Chislin’ Dixie

Blue vs. Gray, twice a day!

My daughter was one of the first employees of Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede Dinner Theater Attraction (yes, you need all those words) when it opened in Branson—1996, as I recall.  It’s advertised as unique, and for a fact I’d never seen anything like it.  The audience sits in long rows before plank tables with a sawdust arena serving as the stage.  The two sides of the horseshoe-shaped seating area are designated North and South, and the servers dress in blue and gray uniforms.

The show, like every Branson show I’ve seen, was noisy, corny, and various: trick horse-riding, musical numbers, broad comedy, and animal acts (like ostrich races and buffalo “stampedes”).  At the beginning, the entire cast, including servers, marched out to “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Then the servers scattered and raced to the kitchen to bring out the first course, which they slammed down on the long tables that made up their section. Audience participation took up the space between show numbers, carrying on a “friendly rivalry between north and south” with events like chicken-chasing and toilet-seat horseshoe tosses.  Servers also performed as cheerleaders, stirring up their side to cheer louder than the other.  (My daughter says it was a real workout–she was always either running or yelling.)

Chowing down up north. The food is actually pretty good.

It was dumb.  It was also really fun.

Last summer Alysha Harris, culture writer for Slate, visited the original Dixie Stampede in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and was appalled.  Two considerations: Ms. Harris is black, and the week she attended the show was right around the time of the fracas in Charlottesville.  That said, her review was harsh.  She actually bought two tickets, to experience both sides, and noted that the Southern side was definitely more boisterous.  Though there were very few African Americans in the audience, everyone she talked to was friendly and cheerful.  Meanwhile a bizarre retelling of history played out before them, based on the “lost cause” myth of the gracious southern way of life that’s Gone with the.Wind.  Her review ended this way:

 Dolly’s Dixie Stampede has been a success not just because people love Dolly Parton, but because the South has always been afforded the chance to rewrite its own history—not just through its own efforts, but through the rest of the country turning a blind eye. Even though the South is built upon the foundation of slavery, a campy show produced by a well-meaning country superstar can make-believe it’s not. We’d prefer to pretend, to let our deepest sins be transmuted into gauzy kitsch—and no one blinks an eye because that’s what they truly want.

And don’t forget, “Birth of a Nation was once the biggest box-office hit of all time, and Gone with the Wind still is.”  Ms. Harris published her review in August and requested comment from Dolly Parton’s corporate office.  The PR department replied that they were considering, and this week they announced the removal of “Dixie” from the name of the attraction.  Ms. Harris sees the chiseling of Dixie as a start, but notes that the friendly rivalry theme is still offensive, even more the “fantasy of the Lost Cause.”

I have no investment in “Dixie Stampede” and whether they keep the name is of no concern to me.  I appreciate that Alysha Harris’s perspective is far more weighted than mine—even though the ol’ plantation part of the show felt squirrely to me, too—and would just put forward a few points.  For the sake of conversation, not rivalry, friendly or otherwise.

  • The south is not built on the foundation of slavery.  I’ll grant that it was (even though the vast majority of southerners in 1861 did not own slaves), but it is not now.  The bloodiest war in our history destroyed it, and the southern economy, at a cost of half a million lives at least.  Unfortunately the war did not end racial oppression, but those old roots have shriveled and though racist attitudes sadly remain, times have changed.
  • Likewise, Birth of a Nation can’t be mentioned without being in the same breath condemned.  Once it won Oscars.  Now 12 Years a Slave wins Oscars.  Times have changed.
  • The slap-happy ending of the Stampede show, that we’re all friends now, is kitschy but true.  We are all friends now, even if the political rhetoric is superheated at the moment.
  • Does the typical ticket-buyer to Dolly Parton’s Stampede still buy the Lost Cause myth?  I doubt it.  If a few die-hards remain in the audience, they won’t remain long.  Old myths are dying out and new ones taking their place, like the environmental spiritualism of native Americans and the innate wisdom of every ethnic group but white Europeans.  Real history is complicated and tangled, and myths don’t help us sort it out on any side.
  • Finally, the audience isn’t there to see their deepest sins transmuted in gauzy kitsch.  They are there to have a good time.

What I truly want is reconciliation, desperately, for the sake of “my people” and “your people.”  That won’t happen unless we give each other a little grace.  Slavery was indeed our deepest sin and the Civil War was a great tragedy.  It also occurred 150 years ago.  There may be a time and place to not take it so seriously–or something like it may happen again.

All friends now?

