Basil King
CROWNSTONES
This piece was finished and I didn’t have a title. The six people I’d profiled all came from below the Mason-Dixon line.
1763 to 1767, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, English surveyors, were commissioned by the second Lord Baltimore (Cecil Calvert) and William Penn’s sons to survey and settle an eighty year boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania. The boundary became more of an issue later as Maryland was a slave state and Pennsylvania was not.
The surveyors put a series of stones every mile along what became known as the Mason-Dixon line. Every five miles they put in Crownstones made of carved English limestone bearing the coats of arms of Lord Baltimore on one side and William Penn on the other. The stones are still there along the highways in or near the Delaware and Maryland border.
Pause
Part 1
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
It says my wife Martha’s father’s ancestor
William Davis had been
One of the founders of Lynchburg Virginia
William Davis was a Quaker
A pacifist a nonconformist
Forsake greed think simplicity
Practice
There is room for everyone
To have a seat and be heard
Do not fight do not go to war
Do not claim what does not
Belong to you
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Who will speak
Who will answer
The vernacular
Oh Jesus
The war is never over
Is there time to scream
To holler
To ride the Joker
The Bumble Bee
Protect the young
The old the innocent
Psalms
Who will speak
Who will answer
The vernacular
Oh Jesus
The war is never over
Is there time to scream
To holler
To ride the Joker
The Bumble Bee
Pause
In May 1944, Jack, Johnny Cash’s brother, was pulled into a whirling head saw in the mill where he worked and was almost cut in two. He suffered for over a week before he died at age 15. Johnny Cash often spoke of the horrible guilt he felt. According to Cash: The Autobiography, his father was away that morning, but he and his mother, and Jack himself, all had a sense of foreboding about that day, causing his mother to urge Jack to skip work and go fishing with his brother. Jack insisted on working, as the family needed the money. On his deathbed Jack said he had visions of heaven and angels. Decades later Johnny spoke of looking forward to meeting his brother in heaven. Did Jack before he died whisper into Johnny’s ear have compassion and encourage sympathy for those who doubt.
Pause
Were Jack’s angels as beautiful as Fra Angelico’s paintings? Did his angels have wings? Did the angels wear Black as the Man in Black did and what message did the angels bring? Was one of the messages a reminder that song is an act of grooming is a social collaboration used by a singer to promote a message, relieve irritation and ease tensions. Jack’s brother Johnny intuitively understood this and groomed his audience and his loved ones with song.
Pause
To conserve the language
The dialogue continues
Go slow otherwise Johnny Cash
Will not see Ad Reinhardt’s
Black paintings
War is not mentioned
The bible is not mentioned
Good and evil is not mentioned
Ad Reinhardt lived in a multitude
Of thinly layered Blues Greens
Purples and Blacks
Black Beauty meditates
He was a foreigner
He came in a car with
Northern license plates
Store bought cigarettes
Chandeliers and a bare bottom
Poetry
The language
Of devotion
The heartache
Revisited
Pause
Johnny Cash wrote “Man in Black”
To help explain his dress code:
“We’re doing mighty fine I do suppose
In our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes
But just so we’re reminded of
The ones who are held back
Up front there ought to be a man in black.”
Pause
“Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don’t see much reason to change my position ... The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we’re not making many moves to make things right. There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.”
Pause
Johnny Cash wore black on behalf of “the prisoner who has long paid for his crime” on behalf of those who have been betrayed by age or drugs. “And,” Cash added, “with the Vietnam War as painful in my mind as it was in most other Americans’, I wore it ‘in mournin’ for the lives that could have been.”
Pause
Johnny Cash said that he was "the biggest sinner of them all." He also said he was a devout Christian. Did Johnny Cash know of Grunewald’s Christ on the cross and how Christ suffered and Grunewald suffered with him. Cash read the bible and his songs are infused with biblical language. How could Cash think he was going to go to heaven when he was a heavy drinker he had taken drugs all of his adult life. Cash agonized over where his talent came from who had given it to him. Why couldn’t he do more and be a better person.
Pause
The Quaker elders of Philadelphia had decreed in 1776 that slave ownership should be forbidden to members of the community. Most Lynchburg Quakers were farmers. A hundred slaves were freed. The community would certainly have had to reorganize their work and living schedules.
Pause
Early in the 19th century
William Davis’s four children
Three sons and a daughter
Were expelled from the meeting house community
Their offense
“Marrying out of the unity”
And “insufficient plainness”
Martha’s father’s family
Followed its original patriarch
Into commerce
And after leaving the community
They joined the Episcopal Church
Part 2
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Loretta Lynn and Eudora Welty sit on a seesaw
“Teeter totter”
They are hoping not to be recognized
A stranger takes a photograph of them
Loretta straddles the plank of wood
The seesaw slowly goes up and down
Eudora sits sidesaddle
Her legs crossed at the ankle
Pause
About the time of Eudora’s high school graduation her father an insurance executive built a large Tudor–Revival-style house in Jackson Mississippi. Eudora and her two younger brothers lived in the house until Eudora died. Eudora’s father took photographs and loved all kinds of gadgets. The house is now known as the Eudora Welty House.
Pause
Martha’s great great grandmother Gabriella was one of eleven children born to William Garth and his wife Elizabeth Woods. Gabriella’s father purchased Birdwood in Albemarle County Virginia in 1819. Birdwood became one of the most successful farms in Albemarle County. Birdwood is now the property of the University of Virginia and is used for conferences.
Pause
Loretta is the second of eight children. Her father was a coalminer, storekeeper, and farmer. She was named after the movie star Loretta Young. Loretta sang in the church choir and her husband gave her a guitar when she was 24.
Eudora was 27 when she published her first short story “The Death of a Traveling Salesman” in the literary magazine Manuscript.
Pause
Loretta’s father got his eight children new shoes at the beginning of every school year. Loretta said she never knew how he did it. But she never forgot what it was like to put on a new pair of shoes and feel the sole of the shoe the extra height it gave her when she walked down the road. Eudora remembers her father sand papering the soles of her shoes so she wouldn’t slip.
Pause
Eudora had entre into any place that she wanted to go in Jackson and she took advantage of it when she wrote about Jackson society for the Tennessee newspaper Commercial Appeal. Later when she went to work for the Works Progress Administration as a publicity agent, she collected stories, conducted interviews, and took photographs of life in Mississippi. What Eudora witnessed was human activity people’s strengths and their failures their inhibitions and how they reacted to their spouses and their children.
Pause
Eudora was a prolific writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Optimist’s Daughter, in 1972. In 1992, Eudora was awarded the Rea Award for her lifetime contribution to the American short story. She taught and she lectured her fiction was always written in the first person she never used an intermediary a third person to tell the tale of what is too often a stressful situation.
Pause
Eudora was old enough to be Loretta’s mother. She was born in 1909. Loretta was born 1935 the same year as Elvis Presley. Loretta had no time to grow up married at 15 she had four children before she was 19. At the age of 25 after teaching herself to play guitar she cut her first record.
Pause
Loretta grew up in Butcher Holler
Kentucky
The family lived in a wooden house
Built into the side of a mountain
She wrote songs about birth control
“The Pill”
About being widowed by the draft
During the Vietnam War
“Dear Uncle Sam”
Country music radio often
Refused to play these songs
This didn’t stop Loretta
She continued and became
“The First Lady of Country Music”
Pause
Martha’s great great grandmother
Gabriella was a resourceful woman
She married Dr. Kirk of Rose Hill, Bluffton South Carolina a rice plantation
Dr Kirk died two years before the Civil War
During the war Gabriella moved with her
Three Kirk children to Alabama
There she married Dr. John S. Mayes
And had a daughter Martha
During the Civil War Dr. Mayes died
And Gabriella left her daughter Martha
With the Mayes family
Moved with her three Kirk children
Back to Albemarle County Virginia
And married Dr. Chancellor
Pause
Oliver Doolittle “Doo” or “Mooney” (for running moonshine) wanted to leave Butcher Holler and he didn’t want to leave alone. This could be one of the reasons why he wanted Loretta. Doo was 21 when he met Loretta they were married one month after they met. He was violent, he drank and he was unfaithful. Loretta said he made her feel special she loved him. Loretta and Doo’s marriage was never private they displayed their love, hurts and anger. It was at times predictable and at other times you couldn’t tell who was the villain and who was the victim.
Pause
Loretta says to the man she loves I don’t want you to disgrace yourself. I want you to respect yourself. I want you to respect me as I respect you. What was most important to both of them was they wanted to keep their own identities and that can be difficult to maintain between two people living together. They were married almost 50 years. After Doo died Loretta never remarried.
Pause
After the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, Eudora wrote “Where is the Voice Coming From?” Eudora said, “Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story – my fiction – in the first person: about that character’s point of view.” Eudora’s story was published in The New Yorker soon after de la Beckwith’s arrest.
Pause
Loretta’s autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter was a best seller and it was made into a movie. She sold millions of records and built herself a big house billed as “The Seventh Largest Attraction in Tennessee.” It has a recording studio, museum, lodging, and more. In the center of the ranch there is a large plantation style house along with a replica of the Butcher Holler cabin.
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Loretta Lynn and Eudora Welty sit on a seesaw
“Teeter totter”
They are hoping not to be recognized
A stranger takes a photograph of them
Loretta straddles the plank of wood
The seesaw slowly goes up and down
Eudora sits sidesaddle
Her legs crossed at the ankle
Pause
Eudora grew up in a household where her parents were civil to each other and expected their children to act in kind to each other. In her parents’ house African American maids and handy men did their jobs and went home. As a child Eudora never knew that African Americans suffered under Jim Crow. She lived in a cocoon no one was cruel to the African Americans who worked in her house. It wasn’t until she went to work for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s that she became aware ignorance festers, boils and ignites cruelty.
