I’ll never forget watching the news the day that fire hoses were turned on school children in Birmingham, Alabama.

Children my age were using non-violence to desegregate that city and in turn our country.

100 pounds of pressure. Children swept down the street. Knocked to the ground trying to withstand the force. Some hiding behind trees.

Then the police turned the attack dogs on them.

I suppose that’s why I’m disappointed – like Nelson George of the NYT - that the film version of Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help gives a “rosy glow” to the conditions and struggles of Jim Crow Jackson.

The aspirations of the main African American characters Aibileen and Minny aren’t central to the screen. Nor their context.

Okay something has to get sacrificed when adapting a book. But isn’t all of that key to these characters? Aibileen – the budding writer herself. The threats to life.

Underplaying the era’s violence soft peddles the courage it took for these two women to participate in Skeeter Phelan’s book. That was a big miss.

But what Mr. George doesn’t address in his fine NYT piece is the film’s clumsy handling of class – which Stockett addresses head on. Again, the movie misstepped.

The book scene I’m referring to is where, much to the shock of Minny, a white woman literally goes to bat for her. Celia lays out cold a man coming after Minny in a moment of class solidarity not bounded by the binaries of race.

The film cuts that scene – losing the complexity of their relationship – which creates a pivotal turn for Minny and leaves Celia to languish in full buffoonery.

Instead, the film version of Celia – of Sugar Ditch who can’t find her “place” in Jackson (Mississippi) society due to class – shows her gratitude by making a meal for her cooking-tutor Minny. A puff pastry piece. Too bad.

Here’s where it gets personal.

Full disclosure: One of my grandfathers was a socialist and the other was a Republican. One man worshiped Eugene Victor Debs and the other was disappointed when FDR became president.

Yet neither of these Irish American men were blind to the commonality they shared with others – whether they were new immigrants just off the boat, not yet speakers of English, or long time Americans of Native or African slave descent.

In fact both of my grandfathers fought politically on behalf of those common workingman interests. My grandfathers – socialist and republican – knew that their economic interests lie with their immigrant, Native, and African American neighbors.

My father was son of the socialist. As a teenager he witnessed accelerating KKK attacks on his family because his widowed mother dared to build a Catholic church in their New Jersey town.

My grandmother was not intimidated – even when the Klan attempted to burn her house to the ground.

The church she was intent on seeing built, that stoked KKK ire, still thrives in Bergen County, New Jersey. (My current writing project is about this story; my grandmother pictured right and below.)

As a result of his father’s socialism and his mother’s defiance of Klan racism, my father’s long life was animated by civil rights. He became another white working class civil rights activist. (My grandmother, uncle, and father L-R pictured below.)

That’s why I have a personal stake in not losing the scene where Celia downs the intruder about to attack Minny.

We need to see that – we white people need reminding – while the racist right wing normalizes itself in US and European politics.

I don’t want to forget the civil rights struggle – extreme acts of courage – or the context to The Help.

Thanks to my thoughtful son, who culled them for me, I’m making my way through the 14 episode PBS documentary Their Eyes on the Prize.

That’s my antidote for the film’s oversights and the existence of Marine Le Pen, John Tanton, racist Norwegian massacres, and groups like American Coalition for Immigration Reform.

Like a tree that’s standing by the water . . .

Stood Up to be Counted against the Klan

He ate and

drank the

precious Words -

His Spirit grew

robust -

He knew no more

that he was poor,

Nor that his

frame was

Dust -

He danced

along the dingy

Days

And this Bequest

of Wings

Was but a Book -

What Liberty

A loosened Spirit

brings -

-Emily Dickinson, late 1882 (with her original line breaks)

The initiating spark for this poem appears to be the illness besetting the poet’s own housekeeper.

That real bout with typhoid fever led Emily to think about how language is so sustaining it is capable of providing uplift to a sick patient.

Composed late in 1882 this poem was written on the reverse of a letter from maid-of-all-work Margaret Maher.

Margaret wrote to her poet-mistress while being cared for by her own family while ill. (She is believed to have lived-in at the Dickinson Homestead.)

