Hi James, you are very welcome and appreciate your be well thoughts. Back atcha.

I sent your American Mongrel post to an old friend in Texas yesterday. I remember about 15 years ago, drinking bourbon and watching some movie on the side of his barn, which we set-up for every Wednesday night for 5 years; surround-sound, Christmas lights and popcorn-machine, a real neighborhood thing out in Driftwood. Later on, listening to some Lightnin’ Hopkins, he said something this northerner didn’t understand at the time, but now have a better grasp of, after reading your articles. He said, in his slow, southern manner, “I’m just white-trash”, smack-dab in the middle of some story about his early days playing guitar with various legends back in the sixties. I thought you’d find his reply of interest. Hope your travels are eventful and safe. Let me know if you get in a fix. I'm in a little town north of Ann Arbor watching over my 95-year young mother-in-law.

PS:

My Dad’s relatives are a mother with roots in London and a runaway clergyman who didn't want to carry the tradition forward (stowed away and went to Tennessee). Reed is a more common name in England than Smith. Blimey mate!

(Blimey comes from the term "God blind me". It comes from the plague days.) The Reeds lived on the 'rich' side of town in Center. My grandfather died from diabetes. My dad had a radio shop in the back of the hardware store as a teenager.

My mother's side was Scotch/Irish. A single mom coming to America with two boys, one young, one teenager (my 'Grandpappy'). The youngest got ill and she went back, leaving Tom McDurant behind. He ended up in West Texas and while building his house, it collapsed and killed his wife. He moved to East Texas (Center, the county seat of Shelby County) and became a grocer. He built several houses there. I watched him and my father build my great aunt's garage apartment. I remember a cracker barrel full of bent nails. Anytime he needed to nail something, he would go to that barrel, pick out some nails and straighten them. When I was a very small kid, he made us miniature furniture in the back of the store where he stored the animal feed. My Granny gave me a plug of chewing tobacco there once to see if I liked it. Of course, it was foul and burned my mouth, suffice to say, I never chewed tobacco! Ha!

Seems like yesterday... your pal,

-Hill Country

Hill Country, thanks so much and if I get stuck near Ann Arbor I should be able to hoof it to your town as long as I’m still physically sound.

I much enjoyed your family tale and wished to share it. I wonder if the Reeds might have been marsh dwellers once upon a time. It would be cool to imagine a lineage going bake to the rebellious Wake of early Norman times.

The entire idea of white trash is vested in the English caste system, which placed Norman folk of Norse and French descent over relatively indigenous Europeans of the British Isles that included Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Welsh, Britanno-Latin mongrels, Cornishmen, Scotts and Irish Gaels.

The social stratification was very similar to what happened in the Indian Sub-Continent when the Arуans crushed the Dravidians and were then subjugated by Persians, Hellenes, Arabs and Mongol mongrels known as Moguls.

The salient difference was, that the Norman overlords, while assigning racial privilege to themselves to this day, have always denied racial differences and clothed their ancestral malice as colorless class warfare.

By first allying with the Dutch merchants of despair and denying their Christian and ethnic identity in favor of a macro-zoological racial identity with a prosperity assignation equating economic failure to thrive with sin [and hence social disposability], the English mercantile class and vestigial aristocracy created a disposable underclass of men and children, which were equated to dung and garbage used as fertilizer with such words as “rubbish-men,” “waste-men” and “white-trash” all describing a tainted racial stain that must be jettisoned for the abstract economic good now worshipped by all of academia.

What white trash literally meant in the beginning, in the 1600s, was a teenager from the British Isles that was shipped off, used to kill as many trees as possible, and then be sunken into an unmarked grave to fertile the maize that would feed his sorry successors and the tobacco that would enrich their masters.

Ever since my Australian boss, circa 1981, once called me “white trash” with other expletives attached to it, and marked me lower morally than the black men he assigned me to supervise, for the very reason that my willingness to work with my hands made me an irredeemable savage, lower even than the ex-convicts who he derisively called “aborigines,” I have reveled in that status and will always be, in my mind, white trash.

And, I believe—and I believe in few things—that for white trash to survive and continue to live and raise a voice to his master and raise a hand to his master’s darksome hounds, is revenge in and of itself.

+ Cracker-Boy + The Greatest Lie Ever Sold

To support this project and view some graphics go to: