THE JUNGLE

Whitie is standing in front of the picture window gazing out, cussing under his breath and fretting. I know the pose. Spick and span glass ashtray in one hand, lit Pall Mall in the other, sharp-creased khaki pants, immaculate white t-shirt and worn but buffed Florsheim oxfords. Civilian though he may be, clean-shaven and impeccably groomed, he’d pass the inspection of any regimental sergeant major at any hour of the day. He is as obsessive-compulsive about his ashes—every one tipped carefully into the proper recipient, none ever falling elsewhere, the ashtray wiped clean after each smoke—as he is about everything else. And this time it’s the lawn that has come under his unforgiving scrutiny.

“What’s the matter, Dad?” I ask.

“Goddamn weeds,” he mutters. “No matter how hard you try and have a nice lawn, there’s always weeds.”

I stand behind him and peer out over his shoulder. I say, “I think the lawn looks really nice. In fact, I wish we’d leave it a little longer.”

“Oh, Dan,” he says, “it’s long as hell already! I’m gonna finish this cigarette and then go out and mow it.”

“Want me to?”

“No. Thanks anyway, but, honestly, I don’t like how you do it. You never overlap enough and there are always these long blades of grass standing up when you’re done.”

“Suit yourself.”

I look out at the lawn, and what I see is a lovely carpet of deep dense green grass ornamented here and there with sparse patches of bright golden dandelion flowers. Beautiful when they flower, sensuous when they go to seed with their little domes of fuzzy white lace, I find them an artistic accent to an otherwise uniform verdance. I’m thinking that such a lawn could well inspire a pattern for a pretty summer frock. Meanwhile, Whitie is thinking about how, as soon as he takes the last drag on his Pall Mall, he’s going to go out there to gleefully decapitate every single one of those little bastards.

Ours is a rural small-town, white Midwestern society. It’s not a place that rewards diversity. And every person’s lawn is measured by how much it resembles a golf course, not a fallow meadow, so weeds of any sort are anathema to the bulk of the home-owning population. People have been known to petition the municipality to require lackadaisical neighbors to manicure their lawns. A neighbor who allows his or her grass to run wild, they reason, lowers the property value of the surrounding lots, and, worse still, permits weeds to propagate and spread from there to kingdom come.

My mother’s father had a practical view of dandelions. They weren’t weeds, they were greens. He was a country boy and didn’t think spring was spring without dandelion greens. He taught me from an early age how to use my pocketknife to harvest them while they were still tender. Right in the middle, right where their single flower stem emerged, you stabbed them deep in the heart. Then you removed the knife, took hold of the entire plant at its base and pulled. This was best done after a nice rain, so they came out by their roots instead of your ending up with a handful of loose leaves. It killed two birds with one stone, or so he said, since the weeds got pulled up by their roots—which was supposed to be a permanent solution—and you could get a nice bunch of greens into the bargain. Still, it seemed that each year there were always plenty to harvest.

Grandpa used to bring a dishpan full to my mother, Reba Mae, each year, because he not only carried out this meticulous task at his home, but also at the local cemetery, where he was the caretaker. For the twenty years that he held that post after moving to town from the country, Greenlawn Cemetery lived up to its name—always neat and green as a formal garden and each and every grave mown and clipped to perfection.

As a young boy, I was proud of this gardening skill my grandfather had taught me and was always glad to help harvest greens in the dandelion season, but I was no fan of dining on them. Former farm girl that she was, Reba Mae loved them and made them “wilted” with vinegar and a little sugar and stewed with a nice ham-bone. But she was about the only one in the family who ate them. Certainly not Whitie, who, a city boy, said that if supermarkets existed, he didn’t know why the hell he should be eating weeds with his pork chops.

When you drove around a town like mine, the great majority of homes had the sort of lawn Whitie and Reba Mae aspired to—some more, some less perfect. But the effort was in some stage of being made. The most established of lawns were picture perfect, an unbroken carpet of single-shade green, achieved through the combined liberal use of weed-killer and urea. Well, except at my father’s father’s house. At Grandpa Murel’s place, the cure-all for home and garden was manure. He would go out to the speed barns at the County Fairgrounds to collect it and he put it on everything—the vegetable garden, the flowerbeds, the strawberry patch and the lawn. When Murel started spreading manure, you wanted to get out of the way. Because if not, he was sure to find a use for it on you as well.

In those perfect lawns, any trees were carefully pruned and every random leaf or twig raked, flowers all contained in geometrical flower-beds, tulips here, roses there, salvia to make a nice tidy border, geraniums like bookends on either side of the porch,  each species with its own cedar-chip mulch providing a uniform look to the surface of the soil. In the old yards, there might be a picket fence or a set of bordering hedges, fussily trimmed to squared perfection. But in the “new additions” on the outskirts of town, like the one we moved to when I was twelve and where Whitie and Reba Mae would live for forty-two years, lawns blended one into another, preferably in continuous visual sequence. And if that wasn’t the case, the offending neighbor (yard slob) was sure to hear about it from the aggrieved parties next door.

This obsession with uniformity wasn’t hard to understand. Most of us were the descendants of German and Scots-Irish farmers. We came from families that lived on basically flat land and valued straight crop rows and fields with no weeds. I used to get tickled when I was a kid and we would be driving through the countryside and Reba Mae would say sarcastically that a corn or bean crop would “have to be sold for succotash” whenever there was corn coming up in the beans or beans in the corn. For farmers there was nothing quite as beautiful as an impeccable carpet of a single crop.

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

One of my favorite paintings is Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth. Apart from its haunting subject—a young woman in a simple house-dress and country oxfords half-prone with her back to the artist in a fallow meadow, gazing tensely toward a house in the distance—I love how the painter captured the texture of the grass, and the feeling that a light, late-summer breeze is slightly ruffling it, as it is the woman’s long hair, which is tied back but with a few wisps breaking free. As a boy, I wanted grass to be like that, for it to wave in the wind, to bend with the breeze, to tassel and re-seed itself. I wanted country grass, not suburban grass. I wanted grass a cow or a horse would be tempted to graze on. So I was fascinated and would stop a while to drink it in whenever I saw a house where the lawn had been allowed to get a little out of hand.

There was a farmhouse a mile or two outside of town that reminded me of the one in Christina’s World. A rambling old two-story house that hadn’t been painted in decades and was the natural grey of well-weathered wood, crowned by a red-rusted, gabled, sheet metal roof. There was a barn out back, of the same matte-grey lumber as the house.  The only sign that anyone lived there was a very tidy little vegetable garden to one side, which seemed incongruous compared with the rest. The yard had been let go as much as the buildings had, and the grass that grew up to the edge of the wood-plank front porch was knee-high. It waved in the breeze like wheat before the harvest.

More than once as we drove by, I’d heard my mother say, “If somebody held a paintbrush up to that house, it would suck the paint right off of the bristles.” And then she would add, “They’ll need a scythe to cut that grass.” But I found the place enchanting, and all I could think was that it was exactly where I would like to live.

Why couldn’t you just let your yard go crazy? Who said everybody’s place had to be neat and tidy? What was the big deal if the property was yours? Why couldn’t you do whatever you wanted with it if you weren’t hurting anybody with what you did or didn’t do and if that’s what gave you joy? Why conform to common practice?

Imagine my delight, then, when we lived, for the three years before we moved to the house in the “new addition”, in a big old house in town that fronted on the main residential street and the rear of which was on another major thoroughfare, but the yard of which was in the style of a different era, before housing “additions” became a thing.  There was a huge old sugar maple on the one side in front and an enormous cedar on the other. Cedar spreaders ran along the front. In the little door yard at the back there was another centenarian maple and the most wonderful lilac, as tall as the garage. The backyard proper boasted another ancient cedar and another towering maple. Hedges separated the different parts of the property and the previous owner had let them “get out of hand,” according to Whitie. While they lasted that way, I thought they were grand.

Despite the fact that Whitie got my mother’s father to come over with his hedge shears and fashion the hedges into even, waist-high, green blocks, and in spite of his own obsession with mowing the grass to perfection with a hand-mower, it was hard to ruin the natural beauty of a yard with that many trees—which was part of the reason we would shortly move to a place in the new addition where Whitie could start concentrating on turning the uninspiring lawn into a veritable golf green (despite his distaste for golf, and the country club crowd who played it).

But what truly excited my interest when we lived in that big house in town wasn’t our yard as much as one catty-cornered across the street at the back of our place. And the owner of it was as fascinating as was the environment that he had created around him. Everybody tauntingly referred to him as “Jungle George”.

George was, they said, a retired professor of some sort—law, some people said. I still find it hard to imagine a man as retiring and reclusive as he was standing in front of a classroom, but perhaps he had been more outgoing in his youth. But I never saw more of him than glimpses on his porch or in his yard, and we never seemed to run into him anywhere else around town. His hermit-like nature had, for us kids, turned him into something like the Boo Radley of our neighborhood.

The house was set back from the street, a plain enough place with a modified A-frame roof and a long low porch across the front. A narrow cement walk led to the porch from a waist-high wrought-iron gate in a simple wrought-iron fence that ran all along the sidewalk at the front of the property. What was extraordinary was the yard, a big one by town standards, which was plain and unremarkable for its topography, but that had, over many years, been turned into a patch of wild woodland with enormous trees that loomed over the house and a dense undergrowth of flowers, plants, shrubs and vines of every sort imaginable. It was like the overpopulated botanical garden of a mad scientist. So dense was this miniature forest that the house lay in a kind of permanent gloom, only penetrated by random rays of sun that spotlighted this or that tree or plant, or that fell in a dust-mote column across the front porch.

George’s house was on a corner. The west side of his yard bordered on a one-block-long street. My friend Steve’s back and side yards gave onto that street as well. So from that side, Steve and I could observe Jungle George’s property any time we pleased. My mother never worried about me when I was with Steve. He was ten or eleven when I was nine or ten and was a very responsible kid for his age. It was like leaving me with a big brother, especially since my parents knew his to be unquestionably decent people, and Steve’s father was almost always there, since he was a cabinet-maker who had set up his shop in the detached two-car garage at the back of their lot. There were only two properties on that side of the street—Steve’s and that of his neighbor, Forest, whose son Dick had set up a marine motor sales shop in their garage, with the two shops sitting back to back. George’s was the only property on the other side, with a narrow alley running along the back leading to his hidden garage, followed by an abandoned lot that was wilder and woolier than his place and that, for all I know, he may have owned as well, because no one ever bought it and built anything there.

Sometimes when Steve and I would stay out a while after dark to go hunting for the nightcrawlers that we used for fish bait, we would see a light in the low basement windows at George’s place—or, better said, we got a glimpse only, piercing the thicket of shrubs and trees. Once I told Steve that other kids had told me that Jungle George was a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, who had a laboratory in his basement and did god-knows-what down there at night. They also said that he was a widower who had killed his wife and buried her behind a wall down there.

“You gotta stop listening to those dumb-asses, Danny,” Steve told me with a laugh. “They’re full o’ crap. I figure he’s got his gardening stuff down there. He’s always doing something with his plants. Gathering bulbs and seeds, re-potting, whatever it is guys like him do.”

“How would you know?” I asked, preferring to believe the Frankenstein and walled-up wife stories.

“Because I’ve talked to him.”

“Really?”

“Sure. He’s a nice ol’ man, just strange, is all.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. But Steve—whom I already held in high regard just because of how he was, but also because he had built his own bedroom furniture in his dad’s shop, and had given Stan, the neighborhood bully, whom we all feared, such a beating that Stan had run home bawling and holed up in his house for days afterward—had just become even more of a hero in my eyes. He had actually talked to Jungle George...and lived!

“When?” I asked.

“When what?”

“When did you talk to him?”

“Whenever. Last week. Whenever I want.”

“You mean you just go, ‘Hi George,’ and start talking to him?”

“Well, I don’t go over and knock on the door or anything. He doesn’t like being bothered, and Dad makes sure I don’t. But if I’m around and see him out in the yard messing with his plants, I’ll walk over to the fence and say hi, and if he talks to me he talks to me and if he don’t, he don’t.”

My mouth was open as wide as an airplane hangar.

Steve chuckled. “Nothin’ to be scared of. He’s just a lonesome ol’ man.”

“Ever been inside?”

“Not the house. But he invited me into the yard once when he was in a pretty good mood and started showing me every plant and bush and tree in there. He can tell you the name of every one of them in Latin and German too.”

German! That was sinister in itself. World War II had only been over for a decade and a half by then and our dads were vets. Germans were the enemy. The villains in every war movie, storm-troopers, Jew-killers, the ones who had wounded or killed our fathers or the fathers of people we knew. In fact, Steve’s dad had a scar on the front of one shoulder and a bigger one in back at the top of the shoulder blade where a German round had gone through. Mad German scientists had experimented on prisoners. Couldn’t George be one of those?

This “logic” ignored the fact that George was very likely American of German descent, the same as my own grandfather was. Perhaps a first-generation American like Grandpa Vern was. But locally, the language and many of the customs of the old country had been very intentionally lost. Other communities had maintained those Germanic traditions. In nearby New Bremen and New Knoxville, people of my grandfather’s generation still spoke “low German” among themselves. But that wasn’t common in my town, where the people in those places were referred to, in pejorative terms, as “ol’ Dutchmen” (because they spoke Deutsch) and around here, my own grandfather had been brought up being warned not to speak German so he “wouldn’t sound ignorant”. It was a “no dandelion” community and you had to try and avoid being a stand-out weed, especially within the context of the two world wars, in which Germany was a bitter foe.

“He just knows German, is all,” Steve laughed. “No crime in that.”

For the three years that we lived in that neighborhood, Steve continued to be my best friend and protector, and Jungle George and his incredible yard the object of my fascination. I had to work up my courage before, on Steve’s coaxing, I could ride through the twilight of George’s tree-tunnel front sidewalk when he was out in his yard and wave. But I eventually started doing it any time he was out. Sometimes Jungle George gave a perfunctory wave back. Other times he didn’t. But the important thing was that he was now human in my mind—an interesting character, in fact. An eccentric with an incredible environment that we should be glad to have as an integral part of the neighborhood.

As I grew from childhood to pre-adolescence in those three years, there were a lot of times that I wanted to be Steve. A kid whose dad taught him amazing skills and actually talked to him. A little boy with a man’s sense of responsibility and with the empathy and honesty of a gentleman. A small, wiry tough kid who used his grit to defend not only himself but others. A guy who seemed to know no fear.

I learned a lot from Steve and I learned to admire George. He was that little boy who wanted waving grass and a yard gone rogue, and as a man he had the individualism to make his wish come true. Ironically, in the last twenty-five years or so, I’ve turned, not into Steve, but into Jungle George. The neighbor who refuses to cut the grass and lets it wave in the wind, who lives in a piece of the deep, dark forest that still invades what is becoming a suburban neighborhood. The one who thinks dog-rose and Spanish broom are as beautiful as any other flower and lets them run rampant. The curmudgeon who rejected the installation of natural gas and kept on heating with firewood. The rebel who acquired a buffer zone on the edge of the wilds and decided to remain on the margin of the  civilized life around him, because that was always his dream.

WAPAKONETA ON THE WARPATH

Shawnee Chief 
Catahecassa, or Black Hoof, 1740-1831

The decision by the Washington Redskins to—finally—get on the right side of history and state their intention to change their name and logo has had long-tailed consequences in what should be the front line against racism throughout the United States—public high schools. And nowhere has the hornets’ nest been poked more savagely than in my hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, where the School Board has stubbornly resisted reiterated attempts to foster a change in its team name and mascot. For, as we were drilled throughout the school-days of our youth, “We are the Redskins, the mighty, mighty Redskins!”

Alas, we are not. In fact, ours is a blindingly, nearly homogeneously white community. And therein lies the rub, which has caused a direct clash between the Wapakoneta Superintendent of Schools and the Chief of the Shawnee Nation. As a result, the controversy about the team name and mascot has gone from being an ongoing and bitter debate between local residents—with other far-flung Wapakoneta alumni weighing in as well—to actually making a ripple on the national scene.

Last week, Wapakoneta schools Superintendent Aaron Rex released a statement in the midst of a backlash from the Washington Redskins’ historic decision in which he stated, “At Wapakoneta we have always believed that our representation of Native Americans and their history in our area has been done with a great deal of respect. Our community was once a place inhabited by many Indian tribes with the last being the Shawnee under the leadership of Chief Black Hoof. In the last few years we have redesigned our school logo and feel that it has been done keeping the idea of respect and history in mind. Wapakoneta has a great deal to be proud of, as you know. Native American history is one piece of what makes our town one of the best small towns in Ohio.”

There are a few things blatantly wrong with that statement: First, as an educator, Mr. Rex should know that “beliefs” aren’t facts. What Wapakonetans have “always believed” about our way of representing Native American culture and history is in apparent and aggressive conflict with the view of the ethnicity involved. Second, any redesigning of the school logo has been carried out, according the representatives of the Shawnee Tribe, without consulting the true experts on tribal culture—namely, the Shawnee themselves. And third, although Wapakoneta may indeed have attributes that it can be proud of, its history with Native Americans in general and the Shawnee Nation in particular isn’t one of them.

The fact is that our white ancestors first forged a peace treaty with the Shawnee and then betrayed the trust of once great warriors and defenders of the land like Black Hoof, breaking the treaty, stealing the sacred lands of the Native American residents and driving them en masse on a forced march to the far off Kansas territory, during the course of which large numbers of them perished. Our history with the indigenous tribes of the region is, then, not a happy story of respect and ethnic diversity. Rather, it is one of abject tragedy, betrayal and complete disregard for the native peoples of our area, who had come to trust the European settlers enough to agree to a treaty in the belief that it was better to live in peace with them than to attempt to fight a burgeoning trend. Their trust, like elsewhere throughout the continent, was met with a ruthless and genocidal push to be rid of Native Americans once and for all.

In response to Mr. Rex’s rather cavalier statement, Shawnee Tribal Chief Ben Barnes tweeted, “You said, ‘Our community was once a place inhabited by many Indian tribes with the last being the Shawnee under the leadership of Chief Black Hoof.’ The office of Chief of the Wapakoneta Shawnee is now me. Ask us our opinion first.” So far, the chief reports having no response from Wapakoneta school officials.

In statements to a Native American publication called Indian Country Today—an online magazine that, it is worth noting, never writes the word redskin, referring to the clearly racist term as “the R-word” just as has become standard practice everywhere else when mentioning “the N-word” on citing racist references to African Americans—Chief Barnes again referred to Superintendent Rex’s statement, asking, “How can they say they’re honoring us if they won’t even speak to us?”

The Shawnee leader had earlier stated the position of his tribe regarding the decision of the Washington team to change its name and his hope that high schools would follow suit in also rejecting anti-Indian racism. “We are not mascots,” Chief Barnes said. “We are living cultures and languages with histories going back thousands of years. Our stories are a thousand-fold, filled with wondrous stories of our ancestors and our relationship to the land. It is in this way we want people to know us, not as an emblem on a hat.”

Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee Tribe

In telephone statements made to newsman José Nogueras for an article that appeared in The Lima News—published in Lima, Ohio, fifteen miles from Wapakoneta and the county seat of what was once the Hog Creek Shawnee Reservation—Chief Barnes again commented on Superintendent Rex’s unacceptable defense of the Redskin name and logos saying, “Our nation and our office is totally preoccupied with COVID, and I can’t devote fifty hours to this, but at some point I will reach out to the school district, and so my tweeting was in a way to say don’t presume to speak for the Shawnee tribe.” In response to Mr. Rex’s historical reference to Chief Black Hoof, he added, “We are still here. I occupy the seat of Black Hoof’s descendent government. I’m in that position, so why not come to our nation and ask us. Black Hoof’s family exists. I know these people. They are here. They are available.”

Referring to the importance to Shawnee culture of the land where Wapakoneta now stands, the chief had earlier told Indian Country Today, “Wapakoneta is holy ground for us; it is where Chief Black Hoof died.”

The Shawnee chief also told Nogueras, “I think saying they are honoring us is at best disingenuous.”

After a week of wrangling with local opponents to a team name change, I feel that “disingenuous” is a perfect term for the arguments I’ve heard for maintaining a racial epithet and a racial stereotype for the name and mascot of Wapakoneta’s home team. One local history-hobbyist sought to convince me that it was only now, in the wake of the George Floyd slaying and the Black Lives Matter movement that people had started getting touchy about anything that could be construed as being even vaguely racist. The term “redskin” had only recently become taboo in this context, he claimed. Before, he indicated, when we were all young, it had no pejorative significance. It had been, he posited, a sort of term of endearment.

In order to provide a bit of context, I should mention that this is the same local history-hobbyist and antique picker who, the previous week, had sought to convince me that there was nothing racist about so-called “lawn jockeys”, those caricaturesque and stereotypical little hitching post statues that depict antebellum stable slaves holding the hitching ring and a lantern at the service of their masters.

A quick perusal by myself and others of a variety of online dictionaries that all qualified redskin as a pejorative and insulting term failed to convince the pro-Redskins crowd including my local history buff interlocutor. It was all a recent liberal (for many “libtard”) political play and they were sure the Indians wouldn’t mind “because we’re honoring them and ‘our’ Native American history.”

Clearly, Chief Barnes and the folks at Indian Country Today beg to differ, as do I. There is nothing recent about the pejorative, racist status of the R-word. While the same revisionist movement that erected multiple statues glorifying the Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century apparently also ended up convincing dictionary publishers to edit out references to the pejorative nature of the term “redskin”, both earlier and later (post-civil rights era) editions have identified it as such. For instance, an early edition of the Webster’s Collegiate dictionary from 1898 defines it as follows:

Redskin — A North American Indian; —often contemptuous.  

In referring to Wapakoneta, I say “our town”, because, wherever I have wondered in my life, I have remained, truly, a Wapakoneta native son. Much of what I consider my best writing has been done about my home town and I have always felt a deep, inextricable attachment to it. So much so that I often describe myself as being like an aging vampire who still carries some of his native soil with him wherever he goes. Except that mine doesn’t hail from Transylvania, but from Wapakoneta, on the banks of the legendary Auglaize River, where the Shawnee once made their home and founded the Council House of their nation.

Expats like myself tend to be just the opposite of how the people we left behind see us. We all have different reasons for why we live abroad, but many of us find ourselves living in a kind of permanent limbo between the world we adopted and the world we left behind. We are not detached. We are, in fact, invested and hungry for news from “home”, from our next of kin, from our heartland.  What is more, while we tend to get deeply involved in the current affairs of our homeland, we also tend to idealize that world of our childhood and youth, freezing it in our minds exactly as it was when we left it.

For the first thirty years that I lived abroad, Wapakoneta was the stateside address in my passport, just as it had been on my Army papers for several years prior. And on every trip back to the US for a visit during those first three decades, Wapakoneta was home base. It was where my parents lived until their deaths, six months apart, in 2003. It was where I stayed, in the room I had shared with my younger brother when we were boys, where my books were still on the shelf, my keepsakes in the drawers, the place in which I was reunited with my sister and brother on every trip, where friends and relatives dropped by to see me. The place where my brother and I frequented the bars on the main drag and bumped into friends we hadn’t seen in years. Wapakoneta was even the county seat where I was registered as an overseas absentee voter.

Wapakoneta, my home town.

This was the town to which my father and two of my uncles came home from World War II to found what, over the next quarter-century, was to become an iconic Wapakoneta eatery, the Teddy Bear restaurant. It was the farming town where my mother’s German immigrant paternal family had started a new life, bought supplies and sold their produce, while farming the surrounding land since the mid-nineteenth century, and around which her mother’s people, who were of Scots-Irish and German descent, had farmed since no one knew when. It was the place where, for the last two decades of his working life, my maternal grandfather, Vern Weber, was the superintendent of the local cemetery and laid to rest the dead of three generations of Wapakonetans. Indeed, it is the place where all of my dead loved ones have been laid to rest as well. For me, as for the Shawnee, Wapakoneta is, then, a sacred place. But that doesn’t mean that I am blind to either its attributes or its failings.

When my parents passed away and their house was sold, I grieved not only for them, but also over the fact that Wapakoneta would no longer be my stateside residence. First it was Ocala, Florida, where my brother had gone to live in what had once been my parents’ winter home. I had no kinship to Ocala or to Florida and resented having that address as my Stateside home. I was only consoled by the thought that it was where my little brother had chosen to live until two years later, when I lost him as well.

Later, my sister, by this time divorced and her children grown, moved into a condo in Cleveland, and was kind enough to share that address with me. I was an Ohioan once more and Wapakoneta was only two and a half hours away by car. Each year when I return, I “go home” to Ohio and home to Wapakoneta, where I bask in the warmth of family and friends, both new and old. And where I walk the familiar streets of my childhood and youth and the surrounding countryside.

I mention all of this for two reasons: First, because in discussions like the one now raging over the Redskins team name, it is on the tip of the tongues of many “locals” to tell me to butt out, since I left and, according to them, have nothing more to say. To these people I say, sorry, I feel I have every right to opine, because in my mind and heart and family traditions, in my history and the history of my family, Wapakoneta will always be my home town. And as such, I will always not only portray my best memories of it in my writing, but also my worst, since there is nothing more consistent in human beings than conflictive feelings and the constant dichotomy of life itself. Second, because I think my expatriate status provides me with a tiny crack in the window into the pain that the Shawnee must feel when faced not only with the history of having been driven from their sacred lands on the banks of the Auglaize, but also with the indignity of white residents of the area mocking the traditions of their race and supposedly “honoring” them with a racial slur.

I recall our Wapakoneta High School football games in the sixties in which we all delighted to the “war dance” of our Sammy Spirit mascot, an unmistakably white classmate who donned TV stereotype Indian buckskins, moccasins, war paint and plains Indian headdress to cheer on our team, firing a miniature cannon every time our players scored a touchdown, before whooping and hollering and waving a tomahawk in the air. At Redskins basketball games our fair-skinned, blonde-haired “Indian princess” with long twin braids did the honors in a cute little beaded, buckskin outfit that distracted many of the male spectators from the game. There was no intentionality in the inherent racism and mockery of these theatrics, and we were indeed proud of our town’s Native American past and unique Indian name.

But it was all a fantasy, a myth, like the bedtime stories we were fed about noble Chief Wapa and his lovely daughter, Princess Koneta, who only existed in white people’s story books. Our feeble attempts to “honor” the native past of our town have blithely ignored and continue to ignore and inadvertently disrespect the true and tragic history of the Shawnees’ encounter with white settlers. Says Chief Barnes, “The Shawnees of Wapakoneta and the Shawnees of Hog Creek were both forced marched after The Indian Removal Act (1830), so Wapakoneta is built on the pain and suffering and tears of the Shawnee people, and they can’t even get the headdress right or talk to us about the mascot.”

I asked some of the people I debated with this past week how they would feel about “honoring” our own ancestors, the German and Scots-Irish settlers who replaced the Indians on the site of our town and the surrounding countryside. Perhaps we could call our team “the Krauts” and our mascot could be an apple-cheeked lad in lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a feather waving a beer stein in the air to cheer the team. Or maybe the mascot could dress in a storm trooper’s uniform and goose-step up and down the sidelines threatening to send the other team to the Russian Front. Or, how about calling ourselves “the Micks” and dressing the mascot in a kilt and bagpipes on which to drone the Fight Song, while waving a whisky bottle at the crowd? Don’t our own ancestors deserve to be “honored” as we “honor” those of the Shawnee?

Chief Barnes makes it clear that the Shawnee have never tried to step in and legally force teams to change racially charged names and logos, but his people ask that whites permit a dialogue to discuss a more empathic and respectful use of Native American names, history and symbols. In particular, he considers the use of the R-word as a team name unacceptable, pointing out that it is beyond hypocritical to pretend to “honor” the Indians while using a name that is racially insensitive and has a long history of demeaning application.

The chief laments the fact that while terms such are Oriental, colored, the N-word and logos that were offensive to other races and ethnic groups have been retired from use, stereotypes and racial slurs that are offensive to Native Americans continue to be considered acceptable by the white community at large.

My hometown has a poor record for racial tolerance. This is a confession that has always hurt me, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Until far too recent decades, it was known as a “sundown community”—a place where African Americans were forcefully discouraged from allowing the sun to set on them within city limits. It made national headlines in the latter part of the twentieth century by turning down a project to build a Japanese firm’s auto plant there because the mayor at the time had “fought the Japs” during World War II and refused to have them in “his” town no matter how much progress and how many jobs the firm might bring. And time and again, it has resisted attempts to change the Redskins team name and logos despite unequivocal messages from Native Americans explaining that the name is disrespectful and racist and that the logos are offensive and have nothing to do with the tribe that they allegedly honor.

Local defenders of the Redskins name argue that they mean no offense and don’t consider it a racist term. But that argument is rendered invalid by virtue of the fact that the Shawnee are indeed offended by it, no matter what white townspeople’s intention might be, and do indeed consider it a racial slur.

I find it sad that the white leaders of the hometown that I still carry in my heart have once again had the chance to get on the right side of history and do what is proper and have failed the test, thus missing yet another opportunity to shrug off the town’s racist reputation of the past. And in so doing, they have also offended the very aboriginal tribe that they groundlessly claim to be honoring, turning deaf ears on the outreach from Chief Black Hoof’s own descendants.

Blogger’s Note: I would like to apologize to readers of my blog, the Shawnee Tribe and the Blackfeet Tribe for an error in an illustration that originally accompanied this post, "Wapakoneta on the Warpath". The photograph that I captioned Chief Black Hoof was actually of Chief Mountain of the Blackfeet Tribe. The fact that I had only seen one image of Black Hoof in my life—the one above, which now illustrates the blog entry—and that the image I used was mislabeled on the site from which it was culled is illustrative of precisely what I discuss in the "Wapakoneta on the Warpath": namely, the abject ignorance of most white people, including myself, about the history and protagonists of Native American tradition. My thanks to FB friends and reader Judy Clark Walter and Joel Smith for the heads-up, and again, my apologies to all, even when the error only serves to underscore the premise of the piece.

REGARDLESS OF YOUR REGARD FOR IRREGARDLESS

The sniveling, weak-kneed language police at Merriam-Webster have just caved and let "irregardless" out of idiomatic lock-down.

