On Side

Woke up different today.
With questions mainly. Dark ones.
Riding with my mama from Virginia to California.
Different because she couldn’t drive.
And the car wasn’t papa’s used Chevy Chevelle but
Something like Uncle Ed’s new-smelling Buick.
“What’s this called?”
“Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.”
“The guy that said slavery was humane. Slaves were happy. Glad to have masters keeping them Christians. That the plantation was like the Garden of Eden.”
“Our history, honey.”
On a field trip with Miss Scarmack. Liberty Bell. Independence Hall.
“In this room, our Declaration of Independence was ratified.”
I spoke up. Different because that was something I never remember doing.
“41 out of the 56 white men who signed it owned slaves.”
Scarmack scowled, caught herself, and glowed, east to west.
“It’s not about who signed it. It’s about what it stands for. ALL MEN. CREATED EQUAL. Even you. LIFE. LIBERTY. PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.”
There was even a tear like a diamond stuck on the side of her nose.
In Washington. Rotunda. Charters of Freedom. The Trinity.
Constitution. Since 1952. 70 degrees. 25 percent humidity. Resurrected each morning from a steel and concrete vault built to withstand nuclear annihilation. Enshrined. Special glass. Two armed guards. Today one was black.
Spongy ranger proclaims, “Founding Fathers worked this out carefully, patiently, exhaustively…”
I kept my mouth shut while thinking, “27 out of 55 delegates to the Convention owned slaves. Supreme Court Justice Taney declared that Africans were not ever meant to be included as humans in that venerable opening preambled pronoun.”
The guide was still going on, “…highest achievement, greatest invention…”
“5th Century BC Athens would have something to say about that,” I muttered. Fortunately, no one heard.
At Mount Vernon in an August swell. Recreated to look and feel the way it might have in President George Washington's day.
I kept my eye on the teenager playing the role of Ona Judge whose duties included giving Martha a bath, then dressing her. There was a movie to introduce us to the Mount Vernon Experience.
“…Mrs. Washington had the reputation of being a kind and gentle mistress. When she left with the President for New York, many slaves wept openly. Most of all, she believed that a slave should no be punished without a very good reason.”
Did I hear clapping?
I snuck over to Ona.
“Why is this place even here?”
“Their history,” she whispered so only I could hear.
There were many things to wonder about today. Like what the 220,000 African Americans in the United States Armed Forces who had pledged their lives for American felt about being stationed at Fort Lee.
Or Fort Gordon. Home of the United States Army Signal Corps and Cyber Center of Excellence. Named after Mr. John Brown Gordon. General in the Army of the Confederate States of America. Governor of Georgia. Grand Wizard of the KKK.
Or Fort Polk, thirty miles north of DeRidder in Beauregard Parish, Louisiana. Its eponymous hero was the Right Reverend Leonidas Polk. Episcopal Bishop. Lieutenant General of the Confederate States of America Army. Largest slaveowner in Maury County, Tennessee.
Camp Beauregard.
As in Jefferson (Davis) (Pierre Gustave Toutant) Beauregard Sessions III. Attorney General of the United States, who once said to a black colleague, “Boy, be careful what you say to white folks” and joked that he liked the KKK until he found out they smoked pot. Some blacks apparently don’t have a sense of humor.
P.G.T. Beauregard, General in the Confederate States of America Army of the Potomac whose soldiers started the Civil War by firing on the 1st U.S. Light Artillery, Battery E of the United States Army at Fort Sumter.
I walked right up to a black soldier. His face looked like it had been carved out of basalt.
“How can you endure the name?”
“No questions.” The sound came out but his lips never moved.
Well, I was asking, and I was angry, and I was confused, and I felt like I lacked roots. No. I felt like I was uprooted and never replanted.
I was in Charlottesville on Saturday. While whites with Tiki torches proclaimed themselves irreplaceable, Nazi James Alex Fields ran his car into American Heather Heyer.
I was waiting for a word from the President.
Not that I expected much.
Not that I respected someone who earned no respect.
Just because I selfishly wanted to feel that my protest was worth something. That I was part of something…American.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” Then with the sigh of “Why can’t the White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and the citizens against hatred just find their common ground,” he repeated “On many sides.”
You see, the President knew there were some very good American citizens among the torches and swastikas. And that some of us, the ones who protested hate, were on his naughty list.
Percipient to history and connoisseur of the aesthetic, he later tweeted that I should respect the beauty of Confederate monuments.
Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You…
…the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!
I wanted to curse and laugh. An American tragicomedy.
Bob, at the bar, mustn’t have noticed I was different. He asked his own question, “Black Lives Matter! How is that not racist?”
I kept my head in my glass.
“There ain’t no slaves any more.”
That was too easy.
“All the more reason why you should’t be a master any more.” I sort of chuckled, but I was serious.
“What?” Now he eyed me as though I were something out of Project Blue.
“Privilege.” My voice was soft. Truth doesn’t need a trumpet.
“Bullshit. I never got nothing from nobody.”
I wasn’t going to debate with Bob. Getting him to think was like registering for a Black Studies class at Liberty University. Not part of a Christian curriculum.
“Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was a racist.”
‘Who the fuck — “
“C.C. Signer of the United States Constitution. Has his very own National Historic Site in South Carolina.”
“So?”
“ ‘Blacks must have been created with less intellectual power than whites, and were intended to serve them.’ His words.”
“You can’t change history,” he sighed. I exhausted him.
I wanted to scream, “We don’t have to honor racists. Don’t you see how I feel? Don’t you care how I feel?”
Those were the pointless questions I was ready to ask when the outline of things began to fray. Colors merged. I could just about make out the borders of the five bronze fingers of my right hand.
“What would happen?”
Tomorrow would arrive. I would wake up the rule and not the exception. Satisfied. Comfortable. The guy who sets aside the Tiki torch to cheer on the Dallas Cowboys.
Unconcerned.
Unaware.
Unconscious.
United.
Not to give her a pass, but maybe Rachel Dolezal simply didn’t want to wake up to another morning where those well-meaning feelings of white guilt justified hurling stones at everyone else.
I didn’t fall asleep so quickly tonight.
Wanted to bask in the glow of who I was.
Standing for something.
Fighting for rights.
Eager to ask. Not afraid of the answers.
Right now I mattered as much as they always have.
I was the difference between “always been” and “never before.”
I was the last hope of making something good out of the decent parts of their documents.
I was the prophet of Tekoa.
Vox Clamantis in Deserto…
Your country and your Christ are creepy.
It is the atheist who does my will.
Humanists are my saints.
Germany stands for Justice.
Trees are known not by name but in fruit.
Your Christ might as well have anchored himself on his cross for all he’s worth. If he were real, could your President love him so easily?
I hate your chapels and your megachurches.
Your praise songs.
You tongues-talk and way-up-in-the-air arms.
Your born-again bullshit.
Your wives-serve-your-husbands waste and homosexuality-is-a-sin slop
Your Bible-grovel
You're reading scripture like an owner’s manual and ridiculous rejection of science and good sense
Your salvation for a quick I’m sorry Jesus kind of cheap grace.
Your all-stand, MAGA caps-off, hand-on-heart, cheesy patriotism.
Your routines.
Moral Development stuck at stage 2 or 3 out of 6.
Too empty to empathize.
Ecce!
The new fruit is ripe. I am the late harvest.
The new wine will come dripping from the crags where the hinds angle their hooves.
New justice-wine will roll down the mountains on many sides
On many sides…
