Many rural community cemeteries in western North Carolina hold “decorations.” A decoration is a religious service in the cemetery when people decorate graves to pay respect to the dead. Each cemetery holds its decoration on a traditional calendar day – say, the second Sunday in June. As Decoration Day approaches, people go to clean, repair, mow, and weed their community cemetery. Leaning or fallen headstones are re-sited. If the site uses gravel, the gravel may be supplemented or rearranged. Next they decorate the graves with flowers.

The early part of the decoration proper focuses on final dressing of the graves as people mingle, socialize, and reflect on loved ones buried there. Then gospel singing begins, followed by a sermon, and then more gospel singing. The formal program then dissolves into more private and small-group visiting and reflecting on the cemetery. Finally, the group assembles at outdoor tables, sometime in an outdoor pavilion, for the ritual “dinner on the ground.” There are variations of this pattern, but the overall pattern is fairly consistent.

Out of Conflict, New Customs Emerge
A variant form of Decoration Day emerged in the North Shore region of Great Smoky Mountains National Park – the region lying north of Fontana Lake. As Fontana Dam was completed, hundreds of families were removed in 1943 and 1944 from the valley of the Little Tennessee River and the creeks flowing down from the Smokies. The land was transferred to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The only consolation for the departing families was a plan, formally agreed to by local, state, and federal governments, to build a new road through the North Shore region after World War II, providing access both for park visitors and for the displaced families to decorate the region’s 27 cemeteries.

The new road was begun, but construction ceased in the 1960s. Because the road extends through a tunnel, then abruptly stops on the other side, some wag dubbed it the Road to Nowhere, and the name stuck. A protest movement arose in 1978, pressing the park to provide access to the cemeteries, most of which had been abandoned by the park to gradual reforestation. A well publicized and successful decoration group crossed the lake in boats to decorate Cable Cemetery. The grassroots movement forced the park’s hand, and soon the park was restoring overgrown cemeteries, providing boats, and supplying other help. Within a few years, all the cemeteries had been repaired, and nearly every spring and summer Sunday now has a scheduled North Shore decoration.

North Shore decorations differ from classic decorations in two ways. First, park rangers do the maintenance work once done by community members, though decorating graves with flowers is left to community members. Second, the journey to and from the cemetery is usually by boat – a radical new element with ancient mythic associations (crossing bodies of water from the secular into the sacred world).

Slideshow of Decoration Day photographs

by Karen Singer Jabbour

Decoration Day beyond Appalachia
People have decorated graves from time immemorial. But similar customs like the Day of the Dead in Mexico have one fundamental difference. They are on a fixed day, whereas the Southern Decoration Day falls on different Sundays for different cemeteries, enabling people to attend multiple decorations. The evidence points to the development of Decoration Day as an American Protestant tradition – specifically a Southern American tradition.

Two historical events indicate that Decoration Day is at least as old as the Civil War. In 1865 the African American community in Charleston, South Carolina, reburied Union soldiers originally buried in a mass grave, then held a service on the site with spiritual singing, speeches and preaching, and Union soldiers marching. The event was reported in Charleston and northern newspapers, and some historians today cite it as “the first Decoration Day.” In 1866 a decoration in Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, commemorated Confederate dead buried or reburied there. Organized by the Ladies Memorial Association, it was held again in 1867 and annually thereafter.

The Petersburg model seems to have inspired the northern Decoration Day, which became the national Memorial Day. General John A. Logan was commanding general for the Grand Army of the Republic – the Union veterans. His wife, Mary Logan, visited Blandford Church in early 1868. Passing through the cemetery, she was touched by the sight of flowers and tiny flags on the Confederate soldiers’ graves. After she described it to her husband, he issued a general order instructing Union veterans to decorate the graves of fallen comrades on May 30. Thus Memorial Day was inspired by the southern Decoration Day but refocused on the fallen in battle.

