Month: November 2013

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters To The Editor

For the Kids

I think Jim Strickland’s and Shea Flinn’s hearts are in the right place (“For the Kids,” November 14th issue), but getting a tax increase (any tax increase) passed in this tightfisted, Tea Party era is going to be very difficult, no matter how worthy the cause.

I will vote for the increase, but I do not have great hopes for its passage. Hopefully, Memphis voters will (pleasantly) surprise me.

Charlotte Bird


Memphis

The Hamp

Thank you for Bianca Phillips’ excellent article on Binghampton (“The Hamp,” November 7th issue). To the long list of nonprofits, businesses, churches, and individuals working in Binghampton, it would be remiss not to name and honor Rachel Coats Greer, her late husband Harry, and their Rachel’s Kids, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to improving lives in Binghampton.

Rachel is a tireless guardian angel for children and adults alike in Binghampton. Stop by Rachel’s Flowers on Poplar any Saturday between now and Christmas, and you’re very likely to see a group of Binghampton children and teenagers in Rachel’s shop busily crafting reindeer for sale. Rachel returns every penny from the sale of the reindeer to the child to save and use. Bravo, Rachel! Bravo, Binghampton!

Peggy Williamson

Memphis

Merry Christmas, Dammit

Just got home to Jackson after picking up a Flyer in Memphis. I read Bruce VanWyngarden’s column about the “war on Christmas” (Letter from the Editor, November 14th issue). My wife and I will be sitting down this weekend and addressing our “Christmas cards” that we purchased at Lifeway Christian Bookstore. We do not send out Season’s Greetings or Holiday cards. We send out the real thing.

When I am out this time of year, if I see someone I think might be Muslim or Hindu, etc., I make it a point to wish them a very Merry Christmas. God bless you, and Merry Christmas.

George Dean


Jackson, Tennessee

Jim Santoro

Many of us who lived in Memphis during the 1970s and 1980s fondly remember the Memphis Star. This publication was the brainchild of publisher/owner Jim Santoro, and it promoted all genres of Memphis music on a monthly basis. Besides publishing the Memphis Star, Jim was also an excellent performer and songwriter who had many of his songs recorded here and in Europe. However, his heart and soul were always in the promotion of talent in the Memphis area through his paper.

Sadly, Jim passed away last month. If anyone remembers the Memphis Star and has stories or thoughts they wish to share, please forward them to me at the email below and I will get them to his wife, Jackie.

Thank you to the Flyer for this space. We miss you, Jim.

Phil Olive

Memphis

lowdrivemusic@yahoo.com

Tim Sampson

Another good issue ruined. I get to the back page, and there is Tim Sampson with his ideas on how to save the world or, in this case, the homeless (The Rant, November 14th issue). Tim’s always good for a liberal dig at the wealthy too.

Add the private school stickers on the SUVs as something else he doesn’t have the loot for, in addition to a hotel run by the homeless. Who do you think would finance such a project? A Northside High School alum or an MUS alum? That’s usually who it takes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the homeless getting off the streets. But instead of knocking the conservatives who could fund these projects, point the homeless in the direction of Bellevue Baptist Church. That’s five acres for sure.

Scott Blankenship

Memphis

Like Tim Sampson, I too could care less about nachos, billboards, or Lady Gaga, but I do love the idea of a hotel named SHELTER. (I don’t know why all caps were used in the column, but decided to follow suit.) What a great concept! Shabby chic in the heart of Midtown Memphis.

The resurrection of the French Quarter Inn is highly overdue. What better way to enliven the square and lure tourists to our fair city? I spent my “first life” in the hotel/bar/and restaurant industry and would be more than willing to help with planning, training, and organizing this endeavor.

Great vision, Tim. I’m holding out for the innovative loot-holders.

Carol Ricossa

Memphis

Categories
News News Feature

Bee Good

As you survey the bounty of your Thanksgiving Day dinner this year, send up a word of thanks to the honeybee. From your Aunt Delia’s pecan pie to Nana’s cranberry-orange relish and that heavenly sweet potato casserole, all those fruits and nuts and vegetables are made possible as the result of pollination from bees. You may not realize it, but honeybees — European honeybees to be precise — pollinate about 80 percent of the foods we eat.

