Speaking of flag waving, by the way, here’s a news item from AP: “The University of Mississippi quietly removed the state flag from its place of honor on Monday, heeding the calls of those who say the banner’s Confederate battle emblem is hurting the school’s future.”
The Confederate flag refuses to disappear. Nobody remembers the Iran nuclear deal anymore, and nobody cares. But the Confederate flag is serious business. The repercussions from the shooting at the black church in South Carolina refuse to ebb.
I keep moving on and I meet Dianne, a retired lady who has just finished lunch with her husband, and she asks me where I’m from. I tell her I’m an Israeli.
Oh, she loves Israel, she says. Christians, she informs me, love Jews. Have I been to Alabama? she asks.
What’s in Alabama? I ask.
“Jews.”
Nice.
“I checked my DNA in Ancestry.com,” she joyfully tells me, “and I discovered that I am one percent Jewish.”
Wow!
I wonder what she had for lunch, beer or brandy. Captiva doesn’t wonder about anything now. She just wants to move. We drive to Nashville, “Music City.”
• • •
I’ve always been intrigued by Nashville for the simple reason that I like country music. Yes, I do. Years back it was my dream to be a country singer. I fell in love with the image of it: female lovers with sexy accents, stallion horses, expensive whiskey and ranches that make New York look like a small village. Sadly, fate stood in the way and I never actualized my country dreams. But now I am in Nashville, and maybe my old dream will become a reality soon.
You never know! This is America, where anything can happen.
The State of Tennessee Department of Tourist Development is nice to me. They get me a hotel about ten miles from here, and I am told that the visitors center can provide me with suggestions about places to see and people to meet.
I go to Nashville’s visitors center, officially known as Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation, but the ladies at the front desk, to my surprise, won’t respond to most of my questions. Even a simple question, such as “Who’s your favorite country singer?” is met by a reply of “I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna answer this question.”
Why not?
“Because we can’t really do that.”
It’s against company policy. I try to be friendly and ask them to name some of the famous singers in the city, but they fiercely object to the question.
Why?
It is against company policy to name famous singers. That’s it.
When I’m done with them, Martha, an official with the corporation, comes to talk to me about “our” city, but once she opens her mouth her Los Angeles accent reveals that she is a transplant. Going for the small talk, I ask her how it feels to move from a liberal state such as California to a conservative state such as Tennessee.
I don’t get a clear answer to this question.
The corporation, by the way, is an all-inclusive enterprise. On its shelves I find a nice brochure, “sponsored in part by the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation,” called “The African-American Guide to Nashville.” I ask the ladies if they also happen to have a Native American Guide to Nashville. They have no answer.
These are not the female lovers with the sexy accents that I’ve been dreaming of.
Outside their office is a place called “Honky Tonk.” What’s honky-tonk? I ask Martha.
“A live music bar.”
What does it mean literally, “honky-tonk”?
“I don’t know what it means. It’s just a name.”
Who came up with it? Why not Ponky Shmonk?
“It’s a great question; I’m not sure.”
I proceed to downtown Nashville.
Nice, cute and awfully small. For about five blocks on Broadway, live music can be heard from eateries or bars, which is nice, but most of these places are almost empty. I go to a joint called Honky Tonk Central. What’s country music? I ask Paul, one of the two singers now performing.
“Country music is about storytelling.”
Could you sing one of these stories to me? He gladly does. He sings George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” a song that will make a romantic soul cry for at least a month because it tells the tale of a man who has died and hence will no longer love.
What happened to the beloved girl afterwards? I ask Paul.
He’s not sure, but then an idea pops into his head: “Fell in love with the mailman?”
Great answer!
In a honky-tonk joint down the road a young singer is singing: “I want to be like you, walk like you, talk like you.” What’s the story here? No story. This is “modern” country, I’m told, and in modern country it’s not about a story but about a message. I’m not sure if I get the “message” here, but what do I know?
The question I have is this: Since the bars are almost empty, where are all the country lovers? I know they are around, because the hotels in Nashville are packed.
It takes me some time, but I catch up with the crowds later on in places such as the Johnny Cash Museum and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, where they longingly look at Elvis Presley’s “solid gold” Cadillac and watch short video clips. There are more people in each of these locations, which offer trashy celebrity memorabilia, than on all of Broadway.
Once upon a time, perhaps, Nashville was a great cultural city; it no longer is. Today’s Nashville is kept alive by a highly effective PR machine and big businesses that milk huge amounts of cash from naïve tourists who stupidly enough still flock to Nashville. Hotels in downtown Nashville charge hundreds of dollars a night, and people think that if it’s so expensive it must be worth it.
Ponky shmucks.
Here, by the way, is how the Urban Dictionary defines a honky-tonk: “A loud, rowdy bar that plays ‘honky-tonk’ country music. Typically full of drunken hillbillies having a good ole’ time. To go out ‘honky-tonkin’ is to go out on the town to honky-tonk bars and get drunk.”
Full of drunken hillbillies? I wish!
Later on I meet an older woman and ask her to tell me what honky-tonk is.
