Docs and musings

Southerners are said to be obsessed with their own history. It’s true, belying that old dictum that history is always written by the winners. Even now, well into the 21^st century, I find myself wading into the murky waters of that Southern obsession with the past, which invariably goes back to slavery and the War.

This obsession animates the 2016 book I have just finished reading, The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade, by historian Charles B. Dew. And I feel it in myself as I riffle through about 40 pounds of family files I recently hauled up from Atlanta to Virginia.

Charles Dew, a professor at Williams College, has written books about antebellum industrial production in Virginia that used slave labor and a book about the secession commissioners who brought on the Civil War (Apostles of Disunion). But The Making of a Racist is different, a personal narrative that is half about his own growing up in segregated St. Petersburg, Fla., in the 1940s and ‘50s and half about how it feels for a historian to read documents about the business of the South’s flourishing slave traffic.

He stitches the two halves together skillfully, painfully. The banal mercantile language of the slave buyers and sellers is almost exactly the same as that of livestock traders. Cotton and slave prices rise together with the intoxicating power of an economic bubble in the 1850s. It had become just another face of capitalism, protected by the Constitution. Long after the African slave-shipping trade was abolished, Richmond auction houses sold slaves bred by the thousands, often in families that were then torn apart by that hot market.

Southern apologists for slavery, by then, had worked out their sacred dogma of white supremacy. One of these early apologists, the historian Dew confesses, was an ancestor of his named Thomas Roderick Dew, who wrote in the 1830s of Virginia as “a negro raising state.” T.R. Dew proposed that these slaves were “harmless and happy” but could be turned into “dark designing and desperate rebels” by those sinister northern abolitionists.

After World War II, the Jim Crow system that became the Southern way of life for young Charles Dew was softer, of course, but the underlying assumptions were the same, he argues. Whites believed that race relations, under segregation, were good, that Sambo books were funny, and that maids like the one the Dews employed were loyal and content, if only the NAACP and other outside agitators didn’t stir things up. Charles Dew, as a teenager, began to stray from the conservative attitudes of his gruff lawyer father and polished upper-class mother. He drove their maid home and visited with her. He went far off to Williams College in Massachusetts, learning just how much of a “Southern white” he was. He studied Southern history. He changed.

I recognize the white South of Dew’s youth, because its fading details still lingered in my salad days in Atlanta in the 1960s and early ‘70s. The roots of his family tree go deep into 19^th century Tennessee and West Virginia, while mine go back at least as far in Georgia history. The letters and other documents I’m pawing through from my parents’ file cabinet and boxes tell stories that I have known most of my life. I always took a quiet pride in these stories.

In contrast to Charles Dew’s pro-slavery ancestor, mine in the Cumming line were lawyers whose letters and speeches tended to be about the dignity of the law, the virtue of public service, the charm of classical and romantic literature, and the need for industrial uplift in their fair city, Augusta. My grandfather Joseph B. Cumming was an FDR and LBJ Democrat. He served in the 1920s on an inter-racial committee to address racial problems and in the 1940s led a reform movement against the corrupt “Cracker Party” in the Georgia legislature. His son, my father, was ready for the civil rights movement as a liberal Democrat. More than that, he was in the middle of the movement, covering it for Newsweek magazine.

In one folder, I found a photo of him interviewing civil rights hero Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham in 1963, the two pressed together from behind by a group of blacks on the move.

Reading my family’s papers, I don’t experience the kind of guilt that waylaid Dew as he unearthed the past. But I have been disconcerted by something I found in the family record. It’s not exactly racist, but is related. What I found was a prickly defensiveness. The Confederate army fought a good defensive war, and its descendants have remained defensive ever since.

It’s a matter of honor and reputation. I can’t argue with the defense when it is based on evidence and history, as it is with my family. Still, it was disorienting for me to find the old defensiveness coming from my own flesh and blood, because I know that this protective pose has always been one of the main reasons white Southerners are incapable of facing what Charles Dew experiences as our deep collective sin.

My mother died peacefully a few months ago at age 90. Back in 1980, she wrote a well-researched family history constructed around her great-grandfather, Maxwell Rufus Berry, who waited out the Civil War as a money clerk in downtown Atlanta. He didn’t care about slavery or politics; he cared about business. True, he had friends and relatives who were Union sympathizers. But he was not a Unionist himself, my mother wrote in her Berry family history. The distinction was important.

So in a letter to the director of the Atlanta History Center, she said she was “shocked” to see Maxwell Berry described in an ad for a Georgia public TV feature, “Georgia’s Civil War,” as a Union sympathizer. He was a “non-combatant,” she said. Not that my mother admired our ancestor’s “practical and self-serving realism.”

Maxwell Rufus Berry (1823-1909), portrait by Whittier Wright

But she was proud to note that he survived to be a major player in the rebuilding of Atlanta from the ashes, and that his 10-year-old daughter’s diary of Sherman’s bombardment was featured on Georgia public television that season. The history center’s director apologized for the error, and thanked my mother for her support.

A far more lavish Southern defensiveness I found in a nine-page single-spaced letter that my grandfather, the Augusta lawyer, wrote to journalist James Wooten in 1978.

