I got up this morning and decided to take in some artwork. I live in the Ashe building, on the second floor in the rear where the apartments are. Photographer (and former high school classmate) Eric Waters had called me the day before, summoning me down to check out the Art of the Black Experience show, a collection of drawings, paintings, sculptures revealing and reveling in who we are and how we got over. I was so glad he had–even though I knew about the program, like most negroes, I needed some encouragement.

Moved by what I had seen the day before when Eric called, I slow walked down four uneven flights of steps and went through the parking lot to the front of the building for a second viewing. I had my iPhone7 in my pocket so I could take and share snapshots of some of the artwork.

I didn’t know how important it was for me to go back and spend some time with this artwork, including Eric’s portrait of drummer Joe Dyson built on black, brown and beige tones. I know that it was more than I used to be an R&B drummer during my army days (1965 – 1968)–emphasis on “used to be”–that attracted me to the sticks and cymbal portrait of a young master drummer. Here Eric captures the dignity of our people and the rhythms we produce.

Far more than a mere snapshot, this visual essay struck my eyeballs in wonderment and encouraged me to closely inspect the whole assemblage of visual interpretations. I’m probably going to revisit the gallery for a third viewing. The totality of the artwork is so rich, one needs more than one or two bites to fully comprehend and digest this material expression of our outer beauty and inner soul.

I was enriched by what we see when we look at us. Deep into us. Archive, keep, and share ourselves with the world of New Orleans and beyond.

Our people are all up in here. Workers, visitors. Fam who look like some of the artwork on exhibit.

Sitting. Standing. Hands on hips. Mouths wide open in delighted surprise. All kinds of folk. Some looked like a brother who just walked in off the streets. A sister on her way to or coming back from church. Diaper-wearing toddlers running around, freely, untethered but not unwatched nor uncared for.

And music all in the air. Music. Music. You could easily dance here. They actually have Black music playing as an aural wallpaper while one views the artwork.

Plus, vendors with everything from home cooked food to colorful ethnic attire. Ethnic? A lot of our people wear a lot of this clothing everyday. The traditional marketplace and crossroads ethos reigns supreme here.

This is what it be like when a commercial boulevard becomes a stairway deep into the soul of the hood, the soul of ourselves.

You look into the window, and on one level or another, at one photo or another–maybe that statue on the left reminds you of your kinfolk. Or maybe not. But you will remember, later when the extended family gathers for a holiday. You will see that uncle you seldom see and he will remind you of something you saw, something you didn’t really remember until just now when a distant cousin laughs out loud.

Ashe Cultural Arts Center is a physical ring shout. A place to see. A place to dance. A place to be whatever you were in your boldest dreams. The vision you see at night when you close your sleepy eyes; the sunlit reality you vow never to forget as you prepare to face another day in this Babylon of a nation state.

Sister Asali commandeered a portion of the small piece of dough set aside by the city to purchase artwork for public use. This space is a venue not just for the viewing of art like a museum but way beyond that. In exchange for holding the exhibition here, they negotiated that the authorities would purchase selected pieces of artwork from the artists.

Plus, the people got to decide which art pieces they liked the best by stating their choices on a paper ballot–true democracy in full effect.

Of course like Duke told us, it wouldn’t mean a thing if it didn’t have that swing. That color. That forwardness. That joie de vivre. Look at how Val Rainey is smiling. She works there. Do you smile like that on your yolk, be glad to show people around your workspace? 

Some of this stuff could easily have made it into a so-called reputable gallery, others of the pieces–well, let’s just say the establishment wouldn’t touch some of this shit with a ten foot… you know what I’m saying? To be us is to be used-to-being overlooked, which is precisely why it is so great to peep what has been gathered at Ashe.

Check it. This is not just a random collection of some Black visual artists. This is us when our imaginations are raised full blast to well pass ten. Like, what looks like a lot of different, earth-toned blocks thrown together is actually a representation of Black skin tones and textures in New Orleans where we were forced into a ghetto by the strictures of the historic “brown bag” test.

What kind of test was that? Well, reduction ad absurdity, if you were darker than a brown paper bag there were certain social situations, places and gatherings operated by light-skinned negroes that would not allow darker-skinned folk to enter or join. I know, that’s crazy, especially since we all lived in a classist and racist society. Ah, but that was one of the downsides of the depressing aspects of a small sector of pre-Civil Rights era New Orleans: self-segregation administered by us on us in its most sinister hierarchy.

Black life in the gumbo of modern New Orleans is way different (and way better) today than it used to be a number of decades back when not only were we not all in the same boat, indeed, most of us were not even allowed into specific boats. We had to survive hanging on to driftwood or treading water or making our way in thrown together skiffs. Far too many of us didn’t make it. Like brother Jerry Butler sagaciously sang: only the strong (and/or the lucky) survived.

How one, seemingly simple abstract-geometric presentation of block shapes told this damning story is brilliant in cogently illustrating the complexity of a people deformed by White supremacy.

Dig, here is a detailing on canvas of what we look like in the multiplicity of sizes, shapes, and colors that resulted in a wide array of both biological and social, physical realities and social mores–part of what we are is a result of the too often, overwhelmingly forced introduction and intervention of Whites into our gene pool.

Only an Ashe could have pulled off an undeniably painful presentation of our historic suffering and nobody was cussing or crying or even much looking cross-eyed at someone else. Regardless of class and color differences, today we are one (or, at least, most of us strive to be).

A truthful artistic representation of who we are and how we came to be is not always just a self-congratulatory facade of pretty pictures but rather, a most intriguing and thoughtful examination of both our overwhelming beauty as well as certain of our most debasing moments.

Our truths are not always positive. We have to be honest and self-critical of some of the shit we went through. Fortunately, Ashe is a venue where the totality can be told, can be acknowledged even when there are some painful aspects some of us would deny or would rather not ever be revealed.

Ashe is a deep spirit house. We own, run, and maintain this facility; from brother Ed who does an incredible job pulling maintenance to sister Asali who is in charge of the whole shebang.

We need more of this. The United States is a big ass country. They got cities up, down, side to side. Urban and rural places with thousands of residents, as well as small municipalities and gathering spots, some of which are not even on anybody’s map. If I call some of the names of places located just around the Crescent City–Arabi, Chalmette, Marrero, Kenner, Shrewsberry, Slidell, LaPlace, not to mention Algiers on the West Bank of the Mississippi River, which is just about as old as New Orleans its self–most Americans would not know those spaces.

The point is although America is full of incorporated districts like our city, however, and regrettably, this country is not full of places like Ashe–places where the fullness of our story can be told in all its terrible beauty and complexity, and, yes, some elements of whom we have been are alarmingly depressing.

We got a lot of work to do, miles to go before we can rest, institutions to build, maintain and develop. Maulana Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa, said it best: “Always remember we can always do more!” To which I would add, we need to, we must do more, much, much more.

There ought to be ten, twenty, literally thousands of Ashe initiatives north, south, east, and west. Right now there ain’t, but we can make it so. Not too long ago, there was no Ashe. Now Ashe receives bus loads of visitors.

Regardless of our longitude, our latitude, let’s just start wherever we’re at–and if the conditions are not forthcoming, well then move. Or at the very least, carve out your own small sacred space; create an altar to the departed: your ancestors, friends and family members who have transitioned.

Don’t worry about what we ain’t got nor who’s not here. Celebrate the victory gardens we have already grown, the people whom we have known. Embrace the here and now. Tend to and inspire those steady coming on.

The Art of the Black Experience show will be up until January 28, 2022. You will be surprised to see yourself in the mirror that art is. Get there if you can.

If you can’t, at least know that Ashe exists. Know that there is a place where the Black Experience is celebrated in all aspects of our bittersweet existence.

Ashe is our home no matter where we are from, no matter where we are going.

Minnie Julia Riperton Rudolph (November 8, 1947 – July 12, 1979)

Stevie knew Minnie was a perfect angel.

But isn’t it superfluous to say that someone is an angel and then have to qualify their angelness by saying they are perfect?

Isn’t being angelic by definition a state of perfection? Is there such a thing as an imperfect angel? Perhaps, if you are an angel you are good at being an angel but not so good, or even ungood, at being something other than an angel. You’re not good at basketball, or cooking, or astral physics.

Which begs the question: what is an angel? Are their stages or levels of angel-ity?

Who knows? We just know that Stevie saw Minnie as a perfect Angel.

Was it just because of her voice? Or was it some other quality that Minnie had?

One of her albums was called Adventures In Paradise. Is paradise a real place–a place without any troubles, trials, or tribulations? Maybe paradise is not about a specific earthly location but rather about our own abilities to deal with whatever happens, to overcome hardships. Gracefully. To cross the water without drowning.

Because you know into each life some rain must fall. The question becomes can we swim, can we not get flooded out?

Minnie had that fire. She burned brightly, and thereby, lit the way enabling a lot of us to see. One of my favorite recordings was her “Light My Fire” duet with José Feliciano.

Indeed, as Minnie so wonderfully, and funkily articulated, a major part of life is remembering the good times, which good times inevitably includes successfully overcoming the bad.

However, Minnie also had to deal with a terminal illness. Minnie died young at 31. But while she was here… she lived, lived to her fullness.

Life may be different for each of us, but the real question is are we doing our best, given whatever are the circumstances, whatever are our capabilities, are we living at our best, doing all we can possibly do?

Moreover, for Minnie, being an angel did not mean being sanctimonious. Did not mean not having fun, or as she put it: dancin’ and actin’ crazy. Oh, what a sight, an angel dancing, totally getting down.

She had two children. She truly knew how to make love/how to love others.

One of her records celebrating carnality with a partner got her banned from a lot of stations, but she knew it was cool. Let the squares do what squares do, she just kept rolling along.

Minnie knew that even the birds and bees did it, and she would not deny that joy nor the resultant responsibilities. For her, rearing children was as much a part of life as making and birthing children.

Who was she, this perfect angel? Here is a biographical documentary. An essential aspect of her perfection was her music that she freely shared with us. All hail Minnie Riperton.

Young people make revolution. Always have. Always will.

Wanting a better life. Willing to die fighting for it, but more importantly, willing to live and love to create a better world. Everyday.

In sociological studies, one of the big questions every social organization had to face was: what to do with the youth, especially the young men? The seemingly fearless ones, or, as the popular television program of an earlier era called them, “The Young And The Restless”.

Many of us are reluctant to publicly acknowledge how big a role sex places in youthful social movements. But there is no denying the obvious fact that youth in their twenties either fantasize about or engage in sexual activity. Flagrantly. Moreover, the game changer was the commercial development and broad availability of the “pill”.

The sixties was a period of great awakening in diverse and broadly unrelated areas. World War 2 ended with a bang, i.e. the nuclear bomb dropped by America on the Japanese–not on major military targets but rather on two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the overwhelming bulk of the victims were civilians.

It is ironic that the “pill” and the “bomb” define the fifties/sixties, and even more so when we realize the implications of a popular slogan of the period: “Make Love, Not War”–use the pill and not the bomb.

In May of 1960 the FDA approved the oral contraceptive pill after clinical tests beginning in 1954. For the first time on an affordable and mass basis, contraception is available to a majority of the female population in America.

When General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, who had become the 34th President of the United States, left office, one of his departing speeches warned the nation about the “military/industrial complex”. Irony upon irony, a celebrated general of WWII railed against the confluence and influence of the two major economic drivers of this society, i.e. 1. the military and 2. industrial corporations, and particularly the confluence and influence of these two sectors on society at large, notably via technological and consumer activities.

For those who might be interested, a new report on the military/industrial complex makes clear the staggering amount of money in that sector.

One quick example of technology changed by commercial concerns: eye glasses. The lens used to be made of glass, hence the title. In the 21st century the lens and the frames of eyeglasses are manufacture from plastic. So what should we call these spectacles? Eye-plastic?

Yes, the pill and the bomb irreversibly changed American society, particularly the military and our daily life as led by multi-national corporations. Today we take for granted those developments and their far-ranging off-shoots. Most of us do not realize the vast changes in both private and social life that have been wrought by the pill and the bomb, however, when we look at society, what shapes us and what we fashion as a result of being shaped, well, then we see just how deep and far-reaching these biological/technological influences have either outright or significantly shaped and determined our lives.

Both the pill and the bomb were achieved by a concentration on science, specifically human biology on the one hand, and nuclear physics on the other. However, what is most significant is that both resulted in a surge in science employed for military and consumer purposes, and that surge led to both theoretical and practical advances in the second half of the 20th century on into the 21st century.

In the context of technological advances in society as a whole, it is but a hop, skip and a jump to move from chattel slavery, to Jim Crow, to Black Lives Matter. The summer of 2020 was significant. Why? Because massive numbers of young Whites chanted, marched and actively supported the basic premise that all humans matter, even Blacks who, throughout the history of this country, have been vilified, incarcerated, and locked into perpetual poverty.

The now popular Civil Rights Movement was not always broadly accepted. In many cases it wasn’t even a dream. But two sectors of the Black population were determined to make change. 1. returning veterans of World War II and the Korean Conflict, were major participants as they and their families helped kick-off the militant wing of the Civil Rights movement. Men such as Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi home, and Robert Williams, who spent years in exile in Cuba and China before eventually being allowed back into the United States in exchange for his introduction of government officials to Chines officials. Of course, the role that Robert Williams performed as a go-between is little known and never officially acknowledged by the U.S. government apparatus.

Even more important was the children of these men–young people who became militant advocates of Black Power and of feminism. A number of the men had been active in the military campaigns that stretched from the Middle East into the longest war ever engaged by the U.S., i.e. the Afghanistan conflict. After every major war, Black men were pivotal in the struggle for Black social advancement. This is not an accident, but rather a direct result of international conflict. Scratch the surface of these social struggles and the role of returning vets is significant, if not dominant.  

In the fifties and sixties, five major organizations spear-headed the Civil Rights Movement: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League (NUL), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). While far from the oldest (i.e. NAACP), and not as widely known as SCLC (led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), SNCC (pronounced “snick”) was not only the shock troops of the movement but also took up residence throughout the countryside in the south.

They not only were known for organizing but SNCC field secretaries also lived and worked with the sharecroppers, sometimes referred to as America’s peasants. SNCC people were mainly in their twenties, although their major inspiration came from veteran freedom fighters, such as Rosa Parks and Ella Baker, who along with rural, Black residents, encouraged the young activists, such as Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner who were murdered. As internationally celebrated martyrs, the activist trio literally bore the brunt of resisting racism.

Although it may seem insignificant today, wearing denim over-alls became an unofficial uniform of many of these activists, a number of whom were college educated individuals who seemed destined for the suit-and-tie track.

One of SNCC’s accomplisments was the elevation of what was called “participatory democracy”, meaning that regardless of your educational status, everyone had a right to the tree of life, to all the freedoms and responsibilities of full citizenship. This was a major achievement.

People who had not graduated from high school were encouraged to speak out and what they said was considered a valuable contribution to town-hall discourse. No longer only “sick and tired of being sick and tired”, as Mrs. Fannie Lou Hammer articulated, rural Black voices spoke up, stood up, and demonstrated. Even now in the era of social media, the views and voices of the so-called little people are no where near as valued as those voices were during the height of the rural and small town struggles for Civil Rights.

A great overview is In Struggle — SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson. There is also an online website: https://snccdigital.org

The participation of women as both leaders and organizers around feminist issues and concerns, as well as participation in all aspects of daily life, particularly as heads of households, parents, and workers across all sectors of society, is, has been, and will continue to be critical to daily life in modern America. It is no accident that some of the most militant and/or progressive elements are women, many of whom spotlight highly contested social issues.

It is significant that the “pill”, the “bomb” and the “vote” were defining issues energizing freedom struggles for the formerly enslaved and for women in general, both of whom have a long history of resistance to the patriarchal mainstream.

Today, our society is in the midst of major convulsions around access to safe and medically competent “abortions”; around how to square the constitutionally recognized right to own and bear “arms” and at the same time deal with the alarming rise of gun violence in schools and neighborhoods nationwide.

And perhaps most significantly of all, there are major conflicts around the volatile issue of “voting rights”. As long as it is mostly middle-aged and elderly White men who continually make and determine the legality of most of the laws and mass social activities, seminal elements of progressive change will be either illegal or severely circumscribed.

The more society changes, the more social issues and conflicts will remain essentially the same until and unless there is a thorough-going revolution of by whom and how our lives are controlled.

The Power to make and to appreciate pictures
belongs to man exclusively. — Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was no ordinary personality. He was extraordinary. Although enslaved when he was born, he transformed himself into a world renown orator, writer, and statesman. Throughout his adult life, he was conscious of his status and strove to present himself in the most positive light possible.

Aware of the potential impact of the then new technology of photography, Douglass sat for at least 160 individual photographs. In fact, during his era, he was the most photographed person in American history, including his contemporary, President Abraham Lincoln, who is credited with 126 different photographs.

Douglass was a full time abolitionist. In 1847 he founded a newspaper, The North Star, at a time when it was against the laws of Southern-states America to teach “negroes” how to read. Slave owners had predicted that literacy would make us unfit to be slaves, i.e. would make us rebellious.

Douglass was partially taught to read by Mrs. Sophia Auld, the wife of one of his enslavers. When those lessons were aborted by Hugh Auld, Auld’s husband, Douglass went on to surreptitiously learn to both read and write.

He used his wits to trick young Whites he encountered while doing his chores in the streets. He carried a notebook and found ways, such as offering them bread he had flinched from Mrs. Auld’s kitchen, to show him the meanings of words and phrases. According to his autobiography, the learning process took approximately seven years to complete.

As he grew toward adulthood in the Baltimore area, he had the support of Anna Murray (March 8, 1813 – August 4, 1882), who eventually became his first wife. Murray was the daughter of a recently manumitted couple and encouraged young Douglass in his abolitionist dreams.

Through her work, she provided both funds and sailor’s clothing Douglass used to escape from slavery. Soon after arriving in New York, Douglass was approached by David Ruggles, a Black man who sheltered Douglass.

Ruggles was a free Black man and activist, a leader in the New York Committee of Vigilance, an organization dedicated to actively fighting slavery. Eventually, Anna joined Douglass in the Ruggles home. On September 15, 1838, the couple entered a forty-four year marriage.

Although she was not fully literate, Anna was an activist and willingly worked with Douglass as an abolitionist. They moved about the northeast area.

Anna turned their Rochester, New York home into a terminal of the Underground Railroad, supporting runaways on their way to Canada. Her work is too often overlooked, especially as she remained on the home front, and did not share in the limelight cast upon her famous husband.

Moreover, Anna Murray Douglass’ abolitionist work was dangerous and also unlawful in southern slaveholding states. According to the Fugitive Slave Act, harboring and abetting runaways was an offense. That Anna Douglass successfully held down the fort, as it were, while Douglass was often away from home is an amazing feat, especially when we consider that she was also the prime caretaker for their family.

Anna and Frederick were an example of a couple working as one to realize and promote the advancement of their people. Their forty-plus years of marriage and abolitionist work was more than the average lifetime of many  of their contemporaries.

During their marriage they had five children: Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., Redmond, and Annie (who died young). Frederick was often away on speaking tours while Anna reared the children and took care of the family. After the Civil War the family settled in Washington, D.C. where Anna died on August 4, 1882.

Douglass had established himself as an activist, orator and writer. He was the author of three autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), published prior to the Civil War, 1861 – 1865; My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), often considered by scholars and abolition activists, as his master work; and, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised in 1892).

Narrative was a cause celebre and was popularly received in America and in Europe. Some questioned Douglass’ authenticity but Douglass astutely cited people, places and dates in his autobiography, effectively countering doubters.

As Douglass’ fame grew, Hugh Auld was determined to recapture Douglass. Responding to the many threats of recapture and kidnapping, Frederick Douglass decided to travel abroad. From August 1845 until just over two years later, Douglass toured Britain and Ireland. Eventually a cohort of friends and supporters “purchased” his freedom.

During his lifetime Douglass achieved notoriety as a preeminent “man of letters” in the 19th century. Certainly there was no other person of color whose published work was as influential, especially if we consider his popular speeches, such as the perennially cited “What To The Slave Is Your 4th of July”.

His literature continues to be studied well into the 21st century, and some of his noted aphorisms, such as “you may not get all that you pay for, but you will certainly pay for all that you get”, remain both accurate and popular among organizers and people struggling against systemic systems of physical, political, and economic oppression and exploitation.

Consider the circumstance: born into chattel slavery, the child of an enslaved woman and a White owner, Douglass’ lot was circumscribed and pre-ordained except he refused to submit to the standards of his time.

When he became a free man, or, more accurately, when he became a famous abolitionist asserting his right to be free, he started a newspaper, The North Star. Beyond that daring feat, he chose to speak for himself and was not content with others speaking for him or his people. 

In the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass (February 1818 – February 20, 1895), was the most recognized individual in America. Douglass set the standard for what a serious, conscious and politically active Black man looked like.  

Aware of the potential impact of the then new technology of photography, Douglass sat for at least 160 individual photographs. In fact, during his era, he was the most photographed person in American history, including his contemporary, President Abraham Lincoln, who is credited with 126 different photographs.

Douglass was no ordinary personality. He was extraordinary. Although enslaved when he was born, he transformed himself into a world renown orator, writer, and statesman. Throughout his adult life, he was conscious of his status and strove to present himself in the most positive light possible.

Douglass became a full-time abolitionist. In 1847 he founded a newspaper, The North Star, at a time when it was against the laws of Southern-states America to teach “negroes” how to read. Slave owners had predicted that literacy would make us unfit to be slaves, i.e. would make us rebellious.

Douglass was partially taught to read by Mrs. Sophia Auld, the wife of one of his enslavers. When those lessons were aborted by Hugh Auld, her husband, Douglass went on to surreptitiously learn to both read and write.  Douglass used his wits to trick young Whites he encountered while doing his chores in the streets. More importantly, he carried a notebook and found ways, including offered them bread he had flinched from Mrs. Auld’s kitchen, to show him the meanings of words and phrases. According to his autobiography, the learning process took approximately seven years to complete.

During his life time Douglass achieved notoriety as a preeminent “man of letters” in the 19th century. Certainly, there was no other person of color whose published work was as influential, especially if we consider his popular speeches, such as the perennially cited “What ToThe Slave Is Your 4th of July”.

Douglass was the author of three autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), published prior to the Civil War (1861 – 1865); My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), often considered by scholars and abolition activists, as his master work; and, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised in 1892).Narrative was a cause célèbre and was popularly received in America and in Europe. Some questioned Douglass’ authenticity but Douglass astutely cited people, places and dates in his autobiography, effectively countering doubters concerning the veracity of his claims.

His literature continues to be studied well into the 21st century, and some of his noted aphorisms, such as “you may not get all that you pay for, but you will certainly pay for all that you get”, remain both accurate and popular among organizers and people struggling against systemic systems of physical, political, and economic oppression and exploitation.

Consider the circumstance: born into chattel slavery, the child of an enslaved woman and a White owner, Douglass’ lot was circumscribed and pre-ordained except he refused to submit to the standards of the time.

