In The Battle of Danziger Bridge, Amos Jasper Wright IV’s loquacious chronicle of New Orleans, he “provides a complex portrait of a complicated and flawed place in which misery and joie de vivre coexist. It is a scathing and frequently hilarious exposé of the American character. As one of the characters opines, ‘In fifty years people will look back on today and want to know what the f__k was going on’.”
Here is the my full review of the raucous book for Alabama Writers’ Forum:
Mother at Dad’s grave (2016)
When my parents, Grover and Jean Journey, moved back to Birmingham after living in Tuscaloosa for almost four decades, Dad decided to sell their burial plots in Tuscaloosa and buy plots at Elmwood, Birmingham’s sprawling historic cemetery. As he put it, “I don’t want your mother traipsing by herself back and forth to Tuscaloosa all the time to visit my grave if I go before she does.” They bought four plots. On my next visit to Birmingham, Mother was anxious to show where she and Dad would be laid to rest (and where I would lie if I decided to take advantage of one of the two extra plots). As Mom walked across the cemetery lawn to find the exact location of their new real estate, I thought this scene will come back to haunt me one day.
Dad passed away in 2016 and he was right: for a long time, Mom “traipsed” out to Elmwood daily, usually alone, to visit Dad’s grave. Mother died ten years after Dad, on June 22 of this year, one day before she would have turned 92. I had been staying with her full time as a caregiver for over four years and had watched as her health declined and her energy and spirit waned. You think you’re prepared, but I’m not sure that you ever really are. Her passing was peaceful and, as far as I can tell, painless. She died at her home; I was there along with my brother, Rick, and his wife, Jennifer; and she knew that her great friends, Virginia and Herbert Thomas (Mom’s favorite pastor), and their daughter Cindy were on their way from Tuscaloosa for a visit.
The service on June 26 was simple. I think she would have been pleased. The pianist, Kaye Davis, opened the memorial with “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” At a family funeral in the ‘80s, Mom told me that she would like that played at her funeral. I’m glad I remembered. Herb Thomas officiated, of course. Rick introduced a video tribute he had prepared. He set it to the song “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash (“I can see clearly now, the rain has gone …”) which had special significance for Mother after she lost an eye to cancer forty years ago. She had told Rick back then that the song made her kind of sad, but also kind of happy. It was a triumphant video; Mother was smiling and laughing in almost every shot. One of Mother’s neighbors, who had not known about the cancer and the loss of the eye, commented that, “She never let her cancer define her.” Mother would have liked that. She outlived her cancer by forty years.
After the video, Kaye played an arrangement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” with the hymn, “It Is Well with My Soul” that Mother had been moved by in a concert Kaye had given several years ago. Brother Herb gave a personal, moving, and comforting eulogy and, after the benediction, an old arrangement of a gospel song, “Going Home” by the Johnson Brothers, was played to end the service. Mother had that song played at Dad’s funeral and told me that she and Dad had agreed that they would play it at each other’s memorials.
My brother, nephew, and I were among the pallbearers and I did flash back to that sunny afternoon when Mom walked across the grounds to show me where she would be buried. Brother Herb recited scripture, prayed, and those gathered sang the “Doxology.” We did our best. I hope she would have been pleased.
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When Mother chose the monument for their graves in 2016, she asked that two intertwined wedding bands and the words “Together Forever” be engraved under the family name. And now her remains are back with Dad’s for eternity. During Mother’s most intense period of grieving after Dad passed away, I suggested that – as a distraction – she might sit down and write the story of her life and see what good memories that exercise might elicit. I found it in her papers the other day; it begins with the day she met Dad.
There’s really no way to talk about Jean Journey without talking about Grover. They supported each other and never tired of doing things together. When Dad died, I wrote that “they were a formidable team for over 63 years. They were independent and occasionally stubborn. As a team, they didn’t always agree; Mother was never the kind of wife who felt bound to abide by her husband’s opinions and Dad always respected and valued that in her. He didn’t try to run her life and she didn’t try to run his.” However, she always helped and supported him in his work and he always helped and supported her in hers.
