For Fred

 It has been a little more than six years since I published a blog post I called Oscar and Felix, a post in which I wrote about a friend of mine that read as follows:

A friend of mine tapped the window of my school bus one morning early last week...and said, 

“My son came to visit last night.”

“That was nice” I said.

“No it wasn’t,"  he said. "He had a cold and I got angry.' Don’t you know that at our age your mother and I are susceptible to colds?’”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he wanted some soup.” 

I laughed.

“So I made him some soup and told him not to touch anything.”

By this time I felt as though I were playing Oscar to his Felix, and I wanted to move back a step or two, but I was sitting inside my bus and he was standing outside it. 

“Fred,” I said, “does it ever surprise you when you hear about someone’s death? Someone who’s younger than you?” At 76, Fred is a year younger than me.

“I think about it all the time,” he said.

I do too.

Because Fred died last month, I would like to honor him here. 

Fred was a retired Army sergeant and a Vietnam Vet. He and I used to talk about Vietnam a lot. But mostly we talked about what came after - for each of us. 

Upon his return from Vietnam, Fred began to drink heavily until his family, seeing what was happening, intervened. He then began group therapy at a local VA hospital, which became his salvation.  

Fred was my first friend when I went to work at a new

location. What I want to say to him is: I miss you, and thank you. We will meet again - in death and in friendship.

 

"If I Can Help Somebody..."

It was Friday night, the beginning of a long weekend culminating with Martin Luther King Jr Day, so I decided to watch a movie.

I chose a documentary called I am MLK Jr, which celebrates Dr. King's career as a civil rights activist, starting with the day he happened to be in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to enter the bus, pay the fare, exit the bus, re-enter the bus's back door, and take a seat at the rear - the only section open to Blacks. 

The documentary shows news reels of the day Bull Connor viciously turned fire hoses and police dogs on demonstrators, many of them students. It highlights the day Dr. King stood in front of more than 200,000 people in Washington to tell them about his dream.

By 1968, Dr. King, who had been receiving death threats to himself and his family every day for years was so exhausted and so depressed he decided not to speak to the sanitation workers in Memphis who were fighting for their rights. His friends, however, convinced him to at least appear.

On the plane to Memphis, King, who had been beaten many times, stabbed, and threatened, told a reporter that in the past he had been so afraid that he had yielded to the real possibility and inevitability of death. 

When he spoke that day, telling his listeners it is the right of every American to fight for their rights, he was, according to Travis Smiley, one of the documentary's narrators, looking around, his eyes darting from one person to another because he knew "his days were numbered," King told the crowd he "did not know what would happen now... But it really doesn't matter to me now because I've been to the mountain top. I've seen the promised land...I may not get there with you (but) I don't mind (because) mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

And with that last word, and without finishing his speech, he turned and collapsed into the arms of his friend, Dr. Abernathy. 

By the next evening however, he was "jovial and clowning and free...He was in a playful mood."  He was  standing on the balcony outside his hotel room when someone reminded him he was expected at dinner soon. Dr, King called down to Jesse Jackson, saying, "It's time to go to dinner, man. Get dressed," When Jackson responded, "The prerequisite for eating is not a tie but an appetite," Dr. King laughed - and a bullet struck his body.

As I listened to these words of Travis Smiley: "We have no control over when we die, where we die, or how we die. All we have control over is what we die for," I listened too, to the words of a song playing in the background, the one about helping somebody, and realized that, although I am not Black and have never had to suffer the way any Black man, woman or child has had to suffer in this country, I have suffered and if I can use my suffering "to help somebody, then my living will not be in vain."     

If You See a Good Fight...

  

A friend told me recently about a movie too few people have seen, a movie about a man too few people have ever heard of. The film, The Story of Vernon Johns, is about a minister who was a civil rights advocate before Martin Luther King Jr. rose to the pulpit, before the hideous death of Emmett Till, and before the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Dr. Johns, who was proficient in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and German was a man who fought against both white Jim Crow laws in the south and black indifference to change, a man who deeply believed that "if you see a good fight, get in it."  

In 1947 Johns told the well-to-do parishioners of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that "the nastiest and deadliest sin in the world is the hatred between the races. This innane and foolish hatred threatens to devour civilization like a moth caught in a hell fire."

In a sermon given after the death of a young black boy who was shot in the back for allegedly resisting arrest, Johns told the congregation that murderers act with impunity knowing the black witnesses would not come forward. "By not coming forward," he asserted, "you have become accessories to murder."

After Johns, who advertised the topic of his sermons on a bulletin board outside the church, decided to give a sermon declaring that "It's Safe to Murder Negroes;" after he is threatened with a lynching, after a cross is burned in front of his church, Johns decides to give the sermon anyway.

If you are wondering what happened to this fearlessly courageous man, I think that, like me, you will have to watch the movie, which stars James Earl Jones, and is currently streaming on Appletv. Or if you have Amazon prime, it will direct you to Freevee where you can watch it with commercials. Either way, it is a movie well worth your time!

 

 

Rise and Shine

 

For the past year or two, I have had trouble reading. Not trouble reading, actually. Just trouble finding a book I wanted to finish. For the past year or two, I’ve picked up, started, and then discarded more books than I can count.

That is until I rediscovered the kind of books I truly enjoy – books by women, about women. Right now, I’m delighting in a book by Anna Quindlen called Rise and Shine.

It’s a story about a woman named Bridget who lives in Manhattan and works in the Bronx. (Why is Manhattan called Manhattan and the Bronx called the Bronx?)

It is also a story about a young, black girl (called Princess Margaret) who lives in the Bronx and goes to an exclusive, private high school in Manhattan. When asked if she found it difficult “to ricochet between a school in which most of the students consider it a tragedy if a cashmere sweater had a moth hole and a neighborhood” in which the housing project smells – well, unpleasant, Princess Margaret answers, “It’s pretty easy…You’re just two different people. One there and the other here. And you have the whole ride on the train to turn from one into the other.”

And, although the story is about the dissimilarities between the very rich and the very poor, our protagonist likes to revel in the similarities. Like how from the top floor window of the projects, the Bronx looks every bit as magical at night as Manhattan does atop Fifth Avenue.

Now let me give you some examples of why I love books written about and by women via an excerpt or two from the book. While describing the poor odors in the projects, Bridget says: “Fortunately, the community room smells most of the time like frying chicken and cake because of the elderly woman who lives next door and who salves her loneliness by cooking as though her children are still home, or at least likely to visit. I love the smells of grease and sugar; if I were to create a signature perfume, I would call it Donut Shop and would smell just like the community room…”

I love it! And I’d be willing to bet that men would love it too.

Another example involves Bridget’s older sister Meghan, who is the popular anchor on a morning television show. The first time Bridget heard her sister announce the name of the show, Rise and Shine, she said it reminded her of the way Meghan woke her up every morning when she was little. Those words, she said, “sounded so promising, as if this would be the day: the day to ride a bike without training wheels, to make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding, to persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly.” Or to be. Simply to be! 

 

 

1001 Books

I saw this book club, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, on social media and decided to join, even though I thought that at my age, I’d better start reading a lot faster!

But when I saw this month’s selection, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, I changed my mind - then changed it again, mostly because its members meet in person and not on Zoom.

 I read In Cold Blood back in the late Sixties, not long after it was published. I read it and never forgot it. 

It’s a story about two men who walked through the unlocked door of a farmhouse in western Kansas in the middle of the night on November 15, 1959, and brutally murdered an entire family, Herb and Bonnie Clutter, and their two teenage children, Kenyon and Nancy.

“Two worlds exist in this country," Capote said in the 2005 movie Capote. “The quiet conservative life, and the life of those two men. The underbelly. The criminally violent.” (Or as I would put it, the sane and the obscene.) “And those worlds converged that bloody night.”

To write the book, Capote and his friend Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, interviewed hundreds of people and took more than 8,000 pages of notes. The result was the first “nonfiction novel,” and an instant success.

However, although Capote finished the book in three years, he had to wait another three, (until the killers were hung) to release it.

While interviewing Perry Smith, one of the two killers, Capote discovered that both he and the killer had mothers who neglected and mistreated them.

“It’s like Perry and I grew up in the same house,” Capote told Lee, “and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front.” 

Or did he? 

Writing that book “changed my life,” he said. “It altered my view about almost everything.” 

It also interfered with his relationship with his partner, made him jealous of Lee whose book won the Pulitzer Prize, increased his intake of both alcohol and drugs, kept him from completing another book, and contributed to his death.

"If I have to leave here without understanding you,” Capote told the imprisoned Smith, who he both "fell in love with” and used to further his career, “the world will see you as a monster.” 

But, in trying to deny the monster in Smith, Capote, I believe, unleashed the monster inside himself.

“

The Movie Tar

 Even though the movie had started, it was dark in the theater when I entered. So dark I had to put my arms in front of me to get my bearings, which is how I felt throughout the movie because this movie, Tar, felt more like a puzzle than a film.

 In the first scene, which runs for almost twenty minutes, Lydia Tar, played by Cate Blanchette, is being interviewed by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. Throughout the interview, we see Tar, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, as accomplished, brilliant and, for want of a better word, haughty. In the second scene, with a fellow orchestra conductor (a male this time), she moves beyond haughty to condescending. And in the third scene Tar is teaching a seminar at Julliard where she berates a young student after he tells her he’s “just not that into Bach.” This time she comes off as bitchy.

It is at this point that the movie begins to feel like a puzzle. There are too many questions. For instance: a woman named Christa is mentioned. But who is she and why is she at risk?  And why, as I watch Tar progress through the movie, do I feel as though I am watching a skein of yarn unravel?

The answers come slowly. At first, as guesses. And then with an undeniable certainty as the story reaches its incredibly dramatic climax.

And I am left gaping.  

Till, the Movie

 

“Hate is a virus in the blood…”                                     

Roy Wilkins

 

I heard the words quoted above while watching the movie Till, a story about a Black boy from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and lynched while visiting his cousins in Mississippi in 1955 because he whistled at a white woman

This powerful movie begins by showing us the excitement and vulnerability of a 14-year-old boy as he gets ready for his trip. Three days later, Emmett was dead. 

After his body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River, authorities in that area tried to have him buried anonymously. It was Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who insisted her son’s mangled body be returned to Chicago and the casket remain open during the public viewing.

During the movie, Medgar Evers, who accompanied Emmett’s mother to the trial that followed one month later, said the federal government was trying to pass a law that would make lynching a federal hate crime.

“It wasn’t passed until this year,” I whispered to my daughter, who was sitting beside me in the theater.

Why had it taken so long?  I wondered. As I sat there watching the movie, I thought about the noose I’d seen on the Capitol steps during last year’s January 6 riots and wondered if lawmakers had to experience hate for themselves before they acted.     

“Hate is a virus in the blood.” Wilkins words reverberated in my head throughout the rest of the movie.

“Does this story need to be told again?” someone has asked. The answer is “yes.”

Emmett Till was only 35 days older than I was in 1955, and I have known about his murder almost since the day it happened. His brutal death is a story that must be told again and again and passed down until racial violence and injustice in this country are finally eradicated.