Wooten, a New York Times reporter based in Atlanta and later with ABC News (not to be confused with an Atlanta Journal columnist with the same name), had published a biography of the newly elected President, Jimmy Carter. My grandfather’s letter criticized the subtle but pervasive anti-Southern bias that he detected in that biography, Dasher. It’s an essay-worthy letter, typed on the stiff stationery of the Augusta law firm from which he had retired and withdrawn the Cumming name.

He complains about Wooten rendering quotes phonetically, such as Miss Lillian saying “negra.” He questions why Wooten made a point of the local pronunciation of Albany, Ga., as Al-BIN-y. My Granddaddy was known for his florid vocabulary, his extraordinary recall of Shakespeare and other literary touchstones, and his powerful courtroom manner, in the tradition of an earlier Augusta lawyer whose oratorical sway of juries was said to be grounds for an appeal.

“My son, Joe, tells me that you regard yourself as a Southerner,” Granddaddy writes, but then sets Wooten straight. Atlanta, he says, is no more Southern than St. Augustine is Spanish or Mobile is French. Lest Wooten think this Augusta lawyer is provincial, Granddaddy notes that he was in boarding school, Princeton, Harvard Law and the Army outside his native Deep South, and in his youth was quite taken by it all. But with mature judgment, he came to regard everything north of the Potomac a mere “sub-culture” with few of the abiding standards and virtues of the ages.

Joseph B. Cumming Sr. in his library in Augusta, Ga.

In fact, he argues, it’s New Yorkers who are ignorant of the correct “iambic” pronunciation of “Albany,” he writes. (“Witness the half dozen largest cities in Georgia where the accent is on the penult.”) Wooten’s attempt at local dialect reminded Granddaddy of what Shakespeare did in Henry V with the Welsh speech of Fluellen (“The Welshman in the Globe Theater when that play was performed was not amused”).

Granddaddy was not amused. Or maybe he was – amused with himself. He cites historical tidbits that range from the Edict of Caligula to what he claims were the peculiar causes of the 1970 racial disturbance in Augusta – a city, he says, with a long history of racial harmony. His arguments sound original and even charming, full of the kind of historical flourishes we always enjoyed hearing from him. He was chairman of the Georgia Historical Commission, president of the Georgia Bar, a national advisor on historic preservation and an honorary Cherokee Indian. He wrote long well-reasoned arguments against Nixon, against pure laissez-faire capitalism, against Christian fundamentalism. . . and all in perfect rhyming couplets, in the 18^th century style. He seemed to know everything and everybody.

But the defensiveness I found unbecoming. Granddaddy, not quite digging the journalistic style of Wooten (or his son or me, who also became a journalist), in this letter spoils his few gracious comments with peevish insults. Words like “supercilious” “derisive,” “patronizing,” and “offensive” call to mind the luxurious language of Southern gentlemen making a challenge for a duel. Granddaddy knew the old insulting vocabulary of the code duello. He had written a monograph about the duels between his distant ancestor William Cumming (for whom Cumming, Ga., is named) and a governor of South Carolina. In a note I found addressed to my father, he complains – self-mockingly, I hope – about a “base, false, perfidious, whoreson knave” who had failed to return one of his books.

The defensiveness, in the end, is a cover-up. At one point, Granddaddy criticizes Wooten for mentioning that a train’s passenger car was segregated. “So what’s new?” he writes, calling segregation at that time an immutable part of the then-existing circumstances of life. “None objected and all recognized that it was desirable, eliminating possible friction.” Granddaddy was buried in the historic Summerville Cemetery on Cumming Road some thirty-three years ago.

I have no wish to blame my eminent, idealistic Granddaddy for his worldview any more than he was willing to blame his Confederate forebears for being products of their time. It is not blame so much as blindness that Charles Dew tries to reveal in the white South, a moral blindness in the slave auctioneers, in his parents, and in himself. If we can see that blindness in the past, maybe we can begin to see it in our day too, and see to see.

For Pam

I was just beginning, in that clammy
August, to pick up the riff of the teaching gig
when I flew from New Orleans off to Miami,
the two U.S. cities we journalists dig.

It felt like betrayal of old newsroom friends
to be hot in pursuit of another career,
where readers are counted down in the tens
and deadlines perk up about once a year.

Abject, name-tagged, I joined the whir
of meat-market interviewees on the path,
blind to the grandeur of the gaudy Fountainebleu,
figuring long odds, doing the math.

Then (on cue, play the James Bond theme),
across the lofty lobby’s dazzling space
you appeared on the minute, as out of a dream,
a civilized, intelligent embodiment of grace.

How we clicked, over coffee, playing Who do you know?,
our geographic coordinates just out of sync —
you were the editor I needed years ago,
and now my professor type, tinged with ink.

So thanks for that appointment, and this scene
of liberal arts, news and philosophies,
for a tenure track through a valley so green.
How lucky this family of news refugees!

Pam Luecke, at TAPS, Lexington, a toast to our colleague stepping down as department head.

The American South isn’t the only place where heritage groups claim a particular day to wave their flags.

Photos by Sarah Cumming

When I was in Northern Ireland a few years ago, a nervous public waited to see whether the traditional July 12 parades of the Protestant Orangemen, dressed oddly enough like Edwardian bankers of London, would re-kindle old hostilities as they marched through Catholic neighborhoods. They carried Union Jacks and flags of the bloody hand. But good behavior on everybody’s part kept things calm that year.

