Traces of the Trade, on P.O.V. This Tuesday

I've been buried in work on University, Court, and Slave (though you couldn't tell it from how little progress I made last week), so I'm a little behind the curve on this most exciting news. The much-discussed documentary Traces of the Trade will be broadcast on television for the first time this Tuesday, June 24, on the PBS show P.O.V. (In Chapel Hill, POV's broadcast of the film will be on Friday the 27th.) Traces of the Trade is about James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island (one of our country's wealthiest men and a leading figure in the slave trade in the eighteenth century) and a journey that DeWolf's descendants made recently as they retraced the paths of his trade routes and property holdings. They began in Bristol, then went to Ghana and the Caribbean.

I saw a director's cut of this back in 2005 at a conference at Brown University. It was fantastic--absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to see the final version. You need to see this. Trust me on this one.

This evening's Bill Moyer's Journal has a short preview, which you can watch here. Also, Sally tells me that the director, Katrina Browne, will be speaking in Chapel Hill on September 6. You may also be interested in c-span's broadcast with Thomas DeWolf, who's the author of a book on this subject, Inheriting the Trade.

Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments

Well, it's a Friday afternoon in June and though my favorite librarian recently told me I should be relaxing now that I'm moved into Chapel Hill, I'm sweating out a paper for a colloquium next week. It's going to be about University, Court, and Slave. I'm trying to get the introduction written so I can distribute it on Monday. But instead of doing that, I'm blogging about a piece of it....

One of the chapters is on Thomas Ruffin, so I thought I'd post a note about an article that I forthcoming in the North Carolina Law Review (thanks to Sally and Eric Muller's kindness) on Mr. Justice Ruffin. The article was part of Sally and Eric's conference last fall on The Perils of Public Homage. Chapel Hill residents may find this of particular interest because there's a dormitory on campus named (in part) after him. (It's Ruffin Hall and it's also named for his son.) Anyway, the paper is about two things. First, it's about Ruffin's jurisprudence; second, it's about what we make of the fact that there's a building named after him. The payoff on the later point is that I'm not at all sure the building was named for him because he was a proslavery jurist--in fact, I think that by the early twentieth century that piece of his jurisprudence may have been largely forgotten. And so now, somewhat oddly, the building serves as an occasion to talk about the era of slavery and what that meant to our state and our university.

Here's the abstract:

"Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments " returns to Justice Thomas Ruffin s opinions, particularly on slavery, to excavate his jurisprudence and to try to assess what Ruffin s legacy means for us today. It begins with an exploration of Ruffin s 1830 opinion in State v. Mann, where he self-consciously separated his feelings from his legal opinion to release a man who abused a slave from criminal liability. Anti-slavery activists frequently wrote about Mann, because of its brutal honesty about the harsh nature of slavery. After discussing Harriet Beecher Stowe s fictional account of Ruffin and Mann in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, which further developed the theme of separation of law and morals, the paper turns to some of Ruffin s other opinions. It looks to slavery opinions including Heathcock v. Pennington (which released a renter of a slave from liability for his death in a coal mine) and Green v. Lane (which dealt with a trust to give quasi-freedom to slaves), as well as non-slavery cases like Scroggins v. Scroggins (which argued against granting judicial divorces because that would encourage more of them).

Ruffin s jurisprudence took the world as it was, or as he phrased it, looked to the nature of things. His judicial opinions the monuments he left to us illustrate a world of proslavery moral philosophy. That thought separated humanity from law and then decided cases based on precedent and considerations of utility to society. Ruffin was a great expositor of the system of slavery, as well as a great wielder of what Stowe called cold legal logic.

What should we make of this legacy today? Perhaps Ruffin aided the cause of antislavery through his honesty in State v. Mann. And, thus, perhaps we should honor him for that. Moreover, perhaps the honor he received in the early twentieth century (when a dormitory was named in part for him on the UNC campus) derives from his facility with legal reasoning outside of the slavery context. However, honoring him also runs the risk of honoring proslavery values. Conversely, removing his name from a building now runs the risk of concealing the prevalence of proslavery thought in the nineteenth century. That is, removing a name might facilitate a process of forgetting when universities should be trying to provide a proper context for viewing our past.

The paper's available on the social science research network.

