Harold Lloyd: got a light?

This has to qualify as the strangest Harold Lloyd movie I've ever seen (and believe me, after spending more than three years writing about his life, I've seen plenty). It's only a minute and a half long, has no sound track (truly a silent film) and no plot to speak of. It's just him n' the chimp.

I don't know why this little gem was made - it looks almost like a screen test for the ape. It's unusual for several reasons: Harold still has an intact right hand (a horrible accident blew half his hand away in 1919), he's shown smoking a cigarette which he never did in real life (explaining his relative awkwardness), and he's in tighter closeup than usual.

This is startling, because it reveals why women loved him so much: the guy was simply gorgeous, with a clean handsome jawline, vigorous head of black hair and slightly bedroomy blue eyes. There was a boyish sweetness about him which never slid into Harry Langdon-esque creepy infantilism. Under the mild exterior he was a tough little scrapper, with a volatile temper that came directly out of his own hot-and-cold personality.

I love this man. I wrote a novel about him called The Glass Character, and I cannot tell you how I ache to see this get into the hands of readers. I want them to know, to feel, to see him as he was, and is. I made a total fool of myself in writing this, and though I think it's the best thing I've ever done, I do wonder if there is something star-crossed about my life, something that just short-circuits success and snatches it out of my hands just as I am about to grab it. If I could figure out why, maybe I could do something about it.

Whenever I discover something new about Harold Lloyd, some odd little thing like this minute-and-a-half-long mini-picture, it's as if I am given a tiny glimpse through an aperture or a magic portal. While I was writing The Glass Character, there were days when I felt as if I had stepped right through it. I did not want to come back. I don't know what is going to happen with my novel, and I know I shouldn't care this much, I'm just putting my heart out on the railroad tracks. But there's just something about him. He inspires that sort of feeling. It's spooky, because I realize that he doesn't try for it.

I can't define charisma, any more than I can define charm, but I know when I am in its presence. In this case, mere dying did not end it. It's still there, lightning in a bottle. If you think you know silent comedy, if you've seen Chaplin and Keaton and maybe Harry Langdon or Chester Conklin, you don't know this: there was a man, an extraordinary actor who never planned to be a comedian, who was able to make the most ordinary, hapless guy so compelling that you couldn't stop watching him.

Harold, Harold! I don' t know how I got in so deep. And I am not sure if I want to be saved or not.

The Further Adventures of Ooka and Eeka (a grandma's tale)

   The Further Adventures of. . .

OOKA AND EEKA!

                                                                  Ooka

                                                                  Eeka

Ooka and Eeka were two sisters who looked alike. Well, almost. One fine day in the spring, they decided to go for a walk together.

Since Ooka was 17 feet tall and Eeka was one inch tall, it was very hard for Eeka to keep up with Ooka.

“Wait for me, Ooka!”

Ooka was enjoying the walk so much that she didn’t notice that Eeka wasn’t beside her any more.

“Oh no!” said Ooka. “Did I step on her again?”

Ooka looked on the bottom of her shoes, but Eeka wasn’t there. What a relief!

But then she thought: no Eeka? She must be lost!

Ooka was very worried. She looked everywhere, under every tree, rock and mushroom. But Eeka was nowhere to be found.

Ooka was very sad and discouraged. Would she ever find Eeka?

Then all at once she met a friendly elephant.

“Hello, friendly elephant,” she said.

“Phhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht!”

“Mr. Elephant, do you have a cold?’

“No. But I can’t smell the flowers any more.”

“How come?”

“I was smelling this daisy here, and something went up my nose.”

That gave Ooka an idea!

She grabbed the elephant’s trunk and yelled into it.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”

Then she held his trunk to her ear. At first she didn’t hear anything, but then she heard a teeny tiny voice saying,

                         “Oooooooooooooooo-kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Save me!”

The elephant was very upset by now. “I have a girl up my nose,” he said.

