North Of Boston Research Articles

Stories, Streets, and Saints: Photographs and Oral Histories from Boston's North End

Stories, Streets, and Saints: Photographs and Oral Histories from Boston's North End

Designing for the Future: A Climateresponsive and Adaptive Design Framework for Habitat Restoration and Recreation in the Rumney Marsh Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC), Massachusetts, USA

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Rumney Marsh Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) north of Boston, has been considered as one of the most significant estuaries of biological importance in Massachusetts. The area comprises of approximately 400 ha of saltmarsh, tidal flats, and shallow sub-tidal channels. Our goal was to develop a landscape design strategy for the marsh that integrates research and design focused on improving habitat, creating recreational opportunities, and mitigating the long-term impacts of climate change. An evaluation of existing case studies on wetland development was developed as a matrix to guide the framework needed and learn how other projects address these issues. A thorough analysis of the site’s quantitative and qualitative data was done to facilitate the process through which the design strategy could take place, focusing on the marsh by extending programs from the surrounding social context, while at the same time enhancing its ecological value, and preparing for climate change. By developing such strategies that are in tune with the environment and sensitive to the natural systems, our proposal tries to establish design interventions to allow access and recreational opportunities while still enhancing the marsh landscape ecology. Through this project a method is developed to create an open space strategy that can support the diverse social interactions and ecological demands of such a wetland system.

Stories, Streets, and Saints: Photographs and Oral Histories from Boston's North End

Stories, Streets, and Saints: Photographs and Oral Histories from Boston's North End

Editorial

Editorial

Food access initiatives: An integral piece of the Revere, Massachusetts, COVID-19 response

Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) is a community health care system that serves the region north of Boston, including the city of Revere, Massachu­setts. In an effort to confront the root causes of poor health, CHA has engaged in an initiative to address the social determinants of health, including food insecurity, homelessness, and unemployment. In 2017, we learned that 51% of our patients in Revere screened positive for food insecurity. In response, we committed to increasing our patients’ access to healthy foods.

Do Better Now

Do Better Now Michelle N. Huang (bio) On June 10, 2020, as protestors streamed into the streets in the wake of George Floyd's murder by the Minneapolis Police Department and in support of Black Lives Matter, the statue of Christopher Columbus that stood [End Page 303] in Boston's North End was decapitated. His headless body was put in storage indefinitely, pending further review by city officials. It was not the first time Columbus had lost his head—it had been taken earlier in 2006, and in 2015, the statue was drenched in red paint and tagged "Black Lives Matter."1 Largely missing from discussions of the statue's purported cultural significance was its relative newness—that it was erected in 1979, less than five years after the Fall of Saigon, by pro-Vietnam War activists and the Knights of Columbus. Just as Confederate statues are new—not old—monuments to racism raised during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, the Columbus statue spun a new mythos, one that bound America's "origins" to its imperialist projects abroad.2 That Vietnam was called "Indian country" by American soldiers deployed there starkly manifests how Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian death was patterned on the murder of Native Americans.3 Further, bringing BLM into relation with the Columbus statue also reminds us that many modern warfare tactics and weaponry used by the police to brutalize Black bodies were learned from America's wars abroad—one infamous example is Chicago Police Department Commander Jon Burge's use of electric shock, mock execution, and suffocation to coerce confessions from over two hundred Black and Brown incarcerated people from 1972 to 1991. In particular, Burge's method of electroshocking prisoners bears more than a family resemblance to the "Bell telephone hour," a practice whereby American troops jolted Vietnamese captives using a hand-cranked army field phone.4 I confess an allergy to the word "new," because it so often disavows the animating presence of the past. The Boston Columbus statue is only one small figuration of America's intersecting imperialisms. Its amalgamated Cold War/Columbian context also situates Franny Choi's poem "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On" (2019).5 Choi's speaker locates her readers in post-apocalyptic times—"the apocalypse began / when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor" (286). As Indigenous philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi) reminds us, "Anishinaabek already inhabit what our ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future," a world degraded by settler colonialism's cultural and environmental destruction.6 But Columbus's "discovery" is not the only apocalypse: pointedly without dates, Choi's poem interlaces domestic American violence with conquest abroad. The anaphoric repetition of "There was" traces the repetition of racist, imperialist American logics that crisscross the world, from the Dakota Access Pipeline ("the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way / through sacred water") to chattel slavery ("the apocalypse / of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light") to refugee crises ("the apocalypse of boats") to illegal abortion ("Coat hanger apocalypse"). Interleaved are the conditions of the speaker's family's diasporic displacement during the [End Page 304] Korean War: "There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left— / of my mother unsticking herself from her mother's grave as the plane / barreled down the runway." These constellated apocalypses add up: we have already lost the world, many times. In her work on post-apocalyptic fiction, Heather J. Hicks enumerates some of its generic conventions, among them "ragged bands of survivors," "defunct technologies," "poignant yearning for a lost civilization," and "extreme violence."7 Taking Choi's poem and Whyte's provocation about ancestral dystopia into consideration, it is clear that minoritized people have already been living in post-apocalyptic times. This is a sentiment Chang-rae Lee affirms when he writes that immigrant narratives are "essentially dystopian in nature; for what does such a fiction describe if not a world in which the beliefs and practices are unfamiliar and sometimes backward, in which the morality is skewed, and whose every civil contour feels wrong, if only to its newly arrived hero, who must venture into and negotiate his way through...

