Climbing Jacob's Ladder

Memorial Day. 30 May 2016.

On the morning of June 9, 1981, engaging in a pious practice long ago recommended by Ignatius of Loyola and many other spiritual guides, I opened the Bible at random to find a passage that could focus my morning prayer.  The passage that lay before me was the story of Jacob in flight from his brother, resting his head on a stone, dreaming of the ladder that stretched from earth to heaven.  And I read further into the story, being made brand-new to my mind, following the adventures of one of the most disreputable heroes in the Old Testament -- from his creative responses to matrimonial betrayal, to his even more creative measures to ensure that, even while working in an indentured servant’s capacity, he would become economically independent of his uncle, Laban. The part of the story that especially captured me was the story of Jacob wrestling with the “stranger” during the dark, solitary hours while Jacob prepared to attempt reconciliation with Esau, his brother.

That afternoon, on the campus of Marquette University, I was to profess my final vows in the Society of Jesus, before a congregation of more than 300 Jesuit priests, brothers, and guests – including my mother and my sister Arlayne. Just before we processed into the church, the coordinator of the afternoon liturgy (the “master of ceremonies”) said to me, “The other two men pronouncing their vows don’t want to say anything during the Mass. I suppose you don’t want to speak, either.” “Oh,” I said, “I think that this occasion is far too important to pass without a comment. Yes, I will say something.”

The music started. And that was the last of it, until after the rather complicated ceremony of professing vows (some in public, before the altar; others in a semi-private setting in the sacristy). After we had settled into our chairs after Communion, the provincial superior of the Wisconsin Province leaned over to me and said, “Don’t look now, but you are being introduced.” So I went to the pulpit and looked at sixteen years of my own wrestling match with dozens and dozens of men, leading to periods of deep depression; extreme traumatic stress; thoughts of walking away from all aspects of religious ministry and communal responsibilities. I looked at my history. And theirs.

And I said, aloud, how grateful I was to have read the story of Jacob in Genesis (chapters 28 – 32). I made an interpretive choice that has served, for more than 35 years, as the foundational interpretive tool that I have used to build my theories of cross-cultural criticism. I saw Jacob as representative of the men of the Society of Jesus with whom I struggled – struggled to be seen, to be heard, to be accepted, to be confirmed in my several identities. And that necessarily led me to identify myself, in that wrestling match, with the “stranger,” the angel-messenger of God.   “We have wrestled with each other, these last 16 years,” I said, “and we have not ‘prevailed against’ each other. But we have sought to learn, and have sometimes wounded each other; and I now see myself as one who can give you your true name.”

Returning to New Haven, I kept both my comments and the Jacob story clearly in my mind. The next summer, I went to Toronto in order to write my Afro-American Studies M. A. thesis.  Fr Robert Doran handed me a copy of Joseph and His Brothers, by Thomas Mann.  I consumed all four sections of this monumental work, which begins far before the birth of Jacob and creates a world that is compelling and breath-taking. Jacob wrestling with the angel appeared in my thesis. But the most radical epiphany I experienced while digesting this narrative was to go back to the place Jacob named, “Bethel,” after he has his dream about the angel-messengers traveling from heaven to earth, and back.

The song that made everything new and old and simultaneous was “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.”  If I could see African Americans as the ones who identify themselves as the angel-messengers, then I would have to develop a strong understanding of mysticism as a foundation post of Black Theology. And if mysticism can be seen as an essential strategy in the performance of theology in the Africana world, then I had found a cultural justification of seeing Black believers describing themselves as the voices of authority in the world of religion and culture. It turned the world of received theology upside-down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i14sMDbcpRg

Which eventually would lead me to my simple declaration that we must begin all our intellectual work with the simple question, “Who defines the terms by which we live?”  Sometimes I joke that if a person stood in a large airport or train station and shouted that question, who knows how many people would respond with “Yeah! I took that class too!”  But now there is something more to consider, in order to re-shape what I have known all along.

The question must be doubled. “Who defines the terms by which we live?  Who defines the terms by which we die?”

The motive for this remembrance is a day to “remember our fallen soldiers.” The difficulty of bringing the names of certain of my heroes is this: the three who are especially remembered here would strongly resist any identification with any aspect of military involvement; resist any deed that would lead to the death of any one of God’s children. The only comfort for bringing forth the names of these recently deceased priests is that the song I am singing refers to “soldiers of the cross.”  And one of the basic understandings of “soldier” is “one who serves under any cause.” 

So let us now praise these glorious angels of the Lord, three men who served to wrestle with every institution of privilege and oppression and violence until their very lives, their words, their life-witness would at the very least wound the complacent who are cloaked in denial and fear.

Once again, we let James Baldwin teach us, as he taught Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. And Bayard Rustin and, eventually all who came under his gaze.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.  It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.  One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.  One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.  [from “Down at the Cross”, in The Fire Next Time]

“For the sake of those who are coming after us.”  This is the wisdom to apply to the life and testimony of Rev. Daniel Berrigan, SJ (1921 – 2016).  One “ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”  This is the life witness of Rev.  Anthony Clark, SVD (1944 – 2016). And the life of the great and humble and fiercely clear servant-priest, Rev. Al McKnight, C. S. Sp. (1927 – 2016), carries this truth, as he continues to bring us the blessing word of God, from beyond the grave: “One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness. . ..”

Praise them.

Listen for them.

They will continue to visit us, healing our dreams, nourishing our faith, and calling us to be faithful to the vision of what must be, as we make our way at the cross(roads) of our lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCaxsQCtfwE

O, Give Me Little Time to Pray

For Maurice A. Richards, 11 years old.

From East St. Louis. Killed, March 9, 2016

“In the future, these are to be a sign among you.

When your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean to you?’”

--Joshua 4:6

From the river bring six

stones   and set them in the place

where he was found

                                          let the old

women find their heart-cry   and lament

his finding

                       the old men  shall break

branches from the trees and cushion

his body  with the new  green leaves

do not bring the children

                                                    not one

until

              all is prepared

                                            then say

to all assembled    Bring the sacrifice

Let each one caress the stones   with

cold hands    and bleeding eyes

                                                             It is

Our heart that has been left to die

Our dream     that was   crushed by

the machine that the darkness shields

Write his name

                              In sorrow

write his name

                                on these   and every

stone

for all to see

                           because he

was never seen until

                                          too late

for us to know

                              how our darkness

condemns us

                               if we do this

we were told

                        your hearts will

live again   and gain time

                                             to learn

to see

before

another sacrifice

is found

                                                                16  March  2016

[Maurice A. Richards, age 11, was struck by a hit-and-run driver, during the night of Wednesday, March 9, 2016, near the site of Post Place and State Street, in East St. Louis, Illinois. After he was struck he lay in the street, while traffic drove past him, until two motorists stopped. Ms. Willie Beard, one of the motorists who stopped, said that when she saw the driver in front of her stop suddenly, “she saw him go over to something in the road and then heard him scream: “’This is a baby! This is a baby!’”  Ms. Beard and the first driver stayed with Maurice Richards, holding him, until he was transported to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis. Maurice Richards died an hour after he was admitted to the hospital. (From the story in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 11, 2016, A1.)]

"I've Been 'Buked and I've Been Scorned"

[Luke 22: 63-65. The men who held Jesus in custody were ridiculing and beating him. They blindfolded him and questioned him, saying, “Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?” And they reviled him in saying many other things against him.”]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHGp0XqF9JM&index=39&list=PL5384FE34170E9995

When my younger niece called and asked me if I knew my mother’s real name, I was surprised that she was surprised. “It certainly is no secret,” I told her. “Everybody knows that Mama made up her name.” In fact, I went on to explain, all of her names were self-constructed, and done at a very early age.  Until that conversation I had not made much of that fact. It was just the way it was. But then, has it not ever been so, in all communities and cultures?  Names are bestowed at birth, or soon after, in many cultures. In some, the name is whispered in the infant’s ear. At some point in the life of the children of other cultures, the name is earned and confirmed by the community. And especially in our American history, the names of immigrants were almost of necessity or out of expediency or disdain changed to suit the interrogator or the individual who wanted to assimilate.

In African American culture, the name of any individual can be adaptive to the extreme. Just who was “Frederick Douglass” can become a challenge to be puzzled out while reading any or all of his narratives. Sojourner Truth. Malcom X.  The central characters in almost any foundation novel in African American literature (with Morrison’s Song of Solomon setting the standard for the naming ritual in hyper-drive).

So my mother named herself. Lolita Arralean Luster – not any element of that name was bestowed upon her at her birth.  And since she was not going to have “LAB” on her license plate, she shifted her name to “Arralean Lolita [Brown]”. Only in becoming reintroduced to her one piece of professional writing has it become clearer to me – this woman removed the signs of victimhood from her identity – if not entirely from her mind and spirit – by calling herself names of beauty and music and freshness.

In the year before the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City, my mother, fighting and resisting all the way, finally created a brief memoir about a relative, her mother’s sister, “Aunt Sue.”  The essay was to be part of the series that Nikki Giovanni had been editing, concerning relatives, from grandfathers, to grandmothers, to uncles and then, to aunts. But the upheaval of the times did not permit the publication of the collection about aunts. My mother wrote the essay and, as she handed it to me, declared, “Don’t ever ask me to do anything like this again. It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.”  No. The hardest thing was surviving the atrocities contained in the story from one part of her life. And in surviving the other abuses of the body and soul that she endured before she was ten years old. Physical abuse; sexual abuse; separation from her mother. Whoever the world tried to make her become, she named herself; and in that act, and in many other acts of survival, she made herself into her self.  Her essay is presented here, with a comment afterwards, to complicate with a degree of cosmic irony, some of what followed after the story she put into my hands.

********************************************

AUNT SUE

A few things I remember and some I repeat from family conversation about “Aunt Sue.”  May her soul rest in peace.

My mother said Aunt Sue, her sister, persuaded her to bring me, at about age two or three months (in early 1911), to Arkansas to live with her family.  And she could work while Aunt Sue and her family kept me.

Sometime during the “sitting” period, Aunt Sue gave me paregoric to keep me asleep as much as possible.  Also her husband, John White, kicked me off the porch with the statement to her “to get rid” of me as he didn’t want any “bastards” with his children.  Presumably I was about 6 months old at the time. I was born in December, 1910.

My mother found a family by the name of Partee who wanted me, so she handed me over and went back to Tennessee and subsequently I was with Fannie Partee-Wiley until I was 10 years old.  I lived in several cities before that age.

Aunt Sue and her family got down on their luck and although Mother and I lived in a 3-room house, she let Aunt Sue and her family take over all of the house, except Mother and I were sleeping on a roll-away bed in the kitchen.

Aunt Sue had helped to keep Mother and her husband separated by that time, so she took over.  Mother worked in East St. Louis, Illinois, at the “Glass Factory,” and supported all of us.

Mother got a vacation and she and I went to visit her brother Ben in Bemis, Tennessee, and while we were gone, Aunt Sue told the social workers that Mother was not a “fit mother,” so I was taken to the Detention Home and Mother was forced to go to court to get me back.  I stayed in the home almost a year. I was in the seventh grade at the time, and I was in Miss India Maxwell’s homeroom at Lincoln School, in East St. Louis.

Years later, while Mother and I lived with the original family who had taken me in (the Partee-Wileys), she and Aunt Sue got into an argument. I don’t know all the details, but Aunt Sue lived on South 25^th Street and we lived on 26^th and Tudor, and Mother went to see Aunt Sue to try to clear the problem up and Aunt Sue drew a gun on Mother while she stood on the front steps.  The gun did not fire, which is why Mother lived, but I don’t think the argument was ever cleared up.

Years later, Aunt Sue persuaded my grandmother (Alice Pirtle) to come and live with her, then mistreated her and my grandmother left her and ended up living with Mother and me and my family.  While my grandmother was still with Aunt Sue she “ran away” and was found many miles from home and brought to us.  Aunt Sue came to try to make her return but she refused.  My grandmother lived with us until her death at the age of 101, in 1949.

Aunt Sue had a daughter, same age as me, who had a son who was born blind.  I was told that she would not let her keep the child, but sent him to an institution for the “unfortunate,” where he was educated well enough to take care of himself.  When he left it, he had been a switchboard operator, among other things.  His father’s sister brought him to East St. Louis to live with her.  It is my understanding that he receives a pension, so he is not a financial burden to his aunt.

Many years later, I had major surgery and vowed that if Aunt Sue died before I did I would not be at her funeral.  She died while I was recuperating, so that ended the story. --ALB (2001)

********************************************

In the past I have honored my father as my primary teacher in all things cultural. It was always my intuition that my mother gave me the real writing skills, even though no one in those days would have been able to tell me that the skill manifested itself in how she used words in the storytelling, not necessarily in the transcription. But, oh, the playing with language. A skill that still circulates at every family gathering. She had the narrative impulse. And she had the pain of life that could never be easily disclosed.

What is the irony? When my family moved back to East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1965, after nine years of extreme hardship in Beloit, Wisconsin, the only house they could find that was affordable, was the house where Aunt Sue had died (in 1954, I think). The major surgery that my mother mentions was the removal of a cancerous kidney. And yes, her recuperation period was long and delicate. Aunt Sue had some condition that did not allow her to lay in a bed and sleep, so she had to sit in a chair, during the night.  Being a child, myself, no more than ten years old, I did not interest myself in such details. I know that my grandmother never stopped visiting her, and taking me and my younger sister on those visits. We walked from 20^th Street to Kansas Avenue; and back. And I wondered how the old woman could endure so much pain.

But now I know that it was not about Aunt Sue’s pain, but the radical forgiveness that is spelled out in my mother’s memoir – how her mother walked past the abuse, singing to still her anxious heart. And how my mother went many steps further than the Spiritual that says, “I told Jesus it would be all right if He change my name.”  What radical saints are our ancestors. They told Jesus it would have to be all right because they were going to change their names.

And live as they defined themselves.

"She Rocked Him in a Weary Land"

ADVENT 2015

Dedicated to all the children of this world who will be lost to us. Most especially, as we grow soul-weary of the death of the innocents, to the memory of:

Tyshawn Lee – 9 years old. Chicago. Dead by gang assassination.  Laquan McDonald – 17 years old. Chicago. Dead by Police.

At the beginning of Advent, December of 1971, a young black boy, Charles Hale, disappeared in St. Louis, Missouri. Days went by as the search for this child continued.  After more than a week (as I recollect the timing), his body was found in the ruins of a deserted building on the Northside of the city.  And “Advent” was electric in my mind. How did “wise men” long ago go in search of a child who would be the deliverance from sin and bondage, for the world; and we here and now are searching for yet another young black child who was the promise of his family and became a light snuffed out in a time of cold and darkness?  No, it was not a case of “How can God permit the death of a child?” that pierced my mind. It was the pattern of death that had even then been beating a rhythm of death in this world where children are made into objects, where they suffer hunger, abuse, neglect, torture and violence. How much more before our very minds are choked by the death of children? How do we live, in a world where children, by the millions, seem born to be discarded while the adults around them either suffer the chaos of war and poverty or use that suffering to feed some self-justifying addiction to dominance and power?

It is not, nor has it ever been, God who permits the death of children. The true revelation of Christmas was that God was the Child who was born homeless; who became a refugee from state-sponsored holocaust; who grew to be labeled a criminal and a subversive, and was branded a terrorist, tortured in the fortress of an occupying army and publicly executed, in exchange for the life of a committed terrorist. And do we learn? Have we learned? Are we capable of learning?

