In Mockingbird Time
Reggie Scott Young
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
William Faulkner
History never repeats itself, but it rhymes.
Mark Twain
Eureka Springs prides itself on being scary late Saturday nights, but I never believed in the ghosts of Dr. Baker’s lobotomized patients at the historic Crescent Hotel. I was always a bit of an oddball in that town, not only because of my background as a Chicago native son, but also because I come from a culture that’s so rooted in horrific deaths that the idea of using dead folks’ spirits as a source of amusement has little appeal for me. It was my ninth and final visit to the Dairy Hollow colony for writers, located on a street that runs below the Crescent in the hills of Northwest Arkansas, and I was seated at my desk listening to the syncopated sounds made outside by a nagging drizzle as I tried to decide whether or not to work on an essay that would offer my two-cents on the Go Set a Watchman controversy. Since I was only interested in issues related to the contrasting racial attitudes of characters featured in Watchman and its earlier published revision, To Kill a Mockingbird, and how the Mockingbird novel sugarcoats the racial reality depicted in Watchman, a close reading of the entire book was the furthest thing from my mind. Critics and other members of the literary establishment started debating the legality of Watchman’s 2015 publication and its value as a literary artifact long before its official release, but I can’t remember anyone back then or since who has proclaimed it to be a great read.
I had already gone to bed but decided to get up and mull over the essay idea despite not knowing why I would waste my time on such a project since I was no longer an academic—I had quit my job in a South Louisiana university a few months before out of fear and disdain for the intensifying political climate in the region that had been set in motion long before the emergence of Donald Trump as the savior of Americans who look nothing like me. With my mind still hovering in a space between rational thought and reverie I began to read the opening paragraphs of several more online articles about Watchman’s contested publication. I must admit the ones I paid the most attention to were from the New York Times and New Yorker magazine, and that led me to realize any references I made to those publications in an essay about Harper Lee’s first written and last published novel would make whatever I said appear as inauthentic in the eyes of the South as a brand of salsa made in New York City.
As a black writer who felt compelled to push his literary career to the side in order to teach mostly white literary works to predominately white students for the sake of a regular paycheck, I was already aware of the Mockingbird novel’s reputation as one of the nation’s most universally loved works of fiction. The universe that has loved it, however, since the novel’s publication in the summer of 1960, is one that does not include many people who grew up in urban communities similar to the one I came up in where school systems invested precious little in books. The few we did have, old and tattered leftovers from when those schools were filled with students from the majority population, ignored our existence in the world, as if we were beings who dwelled outside of history and culture. When I, as a dark Yankee, found myself forced to teach courses in Southern literature to daughters and sons of the old Confederacy, I always did my best to veil any critical thoughts I had about books like the Mockingbird novel. For my own safety and wellbeing, I never shared with students my opinion that Lee’s highly exalted character Atticus Finch was more of a fantasy creation than any from the pages of J. R. R. Tolkien, and I wasn’t a fan of white folks’ fantasies.
I can’t tell you how much I wanted to put the first letter of that old Germanic curse word on the top of many of the student essays I used to read in response to that book, such as the one from a history major that proclaimed Finch to be the Abraham Lincoln of the true South, or the paper written by evangelical student who claimed Finch’s character was inspired by the Holy Spirit to serve as the South’s reincarnation of Jesus. After reading about the original depiction of Finch as one of a group of racists in the Alabama town of Maycomb in the Watchman novel, I felt well justified. My place in the English department for which I worked was made more than a bit awkward by a curriculum designed long before the Civil Rights Movement in a community where many in the population today condemn the words “Black Lives Matter” as hate speech. The curriculum was designed as a monument of sorts to proclaim the glories of long-dead writers from British and American literary history. It didn’t take long for me to discover my role on that faculty was to serve as a dark token to help shield the department and the larger university from the appearance of racism, and that’s why I received only a token African American literature course assignment during semesters when I was offered one at all. Considerable room had been made for the inclusion of the female descendants of those earlier dead white male British and American literary figures due to the dominant number of white feminists in the department, although they constantly complained about their own under representation.
The still living Harper Lee was one of those literary descendants. I had to teach her novel because of my course assignments from the department’s overseer of scheduling, an actual position that was held by a career instructor who might have been a descendant of John Tibeats from Twelve Years a Slave. That overseer, despite my complaints to the department head and dean, kept assigning me, a black writer and scholar from Chicago of all places, to teach Southern literature courses that were often made up of students who admitted their parents and neighbors still believe Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist and the 44th President of the United States was an illegal alien. They were courses that no one else on the faculty wanted to teach. I might have been a full professor before I left the faculty there, but I was clearly at the bottom rung of its caste system, one that was not designed for the inclusion of someone like me. Many of the students who enrolled in my Southern literatures courses assumed being born and raised in the South gave them an innate mastery of Southern literature and an exemption from having to obtain assigned books, write course papers, pass quizzes, and show up for class with regularity. The majority were non-English majors seeking to fulfill a general education requirement. They never hesitated to let me know about their lack of interest in textual analysis and critical thinking since those faculties were already developed enough for them to agree with everything they heard while watching Fox News and Duck Dynasty. In class discussions it was not unusual for someone to point out how much a parent or another relative loved To Kill a Mockingbird and especially Atticus Finch, but I knew it was love based on Finch’s cinematic portrayal by Gregory Peck—not Lee’s depiction of him on the printed page.