“Honkies,” she says, “is what blacks call whites and is a derogatory name.”
And what’s “tonk”? This she doesn’t know.
Tomorrow I’m scheduled to meet some interviewees, thanks to the efforts made by Tennessee’s tourism office, and perhaps they will have a better explanation of honky-tonk.
• • •
As I wake up the next day I get an email from a representative of the State of Tennessee’s tourism office, telling me that I better leave the hotel this very day: “In case you have not already checked out, my friendly advice to you is to make sure to check out in time.” In addition, all scheduled interviews made by the tourism people are cancelled.
In other words: the PR machinery wants me out of Nashville, and the sooner the better. Effective immediately I am persona non grata in Nashville. What happened? It takes me a few hours to find out, and when I do I explode in laughter. The State of Tennessee regards me as a dangerous person because I asked Martha a “political” question. Yeah. Asking an American citizen how it feels to move from liberal California to conservative Tennessee is an offense.
And they get mean.
To make sure that I promptly pack my belonging and disappear, their representative calls the hotel and tells them that I’m leaving my room today.
I don’t.
I spend the next two days having the time of my life with the hotel employees and a number of guests, drinking and singing together. Then I slowly advance with Captiva to a new distillery in Tennessee that goes by the name of Short Mountain Distillery, which sells all kinds of “moonshines” with funny names such as Apple Pie and Prohibition Tea.
• • •
The man behind this distillery is a California transplant by the name of Billy Kaufman. Billy, who is the great-grandson of the Samsonite company f
ounder, is happy to be gay and delighted to be a farmer. He walks around in a black T-shirt and boots while his dog is busy making rough love to another dog. Billy is fully ready to sit down with me and chat about his life among the trees and about his distillery venture that he hopes will soon become a household name. If Jack Daniel could do it in this state, why not Billy Kaufman?
Before I try out his drinks, while I am still sober, I ask Billy the most important question a journalist could ask a new distiller: What does it mean to be an American Jew? What is the meaning of Judaism? Billy is Jewish, an American Jew, and I’d love him to explain to me everything there is to know about this group of people and their belief system.
“Jews are international people; we integrate ourselves in so many cultures but we retain intellectualism and an understanding of where we come from so that we never become fully integrated.”
I’ll probably understand the full meaning of this answer once I drink some moonshine. In the meantime, I ask him: What’s Jewish in you?
“Oh, I look Jewish!”
Billy has a moustache that looks similar to the prophet Muhammad’s, and perhaps that’s why he thinks he looks Jewish. I tell him that he doesn’t. Hearing this, Billy now tries to explain to me in exact terms his “Jewish” part.
“You are Jewish by blood, so your brain is Jewish.”
I love this “Jewish by blood,” which is in complete harmony with the Indian blood quantum. What’s a Jewish brain? I ask Billy.
In reply, Billy stretches both hands forward, brings them close to one another as if he was holding a soccer ball or a skull, and then moves his hands in circular motions a number of times.
Yeah, that’s the “Jewish brain.” Bob Nelson would love it. I taste some of Billy’s Tennessee moonshine products and I actually like them; I even buy a small bottle for the journey ahead, in case I get thirsty.
• • •
By now, as you’ve probably noticed, Captiva and I are very tight. We get along extremely well, thank you. She’s never been thirsty since our first day together; I take good care of her. And the best thing is this: we both like to go places we’ve never been before and meet people we don’t know. Yeah, it gives both of us immense pleasure.
Today is no different.
Today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, I meet Bill Wallace, a former pastor whose father worked in Oak Ridge during the forties. What’s Oak Ridge? I just found out, and let me share this with you. Oak Ridge served as a major site for the Manhattan Project, a secretive experimental operation dedicated to the production of atomic weapons that would later be dropped on two Japanese cities toward the end of World War II.
At the time, when Bill was a baby, Oak Ridge was something like a military city, a secret city, where no one could enter without a pass. Everybody in the city, excluding the children, was involved in the making of weapons powerful enough to instantaneously kill untold numbers of people and decimate cities long into the future. Baby Bill didn’t know what Papa’s job was, and neither did Bill’s mama. In fact, nobody in town knew what the neighbors were doing, and if anybody asked he or she would be handled by security officers at once.
Baby Bill, a smart cookie, had an inkling that where he lived was not a normal place. And to this day he remembers that when the atomic bomb, made possible by Papa and friends, was dropped over Hiroshima, “that’s when we knew what we were working on. Exactly.” He was three. It is interesting to me to hear him use the word we, like Nancy from Tulsa, as if he were one of the people who developed the atomic bomb.
I want him to explain to me, if he still remembers, what he saw on that day as a little child. He obliges. Everybody in Oak Ridge, he tells me, “was excited. It was just like a Fourth of July celebration. People were on the streets, they were yelling and dancing and having a good time.”
I ask Bill if America has a right to get involved militarily in other countries.
“I think a lot of this goes back to the foundation of America. The fact is that America was founded because of oppressions of different kinds in other nations and that’s what brought people to America.”
Are you saying that because of the way America was founded, the USA today has the obligation to get involved in foreign countries? Did I get you right?
“That’s a fair observation.”
It’s time for me to drink a Moonshine or two. Hey, Oscar! Are you still singing there in Chicago?
• • •
I take Captiva and drive to my new lodging, a cabin near the Smoky Mountains. My cabin is nice, and in it I have everything a guest needs: three American flags, two Bibles, and three crosses of different sizes. The Internet doesn’t work here, but who needs Internet when you have flags and crosses?
I open Billy’s Moonshine and take a long sip, the first of many…
When I wake up the next morning, Captiva decides to get in touch with nature, and we drive into the Smoky Mountains. What a beautiful ride it is! In this place, at this time of year, the trees offer a marvelous sight. The leaves come in multiple colors, clouds hang between trees, and the valley as seen from the top of the mountains offers the loveliest of images Captiva has ever seen.
It’s rainy, and at times we drive into clouds, but Captiva doesn’t mind. And no matter how far or close the visibility is, the gorgeous scenery encircles us and engulfs us through a majestic dance of nature and man. Slowly, I reach Cherokee, North Carolina.
Gate Twenty-Five
Liberals live much longer than conservatives
CHEROKEE. WHAT A NAME. MUST BE AN INDIAN PLACE. IS THIS A reservation? No, a local lady who goes by the name of Dawn tells me. This town, she says, belongs to the Cherokee tribe, and no one but the Cherokee people can buy property here. Who is a Cherokee? “If you are one-sixteenth Cherokee by blood.”
At this point in my experiences with Indians, after hearing this logic in Michigan and Montana, I try to see what happens if I challenge them on the basic tenet of their thinking. I ask Dawn how she’d feel if she were told by white people that she couldn’t buy property in their neighborhoods. Wouldn’t that be considered racist?
“Yes.”
Here, in an Indian city, whites cannot buy property. Is that racist too?
“Oh, no!”
Why not?
“Whites can buy anything they want; they just can’t own the property.”
Why not?
“We bought the property!”
When?
“In the 1860s.”
Why can’t you sell it?
“We can, to each other.”
Why not to whites?
“Because it’s our property!”
She must be a graduate of Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer. There’s no point in arguing this any further. But I do get from her a quick course about the benefit of being a Cherokee and living here. Twice a year you get a $6,000 check from the tribe, just because you’re a Cherokee.
Poor Cherokees! In Michigan the Indians get $64,000 a year.
Cherokee is different in other ways as well, I learn. History, you see, plays a big part in this place. If your ancestors lived here but were forced by the American government of the time to depart to what is today Oklahoma (along the “Trail of Tears,” 1838–39), you will get one big zero from the tribe.
I talk a bit more with Dawn. How many Indian tribes are there in the country? I ask her.
“There are 565 tribes,” Dawn says, and she tells me that each of the tribes has a different language. Almost no one here speaks the Cherokee language, except for about two hundred people.
Bo Taylor, who is the executive director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indians in Cherokee, which here means a great deal, is one of the two hundred. How do I know? He tells me.
He also tells me that “I speak at least sixty languages, at least a little bit.”
Bo is more than just an Indian. “I’m not really an Indian,” he tells me. “I am a Giduwa. That’s what we traditionally call ourselves.”
What does that mean?
“It means to be set up, above. Like to be raised up on a platform.”
Like the “Chosen People”?
“Yes, someone like that. We believe that we are chosen.”
I would love to arrange a sporting event for a match between members of the Church of the Highlands and Bo, where they can fight it out for the title Chosen People.
By the way: Chosen People would be an excellent name for a sports team. We have the Pirates, the Warriors, the Saints, and all other manner of similar diseases. Chosen People we don’t have. Isn’t it time to have a baseball or football team named “the Chosen People”? They would win every game!
What does it mean to be a Cherokee? I ask Bo.
“It’s my identity, it’s my history, it’s my way of seeing the world, it’s – ”
What’s your way of seeing the world?
“Let me finish! I’m trying to get there. It’s, what’s important is, you know, we see the value not in money but the fact of – of family, the clans, the world we live in.”
I apologize in advance, but it’s strange to hear you say that your values are not about money when you have all those casinos. That’s pure money –
Bo is visibly upset when I say this. He mumbles some half sentences and half words, trying to find the right accusatory terms in the English language, and once he does he spits them out: “You are brutish,” he says to me. He also accuses me of coming to an Indian town for the sole purpose of speaking badly of its people.
My impression is that this Bo is used to white people who get mushy-eyed when they see him, and he’s shocked to see a white man, this fat Jew, who does not bow down to lick his toenails. In addition, Bo cannot grasp the idea of anybody out there questioning the existence of the skyscrapers that he and the rest of the Indians have been building in mid-air for centuries now.
He composes himself and tries a new trick. “The place we live in, the Smoky Mountains, is the most diverse place in all of North America for plants and animals,” he preaches to me.
This Bo must be anticipating that I will now burst out in tears of happiness and total acceptance at the very mention of the word diverse.
The Lies They Tell Page 31