Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Calling of Peter and Andrew (1308-1311)
Spiritual Sunday
As today’s Gospel reading is Jesus inviting Peter and Andrew to follow him and become “fishers of men” (“fish for people” in the New International Version), I share a Mary Oliver fish poem. It took me a while to realize how religious a poet Oliver because they seldom resorts to religious terminology. Nevertheless, I think “The Fish” is, among other things, a description of the eucharist.
My sister-in-law Elizabeth Barrett, who is an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, has a self-deprecating UU joke involving Oliver. UUs are so open to the wisdom literature of all faiths, Mohammed or Buddha no less than Jesus, that Elizabeth says they wired with an automatic translation system. If they are asked, for instance, whether they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, they hear, “Are you inspired by the poetry of Mary Oliver?” and readily answer, “Yes!”
Oliver was herself a practicing Episcopalian but I agree with Elizabeth that the poet translates well across faiths. She especially falls within an American literary tradition, seen also in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson, of finding God in nature. In “The Fish,” one encounters images of violence and death follow by an initiation into mystery. In the eucharist, we symbolically devour the flesh of Christ and drink of his blood in order that we may be one with him.
The first fish I ever caught would not lie down quiet in the pail but flailed and sucked at the burning amazement of the air and died in the slow pouring off of rainbows. Later I opened his body and separated the flesh from the bones and ate him. Now the sea is in me: I am the fish, the fish glitters in me; we are risen, tangled together, certain to fall back to the sea. Out of pain, and pain, and more pain we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished by the mystery.
My wife Julia reported herself “rattled” following the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Wednesday. She has been angrily pushing against Trump for so long, she said, that his sudden absence has unsettled her.
People emerging from abusive relationships often feel this way, I observed, and referred her to the Denise Levertov poem I shared this past Sunday. “It is hard sometimes,” the poet writes,
to drag ourselves back to the love of morning after we’ve lain in the dark crying out O God, save us from the horror. . . .
For fictional moments where people suddenly emerge into the sunlight, I think of the final scene in Carlos Saura’s movie Cria Cuervos (1976). A little girl, living in a dark, oppressive house where she has witnessed wrenching family trauma for the entirety of the film, emerges into the sunlight at the end, heading for school and a normal life. The film was made following the death of Spanish dictator Ferdinand Franco.
The concluding paragraphs of Wuthering Heights also speak to such times. Lockwood has just witnessed the final chapter of the Earnshaws, Lintons, and Heathcliffs, whose family history was once filled with frustrated passion and seething rage where people tore each other apart. The storm has subsided, however, concluding with the far calmer marriage between young Catherine and Hareton. Lockwood thinks back to the previous generation as he visits their graves:
I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
How much time must elapse before we can gaze upon the Trump years with Lockwood’s sense of distance? Step one is watching order return to the the nation and listening to the sounds of orderly government commencing once more. Future generations will have difficulty imagining the unquiet era we have just experienced.
A column by NeverTrumper Tom Nichols helps me understand better many of those who joined the Trump cult and invaded the Capitol last week. We have been witnessing a mixture of boredom and sadism, a dynamic I first became aware of in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa.
I’ve written about Trumpism’s sadistic streak in the past (a shoutout to John Stoehr of Editorial Board). Nichols adds the boredom dimension. Writing about those who invaded the Capitol, the Michigan State House, Charlottesville, and other venues, Nichols says,
These are people – … especially the men – trapped in the eternal drama of adolescence. They are creatures of a leisure society, bored by the ordinariness of life, angry that the world is not more interesting and that others refuse to pay them their heroic due.
Nichols credits Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book The True Believer for the idea:
As Eric Hoffer noted this is the fetid breeding ground of extremism: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves…Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless.”
Even in 1951, Hoffer knew the danger of society of bored children: “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.” This, not rights or freedom, was what the past years of Trumpism are about
There is no seriousness here, no sense of injustice, no actual injury to rights. Merely the aggrieved boredom of men (and some women) who never learned that life is not ceaselessly interesting and dramatic. That life, even the best life, is boring and repetitive on most days.
