Old ways there are not forgotten
by Tom Sullivan
It’s been hard trying to find respite from news of the Charleston church slayings this morning. Halfway around the world in the Sydney Morning Herald is a story of a woman who awoke from a nightmare and recognized nothing in the bedroom. She stumbled out of bed, down a foreign hallway to a bathroom, and gazed into the mirror horrified:
“I grabbed my face and screamed, ‘No! Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god … I’m OLD!'”
Ms Jacobs was 32, but she had lost 17 years of her life to a rare amnesia. As far as she was concerned, she was 15.
How often have we wondered what it would be like to go back and relive our teens and twenties knowing what we know now. Naomi Jacobs experienced a part of that:
As her sister cautiously explained “adult” Naomi’s life, “teen” Naomi could not understand how, despite all the dreams she’d had for her future, she had become a single mother in a two-bedroom council flat.
There was so much to catch up on: Ms Jacobs spent hours online watching piano-playing cats, kids drugged up after dentist visits, crop circles and conspiracy theories. She sobbed over the 9/11 attacks and the “War on Terror”.
Okay, maybe it’s not such a great idea. Who wants to relive the last week, or the last decade and a half? Certainly not the president. Responding to mass shootings has become part of an American president’s job description. But even though Barack Obama refused to accept the mass shooting as “the new normal,” a dispirited president told the U.S. Conference of Mayors, “I have faith that we will eventually do the right thing.” After Americans have tried everything else, as goes the spurious Churchill quote.
A friend who was in SNCC back in the day reminded me yesterday, as Rebecca Traister does in the New Republic, when it comes to discrimination and attacks against black Americans, this sort of thing has never stopped:
Now look at this image, of Frederick Jermaine Carter, a 26-year-old black man found hanging from a tree in a white suburb in Greenwood, Mississippi. It was taken ten miles south and 55 years after Emmett Till was killed. Carter died in 2010.
Yes, southern (and northern) trees still bear strange fruit. In March of this year, Otis Byrd, a man who had served time for killing a white woman, was found hanging from a tree in Claiborne County, Mississippi. (A special investigation ruled that there was no evidence proving his death a homicide.) Less than a year ago, the body of 17-year-old Lennon Lacey—a young man in a relationship with a white woman—was found hanging from a swing-set in Bladenboro, North Carolina. His death was immediately ruled a suicide, despite a series of inconsistencies and a report from an independent examiner suggesting that given his height and weight, a self-hanging would have been impossible. This death recalled the 2000 hanging of Raynard Johnson from a pecan tree in Kokomo, Mississippi. Johnson, like Lacey, had been dating, and been harassed for dating, a white woman, and his death—on June 16, in advance of a local Juneteenth celebration—was promptly ruled a suicide.
Friday at noon, there was a “We Are Charleston” service at a downtown A.M.E. church here. Standing room only in the church. Standing room in the overflow. Lots of tissues and moist eyes. Lots of familiar faces, black and white, the mayor, other politicians. The preacher had the congregation energized about putting divisions aside, pulling together and organizing to fight back against the hatred. But will it be just another flash in the pan as Jon Stewart suggested?
I wanted to believe it would really help this time. God knows we could use some.