I’m not trying to claim Lee’s novel lacks relative value, but its greatness might lie, at least in part, in the way it helped and continues to help relieve a segment of the South’s population, as well as the nation as a whole, of the psychological effects of its own past acts of inhumanity against the race that the novel’s quintessential Negro character, Tom Robinson, represents as convincingly as a wooden nickel.
As someone who worked in African American a literature for a quarter century and, if I may add, after living as a black person each and every day of my life, I knew from my first reading of the Mockingbird novel that Tom Robinson was created to serve as little more than a device on the printed page, a thing of utility, and not the representation of a human being. The Finches, as the novel’s central white family, grieve after Robinson’s violent death, a victim of bullets fired into his body by enforcers of their white township’s laws, but their cathartic tears shed for a “nigger,” a thing, was designed to highlight their own humanity and not his. Vicarious white readers through the years have felt the same, not so much because of the black Robinson’s ordeal, but because of the noblesse of the white Finches. Some black readers, as well as other readers of color who have been conditioned to perceive the world through a blue-eyed mindset, have also shed tears in response to the Tom Robinson section of Harper Lee’s novel; however, their tears are a result of their identification with the Finches. It is remorse generated from a situational drama within the novel’s larger narrative, but not because of the artistic rendering of a fully developed human being.
Harper Lee’s tragic Negro character is an example of the black bodies that were featured in works of mainstream literature and film produced before the multicultural movement forced the larger society to take note of how people of color have historically created their own works in which black, brown, and red characters are not limited to playing the role of the dark victim and other racial stereotypes. The original subtitle of Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of Lee’s literary ancestors, was The Man that was a Thing, and Lee’s act of naming her major Negro character Tom testifies to the fact that she failed to conceive of her dark creation as a fully realized human being. He is a figure who for the sake of melodrama is both innocent and doomed. In contrast, the novel’s central white characters are all spared from fatal encounters with a brutal cross.
Mockingbird depicts Robinson as a physically deformed individual who performed chores for the Ewells, a poor white family at the lowest rung of Maycomb’s class hierarchy, people who were often referred to as white trash in the vernacular of those times. They, however, were white, and therefore, it gave them as a birthright dominance over every black person they encountered with little regard to the content of that individual’s character. After finishing his choses at the Ewell household one day, Robinson found himself alone with Mayella, the maltreated daughter of the household, and he attempted to leave, but she asked him to stay and provide additional help as a pretext for making a pass at him. Robinson resisted, but her father, ominously named Robert E. Lee (Bob) Ewell, witnessed the sight of his daughter throwing herself at a Negro from a distance. He also saw Robinson rebuff her. After a jealous Ewell accused Robinson of violating his already abused daughter, Mayella’s reputation in Maycomb’s white community quickly rises to that of a precious and previously unplucked flower due to the zeal of its citizens to make Robinson pay with his life, even after Finch proved in court that the only abuse Mayella received was from her father. At the end of my residency it became clear that Eureka Springs could serve as the setting for a new twenty-first century retelling of the Mockingbird novel, this time as a horror story with me forced to play Tom Robinson’s role.
Eureka Springs is a secular events town with a Christian symbol hovering over it, the sixty-five-foot tall chalk white Christ of the Ozarks statue that stares in the direction of the writers colony and Crescent Hotel from the Great Passion Play complex on the outskirts of town. Among the activities Eureka Springs hosts are the annual Eureka Springs 3-Day VW Festival, Swap Meet & Tourcade, a Watch and Clock Collector Convention, the annual Big Beaver Raft Race, a Flat Tire Festival, regular Opera in the Ozarks performances, a PT Cruiser Rally, a Mini-Cooper Rally, a classic Corvette Rally, Banjo rallies, a Great Train Robbery Reenactment, an Annual Bluegrass Festival, and the Miss Gateway to the Ozarks Beauty Pageant, which has no connection to Donald J. Trump. Continuous caravans of motorcycles, whether organized or not, parade though the streets on weekends, and special trolleys transport tourists during the day with tour guides narrating the town’s “official” history on a sound system loud enough to disturb working writers in their writers colony studios. You might think Halloween would be one of the biggest days on the town’s calendar, but I’m not sure that’s true since Halloween type activities are likely to spring up during any weekend night. That’s why I didn’t think twice when I heard someone headed down the steps to the Peach Blossom studio right below mine as I continued to sit at my desk.
What I heard could have been a ghost from the Crescent Hotel, but more likely it was one or more members of the population of deer that were overrunning the township with no one seeming to care, or some of the local Jems, Scouts, and Dills trying to entertain themselves in a town without a nearby mall or Cineplex. Neither deer nor teens bother to hesitate before rumbling down the tricky flight of stone steps leading not only to the Peach Blossom’s door but also beyond to a clearing that runs over to Polk, the side street that slops further downward from Spring Street until it reaches Dairy Hollow Lane at the bottom of the colony’s hill. Including myself, there were only three writers in residence at the time in the colony’s two houses and eight studios: Dianne in the Spring Garden studio to the right of mine on the upper level of the 515 house, and Aurora who was by herself in the recently opened 505 annex located a tree filled lot away. Diane was from Kansas City and the two of us spent time together in residence at the colony once before. With such thin walls, creaky floorboards, and loud doors, I would have heard if she had gone outside and there was no reason for Dianne to go down the stairs on the opposite side of the building since the entrance to the colony’s office, its adjoining dining room, and the community kitchen, was at the bottom of our building’s main flight of steps to the right of her studio.
My summer complexion turns to the color of raw unfiltered honey and Aurora’s was just as dark, but during one of the colony’s community dinner conversations she talked about how her Filipino accent did little during her youth to immunize her from the intolerance that was usually directed at the state’s black population in the Fort Smith area of Arkansas. If he was around today, I’m sure Richard Prior would have interpreted her as saying she was still pissed from white folks treating her like she was just another darkie, but he would have used a more pejorative term. Even as a Caucasian from the Cornhusker state, my impression of Diane was that she possessed a fairly progressive mindset concerning issues of social justice. That’s why we were all concerned about the number of confederate flags that were on exhibition in the town and along Route 62 leading into and out of it in both directions.
Large Confederate flags were on display from buildings and fence posts and from beds of pickup trucks and atop the roofs of Jeeps as they cruised through town and along the bordering highways. There were also decorative plates featuring that flag in front of passenger vehicles and affixed to the rear wheel housings of jacked up motorcycles. Worst of all were the angry flag images tattooed on the iron-pumped biceps of self-ordained infantrymen walking in and out of leather shops and beer halls downtown. South Carolina was in the process of banishing the Confederate flag from its capital grounds. Several other Southern states elected to follow suit in response to the mass murder of black churchgoers in Charleston’s historic Emmanuel AME Church a few months before by Dylann Roof, a zealot who wanted to fire the first shots in a war between the races he hoped to ignite. As a citizen of the self-identified Bible Belt, Roof didn’t think twice before murdering a group of defenseless Christian saints who welcomed him into their place of worship, saints who were slain with their heads down and eyes closed while praying with at least one, no doubt, asking God to bless the young white man in the back of their sanctuary. But Roof acted in devotion to a symbolic banner that represents the false god of a short-lived rogue nation that refuses to die. After I reached Eureka Springs that summer it appeared as if the flags that were removed from South Carolina and other states had all been relocated to Northwest Arkansas.
With all the flags everywhere, I should have been more concerned that the noise I heard might have come from someone planting a burning a cross next to the house my studio was in or painting KKK on one of the outer walls while carrying a lit torch because of my presence. It could be that my naiveté was based on the fact that before my current visit to Eureka Springs I had only been involved in a few minor situations that made me feel like I was on the receiving end of indifferent treatment. 2015 was a different year, however, and it could be that I had traveled into a very different reality, one I should have become cognizant of during the first week of my residency when I walked downtown to the Mud Street Café with the intention of starting my work day off with coffee and a hot breakfast. My encounter with a waitperson there should have served as a warning for what was to come.
§
I’ll never forget something my Uncle Carnell, an Arkansas resident for most of his life, told me when I was a young boy during one of the summers my father forced me to spend my vacation from school in the state’s eastern delta region where he had been raised. I was a city kid living in a neighborhood full of recent migrants from the South. I was no more than eight or nine at the time, but I had already heard so many horrific stories about the South that I feared for my safety every day I was there. All the black boys in the city’s West Side neighborhood where I lived seemed to know about what happened to Emmitt Till, and the lingering memory of that Chicago kid getting murdered in Money, Mississippi, bloodied my perception of the South. Many of us learned about his lynching from our parents, but we also talked among ourselves about the South Side teen who traveled down to the Mississippi delta to spend his summer with relatives who never fled the South. That day my uncle drove by a house set a bit off from the dirt road we traveled upon and it had people gathered together in the front yard with that flag flying above like a bloodthirsty vulture scouring for unsanctioned movements along the roadway. I had only seen pictures of that rebel flag in old Civil War movies on television and from reading about the era in the collection of World Book encyclopedias my mother purchased for our home though subscription. The folks in that yard looked at us in my uncle’s slow rolling pickup with a disdain I had never seen in the eyes of white people in Chicago. I wondered if they were the kind of folks who could kill a boy like Till, or me, without feeling a bit of remorse. My uncle noticed when I tried to slump down in my seat and make myself look so small that no white person in Arkansas would be able to see me, and he laughed because I must have looked pretty pathetic. But he taught me a lesson about that flag as we continued on our way, saying whenever you see that thing, and it doesn’t matter where, even in places like Indiana and Illinois, people in white sheets are never far behind.
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I had taken printed drafts of different writing projects with me to the café during each of my previous residencies. It was a place where I liked to work on edits and revisions of poems and stories—never academic articles and essays—while having coffee and breakfast. I’m sure I had visited the place more than two dozen times. During most of my previous visits a woman named Jackie, if I remember her name correctly, acted as my server and she was very friendly. with me. She was a rather petit looking woman who made her way around the place with light and breezy movements. Knowing I was a professor she often engaged me in conversation while cleaning off nearby tables about books she liked such as John Gresham’s legal novels, and I once, in response, I gave her an autographed copy of a different kind of legal novel, Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying. No matter how long I sat at my table she encouraged me to continue working long after I finished my blueberry pancakes and applewood bacon, and she would invite me to have as many coffee refills as my bladder would handle. She and the other members of the wait staff made me feel so welcomed that I often tipped well beyond the means of my limited residency budget, despite the highly inflated tourist prices for the meals.
