Skip to main content

New England Reflections 2014 (Cont.): Platypus Travels Part LV

 The Wooster monument at Oak Cliff Cemetery Derby, Connecticut.  Many of the graves in this cemetery are arranged in family plots with a central monument that lists the names and dates of those buried there.  Small stones with initials mark the actual burial site of individual family members.  I have written about another family plot in this cemetery here.
Buried along with the Woosters in a place of honor is Harry N. Thomas, their African-American servant.  I'm in the middle of teaching The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Up From Slavery to my seniors.  We've had some hard conversations and will be having a few more.  One goal of those conversations is to help them see that slavery may have ended in 1865, but the effects of slavery continue on in all manner of forms down to the present day.

W.E.B. Du Bois begins his magnum opus The Souls of Black Folk by saying that there is one question he continually senses in the minds of white folk but that they are too sensitive to ask: "how does it feel to be a problem?".  The rest of the book attempts in some way to answer that question.  One way that Du Bois describes it is with the image of a veil that separates every African American from the white world beyond.  Face to face with this tombstone, I bumped into the veil, but from the opposite side.

You may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But I'll hear the trumpet sound
In a-tat morning.

Rest well Mr. Thomas,  I'll see you in that morning where there are no more veils.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane: The Platypus Reads Part CCLII

I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard.  This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane.  The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up.  I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all.  Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser.   Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong.  I h...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (Cont.): The Platypus Reads Part CCLI

Wow, it's hard to read anthologies at anything other than a slow crawl.  The change from author to author and style to style is exhausting.  Slowing down is a good thing, though, if it makes time for reflection.  That seems like one good reason to create an anthology: to force readers to slow down and reflect. With that as a preamble, let's move on to today's selections. The Black Ferris by Ray Badbury I didn't expect to see this Sci-Fi heavy hitter in a Fantasy collection, but there you go.  I've tried to get into Bradbury once or twice and failed.  His Martian Chronicles , in particular, resisted all my best efforts.  This short story, however, worked like a charm.  The sense of atmosphere in particular is masterfully done (a sort of Tom Sawyer strays into Edgar Allan Poe).  My only complaint is that there isn't more of it, but apparently Bradbury already fixed that by expanding the story into Something Wicked This Way Comes. This raise...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Broken Wings: The Platypus Watches Trinity Blood

My questions were not all answered.  That's par for the course when dealing with anime.  Most anime is based on manga.  That means that an immense amount of plot and character development from a 24+ volume series must be condensed into 24 30 minute episodes.  In many cases, the anime is produced before the manga is even finished.  Thus, not having a satisfactory conclusion to an anime series is par for the course.  Most times, I accept this and shrug it off.  In the case of "Trinity Blood," however, I found its incomplete ending oddly fitting.  Let me explain. "Trinity Blood" is chiefly about brokenness.  The ending song with its chorus of "my broken wings" gives it away.  The setting, a post-apocalyptic Europe, gives it away as well.  In fact, every one of the characters in the world of "Trinity Blood" is broken in some way.  We see a young Pope, broken by the political machinations of his older siblings.  We see a y...
1 comment
Read more