Jeff Davis

"We have more and more words now, and being truly adult is largely the effort to make the lying words stand for the old living truth."

-Robert Penn Warren, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back

A pall hanging over Tara this morning, a sense of some dark spirit that's settled over this usually happy place. Both of us tossed through the darkness with nightmares; I don't know about P's, but mine seemed as if some demon had gone searching around my mental attic for the things that could invoke real horror.

The first was a viewing, body in casket with that ethereal light funeral homes like to project down onto the poor guest of honor, face masked in the undertaker's waxy makeup. I knew that face as I approached. It was my child. I would turn away, horrified, and there it would be again in front of me. I'd close my eyes, and there he was, in that glow. I woke up, but couldn't go back to sleep because whenever I closed my eyes the image would return.

But eventually I drifted back off. Now I was taking a tour of a beautiful castle, being led by some sort of British royalty, tall and gracious and slightly effeminate, pointing out the objects d'art that punctuated the space. But then I heard a jet pass overhead in full afterburner, then saw out the window several more, all screaming off in the same direction. The sky started to grow dark. Why wasn't I with them? What was happening?

Then I heard the ominous "thud" I haven't experienced in over thirty years, the sound of the huge concrete doors of the aircraft shelter slamming shut, and the eerie quiet that follows as the air conditioners go quiet because a chemical attack is incoming. Now the frantic pawing through my things--where is my gas mask? S**t, I can't find it, as everyone else is calmly pulling theirs over their faces. A feeling of absolute panic. I know that one. It happened that way, more or less (I finally did find and put on my mask in the real event).

Like I said, something wicked seems to have gone looking among the recesses of my gray matter, and found a couple things to help me begin the day on edge. Sentient evil? I don't know. So much we don't know about why our minds do what they do.

But enough of all that.

After sweeping all the debris off the front porch and steps following yesterday evening's intense thunderstorm, I settled into a rocker there to digest, rather than the horrible news of the day (there's not even baseball this week to distract), my latest book on Kindle, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, by Robert Penn Warren. The book found its origins in a New Yorker essay Warren wrote back in 1980, after visiting the Jefferson Davis Memorial in Fairview, Kentucky for some sort of rededication ceremony. Marking Davis's birthplace there, the obelisk is the tallest freestanding concrete structure in the world, standing 351 feet with no rebar.

If you've not read Robert Penn Warren, you've missed out. He's probably my favorite Southern writer, prose beautiful but not flowery, nor meandering like Faulkner. He spent much of his life as a writer wrestling with Southern rural identity, the problem of racism and segregation (basically switching sides from right to left over his life), and the legacy of the Civil War. He was born in 1905, so that last topic seems more tactile to him than we can feel now; his grandfather had been a Confederate cavalryman.

That grappling with the war, its origins, and its aftermath is woven all through this book. In this age of analysis, such as it is, devoid of subtlety or nuance, his portrait of Davis is more tragic than either indicting or serving as Lost Cause hagiography. In the place of the cruel slave master we've come to accept as the norm, Warren reminds us that Davis generally didn't break up families, gave health care, including dental, to his slaves, and even set up slave courts for crimes on the plantation, which empaneled slave juries and were presided over by a slave judge.

I know, you can't say "slave" that many times in a sentence without the glaring incongruity of it all to jump out of the page. Still, this isn't the history we hear now, and it is in fact part of the story.

And in juxtapose to the frequently uttered indictment that he and others "committed treason in defense of slavery", we hear Davis reluctantly resigning from the Senate to return to Mississippi in 1861. Federal service made this guy, after all--he'd been a West Point graduate, congressman, Senator, and Secretary of War. He let anyone who'd care to listen know that he thought secession was a bad idea. But he unfortunately went along, explaining that he couldn't take up arms against his "country", by which he meant Mississippi. Lee said the same thing about Virginia. That all rings hollow to us now, but these guys grew up in a world where children's civics books referred to the United States as a plural, not singular, as "they" instead of "it". We don't get how they viewed the world or their place in it. That makes none of it right, but maybe we should be reading with an eye toward understanding rather than judgment. We all could use that sort of mercy, couldn't we?

One small nugget in Warren's story that called me up short was the observation that the country was holding itself together, despite Bleeding Kansas and Dred Scott and the rest of the watershed events of the 1850s, until one of the two main political parties, the Democrats, disintegrated over the issues of slavery, its expansion into the territories, and ultimately secession. As we watch our country drift into the political iceberg field of 2024, it's an interesting parallel that the disintegration of one party, in our case into a cult of personality, may prove more dangerous in the long term than the rise of the demagogue himself.

I haven't finished the book, so won't spoil it for you. I'm just grateful for the diversion lately.

They're calling for another 92 degree day up here, as my attempt to evade tropical summer heat continues to be a bust. I have a Zoom mediation in a little while, and will likely try to get up to the condo to meet the electrician and fix everything I messed up when I tried to install a dimmer switch over the weekend. I know what you're thinking--how does one botch installing a dimmer switch? You underestimate me, friend.