Counting Votes, Georgia Style

Once in the seventies, during an ice-storm caused power failure that was days in duration, I fought boredom by grazing on my father’s bookshelves.  The best book I found was called Gothic Politics in the Deep South, by Robert Sherrill.   The book was composed mostly of profiles of Southern demagogues of the fifties and sixties – Orval Faubus, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and the like – plus some reporting on Bob Jones University and other contributors to Southern political backwardness.   The chapters on Georgians Herman Talmadge and Lester Maddox were particularly fascinating to me.   Later I read William Anderson’s The Wild Man From Sugar Creek, a biography of Eugene Talmadge, Herman’s father, a colorful, corrupt, race-baiting, reactionary populist and the dominant figure in Georgia politics in the 1930s and early 1940s.  So at 17, I was better informed about Georgia political history than the typical Georgia teenager.   It was lucky for me that my first exposure to this history came through Sherrill, an entertaining writer with a biting sense of humor.  It was such a good book that as I first read it by candlelight in our unpowered house, it was almost possible not to notice that I was freezing my ass off. 

 

One of the things I learned about from Sherrill and others was what they called the “County Unit System.”   Because of lingering Civil War bitterness, Lincoln’s Republican Party remained a political nonentity in the South for 100 years.  In almost every old Confederacy state the only election that really mattered until the 1970s was the Democratic primary – the Democratic candidate would inevitably win in a landslide in the general election.   Of course the Jim Crow era Democratic Party of Georgia ran its primary election exactly as it pleased, excluding Black people from voting – contra the 15^th amendment – for as long as it could get away with it.  The County Unit System was another bit of skulduggery.   In the race for the Democratic nomination for Governor, the County Unit System was a kind of electoral college in which each of Georgia’s 159 counties was assigned a number of county unit votes that the winner of the popular vote in that county would earn.  The eight most populous counties in Georgia (“urban counties”) were worth six votes each.   The next 30 counties in size (“town counties”) were worth four votes each.   The remaining 121 counties (“rural”) were worth two votes each.  In practice, all other forms of unfairness in the voting process aside, this way of determining the winner gave low-population rural counties a vastly disproportionate share of political power in the state.  In 1960, for example, the 7000 people in Echols, Glascock, and Quitman counties (six county unit votes) had as much say in who would be governor as the 550,000 people in Fulton County.   The system was so tilted against city dwellers that Eugene Talmadge once boasted that he would never have to campaign in a county populous enough to have streetcars.  

 

In almost every instance the winner of the popular vote and the county unit vote were the same person, usually by a large margin.  1946 was a notable exception – James Carmichael defeated Eugene Talmadge in the Democratic primary by almost 20,000 votes but lost the county unit vote 244-144.  Talmadge won the general election, of course, but died before he could take office, and what followed has to be one of the most fascinating trainwreck / clownshows in the history of American politics, the "Three Governors Crisis".  It featured - among other things - 58 miraculously discovered write-in ballots, some of them cast in alphabetical order, a feat surpassed only by the dead people who cast some of the other ones.*  

 

Lawsuits ultimately ended the white primary (1944) and the County Unit System (1962).   With the coming of the Voting Rights Act (1965) and actions of the brave people who put themselves in danger to extend the vote to all adult citizens, the South was truly on its way to a more just manner of choosing elected officials.  

 

I don’t have to tell anyone who has been paying attention how much backsliding there has been on this progress the last few years. That backsliding has accelerated ominously in the last few weeks and days.  It is such a misbegotten effort.  Thinking about the County Unit System and the political figures behind it, I note that history never looks favorably on those who endeavor to make sure that some people’s votes don’t count or count less, or who try to rig the system in their favor instead of trying to win on the merits of their politics.  I can't think of an instance where disenfranchisers were on the right side of history.  People who try to pull that stuff inevitably look like villains in the long run.

As comedian George Wallace (a different George Wallace than the one pictured on the cover of Sherrill's book) tweeted the other day, "If you don't want the votes of your fellow Americans to be counted, what the hell happened to you?  That's some soulless shit right there."   

