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.