A similar civic pride was displayed in South Africa under apartheid, as I learned when I visited the imposing Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria in the 1980s. The central identity story of the white Afrikaners was the Covenant – the belief that their ancestors made a vow with God before the Battle of Blood River in 1838, and that God kept His side of the bargain by helping only a few hundred of their armed men slaughter thousands of Zulu warriors, and suffer no casualties. The Day of the Covenant was celebrated every year on Dec. 16 until the new South Africa under Nelson Mandela changed the name to Day of Reconciliation.  It is still a public holiday in South Africa.

Northern Ireland and South Africa are beautiful lands that have achieved a relatively miraculous peace after long histories of bloody conflict. Both of these holidays, with their parades and saltire flags, recall some part of the bloody conflict. The Orangemen of Ulster are celebrating the victory of William of Orange’s forces over those of the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, on the banks of the Boyne River in eastern Ireland. The Afrikaners looked back to their triumph at the Ncome River in Natal Province.

Folks here in Lexington are stirred up again about the Confederate flag. Once more, the unresolved civic symbols of Martin Luther King Day and Lee-Jackson Day fall crosswise in the middle of January. But this time, a new group called the Community Anti-Racism Education (CARE) Initiative succeeded in getting a parade permit for Saturday – Jan. 14 – that was traditionally the day the Sons of Confederate Veterans marched in honor of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, flaunting their Confederate costumes and flags. This “Martin Luther King Jr. Community Parade” commences at 10 a.m. from the historically black Randolph Street United Methodist Church.

Five years ago, the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans felt excluded from a heated public hearing when the Lexington City Council was considering putting an end to Confederate flags on city-owned poles during Lee-Jackson weekend, such as along the bridge over the Maury River. City residents, overwhelmingly in favor of the ban, packed the council room before the flaggers arrived. About 30 or 40 supporters of the Confederate flag, after holding a rally on Hopkins Green, had to wait outside the room. Besides that, the council decided to let people speak in the order in which they signed up and to let city residents speak first.

The ordinance, which passed 4-1, banned from city streets all flags and banners other than those of national, state and local governments, without prejudice. This official neutrality protected Lexington from the charge of unconstitutionally infringing on free speech, the claim of a federal lawsuit that the Sons of Confederate Veterans filed, and lost.

Having been preempted again by local opponents, the Sons of Confederate Veterans took out a permit to march on Sunday, Jan. 15, at 3 p.m. The following day, Monday, is the official King Holiday this year. A more flagrant group of Confederate activists called the Virginia Flaggers withdrew its request for a parade permit on King Day, but may well gather at Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery in Lexington on Friday, Lee-Jackson Day, or sometime over the weekend. No permit is required for that.

What is a good, civil response to all this?

A friend of mine who feels the anti-racism CARE parade may be unduly provocative – what he called “poking the bear” in his local newspaper column – had an alternative suggestion. He said citizens should line Main Street for the Confederate flag-wavers parade, turn their backs on it and remain silent. My son, a former Marine, suggested Lexingtonians should join the Sons of Confederate Veterans parade with white flags of surrender, to remind us of the final flag of the Confederacy that mattered the most.

Don’t think my son and I don’t appreciate Southern “heritage,” whatever that is. My great-great grandfather and his four brothers were all Confederate officers from Georgia. Three were seriously wounded. Alfred Cumming, in fact, was wounded in three different battles and Thomas Cumming was taken prisoner three times, I’ve read in a history book. From another history book I read that their father, a lawyer, defied federal troops when Jefferson Davis was paraded through the streets of Augusta after his capture. Henry Cumming stepped forward, removed his hat and said, “Mr. President, I salute you.” The leader of the guard demanded his name, and he told them.

A century later, my Southern family was witness to another historical turn. My father covered the Civil Rights movement for Newsweek magazine. He knew the smell of tear gas and the hair-raising harmonies of mass meetings in black churches. Against the background of that great moral crusade, growing up, my siblings and I saw the Georgia state flag changed to include the Confederate flag in 1956 as a sign of defending segregation, and I noticed that flag popping up in bad places, at Klan marches and on billboards calling King a communist and Chief Justice Earl Warren impeachable.

When I look at the Virginia Flaggers’ website, I get the impression that the Confederate battle flag means something else to them now. I sense that it has more to do with a cultural identity in an age when that identity is under attack and disrespected. The Afrikaners and the Protestant Unionists of Northern Ireland have good reason to worry about the future of their identity. But the flaggers need not be so defensive. Let other tribes celebrate distant wars their mythic forebears won. Let us remember that the Confederacy lost, and seek to understand the profound meaning of that loss. This is the larger identity that includes our many distinct identities, thanks to another flag, the white flag of surrender. The American idea won – in 1865 and in 1965.

If there’s a Southern heritage to honor and practice, I think it was best expressed by the first speaker at the 2011 city council hearing on the flag ban. Patrick Hinely was the only speaker that night who criticized both sides – the city council for borderline censorship and the flaggers for beating a dead horse. To both, he recommended common decency. He received only a smattering of applause, and the council decided at that point to ban any further applause.

Hinely didn’t bring up race, but it has always seemed obvious to me that when any group says that a symbol or word is offensive, it is up to the offender, not the offended, to have the common decency to desist. Hinely put it this way: “Growing up in the South, I came to understand that a fundamental element of the unwritten code of proper comportment in polite society is that a gentleman never gives offense to anyone unless it is absolutely necessary. In this case, it is not.”

