The end of the rail

Today when I set down The Underground Railroad after the final page, I crumpled. I had not experienced the overwhelm I expected to feel in each chapter while reading a book which I knew would text my limits of tolerance, but it all came in a wave at the end. 

Though it wasn't the graphic nature of torture, but the weight and hopelessness of the whole enterprise of slavery which made me cry. I had been steeling myself against descriptions of personal injuries on the page, but it's the book's overall message about the institutionalized atrocities of slavery that walloped me as a reader there at the end.

I don't read reviews of books until after I read them, and here is much more than a review: this New Yorker Article talks about our attempts to rebrand the UR as a white institution that saved blacks. It properly contextualizes risk and heroism in the pre-Civil War south, and refers several times to Whitehead's book. 

I think everyone should read this book. 

A short review by Toni Morrison

I'm now deep into The Underground Railroad, and the most recent lesson it has taught me is that North Carolina criminalized being black when the ratio of blacks to whites become worrying. Indentured servants from Europe were brought in and "the penniless black were replaced by the penniless white, except the whites weren't penniless at the end of the week." Eventual freedom, after earning enough to pay off passage, loomed for whites. Blacks found in North Carolina, free or fugitive, were lynched publically and strung up along the Freedom Trail. 

This book prompted me to watch the Netflix documentary 13th this week, about the 13th Amendment, and its disastrous loophole which granted freedom to everyone "except those convicted of crimes". The film demonstrates that mass incarceration for whatever crime is necessary has replaced slavery as a way to keep black men out of society's mainstream. 

Young Angela Davis

One segment of the film focuses on the history of Angela Davis, who was charged with aiding in a murderous scheme in 1970, at which point she was a professor of philosophy at UCLA. I had never heard of her, but was immediately compelled by her bravery, by the footage of her trial, by the seeming clarity of her commitment to communism and resistance against white tyranny. 

Davis, recently.

I looked her up in the nytimes archives, and found this smoking review of a biography of Davis. The biography was written by a white high school classmate of Davis', and the review was written, carved, by Toni Morrison. She takes the author to town for being a modern-day Harriet Beecher Stowe and presuming to tell the story of a black revolutionary - as if she could possibly know how a revolutionary black person's mind works, let alone is formed. Naturally, the biography gives all credit to white influences, and deems the subject "kind and funny."

Read the review here.

Cruelty - Bible, Shakespeare, Slavery

In adult Sunday school this week the pastor talked about Paul and his attitude on slavery. In his letter to Philemon, Paul tells Philemon to receive his former slave Onesimus not as a slave, but as a friend. Onesimus has come to help Paul survive in prison. Roman prisoners at this time got nothing from the prison, so they died if they didn't have care teams from the outside. 

Paul sends Onesimus back to Philemon saying "I am sending him—who is my very heart—back to you. 13 I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel.14 But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. 15 Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever— 16 no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord."

It was strange to read this and imagine such a suggestion - that a slave be received as a beloved brother, not as a slave - in the context of the book I'm reading, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. 

In TUR, Cora is a runaway slave, and the cruelty she has escaped is so vicious it is hard to fathom. My friend I. says "It is my personal belief that slavery was so horrible that we can't even conceptualize it. There is no way we can imagine how bad it was. I feel the same is true of the Holocaust." Her words ring true as I read Whitehead's no-frills prose describing the everyday treatment of slaves, both delinquent and rule-abiding. Nothing helps me contextualize it in the kind of human treatment I have ever experienced or witnessed. 

It's bizarre to think of Paul's Letter to Philemon sitting on the shelves of all those slave owners who drained the life from the slaves that they owned, and did far worse than that to those that were returned to them. No semblance of brotherhood linked them, and still it seems nearly impossible for white and black to be in true brotherhood in this country. Perhaps that sounds harsh. There are certainly black and white friends. But I have the intense impression that I, as a white person, will never get it. I can try, and trying to get it is the right thing to do, but I'll never get it. 

In Twelfth Night, which was at Pioneer Theater on Saturday night, Olivia is called "Fair cruelty". I bring this up only because it was another use of this word this weekend which fit into so different a category it was also hard to accommodate. Olivia rebuffs the amorous declarations of Orsino, and is labelled cruel for it. Poor Orsino. The obliviousness of the wealthy people in this play reminds me of my Renaissance Theater class at Bread Loaf last summer, where we talked about the atrocious waste of human and physical capital that took place in Renaissance courts. Good people, who wasted their time chasing love and wasted their people's money on clothes and frivolities. Large scale cruelty against the poor. 

At least Shakespeare gave those an opportunity to laugh at representations of the courtiers on stage.

Last week I used this video to talk with my students about how to give a group poetry performance. It candidly talks about cruelty that is subtly dealt out to students by teaching them certain lessons that never appear on the official curriculum. The students found it very impressive.