The Bright, Swampy South Where I Come From

Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle: a Novel

A young Black boy in a small Mississippi town is accused of crossing a stark line: he speaks with unforgivable freshness to a well-off White woman. The woman’s husband, rich but damaged from fighting in Korea, can’t let that stand. So he hires a representative of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi’s vast White trash community to make it right. But like vengeful husbands everywhere, he can’t control what he’s put in motion.

There’s two ways to write about America’s largest nation within a nation, the Solid South. Flannery O’Connor and Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner wrote while living in the South, describing their neighbors in terms those neighbors might’ve described themselves, even if the product was often unflattering. Erskine Caldwell and Harper Lee fled the South, resettling elsewhere and writing for a primarily Northern audience who didn’t share their expectations.

Lewis Nordan, a critical darling who nevertheless escaped a commercial breakthrough and toiled in anonymity, takes the second approach. Though born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, which he thinly camouflaged as Arrow Catcher, he spent his career teaching, mostly in Pittsburgh. Like Harper Lee, he presents a South populated by stereotypes and authorial sock puppets, who enact a plot largely designed to reassure Northerners that they could never stoop this low.

A Chicago teenager, identified only as Bobo, is visiting kinfolk in Arrow Catcher. Being a Northerner, Bobo doesn’t understand Mississippi’s intricate rules for how “colored” youth should comport themselves in mixed company. His boasting and strutting gets perceived as a sexual advance on a married White woman: witnesses accuse him of directing the titular Wolf Whistle at Sally Anne Montberclair. Soon the story travels throughout town.

History readers will recognize this premise. Yes, Nordan has created a fictionalized retelling of the Emmett Till lynching. To his credit, Nordan avoids low-hanging fruit, staying away from maudlin depictions of the actual events; he cares more about the soap-operatic inner torment of the characters surrounding the violence. But that doesn’t absolve Nordan of responsibility for a major misinterpretation: he depicts lynching as a crime, like a Northerner would.

Lewis Nordan

People who don’t read racial history might mistake my meaning when I call lynching something other than a crime. But Nordan, like Harper Lee, depicts lynching happening in the heat of anger, under the cover of darkness. Most important, though Nordan says the lynching happens at the instigation of Arrow Catcher’s richest man, that’s as persuasive as a fishnet condom, since a walking Po’ White Trash stereotype does the killing.

Lynchings usually happened in broad daylight; killers often photographed themselves with the corpse, and printed the pictures as penny postcards. Because the entire point of lynching was to remind survivors that the perpetrators didn’t fear consequences. Emmett Till’s lynching was an unusually private affair, but it wasn’t secret. His killers admitted their actions, because they knew no Mississippi jury would hold them culpable. And they were right; they were acquitted.

Nordan, like Harper Lee, paints lynching as impetuous, drunken, and hasty. Not something undertaken with forethought, Bobo’s murder is fraught with a tragicomic level of infighting and slapstick incompetence. (Randall Kenan’s back-cover blurb compares Nordan’s writing to Shakespearean comedy, which isn’t unfair.) By contrast, Emmett Till’s lynching was planned for three days in advance. In real life, lynchings were grotesquely ritualized affairs.

I struggle while reading this book. Because I’ve just spent several paragraphs describing how Nordan misrepresents lynching, in ways presumably designed to reassure Northern readers that only hickish trailer trash would do something so horrible. I keep mentioning Harper Lee, who did something similar. These authors want audiences to understand that their White Trash protagonists are different, are outliers. You and I could never do something this disgusting.

But despite this historical slovenliness, Nordan presents interesting characters. They express the kinds of rambling, morally contradictory inner monologues for which O’Connor and Faulkner became famous, creating justifications for their own awfulness. These inner struggles are moving and frequently, yes, comical, as they can’t see past their own noses. I might’ve appreciated these characters, and Nordan’s writing, in a different story, one that didn’t try to score political points.

Simply, I wanted to like Nordan’s book, but I couldn’t ignore how he’d anchored his entire story to historical self-justification. By falsifying how lynchings happened, Nordan assures readers that we couldn’t possibly participate in something so revolting. Equally importantly, he assures readers that Lewis Nordan couldn’t possibly participate. He holds his story’s central event at arm’s length, trying not to get the stain of responsibility on us, or himself.

