Loaves and Fishes
In many churches yesterday, congregants heard the story of feeding the thousands, supposedly, with “five barley loaves and two fish.” Some years ago, as I listened to the account of this event in John’s Gospel, I thought to myself “I bet lots of people who congregated in hopes of seeing Jesus perform one of his ‘miracles’ brought a little snack in case they got hungry waiting their turn to be healed from something.” At each subsequent service where this story has been read, I’ve become more convinced that it was human generosity and a willingness to share that was the “miracle.” A couple of months ago, the Gospel reading at my church was about Jesus’ interaction with a woman who had been bleeding internally for many months, who came up behind him, touched his robe, and asked him to help her. Jesus ignored his disciples who urged him to move on to help the daughter of an important citizen who was deathly ill. Instead he touches the devout woman and she stops bleeding. When she and the others are awed by his powers, Jesus corrects them, insisting to the woman “Your faith hath made you whole.” In John’s account of the hungry thousands, we’re told about there being a little boy who has the bread and fish for himself but gives it up to Jesus who then “took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were reclining, and also as much of the fish as they wanted.” At the end of the day, Jesus instructs his disciples to go around and collect any left-overs “so that nothing will be wasted.” We’re asked to believe that there were several containers of left-overs.
In his brief homily yesterday, the priest said he believes the crowd could feel Jesus’ love for them so they extended themselves and shared some of whatever dibs and dabs of food or drink they had in their knapsacks or pockets. He also stressed the relationship between material food and the spiritual food available to us when we are generous with what we have. Instead of holding on tightfistedly to what is “ours,” we openhandedly relinquish ownership so that those less fortunate than we can feel better. Surely this is a “healing” that works both ways. In our story, there must have been many who perhaps didn’t have any extra food on hand or who were too eager to draw near to the man who seemed to have strange and amazing powers to help. In any case, they arrived eager to be “fed” in spirit. So maybe the aura on that expanse of grass where they reclined to listen to and witness awesome healings performed by Jesus took over and people shared. So it was their faith that let them feel a love of community. The “miracle” was feeling generous of material food because of feeling seen and loved by a stranger who knew of their untapped capacity to share. And the “left-overs” prove that generosity then or now defies theories of “zero-sum gain,” so prevalent in today’s world so often ruled by greed.
As I held out my hands to receive what I thought would be one of the little round, tasteless wafers from a member of the congregation, I was taken up short by what got put into my hand. It was a tiny triangular wedge and I registered where it had come from. At a pivotal moment in the liturgy, the priest raises a large round host wafer and breaks it into little chunks as he recounts what happened at the last meal Jesus would share with his disciples where he broke their hallah loaf into pieces and handed them to the twelve disciples. Chances of a given member of my very large congregation’s getting one of the resulting shards are very slim, yet there one was being put into my outstretched hands by a woman I know to be a staff member at my church. No longer believing in “coincidences,” I returned to my pew deeply moved by what was happening to me and all of us walking quietly up to the alter rail to be “fed” physical bread. The physical really felt like a stand-in for the spiritual significance of the moment.
I went home satisfied.
More Echoes
I recently blogged about how disorienting it can be to lose an architectural structure that has provided something to stop our eyes and send back a familiar message–an echo. Now I want to speak to another kind of echo that enlivens me because it suggests a future that can hold something new but that reminds me of older things. By this I mean a literary echo, a new piece of writing that keeps sending me back to an earlier piece of writing, a new writer who speaks in ways and on subjects that connect me back to an older writer. Jesmyn Ward is a black Mississippian with several titles to her credit, two of which have won substantial awards. Two of her novels–Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing–won National Book Awards in 2011 and 2017. Her trenchant memoir, Men We Reaped, was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.
Though I haven’t yet read Salvage the Bones, a story framed around the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on various populations in New Orleans, I have recently read the memoir and her most recent novel about a black family coping with personal and institutional violence and with the power of story and memory to keep the tangibly dead importantly alive. Why do I hear echoes of Morrison in Ward? Both women think deeply about the effects of decades of slavery on descendants of the enslaved yet both present their “theories” about this through stories of people we come to care deeply about and about people whose actions we may condemn (Cholie in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Leonie in Sing, Unburied, Sing) but whose own pain we are forced to see and reckon with before we pass easy judgments. Both women did not come to the public’s attention until they were in their thirties (Morrison was 39 whenThe Bluest Eye was published and Ward was 34 when Salvage the Bones appeared). Both authors say they write stories about people not often found in mainstream fiction.
For me, as a person who is never satisfied by contemporary minimalist literature, the strongest echo I hear in Ward’s work is her obvious passion for finding the precise word or metaphor, the most germane descriptive detail, or the finest emotional nuance with which to embody whatever broader idea or mood she wants to convey. Because both care so deeply about language, I feel trusted by each to employ my best honed reading abilities. I can’t just “pick up” a Ward book; she deserves my full attention just as Morrison has for decades. So, knowing that Jesmyn Ward is at work right now on her next novel enlivens my imagination as I look forward to what she will gift me with next. She has said that the new novel is set in New Orleans in the 18th century, just as the trans-atlantic slave trade was fading, a cruel fact that necessitated a worsening of conditions for enslaved Africans and their progeny, more and more of whom were products of thoughtless rapes of black women by white slavers. I know I can depend on Ward to write about the horrors of the domestic slave trade in this country with precision and grace, just as I’ve always awaited Morrison’s next book with similar certainties.
So, while I wait for the new novel, I’ll dig into Salvage the Bones. And, if this new book takes longer than I might wish, I’ll return to Sing, Unburied, Sing, knowing that I will find all sorts of things I missed on first reading. Because the tight plot line will have remained in my consciousness, I can pay closer attention to particulars. I can look for more instances in which Ward forces me to feel kindly toward Leonie who tells us late in the story that she loves her children but has no idea how to tell or show them that,and that this emotional lacuna pains her terribly. Or I’ll read all Pop’s italicized stories he tells to Jojo to help him grow from boyhood to manhood without succumbing to despair or destructive anger. Or I’ll listen to the whisperings from Given and Richie, who deserve to have their stories and endings embodied in the world of the still living. Or I’ll weep again as I rejoice that Kayla is going to have the “gift” to see and hear from those no longer breathing but just as surely not yet completely dead. And, what more cogent echo could I ask for than Morrison’s amazing story of eponymous character in her novel, Beloved. Just as there is the unavoidable echo when we learn that Ward’s character, Pop, killed Richie as an act of love, just as Sethe killed Beloved to save her from re-enslavement and as Eva killed her boy Plum in order to spare him a slow death from heroin addiction.
And so, as I continue to find ways to resist what the president and his minions are doing to destroy the America I value, I will cling to Ward as a positive echo of a woman whose body of work (11 novels, numerous essays/speeches, several children’s books) helps me understand the legacy of slavery and white supremacy and whose characters urge me to feel empathy for characters who do not always act exactly as I might want them to. Upon the publication Between the World and Me, Morrison said she had feared that, upon James Baldwin’s death, she would not have anyone to tell her what it’s like to live as a black man in America, but that Ta Nahisi Coates was emerging as that person. So I feel that with a continuing publication of new work, Jesmyn Ward may be the woman who can carry on Morrison’s legacy for a new generation of readers, both black and white.
The Value of Echoes
If you’ve been in an echo chamber, you’ll surely recall the impulse to shout or speak quietly into that magic space and then wait for the reverberation to send back your words or sounds. Echoes are not always sonic–they can be architectural. During the Blitz, Virginia and Leonard Woolf did not seek safety from London by fleeing to a southern county like Essex. Friends urged them to do so, but they stayed because they were running an important small press in their basement–The Hogarth Press, that still publishes books. It seems that Virginia often began her day by walking from their Bloomsbury flat to a local market for milk and baked goods, passing by the same buildings every morning. But bombs could change that with frightening ease, and she often wrote about new devastation wrought by German planes. In a powerful entry, she said “All the walls, the protecting and reflecting walls, wear so terribly thin in this war. There’s no standard to write for: no public to echo back…. They [enemy planes] came very close….We walked around back. Stood by Jane Harrison’s house. The house was still smoldering…. Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing. A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out–a clean cut.”
What Woolf is working out is just how valuable seeing familiar structures can be to provide us with an end point for our eyes. They travel along some vector to building X, are stopped by it and then it’s as if the arc of our vision returns to assure us all is well. Losing these architectural limits clearly caused Virginia emotional discomfort. Since she was also losing good friends who served to mirror her and offer assurances that she was “seen,” I believe the shock caused by the erasure or destructive alteration in her physical environment frayed her nerves in serious ways.
