both the same

The Old Plantation

Dark and stormy may come the weather;
I join this he-male and this she-male together.
Let none but Him that makes the thunder,
Put this he-male and she-male asunder.
I therefore pronounce you both the same.
Be good, go along, and keep up your name.
The broomstick's jumped, the world's not wide.
She's now your own. Salute your bride!

"Slave Marriage Ceremony Supplement" from Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing, which I pulled off the shelf this morning when I learned the historian John Hope Williams, author of From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, had passed.

enough.

Things get better when regular folks take action to make change happen from the bottom up. Every major historical moment in our time, it has been made by folks who said, 'Enough,' and they banded together to move this country forward — and now is one of those times.

Michelle Obama, speaking at a rally in South Carolina during the campaign, as cited in a Seattle Times piece on her ancestry.

Mrs. O's great-great-grandfather was enslaved on the Friendfield Plantation in South Carolina. The piece states: "The coastal Carolina city [of Friendfield] often is referred to as the African-American Ellis Island because of the many slave ships that docked along its shores."

anybody want a peanut?

I started crushing on George Washington Carver right around the time I developed a thing for Abe Lincoln and Madame Curie -- somewhere in that shapeless divide between elementary school and high school called middle school. I’m pretty sure it stemmed from the “great people in history” biographies that were spooned to us as social studies reading.

All three of them had a solitary bookish quality that felt like family to a little girl who’s favorite illicit act was to sneak out onto the dormer roof outside her bedroom window to read in the sunlight that baked down on the shingles that smelled like tar. Images of Abe reading his books long into the night in front of the fire and glances of Marie and George locked away in their labs, captivated by questions, felt like home to me.

They all three had an awkwardness about them, something I knew a lot about (uh, still do); something strange and singular that mostly comes off as peculiar.

The other night at the Field all those shy familiar feelings sprouted up when we took a pass through the George Washington Carver exhibit. His is an extraordinary story -- enslaved child, abducted with his mother by slave raiders and left for dead before he was found again (mother gone forever), emancipated at 9 months and then a lifetime of learning in spite of being told that a black man couldn’t have what he wanted: An education.

He got his education. And from all that learning he gave. The achievement he’s known for, of course, is giving the South something to grow besides soil starving cotton -- and the Field’s exhibit does a great job of underscoring all his other gifts as well. Including the Jessup Wagon -- a “movable school” that he designed at Tuskagee to take education -- most of it agricultural and vocational -- into the community.

The exhibit also speaks frankly to the heat that he took from the African American community and folks like W.E.B. Dubois who thought he dodged the issues surrounding racism too much and that his dreams for the black community were too small.

The most curious aspect of the exhibit is how it handled Carver’s sexual orientation. George Washington Carver never married, and from 1934 until his death in 1943 he co-habitated with a fellow named Austin W. Curtis, Jr. I didn’t know this going in to the exhibit, and I certainly didn’t learn it from middle school social studies -- I googled it just today.

But I wondered enough to google it because my gaydar was on high alert from the moment I walked in the door: Carver was an impeccable dandy, beautifully decked out in all the photographs on display, and he had a life long passion for needle craft which made me crush on him even more -- his knitting, crochet and rug making are on exhibit -- not that fiber arts makes a man gay. I’m just sayin'.

The sirens went off when I approached one of the interactive displays and fired up an audio recording of an interview with Carter. His voice was high-pitched, with unique intonations. But that’s not what made me decide I would google the gay question when I got home. The deal that sealed it was the curious apologetic placard that accompanied the recording -- the Field Museum’s editorial on Carver’s voice, including a warning that the listener might be surprised by it, and the consolation that it may have been the result of a childhood illness.

Which is when I thought: Someone at the Field is extremely uncomfortable with the possibility that this great man of history, this extraordinary American, a man who stepped out of slavery and created a tremendous legacy for himself, for African Americans, and for our country -- that this great man may have been gay. [1]

Which made me wonder if Dr. Carver may have taken his conciliatory approach toward combating prejudice because he was saddled with the dual discrimination of being both a black man and gay in America -- the latter for which there still has been no Civil Rights Act.



