Plantation Tales
Old and New
a) “I used to say My name is also Jack the Rabbit because my home is in the briarpatch, and Little Buddy (than whom there was never a better riddle buddy) used to say Me my name is Jack the Rabbit also because my home is also in the also and also of the briarpatch because that is also where I was also bred and also born. And when I also used to say My name is also Jack the Bear he always used to say My home is also nowhere and also anywhere and also everywhere.”
---from Albert Murray’s novel, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), p. 4
b) Milan Kundera’s idea: when people are walking and trying to remember something, they slow up; when people are trying to forget something, they speed up. In his novel, Slowness.
Fiber optics may speed things up so much that it all loops around to becoming a new way of remembering (?).
c) "Our ties to beings and things are so fragile they often break without us noticing."
"You try to be free through writing. How wrong. Every word unveils another tie."
Léca is a rabbi and commentator, one of the characters in Edmond Jabès' The Book of Questions, p. 37. Trans. Rosemarie Waldrop. Hanover NH: Wesleyan UP, 1991. Jabès' texts were originally published in France in 1964-65.
A trip to Louisiana (especially Lafayette and the surrounding bayous, plus New Orleans) and Mississippi,
April 25 - May 3, 1996.
1. Around Lafayette, Louisiana
The expanded highways, built in the 50s and 60s, follow the train tracks and plow through the poorest black section of Lafayette, small wooden one-story houses and other buildings. The road splits and many people live inside the “median” between the two highways, in some cases with the cars traveling at 50mph right off the steps of their front porches. A few have responded by turning a former home into a restaurant (“Mama’s Fried Chicken”) or drive-in Daiquiri stands (legal in Louisiana): “Bogart’s Daiquiri’s.” Cars are lined up outside of these at all hours in the evenings.
A new Comfort Inn in the 1980s is constructed in the middle of one of these neighborhoods, just up from the river from a sewage plant constructed a decade or so earlier but screened from it by a stand of trees. The city just took the land it needed, displacing houses.
The Comfort Inn is a set of landscaped motel room complexes surrounded by a parking lots and a high fence. The parking areas are floodlit all night. The light also floods into the neighborhood on the other side of the fence, wooden one-story houses like those split by the highway nearby. They have open porches, a window or two on the sides and front, a peaked roof. Many need paint. The yards are often bare, from all the pets and children constantly moving about, though some have small gardens out back. At night, the yellow-tinged light from the Inn is so strong that it must come into the front rooms of these houses even through shades.
One morning I see a boy with a German shepherd puppy on a leash walking away from the motel apartments carrying a white styrofoam food container. Is this leftovers from someone’s room service or from the main kitchen, gathered by one of the “housekeepers” (note the euphemism) or kitchen workers, maybe even by his mother or sister? He holds it in his hand carefully, as his dog frisks beside him. He’s angling toward a corner of the parking lot, where there may be a break in the fence. He’s clearly taking something that was carefully and secretly packed for him, taking it back to one of the houses on the “other side” of the Comfort Inn’s fence.
Comfort Inn as new/old plantation Big House, with the Slave Quarters behind—or rather the Big House after Reconstruction, when the economics of slavery became slightly modified to accommodate paying wages, thus putting the power relationships on a more “modern” basis while social relations changed little. What percentage of adults from the surrounding neighborhood work at the Comfort Inn as housekeepers or in food service and the dining room, or the laundry rooms? (The men and women employed at the front desk are on the other side of the color line and are dressed in suit jackets to signify they belong to a different class of employee.) Mostly, this new Big House seeks to have nothing to do with the world on the other side of its fence, except that it needs it for contract labor.
The “American” right to free passage, movement, travel (and to find a “comfort inn” at the end of the day): freedom for us tends instinctively to mean freedom of movement, to take to the road. Of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we think that in many ways these aren’t three separate terms or “rights” but three names for the same thing, and the greatest of these is “pursuit.”
(We rarely examine or are comfortable with other possible meanings for “freedom” that don’t involve movement, that involve staying put or in discovering the network of relations that links things together. Or the meaning of freedom that involves movement in another way, dissent from the majority---this makes us too uneasy, despite all the mouthings we make about valuing freedom of speech as much as freedom of movement.)
Liberty as freedom-of-movement thus also means the freedom to bulldoze through others’ homes if they can’t stop you.
Question: When in 1999 is the word "plantation" used as a point of pride, to signify prosperity and enhanced real estate values?
Answer: look at the upscale housing developments/gated communities/golf courses that have taken over the various "Sea Islands" (such as Hilton Head) off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.
Formerly actual indigo and rice-growing plantations, these islands became mostly free black communities after the Civil War, renowned for the "Gullah" speech and their retention of African traditions. (For one contemporary portrait, see Julie Dash's movie early 1990s movie Daughters of the Dust plus the novel of the same title she published in 1999 continuing the story of the Peazant family.)
By the 1990s, however, they are increasingly becoming gated communities for rich whites. Dash's work captures history at its vanishing point.
'UNCLE'
SALT
'N'
PEPPA
SHAKERS
FOR SALE
ON THE
INTERNET
1999
civ
ili
za
tion
--Or
nette
Cole
man
2. Teche’d
South of Lafayette, we drive by “Shadows on the Teche,” a stately plantation Big House built with money from sugar cane. The house has two impressive facades showing wealth and leisure, one facing the road and one the bayou Teche behind, a vista of slowly flowing waters and live oaks with their swaying moss.
“Shadows on the Teche” is a haunted name. Shadows as dreams of leisure on the bayou, softness and the play of light and dark for contemplation from the back patio with a drink in hand. Versus a different vision: shadows as fears of slave uprisings, as the hidden movements of guilt and nightmares: these had to shadow the Big House’s self-regard as well.
Sugar cane is still the main crop in the fields. The new-growth cane is just emerging from its humps, while stalks from last-year’s crops turn gray in the sharp sun as they litter the fields. Mexican primroses dance in the wind along the edge of the fields, near the roads, where chicory would grow up North.
3. New Orleans
At the Camellia Grill, New Orleans: the black waiters’ code for new white customers coming in through the door is “two more malteds in the house!”
A crucial book bought in New Orleans: Jerah Johnson’s Congo Square in New Orleans (Louisiana Landmark Society, 1995).
Is there anything more important in American history than the story of this square? At least, its story juxtaposed with that of the Constitution and its history (its ideals vs. its realities)?
This is the site where the history of how the African and the European were combined can be told—or, rather, the story of how they could be combined in a different way, undoing the color-line or a least redrawing it in a way very different from how both the white North and the white South wanted it drawn. And even more crucial than the history of the square is how its history of survival and resistance and transformation is the story of how this synthesis was carried away, was made portable when the square itself was calculatedly destroyed by the New Orleans authorities as a place for revolutionary interaction. Drawing on the square’s performance traditions but now no longer linked to one site: moveable, on the move, first to Storyville and then to the rest of the country.
Been here and gone.... Jerah Johnson’s book sketches all these histories....
Blur
Test
4. THE LEGENDARY CHATTAHOOCHEE PLANTATION
COBBS COUNTY, GEORGIA, 1968
SECTION: LOCAL NEWS; Section B; Page 1
HEADLINE: J.M. Wilson, Marietta's mayor, dies
BYLINE: By Tom Bennett STAFF WRITER
Joe Mack Wilson, a first-term mayor of Marietta and a former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Georgia House of Representatives, died Monday while taking a nap. He was 73. The apparent cause was heart trouble, a relative said. Funeral arrangements are pending.
Mr. Wilson, a jeweler, was elected Marietta mayor in 1989. "All I wanted the job for was to show them I could get it," he said later. He proposed a commuter rail station for the city, reversing an earlier anti-MARTA stance in the Legislature, and vetoed a $ 5.5 million line of credit the City Council approved in 1990, saying the risks outweighed the benefits. "The greatest accomplishment of the Wilson administration is the atmosphere, procedures and mechanics in making the city of Marietta a well-run business administration," he told the Kiwanis Club in January. "We're not there yet, but give me five more years and we'll get there."
Mayor Pro Tem Marion Rigo will serve as acting mayor until a special election can be called, according to City Manager Ken Vanderslice. Mr. Wilson served in the state House for 26 years, from 1962 until losing the office in 1988. He headed the powerful Ways and Means Committee from 1983 to 1988.
A self-proclaimed "old mossback conservative," [Mr. Wilson] needled the city of Atlanta often in the Legislature, co-authoring a 1966 "Stop Atlanta" ballot measure that voters approved. It required the approval of a majority of the county's voters before Atlanta could annex Cobb land.
In 1968, Mr. Wilson and others wrote a law creating the 10-foot-wide mythical city of Chattahoochee Plantation along the river. They took advantage of a state law prohibiting any city to cross another in an annexation move; their target was Atlanta.
[The object of this mythical but legal plantation city is not clearly described here in Mr. Wilson's obiturary. But it can be inferred: it was to stop Atlanta from expanding northward into Cobb County---and, more specifically, to draw the line on blacks moving in. For similar reasons, efforts to build an area mass-transit systems uniting Atlanta and Cobb County (which presumably would have benefited everyone in the area) were repeatedly blocked by Cobb County legislators, who wanted a clean "color-line" between too-black Atlanta and white Cobb, though of course they hardly described their motives in such terms. Atlanta built more and more highways and now, in the late 1990s, has some of the worst traffic congestion in the United States.]
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