A much shorter version of this was published in The Roanoke Times, Jan. 11, 2017.

Another semester is ending. It always feels a little messy, like cleaning up a gymnasium after a big dance party during which (you remember) some things happened you wish had not happened. But several of my students have sent me emails exclaiming what a great experience they had, and this makes me remember the good that has come out of the two courses I taught.

Especially JOUR318, “The Literature of Journalism.” We read and discussed, in grad-school seminar fashion, most of the great American writers who combined journalism and prose craft: Stephen Crane, Lafcadio Hearn, W.E.B. DuBois, Joseph Mitchell, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Ted Conover, Isabel Wilkinson and more. The nine students also tried their hand at a news feature, most of which were published (guest appearances) on our department’s weekly Rockbridge Report website. A few examples here, and here.

But what most floors me are several of their final projects. Some did research papers, but others tried long-form journalism, or what might be called creative non-fiction. In one, Alexandra Seymour wrote a poignant narrative about the incredible life of her 81-year-old father, who pioneered global clothing imports such as pocket-tees and managed old pop-chart figures, including Chubby Checker. Another, by Jackie Clifford, turned interviews with her grandfather into a tightly crafted thriller about his surviving 43 hours in the water after his aircraft carrier was sunk in the Pacific by a Japanese shell. Caroline Holloway, who discovered Freddie Goodhart’s magical shop of priceless junk in a class exercise in which we scattered around Lexington in pairs, wrote a charming profile of that free-spirited descendant of the McCormick family. I would love to see these published in some classy magazine. But wait – why not just put them on the web?

You hear people saying negative things about the Internet, but I’m thinking good thoughts about it at this beginning of Advent. It’s a great light for a people who dwell in darkness. I’m thinking of all the WordPress blog posts I’ve written, from Ireland and Italy and for my parish church. They’re all there, a link away.  I don’t bother to push these out to the world with keywords or Search Engine Optimization, but I know how to find them, like journals of my last 10 years sitting on a shelf in my bedroom. I think of good feature stories that some of my students have written, and realize that I can call up many of them in half a minute. To pick one I just remembered, somewhat at random, here’s a fine narrative about the little town that has almost vanished, Rapp’s Mill. There are a lot more, the culmination of semesters past and (nearly) forgotten.

In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dec. 1, 2016:

Emily Wright Cumming, a multi-talented, dynamic fourth-generation Atlantan, died Nov. 27 at age 90 after a brief illness.

She is survived by her husband of 68 years, Joseph B. Cumming, Jr.; four children; seven grandchildren, and three great-granddaughters. Together, Emily and Joe Cumming set in motion circles of friends who joined them across the decades in a creative life of work and play in Augusta, Atlanta, and Carrollton.

She was a longtime member of the Habersham Garden Club, which her mother Gertrude Wright helped start in the 1920s, and wrote its “Modest History and Apocrypha.” A passionate environmentalist, she was also active in projects of the Georgia Conservancy and helped start a recycling program and tree-plantings in Carrollton. She was a member of the Colonial Dames, the Junior League of Atlanta, and the Episcopal Church Women of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church.

She was born in Atlanta on Sept. 2, 1926, the second of five children of Gertrude (Whittier) and Douglas Berry Wright. As she wrote to her namesake, her one-month-old great-granddaughter Emily Beckley, in 2014: “How lucky I was, from the beginning. First, to have two smart, shy parents, who were gifted, artistic, and really serious about raising healthy, unspoiled children. Second, to be raised in a deep forest in a big stone house, with plenty of room for playing or hiding, or privacy for reading, and great spaces for big dinners or dances when we were teenagers.”

Emily was a competitive child athlete, winning state awards in diving and badminton. She was educated at St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines, Washington Seminary, Hollins College, and Agnes Scott College. In 1948, she married Joe Cumming and they moved to his ancestral home, Augusta, where all four children, Bryan, Doug, Walter, and Anne, were born. In 1956, the family moved to Atlanta. Joe worked there for 22 years reporting on the South for Newsweek magazine.

Emily, through those years, managed a vibrant family life of jazz-band parties, literary house parties in a vacation home in North Georgia, and environmental activism. She worked in public relations for a clean-energy company and campaigned in Wisconsin for Jimmy Carter. In these years, “I discovered I could write,” she wrote to little Emily. She had an essay in Newsweek and Reader’s Digest, and wrote several privately printed histories, including one about the family tree of her great-grandfather Maxwell Rufus Berry (1823-1909).

She and her husband were an energy-generating unit, in a marriage that Joe Cumming wrote about in Esquire magazine in 1977 proposing a new verb, “monog-ing,”  for the “dark magic practiced by certain married folk.” From that article:

“. . .let me describe Emily as I see her: a broad-browed and smiling brunette with short, often unmanageable hair, as lithe and light of step as when I first met her in World War II (I won’t ask you to believe under the Biltmore clock, but it’s true), cool as a schoolgirl lit with mischief, yet warm in the womanly ways of a world-famed mistress. I could go on and mention qualities from the likes of Julie Andrews, Erma Bombeck and Annie Dillard, but it would embarrass her and make you suspicious.”

