In this space last week, I quoted and extrapolated at some length from the work of Kurt Vonnegut, one of the last true giants of American letters. That I am not alone in my estimation of him is evidenced amply by the heartfelt responses the column drew from fellow admirers of the man and his writing.
I had not planned on writing about Vonnegut again this week, but one of those heartfelt responses came with a story that is too good not to be shared. It came from Yvonne Foster, about whom I wrote recently, along with several other folks, in a column that paid tribute to people who influenced the direction of my life at various times.
Mrs. Foster was my 12th grade English teacher at Russellville High School, with whom I have become happily reacquainted over the past few years through the miracle of Facebook. More importantly to this story, she later became a teacher representative for the Alabama Education Association. This was in the early 1980s, and one of the first cases she was assigned was that of a high school teacher in the northwest Alabama town of Haleyville (coincidentally, the place where my parents were born, grew up and married, where I was born, and where I still occasionally visit friends and family who live there).
The teacher in question had been suspended without pay after assigning his students an optional reading of Slaughterhouse-Five. Published in 1969, the book generally is held to have been Vonnegut’s masterpiece and an enduring antiwar statement. Its satire of human proclivities, especially that toward war, is both hilarious and horrifying, constructed around a plot that blends elements of science fiction with history and contemporary reality.
Amid scenes involving time travel, aliens from outer space and other things that might or might not be delusions of the protagonist, there are passages largely based on U.S. Army Private Kurt Vonnegut’s own experiences as a prisoner of war during the closing days of World War II. Along with other American prisoners and their German guards, he survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, that killed tens of thousands of German civilians. The book’s title comes from the building where Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were imprisoned when the city was bombed.
Slaughterhouse-Five was controversial from the day of its publication, at a time when the Vietnam War was escalating. Its darkly comic tone, along with the writer’s unvarnished treatment of the effects of violence and war on the human psyche — he also delved into themes of sex and relationships, death and dying, and the subversion of individual dignity by mass psychology and culture — made it hard for some to stomach.
Especially those who tend to view the capacity for and inclination toward creativity and critical thought as evidence of Satan’s presence on earth. Over the years, Slaughterhouse-Five has been a frequent target of censorship efforts from right-wing religious and patriotic organizations that have objected to it as not only sacrilegious and unpatriotic, but obscene to boot.
Such was the case in Haleyville, where the teacher’s suspension was followed by a demonstration against the teacher and Vonnegut’s book, organized by the Alabama chapter of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. As Mrs. Foster recalled in her note to me last week, one of the most prominent leaders of that demonstration was Bobbie James, the wife of then-Alabama Gov. Fob James.
(Around the same time as the dustup in Haleyville, an unrelated story in The Tuscaloosa News noted that, “Mrs. James has been active in fundamentalist religious work and related conservative political causes,” and reminded readers that she once used a state-owned plane to travel to the nation’s capital to take part in a “Washington for Jesus” rally. It seems fitting to mention this here, even if only as a reminder that Alabama’s tradition of government by demagogues, zealots, miscreants and kooks is long, hallowed, ongoing — and fated, it generally appears, to be never-ending).
After a hearing, the local school board voted to terminate the teacher, prompting him to file a lawsuit. In preparing his case for trial, attorneys supplied by the AEA and the National Education Association alerted the American Civil Liberties Union (cue here the baying, bawling and bloodlust of the right-wing herd), of which Vonnegut was long a generous and vocal supporter. I’ll let Mrs. Foster take it from here:
[The lawyers] went to the ACLU because of the censorship issue, and that’s where Vonnegut learned that his book was being used as the reason to fire the teacher. One morning, the teacher was in the shower when his telephone rang. He got out to answer it, and it was Kurt Vonnegut, who asked him the amount of his monthly take-home pay. Until the case actually went to trial about a year later, Vonnegut sent the teacher a check for that amount every month! I had always loved his books, but after finding out that he practiced what he preached, I loved him!
Postscript: The case ultimately was dismissed when a settlement was reached out of court, Mrs. Foster told me. The teacher is now deceased, as of course is Vonnegut himself. And, to appropriate the signature phrase from the book that caused a stir here in Alabama a generation ago, so it goes….
Having now exhausted for the foreseeable future all of the space (as far as I know) that will be devoted here to the esteemed Mr. Vonnegut, I’ll use what I have left to begin shifting the focus back toward more customary subject matter. I’ll do so by sharing a few brief questions and observations. These have arisen in various conversations I’ve had over the past week or two, or from the simple act of doing something that I don’t do often enough — that is, spending a little time combing back through my notebooks and the collection of envelopes, grocery receipts and cocktail napkins that supplement them on occasion.
To wit:
When will Mayor William Bell announce the awarding of the contract for renovation of the former Social Security building north of the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex? More pertinently, to whom will he award it? I’m told that the project will go either to Birmingham construction giant BL Harbert — or to Franklin Haney, the Tennessee-based developer whose plan for the building and its cost to city taxpayers came under public scrutiny that prompted the mayor to announce that he would seek bids rather than give Haney the contract outright.
When will City Hall provide an update on implementation of the city’s Comprehensive Plan? According to timelines and benchmarks that were part of the plan, such an update is overdue.
Will Mayor Bell run for Congress in 2016 against incumbent Rep. Terri Sewell? That he could do so without giving up his seat as mayor makes the question even more intriguing.
Finally, and briefly — though I will be returning to it soon, with an answer in mind — what is the single most valuable piece of real estate in Birmingham, at least speculatively speaking?