* The political descendants of the perpetrators of this electoral fraud are - not surprisingly - the ones who routinely and bogusly accuse the other side of cheating  

The Family Mill Village

In late February, before the virus really hit, we were driving from Atlanta to Richmond and I prevailed upon my carmates to take short detour to the mill village of Saxon, S.C., close to Spartanburg.

Saxon used to be the home of a large textile mill, founded by my mother’s maternal grandfather John Adger Law, in 1900, when he was just 30 years old.   Operations like Saxon Mill, where the local cotton was turned into fabric, were everywhere in the South Carolina upstate in those times, and Law’s mill prospered.  Mill work was grueling and miserable, of course, as one can discern from the 1932 protest song “Weave Room Blues,” but hundreds of small farmers swapped the risks and struggle of rural life for the security of work in the mills, and mill operators like my great-grandfather got rich.  Like every other major institution in the South, the textile mills remained whites only well into the 1960s.  Saxon Mill, like most others of its kind, was surrounded by a community of small homes, owned by the company and populated exclusively by mill workers and their families, and John A. Law (pictured with two of his grandchildren) ran the whole place, mill and village alike, in the manner of a latter-day feudal lord from a big white house on the property.  He sold out in 1945, just four years before his death, and the mill ultimately became a victim of the Carolina Piedmont textile industry’s collapse in the late 20^th century.  In 2006 Law's long-vacant house was demolished, and in 2012, having been dormant for several years, Saxon Mill burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.  

The ripples of John A. Law’s history and fortune were still around when I was a kid, discernible but fading.  One of my earliest memories, from the late sixties, is of being at an old lake house in the North Carolina mountains with my mother and my cousins.  I vaguely recall a massive staircase, a claw-footed tub, and a steep rock path down to the lake.  When I was older I learned that Law had built that house with his textile riches.   And he had used his considerable influence to help make the lake happen, too, displacing a number of small farmers in the process.  I remember that there was some urgency about that childhood visit:  Law’s children – among them my grandmother – were selling the house.  This would be our one and only chance to experience it.  The house at Lake Summit was gone before I ever got to really know it.  A few other remnants of those prosperous times remained – my grandmother’s taste for golf, for example, and a certain patrician polish to her correspondence – but in the main my great-grandfather and his wealth were part of a shrouded past.  I knew he was a Presbyterian minister’s son.  I knew his grandchildren called him “Demi.”  I knew that late in life he had left his wife, Pearl Sibley Law.  A portrait of her hung in my grandmother’s living room.  She had been known as “Granny.”  Beyond that, I didn’t know much.  John A. Law and his world were not a forbidden subject by any means, but nobody seemed especially keen to talk about him.   And until recently I wasn’t especially curious about him myself.   

What got me thinking about John A. Law and Saxon was the work of Carolina novelist Ron Rash.  I started with his wonderful first novel, One Foot in Eden, whose main character is a poor farmer whose land is about to be flooded out for a man-made mountain lake, and he’s moving in to town to work in a mill.  That seemed a familiar storyline.  I learned that Rash spent his early years in another upstate South Carolina town, Chester, where his parents worked in one of the three mills operated there by Colonel Elliott Springs, another South Carolina textile mogul.  By coincidence, Chester is where my mother spent her teenage years.  There was no overlap between her time in Chester and Rash’s, but even if they had been contemporaries, there’s a good chance he and my mother would not have been well-acquainted. She has spoken often of how the community of Chester perfectly embodied the stratified Southern social structure of those times.  There was strict racial segregation, of course, and strict class division among whites themselves:  Mom recalls, with the acidity she reserves for straight talk about what others regard as “the good old days”, that as a member of the local "white glove set" she was not to consort with “lintheads”, the poor whites who worked in the mills.  

Although Rash is best known for his fiction, particularly his novel Serena, early in his career he wrote a book of poems about life in a textile mill village, Eureka Mill, named after the mill where his parents worked in Chester.   In over thirty poems Rash imaginatively recreates just about every angle of the textile mill experience - trading hardscrabble farm life for the security of mill work, a woman injured by machinery and returning to work the same day, religious revivals, brown lung disease, violent fun on Saturday night, muckraking photographers, funerals, union organizers, an interview with Colonel Springs, and on and on.   For this reader the book’s most poignant theme is the loss the workers experience in the transition from farming to claustrophobic industrial work.  This is Rash’s poem “Mill Village”:

Mill houses lined both sides of every road
like boxcars on a track. They were so close
a man could piss off of his own front porch,
hit four houses if he had the wind.

Every time your neighbors had a fight,
then made up in bed as couples do,
came home drunk, played the radio,
you knew, whether or not you wanted to.

So I bought a dimestore picture, a country scene,
built a frame and nailed it on the wall,
no people in it, just a lot of land,
stretching out behind an empty barn.

Sometimes at night if I was feeling low,
I'd stuff my ears with cotton. Then I'd stare
up at that picture like it was a window,
and I was back home listening to the farm.

But what was done was done. Before too long
the weave room jarred the hearing from my ears,
and I got used to living with a crowd.
Before too long I took the picture down.

This poem and many others made me contemplate how many times I had unthinkingly passed Eureka Mill and its village during my Thanksgiving visits to Chester without wondering about the lives within.  Reading Rash’s empathetic rendering of the inner lives of his subjects, poor people feeling trapped and full of longing, set me to wondering more about John A. Law and Saxon. 

The most cursory Google search brought forth a discovery that should not, in retrospect, have been surprising:  in his mill’s early years, Law was an exploiter of child labor.  Reformer  Lewis Hine, celebrated for his photographs that documented the employment of children in textile mills, work that ultimately led to improvements in child labor laws, made a visit to Saxon Mill in 1912.  He never got inside the mill as he had at some other places, but he did capture some memorable outdoor shots, including this one labeled “Eddie Norton, a sweeper in Saxon Mill. Spartanburg, S.C.”  As Hine's photographs reveal, my great-grandfather had a lot of company in this appalling practice, but still . . . "As seen in the photography of Lewis Hine" is not an honor for any business to aspire to.

My newly ignited curiosity also brought me to G.C. Waldrep’s Southern Workers and the Search for Community (2000), a social history of the mill communities in the Spartanburg area, with an emphasis on the solidarity that emerged within them amid adverse conditions.   Law and Saxon Mill make quite a few appearances in Waldrep's accounts of labor/management strife.   He devotes several pages to a 1935 strike by the fledgling union at the mill.   In that section he describes Law thusly: 

John A. Law had always viewed his style of mill management as enlightened paternalism in the most exacting sense of the phrase.   His village was known for good housing, good water, excellent schools, recreational opportunities, and a family atmosphere – all available to any worker and his or her dependents who were willing to acknowledge Law as the sole proprietor of the community in which they lived . . . Law even enforced his paternalism by residency:  He was the only mill owner in Spartanburg County – indeed , one of the few in the textile South – who actually lived in his village . . . Paternalism, however, provided only a thin veneer to cover Law’s hostility toward the union.  Inside the mill, Law’s tactics in dealing with Local 1882 conformed to the paternalistic ideal.   He received the shop committee with unfailing courtesy and willingly discussed every issue they raised, all the while asserting and retaining the ultimate right of total control over both village and factory . . . At no time during the mid-1930s did he ever refuse to deal with union or government representatives.  He simply met with them, behaved like the gentleman he felt himself to be, and then did nothing to address their suggestions, complaints, or demands (90).

In a later discussion of the 1935 strike, Waldrep goes into some depth about a character whose name I vaguely recalled: Marjorie Potwin.   She was a Columbia University grad student when Law met her in New York.  He hired her to come to Saxon as a welfare worker.  In time she became Law’s partner in micromanaging everyday life in Saxon.  She also became his lover, in an affair that Potwin and Law “flaunted”, according to Waldrep.  Things came to a head where Potwin was concerned during the 1935 strike. As Waldrep tells it, although there were many safety and pay issues at stake, the main matter of contention was that the mill community found Potwin overbearing in her attempts to control village life and insisted that she be removed.  Apparently she was the sort of manager who would ride around the mill village on a white horse, hectoring workers she thought were goldbricking to get out of bed and get on the job.  The community hated her. According to Waldrep, the striking Saxon workers “conceived of the conflict holistically” – that is, better wages would only go so far in improving quality of life if life meant living under Marjorie Potwin’s iron hand.   So John A. Law sent her off to a mountain retreat, the strike ended, and he embarked on a slow but determined campaign to remove the labor leaders from Saxon.  And not long after he divorced his wife Pearl, married Potwin, sold the mill, and moved to Connecticut, where he died in 1949.  Pearl lived out her life as a pseudo-dowager in Spartanburg, passing away in 1962, a year before I was born.  Before I read Waldrep I vaguely knew that there was a Miss Potwin who was a homewrecker (in the view of my family), but it was surprising to read of her central role in an episode of Great Depression labor unrest.  

I’m sure that at some point in my childhood I was taken through Saxon, but I don’t remember such a tour.  Our brief drive through the place last February was my first visit there as an adult.   I did not expect to see a thriving place.   The desolate state of the old mills and mill villages of the Carolina Piedmont is well known, and it testifies to the devastating effects of the collapse of a sector of the economy.   I knew already that Ron Rash’s Eureka Mill in Chester has been torn down.   The weave room that deafened and distressed the workers he wrote of has been demolished.  Web pages are devoted to artsy photographs of the disintegrating old mills.  I knew all this, and yet I was still taken aback by the sorry condition of Saxon, South Carolina.   Poor Eddie Norton and the tyrannical Miss Potwin are long gone. What had been John A. Law’s inequitable but thriving fiefdom was now a vision of destitution - the crumbling remains of the mill, decrepit mill village houses, boarded-up shops, a weedy lot where the Law House used to be.  How many of the people living in Saxon now are descendants of mill workers?  Is it still haunted by ghosts of the sort of people Ron Rash wrote of in poems such as "First Shift"?

The four-thirty whistle won’t wake him this morning.
My father’s awake, dreaming of paychecks.
Bedsprings creak in the other bedroom,
my grandfather coughing, my grandmother rising.
Then the clatter of pans, the warm smell of coffee,
the dog at the door, begging for scraps. 

The three of them walk up the hill in the dark,
across the train tracks, past Darby’s Grill.
They pass through the gate where I cannot follow,
except in blood-memory, except in the knowledge
I eat well and I rest on the gift of their labors. 

 

Another Athens Book Appears; Once Again, I'm Not in It

My brother makes a brief appearance in Cool Town, Grace Hale’s new interpretive history of the Athens music scene from its inception in the late seventies through the early nineties.  The index entry goes like this:

            Veal, Rob, 261, 340-41n72

On 261 we find Rob identified as one of the few Athens musicians to actually have gone to high school in Clarke County.   What would my index entries look like, were I to have qualified for the book?

Veal, Jim; multiple failed attempts to make casual conversation with members of R.E.M.,122; self-satisfaction that he had a more sophisticated view of the obscene coin-operated sculpture in the art school lobby than the frat boys in his art history class did, 182; at Chapter Three Records buys Steely Dan albums instead of the work of local bands, 207.

Yes, Rob, as a member of the Dashboard Saviors and a friend and sometime collaborator with Vic Chesnutt, was in and of Athens’ legendary alternative music scene.   I never was.   I was there for most of the glory years, but just as another guy on the periphery, never on a guest list, always hearing about R.E.M.’s fake name shows the day after with all the other schlubs.   My closest extended exposure to anyone in the scene (other than my brother) was to a coworker at the Schlotzsky’s on College Square, a member of a locally prominent punk band.  From him I learned this nugget of wisdom: “The Smiths are for guys who hang around in their bedrooms all day.   And Morrissey is the king of those guys.”  

That fellow is in the book, along with a number of bands I heard, places I used to go, events I recall, and people I knew by reputation.  Thrift store clothes, Howard Finster, the documentary, trying to decipher R.E.M. lyrics after Chronic Town came out, various manifestations of the 40 Watt – it’s all there.   So from a purely nostalgic standpoint, I had a blast reading Cool Town – I could almost smell the mustiness of the tumbledown old houses so many music scene Bohemian types lived in back then.   I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about the countercultural ferment of Athens in the 80s, or be reminded of it.  Or both, as was the case for me. 

As an Athens native I enjoyed the petty little pleasure of catching the author in trivial errors (It’s Poss’s barbecue, not Posse’s barbecue, and the Athens Observer offices were not across the street from the Georgian Hotel).   But the detail errors are negligible, and Hale gets the important things splendidly right.  I especially appreciate her attentiveness to, and elucidation of, the Do-it-Yourself spirit that characterized the scene.   The bands we remember from that time – the B-52s, Pylon, R.E.M., Love Tractor -  often buoyed by art school inventiveness and dauntlessness, were not in the habit of talking themselves out of trying new things.   To paraphrase Guy Clark’s “The Cape”, they did not know they could not fly, so they did.   That spirit really circulated beyond just the music community, and if I could go back in time I would breathe it in more deeply than I did from 1982-1987. 

As I moseyed down memory lane with Cool Town something happened in the national news that corresponded rather interestingly, in a geographic way, with what I was reading.   A key location in the book is Barber Street, home of a couple of ramshackle old Victorian homes cut into apartments and occupied by well-known Athens bands in the early 80s.  One notable address is 169 Barber St.  As I was reading of this house as a Bohemian headquarters, word came out that Nancy Pelosi was moving to have all the portraits of former Confederates removed from the Capitol (more power to her).   Among these would be the portrait of Howell Cobb, Speaker of the U.S. House from 1849-51, later the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Treasury.  Cobb was an Athenian, and his old house – a columned mansion, of course - is on North Pope Street, separated from 169 Barber St. by a back yard.  I believe if I were standing on the porch of one place I could hit the other with a Frisbee (see below).  For this reader the proximity of a shoddy, creatively repurposed old house to a well-preserved Confederate mansion reinforces how the South's shameful racial history (and its lingering manifestations) were always close by in the era described in Cool Town, right there in plain sight even as most of us tried not to notice.  And not noticing it in a town whose racial inequities are as obvious as they are in Athens took some doing.  As a former Barber Street resident myself, I remember well the many Black pedestrians from the poor neighborhood around Cleveland Avenue walking past my house on the way to and from the stores on Prince Avenue.  The young white Southerners who constituted the music scene sought to imbue their creative endeavors with the rich strangeness of Southern culture while keeping the racist elements of that culture at arm's length.  How do you finesse that?  Hale’s take on this dodgy side of the music scene is worth reading carefully and reflecting upon.

I have few vivid memories of performances I saw.  In fact, my most vivid memory is of a performance I missed.   I became old enough to go to clubs just as R.E.M. was outgrowing them.  I got to see them a couple of times at the i and i, but when that place closed the best chance I had to see them were the free shows they were in the habit of playing every year or so at UGA’s Legion Field, a small grassy space in a hollow in the middle of some hillside dorms.   One of these shows was Monday, April 22, 1985 (I have checked the date).  I yearned to be there, of course, but my English professor that term had made it clear to me that I was on my last chance to submit a paper that was way, way overdue (I believe the prof was old Rayburn Moore, who admonished me not to “dilly dally about it.”).  So no outdoor R.E.M. for me that night.  Rob and I were living then in our family house, off the Nowhere Road, north of town (Mom had moved to Atlanta and we were just waiting for the house to sell).   I struggled to compose that paper, probably trying to deploy cleverness as a substitute for deep engagement with the text, as I was always doing back then.  But progress was happening and it felt so good I almost forgot what I was missing.  When I had written a few pages I stepped out onto our back deck for some fresh air, to clear my head.   It was quite dark – we lived far from town, on a wooded lot.   In the distance, from the south, I could hear a faint noise of rhythmic thumping.   And it did not take me long to realize that what I was hearing – improbably because of the distance but all too real to be denied - was Bill Berry pounding his drums and ruining my night from six miles away.  

