MY SOUTHERN BRIER PATCH

tony smith

New Year's day I spent mostly in the bed. Didn't want to do anything. Didn't want to be awake. Read some between naps in a new biography of Vincent Van Gogh. Today I passed the half way point. It's 900 pages.Woke a few minutes to seven, thinking it morning. The weather report on the radio for Friday was "tomorrow." I thought, you mean today. Today is Friday. I remembered I was waking from a nap--oh no, it's not tomorrow yet--it's evening. Friday morning I need to get with mechanic, tie the car door closed with baling twine and drive to his shop, taking back roads, to see if he can fix it. I hope it doesn't involve two hundred dollars in parts, or more. Happy New Year. This morning I found the owner's manual, looked up the fuses and pulled the fuse that works the interior lights to avoid running down the battery. I tried everything someone with no experience in such matters could think of. New Years. Things like this tend to happen to me on Friday evening after five o'clock. I have to wait til Monday to make an appointment for help. If mechanic cannot get to it tomorrow, the highest likelihood, I'll have to wait through the weekend til next week. Here again, when frustration reaches the point I can't stand it, I pull back into indifference. It only means I can't go anyplace for almost a week. Good. Like getting snowed in. Plenty of catfood, birdseed and carrots to last a week. Don't need a prescription filled for another week. Turns out it was a good time to be immobilized. Nothing to do but accept. As long as I'm staying at home, I'm not spending money. Money goes a lot further when I stay home. Staying home consumes no gasoline. And it's where I want to be anyway. Don't throw me in the brier patch. 

tony smith

I think of Brer Rabbit from the Disney film, Song of the South, tales of Uncle Remus, that I saw age 6. My only memory was Brer Rabbit (me) caught by some characters that wanted to hurt him. They were talking of what they could do to him. Brer Rabbit said, "You can do anything, but please don't throw me in the brier patch." It struck his captors a good idea. They threw him in. He hopped among the briers, tapping a bunny dance, singing, "I was born in a brier patch." More than likely, this was my first acquaintance with the South. I loved the movie, loved the Southern accent, loved the characters. This is age 6. I've been searching for my first discovery of the South as a place and hadn't been able to trace it past a biography read in third grade of Robert E Lee. Looking for why the interest in Lee, the South. The Uncle Remus stories must have been my very first introduction to the South. I do remember identifying so fully with Brer Rabbit that his plea, don't throw me in the brier patch, has stayed with me all my life. I think it taught me that cleverness of mind trumps brawn. I had the metaphor of brawn sitting beside me. I already knew he had no brains. I'm hearing Chuck Berry sing in my head, "You can't catch me, oh no, you can't catch me." As soon as I had my freedom, I headed for the South. You'll never catch me in the South. Maybe the South is my brier patch. I've found that people outside the South are largely afraid of the South. My brier patch. To say I loved a movie at age six has no bearing on if I might like it now. Age 11, I saw Demetrius and the Gladiators, starring Victor Mature. It was so sentimental, I loved it, cried at the end. Mid-twenties, I was in somebody's house while it was playing on the tv. I watched a scene and gagged. Victor Mature made me puke. How could I have ever liked such a thing? Eleven. I liked Mighty Mouse too. 

tony smith

Live oak trees, Spanish moss, the Southern accent, the Solid South at election times, my symbols of the South. I knew about slavery and the Civil War from school. I was partial to the South in history class. Didn't know the politics of the South until after school when the Civil Rights movement was cranking up. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, later to become The Band, were from the South. The South is where rock n roll was conceived and born. The Carter Family were Southern Appalachian hillbillies in the time before electricity and plumbing arrived in the mountains. Mountain people listened to them on radios that worked from Model T batteries. I had never listened to the Carter Family until I'd been in the mountains a quarter century. The church I went to had Carter Family gospel songs in the hymnal. Hearing Carter Family the first time, I recognized several of their songs. Being able to understand and feel the Carter Family is one of the great blessings of my life. The Carter Family songbook, over 500 songs they recorded, is the songbook for Southern Appalachian old-time and bluegrass, songs AP Carter found traveling up and down the mountains looking for songs. For me, The Carter Family makes a greater icon for the South than any general or politician. The Carter Family are the Southern people, the white people, the culture I live in. I love to hear Sara Carter sing like I love to hear Lucinda Williams sing. 

tony smith

Going by Southern politicians, the rest of the country takes all of us for racist bigots. That's ok. Keeps em away. It's never 100% of the vote that goes to the politician appealing to racism. They most often win an election, though not by much more than 50%. I am here to learn the South and the mountains, not to judge the South or want to change it. I would like to see less racism, but that time will come. It's an historical progression involving belief systems with religion woven in, a mythology. It's slow to change. Like all healing, it takes time. Racism comes from ignorance, and willful ignorance is the slowest to change. This form of ignorance is all over the country. Michelle Bachmann is from Massachusetts. Ted Cruz is from Texas-Canada-Cuba, went to Harvard Law school. He aint Suthun. Bobby Jindal is from India and went to Oxford. Evidently, ignorance has nothing to do with education. It's like the meme that reappears on facebook, You can't fix stupid. Those people are avoidable anywhere, except maybe in an elevator. I stay away from them. They know I'm a liberal and they stay away from me first. Works out just right. As I like to be received for who I am, I like to receive others for who they are. I don't care that some of the people I know are racists. It weakens my respect for them, but that's all. Each one has his and her own history, same as I have mine. I like to know individuals for who they are, not a pretense made up for show. If I judge them, they don't let me know who they are. If I were to judge them for being racist, I'd be a racist about white rednecks. Individually, person to person, I prefer to stay out of their politics and mine. I'm of the old-time way of sitting around the wood-stove, spitting in tin cans, talking about anything but politics and religion. I save these subjects for the blog.  