Pause
Loretta Lynn wrote and sang
What she had experienced
What she experienced
Didn’t relieve the heartache
It intensified it
Eudora Welty channeled
Internalized
Gave herself permission
To feel and experience
Intimate
Spaces
The language
Of devotion
The heartache
Revisited
Part 3
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
It says
The arms the throat the song
The Weather Vane
The tender the keepers voice
The positive and the negative
In the streets the spirit
Blows the candles out
I’ve never been to hell but I’ve seen
A wooden match
Glow in the eyes of those that hate
I saw that they wanted to burn
The house the sitting room the bed room
Burn black man burn white trash
Burn the tender the keeper’s voice
Burn the positive and the negative
Burn the arms the throat the song
The Weather Vane
The south the north the Continental Divide
The blond the red head the brunette
The black nappy African American hair
Define the root of its hollow springs
The spirit asks why
Pause
Why did the squirrels chew
The stems off all the Black Tulips
Martha planted
The squirrels
Never touched the White Tulips
A black Tulip for Mohamed Ali
A White Tulip for Elvis Presley
Black is beautiful
The same can be said of White
Say the same for the
Fighter and the singer
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
Pause
Ali said, "Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." When the town council of Ennis, County Clare, Ireland made Ali the first Freeman of Ennis Ali accepted. Ennis was the birthplace of Ali’s great grandfather before he emigrated to the U.S. in the 1860s and settled in Kentucky. Ali’s great grandfather was a white man and he owned slaves.
I don’t understand why Ali went to Ireland. He was an angry African American who became a Muslim why did he go to Ireland and accept the freedom of the town of Ennis. His great grandfather slept with one of the women he owned and denied their child a place at his table.
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Martha’s mother’s family owned plantations and slaves
These families of the eighteenth
And nineteenth century were educated Intelligent and prided themselves
On having good manners and they owned slaves
Theirs is a history of conflict and denial Right or wrong slavery was a business
The double standard the Hall Mark of empire Colonialism Segregation pride and guilt Inhibition draws a line in the middle
Of the road a white line do not cross
Do not pass Martha’s mother Isabella
She is someone who has lost
Title and property and
Tolerates the fear of loosing
More
Pause
When Cassius Clay was twelve
His bike was stolen he was furious
He wanted justice
He wanted revenge
He wanted to hurt someone
Clay won six Kentucky Golden Gloves titles two national Golden Gloves titles an Amateur Athletic Union National title and the Light Heavyweight gold medal in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. He says he threw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River after being refused service at a Whites-Only restaurant and fighting a white gang. Ali was given a replacement medal at an intermission during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta where he lit the torch to start the games.
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
Pause
An old African American woman is standing at the window of a Cadillac showroom. Elvis Presley comes up to her and asks what color do you want. He takes her into the showroom and buys her what she chooses. The White Tulip knows what it is to want. He knows that his twin brother died. He knows his father went to jail for forging a check.
Elvis and his mother lived with relatives and there were times when the family relied on neighbors and government food assistance to eat.
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
It says
For his tenth birthday
January 1945
Elvis had wanted a bicycle or a rifle
Because his parents couldn’t afford
To give him what he wanted
He was given his first guitar
Pause
In the sixth grade
Elvis was friendless
In the seventh grade
He brings his guitar
To school and every day
During lunch time
He sings and plays
Hillbilly music
He was teased
He was called "trashy"
They called him “a mama’s boy”
Pause
Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo Mississippi. In 1945 the family lived in an African America neighborhood. 1948 the family moved to Memphis Tennessee. They lived in a rooming house for almost a year. Then they moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the public housing complex known as the Courts.
Pause
Yesterday there was a South that wanted to succeed from the Union. Today no member of Martha’s family lives in Lynchburg or in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
Mohamed Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky. The younger of two boys he was named after his father who was named after the 19th century abolitionist and politician of the same name. His father painted billboards and signs. His mother, Odessa O'Grady Clay was a household domestic. Cassius Sr. was a Methodist. Odessa brought up Cassius and his elder brother Rudolph "Rudy” (later renamed Rahman Ali) as Baptists.
Pause
Clay beat the aged Archie Moore, a boxing legend who had fought over 200 previous fights, and who had been Clay's trainer. Clay considered continuing using Moore as a trainer following the bout, but Moore insisted that the cocky "Louisville Lip" perform training camp chores such as sweeping and dishwashing. Instead Clay hired Angelo Dundee. Ali and Dundee became friends. They traveled the world together and Dundee was in Ali’s corner for twenty-one years.
Pause
Mohamed Ali refused to go to VietNam and he said, “I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me Nigger.” He was warned that he was committing a felony punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. He was arrested his title and his license to box were taken away. He was tried and the jury found Ali guilty. After a Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court reversed his conviction for refusing induction by unanimous decision in Clay v. United States.
Pause
Martha Mayes, Gabriella’s daughter married Theodore F. Shuey. He was from Virginia and he fought for the Union. Theodore F. Shuey was for sixty-five years the Official Reporter of Debates, United States Senate. Martha and Theodore had two children Agnes and Philip. There was a divorce and Martha took her children and left them with her mother Gabriella.
Pause
Martha’s grandmother Agnes married James Keith Symmers. James Keith’s family was the last member of Martha’s family to come to America. They came from Scotland to South Carolina in the 1850s.
