Black History Month?
Jesus says to be reconciled before coming to the altar. A
day. A week. A month. Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday. Negro History Week.
Black History Month. And still. So much yet to reconcile. Can a Day, a Week, or
a Month bring about the necessary reconciliation? How about a Year?
Consider: King was assassinated in 1968. It took until 1983
before President Reagan signed the King holiday into law. It was first observed
three years later. And, it was first observed in all 50 states in the year 2000.
In 1926 the historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of
Negro History and life announced the second week of February to be “Negro
History Week” – chosen because it coincided with the birthdays of Abraham
Lincoln on February 12 and Frederick Douglas on February 14, both of which were
already being celebrated in black communities since the late 19th
century.
Black History Month was first proposed by black educators and
the Black United Students at Kent State University in February 1969. The first
celebration of Black History Month took place at Kent State one year later,
from January 2, 1970 – February 28, 1970. Just two months later, on May 4, The
Kent State Shootings took place. It was six years later that President Ford
recognized Black History Month during the celebration of our nation’s
Bicentennial. He urged Americans to "seize the opportunity to honor the
too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of
endeavor throughout our history".
Despite their being no scientific, genetic or biological difference
among human beings – that The
Concept of Race is a Lie – the lies persist and there is still much to
reconcile. The truth is that we are all one human family that had its origins
in Africa. There is no such thing as race – only racism. A day, a week or a
month is not getting the job done. Therefore, I will spend A Year – A
year of reading literature by authors of other cultures.
I read a lot. A lot of white-folks literature. Poetry from
Masefield to Wendell Berry to Mary Oliver. Literature from Joyce to James to
Banville. I got a head start back in 2012 when I picked up a book of poetry by
Tracy K. Smith, an African-American woman: Life On Mars. The book is inspired
by her father, a space engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope, and what
its like to be of African descent living in America which once claimed that “all
men are created equal.” Smith’s book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, and she
was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 through 2019. In My God Its
Full Of Stars, she writes:
When my father worked on the
Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons:
scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room cold,
and bright white.
He’d read Larry Niven at home,
and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink.
These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on
The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children.
My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye,
hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone
asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly
at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground,
we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles
married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things.
The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back
blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all its cheerful engineers,
my father and his tribe. The second time
The optics jibed. We saw to the
edge of all there is –
So brutal and alive it seemed to
comprehend us back.
In Smith’s latest book, Wade In The Water, she assembles
“found poems,” one fashioned out of letters from slaves sent to fight in the
Civil War and their families. The following is a letter from Annie Davis of Bel
Air, MD, Aug 25th, 1864 to Abraham Lincoln:
Mr President It is my Desire to be free to go see my people on the eastern shore
my mistress wont let me you will please let me know if we are free
and what i can do
This idea of mine began when at our diocesan book store, St
Bede’s, I picked up a book of essays on what it’s like to be
African-American living in America today, The Fire This Time – an homage
to the James Baldwin classic, The Fire Next Time, about African-American
life in Baldwin’s USA (1962) which drove him, and myriad other black artists to
spend most if not all their time in Europe where their talents were more widely
and readily recognized and accepted. The essays in The Fire This Time
are all by contemporary black writers in America today, most of whom I had never heard of because…I tend to
buy books by white people. It’s edited by Jesmyn Ward, winning author of the National
Book Award, for Salvage The Bones. A Year of reading literature like
this may help, I thought. So here’s my starting list:
Write This Second: A Poetic Memoir, by Kira Lynne
Allen:
What Is A Home Language Poem To A
Girl Who’s Never Belonged Anywhere
Not white/never white like Mama/Not
black/ never black enough like Daddy/the one who never stays/In 1964/ Bonnie
and Bobby become parents who love each
other/but live in fear of anti-miscegenation laws/moving from place to
place/dodging bullets bombs fires/living in a war zone together/In 1966/a year
before the federal law changes they marry/ but by ’69 their resolve crumbles and
they divorce/Still no one in her extended family embraces the child/the living
evidence of an illegal birth/Not the white side in Utah/ they say her mother is
invisible/so she doesn’t exist/Not the black side in Oakland/ they say her
father is a traitor/so to them she talks funny/ In 1971 the sleepy town of Mill
Valley/burns her house down/drives her and her mama out…
Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi: beginning in 18th
century Ghana, two half sisters are born into different villages unaware of
each other. One marries an Englishman who lives in the Cape Coast Castle, the
departure point for many slave ships. The other is captured in a raid on her
village and imprisoned in the same castle and sold into slavery. Her daughter,
Ness, is purchased by one Tom Allan who decides she is too pretty to be a field
hand and has her dress as a house slave. She comes out to meet Tom’s wife:
She walked out to her audience of two, her shoulders
bared, as well as the bottom halves of her calves, and when Susan Stockham saw
her, she fainted outright. It was all Tom Allan could do to catch his wife while
shouting at Margaret [another house slave] to change Ness at once. Margaret
rushed her into the back room, and left in search of field clothes, and Ness
stood in the center of that room, running her hands along her body, reveling in
her ugly nakedness. She knew it was the intricate scars on her bare shoulders
that had alarmed them all, but the scars weren’t just there. No, her scarred
skin was like another body in and of itself shaped like a man hugging her from behind,
with his arms hanging around her neck. They went up from her breasts, rounded
the hills of her shoulders, and traveled the full, proud length of her back.