A Philadelphia newspaper proclaimed General Logan’s order an inappropriate imitation of a Rebel custom. A Richmond newspaper responded that the northern Decoration Day was “a miserable mockery and burlesque upon a holy and sacred institution, peculiar to Southern people.” Both comments support the existence of the southern Decoration Day before the Civil War, as does one fascinating geographic detail. Decoration Day is a national holiday in Liberia, which was settled before the Civil War by former American slaves. It has no trace of the northern Memorial Day’s focus on wartime deaths or the freeing of the slaves. It is about cleaning the graves and honoring one’s ancestors, like the southern Decoration Day that seems to be its source.

Westward from the Appalachians to the plains, Decoration Day is a widespread rural custom. A map of Decoration Day coincides with the nineteenth-century migration pattern westward from the Appalachians. It is surprising that a cultural tradition so widespread and so meaningful to its practitioners is so little noticed. Encyclopedias and other reference works ignore the southern Decoration Day. Those few acknowledging it sometimes suggest that it is an offshoot of the post-Civil War northern custom. Others confuse it with the Confederate Memorial Day observances declared by southern states after the Civil War. The southern Decoration Day differs from, but seems to be the source for, both the northern and the Confederate Memorial Days.

The cemetery, seen as an integrated whole on or after Decoration Day in the Appalachians, is a compelling panoramic canvas – a strikingly beautiful folk art created by communities together over time. We hope that the words and photographs of our book will convey to others what we experienced attending decorations and visiting Appalachian cemeteries – a sense of the decorated cemetery as a folk art capable of breathtaking beauty and expressing powerfully the deepest values of Appalachian culture.

–Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour
Washington, D.C.
authors of Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians

In his book, Rogoff chronicles  Jewish life in the Tar Heel State from colonial times to the present as he explores oral histories, original historical documents, and profiles of the people whose lives he traces. Throughout, he brings together documentary research, folklore, and more than 125 historic and contemporary photographs to create a full and nuanced understanding of Jewish social, cultural, economic, and religious life in North Carolina.

In particular, Clark draws our attention to the first-person narratives that make this book special.  Please give it a read:

A ’400-year-old book,’ Coach K’s faith, and more

It’s a book that’s been in the making more than 400 years. And in a sense, is still being written. Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina (UNC Press, 2010) chronicles the Jewish experience in our state dating back to before we were a state.

“It was interesting doing Down Home,” author Leonard Rogoff told me, “because in contrast to our neighboring states, North Carolina was not thought to have a Jewish history. And the book documents and tells a narrative that begins in 1585 and continues to this very present day. So they’ve been part and parcel of this state’s history from the very beginning.”

To continue reading, click here.

Also, if you’d like more info about the related multimedia project at the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina, click here.

And happy weekend, everybody!

B

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Illustrated with Ferris’s photographs of the musicians and their communities and including a CD of original music and a DVD of original film, this book features more than 20 interviews relating frank, dramatic, and engaging narratives about black life and blues music in the heart of the American South.

Give My Poor Heart Ease was featured on NPR’s The Story earlier this month. Click to listen to the podcast and read the article.

You can also visit givemypoorheartease.com, a web site devoted entirely to the book and to its author, Bill Ferris.

If you still need more, check out what people are sayin’ about Give My Poor Heart Ease:

• “These voices express the blues in a deep and truthful way. They touched my heart.”-B. B. King
• “Like Bill Ferris, I grew up in Mississippi. My life is continually shaped by the blues. This book captures those rich voices so well.”–Morgan Freeman
• “Captures the cadences of [the musicians'] spoken voices and the stories of their lives, and the DVD and CD that accompany the book allow us to hear their music. . . . If the unhealed wound of injustice is everywhere present in these stories, many of the people telling them, like Ferris himself, have refused to see their lives reduced to race and stubbornly resist despair.”- Harper’s Magazine
• “For blues lovers who love their experience pure and strong. . . . Joyous, powerful and authentic, this package is designed to both inform and entertain those willing to plunge into this audacious world.” – Publishers Weekly
• “Ferris’ fieldwork proves to be every bit as important and impressive as the now-famous Mississippi recordings made by John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. . . . Ferris’ audio and video recordings . . . are unpolished gems, further preserving pieces of Mississippi’s musical past that may have otherwise been forgotten.” – The Vicksburg Post

