'Highway 61 Revisted'

I’ve done a lot of driving on PA Route 61 in the past few weeks and I’ve probably had some experiences readers can identify with. I drove into a wrong lane, alive to tell the tale because there was no oncoming traffic, I missed the exits for some of the new jug handles and had to turn around in parking lots. I’ve had trucks from construction sites cross my path as if I weren’t even there, and of course, I’ve learned to slalom through the narrow corridors, some enclosed, some not, that make up the transition road between ‘old 61’ and the new improved highway everyone is hoping for.

I’m on vacation, visiting family and friends and probably, hopefully, in a year from now, the next time I visit, the new highway will be done. In the meanwhile, just like everybody else, I sit, motor idling, stuck in a traffic jam.

In some ways, believe it or not, I like it. Car-life, as I call it, is a novelty for me. In France I don’t own a car (though as readers know, I have a hard-earned driver’s licence). I take the crowded, smelly metro to work and instead of loading groceries into the trunk, I fill a personal shopping cart, a ‘caddie,’ that I wheel along the sidewalks between the supermarket and my home. Then I sling the handle of the caddie onto one shoulder and lug the thing up seven flights of stairs… Yes, car-life has definite appeal.

I’m someone who has had what you might call a chequered driving history. I didn’t get my first licence till I was 21, the age at which I also had my first accident, in the Penn State Schuylkill parking lot. Moving around, living in cities, I let my licence expire and had to take the test again in 1987, before I moved to France, where I found out my US licence was not valid. I did not get my French licence till 2011 and now I proudly possess two because, since 1987, I’ve kept my Pennsylvania licence up to date.

This summer, I’m getting used to driving. Perhaps it is my rental car, a black Impala, sporty and speedy, that has made me feel more confident. Perhaps it is the life I am living, the discoveries I am making, thanks to the freedom of being able to take to the road. In fact, not only am I revisiting ‘Highway 61’ (I thank Bob Dylan for the title), I’m getting to know Schuylkill County in an entirely different way.

I’ve gone south. I’ve moved to southern Schuylkill. I am living in the shadow of Hawk Mountain, not far from the banks of the Little Schuylkill and I feel like I’m in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I have my own ‘little place’ (it’s bigger than my Paris apartment), I’m the summer resident of Summer Valley Guest House, operated by Carolyn and Gene Bonkoski, and I couldn’t ask for better hosts. Outside my bedroom window, I see green fields and trees and most days, I also see Charlie and Rio, the Bonkoski’s horses, who enjoy carrots, apples and watermelon rind as treats.

From the living room, I see the sun rise over Hawk Mountain and, thanks to my black Impala, I often go there to walk the mountain trails and sit at North Lookout, scanning the sky for hawks and eagles, catching glimpses of beautiful song birds as well. There, my sister and I spotted a scarlet tanager; along the Little Schuylkill, I’ve seen indigo buntings, gold finches, tufted titmice and catbirds.

Most of the year, I live in Paris. When I tell people, they exclaim at my good luck: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, all that beauty, all that culture at your disposal every day. They forget I also take the metro, go to work and carry my groceries up all those stairs: metro, boulot, dodo, as the French say: metro, work, and straight to bed. I wish I could take advantage of more of that beauty and culture. Just as I wish I could have more green…

In southern Schuylkill it surrounds me and I feel better, breathe better, even look better living in the midst of it. But as I write, rain is falling and outside, green leaves are shivering on the trees. Already there’s a hint of autumn in the air. The leaves will change color, they will fall, and inevitably winter will come. Perhaps I’d change my tune about my southern Schuylkill experience if I had to weather a Pennsylvania winter or two.

For the moment, I’m entranced. Travelling just a few miles to the other side of Route 61, I park my car at the new boat launch in Auburn and set out on the bike trail to its end, where I take a gravel road to the railroad tracks. I cross a bridge over the Schuylkill and then head down a path into the woods. Above my head, there is an abandoned railroad trestle. I walk beneath it. On the other side, there is a steep path that cuts up to a section of the Bartram Trail, that one day soon will continue from Pottsville all the way to Philadelphia.

I follow it for a stretch, stopping at a pond where I disturb a blue heron. It gracefully takes to the air, its image reflected, along with the surrounding pines, in the perfect stillness of the pool.

Soon I return to France, after a golden summer, one of the best and the calmest I’ve had in years. For that, I’ve also my two yoga teachers to thank, Beth Shields of Pottsville, and Pamela Gyory of Kempton. I discovered Pamela, her yoga classes, and her beautiful 'Forget-me-not' bed and breakfast, thanks again to my black Impala, that has carried me up and over Hawk Mountain, one of the most beautiful summertime drives around.