tony smith

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THE OLD MAN THAT DIDN'T KILL SPIDERS

tony smith

Listening to friends who hunt talk of their adventures with a bow, a rifle and a one-shot musket, the kind you pack the powder and the ball down the barrel and hope it works. I don't take an interest in guns, nor do I have an interest in killing a conscious being who has the same right to live as I hold for myself. I like to listen to my friends tell about getting a "ten-pointer" or a "twelve-pointer" with a rack so wide, measured by hands like the length of a fish, "they was this wide!" I like to listen to hunters talk about their different kills. Justin told me one day that hunting is better than sex. Hunting is different every time; sex is the same every time. He is the kind of hunter who will not take a shot unless he is certain he can hit it so the deer will drop straight down. He doesn't like them to suffer. Nor does he like to track their blood trail with a flashlight in the dark and drag the dead weight up the side of a mountain to a place where he can get his truck. His aim is that they don't feel anything; suddenly fall asleep, knees give out. I appreciate that in Justin, as well as in other hunters I know. It's hard for me to listen to the accounts, yet I enjoy hearing them. I am one who sees the deer of a level of consciousness about the same as the donkeys. From knowing other four-leggeds, I can project, I feel fairly accurately, that the deer fall in love, have partners, love their young, and probably live closer to love than we humans do. My impulse is to want to know the deer the way I know the donkeys, a dog, a cat. I want to know the individual personality, aware they are as individually unique as Jack and Jenny. 

tony smith

Deer run for their lives, literally, when they see a human. It's like they believe we can kill them just by seeing them. I only see deer by chance, as I never go looking for them, and when I see one or more I feel a longing to know who the individual is, same as I do when I see a crow walking in the donkey meadow. The Australian Aborigines and American Indians called them people. They are. I've learned like they did, from knowing some and paying attention. I don't attempt to tame any of the the deer by putting food out for them and earning their trust. I'd love to have a deer feeding station close to the house and get to know some. I remember in my first years in the mountains the news one week of someone who had raised a deer from a fawn found in the woods, brought it home and raised it a pet. The young deer was tethered in the back yard when somebody drove by, saw it, stopped, picked up his rifle, shot it, and drove on. Something such as this is inevitable. I'm recalling in my first weeks on the farm, I was introduced to some Park rangers to give me some tips on growing Christmas trees. The one talking was telling me about hunting. He justified it with Bible, "It says in Genesis God give us dominion over the beasts," which he interpreted the right to kill. I had to double-take. It shocked me. I was thinking it a tyrant's interpretation. For me, it means the responsibility to take care of them. If I ever had a lifetime long ago as a king, I hope I was one who treated his people with care, not a tyrant. I could have been either, according to the belief system one grows up in, the culture, the place, the time, the context.  

tony smith

Though I automatically recoiled within hearing the man talk so casually of killing gentle, harmless beings to eat them and display their horns on the wall, I reminded self that I'm here to learn the culture, know the people, have a Blue Ridge experience. I was here for the culture. The culture was not here waiting for me to shape it according to my whim. It is my role to allow the people around me to live as they live, believe as they believe, be as they are, not to judge them, but to support them. Learning the culture through the people, I have learned to appreciate the mountain people on their own terms, not the terms of an outsider. All Justin's life he has known that I don't like to kill anything, but that's only for me. It has nothing to do with him or anyone else. It is mine for myself. I don't like to presume my rights more important than another's. We talk in terms of people, but I include raccoon, possum, crows, every sentient being, including spiders. Justin's girl, Cheyanne, found a common window spider in a plastic grocery store bag I'd brought something in. She showed it to me squeamishly, like, Eeu. I carried the bag outside to the deck and turned it over above a flowering bush next to the railing. Cheyanne watched. I turned around and she said, "Why didn't you kill it?" I took it she had never seen anyone let a spider live. I said, "I don't have to kill something just because it's living." She got it. It was a brand new concept in her six year old mind. Every adult in her life killed spiders. Many years after I'm gone, I'd like to be remembered by Cheyanne as the old man that didn't kill spiders. 

tony smith

I think our bond has something to do with me as perhaps the only adult in her life who takes her seriously as an individual instead of a mindless kid who needs to be told what to do. She lives with her mother and sees Justin every other weekend. I am an adult in her life who doesn't judge her or threaten her, doesn't want to control her, always open to listen to her. And she listens to me. We communicate. This is how I am with kids I know. It's so easy. I was this same role for Justin from the time he was the age Vada is now, 3, I was the adult in his life who affirmed him, listened to him talk like he knew what he was saying, and he did. I paid attention to him as a consciousness in a human body like everybody else around me. The same with his sister Sheena I've known since birth. Now that they're grown up, Justin past 30, Sheena approaching 30, they're the closest friends of my life. Justin said to me a few months ago that I have known him through all the phases and experiences of his life and he has only known me with white hair. I've had white hair the whole time he's been living. I've never given him advice. I don't do that, because I don't know. We talk things over and look for practical solutions. When he's troubled, he comes to "the calm down place," and tells it all, sometimes stressed so much he's red faced. I let him tell it until there's nothing left to tell. I know that in the telling, he heard it too. In looking for what to do, I let him figure it out; he's a lot closer to it than I am, knows it from the inside. My goal in his childhood was to pass to him self-awareness, somehow. I believed he could make it through the gauntlet of his childhood with self-awareness. I don't know how it happened, unless it was the listening and letting him search for his solution in the context only he knows. His self-awareness helped him grow into the ethical man he now is.  

  

tony smith himself

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