Early in their marriage, they lived in Chicago while Dad was stationed at 5th Army Headquarters. Mother worked for an insurance company. When Mother got pregnant with me, they both turned down promotions at their respective jobs to request a transfer south to be closer to family for the arrival of their first-born. Mom always talked about their time in Chicago. They were just kids and the place seemed to be an adventure for them. In their photos from that time – at museums, in Grant Park, along Lake Michigan – they look so happy. Mother always wondered what their lives would have been like if they had settled in Chicago.
The marriage took them to many places as Dad worked with a national company that transferred with every promotion, but they always seemed to land back in Alabama. Wherever they went, they involved themselves with volunteer opportunities in church or schools or other community projects. They were never busier, however, than they were when Dad took a job in Tuscaloosa and eventually became an administrator at the University of Alabama, where he would stay until he retired.
In Tuscaloosa, Mother had opportunities to work with children. She was never happier than when she was holding a baby or talking to a child – hers or anybody else’s. Her favorite charities were those that served children. She especially liked supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Ronald McDonald House at Children’s of Alabama. She and Dad taught four and five-year-olds in Sunday School for years and stayed in touch with many of them as they grew up.
Their work in the PTAs of Tuscaloosa City Schools seemed to become legendary for a time. When Dad became president of the City Council of PTAs, Mom was active on a daily basis, visiting the schools, finding out the teachers’, principals’, and students’ needs, and getting it done. I was grown and living out-of-state during much of that time, but whenever I would visit my parents in Tuscaloosa they had school and church projects in the works and were busy fielding phone calls from people soliciting their assistance for other projects. In those days, Mother’s energy seemed boundless.
Mother and Dad were partners in every aspect of their lives. Whenever health issues arose, they became tireless advocates for each other. When Mother lost her eye in the ‘80s, Dad brought her back. Knowing her affinity for gardening, he brought a truckload of dirt to the house, dumped it next to the drive, and she used gardening as a therapy tool. Knowing her fear of driving with only one eye, he stopped on the side of a road and told her to drive the rest of the way home. From that point on, she loved to go for drives by herself until her health began to preclude it. Late in Dad’s life, when he became ill and disabled, Mother challenged his doctors to do more and was determined to bring him home again. When she couldn’t, something in her seemed to break. Over those ten years, I watched her steady decline.
Mother always longed for grandchildren. I didn’t provide her with any but when Rick and Jennifer’s son, Truman, was on the way, Mom’s friends in Tuscaloosa were so excited that Jean was finally having a grandbaby that the people at their church threw a baby shower for her and Dad. Truman’s birth gave both of my parents a fresh spark of energy, it seemed. They cherished their time with him growing up and I always hoped that my mother would be able to see him grown. She did; Truman graduated from college in May.
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I debate whether or not I should bring up Mother’s political point of view since that topic is so polarizing these days. But as she would often say, “Other people seem to have no problem telling me what they support, so why should I hold back?” She always eschewed political party affiliations and tended to support candidates she felt were honest and compassionate. Growing up, and for most of my life, I perceived my mother as being politically passive. She seldom failed to vote, but she didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. Years ago, when she told me who she was going to vote for in a specific election and I challenged her reasons, she blithely replied, “I don’t know … he just amuses me.”
That blithe spirit changed, however, when the current Resident of the White House came to office in 2017. Mother was appalled by everything he said and did; by his lack of morals, ethics, and dignity; by his cruelty, his sexism, his racism. She was horrified by everything he stood for. She became increasingly vocal about it. She became a bit of a news junkie and would talk back to the television whenever the face of “that thing” appeared. The only relief she took from the troubling events of January 6, 2021, was in the fact that his actions on that day had “finished” him politically. So it was of great concern to her when he was “baaaaack” like some dreaded poltergeist. Mother was a person of strong faith and she was shaken by the support for the Resident from within her faith community. It was a source of despair for her. I often heard her say, “Why can’t they see him for what he is?” I was proud of my mother’s belated political outspokenness. We discussed it often and agreed that the existential threat we’re facing was serious enough that we had to speak up. Once, recently, I suggested that maybe it was time we hit the streets in protest. “I would if I could,” she forcefully pronounced. And I know she meant it.
