Rest In Peace -- Not, William Zantzinger

The headline on last night's news story -- BOB DYLAN VILLIAN: WILLIAM ZANTZINGER DIES -- got me.

Reading those words, I was transported back to my teenage bedroom in West L.A., where, in the mid-'60s, my sister Lizzie and I struggled to out-do each other in climbing out of the bourgeoise morass of complacency of a country too-slowly turning.

To me, Ray and Aretha (and Reverend James Cleveland with his Voices of Tabernacle's "The Love Of God") were The Way Out, The Truth -- a get-out-of-jail pass from the about-to-burst box of conventionality (and bigotry) we all lived in. A blond-flipped, white, high school cheerleader, as soon as I got my driver's license (on my 16th birthday), I started driving myself downtown to the Central Avenue AME Church to drink in the redemptive music that I knew could inspire and heal me, even if I hung in the back of the pews, all out of place and self-conscious.

To Lizzie, the Way Out was Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. She played their albums endlessly, and, with her boyfriend (the son of a glamorous movie star -- this being Beverly Hills and all) in the Dylan role, she played Joan -- they dueted. She looked like Joan -- the long, straight, dark, center-parted hair; the serious face bent over the guitar. I did not look like Ray's Margie Hendricks, which put me at a disadvantage, but, if you wanted to be metaphorical about it, perhaps made my identification more yearning.

I was sure I had won. "Hard times, talking about those hard times...who knows better than I?" How could you beat that? Our mother had attempted suicide a couple of times and been -- just barely -- saved by shock treatments. Our father disinherited me because he'd fallen in love with and married my aunt (incest, of sorts), who had haughtily made mincemeat of my insecure preadolescent femininity. There was a frightening homicide attempt between this gang, on our front lawn, which Lizzie and I had witnessed. We had no money, and we took in boarders: nudists, alcoholics, (fascinating) young beatnik actresses, semi-pedophiles. So when Ray sang, "Hard Times," and Aretha sang "The sun's gonna shine...," I related!

Then Lizzie came into my room one day and played "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." It was early Dylan at his best, and she explained the song to me: William Zantzinger, a rich, arrogant, young Southern bigot had killed a servant in his house (this was the story, back then) -- a much older, hardworking woman named Hattie Carroll -- by beating her with a cane because she served his food too slowly. A whole generation of young white teenagers, living far from the South, got their social studies and history from music in those days: from obscure radio stations at the ends of the dial and from record stores you had to drive far away to find. The difficulty and esotericism was part of the intensity of the lesson. And for each of us -- even those, like me, who liked other music better -- there was a Dylan line that laid it all out, writing on a secret blackboard what had to be done to change America. "William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll with a can that he twirled around his diamond ring finger" was that line for me, courtesy of my little sister.

I still thought I'd won. There was no one like Ray! There was nothing like soul and gospel music. But, soon, everything melded, and the secret social studies lesson was all over the news; and the music and the activists -- and then the citizens -- pushed America to change. And finally America did change.

Over the last half dozen years I've been lucky to get to know, through my work, people -- like reporter Jerry Mitchell and filmmaker Keith Beauchamp -- who've been going back and finding the culprits of old, unsolved Civil Rights era murders, and bringing them to the attention of authorities. who have sometimes been able to bring them to justice. You could almost believe that many of these cases were being ferreted out, and righted -- however late in the game, however much of a lifetime the killers had lived off the hook, in freedom. But Zantzinger got through the system early and easy. According to yesterday's abcnews.com, "William Zantzinger, a wealthy Maryland landowner whose fatal beating of a black barmaid was recounted in a Bob Dylan protest song of he 1960s, was buried Friday. He was 69....The tobacco farmer served six months and was fined $500 for manslaughter in 1963 for striking the 51-year-old barmaid with his cane for taking too long to serve him a drink... Zantzinger was allowed [by a Maryland court] to delay the start of his sentence two weeks so he could harvest his tobacco crop." He was just "playing...having a good time" with the cane beating, he said. After his release, he became a foreclosure auctioneer, and in 2001 he told a Dylan biographer, Howard Sounes, "[I] should have sued [Bob Dylan] and put him in jail" for using his name.

As we prepare for the Inauguration not too far from his grave, I think about this man's pathologically genial defense of his crime, and his combative umbrage toward Dylan -- tendered in 2001, no less, when the country had already profoundly changed. How could he have remained not just unchagrined but defiant?

Rest in peace NOT, William Zanzinger. You don't deserve peace. But at least you lived long enough to have witnessed this election.

Comments

[Libbydoe]

I have always had a deep affection for Dylan's Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. The funny thing is that I thought that I was the only person who remembered the song. It is gratifying to find out that there are others out there who were deeply moved by Hattie Carroll's story put to music as only Dylan can.

[bdaved]

While I'm on my high horse, if he'd been from Massachusetts, would you have identified Zantzinger as a "Northern bigot"?

[Clavis]

It's appropriate because a "Southern bigot" is a specific kind of bigot. Zantzinger benefited from the subculture of which he was a part - the Southern community that helped him get off. (He didn't let himself harvest his crop, for example -- the local "law" did.)

People in the South (a lot of them, it seems) seem to like to maintain this grievance-laced pride of "The Southland", where people are axiomatically better than "Yankees", simply by virtue of being born down south. "We don't think we're better than other people, the way those cityfolk do... and that's what makes us better than them!"

[rpnewman7]

Since when is Maryland the south? This guy was from Maryland and was given time to harvest his crops by a Washington county jail. I've never thought of either Maryland or DC as southern.

[bdaved]

I really like a lot of your comments I've read, but I don't think that's one of your best. It's too easy to point accusing fingers at the South and Southerners when racism and bigotry have been present everywhere in our society. The prejudice that was openly celebrated there was communed in more privately all over the country. When you say "the Southern community" I don't know whether you mean the local community, located there in the South, or some kind of group embodying a regional identity. I don't believe people are that easy to quantify. And people all over are given to believing in the superiority of their home and way of life.

[bdaved]

I really am sick of hearing the word "servant". It continues to demean people and imply there's a kind of person whose very identity makes them inferior. It's a useless word that separates people into the served and the serving. Keep public servant, it's a useful ideal. But why identify Hattie Carroll as just a servant, a "black barmaid"? Let's just say she was a human being with as much right to live and be respected as anybody.

[jaygatsby]

Where is he buried? If I'm in that neck of the woods I'd like to relieve my bladder on his grave. That may help see that it's sweeped clean.

[Dukedraven]

That's a sad story and song, and I can understand why people wanted to recruit Dylan into the civil rights movement. From my point of view, the barmaid held no bitterness toward Zantzinger, who became fully aware of the wrong he commited and he judged himself the hashest. Thanks for remembering, Sheila.

[clemenj98]

Huh? You can't be bitter toward someone if you're dead. And it doesn't seem like Zantzinger was all that hard on himself afterwards, either.

[pros54]

Thank you for the history lesson. I fell in love with Dylan's songs from way back home without knowing the full stories behind them but related to the philosophy. I believe growing up in a third world country with the poverty and ever present inequities his lyrics was seen in my everyday life. In terms of the country I was not poor by any chance but was fortunate to be one of those people who see things happening whether it was being done by those related to me against others or vice versa. I wish I knew more about the histories surrounding the rest of his lyrics and that of the other great socially conscious musicians.

[WorldGriot]

Now is a great time to listen closely to Barack Obama. If we are not careful, we will, inadvertently, keep the embers of hatred and ignorance smoldering near an ocean of fuel by how we treat the haters. It is one thing to hate hatred - but we need to remember that it is neither the hater nor the hated that is the most dangerous to our society. it is the hate itself. So hating William Zantzinger seems "appropriate" given both his transgressions and his treatment. Yet, by doing so, we provide just enough life to a dying ember of hatred to prolong it in our midst waiting for another flame to spark. William Zantzinger was but a vessel for the infectious transmission of centuries of hatred, ignorance and violence that continue to threaten our democracy. We fought a civil war but we let hatred survive; we won the civil rights battles yet we allowed hatred to thrive. Hatred continues to sport its vile and destructive rhetoric around the world and we describe it as if its just another normal expression of outrage. Shining the light on a William Zantzinger as Dylan did is noble, indeed. And many of the sentiments expressed in outrage of Zantzinger's actions are likewise, laudable. But if we are going to realize our grandest selves in our lifetimes, then we must appreciate that hatred of anything extends the life of hatred, Period! Love alone can conquer hate. just saying.....

[ARonHenry]

What a song! It rocked my world. The important thing to remember about the song was what a great vocal Dylan delivers. Some people don't get it, about what a great singer Bob Dylan was, and still is. I'm not talking about his voice. He wasn't any Sintra or even Elvis. But his strength is in the expression. Overpowering. Give "Only A Pawn In Their Game," "When The Ship Comes In," and "A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall" another listen too. Just brillant in their writing and performance. Funny thing was the first Bob Dylan song I ever heard was "Like A Rolling Stone." I loved his rock 'n roll. I came to the folk music after the fact. Dylan's sudden rock stardom helped bring his earlier music to a mass audience. I still think Bob Dylan is one of the half dozen or so greatest artist this country has even produced.

Remeber that Dylan got the story for Hattie Carroll from newpasper accounts. He was struck by the fundental injustice of the whole saga. Dylan changed not only popular music and culture, he also had a profound impact on the way a lot of people, particularly young people, looked at life and the world around them.

[anandakos]

RH,

Agreed; these early songs are spectacular poetry and hit like a splitting maul.

[ZinDC]

According to an article in the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/09/AR2009010903668.html, Hattie Carroll actually died of a stroke some time after she was struck. But what is really bizarre, it turns out that Mr. Zantziger was a 1957 graduate of Sidwell Friends School, which the Obama girls now attend. Not an alum to be proud of, that's for sure. He apparently did not absorb any Quaker values while he was a student. At the time he attended, though, Sidwell Friends was still a segregated school, a troubling aspect of the school's history that they are still making amends for.

[fratricide08]

Dude was from Maryland not exactly southern.

[go]

Dude...ya might want to brush up on a little history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkes_Booth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_assassination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipriano_Ferrandini

[fratricide08]

That still doesn't make Maryland a southern state.

[pfc1369]

Billy Zantzinger was from the Easteren Shore of Maryland, about as Southern a piece of land as you'll find.

[benjaminblue]

It's good to know that, one way or another, the attitudes we thought we'd conquered in the 1960s are finally dying out. America's sad history can never be erased, but it is reassuring to see that each generation finds it more difficult to comprehend.