July 12, 2018
Yesterday and the day before were about Cherokees;
today and tomorrow, we look into the eyes of Appalachian racism. There's
defensiveness about it, evasiveness, and maybe people here don't think
so. But it was apparent from the very first part of my day, when I ran
to the Riverside Cemetery to visit the graves of Thomas Wolfe and O.
Henry and also took a picture of the memorial left to one Zebulon Baird
Vance.
I was directed to him by the walking guide on the web and so
looked him up and he was described in one of the first descriptions as a
white supremacist governor of the Confederacy. When I arrived at his
gravestone, there was a fresh wreath of flowers and a stone marking him a
hero. On our way later to his homestead, I asked one of our professors
about what I'd read on the web and was told that he was a product of his
times, that any governor serving in the South during the Civil War
would be described that way. Later I heard there was a debate about his
towering memorial, on obelisk in the center of the city, argued at the
time some other Confederate markers in the South had been removed, but
the council ultimately decided they didn't need to, because the obelisk
is not a man but an abstract object. On the homestead itself, lovingly
preserved, we learned about the twenty slaves who served his 900 acres
and were shown the little two room slave quarters where they lived; we
read plaques that further demonstrated what to me felt like glaring
evasiveness but may have felt like brave admissions of truth, to the
curators: One plaque managed to discuss slaves on the property without
ever using the word "slaves" or "enslavement"--at one point, the phrase
"enslaved people" captured the sentiment. And in another plaque, Vance
was described as having Unionist sensibilities, but at the last second,
he became a general and then a governor for the Confederate forces and
people. That sounded super fishy; but now that I've read a little bit
more about him and his "unionist" sensibility, I see that it
is
super fishy. He was a unionist because he didn't want to secede from the
Union, not because he wanted to end slavery. Vance's public statement
was that slavery would survive better in a country kept whole. When
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he felt betrayed.
We were assigned a Thomas Wolfe short story, "Child by Tiger," that I had also read a couple months ago in
Web and the Rock,
and I remembered it pretty well because it was such a weird story.
There's this super competent, religious, careful Black man who plays
with the kids and then one day goes crazy and kills a bunch of people.
This is how it ends:
"He came from darkness. He came out
of the heart of darkness, from the dark heart of the secret and
undiscovered South. He came by night, just as he passed by night. He was
night's child and partner, a token of the other side of man's dark
soul, a symbol of those things that pass by darkness and that still
remain, a symbol of man's evil innocence, and the token of his mystery, a
projection of his own unfathomed quality, a friend, a brother and a
mortal enemy, an unknown demon, two worlds together--a tiger and a
child."
July 13, 2018
I hoped that, when we met with the scholar
from African American studies and discussed Thomas Wolfe's story, I would find a way to respond to its "heart of
darkness" with something other than revulsion and disappointment. And I
have.
Darin Waters
met with us on campus in the morning and started his story by talking
about both of his family lines. He can trace his father's back to 1850,
where the Waters were apple farmers in Henderson, North Carolina. When
Darin Waters decided to study African Americans in Appalachia to
counteract people's beliefs that they didn't live here, weren't slaves
here, and when he had to make a case for it because even
well-intentioned professors said he wouldn't find the resources to
support his dissertation, the Biltmore Estate came through. It was a
treasure trove of documents, like letters written by African Americans
to Cornelius Vanderbilt. When the archivist asked on the first day if he
would like to look see if there way anything on his great grandfather,
Waters thought there'd be no way: First of all, he doubted the man would
be literate. Second of all, what would Vanderbilt have to do with an
apple farmer? But she said, Let's put him in and see what comes up--and
three hits came back. She retrieved for him three handwritten letters
from his great grandfather, dated 1892, 1893 and 1895. Meanwhile, his
grandfather of his mother's side amused himself with a little
bubble-gum-pack sized spy camera, taking secret photos everywhere he
went. Now the University of North Carolina Asheville has digitized the
whole mess of them, maybe 1500 pictures--they provide, for white people,
a
rare and private view of life experienced from the eyes of an African American, and of African Americans with their guards down.
I
am repeatedly drawn to the intimate, personal stories people use when
they're not from a mainstream (white Christian male) academic approach.
When whole injustices and histories and triumphs have been made
invisible by the broader narrative, people on the margins say, Wait,
look at me, my very own story says that's not true, and so scholarship
from the margins gets beyond presidents, kings and bullets right into
the kitchens and barbershops to announce their truth.
Darin Waters also shared an amazing
letter from a former slave I've never seen before but want to share with everyone, and also a fascinating
segment of This American Life about a woman playing a slave on a George Washington reenactment farm.
Then
we took a van to the city center and listened to Waters some more from
the second floor auditorium of the YMI, the Young Men's Institute, one
of the oldest freestanding African American cultural centers in the
country (and the only thing in
Look Homeward Angel that didn't
get its name changed). Waters talked there about Black history in
Asheville, which he said included both the mountain attitude of Don't
bother me I won't bother you, but also the long history of Asheville as a
tourist hub, and the need to maintain its harmonious, nonviolent image.
And
then he invited us with our reactions to Wolfe's "Child by Tiger." I
was the first to speak. I talked about how I'd read the story before, as
I'd written you, and that it was the thing that made me think Wolfe was
a bigot; I described that last paragraph again (in the last email); and
I said that I did some research and found the story of a Black man who
gets pushed too far and goes on a shooting rampage was based on a real
person, Will Harris, who'd shot up two Black people and two white people
when Wolfe was six--so now I don't know what to make of that last
paragraph.
Waters got very excited, because he knew a whole
lot about Will Harris. Two days before the rampage, a "colored" man
named Will Harris had sued for wages. Two months before raged the
Atlanta race riots. And all this occurs a few years after the
Wilmington, North Carolina insurrection that led a mob of 2,000 whites
to turn out the Reconstructionist government to one more of their
liking. Darin Waters believes what happened with Will Harris is not
unlike what happened to Robert Charles of New Orleans, a man who read
about white terrorism but had caused no trouble until 1900, when a
policeman pushed him too far, at which point, he shot the place up and
was riddled with bullets and dragged by mobs. Reconstruction was a
shining moment, and for that, it caused violence and terrorism. So, what
about Thomas Wolfe and his point of view? In the case of Will Harris,
the mayor, fearing a riot, immediately closed the saloons; the African
American community repudiated Harris; the whites were proud no
vigilantism followed. But there was certainly vigilantism and lynching
in the story, which is its own accusation. And those red eyes of
restraint in the story are deeply sympathetic. Additionally, Wolfe was
apparently reading
Black Thunder when he wrote the story--a book
about a slave revolt led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800; the book is a
warning about the rebellions that come of poverty and racial oppression.
Is it an accident that Wolfe's narrator is also Prosser? Is the story
of racism or about racism? Waters thinks it's about, and that Thomas
Wolfe is a master observer. Here's a last story he told in relation to
the conversation. In the 1936 Olympics, Adolf Hitler vexedly asked about
the American man nearby cheering and shouting in triumph as a Black
man, Jesse Owens, won his race. That's Thomas Wolfe.
