"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and conservation science with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone.
"Sumer is icumen in" at 23:59 this evening, to be precise. Still, I rather doubt that any of the 8 North American members of the Cuckoo family will be heard singing outside my window on the Solstice, lhude or otherwise. However, if I were in the desert southwest - and a bit gullible - I might hope to hear one of them go "Beep Beep!" Yes, the family Cuculidae includes cuckoos, roadrunners and anis.
We have plenty of "Wile E" Coyotes hereabouts, though. Lhude howl awoo?
When Emily was 5, we read The Hobbit. She loved the Unexpected Party, but was sad about Thorin Oakenshield. At six we read The Phantom Tollbooth and Treasure Island. When she was 7 and Elias 4, we read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass together. Viv and Emily started the Narnia series last year and now she reads it on her own.
As we begin a summer that will see Emily's eight birthday and Elias' fifth, the three of us are reading The Black Arrow: another Robert Louis Stevenson classic, illustrated once again by N.C. Wyeth and a story I absolutely adored when in 3rd and 4th grade.
Adventure tales from 100 years ago challenge modern children and parents with complex dialog and sentence structure. Murder, revenge, and young people in danger and make for challenging and complex subject matter. You would not expect a 2nd grader to venture into these woods on her own, let alone with her little brother in tow. But with an adult reader to light the way, to answer questions and to process whatever transpires, it is a journey they are thrilled to take.
"I had four blak arrows under my belt, Four for the greefs that I have felt, Four for the nomber of ill menne That have opressid me now and then.
One is gone; one is wele sped; Old Apulyaird is ded.
One is for Maister Bennet Hatch, That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch.
One for Sir Oliver Oates, That cut Sir Harry Shelton's throat.
Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt; We shall think it fair sport.
Ye shull each have your own part, A blak arrow in each blak heart. Get ye to your knees for to pray: Ye are ded theeves, by yea and nay!
"JON AMEND-ALL of the Green Wood, And his jolly fellaweship.
"Item, we have mo arrowes and goode hempen cord for otheres of your following."
Emily, of course, loves the fact that there is a heroine in the story, brave and true, who spends much of the first part disguised as a boy. Elias likes to show that he can anticipate what will happen next or that he remembers a key piece of the story. There is plenty of moral ambiguity in The Black Arrow, as even the hero steals a ship without regard for how it may impact its owner (though in the end, he makes amends). The unfamiliar language and setting are animated when they hear the words read aloud and can get the sense from the sound of them, much as they have learned to do in attending Gilbert & Sullivan and Shakespeare productions. It is like learning to float on the surface of deep water and acclimating to that element before ducking beneath the waves to see what is below. It asks much of them and of me, but all three rise eagerly to the challenge.
Morgan Bulkeley, Sr. is one of the Berkshires' greatest treasures. During the 1960s and 1970s, his "My Berkshires" column in the Berkshire Eagle animated the land, people, history and ecology of this special place with the keen eye of the naturalist and the sensitivity of a writer who studied with Robert Frost. In 2004, the cream of more than 750 of these articles was lovingly edited by another great local writer Jon Swan and illustrated by local artist Morgan Bulkeley, Jr. Published as Berkshire Stories, it abounds in exquisite story-telling and fascinating details about the history, nature, people and conservation of our region.
"Have you ever held a spark of life in your palm? One ten-year old boy will never forget it. He was plying a butterfly net about the honey-suckled lattice of the summer cottage when all at once he had 'the tiny, pulsing, burnished green-gold gem' that is a ruby-throated hummingbird. He rushed to show it to the one who had given him his own spark. Little fingers opened gingerly, and the mystery, held for a moment, vanished into summer air, gone but not forgotten..."
I highly recommend you purchase a copy. This blog can only aspire to write as evocatively about the topics that Bulkeley so masterfully reveals.
Nothing like a ghost town in the desert to get me thinking on Ozymandias:
"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This place was called Kolmanskop and it lies in the restricted diamond area or Sperrgebiet about 10 kilometers inland from Namibia's sand swept port Luderitz. In the early 1900s it was a German mining town, complete with wooden skittle alley, and now the dunes rise to the rafters.
A good place to explore if you are in the neighborhood. There is precious little else you can do on the road from Aus to Luderitz except look for wild desert horses and drive around the sand that drifts across the tar road. There is, or used to be, an L-shaped pool table in a German bar back up the road in Keetmanshoop that I have fond memories of playing.
Strap on those brass goggles and gas up the zeppelin, honey. The 5th edition of Cabinet of Curiosities is heavily into Steampunk. What could be more curious than a branch of speculative fiction spawning an entire alternative lifestyle for retro, do-it-yourselfers with a flair for dark wood and brass rivets?
Steampunk is a fantasy genre where form trumps function and sword canes co-exist with ray-guns and pith helmets. It is also a style of art and design. The Boston Globe describes it this way:
"Steampunk has its roots in science fiction literature, where it describes a corner of the genre obsessed with Victoriana and the idea that the computer age evolved alongside the industrial. Steampunk stories, which started appearing with regularity in the 1980s, eschew clean and orderly visions of the future in favor of gas-lighted streets, steam engines belching toxic smoke, and dastardly villains inventing strange technologies. Dirigibles rule the air, and the upper classes employ clockwork servants to serve their meals."
Steampunk tips its hat to the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as well as Twain, Lovecraft and, one assumes, Frank L Baum, whose oeuvre has many beloved Steampunk elements (Tin Man, Tik-Tok and those great green goggles). Films like Wild Wild West and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, while box office duds, are classics of Steampunk sensibility. 19th-century inventors Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison are often cited as Steampunk idols, but I would think there would be ample room in the pantheon for Alexander Graham Bell:
"Alexander Graham Bell Note the name and note it well Father of the modern age His inventions are all the rage Of course there was the telephone He’d be famous for that alone But there’s 50 other things as well From Alexander Graham Bell"
From there you can follow links to the wondrous creations of AlexCF, a retrofuture cryptozoological assemblage artist, who will be more than happy to show you his wares. His necropathic spectregraph (shown at left and auctioned at eBay) looks particularly handy for all you spiritualists.
If you are really having trouble with gaslight poltergeists, then Ectoplasmosis! recommends you call a Steampunk ghostbuster. The gentleman in question (pictured at right) was spotted at the 2007 San Diego Comic Con last summer.
"Beautiful, weird, hand-machined -- this is not just art attached to an existing quartz movement, but a fully realized working pendulum clock out of brass and rice paper. The particular clock's inspiration is based on the calligraphy of the numbers."
Steampunk is where the cool kids from shop class go to play. The grand master of this gears 'n goggles breed of engineers is Jake Von Slatt, proprietor of The Steampunk Workshop where keyboards get tricked out in electrolytic etched brass and fellow DIYers take his ideas and run with them.
The most recent elaboration on a Von Slatt theme is this much envied MacMini monitor and keyboard, pimped out in Steampunk glory by Dave Veloz.
All it needs is a Steampunk furnace mouse with glowing LED coal!
If you are not handy at hand-tooling machinery, you can still get your Steampunk on with all sorts of fanciful garb through the Aether Emporium.
The Heliograph profiles some Steampunk fashion pinups from photographer Kat Bret if you are in need of further inspiration.
Nor is the Steampunk aesthetic restricted to some Anglo-American tech-nexus. From Uruguay, Marie shares some fantastical Steampunk illumination devices.
Given all this mad tinkering, it is not surprising that Penny Dreadfully Steampunk is all the rage at Esty: purveyors-at-large of all things handmade.
Going Like Sixty observes that late boomers, like Steampunk itself, are "suitably old, but mysteriously advanced."
You can get your very own Pavoni PG-16 Romantica 16-cup Espresso Machine in brass for just under 1K at Amazon - a must have for the Steampunk dream kitchen - or maybe you can get your gauntlets on this Etienne Louis, mechanical hedgehog looking design (at right), previewed at ESP Visuals. Actually, it looks even more like a WWI era anti-ship mine to me, but maybe the coffee is just that potent.
Janice Brown of Cow Hampshire is a collector of Granite State historical oddities, and for this edition of Cabinet of Curiosities she offers up a cautionary tale of the perils of 19th-century self-doctoring in Hanover NH: Death by Sponge in 1851.
"The more I research this old framed piece of embroidery, the more I wish I could "hear" all the stories of the inmates who had a hand in making it. I fear my telling of just this part of the story is only the beginning of some tales unlike any heard before. Everyone says "if walls could talk" but this is a case of wishing that individual threads sewn into a simple cottage scene could tell the story of the individual who stitched the thread into the picture."
"There is a beautiful surfeit of things of brass and wood, and apparently the museum itself is reached through a medieval church with beautiful flying machines (such as the Eole bat-plane...) hanging from intricately carved ceilings. A visual feast; where beauty and science are dramatically entwined, where history smells of varnish, tarnish and soot, and where three-wheeled steam carriages rest proudly next to hand-cranked cinomatographs."
Louis Roderiguez of ...What I Know Now explains the primary function of the Smithsonian to his UK readers as preserving the Junk of the Nation that defines a people. That sounds very much like the function of my house, except it preserves the junk that defines me.
The Museum of Hoaxes shares this Victorian poster for S. Watson's American Museum of Living Curiosities, complete with Australians in what could only be described as their native dress if they were from an alternate universe (click to enlarge).
And then there is the private collection of China's Dr. Liu Dalin, a professor and sociologist at Shanghai University, who is also curator of more than 1,000 objects housed in The Ancient China Sex Culture Museum.
"...if like me, you like to collect things from the natural world, a search for “Coyote Skull” brings back about 91,300 images. Searching for a skull to put into your very own cabinet of curiosity? Searching “Coyote Skull Retail” brings back over 66,000 sites, but you may want to further qualify your search terms. As of my typing this, there are nearly twenty different human x-ray images for sale on eBay (over a dozen of them in eBay Stores). In fact, on eBay, you can find things like crocodile teeth, meteorites, or the disarticulated skeleton of various small mammals. Building your own Wunderkammer is just a PayPal account away...."
Some people use the World Wide Wunderkammer to amass virtual collections of the most remarkable things, like Ethan Persoff's 21 image assortment of paper-based condom envelopes from the 1930s-1940s. If any were made in China, no doubt Dr. Dalin could find a place for them in his Shanghai Museum.
Also at EP.TC, a collection of comics with problems that includes my personal favorite: a 1956/1962 Planned Parenthood comic about birth control called Escape from Fear with the lowbrow lead-in: "Joan and Ken Harper's marriage was on the rocks - because they loved each other!"
Jessica Palmer, whose delicious blog Bioephemera makes her the ideal host for the 6th Edition of CofC in April, shares some of mixed-media artist Ron Pippin's Steampunk creations in this post From the Mad Taxidermist's Attic.
Famous Ankles discovers that the Forbes Magazine Building on 5th Avenue houses Malcolm Forbes' renowned toy collection.
"The first stuff was toy boats. Magnificent, wondrous, perfect toy boats. Hundreds of them. They were exclusively not modern. I didn’t notice anything that looked less than 50 years old. Most looked much older than that. I got the feeling that these were Malcolm’s and, being raised a child of wealth, he got every one he ever wanted (and he wanted a lot of them). They were shown with very few placards, but mostly as if to say: “I got a zillion of these things, here they are in bulk. My collection is the greatest in the world!”
And, by George, it probably is. They were mostly steamship-type boats and they looked like they had a complete life and a wonderful time on small ponds throughout NYC over the years. None of them, at least offhand, looked like a true collector might want them: absolutely pristine and without blemish. Instead, they looked like they had been played with a lot by a boy (or a bunch of boys) with every intention of enjoying them to the max."
L.H. Crawley of The Virtual Dime Museum has just the sort of post that I had in mind when I launched this carnival. She proudly displays samples from her Cabinet of Curiosities: Yellowstone Park Stickers, circa 1940, part of a collection of sixty souvenir stickers brought back by her grandparents who made a trip there from New York by train.
"The Dom Museum’s Kunst und Wunderkammer is the lovingly recreated and restored collection once belonging to the villainous Archbishop Wolf Dietrich. Wolf Dietrich held the title of Archbishop from 1587-1612, and it was he who tore down the original Salzburg Cathedral after it was ravaged by fire, and had it rebuilt in baroque style. Today the magnificent Cathedral is the centerpiece of Mozart’s hometown (and the site of the troubled composer’s baptism). But in the late 1500s, the archbishop’s decision to tear down the damaged cathedral enraged the citizens of Salzburg. He showed complete disregard for valuable sculptures and gravestones, destroying them all. His construction crew didn’t stop at gravestones, as they plowed up the entire cathedral cemetery, unearthing and dumping the bones of the dead atop the debris. The citizens had their revenge years later, when Wolf Dietrich was arrested and imprisoned over salt mining rights; the very salt mines which gave Salzburg its namesake and 16th century riches."
March is when most of the United States springs forward with Daylight Savings Time, so be sure to recalibrate your TDAH-meter and remember that not everything that happens in alternate Steampunk time lines stays in alternate Steampunk time lines...
And that concludes this Steampunk-inspired edition of Cabinet of Curiosities. If you like what you've seen, why not check out the links to previous editions of Cabinet of Curiosities here? Be sure to wind up your rosewood laptops for the April edition, hosted by Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera. Get out your collection of mechanical mice, dust off your rattle bags and submit your entries for the 6th Cabinet of Curiosities directly to Jennifer at cicada AT bioephemera DOT com or via the handy pneumatic submission form. Let me know if you'd like to take a future edition out for a spin and I'll make sure there's plenty of coal in the hopper.
And if you need any more convincing that Alexander Graham Bell was ever so Steampunk, just crank up your graham-o-phone and sing along with RT...
"...Graham Bell, Alexander, It is tantamount to slander To call him just a scientist Why his inventions top the list Edison, he was a thief And Tesla nuts beyond belief But Alexander was a gent So philanthropic, so well meant
Founded Science Magazine Wrote a book for kids Because he was a caring fellow Gave a hand to Helen Keller Of course there was the telephone He’d be famous for that alone But there’s 50 other things as well From Alexander Graham Bell..."
I am in a Whitman kind of mood today - expansive, contemplative, savoring a dish of hope seasoned with a touch of melancholy.
Perhaps for me there is also a leavening of nostalgia, both in its original meaning of the pangs of homecoming and also the yearning for an irretrievable past. I get this way as the seasons turn, and more so this Spring as I turn 40. There are other, outer reasons to feel like this now, as we look forward to my Grandmother's memorial service this summer and work toward a conservation outcome for the land our family is privileged to share.
This picture of me taken ten summers ago with my cousin's daughter Charlotte brought "Leaves of Grass" to mind, and one passage in particular that seems worth reproducing in full.
"A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them; It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, And here you are the mother's laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues! And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men? What do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprouts show there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."
- Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Better to have this long view, to have a disposition of hopeful green stuff woven. I watch my own children stretch and grow like vigorous young shoots, leaves unfurled and reaching for the sky. I feel my toes grip the ground more tenaciously, the fixed foot to their widening arcs - but that metaphor belongs to another poet, and one who also forbids mourning:
"If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home."
A challenge from far Mississippi, And a blogger so daring and hip, he Asks us for a meter most skip, we Bemoan a sestain, Beg for limericks again, And what muses for his readership be!
More: Having taken on this fiendish AAABBA rhyme scheme meme, I've been gleefully scattering poems at the blogs of others (and some more from others have started popping up here in various comment threads as well). I'll add links to my verses as they come online...
Unlooked for gift from Lori I see, Such praise from a poet in East Tennessee, (Quite undeserving though I be) If you're seeking a secret admirer This Valentine's Day, you should hired her, You'll be in cross-stitches, just take it from me!
There once was a cow from New Hampshire A poet inspired, for damn sure A rarified wit, and a ham, her But Sitemeter gives me a pleurisy: It says that she comes from New Jersey! Perhaps that's to confound the spammer.
For Randy, whose Genea-musing, Illuminates posts of his choosing, Conducive to eager perusing, So now let us praise, His most generous ways, It is he we should all be enthusing!
Craig Manson, the Geneablogie, Though he lives where the gold rivers ran free, Now prospects for lore in ancestry. With his posts he reveals, Old wounds that he heals, A service to kin and to country!
A Man with Dolls is Tom MacEntee, With curios diverse and plenty, To my cabinet proudly some sent he. And with captions he's deft, For rhyme has a gift, Erato herself must have sent thee!
I must confess the Apple of my eye Is not Macoun, nor yet a Northern Spy, But she who's tree I often wander by, It's clear she's given family roots and wings, And though it's she to others praises sings, There beats a noble heart, let none deny!
Unique among buffs is this fine Charlottes-villain, He's unmoved by manoevers, knows that war's about killin', Black confederate myths to debunk he's most willin'. A fresh look at our past offers Civil War Mem'ry, (And fresh templates as well, he's gone through 43), His High School is blessed, makes me wish I were still in!
Oh, dinner at Dum Luk's, a feast of delights, You'll flip for his fruitcake, in single serve bites, Which I can attest, for Dum Luk's overnights. His way with a wok is a wonder to watch, He marmalade laces with single malt scotch, You're bound to find something you like when he writes!
Three cheers for Bill West in New England! And his penchant for distant kin minglin! (Though this meter his tongue sets a tinglin') A droll wit, ever wry, Genealogist spry, So with poetic praise him I'm singlin'!
Writing this series of posts on race and responsibility came on me quite unexpectedly, and I am not at all sure where it may lead. I wanted to talk through some of what it prompts me to think and feel, and so I called my father. I wanted to ask him about one of his experiences during the Civil Rights era, when he was an Episcopal seminarian in Massachusetts and one of his activist classmates was murdered in Alabama.
Religion is not a regular topic of conversation in our family. Both of my parents came from families of faith, and yet neither my sister nor I was raised in a particular denomination, or even went to a formal church. I attended an Episcopal boarding school and a Quaker college, but in neither case were these decisions based on their religious character. Today Dad composes and orchestrates choral music that reflects a deeply individual and organic faith. I have vivid childhood memories of the Martin Luther King service he would hold in the school chapel, back in the days when he was a headmaster and before there was a National Holiday, that featured Stevie Wonder's Happy Birthday and my father's clear tenor singing Abraham, Martin and John:
Anybody here seen my old friend Martin? Can you tell me where he's gone? He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young I just looked around and he's gone.
Dad holds a B.D. from what is now Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, but chose not to be ordained at graduation. I asked him if his choice was influenced by the death of his fellow seminarian and what he drew from that experience.
My father replied that the decision not to get ordained was made practically before he went to Seminary. While a Yale undergraduate, he studied religion and was a deacon with chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr. Bill Coffin was Dad's lifelong mentor, and the one who encouraged him to apply for the seminary fellowship because it offered the space to engage with the very questions of spirituality and social justice that made my father question whether he should become a minister. Dad went on to say that the murder of his classmate in 1965 "confirmed in my mind that the church had to get out of its sanctuary and that as a layman I could do more...and people should speak from the position of faith to do so."
Dad describes his own growing activism and the late night conversations with his fellow seminarians in which "we were honing our positions and our hearts on what had to be done." He remembers his classmate Jonathan Daniels as a complex man, and totally non-violent. "I was in a very different place than he was, in terms of active activism and spirituality" he told me. "In his liturgical way he could sing the Magnificat and feel as if that was his calling, a true Epiphany, and I wasn't there yet. I was studying religion rather than living it the way he was. I was much closer to the activism, on the verge, but there were too many easy rationalizations for not going down to Selma. They weren't about self-protecting - I was not as concerned about personal harm, though perhaps I should have been - but felt I had obligations at school...When he went to Selma with the 1st wave, a couple of seminarians went with him..."
Jonathan Daniels responded to Martin Luther King's March 7th, 1965 call for clergy of all faiths to come down and support their efforts of voting rights marchers in Alabama. Realizing that a brief visit by outsiders was not a sufficient expression of solidarity, he and fellow seminarian Judith Upham returned to Cambridge only long enough to request permission to return to Alabama for the rest of the semester. After taking his exams in May, Daniels went back a third time to continue his work integrating a local Episcopal church, living with a black family while he tutored school children and helped register black people to vote.
