Driving Miss Daisy Crazy: Or, Losing the Mind of the South
2002; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoGood evening, ladies and gentlemen, good ol' boys and girls. I want to start my talk tonight by introducing to Miss Daisy. Chances are, already know her. She may be your mother. She may be your aunt. Or may have your own private Miss Daisy, as I do: a prim, well-educated, maiden lady of a certain age who has taken up permanent residence in a neat little room in frontal lobe of my brain. I wish she'd move, but, as she points out to me constantly, she's just no trouble at all. She lives on angel food cake and she-crab soup, which she heats up on a little ring right there in her room. She's very neat, dusting constantly. She doesn't require a bathroom. All she needs is rocking chair in that dormer window where she sits all day long, crocheting and watching neighbors. Miss Daisy was an English teacher at a private girls' school for forty-three years, back in days when English was English--before became Language Arts, or, worse yet, theory, back before they started putting all those Cherokee Indians into textbooks. She was famous for her ability to diagram sentences, any sentence at all, even sentences so complex that their diagrams on board looked like blueprints for a cathedral. Her favorite poet is Sidney Lanier. She likes to be elevated. She is still in a book club, but is not Oprah's book club. In fact, Miss Daisy is not quite sure who Oprah is, believing that her name is Okra Winfrey, and asking me repeatedly what all fuss is about. Miss Daisy's book club can find scarcely a thing to elevate them these days, so they have taken to reading Gone With Wind over and over again. Miss Daisy's favorite word is ought, as in, You ought to go to church this morning. She often starts her sentences with you know, as in, Lee Marshall, know don't believe that! or, Lee Marshall, know don't mean it! She believes is true about two ladies who got kicked out of Charlotte Junior League: one for having an orgasm, and other for having a job. In fact, Miss Daisy reminds me of another lady I encountered many years ago when I moved down to Alabama to become a reporter for Tuscaloosa News. The former editor of ladies' page of paper had just retired. Thank God! everybody said, since, for many years, she had ceased to write up events in paper way they actually happened, preferring instead to write them up way she thought they should have happened. Pat Conroy has said that South runs on denial. I think this is true. We learn denial in cradle and carry to grave. It is absolutely essential to being a lady, for instance. I myself was sent from mountains of southwest Virginia, where I was growing up, down to Birmingham every summer to stay with my Aunt Gay Gay, whose task was to turn me into a lady. Gay Gay's two specialities were Rising to Occasion and Rising Above It All, whatever it happened to be. Gay Gay believed that if can't say something nice, say nothing at all. If don't discuss something, doesn't exist. She drank a lot of gin and tonics, and sometimes she'd start in on them early, winking at my uncle Bob and saying, Pour me one, honey; it's already dark underneath house. Denial affects not only our personal lives but also our political lives, our culture, and our literature. In her book Playing in Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison talks about a kind of denial she sees operating in American literature and criticism: she chides liberal critics for what she describes as their neglect of darkness. She says that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture (9-10), but that excising political from life of mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly.... A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only universal but also race-free risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both art and artist. …
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