A Meaningful August 28th

It never occurred to us until this year!  Maybe that’s because it was a particularly significant anniversary, the 50th.  Fifty years since the peaceful March on Washington of a quarter of a million people.   Maybe it was because some of the fog of the day lifted and we were more aware of what was happening in the world.  I don’t know.

 But we finally realized that Natalia died on the same day, August 28^th, that Martin Luther King gave his “I Have A Dream” speech.  Somehow that was meaningful to us.

I have always loved his speech.  I have loved not only the content, but the eloquence.  In addition to the more famous lines, I love his declaration that he had come to Washington to “cash a check”.  He maintained that when the Declaration of Independence defined life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the unalienable rights of all men, it was, in essence, a promissory note – a promissory note for these rights, given to all Americans, black as well as whites.   What a powerful analogy!  Particularly when he went on to say that America had defaulted on this note with respect to its citizens of color.  Further on he stated his belief that the bank of justice was not bankrupt.  He was more hopeful than I often feel. 

Interestingly enough, Trista and I came to the realization about the date independently of each other.  While riding to the Zumba class she teaches and I attend, she asked if I were by any chance writing anything about slavery.  Before I could respond she went on to say that she had just realized that Natalia’s date of death corresponded to Martin Luther King’s speech. 

I find it fascinating that she asked about slavery, not Civil Rights.  You’ve guessed, haven’t you?  I was writing something about slavery. 

What follows is just something that came to mind when I was thinking about Martin Luther King’s dream for his children: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”


(Note:  I made aboslutely no attempt at historical accuracy.  I just wrote.)

I have no choice.  Her cruelty is eating at her just like the fleas eat at the field dogs.  Those poor dogs scratch until they have patches where their hair is gone and the flesh underneath becomes a raw, nasty looking sore.  The fleas do not stop.  It is as if they have the ability to think and plan to torment the dogs without end until all of the dogs’ fleshy tissue has been laid completely bare.   

I am no longer able to calm her when she flies into her rages. Her rants do not allow her to hear my voice, my attempt to help her calm herself. Anyone in her presence at the time suffers verbal lashings.  Of course the verbal castigation is nothing for them to withstand.  They have been trained since birth to accept whatever is said to them, without reply.  Unless that is to say “Yes’m or “Yes Sir”.

The beatings are what worry me, as it most certainly does them.  The anger of her soul gives her uncanny strength, not usually found in a woman, much less one as small as she.  She is unfulfilled unless she sees the blood spread of the one being flogged, until the black skin she so despises is covered over with the bright red of fresh blood.  And if that blood oozes from the body of a child, it makes no difference to her.  Her hatred does not see child versus adult.  It does not see male or female.  It does not see culpable versus innocent.  It sees only black.  Sadly she sees nothing of the inner blackness that is her heart.  She sees only the black that is another’s skin.

Until recently they understood there was no hope their children would escape a life sentence in the prison called slavery.  But they did have hope that the children would live; even though they might be sold at auction and would be lost to their parents this side of heaven, they would not have to watch them be randomly maimed and/or killed in their childhood.  It was the loss of this hope that drives me and them.  It was, at first, an unspoken realization, a common bond, a collective goal of saving children’s lives, something that needed no words. 

Thus I began to consider and quietly learn how to try to help some safely reach a northern state where slavery does not exist.  They will take the journey other runaway slaves have traveled.  If they cannot go together as family units, I will find a way to send the children.  I have to.  I just have to.

More accurately, we have to.  I will do this with and for my black male friends with whom I played until about age 12.  Their mothers helped care for me, as much as Mother did.  I grew to love them as I loved her.  I grew to love my play mates as I would have loved the brothers I did not have.  I did not understand when I was told I could no longer be Jim’s friend; I was to consider him my personal slave.  I would forget and do things for myself, or even for both Jim and me.  That would particularly draw her wrath.  I was to remember that I was Jim’s master now!  Did I understand?  I had best not forget again! There was no allowance for my being solicitous on Jim’s behalf.  Perhaps if I had had siblings I might have felt differently.  But Jim was my brother, along with several others our same age, although I was closest to him.  We were a family, much more so than my “real” family, meaning my parents.    

It will be especially difficult because their master, my father, was not known to be an unfair or harsh man. And I believe help is first extended to those whose masters are merciless.  What people do not know is the control some women of the plantations hold over the affairs of the slaves.   And my mother’s society friends never see the heartless woman who is mistress of this plantation.   She is careful to hide her true nature.  (I suppose she does so in the same way Jim and the others have learned to conceal their intellect, their ability to think, to reason, to listen and to learn.  Not that they have found it to be so very challenging.  After all, Mother considers it absolute truth that they are inferior intellectually and therefore fails to look for the possibility that she could be wrong about their abilities.)  Given the opportunity, Jim is only one of many of them who could have been my fellow classmate. Being innately more intellectually gifted than I, he would have been the better student.  Should Mother hear me admit such a thing, there would be no sparing my black family and friends from her brutality.  I sincerely believe that, in her mind, I could more rightly curse God Himself openly than to even think such a thing. 

And poor Mother; would it not be her very undoing to know that it was at the northern university she and Father sent me where I learned there were others who felt as I did.  I was free to not only have my own opinions about my black family/friends, but to give them voice.  I could express my deep hatred and complete lack of understanding of this institution called slavery.  I could denounce my birthright to hold slaves; my right to prosper from their unending labor.    

It was my plan, upon returning home, to begin to work alongside Father, to encourage him to allow the Negro children to attend a school here on the plantation.  I had other grand plans, but Father up and died suddenly, necessitating my immediate and permanent return to the plantation.  It was obvious within the first moments of my homecoming that any good once evident in Mother’s heart was completely gone.  In addition to the underlying need for a feeling of superiority she now had self-pity to add to her self-aggrandizement toolbox, used so skillfully to fulfill her desire to control all matters. 

Therein is my problem.  The widely held opinion is that females are the gentler sex; that they hold in check the callous vindictiveness of males.  But it has been my experience that hatred and evil are not constrained by whether or not one is man or woman.  Rather, very ironically, they are bound only by an open heart!  A heart that is more selfless than selfish.  Such a heart allows no access.  It is safeguarded by a tendency and/or willingness to submit to compassion, to kindness, to benevolence.

The heart of anyone at any point in history can be wholly filled with, and consumed by darkness; the darkness that fights against a spirit of generosity, against caring about and for others, against living life without the presumptions of superiority and special favor bestowed by God.  Should Jim and I, and our other co-conspirators succeed in sheltering the children, in helping them to survive, it will be in spite of such hearts.  And it will be wholly dependent on humble hearts uncluttered by such malice; hearts willingly made vulnerable to hurt on behalf of another.  I pray for enough such hearts, both during this perilous undertaking, and for future generations of children I will not live to see.  I pray for hearts that see slave children in the same light as white children are seen.  Were we to be surprised and find many, I still have to wonder just how long it will be before hearts like Mother’s can be changed.  If ever.