[1] And I say "may have been" because I need to go deeper, of course, to know for sure -- one Google hit doesn't a truth make. If he were straight, and married, that would be called out in his biography and mentioned in the exhibit. As a gay man with a partner we have no convention for designating that partnership in polite society.

We should do something about that.


& on a lighter note: 10 pts if you get the movie allusion in the title. ;)


Update: Received an email from a straight friend shortly after I posted this that warned my use of gaydar might be offensive to some. Which was of course exactly what I was worried about when I posted: how to write, as a straight person, with sensitivity about being aware of others' sexual orientation.

There are few safe places in America if you're gay or lesbian, and it's been my experience that new acquaintances will take a good long while to come out to me -- months, sometimes -- even if I know almost immediately that they're gay. (There's that gaydar again.)

It's not my business what a person's sexual orientation is. But I am interested, from a human rights perspective, in creating an environment where everyone I encounter feels safe and welcome and accepted for who they are. If you're gay in America you learn very quickly that that's not always true, and you're frequently walking on eggshells.

'Cause baby, we're still lynching gay folk, after a fashion. See: Matthew Shepard. And I recently heard a group of gay high school students speak about the intolerance they encounter at our local high school because they're Out. It shocked me anew about the depths of discrimination that gays and lesbians encounter, just for being gay and lesbian.

I still remember with shame being present, years back, when someone in the room expressed intolerance for gays. I was there with a gay friend. He said nothing, and neither did I. I won’t be forgiving myself for that anytime soon.

It's not easy being gay. We straight folk need to do what we can to make it easier.

straight talk

Video: Barack Obama's A More Perfect Union adddress

As far as I know, he's the first politician since the Civil War to recognize how deeply embedded slavery and race have been in our Constitution. That's a profoundly important thing to say.

Professor Paul Finkelman of Albany Law School, commenting in this morning's New York Times on Senator Barack Obama's We The People speech, delivered yesterday in Philadelphia.

& p.s.: baby quoted Faulkner in his speech. WILLIAM FRICKIN' FAULKNER.

You wanna win my heart forever? Quote friggin' Faulkner. (Or Borges.)

The Past isn't Dead and Buried. In fact it isn't even past.
—W.F.

oh, &p.p.s. The author of the speech that Barack Obama delivered yesterday in Philadelphia? Barack Obama.

I apologize

Video: Oscar Brown Jr., I Apologize

If you free the music the music will free you.

—Maggie Brown, quoting her father, Oscar Brown Jr., over a week ago at a Steppenwolf Traffic production in his honor.

Saw Maggie Brown and her sister Africa the Monday before last, in a tribute show for their daddy, Oscar Brown Jr., but the week got to moving so fast that I didn’t have a chance to sit down and write about it.

In a nutshell: great show. Peopled by extraordinary artists -- musicians and poets -- some of whom had a hand in the Afro-Centro movement (Kwame Steve Cobb was there, playing percussion and reading -- sweet merciful lord -- reading I Apologize. See the video clip above for Mr. Brown reading it his own dear self.).

Others --- Keith M. Kelley and Jeff Baraka -- who are writing new stories, giving new wings to the ancestors’ work. The sisters even brought out the kids -- nieces and nephews and sons and daughters culled from all the siblings, eight in total -- and the littlest of them all brought the house down with his dance moves.

Left me with that solid feeling that comes only rarely when you’re a white girl living in America: the knowledge that there’s a whole chapter of American history that we simply don’t talk about enough. And the awareness that there are daily slights committed against our fellow Americans whose skins are dark. Slights that I only feel if I’m with a friend who’s black and the air turns chill as we’re shopping or dining or just walking down the goddamn street. It’s not omnipresent, but it rears up like a fog, and me unfamiliar with it it always takes me a brief WTF? moment before I realize: Oh Sh*t. Here we go again.

And then I get to leave it behind. Because my skin’s white.

Ignorance is my inheritance as a white girl, because no one forces this knowledge on you when you’re the same color as the men in charge. I first felt it for real the day the verdict (or lack thereof) came down against the policemen who battered Rodney King, Jr. I was working as a freelance researcher and graphic artist for an office in downtown L.A. and drove in late, without a radio, so I didn’t hear the news.

After I parked the car I stopped in the Post Office that I was used to frequenting, and there was a chill in the air. All the women who worked there were African-American, and what was usually a warm and receptive place full of laughter and jokes was stone cold and mostly silent. From there I walked to the office, where two men -- the security guard who I greeted everyday and another fellow who worked in the building -- were speaking in hushed tones at the front desk.

I held the elevator and the gentleman got in, with a small nod of thanks, his body turned from me. I asked him what was going on, and he told me about the verdict. Quietly, dispassionately. My response was immediate and violent: One loud “WHAT?!”

In that moment I made a friend, and he turned to me and we talked about the injustice. A warmth grew between us. Neither of us knew that the city would burn that night, but both of us could feel that something had to break loose. Something had to set this right.

It wouldn't of course -- set things right, I mean. But if you were there when it happened it all made sense somehow. Terrible, sad, sense.

It was after he stepped out and I did too that I realized what I had felt in those few feet -- from the P.O. to the front desk -- I carried my white with me. Unshakable. Branded. With judgment on my head.


p.s. Here's another story about those days in L.A. »

blood ties

Illus: Am I Not A Man, And Brother?

1830s Anti-Slavery Banner

I'm just going to spit this out, because it's bugging the hell out of me.

My mother's doing research on our family history and has traced down the fellow who kicked off her father's line in America -- the fellow Goochland, Virginia was named after. And, as you might suppose, having shown up in the 1600s, he became a landowner and a businessman and, goddammit, a slave owner.

GODDAMMIT.

Which completely contradicts my sense of my family history. My story, the story that's close to me, is just three or four generations old: huddled masses arriving in America and working the boardinghouses and box factories and copper mines of the American West. Rancher. Construction foreman. Stagecoach station operator and a saloon owner.

I wasn't counting on this.

My first impulse is to practice cognitive dissonance and discredit my mother's research. After all, her previous claims that we're related to Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman AND John Steinbeck were somewhat dubious. But I know I have to dig into it for myself and get to know this ancestor. Hear this part of the story. And then figure out what to do about it.

Goddammit.


More on American Slavery on detritus »

on your back, baby.

morning paper, 2
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Anali reminds me that today is Juneteenth. Now an official holiday in her home town of Boston, Juneteenth commemorates the day “in 1865 when the last slaves learned they were free.”

Took awhile to get word out. No Internet back then.

Growing up west of the Mississippi one doesn’t see a whole lot of evidence of our history of slavery in the landscape. (We’ll save the discussion of the Reservation System for another time.) We western kids are the children of Manifest Destiny – the offspring of those who slogged out this way, early in wagons or late on airplanes, to build something bigger, something more, something new.

I wasn’t aware of it growing up – that thread of entrepreneurship that drives so much doing out West. It was all I ever knew. But I feel the absence of it, having inched East to Chicago, which boomed once and still gets along in its own old school way -- but the spirit’s different here: it’s not as raw. It’s not as eager. It’s a little bit tired around the edges. (Although maybe I'm just hanging out in the wrong neighborhoods.)

Traveling down to Gloucester, Virginia last summer for a friend’s funeral I was struck by something entirely different -- the sense that development around there stopped mid-stream, some time a long time ago. I don’t know how persistent that sense is across the South, but in the pocket I visited there was the sense of a boom interrupted – lot of activity, building, and commerce that seized up and slowed at a particular point in time.

I chalked it up to the end of slavery. I could be entirely wrong. But right or wrong, the realization mattered to me then because it brought home the economic face of enslavement: we built this country on the backs of people who were not compensated for, and did not consent to engage in, that labor.