Pause
Everything Ali did was calculated the verbal taunting of his opponents his unorthodox boxing style. It’s as if he had thought of everything and it made him a celebrity. He still is. In 1984 Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome. He remains a devout Muslim and he travels the world when he can lend his name to hunger and poverty relief.
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
Pause
In his junior year
In high school
Elvis grows sideburns
Styles his hair
With rose oil and Vaseline
Elvis never received formal
Music training or learned to read music
He frequented record stores
With jukeboxes, pinball machines
He loved the music of the African American Gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe
And he knew B.B. King and his guitar
Lucille
Immerse the phrase
Internalize
The language
Pause
On Beale Street, the heart of Memphis's thriving blues scene, Elvis would gaze into the window at the wild, flashy clothes in the windows of Lansky Brothers. By his senior year he was wearing them.
Pause
"Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century" said composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. "He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything - music, language, clothes. It's a whole new social revolution - the sixties came from it.”
Pause
The range of Elvis Presley’s music expanded to include the hits of the day, patriotic anthems, pure country gospel, and really dirty blues. Not only Elvis’s achievements but his failings add to the power of this rare man. Elvis got inseminated with black music and he was never ashamed or afraid to love a tulip of another color.
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
It was 1am in the morning when Martha and I came out of the Blue Ribbon Bar in mid-town Manhattan. It was the early 1960s. There weren’t too many cars and the only light on the street came from the streetlights. As we turned onto 6th Avenue we stopped in our tracks and I know we gaped with open mouths at a giant of a man holding hands with a beautiful woman almost as tall looming towards us.
It was Ali
The Genii
Part 4
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
It tells me William Clark Styron, Jr. was born in the Hilton Village historic district of Newport News, Virginia less than a hundred miles from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion.
Pause
Onions Roses Muscles Triangles
Politics be damned
Burlap silk brocade leather
The ghost in a morality tale sings
Onions Roses Muscles Triangles
Politics be damned
John Donne and the St. James Bible
Footsteps the ghost sings footsteps
Needles Pine Cones Print
Leave home meet strangers and learn to draw
Pause
Thomas Wolfe’s
Mother
Ran a boarding
House
William Styron
Moved into
A boarding house
In Brooklyn
Europeans
Jews
A word
In Polish
A word
In Yiddish
Styron
Before you
Go North
Listen to Faulkner
Talk about Wolfe
Wolfe didn’t like
Europeans
Jews
Faulkner
And
Styron and
Wolfe
They were
All from
The South
Pause
Styron’s childhood was a difficult one: his father, a shipyard engineer, suffered from depression. His mother died after a decade-long battle with breast cancer in 1939 when Styron was 13. Styron attended public school until third grade, and then because he was getting into trouble his father sent him to Christchurch School, an Episcopal college-preparatory school in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Styron once said, "But of all the schools I attended ... only Christ- church ever commanded something more than mere respect — which is to say, my true and abiding affections.”
Pause
Onions Roses Muscles Triangles
Politics be damned
Burlap silk brocade leather
The ghost in a morality tale sings
Onions Roses Muscles Triangles
Politics be damned
John Donne and the St. James Bible
Footsteps the ghost sings footsteps
Needles Pine Cones Print
Leave home meet strangers and learn to draw
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
In the summer of 1985, Styron turned sixty and he had to give up drinking. But giving it up brought on mood disorders. He had to be medicated. The drugs produced destructive side effects he went into a deep, prolonged suicidal depression that did not lift until he was hospitalized from December through early February 1986.
Pause
What began as a lecture became the best-selling book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). This memoir, originally intended as a magazine article, chronicled Styron’s painful descent into depression and his near-fatal night of "despair beyond despair."
Pause
Dante was exiled and he asked the question why do we suffer? Why do we carry hate into a room and shut the windows and the doors? Why do we tolerate injustice, claustrophobia?
Red, Green
White Yellow Rose
There is no suffering
No hate
When Josef Albers frees
The room of claustrophobia
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Styron laid a template over his biography.
Styron’s paternal grandparents had been slave owners. Bigotry hides between the pages of the family bible. His Northern mother and his Southern father did not abide with slavery.
Pause
Martha’s father was an editor and director of the University of North Carolina Press for 22 years encouraging writers who were concerned with problems of Southern life like discrimination, race relations and the education of African Americans.
Lambert Davis was in New York 1938-1949 with the publishing houses Bobbs-Merrill and Harcourt, Brace & Company. He edited "All the King's Men," by Robert Penn Warren. He worked with Southerners Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and others.
Pause
William Styron wrote
Confessions of Nat Turner
And Styron
Says
You teach me to read and write
You teach me carpentry
You rape my mother
You whip me
I love the bible and read
It
To my people
I see black and white angels
Fighting in the sky
And the angels whisper
Deny despair
Deny pain
Love
Shame
And
Guilt
Kill
The demigod
The white man
His wife
His horse
Kill
His children
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Martha’s mother retained entitlement she was a white woman from a good family. She retold her family legends to me as if they happened yesterday. I never heard Martha’s father say it but I think he retained a pride that his family had once been Quakers. What Martha’s mother and father shared and it was important to the two of them was the South. It was home they had roots.
This piece was finished and I didn’t have a title. The six people I’d profiled all came from below the Mason-Dixon line.
