Episcopalians and Race: One Slice of a Complex Story

By coincidence, the scripture assigned to Episcopalians for April 3 was also the text for a sermon I'd just read by Duncan Gray. An Episcopal priest in Mississippi in 1954, Gray was responding to the Supreme Court's then-recent decision in Brown v. Board of Education. I was following up on information new to me about my church's historical stances on racial equality in Stephanie Speller's book The Church Cracked Open when I ran across Gray's sermon.

I encountered Duncan Gray often when I lived in Jackson, MS. I walked my dogs past his house and sometimes parked in front of it to attend my church two doors down. Bishop Gray officiated when I was received into the Episcopal Church around 1985. I retain the sensation of his hands pressing on my head.

[PHOTO: James Meredith in 1962 and Bishop Gray as I remember him years later.]

I also knew Duncan Gray from hearing that he accompanied young James Meredith in 1962 when the younger man defied a racial ban to enroll at Ole Miss that year. During the 1980s, I also sang at St. Andrews Cathedral in downtown Jackson for midday concerts that Gray had instituted to bring mixed-race audiences together The church offered free admission and free sack lunches to make the concerts feasible for workers on their lunch break and for homeless people.

Gray came to mind because I've been reading The Church Cracked Open by Stephanie Spellers, the Presiding Bishop's Canon for Evangelism, Reconciliation, and Creation. For her, this time of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and dwindling membership is a time of vulnerability and crisis for the church, a "crack" that may lead to new growth in new directions.

One of her messages is that the Episcopal Church has long been complicit in enslavement and colonization of peoples outside of its white Anglo-Saxon base. The University of the South, Sewanee, whose extension program Education for Ministry (EfM) assigned her book, was itself established by Bishops who not only wanted slavery to continue, but who wanted research to support their belief that all non-white peoples of the world were inferior to, and should be subordinated to, whites (Spellers 82). As the 20th century heated up, she writes, the Episcopal Church maintained silence, and did worse: black clergy were not seated at conferences, and black congregations were ruled by white vestrymen from other parishes.

My experience in Mississippi in the 1980s gave me the opposite impression. All (ALL) the people I knew in my Episcopal Church had flocked there to get away from other churches where segregation was enforced. My friends Joe and Linda were literally kicked out, pushed and dragged out, of their church because they re-enrolled their children in the newly-integrated public school system. They showed me a newspaper they'd saved from the mid-1960s in which people I knew had paid for a full-page ad listing their names in favor of an end to racial segregation.

Gray's sermon takes off from I Corinthians 14.1-19. (Read the sermon.) Gray doesn't get to race until several pages in, when he says matter-of-factly that the Supreme Court decision was the right one. But he leads up to that by observing that Paul downplays speaking in tongues. It may be a gift, but it's not intelligible, not helpful, not persuasive to observers. From this, Gray derives the principle that what the church says should be relevant to the society. Too often, he says, our religion is self-centered.

Gray's sermon could be chapter in Spellers' book. She decries self-centrism -- concern with individual self, preoccupation with the preservation of the institution itself. That this idea is still so relevant is sad; that the Episcopal Church has not been quite so blasé about injustice as the recent book suggests is reassuring.

"Nixon in China": My Favorite Opera

I recently devoured Michael Dobbs's book King Richard, a page-turner focused on 100 days between Nixon's triumphant landslide re-election and the day when he recognized that he had no control over the Watergate scandal that would lead to a vote to begin impeachment proceedings, followed quickly by resignation. I could not put the book down because of the weirdness of discovering just how incompetent Nixon and his minions were. Most telling is the way he kept repeating the mantra "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" that made him a political star during the House Un-American Activities investigation of Alger Hiss -- only to get enmeshed in cover-up activities himself. He was so deep in denial.

That said, I'm glad to have a reason to pull together all the different reflections I've made through the years on the opera Nixon in China by composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, and director Peter Sellars. The piece is so important to me that I'm astounded that the title hasn't been prominent in my blog so far. Today, I make amends! I'm stringing together comments I've made about Nixon in other contexts. Links to the original articles are listed at the end.

Nixon and ArtMy friend John Davis, polymath and astute observer of everything, opined when the opera premiered that Nixon would long be a source for artists, while Reagan, Johnson, and most others never would be.

Why?  Davis suggested that, for a man so determined to control his own image, Nixon's inner conflicts and torments were always on view.  Nixon argued endlessly that he made all of his choices for the right reasons.  His good intentions make him tragic; his lack of self-awareness makes him comical.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the opera NIXON IN CHINA has become one of my favorite works of art in any medium. Here, I have special authority, because I was at the premiere. [I've since seen a very different-looking production by the Cincinnati Opera and a much grander remake of the original on the Live in HD Series at the Metropolitan Opera. SEE PHOTO]

In 1987, I drove the ten hours from Jackson MS to Houston TX to see the opera's world premiere. I admit that I got totally lost in the long bombastic scene with Nixon, Mao, Chou, Kissinger, and Mao's secretaries; that I was baffled (and bored) by the "ballet" in Act Two, and I had trouble staying awake in Act Three -- in which all the principals prepare for sleep after the final day of the summit, with six plain roll-a-beds, as if they're retiring to their cabin at summer camp.

As I walked among national TV crews and even literally ran into the entourage of the "kid wonder" director Peter Sellars, his orange hair standing straight up four inches -- I was thinking that the music was never less than pleasant, but I wasn't all that excited. I also couldn't decide what I thought about several places where the orchestra was reaching for big, ominous climaxes while the stage action was extremely banal, as when we watch Pat Nixon put on her hat and gloves for a day of touring. That seemed like bad staging to me.

Through recording and a PBS Great Performances video of that same performance, I grew to appreciate even those parts that baffled or bored me at the time. If I was baffled by Mao and his strident secretaries, well, so are Nixon and Kissinger. (Mao makes an oblique pronouncement and leaves Nixon -- the dogged student and striver all his life -- to interpret it as a statement of policy; Chou En Lai reassures Nixon: "It was a riddle, not a test.") If Madame Mao's propaganda ballet seemed to dissolve into chaos as Pat and Dick rush on stage to help the heroine with a glass of water -- well, I've learned to see this as an amusing theatrical trick that embodies the difference between Mao's hard doctrines about classes and systems and empathetic Americans' visceral response to personal stories.

The Cincinatti Opera's production made a backdrop from a bank of TV screens, and crowded the stage with replicas of those eerie hundreds of clay soldiers we've seen from China. Both added resonance to the wonderful opening of the opera. Adams's overture builds patterns over a rising a-minor scale; then a chorus of Chinese people in their Mao-fatigues sing incongruous phrases from his "Little Red Book" - "Respect women: it is their due...Close doors when you leave a house... roll up straw matting after use"

In 1987 and again on HD, the arrival of Airforce One is a delight. Adams's orchestra mimics the hum of an airplane engine; the chorus moves out of the way; the plane lands from the ceiling like an immense cardboard cut out; and Nixon and Pat appear at the open door waving--to rapturous applause and laughter.

Art and Americans Adams, Goodman, and their director Peter Sellars caught some criticism from Nixon haters for presenting Nixon at his height of success, using only resources pre-Watergate, putting verse in his mouth that represented him as he might have seen himself.  Thus, Nixon sings in his "News" aria,

On our flight over from Shanghai,
The countryside looked drab and gray.
"Bruegel," Pat said.  "'We came in peace for all mankind,'"
I said, and I was put in mind 
Of our Apollo astronauts, simply achieving a great human dream.
We live in an unsettled time.
Who are our enemies?  Who are our friends?

... As I look down the road, I know America is good at heart...
Shielding the globe from the flame-throwers of the mob.
                  
                               (quoted from memory - apologies if I miss some words)

There we have laconic Pat, Nixon's pretentions and his goofy inability to separate personal from public.  (Biographer Stephen Ambrose tells how Nixon, kneeling beside a woman injured by his motorcade, crowd and cameras watching, asked what she thought about tax policy!  That's the Nixon we have in the opera, wanting desperately to be good, apt to orate, unable to connect to Mao or even to Pat.

