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Once, Fred Scott and I lived as neighbors in houses that sat side by side on Fifth Street in Southeast, D.C. Ma and Daddy moved us to their first house in 1971 after years of living in an apartment in Parklands.

Like my father, Fred’s Pops (of course we called him Mister Scott) worked hard, laughed hard, and lived with that unsung dedication which always makes me think of advice that Daddy always gave me: do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do!

So in May 2020, Fred Scott, now a grown man, started a post on Facebook like this:

“I thought I would share this story this morning with my FB family and friends which caused me to break down and cry this morning.”

Read the rest and you’ll see he meant tears of joy, and you’ll see why I’m so deeply moved.

“My mom gave me my fathers wallet years ago and I never thought about going through it because there was nothing in it [–] so I thought[;] he had this picture of me tucked away. if you really know me[,] you know how private I am. I’m going to show this to my daughter who never had the chance to meet her beloved and wonderful grandfather who was the best father and caring man that you will ever meet. I know his spirit is always with me and all his kids. I will see you again and I miss you so much R.I.P. DADDY I LOVE YOU.“

Like a shocking reveal to an inspiring story, ‘… this picture of me tucked away …’ was a school photo of Fred as an elementary school student!

Everyday, Mr. Scott carried his little boy’s photo. Everyday, Mr. Scott reminded himself why he worked so hard. Erryday until he died!

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After international viewings of video showing Mr. Floyd suffocated, U.S. Representative from Boston Ayanna Pressley wrote on Twitter on May 26, 2020:

“Just for a moment, I am going to drown out the images of profiled, surveilled, policed, lynched, choked, brutalized & murdered black boys & men w/images of their joy. It won’t erase the ache, agony & fear, but joy is an act of resistance too. Add your #blackboyjoy #blackmanjoy.”

On May 27, @wodouble22 wrote Representative Pressley: “YOU literally have the power to introduce legislation to protect Black people and hold police accountable but you’re talking about posting some damn pictures. No wonder they can kill us with impunity….SMDH.”

Igniting a thread…debating value of the images…in a classic case of either/or thinking:

Two examples:

@DuaneAMoody wrote: “You can’t symbolically do away with the ugliness of this country by countering that ugliness with pictures and not POLICY!! Lord, you new folks are proving useless as well. I just don’t know what to do after we vote in supposed progressives who STILL draw on symbolism.”

@_AVBAD wrote: “Drown it out by drafting a bill or proposing some legislation that protects us! This is our political class, black people. Notice how useless they are, posting feel good content, during our slow genocide. #MinneapolisPoliceMurderdHim #MinneapolisPD”

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The thread of photos on May 27 was LOOOOONG!

The photos featured all generations, all complexions. There were photos from all over the U.S., and from Africa. Photos featured dudes wearing suits and swim trunks. Obvious activists and cats in more quiet settings. Grandparents posted. Fathers, Mothers, Aunties, Uncles posted. Brothers, Sisters, and Cousins posted. Photos showed men and boys playing ball, playing trumpets; with their daughters, with their sons, with their Homeboys, with their frat brothers.

The call for these images was appropriate. Y’all know I’ve been SHOUTING this call for years, most recently in my Faces of the Black Man of Happiness social media campaign See You … Emanating a Sense of Joy on Instagram @seeyou247.

That so many folks were inspired to post photos reflects vitality that too typically goes unheralded. Vitality that at its best actually keeps us inspired to organize, fight in legislative arenas, take to the street. Pressley obviously tapped an emotional vein to have inspired posts by such an invigorating cross-section of folks.

It’s a measure of how wounded we are that even a call to pause ‘just for a moment’ from being society’s bulls eye seems too long for some folks, as if genuine joy doesn’t deserve to be celebrated, as if Black men should be only mourned, only fought for, only used as a cause, only be the poster child of a slogan.

