Freewater: Up in Air, Grounded in Reality

Freewater is the name for both Amina Luqman-Dawson's first novel and for the community of escapees from slavery that she has imagined, their treehouses and rope bridges in the air high above America's "Great Dismal Swamp." The story begins with young teenager Homer's escape with his little sister Ada from a plantation called Southerland.  They've made it through the swamp as far as they can when Suleman, a scout from Freewater, takes them to the community.

Through chapters focused on different characters, we come to see the symmetry in the worlds of Freewater and Southerland, both formed by the institution of slavery. Freewater's design and protocols all stem from the determination not to be found and recaptured, while Southerland's master Crumb and his crony Stokes are determined to recapture the children lest any of the plantation's "darkies" get the idea that they can escape alive.

While Homer and Ada make friends and learn the ways of Freewater, we readers have a nagging sense of unease that the goodness cannot last. Homer feels guilt for leaving behind his mother Rosa and his friend Anna. While he grows to love his new home, he is drawn back to the dangerous old one. At the same time, one of his new friends Sanzi, born in freedom with no sense of limits, yearns for adventure beyond the swamp. She dreams of raiding a plantation like her hero Suleman.

In each community, preparations for a wedding create opportunities for characters to take risks.  I stopped feeling uneasy when I realized that the author had set up a romantic comedy:  each of the friends has someone they really like, but...   shy Billy adores beautiful Juna but can't find the courage to express himself;  Sanzi despises the bully Ferdinand, but she softens when her revenge goes too far;   Homer longs to bring Anna with his mother to Freewater, but how?

Meanwhile, at Southerland, Anna has plans of her own to escape; the owner Mr. Crumb has hired a militia to raid the swamp; his silent younger daughter Nora has a plan to help her nursemaid Rosa to freedom.

All these characters and their plans converge for page-turning suspense, laughs, and the satisfaction of seeing young characters find their own strength.

Luqman-Dawson adds a note about the actual "Great Dismal Swamp" and the real-life "maroon" communities here and abroad where escapees from slavery really did thrive in secret. "Freewater" is her own creation, as marvelous as Oz or Hogwarts.

While her adventure book touches the deep pain of real slavery, the meaning of freedom, and the distortions of personality that slavery imposed on all their lives, whites and blacks alike, the wonder of this book is its joyfulness.

Saturday, Summer Evening

Rode my bike 38 miles in Atlanta in the morning; lunched with sister; napped with dog Brandy. At 6PM, patio, ceiling fan, breeze, jazz on laptop, martini, new book: paradise, captured in this photo, made into a pop art image with a filter at BeFunky.com

Two Steps Back from the Precipice

In May, Mom had grown listless and a bit grumpy, and I thought dementia was pulling her down. Then the staff at Arbor Terrace found her conscious but unresponsive. At the ER, doctors discovered the cause for her recent decline: she had developed diabetes, and tests of her blood that should have been "around 110" were around 600. Doctors and nurses were alarmed.

Once she was back home on a regime of low-sugar meals and meds to control her blood sugar levels, she regained a lot of the energy and sparkle that had been missing for weeks. Her sentences are making sense more often. Even when she substitutes wrong words for the ones she means, the sense is in her tone. For instance, she told me and her doctors, "I have to frock all the time. All that mingling and dangling." Then she laughed, and we laughed along with her, the response she seemed to expect.

Today, she seemed tired, until a conversation with Laura about riding trains moved me to sing that wonderful old song that begins, "I took a trip on a train / and I thought about you." She snuggled closer and laughed and said, "Wonderful!"

In one photo, she welcomed a visit from her daughter Kim. In another, she's enjoying a visit with me. Laura is also present out of the frame.

Starling "Murmurations" in book Black Sun

Photographer Soren Solkaer has published a book Black Sun collecting photographs of starlings who congregate each winter by the hundreds of thousands. When they take flight together, they respond to any stimulus or threat to any member with nearly-instantaneous shifts in formation. He has seen them form a solid black wall to repel a falcon.

Robin Young on NPR's Here and Now (hear the story) asked him about similar behavior in schools of fish, and about the phenomenon as a metaphor for collaboration. But the two of them agreed that the sight is beautiful enough without adding another layer of meaning to it.

Here is the video embedded from the Here and Now website:

Biking to Iceland

←← | ← || →

Scott Smoot on his bike in the North Atlantic, virtually

This week, my bike's odometer hit 10,000 miles. When it happened on the Silver Comet Trail in Hiram, GA, I took this selfie, which Photo 3D helped me to transplant from Georgia to the north Atlantic Ocean, almost midway between Newfoundland and Iceland. That's where I am now on my virtual tour of the world.

Wondering how I'm doing this on a bike? Well, I'm relying on the physics of surface tension that I learned in 3rd grade from DC comics. The world's fastest man, i.e., The Flash, moves forward before he breaks the surface of the water. (This selfie had to be taken quickly, of course.)

My next goal is Reykjavik, where Mom and Dad joined Uncle Jack and Aunt Blanche for a tour about 15 years ago. That's enough to make it "a place I've lived or loved."

I've cycled 444 miles from Gander, Newfoundland, to this spot in the North Atlantic
May 18 - June 8, 2022

Since June 2020, I've totaled 10,300 miles on my second virtual bike trip around the world.
Just in 2022, I've cycled 1633 miles, average speed 15.3 m.p.h.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the beinning.

Creator at Play

Sunday morning I read this wonderful line from Psalm 104: "Yonder is the great and wide sea... and there is that Leviathan, which you [God] have made for the sport of it." The commentator in the quarterly Forward Day by Day wrote that it's "encouraging" to know that the "daunting" command to "be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect" can include "taking pleasure in creation, which, through the work of the Holy Spirit, pulses with life" (Brendan O'Sullivan-Hale).

A Day of PlayPlayfulness in creation set the tone for everything else Sunday. First, of course, there was my dog Brandy, who seconds ago interrupted my writing to get me to play with a ball. Once she caught it on the fly, she carried it away to chew in private, and now she's resting. She reminds me that Leviathan, some kind of giant sea-serpent, is said in Job 41 to be God's pet on a leash to play with.

Then, on my way to church, the classical station played Bach's Concerto for Three Keyboards, its first sixteen notes tossed around like Brandy's tennis ball for each player to do tricks with. Sure, Bach committed it to paper for musicians to learn, but it has the playful character of improvisors who try to keep the ball of melody up in the air while putting their own spin on it.

[PHOTO: A playful photo - birds on lines looking like musical notes.]

Fr. Roger Allen's sermon for Pentecost also seemed to be about the element of improvisation. In the 40 days since the crucifixion, the apostles have been huddled in fear, or scattered in their old home towns, "not ready" for mission, Fr. Roger said. God doesn't wait until they're ready for the Spirit, He just hits them with it, and off they go, improvising the church.

The sermon was accompanied by some recreational crying from eight small children there for baptism, one crier setting off another. From the choir, I saw smiles throughout the nave. We also enjoyed an unplanned drama when a toddler reached for the flame on the candle given his mother: there was a collective gasp and then a laugh when the quick-thinking mom blew the candle out just in time.

As a retired drama teacher, I know something about improvisors. They may have been given the goal to reach a happy ending in a scene, but they each have to "go" with what their partner(s) come up with. Any quirky "mistake" has to be made a part of the story.

Looking at the Bible from this angle, we see how God left himself vulnerable to our choices. It doesn't seem as though he'd planned for Adam and Eve to rebel, or for King Saul to go mad, or for David to rape Bathsheba.

But, like a comedian, he chooses to redeem our mistakes through unlikely agents -- Jacob, the mama's boy; Joseph, the arrogant young brother; the Hebrews, refugees from slavery; David, the youngest brother; Mary, a modest unmarried girl; Jesus, the carpenter's son; Peter, the uneducated fisherman; Paul, the baddest anti-Christian in Jerusalem.

And us. I don't want to lose the insight that, for all the challenges and pain involved, God enjoys the process of bending creation towards justice and reconciliation.

Other posts in this blog that relate playfulness to faith

• The Brick Bible: Theological Reflection (11/2020) records how our EfM seminar processed the Old and New Testaments illustrated with Legos: blasphemy? or enlightening playfulness?
• Teaching Playfulness, Reaching God (12/2012) curates other articles I've done on the subject, ending with an extensive quotation about God's improvisation from Tom Stoppard's wonderful play Arcadia: "If all the answers are in the back, what's the point?"

New Poems from May

I finished two poems in May. A favorite from February needs more love. I hope you'll check them all out!

• Solar Power What a little sunlight can do. [Revised from January].
• Evolution Bird v. man.
• Interview with Box Turtle Self-portrait as spirit animal.

As always, here's an image by my friend Susan Rouse, whose discipline of painting each week inspired my blog First Verse, where I present at least two poems each month along with her art.

First Verse