Memoir of a Race Traitor by Mag Segrest

Source of book: I own this

 

When this book was re-released in 2019, I knew I needed a copy for my library. I am collecting a number of non-fiction works related to the Civil Rights Movement and other liberation and justice movements in our history. In part, this is because of the ongoing push by the Right Wing to ban these books from libraries and schools. 

 

Mag Segrest is still around, believe it or not. She is about the age of my parents, although she has been an active organizer, advocate, and educator for decades. She wrote this book in 1994, mostly about her anti-Klan work during the 1980s in North Carolina. 

 

The book is divided into three sections. The first and longest is her memoir, which includes a lot about her family as well as her anti-racism work. It also speaks quite a bit to the necessary alliance between anti-racists and anti-bigots in other areas, particularly the need for the racial justice movement to embrace the LGBTQ rights cause and vice versa. 

 

As she points out time and again, with solid evidence, the two are engaged in the same fight. Racism and other bigotries - misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, economic injustice - all come from the same diseased part of the soul. And the bigotries combine to place certain wealthy white males at the top of society, grinding nearly everyone else. 

 

The second part of the book is a series of essays about history. Specifically, the history of the United States as traced through the generations of her maternal ancestors, who came here around the beginning, and were active Confederates and white supremacists down through the generations. 

 

These also talk a lot about capitalism and how it depends on permanent underclasses at home and abroad. You will get a bit of Howard Zinn here. I don’t agree with all of her points - for example, I think that NAFTA and its successors did less harm to industrial jobs than automation, and that simply ending free trade (e.g. the Trump tariffs) won’t bring back those jobs. But for the most part, it holds up well. 

 

The final part is a lecture she gave to a Southern LGBTQ group about the need to fight for racial justice, and it is pretty badass. 

 

And actually, Segrest herself is pretty much a textbook badass, doing the right thing, fighting the good fight, living authentically as herself despite her roots, and encouraging others to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. 

 

Segrest jumps around a bit in time throughout the book, switching between her public life fighting the Klan and her personal life involving her parents. 

 

And her parents are fascinating. They had issues, for sure. Her father advocated for segregated schools, but also weirdly respected Segrest’s completely opposed advocacy. At the end of the updated edition, she notes that they remained friends until his death. 

 

Likewise, her mother wasn’t happy about the book, but they found common ground. Her mother also suffered most of her life from a debilitating auto-immune disorder that kept her bedridden and in pain until her early death. So she had other issues to worry about. 

 

I was also fascinated by the way that her very traditional Southern parents were both disappointed and yet weirdly accepting of Segrest’s sexual orientation. Ditto for her sister, who went all Fundie as an adult, and yet somehow kept a connection. I can’t explain in a few words the complexity of all this, but the book does a good job. 

 

The book tells a story that feels very relevant today, but isn’t known all that well to those of us who grew up on the West Coast. The 1980s were a time of Klan violence across the South, with some events that I never even heard of until relatively recently, like the Greensboro Massacre and various Klan assassinations throughout the South. I certainly wasn’t taught about modern Klan violence in our Fundie curriculum. But these are events that directly involved Segrest and the anti-racist organization she worked for at the time. 

 

It is horrifying to understand that the same people, the same organizations, and the same ideologies that drove the Klan and the American Nazi Party back then have basically seized control of our federal government in the form of Trump and his goons. And I mean literally the same people and organizations.

 

Rather than try to summarize the book, I am just going to go with a whole lot of quotes. The book tells a fascinating story, by a fascinating human who is now one of my heroes. 

 

I’ll start with a great quote from Lillian Smith, a white woman who fought racism in her own way. I wrote about her excellent book, Strange Fruit, in 2019, for Banned Books Week. That book was the original “Banned in Boston” book. 

 

“Racism is so different from prejudice; it would be helpful if people could begin to use words precisely, giving them their actual meaning…We have scarcely begun to probe this illness. Let’s call it what it is: evil. I’m not sure it is an illness, it may simply be evil.”

 

Although not in this quote, Segrest makes clear elsewhere that racism requires power. Anyone can be prejudiced, but only power can segregate and brutalize. 

 

I am very much with Smith here: racism is evil. It is our national sin, and it is the worst of sins, as it dehumanizes other humans. It also is the polar opposite of neighbor-love, and thus the most anti-Christ sin possible. (Bigotry in general is in this category. It is the worst and most serious of sins.) 

 

The introduction to the new edition is worth reading. I wrote down a few quotes from it. 

 

She quotes a black feminist organization statement about Intersectionality that explains why all forms of injustice need to be addressed together. 

 

“[T]he particular task of integrated analysis and practice based on the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”

 

I have discovered this over the years to be true. I do not know of a single anti-LGBTQ bigot who is not misogynistic, and I do not know of a single white anti-LGBTQ bigot who is not also racist as fuck. I cannot think of a single exception. It is the same disease of the soul. 

 

Later, in the preface to the original edition, she explains again how things interlock.

 

This book is by a lesbian, who cannot look at race in an uncomplicated way, who has worked to articulate the many interfaces among misogyny, racism, and homophobia in a culture ravaged by all three. 

This book is by a woman who has never yet gone to bed hungry for lack of food, who has never yet slept outdoors for lack of shelter, who has never yet not worked for lack of a job, who is trying to understand a capitalism that denies many of her fellow humans all three. 

 

Another quote is excellent, and to a certain (although lesser) degree, it reflects my own journey out of my family past. 

 

In Durham in my twenties and thirties I jumped the tracks to the right side of history. I carried in my baggage, out of the apartheid of my Alabama childhood, the genealogies of family members whose legacies included the destruction of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens’ Council, segregated private schools, and the murder of civil rights worker Sammy Younge in my hometown of Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1966. It left me lots to unpack and sort through, to discard or mend, or to wrap around me. 

 

I too find myself as a “Race Traitor,” one who has rejected a certain thread in my ancestry. While my ancestors do not (as far as I know) include any KKK members, I have come to realize that most of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations in my family hold white supremacist views, and vote for white supremacist candidates, parties, and policies. 

 

There are also some good threads, like an uncle who used his position in the LAPD to fight the Klan after a cross was burned on his neighbor’s lawn. There are moments when my parents have been antiracist, and they certainly taught me those values, although they seem to have abandoned them in the Trump Era. 

 

I clearly have “switched sides” like Segrest, to the right side of history. But also, weirdly, I feel like I was raised there, and instead it is my family and my church and my country who switched sides to the side of evil. I don’t get it. It’s disorienting for sure. 

 

The book opens both with a look at history - the murder and beheading of Native American figure Osceola, and the lynching of Younge by Segrest’s cousin - and with a preview of what will unfold in the book in the battle against the Klan. 

 

My immediate adversaries were Ku Klux Klansmen seeking to restore the apartheid world of my Alabama childhood and neo-Nazis looking toward a cataclysmic future, a globe in which only Aryans would survive their wars to purify the white race. These extremists could operate because they served the purposes of numb and greedy men and their systems built on dark-skinned people’s bones and blood. 

 

At the same time, as I noted, she was at odds with her family. 

 

Then there is my father, who organized a network of segregated private schools all over Alabama. I have made a profession of being better than him. 

 

I kind of feel like that last line applies to me as well. Trying to be better than my ancestors. In a later passage, Segrest mentions the Rev. Wilson Lee, a black anti-racist organizer she worked with.

 

In fact, Wilson Lee and my own daddy were the opposite sides of a coin. My father spent much of my adolescence organizing white private schools all over Alabama. Like Wilson, he spent many of his evenings out of the house at meetings. When I went to Black community meetings in Statesville with Reverend Lee, I had an eerie feeling that my father was out there somewhere organizing the other side.

 

She ends the chapter with this thought:

 

It’s not my people, it’s the idea of race I am betraying. It’s taken me a while to get the distinction. 

 

Truth. 

 

As she should, Segrest notes that the history of the United States has been one of the moneyed classes pitting poor blacks and whites against each other. 

 

In the 1890s all across the New South, northern capitalists and a new southern owning class built a network of cotton mills on the rivers and streams of land only thirty-five years removed from chattel slavery. Into those mills flocked poor whites out of the hills and off depressed farms. They entered into a pact to provide non-union, low-wage labor in exchange for the exalted privilege of being white.

 

This explains a certain amount of MAGA rage. (The average MAGA is above average in wages, below average in education, but there is a working-class MAGA contingent.) They are used to being able to look down on minorities, but as minorities have made gains, it turns out they are now just poor, not exalted whites.

 

These whites had plenty of help in making this illogical leap. Republican Party strategists began telling them in 1972 that the problem was affirmative action programs, niggers getting their jobs. Forget the fact that Black folks were still worse off than whites. And the Klan was around again to focus white discontent. 

 

Sound familiar? That’s exactly the evil lie that Trump and MAGA are selling, with their anti-Diversity, anti-Equity, anti-Inclusion push. 

 

In another horrifying episode involving her father, he complains about the tears shed after the little girls were killed in the church bombing. Young Mab is horrified. 

 

He was wrong, and it made me angry. Like him, I withdrew into silence.

 

So. Many. Times. With. My. Parents. Particularly over the last two decades. They are wrong. Dead wrong. Wrong as in evil in many cases. And it makes me angry. Same thing with the religious leaders who taught me good values they had no intention of living by.

 

Like most adolescents, I was an idealist, and this rupture between my teachers’ lessons and their behavior shook me profoundly. If we could decide who could not come into our church, then it was just a building that belonged to us, not God. It took me years to articulate my disquiet. Didn’t the same act of locking other people out also lock us in?

 

Amen. 

 

There are some great stories told by Rev. Lee in this chapter. And also this one by his wife Alice. 

 

Alice Lee was as brave as her husband. She told me once about a series of threatening calls to their home. She would answer the phone, only to hear a white male’s voice. The first time he called with a string of obscene insults, she said, “That’s your mama.” The second time he called to harass her, she said, “That’s your grandmamma.” The third time she said, “That’s your great-grandmamma.” The fourth time, she said, “I can’t go back any farther than that, or we will be related.” He hung up and did not call again. 

 

That too is the truth of America. We are related, literally, through our bloodlines. As Albert Murray noted, not only do virtually all of the descendants of the enslaved have white genes, it comes from the rich and powerful of that era. 

 

Another interesting story in this chapter reminded me that the current group of would-be book banners is no different from the old one. Back in the day, the Klan showed up to protest supposedly “obscene” books. And yes, some of the books are literally the same books now as then. It is the “same old serpent” as Abraham Lincoln put it. 

 

Segrest also describes the “nighthawks,” the heavily armed security force for the Klan. Then as now, they were also self-proclaimed “followers of Christ” despite standing for the polar opposite of Christ’s teachings. The Klan has always claimed to be “christian.” It just uses the initials MAGA now. 

 

I ran across an unexpected and fascinating connection in this book. I am a huge fan of Rhiannon Giddens, an African-American musician and composer who has incredible musical range. Trained as an opera singer, she co-wrote the opera Omar, which I wrote about on this blog, and has been a champion of roots music, bluegrass, and all the connected art forms co-created by white and black. 

 

So anyway, Segrest talks about her work with the magazine, Feminary, which was a lesbian publication back in the day. One of the names she mentions as being involved was Deborah Giddens. 

 

While I cannot 100% confirm that this is Rhiannon’s mother, it seems extremely likely. I do not know how many black lesbian women activists with that name are from Greensboro, and at that exact time in history, but it seems to me highly likely that this is the same person. That’s pretty cool. 

 

This leads to a discussion of feminism and racism, including the uncomfortable fact that many first wave white feminists engaged in racist rhetoric in arguing for female suffrage. Specifically named are two women that did a lot of good, but, like all heroes, had feet of clay: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Sigh. 

 

But that is part of what Segrest is getting at, is that white activists need to get over ourselves a bit, and recognize that misogyny is also about racism, just like anti-LGBTQ bigotry is rooted in misogyny. 

 

Also important here is another issue that Segrest raises regarding allies who inadvertently place LGBTQ or black people at risk. She mentions her friend Carl, who succumbed to AIDS in the 1980s. 

 

Carl once explained his disillusionment with the community organizing he had done, the ways some organizers would “manipulate people into taking certain steps” without risking the repercussions themselves. 

 

This chapter also has a great discussion of the concept of “bad blood” - something Hitler talked about a lot (“Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world.”) and also that Trump and his goons also talk about a lot. It’s the same old serpent. It is interesting to see how both blame disease on “those people,” seeing Jews and brown people as inherently diseased. This really should be a whole blog post if I get time. It undergirds Trump’s botched response to Covid as well as RFK Jr.’s approach to measles. 

 

And yikes, Tuskegee. The experiment where black men were allowed to die of syphilis due to lack of treatment in the name of “science.” The men were not even told what they were sick from, instead that it was “bad blood.” God. Segrest ties this to our criminal lack of response to AIDS decades later. We let people die because we saw them as the contamination, not viruses. 

 

I also have to quote a conversation at a trial that Segrest recounts. I am thinking I might have to use it myself.

 

“Miss Segrest, are you a l-”

Here it comes, I thought, bracing myself.

“-liberal?” he completed.

“Are you a fascist?” I asked, then walked away. 

 

Mic drop. 

 

I found that the chapters about family were particularly fascinating, probably because of my own political break with my parents and my subsequent estrangement as a result. There is a line in the chapter about her mother’s death that resonated for me.

 

I had dedicated the book [of essays] to Mother “for all she taught me, and all she left for me to learn,” its origins in my mid-adolescent realization that something at home was very wrong and that I could not take the world as my mother taught it to me. 

 

Yeah, that sounds very familiar. 

 

And also this, about how her parents, like mine, dealt unhealthily with their fears. 

 

They stuffed it all into a myth of domesticity that they had dreamed out in the long war years and now saw refracted back from the new television screens.

 

A later chapter centers on a line from Alice Walker, in a discussion of Flannery O’Connor. A great Southern writer whose work nonetheless suffers from unconscious biases. 

 

For Walker, she goes with “Take what you can use and let the rest rot.” This has served as a solid approach to life - and to reading - for me. Perhaps it could serve as a motto for this blog. It certainly describes my relationship to my upbringing. There was a lot of good. And lot of poison. Take what you can use. Let the rest rot. 

 

In another passage later - about the murders at a queer-owned bookstore by the Klan - there are more explicit connections drawn between white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ hate. In fact, the neo-Nazis that are eventually put on trial for the murders are explicit that their “Aryan God” - their own words - compels them to “declare war against Niggers, Jews, Queers, assorted Mongrels, white Race traitors, and despicable informants.” 

 

A more positive conversation takes place between Segrest and her long-time fellow civil rights advocate, Christina Davis-McCoy. The two of them ended up having a falling-out due to a combination of factors that included health issues, but remained allies even after both left the organization. (The updated book has a chapter on where key figures ended up, and Christina contributed her own bit including kind words for Segrest and their cause back in the day.) I want to quote her in an earlier passage:

 

“For me, the real issue is that the hope for the world rests in us, people of goodwill, people of consciousness, working together to do the hard work of reforming, deconstructing, reworking this society.”

 

Indeed. 

 

Segrest contrasts the community she found in marginalized groups, that didn’t really exist among racist whites. She makes a point that very much applies to our present time.

 

[F]ascism was about isolation, about political movements deliberately breaking down the human bonds between people so that they give blind allegiance to a leader or ideology. 

 

The epilogue ties up the memoir portion of the book, and it has a number of lines I liked. 

 

Writing autobiography, if nothing else, has deepened my appreciation for why people write fiction. 

 

And this one:

 

Individuals project onto others the characteristics they cannot accept in themselves, then control, punish, or eradicate the objects of those projections (whether female, dark-skinned, homosexual, poor, Jewish….) Our identities, structured as they are on what we hate, resist, or fear, are disturbingly unstable. This leads to further repression and gives us a curious interest in proliferating the things we oppose. 

 

Some interesting family stuff makes it in here too, like her father telling her that she was too hard on herself in the book. Again, it is weird that they ended up respecting each other at the end. Her sister, likewise, said, “Your memories are your memories, and you have a right to them in your own book.”

 

That particular line hit hard for me, because one of the big disagreements I have had with my parents and my sister is over my right to tell the story of my life. They think they own my memories, and that I have no right to my own perspective if it conflicts with theirs.

 

Another interesting bit came in a passage where Segrest mentions the later lives of some of the people from her early years. In particular, it is fascinating to see how some of the families of her gay friends eventually came to accept them. 

 

One of them, a mother of one of the murdered gay men, actually came out and said, “There should be classes in school, like sex education classes, that teach that people like this may be in your family and how to accept it.” She gave permission for the line to be in the book. 

 

And damn, YES! This is exactly what we need. And exactly why Fundie bigots fight so hard against scientifically accurate sex education, including information about the existence of LGBTQ people, and work to ban books that acknowledge their existence. 

 

This wraps up the first section of the book. 

 

The next section was really fascinating. As I noted above, I disagree with a few of her opinions about the economic issues. For example, I think she falls into the error of many white liberals of thinking that economic insecurity drives racism and the KKK. The problem with that is that the Klan has always recruited from the upper middle class - and MAGA itself has higher than average income. (But lower than average education.) The driver, in my view, is not economic but social. Seeing women and minorities gain some degree of social equality threatens them most. It is the loss of that supremacy that drives racism, rather than pure economics. Otherwise, the poorest whites would be the most racist and MAGA, but they aren’t. 

 

I already mentioned the problem of automation, but I also want to mention here that Segrest seems negative about a service-sector based economy. She is correct that we do not pay our service sector workers adequately, but I also think that it is inevitable if we accept automation that the service sector will be the source of most jobs. And honestly, we don’t really need more manufactured crap widgets. We need teachers and medical care workers and all the other service sector people - the ones who care for others and do the human work that is the most vital in our society. 

 

That aside, Segrest is correct that the solution needs to be to address the problems of predatory capitalism. (Which is not the same thing as free enterprise, commerce, or markets. This could be a whole post, but it is the concentration of wealth - and yes, the means of production - that drives inequality in our society.)

 

These chapters are all about Segrest’s ancestors, as they lived in the midst of the colonialist capitalism of the last 400 years. 

 

My goal, then, is to provide an overview of the history of racism in the United States that can be read in one (long) sitting: a place for beginning students and activists to understand the extensive and cruel history of institutional racism, as well as for others more veteran to review this history in light of the present emergency; to understand how capitalism has worked with racism to write various of us into it differently according to gender, class, sexual orientation, nationality, geography, and skin color. The essay has had an additional value for me in getting a historic perspective on my own family’s emotional dynamics.

 

Early on, in a passage about how Europeans somehow lost their ability to feel empathy and community, Segrest notes the toxic fruit. This goes back a long way - Howard Zinn has speculated that the slave societies of Greece and Rome were a factor. 

 

It is this failure to feel the communal bonds between humans, I think, and the punishment that undoubtedly came to those Europeans who did, that allowed the “community of the lie” to grow so genocidally in the soil of the “New World.”

 

Even a cursory look at the statements against empathy and in favor of genocidal violence coming from the Trump regime reveals these evil roots. As does the swerve of right-wing religion toward treating empathy as a grave sin. 

 

Segrest also notes what many Black writers have for centuries: race is an invention, an excuse to justify exploitation. “White” isn’t a biological category, but a made-up social one. It is very real in the way it affects people, but it is a human invention. 