A Charming Chapel Hill Story

So I'm back from Philadelphia, where I went to see my dad for father's day. What a pleasure being within driving distance of Philly--this is the first time since I was in practice, lo' those many years ago, that I've been able to get home for the weekend. I hope to make a habit of this. On the way up there on Friday I had lunch in my old stomping ground of Richmond; drove a little around downtown and I hardly recognized it. There are new, tall buildings where there used to be parking lots. Last time I was in Richmond (in 2000) I enjoyed the restored Tredegar iron works. They're done a great job with it. My, things change over the course of nearly 20 years.

Anyway, as I was returning my rental car this morning, I asked the folks at Enterprise to give me a lift up to school--and a nice man next to me said, actually, I'm driving up Franklin Street. So I accepted his offer and to my good fortune it turned out that the man offering the lift is John Shelton Reed--whose works I've been reading for a while. What an unexpected pleasure! I didn't ask him what he thought of Dreamland Barbeque--but I will.

One good thing about moving

... is coming across books that I haven't handled in a really long time and enjoying them again. There are the books I love that I return to time and again, like Rhys Isaac's Transformation of Virginia and David Davis' Problem of Slavery in Western Culture; and I carried with me two books that I particularly love--Angela Miller's Empire of the Eye and Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order. But then there are the books that I haven't opened in a while, which really repay reading again--like Mark Steiner's An Honest Calling: Lincoln as Lawyer and Edmund Morgan's American Slavery--American Freedom and Stamp Act Crisis (what a beautifully, beautifully written book).

And while I'm talking about beautifully written and important books: when I arrived in my office on Wednesday I was pleasantly surprised to see the advance sheets of Mary Dudziak's Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey. Now, I'm really partial to books with Dream in the title--particularly if they're about race. Mary's book has a great first paragraph (I'm partial to first lines and here):

It was January 1960, but it was summer. An American lawyer arrived in a new land, but he called it his home.

The whole book reads like a novel. It's a fabulous history of civil rights in the United States that runs parallel to Marshall's work to create a constitution for Kenya. I absolutely love it.

The (Not) Silent Slave

Been absurdly busy getting settled in lovely Chapel Hill. This week I had the pleasure of riding a bus home from work (and it's free, no less!); haven't been able to do that since I left Honolulu a few years ago. And I'm getting used to this most friendly town--what an unexpected pleasure to run into an old friend and now colleague at the Weaver Street Market at lunch the other day. And once I get a little more settled I hope to talk some about my "new urbanist" experience. But right now I have something else to talk about--silence and slaves....

So I understand that Silent Sam's a key monument on the UNC campus. I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time around his statue and elsewhere on the campus. However, these days I'm interested in other antebellum (or maybe in the case of Mr. Sam, bellum) characters who are often silent, though perhaps not quite so silent as Sam: slaves in southern literature. One piece of University, Court, and Slave looks to the ways that slaves are silenced in court--they're rarely permitted to testify. I'm interested in this because it seems such an obvious corruption of seeking truth--but there's a larger purpose that's served by the silence.

But what about slaves who speak in southern literature? We hear a lot from Uncle Tom. And in some of the southern responses we hear from slaves as well--like Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis' Cabin. But what about Beverly Tucker's obscure novel George Balcombe? The last line of the novel comes from a slave, who testifies to the love of Mr. Balcombe: "We been all mighty willing, sir, to have Mass' George for master." Wow--putting words of testimony to Mr. Balcombe into the mouths of the enslaved. Mighty interesting stuff--monuments and slaves who speak intermittently.

87 Years Ago Today... The Tulsa Riot

Well, it was 87 years ago today that the Tulsa Tribune story hit the streets and ignited the Tulsa riot of 1921. The story--called by the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch "the false story that set Tulsa ablaze"--said that "Diamond" Dick Rowland, a young black man, had tried to assault a young white woman in an elevator the day before. After that, white people gathered at the courthouse, where Rowland was being held. They'd come to see a lynching and maybe participate in one.

Meanwhile, over in Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa, veterans of the world war met in a back room of the "Dreamland Theater" with a newspaper editor to plan how to stop the lync hing. Their trip to the courthouse to stop the lynching later that evening resulted in a struggle. Immediately it turned into the riot that led to the destruction of the black community. Along Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa this evening the ghosts of 1921 may be walking again, reliving that tragedy....

More on this story here. This is cross-posted from thefacultylounge.

Resurfacing in Chapel Hill

Well, it was a long trip from Tuscaloosa to Chapel Hill.

I'm sitting here in my pet friendly hotel in Chapel Hill listening to the Democratic Rules Committee debate; riveting stuff, for sure. And because Chapel Hill is a new beginning for me, I thought that I'd post Thomas Cole's Falls of the Kaaterskill, which is about nature and the new. It's also a connection to my past, however, because it's home is the fabulous Westervelt Warner Museum in Tuscaloosa.

I have new found respect for folks like movers. I also have new found respect for the antebellum southerners I study. The amount of energy it took to settle the south and the physical difficulties were extraordinary. But what the move--packing my books and files, even with the help of movers--as well as the drive impressed upon me how difficult is was to sustain and propagate intellectual culture. The library at the antebellum University of Alabama had something like 5000 volumes; it was one of the largest libraries in the country at the time. Yet it must have been extraordinarily expensive and difficult to assemble those book. Moreover, it's testimony to the extraordinary commitment to the community of ideas that people in the old south, in places that were so difficult to get to, read and wrote about ideas of religion, politics, and moral philosophy. They sustained a culture in the face of adversity. Now, that may also tell us something about why that culture was so thoroughly conservative. (Although in the eighteenth century the hurdles were even greater and that was not so nearly conservative an intellectual culture.)

A song for Al

My excellent guest-blogger Al Brophy is in transit today and tomorrow, moving from Tuscaloosa to Chapel Hill. This little song, via twittering Paul, goes out to him and Barb.

History from the Jim Crow Era

One of my favorite works of history is W. Sherman Savage’s The Controversy Over the Distribution of Abolitionist Literature, 1830-1860 (1938), by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Why has it won this place in my heart? In part because of the conditions under which Dr. Savage (who was a professor of history at Lincoln University) wrote and published it–in the dark days of Jim Crow. It’s newsprint paper testifies to the difficult economic conditions of its publication. Yet, despite the hardships of being an African American scholar of extremely modest background and means, Dr. Savage persevered.
I first fell in love with this volume when, as a third year law student (now many, many years ago) I was working on the response to abolitionist literature that was mailed through the United States mail to southern slaveholders and free blacks alike. The abolitionists’ campaign was a shrewd one–to use that great engine of commerce, the mails, to get their ideas into the hands of people where they might have an impact. The response testifies to the power of ideas to liberate us as a people.
Savage’s volume collected a lot of wisdom and presented it in simple and therefore elegant prose. And as I wondered about why such an important work was printed on such, well, inexpensive paper it dawned on me that this was the case because this was likely all the publisher could afford. Ah, further testimony to how ideas can find expression and an audience, even when they are not clothed in the trappings of wealth and majesty.
It’s further testimony to the perseverance of people who sought to tell the truth in those dark days–and were able to help our country remake itself.
Savage’s book is also a reminder that the mainstream academy does not always address issues of importance to African Americans. As Christopher Metzler’s been talking about here of late, we need to be careful to produce scholarship of importance to the African American community–and to our country as a whole. Similarly, we ought to be very suspicious of our colleagues who tell us that issues of race aren’t important or that we’ve already learned what we’re going to from research on race.
Alfred Brophy

Yale's Hidden, Then Disappearing Portrait

This repeats a post from a few years back over at moneylaw, where I used to post now and then.

Yale recently took down a picture of Elihu Yale, the university's namesake, which depicts a young enslaved male (who is wearing a metal collar) waiting on him. I had never heard of the picture before the story broke. Yet, now that I see it, I think it's an important depiction of the connections between that great university and the institution of slavery. I've posted the picture, from the Hartford Courant website at right.

The article reports that the painting hung in a room where the trustees met, though the room apparently was not generally open to the public. It is going to replace the offending portrait with another one, which does not have a slave in it.

Yale has other portraits of its benefactor, with less historical baggage. A painting of roughly the same size - of Yale standing alone by a table, a seascape behind him - will soon be dusted off and pulled from a storeroom at the Yale University Art Gallery to replace the one up now.

The African slave trade was brought to America by European settlers, desperate for bodies to work the sugar and cotton plantations, to supply their trading empires with goods. In paintings of the time, images of blacks in metal collars, marking them as slaves, were not uncommon, said John Marciari, a curator of early European art at Yale.

"It's a simple but lamentable fact of history," he said.

I think it's important to talk about the past and so I am grateful for the discussion of the Yale portrait. But I also worry when I see an effort to erase history, which may be one effect of moving the portrait. Lots to talk about here, of course. This will be a piece of University, Court, and Slave, of course.

Thanks to the fabulous Jim Campbell of Brown University for alerting me to this story.