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A few weeks ago, I tripped over an obstacle in downtown Birmingham and had a fall. Rick had stayed with Mother that day to give me a break. He knew what had happened but had not told Mom. When I finally got back to Mom’s house after a trip to the emergency room, my eyes were swollen, my head was bandaged, and I had a pronounced limp. I walked in and stood next to her bed. She looked up, gave me that look, and said, “What have you done now?”
As I was healing from those injuries, and as my swollen eyes evolved into two impressive shiners, the first thing Mother asked when she called for me every morning was that I show her my face. One morning when I went to her bedside, early in my healing process, she said, “Now let me look.” I leaned down so she could see. She muttered oh my as she evaluated the shiners that were purple and green by then and the bandages covering much of my forehead. “You look awful!” she said. And then, after a moment, she burst into the kind of hearty laughter that I hadn’t heard from her in years. I joined in and we laughed for several minutes. It would almost subside and then it would burst forth again. It was the last time we laughed together.
God, I miss her. She would have scolded me for that previous sentence, telling me not to take His name in vain. I wasn’t.
Mother and Dad’s grave (2026)
A couple of days ago, I posted an essay about my great-grandparents, Houston and Dura McCarn, who are featured in Joyce H. Cauthen’s riveting new book, The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman: Music, Murder, & Moonshine in Bug Tussle, Alabama. My review of Cauthen’s book is freshly in print in Alabama Writers’ Forum’s First Draft magazine. Open this file to read the full review:
Edward Journey review of Cauthen Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman
I recently reviewed The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman: Music, Moonshine & Murder in Bug Tussle, Alabama, by Joyce H. Cauthen with Robin Sterling, for Alabama Writers’ Forum and First Draft magazine. I was compelled to add the following note to my author bio: [Journey] was pleased to find that his great-grandparents, John Houston McCarn and Dura Evelyn Graves McCarn, are a part of Fiddling Tom’s story; he is quick to point out that they appear in the context of music – not moonshine and murder.
The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman includes generous excerpts from an autobiographical book Freeman wrote that was never published. Cauthen took his manuscript, her own research and information on historical contexts, and Robin Sterling’s extensive research to bring Freeman’s story and the story of his community to light. She contacted me just before the book’s publication to tell me that she had found my family connection to a part of Freeman’s story.
I chose not to include the family connection in my review. The book has so many fascinating anecdotes and information that it was a challenge to figure out what to leave out. But this is my essay about my great-grandparents so I will feel free to focus on my kin.
(L-R) Houston, Jewel, and Dura McCarn
I have written about my great grandfather, John Houston McCarn, who was a schoolteacher in and around Cullman County. He was born in 1865 and didn’t die until 1959, so I have vague memories of him from when I was very young. As I grew older, it dawned on me that this old man that I had first-hand memories of was born the year the Civil War ended. Houston married Dura Evelyn Graves, who was fifteen years his junior, and they had seven children together. Their first-born daughter, Jewel, died in childhood in 1909, the year my grandmother, Eula, was born. Dura died an early death in the 1920s. Houston and Dura raised their family in a dogtrot-style house, always referred to as “the homeplace,” on a large farm in the community of Bremen. That house is long gone but I remember it, too. When I knew it, the dogtrot had been closed in and my grandmother’s sister, Bessie, lived there.
I’m writing now about things that happened in the late-19th and early-20th centuries before electricity and mass media changed the dynamics of how neighbors interacted with and entertained each other. Grandpa Houston played the fiddle, as did his daughter Nadine. Son Burnett played guitar and Eula played the piano. I assume Bessie, Ray, and Zell played instruments, also, and I seem to remember my grandmother saying that Dura played the piano. I imagine the family gathering on the wide porch or in front of the fireplace and playing music together. I’m told that Grandpa had a lot of books, so perhaps they read or told stories together, too. Family histories are derived from stitching together the bits and pieces of stories that come down through the years.
Bremen was up the mountain from the community of Wilburn, which over time came to be called “Bug Tussle.” According to Cauthen, “Bug Tussle” was the informal designation not just for Wilburn, but for parts of the communities that surround it. Bremen was close so some might have placed Grandpa’s farm in Bug Tussle. Either way, Bremen’s proximity to Bug Tussle is how my ancestors became a part of Freeman’s story.
The most satisfying part of the book’s comments about my great-grandparents is that they confirm stories about the two that I have heard all my life. Tom Freeman calls my great-grandfather “Uncle Houston McCarn.” He writes that “Uncle Houston” would drive his horse and buggy down Brushy Pond Mountain and say, “Fiddling Tom, go home with me & fiddle some for me tonight.” Houston had the first car in his community, according to my grandmother, but never bothered to learn to drive himself. Tom and his fiddle would hop in the buggy and go to Bremen, play well into the next morning, and after going to bed around 3:00 AM, Dura would wake them for breakfast at 4:00. On another visit to play at Houston’s house, Tom claims, “I played 63 hours with only four hours out to sleep.” Tom challenges any doubters of the veracity of his claim to contact J.H. McCarn.
Houston taught at one and two-room schools through the years and often went to college in the summers to augment his already impressive education. While he was away, he’d leave his children to toil with the sharecroppers to tend to the farm. He used his education to be a good teacher, but a stern taskmaster. Tom calls Houston “one of the best old-timer school teachers I ever saw.” Tom’s son had “Uncle Houston” as a teacher and Tom writes that he “learned my boy more in one day than he had ever learned in 5 years of going to school.”
Tom’s grandson Donald Freeman shared another Houston McCarn teaching story with Joyce Cauthen. He heard it from his grandfather: A group of parents went to the local school commission asking for a teacher who could control the unruly boys who kept running teachers off from the McKinley Chapel school. The commission told the parents, “Yes, we have one, but you might not want him.” The parents wanted him anyway and Houston McCarn arrived at the school on the first day with “a six-foot hickory limb and a double barrel shotgun. Within two days you could hear a pin drop.”
My great-grandmother Dura McCarn died when my grandmother was a young girl so we only knew her through the fond memories of Grandmother and her siblings. Tom, though, also knew Dura (he calls her “Dewey”) and he can back up her children’s affectionate words. She was, he writes, “one of the best women I ever met in my life.”
Cicero is given credit for saying that “the life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living” in the 1st Century BC. That idea persists today in the idea of the “second death” – when there is no living memory of those who have passed on to “the next thing,” as my parents’ friend Phoebe Barr used to say. I must say I’m grateful to Fiddling Tom Freeman and his chronicler, Joyce Cauthen, for helping to extend the living memory of Houston and Dura McCarn.
Bayt Al-Qahwah means “House of Coffee” if you didn’t know. I didn’t know until I dropped into the newish coffee shop in a strip shopping center in Birmingham’s Homewood suburb (baytalqahwah1.wixsite.com). I was glad I dropped in.
Bayt Al-Qahwah features coffee from Yemen and sports a sleek and comfortable vibe with pillows on the seats and lots of shiny surfaces. An artpiece hanging near the entrance is a 3-D map of Yemen. There are conference rooms to the side, and a prayer room tucked in, too. When I was there, a World Cup match was being live-streamed on a large but unobtrusive screen. It was a pleasant way to spend part of a hot Saturday afternoon in June. I was pleased to see that Bayt Al-Qahwah (I’m trying to figure out a shorter name to call it) is open until 10:00 every night and until 11:00 on Friday and Saturday. Too often, coffee shops are closing right around the time I’m getting the urge, so it’s good to find a nighttime option.
For my less sophisticated coffee palate, Arabic coffee can be a little harsh, but there are plenty of options on the large beverage menu and a case full of enticing pastries. I played it safe with a latte but explored the menu for more adventurous options on future visits. There will be future visits.
It was a diverse and subdued crowd; even people watching the World Cup kept it under control. A family ranging from small kids to grandparents trooped in to get refreshment and catch some futbol action; they wore the shirts of their favorite American college football team. A man wearing a Knicks jersey walked in the door. A couple near me was on a first date; I tried not to eavesdrop, but the conversation was animated at times. Well-behaved dogs were welcome and foreign languages were scattered around. Several of the very friendly women behind the counter wore hijabs and one of them engaged me in conversation about my black eye and bandaged forehead from a recent accident. I had camouflaged both with sunglasses and a cap, but there they were. I would rather answer questions about my wounds than have people stare and then look away when I look back.
I finished a chapter in the book I’m reading and finished my latte. I was relaxed and wanted to linger but responsibilities called. There hasn’t been much time to explore of late, so I was glad to wander forth into a fresh experience so close to home. I wasn’t at Bayt Al-Qahwah for long, but I felt refreshed and adventurous going back into the parking lot of an outwardly bland strip mall.
It’s June, the days are sultry, and the wanderlust sets in. But since summer travel is not in my plans this year, I decided to read On the Road. Or re-read. I’m not really sure. Jack Kerouac’s beat novel is so endemic to American culture in the second half of the twentieth century, it’s one of those books we know even if we never read it. I read it recently and I’m still not sure if I had read it previously. It felt familiar.
I know I’ve read other Kerouac, so it only makes sense that I surely read On the Road years ago. An early ‘60s television series, “Route 66,” was inspired by On the Road; I watched it when I was barely in elementary school and, for third grade me, it defined what it meant to be “cool,” for better or worse. So my references for On the Road predate my knowledge that there was a book by that name.
For the record, The Subterraneans is still my favorite Kerouac book. I lent so many copies of The Subterraneans that were never returned that the last time I bought it, I bought two copies so I would be sure to have at least one copy in my library. I did lend out that other copy and, of course, it was never returned.
The impetus for my recent reading of On the Road was a book about the Grateful Dead. Here Beside the Rising Tide by Jim Newton purports to be a biography of Jerry Garcia, but it really becomes a chronicle of the counterculture of Garcia’s time. While reading it, Neal Cassady’s name occasionally popped up and set me to thinking about On the Road. Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in On the Road and other books is a barely disguised version of the author’s buddy, Neal Cassady, who was a muse for the Beat writers and is iconic in ’50s and ’60s counterculture. He drove the bus for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests, for which the Grateful Dead was the house band (bus band?). The Grateful Dead song “Cassidy” is the first song I want to hear when a member of the Dead passes on; even though the song’s namesake is the daughter of a Grateful Dead roadie, Neal Cassady is present in the lyrics.
So, I just finished reading On the Road, perhaps for the first time. And I really like it, again maybe. But I have issues: I have always thought of Neal Cassady as one of my counterculture heroes, but I really got tired and annoyed with Dean Moriarty while reading the book (“Yass! Man! Go! Go! Phew! Yass! Ahem! …”). I knew guys like Cassady, mainly in college and grad school. I enjoyed hanging with them back then, as I recall. You might know the type: frantic, charismatic, a maverick, always on the make and take, womanizer, manizer, pretentious in an aw shucks way, in their seventh year of working toward a B.A. in philosophy. They’re fun but tend to get boring and tiresome and you just want them to shut up sometimes. Or, better yet, go away for a while.
I get the sense at times that Sal Paradise, the book’s Kerouac stand-in, feels that way about Dean. Sal hangs and goes the distance with Dean throughout the book. He misses Dean when he’s not there. Sal clearly wants Dean’s approval, but he doesn’t always present him in the most flattering terms. I’m reminded of a friend of mine who was raised in a very middle of the road Midwest family. Occasionally, though, he tried to take a walk on the wild side, or at least visit it. He told me once that every morning as he looked in the bathroom mirror, he said to himself Don’t be shocked by anything that happens today. I can imagine Sal Paradise doing that, but he’d never reveal it.
From a twenty-first century perspective, it’s hard to know where to even start in terms of On the Road’s treatment of women. It’s staggering to realize that there was a time fairly recently when those sorts of attitude toward women would have been deemed acceptable on any level. You might say Well it’s a product of a different time and a different mindset. But then, you look around and see what’s happening around us today – among the billionaires on private islands, at the Pentagon, on the grounds of the UFC next door to what used to be “the People’s House” – and maybe the mindset hasn’t changed so much after all. I’m sorry to get all wound up: I just read a pastor’s letter “explaining” why women shouldn’t be allowed behind the pulpit. My irritation is deep. I’m keeping the faith but losing my religion.
Perhaps my reaction to Dean Moriarty and the rest is just the collateral damage of maturity. I’m sure I didn’t feel such reservations when I first knew of Cassady and read Kerouac and the Beats. In a recent column, octogenarian Garrison Keillor writes, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas is all well and good when you’re in your twenties but when the Stones come back fifty years later and fans with walkers and canes are dancing, is this something we really need to see?” I see what he means.
But when all is said and done, I really enjoyed reading On the Road. Yes, despite everything.
You dig? Cool! Ahem.
Progressive Alabama attorney Jack Drake has written his memoir, Be Not Afraid. In it, he carries his readers through decades of activism and litigation for civil and human rights causes. I recently reviewed Be Not Afraid for Alabama Writers’ Forum. My review states that “Drake was a force during a pivotal time in the story of the United States, and particularly of Alabama. His awakening and action should strike a chord with those who lived through those turbulent times, and ring alarms for the turbulent times we face today.” You can read the review at the link below:
My favorite Birmingham neighborhoods are Five Points South and, adjoining it, Highland Park. Five Points is primarily an entertainment district that was a streetcar junction back in the early days of the city. Highland Park was an early Birmingham suburb dotted with parks and going up the mountain, centered around the meandering Highland Avenue. When I lived on Birmingham’s Southside for four years in the 90s, I lived on Red Mountain near Vulcan and could see Five Points and Highland Park from my apartment balcony. They are great walking neighborhoods. The area also satisfies my interest in ecclesiastical architecture with its scattering of historic churches.
I recently went for coffee at a shop in Five Points and, while circling the block looking for a parking place, I went past one of the neighborhood’s great nineteenth century church buildings, St. Mary’s on the Highlands. St. Mary’s was formed in 1887 when parishioners at the Episcopal Church of the Advent downtown started their own parish on the mountain, overlooking the growing city and serving the growing Highlands suburb. The imposing English Revival church was completed in 1891. There have been expansions since, handsomely complementing the original structure.
I have always admired the church and have passed it many times. I guess I hadn’t passed it in a while, though, because as I was circling the block I was gobsmacked to see a formidable metal angel on a façade over an arched passageway leading to a meditation garden. If the angel was there on past visits, I somehow didn’t notice it; now, I don’t know how I could have missed it. I did a little research and found that the angel sculpture, by Birmingham sculptor Cordray Parker (1934-2007), is called “Fear Not.”
The banner flowing from the angel’s left hand says “FEAR NOT.” I read that those words appear in the King James Bible over seventy times and “be not afraid” shows up almost thirty. The Biblical passage that comes immediately to mind is in the gospel, Luke 2:10, when the angel announces the birth of Jesus to the shepherds in the field.
“Fear not” is a powerful piece of advice, don’t you think? It definitely applies when one sees a spectral gathering in the night sky … runs across a copperhead on a wooded trail … jumps into water over your head … watches an approaching storm … stops by woods on a snowy evening … cares for an ailing parent … feels helpless watching one’s country rapidly decline into an uncertain future …
Yes, “fear not” can adapt to many applications. I try to remember to pair it with the Persian adage “This too shall pass.” In both cases, the words are simple and forceful and might provide a flash of hope and peace in troubled times. I don’t know about you, but that’s the message I want to get from a church … even in passing while searching for a parking spot.
