Everyone Needs a Pewee

I have this fear of losing interest in my cherished pastimes and then having nothing I want to do; a sure sign that depression could take hold of an aging brain. My go-to activity for 45 years has been birding, but this spring has been the worst neotropical migration I can remember. I can count the number of transient migrant species I have seen on one hand. In short, migration has been a bummer.

An important component of birding for me has been immersing myself in the peace of a morning. I get up just before the sun, pour coffee and drive up to a one mile stretch of road, which at that hour is free. Free of the invasion of lawn blowers, motorboats, traffic, and other forms of noise pollution. After turning off the A/C fan in the car, I lower the windows and just listen. By stepping on the brake and engaging idle-stop there is only the woods and me. I now clearly hear the dawn chorus, the songs of the mix, and newly arrived birds. As a recordist I thirst for that now threatened free environment.

I may still be the only one in my state who regularly records bird song, and over the years I have accumulated all the right gear. When I traveled I used a lesson I learned from photography, standing on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, trying to get a decent shot of Half Dome. First visit, take in the whole scene. Go back again and work on your shot or your recordings, but only after you have soaked up the visual or auditory experience, and know where you want to go and when to be there.

Birds don’t sing to attract a mate during fall movement, so spring is the recordists’ moment. And there is one in particular that I need to hear; the simple up, then down-slurred song of a nondescript gray flycatcher, the Eastern Wood-Pewee. I don’t know why this bird, of all the others, is my tonic.  Bald Eagles, for all their majesty, have a rather wimpy call. Tiny, iridescent hummingbirds simply squeak. Thrushes, masters of beautiful song from deep in the green woods, are contenders to be sure, but when Pewees return, all is well. For me they are a jolt of adrenalin, a renewed spirit that gets me back in touch with a pastime I have had for almost half a century. I get my microphone and recorder ready to capture that sound, how many times now I do not remember. It doesn’t matter.

 

A Way of Life and the Times

 

I had some cockamamie idea after reading Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman that I would make some lucid comments about the book. I was only nine years and many thousands of words too late. However, in the several reviews and academic commentary, laboriously comparing it with To Kill a Mockingbird, many pontificating in overwrought prose, I think most of them missed the real theme. Wring their hands over early writing style and the characters as much as they would like, the real story of Watchman is Brown v. Board of Education, the impact that had on a way of life, ordinary people, and how it changed them.

         I was there as a witness to those times as an immigrant to the South, fresh from under the shadow of the Empire State Building. On the surface all was well, unchanged for generations, but the Jim Crow south of separate but equal was only on paper. In truth, the local high school serving blacks, Lucy Laney High, in Augusta, was deplorable. I can only imagine the lack of resources and teaching skills available to students. The separate public drinking fountains and bathrooms in some stores were shabby at best, and blacks often had to enter through a back door – if they were allowed in at all. Blacks lived in one particular area of town, and the roads were the only ones not paved. Public conveyance did accommodate them, however; how else were they going to get to their jobs as maids and yardmen for white homes?

         But like Maycomb, there was enormous resistance to the concept of integrated schools, complete with the same fears Harper Lee described. For many white people, spoken only in trusted circles, they wanted blacks kept down, in their place. For others, the benevolent ones, the common theme was ‘they are not ready yet’. The fact is they had a point. The counterpoint was, if not given a chance, would they ever be ‘ready’?

         The truth is many of that generation would never be ready, and in some communities there would not be a leader to step up. Allow me to digress for a moment. When Lyndon Johnson was crafting his legacy legislation to be presented as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he turned to his good friend, the highly influential Richard Russell of Georgia, to help him bring in the southern votes in the Senate. Russell couldn’t help.  His comment: “They are not ready yet”.  

An objective reading of Sherman’s act of giving ‘possessory title’ of 40 acres and a mule under “Special Field Orders No.15” to newly freed slaves on the coast of Georgia, and South Carolina is instructive. The program was a dismal failure, even though much of the land was rich and fertile. Freedmen had no experience whatsoever in making their own decisions, let alone the right ones to make a farm pay. Andrew Johnson put a stop to it anyway. But the point is things did not get better for rural folk. If they left the land and moved to town there were no services to provide for them, schools to instruct them, jobs to pay them beyond being cooks, cleaners, and yardman if they were lucky. They had no skills other than the ability to tend a crop. There was no leadership, no conception of a democratic process, and without money, no financial wherewithal.  Worse, if the vote were available to them, they voted as a bloc. In Harper Lee’s fictional account of the Maycomb Citizens Council, as in real life in the rural south, there were frequently more blacks than whites in a community. That alone caused angst. Now the Supreme Court had ruled that schools nationwide were to be integrated.        

