Jefferson and the Blues

Slowly, ever so slowly, through a combination of history, travel, and personal contact, I began to see this new South through a different focus. Notice that I don’t claim any deep or cosmic understanding; not even high-quality hallucinogens could make up for my lack of a dixie backstory. 

Life in Atlanta taught me that one cannot truly understand the region unless one’s family predates the war between the states (“the war of southern independence,” as it was known by those fair-haired boys standing beside their lion). My view was clearly that of an outsider. I was a convert, not a native, who tried hard to fit in, but ultimately would move on. 

My southern friends were right that no matter how much I absorbed the culture, I was still a peripatetic Yankee carpetbagger at heart, likely guilty of cultural appropriation if I even attempted to put my observations in print.

The view I came to encompass was this - the South, for better or worse, is America - more so than any other region. Maybe because southerners live their history; maybe because everyone else forgets theirs; maybe because, despite the suburban sprawl and shopping malls, the south remains a separate culture; but most likely because the most critical issue for America to come to grips with is, and always has been, its original sin - racism and its foundational evil, slavery.

You see, there is no truly unique American culture, language, or ethnicity. Not as there is in, say, France, Germany, or Sweden. If you are French, it doesn’t matter whether you are Communist or Monarchist, Socialist or Gaullist, you are still French. We are American because of a shared set of ideals. America at its best is as much an idea as a physical place. That space is capacious. There is room for many differing views of American ideals, but there is at its root a uniquely American concept of opportunity. You need not be born here, you need only accept the guarantees and limitations of our institutions to be one of us. 

We are all equal before the law - or so Americans in their most optimistic and, some would say, blinkered reality like to believe. There are in theory no hereditary classes, or so we are taught in school. But this doesn’t resonate if some are less equal because of their racial background. How can all be created equal if some are more favored than others before the law? For America to be what her most fervent patriots wish her to be, for America to lead the way toward a future of equal opportunity, it must finally come to grips with the issue of slavery and its legacy, racism!

If race is the transcendent issue in America, the south is where it becomes real. Others may delude themselves into thinking all things are now even, but southerners know better. President Reagan may have claimed that where he grew up in downstate Illinois there was no racism, but southerners know they are not the only region who suffer this curse. In the Illinois of Reagan’s youth, the Grand Dragon of the Klan, who headed a state membership of over 200,000 in 1924, could legitimately claim, “We know we’re the balance of power in the state...We can control what we want and get what we want from the state government.” 

The largest Klan chapter in the country in the 1920s was in neighboring, and northern, Indiana, with a membership of over 250,000. In addition to African Americans, the Klan also fomented hatred against Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, and Slavs - all Caucasian, just not the RIGHT kind of Caucasian. By 1925, over half of the elected representatives of the Indiana General Assembly, and the Governor, were members. A southern problem indeed. 

The complexity of race in the South - and, in reality, the entire American experiment - is exemplified in the man who penned that famous claim that, “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Thomas Jefferson, squire of Monticello, third President of the United States, Secretary of State, Ambassador to France, classicist, linguist, inventor, architect, and botanist, among other things. A true man of the Enlightenment. Scourge of conservative Christians of his day - burned in effigy for his lack of piety. Champion of religious freedom. A man so brilliant that President Kennedy, when toasting a roomful of Nobel laureates nearly 150 years after his death, said, “There has not been this much brainpower assembled in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.”

In addition to all of this, he was an owner of slaves, of his fellow humans, as were 41 of the signatories of that revolutionary document. A Virginian at heart. A southerner of the eighteenth century by birth. 

In Jefferson, the dilemma that would forever block the path to realizing the enlightenment era belief in a universal declaration of human rights as well as achieving the more utopian aspects of the American ideal was there, in one brilliant package. A lightning rod in his own day, he remains so today. What does the Declaration of Independence really stand for if its author was a slave holder? 

Whose rights does the Constitution guarantee? If “originalist” constitutional theory is applied, then the rights of more than 50% of the people alive at the time the Constitution became law had no protections. Not women, who would not become enfranchised until the 19th amendment was ratified in 1920. Certainly not people of African descent, who largely remained property until 700,00 people on both sides died during the Civil War, resulting in the passage of the 13 Amendment in 1865. It most certainly did not apply to the Native Americans whose continent was dispossessed. They did not legally get the right to vote until passage of the Indian Citizens Act of 1924. This does not even address the impediments of voting for these latter groups imposed by Jim Crow, poll taxes, and literacy tests, alive and well into the 1960s, and under attack once more by the Trump administration.  

Do the ensuing two centuries prove that Jefferson was right in supporting both a ban on slavery in new territories combined with repatriation to Africa in 1784, believing that white Americans would never accept blacks as equals? As we approach our 250th anniversary many of these issues, avoided, ignored, and unresolved in the 18th century, in many ways remain at the heart of political polarization today.

Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, was another Virginian, Jefferson’s protégé and an owner of slaves. The so-called “Father of the Nation and first president, George Washington was the largest slave owner in Virginia. Presidents, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, and Andrew Johnson were all slave owners. 

The original Constitution didn’t fully count those of African descent as people. It would take eighty long years, and the bloodiest war in American history, to change this tragic omission. And even then, this gaping wound would not heal. To this day, it remains the insuperable barrier to America truly reaching the transformative ideals laid out in its foundational documents.

And yet, as they say, there is more. Jefferson is even more complicated than the accepted history. Because Jefferson crossed still another line - Jefferson broke the sexual taboo. He bore children with his black slave, Sally Hemings. To Jefferson, according to the accounts of the day, she was more wife than concubine. Modern historians and racial activists, seeking redress, cannot come to grips with this. 

In his time, Jefferson could not legally cohabitate with Sally Hemings. To free her would separate them. Contemporary accounts, tinged with outrage and scandal, indicate that she was the lady of Monticello from the time Jefferson’s wife died when he was a young man. She was offered her freedom in France when Jefferson served there as US Minister but declined and followed him home. 

Was Sally Hemmings his slave, concubine, surrogate wife, or mistress of Monticello? Could their sexual relations EVER be considered consensual as she was his legal property? Did she return voluntarily from France with him or was she coerced because her relatives remained enslaved? While much debated today, we can never truly know the answers to these troubling questions. And even if we could definitively answer them, if a previously hidden diary of Ms. Hemmings were to be discovered, what might we learn? 

Can we judge Jefferson by modern standards? Does the fact he was a slaveholder eliminate his historic efforts on behalf of religious freedom or diminish the revolutionary nature of the rights claimed in the Declaration of Independence? Does his statue deserve its place in a monument on the national Mall? What to make of our national founding myths?

As all things pertaining to race in America, and particularly the south, black and white elide quickly into gray. When I moved south, I had the certainty of youth. North good, south bad. Interracial Penn State and USC were favorites on the football field, all-white Alabama and Texas the hated enemy. Southerners were yahoos and rednecks, northerners and Californians the enlightened ones. It would take years of books, barrels of sour mash, and many hours sitting around campfires in the south and west to get even a limited handle on this subject.

I certainly don’t mean the racial legacy, for this is as appalling as ever. However, what I learned was that among these southerners, this was their past - and while they were not proud of much of it, they had not created but rather inherited this world and all it represented, and thus they refused to be defined or blamed by its warped racial values, no more so than young Germans, born since the war, could rightfully be blamed for the Nazi past of their parents. 

Know the past and learn from it. Never forget, but don’t be held back by it. Keep the good, toss the bad. Grow and learn. Black and white kids in the south know each other, often better than those in segregated northern cities and suburbs. 

In the bad old days of Jim Crow, this would end when the kids went off to school. End legal discrimination, and outside the exclusive neighborhoods, black and white were thrown together in ways not possible in the well-zoned parts of the country. They knew each other. The attitudes, good or bad, were based on real contact. Some prejudice clearly remained, but it was to a larger degree a prejudice of familiarity.

The antebellum South still lives, at least in memory, and in the grace and grandeur of Madison and Savannah, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans. Not as an urge to return to the terrors of slavery, but rather as a reminder of the past and of the land. Those raised north of the Mason-Dixon line fail to grasp the subtlety in the distinction. For the southerner with roots in Dixie soil, there is no contradiction in revering the gentility of the past in contrast to the gross commercialization and unending churn in modern society and ignoring the harshness of the economic system that made it possible. 

A celebration of Robert E. Lee's birthday, a hoop skirt, yes, even the Stars and Bars, can be worn proudly in remembrance of a noble past, without rancor towards those oppressed by these very symbols. Outsiders don't understand - and southerners don't care. 

There are no easy answers here. For those more comfortable with simple truths, the south will always remain mysterious. A brief visit, like a flyover of the Grand Canyon, may reveal only the obvious, while missing what can be learned down there on the ground. 

As Scarlett O'Hara learned from her father, it is the land that makes the South unique. Whether the rich loams of the Mississippi Delta or the hard scrabble pan of the Appalachians, it is what creates the ties that bind. Neither reconstruction troops nor kudzu vines can obscure the reality that the soils of the South are different. What makes them so cannot be easily explained. 

Light Horse Harry Lee came from this land and was returned to it on Cumberland Island in the south Georgia coastal tidelands. So too came Faulkner. And Martin Luther King. And Pitch Fork Tom Watson. And Medgar Evers, George Wallace, Ray Charles, Thomas Jefferson, and the Blues.

The Klan and night riders are the south. But so are jazz and the blues. The Mississippi Delta is a poverty stricken region that created wealth for its white overlords and miserable poverty for the black population. It is both violent and beautiful. It is the home of the Klan, the murderers of the civil rights campaigners Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and White Citizen Councils. 