It’s a hopeful act to vote for a Democrat for state-wide office in Alabama these days. And an insurrectionist president, his complicit Department of Justice, and his reactionary Supreme Court majority are assisting in the dismantling of our once proud country and hard-fought election rights. They have made it easier for Republicans in state governments, like Alabama’s, to ignore both legal and moral considerations. The current American President is a scofflaw, a felon, a tax evader, a compulsive liar, a foul-mouthed misogynist, a failed businessman, and a warmonger (shall I go on?) and that makes his followers better able to follow their own worst instincts. What’s worse, they try to disguise those instincts as “conservative values” or, even worse, “Christian values.”
Whenever an election season rolls around, I think seriously about my decision to return to Alabama in the 2000s after several years away. The state is my home and I love it. But then, the political ads begin to appear and I am lectured about “Alabama values” and “Socialist liberals.” I watch images of politicians totin’ their guns and announcing their Christian values. One even says he’ll protect our Christian values alongside an image of himself aiming his rifle at something. A candidate for attorney general seems to think that the most pressing problem in the state is the “transgender agenda” while another wants to tell Muslims to Allahu Akbar their butts back to the Middle East. And the majority of them manage to sneak in an image of their orange idol, sometimes with his “complete and total endorsement,” and we know from history how long that will last if the “chosen” crosses the chooser. These 30-second indignities mortify and embarrass me and I take scant comfort in the fact that these atrocities are happening on screens nationwide.
Now, the ludicrous Louisiana v. Callais decision by the U.S. Supreme Court gave Alabama Republicans an excuse to challenge Alabama’s court-ordered redistricting map from 2023 and stretch out this primary season from hell. That 2023 court-order resulted in a second congressional district represented by a Democrat elected in a free and fair election from Alabama. Currently, Alabama’s representation in the United States House of Representatives is seven Republicans and two Democrats. But Alabama’s Republican-led state legislature, which usually takes forever to get anything done, did not waste any time scrambling to get the gerrymandered Republican-friendly pre-2023 districts back on the table and Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, immediately called a special session to see how quickly they could overturn the 2023 map.
The Republican-compliant U.S. Supreme Court put a hold on the 2023 order and slow-talking Ivey quickly called a special primary election for August which will affect about half of the state’s counties and void the results of congressional elections for four of Alabama’s nine congressional districts held a few days ago. Kay Ivey and her Republican cronies are getting a do-over, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. Incidentally, the two Democratic Congressional districts are represented by Black representatives. The Republican leadership talk like there’s not a racist bone in their bodies, but the facts speak for themselves.
The guv’nuh argues that “Alabama knows our state, our people and our districts best. The United States Supreme Court’s decision is plain common sense and enables our values to be best represented in Congress.” Which begs the question: Whose values are “our values”? She certainly doesn’t speak for my values and I am an Alabamian. Nor does she speak for the values of most of my acquaintances. I am fortunate, I guess, to live in the purple suburbs of a very “blue” city and the values I see advocated in the political ads and by the MAGA contingent in the state capital are contrary to the values I learned in Sunday School growing up with parents who, frankly, leaned Republican back in the day.
So Ms. Ivey, whose legacy of overseeing arguably the worst prison system in the country is firmly established, now has seized her “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” moment. In the past, I have been hesitant to use the “racist” label – a label which has sometimes been overused and abused. But now, I see that racism is the only explanation for much of what is happening in our country today. They may try to “pussyfoot” around it – to use one of George Wallace’s words – but Kay Ivey and her Republican legislators are now having their “stand.” This time it’s at the ballot box and, once again, it’s a sorry sight.
Add a new mystery set in a cave to the list of Gin Phillips books. My review of Ruby Falls is newly available at Alabama Writers’ Forum. Read it here:
Professional Southerner 