A “CITY OF EXCELLENCE”

Marquis de La Fayette

When I’m out “vagabonding,” I’m sensitive to the energy of a city and am curious about the economy that has helped develop that energy. This past week-end, we visited our good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, a retired English professor from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who recently moved to LaGrange, Georgia. It was our second visit, and we were again impressed by the energy and diversity in this city of 30,000.

LaGrange is situated in the foothills of the Georgia Piedmont, and in 2000 it gained recognition as “Intelligent Community of the Year” along with larger, bustling cities like Toronto, New York, Singapore, and other large metropoles. It has also been named a Georgia “City of Excellence,” which I think typifies this distinctive city. Once a textile center due to the plethora of King Cotton plantations, it has morphed into an industrial and commercial center housing carpet tile manufacturing and the major assembly plant for the KIA automobile industry.

Taste of Lemon Restaurant

Like other burgeoning cities (e.g., Chattanooga, Tennessee), the investments of wealthy philanthropists have created centers of culture in LaGrange that are largely due to the donations by philanthropic foundations — in the case of LaGrange, the donations of the Callaway family foundation have resulted in outstanding cultural centers: two art galleries, a symphony orchestra, a ballet company, an opera company, a Biblical History Center, and other cultural sites. New Iberians in my home town of New Iberia, Louisiana may be interested to know that LaGrange even has its own Mardi Gras Krewe called the Krewe of Mask, which sponsors a Mardi Gras Parade in February each year.

Mary Ann @ her new house

We missed the International Festival and other activities honoring the Marquis de La Fayette, a Revolutionary War hero who impressed George Washington by crossing the Atlantic and fighting in the War for U.S. Independence. La Fayette left his wife on their country estate near Paris to participate in this war after visiting Georgia in 1825. While visiting, he observed that the topography resembled that of LaGrange, his wife’s estate in France — hence the name of present-day LaGrange, Georgia. We did get a snap of the statue of the Marquis while walking in the beautiful town square. The Marquis penned lines that seemed to have imprinted on its residents and contributed to its recognition as a city of excellence: “The welfare of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she will become the respectable and safe asylum of virtue, integrity, tolerance, equality, and a peaceful liberty.” 

We attended an unusual art show at the LaGrange Art Museum that featured the work of French Symbolist artist Eugène Anatole Carrière. The exhibit contained portraits of Gauguin and the poet Verlaine in monochrome and covered the top floor of the museum. We ascended via an old elevator that the docent asked us to imagine as one that took us to a loft in New York City, but she gripped my arm tightly when she glimpsed my anxiety at boarding the carrier. The artist Carrière is reputed to have influenced Pablo Picasso’s renderings of mother-and-child works, and the exhibit showcases “Kodak Moments” of Carrière's wife, daughter and sons in which the subjects are winding wool, lying down, embracing, praying as depicted through the eyes of a family man.

The Callaway Foundation donated the former Troop County Jail to the LaGrange Art Museum, and when we stood before the Victorian structure, we had difficulty envisioning it as a former prison since the building resembles an old castle. We laughed about the tower being an innovation after the architecture of Brit towers that sequestered those who were to be beheaded. Art Education has become an objective of the Museum, and more than 300 classes of workshops and gallery lectures are conducted in a building called the Center of Creative Learning, a center dedicated to various educational art programs.

Private gardens abound in LaGrange, and Mary Ann keeps pace with gardening enthusiasts in the area; within four months, she has cultivated beds of lantana, Vinca, Ixora, azaleas and other flowering plants skirted by pebbles and growing near a screened porch she had commissioned a carpenter to construct within the few months she has lived in this city. Potted plants line the entry way to her beautiful home near West Point Lake, and we visited two garden centers where she threatened to purchase more flora while we searched for a statue of St. Francis for my herb garden at Sewanee, Tennessee. 

The present mayor of LaGrange has been touting the construction of a walking trail in LaGrange as he feels that the walkway will create greater community connections, but I think that the friendliness and diversity we encountered as we moved about the city indicate that community connections are already well-established in this city committed to excellence.

Photographs by Victoria Sullivan.

LET THE TREES ANSWER

Back on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee for the spring and summer seasons, I shiver in temperatures dipping to the 30’s and 40’s and winds blustering out of the North today. I’m warmed by the sight of the cover of my new book of poetry, Let the Trees Answer, designed by my grandson Martin Romero from a photograph of the Gebert oak taken by Victoria I. Sullivan. Dr. Sullivan, a botanist and writer, photographed the trees included in this salute.

The book of poetry is my contribution to National Poetry Month and is slated to be published by Border Press within this month. A description of the poems and an acknowledgment by Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, Professor of English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, are featured on the back cover of Let the Trees Answer.

This volume, a poetic tribute to trees, includes poems conveying the idea that “trees can talk,” a form of humanistic botany within the frame of verse. Let the Trees Answer is the third book in the series Between Plants and Humans, ranging from pines in Louisiana to jacarandas in Florida, and along the way, crabapple, Chinese Tallow, catalpa, and other trees scattered throughout the woods of the United States. This is a must-read for tree huggers.

“This loving tribute to trees, beautifully illustrated and full of plant lore, celebrates and remembers childhood, first love, betrayal, loss—all the time markers of our lives. Its lyrics turn us back to Nature, to the “consolation of spirit” trees offer whether they deflect family sorrow or embody erotic longing. Jacaranda, Joshua, Cedar, Paradise Apple—even the lowly Chicken Tree—emerge newly clothed with memory and desire. Let the Trees Answer gives us a writer at the top of her form, fully alive to the wisdom and mystery at the heart of our life on this earth. Kudos to Diane Moore for inspiring us to stop and look and remember.”

—Mary Ann Wilson, Professor of English, University of Louisiana, Lafayette —

Happy National Poetry Month to all of you poetry writers and lovers, as well as tree huggers everywhere!

LOUISIANA WOMEN: Their Lives and Times

In the mail this week, a gift arrived from good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson: the second volume of Louisiana Women, a book that records the contributions of outstanding Louisiana women from the eighteenth century to the present. Essays by southern scholars include the history of women who struggled to not only sustain their sense of self-worth but to “follow their bliss” in art, politics, and cultural pursuits. Edited by Mary Farmer Kaiser and Shannon Frystak, the volume covers four major aspects of Louisiana women’s history that have affected the cultural, social, and political progress of the bayou state: Women and the Politics of Identity; Women and Work; Women and the Arts; and Organizing Women.

Louisiana Women is one of those bedside table books that provides a look into rich histories that have often been overlooked or hidden, such as the profiles of Lulu White, infamous Storyville madam, and voodooienne Marie Laveau, as well as well-researched essays about famous female artists, writers, musicians, and supporters of the arts.

I was particularly interested in the essay about Cammie Henry, a supporter of the arts in Louisiana, a woman who intrigued me and about whom I wrote in my own version of outstanding Louisiana women, Their Adventurous Will. I was grateful to Lucy Gutman and Shannon Frystak, authors of this essay, for citing “The Mistress of Melrose,” my essay about Henry, and I learned new information through the authors’ insights about Henry being an embodiment of the Lost Cause movement in a region that sought to recapture a lost heritage. She is described as being a woman who “used the leverage of a revered cultural movement that celebrated the Confederate tradition to emancipate herself from the restrictions of a gender-prescribed position, while simultaneously sustaining and expanding her status as a revered traditional southern lady.”

In the essay entitled “The Evolution of a Plantation Mistress and Chatelaine of the Arts,” the authors credit Cammie Henry with the revival of native crafts, for hosting writers, artists, and photographers through the Natchitoches Art Colony and for preserving the history and heritage of the Cane River and the Isle Brevelle Creoles of color. Among the notables who sometimes lived and worked at Melrose: William Spratling, a Tulane University professor of architecture; artists Alberta Kinsey and playwright Natalie Scott; Lyle Saxon, an author Henry described as “magnificent and knit into my soul;” authors Sherwood Anderson, Harnett Kane, and Francoise Mignon…the list of luminaries who visited or lived at Melrose at various times is formidable.

Dr. Wilson’s essay about contemporary writer, Rebecca Wells, entitled “The Divine Saga Deep in the Heart of Louisiana,” takes the reader deep into central Louisiana territory, delving into the life of the author of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a novel which Wilson relates created a “powerful sisterhood that replicated itself across the country…the author herself identifying the hunger for sisterhood and community as the driving force behind the book’s rise to prominence.” Interestingly, Wilson defines the theme of this book as forgiveness, quoting from the theologian Henri Nouwen: “Forgiveness is the nature of love practiced among people who love poorly. That hard truth is that all of us love poorly. We need to forgive and to be forgiven every day, every hour – unceasingly…”  I was intrigued by Wilson’s comment about Wells’ recognition of the idea of sisterhood or women’s communities as a “necessary antidote to our depersonalized, isolated postmodern condition.” She highlights Wells’ articulation of this idea of female bonding in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: “I didn’t write the book because I had a group of friends like the Ya-Yas. I think I wrote it because I wanted one.” In this essay about Wells Dr. Wilson conveys the idea that Wells has accomplished in her contemporary writing what many outstanding writers accomplish – “she has [begun] with the regional (central Louisiana) and made it speak to and for a larger humanity.”

Lucinda Williams, the colorful Lake Charles Louisiana musician; Lindy Boggs, congresswoman and majority leader of the House; Cora Allen, member of the Calanthe Temple Commission; Sarah Towles Reed, labor union lobbyist, and educational reformer…the stories in Louisiana Women reveal the perspectives of eighteen scholars who have documented the activities of women who exemplified the courage and faith to pursue seemingly impossible projects and contributed to the history and culture of Louisiana.

I wish that I could highlight all the essays but perhaps this is a small titillation to read the profound stories in this volume featured in a series about Southern Women: Their Lives and Times, which includes many of the southern states, published by the University of Georgia Press.

Brava, Mary Ann!  

    

CHRISTMAS CELEBRATIONS AND FRIENDS

Mary Ann and Darrell

The Greek word philia means affection or friendship, and C.S. Lewis wrote one of the best treatises about this special relationship with others in The Four Loves, my favorite book by the great Anglican apologist of the 20^th century: “It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, ‘Do you love me?’ means ‘Do you see the same truth?’”

Pistachio cake

The Christmas season provides fertile soil for commonality among cherished friends, and lately I’ve been blessed to have been invited to a few celebrations in which I’ve enjoyed the “real glory of friendship,” as Lewis puts it. The most recent of these celebrations took place this week when I and my friends Vickie Sullivan and Mary Ann Wilson, went over to Church Point, Louisiana for dinner especially cooked by Darrell and Karen Bourque. Darrell, a former poet laureate of Louisiana and acclaimed poet (as well as my mentor in poetry), had prepared a succulent pork roast, fresh asparagus, quinoa with chunks of sweet potato; and Karen, master glass artist, had created an artistically-arranged green salad with thinly sliced avocado and homemade dressing. The piece de resistance was a beautiful white pistachio cake with coconut frosting, pictured here.

Karen and Diane

As we sat around the table, I thought about Emerson’s words: “Do you see the same truth?” Most of the conversation centered on common interests: books, art, and politics, but table talk soon turned to concerns about a mutual friend who has been diagnosed with cancer, and we discussed the humanitarian work she has done during her almost-80 years. Our friend, Jane Bonin, a former professor of English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, was affiliated with the Hunger Project for many years, presenting talks to various groups to raise the consciousness of people regarding the problem of hunger in both Acadiana and Washington, D.C. where she migrated after leaving Lafayette, Louisiana. She was dedicated to the sustainable end of world hunger and to the maxim of “Creating An Idea Whose Time Has Come.” A few years later, she joined the Peace Corps and served in both Malawi and Niger, Africa for six years. Her experiences in Africa have been recorded in The Color Of A Lion’s Eye, released earlier this year.

The note of solemnity that had begun the conversation about Jane’s condition, changed to one of shared acknowledgement as we talked about Jane’s resilience and strength. And after a few moments, we were laughing about adventures several of us had experienced with her; e.g., “The 6-Day,” a leadership training course in which we rappelled off the side of a mountain and endured the famous “Tyrolean Traverse.” During this exercise, we were strapped at our waists and had to propel ourselves, hand over hand, across a wire strung above a ravine yawning beneath us. What we remembered was how long some of us (Jane and I included) hung in the middle of the wire and, finally, those who had made it to the “farther shore” sat on the end of the wire so that it sloped downward, and we could get off. These efforts of fellow participants underlined the support we had been promised when we entered the rigorous program. We were greeted by cheering supporters who massaged bound muscles in our arms and told us how accomplished we were to have moved across the wire. Actually, the Tyrolean Traverse is a good metaphor for the support of friends.

It was late when we drove away from the dark countryside near Church Point, but the three of us left the celebration at the Bourque’s table feeling not only the warmth of strongly-supportive relationships in which all of us “saw the same truth” but were buoyed by the “real glory of friendship.”

And we just know that Jane is going to make it across that yawning ravine again.