However, from that poverty and oppression came BB King, Muddy Waters, and the Blues. New Orleans produced Louis Armstrong and Al Hirt, Wynton Marsalis, Dr. John and the Neville Brothers. But does one exist without the other? Does the richness of black society exist absent the tragedy of our history?  Is our culture richer for the shame of it all? Is this contradiction what binds us as Americans?

It is why Bill Clinton, the small-town hustler from Hot Springs, Arkansas, captured the hearts and minds of black Americans. To Blacks, "he's just passing." He understands them, and they, him. 

Clinton’s Hot Springs was Baptist Vegas, but with a little Christian moralizing sprinkled on top to make it interesting. Everything was for sale: the flesh, the soul, and all in between. The southern hustle played out in Phenix City, Alabama, Biloxi, Mississippi, and in that grand madame of wanton lasciviousness, New Orleans, the Catholic harlot in the Baptist homeland.

From the beginning of that freshman night watching JB Stoner spew his execrable ideology, when all present realized they were peering into the heart of darkness and that the nation’s original sin still resided only partially in the shadows, the image of Stoner and his White Rights banner would never be far from my consciousness. 

As the South revealed itself layer upon layer, like a sweet Vidalia onion, and I began to grasp the complexity of the region at least partially, I remained unable to reconcile the place and people that I had come to love with the crude, race baiting night rider whistling dixie under the stars and bars, illuminated by a burning cross. 

I came to accept George Orwell’s admonition when trying to come to some understanding of the south as I experienced it, that “he who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.” 

The question I would ask myself many times as the years and decades rolled forward was why, with my mostly radical views of the American nation, could I come to love the south, its culture, its people, and the very landscape of this beautiful yet dark, mostly conservative and historically troubled land. 

The answer to this deeply personal question would require a nuanced perspective on race relations in America, still inchoate during my early years in Georgia. In future decades, after relocating to California, I would expand my understanding of the complexity inherent in the American experiment as I worked with and interacted with Latinos of all stripes, east and south Asians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and so many more. I learned that the simplistic duality of black and white, native and immigrant, that I had experienced in Georgia, was a single variant in a far more nuanced equation, like comparing trigonometry to simple math.

Writing from modern liberal 21st century California, it is easy to forget my adopted home’s fraught history. Indigenous tribes were dispossessed of land, forcibly converted, and eventually hunted to near extinction with bounties paid for scalps as if they were animals. Oregon, another 21st century blue state, has a tiny black population due to racial exclusionary laws passed in the 1840s, whereby blacks were prohibited from even living in the state. 

After the US Supreme Court in 1948 in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer precluded enforcement of racially restrictive housing covenants, the California Association of Realtors advocated for an amendment to the United States Constitution that would overturn Shelley and constitutionally guarantee the legal enforcement of racially restrictive covenants throughout the United States.

In advocating support for a federal constitutional amendment guaranteeing the legal enforcement of racially restrictive covenants, the California Real Estate Association publication stated that "millions of home owners of the Caucasian race have constructed or acquired homes in areas restricted against occupancy by Negroes. The practice of surrounding homes in such areas with the security of such restrictions has become a traditional element of value in home ownership throughout this nation."

In 1964, Ronald Reagan jump started his political career running for Governor by campaigning against the Rumford Fair Housing Act signed into law the year before by Governor Pat Brown. The Act outlawed discrimination in housing. Reagan was joined in his opposition by the John Birch Society, the American Nazi Party, as well as the California Republican Assembly. 

In 1994, behind in the polls to Governor Pat Brown’s daughter, State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, incumbent Republican Governor Pete Wilson roared to victory running an effective and hugely racist commercial targeting Latino immigrants, with the tag line, “they keep coming.”

Caesar Chavez and his United Farmworkers Union came to national prominence decrying the inhumanity of working conditions on California’s giant corporate farms, where many recent Latino immigrants were employed.

My perspectives on race have evolved from those early years in Atlanta. Slowly forming, shifting, metastasizing into a deeper questioning of caste, and race, class, and economics, never static, each experience, each class, each year leading to a few answers, but ultimately only more questions.   

Wrestling with these issues is never easy. Each person experiences race through societal legacy and personal experience. Anecdotes containing positive and negative stereotypes are passed from parent to child generation to generation. Throughout history fear of “the other,” has been an easy tool for demagogues to wield. It may reside in our very biology. A million years ago when our humanoid ancestors first climbed out of those trees in southern Africa, the folks in your tree were less likely to be a threat than those from the neighboring forest. As a result of this evolutionary past, we humans, at this most fundamental basis are tribal. Overcoming that instinct has not been easy.

Looking back on my life from the vantage of 70 years, I often reflect on a line from Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” , “I was so much older then I’m younger than that now.” When I was young in those formative years in Atlanta I was certain of my perspectives on the world. On race, politics, and human nature. What the ensuing decades have taught me is that each partial answer leads only to more questions. The certainty of youth has evolved into the wonder of the lacuna of my ignorance. Wouldn’t it be lovely to revisit youth with the knowledge gained by age? 

Thomas Jefferson and the blues, the story of America!