MODULE 4 DISCUSSION BOARD 1
Mamie Garvin Fields (1985). Lemon Swamp & Other Places. ISBN 0029105501
Digital copy can be located at https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/
Please respond to the following Prompt in keeping with the Written Assignment guidelines from the syllabus.:
General Requirements for Written Assignments
• Submit assignments as DOC or DOCX files.
• All work will be typed in 12-point font, Times New Roman, one page, single-spaced, with 1” margins on all four sides. The top left-hand corner of the first page of every document (not the header and not subsequent pages) should include the student’s name, the assignment, and the date, all single-spaced. All work employing sources should employ MLA citation style. Work that does not conform to this standard or is short of the required page limit will have points deducted.
1. Consider how refined a sense of place can be (view of peninsular Charleston).
Lemon Swamp asks you to consider another perspective of Jim Crow.
This is a view of the peninsula of Charleston. Consider this in relation to the image that was on the folder for this module. While Robertson may have presented a sense of geography in broader strokes, in malleable regions and shifting alignments, Fields’ memoir defines space in terms of streets, at times, or portions of streets.
To orient ourselves we will begin, as we did with Robertson, with considerations of place. Note moments of specificity, of Fields’ positioning within her physical world. Consider, too, how her access to this physical world was limited, restricted by both custom and law.
For some, the gorgeous image of Hampton Park from the folder cover could only have safely been enjoyed on the postcard.
2. (a) The Fields House
The structure of the memoir is based on place, so it seems important to locate the Fields house, described at the start of the book, on the Charleston peninsula, as a means of orienting ourselves in the book. Refer to street map of peninsular Charleston showing the Fields house.
The house is still there.
Street image of the Fields house, present day
John C. Calhoun Statue in Marion Square
Image of the John C. Calhoun statue towering above Marion Square Park. The statue itself sits on an imposing pedestal and cylindrical tower. In this memoir of place, there are many locations and descriiptions of landscape whose political significance looms, like the imposing and towering John C. Calhoun statue. For anyone not familiar with the statue that until weeks ago stood in Marion Square Park, the above image is meant to illustrate how the statue would appear to the viewer walking by. How might this statue, and Fields’ position in relation to it, reflect the oppression of Jim Crow?
Aerial view of Marion Square Park that shows the imposing statue of John C. Calhoun
The killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, spurred national protests and reignited discussions around removing or renaming monuments to Confederate leaders, which led to the removal of Calhoun’s statue just shy of a month later on June 23, 2020. Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg spoke at the occasion: “The intellectual underpinnings of slavery and white supremacy came from this man. So there’s a sense of relief — relief for the generations of Charlestonians who had these personal stories about the impact of Mr. Calhoun being here and being in such a suppose place of honor over our city.” Read more about the statue’s removal in this article.
Lowering of Calhoun Statue
Co-Authored Memoir
Lemon Swamp was co-authored, even though it concerns the life of only one of the authors. This fact is spoken to, directly, only in the Introduction and Epilogue – chapters that give insight into the process of editing the stories of a lifetime and constructing a narrative from them. These chapters are written in the voice of the granddaughter, a different first-person voice than that of Mamie Fields, who narrates the rest of the memoir.
In the Epilogue, pages 242-43, Karen Fields discusses how they chose the ending for the memoir:
Karen Fields suggests, then, that at a certain point a person is formed, that all that they do from that point on is simply an extension of those “commitments long since fully tried.” Let’s assume that we agree with this assessment. Note how often the memories are local, the protests personal. Though it is not published until nearly four decades later (1983), the text ends in 1948, just before the explosion of the Civil Rights movement on a national and international scale.
Read the “Abstract” for Fields’ collected papers housed at the Avery Research Center for African American Culture at the College of Charleston and the “Biographical Note” appended to the inventory: . As you see in these sources, Fields’ activism in the national Civil Rights Movement is well-documented, but her memoir stops just short of the 1950s. Given this, what, then, would you say are the characteristics of the person, the Mamie Fields, that we see formed in the memoir? How would you describe her solely given the contents of the memoir, the events Field herself wanted forefront?
Prompt
The differences between Red Hills and Cotton and Lemon Swamp are many, and recognition of the ways in which these two experiences of the State radically diverge from one another is an important part of this course. For this post, note one way in which you see connection or similarity between these two memoirs. Discuss subtle differences, but these should be highlighted by the connections between the texts. Another way to approach this last point might be, once you have established a clear similarity, how can one understand that similarity better by also recognizing the differences?
