Wednesday, \u00a0August 21
\n“Four hundred years is a mighty long time.\u00a0 Courage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Several days ago, my colleague and friend in the Detroit Mercy History Department suggested that The Work Day\/Hard Time Poetry List give its attention to a vicious and important anniversary in the history of slavery. \u00a0As editor of the list, I am honored to post Roy\u2019s essay interpreting Langston Hughes\u2019 poem \u201cWe are the American Heartbreak\u201d just one day after the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown landing of the first \u201c20 Neggers\u201d there.<\/p>\n
Here is Roy\u2019s interpretative post for today. \u00a0Best to read his historical note slowly, with pauses.<\/p>\n
Thank you, Roy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
john sj<\/p>\n
Jamestown 1619 \u2013 and Now:<\/strong><\/p>\n On August 20, 1619, a privateer named the\u00a0White Lion<\/em>\u00a0landed \u201c20 and odd Negroes\u201d at Jamestown, Virginia, then a lonely outpost of the English empire in the far-flung Atlantic world.\u00a0 These Africans, who were stolen from their villages and families in Angola and forcibly transported across the vast ocean, were the first black slaves landed in the English colonies in North America, the forerunners of what a century and a half later would become the United States.\u00a0 The English colonists bought these first twenty African souls with \u201cvictuals.\u201d<\/p>\n We stand four hundred years removed from that foundational event in what Rev. Jim Wallis has called \u201cAmerica\u2019s original sin\u201d \u2013 our long and troubling encounter with slavery and racism.<\/p>\n And yet we remain deeply impacted by that event and what it set into motion.<\/p>\n African American poet Langston Hughes reflected on the meaning of that event in his brief poem, \u201cWe are the American Heartbreak,\u201d which appeared in\u00a0The Panther and the Lash<\/em>\u00a0(1967).\u00a0 In these verses, he speaks for all African Americans of those earlier times and our own.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Today\u2019s Post \u2013 \u201cWe are the American Heartbreak\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n We are the American heartbreak \u2014 As contemporary Americans, we live \u2013 whether black, white, or something else \u2013 with the lingering effects of that foundational event at Jamestown in 1619 and the way our path to the present has unfolded over the past four centuries.\u00a0 We\u2019re not very good, individually or collectively, in thinking about, talking about, or doing something about the giant \u201celephant in the room,\u201d that is American racism.\u00a0 We prefer apathy and indifference and hopes and prayers for a brighter tomorrow.\u00a0 We prefer to believe that time alone will heal the wounds, or that we\u2019re already living in a \u201cpost-racial America,\u201d or that those descended (if only metaphorically) from the \u201c20 and odd Negroes\u201d are being just a little too sensitive.<\/p>\n Hughes\u2019s poem challenges us to reflect, I think, about what we can do, individually and collectively, to heal \u201cthe American heartbreak\u201d \u2013 to correct \u201cthe great mistake.\u201d\u00a0 As the late poet Maya Angelou said at the 1992 inauguration of President Bill Clinton: \u201cHistory, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.\u201d<\/p>\n Four hundred years is a mighty long time.\u00a0 Courage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wednesday, \u00a0August 21 “Four hundred years is a mighty long time.\u00a0 Courage.\u201d Several days ago, my colleague and friend in the Detroit Mercy History Department suggested that The Work Day\/Hard Time Poetry List give its attention to a vicious and … Continue reading
\nThe rock on which Freedom
\nStumped its toe \u2014
\nThe great mistake
\nThat Jamestown made
\nLong ago.<\/p>\n