Old Sparky
Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Scrib once wrote a column for the Gulf County Breeze, the last independent
newspaper in
He called the paper Old Sparky, because the correctional officers at the prison thought the printing press on the masthead looked like the electric chair at Raiford.
If he wanted to
make fun of Haitians, there was no Haitian-American community to object. No Haitian-American leaders. They were all down in
Why would Scrib want to make fun of Haitians.
He was a satirist. Satire made fun of a society’s foibles and peccadilloes.
The great African-American Florida writer Zora Neale Hurston called the black literati of the Harlem Renaissance the niggerati. This did not endear her to the black literati of the Harlem Renaissance.
She wasn’t a
member. She was off studying voodoo in
Deep down in the jungle. The signifying monkey.
I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots.
She wrote a book called Mules and Men.
She wrote a book called Tell My Horse.
Scrib once read
in
They have a Zora Neale Hurston Festival there every year now, but when she was alive, she was obscure, her books out of print.
She died in the poorhouse and was buried in potter’s field. In an unmarked grave.
Sic transit Gloria Monday.
She’s on the
Florida Artist Wall of Fame in the New Capitol, in
Posthumous recognition. If you’re lucky.
That’s what Marcel Duchamp said the great artist of tomorrow in art could hope for.
No, the only solution for the great man of tomorrow in art is to go underground. He may be recognized after his death, if he’s lucky. Not having to deal with the money society on its own terms, he won’t have to be integrated into it, and he won’t become contaminated, as all the others are.
I guess it was true in Zora Neale Hurston’s day, too.
Don’t try to integrate yourself into the money society.
For one thing, it won’t work.
They don’t let you in.
Scrib looked up Florida Artist Wall of Fame in Google and got a hit on Stetson Kennedy.
Kennedy had recently been admitted to the Wall of Fame.
He was Hurston’s supervisor in the WPA, on the WPA Writer’s Project they both worked on, collecting songs. They would go around with a reel-to-reel recorder and tape folk songs, in schoolyards. Black schoolyards.
Back then, you could get killed for lighting someone’s cigarette, Kennedy said.
An interracial couple had to be very careful.
Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, and exposed its members.
This was dangerous too. Crosses were burned in his yard.
He’s 93. Howard Zinn was 87.
The old ones are dying off.
Good thing some of them left a record.
Books. Stories. Tales. Tales of Beatnik Glory. Poems. Ed Sanders is a poet.