Dixie Fears

I just had to post a picture of this tombstone found in the Magnolia Cemetery. Metaphorically, Dixie’s fears can be seen as being born sometime in the middle of the Civil War (both Gettysburg and the Emancipation Proclamation happened in 1863 and the tide seemed to be turning against the South) and continue until the middle of the Great Depression (perhaps the election of FDR to a second term in 1936 clamed some of our fears as his National Recovery Administration programs were beginning to make us feel more secure). I guess at that point Dixie died and the New South was born.

In reality, however, this tombstone marks the grave of a member of one of Columbia County's oldest families--Nattie Hicks Killgore's History of Columbia County, Arkansas tells me that William Fears served on the county's first petit jury in 1853 and that Dixie Fears herself was a member of The Ladies Aid Society of the Methodist Protestant Church in 1895.

For more Magnolia Cemetery pictures take a look at my "Magnolia & Sorrounds" set on my Flickr account here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/77315663@N00/

The Magnolia Banner-News...My Favorite Paper

Most archeologists have had troubles with the media from time to time--once a project I was involved with got the headline "Founding Fathers Ate Possum off Fine China." However, so far I've had great results from the Magnolia Banner-News--more specifically Banner-News reporter Jen Brady.

Ms. Brady did a great and detailed article on Frank Schambach's retirement in the South Arkansas Sunday News (on Sunday the papers from Magnolia, El Dorado and Camden join forces to produce a respectably-sized Sunday paper) and she also gave us the most accurate article on the theft of 27 Caddo pots from our facility in August.

She has come through again with a front-page, over the fold article on the plans for the new SAU Museum. The article appeared in the Monday (09/25/06) issue of the Magnolia Banner-News. You can read a PDF of the article here.

I do have one concern about the Banner-News, however...If you look on the PDF....look at the story in the lower right-hand corner next to the Bruce Center article. This is a very brief article on the cross burning in Fouke, Arkansas that happened right as I was moving to southwestern Arkansas.....My concern?

Feel-good article on new museum=big article and full coverage
Article on someone having their civil rights violated a county away=very small AP blurb.

More Changing Identities...

While I'm talking about identities...I've just returned from my second trip back to Fayetteville since I became the AAS-SAU Station Archeologist. Interestingly, I did not feel like a Station Archeologist until I returned to the main AAS office on the UofA Agricultural Campus...

I drove the 5 hours up to Northwest Arkansas, parked in the parking lot, walked in the door, said my "hellos" and gave my supply order to Barbara Scott, our office administrator and....BAM!...it hit me that I was a Station Archeologist.

I thought, "that's odd, why now?"...the answer is simple...Although I've worked for the AAS on and off since 1997, I rarely saw Station Archeologists actually at their stations...I typically saw them rolling into the "Coordinating Office" (the C.O., to us at the AAS) for visits...I was now doing just that...so...BAM!

That made me do some thinking about how I was running my station...why when I wanted things a certain way, or assumed I had access to certain types of data, my station assistant and volunteers sort of looked at me like I was crazy...my only model was the CO...I am attempting to run my station like a little version of the CO...

Is that a bad thing? I'm not sure yet, it probably has good points and bad points...but at least I'm aware of it now.

A Change of Identities...

My friend Peggy Brunache is a Miami girl now living in Perth, Scotland...As she is struggling with being Haitian-American urbanite in a predominately rural, white country, I'm facing a different challenge in Magnolia, Arkansas...

As I alluded to in my previous post (Call To Home), I'm from a small southern town myself....Hell, the county seat of Benton County, Tennessee, is three-times smaller than Magnolia. So when I moved to Memphis, I was the token "hick-town kid."....even while I was completing my Ph.D. in the "oh-so hip" town of Austin, Texas, my colleagues reinforced my rural, southern identity....I frequently spoke for rural, poor, southern America even though I had not been a part of that world for more than a decade...At one point, a good friend and classmate even referred to me playfully as "a reject from the Charlie Daniels Band"....I'm not quite sure what he meant, but I assumed it had to do with my long, one-length hair, my scraggly beard and my frequently worn black Harley-Davidson T-Shirts.

Now that I have returned to a rural southern town, I find that I am not allowed to claim the identities that I have worn for fourteen years. I am constantly referred to as being from the city as in: "You city folks are always going home n' checkin' on your dogs...we just let ours run wild."

Even more perplexing, I am often not allowed to claim the South as my own...three different people have commented on the fact that they thought I was from California...WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?!?!? Others, echoing the words of my old friend Mary Evelyn Starr, comment off-handedly that Tennessee is not really very southern. I understand that I have lost most of my southern accent during my higher education, but--by God--I still listen to country music, dip snuff and say "Yes, Mam'." The accusation that I am not very rural, or very southern at all wounds me to the very core of who I have become very comfortable being...

I have spent a great deal of time attempting to parse the cutltural meanings behind these statements...One thing is certain....To most folks in Magnolia, I am clearly not from here.

Today on an NPR segment about Muslims in America, two young Chicago-born girls were asked which they most identified with--being Muslim or being American....Their reply was very perceptive...they cliamed that they felt more Muslim in America and more American in other Muslim countries....You are whatever makes you different...

Silly me....Any anthropologist should understand that.

Of course, it'll probably take me another 14 years to get comfortable being a token urban, urbane, left-wing intellectual in Magnolia....but it looks like I got no choice.

Call to Home....Or Someplace Like Home

Below is a section from Carol Stack's Call To Home (a narrative-style ethnography/novel about urban African-Americans returning to their southern hometowns)...the passage struck me this afternoon--I can't imagine why (he said sarcastically).

I come from a small town in Western Tennessee. When I lived there I was considered an intellectual and not quite normal. When I moved to Memphis for college I was considered a rural rube (which I quickly began to identify with and wear as a badge of honor) and, thus, not quite normal...After that, I moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas and Austin Texas...all the time staying in intellectual circles and being the token rural, southern, white boy from a working-class background.

Now I've moved to Magnolia....a town very much like the county seat of my home county in Tennessee...I find myself confronting long abandoned feelings and roles....

Not to mention that I'm living 5 hours away from my wife for the foreseeable future.

"Hank spent two more years in Brooklyn. He got over being mad and drove down to visit Billie almost every weekend, but, of course, people still talked, and Billie herself wasn't always certain where the marriage was heading. A man can get used to city life. Up there he could get his hands on this and that--he could hustle. Down home it was a different story.

Maybe a man could make up his mind, decide to turn his back on what he had acquired a taste for. But the question was, could he get used to the country again, to the South? Could he wait patiently enough for people in Chowan Springs to get used to him again, to be able to trust him? Billie prayed Hank would change..."