According to their justification: "It may not be a word that you like, or a word that you would use in a term paper, but irregardless certainly is a word. It has been in use for well over 200 years, employed by a large number of people across a wide geographic range and with a consistent meaning. That is why we, and well-nigh every other dictionary of modern English, define this word. Remember that a definition is not an endorsement of a word’s use."

And with that little disclaimer at the end they figure they're covered.

Whitie must be laughing his rear-end off somewhere because it was one of his favorite words whenever he was trying to provide a didactic explanation of just about anything. As in "Dan, irregardless of what you may think, you're wrong about this and I'm right."

To which I would say, "Regardless, it's regardless. Irregardless isn't a word."

Reddening he would say, "Yes, well, regardless, or irregardless, I'm right, smartass." (Which also isn't a word).

Webster says irregardless is a "nonstandard" (which I would hyphenate) equivalent of regardless. But it's not. It's a nonsensical word that negates itself by indicating NOT regardless when it is clearly used to mean regardless. If irrespective means "without respect to", then irregardless is a veritable double negative meaning "without, without regard to," or in other words, NOT regardless at all but with regard to, since the "ir" prefix negates the "less" suffix, leaving the root word "regard" standing alone.

While we're at it, why don't we just add supposably, non-defunct, unequivocably, and unthaw to the dictionary as well?

Might as well go whole hog!

A YANKEE BOY

I worked for many years for a newspaper in Buenos Aires that was majority-owned by a media company based in Charleston, South Carolina. When I was about seven years into my career there—and nearly eight years into my life as an American expatriate—I had pretty much decided that, at some point sooner than later, I wanted to move back to my native United States. By this time, I was general news editor of the paper, but I had never been to the headquarters office in Charleston. While on vacation with my wife and brother-in-law, I decided that as long as we were going on a road-trip, it might as well include Charleston and a visit to headquarters. Maybe I could make the necessary contacts there to provide me with a ticket back to life in the USA.

I had gotten my first taste of the South (as a society, not a region) in 1970, when I was in the Army before moving to South America. I’d done Basic Training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, which was, I discovered somewhat to my surprise, named after a Confederate general, Braxton Bragg, who had led his rebel army in numerous major battles against the United States, in an effort to overthrow the American republic and create a new, opposing nation the basic tenet of which was to be the preservation of a long-standing tradition of slavery as a mainstay of the Confederacy’s agrarian economy. Why, I wondered, would a major US Army base be named after a leading proponent of insurrection and rebellion against the United States? Why not, I wondered, just name a base after America’s most famous traitor, Benedict Arnold? Worse still, Bragg was one of some sixty West Point-graduate general officers who used all of the experience they had gained in the Army of the United States to become the enemy of that Union and to defend the enslavement of the ancestors of a race of people who made up an important segment of the US population, and, indeed, of the Army?

Despite being taught in school that there were other factors beyond slavery between the industrialized North and agricultural South, it was clear to me that the principal reason for the Civil War had been the issue of the federal government seeking to dictate the abolition of slavery to the Southern states. But I thought that this was a long settled affair. That it had ended with the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in 1865. Crass error on my part.

I was made painfully aware of this error on my first day in uniform. Standing in formation in our brand new fatigues and painfully stiff new combat boots, we were each asked by a drill sergeant to tell where we were from. It was the typical humiliation exercise—part of the unwritten rulebook for drill instructors—of proudly pronouncing the name of your home state, which you were already missing, only to have the DI howl, “O-hi-o! Oh...hi...oh! Only queers and steers come from Ohio, maggot! Which one are you?”

I noticed as the question made its way down the line that the only northerners in my platoon were myself, a scared-stiff Jewish boy from the Bronx and an older guy from Maine whose number had come up in the draft lottery right after his student deferment for college had run out. Everyone else, to a man, be they black or white, was from the South.

I had already been getting static from one of the DIs since we were lined up at the Reception Center and counted off into platoons, while still dressed in the civvies we’d come from home wearing. I always tended to dress more formally than my contemporaries and that, combined with my then-willowy frame and horn-rimmed spectacles, caught the guy’s attention.

Standing almost nose to nose with me, the broad stiff brim of his felt campaign hat almost touching my forehead, he asked, “You a professor, maggot?”
“No.”
“No, what, shithead?”

“No, sir!”

“Sir? Sir!? I ain’t no goddamn sir! I work for a goddamn living! You will address me as Drill Sergeant. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

“I can’t hear you, maggot. Sound off like you got a pair!”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“I still can’t hear you!”

“YES, DRILL SERGEANT!”

“And are you a professor...a bookworm...a faggot intellectual?”

“NO DRILL SERGEANT!”

“Well, you sure as hell look like one, and I promise you, trainee, I am going to bring smoke on your young ass!”

It was divide and conquer. They picked out someone to humiliate in front of the rest so as to keep the pack in line. Nobody wanted to be the brunt of that kind of withering exchange, so if the DI could reduce just a handful of men to trembling masses of jelly, he’d have the others’ attention.

But when you were one of the victims, that’s what you were seen as in the eyes of your peers and you had to overcome that imposed identification right away or have it stick throughout training. These were prison-type rules, since we were all captives here and the DIs were our jailers. And that wasn’t always a metaphor. The fact is that several new recruits had come to the reception center in the company of the military police. These were guys, I found out, who’d been given a choice by the judge of going to jail or joining the Army. They had apparently come directly from a holding cell to patriotic duty.

So after asking what state we were from that first day in actual uniform, they asked, “How many of you maggots are Regular Army?” meaning how many of us had joined rather than being drafted. Oddly enough, I was one of the few in my platoon to raise his hand.  

“You, maggot?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“Really?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“Well, well, so the professor is Re-gu-lar Army! I am surprised all to hell!”

I was thinking, “Vindication. I’m in.”

“So how long you in for, O-hi-o?”

“Three years, Drill Sergeant!”

“Three years?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!

“Three...fucking...years?”

 “Yes Drill Sergeant!”

“Well, I think it’s a pretty miserable fucking excuse for a human being that only has three goddamn years to give to his country. Get the hell down and knock out twenty-five, you maggot.”

When we were dismissed to go to our barracks and get our things squared away before chow and the next formation, we were issued a dire warning. Our particular platoon DI, who was five-feet-ten, a solid if lead-bellied two-hundred-twenty pounds and African American, said, “One other thing, maggots. In my Army there’s only one color—green. If anybody wants to dispute that, you’ll do it with me.”

Then the sergeant turned on his heel and headed back to the cadre shack and we trainees were left briefly unattended. As we broke ranks and walked to the door of the barracks, I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder. I turned to see a tall, rangy drink of water with a crooked sardonic grin, who, had it not been for the fatigues and the attitude, could have passed for a banjo-player from the Grand Ole Opry. He was one of the other few who confessed to being Regular Army. I was also pretty sure I remembered him as being one of the ones who had arrived accompanied by the MPs.

“Hey,” I said with a friendly smile.

“Hey yourself, you Yankee, blue-balled, sumbitch,” he snarled as he landed a left hook on me that I never saw coming.

I went down, dazed, in the red dirt of the company street. Some of the other guys gathered around to see how this would play out, while others wandered off to the barracks not wanting to get involved. Nobody sought to restrain my attacker. I sat up slowly, desperately trying to shake clear my head and saw the guy standing over me, legs spread, fists cocked. I thought, “If I get up and ‘box’ with this guy, I’ll lose big-time. He won’t even let me get on my feet before he hits me again. So as I dragged myself to my knees, I shot my fist out and up, and the blow was right on target, catching him flush in his unprotected groin. He went down and I was up, shining my brand new boots on him to make sure he wouldn’t feel like jumping right up and hitting me again.

It worked, and discouraged any of my other reluctant comrades from bothering me. But it was clear to me from that point on that if the only “race” in the Army was green, there were still minds in which blue and grey vividly existed. And it wasn’t the last time I would hear insults about “goddamn Yankees” and the honor of the Confederacy.  

Granby Street in Norfolk as I knew in in 1970

I had a much better Southern experience during the seven months that I spent in Virginia on my next assignment at the Army Element of the Navy School of Music. I had a chance to occasionally rub elbows with the traditionally urbane and genteel higher society of that early-American state. An Army buddy of mine—who was from New York, had a doctorate in liturgical music, and had no business being in the Army despite which he was drafted—had a Navy officer friend who asked him to direct his church’s choir in Virginia Beach.

My friend had me singing tenor on Sundays because he had an over-abundance of baritones and basses in the group. So we got to know people who knew people. And then too, this buddy, who was older than I was by six years, was a guy with refined tastes and he took me along on his tours of the local cultural sites in Norfolk and the surrounding area, which was where we worked and studied. He even ended up living off-base in a little century-old bungalow behind the “big house” on what had once been one of Virginia’s traditional antebellum plantations.

But even in that refined atmosphere there was a barely disguised distrust of Yankees and a feeling that, until they got to know us, they should assume that we were slippery, judgmental and up to no good, sticking our Yankee noses in where they didn’t have any business being.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, years later, when, on my first visit to Charleston, I was received by none other than the president and majority owner of the publishing company. He even came in his own car to pick up my wife, my brother-in-law and me at our hotel to show us around the flag-carrier paper (the company owned a total of seven dailies, as well as other news media).

Charleston, South Carolina

I knew enough about him to know that he was a liberal-minded intellectual with a deep respect for democracy, and human and civil rights. He was also a former Navy officer—like several of the top editors in the organization, including a retired rear-admiral. (So much so that the editorial offices upstairs were known as “battleship row”). I was introduced to all of them and we all promised to talk more the next day.

The publisher had traveled widely and bought the controlling interest in our paper in Argentina (his only foreign property) because it was unique—the only English-language daily in the country and one of only a handful in Latin America—and because it had long been a staunch and fearless defender of the ideals that he cherished. He spoke a little Spanish and was quick to bring my brother-in-law, who spoke no English, into the conversation.

That evening, he and his then-fiancée-later-wife showed us the sights in Charleston and then took us to their favorite Greek restaurant for dinner. He told us a great deal about the history of Charleston, its refined cultural traditions, and his family’s long parallel history in the area. He was clearly proud of that history and of his city. But his nostalgia was for the urbane and highly cultured past and present of Charleston society, not, clearly, for the Civil War or for the area’s less savory past in years leading up to the Civil Rights Era.

The following day, my wife and brother-in-law went off sight-seeing, and I met up with a group of editors and columnists from the organization.

“We thought it would be nice to all go to lunch together so we have a chance to chat,” one of the editors said.

“Great,” I said.

“I thought we could go to my club.”

“Sure.”

He introduced me to the others presenting me as, “This is Dan Newland, the Yankee boy that runs our editorial department down in Argentina.”

The Yankee boy? So what was he, the Johnny Reb that ran the editorial department in Charleston? I bit my tongue but thought, “Okay, here we go.”

“So where did the boss take you to supper last night?”

“A nice little Greek...”

“Oh lord! Not that god-awful place. He’s always taking people there. It’s embarrassing. I don’t see what he sees in it.”

“I thought it was lovely.”

“You’re just being polite. Did he make you drink that rot-gut retsina as well?”

“I quite liked it.”

“You’re way too kind. Today I’ll take you to a real Charleston institution.”

It was all very pleasant but there was an undercurrent that made me squirm a little. There was a lot of joshing about my being a Yankee, fond mentions of the antebellum glory of the city, with a barely perceptible hint that it was people like mine, Ohio Yankees, who had destroyed all that. The other editors and columnists seemed less than comfortable as well and kept trying to talk shop with me. The host editor’s message seemed to be, you’re not just foreign because you live in Argentina, but also because you’re a Yankee.

Before we left for lunch at his club, he presented me with Lord Ashley Cooper’s Dictionary of Charlestonese, a lovely tongue-in-cheek study of Charlestonian pronunciations written by Frank Gilbreth, one of the columnists (a.k.a. Ashley Cooper) accompanying us to lunch. Frank was also the best-selling author of Cheaper By The Dozen. We hit it off from the outset. The editor seemed to forget that Frank, although a transplanted Charlestonian for the past thirty-two years, was a Yankee from New Jersey and educated at the University of Michigan.

“Frank here has been kind enough to write this guide for Yankees like yourself who are always at a loss to understand us,” our host said with a wry chuckle.

The club was posh and steeped in tradition. It was in the harbor district, and looked onto Fort Sumter. He made sure we were seated at a table where I would have a clear view of this iconic Civil War relic of the Confederacy.

“You a Civil War buff, Dan? Lots of Yankees who come down here are.”

“Not really,” I said. “Most of my knowledge of it stems from the Civil Rights Era.”

He said, "The Stars and Bars still flies above
the Statehouse here."

“Well, that right out there is Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began.”

“Yes,” I said, “that part I remember from history class. Quite a view.”

“It’s practically a shrine here. You know, the Stars and Bars still flies above the Statehouse here.”

We ordered drinks. Bourbon for him, scotch for me.

“Not a bourbon-drinker?”

“Nope, never acquired a taste for it. My brother is though.”

“Well, if you ever move to the South, you’ll want to learn to like it.”

I wasn’t paranoid or crazy. There was definitely a “you and us” thing going on here even if I refused to participate.

While we all talked shop, waiting for our steaks and seafood, we ordered another drink. As the host editor was finishing his second bourbon, he tried again to bait me and this time it worked.

“Know what it means to renege, Dan?”

What is this, I wondered, a vocabulary test in case I ever work here? But, okay, I was game. If nothing else, to see where he was going with this.

I had a pop of my scotch and said, “Sure. To welch on a commitment.”

“No,” he said with a wry grin, and then carefully pronouncing it so I would get the joke, he said “Re-NEGE is what they do when the change shifts down at the carwash.” And then he laughed raucously at his own joke.

If he had been testing me to see how far he could push me with this Confederate thing before he finally got under my skin, he had finally reached the limit. This was where appeasement ended. He chuckled. The others fell silent. I gave him a hard look, and then looked down at the ice in my scotch. Quickly one of the other editors recovered and said brightly, “So Dan, tell us how you ended up in Buenos Aires,” and that was the end of the renewed Blue and Grey hostilities.

I’ve been thinking about all of this in the context of a piece of news that I saw this week about the failure of the Ohio State Legislature to approve a bill aimed at prohibiting the sale of Confederate memorabilia at this year’s Ohio State Fair. Clearly, this is part of a broader debate going on right now and sparking nationwide protests. But it got me analyzing what it was that had consistently bothered me about what I’ve always considered a futile and divisive attempt by some white Southerners and some white Northerners to rekindle discussions regarding a cruel and needless Civil War prosecuted and settled a century and a half ago at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Part of what bothers me about it is that I am indeed an Ohio Yankee. That doesn’t mean I hold any animosity toward the South. On the contrary, I’ve spent a lot of time in the South over the years and have met a lot of wonderful Southerners—whom I know only as fellow humans and fellow Americans. I simply grew up feeling repugnance and shame regarding the well-deserved reputation of my country, as a whole, as one of the staunchest and most long-standing defenders of slavery anywhere on earth.

As such, I was always proud that my state had been a major first stop on the so-called Underground Railway, the network of abolitionists who aided and abetted fleeing African Americans in their bid to escape from slavery in the South and to find a new life as free men and women in the North. Ohio was a sanctuary state, a haven for members of an entire race of people held in bondage for more than two and a half centuries, simply because of the color of their skin.

I was proud too that Ohio had provided not only hundreds of thousands of

Ohio general and future  president U.S. Grant

troops but also many of the most prominent generals who fought in that bloody half-decade conflict to not only save the republic but also to root out the scourge of slavery and, once and for all, fully implement the country’s founding principles of individual rights, equality and freedom for all—a struggle that, unfortunately, as witnessed by current nationwide protests, continues today. Indeed, the leader of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant, was from Ohio, as were nearly a score of major generals including such historic names as Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, Garfield, McPherson and McCook. The state also furnished over fifty of the Union’s brigadier generals.

Ohio’s immigrant German farming communities, like the one that I hail from, were also well represented in the anti-slavery effort, not the least of which was the Ohio Ninth Infantry that originated in my native Auglaize County under then-Colonel (later Brigadier General) August Willich of St. Marys, a little town about the size of my own and ten miles west.  Willich was a former Prussian Army officer, who brought his knowledge of war with him and made good use of it in that bloodiest of American tragedies.

Ohio immigrant August Willich of St. Marys

There were so many fellow German-Ohioans under his command that his infantry was nicknamed “Die Neuner”. He led those Ohio immigrants in major battles including Shiloh, Stones River, Liberty Gap, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Peachtree Creek and Resaca. Willich spent long months in a Confederate prison as a POW before being released in a prisoner exchange. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Resaca (Georgia)—and never fully recovered from his injuries after returning to his home in St. Marys. A radical communist who considered his countryman Karl Marx to be “too conservative”, Willich’s zeal in fighting the American Civil War was clearly ideological and based on his repugnance toward the institution of slavery embodied by the Confederacy.

My conclusion in thinking about all of this in the midst of current unrest and renewed divisiveness across the US came as something of a revelation to me. Basically it is that it has nothing to do with North and South, Blue and Grey, Yankee and Rebel, or any other political and regional discussion between white Americans. It boils down, rather, to the two and a half century US institution and tradition of slavery and whether we as white people, still support it as “just another part of our history”—albeit one that is vile and contrary to everything that our nation claims to stand for. It isn’t an historical discussion about the industrialized North subjugating the agrarian South. It is about whether we accept slavery, with no moral judgment, as “just how things were back then.” Which, to my mind, is no different than if today’s Germans accepted the Holocaust as “just another chapter in our history” and as “just the way things were back then.”

It is also about whether we continue to honor and glorify, not the South, but the Confederacy as simply part of a cruel Civil War in which all is now forgiven and in which the leaders of the Confederacy and their symbols have been somehow “sanitized”. Whether we accept those Confederate leaders simply as fellow Americans who were in disagreement with Washington about issues that have grown hazy over time. Whether we continue to be willing to leave slavery out of the discussion of efforts to keep alive the practice of honoring symbols and historical players that are emblematic of only one thing—the dark chapter that the enslavement of an entire race has played in our history.

In the end, I have concluded, it is not a discussion that we white people can have or “own”. It’s not ours on which to have an opinion. It is only a valid historical discussion within the history of our African American fellow-citizens. And efforts to keep the symbols and “heroes” of the Confederacy in a place of reverence, rather than within the context of insurrection and slavery, is one of the last hurdles on the road to true racial equality in America.