 

This creation of white identity in late seventeenth-century Virginia is what James Baldwin recognized. The implications are profound: if we white folks were constructed by history, we can, over time and as a people, unconstruct ourselves. The Klan knows this possibility and recognizes those whites who disavow this history as “white niggers,” “race traitors,” and “nigger lovers.” How, then, to move masses of white people to become traitors to the concept of race?

 

That is the question, isn’t it? For a fellow “race traitor” like me, this is ultimately the goal. To convince other white people that white identity has harmed all of us, black, white, and brown. 

 

One of the most interesting parts of these essays is the passage detailing the history of cooperation and antagonism between the abolitionist/civil rights movement and the feminist movement. At times, there was constructive cooperation, and those who recognized that racial justice and gender justice are linked. For example:

 

This radical analysis emerged as a contradiction to the moment when growing industrialism encouraged the “cult of true womanhood,” confining pious, domestic, submissive, and pure - therefore middle class - “true” women to the home at a time when more and more poor women were entering the factory workforce. 

 

The “cult of true womanhood” - aka the “cult of domesticity” - has been devastating in my birth family. But it also arose out of a need to enable idle white women to look down on women of color, immigrant women, and poor women who had to work. Recognizing the role of this cult in enforcing racism and classism is a significant reason I rejected it in my own marriage and family. 

 

Eastern Europeans battled their way into the white working class, while non-Europeans were often excluded from the unions and the economic progress that resulted from labor struggles. Like the “cult of true womanhood” that worked to draw the line around who was a “real woman,” race ideology created a highly elastic “cult of true whiteness”; both of these seemingly biological categories drew their power in part from their volatility and their power to exclude.

 

Yep, the Irish and the Italians used to be “not white” until they were. 

 

The family stuff is fascinating too. Segrest’s mother never really knew her father. He died of malaria complications when she was young, so she never experienced the dark side of him like the rest of her family did. 

 

She loved her daddy the way women love men they never knew except through other people’s stories.

 

And also this:

 

In my forties I have begun to deal with the effects of my sense of abandonment from her absences, my panic from her sickness: issues usually privatized in therapy discussions of “dysfunctional families,” but in fact with historical causes and dimensions, racism not the least of these. 

 

The final main section (not including the brief updates for the second edition) is the lecture to the LGBTQ group. I really loved this for so many reasons, and wrote down a number of quotes.

 

Those of you making your first trip South may already be disoriented by our peculiar blend of hospitality and repression, which comes from having spent 246 of the last 374 years as a slave culture. 

 

Oh man, I know that feeling. It really is a bizarre culture in so many ways, from the casual racism of people who don’t think they are racist, to the hospitality foreign to the West Coast where I am from, to the oddly repressed ways of thinking. Of all the people I know from around the country, it is the Southerners that have been the hardest to connect with. Yes, there are exceptions, but on the whole? 

 

The passage on civil rights and intersectionality is excellent. 

 

The only “special right” that the United States gives to minorities is the right to be the target of genocidal policies. We have only to look at AIDS policy to confirm this truth. Just as we do not want people of color buying the Right’s homophobic argument that we are after “special rights, not civil rights, it is also vital that our movement does not buy the racist backlash to affirmative action propagated over the last two decades by the same Republican forces. When we put both parts of their strategy together, it’s clear that, to them, all civil rights are “special rights” that victimize privileged white men. When any “minority,” whether racial, ethnic, gendered, or sexual, buys into these wedge strategies, we play ourselves for fools and disrupt the possibility of a transformative political majority in the next century. 

 

Sigh. And now we have MAGA, convinced that those poor white males are being discriminated against because women and people of color do a bit better than they used to. 

 

If we follow the ethnicity theory, we perpetuate the belief that the issue of “homophobia” is mainly a matter of personal prejudice, which contact with us will diffuse. We ignore the extent to which the most powerful political and economic forces in this country have an investment in our degradation. Literally, right-wing groups invest millions in slandering us, knowing that these efforts will build up their grassroots base and their funding chests.

 

Sad that this is true, but it very much is. 

 

I also loved that she pointed out how much our culture - descended from the Puritans, the Victorians, and an entire toxic religious tradition of mind/body duality - Gnosticism of the modern age - hates bodies. Because of this, we are able to hate people whose bodies differ from ours, whether in skin color or sexual expression. 

 

We know that in some cultures that do not hate the body, the male and female principles are not so much at war as they are in this culture, and that gender-transgressive people like the berdache in American Indian societies are considered holy people - as we are holy people. 

 

And also this:

 

But we gay people also bring the knowledge that humans are not only “means of production,” however much capitalism seeks to define us that way. We know and insist that our needs include not only the survival needs of food, shelter, health care, and clothing but also dignity, pleasure, intimacy, and love. 

 

The lecture ends on a very positive note, and a call to take up the cause of human thriving for all of us. 

 

In our movement, we see the opportunity in the crisis to do what we should have done twenty-five years ago: increase our determination to keep faith with one another by not tolerating racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, ageism, the fear and neglect of the disabled, or class divisions in ourselves or in our organizations.

…

This reenergized movement will be, in Suzanne Pharr’s eloquent terms, “not a wedge, but a bridge”; not a point of division, but of expansion and connection. To those who insist on denying us our full humanity, we will insist on the sacred humanity of all people. 

 

The final word I will leave from the book comes in the updated Afterword, which gives the end of the story for some of the people in the book. For one of the white supremacists, he ended his life on death row for a stupid anti-Semitic murder spree that ended up killing people who weren’t even Jewish. This came after he had already buried two of his children, and descended into an increasingly psychotic racism and degradation. 

 

Segrest points out the irony for white supremacists. They claim to be worried about “white genocide” - the “great replacement theory,” and other paranoias resulting from their panic about loss of privilege; but they are literally killing themselves and people like them. 

 

White Supremacy IS white genocide. 

 

This is the tragedy of racism and bigotry. It hurts all of us, black, white, brown, male, female, seniors, children, gay, cishet - everyone. It is a poison that can only kill and injure, not heal. It has borne toxic fruit in my birth family, in our nation, and around the globe. 

 

In fact, it is the polar opposite of Christ’s “greatest commandment”: 

 

Love your neighbor as yourself.

 

Neighbor love does not sort people into hierarchies. It does not relegate some neighbors to suffering. It does not look down on neighbors because they are different. It does not set up and maintain systems of oppression, but dismantles them so all can thrive.

 

This is a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it. 

Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel Moniz

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

Let me say at the outset that this collection of 11 short stories is both excellently written and also a bit rough in the subject matter of a few of the stories.

 

So, if you have issues with certain themes, you might either want to skip a story, or at least be forewarned. 

 

I also am going to, as I often do with short story collections, go through each in order. Thus, there will be spoilers. If you want to read the stories first, stop after the next few paragraphs and come back later.

 

The book is about relationships - family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances. It is also about traumatic incidents and how they unite or divide. It is about the less comfortable truths about interracial encounters, whether marriage and parenthood, or in less intimate settings. It is about the vulnerability humans have at transitional times: puberty, pregnancy, illness, marriage, death of a parent, abandonment. 

 

As I mentioned, the book is really well written, and emotionally compelling. The fact that I wanted to yell at various characters is an indication of how real they felt. So if you like good writing, good characters, and believable scenarios, you might like this book.

 

But be warned that some terrible things happen in this book too. 

 

Okay, if you don’t want spoilers, here is where you stop. 

 

***

 

“Milk Blood Heat”

 

The author starts right in with what I found to be the most traumatic story. Ava is a middle-class black girl, who is best friends with Kiera, a white girl. They go so far as to make a blood pact - cut their palms, let the blood make milk pink, then drink it. 

 

The two of them are a bit of trouble together, although probably not more than the average middle schooler dealing with puberty and all the really big feelings of the age. 

 

So much about this story is beautiful. But from the beginning there is the ominous fact that the two of them talk a lot about death and what it would feel like to die in various gruesome ways. 

 

It all goes to hell at a fancy birthday party for a mutual acquaintance, when the girls sneak off to the hotel roof to talk, and Kiera, on a whim, throws herself off it to her death. 

 

Yeah, that’s a rough story to start with. 

 

The thing is, I kind of understand Kiera all too much. To be clear, I am not suicidal, and I don’t tend that direction. (I used to joke as a kid that I was more homicidal than suicidal, but really I’m not violent by nature.) 

 

That said, there is a weird human psychological phenomenon where some of us feel a weird urge to jump from heights. It affects about one-third of people, most of which do not have suicidal ideations or other risk factors for suicide. Christopher Walken actually talked about his experience in one of his films where he felt this. 

 

More recently, and more seriously, a 14 year old boy walked off a cliff hiking down from Mt. Whitney last year. Fortunately, he appears to have recovered well, but scary as hell. (Lack of sleep may have been a factor, but probably also “the call of the void.”) 

 

I love to walk up mountains and love views, although cliffs are not really my vibe. In the course of my many hikes to tall places, like Half Dome, I have experienced this, and it is not fun. I don’t think I am a risk to do anything rash, but the fact that my psyche does this is one reason why I tend to stay well back from the edge. 

 

Anyway, I should mention that the ending of this story is pretty incredible. If you can handle the trauma, it is worth it.

 

“Feast”

 

This is the one where I really wanted to yell at the protagonist. Rayna is a black woman married to a white man, Heath. He has a six-year-old daughter from a prior. Rayna has just had a miscarriage, and is experiencing psychotic issues afterward. Thinks like seeing body parts from her lost baby everywhere. 

 

She needs help, but is masking her symptoms from her husband. Until her stepdaughter, trying to make her feel better, triggers something. 

 

Fortunately, in this story, only the pregnancy is lost. Nobody dies. But damn, poor kid is going to have some trauma. And the ending on this one is frustrating. One worries that later, Rayna is going to harm herself or someone else. I want to shake her and get her some therapy and medication. 

 

And really, if you are experiencing post-partum or post-miscarriage depression, please get help. 

 

“Tongues”

 

This one has some trigger for sexual assault, although it is a lot less traumatic than the first two stories. 

 

Zey is a 17 year old girl who is losing her faith. Largely because her pastor (who is creep-ass too) insists on the subordination of women. 

 

After her younger brother Duck gets bullied due to the rumor that she is “possessed,” she takes matters into her own hands, literally, in a seriously crazy incident that leaves the bully pretty shaken. And he deserves it. 

 

I certainly get the deconstruction stuff, and I have dealt with my own creep-ass pastors over the years. I have also seen how bullies operate. So I was mostly with Zey in this story. 

 

“The Loss of Heaven”

 

All of the stories are from the point of view of women other than this one and a really short one that has more of a group narrator. 

 

Fred is in his 50s and is facing the loss of his beloved wife Gloria, who has chosen not to undergo a second round of radiation and chemo after her cancer returns. 

 

This story is really perceptive, about the ways that many men struggle to process or discuss their feelings. The stoicism, the isolation, the projection of fear and grief onto more “manly” emotions like anger and arrogance. 

 

This is all complicated by Fred’s belief in traditional gender roles. He loses control and cannot deal with that loss well. 

 

Fred is a sympathetic if frustrating protagonist. I can see in him so many from my grandparents’ generation, my parents’ generation, and even my own. 

 

He is unable to truly feel the legitimate grief and his impending loss, and this means he cannot really share with his wife, or anyone else. 

 

The story is also about the loss that comes from putting freedom and wealth over relationships. In the end, those things are mostly meaningless when you lose the one you share your life with. 

 

“The Hearts of Our Enemies”

 

I think this one may be my favorite of the collection. The central relationship is between the mother, Frankie, and her teen daughter, Margot. 

 

Frankie has come close to having an affair with her daughter’s teacher, Mr. Klein. When she breaks it off and confesses, her husband leaves for a while. Her daughter pretty much disowns her, but, as we find out, not because of the affair per se. Rather, it is because her mother lacked the courage to actually have the affair. The sort of yes, sort of no, strikes her as cowardly. 

 

To make things crazier, Mr. Klein starts pursuing Margot - and Frankie finds the love note. 

 

Here too, there is a creative and interesting revenge scene. But it is the psychology of both Margot and Frankie that is the best part of the story. 

 

“Outside the Raft”

 

This is another story about failure to connect, failure to be honest with one’s self. In this one, young Shayla is close to her cousin, Tweet, who has a reputation as a troubled child, probably because her parents are in prison. 

 

Shayla overhears her mother saying that Tweet has “darkness” in her that she hopes doesn’t rub off on Shayla. Since Shayla knows that she has her own dark impulses, she fears that she will not be loved if she is herself.

 

A near drowning at the beach where Shayla panics and nearly kills Tweet in her attempt to get back to a raft confirms to Shayla that she is unworthy of love. There are a lot of “what if?”s in this one. 

 

“Snow”

 

Another interracial marriage story. Trinity is newly married to her husband Derrick. They are going through a rough patch, though, where the sexual connection is struggling and both are feeling that the problem is their fault. 

