Plan your exit strategy.

No really, I have to get off the phone NOW.

Tim Tyson to speak at Greensboro hearing

Via Ed Cone: Tim Tyson will be one of the speakers tomorrow at Greensboro's final Truth and Reconciliation Commission meeting.

Constance Baker Motley

As my civil rights seminar was watching "The Road to Brown" on Tuesday, I had to interrupt to point out Constance Baker Motley. She gets too little time in the documentary, considering the key role she had in writing the briefs in the case, and I wanted her to be noted. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson appointed her the first female African American federal judge. She was a distinguished alumna of Columbia Law School. She was still officially working--on senior status--as judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York when she died yesterday at the age of 84.

Obits in the Post and the Times outline her distinguished career with the NAACP. These stories offer a window, if a small one, into the treacherous southern landscape against which she, along with Thurgood Marshall and other dedicated civil rights lawyers, worked for justice.

The thing I wanted to point out to my class was a small, kind of oddball point. It comes out in a quote that, interestingly, shows up in the Post obit.

In 1962, she represented James H. Meredith in his arduous but ultimately successful battle to gain admission to the University of Mississippi. Marshall gave her the case, she said, because she was a woman. "Thurgood's theory was, in the South, they don't bother black women because they all have mammies," she once said.

As a young woman Motley was not fat--she did not fit the most exaggerated stereotype of the black mammy--but she was "full-bodied," which is how Lorraine Hansberry describes the character of Mama Lena Younger in her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). That's the work we had read the week before. It's based on a case her father was involved in that challenged a race-based restrictive covenant, Hansberry v. Lee (1940). The play, as you might expect, doesn't sound at all like the legal opinion. One crucial difference is that in the play, it's the mother of the head of the family who carries the weight, in every sense.

Using Trudier Harris' reading of the play in Saints, Sinners, Saviors, I suggested that we consider Mama Lena as one of a long line of strong black female characters--written by black women--who both conform to and play against the stereotype of the old black mammy. Hansberry's choice seems to have been calculated as a way to turn a radical argument for racial equality into a palatable story about a figure every white person knows ("they all have mammies").

Mama Lena Younger is what she is: a strong but stereotyped figure for whom Hansberry was largely forgiven because of the contribution she made to the fantastic success of the play as a whole. It would certainly be wrong to confine Judge Motley to such an image. I'd rather remember her the way Jack Greenberg does:

"She was indomitable," said Jack Greenberg, who succeeded Marshall as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal and Education Fund and is now a professor at Columbia University School of Law. "She would take on a project like opening up the University of Mississippi and just keep coming back again and again and again. She was like Grant at Vicksburg. She just dug in there and stayed there until they rolled over."

She may have been calm and comforting like a mythical mammy, but what carried the day was stateliness and dignity, steadiness and smarts.

UPDATE: Kim Pearson, who comments below, finds it telling that the President made no mention of Motley's passing; he was too busy congratulating Chief Justice Roberts.

Happy birthday, OP

Congratulations to Ruby and Orange Politics on its second anniversary. Hey, from the looks of things you'd think there was an election coming up.

So not a shoe-in

Paul urges me to enter the essay contest at Manolo's Shoe Blog. I tell him I haven't bought a new pair of shoes in years. He says it doesn't matter, pointing out that I did win the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow award in high school (an essay contest). I'm just delighted to see some shoes on this site designed by Steve Madden. I think my Steve Madden black huggy sandals, not entirely dissimilar to these, is the last pair I bought, and they came from the PTA Thrift Shop. I feel an inspiration coming on.

I'm going to have to give Steve Madden more thought. Anybody who can propose this as a wedding shoe has more going on than meets the eye.

Don Adams was Smart.

We mourn the passing of Don Adams, a/k/a Maxwell Smart, a favorite anti-hero of the Cold War. Here's how smart he was: he took his wife's last name (his first wife's last name that is) because he noticed that auditions were often called in alphabetical order.

Tales out of (charm) school

Merck employees sure know how to party.

UPDATE: It's fun and games working for Merck!

It must have been Janis Joplin's fault.

If Katrina was God's wrath on New Orleans, my brother has a good question: why was the French Quarter spared? And this time, what's the deal with Port Arthur?

Rita: Cousin of Floyd?

The reports today are that Rita will be a powerful but slow-moving storm once it makes landfall, generating heavy rains far inland. Sounds a lot like what we experienced in N.C. with Floyd: "[T]he costliest damage came not from the storm itself—it came from the swiftly rising rivers and creeks that course through eastern North Carolina like a dense cluster of capillaries connecting the Piedmont Region to the Atlantic Ocean."


Clogged estuaries, Sept. 23, 1999.

My family is in East Texas right in Rita's path, possibly far enough north to avoid the worst of it. Still I hope they have plenty of flashlights and batteries.

This just in: Cheese does not cause nightmares.

So concludes the British Cheese Board. Further notes from their study:

85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most unusual dreams of the whole study. 65% of people eating Cheddar dreamt about celebrities, over 65% of participants eating Red Leicester revisited their schooldays, all female participants who ate British Brie had nice relaxing dreams whereas male participants had cryptic dreams, two thirds of all those who ate Lancashire had a dream about work and over half of Cheshire eaters had a dreamless sleep.

