Magnolias And Mint Juleps Poem by gershon hepner

Magnolias and mint juleps
for anti-bellum slaves were not
like daffodils and tulips
Dutch Masters painted in a pot.

With details of still lives,
a genre painter may embellish
traces in archives
that, colored, are not seen as hellish.

But if the daffodils
and tulips were not on the table
the genre painter fills
his frame with a mere phony fable.

Slavery demands,
just like the holocaust, a true
depiction that time’s sands
don’t hide with a distorted view.

Lets listen to the vic-
tims in the tales of woe they tell,
for it should make us sick
to learn how earth turns into hell.

Inspired by Bruce Weber’s obituary of Kenneth M. Stampp in the NYT, July 15,2009:

Kenneth M. Stampp, a leading Civil War historian who redirected the scholarly view of slavery in the antebellum South from that of a benign relationship between white plantation owners and compliant slaves to one of harsh servitude perpetuated to support the South’s agrarian economy, died Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 96.The cause was heart failure, said Richard Hill, a friend who was also the family lawyer and a former student of Mr. Stampp’s. Mr. Stampp, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1946 to 1983, wrote several influential books about the Civil War period, from the decade leading up to the war to Reconstruction. His reputation was founded on two books that turned accepted wisdom inside out and engendered seismic shifts in the scholarship of the period. They became staples of university classrooms. The first, in 1956, was “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South, ” which juxtaposed the views of slaves themselves with the more conventionally researched perceptions of slave owners, yielding a far different picture of the institution than historians had previously created. Rather than portraying slaves as docile, simple-minded creatures who were complicit in their own subjugation, Mr. Stampp showed how by working slowly, breaking tools and stealing from their owners, the slaves were in constant rebellion. And rather than portraying the owners as beneficent upholders of a genteel culture determined to maintain racial harmony, Mr. Stampp revealed the slave-keeping impulse to be an economically motivated choice. “We now viewed slavery not only through the eyes of the masters but through the eyes of the slaves themselves, ” said Leon Litwack, a long-time colleague and former student of Mr. Stampp’s at Berkeley, and the author of “Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, ” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. “He was clearly one of the influential historians of the 20th century. All you have to do is open history textbooks and compare what you find in them to what you found before 1960.” The second seminal book, “The Era of Reconstruction,1865-1877, ” published in 1965, demythologized another favorite trope of previous historians: that the decade after the Civil War was disastrous for the South, a time of vengefulness visited upon it by the North, of rampant corruption and of vindictive political maneuvering.Mr. Stampp’s more measured account showed that much good was accomplished in the period; he called Reconstruction “the last great crusade of 19th century romantic reformers” and viewed it as a progenitor of the 20th-century civil rights movement that was in progress as he wrote.

7/15/09