Ida B. Wells: The Black Woman Crusader Against White Knights

Posted on March 4, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Ida B. Wells was born into slavery on July 16, 1862.  She was “freed” by presidential proclamation and executive order (the Emancipation Proclamation) issued by President Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862, during the American Civil War.

Ida B. Wells became a journalist, and her most famous writing is in her pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law and All Its Phases.  Wells was the first person to extensively document lynchings, and dispelled the myth that lynchings were reserved for Black “criminals.”  Wells exposed lynching as a practice of white men, often inspired by the siren song of white women, to intimidate and oppress Black Americans who created economic and political competition for whites.  Think the destruction of the Black Wall Street in 1923, and the mass murder of its Black residents.

Wells’ work is noteworthy for its real-time reporting on the “incendiary propaganda about Black rape that was used to justify the practice” of lynching.

If the Black Church had saints, then Ida B. Wells would be part of that celestial lineup.

In my collection of poetry, The Black Feminine Mystique, there is a poem, one of my Almost Sonnets, dedicated to Ida B. Wels, entitled “Strange Fruit.”

She waged a just war against White knights,

This patron saint of the anti‑lynching crusade.

She wielded her pen like a crusader her sword,

Exposed emasculators who’d reduced Black men

To icons to be destroyed.

Self-proclaimed Christians hell‑bent on destroying this African Priapus,

This ancient Black God who made them feel inadequate.

They castrated him and crucified him on a tree,

Commemorated this day as The Day of the Rope.

She was Isis reincarnated, the devoted sister‑wife‑mother.

She attacked with the relentlessness of a warrior‑goddess,

Revealed that mostly innocent Black men

Were victims of this strange justice.

If slavery is America’s original sin,

Then America’s Eve falsely accused the snake of seduction.

She told this story again and again, until the myth had become a reality

In the popular White imagination.

This Women’s History Month, all women, but especially white women, should read Ida B. Wells’ Southern Horrors: Lynch Law and all its Phases.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, crime, ezwwaters, Lest We Forget, Poetry, Politics, race, raising black boys, Religion, Slavery | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

We Be Watchin’ You God!

Posted on March 3, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Their Eyes Were Watching God!  That is one of the greatest and most meaningful titles to come out of the Harlem Renaissance.  And Zora Neale Hurston was one of the coolest women during that era, holding her own with all the male Harlem luminaries, shining as brightly.

Yeah, God, we be watchin’ you, thru 246 years of slavery, thru 72 years of sharecropping ‘n’ segregation, but we still faithful, e’en when white folk curse us, call us sons ‘n’ daughters of Ham, Uncle Toms, Toby, ‘n’ Aunt Jemimas!

Readers might find the vernacular hard to follow, but no harder than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Hurston had a better handle on the vernacular of Black people in the South than Harriet Beecher Stowe.  In fact, I made it through Their Eyes Were Watching God easier than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  If the vernacular is difficult to follow – actually, it’s like a foreign language, maybe developed by Black folk in order to communicate with each other without having massa and missus any wiser – then listen to the audio book, superbly performed by Ruby Dee.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, Lest We Forget, race, Religion, Slavery | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

“My Lord, What a Morning”

Posted on March 2, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

On the penultimate day of Black History Month, I participated in a Black History Month Celebration at my church, St. Michael-St. Malachy.  I was asked to recite a poem.  A number of youth were present at the celebration, and even though poetry should not be explained, but experienced, I provided a little context for the following poem, dedicated to Marian Anderson, the great Black Opera Singer.

If timing is everything, I chose this poem over something from my first book, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present, simply because I thought it would resonate more with the audience.  It just so happened that Marian Anderson was born on this day, February 27th, in 1897.

I confess that I’m not a lover of opera, but I have listened to it.  My High School Music Teacher at Alexander Hamilton High School, now Paul Robeson High School, Mr. R., a Black male, introduced us to opera.  He said, even if we didn’t like it, we would have had at least experienced it.  He would mix it up though, give us some James Brown and Beethoven, Marvin Gaye and Mozart, Sarah Vaughan and Vivaldi.  At 14 years of age, I had already watched Porgy and Bess, my only claim to having experienced an Opera.