Since composer John Adams's falling-out with librettist Alice Goodman is pretty famous, dwelt upon in another book THE JOHN ADAMS READER, I was especially interested to see how Adams treats her with respect and appreciation. He writes,

She could move from character to character and from scene to scene, alternating between diplomatic pronouncement, philosophical rumination, raunchy aside, and poignant sentiment. And she did all this in concise verse couplets, exhibiting a talent and technique that has nearly vanished from American poetical practice. (136)

His citation of lines from Pat Nixon's aria "This is Prophetic" brought tears to my eyes, as he focused my attention on an aspect of the words that I hadn't seen so clearly before. Here are the lines that he quotes, as Pat Nixon piles image of America on image in the form of a prayer :

Let lonely drivers on the road
Pull over for a bite to eat,
Let the farmer switch on the light
Over the porch, let passersby
Look in at the large family
Around the table, let them pass.

Adams comments, "It was part of Alice's genius to be able to handle images of Americans -- so routinely abused in magazine and television advertising -- in a way that recaptured their virgin essence, making them, when Pat sings them, not cliches at all but statements of a deeply felt, unconflicted belief." I'm pretty sure that Adams and I reach different conclusions about politics and religion, but it's clear that, in this book and in his art, he speaks what I believe, that humanity is deeper than all our economics and policies and creeds.

Chou En Lai's toast (sung originally with a silvery yet warm tone by remarkable baritone Sanford Sylvan), is one of Adams' slow rides across a vast landscape, with text that mirrors his method: "We have begun to celebrate the different roads that led us to this mountain pass, this 'summit' where we stand. Look down, and see what we have undergone. Future and past lie far below, half visible..." This aria succeeds in a way that's like no other piece of music I know, sweeping us up in pulsing and colorful accompaniment, long lines of melody, and gradual build up to a vision of "paths we have not taken yet" where "innumerable grains of wheat salute the sky," and a toast to a time when our children's children will look back on this moment. I get chills thinking about it even now.

And to what end?

Alice Goodman and John Adams give Chou En-lai this line in Act Three, never answered, never developed: "And to what end?
From Thomas May's book THE JOHN ADAMS READER, I see that the collaborators did not work well together, and the librettist Alice Goodman was miffed most. But I give her a lot of the credit for what's right in this show. She tried, she said, to represent each character "as eloquently as possible" in the way that the character would want to be portrayed.

As a writer and composer myself, I'm inspired by these two ideas: Let the characters speak eloquently for themselves; give the music movement and shape like the landscapes we drive past.

Text adapted from...
• Musical Landscapes (07/2006)
• a reflection on John Adams' memoir Hallelujah Junction Thanks to and from John Adams (10/2008)
• Nixon's Voice (10/2015)]
• See other articles about John Adams and other composers who share a certain catch-all label at my page The Minimalist Zone
• See an article ostensibly about Santa Fe that's really about how I learned to love traditional operas, too.

History Hysteria: Nothing New

Bless Sam Sanders, host of the NPR program It's Been a Minute for bringing on a guest who could give us a long view on the uproar over Critical Race Theory. Sam often gives voice to feelings that many of his listeners share (myself included), and this time it's a sickness in the pit of the stomach as he hears of disruptions to school board meetings, threats to members, and legislators resolving, in effect, to ban the teaching of historical facts that might make students feel bad.

Sam's guest Adam Laats, a professor of educational leadership at New York's Binghamton University, focuses his reasearch on cultural reactions to school reform. He taught history in middle school and high school for ten years.

[Photo: Sam Sanders (left), Adam Laats]

Sam wanted to know, has this happened before? If so, has it ever been this bad? And is it unprecedented that it's erupted so quickly in school districts and state legislatures all across the nation?

Dr. Laats gave examples from 1930s, 50s, and 70s to show that, yes, parents have called for the banning of books for drawing attention to inequities in American history; yes, they've burned books and even bombed school buildings (1974, West Virginia); and, no, there's lots of precedent for national media and Washington politicians whipping up coast-to-coast hysteria over local school affairs. Laats's own article on the current CRT "panic," written with Gillian Frank for Slate, concludes that each of these eruptions has succeeded in the short term by removing the curriculum in question, and in the long-term by discouraging teachers from asking questions that might stir up another hornets' nest.

Adam Laats's own website includes a page called My Two Cents where he curates links to his articles and media appearances. Judging his books by their covers -- risky, I know -- I'd say that Laats is finding ways to bridge gaps between fundamentalists and teachers who encourage critical thinking about science and history.

So my blood pressure is down again. Thanks Dr. Laats and Dr. Sanders.

Of Related Interest

• To open up critical inquiry for 8th grade history students, I designed a year around four questions derived from the Pledge of Allegiance: How true is it to say that America is, or ever was, one nation? under God? indivisible? with liberty and justice for all? We studied primary sources and reached no simple answers. See details at Teach History with the Pledge of Allegiance (07/2017).
• "We've been here before" is the somewhat comforting message of Jon Meacham's The Soul of America, a survey of US history composed in 2017 to answer the popular perception that America had never been so divided. See my reflection 07/2018.
• I've thanked Sam Sanders another time for his friendly inquiry into a fraught subject. See Trans Eye for a Bible Guy

Bringing "That Slavery Thing" Out of the Archives

On the heels of blogging about The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr.'s novel set among enslaved people (02/18/2021), I found many points of agreement between that fiction and what Atlantic staff writer Clint Smith has found in archived interviews with the last Americans to have been born in slavery. His article "We Mourn for All We Do Not Know" is in the March 2021 issue.

Smith was surprised to find, among the horrific accounts of violence and deprivation that he expected,

stories of enslaved people dancing together on Saturday evenings as respite from their work; of people falling in love, creating pockets of time to see each other when the threat of violence momentarily ceased; of children skipping rocks in a creek or playing hide-and-seek among towering oak trees, finding moments when the movement of their bodies was not governed by anything other than their own sense of wonder.

The accounts of love and wonder resonate with Jones's novel, where flirtation, love, dancing, and horseplay at the stream are all part of the texture of the story. But Smith writes that some members of a black family, reading an ancestor's account of some happy times, were suspicious, because it played into pre-and-post Reconstruction propaganda about how slave life was so sheltered and carefree.

Smith writes that these interviews, conducted in 1938 for the New Deal program the Federal Writers' Project, have long been suspect, for some good reasons:

• Were the memories of people so old be trusted?
• Few of the interviewers were black; living in the Jim Crow South, did elderly men and women say what they thought a white person would want to hear? Did biased interviewers manipulate their subjects?
• The transcripts are written in dialect, e.g., "My mudder...hafter git some food... Us all 'round de table like dat was like a feast"; to what extent were the transcripts altered to be "more authentic?"
• Critics after historian Ulrich B. Phillips (d. 1934), who thought slavery was a civilizing influence, mistrust what black people had to say about slavery because, well, how can black people be objective about slavery?
  

Answering that last one, Daina Ramey Berry, History Chair at U.T. Austin, wonders how white people can be objective about plantation owners.  She told Smith that there's some kind of bias in every source.

Something else that resonates with Jones's novel is something that sociologist Orlando Patterson calls "natal alienation." Patterson observes how black people under slavery and still to this day have been "stripped of social and cultural ties to a homeland we cannot identify." Records weren't kept. In The Prophets, the character Isaiah aches to be able to remember his mother and the name she gave him.

Smith interviewed modern-day black historians and genealogists who have searched for their own families in those archives. They tell of strong emotional reactions when they see photos of great-greats that they'd only heard of. Janice Crawford traced her family back to the plantation operated by the Rogers family. 

