Virgil Hutton, killer of Sheriff Owen Sizemore during the Harlan County coal wars

Been thinking about the furor surrounding a certain song about “small town” ethics and vigilante justice.

I hate to dignify the singer by naming him – it surely only adds to the magic algorithms which magnify his presence on social media, while swelling his head and bank balance.  But, like a fish rising to the bait, here we go…

I’ll turn 60 in the next year.  I grew up in a small town.  An actual small town that had 2000 people in it back when I was a kid – a town that still hasn’t broken the 5000 population mark yet.

Mill ponds on rivers that flooded us out.  Gas wars.  Demolition derbies.  Five-year-olds allowed to set-off bottle rockets and Roman candles and Black Cat firecrackers.  A chicken house, and a pile of old railroad ties with copperheads living under it.  Being made to go to Sunday School on Sundays AND Wednesdays.  Having an acre of beans you and your brother planted and hoed yourselves eaten by deer in a single night.  Winters so cold the coyotes tried to get into the house.

I don’t know when things changed to the extent that people growing-up in cities with over 150,000 people in them got to start claiming “small town” culture.

But then again, I never understood why country singers from Southern Appalachia and The Ozarks who made it in Nashville suddenly stuck cowboy hats on their heads.  Where I grew up, anyone who was “country” probably wore a cap with “International Harvester“, “John Deere“, or “Skoal” on it which they got for free at the local feed store.

Now that I’m approaching Old Codgerville, watching the wheels of the generations turning, I’m beginning to understand this bullshit posturing that some people get up to.

Each generation is moving farther and farther away from actually knowing and speaking with people who were around back in the old days, and the “like my daddy and his daddy before” stuff has never been passed-down the generations with any real accuracy.  Folks forget things.  Folks hide things.

In the place I lived as a kid, one of the most popular things on TV was a variety show called “Hee Haw“, which played-up to every “country” caricature in the book, in between showcasing some damn fine musical talent.

It was hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, both excellent musicians in their own right, and both children of real, not imaginary country people.

Clark was born into a tobacco farming family in Virginia during the Great Depression. His parents had to abandon the farm and move to New York to find laboring jobs to keep their children fed.

Owens, for his part, was also reared on a farm in Texas, until The Dust Bowl and Great Depression forced his family out, too.

“Hee Haw“, for all its silliness, was a show tinged with longing and nostalgia, watched by people stuck in working-class suburbia – people just one generation removed from a way of life which had lasted for uncounted generations.

The wheel keeps turning, and memories get passed down and gilded and curated through selective amnesia.

Many country singers today, and many of the folks who spout the “Make America Great Again” nonsense, are recalling a world they never experienced, and constructing a world in their own heads based on what they IMAGINE things were like.

The “small town life” of current hit country songs doesn’t mention alcoholism caused by violence and trans-generational trauma.  Kids being whipped with belt buckles.  Local sheriffs “escorting” people of color over county lines to keep their “small town” fit for “white folks”.  Young boys who were gay hiding it behind performative violence, and if they couldn’t hide it, being called “pansies” and getting beaten-up at random.  Women with black eyes trying to get the shopping done early in the morning before too many people were around town.

There were of course many good people in small towns, but boy oh boy…

It was hard to be “good” when you were 12 years old at a local baseball game and all the grown men beside the snow cone stand waited for you to laugh loud and hard at their repertoire of n***er jokes.

But still, a few folks knew the real score.  Many had family whose land was taken off them during hard times.  Some had family who had died in the mines.  Others had grandparents who had fought in the coal mine wars.  Most knew of or had children who had died unnecessarily because there was no money for a doctor.

Country singers like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard and Patsy Cline and Bobby Bare and Dotty West and Buck Owens and Roy Clark and Tom T. Hall and Tennessee Ernie Ford and Dolly Parton were from that time when good people, when real people, knew the truth about life in America for the underclasses.

That’s why old country music was full of drinking and heartbreak and disappointment and money problems and prison and trains and loneliness and longing for family when forced to look for work hundreds of miles from home.

Some bro-country dude from a city in Georgia sporting a cowboy hat, far in time and distance from “small town” reality, isn’t a spokesman for “country” or “small town” values.

If he wants to be a spokesman for something, he should forget the “small town” stuff, and stick to his more general area of expertise – “How to monetise horseshit”.