Deliver Into Us

St. Louis, 1971.  The Search for Charles Hale

first in rain   then snow   through the fire-

chewed ruins of the northside deserted by

everything but cold rotting air

                                                   police and

city volunteers hunt for a missing child

                                                                 keeping

us informed   to nothing definite   the news reports

feed our strained hope with some slight signs

each day

                 and each night   the ageless silence

that is always with us    scratches our minds

like a desert wind   and we   like forgotten

nomads scattered in some dark countryside   crawl

close and cling to whatever light we have

                                                                             visited

with this   the listening city stirs before it

sleeps  waiting restless     without peace

distracted   and caught in time

                                                          until this child

is found   declared seen    or delivered into us

(In, The Sun Whispers, Wait, Brown Turtle Press, p. 70)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5nbc0zdQPY

Not only Herod’s soldiers seek out the infants to slaughter, performing the same purging of the innocent as that performed by Pharaoh’s army in the time of Moses.  Will we ever realize that all children are “the Hebrew children” today? The Sudanese, Somalian, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Lakota, Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Nigerian, Philippine, Puerto Rican children, and their sisters and brothers found in alleys and trash bins and boxes and basements and abandoned cars and ditches of the United States.  They and all the others whose cries will never be heard except by those who held them, are stronger than any host of angels singing, “Peace on Earth to those of good will…”

That is the chorus that must be attended to.

And it is not a song of peace. It is a song of warning.  “Visit war and death on us”, they are whispering into our dream-state, “and those who survive the slaughter will haunt your days and nights. Baptized in terror and suckled on the poisons of power and greed and disdain, those who survive our death will never be at peace – not until the world bows down in grief at the places where we children lay.”

The ritual of birth must be reversed, even as the poem about Charles Hale intuited: the spirits of these children must find shelter in the manger we prepare in our hearts.  Even – most especially – they must find a place where they can be reverenced and caressed and anointed with the tears of those who survive.

What gifts do we bring to the children who cry to us?

Only our hearts. Our minds. Our souls. Our strength. Our hearts. Our minds. Our determination to lift them up so that the world can look upon those they have pierced and see them for who they truly could have been. 

We are bound to (carry) them. 

"Anybody Ask You Who I Am..."

18 October. The Feast of St. Luke.

The birthday of Floyd Brown.

It began the night of my father’s funeral, in February, 1978, as I was sitting there on the altar listening to his voice in my head, pushing me to return to school. And then other voices intervened with an entirely different injunction: you will not apply to graduate schools. The priests in Milwaukee who moved to thwart my desire gave three reasons: first, I was not academically prepared to be successful in graduate school; second, my psychological state was not stable enough for me to continue in graduate studies, if by chance a school would accept me; and third, (and this will be a verbatim quotation), I “had not displayed sufficient discipline in the exercise of my ministry.” The first objection was quickly dismissed. My transcript from Johns Hopkins was as good as a plantation pass, in that matter.

A psychiatrist friend in Omaha challenged the second impediment. She said, quite forcefully and clearly, that most of my psychological difficulties seemed to stem from the treatment I had been subjected to, for over a decade, by those same priests or their predecessors.   And the third objection was explained as a response to my never having entered the process of becoming tenure-track while I was teaching at Creighton University. The irrefutable fact that the Academic Vice-President at Creighton had asked me to sign a contract as an instructor because he was campaigning to reduce the number of tenure-track contracts given to Jesuits seemed, somehow to render that last point forever moot.

Because I was bound to the promise of entering the academic contest, yet again, and at the age of 35, I knew very well that no obstacle would be insurmountable. The ancestors are never idle.

Moving on to refresh my spirit and expand my talents during a six-month sojourn in Spokane, Washington, under the guidance of one of the legendary Jesuit spiritual directors, Fr. Joseph Conwell, I cast my applications into the winds of change and put my mind to the renewal program in which I was engaged.  When the rejection letters arrived from Harvard and New York University, I was still calm and undisturbed. When the acceptance letter from Princeton arrived, I remained watchful and hopeful. My heart was really set on going to Yale because it had the library resources that excited me beyond all bounds.  So the letter from Yale stunned me, telling me that due to an oversight, my application had been misplaced and not found until after their deadlines had passed; and that I was therefore not eligible for any financial assistance and should apply for the next year’s entrance into the Afro-American Studies program.  I had originally applied to the Department of English, not knowing that there was a subtle tradition of segregation well-rooted at Yale:  African American literature was not part of the curriculum of the English department. A most solicitous member of the English faculty took it upon himself to forward my application to Afro-American Studies, where, he thought, I “would be happier.”

That initiated the letter that told me the bad news.  The poor, unsuspecting professor who mailed me the letter had no way of knowing that I was supposed to be at Yale in the fall of 1979.  The conversation I had with Professor Robert B. Stepto, as he waited for a technician to arrive at his house to repair his furnace, was without any doubt whatsoever the single most important act of mentoring he may have every performed.

He listened to me.

He reversed the decision. The priests of Milwaukee found the funds necessary to enable my first year of study in New Haven. And I drove East, seeking a few wise men. (In 1979, gender balance was not part of the alchemy at Yale…)

Robert Stepto never eased up in his belief in and support of me.  At our first meeting he asked me why I had turned down Columbia and Princeton. “Because you have the library and the faculty I have dreamed about, for years. And if things don’t work out for me, you will be the first to know.”  He smiled and said, “I don’t doubt that at all.”  And then he told me to sign up for the class that Robert Farris Thompson was teaching and the seminar that was being conducted by Charles T. Davis.  Outside of my family circle I have never been more at home than I was when he said, “Come in and be at peace.”

Within a few months, he learned me and I learned us.  His advice was unerring. “For your thesis, and your dissertation, write two pages a day. That way it will never seem too big a task.”  He and Charles Davis told me that funds would be found to keep me in school and that I would be enrolled in both the M. A. in Afro-American Studies and the Ph. D. in American Studies, as soon as I finished applying for the doctoral program. And then they said, “And we never want you to be treated badly again by the ‘priests in Milwaukee' [and by extension, in Omaha], so we will find you a job when you are finished,” It was then that Robert Stepto told me the heart-wounding secret that had been wrapped up in my file. Some of my priest-brothers had written letters suggesting that I would indeed not be successful in graduate school.  The pain he felt in telling me that was deep. And the love and appreciation I felt for him was even deeper.