Though I intend no comparison with the effects of nightly bombing, I am experiencing a similar fraying brought on by the destruction of a landmark building in my own neighborhood. Ever since I moved to Minneapolis in 1964, I’ve been shopping for groceries at a store named Lunds. Right across the street from it has always stood a large and graceful sandstone public building housing things like banks and law offices and real estate establishments. In fact, when natives heard where I lived, they urged me to go visit this building and I did. About five stories high, it boasted a beautiful frieze border at its top: SONS OF NORWAY was inscribed onto a background of lovely multi-colored flowers–all true blues and bright yellows embedded in primary green. Not being familiar with the name, I inquired and discovered that the building had originally served the Norwegian community settling Minneapolis. In particular, offices in the space helped new immigrants secure housing, jobs, and–importantly to the Norwegian sense of family responsibility–solid life insurance policies. These new citizens often worked dangerous construction jobs and so wanted to be sure their families were “covered” in case of their unexpected death. So the building spoke to providing unrooted people with a visible “echo” of sorts, a place where their words requesting help and information were heard and heeded, helping them begin to feel secure in their adopted country.
A new generation of city council members in Minneapolis is pushing all sorts of plans to increase “density” and discourage people from driving individual cars. So they forced through a mammoth proposal for the city block that had been peacefully occupied by the Sons of Norway building and its generous parking lots. They will erect three six-story buildings that include features like a skating rink and high-end boutiques. Within less than a week, gargantuan cranes, trucks, pile-drivers, and wrecking tractors ate away that lovely building. I tried not to look as I went into and out of Lunds for fresh vegetables, Norwegian salmon, or flowers for my dining room table. I took to arking on the side of the store with no view of the sandstone façade being reduced to mountains of ugly twisted metal and rubble. But today, I made myself look at the giant gaping hole. Doing so brought Woolf’s frightening and frightened words to mind. And, like her as she coped with no place for her eyes to “land,” I felt disoriented and not a little lost. My eyes just kept going until I forced myself to look into the sky that had not changed. But clouds are by definition diaphanous, not like sandstone and glass. So my vision had no familiar echo and I felt sad and scared.
1808
I’m just home from a pilgrimage to Washington D.C. with a good friend. We went to have the better part of two days at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and then part of a single day at the National Museum of the American Indian. My heart is full of sorrow and gratitude while my mind is full of new harrowing knowledge. So I’m planning several blogs over the next period of time. It feels important or “right” to begin with the single piece of information that has staggered me both for its content and for the fact that I did not know about that content until this very late-in-life moment.
It seems that in 1807 President Jefferson convinced the federal government to pass a bill that went into effect in 1808. This bill forbade the importation of any “new” African people to become slaves in this country. Had the world into which this bill landed been different, the institution of slavery would have gradually dwindled and eventually disappeared as the population of the enslaved shrank. But the world in this new country was seeing the cotton industry grow exponentially and quickly into an import trading business which would make “America” into a viable international commercial player. That means that we moved from engaging in the incredibly violent transatlantic slave trade to what has come to be known as the domestic slave trade. What I learned from trenchant videos, photographs, and other powerful displays is that slavery became focused on black Africans rather than the conglomerate of groups including indigenous peoples living here and individuals from various European countries who were enslaved in the Americas for stipulated periods of time to grow and harvest sugar cane and then tobacco. I remembered reading Toni Morrison’s A Mercy about this time in our history, set in the region known as the Chesapeake until it became Maryland. In discussing why she did the research and writing about this phenomenon, she said she wanted to understand the differences between this form of slavery and what came to be the systemic and inhumane treatment of specifically African people by the white majority.
The Museum told me that slavery changed at this time in our history from being a stipulated period of servitude to a permanent condition from which it was impossible ever to be freed unless one’s owner did so at his death. More painfully, I was told that the treatment of black enslaved women and men became markedly more violent and violating, i.e., the routine and continuous rape of African women in order to produce the next generations of enslaved workers in the cotton fields of the South, the brutal whippings and near starvation of African men (and women) for no reason other than to strike terror into their hearts so as to reduce the likelihood of escape efforts, and, significantly enough, the collusion by Northerners in capturing and returning to Southern slavers the brave and resilient Africans who naively thought the “North” would treat them differently.
So what I’m left with now that this new knowledge is seared into me is this: Slavery might well have died an inevitable death had the cotton industry not been moving into high gear. That is to say, inhumane and barbaric treatment of innocent captives could have been weakened and then perhaps discontinued entirely if commerce and money not been the driving forces behind the perceived need for that treatment. And it remains true that a capitalist framework has seen the aborted end of Reconstruction, the legal support for Jim Crow laws, and the prolonged and continuing mass incarceration of black people, especially black men. We don’t have slaves picking cotton until their hands became blistered and shredded, but we do have black prisoners working both inside and outside their cells in order to provide white commercial and agricultural ventures with essentially free labor. And a bill that may well have come from good intentions on the government’s part never got even to be put into play with any energy or hopes for a positive outcome.
My sadness stems from grasping this unnecessary prolongation of pain and abuse; my anger stems from having no one ever teach me anything about this travesty.