1763 to 1767, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, English surveyors, were commissioned by the second Lord Baltimore (Cecil Calvert) and William Penn’s sons to survey and settle an eighty year boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania. The boundary became more of an issue later as Maryland was a slave state and Pennsylvania was not.
The surveyors put a series of stones every mile along what became known as the Mason-Dixon line. Every five miles they put in Crownstones made of carved English limestone bearing the coats of arms of Lord Baltimore on one side and William Penn on the other. The stones are still there along the highways in or near the Delaware and Maryland border.
Pause
Part 1
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
It says my wife Martha’s father’s ancestor
William Davis had been
One of the founders of Lynchburg Virginia
William Davis was a Quaker
A pacifist a nonconformist
Forsake greed think simplicity
Practice
There is room for everyone
To have a seat and be heard
Do not fight do not go to war
Do not claim what does not
Belong to you
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Who will speak
Who will answer
The vernacular
Oh Jesus
The war is never over
Is there time to scream
To holler
To ride the Joker
The Bumble Bee
Protect the young
The old the innocent
Psalms
Who will speak
Who will answer
The vernacular
Oh Jesus
The war is never over
Is there time to scream
To holler
To ride the Joker
The Bumble Bee
Pause
In May 1944, Jack, Johnny Cash’s brother, was pulled into a whirling head saw in the mill where he worked and was almost cut in two. He suffered for over a week before he died at age 15. Johnny Cash often spoke of the horrible guilt he felt. According to Cash: The Autobiography, his father was away that morning, but he and his mother, and Jack himself, all had a sense of foreboding about that day, causing his mother to urge Jack to skip work and go fishing with his brother. Jack insisted on working, as the family needed the money. On his deathbed Jack said he had visions of heaven and angels. Decades later Johnny spoke of looking forward to meeting his brother in heaven. Did Jack before he died whisper into Johnny’s ear have compassion and encourage sympathy for those who doubt.
Pause
Were Jack’s angels as beautiful as Fra Angelico’s paintings? Did his angels have wings? Did the angels wear Black as the Man in Black did and what message did the angels bring? Was one of the messages a reminder that song is an act of grooming is a social collaboration used by a singer to promote a message, relieve irritation and ease tensions. Jack’s brother Johnny intuitively understood this and groomed his audience and his loved ones with song.
Pause
To conserve the language
The dialogue continues
Go slow otherwise Johnny Cash
Will not see Ad Reinhardt’s
Black paintings
War is not mentioned
The bible is not mentioned
Good and evil is not mentioned
Ad Reinhardt lived in a multitude
Of thinly layered Blues Greens
Purples and Blacks
Black Beauty meditates
He was a foreigner
He came in a car with
Northern license plates
Store bought cigarettes
Chandeliers and a bare bottom
Poetry
The language
Of devotion
The heartache
Revisited
Pause
Johnny Cash wrote “Man in Black”
To help explain his dress code:
“We’re doing mighty fine I do suppose
In our streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes
But just so we’re reminded of
The ones who are held back
Up front there ought to be a man in black.”
Pause
“Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don’t see much reason to change my position ... The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we’re not making many moves to make things right. There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.”
Pause
Johnny Cash wore black on behalf of “the prisoner who has long paid for his crime” on behalf of those who have been betrayed by age or drugs. “And,” Cash added, “with the Vietnam War as painful in my mind as it was in most other Americans’, I wore it ‘in mournin’ for the lives that could have been.”
Pause
Johnny Cash said that he was "the biggest sinner of them all." He also said he was a devout Christian. Did Johnny Cash know of Grunewald’s Christ on the cross and how Christ suffered and Grunewald suffered with him. Cash read the bible and his songs are infused with biblical language. How could Cash think he was going to go to heaven when he was a heavy drinker he had taken drugs all of his adult life. Cash agonized over where his talent came from who had given it to him. Why couldn’t he do more and be a better person.
Pause
The Quaker elders of Philadelphia had decreed in 1776 that slave ownership should be forbidden to members of the community. Most Lynchburg Quakers were farmers. A hundred slaves were freed. The community would certainly have had to reorganize their work and living schedules.
Pause
Early in the 19th century
William Davis’s four children
Three sons and a daughter
Were expelled from the meeting house community
Their offense
“Marrying out of the unity”
And “insufficient plainness”
Martha’s father’s family
Followed its original patriarch
Into commerce
And after leaving the community
They joined the Episcopal Church
Part 2
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Loretta Lynn and Eudora Welty sit on a seesaw
“Teeter totter”
They are hoping not to be recognized
A stranger takes a photograph of them
Loretta straddles the plank of wood
The seesaw slowly goes up and down
Eudora sits sidesaddle
Her legs crossed at the ankle
Pause
About the time of Eudora’s high school graduation her father an insurance executive built a large Tudor–Revival-style house in Jackson Mississippi. Eudora and her two younger brothers lived in the house until Eudora died. Eudora’s father took photographs and loved all kinds of gadgets. The house is now known as the Eudora Welty House.
