I was going to hitch these thoughts on the end of my racism post, but then started thinking about it some more and thought there was more going on. More going on than just an unpleasant memory. My Dad could be a son-of-a-bitch, but I suppose he had some good qualities. When not drinking and expounding like some hot-air-bag buffoon, he could say some things that were reasonably intelligent. The man used his brain, and his generation, with his level of education, were not expected to do that. What I liked most about my Dad was the way he hated Americans. Well, not hated exactly. He could not fathom why they acted the way they did. He had been born in England, grew up in a little fishing village called Leigh-on-Sea, and never quite lost that scruffy English street urchin thing, having to go out and make a living at age thirteen. Like the Dad in Angela's Ashes, which rattled a few memories for me, his father appeared only sporadically, joined the army, was booted out, worked a bit, mostly haunted the pubs, and was sometimes violent.
But back to the American bit. I don't know if this was originated by him or by Mark Twain or somebody else, but sometimes he would expound on some particularly idiotic turn of American political events, roll his eyes heavenwards and exclaim, "The land of the free, and the home of the slave." His version of the Star-Spangled Banner (which he sometimes sang at the dinner table) was, "O say can you see/Any bedbugs on me?" Irreverant was no word for it. But I will never forget the most terrifying, and perhaps the most profound thing he ever said, when he was fairly drunk but in a reasonably benevolent mood, not in one of his fist-thudding rages. He was rambling on about something, then fixed me with his glittering eye and said, "Do you know what the worst word in the world is?" I thought he meant cursing, and kept thinking, shit, fuck, goddamn, but I couldn't say those words out loud. "The worst. The very worst word you can say or write or think of." Bitch. Asshole. Christ?
He sort of crooked his finger and made me get in really close so he could say it low. But he said it. "Nigger." I flinched. I knew that word was terrible, that I never said it and was not supposed to say it. My mother had told me rather casually that they used the word all the time when she was growing up and didn't see anything wrong with it. But my mother was born in 1915. I didn't ask why it was the worst word in the world, but I didn't have to because he was about to expound on it. "Nigger. Nigger is the worst word in the world, and I'll tell you why. It means one person owns another person."
It took me a minute to realize he was referring to slavery. And it was appropriate, because nigger is a slave word, a plantation word, a word to describe a thing that can be owned, bought and sold. Placed on the auction block. And when those ran out, there were lots of others to be captured and shipped over, an industry in itself, the importing of essential goods. This was difficult for a ten-year-old kid to contemplate, the concept of one person owning another person. It was horrible, demeaning, dehumanizing. Little middle-class white girls growing up in 1960s suburbia didn't use language like that because it might evoke something demonic. Nigger meant you were farm machinery, replaceable and even renewable through breeding, and that your purpose was to make agriculture possible, thus founding a country which insisted it was the greatest nation on earth. Then not being able to use the white drinking fountain. It was crazymaking, a blank wall of contradiction. That communities grew up, vibrant communities, out of the ashes of slavery makes my scalp prickle with awe. That those communities grew up right outside my door makes my head spin. But when I realize that Chatham's significant part in the Underground Railroad was never even mentioned in all my years in school, it fills me with a sickness, and casts a pall over the brightest sunshine of my life.
I can't begin to tell you how much it sickens me to see what strikes me as a great resurgence of racism - and not just in our neighbors to the south. How we love to say things like, "Oh, that's just in the States," or "our history was so peaceful," conveniently forgetting the apartheid of residential schools which literally stole children from their parents and held them hostage. We never heard about these things at all, of course, and I think if we had, we would have thought in terms of what an advantage it was for these poor underprivileged "Indian" children to get a good solid Catholic education. Blindness. I don't want to start. Chatham, where I grew up, seemed for some reason to have a disproportionate number of black people. Disproportionate? That means five per cent rather than none! But black culture was a presence, if not from the citizens of Chatham we lived and worked with, then from Detroit, that source of vibrant new musical culture along with alarming rumbles of unrest.
But there was something else about Chatham. I think my schooling was lily-white until I got into Grade 9 or so (not that it had anything to do with the parallel social movement of integration, no sir!). Then suddenly there were black kids, maybe two or three in a class of thirty. Compared to the zero of before, with all those classes of kids at the Dutch reform school who seemed to be universally blonde and blue-eyed, it was a lot.
It was a confusing time. Black culture was cool, we thought, but we wanted the "good part", Diana Ross and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Afros and "black is beautiful", and wanted to leave out the ugly part, the violence, the riots. Of course I knew about Martin Luther King - he was my hero - but I was beginning to have just sprinklings of awareness of other leaders with names like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Malcolm X. Meantime, something seismic happened on a more intimate level that rocked our school, and everyone's school. It was a song by a folk singer named Janis Ian, and it was about a white girl dating a black boy. It was called Society's Child, and the refrain was, "I can't see you any more. . . " The girl's mother would not even let the boyfriend in the house. To me, the most chilling line of all is the very last one: "I don't want to see you any more." Her mother's ugly mentality has won a mean little victory.
This song caused a furiosa of response, but it was all underground. Girls huddled around their lockers whispering to each other about it. "Did you hear it? That song? . . .I heard it. . .yeah, it's true, isn't it." Not one person thought the song was inaccurate. I don't know why were such idiots about it, why we didn't discuss it openly in school, but then we never discussed anything important in school. This was never more apparent than when my mother started talking to me one day about her favorite history book, Romantic Kent by Victor Lauriston. "There's a chapter in it about the Underground Railroad. Chatham is one of the termination points, you know." About the what? Once my mother had explained to me, more or less, what the Underground Railroad was, and that Chatham was instrumental in helping escaped and fugitive slaves to settle and build new homes and create communities, a question screamed in my head: why didn't we learn about this in school?
We learned nothing of the Underground Railroad. Either it didn't occur to the school board to put it on the curriculum, or they were embarrassed by it. Chatham had a famous son, Fergie Jenkins, a nationally-known champion ball player, and he was a real nice colored man. Wasn't that enough? We had Mahalia Jackson who came all the way to Chatham to sing for us, but, oops, Mahalia wasn't allowed to stay at the William Pitt Hotel because the management was sure she would be "much more comfortable" in another hotel across town. I see racism minimized now, I see people writing in comments sections (and why do I still read them?) about how it has all been blown out of proportion, how black people should just forget the past and suck it up and be glad they live in the greatest country in the world (and you know the country I mean, and it isn't Canada). Unfortunately they omit one little fact: that greatest country in the world was founded on the backs of slaves. The United States would not, could not exist without slavery. Slaves were the engine that made the entire machine run. If by force, if by theft of liberty, then what was the damage? They could always go over there and get some more, because slaves were a renewable resource.
But why do those black folks still insist on making such a fuss? I have seen diatribes about indentured workers, Irish mostly, and about how they were treated "just as badly as the blacks". It's the same mentality that whittles down the Holocaust: "but lots of other groups were just as persecuted", "other atrocities took place in history and nobody notices", and maybe just maybe they got that infamous six million count wrong. I try not to write these days, I really do, because when I do this is what comes out. Truly, I'd like to only post silly videos and animations and things I enjoy doing, because none of it makes one jot of difference anyway. I have almost no readers, and I keep this going only for something to do. I have had weird surges in readership that then died, and I don't understand the surges and I don't understand the dying. I guess I will keep on as long as it amuses me, but there are certain things that will never amuse me, and atrocity against humanity is definitely at the top of the list.
I just posted a Facebook comment, and how I wish I hadn't, in response to another comment, and how I wish I hadn't read it, by a guy who was blustering on and on about the Second Amendment and Constitutional Rights, etc. etc. so you knew where he was coming from without asking, and he says at one point, in all-caps of course, SO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT YOU THINK IF ALL GUN OWNERS SURRENDERED ALL THEIR WEAPONS, THERE WOULD BE NO MORE MASS SHOOTINGS?
I answered, well, uh, sir, um. Uh, YEAH, that's the way it would be; if there were no guns, there'd be no shootings. Eh?
"What, what, what," I can hear him (and others of his ilk) spluttering. "That's - that's impossible. That wouldn't change anything! It would just infringe on our Constitutional rights!"
But it would. It would change everything.
Even though to many, many people, being without guns is unthinkable, it's thinkable. It is. People just haven't realized it yet.
There was a time when most Americans believed slavery was acceptable, if not desirable and/or an innate right. Then things began to change. Certain people began to speak out, people who saw it as an innate wrong.
Sometimes, when the time is ripe, history lifts up the right leader. So along came that cat named Abraham Lincoln. And then a funny thing happened.
After a long and incredibly bloody war, during which one whole side wouldn't let go of their entrenched ideology and/or their weaponry, - POOF - or (bang!) - slavery was no longer acceptable.
In fact -
In fact, slavery no longer existed.All the slaves were set free. All of them. At once.
That doesn't mean all the problems were solved, but the problems changed. Those former slaves needed/deserved to build decent lives for themselves, with the same rights and privileges as everyone else. The transition was so rocky that some people think it's still being made to this day.
Am I making my point here? Slavery was acceptable - just a given. Could you do anything about it? Of course not. The commerce of an entire country was built on the backs of slaves, so why would anyone want to?
Then someone wanted to. Then a lot of someones.
Then slavery was unacceptable. Then a war was fought, and when the dust settled, it no longer existed.
New ideas or good ideas or shit-disturbing/revolutionary/incredibly simple and powerful ideas always start off as impossible/impractical or even insane ideas and have to be shouted down. Hey, we can't do that! YOU can't do that! It's - it's, well - we've just never done it that way! Or: it's immoral, or: God doesn't like it. Or it violates my Constitutional rights.
We can't get rid of all the guns!
Then we'd have no guns. NO GUNS?
(But that doesn't mean we'd have no shootings. Does it?)
Uhmmmm.
Yes.
Afterthought. I like to tack on things I couldn't work into the main body of my post. I'm not sure how to say this one, but it's been rolling around in my head all day, and even before that - ever since the latest carnage/atrocity that destroyed dozens of valuable, irreplaceable human lives.
There's a lot of talk about the Constitution and the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, etc., when the wording of the original statement seems so irrelevant to me that I have to twist it into a pretzel before it means anything at all.
But with all this talk of rights and freedoms, what about my right, your right, OUR right to peace of mind? What about being able to go to school or church or a night club without fear of being shot to death? We're beginning to think of these horrors as a fundamental fact of life, something we can't do anything about.
When that happens, we stop trying for anything better.
I have a right, you have a right, they have a right. WE ALL have a right to not have to worry about our kids and grandkids being killed, their future stopped. I remember a time, and it was not so long ago, when these things simply did not happen, when mass murder was so rare as to be almost unheard-of. There was no familiar pattern of groaning and sighing every few months: "oh God, not another one," and waiting to find out the sickening circumstances.
People are starting to act as if nothing can be done.
If they think nothing can be done, nothing can be done.
A gun can be picked up. A gun can be put down. It can be surrendered; confiscated; thrown away. The ammunition can be pulled out of it forever.
No guns = no shootings. Too simple; it can't be so. But how could it be anything but true?
Kara Walker was barely out of art school when she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, in 1997. Back then, her early work shocked audiences in part because her murals looked so charming from a distance. Black paper shadow portraits of colonial figures seemed to dance on white gallery walls; but lean in and you'd find your nose pressed up against images of slavery's horrors — mammies, masters, lynchings and sexual violence.
In other words, Walker is used to filling a room. But this spring she was asked to fill a warehouse — the abandoned Domino Sugar factory in New York. It's about to be leveled to make way for condos and offices, but before it goes, Walker was asked to use this cavernous, urban ruin for something special.
Walker took me on a tour of the show a day before it opened. The factory is covered in sugar — it almost looks like insulation or burned cotton candy.
"It's a little bit sticky in some areas ..." she said. "There's sugar caked up in the rafters."
I was so busy trying not to get molasses on my shoes that when I turned the corner, I was stunned. There in the middle of this dark hall was a bright, white sphinx. The effect is the opposite of those white-walled galleries; a dark space and a towering white sculpture made of — what else? — sugar.
"What we're seeing, for lack of a better term, is the head of a woman who has very African, black features," Walker explained. "She sits somewhere in between the kind of mammy figure of old and something a little bit more recognizable — recognizably human. ... [She has] very full lips; high cheekbones; eyes that have no eyes, [that] seem to be either looking out or closed; and a kerchief on her head. She's positioned with her arms flat out across the ground and large breasts that are staring at you."
Walker has dreamed up a "subtlety" — that's what sugar sculptures were called in medieval times. They were a luxury confectioners created for special occasions.
To understand where all this is going, you need look no further than Walker's teasingly long title for the show: "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant."
I know, it's a mouthful. But Walker has this wide smile and as she sweeps her hands around in broad gestures, white tides of sugar dust ripple at the edge of her feet — and she sells it.
"It was very fun and childlike to, you know, have your hands in a bucket full of sugar, or a 50-pound bag of sugar, throwing it out onto the floor," she says.
She's doing what she does best: drawing you in with something sweet, something almost charming, before you realize you've admired something disturbing. In this case, that's the horror-riddled Caribbean slave trade that helped fuel the industrial gains of the 18th and 19th centuries; a slave trade built to profit from an insatiable Western market for refined sugar treats and rum.
"Basically, it was blood sugar," Walker says. "Like we talk about blood diamonds today, there were pamphlets saying this sugar has blood on its hands."
She explains that to make the sugar, the cane had to be fed into large mills by hand. It was a dangerous process: Slaves lost hands, arms, limbs and lives.
"I've been kind of back and forth with my reverence for sugar," Walker says. "Like, how we're all kind of invested in its production without really realizing just what goes into it; how much chemistry goes into extracting whiteness from the sugar cane."
Walker went down a rabbit hole of sugar history, at one point stumbling on some black figurines online — the type of racial tchotchkes that turn up in a sea of mammy cookie jars. They were ceramic, brown-skinned boys carrying baskets. Those were the size of dolls, but Walker's are 5 feet high, some made entirely of molasses-colored candy. Fifteen of them are posed throughout the factory floor, leading the way to her sugar sphinx.
The boys are cute and apple-cheeked, but they're also kind of scary — some of the melted candy looks a lot like blood.
"I knew that the candy ones wouldn't last," Walker says. "That was part of the point was that they were going to be in this non-climate-controlled space, slowly melting away and disintegrating. But what's happened is we lost two of these guys in the last two days or so."
Losing those figures in service of the sugar is the slave trade in a nutshell.
"Also in a nutshell," Walker says, "and maybe a little bit hammer-over-the-head, is that some of the pieces of the broken boys I threw into the baskets of the unbroken boys."
OK, that's not so subtle, but it's also not unusual for Kara Walker. She's dressed in a shiny, oversize baseball jacket emblazoned with the gold face of King Tut on it. I ask her if at a certain point she worries about doing work that is seen as being just about race.
"I don't really see it as just about race," she says. "I mean, I think that my work is about trying to get a grasp on history. I mean, I guess it's just kind of a trap, in a way, that I decided to set my foot into early on, which is the trap of race — to say that it's about race when it's kind of about this larger concern about being."
I tell her it's almost impossible to talk about our history without talking about race. She replies: "There [are] scholarly conversations about race and then there's the kind of meaty, unresolved, mucky blood lust of talking about race where I always feel like the conversation is inconclusive."
Inconclusive, but for artist Kara Walker, ongoing.
BLOGGER'S BLAH BLAH BLAH. When I first read about this today, I was astonished. It was the most innovative thing I'd seen in years, gorgeous in a scary, monumental way. It's Mammy as Ramses, as Isis, as Mount Rushmore carving, as the Venus of Willendorf with a scarf tied around her head. She's Goliath, she's Gulliver, she's everything God-sized and oversized and improbable. Everything about it, from the jutting fertility-symbol breasts to the enormous rounded butt thrust up either as an offering or a giant ass-up fuck you, to the face that is Sphynxlike and impossible to read, is provocative and even thrilling.
But I always have a strange stab when I see art like this. I truly think, whether this is irrational or not, if I had been able to get a career like this going when I was that young, if I had had that much acclaim and affirmation, recognition of my talent, opportunities even, my life would have been totally different. Happier? Hell, it would've been ecstatic, and the problems I've had - oh God, let's not get into the problems I've had - never would have happened at all, because I would have been an Artist.
Logic tries to scream at me that women artists, in particular, can be self-destructive and even suicidal, that no amount of acclaim or even love is ever enough. And I don't believe it, because in the core of my doomed little brain I think success solves everything. I just feel that way, I am convinced.
But that's a mere sideline. This was a headspinning project that must have been built to scale by a huge team of people, and I am not sure how all that sparkling white sugar was layered on. I know there are other articles about this astonishing display, but right now I'm tired and I don't want to read any more. My own life is mystifying, not very productive it seems, and I'm not expressing anything of note. But maybe I should take heart in the fact that at least somebody is.
Right. This is one of those mornings that I wish I could make disappear. The weather around here has been putrid, unrelentingly cold and wet and grey, dank, with dampness seeping in everywhere. My beautiful new Mother's Day hanging baskets of flowers are wilting and turning slimy and brown. I don't want to go out.
I had something happen to me today, and I guess I shouldn't even been surprised, but it has lit the fuse of memory of every other time I have been stepped on as a writer. I know I shouldn't feel that way, and somehow that just makes it worse. I should be cool and detached and never take offense. But I've never been any good at that.
Sometimes I think that writers (like me, I mean, not successful ones) have to roll around showing their pink bellies to people who then slash at them with a razor blade. Or something like that. And I'm supposed to be fine with it.
I'm not fine with it. I hurt so bad it might just ruin this whole week, so I want to throw my mind into a topic I've been turning over for quite a long time. (It seems the only anodyne to the agony of being a writer is more writing.)
Several years ago, before I was run out of town by some people with very sharp teeth, I wrote a blog for Open Salon. I had been trying to read Gone with the Wind for about the third time, and was once more getting stuck on black stereotypes that sometimes made me feel literally nauseated.
I started doing an exploration of such things, and what popped out of the Google images was a riot of pulsating energy and saturated color: the works of dozens and maybe even hundreds of African- American artists, many of them taking the phenomenon of the black stereotype and turning it on its ear.
Drawing on ceramic salt-and-pepper sets of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, old ads with grinning black children eating watermelon, and (in a much darker exploration) the old slave posters that equated selling a human being with "needles, pins, ribbons &c. &c.", these artists recombined the images into a potent mixture of parody and protest, shoving it under our noses in the most provocative way possible.
Betye Saar created Aunt Jemima's Revenge, seen above, in which the comfy and familiar Mammy-figure on the pancake-mix box wields a shotgun. There were so many others I had not heard of: Robert Colescott, Kara Walker, Mark Steven Greenfield. There was a unique creative energy here, subversive, riotous and "in your face".
One of the purposes of art, of course, is to disturb and unsettle. Back a few years ago when I did my GWTW exploration, I encountered paintings that were probably the most extreme of any of them: deeply saturated colors so vibrant they could trigger a migraine, with figures that were both fierce and embarrassing.
Embarrassing only because of their Mammy-ness, their Little Black Sambo-ness, their resemblance to those Golliwog dolls that people like to buy at craft fairs and collect. They were salt-and-pepper shakers come to life.
The artist was a man, and there was a web site, and I didn't save the link because I was sure I could find it again. Art this potent had to have a following.Well, guess what. I can't find it. Can't even find his name.
I've been looking for days now, beating the bushes. I've found sites that list literally hundreds of African-American artists in every genre. My artist might be in there, but I just don't have time to go through all of them.
In some cases, I found long, stuffy, scholarly articles that filled the entire screen with flyspeck print, and no illustrations. Fooey. Even if he's in there, he's buried.
So all the little girls in neon gingham, the little boys with spikily nappy hair, and all those other down-on-the-old-plantation characters that he has transformed into a strange kind of protest, is lost to me, seemingly forever.
What happened? How can you suck back something that's been on the 'net for years? You can't. So I don't know what's going on. If I just had a name. I'd have something to go on.
So I could forget this punch in the stomach. Maybe.
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