In this case, attacking a legislator such as Pressley, though well within the job description for a public official, seems sigh-inducing. From the beginning of her career in Congress, she’s consistently raised her voice for a humane vision in bills she’s (co)sponsored, including one that would end the principle of qualified immunity, in which police officers and other public officials are shielded from lawsuits in the course of doing their jobs.

Already Pressley has endured (and more than held her own) a national game of the dozens with Trump Devoid of Funk, who derisively and dismissively said that Representatives Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar made up “the Squad” whose members, all U.S. citizens, were asked in a tweet: “…why don’t they go back…’ to their ‘countries.’”

When racist-dehumanizing mythology is the foundation of social attack, then you better bet that the use of ‘some damn pictures’ (not to mention film and other media) MUST be a part of the quilt of conceptions and strategies and actions of resistance and renewal and restoration. 

“The endeavor to affirm the dignity of human life cannot be waged without pictures, without representational justice….” wrote Sarah Lewis in ‘Vision & Justice: Guest Editor’s Note’ for the special issue of Aperture magazine. “American citizenship has long been a project of vision and justice.”

Critically, In the face of lethal relentlessness, these photos belong to a long righteous tradition of creative disturbance on behalf of our humanity.

The photos do NOT represent powerless ‘symbolic’ celebrations in the face of overpowering enemies. They are NOT trying to convince our enemies of our humanity.

Just scan the eloquence of the captions — even at the pace of a Twitter feed. The posted photos prove that we, the people are the sacred audience for these breathtaking images!

In most viewers, smiling at these photos, laughing at these photos, smiling and laughing WITH these joyful human beings, absolutely ignites a gratifying implosion. Absolutely ignites that cascade of brain chemistry and visceral response, which restore or revive our inspiration and motivation to ACT with ethical determination and discernment as citizens. That expansive cascade represents “an inner, life-changing shift,” in Lewis’s words.

(And we damn sure know the visceral rush of that negative chemical cascade triggered by the viral videos of the murders of Mr. Floyd and too many others!)

How effing ahistorical is it to rant that these photos are not part of ‘The Struggle.’ As if we don’t have the right to grieve and mourn along with our right to rage and resist.

These photos are a reflection of what already exists.

Happiness as Geology. As Nature. As Human Hunger.

Happiness as Refreshing Protection. As Motivating Counterspell.

Happiness marked by individuality and distinction.

These photos are now part of the public record, and reflect what Lewis calls the “gravity of this connection between vision and justice.”

These photos illustrate our relentless, and parallel, Oral History of Happiness.

Like Fred Scott’s picture, these photos tell no lie!

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “…  I understand and embrace the wonderful African American humanity with which we forged joy out of insanity. But it’s time to forge joy from joy, ignite happiness from happiness, to spiral inward to get to an indivisible irradiation, whose fragrance is exhaled as part of each breath we take. Want to be happy. Will be happy. Become ornery about happiness. What happiness can I cultivate when I don’t have to look over my shoulder? What endorphins will I release – in my body and into the body politic – by singing of myself, singing to myself…being myself…again…? What ecstasy? For ourselves and for others we love …?” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

Here’s another embossed Metro Moment:

I saw a brother striding to exit the train. Just before he stepped through open doors, he stuffed a roll of U.S. currency into the hand of a Latina holding her baby. Could have been a dollar, could have been a thousand. Body language suggested they were strangers and that I’d just witnessed an act of generosity, which was the inference drawn by this Black man of happiness.

I do keep my eyes peeled for public beauty. While on Metro, I’m people-watching big time. And no doubt, riding the trains and buses of LA, I witness America’s pain [homeless riders, drunk individuals, bold individuals shouting, selling, bullying …].

Yet I stay bent on peeping ‘Joy Vignettes!’ And often I’m a witness to America’s kindness.

I love witnessing adolescents, hoodie-wearing, pants sagging, shouting, ‘Thanks bus driver,’ when they clamber out the back door.

