My dream house is a negative space of rock

[sovay]

My poem "Northern Comfort" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was written out of my discovery over the last few years of the slaveholding history of Massachusetts literally under my feet and my more recent anger at the murderously terrified fragility of the current administration. Half my family turns out to be wound into these vanguards of American colonialism and I don't waste my time pretending that the other immigrant half bullied me into demonizing them to death. At this point I am moving past hundred-year tides and into glaciers.

I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.

early all in the morning	On the highway	Pen and ink	Silver screen	There are worlds out there...
A wilderness of water	Haunted	sailing is a dance and your partner is the sea	Supernatural	No harm ever came from reading a book
The road goes ever on and on	Phoenix	FREE SPACE	Fever	a tangled mess of wild
Cold blows the winter wind	no mortal man his life could save	The sea always in my ear	Apocalypse	Transformations
Candlelight	through smoke and fire	Encrypted	Sundial	Jet

I got at least three songs stuck in my head from this card.

... in SPACE	Rust	Tied up in a ribbon
the woods are lovely dark and deep	FREE SPACE	Faerie law
Secret agents	Parsley sage rosemary and thyme	Bog body

I really appreciate the inclusion of the bog body.

Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.

Comments

Re: Slavery in Massachusetts

[sovay]

Was the extent of slavery in Massachusetts not taught here in history classes? You were probably too old to have read Alice Hinkle's book about Prince Estabrook in school (it came out in 2002).

I don't think I've ever seen that book. (I had heard of its subject.) I had a slightly idiosyncratic education and graduated high school in 1999. I can't remember a formal lesson on it, but I would have known in elementary school that slavery had existed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony because of the presence of Tituba in my reading about the Salem witch trials, at the same time that we were taught "Follow the Drinkin Gourd," which regardless of its historicity as a guide-song is part of what went into the poem. Other information I picked up over the years, as often as not from fiction, e.g. M. T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (2006–08), but I didn't know until 2019 that the ownership of people had endured as close to home as the estates of Somerville and Medford. I don't know what anyone else of my generation and location was taught.

I grew up in the South, and there was a not uncommon response when people from the North complained about slavery that it had happened in the north too. Not that that would excuse anything, of course, and duration differed a lot.

Just for the record, I wasn't worried you were about to reopen a civil war in my comments. The point for me isn't whether I should feel worse for not having known, or worse after finding out; it is what's true.

I had an exchange a long time ago with a British bellringer who claimed to be confused about why people on this continent went to the extreme of importing people all the way from Africa for slavery purposes. I pointed out that the first enslaved Africans came here with their English "owners" in 1619. He seemed to have forgotten the extent of such slavery in England.

It's not like there's Turner paintings about it or anything. (But people want to forget. I feel like my entire adult life has been a lesson in the hatefulness of historical memory to most people when I think it is what we have to hang on to or there's nothing to put the future on.)

[edit] I literally went over to the Guardian to see what was going on in the arts this morning and saw this book.

Re: Slavery in Massachusetts

[lauradi7dw]

I don't know when the Royall house opened as a museum. It might be fairly recent, like many other Massachusetts reminders that happened during your adulthood. I was distraught when Jared Hardesty's research (less than ten years ago) showed that two of the biggest donors to the bell-buying fund at Old North made their money in the slave trade (the slime factor about Peter Faneuil was already known, but before JH's research, 21st century people at ON thought of parishioner Captain Newark Jackson as an importer of chocolate, not also as a smuggler of people from Suriname). I remember walking up Salem Street to hear Hardesty speak, thinking "please don't be the bells, please don't be the bells" but of course one can't change it. I went up and patted them and told them it wasn't their fault. Is that TMI about my mindset? It wasn't news that slavery was a thing among the congregation. I could go on at great length, but maybe that's something for another time. The historical department acknowledges and teaches it all now.

Thanks for the book rec. I just this morning put myself on the hold list at the library for Dorothy Brown's new book about reparations, a subject that interests me a lot.