America's First Serial Killers!

In Eudora Welty: Some Notes on River Country edited by Hunter Cole, a quote from Welty as told to Dr. Peggy Prenshaw in Conversations with Eudora Welty included in Cole’s afterword, inspired my thoughts. Welty said, “Why, just to write about what might happen along some little road like the Natchez Trace—which reaches so far into the past and has been the trail for so many kinds of people—is enough to keep you busy for life.”

Just as William Faulkner set his novels in fictional Yoknapatawpha County and Tennessee Williams used the Clarksdale area as setting in most of his plays, Welty kept busy with stories set in the River Country between Vicksburg and Natchez. These stories include her book The Robber Bridegroom and short stories: A Worn Path, Asphodel, First Love, A Still Moment, Livvie, and At the Landing.

Cole continues, “It is known that she had read Audubon’s diaries, J.F.H Claiborne’s Mississippi narratives, and Robert M. Coates’s The Outlaw Years: The Land Pirates of the Natchez Trace and wished to verify the history these told."

I, too, wish to verify a sentence mentioned in Welty’s Some Notes on River Country. Welty wrote, “Deep under them both is solid blue clay, embalming the fossil horse and fossil ox and the great mastodon, the same preserving blue clay that was dug up to wrap the head of the Big Harp in bandit days, no less a monstrous thing when carried in for reward.”

What! How disgusting! Is this really true and why haven’t I heard of said Harp, Big or Little?

The Robber Bridegroom and Eudora Welty: Some Notes on River Country are perfect companions to a class on Mississippi history. Yes, I know RB is fictional, but sometimes it takes a story to get students interested. I surely want to know more about the Harps, Mike Fink, Lorenzo Dow, John Murrell, Aaron Burr, Harmon Blennerhassett, and John James Audubon’s search for the ivory-billed woodpecker in Mississippi. ~Maggie

2009 Presidential Inauguration Lesson Plans

Thanks goes out to Shelia Bonner for finding these lesson plans and sharing them with our 4Ws group.

The resource website states, "On Jan. 20, 2009, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. Teachers across the country can bring this historic event to life in their classrooms using a wide array of free resources and technologies. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) have jointly developed a series of general instructional activities to give teachers lesson ideas to help their students understand the historic significance of this presidential inauguration."

Lesson plans cover grades K-12 and are broken into three sections: Learning History, Making History, and Living History.

The Jackson State University
Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center
40th Martin Luther King Birthday Convocation

“From King to Obama:

New Challenges for the 21st Century”
Friday, January 16, 2009
10:00 a.m.
Rose E. McCoy Auditorium

Dr. Dolphus Weary,

President of Mission Mississippi
Dr. Mark Henderson and MADDRAMA
The Award Winning Jim Hill Choir

11:45 a.m.
The Isaac Byrd “For My People” Awards
Jackson State University New Student Center, Ballroom A
Luncheon Speaker

Dr. Ronald Mason, Jr.,

President, Jackson State University

Award Recipients
Mr. Fred E. Carl, Jr., Founder of Viking Range Corp.,
Dr. Dolphus Weary, Author of I Ain’t Comin Back,
Mrs. Okolo Rashid, Co-Founder Intl. Museum of Muslim Culture,
Mr. Jimmy Travis, Chairman,

Mississippi Civil Rights Veteran Documentation Project,

IMS Engineers

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Robert G. Clark, Jr. Symposium
Jackson State University New Student Center, Ballroom A

Speaker
The Honorable Robert G. Clark, Jr.,

MS House of Representatives, 1968-2003
“Mississippi Politics:

King’s Dream, Clark’s Reality and Obama’s Fulfillment”

Respondents
Mrs. Elise Winter, Mississippi First Lady, 1980 -1984
Dr. Hilliard Lackey,

Historian & President Jackson State National Alumni Association
Judge Bob Waller, Jackson Municipal Court

~ Shelia Bonner

There’s That Word Again!

I was enjoying Why I Live at the P.O. when out of the blue Sister uses the N word. Not only does she address the little girl with the word, she also tells the girl to do her bidding. Sister did not ask if she could borrow the wagon or if the girl had other errands to run, but said, “Come help me haul these things down the hill.”

Sister’s need to control something has her ordering around a little black girl. I get the concept without the word. The girl took nine trips up and down the hill, and Uncle Ronda is the one to throw her a nickel for her troubles. Does Sister offer her any compensation? No. The child is merely her slave for a day.

Last summer, I spent time reading all of Flannery O’Connor’s work for the Southern Reading Challenge. At first I did not like her. Not one iota! Her benign use of the N word set me off. Just as Welty, I got the point without all the word usage, but then I realized she wasn’t trying to make a point. The N word was just a vocabulary choice and not meant to set my teeth. I went back and reread O’Connor’s work and these are my thoughts at the time, and this is my copy written for the newspapers that following week.