He treated me like I was a Child of God.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBRQqP7WlXc

My spring semester’s total mental spasm, during which I cried – for no apparent reason – for almost two days was an opportunity for him to drop healing oil into my spirit. “Well, you got it out of the way, early; good for you. It took some of us a lot longer to fall apart. So you won’t have to go through that again.”

Then I finally thanked him, for facilitating every promise; for leveling the path through the academic thicket; and for being as gentle and steady a support as I had ever received – joining the seraphim who had been at each oasis of my struggle to learn: Leonard Waters, SJ, in the early days of my Jesuit career; John Knoepfle, that wonderful summer of 1967 in St, Louis, who heard a surety of voice in my poems that I could not at that time discern; and Elliot Coleman, who transported me to Hopkins with a wave of a fountain pen.

“Oh, it is easy to ‘go to bat’ for someone when they hand you the bat,” he said. And smiled.

One very chilly day in New Haven as we were in his office, talking about my dissertation, he asked me what I knew about the University of Virginia. “Oh, they have a successful basketball team, I think…and didn’t Thomas Jefferson have something to do with it?”  By now it should be apparent that he never failed to find a reason to smile at me. It is easy, I guess, when someone displays himself a thorough fool.

He made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. He would arrive with a junior faculty associate and a senior graduate student. And then Yale made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. So he remained at Yale and I wound up in Charlottesville, awakened finally to see the dream that many people saw within me – me, who wanted to do nothing but be a high school English teacher for the rest of my life.

On the feast celebrating the man whose name I have taken for my poetry -- “a Gentile among the Jews”; the faithful companion of Paul on several of his dangerous journeys; the word artist who dwelt upon the gentle grace of the mother of Jesus and who brought to our hearts the stories of the poor, the outcast and the culturally and religiously “other” – on this Feast of St. Luke, I see the gift a mentor gives, no matter the situation, no matter the ages of those involved.

One afternoon as I was leaving Robert Stepto’s house, a teenage girl was drifting down the sidewalk. She stopped and boldly interrupted our conversation with, “Are y’all brothers?  You sure do favor each other.”  Is that not the point, finally, and primarily?

We should favor one another.  As often as we can, and for all the right reasons.  To accept the other. To give and receive trust, with no violations by anyone. To see a promise that has to be nurtured into strength and independence.  To know. To know who and what matters.

My father said, “Go.” Robert Stepto said, “Come, be with us.”

And the evening before the 1985 commencement at Yale, at a reception hosted by members of the Afro-American Studies extended family, my mother, upon meeting Robert Stepto, looked back and forth, from him to me, and said, “But Joseph, he looks younger than you,”

“He is, Mama, he is.” 

And that has made this friendship all the more precious.

""Wheel Within A Wheel..."

PART ONE. In the Introduction to The Sun Whispers, Wait (Brown Turtle Press, 2009), I situate my beginnings as a writer of poetry on an October night in 1957. After I finished my own imitation of a bit of light verse that I had just read in “The Saturday Evening Post”, I showed it to my father, who said, “This is good. You should keep doing it.”  The Introduction ends this way:

                “It is a blessing that he gave me that advice and that the original poet in                  the family -- my mother -- kept a dictionary by her chair for the sixty-                  two years I knew her. Oh, I inherited words enough for the telling,                        even if the stories are most often whispered by and for the child within.”

As I live through yet another commemoration of yet another birthday, I have focused on both my father, Floyd, and mother, Arralean, as I have reflected on how they planted and nurtured my deep commitment to studying African American culture and how it has been the defining challenge of “American” and modern world culture.  My father’s formal, intentional lessons in Black history and culture, are part of my formation – long before his approval of my first effort at writing poetry.  For all of the best “right reasons” my father had me in the car on every length and purpose of trips. “Come on.” And I went. I do not ever remember talking to him, asking questions, seeking clarifications. He would begin talking. 

And I would continue listening.

                                      

That one special evening when he drove me to the site of KKK cross-burning in East St. Louis is, without any argument, the beginning of my journey from innocence to experience. John Kirkpatrick, the publisher-editor of the “East St. Louis Crusader,” had obviously angered the shadowy anonymous vigilantes who protected the denial of America’s truth. They burned their threat in front of his home. My father explained that to me. I was no more than seven years old.  Nearly three decades later as I was studying British and American literature (again), I was able to see that the Privilege of Whiteness was apparent in how novels were analyzed. The hero, we were told, began HIS journey into adulthood when he left his home and began his path from innocence to experience. (The girls and boys who skipped into the foreboding woods of the fairy tales we had all absorbed as tiny children did not factor into the theory of “innocence to experience”; how could they? Such tales were of little significance to the serious literary critics of those days.)

But when I read the Slave Narratives and other forms of Black literature in graduate school, it became apparent that Black children were tossed into the fiery furnace of abuse, oppression, danger and death, at the earliest age imaginable. From Frederick Douglass remembering his Aunt Hester, to Hurston’s Janie Crawford searching for her face in a group photograph and not realizing that she was the black girl in the crowd; to Du Bois experiencing the rejection by his white female classmate of his calling card, in an early grade – the shock of Blackness being defined by childhood trauma became all too clear to me.

But by then Hurston and Du Bois and Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were confirmation of my father’s voice. The multiple forms of print media in our house were the most basic form of “home schooling” for me. Ebony, Jet, the Chicago Defender, the Crusader; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe Democrat; the Saturday Evening Post – these magazines and newspapers were the motives for methodical, focused instruction into history, culture, art and politics. He made sure I watched political conventions. His “running commentary” on baseball games and boxing matches was matched by the way he provided context and perspective on every Black artist who ever appeared on a television show. In Ebony magazine, I looked at Du Bois and heard my father tell me of his meeting him at Wilberforce in 1915. Earl “Fatha” Hines wearing out a piano on the Ed Sullivan show sparked an anecdote about some less-than-reputable encounter my father had with him in a club in Chicago in the 1930’s.  On and on flowed the river of stories and commentaries and footnotes to historical and contemporary issues.

When we moved from the culturally comfortable environment of East St. Louis, in 1956, to the bewildering and unsettling atmosphere of Beloit, Wisconsin, the education continued; perhaps with even more urgency. For me, at least (more so than for my younger-by-four-years sister), a twelve-year old black boy in an overwhelmingly white world, my father did much more than give me “the talk.” In that regard, he never had to warn me of the consequences of unfiltered social behaviors. I already knew. The KKK cross, the pictures of Emmett Till, and the by then ingrained habit of questioning everything I saw had made me sufficiently prepared to navigate the maze of our new home.

Once my father had said goodbye to me at the Beloit train station at 8:20 am, the morning of August 14, 1962, as I began my journey to the Jesuits, he had armored me as well as he could against the ever-deepening strangeness of a culture about which I had been a most attentive student. But as I have also mentioned in a previous entry, he brought other voices into my world, long-distance. Books by Claude Brown and James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. Music by Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson.  The packages arrived and I did my best to make the connections – to the multiple worlds wherein I resided, and to the cultural assimilation to which I was subjected.

How could I be anything but supremely well-schooled and truly educated by the time the 60’s overwhelmed the known world? Transported back to St. Louis for studies in philosophy, I haunted the bookstores and libraries, picking up every newly published or reprinted power-text of the Black cultural awakening. And once again, similarly re-situated, my father gave me books.  And reestablished his still pertinent and prophetic commentaries.

In so many ways, he taught me to be a teacher.  I was trained in the formal and extended manner by a true Black Studies scholar. When, at his funeral in 1978, I heard his voice, over and over, saying to me, “I told you to get all the education you could,” I renewed my covenant with him. A year later I was in New Haven, having brought my eight boxes of books with me. My past and my future were shaped into the sacred circle at my father’s funeral. Nothing I would learn at Yale would be foreign to me – except the excesses of theory that buzzed in places where I was forced to sojourn from time to time.  Just as I had promised, at my ordination, that I would never preach a sermon that my two grandmothers could not understand, so I added a pedagogical vow: I would never teach or lecture in a way that my father, my mother and my brother would find off-putting or confusing.  Those vows, it can be safely said, have been kept without fail.

PART TWO.  “My mother, the original poet in the family.”  And nothing that I would ever learn in any course dealing with literature, be it classical Greek or Latin; early, modern or contemporary British; or from the entire spectrum of American literature – nothing would ever be daunting to me because my mother taught me how to maneuver among the knots and tangles of language, and never “break a sweat.”  My mother mastered multivalent discourse at a very early age. She, too, participated in my home-lessons. But the verbal agility with which she controlled all conversations, serious or playful – and for her, conversations could be both, simultaneously – that verbal virtuosity is still a source of amazement and delight among her family, friends, neighbors, nearly a decade after her death.

Also mentioned in the quotation that begins this is the fact that I never knew my mother to be without a dictionary next to her chair. Never.  Many occasions produced the briefest of comments, always perfectly timed and inflected. Her jokes, familiar to three generations of her “children”, focused mainly on choosing one level of meaning over another, with the simplest of words.  In the style of the master dancers of west Africa, my mother could listen to four or five people talking, a room away, and make the best possible intervention – one that could stop all talk and then induce great laughter – when folks “got the joke.”

And then laughter would be aimed at those who did not hear the sly, hidden, doubled meaning of the pivotal word. Playing the dozens? Signifying? Not hardly; my mother was far to “genteel” for such crude performances – except that is what she did morning noon and night. And not always in a harmless way.

What else informs the best Black literature, except the high, giddy dazzling displays of linguistic acrobatics known from tales about rabbits; to boasting and toasting chants in bars and barbecues; to verbal jazz improvisations practiced in barbershops, beauty parlors -- and some of the sturdiest pulpits in the country?                                                            

How could I do otherwise but establish my credentials as a Black Studies practitioner with, “Who defines the terms by which we live?’ when I was raised by a woman who named herself several times before she was seventeen years old.  I had always thought her mother’s relatives were less-than-well-tutored because they persisted in calling her “Arralee” instead of “Arralean,”  It was only after her death in 2007, that I discovered that she had never liked “Arralee”, so she changed the name. I had known for years that she had always wanted a “pretty” middle name, so she gave herself one: “Lolita”.  And as to her last name (the so-called “maiden” name), no one will ever know for sure how “Luster” was added to her signature. Except that it certainly does describe her presence in our world.

Sometimes I think I teach the books that I am sure that my mother would like to read – and about which she could give a laser-like critique.  The summer after my father died, she finally had an obscenely large tumor removed from her left shoulder. Doctors had resisted operating, for fear that she could lose all mobility in that arm. Because of the thirty years she lived with that deformity, I learned much about cooking, since I was there to help her in the kitchen; stirring and lifting and managing the tasks she could not do easily.  The afternoon she went to the hospital, I brought her a copy of Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I had fallen in love with the book, the characters, but especially the symphony of language that Morrison displayed.