[Photo: Carter J. Johnson, born in slavery, who raised Janice Crawford's orphaned mother]

Crawford contacted one Rogers descendant who had published an article extolling his family's preaching the word of God through many generations of ministers, but he didn't stay in touch. She wonders how slave owners could commit to slavery while espousing Christian principles; The Prophets features a slave owner who quotes scripture to assuage his momentary moral qualms.

Smith also talked with Gregory Freeland, who grew up on Crest Street near where I lived on the campus of Duke University.  I was never aware that the Crest Street community had originally been its own town established by people emancipated after the Civil War. Freeland, who has done extensive research in the archives, regrets that he passed up the opportunity to ask questions of his own elders when he was growing up. "I was sort of ready to get away from that, that slavery thing," he tells Smith. Now he's working to collect interviews with those who remember the Civil Rights era.

That slavery thing has been left moldering in the archives while white history has wanted to move on.  In the 1980s, when Ken Burns' Civil War documentary ran on TV night after night, I was teaching in Mississippi.  I talked about each installment with friends. We were all college-educated and liberal in our racial views, and we loved the 89 appearances by Mississippi writer Shelby Foote, who had a wry twinkle in his eye as he regaled us with anecdotes from that conflict. While we respected the big-picture commentary by Columbia College professor Barbara Fields, I remember consensus that her 10 or so clips were too many, because, being black, she just couldn't move on from the topic of slavery. But, being white, we didn't think about "moving on" from Lincoln, Lee, and Mary Chesnutt.

Articles like Smith's and writing like The Prophets, along with other books I've read recently -- Bryan Stevenson's memoir Just Mercy and the YA novel Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam (see blogpost 12/2020) -- make me more aware than ever how our desire to segregate "that slavery thing" from the rest of America's life still distorts our teaching of history, our political discourse, our laws, and our communities.

[By coincidence, Clint Smith has popped up in my reading and radio listening three times this weekend. He told Shankar Vedantam on Hidden Brain about his early career teaching literature to mostly poor black kids, and how he learned that averting their eyes from their lives to Shakespeare and fantasy literature was a mistake. He's also represented in a book of essays 400 Souls. I've learned that Smith is also a poet. Here's a photo from a short talk-and-poem on TED talks. His web site is www.slintsmithiii.com

]

"The Prophets" by Robert Jones: History and Prophecy

Calling his novel The Prophets and drawing on the Bible for names of characters and titles of chapters, Robert Jones, Jr. invites us to place this historical fiction in dialogue with Christian tradition.

Creation, Sin, Redemption The setting for the story is a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, years before the Civil War. Except for a couple of excursions by members of the slave owner's family, we never leave that plantation. The enslaved characters call the plantation "Empty." They have only a vague sense of what lies beyond its boundaries.

Yet the goodness of creation transcends the brutality of the circumstances. During an ordeal of humiliation and physical pain, the enslaved young men Samuel and Isaiah are still aware how birds, insects, the natural world go on with their lives amid the beauty of field and forest. Forced since childhood to work and sleep among the farm animals, Samuel "the strong one" and Isaiah "the sensitive one" have turned to each other for love and understanding. Their embrace of each other is described rapturously, and their relationship is known and honored throughout the community, at first.

Their world is also suffused with the voices of the ancestors, beneficent spirits who talk to us, speak through elders in the story, and who appear fleetingly to characters, giving encouragement and magically healing. The ancestors laugh at our limited perceptions: "You thought you were the living and we were the dead? Haha" (2). In chapters interspersed throughout the novel, we follow a parallel story of ancestors in a previous century who call a woman "King" and who celebrate the marriage of two young men who are privileged to be appointed "guardians" (187).

The different chapters bring us the voices of different characters, some of them tangential to the story of Samuel and Isaiah. Some of these particular narrators were obscure to me, or just not so interesting. Happily, I remembered a famous author's advice (Virginia? Flannery? I forget) that there's no rule that you have to read every chapter.

What brought me back to the novel time and again was this underlying confidence and joy, suggesting to me that Hebrew phrase from Genesis tov mahov: creation is very good. Love of and between "the two of them" is Edenic in the setting of a stable where the stars shine through a skylight, and the maturing of that love under duress is gripping to experience. The ancestors and the elder women among the community who channel them recall the Bible's "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12.1) and the ministering of angels.

But everything good is twisted by the state of slavery. Under the slave owner Paul, love is reduced to what happens at a clearing known as the "F---ing Place," where he commands couplings with and between his slaves, to rear a new generation of slaves to increase his wealth. Black mothers have borne his light-skinned sons, and his wife Ruth also tries to fulfill her desires with black men.

Paul weaponizes the Gospel. A self-righteous man, sure that his ownership of these people is a sign of God's approval (250), he charges his black disciple Amos to preach the Gospel to the workers with stress on obedience. Paul is appalled when he learns that his young workers Samuel and Isaiah love each other, not just because of passages in Leviticus and Romans that forbid sex between men: Paul had planned for the young men, brought to "the peak state of brawn" by their work in the stable, to sire hardy workers for use and for sale (259). When they don't respond to the women he sends to them, Paul charges Amos to push the community to shun the young men. In the parallel story of the ancestors, it's a cross-brandishing Portuguese captain who introduces the notion that the marriage of the two guardians is unnatural and detestable; the tribe laughs at him.

Under the distortion of slavery, the comfort that the Gospel offers is that of excluding "the two of them" (76). During the sadistic ordeal imposed on Samuel and Isaiah, members of the community jeer, finding "some kind of happiness... in seeing someone else being humiliated for once" (143).

Paul's son Timothy, an artist described as "not a man man," pushes the story to a crisis. We see how he found freedom to express his homosexuality at Harvard and imbibed Yankees' ideas about the wrongs of slavery (202). At home, taken by the beauty of Isaiah and Samuel, he commands them to pose for portraits. He imagines that Samuel and Isaiah will both be flattered and enriched by his attention. He considers that he's doing them a favor when he invites each to his bedroom. Instead, he causes jealousy, hurt, and fury.

"Redemption" in this situation isn't going to be the same thing as a happy ending. There comes with pain a deepening of love (215 ff). Without any spoilers, I can attest that the feeling at the end is of a kind of restoration of wholeness in the embrace of the ancestors. There's also an unforgettable and comforting vision of a man who dissolves into a thousand swirling fireflies (238).

The arc of the story, from creation through sin to redemption, is one that repeats throughout the Bible, and, I believe, in our lives.

Guessing Game

Jones, with his Biblical connections, challenges us to a guessing game: How do the titles fit? The first chapter in the voice of the ancestors he calls "Judges," as in, judges of the story. A chapter that depicts the playful banter between Samuel and Isaiah, that ends with them lying side by side, that deepens into their sharing painful memories, Jones calls "Psalms." Being the songs of David, "Psalms" perhaps recalls the intense love of the youthful David for Jonathan, or the lyrical expressions of joy and pain in the Psalms, or both. The chapter chronicling the ordeal imposed on the young men is called "Babel," perhaps because of the babbling mockery of the crowd; the chapter that follows in which the women heal them is appropriately called "Balm in Gilead." Some of the titles are playful, as when the throwback chapter of two guardians in Africa is called "II Kings."

Likewise Jones's choices of names for his characters. The eponymous prophets would be Samuel, instrumental in ending King Saul's reign, and Isaiah, harbinger of Israel's restoration through the trials of a suffering servant. If we remember that the apostle Paul was also known as Saul, then Samuel's readiness to fight the plantation owner makes the name a good fit. Seeing Isaiah as harbinger of a restoration is harder to do in a literal way. But in his gentleness, unwilling even to make a fist (145), and in his suffering, he may fit the theme of suffering servant.

The other prophet among the characters' names is Amos, known for his call to justice, and that seems ill-applied to the servile character hand-picked to preach. But when we see into Paul's mind, we read how he envies the black man's spiritual visions, causing the slave owner to concede that black people "have souls" (258) and to doubt the rightness his life's work. He finds comfort in Christ's dictum, "Render unto Caesar" and St. Paul's admonition that slaves are to be obedient.

