​Note that I don’t say “Best.” That way I don’t have to justify my choices, some of which are not mainstream indeed. I could justify them, but I don’t have to.
 
TWO THAT STAND OUT
 The greatest moviegoing experiences of my life, movies that shook me immediately and grew even more on repeated viewings. In order of release.

2001, A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
The Tree of Life (Malick).
​
They soar above any listing I might make. Now that that’s off my chest let me try for a Top 10 Favorites:

​MY TOP 10

AI: Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg)
Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fincher)
The Dead (Huston)
Empire of the Sun (Spielberg
The General, The (Keaton)
Interstellar (Nolan)
The Long Day Closes (Davies)
Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Jackson)
The Thin Red Line (Malick)

 
RUNNERS-UP

The Abyss, The (Cameron)
The Age of Innocence (Scorsese)
Alien (Scott)
All about Eve (Mankiewicz)
Angels in America (Nichols)
Anna Karenina (Wright)
Apocalypse Now! (Coppola)
Avatar (Cameron)
Babylon (Chazelle)
Blade Runner (Scott)
Bringing Up Baby (Hawks)
Call Me By Your Name (Guadagnino)
Casablanca (Curtiz)
Chinatown (Polanski)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick)
Cloud Atlas (Wachowski Siblings)
Crimson Peak (Del Toro)
Death in Venice (Visconti)
Deer Hunter (Cimino)
Django Unchained (Tarantino)
Father and Son (Sokurov)
The Fountain (Aronofsky)
Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick)
The Godfather Trilogy (Coppola)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (W. Anderson)
The Haunting (Wise)
Heaven’s Gate (Cimino)
A Hidden Life (Malick)
Hugo (Scorsese)
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg)
Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)
The Innocents (Clayton)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Brothers)
Jaws (Spielberg)
La La Land (Chazelle)
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
The Leopard (Visconti)
Let the Right One In (Alfreson)
Let There Be Blood (P.T. Anderson)
Life of Pi (Lee)
The Lone Ranger (Verbinski))
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer)
Maurice (Ivory)
Midnight in Paris (Allen)
Mimic (Del Toro)
Mother and Son (Sokurov)
Moonlight (Jenkins)
Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann)
Nashville (Altman)
The New World (Malick)
The Night of the Huner (Laughton)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Coen Brothers)
Of Time and the City (Davies)
Once Upon a Time in America (Leone)
Paths of Glory (Kubrick)
Pennies from Heaven (Ross)
Predestination (Spierig Brothers)
Radio Days (Allen)
Seven (Fincher)
Seven Chances (Keaton)
The Shining (Kubrick)
The Social Contract (Fincher)
The Thing (Carpenter)
Titanic (Cameron)
West Side Story (Robbins & Wise)
West Side Story (Spielberg)
Wolfen (Wadleigh)
Some of those runners-up, if I were in a different mood, just might have switched places with some in the Top 10.

 
DIRECTORS

Certain directors have been essential in my life. Some are represented in the above lists. Others: well, how could you decide which movies to include? For some, I will watch anything they produce but reserve the right not to like (Allen, P.T. Anderson, Aronovky, among ohers).
 
Woody Allen
Paul Taylor Anderson
Wes Anderson
Darren Aronofsky
Ingman Bergman
 Kathryn Bigelow
Bong Joon Ho
James Cameron
John Carpenter
Coen Brothers
Francis Coppola
Terence Davies
Brian De Palma
Guillermo Del Toro
Federico Fellini
David Fincher
Alfred Hitchcock
Peter Jackson
Buster Keaton
Krzysztof Kieślowsk
Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa
Davd Lean
Ang Lee
Sergio Leone
Terrence Malick
Christopher Nolan
Yasujirō Ozu
Martin Scorsese
Stephen Spielberg
Quentin Tarantino
Tom Tykwer
Luchino Visconti
Wachowski Siblings
Zhang Yimou
Chloé Zhao

I have gotten great pleasure out of certain franchises:

The Avengers
Harry Potter
The Hobbit
Indiana Jones
The Matrix
Pirates of the Caribbean
Star Wars.

And then there are movies that in spite of critical and/or popular success have left me cold. Examples include the Back from the Future Trilogy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Vertigo. Some actors I tend to avoid: Roberto Benigni, Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, and John Wayne lead the pack. (Reminder to self: Do try to watch The Searchers again and try to figure out what all the fuss was about. And maybe Vertigo.)

And I must to confess loving a number of movies that all others seem to hate: 2012, Alien3, Cowboys & Aliens, John Carrter, The Lone Ranger. And I am proud that I admired some movies right off the bat, ignoring what seemed to be revealed consensus at the time of release, and have watched critical reevaluation catch up with me: Blade Rummer, Heaven’s Gate, and The Thing (Carpenter’s) serve as examples.
​
All such lists are works in progress. I hope in about 5 years to be able to revisit these lists and see whether and how they have changed.

Reading it again after all these years . . .

“Adored by some, abhorred by others, actress Vilma Valentine is presumed dead after a fiery automobile collision in Mexico, her body never recovered. In the intervening years the fabled star is sighted more often than Bigfoot. Is it her ghost that crashes a party for Ronald Reagan in Juarez, appears at the deathbed of her estranged father in Rome, flees from Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst at the Parthenon? In 1969 Virginia Dofstader wins the Valentine lookalike contest publicizing ‘The Curse of Vilma Valentine’ by literary heavyweight Gerald Carstairs. In the course of the book's promotion, it is discovered that Virginia's mother looks even more like Vilma than Miss Dofstader does. As notorious in death as in life, Vilma haunts the imagination of aficionados of 1940 movies. Did she really kill all those husbands? Was she a Nazi spy? Was she truly responsible for the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Her story, a suspenseful stew of WWII saboteurs, stolen European artworks, murders and massacres, is told in the words of major Hollywood figures - lovers, friends, enemies, and Vilma herself. It's all seasoned with a knowing dose of romantic comedy.”

          So goes the jacket copy (also used on Amazon) of my late friend Tom Canford’s comic novel The Curse of Vilma Valentine. I’ve just read it again after all these years. I probably last dipped into at it after Tom’s author copies arrived om 2006, but my last thorough reading was in manuscript before it went off to publisher iUniverse. I was seriously tired of it by then, for I had been reading and editing drafts of it for more than a decade, and I recall my feeling being as much exhaustion as anything else. Now 20 years later I appreciate it more as a (at least for me) remarkably funny work.

          Yes, it does have its problems. There are times, particularly in mid-book, when the research shows rather than underlies. At times the plot seems unduly convoluted, but somehow for me that becomes part of what’s funny. In general, the voices of real and imagined people are well done. It’s not an accident that the first voice we here are those of Groucho Marx and William Faulkner.

          The voices, as becomes apparent later on, come from interviews by Gerald Carstairs in 1969 for his titular book. In addition to those mentioned we get bits from Robert Mitchum, George Balanchine, Yakima Canutt, and others, included some invented. These are interspersed with newspaper articles and headlines, gossip columns (yes, both Hedda and Luella, among others), fan magazine pieces, and other such collected by Carstairs as part of his research. The Big Reveal to the public mid-book about the relationship between Virginia Dofstader and Vilma comes in the transcript of a Today Show interview with Carstairs and Ginny on the book tour. On this read I was impressed with how well that reveal had been prepared for.

          Reading it for fun rather than work I found myself liking the characters more than in the past. Vilma herself, her sidekick/assistant Betty DaTodi (think Thelma Ritter), Vilma Dofstader’s husband Harry, Ginny, friend/nemesis Clydette White and her villainous mother, and others along the way friendly or otherwise. Vilma’s “curse’ had begun on that October 31 night when she was born and the delivering doctor fell hitting his head against a cabinet and dying at the moment Vilma drew her first breath. And then all those lovers and husbands who had met mysterious deaths . . . Will Harry survive?

          In the past I had doubts as to whether the finale at the opening of a wax museum exhibit featuring Valentine was successful. Now I think it is.

          My own contribution to the work was mainly editing, although I did suggest to Tom that he might bring in a movie in which George Balanchine directed Fred Astaire, someone whom Balanchine considered the finest American dancer.

          For years I have been thinking that with the title alone and all the outrageous Incidents from the 1940s and the late 1960s and early 1970s the book would make a great source for a miniseries on Netflix or some such. Reading it again now convinces me that I was right. It would need to be restructured. Let’s see:

          Start with the announcement of Gerald Carstairs beginning work on his forthcoming book on Vilma . . .
​
             But that’s as far as I will go.  Too old for this sort of thing!

Dear Filippo Ulivieri,
​
First and foremost, let me express my gratitude for the research you have done on Kubrick and the clarity with which you have presented it. It is the best thing have read in some time on Kubrick and something that helps me see the man in a clearer, if not newer, light. Somewhen within you seemed apologetic about your struggles with the English language, not the langue you were brought up with. You write clearly. To write a simple and clear sentence is one of the great challenges of any writer. You do that in a second language. I am impressed

      My first encounter with Kubrick movies was early in 1958 when three buddies and I from Birmingham-Southern College drove downtown to see a movie. A war movie! Let’s see that. It was at the old Lyric Theater, not among the top movie houses in Birmingham. We emerged in a state of shock. It was unlike any war movie we had ever seen. Actually, it was unlike any other movie we had ever seen. We loved it. If love is the right word.

          Yes, that dates me. I was born in 1939, some 38 years before you. The upside of being this old is that I was able to see Kubrick’s work in Real Time.

          But to return to, or get to, point.  Your book.

          I much appreciated your deconstruction of the Kubrick Mythology. I had assumed for manty years that such existed. I had figured out that SK had a mask, a disguise, an invented persona. Maybe some truth in it, but not pure truth. I like your discussion of how it was a self-constructed myth. So many directors did so. And not just directors. Faulkner. Garcia-Marquez. Pynchon. Salinger. I knew that what one saw on the surface was just that. Not the person. The image of the “true” Kubrick I get from your book is close to what I had imagined. I’m grateful to you for helping clear out some of the clutter.

          I like your approach throughout. Research. Documentation. Don’t be distracted by revealed truth and opinion. Follow the facts, to the degree they can be determined. This really pays off in the section on the three writers vs. Kubrick, most especially in the one dealing with Frederic Raphael. I was most impressed with the careful way in which you examined Raphael’s big book on the matter and all other writings and interviews to find much of value in spite of the disdain in which Raphael is usually held. I thought you did a great job in recounting the Kubrick family’s dismay and reaction and while understanding where it came from not being seduced by it. I strongly suspect that had Kubrick still been alive he would have insisted on no response, as tended to be his default mode.
          Your portrayal of a genius who used script and idea as a starting point to finding the work as he went along reminds me of Terrence Malick, another of my idols. For years I had sensed a kinship between the two, but I couldn’t explain why. Now that seems clearer in my mind.

          The two Kubrick movies after Paths of Glory that give me the most trouble are Lolita and Eyes Wide Shut. That earlier one is filled with greatness but leaves me unsatisfied. I think my problem with Eyes Wide Shut is that Kubrick, as you mention, was not around for those last four months. My sense is that he kept on tinkering almost up to the time of release and sometimes beyond. I think of 2001 and The Shining. I will ever be grateful that I got to see the longer cuts of both. Although personally I preferred the longer cuts, I can see why they were shortened, and that shortening does not damage either. I think in both cases the cutting reflects his attention to both his studio and his public. As you say, he was not isolated from either.

          I love Kubrick. I love Stephen King. I came to the latter in Real Time too, starting with Carrie. Whenever I talk or write about The Shining, I am always careful to label it as Kubrick’s or King’s. They are different beasts. I can understand, always did, why King became upset. Of course he protested too long and too much. But really, he should be grateful to Kubrick. Kubrick took his novel seriously. Until then King tended to be dismissed as a mere popular or hack writer. After this movie critics began taking his books more seriously. If Kubrick did, we can too! The movie, in spite of King’s dislike, helped break through that barrier.

          Upcoming for me: watching Eyes Wide Shut again. Of course I have it on DVD, but I note that it is popping up on Turner Classic Movies now!

          I’m fairly certain I saw S Is for Stanley some years back, but I’d like to see it again. It is apparently not available for streaming, and it is not listed on Amazon. So far, the only copy I’ve located on YouTube is in Italian with no subtitles, and my Italian is limited to a few items on menus. If you have any thoughts, send them.

          I am so glad to have encountered your book!
​
All best wishes.
Jonathan May

​On the anniversary of my mother’s birth I binge-watched the first 8 episodes of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Appropriate somehow because of the importance of Úrsula, the main mother in the book and Netflix series. Sadly, I will have to wait a year before getting to see the last 8 episodes. Only then will I make a final judgment on the adaptation, but my initial impressionist that it is fine indeed. I love it that the series opening, even before we get to the novel’s great first sentence about General Aureliano Buendía standing before the firing squad and remembering seeing ice for the first time, is cribs from the end of the novel but presented in such a way that the person who has not read the novel will not quite understand what is going on.

​Gabriel García Márquez’s novel has come to define what we now call “magical realisms.” The adaptors here understand that the noun is realism, magical an adjective describing it. In the novel the most magical thing is the way the author makes the town of Macondo and its surroundings super-real. This series retains that. The more fanciful elements are presented in a matter-of-fact realistic manner. Yes, the bag of bones moves, but often this takes place in the rear of the frame, as if it is something not to be remarked about. Just life.
 
Yes, there is compression. Yes, plot is brought to the fore. This struck me as appropriate while I was watching. It had the effect of strengthening even more m belief that the novel is the Latin American version of William Faulkner’s “Absolom, Absolom!” (That ! is Faulkner’s.) Not a new insight of mine. Wiser heads than mine have found similarities. In the past I have suggested that there are passages in both that could be inserted as is into the other. I had considered the influence to be primarily stylistic, but now I see more clearly how what may be the Great Latin American novel echoes in a number of what might be the Great North American Novel.
 
Both have a central character who leaves home, has adventures, and establishes a community. In Faulkner that community was Sutpen’s Hundred, a great plantation with many enslaved. ln García Márquez it is a village, later a town, Macondo. Thomas Sutpen arrives without family or friend and is accompanied by a large group of slaves from Haiti to carve out holdings in the Mississippi wilderness. José Arcadio Buendía travels with a wife, a group of friends, and their families to found Macondo, also hewn out of a wilderness.
 
Both works involve generations that rise and then fall. Possibly both writers had heard the old truism that the first generation makes the fortune, the second generation uses the fortune, and the third generation loses the fortune. Possibly that old truism does have truth in it. Both novels follow a similar trajectory, although in Solitude there are more generations.
 
Incest appears in both novels. In Absalom, Charles Bon is the half-brother of Judith, the woman he courts and wishes to marry. There is a hint that her full brother, Henry, has longings for her, and this brother might also have such longings for his half-brother. In Solitude José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula are first cousins, and there is constant concern that offspring will be born with a pig’s tail.  No wonder the Buendías are upset when a son wishes to marry his sister, but she is really not his sister but a distant cousin who had been brought to the family to raise after her parents were killed. And there is that relationship between nephew and aunt . . .
 
Children born outside of the main family are significant in both novels. In Absolom it is central to the disaster that strikes the Sutpen family. Charles Bon is the son of Sutpen’s first wife, a Hattian woman of status he had married and impregnated before discovering that she had a Black ancestor, anathema to this man with his dream of establishing fortune and dynasty. He divorces and abandons her and their son. It is Bon’s desire to have his father acknowledge him that leads to his disastrous courtship of his half-sister. Clytie (Clytemnestra) is Sutpen’s daughter by an enslaved woman, and she is among the last standing in the novel, the caretaker of what little remains. In Solitude the children born outside of marriage tend to be taken into the Buendía family, but this too leads to complications.
The name Buendía does not echo Sutpen, but it does somehow rhyme with another important name used by Faulkner: Bon. Buen in Spanish = Bon in French = Good in English. Not an accident, I’d suggest.
 
Amaranta. While watching the series at times I was reminded of Miss Rosa Coldfield and at times Clytie. Possibly she is suggested by both of Faulkner’s characters. It made me reflect on how both of the characters in Absolom become in their diverse ways caregivers. Amaranta in Spanish means "unfading" or "unfading flower." I think of Keats and his “unravished bride of quietness,” an image that pops up more than once in Faulkner. For me it defines Judith who also becomes caregiver.
 
Sutpen’s Hundred and Macondo are both isolated places created from wilderness. Interactions with the outside world does not lead to good in both instances. Both become involved in civil wars resulting from competing ideologies. Those who go to war return changed, not for the better. Both are destroyed at the end: Sutpen’s Hundred by time and fire, the town of Macondo and the Buendía home by time and natural (or supra-natural) disaster.
 
Mothers and motherhood are important in both. Úrsula is central to Solitude, but other characters also play mothering roles. Ellen Coldfield, much older sister to Miss Rosa, is less central except as a breeder of children once she marries Sutpen to produce Henry and Judith. Still, without her there would be no plot. There are other mothers and mother figures: Charles Bon’s abandoned mother, the unnamed slave mother of Clytie, Clytie herself as acting mother, and even Judith toward the end, even in her virginal state.
 
Madness. José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch, goes mad and spend much of his life tied to a tree. The last survivor of Thomas Sutpen is Jim Bond, son of Charles Bon (and I love the change form Bon to Bond), and he is a madman screaming in the night.
 
Thomas Sutpen and José Arcadio Buendía both come from peasant stock before being motivated to seek fortune elsewhere. Sutpen leaves his hardscrabble Appalachian home after he, while in the coastal lowlands, had knocked on the door of a great mansion and was told that he had to use the back door. His motivation is to have his own front door. José Arcadio leaves home to escape the wandering ghost of the man he has killed after an altercation following a cockfight. Different motivations, but the similarity lies in both trying to escape the past. In Garcia Marques as well as Faulkner that rarely works.
 
Who tells the tale in each novel? In both that does not become clear until toward the end. (Clear might be the wrong word here: more nearly apparent?) In Absolom we learn that all the tales and accounts with varying points of view we have heard have been filtered through the mind and voice of Quentin Compson, a Mississippi boy now a student at Yale, and discussed and meditated upon with his roommate from Canada, Shreve. In Solitude we learn that the coded manuscript left by the long-dead character Melquíades, who had come to Macondo with his band of Gypsies, is at last being fully deciphered by the last Buendía even as he, his home, and his town are blown to smithereens by the elements, and at that final moment he realizes that the history of his family and even this its and his own final destruction had been foretold in the manuscript, which is, of course, the novel we have just finished reading.
 
The endings of both are in their own way apocalyptic. In Absolom the apocalypse involves particularly the one family of Sutpens, but in Quentin Compson’s final musings you get a suggestion that it just might apply to his society. In Solitude not just the family but the community is destroyed. Nations, like families, rise and fall. A theme that still resonates.
 
García Márquez once said of his novel, "Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends, and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves." This is of course a statement that might be said of any great work of art and those who study it. If they are truly great, they defy dissection. Although they can speak to the intellect, their truest impact takes place on some other, higher, level, beyond explication.
 
That word joke. I think back on a bunch of us librarians at Columbia University sitting around a table at John Jay Cafeteria and talking about Solitude. I remarked that it was one of the few works that moved me to tears. One of the women took issue. I thought it was funny, she said. Yes. It is. But that does not negate the possibility of its being incredibly moving. Part of what moves me so deeply is the incredible perfection of the ending.
 
But the novel is definitely funny. Not that the author cracks jokes, and his characters never act as if they think they are funny. But who can resist a smile when the first magnets ever to make it to town pull lost metal objects from their hiding places to the astonishment of all.  It may be sad that Colonel Buendía remembers the first time he saw ice as he is facing a firing squad, but Buendía’s actual moment of seeing that ice is funny. Much of what makes one laugh comes from the suer-realistic portrayal of the most outrageous incidents. DareI use the word deadpan?
 
Something similar happens in Absolom. Sometimes outrageous things happen and the prose becomes so outrageous that one cannot help but smile. Adjectives pile up in a manner that becomes funny. Not an accident. I think Faulkner knew what he was doing. But as in Solitude, what is funny is inextricable from what is serious and moving.
 
Of the novels I believe that One Hundred Years of Solitude is the more easily accessible. Would I have the patience to tackle Absalom, Absalom! For the first time in my old age? I don’t know. Reading it for the first time is like slogging through a swamp with deep mud and quicksand that can suck you down. You must not stop to think and analyze or you will be lost. Plunge ahead and maybe you will get through, and on the next read the path will become clearer. I first read it when I was in my early 20s, and since then I have reread it at least 3 times, most recently a couple of years back. For me it repays the effort.
 
Now I am starting Solitude again. I will go slow this time, reading just a few pages at a time, savoring. There is a lot to savor.

When all through the house

Not a creature was stirring,
Not even my mouse!

​It is a truism of sorts that David Fincher’s movie The Social Network has parallels with the Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane. Easy to see. Both have multiple narrators. Both involve megalomaniacal media giants. Both have their Rosebuds at the end. Fincher has even directed a movie involving Citizen Kane and the media giant who inspired that movie.

Recently I watched the next movie that Welles made, The Magnificent Ambersons. I had recorded it from TCM not knowing if I was really ready to watch it again, but it is one of those movies that once I watch a few minutes of I can quit watching. And lightning struck. I began to think about the Fincher movie and how much it also resembles Ambersons.

The first thing that struck me was that both movies involve a technical advances and the effects that each has on society, both for good and bad. In Welles’ case the automobile (this is even more apparent in the Booth Tarkington novel on which it is based). In Fincher’s case the internet and particularly Facebook.

Both have central characters who are obsessed with social position. In Ambersons it is with inherited social status and the desire to keep it. In Social Network it is with the lack thereof and the desire to attain it. Both men in their monomaniacal ways pursue their goals with total disregard for those around them: families, friends, lovers, innocent bystanders.
​
Both men receive their comeuppance of sorts, most explicitly in the Welles movie. Both men end up definitely sadder and I think in each case just a bit wiser. George Minafer (his mother was an Amberson) when brought to his knees does seem to express a certain responsibility for his late father’s sister, also impoverished. He actually gives up a possible law career in order to take a dangerous job paying more and immediate money to finance her life in a boarding house. 

​Mark Zuckerberg ends up with his millions turning into billions in spite of the result of the lawsuit that forms the core of the movie, but at the end, all alone in the hearing room, he does seem to show just a bit of regret.

​A big difference between the 2 movies: The Social Network happears to be exactly the movie that director Fincher and write Aaron Sorkin intended to make. For e is it one of the most perfect movies ever made. The Magnificent Ambersons, on the other hand, was recut by the studio, shortening the movie by nearly an hour and adding a happier ending (which oddly, does reflect the ending of the novel where it seems just as fake). Bravura camera movements in single take were snipped up to shorted the sequences by a few seconds. In spite if all, it remains for me one of the most wonderful movies ever made.
For me, that wonderful movie ends with the voiceover of Wells as narrator: “Something had happened. A thing which, years ago, had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town, and now it had come at last; George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance. He got it three times filled, and running over. But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.”
I can watch the rest without gagging, but the rest is definitely not Welles.

{It is a surprisingly good novel!]

[No, that is not his cabin, and that is not Mr. Frank. This HABS photo was taken maybe a ear before Mr. Frank arrived at Umbria. But I like to think that the cabin he occupied there looked like this one.]

I was only 4 when Mr. Frank died in 1943, but I do have a strong memory of him. He would come to my father’s post office in Sawyerville, Alabama to pick up any mail for the people living or staying at Umbria Plantation just to the east. Tall. Skinny. Old. I’ll stick with those last 2, but tall? To a 4-year-old all adults are tall. I knew that he had been a hobo who showed up in Sawyerville one day going from house to house asking to sharpen knives for a bit of food, and when he got to Umbria the folks there took him in and provided a home for him.

         That was the sum of what I knew about him. I assume that the basic facts of his tale had been told me many times by my parents, and they stuck. I think even kids of 4 in 1943 would know what a hobo was. We were still close to the Depression years. I had assumed (or was I told?) that he had arrived in Sawyerville by “riding the rails.” I’ll bet he stopped first at the kitchen doors of several of the houses in Downtown Sawyerville before making his way over to Umbria, set back well from the main road maybe a third of a mile away. The tale in my mind did not reveal whether he had had any success at those other doors.

          Later I have been able to add some further details to the story of Mr. Frank. First, my sister had found in the “75 Years Ago” column in the Greensboro Watchman (the local weekly) the following: “Frank Williams, the elderly man who has stayed at Umbria, Sawyerville, for the past seven years, died Tuesday morning. Mr. Williams, 77 years of age, came originally from Ohio.” The paper was published on Thursday the 19th of August, and that tells us that he died on Tuesday August 17, 1943.

          When the plantation was sold in the mid-1950s by the last Pickens owner, Eloise Pickens Lunsford, my mother helped Miss Eloise with the sale of the contents of the house. Miss Eloise offered my sister and me our pick of any small items. Our mother took us aside and admonished us to take just a few things because Miss Eloise would need to sell as much as possible to support herself. I took maybe a dozen novels, and my sister took personal items such as guestbooks and personal notes that Miss Eloise had saved. Among them was an unsigned, handwritten essay “A Visit to Historic Umbria,” enclosed in an envelope addressed to Mrs. Will Lunsford, Sawyerville, Alabama, and postmarked Tuscaloosa, March 29, 1939. This essay provided a few more details about Mr. Frank and Umbra:

          “Thereby hangs a tale – how it is kept. Late one evening more than a year ago an old man who was an itinerant scissorssharpener stopped to ask for work. While one of the sisters looked up knives and scissors another of the kind hearted women engaged the man in conversation and asked where he lived. He replied that he had no home but came originally from the West. The man was old and the hour was late so Miss Juliet said “Why don’t you stay here with us?” Being unused to such trust and generosity he appealed to Miss Eloise when she returned repeating what her sister had said “Well, why don’t you?” she replied. The man looked up to heaven and said “God, help me to think. Do they really mean it?” God must have reassured him in a dream that night for “Mr. Frank” has been there ever since. It is he who keeps the grounds in such ordered perfection, mends the tools and serves as veterinarian for the stock. When they said that “Mr. Frank” built a chimney to the box house and lived in it I thought that this must be some such plantation adjunct as a smoke house. But it seems that some member of the family had a box complex and just couldn’t throw away boxes so this room of the old slave quarters had been set aside to house boxes.”

          I was interested to learn that it was one of her sisters who first invited Mr. Frank to stay, something that Miss Eloise confirmed when she returned. This would have likely been in 1936, the depths of the Depression, when so many displaced people were wandering the national landscape. Mr. Frank was, it sems, the most fortunate among them to be taken in and given a home and food for the rest of his life. Knowing the generosity of Miss Eloise I assume he was given a substantial wage as well. It appears that Mr. Frank was a hard-working man who earned his keep, and the fact that he was able to build a chimney suggests that he had some talent in construction. Apparently, he made a significant contribution to life at Umbria. He was valued, and he gave value.

          Recently I asked my Cousin Billy if he would search for Mr. Frank in the 1940 census. I have the ability to do that, but not the ability to read the old handwritten records. Billy did turn up the listing for Mr. Frank, and that aided a few more details to his story.

          He was 74 years old in 1940, suggesting that he was born in 1866. Place of birth was given as Ohio, but no town. He had no formal schooling. Country boy maybe? If he lived in a town of any size, he would likely have had some schooling. In 1935 he had been living in (or passing through?) Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His role was listed as servant, his occupation or trade as gardener.

          Those 3 documents and the childhood memories of my sister and me provide all that we are ever likely to know about Mr. Frank. One more detail that we believe is fact: he was buried just outside the fence surrounding the Pickens family graveyard. There is no marker for his grave. Was there ever one? I don’t know.

          An interesting little fat: Will Lunsford, Miss Eloise’s husband, had died on August 9, 1943, only 8 days before Mr. Frank. Losing both White males on the plantation so close together with one her husband of many years and the other so important to its upkeep must have been a heavy blow for Miss Eloise. I find myself wondering if these 2 White men surrounded by so many women living or visiting for long period in the main house might have bonded and become close companions. Mr. Will’s plantation office was in the lower semi-basement part of the big house, and Mr. Frank’s little house would have been just across the dirt road leading back to the Pickens cemetery. Mr. Will died a lingering death from cancer, something I know because my parents saved their liquor ration stamps for him, alcohol being one of the few things giving him any surcease from pain. My guess is that Mr. Frank would have been much involved in taking care of Mr. Will during the last months and weeks. Could Mr. Frank’s death have resulted from the toll of heavy caregiving on a 77-year-old man? Could his grief over Mr. Will’s death have been a factor? I’ll never know. I can only speculate.
         
           And speculate I do. So much that we think we know about even our best friends are the result of speculation and extrapolation from what little fact we think we know. At heart we are all writers of fiction. In my own writing I try to clarify what is seemingly factual form what is my own extrapolation. I think there is a great fiction in Mr. Frank’s life based on what little is documented.  A movie, perhaps? Bruce Dern would be great. So would Richard Gere. John Hawkes, maybe?
​
          It amazes me even yet that someone I knew so very slightly and so long ago has always remained a big part of my life.

On May 9, 2024 I gave a book talk at the Hale County Library in Greensboro, Alabama about my 2 most recently-published books, White on Black: Thinking about Race in a Small Alabama Community and Remembering My Forebears: The Turbervilles of Greensboro and the Mays of Hollow Square and Sawyerville, Hale County, Alabama. I threw in mention of my forthcoming book Sawyerville, Alabama, and the Earlier Communities of Erie and Hollow Square: History and Reminiscence, for I view each of these books as part of a trilogy.
​
          The title for my talk was Why I Write. I had composed a neat outline of what I wanted to say and printed it out in large type to keep me on course. And guess what, that train leapt off the tracks shortly after I began. I don’t think I embarrassed myself and I do think the audience was entertained. Or so I hope.

in         But having that outline, why not write down the speech I sort of meant to give? I can always use that in the future, if such happens again.

          So why do I write?

          How often have you thought, “Why didn’t I ask Grandmama that?” Or your father, or your great-aunt, or your elderly cousin. In a way I am motivated to write to answer the kinds of questions that years from now folks might wish that they had asked me. That is a major reason that I tell the bad stuff as well as the good stuff, for too often it is the bad stuff that is lost and that later folks wish they knew. Did that uncle kill himself or was it accident or murder? How many mixed-race kin do we have, and how did that come about? Did you know about my older sister who died when she was born?

          A by-product of this is that remembering and writing it down makes me remember more, and somehow that too is a good thing.

          A related matter. In my White on Black book in the chapter entitled “Witnessing” I refer to the Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in which a person going to a wedding is stopped by a wild-eyed man, the mariner of the title, and told a story. The mariner is compelled to recount his tale, and the wedding guest is compelled to listen. Both in their own way are witnessing. The mariner himself is witnessing in 2 senses of the word: he has seen events and now he must relate them.

          I have experienced, seen, heard certain things during my life. I feel that I must bear witness to all that I can, to tell some future party about it. I am compelled.

          You have witnesses at trials. They tell what they saw or know. But it is a truism that witness testimony is unreliable. Memory is tricky. We think we remember something, but what we remember is the last time we remembered the event. A copy of a copy of a copy, with the possibility of errors compounded along the way. That is why lawyers go over a witness’s testimony many times before the trial, to try to shape that testimony to the best advantage of the client.

          I have strong memories that I believe are factual, but I find myself wondering whether what I recall is a dream or an embroidery from what I heard way back when.

          Here’s an example. When I was in my early teens my father took me aside and told me that his mother’s brother (never uncle, never named) was a deaf-and-dumb man who had been placed by the family in the care of a Black woman. They lived together on the family farm, and with her he fathered several children. After his death the mother and the children moved to a city up north. This was serious. This was gospel. But it was not the true story. A newspaper account from 1905 reports that Walter Kinnaird, the only one of my grandmother’s brothers who lived to adulthood, had been shot and killed at the age of 35 by the 73-year-old Allan Wilson, a deaf-and-dumb man on whose farm Walter lived. Great-Uncle Walter lived for 4 days before expiring and gave detailed testimony to the authorities about the incident but claimed not to know why he had been shot.
​
       I believe that my father believed that what he told me was true. But in 1905 he would have been 6 or 7 years old. He likely heard whispers and bits and pieces and put together in his mind what he thought was true. Questions abound. Did Uncle Walter live with a Black woman with whom he had children? Or did the deaf-and-dumb Allan have the Black mistress and children? Why did Walter live on Wilson’s farm? What was the motive for the shooting? Was the Black woman part of that motivation? The novelist at work in me can’t help but toy with the incident and what is not known.
I am convinced that the greater truth that my father wished to impart was that I had Black relatives. He thought I should know that. It was more convenient to use an old story to do so, for I suspect that he did not want me to know that I had a Black first cousin who was a regular customer in his store who had lots of kids. Push the incident back in time and let the offspring thereof be far away.

edit a work (and editing is a long process complicated by my lazy fingers at the keyboard, my macular degeneration, and the thinning of my retina), I then face the challenge entering it in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Yes, you can purchase assistance in that, including the editing and the cover preparation, but doing so myself is part of the challenge that is useful for my aging brain. And cheaper.

​        And the fourth reason is the pleasure that I get out of the whole process. Oddly, the writing and editing and publishing process becomes something like a drug: I’m hooked. And that reminds me of that Ancient Mariner referenced above. Sometimes I compose a sentence or even a paragraph or come up with an image or connection that gives me particular pleasure.

       What is not significant is the financial or critical success of this work. It is a hobby, really, something I do for myself. It is strangely liberating to write what I want without having to please anyone else or earn money from my labors.  I am fortunate that although my monthly income is modest, I am able to live modestly within those means and still have a bit left over to invest  and don’t have to rely on my writing for financial support.

         But it does make me happy when the occasional reader reports pleasure in the work. That is money in my emotional bank. A few friends from my New York years seem to take particular pleasure, and several of my kin claim to do so as well. I am especially happy when Black friends like my work, for often I deal with material not pleasant to them.
​
        In the family memoir I wrote, “You’ve all heard the old expression ‘warts and all.’ Well, this is not quite that. Too much emphasis on the warts and you don’t notice the good stuff. But I have not avoided the warts entirely, and I believe my examination of them is restrained and judicious.  I hope that I am ending up with a fairly decent and fairly honest set of pictures of the Turbervilles and the Mays without being cruel or offensive. Certainly my intent has been to be kind.”

        Although some may disagree, I believe that I have kept to that intent. Yes, I have told some hard stuff. Most of the time I wrote about my parents, their siblings, and their parents. Usually I avoided discussion of my cousins except in a few cases when I believed the story would be incomplete without such mention. This was especially true in my accounts of Uncle Stephen and Uncle Freeman, but even then most of those I mention are dead. The nice thing about writing about the dead is that they can’t shoot you!

        What the dead do is haunt you. I have been haunted by my kin all my life. It interests me that in writing about some of these people I find that thinking about them and setting down what I remember about them has given me greater empathy for them, more than I ever thought I would have. Take the first cousin whom my mother described as “crazy and mean with it.” I avoided her from the time I moved home in 1989 until her death. Yet thinking about her life, her parents and their problems with alcoholism and religious extremism, the mental and physical abuse she suffered during her marriage, I find myself not so much forgiving her but at least understanding her a bit better. Sympathy seeps in. Even for her last-born son who shot and killed his 2 teenage sons and then himself I find just the tiniest touch of empathy.
​
          Thinking back I find that there is really only one person in the family account whom I consider a monster, for I believe the woes described just above trace back to her. Maybe one day I will be a better person and find empathy for her as well. We’ll see. Or at least I will

paragraphs that I like. I am proud of the way that I dealt with a major secondary character’s death. I like how I show the eruption of a threatening creature from the water from 2 different viewpoints, first from the gaze of those watching, and after a long flashback from the gaze of the creature as it leaps into the air. Frozen moments capturing movement. I like most of Uncle Bart’s journal, which really is the heart of the book. I like the idea behind inserting Bart’s transcriptions of old Waterfolk tales for children in his journal, but I have decided that the execution thereof leaves much to be desired and slows down the narrative. I do like the odd device I use to indicate Waterfolk speech.
​
       And yes, you can create juvenilia when you are in your 50s. I think when you write your first novel you are always a teenager.

       I started writing about things I remembered from my youth and my time in New York and my life after returning to Alabama. I wrote about books I had read and movies that I watched. I wrote about family. Some of these I self-published, although several of those earlier works have been withdrawn. Along the way I assembled many these writings into one long chronologic work, a memoir about my family and my life. Then I met Madison Smartt Bell, author/teacher/literary agent. As a writer he is probably best known for his trilogy of novels published between 1995 and 2004 about the Haitian Revolution. He taught creative writing and began acting as a literary agent to help get his students’ work to the attention of publishers. He was accompanying photographer Andrew Moore, noted photographer, on his trip through the Alabama Black Belt taking picture of people and places in that region. His task: compose an essay to accompany the photographs in the published work, Blue Alabama. They heard some of my tales and impressions and were interested in using some of them in the essay. I made the text of that long memoir available to Bell, and in fact he did use some of it.
​
       Bell seemed to like my writing and was willing to act as agent for me, but he suggested that since I was an unknown (well, in the larger world), it would be difficult to get the work published in its entirety. He suggested that I cut out everything except the material involving racial matters. I considered it, tried it, and realized that whittling down was not enough. The material require further writing. A lot more. Eventually that rewrite of this material became White on Black: Thinking about Race in a Small Alabama Community.

       I extracted the family material from that memoir and other writings and wrote 2 slim volumes, one about the Turberville family of my mother and one about the May family of my father, which I self-published. Along the way I began to realize that really they were one story instead of 2, and I combined and rewrote them, adding more material and photographs, ending up with Remembering My Forebears: The Turbervilles of Greensboro and the Mays of Hollow Square and Sawyerville, Hale County, Alabama.

       Why that long subtitle with all those place names? Simple. Having them there meant that I didn’t have to use them in the 7 tags allowed by Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program.

​       Due for publication June 1, 2024 is my slim volume Sawyerville, Alabama, and the Earlier Communities of Erie and Hollow Square: History and Reminiscence.  In a way that forms the final volume in what might be called my “Sawyerville Trilogy.” I think I have said pretty much what I want to say about the matters included. At least for now.

       ​That memoir? I had written it with a certain degree of circumspection, being coy or totally ignoring certain matters. I decided to go back to it and add more of the stuff left out. No, not everything, but a lot more than was there originally. More truth.

       Because much of the memoir involved the community of Sawyerville and the Pickens family of Umbria Plantation, I inquired at the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of South Alabama ion Mobile whether they might be interested in a digital copy. I chose them because they already house a major collection of materials on the Pickens family and Umbria. They were pleased to accept it for that reason but also because other aspects of the memoir fell into areas in which they are specializing. I have agreed that after my death it can be made publicly available. It makes me especially happy that my modest work can join that collection because it just so happened that when I was about 15 years old I was at Umbria when those archives were removed from the attic by someone who preserved them.

       So what next? Well, there’s this piece. I’ve also got essays started on the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the act of dreaming, and memories of my 2 friends Greg and Bill. I’m big on getting a topic and a paragraph or so and saving to work on later. I think I would like to revise my short story “Bottle Found on Chinkapin Hill” for possible publication, and I’d like to finish a short story about the ghost of an enslaved man who sits on the porch with and chats with a descendant of his enslavers. No, it’s not at all like the famous Dickens ghosts. I am toying with the idea of another story that would involve Mr. Frank, a wandering scissors-sharpener who in the late 1930s turned up at Umbria wishing to sharpen scissors for food and lived there for the next 7 years.

        Probably no more novels and no more full-length works like White on Black. My next published work, if at all, will likely be a collection of miscellaneous essays. There’s so much more that I want to write about! Vietnam movies that are not really about Vietnam. The revised version of The Cotton Club, so much better than Francis Coppola’s original cut. Tales about certain friends no longer with us. The pleasures of growing old (somebody has suggested that would be a short one, but maybe not). Why Heaven’s Gate is one of the best movies ever made. The particular pleasures and drawbacks of having to read eBooks. No doubt more to write about than time available.

       But I’ll soldier on . . .


[More images from the book talk, enlargeable with a click. And do notice how attractive our library is!]

In December 1971 when the plantation house buned it was still owned by Mrs. George Spigener, who with her late husband had restored both hohse and grounds to a state of beauty. The house was empty when it burned, Mrs. Spigener having remained in her Tuscaloosa home for the holidays. The Spigeners had hired my first  cousin Stephen May, Jr. to oversee house and ground, and at the time of the fire he and his wife were on a trip to New Orleans. Ther son Billy (Steve III) called them as soo;n as he heard about the disaster and they rushed back to see ruins.

In the spring of that year Steve had asked his brother Albert Y. May, a local photographer, to take pictures of the house and grounds. At some point the slides were given to me, and I had thenm digitized. Here they are for you to see.

Smaller photographs may be enlarged with a clidk.
​

Sigb at the front gate on Highway 14.

 Another view from that angle follows.Front of the house viewed from the northwest. I have heard that the lower level, slightly sunken, was occasionaloy used by family during excetionally hot weather. The lantation office was on that level. I recallit used primarily for storage. It was definitely cool down there.

West wing.

East wing. Those steps led up to a small porch from which you entered the kitchen. Note the 2 attic windows. That attic ran across the entire width of the front of the house. Another view follows.

West wing, rear. That veranda on the right ran across the rear of the main body of the house and down both wings, a U shape embracing a formal rose garden.

Rear enttrance to rose garden.

Another view of the west wing. The bathroom for that wing was at the south side of theof the building, and you wold have to go out onto the veranda to get to it.

​East wing and garden gate. The 2 master bedrooms were in the east wing with a bathroom between. A door oopened from the kitchen into the first of the bedrooms.

North and west veranda and garden gate.
​

Old schoolhouse. The schoolroom on the right was moved to Tuscaloosa by Jack Warner and is, I understand, in its theird location there. I speculate that the larger room on the left might have been reserved as living quarters for the schoolteacher. There was a small kitchen between. In my early lifetime this was used as a guesthouse, a schoolhouse no loner needed becaust both children of Will nd Eloise Pickens Lunsford had died as infants. After Miss Eloise sold the property in the mid-1950s the first buyer allowd her to live in this cottage, but since she could not restrain herself from interfereing with workers in house andgrounds the new ownere finally asked her to move. She rented a one-room building from Miss Sadie Christian diagonally across Main Street from the Greensboro Presbyterian Church. Later when she became infirm she was moved to the nursing home in that community, where she died.

Well house.

Front gate. 

Looking north toward the front gate.

​

The driveway split in front of the house, the left branch going past  stable, garage, and outbuildings on the east side of ther road and continuing on back to the Pickens family cemetery. This view is of the right branch, which lead across the yard to the west gate.

 Steps down to the lake, which was created by a later owner. That lake is fed by a large spring which in my young years was used to cool watermelons for summer consumption by neighborhood children. Earlieer it likeky kept milk and butter cool.

There follows a series of photographs of the lake and grounds that spring. They can be enlarged with a click.

The following phographs I took in May, 1999 shortly before the Umbria property was divided into 3 to 4 acrle lots and auctioned off. Even these ruins were knocked down, I believe before tha auction took place.

​On May 31, 2024 Birmingham-Southern College will close its doors forever after a long history. I received a Bachelor of Arts degree from that institution in 1961, along with honors including membership in Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa honorary fraternities. This is the second time an institution from which I received a degree has closed: in the early 1990s the Columbia University School of Library Service, from which I received a Masters of Library Science, was closed down by the larger institution. Maybe I’m the Typhoid Mary of institutions . . . But the handwriting had been starkly on the wall for both institutions for some time.

​child. The main building lasted as a town landmark until 1973. At the time it was being used by the local private school set up to continue segregated education, and graduation exercises taking place in the auditorium had ended not long before a tornado destroyed the facility.

​          Both of these old schools had roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church. When I attended 1957-1961 it was considered a major small liberal arts college, with emphasis on liberal. Well, the students tended to be so and some of the faculty, but I think not the institution itself. Case in point: not long after I graduated a young woman named Marti Turmipseed who had participated in lunch-counter sit-ins in Birmingham was suspended because her political and moral actions violated school rules. Marti was pardoned some decades later, just about the time when her cohort of graduates would have been reaching the age when they might leave donations to the college in their wills. Didn’t do her any good, for she and her son had been killed in a car wreck some time earlier.

             In my day the school had no Black students. There were a few Browns, primarily young men from Cuba. The fall before Castro took over I had a Cuban roommate. He and his Cuban friends were thrilled with recent developments when they left to go home for Christmas holidays. None of them returned.
           Do I recall my time at BSC fondly? Yes and no. My first roommate was a sophomore whom I liked tremendously, and through him and his friends on the floor I began to be drawn into a social fraternity. I consulted faculty members as to whether I should join, and they seemed to think it was a good idea. I joined. Mistake. I should have remained free to make my own friends at BSC and not have to be constrained by fake brotherhood. I hated the social aspect of it all. I went home as often as possible on weekends to avoid those parties. And the roommate moved out after one semester. I learned that the fraternity placed members in rooms that would be shared with freshmen just to seduce them into joining. They did want me: I was a National Merit Scholarship winner and was thought likely to help the grade-point average of the fraternity. I was a trusting innocent, but I learned to distrust.

          What I loved was the education I got. I had some spectacularly gifted and charismatic teachers. Mr. Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams taught freshman English and creative writing and was my faculty advisor. He hired me to assist him in grading papers. Mr. because he lacked a PhD, and he insisted on the Mr. Dr. Egbert Sydnor Ownbey taught more advanced courses in the English department, and my 2 semesters of Shakespeare under him remain among my best educational experiences. In History of Philosophy, History of Religion, Art History, and Biology I had wonderful teachers.
          During my second year the college created something called President’s Scholars in which particularly promising students were invited to participate. I was one of them. We read works outside the regular curriculum and were led in discussions by various faculty members. The discussion I recall most fondly came after we were instructed to read both Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Robert Penn Warren’s  All the King’s Men, after which the campus expert on Romantic literature discussed the novel from the viewpoint of the poet’s literary theories as exemplified in the poem. Thrilling.
             At the time BSC had a fine pre-med course of study, and the finest teacher among them was the fellow who taught me Biology. He was known to be gay among the male students, and it was talked-about truth that his valued recommendations for medical school might be assured by succumbing to his sexual interest. As one of my fraternity brothers said, “Small price to pay to get into med school!” He later got into trouble and was dismissed. No, not at the college. He was arrested for solicitation in the men’s room of the bus station downtown.
           The Philosophy and Religion courses I took were wonderful. No, not Sunday school lessons by any means. Philosophical history was chronoligical, sensible enough, and each philosophic idea was taught so brilliantly that students fell in love with it until it was displaced by the next big idea down the line that usually reacted against its predecessor. The course in Religious history I recall because it made no bones about the fact that so much of our religious faith is based not so much on the Word of God or the Teachings of Jesus but on what church-based committees of men decided later. There were lots of pre-ministerial students in both courses, and I firmly believe that a major thrust behind these courses was to make students think and doubt while they were students and not delay that process until they became preachers.

the school was part of the cause. Recent excitements in the Methodist Church have not caused me to change that belief.

         So why did the school eventually go belly-up? Lots of reasons, I imagine. Much blame seems to be placed on the economic downturn of the first decade of this century. Endowments lost value. But I strongly suspect bad management by the college also contributed. One example: Funds designated for scholarships were placed on the income side of the balance sheet, disguising to some extent the true financial situation. I hope that as the failure of this institution is studied there will be detailed examination of its books over time. There were bad administrative decisions. Why try to start a football team when Alabama already had more than it needs? It takes lots of money to start such a program, and any resulting financial bump will be years away.
       Am I sorry to see the school go? Yes. Am I surprised? No. In 2022 I lost 2 of my best friends locally. The first had been in serious decline for over a year. The second, while having suffered possibly from COVID earlier in the year was much improved in body and spirit. The second was a surprise. The first, not so much. I had watched the process of his dying for over a year. The passing of BSC is like that earlier death.
       In this institutional death I find I have the most sympathy for the students. Yes, the college is trying to help them find new homes, but their present scholarship funds will not accompany them. I am sorry for the part of town surrounding the college: All that empty space cannot help but attract low-lifes. I am sorry for the larger city and the state: The school did apparently add a lot to the wealth of both.
       The state had passed legislation during the last year to assist private institutions such as the late Judson College in Marion and Birmingham-Southern, loans toward which were in the hands of state treasurer Young Boozer III. Boozer declined the loan to BSC on the grounds that it was a bad risk for the Alabama taxpayers’ money. Then a new bill was introduced that would remove that power from him and place it in the hands of the director of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. The bill did not receive compelling support from legislators, and it seemed that Governor Key Ivy did not guarantee that she would sign such a bill. Boozer’s testimony against this new bills seems to have been persuasive.
       Earlier this week school’s board of trustees voted unanimously on Tuesday to close the school, students and staff receiving formal notice shortly after.
Historically the school had been highly ranked nationally among liberal arts colleges of its size and mission. In the last decade or so those rankings had been slipping.  Let’s face it, liberal arts education is not having its finest moment in people’s eyes, for various reasons. Applications and enrollment were dropping. The dire financial situation was becoming known. I cannot imagine that parents were eager to support a new high school graduate in any desire to attend BSC. My bet is that staff were looking seriously and eagerly for openings elsewhere. Fewer students and declining faculty. Both, I think, should be viewed as symptoms, not as cause. I’ll bet that wills providing for the college were growing fewer. The corpse didn’t smell yet, but there was a whiff of dying in the sickroom air.
          To all things there is a season. A time to live, a time to die . . .
          That time has now come for Birmingham-Southern College.
          Now is the time for autopsy. We need to study why this death did happen.