Docs and musings

Our streets are quiet, houses hiding their sequestered stories. Single joggers, without running mates, claim the middle of the road. There are no real church services or huddlings at the local brew-pub. My classrooms are locked and dark, a packet of Lysol wipes left abandoned from the sudden exit a month ago.

This looks like a parody of what American life did to us in its heyday. We are each alone, or stuck in our nuclear family units. The victory and wealth that followed World War II, as David Brooks wrote about it in the Atlantic last month, brought to an end the 10,000-year reign of the Extended Family. We didn’t need to keep our children living with us when they grew up, or to keep our parents around when they retired. Ambition and the interstate scattered us far and wide. Now, with the coronavirus forcing us to practice social distancing and sheltering in place, it looks like a mockery of independence and individualism. We’re isolated – for the common good.

But the magic of digital technology is calling us to reconnect with the extended family. Thanks to Zoom, we become live video images reconnecting around our kitchen tables and on porches, brothers and sisters together, the generations reunited. (Even in the severely locked down nursing-care facilities, we send digital greetings or talk through the “window” of the internet). It seems a natural response to this natural disaster.

I have been Zooming almost daily with my older brother in Nashville, my younger brother in Black Mountain, N.C., and our sister in Decatur. Their children, in other places as far away as Oregon, sometimes join us. We talk about anything, or nothing much, but always enjoying this time together. And we talk about that. “This is so great,” we say, loving each other as perfectly as ever, it seems.

We’ve come around, past the grief and turmoil of our mother dying three and a half years ago at 90. And there’s a recent grief. We extend the powerful intimacy we had around the ICU bed of Bryan’s wife Holly at the end of February, when she passed away with a pneumonia that was not Covid-19 but taught us the very medical support that would soon be needed for thousands more across the land. Bryan is alone now but not lonely, it seems, as he is creatively putting together the beautiful images and songs that Holly left us. She smiles radiantly for us in so many photographs that he loads onto his social media platforms, technical wonders that are mere maps of the real relationships he has with us and Holly’s kinfolk, with his fellow musicians and with his house-church family.

We three brothers and sister share what we know or don’t know about Covid-19, stories from the news or from the view we have where we are, in four contiguous Southern states. We become our own little news program, producers and reporters broadcasting to themselves. Walter recommends good movies. Bryan teaches me the guitar licks that begin “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” Anne tells about how happy the horses seem as she tends them out at Little Creek Farm, the location of the therapeutic riding program she started there. The program is in hiatus, the horses needing only daily feeding and maintenance. “They are so happy they don’t have to work.”

Yesterday, the three of us in this house Zoomed with our son Daniel in Austin and our son William on his farm in Fancy Gap, Va. It was a first Zoom for William, Alyssa and little Avis, the nearly 2-year-old darling star of Alyssa’s Facebook art-photography. We are a family again, and what an amazing threesome – Dan, Will and Sarah Rose. They are so different from one another and yet so bonded together. I loved hearing Daniel and William talk about their work – Daniel is making plastic ventilator masks with a 3-D printer for what sounds like a start-up business, and William showed us his invented “woodstones” cut with his electric miter saw, another possible start-up. It feels like the old form of extended family – where work too was connected with the home and farm and we were all there across the generations.

There’s a new kind of balance now between the local and the not-local. Global news is of dread interest to all, reliable and scary – “cases near 2 million” – but we are just as interested in what’s happening on our own block or in our town.

Junie and me, on spring-green Brewbaker Field, behind our sequestering house in Lexington.

We all have stories to tell. No one’s story is average or insignificant. (On National Public Radio, random ordinary people’s voices carry dignity and weight alongside the president’s news conferences and reporters reporting from Paris or Rome.) Collectively these individual stories make up the numbers, the statistics. (At least 580,878 people in the U.S. have tested positive, according to the NYTimes database. More than 23,000, about 4%, have died.) But each one wants to be told, in Zoom meetings between siblings or among college classes scattered across the land. Those stories are our lessons for the day, and for the time to come.

Things are turned on their head. Positive is bad, and a false negative is the last thing we want in our test results. Being stuck at home is a journey, an adventure with an uncertain destination that will bring us home when we can set out into the world again.

The common good, that elusive abstraction of academics like Michael Sandel, is temporarily visible to the non-elite, like dust motes you can see in a stroke of sunlight. Everybody must play nice. Everybody has public obligations, and everybody carries an inner truth of privacy rights, behind their mask or within their prison homes or literal prisons.

Whether for the rich or the poor, the un-evolving spiky little virus is the same. All are vulnerable, even if our protections vary. Humanity is the same. The variance that we created is visible now, the guilty gulf between the richly housed and the homeless, the Hamptons and the refugee camps.

[Published in website “Like the Dew,” October 6, 2019.]

Fifty years after my graduation from North Fulton High School, the pages of my 1969 “Hi-Ways” yearbook fill gaps in my mind better than any real memories. I look at my senior picture, a boy I barely recall with dark eyebrows and blond hair where I have little now. Next to me, in alphabetical order, is Ed Davenport. I didn’t know him.

Me. . . .and Ed Davenport, in 1969 yearbook.

But I do know that he was the first African-American to graduate from North Fulton in its long history as one of Atlanta’s best public high schools. (I also know, from my research in Southern literature, that the poet James Dickey and writer Flannery O’Connor both went there for at least one year in the 1930s – at the same time!)

The Class of ’69 recently held a 50^th anniversary reunion. We met in a crowded bar scene in Brookhaven on a Friday night, had a Saturday tour of the handsome Depression-era school, now occupied by the private Atlanta International School, and met that night in a Hyatt-Regency ballroom just inside the Perimeter.

Something protected us in those years, being at that school at that time in history. We were covered by a gauzy veil, guarded against the Sixties except for the good music. We were oblivious, indifferent to the times and the changes going on. We held on to a good past, and a decent public education, up until the changes couldn’t be avoided. Then we graduated, and dispersed into the maelstrom.

My debate partner went the farthest for college, to Dartmouth, and now practices law in Atlanta. One top student became the U.S. Ambassador to Panama. Another became the first Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, adopting the role that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. created to clean up the Hudson River. The “Artful Dodger” to my “Oliver” in our senior play became the singer-band leader of the best blues band in Georgia, The League of Decency.

In the crowded ballroom Saturday night, I saw Ed Davenport. He was sitting at a small table with his Filipina wife, Dina, talking to another classmate. When my chance came, I sat at his table and we began to talk.

But how do I get his story? I didn’t know him 50 years ago. Across the civil rights history that I study more deeply the further I get from high school – the history we somehow didn’t see beyond our high school gauze – how could I interview him as if he were the embodiment of that history? It didn’t seem decent. But this was a happy enough greeting. Dina laughed a lot, and made me sign my senior picture in his yearbook. I thought of an opening.

“I actually studied this in grad school,” I told him, gently shifting to the sensitive subject of race. “We think of this one big history of the civil rights movement, with the usual heroes.” But really, I said, there are thousands of civil rights histories, most of them untold.

The first big wedge was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, aimed not at voting rights or grownup discrimination but at children in schools. That’s why every Southern state, every school district, and eventually every public school had its own civil rights story. We know about James Meredith at Ole Miss, and Ruby Bridges walking to school in New Orleans in that famous Norman Rockwell painting. But there are thousands of other “firsts.” And here was one, one of the last – oddly enough, 15 years after the Brown decision. Ed Davenport began to open up, and I began taking notes.

Did he live in Buckhead, a solidly white community that lost its battle against being annexed to Atlanta in 1950? No – he lived in Grove Park, about eight miles away in the west end of the city. He was getting in fights at West Fulton High, a previously all-white school in the middle of its troubled transition into an all-black school. Ed’s mother told the principal she wanted him out of that school.

The principal suggested more solidly black schools like Harper or Frederick Douglass. No, she demanded, he needs to go to North Fulton. But how did she know about the Buckhead mystique?

