His Excellency, former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan
Hal-lah-ji-lou-ya!! We done got rid a Goodluck Jonathan!!! Jus da name alone wa diskustin'... Grinnin' an wearin' dat big ol hat.
Doin' nutin'... wit all dem yung gurls got took....
How could dey eva tak us seriusly.....
It was the Breaking News Alert below from The New York Timesthat inspired the thoughts above. After that the mind went straight to the point. And that was googling, "what's up with goodluck's hat?" lol....yea you're right. I'm having fun tonight. lovu, Kendke
BREAKING NEWSTuesday, March 31, 2015 1:17 PM EDT
President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria Is Defeated in Election
With anger swelling over corruption, inequality and a devastating Islamist insurgency in the nation’s north, Nigerians chose a former general who once ruled with an iron hand to be their next president, according to election results on Tuesday.
The election was the most competitive presidential race ever in Nigeria,one of the largest democracies in the world. Now, if power is handed over peacefully, it will be a major shift for the nation — the first transfer of power between civilians of different parties in a country that has spent much of its post-colonial history roiled by military coups. With all but one of Nigeria’s 36 states counted, the former military ruler, Muhammadu Buhari, held a lead of more than two million nearly votes over President Goodluck Jonathan.
Never took the time to get to know President Goodluck? Well check out this peach of an article by African author Tee Ngugi, son of renowned Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He got a chance to spend a day with the then President of Nigeria back in 2013, and thankfully for our insight, decided to write about it.
Daily Monitor online
Commentary
Nigeria’s Goodluck and his Hat Condition
Posted Sunday, May 12 2013 at 01:00
Every evening since arriving in our village some days earlier - to think, he told us, about the growing threat from Boko Haram - Goodluck Jonathan, the President of Nigeria, entertained us with hat fashion, hat games, hat stories and even hat psychology.
He could not only describe in great detail various headwear, from the bear hat worn by Russians in Siberia to the Mexican Sombrero, but their history too. On some evenings, he organised hat catwalks in his compound. In the glow of a camp fire , and lamps hanging from strategic points in his yard, models, including - to my great amusement - my mother, who had spent the day or days fashioning hats from various materials, strutted their stuff.
On other days, there would be games, the object of which was to throw a hat on to a peg placed some distance away. The winner got - you guessed it – a hat.
One evening, the Nigerian leader pronounced, “You can tell the character of a man by the hat he wears, and how he wears it.” And then he added, “We all wear our hearts in our hats.” He got a kick from the witticism, and he laughed hard and long. What followed was an intriguing lesson in hat psychology: A hat worn low over the brow could denote a Casanova or wicked character; a bowler hat expressed self-assuredness or arrogance; a cowboy hat - such as Jonathan himself wore- was a mark of confidence and boldness; a Ghanaian kente hat or the one made from cloth to match Nigerian traditional wear signaled either self-assuredness or showiness; a wool cap showed the haughtiness associated with youth, etc.
The women in the crowd were a little flabbergasted and amused to learn that the colourful headdresses they sometimes wore on special days indicated a quiet sensuality.
But what really intrigued us was his theory that wearing a hat of a certain style consistently, and meditating on what it represented, could change one’s personality, so that, for example, wearing and meditating on a cowboy hat could change a weak and shy person into a confident and bold one.
“I will let you into a secret,” Jonathan told us one evening, “I was very weak, but once I discovered the secrets of hats, I was able to transform myself into a bold and confident person.” He paused a little while to take a generous gulp of the palm wine Old Nyati had made available for him. “And now you can see the bold steps I have been taking to transform Nigeria.” I saw an opening to have a conversation about that tragic country.
“Sir,” I said, “why is Nigeria, endowed with so much, yet amount to so little?” Good luck, no doubt expecting a fashion question, reeled back, and allowed himself sometime to gather his thoughts. Then using a hat analogy, he said that the leader a country “wore” determined the country’s fortunes.
“Look,” he said, “until myself, Nigeria had been wearing a lot of bad leaders.”
The analogy aside, I agreed with the gist of Goodluck’s contention that leadership - just as in the rest of Africa - was the single most important impediment to development. Leadership in Africa had failed on two important counts: (1) To Institutionalise democracy so that government was run transparently and for the benefit of the people; and (2) To inculcate, by personal example, in public officials and the general public values and codes of behaviour consistent with operating a modern democratic nation- state.
Instead, what the leaders had done was the exact opposite. First, they hijacked state institutions to enhance their power, thus building a system that ran the country like personal property of the president and his cronies. Second, systems of accountability and sanctions were systematically dismantled. A culture of impunity for mediocrity, non- performance, mismanagement and theft seeped deep into the body politic.
However, Jonathan’s contention that he was changing all that contradicted the reality. For instance, his handling of the growing threat of the Boko Haram terrorist group has been described as bumbling, and reactive as opposed to pro-active. It has also failed to address issues of poverty and exclusion that contribute to the problem.
Goodluck’s administration, like its predecessors, has failed to move forcibly against high-level corruption, a state of affairs communicated powerfully by his pardon of a State Governor convicted of corruption.
But as I thought of these things, a hat fashion show had begun in the yard, and Jonathan, back in his element, was beaming with joy. The president had abandoned our discussion of affairs of state at the drop of a hat.
The author is a Monitor contributor based in Nairobi.
Greetings Friends and Lovers of Great Films~ PAFF NEEDS YOUR VOTE! Pan African Film Festival has been nominated in the "Best Film Festival" contest in USA TODAY. Please vote again and again and share the link with your friends! For years, Ayuko Babu and the PAFF team have been presenting WONDERFUL films which are produced and directed by artists of the African diaspora. These are great films of awesome stories, characters and scenery, which we would never have had a chance of hearing about without the Pan African Film Festival. This festival originated the idea of honoring and bringing films out of the Pan African Diaspora to the attention of movie lovers in the United States.
The annual Los Angeles event is always a cultural highlight of the year. Besides the excitement of a red carpet premiere of a major film, and the showcasing of over 150 films, the event features international panels of directors, producers, scholars and actors, art exhibits, and fashion shows. There's something for everyone, with an entire program of films, devoted to children and young film-goers. The event is always well supported and attended by Hollywood's African American stars.
Now is the time to show our gratitude and appreciation for this successful institution, and demonstrate that we Love the work of Pan African film-makers, and want to see more of it in theaters.
In case, you're not familiar with the festival, click
the link. At their website check out the list of films presented last month. And please vote for the Festival again, and again.
And since we're talking about
entertainment on screen.... I bet you heard of the record breaking success
new show 'Empire', achieved Wed nite with it's tremendous season finale
~ best season finale of any new show in the last 10 years! Deadline Hollywood had this to say: "
Last night’s airing of the hip hop family drama delivered the best
first season result any new series on any broadcast network has had
since the Shonda Rhimes created Grey’s Anatomy ended its debut cycle on
ABC in 2005."
Shonda Rhimes is an outstanding example of
the type of excellence we create, when people of African descent can
define our own images, dialogues and television content.
Oh! Can I mention that Serena
just reached the semi-finals at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells!!!
Her classy comeback is such a rich victory for her and all of us.
Love her inner and outer beauty. She's powerful, humble and true to her integrity, all at the same time! Straight outa Compton, and out into the world~
This
is my ideal of how you defeat the ignorance of racism and bigotry: With
excellence....you can't deny it, resist it or refute it, and we're on a roll right
now~ Hammer didn't lie when he said....You can't touch this! lovu, Kendke ps/ Just saw that Snoop is developing a
show for HBO about L A in the 1980's. That brother's evolution just
continues to make me proud. If you caught his show about parenting his
son, into becoming an outstanding student and football star, sought after by top universities, you got
a chance to see strong positive parenting skills. He does a lot for young black
kids with his football league. If you're unfamiliar with his passion and generosity, click this link: http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/2009/12/kudos-to-hood-snoop-dogg-and-homies.html I'm looking forward to supporting his show. And you know, he sounded damn good singing too, last night on the Empire season finale! ---
Greetings Kendke: PAFF NEEDS YOUR VOTE!
PAFF has been nominated in the "Best Film Festival" contest in USA TODAY. We need your help to start a social media campaign that will give PAFF the win. Get this link out to everyone you know. Post it on your Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, etc. Email it. Ask your family members, friends, schoolmates, students, co-workers, professional/social organization members, frat brothers, soror sisters, congregations, colleagues and anyone you know who uses email and social media (especially those with large followings) to participate and pass the contest info on to their connections. We were #8 yesterday and have dropped down to #11 (Currently #7!!!). So we really need your help to make sure we stay and remain at least in the top ten.
Voting ends Monday, April 13, 2015 at 11:59am EDT and the winners will be announced on 10 Best on Wednesday, April 15th, 2015 at 11:59am EDT, then later in USA TODAY. We know we're #1 but we need to let the World know it. Besides, we are the only film festival on the list serving People of Color. So we have to "Represent"! Help us to win this!
Ayuko Babu
Executive Director,
THE PAN AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL
Celebrating 23 Years
6820 La Tijera Blvd., Suite 200
Los Angeles, CA 90045
Ph: 310. 337-4737
Fax: 310.337-4736
www.paff.org
After the booing, slurs, and cheating allegations of 2001, Williams
vowed never to return to Indian Wells. She said she was profoundly
impacted by the late Nelson Madela, and relished the opportunity to be a role model. On February 4, she wrote an op-ed for Time magazine announcing her decision to finally return to Indian Wells.
“I was raised by my mom to love and forgive freely,” Williams wrote.
“‘When you stand praying, forgive whatever you have against anyone, so
that your Father who is in the heavens may also forgive you’ (Mark
11:25). I have faith that fans at Indian Wells have grown with the game
and know me better than they did in 2001.”
By Karen Crouse
INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Serena Williams was conspicuously absent from the BNP Paribas Open for 13 years, so she could be forgiven for lingering in her return.
Making her first appearance at the tournament since the 2001 final,
Williams, the world No. 1, defeated Monica Niculescu, 7-5, 7-5, in 2
hours 3 minutes in front of fans so firmly behind her, their cheers were
like a wind at her back.
Williams
had 13 aces, converted 5 of 10 break opportunities and sealed the
victory on her fourth match point. She said afterward that the warm
welcome was “overwhelming” and added that she was glad to be back to
“create new memories.”
It was the first meeting between Williams, who won her 19th major singles title
at this year’s Australian Open, and the 27-year-old Niculescu.
Williams, 33, started tentatively, producing a few second serves that
registered in the 70s, which is the equivalent of an underhand toss for
the owner of one of the fastest serves in the women’s game.
Niculescu,
ranked 68th, won the first two games and took Williams to deuce seven
times in her second service game before Williams held. Williams needed
an hour, but after she passed Niculescu with a backhand to secure the
first set, the fans erupted in cheers.
A
few hours before Williams arrived for the match, a crowd began forming
behind a railing several yards inside the entrance. Some of the fans
were indiscriminate autograph seekers, hoping to catch whoever happened
to stop before a match or after practice. Others, like the man holding
up the sign for the television cameras that read, “Welcome Back,
Serena,” had a carefully considered strategy.
So
did Ryan Frampton, a junior tennis player from Montana, who wriggled
his way to a spot directly behind the railing at 3:30 p.m., three and a
half hours before the scheduled start of Williams’s match on Stadium 1.
Around his neck, Frampton wore a lanyard that contained a ticket for the
night session on that court.
He
was excited to see Williams play, but more excited at the prospect of
flagging her down to sign a page in the black notebook he dug out of his
backpack whenever a player he recognized came into view. Frampton, 12,
had not been born the last time Williams played in this tournament. But
he perhaps understood the situation that led to her boycott better than
people three times his age.
At
junior events in Montana, Frampton said, he occasionally faces the most
difficult draw of all when he is matched against his brother, Luke, who
is two years younger. “I don’t like it, to be quite honest,” Frampton
said.
Their
father, he said, likes it even less. And so, Frampton said, he and his
brother take turns defaulting when they have to face each other. Was
Frampton aware that a similar situation indirectly led fans to boo Williams, her older sister Venus and their father, Richard, at the 2001 event?
The
angry spectators suspected that the Williams family patriarch had
encouraged Venus to default her semifinal match against her sister
shortly before its scheduled start. They did not believe Venus’s
explanation that she had tendinitis in her knee. The crowd reaction
during the Indian Wells final, which Richard Williams said included
racial slurs, prompted both sisters to boycott the tournament until
Serena decided to play this year.
Frampton
nodded. He was familiar with the story. He said he saw snippets of
Williams’s 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 victory against Kim Clijsters in the 2001 final
here in a documentary on the Williamses that he said he found last year
on YouTube.
“You could hear the booing,” he said. “It was horrible.”
On
the court that day, Williams could hear the booing, too. She made that
plain during the trophy presentation when she said, “You guys were
pretty rough on me, but I love you anyway.”
On
Friday, when Williams returned to the court for the first time in match
conditions, she received the opposite reception. As she emerged from
the tunnel into the night lights, she slid her headphones around her
neck in time to hear sustained applause from the crowd, which gave her a
one-minute standing ovation. An African-American girl held aloft a sign
that read, “Straight Outta Compton,” where the Williamses lived in
California when they were her age.
“It was overwhelming walking out here and everyone cheering,” Williams said.
During
the coin toss, the giant scoreboard camera zoomed in to show a close-up
of Williams, who looked nervous. In a way, Williams was as much the
defending champion as Flavia Pennetta — both won the last match they had
played in the tournament.
Earlier
in the day, two ball girls spoke excitedly about having the chance to
see Williams up close. The WTA Tour used to have regular stops in San
Diego and Los Angeles, but they have pulled up stakes. In the years
Williams boycotted this tournament, she played five tournaments in
Southern California, including four in Los Angeles, near where she spent
her childhood.
One
of the ball girls, Katie Tavasoli, a 14-year-old from Thousand Oaks, in
Ventura County northwest of Los Angeles, said Williams was her favorite
player. Why?
“She’s confident,” Tavasoli said. “She doesn’t care about what people think of her.”
By
choosing to return to this tournament, Williams was effectively
asserting her independence from her father and her sister Venus, who
stayed away. With every swing she made Friday, Williams sent a strong
message that she was her own person, no matter what the people closest
to her thought.
An additional perspective from a sports journalist that focuses on tennis.
Slate Magazine
No Apologies
By Ben Rothenberg
Serena Williams at Indian Wells in 2001 and making her return in 2015.
INDIAN WELLS, California—Fourteen years ago, the boos grew louder when she hugged her father and sister. The pigtailed teenager had just won the biggest tournament in her home state, but the anger in the stands only swelled.
Serena Williams was just 19 when she won the Indian Wells final in
2001, in front of perhaps the most hostile crowd in tennis history.
The loudest boos from the predominantly white crowd were reserved for
Williams’ father, Richard, and sister, Venus, as they walked down the
stairs to their courtside seats at the beginning of the match. Venus had
withdrawn from her semifinal match against Serena two days earlier,
citing knee tendinitis, and the withdrawal was announced only minutes
before the match had been scheduled to start.
Still rattled by the Williams family’s unexpected, unrelenting, and
unapologetic arrival into the stilted world of tennis from their home of
Compton—just a two hour drive from Indian Wells but practically a
different universe from the extremely whitedesert enclave of wealth—some fans and media suspected that the withdrawal had been orchestrated by Richard, who had been previously accused in tabloids of fixing matches between his two daughters. Some other players also indulged in that speculation, especially after losing to one of the sisters.
Many of those in attendance for the final took their grievances out
on Serena—who was not herself accused of any wrongdoing—vociferously
booing her and cheering her unforced errors. Richard Williams claimed
that the worst jeers directed at him and Venus included racial slurs and threats. (At least one fan in attendance at the semifinal, but not the final, recently told ESPNW that he heard “all kinds of nasty racial slurs” at the tournament.)
Williams remained resolute throughout the verbal assault, coming back
from an early deficit to beat a 17-year-old Kim Clijsters and claim the
title. After striking a final forehand winner on match point, she
raised her arms in triumph, standing tall like a tree that had weathered
a hurricane, and then twirled and waved to the crowd, which continued
to voice its displeasure.
Neither she nor Venus would return to Indian Wells the next year, nor
in the years after. Even as the facilities, prestige, and prize money
of the tournament grew astronomically, solidifying the event’s status as
the biggest and best tennis tournament outside of the four Grand Slams,
the sisters remained firm in their boycott.
“I play for the love of the game,” she wrote. “And it is with that
love in mind, and a new understanding of the true meaning of
forgiveness, that I will proudly return to Indian Wells in 2015.”
Black and white voices alike praised Williams for her decision;
indeed, it was an undeniably eloquent, magnanimous, and inspiring one.
It was also completely unnecessary.
It is fair to say that Williams’ decision reflects an evolution, but to say that she is doing the “right thing”—as Williams herself has suggested—implies
that maintaining the boycott was somehow incorrect. It was not, and her
decision to return does not make the initial decision to boycott any
less honorable.
What exactly was said to the Williams family has been treated as a matter of dispute,
but it doesn’t matter how many racial slurs were actually uttered that
day. It was an environment the family felt was racially hostile, and
their emotional truth and scars count as much as anything when it comes
to their decision-making.
In conjunction with her return, Williams has partnered with the Equal
Justice Initiative, which works to help black Americans through the
machinery of the legal system. Its founder, Bryan Stevenson, drew
parallels between his work and Williams’ experience in a recent interview with the website Tennis Panorama.
“Our work [at EJI] is really trying to confront the consequences of a
presumption of dangerousness and guilt that is a feature of our failure
to talk more honestly about our history [of racial inequality],” he
said. “I think what Serena encountered at Indian Wells was precisely
that same presumption of guilt. People could not accept that anything
she said or did about her play was honest or legitimate because this
presumption that she is not like everybody else was all out there.”
In an era of professional (and collegiate) sports where money has
been chosen over principles time and time again, the boycott that the
Williams sisters maintained for more than a decade was one of sport’s
most admirable demonstrations of conviction over compensation. By
staying away, the two sacrificed thousands of potential ranking points
and millions of dollars in possible prize money, appearance fees, and bonus pool earnings.
Despite those forfeitures, the Williams sisters have prospered without
Indian Wells, winning 23 Grand Slam singles titles since the boycott
began.
And indeed, it is only Serena stepping back into the desert this year
while Venus continues to stay away. Writing for NBC Sports, Douglas
Robson called Williams’ split from the lockstep family line “the ultimate act of individuation.” This departure fits their more divergent recent trajectories.
Venus has developed as the more steadfast of the two, emerging as a leader for all women on the tour with her advocacy for equality with men in a sport where a pay gap still exists despite tennis’ groundbreaking equal pay efforts at the majors. She has also been more fiercely protective of her family and its legacy as pioneers, reportedly voicing greater umbrage
than her sister at a 2012 documentary that included a segment on
Richard’s out-of-wedlock children. In the wake of blowups at the U.S.
Open in 2009 and 2011, meanwhile, Serena has been more focused on trying
to smooth over her image in recent years. The previously pricklier
Serena has been more open and playful, even striking up friendships with
other top players. She has also relied on her family support system
less as she has gotten older, handing over the coaching reins from her
parents to Frenchman Patrick Mouratoglou.
Speaking to me at Indian Wells, Mouratoglou said that he had
encouraged Williams to return here each year since they first joined
forces in mid-2012, saying that playing this tournament made the most
sense “sportswise.” Each year Mouratoglou had added the tournament to
the calendar he made for her, and each year she had removed it to his
disappointment—until this one.
Serena Williams celebrates the next to last point in her final against Kim Clijsters at Indian Wells on March 17, 2001.
“She didn’t ask me my opinion,” Venus said when asked last month
about Serena’s return. “She just said, ‘I might be playing there.’ I
said, ‘Oh, OK.’ That’s pretty much the conversation.”
In front of a sardine-packed room of reporters on Thursday afternoon
for her pre-tournament press conference, Williams’ most revealing
moments came when she was asked about her family’s thoughts on the
return.
“If she said, ‘Serena, I don’t think this is good, I don’t think you
should go,’ then there is no chance I would be here right now,” Serena
said of Venus. “She 100 percent supports me and is very happy that I’m
here and even encouraged me to come.”
Serena had been more apprehensive about the reaction of her parents.
She said she was “a little shocked” at how well her mother took the
news. “I don’t know why, because she’s always been really supportive,”
Williams said. “For whatever reason, I still was. It was a wonderful
feeling.”
Williams also offered her father, who has written about the racism he
experienced during his youth in Shreveport, Louisiana, veto power over
the decision. “Last thing I’m going to do is do something that I don’t
think is right for all of us,” she said of their talk. “He said it would
be a big mistake if I didn’t go back. I thought that was really
admirable.”
Despite the grace with which she has handled the entire saga,
Williams still has her detractors. The most jarring question in
Williams’ pre-tournament press conference came from a reporter who said
that “both sides” had made mistakes in 2001. “Just wondering if you feel
like you have anything to apologize for,” he asked.
“I’m not here to focus on what happened in 2001,” Williams replied.
“I can say that I was a teenager. I have a tremendous amount of
integrity from the day I stepped out on the court professionally until
today.”
Indeed, Williams has carried herself with integrity throughout her
time at Indian Wells, both then and now. And she owes nothing to
anyone—least of all an apology.
Sometimes being a woman of color, you just get sick and tired of the ignorance and arrogance of white men. Let me rephrase that, not sometimes, but in truth, I live sick and tired of being governed, ruled by, and effected by men that are less intelligent, and less globally aware of the requirement of a high consciousness within all of humanity, for the wholeness of all life on this planet. Those whose minds which are still caught up within the boundaries of tribal, regional, religious, cultural, political and ethnic identifications bore me. I love how these things can lightly sweeten a person's being, but when they overpower the individual's expression of Life in the moment, they bear an odor. And for me, it's a repulsive fragrance, not an attractive one.
We have got to expand our minds and ideas about what is good for us, to know that what is good for the wholeness of the planet, is what is good for us.
Selfish, greedy, and long outdated ways of living and using Earth's resources have got to be released, so that Life can be all that it's supposed to be IN THIS MOMENT.
Not the good old days of how it was when Ronald Reagan was president, Russia was an empire or the Soviet Union, or the Rockefeller and Rothschild families controlled economies. Nor do we need to deny the possibilities of this moments gifts, in favor of how life was lived when the Prophet was alive, or when slavery created a vicious culture that made white people rich, imperialism and colonization subjugated cultures and people so that England, could declare that she ruled the seas. I shared a petition with friends that deals with the interference of US Senators in the peace agreements the current administration is undertaking with Iran. Here's the link should you like to check it out, and sign or offer your disagreement.
Here also are two conversations sparked by the email that was sent out.
Hey ....
Good luck. If you got a
million signatures nothing would happen. This is America or have you
forgotten? These are about 45 highly placed white people you are
talking about!!! You would stand a better chance getting you 40 acres
(which is no chance at all) then getting treason charges brought. Power
comes out of the barrel of a gun -- America/Obama/Congress/the
Judiciary all knows that. Not from the ballot box. It's better to keep
one's mouth shut & carry a BIG STICK. Race relations are worse now
than they were 6 years ago when our black prez took office.
Good
luck with your petition. Once submitted their will just wipe their
asses with it. By the way the Koch brothers control the toilet paper
business. Smart white boys!!!
When
you speak of war mongers think about Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan,
etc. And don't forget about Panama, Columbia, Venezuela, Somalia,
Libya, Iran, the Phillipines, and of course the biggest pain in the ass
in the entire world is Israel (been that way since 1948). Instead of
giving the Eastern European Jews a part of Germany they gave them Arab
land. It became the So. Africa of the middle east. Without the USA
Israel would not exist. There are 14 million Jews in the entire world.
1/2 of them are in Israel & the rest are in Russia & the USA.
Not that many people in a world of 6.8 Billion people. That is equal to
0.021% --basically no body!!! Check out the positions of power that
they occupy in finance, entertainment, news, CEOs of corporations.
Never forget that the A-bomb has been used twice in history against 2 civilian targets!!!
Let me know how the petitioning of your government works out.
I
would suggest you might have more success with learning to speak both
Spanish & Manadrin Chinese & learning to make tacos &
chicken fried rice.
Hope all is well with you & yours.
jk
And the response ~
Wow Jimmy! You're in rare form this morning!
Thanks for that! I agree with every single thing you said ~
except for the fact that what happens in the world, is not just about what human beings think constitutes POWER.
It does not come out of the barrel of a gun. What comes out of the barrel of a gun is death, and force. Let's be clear about that.
What
these men are instituting is not Power. They delude themselves and use
money and institutions like police and military enforcement, courts and
laws to force by violence and threat of death, their will upon the people.
That's not power. That's ignorance, that's evil, that's cruel and mean, and most of all blind to how LIFE works.
That shit is short lived. And time and time again, it fails and falls.
And
by the way, I take insult at your referring to it as 'my petition', and
' my government'. Neither of these do I claim as representative, or
expressions of who and what I AM.
I
passed this on because who I AM, does have the right to let these legislators
know, that somebody don't agree with them. That somebody doesn't like
what they did, and that somebody is willing to stand up to them, and
tell them so.
Who knows,.....enough
people sign that petition, or letter, or rant, .....and they just might
hear it. They might 'feel it'. It might stimulate thought within
themselves...because that's what's powerful. Thought. And if a physical
instrument, like a petition signed by millions, made them stop, reflect
and think for even a moment.....then that's a powerful grace.
You
see, unlike you, I do not believe that man is ALL POWERFUL. Whatever
one calls It, I believe, that there's something that holds all of this
together, and at any point It can pull the rug out from under those that
as my grandmother used to say...'think they're standing besides
themself'...meaning....they're ego has them thinking they are bigger
than they really are.
I work from that awesome wholeness, and watch and laugh, as It does It's Thang......
I
agree, it's almost impossible to live happily and hopefully, by what
Man and Society present to us as, 'The Appearance of Things". I believe,
that that is all that what we're seeing is....just the 'appearance'. I
know that the real power is in the stuff, you can't see. The Invisible,
the Force, the Power, the Substance of Creation ~ unable to be
correctly named, understood or fully known, but that's always
happening, is an absolute energy that's about wholeness, harmony, and
most importantly is a loving, giving cosmic mind.
White
boys from the south ain't got no power.....everybody knows that. That's
why they band together and hide undersheets, and created and maintain an "'ol boys
club". Cause individually... and alone...they.. ain't.. got... no....
power.
Scared ass muthafuckers, vicious, incapable of
doing anything but copying/stealing and imposing prolonged violence and
destruction.
Still mad, cause they
ain't got no melanin, no dicks..sickly, mad cause we kicked em out of
humanities' Motherland, and sent them on they treks away from us. So
this latest act is another demonstration of their revenge~
See.... tribal. Small minded. I'm gonna get you back....Solocked in their hatred and subconscious fear of Black men (bi-racial President Obama), and so blinded by it's control of them, that they're willing to doom all humanity to constant conflict.
lovu.
glad to hear from you.
hope to see you sometime soon~
John Cummings (right), the
Whitney Plantation’s owner, and Ibrahima Seck, its director of research,
in the Baptist church on the grounds.Credit
Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times
‘Is it an art gallery? A plantation tour? A museum? It’s almost this astonishing piece of performance art, and as great art does, it makes you stop and wonder.’
Louisiana’s
River Road runs northwest from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, its two
lanes snaking some 100 miles along the Mississippi and through a
contradictory stretch of America. Flat and fertile, with oaks webbed in
Spanish moss, the landscape stands in defiance of the numerous oil
refineries and petrochemical plants that threaten its natural splendor.
In the rust-scabbed towns of clapboard homes, you are reminded that
Louisiana is the eighth-poorest state in the nation. Yet in the lush
sugar plantations that crop up every couple of miles, you can glimpse
the excess that defined the region before the Civil War. Some are still
active, with expansive fields yielding 13 million tons of sugar cane a
year. Others stand in states of elegant rot. But most conspicuous are
those that have been restored for tourists, transporting them into a
world of bygone Southern grandeur — one in which mint juleps, manicured
gardens and hoop skirts are emphasized over the fact that such grandeur
was made possible by the enslavement of black human beings.
On
Dec. 7, the Whitney Plantation, in the town of Wallace, 35 miles west
of New Orleans, celebrated its opening, and it was clear, based on the
crowd entering the freshly painted gates, that the plantation intended
to provide a different experience from those of its neighbors. Roughly
half of the visitors were black, for starters, an anomaly on plantation
tours in the Deep South.
And while there were plenty of genteel New
Orleanians eager for a peek at the antiques inside the property’s Creole
mansion, they were outnumbered by professors, historians,
preservationists, artists, graduate students, gospel singers and men and
women from Senegal dressed in traditional West African garb: flowing
boubous of intricate embroidery and bright, saturated colors. If
opinions on the restoration varied, visitors were in agreement that they
had never seen anything quite like it. Built largely in secret and
under decidedly unorthodox circumstances, the Whitney had been turned
into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery — the first of
its kind in the United States.
Located
on land where slaves worked for more than a century, in a state where
the sight of the Confederate flag is not uncommon, the results are both
educational and visceral. An exhibit on the North American slave trade
inside the visitors’ center, for instance, is lent particular resonance
by its proximity, just a few steps away outside its door, to seven
cabins that once housed slaves. From their weathered cypress frames, a
dusty path, lined with hulking iron kettles that were used by slaves to
boil sugar cane, leads to a grassy clearing dominated by a slave jail —
an approach designed so that a visitor’s most memorable glimpse of the
white shutters and stately columns of the property’s 220-year-old “Big
House” will come through the rusted bars of the squat, rectangular cell.
A number of memorials also dot the grounds, including a series of
angled granite walls engraved with the names of the 107,000 slaves who
spent their lives in Louisiana before 1820. Inspired by Maya Lin’s
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the memorial lists the names
nonalphabetically to mirror the confusion and chaos that defined a
slave’s life.
Mitch
Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, was among those to address the
crowd on opening day. He first visited the Whitney as the state’s
lieutenant governor in 2008, when the project was in its infancy, and at
the time he compared its significance to that of Auschwitz. Now he was
speaking four days after a grand jury in New York City declined to
indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, a black
man who was stopped for selling untaxed cigarettes; 13 days after
another grand jury in Missouri cleared an officer in the shooting death
of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager; and two weeks after Tamir
Rice, a 12-year-old black boy playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland
park, was killed by a police officer. Evoking the riots and protests
then gripping the nation, Landrieu said, “It is fortuitous that we come
here today to stand on the very soil that gives lie to the protestations
that we have made, and forces us as Americans to check where we’ve been
and where we are going.”
The
mayor concluded his speech by extending his hand to an older man
standing just offstage to his left. Stocky and bespectacled, with a
thick head of unkempt white hair, John Cummings was as much a topic of
conversation among those gathered as the Whitney itself. For reasons
almost everyone was at a loss to explain, he had spent the last 15 years
and more than $8 million of his personal fortune on a museum that he
had no obvious qualifications to assemble.
“Like everyoneelse,” John Cummings said a few days earlier, “you’re probably wondering what the rich white boy has been up to out here.”
He
was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the
museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans,
Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his
plantation.
He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager.
His disposition is exceedingly proper — the portly carriage, the trimmed
white beard, the florid drawl — but he dresses in a rumpled manner that
suggests a morning habit of mistaking the laundry hamper for the
dresser. As someone who had to hitchhike to high school and remains
bitter about not being able to afford his class ring, he embodies the
scrappiness of the Irish Catholics who flooded New Orleans in the 19th
century. But as a trial lawyer who has helped win more than $5 billion
in class-action settlements and a real estate magnate whose holdings
have multiplied his wealth many times over, Cummings personifies the
affluence and power held by an elite and mostly white sliver of a city
with a majority black population.
“I
suppose it is a suspicious thing, what I’ve gone and done with the
joint,” he continued, acknowledging that his decision to “spend millions
I have no interest in getting back” on the museum has long been a
source of local confusion. More than a few of the 670 residents of
Wallace — 90 percent of whom are black, many the descendants of slaves
and sharecroppers who worked the region’s land — have voiced their
bewilderment over the years.
So, too, have the owners of other
tourist-oriented plantations, all of whom are white. Members of
Cummings’s close-knit family (he has eight children by two wives) also
struggle to clarify their patriarch’s motivations, resorting to the
shoulder-shrugging logic of “John being John,” as if explaining a
stubborn refusal to throw away old newspapers rather than a consuming,
heterodox and very expensive attempt to confront the darkest period of
American history. “Challenge me, fight me on it,” he said. “I’ve been
asked all the questions. About white guilt this and that. About the
honky trying to profit off of slavery. But here’s the thing: Don’t you
think the story of slavery is important?” With that, Cummings went
silent, something he does with unsettling frequency in conversation.
“Well, I checked into it, and I heard you weren’t telling it,” he finally resumed, “so I figured I might as well get started.”
This
was a practiced line, but also an earnest form of self-indictment:
Cummings’s way of admitting his own ignorance on the subject of slavery
and its legacy, and by extension encouraging visitors to confront their
own. As with the rest of his real estate portfolio, which includes miles
of raw countryside and swampland, a 12-story luxury hotel near the
French Quarter, a cattle farm in rural Mississippi and a 1,200-acre
ranch in West Texas that he has never set foot on, he initially
gravitated toward the Whitney simply because it was for sale. (“Whatever
Uncle Sam and the bartender let me keep,” he likes to note, “I bought
real estate with it.”) Originally built by the Haydel family, a
prosperous clan of German immigrants who ran the property from 1752 to
1867, the grounds had been uninhabited for a quarter century.
“I knew I
wasn’t going to live here,” Cummings said as he drove past the
blacksmith’s shop that he spent $300,000 rebuilding, where a plaque
noted that a slave named Robin worked on the plantation for 40 years and
where the actor Jamie Foxx, playing a slave in “Django Unchained,” was
filmed being branded. “But aside from that, I didn’t know what I would
do with the place.”
It
takes just a few minutes of conversation with Cummings, however, to
understand that he would never have been keen on restoring the Whitney
in the mold of neighboring plantations, which rely on weddings and
sorority reunions to supplement the income brought in by picnicking
tourists. Pet projects he has taken up in recent years include outlining
for the Vatican a list of wrongs the Catholic Church should formally
apologize for and — to the chagrin of, in his words, “my friends who
have all had political sex changes in the past 15 years” — exploring
ways to curb the influence of conservative “super PACs.” Decades ago,
his interest in abuses of power led to his involvement in the civil
rights movement; in 1968, he worked alongside African-American activists
to get the Audubon Park swimming pool in New Orleans opened to blacks.
“If someone is going to deny someone rights simply because they have the
power to do it — well, I’m interested,” he explained.
“I’m coming, and
I’m going to bring the cannons.”
Still,
his plans for the Whitney might have gone in an entirely different
direction, if not for the existence of an unlikely document. The
property’s previous owner was Formosa, a plastics and petrochemical
giant, which in 1991 planned to build a $700 million plant for
manufacturing rayon on its nearly 2,000 acres. Preservationists and
environmentalists balked. Looking for avenues of appeasement, Formosa
commissioned an exhaustive survey of the grounds, with the idea that the
most historic sections would be turned into a token museum of Creole
culture while a majority of the rest would be razed to make way for the
factory. In the end, it was wasted money and effort: The opposition
remained vigilant, rayon was going out of fashion, the Whitney went back
on the market and Cummings inherited the eight-volume study with the
purchase. “Thanks to Formosa, I knew more about my plantation than
anyone else around here — maybe more than any plantation in America
outside of Monticello,” said Cummings, a litigator accustomed to teasing
secrets from dense paperwork. “A lot of what was in there was about the
architecture and artifacts, but you started to see the story of
slavery. You saw it in terms of who built what.”
After
digesting the study, Cummings began reading “any book I could find”
about slavery. Particularly influential was “Africans in Colonial
Louisiana,” by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a professor at Rutgers. Certain
details startled Cummings, like the fact that 38 percent of slaves
shipped from Africa ended up in Brazil. No wonder, he thought, that the
women he watched on television celebrating Carnival in Rio de Janeiro so
closely resembled those he saw dancing in the Mardi Gras parades that
surrounded him as a youth. “I started to see slavery and the hangover
from slavery everywhere I looked,” he said. As a descendant of Irish
laborers, he has no direct ties to slaveholders; still, in a departure
from the views held by many Southern whites, Cummings considered the
issue a personal one. “If ‘guilt’ is the best word to use, then yes, I
feel guilt,” he said. “I mean, you start understanding that the wealth
of this part of the world — wealth that has benefited me — was created
by some half a million black people who just passed us by. How is it
that we don’t acknowledge this?”
Cummings
steered the vehicle past the yellowing fronds of banana trees and
pulled to a stop in front of a sculpture, a black angel embracing a dead
infant, the centerpiece of a memorial honoring the 2,200 enslaved
children who died in the parish in the 40 years leading up to the
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. At traditional museums, such
memorials come to fruition only after a lengthy process — proposals by
artists, debates among the board members, the securing of funds. This
statue, though, like everything on the property, began as a vision in
Cummings’s mind and became a reality shortly after he pulled out his
checkbook. Perhaps most remarkable is that this unconventional model has
yielded conventionally effective results: at once chastening and
challenging, beautiful and haunting. “Everything about the way the place
came together says that it shouldn’t work,” says Laura Rosanne
Adderley, a Tulane history professor specializing in slavery who has
visited the Whitney twice since it opened. “And yet for the most part it
does, superbly and even radically. Like Maya Lin’s memorial, the
Whitney has figured out a way to mourn those we as a society are often
reluctant to mourn.”
Before
leaving the grounds, Cummings stopped at the edge of the property’s
small lagoon. It was here that the Whitney’s most provocative memorial
would soon be completed, one dedicated to the victims of the German
Coast Uprising, an event rarely mentioned in American history books. In
January 1811, at least 125 slaves walked off their plantations and,
dressed in makeshift military garb, began marching in revolt along River
Road toward New Orleans. (The area was then called the German Coast for
the high number of German immigrants, like the Haydels.) The slaves
were suppressed by militias after two days, with about 95 killed, some
during fighting and some after the show trials that followed. As a
warning to other slaves, dozens were decapitated, their heads placed on
spikes along River Road and in what is now Jackson Square in the French
Quarter.
“It’ll
be optional, O.K.? Not for the kids,” said Cummings, who commissioned
Woodrow Nash, an African-American sculptor he met at Jazz Fest, to make
60 heads out of ceramic, which will be set atop stainless-steel rods on
the lagoon’s small island. “But just in case you’re worried about
people getting distracted by the pretty house over there, the last thing
you’ll see before leaving here will be 60 beheaded slaves.”
The memorial had lately become a source of controversy among locals, who were concerned that it would be too disturbing.
“It is
disturbing,” Cummings said as he pulled out past Whitney’s gate. “But
you know what else? It happened. It happened right here on this road.”
A nation builds
museums to understand its own history and to have its history
understood by others, to create a common space and language to address
collectively what is too difficult to process individually. Forty-eight
years after World War II, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
opened in Washington. A museum dedicated to the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks opened its doors in Lower Manhattan less than 13 years after
they occurred. One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil
War, however, no federally funded museum dedicated to slavery exists, no
monument honoring America’s slaves. “It’s something I bring up all the
time in my lectures,” says Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian
and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiery Trial: Abraham
Lincoln and American Slavery.” “If the Germans built a museum dedicated
to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you’d think
they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven’t yet figured
out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history.
To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.”
These
competing perceptions converge with baroque vividness in the South. The
State of Mississippi did not acknowledge the 13th Amendment abolishing
slavery until 1995 and formally ratified it only in 2013, when a
resident was moved to galvanize lawmakers after watching Steven
Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”
While some Southern states have passed
resolutions apologizing for slavery in the last decade, a majority,
Louisiana among them, have not. In 1996, when Representative Steve
Scalise, now the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, was
serving in the Louisiana State Legislature, he voted against such a
bill. “Why are you asking me to apologize for something I didn’t do and
had no part of?” he remarked at the time. This episode recently came to
light amid the revelation that in 2002 he addressed a gathering of white
supremacists at a conference organized by David Duke, formerly the
grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization founded the year the
Civil War ended.
Slavery
is by no means unmemorialized in American museums, though the subject
tends to be lumped in more broadly with African-American history. In
2004, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in
Cincinnati with the mission of showcasing “freedom’s heroes.” Since
2007, the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, S.C., has operated as a small
museum focusing on the early slave trade, on a site where slaves were
sold at public auctions until 1863. The National Civil Rights Museum,
which opened in Memphis in 1991 and was built around the Lorraine Motel,
where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, offers a
brief section devoted to slavery. Next year, the National Museum of
African American History and Culture is scheduled to be dedicated in
Washington as part of the Smithsonian Institution, a project supported
by $250 million in federal funding; exhibits on slavery will stand
alongside those containing a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong and
boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali. “It has to be said that the end note
in most of these museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is
wonderful,” says Paul Finkelman, a historian who focuses on slavery and
the law. “We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of
the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most
productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them.”
What
makes slavery so difficult to think about, from the vantage point of
history, is that it was both at odds with America’s founding values —
freedom, liberty, democracy — and critical to how they flourished. The
Declaration of Independence proclaiming that “all men are created equal”
was drafted by men who were afforded the time to debate its language
because the land that enriched many of them was tended to by slaves. The
White House and the Capitol were built, in part, by slaves. The economy
of early America, responsible for the nation’s swift rise and sustained
power, would not have been possible without slavery. But the country’s
longstanding culture of racism and racial tensions — from the lynchings
of the Jim Crow-era South to the discriminatory housing policies of the
North to the treatment of blacks by the police today — is deeply rooted
in slavery as well. “Slavery gets understood as a kind of prehistory to
freedom rather than what it really is: the foundation for a country
where white supremacy was predicated upon African-American
exploitation,” says Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor.
“This is still,
in many respects, the America of 2015.”
In
2001, Douglas Wilder, a former governor of Virginia and the first
elected black governor in the nation, announced his intention to build a
museum that would be the first to give slavery its proper due — not as a
piece of Southern or African-American history but as essential to
understanding American history in general. Christened the United States
National Slavery Museum, it was to be built on 38 acres along the
Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Va. Wilder, the grandson of
slaves, commissioned C. C. Pei, a son of I. M. Pei, to design the main
building, which would be complemented by a full-scale replica of a slave
ship. A number of prominent African-Americans, including Bill Cosby,
pledged millions of dollars in support at black-tie fund-raisers. The
ambition that surrounded the project’s inception, however, was soon
eclipsed by years of pitfalls. By 2008, there were not enough donations
to pay property taxes, let alone begin construction; in 2011, the
nonprofit organization in charge of the project filed for bankruptcy
protection. As it happens, it was during the same period Wilder’s
project unraveled that John Cummings, unburdened by any bureaucracies,
was well on his way to completing a slavery museum of his own.
Cummings and Seck at one of many memorials to slaves on the plantation.Credit
Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times
For much of
the last 13 years, Cummings has been joined on the Whitney’s grounds by
a Senegalese scholar named Ibrahima Seck. A 54-year-old of imposing
height, Seck first met Cummings in 2000, when Seck, who has made regular
trips to the South since winning a Fulbright in 1995, attended a talk
at Tulane with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, the Rutgers professor. Cummings put
up Seck at the International House, the hotel he owns in downtown New
Orleans, and invited him to see the Whitney. Though at that point it was
little more than a series of decrepit buildings entangled in feral
vegetation, Seck was impressed that Cummings was thinking about it
exclusively within the context of slavery. As someone from the region of
Africa that provided more than 60 percent of Louisiana’s slaves, he was
disturbed by the way other plantations romanticized the lives of the
white owners, with scant mention of the enslaved blacks who harvested
the land and built the grand homes fawned over by tourists. After
walking the property with Seck for a few hours, Cummings invited him to
return to New Orleans the next year to help crystallize the Whitney’s
mission. Seck took him up on the offer, and for the next decade,
Cummings flew Seck in from Africa each year during the scholar’s summer
vacation.
Since
2012, Seck has lived full time in New Orleans to serve as the director
of research for the Whitney. “As historians, we do the research and we
write dissertations and we go to conferences, but very little of the
knowledge gets out,” Seck said one afternoon in his French-inflected
baritone while seated on the antique upholstered sofa in the parlor of
the property’s Big House. “That’s why a place like this is so important.
Not everyone is willing to read nowadays, but this is an open book.” He
took a moment to glance around the lavish room, its hand-painted
ceiling now meticulously restored. “Every day I think about how
remarkable this is,” Seck said. “One hundred and fifty years ago, I
would not be able to do what I’m doing here now. I would have been a
slave.”
The
alliance between the two men has been an auspicious one, with Seck’s
patience and expertise serving as a counterbalance to the instinctual
eccentricity of Cummings. While Seck researched the Whitney’s history,
Cummings became something of a hoarder, buying anything he thought might
one day be relevant to the project. When he learned about a dilapidated
Baptist church in a neighboring parish that was founded by freed slaves
in 1867, for example, he brought it across the Mississippi and had it
restored on the grounds at a cost of $300,000. When recordings of
interviews with former slaves that were made in the 1930s as part of the
W.P.A.’s Federal Writers’ Project were acquired, Cummings hired a
son-in-law who works as a sound engineer in Hollywood to clean them up;
he plans to install a speaker system near the slave cabins, where the
recordings will play on a loop, allowing visitors to hear the voices of
former slaves while staring into the type of homes in which they once
lived. After Seck unearthed in old court documents the names of 354
slaves who worked on the land before emancipation, Cummings bought an
engraving machine so they could be etched in Italian granite in a
memorial he christened the “Wall of Honor.”
“By
2005, it was clear to me that we were building a museum, but I’m not
sure John was thinking about it in those terms,” Seck said. “If John
feels something, he just goes ahead and does it. His stubbornness can be
frustrating, but who in the world is willing to put so many millions of
dollars into a project like this? If you find one, you have to support
it.”
In
his years of working on the Whitney, Seck has come to see the museum as
both a memorializing of history and a slyly radical gesture: Cummings’s
desire to shift the consciousness of others as his own has been
altered, and in the process try to make amends of a kind that have been a
source of debate since emancipation.
“If
one word comes to mind to summarize what is in John’s head in doing
this,” Seck said, “that word would be ‘reparations.’ Real reparations.
He feels there is something to be done in this country to make changes.”
In 1835, a biracial
child named Victor was born on the grounds of the Whitney, the son of a
slave named Anna and Antoine Haydel, the brother of Marie Azelie
Haydel, the slaveholder who ran the plantation at the time. One hundred
and seventy-nine years later, a group of both the black and white
descendants of the Haydels made their way to the Whitney’s opening in
December. Many were meeting for the first time, and the sight of them
embracing and marveling at the similarities in their appearances was as
powerful as any memorial on the plantation. Among the black Haydels in
attendance was one of Victor’s great-grandchildren, Sybil Haydel Morial,
a well-known local activist who is the widow of Ernest Morial, the
first black mayor of New Orleans, and the mother of Marc Morial, a
subsequent mayor. “I was with John when he helped get the pool in
Audubon Park opened to blacks,” she said in a later conversation. “Now,
with the Whitney, he has given us a place where we can come and clear
the air. If my slave great-grandfather had lived eight more years, I
would have known him. Yet growing up, whenever my elders talked about
slavery, they’d always get quiet when we kids were near.” Morial added
that she hoped “some people around here may find their views changing”
after visiting the Whitney, which seemed to be the case with some of her
white relatives at the opening.
“I
have to say, I was a little offended when I heard that slavery, of all
the stories, was going to be the focus,” Glynne Couvillion, a white
Haydel, said while standing inside the Baptist church, surrounded by
dozens of ghostly sculptures of child slaves that Cummings commissioned
to represent those interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project as they
would have looked when enslaved. “But after today, I’m just in awe and
proud to be connected to this place.”
For
all the time and money Cummings has dedicated to the Whitney — and he
is by no means finished, with plans to build an adjacent institute for
the study of slavery — the museum was built on a shoestring budget
compared with traditionally financed institutions. (The Holocaust
Memorial Museum cost about $168 million.) Besides Seck, there were only
two full-time staff members, an energetic young woman named Ashley
Rogers, who serves as the director, and her deputy, Monique Johnson, a
descendant of sharecroppers from the area, and it was evident that they
were still finding their footing.
Like the other plantations along River
Road, the Whitney can be seen only through a guided tour — the cost is
$22 — and a number of the docents struggled to find the proper tone.
(“Time to depress you a little more,” one could be heard saying at
various points.) Others struggled to answer questions about how,
exactly, sugar cane was harvested by slaves, responding instead with
generalities intended to incite emotion rather than educate: “It was the
hardest, most grueling slave work imaginable.”
Yet
this awkwardness might well serve as one of the Whitney’s strengths.
Talking about slavery and race is awkward, and the museum stands a
chance of becoming the rare place where this discomfort can be embraced,
and where the dynamic among the mainly mixed-race tours can offer an
ancillary form of education. A man who grew up in a “maroon community,”
as bayou enclaves founded by runaway slaves are known, was so moved
during his tour that he volunteered to work as a guide. A young black
woman mentioned that she avoided tours at another nearby plantation
because an ancestor was lynched on the grounds. Among the Whitney’s
first visitors was a black man named Paul Brown, whose father was a
field hand and who arrived dressed in a sharp blazer and a fedora on
opening day “to shake the man’s hand who made this place possible.”
During his tour, he offered personal anecdotes that served to buttress
the white guide’s skittishness — bringing the past into the present, for
instance, by pointing out how the images of slaves etched in one
memorial were reminiscent of portraits of his ancestors. “I wish some of
my white co-workers would come to this place,” he said afterward.
“They’d understand me in ways they’ve failed for 30 years.”
Jonathan
Holloway, a dean at Yale College and a professor of African-American
studies, arrived for a tour in late January. He was in the area to give a
talk at Louisiana State University about the ways the horrors of
slavery are confronted and avoided in heritage tourism, and he found the
Whitney to be a “genius step” in a long-overdue direction. “People have
tried to do a museum like this for years, and I’m still stunned that
this guy made it happen,” he said afterward. “There I was, coming down
to talk about how in trying to tell the story, it’s often one step
forward and two steps back, and boom, here’s the Whitney.” Holloway was
particularly taken by the museum’s subversive approach. “Having been on a
number of tours where the entire focus is on the Big House, the way
they’ve turned the script inside out is a brilliant slipping of the
skirt,” he said. “The mad genius of the whole thing is really resonant.
Is it an art gallery? A plantation tour? A museum? It’s almost this
astonishing piece of performance art, and as great art does, it makes
you stop and wonder.”
Cummings,
for his part, has been on the grounds every day since the Whitney
opened, where he is in the habit of approaching visitors as they enter
and telling them how they should feel afterward: “You’re not going to be
the same person when you leave here” — a line that some found more
grating than endearing. Inwardly, though, he was constantly making notes
on what could be done to improve the experience.
“Look,
we’re not perfect, and we’ve made a lot of mistakes, and we’ll make
more,” he said one afternoon as the sun set across the sugar-cane fields
that surround the plantation in much the form they did when slaves
worked them 200 years ago. “We need all the help we can get — not
financial, but we need brains.” With this in mind, he recently started
reaching out to prominent African-American academics, hoping to create a
board of directors — typically the first step for a museum, not one
taken six weeks after opening day. “I’m firing before I’m aiming, O.K.?”
he said. “I’m smart enough to know I don’t have the answers, but so far
it looks like it’s the right thing.”
