Tag Archives: history

152. Montrose and Argyil

Leave a reply

Here is a poem based in an era when having the wrong religious belief would get you killed very quickly and very cruelly.

The English Civil War was fought while America was being born, between fierce sects of Protestant Christians, over points of doctrine so small that no one remembers them but historians. It was a time of multiple and conflicting loyalties, when opportunists and men of conscience alike changed sides, then repented and changed back again. Much of the freedom of religion we cherish in America today came as a reaction to the excesses visited on the people when armies decided what God had intended.

It was not unlike Shia and Sunni today. I understand them both, and fear them both when they march, because I remember how recently our Christian ancestors were killing each other for the same kinds of reasons.

To explain the obscure points in this poem, it takes place in Scotland which was under English rule. The tolbooth is Edinburgh city hall and the heads of executed prisoners were hung there. Corbies are crows in the Scots language. Montrose and Argyll were sometime enemies, depending on shifting fortunes. Both fought long and eventually lost – then lost their heads. I have bent history enough to put them on the spikes at the same time, so they could have a final conversation.

Montrose and Argyll

There is a spike by the Tolbooth side
Where famous heads are hung to dry;
There came the Marquise of Argyil,
Bereft of body, to reside.

In sun and rain, by weeks and days,
‘Til bare of flesh, by corbies pared,
Above the commons in the street
Who gibed and jeered, and milled and stared.

Montrose later joined him there,
Come newly from the scaffold head,
With fresh and bloody countenance,
Unwelcome, save that he was dead.

Then Montrose said to Argyil’s skull,
Staring eyeless at his side,
“A martyr’s death ye sought and found;
I see your flesh is mortified.”

The skull spoke back, “My Lord Montrose,
Ascent has brought you to my side;
And yet the rose upon your cheek
Comes newly leaking from your eye.”

They bickered harshly through the day
Of who was right when King Charles fell,
And who the Lord most dearly loved,
And who would spend his days in hell.

Then said the Marquise of Argyil,
“That ye died was no one’s fault but yours.
Ye had the chance to do the right,
But ye woudna’ heed the Lord.”

Replied the Marquise of Montrose,
“Full many died, whose deaths are yours.
Ye had the chance to let them live,
But ye woudna’ heed the Lord.”

They both paused, their voices spent,
Reflecting on the weary years,
The twists, the turns, the changing sides,
Betrayals, deaths, and bitter tears.

To overthrow an upstart King,
Then, repentant, bring him back again.
For Scotland, God, or Covenant
‘Til Cromwell’s axe cut short his reign.

Now all is done; the King is dead,
The Scottish church no stronger stands;
Both Marquises have lost their heads,
And Cromwell strides upon the land.

  * * *

          Myself, I am a sinful man,
          My kindness an indifferent sort.
          Temptation is my truest friend,
          And prayer remains a last resort.

          Yet when I stood beneath those spikes
          To hear the dead and mighty speak
          With undiminished passion still,
          Though hung in shame before the weak.

          I wondered then, as I ask now,
          What further deeds they might begin,
          In Jesus’ name, on Jesus’ flock,
          If they were not such Christian men.

151. Not So New Enemies

Leave a reply

Part two of a comparison of Christianity and Islam.

Bush Two called those who strap on bombs to kill their enemies, cowards. That was the most monumentally stupid statement to ever come out of the mouth of a man not noted for his wisdom. People who die for their beliefs are not cowards. If we are to defeat them, we have to understand them. Mislabeling them is not useful. And if we call them fanatics, we had better understand what fanaticism is.

We made a start yesterday by looking at Christian fanatics. Now it’s time to make the comparison to Islam.

*****

Muhammad did not claim to be God or his son. He claimed to be God’s messenger, a prophet, making him closer to Moses or Isaiah than to Jesus. Muslims believe that Jesus was also a prophet, but not the Son of God. Christianity grew out of Judaism, fulfilling it and therefore removing its validity, at least according to Christians. Islam grew out of both and recognizes both as sister religions which have been rendered obsolete by the Koran. Christians and Jews get preferential tax treatment in Islamic law as People of the Book.

That doesn’t keep wars from happening.

