I Made a Comic

Inspired by Killing the Buddha.

Edit: Click on the photos to see them larger.

“I Am Afraid of a War”

In March 2003, I was seventeen years old. I attended the Kansas City 4-H Conference (whose actual title escapes me, but it was something of a giant career fair with workshops and the like). If I remember correctly, I’d made a friend on the bus there who wanted to attend the journalism workshop so, hey, why not tag along? It would turn out to be my greatest memory from the entire trip.

After the journalist gave his spiel about what he did every day and what it was like working for a major newspaper, he confessed that he was interested in what we had to say, since we were the future. I don’t remember the exact phrasing of the question–what were our concerns about the future, what were our fears for the future? Something along those lines. At any rate, a chubby blond boy wearing a Kansas City Chiefs football jacket to my left was the first to volunteer: “I am afraid of a war,” he said. In the minutes that passed, he stated his fears of an imminent war with Iraq. He didn’t want his friends, people his age to die. He didn’t want to fight this war. Our generation had never really seen a war, since we were so young during the First Gulf War. The honesty and sincerity behind his words struck me. If a war comes, he said, we will be the ones to fight it–our generation.

Though I was six months shy of being a legal adult, until that moment, a part of me had still hidden behind my age of minority. Perhaps it is only human to think first of oneself in regards to the potential of Mortal Peril.

Finally, the boy ended with a question of his own: do you, mister journalist, in your vast knowledge of current events, think there will be a war soon? Yes, he said, and it could start any day.

The war on Iraq started two days later. I watched Baghdad burn in a brilliant neon green color that day on television while journalists yelled back and forth at each other opposite the live coverage. I watched the bombs drop and heard in my head the screams of children on the other side of the world, killed by an army not much more than children themselves. Now, all these years later, our generation has not only seen a war, but seen our classmates and friends return from war broken or dead. It is strange for me to think of children I grew up with that have died. I remember playing hide and go seek in the dark of the church auditorium during a potluck, hiding under pews and seeking other children trying to slide underneath the pews to avoid my gaze. It’s strange to me to think of my most frequent playmate from those years, and later a school bully, would have his funeral in that very auditorium and the husband of my best friend delivered the colors. This, indeed, was our war, though few of those I knew in childhood probably could locate Afghanistan or Iraq on the map, and we, surely, did not start it.

What I think is most important about any war or any disagreeance, period, is that both sides are human. All adults were once children. While you see a soldier, someone else might see the young boy she once played hide and go seek with in a dark church auditorium. Someone else might see a friend, a brother, a daughter, a neighbor–we are not without connections. It is easy to vilify those you may call an enemy, but they, too, are human. They, too, were once held in their mothers’ arms during late-night feedings.

(By the way, read the article about that photo here.)

Dear Kleenex, Thanks, But I Already Have a Mom

Kleenex has launched a new website entitled “Get Mommed,” where you can choose a mom to give you “extra care” this cold and flu season. You have your choices of race, ethnicities, socio-economic statuses . . . Are you gagging yet? ‘Cause I am.

I’m sorry, Kleenex, but I already have a mom, and I don’t see her featured there. Maybe that’s because my mom uses Puffs because, until recently, Kleenex deforested virgin rain forests in British Columbia to make their product. So, I’m sorry, hippie Amber. My mom’s more socially aware about products than you, and I’m sorry, Asian Sue, but my mom is as much of a hard-nosed bitch as you (I can say that, you can’t), but she hates Asians ever since she got tired of eating at Chinese restaurants with Dad and I. And, most of all, I’m sorry, Southern Magnolia, but, while I’m sure my mom would find you as adorable as Minnie Pearl, my mom thinks any sort of dancing “conjures up the devil,” and she would find the idea of being a debutante uppity (thank god). But, if you had a tv show like Paula Deene, she would not only watch you, but dvr you and refuse to ever delete you even when the thing was full of you, Paula Deene, John Wayne, Johnny Cash, and Dad’s “This Old House.”

