Echo chamber

This morning I had a Skype call with Marie. She had been out of contact for five days. When we started the call she was troubled. By the end of the call she said I had cheered her up. So far, so good, I guess.

But God in heaven, what an unsatisfactory call!

A couple weeks ago she and I had been talking about a book that had come across her radar (I no longer remember how): The Schoolmaker: Sawney Webb and the Bell Buckle Story, by Laurence McMillin. I told her I'd read it, and that the subject of the book seemed to be a fine gentleman in the best Southern tradition. I said some other things too, and she secured a copy.

Now, Sawney Webb was born in North Carolina in 1842. When he was a boy, his family owned slaves. As a young man he fought in the Confederate Army. Later he settled in Tennessee, spending the rest of his life there. He was a schoolmaster, and some of his students—even some of his favorite students—said, did, and wrote mean or cruel things about Black people. Sawney was not a violent man himself, and he refused to join the Ku Klux Klan because its members wore masks. But he lived in Tennessee in the second half of the nineteenth century, so of course he had students and neighbors who were not so particular. And as he had a school to run (at the very least) he could not afford to be at war with his neighbors.

Marie was shocked—shocked!—to learn that Sawney's family owned slaves when he was a little boy, that there were White people in the South in the nineteenth century who were cruel to Blacks, and (apparently) that Sawney spent his life educating his students and raising his family rather than crusading for social justice. This is the news that upset her so badly that she dropped out of communication for five days and (so she told me) had a hard time sleeping all that time. Her voice almost cracked into tears as she explained to me how upset she was.

Bloody hell. Marie is over sixty, like I am. I could understand being that shocked and upset if she were twelve, or even if she were (say) sixteen and outrageously sheltered. At sixty? Inexcusable.

Let me qualify that. It's inexcusable, but perhaps not quite inexplicable. As an aside, Marie also explained that she expects all the most violent episodes of the immediate post-bellum period in the South to repeat themselves on a nationwide basis now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for President. (I think I may have suggested before that Marie suffers from an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. I allude to it briefly here, for example.)

So I talked. I explained that the world is not divided into Good People and Bad People, but that everyone is capable of either. I explained that everyone is born into a historical context, and you have to take that into account when evaluating them. I explained that we are no better: we too have been born into a historical context, and people in the future will condemn us harshly for things we currently believe to be virtues—all because times change. (I don't know which of our modern virtues we will be condemned for, but I'm sure it will be something. Hang around for another 200-500 years, and you'll see.) And in the end she said she felt better.

But I'm still troubled. Haven't we had this exact conversation before? It feels to me like we have. And if so, why are we having it again? I mean … I really don't understand why I need to have it at all with an adult. It feels like the kind of conversation that I should be having with teenagers, or at worst with teenagers cosplaying as adults. But in any event I sure don't understand why we should have to discuss it twice.

This afternoon I emailed Marie exactly that question, phrasing it as non-judgmentally as I possibly could and allowing that maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. Maybe we haven't discussed it before. So far I have not heard back, but it's been only a few hours.

I guess I'll see what she says.