On Joaquin Murieta, Race, and Cult Movies

The Sonoran outlaw, Joaquin Murieta is one of those historical figures who was a real person but whose factual existence has been so clouded by myth that now he’s more literary than historical. Of course, this isn’t much of a problem for us in the world of literature. After all, even historical figures have a literary equivalent, a version of themselves that signify some greater, larger abstract ideas. Sure, there might be a historical Lincoln, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also have our own badass, vampire-killin’ version of Honest Abe as well. Interesting enough, it was the Native American author, John Rollin Ridge, who wrote the ur-text of the Murieta mythos, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, which also happens to be the first novel written by a Native American.

Ridge (whose Cherokee name was Yellow Bird) lived an interesting life, almost interesting enough to compete with his most famous literary work. Ridge was the son of John Ridge and grandson of Major Ridge, leaders of a group of Cherokee who, prior to the forced removal from Cherokee lands, struck a deal with the U.S. government, known as the Treaty of New Echota, that would cede Cherokee lands in exchange for compensation. Understandably, this was an unpopular position among the Cherokee, but you can see the logic behind the Treaty Party’s position. They felt that removal was inevitable, so they wanted to strike the best deal possible.

Many other Cherokee saw these actions as a betrayal, and after enduring the Trail of Tears and removal to Indian Territory in the West, many of the leaders of the Treaty Party were assassinated, including Ridge’s father and grandfather, John Ridge and Major Ridge.

Ridge eventually made his way to California during the gold rush, but unsatisfied with mining turned towards writing as his trade, eventually writing a highly fictionalized version of the exploits of Joaquin Murieta. Joaquin Murieta: The Novel is a fascinating, contradictory, and often shockingly violent story. Throughout, however, it’s infused with real feelings of love, anger, and betrayal. Arguably, the object of love and hate is the United States herself.

Early on, Ridge establishes that the story of Murieta is not singular; it’s the story of circumstances: 

The character of this truly wonderful man was nothing more than a natural production of the social and moral condition in which he lived, acting upon certain peculiar circumstances favorable to such a result, and, consequently, his individual history is part of the most valuable history of the State. (7)

Here and elsewhere you can feel Ridge working out his complex feelings about the nation on the page. Murieta is a dashing outlaw, a good man turned to do bad things, a victim of circumstances. 

In their heyday, the Ridge family were wealthy Cherokee elites who held positions of power and esteem. The Cherokee themselves were a part of the five civilized tribes, which meant they adopted a number of white customs, in part strategically assimilating as a means to protect their rights from white settlers. In fact, the Ridges even owned slaves. If things had gone differently, if his family hadn’t signed the Treaty of New Echota, then he too may have become an important leader among the Cherokee people. In part, the Ridges achieved their positions of prominence because they were able to deftly navigate both white and native worlds, acculturating when it was advantageous. 

It’s not hard to see a bit of Ridge in Murieta as he immigrated to California “fired with enthusiastic admiration of the American character” (8). But this enthusiasm is soon dashed. After much initial success in mining, Americans jealous of his success violently beat him, tie him up, and then rape his wife in front of him. Murieta continues to mine for gold, chasing his initial success, only to be attacked by Americans once again. (Usually, these sorts of tales only require one violent inciting incident, but Ridge has Murieta victimized a second time). This time whites accuse him of being a horse thief, tie him up and whip him, and then go to his half-brother’s house and hang him. 

Naturally, after enduring this sort of violence, Murieta forms a band of robbers. California during the gold rush was a multicultural place, and whites established laws that prevented non-whites from competing in the gold mining craze, including the 1850 Foreign Miners’ Tax Law, which had the intent of making it nearly impossible for people of color to compete with whites in the gold rush by establishing a cumbersome bureaucracy and taxes that applied only to “foreigners.” 

Despite the violence he endured, Murieta is the consummate gentleman thief. He occasionally prefers to let people go rather than murder them, and when his enemies get the best of him, he often laughs it off. When Murieta and his men are betrayed by seemingly friendly Tejon Indians, he eventually “burst out into a loud laugh at his ridiculous position, and ever afterwards endured his captivity with a quiet smile” (38). 

Interesting enough, during Murieta’s time as the captive of the Tejon Indians, Ridge paints a largely unflattering portrait the Tejon people. Although, they are some of the few people who can win one over on Murieta, they’re also described as “poor,” “miserable,” and “cowardly.” Presumably, as a partially acculturated member of one of the “civilized” tribes, Ridge sees himself and the Cherokee in general as superior to the Tejon. His somewhat unkind portrayal of California Indians may also be a way for him to distance himself from “those Indians.”

Ridge seems unable to fully identify with California Native Americans, but this isn’t the only strange, tangled relationship the novel has with race. While Murieta can take a joke and lose a few battles without losing his sense of humor, his chief lieutenant, Three Finger Jack can’t. In fact, he’s shockingly bloodthirsty, especially when it comes to killing Chinese: “ ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I can’t help it; but, somehow or other, I love to smell the blood of a Chinaman. Besides, it’s such easy work to kill them. It’s a kind of luxury to cut their throats’” (64). And here is the crux of Joaquin Murieta’s weird relationship with race: Murieta is both a victim of racialized violence while his gang is simultaneously a perpetrator of racialized violence.

