On Ariel Levy,  Writer for  The New Yorker

Where the truth lies is somewhere, and Ariel Levy wants to find it. She is always searching for what is holding up the façade of normal. She builds her essays on a foundation carefully construed of complex legal, economic, or social information. Her craft is in the synthesizing she does with her research and insight. I think her feminist, lesbian, no-nonsense aesthetic guides her perceptions, hones her awareness; much like a master carpenter has the ability to see the way the pieces of a blueprint need to shift for alignment. Everything Levy approaches is stripped of the usual assumptions to reveal a streamlined description. She’s got attitude and pluck, but she never slips into the abyss of rhetoric or political correctness. She likes facts, but doesn’t allow them to hold her hostage. There’s room to find humor, even when she is at her most incredulous, as she was as she strode right into Spring Break in Florida with raucous vacationing college kids (her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs).  Nor did the wreckage of the 2013 rape scenario in Steubenville, Ohio (‘Trial By Twitter,’ August 5, 2013) daunt her. In that essay she hammers through the impact of social networking on Steubenville’s criminal justice endeavors. There is a lot of evidence for investigators now on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook and Levy considers how bloggers can blow all kinds of things into and out of proportion. She suggests, “By the logic of vigilantism, the need for justice supersedes the rules of a creaky bureaucracy.” I immediately thought of one of Levy’s predecessors, The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner, who wrote in 1936 of democracy moving at the pace of stagecoaches while fascism traveled at the speed of airplanes.

Flanner was writing about Adolf Hitler’s fascism vs. democracy, Levy about our legal system catching up with electronic communications. Both, it seems, consider social values and the speed of change. Flanner was a New Yorker foreign correspondent for fifty years. One of my favorite quotes for the prose and the perspective is, “History looks queer when you’re standing close to it, watching where it is coming from and how it’s being made.”

Levy is a writer with a similar astute sensibility. Her essay The ‘Perfect Wife’ (September 30, 2013) is about Edith Windsor and the fight for justice for same sex couples. Our Rosa Parks if you will. Windsor is 84. She was in relationship with Thea Spyer for over forty years. Their life together began in the era when dancing closely or not wearing three items of clothing that matched their sex were illegal and same sex couples stayed in the closet if they wanted to stay employed.

Levy describes Ms. Windsor as the three dimensional woman she is: a glamorous eighty-four year old, irreverent, and –luckily for lesbian and gay couples– irrepressible in her pursuit of equality. Levy acknowledges the difficulties Windsor presented for the lesbian and gay rights organizations. As much as Ms. Windsor is adorable, her estate tax claim represents the upper echelon issues of LGBT folks. Windsor was an ideal plaintiff due to her femme appeal, intelligence, long-term relationship and status as widow. Her legal team did, however, want to keep her eloquence about the joys of lesbian sex from the justices of the Supreme Court. Beyond the publicity and the incredible risk Ms. Windsor took to pursue this case, it is the depth of Windsor’s loving relationship with Ms. Spyer that reverberates through Levy’s essay.

If love and the courage to break down legal and social barriers is the theme of “The Perfect Wife” then ‘Thanksgiving In Mongolia’ (November 18, 2013) is about the absolute audacity required to get through pain and demolished dreams. The prose here defies gravity, taking the reader from the very heights of the Gobi Desert into the depths of miscarriage and despair. The intimacy of this piece reveals yet another aspect of Levy’s commitment to writing truths often left unspoken. Sometimes there are no words for grief and utter sadness, but Levy discovers and articulates it all.

Levy ventured to Mongolia to write about the impact of mineral riches flowing into a nation of nomadic herders.  She describes the night she spent with two Americans who took her out to a bar, “I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange. I ended the night early.” The heartbreaking event at the core of her essay is underway, “I felt an unholy storm move through my body, and after that there is a brief lapse in my recollection; either I blacked out from the pain or I have blotted out the memory.” Her description of the placental abruption that caused the miscarriage is pounding, as intense as the little heartbeat that stopped.  The essay slaps overly sentimental visions of maternity right into the jarring reality of disappointment that many women experience. No cute cards or balloons, no flowers. Grief deserves this attention.

Levy’s craft opens a reader to witness new insight. She explains how her sorrow eased when other mothers (and one man) collapsed in tears hearing her story. Women have always had miscarriages and grief so deep, but this side of motherhood is silenced. Our society won’t have it. Such sadness is held alone. Levy’s grief unifies us all with her story of the lost dream, the lost marriage, and the resilience it takes to carry on. Nature, Levy notes, demands this of us.

On her fifth birthday Janet Flanner told her mother she wanted to be a writer.  Ariel Levy tells of being a little girl in her wooden fort, “…self-reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.” Two bold and curious New Yorker writers. One retired as the other is born. Luckily for us, the art and legacy of lesbians writing marvelous essays that search out truths behind the façade of facts and normal endures.

Janet Flanner (b.1892- d.1978). New Yorker foreign correspondent 1925-1975, pen name Genet.

Ariel Levy (b.1974- ). New Yorker staff writer, author Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005).

SUMMER 2013 READING

 

“There is no beach reading on this list,” quipped a friend when I asked if she could make heads or tails of my summer reading list. This comes as no surprise: the winter of 1979 I took Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by Mary Daly on a vacation to Jamaica.

 

I actually did go to the beach this summer while the celebrations of fiftieth anniversaries of Civil Rights events were in full media swing. The stories of the 1963 August 28^th,  March on Washington for Jobs and Justice followed by the September 15^th’s bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama kept these stories alive, brought people together in the 2013 marches.

 

Michelle Norris wrote in Time Magazine, September 2, 2013, “One thing I have come to realize during this summer retrospective is that the equality King called for involves not physical terrain but the geography of the mind.”  She founded the NPR Race Card Project where you may submit a six-word description of your experience with race, ethnicity, or cultural identity to be posted on the Race Card Wall. One card sent by Rondrea Danielle Mathis reads, “We wanted equality. We got integration.”

 

There is deep disappointment at the seeming lack of progress over the past fifty years. Integration has not meant equality even with the election of a biracial President and the appointment of two women to the Supreme Court.  Instances of injustice continue, and I want to understand why. You’ll notice the copyrights of my summer reading books range from 1949 – 2013. You’ll notice the themes are identity, home, searching heart and soul to understand what divides people and what sustains them.

 

Learning is key to interrupting hate. Marion Dane Bauer cites a friend in the introduction to the anthology Am I Blue? Coming out from the Silence (1994) that I often ponder when my faith in learning wavers, “I have never met a bigot who was a reader as a child.” I needed to believe in that antidote to bigotry, especially this summer, reminded as we were of 1963 as the 2013 headlines read:  July 13th in the New York Times:  “Zimmerman is acquitted in Trayvon Martin Killing.”  On August 27^th again in the New York Times: “ 21 year-old intern for Harlem design house Ay’ Medici, Islan Nettles, beaten to death in an apparent hate crime toward transsexuals.”

“Why can’t people just love one another?” my students from ages 17-62 plead. I’m always searching for the answer. My summer books range from textbooks to memoir. The authors are journalists, academics, theater and literary types. You may wonder why Alexander Fuller is here. Her parents’ story of expatriation offers another view on race and class dynamics. James Baldwin joined the American expatriates in Paris in a search of freedom from hostilities in the U.S. Lillian Smith and John Howard Griffin were exiled from their local communities—philosophically and in Griffin’s case, physically. They seemed a random collection as I read them, but when I think about all of these books together, now that summer is giving way to autumn, a real sense of continuity appeared as the themes filtered together.

 

History is only current events in hindsight. What happened fifty years ago is still happening today. Each movement for social justice teaches the next one, but the need to insist and struggle for equal rights is constant. In this is my sense of the continuity between the books I read this summer. A movement is a gathering of individual people designing and building change at all levels of our society. We see though the historic record how the Labor Rights Movement taught the Civil Rights Movement and the Movement to end the war in Vietnam taught the Gay and Women’s Rights movements. We need to keep moving. Our next focus, as I see it, is the quest to dismantle rape culture. The headlines put us on notice. Rape culture cuts across all lines of rich and poor, young and old, heterosexual and homosexual, male, female and transgender. We’ve got to end the glorification of guns and sexual violence.

 

So here is what I’ve been reading in preparation to teach and to live in these times, which are teeming with teaching moments. In my summer reading list I found a counterbalance to despair: hope and understanding.

 

 

Baird, Vanessa. (2007). The No-Nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity. Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications, Ltd.

Vanessa Baird has compiled a concise international LGBT history and explanations of non-heterosexual expression and oppression. There have been many changes in legislation since publication yet ferocious acts of gendered and sexualized violence occur regularly around the globe.  Different gender expression and sexual desire ought not provoke forensic overkill.

Baird cites Paul Cameron, Founder of the Family Institute in the United States as saying, “‘If all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get,’ then homosexuality becomes ‘too powerful to resist.’ Marital sex, he says, ‘tends toward the boring end’” (p. 86). This offers a very different point of view as to the core of homophobia.  The emotional and economic lives of men and women shift when dependencies are altered by same sex love. This shakes up a society built on hetero-normative expectations. This is such a danger zone for traditionalists and consequently for those who do not conform.

 

James Baldwin. (1956). Giovanni’s Room. New York: Delta Books.

James Baldwin grew up in Harlem as the Harlem Renaissance was waning and the Civil Rights Era waxing. Baldwin fled the racial and homosexual discrimination of the United States and took up residence abroad. He returned to the US to advocate for civil justice believing this was “the latest slave rebellion.” His second novel, Giovanni’s Room, describes the gnawing pains of protagonist David, as he struggles with internalized and external homophobia. He attempts bisexuality as he negotiates his love of men under the guise of heterosexuality. Paris expatriates from many countries populate the novel as David searches for his identity and in the end, betrays his heart and his lover, Giovanni.

 

 

Ruth Behar. (2013). Traveling Heavy: a memoir in between journeys. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ruth Behar is a Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American anthropologist, an immigrant, a professor, and compassionate observer. She writes of her search for identity as she constantly returns to the island she had to leave as a child. Her freedom to travel is in sharp contrast to the stasis of those on the island who can’t so easily leave. Behar’s American students bask under her guidance in their Cuban semesters, finding their own meaning while their teacher continues to search for pieces of her life puzzle.  Behar visits friends around the world who have left Cuba, those thrust into exiles’ limbo, searching for work in country after country, searching for home while Behar boards another plane. She is always traveling.

“Memory, however, is volatile, slippery; we tie it down, as the classical orators did, by linking it to places, sites” (81), she wrote in The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (1996). She is still trying to tie things down.

 

 

Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. (2012). Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Second      Edition. New York: New York University Press.

 

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic defy the usual obtuse nature of theoretical writing and offer the hugely systematic and day-to-day pragmatism of Critical Race Theory.  This introduction puts into perspective the legal, economic, feminist, and philosophical nature of power and the construction of social roles we all are subjected to in contemporary American life. Everyone has overlapping identities; sometimes conflicting identities. We each are a wild kaleidoscope of biological and social aspects. The particles of our being are those we are born with, born into, and those we are influenced by as children– and those we can change (or know we are pressured by) as our awareness develops.

As we align the fragments and colors in the kaleidoscope we come to see how our nation racializes different groups in different ways at different times. (Consider the exotic Aladdin and the magical genie as they become evil Middle Eastern terrorists after 9/11/2001.) How do we learn to listen to all voices, search for all sides of the story?  Where do we get the news and from whose point of view is it written? If your son or daughter is in the courtroom—how will the verdict be decided? Challenging our privileges, preconceptions and world-view can only create a more fair and just future for us all. Understanding how our legal, social, political and personal systems are racialized allows us to make choices to initiate and advocate for change.

 

Fisher, Emily S. & Komosa-Hawkins, Karen. (Eds). (2013). Creating Safe and Supportive Learning Environments: A Guide for Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth and Families. New York: Routledge.

 

The editors have assembled a truly accessible collection of essays that are mercifully concise and deeply compelling.  We are well informed about the queer historic landscape and adolescent development issues for LGBTIQ youth. The L and the G kids have a more developed support system than the T and I youth, who are still on the fringe of most people’s understanding. The Q, it turns out, are extremely vulnerable because they haven’t landed in a group where support and acceptance reside. What to do with the transgender Kindergartener?  Teachers get ready!  Consider lining them up for recess by the color of their socks rather than the traditional gender binary.

Pushing the gender envelope causes great distress. Hippies in the Sixties were harassed for their long hair but they were not necessarily transgressing gender lines. The fluidity of gender for youth today defies all prior prescriptions for “boy” or “girl.” It is a very exciting era and it can also be murderous. There is so much creativity and joy in the possibilities. Part Two offers Applications in Schools and Communities. Parents and teachers need support for understanding their LGBTQI kids in order to provide safe learning and growing environments. This is thrilling work for us all.

Fuller, Alexandra. (2011). Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. New York: Penguin Press.

Alexandra Fuller takes us back to the landscapes of her earlier memoirs, “Those Awful Books,” exclaims her mother, “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa.”  This book is actually about her. How does a daughter understand her mother? The memoir delves boldly into this usual abyss. Many of us spend our adult years wondering, just who was that woman behind the mask of motherhood?  Alexandra Fuller describes the amazing losses (beloved horses, infants, farms, dreams) and the dazzling life force (off to a children’s party driving the Land Rover with an Uzi in her lap) of Nicola Fuller. The personal losses, grief, and wars in Africa drove Nicola into despair so deep no pills nor psychiatry could reach her. Her husband’s unfailing devotion, the pounding happy tails of her hounds, and the new farm brought her back. “She gave herself amnesty and her soul had a home again” is how Alexandra puts it. Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Nicola regained her courage.  The Fullers are white people in Africa, not the party people or abusively greedy, but the workers, devoted to the land they work: their spirits irrepressible.

 

 

Griffin, John Howard. (1960). Black Like Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

I have again reread John Howard Griffin as he darkened his white skin and walked into New Orleans and Mississippi of 1959. Black Like Me chronicles the journalist’s physical and emotional transformation as he encounters the double standards of humanity. As a white man he could enter any restaurant, find a bathroom or a cup of coffee. As a man of color he had to find the places that would serve him, where he would be safe to sleep or get a glass of water. Griffin’s book records the insults, the assumptions, the disregard and disingenuous nature of white people towards people of color.  The sexualization of people of color, the demeaning assumptions of moral and ethical behavior in contrast to the extreme eroticism and immorality by white people toward people of color leaves the reader spinning. Griffin records the insults, injustice and inhumanity to the point where he finds the internalization of racism enters him so he even fears writing a letter to his white wife as a ‘black’ man.

True, the white guy gets to take the color off and go home after a few months but Griffin’s emotional and psychological being has been transformed. After publication he and his family were so harassed they left Texas and years later while on the lecture circuit, he was beaten and left for dead by the Klu Klux Klan. He lectured until his death from complications of diabetes at age 60. “If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustices of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.”

All these decades later, Griffin’s descriptions of the South, his interactions between peoples, his realization that with darkened skin he was not viewed by white people as a human parent or an intelligent man still resonate. He was automatically inhuman, unintelligent, and unfeeling.  He went to Mississippi in 1959 right after Mack Parker was lynched by a mob in Mississippi despite FBI evidence of his innocence. Trayvon Martin was killed in a neighborhood in Florida in 2012 with Stand Your Ground impunity. We must dare to ask, how far have we come, and who are we, white people?

 

 

 

 

Said, Najla . (2013). Looking for Palestine: growing up confused in an arab-american family. New York: Riverhead Books.

Edward Said’s writing launched careers for many academics in Post-Colonialism and Orientalism. His memoir, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), offers insight into the grounds on which his theories grew. His daughter was raised in this heady environment. The paradox is that he raised a daughter beset with her own mystery and sense of misplacement. In this memoir Najla Said takes the reader through the landscape of her mother’s Lebanon, her father’s Palestine, New York private schools, the Episcopal Church and anorexia of her own geography. Ms. Said describes churning with the inner turmoil of her eating disorder while walking through the mud in a refugee camp in her expensive shoes and wardrobe. She couldn’t bridge all her worlds until she found theater to eventually allow her full expression. Her father’s stage was the world, Palestinian Statehood and justice. Her world, Off Broadway is where identity can be explored and the Arab and American becomes one.

 

 

Smith, Lillian. (1949/1994). Killers of the Dream. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

This book sabotaged Lillian Smith’s writing career. She had a smashing success with her 1944 novel Strange Fruit but no critic would comment on Killers of the Dream five years later. It was too autobiographical, too critical of racism and segregation.  She was a decade ahead of John Howard Griffin and they both beseech white readers to wake up to racism and how it diminishes white people. Smith describes the wonder with which children approach differences and the difficulties of race at her summer camp.  She defines three ghost relationships of the white man and the African American woman (Negro and Colored are her terms, the usage of the times); the white father and the biracial children, the white children and their beloved African American nurse. Then there is a fourth, the white children with their biological mother and their African American caregiver. White women became sacred, aloof on pedestals while the black women were endless caregivers. Her analysis was written in 1949, to be taken further by people of color and feminists in the following decades. She was delving into the intricacies of black and white relationships in bold stokes. Griffin would encounter haunting questions about his sexuality and penis size as he hitchhiked through Mississippi.  In all these relationships between whites and African Americans there was silence, perpetuating assumptions, brutality, inequality, and broken hearts and minds. Eric Deggans cites Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr. in Race Baiter: How Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation (2012), “The whole purpose of segregation was so black and white folks wouldn’t talk to each other and find out they had more in common, okay?”

Smith had a lifelong-closeted relationship with Paula Snelling. She died of breast cancer at age 68.

 

 

 

Teich, Nicholas M. (2012). Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Teich says it all in the title. He is so clear and, ironically, straight-forward. What is gender? What is sexual orientation? What is transgender?  There is an international and historic lineage to transgenderism and Teich (and Baird, Fisher & Komosa-Hawkins) offer stories and insight. I think Transgender is exciting for heteronormative and homosexual readers because it offers many deeper questions and requires more insight into gendered experiences. There is tremendous opportunity for the disruption of the very segregated gender options in our expression, toys, clothing, story-lines in film and books.

Even BatGirl has a transgender roommate now. We could Marvel….(but BatGirl is DC Comic after all).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had to close this book frequently due to an eerie unease and a desire to deny. I stomped into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and later stomped back for tea. But the book is just as intriguing and captivating as it is unsettling, so I headed back into the pages until I had devoured every one.

In her memoir Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and The Mother Who Gave Her Away (2006, watch for a later blog entry on this one), June Cross writes, “I was descended from a slave, a slave trader, and an abolitionist. The American Trinity” (p.297). DeWolf and Morgan search the depths of this trinity in their epic exploration, Gather At The Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade. They are utterly accessible writers and bravely honest as they breach each wall of silence regarding the complexities of slavery in the United States.

DeWolf and Morgan met at a Coming to the Table Conference, where black and white folks gather to make Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream come true:

 I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood (August 28, 1963).

 The authors follow this model as each one takes the other to meet family, building real knowing of one another before they try and come to terms with the power, privilege and despair of the legacy of slavery. They spend three years traversing 100,000 miles in the United States and overseas. One May they drove 6,000 miles through 21 states visiting plantations, museums, cemeteries, and archives.