Pause
Martha’s great great grandmother Gabriella was one of eleven children born to William Garth and his wife Elizabeth Woods. Gabriella’s father purchased Birdwood in Albemarle County Virginia in 1819. Birdwood became one of the most successful farms in Albemarle County. Birdwood is now the property of the University of Virginia and is used for conferences.
Pause
Loretta is the second of eight children. Her father was a coalminer, storekeeper, and farmer. She was named after the movie star Loretta Young. Loretta sang in the church choir and her husband gave her a guitar when she was 24.
Eudora was 27 when she published her first short story “The Death of a Traveling Salesman” in the literary magazine Manuscript.
Pause
Loretta’s father got his eight children new shoes at the beginning of every school year. Loretta said she never knew how he did it. But she never forgot what it was like to put on a new pair of shoes and feel the sole of the shoe the extra height it gave her when she walked down the road. Eudora remembers her father sand papering the soles of her shoes so she wouldn’t slip.
Pause
Eudora had entre into any place that she wanted to go in Jackson and she took advantage of it when she wrote about Jackson society for the Tennessee newspaper Commercial Appeal. Later when she went to work for the Works Progress Administration as a publicity agent, she collected stories, conducted interviews, and took photographs of life in Mississippi. What Eudora witnessed was human activity people’s strengths and their failures their inhibitions and how they reacted to their spouses and their children.
Pause
Eudora was a prolific writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Optimist’s Daughter, in 1972. In 1992, Eudora was awarded the Rea Award for her lifetime contribution to the American short story. She taught and she lectured her fiction was always written in the first person she never used an intermediary a third person to tell the tale of what is too often a stressful situation.
Pause
Eudora was old enough to be Loretta’s mother. She was born in 1909. Loretta was born 1935 the same year as Elvis Presley. Loretta had no time to grow up married at 15 she had four children before she was 19. At the age of 25 after teaching herself to play guitar she cut her first record.
Pause
Loretta grew up in Butcher Holler
Kentucky
The family lived in a wooden house
Built into the side of a mountain
She wrote songs about birth control
“The Pill”
About being widowed by the draft
During the Vietnam War
“Dear Uncle Sam”
Country music radio often
Refused to play these songs
This didn’t stop Loretta
She continued and became
“The First Lady of Country Music”
Pause
Martha’s great great grandmother
Gabriella was a resourceful woman
She married Dr. Kirk of Rose Hill, Bluffton South Carolina a rice plantation
Dr Kirk died two years before the Civil War
During the war Gabriella moved with her
Three Kirk children to Alabama
There she married Dr. John S. Mayes
And had a daughter Martha
During the Civil War Dr. Mayes died
And Gabriella left her daughter Martha
With the Mayes family
Moved with her three Kirk children
Back to Albemarle County Virginia
And married Dr. Chancellor
Pause
Oliver Doolittle “Doo” or “Mooney” (for running moonshine) wanted to leave Butcher Holler and he didn’t want to leave alone. This could be one of the reasons why he wanted Loretta. Doo was 21 when he met Loretta they were married one month after they met. He was violent, he drank and he was unfaithful. Loretta said he made her feel special she loved him. Loretta and Doo’s marriage was never private they displayed their love, hurts and anger. It was at times predictable and at other times you couldn’t tell who was the villain and who was the victim.
Pause
Loretta says to the man she loves I don’t want you to disgrace yourself. I want you to respect yourself. I want you to respect me as I respect you. What was most important to both of them was they wanted to keep their own identities and that can be difficult to maintain between two people living together. They were married almost 50 years. After Doo died Loretta never remarried.
Pause
After the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, Eudora wrote “Where is the Voice Coming From?” Eudora said, “Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story – my fiction – in the first person: about that character’s point of view.” Eudora’s story was published in The New Yorker soon after de la Beckwith’s arrest.
Pause
Loretta’s autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter was a best seller and it was made into a movie. She sold millions of records and built herself a big house billed as “The Seventh Largest Attraction in Tennessee.” It has a recording studio, museum, lodging, and more. In the center of the ranch there is a large plantation style house along with a replica of the Butcher Holler cabin.
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Loretta Lynn and Eudora Welty sit on a seesaw
“Teeter totter”
They are hoping not to be recognized
A stranger takes a photograph of them
Loretta straddles the plank of wood
The seesaw slowly goes up and down
Eudora sits sidesaddle
Her legs crossed at the ankle
Pause
Eudora grew up in a household where her parents were civil to each other and expected their children to act in kind to each other. In her parents’ house African American maids and handy men did their jobs and went home. As a child Eudora never knew that African Americans suffered under Jim Crow. She lived in a cocoon no one was cruel to the African Americans who worked in her house. It wasn’t until she went to work for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s that she became aware ignorance festers, boils and ignites cruelty.
