights. The centers of wealth and population will be preserved and the outlying areas will be sacrificed. The residents of Queens or Staten Island implicitly know this – that in a crisis, Manhattan means more.
The problem is compounded by the organized duplicity known as the law. The residents of St. Bernard parish arrived at their levees armed, in order to defend their homes against the government which was about to destroy them. They were convinced to leave by the promises of the wealthy gentlemen of power in New Orleans, who gave them their “word of honor” and pledged in writing to recompense them for their damages. This ended up being a false promise, as they effectively stacked the Compensatory Commission and used various legal methods, all detailed by Barry, to prevent people from receiving compensation. In the end, of the $35 million in claims, New Orleans paid $2.9 million, $2.1 million of which went to two companies whose presidents were on the boards of the New Orleans banks (those claims do tend to get paid in full). The remainder of the claimants received an average of $200 each in exchange for the complete destruction of their homes, effects, and jobs (the area was flooded throughout the rest of the year). “Never trust a rich man’s word of honor” is a generally useful rule to live by.
All of this is typical municipal politics, of course, and we all know that societies break down this way when encountering a crisis. The rich manipulate the system to protect themselves and dump the losses onto the backs of the poor (see our current financial crisis). But it is always good to be reminded of it.
The book is even more interesting, however, as it confronts the effects of the flood upriver, most notably in the Mississippi Delta. The size of the flood was astonishing – it poured water over 27,000 square miles (about the size of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut combined), displaced more than a million people, made the Mississippi River more than 150 miles wide at places and over most of the flooded area more than twenty feet deep. More than 300,000 people were rescued by the government and the Red Cross from trees and rooftops. The cold water stayed for months and devastated the valley’s economy.
But the flood was particularly dangerous socially. The plantation system in effect there – more or less the same as slavery – could only be preserved by preventing blacks from leaving, even during the flood. Refugees poured in to Greenville, Mississippi, where the whites were quickly evacuated. An initial order was given to evacuate the blacks as well, but the officer in charge was called back by the planters of the region, who informed him of their concerns. Most of the blacks there had nothing but debts to their landowners. Most of them would never come back once they got on that steamer. They had to be kept there. The blacks ended up watching as the last steamer, capable of carrying thousands to safety, “departed with thirty-three white women and children.” The blacks would be kept in the flood zone.
The resulting logistics were quite astonishing. The white men in charge of the relief effort had 20,000 blacks crowded onto a levee no more than twenty feet wide, the only land in the area not flooded. Food and water for all these people had to be brought in by steamer from hundreds of miles away, for several months. Refugees were put to work creating order out of chaos, tents and pathways and the like, which was called a “concentration camp” (an interesting episode in the history of the term, which did not have quite the implication it has today, but still does not indicate much good). They were kept in the camp by armed guards, and “tagged” so they could be returned to the proper plantation when the floodwaters receded. Barry quotes a Red Cross memo: “Plantation owners desiring their labor to be returned from Refugee Camps will make application to the nearest Red Cross representative” (313). A later investigation noted “Negroes were caught slipping out of camp and were … whipped, the men using a strap taken off of one of their rifles” (315).
The blacks in the camps worked loading and unloading the barges and steamers supplying Greenville. They were given food on the following conditions:
1. No rations will be issued to Greenville negro women and children unless there is no man in the family, which fact must be certified by a white person. 2. No negro man in Greenville nor their families will be rationed unless the men join the labor gang or are employed. 3. Negro men … drawing a higher wage [than $1 a day] are not entitled to be rationed.” (317)
The similarity between these rules and those of the later federal welfare system is quite striking. Of course, no other Red Cross refugees were required to work in order to receive food.
The refugees ended up being kept in these camps for nearly a year, and conditions of course deteriorated, with thousands suffering from pellagra, a disease caused by niacin deficiency.
Barry goes into great detail explaining how Herbert Hoover – the man in charge of the recovery effort, who ends up being an extremely interesting figure – started out desiring to help the conditions of blacks and ended up kowtowing to local mores. One of the results of this was the shifting of his Republican party away from its Abolitionist roots. Hoover’s usefulness to the South during the flood gained him partisans there, which led to his realization that he could exploit the South’s revulsion at voting for a Catholic (Al Smith) and win Southern states. He became the first Republican candidate blacks shied away from and the first to win any southern states since Reconstruction (he carried Texas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia). Roosevelt of course later began the process of winning the black vote for the Democratic Party.
This is one of the modern results of this flood, another being a transformation of the role of government. Barry notes how Grover Cleveland in 1887 had vetoed an appropriation of $10,000 for seed for Texas farmers devastated by a flood, as he found “no warrant in the Constitution… to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds… for the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service” (369). This he said, despite the fact that he believed that it would be effective. After this flood, on the other hand, the U.S. government not only undertook disaster recovery operations, but the Army Corps of Engineers assumed responsibility for the regulation of the Mississippi River, and by extension every other river in America. This built the Hoover Dam, brought water to California, made agriculture possible in the West, brought electric power to the South, and numerous other things.