A Memorial of Samuel Townsend

In honor of memorial day, I thought that I'd post on a most interesting will--that of Samuel Townsend of Madison County, Alabama. (Thanks to the fabulous Merrily Harris of the University of Alabama's Hoole Library for bringing this to my attention.) Mr. Townsend's 1856 will freed a number of people (Joel Williamson speculates that at least some of them were family members). The will is important evidence of the ways that testators, lawyers, and executors negotiated around the system of slavery--and on this I will be talking more later this summer.

However, you know what the very first substantive request was? To be buried on his plantation and for a memorial to be erected over his remains! ("I wish my body to be interred in the grave yard on the plantation where I now reside, a marble monument worth from five to seven hundred dollars erected upon my grave, and enclosed by a durable stone wall.") Pretty cool to look to wills to see how people thought about memorials, isn't it?

The Architecture of Jim Crow

At some point I want to get serious about talking about how Jim Crow affected southern residential architecture. Leslie Kirchler talks about some of this in "Architecture and Landscapes of Segregation: An Historical Look at the Built Environment of Educational Facilities in the United States."

An Honorary Degree for Paul Jones

The blogosphere is lighting up with discussion of Washington University’s award of an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly. Sometimes those decisions are controversial; at other times, they are something that everyone agrees on.

All of this reminds me of one of my university’s excellent decisions on an honorary degree, which it awarded back in 2006 to art collector and benefactor Paul Jones. (Not Sally's Paul Jones, a.k.a. "The Real Paul Jones"!) The University of Delaware houses much of his collection of African American Art.

But first a step back in time to the 1930s Alabama. It was one of Jones’ childhood aspirations to play football for the Crimson Tide. Alas, that was not to be. Instead, he played for Alabama State. In the 1940s, when Jones was a student at Howard University, he applied to the University of Alabama’s law school and was denied admission because of his race. That didn’t stop him, however; he went on to a successful career as a businessman in Atlanta, then to work in the Nixon administration, and even a run for Congress in 1982 (as a Republican). At one point in the 1970s, Dr. Jones was in the federal government’s education department and approved a large grant to the University of Alabama for adult education. He never mentioned his history with the university at that point–he just did something that was forward-looking and positive. Though that did not mean that he had forgotten his history with the university; in fact, he saved the law school’s letter to him.

In 2004 the University of Alabama and Dr. Jones began a partnership that involved a show of some of his art collection in Tuscaloosa; that was followed by a generous gift by friends of the university for a scholarship for needy students in his name. And this culminated in his giving a commencement address in August 2006, along with an honorary degree. Even there, Dr. Jones did not talk about the past; he chose instead to talk about the graduates, their families, and the future. It was a moment of a gesture to make amends for the past and to build something better for the future.

This repeats a post I put up recently over at diverse education's group blog, The Academy Speaks.

Alfred Brophy

University, Court, and Slave

I thought that I'd talk a little about my current project. I'm pretty excited about it, in part because it's something I've been working on (in one way or another) since beginning graduate school. I've had a bunch of detours, through colonial American history (particularly Quaker legal thought), through violence in the early twentieth century and contemporary discussion of reparations. But I'm now back and working on intellectual thought in the old South.

Alas, I'm one of those people who study dead, white men--and Christians and slaveholders at that. Every now and then a white woman wanders across my pages, too. And sometimes enslaved people speak--though as I'll talk about next month, I more often study ways that the slaveholders try to prevent them from speaking.

My current project is a monograph, tentatively called "University, Court, and Slave." It's about jurisprudence in the south in the years leading into Civil War. And the way I try to get at that complex set of ideas is by looking to the writings of academics, who were often more expressive about the matrix of ideas about economy (utility), history, and precedent than were judges faced with deciding cases in front of them.

In the years leading into Civil War, orators at Harvard and Yale spoke in support of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. William and Mary’s President Thomas Roderick Dew and University of Virginia Professor Albert Taylor Bledsoe were among the leading American proslavery writers. Randolph Macon College President William Smith wrote a proslavery college textbook, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery. Smith's book, like many other southern texts, are available on the UNC website. I 'm glad such books are available, so they can be studied.