Pause
Loretta Lynn wrote and sang
What she had experienced
What she experienced
Didn’t relieve the heartache
It intensified it
Eudora Welty channeled
Internalized
Gave herself permission
To feel and experience
Intimate
Spaces
The language
Of devotion
The heartache
Revisited
Part 3
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
It says
The arms the throat the song
The Weather Vane
The tender the keepers voice
The positive and the negative
In the streets the spirit
Blows the candles out
I’ve never been to hell but I’ve seen
A wooden match
Glow in the eyes of those that hate
I saw that they wanted to burn
The house the sitting room the bed room
Burn black man burn white trash
Burn the tender the keeper’s voice
Burn the positive and the negative
Burn the arms the throat the song
The Weather Vane
The south the north the Continental Divide
The blond the red head the brunette
The black nappy African American hair
Define the root of its hollow springs
The spirit asks why
Pause
Why did the squirrels chew
The stems off all the Black Tulips
Martha planted
The squirrels
Never touched the White Tulips
A black Tulip for Mohamed Ali
A White Tulip for Elvis Presley
Black is beautiful
The same can be said of White
Say the same for the
Fighter and the singer
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
Pause
Ali said, "Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." When the town council of Ennis, County Clare, Ireland made Ali the first Freeman of Ennis Ali accepted. Ennis was the birthplace of Ali’s great grandfather before he emigrated to the U.S. in the 1860s and settled in Kentucky. Ali’s great grandfather was a white man and he owned slaves.
I don’t understand why Ali went to Ireland. He was an angry African American who became a Muslim why did he go to Ireland and accept the freedom of the town of Ennis. His great grandfather slept with one of the women he owned and denied their child a place at his table.
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Martha’s mother’s family owned plantations and slaves
These families of the eighteenth
And nineteenth century were educated Intelligent and prided themselves
On having good manners and they owned slaves
Theirs is a history of conflict and denial Right or wrong slavery was a business
The double standard the Hall Mark of empire Colonialism Segregation pride and guilt Inhibition draws a line in the middle
Of the road a white line do not cross
Do not pass Martha’s mother Isabella
She is someone who has lost
Title and property and
Tolerates the fear of loosing
More
Pause
When Cassius Clay was twelve
His bike was stolen he was furious
He wanted justice
He wanted revenge
He wanted to hurt someone
Clay won six Kentucky Golden Gloves titles two national Golden Gloves titles an Amateur Athletic Union National title and the Light Heavyweight gold medal in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. He says he threw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River after being refused service at a Whites-Only restaurant and fighting a white gang. Ali was given a replacement medal at an intermission during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta where he lit the torch to start the games.
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
Pause
An old African American woman is standing at the window of a Cadillac showroom. Elvis Presley comes up to her and asks what color do you want. He takes her into the showroom and buys her what she chooses. The White Tulip knows what it is to want. He knows that his twin brother died. He knows his father went to jail for forging a check.
Elvis and his mother lived with relatives and there were times when the family relied on neighbors and government food assistance to eat.
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
It says
For his tenth birthday
January 1945
Elvis had wanted a bicycle or a rifle
Because his parents couldn’t afford
To give him what he wanted
He was given his first guitar
Pause
In the sixth grade
Elvis was friendless
In the seventh grade
He brings his guitar
To school and every day
During lunch time
He sings and plays
Hillbilly music
He was teased
He was called "trashy"
They called him “a mama’s boy”
Pause
Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo Mississippi. In 1945 the family lived in an African America neighborhood. 1948 the family moved to Memphis Tennessee. They lived in a rooming house for almost a year. Then they moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the public housing complex known as the Courts.
Pause
Yesterday there was a South that wanted to succeed from the Union. Today no member of Martha’s family lives in Lynchburg or in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
Mohamed Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky. The younger of two boys he was named after his father who was named after the 19th century abolitionist and politician of the same name. His father painted billboards and signs. His mother, Odessa O'Grady Clay was a household domestic. Cassius Sr. was a Methodist. Odessa brought up Cassius and his elder brother Rudolph "Rudy” (later renamed Rahman Ali) as Baptists.
Pause
Clay beat the aged Archie Moore, a boxing legend who had fought over 200 previous fights, and who had been Clay's trainer. Clay considered continuing using Moore as a trainer following the bout, but Moore insisted that the cocky "Louisville Lip" perform training camp chores such as sweeping and dishwashing. Instead Clay hired Angelo Dundee. Ali and Dundee became friends. They traveled the world together and Dundee was in Ali’s corner for twenty-one years.
Pause
Mohamed Ali refused to go to VietNam and he said, “I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me Nigger.” He was warned that he was committing a felony punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. He was arrested his title and his license to box were taken away. He was tried and the jury found Ali guilty. After a Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court reversed his conviction for refusing induction by unanimous decision in Clay v. United States.
Pause
Martha Mayes, Gabriella’s daughter married Theodore F. Shuey. He was from Virginia and he fought for the Union. Theodore F. Shuey was for sixty-five years the Official Reporter of Debates, United States Senate. Martha and Theodore had two children Agnes and Philip. There was a divorce and Martha took her children and left them with her mother Gabriella.
Pause
Martha’s grandmother Agnes married James Keith Symmers. James Keith’s family was the last member of Martha’s family to come to America. They came from Scotland to South Carolina in the 1850s.
Pause
Everything Ali did was calculated the verbal taunting of his opponents his unorthodox boxing style. It’s as if he had thought of everything and it made him a celebrity. He still is. In 1984 Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome. He remains a devout Muslim and he travels the world when he can lend his name to hunger and poverty relief.
