And All Our Wounds Forgiven

Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama
To Be a Slave
Revolutionary Notes
Black Folktales
Search for the New Land
The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B.
Du Bois
Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History
Two Love Stories
The Knee-High Man
Who I Am
(with David Gahr)
All Is Well
This Strange New Feeling
Do Lord Remember Me
The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit
More Tales of Uncle Remus: Further Adventures of Brer
Rabbit
Further Tales of Uncle Remus
The Last Tales of Uncle Remus
Lovesong: Becoming a Jew
How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have?
Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky

To
Milan Sabatini
evermore

i do not know where the story begins, though i am integral to it, i am not sure i know even what the story is as neither my life nor death constitutes
the
story.

nor is the story always the one we recall, rarely is it the one we tell.

in its etymological root,
story
means to see. hi-story is, then, the record of what was seen, there’s the rub, to coin a phrase, what constitutes seeing? is such profundity even possible?
who
is seeing determines what is seen, can we hope, then, for more than awareness of what we
think
we see, though what we see may not be there at all?

example: in the mid-fifties i
saw
that the time had come to end racial segregation in the south. the 1954 supreme court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools was like a second emancipation proclamation for us. the highest court in the land was, at long last, ready to uphold the constitutional principle of equality under the law. by decree-ing segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the court, wittingly or unwittingly, had declared segregation illegal in every aspect of american life.

i was under no illusion that ending segregation on buses, in restaurants and in other areas of public accommodation would be easy. i and others would give our lives. dying for the right to sit on a torn seat at the front of a bus was not an even exchange. but such obscene inequity was inherent to the story. i thought that was all i needed to understand.

how little i knew about the nature of
story.
i still believed stories had the calming order of beginnings, middles and ends, with unambiguous heroes, heroines and villains, if i acted for the good, the good would prevail and justice would roll through the land with the meandering majesty of a mighty river.

what gave me such confidence to think i knew what the good was? i equated recognition of injustice with apprehension of the good. such elegant symmetry is only in the minds of political ideologues. whatever judgement history makes of my life, it will not record that john calvin marshall was an ideologue.

yet, i, too, was guilty of oversimplifying, of trying to contain the story within the parameters of my subjective landscape. i believed that if you sincerely and honestly acted for the good, goodness would be the consequence.

how little i knew.

once set in motion, social change, regardless of its noble intent and pure righteousness, cannot be controlled, you think you are changing “this” and you are. but you did not anticipate “that” changing also, by the time recognition of the unanticipated consequences comes, it is too late to do anything — except hope you survive.

i thought social change meant the enactment of laws to modify behavior and eliminate or at least reform institutions that acted unjustly and punish those who refused to alter their behavior, if not their attitudes.

i learned:

social change is the transformation of values by which a group and/or nation has defined and known itself, such change is like pregnancy; a woman is aware of it only a month after conception. a nation becomes cognizant of a shift in its values only when facing a phenomenon it does not understand and can find no precedent for.

example: 1956: i was 26 years old, a harvard ph.d. andrea and i had been married for a year. congress authorized the construction of an interstate highway system. i’m sure we read about it in the paper. i have no doubt that huntley-brinkley mentioned it one evening in their droll, offhand way that made cynicism not only acceptable but attractive. there was probably a picture in the atlanta constitution of president eisenhower in the rose garden or oval office using thirty pens to sign the bill into law. we did not pay attention because we thought it was a wonderful idea. we remembered the drive from boston to atlanta the year before. part of the new jersey turnpike had been built by then and what a treat it was to drive at 65 miles an hour for unbroken stretches. but most of that journey was made on two lane highways through small southern towns where the speed limit was 35 and, if you were colored, you got arrested for doing 34. i greeted the projected interstate highway system with anticipation. that i did so indicated a transmutation of my values of which i was as yet unaware.

like all other americans in the fifties, i had become a believer in the ethic of saving time, (bear with me if i appear to be rambling. i am not. for some the exercise of logic means moving straight ahead. on this side of the veil, we tend to go sideways but are no less logical.)

saving time is a peculiar concept. what does it mean? and how do you do it?

theoretically, you reduce the time used for one task and free time for other activities. sounds reasonable. but is it? Shakespeare “wasted” a lot of time because he wrote in long hand with quill pens. it would be logical to conclude that if he had had a ballpoint pen, typewriter or computer, he would have written more plays and perhaps, greater ones, yet, no user of a ballpoint pen, typewriter or computer has equaled or excelled him in applying the english language to human experience. it is possible Shakespeare would have written less and less well had he used a computer.

perhaps Shakespeare neither spent or saved time but lived in different relationship to it. perhaps he wore time. perhaps it wore him.

the twentieth-century metaphor for our relationship to time implies ownership. “how much time do we have?” is a common question. “i wasted a lot of time sitting in traffic,” is a daily plaint. “i have some free time tomorrow afternoon.” we conceive of time as a commodity to be expended, hoarded or wasted. the marxist — when such existed — would have said the metaphor reflects capitalism. it is not so simple.

the interstate highway system was created to save time. how much time? if two cars leave new york city for albany at noon, one driving 65, the other 55, the first car will arrive twelve minutes before the second. i suppose if you had to go to the bathroom badly, knocking twelve minutes off a three hour drive would be helpful. otherwise, what would one do with the twelve minutes saved?

but what one does with the time saved is not the issue. an american axiom: better to have wasted the time you’ve saved than not to have saved it at all. some are so conscientious about saving time they drive 80 and 90 miles an hour and save themselves the most time of all — the rest of their lives.

what was not anticipated was the enormous social change the interstate highway system would bring into being. for centuries we had been rooted to place. home and work and leisure occurred in one place and created a whole — community. the interstate highway system made it possible to live thirty, forty, fifty, sixty miles from where you worked. work and home and place ceased to be interrelated. you could work in a city whose people and institutions were alien to you. you could live in a place and be indifferent to its people and institutions. you could live and be unknown at work and at home. You could live without belonging to a community (enter the nuclear family as locus of society. but the family is too small an entity to withstand the intricate permutations of relationship. the pressures of family are alleviated only if the family knows itself as part of a community. when it does not, we should not be surprised that one out of two marriages end in divorce.)

the interstate highway system brought into being a geopolitical entity called sub-urbs as people discovered they could have the amenities of country living on city incomes. eventually, stores and corporations moved to where their workers and consumers had gone. the middle-class white collar workforce and corporations that had provided the tax base for the urbs took their tax dollars to the sub-urbs. the cities deteriorated because the majority of the inhabitants remaining were blacks, hispanics and poor whites who did not have incomes to generate sufficient tax revenues. amer-ica became a nation of predominantly white sub-urbs encircling black and poor urbs. why? is it too harsh to conclude that we cared more about saving time than about the structure of our society?