COVID-19 JOURNAL #10 THE FOURTH OF JULY, 2020
Title
COVID-19 JOURNAL #10 THE FOURTH OF JULY, 2020
Description
An old woman dying of Covid-19 on a ventilator has a vision about America.
Creator
Lfj Gill
Language
English
Text
COVID-19 JOURNAL #10 THE FOURTH OF JULY, 2020
Unraveling the American Tapestry
[Preface: The woman in the following narrative is fiction. Her situation and thoughts are not.]
I am in this bed. I have a tube shoved down my throat into my trachea, attached to a machine forcing my body to do what I cannot make it do—pull air into my lungs. I am in pain. I am sick to my soul. There is no one here but me.
Every once in a long while, someone gowned and masked appears beside the bed to check my body and the machines, a few with warmly concerned, compassionate eyes; and this is the only evidence of human concern that comes to me in the endless hours of pain and solitude. I am lonely beyond words. I know that I will die with this tube in my chest, with no family, no loved ones, no friends near me to hold my hand or speak to me as I gasp for my last breaths.
And I know there are many out there who do not care, like the middle-aged woman cashiering at the hardware store the week before I was stricken—blatantly, defiantly mask-less, breathing and talking two feet from the customers trying to get out of the store. And like the many others I’ve seen displaying the arrogant disregard being modeled by the sociopath in the Whitehouse—too good to protect others by wearing face coverings or keeping a safe distance.
I know, too, the attitude many harbor—“It’s only the oldies getting killed off—time for them to go anyway and stop burdening the system.” I actually heard someone say the pandemic is “just culling the herd.” Apparently these people plan on never aging themselves, so are quite happy to see “them” clearing off the planet—at least until “them” is a favorite aunt or grandparent dying in solitary confinement, like me.
The day I cannot wrench another breath into my burning lungs, I will become just one in the data pile, the daily death toll pre-softened to near inaudibility by the opening remarks: “Good news today, we are doing well. Our Rhode Island numbers continue to decline, even as much of the rest of the country’s Corona cases are escalating. We now have only ninety-one people in the hospital; sixteen of these people are in the ICU; and fifteen of the ICU patients are on ventilators. [—Now for me and the recent cadavers in the refrigerator trucks—] And, sadly, we have seven more corona-related fatalities to report today,”—followed by hearts and prayers going out to their families. This last, the death datum, makes hardly a blip in anyone’s radar, except for the families who knew and loved them. Us.
What have they given me today? Something new. I’m receding from my body, floating somewhere apart from it, even though I can still perceive the pain in my lungs and hear my endless attempts to cough and to breathe. From a distance, I hear my old body trying now to scream, so afraid—of what? something—trying to tell the plastic-covered nurse—“Somebody trying to kill me, why am I in this jail, why are they torturing me?”—must be hallucinating—but I am not now in that part of my mind—I am floating somewhere apart, where the body I know as mine is not attached to “me.” What did they give me? Is this morphine? I don’t mind the pain any more—it never leaves, but now it’s far away. Where am I being taken? I am still receding…
I hear voices. Indistinct. I am being moved toward—what? Something . . . a building—big. Going through an archway . . . into a hall, I think . . .yes, a ballroom-size hall. There’s a picture taking shape—a large tableau of some sort, it appears. The voices are coming from there. It is growing ever larger as some invisible conveyer moves me closer, and now I see it is a huge tapestry being woven on a gigantic loom stretched along the far wall. It seems to be unfinished, yet already a great many scenes have been depicted, in rich, vibrant colors—scenes somehow familiar as I focus in on them one by one. Yes, this is familiar—they are all familiar—I know this picture. I am propelled into it, in among the threads of yarn, into the woven scenes all around me and stretching back through time. I am amazed at the colors, fascinated with the intricacies in the weaving.
“Recognize where you are?” asks a voice, clear now, though unfamiliar. “See the little dairy farms and white-steepled churches? The fields and trees and stone walls? See the little white girl floating down among the elms . . .”
Yes, I know these houses, these fields, these country lanes and stone walls. Suddenly I am in my old New England village; I see my childhood home where, like the child in Fern Hill, “I was young and easy under the apple boughs, about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green”—Wait a minute, what did that voice say?
“Little white girl,” it says again, “with all your Caucasian European-American neighbors . . .” I feel a long-standing irritation arise—ever since I first heard those ignorant terms. “First of all,” I say to the disembodied voice, “my skin is not ‘white.’ It’s more like a pale salmon. At least it was, till I got sick. Now it’s almost blue. (No oxygen.) And second of all, my forebears originated nowhere near the Caucasus.” But I soon tire of the attempt to educate. What does it matter anyway?
I am being lifted upward now. Another voice is speaking. It seems to be accompanying me aloft, where we hover over the great tapestry. “Now you can see the entire work, can you not?” she asks. I say “she” for the voice now sounds female to me.
“Yes, I think so,” I say. The loom and the tableau are so huge I am not sure if I am seeing all the way to the far end, which seems somewhat shrouded in mist.
My unseen companion blows a breath over the tapestry and it all comes clear, far and wide.“We are going to traverse the length and breadth of this great work,” says the voice, “all the way back to the very first stitch. But first look down and behold the grand design. Do you know what you are seeing?”
My eyes seem to be going in and out of focus, or else the brilliant jewel colors below are themselves going in and out of focus, now looking like shapes I recognize, now shifting and changing to other forms that feel familiar yet defy my intellect. I can’t think of anything to say.
“I understand,” she says, though I have said nothing. “You cannot see everything because what you are looking at is not finished. Even as you gaze back down along the length of the design, there is shifting and changing, uneasiness and conflict, layered realities, each in its own realm. But now look with my eyes and see all that was, and is, and is coming to be.”
Strains of music now rise from the tapestry, and with it the vision embodied in the words I am hearing as if for the first time:
“Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain—America! America! God shed his grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”
I see the purple mountains, the amber waves of grain, the orchards and gardens, and the shining seas below, all woven in living colors, now plain to see.
“Yes,” she says, “that was and is the land you have lived in, though you are now leaving it. You will not see the day when this song displaces the bombs bursting in air and becomes the national anthem. The nation is not yet ready. But you can also hear what will be, the time that is coming, in the words of the song. It begins with a prayer:
“God mend thine ev’ry flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law. . .
May God thy gold refine, till all success be nobleness, and ev’ry gain divine.”
“You see,” she says, “the reality is, as yet, real only in vision, in the ideal. But it is there in the weaving—one of the layers yet to come forth. God has already shed his grace on this nation. But much of it is still locked up within ideals, the very ideals expressed in the founding papers, but the nation is not yet equal to the gift.
“Nonetheless, you can pray, and you can work, and you can forgive, and you can rebuild, until the ideal releases its soul into the living reality, when you actually do crown America’s good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
“The ‘patriot dream that sees beyond the years’ truly does see the time to come, when this nation’s cities will be ‘undimmed by human tears.’ But that time is not now. This nation has work to do—every soul in it. And you have work to do before you leave.”
I am wondering what work I can do from a deathbed, but she goes right on.
“I will carry you along and guide you. All you need do is watch and listen, and do as I ask.”
I am trying not to think the thought I’m thinking, for it’s obvious she can read my thoughts: Who is this? And why me? What possible difference to the world can a shriveled, dying old woman make now?
“A great difference, if you will allow. All human movement toward truth begins in the spirit. And that is where you are now. You will not be there to see the changes coming into the world, but you will play a part in them nonetheless in this vision.”
“This is a vision?” I say. “What if this is just the drugs causing hallucinations?”
“Foolish! Do you really want to waste the time you have left? Hallucinations are what your body and physical mind are going through right now down in that bed, as you well know. They are the effects of a deadly virus and pain medications. I have carried you away from all of that into this clear light. Do not look back or back you will go!”
I feel how this is so. The moment I had succumbed to that doubt, I’d felt a terrific pull back toward the bed where my body lay in agony. But her sharp retort countered the pull, like a hand yanking a drowning man from the water. I won’t go there again.
“Are you ready to begin?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. I notice we are slowly descending again toward the tapestry.
“We will be touching down at points along the weaving,” she says, “going back more than four hundred years along the timeline to the beginnings of this nation. You will be seeing scenes and hearing voices along the way. Some you will recognize from your own experience and your education; some you will not. If you listen, watch, and learn, you will have no need of questions. Simply do as I ask as you go, and all will be well. I will be with you.”
I don’t say anything out loud, for there is no need. She can hear my unspoken assent.
We touch down at the point in the picture where I departed a week ago, when I left my comfortable home for a death bed. I recognize the first scene with no trouble. A man on the ground—another man kneeling on his neck—eight long minutes passing while the pinned man pleads for breath until he dies—right there in front of the whole world. One man wrapped in brown skin, the other wrapped in “white” skin.
“I can’t breathe!” echoes around the globe. Conflagrations erupt—shouts, masses gathering around the world, hatred and accusations hurled back and forth, sorrow and grief, questions, lies and truths, tears and embraces.
“Look closely at the weaving,” says my companion. “What do you see?”
“There is a rift,” I say. “A rip in the fabric. A long tear separating the threads—it looks like it goes back before this place.” I see rifts continuing farther back down the weaving, as far as I can make out—maybe all the way to the beginning.
“These gaps and rifts will need to be repaired,” I say, “won’t they? Need to be sewn back together?”
“No,” she says. “Not this time. There will be no more patching or mending. The tapestry will have to be unwoven, completely unwoven, all the way back to the very first wrong stitch. You will be tracing that rift back.”
Instantly I am transported back to my first vantage point, where the other voice had described the “little white girl descending among the elms.” I am home. I am a little child. I know no rifts. “Happy as the day is long. . .”
There was only one black family in my town, though they would not have liked being called “black” in those days. Anyway, they were brown, not black. They had one girl, my age. Everybody else in the whole town was “white.” So I went through school with one brown classmate in a sea of white, the children of Finnish, British, Irish, and French immigrants—along with one or two German and Jewish families . . . One brown-skinned girl whose ancestors were brought here to be exploited in their brown and black skins.
In my little town, being the daughter of white upper-middle-class parents, I grew up with a sense of continuity and security, trusting the stage on which I found myself—and had no thought for many years that it was not sustainable, could not hold—even though little threads of lie were all around me, and soon wove themselves across the warp threads of my mind—little weft threads I could not place neatly in the picture, even as a child. I later wrote about them—painful weft threads piercing the heart.
“Now we are going to travel much faster,” my companion said—back through seminal points along the timeline. Keep an eye on the rift in the fabric as we go. We will touch down where certain voices rise up from the design; you will recognize what they are. They must be heard. No need to comment—they will speak for themselves. Let’s go.”
_______________
1963 “I have a dream! I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 1
I see beautiful weft threads meshing at this point in the weaving. Yet nearby the rift gapes open, a dark slash in the fabric:
1968 “At 6:05 p.m. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King’s assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. During King’s funeral a tape recording was played in which King spoke of how he wanted to be remembered after his death: “I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.” 2
1955 “When, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to obey an order to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, an action that led to a boycott of the Montgomery bus system, she had in mind a murder trial that happened two months earlier in Sumner, Mississippi. A fourteen-year-old boy, Emmett Till, had been brutally murdered and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River, but despite clear evidence that two white men committed the crime, an all-white jury returned a "Not Guilty" verdict after just an hour of deliberation. Parks wrote, "the news of Emmett's death caused me...to participate in the cry for justice and equal rights." The trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for the murder of Till shook the conscience of a nation and helped spark the movement for civil rights for black Americans.” 3
1946 “Between the end of Reconstruction and the years following World War II, thousands of black veterans were accosted, assaulted, and attacked, and many were lynched. Black veterans died at the hands of mobs and persons acting under the color of official authority; many survived near-lynchings; and countless others suffered severe assaults and social humiliation. Documenting these atrocities is vital to understanding the incongruity of our country’s professed ideals of freedom and democracy while tolerating ongoing violence against people of color within our own borders. As veteran and later civil rights leader Hosea Williams said, ‘I had fought in World War II, and I once was captured by the German army, and I want to tell you the Germans never were as inhumane as the state troopers of Alabama.’” 4
1917 On August 16, 1917, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi spoke of his fear of black veterans returning to the South, as he viewed that it would "inevitably lead to disaster.” To the American South, the use of black soldiers in the military was a threat, not a virtue. "Impress the negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air," and, the senator cautioned, "it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected."5
1863 November 19th The speaker describes “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” urging his listeners to “resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”
Behind him I see a huge expanse of green, beautifully woven, but even as I am looking it begins to turn a deep purple-brown color. We are sweeping over a field littered with the bodies of brothers who have slaughtered one another, the field soaked with their blood.
“Come,” she says, and I am carried on along the fault line in the tapestry as another voice rises from the rift. “We will pause here a while,” she says. “He has much to say. You have much to hear.”
1500s - 1859 “At last everything was ready, and the traffic in human flesh began. I will attempt to give as accurate an account of the language and ceremony of a slave auction as I possibly can:
‘Gentlemen, here is a likely boy; how much? He is sold for no fault; the owner wants money. His age is forty. Three hundred dollars is all that I am offered for him. Please to examine him; he is warranted sound. Boy, pull off your shirt ⎯ roll up your pants ⎯ for we want to see if you have been whipped.’ If they discover any scars they will not buy, saying that the nigger is a bad one. The auctioneer seeing this, cries, ‘Three hundred dollars, gentlemen, three hundred dollars. Shall I sell him for three hundred dollars? I have just been informed by his master that he is an honest boy and belongs to the same church that he does.’ This turns the tide frequently, and the bids go up fast; and he is knocked off for a good sum. After the men and women are sold, the children are put on the stand. I was the first put up. On my appearance, several voices cried, ‘How old is that little nigger?’ On hearing this expression, I again burst into tears and wept so that I have no distinct recollection of his answer. I was at length knocked down to a man whose name was Denton, a slave trader, then purchasing slaves for the Southern market ….
Each one of the traders has private jails, which are for the purpose of keeping slaves in . . . Denton had one of these jails . . . and on entering I found a great many slaves there, waiting to be sent off as soon as their numbers increased. These jails are enclosed by a wall about 16 feet high, and the yard-room is for the slaves to exercise in and consists of but one room, in which all sexes and ages are huddled together in a mass. I stayed in this jail but two days when the number was completed, and we were called out to form a line. Horses and wagons were in readiness to carry our provisions and tents so that we might camp out at night. Before we had proceeded far, Mr. Denton gave orders for us to stop for the purpose of handcuffing some of the men, which, he said in a loud voice, “had the devil in them.” The men belonging to this drove were all married men, and all leaving their wives and children behind; he, judging from their tears that they were unwilling to go, had them made secure. . . . I will not weary my readers with the particulars of our march to Tennessee, where we stopped several days for the purpose of arranging our clothes. While stopping, the men were hired out to pick cotton. While in Tennessee we lost four of our number who died from exposure on the road.
[I]n about four weeks arrived in Natchez, Miss., and went to our pen, which Mr. Denton had previously hired for us, and had our irons taken off and our clothes changed; for Mr. Denton was expecting visitors to examine the flock, as he would sometimes term us. There was a sign-board in front of the house, which informed traders that he had on hand blacksmiths, carpenters, field-hands; also several sickly ones, whom he would sell very cheap. In a short time purchasers became plenty, and our number diminished. I was not sold for several weeks, though I wished to be the first, not wishing to witness his cruelty to his slaves any longer; for if they displeased him in the least, he would order them to be stripped and tied hand and foot together. He would then have his paddle brought, which was a board about two feet in length and one inch in thickness, having fourteen holes bored through it, about an inch in circumference. This instrument of torture he would apply until the slave was exhausted, on parts which the purchaser would not be likely to examine. This mode of punishment is considered one of the most cruel ever invented, as the flesh protrudes through these holes at every blow, and forms bunches and blisters the size of each hole, causing much lameness and soreness to the person receiving them. This punishment is generally inflicted in the morning, before visitors come to examine the slaves. Just before the doors are opened, it is usual for the keeper to grease the mouths of the slaves so as to make it appear that they are well and hearty, and have just done eating fat meat; though they seldom, if ever, while in the custody of the keeper, taste a morsel of meat of any kind. . . .” 6
1493 “The European trade in American Indians was initiated by Columbus in 1493. Needing money to pay for his New World expeditions, he shipped Indians to Spain, where there already existed slave markets dealing in the buying and selling of Africans. . .
Colonists participated in Indian slave trading to obtain capital. It was as if capital could be created out of thin air: one merely had to capture an Indian or find an Indian to capture another. In South Carolina, and to a lesser extent in North Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana, Indian slavery was a central means by which early colonists funded economic expansion. . . .
Without slavery, slave trading, and other forms of unfree labor, European colonization would have remained extremely limited in the New World.” 7
_______________
“Surely this is where the rift begins,” I say. “This is the cause of the damage, isn't it? Can we not stop here? I am tired, even here with you, I am tired to death. Let me go back now and be done with it.”
“Do you know what it means to grow in the spirit?” asks my companion.
“Spiritual growth, you mean?” I say without thinking.
“Yes,” she says, “of course.”
“Frankly, I can’t take any more,” I say. “No wonder they’ve tried to mend this tapestry with patches and desperate stitchings all these years. To unweave all this right down to the warp—the guilt alone would be unbearable.”
“Spiritual growth,” she says, ignoring my comments, “consists in stages of awakening. It is the process of waking up. Yes, you can stop here if that is your wish. You may return to your suffering body. But do you understand that spirit does not die?”
“What does that have to do with it?” I ask.
“You may go back into hiding, but you will not be relieved by the death of your body, any more than the nation will be relieved of its guilt by stitching patches over the ever-widening rift in this tapestry.”
I know she is speaking the truth. “Lead on, then,” I say.
She adds, “You are right in thinking we are touching the cause of the rift. Just a step or two more, just back a little, and we are done. It is just here:”
1776 July 4th “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.…”
“You are well aware,” she continues, “that the very man who wrote those words kept human beings as property. As did others among the founders of this nation.”
“Yes,” I say. “I know. So is this the real beginning of the fault line?”
“The hypocrisy is, yes. The lie dividing the ideal from the lived reality was woven right into the first stitch of weft over warp in the tapestry of America.”
“The native people called it out, though, didn't they?” I say. “They saw the ‘forked tongue’ from the beginning, and been dealing with it ever since.”
“Yes, that is also true,” she says. “But there is something more. It goes much farther back than this tapestry, which, after all, is only that of one nation among many. It goes back into the deepest recesses of the human soul. It is responsible for every form of use and abuse of one human being by another. It is the cause of the first false stitch woven into this tapestry from the very beginning of the weaving. And it is the reason the entire tapestry must be unwoven, until there is nothing left but the truth within the ideals, and the choice every human being must make. Then the real work of rebuilding can begin. And the real nation can begin.”
I am silent now. What is it I am feeling? Depression? Elation? Grief? Hope? Something has taken place in all this, I know, unleashing this swelling tide of feeling. But what have I done? I haven’t done anything.
“Not true,” says my companion. “You have taken the necessary step. You are awake.”
“But I’m about to die, how does this help anyone else?”
“It wouldn’t help anyone else,” she says, “if human beings were not of one essence. But they are— and are beginning to awaken to this reality. Human being, human spirit, is one. For one of you to take this step is to open the door for others.”
And now I feel myself slowly descending, wafting back in the direction of my body. I am exquisitely tired, yet somehow full of life. I see my body is sleeping, at last.
“Are you still here?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “I am always here.”
—Lfj Gill
_______________
1 https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm
2 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/assassination-martin-luther-king-jr
3 http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/till/tillaccount.html
4 https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/lynching-in-america-targeting-black-veterans-web.pdf
5 Equal Justice Initiative 2019, quoted in Wikipedia article “African-American veterans lynched after World War I”
6 http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/text2/
7 http://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essay/indian-slavery-americas
Photographer: Gilberto Mello, on Pixabay.com (https://pixabay.com/users/gmello-5539530/)
Corona Virus Journal for RI Historical Society Covid-19 Archives
Journal #10 The 4th of July, 2020
Unraveling the American Tapestry
[Preface: The woman in the following narrative is fiction. Her situation and thoughts are not.]
I am in this bed. I have a tube shoved down my throat into my trachea, attached to a machine forcing my body to do what I cannot make it do—pull air into my lungs. I am in pain. I am sick to my soul. There is no one here but me.
Every once in a long while, someone gowned and masked appears beside the bed to check my body and the machines, a few with warmly concerned, compassionate eyes; and this is the only evidence of human concern that comes to me in the endless hours of pain and solitude. I am lonely beyond words. I know that I will die with this tube in my chest, with no family, no loved ones, no friends near me to hold my hand or speak to me as I gasp for my last breaths.
And I know there are many out there who do not care, like the middle-aged woman cashiering at the hardware store the week before I was stricken—blatantly, defiantly mask-less, breathing and talking two feet from the customers trying to get out of the store. And like the many others I’ve seen displaying the arrogant disregard being modeled by the sociopath in the Whitehouse—too good to protect others by wearing face coverings or keeping a safe distance.
I know, too, the attitude many harbor—“It’s only the oldies getting killed off—time for them to go anyway and stop burdening the system.” I actually heard someone say the pandemic is “just culling the herd.” Apparently these people plan on never aging themselves, so are quite happy to see “them” clearing off the planet—at least until “them” is a favorite aunt or grandparent dying in solitary confinement, like me.
The day I cannot wrench another breath into my burning lungs, I will become just one in the data pile, the daily death toll pre-softened to near inaudibility by the opening remarks: “Good news today, we are doing well. Our Rhode Island numbers continue to decline, even as much of the rest of the country’s Corona cases are escalating. We now have only ninety-one people in the hospital; sixteen of these people are in the ICU; and fifteen of the ICU patients are on ventilators. [—Now for me and the recent cadavers in the refrigerator trucks—] And, sadly, we have seven more corona-related fatalities to report today,”—followed by hearts and prayers going out to their families. This last, the death datum, makes hardly a blip in anyone’s radar, except for the families who knew and loved them. Us.
What have they given me today? Something new. I’m receding from my body, floating somewhere apart from it, even though I can still perceive the pain in my lungs and hear my endless attempts to cough and to breathe. From a distance, I hear my old body trying now to scream, so afraid—of what? something—trying to tell the plastic-covered nurse—“Somebody trying to kill me, why am I in this jail, why are they torturing me?”—must be hallucinating—but I am not now in that part of my mind—I am floating somewhere apart, where the body I know as mine is not attached to “me.” What did they give me? Is this morphine? I don’t mind the pain any more—it never leaves, but now it’s far away. Where am I being taken? I am still receding…
I hear voices. Indistinct. I am being moved toward—what? Something . . . a building—big. Going through an archway . . . into a hall, I think . . .yes, a ballroom-size hall. There’s a picture taking shape—a large tableau of some sort, it appears. The voices are coming from there. It is growing ever larger as some invisible conveyer moves me closer, and now I see it is a huge tapestry being woven on a gigantic loom stretched along the far wall. It seems to be unfinished, yet already a great many scenes have been depicted, in rich, vibrant colors—scenes somehow familiar as I focus in on them one by one. Yes, this is familiar—they are all familiar—I know this picture. I am propelled into it, in among the threads of yarn, into the woven scenes all around me and stretching back through time. I am amazed at the colors, fascinated with the intricacies in the weaving.
“Recognize where you are?” asks a voice, clear now, though unfamiliar. “See the little dairy farms and white-steepled churches? The fields and trees and stone walls? See the little white girl floating down among the elms . . .”
Yes, I know these houses, these fields, these country lanes and stone walls. Suddenly I am in my old New England village; I see my childhood home where, like the child in Fern Hill, “I was young and easy under the apple boughs, about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green”—Wait a minute, what did that voice say?
“Little white girl,” it says again, “with all your Caucasian European-American neighbors . . .” I feel a long-standing irritation arise—ever since I first heard those ignorant terms. “First of all,” I say to the disembodied voice, “my skin is not ‘white.’ It’s more like a pale salmon. At least it was, till I got sick. Now it’s almost blue. (No oxygen.) And second of all, my forebears originated nowhere near the Caucasus.” But I soon tire of the attempt to educate. What does it matter anyway?
I am being lifted upward now. Another voice is speaking. It seems to be accompanying me aloft, where we hover over the great tapestry. “Now you can see the entire work, can you not?” she asks. I say “she” for the voice now sounds female to me.
“Yes, I think so,” I say. The loom and the tableau are so huge I am not sure if I am seeing all the way to the far end, which seems somewhat shrouded in mist.
My unseen companion blows a breath over the tapestry and it all comes clear, far and wide.“We are going to traverse the length and breadth of this great work,” says the voice, “all the way back to the very first stitch. But first look down and behold the grand design. Do you know what you are seeing?”
My eyes seem to be going in and out of focus, or else the brilliant jewel colors below are themselves going in and out of focus, now looking like shapes I recognize, now shifting and changing to other forms that feel familiar yet defy my intellect. I can’t think of anything to say.
“I understand,” she says, though I have said nothing. “You cannot see everything because what you are looking at is not finished. Even as you gaze back down along the length of the design, there is shifting and changing, uneasiness and conflict, layered realities, each in its own realm. But now look with my eyes and see all that was, and is, and is coming to be.”
Strains of music now rise from the tapestry, and with it the vision embodied in the words I am hearing as if for the first time:
“Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain—America! America! God shed his grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”
I see the purple mountains, the amber waves of grain, the orchards and gardens, and the shining seas below, all woven in living colors, now plain to see.
“Yes,” she says, “that was and is the land you have lived in, though you are now leaving it. You will not see the day when this song displaces the bombs bursting in air and becomes the national anthem. The nation is not yet ready. But you can also hear what will be, the time that is coming, in the words of the song. It begins with a prayer:
“God mend thine ev’ry flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law. . .
May God thy gold refine, till all success be nobleness, and ev’ry gain divine.”
“You see,” she says, “the reality is, as yet, real only in vision, in the ideal. But it is there in the weaving—one of the layers yet to come forth. God has already shed his grace on this nation. But much of it is still locked up within ideals, the very ideals expressed in the founding papers, but the nation is not yet equal to the gift.
“Nonetheless, you can pray, and you can work, and you can forgive, and you can rebuild, until the ideal releases its soul into the living reality, when you actually do crown America’s good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
“The ‘patriot dream that sees beyond the years’ truly does see the time to come, when this nation’s cities will be ‘undimmed by human tears.’ But that time is not now. This nation has work to do—every soul in it. And you have work to do before you leave.”
I am wondering what work I can do from a deathbed, but she goes right on.
“I will carry you along and guide you. All you need do is watch and listen, and do as I ask.”
I am trying not to think the thought I’m thinking, for it’s obvious she can read my thoughts: Who is this? And why me? What possible difference to the world can a shriveled, dying old woman make now?
“A great difference, if you will allow. All human movement toward truth begins in the spirit. And that is where you are now. You will not be there to see the changes coming into the world, but you will play a part in them nonetheless in this vision.”
“This is a vision?” I say. “What if this is just the drugs causing hallucinations?”
“Foolish! Do you really want to waste the time you have left? Hallucinations are what your body and physical mind are going through right now down in that bed, as you well know. They are the effects of a deadly virus and pain medications. I have carried you away from all of that into this clear light. Do not look back or back you will go!”
I feel how this is so. The moment I had succumbed to that doubt, I’d felt a terrific pull back toward the bed where my body lay in agony. But her sharp retort countered the pull, like a hand yanking a drowning man from the water. I won’t go there again.
“Are you ready to begin?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. I notice we are slowly descending again toward the tapestry.
“We will be touching down at points along the weaving,” she says, “going back more than four hundred years along the timeline to the beginnings of this nation. You will be seeing scenes and hearing voices along the way. Some you will recognize from your own experience and your education; some you will not. If you listen, watch, and learn, you will have no need of questions. Simply do as I ask as you go, and all will be well. I will be with you.”
I don’t say anything out loud, for there is no need. She can hear my unspoken assent.
We touch down at the point in the picture where I departed a week ago, when I left my comfortable home for a death bed. I recognize the first scene with no trouble. A man on the ground—another man kneeling on his neck—eight long minutes passing while the pinned man pleads for breath until he dies—right there in front of the whole world. One man wrapped in brown skin, the other wrapped in “white” skin.
“I can’t breathe!” echoes around the globe. Conflagrations erupt—shouts, masses gathering around the world, hatred and accusations hurled back and forth, sorrow and grief, questions, lies and truths, tears and embraces.
“Look closely at the weaving,” says my companion. “What do you see?”
“There is a rift,” I say. “A rip in the fabric. A long tear separating the threads—it looks like it goes back before this place.” I see rifts continuing farther back down the weaving, as far as I can make out—maybe all the way to the beginning.
“These gaps and rifts will need to be repaired,” I say, “won’t they? Need to be sewn back together?”
“No,” she says. “Not this time. There will be no more patching or mending. The tapestry will have to be unwoven, completely unwoven, all the way back to the very first wrong stitch. You will be tracing that rift back.”
Instantly I am transported back to my first vantage point, where the other voice had described the “little white girl descending among the elms.” I am home. I am a little child. I know no rifts. “Happy as the day is long. . .”
There was only one black family in my town, though they would not have liked being called “black” in those days. Anyway, they were brown, not black. They had one girl, my age. Everybody else in the whole town was “white.” So I went through school with one brown classmate in a sea of white, the children of Finnish, British, Irish, and French immigrants—along with one or two German and Jewish families . . . One brown-skinned girl whose ancestors were brought here to be exploited in their brown and black skins.
In my little town, being the daughter of white upper-middle-class parents, I grew up with a sense of continuity and security, trusting the stage on which I found myself—and had no thought for many years that it was not sustainable, could not hold—even though little threads of lie were all around me, and soon wove themselves across the warp threads of my mind—little weft threads I could not place neatly in the picture, even as a child. I later wrote about them—painful weft threads piercing the heart.
“Now we are going to travel much faster,” my companion said—back through seminal points along the timeline. Keep an eye on the rift in the fabric as we go. We will touch down where certain voices rise up from the design; you will recognize what they are. They must be heard. No need to comment—they will speak for themselves. Let’s go.”
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1963 “I have a dream! I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 1
I see beautiful weft threads meshing at this point in the weaving. Yet nearby the rift gapes open, a dark slash in the fabric:
1968 “At 6:05 p.m. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King’s assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. During King’s funeral a tape recording was played in which King spoke of how he wanted to be remembered after his death: “I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.” 2
1955 “When, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to obey an order to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, an action that led to a boycott of the Montgomery bus system, she had in mind a murder trial that happened two months earlier in Sumner, Mississippi. A fourteen-year-old boy, Emmett Till, had been brutally murdered and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River, but despite clear evidence that two white men committed the crime, an all-white jury returned a "Not Guilty" verdict after just an hour of deliberation. Parks wrote, "the news of Emmett's death caused me...to participate in the cry for justice and equal rights." The trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for the murder of Till shook the conscience of a nation and helped spark the movement for civil rights for black Americans.” 3
1946 “Between the end of Reconstruction and the years following World War II, thousands of black veterans were accosted, assaulted, and attacked, and many were lynched. Black veterans died at the hands of mobs and persons acting under the color of official authority; many survived near-lynchings; and countless others suffered severe assaults and social humiliation. Documenting these atrocities is vital to understanding the incongruity of our country’s professed ideals of freedom and democracy while tolerating ongoing violence against people of color within our own borders. As veteran and later civil rights leader Hosea Williams said, ‘I had fought in World War II, and I once was captured by the German army, and I want to tell you the Germans never were as inhumane as the state troopers of Alabama.’” 4
1917 On August 16, 1917, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi spoke of his fear of black veterans returning to the South, as he viewed that it would "inevitably lead to disaster.” To the American South, the use of black soldiers in the military was a threat, not a virtue. "Impress the negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air," and, the senator cautioned, "it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected."5
1863 November 19th The speaker describes “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” urging his listeners to “resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”
Behind him I see a huge expanse of green, beautifully woven, but even as I am looking it begins to turn a deep purple-brown color. We are sweeping over a field littered with the bodies of brothers who have slaughtered one another, the field soaked with their blood.
“Come,” she says, and I am carried on along the fault line in the tapestry as another voice rises from the rift. “We will pause here a while,” she says. “He has much to say. You have much to hear.”
1500s - 1859 “At last everything was ready, and the traffic in human flesh began. I will attempt to give as accurate an account of the language and ceremony of a slave auction as I possibly can:
‘Gentlemen, here is a likely boy; how much? He is sold for no fault; the owner wants money. His age is forty. Three hundred dollars is all that I am offered for him. Please to examine him; he is warranted sound. Boy, pull off your shirt ⎯ roll up your pants ⎯ for we want to see if you have been whipped.’ If they discover any scars they will not buy, saying that the nigger is a bad one. The auctioneer seeing this, cries, ‘Three hundred dollars, gentlemen, three hundred dollars. Shall I sell him for three hundred dollars? I have just been informed by his master that he is an honest boy and belongs to the same church that he does.’ This turns the tide frequently, and the bids go up fast; and he is knocked off for a good sum. After the men and women are sold, the children are put on the stand. I was the first put up. On my appearance, several voices cried, ‘How old is that little nigger?’ On hearing this expression, I again burst into tears and wept so that I have no distinct recollection of his answer. I was at length knocked down to a man whose name was Denton, a slave trader, then purchasing slaves for the Southern market ….
Each one of the traders has private jails, which are for the purpose of keeping slaves in . . . Denton had one of these jails . . . and on entering I found a great many slaves there, waiting to be sent off as soon as their numbers increased. These jails are enclosed by a wall about 16 feet high, and the yard-room is for the slaves to exercise in and consists of but one room, in which all sexes and ages are huddled together in a mass. I stayed in this jail but two days when the number was completed, and we were called out to form a line. Horses and wagons were in readiness to carry our provisions and tents so that we might camp out at night. Before we had proceeded far, Mr. Denton gave orders for us to stop for the purpose of handcuffing some of the men, which, he said in a loud voice, “had the devil in them.” The men belonging to this drove were all married men, and all leaving their wives and children behind; he, judging from their tears that they were unwilling to go, had them made secure. . . . I will not weary my readers with the particulars of our march to Tennessee, where we stopped several days for the purpose of arranging our clothes. While stopping, the men were hired out to pick cotton. While in Tennessee we lost four of our number who died from exposure on the road.
[I]n about four weeks arrived in Natchez, Miss., and went to our pen, which Mr. Denton had previously hired for us, and had our irons taken off and our clothes changed; for Mr. Denton was expecting visitors to examine the flock, as he would sometimes term us. There was a sign-board in front of the house, which informed traders that he had on hand blacksmiths, carpenters, field-hands; also several sickly ones, whom he would sell very cheap. In a short time purchasers became plenty, and our number diminished. I was not sold for several weeks, though I wished to be the first, not wishing to witness his cruelty to his slaves any longer; for if they displeased him in the least, he would order them to be stripped and tied hand and foot together. He would then have his paddle brought, which was a board about two feet in length and one inch in thickness, having fourteen holes bored through it, about an inch in circumference. This instrument of torture he would apply until the slave was exhausted, on parts which the purchaser would not be likely to examine. This mode of punishment is considered one of the most cruel ever invented, as the flesh protrudes through these holes at every blow, and forms bunches and blisters the size of each hole, causing much lameness and soreness to the person receiving them. This punishment is generally inflicted in the morning, before visitors come to examine the slaves. Just before the doors are opened, it is usual for the keeper to grease the mouths of the slaves so as to make it appear that they are well and hearty, and have just done eating fat meat; though they seldom, if ever, while in the custody of the keeper, taste a morsel of meat of any kind. . . .” 6
1493 “The European trade in American Indians was initiated by Columbus in 1493. Needing money to pay for his New World expeditions, he shipped Indians to Spain, where there already existed slave markets dealing in the buying and selling of Africans. . .
Colonists participated in Indian slave trading to obtain capital. It was as if capital could be created out of thin air: one merely had to capture an Indian or find an Indian to capture another. In South Carolina, and to a lesser extent in North Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana, Indian slavery was a central means by which early colonists funded economic expansion. . . .
Without slavery, slave trading, and other forms of unfree labor, European colonization would have remained extremely limited in the New World.” 7
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“Surely this is where the rift begins,” I say. “This is the cause of the damage, isn't it? Can we not stop here? I am tired, even here with you, I am tired to death. Let me go back now and be done with it.”
“Do you know what it means to grow in the spirit?” asks my companion.
“Spiritual growth, you mean?” I say without thinking.
“Yes,” she says, “of course.”
“Frankly, I can’t take any more,” I say. “No wonder they’ve tried to mend this tapestry with patches and desperate stitchings all these years. To unweave all this right down to the warp—the guilt alone would be unbearable.”
“Spiritual growth,” she says, ignoring my comments, “consists in stages of awakening. It is the process of waking up. Yes, you can stop here if that is your wish. You may return to your suffering body. But do you understand that spirit does not die?”
“What does that have to do with it?” I ask.
“You may go back into hiding, but you will not be relieved by the death of your body, any more than the nation will be relieved of its guilt by stitching patches over the ever-widening rift in this tapestry.”
I know she is speaking the truth. “Lead on, then,” I say.
She adds, “You are right in thinking we are touching the cause of the rift. Just a step or two more, just back a little, and we are done. It is just here:”
1776 July 4th “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.…”
“You are well aware,” she continues, “that the very man who wrote those words kept human beings as property. As did others among the founders of this nation.”
“Yes,” I say. “I know. So is this the real beginning of the fault line?”
“The hypocrisy is, yes. The lie dividing the ideal from the lived reality was woven right into the first stitch of weft over warp in the tapestry of America.”
“The native people called it out, though, didn't they?” I say. “They saw the ‘forked tongue’ from the beginning, and been dealing with it ever since.”
“Yes, that is also true,” she says. “But there is something more. It goes much farther back than this tapestry, which, after all, is only that of one nation among many. It goes back into the deepest recesses of the human soul. It is responsible for every form of use and abuse of one human being by another. It is the cause of the first false stitch woven into this tapestry from the very beginning of the weaving. And it is the reason the entire tapestry must be unwoven, until there is nothing left but the truth within the ideals, and the choice every human being must make. Then the real work of rebuilding can begin. And the real nation can begin.”
I am silent now. What is it I am feeling? Depression? Elation? Grief? Hope? Something has taken place in all this, I know, unleashing this swelling tide of feeling. But what have I done? I haven’t done anything.
“Not true,” says my companion. “You have taken the necessary step. You are awake.”
“But I’m about to die, how does this help anyone else?”
“It wouldn’t help anyone else,” she says, “if human beings were not of one essence. But they are— and are beginning to awaken to this reality. Human being, human spirit, is one. For one of you to take this step is to open the door for others.”
And now I feel myself slowly descending, wafting back in the direction of my body. I am exquisitely tired, yet somehow full of life. I see my body is sleeping, at last.
“Are you still here?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “I am always here.”
—Lfj Gill
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1 https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm
2 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/assassination-martin-luther-king-jr
3 http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/till/tillaccount.html
4 https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/lynching-in-america-targeting-black-veterans-web.pdf
5 Equal Justice Initiative 2019, quoted in Wikipedia article “African-American veterans lynched after World War I”
6 http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/text2/
7 http://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essay/indian-slavery-americas
Photographer: Gilberto Mello, on Pixabay.com (https://pixabay.com/users/gmello-5539530/)
Corona Virus Journal for RI Historical Society Covid-19 Archives
Journal #10 The 4th of July, 2020
Date
July 4, 2020
Location
At home in Hopkinton, RI
Collection
Citation
Lfj Gill, “COVID-19 JOURNAL #10 THE FOURTH OF JULY, 2020,” Rhode Island COVID-19 Archive, accessed July 2, 2024, https://ricovidarchive.org/index.php/items/show/1054.
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