Gotham City Soul

MLK Out of Context, and In

2012-01-16T11:39:00.001-05:00

Every year that Martin Luther King's birthday arrives I am reminded of our national penchant for putting Dr. King into a more andmore profound and iconic deep freeze. This may upset some reading this, but I’ma big fan of a moratorium on the “I Have a Dream” speech, an idea first putforth by Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Heis also a Baptist minister and the author of the 2000 book I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr., abook that dares to reveal Dr. King as multi-dimensional, a human being who mademistakes, but whose herculean and ultimately selfless effort to help the poor,downtrodden, and disenfranchised of the Earth far outweighed his personalflaws.

It’s not the speech—a speech that was actually first given on June 23,1963, in Detroit during a memorial for race riots that had occurred in thatcity in 1863 and 1894—two months before his famous oration during the March onWashington. It’s the co-opting and commodification of the speech that rubs meso very much the wrong way. Those few lines we hear over an over are soliterally interpreted by some as to paint King as someone who would make nodistinctions based on race, the logical conclusion being that he would have notsupported programs and laws passed to bring about equality among the races.

Aclose read of King’s book Why We Can’tWait tells us otherwise: “I am proposing, therefore, that, just as wegranted a GI Bill of Rights to war veteran, America launch a broad-based andgigantic Bill of Rights of the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege ofdenial,” King wrote. “Such a bill could adapt almost every concession given tothe returning solider without imposing an undue burden on our economy. A Billof Rights for the Disadvantaged would immediately transform the conditions ofNegro life. The most profound alteration would not reside so much in thespecific grants as in the basic psychological and motivational transformationof the Negro.” King did go on to include aiding the poor of all races,stressing the need of poor whites.

Dyson’s call for a moratorium on “I HaveA Dream” was about allowing the rest of King’s ideas to come off of thesidelines for a chance to be heard, taught, understood, and acted on. One ofthese was his opposition to the military action in Southeast Asia better knownas the Vietnam War. I knew about it, but hadn’t given it any deep thought untilI read the text to his speech called “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In it he, among other things, outlines what the U.S. must do to disengage from the Southeast Asia conflict.

He delivered the speech at a meeting of clergy and laity at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, the same year that Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted because of the war, and one year to the day from his assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.In the pocket of the dying man was a type written paper titled “The TenCommandments of Vietnam.” His widow, Coretta Scott King, delivered a speech based on those commandments in New York City, a mere few weeks after his death.

Soul Mining with Sacha & Deepak

2011-10-04T12:47:00.008-04:00

This is my amazing friend Sacha Jones, whom I love very much. I have things that I want to tell you about her but, for now I want to tell you about some things I heard a few Sundays back, things that made me sit in a content silence after I heard them and smile into the soft dark of my living room, things I would not have heard if Sacha had not invited me along with her that day.

Because I don’t want you to turn away from this piece, I’ll keep it simple and quick and not tell you everything. Just the highlights. I learned that my consciousness is a collection of karma, memories, and desire. Isn’t that beautiful?

I learned that I must learn to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity and unpredictability. I can be alright without knowing the very next thing. I don’t have to act immediately on every “problem” that comes along. I don’t have to understand everything right away. Sometimes I can do nothing, and nothing is fine—I can’t tell you how that takes the pressure off.

I learned never to ignore a coincidence.

As a young girl I used to examine every coincidence closely, but years of negative responses from people around me telling me to brush it off as nothing made me start to ignore these odd occurrences.

What is it with people when it comes to the extraordinary, the magical, the mysterious? Why is the idea of something incomprehensible or unknowable, or simply more intelligent than us so upsetting to some? Especially when there are so many things here on Earth that many of us can’t comprehend—take String Theory, for instance—should we be afraid of that, brush that off, too, because most of us can't understand it or it doesn't fit into our scheme of things? Can’t we be rational and spiritual creatures at the same time? Einstein certainly could.

So I had lost the art of looking at coincidences. Then I heard Deepak Chopra tell me to pay attention and I found it again.

Deepak Chopra, September 2011

You can tune out now if you want to. But this is me, your friend. Audrey. I am telling you this. Not a psychic, or a guru, or a shaman, or a priest(ess) or anyone. It's me. I want all of you whom I love to know these few things I learned.

Because I couldn’t write fast enough to catch everything he said, I found a quote from Chopra’s book "The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire" In it he says

"When a coincidence arises, don’t ignore it. Ask yourself, What is the message here? What is the significance of this? You don’t need to go digging for the answers. Ask the question, and the answers will emerge. They may arrive as a sudden insight, a spontaneous creative, or they may be something very different. Perhaps you will meet a person who is somehow related to the coincidence that occurred. An encounter, a relationship, a chance meeting, a situation, a circumstance will immediately give you a clue to its meaning. “Oh, so that’s what it was all about!” The key is to pay attention and inquire."

"Live the question. Life will move you into an answer," is what Chopra told us and I have since experienced a coincidence, just this past Sunday evening, and I paid attention to it, and it did me good.

I learned all of this at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s conference that Sacha invited me to. She is a graduate of the Institute and a marvelous holistic health counselor. I came to her as a client and found a dear friend. If it seems like I’m shamelessly promoting Sacha. I am! Not because she took me with her to see Deepak Chopra but because she has so lovingly come along with me on my journey, helping, educating, guiding me, and I want to share her with you, my dear ones. Visit Sacha here

Art in the City: the Spiral Show at the Studio Museum in Harlem

2011-08-14T23:28:00.007-04:00

Godzilla, 1966, by Emma Amos

I've been meaning to get around to this, this little review of Spiral: Perspectives on an African-American Art Collective at the Studio Museum in Harlem. I'm including an excerpt from co-curator Emily G. Hanna's introduction to the original show, which opened at the Birmingham Museum of Art late last year (because I want to get this out to you now and it would take me a long time to craft suitable words to go with):

"In July 1963 Romare Bearden initiated conversations with fellow painters Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, and Charles Alston about the prospective role of African-American artists in the Civil Rights movement. While their original focus was the upcoming March on Washington, attention was also given to if, how, and to what degree artists might assume a meaningful placement within the social change platform of the overall movement. The discussions evolved into regular meetings at Bearden’s downtown New York Canal Street studio. Within a few weeks Spiral was established as a legitimate artist group that gathered at a rented location at 147 Christopher Street. By this time Emma Amos, Calvin Douglass, Perry Ferguson, Reginald Gammon, Felrath Hines, Alvin Hollingsworth, William Majors, Richard Mayhew, Earl Miller, and James Yeargans had joined the initial four discussants.

Woodruff suggested the name Spiral for the group, referring to the Archimedean spiral that moves outward embracing all directions yet continually upward.

The name also alluded to the diversity of styles and interests represented by the work of its membership as they collectively sought to move toward common goals as individual artists and as African-American people. Although the group seldom operated out of unanimous consent, their clear objectives were to endeavor to define the nature of their participation in the Civil Rights agenda, raise questions about the essential requirements and pertinence of a racial aesthetic sensibility, and deliberate on responses to what prominent author Ralph Ellison referred to as ‘the new visual order.’"

West, 1965, by Richard Mayhew. Photo by Marc Bernier.

The show is a small, but potent one in the sense that what we were looking at was a declaration that the nature of a black artist's participation in the civil rights movement was to dismantle the idea that blacks create in lockstep. Norman Lewis asked, likely at one of the weekly Canal Street meetings, "is there a Negro Image?" To which Felrath Hines responded, "There is no Negro Image in the twentieth century—in the 1960s. There are only prevailing ideas that influence everyone all over the world, to which the Negro has been, and is, contributing. Each person paints out of the life he lives."

"Is there a Negro image?" is a question asked and answered nearly half a century ago, but still hotly debated today among artists.

I feel especially warm toward the show because the original exhibition was co-curated by artist, art historian, educator, film critic and curator Amalia Amaki. Some years back she was instrumental in putting me in touch with and coordinating an article for American Legacy on the late collector Paul R. Jones. She was delightful to work with. The entire time working with her I felt like I had picked up my art education where I left off all those years ago at Rutgers.

My favorite paintings at the Spiral show were by Richard Mayhew and Emma Amos, and a friend of mine really connected to Bonfire, 1962, by Norman Lewis. It's not shown here but is marvelous, so go see it and find what moves you. The show is open until October 23!

A postscript: Facebook members can view a video of artist and art educator Nashormeh Lindo discussing the 1963 March On Washington and Romare Bearden's support of artists involved in the Spiral Group brought to you by the Romare Bearden Foundation.

Credit: Courtesy of Studio Museum of Harlem. If I'm violating any copyright laws by showing images from the show, please let me know and I'll be happy to remove them, please note, thought, that I'm making absolutely no money off of this review. It's meant to inform and to send folks to the show.

Sun Moon Child

2011-08-14T14:45:00.001-04:00

A repost from a couple of years ago.

It seems that my job is keeping me away from Gotham City Soul, and that Friday's are for abbreviated blogs that lift the spirit. I have so many many things to write about, and when I can arrange my time, I'll be giving you more history, and culture and soul than you'll probably want to read. Until then, this morning Cousin Taroue Brooks sent this video, the song "Sun Moon Child is by Imani Uzuri, created by Pierre Bennu. Lovely.

Art Feeds the Soul: One Guy in Bed Stuy

2011-08-09T13:11:00.000-04:00

The Yusef Hawkins mural today.

This morning I was reminded of Yusuf Hawkins, the 16-year old Bed-Stuy youth who was killed by a white mob in Bensonhurst, New York, just for being black and in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was 22 years ago in August. But the reminder came in a positive story: A young white artist named Gabriel Specter, himself a resident of Bed Stuy is working to recreate the mural on a material called parachute cloth, to be attached to the original mural wall, which has, over the been painted over and has faded. I can't find a photo of the original mural. Specter is paying for materials out of his pocket, and this just does the heart good. Hear and read the story from NY1

Yusuf Hawkins, date unknown

As a sidenote: While I was searching for a mural image, I came upon a site with a painting called "The Murder of Yusef Hawkins." In the description underneath is the account of members of St. Dominic's Church in Bensonhurst laying a wreath of flowers on the site where Hawkins was murdered.

Eight youths faced charges stemming from the killing. One, Joseph Fama, was convicted of murder. He was 19 when he led the mob to kill Hawkins. He is 40 now. He will not be eligible for parole until 2022. Another youth, Keith Mondello, was acquitted of murder, but served time for lesser charges. After leaving prison he met with Yusuf's father to apologize and ask forgiveness.

A Park Most Wondrous

2011-07-11T15:06:00.009-04:00

The East River part has been slowly, slowly, getting a facelift, to the tune of millions of dollars, all well-deserved. Of all the parks in the city, it is my favorite, not just because of its proximity to my house (Tompkins Square Park, another favorite, is closer), but because it's so . . . normal. There are no testosterone-fueled packs of extreme cyclists ready to mow everyone down like in Central Park. The landscape doesn't feel inaccessible, like Bryant Park (when it wasn't being overrun by fashion week or some such). Sure it has been worn down in places, but that's been worked on to wonderful effect. The promenade is being rebuilt and we have access to the river again. Here's something I wrote about the park some years back.

It is a good park, the East River Park, measured not in acres, but in the sounds that it produces. First there are the obvious sounds. The big noise of Latin men playing the games of their childhood; Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans, baseball; Mexicans, and Guatemalans, and Ecuadorians, soccer. All the while a man with a microphone booms out game commentary in Spanish. Families ease themselves on the grass around the ball fields, barbecues sending up puffs of dark gray smoke that float over the infield.

There is the sound of the ices man dragging a metal scraper over a huge block of ice. For the hundredth time that summer he shouts out the flavors, and will shout them for one hundred more: Chocolate! Vainilla! Café, coco, anañas, pistachio, fresa, frambuesa! Límon, cereza melocoton y cremolata! provides a constant refrain for the less permanent sounds of the picnickers and ballplayers.

There is the nearly soundless huffing of dogs running off the leash, looking warily over their shoulders, respectful of their positions, and trying not to blow their great good fortune by scaring the humans in the park.

There are the sounds of tugboats toiling in the river, for now, a black and red one pulls a barge stacked with wood, and another, blue and yellow, trails behind. But there will be others, and other boats. Sailboats soughing through the water, and ocean liner types blasting their horns, baying at the island, and playing counterpoint to the car horns and rush of rubber tires across asphalt on the FDR drive. These are the sounds that girdle the park

In the body of the park are the sound of the birds. There are three sounds: that of the birds close and high in the ears, the persistent caw of the birds several hundred feet in, and the, low, slow strident call of the birds deep inside and far away. The sound of the birds defines the height and width, the depth and breadth. The sound of the birds givee knowledge of the park’s hugeness.

There is a place in the park that speaks louder than any other because of its complete absence of sound. There, tall, handsome trees stand west to east from the highway to the river, two parallel rows, reaching out their upper branches to embrace across a small avenue of pavement. Here no sound can come and remain. It can not bounce or echo or ring without being swallowed and silenced. This is where sounds come to die. I stand sometimes at the end of the lane of trees; this is my favorite place, the place I have privately named the via Dolorosa, the sorrowful street.

I stand sometimes before the short stretch to the lane of trees. With my hands to my sides and my head tilted up I take deep breaths, pulling in mown grass and wet leaves and the faint scent of car exhaust from the FDR drive. Across the highway I can see the fading red brick of the projects baking in the hot sun. I take some more breaths, then enter the avenue of trees, enjoying the momentary blindness and chill of it. It is dark and still except for one small, shivering point of sun that had bored through the canopy of leaves.

The lane of trees is one thing. But there's a the bridge, the wonderful Williamsburg Bridge, under which I could stand for hours, and a secret spot past the tennis courts that's just as beautiful as it can be. It's so peaceful and undisturbed, I almost don't want to tell you about it.

If you want the real details of the park, square acreage and whatnot, the Coastal Marine Resource Center Web site has some great information.

Thoughts About My Father

2011-06-19T08:40:00.011-04:00

For Father's Day I thought I'd post an excerpt from a memoir I am writing.

A thing I can look at, and do often, is a photo of my father that I took on our last trip together to his hometown of Battle, Alabama in May 2001. It is one of him sitting in a folk art gallery. It was located not far from where he grew up in Russell County, in the southeastern part of the state, not far from the Georgia border. He is sitting in a rocker, relaxed, and smiling. Primitive paintings done by local artists make a colorful backdrop. What I love about this picture of my dad so much is that I had coerced him into taking me to the gallery—really just a somewhat broken down general store run by a white man in his seventies, Frank Turner, who called himself the Mayor of Pittsview. Dad, because he had a father’s heart for a daughter, went along with my "art collecting" shenanigans, and we wound up standing in "The Mayor's" office. If you knew my father, you would know his tastes ran toward the Renaissance, Realism, and Norman Rockwell. Things that looked like chickens made it with their feet were not his thing. But he went along with me, his wacky daughter

Still dad tried, in vain, to get me to buy a landscape painting that he thought was "real peaceful and pretty," but I got a drawing of a dinosaur and a dancing man painted on an old shutter and even though he really didn't understand, I was so happy with my finds, and he was so happy that I was happy, he even paid for them, as a treat.

I snapped the picture after he bought me the art. You can see the twinkle in my dad's eyes; they say that just moments before he was able to indulge his daughter. Out of the frame is Frank Turner, who is preparing two glasses of elderberry wine. He tells us more than once he is a staunch Republican and is unapologetic. He and my father marvel at the idea that a black and a white who decades earlier would have not exchanged more than a few words, stayed in their own necks of the woods, were sharing a glass of homemade wine together. It was a sheer wonder to them as they sipped and chuckled in the land of Dixie.

A Gentile at the Seder

2011-04-20T08:10:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, I saw this on my twitter feed:

"questlove Questo of The Roots

Its just hittin me: as much jewish people I got on payroll, NADA ONE has invited me to the crib for dinner this week! #reUP?"

I laughed because I was thinking the same thing as Questlove: Where was my Passover dinner invitation? I have a number of close Jewish friends who love me, I know they do, yet nada. I understand that it is deeply spiritual and important celebration of the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. But I also know that Christians are allowed to participate, and years ago, some time in the early 1990s, I did participate in the only Passover seder I've ever been to.

At the time I was palling around with a young woman who is the daughter of a renowned television journalist. We had met over our dogs in Tompkins Square Park. It was a week or so before Passover and she was surprised to hear I'd never been invited to one meal by any of my Jewish friends. So she invited me and another mutual friend, assuring us that there would be at least one other Gentile at the table. Still, I was nervous. Big-time journalist in his brownstone on the Upper East Side where other big-time journalists and TV producers and the like would be.

It became one of the best spiritual experiences I've ever had.

I know the story of Passover and the delivering of the Israelites from Egypt, how could I not? I heard more than my share of Negro spirituals, some of the more well-known ones having to do with that very subject. I had seen the Ten Commandments. I had Jewish friends. I had read the Old Testament. I experienced a facsimile of a seder every Sunday at mass during the Eucharist. I understood the significance on an intellectual level.

There was a pre-dinner cocktail hour, the said famous journalist and his wife were the easiest, most gracious people, and the hardboiled news people, although intimidating, took it easy on the kid (I was in my early 30s already) at the Passover table, one doyenne of the newsroom whispering to me when to dip the horseradish in the salt water (the bitterness and tears of the Israelites in slavery) and eat it, nudging me to sip the kosher organic wine (which was delicious) during the recitation of the ten plagues that Moses visited upon the Egyptians to force the Egyptians to let the Israelites go, and smiling after I let out a big "phew!" after I finished reading my designated part of the Haggadah.

It was a smoking seder, announced at the start, and in between readings (we were told that the Haggadah reading led by the head of the household, would be passed around and each guest was required to participate), famous newsman would light up a cigarette, as did others. I don't remember exactly what was said during the meal, but I do remember that there was much laughter and merriment at the point when we drank through the plagues—I think I said "I have to take a sip after each plague?" "A big sip," beamed the newsman—I am convinced that bit was not regulation passover. I also remember whispering (in between bites of the matzoh bread, blessed in Israel) to the guy next to me, the other Gentile, also raised Catholic, that a few prayers here and there in the Haggadah sounded suspiciously like prayers said during mass.

From the Passover Haggadah:
"Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine."

From the Catholic mass:
"Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through you goodness we have this wine of offer, fruit of the vine and work of human hands. It will become our spiritual drink. Blessed be God forever."

The evening ended with the hunt, by us, the children (the youngest one there, the daughter of the newsman, was in her late twenties), for the afikomen, a bit of matzoh that is hidden and must be hunted, found, and returned to the Passover table for the dinner to conclude. My friend, the daughter, found it, and Passover came to an end. The room cleared out slowly and I found myself to be the reluctant last guest, alone in the dining room with famous newsman. He asked me if I had a good time, and I said yes. He smiled and eyes twinkling said, "my favorite part of being the host and the head of the Passover table is that I get to have the leftover wine after everyone's left," and he poured some more wine.

Ultimately, it was a magical evening, full of meditation on hard times, celebration of good times, and appreciation of life an overcoming challenges. We were on spiritual common ground, Jewish, Catholic, whatever. To me religion is the language that we use to speak to God.

For the basics about Passover dinner visit Judaism 101

The Passing of Manning Marable

2011-04-14T17:18:00.008-04:00

From: Manning Marable
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 4:55 PM
To: Peterson, Audrey
Subject: RE: Affirmative Action, Brown v. Board of Education, et. al

Dear Audrey,

Thanks for your email. I may have told you about my chronic illness, sarcoidosis, which my physician now says probably was responsible for elevating my calcium levels, which led to the creation of kidney stones. Anyway, the bad news is that I've just learned that the ilnness, which was in remission for seven years, is now active again, and I'm going to have to devote more time just to health maintenance.

To make a long story short, this means that I will need to cut back on some writing projects I wanted to do this summer, and unfortunately that included my article ideas for your magazine. Don't worry--I have a sabbatical leave in 2004 so I'm sure that I'll be able to contribute something of value to your excellent publication.

Yours,
Manning

-----Original Message-----
From: Peterson, Audrey [mailto:APeterson@forbes.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 4:21 PM
To: Manning Marable
Subject: RE: Affirmative Action, Brown v. Board of Education, et. al

Wow, I'm sorry about the attack--I hear they rank right up there with the worst pain a human can have.

We talked about a piece on affirmative action,Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Ed. etc. There were other things, too, but that was the first thing we talked about.

Audrey

From: Manning Marable
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 4:17 PM
To: Peterson, Audrey
Subject: RE: Affirmative Action, Brown v. Board of Education, et. al

Dear Audrey,

Thanks for your note. Several days after our lunch I fell victim to a severe attack of kidney stones. I was seriously out of commission for about a five days, but I'm fine again now.

I neglected to take notes during our conversation, so I don't immediately remember which of my ideas for articles was most interesting to you. Please jog my memory and I'll get back to you.

Manning

-----Original Message-----
From: Peterson, Audrey [mailto:APeterson@forbes.com]
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2003 1:23 PM
To: Manning Marable (E-mail)
Subject: Affirmative Action, Brown v. Board of Education, et. al

Hi, Manning,

Just checking in on what we talked about at the lunch. Are you still interested? Also, look for a package of books from me.

Talk to you soon!

Audrey

When I heard that the brilliant Manning Marable had died, I can't rightly describe to you how I felt. Sadder than I should have about a man whom I only knew professionally. Sad because I would not have another "annual" lunch in the dining room of Columbia University. Sadder still, though, for we the people, who had lost a gentleman and scholar of the highest order. All of the things that should be said about Manning have been said by people who knew him better and loved him more. My memories are small in comparison. I will tell you what, though. He was real, in every sense of the word. During our conversations, he always meant what he said. No subtext, although his beautiful mind was capable of layer upon layer of subtlety, interpretation, understanding.

He gave his vast knowledge to everyone, took time out of his incredibly busy schedule (he's left us scores of books and writings that will be invaluable to black scholarship, among them The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life). Just a few days after his death, he gave us Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which, according to a friend who was looking to buy a first edition at the Strand, is apparently in its third printing. There are those who are praising it; others are criticizing it as scurrilous and poorly researched.

