Howdy Alex,
On why I wrote to you: For years I have needed to write to you to explain my reclusive behavior when you and Tom Douglass published the “Smoke” excerpts in NCLR but suffering the hellish depression, I couldn’t call up the discipline to do so, but the nagging thought stayed with me, and thanks to to hawthorn (the nutritious berry) that I rediscovered about a year ago I knew I would finally be able to keep my promise and decided while writing those few lines to fire off the Pamphlet writing to you because I wanted you to read it, and believing that if the Pamphlet found favor with you, even daring to believe you would do what you could to help the cause. And on that note I’m gonna ask another favor: please remember the few pghs in the Pamphlet devoted to natural plant medicine because they will heal and have healed humankind for thousands of years and used in their natural unprocessed state will continue to do so, and I believe hawthorn, in particular, should be used as a preventative medicine for the heart, in particular. As my Aim would say, it “makes my heart happy” to tell you this.
And this: I agree with you re ECTC. All my public school teachers were ECTC except two who were West Point, and they were all excellent teachers, and I felt bad when education became a business and the corporates took control, even becoming members of the Board of Governors and always raising, never lowering tuition and causing students to be burdened with a lifetime debt for an education that should be completely free, for all people.
We learned way back in the roaring 60s that the schools were for the students and that the students could shut down the schools and of course that lesson was learned at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) when the students took control of the school and freed the prisoners. I don’t really know what’s going on in the world, I shot the tv way back when Iraq (oldest civilization on Earth) was invaded and occupied by colonizers and I was huddled under my grandmother’s cotton quilts in the big and dark and cold backroom of my grandmother’s house, the room she had left me to sleep in and gone on on her long journey back home, and I was trying to keep warm but I had the muted tv on across the room, remotely operating it from beneath the tent I had made with a few chairs and my grandma’s cotton quilts and it was getting darker and colder and I saw flashes on the screen and a caption running across explaining that those flashes were bombs over neighborhoods in Baghad (oldest civilization on Earth), and when I saw the carpet bombs bursting in air I remember screaming in my mind, Stop it! There are little innocent children down there sleeping in their innocent mothers’ arms, and I came out of my cave and went across the room and snatched the tv plug outa the wall and turned the dead tv screen to face the wall and went and got my cousin’s horse pistol, a long- barreled .44 caliber Ruger, and came back, took the tv cord and wrapped it around the rabbit ears and got a handful of cord, dragged it over to my escape window and threw and pushed it through the window, got the .44 secured, went through the house to the front and then around to the back where the tv was waiting, on sleep mode, took it by the cord, dragged it about 25 yards to the beautiful little pine thicket on the edge of the woods that ran directly downhill to the Moccasin River, a little over a half mile away, and when I pulled the tv into the now dark thicket I shot it from above its top, between the rabbit ears.
You seem to have misunderstood what I was trying to say re needing your help. I have no truck with politics, and I’m an old trucker. I was taught by my Scottish forebears to never trust British government, and I believe all the troubles of the West, and the United States in particular, can be traced back to Roman/English (Londinium) laws, slavery, colonialism, etc. And I’m not alone. I recently scrolled up a website in which a Duke professor of hydrology, a member of the Lumbee tribe, was discussing his recently published book, On the Swamp, and read excerpts from the book and viewed the photographs that the writer made of the huge cypress trees, trunks, knees along the Lumber River, and it all reminded me of my Moccasin River (Tuscarora name for Contentnea Creek), which is just north of the Lumber, and because I read from the excerpts that he believed all the troubles of his people could be traced to colonialism, his thoughts on how he was interested in cleaning up Lumber River, and “dismantling” the hog factories that have turned Sampson County, according to AP, into the toilet bowl of North Carolina, and because I had his Duke email address, I sent the Pamphlet on to him. And at that time I was trying to get a copy of the writing to the editor of the UNC Pembroke student newspaper to ask them to consider publishing the Pamphlet, or even the first eight pages and telling them that if they did I believe it would go “viral” and make its way to other student newspapers, online newspapers, etc., maybe even “all the news fit to print” New York Times, and that way we could begin to clean up all our water, even the foul air, the poisoned land, the wasted land, and asking if they knew of a better way, and asking them if they believed it would be done if we the people didn’t do it. Alas, never heard a word.
The above trying to tell you that politics had nothing to do with my asking you to consider helping get Paradise Farms sprouted, rooted, and growing. There is no politics, no poison mongers, no gmo, no corporate greed at all allowed in Paradise Farms and Gardens, that if a writer’s writing is the writer’s intellectual property, then I wish to give all Earth’s Paradise Farms and Gardens, Unlimited, to the students of the world, beginning here in Eastern North Carolina, and I’m the hapless helpless hopeless dreamer with a wild imagination, living well below the poverty line, wish to give it to you and ask you to give it to the students, and have even dreamed up the Eastern Carolina Press, the Fountain, with you as Chief editor, etc., and felt blessed to do so and feel blessed to have shared the Pamphlet writing with you, and that’s the spirit in which it was sent to you. I pray you understand.
The Pamphlet is constantly growing, evolving and now the first line in headline reads: Good news! Great Hope! Solutions!
I could tell from your letter that the invasion of your home had unsettled everything and I understand. One thing I wish to say re the unsettling that has helped me through my unsettlings is remembering the teaching: Everything is in flux, every thing is constantly changing so if you just hang on, hang in there, everything will sort itself out, and I hope that thought might help.
I believe you would be perfect fit to head up all Paradise Farms, especially the publishing ideas I have that PF will need. And these few things: Believe it or not it would take relatively little brass to launch PF onto the high seas, in fact, if I was a tik tok tweetering twittering limericking, freebooting, facebooking X-type person I might already have PF up and growing, but I have no interest in that type of life and won’t have any so I must keep praying for guidance, hoping for help. And once PF ever gains traction and people learn about its aims and that any and all donations to the cause would be tax deductible, I believe the digital money would pour in and that would get the whole enterprise going in a jiffy, but I don’t know that.
When I read about what the unjust corporates were doing to your home, it bothered me, it’s an unjust greedy corporate crime against you, it’s an invasion of your house. your castle, which I consider a work of art so it’s also a crime against art. Please let me know if I can help and I promise I’ll come running. O .
Re your house: Long time ago I was watching a website and there was a photograph of your house at Fountain on the screen, and I said to myself, Look at that, what an absolute gem of a Lowland Carolina country house, and later on, after adding the production of modular houses to PF. I remembered your special red-roofed house and knew it would be a perfect fit, built to exacting specifications, complete with horsehair plaster, and the same special red color that’s in the photograph, all with your approval, of course. All this long before I read your letter. Let me know if I can be of help.
I’ve wanted to ask you for years, ever since you helped me with NCLR, and I discovered that you taught nonfiction writing, if you knew Emerson’s quote: There’ll be no more need for fiction once the writer learns to write his truth truly.
And this too: All action begins with a thought. And I thought, I have had the thought, now is the time for action.
And these words on a tea box: What the world needs now are dreamers and doers but above all, dreamers that are doers.
I now wish the following roughly written pghs weren’t written attached to the above but I don’t know how to not send them on in this pdf, except by erasing the copy which I’m reluctant to do. All writing is sweating blood with me, but trying to recall something I’ve written hurts my brain so I will leave them and since they are even now history, maybe you might glean something from it. I will add a few lines that I want you to read: On the long forced Trail of Frozen Tears march from our neighborhood to co- o-old Niagara, New York, many of the Tuscarora women and children froze to death. First the colonizers burned them alive, to death, then caused them to freeze to death on a forced march.
There’s a letter still in existence that a Tuscarora woman wrote on the march and left by the roadside in which she asks anyone who reads the letter to please leave blankets because their little children were freezing to death in their mother’s arms at night. Now on my long night dream run to Niagara I stopped by the Niagara Falls newspaper when I arrived and was told that a reporter for the paper had won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on how the Tuscarora were freezing in the cold winter in the prefabricated houses on their new “reservation” that the government had provided for them after running them off the Niagara Falls reservation land they were “given” because the government needed the land for ConEd to build a generating plant at the Falls to send electricity to New York City.
So I ran on down the long long trail across America, all the way to Omaha, then on across the Rockies to Trails End, Oregon, where I saw justice at work, there by Puget Sound, where the Native people, Blacks, Puget Sound University students were all working together, meeting together in good fellowship, all farming together sustainably, in beauty, in happiness. From there I ran on down the coast to Highway 1 West Coast, stopping at all the Vista Points, and finally came to one of my all-time favorite places, Big Sur, and in the dream I was standing alone there in a giant Redwood cathedral, with long rays of slanting sunrays shining down on me me just like they did that morning back in 1975, when the same morning star shone its light down on us in Roughing it with Ruffles, when we stood together there a long time ago. I kept running all the way to Mexico’s Copper Canyon (five times size of Grand Canyon, a place I had never visited) and ran with the Tarahumara and they told me that when I got back to my land to tell my government to stop sending them whole seed corn because they considered their corn sacred and did not want it crossed with gmo-ed seed corn. I liked it there and running with the people, all great runners, even the women and children. And from there I ran through high mountains till I came to highest coastal mountains in the world and finally got to the mountaintop and met the King of the Kogi people that I had seen in a documentary and was accepted by the King and the people and lived among them for a while and every morning I’d go hiking on the wide mountain top and one day I found a little trail right on the edge of the world that led down to a grassy strip that was tucked back under the ledge and it gave me the feeling of being in a cave, and I’d go there and sit in comfort and looking straight out on then big ocean and sky blue Pacific I felt like I could see forever.
One day through the interpreter I asked to have a meeting with the Chief. Now in the documentary I could tell that the people including the Chief seemed extremely paranoid, and I had learned that the Spanish “colonists” had set fierce dogs on them in their village below and they had retreated to the mountaintop and learned to live there and refused to go back down off the mountain and I explained that the same thing had happened to the native people in my land and other parts of the world, and that I believed it was wrong to keep teaching the people they must live in fear. And then I said to him, I came to ask if you would tell me how I should live (all through a Kogi woman interpreter whom the Chief had sent down to learn the language of the Spanish people below) and the Chief put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, My son, do the right thing, always do the right thing, and then I asked how I would know what the right thing was and he said, You will always know. And I thanked him and said, Since you are the wisdom keeper of your people, and I try to write, would you please give me advice on writing, and he again put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, said, My son, write the truth from your heart and when you find your reader your truth will touch your reader’s heart.
And the following morning preparations had been made for my departure, and when we went to the small wooden bridge that led across to where they lived, and I walked across the bridge, the Kogi on the other side of the great divide cut the ropes holding the footbridge and the bridge swumg free.
There’s more to above but I just cut it short. The following is the “rough cut” writing mentioned above: I have now begun to write about my long dream distance running to try to find justice, and the run begins right outside Snow Hill by a State historical marker near Fort Run where the Tuscarora were run into a hastily dug pit where they slaughtered and burned to death nearly a thousand Tuscarora men, women and children, setting them afire in the pit. And all my life I have hoped my people never would do such a thing and don’t believe they did. My great Aunt Martha told me in “Martha’s Song,” (a short piece I recorded when she would visit my grandma (her sister) and then transcribed, told me a about my ancestors, and I wrote down some of what she told me in “Martha’s Song,” and knowing of your interest in our history, maybe sometime I can share that with you, but from her and her three sisters, all storytellers, and listening to other people too, I believe one of my great grandfathers befriended the Tuscarora and I don’t know, but believe he even allowed some to hide on his land after the “massacre” (slaughter) at Fort Run. After the massacre the soldiers rounded up what Tuscarora they could and forced them in the cold winter to march all the way to Niagara, New York, where they joined the Iroqouis. I do know that my great great grandfather Frank, who wore a tam O’shanter here in Glasgow County (original name of Greene County) and was quite a romantic, wearing out two pairs of brogans walking to court my great great grandmother Kate. He had a lot of land, grew a lot of cotton, so much that –Ol’ Frank would put out the word that he needed cotton hands, and son, let me tell you, the hands would come, some walking, but most on carts and wagons, all the way from Wilson and Wayne Counties, cause they knew he’d put them up, feed them good and pay them good. And when it’d come time to sell the cotton, if the price offered didn’t suit him he’d hold his cotton off the market till the following year; you see, he had barns and shelters built to score the cotton in and one year some of the cotton bales caught on fire and no one knew how to put out the fire and when Frank found out what was going on he told his hands to fetch kerosene and pour it slowly into the bales, let it seep in and that would douse the fire, and it did, too. Law son, he was a character, had stables of mules and horses, best and biggest grapevines you ever did see and when I’d go to see your grandma Lou (Louise) and great grandma Kate, I’d eat a bait of grapes and they were best before breakfast when the dew was still on them and I’d eat me a bait of them. They were good.– And my grandfather left it in his will that the people living on his land would inherit the houses they lived in and each one to have a garden plot, and someone told me that those were the first African Americans to own land in Greene County and that some of those people might have been Tuscarora because they had blue eyes. From what I have been told I believe my people and other Scottish settlers here in Glasgow and all the way down to Scotland County in North Carolina befriended the people living on the land and that they got along fine, but I’ll never know.
I have considered including some of the following with the Pamphlet writing, which I think fits because it all concerns Eastern North Carolina, and beyond. [Have you seen the stat that if Eastern Carolina would split from the rest of the State and become a new State, that it would rank 51st in education, per capita income, and health care?]
(more)
Jake