         Are things better today? Maybe. Certainly at the civic level blacks are very active, and in cities and towns across the south they are competently running political subdivisions at all levels. Savannah’s black mayor is outstanding.  He is in his second term, and many wish he could continue on.  As entrepreneurs, corporate, professionals, and national political leaders, and in academia there are no doubt growing numbers. That is a far cry from my time in graduate school in the early 1970s, where there was only one.  In a business law class, he turned in a final paper with the title spelled incorrectly.  It was overlooked by the professor.  That happens even today, as I can attest from my own experience as an academic. No one wants to fail a black student. I remember clearly trying to convince one young black lady, one of my best students, to leave our less than rigorous academic environment for a challenging school. She needed it. She deserved it.

         Today in the south, in polite company, African Americans are spoken of as blacks, or African Americans. Behind closed doors or locked in a private mind, a distinction is often made between those blacks which are respected and liked on an individual basis, and niggers.*  Fuel for this fire is a massive culture clash, and many whites cannot relate.

Although it is always overlooked in these discussions, poor whites, (a.k.a. ‘white trash’, ‘rednecks’, ‘crackers’) indigent sharecroppers and tenant farmers, shared much with poor, illiterate blacks, and their participation in civic life would be unwelcome, and barely tolerated, if at all. That, of course, does not justify racial discrimination, but it does suggest that these biases, so clearly hinted at in Watchman, were, and still may be in some ways as much about class as about skin color.

 

Coda

For the uninitiated, Watchman predates Mockingbird as a literary effort by Harper Lee. It was rejected by her publisher, and she was urged to develop the characters in accordance with flashbacks to a youthful Jean Louise (Scout). Unlike her masterpiece, set in the 1930’s, Watchman was in the moment, placed shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case to desegregate schools; one more nail in the states’ rights coffin. The turmoil and angst of the time was real. And the ‘Dixiecrats’, as they were known, began a unified flip to the Republican Party across the southern tier of states. The lasting impact of that political shift is another story.

In addition to my 68 years of personal experience in this part of the world, there are some books from which I further derive the right to comment on this touchy, complex subject. For those who wish to learn more from experts rather than an observant octogenarian I have listed them below in no particular order. They cover the times and the plights of both poor whites and blacks. Finally, it goes without saying, if you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird yet, what the hell have you been doing?

 

Non-Fiction

·      The Promised Land – Nicholas Lemann (the great migration)

·      Now is the Time to Praise Famous Men – James Agee and Walker Evans (sharecroppers)

·      Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 – Eric Fromer (academic)

·      Caste and Class in a Southern Town – John Dollard (academic)

·      Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era – James McPherson

·      The South and the Southerner – Ralph Mc Gill

·      The Humane Propagandist – Roy Stryker (extraordinary photograph of the Great Depression)

·      The Great Depression Photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans – Library of Congress online

·      The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson (the great migration)

 

Fiction

·      The Sound and the Fury – Willam Faulkner

·      Their Eyes were Watching God – Zora Neal Hurston

·      Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin

·      Tobacco Road – Erskine Caldwell

·      The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

 

* The word ‘nigger’ was not originally a pejorative term.  It described a job, a field hand. In Britain, prior to WWII, its use was not uncommon. Two examples: Joseph Conrad titled a story The Nigger of the Narcissus, and Agatha Christie wrote Ten Little Niggers.  When this last book was released in the U. S. it was rebranded Ten Little Indians, but in short order that was deemed politically incorrect as well, and dropped for And then there were None.

Two Community Newspapers

 

This year’s order of maple syrup came recently. I order it directly from the producer in Newport, Vermont, as I have for many years, and my mother before me. When I unpacked the shipping box I took out the Newport Daily Express, wadded up to prevent shifting. It was from a Tuesday, and it was ten informative pages. That caught my attention, published in a town with just over 4000 residents. With a few keystrokes I learned that the primary service area, Orleans County, has a population of 27,500, and this apparently thriving daily print edition of a community newspaper serves 3,000 subscribers. Contrast that with the fragile bones of Savannah Morning News in Chatham County with a population of 303,000, where daily print circulation has been in decline since at least 2006, and as of 2022 stood at under 17,000 (10.9% vs. 5.6%). On a hunch I did a dive into the demographics of the two counties looking for answers.              

Other than the obvious differences in population everything else was close except one major factor. In terms of high school education, they are identical. Chatham has a greater percentage of college educated residents, and they are similar regarding households with computers, access to broadband, and household income. The exception was race. Orleans County, Vermont is 96% white and Chatham County, Georgia is 52% white. The difference has to be cultural.

 Another dive took me to the pages of ETS (formerly Educational Testing Service) where a study commissioned in 1972 on reading differences between blacks and whites revealed that blacks read significantly less of all printed material, particularly newspapers, at all educational and economic levels. That apparently has not changed over the intervening 51 years. A 2023 survey by Pew Research found that blacks get their news today primarily from television and social media, and they don’t trust white reporting on black matters.

As an observer, which is all I qualify to be, I see these biases preventing many black families from fully assimilating into the American economy. This is a roadblock to not only upward mobility for so many in the community, but for meaningful participation in a multicultural and pluralistic society. African Americans have been significant contributors to American life with music, art, fashion, and athletics, but not economically or professionally in significant numbers. Hopefully, change is underway. As we know, many more underrepresented minorities are now attending college.

