Norma Druid’s blog

Since we now have a black presidential nominee, I thought it would be a good time to recall the troubled history of race relations as they have developed in my lifetime in my family and in Nashville,  Tennessee.  Anybody who´s ever studied the Civil Rights movement will have noted that in Tennessee the struggle was for equal access to restaurants and other facilities rather than the vote.  Tennessee political bosses some years ago had decided that a black vote could be bought just as well as a white one.  By providing coal, food, and similar necessities, they could count on the black community to keep them in power.  In fact, I learned from that remarkable book The Secrets of the Hopewell Box, when Nashville Mayor Ben West agreed to meet with protesters to discuss racial grievances, he in fact held his office by virtue of 5 stolen black votes.  We had a number of demonstrations, arrests, etc. during those years, but nothing like the horrors in the states further South.
I remember segregated buses.  There was a little painted sign above the fare box - Colored to the Rear of the Bus.  ¨Colored¨ was considered the polite term back then, as opposed to the N word.  Black people themselves began using the word ¨black¨ for everyday, ¨African American¨ being a tad long.
I remember the buses, alright, and I remember Mama telling me this was wrong.  She made quite a point of teaching my brother and me that it was not right to treat black people different.  Ernie used to run to sit on the very back seat of the bus, where he was made much of.  I didn´t dare try anything like that because grownups were far too easy to upset and were likely to carry on at great length.  All my grandparents were fairly virulent racists, and this was rather a low key bone of contention in a family that didn´t need anymore.  I later learned that, although he didn´t share his parents´ attitudes, he had not himself thought much about the racial situation until Mama brought the injustice to his attention.
During the Civil Rights years, I was always aware of the family tension as well as the sense that there wasn´t anything we could do.  We still depended on my paternal grandparents for help sometimes and couldn´t afford to give offense.  Besides, who would listen to us?  Who would care what one struggling white family that could barely keep its head above water thought?
The Church of Christ of the time was, alas, as prejudiced as anybody else and maybe even more so - with the honorable exception of Ira North, of course, who was just starting his career during those years.  I remember one summer when I was a preteen the black Christians of Nashville all came to white churches one Sunday, resulting in stiff, tension-filled services.  ¨We wouldn´t mind if they were coming for the right reason,¨ one of my contemporaries told me, aping his elders.  My most vivid memory is of going to put something away in Daddy´s room one day and finding an unusual drawing taped to his drafting table.  He had meticulously drawn the guttering outline of a large church building.  Within the guttering was a board shack with the sign ¨White Only¨.  He was venting the only way he could - this was before he began teaching Sunday School and actually had a chance to challenge some of his co-religionists.
I knew, though, that it was Mama who had sparked his concern in the matter and changed our family culture.  In the years just before she died, I asked her why - what had turned her against the prevailing attitudes.  After thinking, she said, ¨I guess it was Emma¨.  Emma Harlan was a black neighbor in the then sparsely inhabited area where Mama grew up.  The area was still rather out of the way when I first remember it.  Growing up, her white neighbors were the Colliers, the Barnetts, the Moores, the Wests, and the bootlegging family.  Then there was the small black community of Briarville.  I´m sure PatrickXFCE remembers seeing chickens in the front yard of a house on Briarville Road even after it became virtually an on ramp to Ellington Parkway.
Anyway, folks in the white community hired neighborhood blacks when they needed help.  Grandma hired Emma Harlan to look after Mama and her younger sister.  This puzzled the neighbors, who asked why she hired a black woman and then did all the gardening, churning, and farm chores herself.  ¨I know how to do those things,¨ she replied with devastating honesty.  ¨I don´t know how to look after children.¨
My Grandma was one of the most difficult people I ever met.  She could have been written by William Faulkner, or even, considering one main source of her discontent, by the playwright Ibsen.  Here was a woman who could do trig problems in her head for fun, and society had no place for a woman with that kind of skill.  She was miserable, and, like all her sisters, did a good job at spreading this around.  It´s not surprising that Mama grew to love Emma.  ¨She was a lady,¨ she told me, ¨and I remember her saying she couldn´t see why people would eat the food she fixed and not let her put her feet under the table.¨  Emma did eat with the family when there was no company.
Mama considered it a great treat to go to Emma´s house in Briarville.  The kitchen was papered with newspaper, which she thought was wonderful, and she enjoyed Emma´s family.  This was still a small community where everybody knew everybody else.  Years later, when I divorced my husband and she began looking after PatrickXFCE, one of the things she enjoyed about taking him to the local elementary school was the fact that she got to renew her acquaintance with Briarville friends from childhood while they waited for their kids.  Anyway, Mama had started having doubts about the prevailing racism even during her high school years.
Daddy, with his vastly different experience, took that part of society as he found it.  My grandad had black workers at the Water Plant (he got along well if they knew their place), and he paid one of these men to teach Daddy how to swim when they moved to the house by the river.  Appropriately enough, the only lifesaving Daddy ever did was of a young black man who had come out with friends and gone out into the water up to his neck.  His friends were teasing him (You standin´ on a rock?), but it turned out he couldn´t swim.  Daddy went out and got him in.  This man´s niece went to elementary school with PatrickXFCE.
I was about in fourth grade when School Board Vs. Brown was decided.  There was muted buzz amongst us kids - that kind of news wasn´t discussed openly in schools, of course.  I remember someone saying there were only three black children in our school zone - probably true, since we later had to have court ordered busing.  The Solid South wriggled around the Supreme Court ruling for years.  I never attended an integrated public school.
When I went to college at David Lipscomb, we had a token black.  It had long been school legend that David Lipscomb´s will, which gave the grounds for the school, stipulated that no black students should be admitted.  Many of the same Christians who sat on the Lipscomb Board also sat on the board of the undefunded black Nashville Christian Institute.  If this was a provision of the Lipscomb will, Athens Clay Pullias got around it when he found he needed Federal money for a new science building.  I understand the school is fully integrated now.
There was one respected black preacher, the charismatic Marshall Keeble, whom white folks went to black churches and tent meetings to hear.  He was quite famous for putting Bible concepts into the language of the share cropper.  I heard him in his dotage.  Mama and Daddy went to one of his meetings with my Grandad, who got the giggles when they both jumped when a woman started shouting.  Shouting was a popular practice in all rural churches, but they had never been exposed to it.
Daddy taught Sunday School for some years with a remarkable man named Wendell Cooper, who with his wife befriended us despite Ernie´s psychological problems.  Wendell, a country boy from Auburntown, was an independent thinker who took his religion seriously.  He happened to draw jury duty at one of the sit in trials and hung the jury in his search to find the right.  I remember he later did a fine oil portrait of Z. Alexander Looby, Nashville´s first black lawyer, who had defended the case.
To give you an idea of how deeply racial prejudice was ingrained, when I was small our neighbor Vernon Hines, a lawyer and brother-in-law to Beverly Briley, first Mayor of Metropolitan Nashville, referred in court to ¨my distingushed colleague Mr. Looby¨ and was much criticized in the legal community.  He was an unusual man in his lack of prejudice and interest in helping others, perhaps because of his early experience in an orphan home when his mother was widowed.
I myself never got to know black people as people until I went to work in 1969.  At that time, people were still walking on eggshells about integration, and our office manager dealt with it effectively if somewhat unusually.  He insisted on absolute formality in the workplace.  Everybody, white or black, was Mr. So-and-So or Miss or Mrs. So--and-So.  He would not tolerate any type of harrassment, racial or sexual.  His son, Samuel F. Pickering Junior, has written that his father was a racist in theory but simply could not stand seeing anybody mistreated or even treated rudely.  I know he got us through that period very nicely.  Corporations, especially in a business like insurance, quickly realized that the way to be the Good Guys and avoid a lot of trouble was to be just ahead of the latest legislation and court decision.
When PatrickXFCE was 15, I decided to teach him some living history and got from the library LPs of two great 20th Century orators - Churchill and Kennedy.  He found Churchill the more amusing of the two, but I will never forget his reaction to Kennedy´s speech given when James Meredith was trying to get into the University of Mississippi.  Kennedy was listing all the everyday disadvantages suffered by blacks at that time - not being allowed to use service station restrooms, not being allowed in retaurants, etc., and PatrickXFCE sat there on the sofa with his mouth open.  ¨I can´t imagine a restaurant where they don´t serve blacks,¨ he said.  I am glad he can´t, but it was a hard struggle getting there.  Now we´re starting to take another step, and I wanted everybody to know how far we´ve come.