They licked the top of her buttocks before trailing away into nothing. Ness’s
skin was no longer skin really, more like the ghost of her past made seeable,
physical. She didn’t mind the reminder. [p 73-74]
A Good Cry, Nikki Giovanni, what we learn from Tears and
Laughter;
The Past…The Present…The Future
There is really nothing/We can
do/About the Past/ We cannot be unraped/ We cannot or at least/ Should not take
back/Degrees because we no longer like the person/There can be no Justice/Only
Revenge/…We cannot undo/The past/ Not the people who kidnapped/Not the people
who sold/Nor bought/ Not the ships in which we languished/Nor the buses upon
which we had to stand/While others took/Our seats until/One woman said No/We stand
for the future/We embrace Peace/Not mongers for War/We cannot undo/The past we
can build/The future/Where we go/To Mars we send/A Black woman/Because she will
make friends and sing a song/With them/When we go to Pluto/Which will be again/A
planet/We send Black children/To learn to ski/When we decide/It is time/To
thank the Deity/ For our food…our shelter…our health/We will all…no matter
which/Ideology…wrap our arms/Around each other/And be glad we live…at this
time/On/This Earth
Collected Poems 1974-2004, Rita Dove, US Poet Laureate
1993-95:
Ripont
We were enroute to the battlefields
of the 369th
The Great War’s Negro Soldiers
who it was said fought like
tigers
joking as the shells fell around
them
so that the French told the
Americans
Send us more like these and they
did and so
the Harlem Hellfighters earned
their stripes
in the War To End All Wars
…
We made out the year of the
battle the name of the town
a bugle sounded as two old
soldiers laid down a wreath
and only then did we notice the
memorial stone
with the date today’s
and the names of the fallen
both the French and the Negro…
Tsunami vs the Fukushima 50, poems by Lee Ann
Roripaugh
radioactive man
the papers started calling me
Radioactive Man after tests from
the Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency
revealed the highest radiation
levels
in anyone they’d ever screened
I guess I’m the champion, I joke
to reporters who come for
interviews
like visitors from another
planet
bulky and brightly awkward
in white hazmat suits, they look
like mourners at a Buddhist
funeral
…
I’ve seen terrible things:
cages filled with withered songbirds,
horses left to starve in their
stalls,
an abandoned puppy that grew
too big for the chain around its
neck
I rescue as many as I can:
the dog trapped inside a barn
for months who survived eating
the dead flesh of starved cattle
or the feral ostrich so vicious
the police who border patrol
the nuclear exclusion zone
armed with Geiger counters
nicknamed her The Boss
…
I wait for the cancer or
leukemia
and joke to The Boss about
becoming a superhero through
a radioactive ostrich bite
…
I remember I can see my future
in the sick animals I care for
Eye Level, poems, Jennie Xie:
I enter Wat Langka to sit
To still the breath
A steadying out and in, out and
in
Still, here in this country,
something I can never enter
…
Can it be that nothing
is as far as here?
Just look!
How much past we have
to cover this evening –
Come to think of it,
don’t forget to pick
off this self and that self
along the way.
Though that’s not right –
You spit them out like pits
Traveling and traveling,
but so much interior
unpicked over by the eyes
Nothing is as far as here.
Be Recorder, poems and essays by Carmen Gimenez
Smith:
Origins
People sometimes confuse me for
someone else they know
because they’ve projected an
idea onto me. I’ve developed
a second sense for this – some call
it paranoia, but I call it
the profoundest consciousness on
the face of the earth.
This gift was passed on to me
from my mother who learned it from
solid and socially constructed
doors whooshing inches from her face.
It may seem like a lie to anyone
who has not felt the whoosh, but
a door swinging inches from your
face is no joke. It feels like being
invisible, which is also what it
feels like when someone looks
at your face and thinks you’re
someone else. In graduate school
a teacher called me by another
woman’s name with not even
brown skin, but what you might
call a brown name. That sting
took years to overcome, but I
got over it and here
I am with a name that’s at the front
of this object, a name
I’ve made singular, that I spent
my whole life making.
I purchased the first edition of Maya Angelou’s I Know
Why The Caged Bird Sings in 1969 in the college book store. I still weep
when I read and re-read the chapter depicting a rural country store with one
radio and black people from the area huddled around the radio listening to Joe
Louis become the heavyweight champion “of the world.” What that meant for them
that night is difficult to imagine. The chapter concludes, “It would be an
hour or more before the people would leave the Store and head for home. Those
who lived too far had made arrangements to stay in town. It wouldn’t do for a
Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when
Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.” [p132]
We try to sum this all up in a day, a week or a month. Who
are we kidding? We wake up each morning to more stories of White Nationalism.
More stories of Klan marches. More stories of mass shootings, mass
incarcerations. More stories of racist graffiti. In the wake of the El Paso
shooting and other white supremacist-motivated attacks, just recently the
Department of Homeland Security has added white supremacy to its list of
domestic terrorism threats, marking the first time since the creation of the
department post-9/11 that it has emphasized white nationalist domestic
terrorism as a threat on par with that posed by foreign groups.
Can a year of reading literature by other-than-white people
make a change? The kind of change we still hope a day, a week or a month might
make? I try to imagine, as the Hebrew Prophets urge us to imagine, what the world
could be like if we would realize we are all sisters and brothers. There is no
such thing as race. That all people are created equal. That we really can love
our neighbor – and our enemies. Black history is our history. Is our story.
Until we know our story, the whole story, how can we even be reconciled within
ourselves, let alone among our selves? We need to hear one another’s stories to
be reconciled. We need to listen other voices.
“…So, when you are offering your gift at the altar, if
you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your
gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or
sister, and then come and offer your gift.” – Matthew 5: 23-24
I have to wonder sometimes: How do we dare to come to the
altar of the Lord with so much left un-reconciled?
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