Lucky Us

We flew back for Katie and Eamonn’s much-delayed (yup, COVID) wedding reception in Potomac, Maryland, a few miles upstream from our nation’s capital, and decided to come in a few days early for visits to Abe and Tom and the new Museum of African American History and Culture, and for strolls along the vistas laid out by Charles L’Enfant two-odd centuries ago for President Washington.  Our strategy served, as we hoped it would, as a restorative antidote to the images polluting our brains since January 6 when a howling mob of banshees and jackals and knuckleheads stormed our citadel of democracy while elected officials inside tried to fulfill their constitutional duty.  

Still, to encounter the history of our beloved country, here chiseled into marble and preserved in museums and libraries and statuary, is to encounter the institution of slavery.  The majority of our founding fathers owned slaves.  As the American colonies of England wrestled free of the mother country, they did so, every one, as entities relying on slaves for the heavy lifting.  Slaves built the capitol building, the White House, and the Smithsonian Castle.  

A quick scan back down the corridors of history discloses that that was simply the way it was.  The authors of Old Testament and New populate their chapters and verses with slaves, and nary a wagging finger.  Alexander the Great enslaved the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East as far as India, as did the Persians before him and the Romans after him. The Mongol Empire.  The Chinese Empire.  The Incas and Mayans and Aztecs.  African tribes and nations.  Native Americans.  Slavers all.  The teenage Indian girl, Sacajawea, who so famously enabled Lewis and Clarke to cross the Continental Divide, was a Shoshone, kidnapped by the Hidatsas as a girl and given or sold to the French Canadian fur trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau, whose child she delivered one winter night in 1805 with assistance from Meriwether Lewis, who was wintering over nearby with his Corps of Discovery.

So it went for centuries and millennia.  The conquerors enslaved the conquered, sent them into the fields to dig irrigation canals and sow and reap, built pyramids and ziggurats with their toil, set them to the oars of their galleys, and impregnated their women.

• 

• 

Here, in this country, we don’t do that anymore, and if you spend attentive time in our shrines, you see why.  Right there on the wall behind old Tom, one can read his immortal words:  We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal . . . So OK right there from the get-go women were left out, and stayed out until women themselves rectified the situation through their prolonged and peaceful suffrage struggle a century-and-a-half on.  But how about African slaves?  Equal?  Not so equal?  Scan left on the perimeter wall of the very same structure and you will read these words, surprising words because written by a man who owned, and profited from, scores of slaves:

Commerce between master and slave is despotism.  Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

Six decades later we tore ourselves asunder, spent four years introducing the frightful practices of mechanized warfare to the world, and expended all that blood and treasure to banish slavery from the land.  At the conclusion of that terrible trial, which his presidency had commenced, prosecuted, and concluded, Abraham Lincoln stood before his country at his second inaugural and uttered the words of bereavement and consolation so desperately needed.

• 

• 

With malice toward none

Bind up the nation’s wounds

A just and lasting peace among nations

Mr. Lincoln, sir, sadly we are still at it.  After all these shameful years of sharecropping and Jim Crow and lynchings and flaming crosses and segregation and assassinations, we confess that many among us still yet to this day believe that Black people are not, indeed, created equal.

When will it end?

One seeks hope these days, something to be optimistic about.

In the summer of 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. stood sixty feet from President Lincoln’s marble toes and said, “I have a dream.”  Next time you are in Washington you might want to go stand in that very place.  It’s there for you, for free, for all.

The first time I stood there, my children were still children.  After, we descended the marble steps to ground level and discovered the little gift shop tucked in under the monument.  There, mounted in the wall just inside the door, was a television on which Dr. King recited his speech in an endless loop.  Kate and Tucker knew the words.

How lucky we are, every one of us,  to live downstream from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all of the other imperfect post-enlightenment men who devised our resilient republic.  How lucky we are, every one of us, to live downstream from the magnanimous heart of Abraham Lincoln.  How lucky we are, every one of us, to live downstream from Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the other freedom fighters who improved our republic.

That struggle continues.  I pray that those downstream from us will give thanks for our legacy to them.