A small but surviving nugget of optimism

A SOUTHERN TALE -- SOCIAL CHANGE  [HG]  [somewhat expanded rerun]

Another very early morning in the Idaho mountains -- and one that's cold,
windy, and snowy.  Even my great and loyal buddy, my half-Bobcat cat,  has
returned to sleep. On the SNCC list recently, our very old friend -- Joan
[Trumpauer] Mulholland, one of we of the well-known, violently-attacked
Jackson '63 Woolworth sit-in situation and photo, who has twice visited us
here, commented astutely on " . . .Hunterbear's fluffy kitty  -- but watch
those
claws!"

But the Clawy Kitty is off chasing rabbits in dreamland.

Anyway.  Writing just now to a good colleague in New Mexico, I wound up
telling -- as Indians and Other Ethnicities and Real Westerners and the
Working Class -- always do so very well: telling a story or two.  Many
people like these and a few don't.  And if you don't, cut out.

Anyway, to my friend in the Great Southwest, I wrote in part:

=================

I have a strong hunch you were hatched right into civil rights and civil
liberties -- and, unlike many, you are still going strong: like the Santa Fe
chugging resolutely across the Southwestern canyons and ranges.

I'm a great train man, too [I fly -- but my technological travel acceptance
really stopped with trains.] And I miss the little now-gone branch lines and
out-of-the-way deals -- that were always so shaped by interesting local
geographies and "sub-cultures." [Including fascinating local food.]

My idea of socialist democracy does not involve cultural monolith-ism at the
people grassroots.  I'm a  strong pluralism person.  Within reason -- my
reason -- of course.

 I remember taking -- as a full-time civil rights organizer -- increasingly
archaic trains from Mississippi deep into Louisiana, very early Fall or so
'63, and eventually passing through a succession of little Louisiana
pine-timber towns. At one, an Anglo family was putting on -- entraining, so
to speak -- the "old" mother/mother-in-law. Helped by her goodbye-murmuring
kin,   she and they mounted into the passenger car.

Then!  Then she saw several Blacks sitting therein [as per the increasingly
effective ICC rulings] -- and her public comment was really very, very
crude.  Even my resilient ears were jarred, burned. Several people at least
in our car were visibly  startled -- interracially -- as were even a couple
of the younger folk in her group. Quickly, the aged conductor reached for
her -- simultaneously assuring her family members:  "I'll take very good
care of her. She will be just fine.  You all don't worry one bit."

Reassured and embarrassed, they stepped back down, and the conductor, very
grandly, almost  elegantly, escorted her, the still-smoking outburster, out
of the passenger car and through a door. And the train jolted hard a time or
two, and then commenced its rolling-along through the edges of the little
town and back into the piney woods.

And I wondered.  "Where in the hell did he take her?"  When the conductor
returned without his distraught charge, I finally got up and went casually
but sociologically through that door.

And I had to go through several doors and cars until -- Suddenly!

 I was in an intriguingly ancient old "living room" car.  Tired flowers
clung to their water base in very old vases.  There was a rug of distinctly
conservative color.  A kind of wall-paper depicted pleasant antebellum
themes and times.

 And there They were -- not just one but several of Them:

Five or six old Southern white ladies -- including the now ostensibly calm
recent addition -- sat silently in bolted down chairs -- staring bleakly,
drearily out the windows.

Lonely, but segregated.  Racial Integrity -- as the Citizens Council zealots
would approvingly note.

This was well before, of course, the '64 Civil Rights Act -- but, as I say,
the trains and other  trans-state public conveyances were covered by slowly
effective ICC orders and regs. Hence, the desegregation in my car and
elsewhere on the train -- save for this intriguing little exception which,
if technically illegal, was, in its own way, in everyone's best
psychological interests.  American pragmatism.

Just as soon as I was hatched, literally, my father gave me a very nicely
done and intricate sketch in which the Mohawk chief, Thayendanegea [Joseph
Brant] is standing -- grim, determined, and partially in shadow -- and
partially in firelight:  the firelight of a burning settler's cabin as he
watches his
warriors, one with tomahawk raised, doing in some settlers in the Cherry
Valley region of New York.  That sketch has always been with me -- and
presently hangs on my office wall right here with a number of other notable
activists: Frank Little, Cherokee, metal miner, and IWW organizer lynched at
Butte by the Copper Trust on August 1, 1917; my old photo of John Reed
[which just surfaced the other day as it periodically does -- a sign];
other bona fide and committed social justice radicals.

And I also, believe it or not --  read GWTW [every word -- something that's
always interested Southern oral historians] while I was in the third grade,
after seeing the flick. In that Great Fantasy, the always perceptive and
trenchantly ironic Rhett Butler comments to Scarlett, as he studies the
aging white folk of Atlanta, "The Old Guard dies but it never surrenders."

But, as I saw the lonely and old segregationist ladies sitting in their drab
and fading -- but racially exclusive --  version of splendor,  I knew the
Old Guard, if not yet dead, was definitely surrendering. We-all were out in
the vigorous and visiting Big Train Country -- and they, encased and hushed,
were prisoners in a tiny canyon -- deep and arid.  They weren't even looking
at one another.  Lifeless.

And the Old South, however slowly and -- in some quarters, however bitterly
and sometimes bloodily -- was passing.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------

Anyway, that's the story I've just told my friend down in New Mexico.

The South was tough -- but we all won some very significant things in that
one. Significant for the country, for the world.

And we'll win again -- and again -- all of us together -- as we travel
toward the Sun.

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR]
www.hunterbear.org

It's critical to always keep fighting -- and to always remember that, if one
lives with grace, he/she should be prepared to die with grace.



"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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