Nichols has a simple message for those who have rioted and threatened violence: Grow up!
This is why the legal and social response should be swift and clear. To remind people that life is not a TV show. It is not Twitter dunks and Facebook memes. To show that hurting other people out of boredom and childish narcissism has real consequences.
Real adulthood, Nichols goes on to say, involves “showing up and doing your best no matter what the job is.” Life is most heroic when it is not dramatic, given that it calls for
[t]aking care of your loved ones, looking after a sick friend, letting someone go ahead of you at a stop sign, holding the door for someone at a store. Adults know this. Stunted, selfish, undisciplined, stupid adolescents do not.
And further on:
I am exhausted by turning on the news and realizing that the blessings of life in a liberal democracy have also produced a stubborn knot of bored children who think guns and flags and dumb slogans will give their lives meaning.
All I can do is suggest to other people in this society to treat these brutal, overgrown adolescents with as much distance as possible. To show them, by example, what stoicism and seriousness look like. To be the adults. I know it’s hard. I’m not consistent about it myself.
But amidst all the calls for unity, it’s important to remember that unity and understanding can only happen between adults who agree to live peaceably. The people who defended sedition – and especially those who instigated it – are not those people. Those are armed toddlers.
Clarissa is the story of a beautiful young woman who, after being pressured by her family to marry an old and awful man with money, is tricked into running away with a rake. He, in turn, holds her captive and, after she repeatedly resists his overtures, drugs her with opium and rapes her. The rest of the novel involves her attempts to escape and the efforts of friends (but not family) to see that justice is done.
The novel has multiple depictions of sadism but the one I have in mind occurs within her family, For page after page we see her parents and siblings taking sadistic delight in tormenting her, which ultimately drive her into the rake’s trap. To give you a taste, here’s her brother writing to her:
By command of your father and mother I write expressly to forbid you to come into their presence, or into the garden when they are there: nor when they are not there, but with Betty Banes to attend you; except by particular license or command…
You are not to enter into the presence of either of your uncles, without their leave first obtained. It is a mercy to you, after such a behavior to your mother, that your father refuses to see you.
You are not to be seen in any apartment of the house you so lately governed as you pleased, unless you are commanded down.
In short, you are strictly to confine yourself to your chamber, except now and then, in Betty Barnes’s sight (as aforesaid) you take a morning or evening turn in the garden: and then you are to go directly, and without stopping at any apartment in the way, up or down the back stairs, that the sight of so perverse a young creature may not add to the pain you have given every body.
The hourly threatenings of your fine fellow, as well as your own unheard-of obstinacy, will account to you for all this. What a hand has the best and most indulgent of mothers had with you, who so long pleaded for you, and undertook for you; even when others, from the manner of your setting out, despaired of moving you!—What must your perverseness have been, that such a mother can give you up! She thinks it right so to do: nor will take you to favor, unless you make the first steps, by a compliance with your duty.
As for myself, whom perhaps you think hardly of [in very good company, if you do, that is my sole consolation]; I have advised, that you may be permitted to pursue your own inclinations, (some people need no greater punishment than such a permission,) and not to have the house encumbered by one who must give them the more pain for the necessity she has laid them under of avoiding the sight of her, although in it.
That boredom explains such behavior I owe to Frederick Karl’s Adversary Literature: The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Genre. Viewing the gentry class as Nichols views pampered Americans, Karl notes the salacious buzz that Clarissa’s family gets from desecrating her purity. After all, he asks, what else is so salacious for members of this pampered gentry class than desecrating Clarissa’s purity. The novel inspired the Marquis de Sade’s Justine: The Misfortunes of Virtue, and although Sade goes to extremes that Richardson would never dream of, the underlying dynamics are the same.
For four years, the world has witnessed a sadistic reality television show, all the more delicious because people actually got hurt in this one. One’s dark gratification could be tickled by stories of children torn away from their parents (a common staple of Sade’s novels) and people of color injured or killed by police. To join this show, one simply had to grab an easily obtainable AK-47 and parade around in military fatigues.
Storming the Capitol while Congress was certifying the election was the season finale, something far more gripping than anything see on Survivor or Jersey Shore. One woman (now under arrest) even flew to Washington in a private plane to take part. And if upright citizens recoiled in horror at the show, well, that just added an extra zing, something comparable to having your parents wave their fingers at you. “Owning the liberals” has been a big part of the fun.
Thinking of the Trump years as a reality television show, however, leads me to another theory of popular entertainment that may provide some hope. In his important book on Film Genre, Rick Altman says that the transgressive thrill we get from watching genre movies is ultimately countered by an intense desire to return to conventional values. For much of the movie, we enjoy watching gangsters commit crimes, monsters cause mayhem, and lovers challenge sexual restrictions.
Then, however, the transgression goes too far and we find ourselves longing for normalcy. We want the gangsters shot or at least locked up, the monsters defeated, the lovers married. What once gave us a rebellious thrill now causes painful anxiety.
History provides many examples of retreats from rebellion. The daring Restoration sexual comedies were followed by the far more conservative theatre of the 18th century; Byron’s Satanic heroes by novels hewing to Victorian morality; the wild energies of early 1930’s Hollywood (Mae West, Universal’s monster movies and Warner Brothers’ gangster films) by the Hayes Code.
I’m hoping that Trumpism’s transgressive energies will be followed by a revulsion that causes America to embrace adult maturity once again. I want troublemakers to be either locked up (when they commit crimes) or laughed out of the arena. I want wannabe Trumps to be socially ostracized. I want the country to go about seriously addressing the issues that matter.
These, of course, include a pandemic that has killed 400,000 Americans and cratered the economy and the climate change that is causing out-of-control wildfires and increasingly destructive hurricanes.
Many conservatives have had their sadistic pleasure centers tickled for four years. Let the good resolutions that follow a hangover begin now.
My mother, who runs a poetry column for Sewanee’s weekly newspaper, is sharing A.A. Milne’s “Buckingham Palace” for Inauguration Day and I’m following suit. I’m praying that the inauguration proceeds seamlessly as I post this 36 hours before the actual event.
The poem’s humor lies in the contrast between what sounds like a momentous occasion and the incidental concerns of a child. The actual changing of the guard is somewhat boring, which is why we find Alice catering to a four-year-old’s stream of consciousness.
May our own inauguration be similarly incident free.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. Alice is marrying one of the guard. “A soldier’s life is terrible hard,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. We saw a guard in a sentry-box. “One of the sergeants looks after their socks,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. We looked for the King, but he never came. “Well, God take care of him, all the same,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. They’ve great big parties inside the grounds. “I wouldn’t be King for a hundred pounds,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. A face looked out, but it wasn’t the King’s. “He’s much too busy a-signing things,” Says Alice.
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice. “Do you think the King knows all about me?” “Sure to, dear, but it’s time for tea,” Says Alice.
The other day Joyce Carol Oates, observing the insurrection at the Capitol, commented on how the violent craziness of Trumpists feeds on itself. Oates is an author who knows crazy, having explored the darkest recesses of the human soul in such novels as The Gravedigger’s Daughter and Daddy Love. (To this day I wish I could get Daddy Love’s serial killer out of my head.) To illustrate her point, however, I turn a different novel, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
In two tweets, Joyce observed the following about the Capitol Hill marauders:
Initially they were (just) racists with a (latent) wish to kill Blacks. then, they began to wish to kill whites whose political convictions differed from their own. then, their wish to kill began to include other right-wingers like themselves who were not–quite–as crazy…
The rioting criminal mob came within 60~ seconds of seeing Mike Pence on Jan. 6. And they were just 90 feet away from a small office where Pence was hiding, before a cop steered them away.
