Sadly, this quote seems appropriate given the events in Virginia. I had hoped we were beyond this but apparently not.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pockets. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you”. Lyndon Johnson, 1970.
Recently, while reading a novel about a woman in Shakespeare’s time, I came across this statement by one of the characters. It rings so true for many eras of human history, I feel compelled to share it:
“Religion is not only about men’s souls. It is about who rules us, what laws we obey, how and why we are punished, and by whom.”
Today at the bookstore browsing, I picked up a book nestled among the magazines.
This question appeared on page 41: “If you were given a book on the story of your life,
would you read the end?”
I asked my grandson. He immediately said, “No!”
I wonder.
Remain unsure.
If I read it, could I change it?
Are lives predetermined, choiceless?
Are we unwittingly predetermined and just victims?
If I read it, could I change it?
Eat something different,
sing a varied song,
laugh more,
spend more time with sunsets, sunrises,
read less, more,
love someone new,
say words now lost,
write a contrary story,
choose an opposing path,
challenge?
Whitney Plantation resides on the River Road about one hours drive from New Orleans. A recent visit there provided much enlightening information about the slave trade, crops grown near New Orleans, and the history of this area. Tours can be scheduled all days of the week except Tuesday. It is unique in that many different types of plantation buildings still exist there, including old slave cabins, a foundry, and the outside kitchen.
A German immigrant started the plantation in the late 1700s. At Habitation Haydel, its original name, he grew indigo. After his death, his youngest son converted the main crop grown to sugar cane, which is still grown there today. Both indigo and sugar cane required intensive labor for profitability.
Although, according to population data, only ten blacks lived in Louisiana in 1712, by the end of the century slavery was the main source of labor. In 1795, there were 19,926 slaves in Louisiana. Under Spanish rule the slave population steadily increased. Although many were imported from Haiti, those from Africa came from what are now the countries of Senegal, Bissau, and Guinea. After the initial importation of slaves, the United States imported few compared to islands in the West Indies and Latin America, e.g. Brazil. The preferred method in the United States to obtain slaves was breeding. Women and men were forced to breed. Their owners specifically chose certain people to produce certain types of progeny just like in breeding livestock. One woman complained of having 16 children by 16 different men.
After leaving the visitor center, the first building on the tour is the church. Inside the church are statues of various children who were the products of the breeding program at the plantation.
The artist created these statues from specific information about the children. The plantation owners maintained detailed inventories of all slaves and their value. This particular plantation often owned as many as 100 slaves.
From this inventory a memorial has been created with the names of the slaves. Included are various statements made by the slaves themselves as recorded in slave narratives.
The above tells the story of a child fathered by his owner and one of the slave women and how his father treated him.
Even pregnant women could not escape beatings.
Because the area around New Orleans receives 60 inches of rain a year, the landscape everywhere is lush. This is one of several pools at the plantation.
These containers cooked the sugar cane. Starting with the largest, the cane was boiled repeatedly until it cooked down and poured into increasingly smaller containers. This was especially dangerous work due to the fires, the heat, and the boiling sugar cane. Sugar cane production was much more dangerous than cotton which was grown farther north in Louisiana. The cane itself was cut with large machetes and the edges of the cane are also sharp. Many people were severely injured. The life expectancy of a sugar cane slave who worked in the fields or cooking the cane was approximately ten years from the time he or she went to work, often as young as ten. Although field slaves had a much harder life in terms of labor, they had less exposure to their owners and their families and therefore, in some ways, more freedom to talk and interact. House slaves were constantly watched and the women especially subject to sexual abuse.
Slave cabins like this one contained four rooms. Like the main plantation house, most buildings were built off the ground. No levees existed then and the largest plantations were often built within sight of the Mississippi River and thus prone to flooding.
This building housed the foundry. Skilled slaves, like blacksmiths, were very valuable and received better treatment, e.g. enough food. When the movie, “Django Unchained” was filmed, part of the movie was filmed here because the adjoining plantation did not have a blacksmith shop. The branding portion was filmed at Whitney Plantation.
The walkway, looking from the front of the main plantation house, is lined with giant oak trees. Before the levees were built, the Mississippi River could be seen from the house.
Originally, there was no first floor due to the flooding. Later, after it will built and used for dining, an office, and a living area, whenever the floods came, the slaves were required to carry everything to the second floor until the water subsided. Then they would clean the first floor of mud and debris and return the furniture there. Whitney Plantation possesses some unique characteristics, e.g. finely painted European style ceilings.
Cooking was not done inside the main house at any of the plantations due to the heat and fire danger. The cook, another skilled and valuable slave, was required to know how to cook various popular cuisines typical of the area, e.g. creole, European–French, Spanish.
The various ferns and mosses growing from the limb of this large oak trees demonstrates the lushness and humidity typical of this area and why it is still used for sugar cane production.
A short distance down the road is Evergreen Plantation where the main portion of “Django Unchained” was filmed. It, too, still produces sugar cane and a family lives here. Tours are available as well.
The first woman to write a book in English–in the 1300s.
Doing a recent talk on pioneering woman writers, I like to do the Before Jane Austen test with my audience. Who can name a single woman writer in the English language before Jane Austen? Alas, because woman have been written out of history to such a large extent, most people come up blank. Then we talk about pioneering Renaissance authors, such as Aemilia Bassano Lanier, the subject of my recent novel, THE DARK LADY’S MASK, or her mentor, Anne Locke, the first person of either sex to write a sonnet sequence in the English language.
But my next question takes us even further back into history. Who was the first woman to write a book in English?
The answer is Julian of Norwich, who wrote Revelations of Divine Love.
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Although few argue with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, few look long and hard at the history and life then. Unless you owned land, were male, were white, nothing for you. Most of the founding fathers still held, tacitly or openly, to the old English class system. Many owned slaves even when they claimed to dislike it. Throughout United States history, a small group of high status, white men have controlled the country.
More recently during WWII, we imprisoned Japanese Americans but not Germans. The Japanese were often seen as ruthless, barbaric while the Aryan German remained quite close to the idealized, white, patriotic American ideal.
Today when people read about white men murdering large numbers of people, the news and the comments indicate that most think these people are abnormal, not like the rest of us. This is a country fascinated with hate. For many in the last couple of years this has taken the form of hatred of outsiders, refugees, dark people. This has brought a new wave of tough on crime mentality. People who think differently, more welcoming, more critical, are seen as subversive, anti-patriotic. Much of the public sees certain groups, e.g. black men, as criminals, wicked, violent, groups to be feared. Any research contrary to these prevalent views tends to be hidden, pushed away, unreported. One example is a report by Homeland Security in 2009 which warned law enforcement agencies about the dangers of right-wing conservatism. Certain conservative groups demanded the withdrawal of this report and succeeded.
Certain Christian groups push for a return to Christian values not realizing perhaps the origin of some of these values. The word, evil, provides an excellent example. This word goes back to Saint Augustine who defined it as a refusal to act morally, a refusal to do good. While Hitler, the Holocaust, and Nazism have been associated with evil, interestingly fascism has not. Franco in Spain escaped the evil label probably because the Vatican, the US government, and US businesses supported him. The word evil is rarely used to describe state sanctioned violence as in the US support of the Shah of Iran, Pinochet in Chile. It appears we pick and choose the evil label to suit certain purposes. Powerful groups are rarely labeled evil and therefore do not become targets of general hatred.
Fear relates to hate. People hate what they fear. Some media play on these fears to incite hate to suit their own goals and philosophies. Certain talk radio hosts use their rants to further their goals in this manner. They want people who do not think like they do to incite fear which leads to hate. These media can easily inflame the public fears about crime, refugees, drug usage. They also rely on the often hidden preexisting prejudices that many deny they have, e.g. racism, fear of outsiders, fear of differences.
The ultimate end of these prejudices is war. The often popular belief remains: justice and goodness can be attained via violence, force. We are good and everyone against us is evil and therefore to be hated. The war vocabulary remains part of common everyday language: War on Women, Drug War, War on Poverty. Our language remains full of these types of communications. It expresses a common worldview. Problems can be solved by force. This continues in spite of enormous evidence that it does not work. The War on Drugs never attained success, our economic and social problems remain. Even efforts at containment frequently fail, e.g. the current opioid epidemic. Many schools currently hire police officers and sometimes students are arrested for relatively minor infractions. Often those arrested are students with certain types of disabilities or from certain minority groups. Our prison population has increased by 500% over the last thirty years with the increased imprisonment of women double that of men, mainly due to drug related crimes. Obviously, these “wars” are failing. Because of the “cult” of individuality and freedom, people in the US often see these failures as the result of individuals acting irresponsibly rather than societal failures. Although these factors do not force an individual to behave in certain ways, they do affect a person’s psychological makeup, opportunities for betterment, and mental and physical health.
We have become a society possessed with fear and hatred caused by a profound mistrust of others. Contrary to what many wish to believe this nation has a long history of obsession with perceived enemies and evil. Some see threats everywhere, liberals hate conservatives and vice versa, some fear and hate those with different sexual orientations, the list seems endless. Many see the solution as one form of war or another either through violence, incarceration, or laws.
Mass rallies on both sides further incite this sort of mass mentality. History remains full of disastrous consequences of such behavior. The Nazis came to power this way and killed millions of Jews via such strategies. The genocide in Rwanda is another example. We see the perpetrators of such as monsters, but common, ordinary men and women made the Holocaust possible. Good, decent people engage in horrible crimes. The Ku Klux Klan continues with membership of otherwise ordinary, upstanding citizens. Doctors in Nazi Germany rationalized their help with exterminations and experimentations as part of German nationalism to save their country.
In the US racism is not the sole purview of white bigots. Just recently someone commented to me about being colorblind. Such is a form of denial. When people see another person, they notice how they look, eyes, height, etc. Most white people in the US today never choose to recall, if alive then, and acknowledge, if not, the millions of black people (mostly men) lynched, most of whom were raped, tortured and castrated before they were killed. When someone commits these types of atrocities today, we often refer to him as a monster. We conveniently forget the long history of atrocities against all people of color in this country, atrocities deemed perfectly normal at the time.
As noted in the examples above, much of the violence and hatred and injustice currently seen in this country has a long history. We have not been able to even come close to the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence. Instead of talking about Making American Great Again, we need to change the conversation into a future vision of making the US like the vision detailed in this document, a place where justice and the hope of equality can be attained by all, regardless of color, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion.
Note: Recommended readings include “Considering Hate” by Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski and “White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” by Nancy Isenberg.
A tale for our times.
The raven was standing on the little table in the wicked witch’s private room. Expecting a new kind of feast, he dipped his beak into a bowl of wiggly white worms. And spat them clear across the room. “Great Suffering Succotash!” he exclaimed. “What is this stuff?’
“It’s ramen noodles,” the witch replied calmly. ”They’re cheap. And you know we need to save money. El Presidente’s got men cruising around the country doing whatever they want to obstruct justice. We’re all trying to save money and build up the resistance.”
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See the paintings. With deforestation affecting so much of the world, the idea of trees as sacred is especially appealing and meaningful.
In a world where humans were small and nature was big, surrounded by forests of trees of immense size and stature, it’s not surprising that the ancient Celts came to hold trees as sacred. Like many others, the Celts revered the World Tree or the Tree of Life as the mythic bridge between heaven and earth. The roots reach down and ground with the Earth while the branches spread their canopy up to the heavens.
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Dad lived his entire life, 90 years, on the farm which my great grandfather, Gottlieb Werth, homesteaded in the middle 1800s. Gottlieb Werth came to the United States from Switzerland when he was 18. Even though Dad lived in the same place all his life, he liked road trips. The first occurred when I was three. He drove us all the way from Northwest Missouri to Monterey, Mexico. I still have photos of us wading in the Gulf in Texas before we crossed into Mexico. Thereafter, we almost never missed at least one road trip a year between wheat harvest and the start of school. Sometimes instead of a summer trip we took one around Christmas, like the year we went to Florida when I was in elementary school. I skipped school a couple of weeks, took my work along, and came home ahead because the flu, which I missed, put everything behind.
By the time I was six, I had probably covered half the continental United States and, of course, been to Mexico. I do not remember some of those first trips but the later ones I remember well, like the summer we spent in Crested Butte, Colorado, when it was still a mining town, and another in Placerville, Colorado, down the road from Telluride. Then it was just a nowhere place, filled with the Victorian houses of its mining heyday. Dad joked later that he should have bought one of those houses when it was cheap.
One year, the year between my junior and senior year in high school, we took a one month trip and drove 6,000 miles, from home to the Black Hills, where we had relatives, to Vancouver, to Vancouver Island and then to Victoria. We visited every national park along the way, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier, Olympic, then drove up the Columbia and cut back across Rocky Mountain National Park and through Colorado. On an earlier trip we went to every park in Utah and Northern Arizona and Mesa Verde.
Dad’s interest in and curiosity about everything seemed endless. He tried the latest agricultural methods in his farming, was an avid conservationist, wanted to check everything out on these trips, talked to people about what they were doing. At home he read National Geographic and Scientific American and endless books.
Because of these trips, his sense of wonder, his propensity for intellectual activity, my friends in college were always shocked to find out he was a farmer. They often thought, originally, that he was a college professor.
He moved into this house where I grew up when he was ten. After Mom died, Dad and I were at her grave on Memorial Day when a man came up and starting talking with Dad. I learned that the building in the foreground of this photo, before it was used for livestock and storage, was used for dancing during the Depression. The sheriff would send out deputies to make sure no illegal alcohol was consumed. I took this photo four years ago when I took a trip back.
There used to be woods to the right of this photo but someone bought the land and bulldozed down all the huge oak trees. The tall douglas fir tree in the middle was tiny when we brought it home on one of our trips out West.
I will forever be thankful to Dad for instilling in me a love of exploration, wonder, and curiosity.
Six days ago a huge storm struck, including eight inches of hail, a rain deluge, and high winds. While the hail denuded many plants and bushes, the deluge made my drive a mess.
Although it may be hard to determine the depth of the gravel and dirt and rocks from this photo, many of the rocks are bigger than the size of the fists of both my hands together, large enough to not want car tires to drive over them. The gravel and dirt on the far side of the photo were at least eight inches deep. Luckily I have a small tractor with a bucket and a helpful grandson. He picked up the larger rocks and hauled all of them to the ditch created either side of the steep incline above the cement. The rain had created a trench a foot deep in some places and exposed a pipe to the septic system. He filled parts of these trenches with the bigger rocks.
The next morning I used the tractor bucket to scoop up dirt and rocks and haul them to washed out places in the upper drive. It was impossible to get it all with the bucket given some of the space is not very big or where it was possible to maneuver the tractor. Therefore, I had to scoop it up and remove it with a shovel. It took several tractor buckets full to get rid of what I had to shovel. Finally, this morning I finished sweeping the rest of the fine sandstone off the cement.
After all this, why am I grateful? There was no damage to my house. The hail broke windows in some houses not far away, the wind blew light weight buildings into neighbors’ yards, and some people nearby had roof damage. I only have some tiny damage to the barn roof. It could have been a lot worse. I feel grateful to have escaped with just a messed up driveway.
Why do I feel even more grateful? It occurred to me that I was able to clean up most of this except for my grandson’s help with the rocks–which I could have done but it was helpful. I can still shovel gravel and dirt, a lot of it, lift and carry 50 pounds of horse feed from the vehicle across the barn–about 40 ft or more–and dump it in the container. I can work for hours doing this sort of stuff and feel fine afterwards. Yes, I feel grateful that I can continue to do all these things myself and what is more, usually enjoy doing them, feeling productive and independent.
When people ask me how I do all this, I usually tell them two things, yoga (as well as lots of other exercise mandatory if you live in the country and have animals) and heathy food. My yoga practice began decades ago; I never stopped. I practice it at least three times a week, sometimes more. I stand on my head in the middle of the room several times a week. My favorite foods are mostly vegetables. The only carb I really like is rice. One of my dad’s sayings was, “You are what you eat.” He still ran a farm at 90. Yes, I admit, genes probably help, but without the exercise and self discipline, it probably is not enough. I also meditate daily which does not require lots of time unless you want to spend lots of time doing it. Even 15-30 minutes a day matter. Exercise, yoga, healthy eating, meditating will all make for a happier person. I promise.
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