He and a group of nearly 30 protesters were arrested on August 13th, 1965 while picketing white-owned stores in Fort Deposit, Alabama. All but five juvenile members of the group were held in the Hayneville jail for a week in incredibly cramped, fetid conditions until they were released but without transport back to Fort Deposit. Daniels, along with a Catholic priest and two young black women, walked down the street to Varner's Grocery Store to get soft drinks, and were met on the steps by Tom L. Coleman, a state highway department engineer and unpaid special deputy who confronted them with a shotgun. According to one of the young women with them, Ruby Sales, Coleman shouted at them; "Get off my goddam property before I blow your goddam brains out, you black bastards!" He then leveled his shotgun at her, and Daniels pulled her aside as Coleman fired, killing him instantly. Priest Richard F. Morrisroe grabbed the other two young people and ran, taking a second blast to his lower back which critically injured him.
The killing shocked the Episcopal Church. It came two weeks after President Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act into law, and just days after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles that officially left 34 people killed (28 African Americans), 1,072 people injured, and 4,000 people arrested. Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes record a conversation he had with his chief civil rights aide Lee White about a request for assistance to help the Daniels family bring their son's body back home to Keene, NH. My father was a pallbearer at the funeral on August 24th, and recalls linking arms along with Stokeley Carmichael.
Dad told me that he remembers preaching at chapel that fall - by then the killer had been acquitted of manslaughter - and that his sermon grew out of Matthew 10:34 "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." Dad called it "the hard realistic message that change would not come not without sacrifice." Peace and social justice work continues to be a central part of my father's life and a formative example for my own.
This conversation was a great gift to both of us. We got into some of the racial themes I've been exploring these last few days, and particularly how we remember and internalize the past. "Memory and denial are kissing cousins", said my father. He said the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel are embedded in his heart:
"In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible."
The difference between guilt and responsibility is a key distinction for me. I believe that is where we will pick up the thread tomorrow.
One evening around our cooking fire in southern Africa, the Environmental Shepherds of ≠Khoadi ||Hôas Conservancy got to talking about animals, and in particular the ones that we thought we most resembled. I remember that Harry chose the tiny pearl spotted owl as his personal totem, but what stands out from the rest was what the one African woman in our number had to say. Landine !Guim said she was a baboon. Had we been in America, I would have been appalled, given the horrible slur that this analogy signifies in our society. Landine surprised me with her explanation. "I am like that one" she said in her halting English, "because I am always looking under rocks to see what is there."
There are some very heavy rocks out there.
For the last couple of days, I've been looking under stones, thinking hard about how our racial values and attitudes get internalized and overcome. Does what we come from predetermine who we are or can hope to be, or are we truly masters of our own destinies? The problem with this kind of polemical choice lies in its assumptions about the nature of the problem, grounded in the old nature v. nurture dichotomy. I'm afraid a deeper understanding and any conclusion is going to require a far more complex hypothesis.
I recently heard conservative intellectual and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Shelby Steele speaking on the radio about African American racial masking", and particularly the bargain it makes with liberal white guilt. Take a few minutes to listen.
It has been a long while since I've had my self perception on matters of race challenged so directly, and I confess there is part of me that wants to reject the message by discrediting the messenger. Shelby Steele is that most uncomfortable of liberalism's critics, a conservative African American, someone who challenges the multicultural narrative of mainstream progressives and whose motives we naturally suspect. Challenges to our deeply held beliefs and assumptions do not come from those who agree with us. They frequently come from those who once held the same beliefs, and somewhere along the way broke ranks with the dominant view.
Steele asserts that the primary focus of the civil-rights era was a legitimate quest to remove racial barriers. In the shift to the black-power era, Steele sees a paradigm shift, away from racial uplift and agency, where blacks assume responsibility for themselves, to a "race is destiny" mode. As the counterculture merged with the civil-rights movement, America was exposed for its racial hypocrisy and, consequently, lost its moral authority. Here, "white guilt" became the moral framework for America. Steele argues that liberal whites embraced guilt for two reasons: to avoid being seen as racists and to embrace a vantage point where they could mete out benefits to disadvantaged blacks through programs such as affirmative action. Steele believes blacks made a deal with the devil by exchanging responsibility and control over their destiny for handouts. He sees a deficiency in black middle-class educational achievement, further raising questions about claims of lack of equal opportunity. Despite these omissions, the cultural analysis of America's loss of moral authority for its exposed racism has resonance today.