This good news sounds like more bad news for Charles Martell, who stands on the unwelcome brink of fame for reasons not of his cheesemaking.

Passings

Not long after attending the funeral of our neighbor Bob Miller, a fine fellow and writer of, among other things, a biography of Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the leaders of the progressive Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century, we learn of the death of Joe Straley. Two great Chapel Hill men who will be missed.

I'll bet you've needed one of these from time to time.

I know I have.

A not-to-do list.

Keeping the world safe for the book

Terry Belanger, founder of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, is one of this year's recipients of a MacArthur fellowship. "With thousands of former students currently at work in the field and offshoots of his programs in California, France, Australia, and New Zealand, Belanger is making the world a more secure place for the irreplaceable legacy of the book."

Impress your mateys today.

In case you're scrambling for resources on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, see Paul for tips.

"Rebirth of a Nation" in Chapel Hill

This Friday night, Sept. 23, Dj Spooky brings his "Rebirth of a Nation" to UNC's Memorial Hall. It's a postmodern remix of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation."

How to describe it? Words fail me. I saw it at Spoleto in 2004. It'd be cool to see it again.

Spirits abroad, shifting shoals

After a deadly flirtation with Florida, on August 28 Katrina whipped herself up into a Category 5 storm heading for the Louisiana barrier islands.

In Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening (which I just reread online courtesy Documenting the American South), August 28 is the date on which, on one of those islands, Grand Isle, Edna Pelletier begins her journey down the road of self-discovery that will become both her salvation and her undoing. Madame Ratignolle's piano-playing stirs her to a frenzy; she can't sleep; the whole night becomes "like a night in a dream." To her admirer and possible lover Robert she says, "There must be spirits abroad tonight."

Indeed, he responds: "On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is shining - the moon must be shining - a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into realms of the semi-celestials. His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But to-night he found Mrs. Pontellier."

Mrs. Pontellier is not, in the end, strong enough for the prevailing winds. But her decision to end her life by walking out into the majestic sea has to be read, on its own terms, as an affirmation. "The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace."

Southern writers and readers often talk about a "sense of place"--a notion that, while it can seem trite, has certain meaning. It has to do with the concrete and intimate relationship of geography to time and narrative. Among other and surely greater losses generated by Katrina, we should not forget the permanent destruction of so much of the physical environment.

An essay published earlier this summer, before the storm, explores the sense of place in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Residents of Grand Isle are similar to many other Americans; however, Grand Islanders believe that they have a unique culture specific to the region that makes them different from many other Americans.

Residents’ landscapes convey ideas of uniqueness and fragility. Even those respondents who do not live permanently on the island talk about how the island is fragile. Respondents’ narratives of place are framed in terms of the island being unique socially and environmentally. The island’s unique quality is not separate from its fragility. As the land erodes and changes so do the cultural aspects of the island. Traditional forms of work change and it is unknown exactly what will replace it. Neither fishing nor the oil industry can be counted on to sustain life. Development and an influx of upper middle class outsiders also change landscapes. There is a sense of cultural fragility as well as fragility of the natural environment.

While the landscapes of these residents are shaped by the certainty of erosion and the prospect of the ‘big’ hurricane, the framing of their environment in terms of fragility also contains elements of faith that go hand in hand with the land - they will hold on and sustain community while never abandoning the idea of moving ‘up the bayou’. The fragility of place appears to accentuate the unique qualities conferred upon place.

Grand Isle appears to have fared relatively well in Katrina, better than the Chandeleur Islands to the east. The before-and-after photos there are astonishing.

Constitution Day: enduring lessons

On this day in 1787, the 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention put their signatures to the document they had created.

In something of an oxymoron, President Bush signed a law that, effective this year, makes a formal celebration of Constitution Day mandatory for schools receiving federal funds. With the 17th being a Saturday this year, it was observed yesterday.

Mary Beth Tinker, child of a Methodist preacher with Quaker leanings, was an eighth-grader in Des Moines, Iowa, when she decided to become an activist against the Vietnam War. She, her brother, and others wore black armbands to class. They were suspended. For their trouble they ended up with a landmark free speech verdict from the Supreme Court, Tinker v. Des Moines (1969).

She grew up to became a pediatric nurse. She doesn't seem like a rabble-rouser. But yesterday, on Constitution Day, she was sharing her story with high school students in Washington, D.C. And she was wearing a black armband.

Muted homecoming

Abram Himelstein is back home.

Fact-checker wanted found

In thinking about what it means to lose New Orleans, I'm reminded that as a schoolgirl I "learned" that there were four "unique cities" in the nation: New Orleans, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Boston. Thanks to Google, I "learn" that it was Will Rogers who told us so. The trouble, though, is that it's only in the context of San Antonio. San Antonio's tourist industry has done a remarkable job in spreading the word that this is something Will Rogers said. But it never says where he said it (can't find it here), and besides, none of the other three cities seem to be making the claim.

A Texas tall tale?

Santa Fe apparently wants a bit of the action, substituting itself for Boston.

UPDATE: I gave up too soon. The answer is on the "Stumpers" listserv: Will Rogers did indeed call San Antonio "unique," but along with only two other cities: San Francisco and New Orleans. "They each got something that even the most persistent chamber of commerce can't standardize."

Windy City news

Chicago, hog butcher to the world, threatens to ban foie gras.