If we were to map Ridge’s psyche onto his text, then surely Three Finger Jack would be the id to Murieta’s ego. The astute gentleman thief of Murieta surely represents how Ridge, an educated man descended from a once powerful family, sees himself. But within Three Finger Jack, Ridge can arguably release his unfettered rage, lashing out at white racists and Chinese settlers alike. 

Even though Ridge is the first Native American to write a novel, like many nineteenth-century authors, he doesn’t fit nicely into our modern conception of how a minority author is supposed to tackle issues of race and colonialism. We don’t expect denunciations of white colonial racism to sit side by side with leering depictions of violence against immigrants, which is one of the reasons why the text is so valuable as an object of study and analysis. Not all minority authors could be as incredibly ahead of their time as Frederick Douglass.  

Of course, as a son of slave owners, we of course shouldn’t expect racial solidarity from Ridge. But Joaquin Murieta’s anger at injustice and simultaneous rage against innocents reminds me a lot of the cult films of the 70s and 80s, like Repo Man, They Live, A Boy and His Dog, Death Race 2000, and Escape from New York. These are explicitly political films that pummel their targets of with anger and a good bit of irony. Arguably, the politics in these films are mostly liberal, but there’s a not-so-hidden mean streak that runs through all of them. The raw anger of these cult classics is also what drew me to them in my youth, and if I’m being honest, one of the reasons why I return to many of them now that I’m older. 

But like Joaquin Murieta, the target of these movie’s anger often slips, often landing not on Reaganomics or inequality but on women. LIke Ridge’s casual violence towards the Chinese and semi-dismissive portrayal of California Native Americans, misogyny is an unfortunate byproduct of so many cult classics of the late twentieth century. If I would draw a hasty framework connecting a novel from the 1840s and movies from the 1970s and 80s, then I might claim that anger at injustice done to us by society can so easily curdle into anger at other, easier targets. It’s not so difficult to both punch up and down at the same time. Looking at the world around us, where anger is hardly in short supply, this seems like a useful reminder.

On Bringing “The Real World” into the Classroom

Over the last week, it’ been difficult to get the Christchurch shootings out of my head. The sheer scale of that violence and the Islamophobic and xenophobic motivations of the killer make it seem as if could have happened here in the United States. And of course, it speaks to the global reach of alt-right terrorism, which we’ve experienced in droves recently. Just last year there was the Parkland shooting, the Tree of Life shooting, and the Tallahassee yoga studio shooting, each of which was carried out by a violent white male under the influence of right wing demagoguery. (There are so many mass shootings in the U.S. that I had actually forgotten about the one in Tallahassee, perhaps because “only” six people were shot).

After the shooting, I felt compelled to discuss the incident with my students. I’ve long tried to draw connections between what we do in the class with events in the news and on campus, something I was more disciplined about as a graduate student than as an overburdened adjunct. But earlier in the semester I had my students read an essay by Doreen Massey on rethinking space and place, in which she argues, in part, that we must think of places and their meanings as fluid and changing rather than ossified. This of course has implications for how we view the nation and our borders.

Using this essay, I had my students use Massey’s essay to dissect the Vice documentary on the Charlottesville alt-right protests, looking at how space and its meanings are contested and to what purpose. When I heard about the Christchurch shootings, I immediately thought of the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally and the murder of Heather Heyer. However, when I brought up the the Christchurch shooting and asked my students to draw connections, they struggled at first.

There might be a number of reasons for why my student had difficulty connecting the dots between the Unite the Right Rally, Massey, and the Christchurch shooting. First and foremost, we read Massey and watched the Vice documentary all the way at the beginning of the semester, so it was hardly fresh in their minds.

But I wonder how often students are asked to draw conclusions between what’s happening inside the classroom and what’s happening outside the classroom. Testing culture and a fear of inviting controversy can easily hermetically seal the classroom space.

Our discussion ended up moving beyond Massey and veering towards internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube and their responsibility or lack of responsibility for the current resurgence of right-wing violence. Immediately, students fell back on dualistic notions of freedom of expression versus censorship. When I mentioned that social media platforms have censored information since their inception–banning nudity for instance–they weren’t exactly sure what to do with this information. We didn’t come close to solving the problem of right-wing hate and online culpability, but they did start to complicate how we might approach these problems, and at least see that there might be a problem in the first place.

In order to teach well, I have to come to the class ultra-prepared. Other teachers might be able to play the classroom in the same way a jazz player might play his instrument, with a heavy element of improvisation. But I’m just not that teacher. Still, I think this recent class really stressed the importance of drawing connections to classroom discussions and current events.

Students are trained to see the classroom as a series of obstacles they must simply pass to get to the next level. It’s our job to remind them that the issues we discuss in the classroom have very real life or death implications to others. Not only does this bring home the fact that seemingly abstract discussions about space, place, nation, speech, and censorship manifest in the world, but it helps foster the ability to synthesize information and make the kinds of connections we want to see from our students. I know that what we discuss in the classroom is of importance, and I want to make sure my students see that as well.

On Tom Sawyer Abroad and the Accidental Imperialists

Everyone knows about that time Tom Sawyer tricked the neighborhood kids into painting his aunt’s fence for him. Everyone knows about his time hiding out on Jackson Island with his friend Huck Finn and when he made his way out of McDougal’s Cave with his sweetheart Becky. Heck, those who have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could even tell you that Tom Sawyer was there when Huck Finn freed the slave Jim after he is recaptured. Tom Sawyer’s story has been a part of not only the literary canon, but a part of the American tale we tell ourselves. But few know about that one time Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim hopped on a flying machine with a deranged inventor and made their way over to Northern Africa.

It turns out that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not the end of the Tom and Huck saga. Mark Twain completed two other novels focused on his two most famous characters, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective. Twain even attempted to write other adventure tales featuring Tom and Huck, including Huck and Tom Among the Indians, Schoolhouse Hill, and Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy, but none of these were published or even completed in Twain’s lifetime.

There’s a reason why Tom Sawyer Abroad failed to lodge in America’s consciousness: it’s not great. I suppose you could see it as the Solo: A Star Wars Story of the Tom Sawyer series, or Twain’s Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, if you’re being unkind. While the previous Tom and Huck stories weren’t exactly concerned with narrative realism, it does seem odd to see Twain inject some Jules Verne steampunk into the bucolic world of St. Petersburg, Missouri.

Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Abroad is narrated by Huck, and though published about a decade after Huck Finn, it begins almost immediately after the events of the previous novel. The first chapter, “Tom Seeks New Adventures,” which begins with Tom Sawyer deciding that the events of Huck Finn wouldn’t be enough to satiate his curiosity and wanderlust, seems to perfectly describe what was likely Twain’s brainstorming process. As M. Thomas Inge notes in my edition’s afterward, Twain, who got himself into financial trouble towards the end of the nineteenth century, wrote Abroad for “crass commercial purposes.” In other words Twain writing a third novel featuring these characters is kind of like when a movie studio decides that they have some IP that they can squeeze a few bucks from. So I guess this makes Tom Sawyer Abroad the Live Free or Die Hard or the Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or Godfather III of Twain’s oeuvre.

And just like many movie studios of late, Twain had been bitten by the franchise bug. He apparently had plans to ship Huck, Tom, and Jim to other parts of the world in a series of sequels, which never came to be. Judging by the quality of Abroad, this is probably for the better. The main problem is that although Abroad promises lots of hijinks by Tom, Huck, and Jim in Northern Africa, the trio doesn’t really spend much time actually on the ground. Instead, they spend much of the early chapters terrorized by the manic mad inventor of the airship who both seems to have absolute faith in his invention and a streak of misanthropy, and when he plunges to his grizzly death, the three of them are left to figure out what to do now that they’ve somehow wandered across the Atlantic Ocean. But once they reach Africa, they mostly just hang out in the stupid air balloon. There’s no awkward mix up with local customs or getting caught up in the tension between the Berbers and colonizing European powers. No, it’s mostly just Tom, Huck, and Jim observing things from a far and shooting the shit.

On the bright side, the conversation and arguments that the three get into are without a doubt the highlights of the novel. As the most learned of the three, Tom repeatedly tries to represent himself and worldly and authoritative, but he’s almost always rhetorically outmaneuvered by Jim. At one point they consider the implication that fleas are proportionally much stronger than humans, leading them to the horrifying conclusion that if a flea were human-size, then that “flea would be President of the United States, and you couldn’t any more prevent it than you can prevent lightning.”  In these moments, you can feel Twain’s warmth towards his creations, and the book starts to take the shape of an anti-adventure novel, where the characters go halfway around the world just to get into philosophical arguments with one another. Maybe Richard Linklater can do the film adaptation.

It’s worth highlighting the boisterous illustrations, which are admittedly a lot of fun, and interestingly enough they were created by Dan Beard, an early founder of the Boy Scouts of America. 

Tom Sawyer Abroad is uneven at best, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not some interesting work going on here. The novel showcases Twain’s burgeoning anti-imperialist attitudes. Early on, Tom tries to convince his companions to embark on a crusade, but Jim is unsure about the ethics behind this new idea, arguing that if he had a farm and someone wanted it, it wouldn’t be right for them to just take it like the so called crusaders. Apoplectic, Tom rejects Jim’s metaphor outright:

“It ain’t a farm, it’s entirely different. You see, it’s like this. They own the land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”

Tom’s response surely strikes the reader as an inefficient defense of crusades, but it also inaugurates themes of epistemological uncertainty and imperialism. He rejects Jim’s metaphor as a means of knowing how Middle Easterners must have felt about invading Europeans. Throughout the novel the notion of metaphors as a means of knowing comes into play, which in turn affects how the trio see themselves as an invasive force.

Later, after the three have been riding the balloon across America, Huck uses his knowledge of of maps to try and pinpoint exactly where they are. Although they have been riding the balloon for quite some time, Huck’s surprised that they haven’t passed into Indiana yet. When asked why he thinks they haven’t passed Indiana yet, Huck logically observes that while the state of Illinois is green, Indiana is clearly pink. After all, that’s how it’s portrayed on maps he’s seen. Like the metaphor of the farm, Huck is relying on the map as a form of metaphor. It synecdochically stands in for the nation as a whole, but where Jim’s farm metaphor attempts the bridge the distance between Christians and Muslims, the map demonstrates ways in which metaphor can distance us from the reality of the object itself. Color coded states are a helpful shorthand, but they are clearly a fiction.

There’s a running theme of how distance, both figurative and literal, between us and the other becomes difficult to bridge through traditional modes of knowledge production. While reading Tom Sawyer Abroad, I eventually became frustrated by the fact that Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the damn balloon. One of the joys of these globetrotting nineteenth century adventure stories is how our western heroes get to visit new places and cultures. Of course, these cultures are always interpreted through the understanding of the white authors, often in wildly inaccurate and racist ways. But if we’re to look at Abroad as an anti-adventure novel, perhaps this is the point. There’s no uncovering of ancient artifacts from lost civilizations or opportunities to use superior wit to escape capture by the natives. Instead, the three of them much prefer to sit around and jaw with one another just as if the front porches of St. Petersburg, Missouri were transported to the Sahara Desert.

Because Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the balloon, they have a skewed perspective understanding of Africa and its people. It’s telling that Twain borrows the word “aeronaut” from Jules Verne, who he is clearly satirizing, but here he spells it “errornaut” (italics mine).

 To me, this seems to suggest ways in which this new technology allows individuals to more quickly and easily cast about the world while also maintaining a distance from the actual people who live in these “far flung” regions, keeping us just as ignorant as before we left our provincial town. I can’t help but compare the balloon in Abroad with drones sent by the military to places like Northern Africa and the Middle East.

We see both of these issues, the use of metaphor as knowledge-creation and the errornautical view of the world, collide in the chapter, “The Sand-Storm,” where the trio witnesses the destruction of a caravan of nomads violently tossed by a sandstorm. Tom and company were devastated by these deaths and felt like they had lost friends although they never actually met any members of the caravan.

For some time, the trio had followed the caravan with their air balloon, and as Tom says, “The longer we traveled with them, and the more we got used to their ways, the better and better we liked them.” Of course, they didn’t actually know any of the Africans below, so they granted them names, like “Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson” or “Miss Harryet McDougal.” Over time, the group became so familiar with these nomads that they decided it was okay to drop the misters and misses and other titles. Once again, Abroad is trapped between the remote and the nearby. Tom and the rest are capable of extending empathy towards outsiders from a culture and place foreign to them, but in order to do so, they must Anglicize these people. The Africans become Robinsons and McDougals.

Over the course of the novel, Tom, Huck, and Jim become accidental imperialists. At one point, Tom looks at all the sand that’s been gathering in their balloon and decides that it must be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Quickly, he sets upon a money-making scheme:

“[W]e can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we’ve carted this whole desert over there and sold it out; and there ain’t ever going to be any opposition, either because we’ll take out a patent.”

The only thing that preventing Tom from embarking on literally stealing the desert sands of North Africa are tariffs, which he reasons would completely eat away at their profits.

But just as it’s easy to not only forgive Tom’s fence-painting scheme, but actually laud him for his ingenuity, Tom, Huck, and Jim are so genial, it’s easy to forgive or miss altogether the fact that they seem to be inadvertently colonizing countries they likely didn’t even know existed at the beginning of the novel. Needless to say, Tom Sawyer Abroad is a strange novel. I don’t think anyone expected Mark Twain to pump out a steampunk sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and after reading the novel, I’m not surprised that it’s fallen into obscurity. Despite the fact that the novel spans oceans and deserts, it seems strangely stagnant and claustrophobic. The novel is filled with contradictions like this, but in many ways Tom Sawyer Abroad is the kind of novel you enjoy the more you think and write about it. 

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I do think that there’s a lot of potential to adapt Tom Sawyer Abroad as a film. Hear me out. There’s no definitive film version of either Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, perhaps the closest being the 1938 technicolor adaptation. For whatever reason, both novels seem to resist adaptation, perhaps because of their episodic structure. But what’s the use in letting these instantly recognizable IPs lying around? People have heard of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and they’re in the public domain. Do I have to draw you a map?

But in all seriousness, I would be down for a steampunk, globe-trotting Tom Sawyer movie. And since the novel isn’t as precious as the first two, a screenwriter doesn’t really have any obligation to follow the book to the letter. It’s an invitation to let your imagination go wild. If Hollywood wanted to play it safe, they could just let Guy Ritchie do to Tom Sawyer what he already did to Sherlock Holmes. But I also think both Kings of Summer and Kong make Jordan Vogt-Roberts uniquely qualified for steampunk Tom Sawyer. This one’s for free, Hollywood.

On Pap Finn and White Trash

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might be the most laid-back of any “Great American Novel.” It goes down as easy as iced tea on a summer day or a dry stout after a long day of work. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the cover of Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (the copy I own) by Lilli Carre. Just look at how delightful that image is. Doesn’t it just invite you to take an adventure on the mighty Mississippi? And doesn’t it promise that the adventure will be fun, even exciting, but that in the end, no one will get hurt?

That’s not exactly true of the story itself. A few people die, including Huck’s drunken and abusive dad (who we’ll get to in a bit), but the story is so wrapped up in irony that when Huck once again teams up with Tom Sawyer in the final act in order to rescue the escaped slave Jim, Tom purposefully creates obstacles for the rescue so that it better resembles the adventure novels he’s read.

I mean, take a look at the inscription that opens the novel:

NOTICE.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

Per G. G. Chief of Ordinance

 

It almost makes it possible to not read anything into the novel, to refuse to peak under the veil, to plumb the subtext, and to just come along for the adventure.

But we can’t. No, it’s just not in our constitution. So when rereading Huck Finn after about a decade, I couldn’t help but draw connections between the world Twain crafted and our own. (By the by, G. G. in the above inscription likely refers to General Grant who Twain befriended. Twain even published Grant’s memoir.) Huck Finn draws a picture of a fragmented, inchoate nation. Its very geography speaks to differing, contested, and overlapping peoples, governments, customs, borders, and languages. The narrative spans the length of the Mississippi, a commercial byway that seems to be the only link to disparate, isolated communities. In other words, the world of Huck Finn is startling familiar to the United States of today.

Before we even get started on Huck’s trip down the Mississippi, Twain highlights the divided nature of America as embodied in speech:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” Dialect; and the modified varieties of this last…I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Through multiple dialects, Twain illustrates ways in which we barely speak the same language, and in fact language serves as much a means of division as a means of communication. Language attaches itself to geography, race, and class.

It’s the last of these that I want to focus on, specifically on Huck’s drunken, abusive father. It’s easy to see Twain as a champion of the lower class. He not only uses dialect, but he allows Huck to the be narrator of his own story, elevating him and his unique speaking style to that of the novel’s typically bourgeois subject who for so long nearly monopolized literary attention. It’s this populism that has lead to his canonization as a particularly American author.

But when we look at Huck’s father, Pap Finn, it’s clear that he’s burdened with many of the same stereotypes associated with the poor in America. He’s lazy, he’s a drunk, and he’s an unrepentant racist. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg traces common stereotypes of poor whites from early colonization to the 21st century. She finds not only that America has always had some form of class system, but also it was commonly believed that that a permanent underclass was natural and right. Pap seems to reflect America’s belief that poverty is the result of individual failings.

There’s one striking passage where Pap expresses class and racial resentment against a well-educated black man who had the audacity to live in Missouri as a free man. What’s worse, the useless government didn’t even bother to enslave him:

“There was a free nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane–the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think they said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home…I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?…Why they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months…They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months.” (36-7)

So many of the negative perceptions of poor whites that we associate with Trump voters are found in Pap. He’s resentful and embittered, and these feelings are directed towards blacks who he sees as his natural inferiors. This passage reminded me of a remark made by J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy claiming that many poor whites look at Barack Obama, see a successful black man with an established family, and feel angry and ashamed.

As mentioned in White Trash, there’s a long history of elevating African-Americans by comparing them favorably to poor whites. Isenberg point to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine girls who were selected to attend the newly desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. In the photograph, we can see Eckford calmly walking to school while a white classmate, Hazel Bryan, shouts at her from behind. The image is powerful. As Isenberg puts it, attempting to maintain her tenuous social and economic position above blacks Bryan became the face of white trash for most of America. There’s certainly truth in this reading, and it’s long underpinned our understanding of why poor whites would fight so aggressively for slavery during the Civil War when they could never hope to own slaves themselves. (Of course, there were exceptions, even back then).

Of course, focusing too intently on animosity between poor whites and blacks serves to distance middle and upper class whites from their own more genteel bigotry. We see racism as something that only the ill bred engage in.

At the same time, poor white racial animosity has long been used by the left as an explanation for why we lack the kind of class consciousness that’s found in Great Britain. Look at What’s the Matter with Kansas or the debate over whether Trump’s ability to flip the Midwest was a result of economics or racism. (Recent research has suggested that white voters were concerned about losing their status as whites, but I don’t think you can discount ways in which economic anxiety can reinforce racism).

In some ways, Pap demonstrates the tricky relationship progressives have with poor whites in the Trump era. We believe we should be sticking up for the economically marginalized while also acknowledging that racism drove many of these people (although certainly not all) to vote for an obvious huckster who represents the exact opposite of what we believe to be the best qualities of the nation.

So what do we do with Pap? It helps that he’s not the sole or even the most prominent representation of poor whites in the novel. That position, of course, belongs to Huck himself who purposefully flees bourgeois respectability. Perhaps it’s easier to handle the stereotypes embodied by Pap because he does not fully stand for poor whites, and Twain valorizes the dusty street urchin that headlines the novel.

There’s also an opening to read Pap as more than a simple stereotype. In one exchange with Huck, he tries to steer his son away from education. First, he asks his son to read in order to see if his son even knows how, and when he sees that Huck can read, he accuses him of putting on airs:

“It’s so. You can do it. I had my doubts when you told me. Now looky here’ you stop that putting on frills. I won’t have it. I’ll lay for you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school I’ll tan you good. First you know you’ll get religion, too. I never see such a son.” (29)

There are different ways to interpret his fear of education. Certainly, he’s afraid of his social standing in relation to his son. For his son to be educated would mean an inversion of father/son norms as he understands them. There’s also a suggestion that Pap sees education as unmanly and unsuitable for a son of his. (At one point he calls Huck a “dandy.”). But I wonder if we can’t also read some genuine attachment.

Pap could be afraid of how education might transform Huck’s speech, driving a wedge between him and his son. Twain foregrounds language’s ability to divide, so it makes sense that this form of logophobia is on the mind of Finn the elder. As Huck’s language changes, he becomes a part of the bourgeois, and it’s interesting to note that Pap links education with religion here. In English departments we so often find common allies with characters who reject bourgeois norms, but Pap seems to test these limits. Still, we might see his tirade not simply born out of personal grievances or fear of losing what little socio-economic privileges he has, but rather developed out of a fear of losing his only son. We might consider whether such a monstrous character might also have room for affection within.

In 2007, Jon Clinch published a book, Finn, that follows Pap Finn prior to the events of Huckleberry Finn. Instead of humanizing and rounding out the character, though, he makes him even more gruesome and beyond our sympathy. I haven’t read Clinch’s book, but it is interesting to note that when so many retellings try to humanize the villain (see: Wicked and Maleficent), Pap is denied a similarly new perspective.

Pap Finn reminds us that liberals and the left have always struggled when it comes to poor whites. Often they are seen as enemies while also being the kind of marginalized group we should be working to help. But people can be complicated. A racist can also be economically disenfranchised; a poor white can also benefit from white privilege. As Huckleberry Finn still teaches us, race and class wrestle with each other in troubling ways.

On Hillbilly Elegy and the Pundit Class

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Hillbilly Elegy benefited from some good timing. Released a little over four months before the Electoral College ushered Donald J. Trump into the White House, J.D. Vance’s memoir was within easy reach and memory for pundits and journalists who wanted to figure out the once unthinkable event of Trump becoming president of the United States. Trump was able to flip a number of midwestern states thanks to an increased support in the rust belt and Appalachia, and here was a memoir attempting to explain, through the author’s experience, the mindset and problems facing this often ignored population.

While it’s impossible to say whether Hillbilly Elegy would have been as critically well received if Vance had published the book a year or more earlier, I suspect that the rapturous reviews were boosted by Trump’s win. Although well intentioned, Vance’s memoir doesn’t offer much new information. And at it’s worst, Hillbilly Elegy aligns itself with Clintonian incrementalism, a philosophy that has had a stranglehold on the pundit class for the last couple of decades. It also happens to be a philosophy that was resoundly rejected by voters last November.

Personally, I was drawn to Vance’s memoir because, like him, I was also raised in Ohio, although in the northern part of the state. My home was surrounded by farms rather than factories, but I think of myself as an Ohioan to this day, even though I no longer live in the state.

Vance’s family is originally from Kentucky and immigrated to Ohio because his grandfather went to work at a factory in Middletown, Ohio, which is situated in the southwestern part of the state. In his Kentucky parlance, Vance refers to his grandparents as Papaw and Mamaw, and his writing evinces clear affection for these two.

Vance has a more mixed attitude towards hillbilly culture in general. (He uses the term hillbilly, but he identifies with the word and uses it mostly positively). While he’s proud of the culture’s fierce loyalty to family, which can sometimes result in quickly escalating verbal and physical fights, he’s less enamored of the culture’s high divorce rates and teen pregnancies. His own mother became pregnant while in high school, which lead to a string of husbands and boyfriends. Eventually, she became addicted to prescription medication, which could have been devastating to Vance if it weren’t for his Mamaw who was always watching out for her granchild.

Mamaw is without a doubt the memoir’s most interesting character, and not simply because she becomes Vance’s salvation from the failures of his mother. In fact, Mamaw and her husband engaged in many of the typically destructive behavior that Vance faults in hillbilly culture. Both are quick to anger with strangers and each other. Vance recalls a time when his grandparents became incensed and nearly came to blows with a store manager who had told him to stop playing with a toy. Mamaw and Papaw appear to have had a tumultuous relationship, and it’s likely Papaw suffered from alcoholism. They’re the kind of people who may not have been good parents but become good grandparents, perhaps as a means of redemption after failing their own children.

Vance eventually makes his way out of Middletown by joining the Marines, and then goes to college at Ohio State, and finally attends law school at Yale. He’s one of the lucky ones who beat the odds, and he’s sure to note that there were many points in his life where he may have succumbed to the same problems that often bring down those with his background. This narrative of upward mobility is nothing new, and as a memoirist, Vance’s writing is ill equipped. Despite the lyrical title, Vance’s prose is mostly bland, and at its worst, his writing is lazy and cliche. Certain lines really shouldn’t have made the final draft: “Bob was Mom’s third husband, but the third time was not the charm…I knew that Ohio State was put-up-or-shut-up time…Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

But the reason why Vance’s book became a bestsellers has little to do with his skill as a memoirist. Hillbilly Elegy became a favorite of the pundit class because it not only diagnoses Trump’s base, but it also does so from the perspective of an insider. Vance identifies as a Republican, and he’s mostly skeptical of the power of government intervention, giving us the usual anecdotes of people supposedly misusing SNAP and poor people having such exorbitant luxuries as cell phones. Sidestepping race, Vance argues that the working poor have turned to the Republican party because they are fed up with people who are living off government assistance while they have to work. And yet, in the age of Trump this is a poor explanation of our current climate. After all, Trump managed to win the Republican primary by repeatedly rejecting the party’s “all government is bad government” dogma.

At times, however, Vance’s memoir veers from common images of the white poor, who are almost always represented as proud and hard working men and women (unlike those other kinds of poor people). Here he condemns hillbilly culture:

We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance–the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.

What makes Vance’s memoir fascinating despite itself, is how he takes the usual racialized criticism of African-Americans and applies it to whites. He sidesteps economic and structural problems and places the blame on culture. Vance isn’t the only conservative to make this move. Charles Murray, who is cited in the memoir more than once, has also made the move from strongly implying that African-Americans are genetically inferior in The Bell Curve to blaming poor whites for their own plight in his 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America. As the shifting global economy has imperiled more working class whites, it’s been interesting to see traditional conservatives turn on the Republican base rather than to question economic dogma.

Even within Vance’s own life story, his cultural explanation of why so many poor whites are struggling today doesn’t quite make sense. He notes in the introduction that the Scots-Irish–his people–are “‘one of the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country.’” And the heavy drinking, fighting, and unstable family structures that he points to as contemporary problems appear to have also existed in his grandparent’s generation. So if by all indicators, this culture seems consistent from one generation to the next, then why is it that his grandparents managed to eek out a living while so many of his peers haven’t?

He also never fully grapples with the fact that the American middle class is shrinking even while American families are working longer hours. And while it’s true that we normally don’t ask memoirs to provide solutions to complex socioeconomic problems, Vance invites this criticism by occasionally becoming prescriptive in his advice, extolling the virtues of optimism and hard work in the greatest country on Earth. Although Vance himself identifies as a Republican, some of his rhetoric actually reminded me of language from the 2016 Democratic Convention, which tried to present itself as an optimistic rejoinder to Trump’s Mad Max view of the world. We saw which image of the United States won out.

To his credit, Vance isn’t the breed of extremist Republican that has taken over the party. He rejects the kinds of conspiracy theories that circulate among his friends and family back home. He also doesn’t appear to be a free market Randian, and he does believe government can help people, if only to push its “thumb on the scale.” His political views line up with coastal Republicans like Mike Bloomberg and Mitt Romney or Blue Dog Democrats like Rahm Emanuel. In other words, he shares the same views as the East Coast elite.

Perhaps the greatest paradox in Hillbilly Elegy is the fact that even as Vance sneers at elites, making fun of their use of fifty-cent words and modern art museums, politically he falls squarely within their ideological worldview. He’s the kind of moderate Republican that populates places like CNN and the Wall Street Journal opinion page. Or, in the parlance of the far right, he has the same beliefs as the MSM.

Things brings me to the uncommented on reason why Hillbilly Elegy has been so damn popular among the pundit class: it’s comfort food for elite journalists. Think about it. Trump came through the political establishment and bulldozed everyone by not only rejecting Republican dogma but also relying on explicitly racist ethno-nationalism, and populations most affected by the new globalized economy ate it up in their desperation. Any rational individual would take a step back and reevaluate the last thirty years of politics, starting with the Reagan revolution through the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus. But then this guy comes out and parrots these same neoliberal beliefs, but what’s more, he comes from the same population that turned on the Republican establishment. It’s almost as if Vance had held the pundit class close, patted its head, and repeatedly whispered, “Don’t worry. You were right. You were right.”

So while Hillbilly Elegy has been held up as a look inside of a culture those living in the coastal bubble largely ignore, it actually functions quite differently. Instead, Vance provides an echo chamber for those East Coast op-ed writers, allowing them to them to dress up old ideas in new working man’s clothes.

On Free State of Jones

In 1948, Davis Knight was put on trial under Missippi’s miscegenation laws after marrying a white woman, June Lee Spradley. By today’s standards, Knight appeared white, and he passed to the extent that the official marrying Knight and Spradley didn’t even think to ask about Knight’s race. But Knights ancestry hid African blood, and the state of Mississippi eventually brought him to court and were able to return a conviction. In the mid-nineteenth century, his ancestor, Newt Knight, had taken up with a former slave by the name of Rachel, meaning that Davis Knight may have had at least one-eighth African blood, making him black according to Mississippi law. Fortunately, this conviction was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the overturned conviction rested not on the unconstitutional nature of miscegenation laws, but rather as a means to avoid a challenge to miscegenation laws in the federal courts.

Davis Knight’s incredible story is a shocking example of how race in America was policed by state forces. And yet, the story of his ancestor, Newt Knight is somehow even more improbable. Newt Knight lived in Jones County Mississippi, a poor subsistence farmer in a land ruled by the whims of large plantation owners. He would briefly serve for the Confederacy before going AWOL and leading a band of Anti-Confederate fighters in their resistance against the newly formed government. Director Gary Ross’s film, Free State of Jones tells the story of New Knight as well as Davis Knight, and it’s an important film that stretches our understanding of both the Civil War and its aftermath, Reconstruction. Ross seems intent on bending the traditional Civil War narrative in order to get the viewer to see how the problem of race in America was not settled with the close of the war in 1865.

Newt Knight worked as a medic during the war, and when we first see him, he’s exchanging a wounded soldier’s garb for an officer’s jacket so that the man will be treated more quickly. Already disillusioned with the war, Knight becomes incensed when he discovers the implementation of the Twenty Negro Law, which exempted those who owned twenty slaves or more from military service, making his service part of, as Knight puts it, “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

Knight abandons the army and returns home to his wife and child where he finds that the Confederacy has been seizing a disproportionate number of food and goods for the war effort. After turning guns on some Confederate soldiers to prevent them from taking any more, he flees to the swamps and lives alongside a number of slave maroons.

Knight strikes up a friendship with an escaped slave Moses as well as Rachel, a woman still tied to her plantation, but who manages to smuggle supplies to the escaped slaves. The film treats this as an experience of cross-racial empathy. Not only does Knight live with these escaped slaves, but he also depends on them. Unlike Knight, these men and women are knowledgeable about the swamp, able to navigate its inscrutable waters and wrest food from its harsh corners.

After the battle of Vicksburg, which essentially cleaved the Confederacy in half, more deserters trickle into Jones County, and Knight begins to rally a resistance, a resistance that includes both black and whites. Using guerrilla tactics, Knight and his men eventually wrest Jones County and the surrounding area away from the Confederacy. During this time, he also strikes up a romance with Rachel. (At this point in time, Knight’s wife has fled the county, afraid that her husband’s lawlessness will mean repercussions for her and her child.)

Ross’s film is attempting to reinsert the notion of class into the Civil War narrative. Knight’s journey takes him from a realization that as a poor farmer, he’s being used as fodder to prop up an unjust economic system to the understanding that he has much in common with enslaved blacks of the South. This is not to mean that the plight of the poor white man is just as bad as that of enslaved persons. It certainly wasn’t. And slave narratives at the time from people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs took pains to make it clear that slavery was a far worse situation than poverty. Still, both Knight and the escaped slaves he’s taken up with are being chewed up by an unjust economic system.

In a pivotal scene, Moses is chastised for taking food that one of Knight’s men believes belongs only to the other whites, not to “n***ers.” Moses responds, “How you ain’t a n***er?” This of course can be read a number of ways. This poor white has also been used by Confederacy, conscripted into a war that does not benefit him. It could also be read as a comment on the illusion of race as a biological category, an absurdity that becomes clear in the film through the intermittent intrusion of Davis Knight’s story.

In a film of this nature, it would make narrative sense to end at the close of the Civil War, perhaps also covering the fact that Knight and Rachel had to flee their home for fear of repercussions, just so that the ending isn’t too “Hollywood.” But nearly the last half hour of the film covers the Civil War’s aftermath and Reconstruction. Moses’s son is taken by a plantation owner as an “apprentice,” a form of slavery that persisted after the Civil War. We also witness the political disenfranchisement and violence blacks faced at the hands of terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

By extending the narrative, Ross points out the long-term destructive force unleashed by slavery, which was not stopped at Appomattox, at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, or at the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Like Knight’s descendants, we too are living in the shadow of slavery and the Civil War.

As a filmmaker, Ross is often faulted for being too much of a crowd pleaser, and you can see his desire to make buoyant entertainment in his screenplays for Big and Dave or in his directorial efforts like Seabiscuit. There’s really nothing inherently wrong with this instinct for making an audience happy, but I think critics also forget that Ross also directed the smart and nuanced take on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Pleasantville. And there’s a real desire on his part in push the Civil War drama forward in the hopes of counteracting the Lost Cause narrative that has infected the public imagination. And in doing so, he plays with the structure of Free State of Jones in unique and interesting ways.

That’s not to say that Free State of Jones is a perfect film. I can’t quite decide if it’s too short or too long. Davis Knight’s story seems essential to what Ross is attempting to accomplish with this film, but his intrusion into the nineteenth-century narrative is sometimes clunky. And while Ross worked with historians to make sure the details of his film were right, by necessity some of history’s weirdness gets sanded down. For instance, by the end of the film, Knight’s first wife comes back to live with him and Rachel, but we don’t really get a sense of what she would have thought about her husband taking up with another woman, especially a former slave. (Although, it is suggested in the film that Knight may have been carrying on a sexual relationship with both women, which the historical record appears to back up).

But Free State of Jones is a timely and necessary film. We live in an age where racism has forced many poor and working class whites to vote against their own interests. And it’s worth remembering that this has historical precedent that goes back generations. In time, I expect the reputation of Free State of Jones to increase. It’s another important film in a string of them that asks us to reexamine nineteenth-century America in order for us to understand how we’ve gotten into the mess we’re currently in.