Southern Cultures: Volume 19: Number 4 – Winter 2013 Issue

front porch

Part of a long history of children’s farm labor, Pepper Capps Hill tells us what it was like for the last generation of young tobacco pickers in this issue’s Not Forgotten. Ten-year-old Ora Fugate worming tobacco in Hedges Station, Kentucky, August 7, 1916, by Lewis W. Hine, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In late July, I pulled on well-worn leather gloves and dove into the looming task of weeding my mother’s beloved roses. My mother sat on the front porch, too weak from recent surgery to tend her gardens, but still strong enough to supervise the work. My youngest daughter toddled around the lawn nearby. I was home, if only for a week or so, breathing the fresh mountain air and soaking in the New Mexican landscape that stirred up fond memories of childhood. The people and the very place itself—its economic, social, and cultural structures—had forged the core of my personal beliefs, philosophies, and politics. Yet in spite of my nostalgia, borrowing the words of North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe, you can’t go home again: my room had long since been redone; the town had changed radically in the decades since I last walked its streets as a resident, and in most instances, the people who had shaped me as teachers, mentors, and friends had moved or passed away. My relationships with those who remained had been irrevocably altered by the intervening years and the journeys I had taken since leaving. As I dug in the still familiar dirt, I thought about what it meant to have come of age in that place, what I had taken with me from there, and what I now brought back.

This issue of Southern Cultures invites and even challenges its readers to similar contemplations. Our authors tell tale after tale of coming of age, along the way querying what it means to be at home, and how the movement of people—especially young people—across fixed geographies is both formative and transformative. The essays offer portraits, fleeting and extended, of youth maturing in the crucible of the South at various times in history. Even within those essays whose main theses focus elsewhere, we find tucked away fragments of those narratives. And each essay highlights local peculiarities, suggesting that our definitive experiences come not from the identity of a monolithic region but, rather, from the details overlooked in our too-frequent generalizations about the capital-S South.

Charles Perrow’s recollections of Black Mountain College and Pepper Capps Hill’s reminiscences of working in the tobacco fields take us on very personal journeys into the authors’ pasts. Just after World War II, Perrow hitchhiked to a dynamic, explosive, self-destructive hothouse of a college—an outpost of brilliant minds, liberal thinking, integration, and sex, presented in the trappings of higher education and located in North Carolina. The army veteran’s reconstruction of the two short years he spent there contrasts sharply (and wonderfully) with the better-known tales of northeastern-raised youth of the Folk Revival hitchhiking to North Carolina in search of some imagined Appalachian primitive culture a decade later. Hill contemplates her own youth in North Carolina, much of which was spent in the tobacco fields in the sort of intense and health-damaging physical labor that gives me pause as a mother. Would she send her children out to labor in such conditions? Yes, she answers unequivocally, for the work ethic, strength, sense of camaraderie, and respect it instills. Would I send my own children? I don’t know. And do students arrive at college today thirsting for the challenges and intellectual stimulation that Perrow vividly recalls more than sixty years later? I’d like to think so.

The impact of war on one’s coming of age resurfaces in two different centuries. Carolyn Osborn recounts the disruption and dislocation, both familial and geographic, brought on by World War II, and John Coffey brings to life the character of Wharton J. Green in the years leading up to the Civil War. The details of Osborn’s account are poignant: her forced estrangement from a mentally ill mother, the effort of weaving familial bonds from new and resurrected relationships, and the transplanting of a Tennessee girl into the remote middle of Texas. T for Texas, T for Tennessee, words sung in a hundred years of blues lyrics, both white and black. In Osborn’s experience, the two spaces could not be more different, from the shoes to the saddles and snakes and sense of self. A lifetime later, she is no longer a transplant but has instead put down roots as a Texan. How long does it take to complete that transformation, I wondered, as I packed our bags to head home to North Carolina.

In Drinking Deep at Black Mountain College, Charles Perrow recalls with fondness the years he spent at the experimental school. BMC student Don Page in weaving class, ca. 1940, North Carolina Museum of Art Black Mountain College Research Project, courtesy of the North Carolina Digital Collections, ncdcr.gov.

Coffey’s compelling research about a stained marble bust covers half a generation of southern politics leading up to and through the Civil War. Amidst the historical account, one of the most revealing depictions of the bust’s original owner, Wharton J. Green, comes through his relationship with his father. Much of Green’s later public posturing, politicking, and displays of ambition during the early years of the Civil War were motivated, Coffey suggests, by his repeated failures in the endeavors for which his father set the course. The burden of the Southern Gentleman, bestowed on Green as he entered manhood, was a heavy one; even his financial windfall, acquired through marriage, was the product of his father’s maneuvering, not his own.

One challenge for anyone growing up displaced from home is how to steer one’s course between assimilation and preservation of tradition, the underlying theme in both James G. Thomas Jr.’s and Patricia Silver’s articles. Within a South that has largely been cast in a biracial binary of black and white, both Thomas and Silver remind us that, despite that generalization, diverse peoples have been flowing into and out of the region for some time. Each day, they decide anew how to relate to the communities in which they find themselves. Thomas’s account of Lebanese immigrants to Mississippi explains how economics and climate converged to sustain a vital and complicated segment of population that was neither black nor white. As successive generations of Lebanese youth grew up, their distinctive identity melded into the mainstream culture through the common act of assimilation.

Silver’s sociological account of Puerto Ricans in Orlando similarly complicates any biracial depiction of the South. She suggests that Puerto Ricans have long strategized their role within that community by navigating complex racial issues in sometimes contradictory ways. One oral history in the article ties the themes together: Puerto Rican Patricia González Durocher moved to Orlando with her ex-serviceman husband, where they befriended Lebanese neighbors. Her young daughter perceived that both families were marked as equally foreign in the racial construction of their community. Echoing similar themes of being a stranger in a new land, but in this case with a tragic outcome, Philip C. Kolin’s poem invites renewed reflection on Emmett Till as a youth wondering how to fit in, and at what cost. These questions resonate powerfully and lamentably in light of today’s news reports, suggesting we still have much to learn from our own pasts.

To my young daughter, my hometown is a mere vacation spot, where the accents are strange, the food unfamiliar, and the air unsatisfyingly thin. Neither of her parents are southerners, yet she, born and raised in North Carolina, might fairly lay claim to that identity someday. How will this place and its many people—those passing through, those moving in, and those whose roots already run deep—shape her, and what coming-of-age story will she write in sixty years? What story will you write?

JOCELYN R. NEAL, Editor

ESSAY

Arms for Art, and Other Shenanigans

The Curious Case of a Marble Bust of John C. Calhoun

by John W. Coffey

The bust of the seventh vice president of the United States arrived damaged—the purity of its Tuscan marble surface marred by unsightly yellow stains of unknown origin—and its provenance a mystery. John C. Calhoun, by Hiram Powers, in its damaged state. Modeled 1835, carved 1859, marble, H 29 1/2 inches. Presented to the State of North Carolina by Wharton Jackson Green, 1861; transferred to the North Carolina Museum of Art, 1956. Courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The North Carolina Museum of Art first opened its doors in April 1956. That same month the museum received from the North Carolina Hall of History a marble bust of John C. Calhoun by the American sculptor Hiram Powers (1805–1873). Apparently, the Hall of History, later renamed the North Carolina Museum of History (NCMA), had little use for a bust of the seventh vice president of the United States. Though the preeminent statesman and political theorist of the Antebellum South, Calhoun was, after all, a South Carolinian. Also, the sculpture was damaged, the purity of its Tuscan marble surface marred by unsightly yellow stains of unknown origin. Even the provenance of the bust was a mystery: the Hall of History had no record of a donor. The Museum of Art accepted the sculpture without much enthusiasm, consigning it to the secondary Study Collection.

In 1984, a conservator valiantly attempted to clean the bust, but the deeply saturated stains remained. In order to make the sculpture more presentable as a work of art, it was decided to mask the stains with stippled gouache, rubbed wax, and powdered talc. Wearing this cosmetic, John C. Calhoun has long glowered on his pedestal in the NCMA’s American Galleries.¹

That a portrait of a once-famous politician by an equally famed sculptor could be traced no further than the 1950s and the storeroom of the Hall of History sparked inevitable questions and a lengthy inquiry. Ultimately, a story emerged that places this marble bust at both the jubilant beginning and the bitter ending of the Civil War in North Carolina. For color and eccentricity, few tales can match it.

The story begins in 1835 in Washington, D.C., where the young Vermont-born sculptor Hiram Powers convinced many of the nation’s good and great to sit for bust portraits. Working in a makeshift studio in the Capitol, Powers modeled each bust in clay for later casting in plaster and replicating in the whitest statuary marble. President Andrew Jackson sat for him, as did former President John Quincy Adams, Chief Justice John Marshall, and Senator John C. Calhoun.²

Calhoun’s bust, modeled in late December 1835, is one of Powers’s more memorable portrayals, combining classical idealism with an almost alarming intensity of character. While noting the nobility of Calhoun’s head, the sculptor remarked that the senator’s eyes seem to burn in their sockets with all the surpassing restlessness and vigour of his soul. For the bust, Powers tamed Calhoun’s unruly hair, which he deemed effeminate and soft, into a more Roman coiffure. The brows were beetled to cast pensive shadows over the eyes. The cheeks, hollow from loss of teeth, accentuated the asceticism of the face. Unusual among Powers’s portraits, Calhoun gazes left and downward, suggestive perhaps of an ancient orator marshalling his arguments before speaking. Powers later boasted that many people thought his portrait of Calhoun would pass for a bust of Brutus.³

By all accounts, Calhoun was flattered by the portrait. He later wrote to Powers, If I am to go down to posterity, there lives not an artist to whom I would so willing[ly] trust myself as you. The great man took a kindly interest in the young artist’s career and saw to it that Powers was selected to carve his statue, which was planned for the City of Charleston. The Calhoun statue was the sculptor’s first important civic commission. He received word of it in Italy, where he had moved in 1837, following the much-traveled pilgrimage trail of American artists to the art capitals of Europe. In Powers’s case, he never looked back. He settled with his family in Florence in the moldering Grand Duchy of Tuscany, eventually leasing a spacious studio and upstairs apartment in the Via dei Fornaci, later renamed Via Serraglie. There he worked on the Calhoun statue, which he conceived as a toga-clad figure unfurling a scroll on which were inscribed the senator’s watchwords: Truth, Justice and the Constitution. He modeled the head from the earlier portrait bust he had made in Washington.⁴

The Calhoun statue was Hiram Powers’s first important civic commission. He received word of it in Italy, where he had moved in 1837, settling with his family in Florence and eventually leasing a spacious studio and upstairs apartment in the Via dei Fornaci, later renamed Via Serraglie. By the late 1850s, a visit to the artist’s studio was de rigeur for cultivated Americans on the Grand Tour. Exhibition room in Hiram Powers’s studio, Harper’s Weekly, October 4, 1873.

Powers worked on other sculptures as well, portraits and ideal subjects, most notably the Greek Slave (modeled 1841–43), the first full-size nude statue by an American. The exhibition of this chastely erotic figure in Europe and the United States caused an international sensation, propelling Powers to the forefront of American art. By the late 1850s, a visit to the artist’s studio was de rigeur for cultivated Americans on the Grand Tour, who could browse his showroom,