by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
Southern writer Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You can’t go home again.”
You can figure out what that means for yourself, but some scholars have suggested it means you can’t recover the past.
In Wolfe’s book, George Webber has written a novel about his hometown. When he returns, he is shaken by the force of outrage from his family and friends, who feel naked and exposed by what he wrote. Their fury drives him from home.
Outcast, George Webber begins a search for his own identity. It takes him to New York, Paris and Berlin. The journey comes full circle when Webber returns to America and rediscovers it with love, sorrow and hope.
Is it possible for a person to eradicate his roots, a necessary step George thinks if, “a man was to win his ultimate freedom and not be plunged back into savagery and perish utterly from the earth?”
Other southern writers have said you can’t write effectively unless you embrace and understand where you come from.
The world is full of contradictions. Figuring them out ought to be a parlor game - if there were a such thing as a parlor game in these times.
Events of the past few days have forced me to try to deal with some of the contradictions of the place I have come home to, at least for now.
The celebration of Birmingham’s Southside. The healthcare hearing with Rep. John Conyers at the Carver Theater and Jazz Hall of Fame. The Friends of the Locust Fork hike down the river from the Swann Bridge to Powell Falls. The Condi Rice visit and the protest. The campaign of William Bell to get back on the Birmingham City Council. Conversations with the local artists and photographers club.
For the Southside remembrance, it became necessary to think through my own connections to Southside as well as some thoughts on my close friend Spider Martin, who departed this planet on April 8, 2003, on the 30th anniversary of his hero Pablo Picasso’s death.
For the record, I was born in South Highlands Hospital - which was taken over by HealthSouth under Richard Scrushy - on Oct. 15, 1957. It was the same week Life magazine came out with a cover story on Sputnik, the Russian satellite which set off a massive space race that ultimately led to the moon landing on July 20, 1969. That may have something to do with my keen interest in science.
I was raised in the suburbs and grew up reading The Birmingham News, which by any definition is not now and has never been a “liberal newspaper,” in spite of what the far out critics of the right on talk radio would have you believe.
After learning to play the drums in a Jefferson County junior high school band, my dad bought me a set of drums from the old Nuncie’s music store on Fourth Avenue downtown about a year before he died of a heart attack on March 1, 1973. I was only 15.
By the time I turned 17, I was playing the drums in rock bands in the bars of Birmingham, including Diamond Jim’s on First Avenue, Terri’s Big Top downtown, and The Courtyard on Southside. I was hanging out drinking draft beer in the Cadillac Cafe before I was old enough to drink legally. The legal age in those days was only 18.
I played in the last house band in the Courtyard before they closed it down and enclosed it in about 1977 in a band called Backstreet.
By the end of the summer of 1979, the game of musical chairs in Birmingham bar bands, and the lack of ultimate success by bands such as Hotel and Alabama Power, turned me off to the business of rock ‘n’ roll.
So I went back to college and discovered an interest in history, politics, science and writing. In 1981, I left Birmingham for the first time to live in Tuscaloosa and study journalism and political science.
By 1983, I was back again hanging out on Southside with a woman I thought I would marry. Her family owned a retail store, a flower shop and a diner on 20th Street in Five Points, so I spent a few months learning every nook and alley on Southside and hanging out at Joe bar, Dugan’s and other haunts while applying for newspaper jobs around the region.
By the beginning of 1984, I left Birmingham again and moved with my fiancé to Bay Minette to work for Jimmy Faulkner’s old weekly newspaper The Baldwin Times. After a year there learning the news business, I was recruited to work in North Alabama as a political reporter.
Some of the lessons of the news business were hard to take, though. I learned that newspapers were not as honorable as they should be and ended up in federal court standing up for the rights of reporters to be paid overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It changed the news business in this state and forced the news companies to start paying people a living wage.
I moved back to Birmingham in 1986 and rented an apartment on 29th Street just off Highland Avenue and opened a newsstand, bookstore and coffee bar next to the old Highland Music store and the Sheraton apartment building. My plan was to learn the magazine business and make extra money free-lancing, which I did.
By 1988, I opened another store in Five Points. Even with two stores, however, the profit margin was not enough to live lavishly to say the least. So burned out on retail, I left Birmingham once again in the summer of 1989 and moved to Gulf Shores to write for Gulf Coast Newspapers, a chain of twice-weeklies in Baldwin County.
While there I had a hell of a run covering the environment in the days after the Valdez scandal and up through the first Persian Gulf war, before a major investigative story got me in trouble with the CIA in 1992.
At the end of the tourist season that year, my good friend and photographer Spider Martin came to see me in Gulf Shores and helped me move back to Birmingham and into his house on Highland Drive. I lived there for only a couple of months helping him organize his collection of civil rights photos and negatives and begin to try to sell the collection to a museum.
Then I left Birmingham for Tuscaloosa again to work on a masters degree at Alabama and launch a teaching career.
To give you a timeline but to make the long story short by omitting a lot of the details, the day my masters thesis was signed in August of 1995 I landed a full-time teaching job on a one-year contract in Georgia the year the Olympics came south. So I finally got out of Alabama for awhile.
The next year I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, to teach and work on a Ph.D. After completing the course work and passing comprehensive exams in only a couple of years, I took some time off of working on a dissertation to produce The Southerner magazine online at southerner.net.
When the dot com bubble burst, however, I accepted a full-time, tenure-track teaching position at Loyola University New Orleans in the summer of 2000. In the first semester of my second year there, I finished a draft of my dissertation and sent it off to my committee in the early morning hours of Sept. 11, 2001 - just a few hours before the first United Airlines 747 hit the World Trade Towers.
Like a lot of other people, the shocking events of 9/11 changed my life. The news seemed vital again, so I lost interest in teaching and research and decided to free-lance from New Orleans. Again I had a great run as a journalist, covering Louisiana for the Dallas Morning News and the South for the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.
Then along came Jayson Blair, making stuff up in the New York Times, and blew the news business all to hell again. In December 2003, I moved back to Birmingham briefly to investigate George W. Bush’s time in Alabama in 1972, then moved to Washington, D.C., to get in on covering the election of 2004 from the nation’s capital.
But by the fall, my 78-year-old mother got sick and I moved back to Birmingham once again. Bush was reelected and Birmingham is not exactly the greatest city in the world to work as a journalist, so I started this Web site as a new experiment in Web publishing.
Since then I have listened to all the arguments about Birmingham again. How the city always seems to have an inferiority complex because of its flawed history as the racist city from the civil rights days in the 1950s and ’60s. How Atlanta built the international airport and became the hub of business in the New South, leaving Birmingham in the dust.
But there is also a certain arrogance in Birmingham on the part of those who either never left or came from somewhere else and planted permanent roots. Birmingham is a manageable city in many ways, if only the people could find a way to elect someone who could actually manage it. Richard Arrington did a pretty good job of it in my view, although he certainly has his critics.
The media managers in this town think they are really something. But if you’ve ever spent time in a larger American city, the weaknesses are simply glaring.
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| Photo by Glynn Wilson |
| Can you imagine what it would be like to be attacked by a cop and a dog for trying to obtain the right to equality in public accommodations? |
Look no further than the local coverage this weekend of the visit by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.
Ms. Rice was sent down to Alabama by Karl Rove to fool a few of the people into thinking that the war in Iraq and the pretense of building a democracy in the Middle East is somehow parallel to the struggle for civil rights in Birmingham. If any white politician had tried to make this argument - here or anywhere else in the country - he would have been laughed out of town.
But since Ms. Rice spent part of her youth here and had a tangential connection to the families who suffered the bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church - and since Birmingham still suffers from the guilt of its racist past - she was treated with kid gloves by the press and the television news stations.
The Washington reporter for the Birmingham News did manage to ask a question about the appropriateness of the comparison. But she allowed Ms. Rice to get away with one of the worst non-answers in the history of American journalism and politics.
The incident clearly demonstrates how screwed up American democracy is these days. The press is in a circulation free-fall, in part due to readers fleeing onto the Internet, so newspapers seem incapable of doing their duty under the First Amendment to inform citizens in a democracy.
The Bush administration, about to be totally ensconced in scandal in a lame-duck second term, has lost its ability to abuse public relations and propaganda to continue the facade.
I have to admit that I’ve been gone from Birmingham for far too long to fully understand the city’s political scene. But I made it to a party for William Bell Sunday night and asked him the question on my mind about the Rice visit. I was curious to know how the African-American community felt about it.
Bell is not universally loved in Birmingham, but even the conservative publisher of the local alternative newspaper Black and White held his nose and basically endorsed Bell for the City Council - presumably because no one else at City Hall these days knows how to apply for a grant or answer the phone.
Perhaps Bell is a guy who you can do business with who has a chance of getting something done. When I asked him what he thought of Rice’s comparison of the war in Iraq to the struggle for freedom blacks fought in Birmingham, he simply scoffed and said:
“What do I think about it? I think about as much of it as every other publicity stunt by the Bush crowd.”
You can fool some of the people some of the time. But does anyone really think the Republican Party will actually nominate a black woman for president in 2008? The strategy is obviously to float the trial balloon and see if the mere suggestion that it might be possible may allow the GOP to recruit another percentage point or two of the black vote.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the botched federal response, polls show Bush’s approval rating in the 30s. Only about 2 percent of black folks approve of the job the president is doing. Does anyone think Rice’s campaign swing through Alabama will improve that situation?
If so, there’s some swampland in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans I’d like to sell you.
As for myself, I’m thinking of buying some property in Blount County near the Locust Fork River and publishing a real liberal newspaper to show the uneducated conservatives in this state what one looks like. If you like the idea and want to help, get in touch.
One of these days we may be able to raise the level of dialogue in this city, state and country. I’m not holding my breath due to the attack from Washington on the public education system. But no matter what my critics like to say about me, I will be raising some issues you’ve never heard before on talk radio in the coming months.
I don’t know if it is possible to go home again and recover the past. I do know that no matter how hard you try, how hard I have tried, it is apparent that you cannot eradicate your roots.
So here’s looking at you, Birmingham. What do you say?
