Last month, some of you were introduced to Street Sense Media and the work that organization does. Since then, it has marked its fifteenth anniversary. Talk to almost anyone who attended the celebration, Art Brings Us Home, and you’ll get the sense that it was much more than a great evening. I talked to a few.

“Artistic expression and the practice of it is like therapy,” said vendor-artist Angie Whitehurst, who began participating in the organization’s theater and writing groups six years ago. “It helps alleviate stress, it helps you to breathe, to go to the next step, to be able to be visionary, to develop new dreams and make those dreams reality.”

The celebration highlighted the vendors and volunteers and the work they do in a nice, gracious, fun way, according to Whitehurst.

Fun there was. Held this year at Big Chief in D.C.’s Ivy City neighborhood, the evening featured live music and dancing, an open bar and hors d’oeuvres, a giveaway of prizes and artwork, and a silent auction that included two VIP tickets to a live taping of “Dancing with the Stars” in Los Angeles.

Whitehurst’s words were echoed in those of Ann Herzog, a longtime customer and volunteer. “I had a lot of fun. The people who came with me had a lot of fun.”

Her friends, Herzog said, didn’t really know much about Street Sense Media other than what she told them. They were “just blown away by this wonderful, strong, community of people, staff, and vendors. I think the staff did a great job, and what a great job the vendors did, showing up and giving their stories.”

Those stories, told through poetry, song, photography, illustration, interactive art, theater and film, were an integral part of the evening. “With this particular celebration,” Herzog said, “you really understood the work Street Sense Media does and the intersection between homelessness and the community and creativity.”

Whitehurst was delighted by the performance of an artist and vendor she calls by his stage name, Pookanu. “I love his work,” she said.

Pookanu, a.k.a. Ron Dudley, has been doing hip-hop all his life, performing at many of the now-defunct clubs along U Street.

“Since I’ve been with Street Sense Media, I chopped it down to poetry,” Pookanu said. “I was doing music before I was doing the paper. Now I can put my work in the paper. This anniversary was my fourth event. I performed something I had in the paper called ‘Color Blind.’”

Dudley credits Street Sense Media “all day, every day,” with helping remove him from “street life.”

“This is the best job I’ve ever had,” he said. “[Selling the paper] taught me more people skills. It taught me to be dedicated. It’s the fact that it’s your own business. You treat people with respect, and you have something to offer.”

Both Herzog and Whitehurst said two of the highlights of the evening were the Denny brothers, vendor-artists David and Reginald. “David Denny and Reggie Denny are extraordinary people,” Herzog said.

“[Reginald] has a beautiful voice. He sang a beautiful song,” Whitehurst added. “[David], when you hear him recite his poetry, he does it with such passion. It touches everyone who ever hears him. It’s so sincere.”

David was also the subject of a documentary film shown at the event, which chronicles his journey from homelessness to housing with the help of Street Sense Media.

“The video really communicated to the audience the real mission work that Street Sense Media does,” Herzog said. “To have the customers and donors there and really see the vendors and see what extraordinary people they are — and then to see the video on David’s story — was just inspirational.”

Of his rendition of “The Impossible Dream” (as done by Matt Monroe), Reginald said “That was a ministry for me … I’m not poetic. I can sing and that’s what I was there to do.”

Reginald’s brother drew him to Street Sense Media. “I said, ‘Damn. He makes a lot of money just to sell some daggone papers and running his mouth, and I can do that – well,” he laughed.

Other vendors told Reginald about the organization’s artistic workshops and he thought it would be a chance for him to display some of his talents, most of which he had tried to keep hidden from his old community. “I joined the liturgical dancers, even though I was the only heterosexual at the time, but I didn’t care because I was uninhibited by what people said.”

For Reginald, this organization has been more than a newspaper. “Street Sense Media, for me, is a platform. Our mission is to raise awareness of the homelessness and poverty of our neighbors in the community, but it’s more than that.

“Street Sense Media is a platform for those who have been pulling back and not being able to speak out about whatever you have dealt with, whatever you are dealing with, whatever you aspire to do with your life.”

Rather than tell you myself about Street Sense Media, I’ll let them tell you in their own words:

“Street Sense Media was founded as Street Sense in August 2003 after two volunteers approached the National Coalition for the Homeless on separate occasions about starting a street newspaper in Washington, D.C. After bringing together a core of dedicated volunteers and vendors, Street Sense published its first issue in November 2003 with a print run of 5,000 copies. The newspaper has published consistently on a monthly and now biweekly basis.

“Our mission is to end homelessness in the Washington, D.C. area by empowering people in need with the skills, tools and confidence to succeed. Together we use a range of media platforms to raise awareness and spotlight solutions to homelessness in our community.

“Street Sense Media creates content in print, film, theater, photography, audio, illustration and more, all for the purpose of providing economic opportunity for and elevating the voices of people experiencing homelessness. The content of our media center aims to challenge perceptions of homelessness and those it affects while creating common ground upon which we can build a stronger community.

“Our innovative approach harnesses the abilities, aspirations and hard work of men and women experiencing homelessness. We have long known that while housing and economic opportunity are distributed unevenly, talent and creativity are distributed equally, without regard to income or housing status.

“In addition to the economic opportunities provided by our newspaper vendor program, Street Sense Media provides case management services to help the men and women we work with navigate the often-complex bureaucracies toward permanent housing, employment and physical and mental health care.

“At Street Sense Media, we define ourselves through our work, talents and character, not through our housing situation.”

Why am I writing about Street Sense? Well, for the past few years, I’ve been buying the newspaper, and often have found myself in conversation with the vendors selling them. So, when I registered for a course that required I do an internship somewhere, the newspaper came to mind. One of my first assignments was to do a vendor profile. Because the organization was about to commemorate its fifteenth anniversary under the theme “Art Brings Us Home,” I decided to interview one of the artists whose work was being featured as part of the celebration, a young man named Vincent Watts.

When Vincent says one of his defining attributes is being “observant,” it is easy to find his fortune in possessing such a trait. After all, what better ability would serve someone engaged in the creation of visual art, something that has been a life-long interest of his?

“I started doing art when I was about three years old,” Vincent says. “My mom noticed my talent, like, right-off-the-bat, and she put me in a private art school. Whenever I couldn’t play with my toys or go outside on a rainy day, I was sketching the Ninja Turtles or something. I was always into art.”

Vincent’s early and never-waning interest took him from his native Detroit to the city he considers his second home, Chicago. There, after already having begun studying at a community college, he enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. His medium is computer graphics. “You can call it digital art,” he says. Arriving here in Washington, D. C. a year ago this month, Vincent says his artistic interests have expanded to now include architecture.

Since being in Washington, Vincent has been seeking employment opportunities. While doing so, he has made use of the chance offered by Street Sense Media. When asked why he decided to become one of the newspaper’s vendors, he says it is because of the opportunity “to sell something.” He goes on to add that “I actually used to be in sales. I’ve been in sales for quite some time.” When it comes to selling the paper, Vincent explains it this way: “To me, my perception is it’s a lot better than just asking for cash, so the idea appealed to me, the whole concept was kind of a unique experience.”

Though not now having a place of his own in which to pursue his art, Vincent does not consider himself homeless. Because of the shelter where he stays, he says of his current circumstances, “I don’t want to refer to it as a homeless situation, ‘cause you have someplace to go. I consider homeless being, like, literally homeless – no place to go. You do have resources and services available at a lot of these shelters.”

Not having his own place, however, has not stopped Vincent from doing what he loves, and here, too, Street Sense Media has helped, affording him the opportunity to provide illustrations to the newspaper. (In fact, the art work of vendors was an integral part of the organization’s aforementioned anniversary celebration, which included photography, illustration, interactive art, poetry and writing, theater, film, and audio production, and featured a silent auction and raffles for prizes and artwork).

One of Vincent’s stated goals is “getting a job, getting back on my feet.” When asked if that means returning to sales, he says he’d like to do something else. Referencing his background in the fine arts, he shares that he’d “love to go into that,” and that working with art students here in the city is also something he’d like to do. “I’m putting my best efforts forward. I’m reaching out to a lot more people so, hopefully, the feedback will kind of give me a new approach.”

Hopefully, it will.

Dear  —————–,

You and I talked once before about trying to look at your situation as sort of like a monk in a monastery, a place where men withdraw from the world to reflect, to study, and to focus on their faith through prayer and meditation. Some do so to become self-aware and self-realized individuals, but the monastery is their life. For you, however, the “monastery” will not be your life; you will be returning to the world to live. So, something I hadn’t thought about in a long time came to mind, something from the natural world that I want you to consider.

Do you know what a chrysalis is? The word is from Latin, but the Latin speakers (the Romans) got it from the Greeks; it was from their word for “gold.” Well, in nature, a chrysalis is something that is used when going through a transformation between immature and mature stages of life. For example, when a caterpillar is fully grown, it makes a button of silk which it uses to fasten its body to a leaf or a twig. Then the caterpillar’s skin comes off for the final time. Under this old skin is a hard skin called a chrysalis. During this stage, the caterpillar does not move at all, although sometimes it will produce sounds to scare away predators. But, one of the wonders of nature is the fact that after this stage of life, the caterpillar – a thing that once could only crawl – has transformed into a butterfly, a thing that can fly. All of that happens because of the time spent in the chrysalis stage.

Of course, you don’t have the luxury of being able to not move at all, but if you know that you are at a point in your life where you are not interested in what the other “monks” are doing, then there is nothing wrong with limiting yourself to the benefits of what a “monastery” can provide: a chance to reflect, to study, and to focus. Let that be your hard skin, your chrysalis. After all, you’ll be returning to the world soon. Might as well prepare yourself to fly.

Love,

(Some of the things I need to do, even the trivial, sometimes seem to get themselves done without much help from me. For example, after planning to write about a serious subject this month, I decided at the last minute to do something light instead. “What about that piece of very-short fiction that’s never seen the light of day,” I thought. That led me to wonder what I had done this time last year, so I checked. Lo, and behold! I had posted a piece of very-short fiction. Discovering that led me to further wonder when I had written the piece I am posting today, so I checked that, too. The date was August 12, 2017. Funny how things work out.)

Paint

     It is that time of the summer when the full Moon casts its light through their bedroom window and directly onto the bed. Rose had noticed it one night three summers ago, their first summer in the house. They have looked forward to it every year since, waiting for this first-of-three nights when the window frame forms their very own lunar monolith.

     As they lie in bed, Rose asks, “You know what I want you to do, don’t you?”

     He grunts in response.

     She lightly pinches his arm in gentle rebuke. “Well?” she asks.

      “Okay. Tomorrow. Okay?” he says, relenting to her three-year request.

     “You’d better,” she warns.

     They know she could easily have done the painting herself by now, but she persisted instead in reminding him that he had said he would do it. Though it takes a while at times, Rose always has been good at finally getting him to do things he is reluctant or less than enthusiastic to do. She had succeeded in convincing him to give up his life, his job, and his apartment in the city of his birth and move to this tiny southern town her family has inhabited for generations. He has had none of the regrets he thought he might.

      They moved into this big, sprawling house left to her by her grandmother. He loves this house, though he could do without the knocks and thumps and bumps and creaking he has heard on occasion, noises that has caused him to get out of bed in the middle of the night expecting to confront an intruder. The only thing he’s ever encountered is the interplay of shadows caused by the collision of darkness and the ambient light of the night sky coming in through the kitchen windows’ faux-lace curtains, shadows that for a moment can seem like something more. Rose had said it is just how an old house sounds and had laughed when he told her about how the shadows had made him think he was seeing things out of the corners of his eyes.

      He had taken his time in taking care of the many things the house needed to have done when they moved in, but even he knows it is ridiculous that he still has not gotten around to painting the front porch. It isn’t as if the old paint is peeling and causing the neighbors to suck their teeth in disapproval as they pass by, and he doesn’t care one way or the other about the present color. But for Rose, it is the fact that the color, a pale mint she had loved when she visited as a girl, does not reflect the house’s new tenants. She had been no help when asked what color she thought suited them. “Surprise me,” she had said. “Alright, but just remember you said that,” he had answered, intentionally trying to make her wonder if he might choose something that would make her sorry she had left it up to him.

     In the morning, he is in the town’s only paint store and decides that, like the house itself, the porch’s spandrels and balustrades and columns will be white, with the floor being a standard grey. As for the ceiling, he smiles as the inspiration comes to him: he chooses a bright rose. Not long after, he is back at home in the t-shirt and raggedy jeans he wears for chores, up on the ladder with paint brush in hand, whistling happily as he applies Rose’s namesake-color to the porch’s ceiling.

     After a while, he pauses, sensing the presence of something; he wipes his brow with the back of his hand and glances around. There, under the gnarled elm that stands just beyond the front yard, is Mr. Crawford, watching him.

     The first time he had ever seen Mr. Crawford, strolling up the street toward him, it was if the man had been walking from out of the past. He was impeccably dressed for what turned out to be just a regular constitutional, but his clothes were not in the style of men his age, men who had been born right after World War II; his raiment was that of a nattily arrayed gentleman born a generation earlier. This morning, there he stands, cane in one hand, one hand resting against the tree.

     Upon being noticed, Mr. Crawford speaks. “That’s not what you’re going to need. Haints are strong around here, especially the ones in your wife’s family. You’re going to have to go and get yourself some of that Haint Blue.” He gives a slight doff of his straw fedora and moves on.

     Having no idea what the old man had been talking about, he recounts what happened over dinner. Rose’s explanation leaves him staring at her in disbelief. “Ghosts?” he asks. “Are you serious? He was talking about ghosts?”

     “No, not ghosts, evil spirits,” she says, the distinction lost on him. “Haint Blue is to keep evil spirits from coming in. They can’t cross water, so the Haint Blue on the porch ceiling fools them.”

     “So, if he believes in all that stuff, why is he so sure the ‘haints’ in your family are strong.”

     “Well, Mr. Crawford and my folks didn’t always get along,” Rose laughs, “and I can’t say that none of them might’ve seemed evil at times. Anyway, all haints aren’t necessarily evil. Some are just stubborn and selfish, some are just lost and confused.”

     “I don’t know if you’re just messing with me right now, or what, but I wish I didn’t know any of this.”

     Now they lie in moonglow once more, the only sound being that of Rose’s quiet breathing as she sleeps and the soft, ubiquitous din of the night creatures outside. Now he hears something else. “Just an old house,” he reminds himself, but that is not enough. He rises and creeps downstairs, as if hopeful of catching someone by surprise. There is nothing to be seen anywhere, just the shadows caused by darkness and light. In the kitchen, he pours and drinks a glass of water. He sets the glass in the sink and turns to take the back stairway up to bed. He stops; he is certain something has just suddenly and swiftly moved to avoid him. He stands stark still, his eyes sweeping the dark, his ears primed for the slightest sound. He sees nothing, hears nothing.

     Back in bed, he silently plans what he will do in the morning. He knows Rose will chide him, but he doesn’t care. “Well, Mr. Crawford,” he thinks, “Haint Blue it will be.”

We live on a world the motion of which reminds us every day that we cannot believe everything we think we are seeing – right there in front of us – with our own eyes. Sometimes, additional information is required before we understand something else is going on. We see the sun rise in the east; we learn the sun never rises. We live in a time when it may be difficult but will be necessary to keep all of this in mind.

People to whom some of us pay no particular attention have given us a reason to view them askance. The problem is they look exactly like many others who give us no reason to regard them that way. The dilemma is not new; it is one whites have been presenting to blacks ever since Europeans brought African slaves to this land: how do we not paint everyone in a single group with one broad brush? The answer always has been dependent upon the actions of individuals. Unfortunately, when the action in question is veiled by a secret ballot, there is no way for an outside observer to discern what to think of the individual observed – other than by additional observation, something not easily accomplished when dealing with strangers.

In the elections of 2016, a majority of white voters made themselves suspect by casting their votes in a manner that common sense and/or common decency would seem to have precluded. In doing so, they likely contributed to a rise in negative views about whites in general. Never mind the possibility that the number of whites who stayed home but would not have voted for Trump – combined with those who voted for someone else – may far exceed the number of those who did vote to put Trump in the White House. That is a statistic we don’t have. The one that matters is the one that produced the election results.

There are some people who scoff at the idea that any white person should be viewed differently than any other. I haven’t heard anyone advance the whole Yakub-and-his-race-of-devils thing lately; it’s more or less along the lines of “well, you know how they are.” People can hold this view despite not only knowing some white people well, but while having white friends; they tend, however, to be wary of whites they do not know.

Because of this nation’s history, that wariness is a widely-felt one. Yet, despite the race-based obstruction and disrespect we saw directed at a black president, some of us lowered our guard; we could see that none of the slings and arrows arrayed against him had prevented this country from electing him twice. Former Republican-operative Nicole Wallace, a never-Trumper, has spent time talking to whites who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but voted for Trump in 2016. She, like others, are keen to understand why. Among the many to whom she spoke were a young man who had lost his job and felt on the verge of losing his house and his family, and a middle-aged woman who was not struggling financially but said she just didn’t like Hillary Clinton. What became clear is that what happened last November may be seen by some as the ultimate repudiation of Obama, but it was not. It was something wholly different; it was the affirmation of what Trump espouses and claims to represent. This is much worse than a rejection of Obama and causes – fair or not — an increase in a general wariness.

We have been asked to regard the precarious position of the left-behind white with empathy. We are told it is their desperate economic condition that drove them to a candidate like Trump, but this is a supposition not supported by fact, as evidenced by this fact from a piece by columnist Charles Lane: “A General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, would have closed but for Obama’s rescue of the auto industry; Trump won the surrounding county by six points.” Obviously, something else is going on. Lane describes what economists call “compositional amenities,” which provide people in rural areas and small towns with a life “…where everyone speaks the same language, or everyone practices the same customs…” a life that is “…simpler, more predictable, less frictional.” It is a life offering a homogeneity valued “above the benefits of diversity – even above economic gains.” He goes on to cite a 2009 paper detailing the findings of a U.S.-British team of social scientists whose study discovered “that ‘compositional concerns’ rise as educational attainment falls.” It was not lost on Lane that Trump “… got himself elected President with overwhelming support from non-college-educated whites in smaller cities and rural counties by telling them he would build a wall on the Mexican Border, impose ‘extreme vetting’ on would-be immigrants and deport large numbers of the undocumented…”

We have to look at facts about the white vote. Others would have us look elsewhere. Those “others” include Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who – as was pointed out by Mehdi Hasan in The Intercept – both discount the degree to which bigotry rather than economic concerns was a motivating factor for a plurality of Trump voters. Perhaps neither of those two senators are familiar with studies that show this to be the case. In Vox, Philip Klinkner, a professor of political science at Hamilton College, wrote about his analysis of data from the American National Election Study. Klinkner writes that he, like other analysts, “…have found that support for Trump is rooted in animosity and resentment toward various minority groups, especially African Americans, immigrants, and Muslims.” For those who are not going to read Klinkner for themselves, the title of his article may be all they need to know of the study: “The easiest way to guess if someone supports Trump? Ask if Obama is a Muslim.”

Just two weeks before Klinkner’s article, Max Ehrenfreund and Scott Clement of The Washington Post wrote about their analysis of data from that organization and ABC News. They concluded that “…the results suggest that both economic and racial anxieties are driving supporters to Trump.” According to the two, Trump “…did particularly well among people who said they are struggling economically, with 40 percent of their support, and even better – 43 percent – among people who said that whites are losing out.” Does this mean that 43 percent of Trump supporters believe some Americans are losing out only because they are white and not as the result of a changing economy or inattentive politicians (or personal behavior)? Would it be wrong to assume the answer to that question is yes? After all, white resentment is an old and well-used sentiment/instrument/weapon, one that often has afflicted the nation’s politics and impeded its progress. Is there any reason to believe this was not proven once again in 2016?

Our wariness of the whims of some of our fellow citizens is added to when considering that 81 percent of white evangelical Christians, 60 percent of white Catholics and 61 percent of Mormons voted for Trump, leading some to raise questions about the very character of some white voters. One question was posed by columnist Colbert King who asked, “What is a Christian?” A practicing Christian himself, he did not dive into a diatribe against the religion or engage in a holier-than-thou sermon. He simply pointed out that the answer to his question is worth considering. He reminded readers it had been raised earlier in our lifetimes by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and that it had been white Christians who “…elected and reelected to public office some of the country’s most sexist, racist and religious bigots.”

Today, some voters think their support for a man like Trump has been vindicated (absolved?) because they assume he will appoint Supreme Court justices who will not recognize or respect a pregnant woman’s right to decide to not give birth. Now, nearly two years after the last elections, the nation will soon have to decide whether to begin the process of aborting the life Trump and his followers want to give us or taking it to term.

There is no reason to believe that the majority of whites who voted two years ago are representative of a majority of this country’s whites in general, but every reason to believe that an affirmation of the status quo will increase a general wariness.

Though they sometimes shouldn’t, people have a tendency to believe what they see.

Of late, I find I am easily overwhelmed when either witnessing or experiencing what appears and feels to me to be some aspect of beauty, goodness, kindness, and love, am brought to quick tears by all of it. I’ve avoided listening to a beloved piece of music because of an unwillingness to undergo what would be its effect. Such had been the same with the reading of a novel I was required to write about. I put off reading the work. How could I bear the book? I read it once long ago. Its beauty was a revelation then, a natural poetry in nearly every passage. How could I read it again now? Its words would make me weep, yet the paper was due. I read; I wept. Such is the beauty of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

I could not write about the novel without considering something Hurston herself had to say about looking at works of art. In editor Cheryl A. Wall’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Casebook, Hurston is quoted as having written that “‘we each have our own standards of art, and thus we are all interested parties and so unfit to pass judgments upon the art concepts of others.” This advice is not always followed; for proof, look no further than what some of Hurston’s contemporaries had to say about her novel. The esteemed Alain Locke, seen as the dean of the Harlem Renaissance, thought it an “oversimplification” of the life Hurston sought to depict. Richard Wright considered it “minstrelsy.” Ralph Ellison called it “calculated burlesque.” These responses bring to mind a question posed in “Postcolonial Fiction and the Outsider Within,” an essay by Brooke Lenz in which she asks “…to what extent any given literary analysis reflects the standpoint of the critic, rather than the character or author.”

So, what is one to make of Their Eyes Were Watching God other than how it makes one think and feel? Is it possible to suss out Hurston’s intent in writing the novel – assuming she had one? For all the reams of information proffered by scholars, it may be best to read what Hurston writes about it. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, she tells the reader that she wrote the book “under internal pressure in seven weeks” following a romance with a younger man that had ended, and that – in the book – she had “tried to embalm all the tenderness of [her] passion for him.” She accomplishes much more than that. To me, it seems that Hurston, in her mid-forties at the time and conducting ethnographic research in Haiti, decided to use a good part of her life-experiences to create the story the reader encounters. Hurston seems to revel in Black culture at its roots, in Black independence (that of individuals and of communities), and in the joys and vagaries of human existence — of being alive.

One of the most striking features of Zora Neale Hurston’s work is her use of a culture’s root — its language. This, no doubt, can be attributed to her skill as a writer, her ear as an anthropologist, and to her being the daughter of a man described as “a preacher/poet.” Hurston, immersed in the southern culture from which she sprang, is able to bring that culture to life in ways that would escape a lesser artist. Take, for example, how she uses the characters portraying the citizens of Eatonville, her real-life hometown fictionalized. The residents of the town appear in much the same way as the chorus in an ancient Greek tragedy, offering vital information to listeners. Though one reads Hurston, she is able to make readers hear. I remember visiting family in the Alabama countryside and seeing and hearing men born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sitting on the porch of a small, wood-framed store in a sleepy southern town on a summer’s afternoon. Because of that experience, I can read the words Hurston puts into the mouths of her characters and hear the drawls, the cadences, the emphasis on certain words, and the imagery of their lives. Thus, it is easily relatable when Sherley Anne Williams, in her essay, “Encountering Zora Neale Hurston,” writes that “In the speech of her characters I heard my own country voice…”

As Neal A. Lester notes in his Understanding Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, “Hurston’s novel exalts an African tradition of storytelling over what Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer calls “‘being hypnotized by literacy…’” Lester adds that the language of the book’s characters “is something that Hurston aesthetically raises to high art.” Hurston delights in the language of the commoner, as evidenced by her prodigious use of black idioms. A good woman can’t be gotten “wid no fish sandwich.” Janie Mae Crawford, the heroine at the center of Hurston’s novel, has a certain rank in the community and “must look on herself as the bell-cow.” One can’t invite guests “just dry long so;” one must be prepared to feed them well. Cheap or pointless talk is “gum-grease.” To be in a committed relationship with someone is to be in the “go-long.” Hurston reminds or teaches the reader that “going straight by walking crooked” is sometimes the best way to reach a destination.

Having grown up in an independent black community, the first incorporated black township in the United States, it is likely more than chance that Hurston chose to do anthropological field work in Haiti, what was then the only independent Black nation in the western hemisphere. In her novel, Huston writes with a great love of black freedom and strength in all its forms. Robert E. Hemenway, in Zora Neale Hurston, his literary biography of the writer, tells the reader that Hurston’s “sense of racial pride had contributed much to Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In her own words, Hurston is “on fire about my people.”

Although Hurston’s novel is viewed by many as an early work of black feminism, in her depiction of the character, Joe Starks, I see Hurston also pointedly painting a portrait of a strong black man. For all that character’s foibles, Hurston obviously is interested in having the reader see Joe in his fullness. Joe is agent rather than victim, and his agency uplifts others. The reader meets him wearing a “hat set at an angle that didn’t belong” in the area through which he is travelling when he meets Janie. Joe has “a bow-down command in his face, and every step he took made the thing more tangible.” He is “a whirlwind among breezes.” He is a natural-born monarch with “a throne in the seat of his pants.” He has “books in his jaws.” Eatonville “bowed down to him…because he was all these things…” The theme of the strong black man is reprised in the character of Tea Cake, “the son of Evening Sun” who, like Joe before him, commands the attention of his community. For the migrant field hands drawn to the Florida Everglades for seasonal work, “Tea Cake’s house was a magnet, the unauthorized center of the “‘job.’”

That Hurston wrote her novel while studying in Haiti makes it easy to surmise that she was struck not by the differences but by the similarities of cultures and communities, and that she utilized those similarities in her writing. What southern blacks knew as hoodoo, Haitians knew as Vodou. In “Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” essayist Daphne Lamothe writes that Hurston’s novel has allusions to Vodou “so embedded into the foundation of the narrative that they are virtually invisible…” This is true only if one does not know what to look for. If, as Lamothe suggests, it is true that there are allusions to “similarities between Janie…and the Vodou Goddess Ezili,” one can then read additional meaning into Tea Cake’s insistence that Janie dress in blue.

As stated earlier, Hurston seems to have used a good part of her life-experiences when writing her novel, which is why – as also stated before – the work is suffused with a natural poetry, a poetry evident even in the novel’s now-famous opening line: “Ships at a distance has every man’s wish on board.” Even the poet Sterling Brown, while criticizing the novel, had to admit that it is “chock-full of earthy and touching poetry.” In her introduction to Hemenway’s book, writer Alice Walker notes that Their Eyes Were Watching God “is regarded as one of the most poetic works of fiction by a black writer in the first half of the twentieth century.” Hemenway himself believes that “Janie’s poetic self-realization is inseparable from Zora’s concomitant awareness.” Robert Bone, in his essay “Ships at a Distance,” writes that “If the first half of the novel deals with the prose of Janie’s life, the latter half deals with its poetry.” How did Hurston come by this sensibility? What life-experience imparted this? Hemenway says of her that “she enjoyed Keats but recognized the poetry in her father’s sermons.” Lester points out that traditional southern black church services “become art in process, patterns of movement and language always expected but quite unpredictable.”

It is the poetry that comes from the novel’s most arresting character that is most notable, that of the book’s omniscient narrator, Hurston herself. She forces the reader to pause and savor lines. One learns there are “dinners that chasten all women sometimes.” At a moonrise, “its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.” Tea Cake, the one true-love of Janie’s life, “looked like the love thoughts of women…He was a glance from God.” At one point, still feeling his presence after he has left a room, Janie “got up and opened the window and let Tea Cake leap forth and mount to the sky on a wind.” At the approach of a hurricane, “dead day was creeping from bush to bush watching man.” The storm leads to flooding, and “the sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.” Surveying the destruction wrought by wind and water, Tea Cake “saw the hand of horror on everything,” saw that “the mother of malice had trifled with men.”

It is Hurston’s life-experiences, no doubt, that gives truth to the fact that just as notable as her poetic sensibilities is the wisdom she exudes throughout the book as the all-knowing teller of the tale. Though, as mentioned before, she was in her mid-forties when writing the novel, one suspects Hurston had always been wise beyond her years. In the essay, “A Personality Sketch,” the writer Fanny Hurst — a sometime employer, sometime patron, sometime companion of Hurston — thought she possessed “a vulnerable philosophy at variance with much of her splendor, and splendor she had.” It is Hurston-the-wise, not the ever-evolving Janie, who teaches the reader that humans are singing, glittering beings who were covered in mud by jealous angels. Hurston understands that doubt is “the fiend from hell specially sent to lovers.” It is Hurston who knows that no amount of determination should keep one “turning round in one place.” She makes the reader contemplate the truth that “it’s hard trying to follow your shoe instead of your shoe following you.”  Perhaps most cogently, Hurston tells the reader that jealous angels are the least of one’s celestial worries:

 “All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”

It is with this passage that Hurston shows the reader that she, mud-covered or not, has more than just glimpsed the machinations behind the human condition.

Now, following my second reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God, I find I am drawn to the same things that endeared the novel to me originally: its poetry; its loving and true-to-life depiction of a people in their place and time; its knowingness; its overall beauty. I find it both interesting and ironic that, of the many critics of the novel at its publication, it is a white critic, Lucille Thompkins, who is most closely aligned with my own view of what Hurston has given the world. As Lovalerie King writes in The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston, “Thompkins saw in the novel a universal tale: ‘It is about Negroes…but really it is about everyone, or at least everyone who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory.’” I’ll let Thompkins have the last word.

During the past few months, I’ve been introduced to the works of writers who explore what it means to be an immigrant. Some of the characters in these novels leave their home countries by choice; others are fleeing for their lives. One of the writers was the Punjabi poet, novelist, and essayist Amrita Pritam. I’ve only read her poem, “Ode to Waris Shah,” and an excerpt from her autobiography about the incident that gave rise to the poem: the Partition, the creation of Pakistan by the dismemberment of India in 1947. Of that year, Pritam writes that “…accounts of marauding invaders in all mythologies and chronicles put together will not, I believe, compare with the blood curling horrors of this historic year.”

What immediately sprang to mind was something I first heard as a child while watching a TV sitcom, something I later learned was a reference to the Roman lyric poet Horace. In book three of his Odes, he writes that “Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’ / We, their sons, are more worthless than they.” Given the magnitude of the violence and destruction attendant to India’s partition, it is no wonder Pritam sees no hyperbole in her belief that there is no historical comparison, that the widespread slaughter proved her generation to be “more worthless” than all those before. In the midst of all of that, how could she believe otherwise?

Consider, for example, this passage from Kanwaljit Kaur’s “Communal Violence in Princely States during Partition” in which she writes that, on August 15^th in the east Punjab state of Patiala, “…500 rioters including police and troops in uniform attacked Mohalla Kucha Rangrazan and killed 1000 Muslims.” Kaur writes that, in Patiala, “the Muslims who constituted 1/3 of its population was virtually wiped out or expelled.” The state’s maharajah’s efforts to curtail the violence were hampered by the reports of what Muslims were doing to Hindus and Sikhs elsewhere. Kaur sums up the extent and effect of the carnage when she writes that the “…people in princely states were butchered mercilessly on a massive scale. The violent Communal riots, murders and heinous crimes brought the people’s morale to the lowest ebb.”

At this low point, Pritam does what poets do: turn to poetry. In another line given from her autobiography, she writes of the Partition’s horrors that they “…would take a lifetime to retell.” She understands a poet attempting to tell the tale must do so in only a few lines. In turning to her art, Pritam invokes the spirit of one of its most illustrious practitioners, the 18^th century Punjabi poet Waris Shah, and addresses her words to him as a plea for his indulgence. “Too Waris Shah I turn today!”, she begins. The man who wrote not just of love but of great love must give aid in the age of great hate. Speaking of a woman of whom Shah wrote, Pritam reminds him that “When one daughter of the Punjab did cry / You filled pages with songs of lamentation,” and informs him that “Today a hundred daughters cry.”

From that point on, Pritam’s “Ode to Waris Shah” is – itself – a lament. Nearly every line of the poem recounts a tragedy of the Partition, but it is not the great ones that stand out, not the lines that tell the reader that “Corpses are strewn on the pasture / Blood runs in the Chenab.” It is the seemingly small things that loom large:

Song was crushed in every throat:

Every spinning wheel’s thread was snapped:

Friends parted from one another

The hum of spinning wheels fell silent.

So at a lost is Pritam by what is happening that she feels compelled to implore the great poet to “Open your grave / Write a new page / In the book of love.”

I am yet reminded of those lines from Horace when reading the words of a woman escaping with her children from certain death. “If they find you in the house, they will burn it so you come outside. Then they catch you and chop you with the machete.” This woman had to flee from an area where there had been “…widespread rape, dismemberment of victims, [and] the kidnapping of small children.” This is not a tale from 1947, but one appearing on the front page of The Washington Post newspaper only three weeks ago. It is just one tale from the people now fleeing across Lake Albert from the Congo to Uganda to escape the slaughter of the Hema by the Lendu. Just yesterday, the Post’s front page featured a photograph of Central American migrants who — fleeing violence — are seeking asylum at our southern border. I think of Horace once again because of the rest of what he had to say. After having described his generation as being “more worthless” than the one before, he follows that by concluding “so in our turn / we shall give the world / a progeny yet more corrupt.”

I find it doubtful that any generation of our species has been, is, or will be either more or less “worthless” than any other. I suppose one would have to read much more of Amrita Pritam’s work to determine whether she found any hope in the aftermath of the Partition. It would be understandable if, instead, she — like Horace – concluded that the human condition is destined to worsen with each successive generation, but her “Ode to Waris Shah” reminds us of places to turn for hope.

Recently, someone asked the reason for my name. I thought I knew but decided to make sure.  As I thought about calling my mother and asking her how it was chosen, the telephone rang. Serendipitously, it was my mother, calling to check on me. I think she worries a bit more than usual, now that – after almost forty years of marriage – I am a widower. I told her I was okay, that I had been just about to call, and why.

“How did I choose your name?” she asked herself. “Let me think. How did I choose your name?”

After a moment, I asked if it had been because of the Hollywood movie star Gregory Peck, which I always had assumed. It was not strange for me to have done so. As a child watching a music show on television once, I had been amazed by the host announcing a singer named Julius La Rosa, the first and middle names of one of my younger brothers.

“Gregory Peck,” my mother said in contemplation. “No, I don’t think so, but I honestly can’t remember. It might come to me if I think about it. You know,” she said, laughing, “you’re going to have to excuse your 90-year-old mother’s memory.”

My mother and father had to choose names for four boys, three girls, and, then, two more boys. I was third up. For me, my name has never been anything other than something that serves its fundamental purpose without embarrassment. After all, it turns out that Gregory was Mr. Peck’s middle name; his given name was Eldred. But, who knows? I probably would not have cared one way or the other about that one, either. I mean, The Bard is right, is he not, about his whole rose-by-any-other-name thing? That is why I considered, during the Black Power era, changing my name as many were doing. I didn’t, which is just as well. I probably would have done the same thing others did: give up their given names for Arabic names in the mistaken belief that they were West African names, thereby dropping the names from Christians slave masters, only to pick up those from Muslim slave masters.

Today, on this Easter Sunday, I remember that Christians, apparently, love the name. There were sixteen popes who selected it; also, there are ten saints with the name. I discovered this at some point in my youth, after learning that names not only have meanings but are supposed to have meanings. I began to search for the origin and meaning of mine and read, initially, that the name is of Germanic origin. I later found that a consensus considered this incorrect, that the name is really of Greek origin and passed into Roman culture; I suspect that from the latter is how it made its way to those Germans known as the Angles and the Saxons. Regardless, the meaning, the same across cultures, has an ironic resonance today: woke.

Woke, or awake are just two of the synonyms commonly associated with the name’s meaning. Others include watchful, alert, and guardian. The one most often used is vigilant, which, most likely, is why the name became so popular among Christians; in a letter Peter the Apostle wrote to followers, he exhorted them to be vigilant.

As I write, I am reflecting on the fact that I have known others with the name, but not many. This seems as though it should be improbable, since it is not an uncommon name, but I remember my wife once saying that the only other Gregory she had known before me was a boy in her elementary school class.

My mother, who still cooks and cleans and does laundry; who – at her ninetieth birthday party — was on the dance floor in three-inch, red heels; and whose memory still surprises me, has yet to recall the reason for my name. My father died two decades ago. The reason for my name is and, likely, shall remain a mystery.

The excitement generated by the release of the Marvel Comics-based movie, Black Panther, brings to mind the man whose work of science fiction became the first by a black writer to make its initial appearance before the public as a novel. With the 1931 publication of his Black No More, George S. Schuyler becomes someone who presents an alternative to the sameness of accepted American literature. Before Schuyler, not only is there no black writer of science fiction whose novel had not begun in serialized form, there is also no black author who had written a satiric novel, and no black writer who demonstrates a mastery over what is called the “Master Discourse” in the manner which Schuyler succeeds.

Black writers certainly had produced works having non-traditional settings before Schuyler, but most of these works fall under the term “speculative fiction,” which includes the genres of fantasy and horror as well as science fiction.  Writer Jess Nevins, who sometimes writes articles focusing on science, technology, science fiction, futurism, and fantasy, gives a reader a history of how blacks have contributed to speculative fiction in a piece titled “The Black Fantastic: Highlights of Pre-World War II African and African-American Speculative Fiction.” Nevins points out that an early practitioner of the fantasy genre of black speculative fiction, that which deals with futuristic themes and alternate histories, is Martin Delaney who, in 1859 “in response to the slave insurrection panics of 1856 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857,” wrote Blake, a novel which “describes the heroic black revolutionary Henry Blake in his attempt to rouse black Americans into a slave revolt and establish a new black country in Cuba.” Blake certainly may be considered a work of alternate history, but it is not science fiction.

The same may be said of the stories collected in Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 The Conjure Woman. These tales, based on black Americans’ understanding of the traditional spiritual beliefs of West and Central African peoples, fall in the horror category (in much the same way as Roman Catholicism serves the purposes of horror for a writer like Dan Brown in his The Da Vinci Code). Schuyler’s fictional character, on the other hand, is a man of science who uses technology to accomplish his goal: to transform any paying black customer who wants to appear white.

To see an early example of a work of science fiction by a black writer prior to George Schuyler’s Black No More, a reader can look back nearly three decades before his book to 1902’s Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins, whom Nevins calls “the most prolific African-American woman writer of her time,” and “one of African-American literature’s foremothers.” Hopkins’s work meets the definition of science fiction in that she imagines a modern civilization of “the direct descendants of the Ethiopia of 6000 B.C.E. and the possessor of advanced crystal-based technology, including suspended animation for the most beautiful in the city and technology-based telepathy.” Hopkins’s novel, however, began in serialized form. This leaves Schuyler as the earliest black writer of science fiction whose work – as said before – debuted as a published novel.

Oh, what a novel it is! While science and technology serve as needed components of its plot, it is satire that is essential to its purpose: to skewer the nation’s then-prevailing notions on race as it relates to identity by holding up a mirror to those who held those notions, albeit a distorting, funhouse mirror. And, who better than Schuyler to show how grotesque one’s image appears when seen on such a reflective surface? If forced to give a one-word description of the man, the word is iconoclast; iconoclasm is a necessary tool of the satirist. Michael W. Peplow, in his book, George S. Schuyler, quotes historian John Henrik Clarke on Schuyler. Clarke says he “used to tell people that George got up in the morning, waited to see which way the world was turning, and then struck out in the opposite direction.” In Black No More, this tendency serves Schuyler well. One can’t help but see how the satire does not simply bite, but chomps; the book’s title alone should suffice to demonstrate this.

Of course, presenting satire from a black American’s perspective was not something to which Schuyler could lay proprietary claim; Peplow, in a footnote to his article, “George Schuyler, Satirist: Rhetorical Devices in Black No More,” makes this plain by quoting W.E.B. Du Bois from the March 1931 issue of The Crisis. Du Bois writes that “American Negroes have written satire before, usually in small skits in columnists’ paragraphs.” Indeed, they had. In that same passage, Peplow goes on to note that “Elements of satire had appeared in the poetry, short stories, dramas, and columns of writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, Wallace Thurman, and Rudolph Fisher,” but he categorically states that “Black No More was the first book length satire to be written by a black author in the United States.”

The evidence for Schuyler’s novel demonstrating his mastery over the Master Discourse may lie more in one’s perception than in anything tangible. A term coming from the field of psychoanalysis, the Master Discourse is based upon early 19^th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and, when viewed as an external rather than internal (self-conflicted) process, may be seen as an interaction between two or more individuals. When applied to culture, it is not difficult to see how it relates to the dominator-dominated dynamic that plays out in American society between wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant males and everyone else. The Master Discourse, however, is but one of four postulated discourses, the other three being the “University,” the “Hysteric,” and the “Analyst.”

It is the Analyst Discourse which is significant here in that it is defined as an intentional subversion of the Master Discourse. As an example of how Schuyler does this, consider that by the end of Black No More, the stampede to become white is subverted by a new-found suspicion of and disdain for whiteness, even among the naturally white. This absurd turn of events is crystalized for a reader when Schuyler writes “…it was a common thing to see a sweet young miss stop before a show window and dab her face with charcoal.”

It is doubtful that those who shared the basic values and assumptions of the Master Discourse had ever encountered anything even remotely similar to the sensibilities of Black No More. Many American novels were published in 1931. William Faulkner’s reputation was made that year with the publication of Sanctuary. Fannie Hurst, the sometime-patron, sometime-companion of Zora Neale Hurston, gave us Back Street. There was Upton Sinclair’s Roman Holliday and Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Earth. Schuyler’s was not even the only science fiction novel published that year, but of all the novelists, no matter their genres, Schuyler was the only black. That alone constituted a challenge to the status quo, yet that challenge did not end there. It rightfully can be said his upending of the commonly accepted thinking of the dominant culture is further demonstrated by his showing a distinct sameness between black and white Americans. As pointed out by Jane Kuenz in “American Racial Discourse, 1900-1930: Schuyler’s ‘Black No More,’” “Schuyler’s depiction of the U.S., black and white, is uniformly bleak: a world in which everyone is subject to and motivated by the same ruthless social and economic forces and out of which select winners emerge by dint of their own corresponding ruthlessness.”

A reader familiar only with the then-accepted literature would see something new in Schuyler, something wholly different from the earnestness of writers like Anna Julia Cooper or Du Bois or Alain Locke. That any black should be able to write as cogently and elegantly as these and others would undoubtedly subvert the thinking of some of those ensconced in the ivory towers of the era; that Schuyler writes so ferociously must surely have been a revelation. Perhaps it will be revealed to modern readers who also enjoy watching the movie-screen exploits of comic book heroes.

(I often am at a lost as to what I will write each month, not knowing what it will be until I come up with it. No doubt, that would have been the case again this month were it not for something I did in December, something I never had done before. That month, I wrote what I planned to post for February. Why? Only fate and irony have the answer to that. After re-reading it, I’ve decided to publish it as is).

Not long after I met my wife, I found among her books a little, palm-of the-hand sized, hardback volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I had no idea the book contained only a few of them, that he had written 154. At that point, I had read only a few of his plays and had seen a few on stage and screen, but my only encounter with his sonnets was having heard — more than a few times — that famous opening line of Sonnet 18. Now, here it was before me for the first time, in its entirety, and I had a chance to read beyond a line that had become something often recited as a joke.

I did not know at the time that there is a specific rhythm and rhyme in what he wrote and did not pay attention to it at first. My own stabs at poetry have no set order to it that I would be able to point out. When I read poets, I either like what they write or don’t. I like a poem for its own reasons and, whatever those reasons are, they are not based on any critical analysis.

Around the same time I discovered the sonnets, I joined six other aspiring poets (Gideon Ferebee, Gregory Ford, Essex Hemphill, Oliver Jackson, Andre Ramseur, and Garth Tate) to form what became Station-to-Station Performance Poets and Writers’ Collective. Eventually joined by others, we soon found ourselves performing poetry all over the city in nightclubs and coffeehouses, on the stages of theaters and street festivals, even in government offices – including the mayor’s. Jokingly one day, my not-yet wife asked why I had not written a poem for her. Jokingly, I wrote one. Having read her book of The Bard’s sonnets but still not knowing what a sonnet was, I titled the poem “Sonnet One.” It was a hit with her.

It was later that I learned a sonnet has a certain meter and rhyming scheme, and I began to see possibilities. Instead of being subject to the whims of inspiration alone, there was an actual blueprint based upon which a work could be built, so I tried my hand at building what I thought might sound like a romantic, Shakespearian-ish sonnet. I titled it “Sonnet 118”, still unaware Shakespeare had written 154, thinking at the time that – maybe — I would write a hundred, seventeen more. Ha! In the thirty-plus years since, there have been only five others, four of which I previously inflicted upon you poor readers in February 2014.

Anyway, we are nearing that time when some are prone to romantic notions, given that the 14^th day of this month has become a hyped-up, Hallmark holiday. There is little care about saints when there is sex and/or chocolate to be had. So, in keeping with the spirit of that approaching day, I share with you Sonnet One (a misnomer) and Sonnet 118 (which very well may be a misnomer).

Sonnet One

Is it poetry you want,

ethereal sounds conjuring forgotten visions,

like: the wind blowing clouds but spoken out loud,

words that soar like birds,

smooth words, slick words sliding into place?

Why sit with pen in hand awhile when there is poetry in your smile,

when there is poetry in the warmth of your embrace?

Is it poetry you want,

chant of the Magi echoing the Music of the Sky,

like: the tides at their times but flowing in rhyme,

psalms that soothe like balms,

fine lines, glib verse gleaming bright as gold?

Why sit with pen in hand awhile when there is poetry in your smile,

when you are poetry for my eyes to just behold?

Sonnet 118

In daydreams, you and I lie in moonglow.

We are entwined; we are slowly moving.

It is just a trick of the mind – I know —

a sly, little jest once again proving

a thought, sometimes, is a mischievous friend,

conjuring scenes of that which cannot be.

I bid it, “Be still!”, it wants to pretend.

Reverie — sweeter than reality —

rushes forth, keeping common sense at bay;

such visions do not easily abate.

But, hope hovers near at the end of day,

and truth does not have very long to wait.

Fantasy becomes factual delight

when you, my love, lie in my arms tonight.