I’ve witnessed old heads holding brown bags of wine, or a half-pint of liquor, cheerily giving accurate directions to a family of European tourists.

I once smiled witnessing a 20-something young cat look up from his drawing pad to patiently explain to a dude smelling like four or five yesterdays:

‘No, bruh, you on the wrong train; you need to get off and go back to 7^th & Metro.’

And all riders, whether we notice or not, are surrounded by “innovative, award-winning visual and performing arts” integrated into Metro stations.

According to Metro’s website, “Metro Art … connects people, sites and neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County… improving the visual quality of transit environments and creating a sense of place….” 

Unable to ride the Metro during the Covid 19 pandemic, I’ve missed entering the subtle fields of beauty that public art provides to stations.

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I see public art as, like, boutonnieres and corsages, which I wear like I’m heading off to the prom as I move through Metro stations.

At Union Station, I actually walk with a dancer’s attitude, when I gaze up at Richard Wyatt’s eighty-foot long mural that contains images of Native Americans and settlers of the LA basin as well as contemporary Angelenos in a row of dignified faces. It’s part of City of Dreams/River of History that also includes an undulating aquarium by May Sun that holds 7,500 gallons of water and is populated with indigenous coastal fish.

Or I bop rhythmically to “Take the A Train” playing as part of artist Bill Bell’s installation featuring twelve vertical light sticks producing varying patterns of light and color beside the escalator to the red and purple lines.

“Take the A Train” was written by Billy Strayhorn, genius composer, arranger, and cultural icon. Duke Ellington said that Strayhorn was my “right arm, my left arm, all the eyes on the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head and his in mine,” according to an exhibition I swooned over at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City.

And in some wonderful way of the world, Mr. Strayhorn’s great niece, Robin Strayhorn, has been an artistic muse and colleague of mine since the early 2000’s, when we began working together in classrooms and on public art projects. Robin’s color-infused art, including her public art, keeps my senses alert to awe in my life.

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Robin’s public art can be found all over Southern California. The Ontario International Airport features her Terrazzo Floor and Tile Mural. There’s her Central Avenue Jazz Park Mural and her Morningside Community Mural. You can find her work adorning the Hyde Park Branch Public Library and the Ascot Branch Public Library. Robin’s striking tile work is also featured at the Ted Watkins Park Flagpole and Pool House, Enterprise Park Pool House, and Gigante Supermarket.

And at Metro’s Imperial/Wilmington Station, she co-created with Michael Massenburg the marvelously elemental Pathways to Freedom, a tiled bench that evokes the bench bus seat Rosa Parks refused to relinquish in 1955.

∞

Originally, I wanted to jump in a car with Robin and interview her when we stopped at each of her public art projects. During the pandemic, I had to settle for a telephone Q/A, which I’ve excerpted in closing below.

Q: Why do you make public art?

Strayhorn: I like the idea of working with the community to create something that’s uplifting for people and to enliven people’s daily experience…. [Her public art practice was inspired by a 2004 trip to Spain, where she was blown away by the “artistic adventure of public art” by architect Antoni Gaudi.]

How did you get started making public art?

Strayhorn: I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I became interested, however, I do remember I was exhibiting my work in Atlanta at the National Black Arts Festival. Varnette Honeywood inspired me to go. Showed me what to do, how to package my artwork, how to ship it. … I was there and remember running into Michael Massenburg,  and I mentioned that I had a strong desire to work in the public art realm. I wanted a wider audience. Michael said he’d just completed his first public art project. Within a year, I received a phone call from a friend who had purchased some of my artwork telling me she had given my phone number to Lydia Kennard, at the time the Executive Director of Los Angeles World Airports. I was an emerging artist at the time. We were all invited to create proposals for the Ontario International Airport. That is how I got started. And I was able to create couple of designs for the Ontario Airport.

I was nervous. It was a fast-track situation. Varnette again helped me. She said you need to look at something you’ve already done and expand on that. I had these mask-like images that I used to take into classes for kids to color. I ended up using those. I expanded upon them. Varnette encouraged me to look at what’s already there. ‘They already like your colors and your work,’ Varnette said, ‘so go with something you already have and that they’ve already shown interest in.’ She gave me so much other advice.

Recently, I saw a movie on Netflix that was filmed in Ontario airport, with Meryl Streep and Jeffery Wright. I saw my work, the terrazzo floor. I was, like, ‘Oh cool!’ I paused it and I took a screen shot. It was motivating to see it. A reminder to me of what’s possible.

What do you want your public art to accomplish?

Strayhorn: I want it to be inviting and to be aesthetically pleasing. I want it to aesthetically enhance the environment, to add to, and not take away, from the environment. I want it to be relevant to the community that it serves. In some cases, I want it to get people to think about something, or to inspire them. When I created the floor design at Ontario Airport, I wanted the art to be playful and welcoming, to give them, like, a blast of energy. One day I had to go there and get some better photographs of the floor. [I was told that a] lot of children are drawn to the mural. They like to jump on certain parts of the mural. Once it’s out there, it’s for everybody. It’s like giving birth to something, but it’s not for yourself. It’s for the whole community.

∞

Yes yes yes … People get ready there’s a train a coming.

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… HAPPINESS BURNS WITHIN: …One man’s life-affirming grito, shouted in the uncensored voice of a ‘long-distance runner’ for what’s refreshing and marvelous and courageous about being a man of witness and participation and conscience .…” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

With my youngest daughter Adenike, who celebrates a major birthday in July, I laugh, I grieve, I listen, I counsel, I encourage, I support, I debate, I argue, I learn.

I’m humbled and amazed at how close we’ve become in her adulthood.

In a 2018 TEDx Pasadena Talk we discussed our courageous collaboration of renewal after she revealed that her former stepfather sexually assaulted her.

Ironically, as I meditate on her upcoming birthday, that’s not the phenomenal part of our journey and our relationship that I want to celebrate here.

What’s amazing, to put it simply, is how we are living family as it really is. No formulas, just exceptional experiences grounded on a mutual goal of maintaining honesty, reliability, and trust.

Halfway through 2020, she’s even got me joyfully grimacing on Instagram and Facebook and co-creating internet programming.  

On January 25, 2020, we launched season one of a new podcast, Conversating with Pops’nAde, featuring 10 episodes of thoughtful, concise conversations between us.

We’re also producing ROAD TRIPPING, an unscripted web series, which will feature us taking road trips in search of ‘Celebration Conversations’ with men and women describing triumphs over trauma and pinpointing joy on their journeys.

All this conversating – and y’all know my Moms is turning over in her grave! – embodies our mantra: “We’re all worth healing and no silence is good that keeps you from talking to people who can help you.“

∞

Stooping in front of Ade to say goodbye in 1984 was my biggest mistake. Stooping in front of Ade at Baltimore Washington International airport before taking her brother with me to the Bay Area is the biggest mistake of my life. Agreeing to a court order that separated a four-year-old baby sister from her seven-year-old big brother, a big brother from his baby sister, was the biggest mistake of my life. I squatted inches from her sadness. Masking my own. I didn’t allow myself to fall into the shadows in her eyes. I failed to prioritize her pain. I whispered platitudes and told her we’d be together soon. Violated my father’s oath, my poet’s oath, against clichés and lies and pedestrian language. I can still see the betrayal on her beautiful blank face, stooping in front of Ade to say I’m leaving on a jet plane. How CLUELESS to think this scorched moment would resolve itself without inflaming our futures. My lack of discernment was really only a 25-year-old father’s fevered wish that divorce should allow me to accelerate past the pain. It would be three years before we saw each other again. Tell me a bedtime story about loss and resuscitation.

∞

It is phenomenal that my kid still wants to love me, still wants to work with me.

