FRIENDS AND RELATIVES

DADDY sat on the side of his bed pensively thumbing through a thick, rubber-banded, stack of departed friends' and relatives' funeral programs. "One day,people will reminisce on us, while thumbing through our funeral programs, too, Daddy." I said. He quietly smiled, and kept thumbing through.

RUDIMENTS ELEMENTS

RUDIMENTS, ELEMENTS. Marks. Letters. Numbers. Drawing. Notes. Began someplace. Sometime. Somehow. Someones’ . Connected marks communicate. Connected letters spell words. Connected numbers quantify. Connected drawing makes art. Connected notes make music. Mankind says that it knows how , when, where, even among whom, these rudiments of letters, numbers, drawing, and notes were raised up, codified , quantified, connected in beautiful, useful , replicable forms. Doubtless speech followed similar patterns of coherence , adherence. Possibly repeatedly in the sojourn of mankind movements, encountering people; making marks upon earth for millions of years speech became a necessary element. Maybe indeed mankind itself manifested , infested on earth in similar millennial nature. Perhaps as marks, letters, numbers, drawing, notes came, became, formulae, words, maths, art, music, and then other elements, rudiments came , became all that we now eat, sleep, do, say, make, teach, revere, play with, contemplate, there yet remains something else; infinitely things else, to arise for someones, somewhere, somehow, someplace. Perhaps we are still rudiments in the process of becoming increments of a broader integumentary being that we abide within infinitesimally now. Perhaps not.

STILL HERE!

STILL HERE BY GRACE African Americans have made their involuntary home, the United States of America, a superpower by their free slave labor, peonage, discriminatory practices. Thereby, they received less than was their true due , less than was fair market share for centuries. Their color, hair texture, appearance made them vulnerable in comparison to indentured “whites”, who for a time into the mid-18th century shared the economic fate of the imported Africans. So in the middle 18th century, the future President, author , American philosopher, Thomas Jefferson, codified a color-based rationale to placate “Christian” slaveholders’ consciences . He wrote a secret book that later was to be publicly disseminated, NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA (1785). In “Query XIV.” of that book of racist propaganda, the “enlightened” man justified his own, and that of all now-“white” slave owners’, lifetime encroachment upon the lives of enslaved African people and their descendants’ lives as well forever. Ironically, an “Ethiopian,” Dogon-descended, African man of science, Benjamin Banneker was famously corresponding in 1791 with Thomas Jefferson about his scurrilous book. Benjamin Banneker, was a freeborn, first American wooden clock maker, largely self-taught mathematician and astronomer, almanac author, Maryland farmer, husbandman, actuarial table maker, and the main surveyor of the team designing the nation’s new capitol, Washington, D.C. Banneker’s personal example put to shame the lies about innate African inferiority that Jefferson had claimed for an entire class of man. But Banneker was not alone when it came to African inventiveness and technical mastery to which the United States of America was prime beneficiary. From the space age of the present day to the cotton gin of a former day, countless numbers of able African American inventors , designers, builders, technicians , within and outside of agriculture, and education, have enriched Americans’ power internationally. Not just free labor and inventions, though, but perhaps preeminently in culture, in music, the arts, drama, film, television, radio, recording, and especially athletics, from the Olympic Games to Adolph Hitler’s “Aryan race” shame, black America has contributed mightily to America while being its despised minority. The American Revolution itself was remarked as beginnings on March 5, 1770, with the killing of Crispus Attucks in the “Boston Massacre.” Attucks was a black man who was killed by the British while protesting. Peter Salem at the Battle of Bunker Hill killed the British commander . Salem was another black man. James Armistead (Lafayette ) a Virginia slave and double agent for the American patriots betrayed the British general in chief, Cornwallis, into a siege trap from which there being no escape he was forced to surrender , lest his troops starve! That shrewd deed in 1781 ended the fighting between the late “Mother Country” and her precocious child! So, one might say that the blacks began and successfully ended the Americans’ “revolution” although they were not freed in recompense, as a class as promised by patriots! As with the American Revolution, the blacks once again rescued the United States from the British in the War of 1812. England had burned down the “White House”, causing its occupants to flee. But at the decisive Battle of New Orleans in 1814, the blacks famously helped General Andrew Jackson to defeat the British. But the promised free land, freedom, benefits promised to the Africans were not forthcoming ! In the Civil War, “Freedom War,” the Africans sided with the Union forces by 200,000 soldiers and sailors and with over a million “contraband” (slaves escaping to Union lines) who greatly helped preserve the Union, the nation, who also helped, this time, by liberating themselves by force of sable arms ! But after the end of Civil War came constitutional amendments: 13th (slavery); 14th (equal protection and due process of law); and the 15th Amendments (federal voting), with the enabling statutes in laws. These new “rights” were castrated by United States Supreme Court’s decisions, starting in 1866 with New Orleans’ “Slaughterhouse” , Louisiana’s “Cruikshank” and more. We now-African Americans, entered a “nadir” (low spot) period in American society of being neither slave nor free, but another: “Jim Cow,” i.e. segregated socially, amerced politically and economically, and later terrorized—lynched, burned out, bombed out, shot and killed in Wilmington , NC, Tulsa, Oklahoma , East St. Louis, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Springfield , Illinois and Missouri, dozens of other locales, in “white” riots, pogroms, coup d’etats from 1898-1943 and beyond that! But here we are! We are still here! In 2020 due to the grace of God! We Here! Due to the faith and works of our forbears still here, and grateful!

HISTORIC BLACK CHURCH CLOSINGS

Ironically, Brooks Chapel A.M.E. Church in Butler, Bates County, Missouri, also founded in 1871, has closed this year. I formerly pastored that church, 1995-2004, and was blessed with people who had “a mind to work!” We formed the Amen Society and erected a statue to the first black troops to fight in the Civil War in 2008, on the main square in Butler on the Courthouse grounds. In 2012, the State of Missouri dedicated a 40 acre park site at the Battle of Island Mound location; to honor the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry, who fought October 1862! They defeated Confederate cavalry twice the size of their infantry before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Visit Butler, Missouri, and see it yourself! https://www.wftv.com/news/trending/historic-black-church-boston-be-sold-after-nearly-150-years-worship/RZTG63AUOJD7VDPKXTGOTAQHVA/?fbclid=IwAR361yab_DnQjVG_jK98Js4lDOmsnqmRwlswcu4ARRBQ6q9alp_IC-plN7c

AVERAGES AND ESSENCES

AVERAGES & ESSENCES Averages say everything. Averages say nothing. If and when we speak of numbers, items, people, ideas, averages identify nothing in particular & everything in general. As to any one thing, one idea , person, like you, for example, averages do not identify you. They cannot particularize you; for you are unique. I am unique. Grass shoots are unique. Water drops & light are unique. Dusts are unique. Uniqueness notwithstanding, grass is; grasses are & grow, because of averages ; water is water because of averages. Man and woman are identified as such due to averages. With essences, however, averages are wholly inaccurate inapplicable. Averages cannot apply, they do not apply to essences. Essences exist before time and space; before night and day; before existence existed. Essences preexist life everlastingly to everlasting. Essences are divine. Essences are of God are from God. Human beings are earthen essence. Divine numbers without averages in essence, but within earth averages. Individuals are both averages and essences simultaneously: in one instance evanescent; other eternal.  I am not average; nor are you or we average; nor are we averagable in essence. We are unique figments of indefatigable, undefinable, divinity. Amen.

CURIOUS

Curious how the “law of ‘93 and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 were constitutional, binding not only on the State but on each citizen of a State’” as correctly noted by leader, Frederick Douglass, in LIFE AND TIMES; but the Supreme Court in the “Civil Rights Cases” of 1883, and in the “United States v. Cruikshank” , 1876, said that the 13th and 14th Amendments’ provisions were not applicable to private persons, but only to the States in criminal or civil cases. Thus, in “Cruikshank” white terrorists, murderers of black voters in Louisiana in 1872 were freed; and in the “Civil Rights Cases” combined from five states, public accommodations, public transport, and theaters were and could be legally denied to black patrons too! Such “in-your-face” legal skullduggery persists even into the present day with respect to the privileges, immunities of blacks in comparison to whites’ in the United States of America under Trump!

SUNDAY SCHOOL

MY SUNDAY SCHOOL I used to teach Sunday School as a boy at St. Matthew C.M. E. Church in Kirkwood, Missouri in the early 1960s, age 12. But one day I was moved from teaching children to studying with the adults up in the choir stand. I was soon remanded back to the catechism class, after I began to correct the adults’ reading errors and asking penetrating questions. That was how I began to sense the disconnect between my incipient curiosity and the orthodoxy of the religious experience in our church. Mine was exploratory, wondrous, alive, seeking. Our home church’s vantage point was traditional, fixed. There had to be a clash. It came in the Sunday school teaching report related above. But it continued through my reading BEFORE THE MAYFLOWER by Lerone Bennett, Jr., at age 16. I sought permission to teach black history to the youth of the church. Not only did that pastor say “no,” he actually preached against the black history proposal in a sermon in which he said that “Black was ugly! Stick your hand in a jar of axle grease. That is black and ugly.” I was hurt! Remorseful . For years I then stayed away from church, any church. But, having been “raised up right” , brought up, in the spiritual, African American, philosophically-penetrating base of perceptions, conceptions intuition, of Southern Christianity, that saw through false facades and masks to the hidden truth of Jesus Christ, I was also beholden to its brush-arbor sapience, Siren-song’s holy salvation. Rather landing on the rocks, as in Greek mythology , lured by fanciful lusts, the “stones” were rolled away from the catacombs of inquiry. I saw God in nature, in the stars , in myself, in Jesus Christ, in my fellowmen, in life and after-life! So, in capsule, I have explained me to my inner self and to whomever. My story, testimony may also help someone, who may have struggled.