The main value of this book is in its details, which fill you with that horrible Faulkner feeling (“The past is not dead. In fact, it isn’t even past.”) that so pervades the South. All the labor building and fortifying the levees was done by blacks. LeRoy Percy, a quondam U.S. senator, friend of Teddy Roosevelt, and one of the book’s main characters, wrote to a friend this way:
Nothing could be more interesting, so far as racial study goes, than to see five or six thousand free negroes working on a weak point under ten or twelve white men, without the slightest friction and of course without any legal right to call upon them for the work, and yet the work is done not out of any feeling of obligation but out of a traditional obedience to the white man. (193)
This is the kind of delusion that seemed to grow well at the time with a little money and a university education. The “traditional obedience to the white man” was enforced at a thousand points in the society and was no less violent because it was so habitual. And of course, the crisis brought these facts to the fore:
In towns on both sides of the river, every morning the police ran patrols through the black neighborhoods and grabbed black men off the street to send them to the levee. If a black man refused, he was beaten or jailed or both; more than one man was shot…. William Davis, a black man, drove the trucks, and says, ‘The first of April I started carrying people up there. Never saw any white people on the levee working.’ (195-6)
When the levee broke:
‘The negroes ran to the break also,’ [National Guard officer E.C.] Sanders wrote in his official report, ‘but as they arrived they soon became demoralized and ran away. It then became necessary for the civilian foreman and my detachment to force the negroes to the break at the point of guns.’ (200)
It was no use. The levee was ripped apart by the river.
Paternalism is one of the primary phenomena in the white-black relation in the book; Will Percy, LeRoy’s son, wrote: “None of us was influenced by what the Negroes themselves wanted: they had no capacity to plan for their own welfare; planning for them was another of our burdens” (308). Time has not made this way of thinking or mode of action go away. Here is a description of the Hurricane Katrina evacuation, from the mouth of Anthony Wells, in Dan Baum’s book Nine Lives, some eighty years later:
They didn’t take us to no Superdome. By then, they were cleaning that bitch out. That’s when they found all them women raped, the murdered babies, all that shit. They took us to the Convention Center, and, man, they had that shit tight! The Army was running it by then, and they took everything you had – guns, knives, even my ink pen. One thing they didn’t take away was people’s animals. It was like every other person there had him a damned dog on a leash. One guy had a basket of kittens. Another had a hedgehog up under his shirt. I ain’t kidding you. A hedgehog. Couldn’t take my ink pen in there, but go ahead, sir, take your hedgehog. (262)
Finally, they put us on a plane, a regular airline plane because they’d run out of Army planes. The whole time, they wouldn’t tell us where we were going. ‘You’ll know when you get there,’ they said, but what kind of shit is that? Some people said, ‘No, I ain’t going,’ and the soldiers and police and all, they just said, ‘Oh yes you are.’ Like we was under communism or some shit. Put us all on that plane with dogs all up and down the aisle, people crying. We flew I don’t know how long. An hour. Maybe two. Set down right before dawn. When we come to a stop, the door opens, and this white man gets on. He’s wearing a suit and tie all buttoned up, and it’s like five o’clock in the morning. He looks like a preacher. I look back to see what he’s looking at, and oh Lordy Jesus, that plane was full of stinking, crazy-looking niggers. We got dogs, we got cats. We got that dude with his motherfucking hedgehog. One dude, with the big gold grille, had a big-ass boa constrictor around his neck. This little white dude in the suit, he must have thought his world had about ended. The best of New Orleans delivered up fresh to his doorstep! But I’ll tell you, he was cool. He smiled like he was on a game show. Said, ‘I am the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, and I’m here to welcome you to my city.’ (268-9)
Whites and blacks both need to figure out what to make of this relationship and how to change it. It makes you want to go out and start reading Kipling, just to understand it better.
There is a third part of Rising Tide, dealing with the engineering questions on the river itself, which are in fact more or less irrelevant to the book. Any ink spent on James Eads – one of the three engineers profiled – is worthwhile to some extent, as he is one of the great autodidact geniuses of all time, but the section as a whole is not worth much except as a proof of Barry’s general contention that personal grievances and politics often get in the way of justice or achievement. For an understanding of the engineering problems of the river, a look at John McPhee’s essay Atchafalaya will better repay your time. Barry does not appear to have a grasp on the technical reasons for the failure of the levees-only theory of river control.
I will close with a word on the book itself. The value of the book derives from the facts and quotations (judiciously selected; Barry has a good eye) in its pages, and the story itself, but not from its handling. A hundred-fifty pages could easily have been excised out of its 420 without any damage; there is no stylistic reason to read the book; and there are entire paragraphs of inaccurate bluster and crass sensationalizing. Do we really need utterances like “There was something dark in Mississippi, darker even than the rest of the South. And it would grow darker still”? You have to endure things like this:
He could face the fact that he would never be his father. He could even face the fact that he had failed his father, but he could not accept that his father had failed him, not because his father had patronized or even betrayed him, but because his father had done what Will could not admire. He could not face his father’s ruthlessness, and the abnegation of everything in which Will had believed. Unless one embraces the truth, one can only be comic or tragic; one cannot be heroic. His father had often been heroic. In the war Will had been heroic. Neither his father nor he were heroic now. (335)
If your story doesn’t make the fact that the son is ashamed of his father obvious, then at least you can say it more quickly than this.
Earlier Will had derided as ‘rabbits’ those men who had fled the city. But he could not tolerate criticism; he could not tolerate public failure; he could not tolerate being treated as irrelevant; he could not tolerate the truth. (335)
You have to tolerate a great deal of this in between the narration of the facts, and it cloys especially as it comes with so little psychological insight. Every man is reduced to wanting one thing (usually power), and every man “would do anything to get it.” You tire of the hyperbole after the first 300 pages or so.
But the book as a whole is worth a look, and it shows how deep and abiding many of this country’s problems are, and shows the truth of this saying, from Margaret Knox (reported by Dan Baum): “Oy! You ask someone in New Orleans a question, and they have to start so far back that they never get to telling you what you want to know.” There is so much water already under the bridge, and the current so vast and uncontrollable, you find yourself unable to say anymore how things could be made better.
The two faces of government.
17-Mar-09A quotation from Matt Walsh which appeared on this blog:
This whole national debate [on gay marriage] is overwrought. If the state sanctions marriages (check) and confers benefits to the parties involved (check check) then anyone should be able to marry anyone.
Whatever church or cult you belong to doesn’t have to recognize it.
This to me is a perfect example of “rights thinking” with regard to everything a government does. We are used to – from Social Contract language and the rest – considering government’s job as “protecting rights” and hence being indiscriminate – all have their rights equally protected.
But this is really only a tiny fraction of what government does. Most of government work is really social and cultural self-expression, and is far more organic – it far predates any Social Contract theories or even the idea of rights at all.
A good example of this is scientific research. As we know, most university research in the United States is funded by the federal government. There is no question of protecting rights here – we are talking about research into new methods of refrigeration or better soaps or genetically engineering a really good-tasting eggplant. Of course, much of that research provides advances in life expectancy, prevents diseases, develops new military technology and so forth. But the main dynamic is that the society as a whole values research and innovation, and so allocates social money for it.
The National Endowment for the Arts is another example. You will hear bad thinkers justify this kind of government program by talking about the citizens’ “right to art,” but really what is going on is that certain people – the artists – receive privileges from the government because the society approves of having artists around in the society.
Education is the same. Education is mostly state-sponsored – even private institutions rely on both direct funding and nearly complete tax exemptions – because this is the way the society wants itself to be. It is the society’s self-expression.
In fact, most of government is like this – roads, post offices, bailout packages, all the things government does for the economy, are all questions of society’s cultivation of itself rather than protection of rights.
In doing this, society imposes restrictions. When a post office has to be built, there is no equal opportunity with the design competition: it goes to the person who fits the society’s cultural demands at that time. If neoclassicism is the expression of the society (or at least the contract-awarding commission) at the time, then you had better put some Corinthians on that facade. If cheapness is the order of the day, then build a warehouse. If you want the economic benefits of a road running through your property, you’ll have to locate yourself in between two important destinations or in the only mountain pass for miles on either side.
But just because your neighbor in the pass got a road built right to his doorstep and clear on through to the other side does not mean that under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution you have a right to one too in your dead-end valley. Just because Toni Morrison got an NEH grant to sit around at home putting words into a computer doesn’t mean you have a right to the same thing. Those kind of privileges are conferred by society and under society’s conditions.
This is not the same as a license for unlimited corruption, although admittedly most corruption comes through the government this way. Theoretically, a road’s route should conform to the basic expectations for a road, such as directness, ease of terrain, and so forth. But those standards would have been the same for Ivan the Terrible, who recognized no rights but still would have known a good road when he saw one.
This is why I do not agree that in the case of marriage that merely the fact that the government is conferring benefits on some people that that means that all must have equal access to it. If the society votes a billion dollars to preserve “historical” homes, and you think your home you built last year has a lot of history in it, go ahead and try to convince other people, I say – but don’t be surprised when your neighbor’s house where George Washington slept sops up most of the funding. That’s what most people mean by “historical.” And until society’s definition of marriage changes – which it is, by the way, but not nearly enough for democratic legitimacy – don’t be surprised if the benefits go to only a portion of the population.
May as well give it a try…
17-Mar-09
Michael Jackson for Congress poster in Carville, Louisiana.
Institutions and the Living Individual.
13-Mar-09If you want to know why Andrew Sullivan has such a huge readership, look no further than this lovely bit of confession that surfaced on his blog yesterday:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/believing-throu.html#more
Despite being a generation older than most of his readers, he expresses precisely the feeling so many of us share, of being a living soul in an ash-heap of dying institutions. As I think about the people I love most, I almost can say that I know of no one who derives life and happiness from an institution: churches, schools, businesses, charities, and countries alike all fail for us. This is not merely because I know only one sort of person. This feeling that any membership is at best a leaving behind of one’s best parts, and at worst a betrayal of one’s purpose in life, is felt by friends in schools, universities, law, the corporate world, start-ups, music, publishing, unions, neighborhoods, and religions. And this may be mere solipsism, but I feel Sullivan’s words particularly keenly: can the alienation get any more intense than for educated upper-middle-class American Catholic idealists with a conservative bent? Cicero said that trust (fides) is the foundation of all civil society. Is there any place where abuse of this trust has not become policy?
The Boyhood Home of James Earl Carter.