I haven't read the book yet, so I cannot talk about it. What I can say is that from all of the conversations I had with Manning about his Malcolm X research, not once did he present information to me as fact without a credible source. Speculation was always purely off the record—he insisted (and there was some speculation that I could have easily printed in American Legacy to stir controversy and gain us much-needed press; it will be interesting to see if he was able to verify any of it and include it in his book). If he was trying to grab the spotlight, be a media whore, he was doing a poor job of it. This was a man who looked you straight in the eyes when he spoke. His charm was genuine but not always "turned on" for the cameras. Real.

I feel qualified in saying that Manning's goal has always been to reveal the full character and personality of Malcolm X, not perpetuate the two-dimensional icon. I learned that when we worked on a cover story on Manning's work on Malcolm for Legacy in 2002, right around the time when one of Malcolm's daughters lost his personal Koran and various other important papers because she defaulted on paying a storage charge. It was splashed all over the news, another one of Malcolm's progeny gone wrong, a topic in which mainstream media delights. I don't recall exactly what Manning said about it to me, but I remember his voice was full of empathy. And that was it.

I haven't read the book yet I know more about the homosexual affair Malcolm supposedly had with a white man than anything else in the 608-page book. I'm especially sad that people who should know better choose to talk about this over anything else. But then again, if not for the sensationalism, perhaps those who knew nothing about him would still not know what a national treasure Manning was and is. Mostly I wish he were here to get us back on track and refocus. I wish I could turn on NPR and hear his voice, or see him on Democracy Now! schooling us. I wish I could have one more lunch.

compressedmalcolm

Lent

2011-03-21T11:19:00.002-04:00

When I was kid, I was always encouraged to give something up for Lent. My mom would suggest we choose something that would be not so easy, like candy or our favorite television program (not that we were allowed to watch more than a couple of hours on the boob tube when we were young). Of course, we'd try to slide by with something that was easy to give up because we never really cared about it in the first place. The trick was to make everyone think it was a pretty important sacrifice. If you picked broccoli, or any vegetable or good-for-you food, you were sure to be shot down. Same went for an activity that you could live without--badminton or ping pong, for instance. You had to prove that you would feel it if it went missing.

I can't remember what my choices were as a child, or even as an adult. Which started me thinking some time ago about the entire concept of giving something up. I know it's supposed to make you a better person somehow, and I'm not knocking it--I just didn't know if my choice of sacrifice was improving me in any way.

Some years ago, I decided to scuttle the idea of giving something up for Lent in favor of doing acts of charity and kindness. I try to do something throughout the year (with more or less success, depending), but I've in the past several years made a particular effort during the Lenten season. This year, I'm going to change it up. I'm going to bring back an aspect of giving something up and combine it with a good deed. Until Palm Sunday, I will be volunteering my editing/writing skills to any of my close friends who might need them. Be it a letter, e mail, resume, cover letter, school paper (within limits!) grant, short story, essay--whatever--as long as it's legal, I'll do it.

That Was Naughty, This Is Nice

2010-12-13T10:34:00.003-05:00

Some years back I was recording some music for Christmas, which would be held at my brother’s house in Virginia and got knocked in the heart without warning when I clicked on Susser die Glocken nie Klingen. From the first notes I began to tear up. I think that my mother must have been playing these songs when I was in the womb (I was born in Germany). I never really learned the words, but could easily translate them if I wanted to. Here I am a black American woman crying at my computer over German Christmas songs. I have not been back to Germany since I was born, but the culture is so hardwired into my system that things German really get to me.

Christmas began with the first Sunday of Advent. Mom would pull out a little brass-plated Advent candle chime that I always thought was German, but turned out to be of Swedish origin. It has four candles and above them a merri-go-round type of contraption with angels and chimes hanging from it dangling from it. Inside the angels and chimes are bells attached to a center pole. The heat from the candles starts the angels dancing and the dangling chimes strike the bells as they spin around. It is rumored that this tradition was once only practiced by Swedish royalty. We also had one advent calendar each. Early on we had the beautiful paper kind with the lovely illustrations, then we started getting ones with chocolate for many years, even when I was in college I had one.

My Tante Adela and Onkel Gustav would send a big package every year with marzipan, stöllen, this marvelous bittersweet chocolate bottles filled with liquer. My mother made Christmas plates and we’d get lebkucken and pfeffernusse, basically gingerbread cookies with a white sugar glaze of which you were obliged to eat at least one, and spekaltius cookies in the shape of windmills. There would also be cards from everyone in Germany, which my mother would include with all the others on the archway between the living and dining rooms (a couple years we got some from inmates who were incarcerated where my father worked—as a correction’s officer; my mother hung those up with all the rest of them)

When the tree went up (after my mother and father went out and got it in the bitter cold from the tree farm), mom would pull out the ornaments. We had ones that had been given to us, ones my brother and I bought or made, but my favorites were always the ones my mother and father brought from Germany, ones they had bought during their very first Christmas. They are delicate glass ornaments, some abstract, others with a snowman or boy in ski cap. We had a tall star finial, like something at the top of the Chrysler Building to top the tree. My dad would, after much fussing string on the lights, then we would put on the ornaments and icicles. Usually, my mother had put on the Christmas music. Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and German Christmas songs—Es ist ein ros’ entsprungen, Stille Nach, O Tannenbaum, Alle Jahre Wieder, O du frohliche, Kling Glockchen, Susser der Glocken nie klingen.

On the table with our Christmas plates, or in the living room next to the advent candles was always a bowl, a beautiful one carved from a tree trunk with the bark on the outside of the bowl, with nuts—hazel, Brazil, almonds, walnuts, pecans, and a coconut in it. This was my father’s contribution. When he was a boy growing up in Alabama, he got oranges, apples, nuts and one or two gifts. Oranges were a big treat, even though he grew up one state up from Florida. So were any nuts that weren’t peanuts, or anything you couldn’t find in Alabama. So if a hazelnut or Brazil nut made its way into his hands, he was thrilled. He really appreciated the variety. My brother and I used to actually crack the nuts and eat them. I never understood the significance of the coconut; I think dad just liked the coconut for his own reasons and thought it should be included.

On Christmas Eve night we’d have gumbo for dinner (nod to dad’s Southern roots). My brother didn’t like it so Mom made him something else—but gumbo became an annual tradition. Then we’d go to church for Christmas Eve mass. That was always wonderful—the old Sacred Heart Church filled with incense. The altar covered with Christmas flowers. The priest in his gold and white robes. The church stuffed to the gills with the regulars and visiting families and the Christmas and Easter Catholics. The mass always opened with O Come All Ye Faithful. Even years later when I sang with St. Patrick’s Cathedral choir we’d start the mass with that great song. There was a lot of baby squalling, fidgeting, sniffling, coughing, whispering, reprimanding, giggling, snoring, dozing—there was life in that church. And everything always got quiet when our priest got to the point when Christ was born. The mass was extra long because twice as many people as usual had to go up to communion. You waved to the people you knew and nodded and smiled at the people you didn’t. After mass there’d be a running commentary about Mrs. So and So’s get up, or Mr. So and So’s annoying habit of stopping you in the doorway of the church to be nosy, and blocking all exiting traffic in the process.

Home to Christmas plates and eggnog, but before that, mom got out the Bible, and one of us, usually me because I was the oldest, had to read from the gospels. I think this happened more when we were younger. After the reading, we were allowed to open one, maybe two gifts, in a concession to my mother’s German childhood, when they opened all of the gifts on Christmas Eve.

This was when we were past the age of believing in Santa Claus, and my parents put the gifts out while we were still up and about. Before then we went to bed and they sneaked the presents out. Although I maintain to this day that I figured out that Santa was a fiction when I was four years old and figured out that the loot my mother was bringing out of Sears in plain brown bags and putting into the trunks, the same loot she hauled upstairs, was loot that eventually would be mine. I don’t know how I guessed it, probably the proximity to Christmas and the strangeness of bags and bags of stuff coming out of a place that I knew sold toys. Or I think I might have caught my mom at wrapping. Anyway, Mom tried to explain it away by saying that Santa couldn’t wrap all the presents and needed help from mommies and daddies. I didn’t buy it. My brother, on the other hand, believed in Santa for a normal period of time (although he is still bitter about the fact that I have a photo of me on Santa’s lap and he doesn’t. It isn’t as if my parents didn’t care—he was just terrified and wouldn’t go to Santa). Once Kenny understood the concept of Parents = Santa he did some snooping of his own, uncovering a Lionel train set less than 48 hours before Christmas and getting into loads of trouble for ruining the surprise.

Morning was either a happy 6 am surprise, or a bit later when we got older, but not that much. It’s fair to say that my mother has always been a very early riser, so she was sometimes up before we were, putting on coffee and excited for us to open our gifts. There would be nut bread and cranberry bread and stöllen, hard boiled eggs and lunch meats, mostly wursts and Westphalian ham, Swiss cheese, butter. When we were very little, gifts got opened first. But when we got older, we ate first, opened gifts afterward.

Ken and I would go at it pretty steadily with mom behind us, and dad hanging way back. He was always sort of shy about opening gifts for some reason. I think, no matter how far in life he got, he always appreciated the abundance, and never took it for granted. That reminds me of stories my mom told me about winter’s during the war (WWII). I don’t remember if it was around Christmas or not, but she told me that wool was scarce, so they carefully unraveled old sweaters, wet it, rewound it, and knit the wool into new items, including socks. Leather shoes were an impossibility, so her grandfather made her wooden shoes and she wore them with the heavy wool socks. She said her feet to this day have never been warmer. It seems to me those reknit items were given as Christmas gifts.

I have a million great memories of Christmas. There was one in particular that makes me smile to this day. It was the Christmas we gave mom an exact replica of a doll she had for many years, that was broken by a little boy, when she was in her early Twenties (and just married to dad, I think). We went through all sorts of machinations to get that doll—I ordered it, dad paid me, we had it sent to our neighbors, the doll took forever to come. But it came. And when Mom opened it up on Christmas Day, she burst into tears, she was so happy.

This is all so corny and there are those out there who might think that I've sugar coated things somewhat here but it's all true.

As you can see my Santa-dotes are not a true reflection of how I feel about the holidays. I love them. Not for all the commercialism of them, but because coming to the end of the year, to the winter solstice, to a time of solitary thought (for a lovely contemplation please read my friend Saara Dutton's thoughts here. can be a time of private joy, a cleansing of the soul palate for the fresh new year.

If you are not all sugared out a couple of well-worn scenes that always make me smile. And please share your thoughts if you'd like.

Santa-dote 2010

2010-12-02T13:16:00.015-05:00

Warning: This is not for people under the age of 18. Period.

So for the past couple of years I've tried to provide you with a holiday palate cleanser. Something to offset all the traditional Christmas/Hannukah/Winter Solstice/Kwaanza delirium that sets in right about now (although, is it just my imagination, or are people acting with a bit more restraint and common sense this year?)

Top of my list of things to see and do this year is a film I haven't seen yet myself, but I've been told by a friend is good. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale looks like just the sort of flick to put the edge on. Looks like the real Santa is a truly bad one and is being kept frozen in the arctic by scientists. It's playing in NYC until December 14, so catch it if you can.

From scary to funny. From Mad TV:

If you want to get back to scary Santa, here's an oldie but goody from 1972. What could be better than Joan Collins in a stand off with crazy Santa. I don't know what's more frightening, an insane St. Nick, or the home decor in this little segment.

I stumbled upon literary references to Christmas and Santa by accident when listening to Stories: All-New Tales, edited by Carolyn Parkhurst. They are tales of mystery and horror by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, Walter Mosely, the list goes on. In one story a group of bitter people take out a hit on Santa; in another called Human Intelligence by Kurt Anderson, we learn the true identity of the man from the North Pole, and it ain't the guy in the Finnish film. Get it out of the library, (please always check your local library first--libraries need all the love you can give them) or buy it, it's a good read for people who love the horror genre. And while you're at it check out 20th Century Ghost Stories, by Joe Hill aka Joseph Hillstrom King, deeply related to Stephen and Tabitha King. Joe Hill is as talented as his father. I kid you not.

And for those who would like to take a quick trip down memory, visit Santa-dote 2 highlighting bad Christmas cards and gifts, and the very first Santa-dote, featuring Divine, Billy Bob Thornton, creepy Santas and the works.

Good Yule!

I'd Rather Be Good Than Nice

2010-11-10T14:52:00.006-05:00

The Huffington Post carried this article the other day about the difference between good people and nice people. It spoke to an idea that has been rolling around in my head for years. In it, the author Judith Acosta, outlined what makes a good person, and what makes a "Super Nice" person, not a nice person in the classic sense of the word, meaning pleasant, but something a bit more sinister.. I posted the checklists below, but the full article is worth a read. Calling someone nice always smacked of lameness to me. The etymology of the word "nice" says it all: [Middle English, foolish, from Old French, from Latin nescius, ignorant, from nescire to be ignorant.]

I am sorry to admit that I could check off one or two items on the "Super Nice" list but can say that I do try to plug away at the Good People agenda. The lesson learned (but somehow always known) is that good people are not always nice, and nice people are sometimes just no good. Both qualities can exist together, of course, and those people who have both, goodness and genuine niceness, are the ones I'd definitely like to know. In fact, I do know quite a few—they number among my friends and family.

Good People

They understand the battle against evil but never take pleasure in its defeat, rather sadness in its necessity.
They have consistent integrity.
They say what they mean and mean what they say.
Good men and women are warriors of a sort. They do not tolerate injustice but also do not seek to punish or exact revenge.
They are temperate of mind and heart.
They have substance.
They are responsible in that they respond to others.
They are appropriately (not helplessly or cunningly) selfless.
They are empathic without being passive.
There is no pretense in them, and they are willing to be good without seeking approval or awards of any kind.
They are the last ones to see themselves as good and definitely the last ones to tell anyone they are.

Super Nice People

They are "charming."
They interact with a pseudo-intimacy, behaving as if they'd known you personally for years.
They engage you on their terms only, even if you don't realize it.
They can seem very passive and quiet.
They relate to you on the surface and let you in only so far.
They do not respond to your needs but gloss over them in a way that makes you wonder what you needed that for.
They are very intent on pleasing others or ingratiating themselves into a social network.
They need to maintain a persona or a position in a social circle at all costs because how they are seen is more important than who they are.
They manipulate.
They are like perfume -- very sweet but often used to cover what is deeply offensive.
They have no compunction about lying to get what they want so long as they are nice about it.
And, they will inevitably tell you how good they are.

Ft. Greene Park Gospel Blow Out

2010-09-07T17:40:00.017-04:00

On Tuesday September 14 at 6:30 pm Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens will be performing in Fort Green Park, Brooklyn. Now I love Ms. Shelton, and I've blogged about her for American Legacy, but the reason I'm back to talk about her is that I love my friend John Stuart even more. Known to many as DJ Johnny Stuart, he will be knocking out some very deep, very rare gospel grooves in between the sets of Ms. Shelton and the brilliant, strange, and hilarious Reggie Watts. John won't be playing any ordinary stuff, either—we are talking pre-1970s Moving Star Hall Singers kind of spirituals and the like.

Shelton has been singing gospel and soul in the deepest sense of the word since she was a young girl attending her parent’s church in Midway, Alabama, (which is pretty close to where my father grew up, we both realized) and at a radio studio (one of several) that her father built in Tuskegee. Inspired by Sam Cooke, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama (“the spiritual tone they had in their voice”) she left Alabama in 1958 and in the 1960s crossed into the secular world, playing gigs in Florida, then at a club called the Night Cap on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where she eventually moved. She was working as the house singer when she met organist Cliff Driver, her musical director, and producer, but more importantly her mentor and friend. “You can’t get me without my organist. He got me where I am. He’s my teacher. He knows about the music business,” says Shelton.

What’s so compelling about her singing is that place of comfort I immediately go to when I hear her, back to those evenings when my dad would drop a Sam Cooke or Ray Charles album on the stereo turntable, and those Sunday mornings my mom would play Mahalia Jackson. It’s that kind of music, pure Shelton, the words all good news, the music R&B. About the crossing over and mixing of the two genres, Shelton says that singing gospel the way she does helps to attract new listeners: “My heart is full of love for people in love with kinds of music. One style grows out of the other. I don’t look at something as a set pattern. I like to be flexible. If I have sweet potato pie I can have apple pie, too. You go one route, you get stuck. I asked God to expand my territory. People didn’t know that old time gospel was still around. He wants me to get out in the world to shine a light through me.”

John and I both had the great good luck of seeing Ms. Shelton live last year at Joe’s Pub in New York City, and she rolled through a set of roughly 15 songs (maybe more) without breaking a sweat. It was a pleasure to watch Shelton, her musical partner Cliff Driver, her back-up band, and the Gospel Queens shine on the crowd.

So hit Fort Greene Park for what promises to be a wonderful show!

P.S.
If you live in or around New York City, she performs every Friday night at the Fat Cat. Admission is only three dollars! For more information visit www.fatcatmusic.org. For upcoming performance and information visit here .

A little bit of fun from New Orleans

2010-09-02T13:55:00.003-04:00

Okay so here's a little something for fans of that special neighborhood in the Crescent City.

Nikki and me

2010-08-13T14:37:00.004-04:00

So my mom bought Nikki Giovanni's album "The Truth Is on the Way" when I was a kid. Eventually I got around to listening to it (I listened to all my parents album in an attempt to understand their musical tastes, which ran the gamut from R&B, blues, jazz, and funk, to classical, folk, and country). I memorized this poem and used it as protection and defense against junior high school boys. It stunned at least a few of then into silence. I've since met Nikki, had the great pleasure of having lunch with her. I told her that my mama was my introduction to her poetry. But I didn't tell her I used her as a secret weapon.

Ego Tripping
by Nikki Giovanni

I was born in the Congo.
I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built the sphinx.
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light.
I am bad.
I sat on the throne drinking nectar with Allah.
I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe to cool my thirst.
My oldest daughter is Nefertiti.
The tears from my birth pains
created the Nile.
I am a beautiful woman.
I gazed on the forest and burned out the Sahara desert.
With a packet of goat's meat and a change of clothes, I crossed it in two hours.
I am a gazelle so swift, so swift you can't catch me.
For a birthday present when he was three, I gave my son Hannibal an elephant.
He gave me Rome for mother's day.
My strength flows ever on.
My son Noah built an ark and I stood proudly at the helm as we sailed on a soft summer day.
I turned myself into myself and was Jesus.
Men intone my loving name.
All praises all praises,
I am the one who would save.
I sowed diamonds in my back yard.
My bowels deliver uranium.
The filings from my fingernails are semi-precious jewels.
On a trip north,I caught a cold and blew my nose giving oil to the Arab world.
I am so hip even my errors are correct.
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went.
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid across three continents.
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal,
I cannot be comprehended except by my permission.
I mean. . . I. . .can fly like a bird in the sky. . .

Worth the (free) Price of Admission

2010-08-02T12:35:00.005-04:00

I can never say enough about the Library of Congress and its terrific archive of images. Here is a lovely blog from the Denver Post featuring photos taken around the United States from 1939 to 1943, but instead of the usual black and white, they are in stunning living color. The photographers all worked for the Farm Security Administration and were given the task of chronicling the effects of the Depression. Please take a moment and look. Unlike the famous photo of the Depression era mother and child that we've seen many times, these are actually more about living life and overcoming.

Timoun/Wilner in Maïssade

2010-03-29T10:28:00.009-04:00

Germany might have been my birthplace, and America my homeland, but Haiti, a place to which I've never been (but one day hope to go) has a deep place in my heart. I don't know why—only God knows why, but I am connected, through my friends Michael and Michelle, and spiritually in ways yet to be discovered.

Timouns means children in Kreyol. Through an organization called Save the Children, I sponsor a child named Wilner Derval, who lives in a village in Maïssade Haiti in the Central Plateau about an 8 hours drive (over rugged terrain) from the capital of Port-au-Prince. I chose Save the Children because they have no religious affiliations. They also checked out well with the Better Business Bureau. The money I send goes to building a solid educational system in the countryside, paying for schools, teachers, and teacher training.

It occurred to me that although I do correspond with Wilner, who is 14, I don't do it nearly enough. All I have is a photo, which they update every couple of years and some notes and drawings from him. I don't know what his voice sounds like, or his laugh. I only imagine what his life might be through written reports

"The town of Maïssade, the main city in the eponymous district, is relatively undeveloped. Dirt roads are unimproved, with no drainage system to control the torrents of water that overwhelm them in the rainy season. Two large rivers split the district of Maïssade in three. Rocky mountainsides, the major rivers, and a lack of roads render most of the country inaccessible by motorized vehicle. Most people spend long hours walking to get from one place to another, or they just stay in the countryside. The exception is Thursday, market day, when Maïssade town swells with people and bustles with commercial activity. The district has 120 schools, mostly located in the countryside and many only partially constructed. People live spread out across the mountains, with no real towns or population centers outside of Maïssade town. . . .Students and teachers often walk long distances to school, fording rivers and climbing steep, often muddy paths. Schools in these remote corners of Maïssade are of poorer quality construction, many of them half completed. Usually there in one large room with a tin roof, a few benches, and sometimes a couple of freestanding blackboards."

As I was writing the above paragraph a light went off in my head thinking about where my father went to school--a large one room schoolhouse in rural Alabama in the 1930s. He didn't have to ford rivers for elementary school (he did have to walk a long distance for high school), but the similarity to the Maïssade schools is striking. I was inside my dad's schoolhouse some years ago (it has since been tragically torn down--that's another story for another time). It had one chalkboard and dad said they sat on benches. You've seen the image many times, I'm sure. This all makes me think of the Rosenwald school programs created. I've swiped this part from the latest edition of American Legacy

From 1912 to 1932 the department store magnate and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and black leader and educator Booker T. Washington recognized a need to narrow the huge education gap between whites and blacks. Together they worked to provide grants to African-American rural communities in the Midwest and South to build schools, vocational shops, and teachers' residences. The only catch was the communities had to raise their own funds, which Rosenwald would then match. In the two decades grants were available to blacks in 14 states, they built more than 5,300 schools and other facilities. . . . The illiteracy rate dropped from 90 percent at the end of the Civil War to half that by the start of World War II.

My dad's school, located in the Battle community of Alabama (which was very rural when he was a child) was never officially designated a Rosenwald school, but there was evidence that it was a prototype. My father went on to become a fine man of character and dignity, with a deep sense of duty to humankind. He also taught us a love for poetry and music (as did our mom), his own appreciation being learned in the schoolhouse. I'm hoping that something similar will happen for Wilner.

P.S.

Happily, as I finally got it in my head to really try to research Maïssade (I had been googling Wilner's school Ossenande, thinking that was the name of his village and coming up with nothing!) I found video on youtube! Bless youtube. I have some idea what life is like for Wilner. I'm going to contact the person who traveled to Maïssade to get a first hand account. I think he went as a missionary (I don't approve of feeding people food and religious beliefs at the same time, just don't, but I also believe that many people want to help out of the goodness of their hearts and souls, and that's the best way they know how, even if it's not the best thing for the people they are helping) Here is one video of market day.

Haiti/The Start of It

2010-02-09T15:29:00.015-05:00

Part two of my grand adventure in the Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté region of France in 2004: How I learned about the fate of Toussaint L'Ouverture, liberator of Haiti.

I am standing with several fellow journalists in the courtyard of a nearly 1,000-year-old fortress called Chateau de Joux and looking at two tiny windows in it. The chateau is more than 3,000 feet above sea level near the French town of Pontarlier in the Jura Mountains, a range that forms a 125-mile natural border between France and Switzerland. Built in the eleventh century as a Burgundian fortification, the original wooden structure was replaced with one of stone two centuries later.

A true castle fortress, with its massive medieval towers, dry moats (there wasn't enough water for a wet moat up on the mountain), and drawbridge, the chateau was reinforced and expanded several times. Sometime in the eighteenth century it was converted into a state prison. A guide on the tour I'm taking, called the Abolition of Slavery Route, points to one of the windows and says (in English: There are two guides, one speaking French, the other English), "In there Toussaint L'Ouverture, the greatest leader of the Haitian Revolution, spent his final days."

The Haitian Revolution, the only successful wide-scale revolt of black slaves anywhere in the world, began with the killing of whites by blacks in the late summer of 1791, in areas surrounding the main port town of Cap François (now Cap Haitien) in Saint-Domingue. Occupying the western third of the Spanish island of Hispaniola, an area that had been ceded to the French in 1697, Saint Domingue (it would become Haiti in 1804) was the gem of the Caribbean, the envy of the British, yielding more sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton on its plantations than any other European colony. It was also, by many accounts, a place of horrifying cruelty. The rebellion was started by a charismatic Jamaican named Boukman. He was a houngan, or Vodou high priest, and with several thousand slaves (there were some 500,000 of them on that part of the island, many fresh off-the-boat African warriors), burned the northern plain to the ground.

François Dominique Toussaint Breda (his original surname being the name of the area in Saint-Domingue from which he came) took care to get the family of his white owner, who had been good to him, on a ship to America, and then joined the revolution. He was 48, not a young man acting rashly but middle-aged and educated, with a family of his own and much to lose. But he was still a slave.

Toussaint was bolstered by, among other things, the work of the French writer Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, a radical Jesuit priest whose attacks on slavery caused his 1772 book A Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies to be banned in France. In it he wrote of the slave's plight: "A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed and tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, doubt it not; he will come forth and raise the sacred standard of liberty." It is said Toussaint read this passage many times.

Toussaint, whose last name became L’Ouverture---the one who finds an opening---because of his ability to always find a gap in the enemy's defenses, rose to become that courageous chief. He drove the British from Saint-Domingue when, beginning in 1793, they spent five years trying to snatch the West Indian jewel from France. By 1801 he had persuaded some former plantation owners who had fled to return and help try to set the province on a new path to prosperity. He also formed an assembly of six men, one from each province of Saint-Domingue, and created a new constitution, which named him governor for life with the right to pick his successor.

That Toussaint had the audacity, as a black man, to aspire to such greatness stuck deeply in the craw of Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France and the most powerful man in that nation. But more to the point, Napoleon wanted Saint-Domingue restored to France and he wanted to re-establish slavery and its riches. So Toussaint, the one man who truly stood in his way (or so Napoleon thought), was tricked into capture and carried across the Atlantic in June 1802 to be imprisoned in a castle on a mountain.

Our guide tells us that it is very cold in the Jura Mountains in winter, one of the coldest places in France. I can attest that the damp air was bone chilling as we stood there on a rainy day last September. The cruelty of the entire situation crystallized for me as I drew an invisible line with my eyes from his window to the outside world and realized that this man was not even given a glimpse of the fairy-tale landscape that surrounded the fortress.

The evening before, I had seen similar scenery from the bus window as we traveled south from Besançon, the heart and official capital of the Franche-Comté (which means "free county") region of northeastern France. We were on our way to a welcome dinner with our hosts, representatives from the United Nations, UNESCO, and various French tourist offices. They had worked together for the past two years to perfect the Abolition Route. The route was created in 2002 under the direction of Philippe Pichot, as part of a larger Slave Route project initiated by UNESCO in 1993. The goal of the bigger project was to acknowledge the impact of slavery on a global level UNESCO's member countries in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe were called on to research their own roles in the slave trade, and to find ways to use what they learned in their cultural tourism efforts. This tour we were taking was France's contribution.

The base of a mountain rose to the bus's left side, and a dark, placid river flanked our right. Trees grew thick on the hillsides. A gentle mist came and went, half-revealing lakes, yellow stone cottages with peaked roofs and red shutters, gardens with giant cabbages, and grazing red-and-white cows called Montbeliardes.

Toussaint L'Ouverture was given no view of the natural beauty of the Franche-Comté not only because, as I can see, part of a tower completely blocked the view, but because boards were put-up over his windows to keep out all but a scant bit of light. The effect of this is plain once we crowd inside the cell. The interior is 20 feet long and 12 feet wide, with a simple barrel vault ceiling, and when the guide turns off the light, it is nearly pitch-dark. There is a large fireplace, but judging from the few existing accounts, it was rarely lit. Some sticks of furniture, representing what might have been made available to him, nearly complete the pitiful picture. The rest I fill in myself a graying black man, nearing 60, dressed in the "old half-worn dress of a soldier, and shoes in the same condition," as he described in his final memoirs, sits shivering and hungry in the dark. He was given no news of his family and even though Napoleon had called him a traitor, no trial, something Toussaint requested in letter after letter to the First Consul.

The former general begged for fair treatment, but no answer ever came, and on April 7, 1803, Toussaint L'Ouverture was found dead. The coroner called it apoplexy; I think the man's heart just broke. The French writer Chateaubriand said it was a case of "the Black Napoleon" being "imitated and killed by the White Napoleon."

A bronze bust of Toussaint that stands just outside his cell moves me. Although it is thought that no true likenesses were made of him from life, several drawings and paintings do exist, all different. The artist who cast this work captured a fierce pride and determination in his eyes that reminds me of later black visionaries-Congo's Patrice Lumumba, or America's Malcolm X.

Some may say that violence is not an answer to violence. Those people are often the ones who have dealt the violence and now are getting a dose of it in return. Do I think that rampaging through the countryside killing every white man, woman, and child was a good thing? Of course not. But in the wake of centuries of black enslavement. There is sometimes such a thing called tit for tat.

Images (from top) Chateau de Joux; an illustration of Toussaint L'Ouverture at battle; the cell where he spent his final days; Haitian revolutionaries stringing up French officers; an enslaved woman, after a beating.

Epiphany (of another kind)

2010-01-06T08:07:00.014-05:00

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany in the Roman Catholic Church (and other religions and cultures), the commemoration of the Christ revealing himself as man as well as the visit of the Magi (Wise Men) or more familiarly, the Three Kings (they weren't kings but astrologers, seers, holy men). There is much written about the Magi, better and more intelligently than I could without extensive research. What I did want to talk about is one of the wise men who is described and represented in literature and art as an African. Although there is no evidence that one of the magi was African (often considered either Abyssinian, Ethiopian), black Baltasar, bearing either frankincense or myrrh (both of which are found on that continent) has made an appearance at Jesus's crib from around the 12th century A.D. . Since the Magi themselves were said to have been Persian, it's a bit of mystery as to how Baltasar (whose name has roots in ancient Phoenecia and means "save the life of Ba'al" or "save the life of the king") is a black man. Scholars note that had become a tradition to represent Europe, Africa, and Asia in literature and art, hence Baltasar.

All that backstory aside, I have one of my own. In 2004 I visited the Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche-Comté regions of France to research French abolitionists against slavery. At one point the group I was with found itself in a tiny town in the foothills of the Jura Mountains called Champagney. The tale I finally wrote follows:

The Church of Champagney, built in 1788, was a meeting place for millers, loggers, and peasants-people who knew what it was like to eke out an existence, pay crippling taxes, and have no say. One day after Mass, they gathered to discuss what they would enter in the cahier de doléances—notebooks of grievances—to be presented, along with many others, to King Louis XVI. Among the congregation was a man of some fortune and good education, Jacques Antoine Priqueler, a captain of the king's guard. He spoke of the evils of slavery in the French colonies. But the peasants, most of whom had probably never traveled more than a mile or two from their village, had never seen a black man. Priqueler went home to his chateau, which still stands a block or so from the church, and brought back a sixteenth century painting of the Adoration of the Magi.

At this point in the story [our guide] Madame Olivier produces a reproduction of one such work, and we all crowd around to look at it. We see a richly dressed African magus presenting a gift to the Christ Child; he is hardly kin to the suffering slaves, but Priqueler's point was to show the peasants what an African looked like. He then told his fellow villagers terrible stories about slavery. It didn't take long for them to understand. They immediately drafted their grievance:

"The inhabitants of the community of Champagney are unable to think about the suffering of Negroes in the colonies without it piercing our hearts with a deep pain," it said in part. They wrote that they could not imagine using any exports from the colonies, "when one realizes that they will be sprayed with the blood of their fellow creatures: they feared that future enlightened generations will accuse the French of cannibalism."

Madame Olivier takes us on a brisk walk up the same path the villagers, led by Priqueler, walked more than 200 years earlier. We stop in front of a small white building. We are on the exact spot, Madame Olivier tells us, where the peasants stood to have their grievance entered into the book (by Priqueler or perhaps the parish priest, I presume). Because most of the townspeople could not write, they marked their names with an X. Among the many doléances given to the king in March 1789, only that of the peasants of Champagney, these poor white folks from the mountains of northeastern France, spoke of the abolition of slavery.

I know I kind of backed into this topic of early French abolitionists. If you're interested in more info, here's a link to France's Abolition trail It's in French, Spanish, and Portuguese but I can give you a copy of my article if you'd like.

It's That Time of Year Again

2009-12-22T18:26:00.009-05:00

Last year’s Santa-Dote entry was so popular I thought I’d do another one to give people refuge from the stress that sometimes comes with the holidays. I’m a Christmas fool, being part German I am prone to what I call Weihnachtsdelerium, so I am not here to diss it but to add to your cheer by making you laugh. A couple of these things have nothing to do with Christmas such as the following throwbacks to my childhood (and some of yours too if you were born in the 1960s)

I came across a Dragnet Christmas episode that was sweet and funny at the same time. Joe Friday and the gang have hearts just like the rest of us. The incongruity between their deadpan delivery and the holiday theme makes the show.

For those last minute gifts and cards that look like they come from the Island of Lost Good Taste

Regretsy

Awesomely Bad Christmas Cards

Awesomely Bad Christmas Gifts

And for something different to ring in the new year, watch this performance by Babatunde Olatunji, the Nigerian drummer who brought his music and culture to the United States. My parents took my brother and me to see him and his troupe perform when we were kids (while my friends went to see the Ice Capades). Bummed at first that we weren’t going to see the ice show, what we got instead was thunderous, wondrous drums and singing and people who danced with FIRE. "Odun de!" is a New Year's song to celebrate the harvest and is one of my favorite songs

Black Orpheus Lights Up November

2009-11-08T22:57:00.001-05:00

The truly perfect film Black Orpehus is 50 years old this year and it is still fascinating me. I've been to Brazil since the first time I saw the movie at least 20 years ago, and darned if the energy and music and beauty in Salvador da Bahia in 2005 wasn't like that in Rio in 1959. A synopsis from Gene Seymour in an article for the Fall 2005 issue of American Legacy

"The ill-starred ancient Greek romance of Eurydice (played by the luminous Marpessa Dawn) and Orpheus (Breno Mello) takes place in Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval, with an all-black, mostly Brazilian cast, and evocative samba soundtrack by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim. With the success of this film, its director Marcel Camus and screenwriter Vinicius de Moraes broadened the global perspective on black cultures and helped ignite the bossa nova movement that would seduce music lovers in both hemispheres"

The film won the Palm D'or at Cannes in 1959, and the Oscar and Golden Globe for best foreign film in 1960. It was shot mostly in a favela (ghetto) in the Leme neighborhood of Rio giving us snapshots of a time and place gone some nearly half a century. But that's not the only appeal. The colors, the music, the rhythm, the atmosphere is magic! To be transported in November watch it. Queue it, rent it, borrow it from the library if you can. As a last resort, buy it. For those with Time Warner Cable in New York, you can see it on Free Movies on Demand, Channel 1008, under the TCM offerings.

Have You Had Your Schadenfreude Today?

2009-11-04T14:10:00.009-05:00

So the other day someone engaged me in a conversation full of information I’d rather not have had. It was not useful, positive, enlightening, or nurturing in any way. What the individual had to say was born of an ignorance of the big picture—this person had no idea what they were talking about (I incorrectly use the plural rather than singular here to mask gender) when it came to the subject at hand, which included me and someone close to me. It might not have been so unpleasant had it not been practically the first words out of the person’s mouth. This took place in a setting where I had expected to relax and enjoy a peaceful afternoon, not get blindsided by spiritually draining gossip. The way the individual began speaking before they even said hello, it was almost as if they couldn't wait to tell me this bit of upsetting news. I choose to believe that it was thoughtless, not deliberate. It happens to us all.

I had a conversation with one of the subjects of the gossip, who told me to let it go and not get myself worked up over nonsense. That we both knew the truth and should not get mired in another's negativity. That person was right. All that little exercise in gossip did was help us gain a better understanding of our friendship.

Still, when I heard that a misfortune happened to that person, not a big one, thankfully, but enough to make me feel as if they got bit with some instant karma for the negative stuff they put into the universe, I indulged in what is generally known as schadenfreude—taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune. I was going to keep it private, because ultimately it's a nasty bit of business to take pleasure in someone else's schmerz, but then I started thinking about how much I dislike this emotion, and how pervasive and insidious it has become in our public culture and how I wanted to write about it.

There is the kind of schadenfreude that comes from righteous indignation. The Madoff scandal provides a good example. I don’t know anyone who didn’t practice more than a little schadenfreude when Bernie Madoff went to jail for life and his wife got booted from their penthouse and has to live like the rest of us. No punishment, it seems is too good for Madoff, and schadenfreude in this case acts like a cathartic. Schadenfreude does have it’s light moments: Who doesn’t like to see the villain in a movie get his or her just desserts? It can be positively satisfying.

It’s the kind of schadenfreude born of jealousy and ill will that worries me. The kind that makes us watch "reality" shows and laugh at the messy lives of others, patting ourselves on the back that our lives may have problems but we're not that bad off. The kind that rises out of another German term Glückschmerz—unhappiness in another’s good fortune. The "my-life-stinks-and-their-life-is-wonderful-so-ha ha-if- something-bad-happens-to-them" kind of thinking that is just wrong. It’s the schadenfreude born of wanting to exact revenge on someone who has wronged you that eats at the soul. Are we that lost, insecure, and spiritually untethered that we reflexively find joy in someone else’s misfortunes, or spend valuable time thinking about avenging every wrong? Am I?

I’m asking myself that because I’m disturbed by my reaction. This may not be a completely bad thing. According to an individual commenting on a New York Times article about the use of the word, some native Germans told him that to Germans schadenfreude means feeling guilty about the pleasure one feels because of another’s misfortune. That may be the deeper meaning, or that may be a revisionist definition that Germans made up so as not to have to take credit for such a word describing such an emotion. Being half German myself I know that Germans have not cornered the market.

Wait for it . . . Wait for it . . .

Okay so I indulged in this misbegotten emotion. Now what do I do to move on? There is an opposite to schadenfreude, and as often happens it is found among the Buddhists. There is a concept called mudita, which translates into sympathetic joy” or “happiness in another’s good fortune.” I know we all have experienced that, but how many of us do on a daily basis, feel happiness for anyone aside from our closest loved ones? I haven’t for a long time, but intend to, even if I have to go out and find someone to feel good for. I don't think it's going to be that difficult to find someone, but I do think sometime it might be difficult to indulge in selfless joy of another's good fortune, especially if we're feeling not so joyful. Its sounds easy, but I think it will take practice. At the very least we can always try those very tried and true emotions of empathy, pity, and compassion in the meantime. The rewards are great.

Scary Fabulousness

2009-10-27T22:58:00.012-04:00

Okay everybody, Halloween is upon us and I thought I'd do a sampling of favorite scary movies. For those who are easily frightened, this post might be enough for you. For the rest—enjoy!

Numero Uno

The Host (2006)

I can't say enough about this film, which I made a point of seeing in the theater. Watch it on a big TV screen if you can. I've never laughed so hard and been on the edge of my seat with fright at the same time. This movie is way beyond your average monster movie. There were points where I actually cried, too. Basically it's about the love of family, specifically a parent for his child. Somewhat of a fairytale, only instead of a dragon, the hero—according to Manohla Dargis of The New York Times "(the wonderful Song Kang-ho), an overgrown baby with a shock of badly bleached blond hair and a moon face that waxes and wanes depending on his proximity to his beloved daughter, Hyun-seo"— has to slay a giant mutant fish monster spawned by an immoral and unethical American scientist, who dumps old chemicals into Korea's Han River. Yes this is K-Horror and way off the charts in terms of not being anywhere near formulaic. If you show anything at your Halloween frightfest, show this one!

Two Classics

Ringu(1998)/The Ring (2002)

I can't get enough of these films, and must say the English language version is what got me into Japanese horror, while the original Japanese is wonderful in its subtlety. In both creepy crawly not of this Earth Sadako/Samara stays with you long after the movie is over. Of all the movies, this one really, truly scared me, but the most frightening thing was how far a person will go towards self preservation.

Kwaidan (1964)

I don't ordinarily go for Wikipedia as a source, but here goes:

"Kwaidan (怪談, Kaidan) is a 1964 Japanese portmanteau film directed by Masaki Kobayashi; the title means 'ghost story'. It is based on stories from Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folk tales. The film consists of four separate and unrelated stories. Kwaidan is the archaic transliteration of Kaidan, meaning "ghost story". It won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival[1] and an Academy Award nomination."

I love the quiet spareness of many of the scenes. Watch it for the beautiful painted backdrops if for nothing else.

The Coolest Vampire Film

Let the Right One In

Låt den rätte komma in (2008)

This is from Sweden. There are no sexy vampires in it or swooning or steaminess or Brad Pitt, or Gary Oldman. Just two lonely children. Sort of. Just see it

Classic American Gothic Films That Are Often Overlooked

The Sentinel

(1977)

Martin Balsam, John Carradine, José Ferrer, Ava Gardner, Burgess Meredith, Sylvia Miles, Eli Wallach, Christopher Walken, Jerry Orbach, Beverly D'Angelo, Tom Berenger, William Hickey, Jeff Goldblum, and Richard Dreyfuss and an uncredited man on sidewalk talking to girl in red sweater. With a cast like that who can resist a film that made the rounds of the network Late Late Show movies that came on after the 11 o'clock news (way back before cable)? A model moves to New York and takes up residence in a gloomy, if beautiful old house in Brooklyn Heights. Great weird New York, that doesn't feel like New York. There is also a darkly funny party scene reminiscent of that other party scene in Rosemary's Baby.

The Changeling(1980)

George C. Scott fights a demon ghost child in a large, lonely mansion. The incessant pounding scared me witless!

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)

Another one of those late night movies. C'mon. Uncle Charley from "My Three Sons" is in this one as the foreboding caretaker. "We want you Sally, we want you!" Sally was so dimwitted at times, I couldn't wait for her to be dragged away by the munchkins from hell. This is as corny as can be, but at 11 years old watching it in a darkened basement rec rooms with friends--it couldn't get more spookily fun.

And finally, for a laugh to break the darkness, get a load of the trailer to this creaky fromage festival. I saw this movie dubbed on a Saturday afternoon when I was around 12 or so. It's been alternately titled Necrophagus, The Butcher of Binbrook, and when I saw it Graveyard of Horror.

The image at top is a screen shot from the unreleased trailer to The Exorcist. Apparently it was deemed too intense and over-the-top to run on television, although I remember the ads they did run scared the bejesus out of me. If you'd like to see the unreleased version, go here.

"The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind"

2009-10-10T11:53:00.005-04:00

With a few scraps that he scrounged from junk piles, a Malawian teen named William Kamkwamba built a windmill (one of the things he used was a pair of flip flops!) brought electricity and water to his village. This kid had to drop out of school because his family could not afford the $80-a-year tuition. He learned how to make the windmill from books in the local library (the books were in English and his English was not even very good at the time!) The people in his village called him "misala" crazy, but when he attached a bulb and it lit up, his fellow villagers cheered. He has certainly lit up my world and I hope he does yours too.

BBC News tells the story better than I can here.

I first saw this remarkable person on Good Morning America, an interview with Diane Sawyer.

Kamkwamba cowrote a book with journalist and African correspondent Brian Mealer called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. It just came out the end of September. It's for sale of course, but try your local library.

Oh, and William has a Web site. Here it is

If you want to sleep, sleep. Simple as that.

2009-09-16T23:40:00.008-04:00

I was listening to some short stories on my Ipod yesterday evening, a collection of horror stories, supposedly although they weren't very horrific or frightening to me, and one by Peter Straub has struck me. It's called "Little Red's Tango". I'm not finished with it but one chapter was called

THE BEATITUDES OF LITTLE RED

and it moved me. So here they are:

Whatsoever can be repaid, should be repaid with kindness.

Whatsoever can be borrowed, should be borrowed modestly.

Tip extravagantly, for they need the money more than you do.

You can never go wrong by thinking of God as Louis Armstrong.

Those who swing, should swing some more.

Something always comes along. It really does.

Cleanliness is fine, as far as it goes.

Remember--even when you are alone, you're in the middle of a party.

The blues ain't nothin' but a feeling, but what a feeling.

What goes up sometimes just keeps right on going.

Try to eat solid food at least once a day.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with television.

Anybody who thinks he sees everything around him isn't looking.

When you get your crib the way you like it, stay there.

Order can be created in even the smallest things, but that doesn't mean you have to create it.

Clothes are for sleeping in, too. The same goes for chairs.

Everyone makes mistakes, including deities and higher powers.

Avoid the powerful, for they will undoubtedly try to hurt you.

Doing one right thing in the course of a day is good enough.

Stick to beer, mainly*.

Pay attention to musicians.

Accept your imperfections, for they can bring you to Paradise.

No one should ever feel guilty about fantasies, no matter how shameful they may be, for a thought is not a deed.

Sooner or later, jazz music will tell you everything you need to know.

There is no significant difference between night and day.

Immediately after death, human beings become so beautiful you can hardly bear to look at them.

To one extent or another, all children are telepathic.

If you want to sleep, sleep. Simple as that.

Do your absolute best to avoid saying bad things about people, especially those you dislike.

In the long run, grasshoppers and ants all wind up in the same place.

*This is the only one I can't agree with. Cocktails yes, then you've got me

The photo:Louis Armstrong scaring Koko the Clown and Bimbo from a Betty Boop reel from 1932. In his role as a higher power, Pops is singing "You Rascal You", a song not quite in keeping with the peaceful sentiments of Little Red's Beatitudes, but certainly fun. You can watch the entire politically incorrect short film here, if only because it is one of Armstrong's earliest film appearances.

Refresh your Soul

2009-09-09T08:22:00.005-04:00

My friend Michael Zwack, who is a transcendent artist of spirit in his own right, sent me a youtube link with images by a photographer named Hans Sylvester of what I will loosely call the Omo people of Ethiopia, as there are apparently many different tribes living along the Omo River there. If you do anything for yourself today, watch this: It will refresh your soul.

Microloans=Major Return (for the soul)

2009-08-09T13:16:00.006-04:00

The people you see above are members of an enterprising group in the Democratic Republic of Congo that produces and sells everything from peanuts, smoked fish, and larval worms, to charcoal and lamp kerosene. Led by a man named Kalobwe Ngoy, who began his business in 1989 with $150. Today the dream of Ngoy and his fellow business partners is to open a small factory to produce purified water. They needed $2,750 to begin this enterprise. The signed up with a microloan organization called Kiva I caught up with the Mobeteli Plus Group when they needed only $25 to complete the loan. I can't tell you how it felt to be able to give that small amount of money--it meant that the full amount could be released to these entrepreneurs.

These are loans, not gifts. And sure enough, not long after I made my loan, I received some repayment. I could have put it in my bank account, but there was the option of making another loan, and I did. To date, I've made three loans, some with new loan money, some with repaid money.

Gary Gack in Understanding Buddhism says it better than I can:

"When I can I volunteer at nonprofits whose cause I relate to. Small organizations that live low on the food chain can use all the help they can get, and miracle workers in adversity's doorway deserve our support. From a certain light, volunteering could be seen as selfish, because it can be a great boost for the person giving. In true service, there's a mutual relationship. There is no "helper," no "helped." Something deeper is taking place. Buddhism grants us intimacy with life: with our life with the lives of those with whom we're in relation, and within the larger tapestry of life. Engaging the whole world. This tapestry's not a big fabric rectangle, though: It's a big living circle . . . with many threads."

Enough Already

2009-07-13T15:35:00.003-04:00

Look here, I'm happy to be honest about what kind of job I think our leaders are doing, never hesitated to get on my soap box. But all this whining about disillusionment with Obama is really starting to get on my nerves. I don't know what people expected when they voted for him, but I don't think it was for him to spend all of his attention, time, energy, and brain power on special interests, not the way some folks would like. It's so unbelievably selfish to feed him to the wolves because he's not doing what you want him to do. Would we rather have had the alternative in office? And if you didn't want either, be angry at our two-party system and the way we do politics and do something to change it.

Everybody is so full of criticism, but I have not heard one, not one viable solution to anything (believe it or not oilman T. Boone Pickens is really the only person who has made any sense to me at all, him and a few others. I'm sure somebody is going to write in to tell me he's the anti-Christ. I know, I know, natural gas has to be released and that means digging and breaking up land, but for crying out loud, we don't have enough facilities to gather all the sustainable and renewable energy like solar and wind power yet, and may not for a long while, so we may have to go natural gas until we get off the teat of big oil and get our act together) We built this economic mess over many years--wake up folks, it's not going to turn around in a few months. We also have to start thinking beyond the same old same old in terms of the way we are living. Those times are over. And let's not forget where our deficit, this so-called horrible legacy that we are leaving our children really came from.

Sitting around and waiting for President Obama to save the world is just plain stupid.

So okay, maybe we don't have enough motivation or anger to take to the streets like the Guatemalans, but we can do things, however small, to contribute to make everyone's life better. As I come across these things we can do, I'll post them here for inspiration. I'm sure there are many of you out there who are already inspired. I'd like to hear from you.

Remember the Time

2009-06-26T16:42:00.007-04:00

It was a blow to hear that Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest yesterday, and the remembrances and analyses (some of which are neither desired or required) are too many to count. I can't think of one friend under the age of 60 who can't sing at least one line from any Jackson 5 or Michael Jackson tune. I have to admit that I was much more sad than I thought I would be—after all, I didn't know him personally. But when I think of how he touched so many people's worlds with his music—my dear friend John, who is a deejay, told me that he would never be able to count how many times he played MJ's music at weddings and birthdays and sweet sixteens for people of all races, cultures, religions, and socioeconomic levels, that Michael made his career possible in a big way.

At 7 I was going to marry Michael (this was in 1969 when the Jackson 5 came out with "I Want You Back"). I declared it just as all my fellow female classmates declared that they were going to marry him. On rainy days during recess in 4th grade we'd bust out "Rockin' Robin" and play it until our teacher couldn't stand it any more and made us take it off the turntable. On Saturday mornings there was the Jackson 5ive cartoon, which my brother and I always watched. Michael continued to be a part of my life when the movie Ben came out. My mom would not let me see it, I was 10, and she thought it was morbid, but I sure did buy the record. And looking back on it, Ben was the hit single, but "We've Got a Good Thing Going" was the one I played over and over and over.

At 16 Michael was there with me when I entered a disco dance concert at Rancocas Valley Regional High to "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" from his stellar Off The Wall. I don't remember if I placed at all, but I had so much fun I don't think I cared one way or another. It was 1978, I was rocking my wine-colored Quiana disco dress and high-heeled black patent leather strappy sandals, and Michael was killing it!

Michael knocked me out when he showed up on MTV, the first black performer to do so. I was 20 or 21 when "Thriller" debuted, a 12-minute video (unheard of then) that I made a date to see. I was an official adult and Michael had been with me through my entire childhood.

So it is there I'm going to leave him, at the dawn of my adulthood. Let's remember the time and smile.

Been Away

2009-05-22T09:36:00.003-04:00

I've been away since February, mostly because I am now working regularly on the blog for the magazine I work for, American Legacy. When I can balance writing for the both that blog and this, I will be back!

The Soul Inside

2009-02-06T15:35:00.002-05:00

It's black history month, six days in, and not a morsel from Gotham City Soul. Now that I'll be writing a blog for my magazine's Web site, I'm more inclined to veer toward other definitions of soul here. So I'm leaving black history and culture and New York City and American soul for parts varied, strange, and sometimes unknown (at least by me) to examine the spirit of things, go to places that may not be pretty, or especially pleasant all of the time, but will surely move you. It is my hope that you will be moved to movement.

The House Is Black/خانه سیاه است

2009-02-06T15:34:00.002-05:00

A month or so ago I came upon a mini Iranian film festival on public television. There were two short films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, The School That Was Blown Away (1996), and Images from the Qajar Dynasty (1992). But there was also a film that was something beautiful and terrible all at once, The House is Black (Khaneh siah ast in Farsi) created in 1962 by a woman I had not known of until now: a renowned Persian poet named Forough Farrokhzad.

Essentially, The House is Black is a documentary of a leper colony, an awful thing given beauty and humanity by Farrokhzad. In 1962 there were two drugs, Promin and Dapsone, used with limited and painful success, but a true treatment wasn’t developed until the 1970s. It is clear that even the earlier treatments did not make their way to this desolate colony in Iran. Still, with her unflinching shots of these afflicted people as they go about their daily lives, breathtaking is the scene of a woman applying eyeliner, and another combing her long beautiful hair—believing still in the beauty they lost, or might have once had, had they not caught the disease—Farrokhzad challenges us to not feel sorry for them even though they are clearly disfigured and indigent. All of the flickering black and white images are deeply affecting by themselves, but coupled with lines from the Koran, and Farrokhzad’s gorgeous poetry and this film is one that haunts. The House is Black is the only film ever made by Farrokhzad and is considered seminal to modern Iranian filmmaking.

Farrokhzad herself has an interesting story, having married against the wishes of her family, and divorced her husband (and being forced to hand over her only child, a son, to her husband’s family) to gain her independence. She went on to become a famed poet, but was considered a notorious woman for the lovers she took (even in pre Ayatollah Khomeini Iran, that sort of behavior in a woman was heavily discouraged). For more on Farrokhzad and samples of her poems go here to the Iran Chamber Society. I think they are quite wonderful. There is also Mirror of the Soul: The Forough Farrokhzad Trilogy (2002), a three part documentary on the poet directed by Nasser Saffarian that combines interviews with family and friends and footage of Farrokhzad shot by the famed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. You can rent this on netflix, or purchase it through the usual suspects.

As to her one and only film you can see it on youtube, but I would suggest renting it (it’s available on netflix and online at blockbuster) or ordering it, if you’d like it in your collection. The quality will likely be better (it’s sometimes hard to read the subtitles) and the DVD comes with all three films mentioned above.

For those who want a taste

The Spirit of the Thing

2009-01-13T13:59:00.003-05:00

I was in a marching band—a bigger bunch of spoiled and entitled kids you probably would not have met. We took our opportunity to play instruments and be in a band for granted. Not these kids. It's often when I wonder how some of my fellow Americans can possibly share the same citizenship with me. It's more rare that I'm glad to claim a kinship. These are one of of those times

This is the spirit of the thing, this impending presidency, this inauguration and I intend to savor this rare and gleaming moment for as long as I can. It may never come again in my lifetime.

Santa-dote

2008-12-10T21:48:00.010-05:00

In an attempt to provide an antidote to some of the syrupy (and fake) nonsense that goes on at Christmas time, and to provide some dark humor for those out there who dread the holidays, I'm leaving our regularly scheduled program to bring you Santa-dote. Last year I wrote about St. Nicholas Day, and how it has a dark side (if you check that link out, take some time for David Sedaris's "Six to Eight Black Men"). This year Santa Claus, who is a direct American descendant of St. Nicholas, gets a bit of a drubbing. I have nothing against Santa, just think that if you look at him from a certain perspective, he can seem frightening, absurd, or just damn funny.

I had this conversation with my mom the other day where we were sort of taking issue with old Santa Claus. She said that nowadays they've got him running around Germany, amok, which would be fine with her, if he weren't an American invention. German kids are supposed to get their gifts from the Kristkind, the Christ Child, not a sometimes scary chuckling chubby man in a red suit. I mean, look at these guys: Would you want your kids sitting on their laps?

And because laughing at screaming kids sitting on Santa's lap never gets old (at least for me, who has no children, but I suspect there are some of you out there with children who find it funny, too) here's a link to more.

For something higher up on the humor chain, listen to an excerpt from David Sedaris's Santaland Diaries at NPR. His version of "Away in the Manger" sung like Billie Holiday is worth the listen.

I'm adding back the awfulness that I had in here before, but felt guilty about and took out because they are two classics that are just too good to withhold.

That's all I have. Enjoy!

No Disrespect to Charles M. Schulz

2008-12-04T09:28:00.004-05:00

But this is just fun! Enjoy.

At 5:15 PM on December 2, 2008

2008-12-03T10:55:00.008-05:00

We lost a great lady and an amazing soul. The singer, musician, and activist Odetta died yesterday evening at Lenox Hill hospital in New York City. She was 77. I didn't find out about it until this morning, when I opened my e mail and saw messages from several folks who knew her well, particularly her manager of 12 years, Doug Yeager. It was he, prompted by David Lander, a regular writer for American Legacy, who set up an interview with this grand dame of folk music, and made it possible for us to include her in the pages of our magazine.

I approached the telephone interview with excitement and a bit of trepidation—Odetta's gorgeous voice was a regular presence in our house when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. She had performed at the 1963 March on Washington, singing “Freedom Trilogy”; marched in 1965 with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and some 25,000 others from Selma to Montgomery; and protested against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. The traditional black songs that she sang sparked a fire in more than one activist. She was an iconic figure in American musical history—in American history in general, and besides, my mother adored her and would have been upset if I didn't get it right. After a stumbling start, when Ms. Odetta chided me for questions that she thought were a waste of both our time—basic questions about her childhood, education, questions that I ask on almost all interviews to check the accuracy of existing biographies that are not always correct.

"That stuff is already out there," she said brusquely. She was right, it was. Mortified, I skipped over about four or five questions to something she did want to talk about. The present. The internet. Youtube. The future. Stuff like that. We wound up having a wonderful time.

To my great pleasure, some months later, I got to meet Odetta at a mini concert and reception that we threw to promote our second annual music issue. The featured performers were the Carolina Chocolate Drops, of whom I've written before. Being wheel-chair bound made no difference, Odetta bore herself like a queen in a sedan chair, sat front and center while the CCDs graciously entertained the room with a few of their great old-timey tunes. She beamed the entire time and the energy in the room was bright and golden, and made at least one of my friends cry with the beauty of it and the rest of us walk out a little lighter, a little better for having been there.

In a year of disasters and wonders, today I am just plain sad.

You can read the full article at Legacy's Web site.

Above: Odetta at the Forbes Galleries in NYC, with the Carolina Chocolate Drops (Rhiannon Giddens, Justin Robinson, and Dom Flemons), Rodney Reynolds, American Legacy's publisher, and me over there on the left tacking myself on like I'm somebody.

Photo credit: Barry Mason

The First Black Recording Star? Probably!

2008-11-24T18:57:00.005-05:00

"Emerson needed more musicians, preferably cheap and loud. What about that middle-aged black man with the melodious whistle and hearty laugh he’d seen performing for coins at the Hudson River ferryboat terminal? Johnson listened to the proposition of the neatly dressed young man and said, “Why, sure . . . how much did you say you would pay?” “Twenty cents a song,” said Emerson, “and you can work all afternoon.” “Well, suh, just show me where you want me to go,” said Johnson, throwing in one of his hearty laughs for free. Emerson had his second recording artist."

--From Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, by Tim Brooks.

One could make a case that the American music industry was born when the inventor Thomas Edison first devised a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders in 1877, famously consigning his own voice to posterity (it should be noted that a recently uncovered audio fragment of the French folk song “Au Clair de Lune” made in 1860 by a Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville may now be considered the earliest recording of a human voice). Edison’s experiment yielded sounds that were barely audible, and after a few plays, the tinfoil was destroyed. He put his invention aside to work on new projects, such as the electric light, and others picked up where Edison left off, improving upon his invention to the degree that he became angry that it had been co-opted by others. In 1886 Edison produced a more durable wax cylinder that that could hold a permanent recording.

The equipment required to play these cylinders was too expensive for most people to afford, so the majority of the phonographic machines in the early 1890s were sold to exhibitors and coin-slot operators. They would play a disc over and over to a fascinated public. But it was not the singing voices of the popular stage stars that people heard—top entertainers considered the phonograph a novelty and beneath them (and those who produced the recordings couldn’t afford to hire a star anyway). The voices were almost always male, with strong elocution to override the still-fledgling technology. As the only other people likely to own a machine were white middle-class hobbyists, the men who were recorded were also white, but that color barrier would be broken sooner than many in the United States, and the results would open doors for blacks in the mainstream entertainment industry. In Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, the author Tim Brooks looks at the early black recording artists who helped popularize the nascent industry. Some such as Bert Williams and George Walker, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W.C. Handy, and Harry T. Burleigh, are widely documented and well known. Many others are less familiar, big stars of their era who drifted into obscurity. One such artist was George W. Johnson, an ex-slave, who in the 1890s had two of the best-selling records in America, one of which was "The Laughing Song", which you can access, along with one other hit (I'll warn you here, the title might irritate) here.

Born on a Virginia plantation in 1846 or thereabouts, Johnson learned to play the flute and to read along with the plantation owner’s children. After the Civil War (he was set free in 1853 but was conscripted as a laborer by Confederate forces), he made his way to New York City sometime in the 1870s. He made his living whistling and singing for coins at the Hudson River ferryboat. It was there that he was noticed by an employee of the New Jersey Phonograph Company. This is as far as I'm going to take you: You must borrow the book from the library, or buy it to find out the rest. But it's all fascinating stuff, well worth time spent on a gray afternoon curled up in a chair (although I must admit the book is kind of big)

So Much Has Been Said . . .

2008-11-09T13:15:00.003-05:00

. . .and I will be compelled to say more in my magazine. I don't have the eloquence of others, and my words will doubtless be lost in the millions of other words written.

I cried for days after 9-11, tears of grief, my heart was broken. As of last Tuesday I cry for joy, my heart finally healed.

(For my honored ancestors, my father Miles Peterson; grandparents Ransom Peterson, Annie Peterson, nee Johnson, and Fannie Mae; my great-grandparents Fletcher and Polly Johnson; Silver and Susiann Peterson; my great-great grandparents Amos and Saleta Battle, and all of my ancestors from Africa, and all over the world)

时势造英雄

2008-10-29T11:29:00.003-04:00

(pin-yin:shi shi zao ying xiong)

Heroes (leaders) are made over turbulent times.

I've been way too caught up in everything to blog. I'll be back soon, I promise

I Live on Main Street, Too

2008-09-30T17:18:00.003-04:00

I pay rent instead of a mortgage, and can only afford to live in Manhattan because I was lucky enough to get into a rent stabilized apartment. Without that apartment, I would not be able to afford to live here.

My salary has remained the same for years. Yet I pay the same increasingly higher prices for everything that everyone else on Main Street U.S.A. does. The one thing I don’t have to worry about is gas prices—I don’t own a car. I don’t need one in this city because it has a terrific public transportation system.

I also don’t have children. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have financial responsibilities to children, and other people in my life. I do.

When I take vacations, they are modest ones. I don’t have closets full of clothes like Carrie on Sex in the City. I don’t have a giant apartment like the folks on Seinfeld and Friends. My apartment is 450 square feet at the most. It is in a fifth floor walk up. It is comfortable, but there is nothing luxurious about it. There are only about a million of these apartments in New York City. This may seem like a lot to you. Trust me, it’s not. The people who live in those apartments are mostly like me. We live on Main Street, too.

I worry about my job outlasting the faltering economy like anyone else on Main Street. I’ve been disgusted with Wall Street since President Reagan, deregulation of the financial markets, and smarmy Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street standing in front of a bunch of fledgling stockbrokers intoning “greed is good”. The only difference between me and someone from Main Street elsewhere is that I can get on a subway train and ride down to Wall Street and shake my fist at the stock exchange for all the good it will do anyone.

I go to church. I spend holidays with my family. I like to go out for dinner and drinks with friends and dates with boyfriends. I worry about the environment and my health (although, unlike 45.7 million American people, I do have health insurance. For now), and know I need to volunteer more in my community. I yell at the television and shake my head at food prices at the grocery store. I own one winter coat. My closet is not full of shoes. I don’t have a flat-screen TV. I babysit for my neighbors.

Although I grew up in South Jersey in a Levittown-type development built soon after World War II, my neighborhood is near a town that has a real main street. It is exactly what you would picture it to be—tree-lined, with eighteenth and nineteenth century houses set back from a wide street. If you saw my high school you would laugh at the regularity of it—it could be the set for any film set in the 1950s (and was for the film Eddie and the Cruisers). My brother and I played outside with the other neighborhood kids until the sun went down, jumped in leaves in the fall, sled in the streets before the plows took away all the good snow in the winter, and stuffed ourselves with watermelon in our backyard in the summer. It was idyllic. I know that Main Street, the one most people imagine when they shut their eyes.

But even though I've moved to the middle of one of the biggest metropolises in the world, I am still a citizen of Main Street. Because what happens on Wall Street leaves me just as vulnerable as anyone who lives in a house with a backyard.

Am I happy about the idea of a bail-out? No. The circumstances surrounding it makes it a lousy solution so far. Main Street Americans are angry that the fat cats on Wall Street are going to be bailed out, while they lose their retirement funds, or homes because of poorly-structured mortgages. They argue that the government should bail out ordinary Americans, and put a moratorium on foreclosures. Offer us the low-interest loans, rather than the banks, who got us into this mess in the first place. They point to the rally on Wall Street and say "see, we don't need the bail out". The rally on Wall Street happened precisely because the market believes there will be a bail out.

As a Main Streeter, though, I have to blame myself for some of this mess. I slept through two and a half decades of deregulation, mostly because, and this is important, Wall Street had nothing to do with me. Or so I thought. As long as I had a job, and could pay my bills and live a decent life, I wasn't paying attention to what was happening to America's economy. Sure we griped about inflation, and recessions, unemployment and the usual things. But did we ever really ask why things were the way they were? I didn't. I just floated along in a happy little middle-class Main Street bubble. When we should have been showing up on the steps of the capitol with pitchforks and torches, demanding transparency, regulation, and oversight, we were busy running up our credit cards instead of saving.

As someone from Main Street, I think it stinks that we have to have a bail out. But I also know that if the banks fail, there will be no or very few loans to private individuals; no loans to small businesses, fewer loans to larger businesses, where many of us hold jobs. That person who was going to buy your house, won't be able to because they won't be able to get a mortgage of any kind. We have to start understanding that it's all connected. And yanking your money out of a bank and putting it under your mattress, while seemingly a good solution, is just plain stupid. You get robbed, or your house burns down, or there's a flood, and your done for good. Besides, the U.S. dollar is literally just paper until the global economy and financial market decides how much it's actually worth. So you can stuff your mattress with money all you want, in the end, it's not gold bouillons and could wind up being worth nothing if we, Main Street America, don't wake up, educate ourselves, and demand action and oversight.

I invite comment. If I'm wrong, call me out. Agree, disagree, let's talk.

No swearing or loud talking after 9 o'clock

2008-09-03T15:17:00.009-04:00

So as usual, I was looking around on the Internet, for what, I do not remember when I came upon the book Lights and Shadows of New York Life or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City written by James Dabney McCabe and published in 1872 or thereabouts. I looked up the author and his biography was so boring I stopped reading it and decided not to bore you with any of it here. The only thing you might bear in mind is that he was a Southerner, and a Confederate sympathizer before he moved North.

I’m much enamored of the title, which gives off a certain mysterious energy. The excerpt I’ve included here is essentially a complaint that never goes out of style--that the city is too damn expensive. I’ve included the amounts of things in today’s dollars (converted on this calculator for a greater understanding of McCabe's frustration. I came to the realization that if I had my 2008 salary back in 1872, I’d be rich. But that’s not how this works. I converted my salary today to 1872 dollars—and let's just say I’d be economizing in modestly appointed rooms with very little, if no, hired help. Sort of like I live today.

After McCabe’s diatribe on the high cost of living in the city, comes an excerpt from How the Other Half Lives, by social reformer Jacob Riis. Grim stuff, and grimmer still the photos Riis, who snapped the images himself, included to drive his point home.

For one of the best accounts of Lower Manhattan—also grim, yet dark and funny, please read Luc Sante’s Low Life: The Lures and Snares of Old New York. Sante has a terrific blog called Pinakothek: A Blog About Pictures. All Kinds of Pictures, which is very much worth visiting.

The question is very frequently asked, "Is living in New York very expensive?" An emphatic affirmative may be safely returned to every such interrogatory. Let one's idea of comfort be what it may, it is impossible to live cheaply in this city with any degree of decency. One can go to a cellar lodging-house, and live for from twenty to forty cents a day ($3.50 to $7.00, or $105 to $210 a month), but he will find himself overcharged for the accommodation given him. He may live in a tenement house, and his expenses will still be disproportioned to the return received. The discomforts of life in New York, however, fall chiefly upon educated and refined people of moderate means. The very rich have an abundance for their wants, and are able to make their arrangements to suit themselves. The very poor expect nothing but misery.

To begin at the beginning, the expenses of a family in fashionable life are something appalling. Fifty thousand dollars ($875,000) per annum may be set down as the average outlay of a family of five or six persons residing in a fashionable street, and owning their residence. Some persons spend more, some less, but this amount may be taken as a fair average, and it will not admit of much of what would be called extravagance in such a station.

For those who own their houses, keep a carriage, and do not "live fashionably," or give many entertainments, the average is from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars ($262,680 to 350,240). . .

The average rent of a moderate sized house in New York is $1800 per annum ($31,521 or $2,626 per month rent). This amount may or may not include the use of the gas fixtures, and the house may or may not have a furnace in it. There will be a dining-room and kitchen, with hall or passage in the basement. The first floor will contain two parlors and the front hall. The second floor will contain a bathroom, water closet, and two, or perhaps three, chambers. The third floor usually contains two large and two small rooms, and several closets. The chambers in the more modern houses contain marble basins, with hot and cold water laid on. Where the tenant is unknown to the landlord, he is required to pay his rent monthly, in advance, or to give security for its quarterly payment. Such a house will require the services of at least two women, and if there be children to be cared for, a nurse is necessary. . .

Here comes the tax man (my words)

The General Government secures a large slice of this through its iniquitous income tax, and State and county taxes take up several hundred more. Those who have had experience in keeping house in any portion of the country can easily understand how the rest goes, when one has to pay fifty cents ($8.76) per pound for butter, fifty cents a dozen for eggs, sixteen cents ($2.80) a pound for crushed sugar, twenty-five cents ($4.38) a pound for fowls, and thirty-five cents ($6.13) a pound for the choice cuts of beef. All this, too, with the certainty of getting light weights from your butcher and grocer

Many persons seek refuge in boarding. Those who have no children, or but one or two, may live cheaper in this way, but not in the same degree of comfort that their outlay would bring them in their own homes. A couple with two or three children and a nurse, cannot live in any respectable boarding-house in New York, except in instances so rare that they do not deserve to be mentioned, for less than sixty dollars ($1,051) per week ($4,204 per month) for board and lodging alone. Such persons must pay extra for washing, and there are many "incidentals" which add to the landlady's receipts. . . .

Of late years, a new style of living has been introduced. The city now contains a number of houses located in unexceptionable neighborhoods, and built in first-class style, which are rented in flats, or suites of apartments, as in the Parisian houses . . . .

The "Stevens House" was built and is owned by Paran Stevens, Esq., and is one of the largest buildings in the city. It is constructed of red brick, with marble and light stone trimmings, and is eight stories in height above the street, with a large cellar below the sidewalk. The cost of this edifice is to be one million of dollars ($17,512,000). "The woodwork of the interior is of black walnut; the walls are finely frescoed and harmoniously tinted. There are, in all, eight floors, including the servants' attics. Five stores occupy the lower tier. There are eighteen suites of rooms, to which access is had by a steam elevator. The building is heated upon the principle of indirect radiation, by forcing steam-heated air through pipes into the different rooms (author's note: it goes on and on; I stopped at the steam heat) . . . .

These houses, however, are accessible only to people of ample means. The apartments rent for sums which will secure comfortable dwellings, and the other expenses are about the same one would incur in his own house. The great need of the city is a system of such houses in respectable neighborhoods, in which apartments may be had at moderate rents.

Meanwhile, these poor souls had to pay the equivalent of a dollar sixty five to six dollars a night for these horrible accommodations. Just like today, if you don’t have any money, it doesn’t matter if it’s one dollar (the equivalent of $23) or one hundred dollars.

The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretence of a bedroom, though the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is the shallowest of all pretenses. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul. At the ten-cent level the locker for the sleeper's clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is reached, and there is nothing to lock up save, on general principles, the lodger. Usually the ten- and seven cent lodgings are different grades of the same abomination. Some sort of an apology for a bed, with mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp who, by a lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty box or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of these "hotels." A strip of canvas, strung between rough timbers, without covering of any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger who prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow to the revelry of the stale-beer dive. It is not the most secure perch in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals, but they have not far to fall to the next tier of bunks,; and the commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the boss and his club. On cold winter nights, when every bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room more than once, and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine, and the slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight, imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the very real nausea of sea-sickness. The one thing that did not favor the deception was the air; its character could not be mistaken.

The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses was known to me as a man of reputed wealth and respectability. He "ran" three such establishments and made, it was said, $8,000 a year clear profit on his investment. He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish precincts of Murray Hill, where the nature of his occupation was not suspected. A notice that was posted on the wall of the lodgers' room suggested at least an effort to maintain his up-town standing in the slums. It read: "No swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock." Before nine no exceptions were taken to the natural vulgarity of the place; but that was the limit.

Photos top and bottom by Jacob Riis, from How the Other Half Lives; Photo center from the New York Public Library

Blacks in Manhattan: St. Augustine's Slave Gallery

2008-07-31T15:04:00.002-04:00

It is a clear Sunday morning in the summer of 1828 and skiffs filled with people both black and white make their way across the East River from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan Island. The white people are churchgoers, on their way to services. The black men rowing them will also worship. The African-Americans guide the skiffs into slips and the white families disembark, making their way to Henry Street, where lies St. Augustine's, a brand-new Episcopal church. They take their places in the pews that fill the nave. Meanwhile the blacks climb up two treacherously narrow staircases to a pair of small rooms behind the pipe organ at the back of the church. It is dark and stiflingly hot where the Africans stand packed together.

These rooms made up the church's slave gallery, one of two that remain in the United States today. (The other is in Boston's South Church.) For decades the church's staff and its parishioners knew what the spaces had been, but not until 1999 did they decide to really explore the gallery's history.

"It was there—people would go up there, children would play in it—but no one talked about it," says Rev. Edgar W. Hopper, St. Augustine's deacon. "Why? I think because the church wanted to forget that part of its history, but the African-Americans in the congregation were also reluctant to admit that their ancestors were slaves. Our rector, Rev. Dr. Errol Harvey, and I were concerned that the African-American presence in New York's history was getting lost."

What is so remarkable about two cramped rooms in a church? Described by nothing more than floorboards, walls, and a few hinge marks, they give only a small glimpse African-American life on the Lower East Side, but they speak volumes about segregation in Manhattan at that time. In 1799 the state legislature had passed a bill providing for the gradual emancipation of New York’s slaves, but the white citizenry did not extend the same thinking to worship. Yet in the very southern city of New Orleans, where race mixing and segregation was severely codified, people of all color and class prayed side by side at St. Louis Cathedral.

That the space in St. Augustine’s was called a slave gallery at all "raises certain questions about African-Americans in New York," says Elizabeth Sevecenko, vice president of programs at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The museum, founded in 1988, and housed in an actual nineteenth-century tenement building, is a center for projects like the one at St. Augustine's, which it took on last year. "Slavery here was abolished in 1827," Sevecenko relates, "yet a year afterward the slave gallery was built. If that was the case, what did freedom mean for black New Yorkers?"

African-Americans numbered around 2,000 in Lower Manhattan in the 1820s. Over the century, they were pushed north to Harlem as other cultural groups moved into the Lower East Side. "This is still a diversified neighborhood," says Sevecenko, "but relationships among the different groups are very fractured, mostly because of competition over living space brought on by rising real estate costs and gentrification." She believes that looking at the role that architecture and crowding have played in the lives of minorities in Manhattan can help us understand the nature of a neighborhood that today is still much peopled by immigrants.

Study of the slave gallery is the first of what promise to be several projects for the Lower East Side Community Preservation Program (LESCPP), which is shepherded by a consortium of neighborhood groups and the Tenement Museum. Sevecenko looks at the slave gallery as a way to connect different ethnic groups. "We're preserving the African-American site as a shared experience," she explains. "The gallery speaks powerfully about anyone who has been treated badly because of his race or religion." The LESCPP and Rev. Hopper want to take the project to another level. "We're hoping this will lead to a full-blown museum that would include African-American history throughout New York City," he says.

Blacks in Manhattan: The African Burial Ground

2008-07-18T17:12:00.008-04:00

I've backtracked five years to give a short chronicle of black people and their migration up the island of Manhattan. This is swiped from Ame rican Legacy, for which I wrote this article in 2003 called "At Rest".

And so they were buried. After two centuries of lying forgotten in the ground, and another dozen years being studied, squabbled over, and finally, honored, 419 wooden caskets, decorated with traditional West African symbols and village scenes were lowered into crypts in a small plot of land next to 290 Broadway, all that remains, in any practical sense, of an African burial ground, the oldest known cemetery of its kind in the United States.

As I walked along Reade Street toward Broadway on my way to the reinterment ceremony in October 2003, I in all likelihood walked near more graves, all located under downtown buildings. The original burial ground spread across five to six acres of lower Manhattan that is today bounded by Duane Street and City Hall Park on the north and south, Broadway on the west and Centre Street on the east. Archaeologists estimate that during the eighteenth century some 20,000 Africans were buried there. I looked up at the tall buildings around me and struggle for a new metaphor that would have to do with rising up, or flight, or the soul and come to the conclusion that this city does not so much rise up as recycle. That was certainly not the case at the beginning, though.

The first Dutch used slaves to build the settlement of New Amsterdam, including its famous wall for which the city’s financial district would be named, and its fort (which would, incidentally, be saved fro m blowing sky-high in 1689 by a Negro man who discovered and put out three fires, set by Papist arsonists, that had been set near 6,000 pounds of gunpowder). They Dutch worked the blacks literally to death, then sent to Africa for more. The English provided no relief when they sailed into the harbor in 1664 and took over the island. They, too, indulged in the slave trade setting up on Wall Street in 1711, a thriving slave market that operated for 50 years; during this time New York City was second-only to Charleston, South Carolina, as a slave-trading center. As under Dutch rule, slaves died prematurely, but not always as victims. In 1712 a group of Africans ambushed and killed at least nine whites on the outskirts of the city in an attempt at a revolt. Afterward, 21 blacks were executed and buried in an unwanted piece of land a half mile northwest of the city limits that had been designated as an African burial ground.

In 1795 the land was sold and its new owners built over the graveyard. The slaves had been forgotten. After all, why would the Dutch, and the English after them remember creatures that meant less to them than their livestock? To them, the Africans had been virtually invisible and their bones were just part of the earth, like manure, or worms, or dead leaves. Not quite 200 years later the federal government decided to erect a building at the spot where other things had stood and been torn down countless times. This is the way of things, right or wrong, things get recycled here a lot. I am reminded how, when asked about the long-lost grave of Alexander the Great, the renowned Egyptian archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass says he guarantees that the person who finds it will be doing something as mundane as digging a hole for a swimming pool. Here in New York breaking the ground to build something as ordinary as a 34-story federal office building yielded a treasure of inestimable value. In Athens, and Rome, and Alexandria, huge projects are shut down when an artifact is found. In New York City, too, there were people—mostly black, no longer slaves—to speak for this treasure. So construction ground to a halt, and we were given a chance to bring the slaves, the invisible people back into the world of the living for just a while.

The bones were sent to Dr. Michael Blakey and his team of biological anthropologists at Howard University, who studied them for 10 years, and from this research we learned about who these people were. They came from many parts of West and Central Africa. Most of them were males between the ages of 15 and 25. Of the more than 400 skeletons, about 40 percent were children. Many of the Africans had died of malnutrition. From fractures and lesions on the skeletons, we know that these people were worked beyond their capacities, yet their survivors managed to provide them with proper burials; they were wrapped in linen shrouds and given beads, shells, and coins—money for the other side. Each body was placed so that its feet pointed east, toward the motherland.

When I walked into the yard next to 290 Broadway and saw the waiting coffins I felt peace, not sorrow even when I noticed showing numbers, instead of names, dangling from the caskets. The people to whom these bones belonged had already been buried by those who knew their names. I was there to see them reinterred, but more important, I was there to thank them for giving their history back to us, the living.

Some people left flowers other offerings; some touched the beautiful new coffins carved by woodworkers in Ghana and prayed. Four caskets sat by themselves on a dais. They held the remains of a man, woman, boy, and girl, and had traveled apart to ceremonies in Washington D.C., Baltimore, Wilmington, Delaware, Philadelphia, Newark, and Jersey City, New Jersey, and finally, New York City. White-gloved pallbearers, somber in tuxedos, their expressions turned inward, arrived and lifted these representative caskets to begin the procession to Foley Square. All at once, amid the relative quiet, above a general murmur, came a strident voice. A man dressed in African robes, from what tribe I could not tell, protested that everything was being done wrong, that the bones were being disrespected, that they should be buried in Africa. I silently disagreed: They should remain here iin the place the people they belonged to helped build, and where they'd lived out their lives.

The angry man served to remind me, though, that the African Burial Ground project has not been without its problems. A lot of allegations thrown in many directions during the dozen years of the effort: accusations of racism and misconduct, disrespect, stonewalling, and downright dishonesty. Quite frankly, I hadn't seen a shred of evidence that would prove anyone had intentionally tried to do harm to the project, or the bones. Were mistakes made? Were some people clumsy about things? Were others, in their zeal, insensitive? Most likely. But enough people came together, bringing their skills and passion to bear to lead us to that day.

When I entered Foley Square, I saw a burst of color and activity. Choirs shouted spirituals, and an African song of mourning was offered up; a fiddler and a dancer raise the ghosts of the Negroes who danced for eels in nearby long-gone markets where the South Street Seaport now stands. Drummers led the pallbearers into the square. There were prayers of different faiths. Who knows exactly to whom these blacks of long ago prayed? There were words spoken by celebrities and politicians. There was a quiet moment at the start of the tribute, and that finally brought an ache to my throat: Dr. Kofi Asare Opoku a religious scholar from Ghana, poured a libation of water out of a small gold bowl onto the ground and prayed in his native tongue, a simple gesture amid all the celebration. It brought me back to what it was really all about.

In the end there was a procession to a small grassy patch that is all that's left of the burial ground. Many tears shed, and the bones were lowered and laid to rest once again.

For more information on the African Burial Ground Project visit the project Web site here.

Photographs: John T. Stuart

Ain't Nothing New to Some of Us

2008-07-17T09:56:00.004-04:00

So a very close friend of mine, who also grew up in Jersey, and whom I met during götterdämmerung of Hoboken in it's gentrification days of the 1980s and early 1990s (it was a bloodbath) was visiting from Los Angeles, where he moved five years ago. He got caught off-guard by the changing landscape here on Manhattan Island and wrote a truly gloomy poem about it. He was closely followed by another dear friend, who has lived in Chelsea for the past 15 years, who sent me an article in The New York Times about the death of Bohemia, which I will not even bother to link to, because I'm tired of all of the weeping and moaning and gnashing of teeth. Not because it isn't warranted, but because I think we should be capable of something else. Anything else. Even fiddling while Rome burns is a more attractive alternative than bemoaning our fates and the fate of our beloved city and doing nothing.

That said, I think what galls me most is that people only really get involved when it's personal. This sort of thing has been going on since forever but people only wake up when it starts to effect them. What I'm trying to say is that black folks in Manhattan have been gentrified to within an inch of their lives from the time the Dutch brought slaves over in the seventeenth century. So excuse me if I can't get as upset any more about things like the death of Bohemia, and being pushed out of Manhattan in modern times. Our burial grounds were built over, and slowly but surely we were forced up the island to Harlem, which was empty at the dawn of the twentieth century because of overspeculation by greedy landlords. They charged black people double and triple what they would have charged whites, and black people paid it because they had nowhere else to go. And as we have for the past 300 or more years here in this part of North America, we made something out of nothing.

It ain't nothing new to some of us.

In this vein, I'm going to be writing some entries on some of the long ago black people on the island. The New-York Historical Society did a brilliant job with its series of "Slavery in New York" exhibits, but I think some things bear repeating.

I'm also going to try to gather together some information on how we, the little people, can fight some of this gentrification insanity. Ultimately, this is just such a tiny problem compared to what's going on on this Earth and in the world, I know. I just thought we'd start here and work our way out.

It Is Time for Us to Stop All of Our Sobbing

2008-07-17T08:23:00.007-04:00

I've talked about this here at Gotham City Soul myself and I must say I'm even tired of hearing myself complain about it, this thing I will call the luxury malling of Manhattan. It's been ugly, gentrification, the pushing out of minorities, the working poor, and others to make way for mostly rich or well-off white people. Churches closed, mom and pop shops run out by high rents, building destabilized and converted to condos, other buildings knocked down so that greedy developers with no vision and no clear love for New York City besides its real estate value can erect flimsy glass and metal boxes with no aesthetic value whatsoever.

But something I read the other day has stopped me in my tracks, and I've decided I've done enough fussing for now. There's just too much bad news in the world to keep adding to it. The article to which I'm referring was in the local newspaper The Villager. It is about Florent Morellet, who, for 23 years owned the magical Florent restaurant on Gansevoort Street in the meatpacking district. It closed at the end of June because Florent's lease was up and the owners of the building are charging an unbelievable amount of rent, in the tens of thousands per month. Bad news for those of us who pitched up at this oasis on late late nights and early mornings because, aside from the Empire Diner, there was nowhere else to eat in the area; we found ourselves in a warm, colorful, noisy world of everyone from truck drivers, to transvestites, to superstars, and neighborhood folk; and bad news for those people who will never get to experience this wonderful little place. But not bad news for Morrellet, not really. He is doing something that is rare—he is refusing to be bitter. I'd take it further and say that he's not capable of it:

“‘I realized a long time ago that being angry and staying angry only hurts oneself,’ said Florent Morellet, speaking two days after his famed Florent diner closed in the Meat Market. . .

“He said he was not bitter about losing his lease.

‘As far as I know, we’re in a capitalist society,’ he said matter of factly. If people want to limit development, he added, they ‘should look into that and not just be angry.’

“Moving forward, Morellet intends to spend his free time doing art, working on Community Board 2’s Traffic and Transportation Committee and perhaps writing a book, which likely would focus on the restaurant.

‘Sometimes, it’s good to get kicked out of doing something,” he reflected. “When you’re good at something, sometimes you just do it until the day that you die. And that’s pathetic.’ ”
All I can say is that Florent the restaurant and naturally the owner, made a nerdy girl from Jersey, who was never really hip enough, or cool enough, or clever enough to be a part of the admittedly wild and often breathtaking scene back in the 1980s feel right at home on more than one occasion. You can read Gabriel Zucker's entire article here, and Morrellet's short and completely sweet autobiography here at the restaurants online magazine Papotage. For an audio slide show with reminiscences from Morrellet and more see the article in The New York Times

What I'm Doing on My Summer Vacation: A Park Most Wondrous

2008-07-02T19:29:00.011-04:00

It is a good park, the East River Park, measured not in acres, but in the sounds that it produces. First there are the obvious sounds. The big noise of Latin men playing the games of their childhood; Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans, baseball; Mexicans, and Guatemalans, and Ecuadorians, soccer. All the while a man with a microphone booms out game commentary in Spanish. Families ease themselves on the grass around the ball fields, barbecues sending up puffs of dark gray smoke that float over the infield.

There is the sound of the ices man dragging a metal scraper over a huge block of ice. For the hundredth time that summer he shouts out the flavors, and will shout them for one hundred more: Chocolate! Vainilla! Café, coco, anañas, pistacho, fresa, frambuesa! Límon, cereza melocoton y cremolata! provides a constant refrain for the less permanent sounds of the picnickers and ballplayers.

There is the nearly soundless huffing of dogs running off the leash, looking warily over their shoulders, respectful of their positions, and trying not to blow their great good fortune by scaring the humans in the park.

