tabula|rasa

       When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died. As I saw the cheek grow paler, and the eye more glassy, how earnestly I prayed in my heart that she might live! I loved her; for she had been almost like a mother to me. My prayers were not answered. She died, and they buried her in the little churchyard, where, day after day, my tears fell upon her grave.

        I was sent to spend a week with my grandmother. I was now old enough to begin to think of the future; and again and again I asked myself what they would do with me. I felt sure I should never find another mistress so kind as the one who was gone. She had promised my dying mother that her children should never suffer for any thing; and when I remembered that, and recalled her many proofs of attachment to me, I could not help having some hopes that she had left me free. My friends were almost certain it would be so. They thought she would be sure to do it, on account of my mother’s love and faithful service. But, alas! we all know that the memory of a faithful slave does not avail much to save her children from the auction block.

        After a brief period of suspense, the will of my mistress was read, and we learned that she had bequeathed me to her sister’s daughter, a child of five years old. So vanished our hopes. My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s Word: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor. I would give much to blot out from my memory that one great wrong. As a child, I loved my mistress; and, looking back on the happy days I spent with her, I try to think with less bitterness of this act of injustice. While I was with her, she taught me to read and spell; and for this privilege, which so rarely falls to the lot of a slave, I bless her memory.

        She possessed but few slaves; and at her death those were all distributed among her relatives. Five of them were my grandmother’s children, and had shared the same milk that nourished her mother’s children. Notwithstanding my grandmother’s long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

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“The survival of such a primitive rite has been made possible among us only by the thoughtlessness or ignorance of the public, which reacts only with the ceremonial phrases that have been drilled into it. When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindlessly registers the condemnation of a man. But if people are shown the machine, made to touch the wood and steel and to hear the sound of a head falling, then public imagination, suddenly awakened, will repudiate both the vocabulary and the penalty.”

“This is probably even truer of capital punishment since everyone strives to refer to it only through euphemisms. It is to the body politic what cancer is to the individual body, with this difference: no one has ever spoken of the necessity of cancer. There is no hesitation, on the other hand, about presenting capital punishment as a regrettable necessity, a necessity that justifies killing because it is necessary, and let’s not talk about it because it is regrettable.”

This day, today, had to be one of the more rewarding of my college career and indeed my life. Dr. Cornel West, Joshua Bennett, and Garth Fagan all came to visit RIT  for our 30th annual Expressions of King’s Legacy Celebration.

All quarter long, I’ve been taking a course entitled “Special Topics: Cornel West”. We’ve engaged his seminal text Race Matters, some of his 2004 Democracy Matters, and we’ve also imbibed The Cornel West Reader. He came to RIT today to deliver the keynote address for the celebration, but prior to that amazing oration, he sat down with us to discuss some of the burning questions we’d been grappling with while engaging his texts.

He sat down right next to me and I was asked to lead off with the first question. It was really an honor to listen to him weave his poetic, verbose, but cogent, responses to our queries. He really is a thinking, living, profound human being!

I was so nervous before he actually showed up. However, after he came in and shook and my hand and addressed me as “brother”, I felt at ease and was taken aback at the breadth of his intellect and his serious commitment to rigorous scholarship and thoughtful, substantive dialogue.

I was also afforded the high honor of enjoying lunch with him following his keynote, and that was just awe-inspiring. I quizzed him about the GOP race, about Melissa Harris-Perry’s criticism of him surrounding his stern critique of the Obama administration. I also was able to ascertain, with nebulous certainty, his future plans as he moves back to Union Theological Seminary: he thinks this might be the last academic move for him.

Just as moving, was the time I spent with Joshua Bennett. In the waning hour or so before he and his sister Tamara left, my girlfriend and I were able to chat it up with the acclaimed poet and current Princeton, Ph.D. candidate. He is a really awesome, down-to-earth guy. It was very humbling to spend that time with him.

On the whole, today was about as good a day as anyone could have. The biggest lesson I gleaned from this rare privilege, however, was that beyond their intellectual and artistic genius, West and Bennett are human. They are deeply human. Part of what makes them great and loom so large for me, are their amazing talents and abilities. However, they are just as human as I am; just as radically fallible. To that end, I was just conversing and visiting with fellow brothers of the human family. Today was profound just because it elucidated this simple, but sometimes elusive, truth. Thank God for such a day.

I’m amazed at the level of fear or dread or paralysis—or some mixture thereof—that has impeded me from venturing outside the bounds of my personal, so-called, comfort zone.

The slaveholder, having nothing to fear from impotent childhood, easily affords to refrain from cruel inflictions; and if cold and hunger do not pierce the tender frame, the first seven or eight years of the slave-boy’s life are about as full of sweet content as those of the most favored and petted white children of the slaveholder. The slave-boy escapes many troubles which befall and vex his white brother. He seldom has to listen to lectures on propriety of behavior, or on anything else. He is never chided for handling his little knife and fork improperly or awkwardly, for he uses none. He is never reprimanded for soiling the table-cloth, for he takes his meals on the clay floor.

He never has the misfortune, in his games or sports, of soiling or tearing his clothes, for he has almost none to soil or tear. He is never expected to act like a nice little gentleman, for he is only a rude little slave. Thus, freed from all restraint, the slave-boy can be, in his life and conduct, a genuine boy, doing whatever his boyish nature suggests; enacting, by turns, all the strange antics and freaks of horses, dogs, pigs, and barn-door fowls, without in any manner compromising his dignity, or incurring reproach of any sort. He literally runs wild; has no pretty little verses to learn in the nursery; no nice little speeches to make for aunts, uncles, or cousins, to show how smart he is; and, if he can only manage to keep out of the way of the heavy feet and fists of the older slave boys, he may trot on, in his joyous and roguish tricks, as happy as any little heathen under the palm trees of Africa.

To be sure, he is occasionally reminded, when he stumbles in the path of his master—and this he early learns to avoid—that he is eating his “white bread,” and that he will be made to “see sights” by-and-by. The threat is soon forgotten; the shadow soon passes, and our sable boy continues to roll in the dust, or play in the mud, as bests suits him, and in the veriest freedom. If he feels uncomfortable, from mud or from dust, the coast is clear; he can plunge into the river or the pond, without the ceremony of undressing, or the fear of wetting his clothes; his little tow-linen shirt—for that is all he has on—is easily dried; and it needed ablution as much as did his skin. His food is of the coarsest kind, consisting for the most part of cornmeal mush, which often finds it way from the wooden tray to his mouth in an oyster shell.

His days, when the weather is warm, are spent in the pure, open air, and in the bright sunshine. He always sleeps in airy apartments; he seldom has to take powders, or to be paid to swallow pretty little sugar-coated pills, to cleanse his blood, or to quicken his appetite. He eats no candies; gets no lumps of loaf sugar; always relishes his food; cries but little, for nobody cares for his crying; learns to esteem his bruises but slight, because others so esteem them. In a word, he is, for the most part of the first eight years of his life, a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy, upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck’s back. And such a boy, so far as I can now remember, was the boy whose life in slavery I am now narrating.

(Find it online here)