Lozen and Hettie Tom

 Five years ago I posted in this space about an 1898 studio photo of an Apache girl in her formal sunrise dance dress. I compared it to other photos that have different meanings to family members, photographers, and scholars. And I traced her life, showing why there are no great great grandchildren to look at that photo. I promised to return “another day” and discuss it some more. Today is another day.

The artist Douglas Miles is Apache, too. He comments often about the difference between his own photography and that of non-Natives like the ever-popular E.S. Curtis. His work is highly technical, too, but he is making images of family, neighbors, and friends instead of elegies of imagined Indians. He raises the same questions, both in his visual art and in his social media commentary (which is, itself, art) about when Hollywood will start putting Natives behind the camera to tell their own stories. This week he put up another “ad” for a movie about Lozen, the holy woman and warrior who fought alongside Geronimo in the 1870’s and 1880’s. I wondered whether there actually was such a project somewhere and googled it. I shouldn’t have. 

Among the very first hits was a tweet by a magazine of speculative fiction. They were soliciting entries for a short fiction competition (very short, under a thousand words) with the prompt “Lozen.” And what photo were they using to accompany this prompt? That’s right.

I should add some facts at this point. The girl above was 12-years old at the time of this picture. Her name was Eneh, but the caption at the bottom says “Hattie Tom.” In government records he is listed as Hettie. She was part of a living exhibit at the Omaha World’s Fair (Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition) in which hundreds of Natives were brought in for the visitors to look at. That’s right, she was on display for the  edification of white tourists. The initial intent was for them to display “traditional” lifeways - cooking, crafts, sewing clothing and building shelter - but the promoters of the exposition quickly discovered that the audience wasn’t all that interested in anything other than “war dances” and sham battles, and so that is what they
were given.

The photo itself is a part of that voyeurism. The Frank A. Rinehart studio received an exclusive contract to photograph the fair. Rinehart and his  assistant, Adolf Muhr, produced hundreds of souvenir photos, in multiple formats. But this one seems to be endlessly popular. Look at the colorized 1904 post card to the left, with rouge added to her cheeks. I find versions of it in hundreds of places on the internet. It occurs to me that it is a nineteenth century thirst trap, and that this way of looking at a Native girl (a 12-year old girl!) feeds the sexualization in the white male mind that contributes - along with bizarre boundaries of law enforcement - to the catastrophe of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Ask yourself what there is in this photo that makes it so popular
120+ years after it was taken.

The Rinehart photos are considered in some circles to be much better than Edward S. Curtis’s somewhat later project, The North American Indian. Curtis photos are known for soft focus and heads turned away to create the feeling in the viewer that Indians were “vanishing.” He airbrushed out artifacts that he considered non-traditional. He carried props that his white viewers see as “authentic” to include in photos of people living thousands of miles apart, with dramatically different cultures. By contrast, the Rinehart photos are straight-ahead portraits and in sharp focus. They are, nevertheless, documents of colonial authority. In Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection, Professor Beverly Singer of Santa Clara Pueblo wrote: “It is difficult to convey and emphasize the power that even a white photographer had over Indians.” Professor Jojola of Isleta Pueblo was even more direct in his own essay in that same volume: “Dare I say (or ask), Were these photos from hell?”

Let me address that hell a little. Hettie Tom was born in 1886. Her dad, known in the records as Chiricahua Tom or Tom Chiricahua, was a US Cavalry scout. At the time of Geronimo’s surrender (also 1886) he was with a delegation of Apache scouts in Washington, D.C. Instead of being allowed to return home, their train was redirected to Florida. The scouts and their families were held as prisoners of war for the next 26 years along with Geronimo’s band whom they had been charged to capture. Reread that if you want. From about the time of her birth, Hettie Tom was a prisoner of the Army her father had served in! Actually continued to serve in, because - even as a POW - Chiricahua Tom was a uniformed US soldier, along with many of his fellow captives. I see commentary on that photo describing her as “beautiful” and “haunting” and I keep saying, “She’s twelve!” But when I see the word “captivating” all I think  of is the cruel irony.

Consider another photo, this one without a formal, single-occasion, ritual dress. Because she was born at the time of Geronimo’s surrender, Hettie Tom was too young to be taken when the Army seized most of the imprisoned the Chiricahua children from their parents and sent them to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania to be stripped of their language and culture and the love of their kin. She was educated instead at the Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. I imagine she is one of the girls in this picture. I look at the photos that retain  wide circulation and I know that this one fails to present the wistful nostalgia of those. The children are forced into the clothing of the conqueror. They are forced to speak the language of the conqueror and learn his trades. The boys’ hair is cut. Even their names are changed. (And this is another of those absolute horrors of the dystopian future imagined in The Handmaid’s Tale that has

Clement Nahgodleda, standing

already happened.) But while the photograph has the imposed name Hattie Tom (sic) right on it, those cloth dresses don’t seem to engage the white viewer in the way that Hettie’s sunrise dance dress does.

Hettie returned from Omaha to Fort Sill, Oklahoma where the captives had been moved. Some time within the next two years she married Clement Nahgodleda, another POW about nine years older than her, who had been a student at Carlisle. They both died of tuberculosis in 1901. She was about 15. The warrior woman, Lozen, had died in captivity while they were all still in Alabama 11 years earlier when Hettie was three and Lozen was about fifty.

So why is a magazine of speculative fiction posting this photo of Hettie Tom along with an invitation to write about the warrior Lozen? This is a magazine that proudly describes taking an initiative to create a more equitable community. Its submission policies encourage the work of  BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers. Why use a picture of a vulnerable-looking young girl to illustrate a grown woman whose exploits in battle were legendary?

First I will acknowledge uncertainty as to whether any photo of Lozen exists at all. After

Geronimo’s band surrendered, when they were being transported East to imprisonment, the picture to the right was taken by J.K. Hillers, a photographer with the Bureau of Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institute. According to James Kaywakla, the principal informant for Eve Ball’s In the Days of Victorio, Lozen was not in this group. According to Jasper Kanseah and Dahteste, however, she is the third from the right in the upper row. Most “portraits” of Lozen are prints made from this glass negative cropping out everybody else.

In recent years admiration of Lozen as a warrior has been complemented by discussion of her as a two-spirit woman. Most of this identifies Dahteste (next to her in the photo above, second from right in the top row) as her companion. Sherry Robinson’s Apache Voices, based on Eve Ball’s unpublished notes, reports that Dahteste mourned Lozen until her own death in 1955. 

I described the photo of Hettie Tom as a 19th century thirst trap for white men. I am stepping way out of my lane by speculating that perhaps it serves the same role for gay white women. Nevertheless, I am otherwise at a loss as to why they wouldn’t use the cropped photo to the left.

Photos, even colonizer photos, can serve more than one purpose. Lynching photos were souvenirs for participants in the mobs but were also used to publicize the horrors of lynching. That is true of the Rinehart photos from the Omaha world’s fair, too. I quoted Dr. Beverly Singer above on the power of the white photographer over the Native subject, but I truncated her words. What she actually wrote is this: 

It is difficult to convey and emphasize the power that even a white photographer had over Indians, but it is also possible for Native communities to request from photographic archives many of these old images that hold the memory and legacy of our ancestry that belongs to us.

Lozen left no descendants, perhaps because she was a two-spirit woman. But what of Hettie Tom? When she died at Fort Sill at the age of 15, she had no children. Her brother Sago died that same summer. So did seven of her nieces and nephews by her brother Yahnaki. When I describe the horror of a child growing up imprisoned that is by no means the end of it. Hettie’s nephew, Rufus Sago, who was one when she died, lived until 1970 and was active in tribal affairs at Mescalero where some of the imprisoned families settled when they were finally released in 1913(!) Perhaps his children and grandchildren are getting something positive from looking at her photo and those of her parents.

Marcos Muñoz, descanse en paz.

Marcos Muñoz about 1965

 On TV and in movies the story of the farmworkers’ union frequently devolves into a hagiography of Cesar Chavez. 

The Filipino workers, who had been organizing workers since the 1930’s on farms and in canneries from San Diego to Anchorage, are sometimes mentioned briefly and in passing, but more often erased completely. Maybe, maybe, you hear the name Larry Itliong, the veteran organizer who led the Filipino workers out of the Delano table grape vineyards in 1965 and who became assistant director of the United Farm Workers when the Mexican and Filipino workers merged their unions. Typically he is only referred to as a prelude to discussing Cesar.

