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Confederately Confused (Pt. 2)
[The second part of a three-part posting that begins here] 1977 (Home from college): Me: Frankly, I’m glad the North won the Civil War. They were right and we were wrong. Them: But your grandmama’s grandaddy fought in the War and was killed by Yankees! Me: He should’ve never been there in the first place.…
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Confederately Confused (Pt. 1)
For decades Southerners were trained to distrust and dislike Yankees, by which was meant anyone raised anywhere outside the eleven Confederate states. So, like most Southern kids of my generation, I was instructed in the Dixie catechism, which varies only in that each family has its own tale of why the Civil War is personal. …
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“Agricolae sunt!” (Tribute to Miss Hortenstine)
Occasionally on TV I’ll see a Farmers Insurance commercial featuring the Oscar-winning actor J.K. Simmons who describes the various ways the vaunted insurance company can save us from doom. Always, the commercial ends with the ear-wormy jingle We are farmers! Bum-bah-bum-bah-bum-bum-bum! To which I often sing back Agricolae sunt! Bum-bah-bum-bah-bum-bum-bum! which is Latin for “They are farmers!” …
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Lemme ‘splain to you about my back-up ball
Where I was born, every boy was supposed to become an athlete. This was terribly unfair to the few of us who weren’t equipped for the task. But there was no begging off. It was unthinkable to face your father and say, “Look, Dad, I’m really more of the bookish type.” No, you had to…
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Me and Russia, we go way back
[Written in response to, “How come you old farts are so pissed off about Russia?” asked by a younger friend whose political awareness bloomed after the Cold War.] My stormy relationship with Russia began benignly enough in my front yard on an October night in 1957. I was three years old, so it’s a bit…
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Eulogy for Ensley High School
Last Tuesday around 2:30 a.m., a call came into the Birmingham Fire Department that a large, vacant three-story building at 2301 Avenue J was on fire. TV cameramen arrived shortly after the firefighters and filmed thick flames shooting like cannons from the building’s third-floor. Against the night sky, the scene was especially lurid and would have…
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“Mr. Stephens, were you a racist?” (Conclusion)
[This concludes a five-part series that begins here.] As I grew older, my experience of the world around me increasingly contradicted the stereotypes in which I’d been indoctrinated. I began to notice that the exceptions were overwhelming the rules. Italians were not all connected to the Mafia. Greeks were not all in the restaurant business.…
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“Mr. Stephens, were you a racist?” (Pt. 4)
[The fourth installment of a five-part series that begins here.] “Why did you come to our school?” I asked my 7th-grade classmate Shirley, one of only two black students in our 800-student school. She had been writing but stopped at the sound of my voice. She didn’t look up. Long seconds passed, and I was sure…
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“Mr. Stephens, were you a racist?” (Pt. 3)
[The third installment of a five-part series that begins here.] In 1954, the year I was born, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared, in Brown v. Board of Education, that racial segregation of public schools violates the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and that American schools must desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” Short version: “Segregation of…
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“Mr. Stephens, were you a racist?” (Pt. 2)
[The second installment of a five-part series that begins here.] The church my family attended had sought long and hard to find a minister who would state openly that he was in favor of segregation. And find him they did. Racism imbued our church as it did almost all white congregations in the South, and…
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“Mr. Stephens, were you a racist?” (Pt. 1)
The eighth-grade curriculum I teach requires students to read and write about the American civil rights movement. Truth be told, our school district starts covering the movement from fourth grade onward. So, by the time students reach me, most are worn out by the topic. But, abracadabra! I have a magic wand that reanimates their…
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You ain’t never gonna make a livin’ like that!
Spring afternoon, 1969. We’re struggling to read Romeo and Juliet, to stay awake, really. A lawnmower moans distantly from somewhere in the free world. We’ve raised the classroom’s enormously tall windows a foot or so in hopes of coaxing in a breeze to quash the heat from the steam radiators that were necessary against the…
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Long Live the Prince of Darkness!
I was born into a binary world. This was the mid- to late-1950s onward, when you were taught to put yourself on one side or the other of a passel of either/or’s. You were to be on the side of either Coke or Pepsi Ford or Chevy Bama or Auburn U.S. Keds or P.F. Flyers…
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“I’M ERNEST TUBB’S LOVE CHILD!”
Matt and I were in Manhattan’s SoHo. It was late afternoon, one of those seering, sunblazed days when concrete and asphalt work like steam radiators. We’d walked nearly the whole length of Broadway from 225th Street, counting down all 225 of ‘em, and now, with leaden legs, were wading through streets bearing surnames, only blocks…
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I’m a Fool for the City
[Writing from New York City.] The last time I was here, I went with my granddaughter Rachel, then 15 years old, to the top of the Empire State Building. It was nearly 10:00 p.m., and so the many millions of lights of New York were spread beneath and around us as if the starriest of…
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“They wudn’t nobody in there what spoke English!”
“They wudn’t nobody in there what spoke English!” said the angry man. His female companion grunted assent. The man wore a crimson cap stitched with a white scripted Alabama “A,” the woman a similar t-shirt. I turned and watched as they stomped empty-handed to their car and drove away in a roar. I had been…
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Mammaw Teaches Me Physics
Lately I’ve been studying a book of basic physics. Don’t ask me why. I’m wading through Newton’s Laws of Motion. The First Law—an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion in a straight line at a constant speed—is pretty easy to comprehend. But the…
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OCTOBER 1962
In October 1962 I was barely 8 years old and in Mrs. White’s 3rd-grade class at Birmingham’s Charles A. Brown Elementary School. Until this fateful moment, I had basked in the security that grown-ups knew best and would make sure nothing bad would ever happen to me. But then…Soviet Premier Nakita Khrushchev planted nuclear missiles…
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To Live and To Die by Change
My maternal grandfather, Kyle Hobson Durant, was born in rural Shelby County, Alabama, in September 1899. At 18, he came to Birmingham to take a menial railroad-yard job held by his brother who was enlisting into World War I. Though Kyle’s form al education reached only 6th grade, his native intelligence and eagerness to learn…
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Chiggerticky’s Kitchen
Back by popular demand. Chiggerticky forays into the kitchen to whip up an American delicacy.
Chiggerticky
A Boomer's Lament
Chiggerticky 