I May Be Wearing White After Labor Day

If only to signal my surrender.

Class started on Thursday.  It is called Algebraic Structures.  I thought it might be a survey course on bridges and buildings built from first-degree equations.  I was wrong.  For the first hour I was following along, my head nodding as the professor's hand danced over the board.  Then he started to do matrices to solve for systems of linear equations and all of a sudden the board was analogous to the meta-joke about telling familiar jokes:  These guys had all been in prison together for a long time and a new inmate arrived.  When it was night and lights out, someone said, "16" and everyone cracked up. Someone else said "23" and people cracked up again. Someone else said "45" and everyone was rolling.  The new guy asked his cellmate what was going on and was told that they'd all been together so long, and knew all the jokes that instead of reciting the whole joke they'd numbered them.  And I'm sitting there going, What the hell?!?!?!?!???  What have I gotten myself into now?

I better check and see if the Sushi and Vegan Pastry Institute of Lower Transylvania will take me as a grad student. 

Saturday Poetry: What Did Thou Do to Thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee

A young man, strong and black

A musket tore your back.

Three hundred guilders lost

Did Master rue the cost

of his African

so strong and black?

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

It is true

that thee are with us now

Thy Master’s guilders gone

No doubt he mourns the loss

but killed you nonetheless.

One of his best.

What did thou do, my son

to thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee

Rings burned around thy neck

Eyes plucked from thy face

The Pearls of Africa

are missing from thy case.

Thy master stole thou eyes?

No others tell thou that

they still are used

to find your way, to this our home?

Young slave made blind.

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

Thy Master’s guilders gone.

No doubt he mourns the loss

but killed you nonetheless.

One of his best.

What did thou do, my son

to thy Master?

Look at thee

Africans strong and black.

(Look at me

African strong and black.)

Thy Master’s loss our gain

Thy mutilation is their shame.

Three hundred guilders thrown away

is not the measure of

Two warriors in our midst.

Returned to the Mother’s land

because of what thee did

to thy Master.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part V

Lately I've been thinking a lot about American slavery.  Not quite sure why, perhaps it's where the mind goes when reading or listening to commentary about the 1963 March on Washington.  Perhaps it is, as I alluded to before, being in Myrtle Beach and Pawley's Island in the summer.  The other day a friend related a story about the lives of her forefathers.  She is a Yankee, a tribe that I hadn't encountered with any frequency until I moved here.  Her family has probably been here as long as Europeans settled these lands.  In her youth she read a history of her ancestors' town (located in the lobster's tail of Massachusetts).  It was published shortly after the Civil War (in part to make sense of the newly re-ordered Republic) and she found it remarkable for the book's candor about the North's complicity in chattel slavery.

The history's foreword tells a story about a slave named Pomp who one day walked to the water's edge with a parcel of food, laid the parcel down and then hanged himself facing the sea.  He had brought the food for the journey home and he faced the sea because home was across the vast Atlantic.

Back in the mid 1990's I created The Negros Burial Ground with composer Leroy Jenkins.  It was inspired by the discovery of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan.  In order to write the piece I researched 17th through 19th century New York history.  Prior to manumission (in 1829) New York benefitted from not only the sale of slaves, but the owning of slaves in the city and country.  It wasn't like the antebellum South with its plantations.  A farmer may have had 2-3 slaves, an affluent urban householder a few more.   Armed with that knowledge I wrote a libretto that was fueled by my imagining the lives and deaths of enslaved Africans in New York City, and contemporary victims of police violence (Michael Stewart, Eddie Perry, and Eleanor Bumpurs).  They became wanderers in the Land of the Dead struggling to go home.

To make a long story short, a shitstorm ensued.  (I'm here to tell you that the best colon cleanser ever is sheer unmitigated terror.)  Were it not for the courage and vision of The Kitchen's Laureen Amazeen and John Maxwell Hobbs, of my collaborators Leroy Jenkins (now deceased) and the playwright and director Dominic Taylor, this work would never have been seen.  And in its totality it is a beautiful thing.  We were never able to mount a fully staged production.  What we presented at The Kitchen was an oratorio version.  I am grateful for that.

The poem that follows in my next post was the lyric for what became "What Did Thy Do to Thy Master?"  I read it today and can't help but think of Trayvon Martin.  Selah. 

Saturday Poetry: Annie

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:

On the train

A woman prettier than pretty

hair a red not found in nature

black stilettos worn for stature

butt made to serve tea.

She gets out from the same door as I

follow her down the steps

through a steel shamrock.

I am curious how easily she walks

and knows where she’s going.

To the token clerk, a lift of her hot ‘n cold cup.

He in his booth like a banished pup.

She turns around.

Come on, she says,

go with me.

You’re a nice girl.

Nowhere else you could be

but at the Shipyard.

Come on.

I'm Still Not Hearting Diane Ravitch, Part III

I am going to keep this short because I've already used up my quotient of profanity for one day.  Came across this about Diane Well-I'll-Be-Goddamned Ravitch.  Like I said when I referenced her before here, here and here, I don't trust apostates.

What's the count now?  Three post-education reform books to tell the world what any person with sense already knew?  When schools like Choate, Dalton, Foote, Hopkins, St. Ann's, Sidwell Friends, Brooklyn Friends (you get my drift) start insisting on standardized tests and the curricula that love them, then I'll be convinced that No Child Left Behind is not the spawn of Satan.  In other words, in matters of education, I'll have whatever the elite is having.  Thankyouverymuch.

Etc.

I knew about the wrinkles and the aches and the pains.  I even was prepared for one's big nose to get bigger.  The sometimes not-so-subtle decline in energy, the been-there-seen-that attitude towards everything.  But the beard and mustache?  The teeth that break while you're eating a hamburger?  Come the fck on!?!?!?!?!

Geez.  Louise.  I'm old enough to expect that every quarterly visit to my internist will be followed with a "Let's run some tests ..." remark sure to send me into an anxious frenzy about tainted blood and exponentially massing tumors.  But waking up in the morning looking like a Snidely Whiplash avatar?  I.  Did.  Not.  Sign.  Up.  For.  This.

 When did I get old?  All of which has made me consider how to best get into the classroom as a math teacher.  Thinking now that I'll work towards certification so that at the pace I'm going (one class at a time) I should be finished by 63 years of age.  (Driving around the other day in the big-ass Nissan Cuthbert bought, slowing down just enough for some 10 year old boys to get out of the street before they became human Mobius strips and one of them says, Hi Grandma!  I'm done.)  I am trying to keep soul and body together enough to be effective.  (This summer's sojourn at the Fitness Center has been a life-saver.  My blood pressure is astoundingly normal.  It's so low that that I take my pulse to make sure I'm alive.)  The semester begins in a couple of weeks and along with the premature September weather (except there's still August light) -- watch, it'll be followed by one hell of an Indian Summer -- and the V-wedge of geese I very much feel that the summer is coming to it's end.

99% of the grand plans I had for the summer remain grand, and undone.  I've been working on the same short story for 3 months.  I'm practically rewriting every sentence (with the ghost of Raymond Carver looking over my shoulder) yet it feels premature and illegitimate.  Like putting lipstick on a pig because I don't think the story is fully baked, but without this kind of cosmetic attention I don't know if I'll stay embedded enough to figure out how to fix it.  I am putting an artificial deadline on getting it done.  I cannot, can't even conceive of doing fiction and doing combat with my next class, Algebraic Structures.  (4 credit hours of begging the professor pull out my fingernails instead, I'm sure.)  Off goes the writer's beanie, on goes the mathematician's beret.  If summer weren't so hot I'd order another month, but 30 additional days would just be the Sword of Damocles over my head 30 days longer.  So, it ends when it ends.  The story and the summer.

There are 2 things that I did accomplish:

1.  Strength-trained myself into better shape.  Now when I raise my arms I don't cause a tsunami in Indonesia, and

2.  made quite a lot of progress on my Front Yard of Eden (notice the pumpkin taking over):

 

If I'd Wanted Heat I Would-A Moved to Myrtle Beach

It is August the 5th and I'm sitting here in my sweatshirt.  Now, this is the kind of summer I'm talkin' about!  I can wear shoes without fainting, and my head has ceased to be one big sinus cavity and now I can think about something else besides pining for last winter's snow apocalypse.  I'll be honest and repetitive -- I detest hot weather.  A few weeks ago I was working out stunned by the amount of sweat pouring down my face.  I knew it wasn't because I'd loaded up more weights; it was simply the ambient atmosphere.  Were I living 150 years ago in Myrtle Beach™ instead of strength-training scientifically I'd probably be horseshoed over picking cotton.  Or not, because by my age I'd be dead dead dead.  I don't have the imagination (or the stomach) to think what life was like then.  I only have the gratitude for living now in an era where my biggest problem is a slow DSL connection on rainy days.

My father was one of nine siblings.  We went down to celebrate the 80th birthday of the last remaining child of Bessie and George.  Otherwise funerals were our only family reunions.  My parents were from Georgetown, SC (as is probably 1/5 of the African-American population in this town), and I lived there with my beloved maternal grandmother, Mamie, for a minute between bouts of staggering depression.  My memories are punctuated by gaps of four years, the intervals between visits.  That's not enough time to know a place, but it is enough to have disorganized and unsorted images that may or may not make sense.  When I moved there at 19 the experience of Georgetown was different.  I was different -- a difficult, tactiturn college dropout from up north.  A child only a grandmother could love; to the others I was either a curiosity, an object of pity or incontrovertible evidence of the gods' rebuke of my parent's ambitions.

Back then, the early 1970's, the place was real.  The social order of centuries was just barely giving way.  My grandmother and her contemporaries were still alive radiating a quiet pride in what they'd accomplished under apartheid -- beautiful well-kept homes, good livings, children who went to college.  The small downtown was still a real downtown, not the theme park for bored golfers, foodies and boaters it has since become.  Georgetown and its environs stank when the paper mill operated.  It was awful -- an almost hostile amalgamation of farts, cornered skunk and sulphur.  There was a synagogue 2 blocks down the street from home.  (I had walked by that building dozens of times, but only realized what it was the last time I was there for my mother's funeral.  After I'd read some about the history of Jews in the American South only then could I see evidence of their presence.)  And undisguised poverty.

And now, with most of the older generation dead and the strip malling, well, there's very little there there for me.  I don't mind so much; my attachments were the people, not the homes.  But still, it's become harder to distinguish Georgetown from suburban Connecticut.  Dunkin Donuts.  Walmart.  AutoZone.  Starbucks.  Sprint.  And Myrtle Beach?  The arable land, the wealth of the Confederacy turned into golf courses and town houses and Columbia, MD-like new communities sprung whole from the real estate developer's mind.

So I visited my Aunt Johanna, she the last of the Pawley's Island Browns.  And we took Lilli to the Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church graveyard where my mother and her kin are buried (and where my mother would not recognize the church building or the congregation that now worships there).  And frolicked in the ocean for a day and shared the beach with the new south.

Lake Street Dive Plays "I Want You Back"

Just got back from Myrtle Beach a few days ago.  I got nothin'.  So, enjoy this!