For a variety of reasons, in the last few days I have been thinking of my Grandpa Norman, even more often than usual. My yiddish grandpa was my best friend, and he died when I was six. The loss was profound, the wound deep, and I miss him every day. I mention this now because I often think about how my grandpa would have guided me as I tread difficult waters, especially in the last year. He was a machine worker who dreamed of becoming a scientist. I am living that dream, but struggling with it. He was also a machine worker who believed in social justice, who had (perhaps naively) hoped for a fair Israel, who loved his little granddaughter even though she was darker than him and taught her to dream big. I think he hoped that I would laugh a lot.
Today I have been wondering about how my grandfather maintained that laughter, despite all he had seen. He was man who lived through the Depression, felt the ripples of the Holocaust, American anti-semitism, what had most educational doors closed to him, who maybe spent much of his life in heartbreak and rarely saw his son. Yet, into his 70s, he was teaching his granddaughter to laugh. As I thought about writing this entry, again I came back to the question of how he did it. Much has been written about the Yiddish sense of humour, so perhaps that’s where I should start. Regardless …
Frankly, sometimes it is hard to laugh in this world, especially when you know its story. Anyone who knows something of slavery knows what Chapter 4 is about: the Middle Passage, so-called because it was the middle stage of a three part journey. Ironically, this is a reference to the journey of the ships which carried slaves to the Americas, not the journey of the slaves themselves. The ships began and ended in Europe, carrying “goods”: people, spices, etc.
I don’t want to give away the chapter, but I want to urge everyone to know this chapter, if not in this book, from another one, a non-fictional account. Anyone who has ever been moved by accounts of German concentration camps or Stalinist prison camps should come to understand the precedent for these structures: the grotesque ships which carried African peoples away from their freedom. Why grotesque? Not just because of the cargo they carried but because of the way the people were held. With little room to move, they lay in each other’s waste for months as the ships crossed the Atlantic.
Not only were the conditions physically unsanitary, they were also psychologically destructive. As Aminata notes,
A child had certain advantages on a slave vessel. Nobody rushed to kill a child. Not even a man-stealer. But also, the child’s mind has elasticity. Adults are different — push them too far and they snap. Many times during that long journey, I was terrified beyond description, yet somehow my mind remained intact. Men and women the age of my parents lost their monds on that journey.
I think it will never be clear, though, what the greater tragedy is: the experience of those who survived the middle passage to be auctioned into slavery, or the people who didn’t. While it was in the interests of slave ship captains to keep as many Blacks alive as possible, obviously they considered the optimization problem and decided that the quarters would be as they were. Between disease, starvation and what some considered to be the “lucky” successful suicide, something like 20% of the ship’s captives died before reaching North and/or South American shores.
Notable about Hill’s particular rendering of the Middle Passage is his ability to make it survivable. Not easy, not easier, nothing like that. Simply that many did survive with language, with culture, with some sense of dignity, however fractured. I have wondered many, many times how one does that in the face of such brutality. To come to understand, even a little bit, is to have a lesson in the strength of the human spirit, really.
I feel this has been a craptastic entry, and I don’t think it’s an accident. I don’t have the emotional energy to think about the Middle Passage too deeply right now. I have the privilege of not letting it tear me up and because I have spent so much of my week dealing with a really tragic and very personal instance of homophobia, I just can’t do it today.
A couple of vaguely related media items that I’d like to recommend, though:
1. Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography. Equiano not only survived the middle passage but went on to become an abolitionist. The publishing of his autobiography in 1789 turned out to have a major international impact. As Haiti revolted and France was in the throws of questioning what freedom meant, Equiano forced the world to look at cold facts. You can get this book from Amazon or via special order at any bookstore. If you’re in Boston, you can almost definitely find it on a shelf somewhere in Harvard Square.
2. Gary Younge’s recent analyses of the Barack Obama candidacy. I’ve thrown my cap in with Edwards, vaguely begrudgingly, but not really. Younge (whose book about retracing the steps of the 1960s Freedom Riders will be the subject of a later entry) is much more articulate and eloquent than me, so he can describe why I am completely unimpressed with Obama better than I can. There’s one in The Nation and a condensed version of that was published in Monday’s Guardian (UK).*
3. Watch the film Cool Hand Luke! A fantastic exploration of how cruel systems attempt to destroy a man’s spirit in order to gain control of his body and his will. What might be terrifying about watching this film is that what goes on, for the most part, is Slavery-Lite. These guys have it easy in comparison, and it’s still hard to watch.
*Okay, I can’t help myself. I have to quote one comment posted on the Guardian site in response to Younge’s comment. It is from a young Black woman who hails from North America. She’s apparently better at gathering her thoughts than I am, because when I sat down to write a comment, I meant to say much of the following but something less lengthy and less useful came out instead, I think. Anyway, here is part of what she had to say:
Let us not forget that while many Blacks are enthused with the strength of his campaign and the potentiality of him being a First, Obama also represents the elitist White institution having been raised in a white home, and attended the predominantly white institutions of Harvard and Columbia. I say this not to question or challenge his blackness, coming from the Black middle-class myself and having to defend my own Blackness because of where I live and my educational background. I point it out because to a single mother living in an inner-city marred by violence and having few opportunities to change her situation, a rich lawyer from Harvard, despite his race, has little in common with her. It’s a simple case of class beating out race (unfortunately); and let’s not forget that the white middle-class who support Obama, might have more in common with him as a consequence of class, than difference due to race.To end, let’s not get our hopes up about what Obama can do materially for race relations. To change the institutions of racism, take a movement not a man.
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