Jackson, 1964

Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America

Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2016)

        Calvin Trillin spent his late twenties on the ‘seg beat’; first for Time’s Atlanta Bureau in 1960-61, then for the New Yorker, “in the days when race and the South were thought of as basically the same story by national magazines.” He covered sit-in movements, school desegregation in all sorts of places, voting drives and Freedom Rides. This collection of his New Yorker pieces brings them back as he originally wrote them, give or take a few redundancies.

       The South, of course, is not the only place with racial tensions: he also reports from Seattle, Newark, and Oshkosh. In New Orleans, there’s the black Mardi Gras parade, featuring King Zulu in a grass skirt, black-and-white face, and coconuts, though perhaps fewer stops at taverns than had one been the norm. Whether this is tradition, parody, good clean fun, or heinous racism, seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

       New Orleans is of particular interest because it has so many gradations of race. A piece from 1986 goes into the story of a woman who discovered that her birth certificate listed both of her parents as ‘colored.’ It’s not the sort of error, if such it was, that the responsible bureaucrat was willing to remedy with the stroke of a pen. Jack Westholz represented the vital records office, where “it was taken for granted that certain families had a traceable amount of black blood, and that it was up to the vital-records office to tell them apart. When it came to tracing traceable amounts, nobody ever accused the vital-records office of bureaucratic lethargy.” This is characteristically dry Trillin prose: the strain of the ridiculous is allowed to speak for itself. The matter didn’t make it to the United States Supreme Court, but not for lack of trying.

      When it comes to weird racial math, Boston holds up its end. The parking garage for the John Hancock tower had an awkwardly large restaurant space on its ground floor, which in 1976 was a discotheque known as Whimsey’s. Black people were not exactly barred from going to Whimsey’s, but they sometimes had trouble getting in – does anyone actually have three photo IDs? (When someone actually showed up with three, the bemused doorman let her in.) The Boston Licensing Board heard from enough unrelated complainants to suspend Whimsey’s license for a few days, which surely made absolutely no difference in the grand scheme of Boston’s racial troubles in the nineteen seventies.

      The title essay goes deep into the Mississippi Summer Project, as it’s coordinated by the Council of Federated Organizations. “As it happens, COFO is, for all practical purposes, a project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ...so the style-setters are the staff members of SNCC, which may once have been a coat-and-tie organization but is no longer.” By 1964, it’s an overalls-and-blue-workshirts organization, befitting its efforts in the poorest, most rural parts of the state; this also reflects the fact that coats and ties are not good for sleeping on the floor, when needs must. Trillin is following James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, and Robert Moses, who directs the Summer Project; they’re working on literacy education and voter registration, but somehow, much more than that. Moses says, “People say, ‘Why are you doing this? or ‘Why are you starting with this aspect? or ‘Where can this approach ever get you?’And we say, ‘What else would you have us do?’”

      From the state side, public school desegregation is seen as inevitable, “and about all that the last session of the legislature could think of to do about it was to provide tuition grants for those who wanted to attend private segregated schools.” How’s that! for an offhand remark with a very long tail. In 1995, he wrote about the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission’s trove of records, and the lawsuits trying to open them up. The lawsuits themselves pried loose some colorful secrets: “It is now known, for instance, that an early black applicant to the University of Southern Mississippi who was convicted of several crimes and thrown into prison was framed; an alternative plan was to murder him.”

      Calvin Trillin has produced many light-hearted books on eating, presidential foibles, and his late beloved wife, Alice. I would happily read him writing the phone book, so to speak; but on a subject so subtle and so complex, so tragic and so nonsensical, as race in America, his powers are at their best. 

 

Any Good Books, March 2025 by email

 

Pappyland

 

Any Good Books, February 2025

Pappyland: a Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

Wright Thompson (2020, Penguin Press)

 

         If you’re going to write a book about Kentucky, you might as well start at Churchill Downs, preferably during Derby Week, a quintessentially American meetingplace of genteel tradition and upstart gaucherie. “This new-money Derby attracts people who seem desperate for the lifestyle. The Day-trippers wear gangster suits and outlandish patterns and hats inappropriate to the latitude, temperature, or setting. It’s amateur hour. They hold their liquor like ninth graders.” (Ouch!) Behind the Derby where folks go to see and be seen, to gamble and drink, lie rivers of money, most of it new; and deep streams of knowledge about horses and their generations. Bringing in a Derby winner takes art, science, and very good luck.

 

         But Wright Thompson was there to write about bourbon, the other great heritage of old Kentucky. He was meeting up with one Julian P. Van Winkle III, a third-generation purveyor of fine bourbon; this is a generational story about both of them. 

 

         Whiskey’s been around since before Kentucky was a state. “Without modern supply chains, and because they were living on the edge of civilization, the farmers still couldn’t monetize all of their crop before it rotted…Soon whiskey was traded as a currency, avoiding government notes and any taxes associated with them, which is why the IRS has long been obsessed with chasing down moonshiners and bootleggers. To Kentuckians, that is a federal war on working rural families, no matter what it’s called in Washington. That’s corn and wheat, not rye.”

 

              The face of the original Julian Van Winkle appears on bottles of very fine bourbon. Pappy Van Winkle was a pioneer of the business, in a couple of ways: he was on the spot at the close of Prohibition to start producing whiskey as quickly as possible; and he was one of the first producers to use locally grown wheat. (Most bourbon, then as now, contains some rye, which is grown in the cooler climes of Pennsylvania and New York; as long as the mash bill –“the list of grains that get combined to create the mash that is the foundation for whiskey”–is more than fifty percent corn, it’s still bourbon.) 

 

             The result, in Pappy’s case, was legendary, but the next generation hit hard times for the bourbon business. The 1960’s, when the second generation took over, saw vodka and other spirits become dominant. In 1972, the family’s brands wound up being sold to a larger business, and so fell prey to a very common kind of short-term thinking. They didn’t know what they had. But whiskey, like race horses, is not a short-term business. It’s a long-term investment from fermentation, to distillation, to aging and bottling. And it’s never a sure thing.

 

             Julian III is on a mission to make bourbon as good as his grandfather’s, and he’s one of the few people in the world who could do it, because he remembers how it tastes. He has a partner doing the actual distilling, but he’ll get the last word. Thompson accompanies him around the state, into the past, looking into his and his family’s history. Along the way, naturally, a lot of whiskey is drunk, and a lot of stories are shared. It all sounds delicious.

 

                “It’s funny: when you start to learn about bourbon, you imagine it as an art, and the more you learn, the more you discover it’s a science. But there comes a point when even the experts dissemble and shrug and admit they don’t actually know how all those factors work together and interplay, and that’s when you start to see it as art again.”

Nature’s Mutiny

 Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

Philipp Blom (German original, 2017; English translation by the author, Liveright, 2019)

     “A two-degree [Celsius] drop in annual mean temperature translates into almost three weeks of lost growing time, meaning that crops were very much slower to ripen, and sometimes failed to ripen at all.” From the 1560’s until the end of the following century, a period known as the Little Ice Age, unusual weather disrupted the patterns of agricultural and economic life that had obtained in Europe for the preceding thousand years. Some summers were hot and dry, while others seemed to barely come at all. Some winters were so frigid that the Thames bore thick enough ice to be used as a sort of fairground.

 

      This was a worldwide phenomenon. “There were reports of population collapse due to famine in Ming-period China, as well as murderous winters in North America and paltry harvests in India…” Philipp Blom concentrates on Europe’s history for a few obvious reasons. For one thing, we have the most complete records there, not only from individual diarists, but from business records, like those from vineyards that recorded the dates of the harvests and the amounts of the yields. Second, Blom is at home in German and English, but the contemporary Chinese or South American records would have come to him only heavily mediated.

 

     There’s certainly more than enough to say about Europe! The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe saw profound changes in how people lived. Recurrent crop failures strained local economies, both at the level of the hand-to-mouth peasant, and up the ladder, where the landowner couldn’t raise enough surplus from his tenants to pay his own obligations to the central government. At the same time, the local common space in which a peasant family could keep a cow or pig began to be seized by landowners, who found sheep or cattle easier and more profitable to manage than human beings. The feudal system, in which people were tied to a small geographic area and the social station they were born into, gave way to life in industrial towns or flourishing cities.

 

      To that broadly well-known story, Blom adds some captivating details. You may recall that the Spanish Armada of 1588 failed to invade and conquer Elizabethan England, despite mustering 130 ships and over ten thousand sailors and soldiers. In the English Channel, the Spanish ships were harassed and damaged by the English fleet, and threatened by its fireships, to avoid which many cut their anchors and fled. At last, they headed north, sailing the long way around the British Isles–only to encounter an arctic storm, with hurricane-force winds, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. Only half of the ships limped back to Spain; the soldiers and crews were weak with illness and starvation.

   

       That military force was the largest seen in centuries, but it would not remain so. Modern weapons and modern tactics were developed together. “A victorious campaign, or even the capacity to deter potential invaders, required not only vast armies and fleets but also experts trained to control the complex logistics, constructions, tactics, supplies, and accounts, as well as vast amounts of treasure. Perhaps war really is the father of all things.” That is, modern warfare necessitated modern economics, in the form of mercantilism: an emerging middle class learned to manage tariffs, trade balances, and colonial administration.

 

     In the late sixteenth century, the Little Ice Age was seen as a religious problem, to be met with prayer, and desperate measures like witch-burning. Voltaire, Descartes, and their contemporaries would turn Europe toward rationality and the Enlightenment; Blom also introduces some other thinkers, largely written out of Enlightenment history, who might offer us alternatives to materialism and mercantilism, in case our current attempts attempts at dominating nature don’t work out so well.

 

    I recommend Nature’s Mutiny, though perhaps not as beach or casual reading; the writing is rich and dense, befitting its origin in German. Even if I don’t start ordering books from the twenty-page bibliography, I think I’ll be chewing on it for a while.

 

Any Good Books, January 2025 by email

 

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

 The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Wright Thompson (Penguin Press, 2024)

Journalist Wright Thompson hails from the Mississippi Delta, from the privileged land-owning class. In the early days of the Covid pandemic, he went home to live for a while, and found his next subject, indeed, his next obsession: the barn where Emmett Till was tortured and killed on the morning of August 28, 1955. Thompson didn’t grow up hearing anything about that event, though it happened twenty-three miles from his boyhood home. But then, he didn’t encounter the concept of lynching till he was seventeen.

The Barn is partly about maps. “The barn sits on the southwest quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian.” This numbering comes from a scheme of Thomas Jefferson’s, to lay a grid across the whole country. This particular six by six mile township was home to one of the fathers of Jim Crow, and to Fannie Lou Hamer, who later worked to overthrow it. Confederate guerrilla chief Nathan Bedford Forrest traversed it while it was still thick with woods, the rich topsoil not yet put to commercial use. The mapping scheme enabled the acreage to be a commodity traded in Chicago and New York, somewhat in the manner of swampland in Florida. Wright follows the ownership of the land through various corporations, reaching all the way to Manchester, England, a global capital of textile production.

Wright deals in timelines, too. One reason the barn is important is that the narrative of Emmett Till’s last few days had a great gap in it. On Wednesday, August 24^th, Emmett and his cousins visited the Bryants' store in Money, where Emmett had fatefully whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who was working behind the counter; he was in the store with her for barely a minute, so some of the story she later told was clearly a lie. In the early hours of Sunday morning, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, entered the home of Till’s great-uncle and made off with him, but what happened next disappeared from the record. The barn on the Drew-Ruleville Road was then in the possession of another Milam brother; witnesses saw a green and white truck arrive, full of men, and heard Till’s cries of anguish.

Wright’s timeline extends forward: “The police arrested J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant for the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. For a few news cycles the story got presented, even locally, as a pretty clear case of good versus evil, until the partisan political machine recast it as a battle between the NAACP and Mississippi white people.” Witnesses were intimidated, or taken offstage by putting them in jail under other names; those who did show up to say what they saw could never live in Mississippi again. After their acquittal, Milam and Bryant sold their story to Look magazine, in a version heavily influenced by the language of the defense lawyers.

Some of Wright’s companions in his research are activists who have been working to make the barn a place of memory. “The barn will not allow you to live free of the image of a tortured child. That, it turns out, is its curse but also its blessing. It will not let you go. Why was Emmett Till murdered? One cannot see the barn without being faced with that question.”

The last surviving people who knew him also want us to remember their friend Bobo, a funny, lively boy on the verge of manhood, who loved his mother. Mamie Till Mobley’s anger at his loss lit a fire under the civil rights movement, in ways that would not be stopped.

The Barn is a very fine piece of narrative journalism, and an even finer work of history. Wait for the paperback if you must, but read it.

 

Any Good Books, 

2 December 2024

 

This is your mind on Plants

This is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan (Penguin Books, 2021)

       “The drug war’s simplistic account of what drugs do and are, as well as its insistence on lumping them all together under a single meaningless rubric, has for too long prevented us from thinking clearly about the meaning and potential of these very different substances. The legal status of this or that molecule is one of the least interesting thing about it.” Michael Pollan gives us a book in three essays about psychoactive substances, and our biological, social, historical, and legal relationships with them.

 

        The first essay is about opium. I clearly remember reading the original in Harper’s Magazine, more than 25 years ago. I’m glad to see it again, in a more complete form; in the1997 publication, Pollan censored his account of actually trying a tea made from the pods. The essay is partly about the determination of the US Drug Enforcement Agency to prevent citizens from discovering how easy it would be to obtain household supplies of opioids; in fact, the flowering plants found in our gardens are not botanically different from the dreaded opium poppies of Afghanistan and Turkey. 

 

         It’s also about Pollan’s awareness of the DEA, and the potentially serious consequences that could have befallen him. Those hinged on some constitutionally and philosophically knotty questions. How would the DEA determine that he had ‘knowingly’ or ‘intentionally’ planted the flowers to use them as drugs? Of course, confessing in a nationally published magazine might be considered something of a dead giveaway; but by now, the statute has run. As it turns out, of course, the opiates that were really destroying American lives were the pharmaceutically enhanced plagues of OxyContin and its ilk.

 

          The third essay concerns other mind-altering substances: those derived from cactus plants, such as peyote and mescaline. Pollan’s quest for information and experience was seriously disrupted by the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It’s not impossible to use psychedelics alone, but the story he was after had more to do with the way indigenous people use them, at the intersection of religion and psychology. There’s politics, too; should the use of peyote be restricted to religious observances, and hence to indigenous people? Can white people use it without wrecking it, ecologically or socially?

 

           The middle essay is not about use of a drug, but about abstention: caffeine is one of the most widely used psychoactive materials, though one of the latest to come along. Coffee and tea reached London in the 1650s. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed...everything.” However hyperbolic that sounds, Pollan makes his case: “Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.” 

 

          This was the chapter in which I took the most interest, since I’m as implicated as the 90% of adults who use at least some caffeine; we always know when the next dose is due, and where we’re going to get it. How much of my brain power is owed to the magic stuff, and what would happen if the sleep deficit ever came due?

 

         Be that as it may, it’s always a pleasure to linger with Michael Pollan over a cup of tea, both for the sharp writing and for the wide-ranging view. 

 

 

Any Good Books, November 2024