Then Ooka had another idea!

“Eeka, tickle the inside of the elephant’s trunk.”

“OK!”

So she tickled the inside of his trunk. Then the elephant went:

“Ah – ah – ah – ah – ah – CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Eeka flew out of his trunk and sailed through the air all the way to the other side of the country.

“Ooooooo-kaaaaaaa,” she cried. “Come get me. I’m in Newfoundland.”

Ooka had to take a very long walk to find her, but fortunately her legs were very long so it only took her half an hour.

She found Eeka sitting inside a flower, looking very happy.

“Eeka!” said Ooka. “No more sitting in flowers.”

“Why not? I love flowers.”

“Because an elephant might suck you into his trunk again.”

“OK, I won’t.”

And Eeka never did it again.

THE END

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

The Rev: Part 2

REVEREND RUSSELL HORSBURGH: SAINT OR SINNER?

(Part 2 of 2) by Jim and Lisa Gilbert

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

By 1964, after having been minister at the former Park Street United Church in Chatham for four rather tumultuous years, Reverend Russell Horsburgh had accomplished an amazing number of things.

He had established a program entitled "Youth Anonymous" that was designed to provide guidance for wayward youth, had designed a number of programs for the youth in the community that were designed to get them off the street and onto church property. Basketball games, dances, counseling services and the establishment of an unofficial "drop-in center" at the church occupied much of his time and made him a popular figure with the young. In fact, the famous Canadian actor Cedric Smith was taken under the wing of Horsburgh and given his first form of employment in Chatham thanks to Horsburgh.

The adults within the community benefited from his ecumenical approach to Sunday night lectures (invited rabbis, priests and representatives from other faiths to speak) as well as the bringing in of noted politicians (Lester B. Pearson) and artists (Virgil Fox and Miriam Anderson).

On the surface, one might imagine that the parishioners at Park Street United Church would have been overjoyed and would have been extremely supportive of their innovative, outgoing, charismatic minister and many in the church were very supportive. However, there was a darker side to both "the Rev" as well as to some church members.

Reverend Russell Horsburgh was the first to admit that he was not everyone's "cup of tea". He once described himself as being "impatient, uptight, demanding and having every ugly virtue possible". Others described him as being impulsive, headstrong, unlikable, chauvinistic, demanding, and media loving.

Some members of the church felt that he was "too big for his britches" and that he tended to "run rough shod" over the wishes of the congregation. He was not one to ask for permission or to follow long held protocol. He simply did and then dealt with the consequences. He was thought by some to not be a team player and some simply were jealous of the attention he received and how he was revolutionizing their church by opening it up to people from all classes and racial backgrounds. Some complained that their closely-knit church was becoming a "church of strangers". Clearly, there was a tension bubbling close to the surface that, in retrospect, was obviously destined to explode at some point.

The breaking point came in a cataclysmic, earth shaking moment in 1964 when Reverend Russell Horsburgh was formally charged (based on revelations by a few minors in the church) with "contributing to juvenile delinquency in his church" by knowingly allowing, permitting and possibly encouraging underage teens to engage in sexual activities on church property.

Although in 2008, these charges would seem rather trite and suspicious (considering all the other sexual offences allegedly committed by clergy since that time), the atmosphere that prevailed in 1964 made these charges front-page news across Canada and outraged religious groups, parental organizations and the general public.

The trial became a virtual witch-hunt that resulted in eighty hours of testimony by some pretty confused, frightened and scared teens. If you think sex sells to day, you can imagine what it did in the early 1960s. The fact that the testimony came from unidentified minors and told in rather circumspect ways served to make the accusations even more sinister, mysterious and licentious.

The court proceedings found Reverend Russell Horsburgh guilty of five of the eight counts of contributing to juvenile delinquency and he was sentenced to a year in prison. Although he served only 107 days of his sentence, his real punishment was that he was forced to resign as a minister in the United Church and for a time was relegated to working as a parking lot attendant in Toronto.