Britney Spears, Fathers, and Womanhood Deferred

Britney Spears

Perhaps the most appalling news from Britney Spears’ testimony against her court-appointed conservatorship this week concerns her IUD. The revelation that her conservators—mainly her dad—are forcing her to consume pharmaceutical lithium against her will, probably says more about her long-term health and the harm being forced upon her. But audiences probably had more gut-level revulsion to learn that she can’t make her own reproductive health decisions.

With the vantage of hindsight, it’s difficult to consider Spears without her semi-rural Southern origins. Born in McComb, Mississippi, and raised in nearby Kentwood, Louisiana, she started in America’s Bible Belt, was baptized Southern Baptist, and first sang publicly in church. Though she left the Bible Belt, aged eight, to pursue her entertainment career, that upbringing cannot help but loom large in considering the tribulations she currently faces.

Reading the transcript of Spears’ testimony, I’m seized most immediately by how explicitly sexual her father’s control is. He makes decisions about her reproductive health, although she’s thirty-nine years old, because he perceives controlling her sexual decisions as an economic instrument. Britney’s body has become a commodity which her father markets, like he’d market her clothing if she designed fashion. Jamie Spears’ management of his daughter’s career is painfully sexual.

This testimony occurred just days after Spears’ family church, the Southern Baptists, shared a cringe-inducing “Modest Is Hottest” music video at a denominational gathering. I’m somewhat more forgiving of singer-songwriter Matthew West, who sings from a father’s viewpoint, because parents do frequently have to make decisions about appropriate wardrobe and comportment for minor children, who by definition can’t make such decisions for themselves. But that forgiveness only goes so far.

My problem is, Matthew West, like Jamie Spears, frames appropriate behavior in terms of being “hot.” That is, while the commercial forces that often dominate American life value women according to their ability to get naked, West values his daughters according to their ability to resist this appeal. Yet he openly frames this resistance in terms of sexual appeal and attractiveness. Like Spears, West dominates and commodifies his daughters’ sexuality.

The Purity Culture of the 1990s, which dominated—and frequently still dominates—Bible Belt Christianity, sees adolescent girls as entirely sexual beings, defined by their ability to tempt and entice men. Britney Spears and Matthew West express the extremes of this definition. From her beginnings, when Britney tied her shirttails above her navel in her “Baby One More Time” video, fresh-faced adolescent sexuality has occupied the core of her message.

Britney with Paris Hilton, ca. 2008

Yet Britney’s sexuality, sure as the West daughters, was controlled by her father and other surrounding adults. Jamie Spears made decisions about how to sell her:, for instance, letting Max Martin pitch her a debut song written for a vocalist ten years older than her. Jamie Spears made marketing and image decisions which were entirely, outwardly sexual. Before she turned eighteen, he made his daughter’s body into a commodity.

This tension between seeing one’s daughter as your little girl, and acknowledging her nascent sexuality, probably plagues fathers worldwide. I can’t imagine what frustration it must cause fathers to give advice and guidance about sex, knowing daughters will ignore some or all advice until it’s too late. Yet 1990s Purity Culture, and the opposite number embodied in Britney’s in-your-face exhibitionism, made girls into completely sexual beings, then entrusted that sexuality to fathers.

Readers old enough, like me, to remember the emergence of “purity balls,” know what I mean. These weird virginity proms spotlighted fathers and daughters in relationship. These girls were presented as already women, but per the arrangement, they consciously abnegated their own sexuality, entrusting it altogether to their fathers. These bizarre, frequently disturbing events turn adolescent girls into childlike dependents and also Jezebels at the same time.

In fairness, discordant events like this aren’t exactly inexplicable. As traditional gender roles have proved unsatisfactory, and have receded, without anything prepared to take their place; as sexual mores have evolved, reflecting the fact that most families don’t need to breed their own workforce anymore, older people feel dislocated. Rapid change, venturing into unknown territory, is scary. Some people seek comfort in extreme forms of nostalgia.

But as Britney’s testimony reveals, an iron paternal grip on youthful sexuality doesn’t prevent dangerous consequences; it just changes one unknown outcome for another. Britney’s expertly managed teenage sexuality and Christian Purity Culture couldn’t have existed without one another. Both saw teenaged girls as essentially sexual, and both entrusted that sexuality to heavy-handed dads. And now we’re paying for both.

The Speculative Bubble and the Birth of Modern Capitalism

Thomas Levenson, Money For Nothing: the Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich

The South Sea Bubble, an economic surge that helped solidify nascent capitalism in 1720, maybe isn’t as sexy as, say, Holland’s Tulip Mania of 1637. It hasn’t captured popular imagination the same way. Yet by helping invent mature bond markets and consolidating the power of the finance industry in modern politics, it ushered in the industrial “ownership society” we live with today. And it feels chillingly familiar.

Thomas Levenson, MIT Professor of Science Writing, seems an unlikely historian of Great Britain’s newly invented bond markets. His prior works for general audiences have focused on science icons like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. Yet during the early Eighteenth Century, many British scientists, including Newton, reinvented themselves as financiers and civil servants. Their faith in mathematics and empiricism helped create a “scientific” approach to early modern economics.

This book covers roughly the period from 1693, when Parliament struck a deal with William of Orange to nationalize the public purse, to 1722, when the South Seas Bubble nearly bankrupted Britain. Before 1693, the public purse was basically the monarch’s personal resources, available to boost the crown’s personal glory. Taxes could supplement public funds, but decisions were tied to the monarch personally, making futures trades on public funds virtually impossible.

Once Britain’s national funds belonged to Parliament, it became possible to organize and sell derivatives. London had two markets then: the official Exchange, and the unofficial, unregulated coffee shops of Exchange Alley. Laws creating joint-stock corporations were more restrictive then, meaning fewer companies existed, and trades often occurred informally. Without standards, buyers often didn’t know what futures were really worth; stock-jobbing was a casino.

Into this unregulated market swaggered Parliament, and its new invention, the Bank of England. Britain needed cheap money to support ongoing wars with its traditional rivals, France and Spain. So Parliament began floating derivatives on the Exchange: annuities, pensions, and even lotteries. These derivatives had recently been invented by government mathematicians, including Newton and Edmond Halley (of comet fame), and the market was really an experiment. Failure was always a possibility.

Thomas Levenson

Alongside the government’s gambling, the South Sea Company emerged, willing to take another huge gamble, hoping to establish trade between London, and Spain’s Caribbean colonies. One problem: Britain and Spain were at war, again. While waiting for traditional enemies to resolve their differences, South Sea executives derived elaborate business plans based on Newton and Halley’s actuarial tables. Those plans looked so good, Exchange Alley began salivating.

Soon, the South Sea Company began seeing lucrative stock valuations, based not on anything they’d actually manufactured or sold, but upon the putative value of their future plans. Company principals used this valuation as leverage for their own borrowing. In so doing, they invented a rudimentary form of modern credit swap, creating actual monetary prices for promises. South Sea money wasn’t based on gold or land; it was based on futures.

Anyone familiar with the Great Recession will anticipate where this is headed. Because early government attempts to borrow on credit involved annuities with absurdly long payouts, Parliament was saddled with old debt when it needed to finance new. The Bank of England saw a convergence of Parliament’s needs with the South Sea Company, and devised an idea entirely new in Western finance: privatizing the public debt.

Through a Parliamentary action too complex to summarize, the South Sea Company began hoovering up public debt and translating it into common stock. Stockholders began receiving dividends based on government obligations, while the company continued conspicuously doing nothing. To untrained eyes (which included most of Exchange Alley), this looked like free money. Jealous investors began buying in, and stock prices soared. Many people became rich… on paper.

Levenson includes an epilog comparing the South Sea Bubble to the Great Recession, but not extensively. He trusts informed readers to recognize the parallels. What happened on Exchange Alley in 1720 looks rudimentary compared to today’s credit-default swaps and other derivatives, but in principle, they’re basically identical. And when the crash came, London had two choices: repair this newly discovered system, or return to the old ways.

To their credit, Britain’s investors chose wisely.

Alongside this new economy came a new government. As Levenson relates, the monarch becomes increasingly irrelevant, while an eager young politician, Robert Walpole, consolidates power, and becomes something new: a Prime Minister. The rise of early-modern economics helps create the early-modern government. Though Levenson says it’s risky to suggest our world was birthed around 1720, that implication clearly exists.

