A story quickly framed

  Alice Walker’s story Strong Horse Tea is a good example of a story framed quickly and expertly. Here’s the opening: 

Rannie Toomer’s little baby boy Snooks was dying from double pneumonia and whooping cough. She sat away from him gazing into a low fire, her long crusty bottom lip hanging. She was not married. She was not pretty. Was not anything much. And he was all she had.

 

The story is not about a baby. It’s about what people will do when they’re desperate. Rannie is contemptuous of Sarah, an elderly neighbor known for her home cures. Rannie wants a real doctor and accosts the postman, begging him to bring help.

Sarah asks Rannie whether she really believes the white mailman is going to summon the white doctor to help.

People say trust is the foundation of all human relationships. I suppose they’re right. Have you noticed, though, that the lack of trust is a theme in a lot of the literature about my part of the country?

• Source and note: Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forker and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 355-62.

An attitude about politics

 Edward Hoagland had a terrible stutter that disqualified him for some positions — including teaching posts, or so he thought. He had to lie to an Army psychiatrist who doubted whether Hoagland was fit to be drafted.

I admire conscientious objectors and am not much of a fan of military service. But Hoagland was thinking about responsibilities to serve the public good and he didn’t want to be excused when others had to shoulder the same responsibility.

Hoagland’s story used to be common. Many veterans I knew had deferments but went anyway. They just didn’t feel right avoiding a responsibility that their neighbors had to bear.

Some people look down on that sentiment. The story of how Commander-in-Chief Bone Spurs faced his own crisis of conscience is well known, and I won’t belabor it.

But it’s infuriating that people who enlisted in our armed forces because they felt some sense of responsibility for the public good are being led by people who prefer personal profit. That’s despicable in peacetime. Something worse in war.

• Source: Edward Hoagland’s essay “Curtain Calls” is in Sex and the River Styx; White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011, p. 113.

A lovely plant and a thorny concept

 I saw a few strands of moss phlox flowering. The leaves of Phlox subulata are shaped like little awls, which you might guess if you’re a Latinist. The plant is a perennial and forms mats that might remind you of moss. The flowers are usually purple or pink, but the ones I saw were mainly white. It was as if a watercolorist had touched the wet petals with a brush and the purple had run.

Is this lovely plant a native or an invasive species?

I’d say it’s an example of what’s wrong with that concept. The experts say the native range covered much of Eastern North America, extending south to North Carolina. But the plant did well in the Appalachians, which spill into northern Georgia. The line between the Piedmont and the mountains is tricky, so maybe part of the Piedmont.

The experts say Stone Mountain is beyond the native range, but close. Moss phlox does well in our rocky soils, so the garden centers sell seedlings.

What of the plant I saw? How did it get there? As a practical matter, I have no way of knowing whether it found its place with the help of wind, bird, squirrel or gardener.

Native or invasive? I don’t know. I don’t see how experts could know.

Scientific concepts are useful to the extent that they provide answers to questions on a case-by-case basis. With moss phlox, I don’t think there are answers on a case-by-case basis.

Timing the seasons

 I have been watching my dwindling woodpile and thinking about my grandfather.

As the days got warmer, my grandfather would go to the barn and look at his dwindling supply of hay. Each year, he would estimate the number of bales he’d need to get his herd through winter. Old hay loses its nutrients, so leftover bales were discarded with sadness. Any waste is mourned on a farm. Grandfather didn’t want to have a lot of leftover hay — but he sure didn’t want to run out of it either. 

It always pleased him when the weather warmed up and the grass came out just as the barn was empty.

My firewood is getting low just as the weather is warming up. There’s an odd satisfaction when things like that work out.

Frogs

 I first heard the frog chorus the last week of February. I’m not talking about solos or chamber choirs. The chorus I heard was made up of a gazillion frogs in the marsh where a branch runs into Alexander Lake. The frogs weren’t as loud as a jet engine — but they were close. The peace and quiet we seek is not always quiet.

The chorus reminds me that spring comes in dribbles. Frogs are always early. They start before the lawnmowers do.

The chorus always reminds me of Roy Bedichek’s remark that frogs don’t so much eat to live as live to be eaten. Frogs are so prolific and nourish so many predators that Bedichek saw them as symbols of the food chain.

As I was thinking about it, a great blue heron moseyed up the lake toward the chorus.

Edward Hoagland said the frogs say jugarum. I don’t think that’s quite right, but I can’t do better today.

What strategy requires

 Good strategy presumes good sociology and good anthropology.

That’s a maxim of Bernard Brodie, sometimes called the American Clausewitz. Brodie got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago just before the United States entered World War II. His point was that you can’t control your adversaries without knowing something about them.

Brodie was among the people who changed the way we think about war — and even Americans do think deeply about war. If you allowed ordinary citizens to tour a fleet headquarters, the big surprise would not be the technology but the number of people who have graduate degrees.

I think the U.S. military has an excellent idea about whether it’s reasonable to expect a regime change from the president’s war against Iran.

But I’m prejudiced. I don’t think anyone at the White House knows enough about sociology and anthropology to conquer Minneapolis, much less Iran.

Independence Day

 Texas was declared an independent republic on March 2, 1836. It was the shameful era of “Indian removal,” when Native Americans were driven from their homelands in places like Georgia to lands west of the Mississippi. It was a defining feature of Jacksonian democracy, which was kind of like the democracy we have today.

The Anglos who settled Texas were mostly Southerners who were filled with the spirit of that day. The policy of the new republic was rid the country Native peoples.

The new republic spent so much money doing that it went into debt. If you’re puzzled by why Texas has so little public land compared to other Western states, it helps to remember it had so much debt it had to sell everything. If you’re puzzled why Texas has almost no reservations for Native peoples, it helps to remember that shameful history.

The stories about Texas are like the myths of the ancient Greeks. Homer says the story of Jason and the Argonauts was popular in his day. But there were problems with the tale even then. If you look at the route Jason and Medea used to return after stealing the Golden Fleece, you see that the tales were invented before the Greeks knew much about geography.

Some of the rivers that Jason and Medea took didn’t run into lakes that the myths imagined. The rivers that connected into a kind of escape route didn’t connect. Rivers didn’t run into the right seas.

Geographers and historians gradually learned better, but they couldn’t contradict the hallowed myths without getting into trouble. So the myths kept splintering, getting ever more convoluted, ever more impossible to believe.

If you’re from Texas, all this might sound familiar. It’s what folks call heritage.