Works | Freedom Fighters and Hell Raisers

Foreword by Silas House

Most anyone holding this book would agree that it is being published in dark days. No matter what you think about the current political climate, I would find it hard to deny the fact that we’re witnessing the death rattle of things like nuance, decorum, and honesty. Arrogance—one of deadly sins when I was growing up—is now celebrated and rewarded with fashion lines, reality shows, and all the likes and retweets that social media can handle. Teachers are being negated by governors and senators. Being smart is now openly made fun of by our so-called leaders as was only done in the past by drooling schoolyard dullards and bullies. Freedom of the press is under daily attack.

“In a dark time,” Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”

In these troubling times we’ve seen that the great poet was correct. High schoolers have rallied the entire nation to rethink automatic weapons. Worldwide protests have brought people out into the streets who never before even thought of themselves as anything remotely approaching an activist. Women have changed the world with the recent Time’s Up and #MeToo movements. Investigative journalists are doing some of their best work in decades, exposing shocking secrets of politicians and harassers. Thousands of think pieces have been written about our current dilemma. Perhaps best of all, artists are reacting to this gathering storm with films, novels, essays, paintings, music, and other art forms that are forcing people to think complexly, challenging them to offer resuscitation to nuance, to read between the lines, to use their brains.

Hal Crowther has always done that. The essays in this collection were written before our current political crisis, and Crowther was always ahead of the curve when it came to the national conversation. In one of these essays he wrote: “A smug sub-literacy is spreading like dense fog across America’s cerebral landscape; when and how it might clear, no one I know is prepared to say.” He was warning us of this thickening mist before most others could predict its conjuring. Now that anti-intellectualism is a choking smog in America, his writing is more important than ever. One need only look at the first essay in this collection, written about celebrated writer Molly Ivins, to see how prophetic Crowther’s writing has always been. This is something that readers will find happening again and again in collected essays that are perhaps even more relevant now than when they were first written.

Shortly after I read Crowther’s book Cathedrals of Kudzu in the year 2000, I spent a week with him at a writers’ conference, and by the end of that time together I knew I had been in the presence of one of the most intelligent people I had ever met. That’s always the way I describe him to everyone. Reading these essays reminds me of what an apt description that is. It is also appropriate that in a time when so many of us are mourning the loss of complex discussion and decorum, among other things, Crowther is giving us a book of essays that have their impetus in death.

He is quick to point out that these are neither obituaries nor eulogies, but essays that “aspire to the virtues of both.” I would argue that they go far beyond that.  They are profound meditations on the big issues: race (appropriate for a collection by a man I consider as one of the major public intellectuals of the New South, a culture simultaneously embracing progress while also keeping a close eye—and hand—on the past), religion (an essay about a nun, appropriately titled “Confession,” becomes a deeply personal look at faith, doubt, and forgiveness), art (a meditation on the death of a preacher is also a rumination on great writing), politics (providing some of his most deliciously biting commentary), social justice, and much more. In a time of “alternative facts,” Crowther is focusing on the truth in every single one of these essays.Sometimes his truth is brutal. Always his truth is intelligent, meticulously researched, necessary, and written in his unmistakable voice that manages to be full of authority without ever sounding like a knowitall. Crowther’s voice is sometimes cynical—but only when it needs to be. More often it is full of admiration, logic, and even hope. Always his writing is funny. Jesse Helms, in Crowther’s words, is “a huge old pit bull, useless and viscous, that sits in its own mess at the end of a tow-truck chain and snarls at everything that moves.” A scene after a college football game is described this way: “boys with thick necks and buzz cuts, liberated from training, stalked the campus in various stages of alcohol poisoning.” A study of forgiveness includes this finding: “perhaps testosterone and patience are incompatible.”

In all of this writing Crowther is getting at that one most threatened thing in our America today: complexity. These certainly are neither eulogies nor obituaries because those two forms of writing rarely capture as much nuance as Crowther has wrangled so beautifully here. For example, his admiration for the poet James Dickey is clear in “The Last Wolverine,” but he is no wearer of rose-colored glasses. He finds the frustrating aspects of the man’s existence as important and interesting and as worthy of being told as he does his admirable qualities. We learn not only about Dickey clamping Crowther “in a headlock I couldn’t break,” but also the writer’s inappropriate entitlement on his own sexual indulgences and the dangerous belief that being a genius is a kind of exemption. Anyone who desires a master class in writing about the complexity of a human being—especially one who has come to be a symbol for something as evil as racism—need only look to Crowther’s exquisite study of George Wallace where he writes:

The bantamweight from Clio has thrown his last punch. Under normal circumstances this would be an occasion for stock-taking, a time when the South might find some satisfaction in a moral inventory. The most vivid symbol of its ancestral transgressions is gone—and he departed repentant, shriven and forgiven and ready for whatever grace the next place allows.

This kind of beauty is woven throughout the collection. There’s the passage where Crowther tells us about his loyalties to a wonderful poem by James Still being tested by the presence of an emerald hummingbird: “The poem and the bird struggled for my attention, until I imagined a voice I knew as well as the ageless face that I often studied on the sly. ‘Set that poem aside,’ it said, ‘and mind the hummingbird.’ ” Crowther certainly knows how to turn a phrase, as he did here: “The truly embarrassing people, Martin Luther King, for instance—or Jesus Christ—can be a greater force dead than alive. Anne Braden . . . was one of the most embarrassing Southern women who ever lived,” perfectly articulating what it means to be an activist who puts not only her reputation but also her life on the line for the cause she believes in. In this essay we learn not only about Braden’s tireless fight against racism, but also Crowther’s upbringing on the issue. In fact, we are always firmly rooted in Crowther’s point of view on the world, and often he gives us personal reflections not only from his personal relationships with many of his subjects but also looks into his own life. Yet there is never anything remotely approaching the navel-gazing that happens so often in first-person nonfiction writing these days. Crowther is much too interested in the world and the people in it for that, and he is a master at making us interested, too.

This is a book we need right now. Not only because it is beautifully written, entrancing, and funny, but perhaps even more so because is a book of complexity and truth. Very often it is about people who are fighting the good fight, whether that be through activism, prayer, or—most often—the arts. When it’s not, it’s about the people who needed to be fought against. Crowther, like the best writers, knows these are times that need more truth, more nuance, more empathy. In this dark time, he is once again drawing our eyes to the important matters at hand and articulating them all with firm grace and keen intelligence—two things we need much more of right now, and always.