Robert Frost’s North of Boston: A Poetry of Resistance

This article explores the idea that Robert Frost’s North of Boston can be interpreted as a poetry of resistance in terms of methodology and subject matter. The methodological thread pertains to Frost’s poetics whilst the subject matter pertains to the historical and socio-political beings which Frost dramatises and records.

Applying a Medical Wellness Group Visit Model to a Community Setting Yielding Weight Loss and Improved Laboratory Results.

To determine the feasibility of applying a medical wellness group (WG) model to a community setting to improve cardiometabolic health. This quasi-experiment was designed to compare individuals participating in the WG to participants in the control group who received general lectures on nutrition, physical activity, and sleep. A suburb north of Boston, Massachusetts. Forty-five adults were in the WG and 10 in the control group. Fourteen weekly 90-minute sessions, led by a physician and dietitian, focusing on nutrition, physical activity, and sleep, compared to controls receiving two 30-minute general wellness lectures provided within 3 months. Pre- and postweight, waist circumference, hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c), and serum lipids; a survey measuring beliefs, attitudes, and intentions related to behavioral change. T tests examined the mean change in biometric measurements. The Wilcoxon test was used to compare the ordinal questions in baseline and final survey results. The Mann-Whitney test was used to compare final survey results between groups. The WG demonstrated desirable difference-in-difference between groups in weight (P < .001), waist circumference (P < .001), and total cholesterol (P = .03) compared to the control group. Mean change of HbA1c and triglycerides was not different between groups. Survey results showed that attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and feeling supported about wellness behaviors significantly improved from baseline to final visit in the WG (P = .002; P = .019, P = .006, respectively), but not among controls. Wellness groups are feasible and provide high levels of support and accountability that empower people to make behavioral changes to improve health.

Fragments of the place itself: Boston neighbourhoods in prose poetry

ABSTRACTAs complex and geographically discrete life environments, city neighbourhoods are invested with a great deal of personal meaning as well as with general cultural significance. Pierre Moyal argues that ‘the city is poeticized by the subject’ and explores the refabrication and consumption of space by the city dweller, along with the outsider's creative and fractious presence. Boston, MA, has been touted as ‘the city of neighborhoods’ by Anthony Bak Buccitelli and our practice-led research project, Fragments of the Place Itself, investigates insider and outsider creativity, rupture and poetic form in Boston's North End, Beacon Hill and Cambridge neighbourhoods through prose poetry. Our project considers the notions of perambulation and drifting, and the idea of genius loci. Further, we argue that prose poetry is well suited to writing about neighbourhoods because prose poetry's fully justified text is able to set up a demarcation or ‘plot’ that readily accommodates both insider and outsider viewpoints.

The Descent

The Descent Andre Dubus III (bio) Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment. -Rumi The photograph is black and white, and in it my mother is nineteen. Her face is turned up, and she’s smiling, her teeth white and fairly straight, though she’s not one of the Junior League girls. She’s the daughter of a housewife and a pipe fitter who never went beyond the third grade, and she has spent her girlhood living near job sites while her father built power plants throughout the south and Mexico. In the photograph, she’s a freshman at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It’s 1957, and she’s the “Sweetheart of Delta Theta Chi,” which means she’s been voted one of the most beautiful girls on campus, and she is. Her hair is blonde and elegantly styled, the way movie stars wore their hair then, so that your eye is drawn to her long throat and bare clavicles and shoulders. Around her neck is a string of pearls I’m sure are either borrowed or imitation, and just before the photograph’s frame begins, you can see the top of her strapless gown. It appears to be ivory satin, though I could be wrong about that, for this [End Page 71] was so long ago, and I am thirty-six years older than this young woman in the photograph. I have been staring at it for over an hour, because I am drawing my nineteen-year-old mother’s face. It is ten days before Christmas, and outside my bedroom window snow is falling on my family’s gravel driveway and the hardwoods and pines of our two-acre lot forty miles north of Boston. Downstairs, my wife Fontaine, a dancer and choreographer and the mother of our three children, is playing on our stereo Harry Connick Jr. Christmas carols while she makes peanut butter from scratch for one of my sisters. Throughout the house, our daughter and two sons may be working on their presents too, which cannot be bought in a store but instead have to be homemade for that one person in our larger clan whose name they drew last summer, this tradition of ours going back from before they were born. We were a family of writers and carpenters and musicians and social workers, and there was never much money in any of our pockets, so this tradition became a way to lessen the financial and spiritual heartaches of that commercial frenzy our culture dives into every December. You only have to give one gift, and you have to make it. This year I had drawn my mother’s name. She’s in her late seventies and lives nine or ten miles west, and she teaches dozens of three-year-old children at a Montessori school five days a week. She’s also nearly sixty years older than she was in the photograph in this hardcover book open on my lap, and I’m tempted to stop doing what I’m doing and instead do what I do every Christmas, which is to build a wooden box for whoever’s name I’ve drawn. Unlike drawing, it’s something I know how to do, because throughout my twenties and thirties I made most of my living as a self-employed carpenter. I own all kinds of power tools and use our enclosed back porch for a shop. I’ve built jewelry boxes for my nieces, a toolbox for one of my nephews, a toy chest for another niece. For some I’ve used pine, for others a hardwood like birch or maple or even the spotted Brazilian wormwood, which I used just a few years ago to make yet another box for my mother. But enough of these boxes. Wasn’t there something else I could make? One year I cooked my sister Suzanne a platter of chicken-and-sour-cream [End Page 72] enchiladas. Another year I knitted my aunt Jeannie a wool scarf, though I was not a knitter and it showed. But a few years earlier, my wife—who also paints and studied art in college—brought drawing paper...

A Case Study of the Progressive Era Librarian Edith Guerrier: The Public Library, Social Reform, ‘New Women’, and Urban Immigrant Girls

This paper investigates the intertwined evolution of librarianship and social welfare work during the Progressive Era (1900–1920) via a case study of the librarian Edith Guerrier (1870–1958). From 1898 through 1917, Guerrier worked in the immigrant community of Boston's North End. She established a programme of girls' reading groups that provided access to core elements of a progressive liberal arts education. The most notable of these was the Saturday Evening Girls (SEG). Concurrently, Guerrier established the Paul Revere Pottery, a retail art pottery studio run by the young women of the SEG. Using Guerrier's varied career as a starting point, this paper explores the role of the ‘new woman’ as an agent of social change versus social control, progressive library programmes and their promotion of reading material, and issues of acculturation, cultural plurality, and personal agency among immigrant girls and young women.