In 1967 the Supreme Court of Canada ordered a new trial for Horsburgh and in this trial three of the five original charges were dropped and he was acquitted of the other two. However, it was too little and it came too late for the once so confident minister. By 1967, he was a broken man who only wanted to clear his name.

By 1971 a partial victory came for Reverend Horsburgh when he was fully reinstated as a minister in the United Church. By this time, however, he was in the final stages of bone cancer and when a testimonial dinner was held at the Pyranon Ballroom (site of Rona Cashway Building Centre on Colborne Street to-day) in July of 1971, he was no longer the Horsburgh that once was. At that dinner, tragically, no young people were present and church officials (locally and nationally) were notably absent. The 170 people that were there however tried to make things right and tried to rally their fallen, broken friend and hero but it was to no avail.

Confined to a wheel chair, this man who seemed once, to have been larger than life and unable to be confined by anyone or anything, was a pitiful vision of his former self. Those who attended that dinner in Chatham and remembered him as he was a few short years before must have quietly shed a tear or two or felt intense anger well up within their hearts. However, it was too late for anger and there would be many more tears shed a few months later when Reverend Russell Horsburgh slipped from this life into the next in October of 1971.

He was cremated and buried in a plain tin box under the floor of Zion United Church in Hamilton, Ontario.

Do I feel he was mistreated and maligned? I do. Do I feel he was a tragic figure? I do. In fact, he could be described as a true Shakespearean hero in the fact that a tragic flaw within himself helped to bring about his own downfall. Do I feel that he knew there was some sexual activity going on in the church? Yes, I think he did and he either chose to ignore it or he was so absolutely naive that he did not truly grasp the danger inherent in his quiet acquiescence.

Do I blame the people in Chatham of the time and particularly those church members at Park Street United Church? I have mixed feelings about that. I would venture that some felt that they were doing the correct, moral thing for the time while I also venture that some were attempting to "put Horsburgh in his place" and "teach him a lesson" not realizing how devastating and tragic an end would result. In short, it was a different time and place and who knows how any of us would have reacted facing a similar crisis. After all, by 1964, it must have appeared to many parents that the sex, drugs and rock and roll revolution was swiftly approaching and all of their children were in dire danger.

A play was written about Horsburgh's time in Chatham (as well as two other books, a record album and countless newspaper and magazine articles) by respected Canadian playwright Betty Jane Wylie in 1981. Considering that the former Park Street United Church is now in private hands (the Chute Family), I wonder if it is time to finally stage this play within the church that spawned this huge controversy?

Personally, I think that it would be rather compelling, enticingly appropriate and more than a little spooky!

I am quite sure that it has never been staged anywhere in Chatham-Kent and it might just be a final fitting tribute to a man who has been described as "a bundle of contradictions, caught up in the furies of the sixties". 

Jim and Lisa Gilbert are local, national and international award winning educators and historians.

****************************************************

Postscript. Though the Gilberts have a right to their opinion based on what they were able to piece together about Horsburgh, the fact remains that they were not there when it happened.  Public opinion eventually swung back in Horsburgh's favor, but my own view is that it swung too far.

I was ten years old when Horsburgh was removed from Park Street United Church. I remember a belligerent, browbeating figure literally pounding the pulpit as he harangued his astonished congregation about their unforgiveable rigidity and ignorance.

I remember three very drunken teenage boys hanging around outside the church late one evening,  guffawing and slurring, "Hey, where's the Rev?"

I remember my father's best friend saying, "he's a psychopath," though at the time I didn't know what that meant.

I remember my mother, the least-gossipy person I knew, whispering to someone, "You know, they found empty liquor bottles in the church basement. And worse."

I remember a church bulletin that had an entire page bizarrely x-ed out. When my older brother held it up to the light, he saw that it contained a fulminating rant aimed directly at the ignorant fools of Park Street United, ending with a famous quote: “You ungrateful people should be ashamed of yourselves. . . . I am sorry I ever freed you from the tyrants and the papists. You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don’t improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine.”

It was signed:

Martin Luther
Russell Horsburgh

Rev. Russell Horsburgh: what I didn't know

 

The Controversy over Reverend Russell Horsburgh Continues After Almost Half a Century

The following article by Jim and Lisa Gilbert (part one of two) outlines in vivid detail the strange, turbulent, ultimately self-destructive reign of a United Church minister in a sleepy Ontario town. It was the early `60s, and I dutifully went to Sunday School at Park Street United every week, but in between the services there were whisperings that something terrible was happening with the minister. Though I barely understood what was going on, the episode, and my family`s subsequent flight to a rigidly fundamentalist Baptist church, left indelible scars on me. Years later when my church in Coquitlam hired a fraud who had to be dismissed  from the pulpit, anguish bubbled up from those buried memories, made worse by confusing, fragmentary information and the poisonous fear that comes from not knowing. A few years ago I tried to google Horsburgh and came up with exactly nothing, so these two articles from 2008 were a revelation to me. I reproduce them here out of gratitude that someone finally made an attempt to make some sense of "the Horsburgh affair". They filled in many informational gaps, while at the same time leaving out a lot of emotional context that could only be experienced by someone who was there. Though I do not agree with all of their conclusions, I am grateful to Jim and Lisa Gilbert for clearing out some of the cobwebs from a dark, scary, and extremely traumatic episode from my childhood.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

I felt that I might bump into him around the very next corner. His larger-than-life presence drifted in and out of my possibly overactive mind. Whispered teenage voices seemed to be almost audible amidst the quiet of the once former church. There were muffled giggles, whimpers, hushed outrage and hearty laughs that seemingly emanated from everywhere and yet nowhere. I wandered around the former Park Street United Church trying to visualize a man I had only seen once or twice and a scandal that I, as well as most of Chatham Kent, had largely forgotten.

There's a strange mixture of the holy and the profane that seems to permeate the many rooms of the slightly forlorn former church today. Although it has been almost fifty years since the silver-tongued voice of Reverend Russell Horsburgh mesmerized, mocked and motivated those seated amidst the deep, dark pews and the sacred, stained glass windows, his presence still lurks like a forlorn and forgotten spirit that longs to speak but cannot or....dares not.

The former church was so quiet that I suppose I could have imagined many things and the mere closing of the eyes conjured up a hundred visions and revisions. Sitting in the former sanctuary of the silent structure in 2008, it is possible to imagine a time, some forty eight years ago (1960), when Park Street United Church in Chatham, Ontario was described as a "preacher's church" and the most controversial minister ever to step inside its doors was about to make his appearance.

With its population of over a thousand parishioners Park Street was considered to be the second most powerful church in the London Conference and placement there as a minister was considered to be a "plum job" leading to a promising and powerful future.

When Reverend Russell Horsburgh took over the reins of pastor at Park Street in 1960, President John F. Kennedy was still alive, the Beatles were playing for a few pounds in Liverpool and the distant growing din of a new generation willfully embracing sex, drugs and rock and roll had yet to reach the sensitive ears of those church-going, God fearing, conservative residents of Chatham, Ontario.

If there were whispers of change in the air, they were ignored. Those things happened in Detroit or Toronto but not in the safe, innocent and quiet backwaters of Southwestern Ontario. That, however, was to all change the day Reverend Horsburgh stood up in the pulpit and began, in grand oratorical fashion, to outline his vision of the church's future.

"The Rev", as he soon came to be known by the young and those that admired him, looked at things in Chatham's Park Street Church that never were and instead of simply asking "why", he dared to ask "why not?".

Described by those that knew him, or thought that they knew him, as being impetuous, impulsive, caring, rebellious, creative, maddening, charismatic, contradictory and a hundred other things the new minister wasted little time in "opening up" the church. Park Street United Church was, under his guidance, destined to be open seven days a week. He longed to take the church out into the streets and bring those in the streets into his church.