When he became a free man, or, more accurately, when he became a famous abolitionist asserting his right to be free, he founded three newspapers:

The North Star (Rochester, N.Y.), 1847-1851 (137 issues)
Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Rochester, N.Y.), 1851-1860 (220 issues)
New National Era (Washington, D.C.), 1870-1874 (211 issues)

This is an astounding achievement of both literacy and abolitionist advocacy. Douglass understood the power of the written word. To conceive of producing a newspaper in the 19th century is one thing, to actually print and disseminate an abolitionist newspaper was no mean feat, indeed, if he had done nothing else in life, the founding of the three newspapers was a major accomplishment, a Herculean feat that few have matched.

There is another and little known side of Douglass as a trenchant social critic. Frederick Douglass presented four theoretically searching lectures on the new technology of photography.  He presciently believed that photography could counter the negative images of his people flooding the mainstream circa the Civil War period.

More than simply write about the wonders of photography, he was a theoretical and cultural critic of the new image-making genre. Douglass believed that creating pictures was a human preoccupation; a way not only of reflecting the world but a means to, or at least an attempt to perfect the world.

The reality of his lectures about photography is his amazing enlightenment. He speaks as a seer, showing us ourselves, our motives, the very essence of our being. The book Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American contains three of his four major lectures on photography, presented when the 1839 art form was in its infancy and adolescence, well before it’s twentieth century development and twenty-first century maturation.

Picturing Frederick Douglass includes numerous photos and illustrations, and additionally contains transcriptions of the important essays: “Lecture on Pictures” (1861), “Age of Pictures” (1862), and “Pictures and Progress” (1864–65). Even today when the camera on smart phones is ubiquitous, few of us are learned enough to theorize about photography.

Go here for an informed account of Frederick Douglass’ use of photography as analysed by John Stauffer, the author of the definitive collection of Douglass photographs.

Speaking of the tremendous import of Daguerre’s invention of photography, Douglass enthusiastically noted:

Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them. What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all. The humblest servant girl, whose income is but a few shillings per week, may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and even royalty, with all its precious treasures, could purchase fifty years ago.
Douglass – “Lecture on Pictures” (December 3, 1861)

More than simply write about the wonders of photography he was also a theoretical and cultural critic of the new image-making genre. Douglass believed that creating pictures was a human preoccupation; a way not only of reflecting the world but a means, or at least an attempt, to perfect the world. One of the main goals and great good of photography is to see the world and all that is in the world not simply as we imagine, understand, or even as it appears to us, but rather as the world in truth is.

    The photographic faithfulness of our pictures, in delineating the human face and form, answers well the stern requirement of Cromwell himself. “Paint me as I am,” said the staunch old Puritan. The order reveals perhaps quite as visibly his self-love as his love of truth. The huge wart on his face was probably, in the eyes of the great founder of the English Commonwealth, a beauty rather than a deformity. But in any case we are bound to respect the requirement.
Douglass – “Age of Pictures” (1862)

The reality of his lectures about photography is his amazing enlightenment. He speaks as a seer, showing us ourselves, our motives, the very essence of our being. However, in speaking of photography, Douglass also makes an essential observation:

    The process by which man is able to posit his own subjective nature outside of himself, giving it form, color, space, and all the attributes of distinct personality, so that it becomes the subject of distinct observation and contemplation, is at [the] bottom of all effort and the germinating principles of all reform and all progress. But for this, the history of the beast of the field would be the history of man. It is the picture of life contrasted with the fact of life, the ideal contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible. Where there is no criticism there is no progress, for the want of progress is not where such want is not made visible by criticism. It is by looking upon this picture and upon that which enables us to point out the defects of the one and the perfections of the other.

    Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflections of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.
Douglass – “Pictures and Progress” (circa 1864/1865)

Clearly, Frederick Douglass is a philosopher. He argues that photography not only enables us to see the reality of people and objects, but more importantly also enables us, through learned criticism, to consciously critique that which is in contradistinction to what ought to be. For Douglass, photography not only shows us what is, photography also primes us to critique what isn’t, and to long for, work toward what ought to be.

Douglas was no simpleton, nor was he a narcissist in love with his own image spied in the hundred-plus images of himself he sat for during his lifetime. Douglass is the philosopher who knows that a truthful picture shatters all specious propaganda on the one hand, simply by presenting the truth, but, and even more importantly, truth enables us to critique what is and simultaneously strive for what we think ought to be.

According to Douglass we are not only picture making and picture appreciating creatures, at our best we are also picture creators. A truth picture allows us to envision creating a more ideal picture that more closely conforms to our desires, our conceptions. How one looks is one thing, how one appears to others is another. The goal is to bring the truth and the desired appearance into registration, i.e. to make them one and the same.

Although it is a fact that photography pictures the truth, in the 20th century we discover that even photography distorts the truth depending on the lens used to view and capture the object, as well as the quality of the equipment and the method of reproduction, or any number of other issues (lighting, movement, perspective, etc.).

That Frederick Douglass was both wowed by photography as well as appreciative that photography could be one of the ultimate abolitionist tools is at the core of his arguments about the value of photography. Photography made it possible to escape illusions, made it possible to represent the truth, or should we say, come closer to representing the truth than could a painting or a drawing.

In the 19th century and beyond, the truth of who Black people were and are is a major American issue precisely because so much propaganda and demeaning displays had been issued about us. Indeed, lies were presented as truth. Douglass saw that photography had the power to destroy lies.

Douglass also saw that photography was capable of generating feelings as well as ideas. In one of his profound summations Douglass noted in Lecture on Pictures (1861) that “Only a few men wish to think, while all wish to feel, for feeling is divine and infinite.”

We assess a picture as powerful, not only because of what it makes us think, but rather because of how it causes us to feel—and feeling a certain way can cause us to appreciate or to dismiss a reality whether that reality is dimly or perceptively perceived. When one reads Douglass exegesis on photography, whether we fully understand what Douglass means, we can use our own responds to understand the feelings generated by a photograph, whether that photograph is a quick snapshot or a fully composed, artistic rendering.

Douglass deals with far more than mere appearance, he is concerned with the social meaning of image making and with the value of the image as time passes on.

What is most striking about Douglass’ understanding concerning photography is that in making his arguments, Douglass displays a breadth of learning. His ability to read and write were far beyond utilitarian. Indeed, Douglass lived in the realm of “thinking about things”—the whys and wherefores of existence.

Picturing Frederick Douglass includes numerous photos and illustrations, and additionally contains the important essays: “Lecture on Pictures” (1861), “Age of Pictures” (1862), and “Pictures and Progress” (1864–65). Even today when the camera on smart phones is ubiquitous, few of us are learned enough to theorize about the meaning, impact and social use of photography. It is extremely important to recognize that his four essays on photography were all written during the Civil War period, an era when the new technology was used to bring home the horrors/the reality of war. Arguably, beyond famous men of the era, the most impressive photographs that many Americans saw were images of war.

From the very beginning, Douglass peeped the potential power of the photographic image and sought to understand its dynamic reach into the human soul. Douglass used himself as both a model for and an example of what could be achieved by portrait photography. 

With his impressive lionized coiffure–what would in another century be characterized as a massive afro–and his steely gaze—no smiling, no grinning, no comedic buffoon–Frederick Douglass exemplified the “New Negro” well before the 1920s Garvey Era/Jazz Age had yet to arrive. Douglass saw the future. Moreover, he wanted friend and foe to know what he saw. His stern visage was a portent of the shape of Black portraiture to come.

Douglass and grandson Joseph – October 31, 1894
by Black photographer James E. Reed

When I was in sixth grade at Phillis Wheatley school, around the corner from the Dooky Chase restaurant, back in the fifties, I had class mates who routinely passed for White after school. We got on the New Orleans public transportation busses together, headed to Canal Street, where the main shopping and business district was.

One of the widest streets in America had trolley cars running up and down the median and was lined with stores and offices on both sides. The thoroughfare also was the place where the majority of the diverse bus lines from both uptown and downtown would meet and turn around. Additionally, Canal Street was an accessible and common meeting location known to most New Orleanians. “I’ll meet you by. . .” such and such store, corner, or bus stop. . . “you know, where the Peanut Man be.”

Pamela, Gilbert and a number of other friends boarded and sat in front of the screens; we trooped on to the back (occasionally one of us would throw a screen out the window). The wooden plaques had metal pegs on the bottom that fit into holes on the tops of bus seats. When Whites boarded the buses, if there were no open seats available, they would lift the screen and move it to seats further back. Blacks who were seated in front of where ever the screen was moved, were obliged to get up and move to a seat behind the screen. If there were no empty seats behind the screen, you had to stand. Segregation wasn’t nothing nice.

When I saw the movie Passing, based on the short novel by Nella Larsen that focused on former childhood friends who had both grown up to become women of means in New York City (one living in Harlem, the other visiting while her husband was doing business) during the Jazz Age twenties, Jim Crow memories sullied my consciousness.

The moneyed among us was a tiny minority within a minority. Petite bourgeois class components were even more glaring to me than were the obvious racial conundrums. In no particular order, racial, and in some cases racist, elements twirled around as if on a merry-go-round, class issues were ignored, and the supremacy of patriarchy was assumed.

In that situation, if you are Black, poor and female, you silently did the work while saying little if anything besides “yes, mam” or “no, mam” and “yes, sir” or “no, sir”.

This austere black and white movie is never solely what it seems to be. The cinematography is rich in its shadings that reveal tensions while hiding secrets. The color white dominates throughout and especially so in the conclusion in the snow that is immediately followed by a white-out ending.

Significantly, in the personal aspects of Irene’s life, blackness dominates. Check the skin tones, especially of her children; the dark interiors of her home, which are never portrayed as menacing or forbidding but rather as natural and comforting. In contrast to Clare, who luxuriates in Irene’s world, Irene is made ill by the pretense and contradictions she chooses to endure. This is a subtle and devastating subversion of a placid surface covering an interior life full of turmoil.

The aesthetics of the film present the color white as a source of conflict and the color black as a source of comfort. Whiteness dominates the setting when Irene and Clare are first reunited in a hotel restaurant. Most significantly, upon inserting herself into Irene’s domestic life, Clare is shown now obviously feeling at home; easily interacting with Irene’s children; quietly conversating with Irene’s husband; sitting in the back yard, sharing a relaxing, Indian summer afternoon with “Zu” (i.e. Zulena), who is Irene’s dark-skinned maid.

Obviously the director paid particular attention in employing a color palette on which white is presented as sterile and darker shades as fecund. The dialogue is sharp, always peeling back an exterior to reveal the true, albeit hidden, meanings of words, individuals, situations. In the light of darkness we are shown the realities of black, white, and various shades in-between.

Significantly, the soundtrack features solo piano passages by Ethiopian pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. In the Harlem party sequences jazz predominates, especially when a raucous trumpeter joyously subverts the nuances of the film’s thematic music. The director’s musical choices are no accident. European elements are not presented, instead African and African-American musics provide a tapestry of meaningful sounds.

The scriptwriter and director, Rebbeca Hall, whose grandfather passed for white, has produced a subtle expose of the dangers of passing, particularly when one is outed. Preceding the tragic conclusion, rather than deny or denounce her Black interior, Clare escapes her racist, husband’s wrath the only way she can. He has accused her of being a liar and as he advances in demonic rage, she flees, or is she pushed?

However, before we get to the conclusion, we have to negotiate a maze of psychological feigns and thrusts. This movie is far from a one-trick pony, especially in the interrogation of the behaviors and intentions of the duo of leading women.

1. Repressed Irene Redfield, brim of her hat pulled down, hiding who she thought herself to be: a Black self, she presumed, Whites would peep if she weren’t careful when around them; a self-manufactured identity that was a paragon of both progress and psychosis. She was a light-skined stalwart of racial uplift organizations and, at the same time, mortifyingly afraid of exhibiting real feelings for her family, or displaying the actualities of her social status, and she especially had a reluctance to reveal her deep, complex, and often contradictory notions of self-identity.

2. Libertine (although far from liberated) Clare Kendry is a sell-out who furtively longed to return back as an in-sider. She dyed her hair blond but it was no permanent cover for her unfulfilled desire to actualize her authentic Black self even though she had chosen to live White. She had it all and still wanted more–what more? Why, dreams of Black freedom. How “they” danced through life. She stood the tragic mulatto on her head, desperately wanting both to enjoy the fruits of a forbidden White lifestyle and to be true to her own Black self.

3. Irene, talking around having “the talk” with her two sons, both of whom were too dark to ever pass; trying to keep her physician husband who wanted to escape from home by sailing off to Europe; engaging with a “colored” maid who keeps the homestead working; and, most of all, bereft of friends with whom she could engage in honest girl talk.

Reenie is truly a bird trapped in a gilded cage. In a passing moment of frank, to the point of bitter, conversation with acclaimed writer Hugh Wentworth (played by Bill Camp), Irene momentarily drops her guarded speech and reveals the vapidness of material success, noting that in one way or another we are all passing for something we are not.

4. Clare, the blond bombshell, is always on the verge of exploding. She has a daughter, whom we never see and who is sent off to Europe for an education. Another complexity is the deep, subliminal lesbian desire (including kisses and discrete touches) between the former classmates; the taboo feelings are evident and evidenced in exchanges between the duo who are friends “without” benefits.

In different ways they both desire to “be” the other, while at the same time, for divergent reasons, they are frustrated as they elect to never actually fulfill their mutual desire to “be with” each other. Nevertheless, Clare articulates that if her deception is discovered, then she is willing to move in with Irene (and with Irene’s husband, children and all). That hopeless situation would be a dream that would quickly curdle into a mishmash nightmare.

This austere black and white movie is never solely what it seems to be. The cinematography is rich in its shadings that reveal tensions while hiding secrets. The color white dominates throughout and especially the conclusion in the snow that is immediately followed by a white-out ending.

Significantly, in the personal aspects of Irene’s life, blackness dominates. Check the skin tones, especially of her children and husband; the dark interiors of her home, which are never portrayed as menacing or forbidding but rather as natural and comforting. In contrast to Clare, who luxuriates in Irene’s home, Irene is made ill by the pretense and contradictions she chooses to endure. 

The aesthetics of the film present the color white as a source of conflict and the color black as a source of comfort. Whiteness dominates the setting when Irene and Clare are first reunited in a hotel restaurant. Most significantly, upon inserting herself into Irene’s domestic life, Clare is shown now obviously feeling at home; easily interacting with Irene’s children; quietly conversating with Irene’s husband; sitting in the back yard, sharing a relaxing, Indian summer afternoon with “Zu” (i.e. Zulena), who is Irene’s dark-skinned maid. 

Significantly, in a nod to Ruth Negga’s paternal Ethiopian heritage, the soundtrack features solo piano passages by Ethiopian pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. On the other hand, the film also offers Harlem party sequences, including a raucous, jazz trumpet solo, which joyously subverts the nuances of the film’s thematic music. The director’s musical choices are no accident. European elements are not presented, instead African and African-American musics provide a tapestry of meaningful sounds.

The scriptwriter and director, Rebbeca Hall, whose grandfather passed for white, has produced a subtle expose of the dangers of passing, particularly when one is outed. Preceding the tragic conclusion, rather than deny or denounce her Black interior, Clare escapes her racist-husband’s wrath the only way she can. He has accused her of being a liar and as he advances in demonic rage, she flees, or is she pushed?

The climatic denouement of the movie features figures trotting up six flights of stairs to offer salvation only to conclude with Clare flying out of an open window, falling to her death.

As is the case throughout both the book and the movie, ambiguity reigns. When one attempts to live as other than what we are, clear cut clarity is never achieved. Was Clare’s death a suicide, a homicide, or just an accident. Except for an insightful explanation by Lucas Blue, most of the many reviews I’ve read do not highlight nor definitively explain the meaning of this morbid and ambiguous ending. Indeed many reviews of the movie do not even acknowledge Clare’s death.

For African Americans of that era, the cost of living White was to kill the Black self. Dr. DuBois perceptively diagnosed the problem:

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race-which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair-will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.

In Passing the racial, class, and gender issues and conflicts are subtly presented even when explicitly alluded to. This was the end of an era: circa 1929–the beginning of the great depression and also the publication year of Nella Larsen’s dystopian novel the secret of which is that nothing is what it appears to be or, to put it another way, appearance is no substitute for substance.

Divorced from the social issues of their time period, the conflicts raged internally: sickening Irene and killing Clare. Thus, illustrating the tragedy Fanon so famously explored in Black Skin, White Masks, except here the masks are “light skin” and upper class financial largesse–money is not a problem for either woman, yet life is unbearable for both.

As this movie makes clear, regardless of how high up the social ladder we ascend, we seldom fully escape. Given accidents of birth, regardless of what side of the fence we gravitate toward, the deadly gravity of White supremacy eventually touches, and in far too many cases, entraps us–and that is especially the case for those of us who believe the self-delusion that we have somehow successfully evaded the terror.

When they hit, all who heard, who caught the vibe, got down with it. Funky dreads from across the water. It was the late eighties. They were a deep Camden town amalgamation of dance sounds lead by Jazzie B (Trevor Beresford Romeo).  

Over twenty years later they were still deep in the pocket. Not just a hit in the studio, they were an aggregation that could do it live, featuring the exuberant vocals of Caron Wheeler.

Soul II Soul had an upful, feel good sound: massive vocals, pounding beats, and treacherous dance moves–howsoever your tastes might flow.

Enjoy.

The 21st century is the age of movies. And the 20th century was no slouch, that was when the Garvey era arrived with all its street ceremony and Black daring. Put another way, between the Civil War and the so-called Roaring Twenties (after all, establishment America was hardly ready to celebrate brother Garvey, hence the Negro Renaissance is what the powers that be conceded).

Any hoo, most school textbooks completely ignored Black existence in the period between the Civil War and World War I, sliding right on up to the celebrated so-called Jazz Age. But what is left out is not surprising: us! We were seldom acknowledged.

Racism left the average school child completely ignorant of the first great migration. No, not the one where millions of southern Black folk de-camped for northern Metropoli. That was an important population shift but that actually occurred a bunch of years after the massive “westward ho” movement of Jah people; as well as the simultaneous great migration of Confederate soldiers, their families, and fellow travelers. 

Of course I saw Gunsmoke, the Rifleman, and others of that ilk, but again, it never ever was impressed on me that media celebrated heroes were actually former Confederate soldiers. The “Wild West” was populated, post-Civil War, by literally tens of thousands of folk headed west with the active support of the federal government which gave away land rights–not to Native Americans, seldom to the formerly enslaved, but in a significant percentage to the former enemies of America. People who had actually picked up guns and fought against this country. (Many of them are still doing that–i.e. Kyle Rittenhouse is not an abnormality.) Here is where the story gets really tricky.

I had heard of the Buffalo Soldiers when I was a youngster, but it was not until my college and army years that I really understood who and what the “Exodusters” were, i.e. how Black people got to places such as Kansas and Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm’s home town. 

Internet personality MoeDotJ offers excellent details on the life of the historic figures on which the movie is based. His series is a significant expose of the facts behind the cinematic presentations of: (in alphabetical order) Cherokee Bill, Rufus Buck, Nat Love, Stage Coach Mary, Bill Picket, Bass Reeves, Gertrude Trudy Smith, and Cathay “Cuffie” Williams.

That’s the historic gist of the time period in which The Harder They Fall takes place. The hit Netflix movie brings a slice of this history to life, however, in the interest of entertainment, historic figures are thrown together, most of whom never met each other, and some of whom did not even exist in the same time period.

Although most of today’s viewers are not aware, this movie is not the first Black western. There was Posse, Thomasine and Bushrod, and can’t overlook Buck and The Preacher, just to name three of the small group of films that focused on Blacks in the Wild West. Plus, it is important to point out that those movies were produced in the seventies, a period of massive activism.

Perhaps, what is most surprising is that this movie was written, produced and scored by an Englishman, Jeymes Samuel, and also stars another Englishman, with whom he grew up in London, Idris Elba. Although, reared in the USA but born in Berlin of mixed parentage (father German, mother African American), Zazie Beetz is one of the featured female leads in the movie. Westerns are the most quintessential American genre of movies and yet this movie stars the work of internationally born principals. 

Moreover, the movie’s soundtrack really shines. Throughout music and sounds are employed not simply as background, but also as exposition, cueing us on the meaning of what we are seeing. Towards the end of the movie, during the climatic fight scene between the female leads, all of sudden Fela Kuti bursts forth and it works so well even though I was watching scenes from a much earlier era while hearing an icon from a more contemporary era, I found the mix surprisingly appropriate. The combination of both sight and sound is both innovative and simulating.

This movie proves that the Black experience is not ipso facto simply a product of American exceptionalism. As much as many of us claim or assume that America is the pinnacle of human civilization, that’s not the reality.

The Harder They Fall confirms that you don’t have to be an American to make a great western and you don’t have to be a pan-Africanist to appreciate and be moved by Black history.

Painting by June Beer 

I was walking down a dirt street. Seemingly from out of the blue, I hear someone call to me. In English. “Kalamu! Kalamu!” As the man got closer I recognized the shouter. It was SNCC veteran, Willie Ricks. As we embraced each other, almost simultaneously, we each queried the other, “man, what are you doing here?”

Who in the hell knows I’m here in the northwest of Nicaragua, the city of Esteli, maybe about 150km (roughly 94 miles) away from Managua, the capital, where I flew into the country. Eventually I would visit Bluefields on the Atlantic coast.

Bluefields has a large African heritage population. There is where I met activist and politician Ray Hooker, who was recuperating from wounds he suffered in a recent armed attack.

Also in Bluefields, I just showed up at the front door of largely self-taught painter and poet June Beer. I did not know much about her and she certainly did not know anything about me, but there we were face-to-face. She invites me inside and we engage in a short tete-a-tete. I, of course, learn more about her when I return to the States. She is one of literally thousands, if not millions, of our people who, out of their sheer will to go far beyond simply surviving, decide to do something significant, especially culturally in the arts.

June’s life story reads like a Spanish language tele-nova television series, except that her life was real life, with all the ups and downs we invariably suffer as we bend, and even sometimes break, the bars restricting our life conditions, while we undertake daring efforts to leave a positive Black mark on the world. 

Painting by June Beer 

On the opposite side of the country, I visited Leon, an old municipality located near the Pacific coast side of the country. Leon is the second largest city and, early on, had been the capital. Although I don’t speak Spanish, I was comfortable everywhere. 

In Rama, a city located not too far from the center of southern Nica-Libre, as some of us fondly referred to the country newly liberated by the Sandinistas from the Samoza-regime, I was greeted by a woman in line in front of me. We were waiting to board the ferry that would take us up river to connect to a road that led to Bluefields.

I could not explain to the woman that I was not who she thought I was. My traveling companion, who did speak Spanish, had gone to purchase our transportation tickets. Eventually when he returned and engaged the woman in an animated conversation, she looked confused as he patiently explained who we were and that she was mistaken. I was not ignoring her by saying “no habla Espanol”–I didn’t speak Spanish. She was incredulous as she insisted she recognized me. She knew me and couldn’t understand why I was not talking to her.

I am a big Black man. Tall (five feet, eleven and a half inches) and stout (I easily weigh over two hundred pounds). Although this was my first and only time in the country, I had many of my preconceptions of Central America forever shattered. Prior to arriving, I never would have thought that I looked like a native Nicaraguan.

I spent about 18 days wandering around the war-torn country.

The first Sunday night during an assembly in Managua, I was in a small group that was sent north. Another group was sent south–they eventually were captured by the contras. Our travel was not a typical tourist adventure. In one small town the only two buildings that had been attacked were the school and the medical facility. It’s one thing to see newsreels and television reports, it’s quite another to hear gun battles in the night and sit in or walk next to buildings freshly pock-marked by bullets.

Near Esteli, our group was led by a handgun toting interpreter as we traveled by bus. In one church-building that served as both a school and community center, there was a poster on the wall picturing a man walking a road armed with a rifle. I asked the priest wether it was appropriate for the church to have a poster depicting an armed individual. The priest replied the people had a right to defend themselves. That was one of the major definitions of what “appropriate” really meant: self-defense.

Although I had been in the army, assigned to a mountaintop base located about fifty miles south of the DMZ in South Korea, I had not been involved in actual combat. Indeed, my MOS was electronic maintenance of the Nike Hercules Nuclear Missile, which included arming the warhead.

I was qualified with the forty-five automatic handgun, the fifty-caliber machine gun, and the M-79 grenade launcher, in addition to my training with the standard issue field rife. Moreover, I had been sent to a special school for chemical, biological, and radiological warfare. I was an intensively trained cog in the international killing machine of the U.S. military. 

Eventually, after my discharge, I traveled worldwide both as a journalist and/or as an activist. I felt emotionally comfortable everywhere I ventured: dancing in the streets of Rio in Brasil; walking the roads throughout numerous Caribbean islands, including Barbados, my personal favorite, but also St. Lucia, Martinique and Guadalupe among diverse others.

Trinidad and Tobago deserve special mention. Tobago was almost idyllic in it’s peacefulness and unsullied beauty, whereas the hustle and bustle of its big brother island, Trinidad, was almost like comparing New York City to a little family farm in Virginia.

Oil-rich Trinidad is, of course, widely celebrated for “steel pan” music. Once I experienced “Panafest”, I developed a deeper appreciation for how used oil drum containers had been turned into melodic/percussive instruments. The music they made was more than just a one-note wonder. They did everything from classical music, at an extremely high level, to popular music and jazz, and of course calypso.

As a music producer and event organizer, I was one of the people responsible for putting together the initial Pan-Jazz Festival, at which the reigning pan king, Boosie Sharp, traded improvised exchanges with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who also excelled at both jazz and classical music–in their improvised duet/battle neither man could totally best the other.

A notable excursion I really looked forward to was a trip to the South American country of Suriname where the official language is Dutch. Before we had the opportunity to travel inland, our visit was curtailed by an attempted coup that was successfully suppressed. Even amid bomb threats at the hotel and people literally jumping out of ground floor windows to escape potential explosions, which, thankfully, did not come, I totally enjoyed my brief stay there.

Without exaggeration, Suriname struck me as being akin to the mythical garden of Eden. When we visited a small island in the middle of the major river that flowed pass the capital city of Paramaribo, we were able to pick up succulent fruit off the ground or hanging from the abundant trees. I remember plums and all types of citrus plus many tropical fruits. I’ve always wanted to return but, alas, never did.

My travels in Suriname, Brazil, and throughout the Caribbean islands were facilitated and, on numerous occasions, made for a deeper experience by the intercessions and friendship of my dear brother, Jimi Lee, who became not only a valued guide and a man who shared his many human connections whenever and wherever we ventured forth.

Jimi was a trusted partner in diverse situations and far ranging excursions that otherwise might easily have gone sideways. My ramblings certainly would not have been half as fruitful were it not for Jimi’s knowledgable care and concern. He introduced me to socially important activists, organizers and situations that were previously unknown and unimagined by me. Moreover, as we traveled together, he always looked out for me, who was both a stranger and at the same time an insider in too many instances and situations to be named.

The first independent Caribbean country to significantly break ties with Europe holds a special place in my consciousness. I was on my own as an observer and at the same time enjoyed broad access as a journalist throughout French-speaking Haiti, a country I can never forget. I was especially impressed by the famous Citadel that was built perched atop one of the highest mountains and fitted out with cannons to protect the country should the French decide to counterattack in a vain effort to reclaim that fabled country after the successful uprising in 1804.

Historic Landmark France Citadelle De Corte Castle

The Citadel was a marvel of engineering and human effort. How the victorious  peasants of Haiti successfully constructed the Citadel at the start of the 19th century we will probably never know. That fortress undoubtedly is one of the wonders of the world.

On a different occasion on a different island, one of the vice-presidents drove us through the Blue Mountain ranges of English-speaking Jamaica, a part of the country internationally famous for its coffee but also the historic home territory of maroons who escaped enslavement on Jamaica’s plantations.

Once we descended to the north coast, we paused briefly for a lunch-time, pit-stop nearby the popular Blue Lagoon.

Although I enjoyed the length and breadth of my worldwide travels, I really marveled at and was enchanted by the Casbah-like marketplaces of Zanzibar and especially the sparkling blue-green waters of the Indian Ocean. In Tanzania’s major port city, Dar es Salaam, the activist in me could not resist standing astride the tracks of the then recently completed Tan-Zam railroad, which was built to free, copper-rich Zambia from an economic stranglehold imposed by the racist Rhodesian and South African interlopers.

Much further east in the orient, my vision was increased by standing atop the Great Wall of China and peering out over the adjoining countryside. We were shown the palaces and objects of antiquity but nothing matched witnessing literally millions of Chinese celebrating in Peking (now Beijing), the night Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated.

And of course I should mention the amazing, forward thinking use of technology that was all over Tokyo, Japan, which we visited for a day, both coming and going, during our travel to China. I had previously, briefly been in Kyoto, Japan while in the army. I was wary of the tourist traps, especially for us soldiers, where young women sat at the bars drinking and smoking in an atmosphere of sex and drugs. One quick peep and it was back to the ship for me.

In an entirely different part of the world, I visited a museum in Munich, Germany and had the wonderful opportunity to stare, touching close, at paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Gaugin and others culled from Picasso’s personal collection. Most impressively, visitors were greeted at the front door by a carved head that stood at least six-feet tall, a massive West African statue that left me absolutely awestruck.

At a different time I was in Ghana–my wife was so impressed, she wanted to retire there. We attended the first multi-ethnic festival representing the diverse peoples of the country. Panafest was held partially to attract foreign tourism in addition to helping to integrate and unify the diverse elements of Ghana. While the music, dancing, and related festivities were really attractive, for me, the source of the most meaningful interaction happened when we visited the slave dungeons, known as slave castles, strung out along Ghana’s long Atlantic coastline. 

Most people only see these relics of that terrible time during the daylight hours but special arrangements had been made and we were allowed to go down into the holding cells at night with just small handheld candles for illumination. The eerie feeling, the dankness, the uninviting dark, the vividly imagined horror of the conditions suffered by our ancestors marked me in ways for which I was totally unprepared. At one point I fervently remember wanting nothing more than simply to escape the experience. 

My impressions of Europe, especially London, where I had extended visits at least four or five times, were far different from the unhospitable moments I had expected. Those sojourns were pleasant and consistently culturally rewarding. In retrospect, I realized that a major aspect of my embrace of the London town visits had to do with a factor that hit me by surprise, although it should not have. Similar to the United States, the metropoles of Europe are crossroads containing diverse African peoples striving to make a livable haven out of seats of exploitative and oppressive hell.

I especially recall walking through the snow one dreary afternoon trying to find a flat in north London where a South African freedom fighter was hold up while on a liberation assignment. Like a moment lifted from a semi-secret private meeting, well into the evening, we sat before a crackling fire and seriously talked.

I congratulated him as I related how important their anti-Apartheid work was worldwide. Breaking into my praise, he shushed me by relating how our civil rights and Black power struggles had inspired and catalysed their work. At that moment I realized that no matter where we were and what were the conditions there, we were engaged in struggles that had common elements. We were distant cousins.

A recent book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, by Johny Pitts goes much deeper into the why’s and wherefore’s of Black survival in European environs. While we emphasize political struggles and daily exploitative living experiences there are, nevertheless, also amazing moments of joy, or at least satisfaction, to be found anywhere in the world our people are.

On a different note, as mundane as it may sound, when I managed a band touring music festivals, there was something totally delicious upon eating freshly baked and buttered, French bread in combination with diverse cheese while in Nancy, France. Until I was there, it never occurred to me, that those crusty, long loafs of French bread were not just a stable of New Orleans po-boy sandwiches, but actually had their origin in France. Indeed, an even deeper example of an oxymoron that was actually historically explainable, was that some of the best French bread to be found in New Orleans is actually produced by Vietnamese bakers in their enclaves in a far flung section of the city, New Orleans East, locally known simply as “the east”.

While there was so much to hear, see, feel, smell and taste in parts of the world I had never previously visited, I also had the benefit of my broad travels around the USA, including a cold winter spent in Minnesota, which is where the head waters of the mighty Mississippi River gush forth. I am from New Orleans, over two thousand miles away, located in a bend in the river, just above where the river flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

I have had a wide variety of experiences. My history confirms that people may have divergent cultural practices and languages, but when you get right down to the street level and the daily interactions of people one to another, well, the warping of U.S. imperialism worldwide notwithstanding, people are people. We all laugh, we all cry, we all revere our families and stare, sometimes disbelieving, at the foreign ways of our fellow citizens of the world.

Everywhere I went there was something to learn; something instructive, or important, or at the very least interesting. This travelogue only skims the surface of my memories.

My political activism causes me to have a deep interest in the economic and political underpinnings of different peoples, nevertheless it doesn’t take long to embrace similarities or to successfully struggle to understand or appreciate differences.

Perhaps my most important macro lesson was given to me by Mwalimu (“teacher”–an honorific title), awarded to Julius Nyerere. In a small conclave I literally sat a few feet from the country’s president, who took me by surprise when he imparted an important observation.

Julius Nyerere, President of the East African federation (1964 -1985) of mainland Tanzania and island Zanzibar 

“All governments are conservative. . .” I respectfully sought to interrupted him, recounting the anti-apartheid measures undertaken by their country in overt support for liberation organizations throughout southern Africa. Nyerere hugely smiled at my naïveté and repeated himself, slowly and with appropriate hand gestures, “all governments are conservative.”

I learned a lesson that day that I have never forgotten. Whether revolutionary or reactionary, socialist or capitalist, upon obtaining office and practicing real politics, all governments are, or become, conservative.

You can take that to the bank all around the world; power always seeks to consolidate itself. That’s a basic law of science and sociology. Unless acted on by an outside force, governments are going to strive to be whatever they are, and more likely whatever they become due to their efforts at maintaining their status quo. Howsoever it may or may not benefit its citizens and foreign members, the ultimate goal of every government is staying in power.

The Duke Ellington [Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974)] Orchestra’s signature theme song was composed by a noted musician-extraordinaire who was sometimes referred to as Duke’s alter-ego. Billy Strayhorn was Ellington’s resident composer and arranger. As a result, many of Strayhorn’s distinctive and invariably melodic songs (often hauntingly so) are usually associated with Duke Ellington.

Here is a fascinating and insightful, albeit no where near exhaustive, appreciation of William Thomas “Billy” Strayhorn (November 29, 1915 – May 31, 1967), written by Ronald E. Franklin and featuring ten of Strayhorn’s pulchritudinous originals. 

We are featuring so many versions of A-Train, some of them so totally different from each other that it is virtually impossible to pick an outstanding favorite. We include both vocal and instrumental arrangements, as well as historic takes contrasting to more modern interpretations. Directly above is a version featuring Billy Strayhorn at the piano making absolutely clear that the man was a monster pianist of impeccable taste who knew how to do so much more with less by employing judiciously chosen notes.

As the cliche goes: sit back and relax, we are going to be a moment enjoying sixteen versions of a song which defined the sound of the World War 2 Era as well as many of the sounds that followed in the fifties, sixties and well beyond. While most are in the swing genre, there are also some real surprises, including an avant garde reading by the inimitable Sun Ra.

I promise you, you won’t be bored by the broad variety of musical expressions: there is a sequence by three jazz violinists; The Delta Rhythm Boys undertake an exploration as a vocal swing quartet; Joe Henderson leads a four-piece progressive jazz combo that features South African pianist Bheki Mseleku; then there’s also a modern jazz work out by bassist Charlie Mingus; plus many other delights including a solidly swinging study by the Count Basie Band, an aggregation often thought of as Ellington’s chief competitor. Indeed, we even include an amalgamation of the two orchestras blowing in tandem, deep in the pocket.

There are many more musical treats aggregated here. I’m sure you’ll find at least one or two versions that are absolutely enchanting. And please don’t miss checking out the rock-steady jump up.

We end with an almost impossible to believe workout featuring tap dancer Michela Marino Lerman accompanied by the Wynton Marsalis ensemble.

Enjoy!!!

Herbie Hancock wrote this song, along with Bennie Maupin who was a reeds master in Hancock’s bands–first the Mwandishi sextet and later in the more famous Headhunters aggregation. Butterfly became a standard of the seventies and then a jazz classic. The lyrics included the couplet: “and teach all our children not to lie / and maybe one day we’ll fly.”

Funky flying Negroes (the Garvey era capitalized the “N” in Negroes–get to that, if you can). Haven’t, at one time another, we all dreamed of flying. No plane, no jet, no balloon, nor any other kind of aerial apparatus, we were able to move through the skies based simply on our own will and desires to be in &/or experience another state of existence.

Here is the deep Jungian connection of our collective unconscious. More a subconscious feeling rather than a fully thought out (i.e. conscious) idea. After all, particularly in New Orleans (as well as in culturally related U.S. environs), we feel to believe, i.e. as mighty as the brain be, a body still needs feeling to fully be alive. Our ideas about living are not abstract. Real knowledge is not solely nor even predominately mental but rather also both a physical and spiritual way of being.

Nothing that “was” exists now. Whatever is coming is not yet here. We float and flow through life with all that being in the “now-time” implies. This is especially so for we African Americans, once called Negroes, the descendants of Africans forcibly introduced into new world Americas (north, central and south).

We brought African ways of knowing, exhibited aural and culinary cultures, during periods when reading and writing were prohibited for most of us and our innovative uses of the diverse plastic arts were both circumscribed and seldom allowed to fully flower. Moreover, don’t even get me started on dance, explicating the importance of kinetic bodily expressions.

For most of the years we have been here our culture was forced to remained mainly ephemeral or physically invisible, which is why our music is so powerful–damn near the whole of our American life experiences were put into and expressed through song.

I know, I know, this seems too philosophical for a brief popular look at music, but black music has always been deeper than well-tempered sound. Our soundz (with a “z”) have influenced the world to value internal feelings over obvious external hegemonies.

The master’s power could never match, nor curtail, nor completely extinguish the creativity of the nominally enslaved. Our life-affirming defiance/ignoring of authoritarian rules, regulations, restrictions, prohibitions and plain old bullshit, well, that’s the way we roll through square world constructions.

I’m going to stop here with just a little taste, but know there is much more than a mouthful waiting to be savored, eaten and digested.

Anyway, Butterfly is a slow, polyrhythm exercise with a beguiling melody floating atop. Here are two vocal versions and two instrumentals. Enjoy.