Reading the frontier sketch writers of Alabama, with a fair-minded look at what they got right and what they did not
Saturday, The Frontier Humorists
The antebellum South produced a school of humorous writers whose sketches of court days, horse trades and frontier swindlers were read across the country. Two of them are especially dear to an Alabama reader. Johnson Jones Hooper, an Alabama newspaperman, created a roguish character named Simon Suggs, a gambler and sharper whose motto is that it is good to be shifty in a new country. Joseph Glover Baldwin, a lawyer, wrote The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, a book of sketches about the boom years of land speculation and the lawyers who lived off them.
I will not reproduce their pages, but I will describe the effect. The humour is broad, quick and often at the expense of the gullible. It is a literature of confidence tricks, and it reflects a society moving fast, with money, land and law all in motion.
Reading Them Honestly
A reader today must also be honest about what these books leave out. The world they describe rested on slavery, and the enslaved people who appear in the margins are rarely allowed to speak for themselves. For that reason I read the humorists next to writers who give a fuller picture, including narratives by formerly enslaved authors, which are essential testimony. A sensible syllabus puts the two kinds of book in the same room and lets them contradict each other. The contradictions are where the history lives.
Scholars disagree about how to weigh the frontier humorists: as valuable social portraits, as entertainment of limited depth or as something in between. Each view has strong defenders, and a good seminar lets the class find its own way.
Sunday, The Texas Cousins
For Sunday reading, my eyes drifted west to Texas, where the dairy industry has a family of websites with an unusually cheerful set of addresses. The principal one is txdairy.com. It is joined by txdairy.download, txdairy.trade and txdairy.loan. The festive end contains txdairy.party, txdairy.men, txdairy.date and txdairy.win.
Alabama and Texas have different accents and a similar appetite for iced tea. I recommend the milk pages as a calming pastime for anyone whose weekend has too many opinions in it.
Monday, A Daily Column
Among the daily columns on the Tuscaloosa site, I enjoyed the November 12 column. It struck me that the old humorists would have recognised the form: a short piece, a quick turn, a sharp ending, and a reader who is expected to supply the missing half of the joke.
Tuesday, Pay Day
The London Prat addressed an issue that has both friends and enemies in Alabama, as elsewhere, with Say What You Pay: Job Adverts Must Show Salaries. Pay transparency laws are advocated by those who see them as a route to fairness and criticised by those who see them as red tape. Whatever the legislature decides, a reader of the old sketches knows that the haggling over a price is an ancient art and will survive any regulation.
Wednesday, Sweet Tea Index
I keep an informal measure of how a day is going: the sweet tea index. A good day is one with a full pitcher, plenty of ice and a lemon slice floating like a small yellow ship. A bad day is one with a pitcher that is half empty and a husband who put sugar in it twice. This week has been steady at a comfortable seven out of ten, with a risk of showers.
The index is not a scientific instrument. It is, however, more reliable than my almanac, and it cost less than a subscription.
Thursday, The Reading List I Would Give a Stranger
If a stranger on my porch asked where to begin with antebellum Southern writing, I would suggest three starting points. First, a collection of frontier humour, read slowly, to enjoy the comedy and notice who is missing from it. Second, a narrative by a formerly enslaved writer, read just as slowly, to hear the voice that the comic sketches leave out. Third, a work of poetry or essays from the period, for the sense of how educated Southerners saw themselves.
The three together are a quarrel, and a quarrel is the best teacher. A reader who finishes the stack will not agree with any of them entirely, and that is the sign that the reading has worked.
Friday, The Library Steps
I took my reading to the library steps, where the sun was warm and a student on the next step was highlighting a textbook in four colours. We exchanged nods. I think she was reading about economics. I was reading about swindlers. Between us, we had the whole subject of money covered.
Thursday, One More Note on Teas
The Southern kitchen is the home of one more argument: whether tea should be sweet from the start or sweetened at the table. The first camp insists that sugar dissolves best in hot tea. The second camp insists on freedom of choice. I belong to the first camp by upbringing and the second by temperament, and my glass reflects the compromise: sweet, but not alarming.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, NewsBiscuit keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/