Christians claim to be a religion of peace, but history does not bear that out. Actual wars of religion occurred throughout the Reformation period, and wars of politics and commerce often had a strong religious component. Think of the conquest of Mexico, with priests marching beside the conquistadores and building their missions in the shadow of the presidio.

Islam was born in conflict and has never hidden its belief that the Koran should be spread by military conquest.

Before the Reformation, Christianity had about a thousand years of supremacy, full of internal strife, but well able to keep that strife in check. When Jan Hus rebelled against the Church, they burned him at the stake; problem solved.

Islam, on the other hand, split into two parts almost from the beginning. Upon Muhammad’s death, two lines of succession emerged. Those who favored Abu Bakr became Sunni; those who favored Ali ibn Abi Talib became the Shia. Both sects follow the five pillars of Islam and both believe in the absolute authority of the Koran. They differ on their interpretations of the Koran, and those disagreements have been passed on by sectarian schools. Each sect would say that the other might think they follow the Koran, but they are following false doctrine, and have abandoned Allah. All of this sounds a lot like my Baptist father arguing with my Catholic uncle.

Each of the two sects of Islam remained unified. This was very different from the Catholic and Protestant split. The Catholic church remained unified, but Protestants exploded into hundreds of different denominations, mostly at verbal war with one another, and occasionally at real war.

Throughout the history of Islam, church and government have interacted closely. Islam was spread by conquest, which isn’t necessarily as bloody as it seems. Wherever Islam conquered, the old underdogs often rode the elevator of change to high position in the new order. Sometimes they were very helpful in easing the road to conquest.

By a century after Muhammad’s death, much of the Holy Land was in Muslim hands, which did not please the Catholic church. When Tariq ibn Ziyad led his armies across the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered Spain in 711, the Catholic church fought back, but it took seven hundred years to expel the conquerors. In 1492, the Catholic rulers of Spain finally drove out the last Muslims, expelled the Jews, sent Columbus exploring, and began the Spanish Inquisition. Lovely year.

Also during that period, the Catholic church decided to take back the Holy Land, and set the Crusades in motion. Everybody knows that. What is not so well known is that for most of the second millennium, Eastern Europe was a battleground where vast areas were conquered by Muslim leaders, then reconquered by Christian leaders a few decades later, then Muslim, then Christian, for a very long and depressing time.

So we come to today, in a section of the world where two warring sects of Islam are filled with fourteen hundred years of hatred for each other; where religious, ethnic, and dynastic differences abound; and where those who would prefer prosperity at any reasonable cost, clash with those who are entirely dedicated to following the word of Allah, as their particular leaders understand that word. Many would love to kill westerners, but satisfy themselves instead by killing members of the opposite sect who are so near at hand, and such an easy target.

Above all, Islam is a religion which never exploded into a hundred sects. When there are only two sects, victory and the destruction of the other seems possible for both.

In Britain during the War of the Three Kingdoms (see tomorrow’s post) even pious men kept switching sides because they were enmeshed in conflicting loyalties to King or Parliament, to home region, to religion, to friends, and to their own particular bottom line. All of these loyalties were absolute, but as the situations changed, one loyalty would override another and a man would find himself fighting along side the ones he was fighting against only months earlier.

That should sound familiar. Change the names and the dates, and it could be the Middle East today.

150. Old Enemies

Leave a reply

There are times when a man has to stand up and defend his country. That is the flip side to yesterday’s post criticizing boot camps.

Today we face Islamic extremists who would destroy us. We can bemoan the our mistakes in Iraq, but we have to move forward from where we are. Wishful thinking is of no value in this issue. We call them fanatics. That’s an accurate description, but it is not useful. It’s just another word like evil, enemy, or barbarian – just another word that means THEM, as opposed to US.

If we are going to understand Islamic terrorists in order to defeat them, we have to find the inner fanatic in our own culture, so we can start to see the world through their eyes. Today we will revisit a time when Christians were killing each other over doctrine. Tomorrow, we’ll compare that to Islam.

*****

Trying to compress two thousand years of Christian history into a few hundred words borders on the burlesque, but let’s try. Christianity began with Jesus, who did not write the Bible. Fundamentalists like my people believe that it was written by his immediate followers under the infallible inspiration of God, but textual evidence suggests that it was actually written hundreds of years later.

In any case, by the third century there were hundreds of “books” to chose from. The Church chose some and discarded many in order to create the Bible. This gives some validity to the Catholic notion that the word of the Church is more important than the Bible, or at least others’ interpretations of the Bible.

Within the Roman empire, Christianity went from persecuted, to allowed, to the official religion of the state. Then along came Martin Luther. He was not the first to question the Church, but he was the first one to live through the encounter, because of changes in world politics which pitted proto-German rulers against Rome and provided him with a sanctuary.

The dam broke and here came a vast flood of new denominations, each anti-Catholic and each disputing with its fellow Protestants. For protection, many of these denominations sought the protection of secular leaders. Protection from outside enemies soon moved toward forced conversions within an area. The Dutch and Swiss became largely Calvinist, many Germanic states became Lutheran, Ireland remained Catholic at the core, although under increasing pressure from their English conquerors, France and Spain remained Catholic, England became the realm of the Church of England, and Scotland fell under a particularly Knox-ious form of Calvinism.

From 1618 through 1648 the Thirty Years War decimated Europe as country after country fought to see which form of Christianity would prevail, cementing the notion of one realm, one ruler, one religion. The notion of individual choice in religion was crushed under the boots of Kings and generals. This era provided every denomination with myths of how THEY were trying to destroy OUR beliefs. That WE were also trying to destroy THEIR beliefs tends to be forgotten.

The English Civil War, also called the War of the Three Kingdoms, came hard on the heels of the Thirty Years War. American notions of religious freedom were born out of the horrors of a conflict where various interpretations of God’s Truth were enforced at sword point, and partisan armies swept the land. The American answer to all this was the separation of church and state, found in the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

There is a bit of cynicism in this. Instead of insisting that God’s will be done, Americans have learned that the man in power rarely understands God’s will.

149. Boot Camp

Leave a reply

It’s Armed Forces Week again, that time of year when any questioning of the military is taken as a slap at servicemen or veterans. Citizens who have the temerity to say, “Wait a minute, let’s talk this over,” are seen as unpatriotic. When I was in the military, those people were called commie-pinko wimps. I was one of them, but they drafted me anyway. I’ve told that story in 42. The Other Veterans. I also told the flip side of the story in 43. S. L. goes to War and 44. S. L. in Occupation, which detail my father’s WW II experiences. There are times when a man has to stand up and defend his country. There are also times when a man has to stand up and tell his country to back off.

The military has no use for patriots, because patriots think for themselves. In combat, a soldier who shouts, “We must not do this,” is likely to get himself and his teammates killed. He has to go on, following orders.

So how do we turn patriots into yes-men? Boot camp. That’s what it’s there for.

Boot camp is not seen as something important, or morally debilitating. And, I suppose, compared the things that happen later in the field, it isn’t that important. But . . . without boot camp to turn patriots into soldiers, those later events could never happen.

This isn’t about me. I went through boot camp in neutral mode, observing, remembering, and trying not to feel. I wan’t always successful, but I was successful enough to survive intact. I was changed, of course, but by my own experiences, not by pre-programmed manipulations.

This also isn’t about the eighteen year old children who made up most of the recruits, who were eager to follow the path their elders had set, and ready to go over and kick some commie ass. This is about one young man, and those he represents. He came into boot camp a patriot, ready to serve his country, full of love and compassion, but ready to do his duty. They broke him. I can still see him standing in the barracks before lights out, talking to his friends, saying, “This isn’t right. I joined up to fight for my country. Why are they treating us like this?” His friends laughed at him and told him that this was nothing, it was just getting him ready for what was to come.

It wasn’t nothing, but it was getting ready for his life to come. That was the point.

I never talked to him. There was nothing I could say. He was learning in front of my eyes what I had learned years before, at other hands, under other circumstances. But I never forgot him.

Boot camp is what in Anthropology we call a liminal experience, one that tears down an old identity in order to build a new one. The folks at boot camp are really good at this, even in mild boot camps like the one I experienced at the San Diego Naval Training Center. We could see the real thing across the fence at the Marine boot camp, and we thanked God every day that we weren’t Marines. While I was there, a Marine recruit who could no longer take the daily abuse ran off and stowed away on a jet liner at the civilian airport just over the fence. Hours later the jet landed at his home town on the east coast and he fell out of the wheel well, frozen, asphyxiated and dead. The Marines said good riddance. We worms (as Navy recruits are called) laughed. Learning to laugh at the death of others is part of the boot camp experience.