*****

#SmallTown #JasonAldean #CountryMusic #history

Johnny Cash with his first wife Vivian Liberto

Sally Shields was born in South Carolina in 1821, one of many children born to an enslaved woman and her so-called “owner”, a man named William Bryant Shields.

Details are sketchy, but some form of human bond must have slowly developed between William Shields and his “consort”.

Within a few years, Shields felt compelled to release all of the children resulting from this “union” from their legal birth condition of slavery.

It may be unpalatable and difficult for us to comprehend, but William Shields went further, and made gifts of property – including slaves – to many of his now liberated “mulatto” offspring.

His daughter Sally Shields would go on to marry twice – first to another slaveholder named Anderson Robinson, and second to a man named Irving McGraw, who was also enumerated as a “mulatto” in records.

It is almost impossible to write of these things in a sensitive and wise fashion with the USA still so divided over the legacy of slavery and ongoing systemic racism.

The most left-leaning liberals or progressives will query the motive for even bringing-up the subject of slaveholding among people of color.

Dispicable extremists on the other side will point excitedly, and say “See? Black people had slaves, too.”

As if this fact might somehow excuse centuries of color/ethnicity-based hatred and bigotry.  As if it might excuse “whites” erecting barriers to “black” education and equality before the law.  As if it could lessen the brutality of lynchings, the dehumanisation of Jim Crow laws, and red-lining, and, and…

But let’s set all that aside for now, and try to understand a past historical moment.

*****

Slavery has existed in human societies since time immemorial.

But “color” or “race”-based slavery?  That was a relatively recent development.

Before the invention of “race”, slavery was more likely to be a condition brought upon a person due to a difference of religion, political allegiance, country of origin, social status, poverty, criminality, indebtedness, or simply through being a war captive or the human “booty” taken by pirates.

Medieval England, like most other European kingdoms, had broadly continued with the type of slavery practices left behind after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  In England, the people most likely to be enslaved included those in debt, criminals, or people captured on the field of battle or on the high seas.

Beyond England, in the Eastern European, Ottoman and Arab worlds of the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s, people of color were often slaveholders.  Eastern European warlords in places like Wallachia (modern Romania) enslaved entire ethnic groups, most notably the Romani.

The Ottoman, Persian, and Arab worlds purchased slaves from as far north as Finland.

Central Asian cities like Samarkand and Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) acted as international slave markets, moving human cargo between east and west, and from the Arctic Circle to the eastern Mediterranean.

The Moorish, Jewish and Romani merchant classes expelled from Spain in the aftermath of the Christian Reconquista of 1492 went on to set-up shop throughout the Mediterranean world.  These slave traders operated from North and West Africa, all the way to the Ottoman world far to the east. Markets in places like Persia, Tangiers, and Madagascar also supplied slaves to the all-devouring maw of various European colonial empires run by the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, or French.

This alters the common perception that slaves were captured and shipped only from West Africa during the 1500s and 1600s.

As Europe came to be synonymous with “Christendom”, the Catholic Church began to discourage the enslavement of fellow Christians, and the list of people “deserving” to be enslaved was relocated to the non-Christian world.

This change during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period also happened to coincide with the busiest period of European exploration and colonialist expansion.

Because most people being subjugated and/or colonised were seen as pagans, heretics, or worse, European Christendom felt able to justify their enslavement and exploitation.

Portuguese colonies were mostly in Africa and India, so most of the enslaved were of course sub-Saharan Africans and South Asians.

Spanish, French and English colonies were mostly in the Americas, so most of the enslaved there came from local indigenous populations – at first.

African slavery didn’t become the basis for entire economies immediately, but certain circumstances hastened its advent.

Events like plague, the introduction of tobacco, sugar cane, and rice cultivation – and even The Great Fire of London in 1666 – created labor shortages making indentured labor much more expensive.

Add to this the catastrophic collapse of indigenous American populations, as tribes and nations became decimated by enslavement, disease, and warfare, or simply migrated inland to escape the reach of coastal slave traders.

The rest is history.  Colonial powers in the Americas eventually turned their baleful, greedy gaze to Africa’s non-Christian peoples.

*****

I have written it elsewhere, and it is worth repeating again and again:

Racism did not lead to slavery.

Slavery and greed led to racism.

In the earliest days, Africans and other people of color were not enslaved due to their skin color.  They were indentured or enslaved simply by virtue of being non-English or non-Christian, or both.

But a problem soon arose.

Many Africans and other people of color began to abandon their old faith systems (including Islam), becoming Christians.

This removed much of the justification for their condition of servitude, and during the first few decades of the 1600s, many, many such people of color managed to remain free (or successfully petition courts for their freedom) in places like colonial Virginia.

Many became slaveholders themselves; remember that slavery wasn’t yet based on skin color.

But human greed is seemingly limitless, and the English who had begun to amass fortunes from the labor of slaves decided to change the rules.  Professing the Christian faith would no longer offer protection from servitude.

Christian or not, if a person looked non-European, they could be enslaved.

Racism was the eventual (and much later) thought system invented by innumerable self-interested, greedy people in an effort TO JUSTIFY their ridiculously arbitrary legislative changes and shockingly immoral level of avarice.

*****

The actual ideology of racism did not take root overnight.  A slow but steady creeping change to attitudes and legislation meant that for many decades, North America was a complicated place, with slaveholding families and their slaves coming from many different ethnic backgrounds.

In Anglo-America – especially in places such as New York and Maryland in the north, or Virginia and the Carolinas in the south – there were substantial populations of free people of color, and many were slaveholders.

Members of many indigenous tribes such as the Creek and Cherokee held slaves.

Africans held slaves.

Jewish and Romani people held and sold slaves.

And again, although the majority of these slaves eventually arrived from West Africa, many came from elsewhere.  They came from anywhere within reach of a trading path or sailing vessel.

But as Anglo-America slowly began to crystallise its novel concept of exclusively African or color-based chattel slavery during the late 1600s and early 1700s, these slaveholding and slave-trading people of color in Virginia and the Carolinas felt the full weight of karmic irony dropping like a planet-sized lead ball upon their heads.

Many of these slaveholding free persons of color decided to get the hell out while the getting was good.

Some headed for the remotest hills of Western Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and Eastern Tennessee, where many were part of early statelet experiments like The Watauga Association or The State of Franklin.

Others took the southern route into Georgia, Alabama, and Spanish Mississippi, Louisiana and Tejas.

People like Sally Shields and her family.

But Sally would have been the exception, in that she was actually the slaveholding daughter of an enslaved woman.

The families and community all around her, however, were slaveholding people of color who had never known servitude.

The ones who went into Southern Appalachia ended-up being a foundational part of the people later called Melungeons.

The ones who went into Spanish and French territory became a foundational part of a predominantly ranching people later called “Redbones“.

But we know both groups are related when we see the ancient surnames shared between both groups.  Names like Perkins, Ashworth, Bunch, and Goins.

As already noted, Sally Shields was married twice, and her descendants intermarried freely among many different ethnic groups including the Redbones, the Melungeons, the Choctaw, Mexicans, Louisiana French – and even among Italo-Mexicans.

*****

I was contemplating all of this deep history while listening to an old Rosanne Cash album a few nights ago.

Everyone knows about the long-term love affair between Johnny Cash and June Carter, but fewer might be aware that Johnny’s daughter Rosanne came from his first marriage to Vivian Dorraine Liberto.

You see, Vivian was a direct descendant of Sally Shields, and became a target of white supremacist hate during her not-so-brief marriage to The Man in Black.

Live footage of Rosanne Cash from the 1980s shows a beautiful young woman with a voice to match. She also shares a clear resemblance to her equally beautiful mother. It may be my own imagination, but it seems as if the make-up and lighting on Rosanne’s earliest album covers was designed to minimise her mixed-ethnic background. If this was indeed the case, one suspects this was a record company decision. It would not be the first time.

Rosanne Cash performing her hit “Seven Year Ache”

Cover of Rosanne Cash’s third studio album “Seven Year Ache”, released 1981

This is how the fall-out from racism diminishes everyone in a society – not just the direct victims of said racism.

Perhaps the biggest irony of all lies in the fact that many of the white supremacists who pointed a finger at Vivian Liberto HAD DEEP ROOTS IN THE EXACT SAME COLONIAL ERA MULTI-ETHNIC SLAVEHOLDING FAMILIES AS HER.

Ignorance might be bliss.  But ignorance can be a thing far worse, too.

©Brian Halpin-Before We Were White

#BeforeWeWereWhite  #FreePeopleOfColor  #melungeons  #redbones  #JohnnyCash  #RosanneCash  #VivianLiberto

God and Mammon

A kingpin of commercial American evangelicalism named Pat Robertson died this month.

People born after the Boomer generation can probably not imagine a time before tele-evangelism, and its unholy trinity of The Bible, money, and politics.

