Carol Bergman

 

We can't stop here, this is bat country.

 

-Hunter J Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

 

Do all men kill the things they do not love?

 

William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

 

 

 

 

The credentialed journalists in the courtroom were writing furiously with pen and paper. Clearly, they hadn't lost the skill.  But it seemed quaint nonetheless, and telling in its retro ordinariness. The basic tools of reporting were engaged: listen, record, remain skeptical. But once in the studio these scribes let it rip with gleeful analysis and sounded almost righteous at times. Who could blame them? Who can blame any of us? We're all wrung out, waiting for the day that the man who has created such havoc in our body politic is taken away in shackles. Back in the 18th century, not that long ago in many respects, he would have been hung or drawn and quartered. Now, we are "civilized," evolved, and the rule of law presses on, albeit slow as molasses.

 

Then there is the fear factor.  A journalist on MSNBC and a juror or two expressed dismay at feeling uneasy. Let us applaud their courage and, yes, thank them for their service.

 

And I wasn't even planning to write about this today. Not at all. I was thinking of something else entirely: a bat in our apartment. The day had already been permeated with fear and loathing in the courtroom, in the Middle East, on the college campuses, and as we sat down to relax in front of the last episode of Astrid,  a delightful French detective series on Netflix, I spotted a strange swiftly moving black shape scurry into my office from the living room. It looked like a tarantula and I shrieked, a damsel in distress, my husband the knight in shining armor as he wielded a broom and I held my phone's flashlight aloft in the closet. Yikes! What was that? How did it get in here? Will it harm us?

 

We attacked it ruthlessly.

 

Then it was over. The creature was dead. We scooped it up and put it into a plastic bag without touching it. "I think it's a bat," my nature-savvy husband said. We looked up "bats," we read the word "rabies," got more freaked out. And then, remorse. We wanted to apologize to the endangered creature we had killed, a wee brown bat, so essential to our ecosystem. And the more existential question:  Why do we so mindlessly kill what we fear?

 

Self-preservation and survival is a reflex action when we are attacked or threatened unexpectedly, our sense of safety shattered, that's a given.  But why respond with obliterating force when such force is not necessary. The metaphor is obvious, I am sure. Do I have to spell it out? What would happen if we resisted animal instinct and gazed at the life form that has become our—real or imagined—enemy, in all its nakedness and vulnerability? Dear reader, can you answer this question?

 

 

 

In 1964, the Ku Klux Klan murdered Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Schwerner while working to register Black American voters during Mississippi's Freedom Summer. Their bodies were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam; it took 41 years to bring the main perpetrator, Edgar Ray Killen, to justice. Their deaths were a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement, catalyzing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

--from the press releases of the Andrew Goodman Foundation and

NY State Senate Resolution 2157

 

 

 

My Walden School alumni email chain was busy this week with news of a resolution that has been passed in the New York State Senate to honor Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner 60 years after their murder. Walden was a small, progressive school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one class per grade, the students moving up together K-12, and families interconnected personally and politically. I got there in the 11th grade after I'd been beaten up by a gang of girls in a public school and my refugee parents, in desperation, and knowing little of the city private school landscape, secured me a scholarship. I was two years younger than everyone, felt undereducated and lost, but also inspired by exceptional teachers and the kinetic activist culture of the school.

 

Walden remained a close community until the school merged with New Lincoln in 1988. Andrew Goodman's murder was a communal galvanizing tragedy, as it still is today. Many of my classmates knew the Goodman family; I did not. And when news arrived of the resolution, the email chain got hot. I was mostly touched by a few shared reminisces. A future historian may appreciate these stories, and make good use of them.

 

With everyone's permission, I'll share three memories that appeared on the email chain here:

 

From Judy (Fischman) Johnson:

 

Note: Andy is Andrew Goodman, Carolyn and Bobby are his parents, David and Johnny his brothers, Bernie is Judy's father, a well known attorney, and Mickey is Michael Schwerner.

 

 

 I often think of Andy. June 21-August 4. My parents, brother, and I spent every evening at Carolyn and Bobby's apartment with many family friends holding a vigil. On the evening of August 4th, someone had given Carolyn and Bobby tickets to the NY Philharmonic and insisted that they go. I don't remember where Johnny was, but David was home alone. The phone rang. David answered. It was Lyndon Johnson. He told David that the bodies had been found. David called my father. Bernie said that he would go to Lincoln Center and get Carolyn and Bobby. 

