The Mean Racist Idiot

Y’all, I get down about the current situation. I hate knowing that we’ve chosen to represent ourselves to the world this way. I am still so mad, every time he does something, that people voted for him and voted for him specifically because they thought it was funny he upsets people like me. People willing to kill us both, as long as it means I’m dead.

And then, and then, they insist I sympathize with them, that I have compassion for them, that I listen to their lies and tell them I believe them. It enrages me.

Obsessive Thoughts

–I have been trying to figure out what the significance of the April 19th date for the Looby bombing is. The Hattie Cotton bombing took place the evening of the first day of school. The JCC bombing was coordinated with a bunch of other bombings of Jewish buildings across the south. But why blow up Looby’s house then? The sit-ins had been going on since February. The school desegregation lawsuits were on-going.

If something had provoked the bombing, it’s hard for me to figure out what.

So, does the date mean something? If a black man’s house were bombed on April 19th, 2017, we sure as fuck would think it did, but I don’t know about then.

–I have a weird rash on my arm, so I spent a great portion of my weekend washing everything in the house I could find to wash–bedding, couch slip covers, clothes, towels. I’m also trying very hard not to scratch it. When it itches I rub it, but I try not to use nails. It kind of works. It also kind of is not fooling me.

–One of the most personally embarrassing things about going to therapy is having to admit to myself how I have these weird, obsessive thoughts, which are sometimes paranoid. A few weeks ago, I woke up and a cat was in my bed and I became overwhelmingly convinced that it was not one of my cats. I get overwhelmed sometimes by the thought that I am fat and ugly and no one will ever love me and the people who like me only like me out of pity. And this shit is hard to talk about  because it’s not low self-esteem. Because low self-esteem would mean I felt bad about myself all the time.

But I’m really proud of the stuff I’ve accomplished and, sure, while not in love with the way I look, I like how I look in pictures and I’m kind of in awe of how, when I smile, I can see that it radiates. Like, okay, it must feel nice to be smiled at by me.

And I have a lot of friends who love me and they have big and interesting lives and they have other stuff to do beside be someone’s friend out of pity.

I say all this to try to make clear that these are obsessive thoughts. They don’t go away because they’re disprovable. They’re not satiated by being true–in the case of me being fat. They come out of nowhere, hit hard, and leave me reeling. There are some things that make them more common–me being tired or stressed or upset about something else but not dealing with it. But it is like being swept up in a storm my brain is having.

So, on the one hand, the medicine helps a lot because it seems to slow down the storm and, if I can recognize what’s happening before it blows up into the emotional hurricane, I can usually dissipate it. Oh, that’s just the anxiety.

But another thing we’ve been working on is that I like to have order and schedules. If I could keep my whole life by calendar, I would. And that’s great when it helps. Setting a recurring task of cleaning the litter boxes on Monday evenings means I get into the habit and the poop goes in the garbage can the day before garbage day. The schedule works for me and makes my life easier. Why wouldn’t I then schedule everything?!

Because I also sometimes, okay, often, then get caught up in the ritual of the schedule. In other words, I do scheduled things because those are the “rules” and I don’t want to break the rules or my life will be infinitely harder, whether or not I need to do the things.

And here I think you can see how close kin anxiety is with OCD. “I have to check the door five times to feel confident that it’s locked” is not the same thing as “I have to go to the grocery store on Sunday morning because… um… that’s when I’m scheduled to go to the grocery store.” But you can see they’re cousins.

So, I’ve been working really hard on separating what I feel compelled to do from what I need to do from what I want to do. So, Sunday, I was reading a book. I didn’t want to go to the grocery store. Did I need to go to the grocery store? Actually, no. I have enough stuff in the house that I can skip a week. But it still felt really weird and like I was going to regret not going to the grocery store.

The thing is that I think I like schedules because it lets me kind of put my life on autopilot. I can zone out through stuff I find boring or unpleasant, trusting on my schedule, my to-do list to keep me productive even while my brain is checked out.

But I think that coping mechanism has soured for me and I have to find ways to be present more in my life.

And a thing I find baffling and funny is that, without the checklist, I often don’t know what I want to do. I’m 43 years old but when faced with a truly empty day, I often don’t know how I’d like to fill it. And I pride myself on being so insightful and shit. And I don’t even know what kinds of small ordinary things bring me pleasure.

But I am having fun figuring it out.

Gladys

I have been trying to understand the life of Gladys Girgenti. Eventually, I’m going to have to talk to her family and I want to know exactly what questions I need to ask them. I know it’s going to be uncomfortable for them and I want to make it as non-floundering as possible.

I don’t think I suspect Gladys in the earlier bombings, but as of right now, she strikes me as someone who is absolutely well-positioned to know who did do them. I go back and forth on this.

My main question at the moment is whether and how she might be tied in to the guys who were arrested for the Hattie Cotton bombing. I have a sense that I am constantly brushing up against a structure I can’t see–a web of relationships that would make clear how this could happen and how no one has narced, for fifty years. I don’t know what that web is–family, childhood church membership, parents all in the same Klan unit, or ties to the illegal gambling halls on that side of the river, or something that happened in Bells Bend.

But it’s a lot of people who’ve kept their mouths shut for a long time, especially for bombings where no one was killed. There has to be some mechanism by which that silence is enforced, some shared pressure.

Anyway, this requires looking at Gladys’s life, which, frankly, seems pretty fucking brutal. Her two older half-brothers were tried twice for killing a guy in a robbery gone wrong (I think they must have eventually gotten their convictions overturned since they were sentenced to 99 years, but were out and living their lives by 1960). Then, when she was 15, she married her 37 year old neighbor, which you know I’m feeling rather gross about.

By 1960, she’s in Detroit, married to Nick Girgenti, who had a million brothers, not all of whom were scary robbers, but Nick was among them that were. He did quite a bit of time. Nick had a daughter born in 1954, but I don’t know anything about her other than that, in the late 60s, she shot him. (Which parallels what Carroll Crimmons’s son did to him). I suspect she wasn’t Gladys’s child, because her kids with Nick came in the 60s, before he got shot.

Gladys said they left Detroit because her house was firebombed during a race riot in ’71 and then the stress of it killed her husband. As we’ve talked about, there were no race riots in Detroit in ’71, no firebombings, except for the white people rioting about busing and the firebombing of the Pontiac school buses.

She came back here and spent the 70s being a single mom and raising her kids and belonging to the Klan. She then seems to have run into the “Sunday School teacher” equivalent in the Klan, where the smart, capable women are shuttled off into taking care of the children while the men get to have all the fun. Gladys, allegedly, had enough and tried to kill one of the Klan leaders, thus getting herself kicked out of the Klan.

She then formed her own ultraviolent terrorist cell and tried to bomb the Temple.

I don’t know how to describe what I feel about Gladys. I don’t feel sorry for her, exactly. Northwest Davidson County was a rough place when she was growing up. Lots of girls got messed with and saw family members in and out of jail and they didn’t join the Klan and live lives curiously adjacent to many Klan bombings.

But I do see someone whose life was hard and mean and she became hard and mean to survive it. And I wish that her life had not been hard and mean. And that’s how I feel. I wish she had some luckier breaks.

Can I Do This?

I’m having a small moment of existential doubt about my goal of solving the integration-era bombings. Will I be able to do this? I do not fucking know.

One thing I’d like to know is how many bombers you could have expected there to be in Nashville at that time? My understanding from reading about Birmingham–a city so thoroughly bombed that it was known as “Bombingham”–is that most of those bombings were done by the same Klavern (which I believe was #13, but I’m not looking at my notes, so don’t quote me on it), which means that you probably had forty guys willing to plan violence and, even then, maybe only half those who would do it. Birmingham had a sustained campaign of bombing.

We had a sustained campaign of cross-burnings, but we only had the three bombings.

We know that a couple of folks left here and “became” violent bombers.

Should I be focusing on them and whether these were their actual first crimes? Should I be focusing on the men arrested? Is it too late? I don’t know.

Busy

I’m having the kind of week where I’m getting a ton of stuff done, but it’s none of the stuff I was hoping to get done.

I feel like this afghan will never be finished because I just don’t have time to work on it. Which, of course, is not a problem that will necessarily last.

One of the things I’m trying to put into practice from therapy is being present in the moment and not just going on autopilot. But man, weeks like this, I kind of want to put my head down, power through, and not think about things too much.

Walking in the Rain

The dog and I went for a walk, even though it was raining. He went on three bunny chases. One was clearly just optimism. No bunny; he just hoped a bunny would be there when he got there. The second was a genuine bunny, but it was so close to the woods that it was gone by the time the dog had taken three steps toward it. The third time, though, I think was just for fun. He got back from the second run, seemed so happy with having done it, and he took off again.

I mean, I don’t blame him. Bunny chases are awesome. He sprints off as fast as he can. He comes to a screeching halt. He stares intently into the woods, sometimes pacing a little, and then he comes ambling back to me so that I can take his leash again. All the while I’m telling him what a good boy he is and how brave he is for taking on the bunny and how proud I am of him coming back when he’s called.

I need to remember to get a ball the next time I’m at Petco or Tractor Supply. When we first got him, he was not interested at all in Fetch. It seemed to hurt his feelings that we would throw his stuff away from him.

But now he seems to enjoy playing. I mean, he’s not serious about catching the bunnies or he’d be sneakier about it. It’s just fun for him to chase after them. I mean, two out of three bunny chases today, there was no bunny. And he’s gotten much better about coming when he’s called and he really seems to enjoy the part of bunny chasing where he returns to me with effusive praise.

I wonder now if he might enjoy Fetch. But, oh boy, I am wondering if I can do it–train him to play Fetch. I’m not even sure how I got him to start coming pretty consistently when he’s called. I mean, I know at some level, it’s constant repetition, strong expectations, and rewards he likes. But the things I’ve managed to train this dog to do are mostly matters of grave importance–like recall and not walking like a complete doofus on the leash–or are building off skills he already had–like he likes to get up on the couch, so training him what “up” meant was not difficult.

And I think he could definitely learn to play Fetch. But, y’all, I’m not sure I’m smart enough to take this dog and give him a whole new skill. But I think he would love it, so I want to try. If he’s willing to stick with his hill-rolling-down practice even when it terrified him so that he could reach these days of happily rolling down the hill, I should be willing to work on my Fetch training skills even when it’s hard so that we can get to happy days of me throwing a ball and him running after it.

Another Year Older

I had a really nice weekend of birthday activities. I even failed to get to the grocery store because I was busy making spontaneous decisions to do other things. I don’t know if I could live that way all the time, but it felt nice for a while.

One question I keep asking myself that has grown out of therapy is “If I could be doing anything right now, what would I want to be doing?” And the answer a lot of the time is “I don’t know.”

That, I guess, sounds a little depressing, but from the inside, it feels kind of freeing to admit.

Anyway, here’s to another trip around the sun. I hope it’s a good one.

Po-tay-toe Sa-lad!

My birthday’s not until Monday, but the Butcher’s family had me over for birthday lunch today. We had bratwurst, corn on the cob, delicious potato salad, and cake. And then Mrs. Butcher let me take home some potato salad. I’m going to eat it for dinner and I’m not even going to pretend like it’s healthy.

Chris Cornell

This has hit me really hard and I’m not sure why. Maybe, I think, it’s because to me my generation has always felt a little lost and thanks to early deaths like Cobain and Shakur, as if we were all kind of hanging by a thin thread. To me, the late 80s/early 90s felt like we were all angry, but for justice, for changing things, for not being what our parents were, and then by the end of the decade, we ruined Woodstock.

I don’t know. I guess I felt like we had to cling together in small groups and try to do for each other what the rest of the world would not do for us. If we stuck together, we would survive.

But we’re still slipping away. We haven’t been able to keep each other safe, to change the world to fit for us. There never were enough of us for that and now there are fewer.

Dog Fight!

Y’all, Sonnyboy got mad yesterday! The orange cat had struck him repeatedly in the face and the dog gave a big old angry growl/snap in the cat’s direction. If you know how dogs say “Fuck off,” you know the cat wasn’t in any real danger, but I was still surprised!