There are the sounds of tugboats toiling in the river, for now, a black and red one pulls a barge stacked with wood, and another, blue and yellow, trails behind. But there will be others, and other boats. Sailboats soughing through the water, and ocean liner types blasting their horns, baying at the island, and playing counterpoint to the car horns and rush of rubber tires across asphalt on the FDR drive. These are the sounds that girdle the park

In the body of the park are the sound of the birds. There are three sounds: that of the birds close and high in the ears, the persistent caw of the birds several hundred feet in, and the, low, slow strident call of the birds deep inside and far away. The sound of the birds defines the height and width, the depth and breadth. The sound of the birds givee knowledge of the park’s hugeness.

There is a place in the park that speaks louder than any other because of its complete absence of sound. There, tall, handsome trees stand west to east from the highway to the river, two parallel rows, reaching out their upper branches to embrace across a small avenue of pavement. Here no sound can come and remain. It can not bounce or echo or ring without being swallowed and silenced. This is where sounds come to die. I stand sometimes at the end of the lane of trees; this is my favorite place, the place I have privately named the via Dolorosa, the sorrowful street.

I stand sometimes before the short stretch to the lane of trees. With my hands to my sides and my head tilted up I take deep breaths, pulling in mown grass and wet leaves and the faint scent of car exhaust from the FDR drive. Across the highway I can see the fading red brick of the projects baking in the hot sun. I take some more breaths, then enter the avenue of trees, enjoying the momentary blindness and chill of it. It is dark and still except for one small, shivering point of sun that had bored through the canopy of leaves.

The lane of trees is one thing. But there's a the bridge, the wonderful Williamsburg Bridge, under which I could stand for hours, and a secret spot past the tennis courts that's just as beautiful as it can be. It's so peaceful and undisturbed, I almost don't want to tell you about it.

If you want the real details of the park, square acreage and whatnot, the Coastal Marine Resource Center Web site has some great information.

Answer Me This

2008-07-01T21:34:00.002-04:00

What's wrong with these two headlines? How long does it take to do the right thing?

Mandela off US terrorism watch lists

Mugabe's Thugs Shout: "Let's kill the baby"

Loving "Loving"

2008-06-11T13:07:00.005-04:00

So here is the thing: June 12 marks the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision on Loving et Ux. v. Virginia. In 1958 two Virginia residents, a black woman named Mildred Jeter and a white man named Richard Loving married in the District of Columbia because it was against the law in the state of Virginia for a white person to marry anyone from any other race except the white race. They were charged with violating the law by the state of Virginia. They plead guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail. They received a suspended sentence if they promised to leave the state and not return together for 25 years. They decided that they weren't going to accept something so inherently absurd and something so clearly an affront to their rights as human beings, and their case wound up in front of the Supreme Court, which overturned the convictions and ruled unanimously for the couple, the opinion, delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren stated, in part:

"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
These convictions must be reversed."

This all happened six years after my own parents got married in Germany, and let me tell you getting to the point where they said "I do" was no picnic according to my mom. The United States Army wanted my parents to consider and reconsider, and purposely made it tough for them to get married. What they didn't know about my mother is that she knew that my father was going to be the love of her life and her husband from the moment she set eyes on him and NOTHING save Almighty God himself was going to prevent this. My mom had to have a physical exam; they checked with the local town hall to make sure she didn't have a criminal record (my mother was raised as much by nuns as her own family and grew up solidly upper middle class, for crying out loud!) The Army chaplain, a priest, had to school them on exactly what they might expect being a mixed-race couple in a country that contained 17 states that considered miscegenation (what an ugly word) illegal. Now that I think about it, I don't know who he thought he was telling--my dad was a 34 year old black man from Alabama, so nobody had to tell him anything. And my mom lived through Nazi Germany. Granted, she was a child, but come on, she didn't pick up a thing or two about what happens when one race subjugates another? Even after all of that, my father's commanding officer did not have to sign the papers giving them permission to wed. But he did. They got married on April 6, 1961.

A year and a half later, after a rough sea voyage of about a week we (I was something like 8 weeks old) wound up in Brooklyn, then at Fort Dix in New Jersey, so nobody was getting arrested, at least not in my family. And then the Supreme Court made what was just and right, legal.

So it was with some deep surprise that I read that a high school in Mississippi was holding its first integrated prom ever almost 41 years to the day of the Loving ruling ! Prior to this year the students at Charleston High School have had two separate, privately-sponsored proms, one for black kids, and one for whites. Since 1997, Morgan Freeman, a native of Charleston, has offered to pay for the prom if the school throws one for everyone. They finally took him up on the offer. You can hear about it here. The slide show of the event is fun and worth looking at. But I have to say, when I first found out about this, I thought that Charleston must be one of those isolated villages that you read about--remote enclaves where time stands still. Apparently, I'm more idealistic and naive than I thought. I know the race problem is FAR from over, but I thought we had gotten over this race mixing thing long ago. At least enough to allow kids of different races and cultures to go to one prom.

Harlem, USA 2041 A.D. . .

2008-06-05T15:05:00.009-04:00

"How much would you pay for a drug that takes you all the way out of your head—and into the mind and memories of another?"

About a month ago or so, I had the pleasure of attending a reading by Michel Marriott, a technology reporter for The New York Times. His new book The Skull Cage Key was recently published by Bolden Books, a division of Agate Publishing. I'm more a fan of the horror genre than speculative fiction, The Good House by Tananarive Due being the last novel of that ilk that I have read. Due is someone who is often compared to Stephen King. I love Stephen King's works. I like Tananarive Due's books a bit better. Michel's debut novel, which I hope to heaven is made into a movie, is right up there with King and Due. I tore through The Skull Cage Key in one weekend and then was mad at myself for not going a little slower to make it last longer. Michel if you're reading this, I hope you have a sequel in you.

I think the thing that caught my attention the most in the book was the kind of technology Michel has created for mid-twenty first century America. Picture windows that need just a tap to magnify something or someone many feet down on a busy street--that was one of my favorites, but there are so many more innovations that I don't want to give away. There are many things that have changed in 2041 New York City in general, and many things that have stayed the same. A New Yorker will probably find this that much more deeply satisfying, but anyone who has been to this city for even a day get swallowed up in the tale of Harlemite Armstrong Black as he tries to unravel a mystery, save his loved ones, and clear his name. A word to those on the prudish side: tread lightly. For details go here.

The Golden Minute

2008-06-04T08:42:00.009-04:00

I was walking home yesterday and it was a time of the evening when many Muslims in New York City pray to Mecca. We have a mosque in the East Village, the Madina Masjid, located on First Avenue and 11th Street. The mosque was founded in 1976 by Bengali immigrants, some of whom ran restaurants on "Indian Row" on 6th Street. On a marquee-like sign you can see that Allah is the true God but that Judaism and Christianity are also part of the true faiths. Listed along with Abraham and a few other prophets, including Muhammad, is Jesus. All this is in large green and red letters. On top of the mosque is a minaret—turquoise with gold leaf. As I walked up First Avenue toward 12th Street I could see some Muslim men making their way toward the mosque, chatting, greeting each other. I turned the corner and walked down 12th Street toward home and was surprised by the sight of a large skateboard ramp that had been erected in a public yard adjacent to a yard the members of the mosque use to garden. A company that produces a sugar-pumped, hyper-caffeinated beverage was sponsoring the ramp, had set up a large umbrella covered drinks stand nearby. A young man was skating on the concave ramp, a few others clustered nearby talking about the ramp--it looked like some event was going to happen just a bit later.

As I walked past, the muezzin at the mosque began the call to prayer, the adhan. The minaret on the mosque is purely ornamental so the muezzin stands on the sidewalk when he chants. He calls out that God is greatest, that he bears witness that there is no lord but God. That he bears witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God. If you've ever heard a Muslim call to prayer it is beautiful and haunting, regardless of what you may or may not believe. The muezzin's voice carried across the garden and play yard and schoolyard, past my old church Mary Help of Christians, now shut and silent.

And it hit me.

Here was Islam mere yards away from the fruit of western culture and it was peaceful. No, it was even more than that. It was golden. It was a golden minute, perhaps followed by another one, the moment itself a prayer.

Careening off the Road and into Wild Country

2008-05-13T14:09:00.002-04:00

I've mostly been quiet on this blog (for me) about the Presidential race, not because I don't have some very strong opinions, but because I was trying not to add to the deafening chatter. Also, this blog is supposed to provide an antidote to the insanity of humans at their worst. It's no small effort to get up in the morning to the news of the world and not just throw up my hands and say the hell with it—why bother writing my small thing in the face of so much that is truly awful? I have no answer beyond because. Because if one person finds relief or inspiration then I've done my job. The Quran (yes, that Quran!) says "If you kill one person, it's as if you kill all of humanity." I'm going to take comfort in the idea that if I help one person, then it's as if I helped all of humanity. Not because I have delusions of grandeur, but because I am such a puny thing in the face of this world, the universe, and beyond.

From time to time, though, I will be going off road from our regularly scheduled jaunts into history and art and culture and spirituality and into wild country—current events and social studies. I may not explain myself—sometimes because I can't, and sometimes because the entry, like the one that follows this, will be self explanatory.

The More Things Change . . .

2008-05-13T14:02:00.006-04:00

"Brutal subordination of the slaves was also a central tactic in controlling low-status whites who, if not thrown the bone of white supremacy, might have questioned the vastly unequal distribution of wealth and power among whites, which Southern grandees enjoyed and protected with guile and force."

" . . . if threats, economic oppression, and political neutering didn't work, denial of education and brute force had to be used to reassure lower-class whites that their central psychological prop in a hardscrabble world—their superiority over black people in all realms of life—would be protected at all costs."

Diane McWhorter in the foreward to Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Freedom Riders by Eric Etheridge

Wake Up Everybody!

2008-05-12T10:27:00.005-04:00

It's not about whose team wins any more:

www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/opinion/04friedman.html

Wordless

2008-04-23T17:27:00.004-04:00

Mostly I've been gone because I've been on vacation and moving my office at the same time. But a large part of my not writing any entries is that I've been rendered nearly wordless by some things I've seen lately (I know as a U.S. citizen I shouldn't be one to throw stones, but does anybody care about the Olympic host's involvement in the Darfur crisis, on the wrong side of the disaster ie they're supporting the genocide)? I feel for the Tibetans, but can anybody show the Sudan some damn love? I see Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson together on a public service announcement and wonder if their plea to save the environment is genuine or another political put on.

Yes, I'm a little beyond annoyed and since this blog is supposed to be about putting positive thoughts out there and solutions, I've said nothing until now. I'll be back in a day or two with my usual gotham-related tales, just needed to break my silence and say I'm back.

Vacation was good though, very good

The Ghost of Twelfth Street

2008-03-26T12:54:00.008-04:00

This morning I walked out of my building and down the street toward Avenue A when I saw something that made me stop. Written in colored chalk on the sidewalk in front of a building a few feet from my own was this:

Josephine Carlisi
Age 31
Lived at 502 East 12 Street
Died March 25, 1911
Triangle Factory Fire

Who wrote this? It was clear by the date why it was written. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a horrifying event; immigrant seamstresses, many of them teenagers were trapped in a blazing building with almost no way out but to jump. And many did jump from the eighth ninth floors of the building and died right in front of witnesses. The reasons for the senseless death of 146 young men and women (most of whom lived in my neighborhood and the Lower East Side) were typical. The factory, located in the Asch Building (now the Brown Building) on Washington Place and Greene Streets—today a posh neighborhood—was a sweatshop—unsanitary, unsafe, rarely, if ever inspected, where individuals worked for long hours for slave wages. Profit was the main goal. A fire broke out and the exits were either ablaze, locked, or useless. The story in all of its terrible detail was recounted in a New York Times article the day after the fire.

The owners of the building, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck who happened to be there at the time, somehow got out with the Blanck children and a governess. The fled over the roof.

I knew about the tragedy when I saw the chalk writing this morning and it just stunned me for a moment to think that Josephine once lived in a building so close to my own. It reminded me that my neighborhood was one of poor immigrants. I looked around and tried to see my street in 1911, filled with men and women on their ways to and from work.

I was on my way to work this morning. Nearly 100 years ago, Josephine Carlisi went to work and didn’t come back.

In the aftermath of the fire, factory safety regulations were passed, higher sanitation standards were put in place, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, formed in 1900, solidified its place in the fight for social reform. The owners were acquitted of wrongdoing because it could not be proved that they knew the alternative exit was locked. Three years after the fire they settled a civil suit: $75 per lost life.

Curious to find out who was behind the chalk writing. I googled Josephine Carlisi and found CHALK: “a community wide commemoration of the Triangle Factory Fire,” as described on the web site Community Walk. On the March 25 anniversary [of the Triangle Factory fire], we spread out across the city to inscribe in chalk the victims names & ages in front of their former homes. For photos of the project go here

Cornell University has created a comprehensive exhibit and Web site about the fire, with photos and illustrations, documents, transcripts and more .

I’m glad that Josephine (or Josephina, as she was listed in a roster of the dead) who lived on my block, is remembered. I will think about her from time to time when I walk by her building.

A Poem as Lovely as a TREE!

2008-03-21T09:25:00.012-04:00

This morning I got an e mail newsletter from my friend and health counselor Sacha Jones telling me that over the next few years, New York City is going to be planting a million trees. That's great news on its own, but it gets better: We get to help decide where! Go directly here if you want to cut to the chase and put in your vote. I did; it took me about a minute. Wouldn't it be nice to have a new tree on your block? Not to mention the extra pollution and CO2 filtering effect and the oxygen. And the birds. Red-tailed hawks and even a Great horned owl have been spotted in nearby Tompkin's Square Park. And the shade! And the spring buds. And standing under a tree in the rain.

Perhaps I'm feeling even more passionate about trees than usual because a tornado took down a huge maple tree in front of my childhood home (and still my home) in South Jersey a couple of weeks ago.

If you'd like more information you can visit the Million Trees Project.

If anyone out there has a great picture of a tree, or trees, or a tree-related image taken in one of the five boroughs that I could use to decorate this blog entry, I'd be grateful (and certainly give you credit)

Photosynthesis Is A Beautiful Thing!

Update: My good friend Constance Ash answered my call for tree photos with the two you see in this entry. The top was taken by her in Washington Square Park in April 2006, the one below was taken on 9/11. Thank you Constance. Both inspire.

Sun Moon Child

2008-03-14T14:14:00.004-04:00

It seems that my job is keeping me away from Gotham City Soul, and that Friday's are for abbreviated blogs that lift the spirit. I have so many many things to write about, and when I can arrange my time, I'll be giving you more history, and culture and soul than you'll probably want to read. Until then, this morning Cousin Taroue Brooks sent this video, the song "Sun Moon Child is by Imani Uzuri, created by Pierre Bennu. Lovely.

Yum Yum Eat'em Up!

2008-03-07T11:13:00.007-05:00

Time for a little levity. It's Friday and I need to laugh.

Yesterday I was on youtube taking a break, looking for something to make me laugh, and I typed in the Little Rascals. I don't think I've laughed so hard or so much in a long time, and it's been a long time since I watched Spanky, Stymie, and the rest of the gang cutting up. Decades later and they are still fresh! Yeah, there is the occasional stereotype that could be offensive taken out of context. But honestly, the natural fun the kids get up to, and the interracial cast, with black actors like Matthew "Stymie" Beard (who got paid the highest when he was on the show) taking center stage makes these pretty ahead of their time. Take a look at the clip from the episode "The Kid from Borneo" then tell me you didn't laugh until your stomach hurt. I've just a clip (the full episode was pulled off by a company that allegedly holds a copyright on the clips I used to have here), but there are other clips on youtube. Another favorite of mine is "Milk and Mush" featured here.

Yum Yum Eat'em Up!

FYI, Bumbo, the kid from Borneo, was a professional boxer turned actor named John Lester Johnson who once went ten rounds with boxing champ Jack Dempsey. It's a shame he had to take silly roles like this, but the man had to eat, and those were unfortunately the times.

A Tale of Six Africans

2008-03-06T16:55:00.012-05:00

In January of last year I caught a cab home from work. As we drove along I listened to the talk show the cab driver had tuned into on the radio, it was one of those call-in shows, and the subject was homeland security. I don't remember exactly what was said, because I really wasn't listening too hard. But the cab driver was. After a few minutes of the men on the radio prattling on about whether our government should be allowed to wiretap American citizens, the cab driver, who was black, and I believe African (I could not read his name on his license, posted in the back, and which usually holds a clue to citizenship, but detected an African lilt to his speech), said, "I would like to call in."

"Why don't you?" I replied

"Because," he said, "I'm afraid they will start investigating me."

I couldn't believe it. I asked him how he thought they could do that if they didn't even know who he was, and he said something about tracing his cell phone. And I thought, what a crazy pass we've come to when a cab driver in New York City, or anywhere in the United States is afraid to call a radio show because he believes that our government might trace his phone, and open a file on him. Or worse.

And then I said, "You call in anyway. The last time I looked around, we still had a democracy, and the right to free speech and our opinions. If you stay silent, then you will not be heard, and you will not be counted. Have courage, or get some quick." I don’t know if the driver ever took my advice. He did smile at me, but his expression led me to believe he was only half-convinced by what I told him.

A month later, I was traveling to Chicago on business. I caught a taxi into the city. The cabdriver was Nigerian. He told me this before I could ask. He also told me he had a master’s degree in computer engineering and worked part-time building computers when he was not driving a cab. he said he loved Nigeria but that it had bad leadership, which had led the country astray. We got caught in a traffic jam, and during the time it took us to get from the airport to my hotel, he told me how funny Americans can be with their misconceptions of Africa. In all seriousness a passenger once asked Kofi—that was his name—if it was difficult to live in a hut. He responded by saying, quite solemnly, that his family actually lived in trees—that his mother had one tree, his father had another tree, and when Kofi wanted to visit one or the other, he jumped from tree to tree. The man believed him for a minute. In fact, Kofi is from Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, a city as congested and modern as any in the United States. Kofi told me that other passengers had asked him why he was in the United States. His answer? “I came to America to enjoy the fruits of the labor of my ancestors.”

Wow!

Kofi came to mind a couple of weeks ago when I was on the campus of my alma mater Rutgers University. Our magazine put together a moving museum, an 18-wheeler outfitted to promote the magazine, but also, simply put, to bring black history to the people. A young black man entered the trailer and was watching clips that we were showing from Africa n-American Lives Pt. 2, the series created by Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in which he traces the ancestry of prominent black folks. I watched part of it with him and we began to chat. He told me he was first generation African, from Ghana, but had become a United States citizen and that he had been thinking a lot about the Africans who were brought here as slaves so long ago. It hadn’t occurred to him until recently that he might be related to people who long ago became African-Americans. It was quite possible, and with more and more advanced DNA tests, even possible to prove. He liked the idea, and so did I.

Another young man from Ghana, who became an American citizen, Derrick Ashong, grabbed the attention of many of us when he eloquently spoke about his reasons for supporting Barack Obama. The overwhelming response prompted him to make a second video, which you can watch here:

He came to the United States when he was a child, and when his family was about to go back, there was a coup. So he grew up in the Middle East in Qatar, the home of al-jazeera, which he points out is not a democracy. The first time he ever got to cast a vote in any election was in 2000, and the fact that he is free to vote in a democratic election is a blessing that he does not take for granted. And something, I add we should not take lightly. Ever.

Freedom and peace and the horror that comes when both are taken away was not more hauntingly brought home to me than when I heard the story of Imaculeé Ilibagiza, a Tutsi tribeswoman and survivor of the 1994 Rwandan massacre. One day she was a happy engineering student, the next Hutu tribesmen, many of whom had been friends, classmates, neighbors, where slaughtering Tutsis, including her family and friends. The reasons for the genocide go deep as many who are reading this must already know. I’m ashamed to say I dimly remember news reports while it was happening, but didn’t really pay attention until Don Cheadle starred in Hotel Rwanda, and the brilliant Raoul Peck (whose films on the assassination of one of Africa’s greatest leaders, the first prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, should be standard for world history curriculum) made Sometimes in April a decade after it happened. Ilibagiza, along with several other Tutsi women, were given refuge in a tiny bathroom in the home of a local Hutu pastor’s house. To hear her speak, you would never know that when she came out of that room 91 days later, her entire family had been slaughtered, as well as many of her childhood friends. The woman has reached a place that would be impossible for many—a place of complete forgiveness. How she came to that place is told beautifully in her book Left to Tell.

A few years ago I was visiting my mother for the weekend. She has cable, but only enough so that she can watch EWTN, the Eternal World Television Network beloved station of many Roman Catholics. So on Saturday nights, we turn to Public Television, which almost never disappoints. That Saturday, there was a mini marathon of films by the late Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembené (Black Girl, Moulaadeé, Xala, and more) When we tuned in, his 2000 film Faat Kine, was just beginning. What a revelation! The title was the name of the main character, a successful businesswoman who owns a gas station in Dakar. The plot is really a day in the life of Faat Kine, but it is punctuated with flashbacks of her struggle to become successful in a patriarchal society that has not always been sympathetic to women, to put it mildly. The wonderful shots of Dakar, another cosmopolitan African city in its exteriors and interiors , brought balance to my own Americanized vision of jungles and savannahs. But what I loved the most is the humor with which Sembené infused the film, his tribute, as he says, to “the everyday of heroism of the African woman.” It is a treat for me to watch a black woman, who knows her mind, making her way through her life as if she were queen of the universe. Here’s a good review, and here's to the Imaculeé's and the Faat Kine's of he world!

Sunshine and Funk (A winter soul party from me to you)

2008-02-26T09:55:00.004-05:00

The shortest month of the year should be the easiest, but it never is. Black History Month, coupled with the fact that my dad died in this month, make it busy and sorrowful for me. Busy and sorrowful are waters that are strange to navigate, and I for damn sure don't feel like preaching any black history today. So here is something that makes me smile every time I hear it, and I hope it will make you smile, too. Roy Ayers' "Sunshine". It's the herald of Spring, the promise of Summer.

And while we're at it, to keep it Gotham, lets add Tom Browne, jazz trumpeter from Queens, with his classic "Funkin' for Jamaica (New York)".

Short But Potent and Just a Bit Nosy on My Part

2008-01-28T16:43:00.001-05:00

Okay folks, I want to know: Which candidate, if any, do you think you will vote for in the primaries: Barack Obama; John McCain, Hillary Clinton; Mitt Romney; John Edwards; Mike Huckabee; Rudolph Giuliani (if he's still in the race come Super Tuesday)? I'm curious. I also want to know your race and gender and religion (if you are religious/spiritual) and approximate age. I'm reading so much about how this presidential race is about age, religion, gender, and color (as if no others were; this one is just more obvious). I want to see if there is anyone out there who breaks the demographic mold set up by (omnipresent, ever-shifting) polls. I won't try to convince you to vote for anyone, or ask you to say why you're voting for whom your voting, although I will be transparent and say if I could vote in the New York State primary (I can't because I'm not affiliated with a party: I would have had to become affiliated before the last general election) I'd be voting for Barack Obama. Not because he's black, but because he's biracial, like me.

Just kidding people! Breathe. Crack a smile. Tell a joke.

His blackness aside (and contrary to what some other black people like to say, Mr. Obama walks this Earth as a black man) I think he is the best man for the job for the simple reason that I believe the words that come out of his mouth. I also believe that he wants to be our leader, and not just the president. They are not automatically one in the same. Power is one thing. Being able to have power and successfully lead a people is another one entirely. What Obama doesn't know how to do, he'll learn quickly, and delegate to the people who do know how in the meantime. Are there other candidates who could do that job? Yes. But he's one of maybe two who I believe holds the interests of the many over those of the few. I'll leave you to guess whom I think the other one is.

In the end, we're all alone in the voting booth. Unless it's made by Diebold.

If you don't want to leave a comment, but would like to answer my question, please shoot me an email here.

Update: My cousin sent me this short quiz at www.votechooser.com. I took the test and it confirmed my choice. Interesting.

A Longish Short List

2008-01-17T17:02:00.001-05:00

Today I'd like to give you a shortlist of books, films, and one event that I think are worth investigating. I haven’t read all of the books, or seen all of the movies: What they have in common is that they’ve caught my attention. I’m hoping I’ll be able to write about all of them in more detail. But for now, without further ado:

On Sunday, January 20 from 3 to 5 pm WNYC Radio and Civic Frame are cohosting a public conversation at the Brooklyn Museum called “Embracing the Radical King: Prophetic or Passé?” In the press release it is described as

“a critical examination and reclamation of a more complex Dr. King, featuring poetry, a montage of archival King photos and audio, and public conversation about some of his underemphasized, but no less defining, positions. Using Dr. King’s own words as a guide, WNYC Host Brian Lehrer and CivicFrame President April Yvonne Garrett will lead an interactive panel discussion in which esteemed public intellectuals and the audience will have the opportunity to explore the “Radical King,” and consider how he might have responded to some of today’s pressing social concerns.”

Topics will range from war in the age of terrorism, immigration, the role of religion in the political sphere, and health care, to the cultural currency of entertainers and athletes, to subjects Dr. King felt passionately about but that often go ignored in the national conversation, including poverty, the prison industrial complex, and the black church.

Danny Simmons, producer of Def Jam Poetry and poet Sonia Sanchez will participate.

If you can’t make the live event, excerpts from the event will air Monday January 21 on The Brian Lehrer Show, from 10am to noon on 93.9 FM, AM 820, and through live webstream at wnyc.org. A full webcast and podcast will be available at www.wnyc.org.

For more information, go here.

My friend Ned Sublette, who wrote the beautifully researched book Cuba and Its Music: From the First Dru ms to the Mambo has come out with a second book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. When I finish the second book, I’ll be doing a mini interview with Ned here at Gotham City Soul. I’m just alerting you to both as well as Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington. Harriet writes for a healthcare supplement our magazine produces and has worked exhaustively to bring us this compelling book described as

“The first and only comprehensive exploration of the vast and horrific medical neglect, abuse and experimentation on African Americans, from the atrocities of slavery to the subtler but equally disturbing inequities of the recent past and present.”.

Harriet’s book is nominated for a National Books Critic Circle award. Congratulations Harriet.

A peer of Ned Sublette's, Madison Smartt Bell, has written a biography of Touss ai nt L’Ouverture. Bell is known for his trilogy of novels about the Haitian Revolution (All Souls Rising; Master of the Crossroads; and The Stone That the Builder Refused). I’ve always been nervous about historical fiction because so much fiction does creep into the historical record through novels, biopics, and the like, so I’m glad that Bell has turned to biography.

At this juncture, I’d like to ask anyone who has read any of the books I’ve suggested, seen any of the films, or attended any of the art shows I mention here or elsewhere on the blog to come forward with a review. Good or bad, all are welcome. I just ask that you not be insulting if your review is not going to be a good one.

In that vein, has anyone seen John Sayles new movie Honeydripper? It premiered in New York City at the African Diaspora Film Festival. It’s playing at Cinema Village theaters. It’s on my way home, but I may never get to the theater to see it.

lll

I love Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which I have read, but never seen on stage. But I have seen the stunning classic 1961 film starring Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, and Diana Sands.

Well, they’ve remade it for TV starring—that’s right, Sean Combs (Puffy, Diddy, and whatever to the rest of us) in the Poitier role of Walter Lee Younger. Here’s the trailer and I’m not going to say another word. You can judge for yourself whether you’ll watch it. It will be on ABC February 25 at 8 pm Eastern.

On cable television, Turner Classic Movies is going to be showing five films by the until recently lesser-heralded but brilliant independent director Charles Burnett. I was introduced to his work when I saw his film To Sleep with Anger in 1990, and it was the second time I realized that a movie can be made about black people, without it having to be about being black (although at times it is very MUCH about being black, if that’s confusing enough for you). The first time was when I saw Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It). Go here for the list of films, which includes his first, Killer of Sheep. Made in 1977, it remained in obscurity for 30 years, mostly because the cost of the music rights would have made it prohibitive to screen. The Library of Congress has declared it a national treasure as one of the first 50 on the National Film Registry, and the National Society of Film Critics selected it as one of the “100 Essential Films” of all time.

On a related note, To Sleep With Anger is not one of the five films that will be shown, and it’s not easy to get your hands on. It’s not on netflix yet (although it’s listed, and not listed in blockbuster at all) You can buy the DVD for 69 bucks and change at Amazon (only one was available when I checked), or if any of you out there still have a VCR, they have him new and used for reasonable prices. Your best bet is the public library. The NYPL has four copies.

On February 4, PBS will be airing Prince Among S laves. Winner of the Best Documentary at the 2007 American Black Film Festival, and based on a biography of the same name by Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves tells the story of Abdul Rahman, an African Muslim prince. Apparently, there are some re-enactments, which usually tend to get on my nerves, but I have a feeling these will be of a higher caliber. Happily, the documentary will be enriched by contemporary artworks, archival letters and diaries; and on-camera interviews with distinguished scholars and experts. Perhaps my favorite part about the entire production, aside from the topic, is that its narrated by Mos Def. A synopsis from the PBS Web site

Abdul Rahman was captured in 1788 and sold into slavery in the American South. He endured the horrific Middle Passage and ended up the “property” of a poor and nearly illiterate planter from Natchez, Mississippi, named Thomas Foster. Rahman remained enslaved for 40 years before finally regaining his freedom under dramatic circumstances, becoming one of the most famous men of his day. He returned to Africa, his royal status acknowledged. Prince Among Slaves ends with a family reunion of Rahman's African and American descendants in Natchez, Mississippi.

To see a clip, go here

If anyone is interested in an article about Abdul Rahman and other eighteenth and nineteenth century black Muslims in America, I’ll be happy to give you a copy of an article published in Legacy in 1998 called “America’s First Black Muslims” by Marc Ferris. Just e mail me.

In the next couple of days I'll be back with art, music, and theater.

Since the only images in this entry today seem to be men, I'm leaving you with this wonderful image of Ruby Dee by Carl Van Vechten from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript collection .

The Garden State Steps Up

2008-01-08T20:12:00.000-05:00

My home state of New Jersey apologized for slavery yesterday. I wasn’t going to blog about it until I read what a Republican assemblyman had to say about it according to the Associated Press:

“But this was a sin that was atoned for in blood 150 years ago by the death of 650,000 Americans,” [Richard] Merkt R[epublican]-Morris [County] said, referring to the Civil War.

“America does not and has never accepted the notion of collective guilt,” Merkt said. "We can all, and should all, express profound sorrow about the evils of slavery, but none of us can truly apologize for the institution because neither we nor anyone we represent was in any way responsible for it.”

PLEASE! I’m so tired of that “our ancestors came here after slavery, we have nothing to do with that” mantra, I can’t tell you. TIRED. He couldn’t let his fellow legislators do a good thing, he just couldn’t.

Here’s what I have to say to Assemblyman Merkt and all those other white folks who have the temerity to ask me “haven’t we finished paying the price?”

No.

I wasn’t born here either. I was born in Germany (although, by virtue of the fact that my father was an American citizen when I was born, I was declared an American). My brown infant self came over here in 1962, a little less than 100 years after the Civil War. Yet, as a black person, I could have been subject at any time to racism both overt and subtle, and have been. Not soul-crushing racism, but if could have been demoralizing if my parents hadn’t taught me to believe in myself and ignore racist morons and their ignorant, bottom-dwelling ways. So even though I came here on a boat, I’m still subject to the consequences of being black in America, just like all the white immigrants have had the opportunity of reaping the rewards of the unearned privilege of being white in America. Pure and simple. My mom, who most of you know is white, tells me that other white folks make all kinds of assumptions and say all kinds of things to her they’d never say if my black father had been with her. They think it’s okay to say racist things to her because she’s in the Caucasian Club. It’s not okay with her. Never was, never will be. She came over on the same boat I did. Got that Assemblyman Merkt? My dad was on that boat too. In a uniform.

The resolution said it best, offering an “apology ‘for the wrongs inflicted by slavery and its after effects in the United States of America.’

It states that in New Jersey, ‘the vestiges of slavery are ever before African-American citizens, from the overt racism of hate groups to the subtle racism encountered when requesting health care, transacting business, buying a home, seeking quality public education and college admission, and enduring pretextual traffic stops and other indignities.’”

So thank you. Thank you. It’s officially acknowledged in the state record books. That may seem like just another empty gesture to some, but it means plenty to me. My publisher, colleagues and I spent the better part of nearly a decade trying to get unacknowledged black people, who helped build this country, acknowledged in print.

I might add that New Jersey is the first northern state to do this. If you’d like to read about the history of slavery in New Jersey (although it abolished slavery on a gradual basis beginning in 1804, the state didn’t free its final slaves until 1846) There’s a good summary at the Web site Slavery in the North.

200 Years at the Rosenfeld

2008-01-04T15:12:00.000-05:00

Today I received an invitation to an exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery called quite plainly “African American Art: 200 Years.” For those who are aficionados, the list of artists whose works will be shown may not come as huge surprise. But that’s what makes me so happy about this show: Many of the artists have become so well-known, so documented, so a part of art history that they are old hat! This is good news to me (although not to some, but I plan to write about the dissent among artists of color in a future blog)

For those who want to gain a basic grounding in African-American art, this is a great place to start; there are works by nineteenth-century artists such as Robert Scott Duncanson, as well as living artists such as Elizabeth Catlett. Two hundred years of it. I want to get a good look at a few of these pieces close up and pretend, for a moment, that I could actually own one of them (I'm particularly enamored of the image at the bottom right of this entry, and imagine that the actual piece must be stunning; I hope I'm not disappointed).

Another reason to visit and support the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is that it represents many types of artists, but it has been consistent in its efforts to bring works by black artists to the fore. All types, of all disciplines and styles.

The opening reception is on January 10 from 6-8. I am planning to attend it; if you’d like to meet me there, shoot me an e mail or telephone, I’d love to see any friends I haven’t already in the New Year (and those I have).

The show runs from January 10 to March 8.

On a similar note, I am told by great friend Wayne Kral that the Martin Puryear show at MoMA is really wonderful. That only runs until January 18. Check out some of his works and words here.

Art, from top: Landscape with Haystacks, France, 1912. by William Edouard Scott; Southern Landscape, 1941 by Eldzier Cortor; Girl Wearing a Bonnet, circa. 1810 by Joshua Johnson; Carnivale del Sol, 1962 by Norman Lewis

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (but not Death, who takes a holiday)

2007-12-31T12:09:00.002-05:00

I was not going to post this blog entry because I feared it might come off as me being a killjoy during the holiday season. I mean, oh boy, a blog about death on New Year's—way to go Audrey. But I wrote this in good faith, spirit, and humor and it is something I wanted to share with you at the end of this year and the beginning of the next. Because I love you, not because I want to bum you out. Plus you have to admit, that picture above is pretty funny.

I do have a plan to get back to history and soul and New York City and all that good jazz in 2008. But for now . . .

Joe Black: Don't be feisty, sista.

Jamaican Woman: I not be feisty mista. You com' for me that's good news.

Joe Black: Can do no right by people. I com' to take you, you want to stay - I leave you stay, you want to go.

from Meet Joe Black

By now people who read my blog might think I’m a bit preoccupied with death. I’m not, really. But the “death” of 2007 makes me think of it. And in my own way, I’m just trying to build him (and I say “him” because I hate “it” as a pronoun, so impersonal here, and death is so very personal) a room in my house because death is an inevitable guest. Many of us Westerners spend huge amounts of time, money, and energy avoiding death (I say avoiding, because we can never, ever defeat death) I figure, let him move in now so I can get to know him. When it’s time for me to exit with him, I might not be so scared.

All of this is because a few days ago I watched, for perhaps the tenth time, the film Meet Joe Black. It didn’t do well at the box office. I don’t care. It is one of the singularly most beautiful movies.

The movie is based on the original 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday, which itself comes from a stage play of the same name from the 1920s. In short, Death decides to experience life. So he looks around at the billions of souls on the planet, and chooses William Parrish (played by Anthony Hopkins), a wealthy, principled man, to be his guide. He then looks for a body, which happens to be that of a young man in a coffee shop (Brad Pitt). This young man had just made the acquaintance of William Parrish’s daughter, Susan, played by the stunningly beautiful Clare Forlani. The two part on the sidewalk outside the shop, sparks a-flying, and she walks away, not seeing that the guy gets hit by a car. A few hours later Brad Pitt’s character shows up at William Parrish’s penthouse home (it is gigantic, hardly an apartment) in NYC for dinner. Death lays it all out for Parrish in the privacy of the study: He can die now, or he can have some more time and show Death the works. Parrish chooses the latter, and when pressed for a name, while introducing Death to his family, he calls him Joe Black. In a nutshell:

Joe experiences anger, treachery, sex, love, pain, humor, loss and peanut butter in the span of a few weeks, all the while living in William Parrish’s home. He has a bedroom where he sleeps. He of course falls in love with Susan. Parrish himself gets to know death, and determines he isn’t such a bad sort. Now of course there is the seduction of the settings, which are lavish, and the good looking people, and Anthony Hopkins, who I would watch in a remake of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (by the way, I told my 7 year old nephew to watch it over Christmas (it was on TV), and he actually got into it, really, really bad special effects and all; you can never tell with kids).

The score to Meet Joe Black by Thomas Newman is so beautiful I defy you not to cry your little eyes out while your watching. And of course there is the love story, and who doesn’t love a love story. Don’t go to youtube to watch clips, just rent the film and watch it. I promise you will not regret it.

I might not have such an accommodating view of death if my will to live had ever been tested. It hasn’t. I see doctors taking what I consider extraordinary measures, and I can’t help but feel sometimes it is more about their egos (I’m going to be the one mortal to cheat death because I am Dr. God!) than about their patients. But of course deciding when to die is such a difficult and frightening thing. Still, like the poor wretch standing on the ledge of a burning building, with only two choices, jump or die from the smoke and flames, there comes a point where it’s not about whether you will die, but how will you die. And I can't say for sure I won't be going, kicking and screaming. I hope I won't.

And who am I to say that extraordinary measures should not be taken when there are people like Randy Pausch (the professor who actually delivered what is usually a theoretical “last lecture” before he dies)? He would not have left us with his wisdom and example of how to die gracefully had he not tried everything possible to arrest his pancreatic cancer (Update: When I wrote this, it was arrested. Since then, Pausch has died).

There is Leroy Sievers, a former executive producer at Nightline, who writes a blog about his cancer. I don’t know how he does it, and there are moments when he himself has wondered whether it might not be better to just stop all therapy and live the rest of his life without the side effects of chemo and the pain that has gone with surgery. But he has something left to give and is doing through his blog. (Update: Sievers has also died)

There are the Terri Schiavos of the world. I cannot pretend to understand a mother and father’s heart, or a spouse’s heart, but like most people I do know the unwillingness to let go of a dying loved one, that unwillingness that really grabs your heart and soul and squeezes until you can barely think or breathe. When my father was dying I forced myself through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—at lightning speed because I couldn’t dwell in any of those places for too long, and because I needed to get to acceptance so that I could bring it to my father, who, being the wise gentleman he was, always knew when it was time to leave the party. He never made any bones about the fact that his time would come, and so for the 24 hours before he died I was given the grace to tell him good luck and godspeed.

The fact that I’m crying as I’m writing this tells you that as quickly as I ran through those stages, I had to go back and live with them after my dad’s funeral. Of course I miss him. But his dying wasn’t about me. One thing I know is that it would have been an awful shame, and truly wrong, to have forced him through extraordinary medical measures only to have him be unable to be the man he was before he got sick. Which is why I was relieved that Terri Schiavo was finally allowed to move on.

Then there are perfectly healthy people who get stuck in tough situations. Becoming lost at sea, for instance, or in the woods; in a motor vehicle accident not of your doing. There are amazing stories of survival. I think that people who survive those circumstances must get very angry at one point, must say to themselves, this is sincerely effed up. They might even shake their fists at the sky. This "the hell with you, it's not my time yet" type of anger is a type of furious denial that I think helps. And if they get through the trial, then clearly it wasn't their time yet.

Then there are certain suicides. I'm not talking about end stage folks who decide enough is enough. I'm talking about people who, although not always ill in the way a cancer patient is, can no longer bear to be in the skin they are in, or the heads they are in. As long as I live I will never understand them. I can only suggest that I had the good fortune to be wired differently.

I know by now you must be saying: seriously Audrey, we see death every day—suicide bombers; disaffected youths gone mad; gang violence; genocide in Africa; pandemics of all kind. But in these places death dwells as the enemy. He shows only one face. Our problem is that we will not let him live with us so that we can get to know him better, see other aspects.

People often wonder why, for instance, Tibetan monks are not fearful of death. Here is a thing: I read once about a monk who would not leave a glass of water at his bedside because it presumed that he might be alive in the morning to drink it. He put his head on the pillow every night with a smooth brow, unconcerned. Death is not his enemy, and quite possibly, because of the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, death is his friend.

All of this is to say live life in all of its goodness and badness, every single day, but give death a little space in your life as you live. Honor the sacred soul in you and the sacred soul in every sentient being. January 1 is just as good a day as any, but every day begins a new year if you really need it to. I leave you with a beautiful photo of my father. It was taken in a folk art gallery in Alabama. When I look at that picture it reminds me how much Miles Peterson lived life and lived it well. This was a man with few, if any regrets.

I love you all more than I can say. Happy New Year!

Audrey

Trains, Planes, Footprints, and (Comfort and Joy)

2007-12-27T18:48:00.000-05:00

So I arrived in Newark Airport from Savannah yesterday around 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I prefer Newark to LaGuardia and JFK for a couple of reasons, not the least of them being state loyalty. Yes, I will travel out of New York City to Jersey paying the $15 surcharge to the Taxi and Limousine Commission to fly out of Newark. Newark Airport makes sense to me. It’s laid out in a way that I can navigate. I just like it better.

I traveled to Newark via cab last Friday because I just couldn’t get up early enough to do anything else, and bless the Supershuttle for being so cheap ($21, one-way; 12 for additional people in your party) and proletarian, but it has its issues (namely, you’re packed in like a sardine; they pick you up way too early for your flight—3 am for a 7 am takeoff, for example; there’s always somebody who is stunningly late for his or her flight (because he or she lied to the dispatcher about the time of the flight) and is killing the driver in a death by a thousand irritating threats and pleas).

My favorite way of getting to Newark is the Train to the Plane.

But I didn’t do that last Friday. My flight was at 9:05 AM. I don’t know why I insist on booking such early flights. I don’t go to sleep until 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning on any given night. On the nights before I’m about to fly out I have this perverse habit of staying up even longer, thus assuring that instead of the 4 or 5 hours of sleep I might get had I gone to bed at the usual time, I will now get 1 or 2 hours of sleep.

Hence the whirlwind of out of the bed, brush teeth, splash water on face, grab my suitcase and purse dash outside and into a cab for a $65 cab ride (that included the tip)

I also must have made some kind of air travel history. I left my apartment at 7:35 am and was through security and sitting at my gate by 8:15. No kidding.

Still, the taxi is not my transportation of choice when it comes to getting to Newark. I love the Train to the Plane. I recommend that to anyone who lives in NYC who has to fly out of Newark: Take the TtotheP (also known as Air Train and Rail Link). There are a few reasons.

1. It is $15 one-way, $11.25 for children, senior citizens, and the disabled.

2. The amount of carbon emissions saved by traveling on public transportation should not be underestimated. You are being green while saving money.

It’s not for someone with luggage of Zsa Zsa Gabor proportions, but if you’ve got one suitcase and a carry-on, it’s pretty much a cinch. You go to Penn Station, buy your ticket and wait for the next designated New Jersey Transit train. Yes, I took a cab to the train station, which cost me all of 7 or 8 bucks with the tip, so location to Penn Station has to be factored in.

You board the train at the appointed time (they run pretty frequently) and in about 10 to 15 minutes you arrive at the Newark Rail Link station (note that Amtrak also stops there and that you can go to points north and south from this station). You get on the Newark Airport monorail (which is almost always there or just about to be there) and you get off at your terminal (inside each car is a map with the airlines and their terminals clearly indicated). Voila.

