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THE PULPIT LEANER A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts by Dawn Christine Hackett May, 2016 © Copyright 2016 All Rights Reserved Except for previously published materials Thesis written by Dawn Christine Hackett B.A., University of Richmond – English, 2010 B.A., University of Richmond – American Studies, 2010 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2016 Approved by David Giffels , Advisor Robert Trogdon , Chair, Department or English James L. Blank , Dean, College of Arts and Science TABLE OF CONTENTS . ii PRELUDE . 1 OPENING QUOTE BY JOHN OLIVER KILLENS . 7 PROLOGUE . 8 ERA: 1920 – 1959 . .17 CHAPTERS: The Ground They Stood Upon . .. 18 Bun’s Clan . 26 Homecoming and a Sister Named Damnation . 34 The Milkman’s Child . 44 Ignorance is an Open Door . .. .50 Bun’s Indiana Hayloft – c. 1954 . 54 The Purple Child . 59 Eddie’s Book of Cautionary Tales . 66 The Dixie Highway . 79 ERA: 1960 – 1995 . 80 CHAPTERS: A Good Year to Be Hitched . 81 When to Call a Lawman . 85 Cal Flies his First Plane . 105 A Brat and The Flying Wallendas . 115 ii The Lyrics of my Mother . 123 Seagulls, Blisters, and Farts . 131 Awkward Purple Gremlin Eater . 143 My Brother’s Bun . 158 Letting Go – Men on the Side . 172 Weed, Wonderful Weed . 188 The Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Five . 206 The Indiana Invasion . 233 AFTERWORD . 250 THESIS AND SECONDARY COPYRIGHT CONTACT . 262 iii Prelude Pieces of Bark in a Rick of Wood My grandfather, Roy Luther Craig, was born in southern Indiana to Loda and Ermel Craig in 1914. When Ermel was nearly thirty and Bun was eleven years old, Indiana elected a Klansman named Edward L. Jackson as governor. Privately men ruled their homes according to whatever dogma they clung to. The Klan weighed heavily in Indiana infrastructure in the 1920s and anyone who was Jewish, Catholic, or African- American needed to get the hell out. It was easy to call it hard times when the Great Depression hit, but with the Klan's prominence, outsiders did not stand a chance. The KKK was in its second wave of power when Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson convinced seven states to break from the national KKK. He ran the Klan and recruited from twenty-two states before he lost power, but he made his home in Indiana, a ways north of where the Craigs called home. Stephenson was rich, had a private train car, and financed political officials. But in 1925, Stephenson kidnapped an Indiana educational worker named Madge Obelholtzer, who - I must clarify - was a white card holding member of the KKK. Madge had dated Stephenson and broke off her relationship, so he trapped her by calling her and threatening to destroy her reading circle unless she came to see him, to talk before a trip to Chicago. Stephenson's bodyguard Mr. Gentry picked her up and 1 drove to Stephenson's home. In his kitchen, Stephenson and Mr. Gentry were joined by two more men, Shorty and Clenck, who forced whiskey down her throat until she was unable to defend herself. Shorty drove Madge and Stephenson to his private train car, pretending he was going to Chicago, shoved her into his sleeper and raped her several times. He bit her face, arms, breasts, tongue, ankles, and legs, punched her while he raped her until she passed out. She came to, still intoxicated and unable to move on her own. She screamed at Stephenson. "The law will get their hands on you." Stephenson, apparently unfazed and ready for more, turned to look at her. "I am the law in Indiana." Soon she was in a hotel room in Hammond and when Stephenson finally went to sleep, she held his revolver to her head. Madge was going to kill herself instead of Stephenson, but later recalled on her deathbed she could not do it. It would shame her mother if she committed suicide. Instead, she convinced Shorty to drive her to buy a black silk hat, begged him to take her to a pharmacy, then purchased a common treatment for syphilis at that time, a mixture of mercury and chlorine. Madge was so weak, she only managed six down her throat, enough to poison her kidneys over a period of days, but not enough to kill her. She vomited blood until Stephenson, who refused to take her to the hospital, dumped Madge at her home. Madge's parents rushed her to the hospital where she was unable to name her attacker. So it looked like it always looked in southern Indiana - the man was going to walk away, scot-free. 2 Madge Oberholtzer came to, asked for the police on March 28th, and gave an official report. She lingered, staph infections in her bite wounds, sepsis, and her kidneys failing from the mercury, until April 14th. Stephenson was arrested, tried, and convicted of second-degree murder. His lawyer argued she died from poisoning and there was no way Stephenson could have foreseen her actions. The jury didn't buy the crazy dame story, neither did the Republican Party or his good friend Governor Edward L. Jackson. The Governor refused to pardon him in 1927. Seems the law abiding white folks who held a Klan card had their ideals shattered. The Klan lost power quickly, Stephenson spilled the beans on everyone who was paid by the Klan to the Indianapolis Times, and Klan officials scattered to Kentucky and Tennessee, or removed themselves from the roster altogether. Membership in Indiana went from more than 250,000 to 4,000 by February, 1928. One year later, the Great Depression hit. No wonder Loda Craig told stories about goblins to keep her children in line. I long suspected that the truth is, holding a membership card or being officially named on a roster was not the thing that caused filth. Not wanting to be associated with the KKK because of the behavior of one member always begged the question of whether tearing up the card and officially disassociating from the official roster meant the member changed in their heart. What I do know is never, not in all my visits to my grandfather’s house when my family went to Indiana in the summer, did I see a person of color in Mitchell, Indiana. This I do know . all that nonsense with politicians and 3 government hardly invaded the part of Lawrence County where my grandfather was raised and my mother Donna after him. Government was a bad word, no one called the police, poaching was a survival must, and taxes were evil. This was a place where tradin’ (as in “I’m goin’ in tuh town tuh do some tradin’”) was how one man helped another man. They had what you needed, you gave something up they could use. It was like a tradition, the male version of a swap meet but usually done one on one. Every man in Lawrence County knew a thing or two about haggling for a bargain. During the same period as the Great Depression crept into the households of even the self-sustaining farming communities, southern Indiana began to feel the weight. Sustenance farmers began an outward migration. But my mother Donna’s family, my grandfather included, never budged. They were firmly rooted in the soil of Lawrence County. Ermel saw the wooded lands cleared and began farming like his father before him. Bun did the same as did Ermel’s other children. They banded together and, lower than poor, held on until Roosevelt stepped in. The times are beyond my imagination but Bun told my mother Donna many stories, the beginning of one generation’s folktales passed down to the next. And I, born in 1963, was my mother’s barrel where she secretly ladled stories, ones she had sworn to die with. And my Aunt Brenda let fly things she had held in her breast for decades. That makes me one of the luckiest of the grandchildren still alive. And this storied soil above the glacial shifts of the Great Lakes in the Knobs of Indiana began to be reforested during the New Deal, abandoned farms were covered, 4 too. Bun was paid for steady work for the first time in a long while, and for that, he worshipped President Roosevelt. But those times ended along with the Great Depression and time lurched forward into a world at war. What held steady was the way of life between women and men, some better than others, and always centered around a festering gossip pool that’s watershed was the church. 5 THE PULPIT LEANER by D. C. Hackett © 2016 Dawn Christine Hackett – Embargoed Original Work 6 A little boy had read numerous stories in his children’s books about various life and death struggles between a man and a lion. But no matter how ferociously the lion fought, each time the man emerged victorious. This puzzled the boy, so he asked his father, “Why is it, Daddy, that in all these stories the man always beats the lion, when everybody knows that the lion is the toughest cat in all the jungle?” The father answered, “Son, those stories will always end that way until the lion learns how to write.” John Oliver Killens - 1970 7 Prologue eyond the river ports of the Ohio, up into the heart of southern Indiana – where layers of till are calmed by kaolin and marl, and rains sweep down from the north B and fleck the soil with coal – the avens bear pressure from rushing springs that surface near a bald and drench the timothy and clover with remnants of decayed limestone.