We’re living in the South Sea’s shadow.

The End of the Ends of the World

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth 1)

Essun, a humble schoolteacher and mother, returns home one fateful afternoon to find her toddler son murdered, presumably by his father. Her world, as she knows it, has ended. The grief leaves her so shocked and paralyzed that she fails to notice when the literal end of the world begins around her: earthquakes, volcanoes, ashfall from the sky. Only latterly does she realize she has to venture out into Armageddon.

N.K. Jemisin had written several critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels before beginning this, her breakout success. This volume addresses the circularity of time, how past events form our present in ways we can’t shake. Essun wants to establish herself, but doesn’t know herself. She’s been molded by a system of fears and doubts, a terrifying bureaucracy which has taught her to fit in or be, literally, struck down.

This novel belongs to a science fiction subgenre called “Dying Earth.” This subgenre deals with civilizations so far into the future, our present isn’t even a historical oddity. Technology has become so advanced that, as Clarke posited, it’s indistinguishable from magic. Yet entropy has become widespread, the Earth is used up, and the Sun is dying. Characters can’t fight for the future, because there barely is any future.

From childhood, society has taught Essun to fear certain people. Then she discovers she’s one of the feared. This novel addresses three stages in Essun’s life: Jemisin doesn’t state this directly until late, we could be reading about three different women, but experienced readers will recognize early that we’re witnessing Essun’s Maiden, Mother, and Crone stages, sort of. The ways she learns to love and hate.

Lifted from her provincial childhood and taken to the Empire’s greatest academy, young Damaya is taught the ways of orogeny, a sort of plate-tectonic wizardry. She’s immensely powerful, but the Empire fears her powers, and molds her through intensive conditioning. She isn’t permitted to pick her own career, or even her spouse; her life is about compliance with unquestionable authority. This authority is paternalistic, even loving, but always autocratic.

As a child, Damaya simply asks questions and wants to better understand her world. She seeks knowledge, but the bureaucracy deems certain knowledge too dangerous. Instead, she’s channeled to public service. Her career is chosen, and her sexuality becomes a matter of semi-public spectacle. She could’ve been a scientist, but the state deems science dangerous. When she rebels against social order, it literally kills people.

N.K. Jemisin

In young womanhood, renamed Syenite, the Empire uses her abilities to preserve its own ideals. This concept of Empire matters greatly. Jemisin’s characters discuss power, conquest, and the instruments of control. The Empire, we learn early, is moribund and decrepit, the Emperor a prisoner, and the bureaucracy marches on. Nothing new gets invented, because to the Empire, the only meaningful truth is continuity.

Finally, in adulthood, Essun wants what everyone wants, love and relationship and community. She becomes a wife and mother; but the secrets she’s spent decades burying reveal themselves in her children. She has to pay for the secrets she’s kept, because even amidst the End of Days, powerful people out there still see her as an enemy who needs to be crushed. And somewhere, she still has one surviving child.

Jemisin’s system, reflecting the three stages of woman in pre-Christian religion, suggests that Essun might be a nascent goddess. She faces systems of control and, in different ways at different times, decides whether to comply or resist. This may include malicious compliance, near the end: on one level she’s broken, but on another, she becomes independent where the world abandons her, and she transcends the world’s fight-or-obey dichotomy.

Essun’s maturation reflects ours, as all literature is about its audience. Throughout the story, she faces the reality of her dead child, or children; she exists without a real future. Environmental decay, technological bloat, and alienation from herself: Essun is the modern adult woman, adrift in a world that perceives her as inherently dangerous, even before she’s actually done anything. Sadly she lives up to, or down to, the world’s expectations.

Jemisin combines several existing tropes: pre-Christian stages of womanhood, or Freud’s belief that civilization causes neurosis, to name just two. But she sees these tropes through a lens that is particularly modern, American, and Black. She offers a literature of rebellion, of anti-imperialism, even when breaking the empire could have grim ramifications. This isn’t a manifesto, don’t misinterpret me; it’s simply a book about not complying with evil, dying systems.

Look What They've Done To Juneteenth, Ma

The Juneteenth Flag, designed by Ben Haith and Lisa Jeanne Graf, per the Boston Globe

This week’s completed legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday leaves me with distinctly mixed feelings. I appreciate the desire to federally recognize the day Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, received word of the Emancipation Proclamation. It not only recognizes those formerly enslaved Americans’ liberation, it also recognizes liberation didn’t come all at once. Word needed to travel, and in some American regions, still needs to travel.

However, I feel squeamish about giving the event official calendar recognition. Consider other federal holidays. Labor day recognizes America’s labor movement, while we retain laws making labor organizing difficult, and limiting collective bargaining. We have Martin Luther King, Jr., day, which has basically become another scheduled day off school. We officially recognize what these days mean, but practically, they’ve become intellectual clutter.

In creating another holiday, the state does largely what the church does by making somebody a saint: it incorporates them into the structure. Their uniqueness gets subsumed, they stop challenging the status quo, and the system chooses which aspects get celebrated. Distinct qualities disappear, especially if those qualities are impolitic, because the individual or event becomes part of the superstructure. Dr. King or Samuel Gompers get reduced to bromides.

Most important, though, the institution gets to clothe itself in somebody else’s virtue. In retelling the narrative of Galveston’s liberation, the state innately implies: we did this. State power brought liberation to Galveston’s enslaved population. This narrative will, almost inevitably, minimize both Galveston’s slavemasters, who concealed the Emancipation Proclamation for over two years, and Galveston’s enslaved workers, and the resistance they offered to the Peculiar Institution.

The state’s hagiography, represented in national holidays, creates a particular narrative. July 4th, for instance, becomes about “We Hold These Truths,” while omitting, say, the “Merciless Indian Savages.” MLK Day becomes about triumphs accomplished, not justice delayed, and certainly not about any backsliding we’ve suffered since then. Based on history, I fear Juneteenth will become about White liberators, not Black resistance.

Juneteenth certainly happened, don’t mistake me. Major General Gordon Granger’s troops definitely occupied Galveston on June 19th, 1866. But by creating a holiday, with the accompanying justificatory narrative, that becomes the most important fact: the act of state. The Great White Father signing General Order Number 3 trumps the suffering imposed by powerful people, or the acts of resistance, great or small, performed by the masses.

A Juneteenth celebration at the Lincoln Memorial in 2020, per ABC News

In decreeing the celebration, the state clothes itself in vestments of virtue, and claims: we brought your freedom. The state claims itself an air of goodness which, in practice, it still lacks. It takes credit for motivating history, although at present, it continues minimizing attempts to remedy the broken system. It purports that the state relieves the oppressed, and therefore, whatever the state does—or wants to do—must perforce be good.

When citizens press the state to actually provide material benefits, that becomes a problem. When asked to lift the poor from poverty, especially generational or racialized poverty, the state pleads poverty and claims there’s nothing it can do. But it performs signs that involve no actual commitment, like decreeing a holiday, because that grants the outward appearance of virtue. Like a teenager cosplaying Captain America, the state looks heroic, but does nothing.

Far worse, I think, than the inevitable descent into barbecues and chain-store sales, this process represents how creating holidays damages the core. Federal holidays have turned Dr. King, the labor movement, and Jesus Christ become stand-ins for the establishment, their orphaned quotes reduced to slogans for the status quo, as historian Kevin M. Kruse writes. Holidays make dissidents into federal employees.

Consequently, today’s powerful people get to feel virtuous. They feel like they’ve contributed something to the discourse. What they’ve contributed doesn’t actually improve anything, or make anyone’s situation better, certainly, but that doesn’t much matter. They feel good, reassured that they aren’t historic villains for holding power. They clothe themselves in virtuous robes, while exempting themselves from the difficult work of making change.

But individuals aren’t pressed down by holidays, they’re held down by power. Granting federal imprimatur to Juneteenth, without helping the generational victims of redlining (for instance), does nothing about the problems which exist. Holidays are, frankly, easy, and cost little. Remedying the problems which our government, economy, and history have created, requires will and money, resources the state notoriously loathes to spend.<

A Juneteenth holiday at least officially provides recognition to slavery and its legacy, long overdue. But it doesn’t fix the problem, and provides justification to keep deferring any remedy.