From the Idylls of Theocritus

From the Idylls of Theocritus Christopher Childers (bio) Theocritus (mid-third century BC) was famous in antiquity as the inventor of pastoral. We infer from his poems—and ancient biographies agree—that he was a native of Syracuse and spent much of his life on Cos. At some point he may have visited Alexandria, where he obtained the patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and could have met Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes; certainly he knew their work, they knew his, or both. Most scholars believe Theocritus was the youngest of the group, but the chronology is in doubt and priority unprovable. No one knows why Theocritus’s poems should be the only ones in Greek called “idylls” (eidyllia, “little types”)—“eclogues” (“short pieces, selections”) is the Latin word. What is clear is that his importance, for us as for the ancients, lies in his status as the father of pastoral, or “bucolic” (from Greek boukolos, “cowherd” or “herdsman”). Yet the genre (or mode) he invented is not easy to define, and his own output is more varied than we might at first expect. All of his poems are “idylls,” but not every idyll is bucolic, as Idyll 2 is not. Many of them, including those selected here, are “mimes” (mini-plays), a genre invented by his Sicilian countryman Herodas. Many, like Idyll 11, make use of narrative frames, in the manner of Plato’s dialogues. Like most of the idylls, 1 and 11 are set on Sicily, while 2 (like Idyll 7) takes place on Cos. The temporal setting is similarly varied: 1 and 2 belong to a timeless and idealized landscape, 11 is set in the mythical past, and others (like 7) take place in the present. The poetry simultaneously invites and resists generalization; it was only in the poetry of his epigones that features of Theocritus’s work crystallized to generic conventions. [End Page 562] Pastoral is not a lyric form. It’s a sophisticated literary hybrid, with an epic meter and a dramatic structure wrapped around a lyric core. It’s also a highly stylized representation of a rustic song culture which Theocritus may have experienced directly in the real third-century Sicilian countryside. What he made of it has enjoyed enormous influence, starting in the Renaissance; for centuries, pastoral was a sort of rite of passage for major poets, from Spenser in The Shepheardes Calender to Frost in North of Boston. This is due less to the influence of the Idylls than the Eclogues of Vergil, Theocritus’s greatest imitator. If pastoral’s long afterlife has rendered some of its features a little shopworn, we might remind ourselves that, when Theocritus was writing his idylls, nothing like them existed in Greek. I find his poems no less strange, mysterious, artful, allusive, witty, humane, and moving, for having replaced Archaic nobleness with Hellenistic subtlety. IDYLL 1 Thyrsis: It’s sweet, goatherd, this whispering of the pine,musical here by the springs; your piping, too,is sweet. It’s only Pan who could outpipe you.Let’s say he takes the horned goat for first prize;then you, in second place, would get the nanny.Or, if he takes the nanny, the kid’s yours.Before you milk them, kids are tasty eating. Goatherd: Well, your songs, shepherd, run sweeter than the waterthat sluices echoing over that rock and down.If the Muses choose the ewe, the stall-fed lambwould fall to you; but if they want the lamb,you could choose next and claim the mama sheep. Thyrsis: By all the Nymphs, won’t you sit down right here,on this grass slope under the tamarisks,and pipe us something while I watch your goats? Goatherd: No, no, I can’t. All piping is forbiddenat noon. It’s Pan that scares me. Noon is when,hot from the hunt, he rests. And Pan is cranky,with nostrils quick to flare when he gets angry. [End Page 563] But, Thyrsis, sing the “Suffering of Daphnis”;you’re a true master of the country song.Come, let’s sit over there, beneath the elms,facing Priapus and the Nymphs, and nearthe oaks and the shepherd...

The Atlas and the Film

In this article I refer to my fieldwork in Boston's North End to explore the implications of using film and media annotating software as two complementary conceptual tools and representational strategies. I elaborate on Warburg's notion of the "atlas" as an analytic device. I propose the Atlas on the one hand and Montage on the other as two complementary formal principles that allow us to take full advantage of the dialectic nature of the sources we encounter in visual ethnography, as well as of our own capacity for visual engagement: on the one hand a potentially infinite analytics, on the other our own storytelling engagement through film-making.

William F. Whyte: Contributions to management

The name of William Foote Whyte is most frequently associated with Street Corner Society, the sociological study of life in Boston's North End during the late 1930s, but his research spanned another sixty years in a range of settings on three continents. This article traces his achievements over the decades, as he developed and applied a participatory action research methodology in the kitchens of Chicago restaurants, the oilfields of Oklahoma and Venezuela, subsistence farms in Peru and Guatemala, and industrial cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. It describes how this methodology, grounded in case research, led to social change at the “Tremont Hotel” in a Midwestern city. It questions why his achievements have not received greater recognition among by academicians and practitioners, perhaps because his ideas and findings on social change produced discomfort among peers and the sponsors of his research.

"Good and Kind Benefactors": British Logwood Merchants and Boston's Christ Church

In the spring of 1727 members of Christ Church in Boston's North End received word that British logwood merchants residing along the Bay of Honduras intended to contribute over one hundred tons of costly dyewood to the newly constructed church. Although their settlements on the periphery of the Spanish American empire were not official English colonies, and they traded with all nations, British logwood cutters—known as Baymen—maintained strong ties to the British Empire, and this gift embedded them in the inner workings of Christ Church. This act of patronage by a small group of logwood merchants enhanced the Baymen's collective commercial reputation and provided an example of benevolence worthy of emulation, marking them as participants in a trans-Atlantic network of Anglicans who financially supported needy New England churches. As a gesture of thanks, the church furnished a prominently located double pew for these merchants' exclusive use. The Baymen's pew was a fixture at Christ Church for over thirty years, during which time church vestrymen actively solicited and procured logwood from the Bay of Honduras, and Baymen participated in religious life and governance at Christ Church. This article places the story of the Baymen's pew and larger trade in logwood within the imperial rivalries and voluntary associations of religion and commerce that characterized the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic.

The Irish way: becoming American in the multiethnic city

In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History of American Life series, James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban American identity was forged in the streets, saloons, churches, and workplaces of the American city. This process of Americanization from the bottom up was deeply shaped, Barrett argues, by the Irish. From Lower Manhattan to the South Side of Chicago to Boston's North End, newer waves of immigrants and African Americans found it nearly impossible to avoid the Irish. While historians have emphasized the role of settlement houses and other mainstream institutions in Americanizing immigrants, Barrett makes the original case that the culture absorbed by newcomers upon reaching American shores had a distinctly Hibernian cast. By 1900, there were more people of Irish descent in New York City than in Dublin; more in the United States than in all of Ireland. But in the late nineteenth century, the sources of immigration began to shift, to southern and eastern Europe and beyond. Whether these newcomers wanted to save their souls, get a drink, find a job, or just take a stroll in the neighborhood, they had to deal with Irish Americans. Barrett reveals how the Irish vacillated between a progressive and idealistic impulse toward their fellow immigrants and a parochial defensiveness stemming from the hostility earlier generations had faced upon their own arrival in America. They imparted racist attitudes toward African Americans; they established ethnic deadlines across city neighborhoods; they drove other immigrants from docks, factories, and labor unions. Yet the social teachings of the Catholic Church, a sense of solidarity with the oppressed, and dark memories of poverty and violence in both Ireland and America ushered in a wave of progressive political activism that eventually embraced other immigrants. Drawing on contemporary sociological studies and diaries, newspaper accounts, and Irish American literature, The Irish Way illustrates how the interactions between the Irish and later immigrants on the streets, on the vaudeville stage, in Catholic churches, and in workplaces helped forge a multi-ethnic American identity that has a profound legacy in the USA today.

Review of: Ferraiuolo, Augusto. Religious Festive Practices in Boston's North End: Ephemeral Identities in an Italian American Community (Albany, 2009)

Review of: Ferraiuolo, Augusto. Religious Festive Practices in Boston's North End: Ephemeral Identities in an Italian American Community (Albany, 2009)

A divided poet: Robert Frost, North of Boston, and the drama of disappearance

North of Boston, Robert Frost's second book of verse and arguably his greatest, brought him suddenly into national prominence in 1915. Though completed and first published in England in 1914, the book was rooted in the decade, 1900-1910, that Frost spent in Derry, New Hampshire, where he witnessed the decline of its traditional farming culture. In presenting this of disappearance, twelve of the book's fifteen principal poems are literally dramatic, composed mainly of direct dialogue. Among them are three of Frost's most famous lyrics, each featuring signature task of New England life and underlining the book's tribute to fading culture. Collectively, the poems bring the diction and tones of New England vernacular within traditional metric frame, making music, as Frost boasted, from the sound of sense and poetry of a language absolutely unliterary. Such adaptations of ordinary language and experience to blank verse drama made Frost founder of American modernism and North of Boston one of its monuments. Exploring Frost's complex connection to his poetic characters, this study provides new readings of the individual poems and new look at North of Boston's development. To degree no other study has done, it addresses the book's design as an artistic whole while placing it in the context of Frost's unfolding career. David Sanders is Professor Emeritus of English at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York.

LOVE AND RUIN(S): ROBERT FROST ON MORAL REPAIR

This essay begins where Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue begins: facing a moral world in ruin. MacIntyre argues that this predicament leaves us with a choice: we can follow the path of Friedrich Nietzsche, accepting this moral destruction and attempting to create lives in a rootless, uncertain world, or the path of Aristotle, working to reclaim a world in which close‐knit communities sustain human practices that make it possible for us to flourish. Jeff Frank rejects MacIntyre's framework and in this essay attempts to create an alternative path, one of moral repair. Through a close reading of several poems from Robert Frost's North of Boston, Frank develops the notion of moral repair and describes its ethical and educational implications.

The Southernness of Robert Frost

The Southernness of Robert Frost Mark Royden Winchell (bio) Joan Didion once observed that "certain places seem to exist because someone has written about them.… A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." By this standard Robert Frost can clearly lay claim to rural New England. The locale "north of Boston" lives in our collective imagination largely because he wrote about it. For that reason it may seem strange to argue that Frost's sensibility was also shaped by other locations. We know that he was born in San Francisco and spent his first eleven years in California. As a young man he lived in England and published his first book as an expatriate. Above even these places, however, Frost felt a deep affinity for the American South. Not only was he a small a agrarian, but he also maintained important personal and professional ties with two members of the Nashville Agrarian movement—John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson. Moreover his view of the world (particularly the part of it that pertained to politics) put him closer to William Gilmore Simms than to Harriet Beecher Stowe. When Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874, his copperhead father named him for the sainted general of the Confederacy. In fact, during the War Between the States, the young Will Frost ran away from his home in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in an effort to enlist with General Lee. Unfortunately for him he made it only as far as Philadelphia before he was apprehended by the police and returned to his angry parents. Robert Frost got his introduction to politics from his father, an ardent Democrat who was chairman of the party committee in San Francisco during Grover Cleveland's successful run for the presidency in 1884. (Young Robbie "recalled 'being carried through the streets … atop a fire engine, by torchlight.'") Although he remained a states'-rights Democrat the balance of his life, the poet would always add that Cleveland was the last president he fully approved of. [End Page 91] In 1918, only three years after the publication of his own first book, A Boy's Will, the publishing firm of Henry Holt asked for Frost's opinion on a collection of poems submitted by a young Tennessean named John Crowe Ransom. (At the time Ransom was in France fighting in World War i.) Frost was immediately taken with "the art … and the tune" of Ransom's verse and recommended that Holt publish his manuscript, "Poems About God." Four years later Frost came to Nashville to lecture at Vanderbilt. By that time, 1922, the Fugitive group had re-formed after the hiatus created by the war. One of the newest members of this group (which would soon be publishing its own magazine) was a sixteen-yearold sophomore named Robert Penn Warren. Years later Warren recalled that "Frost and Ransom admired each other—they were both traditionalists at heart. Frost's poetics—his unconventional use of conventional meters and forms—appealed to us." At a time when modernism was virtually being defined by free verse (what Frost considered the poetic equivalent of "playing tennis without a net"), Frost and the major Fugitives were all writing poetry that was both modern and formal. Donald Davidson recalls first reading the poetry of Robert Frost "by candlelight in the rather cold, upstairs room of a peasant's house in the Cote d'Or" as he waited to be sent home from France and World War i in the winter of 1918–19. He almost certainly met Frost when the poet read in Nashville in 1922. Then, in the autumn of 1928, when he was in his mid-fifties, Frost gave a reading at a luncheon meeting of the Centennial Club of Nashville. Later that afternoon Davidson attended a tea given in Frost's honor in the wealthy Belle Meade part of Nashville. He remembered the hostess's fixing herself on the floor in front of Frost so that no one else could come near or speak to him across the barrier. Then...