Carter

"Gramma said everybody has two minds. One of the minds has to do with the necessaries for body living. You had to use it to figure how to get shelter and eating and such like for the body. She said you had to use it to mate and have young'uns and such. She said we had to have that mind so as we could carry on. But she said we had another mind that had nothing atall to do with such. She said it was the spirit mind.
Gramma said if you used the body-living mind to think greedy or mean; if you was always cuttin' at folks with it and figuring how to material profit off'n them... then you would shrink up your spirit mind to a size no bigger'n a hickor'nut.
Gramma said that when your body died, the body-living mind died with it, and if that's the way you had thought all your life there you was, stuck with a hickor'nut spirit, as the spirit mind was all that lived when everything else died. Then, gramma said, when you was all born back- as you was bound to be- then, there you was, born with a hickor'nut spirit mind that had practical no understanding of anything.
Then it might shrink up to the size of a pea and could disappear, if the body-living mind took over total. In such case, you lost your spirit comlete.
That's how you become dead people. Gramma said you could easy spot dead people. She said dead people when they looked at a woman saw nothing but dirty; when they looked at other people they saw nothing but bad; when they looked at a tree they saw nothing but lumber and profit; never beauty. Gramma said they was dead people walking around.
Gramma said that the spirit mind was like any other muscle. If you used it it got bigger and stronger. She said the only way it could get that way was usung it to understand, but you couldn't open the door to it until you quit being greedy and such with your body mind. Then understanding commenced to take up, and the more you tried to understand, the bigger it got.

Natural, she said, understanding and love was the same thing; except folks went at it back'ards too many times, trying to pretend they loved things when they didn't understand them. Which can't be done."

I had no idea who "Forrest" Carter actually was until last weekend. I am torn about keeping these passages in my commonplace books. Would I own a piece of art painted by Charles Manson? Would I in any way indulge in the legitimization of a person who is anathema to everything I am and believe? Can I divorce the man from the art? I don't know the answer to this.


August 25, 1996