I haven't been in a car in three months. It's not a fossil fuel protest. More of an experiment or an art project. The impulse behind it is conservative. It was Russell Kirk, after all, who said that automobiles were mechanical Jacobins.
Mass auto ownership has upended the good parts of the pre-1914 social order, which was very much a spatial order. Accommodation of mass auto ownership, forced along by federal subsidies, has ripped up our cities and our countryside, fragmenting our communities and our daily lives.
My exercise in refusal is an attempt to reclaim an older, more civilized pace of life. I'm insisting on the right to move slow and think slow. I'm trying to get still, centered, grounded--trying to practice what yoga teachers preach. The only proper way to get through another Southern summer is just to be in it.
Riding the city bus does not interfere with the experience of slowness. It doesn't produce a sense of fragmented perspective, a la Picasso; maybe it's the great mass of the vehicle, or that the ceremonies of buying a ticket and finding a seat make it more like going to a movie theater than watching TV.
So I plan to board the Pulaski Heights bus downtown and disembark in the garden suburb of my childhood. Nostalgic triggers are like any other drug: If you abstain for a while, the effect becomes more potent. I expect the walk from the bus stop to my friends' house to trigger intense nostalgia, because I haven't been to the Heights in months.
Last evening I went out in search of another lost time: the childhood of William Grant Still. He was born May 11, 1895, in Woodville, Miss. His father died when he was an infant. The rumor in Woodville was that some local white men, intimidated by the elder Still's intelligence and prosperity, paid an ex-girlfriend to poison him. As he lay dying, an owl perched on the roof for days. When he died, the owl flew into the house, then left for good.
Widowed, Carrie Lena Fambro Still took baby William to Little Rock, where her mother and sister had already established themselves (the city had a reputation for enlightenment). When her sister Laura died, Carrie bought Laura's house at 912 W. 14th St. She would eventually own most of the real estate on the block. In 1904, she married Charles Benjamin Shepperson, described by William Grant Still as "a postal clerk and a sensitive soul who loved the arts."
On the way to West 14th, I passed the Pike-Fletcher-Terry mansion, boyhood home of John Gould Fletcher, who was eight years older than William Grant Still. Fletcher's mother was, like Still's, an accomplished woman with specific ambitions for her son, and a will to drive him in the desired direction.
Adolphine Fletcher hoped for John to become a musician; when he demonstrated little musical talent, she decided he must become a lawyer. He dropped out of Harvard as an undergraduate and became a poet. Carrie Still Shepperson wanted William Grant Still to become a doctor; a woman of considerable culture, an English teacher who graduated from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta) at age 17, she allowed her son to begin violin lessons when he entered high school. It's a shame that Adolphine Fletcher didn't live long enough to hear of his career.
If the 1910 city directory street listings are any guide, 14th Street was overwhelmingly residential. While many tailors or small grocers might have been doing business out of their homes, the only obvious business listed is Tipton and Hurst, way out at 2116 W. 14th. There were plenty of businesses within easy walking distance of the Shepperson house, however, including the Grottian (pronounced "Grothan") Grocery, where one of Still's childhood friends remembered hanging out while Still (before he began violin) played an instrument he'd made from a Virginia Cheroot Cigar box and rubber bands. He played "Swanee River." "My Old Kentucky Home." "The Star Spangled Banner."
In the summer of 1910, Still would have been 15, preparing for his last year at Mifflin W. Gibbs High School before going off to Wilberforce University, selected by his mother for its premedical curriculum and military discipline. Later in life, Still remembered his Little Rock neighborhood as integrated. The 1910 city directory lists three households on the Shepperson's block; notably, none of them is marked with a parenthetical "c" for "colored."
Moving out from Main Street, 14th Street does appear well integrated; patterns of segregation are more apparent on north-south running streets such as Chester, though on a very small scale: moving south, one might find a line of white-occupied houses running a block and half, which abruptly changes to a line of Black-occupied houses running another block and a half before changing back. The scale is much larger and the contrast much starker today, thanks in no small part to our great monument to federally subsidized mass automobile ownership: I-630.
I paused last night just west of the gates of Philander Smith, where the Shepperson house once stood. Someone to the southwest shot off a Roman candle. The worst item from Still's long list of mischief recollected is the time he found a pistol (his stepfather's, presumably), shot it in the backyard, and, in his own words, "was rewarded by a scream from one of the Italian children who lived near." (He investigated later, and the child was fine. He also got severely whipped, though whippings were quite frequent throughout his childhood.)
Turning north and heading back across I-630, I could only lament the loss of the buildings, the commerce, the culture, the life that Still would have passed while heading up to Ninth Street with Charles Benjamin Shepperson to hear music. For it was his stepfather, Still attested, who "took me to see various stage shows that came to Little Rock. He initiated and fostered in me a love for the stage which never has died."