My Lord, What a Morning, is a “Negro Spiritual.”  Sometimes Anderson is credited with writing it, but she wasn’t the writer, but a great interpreter of it, and of  the Spirituals.  This song though must’ve had great significance for Anderson because it’s the title of her autobiography.

I briefly told the audience a little Marian Anderson history, that she was famous in Europe before her 1935 debut in the States.  She was a contralto.  She had a three-octave range.  The famous conductor, Arturo Toscanini, said that Marian had “a voice one hears once in a hundred years.”

The racism of some Americans didn’t want to hear Marian’s voice.  In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.  The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a member of the DAR, resigned from it, something that endeared me to FDR’s wife.  Instead of singing at Constitution Hall, on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, on the Lincoln Memorial steps, Marian sang before an integrated audience (which included the President and First Lady, who made this event happen) of more than 75,000 people, and a radio audience in the millions.

So, it is only appropriate that this poem bears the same name as the spiritual and Anderson’s autobiography

My Lord, What a Morning

I am Black and proud,

O Daughters of the American Revolution,

Like the soil of Creation,

Like the land of Mother Africa.

Do not look at me with contempt because I am Black.

Your mythology says I am sun‑burnt,

That my forefathers were cursed.

My forebears sold my ancestors into slavery,

Made generations toilers of the land;

But the land I made great rejected me

When I came up from slavery.

You found other ways to keep me down,

Would not allow me to sing my song

In this land that is mine as well as yours.

My forefathers fought in the American Revolution,

My foremothers supported the Civil War,

My father fought to make the world safe for democracy,

My brother would fight to end all wars.

How dare you not allow me to sing my song!

I will lift my voice and sing,

I will sing a song of sweet liberty,

I will sing so loud the earth will be torn asunder,

I will sing so loud those war dead will rise.

Listen, and hear the angels weep,

Listen, the temple’s curtains have been rent,

Listen, and know that God speaks through me.

Hear my voice, O Daughters of the American Revolution,

Hear my voice and eat your hearts out!

— The Black Feminine Mystique

Posted in Black patriotism, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Lest We Forget, Poetry, race, Religion, Slavery | Leave a comment

The Three Pillars of American Society: Slavery, Segregation, and Hyperincarceration

Posted on March 1, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

America stands on three pillars: slavery, segregation, and hyperincarceration (incorrectly referred to as “mass incarceration”).  These “pillars” implicate and impact mostly Black people, but also all people living in America or dreaming about coming to America.  In fact, the U.S. Constitution and its Amendments, as well as major U.S. Supreme Court decisions, revolve around the first two pillars.  The third, hyperincarceration, has not yet been addressed by the High Court in a meaningful way.

Whenever anyone attempts to relegate “Black History” to one month, think about the above three pillars.  The Black experience, and not just the pain and the agony, is woven through the American tapestry.  Indeed, the very soil of America has been fertilized by Black bodies, and watered with Black blood.

In honor of Women’s History Month, I will uplift not only women writers, but also women who are phenomenal, and otherwise.  I’ll begin with Angela Davis, with a book recommendation that addresses these three pillars upon which America stands.

Are Prisons Obsolete? is a short, provocative polemic.  I used it as a primary text in a course, “The Psychological Impact of Prison on Society and Families,” I taught at York College.

President Calvin Coolidge, during the “Roaring Twenties,” said, in a 1925 speech to newspaper editors, “The business of America is business.”  Jessica Mitford, in her 1974 book, Kind & Usual Punishment: The Prison Business, could very well have said, “The business of America is imprisonment.”

For the last twenty years, the U.S. has held the dubious distinction of imprisoning more people than any other nation in the world, and of holding people in prison longer than any other nation in the world.  And the stats go on and on. . .

I was first introduced to Angela Davis through George Jackson’s prison letters in Soledad Brother.  Jackson was serving an indeterminate sentence of one year to life for a $70 gas station robbery.  Ten years later he was dead, shot and killed by guards during an alleged attempted escape from prison.

Angela Davis looks at prisons and asks us are they really necessary?  I would add, are prisons necessary at the scale we have built them?

At one time Americans could not imagine a society without slavery.  Granted, it took a bloody Civil War that lasted a little more than four years to put an end to that peculiar institution.  Sharecropping and segregation immediately replaced slavery, with the stamp of approval of the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1896 decision, Plessy v. Ferguson.  It took the High Court 58 years – “the law’s delay” – to revisit and overturn this ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.  Segregation, of course, did not end with this landmark decision in 1954.

In his inaugural speech as Governor of Alabama, on January 14, 1963, George Corley Wallace said, and it’s worth quoting in full:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

— Governor George Corley Wallace

Let’s just state, for the sake of argument, that segregation ended under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  Immediately thereafter, in 1968, Richard Nixon ran a successful campaign for president against the Great Society, declaring that it was “lawless.”  Here, I’ve argued, is the beginning of the modern War on Crime, and the erection of the third pillar upon which America stands: mass incarceration (read hyperincarceration).

From this point on, peaking in the 1980’s, even in New York under a “liberal” Governor, Mario Cuomo (the Master Prison Builder), prisons become the business of America.  But Angela Davis argues, those first two pillars, slavery and segregation, people thought were “forever.”  Why not prisons?

There’s a movement to “decarcerate” the nation, and there are also prison abolitionists, who have a harder sell.  I read somewhere, from an FBI profiler, that if we wanted to imprison people as punishment, not for punishment, then it wouldn’t be “mass imprisonment,” but there would be a focus on the “truly dangerous.”  He reckoned this at less than 10% of the population currently imprisoned.  Imagine decarcerating by 90%!

The fundamental problem with the prison business is that it doesn’t address crime causation.  It doesn’t even attempt to “prevent” crimes.  It is reactionary, which doesn’t enhance public safety, because the “deed” has been done.  And imprisonment doesn’t deter those not yet arrested because, for the most part, people who commit crimes do not leave their homes and say, “Today, I’m going to commit a crime and get caught.”  But that’s another conversation.  The business of locking people up as our first response to crime hasn’t worked.  I would like to believe that the architects of prisons and the people who think that “more police, more prisons, and longer prisons sentences” know better, that we cannot solve historical social problems that stem not only from gross inequality, but slavery and segregation.  And we certainly should not use prisons as a means of social control of young Black and Brown men.  (Read Charles E. Silberman’s Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice on this point.)

If Americans are willing to not simply parrot those self-evident truths about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from the Declaration of Independence, but to actively promote them, then prisons will become obsolete.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, crime, ezwwaters, Justice Chronicles, Lest We Forget, Life Sentences, Politics, race, Slavery, Sometimes Blue Knights Wear Black Hats, Streets of Rage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Farewell to Black History Month, 2022

Posted on February 28, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Black History Month is in the shortest month of the year.  Caesar Augustus, thinking that the month in honor of his name was too short, took days from February, short changing what would become Black History Month.  In fact, when Black History Month was first celebrated, in February 1926, the month and year my father was born, it was only a week long and was called Negro History Week. 

I previously mentioned how my original birth certificate (I was born at the beginning of the Decisive Decade, the 1960s) lists me as a “Negro.”  (Elsewhere I mentioned how my maternal grandfather came to America from Barbados by way of Panama – he was working on the Panama Canal – through Ellis Island, and in the Ellis Island records he is listed as “African.”  I would wager that a clerk on Ellis Island recorded him as “African” to differentiate him from American born descendants of Africans, that is, “Negros.”  This naming, which was probably not claimed by my maternal grandfather, was just one more ploy to divide and conquer Africans in the Diaspora, and the tragedy is how, to this very day, people from the Caribbean look to differentiate themselves from native born Black folk in America.  The irony is that Black folk in America bore the brunt, the whips and scorns of American society, and challenged laws that would even deny  Black folk from other countries where the slave ships docked their fundamental Constitutional and human rights, and made it easy for them to emigrate to these here United States.  In fact, anyone who emigrates to the United States should thank Black folk, because Black folk have always challenged America to live up to her professed ideals to become a “more perfect Union,” and they are beneficiaries of Black folk’s struggles, and triumphs.)

Carter G. Woodson launched “Negro History Week.”  He is considered the “father of black history.”  He was born in 1875, just 10 years after the Confederate Rebels’ defeat in the Civil War.  He was the second Black person to obtain a PhD from Harvard University, in 1912, after W.E.B. DuBois, and he is the only individual whose parents were enslaved in the United States to obtain a PhD.

Carter was one of the first scholars to study the history of the Diaspora, including Black history.  He founded The Journal of Negro History in 1916.  Speaking of “Negros,” another scholar I mentioned this Black History Month, Rayford W. Logan (1897-1982), preferred the term “Negro” to that of Black,” as did many of his contemporaries.  But note DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903.  (Note these Black Scholars, born in the late 1800s, and what they achieved.)

My last book recommendation is from the Father of Black History.  His The Mis-Education of the Negro, in effect, states that Negros are being “culturally indoctrinated,” not “educated.”  This holds true to this day, but I would add Americans, writ large, are miseducated. 

In Truth, our history was not knowing; it was being shielded from the truth. That was the American way.

— James Patterson

I hope the books I have recommended this Black History Month will help you find the way to the truth about Black history.

A farewell to Black History Month, 2022.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, Lest We Forget, race, Sometimes Blue Knights Wear Black Hats, Streets of Rage | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Roots — Strange and Forbidden Fruit

Posted on February 27, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

“Roots!”

I hate “slave movies,” perhaps more than white Americans hate addressing the issue of slavery and the black shadows it casts on America and American history to this very day.

Not a day goes by in America where race doesn’t rear its ugly head, even in seemingly innocent encounters, even in a place as diverse (and segregated) as New York City.  I have lost count of how many times, on the subway and on the crowded streets of New York City, I’ve made fleeting eye contact with a white woman and I see fear, and fantasy, play across her forehead like a small flat screen TV.  You could chalk this up to my overly active imagination as a writer, or the fact that I am well-read and there are hundreds of years of plays and stories and movies and TV shows that play on this fear, and fantasy, think Othello the Moor; Aaron the Moor (from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus), Mandingo; Jack Johnson; Joe Christmas (from William Faulkner’s Light in August, which should be read alongside James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man);  Bigger Thomas; Emmett Till; and The Exonerated Five (the NYC Central Park Jogger Case).  I know what images flash across white women’s minds, because they flash across mine, too, because we have been conditioned to buy into all the stereotypes about each other, but mine is informed by the collective unconscious and all those voices in my head from Black men who hung from poplar trees, and the fact that Black and white in America share a history that spans hundreds of years of violence, most perpetrated against Black people by white people.

Using 1619 as a starting point of slavery in the “United States,” and 1865 as the end of slavery in the U.S., that’s 246 years of slavery.  The nation itself is only 246 years old.  Let’s then say that legal segregation began in 1877, at the end of Reconstruction, and “ended” in 1977, for the sake of argument, when Roots’ first episode aired on TV.  That’s 100 years of Black dreams denied and destroyed.  And the era of “mass incarceration” (hyper-incarceration), beginning in 1968 and ending in 2000, I’ll leave for another time.

Roots, by Alex Haley, was published when America turned 200 years old, in 1976.  If timing is everything, then it’s release was perfect.  A year later, the miniseries aired to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers. This was probably the first time in American history that collectively Americans, Black and white, took an honest look at slavery and its legacy.

Given this legacy, and the times we currently live in, Roots should be re-read, and introduced to a new generation.

Although I hate “slave movies,” I love books.  Roots opened up the idea of exploring my roots, and with the science of DNA, we can DNA time travel and get a sense of our ancestors.

Roots!

Posted in Genealogy, Lest We Forget | Tagged , | 2 Comments

I Wanna Go to Bailey’s Cafe

Posted on February 26, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Gloria Naylor is another Scheherazade.  She was a consummate storyteller, wrote beautifully, created engaging stories and characters we could judge if so inclined by the content of their character, not their race.  Unlike Alice Walker, Naylor’s male characters have more character, like Ben the janitor/caretaker in today’s book recommendation.  They are not stereotypes.  For the record, and in fairness to Walker, James Baldwin called out Richard Wright for creating the “stereotype” Bigger Thomas.  As I indicated in a previous blog, Bigger is not a stereotype, and he is not simply an angry Black man.  He was created from Wright’s imagination.  He’s that dream denied, not deferred, that turns into a nightmare, and not simply for white folk.

Naylor, in creating her characters, especially the seven women in The Women of Brewster Place, gives them soul, and it conjures up, for me, The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois, which also doesn’t make it on my recommended book list this Black history Month.  As writers know, when we create characters, even if it doesn’t make it into our works, we give them born days, and sketch their lives on a timeline – I, myself, think in timelines, as a history buff.

I have a special place for Gloria Naylor on my Black History Month Book Recommendations, as a native New Yorker, and for her involvement in a literacy program in da Bronx.  And, of course, as a born and bred Brooklynite, for her book, Bailey’s Café, which centers on “a mythic Brooklyn diner that offers an oasis for the suffering.”  Additionally, she intertwined stories from the Bard and Black folklore.  And although Their Eyes Were Watching God – a great title – by Zora Neale Hurston doesn’t make it on my list – there are only 28 days in February this year – I think of how both Hurston and Naylor wove Black folklore into their stories.

The Women of Brewster’s Place, a National Book Award Winner, is Naylor’s most famous work, and it made it to the small screen starring Oprah Winfrey, Robin Givens and Cicely Tyson.

As a Black man I love that Naylor returned to Brewster Place with The Men of Brewster Place.  Naylor knows we need each other, and perhaps she never said, “I don’t need a man.”  I have told Black women perhaps they will never hear a black man say, “I don’t need a woman.”

If you haven’t read anything by Naylor, then you need to.  Pick up any book by her.  You’ll get a good and entertaining story, and you won’t be disappointed.

Posted in Lest We Forget, race, Relationships | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

All Jazz is not Improvised!

Posted on February 25, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Toni Morrison is a conductor, a composer of language so melodious her prose jumps off the sheet, dances in the streets and sings to a music you feel is meant just for you.  Only one other author, James Baldwin, has done this for me, elevated prose to poetry to music to jazz, all that jazz, seemingly improvised but carefully constructed, each note (word) packed with meaning, with emotions, with a story as timeless as the beginning of time, of first loves, of “killing the thing we (men) love.”

Jazz opens in the winter of 1926, the year my father was born, just three days into this new year. Joe Trace, a divorced Black male in his fifties, shoots to death his lover of three months, 18-year-old Dorcas.

From the inside flap, it says, “In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present and future…”

Some readers find Morrison hard to follow.  For the most part, these are readers not accustomed to jazz.  Additionally, Morrison expects more from her readers, as all those (mostly white men) we were required to read in college, a case on point is Faulkner, his works more convoluted than complicated, with nary a note of music.  In fact, Morrison liked the works of Faulkner and her master’s thesis was titled, “Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s treatment of the alienated.”

Alienation is not only a theme in Morrison’s work, but also in so many Black authors.  Deconstructing the treatment of Black folk in these here United States, trauma and alienation loom large.

Morrison looms large over American letters.  She won a Pulitzer prison for Beloved, a National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon, and the Nobel Prize.  Reading anything by Morrison will transport you.  As an artist, Morrison’s gifts are on full display in Jazz.

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More Than One Thousand and One American Nights

Posted on February 24, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Imagine if your very life depended on telling a story.  Imagine telling a story for one thousand and one nights.  Imagine this storyteller as a woman.  In One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Tales from the Arabian Nights, Scheherazade, a young woman betrothed to King Shahryar, finds herself next in line in this precarious position.  King Shahrya, betrayed by his wife, has lost all faith in women.  The wife who betrayed him he had executed, along with all the people privy to her indiscretions as well as those who participated.  Since then, he takes a “wife” every day, and kills her before the night is over.  King Shahrya, this serial killer of young women, meets his match in Scheherazade.

Scheherazade is a consummate storyteller.  In fact, Scheherazade created the serial novel and cliffhanger.  After telling King Shahrya a story, as the night was approaching and it was time to go to sleep, Scheherazade would begin another story and stop at a critical point.  Scheherazade’s stories were so intriguing and entertaining that King Shahrya let her live another day to complete the story.  This storytelling went on for a thousand and one nights.  In the end, Scheherazade has “cured” the King of his murderous ways and they live happily ever after.

When I first started reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson, I thought of Scheherazade.  Wilkerson is a masterful storyteller.  She tells this story of our discontents, and connects seemingly unrelated events, in such a compelling and engaging way.  The first part of this book is entitled: “Toxins in the Permafrost and Heat Rising All Around.”  Suffice it to say that racism, the caste system of race in America, is deeply rooted in America’s “permafrost.”  A little heat will bring what we believe to be long dormant pathogens of racism to the surface. When Wilkerson begins chapter one, “In the haunted summer of 2016, an unaccustomed heat wave struck the Siberian tundra…,” you wonder exactly where she is going.  When she gets there, when you get there with her, you have to marvel at the writing and the connection.

Earlier this month I recommended books by Octavia Butler.  On this day, February 24th, in 2006, Butler, another storyteller in the tradition of Scheherazade, passed away.  As Butler went where no Black woman writer has gone before in her “science fiction,” Wilkerson takes us to the Siberian tundra, and when the permafrost has melted, the thing that America can simply not get away, the thing that America can simply not resolve, racism, rises to the surface, rearing its ugly head.

It has been more than one thousand and one American nights, and here’s yet one more story to add to all the other American stories about race.

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Son of a Native Southern Son

Posted on February 23, 2022 by William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters
My Father in 1958 on his Wedding Day!

On this day in American history, in 1982, my father passed away, at the age of 56, a week and a day after he reached that age.  I always think of my father as a Native Southern Son.  When I learned from an older cousin that my father was an aspiring writer, I think that he would have been influenced by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and Richard Wright and James Baldwin.  Given that, I think a perfect title for his book would have been, Notes of a Native Southern Son.

As much American history as I have read (and lived), I can still not imagine my father’s life growing up in the Jim Crow South, serving in the segregated U.S. Army as a teenager during World War II, migrating (or fleeing) from the South and landing in Brooklyn, living in Bed-Stuy in the 1950s, traveling South every year, not like a criminal, but returning to the scene of one of the greatest crimes in the annals of history (American slavery, segregation, lynchings). And I’ll never forget, because I couldn’t imagine my father’s coming of age story in the segregated South, where malevolent forces still existed and floated freely in the Southern air when I was born, why my father took solo trips to the South almost every year around the Fourth of July, where my paternal roots are firmly planted, and never took me on his Southern road trips.  I perfectly understand now, and how the first ten years of my life, during the Decisive Decade, it was not safe to be a Black man or Black man-child in America, especially in the Southern states.  Still, I think all Black fathers owe their sons one thing: the truth about the world in which we have been born.

My father’s story began long before he was born, and I now see that my story is simply a continuation of his.  The science of DNA has revealed so much about our ancestry, though it’s still hard to get to the root of Black folk’s existence in these here United States.  What I do know, on my paternal Southern tree, probably that poplar tree from which many Black people were hung, is a root from 1805 – that’s as far back as I’ve been able to DNA time travel.  The Southern states can be accused of many things as it relates to Black folk, but they did a meticulous head count of Black folk in those bleeding Black blood states, for purposes of the census (read the Constitution and the provision about representation in the House of Representatives being based on the size of the population).  So, in 1805, the Southern fruit on my paternal tree is a mullata – probably the fruit of rape, that is, a white male raping a Black female.

Billie Holliday first sang and recorded “Strange Fruit” in 1939, when my father was 13.  I know my father loved Ray Charles, another native Southern Son, but I wonder if Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of “Strange Fruit” was a refrain in his mind when he was growing up and when he traveled South every year?  I wonder if he witnessed a lynching. He certainly had to have heard about one…or more.

The more I think about my father, I think that I would be the James Baldwin to his Richard Wright.  Yesterday I recommended Native Son.  Today I recommend James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son.  I know I took the long way to get here, but American stories with Southern themes are convoluted, one reason why William Faulkner is so confusing, and challenging to read.

James Baldwin was simply a masterful writer.  His prose is composed, so composed he is only one of two writers where I literally hear music and melodies in their prose.  My favorite short story of all time is Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.”  In my last year of college, the year my father died, I wrote a paper for a political science class using “Sonny’s Blues.”  All these years later I remember the title of the paper I wrote, which impressed the professor.  For this course we had a number of texts, including: Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents; Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars; and a Marx & Engels reader.  Looking at Marx’s theory of alienation, I wrote my final paper for this class, entitled, “’Sonny’s Blues,’ Or the Alienation of a Black Man in a White Male-Dominated Society.”  In Baldwin’s works, methinks he touches on this sense of alienation.

From Native Son to Notes of a Native Son to what could’ve been, Notes of a Native Southern Son, and perhaps I am well on my way to writing Son of a Native Southern Son.

Posted in Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, ezwwaters, Fathers, James Baldwin, Lest We Forget, race, raising black boys, Sonny's Blues | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments