True Grit

Stardate 20114.3 – Day 31 of Washington State’s COVID-19 shelter in place order.

Today I’ve decided that we should use “star date” rather than months and days. It’s a simpler system and avoids all of the unnecessary messing about with what order to put the months, days, and years. The first two digits “20” stands for the year 2020, next year it will be 21. There is a small limitation to this: in 80 years it will flip back to zero but I am going to suggest we just call that 100.

The next three digits are the day number of the year. What we call “April 23rd” is the 114th day of the year. This eliminates the need for months which were ridiculous anyway.

The decimal is the fractional portion of the day, what we call the “time”. 0.3 is roughly equivalent to 7am.

You might think all this is crazy but then I invite you to look at the history of the year, month, day and minute. How we settled on 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours (two 12 hour clocks at that!), 12 months, and 365 days a year is a real hodgepodge of human history. I’ll just say this as a refutation of my stardate system: base 10 isn’t inherently any more intelligent than base 12 and both have physical markers on the human hands which one could use to count (fingers and thumbs – base 10; knuckle joints on the fingers – base 12). You are probably not remotely wondering what else I have been up to this week but I’m going to tell you anyway.

I finished reading True Grit by Charles Portis. True Grit is Portis’ most famous novel owing to the fact that there were several films made from the story and characters. Most recently, the Coen brothers and Speilberg produced a version starring Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon. Jeff Bridges was nominated for best actor, even though his character (Rooster Cogburn) is the supporting actor in that drama. The main character is Mattie Ross from near Dardanelle Arkansas and she is a 14 year old who has come to revenge her father’s blood in the dead of winter. In that role Hailee Steinfeld is absolutely perfect.

Books like True Grit are complicated reads in 2020 because they are filled with complicated characters. By which I mean that the people portrayed in this book are both very real and also caricatures.

In the “very real” category Mattie Ross is herself a Southern woman writing about events during Reconstruction right after the American Civil War. Portis published True Grit in 1968, just 4 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed and chooses to explicitly make Mattie Ross a member of the Southern Presbyterian church. In the post Civil War era, the Southern Presbyterians were becoming a magnet church for white landed elites and during the Civil Rights era the Southern Presbyterian church became quite notorious for support of the Ku Klux Klan, anti-miscegenation, and support for Jim Crow. It would take them until 2016 before they would officially apologize for their part in the brutal oppression of African Americans.

And yet Mattie doesn’t cite racial reasons for joining the Southern church. She isn’t a racit white woman from the South as we have come to understand them. But rather chooses the Southern Presbyterians for an intriguing religious idea called “Election.”

“[The Cumberland Presbyterians] do not fully accept [Election]. I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it. Read I Corinthians 6: 13 and II Timothy 1: 9, 10. Also I Peter 1: 2, 19, 20 and Romans 11: 7. There you have it. It was good enough to Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. It is good enough for you too.”

This might seem a minor point in this novel or even an excuse for Portis to make Mattie a Southern Presbyterian in order to show “not all whites in the South were racist” but I feel this idea of Election is the central argument of the book.

Election is simply that all things happen according to God’s will. You might think back through the Bible and easily come up with examples of God choosing certain people: the Israelite’s for example. But also Jesus is the Chosen one, his disciples were chosen by Jesus and not the other way round – and chosen with foreknowledge of betrayal (Judas Iscariot).

But what Election radically argues is that God’s choices are infallible and that they happen for His reasons and reasons only known to Him. It’s the only way that he could be infallible, if you think about it. We cannot influence God’s choices – even something like redemption – through our actions. If God’s will were easily bent by man’s actions he wouldn’t be infallible. That’s what Mattie means when she says that the philosophy runs contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play: because at its core, God has either already elected you for redemption or He has not. No matter the good or evil you do.

This is critical because Rooster Cogburn is a US Marshall but he’s also a man who rode with Quantrill’s raiders during the civil war: a band of outlaws who murdered 180 civilians in Lawrence, Kansas. Cogburn also reveals that he led a life of crime after the war; he robbed Union soldiers, he shot a man over a dispute, and many other crimes. In the opening scenes of the book, Mattie recalls a trial in which Cogburn is star witness for the state. He’s accused of shooting criminals with almost pleasure and it’s inferred that he even enjoys hunting men down and killing them. In short, he was exactly the kind of man who he now hunted as a US Marshall.

He probably would have been jailed or even hanged had he not received a break. On his way to prison a friend he used to work for – when he did honest work – vouched for him and instead of taking him to prison, decided to sign him up as a US Marshall in the court of the notorious Issac Parker, the hanging judge.

Parker was a judge in Fort Smith, Arkansas. At the time, the Oklahoma area was still Indian territory and border states like Arkansas were often raided by criminals who would disappear back into the more lawless areas West. It was the role of the US Marshalls and Judge Parker to bring those men to justice and make sure that their own cities and states were safe. In Judge Parker’s court Cogburn became famous for his ability to bring back criminals – dead or alive – and it was his job to help clean up the lawless lands.

Was that moment, when his pal Columbus Potter saved him from jail Rooster’s election? The moment he went from evildoer to “righteous” seeker of justice? Well, I’m not God, and I don’t know and neither does Mattie Ross speculate but I do think that’s at least part of Portis’ point in this novel. That people are much more complicated than we like to see on our TVs and in our books.

And yet, what I find most intriguing is that while Portis is simultaneously busting stereotypes this novel in particular would go on to create some caricatures of Old West cowboys and outlaws that have lasted to this very day. I was struck by how much the main character from Red Dead Redemption II (Arthur Morgan) is like Rooster Cogburn: neither wholly good nor evil, a killer but only if pressed, willing to rob a rich man but reluctant to rob a poor man, and even at one point a badge carrying deputy Marshall. If he’d have been drawn with an eye patch it would not have been out of place.

One could spend years reading True Grit. The writing style is easy and yet the book so densely packed with historical fact and the characters so complex and intriguing that even after two readings in two weeks I still find new things to delight. I often find myself just researching places that the characters visit: McAlester’s store is now a town – McAlester OK – a town with one of the highest crime rates in America.

At its core True Grit is a book about justice but also about change. And like all truly great books, it’s also about how things don’t change and about grave injustice. The characters are perfectly flawed. Their lives a slice of early century Americana. They personify the Old West and yet also crush the iconography that we have built around its history.

True Grit is an American classic. If you get a chance, you should read* it.

Qq

*Or listen to it unabridged in audiobook format. Check your local public library for free copies.