It wasn’t lost on me that to each and every one of them, my sister’s death represented a boon — a chance to move up a slot on the waiting list. My sister was on that list for eight years. Waiting. Wondering. Whenever she’d trot out her conspiracy theories, I’d push back, “Nah — we’re just waiting for someone to die.”
I am shipping off a heavy weight cotton rectangle with a simple resist that came from Africa. It’s an honor to be part of this project, too.
PS my eyes feel 90% better already!
Here’s my finished contribution to Mo’s “I Dream of a World Where Love is the Answer” project. I wish making this pennant had afforded some answers. Instead, the embroidery mostly forced one queasy question after another. How will we move past this riotously awful period of history? Why are we being so battered by destructive ‘policies’, nihilism, and retroactive social ideas? How can seemingly intractable differences in world views ever be reconciled? Why do we live in a country where a sizeable percent of the population doesn’t think fact matters? How much of our republic will survive the hate-fueled attacks on its very fiber? Just getting through a news cycle anymore is fucking exhausting.
(Honestly, even though I understand its instructive value, I cannot even watch Fox News now and again to get the lay of the land).
I read “Hillbilly Elegy” last year and yeah, it was somewhat instructive, but I still don’t have the time of day for Trump supporters, in this case specifically, for coal miners who condemn others for receiving state assistance when they themselves are doing the same. I don’t understand, nor want to understand, defending a dying, polluting industry at all costs. Nope. Not my conversation to have. (And by the way, if JD Vance ultimately runs for office as I suspect he might and chooses to make facile references to ‘East Coast elites’, I will be the first to remind him that he graduated from the same ivy league law school as Hillary Clinton).
I read “small great things” by Jodi Picoult this summer. The novel tells the story of an African American nurse banned from touching a white supremacist’s newborn baby. It doesn’t go well. It was really hard to find any measure of sympathy for the racist characters in this book and not just because I happened to be reading it the week of Charlottesville. It’s because I have no sympathy for Nazi’s or any other form of modern day racist. Why would I want to talk with them?
image by CNN
So, okay, skip dialogue. Prayer, then?
There’s also education.
The research I’ve done to set a novel in SC in the 1740’s has convinced me that without courageously facing our history, we are lost. We have to become aware of at least some of the gruesome details of American slavery. Then, we can acknowledge the lingering shadow and the ongoing harm. Otherwise, we will forever be torn apart by the history of human bondage’s after-effects.
The more I learn, the more convinced I am of this. In the introduction to “The New Jim Crow” Michelle Alexander makes the argument that white supremacy is a many-headed monster with regenerative power. When you cut one head off, another rears its ugly and savage face.
After education (and reflection), naturally, action must come*. Catch phrase (to quote Leslie Mac at an anti-racism training): “At some point, if you’re gonna dig a hole, someone’s gotta pick up the god-damned shovel.”
image by CNN
* Recent TED Talk called “Removing Your Filter Bubbles” by moveon.org founders made this very suggestion. Perhaps you need to be an extrovert and someone who moves in wider social circles than I do for this suggestion to have any possibility of success?
* On 2018’s To Do List: make sure none of our mutual funds invest in private prison corporations (if they do, shift money); offer frequent flier miles to a couple of Cambridge Black Lives Matter activists; continue to read black authors and buy their books; continue to follow and support criminal justice reforms here in Massachusetts; continue to oppose the totalitarian, racist regime in the White House with protests, calls to Congress, and more; learn more about the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in Boston. Maybe (finally?) attend the Annual Slave Dwelling Project Conference. Continue with financial contributions to: the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, the Royall House and Slave Quarters (here in Mass.), the African American History Museum (in Washington, D.C.) Most importantly, to me personally: finish my novel featuring enslaved and elite characters to the best of my ability.
PS. I was reading Judy Martin’s blog this week and found a post full of so much process that I found familiar that it was almost spooky. Her poetic musings are wonderful and provocative.
PPS In my fabric win, Deb Lacativa included four bobbins of her specialty threads. I am enjoying using them in this piece.
Then it turned into fall and more walnuts than I thought possible for two trees to produce fell. They’re still falling. Even after one of the windiest nights ever, they’re still falling!
The gap between cloths is prompting some thoughts, too — thoughts about the divides that seem to be doing us in here in America. Seething, toxic, destructive divides. How do we cross or bind the yawning gap? Is that the right question? Should we be trying to learn how to live with our differences, tattered-edged and unsettling as they are? In the United States, it’s no exaggeration to say that we have not been this divided as a nation since the Civil War. Think about that. I do. All. The. Time.
More to come.
I can be an unabashed braggart when it comes to food — moaning my approval before anyone else at the table has a chance to comment, for instance. But, you know what? Every now and then I just hit it out of the park! These sugar cookies sailed right over the Green Monster* into my happy, happy mouth (*for those who don’t know, that’s a Fenway Park reference).
It’s Friday and it finally stopped raining. I’m reading Michael W. Twitty‘s food memoir and just got to the part about his conversion to Judaism and the parallels between Jewish and African American culinary traditions. Left me with a hankering for pastrami (I must trust my dear readers to be openly lusting for sugar and red meat in the same post!). There may be a run to Zaftig’s in my near future. There happens to be one near my favorite Christmas Tree Shop in Natick (please stop, Dee — too many confessions for one post).
I’ll end on a loftier note. Here’s the start of my contribution to a wonderful collaborative art/magic project that Mo is dreaming up (I Dream of a World Where Love is the Answer — It’s Crow Time). More to come.
PS