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
Pause
In his junior year
In high school
Elvis grows sideburns
Styles his hair
With rose oil and Vaseline
Elvis never received formal
Music training or learned to read music
He frequented record stores
With jukeboxes, pinball machines
He loved the music of the African American Gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe
And he knew B.B. King and his guitar
Lucille
Immerse the phrase
Internalize
The language
Pause
On Beale Street, the heart of Memphis's thriving blues scene, Elvis would gaze into the window at the wild, flashy clothes in the windows of Lansky Brothers. By his senior year he was wearing them.
Pause
"Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century" said composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. "He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything - music, language, clothes. It's a whole new social revolution - the sixties came from it.”
Pause
The range of Elvis Presley’s music expanded to include the hits of the day, patriotic anthems, pure country gospel, and really dirty blues. Not only Elvis’s achievements but his failings add to the power of this rare man. Elvis got inseminated with black music and he was never ashamed or afraid to love a tulip of another color.
Ali fights Elvis sings
Black and White
The stem of controversy
The growth of sensation
It was 1am in the morning when Martha and I came out of the Blue Ribbon Bar in mid-town Manhattan. It was the early 1960s. There weren’t too many cars and the only light on the street came from the streetlights. As we turned onto 6th Avenue we stopped in our tracks and I know we gaped with open mouths at a giant of a man holding hands with a beautiful woman almost as tall looming towards us.
It was Ali
The Genii
Part 4
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
It tells me William Clark Styron, Jr. was born in the Hilton Village historic district of Newport News, Virginia less than a hundred miles from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion.
Pause
Onions Roses Muscles Triangles
Politics be damned
Burlap silk brocade leather
The ghost in a morality tale sings
Onions Roses Muscles Triangles
Politics be damned
John Donne and the St. James Bible
Footsteps the ghost sings footsteps
Needles Pine Cones Print
Leave home meet strangers and learn to draw
Pause
Thomas Wolfe’s
Mother
Ran a boarding
House
William Styron
Moved into
A boarding house
In Brooklyn
Europeans
Jews
A word
In Polish
A word
In Yiddish
Styron
Before you
Go North
Listen to Faulkner
Talk about Wolfe
Wolfe didn’t like
Europeans
Jews
Faulkner
And
Styron and
Wolfe
They were
All from
The South
Pause
Styron’s childhood was a difficult one: his father, a shipyard engineer, suffered from depression. His mother died after a decade-long battle with breast cancer in 1939 when Styron was 13. Styron attended public school until third grade, and then because he was getting into trouble his father sent him to Christchurch School, an Episcopal college-preparatory school in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Styron once said, "But of all the schools I attended ... only Christ- church ever commanded something more than mere respect — which is to say, my true and abiding affections.”
Pause
Onions Roses Muscles Triangles
Politics be damned
Burlap silk brocade leather
The ghost in a morality tale sings
Onions Roses Muscles Triangles
Politics be damned
John Donne and the St. James Bible
Footsteps the ghost sings footsteps
Needles Pine Cones Print
Leave home meet strangers and learn to draw
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
In the summer of 1985, Styron turned sixty and he had to give up drinking. But giving it up brought on mood disorders. He had to be medicated. The drugs produced destructive side effects he went into a deep, prolonged suicidal depression that did not lift until he was hospitalized from December through early February 1986.
Pause
What began as a lecture became the best-selling book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). This memoir, originally intended as a magazine article, chronicled Styron’s painful descent into depression and his near-fatal night of "despair beyond despair."
Pause
Dante was exiled and he asked the question why do we suffer? Why do we carry hate into a room and shut the windows and the doors? Why do we tolerate injustice, claustrophobia?
Red, Green
White Yellow Rose
There is no suffering
No hate
When Josef Albers frees
The room of claustrophobia
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Styron laid a template over his biography.
Styron’s paternal grandparents had been slave owners. Bigotry hides between the pages of the family bible. His Northern mother and his Southern father did not abide with slavery.
Pause
Martha’s father was an editor and director of the University of North Carolina Press for 22 years encouraging writers who were concerned with problems of Southern life like discrimination, race relations and the education of African Americans.
Lambert Davis was in New York 1938-1949 with the publishing houses Bobbs-Merrill and Harcourt, Brace & Company. He edited "All the King's Men," by Robert Penn Warren. He worked with Southerners Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and others.
Pause
William Styron wrote
Confessions of Nat Turner
And Styron
Says
You teach me to read and write
You teach me carpentry
You rape my mother
You whip me
I love the bible and read
It
To my people
I see black and white angels
Fighting in the sky
And the angels whisper
Deny despair
Deny pain
Love
Shame
And
Guilt
Kill
The demigod
The white man
His wife
His horse
Kill
His children
Pause
Mother of pearl there is an Olmec head
In my back yard and it doesn’t stop talking
Martha’s mother retained entitlement she was a white woman from a good family. She retold her family legends to me as if they happened yesterday. I never heard Martha’s father say it but I think he retained a pride that his family had once been Quakers. What Martha’s mother and father shared and it was important to the two of them was the South. It was home they had roots.