I was telling the vet that Sonnyboy never seems to get down or mad. I mean, the Roomba cornered him in the bathroom and he just took it knocking into his legs for a minute until it decided to go elsewhere.

Sometimes I forget how old Sonnyboy is, because I feel like he’s experiencing a lot of things that most dogs experience earlier. Like running. Like cuddling. Like it being safe for him to be deeply annoyed and then mad at the cat. I don’t ever want him to be mean. And, frankly, I’m not sure he has a mean bone in his body. But I want him to feel comfortable disliking things and not standing for them.

And today, you guys, this morning, he threw himself down the hill and he slid on his back head first halfway down and I was a bit scared because on your back head first seems like a dangerous way to go down a hill. But he got up and he came over to me and he seemed satisfied.

And I feel lucky that this wondrous mystery is my friend.

Poking Old Bruises

It’s clear to me now that my dad is freaked the fuck out by my research. He’s trying to be supportive, but he’s obviously worried that coming to the attention of the FBI in any way–even if it’s to ask questions and try to get answers–is going to go badly for me.

I have a theory of the Looby bombing, which I won’t go into here, but which I have floated by my dad. I’ve outlined my evidence–or more clearly, my lack of evidence–to him and his response is that my theory does not take into account the true enormity of Hoover’s evil.

And I get what he’s saying. I truly do. But I feel like all I can do is–like I said–look for antecedents in the public record and I do not know of another instance of what my dad is suggesting.

I also don’t know, this long later, how I would find out. I’m not stuck yet, but it is something I’m wrestling with.

And that my dad believes he knows the truth of what happened, and that it is the truth, well, I get why he’s scared. I just think it’s more likely that I’ll be stonewalled until the end of time than it is that the FBI is going to…I don’t know…take me to some blacksite or whatever.

Still, ha ha, yeah, I’m using all my anti-anxiety skills to not let this worm its way into my brain.

I Now Have a Tiny Robot

My parents got me a Roomba for my birthday, which, as long-time readers may have some vague recollection of, is not until next week. But it came early, so I opened it and got it set up and last night it ran for the first time.

The dog was afraid of it for like a half an hour, but then got bored with being afraid. The orange cat briefly tried to fight it and then lost interest. The house, however, struck back repeatedly. I had to empty the filter three times during its run, dislodge a sock that seemingly came from nowhere, and save it from a hanger, again, that seemed to come from nowhere.

I know this is partially because the Roomba does a better job of getting under things than I have ever done in my whole life of cleaning, but it also makes me feel like everything in my house is under a fine layer of dog hair, which, I guess, is also true.

I repeat my claim that making things in groups of twelve is very satisfying. Just the other day I quickly went from being a forth done to being a third done and tonight, if I finish the square I’m working on, I’ll be half done.

My next challenge is that all the rest of the squares are opposite squares I’ve already done. So, if I had a fat row of brown and a thin row of red, now I need to make a square that’s a thin row of brown and a fat row of red. I already know I’m going to fuck that up at least once and start an identical square to one I already have. But the thing I really love about the off-kilter squares is that, since they are squares, I’ll be able to place the center of the swirl in four different spots, in essence giving me four different squares made the same way.

And things are really stressful and crappy at work, so I’m overcome by the urge to just stay home and work on my squares. It’s nice to have something that, though complicated, I can figure out, and the results are cool as fuck.

In other news, I’ve emailed both Al Gore’s people and the historian of the FBI. If I hear back from either or both of them, I’m going to laugh and be delighted.

Stuff

One thing I’ve noticed since the Butcher has moved out is that I feel like I have so much more time, which at first struck me as weird because it’s not like we socialized together or did housework together or whatever.

I think it’s really because I almost never turn on the TV. It’s not because I’ve become some virtuous hippie. It’s just that I listen to podcasts, which I can do while doing chores or crocheting, and so it feels like time has opened up. I mean, I had three days in a row off, most of which I spent at libraries and socializing and yet, still, the dishes are done, laundry is done, dog is walked, FOIA requests have been made, etc.

And I think I may have found the trick to making the off-kilter squares go faster–more stitch markers. It’s a little weird because in crocheting, before this project, I think I’d only ever used one stitch marker in a project. For a long time, I didn’t even have stitch markers because I had an old safety pin and then I lost it so I picked up a small thing of stitch markers and only ever used one.

But this project, once I figured out that three stitch markers would make it super easy, was eye-opening. So, when I got to these off-kilter squares and struggled so much through that first one, on the second one, about halfway through, I thought–what if I just marked every repeat? That way, when I get to the end of a row and the pattern has been “(2dc in stitch; dc in next 14 stitches) repeat 5 times; 10 dc” I can just look back and count my stitch markers and see, yep, did my five repeats. It’s super handy. I’m just going to stitch-mark the fuck out of it for the rest of the squares.

I may stitch-mark the fuck out of everything. Having a meeting to discuss a thing we’ve discussed before? Now we’ll know how many times we’ve had that meeting. Find a man with multiple penises, but you don’t want to be rude and ask him if he’s a cockapus? Just discretely count the stitch markers. I mean, I feel bad for the person with multiple penises who also goes to a lot of redundant meetings, because they’re just going to be awash in stitch markers, but whatever. It’s for the good of all humanity!

Good Work

I spent Friday morning at the downtown library because I believe it is imperative to avoid graduations if you’re not going to them, for the sake of your sanity. I was sitting in the cafe at lunch when I heard someone hollering my name. It was my co-worker, who had been downtown for some meetings.

“Wow,” she said. “I looked over and I almost didn’t recognize you. You look so happy.”

I don’t know what that says about how I normally look at work, but it seems like it’s not good. Ha ha ha.

I had to go back over yesterday and then I ran to the TSLA to get an obituary and then I spent part of the afternoon doing FOIA requests with the FBI.

I can’t remember if I said this already, but I need to keep it in the forefront of my mind, so I’m saying it again. The trick is to understand that, yes, there is a conspiracy, but to not let myself get sucked into ridiculous conspiratorial thinking. The way I’m trying to balance that is to only accept as reasonable a theory when I can find a factual example of something similar having happened.

This could work broadly–could J.B. Stoner have been sleeping with Dr. Fields? Would homosexual relations have been accepted in the white supremacist community? Well, one of the 16th Street Baptist Church bomber was known to be gay, so okay. That rumor could be true. Probably not useful, but plausible.

Or particularly–Gladys Girgenti was convicted of trying to bomb the Temple here in town. She left the Detroit area right after the Pontiac bus bombings. She said she was a 30-year Klan member and I discovered that her family was from here and still lives here. She wasn’t from Detroit. She was of the demographic that went north for work. So, on the one hand, I don’t have any reason to believe that she was involved with the bombings I’m working on, but I don’t think it’s a crazy conspiracy to think she was running in the right circles to know something.

And looking at particular bombing suspects, I haven’t ruled anyone out, but I feel like it’s more plausible that people who were life-long horribly terrible people are more likely to have been the bombers than the people who were just medium terrible. So, if I have three people, all segregationists, and one went on to have an okay life full of people who loved him and one who seemed not to make an impression on the world after his activities in the ’50s, and one who continued to be a nightmare to all who knew him, I’m not discounting that a person could have done one horrifically evil thing and then never done anything wrong again in his whole life, but I am putting the third guy at the top of my list. He gets first scrutiny.

And yet, of course, there were outlandish things that seem impossible–like Gary Rowe. Once you know that it’s a proven and accepted fact that the FBI had a dude who was doing the things on their payroll and they covered for him and kept him safe, then what do we make of the fact that the police knew immediately where to go to find who might be involved in the Hattie Cotton bombing and went immediately to a place after the JCC bombing to see if a certain person, whoever he might be, was the bomber (and there was some indication he might have at least made the bomb), but had no idea, no plausible candidates for the Looby bombing? We ran out of violent jerks between 58 and 60? That seems unlikely. At the least, shouldn’t they have checked in with their earlier suspects?

The fact that they had no ideas seems utterly unlikely to me. But that they might have known but left him alone? That I can see.

 

Childhood

It’s supposed to look 1970s-ish and, so far, it does. But not really like the 1970s of adults, but my 1970s–childhood.

Also, though it doesn’t make me seasick in person, looking at it in pictures does.

Here we are so far.

Strangeness

Someone mowed my lawn. They did a fantastic job, even in the part across the creek. It wasn’t the guy I paid to clean up the yard, I don’t think, because even though he mowed for me a couple of times, he never mowed across the creek. Also, he left me an invoice and I paid him.

I did contact a guy about cutting my lawn, but he’s going to come by tomorrow and take a look at the yard and give me an estimate. So, I don’t think it was him, and also, I can’t find an invoice.

Neither of my neighbors’ yards are mowed.

Also, for the second year in a row, a mysterious clematis has appeared near my shed. In the shade. It’s not what I would call incredibly vigorous, but on the other hand, it’s enthusiastic enough to show up out of nowhere and give a blossom. So, hey, carry on clematis.

And I saw a giant rabbit last night eating the grass that’s growing in the cracks of my driveway. I guess the cats were out front?

And one last thing I’m thinking about–aside from violent white supremacists–is the weird thing that this afghan is teaching e about color. As you’ll recall, in order for it to have a ’70s feel, my idea was that it wasn’t enough to have ’70s colors, I had to use them in a ’70s way, which meant instead of using complimentary colors together for the contrast, I would use colors right next to each other on the color wheel. But I’m noticing  a really interesting thing.

Look at this picture:

I don’t know if you’re going to have the same experience, but I guess, if not, this still may be interesting for you. There are only five different colors in this afghan so far–red, orange, yellow, green and blue (well, I take that back. That’s a lot considering there are only six colors in the afghan, but anyway…). The point is that the green that’s in the yellow and green square is the same green that’s in the blue square.

But unless I really stare at them, while thinking to myself “that’s the same god damn yarn out of the same god damn skein,” I see them as two different colors. The green in the blue square appears to have a lot of gold in it, so much so that I almost want to see it as more of a greenish gold than an actual green. The green with the yellow looks much greener and the yellow kind of pale and subdued, while the yellow with the orange looks brighter as does the orange, where the orange with the red looks more muted.

I feel like I’m getting twelve colors for the price of six. It’s really nifty.

Magic

Nothing makes me happier than when the dog comes when I call him. It feels like magic. Today he was across the neighbor’s yard, heading into the far neighbor’s yard and I called for him and he looped back around in a big circle and came running right to me.

I don’t know why it worked when so many mornings this would have involved me wandering through back yards calling his name while he hijacked an AT&T truck, but it did!

Also magic: if you’re making a twelve-square afghan, when you’re at three squares, you’re only 1/4 done, but when you’re about to finish your 4th square, you’re 1/3 done.

History Nerd Thoughts

My favorite era of Nashville history is those very early years, with all those folks with oversized personalities making monumental decisions while sexy Frenchmen sex it up. I’ve learned some about the Civil War, though I credit mostly the excellent resources we have in town for pointing out the interesting things about it. Plus, I’ve had to learn some about the war to understand my second favorite era in Nashville history–the postwar pre-turn-of-the-century–which I consider to be Nashville’s second weirdest time. Let’s all talk to dead people and join the Masons and open parks!

And I thought I knew a lot about Nashville post-World War II to like 1970, because it’s the rise of Nashville as Music City and all kinds of interesting people are popping by and Jefferson Street was at its heyday.

But, Christ, I know so little.

One thing that I have failed to appreciate–and getting my mind around it and my attitude changed has been really crucial to understanding these bombings–is how very closely entwined anti-black racism and antisemitism were.

Due to both the personal hang-ups of John Kasper and J.B. Stoner, who were virulent antisemites, and the cross-pollination of KKK-ish groups and Nazi groups, white supremacists had a wide-spread and thoroughly-believed conspiracy theory that black people, by and large, were too stupid and docile to be up to the stuff they were up to with the protests and the lawsuits and the demanding of integration, and so, since they were up to this stuff, there must be someone brilliant and sneaky and hard to pick out under normal circumstances pulling on the puppet strings of black people.

And I get that it’s a tricky story to tell when you’re talking about real life. There aren’t a lot of Jewish people in the South, by and large, and many Jewish communities had survived by being as unnoticeable as possible. Southern blacks were not likely to have any more experience with actual Jewish people as Southern whites. So, from the ground level, when black people started advocating for change, from their perspective, it had nothing to do with Jewish people, except to the extent that they came to find they had some Jewish allies.

And the mother walking her little child to school as white people are hurling rocks and spitting and yelling racial epithets at her and her child is not thinking about Jewish people or that her plight has anything to do with Jewish people.

So, if you’re going to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement centering the perspectives of the people who were working for civil rights, the bombings of Jewish buildings and homes just served to prove that the KKK hated everyone who wasn’t a white Christian and were a violent menace.

And a lot of Southern Jews thought that either opposing integration or remaining neutral on it would protect them from any hatred spilling onto them (and I just want to reiterate that I’m speaking very, very broadly. If you drill down to particulars, you find many Jewish people, even very early on in the 1950s, taking a stand for integration.).

In the minds of Southern blacks and Southern Jews, their stories are not the same stories and their histories are not the same histories.

But in the minds of the white supremacists, they were. And I think this is a really important thing to realize. I mean, look at how it affects my work. If we look at Nashville history through the lens of non-conspiracy-theory, how many bombings did we have over integration after Brown v. Board of Education? Two–Hattie Cotton and Looby’s house.

But now let’s look at history through the lens of this “The Jews control the blacks. Get rid of the Jews and the blacks will settle down” conspiracy. Now how many bombings did we have over integration after Brown v. Board of Education? Hattie Cotton, the JCC, Looby’s house, and the thwarted Temple bombing in ’81. Fully half of the anti-black bombings were directed at Jewish targets.

I haven’t counted all the bombings across the South, but my observation is that you might find that a third of bombings and attempted bombings were on Jewish targets. So, if you discount them as being something other than anti-black bombings–say, merely antisemitic–, you severely diminish the scope of the violence and, important to me, limit your suspect pool. If you don’t see all the bombings, you don’t have a full picture of the atmosphere of violence.

I went to the Nashville room this weekend, which is going to be a tremendous resource for this story, I think, and I spent some time in the Civil Rights room. The JCC bombing is not on their timeline.

Setbacks

I woke up in the middle of the night last night, panicked because I realized I had forgotten to tuck in the ends on the middle of my last spiral, which, in real life, is not that big a deal. I also couldn’t remember if I’d approved my assistant’s timesheet–again, not a big deal in real life, because the system sends a reminder Monday mornings if you forgot to do it on Friday.

As I was laying there, the orange cat came over and demanded head scratches. I became convinced, utterly convinced, that this was not my cat, that it was some strange cat that had been coming into the house at night and sleeping with me and, if I turned on the lights, there would be this stranger.

I was completely panicked about it. And then I thought, this is insane. How would a strange cat be this comfortable? Why would the dog be so nonchalant about it? And then I was like, oh, yes! This is insane! You are having anxiety. And that dissipated it.

But a thing that’s been very hard and embarrassing for me to admit through this whole process is that I do have a lot of obsessive weird thoughts, which bother my life, and which I have just assumed were normal things everyone goes through, so, if I can function, why bother to worry about them? But waking up from a dead sleep and becoming convinced a strange cat is demanding head scratches from you is not really functioning.

Still, I find it deeply embarrassing, though I don’t know exactly why, to realize how much of my adult life was me being all “I’m utterly normal except for these few things, but I understand them and avoid them and all is well,” when really I have been fucked up in this minor but affecting way that I was just ignoring.

Anyway, I know part of it is that I fucked up my medication this weekend. And part of it is just the disappointment in getting rejected. But this weekend felt like backsliding. And that sucks.

The Looby Bombing

courtesy of Metro Archives

courtesy of Metro Archives

Okay, so the story as we know it about the Looby bombing is that someone with 5 or 10 or 20 sticks of dynamite wrapped into a bomb drove in front of the Looby house and pitched the bomb from the car toward the house, trying to get it through the dining room window but missed and thus the bomb landed outside the house at the corner of the house, pretty much destroying the whole front half of the house and a good portion of the neighbor’s house, blowing out windows in nearby buildings, but leaving Councilman Looby and his wife alive in the back of the house.

I went out to look at this yesterday, though the house is long gone, and it is, at the very most, thirty feet from the street to that window. In the picture on the left, the guy in the foreground is standing in the street.

Also important for this–the internet tells me that a stick of dynamite weighs half a pound.

Now, I, as a weak person with no throwing skills, believe that, if I hung out of a large old car window, I could overhand toss 3.5 to 5 lbs of anything and hit that window. I also believe, depending on how far out I was leaning, I might have enough room to underhand lob it. I don’t know if I would be strong enough to throw it hard enough to break the window, but it’s a rather large window. I might not be able to get ten pounds from the car to the window, though. But a man could, right?

Now, if I’m in the car, it seems like the only way to get the bomb to the house is that kind of back-handed newspaper-delivery flick, because otherwise, the car is in the way. But even still, it seems like, if that went awry, the dynamite would end up on the porch.

Also, as an added factor, now the street is lined with parked cars. It’s not in the pictures, but obviously, those pictures were taken in daylight and people could have moved their cars out of the way before then. On the other hand, there weren’t reports of any destroyed cars.

So, my questions are these: there’s a huge difference between five sticks of dynamite and twenty. How much dynamite do you think that explosion was actually caused by? Does the “They threw it from the car” theory make sense? But if they didn’t throw it from the car, why didn’t they place it better? And, just for the sake of argument, let’s say that they did throw the bomb at the front window and it did bounce off and kind of roll to the corner. Does that tell us something about where the car was in relation to the house? In other words, can we guess that the car was headed toward 18th maybe more in front of the porch than the window?

Basically, dear readers, what do we see when we look at those pictures?

This, I Remember

I have been worried that the spiral afghan I’m working on, the recipient of which only requested “70s colors”, in fact, was failing to look 70s-ish. I consulted with folks and we all agreed that the trick would not be just the colors, but how I used them. Still, I wasn’t sure. And then I hit this spiral:

That I remember from my childhood.

Rejection

Also, just for the sake of being honest, I want to say I had a story rejected last night. I’ve had a lot of stories rejected this year. And sometimes a story I love rejected a lot.

And it sucks.

People are all like “What are you working on?” “What do you have coming out?”

Okay, well, I’m working on a huge story about people who escaped justice and many of them are vile and it’s very sad. And I have nothing coming out. Which is also sad.

But we keep on keeping on.

Tough

I went to see a friend in the hospital yesterday. It’s weird. Not that she’s in the hospital. That tends to be where you live for a bit after they cut you open. But that she’s my friend and I’ve known her a while and I’ve always liked her and thought good things about her.

But seeing her in what I know has to be a tremendous amount of pain already sitting up and walking around and tracking the numbers they want her to track and just doing it because it needs to be done.

I left the hospital and I had to sit in my car a minute just like “Wow.” I mean, I don’t quite know how to get at it. It was both extraordinary just on its face and extraordinary in how much it was business as usual for her.

It made me think a great deal about whether I always recognize the ways people are doing things that would, if I noticed, blow my mind.

Singing

Lord, last night in the middle of the night, I was awoken by new kitty just singing and singing. I tried halfway waking up and saying “Good kitty,” but then she got a tone in her voice so hurt that it caused the orange cat to leap off my bed. So, I was concerned that this wasn’t a loud victory song, but a song of pain and her own death.

I also then leap out of bed.

She’s fine.

She’s brought a rabbit in the house to kill and eat. It wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t going to recover. I considered what to do and as I was trying to wake up enough to formulate a plan, she killed it.

I went back to bed.

I wondered if it makes me a bad person that I let my cats outside. I also wondered why a cat who can catch a motherfucking rabbit can’t ever seem to catch the mice when they’re in the house.

Conspiracies

The thing about this research is that there really were conspiracies. But conspiracies mostly put together by angry idiots. I keep having to check myself because it’s very easy to imagine a vast, vast conspiracy of secretive brilliant people and I keep having to remind myself that the simplest answer is probably the right one.

But man, you know, too. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what the simplest answer is.