The elemental lessons for me? Live your WHOLE Life! Say EVERYTHING! Acknowledge when you’ve wreaked havoc and not happiness. Work on honoring the mysterious and making the miraculous. Live your ‘love with accountability,’ a magnificent concept and turn of phrase by Aishah Shahidah Simmons, editor of an anthology of the same name, to which Ade and I contributed.

My work to convert mistakes into wisdom, misunderstanding into mutual gain, loss into dedication, and paralysis into baby steps, has been threaded with candor, regret and atonement. I work to re-consecrate my father’s oath, my poet’s oath, without sentimentality. I own my past without sinking into its worst configurations. I hope Ade and I will continue to redefine family so it reflects the healthiest and most empathetic configuration we can shape.

Our arrival in 2020 has been fueled by the virtuoso art of CONVERSATING. Two folks, way past the biological facts of life, two adults, two histories inflamed by loss, continue to tell each other they remain valuable to each other. Two adults tell each other they believe in each other, when they could have chosen the painful comfort of silence. Two adults have found joy in the labor to keep their love intact, their initiative intact, their curiosity, laughter, and collaboration intact. Two adults have chosen to walk together guided by a genuine compact to live as family for the rest of their lives.

∞

She tells me that my ring tone on her current phone sounds like the rotary or push button phones of my youth! I laugh because I do embrace my Inner Cantankerous OG, who can absolutely hear those phones blaring in his memory!  

But I remember and prefer my ring tone from one of her first smart phones. She said it always jazzed her up, and jazzed up all nearby anybodies who heard her phone announce that it was Pops on the line.

My favorite ring tone?

After all our CONVERSATING, what else but … Let’s Groove!

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… I thought I had the hang of it. But later that week, somebody at day camp unhooked Ade’s plaits and substituted two smart cornrows. I got to soul searching again. Why didn’t I let somebody cornrow me out my constriction and be done with it? I was feeling out my league and locked out the circle of wisdom where these grooming secrets were passed on. Deep down, I was also plain embarrassed: Here I am, a grown man and I can’t even fix my own daughter’s hair. Then I got pissed! Here I was actually braiding her hair, but still having women redo styles without asking me for my permission, or asking whether or not I’d like their help. Turn the tables, I thought. Let me or some other man — day care director, boyfriend, husband, or candy man on the corner —  put his hands on one of their daughters, and be talking about, ‘Girl, I’m just doing a touch-up.’ Homegirl be cussing me out, dialing 911 on my ass, and  feeling around for a knife — all the while holding her daughter close, redoing the hairstyle, and wiping imaginary sleep out the child’s eyes!

My breakthrough came after an intense conversation with my friend Nikky Finney. She encouraged me to keep trying. Despite the tears, Nikky assured me, Adenike appreciated my hard work and would remember my determination all her life. Then, fingering her magnificent dreads, she fondly reminisced about the snap crackle and pop of her own mother’s hands. That night, I dreamed I had been going about it all wrong: I saw braiding as a chore, instead of as an opportunity for special intimacy with my daughter. I was too tentative. Every time she whimpered, I eased up and brushed only the surface of her hair. My dream also offered me some practical advice: Use more Dax Jack! Don’t make her Little Richard or nobody, but spread a little more sheen boy! I had a New Attitude our next session. We had gone swimming, and I got down, if I do say so myself. After I used shampoo and conditioner, her hair draped damply and unruly. But this time, with comb in hand, I took a deep breath and easily separated small portions until her scalp peeked out. Section by section, I parted her hair, fingering dressing down each row, until her crown had a fragrant glow to it. Handling Ade’s hair took my breath away. Slowly I braided and my satisfaction … deepened twist by tug by criss by cross. I transformed her Head of Hair into patterned plaits. Four well-woven strands and she hadn’t moaned at all. She looked into the mirror, rubbed her hands over the job, and nodded approvingly. I was fired up. Once again, I felt under control as a father. A part of me — quiet as its kept — was gleeful that Black women aren’t born knowing how to braid hair. Mostly, though, I felt good reconfirming that with perseverance, dedication and imagination I could learn to speak a loving, painless language to my daughter through her thick, healthy hair …” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

“… Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end. You must make your own map.” Joy Harjo  [A Map to the Next World]

“… won’t you celebrate with me … that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.” Lucille Clifton  [won’t you celebrate with me]

“… And who will join this standing up … we are the ones we have been waiting for …” June Jordan  [poem for South African Women]

“… Who stole the hearts and minds of the humble hard-working folk until they too became moralistic and self-righteous: senators, bishops, presidents, missionaries, corporation presidents?” Simon Ortiz  [From Sand Creek]

“… Blessed/are those who listen/when no one is left to speak …” Linda Hogan  [Blessings]

“… sadness is a chemical one atom away from joy/heroism is a spiritual one history away from slavery …” Peter J. Harris  [Complete Already]

∞

During a pandemic, I remain dedicated to Wreaking Happiness, in the spirit of human ancestors on this land – especially Indigenous and my own cultural ancestors – who set a magnificent example, that can be studied empirically, of lifting every vision and voice into song and action despite encountering social ugliness of epic proportions.

I remain dedicated to singing in the chorus of human beings keeping their eyes on the prize of public health and wise governance. I remain dedicated to working for the world we want, and to the work covered in this succinct statement from Yes! Magazine: “We must be willing to get our hands dirty, to both try new things and trust age-old knowledge, and to be uncomfortable.”

I will continue to sing with the chorus of cultural workers, journalists, Inspectors General, loyal opposition, and Everyday People who see it as our ethical duty to illuminate and resist the anti-democratic, racist, self-serving, truth-deformed, and power-grabbing politics radiating from the White House and from demagogues and policy makers from Brazil, Hungary, India and other national houses of power around the world.

“The study of happiness never was a luxury to be postponed until more serene, peaceful times,” writes Sissela Bok in her bookExploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (2011). “… From earliest times, views of human happiness have been set forth against the background of suffering, poverty, disease, and the inevitability of death.”  [Page 5 and 6]

“Trying to envision “somewhere in advance of nowhere,” as poet Jayne Cortez puts it, is an extremely difficult task, yet it is a matter of great urgency,” writes Robin D.G. Kelley, in his book,Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down….”  [Page xii Preface]

“… And my mama – not one to traffic in metaphors, usually, being a very scientific woman – would add, ‘Yeah, speak your speak, ‘cause every silence you maintain is liable to become first, a lump in your throat, then a lump in your lymphatic system,’” writes Toni Cade Bambara, in ‘The Education of a Storyteller,’ from Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, Fictions, Essays, And Conversations [page 255]

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As I take daily walks during the pandemic, I wave to many folks out with children and dogs. What a joy to exchange well wishes with men and women exercising their bodies and smartly claiming public space. Also, I see folks, fully masked, whose body language suggests they are terrified. They lower their heads. They practically scurry to cross the street, to stride away from my path, or to accelerate past me, as if Covid-19 could simply leap between us like a vile ninja! It takes all kinds, as Moms used to say!

Folks can get sick, be sick, without inevitable death and social dysfunction.

Society can choose democratic disbursement of our tax dollars, wage replacement grants to small business. Leaders can communicate with an overall rigor and candor on behalf of public service beyond the platitudes of Instagram notecards (although I especially co-sign this IG notecard: “If you think artists are useless try to spend your quarantine without music, books, poems, movies paintings and games.”)

Society, in the elemental sense of that word, doesn’t have to embrace fealty to Boeing or the hubris of other so-called too-big-to-fail brands, or real estate moguls, or Dark Money puppeteers. Society doesn’t have to privatize production of medical equipment, or tests, or the production of vaccines, or eliminate the oversight of disbursement of public dollars.

We have evidence of so many more humane visions. You no doubt are a witness through your own prisms, your own analyses or processes for change. You no doubt can pinpoint welcome examples of resistance, persistence, and humane existence.

Among mine: Center for the Study of Political Graphics, with its collection of political posters “advancing the power of art to educate and inspire people to action.”

The alternative or People’s Budget produced in the U.S. House of Representatives by the Progressive Caucus, representing a vision of what control of public resources could do if We the People were the focus of national expenditures.

The Poor People’s Campaign – A National Call for Moral Revival has proferred a humane agenda both during the pandemic and as a larger motivating vision.

Through whichever lens you view Life on this American Earth, it’s important to remember – as a starting point – that government is ours, and that our ideas, our insights, our priorities, are as important as those whose income allows them obscene access, criminal influence, and quid pro quo after quid pro quo.   

“Radical change for Ella Baker was about a persistent and protracted process of discourse, debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle,” writes Barbara Ransby in her book,Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: a Radical Democratic Vision.Ella Baker, like Bayard Rustin, is one of those human ancestors whose life-long, often anonymous, service instructs and inspires me. “If larger and larger numbers of communities were engaged in such a process, she reasoned, day in and day out, year after year, the revolution would be well under way. Ella Baker understood that laws, structures, and institutions had to change in order to correct injustice and oppression, but part of the process had to involve oppressed people, ordinary people, infusing new meaning into the concept of democracy and finding their own individual and collective power to determine their lives and shape the direction of history.” [Page 1]

∞

Even with obvious anti-democratic, racist, self-serving, truth-deformed, and power-grabbing politics radiating from the White House, I am grateful I can find in my life, on social media, in journalism, examples of inspired Mutual Aid, Mutual Encouragement, and nationwide evidence of a society inspired to see beyond pandemic. I’m grateful I can see folks all marshaling digital tools to mitigate isolation during Shelter in Place orders.

Thank you dancers, poets, musicians, political thinkers, health care professionals, urban gardeners, moral and spiritual practitioners. And thanks to my own relatives zooming our stories, history, laughter, and political commentary from D.C.-Maryland down I-95 to North Carolina and Florida and across I-10 to California, where my youngest daughter and I live and work.

In Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s bracing book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, she mentions a term called “Terminal Narratives” by anthropologist Michael V. Wilcox: “accounts of Indian histories which explain the absence, cultural death, or disappearance of Indigenous peoples.” [Page 42]

Dunbar-Ortiz critiques a school of thought asserting that the Indigenous-European Encounter would inevitably have debilitated and disappeared Native folk, because of their lack of immunity to what were, to them, ‘novel’ virus [e.g. smallpox, measles].

“Such an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable,” Dunbar-Ortiz states, because it fails to account for the impact of relentless structural forces [military, ideological, religious, political policies, among others]. [Page 39] Terminal Narratives “… emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so,” according to Dunbar-Ortiz, and refuses to “accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide.” [Pages 41-42].

For me, Wreaking Happiness means resisting any type of Terminal Narratives during the Covid-19 pandemic. And pointing out that the early impact of the disease on who survives, and who thrives, is being (and will be) affected in such a manner that even trillion dollar ‘investments’ of our tax dollars are more akin to schemes mostly benefiting the same folk and institutions currently profiting from contemporary inequitable social circumstances, such as prison overcrowding; lack of health care for all and an effective, compassionate service superstructure for all; less-than-livable wages and overpriced housing; courts stacked with pre-fab judges who fail Bar Association muster; targeted sweeps by ICE, Border Patrol, and local police; and the disappearing of undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and homeless neighbors.  

“The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally,” writes Arundhati Roy in her essay, ‘The pandemic is a portal.’ “But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?”

