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The Artist’s
Almanac
February 2009
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Your’re history. dad
Youth’s dismissal of Age
History’s
not history,
History’s not even past, yet
Anonymous
This is either the worst of months
or the best, depending upon your outlook. In the great blizzard of
1951 we had 12 inches of snow on the ground and 20 below on
Groundhog Day. This week we had bright cold days but the first
tulips were peeping through the mud.
February is mud month. Wednesday
Jack and I wedged into old friend Earl Swan’s 4wd truck to slither
across the old Roscoe place in search of an historic road up the
creek leading from Nashville Pike to Red River Road. We found it,
just where the 1879 map showed it, up the middle of the creek. The
pioneers in 1784 were too busy fighting off Indians to stop and
clear land when a level rock-bottomed creek offered a cleared way,
dry in summer and swept free of mud by the clear shallow currents
of February. It was a good way for both horse and wagon, and even
my father told of ascending the creeks on his horse. Fertile
bottomland was too precious to waste on roadways.
Liberty Branch , 11 AM Feb 4, 2009 – Jack Masters, Photographer
For the roving artist, February is a
month of long views, both in time and space. Austerity clears the
vision and the clean distant views make one thoughtful. In a
conversation with State Historian Walter Durham this week he mused
about the head start the white settlers had over the black, who
both came here at the same time, but under different
circumstances. Those who were given the rich bottomlands you see
here for their service in the Revolution passed them to their
children; those who worked them passed down their grubbing hoes.
In scanning aerial photos of the
farm next door to mine a curious pattern emerges. These are the
tracts given to the Fairview plantation slaves after The War – six
acres and a mule. It is the worst, rockiest land around, and the
green growth shown here, contrasting to the surrounding
pastureland, is scrub cedar, a sure sign of the poorest, rockiest
land.
The Settlements – Peach Valley Road
Nevertheless, the freed slaves made
a community of it, centered around Peach Valley Baptist Church,
famous in Chicago and other communities of exiles, who still
return here for reunions today. They kept this land, and a first
generation descendant, Noah Douglass, just died a few years ago.
Similar communities sprang up around the county at Free Hill,
Village Green, Kansas, Cairo, Macedonia, Rockland, and, next to my
grandmother’s home in Kentucky, in The Kingdom. The less fortunate
emancipates not awarded land squatted on the unclaimed rocky
hilltops, bequeathing muddled titles and lawsuits to this day.
This is rocky ground for a visual
artist hunting beauty. Here is one effort I turned to the wall, a
picture of Aunt Minnie, an aged freed slave from Fairvue making
her scant living alone in a rock garden. It is not a beautiful
painting; it is not a beautiful sight.
Emancipation – Bill Puryear, Artist
But sight and vision are not the
same; sometimes the blind see light where we see only darkness.
Good wife, who sees the best in everyone, while helping our Peach
Valley neighbors secure city water, came to know Mattie, who lived
with her invalid husband in a rented two room shack where she
raised her large family. She would drive her to the eye doctor in
Nashville, and she, in her generosity would insist on sharing her
welfare allotment of sugar as well as her home canning with us.
Mattie had a son, Freddie, who did not even recognize his handicap
until his high school principal insisted he be transferred to the
Tennessee School for the Blind. The school opened horizons to
Freddie, who added to his habit of not recognizing handicaps, a
wonderful education that taught him to cope with them.
Fred Bailey has one of the most
entrepreneurial spirits I have ever known. Soon he had his own
business as well as a good job at the GE plant in Hendersonville.
He married and bought a home in a nice residential section, three
miles from work, down Indian Lake Road. As he was walking to work
one morning the police stopped and asked him why he chose to walk
along the narrow shoulder of such a dangerously busy road.
Because, he responded, I cannot drive and I have a family to feed.
Fred’s family has expanded now, to
include children who have neither the handicap, education nor,
perhaps, the driving motivation, he has. His organization,
Children Are People, is widely recognized as one of the most
efficient and effective public service agencies in the area,
focused on tutoring and mentoring disadvantaged children. There
they learn language skills, respect for themselves and others,
classical music, and a number of things that enable them to be all
they can be. Mostly, they have Fred, who cannot see their color or
his own, but who can see the light that surrounds each of them.
From their website we learn ...
"Children Are People assists
at-risk children and their families with developing academic and
life skills in order to produce responsible, self-sufficient
adults who contribute to the community."
Children Are People, Inc chooses
not to seek or accept State or Federal funds to support the
program. Our message to our students about success is Personal
Responsibility, Education and developing a strong Work Ethic.
...
A personal check to Children Are
People, 117 E. Winchester St, Gallatin, TN 37066, 230-5702 would
achieve leverage no longer available in financial markets today.
Today we are anxious about many
things. Our investment banks and our government have brought upon
us what could be another great depression and many in our
race-haunted South fear our new administration is likely to visit
on us something not unlike Reconstruction. Yet none of us can know
the future, especially in this time when, as after The War, all
precedents seemed broken and the world is turned upside down.
History has a way of surprising the smartest of us with the most
unexpected turns if we will but relax and enjoy the show.
Roscoe Plantation House on Liberty Branch
The creek shown above was, before
the War, known as Shelby Branch, after David Shelby, a first
landowner along its banks and the powerful Clerk of Sumner County
for his lifetime. He bought Tom Spencer’s place and used this road
to commute to it, where he lies buried. Today the branch has a new
name, and it leads to Village Green, where the families of freed
slaves still live today. Its new name is Liberty Branch.
The tulips are coming up and winter
is a rearguard action. February is the first month of spring.
Upcoming Events
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Gallatin Junior Service League –
Tenth Annual Art In Bloom Show – March 27-28, 2009, Bluegrass
Country Club, Hendersonville, Tennessee
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Bill
Puryear, Artist