10-Mar-09“My life on the farm during the Great Depression more nearly resembled farm life fully two thousand years ago than farm life today.” – Jimmy Carter
We know that social change occurs glacially, and that the victories discussed in textbooks represent rallying-points rather than real social conversions. American schools were “desegregated” in 1955, and yet remain overwhelmingly divided by race fifty-four years later, at the time of this essay. Fifty-four years is hardly any time at all in race matters.
The North, after the military surrender of the South in the Civil War, attempted with its Reconstruction to speed this glacial pace, bringing blacks to Congress, integrating institutions, and so forth. The social resistance was so great that military fomenting of this social transformation was abandoned (in 1877) and events resumed their glacial pace – once most of the Reconstruction-era changes were undone.
Consequently, one would imagine that differences between the South in 1890 and 1850 would be merely gradations, and between the South in 1920 and 1890 mere gradations again. Terms like ante bellum – which presuppose a huge demarcating line and a real difference post and ante – are unlikely to hold a great deal of truth.
An example of this is the boyhood home of James Earl Carter, America’s thirty-ninth president. Carter, in many respects, appears to be the first president of the era we now live in – he was the first to be born in a hospital (in 1924, fifty-four years after Georgia was readmitted to the Union), the first to turn his church membership into real political capital, and the first to wish to be evaluated by his handling of America’s client states. He was also the first president to engage Middle Eastern politics outside of a Cold War frame of reference. But it is easy to mistake his upbringing in rural Georgia for something resembling a modern rural or suburban childhood. To a modern, Carter’s childhood strongly resembled the antebellum South.
The appearance of the Carter home helps create the impression of modern middle-class life. The
The boyhood home of Jimmy Carter.
house is an elongated, single-story, three-bedroom home built from catalog plans. It would have fit into any Southern City – even its elongated layout appears to suggest the exigencies of an urban location, though the house stands very much alone. It has no basement and stands on brick piers, the cheapest kind of foundation for a house; and its layout is of the absolute simplest, one long central hallway (about five feet across) with living room, dining room, and kitchen on the left and three bedrooms on the right. There are no beauties, no architectural detailing, no staircases, and no ingenuity. All the windows appear to be the same size. This was a cheap, mass-produced house, a precursor of the age of the two by four. Its plans (and perhaps some of its materials; I am not certain) were purchased from Sears and Roebuck.
The Carter living room.
However, it is also a sturdy and respectable six room structure, with oak floors and moldings. Indoor plumbing was added later, in the kitchen and the single bathroom. The bathroom is home to the home’s homeliest detail, a shower pipe which drops water into a milkpail with a perforated bottom, which served as the Carter shower head. (This might count as ingenuity, although it is hard to imagine why a milkpail was cheaper than a showerhead. Perhaps the pail already had a hole in it.) The area was electrified in 1938. Carter grew up with kerosene lamps for light.
The house was solitary because it was a farmhouse. The house stands at the edge of a lovely pecan grove, the trees arranged in the customary rank and file. Behind the pecan orchard began the peanut fields, which were the primary cash crop of the farm. If you walk through the fields, you can circle back to the house via the barns, the stable, the vegetable garden, the chicken coop, and the tennis court.
If the reader mentally returned in surprise to those words – tennis court – then he did precisely what I did as I strolled by. “Tennis court?” I said to myself, snapping out of my blank tourist reverie. “I have never, ever, in my life seen a middle-class American farm with a tennis court on it.” And yes, it was old – Carter had played on it as a boy (so it was not added by later owners in 1984). And yes, Georgia has an ample supply of clay (it was a clay court), and so it is easier to build a tennis court here than in Vermont. But still, the feature was unusual, especially given the class connotations that tennis (still) has in American society. And given the hardscrabble son-of-a-peanut-farmer image Carter has worked to create (his autobiography of farm life was called “an hour before daylight,” celebrating his own hard work getting up before dawn).
I turned around and doubled back towards some of the farm buildings I had neglected to look at on my stroll through. A barn is a barn, I had thought, and a shed is a shed. But an inspection of the shed disclosed that it was a blacksmith’s shop – a more impressive place than I would have imagined here. Similarly the barns contained stupendous numbers of ploughs, wagons, and tools. The Carters also owned, onsite, their own peanut processing facility. This was a huge farming operation – much more than the Carter family could have managed. And the last shed by the road – that had a few too many windows on it to be a shed.
It turns out it was the home of a black family, the Carters’ skinner Jack Clark (responsible for the horses and mules) and his wife Rachel, who served as a nanny to the Carters’ children. They lived in a tiny one-bedroom shack with several children of their own. And here I realized what I was seeing. Jimmy Carter did not grow up on a farm, as we see it today, farmer, wife, kids, animals, and machines; he grew up on what we would call a plantation – farmer, wife, kids, animals, and negroes. The negroes were no longer owned – they had a degree of freedom they had not had sixty years before. But much of the economic and social reality had remained. If it was not a plantation, it was the ghost of a plantation. Beverly Gherman wrote a children’s book about Carter and describes the place in these straightforward terms:
Earl owned hundreds of acres of land on which he grew cotton and peanuts. He also owned a warehouse where he processed the crops. He employed black field hands to help him plant and harvest. The workers lived in small clapboard houses around the property…” (1)
The next phrase is lovely and needs to be given the emphasis of isolation: “and their children were Jimmy’s friends.” This is no doubt true, and it fits into the myth of Carter purity, but every adult can see the power relationships at work in this peculiar social institution.
This ghost of a plantation was known as the hamlet of Archery. Carter describes it as having twenty-five families; the Carters, twenty-three African-American families, and one other white family that lived at some distance (not visible from the Carter house). The Carters employed all the African-American families. What is more, as the nearest town – Plains – was three miles away and none of the Carter employees had cars, many of them shopped at the Carter “Commissary,” which was next to the tennis court. This particular variant of the “Company Store” may or may not have been typical, with employees in debt to their employer, huge mark-ups, and full-throttle exploitation of a geographical monopoly, but they certainly sold the usual goods like tobacco and whiskey. By the time of the young president’s manhood, the Carters were an affluent family in consequence of this type of peanut farming. Let me add here that I know nothing of the Carters’ cotton growing; this also has never been part of the Carter persona, perhaps because they stopped growing cotton early on, or perhaps because being known as a cotton planter has more complicated political implications which Carter wished to avoid.
There was not much incisive information available on-site about the roots of the Carter prosperity, but that plant grows best whose roots are in dirt is ancient wisdom. But for all I know, the Carters ran their commissary as a charity operation for the mere convenience of their employees and the purgation of the sins on their eternal souls before God. As a president, no doubt polemical biographies exist of Carter which demonize or canonize the family business, and no doubt a reliable biographer or two has found a few facts concerning the matter. And in general, there is much fertile ground here for research, much of which, for all I know, has already been done.
What is clear from the site is that the Carter home as a 20th-century plantation is not the focus of the preservation effort. The term “plantation,” a politically difficult word, of course is not used, and I felt, as I wandered around the place, that I was drawing conclusions a bit different from the ones the site was attempting to convey about Jimmy Carter’s hardscrabble childhood as a simple country boy with a loving-multicultural-harmony-flavor. But I could not ask any questions, because no one was there. The house was open, but there were no guards, no visitors, no one. Placards explained what I was seeing; some of them had buttons which played audio recordings of Jimmy Carter explaining things himself. I saw no one at the house for the entire duration of my visit.
When I left, a certain perverse desire for exploration prompted me to turn right, rather than left to go back
Archery.
to the main road; I figured I’d find a way through. The road came to a sharp right turn and became dirt, so I figured I should turn back, when I realized that I had found the rest of Archery. I parked my pickup truck and got out.
At the turning of the road were about half a dozen old clapboard one- or two-room shacks, unpainted, unoccupied, and slowly decaying. Back behind me along on the paved part of the road was one which was recognizably the same style, but since expanded and upgraded, with painted exterior and a car in the driveway. It had looked so normal and modern that I had paid it no mind as I drove past. Next to it were two shacks decorated with “no trespassing” signs. For
The expensive part of Archery.
the time being I heeded the warning and walked down to the shacks facing the dirt road.
To reach these I had to climb over a fence. The nearest shack was locked, and its windows so dirty I could barely see through them. It was leaning dangerously, and its porch was rotting away. As I neared it two pigeons flew out, which gave me quite a scare. It appeared to be completely filled with objects. All around on the ground was old detritus: glass bottles, tin cans, bits of machinery, cigarette butts. I walked over to a trailer which was parked nearby. It was covered in notices. They were certificates of occupancy, from 2000, 2001, 2002, and sure enough, all the way through 2008. To my eyes the place looked like no one had been there in two years (or cared for it in ten). I inspected a little one-horse stable, now badly rotted but still floored with hay. I continued past two mounds of loose bricks and concrete, an old oil tank, and a large mound of old ashes and fire-remains to look at what appeared to be hundreds of filing-cabinet drawers, in stacks which had been pushed over. They were not file drawers, though: they were hundreds upon hundreds of boxes of ammunition! They had apparently been made by the Army. They were in their boxes, but obviously had been exposed to the elements for some time; I have no idea if the ammunition was any good or not. I was staring at this find when I realized, quite suddenly, that I was in
Those are not file drawers.
precisely the kind of Southern place we Northerners are always told we’d better steer clear of.
Someone else arrived to give me the same news. It was a dog, coming from the occupied house. He was at quite a distance, and looked me over first, before he started barking. “Dammit this is not a good place to be,” I said, and I left the ammo, the ashes, the oil tank, the trailer, and the rotted out shack behind. I leaped over the fence, the dog barking like a devil but not approaching, and I headed on back to my truck. I decided to follow the dirt road, figuring it would get me somewhere eventually. I saw a few more shacks, all similarly abandoned and not looking very accessible, got through a wet spot on the road (by the grace of the God who made four-wheel-drive pickups), and soon hit the highway again.
Those shacks of the Carter’s tenant farmers (presuming that is what they are) could easily become part of the Carter National Historical Site; but the continuity of the plantation past in the life of a living president might not be the kind of thing we like to remember. And to be fair, Teddy Roosevelt’s family might have owned a block of slums in the Five Points (I am making this up), or the Bush family a share in a South African gold mine, but we can’t memorialize the whole social and economic pyramid of life which supported the lives of these prominent men. Still, while there I felt that the term “farmer” could be very casually applied to Carter without full knowledge of what farming meant in Georgia’s cotton and peanut belt in the 1920s.
