Walking Through the Horizon: Poems

4. All Roads Lead to Bubba

✧ CHAPTER FOUR ✧ All Roads Lead to Bubba George Fisher caricatured dozens of prominent figures during his long career as a political cartoonist, and I would bet that almost none of his subjects offered the cartoonish possibilities of Orval Eugene Faubus. What a face! That beak of a nose that seemed to originate mid-forehead and flowed ski-slope style on and on, too great a distance for anatomical discreteness. That chin that jutted out in search of sunshine as if to escape the shadow of the powerful proboscis. Those droopy eyes that might pull double duty as sleepy or beady, depending on one’s estimation of the thoughts behind them. Those satellite-dish ears that framed the kind of face that rarely finds its way to a governor’s mansion. Faubus looked as if someone had walloped him flush in the face with a skillet and the force of the smack had found its outlet in his ears. And these were just his physical characteristics. Faubus’s long career in Arkansas politics and his 1957 starring turn as the embodiment of massive resistance to school desegregation provided the social and psychological underpinnings essential for ideal caricaturehood. It wasn’t inevitable that the mare of the benighted South would find herself in a chute with the Arkansaw hillbilly jackass after World War II. But it happened, and the offspring was a mule named Orval. Two of the major postwar contributors to the Arkansaw image found Orval Faubus. Americans know about his role in the crisis at Little Rock’s Central High; his tenure with the Dogpatch, U.S.A. theme park is more obscure. The first introduced Arkansas to the world in a way to which Arkansans were not accustomed, and in so doing threatened to forever alter the Arkansaw image. In September 1957, Arkansas paraded before the world’s eyes clothed in the raiment of the racist, reactionary South, the South of marble Confederate generals and marbled plantation bosses. South Carolina or Alabama or Mississippi generally led the charge on this field. John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and William Alexander Percy hadn’t given a rat’s ass about Arkansas, yet here she was for all the world to see, standardbearer of southern white defiance—with Arkansas’s one genuine hillbilly governor front and center. 137 BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 137 Little Rock’s and Arkansas’s and Faubus’s sudden infamy in cold war America created a storm that loosed the Arkansaw image from its familiar moorings in hillbilly harbor. For a time it looked as if Arkansas might take her place alongside her sister states in the benighted and bigoted South and watch her generations-old backwoods Arkansaw image eclipsed by a more sinister image, one in which the antiprogressive spirit emanated not from dogged independence and hillbilly cussedness but from hatred and cultural rot. But, as Faubus proved, the hillbilly is nothing if not persistent. A series of developments in the 1960s and 1970s—the folk music craze, the return of the ambivalent Arkansaw image in popular entertainment, and even Dogpatch, U.S.A.—reminded people that Arkansas, though not as naive and innocent as it once had been, remained at heart a place where the good old boys were still basically good, where moonlight was for moonshiners, not magnolias, and where one could find refuge from a life that civilization had gotten the best of. Arkansaw Intermission The heyday of the hillbilly, and of Arkansaw’s time on center stage, had passed by the end of World War II. The nation’s intense fascination with the hillbilly had drawn to an end some time between Midway and Iwo Jima. It was almost as if the atomic age was incompatible with the rube. The United States emerged from the war the world’s greatest power, an outward-looking nation that would soon plunge headlong into the halfcentury standoff with the Soviet Union we know as the Cold War. Gone was the isolationism long bred by practicality as much as by idealism. Gone as well was the intense national self-scrutiny of the Depression era, that national pastime in which no ethnic group, religious sect, or regional anomaly escaped ridicule and/or praise. As the United States began to identify itself by contrast and comparison with the rest of the world, Americans’ fascination with regional and ethnic stereotypes and the entertainment based on those stereotypes faded into the background. As modern developments...