Hey guys, I got an email from my Whitman professor this morning, who has influenced me and been a great person in my life this semester, I asked and he said I could share his words with you regarding the election:
Hey my old Whitman friends,
Indulge me for a moment at this pivotal point in history, when waking up today truly does, without hyperbole, mean waking up to a new America. Our history trembled and shifted last night; it will never be the same. I’m thankful I’ve lived to experience it.
One of the poems we didn’t have a chance to explore this term is a poem Whitman wrote in the late 1860s, called “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors.” It’s always a troubling poem to confront. Often read as betraying Whitman’s racism, the poem has nonetheless been revered by many African American writers over the past century. Langston Hughes called it “the greatest poem in our language concerning a Negro subject,” and the great African American composer H. T. Burleigh set it to music; it was often sung at Harlem Renaissance gatherings. It has always seemed that African American writers and critics see something in the poem that most white readers do not.
Take a look at the poem. Whitman writes it from the perspective of a Union soldier who is marching with Sherman into the Carolinas in 1864, a march that resulted in the liberation of many slaves, who often—to the irritation of the Northern army—tried to latch onto the soldiers for protection and guidance. In Whitman’s poem, a hundred-plus-year-old slave woman, dismissively named “Ethiopia” by the soldier-narrator, comes out of her hovel and salutes the American flag, to the consternation of the white soldier, who wonders who this “dusky woman, so ancient hardly human” is, and why she should care about the American colors. The old slave woman, who was torn from her parents in Africa by slavers a century before and has experienced the Atlantic crossing, the American Revolution, the founding of the country, and its development as a slave republic, is now experiencing something she could not have imagined: white soldiers liberating her and her people. The white soldier can’t see it from her perspective and can only ask, dismissively, “Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?” But, of course, the things she has seen ARE indeed strange and marvelous, none more so than what she is seeing at that moment, when the nation’s flag, for the first time, seemed suddenly to symbolize something positive and had begun to include this ancient and “fateful” woman. (One of my favorite stories of the end of the Civil War is when abolitionists came to Charleston harbor to raise the Union flag over Fort Sumter; in the harbor, a ship filled with celebrating African Americans—many with their children along—heard a white officer say, as the flag was raised, “Now for the first time it is the black man’s as well as the white man’s flag.”)
When my graduate seminar was discussing this poem a couple of weeks ago, it seemed oddly different to me, once Barak Obama had become the Democratic nominee for president. During the 1960s and 1970s, the poem was almost unteachable because it seemed so clumsily insensitive in its understanding of racial attitudes. But I’ve always been attracted to the poem, in part because Whitman’s very first published piece, in the New York Mirror in 1834 (when he was fifteen years old), was also about how “strange and marvelous” things could appear to an old black person who had witnessed American history from a vantage point that only an African American in this culture could obtain. Whitman’s little article is called “The Olden Time,” and it starts by talking about how “vastly strange” it is to be told, that as “old” and “civilized” as New York City felt in 1830, there were still people alive who “conversed with men who once saw the present great metropolitan city as a little dorp or village.” Whitman goes on to tell how, in 1758, a “Negro Harry,” “aged at least one hundred and twenty years,” had died on Long Island. He had been a slave in the same family for a hundred years. This “old oracle” carried the history of the community in a way no one else could, and he remembered New York when “there were but three houses in it.” The young Whitman had talked to people who knew Negro Harry and heard his amazing tales. I’ve often thought that Whitman carried with him this little bit of history he had picked up in his childhood and used it again thirty years later as he thought about what that hundred-plus-year-old slave woman might have seen in her century’s journey through America.
So you will understand last night, as Barak Obama stood before 250,000 people in Chicago’s Grant Park and spoke to us of our history and how we were now experiencing it do something, respond to something, that we could only barely begin to register, why I was struck when he evoked a hundred-plus-year-old black woman to guide us through the moment. This woman, as you all heard, was 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper who cast her ballot yesterday in Atlanta. It’s one of “many stories that will be told for generations” about this election, Obama said, and it’s the “one that’s on my mind tonight”: “She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons—because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.” You’ll remember how Obama then took us through our history, from the “time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed,” to the “despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land,” to the bombs falling “on our harbor and tyranny threatening the world,” to “the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We Shall Overcome,’” to a man touching down on the moon, a wall coming down in Berlin, to a moment when Ann Nixon Cooper “touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.” It was during that catalog of the past century’s history that Obama began to intone his campaign chant, but somberly now and with quiet conviction: “Yes we can.”
He ended this amazing address by saying, just as Negro Harry and the old slave woman Ethiopia, “America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.” Another 100-plus-year-old black woman had looked at what America had become and was, like Whitman’s slave woman a hundred and fifty years earlier, shaking her head at what she had seen. I’m sure many white Americans, like the befuddled Union soldier in Whitman’s poem, were wondering what was so “strange and marvelous” about what Ann Nixon Cooper had seen. But I, for the first time, thought I understood what those Harlem Renaissance writers had seen in Whitman’s poem, had seen in that “fateful” ancient slave woman’s wonderment at what the American flag could come to mean, of how its shape-shifting symbolism actually can change, of how far we have come, and, because of that, of how far we can still go. Those three black centenarians--all carrying the nation’s fate, living the three centuries of our history, from Negro Harry when New York was but three houses, to Ethiopia seeing white men liberating the slaves, to Ann Nixon Cooper voting for the first African American president—carry the stories of all of us, and I loved President-Elect Obama’s final evocation of the next black centenarian (maybe one of his daughters!), leaving us all to wonder what “strange and marvelous” things she will tell at the beginning of the twenty-second century.
Best,
Ed Folsom
1 comment:
dude, this guy is awesome. i bet you have loved his class.
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