Where is the stereotype of my mom, Kleenex? Where is the country-Southern accented, green-eyed, gray-haired, crooked-toothed (because braces were too expensive) arthritic woman that, in my childhood, sometimes weeped uncontrollably in quiet moments over her dead son, who has a terrible Celtic temper and the best fried squash or broccoli and cheese casserole ever made; who loved her children so much that she prematurely ended her career as a teacher and a librarian to stay home with us and turn our childhoods into education-boot-camp because she wanted us to be able to have the most possibilities in life, but who was too prideful to send us to things like therapy even when she recognized how abusive her eldest son was or her after her youngest’s suicide attempts?

I’ll tell you where she is. She’s at home, in Arkansas–and you can’t have her, ’cause she’s mine.

Small Town Southern Man

A couple years ago, Alan Jackson released a song called “Small Town Southern Man.” I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it ever since.

It’s a sweet song, really. There are many people who are just like the people in this song and, having grown up in a small town in the South, I can tell you that it’s the ideal for many people to live like this. They live and die and are generally good people and never really do much with their lives besides have kids, who want to do nothing with their lives except have kids.

The problem I have with this song, and the problem I’ve had ever since it was released, is that there’s so much it doesn’t talk about: most notably, the exclusion of everyone that doesn’t fit into this narrow ideal. Watch the video. Where are the people of color? Where is the GLBT community? For that matter, where are the handicapped people? Where is anyone that doesn’t fit into this narrow view? Were they not invited to the dance? The video shows the progression of a community through generations, but it doesn’t allow anyone new into the video frames.

This is the story of a community, but it’s not my community. In my hometown, people of all colors live side-by-side. Immigrants from Russia and South Africa and Bangladesh teach at the local colleges. Mexicans work in restaurants and in the poultry factory, doing the dirty jobs that others don’t want and feeling rich with their meager wages. Children of all colors and backgrounds go to the local public school and have the same teachers and classmates. A college professor of mine once called my hometown one of the most integrated in Arkansas. I guess no one told him about the race riots at the high school in 1971-1972. To be honest, I was surprised myself when I found out as an adult. It didn’t seem like something that could happen in my hometown–but it did. In fact, one particular protest by white students happened on the parking lot of the church my family went to, where my parents were married only two years before. What was the high school then is now a primary school, and what was the black high school during segregation became an elementary school that I attended in the mid-’90s. It was no secret to us that this building was a product of segregation, or that the storage building on the playground was a Rosenwald school.

The story of the South is the story of persecution, and there are stories from the South that will rip your soul apart–especially if you do research and realize these people that owned other human beings or did horrible things to other humans are not only the ancestors of your neighbors and family friends–but they’re your ancestors as well. Recently, I purused a US Census from before the Civil War and learned that a well-known family name in my hometown owned many, many slaves. Not only this, but at least two or three were mulatto. How did that happen, exactly? Did Grandpa slavemaster rape his slaves? Last fall, a class of mine explored how to use digital archives to do research. In my curiosity, I typed my hometown into the search engine and found the Blood Red Record. I’d never heard of such a thing before. What disturbed me most of all about this record was that not only had a lynching recorded on there happened in my hometown, but that it was the lynching of an “unknown Negro.” I wondered then, and now, was there even a reason for his death? Did he look at someone funny and a mob decided to string him from a tree?

No, no. I didn’t want to think that the ancestors of my home city could be filled with such hatred. I didn’t want to think that this could happen where I had lived my entire life up until a few months before, where many of my family lines had lived since the 1840s and ’50s. This happened in other, more backwards towns in the boondocks. This happened in . . . my town. It happened in my town. Like it or not, there it was on the screen, like blood splattered from the ancestors of the black children I played with so many times at recess, who weren’t Black Children to me, but Kimberly, Emanuel, Alan, Katrina, Christina . . .

In the community that I call home, our ancestors made Alan Jackson’s barn dance flow with blood, and their children said “Hell, yeah!” and their children covered it up with bleach until pissed off enough that the blood flowed again, then again quickly brought out the bleach and made the ancient floors so white that an outsider might not know of the blood once spilled here, but the dancers know.

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he’d done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see

- Toby Keith, “Beer for My Horses”

Four Years Ago Today

. . . Hurricane Katrina was destroying the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts. I was in college in Arkansas at the time. My hometown’s new recreation center was turned into a refugee center to aid the newly-homeless, many of whom decided to stay in my hometown, since they had no reason to return. When I think of the refugees that flooded my city in the aftermath of Katrina, my memories first turn to a family at the local Burger King a week or two later. They had been ahead of us in line, and I watched as the mother paid for their entire meal in coupons. Their clothes were dirty and a bit worn. The mother had wild red hair that didn’t appear to have been combed in quite a while. When they ordered, they spoke in a crazy Cajun accent, which sounded to us to be Almost Yankee. I’d heard this accent six years before when my family went on vacation to Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi, the motel at which we’d stayed right across the street from the ocean I’d recently recognized on CNN as being completely destroyed. What struck me most of all about these people, though, was the attitude of the parents, especially the mother: like she was stressed to the max and about to explode at any moment. Her young son wanted french fries with his hamburger, but there were no coupons for that. I felt bad for him. Their family sat in the middle of the restaurant, while my parents and I sat next to the side windows. “They’re some of those Katrina people,” my mother hissed, and I turned to look at the family quietly eating their free hamburgers. The refugee center was only about three blocks away. The daily newspaper had reported that many local businesses were giving the refugees coupons, vouchers, and free necessary items from their stores. I watched the family for a moment and wondered what their lives had been like before. Most of all, I wondered if the mother was always this angry. As if to answer my question, I watched as the mother swept a lock of hair out of the face of her young daughter and tucked it behind her ear. The little girl smiled at her, and I averted my gaze.

Two years later, I would work with a Katrina refugee. I had no idea she was–on the rare occasion she talked, she had a terrible speech impediment, so I had no hint at an accent–until some of our coworkers were talking in the break room one day. She never seemed to want to talk like some of the other people we worked with, so I didn’t bother her. I actually enjoyed the silence, since so many of the other people we worked with bullied me. They bullied her, too, because she was quiet and a good worker. One day, she had a huge breakdown in the middle of work and started screaming that she didn’t want anyone near her–but the job she was doing required two people. (The incident was actually quite terrifying, for the record.) Although I was working in the other kitchen, I asked her if I could help her, and, out of all the people working in both kitchens, she would let me alone help her. I switched places with someone from the other kitchen and helped her until we were to switch positions again. Since I respected her, she respected me. Somehow, my tolerance calmed her belligerance. Instead of firing her like most bosses would’ve, ours sent me in as their version of a diplomat to keep the peace.

Those who survived Hurricane Katrina will be affected by the memories of that time for the rest of their lives. We as a nation will remember the time when a major US city was unthinkably destroyed by a natural disaster–and the government turned its collective head while our fellow citizens died. It is my hope that those of us who lived through this time will remember it and not let others suffer needlessly in times of trouble. Though it is four years later, the next time I drive by the Hope airport in southwest Arkansas, there will still be FEMA trailers that were never made available to the Katrina homeless. It is on that note that I present to you the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. May we never forget the power of nature, or the goodness within the human heart to help others.

Sean Was My Brother

This is my brother–no, not the religious right-wing jerk I frequently refute in this forum. This is my younger-older brother, Sean, Christmas 1981. Strange that that will have been thirty years ago in a few years. I don’t talk about Sean much. What can I say, my oldest brother generates a lot of attention towards himself by being such a hate-mongerer. Then again, Sean is dead. It’s rather impossible for him to piss me off, especially since I never even met him. Yet, I’ve always felt a special bond with him. I can’t tell our baby photos apart. He was my link to my other siblings, the one who made it less strange that my other siblings were/are 12 and 7 years older than me. When I was little, I used to wish he weren’t dead because I was sure we’d be good friends and we’d play together. As a child, I don’t remember ever not fully comprehending death–thanks to Sean. When I was little, my mother still mourned him constantly. I feel like I spent much of my early childhood in the cemetery and, as a result, learned all sorts of odd facts about cemeteries. As a teenager, I went to a pioneer cemetery in Old Washington with a goth boy who tried to scare the rest of us by saying that he used to play in cemeteries; instead, I scared him.

Sean died when he was six months old from a rare form of leukemia at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. While Jamie Lee Curtis’s daughter asked her repeatedly to tell her again about the night she was born, I was always asking  my mother about the night my brother died–but, at the same time, I was terrified to ask because I knew asking would mean my mother was going to cry again. But I had to know. I had to know every last detail of my brother’s short life. So, over the years of my childhood and young adulthood, I learned more and more in small doses, and still continue to learn more.

My mother knew there was something wrong with my brother. He was her third child, after all. She was old hat to Typical Baby Behavior at this point. She took him to the doctor and told him his symptoms, but he dismissed her as a scared new mother and didn’t do anything. She went home and Sean continued to get worse. My parents took him to the emergency room of a Little Rock hospital, where they did bloodwork and found leukemia. My parents were given a choice: Arkansas Children’s, which was in town, but would charge, or St. Jude’s in Memphis, which did its work free of charge and was reputed to be one of the best hospitals in the country. The decision was made and Sean was airlifted to St. Jude while my family raced back home to pack, then to make the trip to Memphis. In Memphis, my dad got lost and flagged down a taxi to ask directions. The cabbie was nice and escorted my family to the hospital, no charge.

But my brother was already dead. My mother carried my dead brother down a long hospital hallway in the middle of the night. Having seen television spots of St. Jude before, I know that it is brightly painted all over. I can only imagine the amount of pain crushing down on my mother as she carried her dead child amongst murals of sunbeams and happy children. When my mother told me this part of the story, when I was older, I was amazed at how strong my mother had been in such a state of crisis. Other people might have had to been escorted out, maybe tranquilized to cope with such a sudden loss of their child. But my mother just picked up his dead body and carried him down the hall.

As a young child, my mother had explained to me that Sean was up in heaven. I used to stare up at the clouds on car rides, wondering if Icould catch a glimpse of him way up there with god. In my mind, god was cradling him in his arms, and Jesus was sitting on his right-hand side, both of them taking care of my eternally-baby brother. As I grew older, the story of his short life and death became more complex. After he died, the doctor that had dismissed my mother stopped practicing medicine. In college, I learned that my brother also had a rare problem with his genetic chromosomes that the doctors at St. Jude didn’t understand the meaning behind. I asked my Biology professor if he’d ever heard of it, and he said no, nowhere in the animal kingdom had he ever heard of this happening. I researched the chromosomes in question and found that my other family members also have problems associated with these two chromosomes.

When I was little, I used to cry at random because Sean was dead. Even though I’d never met him, he was my brother and I noted his absence when my family of five was placed at restaurant tables with six chairs. Even though I’d never met him, and he was only on earth six months, his short life would influence mine forever. While other little girls might sell Girl Scout cookies to earn badges or to go on camping trips, I put my blood, sweat, and tears into raising money for St. Jude. In elementary school, my school had the Math-a-Thon fundraiser each year. Each year, I would be one of the top donators to St. Jude–because it meant something to me. While my friends didn’t really care if anyone donated, I went around asking every adult I knew. The closest I ever came to raising the most money in school was the year I came in third place. Usually, I came in fourth, and that killed me. My brother had won the Bike-a-Thon the year after Sean died. He won a ten-speed bike that sat in our storage room with flat tires, which I desperately wanted to ride, but I wasn’t allowed to touch it.

What I learned from Sean’s short life is the power of helping others. If my brother had gone to any other hospital and lived for any amount of time, it would’ve bankrupted my parents and I probably would not have been born. Instead, my childhood was filled with fundraisers and community service projects. One year, the Bike-a-Thon was done in memory of my brother and my mother was the chairperson. Sean has been dead 27 years–his 28th birthday would’ve been just two days ago–but his death has given my life so much more meaning than I think it ever would have otherwise had if he had never gotten sick (and, obviously, I was still born). His life and death puts a face for me on the people who are helped by the kindnesses of others–in this case, Danny Thomas, et al. When I think about cancer or St. Jude, I think of my brother, even if it’s just the imaginary fun a lonely little girl created in her mind when her siblings wouldn’t play with her. Weird as it sounds, I was never afraid of death as a child because I knew my brother would be there waiting on me.

In hearing stories about my brother’s life and death, I learned what it really means to be brave. Last year, someone called me a “pillar of strength” during an emergency situation. While they would’ve been freaking out, I was calm. Having learned from the example of my mother in times of crisis, I couldn’t imagine any other way to react than to deal with the situation at hand because this situation–the threat of suicide by a friend in my home–demanded immediate action. Little did I know that my reaction would convince my friend to let me get her help without creating a dramatic scene and calm my friend’s parents hundreds of miles away on the phone. I learned that day that I, too, could be brave, and this bravery could be a positive influence on others. If I’d never had tragedies in my life, and even before my life began, I would not have learned this.

Today, among my many other bracelets, I wear two bracelets in remembrance of the brother I never knew: one for leukemia research, and one for St. Jude. Each time someone asks me what they represent allows me the opportunity to share my brother’s short life with another person, allowing his memory to live on in them and putting a face to childhood cancer. In college, a friend who was starting a “swear jar” and looking for a charity to donate the money towards, told me that she would never donate to St. Jude because “they get too much money.” I would like to think that when I looked at her and firmly told her that my brother died there, that in the awkward oh-shit moment before she began apologizing unceasingly, she learned to consider that she never knows the full history of those to whom she is speaking.

The Only Thing You Have to Fear

This morning, I listened to an NPR radio broadcast about fear (featuring my dear friend Sister Susan). I’ve spent a lot of time before pondering the nature of fear. In fact, in college, I wrote a paper about the philosophy of fear and the use of boggarts in the Harry Potter series. Having grown up in a religion that used fear as a basis of theology, I’ve always been fascinated by the power of it. Fear has an amazing way to control people. It can control where you go, who you meet, what you believe–it can control everything about you if you let it and, in my childhood, it did. That is how I came to grow up and despise fear and the use of fear to control others.

When I was little, my brother made up a story when we were on vacation in Branson, Missouri, to make me afraid of the “motel man” that was going to Get Me in the bathroom. He was relentless. Every breath was motel man, motel man, motel man. From then on, I was scared of bathrooms–not just a little afraid, but a lotafraid. On the way home, motel man was waiting for me every place we stopped. The only way I would use the bathroom was if my sister or my mother came with me to literally hold my hand while I shook from fear. I wasted no time in generalizing my fear to all bathrooms, even after I forgot all about motel man until my mother mentioned it after I was an adult, and I vaguely remembered the trip. I was only about three years old, after all, making my brother 16 at the time. It would turn out to be the strangest, longest-lasting, and most embarrassing fear of my life yet. When I was around ten, my mom was still having to force me to bathe if we were in a motel with only a shower. She’d have to go in with me and bathe me. As a teenager, I attended the state 4-H O’Rama and the dorms had communal bathrooms with massive, rusted exposed pipes abovehead. I was terrified. I grew out of a lot of my fear, but even as an adult, sometimes, I find a bathroom that still scares me. Remembering a childhood of sometimes wetting my pants in public because I was too afraid of the bathroom just makes me angry and determined to both not ever become afraid of something so stupid again, and to not ever be so cruel as to purposefully make a child afraid of something. This, like many other things I’ve discussed in this forum, goes back to the choice between whether to live one’s live positively or negatively.

I hate fear. I hate being afraid. Fear seems like such a negative energy to me. Doing something that scares me and having it turn out well, however, is exhilarating. Doing things you’ve been told you couldn’t do, or thought you couldn’t do, is amazingly empowering. I’ve learned to take the adrenaline of my fear and use it for positive good. The more that I do this, the less I’m afraid and the more my self-confidence overall grows. The only thing you have to fear is fear, itself–but fear is a very powerful motivator, when used to fuel you to do what scares you. Personally, I find that Psalms 23 comforts me.

There Is Much to Do

Growing up, my family never missed a church service on Sundays. Often, we were made to go even if we were sick. We might have been too sick to go to school the next day, but the fate of our eternal souls rested on sitting in those hard pews for hours being bored out of our skulls each week–to miss one service was to risk an eternity in hell. So, it was with great disdain that my dad took me home one Sunday shortly after Easter when I was about eleven after I’d passed out in the church bathroom and thrown up all over myself upon regaining consciousness. Despite that I was wearing a white dress covered in my own vomit, I had to argue for several minutes in the auditorium as to my genuinely needing to go home.

As much as I might not like it, my fundamentalist childhood has shaped who I am today. When I’m sad, I often sing religious songs to myself in my head. No matter how much hurt these songs are laced with, they’ve still always been oddly comforting, even in the depths of my years of atheism. No matter how many cruel things I can remember being said or done in the name of god, I can still remember good things from my fundamentalist childhood too.

This morning, on a bus downtown, a song suddenly came to me after pondering something else. It’s a song I’ve spent quite a bit of effort trying to track down online, only to find that it’s very old (thus, not sang by most churches, just like a lot of the songs from the church of my childhood) and goes by many names when I actually can find the lyrics to it. In our songbooks, it was called “Lord, Send Me.” I’m almost certain of this. It also goes by the name “There Is Much to Do” and “Here Am I, Send Me.” On the bus, I found myself automatically recalling all the words to the first part: There is much to do, there is work on every hand; hark the cry for help comes ringing through the lands . . .

This is one of my favorite hymns because it reminds me of my Bible school teacher from fifth grade, Ms. Ruth. She was an eccentric, senile octogenarian who was placed in a nursing home before the end of my fifth grade year. When I was ten, I despised her. I didn’t have a good reason why, mind. I thought she was the weirdest woman on earth the way she acted like she was high on Jesus or something, while I pretended to do my Bible school work, but was actually drawing little birds and trees in my workbook. If Jesus made people act like her, no thanks, man. You can keep your Kool-aid. I remembered her telling me repeatedly (well, it was new to her . . .) her favorite Bible verse: Isaiah 6:8, the here am I, Lord, send me; the famous missionary verse. She closed her eyes and looked up at the flourescent lighting, quoting the verse with a faraway smile and extending her wrinkly arms up to the ceiling as if reaching for god himself. It was at that moment that I was pretty sure this woman was the craziest effing person I’d ever met, thank you very much. She opened her eyes and looked back at me, so at peace with herself with having recited the verse, and told me how amazingly brave Isaiah was for having such faith. He was willing to give up everything for god. He would’ve gone anywhere, done anything, unafraid of the consequences because he had such faith in Christ. We, as Christians, should be so brave as well to stand up for our beliefs–to stand up for what’s right in what can be such a cruel world–so that one day god will come down and we can say “here am I, Lord, send me.”

While I sat there staring at the clock that Sunday and every Sunday of my childhood, I never forgot her enthusiasm for this verse. Later, I mocked her as a crazy old lady to my mother and she reprimanded me severely for it, telling me to not call people that and informing me that she was a very nice person and she was sick of people at church making fun of her because she was different–because she wore ’70s thift store clothes and walked everywhere, because she was so happy and excited about god. I never forgot that lesson, either: the lesson of accepting people for who they are, and not judging them–or using disabilist language to describe them. By this time, Ms. Ruth was in the nursing home, and I never saw her again. She died when I was a teenager.

Each time the congregation sang this song–”Lord, Send Me”–I felt angry. Ms. Ruth was only ever herself and was always so excited about Jesus, but all the church people could do was laugh at her behind her back. The woman who taught me that we should stand up for our beliefs was mocked for being so excited about her own in her own church. Sometimes, I think about that song and what she taught me, and I’m glad I knew her, if even for a little while, and even if I was completely ungrateful at the time. Her lesson was two-fold: to be brave, and to be yourself. Those are two of the most important lessons anyone could ever teach. When I hear people make fun of Christianity as a whole or when I am protesting something I find important, I remember Ms. Ruth, and she is Sent.

How Has the Recession Affected You?

This question was asked by a speaker at the National Assembly to End the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She asked four questions, and asked the audience to stand and remain standing if the answer was yes to any of the questions for us or anyone we knew. While I don’t remember all the questions, the first was “Have you or someone you know lost their job as a result of the recession?” and the last was “Have you or someone you know suffered from increased mass transit fares?” I, along with almost the entire audience, was standing from question one. By the end, I don’t think anyone was sitting.

For some reason, my mother has the tendency to think I am always one step away from starvation or the street, despite my assurances that I really do comprehend the concept of saving my money. (She told me once it was her job to worry. Sigh.) When I was growing up, my parents had four kids and a tiny three bedroom house. When my younger-older brother died, my parents had to scrape for the cash to bury him, and they never, ever forgot the lesson that sometimes, bad things happen, and bad things are very expensive. So Dad worked from dawn ’til dark, six days a week most weeks, and Mom saved as much as she could through not taking me to the doctor or the dentist, and often not having food in the kitchen. When I turned sixteen, my parents saved still more money by not teaching me how to drive, thus keeping me off their auto insurance.

When I got my first job–a horrid, sweatshop-esque minimum wage job in a candy factory–I felt rich. My parents had only ever given me $5/week allowance, and now I made more than that in an hour. So I saved almost every last penny I earned burning and cutting my hands on brittle that was a boiling blob in its gel form and sharp as glass in its brittle form. Later, I would use this money to pay for taking the GRE repeatedly and for a plane ticket to Providence. I moved to Connecticut with $500 to my name.

The difference between my mother and I is that I don’t worry. I know I will be okay and things will work out. I know I need very little to survive. I don’t think about the things I do without–tv, furniture (that didn’t come from the dumpster . . .), etc. I’m happy. I have my computer and wifi and an amazing apartment and my pets and tons of friends and a bus pass that can take me almost anywhere I want to go in the area, and I feel rich for this. I have no money, but I love my life right now. When I first moved into my apartment, I just laid down on the carpet and smiled. Interestingly, it was my mother who said countless times throughout my childhood, If you pray, why worry? If you worry, why pray? Why, indeed, Mother?

I grew up hearing stories from my granny and my Uncle George about the Depression. To quote my Uncle George, “Times was hard, but we didn’ know it. We’s all in the same boat, and we was happy.”

Don’t You Talk About My Granny That Way

Tonight, I found myself exploring country songs again on youtube while creating art. I came upon Alabama’s “Song of the South,” which I’ve always loved. Growing up, I always cranked up the radio when this song came on. I can remember being little and my mother singing “and I shut my mouth” in one of the silly voices she used when reading to me to make me giggle. When I was little, of course, I didn’t really understand what the song was about. Growing up, I understood more and more, until finally writing a paper my Junior year of college about my county in the Great Depression, which I named “Somebody Told Us Wall Street Fell,” because it was so true for the people I interviewed and the newspapers from the time that I read. While industrialized cities in the North suffered terribly from the Depression, the rural South was already poor. My own home county was more affected by the droughts of the mid-’20s (my family lived just east enough to not be considered part of the Dust Bowl) and the Flood of 1927, which my granny and my great-uncle spent their entire lives retelling. This song, unlike so many gag-me-with-a-spoon country songs, is just so true for so many people at the time. As a historian, I find that highly attractive. As a Southerner, I find it still more attractive. Yes, please do tell me more about my own history, darling.

So that’s why I feel so compelled to reply here in regards to many of the comments left on this video. Let’s just sum it up with this . . . lovely . . . comment, which begs me to recollect what my mother always told me about how when you point your finger, there are four more pointing back at you: did you white-trash christian scumbags decide to take a break from killing niggers, queers, and jews, to put your retarded videos on you tube?

First and foremost, I must say the following: Oh no you didn’t say that about my momma. Now then, I would like to discuss Southern stereotypes.

This is my granny. She died when I was 17, only a few months before I graduated high school. And I want to be exactly like her. When I was a Junior in college, I took a class–US 1900-1945–taught by a professor originally from Michigan. Even though he’d lived in Arkansas long enough that all of his children (one of which was in my grade in school) knew no other home. Despite this, the professor never did understand Southerners and would frequently piss off every single one of us in class because the things he said were just wrong. According to him, all Southerners of this time hated black people and all Southerners basically took part in lynch mobs or something. 

One day, I finally raised my hand and informed him that my granny had black friends, thank you very much, and so did my uncle, her brother. In fact, her very best friend when she was alive was a black woman. I stopped short of actually saying “so shut the fuck up, please,” but I did give him an actual example from the Flood of ’27, when my uncle and other neighbors helped bury a black woman who’d died. Since there was no other dry land except the Indian mound on my family’s property, she was buried there. Does that sound like the actions of a people blinded by their hatred to you?

True, there are people fitting his description. I don’t contest this. I do, however, take exception that someone–a historian, no less–would resign that all of any people were one way or another. This is why I went that entire semester ready to throw things.

I think if I learned anything from my granny, it’s to accept other people for who they are, and to keep on keeping on. At her funeral, my brother delivered a eulogy in leiu of a sermon, even though my granny was a deeply religious woman. She used to tell us that no one could ever steal our education or our souls, and told us to learn all we could so we could have a good life. My granny had a fire in her. While it’s cliche to say she could light up a room, she did. While I have many memories of her being angry and a few of her being sad, always, always, I think of her happiness first–her happiness in spite of having had such a terribly hard life. That, and her willingness for adventure.

At her funeral, my brother told of the time she played in the rain with me on the Fourth of July. She was probably about 76 at the time, and while my mother worried she’d fall and break a hip or something, my granny just laughed at her. So we stood there in the rain, bouncing a plastic ball back and forth to each other, Granny giggling even more than me. About this same time, she wanted to go work at the peach orchard climbing the trees to pick peaches to make some extra money in addition to her Social Security check. My mother’s reaction was to laugh and tell her they wouldn’t hire her, which made my granny yell “Don’t put us down!” as she would do each time she felt my mother was being ageist. (The thing is, I have no doubts about her ability to climb trees, and know very well she’d do it just to show you she could.)

My mom told me once that when I was about three, I said “I like going to Granny’s, but I hate going to Grandma’s [my fraternal grandmother, my granny's polar opposite in personality].” It was after this that Granny would babysit me (well, that, and Grandma left three-year-old me unattended in her carport mere feet away from the street). She had a fake Barbie doll that she insisted we play with every time I came over. She’d make clothes for it and get all excited because now she had an excuse to play with her pseudo-Barbie doll again. I never really liked that stupid doll much, but after my granny died, I took the doll back home with me. Me, I always wanted to play with her building bricks, but she wouldn’t let me because my brother had built her a little house with them and used up all the bricks. At the time, I failed to see the sentimental value she had with the house that, throughout my entire memory, took up a place of honor on the left side of her piano, right next to all our family portraits, and my “baby doll,” as she called the pseudo-Barbie.

I remember playing checkers with milk caps with her. When I was little, I relished in what a good player I was because I beat her every time. One day when I was older, I had the sudden realization that Granny had gotten really good overnight as I watched more of my milk caps disappearing from the board.

The photo above was taken on Grandparents Day 1993 at my school. My granny came to eat lunch with me, then grandparents and grandchildren were directed to the courtyard for photos. My granny never missed a school event. She walked with me all the way to the newspaper office and back each year in primary school for the Just Say No to Drugs walk, came to my plays and musicals. When I was about eight, she had to go to Wal-Mart when she was babysitting me. I think she told every single person in the store that I was her “grandbaby,” the name I cherished because it set me apart from my siblings. I was the one and only youngest grandchild.

So, when you make generalizations that all of a people are one way or another, you’re talking about someone’s dear granny. You’re talking about someone that somebody else loves. You’re blaming people who spent their lives teaching their children and their grandchildren to love and accept other people, no matter their differences, for the harm that others inflicted. Not only are stereotypes wrong, they hurt.