These days I’m studying the intellectual defense of slavery in American colleges in the years leading into Civil War. The same language of moral philosophy that’s employed in colleges also appears in public debate (like the debate over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in Congress) and in judicial opinions. The concern for considerations of utility rather than individual humanity to slaves and their references to historical “knowledge” about the ubiquity and need for slavery appear in college classrooms, in public oratory, and in judicial opinions. Sometimes people write about the role of moral philosophy in judicial opinions. What interests me is how there is a common language. I don’t suggest that lessons Justice Thomas Ruffin learned while a student at Princeton in the first decade of the nineteenth century controlled him when he was a judge on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1829 through the 1850s. Rather, the language of utility and history that was common to college classrooms and to judicial opinions suggests some of the connections. The professors and jurists (and politicians, too) are drawing upon a common understanding of how to address moral problems.

Those sometimes hidden connections can help us answer some important questions about the reasoning process of antebellum jurists–-and so are important to legal historians. Once we focus on the ubiquitious considerations of utility, I think we understand why people as different in outlook as Morton Horwitz and Richard Posner both see economic considerations as central to jurisprudence in the 19th century.

Even more important than what they say about 19th century jurisprudence, these connections illustrate how powerful the proslavery forces were. They demonstrate that when we think about investigating universities’ connections to slavery, we should pay close attention to the ways that they loaned their intellectual capital to the project of continuing nearly four million people–-indeed our whole country–-in bondage. Those proslavery college professors were engaged scholars; they used their talents and their positions of influence to teach the next generation.

There are also stories about a few places where college professors opposed slavery. Judge William Gaston of the North Carolina Supreme Court spoke against slavery in an address at the University of North Carolina in 1835. After the mid-1830s, Southern schools–like the South more generally–were consistently and forcefully in favor of slavery.

President Francis Wayland of Brown University is one of those who opposed slavery; in 1845 he debated through a series of letters a proslavery minister from South Carolina, Richard Fuller. But those who opposed slavery were relatively few. More told their students and whoever else would listen that slavery was right; was ordained of God; was necessary for the continuation of American society; and that emancipation would cause greater harm (for slaves, as well as others) than would continuation of slavery. Such as some of the lessons we learn from rigorous investigations of our past, such as Brown University undertook. And for that knowledge, as for some many other things, we owe Brown's President Ruth Simmons and the Steering Committee’s leader, History Professor James Campbell, a huge debt.

Alfred Brophy

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: The Law and Politics Volume

Following up on a brief mention over at my home (thefacultylounge.org), I want to mention a very exciting new book: volume 10 in the UNC Press' New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Jim Ely and Bradley Bonds edited it. These sorts of volumes are absurdly difficult to conceptualize: how can you capture something so sprawling as southern law--to say nothing of politics--in a few hundred pages. So they're necessarily selective. But that's the fun it is, isn't it? Seeing what you can put together--what cast of a few dozen characters can be made to speak for a region and many centuries? Reminds me of Richard Wightman Fox and James Kloppenberg's fantastic Companion of American Thought. Back in the day, it was a great present for almost all occasions.

Here is the press' description of the volume:

Volume 10 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture combines two of the sections from the original edition, adding extensive updates and 53 entirely new articles. In the law section of this volume, 16 longer essays address broad concepts ranging from law schools to family law, from labor relations to school prayer. The 43 topical entries focus on specific legal cases and individuals, including historical legal professionals, parties from landmark cases, and even the fictional character Atticus Finch, highlighting the roles these individuals have played in shaping the identity of the region.

The politics section includes 34 essays on matters such as Reconstruction, social class and politics, and immigration policy. New essays reflect the changing nature of southern politics, away from the one-party system long known as the "solid South" to the lively two-party politics now in play in the region. Seventy shorter topical entries cover individual politicians, political thinkers, and activists who have made significant contributions to the shaping of southern politics.

Of course, it invites comparison with the law section of the Encyclopedia of New England, published a few years back by Yale University Press (of which I was a co-editor).
Sally's the master of things southern and legal, so I'll be interested in her thoughts on this important volume. There is a synthetic essay by Maxwell Bloomfield and Jim Ely and there are both topical essays (like southern law schools, convict lease system...) and biographical entries. One thing that I'm interested in is how the editors present the system of southern law? How do ideas appear in the story? How does the southern legal system relate to the national system? How do little people and legal mandarins fit into the story? Where does violence fit in and civil rights, too? What about the dissenters. Ah, there's just so much work to be done on southern legal history.

Edward Durell Stone's Crimson Carpets!