-Rose

Eight-year-old Sydney C., of Asheville, North Carolina, was one of the guests at last month’s Asheville book party (which Rachel has blogged about). Sydney met Press authors Foy Edelman and Bill Ferris as well as several contributors to Mariannge Gingher’s edited volume, Long Story Short. The highlight for Sydney, however, was receiving a copy of Ann Shelby’s book, The Adventures of Molly Whuppie and Other Appalachian Folktales. Sydney writes:

Thank you for the fabulus Molly Whuppie book. It is one of the best books I have ever read. Even though it says ages 10 and up, it is the perfect reading material for me.

Sincerely,

Sydney C.

P.S  it was nice meeting you and the authors

Thanks for your kind letter, Sydney! Glad to hear Molly Whuppie’s a hit.

Happy weekend, everybody-

–ellen

In the spirit of young readers everywhere, UNC Press encourages kids to check out two really awesome books.  The Origin of the Milky Way and Other Living Stories of the Cherokee, edited by Barbara Duncan, is really cool because it is presented in free-verse lines that capture the rhythm and tone of the oral traditions from which they originate. The stories introduce young readers to long traditions of understanding Cherokees’ relationships to one another, to animals, to plants and the earth, to the world of spirits and ghosts, and to their own language and history. It introduces Cherokee culture to children in a fun and exciting adventure of storytelling.

Many of the fourteen original stories collected in The Adventures of Molly Whuppie and Other Appalachian Folktales, by Ann Shelby, feature the escapades of Molly Whuppie, the heroine of British folktales transported across the Atlantic and set in the mountains of Appalachia. Molly deals with giants, unwanted boyfriends, her family, an ogre who refuses to do housework, and another traditional Appalachian folktale hero, Jack. The stories are based on plots found in a number of traditional southern Appalachian folktales.

Reading shouldn’t be a chore. With so many wonderful stories and adventures for kids to embark on, every week should be National Young Readers Week! Celebrate reading!

-Rose

A little closer…

Last Sunday, UNC Press held a book party at the historic Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC.  The event celebrated three of our fall 2009 titles:

Foy Allen Edelman, author of SWEET CAROLINA, spent six years traveling every inch of North Carolina to collect the best in local dessert recipes; the result is both an easy-to-use cookbook and an enjoyable read, featuring biographical information about those from whom the recipes came, tidbits of folklore, and surprising anecdotes about the food and cooks featured inside SWEET CAROLINA.

Mississippi native and renowned folklorist William Ferris brings together for the first time his years of work traveling the Delta in the 1960s and 1970s to interview, record, and photograph blues legends from James “Son Ford” Thomas to B.B. King.  Of  GIVE MY POOR HEART EASE Morgan Freeman writes, “Like Bill Ferris, I grew up in Mississippi.  My life is continually shaped by the blues.  This book captures those rich voices so well.”  The book is accompanied by both a CD and DVD featuring footage of blues legends and those who connected with the blues in this turbulent and important time in American history.

LONG STORY SHORT, edited by Marianne Gingher, features selections of flash fiction by 65 of North Carolina’s best writers, including work by Daniel Wallace, Lee Smith, Sarah Dessen, and, you guessed it, 62 others.  These are truly short short stories; most of them can be read in under five minutes, making this the perfect gift for your friends who can’t seem to find the time to read anymore.

