"For this is the prize..."
I've started and stopped drafting this newsletter so many times I can't count. I thought my first note would have be all levity, random pics, and songs that I'm obsessed with, maybe an old school groove because yes. That may come next round.
Never sure what *tiny bit I'd want to share, I landed on a discarded darling, from my notebook in June 2015:
"When I reach the top of the hill on the northwest end of Central Park, I find my friends sitting on complementary blankets horseshoed around a black, red and green tent lying flat on the grass. Then the players, a mix of dancers and musicians, begin their work. They announce that the hour of black joy, gather on top of the tent and begin to weave a narrative part poetry and movement. It has been a hard week, I know this while I watch the dark skinned man stretch his arms wide, love tattooed on his forearm. The light was muted, a gray sky, an insistent sun pokes through in moments, the rain abated for us, a mix of American identities watch these black men tell stories of a now we didn’t imagine years ago, a now where racism yielded in the death nine black Americans in a church by a white killer.
Their song and story took me back to a moment of fiction that felt real. Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, deep in the Ohio woods, a gathering of black women, men and children, her call and response to them to claim the joy of their bodies and living. “This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. and all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” On social media, Morrison’s Baby Suggs words resurfaced like wave as we all tried to process the murders of nine people at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston on June 17th. The AME church is the oldest black church in America, the oldest independently founded black denomination in the world. This performance of Marc Bamuthi Joseph Black Joy in The Hour of Chaos, fell on Juneteenth, June 19th, the day where enslaved black Americans received word of their emancipation in Galveston, Texas in 1865 as the union armies secured the state. I never felt it so necessary to be someplace. I didn’t realize I needed to see art that affirmed my identity in the world."
Last month, after a year of research, reporting and writing, my long form feature article about Dr. James H. Cameron, self taught historian and founder of America's Black Holocaust Museum was published in BuzzFeed News. Cameron, who died in 2006, was also a survivor of one of the most notorious lynchings in American history. Cameron's survival would be regarded as mystery by some, divine intervention by others. He first opened the museum on June 19th in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was buried on June 19th, 2006.
As I finished the final edits, Bea Richard's Baby Suggs looped in my head, "And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up."
Hold it up.
To power through writing, seeing and looking at the ugly, underside of the American story, I listened to *a lot* of music. Film soundtracks helped (I'm particularly fond of Gladiator and Interstellar.) Hamilton cast album, helped. Lemonade, of course. The response to this work has been really humbling. Mostly, a lot of people writing to tell me "thank you", and I'm not sure what to say to that. I think "thank you" belong to Dr. Cameron, who fought his whole life for us, who always showed up at KKK rallies to counter protest and shame their hate. But I also thanks to you readers, for reading (and sharing) this important American story. Cameron should be remembered, but mostly importantly, and ever more urgently, Dr. Cameron, if he were here would insist that we confront the truth of our past, so that we can move forward.
Photo credit: Adam Ryan Morris for BuzzFeed News
BuzzFeed News has assembled stories of forgotten chapters in American history for Independence Day. There are great stories of forgotten and impactful lives there. Be sure to check it out.
To be American and Black is to embrace paradox. Reading Frederick Douglass Fourth of July Address and listening to Sarah Vaughn singing Gershwin's "Of Thee I Sing" are my favorite pastimes for the Fourth, and the best way I can celebrate 240 years of a messy, complicated and beautiful place.