“My grandmama lived there, in Piney Grove,” Ed Davenport said. She’s buried there now, in a weed-slung graveyard that is the remnant of Piney Grove. Like the other small 19^th century black communities squeezed out of Buckhead during the Jim Crow years, Piney Grove has disappeared. One of the streets used to be named for his grandmother’s family, West, he said. Her property was gobbled up for Georgia 400 and Piney Grove Baptist Church has been replaced by high-end canyons of condominiums.

Ed came to North Fulton as a junior. How did he get to school each day, from the other end of Atlanta? “I was 16, so I bought me a car.” What kind? A 1955 Chevrolet. How much did it cost? “I think it was $250,” he said.

Browsing through the yearbook, I asked about his teachers. “They were . . .mean!” he said. That was true, I thought, for some of them. Mean old maids from an older era, but dedicated. One of those that he remembered was Miss Plaster, a tough English teacher. Her meanness toward Ed Davenport had a particular edge to it. He remembers her asking him, when he came into class a little late, “What are you doing at this school?”

He went to the principal, Mr. Bryce, about Miss Plaster. In the mold of his mother’s example, he demanded that the principal get him out of Miss Plaster’s class. It worked.

“Mr. Chesna, he was a great guy,” Ed said. Joseph L. Chesna was white, or course – all of the teachers were white. But he wasn’t someone you would have if you were college-prep. He was the wood shop teacher.

We exchanged business cards, Ed and I. His card had the crisp Delta airline logo, his name and title, “Edward E. Davenport Sr., Base Maintenance Technician, RETIRED.” He lives in the exurban city of Douglasville. He and his wife enjoy the benefit of deep-discount Delta flights to other countries.

Soon, they will be flying to the Philippines to visit her family. Her family is not wealthy, he said, but when he visits them, they treat him like someone very special, a prince, an American. “That feels good.”

(This essay first ran in the website “Like the Dew: A Progressive Journal of Southern Culture & Politics,” Dec. 8, 2019)

The word has gone forth. Our historic Episcopal church has done what many thought was impossible – we got rid of the name that the church had borne since 1903, R.E. Lee Memorial Church.

Photo from Hillsville, Va., by Doug Cumming

After the slaughter in a black Charleston church in 2015 and the neo-Nazi violence of Charlottesville in 2017, we finally replaced a Confederate symbol, Robert E. Lee, with the original name that Lee himself knew when he saved the war-shaken parish in his final years in Lexington, Virginia – “Grace.”

Now, after an interim rector oversaw two years of “healing” and a new rector has arrived, my church finally has a future as well as a past. The Bishop of the Diocese of Southwest Virginia sent praises for our spiritual journey out of a “time of trial in the life of the parish.” A letter from the national Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, the cool preacher whose sermon went viral from the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, said it all: “God has been at work in Lexington.”

When I was in the middle of this “time of trial,” between the rise of Donald Trump and the end of his first year in office, I wasn’t the only member of the parish who was struck by the parallels between our church’s divisions and America’s. Old-guard defenders of keeping the “Lee” name formed an unmovable “base,” and a significant number of parish leaders, like today’s elected Republicans, would not deviate from the base. They finally admitted, okay, maybe we’ll change the name someday, but not now. It would be mere “political correctness,” disrespectful of a great military hero and Christian gentleman, they said.

As Congress moves inexorably, painfully, through the Constitutional process of impeaching the President, I am remembering lessons I learned from this parochial name-change experience. The lessons seem relevant. But I can’t be sure, since no one in our church wants to talk about what we went through. “Healing,” apparently, means silence. So this is for you outsiders, my “Five Lessons and Carols” in this Advent season.

One, taking time is nice, but doesn’t change many minds. The Charleston, S.C., shooting triggered a call for a “Christ-centered” discussion of our name. I agreed, as a member of the elected governing body, the Vestry, that we shouldn’t rush. We opted for many house meetings, and then promised a Vestry vote that would require two-thirds to change the name.

I was among those who felt the congregation should have time to process the controversy and be listened to. As a mass media professor, I was influenced by pollster Daniel Yankelovich’s book Coming to Public Judgment. That book optimistically describes how people process controversies over time, opening up new understandings and giving all opinions due respect. This un-hurried process doesn’t necessarily yield agreement, Yankelovich says, but it does lead to “public judgment,” a feeling that the matter is settled and we can move on.

This, it turned out, was wrong. At the end of 2016, nine out of 15 vestry members voted to change the name, one vote short of the super-majority. Nothing felt settled. Everybody was mad. Families left.

Then we tried another time-consuming – and expensive – process simply to repair the damage. A pair of consultants guided an ad hoc church committee for nine months to issue a beautiful 15-page report recommending nuances of compromise, including (to much shock and surprise) restoring the historic name of “Grace Episcopal Church.” The vestry split again, worse than before. More “no-change” old-guard had been voted onto the vestry (beware of backlash in 2020!). Then Charlottesville happened, and the gulf widened. With each side dug in, we barely passed the name-change, this time by a simple majority, and a two-vote margin.

Two, for opponents of change, “the right time” is never. Early on, many wanted to end the discussion with a congregation-wide vote. That’s not Episcopal governance. We distributed a survey instead. Opponents of change took the results as a vote – two-thirds against a name-change. The people had spoken, they said, and the vestry shouldn’t overturn the will of the people.

After Charlottesville, which was about the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee 70 miles to our northwest, the problem with being R.E. Lee Memorial Church rattled us again. But the old-guard felt it was not the right time – since “our” Lee was not the general on horseback but the church’s former senior warden. Yes, we’ll change our name at some point, they said, but not now. One vestry member was so appalled at that, she resigned.

Three, niceness isn’t enough. I have a friend, a former Democratic operative and Obama administration official, who is finishing a how-to book for political liberals that seeks to extol the wisdom of Machiavelli. “Being Good Isn’t Enough,” she plans to title it, quoting “The Prince.”

I found myself slowly giving up on attempts to be gently persuasive – listening, praying, praising the good will of all sides – and instead, started counting potential votes. I found myself being Machiavellian, I confess. Some, recognizing that, saw me as the Enemy. I came to see my many opportunistic saves, barely keeping a name-change possible at a half-dozen key times, as miracles. It must have been the Holy Spirit. Machiavelli, intensely anti-church, is under-appreciated as a good Protestant realist. Nancy Pelosi, a good Catholic, likewise.

Four, understand tribal identity. You may think that it’s enough to stand on transcendent ideals like the Constitution or the rule of law – or God.  But we’re in an age of identity. Even an Episcopal church, spiritually led by bishops and declaring a gospel to the wider world, will close up like a tree-house boys’ club when the wider world has a different view of its name. If you don’t like it, you can leave, some actually said. Belonging to a church, or a political party, has become more determining of position than any of the institutional beliefs supposedly held by that church or party.

Five, after the change, don’t look back. After the name change, the hurt was much deeper than I anticipated. Not that this was the cause, but one of the most influential leaders of no-change resigned from the vestry and checked into Stonewall Jackson Memorial Hospital and another was struck by cancer. Our interim rector, charged with “healing,” brought in a couple of monks for a day-long workshop on reconciliation, and it worked like a dud. After a powerful sermon on reconciliation, one old-timer came up to me in tears and apologized. But no one else has said a word to me about “the late unpleasantness,” as one Sons of Confederate Veterans widow calls it.

Good things have been happening at Grace Episcopal Church. Our new music director has brought in African drums, college musicians and cool new songs we’ve all learned. An international conference on peace and reconciliation in South Sudan was hosted by Grace Episcopal in September. Our new rector, the Rev. Ellis Tucker “Tuck” Bowerfind, was the Virginia diocese’s co-chair of a committee on race and reconciliation.

None of this would have happened at “R.E. Lee Memorial Church” at this time in history. And yet, no one wants to tell the story of how we changed. When the local weekly paper asked me to cover the South Sudan conference, a reference I made to this history was sugar-coated, pre-publication, by a call from the church to the editor, when the church couldn’t reach me (this is how small-town journalism works sometimes).

I’m telling you this story, because I think it’s a good one. But I’ve accepted that I can’t tell it in my church community. That’s my penance. And if the Democrats don’t blow it, I for one don’t intend to gloat or rub it in. This is my Christmas carol: the future is good; blame is not.