Among authors and contributors was a great crowd of lively book lovers.  Malaprop’s, famed Asheville bookstore, had an array of UNC Press titles available for sale.  After some mingling, glass clinking, and chow, party-goers gathered round for remarks from UNC-Asheville Chancellor Anne Ponder, who stressed the importance of supporting university presses, especially in such dire economic times.  After her remarks, Chancellor Ponder joined in a rendition of  “This Little Light of Mine” as performed by Doug Orr (co-author of UNC Press’s THE NORTH CAROLINA ATLAS), Darcy Orr, Marc Rudow, and David Brown.  The band entertained guests throughout the afternoon with favorite tunes of the North Carolina mountains.

This year one of the festival’s three themes is Wales which, of course, reminded me of the engaging new book by Ronald L. Lewis, WELSH AMERICANS: A HISTORY OF ASSIMILATION IN THE COALFIELDS. This book describes the more than 100,000 Welsh-born immigrants that resided in the United States in 1890. A majority of them were skilled laborers from the coal mines of Wales who had been recruited by American mining companies. In the first history of this exceptional community, Lewis explores how Welsh immigrants made a significant contribution to the development of the American coal industry and how rapid and successful assimilation affected Welsh American culture.

Wales (Cymru in Welsh) is the nation where mile-long words abound, with g’s and w’s and y’s in unexpected places. Famous Welsh Americans include John L. Lewis, legedary leader of the United Mine Workers of America, Hollywood actors Catherine Zeta Jones and Christian Bale, and–at least by name–UNC Press editor Sian (“Shawn”) Hunter. The festival highlights contemporary Welsh handcrafts–like building a dry stone wall, making baskets, carving wooden clogs, industries–like mining, bookbinding, printing, as well as an abundance of good food, beer, wonderful Celtic music, and much more!

If you haven’t been, find an excuse to get to Washington DC and check out the Smithsonian Folklife Festival–it’s free, fun and fascinating for people of all ages.  And, if you haven’t already, read up on what the Welsh brought to America here.

-Kate Torrey, UNC Press director

When I went to college, I made friends with a guy who was training to be a boxer.  A big part of that training meant he was trying to take in over 4000 calories a day – twice as much as a normal diet. When my fighter friend learned I had grown up in Stokes County, he had one thing to say: take me to Hillbilly Hideaway. The appeal was twofold – not only is the food at the Hideaway extremely good, but every meal they serve is all-you-can-eat. Guests are served ‘family style’ – which means unlimited bowls of cinnamon apples, pinto beans, green beans, creamed potatoes, corn, and slaw are placed in the middle of the table. You help yourself. Some nights, they might even include chicken gravy. Other than those sides, fried chicken, country ham, biscuits, and cornbread (not either/or for any of those, all of them) are served. Depending on the day of the week, you’ll also get fried fish, BBQ spare ribs, or homemade meatloaf. Breakfast works the same way, except with eggs, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham, tenderloin, two types of gravy, apples, hashbrowns, and Moravian sugar cake.

North of Hillbilly Hideaway, one can take in a day at Hanging Rock State Park – the best hiking and mountain trails in the Piedmont. During the fall, go for great views of leaves changing the Sauratown Mountains and even into Winston-Salem on clear days. In the summer, go to play in the waterfalls and swim in the mountain lake. Spring is perfect for long hikes up to Tories Den, a cave deep in the mountains where British loyalists hid during the Revolutionary War.

By far, the most important piece of literature associated with Stokes County is White Christmas, Bloody Christmas, M. Bruce Jones & Trudy J. Smith’s in depth look at the Lawson family murders of 1929. The story, with many parts still remaining a mystery today, takes place in Germanton, North Carolina, where Charlies Lawson killed

six of his children, his wife, and finally himself on Christmas day.