From first to last, however, Jones gives another name paramount importance. Isaiah knows that his mother and father gave him an African name and yearns to know what that is. We already do: the second chapter of the book, called "Proverbs," is a pro- (forward) verb (word) sent out from Isaiah's mother to the son taken from her, whom she calls Kayode. By this name, and the emphasis on Judeo-Christian names, Jones suggests that the spiritual world of the African ancestors is a reality behind and through the one codified in Scripture. I don't take that as a denial of Scripture, but a denial of how the slave owner adapts scripture to his own weaknesses and desires. By extension, Jones indicts the whole white supremacy project.

Social Resonances

In an interview on Atlanta's NPR station WABE, the author said, as if it were common knowledge, that African tribes were far from "binary" in their view of gender. That's news to me, but a cursory look through sources on the internet confirmed what he said, mostly in the context of refuting African regimes that justify brutal persecution of gay men as patriotic push-back against sin brought to their continent by decadent Europeans.

Jones also writes a couple of passages, apt for the time of the story, that encapsulate the mindset and method of white supremacists. When Isaiah sighs, "I get tired. But I wanna live," (301), Samuel thinks:

That was the way of the world as remade by toubab [whites], and Samuel's list of grievances was long: They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage.

In a parallel passage some pages later, Paul's overseer James, resentful to be dressed in raggedy clothes (319) and beholden to his cousin, considers the black people he oversees:

They were of raggedy dress (his anger was fueled by the similarity of their attire and his) and little intelligence. They lived on top of one another, packed into dwellings by their own will as much as Paul's. They were belligerent and smelled of a toil that couldn't be washed away. They ate refuse and their skin bore the curse of wild. It was easier to think of them as animals, not so different from cows and horses, apes of great mimicry that managed to speak the language of humans.

Yet in this same chapter, he recalls his desire for a black woman who resisted him fiercely. How can he reconcile his desire for her with his belief that she was an "animal?" He rationalizes:

The fact of the matter was that they could pass for human and, therefore, trick the loins, if not always the mind. (321)

Prophecy The ancient prophets of Jewish tradition aren't properly thought of as fortune-tellers but poetic truth-tellers. Like pundits and poets who raise their voices today, they tell the powerful the perspective of the marginalized; they foretell where things will go if the listeners don't listen.

Jones, building on Christian and African tradition, telling in a poetic way his story from a different century, is also speaking to our times, and to the future.

In that passage of Samuel's thoughts about his white masters, Jones writes

They stepped on people's throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed "CHAOS!" and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.(321)

Probably writing that well before the summer of 2020, Jones could have been looking back on George Floyd's death, the rising up that followed, and the continuing reaction of Trump and his ilk. It also describes the racist attacks in Chicago in the summer of 1919 (see my post about a poet's book 1919 (08/2020).

With the beautiful and heartbreaking story of love and a community, The Prophets also tells of racial injustice and exploitation of all kinds, a story that was and is. How can we ensure that story is not still to be?

Trump Channels Charles I: Lessons of 1642

Capitol insurrectionists January 6 chanted "1776." But the rebels in that year were thinking of 1642. [See A Tale of Two Kings at the Journal of the American Revolution]

By 1642, King Charles I of England had ruled by himself 11 years, the very definition of an autocrat. Flaunting norms, he ruled by executive orders while he rejected mounting demands for him to call elections for Parliament. But when his pet projects and high life style exhausted the treasury, he had no choice: "No taxation without representation" was already an English tradition, and only the House of Commons could raise taxes. Charles reluctantly acceded to elections for a new Parliament. When his opponents won a majority, he ordered another round of elections. Voters named more opponents to this second Parliament than to the first. The House of Commons immediately took to voting on resolutions taking Charles to task for abuse of power.

The King marched on Parliament with soldiers at his side. Stunned by this breach of tradition, his subjects bowed to His Majesty, until Charles ordered his soldiers to arrest leading lawmakers. There were gasps and vocal protest. The leaders, warned in advance, had gone into hiding. Charles, aware that he'd made a royal blunder, said lamely, "I see that the birds have flown," and went home. Parliament, now more unified against him than before, continued their business with renewed vigor.

This past week, our President urged supporters to prevent the normal processes of our representative democracy. When he saw the resulting destruction and the revulsion that he had caused, he lost his head. On screen, he mixed messages:  "go home," "have peace," "these people are evil," and, in a lame conclusion, "We love you; you're very special." Congress went on to certify the election, much of the President's support having evaporated. Cabinet officials, corporate allies, and Republican legislators abandoned him over the next couple of days. A laughing seventh grader told me, "Twitter put Trump in 'time out.'"

[Images: Above, painting of Parliament, formerly kneeling, rising up against Charles I, by Charles West Cope from 1866. Then, the President's supporters crashed through gates and glass doors and entered the House of Representatives, shouting threats to Vice President Mike Pence and legislators. "The birds had flown."]

The ascent of Parliament in 1642 didn't have a happy ending. Civil war followed. The supreme victor was Oliver Cromwell, head of a Puritan faction in Parliament. He decapitated Charles, expelled his opponents from the House of Commons and, in mirror-image of Charles I's "personal rule," ruled with a rubber-stamp Parliament for 11 more years.

Still, in the long run, 1642 established the principle enshrined in our founding documents of 1776 and 1789: the "rule of law," meaning rulers must obey the rules. That includes those who make the rules and those who enforce them: none have absolute power over any other person, nor absolute impunity.  So, too, the voting majority may have their way, but they're limited by the laws that protect the minority's inalienable rights and their voice.

When the majority becomes the minority, they can be secure within the same framework, so long as we all play by the rules and accept the judgments of the referees. That's the lesson of 1642, followed by the other, darker lesson: when one side stops abiding by the rules, the other side can feel entitled to do the same.

Let's hold the line in 2021.

[I used to teach the English Civil War to 8th Graders from Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples. That was over 30 years ago, but his vivid writing lives in my memory. I may have appropriated some of his language in my account.]

Hopeless or Hope Free? Eric Utne Reads the Times

Hopeless or hope free? Seeing no way forward through climate issues, the founder and namesake of the Utne Reader, an alternative Reader's Digest, describes himself as the latter.

[Photo by Scott Takushi, Pioneer Press]

I heard Eric Utne interviewed on the podcast Climate One about his memoir Far Out Man. The title is both a Boomer equivalent for "awesome, Dude" and a literal translation of his family name.

When the Utne Reader first appeared at my favorite indie bookstore Lemuria (Jackson, MS) in 1984, its headlined articles all excoriated the Reagan Revolution. Though I was intrigued, I didn't touch it, guessing that arguments might shake my faith in my beloved President.

The man Eric Utne turns out to be a gentle soul who abandoned his successful periodical to teach seventh grade awhile, then retire.

Regarding climate and all the other issues on the progressives' catalogue of concerns, Utne sees no room for hope. Now that nearly half the electorate has voted to re-elect a man who shrugged off a quarter-million deaths, he concludes that denial rules; if this crisis can't break the gridlock, no facts, no person, will.

Yet Utne calls himself not hopeless but hope free. If I understand him correctly, someone hopeless has lost only the sort of "positive thinking" that Trump imbibed growing up in the church of Norman Vincent Peale.

Peale's book The Power of Positive Thinking was on my parents' bookshelf, so I understand his idea that you lead best when you exude confidence and enthusiasm. Utne observes that Trump's personal creed seems to be a child's version of Peale's message: that you can make something true simply by repeating it with enough conviction. With money enough to pay a staff of sychophants, that creed has worked for Trump until the election. Ranting to Republican state legislators that the Democrats lost, they cheated, he won, that he just needed to find "some judge" to believe him, he'd never sounded so furiously hopeless.

But what is "hope free?" Though Utne has no hope that his efforts will mitigate the worst effects of global climate change, he makes those efforts anyway. It's the right thing to do, and it's for love of his children and grand-children; hopefulness doesn't enter in.

I would call that acting in faith.

