conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Blues, Omni-Americans, Stomping with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'South to a Very Old Place'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: South to a Very Old Place
  Perhaps Gerald Hamilton, who for some reason seemed more concerned with such matters than other freshmen, will also remember a particular conversation about the relative merits of various prominent upperclassmen, the question being whether they were truly big-league academic caliber or mostly jive artists. Addie Stabler and Leo Greene will remember and so will Frank Watkins and Orlando Powers that back at MCTS from the ninth grade on the question was one of being of college timber, and of leadership fiber such as would bring credit not only to your alma mater but to all your people.
  Mozelle Menefee whose nickname is Moqué (a play on Moketubbe, no doubt) knows that if you had said the old Varner Place in the presence of people who really know Tuskegee they would have assumed that you were referring not to Frenchman's Bend (as in Gee's Bend) but to the grounds on part (but not all) of which stands the Institute. Those who know less local history than local affairs would have taken for granted that you were talking about a local Judge of Probate named William Varner, who was in fact a man on the order of a Sartoris or Compson rather than the father Faulkner created for Jody Varner. Mozelle Menefee, whose memory of wisteria is of deep purple falling over sleepy garden walls in a song being sung by Gwendelyn Persley on a high school assembly program, will remember that particular Varner not only because she grew up in Macon County, Alabama, but also since his is the name of the Judge of Probate on her marriage license.
  On the other hand, you were likely to forget that Booker T. Washington, who after all had been dead for only twenty years at that time, was of the same generation as many of these same grandparents (who, come to think of it, only needed to be between seventy-five and eighty-five). Indeed, such was that oldness of Booker T. Washington in chapel on Founders Day that next spring what with the choir singing against the background of the stained-glass windows, what with the words being spoken as if being recited from parchment scrolls, what with his monument outside among the academic cedars, that he seemed to have belonged not to any specific generation at all but to the ages—as did Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And what then follows you remember later as having been not unlike the leapfrogging chase chorus exchanges among musicians running down a theme on some of Lester Young's early, post-Basie, combo recordings: the soloists trading eight-, six-, and four-bar statements (nor did they lack any of old Lester's querulous coolness, nor any of his blues-based determination to blow it as he felt it and heard it regardless of what was currently hip):
  You say: "I think I know what you mean about the white kids, and yet they may be the first generation of white people who are really beginning to be uncomfortable about their heritage of racism. You have to give them that. But the goddam problem is that they are still no less condescending than their parents. I mean who the hell are they to be 'helping' somebody? How the hell would they know who to help anyway? Goddam it if they really mean business they've got to stop acting as if only the most confused, uninformed, and loudmouthed among us are for real. And everybody else is either stupid or is trying to pass for white."
  And somebody else cuts in as with a plunger-style trombone to say: "Hey, especially when you get your head bad. Man, goddam, I'd hate to see one of them little clowns forget he ain't talking to one of them simple-ass ofay reporters and jump you with your head bad. Great googly woogly!"
  You say: "They don't really mean it." You say: "I don't think they realize what they're saying. The big thing with them nowadays is to sound revolutionary. Which is fine. But most of those I've talked to tend to confuse revolution with community rehabilitation programs. A lot of them keep talking about what they are going to do for the people of the black community, and I keep telling them that too many of them are only sounding like a bunch of hancty social-welfare case workers, and ofay case workers at that. Man, you go around to the Ivy League campuses and listen to some of our kids talking all that old blue-eagle jive and they sound like they've never been anywhere near their own people. You know what I mean? Like, well, when you come right down to it they sound almost exactly like a bunch of rich or passing-for-rich white kids ever so hot to trot into the Peace Corps. You know what I mean? To help the poor natives somewhere. What bothers me and this really bothers the hell out of me is that they are responding to what they read instead of what they know, and yet when you check them out on what they read you find they haven't really read very much."
  Elsewhere you yourself also say. "You know what I want them to be like? Our prizefighters. Our baseball players. Like our basketball players. You know what I mean? Then you'll see something. Then you'll see them riffing on history because they know history. Riffing on politics because they know politics. One of the main things that too many spokesmen seem to forget these days is the fact you really have to know a hell of a lot about the system in order to know whether you're operating within it or outside it. What bothers me now is that they are so quick to start formulating policies before double-checking the definition of the problem. The difference between riffing and shucking is knowing the goddam fundamentals. Man, when I see one of us up at Harvard or Yale I want to be able to feel like you used to feel seeing Sugar Ray in Madison Square Garden or Big Oscar there, or Willie Mays coming to bat in an All-Star game. You know what I mean? I like to think that old Thurgood Marshall came pretty close. At one time when he opened his briefcase in the Supreme Court it was almost like Lawrence Brown and Harry Carney unpacking their horns backstage at Carnegie Hall."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It could be called the Friend of Indians Game (in which "no-good" white men provide the Indians with just enough guns and ammo to set them on the warpath and into ambush). But it is usually called Shooting Fish in a Barrel. And the thing about it is that not only will the welfare foundations go for it; so will the ever so nonviolent Compassion Corps. All they need is reassurance that red-blooded white Americans would never actually shoot the mullet-heads once they have been tricked into the barrel. A few squeamish liberals might balk. But there will be plenty of New York intellectuals who will reason that a gas oven is not actually a gas oven until you actually light the gas.
  All you need claim for blues-idiom–oriented political behavior at this point is that it is less given to self-defeating self-righteousness than is moral outcry rhetoric. All you need to point out is that when the self-righteous people you know turn to violence they seem to spend so much time justifying their right to pick up the gun that they forget to learn how to shoot, as if the rightness of the cause were in itself a functional substitute for combat readiness and combat intelligence. All you need to say is that blues-oriented people are conditioned to confront the facts of life.
  Anyway, the more you for one think about some of the theory-oriented leader/spokesmen who were already well on their way to media-prominence even before Martin Luther King's ill-fated mission to Memphis, the more you find yourself coming back to an old notion that it just might be his pragmatic orientation to the flesh-and-blood actualities of food, clothing, shelter, chance, and the contingencies of fellowship and romance that will best equip the blues-conditioned leader to keep the faith of his forefathers during these electro-media days of so much instantly amplified and conventionalized sound and furiousness. As for his own shortcomings, as of now they are (specific technical skills aside) mostly a matter of inadequate horizons of aspiration. In most instances all he would have to do is realize the national (and international) implications of his local achievements. Not that he has been playing himself cheap because he is deficient in self-esteem. It is rather his context of self-evaluation and appreciation that is too provincial, a matter which can be remedied with only the slightest turn of the screw, say no more than it took to get Willie Mays and Hank Aaron from the sandlots of Alabama to big-league superstardom.
  As for the Ancestral Imperatives, now so frequently obscured by pretentious spokesmen overreacting to the Folklore of White Supremacy, what they require is very simple indeed: that you take care of the business at hand to the best of your ability, a business which begins, incidentally, not with historical romances about pre-American identities, but with such supermarket–city hall–monday morning matters as equal employment opportunities, equal protection under the law, equal access to civic services and living facilities, and adequate political representation.
  You decide not to give Shelby Foote one final buzz from the airport, because once there you are already out of Memphis. You are in a sense already out of the South. You are already back in the national zone (and indeed, even in the intercontinental zone) and it would not be like talking to him down home anymore. It would be almost the same as calling from New York. It wouldn't even be very much like calling long distance from Harlem. It would be more like using a booth somewhere in midtown Manhattan with somebody standing outside wondering how much longer you're going to be there.