Guest Post: Terry Barr on his feminist Alabama upbringing
Read on for a touching tribute to the power of mothers and Linda Ronstadt
I’m grateful that most of my academic career has been spent working with feminists (men and women), and this is certainly true of Presbyterian College’s English Department. They support my work as the director of Women’s and Gender Studies and teach classes that center the work of women and queer writers. They also stepped up to support me through two semesters of leave when I had the kids, and continue to help me balance work and family life. I’m tremendously grateful to have them as colleagues, and today my dear friend (and neighbor) Terry Barr, our specialist in American Literature and resident memoirist, shares his mother’s story and how her commitment to feminism shaped him. Terry is a prolific writer, highly recommend you follow him on Medium and pick up his three books (Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warnings from My Alabama Mother, Secrets I’m Dying to Tell You, and his most recent The American Crisis Playlist). Also highly recommend the Linda Ronstadt documentary The Sound of My Voice.
[In more patriarchal news, the SC House just passed another abortion ban after debating on the floor this week if women should be subject to the death penalty for having abortions. It looks unlikely to pass in the Senate, but it’s horrifying to see such blatant disregard for women’s lives fully on display in our state Legislature. Be sure to contact your representatives about it.]
Choosing Words Carefully
By Terry Barr
Last night as we enjoyed drinks and sandwiches at Bar Margaret in Greenville’s Villages of West End district, my wife commented on my mother who would have turned 90 today (Feb. 12):
“You know, your mom wouldn’t have called herself a feminist, but she was. She definitely was.”
I agreed.
“Yeah, she would have said something like ‘I’m not burning my bra!’ And we would have laughed and tried to tell her, like as not, that being a feminist embraced more than that particular sign of liberation. We would have tried to count for her all the ways that she embodied being an independent, determined, and able woman.
As if she didn’t know. As if we knew better than she all the things she overcame and accomplished.
It’s funny and sometimes disheartening all the ways we try to avoid being labeled—how we reject so-called political terms for fear of offending someone, putting someone off, or being somehow misunderstood. If my mother had used the word “feminist” to describe herself, she would have felt the need to explain and justify to her friends and acquaintances just what she meant, and that would have been so hard in Alabama where most people seemed to worship God and Jesus and Rush Limbaugh and not necessarily in that order.
I don’t know if it was Limbaugh who coined the term “Femi-Nazi,” but we might as well say he did. In any case, can’t you see and hear all the back-tracking a person would need to do to defend herself from such charges? It could get awfully tiring and deflating, especially when women of my mother’s generation were expected to be tending to so many other things anyway, like children and food and a clean home. Who had the energy to take on any more, especially when so many wouldn’t believe you even if you said you weren’t a feminist but had sympathies leading in that direction?
My mother began caring for her parents as a teenager, and that’s years after her older brother died of rheumatic fever. My mother never went to college, something I’m sure that always made her feel “less than.” She wanted to go, even arrived at Auburn University, only to have to turn around immediately and go home. Her parents were too sick to get on without her.
Jo Ann Barr, 1950s.
My mother went to secretarial school, but worked only briefly before she married and then settled into the life of an American housewife and then mother. She taught herself to cook; she sewed our torn clothes, too. She taught herself to paint, working with charcoal, pastels, and oil. She loved antiques and became a dealer for a time, owning her own shop. She took a job working retail at a carpet store to help put my brother and me through college, learning how to measure the needs for customers’ draperies, carpet, and then also counseling them on decor. She had no formal training, but an instinct that most of us will never know we have, much less nurture and act on.
My mother defied those who wanted to censor our high school texts like Catcher in the Rye. She read widely, loving Steinbeck, Jon Meacham, James Michener, Michelle Obama, and especially Rick Bragg’s portrait of his own mother, The Best Cook in the World, the book I was reading when she passed. I could never finish it, though, as it hurt too badly, and all respect to Rick and his mother, but my mother was the best cook in the world. And by “cook,” I mean “Chef.” I owe my love for reading to her.
She also organized her neighborhood politically in the era when Doug Jones ran against Roy Moore. Jones successfully prosecuted the Klansmen who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Moore was an accused pedophile. Jones barely won—an election that my mother was as outspoken about as any I could remember. We voted for Hillary together and listened each night to Rachel Maddow thrill and chill us with election realities. We were good liberal Democrats together, and I know we both loved that about each other.
I wish, though, that I had paid better attention to all she tried to teach me about the other loves of her life—antiques and gardening—but at least I know about cooking because I used to stand with her in the kitchen, assisting when I could, tasting when she’d allow me to, and picking up such good tips about the best or only brand of baking powder to use (Rumford) and how to make a homemade barbecue sauce to rival those handed down through the centuries.
Before my father passed in 2000, my mother took over handling their finances, and her bookkeeping skills equaled his. She never fell into debt or despaired about money, the way my father did. She did this all alone, too, and I often thought that had my father outlived her, he would have never made it alone. He was a good man, but he could barely fry an egg.
The other part of her life that I’m thinking so strongly about today is her love of music. I’m playing one of her favorites now: Linda Ronstadt. Mom loved Ronstadt’s voice—so strong, so gorgeous. Ronstadt was part of that early 1970’s era of women rockers, like Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon, who were instrumental in elevating the sound of hearts like wheels into our consciousness. Ronstadt would be denigrated by some for not writing her own music/lyrics. And yet, no one much criticizes Elvis for never writing a thing. My mother loved Elvis, too, and thank god for all of this, for in my youth, loving rock and roll in conservative Alabama wasn’t always rewarded or wanted.
I’m also thinking of my mother as I consider how women in music today still fight an uphill battle to be taken seriously. Especially in country music where all it takes is a critique of a male president to get you banished. Where mainstream country radio still plays ten male artists for every two female.
“I like The Dixie Chicks,” Mom would say. “And I like Dolly and Loretta Lynn, too. What a life they had. How hard they had it, and look where they’ve come.”
Mom’s parents were working class people, and like so many others, she wanted my brother and me to have better lives, more comfortable experiences through life. She worked so hard to make this happen. And she succeeded.
I wonder, though, if she ever looked clearly at all she accomplished, how far she came.
“Do you think,” my wife asked last night, “that your mom would have felt satisfied at what she left behind?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “She left this life free of debt and even left us with a little extra.”
At the time I meant the proceeds from selling her house and the bit of stock she bequeathed. But I knew then, see now, how much more she left us. I see this as I cook Brunswick Stew for friends tonight. As I read and teach Faulkner and Carson McCullers, and as I listen to Heart Like a Wheel, Linda Ronstadt’s best record, and one I wish I could play for my mother today, assuring her that whether she thought of herself as a feminist or not, I know she was. I love her all the more for knowing how strong and able and wise she always was.
And whether she ever knew this or not, I love her for helping make me a strong, proud feminist. She was a good teacher, but I’m still learning, and willing.