Roger O Green

Vanilla ice cream and watermelon

Except on July Fourth.

Vanilla ice cream and watermelon are often associated with the summer. There’s a piece in Medium – which you may or may not be able to access – titled How The Ice Cream Song Exposes Absurdity of American Racism: An essay about ice cream, racism, and stereotypes by Allison Wiltz, M.S.

She notes a song, “released in March 1916 by the Columbia Graphophone Company, entitled ‘N—— Love a Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!’… written by Harry C. Browne, a White banjo player and actor who regularly performed the song wearing blackface… This portrayal undermined Black Americans’ use of the watermelon as a symbol of resistance during the Reconstruction Era. In the song, Browne referred to watermelon as ‘colored man’s ice cream.’

“The ice cream song began with a shockingly racist line, ‘You n — — quit throwin’ them bones and come down and get your ice cream.’ Originally, ‘Turkey in a Straw’ was a folk song with British and Irish roots, with no racial connotations. Nevertheless, in minstrel shows throughout America, Browne popularized a racist remix.”

Not my preference

This intrigued me because, as my family knows, I do not like watermelon. I never have, which predates my understanding of the fruit’s implication. Over the years, people have asked me if my disdain for the fruit was based on the stereotype. Nope.

I’m not too fond of cantaloupe either; I’m not a melon guy. When my daughter offered us some gum on a recent car trip, she knew I’d decline when I learned what flavor of gum she had.

When I was in charge of the NY/PA Olin reunion in the 2010s, one job was picking up the watermelon from the grocery store. I always felt ill-equipped to pick out a “good” one by tapping it or whatever scientific method one uses.

However, if they were washed off, I loved propelling watermelon seeds with my tongue and was not bad at it.

Dairy

Wiltz wrote this, something I already knew: “Folklore in the black community suggested that, in some areas, White people were so racist during Jim Crow that they would deprive Black people of vanilla ice cream… In Maya Angelou’s autobiography, ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,’ she shared such a narrative. ‘People in Stamps [Arkansas] used to say the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days, he had to be satisfied with chocolate.'”

When I was in sixth grade at Daniel S. Dickinson in Binghamton, NY, we were to get ice cream; I don’t remember the occasion, but I remember the little cups of Sealtest (I think) ice cream with these odd wooden spoons.

I was briefly out of the room when our flavor choices were being determined. When I returned, I was asked for my pick. I said, “Vanilla.” The whole class moaned. They had all picked chocolate.

It would be easy to create some racialization of this: the only black kid in the class picks vanilla. But I knew my classmates, about half of them – 7 of 15 – since kindergarten. They were disappointed that we didn’t achieve unanimity. If I HAD been in the room earlier, I probably would have also picked chocolate. Unlike watermelon, I like chocolate ice cream just fine.

Book review: The Undertow

Ashli

Jeff Sharlet is an explorer. The Dartmouth professor shows sides of the United States that most of us don’t fully understand in his 2023 book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, one of The New York Times 100 Books of the Year. I picked up the book at the Telling The Truth 2023: THE STRUGGLE FOR AMERICA’S FUTURE event sponsored by The New York State Writers Institute on Friday, November 17, 2023, at Page Hall on the Downtown UAlbany campus.

He was paired with Juliet Hooker, a noted political scientist, who had a then-brand new book Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss, in a discussion of The American Backlash: “A conversation about the politics of revenge, and the impulse to punish ‘out groups’ who have made political gains — particularly racial, sexual, and cultural minorities, and women. ” Jeff’s book was about that, of a sort, but it didn’t mesh with the moderator’s questions.

Jeff delves into the religious dimensions of American politics as he did in The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, the 2009 book that inspired the Netflix documentary series. He does so by talking to people whom most reporters do not speak to, sometimes in perilous situations.

Asking the questions

As the Amazon review notes: “Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies―sometimes realities―of violence.”

The book is a series of essays, and the first chapter, Voice and Hammer, threw me off a bit. He wrote about Harry Belafonte and his participation in the American Civil Rights struggle. Belafonte told Jeff the tale of getting cash for the movement in the South involving a car chase. I heard Donald Hyman tell the same story when he reviewed Belafonte’s 2012 autobiography My Song for the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library on November 7, 2023.

The second chapter, On The Side Of Possibilities, describes his time embedded in Occupy Wall Street encampments. I understand that he “remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community and an America long dreamt of and yet to be fully born, dedicated to justice and freedom for all.”

djt

But the next section of the book, in the Heavy With Gold chapter, starts with seeing the 45th president land in his large plane and one or more of his devotees hoping to punch a protester in the face. And little wonder, given the gory, painted as patriotic ramblings of djt.

In the chapter Ministry of Fun, men, presumably “of God,” glorify materialism, attracting Kanye West, Kardashians, and pro athletes with a theology mostly devoid of a Matthew 25 directive to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Instead, “lies, greed, and glorification of war boom through microphones at hipster megachurches that once upon a time might have preached peace and understanding.”

In Whole Bottle of Red Pills, there is “a conference for lonely single men [who] come together to rage against women.” From incels (involuntary celibate) to Paul Elam’s A Voice for Men, the manosphere loathes “women ‘leaning in,’ women in combat, women who have the gall to think that they too can be funny, or president.”

MRA, Men’s Right Advocate, is a “gluttony of the soul, while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war―a firestorm they long for as an absolution and exaltation. Political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals.

“On the Far Right, everything is heightened―love into adulation, fear into vengeance, anger into white-hot rage.

The Trumpocene shows that “here, in the undertow, our forty-fifth president, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood.” And he has mastered the “kidding/not kidding” motif.

Saint Ashli

In section 3, Goodnight Irene On Survival, the title essay is about the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on January 6 at the Capitol, who is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood. Yes, a martyr, not unlike the White virgin in the 1915 movie Birth Of A Nation who leaps to her death rather than submit to the wanton desires of a Black man.

Jeff Sharlet then continues traveling east, analyzing the Ashli movement, even as he deals with the grief of the passing of his stepmother, the widow of his late father Robert, the father he started to live with after his mother Nancy died too young, at 45 on January 1, 1989.

Surprisingly, the last chapter was about the musical group The Weavers, Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Pete Seeger, the Peekskill riot in 1949, and their career ups and downs.

It is arguable whether the first two and last chapters “belong” here, as he tries to add some hope to the narrative, but the book’s core was extraordinary.

2024

Here’s an addendum from Jeff’s Substack page, Scenes From A Slow Civil War. In the July 15, 2024 post, One Nation Under Fist: “Consider Trump v. United States, the powers of a king now granted to the presidency, in anticipation of Trump’s return. Consider the sermons preached in Christian nationalist churches across the country on Sunday, declaring Trump spared by God for a higher purpose. Consider the widespread contemplation of the millimeters between life and death for Trump on Saturday, the public pondering of a breeze that might have ever so slightly altered the bullet’s course, or a tremor that might have troubled the assassin’s hand. ‘It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening’” Trump ‘truthed,’ and—” Expletive deleted.

“Those who claim calling Trump a threat to democracy is violent rhetoric are doing a kind of rhetorical violence to democracy, screeching it to a halt, making an ever-moving idea a static one, writing a banal and brutal ending onto a story that’s meant to keep going. The historian David Waldstreicher comments that for fascism and its enablers, ‘democracy is not a process, it’s just another word for the nation’—and the fist, under which it trembles.”

I should note that I’ve known Jeff Sharlet since he was six and a half years old. He lived in Scotia, NY, with his mom and sister Jocelyn. The morning after the Telling The Truth event, we went out for breakfast – he paid – and we talked for three hours.

[This is an edited version of the content of my book review at the Albany Public Library on July 30, 2024.]

CHQ: More people talking

Shadid Aziz, MD and Geraldine Brooks

The hardest thing about writing about our week at Chautauqua was figuring out how to order it. After the weekend there, I ended up with categories. More people talking could have been labeled miscellany, but that seems dismissive.

Monday July 22nd 3:30 PM

I tried to go to Islam 101: Koran and what it says about other faiths at the Hurlburt church, the Methodist Church. Alas, a group of us realized it had been inaccurately posted on the calendar. It had taken place earlier in the season but no longer. So, I had to look to see what else I might do. At that very same time, there was a discussion on the courageous conversations on death and dying by Shadid Aziz, MD, not to be confused with the New Jersey dentist or the Pakistani military leader. Oddly enough, it was in the Presbyterian House Chapel, where I just came from.

