Crossroads Lost

The South has got some sins on its soul that it will never be able to get clear of. But so has the nation. And quite often the attempt to correct these sins leads into still greater sins through the method in which they were corrected." -esteemed Civil War historian Shelby Foote (1916-2005)

'Green Acres' and the Search for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

Eddie Albert - a.k.a. Mr. Douglas, the city-slicker lawyer-cum-farmer on the '60s sitcom Green Acres - kicked the bucket two months ago. Tom Lester, the Mississippi-born actor who played "Eb Dawson," the indolent sidekick far more concerned with Mrs. Douglas's hotcakes (as served by Eva Gabor) than getting dirty with Mr. Douglas's tractors, is the only member of the original cast who is still breathing.

In 1975, as a teenager, I had the dubious pleasure of witnessing "Eb" tell stories at a Baptist youth revival in Tupelo, Mississippi (birthplace of Elvis Presley).

Come to find out Eb was only the opening act. Once the "aw shucks, y'all-will-never-believe-what-they-do-in-Hollywood" portion of Eb's hayseed yarn-spinning reached its denouement, the whole presentation inexplicably turned into a sermon against the "devil's music," replete with some rhinestone-suited holy roller playing boogie-woogie on the 88s. As the congregation clapped in time with the barrel-rolling honky tonk, the piano-playing preacher man began admonishing the assembled to take heed and beware the music of the flesh, and the wanton grunt that is the cornerstone of rock 'n' roll.

Religion is really nutty, in my opinion, and that night in Tupelo only confirmed what I felt about the machinations of the Holy Spirit. Yes, it takes that special synergy of Hollywood and the Deep South to showcase how bizarre it can get.

In the BBC-produced feature film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, south-of-the Mason-Dixon-line musician/muse Jim White motors down sundry swaths of two-lane blacktop in a vintage, beater 1970 Chevelle. The sedan sounds like it needs a new head gasket and, technically speaking, is down on compression in at least two cylinders. Apropos of not much, hanging out of the Chevelle's trunk is a five-eighths replica statue of Jesus. At one point White explains his mission: "I am looking for the gold in God's crooked smile."

I have no idea what that means, really, although it is a nifty-sounding turn of phrase. Still, all these years later, I have to say that the buffoon from Green Acres strikes me as more cogent than the modern itinerant Southern troubadour.

A Rotating Son of a Bitch

Shelby Foote's obituary ran in the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago. After unveiling a laundry list of Foote's prodigious literary achievements in documenting what some folks still call the War of Northern Aggression, the Times spun a yarn about the positive fallout of Foote's involvement in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War and his subsequent, somewhat reluctant rockstar-like recognizance:

"During a 1991 literary festival in Nashville, Foote encountered one enthusiastic fan as he, Garrett and novelist Fred Chappell stood in the lobby of their hotel.

"A woman rushed up to Shelby and planted a kiss on his cheek. Then she said, 'What was Gettysburg like?' Garrett recalled. 'By that time, Shelby had gotten tired of explaining that he hadn't been there. So he just looked at her and said, 'Madam, it was hell.'"

***

Over shrimp cocktails in a mariscos joint in Sylmar (of all places), I re-told that story to Dr. Edwin Cole, a distinguished octogenarian Southern Gentlemen I had the honor and privilege of having dinner with. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably note that Dr. Edwin Cole is my great uncle, and my grandfather's half-brother.) Besides his status as a man of medicine in Richton, Mississippi, Dr. Cole is the last guy I know who has actually talked to folks who served in the Civil War. Like Foote, Dr. Cole is poetic but never pedantic, with a lyrical sense of oratory that curls like a sleeping copperhead and then stings with the quick fury of fire ants.

"Before he moved to Memphis, Shelby Foote was a Greenville, Mississippi, boy," Dr. Cole beamed in smooth, avuncular tones, while swathing a forkful of prawn in guacamole and then half-smiling with some sort of Southern civic pride.

"That's what I understand, Uncle Ed."

"But beyond that, the folks from around there would say that the man was what you would call a 'revolving son of a bitch.'"

"What does that mean?"

"That means that no matter which way you turned him, he was still a son of a bitch."

"I regret the loss of some things that do contribute to our being what we are. A Southerner, for instance, can be insulted. I have been in nightclubs and other such places where one man would call another man a son of a bitch. I expected an immediate invitation to step outside and settle this thing. Well, it wasn't. It was laughter. And it seemed to me that it's not a good society where people go around cursing each other with impunity. There ought to be some risk involved - that risk is conducive to good manners." -Shelby Foote

Cracker Redneck Motherfucker

"Hey, man! Are you that cracker redneck motherfucker with the rebel flag stuck on that ugly-ass car's rear window?"

"That would be me."

