TALK ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG

milton avery

Media interest in pointing the finger of blame at the South over racism has become uber-tiresome. The southwestern quadrant of USA is at least as racist as the southeastern; so is the northwestern and the northeastern. To solve a deep-running issue, NY and LA media want to rid-a-flag they've defined racist. Suppress one, another pops up. In the Soviet time, religion was suppressed. As soon as the Soviet system went away, religion came back. American media is engaged in another frenzy of make-a-law-against. We're so overrun with laws against, we're about painted into a corner. Already, any one of us can be arrested at any moment for something we're doing or have done or conspiracy. Example: the word nigger has been suppressed for the last half century. The working class uses it freely, as does the ruling class. It is only the white middle class that says, "the enword," or uses asterisks between obvious letters. F*t is the same as spelling fat. Saying enword and using asterisks is an act of denial that denies nothing. It's being nice, denying it while saying it. Like it was ok to say shit in front of mommy if I quoted somebody else saying it.

milton avery

I don't mean to be going on like I'm serious about the matter. The flag is too complicated an issue to limit to right or wrong, true or false. Like everything in this phenomenal world we call living, too much is interwoven, experience, thought, beliefs, to call anything or anybody one thing or another. I don't like the way somebody who got drunk and did something stupid that lasted maybe three seconds is called a criminal. I also don't like the way people who have served their time are treated and watched as criminals after their time is served. This is getting into things I have a problem with that I can't do anything about, but I don't have to be that way in my own behavior. Ex-cons I've met along the way, I regard with the same respect as anyone else, with a bit more respect for what they have been through in what I consider an unjust legal system, especially if you're black or any version of non-white, colored, or poor white. Again, nothing I can do about it. I fall back on my boycott of one. Today, I set out to buy a watermelon, wanting to paint one again. I chose to buy it at a roadside stand instead of Food Lion. I can't see giving my five dollars to a corporation that underpays its employees and treats them like shit when I can give somebody an assist who goes into the field early in the morning and selects the produce herself. 

milton avery

I stopped by the welding shop on the way home to visit with Ross and Harry. Milly, Ross's sister, stopped by for a bit and we had a good time sitting and standing in a circle, smoking cigarettes, laughing like the bunch of rednecks we are. These are people I feel at-home free with. We're so close in the heart, I'm about the same as a Richardson. I'm natured a lot like one. Milly and I have been at each other's throats almost with knives, Ross and I have too, and they're my friends I can count on for backup if needed unto the grave. It runs both ways. The subject of the flag came up and we had different thoughts and passions on the matter. Harry most of all. Harry is a retired Army lifer. He said the Confederate flag is treasonous, they fought against the American Army. He called it "you-guys' flag." I said the Civil War was a Yankee invasion. The South defended homeland. Ross said he knows what the flag means. It don't make no differ'nce to him. Milly, the Civil War buff, went off on Yankees and we laughed quite a lot. Except Harry, who identifies Southern, but not with any glorification of the Civil War. It was the Richardson in the rest of us that got us wound up about the South the homeland. 

milton avery

Yesterday, watching the race, Justin told me he was out of sorts with Dale Earnhardt Jr, his favorite driver, for coming out and making a statement that Nascar shouldn't have anything to do with the Confederate flag. I hated to see him so disappointed by a guy he looks up to so personally, like an older brother. He likes Jr's character. I told him Jr is not his own man. I said every time you see him in a commercial, he gets at least hundreds of dollars per showing. He was told by Nascar and corporate sponsors this is what he will do. To say no would cost him hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe his career. I pointed out that television is about money not ethics. Jr is in that world of high-paid celebrities. Once you cross the line into celebrity, your life is no longer your own, you're a product, your name a logo. I wanted to remind him this is a show, this is not real. I knew he knew, just forgot it in a moment of passion. This just a pie-slice of my friends. Very few of them would repeat any other. One can give a hundred reasons for, and another a hundred reasons against, every one of the two hundred reasons valid from some point of view. 

milton avery

The only thing I can see coming of this banning of the flag is a new item in the inventory of underground collectables, flea markets loaded with inflated Confederate flag items, if you know who to ask. Suppression never works and the ones doing the suppressing never get it. We'll have roadside stands selling velvet wall hangings of the flag, tshirts, belt buckles, an infinity of possibilities, just like now. My solution: deal with racism up front and let interest in the flag fade away as it will when nobody cares anymore. I feel like it is healthy for collective American culture to face up to racism as our way of life. Everyone knows it, everyone lives it. We act like we never heard of it. Our racism is rooted deep in our American denial. Which came first, denial or racism? Something like this needs to be brought into awareness collectively, as it does individually, before any real work can be done toward untying the knots of habit patterns that go all the way back to the beginning. It's looking like the Charleston church slayings have brought awareness of pervasive racism in white rule to the surface. If we don't get past blaming the flag, it will have been for naught. I can't imagine television allowing awareness of racism in the white American heart to go beyond blame and punishment, especially not unto self-awareness. 

milton avery

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MY FRIEND ROSS

maxwell equipment, whitehead

I stopped in at Maxwell Equipment in Whitehead to see Ross and the others working there. Ross was the only one in. He was going through some boxes he kept odd parts in, used pipes of various sizes, parts he kept for unknown possible needs. I didn't want to interrupt his focus. I waited and fell into looking at a photograph of Jr Maxwell on the wall under the clock. The photograph was taken by Ross's dad, Dean, who went on a couple years ago. I think Dean was eight years younger than Jr. He told me when he was a kid at Whitehead school, Jr was one of the older kids. He didn't know him well, but looked up to him, because Jr, of the older kids, never picked on him and took up for him. Dean and Jr were never close friends, as Jr was older and they lived in different worlds. Though toward the end, Dean proved himself to be Jr's true friend. Jr worked a sawmill in his teens for Dean's dad, who was a sawmiller as well as farmer. Dean went on to college and worked as a ranger on the Parkway, got his kicks chasing bootleggers using the Parkway for late night runs with absence of other cars at night and no stop signs from Front Royal, Virginia, to Asheville, NC. Dean loved to drive fast. Chasing liquor runners was his thrill. He never worried about getting tickets for driving fast off the Parkway; he knew all the highway patrolmen. His wife, Betty, was terrified of his driving. She rode in the back seat, which she made into a lounge area with pillows, magazines, books and snacks. She distracted herself from paying attention to how fast the car was going. Dean's driving was what we call a "white-knuckle flight." 

reflection on my car's window

we can fix anything but broken hearts

I was looking at the picture of Jr that caught his character in one snapshot when Ross came back from his search through the parts boxes. We started talking about Jr, what a fun character he was, what a true human being he was, what a complex mind he was, how generous he was, how tight he was, how odd it feels to be saying "was." He lives in my heart and Ross's heart as if he were at home in his house as we spoke. Ross took up with Jr in his childhood. By the time he was fifteen, he was hanging out at Jr's tractor repair shop such that Jr became his surrogate daddy. Ross admitted openly before Dean that Jr, in effect, was his real daddy. Ross's attachment to Jr was that kind of strong, and not in defiance. I saw an obvious past-life association the same as I see with Justin and myself. I'd be visiting Justin's parents and gave more attention to Justin than to them. Justin was a special kid to me. I felt close to Justin and protective when he was little. In his mid-teens when he was able to have his own vehicle, my house was his "calm down place," where he went when the riot at home was too much to bear. We played rock n roll on the sound system and talked. I listened to him all the way along, which, I see now, bonded us when he was a youngun. I'm convinced of a past-life connection with Justin, which I didn't talk about. A couple years ago he told a dream he had of a lifetime as a farmer. The dream covered his whole life from childhood to old age. He said in the childhood of that life he and I were brothers, close brothers. I died in that life young, leaving him devastated, explaining the age difference between us now. I feel a similar past-life connection with Jr, whose name is actually Wiley, Wiley the third. He was one of the first people I met in my new life in the mountains. From first meeting him, I felt like I knew Jr. Our association was always honest and open.

jr by me

Ross and I talked about the snapshot Dean took, how it makes you feel like Jr is there. He said he wanted to go with me to Jr's grave and have a drink with him and pour Jr a drink. I've been doing this every year on the day of the full moon he left the body, the full moon in early November. Ross suggested we go have a drink with Jr Christmas day. We set the schedule in our minds. I told him about the time I told our friend Frank of pouring a drink for Jr on his grave. I thought he'd think it was funny. He said, "Waste of good liquor." Ross said, "That's Frank." He said, "It's probably what Jr's thinking, up there looking down on us thinking: Those dumb shits, wasting good liquor." We had a good round of laughter. Ross said, "It aint about the liquor. I'm doing it for me. It means something to my heart." I laughed and said, "Right. It wasn't like I poured out a whole quart." Ross said, "Right. Pouring out one drink aint gonna hurt a damn thing." He said, "Yeah, let's do that, give ol Jr a good laugh. Shit, I miss the old fucker." I said, "Yeah, I do too. It's not the same world with Jr missing." Ross said, "It sure as hell aint." We fell into talking about other things, like two motorcycles he kept in the shop for a place to keep them. He said the yellow one likes him, but the black and silver one doesn't. He rode it twice and wrecked both times. He rode the yellow one half a dozen times and never wrecked. He has a propensity to run off the side of the road. When you do that, it's over. For an example of the yellow motorcycle liking him, he told of a time he left the road and whoever owned the house kept the grass mowed up to the road and the dirt was the same level as the pavement. He said that one was easy to get out of. 

ross

He explained when you leave the pavement, you don't just get back on, you stay beside the pavement until you find a good place to get back on. In the time Jr was housebound, Ross was out riding, left the road and hit a culvert. It tore the bike up and hospitalized him. His shoulder still has pain from it. He's not been riding since. The thrill went out of it for him. He has reason to live now. An X girlfriend had a child by her divorced husband, who didn't want the kid. She couldn't take care of him and turned the kid over to mama to bring up. Ross felt drawn to the kid as a toddler. He saw the kid was simply lonesome. When he was able to walk, Ross would keep him over the weekend. He's in the second or third grade now, and Ross is his big brother and closest friend, family. Ross's older sister brought her baby boy home to mama to raise on the farm. Ross, John and Milly were big brothers and sister. Ross is raising B, the name Ross calls him, like he helped raise little nephew as brother. Joe grew up into a cool guy who can do anything he wants to do. He raced motorcycles and dirt bikes for several years, as did Ross. The yellow motorcycle in the shop was his racing bike. Ross has recently talked with B about staying away from sports in school and focusing his attention toward learning to make music with the Junior Appalachian Musicians at school; you can play music the rest of your life. When school is over, sports is over, you waste your time learning something you can't use the day after you graduate. And later, he will advise B to stay out of the military. B is a neat kid. He's a kid it's fun to be around, comfortable with adults. When he's with Ross and Ross's family and friends, he's at home, safe and loved, one of the fellers. There, again, I can't help but see a past-life connection Ross intuited in the baby without knowing that's what he saw. Perhaps B is a soul who wanted to be Ross's child and got there the best way he could.

john

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