I´ve been meaning to blog about the very nice concert PatrickXFCE took part in last Sunday.  It was a nice reminder that we have quite a lot of musical talent in Middle Tennessee besides Country.  The two directors had managed to get together four violins, a cello and bass, a C trumpet, a bassoon, and two oboists who brought along their English horns for parts of the work.
I had not heard the Bach ¨Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben¨ before.  As Director Stephen Clark pointed out to me afterwards, it is very Lutheran.  It is also rather a contrast to the Vivaldi ¨Gloria¨ which was the other work performed.  The ¨Gloria¨, which I myself sang in many years ago, is a long version of the so-called ¨Greater Gloria¨ that is the second item of the Ordinary of the Mass.  This version was written for a girls´ school (with male choristers from the nearby cathedral) - hence all the solos are for women´s voices.  It is generally a light and cheerful piece, even in its serious moments.
The Bach piece reveals a good deal about the composer´s circumstances.  Each number includes long instrumental interludes, and the chorale that forms a major part of it, the ¨Jesu, Joy of Man´s Desiring¨ is almost more famous for the instrumental accompaniment than the vocal line.  (By the way, Bach expected the congregation to sing the melody on these familiar chorals.)  This is because Bach was strictly a church musician and had to work with inadequate choirs.  When he wrote the huge St. Matthew Passion he had a choir of some 9 to 13 people he could really depend on, making the whole venture a daring leap of faith. (Of course he wouldn´t have to compete with a recorded version.)  Though Bach wrote some light secular cantatas, he never composed for the theater as his contemporary Handel did.  He didn´t have to attract a paying audience, thus he was free for the long instrumental excursions he enjoyed so much.
Unlike Vivaldi, Bach divided his solos into Recitative and Aria.  This does reflect operatic and oratorio practice.  Basically, the Recitative is a simple, sometimes unaccompanied, melody in which the singer announces something has just happened.  The Aria is a highly decorated piece expressing what he or she  feels about the aforementioned event.  These forms later became more flexible.
I was delighted with the quality of the soloists in both pieces.  Baroque is technically demanding, especially in German - everything flows easier in Latin or Italian.  I´m glad for PatrickXFCE to have the opportunity to learn this challenging music.
I am also happy to see him and his whole family in the atmosphere of a mainstream liturgical church rather than in fundamentalism as I grew up and as I raised him.   Though my family bought into part of the Church of Christ philosophy in which my father was raised, we were always rebels, sometimes without quite realizing why.  The thing is, fundamentalists are afraid of culture and learning - they are happy living by very strict rules and are afraid of anything that would upset them.  The Church of Christ is particularly phobic about music, which must be a capella (though they don´t know what the phrase means) and everybody singing at once.  Choirs are evil, going down the slippery slope.  When I sang with the David Lipscomb A Capella Singers, we always performed AFTER the last prayer of the church service.  We didn´t even confine ourselves to religious music, but it had to be very clear we were no part of the worship service.  We were actually advertisements for the college - careful culture on a very short rein, safe for your children.  Our director once told us to remember there is a king in every audience - some person who understands and appreciates what you are singing and even gets excited with you.  We KNEW most of our audiences didn´t get it.  Our director liked a mix of baroque and starkly modern music.  We would sing something stark like ¨O Earth, Cover Not My Blood¨, and our hosts would say ¨Oh, honey, that was so sweet¨.  If we had sung SALOME and ELEKTRA end on end, somebody would have said ¨Oh, honey, that was so sweet¨.  Often we were told more honestly ¨We aren´t ready for that¨.
Yes, I like being a Lutheran.