It was a year or so after the L.A. Riots, and I was working on a documentary on race relations, most specifically how it pertains to the youth of Los Angeles. I had parked my mocha- and rust-colored 1971 J Series Pontiac Grand Prix - a massive muscle car sporting the offensive item in question - outside the elephant doors of a soundstage on the Paramount movie studios. Inside the facility, inner-city and suburban teenagers and college students of all creeds seemed to be upset as a matter of course, and agendas were frothing like fountainheads. Having spent my high-school years in a small town in Mississippi, I found the notions of plight and oppression amongst anybody in California literate enough to be on a panel about race relations more than a little pretentious and absurd. But there was no denying that the assembled youths were plenty pissed off about something, alright. None of the rants, however, was as vitriolic as the anti-rebel flag rap spluttered inches from my face by the indignant young Muslim, a young man whose hip-hop haircut was obscured by a gray Malcolm X baseball cap. Amongst the young and reactionary, the ubiquitous "X" logo seemed de rigueur in those post-Locust days of the Rodney King ass-whuppin'. The young brother continued his polemic.

"Man, what kind of shit is that? Coming in here with that medieval boondock symbol of oppression? Are you trying to tell me there is some twisted nobility to a rebel flag?"

"Calm down, bro," I interjected. "As a civil libertarian, I could easily rationalize that the Confederate flag represents nothing more than states' rights and the duty to keep the federal government off of our backs, but we both know that isn't entirely right. But you have to admit there is a certain simple majesty to the design - the white stars inside a blue X, laid atop the red background, and an utter gestalt contained in the iconography."

"Man, where do you get off with that honky bullshit?" The brother was now more pissed off than perplexed. "All that sticker says to me is that you are an ignorant tool for the white male power structure and a lackey that takes pride in showing off a symbol of oppression."

"Perhaps I am a tool and a lackey, or maybe I am the last bastion of the First Amendment and freedom of speech. Either/or, let's look at it this way: You've got your 'X,'" I said, pointing at his baseball cap and then criss-crossing my forefingers. "And I've got mine," I concluded, pointing towards the Pontiac parked outside.

"You know ... I never thought about it that way."

Wow. If only all the differences in race relations were settled that smoothly.

"I tell [Klansmen] to their faces that they are the scum who have degraded the Confederate flag, converted it from a symbol of honor into a banner of shame, covered it with obscenities like a roadhouse men's room wall." -Foote, in defending the right to fly the rebel flag, while vilifying segregationists

Highways 49 and 61 Revisited

Highways 49 and 61 crisscross in Clarksdale, Mississippi. As the crow flies, this is damn near equidistant between Foote's birthplace (Greenville) and his resting place (Memphis), and is supposedly the intersection that dropped Delta bluesman Robert Johnson to his knees, imploring the lord for salvation in "Crossroad Blues." This intersection has been further mythologized by the likes of northern folksingers like Bob Dylan and English guitar gentry like Eric Clapton.

The subtext and backstory to Johnson's version is that the Devil appeared at the crossroads to strike a Faustian deal claiming Johnson's soul, but only after tuning Johnson's guitar, an adjustment that would empower the axe-man with a supernatural dexterity and rich voice.

(This is noteworthy, if only for the realization that, after the Civil War, black folks were breaking bread with the Devil, too.) Parenthetical to the Robert Johnson allegory, it is worth noting that there are virtually no black people in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which is no mean feat. There are no black people in Green Acres or Mayberry RFD either, but those shows were shot on soundstages in Hollywood.

Which is just as well: The Mississippi Delta doesn't give a fuck about slumming cultural carpetbaggers like Dylan nor Clapton nor film crews from the BBC, and never has. For all the fecundity of the rich, alluvial soil where cotton and soybeans grow in lavish abundance, poverty is still the currency there. On the banks of the Mississippi, panthers still prowl around the terra firma that feels like a moist and muddy sponge cake. Juke joints made of tin are littered on a landscape dotted with grain silos and squalid shacks. There are minimal signs of any satellite communication, and barely totems of landlines and electricity.

Still, in a setting that never seems to change, history is being rewritten. The Highway Department has moved the intersection of 49 and 61 at least once. The crossroads keep moving. The crossroads marked with totemic guitars in Clarksdale did not even exist during Robert Johnson's lifetime.

That is the crux of the identity crisis in the new South. It can't even find its own crossroads.

"What the Civil War did to the South is far more extensive than even Southerners know. The statistics are enough to rock you on your heels. The year after the war the State of Mississippi paid a solid fifth of its total income on artificial arms and legs for veterans coming back from the war.
"The hardships of the war you wouldn't even consider nowadays. The absence of nails or needles kept you from mending clothes or keeping the roof from coming off your house. We were without those things, and it had a terrible influence on us ... I have great admiration for the way people managed to survive and what they did to survive. What they survived is unimaginable to us. And it had continued through the war and continued after the war, as retaliatory measures were passed against them during the Reconstruction days." -Foote, keeping score

The New Carpetbaggers and the Scallywags and How the Wrong People Are Going to Jail

"I wanted to make a film that had the scale, poetry, and emotional resonance of a feature film, and show directly the peculiar character of the South - with its ancient obsessions with the otherwordly and the flesh. But I wanted to do this in a modern and entertaining way and find a new form to approach a fundamental question - why does music and writing come out of the South? When I heard the music of Jim White, one of the most acclaimed of the alt-country singers, I was struck by the haunting quality of his songs and knew he was exactly the right person to provide a focus for that question." -Andrew Douglas, director of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

What an utter pant-load.

British corporate boho Andrew Douglas is a director of television commercials for the likes of Adidas, Nike, and Microsoft. Apparently, that medium did not allow him the flexibility to showcase his genius as an auteur or something, so - based on listening to a song about the dichotomy of religion and secularism in the South by some generic, whiny alt-country troubadour - he decided to make a film. Enter Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, the movie. Knowing Douglas's background, and knowing that making 15-second commercials and feature-length films are completely different disciplines, one could predict the results are as dire as one might imagine. Sure, Douglas has made an indie-approved quasi-documentary with a hipper-than-thou soundtrack (the Handsome Family, Cat Power, Johnny Dowd, 16 Horsepower, et al.), underscoring a travelogue of sorts. With White at the helm of the aforementioned borrowed muscle car stuffed with the replica of Jesus sticking out of the trunk, the cast/subjects and camera crew move from Jim White's adopted hometown of Pensacola, Florida, west into Natchez, Mississippi, before hitting the north into Ferriday, Louisiana, and Cumberland, Tennessee, and Virginia, stopping at sundry bars, crazy-white-people churches, hair salons, and penitentiaries. This is a road picture riddled with superfluously jarring edits and utter contempt for anything as quaint as, say "continuity," strung together with a series of smarmy and self-important soliloquies. (One features White outside of a hamburger stand, eating an ice cream cone while comparing society's "have-nots" to the ice cream that dribbles outside of the cone ... or was it the "haves" who make it outside the cone? Who knows?) It is more than a little precious.

Not that there are not nods to and attempts at credibility: Harry Crews, possibly the biggest fraud of a Southern writer to ever score a book deal, appears sporadically throughout the film to muse about missing fingers and Sears & Roebuck catalogs. Crews is arguably the movie's only genuine Southern voice. Mostly the Greek chorus consists of a parade of alt-country latter-day "murder balladeers," including former glam-rocker David Johansen, who is now an expert on roots music and Americana. He is the most egregious example of the cultural carpetbaggery that infiltrates culture.

Douglas told the BBC that he had no inclination to wire any Civil War history into his film, which he says is a documentary about the "poor white South," a topic that he maintains is an "under-explored" subject - all of which may be news to folks who have spent their careers wrestling with such post-Reconstruction conundrums: e.g., Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, Rose Maddox, Kitty Wells, George Jones, Lil' Jimmy Dickens, James Dickey, and maybe even Burt Reynolds. There is a bustling tradition of trying to reconcile the duality of the South, as embodied on an allegorical level of sin and salvation.

Yes, most of these writers and musicians are dead. But they are dead for a reason: Southern Gothic is over. If it needed a punctuation mark, let's say that the lyrical voice of the South died with Shelby Foote. What is left is artistic grave-digging and scavenging for the pathetic crumbs of what was once a grand tradition.

Even Jerry Springer is more successful at getting at the essence of the tug of good and evil in marginalized White Trash America. Springer's broadcasts are also far less self-consciously styled. Which is to say Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is an unfocused mess. Nevertheless, arbiters from The New York Times ("richly lyrical") to David Byrne ("amazing") to the Christian Science Monitor ("fascinating") to even TV Guide ("strikingly eloquent") are pushing each other out of the way to pat Douglas and White on the back with one hand and to jack them off with the other. Well, like the man said: Go figure. I reckon these big-city wordsmiths wouldn't know the lyricism and the duality of the South if it were served to them by a Sonic Drive-In carhop, with a side order of a Frito chili pie.

Beyond that, I am not going to tell anybody what should or shouldn't be in their documentary, but a film about the South that never acknowledges the Civil War or black folks is kind of like a movie about the Bataan Death March that doesn't include the Japanese.

"I am a member and a preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. ... Jesus was a liar. -Flannery O'Connor (in the voice of Hazel Motes), Wise Blood

Yes. What's dead stays that way, a notion that's not infiltrated its way into Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Aye, Douglas seems hell-bent on exhuming the corpse of Southern Gothic - and it's pretty picked over at this point.

White, to his credit, may recognize the inherent necrophilia of his travelogue. Via an electronic correspondence, I asked him who makes for better music: the Lord or the Devil? White retorted with, "Go to a cemetery and ask the graves."

Which is perhaps the most cogent and logical thought to emerge from any discourse surrounding the movie and even the movie itself. I'll say it again: Southern Gothic is dead.

Why They Call Him 'No-Show' Jones

The same year Eb Dawson wowed impressionable teenagers at a Baptist church in Tupelo, up Nashville way George Jones and Tammy Wynette got a divorce (the first in a series).

Jones was in a world of hurt, and there was a hole in his soul the size of the Confederate battlefield. As Liz Taylor was to Richard Burton, Tammy was to George. This wasn't mere love unrequited, this was being unrequited. Kierkegaard felt that "if the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair"; when George Jones took to the road to fulfill some concert bookings, ´´ he was oblivious to his own despair at his separation from his better half, a pain he obfuscated further with the nonstop whittling down of a rock of cocaine the size of Sisyphus's boulder until it dwindled to a golf ball and then a neutrino.

I followed his series of arrests in the newspapers and the local teevee news, and he did more dates in Mississippi jails than on concert stages. Weapons charges, driving while impaired, possession of narcotics. If he stood on his rap sheet from the road trip alone, he'd be a foot taller.

Which brings us to a point about this so-called alt-country stuff - the very source that motivated British filmmakers to foist their movie on the world. These "inspirational" acts are missing one ingredient: the big house. The joint. The hoosegow. Jail time always makes for good country music and can inform a lifetime's worth of a body of work (cf. Jones, Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash). That's part of the problem w/the U.S.A. The wrong people are being sent to jail.

But if you want longevity and an irreducible ethos while having the sac to call yourself "country," get thee to the nearest penitentiary for at least six months on a weapons charge. After watching Wrong-Eyed Jesus, I'd say let's start with the Handsome Family. Throw them in jail first.

Kill the Goddamn Rebel/The Swamps of the Tombigbee

"The force of the explosion lifted Forrest clear out of the saddle, but he regained his seat and sawed the horse around. As he came out of the mass of dark blue uniforms and furious white faces, clearing a path with his saber, he reached down and grabbed one of the soldiers by the collar, swung him onto the rear of the horse, and galloped back to safety, using the Federal as a shield against the bullets fired after him. Once he was out of range, he flung the hapless fellow off and rode on up to the ridge where his men were waiting in open-mouthed amazement. And that was the last shot fired at the Battle of Shiloh ... " -Foote, on the invincibility of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Brigadier General, CSA

East of the delta, Mississippi swells into mild, sinuous mounds that collect into a section known as Hill Country. Hill Country includes Aberdeen, Tupelo, Columbus, and the swamplands that flank the Tombigbee River.

A year or two after sitting through Eb Dawson's sermon in Tupelo, and on a night dark as a coal miner's colon, I was in the front passenger seat of a Volkswagen bug, parked off a gravel road that buttresses some soybean and cotton fields near the banks of the Tombigbee. The VW belonged to a girl who lived in Columbus. We had met in a bar down the road and took a cruise on the back roads. I remember I was 15 years old and had a doctored fishing license that said I was 19, which was of the legal drinking age. I remember that she was 22. We drank Miller High Life and smoked cigarettes, and then things progressed.

Due to the cramped ergonomics of a front seat of a VW Beetle, there were only so many things we could do. Which meant ... . And, although this was not my first experience in the saddle, per se, there was an act of sexual congress that I had never had the opportunity to enjoy before.

After escaping the clutches of the Federal Army at Shiloh, Nathan Bedford Forrest bivouacked back to the hill country of Mississippi and masterminded a series of raids with inferior forces that crippled both Grant's and Sherman's armies and may have added years to the war. One such battle was that of Okolona, a skirmish that claimed the life of Jeffrey Forrest, Nathan Bedford's brother.

Forrest wept briefly, before mounting his horse and attacking the assembled Yankees, singlehandedly killing three with his sword. His vengeance slaked, Forrest beat a hasty retreat back into his own camp, reconnoitered his men and won the battle of Okolona.

Many years later, I come to find out that the night before Okolona, a smaller skirmish between Forrest's cavalry broke out in the very same farmland that the girl from Columbus took me to.

While the girl from Columbus was otherwise occupied, I recall looking through the front windshield of VW bug at the shadows of the pines and the cypress far beyond the cotton and marveling at the moment and knowing that it would never come back. I remember I had wondered what had happened on this soil before. Now I know.

I never question my desire to fly a Confederate flag.