JenClair, a bloggie friend, had the same complaint (scroll down to the Hey Maggie post) upon reading O’Connor. Her source of relief came in the form of O’Connor’s book, Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being. I decided to look in Suzanne Marrs’ Eudora Welty: A Biography for answers.

Editor John Ferrone recalled her request: “Eudora wrote to correct a typo in the story ‘Powerhouse’ and another in ‘Ladies in Spring.’ Then she said there was a third change, not due to a typesetter’s error but a ‘way of speech forty years ago.’ She wanted the word ‘nigger’ to be deleted from ‘Why I Live at the P.O.’ In a later letter, she asked to have it deleted wherever it appeared, explaining that while it cropped up naturally in conversation in the older stories, 1980s readers might find it ‘throbbing with associations not then part of it.’ She decided instead to review the offensive word case by case, because in the end it was dealt with in several ways.” (452)

Marrs continues in the same paragraph: “In Eudora’s stories, narrative voice was seldom unitary, and in the 1930s and 1940s, it at times shifted into voices of white characters for whom nigger was a culturally inherited concept and who unselfconsciously and obtusely used the term without thought of or care for its effect. Given the political climate of 1980, however, Eudora feared that such characters might seem more bullying than benighted and that her stories might be misconstrued.” (453)

Can you as reader guess my question? Miss Welty intentionally left the offending words in Sister’s speech. I saw Sister using them in a bullying fashion, but given the silliness of Sister’s character, I must be wrong. Did I fall into the 1980s reader of which Miss Welty spoke? ~ Maggie

The Mystic Years

Don't you love this term Dr. Harrison introduced in her presentation!

I very much appreciate Dr. Harrison's historical prespective presentation since I grew up in middle Tennessee. It was a refresher which placed things in a timeline that I had missed since my Mississippi history comes piecemeal from books read.

While discussing this brief era of enlightenment after the Civil War, I was reminded of a book I read last summer. The title is Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann. Author Lemann presents an unbias account of this time period by writing as if he were there watching it unfold. Readers will get both sides of each turning point such as the Easter Sunday Massacre of 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a genteel, white lady writes of her knowledge versus actual interviews conducted with the surviving black families. I consider the book enjoyable narrative nonfiction of heart-wrenching events.

As if you need more to read! *smiles* ~ Maggie

Example of a Jim Crow Narrative

To build on Cassandra's excellent post, I thought I would provide one of the many narratives from the PBS website.

Mr. Money Kirby relates his time in the army when his blood was needed for a transfusion into a white man. It is rather funny, and the background noise sounds like someone doing the dishes. More stories here. ~ Maggie



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The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

While searching for new podcasts for my iPhone, I discovered a FREE and interesting podcast. "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" is a podcast, which provides actual people - not famous people - discussing their very personal interaction with Jim Crow during a time that racial segregation was the nature of life. This podcast is phenomenal. It includes actual experiences during the Jim Crow Era. To find this podcast on in the iTunes Store, you may search under PBS sponsored podcasts.

This discovery prompted me to search PBS site for Jim Crow references. The search results contained:

1. Interactive Maps


2. Teen Leadership Lessons


3. Games and Activities


4. Interactive Timeline


5. Lesson Plans


6. Resources

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow is an actual series showing on PBS. Unfortunately for me the series doesn't air on my local MPB channel. I was sadly disappointed to see this. Check out the series schedule to see if it is showing in your area soon.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow PBS website contains so much information, but what really caught my attention was the actual access to rare documents, videos, photos, and actual interviews with people, who experienced the impulsive control of Jim Crow. There is also a forum area for discussions.

The Term Jim Crow

According to Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D. at California State University, "The term Jim Crow originated in a song performed by Daddy Rice, a white minstrel show entertainer in the 1830s. Rice covered his face with charcoal paste or burnt cork to resemble a black man, and then sang and danced a routine in caricature of a silly black person. By the 1850s, this Jim Crow character, one of several stereotypical images of black inferiority in the nation's popular culture, was a standard act in the minstrel shows of the day. How it became a term synonymous with the brutal segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans in the late nineteenth-century is unclear. What is clear, however, is that by 1900, the term was generally identified with those racist laws and actions that deprived African Americans of their civil rights by defining blacks as inferior to whites, as members of a caste of subordinate people."

You can find more at The History of Jim Crow website. ~ J. W. Ward, Jr., Ph. D.

Image Gallery here. Teacher Resources here. ~ Maggie