On this visit the plodding server seated me at a rickety table in the far corner of a largely unoccupied back room next to a bussing station. Most of the tables in the front where I usually sat were free, but I tried not to think about it since I had experienced similar treatment when I ventured into restaurants such as Applebee’s, Johnny Carino’s, and Chili’s as a lone black male on the road in in rural white communities. Not only did the server appear to be new, she was also more than a bit gruff in the manner in which she spoke and then dropped the menu on the table before I could take it from her hand. I knew what I wanted when I first arrived, but she made me wait an eternity to take my order. I asked for an Americano when I first sat down and reminded her about it when I finally ordered my omelet. After another eternity passed and my food arrived, I still had no drink and the omelet was already devoid of heat. I finally got up and went to the bar in the front and poured myself a cup of drip, but she charged me for the more expensive Americano anyway. I walked out of there wondering if the world had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed after a restless night of sleep.
Since Eureka Springs, as far as I know, had no black residents to give its citizens a need to practice discrimination, I was a bit dumbfounded by the server’s attitude and her apparent contempt for me. It made me wonder if she, after taking a quick look, decided I wasn’t as good as the other people there, including herself. It could be that she simply judged me to be someone whose presence might hurt her employer’s business and she wanted to protect it. Since I had contributed to the establishment’s cash flow so often during the last decade, she was the one who hurt her employers’ business that day because I walked away declaring I would never set foot in the Mud Street Café again. Little did I know I would soon make the same declaration about the writers colony and the entire town of Eureka Springs.
On my way up from South Louisiana for this particular residency, I took a longer route to the west, one I had never driven before that took me through Fayetteville because I didn’t want to risk driving on the road that runs through Harrison again. I had been curious about Harrison for years since it was the only town of any size between Conway, to the south, and Eureka Springs. The shortest way to the writers colony entailed exiting I-40 at Conway and driving two lane state highways through the Ozarks the rest of the way. My perception of my father’s eastern Arkansas was that it was predominately black, but if I ever saw black faces in any cars I passed on those roads while driving through hillbilly country I can’t remember them. With my destination being less than an hour away once I hit Harrison, I never felt the need to stop while driving through the town’s outskirts until several years before my last visit to the writers colony when I decided to pull into a Walmart to use the restroom and buy some snacks for my studio. Similar to the town itself, the store’s atmosphere seemed strange, although alien might be more accurate. After I exited the men’s room and headed toward a display of bottled water, I realized nearly everyone there had blonde hair except for older people whose hair had turned gray. When I looked at the checkout lines, the image reminded me of an illustration I had seen in a book years ago that depicted a vision of a future Aryan utopia. I knew there had to be some black people somewhere in the store and if not at least a few Latinos; after all, it was a Walmart. I walked around without seeing a single person of color among the customers and employees. Dumbfounded, I headed toward the exit without purchasing anything to avoid standing in one of those checkout lines.
It wasn’t until my departure from the writers colony in 2014, the year before my last residency, that I discovered Harrison is the regional home of the Ku Klux Klan and a town that openly promotes white nationalism on some of the high rising billboards along the highway heading toward the east. I had always driven back through Conway while heading back down to Louisiana, but I planned to visit a stepbrother and his wife in Wynn, a small town in the eastern part of the state not far from Memphis. Google Maps advised me to travel through Harrison on Route 412 East to reach Wynn, but there is no way I would have taken that road if the app had offered an advisory for black people to find a detour. At one of the several traffic lights on my way through the town I looked up and saw an enormous billboard next to the road with a highly provocative message: “Anti-Racist Is a Code Word for Anti-White.” I was baffled. Did it mean anyone who is not racist is anti-white? I was an affirmed anti-racist, but many of my friends and close acquaintances were white, so I didn’t consider myself to be either anti-white or a racist.
I pulled into a parking lot and used my phone to google the city of Harrison. I found a website titled “Top 6 Racist Billboards and Signs by KKK in Harrison, AR,” and it not only contained a picture of the one I had just passed but also several others that were on display in the town. One featured students gathered together outside of Northwest Arkansas College holding up a large banner marked with the words “Diversity = White Genocide,” and another with an illustration of gleaming white faces—man, woman, and two boys, all with blonde hair. The boys looked like they had never seen a speck of dirt or puddle of mud in their entire lives. It was painted to suggest members of a perfect family above the words “Welcome to Harrison, Beautiful Town, Beautiful People, No Bad Exits, No Bad Neighborhoods.” A third photo of a billboard offered one of the most demeaning caricatures I had seen of Barak Obama, a sitting president of the United States, with him wearing a turban above a face with grossly distorted bubble lips, and another with a message printed in bold foreboding letters that denounced Obamacare as an attempt to gain revenge for slavery.