 

When Bernie got to Philharmonic Hall, he found the house manager and explained the situation. The manager let my father into the Hall while the concert was in progress. As my father searched one of the aisles, a scream rang out. Carolyn recognized Bernie's physique and knew there was only one reason why he was there. 

 

When Andy went to Mississippi, he was required to fill in a bail bond card with a contact person. My father was his contact. My family was also close to the Schwerners. They had been friends for over 20 years. When Mickey Schwerner was deciding who to take with him on that fateful night, my father was convinced that Mickey chose Andy because he saw Bernie's name on his bail bond card. Mickey would be riding with a young man who also knew Bernie. They had a friend in common. 

 

My father was also a point person arranging the payoff to the informant. I wish I remembered more about that. I only remember that he told me he was involved in the payoff. There was also a payment to a psychic who predicted that the boys' bodies would be found in a ditch. 

 

From Jane (Nisselson) Assimakopoulos:

 

I was pretty close to Andy in school. We used to have play dates after class and play with his electric trains; then we were camp-mates for a few summers at Camp Regis in the Adirondacks, and even boyfriend and girlfriend when we were too young for that to mean much. In my senior year (his junior year) at Walden I coached him for learning his lines, in French, for a production of Sartre's Les Mains Sales, and the last time I saw him was the summer after our freshman year in college when he and Carolyn drove out to my mom's place in Poundridge, NY and we talked mostly about his interest in theater and his budding actor aspirations. Then, the summer after my senior year, I was in Boston doing a make-up course at BU so I could get enough credits to graduate and go off to Greece. I spent that summer glued to the radio every afternoon until I finally learned, from my mother, not the radio, that Andy had been found. I missed the funeral because my class was not quite over, but mom and I drove to Carolyn's summer place somewhere in Westchester, I think, so I could see her before I left. I remember her  hugging me in pain and in desperation as if I was the last thing left to her of Andy. I wrote her and Bobby a long letter from Greece in which I talked about my own feelings of loss and how Andy's death was a piece of my own future forever cut off.

From Gabrielle (Schupf) Spiegel:

 

It is hard to think it has been 60 years. I still consider the worst day of my life the day I sat with Carolyn at her house waiting for them to bring Andy's body back.

 

 

I don't recall much of what we said, other than the fact that we talked about him as a wonderful classmate and good and brave friend dedicated to improving  society by promoting civil rights, the right to vote and other rights, for which he was killed. As I recall his father was especially upset—to  the extent that it was even possible to be more upset than Carolyn—perhaps  because he had not been in favor of Andy participating in the mission to the South to begin with.

 

 

  

Afterword

 

Source: NY State Senate Resolution 2157 and  the Andrew Goodman Foundation

 

        

The family members of the three murdered young people who risked their lives that summer continue to be an inspiration. Andrew's brother, and Stephen Schwerner, Michael's brother, continued the fight for civil rights in the decades that followed. David and his family created the Andrew Goodman Foundation that supports youth leadership development, voting accessibility, and social justice initiatives in campuses across the country. Reverend Julia Chaney-Moss honors her brother's memory through continuing civil rights advocacy and through her ministry. Andrew Goodman was a student at Queens College at the time of his murder and Stephen A. Schwerner, Michael's brother, was director of counseling at Queens College for many years and chair of the academic senate. Queens College President Frank H. Wu is presenting President's Medals, the college's highest administrative honor, on Thursday, May 30, 2024, at the college's 100th Commencement to Julia Chaney-Moss, David Goodman, and Stephen A. Schwerner. 

 

To learn more visit    www.andrewgoodman.org

 

 

This post is dedicated to all the disenfranchised and reluctant voters in the United States.

May we all work tirelessly to register their vote.

 

 

 

 

What in my life had ever prepared me for such a moment? Strong skepticism, on the one hand, and, on the other, poetry. And poetry, a great enthusiasm since I was a teenager, helped me through the reign of terror. The strength of the poetic images gave me solace during those hard days in Rwanda.

 

-Philippe Gaillard, "Surviving Genocide," in Another Day in Paradise; Frontline Stories From International Aid Workers

 

 

 

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the onset of the Rwandan genocide, a low-tech massacre of 800,000 men, women and children. Low-tech because the "tools" of the genocide were machetes and screwdrivers. No aerial bombardment, no tanks, no cell phones or GPS, just humans at their most bestial carrying weapons from village fields.