During that illness -  in September or October 1882 – Margaret was nursed by her sister, Mary Kelley, at the family home,”Kelley Square,” which is about a quarter mile from the Dickinson Homestead.

The letter, below, reports Margaret’s uncertain recovery:

Some times I

think I dont be

sick at all and

the Next time

I am sick again

give my love to

Mother and tell

her

I miss her and

I will sone be

home to her how

is the colds

I hope ye are better

When Margaret was out of the danger zone, in October 1882, the relieved Emily responded with this playful note:

The missing Maggie is much mourned, and I am going out for “black” to the nearest store.

All are very naughty, and I am naughtiest of all.

The pussies dine on sherry now, and humming-bird cutlets.

The invalid hen took dinner with me, but a hen like Dr. T[aylor]’s horse soon drove her away. I am very busy picking up stems and stamens as the hollyhocks leave their clothes around.

What shall I send my weary Maggie? Pillows or fresh brooks?

Her grieved Mistress.

The images, right and above right, (Emily’s head with strawberries) are of a related apron I silkscreened.

The writing – silkscreened on the apron strings – include lines from the above poem “He ate and/ drank the / precious Words -”

If you look closely at the full image of that apron, above, you may be able to see words from the 1882 letter and poem exchange: “and this bequest” and “he danced along the dingy days.”

What has always interested me – in the relationship between the household staff and Emily Dickinson – are the places where maid and mistress intersect.

One selected a piece of stationery and wrote. The other held it in her hand, read it, wrote.

This poem is tactile evidence. Of their interchange, exchange. Of their presence to each other.

I made the apron to create a social moment - so that I could see them.

Have both maid and mistress come into the room.

To see Margaret Maher as clearly as I could see her famous employer.

Emily’s head, on this apron, is part of a larger, full body, screened image. I made it as one side of a soft doll – at the prototype stage – of the two women: Emily and Margaret.

Two sides of a coin.

. . . Look for me “over the fence” in apron.

+++

Key to aprons from top of page (collection of Aífe Murray):

1. Handmade apron by Polish immigrant woman who was a resident of the Philadelphia Poor Farm circa 1930s. Gift to Grace Mawson, another Poor Farm resident.

2. “Over the fence – strawberries – grow”: silkscreened apron with cross stitched berries by Aífe Murray

3. Child’s apron of gossamer with red cotton waistband and strings handmade by Grace Mawson for her granddaughter Aífe Murray

4. Detail of “Over the fence – strawberries – grow” apron with cross stitched berries silkscreened by Aífe Murray

5. Crocheted apron with grosgrain waistband and strings

6. Waist band of handmade apron by Polish immigrant woman at Philadelphia Poor Farm

7. Lace hem of handmade apron by Polish immigrant woman at Philadelphia Poor Farm

After three weeks at Hawthornden, I finally took a day off, at the encouragement of the other writing fellows, and went to the modern art galleries of the Scottish National Museum.

The rain was intermittent-deluge that day as I made my way beyond Edinburgh’s city center to two large villas that hold the modern art collection.

I had a great urge to see large scale canvases with abstract art, preferably something 1960s bold. “Olded-out, are you?” quipped Castle Administrator Hamish Robinson as I set off that morning.

Once there, I discovered that the museum had just taken down two large exhibitions and had not yet mounted their next shows. Because there were fewer pieces to see, there wasn’t the typical museum anxiety about racing through in order to not miss a thing. Thus, the paintings and sculpture I did see, I observed closely (and enjoyed immensely especially Howard Hodgkin and Hamish Fulton & taking my cappuccino opposite Joan Eardly’s Catterline in Winter at a table set between the towering legs of an Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture).

One of the conceptual pieces I was most taken with was an installation (above) by Nathan Coley set up on the lawn. Originally part of a series, erected in and around the town of Stirling, it stands six meters high, with old style theater lighting, proclaiming:

There Will Be

No Miracles

Here

This amusing piece, set deep in the green lawns of the Dean Gallery was inspired by a 17th century royal proclamation made in a French town – the site of frequent miracles. I’ve made my own installations and was drawn to and energized by this simple and evocative piece.

“The more I walk

the more I write”

During my month-long writing fellowship, I sometimes walked (courtesy of lifts from Mr. Robinson) the rib of the Pentland Hills to “see” the spine of the story; to unearth it – as the grazing sheep were exposing the contours of the land.

Mostly, I stayed closer to home and walked the Tyne Esk trail or sat on a stone bench of the Castle Walk with my note book scribbling furiously or in the wing chair set before the window in Milosz, lost in 1920s New Jersey even as I saw a falcon dive through the Esk gorge.

On my last morning at Hawthornden Castle, after my bags were packed and waiting in the front hall, I stood in the doorway of the empty room – the world I had inhabited for a month – staring at the wing chair faced out over the river, pointing toward the Hewan and Maidan Castle.

I was rooted to the spot, even as the hands of the clock swept round and it was nearly time to be whisked to the airport. Something extraordinarily powerful and surprising had taken place.

What was most astonishing is that at the bottom of the tartan staircase, packed in my bags, were 27,000 new words to my next book. Equally astonishing is this feeling of being “in the chute” – that I can hardly write fast enough. There will be miracles here.

Off to the south banks of the River North Esk that flows below Hawthornden – pictured – in Lasswade, Midlothian, Kingdom of Scotland.

I’ll be working in a cave or tower of the Hawthornden Castle - once the home of poet William Drummond (1585-1649) – thanks to a writing fellowship supported by Drue Heinz.

Hoping to catch a spark from the Scots-Lallan (Burns) or the music of RL Stevenson, CA Duffy, or Don Paterson.

If not, perhaps something of Suhayl Saadi or Trainspotting will rub off.

Not Glasgow, but it will do. Haggis: here I come.

The quickest way into West Cemetery, the bone yard where Emily Dickinson lies buried in Amherst, Massachusetts, is to walk up a short driveway between Ren’s Mobil gas station and a snug row of shops.

Then you scramble onto a retaining wall and duck under a chain loosely strung across an unmarked entrance. Around the corner, on a busy bypass road, lies the cemetery’s main entry point but this one, close to the center of town, is the gate that Emily, as a girl, lived beside.

During Emily’s most impressionable years, from age 10 until she turned 25, the budding poet could, and did, look up from her front stoop to watch many a “Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!,” as she put it, wander past the front door.

Tutored early and often in the ways her neighbors mourned and toted loved ones to the tomb, Emily’s death obsession appears, in that light, quite natural. While other Amherst girls dreamed of walking the aisle in wedding white, Emily was concocting her own “Dark Parade.” By the time the famous poet “heard a fly buzz when she died” – 125 years ago this month – Emily Dickinson had her entire funeral planned.

She surprised everyone when this prominent, wealthy Protestant Yankee chose six immigrant men to be her pallbearers. There was a big backlash against immigrants at the time so giving them star billing, well, her family wasn’t exactly overjoyed. Cousin Eudocia Flynt expressed the root cause of everyone’s shock and dismay: “taken to the cemetery – by Irishmen, out of the back door, across the fields!!  Her request -.”

What may be most surprising about this is that three decades earlier Emily Dickinson sounded a lot like John Tanton and Roy Beck in their national crusade against immigrants. Emily claimed immigrants ought to be “scientifically” destroyed in order to leave “more room for the Americans.”

How did Emily Dickinson go from trumpeting ethnic cleansing to giving immigrants star billing in her funeral? Why did she change (and is there hope for the Tantons, Becks, and members of the Georgia, Utah, and Arizona Legislatures)?

Strangely enough, for someone who has become famous as a recluse, it was daily and sustained proximity at home with immigrant domestic workers that improved her attitudes.

Over the decades, the former “Belle of Amherst” became a home-centered writer who withdrew from interaction with her social peers. There, in her kitchen headquarters, Emily Dickinson sought a social environment more comfortable and accepting.

She found literary sustenance through gardening, baking, and close relationships with her family’s maids, stable hands, and gardeners (not as close as CA’s former governor though) . In the course of Emily’s flour sifting, blending ingredients, tying up plants, pinching back, she often conversed with family laborers – including future pallbearers, Dennis Cashman, Tom Moynihan, Dennis Scannell, Stephen Sullivan, and Pat Ward. (There’s something to be said here for the edifying effects of live-in domestic service.)

In the case of laborer Tom Kelley, honored as her chief pallbearer, Emily even allowed herself to cry on his shoulder one distraught afternoon. More often than not she could found “making a loaf cake with Maggie” – her long term immigrant maid whom Emily Dickinson described as “warm and wild and mighty.” Fans of the PBS series Downton Abbey, or the revived Upstairs, Downstairs, have seen many examples of such warmly enmeshed and dependent associations.

If the natural world of gardening and the daily life routines – elbow to elbow with immigrant servants – inhabited Emily Dickinson’s language like a live root system, perhaps these conditions also freed her to go against norms – of poetic form and prevailing attitudes. Given these formations, Emily Dickinson’s pallbearer choice was an enlightened and, perhaps, inevitable revision.

If you ever find yourself hopping over the links of chain behind the Amherst Mobil station and adjacent brick storefronts, you might search out, within 20 or 50 feet of Emily’s family plot, the graves of Dickinson family retainers: Horace Church, Wells and Amos Newport, Henry Jackson to name a few.

Imagining a small funeral held 125 years ago – for the poet who “selected her own society – then – shut the door” – be sure to populate it with a handful of Dickinsons, several family friends, and a good number of present and former maids and laborers accompanied by their immigrant families.

On the day of Emily’s funeral, what struck the children of chief pallbearer, Tom Kelley, most strongly were the butterflies. Oblivious of what gulfs – of fiscal power or places of birth – divided the bearers from the borne, divided family grievers from servant mourners, the butterflies followed Emily Dickinson’s white coffin through barn, around gardens, and over meadows full of violets and innocents, notating drafts of air all the way to West Cemetery.

“The air was pinked with apple blossoms, long grass curved with dew when Stephen Sullivan and Dennis Cashman arrived with their shovels. Their pant legs and boots had turned wet-dark from the grassy approach. Shovels went in easy, up to the hilt. The deepest loam piled on top glistened with ruby worms. It had been 3 1/2 years since the last Dickinson was set down in this plot — the mother, an invalid. Had a stroke one year, almost to the day, after the Squire passed. Now the children — this the elder daughter no one saw much. Butterflies skittered among violets and plot markers by the time the two men squared out the grave, balanced shovels across their shoulder blades and headed from the cemetery. Then they went about the task of making openings in fences between the burial ground and Homestead.

“Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother, would’ve pointed out where he wanted them to dig that Wednesday morning, May 19, 1886. Even if it was another task of many for his laborers, in the place whence Stephen and Dennis’s people came, it was an honor to dig a grave. Plus, Miss Emily had given them a grander role in that afternoon’s funeral as her bearers. How awkward might this have been for Austin? The Dickinson superiority held momentarily in check. She was gone now. After years of muffled laughter, of the gossip that flares in a village of which she had an inkling but pretended not to, her brother could set some things right. Here was the moment to make clear her standing and thereby silence the town. Austin added four of this highly placed friends as honorary pallbearers.”

- Opening of Chapter Five from Maid as Muse

It’s official. Ms. Margaret Maher – who, as maid, collaborated in the kitchen with Ms. Emily Dickinson – has entered the pages, so to speak, of Wikipedia.

Emily D. was drawn to the kitchen to write – when Margaret Maher was stationed there (hence, Maid as Muse).

That’s not all. This maid became the poet’s archivist and saved the poems.

Next entry?

Tom Kelley as Emily’s chosen chief pallbearer?

The list could grow of wikipedia entries on the poet’s Native American, white Yankee, English & Irish immigrant, and African American laborers, stablehands, maids, and gardeners:

Henry Hawkins, Rosina Mack, Dick Matthews, Eliza Thompson, Bettie Ann Brown Scott, Margaret O Brien, Dennis Scannell, Stephen Sullivan & many many more…

These unseen and undervalued people were vital to the making of Emily Dickinson’s art & the creation of our literary inheritance.

AF Wire: 4/1/11

The Northern California Book Awards chair, Joyce Jenkins, has just announced a new book award category: Nonfiction by Diminutive Writers (“Dim Writers” for short).

The NCBA was inspired to create these new sub-awards because of nominations this year for two books published by Dims: Aftershock, by Robert Reich, and Maid as Muse, by Aífe Murray.

This “exciting development,” noted Ms. Jenkins by email, recognizes that “smaller stature writers have challenges” that make writing and publishing a book a taller order.

For example, smaller writers have a harder time reaching the tops of their desks.

Due to leg aches (from dangling feet when seated), it is a surprising, but nonetheless wonderful, achievement that any Dim Writer is able to sit long enough to move beyond mastery of Flash Fiction or the Short Short Story.

This is to say nothing of Dims minding Ps and Qs given their location on the outer lands of a QWERTY keyboard.

NCBA Dim Writer nominee Aífe Murray pointed out that her book wouldn’t have qualified last year. “I was too tall” but now, measuring in at 5 foot, she is “grateful to gravity or aging” for making possible her book’s nomination.

One can imagine Tiger Mothers of the future holding back on hormone growth therapy or speeding the onset of menarche if their preschoolers show any literary promise.

In short, NCBA’s new award category has truly busted the mezzanine ceiling for all Dim Writers.

This week, representatives of NCBA and The New Yorker are hammering out an arrangement whereby excerpts from winning Dim works will appear in a series tentatively titled “Five Under Five” (a send down of their “40 Under 40” fiction series).

One New Yorker editor posited, sotto voce, that, if successful, this could lead to a sub sub set of the magazine’s humor writing competition — or a “Dim Wit Prize.” Ms. Jenkins could not be reached for comment.

The Northern California Book Awards will be held on Sunday, April 10, 1 p.m. in Koret Auditorium, in the San Francisco Public Library.The NCBA is handled Oscars style. May the best writer under five feet win. On second thought, at NCBA, all Dim Writers shine.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably noted this posting’s date…

These five general non-fiction books (or General Verity Books as Richard Rhodes would have it)  have been nominated for the Northern California Book Awards – winning title to be announced Oscars style on April 10 at the San Francisco Public Library:

Winner-Take-All Politics:
How Washington Made the Rich Richer
—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Simon & Schuster

The Big Short:
Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis
W. W. Norton

Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed
Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language
Aífe Murray
University Press of New England

Aftershock: The Next Economy
and America’s Future
Robert B. Reich
Alfred A. Knopf

The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges,
New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World
Without Nuclear Weapons
Richard Rhodes
Alfred A. Knopf

“I am delighted to tell you that Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language has been nominated for the Northern California Book Award in General Nonfiction as one of the best works by a northern California author published in 2010. Congratulations!” writes Joyce Jenkins, chair of the Northern California Book Reviewers.

This nomination puts a spotlight on Margaret Maher, Amos Newport, Eliza Thompson, Horace Church, Rosina Mack and their many fellow servants – & how unseen and undervalued people play vital roles in the making of culture.

Immediately following the awards, a public reception with book signing for all of the nominated books will begin in the Latino/Hispanic Room at the Library.

The event draws an enthusiastic audience, all focused on celebrating books and writers in northern California.

(As a nominee, I’ll be trotted onto the stage and if Maid as Muse wins I’ll read briefly.)

The awards are being held at the SFPL where the idea for Maid as Muse was first seeded & in the same room where the book received its San Francisco launch last April – sponsored by the Library and its African American Center (the audience of 55 wonderful people came out at 10:30 on a Saturday morning. Stalwarts!).

If you are reading this, consider it your invitation to attend!