It was all choreographed indignation, play-acting inflicted onto a captive audience. They said that if we didn’t keep our barracks clean enough or our socks rolled tightly enough, the Trouble Shooters would come.

“You worms have been given socks to roll! That’s all we trust you with now! How can we trust you with nuclear bombs once you’re on an aircraft carrier if you can’t roll socks now!”  Every word was delivered at a shout.

Of course, the Trouble Shooters came. They always do. They came in the night, screaming in manufactured rage and tearing the barracks apart while we stood at attention in our shorts at the foot of each bed.

Near-naked, helpless, frightened into immobility, knowing that the only way to survive was to  let the insanity happen. Civilian identities dying; new, military identities growing.

The making of a Navyman. You could put it on a poster.

132. Emancipation

Leave a reply

Saturday, April 16 is Emancipation Day, a holiday which is actually celebrated on different days throughout the South, depending on when emancipation came to different regions. In Texas it is celebrated on June 19th, called Juneteenth. This name and date have gained popularity beyond Texas. It would not be surprising if June 19th eventually supplants April 16 as the day we celebrate the end of slavery.

Emancipation timeline.

On April 16, 1862, slaves were freed in Washington, D. C.

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation, stating that he would free slaves in states which did not return from rebellion. None returned.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Since it was issued as a war act, slaves were only freed in those areas which were then in active rebellion. It became a practical reality only as those areas were conquered by Union forces.

On December 18, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery everywhere in the United States, was proclaimed. 

By the President of the United States of America:
A Proclamation.

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

“That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.”

Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit: (a list follows)

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.

               By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN
               WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.

116. Spacecraft Threatened by Bears

Leave a reply

200px-Voskhod_spacecraft_diagramYes, I agree; it’s a snarky title. It’s also accurate, believe it or not.

I had the great good fortune of living through the early days of manned space flight. I was nine years old when the Russians orbited the first satellite, and the early manned flights came when I was in high school. I watched every American launch with fascination and envy, but the Russian launches were shrouded in secrecy. I knew only the bare minimum that all Americans knew. I’m not sure the president knew much more.

During those early days, nothing was routine. Every mission was dangerous. They still are, of course, but not so much as then. American failures were there for all the world to see, while the Soviets kept their’s secret. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, information about the early Russian space program became generally available, but by then few people cared. I did, and I sought out the stories.

Today is the fifty-first anniversary of the first space walk – by the USSR. I would have brought it to you on the fiftieth anniversary, but I wasn’t blogging yet. Voskhod 2 was a triumph, and also a flight which went spectacularly awry.

Voskhod 2
March 18-19, 1965

The first six manned Soviet spaceflights were aboard Vostok craft. Gagarin became the first man in space on Vostok 1, Tereshkova became the first woman in space on Vostok 6. I plan to talk about them on their anniversaries, in April and June.

Vostok astronauts wore space suits throughout their flights and landed by personal parachute separate from the descent module. Before the second generation Soyuz spacecraft came on line, the Soviets launched two additional manned missions on modified Vostoks called Voskhod.

On Voskhod, a backup solid fuel retrorocket was added to the spherical descent module, another additional rocket softened the landing so that the cosmonauts could remain within the descent module, and the ejection seat was no longer used. This allowed Voskhod 1 to carry three astronauts where Vostok had carried only one.

Voskhod 1 cosmonauts flew without space suits, as did early Soyuz missions. Voskhod 2 cosmonauts Belyayev and Leonov wore space suits because they were scheduled for the first space walk. Their craft also carried an inflatable airlock.

American space walks first took place during the Gemini program (see post 87). That craft had two hatches but no airlock; both astronauts were in vacuum during the entire spacewalk.

On Voskhod 2, Leonov crawled into the airlock, sealed the inner door and opened the outer one. Belyayev remained in the pressurized descent module.

For ten minutes, Leonov remained within the airlock but exposed to the vacuum of space, then he slipped free and floated on a tether for another ten minutes. He was called back in to terminate his space walk, and his difficulties began.

