dual personalities

How was your weekend? Hope you managed to keep cool. We had more storms and this time the electricity at our house went out for an hour and a half! I was just packing a bag to go to daughter #1’s house, when it came back on. Such drama–these days we are lost without our precious electricity.

Poor daughter #2 and famille had their air conditioning go out on Saturday and had to wait all day to get it fixed. I am sympathetic, but back in my day, we didn’t have central air conditioning at all and we had to wait all summer for relief. We are very spoiled now, that’s for sure. We would go to the movies to sit for a few hours in the AC. Grocery shopping was also a diversion!

Anyway, c’est la vie. Saturday morning I went to a flower arranging workshop at church led by the floral director at Schnucks Markets. I learned a lot!

I like the fact that the flowers at our church are always done by volunteers. There is no “the flowers are given (i.e. paid for) to the glory of God and in thanksgiving for/in memory of by so-and-so” announcement in the bulletin. It is just an anonymous gift. But we in the flower guild do our best (for the glory of God) and every week the arrangements are very different.

After church on Sunday there was a reception for a lady who is retiring after working there for 24 years–one of those unsung women who make everything run smoothly in the office and, if they are lucky, are appreciated for being “hard-working” and “organized”. Lois was also lauded for her sincere faith. Well, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).

I watched a really good movie–Intruder in the Dust (1949) based on William Faulkner’s novel, which is basically a mystery story set in the deep South. It is the story of Lucas Beauchamp, an independent, land-owning black man, who is unjustly accused of the murder of a white man, Vinson Gowrie. Through the help of two teenage boys, the town lawyer and an elderly white lady, who figure out who the real murderer is, he is able to prove his innocence.

I had not seen this movie in many years. It held up. Shot entirely on location in Oxford, Mississippi, it has an air of authenticity that the backlot never would have achieved. The actors are all solid. The screenplay by Ben Maddow sticks to Faulkner’s book. The Director Clarence Brown, who grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee and apparently knew something about the South, was not even nominated for an Oscar for this movie, but he won the British Academy Film Award for it. (Brown holds the record for the most Academy Award for direction nominations–6–without a win.)

Not surprisingly, the film failed at the box office, not even earning back its negative costs according to studio records. There is, after all, no romance in this movie; there are no pretty girls. There is no real action to speak of–only the threat of action (a lynching). There are tense moments, to be sure, for our heroes as they ride around at night and dig up a dead body and, when they get the sheriff on board with their plan, dig the body up again. But American audiences were not interested.

It is said, however, that William Faulkner himself was pleased with the film and Ralph Ellison wrote that of the whole cycle of race-based movies released in 1949, Intruder in the Dust was “the only film that could be shown in Harlem without arousing unintended laughter, for it is the only one of the four in which Negroes can make complete identification with their screen image.”

Check it out. It’s worth a viewing. Then read the book!

“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”

*William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust