Going back to my roots

Knowing who you are and who you want to be and become requires you to know where you came from. As a child I was a more passive consumer of my family's oral history, and I never felt particularly proud or connected to my ancestors. White guilt was also a contributing factor; I just felt like we were an average white family. While we are very white and pretty average, that doesn't mean that I can't and shouldn't learn about our past and connect with my roots.

I could tell the passage of time from the way the shadows of the deer antlers mounted on the walls grew darker and longer. The hot west Tennessee sun was beaming down outside, but I was nice and cozy under the cover of an embroidered blanket with deer on it. Lots of deer here- it’s a bit of a theme. My grandfather, Ronald Coleman Stewart, was quite the deer hunter and the fruits of his hunts are mounted proudly along the walls. He likes to tell his granddaughters that if they behave themselves we might just inherit one of the white-tailed beauties when he passes. How lucky are we? There are five white tailed deer adorning the wall, from Tennessee and surrounding southern forests, I assume. They always freaked me out as a kid when I would spend holidays sleeping on an air mattress up here in the “bonus room.” Their eyes are glass now, of course, but as a child I thought they just had really hard eyeballs. I recall stroking and petting them, willing them to come back to life. 15 years later, and they’re still on the walls, dead as can be, but if I have enough imagination, maybe they’ll move one of these days.

Asking about family history

The crown jewel of my Papa’s deer collection is a buck from Colorado. I always noticed it in the carpeted stairwell that leads up to the bonus room, but I never once asked about.

(I’ve noticed this is a theme- I’ve been surrounded by so many capsules of history, culture, and family tradition, but I never thought they warranted discussion. My nose was down and I thought I just came from a white family with boring history. While we may be white and somewhat boring, this is the only family I’ve got. While some people are fine never knowing their roots and floating around like a dandelion seed, I’ve always been envious of people who are proud of their family and wear their history proudly. Growing up, I struggled to place my identity while grappling with white guilt, an inherited superiority complex (just being honest here), and the desire to excel, achieve, and do better things than settling down in McMinnville, Tennessee. But recently I’ve been acknowledging that my stubbornness and perhaps embarrassment to embrace my family has left me with a void. Well, I’m going to start to fill that void. I’m going to ask my grandparents more about how they grew up, look more closely at the pictures on the walls, and slow down and smell the roses.)

Perhaps traveling to Kyrgyzstan gave me some perspective on that. Most kids my age had their family lineage and grandparents names memorized back multiple generations. Family is the most important thing, and multi-generational households are common. As a self-entitled high schooler, I thought I was too busy doing important business- like preparing for a Model United Nations conference or preparing for AP exams- to give thought to the mundane, like family history and housework. What a privilege that was and is, you don’t have to tell me. I changed my mind about that though, and now I know that you can do both. And in fact, the pursuit of knowledge about my own family will surely benefit my professional, academic, and personal ambitions. I am just a generation away from the Stewarts and Hammons of Hardeman County, who were poor(ish) farmers who worked hard for their families. Subsistence farming not unlike that which thousands of families still rely on for survival. While there may not be radioactive waste out here in West TN, you can bet your britches I’m going to ask my Papa about being born in 1940, on the eve of WWII, and what he remembers about the Manhattan Project.

What can you learn from a Western: Gunsmoke Analysis

Anyway, back to that deer head that I finally decided to ask about. This morning while I was chatting with my grandfather, he mentioned an elk hunting trip he went on once out in Colorado. He didn’t manage to bag an elk, but he did come home with a mule deer (I think he said mule deer— I’ll have to fact check that once I have internet). Maybe they aren’t called mule deers, and I’m just conflating that with one of the episodes of Gunsmoke we watched. Festus has a mule, don’t ya know?

I had been warned about Nana and Papa’s Gunsmoke addiction, but it didn’t daunt me. I’ve been wanting an excuse to watch Westerns anyway. I enjoyed the first episode, which was from an earlier season as evidenced by the black and white screenplay. It comes on everyday at noon on MeTV, and you’ll be darned if Big Daddy and Betty Loo aren’t in their recliners watching. I joined today while drinking my morning coffee. I enjoyed getting aquatinted with the cast: you’ve got US Marshall Matt Dillon with his sun-lined face, kind eyes, and undaunted moral compass; loyal sidekick Chester Goode who in later seasons is replaced by goofy Festus; reliable Doc Adams; and of course the ravishing and entrepeunial Miss Kitty.

My first impression of the show was that I enjoyed the period piece outfits, from the cowboy boot spokes to the frilly dresses and hats. I initially grinned at the good-guy, bad-guy trope that Marshall fulfills, but by the end of the episode, I was somewhat convinced that perhaps Western morals make more sense than what we’ve got going on now. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think shooting people resolves problems as much as these people seem to think it does, but there is something comforting about the universal moral constant that you never shoot an unarmed man, and if you do, there will be hell to pay. Shooting in self-defense is completely understandable, and to be expected. At least it’s straightforward… I sound like an old person, don’t I.

The portrayal of women was pretty grin-worthy too, but what popular media isn’t. I’m going to wait for some more evidence to complicate my analysis, but thus far the saloon girls are your common whores, forced to use their bodies and beauty to survive in a society where the other employment opportunities are sparse. Of course, it costs them their dignity and reputation. “Who would ever marry a saloon girl like me?” Miss Kitty, the owner of the Dodge Saloon, complicates that narrative a bit by being an indepedent, self-respecting business owner. I wonder how she pulled that off. I’ll need some more details. The only non-white portrayal thus far has been a Chinese man who scrubbed the back of a cowboy while he was taking a bath. The show began airing in the 1950s, and according to my grandfather’s box set, they stopped filming with season 20 in ‘75. Anyway, enough about Gunsmoke, but I plan to return to Dodge, so stay tuned.

Remembering the past to understand the present

“Have you heard of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island?”

After the obligatory Gunsmoke viewing, I asked Papa about what similarities he saw between the 1970s oil crisis and today’s energy crisis and rising gas prices. He noted the difference between the 70s embargo, which rendered US supply scarce and created lines at the gas stations so people could get fuel before it ran out, and today’s problem. With no embargo, there is still enough supply to go around in the US, but you have to pay to play. 4.29/gallon, in Jackson, Tennessee, at least. This conversation bled into discussions on energy (in)dependence, the growth of the US domestic oil market, fracking, and nuclear energy. Papa seemed wary of nuclear energy and asked me “if I had heard of Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island.” I chuckled internally in nuclear engineering minor, but nodded my head nonetheless. His concern was that the more nuclear power plants you construct, the more potential you have for creating “forever contaminated” places, which is a risk you don’t run as much with other forms of energy. This was insightful for me as I begin my journey understanding how people view and relate to radiation, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy.

Sometimes I wonder if we will ever be able to combat the stigma against nuclear energy. I occupy a rather contentious space as a nuclear weapons abolitionist but nuclear energy moderate. I understand and condemn the radioactive impacts of nuclear weapons. Some of these impacts are shared in nuclear energy production: environmental and health damage from mining and its associated waste, enrichment risks, and long-term waste disposal and storage. However, the key difference is that nuclear weapons are manufacturing with the intent to destroy and spread harmful radionuclies, whereas that is the worst case scenario of nuclear energy production.

Regardless, their interplay contributes to the stigma against all nuclear production and fear of radiation. We are rightly fearful of radiation; it is an invisible beast. But it has useful properties too, in medical imaging and space technologies, for example. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, so now we have to learn how to use and control it for collective good, not destruction. Easier said than done.

Old Farm Stories

Back to my grandparents though. After breaking down the destructive soul of capitalism and the importance of unions (my father and uncle are anti-union apparently? They’ll be hearing from me…), we shifted into some story-telling, and boy was I all ears. My Nana, Betty Hammons Stewart, was born and raised on the same plot of land my grandparents live on today. Her father Wilburn was a farmer and school bus driver, and her and her many siblings (9) helped out on the farm, excluding baby Doug and Donnis. She told me about she chopped down cotton and got paid $2 a day for her efforts.

It was hard work, but she had good company: her sisters and the Black family and their children who Wilburn also hired. She spoke about how funny “those Blacks” were, and how they would cut up and crack jokes in the field, which made cotton chopping more bearable. I used to bristle when my grandmother would bring up race so candidly. When I was younger I remember her asking me if there were any Blacks at my middle school. I felt mortified. Today, I think I have a better understanding and vocabulary to be able to navigate those conversations and my thoughts. She is simply curious, and using the vocabulary that she grew up with. She is of course, pretty racist and has preconcieved notions about Black people and other marginalized groups. This is to be expected but not excused. I’ve never heard her say anything blatantly ugly and racist, but if she does, I’ll be the first one to tell her. I know how hard those conversations can be, especially with family members. But if we don’t hold our loved ones accountable, who will we hold accountable? It all starts somewhere and you have to decide for yourself where the buck stops.

Anyway, I still need to ask if that Black family got paid as much as my grandma and her sisters did, I sure hope so. I also learned that my grandpa also worked in the cotton fields. He preferred to pick though, because you got paid $3 for 100 bales (or maybe it was pounds?). Regardless, both of my grandparents came of age in the cotton fields of west Tennessee. I think that is part of the reason I am so eager to get out on my Uncle Barry’s farm and learn about his growing practices and everyday work. I’ll have to whittle down his sexism and reluctance to have a “lady” out there working, but I’ve got that Stewart family stubbornness, so I think I’ll make it.

It’s bittersweet how much of a commodity of connectivity cotton is. Its bloodstained history should be understood through the backbreaking work of Black enslaved people throughout the southern US. It was an evil and inexcusable empire. On my journey of reconnecting with my family history, I will have to reckon with how my family might have been slave owners. Though, I don’t think we were ever rich enough to own a big plantation, you never know. At the same time, the cotton industry relied upon poor white folks, and in modern days, many poor folks of color, from Latino migrant laborers (like the ones who work the Hickory Valley cotton gin), to factory workers in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and China. The cheap cotton t-shirt on your back tells as much a story of capitalism, globalization, and environmental degradation as anything. We’ve come a long way from the days of my grandmother chopping and picking cotton from the land to then be spun in the cotton gin and sold to make fabrics. Sometimes I wonder if it’s for better or worse, how far we’ve come: the pesticides we developed so that the grass around the cotton doesn’t have to be chopped and the mammoth machines that are used to pick rows of cotton at a time. Gotta feed the insatiable beast, I suppose. But right now my brain is telling me it was probably a net loss for Mother Earth and our collective humanity.

Until next time

My ears were filled with stories today and my heart warmed. I learned a lot about both my grandparent’s parent’s and families. I of course ate some of the famous red velvet cake from the recipe of my grandfather’s mother Tressie aka Nannie Stewart aka Nannoo. I don’t believe I ever met her, but apparently she was a talker, and her husband Joel was not. The cake was as sweet and rich as the sorghum-making process I learned about. Yum.

I’m not sure what the next week on Edwin Road will hold for me. I’ve got some plans and ideas, but more than anything I’m just along for the ride. My eyes and ears are wide open as I dive deep into what it means to be a Stewart.