Our First Trek: The Woodruff-Fontaine House!

By now I hope that most--if not all of you--have had an opportunity to visit and tour Memphis's beautiful Woodruff-Fontaine house and museum, built in 1871. I was so delighted to share this tour with Carter, Preston, Bonnie, Theresa, Anna, and Micaela, along with a lovely couple from North Dakota! I am very eager to hear your thoughts, reflections, and insights about your experience there, and, if I may, to share my own impressions of this beautiful home.

This was my second tour of Woodruff-Fontaine, though I have visited it twice before as a photographer and as a wedding guest. I am always taken aback at the beauty of the place, how well-maintained it is, and the sheer grandeur of the structure itself. Particularly striking to me is the way architecture and interior design reflects not only the personalities and tastes of the people who lived there, but the social mores of the time.

The Victorians were a culture steeped in social signifiers--symbols and gestures, social customs and behaviors that were used to imply meaning rather than to express direct meaning. For instance, the "Language of the Fan," was explained in one small installation on a table in the main parlor. Women would gesture with their (often beautifully adorned) fans to communicate to their suitors. One gesture meant "Kiss me" while the other indicated "I'm engaged," and so on. Calling cards (like modern business cards) would subtly indicate to the mistress of the house the intent of a visitor. If he was welcome, he'd be seated in a soft, comfortable chair in the foyer; if not, he would be relegated to a stiff, hard-back chair opposite the soft one. This way, he was subtly--but emphatically--made aware of his host's opinion of him.

Placards explain the social conventions of the fan and the calling card:

So now I'd like to hear from you. Please respond with some of your initial impressions of the home and of the tour, and think a bit about what the home and its contents tell us about Victorian Memphis. Were they merely representatives of a cultural age? Or, was there something distinctly Memphian about their lives? What might be said about the gender expectations of the time? How might gender roles be reflected within the contents of the home?

Just some food for thought.

I snapped the photo above in 2013, hopeful to give justice to Woodruff-Fontaine's height and elegance.

If you have checked your syllabus, you know that we are scheduled to meet on Macon Campus this Tuesday evening (2/21). We will discuss upcoming assignments as well as discuss quizzes. I hope to see all of you, and if you cannot be present, you need to contact me ASAP.

Another word on the smART auction: Doug and I continue to need your support in collecting artwork. Please file that in your mind this week. On the evening of the event, you will be asked to be there early to help Mr. Branch and I set up. See you soon!

Bertha Looney Presentation, February 9th

By Thomas J. O'Halloran - Gelatin silver print.U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, Prints and Photographs Division (202)http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-brown.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10872925

Students,

I hope that many of you were able to make the Brown Bag Lunch Series' presentation by Bertha Looney this afternoon. I had to teach a class this afternoon at Macon, so sadly I was not able to make it. However, I hope to hear from those who were able to attend. If you did not, please try to offer some insight on a moment in Civil Rights history. You might watch a documentary on the integration of public schools, read up on a famous civil rights activist or events (there are several I can name below), or, if there is another event taking place in honor of African American History Month that you would like to attend and report on, please do so by February 12th (this coming Sunday).

Some civil rights activists you might consider reading up on:

Fred Shuttlesworth
Medgar Evers
Ralph Abernathy
Michael Schwerner
James Chaney
Andrew Goodman
Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka
Rosa Parks
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Ida B. Wells
A. Philip Randolph
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
The March on Washington
Malcolm X
Vernon Dahmer
Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike

These are just a few names and events that come to mind readily--there are certainly more to consider.

Proposals!

Hello All. I hope everyone's semester is off to a good start. I want to apologize again for the troubles with email that seem to have beleaguered me so far, but I have reported the problem, and with luck it will be resolved soon.

Please let's not forget to begin collecting art for the smART auction on Cooper, which takes place on Saturday, March 18th. This may sound like an early start, but in order to have a successful auction, we need to have a sufficient supply of artwork by the end of February! So, if you are an artist and would like to donate one of your drawings, paintings, prints...or know someone who is, contact me or Doug Branch.

Also, Bertha Looney's talk, "The Desegregation of The University of Memphis: A Personal Account" takes place on February 9th at 12:30 p.m. in the Farris Auditorium. Please try to make that event and show your support for Ms. Looney and for the Honors Program.

Without further delay, the topic of this post is, of course, your ideas for the Memphis: City as Text semester long project. What ideas are you considering? Your response need not be completely etched in granite, but you do need to have some idea about what interests you, and what you want to spend the rest of the term researching. So, I'm eager to hear your ideas and to give you some feedback.

Welcome!

Welcome, students, to HONR 1110-101, Honors Inquiry. This semester, we will be examining Memphis, City as Text--which means that we will be looking at our hometown with new, analytical eyes. What stories can be gleaned from a visit to Elmwood Cemetery? Stax Museum? Beale Street? We have all grown familiar with these sites around our town--many of us have visited these sites once or many times, but have we taken the time to think about what stories these places have to tell? How do they contribute (or do they) to a general sense of regional identity? In a town that at once retains the pastoral, rural landscapes of Shelby Farms Park, but features 'big city' metropolitan aspects like downtown Memphis--yet meanwhile reigns as the country's premiere distribution center and medical mecca, how does one carve out regional identity?

These are some of the questions we will be engaging this semester. To enrich our investigation, we will be reading from Wanda Rushing's insightful text, Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South. This text offers a rich history of Memphis with a focus on the paradoxes--the contradictions that exist in that history that often give way to a kind of ambivalence concerning identity. What does it mean to be a "Memphian"?

Also, we will be structuring our lessons around visits to various sites around town. Some of these sites include the Victorian Village, Elmwood Cemetery, Sun Studios, and the National Civil Rights Museum to serve as a virtual classroom away from the classroom. While it is enriching to discuss these places, to describe them and their histories, it is quite another to visit these sites and interact with them in real time. We will meet as a class at these various places, and as we tour and explore them, think about how each contributes to the themes we are discussing: regional identities and their corresponding contradictions.

As part of your coursework, you will begin with a preliminary essay, "Reading Memphis," in which you will visit a site of your choosing on your own. Here you are performing as cultural historian and scholar, acting independently to seek out information about the site you choose. The only exception to your selection of place to investigate is that it cannot be on our list of treks. addition, you will prepare a much more hands-on, sustained, semester-long project that you will present during the Honors Academy Fellows Presentation Day activities in April of this year.

Finally, as Honors class, we will be involved in the many activities arranged by the Honors Academy, including the smArt auction at Burke's Bookstore, the Carter G. Woodson Celebration and African American Read-In, and the Honors Convocation. There are many exciting and rewarding activities ahead of us this semester, so prepare yourself and let's get started!

Farewell, So long, but Never Goodbye!

I want to let all of you know how much I have enjoyed this semester with you. Each of you is very special to me, and I hope that we can keep the communication lines open as time moves forward.

I was especially proud of all of you yesterday as you presented your projects! I joked with Doug Branch that you all had duped us into thinking you were students, because each of you presented so expertly.

Incidentally, the size of the crowd was, I believe, one of the largest we've had in some time. And, as you might expect, I have pictures to share with you! I will share some samples of the event, and there are more if you would like to see them.

And as a final, technical note, you may send along your Power Points, notes, materials to me via my email at jllester@southwest.tn.edu through the Dashboard rather than through PAWS. I will also be receiving your final reflection papers on the day we would ordinarily have our exam--and I will get those back to you as soon as I am able. I have a deadline to get my grades in (May 9th), so if you have questions about specific grades, best to postpone them until after that deadline.

Having that out of the way, here are the photos of the Honors Fellows Presentations on April 27th 2016. As I said, there are more, but I chose these especially because of the composition, the light, the aura that was brought out in the moment, the way each shot captures the personality and individuality of the subject. They were taken and selected with love, and I hope you enjoy them. Goodnight, all.

 Chante Dobson

Kara Marr


























Alex Barnes



Nyssia Ruston

William Drees

Aly Pyfrom and Brenda Walls


Last but not least: Our fearless leader and Director of the Honors Academy, Doug Branch.

The Last Trek! The National Civil Rights Museum

Where has this semester gone? It seems like only yesterday we were introducing ourselves across a long conference table. Time flies!

Of course I am anxious to hear about your visit to the National Civil Rights Museum. I have not been there in some time--well before the renovations--so I am eager to hear about what has changed.

Since I missed out, I thought I'd share with you some photos I took four years ago, when I took my African American Literature class there.

 

Discussion: Paradise Lost, A Documentary About the West Memphis Three

After twenty-some odd years have gone by since the case came to national attention, the murders of the three little boys in West Memphis Arkansas has almost faded into obscurity. But at the time of the murders, I was a young mother, deeply sensitized to the topic of children, and shocked that something so horrifying had happened so close to home. When I first saw the three men accused of the crimes, I remember thinking of Damien Echols as a cocky little wise ass, scoffing at the lawyers, the police officers, the press, and figuring himself far too sophisticated to be concerned with the hillbilly soap opera playing out around him. Since I've gotten older, I look back at those clips of him schlepping into the courtroom with the bad Prince Valiant haircut and wide, bored eyes, and think, "he was just a kid himself."

In the years that ensued, I watched each successive documentary that one filmmaker after another cranked out about the trial and all of its players. "Paradise Lost," then "Paradise Lost: Revelations," then finally, "Paradise Lost: Purgatory." When I thought that was the end of it, another surfaced called "West of Memphis." In the first two documentaries of the original trilogy, Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the murdered boys, raved and ranted in a forest clearing, bellowing out plans for the demise of all three of the young men accused. His anger certainly matched the viciousness of the attacks on the three children, and illustrated, beyond a doubt, of the "eye-for-an-eye" religious mentality of the community in the little village of West Memphis, AR. Meanwhile, attorneys eager for a career-boosting victory, showboated and swaggered, a man with a mail-order Ph.D. in "Occult Studies" gave testimony based on information presumably gathered from reading sensationalist novels and tabloids in the local checkout aisle. A child with an I.Q. of 75 was berated for hours by police officers who planted confessions in the boy until the boy himself grew too weary resist and confessed to playing a role in a crime he didn't fully understand. His attorney tells the story of Jessie Misskelley pointing to the word "Satan" written on a slip of paper and asking, "What is satin?"

There was no material evidence that linked these teenagers to the murder of Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Chris Byers. All they had were rumors, hearsay, and the assumption of guilt for a boy in a black trench coat and a notebook full of symbols representing nothing more than typical, adolescent curiosity in beliefs other than the fundamentalism he'd been inculcated with since birth. Then a smug police detective is at a press conference. When a journalist asks, him, on a "scale of one to ten, how sure are you that you have the right men?" Gitchell stopped jawing his gum long enough to say, '"leven.'"

"The West Memphis Three" L-R: Jessie Misskelly, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin

 I was embarrassed to be a Memphian. Even though this circus was playing out on the other side of the bridge, I could hear the nation laughing. For the last several decades, the South has been regarded as the cradle of ignorance, and this event, with all its players, had cemented that image in the nation's imagination permanently. Then, Damien Echols is elevated as the sacrificial lamb. Hollywood, the music industry, and every prominent member of left-wing society flocked to Arkansas in support of the "West Memphis Three." However, the center of their focus was always Echols. While they bleated and moaned over the injustice that had been wrought, Jessie and Jason suddenly began to fade into the background. While they denounced the fact that the legal forces at work had made Damien their scapegoat, the real murderer got away--and three little boys were dead.

Yet, while Damien is steadily achieving celebrity status with the help of the Dixie Chicks, Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp, Hank Rollins and Margaret Cho--and a nonprofit group that rushed to his aid, the murderer is still out there, and three little boys are dead. The very fact of their deaths eclipsed by the efforts to secure the freedom of one young man.

                                Damien Echols (www.spin.com)

I have since changed my attitude (some) about Echols. I heard him admit that his actions in the courtroom twenty odd years ago were inappropriate, arrogant, and self-annihilating. He's grown into a rather well-spoken, respectable man with a wife and a new life in NYC. I am actually glad--or at least feel some satisfaction and forgiveness for the guy, and I never believed he was guilty of anything other than childish arrogance. Still. Three little boys are dead. Three little boys who would, had they lived, been in their thirties now with families, careers, homes in manicured cul-de-sacs and two-car garages, if it hadn't been for someone evil who walks free to this day.

Your thoughts?