It caused such a national sensation that John Dillinger was rumored to have shown up to the funeral and the Carolina Buddies had a hit record with their  1930 ballad, ”The Murder of the Lawson Family.” Here’s a recording of Doc Watson performing the song, and here’s a version by the Stanley Brothers that includes an interesting, though slightly incorrect, introduction. Recently, a documentary, “A Christmas Family Tragedy,” was produced on the events, and profiled by Frank Stasio on WUNC’s The State of Things.

And that is just a little bit about the place! If you’re curious about any of these things, as well as anything else to do in Stokes County, just ask in the comments and I’ll gladly fill you in.

- Matt

I wrote briefly last week (in rather vague terms) about some of Archie Green’s accomplishments. Over the weekend, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times both published lengthy obituaries. I wanted to offer a more personal glimpse of him here from a longtime friend and colleague of Green’s, Robert Cantwell. In 2001 UNC Press published Green’s collection Torching the Fink Books and Other Essays on Vernacular Culture. For that book, Bob wrote a foreword that incorporated some of Green’s biography, acknowledging that Green’s life and work were inseparable. In the following essay, Bob writes about Green’s politics and personality, his innovations, and his legacy. [Archie Green photo from the work of Hazen Robert Walker.] — ellen

Since so much of the conversation in which Archie engaged with his many friends and protégés over the years was ideologically nuanced, and often about the nuances of ideology, it became a kind of parlor game to try to locate him somewhere on the ideological spectrum. Was he an anarcho-syndicalist, as he sometimes claimed, like Emma Goldman? Or a cultural pluralist, like Horace Kallen, whom he often cited? Or a “left libertarian,” a term he seemed to favor later in life? Or was he simply an unreconstructed New Dealer? To a superficial observer, Archie might look like one of the underfed revolutionaries gesticulating through the pages of Dos Passos’s USA trilogy — but on that point there was no ambiguity. Archie was a radical, but not, finally, an ideologue; and if he was a revolutionary, it was a revolution more of minds and hearts than of posters and parties.

One of the most surprising and bewildering themes of his conversation was his unrelenting criticism of certain heroes of the folk revival such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie (whom many of Archie’s friends and followers had at one time loved and revered, and maybe did still) or his skepticism about folk revivalists generally in favor of combative movement-songsters like Aunt Molly Jackson, or a genial cowboy singer like Glenn Ohrlin, or a coalfield balladeer like Hazel Dickens — singers whose working-class credentials could not be doubted.

What was all that all about, one wondered — could it be only that Seeger had been perhaps a little slow in repudiating Joseph Stalin?

This always seemed to me a family quarrel exacerbated by the narrowness of the political niche that people like Seeger and Lomax and Guthrie and Green each had tried over their careers to occupy, especially during those difficult postwar years when the embattled Left had retreated, culturally speaking, to an underground of schools, universities, and summer camps. Archie knew where he stood. And he expected those around him to know, or at least to think carefully about, where they stood — for where social change and effective action are concerned, nothing will come of nothing.

Achieving complexity without confusion, subtlety without obfuscation, nuance without equivocation, Archie was all of the above: suspicious of concentrated power at any level, like the anarchists; dedicated, like the syndicalists, to self-governing, voluntary communities as the cultural ground upon which political consciousness may flourish; “left,” certainly, because dedicated to social democracy; but “libertarian,” too, because for him democracy by definition came from the ground up. No plan, program, or scheme, however clever or visionary, might produce it.

We sometimes associate libertarianism with that simon-pure individualism that thinks of democracy mainly as a regime for enriching oneself. Archie’s was a distinctively social kind of ethical libertarianism, with definite Jewish roots, that demands we discover in ourselves the resources of being, in relation to others, conscientiously and energetically human. For all of his bluster about scoundrels Right and Left, Archie was profoundly kindhearted. Oh, and a New Dealer, too, in his idealism, his sense of solidarity with all who shared his convictions, a believer in good government, and, like Roosevelt, one who threw in his lot with working people as the prime movers of American prosperity. And, yes, an Obama supporter.