"1919": Poems Layered with Chicago History

 

"It's hard to explain," I said. The kind woman on the trail could see that I'd pulled my bike over to stand still and cry.

Hard to explain how a poet I don't know, Eve L. Ewing, reading a poem from her new collection 1919 about a racial incident in Chicago during that year could have such an impact on me now listening to NPR one day in June 2020.

PHOTO: 1919. Poems by Eve L. Ewing. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Cover artwork by Brian Dovie Golden, www.briandoviegolden.com

There are so many layers to the work.  You had to hear Ewing explain how the killing of seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams touched off three days of race-specific violence in Chicago, late July 1919. Ewing told interviewer Terry Gross on WHYY's Fresh Air how the young man, cooling off in Lake Michigan, drifted to an area claimed by whites, who threw stones at him and at any blacks who came near. No one knows for sure if a rock struck Eugene unconscious, or if, afraid to come ashore, he exhausted his strength. He drowned.

The background gave immediate power to the poem "Jump / Rope." The poet began

Little Eugene Gene Gene
Sweetest I've seen seen seen
His mama told him him
Them white boys mean mean mean...

She sang the words in the style of ditties that little girls chant when they jump rope together. But she halted, "no, it goes like..." and started over; then she did it again. Each childlike verse comes closer to the harrowing event, closer to what we can imagine of Eugene's own experience:

Sweet sweet baby
Don't make me let you go
Swallow swallow grab the sky
Swallow swallow dark...

How can I explain that, even writing this now, I'm tearing up? The story was sad enough, but the emotion hit hard when the story was filtered through those sing-song lines. The playfulness of the form gets us into the mind of young Eugene, playing in the water, free of care for the invisible line he had crossed.

Ewing didn't have to explain how the title suggests both the child's game of jump rope and the lynchings by noose, so common for so long. Nor could she have known that her book would come out on a wave of current stories of young black adults killed for nothing: George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rashard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain.

In the moment that Ewing read her poem, I couldn't sort all these threads of meaning and feeling that constricted my throat. To the helpful woman, I just choked out, "It's hard to explain." When she was gone, I ordered the book.

Ewing's 1919, brief and illustrated, appears to be a simple children's book, but the cover depicts a moment of horror, Eugene's face, half submerged, eyes wide open in distress. Ewing enriches her collection with the layering of history texts and photos, of different voices past and present, and a variety of forms. Each layer reinforces the other. Where the historical note seems dry, her poetry pulls us in; where the verse seems obscure to me, the historical record fills in the back story. For most poems, there's an epigraph, usually taken from the report of community leaders in Chicago in the early 1920s, half of them black, half of them white, commissioned to explain why the incident and the riots happened.

The tense prelude and violent aftermath of Eugene's death are central to the collection. Before that, the first part of the book enlarges on the commission's report about the influx of black families escaping the South since the collapse of Reconstruction. A third part, looking across the intervening decades, includes some poems previously published.

Ewing begins each part of the book with a poem called "Exodus," 1, 5, and 10. She's taking off from the commission's observation that the black migrants to Chicago spoke of their leaving the South in Biblical terms from the exodus of God's chosen people out of slavery into the Promised Land. Ewing plays with the Biblical stories and phrases. In Exodus 1, not the mother of Moses but all young black mothers in the South place their babies in baskets to send them up the river to freedom. Exodus 5 brings God into judgement on the Chicago politician Richard Daly, whose biographer called him the American Pharaoh. In 1919, Daly was member of a gang of white boys who terrorized black neighborhoods in the riots. Exodus 10 takes off from the plague of darkness, reassuring to the black community, fearful to the wicked.

For other poems as well, Ewing fits the form to the subject. A former teacher now covered in offal from working in the stockyard remembers fondly in 26 alphabetical lines how he instilled self-respect with literacy for black children in the South. A domestic worker, silently resenting her employer, speaks to us in short journal entries, all lower-case letters. Ewing gives us banter about "how hot is it" under an ominous title from Langston Hughes: or does it explode, expressing the tension rising during the heat wave of July 1919.  The story of a barricade that black men set up to protect their neighborhoods is told in a poem shaped like that barricade.

An outstanding poem, "James Crawford Speaks," tells of Eugene from the point of view of a black eye-witness, who fired his gun at policemen that arrived on the scene, who was himself shot and killed. "I saw the whites of [Eugene's] eyes," the voice begins,

before he let go the railroad tie
that kept him almost afloat
almost alive, almost able to walk home...

But what's at home for a black boy in Chicago of this time? The boy is "almost nobody, nowhere, gone home / to nothing. Me, too." The poem is very strong, imagining the gun shot as a statement: We are somebody. Black lives matter.

Ewing reminds us of another teenage black boy from Chicago who died violently at the hands of white men, only the poem is gentle and sweet, a vision of what might have been had the boy lived to become an elder in the community. We know the photo of Emmett Till at 14, grinning under his porkpie hat, taken in the year of his gruesome murder. We know the photo of his bludgeoned face in his open casket. Ewing's poem begins, "I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store," a gentle old man grinning under his porkpie hat. The poem is a benediction.

Telling a friend about that poem, I cried again. Hard to explain.There are so many layers.

John Lewis & Real American Exceptionalism

Former President Barack Obama in his eulogy for John Lewis today called the late Congressman "exceptional" for "redeeming" our "faith in our founding ideals." If our journey towards achieving the "more perfect union" takes another 200 years, Obama said, then Lewis "will be a founding father" of that "fuller, fairer, better America."

Obama once was asked whether he "believed in American Exceptionalism."  His nuanced answer displeased a large swath of the country that thinks "American Exceptionalism" means "We're number one!"  What makes America truly exceptional was one of the ideas that emerged from the celebration of Lewis's life at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Obama put the finish on that theme which had run throughout the service. Opening with remarks about Lewis's suffering violence during peaceful protests, Reverend Rafael Warnock had quoted scripture, "By his wounds we are healed," a phrase about "the suffering servant" in Isaiah, originally identified with the Jewish nation, later identified with Jesus by Christians.  Here, Reverend Warnock suggested that Lewis, with his cohort pushed forward the process of healing this nation by the pain they accepted in standing for truth against the pervasive sin of racism.  Reverend Lawson, a mentor to Lewis, quoted Martin Luther King Jr.'s promise that non-violent Black protesters, taking the pain and death inflicted by their enemies, would "transform" America "and the world."

Elevating a black man to the Mt. Rushmore version of history, these theologians turn the USA's story into one of redemption for the whole world.  In short: The Founding Fathers made the promises of freedom for a new nation, then built that nation on the backs of forced labor.  Four score and seven years later, Lincoln used those promises in the middle of a civil war to give America a "new birth of freedom," admitting in his second inaugural address that justice might require white people to pay back the years they made black people suffer. King's teacher Howard Thurman wrote in the 1940s that black people would play the role of Jesus in American society (read about Jesus and the Disinherited 12/2015). King developed that theme in sermons collected in Strength to Love.

In short, the agency of black people risking their lives to stand up for their dignity -- exemplified by John Lewis -- has been a force to make America grow into its promises.  What other nation has struggled so long and so openly with this dissonance between its ideals and its treatment of a minority?  This struggle, not the strength of our military or the influence of our economy, is what makes America exceptional, the best hope for the world.

Let's recognize the inadequacy of setting aside one month for Black history, as if the story isn't integral to all of our history. Black history is as much American history as any face on Mt. Rushmore - or Stone Mountain.

Other speakers at the funeral portrayed the man as courageous activist, delightful uncle, devoted husband and father, generous boss, and effective politician. Former President Bill Clinton told us what Lewis carried in that back pack in Selma (fruit, toothbrush, a study of American culture, and a memoir by Catholic monk Thomas Merton) because the young man expected to spend the night in jail. Former President George W. Bush repeated the story about Lewis's preaching to chickens, but added that Lewis refused to eat one that the family cooked, "His first non-violent protest." Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi got choked up telling how she visited him one last time and how, after he lay in state, a double rainbow appeared over the Capitol, though no rain had fallen.