In fact, bees are so important that Mike Studer, the state apiarist who inspects registered hives in Tennessee for disease and pests, routinely fields phone calls from farmers requesting bee colonies to help with their crops. A rancher in Middle Tennessee told Studer his cattle weren’t fattening up properly because his alfalfa and clover hay hadn’t been pollinated, leaving the feed lacking in important proteins. That connection “is something you just don’t think about,” Studer says. “That’s when it hit home to me just how important bees are to our food supply.”

Bees fly within about a two-mile radius from the apiary (the box which houses the hive), gathering nectar from flowering plants a drop at a time, visiting 50 to 100 flowers before reaching their nectar-storing capacity. The bee then returns to the hive, where it spreads the nectar throughout the comb and fans it with its wings to thicken it. The resulting honey — a healthy hive of 50,000 bees will produce 100 pounds of honey over the course of a year — produces food for the colony. Beekeepers gather a percentage of that for human consumption.

Commercial growers truck colonies of bees across state lines to pollinate everything from almond trees in California and citrus groves in Florida to apple orchards in Washington and blueberry bushes in Maine, making it “the largest agricultural migration in the world,” according to Richard Underhill, president of the Arkansas Beekeepers Association. Honey production, while better known to consumers, is actually a much smaller segment of the beekeeping industry.

Bees play a vital role in U.S. food production, but since 2007 honeybees have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Scientists call it Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a phenomenon in which worker bees abruptly disappear from the hive, leaving the queen and honey behind. Why it occurs remains a mystery.

Beekeeper Bill Hughes of Brighton, Tennessee, has observed losses firsthand. Since 2008, his colonies have declined from 400 to 60. Hughes, who has been keeping bees for 20 years, has checked many of his apiaries only to find them empty, the bees not dead but simply vanished. Studer and his colleagues report that feral bees, too, are all but gone. “I used to catch wild swarms,” Hughes says, “but if they’ve been poisoned by insecticide, the bees won’t breed,” further reducing their numbers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that 33 percent of bee colonies have collapsed nationally due to CCD (and in some regions, that number is closer to 50 percent). While colony losses are not unexpected, losses of this magnitude set off alarm bells. Underhill calls it “the largest historical die-off in the history of beekeeping.”

It turns out that honeybees have many foes: fungal parasites, Varroa and tracheal mites, diseases like chalkbrood, and a lack of nutritional diversity. Even the use of altered seeds to grow crops like soybeans may play a role. But among its biggest foes is the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, which have become more prevalent in the last decade.

“Bees have been described as the canary in the coal mine, since conditions in the environment tell us we’ve altered the environment — from the amount of chemicals we use to the effects of global warming,” Underhill says. The bee decline has scientists scrambling to better understand these complex creatures and what can be done to stop CCD before it becomes an agricultural crisis. Studer says the USDA is working in concert with a host of universities, conducting multiple studies to better understand the factors that impact the health of bees. But the answers may be five years away. “It’s extremely difficult with so many different variables both inside and outside the colony,” Studer says.

So as you spoon that dollop of honey onto your biscuit at Thanksgiving, don’t take that sweet treat for granted. Honeybees need our help.

Jane Schneider is editor of Memphis Parent.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Poor Peter

Peter Pan star Lindsey Roberts quotes Gabriel Byrne’s character from The Usual Suspects: “No more jobs!”

“It was like that,” Roberts says, insisting that she was serious in 2010 when she turned in her green tights and her harness and said she was finished with Neverland. But like the pivotal character in any good heist flick, Roberts, who’ll return to the role of the little boy who won’t grow up when Peter Pan opens at Playhouse on the Square this weekend, has been pulled back into the game for one last shot.

This is great news for holiday audiences who’ll get to see Roberts flying high in a role she’s very nearly perfected. But for Roberts, who also played Harper, the waifish hustler in Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer’s breakthrough The Poor & Hungry, opening weekend will be bittersweet. She will miss attending a party for the film’s long-awaited DVD release.

“People are posting like mad on Facebook, saying they’re looking forward to the party at Black Lodge Video,” Roberts says with a sigh. She’ll have to settle for soaring and crowing like a rooster and evading Captain Hook.

“I told [director] Jordan Nichols I needed to think about doing Peter Pan again,” says Roberts, who loves the part and the show but had needed to take a break from Tiger Lilly and the Lost Boys. “He said he wasn’t asking.”

Roberts and Nichols have pooled their institutional memories to remount and improve on the classic Playhouse on the Square Peter Pan.

“It should be just as much fun for the parents as for the kids,” she says.

“Peter Pan” at Playhouse on the Square, November 22nd-January 5th. Playhouseonthesquare.org

The Return of “the Poor & Hungry” DVD Release Party at Black Lodge Video, Friday, November 22nd, 9 p.m.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Judges Under Review

Have two state appellate judges from Memphis, both women, fallen victim to politics? That’s a question that may not be fully answered until later this year or next, if ever. The two judges are Camille McMullen, a member of the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, and state Supreme Court justice Janice Holder.

Judge Camille McMullen

McMullen is one of three state appellate judges (out of 24 evaluated) whose retention was recently advised against by the nine-member state Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission. Holder, a former chief justice of the state high court, had earlier decided against seeking reelection in next year’s retention elections, in which the state’s appellate judges are subject to yes or no votes by the state’s electorate.            

In Holder’s case, there has been speculation that her past opinions may have run against prevailing political opinion in state government. The venerable Tennessee Journal, a Nashville-based newsletter on government and politics, put it this way in its most recent issue:

“Holder may have faced an organized campaign to defeat her. She is the last remaining member of the 2000 Supreme Court that in Planned Parenthood v. Sundquist struck down several abortion restrictions and subjected any restriction to a ‘strict scrutiny’ analysis, a more rigorous test than the ‘undue burden’ analysis used by the U.S. Supreme Court. She voted with the majority in the 4-1 decision.”

Coincidentally, a proposed constitutional amendment on the state ballot next year calls for the scaling back of state judicial protection for abortion rights to a level no greater than what federal courts provide. McMullen, who was appointed to the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2008 by former Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, had served as both a state and a federal prosecutor and had the blessing of then District Attorney General Bill Gibbons.

Gibbons, who now serves as state Commissioner of Safety and Homeland Security, said at the time of McMullen’s appointment that she had been “a rising star” in his office and was quoted by The Commercial Appeal as saying, “She has the temperament, the intelligence, the work ethic, and the fairness.”

But McMullen apparently had rough sailing in her interview this fall with the state evaluation commission, in which, said the Journal, she “was perceived as displeased with having to go through the process.” McMullen was also said to have been criticized for the slow pace of her opinions.

No detailed report of the commission’s findings will be made public until after a follow-up meeting on December 6th, when commission members will prepare a draft of their findings. After release of the draft, McMullen and two other appellate court judges who received thumbs down from the commission — Court of Criminal Appeals judge Jerry Smith and Court of Appeals judge Andy Bennett, both of Nashville — will have an opportunity to respond. The retention election itself will be held on August 7th of next year. Meanwhile, McMullen has received the public backing of Chief Justice Gary Wade, who, in an interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel last week, praised McMullen, one of three African-American appellate judges, as “very well qualified.”

An implicit opinion to the contrary came from Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, who pronounced himself pleased with the commission’s action and opined that the three judges adversely cited apparently “weren’t doing their jobs.”

Ramsey, the Republican state senator from Blountville who presides over the state Senate, has major impact on the process. Under a state law passed in 2009, he has a direct say in the appointment of five of the nine members of the Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission.

Until 2009, the retention evaluation process was the work of a Judicial Evaluation Commission that was appointed in large part by a now defunct Judicial Council, which included sitting judges. Legislation that year, the first in which both the state House and state Senate had Republican majorities, altered the process, which now calls for the Evaluating Commission’s nine members to be appointed exclusively by the speakers of the two chambers. Senate speaker Ramsey has four appointees, and House speaker Beth Harwell of Nashville has four, with one to be a joint appointee by the two speakers.

Those who opposed the change expressed concerns about what they saw as the politicizing of the judiciary. Those who favored it see it as a means of making appellate judges, who gain office through appointment, more responsive to the will of the people. They note that in 2014 all the state’s trial judges, subject to direct election every eight years, will be on the ballot in their jurisdictions.

Yet another official advisory body, the newly constituted Governor’s Commission for Judicial Appointments, sent Haslam three nominees to replace Holder. They are Court of Criminal Court Appeals judge Holly Kirby of Memphis, Shelby County Criminal Court judge Christopher Craft, and Memphis attorney Brook Lathram.

Two other Memphians were among the three jurists nominated by the governor’s commission to succeed Court of Appeals judge David Farmer of Jackson. The Court of Appeals nominees are Shelby County chancellor Kenny Armstrong, Memphis attorney Dorothy Pounders, and Jackson attorney Brandon Gibson.

Is School Litigation Coming to an End?

The dominoes have started falling: That was the message that seemed to emerge from Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission. At the heel of the meeting (procedural jargon for holding this or that piece of business until the very end), the commission adjourned for an executive session with attorney Lori Patterson.

When it ended, enough was revealed by Chairman James Harvey and other members to indicate that two of the six suburban municipalities that have been on the other end of litigation brought by the commission — Arlington and Lakeland — were ready to reach agreement with the commission on terms that will be brought before the unified Shelby County Schools board at its scheduled Tuesday night work session.

Though the chapter and verse of the agreement were to be withheld until Tuesday’s school board meeting, enough was learned, from several sources familiar with negotiations, to indicate that the two municipalities would accept financial terms considerably higher than token ones in order to take possession of school buildings within the jurisdictions of their soon-to-be school districts.

Indications are that Millington officials would soon be accepting similar propositions — probably this week — and that Bartlett and Collierville would not be far behind (although some wrinkles still need to be ironed out in all these cases).

The template for an agreement is not identical to that proposed two weeks ago by Superintendent Dorsey Hopson of the unified SCS district, but the board is expected to find it amenable. The chief surprise in the arrangements agreed to by attorneys for Arlington and Lakeland, subject to approval by the municipalities’ governing bodies and by their newly elected school boards, is that the municipalities would purchase the school buildings outright rather than engaging in 40-year leases, as Hopson had proposed.

The sale price, said to be $4 million in the case of Arlington, would be predicated on the basis of number of facilities and amount of square footage involved for all municipalities.

Should such agreements indeed be concluded with five of the municipalities, only Germantown would find itself still in litigation. The city’s officials remain aggrieved by attendance zones proposed by Hopson for the unified county system that includes three Germantown schools — Germantown High School, Germantown Middle School, and Germantown Elementary.

Although county commissioner Chris Thomas said Monday he would defer presenting a motion for full and complete discontinuation of the commission’s lawsuit, pending events of the next two weeks, members of the commission majority that has supported the litigation indicate they are not prepared to give it up so long as Germantown holds out.

The commission will hold a special meeting Thursday to consider further action if copies of the suggested agreement are in its possession as of noon Tuesday. (That was a condition insisted on by Commissioner Heidi Shafer.) Friday was set aside as a contingency date in case there was a delay in disseminating copies of the proposed agreement.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Who’s the Laughingstock?

The argument for “right-to-work” laws, like the one that exists in Tennessee and most other Southern states, is that they function as incentives to attract industry.

The mechanics work this way: In right-to-work states, no worker at a plant where unions are recognized is obliged to join a union. Advocates of right-to-work laws maintain such laws are guarantees of free choice. Opponents of them say they are union-busting measures and allow non-union workers to “freeload” on the employee advantages obtained through union auspices.

A situation now arising involving the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, however, is scrambling all the clichés and talking points and confounding the assumptions of leading Tennessee Republican officeholders that union prerogatives have “job-killing” consequences and impair the state’s efforts to attract industry.

In the case of Volkswagen, the management of the corporate giant has been insisting — in the face of opposition from Governor Bill Haslam and Senator Bob Corker — that the arguments of right-to-work enthusiasts and union-bashers run counter to reality and that strong worker organizations actually constitute a competitive advantage for the corporation. The practice in economically powerful Germany is for corporations to be governed jointly by representatives of management and labor — the latter through union-like groups called “works councils.”

In an interview with Nashville-based Associated Press reporter Erik Schelzig, who is German-born and speaks the language fluently, Bernd Osterloh, head of Volkswagen’s works councils and a member of VW’s supervisory board, said categorically: “Volkswagen considers its corporate culture of works councils a competitive advantage.” Osterloh added, “Volkswagen is led by its board and not by politicians,” and expressed confidence that the board would make “the right decision” in the face of demands by Haslam and Corker that the VW board should void its decision to honor a petition for representation by the United Auto Workers at the Chattanooga plant. The two officials say that, at the very least, Volkswagen should insist on a “secret ballot” vote on union representation by workers at the plant.

Haslam and Corker acknowledge having “concern about the impact of UAW on the state’s ability to recruit other companies to Tennessee,” as a spokesperson for Haslam put it. Corker went so far as to say Volkswagen would be a “laughingstock” if the company permitted a union to operate there. The baffled VW official said, “The decision about [buying] a vehicle will always be made along economic and employment policy lines. It has absolutely nothing to do with … whether there is a union there or not.” He further noted that U.S. law mandates union representation as a prerequisite for allowing the power-sharing function of works councils and pointed out that every other VW plant in the world maintains such councils as a key to its manufacturing strategy.

Though he might have, Osterloh did not go on to note the long-standing fact of existing UAW representation at the General Motors plant at Spring Hill or that Tennessee’s ability to attract industry had somehow not been destroyed by the fact. Nor, and this is surely the clincher, did it keep Volkswagen itself from locating here.

We have to wonder: Just who is the real laughingstock in this argument?

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From The Editor: Fords and Cheneys

It was a good week for schadenfreude, which, literally translated from the German, means “harm-joy” and as commonly used in English, means taking pleasure from the pain of others.

Who in Memphis, for example, isn’t taking a little pleasure from the pain, or at least embarrassment, that Toronto is suffering from the public antics of its inflatable, pumpkin-headed mayor, Rob Ford. Ford, who has admitted to smoking crack and whose behavior in various press conferences and council meetings indicates that he’s still hitting the pipe, has become a household name and the target of Saturday Night Live skits and late-night comedians. (The late Chris Farley must be writhing in his grave at the missed opportunity to mimic the man he was born to mimic.)

At any rate, Rob Ford’s behavior makes the Nashville perorations of Memphis’ Ophelia Ford (no relation, except spiritual) look tame, indeed. When Toronto’s city council moved to limit Ford’s powers, he likened the move to the U.S. invasion of Kuwait. He also cussed out the press and inadvertently tackled a female councilwoman in one of the most weirdly hilarious videos to ever hit the internet. He then went on the Today show and told host Matt Lauer that he had a “weight issue” that he was getting treatment for and that he wasn’t going anywhere. “They’re not going to find another Rob Ford,” he said, which is pretty much irrefutable.

And speaking of schadenfreude, how about Liz and Mary, the battlin’ Cheney daughters? Liz, the elder sibling, who sports a blond bouffant hairdone, looks a lot like her mother, Lynne Cheney. Mary looks more like Dick. (Please, please, forgive me.) Anyway, Liz, who is straight, recently moved to Wyoming from Washington, D.C., in order to launch a primary challenge to incumbent Republican senator Mike Enzi. To assuage concerns that she might somehow be perceived as “progressive” by the Tea Party wing that dominates the GOP in Wyoming, Liz took a stand against gay marriage. This did not sit well with sister Mary, who is gay and legally married to a woman named Heather Poe.

Mary issued several statements castigating Liz, first asserting that her sister had often visited her family and had never had a problem accepting her marriage to Heather, then later issuing a statement saying her sister was on “the wrong side of history.” Mary, of course, conveniently neglected to mention her own history, which includes working to elect and re-elect numerous Republicans who not only opposed gay marriage but even opposed gay rights.

Father Dick Cheney then stepped up in support of Liz, even though he himself has come out in favor of gay marriage — in essence, choosing politics over his own ethical beliefs. Big surprise, I know. But it does assure that the Cheney family Christmas will be a little tense this year.

Merry Schadenfreude, y’all!

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Music Record Reviews

New Records

Leo Welch’s Sabougla Voices is the latest from Big Legal Mess records. It’s gospel blues, a virulent strain of Hill Country religious fervor. Welch is a pastor and the host of Black Gospel Express, a Sunday program in Bruce, Mississippi. He’s 81. There’s a spirit alive in this music all right: the spirit of R.L. and Junior drinking and fishing with the Apostles. Welch’s evangelizing has the two-four jump and growl of the best electric country blues.

After 30 years in the church and working on a logging crew, Welch called the label after learning that Junior Kimbrough had recorded for Big Legal Mess. An intern told him they no longer produced blues. A higher-up overheard the conversation and intervened. The result is an album of 10 tracks that could have come from any of the big names in Hill Country blues aside from the exhortations of praise and the ecclesiastical reflections in the lyrics. It’s some of the dancingest church music you’ll hear outside of a praise break. It would make a fine contribution to any heathen’s Sunday morning Bloody Mary and bacon grease situation.

Leo Welch

Sabougla Voices, available January 7th

(Big Legal Mess)

Another take on the blues and biblical influence comes from longtime Memphis songwriter Ron Jungklas. The Spirit and the Spine has a more twisted take on religiosity and redemption. The opening track, “Black Snake Moan,” paints a picture of a post-religious apocalypse, a tooth-and-claw consideration of human nature. Thundering drums and guitars that sound like dust storms get whipped up into “Automatic,” a Dust Bowl tinged lament for rain as a metaphor for meaningful faith.

Jungklas made a run at the big time in the radio days of the 1980s. He’s taught science at local schools since the 1990s. But he stayed close enough to the fires to heed the call of music. The Spirit and the Spine finds Jungklas mining despair, alienation, and suffering. “Spit” explores the nature of false prophecy and hypocrisy: “I just gathered up some dust, and I spit into my hand … I am the crowing cock, sweet honey in the rock/The poison in the bitter pill.” All of this happens over the unsettling whirring of a filtered drone menacingly throbbing beneath everything.

The sounds on this record signal thematic changes. Mud and smoke clear for “Say Damn,” a bent, electric homecoming: “The loyal opposition in the angel choir.” It’s a gritty, erotic Prodigal Son thing.

Maybe I’m lost in the twister of imagery and this album is not intended to be a pilgrim’s progress through the sex-soaked, anger-spewing, materialistic — yet somehow Christian — culture of the contemporary Bible Belt. But it sure works as one. The Spirit and the Spine is fascinating to listen to, even if it makes you want to put a parental advisory sticker on the Bible.

Rob Jungklas


The Spirit and the Spine

(Madjack Records)

It may be time to work the martini shaker and stare at the moon. If that’s the case, Jeremy Shrader and Ed Finney have got you covered. The Moon Is in Love is a collection of originals and jazz standards from the 1930s. Shrader sings and plays trumpet over Finney’s jazz guitar. The pairing is spare, but it gives them room to play. And do they ever.

The duo’s compositions stand up to some heavy comparisons too. They cover the Gershwins, Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart. The standards give the instruments an opportunity to interplay in a way that’s engaging. The original songs carry the load based on a couple of virtues:

Shrader’s voice bounces along fine on the standards and also keeps up with Finney’s compositional workout in “Lovers in Love.” “Daytime, Nighttime” is a Shrader original that divines the mood and harmonic textures of the age into a masterfully written song. It’s a case study of a golden age in American songcraft.

Shrader’s tune “True” veers off the program a bit with a nod to the 1960s. The song incorporates the virtues of ’30s songwriting but puts an R&B energy behind it. What Finney does on this great set of chord changes is phenomenal. His guitar tone is so full and powerful and his phrasing so precise and lyrical that it’s like watching a rodeo bull dance ballet. You almost can’t believe it.

There is a CD release party at the Cove on Thursday, November 21st.

Jeremy Shrader and Ed Finney

The Moon Is in Love

(Electric Room)

Categories
Music Music Features

George Coleman Quartet at Rhodes

It’s homecoming at Rhodes College for a couple of old friends: Jazz greats George Coleman and Harold Mabern will perform as the George Coleman Quartet on November 23rd in the McCallum Ballroom at Rhodes.

Coleman’s resume is profound. He played for B.B. King in the early ’50s and on several of Miles Davis’ essential hard-bop recordings from 1963 to 1964, including “My Funny Valentine” and “Seven Steps to Heaven.” He also played for Lionel Hampton, Herbie Hancock, Lee Morgan, Max Roach, Jimmy Smith, and Chet Baker. Coleman has made several albums as a leader.

Mabern is the protégé of 2013 Memphis Music Hall of Fame inductee Phineas Newborn Jr. He was also a Miles Davis sideman and worked with Morgan, Sarah Vaughan, and Wes Montgomery in the ’60s. The self-taught Mabern stayed vital in the ’70s, working with George Benson and Stanley Turrentine.

Coleman and Mabern made three albums together with Mabern leading: A Few Miles From Memphis, Rakin’ and Scrapin’, and Workin’ and Wailin’. They are out of print except for a compilation that includes Wailin’ and Greasy Kid Stuff!, Mabern’s follow-up sans Coleman.

The Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes hosts the quartet as part of its concert series. Other acts have included Dan Penn with Spooner Oldham and Mose Allison. For more information, go to rhodes.edu/curb. — Joe Boone

The George Coleman Quartet with Harold Mabern, Saturday, November 23rd, 7:30 p.m. in the McCallum Ballroom of the Bryan Campus Life Center.

Categories
Book Features Books

Truth Be Told

In the summer of 2005, Noura Jackson wasn’t exactly leading the enviable life of an East Memphis 18-year-old. She still hadn’t graduated from high school, and after a monthlong stay at Charter Lakeside Behavioral Center (for fear she’d kill herself), she didn’t have a place to live.

So Rebecca Robertson, a friend of Noura’s uncle, invited Noura to stay with her. Then Robertson’s Lortab and Xanax prescriptions went missing, and Noura’s late-night comings and goings became a problem. That’s when Nora’s out-of-town maternal aunts stepped in and paid for Noura to have her own apartment. They were already paying for Noura’s clothing, groceries, and gas. With the money they sent, Noura even got a dog. But they would not pay when Noura asked to have a personal trainer. And they could not stop the noise — and neighbors’ complaints — when friends showed up to hang out. Noura was evicted from her apartment and spent the next few weeks staying with friends’ families or with the couple she was babysitting for. Until September 29th, when police swooped in.

They arrested Noura and charged her with her mother’s murder — the result of 50 (or was it 51?) stabbings delivered while Jennifer Jackson was asleep inside the East Memphis home she shared with her daughter and only child. The time of death: sometime during the early-morning hours of Sunday, June 5, 2005.

Noura never took the stand during the trial, which finally occurred in 2009. Her blood and DNA were not found on the scene. The murder weapon or weapons were never found. But the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. The jury sentenced Noura to 20 years and nine months for second-degree murder.

That trial was followed by the local news media and online commenters and covered on the TV show 48 Hours. It was a trial that also featured the memorable opening statement of one of Noura’s own attorneys, who told the jury that they would be hearing from a lot of “East Memphis brats.” Judge Christopher Craft characterized them along the same lines: He called them “very privileged, completely selfish, and out of control.”

But it was a trial of special interest to one Memphian: writer Lisa C. Hickman. Her daughter had gone to school with Noura at St. Agnes Academy — one of the many schools Noura attended, among them St. Mary’s, Lausanne, Ridgeway, and St. George’s. Hickman’s older son had also been friends with a man who worked alongside Jennifer Jackson as bond traders. Hickman met with that friend and Jennifer’s half-brother the day after the murder. Something about this case compelled her.

So Hickman sat in the courtroom to observe the trial. She was granted access to investigative photographs taken inside the cluttered Jackson home. And she was once even haunted by the spirit of Jennifer Jackson in a dream.

“It was what I couldn’t reconcile that propelled the writing project,” Hickman writes in Stranger to the Truth (available at the Booksellers at Laurelwood, Burke’s Book Store, and strangertothetruth.com), Hickman’s retelling of the Noura Jackson case and her unstable upbringing.

“A group of teenagers, partying, and yes, being reckless and difficult. And one member, a young girl, accused of murdering her mother, because in theory, her mom started saying no to this life style. The twinning of this normal and extremely abnormal behavior suggested a compelling and worthwhile book. I had no way of knowing just how compelling or that my involvement with the story would span eight years.” But it did span eight years, during which Hickman wrestled with a narrative “not easily tamed.”

“It did not conform to a linear telling or a consistent point of view,” she writes. But she emphasizes: “My goal always was to stay objective.”

As Hickman added in a recent email, she also wanted the narrative to have “energy.” And it does — the better to reflect not only Noura’s disturbing back story (which includes the murder of her father in 2004) but the drug- and alcohol-fueled lives these teenagers led, lives seemingly untethered from parental control.

In the case of Hickman’s epilogue, however, the narrative exhibits more than energy. Call it omniscient and urgent, because she replays events during the early-morning hours of that Sunday in 2005 and reenacts what appears to have been an example of homicidal rage. End of story? Not quite.

In a state Supreme Court decision to consider Noura’s appeal for a retrial, the court wrote earlier this month: “We … conclude that the arguments of the defendant are without merit. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.”

And so Noura Jackson remains inside the Mark H. Luttrell Correctional Center. But after finishing her sentence, she will still be near her mother in one respect. Noura will be close in age to that of Jennifer at the time of her death: 39.

Clarification: The State Criminal Court of Appeals upheld Noura Jackson’s
conviction for second-degree murder. The Tennessee Supreme Court heard
Noura’s appeal for a new trial on November 6, 2013. It has not issued a
decision.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

A Fishy Thanksgiving

The original Thanksgiving wasn’t exactly the Pilgrim and Indian love fest we collectively misremember. But despite growing recognition of the degree to which the Thanksgiving story has been rewritten, the same analysis has not been widely applied to the holiday’s traditional foods. We still tend to cook the same dishes each year, dictated more by habit than history. The original Thanksgiving did not include turkey, pumpkin pie, and other contemporary Thanksgiving staples, like women, children, and football. But it did, according to historians, include a lot of seafood, thanks to the event’s location on the Massachusetts coast.

Likely foods included cod, oysters, and other shellfish, as well as venison. The first historical mention of turkeys at Thanksgiving was in an 1827 novel, Northwood, by Sarah Josepha Hale. The use of turkeys at Thanksgiving really took off in 1947, when the National Turkey Federation began presenting turkeys to American presidents in advance of every Thanksgiving. More recently, Tofurkey has met commercial success by allowing vegetarians and vegans to join in the modern ritual of using the turkey to celebrate what is sometimes referred to as “Genocide Appreciation Day.”

One part of the Thanksgiving story that’s true is that afterward the Indians did indeed help the Pilgrims through the winter, a fact that the Wampanoag tribe almost immediately came to regret. During the winter that followed the first Thanksgiving, the Indians so vastly outnumbered the Pilgrims that they could easily have wiped them out, forever changing the official start of the Christmas shopping season.

Instead, just two years later, a Pilgrim preacher named Mather the Elder was able to thank God for smallpox, which had by that point killed many Wampanoag. A few years later, many of the remaining Wampanoag died in King Philip’s War, which by today’s standards would be considered more of a massacre.

Compared to the holiday’s historical reality, looking at the actual food that was served at Thanksgiving is much less depressing to think about. While there was no pie, the Pilgrims might have contributed stewed pumpkin, along with boiled bread (dumplings) and cheese curd fritters. And there might have been sobaheg, a Wampanoag recipe still being made today by tribal members.

Sobaheg includes a trio of vegetables that are commonly associated with Native American farmers: corn, beans, and squash — aka the Three Sisters. Sobaheg also contains some kind of meat, like venison, or even turkey.

Indeed, centuries before European contact, Native Americans of the region had already domesticated turkeys. It just so happened, according to historians, that turkey wasn’t served during the original three-day bash. But if the historians are wrong and some turkey had somehow snuck its way onto the original Thanksgiving table, it could very well have been via the sobaheg.

Some sobaheg recipes include clam juice, which I find exciting. Clam juice is like a simple version of oyster sauce, which has become indispensable in my kitchen. Both clam juice and oyster sauce contain mollusk extracts, and both are umami donors. The simple fact that clam juice is more authentic to Thanksgiving than turkey is all the reminder we need that there is more to the Thanksgiving picture than what we’ve been fed.

Sobaheg

Ingredients (for a medium pot):

1 cup dry beans

2 cups hominy corn (dried, canned, or frozen); some recipes use corn grits

1-2 pounds turkey, white or dark meat

A pound of winter squash, trimmed and cubed

Two teaspoons each garlic and onion powder

An 8-oz. bottle of clam juice

Salt or soy sauce to taste

Optional: 1/2 cup raw sunflower seeds, pounded to a coarse flour or pulverized in a coffee grinder. This adds a unique flavor that some might find a little too unique.

Procedure

There is a lot of leeway in terms of how mushy you like your corn, beans, and squash. I like the beans soft but the squash and corn a bit more toothy. Adjust your procedure according to your own taste.

 Cook the beans in water until they’re nearly tender. If you’re using dried hominy corn — as opposed to canned or frozen ­— it should be cooked with the beans. While the beans are cooking, roast your turkey at 250 degrees until it’s browned. Turn the oven off and let the turkey slowly cool.

 When the beans are soft, change the water, and set cooking on medium. If using frozen hominy, add it now.

Add onion and garlic powders. When the turkey is cool enough to work with, pull it into pieces and add them to the pot. Let it simmer. If using canned hominy, add it now. About an hour before serving time, add the squash chunks. Adjust seasonings with salt or chicken bouillon. Add sunflower-seed flour, if using it, and stir it in.

It’s a simple yet texturally diverse pot of stew, full of complementary flavors. And if you want to take it even further, a dollop of cranberry sauce adds a refreshing zing — even if there weren’t cranberries at the original Thanksgiving.