Her surviving brother is Jim Wright (Emily), of Dixon Cove, Tenn. Siblings who preceded her in death were Whittier Wright (Sena), Oliver Wright (Mary Semmes), and Miriam Kiser (John). Besides her husband, she is survived by her children and their spouses, Joseph Bryan Cumming III (Holly) of Nashville; Douglas O. Cumming (Elizabeth) of Lexington, Va.; Walter W. Cumming of Holly Springs; Anne Cumming Preston (Clay) of Decatur. Also, grandchildren Anna (Cumming) Beckley (Gary), Alston Cumming (Julie), Helen Preston, Paul Preston, Daniel Cumming, William Cumming, and Sarah Rose Cumming; and great-grandchildren Ella, Katharine, and Emily Beckley.

A memorial service will be held at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, 3098 St. Annes Lane, Atlanta 30327, at 2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 3. Interment of cremated remains will be at Summerville Cemetery, Augusta, at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Mountain Conservation Trust (P.O. Box 35, Jasper, GA 30143).

My friend and mentor, poet Stephen Sandy, died last week in Bennington, Vt., at 82. I learned this in an email announcement from Bennington College. That’s where he taught when he became my literature teacher, adviser and senior-thesis tutor.

Although life eventually led me through the Ph.D. gauntlet to my current work as college professor, I was never good at keeping in touch with my own college professors – except for Stephen. He would send me his poems, often published in limited editions printed by letterpress on handmade paper, his Japanese stamp on the envelope. I would send him my feeble poems in Kinko chapbooks. Once, he came to visit us in Atlanta. We sat one evening in my Uncle Whit’s cigar-fragrant house, front door wide open to the springtime darkness, talking about Andrew Lytle and the Fugitives. I took him to Agnes Scott to talk to a poetry class. And I took him to Tate, where he explained his long poem “The Tack” as we walked around the lake. “Chilly glimpses of eternity” he said of the lake.

Now these three great poets that I have been fortunate to know and to have as classroom teachers, Seamus Heaney, Ben Belitt (who taught me Blake, and translated Neruda), and Stephen, are all gone. They live on in their poems, those chilly glimpses of eternity.

The last I heard from Stephen, he was fighting cancer. The end of his poem “Around Our Table” salutes a friend of his named Stephen Fels, who died of cancer in 1989.

Stephen, you were
The message we waited for, glowing face
Like a lamp in the dark around our table.

So many Stephen Sandy poems bear reading over, and over, years after reading them for the first time. As Frost says of a true poem, like metal to the tongue, they never lose their freshness. I’ve gone back to Thanksgiving Over the Water (Episcopalians will recognize the reference), one of his 11 books of poetry. The last poem in that collection is “Mother’s Day.” Even the most obscure-sounding phrases, like “friable selvage,” if you look up the words, glow in the dark with precise meaning, a shared experience of transplanting a tree and squares of grass. This could be an homage to Seamus Heaney.

Why is it, I asked Daddy, that we two writers, with such rich material to work with, have never made fiction out of our family? Pat Conroy did it with his family. Yeah, he said, and it wasn’t very nice when he wrote about ours.

I read Daddy a short story by Mary Hood called “Manly Conclusions.” Mary Hood was his pal. We wondered how she got the detail for this great story. Was she married? Did she have a son like the boy in the story? Was she still alive? He didn’t know. But we enjoyed the story together. Literature, memory, and good meals for four days in Anne and Clay’s house. Most of that time allowed them to be away at Tate hosting half a dozen couples in their couples group. Every day for Daddy and me revolved around a visit to Mama in room 340, Emory Rehab.

From this experience, I would highly recommend that anyone wishing to help should be with Daddy in units of at least 24 hours at a time, fixing and enjoying three good meals, easy walks with him, rest time for both, porch sitting, and good company without having to do anything that takes sustained concentration. In contrast, visit Mama in units of no more than an hour at a time.

“Precious pair of poets,” Mama said when Daddy and I blundered past her rehab roommate and into Mama’s space. She was quoting a Conrad Aiken poem that came welling up between me and Mama in fragments. “Rimbaud and Verlaine, precious pair of poets.” Playing chess in a sidewalk café in Paris, chestnut blossoms falling in blonde beer. In her corner bed by the window, sunlight squared on flowers and cards, not between knight and bishop.

Mama is making determined progress. When Walter was with us, he was jubilant at the improvement since he had last seen her a week before. The stroke was Sept. 25. This was Oct. 15 when their pals Ginger Birdsie and Kitty Farnham were sitting with us on that third floor hallway and saw Mama being wheeled out from her room to come to us. She pumped her free right hand in the air and kicked one leg straight out like cheerleader, even strapped in.

Talking with Mama was like poetry, shrewd compacted meanings, full of private references. She told us about her speech therapist trying to convince her to enlarge her understanding of the resurrection of Christ and a better world awaiting us. You sure he wasn’t the chaplain? I asked. No, the speech therapist, she said, “trying to save my soul.” By her account, she met this with logic and what I consider good sound incarnational theology – the proposition that this life and this world are as good a gift we can humanly imagine from a loving God. I’m impressed with a certain flinty glee showing in her slightly drooping face. I tell her she reminds me a little of Grandfather Douglas when he was old and being logical. She brushes that away as a bad comparison.

The physical attachment that Mama and Daddy have for each other is so touching under these constraints. They touch and kiss, then try to communicate out of their opposite hemispheres of cerebral strength. Mama’s all left brain. Daddy’s drawing on his right brain. I serve as translator, and that seems to be deeply satisfying for all three of us in snatches.

I am left with this concern – the need for a third-party translator, ideally a family member. That’s what I so enjoyed doing for four days. Being with Daddy in-between visits was one of the greatest experiences of love a son can have. It was like the best moments in the movie “Rain Man,” where the Tom Cruise character learns the meaning of love in action.  .  .except that Daddy’s part is so much more civilized and pleasant than Dustin Hoffman’s role, with its panic attacks. Daddy and I were both operating on some inexhaustible supply of affection and patience. I didn’t much care that I wasn’t getting work done on my job.

We watched movies together – actually, the only two DVDs I could find in the whole house: the 1950s home-movie pastiche called “The Cumming Thing” and David Lean’s engaging “Passage to India.” We walked to nearby Holy Trinity Episcopal Church for the 10:30 service this morning. My first day there, I took Daddy on foot to get a haircut at Maxim Barbers, a hip place with an actual barber’s pole twirling outside. I told him the haircut made him look like Alistair Cooke, and took a couple of pictures of him.

We strolled on into the heart of Decatur, a couple of boulevardiers. A choreographer from Israel named Oren sized us up as a likely audience for a modern dance he was producing. We followed him up an alley beside Core studio and upstairs to a large dance space where six dancers greeted us, three males and three females, although gender identity was pretty fluid even before the performance began. Daddy and I sat transfixed for 45 minutes by the abstract movements of “American Playground,” part improvised, part classical ballet, some children’s games, the whole thing like Mick Jagger acting silly but with impressive physical grace and contortions.  What a cool place Decatur can be. (Another day, jogging to the beautiful Agnes Scott campus – shades of Granny, mother and Robert Frost in past epochs – I spied Bo & Maureen walking on the other side of the street, on their way to the Decatur Beer Festival in the Square.)

Daddy is diligent with projects that can absorb him for hours at a time. He was delighted to find his own writing in a hardback copy of Bylines. He writes in a journal and notebooks, processing information like what day it is and what we just talked about. He worked for more than an hour trying to re-commit to memory the first page of Benet’s “The Mountain Whippoorwill.” He told a number of wonderful stories I had never heard before. Here’s one, about a gal named Joan.

He and Joan were not an item, back then, right out of high school, but they were friends. WWII gave Augusta a kind of rule-breaking jauntiness. Two or three times a week you could count 52 bombers flying over Augusta in formation, Daddy said. Joan was sophisticated for her age. Drinking Cokes at the Partridge Inn wasn’t cool enough, so Joan said come on, let’s go across the street to the Bon Air Hotel for some real drinks. They went, four of them, and at a cocktail bar with paper napkins, Joan said, hey here’s an idea, let’s write a poem or something for the one on this side of you. And she wrote a poem for Daddy. It went like this (Daddy didn’t keep the napkin, but remembered the poem):

Joseph B., of temperament mild
A magnolia sort of Oscar Wilde
Wherein cavalier and poet are blended,
The times you spend with him are splendid.*

(*not sure of this line, except the final rhyme)

A few days later, Joan told Daddy, “I’m going to New York.”

“Oh Joan.”

“Yes.” She went.

Daddy got a letter from her not long after saying she was in New York, but the people there were all manikins, caring about nothing but the clothes they wore. Sometime after that, she called Daddy long distance to say she got married, but now she wanted a divorce. She needed a Georgia lawyer, and she knew Daddy’s father was one. She needed a legal question answered. Daddy asked his father and got the answer for Joan. She could get the divorce if she was still a Georgia individual, and that was defined in the law by whether her “heart was in Georgia.”

I’m on the train back to Virginia, thinking about how much I am still of Georgia.

My daddy, now 90, entertains us with an endless scroll of family stories, and I had never heard this one until recently. One year, when he was a boy, he rode his father’s horse in the Confederate Memorial Day parade up Broad in Augusta, Ga., a city that his Cumming forebears had co-founded and helped develop. This would’ve been the 1930s. When the horse reached the towering Confederate Memorial Monument it stopped. Uh-oh. Everybody knows what it means when a horse stops in a parade. This time it was a liquid stream that came, and kept coming, ostentatiously spattering the base of the monument, leaving the crowds aghast. It was such a lavish performance, the horse seemed almost to be making a statement.

I recently saw that same 1878 monument from the window of a tour bus going through my ancestral home. The inscription at the bottom says: “No nation rose so white and fair, None fell so pure of crime.” White? Pure of crime? I thought it was a strange word choice.

But you see wording like that on a lot of Confederate memorials – purity, honor, unsullied devotion, as if to emphasize instead of just a loving memory, Yes, we lost, but there’s no guilt to be exculpated. Yesterday, I discovered an echo of that in the round brass plaques held in the double gate of our altar rail. The one on the left says TO THE MEMORY OF William Nelson Pendleton, D.D., Brigadier General, C.S.A., CHIEF OF ARTILLERY, ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, 1861-1865. On the right, a matching lozenge reads: FROM FRIENDS AND FELLOW SOLDIERS IN TESTIMONY OF HIS DEVOTION TO DUTY AND UNSULLIED PURITY OF CHARACTER. 1902.

