Author Archives: lesliestainton

Modifications

Posted on by

In the midst of the debate over Confederate monuments, I’m reminded of the statue of Strom Thurmond that stands in front of the South Carolina state capitol. I saw it last year for the first time and was struck by the palimpest it’s become. The base of the statue lists both his accomplishments (minus, of course, his decades-long segregationist vitriole) and his children,  including Thurmond’s mixed-race daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, whose story did not emerge publicly until several months after her father’s death.

What’s so striking about the monument—and a partial argument, I think, for keeping some of these statues intact and in situ—is the very obvious way Essie Mae’s name has been added to the list of his children. And the very clearly edited number of those children:

Strom Thurmond Monument 1

I’ve been told the reason the number “five” is smudged is because so many hands (many, if not most, of them African-American) have reached up to touch it—as if to prove this isn’t a mirage. Like a medieval relic, that edited number bears witness to a kind of miracle: the fact that the state of South Carolina, which until 2015 flew the Confederate flag over its state house, acknowledges, even honors, Essie Mae’s existence.

Context is everything when it comes to these statues, and I’m with those in the museum world (including Lonnie Bunch III of the National Museum of African American History) who’d like to see them preserved in museums, where viewers can probe their full and complicated meanings, rather than out-and-out destroyed. Meanwhile, let’s all work to make public as much of this sorrowful history as we can. Some parts of the story have seen entirely too much public light. Some have not seen remotely enough.

In the Archives

Posted on by

When I was working on my life of Lorca, I often asked myself the question Lear asks, late in Shakespeare’s play, about Cordelia: “Have I caught thee?” It’s the biographer’s essential question: have I managed to transcend time and circumstance and geography to know what makes/made you tick?

I find myself asking it again as I try to make sense of my forebears—the Scarletts of Georgia, who built a small fortune using the labor of human beings they bought and hunted and enslaved. I’m especially curious about the man who started it all—Francis Muir Scarlett, my great-great-great grandfather, who fled from England to Georgia in 1799 and by 1812, at the age of 27, was a plantation overseer, and within another decade, a planter, slaveholder, and state legislator.

He’s a squirrely guy. I’ve got one photograph of him, above, undated. He left little in the way of a paper trail—mostly legal documents and ads for runaways. But last month I got a tiny glimpse of Francis Muir Scarlett in action.

I was trawling the Journals of the state legislature at the Georgia Archives, outside Atlanta, and found multiple references to Scarlett. One, from 1826, showed him in action, in his “room” in Milledgeville, demanding to know why a fellow legislator—a Mr. Powell, from Darien—had published a private letter. The back story is complicated and involves bank business, but the description of Scarlett caught me:

Mr. Scarlett then rose, got the document, and handed it to Mr. Powell, who read it and made no remark about it, nor evinced any surprise.

There he is, my ancestor, fleetingly alive and in action. I can see him in a firelit room, dark suit and white shirt, black tie, as he brandishes the incriminating letter and confronts his peer. It’s a rare moment.

The state legislature Journals reveal other details: that Scarlett was more interested in infrastructure (canals, bridges, ferries, roads) than in questions of slavery or Native American rights (both of which preoccupied lawmakers in the decades he served). Tto my delight, I learned that Scarlett voted in favor of divorce every time he was asked to weigh in. (For a married couple to divorce, both houses of the state legislature had to authorize it.)

But have I caught Francis Muir Scarlett? No way. Try to fathom why he embraced the slavery business, and I’m stumped. Was it simply circumstance? Geography? Need (or greed?)

Could he have said no? I go round and round, wanting to understand how and why he did what he did. It’s clear he wanted to be wealthy and powerful, and it’s equally clear that in early-19th-century Georgia, those tended to go hand-in-hand with enslaved labor.

And what about the women—Scarlett’s wife, daughters, daughters-in-law? Women confined to parlors and birthing rooms, for whom marriages were arranged and dowries compiled, for whom legal rights did not exist. (When Scarlett’s daughter Mary Ann became a widow, her vast inheritance passed directly to her father.)

Unlike the Grimké sisters or the actress Fanny Kemble, who published a chilling eyewitness account of the appalling conditions on her husband’s Georgia plantations, my female ancestors did not, so far as I can tell, speak out. They clung to the family business, it appears, and to their comforts—as I fear I would have done in their place.

I’m working, still, to catch all of them.

Lost Causes

Posted on by

I’ve been reading Faulkner: Sound and Fury a couple of weeks ago, now As I Lay Dying. (When I mentioned him earlier this year to the undergrads in my first-year seminar, one of my Chinese students groaned. “Faulkner!!! He’s impossible.” Tough enough for a native English speaker, I agree. I can’t imagine grappling with him if your first language is Mandarin.)

But the wonderfully self-contained Sound and Fury sheds obscurity as a dog does its coat in spring. Once I’d finished the novel, I circled back to the beginning and reread that astonishing first chapter in Benjamin’s voice. The plot and characters emerged from hiding. I was thick in the Compson fold.

It strikes me that Faulkner was of the same generation as my grandmother (b. 1898) and of Margaret Mitchell (b. 1900). I associate Mitchell, of course, and to some degree my grandmother, with the infamous Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Mitchell’s paean to that fantasy is well known. Reared on the same post-war brew of regret and recrimination, my grandmother shared Mitchell’s reluctance to forgive. While her Missouri-born husband reveled in histories of the Civil War, my Georgia-born grandmother shunned any such reading and repeatedly warned me, “There are some things we don’t talk about.”

I doubt she read Faulkner. But I’ve got my grandmother’s 1936 copy of Gone with the Wind on my bookshelf, and I remember her mentioning—proudly—Mitchell’s use of our family name (Scarlett) for her heroine.

It’s instructive to remember that Faulkner published Absalom, Absalom! just a few months after Mitchell’s novel came out. Faulkner’s novel sold around 7,000 copies, as compared to Mitchell’s millions, and then more or less vanished from bookstores. “I seem to be so out of touch with the Kotex Age here,” he complained. His only other pronouncement on the GWTW  phenomenon was that “no story takes a thousand pages to tell.”

Today, of course, Faulkner’s thorny novel holds up far better than Mitchell’s. Morally, socially, politically, it’s a much more digestible read—although Mitchell’s storytelling still slides easily down the throat.

I was intrigued to learn this year that few of my 18-to-21-year-old students are familiar with GWTW. They know of it, that is, but unlike earlier generations, most haven’t seen the movie, let alone read the book. That strikes me as good news. For too many decades, going back to my grandmother and her peers and extending well through my own generation, readers—especially women—have warmed to Mitchell’s facile tale of chivalric masters and loyal slaves battered by vulgar Yankees.

Faulkner’s the one we need now. “What is it?” he asked of the ideology we associate with the Lost Cause:

Something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your childrens’ children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?

Faulkner knew Mitchell and her ilk—they were, after all, his contemporaries. He knew where their obsessions led. We need only look today at the controversy surrounding the removal of Confederate monuments in places like New Orleans to know that in the second decade of the 21st century, Mitchell’s vision breathes on.

The Actor’s Freedom

Posted on by

I first read Michael Goldman’s The Actor’s Freedom as a college student in the early 1970s. The book has shaped the way I think about theater ever since.

I thought about Goldman again this week after seeing Simon McBurney’s remarkable The Encounter here in Ann Arbor. It’s a one-man show about—goodness—everything. The power of story, our need for story, the utterly shady border between fiction and fact, the linguistic and cultural barriers that impede communication (and at worst, breed violence). Climate change. Cultural imperialism. Parenting. There are long disquisitions on material possessions and on time. Time, the invisible Pied Piper who hauls us along with him, sometimes willingly, mostly not.

Above all, The Encounter is about the actor. The prodigious McBurney is onstage by himself for more than two hours, no intermission. His monologue, abetted by wizardly technology, is pretty much nonstop. He alternates between an authorial figure (a McBurney think-alike) and a real-life figure named Loren McIntyre, who was briefly, and terrifyingly, kidnapped by an Amazonian tribe in the 1970s. The performance has McBurney ranting, whispering, running as he deals with a range of unseen characters: an insomniac young daughter, a tribal chief capable of telepathic communication, a blood-seeking rival, dinner guests.

Part of McBurney’s power comes from the dazzling technology (every member of the audience wears headphones, so that the story effectively unfolds inside our skulls). But most of his power comes from his sheer physical presence—what Goldman labels the actor’s “freedom.” McBurney’s mercurial transitions and transformations (from character to character, scene to scene, past to present) remind us of the actor’s uncanny ability to transcend time and space, to embody (and thus tame) what terrifies us, to act in the face of paralyzing events.

And, in this case, to enter, almost literally, our minds. It’s hard to describe the pleasures of experiencing a play spoken directly into the ears. I’d initially been put off by ads for the performance, thinking the last thing I wanted to do was spend two hours sitting in a theater wearing a headset (how would that work with a hearing aid?). But I’m a convert.

As Goldman writes, the actor “is a figure of fear or awe, and of extraordinary delight, by virtue of his skills, whose power is felt throughout the audience—and must be felt if we are to respond well to his acting. […] He is beyond us because he is disguised; he both is and is not himself.” McBurney’s Encounter is one of the most striking examples of this truth I’ve ever seen.

Reading the News

Posted on by

 

“Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation / Grant us thy peace.” —T.S. Eliot, “A Song for Simeon”

The sky’s still here, the sun’s out, the first bulbs are sprouting in the garden. Everything seems OK. But I fear the ghosts—the demons, devils, tribes—inside us. I remember the months I spent in the archives in Spain, principally Madrid and Granada, trawling through newspapers from the early 1930s. In particular, I remember the small articles, the notices so tiny they nearly dissolved among the ads—offhand reports of edicts against Jews in Germany; accounts of random violence in Madrid. None was more than a ripple in a lake, the benign burbling of some creature breathing beneath the surface of things. No storm yet, no kettle-drum rolls, no ominous movie soundtrack. Just incremental history, as slow as a cake rising in the oven, even, sometimes, sweet-smelling.

But still. There I sat, a U.S. government grant recipient paid to study the life of a gay poet murdered by Fascists in 1936. I sat there with my crisp and eerie knowledge of what later unfolded—the gradual and then sudden suppression of rights not only in Spain but across Europe; the bombs; the round-ups; the mass graves. Blessed with a hindsight I wish I had now, I knew where those little articles led. As I read them, I made invisible underlinings, reminding myself—as we’ve been reminded lately by the likes of Masha Gessen—that this is how it happens. The tanks don’t just suddenly appear on the streets: we get there in increments.

So how do we function? Do we merely note the warning signs and hope to survive?

I remember sitting beside the open window of the reading room inside the archive in Granada (a repurposed Renaissance palace, one of the loveliest archives I’ve ever used), reading those terrible newspapers from the summer of 1936—the black headlines, the trucks, the guns, how the city morphed overnight into a battleground. I’d take a break midway through my morning and go across the street for a coffee, and sit there chatting with the bartender, and wonder how this peaceful and pretty city could have turned so abruptly into a killing zone in our own century. The barracks, the truckloads of victims ascending the steep road to the cemetery next to the Alhambra, where the firing squad waited.

And here I sit now, in my own country, sipping coffee, chatting with friends. The sun is out, the streets calm. I read the headlines and turn the page and every so often wonder if 50 years from now a scholar on a government grant will be poring over the articles I’m reading today, asking how did they not know.

How long before we enter the time of cords and scourges and lamentations? Or are we there already and just don’t see it?

Tree of Life

Posted on by

When my first husband and I split up 30 years ago, we didn’t have much trouble divvying up our stuff, except—to our astonishment, given the fraught nature of our five-year union—for the Christmas tree ornaments. Those hurt. My second husband (18 years today!) reports the same. He and his first wife fell apart when it came to the ornaments.

Later this week, we’ll take down this year’s tree and, as I did three weeks ago, when we put the thing up, I’ll finger its decorations and remember their provenance. Increasingly, it’s a gallery of the dead and lost: gifts from long-vanished mentors and friends; hand-blown eggs painted by my late mother (and even earlier, by her sister, who died in 1977 at the unimaginable age of 54). Presents from colleagues and friends, from a former sister-in-law and a never-to-be sister-in-law; souvenirs from travels; more than a dozen felt birds painstakingly assembled and embroidered by my grandmother, gone since 1994. A pair of hearts stitched from fabric left over from a skirt I wore onstage during my first appearance at the Fulton Theatre in the early 1970s.

African Americans build bottle trees to trap evil spirits. The Christmas tree, it seems, corners good ones (mostly)—the absent loved ones invoked in the daily blessing we said over dinner in my childhood. It courts the grown living, as well. There’s the star I colored for the top of my parents’ tree when I was five years old, still in use, and the painted discs that my stepchildren emblazoned with their names maybe 15 years ago.

I imagine my mother fondling the ornaments as tenderly as I now do. Each one a voice, a year, a friend, a child. Maybe that’s why she shed the whole business in the last, awful years of her life, and put the ornaments away in boxes that sat on the top shelf of the bedroom closet in the condo she loathed, unopened until after her death.

Meanwhile, we continue to haul out the decorations and display them on a dying tree, that emblem of marital harmony and family connection, that time bomb ticking with significance.

Snow, Unpublished

Posted on by

“Publication,” wrote Emily Dickinson in 1863, “is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man.”

… We – would rather

From Our Garret go

White – unto the White Creator –

Than invest – Our Snow –

Words of commerce—merchant, sell, parcel, price—mark this small poem (# 788). The implication is clear: to publish is to sell out, to enter the marketplace.

I’ve just spent nearly two decades working at the University of Michigan in what was once a department of “external relations” and for the past several years has been a department of “marketing and communications.” The obsession today is with our “brand,” with selling and promoting that brand, something universities are increasingly wont to do.

I’m glad to be getting out of the selling game, though I’m not in truth getting out. This bit of commercial property, for example: lesliestainton.com. What does that represent, if not myself in the marketplace? My “brand”?

We brand animals. We have branded people whom we regarded as property. So if we “brand” outselves, who owns us?

Dickinson urges that our “thought” belong “to Him who gave it,” not to the marketplace. To publication.

In the age of Facebook and all the rest of it, how quaint, the writer in her garret.

Here sit I in mine, gazing out the window at this week’s latest gloss of snow. Think of it falling, how it quiets the world, blots, sharpens, defines (memo to self: reread The Dead this Christmas). How beautiful the cardinal and woodpecker look against its erasures. How it brightens, makes things new, makes us new. Takes my breath, literally, away.

That’s what Dickinson proposes: don’t turn this stuff into commerce. (Of course we do: we blacken our snow as quickly as we can. We scrape it away, and if not, pay a price here in Ann Arbor, where there’s a law requiring snow removal from public sidewalks within 24 hours of its falling.)

How to use this image to strengthen writing? To remind myself it’s not about publishing—it’s about going out into that snowfall and wallowing in its revelations. The sudden blessing of idea, of language. Old thought wiped clean; that clarifying plunge in temperature. Dwelling in this, rather than shoveling it up the instant it lands and heaving it out into the street.

Unmasked

Posted on by

I’m struck by pictures of Hillary Clinton these days: hair unstyled, face free of make-up, lines and circles visible (though the smile is still radiant). The Times ran a small piece about this yesterday, accompanied by selfies taken with the former candidate in places as ordinary as the woods near her home and an indie bookstore.

Her performance—at least the one conducted over the past two years—is over, the long run ended, the star shorn of props and costume and setting. I find myself wondering whether, had she won, we’d still be seeing the helmet hair and military pantsuit. (Never mind the Kevlar vests.)

There’s so much theater here—so much about the way women, in particular, must gird themselves for the stage(s) of public life.

Just as 19th-century actresses were treated with a contempt and suspicion far beyond anything to which their male counterparts were subjected, so this woman warrior—this actress impersonating a man (did she ever appear in a skirt?)—endured a level of scrutiny her male competitors were spared.

When Victoria Woodhull ran for president in the late-19th century, she suffered accusations and attacks that would have felled someone of lesser mettle. The feminist Woodhull persisted, convinced of her calling. She dressed not unlike a man. When she appeared onstage at the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1874, she wore a plain black dress with white cuffs and collar. Still, critics reviled her. “We do not clearly see what manly privileges Mrs. Woodhull wants that she does not enjoy,” one charged.

Black performers knew something of what Woodhull experienced. I think of Bert Williams, the brilliant, turn-of-the-20th-century, mixed-race performer from the Caribbean who found he was most successful when he performed in blackface. And so he went with it—and died with it, collapsing onstage one night in Chicago and being carried off, his face still caked in burnt cork, never to return.

Why was his real face less appealing—less lucrative?

What truths about Woodhull did people not want to see?

Why did Hillary feel she needed to arm herself with highlighted hair and airbrushed skin?

Perhaps it’s their humanity which, like our own, we know to be flawed. Rather than confront their (and our) mortality, we ask our stars to be larger than life, more resolved, higher-definition.

Williams was profoundly saddened by the discrepancy between who he was and who he pretended to be. He knew that audiences were more comfortable with a cartoon black—a man who knew his place and his limits—and he hated it.

A century later, here was Hillary, masquerading in whiteface. It’s nice to see her dispense with it so quickly post-election. May she persist.

Requiem in Chalk

Posted on by

In the week since the election, I’ve been turning to words for consolation—as I did when I was 13 and spent the summer away from home for the first time and was deeply homesick (I lost six pounds the first week). I was attending a summer boarding school in Virginia, and in the evening, after supper, we’d sit at desks in the gymnasium to do our homework. Because I was taking classes in typing and drama, I had little to do, so I wrote in my journal instead. It was the first time I’d really kept one.

Bathed in citron light from a score of overhead fluorescents, the cavernous gym took on the quality of dream as I traveled beyond that particular time and place into the territory of language. The aches of my adolescent heart arranged themselves into sentences and then paragraphs, which in the instant of their conception made things clearer, if not always better. Night after night, I pinned my fluttering longings onto the lined pages of my journal like so many moths. There they sat: inert, visible, somehow tamed. Writing was power.

I thought of all this last week as I walked across the Michigan campus some eight hours after Hillary Clinton conceded the election. I hadn’t felt so numb since 9/11. Fogged in thought—in fear—I nearly stepped on the first phrase before I saw it. Chalked onto the pavement, in capital letters: “Stay strong.”

And then: “You belong.”

And then: “This is still home.”

The more I walked, the more I encountered. “Estamos juntos.” “Be kind.” “Love>fear.” At the center of campus, the words were so thick I couldn’t untangle them. I began to cry. A student came over and said, “You look like you need a hug.” He confessed that he was worried about his gay mothers. I said I was worried about so many people on the margins. We talked. Then he headed to his next class, and I walked on. More words, more evidence of a godlike voice among us. Praise the anonymous writer—writers—who got up early that morning, or went straight out into the dark just after the news broke, and with the most primitive of instruments (a stick of chalk straight from elementary school) conjured language to soften the hard day ahead. As I stood there, sobbing, a Muslim student walked up to me and held out her arms. Surrounded by words, we embraced.

Totems

Posted on by

Here in Vancouver, on a brief (and surprisingly welcome, given my recent misgivings) trip, I’ve been looking at totem poles. Dozens of them at the Museum of Anthropology; a handful of contemporary ones in Stanley Park; and just today, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, painter Emily Carr’s enthralled and turbulent renderings of the totem poles she saw during her travels along the BC coast in the first half of the 20th century.

I grew up with images of them, as I expect most Americans my age did. But I’d never really looked at them until now—at the intricate and fluid metamorphoses that unfold up and down the length of an individual pole. One creature grows out of another, resides within another, emerges intact from another’s mouth or ears or loins. Animal morphs into human, human into animal. It is an inviting, prelapsarian world—an egalitarian Eden, summoned, literally, from nature itself: those massive cedars I saw yesterday in Stanley Park, the whirling blue-green trees that sent Carr into such spiritual rapture.

But it’s their ancestral role (and work) that most intrigues me. A marker at Stanley Park describes the totem pole as “the British Columbia Indian’s ‘coat of arms.’” Clans identify with totemic animals, and poles narrate family history. It’s a rich image, one I’m eager to milk as I continue to wrestle with my own family’s past. In the presence of these towering structures, I see afresh how the generations build on and spring from and nest within one another—how long-gone ancestors grow into enormous figures whose deeds cast thick shadows. Try though I might to build my own house, independent of ancestral influence, there they are: immense familial poles rising tall on either side of my front door, exerting their power, generating complications, reminding me whose I am.