Archie did not like to be patronized. And he did not like patronizing political philosophies whose basic argument was that people mostly don’t know what’s good for them, that they needed elite panels of lieutenants or authoritarian leaders to maneuver them in the right direction. The doctrine of “false consciousness” was anathema to him. People were not so misled as they appeared to be. They were not dupes, but, like the rest of us, thought, spoke, and voted from within the world as they saw it. Were we sufficiently imaginative, he seemed to demand, we might get into the shoes of people with whom we disagreed, and see the error of supposing that only graduates of the Yale and Harvard law schools were fit to take up the reins of history.

An intellectually gifted, bookish, and politically inclined smallish Jewish-American boy — his father was a harnessmaker from the Ukraine, multilingual, who ran from the Cossacks after leading a small-scale shtetl revolt — Archie looked for a model of manhood to the skilled, stouthearted, self-respecting Scots shipwrights among whom he worked in his early days on the waterfront, as Jewish boys of later generations might look to the cowboy, the mountain banjo player, or the bluesman. He called himself a shipwright. But he was not a poseur. He had learned the trade, and practiced it.

At the same time, like his mentor, Mission District linguist Peter Tamony, he had had a keen eye for the vernacular, not only in language, story, tale, and legend, but in the crafts and the arts with which skilled workers rear and beautify our built environment. Read one of his books — one of his most recent, for instance, Tin Men, on the effigies that sheet metal workers construct to advertise and celebrate their craft, and suddenly you see “tin men” everywhere. The same was true of all the marvels of crafts and art to which Archie awakened us: not only odd words like “fink,” “linthead,” or “pilebutt,” or songs of mysterious origin such as “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” but also the Italian stone-carvings overhead in the entrance hall of the Library of Congress and the brick walkways underfoot on the UNC campus, laid from the early days to the present by local African-American masons.

Archie was not, as sometimes supposed, an auto-didact, like the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, to whom he was sometimes compared, but a widely read, deeply learned man versed in all manner of subjects, including literature (especially American literature), history (especially the history of the Left in Europe and America), anthropology and folklore, and politics (he was the most astute political observer I’ve ever known). He had taken a degree in Anthropology under Alfred Kroeber at Berkeley in 1939 before joining the Civilian Conservation Corps on the Klamath River. Later in life, after following the carpentry work from the declining postwar San Francisco waterfront to the city’s growing uptown, he reentered the academy, first as a library science student at Champaign-Urbana and finally, in the 1960s, as a graduate student in folklore at Penn. After taking his degree Archie entered the professoriate at Illinois and the University of Texas, but left the academic world after a few years in order to lobby in Washington for the passage of the American Folklife Act and the creation of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. After ten years, he succeeded.

In politically dark times, of which we have had so much in recent decades, Archie used to advise that we cultivate our own garden. He did not mean retreat from the political process. He meant that we should exercise our citizenship in ways in which we could do some immediate, palpable good in some cause about which we cared, whether it was to save the spotted owl, create a country music discography, or raise funds for a scholarship in labor studies. Simply to express one’s opinions, to discuss and remonstrate, to make consideration of the political a part of everyday social intercourse, even if only among friends and family — that too, for Archie, was a way of being “involved.” “Involved?” he might have said, along with Jim Stark, “We are all involved!” For many otherwise committed and well-intended people, breaking out of the private life on behalf of the common good is often a kind of personal crisis. For Archie there was no anxiety on this score. Though he was certainly an “activist” for vernacular lore in all its forms, the common good, for him, flowed over his doorstep and into all of his personal relations; the public sphere was his personal life.

Archie was not bourgeois. He never drove a car. There were no fashionable clothes, no gourmet foods, no fine furniture. The house at the top of Caselli Street in San Francisco’s upper Castro remains pretty much as he found it in the 1950s, when he bought and refurbished it. Archie entertained his many visitors by the window in his front room, which was also, as it happened, his workroom, where the couches and the chairs and the desktop were piled high with file-stuffed cardboard boxes, papers, magazines, journals and books. There was scarcely a place to sit. But sit one did, and listened. Always the focus was not on “I,” or “you,” but “we” — what will we do to advance the cause, to enhance the visibility of labor culture, to improve this or that academic program in folklore, to mount the conference, publish the book, edit the record album, commemorate the site of an epochal strike or save the labor landmark like Copra Crane down on Islais Creek? He was a fountainhead of ideas, which he readily gave away to younger scholars in the hopes they might carry them through. The intellectual proprietorship that is the unwritten law of academic advancement was unknown to him. Were one to undertake a genealogy of the scholarly publications in labor history and folklore over the last thirty years, to track the lines of connection that placed such-and-such a person in a certain influential academic or editorial or executive position in the field, to track the ideas circulating in the discourse of folklorists whether in Archie’s beloved “public sector” or the academy itself, one would discover a vast web of relations he himself had spun and of which he was the vigilant center. He rarely if ever spoke of himself, except when asked — which, in later years, many did, with tape recorders at the ready — and then typically in historical and political terms, using his own story as a window on the politics, the personalities, and the issues of the periods that shaped him.

I like to call Archie, as a kind of shorthand for people who don’t know him or much about him, the last of the Wobblies. The IWW was the “one big union;” their creed, like Lincoln’s, was “to every man the fruits of his labor.” Their martyr was Joe Hill. They were working class intellectuals with strong backs and strong arms and inquiring minds who, when they were not hauling logs or singing protest songs or riding the rails, loved to roll up their sleeves and dispute a point. That was Archie: knit cap on his head, cuffs folded back to his elbows, gesturing with his sinewy forearm, his speech exiting his face with a kind of twist as if his nose itched, and sometimes through one side of his mouth like a street tough, mulling it over, hashing it out, holding forth — “Socrates in a T-shirt,” as Stephen Wade says. That captures it.

For years Archie spoke of opening a dialogue between scholars and working people. I thought he was dreaming — especially during the Bush years when it seemed the estrangement between Right and Left had become permanent and irreconcilable. Meanwhile, ten years or so ago he had gathered a little cohort of his old union friends in the Bay Area to establish what he called the Fund for Labor Culture which, among other projects, would sponsor a day-long conference he called a “Laborlore Conversation.” The first of these took place in the piledivers’ union local in Oakland in 2004. Here the sons and daughters (yes, daughters) of men who built the Golden Gate and the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridges (and who are at this moment sinking the piles upon which the new Bay Bridge will rise), workers and union officers and old veterans of the labor movement met with historians, folklorists, filmmakers, editors, preservationists, journalists, environmentalists, and students to see if together they might at least spade up the ground in Archie’s dream garden.

Since then — the sixth meeting will be in Chicago in May — the conversation has ranged over everything from Al Zampa’s fall from the unfinished decking of the Golden Gate Bridge (he survived) to intrepid women tugboat captains, Lumbee Indian sheetrockers, mountaintop removal and undocumented workers. New friendships have formed: between a man who has groped about in the cloudy waters of San Francisco Bay in a diving suit and a woman who writes and edits a blog on rural culture; between an ironworker and an oral historian; between a retired merchant seaman and an English professor.

It is inspiring, this opening of the ark of the democracy to which Archie dedicated his long and energetic life. We fall so easily into the habit of despising one another it’s easy to forget how much there is to admire and to learn, on the other side of the debate, the ballot, the income bracket. At close range and within close quarters, ideas like “class” can come to seem a little less real, and “culture” a little more so. That’s what we learned, I think, from “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” “pilebutt,” or tin men, when Archie unpacked them. He taught us that as card-carrying members of “one big union” which is the human race, we are all, as he was himself, the fruits of our own labor, each of us entitled to the enjoyment of them as any other.

Bob Cantwell
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill