- Jul 2, 2003
- 5,882
- 931
One of our very own JRS Writer
Writes some very deep, and insightful pieces on the struggle we have incountered, and are still facing. I like the way he keeps the current posted. Thru one of his post, I came across this site. I was looking up more information on Mrs. Callie House.
" Mrs Callie House who founded the Ex Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association the first organized attempt to gain reparations for blacks who actually lived and experienced slavery in 1894 was investigated, railroaded, convicted and jailed on unsubstantiated charges of mail fraud in 1917. "
The following poem, by a American poet Robert Hayden captures how he saw the slave trade. The ships, and the voyage. I printed out the article, and I'm in the process of reading the entire article of 15 pages. I titled the poem from words in the original caption from the heading of the ariticle.
I am always fascinated by history, and poetry of this sort. It is information that otherwise hundreds of people never hear or see. The internet is great. I follow the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King. What sticks out in one of his speeches is his claim to have visited the mountain top and seen the promise land. When I really introduced myself to the internet. Around 1998. I have felt there is something here. My inner voice, rings like large bells all the time that the internet is part of what Dr. King spoke about. Parables are never clear. They sometimes speak of destinations, and vechicles by which they will be carried out. Dr. King often spoke in parables. Dreams are the same. One thing within a dream, means something else.
I don't study dreams. How else would a being almighty " GOD " communicate to us. How would he have communicated to Dr. King, but in a dream.
The answers to our problems come from / through sources you never expect. Through a stranger. Maybe when you stop to assist a homeless person. In the advice and words of a family member. Sometimes from the chidren. We are his vessels, and his work comes through us, and carried out by us.
From experience this I know.
When you pray, you have to be patient, silent, and still internally ( be at inner peace that your blessing will be answered ) to recieve the blessing. If you dream about it. Be sure not to loose the message or answer given. It's wrapped up in there. Trust me.
Dr. King in his speech said. " All of GOD's children, will join hands " How would we do this when some of the peope in the dream Dr. King had are thousands of miles away. Of races of people I may never meet in their home land and them not meeting me in mine. Through the hands we all have. Communication is the joining of thoughts and information. Good, informative and bad. If this isn't what I percieve it to be.. it is a excellent vessel, where I do know. Something good, information and otherwise has and will continue to pass until we do get things right.
Unity.. comes to mind as I write this. On a horizon, unknown at this time. A man of my nation. Stands out of the line. He has hair like mine. He could be of my race. The dream is blurry. I can't see his face. All I know is he knows more than he is ever given credit for. He is often tortured because he speaks the truth. His eyes and his history wear heavy on his brow. He starts to speak. But everyone covers their ears. The truth spews forth. Like a river never changing it's current. The words rage most of the time. Sometime they flow in the intellect of the deaf ones. Words of this man. Falling on dead souls. Those that refuse to believe and yet know. He is only telling them the truth. No body wants to hear him. One from the crowd shouts. Another follows suit. Soon the crowd all turn and say " We must pin him down. Shut him up. He must not rise to a position where the world could hear him exclaim. "
" He is like a mirror. He knows all of our sins. He will make us reflect for days, weeks and centurys. Never could I return to my ways of wrong doing. Don't get to know him. He has a influence, a creative gesture that makes him hard to ignore. "
Many of those that wish he would shut up and go a away. Long to be like him. Act like him. Speak like him. Imitate him. Yet none ever Assimilate him. Or take serious the group he stepped from. Stood with or look like him. No this group must never be asorbed into the prevailing culture. The man who stepped forward knows. Although he stands in a forest of petrified trees. Majestic in their ways. Hard. Never yielding. They can be cut down. Weathered away by drops of water. One step at a time. One drop at a time. Any stone, mountain, or petrified tree must yield to the drops that neither can ignore for ever. This will be the down fall of those trees. None of them believe that over night a great rain of minds, words, couldn't rain nor come down with such force as to wear all resistance away of those stone minds and hearts of the earth. :boring: Then I woke.
In his poem, "Middle Passage," the modern American poet, Robert Hayden captured the meaning of slave ships:
Shuttles in the rocking loom of history
The dark ships move, the dark ships move,
Their bright ironical names
Like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth...
Weave toward New World littorals that are
Mirage and myth and actual shore.
Voyage through death, voyage whose chartings are unlove.
A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
Spreads outward from the hold,
Where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
Lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement...
But, oh, the living look at you
With human eyes whose suffering accuses you,
Whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark
To strike you like a leper's claw.
You cannot stare that hatred down
Or chain the fear that stalks the watches
And breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;
Cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,
The timeless will.
Calculating the costs of such human suffering and loss has always teetered uneasily on the scale of historical justice; clinical statistics, modern moral outrage, a tragic sensibility, and a horror-filled story of human commerce and survival have all found their places in the scale. The slave trade has to be assessed for what it was: a massive economic enterprise that helped build the colonial Atlantic world, a story of enormous human cruelty and exploitation that forged one of the foundations of modern capitalism, and a tale of migration and cultural transplantation that brought African peoples and folkways to all New World societies. Hayden offered a poet's simple and timeless definition for the slave trade: a "voyage through death to life upon these shores."
Sometimes history "accuses" us, as Hayden says, and we cannot "stare... down" its moral responsibilities. But history also forces us to interpret, explain, and imagine ourselves into the events of the past. In the words of the historian, Nathan Huggins, Africans engulfed in the slave trade and transported to the Americas experienced a physical, psychological, and cultural "rupture" from their known universe. They were ripped out of the "social tissue" that gave meaning to their lives and converted into "marketable objects."
========================
Writes some very deep, and insightful pieces on the struggle we have incountered, and are still facing. I like the way he keeps the current posted. Thru one of his post, I came across this site. I was looking up more information on Mrs. Callie House.
" Mrs Callie House who founded the Ex Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association the first organized attempt to gain reparations for blacks who actually lived and experienced slavery in 1894 was investigated, railroaded, convicted and jailed on unsubstantiated charges of mail fraud in 1917. "
The following poem, by a American poet Robert Hayden captures how he saw the slave trade. The ships, and the voyage. I printed out the article, and I'm in the process of reading the entire article of 15 pages. I titled the poem from words in the original caption from the heading of the ariticle.
I am always fascinated by history, and poetry of this sort. It is information that otherwise hundreds of people never hear or see. The internet is great. I follow the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King. What sticks out in one of his speeches is his claim to have visited the mountain top and seen the promise land. When I really introduced myself to the internet. Around 1998. I have felt there is something here. My inner voice, rings like large bells all the time that the internet is part of what Dr. King spoke about. Parables are never clear. They sometimes speak of destinations, and vechicles by which they will be carried out. Dr. King often spoke in parables. Dreams are the same. One thing within a dream, means something else.
I don't study dreams. How else would a being almighty " GOD " communicate to us. How would he have communicated to Dr. King, but in a dream.
The answers to our problems come from / through sources you never expect. Through a stranger. Maybe when you stop to assist a homeless person. In the advice and words of a family member. Sometimes from the chidren. We are his vessels, and his work comes through us, and carried out by us.
From experience this I know.
When you pray, you have to be patient, silent, and still internally ( be at inner peace that your blessing will be answered ) to recieve the blessing. If you dream about it. Be sure not to loose the message or answer given. It's wrapped up in there. Trust me.
Dr. King in his speech said. " All of GOD's children, will join hands " How would we do this when some of the peope in the dream Dr. King had are thousands of miles away. Of races of people I may never meet in their home land and them not meeting me in mine. Through the hands we all have. Communication is the joining of thoughts and information. Good, informative and bad. If this isn't what I percieve it to be.. it is a excellent vessel, where I do know. Something good, information and otherwise has and will continue to pass until we do get things right.
Unity.. comes to mind as I write this. On a horizon, unknown at this time. A man of my nation. Stands out of the line. He has hair like mine. He could be of my race. The dream is blurry. I can't see his face. All I know is he knows more than he is ever given credit for. He is often tortured because he speaks the truth. His eyes and his history wear heavy on his brow. He starts to speak. But everyone covers their ears. The truth spews forth. Like a river never changing it's current. The words rage most of the time. Sometime they flow in the intellect of the deaf ones. Words of this man. Falling on dead souls. Those that refuse to believe and yet know. He is only telling them the truth. No body wants to hear him. One from the crowd shouts. Another follows suit. Soon the crowd all turn and say " We must pin him down. Shut him up. He must not rise to a position where the world could hear him exclaim. "
" He is like a mirror. He knows all of our sins. He will make us reflect for days, weeks and centurys. Never could I return to my ways of wrong doing. Don't get to know him. He has a influence, a creative gesture that makes him hard to ignore. "
Many of those that wish he would shut up and go a away. Long to be like him. Act like him. Speak like him. Imitate him. Yet none ever Assimilate him. Or take serious the group he stepped from. Stood with or look like him. No this group must never be asorbed into the prevailing culture. The man who stepped forward knows. Although he stands in a forest of petrified trees. Majestic in their ways. Hard. Never yielding. They can be cut down. Weathered away by drops of water. One step at a time. One drop at a time. Any stone, mountain, or petrified tree must yield to the drops that neither can ignore for ever. This will be the down fall of those trees. None of them believe that over night a great rain of minds, words, couldn't rain nor come down with such force as to wear all resistance away of those stone minds and hearts of the earth. :boring: Then I woke.
In his poem, "Middle Passage," the modern American poet, Robert Hayden captured the meaning of slave ships:
Shuttles in the rocking loom of history
The dark ships move, the dark ships move,
Their bright ironical names
Like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth...
Weave toward New World littorals that are
Mirage and myth and actual shore.
Voyage through death, voyage whose chartings are unlove.
A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
Spreads outward from the hold,
Where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
Lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement...
But, oh, the living look at you
With human eyes whose suffering accuses you,
Whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark
To strike you like a leper's claw.
You cannot stare that hatred down
Or chain the fear that stalks the watches
And breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;
Cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,
The timeless will.
Calculating the costs of such human suffering and loss has always teetered uneasily on the scale of historical justice; clinical statistics, modern moral outrage, a tragic sensibility, and a horror-filled story of human commerce and survival have all found their places in the scale. The slave trade has to be assessed for what it was: a massive economic enterprise that helped build the colonial Atlantic world, a story of enormous human cruelty and exploitation that forged one of the foundations of modern capitalism, and a tale of migration and cultural transplantation that brought African peoples and folkways to all New World societies. Hayden offered a poet's simple and timeless definition for the slave trade: a "voyage through death to life upon these shores."
Sometimes history "accuses" us, as Hayden says, and we cannot "stare... down" its moral responsibilities. But history also forces us to interpret, explain, and imagine ourselves into the events of the past. In the words of the historian, Nathan Huggins, Africans engulfed in the slave trade and transported to the Americas experienced a physical, psychological, and cultural "rupture" from their known universe. They were ripped out of the "social tissue" that gave meaning to their lives and converted into "marketable objects."
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