by Sarah Becker ©2018 The South Secedes! More Civil War battles were fought in Virginia than in any other state. The majority of the clashes occurred between Washington, D.C. and Richmond, an interesting fact given Virginia’s initial reluctance to secede. “In spite of all excitement, rash conduct, and reckless language indulged in by the ultras at the South, we plainly perceive that the calm attitude and conservative course of Virginia, so far, is exercising its influence in several of the States around South Carolina,” the Alexandria Gazette reported on November 16, 1860. “Enough is known now to satisfy every body that Virginia will not favor ‘precipitate action…that she does not consider the election of Lincoln, as, of itself, ground for an attempt to break up and dissolve the Union….” “What is secession?” The New York Times then asked. “The Southern Disunionist journals are laying great stress on their assumed right to secede.” Said James Madison father of the Constitution in 1832, “It is high time that the [nullifiers] claim to secede at will should be put down by public opinion, and I shall be glad to see the task commenced by one who understands the subject.” After much political pondering—on April 17, 1861—delegates to Virginia’s secession convention voted 88-55 to depart the Union. The vote came only two weeks after the convention roundly rejected an April 4 secession proposal. What changed the delegates and, in turn, the public’s mind? Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln took his Presidential oath of office approximately three weeks after Virginia’s secession convention began. The 1860 Republican platform was clear: “That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is freedom.” Lawyer Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural message was also clear: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of…
Delta Ghosts Miriam R. Kramer Jesmyn Ward’s complex National Book award winner, Sing, Unburied, Sing, lends itself to an alternative form of book review. She pens a tale that offers the reader rich treasures of myth, symbol, and folklore while building its story. Its plainspoken cast of characters, bedeviled by love and suffering, stumble along paths built on the shaky bedrock of racist history. Woven with gorgeous, often painful images, Ward’s narrative takes circuitous routes to reach her novel’s ambiguous conclusions. Ward’s tale focuses on a sensitive biracial boy, JoJo, who has grown up in the Mississippi Gulf Coast swamp hamlet of Bois Sauvage with his sister, (Kayla) Michaela. His Black drug-addled mother, Leonie, yearns for his White father, Michael, in prison for cooking crystal meth. She ignores her children while working a low-level job and taking drugs. His upright and loving maternal grandfather, Pop, wrongfully imprisoned in Mississippi’s Parchman prison as a younger man, teaches him how to take care of livestock and a homestead. His spiritual but practical grandmother, Mam, infused with Voodoo and Catholic ritual, takes care of him and his sister at home, mixing up folk remedies for pain and sickness from her gardens and woods. When Michael’s sentence is up, Leonie and a friend take the children to pick him up at Parchman prison in Faulkner-fecund Mississippi, far away from the Gulf Coast. Her mother, Mam, is dying of cancer, and Leonie leaves Pop there to take care of her. JoJo becomes his sister Kayla’s primary caretaker on the trip as he is at home, protecting her from her neglectful, conflicted mother. This road trip awaken demons in Leonie and her son. Leonie sees her love Michael as her only sun, the compass of her life, even though his White cousin shot her Black brother…