An online non-profit newspaper, The Current, serving our 100 miles of coast, is making inroads. Editors recently announced that one third of a growing readership is black. In spite of my amateur analysis one thing I do know, however, these readers black and white, are not a representative cross section of the Georgia coast. There is still a long, long way to go.

Graduation

 

This past weekend our family drove the three hours to the impressive main campus of Mercer University in Macon for our granddaughter’s graduation from medical school. Mercer Medical School was originally founded to train physicians in family medicine, with the intent to return to practice in their rural communities. It has since morphed to prepare new physicians to practice all primary care specialties, but retains those rural roots, and that was much in evidence at commencement.

As the awarding of diplomas was about to begin the president of the university, as master of ceremonies, politely requested the audience to refrain from applause or cheering until the end of the procession of candidates, so that each name could be clearly heard. Fine, no problem, and our nine in attendance so complied. But not everyone. The Black families, or clans, splendidly dressed for the occasion in indescribable fashion, could not hold back. So as each family member crossed the stage and received his or her diploma, their crowd whooped it up in pride and defiance. They were not alone. Some of the obviously rural families, not quite so dazzlingly attired, made common cause.

It would be smug of us to look down on this breach of protocol, maybe even normal, but there is a flip side to be considered. In four generations of our blended family, we can now count three physicians, two lawyers, plus one in training, as well as a host of advanced degrees. And many of these professional degrees were earned at elite temples of learning such as Harvard, MIT, Duke, Emory, and Johns Hopkins.  For the perpetrators, that young doctor may well be the first in a family to attend college, let alone medical school. And, if they are returning to their roots, they are not expecting to make a boatload of money.  They are there to serve patients with little to no means, or Medicaid. So let them celebrate.

That said we are immensely proud of our own. The doctor doesn’t care about how much she makes as long as she can cover her nut. The lawyer-to-be will be the first to stand in line to provide pro-bono legal advocacy for a distressed family, and the journalist will be unafraid to root out corruption, and speak truth - and fact - to power.

A Bookshop in Atlanta

 

You may not remember the incident of Bill Kovach, editor of the “Atlanta Journal-Constitution” in the late 1980s. During his short tenure from 1986 through 1988 he raised the visibility, coverage, and stature of the newspaper. One of its new staff took home a Pulitzer, the first in 20 years for the newspaper. And then he resigned over irreconcilable differences with management. Kovach was emulating the ‘New York Times’, management wanted a redesign like ‘USA Today’, and old heads grumbled that his vision was leaving Atlanta behind. Worse, aggressive journalists were reporting negative stories on hallowed local corporate institutions. But the rest of the business community at least loved it.

At the news of his resignation, on November 5, 1988, about 300 people, among them luminaries, staged a New Orleans-style wake down Marietta Street in protest, complete with band. Central to the protesters were the highly successful author Pat Conroy and Michael Lomax, an English professor at Morehouse, and Emory, and a candidate for mayor of Atlanta.

I felt a kinship to both these men. They, like me and so many others, were wheel spokes in the hub of Cliff Graubart’s bookshop on Juniper Street. I met Michael there on a couple of occasions, although I would not consider myself an acquaintance, only an admirer. Conroy I never met, but he was a constant there, and besides, he enrolled at The Citadel the year after me. Given my own stature, I can identify with men under 5’10” who played basketball in college. Through Cliff I have two signed first editions of his books.

To Conroy his dislike of the good-ole-boy AJC was personified by the late Lewis Grizzard, redneck funny man and sportswriter, who revered the Old South at a time when Atlanta was emerging as the shining example of the New South. The erudite Lomax ran for mayor twice, but was defeated both times. Although he had the whole-hearted support of the Atlanta white community, Black people considered him an Oreo – black on the outside, white on the inside. Otherwise, his string of personal and academic achievements is exemplary, and today he has been president of the United Negro College Fund for over 20 years. Both men along with Lillian Lewis, wife of Congressman John Lewis, and others, both speakers and marchers, wanted the luster to be restored to the newspaper of Henry Grady and Ralph McGill.

The Old New York Book Shop is still in existence, although it has morphed from the creaky house on Juniper Street to a rare and antiquarian atmosphere in Sandy Springs. The original was packed with all manner of books lining the walls of so many rooms and perfuming the air with a musty fragrance that booklovers cherish as farmers love the smell of manure in a pasture.

During my years in Atlanta used bookshops came and went, and Cliff was also a victim. When he sold the property on Juniper he told me he made a hell of a lot more money on the house than he ever did selling books. The used trade and the rare book business was crushed by the emergence of the Internet as dealers could finally compare notes on value, and collectors could shop with a smartphone.  But even today the industry survives, because any used bookshop is a physical magnet for readers that cannot be matched by digital technology.