A week ago we had our fourth annual silent auction for TDWPac.  What´s TDWPac?  Tennessee Democratic Women´s Pac, a still small political action committee raising funds for Democratic pro-choice women running for state and local offices.  Women are woefully underrepresented in Tennessee, and there is a vocal contingent in the state trying to pass a law that would forbid abortion even to save the life of a woman in the event the Court strikes down ROE.
I was invited to join this group after working with the Davidson County Democratic Party on the Kerry Campaign.  This was quite an honor, because I´m playing WAY out of my financial league.  Most women who stay involved in politics are wealthy.  I contribute  labor, ideas, and art work and try to be a voice for those at the low end of the financial scale.  This way I get a chance to meet local political figures, female and male, and local labor leaders who are important to the party.  Talking to the local representatives has been an empowering mind opener.  My experiences with Metropolitan Nashville Davidson County have left me feeling the government was run by ¨mindless jerks who´ll be first against the wall when the revolution comes¨.  I´ve met a number of caring and involved female legislators and school board members, and two male legislators with firefighting background who understand my concerns about workplace and public safety. 
Last week an aspiring state representative attended with his wife.  As it happened, he is running in my own district, so I had the opportunity to talk about my own particular issues: enforcing workplace safety, medical and social services for people like my schizophrenic brother Ernie and my autistic grandson Josh, and the problem of large companies taking their needed jobs elsewhere.  I was delighted to find he had some real world knowledge of the problems and did not try to mouth platitudes at me.
Helping set up a silent auction is quite an experience.  When I arrived, I immediately started working with two ladies who were trying to figure out how to cover three large round tables with 8 ft rectangular tablecloths that weren´t wide enough - we ended up using 2 to 3 cloths to a table.  Then the set up materials and donations began arriving.  I hefted and found a place for 2 light easels for the art work we always get and then helped sort through the donations, wrappings, and stuff you need to set up a display.  It´s amazing how many things you need - scissors, paper cutters, box cutters, labels, and loads and loads of ballpoint pens.  A number of auction items were services of various kinds or things like dinner with legislators.  For those, a clever volunteer had made up little mini-posters on her computer, and I began helping her  get them into stand up plastic frames.  This was when we discovered that frame makers don´t talk to paper manufacturers; many frames wouldn´t take an standard 8.5 by 11 paper.  I spent some time figuring out which posters could have some fat cut off them and gathering up the paper scraps as we cut.  While we worked, other volunteers came to match the posters with their bid sheets.  A couple of ladies who possess talents I don´t made attractive food trays in the kitchen.  A hired bartender arrived to serve wine, and our fine liberal musician Thomas Duffy arrived in tails to play the piano.  One thing I enjoy about these events is the chance to hear him play - everything from Clair de Lune and O Mio Babbino Caro to Glen Miller and Scott Joplin.  The talented son of one of our patrons also played later in the evening.  Sometimes I almost forget the political talk listening to the music.
In this down economy, our event was smaller than last year´s, but we had less overhead as well.  Some of my own small contributions sold, and I bought a nice Shakespeare in the Park tee shirt.  I understand what we didn´t sell is going to another local liberal group for their fund raiser.  TDWPac is being listed as a patron of that event.  We are beginning to attract attention statewide; one lady candidate drove all the way from Carthage, Tennessee to speak to us and seek our support.
This is political power beginning small.  It´s the way the Republicans took over so much, and it´s the way we´ve got to take it back.