Between 1960 and 1964 he, amid many other things, launched a teen drop-in center, organized youth basketball nights, set up teenage counseling sessions, arranged group therapy sessions, put a pool table in the church hall, and held regular teen dances on Saturday night.

He also, during those first four years, organized a series of Sunday night lectures where he invited, among many others, a rabbi, a Catholic priest, Lester B. Pearson (whose father had been a former minister at Park Street), Virgil Fox ( the famous church organist) and Marian Anderson (the renowned black opera singer) to speak to anyone who chose to attend. The attendance at these presentations was overwhelming. The church, each Sunday night, was "standing room only" as all residents of Chatham and Kent County, no matter what religion they espoused, were invited to have a glimpse at an exciting outside world that had rarely, in the past, come knocking.

Those concerts were followed up by a series of "sex lectures" that ran from October 20th, 1963 to December 8th, 1963 entitled "The Modern Crisis In Sex Morality". While the world mourned and anguished over the assassination of a progressive young leader who seemed immortal, the charismatic "Rev" was intent on bringing the voice of reason and logic to teenagers, as well as troubled adults, who were woefully ignorant. Ignorant about sexual matters as well as about a world that seemed to be moving much too quickly and losing its innocence on many fronts.

The lectures dealt with such innocuous topics, by to-day's standards at any rate, as "going steady", "petting", "lifting sex out of the gutter" and "date bait" but in the 1960s these topics were perceived, by some in the church, as opening the church doors to sex, drugs, rock and roll and, I suppose, Satan himself.

Thoughts turned to whispers, whispers turned to murmurs and murmurs turned to open dissension out in the pews among some of the conservative members of the congregation. They whispered of a minister who listened to no one, who was an ego maniac, who was much too friendly and way too permissive with their children, who allowed too many strangers (some of them black) into their church and was, like the 1960s in general, moving way too fast.

There were others of course in the church (and well beyond the church doors) who considered Reverend Russell Horsburgh to be a saint who embodied the essence of Christianity and who was attempting to save not only the youth of the church but the very church itself.

The scene was set for one of the most controversial events (up to that time) to occur within Canadian church history. It was to occupy the media across Canada and North America. It was to bring the former City of Chatham much unwanted attention, inspire three books, a play, a record album, destroy a man and create a local controversy so powerful and so divisive that I had to think long and hard about bringing it to light once again.

However, after almost half a century and so many other much more horrendous scandals and crimes allegedly committed by the clergy, I felt that it was time to revisit Reverend Russell Horsburgh and attempt to put the incident into a balanced, objective and modern perspective. I wanted to explain both sides of the issue and try to see the good, the bad and the ugly in this really sad story that hints, in many ways, at an almost Shakespearean tragedy.

Next week......I shall try.

---

Jim and Lisa Gilbert are local, national and international award winning educators and historians.

Nice. Nice. Nice.

That's no nut, boy. . . it's Captain Nice!

(To explain the preceding video experience)

For no good reason at all, thinking about the Kid from Deliverance and what he looks like now, which got me thinking about that rockin' Duelling Banjos scene from Deliverance, watched it on YouTube and was impressed by Ronnie Cox on the guitar, wondered what else Ronnie Cox had done, remembered he played George Apple on a show called Apple's Way, then remembered he was also on St. Elsewhere playing Dr. Craig's wife's boy friend, then remembered Dr. Craig (William Daniels) starring in a very very bad, very very lame Batman-ish sendup in 1967 called Captain Nice.

Now you know where I get my ideas.

A horse is a horse is a horse

Last week I had a wonderful riding experience on Vancouver Island at Tiger Lily Farms. I got to ride Bentley, a lovely roan Quarter horse with an amiable personality and a penchant for grabbing leaves that brushed his nose over the trail. Oh how I wish. How I wish I could've taken Bentley out on my own, for a nice meander and perhaps a canter or even a bit of galloping, but this isn't an option for me now. Riding for an hour with a guide cost $40.00, which seemed like a lot until I checked prices around here and found out they're $55.00 per person per hour, minimum booking of four, with a $100.00 deposit.

Did I appreciate having a horse of my own when I was age 10 - 13? Of course not. I am embarrassed to say I eventually lost interest. I was in high school and it wasn't cool to be horsy then. Rocky wasn't a registered anything, certainly not a Quarter horse like Bentley (though I used to say he was "1/4 Quarter horse"). He was a trail horse well-trained to tolerate any kind of rider, even a kid who steered him into some pretty bad situations (like being stuck to the shoulder in a mud-wallow).

I realize in these primitive archival photos that he seems to have too big-of-a-head, which he really didn't. The style of his mane could be described as a Mohawk, more for ease of grooming than anything else (I think his unshaven mane would have been a tangled jungle in which curry-combs would have been lost forever). He was what was called a strawberry roan, a sorrel (redhead) with a lot of creamy white sprinkled through his coat, especially on his face and rump(though it's hard to see it here).

My mother used to say "Rocky has a pink-and-grey face." I remember a kind eye and a rubbery nose perfect for kissing.  He was a "character" who would prance around the pasture trying to evade the bridle (prance? My ass - he was putting it on to annoy me). If we crossed a stream, he would stop and splash vigorously with a foreleg until I steered him the other way.

He once broke out of my back yard and took off like a shot (back yard? Yes, these photos were taken when I had the bright idea of riding him the 2 miles or so from the boarding stable to my house). My Dad said, "I didn't think that horse was so fast." He was a strawberry blur, his hoofs clopping the pavement at a furious rate, and by the time our car caught up with him he was contentedly munching hay in the barn, his coat unusually dark with exertion.

I think horses have taken on an almost mythical significance to me. I was born in the Year of the Horse (not that I believe in such things!) and have come to see the horse as a symbol of absolute freedom. Even the most highly-trained have a streak of wildness in them, much as cats do. The quietest horse can spook (as Rocky did once, seeing a gum wrapper on the trail, causing me to say, "You idiot, you're doing that on purpose").  I have sat on bolting horses, horses who tried to scrape me off under a tree branch, and I stayed on. Not because I'm a good rider - I'm not, particularly - but because I feel like I'm one with them. Or one of them? Almost.

The Help: they just can't help it, can they?

My mother had a black cleaning lady named Eva for years and years. She didn't have much to do with us kids, though we regularly saw her vacuuming our rooms and setting right the chaos of our jumbled games and toys.  My Mum once said if she met Eva on the street and didn't say hello to her first, she'd look away, but if she did say hello, Eva would smile and warmly respond: "Hello, Mrs. Burton." 

I think that was the protocol then: "the help" didn't initiate greetings, in case the white lady would rather the cleaning lady remain anonymous. Or in case she didn't want to be seen talking to a colored person.

Does this sound like the deep South? Guess again. I grew up in Chatham, Ontario, which is near Windsor, which is near Detroit, so we got all the Detroit TV channels and culture. Motown music got to us sooner and affected us more than in most parts of Canada, as did the late-'60s riots that Gordon Lightfoot wrote about in "Black Day in July". 

The Supremes came to Chatham in 1961, but I guess it was too much too soon, because hardly anyone showed up. Marian Anderson came to perform and couldn't stay in the same hotel as her entourage. There were, by Ontario standards, a lot of black kids in my classes, maybe 3 or 4, 5 or 6 even, but we usually didn't hang out with each other or both sides would be offended.

I never learned about the profound historical significance of Chatham/Kent County because it was never taught in school, nor even mentioned once. My mother did talk about it a bit, but I was not sure what she was referring to and I am not even sure how she found out about it. This is a tidbit from Wikipedia:

During the 19th century, the area was part of the Underground Railroad. As a result, Chatham–Kent is now part of the African-Canadian Heritage Tour. Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site is a museum of the Dawn Settlement, established in 1841 by Josiah Henson near Dresden as refuge for the many slaves who escaped to Canada from the United States.^[3] John Brown, the abolitionist, planned his raid on the Harpers Ferry Virginia Arsenal in Chatham and recruited local men to participate in the raid. The small village of North Buxton, part of the African Canadian Heritage Tour, also played an important role in the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was a loosely-organized escape route for runaway slaves from the U. S. South looking for sanctuary in Canada, and many of them found it in Chatham. I read these statistics now in shock: holy hell, these are all places I was familiar with from my childhood! There were poor neighborhoods in Chatham and surrounding areas where black folks had their - well, weren't they really happier in their own communities? We tried to convince ourselves of that. But by then, integration was the norm and they had to go to school with us, whether they (or we) wanted to or not.

Churches remained pretty much segregated, mostly (we believed) by choice. Reminds me of the old joke about the black man who goes to a white church and finds the door locked. He pounds on the door and shouts and tries to get in, but he can't. Then God comes along and says to him, "Don't worry, I've been trying to get into that place for years."

If there was any sort of official attitude toward black folks back then, it was "aren't we generous to let them live here": they were treated as glorified squatters, not part of a historical movement every bit as significant as the undergrounds that operated during World War II. Imagine the raw courage it took to escape, to risk life and limb for freedom and sanctuary. Imagine how many were maimed and killed. But what really destroys me is the kind of "welcome" waiting for them in this land of safe haven: every trace of their courageous journey was erased from the record, as if it were just some sort of embarrassment we'd rather forget.

This is complicated stuff, isn't it? I wonder. I'm not finished reading Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help, the book that would have been on Oprah if Oprah were still on. I probably don't need to tell you what it's about: an entire sub-class of black women in the early '60s basically taking on the role of nanny/surrogate mother as well as household help. But the deeper issue is a racial oppression so ingrained it didn't even draw comment, and a seething unrest just below the surface of normalcy.

I grew up on the cusp of that unrest. By the mid-'60s things were starting to bubble and boil and overflow the container. A shy lady named Rosa Parks had gone to jail for refusing to sit at the back of the bus. I heard about Malcolm X and Black Power and the Black Panthers, but I didn't understand much of it. There was a famous baseball pitcher named Ferguson Jenkins who was as well-known for being black as for his sports prowess. And a Chatham boy! Imagine being on the map for such a thing.

My Dad was full of hot air and given to endless, boring rants and monologues about pointless things. I was the last to leave home, so I sat on his right side for years at the dinner table without any kind of support or buffering from my three older siblings, who had made their escape years before. 

He got drunker and drunker over the years, and more maudlin, though of course no one believed me. His attitude towards black people still puzzles me. It was along the lines of "I knew a real nice colored guy once," like saying you knew a nice Nazi or maybe a leper. My parents were generally enlightened enough not to use the "n-word", and in fact I absorbed the message that it was just about the worst word there was, but my Mum still told me, not once but many times, that when she was a girl Brazil nuts were called "nigger toes".

I still don't know if this was meant to be funny, or a sign of how far we had progressed. But it was all part of the confusing and often conflicting stew of attitudes I absorbed as a child.

Just now this comes back to me: a song by Janis Ian, who wrote the provocative At Seventeen ("for those whose names were never called/When choosing sides for basketball", an anthem for the scorned and socially rejected). I remember kids saying to each other, murmuring. "Didja hear that new song?" "Which one?" "You know, the - " "Oh, yeah. Society's Child?" "Yeah." An exchange of knowing looks. The song is full of loaded images:

Now I can understand your tears and your shame.
She called you "boy" instead of your name.
When she wouldn't let you inside.
When she turned and said
"But honey, he's not our kind."

She said I can't see you any more, baby.
Can't see you anymore.

This is "the" forbidden relationship, delicately referred to as "interracial dating", forbidden particularly in quiet conservative non-radical Chatham. The nice boy down the street who just happens to be black, from another world. With the inevitable ending, but more shocking than I remember: 


One of these days I'm gonna stop my listening,
Gonna raise my head up high.
One of these days I'm gonna raise my glistening wings and fly.
But that day will have to wait for awhile.
Baby, I'm only society's child.
When we're older things may change.
But for now this is the way they must remain.

I say I can't see you any more, baby.
Can't see you anymore.
No, I don't wanna see you any more, baby.


"I don't want to see you any more"? That's not the way I remember it. When did it change?

The "rules" are nearly invisible but incredibly persistent, and thorny. Trespassing can happen in an instant. A middle-aged white woman wrote The Help, wrote much of it in dialect that is quite plausible as Southern black American speech, but in doing so she walked a fine line. I read about at least one lawsuit from a black woman who claimed Stockett had stolen her life, skimmed off the juicy parts and incorporated them into her novel without a thought. This sort of thing happens all the the time, because writers are vacuum cleaners (if not vampires) who suck the life and energy out of every situation and spew it back out again as "literature".

Perhaps they can't help it. But how many black people are equipped to write such a novel? Did Stockett decide she had to become a mouthpiece for the still-dispossessed? Maybe their usual champions are too busy. It seems that every African-American celebrity has to stand for a few thousand or million unknowns. There's only one Oprah, after all (though Condaleeza Rice didn't do too badly and blew open every racial stereotype I ever learned as a child). Alice Walker hasn't been around much since Oprah totally snubbed her at the premiere of the Broadway musical version of The Color Purple. Then there's Toni Morrison, an Oprah Book Club staple.  And who's that other one. . .you know, the one Oprah worships. God, I should remember.

Am I trying to say that only black people should write about black people? Obviously, someone had the nerve and the writing chops to step over that barrier. But I do wonder how all this goes down with black readers. Dialect is just a device, isn't it? Mark Twain didn't speak in the y'all-drawl of Huckleberry Finn, though he caught  the rhythms of speech from the deeps of Mississippi with uncanny accuracy.

"We" have a black President now, but unfortunately, not a very popular one. "We" have Jackie Kennedy coming out in her taped memoirs to say she didn't like Martin Luther King, didn't trust him, thought he was a phony even.  What does it mean? Applecarts are being upset, and even the sacred, calcified foundations of white liberalism are beginning to tremble. Now we have this woman, this middle-aged white novelist, uncovering shameful examples of racism, such as rich white women going on a campaign to force people to build a "colored" bathroom for the help, not just to make their houses more marketable but for sanitary reasons.

The book is readable, so far, but a little sudsy, a little slick. Bits of it make me groan for their almost-cutesy-ness. This is the sort of book that sells wildly. Supposedly Stockett was rejected by 60 agents before landing the one that slam-dunked this probably-mega-million-dollar deal. This smells of the kind of legend spun around the unknown writer (as in the probably-apocryphal "Whales, Mr. Melville?"), the writer who seemingly comes out of nowhere. Kind of like Mark Twain, who had been bouncing around for years on the fringes of eccentric anonymity before he broke through with Tom Sawyer.

Well. . .he didn't quite come from nowhere, nor did Stockett. Try Jackson, Mississipi (Oprah country, for sure). Try sixteen years in the publishing business in New York City. That's not "nowhere". It's the farthest thing from a literary backwater you can get. Surely a writer, a smart writer, a smart white writer like Stockett could make best use of those kinds of contacts. The woman has a good ear and a good eye and a good nose for opportunity, and is any of that a bad thing? If she calls attention to the plight of black maids in the South, a plight that still isn't resolved by many people's reckoning, isn't it all good?

And if it isn't, why not?