Obama looked at the familiar story of Lewis's beating at the bridge in Selma from the unusual perspective of the troopers:  "They thought they had won that day."  But the world had seen the ugly truth that "law and order" here meant degradation and violence, and the world changed. 

Obama told us a story new to me, that Lewis and a buddy named Bernard bought two bus tickets and sat in the front of an interstate bus to test the Court's desegregation order, weeks before the freedom rides organized with protective entourages. "Imagine the courage!" Obama said. "He was all of 20 years old, and he pushed those 20 years to the center of the table" in a gamble for the benefit of others. 

Exceptional man, offering his life to make America exceptional.

[Photos: Lewis, in a very bad spot, has a little smile for the mug shot in Jackson, MS for riding a bus and using a white-only men's room. Top: the Selma march with the backpack.]

Monumental Lies

As a white guy, I've never thought about these two monuments. Left in the photo is Edward Ball's 1876 work in Lincoln Park, Washington, the one whose replica in Boston has been removed in this season of increased sensitivity to systemic racism. On the right is James Earle Fraser's 1939 work, removed from New York's Natural History Museum.

If asked, I'd have said these were quaint products of their time, a bit over-the-top. What I've been missing is what makes the monuments so harmful. I've heard accusations that removing a monument is trying to erase history, but monuments can also cover up history.

Two Racial Lies in Two Monuments

While both monuments purport to celebrate freedom and friendship for the races in America, both perpetuate lies that white people in the Americas have told themselves since the time of Columbus:

Lie #1: Black people are built strong, their bodies suitable to hard labor in hot climates; and
Lie #2: Black people are like children, dependent on whites to survive the complexities of white society

All slave owners had to believe these lies to feel good about themselves. The Spanish Queen accepted these lies as good reasons to initiate the African slave trade to her Spanish colonies in the 1500s; confederate states' articles of secession echoed the same "fact" that only black people could do necessary labor in hot summer months. To justify chattel slavery of Christian brothers and sisters, contrary to St. Paul's admonition, English colonial legislatures simply described blacks as less than full human beings. 

In both of these statues we see both lies. The men of color sport physiques that are, well, chiseled. Yet they appear like wide-eyed children; the white men, fully-clothed and elevated, are the grown-ups in control. White people see these and feel good about the way history turned out, how our white leaders were so generous to people who could not have helped themselves.

But the man depicted at Lincoln's feet freed himself. The model Archer "Aleck" Alexander, who defiantly agitated for freedom years before the Civil War, aided Union troops during operations, and escaped himself [see photo]. (See reporting by DeNeen L. Brown in the Washington Post.). Black people funded the monument, but were not consulted on its execution. At the time of its unveiling, Frederick Douglass deplored that the black man is depicted "nude [and] couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal" (Letter published in the National Republican four days after Douglass delivered a sober assessment of Lincoln at the statue's dedication, 1876. See the article about tracking down the letter at Atlas Obscura.com.)

The Roosevelt monument's creator James Earle Fraser called the men of color "guides" for Roosevelt in his work (Andrea Kay Scott, New Yorker, 1 July 2020). But equally buff Teddy, high up on the horse, is the one looking ahead, gesturing onward, while the native American and the black man cleave to him with wide-eyed timorous looks. They carry Roosevelt's firearms. While they wear next-to-nothing, Teddy is resplendant in the uniform of his paramilitary group "the Rough Riders" that he organized to win Cuba from the Spanish in the 1898 war. Fraser intended to show Roosevelt's "friendliness to all races" (Scott) . But the composition of the statue embodies "The White Man's Burden," a poem that Rudyard Kipling actually wrote for young President Roosevelt to help urge Americans to get involved in the 1898 war. Kipling's poem urges young white men to go out into the world to "serve" people of color. For Kipling, non-whites are "half devil and half child," incapable of taking care of themselves through their "Sloth and Folly." (See the whole poem at the Kipling Society

I've heard discussions on NPR with black men and women who told how the Emancipation monument was like a punch in the stomach. On Here and Now two men told identical stories from childhood of being bewildered to see a man "who looked like me" naked and in such a submissive pose. Removing an image that gives such offense may be what our President would belittle as "political correctness," but I bet his mother might have called that "common courtesy."

More than hard feelings, these monumental lies motivate violence. A childlike man with the strength of a beast is someone to be feared, someone likely to steal or sponge off of welfare, someone to be controlled by police or prison guards. (See my blog post about law enforcement and racial fear 07/2016, and "The Privilege is Mine," an account of many ways that whiteness has been my super-power 12/2017)

The lies show up in the videos that have brought Americans into the streets these past several weeks. Three white men with a truck and a gun respond to an unarmed jogger as if he's threatening them. A white woman in Central Park, incensed to have a black man be the grown-up who points out to her the leash law, fakes terror in a 911 call, confident that authorities will believe her performance. Four cops team up to strangle the breath out of a man already handcuffed.

The lie about being "like children" has pervaded public policy for a century. Even during this pandemic, unemployment benefits and eviction moratoria have been limited for the express reason that the people who receive handouts won't return to the workforce without a push. At the inception of unemployment benefits, jobs identified with people of color were excluded from benefits.We add work requirements and restrict health benefits, on the theory that "they" will rely on government and vote Democratic if we don't prod "them" to work.  Reflecting that assumption, the editors of National Review routinely called the Federal government "the Plantation" when I gave up my decades-long subscription.

Confederate Monuments Do Erase History Confederate monuments are easy targets. Caroline Randall Williams writes in the New York Times June 28 that her body is a confederate monument. A black woman, descendant of Confederate leaders, Randall Williams calls her light complexion "the color of rape." To those who would "deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred," she writes,

I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

Confederate monuments do intentionally erase history, every one a repudiation of the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. When Federal troops gave up on enforcing blacks' civil rights after 1875, whites repressed blacks with new laws, systematic discrimination, and pervasive intimidation. Those statues said to blacks and whites alike, "Forget about Reconstruction and civil rights; the good ol' days of white supremacy are back." Placed in town squares and on courthouse steps, they were always intended to be stone walls to blacks. Whether they be torn down, or surrounded by context, let them no longer stand unopposed.

Exception for Founding Fathers? Before I read an essay on George Washington by Michele L. Norris, I thought monuments to the founders deserved more credit than those honoring Confederates. One group created the union; the other group would destroy the union rather than give up slavery.

But Norris makes us uncomfortably aware how Washington, champion of independence, kept 300 human beings in abject dependence on him. First, Norris draws our attention to names of some who lived and served most closely to George and Martha: Austin, Moll, Giles, Ona Judge, Paris, Hercules, Joe, Richmond, Christopher Sheels, and William Lee. Did loving parents name these people at birth, or did enslavers tag them? Either way, looking at the names, you've got to sense individual character and personal potential that slavery cutailed.

I've been to Mt. Vernon and toured the spaces where its black population lived and worked. I've read lengthy biographies. But Norris's point is well-taken, that slavery was not just incidental to Washington and his peers, but essential. Their eloquent spokesman Patrick Henry riled up his fellow Virginians for war by casting the British as enslavers: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" They knew that life enslaved wasn't worth living, yet suppressed that knowledge every single day of their lives. I remember reading a note from Henry to a friend, about the irony of his most famous line. Henry wrote that he would free his slaves, if only it weren't so "inconvenient" to do so.

While Washington projected himself as benevolent lord to these people, we can see the shadow of the lies he told himself. When those serving him in Philadelphia came close to earning their freedom under a Pennsylvania law, George and Martha went to extraordinary lengths to swap them for others back at Mt. Vernon. Wanting to believe that their laborers prospered under their care, George and Martha reacted with relentless fury to recapture one who got away, Martha's personal servant Ona Judge. Yes, Washington saved up to free and provide property for those he enslaved, but not those jointly owned by his wife, and not until his death. The creepiest detail in Norris's article is a photograph of Washington's false teeth: Not wood, as schoolchildren are told, but human teeth extracted from nine people of his own plantation. A note in his ledger shows how he got them cheap off his own people, paying them a fraction of what the dentist usually paid to get teeth. The payment must have eased Washington's conscience more than it compensated their pain.