The Books of Ferguson

After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, blew the lid off race relations, three black men wrote books.  The first, published only a few months after Ferguson, was Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Kudos to Mr. Coates for using the grammatically-correct pronoun in his title (“between the world and I” is one of my grammar peeves), but once past the title page his thoughts are disturbing, especially to white readers.  He writes out of an upbringing and experience that’s unique to the United States: that of a race of people who were once enslaved and forever after live at the mercy of white overlords who can’t stop thinking of themselves as overlords.

I don’t doubt that these are his true feelings.  What disturbed me was that he seems to mistake his feelings for facts, especially when it came to describing the attitudes of white people.  My truth is THE truth–none of his statements are open for debate.  The overarching despair came to feel like reading in a closet, with the walls closing in.  Early in the book (which he began as a long letter to his infant son), he confesses to being an atheist.  Aha, I thought–that’s one reason for the hopeless, angry tone of his letter to White America.

Yesterday I finished reading Tears We Cannot Stop, a current bestseller by Michael Eric Dyson, political commentator and ordained Baptist minister.  He’s not an atheist, obviously, and he expresses himself in warm, ecclesiastic terms.  I looked forward to learning from him, and yet much of what he says sounds like an echo of Coates, with the same blanket indictment of “whiteness” and its refusal to own up to vast injustice.  Dyson’s key term is white innocence, the bland assumption he ascribes to mainstream majority: everything is okay now and racism is over even if we can’t help thinking of our black neighbors as lazy and violent and the n- word always lurks at the back of our minds.  After finishing the book, it struck me: I don’t think Dyson ever mentioned Jesus, except once or twice, in passing. That’s what I missed.

Both Coates and Dyson speak from the heart and they speak powerfully.  The problem is, hearts are not all that articulate.  They make an emotional argument, but rationality takes a back seat.  I know much of what they say about the system is true: unless they have a rap sheet, white people don’t have to worry about getting pulled over by police for no reason or caught in inner-city crossfire.  The seniors among us (I’m one) don’t remember having to walk past empty seats on the bus in order to squeeze in at the back or bypass the nearest restroom because we’re the wrong shade.  The grievances are real and the roots are long; I get that.  I disagree that the US was founded on racism and its wealth owed everything to slave labor, but we can set that aside for now.  The question is, how do we go forward?

Coates has made a case for cash reparations for descendants of slaves.  Dyson is not against that, but until the politics line up he recommends “Individual reparations accounts,” where white people reach out to low-income black families and neighborhoods to provide tutoring, mentoring, computers, books, jobs—a genuine hand up.  (Here’s a clip where he argues that notion with Tucker Carlson.)  I’m all for that, but I can’t shoulder the additional burden of guilt he wants to lay on me, because his description of me is not accurate.

My World column about Between the World and Me ended like this:

“If there were some way to make real reparations for slavery and bigotry, we should not hesitate to pay the cost, shake hands, and go forward.  But Coates’ atheism misleads him: there’s no material compensation for spiritual harm.  The greatest reparation was made on a cross.  If he could meet me there, I would gladly ask his forgiveness for any perceived harm on my part, because that’s the only place he could forgive me.  Otherwise, resolution seems forever out of reach.”

The subject is relevant to me because I have several bi-racial relatives, including my oldest granddaughter, age ten.  There’s no question about it when you look at her.  Her eyes are so beautiful they knock me out: huge, and such a deep brown you can barely make out the pupil.  Before she was born my daughter fretted about how strangers would react to her.  I brushed it off—who makes a big deal about race these days?  Now I’m starting to get a little worried.

But I would be very worried if it weren’t for that cross.  Long ago I read a story about Frederick Douglass during his days on the abolitionist lecture circuit before the Civil War.  At one of those meetings, he made a speech that reflected the depression he was feeling: How long before the shackles were broken? How long before the bondsman’s stripes could be healed?  The gloomy atmosphere thickened until a piercing voice piped up from the back of the room.  It was Sojourner Truth, the feisty little suffragette and former slave: “Frederick!” she called out.  “Is God dead?”

I can hear her in my imagination.  Is God dead?

No, he’s not.  That brings me to the last book inspired by Ferguson, Under Our Skin by Benjamin Watson.  Watson knows what it is to be pulled over by a cop for no reason; he knows the pain of being sized up and rejected because of his color.  But he also knows Jesus, and that makes all the difference.  I wrote more about the book for Redeemed Reader this week, so check out the review if you’d like to know more.  And then read the book!

I wish I could persuade Ta-Nehisi Coates not to give up hope.  I wish I could show Dr. Dyson that I don’t have to become a white liberal to be sympathetic.  But God isn’t dead, and it’s going to be all right.