I used to live in the South of France, on the Riviera, to be exact, and in the summer, the coast highway, the final stretch of France’s legendary Nationale 7—the American equivalent would be Route 66—was one long string of cars crawling between Cannes and the Italian border. When it rained, the highway would flood in spots, as would the campgrounds located so close to the road that the drone of cicadas was drowned out by traffic noise.

The South of France or southern Schuylkill? For my summer vacation, I’ve made my choice…

George Catlin, coal-region painter, inventor of 'Indian Gallery' he took to Paris...

When I was a child, a favorite family excursion was a visit to the Reading Museum and its surrounding park, where my sisters and I liked to feed the ducks, throwing stale bread from the foot bridges into pretty shaded streams. We also wandered in the museum, in those days an old-fashioned kind of place, with yellowed walls and dimly lit displays.

Upstairs there was an art gallery, where I saw my first painting by the French painter Corot, a bank of willows dipping their branches into the River Seine, a small painting but powerful enough to awaken in me an early fascination with all things French.

Downstairs, behind glass, in display cases that filled the center of the gallery, sat or stood American Indians, as we called them in those days, life-sized mannequins in native dress, surrounded by the artefacts that were the tools of their daily life. Along the walls, there were displays of arrowheads, beads, pottery, coins, too many objects, all too small, to hold the interest of a child like me.

The museum was never crowded and this gallery was a quiet place, where the mannequins, frozen in time, indifferent to the faces pressed close to the glass, mournfully tended fires or raised an arrow in the direction of an invisible prey.

I haven’t visited the Reading Museum in many years and I do not know if those Indian mannequins still haunt the first-floor gallery, silent reminders of a way of life destroyed. Enclosed in glass, unreachable, untouchable, they are reminders of a time when such exhibits represented a kind of Noah’s ark, keeping alive the last vestiges of a dying civilization in the face of Manifest Destiny.

One man responsible for such exhibits was George Catlin, Wilkes Barre native, painter of native American life, explorer, ethnographer, entrepreneur and showman, originator of the type of display I saw at the Reading Museum as a child.

Born in 1796, raised in what was still the wilderness of the Wyoming Valley, where only twenty years earlier, a bloody battle had taken place between the Oneidas and American soldiers, George Catlin was raised on tales about the Indians that had once inhabited his family’s land. An avid hunter even as a child, he roamed fields and woods with his single-barrel shotgun, shooting at small game, hoping to one day bring down his first deer.

On one such outing, aiming at the coveted deer, the boy heard a shot before he had the time to fire and saw the deer fall to the ground. From the brush emerged an Indian who tied its feet together and threw it on his back, smiling at young Catlin before he disappeared among the trees.

The man, an Oneida who was camping near the Catlin farm, had walked all the way from Lake Cayuga, in New York state, to visit the ground where his ancestors had fallen in battle. After smoking a peace pipe with George’s father, he shared his venison with the family, congratulating young Catlin on his hunting skills.

Was it that incident, recorded by Catlin in his memoirs, that planted the seed, that gave him the fever, to go West, to live among the Indians, especially the Iowas and the Ojibwas, to record in vivid detail every aspect of their way of life? Destined by family tradition to be a lawyer, a gentleman farmer, a pillar of the community, responsible for the welfare of the growing city of Wilkes Barre, he gave it all up to study painting. Then, rather than paint the popular society portraits of his day, he devoted brush and palette to the feathers and war paint of the great warriors of the American plains.

When he was 32-years-old, in 1828, Catlin began defining the project that would become his “Indian Gallery,” a testimony to the native Americans among whom he lived while recording their lives. At that time, the idea of collecting Indian artefacts was not new. In fact, the US Department of Indian Affairs had an extensive collection and even invited Indians to Washington to perform native dances and display their skills.

Yet, the West remained a land of conquest and when Andrew Jackson entered the White House in 1828, collecting took a backseat to an upsurge in warfare. For Catlin, this became an opportunity to pursue a passion, born in childhood, that would continue to the end of his life. Through painting and collecting, he hoped to salvage the remnants of a slowing dying part of humanity.

A year later, he headed West, where he painted, collected, and befriended his subjects. After creating a substantial body of work, he returned East, joined by some of his Indian friends, hoping to solicit public interest in his living and artistic testimony, but the interest was just not there. At a time of aggressive westward expansion, Indians were the enemy and few Americans wanted to pay to see Catlin’s museum, the Indian Gallery.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, in London and Paris, Catlin found his public. In 1841, speaking in front of the Royal Institution in London, he proclaimed his desire to create a “museum of humanity,” devoted to all human races and animal species in decline. At Egyptian Hall, an immense exhibition space, he displayed his painting and his collections, while live Indians formed “frozen theatrical groups,” holding the same pose for hours.

Loading his collections, living and inanimate, on a boat, moving on to Paris, he took that city by storm, attracting the artistic and intellectual elite, impatient to rub elbows with the “savages,” hoping to catch a glimmer of the purity of primitive life.

Between 1839 and 1850, Catlin successfully travelled Europe with his “museum of humanity,” but then he went bust. When he had set out on his expedition, the word “museum” was still a kind of “catch-all” term, that took in circus sideshows, wax museums, exhibits of “living specimens,” as well as the serious art collections that were beginning to take form at the British Museum in London or at the Louvre. By the end of the decade, “serious” museums had won out and the European public had grown tired of Catlin’s travelling show, preferring universal expositions, like the World’s Fair that took place in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851.

Catlin died penniless in 1872, still sketching Indian life, devoted to his Indian Gallery to the end. In 1879, his collections were saved from destruction by the Smithsonian Institute. Not until 2002, in Washington D.C., was there an exhibit worthy of Catlin’s work and of his mission to preserve the last vestiges of the cultures of the native American peoples he loved.

In France, everybody loves a cowboy…

My downstairs neighbor Thierry, who also happens to be my friend, is on the lookout for a Colt, a very specific Colt: he’s searching for “the Gun that won the West,” a Colt .45, the 4 ¾ single action model, with an ejector rod as long as the barrel. He has briefed me well on the subject, showing me photo after photo in a book he treasures, Colt, An American Legend, by R. L. Wilson, a coffee table book that has been translated into French.

As I write, I have in mind a model Thierry particularly admires, a gun that belonged to General George S. Patton. It’s a handsome piece of work with a finely engraved barrel and an ivory handle displaying a small medallion of a bucking colt, the sign that it’s the genuine article.

Thierry would settle for a wooden handle and he doesn’t need the engraving, but the day he holds an 1873 Colt in his hands, he’ll know he can die happy, having realized the dream of a lifetime. In fact, if he gets his hands on that Colt, he plans to carry it with him to the grave.

Thierry is a trained marksman and member of a gun club. He also served three years in the French Marines as a member of an artillery regiment. In the early 1980’s, he saw action in Chad during a civil war in that landlocked African country and, for his service, he received a medal for bravery. While in the Marines, he trained on 105mm howitzers abandoned by the Americans during the 1944 allied invasion of Normandy. In other words, he has experience with firearms and takes them seriously.

Sometimes Thierry invites me down for tea. During one of those visits, he showed me his .22 rifle and the medal he won using it in a 50-meter prone marksmanship competition. That was also the first time he showed me his book about Colts. I’ll admit that till that time, I’d never given much thought to firearms, and when I did, I thought about them as lethal weapons, associated with atrocities such as Columbine or Virginia Tech.

Listening to Thierry, looking at the photos, I recognized the Colt for what it is, a work of very fine craftsmanship and an artefact that played an important role in American history. For Thierry and for many Frenchmen, it is also the ultimate symbol of the American West.

Raised on westerns he watched on French TV, Thierry confided to me how much he regrets not having lived in the days of “How the West was won.” He would have loved to cross those wide-open spaces on horseback, his Colt pistol in its tooled leather holster, his Colt rifle attached to the saddle of his mustang. He and millions of other Frenchmen feel that way…

That’s why they flock to Disneyland Paris, where, months in advance, they reserve their seats for “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,” with Mickey and his friends. There, after drinks at Doc Cody’s Saloon, visitors to the park settle down for a real Texan meal of spareribs and baked potatoes served up in a cast-iron frying pan.

And once they’ve put on their souvenir cowboy hats, the show can begin: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, the Rough Riders, Sitting Bull, with Mickey, Minnie and Goofy (called “Dingo” in French), thrown in for the Disney touch. For nearly two hours, they shoot, ride, hunt, and dance around the campfire, recreating the Far West for an audience of Europeans hungry for the wilderness the way Americans might feel hungry for medieval castles or ancient Roman ruins.

Just one week ago, I had the opportunity to observe that hunger myself, standing in a long line at Quai Branly Museum, the museum of indigenous cultures and civilizations, to see an exhibit devoted to the Indians of the Great Plains. The show was packed and entire families crowded around displays of feathered war bonnets, beaded baby carriers, hide shirts and jackets, tomahawks and peace pipes.

There was even an extravagantly beaded hide jacked worn by Buffalo Bill himself, an iconic name to the French, the man who brought the American frontier home to them. In 1889, he was in Paris with his Wild West Show for the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower and the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. He returned again in 1905 for a two-month run in Paris, followed by a six-month tour of the rest of France. Back again in 1906, France was the first stop on his final European tour that took him all the way to Ukraine.

Yet, Buffalo Bill was not the first American to tantalize Europeans with the call of the Far West. The very first American to bring his “Indian Gallery” to Europe was a man who hailed, not from the Black Hills of South Dakota, but from the black hills of anthracite. Born in 1796 in Wilkes Barre, raised on a farm in the Wyoming Valley, George Catlin grew up to become one of America’s greatest observers and recorders of Native American life. A true child of the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, he is also responsible for one of the most fascinating Paris-Pennsylvania connections ever made.

Painting of Catlin by William Fisk (1849)

At a time when his accomplishments as painter, ethnographer, and naturalist went unrecognized in the United States, Catlin was being celebrated throughout Europe and especially in France. In 1845, during a triumphant tour of his Indian Gallery, he was received by King Louis Philippe, who commissioned fourteen paintings of Indian life for the historical museum of Versailles. The painter Delacroix visited the Gallery to make sketches and the French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud were inspired by his work.

White Cloud, head chief of the Iowa (1844-45)

Back home, the US Congress refused to invest in Catlin’s paintings or expeditions because the government considered him hostile to its Indian policy and too sympathetic to his Indian subjects and their way of life. Not all Americans, however, felt that way. In 1852, when Catlin set off to South America to paint, his expedition received the support of none other than Sam Colt himself…

Which brings me full circle to the point where this article began: Thierry and his Colt. In any readers have any ideas, suggestions, or 1873 Colts to sell, I’ll put you in touch with my downstairs neighbor. As for George Catlin, I’ll get back to him next month. This Pennsylvanian who joined East and West deserves an article all his own.

In Rome or in Pottsville, the past is all around us

My mother’s house in Pottsville sat atop the southern tip of the Mammoth Vein, one of the richest deposits of anthracite coal in the world, one of the most twisted and tortuous as well. As children, we played in the woods behind our home, scuffing our sneakers on outcrops of shiny black coal that we “mined” with sticks and stones. Coal was there for the taking, at the surface of the earth, and we played with it the way other children play with sand at the ocean’s edge.

The front windows of my mother’s home looked out on Sharp Mountain, where, in the mid-19th century, outcrops of coal lured ambitious entrepreneurs into believing that all they had to do was scratch the surface to tap into rich veins of anthracite. They tried it and soon came up against rock and shale.

When she sat in her bedroom at the back of the house, my mother could see all the way to the crest of Broad Mountain. Through the trees, she saw a row of houses in York Farm, once company housing for miners. Further north, she could make out the contours of a strip mine. On the clearest of days, the co-gens lining the crest of Broad Mountain sent up visible signals of smoke and ash.

My mother died when she was 91 years old. When she was younger, in the autumn, when Schuylkill County foliage was at its peak of beauty, she liked to hike to the water tanks on Sharp Mountain and look out over the Indian Run reservoir. In a little book I have in my apartment in Paris, The History of Schuylkill County, published in 1950 by the Pottsville School District, I read that Indian Run Valley was where “Indians sought shelter after carrying out attacks.”

Seated in her home, looking out its windows or walking nearby, my mother took in a limited territory, but in terms of time, her gaze could span millions of years. Beneath her house and on the slopes of Sharp Mountain exist visible, tangible signs of geographic activity that began over 300 million years ago, during the Pennsylvanian stage of the Carboniferous period, which marked the beginnings of the slow birth of anthracite.

In terms of time that our minds can grasp, Indian Run carries us back to the French and Indian War in the mid-18th century, when British troops, stationed at Fort Lebanon, pursued Native Americans to a stream in Indian Run Valley. Arriving too late, they found campfires still burning, but the warriors had eluded them.

Closer still to home in time and space, at the York Farm Colliery in 1892, a mine-gas explosion left fifteen miners dead. One of those killed was named Chris Honicker. I wonder if he is a distant relative of mine.

At this point readers may be asking themselves why, sitting in my Parisian apartment, I am busy digging up Schuylkill County’s past. The answer is that I’ve just been to Rome, where the past is everywhere, a part of everyday life, a part of the present, impossible to overlook or to forget.

Of course, there is all the resplendent glory of ancient Rome and of the Renaissance, coexisting in perfect harmony atop the Capitoline Hill at the city’s heart. There, Renaissance palaces flank a piazza designed by Michelangelo, and a 12th-century church supposedly marks the spot where a sibyl announced to Caesar Augustus the coming of Christ. Quite modest in size but enormously significant to the history of Rome, the Capitoline she-wolf, which may date back to the 5th century BC, looks down on the crowds as she suckles Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome.

And that’s just one hill, one small hill in a city that includes seven, none remarkable in size, but each one a veritable Everest in terms of its multilayered history. Above the red-tiled rooftops of Rome, atop Vatican Hill, the dome of Saint Peter’s, another creation of Michelangelo, dominates the skyline and the history of the Catholic Church.

On the Palantine Hill are the ruins of the magnificent palaces of Augustus Caesar and his wife Livia, overlooking the Circus Maximus, where chariot races were once run. In her dowry, Livia brought to Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, a beautiful summer palace to the north of Rome. In the National Roman Museum, you can still visit one of its rooms, a painted garden, where frescoes more than 2,000-years old are as fresh and alive as if they were painted yesterday.

Roman hills also enclose underground treasures. On Celio Hill, across from the regal ruins of the Palantine, you can travel down a staircase to visit the homes of ordinary Romans alive in Caesar Augustus’ time. Above ground, not far from a major hospital and crowded city streets, chickens cluck and scratch the ground while sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, the order to which Mother Teresa belonged, tend their vegetable garden and prune fruit trees.

There are also less glorious hills, not counted among the traditional seven, such as Testaccio to the south of Rome. Its names refers to “testae,” which are shards of pottery, the material of which the hill is composed. Here is where ancient Romans tossed their unwanted earthenware jars. Later, it became the city’s meatpacking district and today the former slaughter houses have been turned into a museum of contemporary art.

Wandering through the streets of Rome, one day I almost literally tripped over a ruin, some ancient stone jutting out from the side of a building, and everywhere, even in the most modern neighborhoods, I came up against Roman columns, walls and statues that artfully blend in with the new.

In Rome there’s no tearing down the past. You simply build around it, which may be why it took sixteen years to construct one line of the Roman metro—new archaeological finds were always slowing down the works.

Rome is not an easy city. It is crowded and noisy, just like cities everywhere yet it is also different, perhaps because the present has not forgotten the past. It’s not like Paris, where the past has been turned into a monument, solemn and imposing, nor like many places in the United States, where too often it has simply been torn down.

In Rome, the past is a companion, a wise counsellor. It does not haunt its citizens, as a forgotten past often does. It inhabits them, enriching their lives, a friendly spirit that reminds them that the ground on which we walk, always and everywhere, resonates with history.

Easter 1914

I read it in The Republican Herald in the column “Days Gone By” : April 7, 1914, Herman Straub returned to Pottsville at the end of two years of working at “the greatest job the world has known,” the construction of the Panama Canal.

Herman made it home just in time for Easter, celebrated on April 12th that year. Perhaps on that day, he and his wife strolled along Centre Street, participating in the Easter Parade. If by chance they did, Madam was most likely wearing a “hobbie skirt,” wide at the hips and so narrow at the ankles she could only take mincing steps. Straw bonnets decorated with artificial flowers were popular that year. Perhaps she was wearing one of those too.

Across the ocean, in Paris, women hobbled along in high heels, wearing the same ankle-pinching skirts. On their heads, they sported extravagant creations, turbans topped with erect, high-reaching plumes, hats with wide triangular brims, cloches fitted with a “Turkish veil” that covered the chin, mouth and nose in order to set off a pair of enticing eyes.

Men’s fashions, on both sides of the Atlantic, remained conservative and dark. At a time when men were busy changing the world, they surely had little time to think about clothes. Some, like Mr. Straub, were off building the Panama Canal; in and around Paris, many were working in the automobile industry. At that time, Paris was the world’s “Motor City,” and in 1914, there were more than 600 car manufacturers in France.

One year earlier, a Frenchman driving a Peugeot had won the Indianapolis 500. Still in that year, a Frenchman was the first to fly from Europe to Africa across the Mediterranean Sea. Those triumphs were broadcast on radio beamed from the top of the Eiffel Tower or seen in newsreels projected on the silver screen of Gaumont Palace in Paris, the biggest movie theater in the world.

In 1914 change was everywhere and things were happening almost too fast, prompting the French poet Charles Péguy to write, “The world has changed more in the last 30 years than in all the time since Jesus Christ.” By the end of that year, at age 41, he was dead.

On August 15, 1914, the first cargo ship sailed through the Panama Canal. Two weeks earlier, on July 28th, the Great War began. Between then and November 11, 1918, it took the lives of 9 million soldiers. The poet Charles Péguy was among the first to fall, killed by a bullet at the Battle of Ourcq on September 5, 1914.

World War I is much on my mind these days as everywhere in France commemorations of the “Great War” are taking place. There are so many exhibits that it would take an entire year to visit them all (to get an idea of the wealth of events, consult http://centenaire.org/en). On TV, there are documentaries to watch, and once July roles around, there were be official ceremonies galore.

Of course, these events interest me but on April 11th, I had the unique experience of participating in one of these commemorations myself. I took part in an opera, a sound collage, a work of experimental music, based on what is called “verbal notation,” a musical score built of words and not of notes.

To participate, there is no need to play a musical instrument or to “read music” in the traditional sense. All you need to know is how to read—and to listen with heart and mind. If you possess those skills, then you can play a role.

This experimental work, “A Great War,” is composed of music, sounds, images and words all belonging to the period of World War I. Its composer, Joseph Kudirka, came from the US to France, where, as the guest of my university, he explained to us how to become a part of his work.

We—a professional pianist, two video artists, three professors from the English department, and three students from the music department, each a musician as well, listened and understood: we would be playing a creative role, improvising as we interacted with a “sound base,” the composer’s montage of songs, voices and gravelly silences all originating in the period of World War I.

Before our first meeting a week before the performance, we had all collected our materials. One of my colleagues chose advertisements: stimulants to keep soldiers healthy in the trenches, alcohol to keep them warm, and, as the war progresses, artificial limbs to replace those they’ve lost. Another chose American patents: a new and improved brassiere, a garbage disposal system, and (remember the Lusitania!) an idea for camouflaging ships at sea.

There were poems by the French poet Apollinaire and texts in Greek, Flemish and Russian I couldn’t tell you anything about. There was also a ukulele rendition of “When this lousy war is over.” I chose poems written in the trenches by the Italian poet Ungaretti and poems in German, wanting to “commemorate” those two languages of the war.

At rehearsals, we all sat down. Through the horns of two gramophones from the war period came a faraway, trembling voice singing “I’ll take you home again Kathleen,” a 1914 recording. We listened and then we spoke, reciting the words we had chosen, together, alone, in swells, accompanied at times by the piano, while behind us flashed images, not necessarily of the war, but of those times. Sometimes we sat in silence and the only sound was the hissing of white noise.

By the night of the performance, we had learned to listen to each other and to the sounds around us. And we had learned to pace ourselves to the composer’s composition of sounds. Then the lights went down and for one hour, we were in the spotlight, using sound, music, image and movement, to recreate “A Great War.”

And it worked. It brought home to us all, audience and performers alike, the density of time and the paradoxes of war. In 1914, during the long weeks of the First Battle of the Marne, Americans were crowding into movie theaters to watch Charlie Chaplin and the “Perils of Pauline.” They were listening to the first recordings of calypso music, and blues and jazz were outpacing ragtime. America was isolationist and little did Americans imagine that a few days before Easter 1917, they too would be entering that war.

Easter 1914. I wonder if elegant Parisians strolling along the Champs Elysées had an inkling that a long and bloody world war was just around the corner.

PA Steel Town Subject of French Documentary

When I can’t sleep at night, I don’t count sheep. Instead, I fill up Pottsville storefronts with the shops I used to know as a child. Back then, around this time of year, my Aunt Mildred, a former principal of Yorkville school, would take me downtown for an Easter dress and shoes. Sometimes we went to Matt’s Kiddy Shop on East Norwegian, sometimes to Wolowitz’s on Centre Street, or to one of Pottsville’s two department stores, Pomeroy’s or S.S.Weiss. For shoes, there were Raring’s or Puddu’s, Triangle or Paramount.

My aunt, who was as generous as she was kind, would then take me out to lunch and on very special occasions, we’d dine at the Necho Allen, where we’d order a “Wimpy,” the hotel’s famous hamburger. If we were in a hurry, we’d stop by Green’s Five-and-ten and, seated at the counter looking out on Centre Street, order hotdogs and a Coke. Our last stop was at an iron railing overlooking the taxi dispatcher, who had his office beneath W. H. Mortimer Jewellers at Centre and East Norwegian Streets. He knew my aunt, who did not drive, and we’d have a taxi in no time.

Of course, I’ve only mentioned a few of the downtown stores. There were dozens, along with restaurants, diners, movie theatres, and bars where the local brews were served, a “Bavarian” from the Mount Carbon Brewery or a Yuengling on tap.

Those were the days…or were they?

By the 1950’s, coal employment in the anthracite region (Carbon, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Northumberland and Schuylkill counties) was less than half of what it had been in 1917, when the number of workers peaked at 156,148. By 1960, those figures had dropped to 20,000. From then on, there was only sharp decline. In the year 2000, a workforce of 945 produced about 4 million tons of coal, as compared to over 100 million in 1920 (all statistics are from government tables reprinted in The Face of Decline, the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the 20th Century by Dublin and Licht, 2005).

Still, I grew up believing “Old King Coal” ruled in the kingdom of anthracite, home to that clean, slow-burning fuel that made America great. What would my country be without it, I asked myself, proud to be a coal miner’s granddaughter.

My father, also proud of his roots, drove us to the edge of the strip mines that were replacing underground mining in the 1960’s and together we looked on as giant shovels tore up the earth. In 1963, we went to Sheppton and, standing behind police lines, watched rescue teams at work after the collapse of a mine that left two miners dead.

Our family history and the history of coal were interlocked, tragic and glorious, unique. At least, that’s what I used to like to believe.

Now I know that anthracite’s history, very interesting and essential, is just one chapter in a long story of industrial decline and decay.

A recent French documentary brought that home to me. The film, “Braddock America,” directed by Jean-Loïc Portron and Gabriella Kessler, is about the western Pennsylvania town of that name. A borough of Pittsburgh located about seven miles from the city center, Braddock is home to The Edgar Thomson Steelworks, the first steel mill constructed by Andrew Carnegie in 1873. In 1901, Carnegie sold his mills to the group that became US Steel, the biggest steel producer in the world at the beginning of the 20th century.

In the background, Edgar Thomson today

In 1974 steel production in the US reached a record high: 132.2 million tons. Less than a decade later, that figure dropped to 66 million and at Edgar Thomson, the massive layoffs began: 1,000 workers lost their jobs at the end of 1981. During the following three decades, as China climbed to the position of number one steel producer in the world, Braddock saw its population drop from about 6,000 to 2,000, at tenth of what it had been in 1920, the heyday of both steel and coal.

“Braddock America,” currently playing in movie theatres across France, gives a voice to those who chose to stay in what has come to be known as a “shrinking town,” as stores and services close (most recently the local hospital), and many move away, simply abandoning homes they cannot sell.

Standing in the middle of a street lined with homes and a couple of brick warehouses, a setting that could just as easily be found in Schuylkill County, a local history buff proudly proclaims that Braddock’s steel made America strong. Seated in his living room, a former steel worker recalls his pride and that of his father. They did a hard, dirty job that paid well. During WWII, the same man points out, the Pittsburgh mills produced two thirds of the steel for the Western European front.

The work was dangerous too. Accidents and death were common but the man who worked in the steel mill took care of his family, earning union wages, offering his children a better life. Many were immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who became proud Americans while keeping their traditions alive.

All in all, it’s a story that sounds a lot like those told in Schuylkill County. Once you’ve substituted “coal mine” for “steel mill,” there’s little else that needs to be changed: the same pride in a hard job requiring skill and strength, a belief in the industry’s role in making America great, similar risks and dangers, labor strife and a long struggle for decent wages; and finally, dramatic and lasting decline.

In “Braddock America,” where film footage from Braddock’s past is artfully interwoven with shots of Braddock today, we see a booming town, a crowded, prosperous main street, payday at the mills—and then a long strip of boarded-up shops and empty lots. Braddock then, Braddock now: two different worlds.

Yet, there are a few dedicated community activists who hang on, organizing volunteer crews of street-cleaners, sprucing up the local ball field, participating in local government, fighting for a better future, the way their parents fought before.

Ultimately, “Braddock America” holds up a mirror reflecting an image I’d rather not see, one of a very wealthy nation that has let the “little guy” down. Americans should be grateful, then, for people like Mike Stout and his sister Nina, two dedicated activists from Braddock. They keep on fighting, losing battle after battle against the rich and powerful, but that’s doesn’t stop them. Who knows? Maybe someday they’ll win the war…

French “Cinderfella” gives a lesson in gender studies: Jacky au royaume des filles

Yesterday, I gave into a secret pleasure. On a blustery, brilliant Parisian afternoon, a true exception in a winter of relentless rain and gray, I slipped into the darkness of a movie theater to take in a matinee, a silly movie, a comedy, that turned out to be not so silly after all.

The title of the film, Jacky au royaume des filles, literally translates as “Jacky in the kingdom of girls,” but a much better title would be “Cinderfella,” because that’s who Jacky is, a masculine version of one of the most beloved fairy-tale princesses, Cinderella, who rose from raking ashes and scrubbing floors to sharing the throne with a prince whose ideal of the perfect bride was a woman with small feet.

Jacky lives in Bubunne, a kingdom where women rule and men obey, a desolate place with no gardens, parks or farms, no animals except for sacred ponies to whom boys pray, pleading to be turned into princes. While women patrol the streets, work in industry or govern—Bubunne is a military dictatorship, headed by a general about to step down in favor of her youngest daughter, “la Colonelle,” the men and boys stay home to cook and clean.

When they go out to shop or pray (sacred ponies don’t come inside), they always dress in “voileries,” a sack-like robe, something like a chador, that covers them from head to mid-calf, exposing their faces but covering the neck. Attached to the robe, just beneath the chin, hangs a silver ring. Upon marrying, wives can attach a leash to it to lead husbands through the streets.

The day the government announces “la Colonelle” will be giving a ball where she’ll choose her consort, the royal “couillon,” the number-one idiot of the land, all the boys go wild!

Of course, Jacky is already in love with “la Colonelle” (aren’t all the little boys?) and he dreams of going to the ball, but his mother dies and, taken in by a cruel aunt, with two husbands, by the way, he must stay home to cook and clean while his two cousins go instead.

By now, I’m sure readers have got the gist—in at least two ways. Jacky will marry “la Colonelle,” just like in the original. And this version of “Cinderella” is a fairy tale turned upside down, with all the roles reversed: women in charge, men scrubbing the floors; women wearing the pants, men covered by veils; women choosing (or, as is also the case in the film, harassing, even raping) and men patiently waiting to be the chosen ones.

Jacky au royaume des filles, directed by Riad Sattouf, is a good movie and it offers viewers a good time. In no way is it a feminist manifesto, but it just so happens that the film has been released at a moment when the word “gender,” as in gender studies, is making headlines in France.

In fact, on February 2nd, in Paris and Lyon, hundreds of thousands (according to organizers, far fewer, according to police) marched through the streets, waving pink and blue banners, protesting against a new program recently introduced in France’s public schools. Called the “ABCD of equality,” its goal is to undo stereotypes and promote equality between girls and boys from their earliest school days.

To give an example, in elementary schools, teachers work with images: a woman doing the shopping, a man repairing the kitchen sink, a couple cooking together, a little boy dressing up in a disguise. Students are asked to sort pictures according to whether they point to stereotypes or not. Disagreement can lead to heated discussion, even among the very young. When one boy suggests it’s OK for boys to cry, another protests: no! that means he’s a girl.

For this and for other ideas like it, such as using 19th-century paintings to discuss how women’s and children’s dress have changed or encouraging less violence on the playground, a part of France is up in arms—to the point that some parents, responding to rumors that the “ABCD of equality” is teaching their children to become homosexuals, intend to pull them out of school one day a month. Alerted by SMS’s that spread like wildfire, they are participating in a nation-wide boycott initiated by Farida Belghoul, a militant for family values, close to Dieudonné and Alain Soral, whom I wrote about last month.

Others are simply worried that schools are not doing their job, which is to teach children how to read, write and count. Still others feel public school is overstepping its bounds, making an unwarranted incursion into the private realm of family life.

In recent days, the whole affair reached proportions that forced the Minister of Education Vincent Peillon to reassure the nation that the “ABCD of equality” does not equal “gender studies,” a subject that will not be taught in French schools. In other words, though he is in favor of equality, far be it from him or the government to want to do away with one of France’s most beloved mottoes, “Vive la différence!”

But what’s wrong with gender studies, I’m tempted to ask. After all, its founder is the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who famously wrote, “One is not born a woman, but becomes one”—though you might say she was inspired by a man. In the 16th century, the Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote pretty much the same thing, claiming we become human, we are not born that way. In both examples, in the best cases, culture and society improve upon nature to make us who we are.

Which brings me back to Jacky. In Bubunne, boys cannot go to school because the ruling regime does not want them to learn to read. Inside or outside, they must be covered by a veil, hiding themselves from the roving gaze of…females. And men and boys do all the dirty work, preparing the daily “bouillie” or slops, recycled human waste, the main, the only, dish in Bubunne.

Veils, slops and ignorance imposed on men, silly stuff, isn’t it? It doesn’t seem very natural, does it? We all know men are strong and intelligent, the ones who rule the world! And women, well, aren’t they the ones who do the dirty work? Ask yourself, who cleans the toilet at your house?

Nature or culture, which one determines the tasks that men and women assume in society? Jacky has taught me more about gender studies than the current debate stirring up French society.