When I got back to Penn Station yesterday, I took the subway home because the taxi line was simply and hilariously long, and no way was I going to stand in that line for 40 minutes in the cold, when I could even walk home quicker. So I toted my suitcase down, then up the steps of the subway stations. And it’s then that I thought of two more good reasons to take the TtotheP: Exercise—sorely needed after holiday eating (the Germans have a verb for that sort of eating, it is fressen used only when describing how animals eat) and the affirmation that I’m still young enough and in shape enough to carry a heavy suitcase up and down several flights of stairs and still feel okay. And that includes the four flights at the end of the trip to my fifth floor apartment. That made me feel good and feeling good at the end of a day of air travel is something to take note of.

For $15 bucks (plus the $2 for my subway fare) I:

Had a workout

Saved $48

Reduced my carbon footprint (almost negligible considering I was just in a plane eating up thousands of pounds of jet fuel, but hey)

Felt decidedly happy and unstressed at the end of what can often be a stressful trip.

It leaves me wanting to come up with other ways to be green and healthy and save money an feel good inside all at once. Kind of resolutions without actually being resolutions. Do you have any ideas? I’d love it if you shared them. In the meantime have fun with this ad for a certain athletic shoe. It shows how the Brazilian soccer team amuses itself and other passengers when its flight is delayed (in a pre 9/11 world. Do you think we can ever get there again?)

A Drive-By Entry

2007-12-07T12:17:00.000-05:00

I've been so wrapped up in work I haven't had a chance to piece together enough decent blogs. I'm doing a drive-by today, telling you quickly about an event our magazine (actually our events planner and publisher put together) a youth forum for teenage boys to meet men who have done great and good things for the community and the world in general. The four men this year were Louis Gossett Jr., Byron Lewis, the founder, in 1969, of Uniworld Group Inc., a media planning company targeting the black and Latino markets; Ohio Congressman Louis Stokes, who served 15-consecutive and highly productive terms in office (during which he helped cofound the Congressional Black Caucus); and Percy Sutton, Jr., elder statesman of Harlem, and lawyer for Malcolm X, among many other things. Because I'm just quickly dropping in, I've provided the links (just click on the names for the bios) and a photo of the men with students, and at an awards ceremony we held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Suffice it to say these are four phenomenal gentlemen who have overcome every type of adversity to serve their fellow people.

We had a captive audience of the young men who were brought to the forum by their teachers, but we have a hard time getting boys to sit still long enough to listen to something besides the nonsense that they are bombarded with every day. I can see how an NBA star or a hip-hop mogul might seem like more attractive potential mentors, I just want them to realize the wider choices they have in following their bliss. If you have any ideas how to reach our young black men in an effective way, I'd love to hear them. Someone already suggested that we make sure Legacy magazine gets into the hands of juveniles in detention; I'm working on that idea for 2008.

Photos: At the very top: Congressman Louis Stokes, Byron Lewis, and Louis Gossett, Jr. with members of the youth forum. Above, left to right: NBC Anchorman David Ushery, Congressman Stokes, Percy Sutton, American Legacy Publisher Rodney J. Reynolds, Louis Gossett, Jr. and Byron Lewis. Both photographs by Barry Mason

Happy St. Nicholas Day!

2007-12-06T20:05:00.004-05:00

I couldn’t let the day go by without acknowledging that it’s St. Nicholas Day in the Netherlands and Germany and other parts of Europe. We never celebrated it when I was a kid, but my Mom sure did, and I’m writing about it here because for me, it marks the beginning of Weihnachtsdelerium, a German specific fever centered on Christmas that begins around now and ends on January 6, Three Kings Day. She and her brother, my Uncle Heinz (who is traveling to Tunisia for Christmas; ironic that my old German uncle has been to Africa a half dozen times or more and I haven’t been once) put their shoes outside their front door the night before, and St. Nicholas would come knocking at this door, with his faithful sidekick, Knecht Ruprecht (farmhand Ruprecht). St. Nick would ask my mom and uncle specific questions about their behavior throughout the year; if he determined that they were good, he would leave gifts in their shoes. If he decided they weren’t, they might get switches. What children feared was the sidekick Knecht Ruprecht who hovered in the background, ready to grab the switches and administer a whipping right there on the spot! My Mom says her cousin, Arno, would get a stomachache every St. Nicolas eve because he was always getting into trouble.

In addition to a possible whipping, you might get stuffed in a sack and sent to parts unknown, a fate much worse, according to my mother. She told me that Knecht Ruprecht had a big old sack with stocking-covered legs sticking out of it. In the Netherlands Knecht Ruprecht is replaced by six to eight black men. If you want to relieve yourself of all of the stress built up by all of this enforced holiday insanity that you’re subjected to this time of year, go here and read the short story "Six to Eight Black Men" by David Sedaris. You can also hear Sedaris read it on youtube. It’s in three parts; I’ll start you off with the firs t.

I guarantee you will laugh yourself sick.

Lest you start getting all huffy about the racist implications behind the black men, understand that most of the sidekicks—Knecht Ruprecht, the six to eight black men, and the hideous Krampus (leave it to the Austrians to come up with something akin to Satan to scare the living wits out of everyone. They have a "holiday" called the Night of the Krampus, where they don frightening masks, and fire is involved), and many others, are dark, but mostly because they are covered with soot from climbing down chimneys, or perhaps, climbing up out of the fire and brimstone of hell (some of these characters have cloven hooves, horns, and tails). There are a few assistants who are really black men, but they aren't portrayed in caricature.

In a way, a Krampus Night wouldn't be such a bad idea here in the States. It would help cut through all the insincere treacle poured all over everything this time of year. If you're Christian, it might remind you why you're celebrating Christmas in the first place, if not, it would be a welcome break from the holiday onslaught.

By the way, nobody in my mom’s family ever got a whipping or switches in his or her shoes, or carried away to parts unknown, not even my mom’s cousin Arno (who liked to administer beatdowns to my poor uncle who had a tendency to tattle).

The story of the historical St. Nicholas (we celebrate today because he died on December 6) can be found here, along with the legends that eventually transformed a saint into what we call Santa Claus.

It’s Not the Name They Call You, It’s the Name You Answer To

2007-11-15T19:02:00.000-05:00

I’m usually willing to give artistic expression, and many things quite a bit of latitude, but I’m going to go ahead and be grumpy about something today.

I’m not going to see American Gangster. I like Denzel Washington’s work. I loved his directorial debut Antwone Fisher , and of course there is the well-known portrayal of Malcolm X; and the lesser vaunted, but equally wonderful performance as Creasy in Man on Fire, the story of a burned out ex CIA operative and assassin who finds redemption in the process of saving the life of a little girl, whom he has grown to love as his own. The Hurricane, in which Washington starred as the embattled boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, is a topic for another blog entry altogether, as there is deep controversy over the facts surrounding the story of Carter’s life. But I loved Washington’s Oscar-worthy performance all the same.

But I don’t want to contribute one thin dime to American Gangster. I fail to see why I should care to know the details of the life of a person who did nothing but cause misery and destruction. Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas was a criminal. He destroyed everything and contributed nothing.

In the trailers, Lucas is made out to be some kind of urban hero. Washington as Lucas, looking fly in his Seventies chic suits, defies The Man: “This is my home, my country. Frank Lucas don’t run from nobody,” he says. “This is America.” A white detective gets all testy when told that Lucas is even above the mafia. “No black man has accomplished what the American Mafia hasn’t, not in a hundred years!” he shouts, as if Lucas had found the cure for cancer and it was too inconceivable a thought for the white detective to even think. And it makes me wince to see Ruby Dee, who plays Lucas’s mom, clap her hands in delight when she sees the new house her son has bought for her—the house that heroin built.

Add to all of this the fact that 93-year-old Mayme Johnson, the widow of Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, (described in a pr sheet I received a day or two ago as “the original American gangster who ruled Harlem in the early twentieth century”) is coming out with a book about her husband called Harlem Godfather: The Rap on My Husband, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. I know just as little about Johnson as Lucas, but it appears that he basically worked as an enforcer for the Mafia (another group that receives way too much hero-worship, and I say this despite having been a loyal Sopranos fan. Hypocritical? Yes. Nobody's perfect, and in my defense, The Sopranos was fiction; American Gangster is based on a true story) to protect their interests in Harlem from other black gangsters. Mrs. Johnson says that she wrote the book because she wants to dispel the legends, myths, and rumors about her husband. She has every right to, and I’m sure he must have had some fine qualities (that’s spoken by a true optimist) and she has some great memories of him, but I have to say right here, in the immortal words of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive in response to Harrison Ford shouting that he did not kill his wife, a one-armed man did: I. Don’t. Care. I stopped being interested in Bumpy Johnson when I heard the man was a criminal. As far as I’m concerned he was, as Malcolm X said, “part of the problem” and nowhere near part of the solution.

And speaking of contributing nothing, shame on Viacom-owned Black Entertainment Television for the documentary series American Gangster, just another opportunity to parade the worst black people they can find for all to see, so people can tsk tsk and confirm how superior they all are. There are no history lessons here.

I understand the attraction of the gangster in folklore. Stagger Lee’s legend endures because of our need to believe in a bad-ass Negro archetype (heck, I've written about him). But when thugs push out every other black person on the silver screen and TV, in the print and electronic media, I can’t help feel like certain non-colored individuals aren’t once again telling black people who they think they are supposed to be. But as someone wise once said, “it’s not the name they call you, it’s the one you answer to.”

Now to give Denzel Washington his due, he is involved with another project that I can endorse. The movie, in theaters on Christmas day, is called The Great Debaters, and tells of Melvin B. Tolson, a poet, columnist, politician, who in the 1930s was an English professor at all-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. There he formed a crack debate team that beat not only USC, but Harvard in 1935. I first knew of Tolson because of a story of the same name as the movie, published in American Legacy in Spring of 1997. It was written by a man named Tony Scherman. Scherman was contacted when Washington, who is directing and starring in the film and Oprah Winfrey, who is producing it through her company Harpo Productions, decided the project was a go. I’ve gotten bits of pieces of news about its progress along the way, as Harpo Productions, a friend who is working on a companion book, a publicity person from something called the Weinstein Company, and members of the Tolson family have all called up for copies of the magazine (of which I have only my archive copy), and the article itself. I’ve talked to Tony Scherman, too, who has been paid, but unfortunately doesn’t get a credit, although it’s clear that the article has been relied upon in one way or another as a source. Still, it’s a great, great tale and I urge people to see it.

You can see the trailer here.

UPDATE: Tony Scherman does get a credit in the movie, large enough for everyone to see. Hooray!

Absurd

2007-11-08T08:58:00.001-05:00

I have to jump in here today to rant. I realize solving the homeless problem is a difficult one, but I've just about had enough of people "in charge", who either don't have a clue, or don't want to have a clue about living in the real world, the world where the majority of people on this planet live.

For example, is it me, or do you think it is completely absurd of the city, and more specifically Mayor Bloomberg (whom I actually like well enough on many issues), to turn homeless families away from shelters, telling them that they should seek shelter with family members? Do the people who try to shape these policies have a lick of sense? Do they understand that the reason most of these people are homeless in the first place is because they DON’T HAVE FAMILY MEMBERS TO LIVE WITH? Even if the family members exist, how can we force them to take in their homeless relatives?

This may seem like a simplistic solution but maybe if we built more shelters, and better yet, affordable housing, instead of sticking a bank on every corner of New York City there would be more room for shelter for the homeless. We could find some money. Or maybe some of those shady subprime lenders and the so-called reputable banks who back them could stop fleecing people and making more homeless families IN THE FIRST PLACE.

And another thing: I’m sick of people who don’t actually live in the premises they purchase. Big ugly glass buildings filled with condos owned by transient residents sit empty while people live on the street. Does anyone have a number on the amount of empty residential units sitting warehoused or unused in New York? I'd really like to know.

The Gede & Honoring the Ancestors

2007-11-05T08:59:00.003-05:00

Back to Vodou, In the wake of all of the Halloween revelry (note to rabid Christians: It’s not a holiday to celebrate the cult of death—it was an early festival to indicate summer’s end and winter’s beginning) I thought it might be interesting to speak about the African traditional religion of Vodou. It’s a bit easier to understand, I think, if you are Catholic, because the Church basically appropriated or blended ancient pagan rituals, such as the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, with its own to keep everybody happy.

Followers of Vodou did the opposite—they (as well as a host of other African Traditional Religions) hid the rites they brought from Africa in the rituals of the Catholic Church, syncretising their spirits, called lwa (note that they are not gods; the Vodou religion recognizes one supreme God, Bondye) to Catholic saints. The lwa and ancestors are spirits that are not worshiped but honored and served, hence adherents are called serviteurs.

When a Haitian friend of mine’s mother died, I watched the video she had made of her mother’s wake and funeral. There was a full-on Catholic mass with proper funeral rites. After the wake, the entire congregation of family and friends walked to the cemetery where they sent her off with her favorite song (a modern konpa) and acknowledgement of the spirits who live there, the Gede.

I have seen the Gede in ceremonies, and they are very funny and very tricky and mischievous. They usually show up at the end of a ceremony (which can last for hours and be extremely intense) and provide comic relief. I have learned to take off any jewelry and hide it, along with any money I have, because they’ll beg for it and take it if you’re not vigilant. They are also extremely flirtatious. A Vodou Vodou priest I know tells me that the phallus is the symbol of the Gede (Haiti being a paternalistic, male-centered culture), and that the phallus brings life (never mind that there are female reproductive organs involved!) That’s why Gede oversees life and death. They are the completion of the circle of life and death. My friend says that the Gede are myriad and almost impossible to count, that they have so many different characteristic because there are so many different personalities to those of us among the living. Or as one individual put it: As many people who have died is how many Gede there are.

During the feast days people put on their party clothes, parade through the streets, dance, and process to the graveyards to feed and honor the Gede at Baron Samedi’s cross. Baron, who is the leader of the Gede, and his children love spicy foods and rum laced with hot peppers, which they will not only drink with impunity, but will rub in their eyes and other places I won’t specify, with no apparent harm done (think about the firewalkers who skip over burning coals without getting burned). Baron is the master of the cemetery and the crossroads (yes, that place where the Devil is said to hang about at midnight) and Maman Brigitte, his wife, is the mistress

In peristyles (a combination of sacred spaces and community centers) the priests and people come together for ceremonies and celebrations, offering food and other items to dead loved ones. It is a chance to reconnect with ancestors and the past, echoing the West African concept of sankofa an Akan word that means “go back and fetch it” This means one must go back to the past and reclaim it in order to go forward. Understanding how and why we got here, just as studying any history, brings clarity.

I don’t dance in cemeteries, but I do pray for, remember and honor my ancestors in my own way. I also pester my mom and other living relatives to tell me stories about family members whom they knew who have passed on, and I write them down. When I look at the photographs that I do have of my grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles and aunts, I feel that I know them better and better, and hearing about their personalities, talents, habits (good and bad), likes, dislikes, and character traits has helped me better understand who I am, because more and more I know who and where I came from.

Images from top: Fet Gede in a cemetery in Hait; the veve (a representation of the lwa, usually drawn on the floor with cornmeal, floor, coffee, and the like to attract or draw down the lwa) of Baron Samedi; the veve of Maman Brigitte; a man lies on the grave of a loved one during Fet Gede in Haiti.

On "Voodoo" Dolls & Other Things

2007-11-02T14:42:00.000-04:00

Today is All Souls Day in the Roman Catholic Church. It is also the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, and the first day of Fet Gede or the Vodou Feast of the Sacred Dead, which is what I want to write about. But before I do, I want to talk about something I saw on Halloween, which was supposed to be yesterday’s entry. Oh well, I get sidetracked sometimes.

So I switched on the Today show on Halloween, mostly to see what kind of goofy get ups the cast were wearing this year (the Munsters, with Al Roker as Grandpa Munster), and there was a segment called “The Supernatural: Fact vs. Fiction”. Natalie Morales (Eddie Munster) was interviewing a ghost hunter (I didn’t get her name), and she couldn’t have been more discomfited. The fact or fiction statements were really pretty worn thin, I mean who doesn’t know that the Amityville Horror sprung from a true-life crime? It was as if the writers for the show tried to pick the most inoffensive, chewed over material they could find so as not to in any way disturb anyone. I mean honestly, Lizzie Borden? I was chanting about her in my nursery rhymes.

When the ghost hunter whipped out a device she uses to measure paranormal activity, Morales had such an “Oh Brother!” look on her face, I can’t imagine the ghost hunter didn’t see it. There were some stumbling, bumbling moments of explaining what the device, which admittedly looked pretty useless and fake, actually did (something about measuring electrical activity). It was as if Morales either had come into the segment with a deep suspicion of anything that could not be explained by science or her chosen religion, or she didn’t want to look like a kook believing in such things. Or maybe she just wanted to appear the skeptical journalist just doing her job.

Morales would throw out a statement, and the ghost hunter, who didn’t look like she knew one thing about any of the topics, would answer whether that statement was true or false it (she actually waited for the teleprompter before answering the questions to make sure she was correct). What made me take notice, was the last question:

6. True or false: Traditional Voodoo involves sticking pins in dolls to induce pain in real people.

Ghost hunter said it was false, without hesitation, that Voodoo was a serious religion and that they don’t make dolls and stick pins in them to harm other people. A friend of mine, who is a Vodou priest (please note that the latter spelling is the way many adherents spell it to distinguish their religion from the Hollywood version full of human sacrifice and yes, voodoo dolls), told me that that isn’t completely accurate. He told me pins are used in Vodou pakets, which, simply put, are small wrapped, bundles filled with consecrated herbs and liquids. I am not going to go into how they are made because I’m not a vodouisant. I will say, though, that these pakets are not made to hurt people, but to protect the owner of the paket, or for good luck, healing, and the like. They are often made with satin and silk, beads and sequins, and other beautiful materials. There are wax figures you can buy in the shape of males and females, and it is a given that there are those who may work with them for benevolent or malevolent reasons. These individuals do not make up the majority of Vodou serviteurs.

My friend did point out a possible point of origin for the “voodoo doll”: the nail fetishes, nkisi nkondi, of the Congo people. They were used to cure illnesses, protect a village, seal agreements, settle disputes, and destroy enemies (which is where the causing pain aspect of the voodoo doll might come from).

Nkisi nkondi were sacred objects anointed and filled with ritual herbs and other materials (in the same spirit as the paket). This was done by what I’m going to call, in my ignorance of a better term, the village shaman, a specialist in both tribal law and religion. Spirits would then be attracted to the figure, depending on what herbs and materials were used, and take up residence. The nails driven into the figure represented oaths taken, deals made, or other circumstances when the spirit is called. Hammering the nails into the nkisi nkondi activated the power within. Nkisi refers to the spirit itself, nkondi (whose root means “to hunt”) the figure, who basically hunted down the evildoer and took care of him or her.

It was something, though, to see an admission that Vodou is a religion. Ghost hunter may have met people, who had mocked her for her belief in the paranormal, so she might have felt a kinship to the followers of Vodou. I, myself, am a Roman Catholic who believes that at mass, during the transubstantiation, the actual body and blood of Christ are on the altar. I’m going to pause here.

Images: Top-Masqueraders on the Mexican Day of the Dead; Above– an nkisi nkondi, or nail fetish.

"The Noose, An American Nightmare"

2007-10-25T13:16:00.000-04:00

Tonight CNN is investigating the history of the noose and its re-emergence at 8 pm Eastern Time. I'm of the opinion, at this point, that if all of this brings about legislation making the displaying of a noose anywhere outside of an educational context a felony, then maybe something useful can come out of all of this.

For more information click here.

Above: A Howard University student protests the omission of lynching from the agenda of a national conference on crime, 1934.

Struwwelpeter

2007-10-24T21:29:00.001-04:00

After a fortnight I’m back, not with warnings to noose hangers, or moral dilemmas, we’re not even staying in New York today. We are, in a figurative way, going to Germany. I’m in the mood for fairy tales . . .

I grew up in an American home, but some of the customs that my mother, who is of German descent, brought with her to the United States became part of our childhood, especially at Christmas (more on that closer to the that holiday). One bit of the culture that I did not learn about until I was an adult, was Der Struwwelpeter. Loosely translated, it means Slovenly or Shockhaired Peter. He is a boy who doesn’t comb or cut his hair, has long dirty nails, and a dirty face.

He’s not so popular.

This filthy boy serves as the introduction and title of children’s tales written by Heinrich Hoffmann, a nineteenth century German psychiatrist. Tales is putting it lightly, these little Geschichte are brutal. One tells, for example, the story of a boy who won’t stop sucking his thumb. He’s warned, but when he persists, someone named the “Great Tall Tailor” comes with giant scissors and cuts them off. Ouch! There are nine of these tales: Little Kaspar who would not eat his soup dies of starvation; Little Hans Look-in-the-Air falls into a canal. You get the drift. My two favorites: The Story of the Inky Boys—three white boys make fun of a black child, and St. Nicholas, takes those white boys and dips them into a big pot of black ink— and the “Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches.”

German fairy tales are particular combination of humorous, violent, and creepy at the same time. The main purpose of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm seemed to be to scare the wits out of every child in Germany. In Rapunzel, a pregnant woman craves broccoli rabe that grows in a witch’s garden. Her husband steals it, has to give up his first born. Somebody gets his eyes put out. In Snow White—queen wants beautiful stepdaughter dead, sends a huntsman out to kill her and carve out her heart. That doesn’t work, so poison apple. Hansel and Grethel—wicked stepmother puts the kids out of the house because there’s no food, they wander in the woods, cannibalism (lots of wicked women in these tales. Hmmmmm.) These are all familiar to most of us. But, seriously? “The Girl With No Hands”? Even the title is gruesome. The story: a beautiful, pure girl doesn’t want to go with the devil (go figure) after her father was tricked into trading her for great riches. At one point her father is compelled by the devil to chop off her hands. Nice.

Apparently the Grimm brothers were dedicated folklorist who collected tales while traveling around Germany. At some point in their research they realized that children loved the stories that they had gathered. I asked my mom if she remembers Struwwelpeter, and she said yes. I asked her if they scared her and her brother, my Uncle Heinz, and she said no, not really. But this is coming from someone who had to go sit in a dark cellar when she was naughty—no wonder the Great Tall Tailor with his giant shears had no effect.

As to Pauline and her matches? Anybody who knows me can guess why I love this story, and why I should read it at least once a year.

All of the tales can be found here.