The New York Times' coverage of the death of A&P heir Huntington Hartford includes a video of his art museum on Columbus Circle, which was designed by Edward Durell Stone. You know what other building was designed by Edward Durell Stone? The one I've worked in the last seven years--the University of Alabama Law School! It's a pretty cool building--has a couple of spiral staircases and is reminiscent of the "dog trot" style popular in early Alabama homes. It also has crimson carpet--and that's what caught my attention, because the video refers to the crimson carpet in the Columbus Circle building!

The wills prof in me loves this vignette from the Times' obituary (which is a great read, btw):

he even floated the idea of his mother’s adopting his first wife, Mary Lee Epling, so that he might keep her as a sister after their divorce in 1939. Instead, Mary Lee made a successful new marriage, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

I love the closing lines:

"I have tried to use my millions creatively,” Mr. Hartford wrote in one of the early issues of his magazine Show. But, he added, “The golden bird, coming to life, has sometimes wriggled out of my hand and flown away.”

Alas, we've lost another person with personality.

This is why they call it the moonlight and magnolia school

I've got my internet connection back up, so....

On Sunday I came home, on the late side from a colleague's house--they live next to the famous Tuscaloosa Country Club (famous because it's the subject of an important vignette in Carl Carmer's Stars Fell on Alabama).

The magnolia tree in the front smelled oh so sweet and the moon cast such beautiful shadows. No wonder there's a whole genre built around them. (The so-called "moonlight and magnolia school" that flourished from the wake of Civil War through the early twentieth century, which focused on the beauty of the old south.) Of course, focus on that can cause us to lose sight of a lot else, which we should be paying attention to.

By the way, trees are great stand-ins in southern thought for the critical southern values of inheritance and family. So when I was looking for a question for my remedies exam, I thought one based on a case from Jacksonville about some homeowners who sought an injunction to prevent the Alabama Power Company from cutting down their trees was the makin's of a great question.

The Poland/DeFeo House: A moving preservation story

Congratulations to George Smart of Triangle Modernist Houses for organizing a terrific modern home tour in Durham Saturday! We enjoyed the three houses on the tour in Hope Valley--Brian Shawcroft's 1963 Bruce and Nancy Wardropper house, Robert "Judge" Carr's 1958 Miriam and Henry Nicholson house, and the new "Three Pavilions" by Bill Waddell for Monica Hunter.

Also available on open house was the wonderful house designed by George Matsumoto for George Poland, a professor of foreign languages and literature at NCSU, in 1954. The house, designed like Matsumoto's own house only on smaller scale, was beautifully sited above Crabtree Valley in Raleigh, but development crowded upon it and threatened to consume it. Poland's heirs worked with Preservation North Carolina in 2001 to find a seller willing to re-situate the house and give it the love it deserved.

Don DeFeo did just that, working with architect Ellen Cassilly to coordinate the move to a new pastoral setting in Durham County, to design modest renovations, and to design a new downstairs.

Now he is selling the house through the Modern Home Network and Preservation North Carolina. What a delight to be able to experience this special jewel box of a house.

To hear a mockingbird

DURHAM - On a sweltering summer day in 2001, Vernon Tyson turned up the heat as he and his son Tim strolled through New Orleans' Garden District.
"What do you want to do?" the father asked.
The men had come to the Deep South as part of an innovative history class Tim was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The father, a United Methodist minister, often cut to the human heart of matters, so his son knew this question wasn't about where they should eat.
"At first I thought it was strange," Tim Tyson recalled. A 42-year-old father of two, professor of Afro-American Studies and author of the prizewinning biography "Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power," he was not exactly adrift. But his father rightly suspected that his son had broader aspirations.
Before he could answer, something even stranger happened. A huge mockingbird -- "twice as big as any you've ever seen" -- swooped down three feet in front of them. It started singing, loud as could be, in music Tyson could only describe as jazz. They stood there, astonished.
"That's what I want to do," Tim declared.

Peder Zane on Tim Tyson.

Ruffin Field Trip: Part II

Here are two of Sally's other pictures from the Ruffin Field trip. At left is one of the slaves' houses from the historic Stagville, a plantation owned by the Beehan and Cameron families. About 900 enslaved people lived on the plantation around 1860. And below is the front of one of the houses. As I recall, there were four compartments--two on the entry floor and two on the second floor. Pretty sparse accommodations---no surprise there. And I think it's great that these structures have been preserved; they help convey a sense of what life was like. One of the things that surprised me (though it obviously shouldn't have) was how the houses are lined up in a row. It seemed very much like the industrial-era villages I've seen up north.