BORED BY WHITE PRIDE

max ernst

Saw a thing on facebook promising this could change the way I think. I couldn't click on it. It looked like something like a hugging contest. Something unexpectedly sweet. I couldn't go there, whatever it was. The intro that it's about changing the way I think did it for me. Not that I reject having the way I think changed. I'm always open to adjusting, fine tuning my thinking. I already know my thinking is based in illusion, mixing details, facts, trends, beliefs I'm unaware of, connecting the dots in my head into a skyscraper of cards. Every card a bit of misinformation, inaccurate details, images arranged into a construction composed by my own attitude toward life. What does some person on facebook who never heard of me know about my thinking? The presumption that I think a certain way is what turned me off. How does that person know I don't already think the way he's making a case for? And what if I don't? I'm half tempted go take a look at what it has to say, but refuse to. It brings to mind somebody saying a sentimental act of common decency restored their faith in humanity. Every time I hear it, I think, but cannot say, If that's all it took to restore your faith in humanity, it must not have taken much to lose it. The American madness to change other people's thinking is totally out of bounds in my way of seeing plain decency. The church I grew up in tried to convince me it was my duty to browbeat everyone I know about changing their way of thinking to the only way, the right way, the way the preacher at the church thought. I wouldn't want to lay that on anybody, God as Fear and Punishment. I had to shed that mind. It took fifteen years by school education and self-education by reading and paying attention to the people I know.  

max ernst

Since childhood, I've wanted through the course of my life to know people from different backgrounds, social circumstances, from the poor to the rich, from religious to non-religious, from pastoral people, who live by supposed-to, to ex-convicts and foreigners, Yankees too. I've been fascinated by the varieties of humanity since as far back as I can remember, always interested in people of different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different languages. I even like knowing cops. I believe our Sparta town police, now, are honorable people. It hadn't always been that way. My best friend through grade school was American-Mexican. He was as American as I was, but he was Mexican. My mother worked sometimes in a TG&Y store as accountant. We'd go pick her up after work. A Mexican girl in high school worked there, Juanita. I loved Juanita. I still love the name. She knew that Mitchell was my friend. I loved the Mexican in her. That she was Catholic fascinated me too. I was like a l dog following her around listening to her talk. I asked her once to say something in Spanish. She asked what I wanted her to say. I couldn't think of anything and we laughed. I had Mexican friends all the way through school. I didn't care that it made me suspect to the other white kids. The Mexicans were far more interesting to me than the white Baptist kids. I also did not like the way they were shut out by the white kids. I extended myself to them, wanting to know them, appreciating them as themselves, liking them especially for being different from the suffocating pride of whiteness. White arrogance toward people I knew to be valid human beings made me ashamed of my white privilege. 

max ernst

In the Navy, my friends were the black guys. I was on an old WW2 destroyer that was sold to Brazil soon after I was released. It could run, and it could ride the waves. It took a 90 degree roll one night and uprighted. I loved how the ship rode the waves. In the very worst times when three-quarters of the crew were out with sea-sickness and and puke was everywhere, I kept on going, thinking to self I'd pay for this ride, and it's paying me. I loved it, walking down a hallway bouncing from wall to wall using upper arms for bumpers, going up steps and stepping down what seemed like three feet to step up to the next step, I didn't like the aroma of puke everywhere, on my clothes too, no avoiding it, but I refused to give in to sea-sickness, because riding the waves was my reason for choosing the Navy to stay out of the Army. I loved riding the ocean. The ship had a dozen or more black guys. I liked them the best and enjoyed social times with them. They were people just like me and the other white guys that called me nigger lover. My closest friend on the ship was Muslim, from Boston. One of the guys on the ship from Texas had a cousin who was going with Joe Tex, then a pop singer on the radio. Going onshore, I always went with my black friends. They were the most fun. The white guys went en masse to the sailor bar to drink as much beer as they could and talk big man talk about pussy. With the black guys I went to jazz clubs. They knew where these places were. Had some great jazz club experiences in Europe along the Mediterranean. My friend, Ameen, played jazz piano on the order of Ahmad Jamal, and jazz vibraphone, vibes. We'd go to a club, enjoy the music by good musicians from all over Europe. During intermission he'd introduce himself to the band, we'd drink with the band and talk. Every time, the piano player asked him to play some tunes. His courtesy was never to play more than two.

max ernst

After being acquainted with a fair variety of people, weary of racial tensions, I committed to a white working class community of mountain people, a real culture. As a white dude, I felt most at home among mountain people. I found my grandmother Worthington in them. From early years in these mountains unto now I feel in the mountains as in grandmother's arms. The attitude was hers, the philosophical mind was hers, the colloquialisms were hers, and the feeling was hers. I didn't learn until I'd been here a quarter century that her parents moved to Kansas from east Kentucky, Pulaski County, not long before she was born. Her older brothers and sisters grew up in Kentucky. She grew up in a mountain home, in Kansas. She married a boy whose parents had just moved to Kansas from Ninemile in eastern Tennessee, Bledsoe County. After living here feeling at home in mountain culture as nowhere else, I learned I've got hillbilly blood, lots of it. It was one of the happiest moments in my life to learn I had hillbilly blood on the Worthington side. Great-great grandpa fought for the Confederacy and survived. One of his brothers didn't make it. I felt closest to grandmother in childhood as to any relative. She was my home base. I had fun telling my sisters in Kansas they had hillbilly blood. Throughout my life, I've regretted the divide between races, religions, nationalities in my country. In the grocery store a couple days ago, a black man I'd never seen before came up behind me in line with two items. I invited him to go ahead of me. He was so surprised he looked suspicious, backing up a step. He declined. I said, Go ahead, I'm in no hurry. He did and spoke his gratitude. Mary at the register said that was nice of me. I said, I can't stand to unload my buggy with somebody behind me who has two items. What's the rush? Then realized it was "nice," unexpected, because he was black. I've done the same for white people and got no notice.  

max ernst himself

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REMEMBERING GRANDMOTHER

views east from air bellows

A couple days ago I wrote in the post DOMINION OVER that I had long ago turned the lemon I got in the luck of the draw into lemonade. I just now read it over and thought: How? It came to me in a flash, an image of my home in the woods, and I said: right. This goes all the way back to first memories. It starts with a memory of my great-grandmother's house in Jefferson County, Kansas, near Perry. I don't even know where to start, unless it would be there. I'm looking at the places where I found my comfort in childhood. My memory of great-grandmother is about like a specter. I don't remember her face, though have never forgotten her embrace.  Dora Ann Hale Worthington went to Kansas from Ninemile in Bledsoe County of southeastern Tennessee with her husband John. She died when I was ten, but I don't remember seeing her after age of seven. I've seen the gravestones of her mother and dad in Tennessee, and hers in Kansas. Her first boy, Tom, was my grandpa. The culture of the home he grew up in was hillbilly. They came from the Sequatchie Valley of the Cumberland Plateau. They were still hillbillies. Mountain ranges to east and west. Tom married Tina Marie Dick Worthington and they moved to Kansas City, Kansas, where he became a railroad engineer, drove the big iron horses, and died of pneumonia seven years before I was born. Tina Marie's family moved to Kansas from Pulaski County, Kentucky, in the Cumberland Plateau surrounded by mountains. I knew none of this genealogy before coming to the mountains. All I knew about these grandparents was Perry, Kansas.

 

 

First thing I noticed when I started knowing people was everybody talked like my grandmother. I had nothing to go by to figure that one out. I settled with this was perhaps the rural American way of talking. I felt her presence in the people around me. It was a love vibration. I recall a time after I'd been in the mountains about six months, riding in the car with Van Pruitt, the old Dodge he called the Goat, it would go anywhere, had a posi-trac rear end. A summer day, approximately a mile from the house, we passed a field so thick with black-eyed Susans you couldn't see the ground through them. I've never seen the field that full of flowers since. I remember another field, another year, this one on the farm, loaded with white daisies, so thick they were like snow on the ground. Never since. The moment Van and I rode past the field of black-eyed Susans, something happened in my heart and I realized this moment was the point of no return. There was no going back. I came here with intent not to return, but allowed for the unforeseen, nonetheless. It was a powerful, overwhelming feeling of the point of no return. I'm not one to commit blindly. It was the feeling that I am now committed to this place I cannot leave that made me shudder for a moment. I wasn't really sure I wanted to stay, either. The adjustment required was radical. I wanted a different culture from the one I had always lived in, average American urban, and I was in a culture very different. I wasn't yet confident I wanted to give over entirely to the new culture. Reading was as alien to this culture as the one I'd left. That was nothing new.

 

 

I had to learn to distinguish between living in the culture and being the culture. No matter what, I could never be the culture. That means being born here, growing up here with ancestry here. Mother's milk. I didn't want to be the culture, because I assessed that the people in the culture were awfully hard on one another and especially hard on themselves. Conformity to culture is absolute. I don't conform all the way to any culture. I remember the day Malissie Pruitt noticed I wasn't wearing a belt, "You better put a belt on! Your pants are gonna fall down!" I could only say, No they're not. In the city, we wore jeans without belts, only rednecks wore belts. I studied the culture closely, from the inside, not reading any Appalachian history books, wanting to learn by my own experience the particular people I lived among. Eventually, I learned every county in the mountains has its own personality. Alleghany County has its own personality. Each township in the county has its own variations on the county's collective personality. For example, the people of Whitehead tend to be stoical, straight-faced lovers of God, and continue to feel themselves a community. A severe hardness runs through mountain culture in all its personalities that I cannot adopt for myself. I learned from experience that beating the shit out of our kids and berating them all the time only makes them angry. We have a culture of angry men, women who live with angry men. Seething anger equals manhood. The degree of anger you bear within is the measure of your masculinity quotient. I came to the mountains to work off my anger. Talk about seething with anger. Phew. It was so bad I couldn't live with it anymore. I wanted to do manual labor farm work old-time hillbilly style.

 

 

In the mountains about twenty-eight years, I asked my mother out of idle curiosity if she knew where grandpa Worthington's family went to Kansas from. She didn't know. She thought it might be Tennessee. I got in touch with a cousin who put me in touch with a family genealogist and LO! Ninemile, Tennessee, is a four and a half hour drive from here. Directly across the highway from great-great grandpa's land is a bluegrass place with parking on the grass, a big area for tents and trailers, a covered stage and covered audience area with folding metal chairs. I visited a couple of brothers, my fourth cousins, and it was like I already knew them. Wendell was a butcher, my age. Went to Vanderbilt and family genealogist, always lived alone. He was distant in the way only a hillbilly can be distant. He was friendly in the way a hillbilly is friendly. He'd never heard of Sparta, wasn't curious. First thing he said to me on sight was, I can see the Worthington in you. His brother Phillip wore bib "overhauls" raised fighting chickens, a hundred or so of them running in the meadow with the cows. He told me he kills a hundred and fifty coons a year keeping them off his chickens. I knew how to talk to him, knew how to listen to him. It wasn't anything like, Oh hi cuz! It was like, If you say so, whatever. I was comfortable with that, would have been very uncomfortable with the other. In line with my hillbilly training, I wouldn't have trusted it. I had found the land and people of my ancestry, and they were hillbillies. In my average American urban years, I'd have hated knowing it, would have held it as deepest, darkest secret only torture could wrench loose. I stood on the land that great-great grandpa worked and looked at the landscape 360 degrees, memorizing it. This was the landscape my ancestors there saw every day of their lives. I understood why I call the mountain I live on the home of my soul. At least half my blood is hillbilly. Let the banjer cluck. Grandmother was my comfort through childhood. The Divine hand picked me up like a mama cat moving a kitten and put me down in the core of the culture that made grandma who she was, and who she is in my heart.

 

 

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