Freejacks and snobs

I uploaded my image and asked Grok to render it in the style
of Edward Hopper. I don't think Hopper need worry about AI.

 “I wish to Heaven I was married," she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it.... I can't eat another bite.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind  

************

“Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every
person has a ring of stories around it, a halo almost.
People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl
squatting in the front dooryard in mud-caked overalls,
digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and
talked to me. Some I've forgotten, but most I remember.
And so my memory goes back before my birth.”
― Shirley Ann Grau 

 “I remember how warm bourbon tasted in a paper cup with water dipped out of the spring at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that I wanted to cry. How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn't matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night. I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder."
― Shirley Ann Grau 

 “At first glance you would not have thought he had any Negro blood. But if you looked sharper—and if you were used to looking—you could see the signs. It was the planes of the face mostly, the way the skin sloped from cheekbone to jaw. It was also the way the eyelids fell. You had to look close, yes. But southern women do. It was a thing they prided themselves on, this ability to tell Negro blood. And to detect pregnancies before a formal announcement, and to guess the exact length of gestation. Blood and birth—these were their two concerns.”
― Shirley Ann Grau

“The army went home heroes, and even the slaves felt pretty good. There were quite a few of them—Andrew Jackson had taken them along when he marched south, nervous and worried, not knowing the kind of British army he’d be facing. Those slaves went down with the army, served with it, and came back with it. As each man left, he got a bit of paper signed by Andrew Jackson giving him his freedom. Now, the General had a poor hand and he signed carelessly, with only the first four letters of his name showing clearly. On those pieces of paper there was just the word “Free” and a scrawl that looked like “Jack.” So these new freemen and their children for all the years after were called Freejacks.”
― Shirley Ann Grau

 

Shirley Ann Grau, terror of the KKK.

The above quotes are from Grau's novel The Keepers of the House, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965.  I first heard of it when reading a blog post by Ted Gioia, the jazz historian, who so loathed it that he refused to name it, merely implying that it didn't deserve the '65 Pulitzer.  Curious, I looked it up, read it and was captivated by it.  Grau is a wonderful writer and she wrote with sincerity and intensity about her world, the rural South in the middle decades of the 20th century and its centuries of memory, but her themes are transcendent and echo down the decades.  Grau's brilliance as a writer was recognized in her day, her first story collection, The Black Prince and Other Stories,  published in 1955, was a finalist for a National Book Award. Time magazine called it “the most impressive U.S. short story debut between hard covers since J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories.”

About The Keepers of the House, Orville Prescott wrote in a review in The New York Times, “The sounds and smells and folkways of the Deep South are conjured up and the onerous burden of the South’s heritage of violence and of racial neurosis is dramatized in the lives of a few unhappy people. It is all an old and familiar story, but seldom has it been told so well.” Well, yeah, but it's a lot more than that.  Grau immerses you in that world and in that time in a way that only the best writers can do.  When you are reading it you exist in that world.  It's your world, too.  The quotes from it I posted above may give you a sense of it. Katherine Seelye called all of Grau's writing "deeply atmospheric, lyrical" and that it is. It's also so emotionally entangling that you feel as if you are actually living the lives she creates. “Shirley Ann Grau writes of our most sublimated and shameful prejudices, about how miscegenation infiltrates every level of southern society, and about how racial harmony is a pretense that integration alone is unable to address,” Alison Bertolini wrote in Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction. Grau wrote of her own writing, "I try to say that no person in the rural South is really an individual. He is a composite of himself and his past. The Southerner has been bred with so many memories that it’s almost as if memory outreaches life.”

Incidentally, the Ku Klux Klan so hated Keepers that they burned a cross on Grau's front lawn.  Was she intimidated? Nah.  She told the Klan leader in her town that she was a better shot than he or any of his boys were so they better leave her the hell alone if they didn't want to get their britches filled with buckshot. 

Why does Ted Gioia despise Grau so profoundly he can't bear to mention her name?  I don't know.  I don't think he's a klansman, being of Mexican and Italian descent.  Could be the Catholic hostility to Protestants. Then there is her double first name: Shirley Ann, which you can bet she was always called, not Shirley. Double first names -- Barbara Jean, Daisy May, Wanda June -- clearly identify a person as not one of the self-proclaimed elite who lord it over us peons. I have an aunt name Shirley Ann, proof positive that I am white trash, fer shure, just like Grau.  The late-comer-to-America liberal's view of American history as irredeemably wicked and foundational Americans like Grau as evil colonist settler slavers and genocidal killers of innocent natives probably also plays a part.  I know Gioia is a liberal because he boasted that anti-Viet Nam war activists such as he ended the Viet Nam war, which is such an egregiously self-congratulatory load that I can't even.  I just can't even.  Can you? Ask a Vietnamese about that. But be prepared to have your butt kicked from here to Ho Chi Minh City.

Hmm.  What was I talking about? I forget. Oh, well, it don't matter.  Nothing does, does it?