I know a little about William Nelson Pendleton. He was this church’s longest-serving rector, from 1853 till his death 1883 (minus those years mentioned above, when he was away at war). He was a mathematics professor at West Point, founder and headmaster of Episcopal High in Alexandria, a scholar of both science and Christianity, a close friend of Robert E. Lee, and an advocate and organizer of education for blacks in this area after the Civil War. His funeral was the first service ever held in our current sanctuary, and it was packed to the balcony. Pendleton’s energy and intellect in the life in the church and in civil society are well documented in George M. Brooke Jr.’s history of our church. Yet what is inscribed in our sanctuary honors only his service as artillery general, and the unsullied purity of his character.

It’s a tiny inscription that I had never noticed before.

There is much bigger and more beautiful brass work around the sanctuary with no Roman-Stoic references to the War. Most magnificent are the grand eagle of the lectern and the ornate symbols of the four evangelists in the filigree around the pulpit. Those are memorials to the families of William Preston Johnston and of Col. William Gilham, two men who taught, respectively, at Washington & Lee and VMI.

The lovely brass work throughout the chancel has grown tarnished and in some place, such as in the feathers of the eagle, clotted with Brasso that should not have been used. For about two years now, Woody Sadler and Mo Littlefield have been quietly researching how to restore and save this legacy in brass. They have been working with Steve Roy, the New York-based master of brass artwork who has restored the bronze statues of Cyrus McCormick, Francis Smith, and “Stonewall” Jackson on our neighboring campuses. Woody and Mo have secured an $11,000 matching grant from the Gadsden Trust, a $5,000 grant from a Virginia-based family foundation called the Titmus Foundation, and enough pledges from several other parishioners (one of them my generous mother-in-law Avis Waring) to reach the $22,000 that Steve Roy originally bid two years ago.

The work is not only cleaning and restoring, but also adding a finishing lacquer that should keep the brass as bright as new, never needing polish again. This means the brass will be gorgeous and radiant for at least the remainder of this century. . .unless someone tries to use Brasso on it. Note to Future: Please don’t put polish on it, ever. That could ruin the finish.

Steve Roy, brass-restoration craftsman, examining the problem.

Steve Roy was looking over the brass on Friday with Mo and me, to come up with a new estimate. Before, he wanted to take the brass up to his New York foundry. This time, he’s looking at setting up a tent outside the church for a couple of weeks to do the work there, and perhaps segment the work to give us options to keep the cost down.

In any case, we should have some radiant brass by Christmas. Laus Deo!

Tom Wolfe, you old rascal! You’ve done it again. You’ve taken on the entire academic field of linguistics – as an outsider, a mere journalist – and played your snappy Emperor-has-no-clothes game on them. Bingo!

Wolfe at W&L booksigning, 2013. Photo by me.

And once again, you’ve stolen one of my ideas. But then, I never did anything with it. You did. Good show!

Getting my Harper’s magazine out of the mailbox recently, I couldn’t believe Wolfe, at age 85, was again doing what he did in Harper’s back in 1975. Back then, I was just starting out as a newspaper reporter when I read that long cover story, “The Painted Word,” with a kid’s excitement. Here was a funny, intellectual journalist, a Virginia neo-duelist taking on the pretensions of all those abstract expressionist painters – Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler. They were gods where I had just graduated from college, Bennington College. Wolfe deflated them all with good old reporting and satire.

Now, almost every year since I’ve been teaching journalism at Washington & Lee University, I’ve seen Wolfe visit, increasingly stooped and guarded in his fancy white suits, two-tone shoes, white-framed reading glasses, and for an honorary degree, white academic robe. He is a W&L alumnus, class of ’51. I remain in amused awe of his work – his New Journalism, good fat novels, moral mockery, punctuation!!!! But he was looking in decline.

Not at all!!! He has a new nonfiction book out now – The Kingdom of Speech, excerpted in the current Harper’s as “The Origins of Speech – In the Beginning was Chomsky.”

When I saw that, I had an Emersonian moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted Americans to realize that we were geniuses, every single one of us. But we fail to realize our genius, he said, because we defer to others – to Europeans, to experts, to published writers. Emerson virtually invented American individualism, and maybe he was a little too successful in getting everybody else to come around to that belief.

But anyway, when I saw that Tom Wolfe had done a number on “the origins of speech,” I thought of what Emerson said about the embarrassing experience of recognizing our own thoughts – my ideas – in someone else’s writing. “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”  You can find that in Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.”

Wolfe’s insight is that language is the distinguishing characteristic, “the attribute of attributes,” of the human species. Now that might seem obvious. But there’s a second part: Human language is like nothing else in the known universe, from subatomic particles to sex-drives in pigeons to every known physical law. What is it then, this very thing that makes us human – and accounts for our incredible success as a species?

We don’t know. They don’t know. It’s a mystery. If it’s not like anything else we know in the animal kingdom, then it didn’t evolve. Wolfe rejects the Darwinian view, and says language was invented. It is the human thing.

No one knows how it originated. No one has discovered a “primitive” language – except maybe a heroic linguist working in the jungles of Brazil who figures in Wolfe’s new book. In any case, we have a lot of theories and a lot of data about language, but we don’t really have a picture of what it is like. Of what it is. It’s bizarre.