 

Most of the story takes place at the restaurant where Trinity is a waitress. She flirts with a co-worker, who clearly has a thing for her. 

 

Then she meets Snow, a Vietnamese-American woman, who is stunning and confident, and also a bit daft. They bond over the course of the evening, in part over how their darker bodies are fetishized by men, and which ends up involving both holy water and cocaine - it’s a weird story.  

 

In any event, Trinity has to decide whether to put in the work with her husband, or chase a new experience. 

 

“Necessary Bodies”

 

Hey, so many stories about women with ambivalence! Billie has found herself pregnant. Her partner is supportive, and she is on the fence as to whether to keep the pregnancy or terminate. 

 

In part, this is driven by her narcissistic mother, who is turning 50. She wants an elaborate party. She wants a grandchild. She wants to be the center of attention at all times. 

 

So Billie assumes that she herself will be an unfit mother. There is also the question of the effects a child will have on her life. Is she willing to put in the time to parent? 

 

Her younger sister Violet, who has that naivety and wisdom of the young, suggests Billie pretend that she wants the baby, and see how she feels. 

 

While the story isn’t entirely clear about what her decision is, Billie does come to understand her feelings a lot better. 

 

And Violet is completely correct: none of us are prepared for parenthood. Nobody ever has been. You figure it out as you go, more or less, sort of, and not all the way. Welcome to being human. 

 

“Thicker Than Water”

 

Another one with sexual assault warnings. 

 

Cecelia’s father has died, and his ashes need to be scattered across the country. She travels with her brother, Lucas, from whom he has been estranged since her father’s death, and Lucas’ white girlfriend, Shelby. 

 

As it becomes clear, there is a lot of backstory to this situation, none of which Shelby knows or understands. This is no shade on Shelby, who is actually a great character. She has the usual white girl blind spots at times, but she is good-hearted, and wins Cecelia over pretty well. 

 

But what do you do with a situation like this? Cecelia was sexually abused by her father, and Lucas never forgave him for it. Cecelia seems to have repressed most of the memories, but they come back. Shelby can’t know this, though, so I feel bad for her having to be in the middle of an emotional vomit. 

 

This story too has an ambiguous ending. Will Lucas and Cecelia reconcile? Will Cecelia retreat again into denial, or use her father’s death as a reason to process her own damage? 

 

One hopes so, because both siblings are decent people in a bad situation. And Cecelia and Shelby really should be friends. 

 

“Exotics”

 

This one is a very short vignette, a riff on the Explorers Club, a club that used to eat exotic - even endangered - animals. Neil Gaiman did his own version of this idea, with a very different direction.  

 

This version is from the collective point of view of the staff. And in this one, it is strongly implied that in the final dinner, the club members eat a human infant. 

 

So, trigger warning. It’s also really short. 

 

“An Almanac of Bones”

 

The final story is about a pre-teen girl, Sylvie, who likes to collect animal skulls and other bones. She lives with her grandmother, because her mother is a world traveler who can’t handle parenthood. 

 

Her grandmother is a real hippie sort, with “moon festivals” that often involve nudity and other more adult pursuits. 

 

When her mother shows up for one of these, Sylvie ends up discussing the issue of motherhood with her mother. It is an interesting and somewhat ambiguous conversation. Nothing is resolved, shall we say, but I think mother and daughter understand each other at least a little. 

 

I have a hard time identifying with the mother, because I have always been an involved parent, and can’t imagine just leaving a kid. But that is me, I guess - plenty of others do otherwise. 

 

Those are the stories. As I said, it’s a good book, well worth reading, but it does have some rough stuff in it, so be warned. 

 

The audiobook was narrated by Machelle Williams, who does a good job. No complaints. 

 

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (A Noise Within 2026)

Trivia question for today: What is the best-selling modern play? 

 

Well, if you go by printed copies rather than tickets, the answer is Death of a Salesman, believe it or not, with over 11 million copies sold. 

 

Oh, and the play won a Pulitzer too. 

 

My wife and I decided on short notice to grab tickets for the opening preview of this play at a smallish professional theater in Pasadena. We had never heard of A Noise Within before, but not only does it have a cool name (presumably drawn from one of Shakespeare’s common stage directions), it has a great setup that puts around 300ish people close to the action. 

 

Back when I was in high school, the local kids all read this play in 11th grade. I was homeschooled, and our curriculum mostly tried to pretend that the 20th Century didn’t happen, at least as far as literature was concerned. It was dismissed as “pessimistic” and “devoid of Christian values.” So I don’t even remember if we read a full play for American Literature or not. Perhaps not. 

I have spent some time reading modern plays, including American ones from what now appears to be a golden age of theater - Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller. 

 

Also, my wife and I have enjoyed live theater together since our first date so many years ago. 

 

The Death of a Salesman is, in my opinion, one of the best plays not only of its era, but of any era. It has held up remarkably well. Even if traveling salesmen are not as common as they were, everything else feels fresh and relevant. Substitute a modern occupation for the sales - maybe an Uber driver? - and it could happen today. 

 

Having only previously seen The Crucible, which is a pretty conventional linear narrative, I was surprised at the avant garde elements of this play. It must have seemed fairly daring in 1949. 

 

The story is told through flashbacks, dream sequences, and episodes that take place only in the protagonist’s head. It is easy enough to follow, and every line in the play is necessary and integral to the plot, so it isn’t exactly Godot or Six Characters in Search of an Author. But it does feel modern. 

 

At 77 years old, I figure it is pretty hard to spoil this play. The salesman, Willy Loman, dies at the end. That’s, um, literally in the title. But yes, spoilers ahead. 

 

Willy Loman is an old salesman, in the twilight of his career. Which has never been as successful as he claims or hoped. Rather, it has been a grind, with his family mostly scraping by in a dollar-store version of the American Dream. 

 

Recently, though, he has been under stress - his company terminated his salary and made him commission only, and he is struggling to make sales at his age. (Most of his contacts are dead or retired now.) 

 

Whether due to the stress, or other factors, he is showing significant signs of dementia. He loses track of blocks of time, has been in serious car accidents that he can’t understand how they happened. He talks to himself constantly, and seems to be confused about both the present and the past. 

 

Honestly, as an attorney who works in elder law, he could be any number of my clients or their parents over the years. 

 

He is stuck in his old stories, his old dreams, and most of all, his own misguided self-conception as a “popular” man. 

 

In reality, he is barely on speaking terms with his two sons, he has exactly one friend, and even that friendship is under strain due to his increasingly erratic behavior. He is one misstep away from being fired, and he isn’t making ends meet at all. 

 

We learn as the play unfolds about the generational dysfunction in the family. His father abandoned them to go seek his fortune in Alaska. Later, his older brother Ben also set out, ending up making a fortune in diamonds in Africa. Willy, not a risk taker and loyal to his job, misses a chance to join him. 

 

Denied the success he dreamed of, Willy lives vicariously through his older son, Biff, who is a star quarterback in high school.

 

But Biff flunks math and thus fails to graduate, losing his college scholarship, and finds himself drifting from low-wage job to low-wage job for the next decade and a half. 

 

Something happened after high school that seems to have killed his initiative - something we only find out near the end of the play. 

 

Younger brother Happ grows up invisible, a sidekick to his golden-child brother at most. Ironically, he grows up to be a corporate grinder like his father - more successful than Biff at least. But he also has become a player, having a series of women, none of them serious. Settling down isn’t for him, it appears. 

 

Willy does have a devoted wife, Linda, who has stood by him all his life, and by the end is the only thing keeping him functional. She is getting old and tired, though, and it is clear she is running out of options as his mental state deteriorates. 

 

I guess that is enough to give an idea about the play. There is conflict between Biff (who has returned for a visit) and Willy over Biff’s future. But also, Willy clearly feels guilt which he deals with in an unhealthy manner by projecting it onto Biff, claiming Biff blames him for everything. (Which is the opposite of what Biff is doing.) 

 

Things go from bad to worse, as things do in tragedies, until the final catastrophe. 

 

It is interesting to me that Arthur Miller claimed that the play wasn’t a classic tragedy. Because it really does fit the definition in spirit, if not in the letter.

 

Aristotle essentially set the template we use today to define “tragedy” in the surviving portion of Poetics, although he was describing more than prescribing. 

 

Miller’s play actually meets most of the requirements. The action takes place in a single day (although there are the flashbacks - kind of like the Chorus explaining the history in a Greek tragedy), it occurs essentially in the same place, and it has a single plotline. So, score one for the Three Unities. 

 

It has the essential character arc of a tragedy. A basically decent man has catastrophe come upon him due to a fatal flaw - the Tragic Flaw. In this case, one could describe the flaw as denialism - Willy’s inability to see himself as what he is and his insistence on living in denial and projection. 

 

There is a turning point - as we learn near the end, it is when Biff catches his father with another woman that Biff loses faith not only in his father, but in himself. 

 

The action is mostly driven by relentless fate, the fundamental unfairness of the universe that seems to have it in for the protagonist, no matter what he does.

 

Really, the only missing element of a classical tragedy is that Willy isn’t a “Great Man™” - the king or prince who is brought low. Instead, Willy is the kind of ordinary man that would typically populate a comedy, not a tragedy. 

 

In that sense, it is a tragedy for the American mythology, right? The celebration of the ordinary man, who not only gets his “rags to riches” narrative, but can experience the same tragedy in drama as the powerful. That’s actually a good thing, in my opinion, and part of a longer shift from the centering of the aristocracy to a focus on ordinary people that has been occurring for the last 250 or so years. 

 

It is interesting how Miller found his inspiration for the story. It was definitely grounded in his own family. He had an uncle who was a salesman, who eventually committed suicide. There was the weird competitiveness between Miller and his cousin, which became in the play the relationship of Biff (the cousin) and Bernard (Miller), the jock and the nerd, respectively. The plot may not precisely follow any family narrative, but Miller seems to have drawn much of the characterization from real life. This may be why the characters seem so believable. 

 

Willy Loman really is one of the most fascinating characters in literature. For a deeply flawed man, he is strikingly sympathetic. It is all too easy to imagine inhabiting his psyche. Just like it is all too easy to see family relationships that resemble the Loman family mess. This is a truly personal play, and thus very different from The Crucible with its political focus. 

 

That isn’t to say that politics don’t come into Death of a Salesman. After all, it is unregulated capitalism of the pre-Depression era that has led to the post-war corporatism that grinds Willy down. But all of this is just context for what is mostly a family and personal breakdown. 

 

My wife had an interesting observation that I decided to include here. 

 

Willy’s mental state and behavior at the end of his life very much resembles where we are with Trump right now. The dementia is manifesting in very similar ways. 

 

Now, to be clear, Willy Loman is not much like Trump. Loman is flawed, of course, but he is no sociopath or narcissist. He’s just a guy. Much like many other guys of his era and other eras, who lacked the ability to process his trauma or acknowledge his emotions. But he’s not a bad man. 

 

Trump, of course, is a narcissist and a sociopath, and a rich fuck with a shit-ton of power to harm people and destroy the world. He is one of the most evil men of my lifetime, a person not merely capable of doing evil himself, but of inspiring others to do evil as well. 

 

But there are a lot of similarities right now. 

 

Trump too is stuck in his imaginary past of being “popular” - he seems to think most people love him even as his ratings tank. He lashes out, seeing persecution everywhere, and blaming everyone else for the consequences of his own behavior. He seems to be unable to understand reality. He keeps telling the same old stories, full of delusions of grandeur but also repetitive and increasingly simplified. He forgets where he is, falls asleep, and cannot process new information.

 

It is dementia. And he has it bad. 

 

As I said, Trump isn’t Willy Loman. By any measure, the death of Loman is a true tragedy, as complicated and flawed as he is. The death of Trump will be a sigh of relief, as he will eventually be unable to perpetrate further evil in this world. Few care about the death of the Willy Lomans of the world - they are mourned by family, unknown by most others. Trump will have a huge queue to piss on his grave. Ding dong the witch is dead. 

 

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the story is that Willy comes to see himself as worth more dead than alive. Even though his one remaining friend, Charley, pleads with him that nobody is worth anything dead, the problem is that Willy is somewhat right. Circumstances - the fates, the flawed systems of capitalism, his own stubbornness - make him worth more in economic terms if he is dead. And that is the tragedy not just for the Willy Lomans of the world, but for all of us as society. 

 

I’m sure there are things I wanted to say about this that I forgot to put in, but this should give an idea. It’s a great play that everyone should see. 

 

I should say a few things about the production itself, which was truly top-notch. These are professional actors, but without the huge budgets of the biggest shows. 

 

I loved the theater itself, in which even the cheap seats felt right up on the action. It felt almost as intimate as a theater one-tenth the size. 

 

The sets were fairly minimalist, with the furnishings becoming less and less as the play went on, a metaphor for the diminishment of Willy’s life, until there is essentially nothing left at the end, just the walls of the neighboring apartments closing in on him. 

 

I cannot say enough good about the acting. You expect this from professionals, of course, but this show was a clinic in inhabiting characters. 

 

In particular, Geoff Elliott as Willy was Willy. It was honestly difficult to feel he was performing the part rather than literally being Willy Loman. Apparently Elliott is one of the people running the theater, along with Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who directed this play. A man of many talents, it appears. It was a command performance, one of the finest I have seen on any stage. 

 

I’ll also mention Deborah Strang (Linda), Ian Littleworth (Happ), David Kepner (Biff), David Nevell (Uncle Ben), Bert Emmett (Charley) and Michael Uribes (Howard) as standouts in bringing characters to life. (And no shade on the others who filled out the cast in smaller roles.) 

 

Overall, it was just a brilliant production, and well worth the reasonable price for tickets. This is one of the advantages of living not too far from the Los Angeles area. If you are a local, I’d definitely consider seeing this. 

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie by Maya Angelou

Source of book: I own this

 

I would say that in pop culture, the American poet of the 1990s was Maya Angelou. She read a poem at Clinton’s first inauguration, her books were everywhere, and her face was on television as a pop icon. 

 

This contributed to her reputation as a “pop” poet rather than a serious one. Which, in my opinion, would be a mistake. Plenty of poets of the past were wildly popular, and also met high artistic and cultural standards. Which is why we still read them today. 

 

I also believe that we will be reading Maya Angelou in the future. 

 

As I noted in other posts that I feel in some ways, Angelou’s celebrity detracted from other worthy poets of her time, particularly other black women. This isn’t her fault, of course. Rather, it is an example of the phenomenon sharply satirized by R. F. Kuang: white-dominated publishing and culture tends to consider one person of color enough for diversity, and lets that one person monopolize budgets and publicity and attention. 

 

The cure for this isn’t to throw shade at people like Angelou, but to actively seek out and promote other authors whose works tend to be unjustly neglected. For other black authors, I recommend checking out my Black History Month list. 

 

I own her complete poetry, but hadn’t read that much systematically. I did feature her longer poem, published as a separate work, Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem in one of my Christmas poetry posts about a decade ago. 

 

I decided to start at the beginning and read her first collection. I suppose this could qualify both as a Black History Month and Women’s History Month selection as well. 

 

I haven’t read any of Angelou’s non-fiction yet, so I am not going to give a mini-biography here. I do hope to read her prose in the future.

 

This first collection, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie, was published in 1971, a couple years after her autobiography. 

 

The poems in this collection range from modern to traditional, from really short to at least medium length, and cover topics from nature to politics. I selected my five favorites to feature in this post. 

 

I will start with a nature poem, because I have always loved that topic, and enjoy how each poet treats it. Nature is part of us, just as we are part of nature, and to sever ourselves from nature, as too many humans do, is to do a moral injury to our psyches, which also tends to result in harm to others and our ecosystem as well. 

 

Late October

 

Carefully

the leaves of autumn

sprinkle down the tinny

sound of little dyings

and skies sated 

of ruddy sunsets

of roseate dawns

roil ceaselessly in

cobweb greys and turn

to black 

for comfort.

 

Only lovers

see the fall

a signal end to endings

a gruffish gesture alerting

those who will not be alarmed

that we begin to stop

in order simply

to begin

again.  

 

The end is also the beginning. Death leads to life. The cycle continues. And honestly, I love fall, almost as much as spring. 

 

This next one is such a gem, I get chills every time I re-read it. And when I read poetry, I read it out loud and multiple times, because the music is part of the beauty, and the secrets reveal themselves over time and repetition. 

 

Remembering

 

Soft grey ghosts crawl up my sleeve

to peer into my eyes

while I within deny their threats

and answer them with lies.

 

Mushlike memories perform

a ritual on my lips

I lie in stolid hopelessness

and they lay my soul in strips.

 

This poem is in a simple traditional form, but, like Emily Dickinson, Angelou turns simplicity into profundity. We all have memories like this, ones we tend to not want to remember, ones we cannot escape. Our souls feel these deeply enough that we tend to resort to denial and lies to counteract them. Healing requires acknowledging them and coming to peace in some way with our pasts. 

 

Here is another one I love. 

 

In A Time

 

In a time of secret wooing

Today prepares tomorrow’s ruin

Left knows not what right is doing

My heart is torn asunder.

 

In a time of furtive sighs

Sweet hellos and sad goodbyes

Half-truths told and entire lies

My conscience echoes thunder.

 

In a time when kingdoms come

Joy is brief as summer’s fun

Happiness its race has run

Then pain stalks in to plunder.

 

It’s a bitter little poem, but speaks truth, and finds emotional resonance. It may not be the entire truth, but it is a truth, held in tension with others. 

 

There are a lot of political poems in this collection. I picked this one to feature. 

 

To a Freedom Fighter

 

You drink a bitter draught.

I sip the tears your eyes fight to hold,

A cup of lees, of henbane steeped in chaff.

Your breast is hot,

Your anger black and cold,

Through evening’s rest, you dream,

I hear the moans, you die a thousands’ death.

When cane straps flog the body

dark and lean, you feel the blow,

I hear it in your breath. 

 

I particularly love the use of “thousands’” rather than “thousand.” The death isn’t a thousand singular deaths, but a single death died by thousands. The many sacrificed to white supremacy over the centuries. It’s a compelling word picture, and a great capture of the scope of the struggle. 

 

I’ll end with this one, which strikes a bit close to home. As a white “liberal,” I know I have my blind spots. This is a pretty pointed criticism. 

 

On Working White Liberals

 

I don’t ask the Foreign Legion

Or anyone to win my freedom

Or to fight my battle better than I can.

 

Though there’s one thing that I cry for

I believe enough to die for

That is every man’s responsibility to man.

 

I’m afraid they’ll have to prove first

That they’ll watch the Black man move first

Then follow him with faith to kingdom come.

This rocky road is not paid for us,

So I’ll believe in Liberals’ aid for us

When I see a white man load a Black man’s gun. 

 

*liberal. I find myself unexpectedly being considered a liberal these days, despite being conservative by temperament, simply because I strive for basic human decency. Apparently, seeking racial equality makes one a “liberal.” Indeed, it appears these days that believing that we all have responsibility to other humans is a “liberal” thing, and that the right wing believes empathy is a sin, rather than literally the foundation of Christ-following. What times we live in. 

 

And yes, Angelou is right. We white liberals need to follow, rather than insist on leading. And we need to arm our black brothers and sisters (whether literally or figuratively) by providing them with the resources to fight for their freedom. 

 

I am looking forward to reading more of Angelou’s poems, and encourage everyone to do so.