That last one struck me for its fallacious use of logic, especially since the Affordable Health Care Act was passed primarily by white politicians in the Senate and House and represented a fairly watered down version of the same plan Hillary Clinton tried to promote years earlier as the nation’s First Lady. Republicans influenced the final version of the bill that went into law. Furthermore, Obama had no black ancestors who were in this country during slavery, only white ones, and African Americans are the people who have benefitted the least from the Affordable Health Care Act because so many, dating back to the days of slavery, distrust government programs and too few have been able to afford any kind of health care at all. I must admit that I was used to hearing disingenuous messages of that nature because Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said stuff like that all of the time and it helped him win two landslide elections.
Due to the slow single lane highways and frequent stoplights, it can take more than an hour to drive as far as thirty-five miles through that area of the Ozarks and having already consumed a twenty ounce thermos full of coffee I knew I would soon need to make a bathroom stop, but after what I learned about Harrison I drove away as quickly as I could without giving any of the local troopers an excuse to pull me over. In another state I would have found a somewhat secluded spot along the roadway to relieve myself behind the cover of open passenger doors, but a drop of my urine on the shoulder of the highway that close to Harrison might have resulted in me being sentenced to castration by a local judge. I held my bladder for over a hundred miles until I reached a gas station and convenience store where I saw several black people standing around outside.
My memory of that server at the Mud Street Café bothered me for the duration of my residency. I can’t help but to wonder if the woman had recently moved to Eureka Springs from Harrison, and if she and other recently migrated Harrisonites were responsible for the local displays of Confederate flags. The flags, the curious treatment I received at breakfast that morning, and the instances of indifference I had experienced while living in South Louisiana, especially after Obama’s 2008 election, all helped to pique my interest in the white supremacist attitudes of characters in the Watchman novel. After all, the slogan “Make America Great Again” was growing in popularity in that part of the country and it was not unusual to see t-shirts and bumper stickers express a version of it with the word “white” used in place of “great,” as if the two were synonymous terms.
I went to a dentist appointment a week before I left for my residency and heard a pundit on Fox News from the flat screen affixed to the waiting room wall defend the newly trademarked “Make American Great Again” slogan that was gaining traction as one that has nothing to do with race and everything to do with heritage and a particular tradition that once, in his estimation, made America great. The pundit’s argument was similar to the ones white supremacist demonstrators used two years later as their rationale for protesting the removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, VA. I laughed while listening to that TV about how white conservatives and many white liberals tend to agree on one thing: it’s never about race, at least not unless someone gets caught using a derogatory racial expression. Few of them ever had the reality of race in American thrown in their faces the way I did as a four or five year old when I went into Louisville’s Chickasaw Park with my older cousin on a late Sunday summer afternoon. A white boy and his friends walked over to where we stood and called me a nigger as he lit a firecracker and threw it at my face. It missed but came close to my left ear when it exploded. My aunt and uncle were relieved to know that I was not injured that day, but neither was shocked by the incident and no one gave a single thought to calling the police, especially since the boy who did it might have been the son of policeman, a judge, a congressman, or a big-time Southern Baptist pastor. The fates suffered by Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and too many other young African American men in recent years showed that little had changed since the 1955 murder of Emmitt Till and the fictional slaying of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, and that’s why I decided there were few people in an era that so many had proclaimed to be post-racial who would care to read an essay from someone like me commenting on issues of race in a novel by a beloved Southern novelist.
I was in the early stages of writing a memoir, so it wasn’t like I needed to start another project during my residency. Without thinking, however, I started fiddling around with ideas for a poem about the Confederate flag that would depict it as an idol more cherished by many Christians in the Bible Belt than the Holy Cross of Jesus and I wanted to jot down the first few lines before turning in for the night. Since I generally write initial drafts by hand, I reached for the yellow pad on my desk and one of the pens I kept handy for sudden surges of inspiration. That’s when I realized something was burning and I’m sure the unexpected odor resulted in a surge of fear that was greater than the threat of ghosts from a four-star luxury hotel.
At first it was rather subtle, but the odor smelled nothing like burning food. The fumes from down below were heavily perfumed and that’s what I found alarming. It wouldn’t have been strange for either Diane or Aurora to be downstairs heating up leftovers in the community kitchen or preparing a late snack, but I couldn’t imagine either of them burning a ton of incense down there. Whether I had been healed by God or the plant filtered air of the Louisiana bayous, I hadn’t felt the need to use an inhaler since I first moved from the polluted urban North in the early nineties, but as the fumes flowing into my studio became more pronounced, I began to wonder how far I would have to drive to find a 24-hour pharmacy in the direction of Fayetteville and about the odds of me traveling on winding hillside roads in the rural darkness without smashing into a deer. It startled me when I went into the bathroom and saw streams of smoke go-go dancing up from the vent in the floor. It wasn’t like the smoke from a house fire, and that’s why I didn’t panic, but it was smoke. I grabbed a broom and tapped the handle on the floor several times to complain to whoever was in the studio below about the smoke. The sound wasn’t very loud, so I grabbed a poker from the decorative fireplace and tried it. The poker was louder, but I had no idea if my message had gotten through.
Not knowing what else to do, I went into the bedroom. Due to the humidity outside and the running air conditioner, I was reluctant to open the windows, but I did raise one of them before I got back into bed. While lying there the fumes grew worse. I couldn’t let go of the fear of something being burnt by a mysterious entity in an old country house made of wood that was full of people, paper, flammable liquids, and other combustible materials. Despite the time I had spent thinking about To Kill a Mockingbird that evening, it would be dishonest for me to say I began to think about the scene depicting the merciless winter blaze that consumed Miss Maudie’s house, or any other literary depictions of blazing fires. Due to all of the Confederate flags in the area, Abner Snopes from William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” should have come to mind. Regardless, the last thing I wanted to do was find myself trapped in a fire in Eureka Springs. That’s why I jumped off of the bed, slipped back into my pants and t-shirt, and went outside.
While standing under the cover of the portico’s extended roof, I could see that the earlier drizzle had turned into a steady rain. Diane also came out of her studio because the fumes had disturbed her, too. “What’s going on,” I asked. “You up to something downstairs?” Diane said, “No, I haven’t been out of my room and Aurora drove home for the weekend.” I told her I could hardly breath inside and Diane confessed it was just as bad in her studio. “But who’s burning incense like crazy this time of night?” We both knew it was coming from the Peach Blossom studio below, but we had no idea why. The lights above the stairs going down to its entrance had been turned off and that was unusual because the staff always left them on to avoid accidents and higher insurance rates. The stairs were uneven stone tablets that had probably been obtained from one of the quarries along the nearby rocky hillsides and they were tricky to climb and descend even during daylight hours. I told Diane I would go down and check out the situation but first went back inside to grab the cheap plastic flashlight that the colony’s staff would leave near the door of each studio in case of power outages.
When I arrived at the Peach Blossom door, I heard Southern folk music and noticed what appeared to be a faint light, like that of a candle through the curtained window. I knocked several times with my hand but there was no answer. I then tapped on the door a few times with the flashlight, but not too hard out of fear that the plastic might break. A few moments later a woman opened up and the sudden rush of perfumed odor made me gag. She was rather short with sandy colored hair and looked a bit tousled but not like someone who had been woken up from a slumber. I had no idea who she was or why she was in that studio. Right off I was convinced that either a marijuana party was taking place down there or a witch’s séance, if not both.
“That smoke, it’s killing us upstairs. Maybe you don’t know the rules, but you’re not supposed to smoke or burn anything in these studios.”
Without looking me in the eye, she said, “I’ll put it out,” and I made my way back up the darken stairs.
In my studio the fumes were now worse than before and after a while I wondered if the woman really put out what she was burning or if she started burning more. Thoughts of Eric Garner came to mind, but there was no need for me to cry “I can’t breathe” since there were no hands around my throat. and no one was there to hear me. It was like being suffocated by a noxious haint. In order to air out the place, I opened up all of the windows while also turning on the ceiling fans in each of the rooms. I went back to bed, but the smoke was in my throat and nostrils and there was little I could do to clear them. I put a sheet over my head to serve as a filter, but that only made it worse. That’s when I decided to go out to my car.
Since the rain had grown more intense, I needed to dash across the street to reach my Jetta. It was parked in an unpaved roundabout next to the hillside that writers and colony visitors are allowed to use for off street parking. I made the driver’s seat recline as far as possible to stretch out as best I could. My rain soaked clothes chilled my skin, but the air inside the car was muggy, so I turned the ignition on and adjusted the controls to make fresh air flow at a moderate temperature. Spring Street, the roadway on which the colony sits, circles the middle section of the town’s large double-layered hill and is often frequented that time of night by both patrolling pickup trucks and nomadic motorcycle gangs that lodge in several nearby biker motels. I had no idea what might happen if some bearded individuals attired in all black like angels from hell spotted my dark face in a parked car. Under the shadow of the town’s Confederate flags, I couldn’t help but to think about Billie Holliday’s recording of “Strange Fruit” and that led me to play the song through the car’s stereo from a playlist on my smartphone.
I listen to shuffled music until the Bluetooth connection went out in the middle of Bob Marley’s “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.” Despite the sound of rain splattering against the windshield, I remained in my car for the better part of an hour. Hoping some of the smoke had dissipated from the studio, I darted back across the street and went inside, but the fumes were as irritating as they had been before. I stretched out with my head at the foot of the bed next to one of the opened windows, but it made me feel like I was stretched out in an open grave. That led me to go downstairs to the colony’s office where there wasn’t the slightest hint of smoke, probably due to the firewall between it and the adjoining Peach Blossom studio. I took a seat in the director’s chair to take a nap but found my attempts to snooze interrupted by the noise from cars and trucks cutting across the sloping gravel-covered driveway out front that locals often used as a shortcut on their way to the bottom of the hill.
I went back upstairs around five-thirty the next morning and changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt in preparation for a daily hike on paths along the hills and around some of the winding streets. I couldn’t wait to get out of that studio again because nauseating fumes were still present. I usually devoted around forty minutes to my morning jaunts, but that day I walked and ran twice as long before I made it back to my studio. I seldom shaved while at the colony except on Sundays mornings, the one day when I’d get myself fairly well spruced up, but that day I gave myself a bird bath without shaving before I threw on some well-worn jeans and a wrinkled t-shirt. After grabbing my computer and a review copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me that I had yet to read, I left out with several of the windows cracked open and all of the ceiling fans running, hoping the circulation and outside air might make the place smell less odorous when I returned.
