Black Friday Mayhem: America's Running of the Bulls

I found the video I've posted above at Mashable; it shows a woman being nearly crushed to death as shoppers go wild, knocking down displays and each other at a Wal-Mart in Mesquite, Tex. Similar reports of Black Friday mayhem appeared on CNN's website yesterday, one about a grandfather and a "bloody arrest" at Wal-Mart, and another about a woman pepper spraying people at where? You guessed it! Wal-Mart.

In 2008, I and others reported that shoppers in a New York state Wal-Mart trampled an employee to death. Customers back then started camping out at 10:00 the night before in hopes of getting a $400 TV, some witnesses said. The death caused bloggers, pundits, and mainstream media talking heads to question the ethics of stores that offer steep sales--outrageously slashed prices on big ticket items--to lure customers to stores but then fail to provide adequate security. However, if you look at the video in this post, you may wonder if it's possible to provide security for customers in a materialism-induced frenzy.

We Americans watch and judge customs in other countries, such as Spain's Running of the Bulls, and say smugly, "Those people are insane!" But is our gory Black Friday sport all that different? Spain's Running of the Bulls began as a tradition but evolved into a competitive spectator sport. People get trampled; sometimes killed, and an audience watches. In Spain, they run from the bulls, beasts of burden; in America, we run toward the bulls, the power of capitalism, the burden of debt. American shoppers compete to snatch the the best deals on popular products, and each year the media cover the madness. People get trampled; sometimes killed, and an audience watches.

Downloading Dad: The Search for Places of Origin Continues

When my father, age 91, told me a few weeks ago that a woman, born Augustine Lemieux Stevens (a.k.a. Gussie), had died, I shuddered for moment in a spasm of grief. I grieved not because I knew Ms. Gussie but because I did not know her.

Born on September 13, 1911 in Vacherie, Louisiana, of St. James Parish, she lived near him when he was a child growing up in that rural town. Vacherie sits on River Road, next to the Mississippi. It is in an area of small farms and sprawling historic plantations, such as Oak Alley. Vacherie is a place of sugar cane and rice fields, of Br'er Rabbit and of the slavery/Antebellum South tourism industry.

Ms. Gussie died on October 7, 2011, so she lived almost a month past her 100th birthday. According to my cousin, she was still cognitively sharp and had worked in her garden almost until her death. My cousin said she and her sister would marvel sometimes when they drove by and saw Ms. Gussie nearing a hundred years old out in the ditch in front of her small house, pulling weeds.

I chided my dad mildly for not telling me of Ms. Gussie's existence sooner, before she passed away. With knowledge of her her passing, I grappled again with my fear that the ordinary black history in Louisiana and my personal family history, the stories of everyday working men and women, are also passing away, slipping farther from my grasp daily and the grasp of the rest of America.

My family is one of many families that lost during Hurricane Katrina tangible and intangible pieces of their history--photographs, family bibles, and other official forms of identification that tie us to our past and the sad or silly stories that elders, some undone through the storm displacing them, no longer tell. I may think about these matters more or be more stricken with a sense of loss because in 2008, my mother, our family historian, died after suffering from Alzheimer's for at least eight years. I suspect she may have suffered longer, may have had other signs and symptoms that she hid from us because she feared losing her memory; my mother had watched her own mother wrestle with what was more often called senility back in the 80s, and the terror of being a bright woman trapped in a thorny thicket of dementia haunted her.

Not hearing of Ms. Gussie until after she died illustrates the challenge black historians and genealogists in particular face as they race to collect stories, artifacts, and wisps of memory that yellow and decay in a senior citizen's home or live in the collective consciousness of our elders left alone or in retirement homes or who wait forgotten with a caregiver who has also been forgotten. Too often these artifacts and memories--shoved into cobwebbed closets and minds--will never receive the attention and respect they deserve. A younger and ignorant person may toss out the dusty Bible heavy with strange odors or ignore the story told and retold by an aged and irritating aunt: old people and their mutterings in our youth-obsessed culture are rarely deemed important unless with them come shiny objects that look like something an antique dealer or pawnbroker may appraise and match to monetary value.

I was disturbed, for instance, to learn in October that years ago the great-niece of one of my maternal grandmother's aunts, had misplaced the family Bible. In it was a genealogy going back to Africa, kept by the great-aunt, a childless woman.

Years before her death, this great-aunt had shown a great-nephew--one of my distant cousins who started doing genealogical research in the 1970s--this family Bible. She had told him also that her father--my great-great-grandfather, Tony Green Mott of Alabama--had been a runaway slave from South Carolina. As the story goes, Tony ran away after his master sold his parents. Apparently, he had learned from his own grandfather on the plantation that his family came from Africa's Gold Coast. The cousin who had been doing the research, but who has had a stroke since he began the work, thinks the family's African country may have be Ghana, but he's unsure. He said it perturbed him that the young niece had no clue about the family Bible's location: "Didn't she know how important that was?"

For the past two years I have actively pursued information about both sides of my family, in particular I have been seeking more information about my grandmothers, both paternal and maternal, and so, I have been interrogating family members as they and I have time. Anyone involved in genealogical research can attest that tracking our mothers, grandmothers, aunts' histories through official documents proves difficult; women's names change through marriage and rarely are their names on property deeds. Nor do they show up often in military records. A conversation with Ms. Gussie may have provided me a hint about my paternal grandmother's family, a suggestion of where she came from because no one alive now seems to know. Her origins have been a mystery for as long as I remember, a topic my father and his siblings did not discuss often because their mother--my grandmother--was half white, a potential passe blanc, fair enough to pass for a white person if she had so chosen, some say, but she never tried to pass.

I have stories about possible relations who visited my grandmother when my father was young, but many of these people went by nicknames and were known to my father only as children tend to know older adults, by titles with names such Aunt Veve or Uncle Sweet--rarely a legal name that may appear in a census record or on a baptismal certificate. Therefore, talking to Ms. Gussie, whose memory was intact and who was nine years older than my dad and had grown up across the street from him in the 1920s when my grandmother was still a relatively young woman, may have given me exactly the kind of information I needed.

Perhaps I would have gotten a name from Ms. Gussie that would help me dig a little deeper and find more clues about not only my grandmother's origin but also about the relatives of her husband--my grandfather. His father, my dad's grandfather, was born a slave. I know his legal, post-slavery name, but I have been curious about why people also called him Pop Dadon--or was it Dada? I have to take Cajun and Creole accents into consideration when I am told names and nicknames from Vacherie.

Among Louisiana slave records, there is a slave who insisted on being called "Dada," his African name. Who was he? Such mysteries abound in black families trying to unearth their roots back to the boats that brought their ancestors from Africa through the middle passage to the United States of America. Almost everywhere we look fog rolls off the Atlantic, obscuring conclusions.

Nevertheless, nearly each day I find out new information about my father. Parts of his past pop from his mouth at the oddest moments. Sometimes he speaks after seeing something in the news that means nothing to me. Sometimes a story erupts with while he's eating a sandwich or sorting his mail and has no clear segue. The anecdote may be one I have never heard such as the one he told me a few months when I asked him about his service in World War II. He was in Italy when Mouth Vesuvius blew, news to me, but he told my younger brother this years ago,, it turns out.

Two days ago he told me about his adventures as a teenager in Vacherie's rice fields. I have a friend who has been writing about rice cultivation technology, which came to the American South via African slaves, and she had told me less than a month ago how she wished she could find someone who knew something about the old technology. I advised her to find someone who owned a farm when humans still harvested the majority of the rice, someone who knew what rice farming was like before rice cultivation was mechanized. It never occurred to me that my dad may have been the person she should talk to.

So, after he mentioned, unbidden, what is was like to harvest rice, I asked him about the fields' irrigation system. He told me about water being piped from the Mississippi River into the rice field ditches and that when the ditches overflowed, the water seeped into the fields. "You can't grow rice without water," he told me.

He also talked about how he would itch after dealing with the rice and about the danger of encountering cotton mouth snakes. He avoided that part, which required that the field worker stand in water and reach down into leaves where a snake may be hiding. He also said that nobody in Magnolia, a black area in Vacherie, ever bought rice. They would just collect fresh rice from whatever the fields' owners left behind in the collection area.

He told me as well that the workers were paid about 45 cents per day. However, the "old Creole" (could have been a Cajun) that paid them wasn't too swift, and maybe the old man could not tell some of the black workers apart, and so some days the workers would return to the pay line and get paid two or three times.

Photo from USA Today's article on Louisiana's African-American history trail. I posted that picture of a slave's room because I know from my father as well as the writings of Ernest Gaines that while my dad lived in a house that his father bought in the Magnolia section of Vacherie, as late as the 1960s some black people in rural Louisiana still lived in the slave quarters on old plantations.

Oprah's Favorite Things 2011 Gift Guide's Been Published

The list of Oprah's Favorite Things, 2011, is posted on her website now. The list is worth a look, but nothing--certainly not a printed list with still shots--can top the video of people falling over themselves, screaming, and crying on her Ultimate Favorite Things show last year.

I did, however, think I may order the Seeds of Life Baby Magnolia Tree you see pictured here. New Orleans could use more trees; Hurricane Katrina killed the big grapefruit tree that used to be in my parents' backyard. Perhaps a magnolia tree will work well as a replacement.

Another goody I saw that appealed to me was the absolutely decadent nine-inch-high Caramel Apple Pecan Pie, something to help people pack on more pounds during the holidays, but typical Oprah, she and her editors also have on the list the Eat Smart Mechanical Retro Kitchen Scale. I guess that will get you back on track after you blow up and out of your skinny jeans.

Sticking with food for a moment, the Cranberry Orange Bread and the Tea Forte KATI Tea Brewing System may be something to give my daughter. At least the tea may be something. She might kill me if I give her a loaf of calorie-rich bread.

I'm not in the market for Christmas decorations; so, I did not care for the dog ornaments on the first page, but if I were in the market for new holiday decorations, I think I'd buy the Uncommon Good Recylced Glass Tree Globes.

My family knows that I'm a bath and body creature, so they would not be surprised to learn that I lingered a moment reading about the L'Occitane en Provence Hugs & Kisses Desert Rose Duo. I don't know if the following is a direct quote from Ms. Winfrey, but someone said of the duo, "I adore the authentic African-print packaging on these tubes of supermoisturizing shea butter hand cream and lip balm." Maybe that is Oprah because speaking of another bath item, she said that she loves the apricot, olive, and almond oil Oversize Soaps, according to her website. Perhaps Oprah's in the tub more since she's closed down the her talk show to run OWN.

Finally, I had to post this one, Spread's "Oprah's 10 - The Collection" --

"With flavors like Chile Mango and Golden Raisin Curry, this is no ordinary peanut butter."

The collection's from spreadtherestaurant.com. There's a peanut butter addict in my house. Consequently, I may consider buying that. But 10 little jars of gourmet peanut butter for $67? Hmm. I'll have to think about that ... I'll have to think about that a lot.

And it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas mall.

Is Sharon Bialek Credible? Herman Cain's Up to Four Women Accusing Him of Sexual Harassment

Per CNN and other news sources, another woman has come forward saying that Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain sexually harassed her. In the video below, Sharon Bialek, an attractive blonde who lives in Chicago, describes an after-dinner encounter with Cain in 1997 in which the candidate, who was head of the National Restaurant Association at the time, groped her:

Cain unexpectedly put his hand on her leg beneath her skirt "toward my genitals." She also said he pushed her head toward his crotch.

Cain stopped when she protested, Bialek told a news conference.

Looking into the television cameras, Bialek said: "I want you, Mr. Cain, to come clean. Just admit what you did."

I don't care for Cain, and so, I tend to believe the accusations. As they say in the cop shows when considering a suspect's probability of committing a specific crime, "I like him for it." But to be fair we must ask the question, "Is Sharon Bialek credible?"



I think Bialek's quite believable in the video above; however, how she says she responded to him when he allegedly tried to push her head to his crotch sounds like dialogue from an old movie. She said something like "What are you doing? You know I have a boyfriend!" What a calmly stilted reaction. Now, if that had been a sister ...

Cain has handled the accusations poorly, and that screams that he's not ready for prime time. First it was the "liberal media" after him, in his words, and then, no, not the liberal media; it was his opponent, Rick Perry.

I would say that it's time to grab the popcorn and watch Herman Cain's supporters scramble, but I don't have time to watch political spectacles this year. Plus, I only took him seriously as a clown, never a real candidate.

CNN is promoting that "Tonight at 9 ET, Piers Morgan talks to Sharon Bialek and her attorney, Gloria Allred, in a live interview about her sexual harassment accusation against ... Cain."

This accusation brings Cain's total number of known female accusers to four. When will the GOP tell him to go back to the kitchen with the rest of their blacks? That last comment refers to conservative blowhard Anne Coulter's idiocy.

If conservatives desert Cain now, I'll chalk the love loss up not to their concern for women but to their evaluation of something else Bialek's story reveals about Cain if the accusations are true, and that is that Cain, allegedly wanting to get in her pants, upgraded her hotel room to a "palatial" suite on his employer's dime. How's that for fiscal responsibility!

Woman Who Posted Video of Her Father, a Judge, Beating Her, Appears on Today Show with Her Mother

Hillary Adams, 23, the daughter of Judge William Adams of Rockport, Texas, Aransas County, appeared on the Today Show this morning to talk about the disturbing video she posted on YouTube that shows her father and mother beating her in 2004. She was 16 years old at the time of the beating and that wasn't the only one, she says.

The video sparked anger and outrage on the Internet. It is difficult to watch and learning that Hillary has Cerebral Palsy only makes her father seem like more of a monster as he curses at her and whips her with his belt. In the video he speaks of beating her into submission.

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Hillary told Matt Lauer that she uploaded the video to YouTube after her father continued to harrass her. "She'd had enough," says another reporter in the Today Show clip.

The judge responded yesterday and only admits to losing his temper. He claims he was disciplining his child, nothing more. Furthermore, he says that the video looks worse than what really happened, and he was beating his daughter because she was lying and stealing. In the YouTube video he calls the beating a spanking.

Hillary says she had downloaded music from an overseas website. Whether it was illegal or not is open for debate, but Judge Adams, a family court judge thought the infraction demanded a brutal response. In the YouTube video he says he never wanted a computer in his house.

The judge most likely cannot be prosecuted, say legal experts, but he may be forced from the bench, according to multiple news sources. The public's flooded Rockport court offices with demands that he be removed from office and subjected to harsher consequences.

Hillary's mother Haley also speaks during the Today Show interview. She has divorced the Judge since the 2004 beating and apologized for participating in the abuse. She also says that she was brainwashed and confused after living with a controlling man who is now threatening to take her to court and sue for custody of their other daughter.

Hillary says that the beatings happened regularly, which is why she set up the camera, but she couldn't release her footage sooner because she was still a minor and living under her father's roof.

Watch the video. I also recommend Rita Arens's post at BlogHer, which at the time of this writing has 125 comments from women fuming over the judge and the YouTube video.

Hillary appears in her Today Show interview to be conflicted about having posted the video because of the number of people who now want to harm her father. She hopes that he gets help and therapy, she tells Lauer.

I don't think therapy can help a man at his age who doesn't think he's done anything wrong. According to Hillary, when she told him she would post the video online, he seemed to dare her to do so. I hope he's thrown from the bench and disbarred.

Related: Former Florida Judge Karen Mills-Francis tells a CNN panel featuring Dr. Drew that it's not illegal in Texas to beat your child with a belt and the panel turns on her, getting pretty angry.



An older story, earlier this year a father beat his adopted daughter to death and claimed his religious beliefs dictated his doing so.