The reason for churches being exempt from various taxes goes back to ancient times, and stems from the church’s historical role in caring for the sick, elderly, and poor.

The last hundred years has seen the governments of developed western nation states largely taking-over this social role of churches – especially in multi-cultural and more secular countries.

The nature of American history, with colonisation and warfare taking place almost continuously for centuries (far from large urban centres), made religion very much a “do-it-yourself” affair.

Religion in frontier-era America was about more than personal faith.  It would be impossible to overstate the role religion played in people’s social lives as a marker of “civilisation”, or as a way to signify that a person was worth “taking account of”.

In a world of war, disease, crop failures, slavery, droughts, floods, tornados and casual violence, to “profess faith” was about more than seeking salvation.  It was the surest route to acceptance into any “decent” community, and the easiest way to elevate oneself socially in the eyes of others, regardless of one’s relative wealth or poverty.

The atmosphere along the frontier fostered generations of rough men and women, many of whom didn’t care for the pieties – let alone the rules and strictures – laid down by Hard Shell Baptists, Quakers, Mennonites, Presbyterians, Methodist circuit riders, and other such representatives of late-stage Calvinism.

The rowdiness, violence, heavy drinking, gambling, and debauchery of such folks happened to coincide with the Age of Enlightenment, with its focus on secular rationalism.

Instead of blaming violence, immorality and licentious behaviour on social, political, economic, and environmental factors, various religious leaders blamed secularism and rationalism, and began to rail and fulminate against widespread “ungodliness”, and the decline of traditional Christian faith.

The most vocal of these religious leaders began to launch regular “revivals” and camp meetings meant to bring stray sheep back into the fold.  The biggest such periods of revivalism are known in American history as the “Great Awakenings”, and these periods of theatrical public preaching and intense religious fervour incubated mass movements such as Mormonism.

In the aftermath of these revivals, a certain type of person quickly realised they could have their cake and eat it.  Even the roughest illiterate man from the backwoods could memorise some Scripture, have a voice that carried, claim to be “sanctified” and call himself a preacher of the Gospel.

From Eastern Kentucky, to the Ozark Mountains, to Bleeding Kansas and on to the mining camps of the Old West, both settled and itinerant lay preachers – whether literate or non-literate – performed marriages and baptisms, spoke words over the dead, and were welcomed into people’s homes for dinner.

It was precisely these sorts of preachers and their followers who would eventually morph into the early 20th century American Pentecostalist or “Charismatic” evangelical movements.

Pat Robertson, while officially a Southern Baptist preacher, was very much informed by Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on a world in which miracles, signs and wonders, and other supernatural phenomena are believed to be real and present in the lives of the faithful.

Such supernatural phenomena might include the overt display of “spiritual gifts”, such as “speaking in tongues”, serpent handling, prophesizing and faith healing, and among many, a firm belief in imminent “Rapture” and Armageddon.

With the power being wielded by the “white” evangelical voting bloc in America today, it would be natural to think these people were followers of a very old strain of American Protestantism.

Not so.  Today’s “white Christian evangelicals” have very little to do with old style Calvinism, and everything to do with very recent forms of “do-it-yourself Christianity”.

The concept of “Rapture” never figured in Christianity until an Anglo-Irish Church of Ireland minister named Charles Nelson Darby went rogue, left his church, and started preaching it during the mid to late 1800s.

And almost all of the current faith trappings of American evangelicalism were late 19th and early 20th century inventions/innovations, with much current “orthodoxy” actually born in one small church in Los Angeles in 1906.

The age of radio, cinema, and TV arrived just in time to turbo-charge these local revivalist crazes, and a generation later – just like the travelling preachers of yesteryear – men like Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jerry Falwell appeared at the door, ready to get their legs under everybody’s table for a free Sunday dinner.

By now, most people paying even the slightest bit of attention will know about the hypocrisy, the bigotry, the jet airplanes, swimming pools, infidelities, and swanky cars.

But this is Before We Were White, and we like to leave our readers with something they might not already know…

*****

The voting bloc known today as the “white evangelical base” was pretty much solidified during the late 1970s and 1980s by a TV preacher man called Jerry Falwell, Sr, whose movement “The Moral Majority” joined American evangelicalism at the hip with Ronald Reagan‘s GOP.  It is hard to resist drawing parallels between Reagan’s background in Hollywood, and the acting skills of tele-evangelists…

To understand the social milieu from which Falwell arose, here are a couple of quotes from the years leading-up to the Civil Rights Movement, in which Falwell addressed the issue of desegregation:

“If Chief Justice (Earl) Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line…”

“…the true Negro does not want integration…he realizes his potential is far better among his own race.”

In old age, Falwell eventually rowed back from his abhorrent position on segregation, but continued to pander to bigots with a variety of other poisonous interpretations of Scripture, up to and including his infamous blaming of the 9/11 attacks on:

“The pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way…I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.'”

Earlier in this post, I noted how “professing faith” was an important step toward “respectability” in America’s earliest days.

This was just as true for indigenous Americans and African-Americans.

In the eyes of much of “white” America, to be indigenous American or African-American was already seen as carrying “the mark of Cain”.  If such people were also non-Christian?  Why, that would lower these people to the level of savages, or even simple beasts.

Of course, while those who suffered under the American racial caste system might become Christian, the one thing they couldn’t become was “white”.

Or could they?

Well bless my cotton socks.

Mr. Falwell’s racism and bigotry seem strange (or not?) when we realise that one of his great-grandparents on his mother’s side was a woman named Judith Goins.

A woman descended from the Goins folks who were free PEOPLE OF COLOR from Buckingham County, Virginia.

©2023 Brian Halpin, Before We Were White

#WhiteEvangelicals  #televangelists  #PatRobertson  #JerryFalwell

Two Laplanders wearing traditional dress milking reindeer, Port Clarence, Alaska,1900

By the end of the short-lived Klondike and Alaskan Gold Rushes of the late 1890s, the far northwest of the North American continent had been changed irrevocably.

Over 100,000 prospectors had swarmed like a plague of locusts over the Yukon Territory and Alaska, bringing everything from pack animals to industrial river dredging machinery with them.

Entire virgin forests were clear-felled along rivers to make boats for transporting equipment.  More timber went to building shanty towns, boardwalks, and sluices.

The rest was firewood.

Fish, birds, and other wildlife was exterminated along entire river systems – rivers, streams, and creeks which had been muddied and polluted by industrialised mining, while thousands upon thousands of other wild animals were shot-out or trapped-out to feed miners and other gold rush opportunists.  Tailors, blacksmiths, guides, carpenters, cooks, saloon-keepers, criminals, pimps, and of course, prostitutes…

By the time most of the prospectors had upped-sticks and left for warmer climes after the gold rush, local tribes such as the Han, Tagish, Tutchone, and Tlingit had been left reeling – from disease, the introduction of alcohol into their communities, and worst of all, the breakdown of old trade networks and the near extermination of much wildlife in many areas – wildlife which had traditionally sustained them for centuries, for millennia.

Added to this catastrophe was the 19th century Pacific whaling industry, which did for indigenous coastal dwellers what gold miners had done to the northwestern interior.

Enter a Coast Guard captain from Georgia named Michael Healy – runaway son of a slaveholding Irishman from County Roscommon and his “consort” Mary Eliza Clark – an enslaved woman who was eventually freed.

Healy, a man beset by his own demons and no stranger to the bottle, nonetheless saw the hungry and impoverished plight of the Alaskan Inuit, and being a fundamentally decent man, determined to help them in some way.

Long story short, having seen the reindeer herders of Siberia on his many travels aboard ship, Michael Healy suggested to Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the Commissioner of Education in Alaska and a Presbyterian minister, that the Coast Guard might replenish devastated wildlife stocks by transporting entire herds of Siberian reindeer to Alaska by sea.

The Inuit might be taught to become self-sufficient herdsmen rather than hunters, the reasoning went.

Jackson bought into the idea, and funds for the project were raised through private and government sources.

The first reindeer arrived, with Siberian herdsmen brought to Alaska as instructors.  These Siberians soon departed due to cultural differences with the Inuit.

And so began one of the strangest episodes of immigration in American history.

Families and groups of Sámi people from Scandinavia (the people formerly known as “Laplanders”), reindeer experts par excellence, were brought to Alaska instead.

This time all parties got on well, the project took proper root, and the Alaska Reindeer Service was born.

Perhaps the natural amity between Sámi  and Inuit should surprise no one, as the Sámi, just like indigenous Americans, had experienced ethnic discrimination and cultural genocide in their rightful and ancient homelands.

The attitude of Siberian reindeer to all of this remains unclear…

#MichaelHealy  #AlaskaHistory  #MixedEthnic  #Inuit  #Saami  #reindeer