Should statues of Washington come down? The Washington Archives webpage about Washington's teeth acknowledges the probable truth of Norris's story, while reminding us how Washington to set the course for civilian, elected, law-abiding government in the new United States. The hope of this nation and of the world abides in those values: I want Washington's best side to be known. But I'd also like to know more about Austin, Moll, Giles, Ona Judge.... 

[I reached a different conclusion in an essay "Disarming Confederate Memorials" (08/2017). It begins with the anecdote of a mother, rancorously divorced, who chose to display mementos of her married life rather than deny her son reminders of his own past.]
<

Firebombing and Force: What's "Strong?"

Both sides - the demonstrators who told WABE "we tried non-violence and it didn't work [so] burn [Atlanta] down!" and the President who threatened looters with "thousands and thousands" of armed soldiers and "vicious attack dogs" -- are deluding themselves that one great show of strength will end the problem once and for all.

To impose discipline once and for all, I did the worst things I've ever done -- hitting the dog, losing my temper at a student. Even when you get the satisfaction of feeling your power over others, their fear of you builds a reservoir of rage and resentment. Whatever you hoped for -- a loving pet, students eager to learn from you, a community of mutual trust and respect -- you've doomed it. Next time, the demonstrations of power on both sides will be even more destructive.

Our President called governors "weak" and threatened to override them with "strength." He said, "You're dominating or ... you're a jerk." In response, commentator George F. Will called the President a "weak person’s idea of a strong person, [a] chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities" (June 1).

If our President were to open the Bible he brandished the other night, he might see numerous times when his kind of "strength" failed God Himself, when awesome force failed to make His people do right once and for all. God tried expulsion from Eden, a world-wide flood, fire from heaven, and opening the earth to swallow the rebels. Psalm 78 alone gives 72 verses' worth of God's forceful actions that didn't have lasting effect. It works the other way, too: when emperors exerted force to make the Jews bow down to them once and for all, the Jews refuse, dance in the furnace, sleep beside lions, and light the menorah.

Jesus lived under oppression from his birth to his death. The massacre of babies at his birth was to protect Herod's claim to the throne; the crucifixion was to stop the Jesus movement once and for all. Theologian Howard Thurman, mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., outlines how other Jews resisted Roman oppression. Some, such as Herod and the much-reviled tax collectors, cooperated with the Romans; the Pharisees enforced Jewish identity and separation from the Romans; the Zealots advocated violent insurrection. Among the apostles of Jesus were some from each group. Thurman shows how each of their ways came with an intolerable cost, from loss of self-respect to violent retribution.

Jesus offered another kind of strength: radical respect for the other, love on a societal scale. Jesus stood up, told the truth to the religious and political authorities, but did not shun Nicodemus the Pharisee nor the Roman centurion whose daughter was ill. At the start of his ministry, Jesus refused Satan's temptation to bring about the kingdom of God by power. Jesus exalted the poor and weak and welcomed outcasts and foreigners. Asked would he forgive anyone as many as seven times, he replied, "Seventy times seven." When Peter defended him, Jesus commanded Peter to put the sword away. Hanging from the cross, he was mocked for having power to save others but not himself.

In our present context, what would Jesus' kind of strength look like? Our creator "became flesh and dwelt among us," says John's Gospel. I imagined what would happen if police officers facing a crowd were to take off their armor, put down their weapons, and join the demonstration. To my surprise, I learned that's what happened in Flint, Michigan and other places around the country. [See collage]

So, once again, the second time in just a couple of weeks, a camera has broadcast the killing of an unarmed black man by white men confident the state will back any white man who claims to have felt threatened by a black man. Once again, while politicians express dismay at the most recent killing, some (such as the President's spokesman Jake Tapper) deny that this kind of event happens routinely.  Once again, both sides face off.

Once and for all, can we agree that there's a better way?

Blogposts of related interest:
• Racism is about fear before it's about hate (07/2016)
• Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited: Real Prophecy. (12/2015)
• A year before George Will called the President a "weak person's idea of a strong person," I wrote how this president is a 13-year-old boy's idea of a great leader: America's First Teen President and Other Adolescent Power Fantasies (07/2019).

"Deep Gloom Enshrouds the Nations" - Isaiah 60.1-3

"Arise, shine, for your light has come!" sings Isaiah in one of the canticles offered in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer for morning worship. I've loved this "Third Song of Isaiah" for its positive vision, so much a part of American history from 1630 onwards, of a people whose way of life is a light to the nations. [I've considered America through the lens of this canticle other times: Does God Bless America? (07/2017), and City on a Hill: Vision for America (06/2018)]

But these days, I've had to pause and shudder at the second verse:

For behold, darkness covers the land.
A deep gloom enshrouds the nations.

I'll admit that I, privileged to have a home, and work, and my health, have not felt so gloomy.

• My friend Jason has sent me a mask and daily updates of pandemic statistics that show some stabilization.
  
• My students have settled into a routine of writing for me and each other on a website discussion board and checking in for Zoom meetings that usually leave me feeling better for having seen and heard the kids.
  
• Brandy has loved having me home, and we take daily walks with our friend Susan.
  
• Caregivers at Arbor Terrace, plus Visiting Angels Laura and others, keep Mom company day and night. When Laura has helped me to communicate on WhatsApp, Mom hasn't been aware that she hasn't seen me in weeks.
  
• Though the county has closed down the Silver Comet Trail, I've been able to ride the 38 mile Stone Mountain loop once or twice a week as the weather has warmed.

For an introverted guy whose idea of the good life is writing on my blog, walking my dog, riding my bike, and closing each day with drinks, dinner, and a good book, this new life isn't so bad.

But then Susan remarked off-handedly, "We're all grieving." She didn't have to explain; I immediately teared up. I'm grieving for the way life was, the things I thought I could count on, the plans I'd made -- all gone. The wait staff who knew us by sight, the launderer who has delivered me clothes, washed and pressed for each week of classes - that's all gone, and they're hurting, I know.

Then there's the news. Every day, I'm hearing of deaths nearby and far away, a world in distress; food banks depleted; doctors overwhelmed here and abroad. NPR and our local NPR station WABE give us personal interviews with people "on the front lines," kind and courageous, but sometimes desperate.

In the past three days, I've had glimpses of a coming Zombie apocalypse, fomented by purveyors of conspiracy theories calling for getting out your guns to fight social distancing. I threw away a respectable-looking faux newspaper, its contents entirely meant to whip up indignation at China and, by extension, people of Chinese descent.

I've got to believe that most of us still know that science is true regardless of who believes in it, and that most of us still carry around in our hearts Isaiah's words, part of our American DNA:

Nations will stream to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawning...

Violence will no more be heard in your land, ruin or destruction within your borders.

You will call your walls, Salvation, and all your portals, Praise.

Fear NotFr. Roger Allen, speaking in a prayer service taped before no audience in our church's small Lawrence chapel, drew our attention to a line in today's gospel that I'd overlooked. It's the story we always read in the second Sunday of Easter, when Jesus appears to the disciples and offers his wounds for doubting Thomas to touch. Fr. Roger focused on the line that set up the story: "The doors were shut." Immediately we see the relevance for us, behind our closed doors, watching Roger speak from the locked-up church.

Jesus says to the disciples, "Peace be with you." Roger takes comfort from that, but adds that we are not to be recipients of peace only.

Peace that comes from faith, and care for others, are things we can offer, even at a social distance.

Little Piston Illuminates Big Picture: NPR's Positive Story

"No rant, no rage, no hype" says a self-promo at National Public Radio, and that sums up about half of the reason I listen to NPR. The network's amiable staff also work hard to find positive human angles on the stories of the day.