Another Southern writer, the novelist Dr. Walker Percy, published academic articles on this failure to understand the bizarre thing, human language, back in the 1950s. Like Wolfe, Percy coyly noted that the weirdness of human language baffled all scientific theories. Back then, it was B.F. Skinner who tried to explain language as merely behaviorism – our animal attribute, like a dog doing a trick for a bone. Noam Chomsky at MIT destroyed that theory, and Percy admired Chomsky’s respect for the bizarreness of language. Now Wolfe is mocking Chomsky’s theories.

But the point is, we just don’t know. And that is an idea I have toyed with ever since I absorbed Walker Percy’s brilliant skepticism. I’m no Creationist. Journalists don’t know anything. But they do tend to know when people who claim to know things don’t, really. I have for many years found it interesting that we don’t really know the origin of this most central fact of our human story. “In the beginning was the Word” makes as much sense as anything.

There are two other great mysteries I have long been obsessed with, but never pursued. I wish Tom Wolfe would report on these. One is the fact that we don’t really know how life – DNA – originated. And two, we don’t know how anything – matter itself – came into being. If Wolfe doesn’t report on those questions, somebody should.

[this is in the Roanoke Times, Sept. 11, 2016]

JOUR395 F17 Specialty Reporting (Education)
Douglas O. Cumming, associate professor

Notes toward a SYLLABUS – 8/27/16

This course fulfills the requirement for a 3-credit specialty reporting class required for majors in the Journalism sequence. Journalism and Strategic Communications majors must have taken J201 as a prerequisite. Juniors and seniors with other majors are welcome, especially those minoring in education or education policy.

In Jour 395, students will learn about:

• key institutions that shape and influence this field

Local public and private schools and universities, school districts (their administration and school boards), state Department of Education, U.S. Department of Education, state and national laws and policies pertaining to education (and legislative and funding bodies responsible for these); organizations of teachers/professors, principals, administrators, school boards, parents, and students; colleges for teacher training and research on teaching and learning.

•  specific terms essential to understand to report and write about the topic with authority

Education insiders and experts use a lot of jargon. Sometimes their obscure terms need to be understood and translated. Educationese can be shorthand for a significant set of meanings, or they contain a history that needs to be told in a nutshell. Other times, the jargon is smoke an education reporter should learn to fan away: it can be merely the empty code that members of a sect use to distinguish insiders from outsiders, or the trick bureaucrats and politicians employ to avoid accountability.

•  credible resources and sources to which a reporter can turn for stories on this topic

Ed Beat: Education Writers Association (join it, consider attending an EWA workshop or following the listserv, and bookmark the website for backgrounders), The Hechinger Report, Journalism Center on Children & Families (University of Maryland J school), Education Week, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Pew Research Center (Education).

K-12 student achievement: NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress), IPEDS (DOE data on higher ed), Institute for Education Statistics (IES), state and local assessment offices, and for a dissenting view, FairTest.

Professional education organizations: e.g. National School Boards Association;  National Association of Secondary School Principals , etc.

•  specific journalistic associations for writers in this field

For Ed Beat writers: EWA (see above), SPJ, Spencer Foundation, Poynter Institute.

•  specific ethical issues that reporters encounter in this field

Ethics: Sarah Carr’s standards & ethics for education reporting.

Students will read exemplary examples of the particular type of specialty reporting and practice the craft themselves through the reporting and writing of numerous stories.  When possible, the class will meet with veterans in the field through class visits or Skype sessions.

 Some award-winning examples:  of Boston Globe columnist Farah Stockman’s Pulitzer-winning columns on busing crisis 40 years after;  other EWA award winters; Tampa Bay Times’ “Failure Factories” , Baltimore Sun’s “Unsettled Journeys,” blogs from Valerie Strauss’ “Answer Sheet” blog in Washington Post, Sara Gregory’s series on Rethinking Discipline, and Columbia Dispatch project she helped, won the Pulliam First Amendment Award; a Washington Post story on a bereaved father’s promise to help other Asian-American parents understand their children’s urge to assimilate. A Center for Public Integrity article on Virginia’s high rate of suspensions. Articles by the professor from when he was senior education writer at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

 Also: Students must cover (and find news from) school board meeting, do a profile of a student and a profile of teacher (ideally, around an issue or narrative), and complete a final in-depth multi-media project. This is the minimal requirement for news stories that a student will produce.

And: A unit on the history of American education, its philosophical and political battles, and how it has been constructed in popular culture and covered in mass communication, from Joseph Rice’s series in Forum (1890s) to coverage of A Nation at Risk (1983) and  test scores under NCLB. (Lawrence A. Cremin volumes on American education; literary nonfiction from the classroom perspective such as by Kozol, Kidder, etc, and portrayal in film).

And: Students will establish contact with an education reporter early in the term and follow that reporter’s work and social-media presence. By the end of the term, the student will write a report on that education-beat reporter that must be shared with the reporter before being submitted for a grade.

Possible guests in class or by Skype: Sara Gregory of Roanoke Times, Aaron Richardson of web-only Charlottesville Tomorrow, Maureen Downy of Atlanta Journal Constitution, Emily Richmond of EWA, Sarah Carr of The Teacher Project at Columbia University School of Journalism.