Growing up as a white kid in America I learned about slavery, of course, but always as something distant and far away and highly emotionally charged. In school there was only the briefest conversation about the economic benefits of slavery -- and when it was touched upon, it was “the South” that reaped those benefits. As if the Northern economy didn’t profit at all from bloody hands. The story of slavery was framed simplistically as good versus evil and then settled, heroically, by our man Abe.

Human rights entered into the conversation as something innate and understood – but never dissected, and never connected to the larger, global conversation about human rights, that continues even today.

And never, in the course of my secondary school education, was the story of slavery dovetailed with the story of labor rights. Aren’t they different facets of the same struggle?

My point: the story of slavery in America has been, in my experience, segregated from so much of our larger story. As if, because it belongs through ancestry to people of African descent, that it doesn’t belong to the rest of us, doesn’t impact the story of our 40 hour working week, the right to choose how we will apply our labors and earn our keep and feed our families and find our fulfillment.

I’m still looking for the thing that I want to do with my life. I’m still searching for work that is more calling than calling card – and the fact that I have the cheek to think I can claim something “fulfilling” for my work, is because I’m an American, and because it’s been drilled into me since day one that we make our way in this world through the work we do.

Work we choose. Work that matters. Work that we have a right to be compensated for. A right that we have no right to deny to anyone.

Slavery is my history too, and it’s what I define myself against. It's what I never want for myself; it's what I never want to inflict on anyone else.

Each of us is free to fly or free to f*ck it up all on our own. Because we're free.

Happy Juneteenth. Get the word out.

p.s. As of 2004, 27 million people remained enslaved against their will. Not sure what the numbers are today -- not optimistic that they're any better.

excavation

a found poem

Under the boughs of a tulip poplar
Buried among clumps of roots
Piles of oyster shells
Is the brick foundation
A remnant

It was home to Frederick Douglass
American Statesman, Diplomat, Orator, Author

Here
At the age of seven or eight
Shoeless, pant-less, precocious

[He] saw whippings and petty cruelties

Here
He realized
He was a slave


Found in «A Community's Roots: With Frederick Douglass's help, the past and present come together on a Maryland plantation» by Samir S. Patel in the November/December 2006 issue of Archaeology.

The article details the excavation of Wye House Farm, where Douglass spent an early chapter in his life, and the impact of that excavation on the surrounding Maryland community.

the silly season

But politics won today. Politics won. The Administration got its vote, and now it will have its victory lap, and now they will be able to go out on the campaign trail and tell the American people that they were the ones who were tough on the terrorists.

And yet, we have a bill that gives the terrorist mastermind of 9/11 his day in court, but not the innocent people we may have accidentally rounded up and mistaken for terrorists – people who may stay in prison for the rest of their lives.

(...)
That is not how we should be doing business in the U.S. Senate, and that’s not how we should be prosecuting this war on terrorism. When we’re sloppy and cut corners, we are undermining those very virtues of America that will lead us to success in winning this war. At bare minimum, I hope we can at least pass this provision so that cooler heads can prevail after the silly season is over. Thank you.

Barack Obama speaking before the Senate on the detainee bill. (Via Atrios.)

I have deep reservations about calling this fine mess we've got ourselves into a "War on Terrorism", so it makes me a bit queasy to hear Obama refer to it the way he does here. But I excuse him in my mind the way I excuse Lincoln when I read about the ways he played to the crowd in an effort to get everyone pointed in the same direction on the whole dissolution of the Union question. 'Cause once he had won his seat and push came to shove, he kicked some serious ass.

(See: Emancipation Proclamation. Genuine equivocation loaded with political pandering -- like not freeing folks who were enslaved within the Northern states, and only bothering about those who were out of reach, within the Confederacy -- but his heart was in the right place. And these many years later we only remember the heart part. And the setting people free, part. Good stuff, that.)

Maybe that just makes me a fool in love, but baby, I've gotta have someone to believe in. The pickin's are pretty slim around here.

p.s. I also find it a bit incredulous that he would call something so serious "the silly season" -- I wonder if the transcriber got it wrong -- I wonder if he called it "the selling season"?