 

Rwanda is at peace today thanks to its National Unity and Reconciliation Commission which began its work in 2002. It was the most ambitious transitional justice process ever attempted until then. Nearly one-fifth of the surviving adult population testified before these courts, including some high-ranking officers who were eventually re-integrated into the new military. In 1999, an international court sentenced George Rutaganda, one of the most prominent leaders of the genocide, to life in prison. Across the nation, there has been accountability, testimony, even "reconciliation villages." Internationally there have been mea culpas for not stepping in to stop the genocide as it began; France and the US were well informed. But that is another long story.

 

Transitional justice, also known as truth and reconciliation, is a complex process, and a promising one, though what it might offer Israel and Palestine in their present iterations is questionable. The Rwandan tribal conflict took place within a nation-state, not between a nation-state and a terrorist organization intent on abolishing that nation-state. Once the killing fields of Gaza are cleared and rebuilt, the Jewish settlers on the West Bank are pushed back, and reformed Israeli and Palestinian governments are in place, a Palestinian state established, well maybe. But it's hard to say from the vantage of a still active brutal and brutalizing war zone what could happen. The future for now is in the conditional tense, certainly after so much collateral damage, the almost certain death of the remaining hostages, and the so-called mistaken targeting of the World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy.

 

Rwanda remains a lesson. Its history is a reminder that it doesn't take much to kill, just a few tools: a history of racism and colonialism, incendiary language, fear, mob hysteria, the decimation of the rule of law, and simple or sophisticated weapons supplied by arms dealers, including the United States. Indeed, this beloved country of mine is so awash in arms manufacture, citizen-owned assault rifles, racial hatred and domestic divisiveness, that international students are becoming wary of studying here.

 

Every year, the International Committee of the Red Cross warns in its annual report that the human consequences of local wars and forced immigrations are becoming more and more serious. At any one time more than fifty conflicts are raging around the world and some 21 million people are being forced to leave their homes as a result; 17 million become refugees. Another 300 million people are affected by disasters unrelated to war, such as earthquakes, floods and famine. Always, children are most at risk, especially those under five, and their mothers who are trying to protect them. Of the remaining population in Gaza, how many women and children have survived? We know approximately how many are dead—but how many have survived to seed the next generation and work for peace? The sad procession of Gazans walking from south to north through the pulverized landscape they once called home will retain their near-death experiences in a collective memory for generations.

 

 

This post is dedicated to all humanitarian workers, past, present, and future in celebration of their altruism, and courage.

 

To learn more about transitional justice, watch this video: https://www.ictj.org/media/5424

 

 

Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.

 

― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

 

 

I called my friend Barbara who lives in Bath, UK, for a catch-up chat the other day, and without missing a beat we began to talk about the weather. It had been a sunny day after too much rain, she told me, and she'd been working in her allotment getting it ready for planting. When she circled back later in the afternoon to admire what she'd done and decided to dig a bit more, she cut her finger which was bleeding profusely as we were talking. But the weather was more important. "How has it been there? " she asked, meaning where I am in the Mid-Hudson Valley. "No blossoms as yet, grey and wet today, more like English weather," I said. And though, like everywhere else, even English weather is changing, chatting about it has remained a constant, for which I am grateful. It's the perfect lubricant and warm-up after a hiatus in communication, and it's safe: no domestic politics or Middle-East wars, for example. We need to feel safe with one another to get into all that, and there's a lot to get into these days. Even old friends and relations are cautious with one another, I find, in an effort not to harm, to remain respectful, and to maintain a friendship. Israel-Palestine has been particularly challenging for me. Thus am I thankful for the decade I spent in London learning how to sustain a conversation about the weather before embarking on in-depth "serious" conversation. It's a skill I still find useful before an interview with a stranger as my directness often pierces privacy too quickly. Warm-ups are essential.

 

But what happens when all we talk about is the weather, when the conversation remains insipid and shallow? When we surmise, or even know, that something remains unspoken, hidden, and inaccessible? When there's no there there as Gertrude Stein once said? What then? Do we continue talking, stop talking, walk away, ask even more confrontational questions to "get the story?" It's a hard call for a journalist, an easier one for a friend, I'd say.

 

Once upon a time, I was ghosting a memoir for a once-married celebrity and had found out that he'd had an affair with his assistant when he was still married. I'd been tasked with doing a lot of background reporting to develop the content for the book, and corroborated my findings before broaching the subject. The celebrity in question was shocked by my suggestion that the "episode," as he called it, when he finally began talking about it, should become a chapter in his book. "It will sell the book," I said. But he refused. I'd pierced his privacy, or was it secrecy—the line is thin—and he had crawled back into his shell. Next time we met for our interview session, I began our conversation with the weather.

 

 

 

Who somebody really was. That was the Zone of interest.

― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

 

 

 

I woke in the night in the midst of a seminar inside a dream about The Zone of Interest, not the award-winning movie, but the 2014 book by the British writer, Martin Amis. In this dream, the participants were gathered around a large circular table in The Hague, and we had an assigned task: to determine if the film was a viable book-to-film adaptation, and to assess its impact on our deadened psyches as we teetered towards fascism in the United States and tolerated atrocity in Gaza, one atrocity compounding another. There was no food, no water, in the wasteland of my dream, only men and women of varying ages, sizes and nationalities taking turns in an unknown pecking order to expound their theories. But the discussion was not theoretical; our lives were at stake.

 

I was not surprised to have had a complex dream about the movie, which continues to haunt me in the daylight hours as I sit down to write about it. The opening sequence—a black screen with the hum of the crematoria revving up, screams, clattering shovels and guns, is so unsettling that I almost stopped breathing. When an image finally emerged, I could hardly concentrate. Was this a garden? A walled-in garden with children playing and flowers in abundance?  But once "the Commandant" appeared, I knew what I was looking at: his home behind the wall of the death camp, killing on an industrial scale, the graveyard of my grandparents and many other relatives.

 

For years, whenever I saw the grainy photos or newsreels of Auschwitz, I feared recognizing my grandmother Nanette's face. I imagined that I heard her screams. Now I am certain that I did hear them in the soundtrack of Glazer's astounding film.

 

Sometimes a friend or relative will mention they are going to visit Auschwitz on the way to or from somewhere else, perhaps Paris, the city of light, or Rome, or Barcelona, equally beautiful. I can't say, "Have an enjoyable journey," or "I hope the sun shines brightly on the day you are at Auschwitz."  I might think, silently, "Please don't show me any photographs when you return." And, these days, "Please don't post anything on Facebook or Instagram." And, now, this film in my living room, piercing my heart.

 

My husband had suggested we watch it early in the evening to create a buffer before bedtime with something lighthearted—a comedy, perhaps? But as the film wound down and we were left with the echo of the crematoria's efficient engines in our ears, we were both distraught. I made some tea and we talked. I had already decided that the film was a masterpiece, an evocation of the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt described it. I was therefore surprised when my husband did not agree. His reaction was visceral and strong: "We should not be shown murderous monsters as normal or happy without juxtaposing them with images of the horrors inside the death camp."

 

This assessment gave me pause; it has merit. But, for me, the smoke, the rooftops, the gunshots, the screams and the dissonant blue summer sky was enough. More than enough. As Naomi Klein wrote in a review of the film for The Guardian, "The concentration camp and the family home are not separate entities; they are conjoined." Indeed, it is their historic fate. So, too, Israel and Palestine; they are conjoined.

 

In the dream I had after watching the movie, we had  entered the infamous gate to the death camp, a windswept, gray day, ashes underfoot swirling around us. And my parents were forcing me to stand in the ashes and to look at the barracks and the crematoria in the distance, the barbed wire around us. In this dream, as in life, unless I witnessed what my family had endured and survived, I would no longer exist myself, I would be worthless to them, and to myself. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

 

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

 

― Susan Orlean,  The Library Book

 

 

 

 

Once again, I have been culling books. I'm not moving again, but over the years I have stored books on my daughter's shelves for safe keeping, or to pass them along. "This is a good one," I'd say, usually about a novel. But I also have enjoyed reading biographies of writers and artists, and I read a lot of history. Some of the books are in hard cover, some in paper, the pages of many browned and brittle with age, others in good condition. The books I have stored on my Kindle are safe in cyberspace, but they are only a miniscule sampling of what I have read over many years. My libraries—electronic and paper—are a personal canon, which is no more than a list of preferences and judgments about a book's value—to me. I follow my interests and curiosity, keep wish lists and read all the time, mostly to deepen and expand my knowledge base, to experience a fiction writer's gifts, or a poet's narrative voice. But books—the tangible objects—are heavy, too, and require culling, especially when one moves overseas, or from one side of the United States to the other. No move this time but my daughter has been renovating her house and asked if I would oblige.

 

I had not expected so many piles, but there they were, accumulated, dusty, sticky, awaiting my decisions about where each book should go: to the dump, to a library, to a friend, but hopefully not to my still overflowing shelves and TBR stacks. Fortunately, three libraries in my 'hood accept donations and host celebratory book sales once a year to raise revenue. But some books are ready for the recycle bin. And that's hard. I turn them round and round, flip the pages, and say goodbye. It's strange to be so attached in this way, to feel aggrieved at a book's departure, and to savor those still lined up neatly by subject and author at home as I sit down at my long table to write early each morning. Every book I have kept is worthy of rereading, I tell myself.

 

Oddly, I was not a reader as a child or even a young teen. I have no memories of being read to at bedtime—my mother was always working. Maybe I was drawing, or practicing dance steps to music on the radio. And, of course, there was television, street games with friends, and homework; I always did my homework.  I never understand how boring homework had anything to do with the books on my mother and stepfather's shelves—some in English, some in French and some in German. They were refugees having arrived in the United States without material possessions except a few photographs, clothes, bits and pieces of memorabilia if it could fit into their suitcases—and  their lives, the most precious possession of all. My mother's books became a synecdoche of her survival and she became anxious whenever I borrowed one and forgot to tell her. The space of the missing book felt like an amputation—or  even worse—a death. Maybe books were so weighted with emotion in our household that I avoided them.

 

So, I've answered my own question, I suppose:  Why did it take so long for me to become a reader? Books and what they contained—the whole world, an ancestry, and a future, a sense of safety and belonging—came into my life so late, beyond high school and into my first year of college, or the summer before to be precise. My first boyfriend was smart, musical, politically engaged, and read constantly. His family owned a chicken farm in Tom's River, NJ and I'd go down there to see him, or he would travel to see me. To my surprise, he read books, lots of them. Books spilled onto my lap and the floor whenever I climbed into the puttering, orange tin can he called a car. It was his car; he'd worked for it, earning money as a troubadour at café's and clubs. The proceeds were putting him through college and buying his books. They became my first library, a portal beyond the borders of my nuclear family.

 

He did a laisser tomber, as the French say—a dump—and I never could find out what happened to him after college. But, Steve, I have to thank you here for sharing your books at a formative time in my life. They live inside me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

 

-Bertolt Brecht

 

 

 

Judging a poetry competition in 1927, a time, like ours, of ascendant fascism, Bertolt Brecht  decided not to award a prize, considering all the entries "useless." This is exactly how I felt watching the Oscars on Sunday night. How is it possible that songs about dolls amuse us? How is it possible that a story about Oppenheimer's afflicted conscience is subsumed in cinematic tricks without accurate dialogue to contextualize the powerful images? Protected, at the moment, from the specter of war, those of us living in North America are free to indulge in such decadent chicanery, and may even find it entertaining and transformative.  I do not.  I am a child of war, raised in what my parents assumed would always be a safe haven. They are roiling in their graves.

 

A few years ago I went back to the same street where I lived alone with my mother from the ages of 1-4 years old. Even though she had casually mentioned the address to me during one of our oral history sessions, I had suppressed it. I wrote it down and kept the notation but there was only a blank space in my mind; I could not remember that I had lived there, only that I  had been told I had lived there. Also, there was a photograph of an empty room; all the walls were blank and the furniture was nondescript and minimal. A small couch, a small easy chair, a side table, one lamp. The photograph was an artifact, nothing more; it meant nothing to me. Now, for some reason, perhaps because I was preparing to move out of the city again, I decided to visit the street and record my findings, or observations. I pretended I was a detective researching the scene of a crime which gave me the emotional distance I required.

 

The apartment building dated back to the Art Deco period and the exterior was ornate. It was on 84th Street between West End Avenue and Broadway in Manhattan on the south side of the street. The entrance was on 84th Street and it had a red canopy and a doorman in a uniform standing outside. I wondered if there had always been a doorman, or if the building had "gone co-op" and therefore had become gentrified and exclusive. It was certainly not exclusive when I lived there with my mother. She was a refugee, a single parent, and her resources were limited. She held a low paying job as a nurse's aide having arrived in the United States without any English and a foreign medical license; her specialty was obstetrics and gynecology. An only child from what was once a large extended family before they were murdered in the Nazi genocide, she loved babies, and she loved me. During the day she worked with babies and old people. Though she was overqualified, she did not complain. Refugees become adept at new complex identities and these become characteristics known and understood by all who encounter them, especially their children—when their children grow into awareness. My mother did not complain, she worked hard, and expected me to do the same in school. That I knew from an early age.

 

Leaning against a low wall, I took out my phone to check my emails, a distraction from my unsettled mood. Whatever upset me was buried deep in my psyche, what the Buddhists call "store consciousness." On that particular day, I left it there. But I have been thinking about my mother a lot these past months as the war in the Middle East has intensified, and the war in Ukraine grinds on with no end in sight. And I have been thinking about the children in those particular war zones, and other war zones, how they are endangered from morning to night and even at night, and how I was spared bombs, flight, famine, murderous gangs, kidnapping, and death camps because I was born in America.

 

It is said that we walk behind our mothers, not in their shadows exactly, but in their wake. Recently I dreamt I was walking up a long stone staircase behind my mother and her small dog. She had on a taupe silk suit that matched her permed gray hair and the dog's fur. Someone said, "She likes dogs." I knew that was correct, but it wasn't me that said it. I remained silent.  Slowly, I followed my mother up the stairs. She did not know I was there because I had not as yet been born. 

 

In daylight I have continuing rhetorical questions: On what day did my mother receive news of our murdered relatives? What year was it? Did she receive a telegram, a letter, or a knock on the door from the International Red Cross? Did she collapse? Was she stoical? Did she go to work the next day, and the one after that? Did her English falter whenever she tried to ask a question? How did my mother hold her grief, or express it? Who was there when she opened the telegram from the International Red Cross, or was it a letter, or was she called into their office?  If so, who did she talk to? Did she recognize anyone in the waiting room? Did she talk to anyone in the waiting room? Or was it an ante room where they served coffee? Did she have a coffee but have difficulty swallowing the coffee? Who was there to console her?

 

    Dedicated to all the children in war zones. May they survive and prosper.

 

 

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

― George Orwell

 

 

 

I've often wondered what it must have been like to have lived in New Paltz, NY if I had been born enslaved, or emancipated in 1827 and remained indentured until the age of 25, or born free only to be out of work and forced to end my days in the Poor House.  I drove through the town for more than a decade to visit my daughter and son-in-law in Kerhonkson on the west side of the Minnewaska Ridge, famous for its rock face climbers call "The Gunks," short for the Munsee word Shawangunk, the language of the indigenous Esopus people. All those years I was oblivious to local history. I'd never stopped to read the signage in front of the library, or walked on Historic Huguenot Street past the old stone houses with their dirt floor cellars.  It was not until I moved to New Paltz in 2018 that I began to wander the town with intention and learn the history of its Dutch, English and French Huguenot settlers, all of them enslavers. Once the indigenous Esopus people were killed, infected with European diseases, or fled north and west, the African slaves provided the town of New Paltz with a constant supply of labor for use in farms, mills, and homes during the town's first 150 years. Indeed, most families in Colonial America, including our Founding Fathers, succumbed to the temptation of free labor, rationalized it, and participated in slavery's long sordid history. All of this is well documented. Yet the signage in the town and the tours I went on before Covid hardly mentioned its enslaved population. I also began to ask, "Where were the descendants of those enslaved people? Why is this town so White?" According to the latest census, less than 7% of  a population of 15,000 are Black, and they are mostly migrants from other areas or students and professors on the SUNY college campus. "Jim Crow," my friend Jerrie Stewart mumbled one day at lunch. Jerrie is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. She runs a blog about her family's history, and is active in the ongoing efforts at Monticello, together with the Martha Jefferson descendants, to update the narration of the tours and protect The Burial Ground for Enslaved People on the property, among other projects.

 

 

But it was the day I met Jennifer DuBois Bruntil in the women's locker room at the pool where we both swim that I began my local education in earnest. Jennifer lives in New Paltz with her family, not in the original farmhouse—they  were dairy farmers—but  in a house her grandfather built when he retired. However, to say she "lives," in New Paltz is not accurate; her family has been anchored here for generations. The DuBois name is everywhere in town, as are the names of  the twelve "patentees," from the seven Huguenot settler families who arrived after the Dutch and the English during the colonial period.

 

Jennifer Dubois Bruntil was working at Historic Huguenot Street in 2018 and had written a sweet children's book called Hugo the Huguenot which depicts the Esopus People, but does not mention enslavement. I wondered why not, but didn't ask as Jennifer is as sweet-natured as the Hugo she created for her book. But it was around this time that the campus began a process of self-examination: some of the dormitories were named after the colonial settler families. After several months of "testimony," the names were changed.  Facebook exploded with vituperative comments.

 

I wrote an article about this "dormitory controversy," for the Poughkeepsie Journal as the decision making process and its backlash reminded me of the International Center for Transitional Justice's truth and reconciliation work in South Africa and Bosnia which I had studied when I was working on my book—Another Day in Paradise—about  humanitarian workers. It occurred to me that the Town of New Paltz, and probably many other towns across America, north and south, might benefit from a similar process.

 

I do not claim to be an historian but rather a journalist and educator.  I have studied what others have researched about the town's history and opined on my blog and for local newspapers. More than once I have received emails prevailing upon me not to tell lies about the town; one demanded a public apology. What this would entail I dared not ask.  I have kept in touch with the programming on Historic Huguenot Street and  been impressed with ongoing efforts to make changes, including exhibitions researched and designed by Josephine Bloodgood, the Director of Curatorial and Preservation Affairs. She has been expanding and deepening the work of two previous onsite historians, Eric Roth and Susan Stessin-Cohn—currently  the Town of New Paltz Historian.  I am certain that not all the patentee families, who still live in the town, would be pleased with these ongoing efforts to intensify research and correct narration. Nonetheless, and to their credit, the Board of Historic Huguenot Street hired Eddie Moran in 2022 as another, more visible bridge from past obfuscation to present-day reinterpretation and redemption. Tall and lean with bright attentive eyes, a steady gaze, and a well enunciated speaking voice, Moran is a 25-year-old colonial settler descendant who knows his history and has the generous and patient persona of a seasoned professor to convey it. His official title is Tour and Interpretation Manager, but he's also an enthusiastic tour guide, and intrepid researcher.

 

I met him on a grey Saturday afternoon on one of his newly designed Black History Month tours. We were standing in the living quarters of the Deyo house refurbished and expanded in the 1890s to demonstrate the Deyo family's "ascendancy" as prosperous citizens of New Paltz. "Ascendancy," is Moran's word and I had never heard a settler descendant utter it before. The Deyo family's enslaved workers lived in the attic or the cellar of the house, Moran told us, but their history—where they were from, who their ancestors were—is  mostly lost. "Unlike my history," Moran says ruefully. "Mine is not lost."  That's because he has access to family trees  and learned early in life that he is descended from settler colonial families.  He often refers to them as relatives while, at the same time, and almost in the same paragraph, he introduces damning information about the treatment of their chattel property and the intentional erasure of the enslaved's history by "my organization," meaning Historic Huguenot Street.  Moran brought copies of documents, laminated in plastic, to be passed around.  The audience was rapt. It was as if the Deyo family's enslaved laborers were within proximity, standing as shadows behind us, waiting to be understood, and acknowledged.

 

 "We just don't know about so much," Moran says, and continues with the admission that "my organization contributed to the historical erasure."  By "my organization" he means Historic Huguenot Street, his employer. This is an unequivocal admission, and a turning point for Historic Huguenot Street and the town. Some of the elliptical signage is now also amplified by explanatory paper "markers," he explained, and some of it will be replaced, an expensive and slow process.

 

Moran also volunteers for the History Committee at the Margaret Wade-Lewis Center, founded to preserve the  Black experience in the Hudson Valley through the lens of free and enslaved lives. It's currently running offsite programming while a donated historic building, the Ann Oliver House, begins renovation this summer. Moran hopes that the tours of both organizations will inform one another, and that all the historians and curators will work together—in a process of truth and reconciliation—to  build a complete and unedited history of New Paltz.
 

Historic Huguenot Street will re-open 5-days a week for tours after Memorial Day:

 

https://www.huguenotstreet.org/programming

 

The Margaret Wade-Lewis Center will be celebrating Juneteenth on June 19th:

 

https://mwlcenter.org/about

 

 

 

 

For all of us in that packed room, Aleksei made it feel not only that a free Russia was possible but also that we could get there with joy, laughter and camaraderie.

 

- Nadya Tolokonnikova,  founder of Pussy Riot.  NY Times 2/24/24

 

This is what a tyrant looks like: small, and full of tedious resentments.

 

-Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 2/10/24, reporting on Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin.

 

 

Lawyers for the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk rock band, came to the Law School at NYU  on September 21, 2012 to discuss their clients' legal predicament, as well as the political climate in Russia. I cannot believe this was more than a decade ago and that when I left I  felt heartened by the spirit of dissent and freedom. I was certain that after years of KGB despotism, that these brave performance artists would be released from the penal colony. I was ignorant and deluded, as were so many in the audience that day. Why were the Russian lawyers there if not for support, I thought, and to taste American freedoms which were not under threat in 2012 as they are today.

 

It was only when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and I realized that I had a broadcaster acquaintance in Kyiv that I began to read and read and read, thus deeping my knowledge and understanding of Russia and Ukraine. As my TBR history stack grew exponentially every week, I abandoned delusion. I am now reading two books by Masha Gessen, both riveting, and a collection of Chekov short stories. The fear of authority is embedded in the stories which were written in the late 19th century during the reign of Alexander III.

 

We must go to the past to understand the present. Have we learned this truism here in America? The past is past you say? No, not exactly. 2016 is upon us yet again, and more dangerous.

 

And now Navalny, who like so many incarcerated Russians over the centuries wrote lyrical letters  miraculously delivered to his correspondents through a hard-to-understand electronic system which he was able to use until he arrived in the Arctic penal colony. Nothing stopped  him from writing and writing and writing. The humorous, compassionate voice strengthened with every missive. One would hope, or I hope, that the connection he felt as he wrote, imagining the recipient of each letter, was a comfort in his solitary frigid confinement. He was also an avid reader: 44 books a year, in English, and lobbied his keepers to allow him more than one book at a time. He liked to read more than one book at a time. And even that small detail is a wonder.

 

When I heard of his death, I was smitten, and joined the community of grief throughout the world. But it was when the NY Times published a handwritten letter that I felt most bereft. He was a writer until his last breath. He probably was given limited paper and pen, and made the most of it, writing small and tight. The words soared with each scratch of his pen, as did his spirit, and ours. May his fortitude inspire all of us to sustain the fight for freedom.

 

                                                                               Navalny's Letters from the Gulag

 

 

The world is a sphere. There is no East or West.

― Ai Weiwei, Weiwei-isms

 

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

-Toni Morrison

 

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

― Georgia O'Keeffe

 

 

 

 

At different times I've written in different genres, sometimes simultaneously. I might be writing a poem while finishing up an essay, or attempting my first murder mystery while on assignment for a magazine. Every genre and every subject stretches and inspires me. I never stop. Every day, I try to express ideas with the tools I have available—notebook and paper, my computer, my phone, my chatterbox brain struggling to make sense of my life, ordering it into sentences and stories.  In the  first scene of the Netflix documentary, American Symphony, about the musician and composer, Jon Batiste, the camera lingers on his sculptural hands hovering over the piano keyboard. His eyes are closed until a note or a melody surfaces, and he begins to play. He is patient and attentive, as is the filmmaker, whose tool is the camera. And the viewer must remain patient also. "Nothing that surrounds is object, all is subject," the surrealist poet André Breton wrote. Once we are engaged with a work, if we are open to receive it, it becomes ours.

 

All art making is experimentation, a challenge to conventional expectations in its singularity, more so when an artist has long experience and control of his/her/ their craft. I don't think for a moment that as professional, accomplished writers, photographers, visual artists or musicians we should repeat ourselves if we have found a winning money-making formula. Nor that we should impose new ideas on a devoted cohort of fans if they are unwilling. There might be appreciation, disdain, or confusion when new work is presented that departs radically from what we have done before. No matter. We press on with our muse and our purpose. Our creative impulse effloresces and a creation has reached fruition. Let it be shown, read, performed, or played without censorship or restraint.

 

This post is dedicated to all the exiled Russian writers and artists—and to Navalny whose defiance inside a despotic regime was a creative act. May his courage inspire all of us in our efforts to celebrate and protect life and freedom.