(Or perhaps they had already begun. Some sources state that he “experienced a disorienting euphoria” during the space walk and other sources state that he suffered bends-like symptoms after the space walk was over; I haven’t been able to confirm these statements.)

It is certain that he had extreme difficulty reentering the airlock. His space suit had over inflated; the boots and gloves had slipped beyond his toes and fingertips, and his suit had increased in girth. He had to vent part of his rapidly depleting oxygen in order to bring his suit down in size, and even then had to enter the airlock head first, instead of feet first as planned. Once inside the airlock, he had extreme difficulty contorting his body to close the outer door. All the time, his body was heating up dangerously. Since he was surrounded by vacuum, there was nothing to carry away the heat his body was generating.

Once air pressure had been restored in the airlock, Belyayev opened the inner door and Leonov was safe. For the moment. As he said in an article for Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine in 2005, “the difficulties I experienced reentering the spacecraft were just the start of a series of dire emergencies that almost cost us our lives.”

The mission had achieved it’s goal and it was time to return, but just before the scheduled time for firing retro rockets the cosmonauts discovered that their automatic guidance system was malfunctioning. It took time to prepare for manual entry, so they had to wait one orbit, which would make them miss their return point by a thousand miles. Most of that orbit they were out of radio communications. When communications were restored, ground control asked them where they had landed, not knowing of their difficulties.

Their orbit was set, but the time they would fire their retro rockets would determine where on that orbit they would land. They chose a target just past the Urals. Using the clumsy and difficult manual backup equipment, they achieved the correct attitude and fired the retro rockets in the conical rear portion of the craft called the orbital module. The orbital and landing modules were supposed to separate ten seconds after retrofire. They didn’t.

The two cosmonauts knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. Instead of the steady press of force against their backs as they decelerated, they found themselves whipped about by confused forces that exceeded ten gravities. A communication cable between the two modules had failed to release, and now both modules were spinning about each other, tethered by the cable.

Finally, about 60 miles up, the cable burned through and the cosmonauts were freed. The drogue chute deployed, and then the main chute. All was peaceful and in order – briefly. Then it became dark as they dropped below cloud cover, the final rocket fired to slow them to landing speed, and they landed in 6 feet of snow.

They were 1200 miles beyond their intended landing point.

They blew the explosive bolts to release the hatch. It didn’t open. They had landed in the middle of a forest and the hatch was held shut by a tree. By yanking violently they dislodged it and it fell away, lost in the snow.

They made their way out of the spacecraft and waded through snow to a small clearing. Bikonur had not heard their landing signal, but a passing cargo plane had. It circled, and was soon joined by other planes and helicopters, but none of them could land in the rough taiga. Pilots threw a bottle of cognac; it broke. They threw warm clothing which got caught in the trees, but at least two pairs of wolfskin boots made it to the ground.

The light was failing. The cosmonauts returned to their landing module for shelter. Leonov was walking in calf deep sweat still trapped in his space suit from his space walk. Both cosmonauts stripped, removed the liners from their space suits and wring them as dry as possible, then put the on again along with the wolf skin boots and abandoned the useless space suits. The crawled into the landing module for the night, well aware that the taiga was filled with bears and wolves, and that this was mating season, when they were most aggressive.

The hatch was out of reach. The lights failed, but the circulation fan ran all night. The temperature dropped to 22 below zero.

A rescue party arrived on skis the next morning; they chopped trees to build a small log cabin and a big fire. The cosmonauts spent a second night, then skied out to where a second, larger party had chopped down enough trees for a helicopter to land.

I guess they made ‘em tough in those days. i suspect they still do.

115. St. Patrick’s Day With Juan O’Malley

Leave a reply

full title
Juan Angus Georg Angelo O’Malley celebrates St. Patrick’s Day
by drinking tequila and while wearing lederhosen under his kilt.

It is cliche to say that we are a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of holidays celebrating our immigrant origins – Cinco de Mayo, Octoberfest, Tartan Day, Chinese New Year, and of course, St. Patrick’s Day.

The middle school where I taught for nearly three decades was not racially diverse. We had an occasional student of East Indian heritage, a very occasional black student, but the rest of the students were divided roughly equally between Mexicans (mostly Catholic) and Anglos (mostly Mormon).

I didn’t say Mexican-Americans. The phrase seems politically correct, but it lumps some very different groups together, and not all of them like the name. There were students of Mexican heritage whose ancestors had been in California longer than I had, students whose ancestors were here before the 49ers, students who were children of recent citizens, students who were children of field workers with visas, and students who had just come over the border illegally. Some were Mexican, some were Mexican-American, and some were more American than the DAR.

The newcomers had an understandably harder attitude. A few of my students wore a T-shirt with a message that said it all:

Not Mexican-American
Not Hispanic
Not Chicano
MEXICAN!

As you might guess, Cinco de Mayo was a tense holiday for the teaching staff, but St. Patrick’s Day was neutral. I took sneaky advantage of that to tell a double story.

Pardon an aside: I got away with a lot because I liked middle school kids and I was a good science teacher. Most good science teachers escape to High School at the first opportunity. My kids always scored high on the science portion of standardized tests because I taught what was in the book first, then added what else I thought was needed. One year our seventh grade science teacher was an incompetent who was invited not to return. The following year I shoehorned four weeks of biology into my physical science class so his students would not reach high school without basic knowledge. For a few insane years, math teachers were forbidden to remediate; I squeezed remedial math into my science class. In the physics of motion chapter, I always taught the space program, including a brief history of the cold war so they would know why we went to the moon.

And I always taught the Irish immigrant story on St. Patrick’s Day.

It is a moving story, which eighth graders are old enough to appreciate. Potatoes from the new world were perfect for Irish soil; where a crop of oats had supported four people, a crop of potatoes would support eight; when previously hungry people were no longer hungry, they had more babies. Then the potato blight struck, and there was no going back to oats because the population had grown.

The land was largely owned by the English. They continued to export grain throughout the famine. Vast numbers of Irish starved. Those who could raise the money took ship for America.

The passage was hard. Ten percent of those who left Ireland died on the way. Their quarters were cramped, filthy, and unhealthy. Eighth graders both love and hate this part of the story; they have a very human capacity to be simultaneously moved and grossed out. I would walk about the room, measuring out the cubicles with hand movements, mimicking the heaving of the ship in a storm, telling of the bilge seeping up from below, pointing out the sound and smell of vomiting from seasickness, and reminding them that the cedar bucket behind that blanket at the end of the central aisle-way would fill to overflowing with human waste on the bad days when the hatches had to remain battened down.

Then I would quote a passage from a letter sent back to Ireland by an immigrant, who described the passage then said, “But I would endure all that ten times over, rather than see my children hungry.”

Once in the United States, things were still hard. The Americans who were already here didn’t want them. They could only obtain the jobs no one else wanted. Many were Gaelic speakers and did not speak English. They were segregated into the poorest part of the cities. They were disrespected.

They bettered themselves, generation by generation. They learned American democracy, and elected their own kind to office. They learned American capitalism and many became rich. Eventually, they elected one of their own, John F. Kennedy, to be president.

Along the way, they began to celebrate themselves. St. Patrick Day parades are an American invention. They have only recently begun to be celebrated back in Ireland, but they have been important in America for more than a century.

*****

You have to talk fast to get all that into forty minutes and still have time for the payoff, because the story is a lead-in to a realization, which is elicited by questions.

Who else came to America from elsewhere? (Mexicans is the answer you get, but you have to point out that the same could be said about Italians or Jews or Viet Namese or almost any immigrant group.) Who else didn’t speak the language? Who else was treated badly by the one’s who came before?

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t about shamrocks and leprechauns. Its about Irish pride. Its about saying, “I’m as good as anyone.” It can even say, “I’m here – deal with it.” St. Patrick’s Day is American, not Irish, because America is where the Irish had to speak up for themselves.

Cinco de Mayo is an American holiday. It is not widely celebrated in Mexico. Just as St. Patrick’s Day is Irish Pride Day, Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Pride Day.

It is a message I got across most years, but no one would have listened if I had not first captured their emotions with the story of a politically neutral and sympathetic people with whom both Anglo and Mexican students could identify.

Voices in the Walls 34

Leave a reply

6 of 6 of an outline of the remainder of Voices in the Walls.

One of the slaves is young, powerful, and pushy. He has always resented the whites above him; he is happy now to treat Matt as an underling. Matt is not about to buy that, and there is a lot of testosterone fueled head butting, complicated by black-white tensions.

Of course, this brings an image to mind – a white guy handcuffed to a black guy, running through the swamps ahead of the law. We’ve seen this show before, in any number of B movies. It will take careful writing to acknowledge that these emotions have to play out, without having the incidents take over the novel.

Eventually, Matt will have a climatic scene where he has to choose between the life of a white man and the freedom of a black man. The whole book points to this moment. It can’t come too soon, nor be delayed too long, but he finally has to take that pistol, given to him to protect his sister, and use it to protect one of the escaping blacks. Which white he shoots has to be carefully chosen. Not Meeker, that would be too pat. Not someone who is a complete innocent, nor a complete villain. The black he rescues is equally important. Probably not Alice – too easy and pat again, as well as being a sexual instead of a racial act. Not his black adversary among the runaways, that would be unbelievable. Probably Ben Sayre. Possibly one of the lesser characters among the runaways.

(Need I point out that this scene will be an obvious metaphor for the entire coming Civil War?)

This climax needs to come shortly before they all reach the Waterside area. There Matt will meet up with the old slave who taught him how to swing and axe and adz at his father’s shipyard. He has to experience again the servility that the old man offers him, and reject it.

Matt and his group steal a bugeye, an inshore vessel which Matt understands well. They work their way down to the Atlantic at night and out into a storm, then turn north and sail to freedom.

I’ve wanted to write this scene since I saw reference to an actual event years ago, long before I got the idea of Voices. A vessel designed for other purposes is exposed to a storm, and weathers it, to the surprise of those who thought they knew its capabilities. Like Matt. The storm is a massive threat from the outside, overshadowing white-black differences, and forcing them to work together or perish. And finally, the land is ripped apart by men in warlike contention, while the sea (aka nature) offers challenges men can overcome if they work together.

Yes, critics, writers are aware of the symbolism in their books. Readers, too. They don’t need you to point them out.

This also prefigures what Matt will do in the years to come. We find in the epilog, as he and Rachel and Sarah listen to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that he will spend the war in the Northern navy and will be in command of a river steamer with a black crew which is lost at the siege of Vicksburg.

In the final scene Alice comes by with her child at her side and is embraced by Rachel. She and Matt face each other; he nods, she smiles, but they do not – cannot – embrace. Matt realizes, sadly and with feelings of personal inadequacy, that he still can’t treat Alice as he would a white woman, and he predicts in his thoughts – as Lincoln’s words echo in the background – that although the slaves are freed, it may take a hundred years before his kind can bring themselves to treat them as equals.

Voices in the Walls 33

Leave a reply

5 of 6 of an outline of the remainder of Voices in the Walls.

I’ve even considered dumping the Alice altogether and having Saul be the one captured, but I can’t believe the story told that way. Maybe if Saul were five years old, but adult-saves-child is too easy a moral path for Matt.

I want Matt to change his feelings for a race, not an individual. Matt is young, good looking, and with a full complement of hormones. That means horny; it isn’t emphasized, but the reader knows. The girl is young, good looking, and forbidden fruit for two reasons. Young men of that era were supposed to save it for marriage, however often they didn’t. And slave owners – even ones like Matt and his father who strive for the moral high ground – would have been pulled two ways. Their “racial superiority” would tend to make them keep their distance, while knowledge that they could do as they pleased would tempt them to take those women who were unable to resist.

You could write a thousand stories out of that swamp of emotions: comedies, tragedies, or stories of moral affirmation and moral downfall. But those aren’t the story I’m trying to tell.

Matt is going to go into this rescue with massively mixed feelings. I want those feelings to be slave-owner vs. friend of a good, old black man. I’m afraid his inevitable sexual attraction to Alice will skew everything.

Nevertheless, logic notwithstanding, my gut tells me Alice needs to be in the story. The only way out of my conundrum may be to buckle my seat belt and write my way through the dilemma. If it fails, it won’t be the first couple of hundred pages I’ve thrown away.

So, let’s move on with the story. Alice gets rescued, and complications ensue.

For reasons I have yet to plot out, when Matt and Ben spirit Alice away, they are joined by a small group of other slaves who either have been planning an escape, or just take advantage of the situation. It may be that Alice invites them along, risking her life and freedom for strangers she had just come to know. That would be just like her.

Matt, Ben, Alice, and the others find themselves on the run. Matt has been found out. He can no longer pass as a southern gentleman. He has become a slave-stealer and his hosts know it. A hue and cry is raised. The road north is blocked.

They must now turn east and south, following a path that will eventually lead them to the tidewater region.

Here is a sidenote, concerning research: The journey from Gettysburg to the plantation where Alice is rescued has to take long enough for all the planned moral and personal dilemmas to play out. The distance from that plantation to the coast has to be be long enough for the remaining plot events to occur, but not be so far that the journey seems impossible for escaping slaves to accomplish. Beyond the linear distance, there is also the issue of time. Matt’s story begins with Lincoln’s election, and the number of weeks in Gettysburg, plus the trip south, plus the escape to the coast will probably push the end of the escape beyond the opening battles of the Civil War. All this has to be worked out in detail.

Accurate historical fiction is a lot harder than science fiction and fantasy.

From the beginning, I have planned for Matt to return to his own home, Waterside, passing through as a fugitive in the night. I want him to be fully committed to his new people by the time he gets there, and to fully realize what his change of heart has cost him; and to accept the change and the cost.

But before he gets there, he and his new people have to undergo a great deal of hiding, running, sneaking, a batch of close calls, a lot of fear, and a lot of interactions within the group, most of them harsh. Matt is no longer the man looking down from above. The slaves don’t know him and don’t trust him, and he is out of his element. He is not a city boy, but he isn’t Davy Crockett either. The knowledge the slaves bring with them is at least as useful as anything he knows.

Voices in the Walls 32

Leave a reply

4 of 6 of an outline of the remainder of Voices in the Walls.

Eventually, Ben and Matt discover where Alice has been taken. Meeker and Bellows have sold her and left the story. There will be no shootout at the OK corral type confrontation with them. This is not a story about two evil men, but about an evil system. It would be fun for the reader, and Matt, and me, to shoot both of them, but that would cheapen the book.

Matt goes to the plantation where Alice has been bought, using his own identity for the first time on the mission, and is given the hospitality of the owner. This is a crucial scene. Matt is plunged fully back into his “real” life; he finds the plantation owner and his son to be kindred spirits. The father is nothing like the stereotyped evil owner; his son is a picture of what Matt would have hoped to become. Matt likes both of them immensely. They are so trapped in an evil system that they do not recognize it as evil. So was Matt, a month ago, and that old accomodation to slavery still calls to him. It was so much easier than the morass of emotions into which he is sinking.

Matt struggles with the knowledge that he is deceiving them and is about to betray their hospitality in a way that he would have found unthinkable a few weeks earlier.

Ben Sayre will discover where Alice is. Ben and Matt will plan the rescue and carry it out. The details of this will come to me as I need them.

Now we come to a crisis of conscience. Not Matt’s; mine. Once Alice is bought and brought to the plantation, being young and beautiful, she will be in danger of rape by her owners.

If a writer (typically) were to have Matt save a white girl from captivity, he would save her before she was raped. I am proposing to have him save a black girl from captivity after she has been raped.

Ugly. Ugly. Ugly.

It needs to happen this way for reasons of realism, and for plot reasons. This is how it would most likely have happened in reality. A good looking young slave woman would have been “sampled” by one or more of the whites, even if I paint the owner and his son as above that act. And when Matt sees her again at the end of the book, I want her to be raising the baby from that rape as a beloved child for whom she has no resentment, however much she may hate the father. That is how I see her personality, and part of my goal in Voices is to push the one-race idea that I hammered on throughout my Black History Month posts over in A Writing Life.

But it’s wrong. Logic and plot needs be damned, it’s wrong. It tastes like exploitation. A black woman author could write this story with the rape intact, but I can’t. At least, I don’t want to.

Turning away from the implications of her capture, simply writing the book without the rape, would dishonor our understanding of how helpless slaves were. Writing the rape, even though it occurs off camera, dishonors the young girl I have created and am responsible for.

Yes, characters in a book do become real for authors, as well as for readers. Alice, who didn’t even have a name two days ago, who has not yet appeared in the text, and whom Matt didn’t even know to exist at the end of what I previously wrote, is already real for me.

This is one of the sticking points that made me stop writing originally.