Skip to main content

The Ragged Shreds of Slavery


Once upon a curious time ago, Fred Nyline asked me to read the Lincoln lines in Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait”.   I have never been so overwhelmed in my life.  

Fred gave me a kind of abbreviated version of the score.  You can tell from my ignorance of what it is called that I was hopelessly ignorant of what was going on.   My understanding of music is limited to, “One, Two, Three, Four, Who do you appreciate?”, or something like that, by a factor of two.  

If you saw the recent movie, “Lincoln”, you will understand the quiet and scornful abuse I took when people commented on my tenor voice, certain in their conviction that mountains shook when Abraham Lincoln spoke, and the waters roiled.  I was just trying to count, “One, Two, Three, Four, now!”

It was on December 1, 1862 that Lincoln addressed Congress.  The issue was what should happen to former slaves.  The nation, Lincoln asserted, had been spellbound, captivated, itself enslaved by the fact of slavery.  

Lincoln said:  “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.  The occasion is piled hight with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.  As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. . . .”

“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

We were spellbound by slavery, and we had to disenthrall ourselves.  We are enthralled, still, by the ragged shreds of slavery.  

The difficulty I had, trying to read that abbreviated conductor’s score, and trying not to embarrass myself under the burden of words that shook mountains, and music that soared like freedom itself, were nothing compared to the heart-and-head-wrenching task of turning away from the captivation, the slavery, of an idea; an awful idea.  

We still hear the miserable music of racial arrogance:  that Barack Obama is “foreign”, that too many “poor people” are voting, that “takers” have their hands in the pockets of good, honest, rich people. 

The dogmas of the quiet past still are inadequate to the stormy present.  Too many young men died in that Civil War to hold to that old enthrallment.  Too many citizens marched across the bridge in Selma.  To many children died in Sandy Hook school to permit us to chant old magic slogans.  

We must rise with the occasion.   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more