I have appended to this essay the quotation from Carter about his life resembling farm life from two thousand years ago; indeed the resemblance to Roman life struck me. The Romans would have called this institution a villa: a farm consisting of a single dominant family, their household servants and their field hands (this tripartite social structure also helps explain the strong connection Carter had to the Clarks, who were skilled labor and in a different social category from the field hands). I remember being disappointed the first time I read Cato the Elder, who supposedly represented the pristine Roman virtue, to find that his farming manual was mostly about running a business and managing slaves. In an advanced society, the people of prominence are the ones who manage workers, not the ones who work. The famous line of Jefferson “those who labor in the Earth are the chosen people of God,” if it was meant to have any honesty in it at all, presumably referred to those managers and Catos – to men like himself – as opposed to their slaves.
Caesar said that he would rather be the first man in a remote and unknown tribe of savages than second man in Rome. The Roman villa provided a kind of training ground for this preeminence, as it placed the young heir in a position of authority over a considerable number of individuals even from a young age. And yet it also brought with it some of the mystical connection to nature, and knowledge of the foundations of human society drawing its sustenance from the skin of the Earth, which Jefferson and Carter both rhapsodize about.
And it can also produce that curious combination of pauperism and nobility which so suits the modern presidency, where experience in command is essential but privilege is not preferred. Carter’s house was not large, especially compared to the homes of other men he encountered in his political life; and he was from Archery, Georgia, a tiny place on the outskirts of Plains, Georgia, which could hardly even be called a town. (The only place I found in Plains that was open for lunch was a soda machine.)
Lunchtime in Plains, Georgia.
Plains is a satellite of Americus, the nearest true town; Americus is an interesting American place and not Podunksville, but neither is it Times Square. It is a strange backdrop for a child who later spent four years as the world’s most powerful man. Carter exploited this “simple, rugged, down-home, honest outsider” image to the full in his political campaigns.
On the other hand, Carter was clearly the crown prince of Archery. His father was the owner of the land nearly as far as he could see and the boss of all but one of the families in the area. As a boy, his appearance, wealth, reputation, and education set him apart from all the other residents of his village. Those twenty-three African-American families probably contained more than a hundred people, all of whom probably treated him with great deference. He himself mentions that he ran the Commissary when his parents were otherwise occupied, which is a rich source of experience for a young person: deciding who could buy on credit and who could not, who could be sold liquor and who could not, what to do in case of theft, how to handle returns, shortages, and other customer dissatisfaction, and confronting other such small but significantly discretionary situations. Superiority over others is a school for judgement and command, and it is not all that surprising that a large number of our presidents lived as masters among slaves (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, W.H. Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Grant, and even Wilson briefly) or spent time managing simple stores (Jackson, Johnson, Grant, Truman, Carter, Clinton). These two categories cover all the presidents ever to come from the old Slave States, excepting the Texans, who deserve their own category in this and every other way.
It would be interesting to learn more about the evolutionary successor to plantation life in the South, and how it continued to develop after Carter. Carter’s own accounts seem likely to be sentimentalized and politically crafted; but as a president, he undoubtedly has drawn the strong spotlight of investigation. A full investigation of racial roles on the farm would be fascinating. Carter continually mentions that the black children in the town were his friends; did they get to play tennis with him? Did they sometimes eat at the dinner table with him? Other typical plantation topics – like the sexual dynamics between the farmer’s son and the black girls of the village – I will presume we will never know for certain.
All these topics may be covered in the existing biographies, none of which I have read. I myself know nothing about Carter besides what a person growing up in the 1980s would hear in normal political discussion and what I could see at the site. I wish there had been an engaged, knowledgeable, and honest person at the site to discuss these things with. The Carter boyhood is now another research topic to add to my list.
The milkpail shower.
The Huey P. Long Bridge.
07-Mar-09
Dan Baum’s Nine Lives.
07-Mar-09Dan Baum came to New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina as a reporter for The New Yorker. The encounter changed his life, and New Orleans became one of his fascinations, for good and ill, as with most fascinations. As he says, “I think part of my being ejected from The New Yorker was that I was always agitating for more space in the magazine for New Orleans. Because as big as this disaster was, it wasn’t the most interesting thing about the city.”
Elsewhere he continues: “New Orleans is so strange in the American context that it turns even the most casual visitor into an anthropologist, seeking to unlock the peculiar characteristics of the city’s inhabitants. This leads to a lot of on-the-fly generalizations that, upon further examination, turn out to be true.” New Orleanians care less about money than the inhabitants of other American cities. They think less about the future. They are less governed by the clock. They work less. They lead less solitary lives. They develop stronger neighborhood ties and family ties. They accept outsiders less.
“Long before the storm, New Orleans was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States – the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most corrupt and brutal cops. Yet a poll conducted a few weeks before the storm found that more New Orleanians – regardless of age, race, or wealth – were ‘extremely satisfied’ with their lives than residents of any other American city.” That about sums up the mystery, doesn’t it?
This mystery explain why Nine Lives is worth reading, but a read of Nine Lives will most certainly not explain the mystery. It is worthwhile as another point of entry into the city, in the form of nine fairly complete lives, each with a compelling narrative arc. The nine are designed to have a Canterbury Tales-kind of encyclopedic quality for New Orleans – a jazz-playing city coroner, the wife of a famous Mardi Gras Indian, the local head of an electrician’s union who founded a museum, a middle-class football-playing transsexual bar owner, a King of Rex banker, a hard-bitten police officer, a Ninth Ward jailbird with a real flair for storytelling (who provides almost all the book’s color), an inspirational high school band leader with marital problems, and a poor bookish woman who tried all her life to escape the Ninth Ward and live the “white picket fence” life and kept on getting dragged back.
Baum’s approach is to tell the stories as if he were writing a novel, mostly narrating important transformative scenes in their lives, with dialogue and spare description colored by their perspective (hence when his character is black, Baum might use a term like “whitegirl;” when his character is white, he might use the term “nigger”). This approach works, in general: you get a fair amount of information about these nine people in 300 pages, and you feel that you have touched on many of the salient issues in New Orleans (and human) life, such as the relation of society to money, corruption to policing, incompetence to politics, dumb regulation to bureaucratic processes, violence to black neighborhoods, pregnancy to women’s ambitions, friendship to influence, and pageantry to New Orleans life in general. Many things you will hear people talk about in New Orleans are narrated here.
But certain things about the approach are ineffective. One is that it is probably impossible to have nine centers of attention in one 300 page book. And you certainly cannot do it the way Baum does, jumping from one center to another, sometimes after only half a page of narration. At times it is like sitting with a person who is trying to watch nine television shows. Baum is attempting to achieve simultaneity, but it does not really work. The best parts of the book are where he allows one story to take over for several pages at a time. (I will note that I am particularly interested in this problem technically, as I am currently writing a multi-centered novel and struggling to keep the parts together). The interwoven structure is particularly difficult because the threads do not necessarily work with each other – Baum, who chose chronology as the book’s organizing principle, does not have the maneuvering room of a novelist, who can have three scenes in a row with three separate sets of characters all be variations on fathers and sons (for instance). And yet he uses the technique of a novelist.
If you do the math, you will note that each person gets only just over thirty pages. Written dialogue and sustained narrative is not a very efficient medium for delivering the story of a person’s whole life over forty years in thirty pages. (In fact, seen from this perspective, Baum’s achievement looks notable against such difficult odds).
What is more, since the book is so focused on these nine lives, many of the other questions a reader is likely to have about the city go unanswered. Hurricane Katrina is a good example. The sheer intensity of these nine storm experiences leave you with many questions and no answers. This may well be the point. But it is frustrating – you learn, for instance, that for weeks after the storm New Orleans had no morgue, and so could not collect bodies, nor any jail, and so it could not arrest criminals. I would like to know a great deal more about the government failures that made situations like that possible. Or you learn that Mardi Gras Indians’ main occupation was to fight, in the manner of gangs. Why in the world was this?
Those are factual questions, and their answers can be found in other books (I presume; though it would have been nice for Baum to at least annotate a bibliography for us so we could find them easily). He is telling nine stories, not explaining an entire city. But there is another thing missing from Baum’s book, and that is the author’s perspective itself. It comes out, of course, as it has to, here and there, but there is almost no evaluation of the tales he is told, and nothing incisive. His jailbird goes in and out of Angola, without ever seeming to do anything wrong. That could be systemic racism or it could be massive denial or it could be the perspective of an amoral monster or it could be something else. And perhaps no one will ever know. But it would be interesting to get the interpretation of the stories, from the man who was close enough to them to record them. The racial segregation of the narratives is striking – but there is no discussion of this fact, merely narrative. This is one of the dangers of writing nonfiction about living people you want to be friends with afterwards. From the reader’s perspective, you want to tell the author that you’re going to turn off the tape recorder and you want him to go off the record and tell you what he really thinks. But he has constructed himself a form in which that would be impossible. You can feel the ultimate constriction this produces.
This is why the mystery of New Orleans remains neither explained nor even touched by the book. Ultimately, the only ways to understand a trance are to have a trance yourself (the best way), or to hear someone who has been in a trance describe the experience. But merely narrating the things a man did that got him into a trance is not enough. So with New Orleans – you feel it is not just the stories, but the feelings in between the stories, that you want. You feel that both Baum and his characters have had those mystical experiences with the city – but that his method of presentation does not convey it. This is why the first-person narrative, which he preserves word-for-word in one instance, is so much more compelling than the rest of the book. In fact, the voice of Anthony Wells, his Angola jailbird, is so mesmerizing it is almost worth the purchase price of the book all alone. And that is why the book ultimately points beyond itself to the literary possibilities of a place like New Orleans: a Canterbury Tales-type book where the perspective (a la Chaucer) is preserved, and the magic of each individual’s experience is presented as the key element in understanding the whole.
A note on style. The writing is generally not interesting in itself, as everything is subordinate to the narrative, and the narrative attempts to keep the “amateur” voices of the subjects. There are no ten-dollar words or imperishable sentences.
That said, when Baum is describing something well known in the city but perhaps unknown to his readers (which is infrequent; as a general rule he explains very little), he will resort to what I will call “the New Yorker style,” which is to use spicy descriptive adjectives, more for their spice than their appropriateness. Hence he describes Audubon Park as having a “misshapen” oval walking path. In terms of connotation, misshapen is the wrong word – the park was designed by Olmsted Brothers and is nothing if not shapely. But “misshapen” looks and sounds better – spicier – than “irregular,” and “sinuous” would be a tad erogenous. It is style over fidelity. Some people, of course, like this sort of writing and will probably wish he did more of it.
Just to close this, I’ll record some of the best bits of first-person narrative, all from Anthony Wells. They really are gems. I’ll have to control myself and make sure I don’t copy that entire part of the book.
“Then one day I woke up from a nap in the backseat and everything was green. I mean like green. Water everywhere. It looked like we were driving over water that had this thin skin of grass on top, like if you scraped up a spoonful of grass you’d find water underneath. And that spooky Spanish moss shit hanging from the trees – you ever see that? Like you’re in a horror movie. Green. And my dad’s music came on the radio. You should have seen my parents, man. Like they got their groove back. ‘Here we are. We’re in New Orleans,’ my dad says, and I’m seeing it, this place I been dreaming about. It’s all jam-packety, pretty old houses lined up one beside the other, each one a different color, with curlicues and flowers, and man, streets just full of people. White people, black people, mixed-race people, all jumbled up together and walking. Music right on the sidewalk and everything, and I don’t mean like one nigger with a guitar, but a whole band and drum set and everything, like the whole city is a big party. I’m looking out the window, eyes big as saucers – eight years old – and I’m thinking, this is a whole different way to be a Negro; I’m thinking, this is where Daddy gets his groove.
“We pull up to a light, and a cop car pulls right next to us. The cops are white, of course, but not like the storm troopers they got out in California; they’re kind of fat and rumpled up, like a couple of plumbers or something, you know what I’m saying? They kind of nod and smile, and Daddy smiles back. Smiling at a couple of white cops!” (39)
“I did maintenance at the Municipal Auditorium, got it ready for their Mardi Gras balls and shit, which was like fucking Gone With the Wind.” (91)
“What happened was, the wind started up ’long about nightfall. Well, I been in wind before, shit. But this time, man, it got louder and louder till you didn’t think it could get no worse. But it did, man. Stronger. Screaming like a thousand whistles. And we’re up on the second floor, the whole place is shaking. I kept thinking, okay, it’s played itself out, it’s going to stop now. But it didn’t. It went on and on and on. The lights was still on until, I don’t know, sometime late, a lightning bolt hit the transformer over by the canal and that motherfucker lit up the whole sky. BOOM! Blue fire – red, purple, and green fire. The lights blinked on and off, and then, bam, everything went dark. I look out, and there’s water up the windows downstairs. I’m thinking, we fucked up.
“At two o’clock, the neighbors start coming. Gwen and Jennifer and Steve and Nat and Guy, Geebee and Shortie – they all come, tied together so they wouldn’t blow off the steps. When I open the door, the wind takes it right off the hinges; I’m holding it by the knob and it’s like a big kite dancing around in my hand. We get that bitch nailed on and wind tears off the front roof. So now we got water coming in, the insulation hanging down. I took me a slug of liquor and curled up in the bathtub, thinking, that’s the safest place. I’m no pussy, but I got to tell you, man, this shit got right on top of my ass.” (219)
“The wind finally stop and we look outside, and I never seen so many stars. Sky was clear like I never seen it in New Orleans before, and there was no lights anywhere. It was like looking at the face of God, man. ” (223)
“I’m from New Orleans, man; I know how to work. But in Tennessee, man, it’s like going back in time. The white people think everything is theirs. Only reason we’re not sitting in the back of the bus is because they ain’t got no buses.” (287-8)
“It was like a dungeon, man, eight dudes to a cell and I’m the only black man in there. I had seven pencils sharpened, all taped together, just in case. ‘What you doing with all those pencils, boy?’ ‘I’m doing a lot of writing, sir.’” (291)
“Always been fucked-up here, man, but it’s home. Till you been someplace else, you don’t know.” (310)
The Malefactors of Great Wealth.
18-Mar-09I know that anger is not all that useful and that my own personal contempt for the malefactors of great wealth is not news to anyone, but since the bonuses paid to AIG executives are being discussed now, let me note that the rich are really storing up wrath for themselves, if not in heaven then in the hearts of those who believe in equality, justice, and humanity. And to trot out these manifestly specious arguments for the sheeple to gobble up just adds another fathom to Madame DeFarge’s weave. “It’s a contractual obligation!” – but we need to get out of our contractual obligations to our unions. “We need to retain our best minds in this crisis!” – but more than a third of the recipients of these bonuses are to people leaving the company. “It’s not that much money!” – all the more reason to forego it without contest. The more I hear, the more I feel that this entire “credit crisis” comes not from defaulted mortgages, but from the immense amounts of wealth corporate executives have removed from the economy and consumed on stupidity and trifles. It makes you realize limited liability corporations really make no sense when coupled with unlimited greed. Someone just may realize that that is a ludicrous imbalance in our law. Someone may also get the idea of loading up the tumbrils to bring the day’s red wine to Monsieur Le Guillotine. I’d much prefer for everyone to sing Lionel Richie songs together, plant daylilies, and just be nice. But “you cannot serve God and Mammon” is not a new teaching.