Email exchange between Stewart and one of his friends regarding his blog yesterday: Republican Hatred and Misogyny.
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This is an email exchange between Stewart and one of his friends regarding Stewart Acuff’s blog yesterday entitled Republican Hatred and Misogyny.
Rachel Jackson*:
Stewart Acuff*:
Truth is that for me all those different cultures gave me a great appreciation for vocal communication, story telling, preaching, mimicry. For me simple free verse poetry and song lyrics are included. I work at the poetry a little. I do love the community of worker artists you – and Red Dirt Rangers, and Hada and Buffalo Fitz – is just wonderful. You are at the middle of it and that’s a big deal.
Funny how our multi heritage worked. My white grandmother was the daughter of a sharecropper. She married a Cherokee. My other part Black Chickasaw grandfather made his stake for his farm because he had two oxen bigger and stronger with much larger splayed feet than mules to skid cypress and oak and hickory trees out of the Mississippi River bottomlands. When I was a little boy, he taught me the vocal commands for oxen- gee now, gee, that’s it, now get up.
Scott Brown thinks that’s all war whoops and bullshit and fake headdresses. It is a mockery of culture in transition, poultices on chests for chest colds and pneumonia, preaching and story telling and panthers that scream in the night, and conjuring away warts and wonderful mustard greens in the springtime with purple berries and fish fries with hush puppies and field peas and sheller peas, the first day I drove the tractor by myself, at an International Harvester Farmall, and cornbread made in an iron skillet with no sugar and very rough texture that made it taste so good in milk (I confess I never liked buttermilk), and sneaking pulling pork off a hog barbecuing over a hickory fire outside and stealing watermelons and droppin’ them on a gravel road as a way to get a pretty girl to go for a ride with you. That shit is all real, that and fried okra which came from Africa and barbecued coon for church suppers. It is me and my people, all my fuckin’ people who worked their asses off, unlike all those Scott Brown pretty boys.
*The authors gave us permission to post this content.
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Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins.
Tags: acuff, cherokee, native, scott brown, stewart acuff
November 16, 2012
Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.