Buzz

“A bee is never as busy as it seems, it’s just that it can’t buzz any slower.” Hoosier humorist Kin Hubbard

This morning I woke up hearing a loud buzz coming from the kitchen.  It turned out to be the stove, which Toni had used extensively the day before while preparing a surf and turf meal for us and Dave’s family.  I am useless in such situations, but Toni knew to turn off the circuit breaker until it stopped.

The word buzz has various meanings, in addition to the sound a buzzer makes. It can mean the sound a telephone makes or the phone call itself, as “Give me a buzz when you get home.” It can convey a sense of excitement or feeling od euphoria, just as getting a buzz from a hit from a joint. Buzzing or scurrying around - moving quickly is another usage, as is referring to the latest buzz, meaning gossip or scuttlebutt.  In the fifties kids often got a short haircut nicknamed a buzz cut or flat top.

James was able to leave VU for the weekend, and he, Dave, and I played Space Base.  I won thanks mainly to acquiring the Buzz Aldrin ship that got me 6 victory points each time I rolled a seven, which I did an inordinate amount of times.  Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin flew 66 combat missions in Korea and earned a doctorate at MIT before joining the space program.  Commander of the lunar module on the Apollo 11 mission, Buzz Aldrin was the second person to walk on the moon.  A devout Presbyterian, he secretly took communion ingredients with him and drank the first liquid, ate the first food, and was the first to urinate on the moon as well. After leaving NASA’s space program, Aldrin suffered through bouts of depression and alcoholism, which he documented in a memoir, “Magnificent Desolation” (2009).  He appeared as himself on numerous TV shows, including “30 Rock” and “The Big Bang Theory,” and in 2010 at age 80 competed in “Dancing with the Stars.”

Ever since Gaard Logan told me she was reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book “Caste; The origin of Our Discontents,” I have seen her on TV and rad glowing reviews of what critics recalling an instant classic.  It has created quite a buzz.  On Gaard’s advice I decided to first read Wilkerson’s 2010 “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” the exodus between 1915 and 1970 of six million African Americans from the South to points north and west.  The title comes from this Richard Wright verse:

I was leaving the South

To fling myself into the unknown . . . .

I was taking a part of the South

To transplant in alien soil,

To see if I could grow differently,

If it could drink of new and cool rains, 

Bend in strange winds, 

Respond to the warmth of other suns

And, perhaps, to bloom.

The first thing I did upon receiving the book from Chesterton library was look up Gary, Indiana, in the index. One mention listed Gary as, according to the 1980 census, the sixth most segregated city in America, a kind of separation so total, wrote Wilkerson, “that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work.” The term sociologists used for this phenomenon was hypersegregation.  In the endnotes I found a citation for “African-American Mayors,” edited by David R. Colburn and Jeffrey S. Adler.  I wrote the first chapter on Gary mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher.

Joe and Katherine Jackson

Wilkerson pointed out that the parents of Michael Jackson, Gary’s most famous native son, had Southern roots, like most African Americans born in the Steel City.  Joe Jackson hailed from Fountain Hill, Arkansas, and came to Chicago when 18 prior to moving to Gary.  Katherine Scruse Jackson was born in Barbour County, Alabama, and moved with her parents to east Chicago when just four.