The next morning, as she was recovering, she told me that she had finished the entire novel the night before. “What?  How could you have done that?” I asked. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t know if I would survive the operation and I wanted to know how things turned out.”  And then she started asking questions about the novel.  About five years later, when I was organizing my sly and subversive themes (the description of someone on my committee; not my own description. Oh, no…), I knew that I was bound to Song of Solomon, if for no other reason to finally answer my mother’s sophisticated questions.

He taught me how to read. She taught me to delight in the words I read.

Everyone who engages in the struggle to continue the work of Black Studies must have similar authorities in their development. And if any would say that they do not, then they do not see that my mother and father did the same work, in my beginnings, that Du Bois, Hughes, Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks and Sterling Brown and Ann Petry and Richard Wright and Paule Marshall and James Baldwin did for me and for all of us, later on.

Paraphrasing my dear friend, Thea Bowman, “we come to our [discipline] fully formed.” Even if we have never had the experience of a ring shout or felt the driver’s lash; even if we have never had a vision like Elijah or Moses or John or Mary, we know that there are wheels within wheels, moving in counter-clockwise tension. And we know how to find the secret, needful, meanings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfdMftXRpeM&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN&index=27

We knew before we ever began this journey that we could not afford not to be wise and allow others to float in a sea of denial.  The Old Ones sang us here. And we carry the songs always.

I hope that from time to time, somebody will say, “he was raised right.”  Yes, indeed. I tried to get all the education I could.

"Joshua Commanded the Children to Shout"

“On the seventh day, beginning at daybreak, they marched around the city seven times in the same manner; on that day only did they march around the city seven times. The seventh time around, the priests blew the horns and Joshua said to the people, “Now shout, for the LORD has given you the city. “ Joshua 6:15-16

Continuing from the previous entry, we shall contemplate, once again, the reality of “Sankofa” as it describes one aspect of the performance of Africana culture.  Presented here are two very different images of the Sankofa Bird, which is always used to embody the principle of "return and get it" – the symbol of the importance of learning from the past, and bringing what has been learned into the present.

The first illustration, is a wood carving of the bird, reaching into its back to bring forth the nourishing egg of knowledge. The positioning of the carving replicates the Kongo Cosmogram, first mentioned in the Sankofa Muse entry, “Little David, Play on Your Harp” (May 16, 2014). That circle “describes” – simultaneously -- the movement of the sun from east to north to west to south; and the stages of life: birth, adulthood, elder status, and status of the “living dead” or ancestors.  What might not be considered of significance is that the movement of the cosmogram is counter-clockwise. The tension in that movement is found in many other performances of Africana culture.  Worth noting here is that this push, this resistant struggle, against our western cultural norm of linear progress is also found in one of the foundational repositories of African American religion: the ring shout.  The dancers move counter-clockwise; beginning slowly and, over time, dramatically increasing the tempo of the singing, dancing and percussive accompaniment.  Until they are possessed by spirits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8DyJpDMs50

The multi-colored depiction of the Sankofa Bird, shown here, 
presents a shape that establishes a clockwise rhythm. This reversal of the traditional flow of energy has implications that deserve attention. One of the persistent worries nagging my soul at what I see happening in our communities, our country, our world is that those of us who have “moved around our circle of life” and have, chronologically at least, achieved the status of elder, all too often have earned the judgment that we have failed to hand on the vital lessons of our past to our young people who stand at the intersecting axis of the Cosmogram -- where they must make decisions about how they will act, for the benefit of the “beautyful [sic] ones yet unborn” and in keeping with the traditions that have guided the community for untold generations. What distresses my soul is the mounting evidence that some who should be teaching this have made, perhaps, too many concessions to the larger world in which we negotiate our survival; and have either not learned the lessons from our own elders and ancestors, or some of us have decided that much of our past can be worn as decorations and can be ignored as keys to unlock the power of our own history. Have we become existentialists in our intellect, believing that there is little in our past that needs to be protected? Coming into the field of Black Studies when I did, I learned that we who choose to study the struggle that marked the old ones -- and that marks us still – do indeed have a useable past and we have an obligation to be agents of Sankofa: bringing forth that which is necessary for today.

As must be evident to anyone who has spent any time reading these entries, or reading any other of my writings, or anyone who is even minimally familiar with my professional focus on Africana religion and culture, Black Sacred Songs (“The Negro Spirituals”) are, for me, sacramental texts. The songs carry within them “the power to make things happen” (as one of my great influences, Robert F. Thompson, defines the concept of àshe). The struggle against the power of enslavement, oppression, abuse and degradation that was waged by those who chose to survive the disruption and dislocation that was the Transatlantic Slave Trade – the lessons learned from that struggle are the foundations of what we should be teaching under any form of Black/African American/Africana Studies.  But in order to know that we have a past worth retrieving, we must first humble ourselves sufficiently to recommit ourselves to knowing that “the struggle continues.”  The lives we live must be praise-songs to our elders and ancestors.

The songs and stories of the ancestors carry messages that have been found useful, over and over. But what has happened in the last half-century, to turn these coded strategies of defining ourselves against the systemic effort to suffocate our souls, to turn these vessels of redemption and liberation into decorations.  Reversing the rhythm of the dance has far-reaching consequences.  No time will be spent on restating the challenge that can be found in another entry of the Sankofa Muse that deals with the embarrassing and demeaning misuse of one of the great claims of peoplehood and covenant – “Come By Here” (December 31, 2013).

What forces this meditation on Yoruba power and Catholic grace, are the murmurings of some of the culture’s elders who see nothing of our tradition in the Black Lives Matter movement that has been gaining in “wisdom and in grace” (as was said of the child Jesus when he had to teach the teachers in the Temple; Luke 2:46-50). A disquieting example of this phenomenon of chastising our young ones when we should be moving among them, bestowing blessings and nourishment for the tasks ahead of them is found in a column published by the Washington Post, on August 24, 2015 by Reverend Barbara Reynolds.  http://wapo.st/1JORYD   Rev. Reynolds sees little that is redemptive or culturally consistent in the actions of the Black Lives Matter participants.  Establishing her status as an elder in the “Civil Rights Movement,” she scolds the BLM generation as being ignorant of their past, contemptuous of those who would lead them and guide them, and unmindful of how they present themselves in public.

In only one quotation that will be used here, Reynolds says, “The baby boomers who drove the success of the civil rights movement want to get behind Black Lives Matter, but the group’s confrontational and divisive tactics make it difficul.  In the 1960s, activists confronted white mobs and police with dignity and decorum, sometimes dressing in church clothes and kneeling in prayer during protests to make a clear distinction between who was evil and who was good….But at protests today, it is difficult to distinguish legitimate activists from the mob actors who burn and loot.”

Just as Rev. Reynolds was publishing these reflections, we were commemorating the 10^th anniversary of the destruction of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As far too many people have proved, it was not the hurricane that destroyed that city, but the aftermath, when the levees failed even the minimum requirements. And the levees failed in communities where time and again, political leaders confirmed the people’s understanding: Black lives don’t matter. We are commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till (August 28, 1955).  Till, whose death galvanized the generation to which Reynolds and I both belong, was horrific proof that nothing the present generation faces is new. 

As I was wrestling with my disappointment with this scolding from Reynolds, demanding decorum and church attire, I flashed on something else from the 1960s “freedom movement” that I doubt Rev. Reynolds would claim as part of her standard of resistance.  On June 28, 1969, in Greenwich Village, New York City, after yet another demeaning and dehumanizing (and “legal”) raid on a social establishment catering to a gay and lesbian clientele, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn finally said, “Enough is enough. Our lives matter.”  And when (as the reports note) “three drag queens and a lesbian” were arrested, a crowd of over 600 people responded with frustration, fearlessness and focus. “The Stonewall Riots” are still celebrated every year as an example of how change actually takes place in our society.

Every so-called “riot” in the United States in the 1960’s was part of the “civil rights” movement --- and those eruptions of frustration and rage were anything but civil. But each and every one of them whirled, shouted, flung decorum to the winds and said, “Here, in this cesspool to which we are relegated, we know that our lives matter. And to prove it we are willing to lose our lives. But attention will be paid.” An aside (of sorts): did the Black Panthers dress for Sunday school?  Did the young contemporaries of Barbara Reynolds who walked all over the South dressed in jeans and boots and wrinkled shirts get lectured because they were not in business attire?

Reading and reflecting on how a cohort of Black Elders chastise our young, I could not help but also “read” the great song of liberation, “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.”  The originators and curators of that song radically revised the biblical account. The problematic thrust of the original narrative – the story of an invading crowd of migrants and refugees convinced that they had a God-given right to appropriate the land of others – becomes a holy remembering of how the history of an oppressed people – any oppressed people – can provide a strategy for confronting whatever oppression looms in our present circumstance.  The singers of this song choreograph resistance through thoroughly African rituals.  Moving counter-clockwise – the song is a Ring Shout – the singers become the historical Israelites. But they are not claiming the territory of others; they are unleashing the power to make their own sense of the godhead within manifest in the world.

Dangerously other, problematic in their silence – except for the horns sounded by the priests, the “children” circled the walled city of Jericho, day after day, for six days. And, then, Oh, Glory! On the seventh day, they marched around the city seven times, while the “lamb/ram/sheep horns” were sounded. And then following the injunction of the God they were discovering, “Joshua commanded the children to shout.  And the walls come tumbling down.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYSX8RxkbgM

Even if Black Lives Matter participants don’t claim the song – and since they most likely were never taught the power inherent in the performance of the song, why would they make it theirs? – they are nevertheless reaching far back into their past and disrupting the order maintained by the privileged. They are teaching their elders how to remember their own past with much more complexity. And they are restless to claim the crossroads.

The Sankofa bird, much like the dove that descended upon Jesus at the Jordan, brings the power to make things happen to the young ones.

We professors of Africana Studies far too often avoid dwelling on the uncomfortable legacy that is locked away in these songs and stories. It is not that we are “unchurched,” or that the songs are far too simple to withstand the intricacies and sophistication of our theoretical gaze. Rather, even more simply, do we only teach that which we understand; not that which makes us personally uncomfortable.  But at this time, more than any time of our recent history, we need to return and fetch the power to transform this desert. And we also need to see that the children may have learned it anyway, because our culture can never be hermetically sealed away. The more we talk to each other, the more we have a responsibility to find silence within ourselves and let the voices of history possess us.

We who think that we have now gained some measure of stability and respectability are charged to renew our mission to educate our children with the “true truth” and to give the greatest gift imaginable: our trust that they are exactly where they ought to be on the circle that defines our people.