Dolores Huerta is always present in the story, but rarely given much credit. The real Dolores Huerta was an elementary school teacher who dropped that work to become a formidable organizer and leader in her own right and who allied herself with Chavez. She is indomitable today, still an activist at 91. In the 2014 biopic about Cesar, though, her character was portrayed as not much more than a yes-woman.

And then there are those farm workers who were dispatched from the fields and picket lines of California and Colorado to the east to organize the grape and lettuce boycotts, the boycotts that eventually won the strikes. The documentaries tell us about those boycotts. Where are the names of those farmworkers, though? Marcos Muñoz arrived in Boston alone, knowing nobody and speaking little English. He shut down table grape sales throughout the northeast.

We knew him in New Jersey and New York, and later - through our friend Richard - in Chicago. He left us yesterday at the age of 80 and so we pour one out for him and his memory.

You can hear Marcos Muñoz share his own testimonio at https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/50th-anniversary-documentation-project-1962-1993/marcos-munos-1965-2012/ and at https://www.enlacechicago.org/oralhistory

DEP, Marcos.

Word Salad

 I don't know Jason Whitlock personally so I have no idea whether he actually believes the stupid shit that comes out of his mouth. There are more than enough media provocateurs out there who will say anything to attract comment because it raises their profile (and income) so it's hard to discern.

Maybe Whitlock is one of them. Or maybe he actually thinks the murder of George Floyd was a "race hoax." Maybe he still believes Derek Chauvin will never be convicted. Maybe he really thinks losing weight is better than any vaccine for preventing COVID-19. I don't know.

Yesterday, though, he went on Twitter with the following word salad:

LeBron James, like other elites, is using racial division as a distraction as elites reshape America to be more like communist China. Elites prefer communism. Millionaire elites are protected by communism. They're the "Talented Tenth" W.E.B. Du Bois promoted. You're being played.

What? Where do you start with this? I have no idea who this is even meant to appeal to. If you can make any sense of it, consider his follow up:

Du Bois = communist elite. Communism = hostile to all religion. Communism makes it nearly impossible to rise above your birth class. Maybe you'll hit genetics lottery and become a pro athlete... Democracy-capitalism-freedom-America more class elevation than any other country.

Again, huh? 

There are no victors when we engage in a battle of wits with the unarmed. I will make the following points, though:

• The phrase "talented tenth" originated with white Baptist missionaries like John D. Rockefeller
• When Du Bois embraced that term (his essay "The Talented Tenth" was published in 1903) he was a staunch anticommunist
• By the time Du Bois became a communist (he joined the CPUSA in 1961, at the age of 93) he had long rejected the idea that African Americans should follow the leadership of their most privileged strata
• Marxism advocates a classless society. China is a one-party state led by people who like to call themselves communist as the US calls itself a republic while actively suppressing voting rights and incarcerating five times more people per capita than China.
• The US ranks only twenty-seventh in the world in social mobility, below all of the social democratic countries.

The trope that says racism is primarily a distraction, created by the ruling class to divide us, is mainly a feature of the white left. The right tends to alternate between actively propagating white supremacy and arguing that there is no racism. The meeting point between those two is their bizarre charge that the only racists are those who call attention to racism, those who - in their revealing expression - "play the race card."

Among leftists, on the other hand, (at least nowadays, they were worse 100 years ago) there is a general acknowledgement that systemic racism exists and that it is bad. But there is also a strong trend that believes that its main purpose is to keep the working class divided. These people look at slavery and imperialism and somehow miss the fact that capitalism itself is based on defining some people as religiously or racially less than human, people who can be murdered, raped, and robbed with impunity. They fail to see that capitalism was and is based on the superexploitation of a class of people with "no rights a white man is bound to respect" as Chief Justice Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision.

Leftists who are blind to the fundamental role of racism in capitalism see it only as dividing the working class, allowing white people to identify with the capitalist class and Black people to think capitalism will be just fine if it includes them. When these class-issues-first leftists insist on muting discussion of topics they consider "divisive" (skin privilege, police impunity) they turn themselves into propagandists for white supremacy, whether they intend to or not.