I set out with the idea of finding a place where I could get some coffee, eat a light breakfast, and finish recovering from my lack of sleep. I was willing to go to anyplace but the Mud Street Café or in the general direction of Harrison, so I drove west toward Bentonville in search of an IHOP or a diner. While heading away from town on Route 62 and past the large Confederate flag affixed to the outside of an old tire repair shop that also had a wagon wheel from stagecoach days sitting in its dirt covered yard, I still felt annoyed. The feeble apology from the incense-burning woman the night before did little to help. Nearly an hour later I took an exit into the town of Rogers and then found a café that appeared to be open. While getting out of the car and grabbing my computer bag, I remembered a group email message the colony’s director sent to residents that Thursday afternoon to inform us she wouldn’t be in on Friday or reachable during the weekend because of a kayaking trip on the Buffalo River. I looked at it again after I went inside and settled myself at a table. The message said, “if you have any problems or things you need help with, please call [the cook] and she will come fix it for you!” Looking at the names and email addresses included in the recipient list, I saw one I didn’t know and figured it must belong to the woman who had been in the Peach Blossom the night before. After I ordered coffee and a breakfast sandwich, I pasted the email address into a new message that I quickly rattled off under the gaze of bloodshot eyes.
To the person in Peach Blossom, the incense you had burning last night went up through the floors and vents and hovered in the air of the studios above. It made it unbearable to breathe, but it seems like you continued to burn it. If you burn any more before [the director] returns, I will call the police because you have no right to do that while in the colony.
From the studio right above
Before I finished my first cup of coffee and my sandwich, a message popped up in my inbox from “TALES FROM THE SOUTH.” When I opened it up, I read the following:
Good Morning Reggie
I sincerely apologize for any harm I have done to you and the other guests. I burned one small cone of incense last night, and after you came down to my studio and asked about it, I put it out and have not burned any more since. I would never intentionally invade others' experience in the colony, and I am sorry that you took my actions as hostile and selfish. The colony is a very special and sacred place to me, and I would never do anything to disrupt others' creative processes.
Best...
She signed it with her first name, but I had no idea who she was or anything about TALES FROM THE SOUTH, although I had heard expressions of that nature often enough, usually in relationship to anthologies of Southern literature, folktales, and horror stories. I didn’t care what it referred to and didn’t bother to look her up on the web.
I roamed around for a couple of hours before I returned to the colony in the middle of afternoon. The air in my studio still reeked of fumes from the night before and every breath I took reminded me of my night of lost sleep. I threw my workout clothes back on and went out for another long walk, this time down on Dairy Hollow Lane, going back and forth in both directions.
While headed back up Polk Street near the colony’s main entrance, I saw an SUV parked outside of the office with its engine running. Usually that meant a writer was about to check in during hours when none of the staff was on duty, unless it was a resident taking grocery items in to store in the community fridge. A woman then came out and climbed into the car through the driver’s door. She was nicely dressed and looked different than the one who came to the Peach Blossom’s door the night before, but I could tell it was the same person. As far as I could tell she was alone. I wanted to avoid a possible encounter because of the irritation I felt and my knowledge of the possible danger that could result from a conflict with a white woman, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, so I turned around and walked back down Polk Street to an unfinished hiking path and spent another half-hour pacing back and forth along the quarter mile stretch before returning to my studio. Much of the perfumed stench had diminished by then, but it was still impossible for me to get the scent of sandalwood funk out of my mind. I felt sluggish from not sleeping the night before and my brain felt like mush. The day had been a waste and any attempt at writing would be of no use. In fact, during the rest of my abbreviated stay at the writers colony the only writing I did was an email or two to the director before I decided to pack up and get away from there like a thief in the early morning light.
I copied the colony’s director when I sent my message to the incense-burning Tales woman and early that Monday I wrote the director again to offer details about the violation of colony rules that occurred Saturday night and how it robbed me of a night of proper sleep. I received an immediate response that informed me she was aware of what took place because the incense-burning Tales woman had already told her about how I barged down to the Peach Blossom without provocation or warning and created a ruckus. There was no mention of burning incense. Instead, the Tales woman told the director I banged on the studio’s door with a hard object and the sound made her afraid it was the police. The director seemed so predisposed to believe her that she never bothered to question why a person burning incense was afraid of the police knocking on the door, especially if she wasn’t doing anything wrong. According to the director, the Tales woman claimed she had her daughter with her and that I frightened the two of them so badly that neither could get any sleep that night because they feared I might return. The Tales woman told the director that because I terrified them so badly it led her and her daughter to check out early the next day. The director never gave me a chance to tell her that I never saw or heard a child in either the studio or in the Tales woman’s SUV the next day when she did finally take off. I had been trumped, and I knew it.
