Fading Memories of Underdevelopment

 

When I started my blog series Doing Good and Living Well, posts about the great 40-year ride I had through Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, I figured that I would write for years.  If I counted the days, each one always remarkable by some character, event, experience, I would have thousands of stories, anecdotes, and memories; and yet, after having written no more than 25 posts in this category, I find myself groping for ideas.  Was it because I had chosen the most eccentric characters, the most harrowing or beautiful experiences and the rest by comparison were more mundane? Was it because so much of life in those days was, for lack of a better term, experiential – it was a total, enveloping experience which I didn’t disaggregate then and cannot do now?  India, I have written, was a visual, intellectual, and sensory kaleidoscope.  It was unique, and never after have I been in such a place.  Or was it that I was looking for some meaning and tried to expand each experience into something broader?

Perhaps that last is the best explanation.  The fragments of memory I have – like sitting in the barsati in the early morning practicing my sitar, hearing the screech of the parrots as they left their rooks on the walls of Humayan’s tomb; or feeling the first cool spot in Delhi in late September, a sign that the brutal heat of the summer was losing its hold; or sitting in the small courtyard of the local Wolof sheik’s hut in a remote village in Thies, talking of family planning while he held court surrounded by his five wives; or eating spicy tripe soup in Bucharest, or admiring the still vibrant exterior frescoes on the monasteries in Suceava – are just fragments, pieces of a pastiche with no particular coherent core, theme, or center.

The most compelling reason, however, is because my life has shifted gears and geographical focus.  Except for a short trip to Nicaragua for a marriage, I have not travelled for over three years, and I have not worked in health or development since June of last year when I retired.  Unlike some people who retire and have trouble letting loose the reins of the career they had, often pushing on even harder than before, happy to die in their traces, fulfilling professional commitments, hoping to strike new ground despite the youthful energy and enthusiasm around them, I left my work with nary a glance back.  It was not that I was tired or unhappy, frustrated or angry.  It was just time for a change.  I had no particular plans, but I knew that there was a new world waiting, and I couldn’t wait to explore it.

I cannot deny that my cultural curiosity, expressed in international travel, did not play a part in my decade-long exploration of the South.  The South is, in many ways, a very foreign country to a Connecticut Yankee; and of course at one time it was another country.  I am fascinated by everything here, curious about community and family ties so important in the South.  I am attuned to racial balance or imbalance, eager to know about the transformation of the Old South to the New.  After all, the North had but one trajectory as it evolved quickly from trade and agriculture to industry, just like Europe.  The South had two – antebellum, and post-Civil War. 

So my intellectual and personal compass keeps pointing south, and in the past year I have spent time in Apalachicola, FL, a small port town on the Gulf Panhandle, insulated from the development to the east and west – again, a cultural curiosity because of its tenacity to retain the artisan oyster industry and succeeding, and its hold against the hotels and condominiums filling the Gulf Coast.  I have travelled up the Atlantic Coast through Georgia and South Carolina, stopping in small towns to sample their variation of Southern life, cuisine, and culture.  I am now in Columbus, Mississippi, and will be for six weeks.  I am here to help prepare for the Tennessee Williams birth Centennial, a two week affair in early September with a performance of Night of the Iguana, academic roundtables, visits to historical sites, etc.  I am also here to live in a small Southern town – my favorite in Mississippi - for an extended period of time.  What would it be like to live here?  How much would my distinctly Northern, urban, international character and experience leave me an outsider? Or would age, experience, cultural openness learned from all my travels, and the very pleasant and welcoming nature of Columbus be an easy elision?

At the same time, my geographical focus has other compass points.  I am getting to know San Francisco and Northern California.  I spent the first two months of my retirement in San Francisco while my daughter was in Europe.  I visit my son in Boston regularly, and my mother in my home town in Connecticut.  I have plans to visit friends in Colorado and Seattle.

Most importantly, my perspective is now national.  I am more interested in Mississippi than I am in Angola or Senegal.  The particular excitement I had in my earlier days – the excitement of new places, languages, challenges, friends, adventures – is not of so high value.  Of course age is a factor.  Travelling to these places has become more and more difficult, and the rewards fewer.  Cost-benefit analysis indicated “Stop travelling”.   India still holds an allure – how could it not, since it was the most seminal and important experience of my life – and so does Romania; but they are all of secondary importance to my life here.

Another element for the fading of my international memories has been my renewed interest for theatre; and that interest grows every day, and now takes up most of my life.  In the early days after retirement I re-read all of Faulkner, was overwhelmed by his writing, insights, and intelligence which made me put aside all other fiction.  I plan to visit Oxford Mississippi this trip or next year and enroll in a course on Faulkner.  I then moved to Shakespeare, and was once again overwhelmed by the same qualities – insight, elegance of language, poetry, and vast intellect and intelligence.  I have read nearly all the plays, and after my Tennessee Williams sojourn, I plan to return to Shakespeare.

These literary interests are supra-national.  Theatre is a world unto itself, a magnificent, boundless world which, now, is even more exciting and challenging and promising than any travel I have ever done.

I have no idea where these current interests will lead me.  I want to continue my readings in Southern history, particularly in Reconstruction and the economics of slavery.  I want to dig far deeper into Faulkner and Williams; but then again, one year ago I had no idea that I would be doing what I am doing now, so who knows?

In any case, I feel renewed, a new sense of purpose and interest – one more moderate, perhaps than the wild ramblings in foreign lands, but maybe even more fulfilling; or better, maybe what I need at this late point in my life.

Mississippi–Building Sets for Night of the Iguana

 

I am now in Columbus, Mississippi and will be here for six weeks, culminating in the 100th birthday celebration for Tennessee Williams who was born here.  I came here to spend an extended period of time because I have always liked the South and Mississippi; and because in the last year I have become re-engaged with theatre.  As those of you who follow this blog know, I have been re-reading all the Shakespeare plays that didn’t take as an English major at Yale, and writing some of my own literary criticism about Shakespeare and the plays.  I had been planning to go to Columbus in any event to get a more extended feel for life in the town, and to continue my explorations of Mississippi which began over six years ago. 

Columbus is a great place.  It is a small town which, unlike many others in Mississippi, the South and the North, is thriving.  The downtown which, six years ago, was active but not alive, is now filled with cafes and restaurants.  A family I met from Newport News was here helping their daughter renovate a space for a new café.  I met, through my hosts, a Mexican-American family who, on the basis of a very successful restaurant, were building a French-style café. 

Every time I go back to New Britain, Connecticut, the town in which I was born and where my mother still lives, I take a tour of the downtown, hoping that I will see signs of life; and yet, there is little more than the foul-smelling Jimmy’s Smoke Shop where as young teenagers we used to ogle the girlie magazines in the back.  Jimmy’s has survived because he has the Peter Pan bus franchise, and the Boston-NYC busses all stop in New Britain, fuel up with candy bars, cokes, and girlie magazines, and head south.  There is a Jamaican restaurant, two nail places, an odds-and-ends notion shop, a diner serving the locals and the bus traffic, and that’s it.  The State of Connecticut put its Appeals Court in New Britain, so in that part of town there are a few coffee shops, but the downtown is still sputtering.  The grand Bank Building, this great 19th Century gem of high ceilings, imposing murals, marble and polished brass is unused and unsold.  The other 19th century buildings downtown are empty.  There is new small industry, but it is located on the outskirts, and its families go to the malls at Corbin Corners.

So Columbus is a delight.  I have been to so many blighted, decaying small town centers in search of themselves, like Helena, Arkansas across the Mississippi from Hernando, relying on floating casino trade, but with a downtown by the levees that is hoping for a tourist influx because of its blues festival, but so many towns in Mississippi on the other side of the river in real Delta Blues country are trying to do the same, Helena has little chance.

Cleveland, Mississippi is alive and well – although without the vibrancy of Columbus – because of a hospital and a junior college.  Greenwood, Mississippi is the home of Viking Stoves, Cottonlandia – a living historical museum of cotton in the Delta – and some great restaurants.  It is alive and prospering because of Viking, and a regional hospital.  Laurel has a great modern art museum.  Clarksdale is the home of the blues…Belzoni is holding its own as the Catfish Capital of the World; and on it goes.  Small towns struggle to regain or retain the integrity they once had, the employment base, the cultural amenities, the life and leisure of community.   Columbus has found the key.  It has a university – The Mississippi University for Women – now co-educational and known throughout the region as a quality academic institution.  In my few days here, I have met many young people who have graduated from the Theatre Department of the “W” as the university is called and who feel that the university has given them an opportunity and a solid foundation for the future.  Columbus is near an air base and not far from Mississippi State in Starkville; so it has the infrastructure necessary for longevity and progress.

Columbus also has an active community.  Because the descendants of the families who settled here are still here, there is a sense of place and history; and the desire to see history extended is noteworthy.  If one wants only the survival of a place, industry, public and private institutions may be enough; but to assure the continuity of the special culture and traditions of a small town with a living history back to 1821 when it was chartered but long before that with the settlements of Hernando de Soto in the 1500s.  In Columbus, as in many towns of the South (and I suspect all over the country), people know everyone.  I was taken on a tour of some of the most spectacular Victorian and antebellum houses of the city, but it was the narrative of my guide which was the most remarkable.  He told me the history of every family in every house, how they came to Columbus, how they made their fortunes, and what has become of them.

Which leads me to my carpentry.  One of the main reasons I came back to Columbus was to help out and participate in the 100th birthday celebration for Tennessee Williams.  During the Festival week (first two weeks of September), there will be performances, readings, visitations of Williams-related homes and churches, and a series of performances of NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, especially chosen because of the character of Nonno, modeled after Williams’ grandfather whom he loved and respected.

I offered to help out however I could, and was invited to help build the sets.  OK, I said, anything to help.  That’s why I am here.  Little did I know that it was actually building the sets – hammering, drilling, screwing, sawing.  I have never sawed, screwed, drilled, hammered, or built.  My life was built around others who could handle these practical aspects of life.  Five hour later, I had learned basic carpentry – alignment, levels, measurement, and of course hammering and screwing.  We – four willing volunteers – built the basic infrastructure of the set.   I don’t want to this to get around.  In the Mississippi parlance it is called “Honeydew” – Honey, do this.  Honey, do that.  I like my life with no hammering.

There is a lot of time before the performance, and I am told the hard work is now over, and the fun work of putting the platforms on stage, building (simple!) the theatrical walls, arbors, etc. is about to begin.  I am in it for the long run.  I will fill in for any of the theatrical parts, backstage and on stage.  I will schlep and cheer.  I am part of a theatrical production for the first time in my life in place I like, for a playwright I admire.

A Connecticut Yankee in the South

 

I love the South and especially Mississippi.  This love – this interest - was easy to explain because each trip was filled with history, magnificent antebellum houses, open people with stories to tell, small towns, community.  There is something beautiful about the Deep South, especially in the Mississippi Delta when the cotton is ripe and ready to be picked – acres and acres of white cotton receding into the distance on all sides.  I would always find ways to be near the Mississippi River, powerful, majestic, and a major part of our history. 

The reactions I got to this enthusiastic paean were surprising.  I was called explicitly or implicitly a traitor – an apostate, a heretic, consorting with the enemy, a turncoat.  Going to Mississippi was wrong, immoral, and a betrayal of Northern liberal, progressive ideals.  The cotton plant that I brought back – a souvenir of the South – was, I was told, a symbol of slavery and I should not display it.  For me, however, the cotton plant was magical.  One of my father’s friends sent me one when I was a child, and I thought it was beautiful and mysterious.  A plant that was light and fluffy like a cloud.  A plant from which my clothes were made. 

On our Southern trips we stayed in over 100 magnificent antebellum homes, restored to their original condition and appointed with furniture and appurtenances from the period – chests, highboys, armoires, beds, chairs, sofas and loveseats, clocks, lamps, mirrors, writing desks, fireplaces.  Some of these homes, like Equen Plantation in Mississippi, are spectacular.  Each room more beautiful than the next.  I never could decide in which to sit.  Early morning coffee in the sitting room/conservatory; breakfast and dinner in the formal dining room; drinks in one of the parlors (in these old houses there were parlors for men and women).  The Chretien Point Plantation in Louisiana was similar.  We got stranded there because of being blown back from the Gulf by a hurricane; but stranded was hardly the word.  Long summer afternoons on the top floor verandah, overlooking a vast lawn with live oaks, or in the library, study, parlor, or various living rooms. 

We stayed in town houses, vast plantation houses in the middle of the cotton fields, elaborate manors constructed by wealthy businessmen in Vicksburg and Natchez.  Each house was carefully and lovingly restored.  Nearly ever proprietor had a story to tell about the house, why he had bought it, and what it meant to him.  Some proprietors purchased family property that had been in other hands for decades so that they could return it to their own historical legacy.  Others were simply protective of a patrimony which they felt important to preserve.  Others wanted simply to rescue beautiful old buildings.  Once we stayed in a home in Lancaster, South Carolina.  The owner had bought the remains of a historic house which had been destroyed and left as rubble, found the original plans, numbered each board and plank, hauled them to a piece of land he had bought, and over two years reconstructed the house.  Amazing and beautiful.

Many of these plantation homes had journals kept by the original owners.  One in particular had the elaborate slave records kept by the owner who was also a doctor.  It was a meticulously kept ledger of expenses and productivity – a true accountant’s tracking of his investment.  He had kept the name of each slave and how much he had spent on housing, food, heating, medical care, etc. At the time I was reading Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (Fogel), an important book looking at slavery as an economic institution and shedding light on one of the most critical issues of the Civil War period – would slavery have eventually collapsed under its own weight, or was it a stable institution that needed to be destroyed? Was the war more about slavery per se or about two conflicting economic systems?  Reading the ledgers and daily log of the doctor/planter, I was better able to understand Fogel and his economic-based arguments. 

We stayed at one antebellum mansion in Jackson, Mississippi and the owner had one of the state’s most complete library of Civil War era books – antebellum, war, and Reconstruction.  The owner was an amateur historian with a particular interest in Reconstruction, and we spent hours discussing what for me is the most important part of the era.  Reconstruction, the politics and philosophy behind it and its dismal failures is replayed again and again in modern American history, national and international.  We continue to believe that our way is right, that we have a moral obligation to enforce it, and ultimately lose out to a more tenacious and committed enemy – think of Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq.  The North imposed impossible conditions on the South, and the South, understanding that it had great power given the North’s desire to build a more perfect Union, rejected them.  De facto slavery continued for another 100 years.

One time we stayed on the Arkansas side of the River in its own Delta, and I had endless talks with people down at the port of Helena about river traffic today and before.  The town – like many small towns in the South – was trying to fend off the natural decline as industry moved out, and had built a museum of the Blues.  It contained many fascinating pictures of the town, of the Delta, and of the River.  The same in Natchez and Vicksburg – the museums are treasures.  We stayed at a townhouse in Vicksburg, bought by a relative of the original owners who had been in the house during the siege of Vicksburg; and he held us spellbound with a story, reconstructed from the oral history of his family and written narratives, about the siege, how cannonballs rained on them from Union ships on the river, how his family survived but the town did not.

Our Southern trips were also about discovering small town Southern life.  I come from an industrial New England city, one of the largest cities in America at the time of the Civil War and responsible for producing many of the industrial products and armaments needed by the Union Army.  It was by no means a small town.  It was a city; and the real small towns we visited in the South were always no more than 5000 inhabitants, usually less, and had, despite economic decline, a real cohesive community.  The towns that were able to survive had some stable institutional base – a hospital, university or college, some important industry.  The others were just crumbling, with old downtowns, abandoned buildings, and little else. 

Cleveland, Mississippi, is one of those towns – solid institutional base, and growing modestly.  Greenwood, Mississippi is the corporate home of Viking Stoves and the corporation has invested in infrastructure and amenities.  It has still retained its old charm, but has been resuscitated. Laurel Mississippi has an excellent art museum with an impressive collection, and it has been a center of social and commercial activity.

Columbus, Mississippi (probably a small city rather than a small town) has Mississippi University for Women, no longer only for women, although the name remains because of its long history as a pioneering institutions, the first public women’s college in the United States.   Because of a strong and active community, Columbus has attracted national and international companies, and I have watched the downtown grow over the six years since my first visit.  It is alive and well with a lot of promise, although many of the old families are dying out and there are many beautiful homes on the market.  Thanks to the people behind the Tennessee Williams Festival held every year (this is the Centennial Year of his birth), Columbus is becoming better known statewide, nationally, and internationally as a place of artistic and historical interest.

On our trips we have visited hundreds of small towns in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.  Some, like those I have mentioned above are thriving.  Others are struggling to retain identity and community, but face the inexorable pressures of a changing economy.  In each town I looked for signs of promise as I do in my own home town of New Britain, Connecticut.  Will the new State of Court of Appeals finally be the one institution that will revitalize downtown? Will the new economic base (New Britain was always “The Hardware Capital of the World” and home to Fafnir Bearings, Corbin Locks, and Stanley Tools) of small-scale tool and dye and other subsidiary industrial enterprises bring upper and middle level managers who want to live in a town, not in the suburbs? 

New Britain just completely restored and renovated Walnut Hill Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead in 1870.  It was a grand park with 100 year old oaks, spacious grounds, parks, and walkways.  It was always used for sports, picnics, and outings, especially by the Polish immigrants (now a more diverse immigrant community).

The Park was also home to the New Britain Art Museum, a small treasure housing paintings by well known American artists.  It, too, was recently renovated and expanded so, like Columbus, it has attracted a statewide if not national attention.  New Britain is no longer The Hardware City, but the home of the Museum.

I want to see towns and small cities survive.  Perhaps because I have lived for so long in big cities (Washington DC for the past 34 years, Bombay, Delhi), I have romanticized life in these smaller places.  Perhaps it is because I am older; but, especially in the small towns like Columbus, there is something particularly attractive – a quieter life? Community? Engagement?  Whatever the reasons, I feel a part of these places.  I am rooting for them.