Jason Whitlock, though, represents another phenomenon entirely. He is pro-capitalism and denies the existence of racism. He somehow conflates the Du Bois of 1900 with the Du Bois of 1960 to pretend that Chinese crony capitalism's dependent on fighting for Black lives!!?? He somehow thinks that US corporate capitalism is egalitarian (?!) because it allows 1% of Americans to own one-third of all wealth in the country while half of Americans own less than 2%. He somehow believes that LeBron James, who has parlayed his talent on the court to spectacular wealth of roughly $500 million (a fortune which fails, by far, to get him onto the Fortune 400 list) is - apparently because he believes that Black Lives Matter - more of an "elite" than all the people who are on that list. 

I would like to ignore tweets like the ones above. I would like to believe that they are too bizarre to matter. But I found myself writing this anyway. I hope that doesn't reflect too badly on me.

More on Division and Solidarity (and to tracing old photos!)

The news is so grim every day. This morning I awoke to find that of the eight people murdered by the latest young, white, male gunman (this time at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis) four of them were Sikhs: Amarjeet Johaol, Jaswinder Kaur, Amarjit Sekhon, and Jaswinder Singh. Since the armed, violent, and already-known-to-police killer had actually worked for a time at this place it is not a stretch to assume that he knew that 90% of the employees were Sikhs. Since he has eyes it is not a stretch to think he noticed that three of the four people he killed were over sixty years old.

Since 9/11, violence against Sikhs in this country has often been misplaced (displaced?) hatred of Muslims because racists see the dastār (turban) and think, "Oh, 

Osama Bin Laden!" It isn't associated with other anti-Asian hate because we tie that to certain distinctive racial features. But among the first things I saw on Twitter was this: "The Stop Asian Hate crowd needs to speak up." Then the observation that when they don't "it reveals a lot."

I have observed before in this space that one of white supremacy's great achievements is turning those excluded from whiteness against one another. I have no doubt that there are Asian Americans who think that South Asians don't count, just as there are South Asians who are certain that they are white. I have certainly written about African Americans who exclude Africans and West Indians from blackness and about Africans and West Indians (including Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans) who agree.

It seemed like I was on a different subject when I noticed a Facebook post about Black cowboys. It was accompanied by a photograph I recognized, though. But I recognized it as a photograph of Black soldiers. A Google image search didn't help me track the provenance of the photo. In fact, almost every iteration of that photo listed was meant to illustrate one or another point about
Black cowboys. I was once again frustrated by my weaknesses in collecting all my notes in one place and thoroughly documenting their sources because I knew I had seen this photo during my research for my books.

MHS Research Center Photo Archives #957-994

I was eventually able to find an only partially cropped version of this photo, but the text that the user added (inaccurate, by the way) meant that the image search I conducted only revealed a few uses of that particular superimposed caption and - interestingly - none of the many I had found that referred to these men as cowboys. Once again, as in my last posting, I couldn't retrace my steps even now, two hours later, but I eventually discovered the original in the photo archives of the Montana Historical Society. This photo of troopers of the 10th Cavalry under General Wesley Merrit was taken in 1894 by A.B. Coe. They were lunching in the St. Mary Valley during an expedition to what is now Glacier National Park. This uncropped version certainly makes the men look more like soldiers than cowboys, both because it is more obvious that they are wearing uniforms and because of their weapons.

What connection am I drawing between the divisive practices of white supremacy and this photo of Black cavalrymen in Montana? In 1894, the St. Mary Valley was part of the reservation of the Piegan Blackfoot tribe. That summer, George Bird Grinnell was negotiating with them to cede the territory to the federal government in order to create a Glacier National Park. The name Grinnell may not be familiar to you. At the time he was a highly regarded conservationist, sport hunter, and ethnographer. He was a prolific writer on Native American culture: among his better-known works are Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk Tales, Blackfoot Lodge Tails, and By Cheyenne Campfires. He was also a champion of the national parks and especially Glacier. His close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt gave him special influence in that area.

John Taliaffero's 2019 biography, Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West, provides a detailed account of what Grinnell was doing that summer. I will just summarize by saying he was bullying the Blackfeet into surrendering their valley. He had known them personally for years. He had made repeated and extended visits to explore the area, hunt, and interview them for his ethnography. The government considered him a great asset in the negotiations to shrink the reservation.

In his 2001 work Crimes against Nature Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, Karl Jacoby discussed how the creation of parks redefined their occupants as criminals. He particularly looked at the Havasupai Indians of the Grand Canyon. Just this week The Atlantic published an article by David Treuer titled "Return the National Parks to the Tribes." Among his points was that they would be better stewards of this land that was seized from them. The catastrophic fires of recent years, fires that were exacerbated by over a century of suppressing Native burning practices, certainly support that view.

But let me work my way back around to my point. Those Black cavalrymen were in the St. Mary Valley to support George Bird Grinnell in his effort to convince the Piegan Blackfoot tribe that they had no alternative but to cede the land that became Glacier National Park. The soldiers did not make that policy. They weren't even the ones "negotiating." In point of fact, their officers were all white.* Nevertheless, when we celebrate the achievements of Black soldiers and applaud these photographs without, at the same time, recognizing how they serve racial capitalism, we make ourselves party to it. 

Again, my Twitter feed has been full of partially-digested facts about the slave-owning tribes of the Indian Territory and their ongoing exclusion of Black members from voting and other tribal participation. If the same people who happily share these posts aren't also critical of the hero-worship of Buffalo Soldiers as "Indian fighters" then they, too, contribute to white supremacy and to cultivating division instead of solidarity. 

Retracing My Steps

 Readers of my historical novel, Though An Army Come Against Us, often report encountering episodes that are simply too much for them to believe. They set the book down, shaking their heads, and saying to themselves, "Rick, you really went too far this time." Then they google the incident and discover that it is, instead, simply true.

I tell them that my imagination isn't all that good. I tell them that the history of this country can be so dark that I don't need any imagination to conjure up these horrors. And it surprises me because I have spent all my adult life looking into those corners. Some were astonished by the presence of gas chambers at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border crossing that was a model for Hitler's gas chambers. Some were surprised by the coal mine explosions I described in Dawson, New Mexico and Littleton, Alabama, or by the fact that seventy-two of the miners killed in the latter were convicts leased by the company from state and county prisons. One reader hadn't heard about the massacre of striking miners' families in Ludlow, Colorado. Another learned for the first time about the Tulsa Massacre that has been so present lately in popular culture.

But my imagination is really not that good, and even many of the minor details in my fiction are factually and historically correct. Unfortunately my notes are not all that great either, because I am not preparing them for academic publication. I have sources listed in multiple notes in Apple Notes on both my phone and laptop. I have highlighted passages in Kindle from ebooks I read. I have PDFs saved in a folder on my laptop. I have files sent to me from various archivists and librarians. And I have handwritten notes in steno pads and notebooks. Retracing my steps can be a colossal challenge, especially when the information was obscure and hard to find in the first place.

This morning I was writing a Facebook post about the experiences Black soldiers had with racist violence while they were in Europe during the First World War. There is an episode in Though An Army in which Rector Beauchamp, a Black Seminole soldier, is nearly lynched by white soldiers led by two white officers who are jealous that a French girl turns to him to rescue herself from them. But a year and a half after I published this, several years after I wrote those particular pages, and who-knows-how-long after I researched them, I couldn't remember why I thought there were lynchings in the American Expeditionary Force in 1918.

I googled those words and easily found references to the Red Summer of 1919 and to lynchings of returned veterans. It took me about 45 minutes to find a popular magazine article by Professor Chad Williams, and then a note in an article that cited a book he wrote titled Torchbearers of Freedom:African American Soldiers in the World War I Era. That was a familiar title, so I looked in my Kindle library. Success!

Instead of using the Kindle search function I simply scrolled through the passages I had highlighted and there it was. Some Black officers had aroused the envy of white officers over the attentions of some French women so the white men got two truckloads of white enlisted men and ordered them to lynch the Black officers. Moreover the incident had been reported by First Lieutenant Charles Hamilton Houston. Yes, that is the Charles Hamilton Houston. He had been an English professor at Howard before enlisting, but after his wartime experiences he attended Harvard Law School. He returned to Howard as a law professor and trained the entire generation of NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys that included Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

1st Lieutenant Houston

When I read this again this morning I wondered briefly why I left C.H. Houston out of my novel. But I remembered that I still have too many characters. Something like his part in the story and that of an unnamed captain are taken in Though An Army by the historical figure Osceola McKaine who was a captain in France, served in the infantry before the war in the Philippines and Mexico, and was a figure in the movement for Black rights after both the first and second World Wars. In Houston's story, retold by Professor Williams in Torchbearers, the two French women are described as "sporting girls." I chose to remove that characterization and turn them into one young teen who is both confused by the attention of the white officers and in danger of being raped by them. The whole thing reminded me of how it is sometimes when people ask me the specific source of some of these stories and I can't really remember.

It also made me wonder about how Professor Houston had told this story. That was another hour-long rabbit hole. The footnote in Torchbearers cited a series in the Pittsburgh Courier that Houston wrote in 1940 as the U.S. was about to get into another World War. I immediately went to the Library of Congress website because they have digitized huge numbers of newspapers. Nope. After hunting around for who might in fact have it I discovered a Proquest database, but my university alumni privileges don't extend to that. A recent laptop update erased my New York Public Library password, but I found it in one of those steno pads I have piled up and - Yes! - a few minutes later, having scanned through thirteen pages of the Courier on the listed date, I found episode ten of Houston's article, which contained more details. (The story also had to be continued on page 13 of the next issue, but that didn't take as long to get to.)

Then I started wondering again why I left Professor Houston out of my novel, especially since I had an entire short chapter take place in the "Colored" Officers Training Camp at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. And that led me to think about the contemporary souvenir book about that camp that I remembered reading online. Another hour. Not in Google Books. Not in the Library of Congress. Not in Iowa Pathways, although they did have PDFs of newspaper ads for the book. I finally found a link to an "online books page" at University of Pennsylvania Library which led me to a HathiTrust page which was where I am pretty sure I originally read this book however long ago.

Do I want to do this again? Not for these particular sources. I started a document with the links and basic information and I'm calling it Annotations. I don't want to track everything down, but I think that every time I do, I should save the links in that document. My memory only promises to get worse with time.

This is a split group photo from that souvenir Fort Des Moines book. It shows all the Howard University grads at the training camp, the largest group of alums of any college.

Though An Army - Final Chapter

Harlem, NY 1922 

 

“Rector!” welcomed Nessa as the apartment door opened. She sounded as enthusiastic as if she hadn’t seen him in a month. 

“How do you know it’s me?” laughed Rector Beauchamp. “Anybody could come walking in through this unlocked door.” 

 “Were you able to get a day at P.S. 119?” Nessa asked. The school was diagonally across from their apartment on 134th Street and a sometime source of employment. But as she came out of the kitchen and saw him in his work clothes, she knew the answer. 

“Miss Larson said she didn’t need a substitute teacher today,” he explained. “I changed real quick, hurried downtown with Jim Rosco, and was able to get a day loading the S.S. Lafayette on Pier 51.” Rosco was a boarder with their upstairs neighbors, Tony and Ella Stevens. He worked as a longshoreman on the West Side, mostly handling passenger luggage for the French Line. 

“When do you think you’ll be able to get a regular teaching job?” wondered Nessa. 

“My best guess?” asked Rector. “Never.” He had been thinking about this for the better part of a year now, since not long after their arrival in New York City. “I don’t think they want to hire any regular teachers at all, not to mention Negroes. They hang on to those Class 1 licenses like it’s their grandma’s engagement ring. They save so much money by hiring subs, it’s no wonder they won’t give out a regular license.” 

“Sadie got a job over there,” objected Nessa. 

“The cake lady? She taught for five years in North Carolina before she got here, and they still wouldn’t hire her until she got a master’s degree from Columbia. And hired a locution teacher so she could learn to talk like a white woman. And why do you think she sells all those cakes? She got that Class 1 license and she still can’t live on what they pay her.” 

“It sounds to me like you’re giving up,” said Nessa. “Did you even go over there this morning?” 

“Yes, I did, baby.” He paused because he didn’t like her challenging his word this way. He took a deep breath and then went on, “Yes, I did. But I am really thinking about signing on regular on the ships.”

Nessa understood his pause; appreciated his restraint. She waited a moment before going on. “Baby, you have a college diploma.” 

“Yes, I do,” Rector answered. “But not one that they recognize here in New York. Leastways not when it’s held by a Negro.” 

This was something that Nessa understood very well. She had been going downtown with Ella Stevens everyday to clean rich white ladies’ homes and she didn’t like it. Maybe these South Carolina Negroes were used to taking care of white folks, but she was from Boley, Oklahoma and she was a high school graduate. For her it was like anthropological fieldwork, not a career. And she had something to say on this same subject that she hadn’t told Rector about yet. “I went to register at Hunter College today,” she began. 

“That is great news!” smiled Rector. “How did that go?” 

“Not well,” admitted Nessa. “They don’t recognize my diploma.” 

“Don’t recognize it?” He began shaking his head. New York. “Any options?” 

“Actually, the lady there took some time asking about Boley High and the courses I took there. She listed the exact credits I still need to get a New York diploma. And she told me who to speak to at Wadleigh High School if I want to take them now.” 

Rector was thunderstruck. “With a bunch of young girls?” he asked. “You’re a grown woman.” 

“Yes, I am,” said Nessa. “But that is not what’s making me hesitate.” She smiled. 

Rector shook his head again, this time in puzzlement. He shrugged and made a face as if to ask, “What?” 

Nessa smiled a little more broadly. “I’m three weeks late,” she said. 

The puzzled look stayed for another second or two. Then understanding dawned across his face, his jaw dropped, his eyes opened wide, and he rushed to take his wife in his arms. “Baby,” he laughed. “That is the best news! You had to wait all this time to tell me that?” 

“We won’t know for awhile. I could just be late. But I couldn’t wait any longer. I just had to let you know.” 

Rector just said, “That is the best news!” And then, again, “That is the best news!” He hugged her and hugged her. 

Nessa finally pushed herself back a few inches from his tight embrace. “Baby, I have to ask. If it’s a boy, can we name him Ezekiel?” 

He pulled her close again. “Why would you even need to ask?” said Rector Beauchamp. “Of course we willl. Of course our son will be Ezekiel.” Nessa blinked back her tears. “Ezekiel Owalv,” she said, adding the Creek and Seminole word for “prophet.” “Because our children can never forget that they’re native, too.” 

Somewhere nearby a neighbor cranked up a Victrola. The trumpet and trombone notes of the opening bars were unmistakable, “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” It was the most popular recording in Harlem that year. Already embracing, Nessa and Rector began to dance along. But the juxtaposition of sad and happy news gave the song a different meaning. Rector would give up teaching, Nessa college; but there would be a new baby. Nessa’s Daddy was gone, but perhaps she would have a son. The world as it was had taken so much from them, but there was still promise of a world to be. They were still living. They were still standing. They could still continue the struggle. 

So Nessa began to sing along with Ethel Waters. And now the song had stopped being a story about a disappointed lover. Today it had turned into a story about entire peoples and about that promise, the promise of a world to be: “There’s a change in the weather, a change in the sea From now on there’ll be a change in me My walk will be different, my talk and my name Nothing about me’s going to be the same.” 

When the record ended, Nessa wanted to say something more about Ezekiel, her Daddy. But the elevated train was going up Eighth Avenue, just down the block, and it drowned out all conversation with its loud clatter. Today, though, even the rattle of the IRT had taken on a new meaning: He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live again?” And I said, “Lord God, only You know.” There was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. So the Lord God said to the bones, “Here! I bring breath into you and you will live! The breath entered them and they came to life, a vast multitude. 

And so it was.

I Despair

 

This morning I watched a short video posted by the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance on Twitter. A naturalist took readings from a spring in the woods near the stables, compared the electrical conductivity of that water with Tibbet’s Brook and Van Cortlandt Lake, showed caddisfly larva, and discussed the significance of these findings.

While he was streaming, someone insisted on repeatedly posting comments complaining about the fact that he was masked and objecting to Darwin, apparently because only Darwinists believe in aerosol spread of COVID-19!?

Checking the spring this morning.

I checked the bio of the critic. He is a Trumpist from Austin, Texas.

We are 1500 miles away. 

We are still running borough coronavirus positivity rates around 10%.

Austin is still struggling to get power and water restored after last week’s storm.

But this man felt the need to tune in to a talk about freshwater springs in Bronx parks and object to our masking.

I despair for the future of humanity.