Blackbirds Fly
Last year I was reading The 1619 Project, learning things I did not know, even though I already knew my history well, having taught it for years. NPR had been covering the Tulsa Massacre, something most Americans had never heard of. In my mind I was imagining images from the past with an empathetic heart. While I can never, ever know what it is like to be a black person in America, we should not underrate the empathetic heart. Its imaginings create literature, theater, music, and visual art that is the only way we can possibly even begin to understand one another. Words are powerful, but images are primal, primordial, perfect. At least for the visually inclined, like me. It is said that the olfactory sense is the oldest, deepest sense, connected to the lizard brain, but humanity hopefully transcends the base level as much as possible. My empathetic imagining was pure mammal brain. Caring. Giving a s**t about suffering. I have a healthy distrust of the intellectual, cortex-level ability to deny, justify, cement itself in ideology. Sometimes it is better just to feel. Blackbirds Fly came out of my feeling. It represents the centuries of suffering of black Americans from the depths of despair, through the collective trunk of striving upward, to finally the release into freedom of those precious individuals who rose from the sap of the collective tree. The sap is still rising! I would like to help it along. I do not suffer from white guilt, although I have an excellent grasp of that from which I came. My mother was a professional genealogist who revealed the tapestry of my ancestors in a varied warp and woof. Some were slave owners, some were Lincoln abolitionists (from Lincoln, Illinois!). Some were Scots-Irish displaced crofters, become Appalachian mountain people. Some were Boston Brahmins of the first church of Christian Science. David Sage of Wales was possibly a criminal transport to this continent in the 1600’s. One Thomas Starr, a surgeon, fought in the Pequot Wars, meaning he participated in genocide. One was an otherwise unknown woman, Susan Ladd, who bore many children on the pioneer trail, suffering trials I struggle to imagine! Heroes and horrors, saints and sinners, this range of humanity existed then as it does now. A full history must be told. Then, imaginative empathy can heal.
