History is an art in a sense. That is, it is not mathematically provable. The mathematician (I am one, at least through some bit of graduate studies) must prove something logically (there are certain basic rules of logic—contrary to reflections from “the squad,” et al). If he can’t prove it, it simply means it is not provable true, nor is it provable false. It may be either but it is neither, absent a deterministic logical proof. Such problems wait to see if one may ever find a proof (such as the recently and famously proven "Fermat's Last Theorem"). Many, many today fall into the yet unknown true or false class. For those interested, an excellent book for a layman’s (most) comprehension of one of the most famous problems, is John Derbyshire’s, Prime Obsession, summarizing The Riemann Hypothesis.


The scientific method of proof (different from the mathematical proof) in the physical sciences is proved by sampling and testing to the point of reproducing such results in the laboratory. These are scientific-method determined proofs. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine work is an example of a proof by the scientific method. Climate change study is an example of a crock of crap.


But the historian has no logical proof of his art since history is what it was. You cannot associate an abstract thought with a concrete fact of the past in order to change the fact. But this is exactly what “liberals” do. (The quotation marks are a tweaking of the modern definition of liberal as opposed to the once accepted and true one—but that is another story for another day.)


Liberals will suggest silliness (though they believe it is serious thought, perhaps) such as Lincoln was responsible for a horrible war that resulted in well over half a million deaths and billions of dollars of destruction of private property and on and on with a political wrecking ball of death by fire and murder as well as the raping and pillaging of both blacks and whites, male and female, and so on. BUT, the great defensible BUT, he was trying to save the union. This is, in fact, abstraction smothering fact. I say "liberals will suggest" when the fact is they state it as the fact that they have proven, even though facts of history are not provable but revealed from recorded sources.


The fact is, he was no more trying to save the union than he was trying to free the slaves. He (and many, many Republican cronies) like Hamilton before him, wanted to create a national state. i.e. a nation.


How irony raises its fortuitous head from time to time? Abe Lincoln was assigned the label "Honest" Abe. However, when digging into history and available primary sources reveal the guy as a notorious liar and charlatan. If Lincoln lived today, he would be in bed with the Clintons (at least one of them) when it came to honesty. Alas, Lincoln's reputation remains largely untainted by those who worship the faux pas of some rotted theory of national conservatism.


But another historical faux pas (of the many) that seems a lesser light of historical fiction is about a man who was president but had a more honorable reputation. Though, sadly influenced by the liar, Alexander Hamilton.


George Washington never (contrary to modern legend) had offers to be king. The myth is that he was so well respected that a crown was offered to him. There was also a myth cultivated due to his honest character: That is, he did not lie. The myth was the one most everyone has heard: he cut down a cherry tree, then fessed up when asked. But neither tale - crown offering or cherry-tree-chopping - was true about Washington. However, most historians have recorded him as a man of integrity.
​

So it is that good tales are created about someone who has a good reputation for honesty. At least most of the time. But the “creation” is not a fact. It is just supposedly true.


But the real historian is like a prospector—always digging, always sifting facts from rumor and/or legend. The primary or original source (I am not a historian, but am a history student), or as close to it as one can get to begin a study is the best beginning. From the beginning of whatever historical-to-present goal is sought the trail is like the trail of evidence in a crime. That is to say that great danger can come to the truth if the trail is broken. All of the evidence may not be available, but all that is should be examined. Therefore, the trail route (the history) can be surmised with a given degree of accuracy.
​

Around us, primarily through online chatter, social media, and the monster maniacal media of television fame are those historian-labeled personalities, many who are promoted (many by self) as PhDs of some grandiloquent history department of “XYZ” university - blah, blah, blah. These types and their schools are worthy of the aforementioned climate change students. Many (most?) of the media-type historians are just airbags who get a nice paycheck.


Or there are the puffed-up Twitter et chirps who glorify themselves in some modern cloak of Thucydides such as the “spit and damn” clownish Kevin Levin (as just one example) who tops out as a racist of the first liberal order. No? His mentions of historical studies and insights of the American War Between the States are the typical Yankee sighting and portraying of the American South with its blacks as simple-minded toadies following “Massuh-Cotton-Man” to every beat of the drum because he (the black man) cannot, or even conceivably learn for himself.


Meanwhile, looming elections of great importance are nigh, and even if there is an explosive so-called Reagan Revolution or contemporarily a red wave, no histrionic magic can make fact fiction, nor vice versa.


This is the problem with the red wave, for those who seem to think that it is a robust rekindling of something called federalism. No, it is not. It is simply the other side of a unitary coin, red on one side and blue on the other. The reds don't know or don't care (either is a possibility, and both a consideration) about federalism. If they did, they would not spout off constantly about their hero Abraham Lincoln and his weaker forerunner Alexander Hamilton. These two draughts of politics and statist standards are the red guys (not necessarily conservatives), the original wolves in sheep’s clothing to any honest concept of federalism. Hamilton, a New York immigrant, spoke one way at the Philadelphia Convention, and a different way when reporting back to his New York delegation. He lied often. Possibly this was what Lincoln found as a trait in common with Hamilton. They both were notorious liars.


The “Federalists Papers” are a defensive rupture of federalism; THAT IS. THEY ARE A SUBTLE DEFENSE OF NATIONALISM, NOT FEDERALISM. A better bet, FOR HISTORIOGRAPHY, if you can find them are the Anti-Federalist Papers. These are scattered in publication, but delve at length into the things Patrick Henry probably concerned himself with when he refused to attend the Philadelphia convention with his infamous: "I smell a rat," rebuff. Think of Lincoln’s “new nation” as a stinking rat (if you are a conservative).


But not to worry, we have been saved from our corrupt past of a voluntary federal system and have come scarred and skinned by an anti-federal and ill-called “Civil War” into the 20th and 21st centuries safe in what both contemporary red and blues call “our democracy.”


This is blue territory. Nationalism and Democracy are their game.


That is of course the “democracy” that has given us most of that which God would not give: A central government with control over all aspects of life; an eternal number of wars, including two that were happily (or somberly) called WORLD WARS; men who are women, women who are men; children who are designated sex toys by their teachers and approved by their parents—who probably thought abortion would be legal until the child reached 18—so plenty of time to get some fun out of the kid before killing him. Old enough to fight, old enough to be aborted.


These people care no more about federalism than did Hobbes or Rousseau and a whole bunch of others, who saw little in man’s locale and locality, down to a single soul, but greater in the state of the state as his god.


"The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution. The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. By conquest or purchase, the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the States, and, in fact, it created them as States." - Abraham Lincoln--July 4th, 1861


“It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.” (Emphasis added) President Ronald Reagan --120 years later


What happened to Reagan? He had too many “reds” whose skin was red but whose heart was blue.


What happened to Donald Trump? He had too many “reds” whose skin was red but whose heart was blue.


What happened to Abraham Lincoln? He had too many people who believed him to be honest.


Many conservatives (as those who voted for Reagan) knew the Cheney-type-timbre was lurking in the dark socialistic political shadows long, long before January 6, 2022.


But the key to elections and politics is history. Not the banal blathering splattered by most media types, too many talk-show chatterers, and enumerable university wags.


History, where the proof is in the facts. Where the future forms in one way or the other.

When the color comes into view then pain abates,
Thorns first felt then tremble of the splendid femme.
Only then does nature avail such horrid fates of them.
Oh, holy rose with beauty yours do you attack flesh touch.
See the flinching form away to react to you as much.

Red is beauty, far in awe always viewed upon;
Forever charm, always sheathed for prickly tear,
It brightens hearts and stabs at flesh wholly without a care.
But delightful forever, draws upon the scenic view;
Though none resist the artful portrait of its pleasing hue.

Peach thy appreciates the lavish sea of life.
The bloom is God’s corsage, for a brooch we see.
Is it not the time of life all saved now for you and me.
The blend of fruit and tasty pulp though it finally ends,
It is a way forever ours and always will begin.

The yellow joy of eternity fills my soul.
We laugh and cry for each day we want as now.
Never trust the final joy of life, as we love our vow.
Grand is the stint so given us while bending present here;
Today’s future we claim is ours and never do we fear.

Black thy rose, apocalypse raining onto dark.
We know the specter’s fire will breathe life’s spell;
And always at a front, thy gate, we see the beast of hell.
Its prophesy lain by our flesh that takes for us a breath.
We’ve stopped and waited at the door, of that we so-call death.

Oh, glorious white save glory, and glory more;
That bright white rose, purity of our new life,
Not ever do we worry as God has removed all strife.
White is now, because we knew that from God’s throne we were fed;
The pledge for our new beginning: white will be born of red.

The numerous declarations among “right-wing” websites, blogs, and print publications usually present a conundrum of any given thoughts among them. It is like a string of firecrackers exploding. They are necessarily lighted in sequence but seem to sound in explosive randomness.


Afghanistan a catastrophe? Of, course. What do you expect? That is if you are a conservative, what do you expect? That is if you are a Jeffersonian republican, which is what a conservative is. It is not Fox News or Prager U. or Mark Levin screaming “You stupid idiot!.” Nor is it any of those pseudo-enlightened anti-Southern beeswax babblers of childish historical elaborations that are publicized as “on the right.”


But being “right-wing” doesn’t necessarily mean being right. It just means being not “left.”


Jefferson advised the United States to seek the friendship of all nations but enter into “entangling alliances” with none.


Even before Jefferson, in his farewell address, George Washington had admonished the republic to beware of “entangling alliances.”


The “anti-Southern” line above is obligatory herein simply because the South always tried to maintain the republic and the North wanted to mutate Jeffersonianism into the Hamiltonian-Lincolnian (Fox News) national state painted as a (ghastly) democracy. The “Southern line” line itself divides true conservatives from the rest of the political pact—left, right or other. This Hamiltonian-Lincolnian mystique is (and always has been) the Republican party; NOT Jeffersonianism.


Historically it certainly isn’t the histrionic grift of the likes of Victor Davis Hanson or Newt Gingrich. Often the two sound as if their primary source is Brian Kilmeade or Sean Hannity (more comedic less grift). Listening to Davis and Gingrich, petty pirates of history is like having poison Ivy on the brain. You can only grimace because you can’t reach inside and scratch. It is like watching T.V. “news” for news — good luck! You might wonder how people can be paid so much to say so little. A better waste of time would be to watch the Olympics or the NBA.


From the birth and period of the Jeffersonianism republic, 1787 until 1860 no more prosperous country on earth existed on earth. A republican union.


So bright a light that Switzerland adopted, and has kept until this day, possibly, the most prosperous and secure country on earth, per capita. One where its central government cannot pass an original tax.  Only the sovereignty of the people in their cantons (states) can authorize taxes, And at that only for a predetermined time by the cantons. And there is no national bank to print money for unconstitutional twenty-year wars. This they copied from the Jeffersonians (conservatives).


Switzerland, fortunately, has had no Lincoln or Hamilton. They have stayed true to the pure republican faith.


A summary of thought from the Southern Jeffersonian republican mind, as currently running among the media, is that the 1776 project is as preposterous as CRT. Both are the mental magic of comic book historians. A contemporary analogy would be that these two “studies” are as sound as today’s medical minds demanding people wear masks to prevent disease transmission or people should be vaccinated even at gunpoint. The comparison is not a light one. When Jeffersonian Conservatism died—YES, in 1865– the central government beast became the Grendel to every aspect of life in the new “nation.”


Sadly, all the potential Beowulfs were disarmed at Appomattox.


The central government (“federal” is a pitiful misnomer writ large) can do what it wants—anywhere from Washington to Afghanistan.  But, not to worry, each area has an equal opportunity hostage plan.


Congress? Good grief, grow up. We have a “democracy.” Ask Fancy Nancy about that. Or even the prince of the Southerners (bigots all, of course) Mitch McConnell.  These two money-makers in congress are only jokers from a deck of 535.  Then read the Ox-Bow Incident for your homeschooling on “democracy.”


Trash thinking like CRT and erroneous historical lies like Project 1776 (Lincoln was not “Honest” Abe) are merely symptoms of a government that can launch twenty-year wars, lose and cripple lives of young men (and sadly even women). It can give over assets and in the end, forge a so-called “Commander-in-Chief” from a necessarily (and clearly) corrupt “democratic” process.


But who will listen to such bigotry? Jefferson, like most Southerners, was a racist, we are told by the media and today’s political gods. Such bigotry can only come from the seeds of Southerners whose DNA is mapped in slavery.


As the pretty boys and girls of the political classless and sophomoric call, it—“The Original Sin”—apparently only the South had a hand’s touch on the mark of slavery!  No group of people in any hemisphere black, white, red, or yellow at any time EVER touched the “racist” idol of slavery, except the American South.


Statues and flags down South are only on display.  We do not worship idols. They exist in our hearts.  They will never be hidden from our souls.


They represent the Jeffersonian republic. And you non-Jeffersonians keep pretending that you can correct problems like Afghanistan that you created in the first place.


One day you can build statues of the three amigos, Milley, Austin, and Biden to replace Robert E. Lee, Christian soldier.


Put on your masks, stick needles in your arms. Do as you are told—just like they do in Afghanistan–catastrophe that it is.


​Hell, you even surrendered at Appomattox and you don’t even see it.

“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour (sic).” T.S. Eliot


“For a long time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.” T.S. Eliot


The above-italicized narrative is an excerpt from Mississippi Cotton, my first novel. Though fiction (it is a novel), the words flowed easily when I wrote it because they were real to me growing up in the South with memories of family and friends–those who held tradition and culture and memories AND memorials high. The setting above is one of a Southern family and home and the strength in it is the muscle of tradition and the bloodline of culture.


The story takes place in 1951. It wasn’t the “machine” tractor that was important and celebrated because of the industrial progress it represented, over the mule and plow, in producing more efficiently, cotton. Machines don’t excite Southern memories (except maybe a hopped-up Chevy and Junior Johnson outrunning revenuers). It is, that the tractor still plowed what the manual plow once plowed–the land. The South is always about tradition and culture, not new industries and machines and i-phones and robotic devices. And its home was there because the land was there.


The land then, nor now, was/is not worshiped. Unlike the ancients in the old world, the South did not make a God of the land and erect statues to worship. The South worshipped God and gave thanks for His gift of the land.


In each of Eliot’s quotes above, he speaks of “great labor” as a function of tradition and a “permanent condition” where God has allowed us to live on the land of the earth as part of our culture.


Stories are like poems—it isn’t in choosing important words but in the choosing of important feelings that come from memories of culture—and traditions.


If you read well-known Southern story writers like Faulkner, O’Connor, or Welty (just three of a multitude), you can sense on the pages of script their almost osmotic planting of tradition and culture into your mind because those two vein-like flowing-fixtures have passed through from generation to generation in the blood. It is something that Southerners have known from their roots forward onto their continuous growth to the wonderful bloom of a culture with strong traditions.


Even when the bloom suffers a diseased blight, not unlike a strong and beautiful oak that has been etched and torn by some rare botanical disease, the malady itself a simile for the evil disease of Yankee invasion with its warring monsters and their grim murder, rape and looting; or the Southerner’s own blights portrayed through writers like Faulkner, O’Connor or Welty– Sometimes it is kind, sometimes harsh, but always from the blood and its source, the heart.


Narcissistic Yankees have never seen our land as supporting a culture with great traditions. They have always seen it as a land of which they deserved the fruits of labor and that which they could gain through pitting black and whites against one another.


Probably they have never known or would care, if they had known, that blacks and whites alike, after plowing the fields, often together, chopped, hoed, and picked cotton, often side-by-side.


Unlike cheap narcissistic Yankees who worship industrial might and revolt against culture and tradition, Southerners worship a God who nourishes them because they are grateful for the land. And regardless of their sins (see Faulkner, O’Connor, and Welty) Southerners replenish the land with a proud tradition, within a wonderful culture.


It is a race to the finish line. The South is still in the race. My money is on it to win. But it, for certain (nor I), will never quit. Lee did not quit. He only wanted not to shed more blood in a (not lost) weakened and wounded cause. Lee et al., surrendered their armies, not their culture and traditions, nor their Southern soul.


“Shake off those gloomy feelings. Drive them away. Fix your mind and pleasures upon what is before you. All is bright if you will think it so. All is happy if you will make it so. Do not dream. It is too ideal, too imaginary. Dreaming by day, I mean. Live in the world you inhabit. Look upon things as they are. Take them as you find them. Make the best of them. Turn them to your advantage.” ― Robert E. Lee


​As long as there is land there will be Southerners—with traditions and with a culture.

The river gave up manifold jetsam: roots, silt, limbs and a number of dead fish; and human flotsam: beer bottles, food wrappers and an occasional automobile license plate. Yesterday, under the Greenville bridge, it gave up a body.


The Mississippi river basin is the second largest in the world, covering almost 2 million square miles. Its watershed encompasses almost forty percent of the lower 48 states.


Along its length of over 2300 miles is a marked path: areas, regions, neighborhoods and homes, all with indigenous qualities born of some function of the river with its strength and power and sometimes gentleness: like a midwife allowing new birth. But as it gives life, it takes life. For it could also be a monster, as in the 1927 flood. But death is the beginning of life as life is the beginning of death, and all floods create a full cycle, from washing away to leaving behind the rich sediments that build the areas, regions, etc.


One such area, the Delta, spread across three states: Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, and though geologically unspecific, the area is truly an alluvial plane, the river has adopted the area as a child of a true delta, and the richness of life it brings. The Mississippi region of this area is the Mississippi Delta. One writer has described the Mississippi Delta as: “Beginning in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ending on catfish row in Vicksburg”: Clever prose for a subjective standard.


Bounded geographically on the east by the Yazoo River and the west by the Mississippi, the region has been cleared, farmed, invaded, fought over in THE WAR, and farmed again. Originally occupied by Indian tribes living in swaps and marshes the Delta was cleared by pioneers and made due for farming from its fertile envelope.


​Central African Negroes, enslaved by West Africans, sold to and transported by English and New England slave traders to the New World, were purchased by Carribean and South American planters as CHATTEL instruments to be worked until dead; in the Southern American colonies, as PEOPLE for labor. Before The War white and black worked side by side, free and slave, master and servant. After The War white and black worked side by side, free and free, together and apart, THE NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM imbued a bitterness brought by Northern cruelty with its imposed BLACK CODES and RECONSTRUCTION.

When I was a young boy, circa six or seven, there were no monstrous interstate highways slashing across the land. The land was beautiful, or as I probably thought, at the time, natural. Interstate highways are about as natural as was Sherman’s march through Georgia. They are federal (Yankee) spending, creating great slashes through private property (eminent domain is Grendel; destroying and destroying and destroying).
​

My grandmother and mother were in the front seat of my grandmother’s 1948 Chevrolet with my mother at the wheel while my brother and I were in the back seat. For some reason they had to take a trip to Vicksburg from Jackson, a trip of about 50 miles. It was not my first trip to Vicksburg but one of my most memorable.
With the single two-lane Highway 80 as our track, it was probably something over an hour before we reached our destination, Vicksburg. I have no memory of why we were going, although at my age I only knew we were in fact going and with the windows down due to no air conditioning, it was fun for my brother and me flying along at 60mph.


It was probably the second longest trip I had ever made as far as distance. Other trips had been in the other direction (eastward) from Jackson to Hickory or Meridian, about75- 90 miles from Jackson. But never had I left Mississippi.


As we approached, the view of the city revealed why the people of Mississippi referred to it as the “Hill City.” It was built on a series of bluffs in and around the river. These bluffs were instrumental in Pemberton’s defense in 1863 against the bearded arsonist U.S. Grant. But almost a hundred years later these same bluffs had become lush with the Japanese plant Kudzu (another story for another day) and were shaded and more peaceful. Back in 1942 we had begun celebrating July 4 again, which had been another celebratory and proper move of secession. For any Yankee who reads (or can) Mississippi had more awards per capita for Medals of Honor in WWII than any other state. But back to the trip.


My brother and I sat in the back seat and had fun just observing the countryside or having a counting game we had created: we counted cows as we sped along, he counted the cows on one side and I counted those on the other. I usually won since we were on the honor system. At the end of the trips he would say “I got 78…” or some such number; I would respond with “I got 937.” My mother would give me the look of: Don’t lie even when you are playing.


But today we were going to Vicksburg and whatever reasons my mother and grandmother had, we would get to see the Mississippi River—one of the great wonders of the world—especially the Southern world. You didn’t have to actually cross it to see it from either the Mississippi side or the Louisiana side, as on the Mississippi side there was a road that carried you along and not too far from the east bank. You could, as well, I assumed, get a similar view from the Louisiana side up close to the west bank although there was no sizeable town like Vicksburg just across the river. And I had never been there since I had never left Mississippi.


Whatever year we were in, ’50,’51… was a year where money was valuable enough that people kept coin purses and anybody with a nickel, or dime, quarter or for goodness sakes a fifty cent (half a dollar) piece has some real money. Money was so valuable that we turned the lights out when we left a room (I still do). And you can be sure that my grandmother and mother coming through The Depression, one raising; the other being raised, knew the value of whatever their coin purse held. Financial frivolities were as scarce as three-legged ducks.


On our previous trips to Vicksburg, we had seen the river and one of the main attractions—the Mississippi River Bridge. It was a two-lane toll bridge and the toll in that period was probably around 50 cents. Although I wouldn’t have used the word at the time, it was a MAGNIFICENT sight. The first bridge built across the Mississippi River south of Memphis (eat your heart out New Orleans).


After driving into Vicksburg and getting their business done (whatever it was) My mother and grandmother proceeded to drive along the river road and my brother and I viewed in awe the great river, the Father of Waters, and our home was the single state that carried its name, Mississippi.


When my grandmother turned around to face her two grandsons in the backseat and asked the question: “Would you boys like to drive across the bridge and go into Louisiana?” It was like getting an early invitation to the State Fair or an offer to get a ride with one of the local crop dusters. We both smiled while silently screaming. Crossing the Mississippi River and entering another state for the first time. Somebody was going to have to open their coin purse!


It was the greatest experience I had had up until that moment of my six or seven years (or whatever I was). And as we crossed, I couldn’t help thinking that we would get a second crossing (and second toll of course) since I was sure we weren’t moving to Louisiana anytime soon.


I don’t know how big the town of Mound, Louisiana was back in the early fifties but it dang sure wasn’t as big as Vicksburg. Mound-- the first town in Louisiana after you had crossed the river. Today it is listed in Louisiana as the smallest “village” in Louisiana with a population of 12.


But back then it did have a gas station (filling station) and a small store adjoining it. My mother and grandmother pulled in and bought gasoline (in addition to the toll coming and going, there was additional gas to be paid for by going the extra miles away from Jackson). Suddenly! as by miracle, my brother and I were asked if we wanted to eat some snacks-for-dinner from the wares of the store. Had money become no object? Hardly, but if God had decided to erect a Hog Heaven that day he had made my mother and grandmother the chief engineers.


I don’t recall what? Charlie, my brother, got but I got a Moon Pie and a bag of potato chips. In addition, we both got Royal Crown Colas—RCs. The big bottle drink that had more ounces than a Coca Cola.


What had started as a hour or two trip to and from Vicksburg had become a vacation.


Due to my age and my skills at description, it would have been difficult at the time to be able to describe the view of this greatest of rivers. But the vision I saw that day was wonderous and today I say that, though I have never seen the Nile nor the Amazon nor any of the “great” rivers of our planet, none will ever match the one named for my home. Its width, its dark brown coloring its grand beauty its crowned sovereignty nor what President Jefferson Davis referred to when he had said:


“Vicksburg is the nailhead (sic) that holds the two halves of the South together,” can ever be matched.


As you get older it seems that things do seem smaller as you return to visit them. But as they say, “It is the exception that guarantees the rule.” I have crossed the river many, many times since that day many decades ago and The Mississippi River only grows grander and larger in my eyes.


As we crossed back, I thought of my friends I would see back in Jackson in the neighborhood and in school. To some of them, money was less of an obstacle. Some of them had been to exotic places like Biloxi or even over to Florida and Panama City. I even knew one boy and girl whose family had been to Canada and had seen Niagara Falls.


But I had been out of the state on a trip. I had been across the greatest river in the world. And I had been to Mound, Louisiana. I sat on the back seat and thought about what a great trip I had had and would tell others about. Dang! I was happy.
​
And add God’s wisdom: The River always flows South.


I had finished my Moon Pie and potato chips. But I still held my now half-filled R.C. in both hands. I would make it last. And it did.

The single star in a winter night of spangled sky
Drawing over the hill, oblique to the east.
Pointing to the landed infant king,
Begetting all, liberation from sin’s dark beast.


Sage travelers pass gifts to God in flesh,
Holy gifting in piety for such eternal life.
From afar they carried their bearing
To set before the Lord who shuns world’s strife.


Docile men of the fields shepherding their cares.
Alerted by light and chorus’ great voice,
Expended fear now brings such blessings,
Through angels’ strong cry that they are God’s choice.


A young girl selected as Heaven’s spiritual womb.
The lineage of David, though seed of God’s story,
Brings Himself into the world of His creation;
And manifests salvation through a crimson glory.


Oh, Herod from his vaporous throne calls for blood
Of those innocent ones feared threatening that haunted fox.
His tortured heart bleeds his dark soul dry unto dust
While declaring power over God’s chosen flocks


Sweeping lights from Heaven for scholars, father;
On purity of mother and safety afar of manger bed,
And to the wisest of those travelers who trusted King.
Sought a path not known to Herod’s dread


Oh… Adeste Fidelis

​Mary Fahl sang the beautiful song, “Going Home,” for the movie Gods and Generals. Such lyrics and tune that reached into my Southern psyche as to remind me of what the fight was all about.

I often treat books in a way I treat old, favorite, movies (picture shows) that I watch over and over, over the years, I reread them. I have read Gone with the Wind twice, None Shall Look Back twice and Absalom, Absalom three times (for this one it was because I am slow and it took me three times to understand it: once in high school, once in college and once twenty years later). I have read (though when I was much younger) The Yearling and Tom Sawyer each, at least, three times, though I read Huckleberry Finn but once--didn’t care for it.

​
I have also read The Catcher in the Rye twice. I read it when I was in my teens, about the age of Holden Caufield, the protagonist, and though I found it humorous at the time I, moreover, pitied him for the New York home he seemed to have either never had, or had lost. Prep school was not home schooling.

All of this is to make a point: A contemporary author whose books I have read more than once, Dr. James Everett Kibler, writes keenly on home and the rich meaning of it. My only regret is he has not written more of them.


I love the topic, the settings, the characters and the stories. Dr. Kibler’s books are (in my opinion) poetic treatments of prose, all such that anyone who loves his own home understands that home is a place of seclusion and contentment. Even in homes, which probably includes all of them, where there is, or has been, from time to time boisterousness or anger and perhaps even regret and shame there usually is a grace that generates peace and love through family. It is a place to fight, and even die, for. Concrete and speeding cars and fast (fat) food restaurants are not a place of home nativity. The personification of the interstate highway system is a psychotic domestic executioner.

In one of Dr. Kibler’s novels, Walking Toward Home, one line which I have quoted elsewhere as it is a favorite of mine, a character by the name of Kildee says: “Guess the best thing dirt roads do…is they slow people down. The world’s too much in a hurry, and usually with no place to go. Everything flies by in a blur. And people get to where they don’t belong anywhere and ain’t from no place at all.”


Dirt roads take you home. Interstate highways take you to traffic jams.


Interstate highways take away land which were places for homes once, and fields of cotton and corn. Now fields grow corn for ethanol for cars so more freeways will be needed to take away more fields for corn. . . what?


It has often been acknowledged that the North was (and still is) the navigation society, the South the (and still is) agrarian society. From Memory’s Keep alluding to what Triggerfoot would have thought, had he been aware of Thomas a’kempis’ words: “‘Those who travel seldom come home holy.’” Holden Caufield did not, nor did Yankee commercial ships. Travelers necessarily leave their homes, and with it, part of their souls.


To my home in Houston, I much prefer visiting my son and his wife in NE Louisiana where he lives in a house in the woods surrounded by more woods with neighbors, few, but themselves lovers of the land and the homes that are part of them.


I sit out on his front porch in a rocking chair (I bought him three so I would have one to sit, rock and smoke my pipe in) an awning of trees shading while providing for jay birds, red birds, occasional tapping woodpeckers and the melodic mockingbird once in a while, with his three dogs alternately sleeping and watching me watch them, then occasionally bolting and chasing after a squirrel or a rabbit taking a shortcut. If early or late enough a deer prances by probably sourcing the pond in the back.

​
It was this part of the South where my wife was born and reared before we married and became Houstonians. Her roots Louisiana, mine deep in the Mississippi earth. Our son loved this area of Louisiana so much he left the concrete city for this piece of land and dirt and gravel roads. It reminds me of Triggerfoot’s thought of the young grandson of Mr. Pink, Eugene, again in Memory’s Keep:
​

I brought her home last year and I buried her in the Southern Louisiana soil of her birth. One day I will again lie beside her, our markers traditionally facing east. Not only will we be facing the rising sun, we will be facing Mississippi. We both will be smiling, for where we are and what we see.


​At some point in my youth, I was called upon to memorize a poem, Requiem, by Robert Louis Stevenson. It has locked itself in my memory forward until now.

There was a little dog down the street from us named Streety. My brother and I hadn’t got our own dog yet; that was five or six months in the future. So, we had adopted Streety as our own–though many in the neighborhood had done the same. He belonged to an elderly gentleman (I think he was about 80, though as a six-year-old, it was difficult to guess ages) down the street named Mr. Worley. My mother said Mr. Worley’s wife had died the day after I was born and Mr. Worley had taken Streety in shortly afterwards.


Streety was all over the neighborhood, a friend to all, a large mutt of mixed ancestry. All of this was typical of small town Southern life. Not that Yankees didn’t have small towns, dogs or friends, but they weren’t stranger oriented, as they were more interested in what you did (money) as opposed to where you were from (family). Besides, Yankees don’t love dogs as much as they prefer to kick them. But I’m a bit away from the story.


Streety was friendly and dirty: both most of the time. He loved the drainage ditches in front of the houses and when it rained he was in Hog Heaven. Often in the summer we would join him in the water-swept ditches, attempting to ride on his back (his mixed ancestry had some big dog in him) down to the end of the street where the ditch emptied. A day later after the water subsided we would spot Streety back in the ditch, enjoying the mud—this was from Hog Heaven to Pig-in-Slop. My mother allowed us the first but not the second, though she had, in a minor way, adopted Streety, too.


Streety sure loved Mr. Worley. We often saw Mr. Worley walk out onto his front porch and spread his arms as Streety bolted toward him, his front paws landing on the top of Mr. Worleys shoulders. Mr. Worley would turn his head to one side in order to avoid the face-on-slurp and lick. After a moment, Mr. Worley would sit in his chair and Streety would gather his 90 pounds or so at his feet, content just to be there, while Mr. Worley smoked his corn cob pipe. He was the only man I ever actually saw smoke a corn cob pipe in person.


Streety was so friendly and could size people up quickly that our neighborhood mailman actually brought Streety treats from time to time. Often Streety followed the mailman on his rounds, as if he were protecting him from some growling stray that might be about.


One day Streety was killed. A truck driver speeding down one of the neighborhood streets hit him broadside. He lay there bleeding from the mouth, his crumpled body twitching. But my friends and I knew the twitching was not a sign of life but of the end. We cried as much for Mr. Worley as for Streety I think. Mr. Worley walked slowly toward the street, his deliberate steps a sign he too knew Streety would never stand or run again. And we saw Mr. Worley rub his eye with the back of his hand. It was the first time I had seen a man cry.


As I got older I was to look back and remind myself that this was something coming to the South that would change its character to some extent. Cars and trucks racing through neighborhoods was not localism, not Southern.


I don’t know why, but though I saw Mr. Worley on the porch after that, I never again saw him smoke his pipe. My mother said that maybe he had quit smoking.


​I thought maybe he had just quit.

I love that old refrain. Of place
That wreathes with eternal song;
That suckles those whose love is
Of the South.
Oh, Dixie land

Where the deep-rooted ages
Are begot to memory in such view.
“Away, away” its chorus cries,
And cries its name,
Oh, Dixie land

Where God placed pastoral grips
Of His children enriched in spirit;
Heeding masculine pleas with code,
And all same, toil for His will.
Oh, Dixie Land

Existing from the flow of water
That clears or browns from
The reaches of the mountains,
Unto its deltas wide.
Oh, Dixie land

It brings rich dreams to us.
Those men of soil and life for
Their ladies strong of heart and mind;
Whose feminine manners reach out,
Oh, Dixie land

Though Yankee hymns, craven shameless
Lyrics cry for blood to flood the land;
And bury the blissful times
Of those whose home was sacred.
Oh, Dixie land

Its knights brave and dashing;
All did climb those bloody walls,
And waged and sang the final song,
To eternity; yes,
Oh, Dixie land

It is a love, a love and love,
That takes my mind to heights
Before unknown but to God;
And stirs my thoughts.
Oh, Dixie land

It lets me sleep with fertile dreams
Of the people and their world;
Such a place claims Injun Batter,
And Buckwheat cakes, too.
Oh, Dixie land

It can cry, while its tears softly run.
From folk: set to work, raised by prayer;
And strong of mind and spine, and
Always their souls to be lifted up.
Oh, Dixie Land

Of haranguing Yankees’ jealousies
My love will not be slaked;
That love but grows protecting itself,
While we stood; now stand, against such evil bent.
Oh, Dixie land

Oh Lord I love the life down wherein
It breathes from unlike chests.
But all and all molded as Southern,
And never, never will we annul.
Oh, Dixie land

It flies its flag within its heart.
And hears that Rebel’s cry-- brave shout,
In spite of those who hate
This valiant land of love and hope.
Oh, Dixie land

I love old Dixie. My home.
Love holds the well of dreams; wherefore
All mystic visions are special,
And are in God’s eyes, ascended splendor.
Oh, Dixie land.