How it Ends

“It warn’t the grounding – that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a n*****.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

That’s from Chapter 32 of Huckleberry Finn.  In an unfamiliar place, unsure of his own safety, Huck has been misidentified by this middle-aged woman he doesn’t know (she turns out to be Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally), so he has to make up a story to explain why he’s apparently late arriving.  A fabricated steamboat accident does the trick.  But for some reason he can’t do it without including this detail, a detail that screams “black lives don’t matter.”   And Aunt Sally affirms it. 

Huck’s gratuitously dehumanizing line makes readers wince, not just because of the awful sentiment it conveys, but because it follows hard upon the novel’s moral climax – Huck’s famous resolution to “go to hell” in order to liberate his friend Jim from slavery.   Did he have to backslide so fast?  Some readers contend that these lines couldn’t be his true feelings, that he’s just tickling the prejudices of his mark, as he typically does when he’s scamming somebody.   Maybe.  But the problem is that this instance of casual racism – whether from the heart or just a ruse - merely previews what can be read as the mother of all backslides, the last twelve chapters of the novel: rather than treating Jim's speedy liberation as the prime directive, Huck plays along with Tom Sawyer’s self-indulgent, overcomplicated, and utterly needless fantasy version of Jim’s escape.  Moreover, Twain undercuts whatever anti-racist bona fides the novel has built up by indulging in minstrelsy-style-humor at the expense of Jim and other slaves in this section.  So disappointing.

And there’s a lot to be disappointed about.  Although Twain's portrayal of black characters in general is tainted by stereotyping,  up to now he has come down hard on white bigotry against black people.  The earliest instance may be the virulently racist tirade he puts in the mouth of one of the book’s most monstrous characters, Huck’s father (Chapter 6), a self-own for the ages.  Most of all, as portrayed by Twain, Jim is plainly the most virtuous character in the novel.  In a world shot through with white villainies, the one slave we come to know, a character referred to constantly by the most odious racial epithet we've got, is more courageous, more loyal, and more humane than anyone who labels him with that word.   My two favorite Jim moments are when he chews out Huck – eloquently, indignantly, and heartbreakingly – for tricking him into believing he was dead (Chapter 15), and when he reveals to Huck his deep grief over striking his daughter for having disrespected him, not realizing she was deaf (Chapter 23).  The character at the bottom of the racial caste system is of far greater heart than any of the whites who regard themselves as his superiors.  This bitter irony, one every character in the novel, Huck included, seems blind to, is the core of Twain’s anti-racist satire.  Moreover, it is the core of Twain’s lacerating portrayal of the Southern white church:  thanks to the slavery-sanctioning organized religion he has been immersed in all his life, Huck cannot get it out of his head that in helping Jim escape, he’s become “a low-down abolitionist”, going to hell for committing a robbery.  But in Chapter 31, tempted to turn Jim in and relieve the guilt that's oppressing him, Huck recollects Jim’s many kindnesses to him and resolves to risk the fires of hell rather than return his friend to slavery.

It is a stirring moment.  Yet a matter of hours later comes his cringe-inducing conversation with Aunt Sally.   And over the next several weeks a boy who has shown a genius for escape from real danger becomes compliant with childish shenanigans that make a mere game of getting Jim out of chains.  And the author who has given Jim nobility makes a clown of him again.  It can be maddening to read. How many copies of Huckleberry Finn have been thrown across the room while readers labor through the last twelve chapters?

Explanations abound for Twain’s seeming loss of the anti-racist thread in this section.  One idea is that as much as Twain may have despised mistreatment of black people, he despised Romanticism even more, and he let his urge to mock Romantic literature and those under its spell swamp every other interest.  Another explanation concerns the circumstances of the novel’s composition.  Though set in the 1850s, Huckleberry Finn was written in the early 1880s, amid the collapse of Reconstruction and its efforts to provide civil rights for freed blacks in the South.  Whether Twain meant it to be so or not, the farce of Tom's escape plan mirrors a general white betrayal of black yearning for full freedom, one that continues to this day.   Toni Morrison speculates that the silliness of the conclusion is Twain's way of softening the blow of the inevitable rupture in any childhood white/black friendship of that era:  "Every reader knows that Jim will be dismissed without explanation at some point; that no enduring adult fraternity will emerge.  Anticipating this loss may have led Twain to the over-the-top minstrelization of Jim." 

For most readers, none of these readings really explain away what makes the conclusion feel like such a big narrative fail.  The author's reversion to demeaning jokes at Jim's expense is damning enough; can't Twain at least make Huck’s moral evolution stick?  I want Huck to be 'woke'.  But he isn't.  And maybe that's the point.  His experiences with Jim haven’t turned him into a barefoot William Lloyd Garrison.  He hasn’t realized that slavery is wicked.  There's no "I reckon I'll go dismantle me some systems of oppression."  It was easy for him to come up with that callous thing to say to Aunt Sally because that kind of thinking doesn't just evaporate after a couple of enlightening experiences.  The extent of Huck's journey on race is that he just can't bring himself to betray his friend -  that's all.  In his situation - he's barely educated, his society is arrayed against him learning to think differently about black people -  mere dedication to Jim's freedom is pretty damn good.  The problem is that he lets this avowed dedication get sidetracked by his spineless subservience to Tom Sawyer and his jackassery. To me, this failure on Huck’s part is what may give us – and by “us” I mean white readers like me - something worth holding on to from the last twelve chapters of Huckleberry Finn, especially in these times, when so many of us are vowing publicly and in our hearts to be better about race.  These chapters depict (imperfectly to be sure) what usually happens in the aftermath of a resolution to do something worthy and needful but hard, something that may put us at odds with the world and threaten our comfort.   We don’t follow through the way we should. 

To a large extent, what's wrong with the last twelve chapters of Huckleberry Finn is what's wrong with us.  

Great War Irony

Remotely (of course) some of my students are completing their study of literature about the Great War. A new text (for me) that I've had them read this year is a Muriel Spark short story "The First Year of My Life." The premise of the story, as the narrator tells us, is that newborn babies are omniscient. As she was born in the last year of the Great War, she can recall tuning in to the German spring offensive and the Czar getting executed and debates in the House of Commons, etc. And as a baby she wouldn't smile, a source of great consternation to her family. The story ends with her first birthday party, the end of the war, and - at last - her first smile, aroused by a politician's smarmy ex post facto rationalization of mass slaughter:

More parents and children arrived. One stout man who was warming his behind at the fire, said, ‘I always think those words of Asquith’s after the armistice were so apt… ’  

They brought the cake close to my high chair for me to see, with the candle shining and flickering above the pink icing. ‘A pity she never smiles.’   

‘She’ll smile in time,’ my mother said, obviously upset.   

‘What Asquith told the House of Commons just after the war,’ said that stout gentleman with his backside to the fire, ‘– so apt, what Asquith said. He said that the war has cleansed and purged the world, by God! recall his actual words: “All things have become new. In this great cleansing and purging it has been the privilege of our country to play her part… ”’   

That did it. I broke into a decided smile and everyone noticed it, convinced that it was provoked by the fact that my brother had blown out the candle on the cake. ‘She smiled!’ my mother exclaimed. And everyone was clucking away about how I was smiling. For good measure I crowed like a demented raven. ‘My baby’s smiling!’ said my mother.  

‘It was the candle on her cake,’ they said.   

The cake be damned. Since that time I have grown to smile quite naturally, like any other healthy and housetrained person, but when I really mean a smile, deeply felt from the core, then to all intents and purposes it comes in response to the words uttered in the House of Commons after the First World War by the distinguished, the immaculately dressed and the late Mr Asquith.

Yes.  The "Whatever, man" smile.

Speaking of the lingering influence of that war on the modern world, Paul Fussell wrote, “There seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; it is essentially ironic; and it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”

The end of "The First Year of My Life" is a pretty good literary evocation of that idea.