Boy, did I need to hear Morning Edition's airing of "The Parable of the Piston" from NPR's Planet Money podcast.

To get a handle on the world-wide effort to combat this pandemic, reporters Kenny Malone and Karen Duffin looked at one tiny piece that will go into the hundreds of thousands of ventilators that must be produced over the next few weeks, and one man involved in that effort, Todd Olson.

[Photo: The piston. From the Twitter feed of NPR's Planet Money podcast.]

We first hear Olson in his apology. "I've been working till about 10, 11 o'clock at night, so you might just have to make me work till midnight." CEO of Twin City Die Castings Company, he's used to more predictable hours, making car parts for GM and Ford.

Then he received a call from GM to join in nationwide effort to supply some 700 different parts that go into a single ventilator. He was eager join a life-saving mission called "Project V" (for "Ventilator"), joking that the name made him feel "like James Bond."

For the reporters, he explained the technical considerations to make a mold for these small integral parts, and the risk if the measurements were off by a fraction of a millimeter. As the reporters recorded him, he described the very first piston off the assembly line. He's ecstatic when it works. Then we hear...

OLSON: Well, those are the first piston parts for Project V - part of history right now. I'm going to get out of their way here. They've got some work to do. And...

MALONE: OK. How are you feeling right now?

OLSON: I'm feeling awesome. This is pretty cool. We've been in business a hundred years, and this might well be our biggest moment in a hundred years.

MALONE: That is quite a statement, Todd.

OLSON: Yep.

So, that little piece of history fits into the big picture of hundreds of thousands of people behind the front lines of the battle against the pandemic. NPR and our local station WABE have been playing us interviews with a truck driver proud of carrying loads of sanitizer and paper products where they're needed, and a nurse who understands why people "part like oil on water" when he steps into the grocery store wearing his (clean) scrubs. These are alleviating my anxiety and weariness with bad news.

Addendum: A few days later, NPR's Here and Now featured a music critic's classical picks for pick-me-ups, all from Russia. After some Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov, she played Stravinsky's Firebird. After some percussive early parts of the ballet, she skipped to the finale, when "this solo horn rises from the orchestra." I started to tear up. As the music swelled, the interviewer Robin Young narrated what she imagined, everyone's throwing open their windows and coming out into the warmth, COVID-19 gone. I was sobbing. Does any other radio station do that? Nah. (And, of course, thank you, Stravinsky.)

Other recent responses to stories on NPR:

• "Trans Eye for a Bible Guy" (03/2020) appreciates an episode of It's Been a Minute featuring Sam Sanders' interview with the author of "Dear Prudence" program about the observation that the Bible is full of people who are, in a way, "trans."
• "Look into Residente" (03/2020) reports on Maria Hinajosa's extensive interview with this Puerto Rican hip-hop artist on her wonderful program Latino USA.
• "Christmas Present: Rosemary Clooney on Fresh Air" (12/2019) responds to a re-broadcast of a wonderful on-stage interview between Terry Gross and the famous singer in the late 1990s.

The World's Fastest Man: Biography of Cyclist Major Taylor

When you stand with a crowd cheering closely-matched rivals, you may feel your own heart race in sympathy with the athletes. But when you read about a contest held 120 years ago, and your heart rate shoots up anyway, what explains that?

Your heart will race for The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero. Author Michael Kranish achieves this in chapter 14.


Before then, Kranish chronicles the life of young Marshall Taylor, son of a Civil War veteran, who earned the nickname "Major" doing stunts on bikes to promote a cycling shop. Coached by a white man, former cycling champion Louis "Birdie" Munger, Major Taylor trains with determination and perseverance, competing whenever possible -- when white men would allow him. Taylor repeatedly faced cycling star Eddie "Cannon" Bald, famous for hanging back in the slip stream of a pack and then passing all with an explosive surge at the last minute. Taylor stunned Bald with his own surge, his "jump."

By chapter 14, Major Taylor is a controversial star in America's most popular, most lucrative, sport:

Now time and money and athleticism had made him into a marvel of a man: muscular, handsome, well groomed, clean shaven. He took great care in his clothing, being able to afford the most fashionable suits, usually of three pieces, a watch on his wrist, a hat to be doffed upon entrance. He delighted in sitting at the piano, playing popular tunes and composing his own music. He wrote poetry and became an amateur photographer... He was also a man of deep faith, entrusting that God would watch over him as he regularly risked his life in such a dangerous sport. (Kranish 150)

Kranish often pauses the hero's life story for a lateral view of his world, so that we appreciate not just one athlete's stats, but what his wins and losses meant as the 20th century approached. Whites north and south were clawing back the gains blacks had made during Reconstruction. Democratic President Grover Cleveland accepted the supremacists' narrative that Southerners were magnanimous in "forgiving" blacks the indignities whites suffered during Reconstruction (48).


Major Taylor threatened the prevalent white supremacist dogma. An editorial in Cycling Life, bearing a cartoon of an ape on a bicycle, asserted that the black man is "a creature of today... a lazy, happy-go-lucky animal" unworthy of competition with whites, and unlikely to afford the $2 entrance fee to race, anyway (50). Taylor proved his stamina finishing 1787 miles in six days of continuous riding -- any time off for sleeping or eating was ad hoc -- before a sellout crowd at a New York velodrome, finishing 8th after a crash in the last 30 minutes. [See The Six Day Race, a video re-enactment of that event.]


Someone defending their identity can't accept facts. If they can't deny a fact, they have to destroy it. Taylor so threatened the white men's identity that a white man who finished after Taylor at the next big race strangled him into unconsciousness before Taylor even got off his bike (97). Southern cyclists refused to compete in a race that Taylor was expected to win and promised to harm him (98).


Racism in one way benefitted Taylor throughout his career, as any race promoted as the showdown between white and black drew huge crowds in the USA, Europe, and Australia.


Such was the case with the rematch between Taylor and a French rider named Edmond Jacquelin in May of 1901, detailed in Kranish's Chapter 14. Jacquelin had mocked Taylor after defeating him at their first match. Who will win the title of World's Fastest Man is answered in the book's title, but Kranish puts us in the saddle to appreciate what it takes for Taylor to do it, and the set up makes victory so satisfying.

[Photograph: Before their rematch, confident Jacquelin offered a handshake with a smirk. Taylor kept his game face on.]

Not long after, one white man named Kimble, outspoken racist defeated by Taylor, does an unexpected thing. With his hand on Taylor's shoulder, Kimble squares off against Taylor's nemesis Floyd McFarland, who colluded with other riders in attempts to beat Taylor. "Yes, Major Taylor did defeat me, and he didn't have to run me off the track or foul me to do it, either."

Taylor was stunned as Kimble continued to face down McFarland. "I do not consider it a disgrace to be beaten by him because he always does it fairly and that is more than any of you can do," Kimble said. Shaking Taylor's hand, he continued, "Major Taylor, I congratulate you on winning this championship race. You're the fastest and squarest man among us" (209).

From this pinnacle, the story slopes downward, as auto racing and other diversions eclipse cycling in popularity. Bitterness at continuous racism estranges his beloved wife Daisy and Sydney, their daughter born in Australia [family pictured below].

Kranish keeps the story interesting, always with those sidelong looks to the broader culture. Among the things about cycling itself that struck me:

• Mark Twain wrote, "Get a bicycle. You won't regret it, if you live" (42).
• New York's young police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt established a bicycle unit capable of outspeeding and outmaneuvering thieves on horseback (84).
• A black fan of Taylor's, injured during a bike race, became a champion boxer, Jack Johnson (253).
• Brakes were an afterthought to the bicycle, as were helmets. When Taylor landed on his head and failed to finish the race, commentators had no concept of concussion; they attributed his poor finish to insufficient training (201).
• At first, cars were considered a fad, noisy, smelly, and dangerous compared to the elegant bicycle (197).

Kranish, Michael. The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero. New York: Scribner, 2019.