Some of the discussion concerned advanced care planning for the end of life in the inpatient setting and a similar item for outpatient. The three questions are: to establish minimum living goals for supporting life by artificial means. For example, what is the minimum level of mental functioning that is acceptable to you with the help of life-prolonging treatments? What is the minimum level of physical functioning acceptable to you with similar treatments? What life-prolonging treatments are you willing to use or not indefinitely or for a trial period if they can get you to your minimum acceptable level of functioning? Dr. Aziz says as a physician, you always work off the patient’s baseline function. If you do not know the baseline, you do not know the possible goals.

The gift of palliative care

I liked the talk so much that I bought his 2018 book Courageous Conversations on Dying. Here are some chapter titles: Basic Rules for Having Courageous Conversations and Giving Bad News; The Power of Touch; The Power of Prayer; Creating a Document of ACP Advanced Directives; Preparing for dementia – the slow downward spiral; Helping Surrogates Make Decisions; managing cross-cultural issues; the hard talks with parents and children; words, words, words.

I have long been interested in this topic, so I’ve been participating in those Death Cafes I mentioned previously.

Tuesday, July 23, 12:30

Chautauqua Dialogues. Presbyterian House

Several times a day, there were discussion groups about how people felt about what they were experiencing at CHQ. It was mildly interesting.

Weekly speaker reception

Tuesday July 23nd, 3:30 PM

Pierce Freelon, Grammy-nominated artist; author, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Daddy and Me; Side by Side; and Daddy-Daughter Day African American Heritage House, 40 Scott.

This was an actual house, with several chairs available and hors d’oeuvres, wine, and other beverages at a table.

Pierce’s family, both his ancestors and his children, are very important to him, particularly his grandmother. He would run with his brother, Deen, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, once a week when they could.

He mentioned that his father appeared in a PBS documentary Matter of Mind: My ALS, which the family appreciated. “In Durham, North Carolina, renowned African-American architect Phil Freelon receives his diagnosis of ALS on the eve of completing his life’s work: The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. As he inches toward paralysis and loss of speech, he and his family grapple with the illness’ erosion of control, reflect on what it means to live and die with dignity, and lean on one another for support and strength.”

(By happenstance, my wife brought to CHQ a book we were gifted, A Fool’s Errand by Lonnie Bunch. In it, Bunch describes the challenges of getting the museum built. Phil Freelon is mentioned, of course, and his photo is included.)

At the talk, someone asked Pierce what his father’s name was. Pierce replied, “My father’s name IS Phil Freelon,” noting the present tense. He also helped his mother, Nnenna Freelon, assemble her album, AnceStars, which he said “She needed.” See this video.

Here’s Pierce Freelon’s YouTube channel, featuring hits such as Tooth Bruh and No Is A Love Word.

Hall of Philosophy

Thursday, July 25th, 3:30 PM

Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Author Presentation. Geraldine Brooks, author, Horse, Hall of Philosophy and CHQ Assembly

The Hall of Philosophy, with its pillars and open-air access, reminds one of the Greek Parthenon. It was SRO, big time.

Geraldine Brooks grew up in a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Her father, Lawrie Brooks, was an American big-band singer stuck in Adelaide when his manager ripped him off. He stayed in Australia and became a newspaper sub-editor. Her mother, Gloria, from New South Wales, did PR for a Sydney radio station.

After graduating from the University of Sydney, Geraldine became a rookie reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. After asking for an assignment based on her interests and expertise, she was tasked with reporting on horse racing. This involved providing great detail regarding the wagering and the position of the horses at every turn. When she left the paper, she knew she didn’t want to have anything to do with horses ever again.

Living in the USA

After receiving a scholarship, she moved to the United States and received a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1983. The next year, she married American journalist Tony Horwitz.

The couple were award-winning foreign correspondents. She covered crises in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East for The Wall Street Journal. After writing one non-fiction book, she wrote five novels, mostly historical fiction, often relying on deep research.

After spending three days in an African jail, she decided it was time for motherhood. Her son Nathaniel was in the audience.

She overheard a story about a once-nationally famous racehorse named Lexington at an event. Eventually, though, his skeleton became the example of a generic horse at a museum. This led to her next book, Horse. She learned that the groom was the most important person in a racehorse’s life and that many grooms were enslaved black men. A mysterious painting of the horse figures into the narrative.

And now Geraldine Brooks owns horses.

Her next book is called Memorial Days, about grief tied to the death of her husband at the age of 60 of cardiac arrest in 2019. She was a great storyteller in her remarks and in answering audience questions.

Lydster: driver’s permit

wisdom teeth

It was an interesting summer for our daughter. For one thing, she got her driver’s permit and decided to learn how to operate a car. She enlisted her mother in the teaching experience. I don’t think this was something that my wife was particularly looking forward to doing, but our daughter has skills in this area.

She won’t have time to get her license over the summer, as she still has to take a five-hour course, but she’s a quick learner. I’m getting this from my wife and daughter because, to date, I have not ridden in the car with my daughter operating the vehicle.

The daughter has a great deal of spatial recognition. This became obvious when we went to Alexandria, VA, in July. She instantly recognized that there couldn’t be a second bathroom in our place because there would not have been sufficient space. This was her third trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, though her parents’ first. We also went to the Jefferson Memorial and passed the Capitol. More about that trip soon.

She’s been going through a lot of her stuff as part of the family purging, whittling through stuff we may not need anymore.

Jock

She’s also been exercising a lot at the local Albany YMCA and is very good at learning how to use some of the equipment, so much so that she’s been teaching her mother how to do so.

This has been interrupted by the need to get her four wisdom teeth removed on August 14. They weren’t hurting yet, but removal was highly recommended based on the dentist and the specialist’s assessment. Annoyingly, because of a scheduling snafu, my wife had to drive her to Queensbury, about an hour away, rather than the closer Latham office. The day after, she had a lot of mango juice, mac and cheese, and chocolate pudding.

She goes back to college soon. It was nice having her around.

Musician Elvis Costello is 70

Spike

The musician Elvis Costello, born Declan Patrick MacManus, was considered one of those “angry young men” in the pop scene that straddled the 1970s and 1980s. I first heard his music on WQBK-FM, Q 104 in the Albany area, a station I listened to constantly for about a decade.

I saw Elvis perform in Albany in 2008. Opening was Amos Lee, then Elvis, who was quite good, and Bob Dylan, more indecipherable than usual.

I bought a few of his earlier albums on vinyl and many of the latter on CD. Here are some of his songs.

Radio Sweetheart – Taking Liberties (1980). B-side of Less Than Zero single, 1977

Watch Your Step – Trust (1981)

20% Amnesia – Brutal Youth (1994)

Everyday I Write The Book – Punch The Clock (1983)

Miss Macbeth -Spike (1989). I love this album so much. Sometimes, you and a piece of music hit the same wavelength.

Remove This Doubt – Kojak Variety (1995). This is a cover of a song on The Supremes Sing-Holland-Dozier album. I love the original.

Accidents Will Happen – Armed Forces (1979)

Man Out Of Time – Imperial Bedroom (1982)

Last Boat Leaving –Spike (1989). The album is quite eclectic.

Ship Of Fools– Deadicated: A Tribute to the Grateful Dead (1991), a GREAT compilation album.

Love and romance

Let Me Tell You About Her – North (2003). The album was “partially inspired by the dissolution of his marriage to wife Cait O’Riordan and his burgeoning relationship with Diana Krall.” This song is about the latter. It is the only EC album my wife, a big DK fan, ever bought for me.

Wise Up Ghost– Wise Up Ghost (2013) is an album EC did with Questlove. The opening strings are lifted from Can You Be True? from EC’s North album.

A Slow Drag With Josephine – National Ransom (2010). I need to listen to this album more often.

Deep Dark Truthful Mirror – Spike (1989)

National Ransom – National Ransom (2010)

Veronica – Spike (1989). This represents not only Paul McCartney’s contribution to Spike but Elvis’ to Paul’s Flowers In the Dirt album the same year

Pump It Up – This Year’s Model (1978)

Chewing Gum – Spike (1989) – I know people who hate this song with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

All This Useless Beauty – All This Useless Beauty (1996)

Watching The Detectives – My Aim Is True (1977). The UK single was added to the US release.

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding – Armed Forces (1979). The American release of the album omitted “Sunday’s Best” and added Costello’s cover of Nick Lowe’s classic.

Coverville 1500: The Elvis Costello Cover Story V

Elvis Costello turns 70 today.