Below is part of an email I got today from American Rights at Work:

How many workers have to be killed before Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao does her job?

Across the country, factory fires and explosions caused by "combustible dust" are claiming lives. Last month alone more than a dozen workers died, and still Elaine's department is stalling on regulations to protect workers.

Concerned lawmakers sent Elaine an official letter urging her to take immediate steps to prevent these fires and explosions. Elaine didn't even respond.

So Congress is holding a hearing TODAY on a bill that would force Elaine to act. It's absurd that it has come to this, but we need your help.

I´m particularly sensitive to this issue because of working in the insurance industry.  I suggest you check out the website www.oshaunderground.blogspot.com, an UNOFFICIAL website that gives a surprising amount of readable data.

This combustible dust issue isn´t new.  When I was putting PatrickXFCE into Austin Peay State University in the fall of 1986, the college held a weekend program for parents.  Being long divorced, I was assigned a dorm room with another single woman.  She had difficulty sleeping (there were dark, bruise like smudges under her eyes) and was glad to tell me her story, knowing that in my business I would understand.

She was putting her oldest son into college by herself because her husband had worked in a factory whose operations produced a good deal of metal dust.  The operation was partly automated, and one building was entered only for maintenance.  It did not have the dust collectors that are industry recommended, and the motors running the equipment were not explosion proof.  Her husband and a fellow employee entered this building to perform maintenance.  They had their company-supplied tools, which were not of the OSHA required non-sparking variety.  Her husband went up on the catwalk and touched a tool to a motor to begin maintenance.  In the resulting explosion, his co-worker was blown out the door and broke his leg.  God only knows what they found for that poor woman to bury.

Thanks to Workers' Compensation insurance and the numerous OSHA violations, she got a good settlement that would allow her to educate all the children, the youngest being seven.  There would be no financial worries - but I can testify that no amount of money in the world could make up for what that woman suffered.

Multiply that by the story above.

Artemisia

I´ve started doing pictures for a proposed calendar of Notable Women.  Any comments?