Even generations after the ships carrying human cargo, the treatment of humans as chattel, and the fortunes made and lost with the labor of workers from Africa, Americans are living on this foundation. Our country was founded upon slave shoulders and land stolen from Native Peoples. The labor and love of generations born of many drops of blood from many cultures has built the infrastructure of this country. But slavery happened so long ago that many have wondered why it still matters. It matters because we haven’t understood the consequences, the ever-present privileges assumed or denied; the constant and present reiterations of denigration and denied access. And who wants to?  Who wants to allow all the truth of this legacy in?

The history of slavery in the United States isn’t pretty. It isn’t heroic and it doesn’t fit the myth of the individual pulling up bootstraps to success, or that hard work and perseverance will get you the gold ring. Slavery proves the lie of every single slogan.  I’ve had middle age students who cry with fury when they learn, for the first time, of the lynch mob hanging of Jewish-American Leo Max Frank in mid August, 1915, Emmitt Till’s late August, 1955 murder, Japanese internment camps and the initiative to brand gay people who are HIV+ in the early 1980s. This is a hug part of America’s multicultural history. My students are furious when they understand the depth of the silence, the lies, the knowledge denied them until now.

We need to know that facing the truths will allow us to understand the fuller picture of our history. Without all the pieces of this puzzle that is us (U.S.), we are held back, kept in a perpetual, peevish childhood of ignorance. We have to go right through the pain, know it, accept it, and integrate it. Only then the wounds can mend and we can all grow into mature Americans together.

Gather at the Table is a book for all of us. DeWolf and Morgan want us to figure out how to recover and heal from these fundamental founding injustices. Sharon Morgan allows us to know her frustration, distrust and even ambivalence at starting such a project with a white man. She is born of white and black families. She has lived her life paranoid and mad at white people. And she rages at the perpetual, everyday racism she encounters. Tom DeWolf has a famous captain of slave trader ships in his family tree. He has abolitionists too. He wrote Inheriting the Trade (2008) and participated in the POV/PBS documentary Traces of the Trade (2008) before embarking on this even more personal project with Sharon Morgan. His demeanor is more concern than anger.

I’m especially emotionally connected to these complex family-of-origin descriptions since a history of families of North Carolina, including mine, recently arrived from my Southern cousin. This particular tree begins with a soldier in the American Revolution and a deed of 1819 that includes “…in absolute legal right and title in and to the following negro slaves…” Here it is: officially and undeniably. I have to accept the slave owners when I only want to acknowledge the triple great uncle who was hung, in effigy after he publically criticized the KKK in his newspaper. I only want to acknowledge the Canadians who moved down from bitter cold Ontario to North Carolina in 1872. Those Wakefields married into the Southern legacy. The slaves were gone by then, but not the system of “just the way things are” dissymmetry of segregation.

Every time I closed Gather At The Table I pouted as I hustled to the kitchen, mumbling to myself that slavery was so long ago, why does it still matter?  There has always been this kind of treatment toward women. And gay people. And Jews.  And people with disabilities. What about the British, French, Dutch, Spanish and all their colonializations? The Pilgrims came to America to escape. There were white indentured servants. The Holocaust.  Rawanda. The Congo. There are more slaves now around the globe being trafficked than ever came over in the Middle Passage.  Every war, every conquering nation, claimed the defeated as slaves.

American slavery is deeply embedded in the American psyche. The racism is blatant and insidious and it is everywhere. Especially in the not-knowing or caring about history or lineage. Not-knowing our history is detrimental to black and white kids who don’t know the struggle for the vote, or black inventors and writers. Popular culture is perpetuating self-demeaning stereotypes and myths (consider my earlier blog piece on Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams). Few schools are willing to teach the full history of slavery. So much has been hidden about the past.

Sharon Morgan is an ardent genealogist, so she and Thomas DeWolf include graveyards and archives in their itinerary. They even literally turn a gravestone over together so Sharon can verify an ancestor. Sharon encountered many dead ends as she combed records for former slaves and found much information incomplete. Thomas could trace and connect more and more lines of relations. Whole counties pledged some level of kinship.

Now I understand Sharon Morgan’s dilemma and frustrations. How could anyone find the story of Sarah, George, Heat, Daniel, Allen, Jenney, David and Moses from Hillsborough, NC of the 1819 deed cited in my family’s book?  Or the seventeen year old Caty and her child Nancy who were purchased as nursemaid for George Meredith Adams in 1829?  How will their ancestors find them? No last name. No place or date of birth. They were not deemed human enough to warrant these dignities, and their descendents’ humanity continues to suffer. This is another leftover of slavery, reaching through the generations to confound Morgan’s search.

Sharon Morgan writes with such pain (the source of so much anger) and clarity about her everyday encounters with bigots, her caution in encounters with white people, and personal loss. For instance, her very first entry begins with an expletive shouted at her about President Obama by a white man in a truck as she exits the post office. Mr. DeWolf writes of learning to listen, staying in the conversation, seeing the everyday lives of Ms. Morgan’s family and her reactions to his family. Morgan and DeWolf explain what they see, in themselves and about one another, as they travel together. They step right on the divides that have kept us from understanding one another, understanding the humanity of us all. After all these years of considering slavery from afar, Morgan and DeWolf invite me to cross the divide of denial too.  I come to understand the persistence of the haunting slave legacy, our particular aspect. Morgan and DeWolf say it this way,

“In America, more perniciously than anywhere on earth, slavery evolved into something quite different from other types that existed before–in treatment, length of servitude, and how the enslaved were viewed by their owners. Europeans created a new paradigm” (p. 106).

The truth is, we’re all twisted by the tenacious tentacles of this everlasting racism. We have left too little of this way of being cruel and devastating behind. “…violence, just like racism, is something we inherit” (p.116). We have inherited racism and the violence that goes hand-in-hand with treating other human beings as “other” rather than human beings. Dr. King’s dream of everyone coming together—from garbage men to Presidents—to work for a greater justice, will require us to disinherit hate and violence, and our propensity to dehumanize each other.

The slave trader and slave, economics and power dynamics prevent people from knowing one another and caring about one another as human beings with spirit and creativity, foibles and flaws. We are prevented from knowing one another by assumptions, unfounded bias. Borders are erected both real and imaginary through education, real estate, media, and legal systems that prevent interracial contact or pluck generations of young men out of their communities and funnel them to prisons for profit. We’ve got the ghosts of slavery leading policy, guiding the ever-present hand of oppression everywhere.

Gather at the Table encourages us to negotiate and acknowledge the past demons and welcome the present, for there is much work to do. DeWolf and Morgan put their intimate hesitations, confusion, anger, fear and trepidation right on the table for us to see. Their willingness to stop being polite, honestly ask questions and explain real experiences offer us a model for conversation. They go to the most painful places where slaves departed Africa, were sold at auction, were held for shipment. They listen to docents in museums tell truths about the conditions for slaves on the plantation and those who continue to perpetuate the fantasy of happy slavery. They describe a very young man leading a tour at a former plantation. His whole script drips of the romanticism of Gone With the Wind. They are astounded that the lies are being so blatantly perpetuated. Together they build a bridge to a more true awareness and acceptance of this American legacy. The bridge—remember the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama? It took several attempts and much blood to cross that bridge for greater equality.

I am deeply humbled. None of this is new. But there are things I still don’t want to accept. Despite my life-long reading, research, teaching, and life-decisions, I dwell so perfectly in my white privilege. This book is terrifically discomforting; taking this journey with Morgan and DeWolf has made me more honest and more willing to continue to walk in the complexity of my daily life. Getting uncomfortable is a sure sign of new learning. We all have a place at Dr. King’s table and there is still plenty to do.