Exile's Song

Old Mother East Wind,

Blow on down.

Old Mother East Wind,

Blow on down.

Gonna chase my torn boot soles,

As I run from this town. 

Old Mother East Wind,

Blow on down.

Old Mother North Wind,

Hush-a-bye.

Old Mother North Wind,

Hush-a-bye.

Don’t say where I’m goin'

If you can’t tell a lie:

Old Mother North Wind,

Hush-a-bye.

I got nothin’ left now, baby,

But the blues in my sack,

I got nothin’ left now, baby,

Keep your lips on my neck.

Old Mother South Wind,

Dry my Eyes.

Old Mother South Wind,

Dry my Eyes.

Make m fair as a pearl 

For the day I die

Old Mother South Wind,

Dry my Eyes.

Young Lover West Wind,

Hold my hand.

Young Lover West Wind,

Hold my hand.

Ain’t no other true lover 

In the whole damn land,

Young Lover West Wind,

Hold my hand.

I got nothin’ left now, baby,

But the blues in my sack,

I got nothin’ left now, baby,

Cept the dress on my back.

I got nothin’ left now:

Keep your lips on my neck.

Let the cool wind blow over

These scars in my back.

(I made this up this evening and was singing it. No reason to sing it for anyone, so I’ll likely forget the tune, but at least, the words)

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Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

"From his deepest soul, he that hour loosed and parted from every hope in the life that now is, and offered his own will an unquestioning sacrifice to the Infinite. Tom looked up to the silent, ever-living stars,--types of the angelic hosts who ever look down on man; and the solitude of the night rung with the triumphant words of a hymn, which he had sung often in happier days, but never with such feeling as now."

Let me tell you what's wrong with Uncle Tom's Cabin, because it's one of those books people feel the need to hate. Uncle Tom's Cabin is not gorgeously written. It sermonizes frequently. The book reinforces some terrible black stereotypes: the 'happy darky', the 'picanniny', the tragically beautiful mulatto, the Mammy nurse. Uncle Tom's Cabin draws on flat, melodramatic characters at the expense of human emotion. Uncle Tom's Cabin is terrifically unbalanced, terribly bigoted, and unredeemably out of date. It is less a classic than an artifact.

Now, let me tell you, please, why I loved reading it anyway.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was not an angel. She was simply a woman who saw that a thing was wrong in the world, and wanted to change it. She wasn't a great stateswoman or a practical reformer, and knew nothing really about how to, nuts and bolts wise, fix the problem of slavery. What she did know was the feeling of slavery. And for all that we now dismiss the book as sentimental, melodramatic and campy, it touched people when it was written - in fact, it was the second highest selling book after the Bible, and earned Stowe's reputation as one of the great abolitionists around the world. The book wounded people - people who did not know what to think were convinced by it, people who disagreed with Stowe were enraged by it. This book, in a way that few simple novels have been, is a mover of history.

And, the thing is, if you accept the sentimentality for what it is, and accept the book's shortcomings, this is still a really moving book. Tom is one of the most unabashedly Christ-like characters in the history of literature. Eva is a poignant, beautiful allegory of Christian thought. Legree channels the soul of evil in a way that is deeply disturbing. The trick is to think of this less as a novel about real people, and more like an allegory, a sort of Puritan version of the religious vision. The characters are types, sure - but that's because they represent ideas, not personalities. And you can feel the fervent hope of a woman who desperately wanted to do her part behind those ideas. It was an imperfect part, sure, and even bad in it's way, but it was noble and full of love. In some sense, the measure of a successful social movement is when we can look at it's founders and think they were backwards.

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Ghost Ships

The American Scholar - A Dark Page in Our History - By Marcus Rediker

The slave ship is a ghost ship, sailing around the edges of our consciousness. We pretend it is not there, but it haunts us. It also challenges us: a telling test of any society that considers itself to be a democracy is its ability to face the dark pages of its history. Do we dare in this post-9/11 age to look back on the terror that was instrumental to the making of America?

I found this reference in 3quarksdaily. The quote comes from a speech given by the author of a new book documenting the American slave trade (this is the 200th anniversary of it's being abolished, here, apparently), but the idea of a ghost ship was so evocative, and the more I consider it the more perfect. The quintessential ghost ship tale in English literature is probably the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and it speaks to the point that Mr. Rediker does with a certain poignancy. The Mariner and his crew are accidentally driven into the waters of Antarctica, where they suffer until they are led out by a great albatross, a sort of tutelary spirit there - only as they enter warmer seas, the Mariner kills the albatross with a crossbow. Later, he is forced to wear the body of the bird about his neck, as a representation of the weight of his sin. Leaving aside the finer points of literary narrative, this struck me as such a powerful literary narrative, that we, as a nation were carried from the squalor of the early colonies largely on the wings of the unwilling slaves - not only in the south, where they had plantations, but in the North where Massachussets, for instance, was founded on the infamous Triangle trade, producing molasses to be made into rum, from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. We expanded westward by trampling on the Native Americans, and more or less enslaving wave after wave of 'albatrosses' - the Chinese immigrants that built the transcontinental railroad, the immigrants that we stuffed into the squalor of cities and used to enrich the pockets of factory owners, and establish our industrial might, the Irishmen in the civil war, taken straight from the dock of the immigration ship to the dock of the military ship, then shipped back a few months later on the same ships in coffins. This is what our nation was built on, this is, more or less, the only reason our nation survived and prospered, and we wear these sins about our necks, always travelling onward, but never resting. Like the mariner, I do not think we can recreate the things we have destroyed. I don't believe in restitution for the ancestors of slaves, not because I don't think they are owed something, but because any payment you could give would be an insult to what we took by force, so long ago. Redemption is a process of love, mercy, forgiveness. It's not something that can be 'made right', anymore. In one of the most famous ships, the Mariner's ship happens upon the ship where Death and Life-in-Death play at dice, to claim the souls of the men on the ship. Death wins the lives of the crew, Life-in-Death wins the soul of the mariner, the guilty one. And the Mariner is cursed, forever, to wander the earth and tell his tale to instruct the world's people with his history. America, if it cannot man it's ghost ships, it's ships of pain and injustice and sorrow, is doomed to the same fate - to live on as a mockery of life, as a mockery of what it is meant to be, to serve as a warning instead of a beacon.

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