I do not know whether I can accept Steele's premise, but I also know I cannot afford to reject it out of hand. I am going to have to engage more deeply with what he has said and written, as well as with his critics, and I am going to have to take a giant step outside my mind, gain a bit of altitude, so I can test Steele's hypothesis againsts at my own understanding and experience.
I grew up at a progessive boarding school headed by my father in the Hudson Valley of New York. The academic community that nurtured me was very non racial and yet only minimally diverse in terms of race. There was a rich life of the mind in our family, and strong examples demonstrated by both of my parents that each of us has intrinsic worth, and that one person is inherently no better or worse than another. Particularly in our formative years, my younger sister and I were treated with great equanimity, and I believe as a result developed a mutual appreciation for the talents and abilities of the other without having to compete for our parents' attention or validation.
There is no denying that ours was a priviledged upbringing. In the prep school environment, the headmaster occupies a unique social position that influences not only the economic lives but also the home lives of every member of the community. My playmates might have been the children of the maintenance staff or of senior faculty members, but though I was initially unaware of it, the fact that I was the headmaster's son was not lost on their parents. Dad and I had a heart to heart when I was nearing High School age about the challenges of being the son of the headmaster as well as a student, and it must have been a relief to him when I said the idea of boarding school sounded good to me and I was looking forward to going somewhere else.
I attended the local public school until 7th grade, when the positive benefits of being connected to people of different socio-econmic backgrounds and with deeper community roots were outweighed by a precipitous decline in the quality of the education provided. Issues of class, rather than race, were most apparent in the schools I attended, but then, there were only a couple of African American families in the towns where I grew up, and fewer than 11 black students at the boarding school I attended. This did not cause me to doubt my own values and attitudes about race until college, when one day I found myself filling out a survey that arrived in my student mailbox from a campus alliance of persons of color inquiring into my experience of racial diversity. The more questions I answered, the more uncomfortable I became, for there was little in my upbringing, in the near absense of persons of color, to suggest that my own beliefs about racial equality were anything other than empty intellectualism.
When I was an undergraduate English Major, I wrote my senior thesis on William Faulkner and an idea I had that those stories he set in the Native American past were a means of getting a fresh perspective on the all consuming issue of race in which he as a white southern male was deeply implicated. My subsequent years in Africa had that effect for me.
I made myself a promise when I decided to go to Africa after college to teach English in newly-independant Namibia. I made myself promise not to try and become a "good white man" in Africa to compensate for the painful legacy of racial injustice in my own country and my own position of priviledge within it. I also accepted responsibility not to take a tour through the lives of others, not to expect absolution or take advantage of the very flattering role that the situation offered me as a priviledged English-speaking white male to be catered to as a patron who held the keys to economic and social advantage.
It is well that I was deliberate in my approach to this new experience and the lives of people who would be impacted by that choice. For the first and only time in my life I was a minority, though one with special status and priviledge that in some ways parallels my childhood as the son of the headmaster. I was the subject of great interest but also held at a distance, with people initially wearing the mask of what they wanted to appear to me. It took months and years of shared experience living together for those masks to start to lift.
During our last years in Namibia, my wife remarked to me after a visit from officials from a development NGO to the community where we lived and worked that our African friends treated these visitors far more gently and with more open expressions of friendship than they now did with us. I replied that that was because our relationship with the community had changed, and they could risk challenging, offending and being more open with us than they could with these others.
People have many layers, of course, and wear multiple masks. Matters of race and class and gender identity coexist and play off each other. We show different sides in different situations. We are not color-blind, but can we hope to be more self-aware about what we project on others, and what we expect of ourselves? More on that in a future post.
"Sumer is icumen in" at 23:59 this evening, to be precise. Still, I rather doubt that any of the 8 North American members of the Cuckoo family will be heard singing outside my window on the Solstice, lhude or otherwise. However, if I were in the desert southwest - and a bit gullible - I might hope to hear one of them go "Beep Beep!" Yes, the family Cuculidae includes cuckoos, roadrunners and anis. 
