Georgia Gazette

I'm Sid Hoskinson and this is Georgia Gazette. Coming up, legislative watcher James R. Groves answers questions about the final days of the 1998 session of the Georgia General Assembly, Georgia's best authors are honored for their work. In Dorothy's story, this 48-year-old blind woman is still adding to her list of impressive accomplishments. Stay tuned. The 1998 session of the Georgia General Assembly wrapped up late Thursday night, around 1130. And there, until the bitter, or this year, not so bitter end, was our legislative watcher James

R. Groves. Thanks for being with us today, Jimmy. Glad to be here, Sid. I just have a couple questions. It feels like the time just flew by this session. Could that be because there was very little shouting and gnashing of teeth this year? Well, the time did fly by this year because they ended very quickly. One of the reasons is, most legislators who are running again have to get out and start fundraising. They can't raise money while the General Assembly is in session, so they try to get out as quickly as possible so they can go back and host fundraising dinners and things like that. As far as contentiousness, it was pretty contentious. The first few weeks of the session, what you saw was the Democrats and the Republicans posturing on issues, trying to set the agenda for the upcoming elections. But about halfway through, they started working together and right here at the very end, they just pushed a number of bills through by working together. Now what did they wait until the last minute to vote on and what actually got passed?

All of the big issues, other than the tax cut, which was passed during the first week of the session. All of the other ones went right down to the wire late last night. They approved the compromise on letting billboard companies cut trees in front of their signs. What they're going to do is they're going to let them cut hardwood trees, a certain diameter, and pine trees around the signs if they're obscuring the view. And the outdoor companies will then have to put money into a fund to plant wildflowers and things like that. It's a compromise for both the Garden Club of Georgia, which is fought the bill and the billboard owners. They also last night approved an amendment that protects lottery proceeds. It gives them constitutional protection. And what that does is now the money will be spent on hope scholarships and pre-Kindergarten first. Any remaining money will be going to a revenue shortfall, which will be used in case lottery sales go down.

They want to make sure there's always money available for those two programs. And once the revenue shortfall fund is fully funded, then they'll spend the money on technology grants and school construction, which is currently what part of the funding formulae is. And what it's designed to do is, of course, nobody would argue with Governor Miller about where the lottery money would go while he was in office, but they're worried about what the future administrations will do because there was no protection they could spend it on just about anything if they wanted to. Well, this was the last session for Governor Miller and Lieutenant Governor Pierre Howard. What was the mood in the Capitol Thursday night? It was interesting. It was very somber. Usually, it's chaotic on the last night. And there was a little bit of that from time to time. But both the Governor and Lieutenant Governor said their farewells in speeches late at night. And you can hear a pin drop throughout the Capitol. People everywhere were listening. You know, they were listening to them. The Governor thanked people for their support for putting hope scholarship and pre-K into a place here in Georgia.

And he said that 30 years from now, people are going to be marveling at this leading progressive state called Georgia. And they're going to look back on what started it all. And they're going to look back to this time in Georgia's history as the start of it all. And he also praised Lieutenant Governor Pierre Howard for his efforts in helping him get all of his programs in. Pierre Howard said he wants to be remembered for being an advocate for the elderly and for children and for protecting the environment. And he urged his successor, whoever that may be, to try to foster a spirit of bipartisanism in the Senate because they get along better in the Senate, the Republicans and the Democrats than they do in the House. Now the legislators have gone home to campaign for re-election. Can they be proud of what they've accomplished? Can they hold this up as a banner? That was one of the questions I asked a bunch of lawmakers last night and they say they have a lot to be proud of and they do. They have the tax cut. And that coupled in next year's budget with the removal of the final penny from the sales tax on food, they've cut taxes more than $300 million in next year's budget.

They've expanded medical coverage for poor children by requiring just modest payments, co-payments, and modest premiums. So families are trying to get off welfare, but the mother or the father don't have a job yet. They do have insurance coverage. That's something they're going to run on this year. The big issue that didn't make it was parole, that's going to be a big campaign issue. They had a constitutional amendment that would abolish it for an unspecified list of crimes. It failed because Republicans didn't like it. Democrats say they're going to beat the Republicans over the head with this issue this year. Republicans say they can explain their position. When the 1998 Georgia General Assembly met James Argroves was there as he has been for every legislative session in the past six years, his final legislative report of the year airs next Friday evening at 6.10, it will be a wrap-up of this year's session at one that you don't want to miss.

Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you, Sid. And the winner is? The 34th annual Georgia author of the year awards were presented last weekend at Mercer University in Macon. Since 1995, the awards have been administered by Georgia Writers Inc. A network that, as executive director Terry Taran explained to the audience, fosters the state's literary talents. We promise to encourage novices to evaluate their work, criticize it constructively, and cheer them on until they're strong enough to meet the rough challenges required to hone the craft, to offer a like-minded haven, an oasis, if you will, to writers confronted with the isolation of producing a work of words.

Works by 62 authors were nominated for this year's awards in six categories, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, short story, first novel, and children's literature. New York Times Southern correspondent Rick Bragg won in the nonfiction category for his memoir, all over but the shouton. Judge Carler's do's who chose Bragg's book from among those nominated because he said he was impressed by its courage and honesty. Well, it was a book that was a new voice, it was about a story that hadn't been told. It was told very passionately and very skillfully, and it was a very current story. It was not only about his growing up in a poor family in Alabama, but also about his current work as a New York Times journalist, covering stories like the Revolution in Haiti. Growing up, poor in the South is a theme shared by another of the winning books, this one by Atlanta resident Jim Grimsley, writer in residence at the Seven Stages Theater, his novel My Drowning, one for best work of fiction. It's a story of Ellen Tote, a rural girl in the 40s in North Carolina growing up with

hardly anything, no material goods to support her, a family's kind of abusive, but with all that she has a lot of very interesting family stories to tell. She's obsessed by a dream that she sees her mother descending into a room where she doesn't know where the dream comes from, so she spends most of her old age searching for the memory, searching for the source of this memory. Another Atlanta resident, Fred Willard, was honored for Down On Ponds, which won the first novel award, Willard admitted to being surprised and satisfied. You know, I'm just really pleased to have gotten it, and it's for a first novelist. There are many, many books out there. It's always nice to have a little asterisk to put next to yours. He describes Down On Ponds as hard-boiled crime fiction. Basically, it's about a man who's offered $30,000 to kill another man's wife. He decides to take the money, but tell the wife.

As a result, he gets in a great deal of trouble, and he decides the best place for him to hide would be in plain sight. And so he goes to Atlanta, Georgia, Ponch, Dalyan, Avenue. It's called Ponch by locals. The final presentation of the evening was the Lifetime Achievement Award, given this year to one of Georgia's best-known and best-loved writers and author of such books as Heartbreak Hotel, Peach Tree Road, and Up Island, and River Siddons. Yes, it's a very fine thing indeed to be a Georgia writer, and an even fine one to have been one all of your working lives, and I'm profoundly grateful to Georgia writers for this award. And I thank you all so much. Born in Fairburn, Georgia, Siddons has published 12 novels since she signed with Double Day in 1973, earning a $2,500 advance. Her new book, Low Country, is Due Out in June.

Another author who's fast becoming a favorite among readers in Georgia and further afield is Janice Dardi, who lives in South Georgia, on the edge of the Okifinoki swamp. Her fifth novel, Whistle, has just come out, and Janice once again takes us to the fictitious Swannucci County, modeled on her own Eccles County, to introduce us to some of the colorful characters who live and die there. You spoke about Whistle with Syngen Flynn. Basically, the story explores the love-dread relationships between black and white, mother and son, neighbor and neighbor. Roper Rackard, 54, is a black man on probation for selling crack he never used. He is mowing math-tailor's property when he comes upon the dead body of math's wife,

Laura. Which is me. Who is me? Fearing him will be charged with murdering the white woman, Roper dumps her body in a caved and brick well, prompting the reader to expect a dark drama. But instead, it evolves into a bittersweet family tale. One of the first things that struck me about Whistle is that you take us into the black quarters of Swannucci County. Yes. That's quite a departure for you, isn't it? Very much a departure for me. The challenge, of course, there for me was to write—I mean, this is how it started was to write black dialect the way that I hear it. And as always, and I'm just intrigued with a character or with a storyline, and I want to see how I can develop it. And so that's what I did with that. Yeah, this is new for me. Roper lives in a trailer next to his mother's trailer, Louise. Tell us about Louise. Louise is the moving force of the book.

The matriarch who loves children, church. And she has no control whatsoever over her son and her grandson and her two teenage grandsons. And she's always looking for that way to make them do what she wants them to do. To make them do what's right or as she says to stand for something, something good. And she said, you know, she wants to see things change. She wants to see her family change before she dies. And she actually is getting quite old. And so she's really trying to manipulate them and to do what she wants them to do. The novel opens with Roper, plowing the field with a tractor, and he comes up with it. He's actually mowing the weeds, yes. And he comes across Laura's body. Why on earth does he not just run to math or to the authorities and say, I found Miss Laura's body? Why does he hide the body? He hides the body because he has just been convicted of a crime he didn't commit, a very minor crime of using crack cocaine.

He didn't do it. And he's afraid. He had to go to jail. He's afraid of having to go to jail again. He believes because this is pretty much true to form in South Georgia. And in this particular instance, surely, up like men's going to be looked at, who investigated, who discovers the body of a white woman, in Roper's mind anyway, this is how the scenario is going to play out. So he can't decide at first what to do, and finally, he decides, well, she's dead. I didn't kill her. But somebody's going to think I killed her. So I've got to get rid of the body. The Louise and Roper have an ongoing relationship with the tailors, with math and with his father Weiner. Yes, it goes way back because Louise has worked for that family, just as Roper has. There's always a center twining of families, people that you've worked for. And so that goes way back. And she has that relationship. Of course, her is there's a lot deeper relationship in that she has also witnessed math tailor at some point.

But he goes even deeper than that, doesn't it? He goes even deeper than that, but that's given the story line away. One of the curious things I found in the novel, there is a generational distinction between Louise and Roper and between Weiner, math's father and math, Louise is constantly referring back to the freedom riders that came through in the mid-60s. And she looks back on her life and the life of that black community prior to the freedom riders. And from this late 20th century perspective, that time before the freedom riders is almost preferable, isn't it? Well, it certainly is, too, Louise, and this book is set up in two parts. The first part is Roper, it's called book one, Roper's Roper, then book two is Louise. And from Louise's perspective, of course, it's like any other youth is always better. The good old days back there when I was young has a lot to do with it, but also that relationship

with the tailors was such that those were better days. And then also you've got to remember that after a certain point after the freedom riders came and tried to get everybody in the quarters to register to vote and nobody did accept Louise, things pretty much deteriorate after Weiner Taylor's death and they really are on their own in this little community after having been very dependent on this boss, this turpentine boss. Very dependent for everything. And I think Louise says that to the boys at one point when they're having this kind of argument and she's saying to her grandsons and to her son, it was better. It was better in the old days when we were, we had to go to the man at the commissary for our medicine and our food and everything and that's what she's saying. And to her those are the good old days, of course they weren't good old days necessarily, but for her and in her situation and this is something I'm working with very closely

is not generalizations about black whites, but this individual and we keep that in mind. I like to keep that in mind. I'm working with individual characters here and individual circumstances. What gives you your insight into the black community as you presented in Whistle? What gives me my insight into the black community is our portrayal in Whistle is just having lived in this rural area where we have our family, my husband, everybody has always worked with these black people and I'm very close to some of them, my husband and our very close to some of them and have maintained friendships over the years with them. And I feel that I do know and just being human and because I know these people as humans, that gives me that insight into it. I'm always working through my imagination and you never know if you're right or wrong, you just hope you're right, but just living through another person and a character. A final question, the title of the novel is Whistle, can you explain its significance?

Well actually the title started off to be, when you whistle the wind will blow and it got cut down by my editor and let's just call it Whistle, he said. So it actually was having to do with the line that Wainertailer said, he says this, he says to Louise, sometimes you've got to whistle if you want the wind to blow and meaning that you've got to take control yourself. You've got to make things happen if you want them to happen. And he had said that to her a number of times and it was something kind of stuck in her head. Does she whistle? Yeah, she does whistle, yes she does. She has to go sort of around about way to get there, yes she does. I think she's very effective and I think that her solution to the problem and to getting her boys to stand for something good, I think she does it. Johnny, thank you very much. Thank you, Sengen. Wistle is published by Harper Collins. Georgia Gazette commentator David Clark is perfect in this spot, see what you think.

Greetings from Cochrane, Georgia. Cochrane proper was settled shortly after the Civil War. I've noticed that no one really talks in Cochrane about the Civil War and like some folks in Macon where you can sometimes go in a restaurant and hear someone talking about General Sherman as if he had marched through their living room last month. Back then the land around what is now Cochrane was apparently nothing but a huge pine forest, close to and on the way to nothing. I can imagine the first people who came to the live down here. People who wanted to be far away from wherever they had been. People who wanted to make their own way on their own terms. I can see these traits in some of the folks who live here now. People who like to know the people they see. People who like to drive 35 miles an hour without some phone and a sports car running them off the road. People who like to sit on the porch and talk while the sun goes down and the stars come out. Friends of mine who live in the city accuse me of seeing this place through rose colored glasses.

I asked one of the friends who said that what he meant and he allowed us to hike to like everything was perfect down here and that this just wasn't possible. I thought about what he said trying to come up with a list of the things that bothered me about this little town. I'm sure there are some who wish we had more stores or more of this than that but so far I haven't noticed that Cochran likes anything that's really worth having and worth paying for. It does bother me sometimes that the grill isn't open at night but aside from that and the fact that some of my dearest friends live elsewhere, I'd have to say this place is about as close to perfect as I can imagine. Another friend said that surely the whole town wasn't full of good folks who are always friendly. Well, I'm sure he has a point in that any group of any creature whether it's dogs or people is going to have a few who bark when they shouldn't, a few who chew up lawn chairs and drag trash all over the place and a few who bite just out of meanness. So I'm sure there are some folks here in Cochran who don't fit the description and always

give of the nicest folks I've ever met and that's not to say that the wonderful people I know and make and are elsewhere are any less wonderful. Maybe in order to become a community in the first place there must be enough of a particular proportion of good folks and bad folks and these percentages must be filled up first. In the remainder that follow many times end up just being non-descript almost like stuffing in a package from Atlanta and maybe the larger of the city, the larger the proportion of non-descript or maybe the little town of Cochran and the other towns around these parts could be compared to the way Macon was when I was growing up where one could do virtually all of one's business within five miles of home and to go 10 miles from home put you on the other side of town where you were allowed to go but not really comfortable. I can remember large stretches of trees and Macon back then where there are now shopping centers and other excuses for too much pavement. So we have our little place where one can do virtually all of one's business and we can

go over to Hawkinsville to eat at the horseshoe if we want to and the folks in Hawkinsville can come over and eat at the grill or it's got to barbecue but at night we all go home to our quiet streets or dirt roads where instead of the incessant roar of alarm systems and sirens and interstates we listen to whipper wills, owls and the coyotes yippin in the field across from the porch we're sitting on and instead of worrying every day about the traffic on the way to work we worry about whether or not we're going to get some rain on the fields around our houses and whether or not we'll get to the grill on Friday before they sell out a catfish. I'm sure Cochran and the other small towns like it are not for everybody and that a great many people just couldn't imagine living in places where there was no shopping mall and where the grocery stores don't stay open all night and that's fine. We don't have room enough for everybody anyway. This story and 15 others are included on the CD Kindly Curious Tales by David Clark

and Out of the Sky Recording. Dorothy Jones has accomplished more in the past 20 years than many of us will achieve in a lifetime and later this year she'll add to her list of achievements when she is ordained a Baptist minister. What makes this such a remarkable tale is that 48-year-old Dorothy is blind and she suffers from a painful form of multiple sclerosis but it's a story that may never have been told where it not for WUGA intern Eva Ulmer who came here from Germany just last year. Eva says that when she met Dorothy while doing some volunteer work she knew right away that others should hear Dorothy's story as well. The children called her Blinky because her eyes flutter so fast. They called her cross-eyed, all kinds of names, they'd point and laugh.

Even adults like Dorothy's math teacher were cruel. One day the teacher asked what she'd do after graduation. I said I would like to be a singer and she said oh I didn't know that. I thought maybe you would want to be a Blink on a Christmas tree. Dorothy Jones is blind and she's a blue-eyed, light-skinned African American. People in her community teased her mercilessly on all accounts. Now 48, Dorothy sighs when she thinks of her childhood in Athens and yet she's like a sunflower, an aura of light and warmth comforts you and cheers you when you're with her. And Dorothy always smiles. It's a God in me that makes me smile. As I was going up, when I used to hurt so bad, I had this thing called Dr. Jesus and I used to tell Dr. Jesus to come into my heart to beg every being better for me, to take away the pain and yet to not let me feel the feelings that I had against other people and don't let

it hurt me so bad. Dorothy's worked to recast painful experiences as opportunities for growth. I learned to tell God, God, forgive them for what they have done, but they know not what they were doing. Even with my high school teacher, I learned to love her very much because what she gave me was strength. At the same time, Dorothy became increasingly sensitive to the hardships faced by other disadvantaged and disabled children. As a teenager, I started working with people who didn't have disabilities, working trying to teach them how to work with us, but people with disabilities. What I wanted them to know is basically, we don't need much, we just need to be accepted. Dorothy was the first visually impaired person to graduate from Athens Tech, where she obtained a degree in food service management.

Later, she also earned degrees in nursing, x-ray technology, and small business. Dorothy left for an eight-year stint at Atlanta Industries for the Blind, but she made a promise to herself. Someday, she would return to Athens. I will go away, but I will come back, and I will speak out and I'll make things right for people with disabilities. Dorothy's kept to her word. She now counsels people with disabilities at an independent living center. She sits on the board of charitable organizations, such as the Athens Heritage Lions Club, where she fights for better services for the disabled. And Dorothy works with at-risk children in the Rights of Passage Youth Program in Athens. I love the youth. The youth is going to be here long after we are gone. When we've left, the youth will be our tomorrow. We need to teach them that loving each other is important, and that's one of the reasons I feel that there is so much violent crime today, is because our youth don't know all of this.

And I think if we could get that point across our youth, that the violence will go down. I guess this is one of the reasons that I came forth, so that I could tell people how God wants us to feel about each other. Dorothy actually never stops helping. Wherever she goes, tapping along with her cane, she talks to people. The elderly in nursing homes, the homeless in the street, or just the person standing next to her at the bus stop. And the next thing I know, they are pouring their hearts out to me, telling me about everything. And I think that's wonderful that I'm there for them. It's particularly remarkable that Dorothy extends good cheer to others, because she has frequent bouts of debilitating pain. For eight years, Dorothy has been suffering from fibromyalgia, an extremely painful disease similar to MS. Did she never ask God, why me? A million times, and then a million times, why me God? Now I don't question God about why me, because now I know that I have to walk through this,

because I'm the strong one. Dorothy's faith grew even stronger during her illness, and a few years ago, she started hearing a voice in the early hours of the morning. Continuously, in my inter-conscious God kept saying, preach my word. Okay, so I said, well, not me, because I can't see. So one day I was reading my Bible, and in the book of Exodus, he told Moses, he said, Moses, if you will open up your mouth, I will speak for you. Moses was a person with a speech impediment. At that point, it seemed as though God said, I told Moses to open up his mouth, and I would speak for him, surely I will be eyes for you. A dream come to pass, sure enough, Dorothy will be ordained as a minister in Athens, Macedonia Baptist Church this summer. I once was lost, but now I'm found was blind, but now I see.

In Athens, this is Eva Ulmer. Still to come on this edition of Georgia Gazette, the reform of the state's prisons for juveniles, and an unsettling play based on the stories of Flannery O'Connor, stick around. The U.S. Justice Department has reached an agreement with Georgia over how the state

will correct problems with its juvenile justice system. The agreement comes one month after federal investigators said conditions in Georgia's juvenile jails were unconstitutional, dangerous, abusive, and overcrowded. This week, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and Governor Z. Mrs. Shortley likes things the way they are, but when her husband's boss, Mrs. Hopewell, takes on Mr. Gisak, a Polish World War II refugee, to help out on the dairy farm, their entire social structure is knocked off balance. Gisak proves to be an honest, hardworking man.

He outshines Mr. Shortley and treats the black-hired help as equals. This is the end of the world as far as Mrs. Shortley is concerned. The question is the cornerstone of Cecil Dawkins' play, The Displaced Person. Based on the Flannery O'Connor's short story of the same name, the play also brings together characters from other O'Connor stories. In addition to the practical and efficient widow woman, Mrs. Hopewell, there's her disenfranchised artist son, Wesley, from The Enduring Chill, who's convinced he's about to die a martyr's death when, in fact, he's sick from drinking unpasturized milk. She's also the overeducated daughter, Joy, also known as Hulga, who has a wooden leg.

And last but not least, there's the smarmy, wooden leg stealing Bible salesman from Good Country Folk, who waste no time working his home spun charm on Mrs. Hopewell. Tom Key is the artistic director of theatrical outfit in Atlanta and the producer of The Displaced Person. He says Cecil Dawkins' script works well because Flannery O'Connor's short stories rely on five or six dot characters. Dawkins was also a personal friend of the late author, says Key, and years of correspondence gave her a special insight into O'Connor's work. She understands exactly how you got to laugh your way into tragedy with Flannery O'Connor,

and we get the audience soft and weak and vulnerable with all the laughter, and then comes the shock of the drama, of the truth of what she has to say. And what O'Connor has to say sometimes isn't easy to hear, as in this scene when Mrs. Hopewell discovers that Gisak is trying to get his orphaned cousin out of Poland by arranging her marriage to one of Mrs. Hopewell's black teenage workers. Do you mean to stand there and tell me that you would bring this poor innocent child over here and marry her to that Mr. Gisak. So cannot be permitted to have a white white from Europe, cannot be done. It may be done in Poland, but it cannot be done here. She cannot be three years. I cannot understand how a man who calls himself a Christian could think of such a thing. You're different, you're black. She not care black. No, a cousin cannot come over here and marry her when a man niggered his face. I will not have my niggers upset.

I cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you, but not without you. I think that's what Flannery wrote about a lot, just the banal everyday evil, which is kind of just the absence of good in a way. Playwright Cecil Dawkins says the displaced person represents a slice of the pre-civil rights past. But when it premiered on the New York stage in 1967, it was just too uncomfortable for audiences to watch. I believe it was right not long after the three civil rights workers had been murdered in Mississippi. So it wasn't a receptive audience for this play because it wasn't much sympathy for the south at that time in that part of the country. Shortly after its debut, Dawkins shelved the play until Atlantis theatrical outfit expressed interest in reviving it. This is the first time the displaced person will be seen in the south, and members of

the cast, including Susie Bass, who plays Mrs. Sharpley, say 30 years of social progress hasn't dulled the plays disturbing edge. Some of the dialogue is very difficult for me to say because I wasn't exposed to a lot of it, and I have a hard time with it. It's very uncomfortable. My husband does lines with me, and it's amazing, we'll say, I'll get to a particular line, say, she's not any better off than if she had more, that, the inward, the very difficult inward for all of us to say. That's something we've talked about and had to get past. I really have a lot of offensive lines, I mean very offensive, I wouldn't be able to surprise if I'm not stoned, it's so important.

But that's been the difficult part, being so grating and disrespectful. But that's the way it was, and I know that. Mrs. Sharpley casually uses the inward throughout the play, but producer Tom Key says it's obvious that the black teenagers are cleverer than the shortlies and suffer them with tremendous patience. He says such vernacular was very much a part of Flannery O'Connor's south, and it's important for today's south to acknowledge the crooked thinking of the past. If we try to cover up what it was really like, then we're going to repeat it, and that's what I think is the great value of this play, and I think that it's seen that the truth of the situation allows us to accept it. I don't want to be a chronological snob and think, we need to look at this because that's the way we used to be, because I recognize myself, I recognize my own fundamentalisms, my own fear of being displaced, my own hidden agendas, my own envy.

That's why it's so painful for me to watch, because I've been laughing at these people, and then I realize by the end of the play, I am these people. The displaced person premieres this weekend at the 14th Street Playhouse in Atlanta, and runs through April 5th. I'm Melissa Gray.