Transcription: Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, 2008
This is a story within a story; how to enter this history, what to show, what to say, what to feel. It was a creation myth, how things came to be as they are. In this constructed place, our classroom, we revisit the past. The students examine the facts and will participate in the construction of history, a history that has been told to them by others. But now, with their own bodies, they engage their own dark terrain, their own winter.
Some of the children are young, learning about civil rights, human rights, for the first time. A teacher will guide them through lessons. For many of them the day will be long and hard, and for others, painful. Some things will be difficult for them to see.
Snow is falling. The students are attentive, curious, anxious. They know that the day will not be a normal day, will not be child’s play. They will see things meant for older eyes, but they need to know. There are now schools for suicide bombers. Lawlessness is everywhere, corruption rampant.
She tells the students that the bright lights of history are now shining down on them, on them, on her, on them and us together. And now all things are unavoidable. Perhaps in shame we’ll turn away, but the crime remains. The age of innocence has passed, and you are now responsible for your own future.
How we got to this point is still one of the great questions of the twentieth century, and yet no viable answer seems to be forthcoming. We simply know that something extraordinary happened in 1968. And what happened, how it happened, has changed everything. Earlier, in the 1940s, a startling thing happened. A bomb more powerful than life itself was dropped on Japan. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. And we knew that the world was now completely, completely ours to destroy. And if left in the wrong hands, would be destroyed. Life gone in a moment, in the flash, in the blink of an eye.
This is a story within a story. A key, a peephole.
The teacher tells the students that when she was young, maybe thirteen, maybe fourteen when it all started. Her world, like theirs, had been a world for the most part that was filled with play, with fun. Like them, she had been protected from the horror, from the horrors of the world, had been shrouded in comfort, in innocence. Then came the war. The war, the war, the war to end all wars. And the assassinations, and the murders. And things changed.
There were protests, marches, demonstrations, riots. Here and there, everywhere there were murders of the famous and the not so famous. Hundreds, thousands, millions of unknowns. Like thousands of others, she joined the demonstrations and felt the crush of the police baton on her back too, and ran for cover, regrouped, and demonstrated again.
Once upon a time, you could not vote. You could not enter a store. You could not try on a pair of pants. You could not take a casual stroll. You could not speak unless spoken to. You could not be unless recognized. You could not sit at a lunch counter. You couldn’t see a movie. You could not, could not, could not.
If you were black, if you were black, maybe that was a good place to start, to begin. Though it might be hard for students to understand, to believe that perhaps that was a good place to start the tale, if you were black.
I go to a diner for coffee, nothing more. The waitress is beautiful, she is white. She pours me a cup of coffee and I talk to her. Jim Crow is almost out of our system. I talk to her about things that matter. She knew some of these things, but not everything, not everything on my mind, not everything that had happened. I ask her for coffee. She pours and readies herself to hear a story, to hear the tale. The story makes her uncomfortable. The hard layer of reality rattles her. I could see it in her eyes.
A Woman in Winter
A woman stands in the fall of winter, the beginning of spring, reflecting, considering, imagining, contemplating the past, imagining the future. With one step, she could be in the future in an instant, or in the past, or in the moment, the now. But to get to now, to this moment, she needs to look back over the landscape of memory. Lost in memory, the woman faces a history, a history with a story that has been told a thousand times before. If you look on the horizon, here and there, first seen, now hidden, are little sightings of hope or dreams, of memories. If you look closely, through the corridors of time, even within the horror, one can see the fluttering wings of doves, wings like time, batting out beats of hope. Hope was the thing missed, the thing hoped for. You could almost taste it. But it was just out of reach, just above your head.
The Fall: The Assassinations
Exhausted from the tyranny, the lies, the manipulation, the mystery, the mayhem, the assassinations, we stumble, strung out, stunned, looking back over our shoulders, with fingers crossed. The strategic manipulation of politics and public opinion has had its way, we’re tired.
There is the murder of Medgar Evers. The assassination of Martin. The assassination of Gandhi. The public assassination of John Kennedy. The assassination and murder of innocent students. The primetime assassination of Robert Kennedy. The assassination of Che Guevara. The assassination of Allende. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The assassinations...the assassinations...the assassinations. The brutal assassination of millions of Jews. Jews gassed for the size of their nose, the bent of an ear, for religious belief, for the jobs they held, for the trades they applied, for the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, the place of origins.
Evidence
It’s 2008, the year Clinton and Obama are running for the presidency of the United States. Opportunistic and a woman, Clinton loses to Obama. Stunned by the upset she stalls for time. Surely a mistake has been made. Perhaps a recount will be necessary. Something, anything that proves that she’d won, and won by a large margin. After a time, she concedes, accepts the hand of fate, and gets behind the man. Some Republicans do the same, believing the strategy key to rebuilding the Republican Party. She wonders about this, about this kind of power backing an unknown, an unexamined, a man who appears almost from out of the void
She gathers her friends about her and she asks the question: Is it absolute power resolving itself to the changing landscape, the changing demographics, or a new face on an old game, the politics, the circus, the power, the cool, the distant, the ability to bide one’s time. Is it proof that the sun is setting on the empire? she asked. Evidence that the president is a mere figurehead. Evidence that America is changing. Evidence of conspiracy. Evidence of acquiescence. Evidence that the popular vote doesn’t matter. Evidence of backdoor politics. Evidence of a proper education. Evidence of the declining significance of race. Evidence that a change has come. Evidence that democracy was winning. Evidence that tyranny was winning.