The mob began chanting, “Hang Mike Pence” after Donald Trump tweeted that the vice president wasn’t doing enough to stop Congress from certifying the election results. Given that they didn’t hold back from beating Capitol police, it’s not hard to imagine them injuring or even killing Pence and Nancy Pelosi had they caught them.
In Song of Solomon Guitar, the protagonist Milkman’s best friend, becomes unhinged by white-on-black violence and joins a secret organization called “the Seven Days.” The organization has seven members, each of whom pledges to kill an innocent White each time Whites kill an innocent Black. Many Americans have seen friends and family descend into similar cult madness over the past four years.
As Oates predicts, the violence doesn’t stop with Whites. A coolness springs up between Milkman and Guitar once Milkman learns about the group, and it doesn’t take long before Guitar thinks Milkman has betrayed them in a search they are conducting for Confederate gold. It doesn’t matter that Guitar’s evidence is as thin as massive voter fraud in the 2020 election, consisting only of an unexplained crate. Logic won’t convince someone in the grip of a conspiracy theory, however:
“Guitar, I didn’t ship no gold. There wasn’t any gold to ship. You couldn’t have seen me.”
“I saw you, baby. I was in the station.
“What fuckin station?”
“The freight station in Danville.”
Milkman remembered then, going to look for Reverend Cooper, looking all over for him. Then going into the station house to see if he’d gone, and there helping a man lift a huge crate onto the weighing platform. He started to laugh. “Oh, shit. Guitar, that wasn’t no gold. I was just helping that man lift a crate. He asked me to help him. Help him lift a big old crate. I did and then I split.”
Facts have become irrelevant to Guitar, however, and he goes over Milkman twice, first with piano wire and then with a gun.
Milkman, meanwhile, has been undergoing his own narrative arc, one that is far more hopeful. Just as many are harkening back to America’s roots in the Declaration of Independence, so Milkman connects with his roots in slaves who resisted white oppression. At the novel’s end, we don’t know whether conspiracy violence or newfound hope will prevail, just as we don’t know whether Trumpist hate or Biden healing with our own future.
Despite the open ending, however, Morrison’s closing paragraph–one of the greatest in American literature–leaves us hopeful. Although Guitar, standing on one mountain ledge, is prepared to pick off Milkman, standing on another, Morrison assures us that if we give ourselves up to the heroic vision of our ancestors, we will be buoyed up:
“You want my life?” Milkman was not shouting now. “You need it? Here.” Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Ieshia Evans detained by police in Baton Rouge BLM protest
Monday – Martin Luther King Day
Martin Luther King Day couldn’t be better timed this year, coming as it does between an aborted white supremacist insurrection and the swearing in of the first woman African American vice president. A fair number of white Americans—enough to make a difference in the presidential election—are awakening to the reality of systemic racism, which African Americans have been trying to tell them about all their lives. Such people, I suspect, will now be much more open to June Jordan’s poem “Jim Crow: The Sequel,” written in 2000.
Before turning to it, a note on why it has taken such whites so long to wake up. For me, the principal virtue of Lee Harper’s own sequel, Go Set a Watchman, is that it shows how white privilege works corrupts otherwise decent people. As long as he is comfortably situated atop America’s racial hierarchy, Atticus Finch can be the principled defender of justice. Once African Americans demand advancement, however, the man who once expressed contempt for the Ku Klux Klan joins the White Citizens Council, the Chamber of Commerce version of the KKK. This explains why Calpurnia, who raised his kids, is no longer speaking to him.
Because he has a fundamental sense of fairness, however, there’s a chance Atticus can still be swayed. Just as he’s willing to listen to a disillusioned Scout, now an adult, I like to think he might give ear to Jordan’s poem.
The Black Lives Matter protests received an unprecedented amount of white support last summer. So did Joe Biden in the past election. And while it may not mean a lot, two days ago Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford apologized to his black constituents for questioning the results of the presidential election, which could cause him a lot of grief from Trump supporters. We may be seeing significant cracks in the white wall.
I don’t expect the cracks to open up into a flood, and we’ve all been deluded by hope before. Jordan quotes Lyndon Johnson’s call for “equality as a fact and as a result,” and the occasion of her poem is George W. Bush’s dog whistle racism thirty years later. Bush, like his father, employed the Lee Atwater playbook, using coded language (“states’ rights,” for instance) rather than the n-word. When Trump turned the dog whistle into a bullhorn, however, certain whites found themselves choosing decency over entitlement. They may, for the first time in their lives, be willing to listen to “an angry Black woman on the subject of the angry White man.”
Dare to dream.
Jim Crow: The Sequel By June Jordan
An angry Black woman on the subject of the angry White man:
We didn’t always need affirmative action When we broke this crazy land into farms when we planted and harvested the crops when we dug into the earth for water when we carried that water into the big house kitchens and bedrooms when we built that big house when we fed and clothed other people’s children with food we cooked and served to other people’s children, wearing the garments that we fitted and we sewed together, when we hacked and hauled huge trees for lumber and fuel, when we washed and polished the chandeliers, when we bleached and pressed the linens purchased by blood profits from our daily forced laborings, when we lived under the whip and in between the coffle and chains, when we watched our babies sold away from us, when we lost our men to anybody’s highest bidder, when slavery defined our days and our prayers and our nighttimes of no rest–then we did not need affirmative action.
Like two-legged livestock we cost the bossman three hundred and fifteen dollars or six hundred and seventy-five dollars so he provided for our keep like two-legged livestock penned into the parched periphery of very grand plantation life. We did not need affirmative action. NO! We needed freedom: We needed overthrow, revolution and a holy fire to purify the air. But for two hundred years this crazy land the law and the bullets behind the law continued to affirm the gospel of God-given White supremacy. For two hundred years the law and the bullets behind the law, and the money and the politics behind the bullets behind the law affirmed the gospel of God-given White supremacy/ God-given male-White supremacy.
And neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the Civil War nor one constitutional amendment after another nor one Civil Rights legislation after another could bring about a yielding of the followers of that gospel to the beauty of our human face.
Justice don’t mean nothin’ to a hateful heart!
And so we needed affirmative action. We needed a way into the big house besides the back door. We needed a chance at the classroom and jobs and open housing in okay neighborhoods. We needed a way around the hateful hearts of America. We needed more than freedom because a piece of paper ain’t the same as opportunity or education. And some thirty years ago we agitated and we agitated until the President said, “We seek… not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.”
And a great rejoicing rose like a spirit dancing fresh and happy on the soon-to-be-the- integrated-and-most-uppity ballroom floor of these United States. And Black folks everywhere dressed up in African-American pride and optimism. From the littlest to the elders we shined our shoes and brushed our hair and got good and ready for “equality as a fact.” But three decades later, and come to find out we never got invited to the party we never got included in “the people” we never got no kind of affirmative action worth more than a spit in the wind.
And yesterday the new man in the White House/ the new President declared,”What we have done for women and minorities is a good thing, but we must respond to those who feel discriminated against…This is a psychologically difficult time for the so-called angry White man.” Well I am here to tell the world that 46 percent of my children living in poverty does not feel good to me and my brothers in prison and not in college does not feel good to me psychologically or otherwise!
Catch that angry White man and tell him “Get a grip!”
Forty-six percent of the American labor force is constituted by White men but White men occupy 95 percent of all senior management positions! And as a wise Black man recently observed “This supposedly beleaguered minority (White males are about one-third of the population) makes up 80 percent of the Congress, four-fifths of tenured university faculty, nine-tenths of the Senate and 92 percent of the Forbes 400.”
Tell me who’s angry!
I say the problem with affirmative action seems to me like way too much affirmative talk and way too little action!
And unless you happen to belong to that infinitesimal club of millionaire Black folks got one hundred and eight thousand dollars to throw into the campaign pot of their nearest and dearest full-time political racist, I think you better join with me to agitate and agitate for justice and equality we can eat and pay the rent with NOW.
While it’s hard to survive difficult times, it’s also hard to open ourselves to those moments when things get better. That’s the position that we find ourselves in at the moment. While Covid continues to ravage us and we witness acts of white supremacist terrorism, we also see the prospect of mass vaccinations and a Joe Biden presidency. “After we’ve lain in the dark crying out/ O God, save us from the horror…,” in “The Love of Morning” Denise Levertov observes observes it’s hard “to drag ourselves back to the love of morning.”
To be sure, it’s less difficult if that morning is a beautiful spring day and “we wake to birdsong.” We have no doubt in those moments that “God has saved the world one more day/ even with its leaden burden of human evil.” But what if the morning is gray and overcast? What if, rather than experiencing “morning in America” (to quote Ronald Reagan) or “hope and change” (Barack Obama), we discover that recovering from the Trump years is a painful slog? What if, to quote from Levertov’s “Oblique Prayer,” we find ourselves in a world that lacks “clear outlines,
the air heavy and thick
the soft ground clogging my feet if I walk, sucking them downwards if I stand.
The contrast between a sunny day and a gray one reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s challenge in his essay “Nature.” We shouldn’t rely on “the sun or the summer alone,” he tells us, for “every hour and season yields its tribute of delight”:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. Almost I fear to think how glad I am.
So yes, it will be hard “to love again,” just as it is hard for an abused partner to love again. Nevertheless, the morning “calls us, calls us,” and it is up to us to listen to “our own hunger, the dear tasks of continuance, the footsteps before us in the earth’s beloved dust.” It is up to us to overcome our sloth and to follow.
The Love of Morning
It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves back to the love of morning after we’ve lain in the dark crying out O God, save us from the horror. . . .
God has saved the world one more day even with its leaden burden of human evil; we wake to birdsong. And if sunlight’s gossamer lifts in its net the weight of all that is solid, our hearts, too, are lifted, swung like laughing infants;
but on gray mornings, all incident—our own hunger, the dear tasks of continuance, the footsteps before us in the earth’s belovéd dust, leading the way—all, is hard to love again for we resent a summons that disregards our sloth, and this calls us, calls us
The horrific attack on the Capitol overshadowed another remarkable event that occurred last week, which was the election of a black Democratic senator in a former Confederate state. While Rev. Raphael Warnock is not the first black southern senator to be elected in recent years—there is also Republican Tim Scott in South Carolina—he is the first who has made racial justice a key component of his campaign. Unlike Scott, who received few black votes, Warnock benefitted from Stacy Abrams’s robust get-out-the-vote effort, which succeeded in spite of GOP voter suppression efforts.
To honor the occasion, here’s a Jacqueline Woodson poem looking back at the Civil Rights movement, without which Warnock could not have been elected. While Woodson chooses Feb. 12, 1963 because it was the day she was born, 1963 was also the defining year of the Civil Rights movement. 1963 saw Martin Luther’s King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the bombing that killed four girls in a Birmingham church. It also saw John F. Kennedy sending the National Guard to the University of Alabama when George Wallace attempted to prevent black students from entering.
Warnock, it so happens, was himself born in the 1960s (in 1969), a year after King was assassinated. Warnock has followed in King’s footsteps, having been pastor of King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Woodson’s image of rivers running through her veins undoubtedly alludes to Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which concludes, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Although born in Ohio, Woodson recognizes the importance of her southern roots.
February 12, 1963 By Jacqueline Woodson
I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital Columbus, Ohio, USA— a country caught between Black and White.
I am born not long from the time or far from the place where my great-great-grandparents worked the deep rich land unfree dawn till dusk unpaid drank cool water from scooped-out gourds looked up and followed the sky’s mirrored constellation to freedom.
I am born as the South explodes, too many people too many years enslaved, then emancipated but not free, the people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed so that today— February 12, 1963 and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free. Can grow up learning and voting and walking and riding wherever we want.
I am born in Ohio but the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins.
“Shoot if you must this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag,” she said.
Thursday
Given how important flags were to the Capitol Hill insurrectionists last week, here’s John Greenleaf’s Whittier’s poem about how a true patriot wields a flag. I remember the poem vividly from my childhood.
Among the worst things recorded during the Capitol invasion is a man with an American flag beating a Capitol police officer with the pole to which it is attached. Another video clip shows Trump rioters tearing down an American flag to replace it with a Trump flag.
We also see see rioters carrying Confederate flags into the Capitol, the first time that the symbol of secession has entered those hallowed halls. And let’s not forget that, over the summer, the Trump campaign actually replaced an American flag with a Blues Lives Matter flag at a Wisconsin rally.
There’s also the tragic-comic story of the rioter who, after entering the Capitol carrying the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of 1775, died when she was trampled during the melee.
In Whittier’s poem, which my grandson and I read on Monday, 90-year-old Barbara Frietchie witnesses her Frederick, Maryland neighbors pulling down their American flags as General Stonewall Jackson and his “famished rebel horde” approaches the city. As Whittier recounts,
Forty flags with their silver stars, Forty flags with their crimson bars,
Flapped in the morning wind: the sun Of noon looked down, and saw not one.
In Friday’s civics poetry lesson, Alban and I learned from Ralph Waldo Emerson that a nation is strong when it has “brave men who work while others sleep,/ Who dare while others fly.” Frietchie proves to be one of these brave men:
Bravest of all in Frederick town, She took up the flag the men hauled down;
In her attic window the staff she set, To show that one heart was loyal yet.
Then, after Jackson orders the men to fire upon the flag,
Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;
She leaned far out on the window-sill, And shook it forth with a royal will.
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
Unlike today’s rebels, the Confederate general shows a glimmer of remorse and accords his opponent some respect:
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame, Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred To life at that woman’s deed and word:
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
As a result, the star-spangled banner continues to wave:
All day long that free flag tost Over the heads of the rebel host.
Ever its torn folds rose and fell On the loyal winds that loved it well;
And through the hill-gaps sunset light Shone over it with a warm good-night.
Let us remember this moment, the poet tells us:
Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er, And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.
Honor to her! and let a tear Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.
Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!
Peace and order and beauty draw Round thy symbol of light and law;
And ever the stars above look down On thy stars below in Frederick town!
We could only wish that the GOP would show the same kind of respect for their Democratic foes as Jackson does. And experience a momentary blush of shame for trying to steal the election.
While sharing these poems with Alban, I thought back to my own citizenship education. In addition to reading and sometimes memorizing poems like this, each morning we pledged allegiance to the flag. I don’t understand why some liberals object to the pledge given that it ends with the resounding declaration “with liberty and justice for all.” That powerful vision, reaffirming the words of The Declaration of Independence, are an integral part of what makes us a nation.
To be sure, we fall short of that vision all the time, but that’s not the flag’s fault. The pledge makes clear that the flag “stands” for our republic, which is “one nation, under God, indivisible.” We can be disappointed by how the republic falls short but not by the ideal itself.
As for “God,” which some people object to, think of it as the transcendent non-material spirit that guides us. Unless you are Hobbesian materialist who sees all relations defined by self-interest or a Foucauldian who reduces everything to power struggle, your idealism will have a spiritual component.
Flag of freedom and union, symbol of light and law, long may you wave. Those who use you for base purposes are the true desecrators.
Further thought: While we honor people who stands up to the forces of sedition, let’s recall Eugene Goodman, the black Capitol cop who lured rioters away from the Senate chambers while it still held members of Congress. By making himself a decoy, he may well have saved people from being held hostage or even killed.
According to the Washington Post,a colleague observed that Goodman “was diverting people from getting on the Senate floor and getting hostages. It was the smartest thing that he could have ever done. I don’t know that many people who can think on their feet like that. . . . His quick thinking enabled those Senators to get to safety.” One tactic he employed was prodding the lead rioter with his baton at just the moment when the mob could have turned right and discovered the Senate floor. Instead they chased him up the stairs, where he had reinforcements waiting.