When we sat down for our community dinner that evening, one of the residents, and I can’t remember if it was Diane, Aurora, or a new arrival, told me the Tales woman was an Arkansas public radio personality who probably drove up from Little Rock for the Swap Meet and stayed at the writers colony instead of paying for a hotel. The biggest complaint I had about the colony in recent years was that there were often non-writers staying in our midst and some didn’t bother to abide by the rules resident writers were required to follow. But while trying to vindicate myself during a face-to-face meeting with the director that afternoon, she informed me that it was her prerogative to let friends of the colony make use of unoccupied studios and that the Tales woman was her special guest. While sitting at the dinner table that evening without a thought of putting anything on my plate, I concluded that the so-called writers colony was now more of a free resort for special friends than a place for paying writers to do their work. Despite the fact that I hadn’t had a full meal since the pan grilled chicken breast, black beans, and green salad I fixed for my Saturday supper, I got up and left the table. I had been made into a villain, a dark ogre in a township in which symbols of white power were in open display, and I had no idea if the situation would fizzle away or explode.
§
Walking by the front desk on my way out of the dining room that night made me think of the director’s use of the word “frightened.” The director was from Canada and it could be that as a Canadian she had no idea of the consequences that could result from an accusation by a white woman about someone like me frightening her and her invisible daughter in a town where an alarming number of Confederate flags were on display. The tragic ways the situation could have evolve frightened me more than the taping of a cheap flashlight could have frightened the Tales woman, and it meant I should have checked my arm once or twice to make sure it hadn’t gone lame like Tom Robinson’s in To Kill a Mockingbird. You might look at this from your own perspective and conclude it was a relatively trivial situation that had nothing to do with race and then condemn me for playing the reprehensible race card, but as an African American male there is no way I could allow myself to be that irresponsible. After all, I used to teach classes in the South that included students who insisted on defending Tom Robinson’s trial and the conviction that led to his death by arguing, “What happened to that man could have happened to anyone; besides the novel never made it clear beyond a reasonable doubt that he didn’t do it, so people in the town had every reason to convict him for their own protection.”
I should have left Eureka Springs that year after my first few Confederate flag sightings, especially after my visit to the Mud Street Café, but I was too naive to do so. I appreciated that writers colony because the other residents I spent time with saw me as a writer, not a professor, an identity that fit me like a cruel leash. I also loved quirky little Eureka Springs, although I now knew neither the colony nor the town could have loved someone like me. As an alternative to the ritzier writers colonies in the East, I often recommend the place to the writers I met at academic conferences and the grad students in our creative writing program, almost all of them white since my token positions made me a resident of almost exclusively white worlds. I was so enamored by the town’s peculiar Americana setting and false charm that I returned to the colony after my Harrison encounter from the year before without grasping the fact that the Klan capital was less than an hour away.
I hit the road that next morning. I didn’t know I would leave until I had a weird dream about me being the monster from the Swap-Meet publicity poster that I had tacked to the wall above my studio’s desk, an entity that had been drawn to resemble the comic book Swamp Thing. Someone in my dream who looked like the Tales woman had accused me of trying to ravish her, although she made her accusation with a sly smile and a wink in her eye. Nevertheless, I was chased by a white mob wearing white sheets while carrying torches and Confederate flags. I knew it was a silly dream, but I decided it would be in my best interest to get on the road and not wait around and let the dream develop into a felt reality. I woke up a bit after three and began to pack. I worked to organize my possessions through the wee hours of the morning while also cleaning the place until it was nearly spotless. After taking my bag of trash down to the big refuse can near the door to the office, I pulled my car up to the curb out front and stuffed everything I had into the vehicle as best I could. Before I came to Eureka Springs I had planned to head out to the “territories” the way Huck Finn did at the end of Mark Twain’s novel so I could settle in the Denver area. My goal that morning was to get on the highway headed west before the first yardbird had a chance to open his mouth, and I wanted the first one I heard to be in Oklahoma, not Arkansas.
I felt endangered because of the events of that weekend, although I must admit the danger I perceived might have been influenced by a healthy racial paranoia as much as it was from the Tale’s woman’s accusation. In fact, I still find myself wondering if I should have remained at the writers colony since my residency had another full week to run. After all, I was in a cozy little tourist town. But a white woman there used coded language to stigmatize me as a way of drawing attention away from her violation of colony rules. Once word got around about the emotional assault I committed against her, there was little to keep me from being haunted by the local authorities and then gunned down for allegedly reaching for an invisible weapon. What if men in a flag waving truck grabbed me and I was never seen again until my unidentifiable body washed up on the banks of the Buffalo River with my flesh largely devoured as fish food?
There were numerous intellectuals in my profession and in the media, on the left and on the right, who had proclaimed at the beginning of the Obama presidency that we were now in the midst of a post-racial age, a new day in American history, but I’m sure they failed to consider the words William Faulkner wrote in a work of fiction that serves as scripture to those who worship at the temple of Southern traditions: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I now understand his proclamation to mean that in terms of its past, present and future, America exists in what might best be described as Mockingbird Time. I witnessed too many things during that and my previous visit to Eureka Springs and its writers colony that should have long been dead but were still very much alive and in practice, including Confederate flags and the use of the word “frightened” by a modern day Mayella Ewell who threatened to involve me in a real life reenactment of the tragic racial drama in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Reggie Scott Young, a native of Chicago’s West Side, is a scholar and writer who most recently served as professor on the English faculty at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is author of the poetry volume Yardbirds Squawking at the Moon, and his works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, Louisiana Literature, Oxford American, and African American Review. He served as guest-editor of the Obsidian Literary Journal special issue on Jeffery Renard Allen, and co-edited Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays by Ernest J. Gaines. He currently lives in San Antonio.