∞

Robin D.G. Kelley entitles one chapter of Freedom Dreams: ‘Keeping It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous,’ tracing rich connections and influences of Black creativity and surrealism, which he describes as a “living, mutable, creative vision of a world where love, play, human dignity, an end to poverty and want, and imagination are the pillars of freedom.” [Page 158]

Cultivating the Marvelous is a liberating way to activate my brain’s biochemistry and supercharge my quest to weave hopeful stories, and seek lush motivation to live a life that will make proud my late mother and father and the other unpretentious aunties and uncles who imprinted me with Each One Teach One.

Cultivating the Marvelous is my antidote, neutralizer, and converter against cynicism, doubt, and anxiety, amidst the onslaught of mythological greed, selfishness, and supremacies of all kinds from power elites implementing social strategies drawn from the abysmal laboratories of feudalism, slavery, colonialism, Nazism, and their vile scapegoating justifications.

“When we become immersed in a story, the brain shifts from attending to our immediate surroundings to imagining the details of the narrative world,” states a summary of research on the website of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. “Understanding this process and its underlying neurobiology may be a key to understanding how stories exert their influence.”

Though I don’t need brain scans to know that a well-rendered story enraptures, I welcome rigorous science on the impact of envisioning another world, and “the brain mechanisms that mediate narrative immersion.”

For now, in closing, I echo the question in New Edition’s hit song: Can you stand the rain?

I can, I believe, with Hope and History, and so I resolve in communion with uplifting words from two generations of the inspiring Harding family, heirs to Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin’s legacy. Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Dr. Vincent Harding, compassionate participants in the Black-led human rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960s, make me proud to be a human being.

First, scholar Rachel Elizabeth Harding on her mother Rosemarie Freeney Harding:

“Mama had an acute and gentle intelligence about navigating the world…,” writes Harding in the intro to a book she co-authored with her late Moms, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering. “…Her understanding of social justice activism situated struggle very comfortably alongside hospitality and mothering. This is a meaning of activism I have not seen widely discussed among scholars, but the women of the Southern Freedom Movement (and their families) know about it. More than anything, it is an activism based in “being family” – bringing people into the house, literally and figuratively. Making room and making welcome. Letting people know there is room for them in the vision, in the struggle, in the nation, in the family.”

And from Ms. Harding later on in Remnants:  “One of the most exciting things for me about being in the freedom movement was discovering other people who were compelled by the Spirit at the heart of our organizing work, and who were also interested in the mysticism that can be nurtured in social justice activism.  …There was an energy moving in those times. Something other than just sit-ins and voter registration and Freedom Schools. Something represented by these signal efforts but broader. As I traveled around the country in the sixties, it seemed to me that the nation – from the largest community to the smallest – was permeated with hope; that people can bring about transformation; that what we do matters. [Page 168]

And from our late Big Brother, Dr. Vincent Harding, from Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement:

“Somehow, in a time like our own, when the capacity for imagining appears to be endangered …, it seems especially crucial to introduce our students to the meaning of such a question as, “Is America Possible?” … Indeed, it is precisely in a period of great spiritual and social hunger like our own that we most need to open minds, hearts, and memories to those times when women and men actually dreamed of new possibilities for our nation, for our world, for their own lives. It is now that we may be able to convey the stunning idea that dreams, imagination, vision, and hope are actually powerful mechanisms in the creation of new realities. Especially when the dreams go beyond speeches and songs to become embodied, to take on flesh, in real, hard places.” [Page 178]  

… Like during a pandemic — when we need all citizens of witness and liberation to become alchemists of our most humane future …

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… I dream of The Black Man of Happiness…. He is vibration, receptor, animating force. He wants to be well, to paraphrase Toni Cade Bambara’s opening line in The Salt Eaters. He is drum major of The Turn. Healing Trajectory. Bedrock. He is quest for perfection, the rumble beneath our doubts, the resonance of anticipation, heroic sensibility, point guard. Just standing there, you can hear the tone of reconciliation and resurrection emanating from his spiritual combustion …” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop