"A SONG OF MYSELF"

 “A SONG OF MYSELF”

Today is my 77th birthday, having been born in the Methodist Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, which was the capital of eastern Arkansas and northern Mississippi at that time. I was born to Mary Elizabeth Armour Stroupe and Gibson Preston Stroupe.  Soon, she would be a single, working mom, raising me in a patriarchal world.  So, on this day, I am grateful for my life and for my mother, who persevered in raising me after my father abandoned our family.  I am grateful to Caroline, who has put up with me almost 50 years now, and to David and Susan, who have had to endure my jokes all of their lives!

I also give thanks that Wipf and Stock Publishing Company has agreed to publish my memoir on my mother and me, in her raising me as a single working mom in a man’s world.  Wipf and Stock is the same company who published my book of sermons “Deeper Waters” in 2017.  I am grateful also to Collin Cornell who helped facilitate “Deeper Waters” and is helping on this manuscript, which I hope will be ready to publish in 2024.  I also want to thank John Blake, who pushed me to think about and to write this book.  I have two tentative titles for it: “Mother and Me: A Southern Story of Agency, Race, and Gender,” or “A Single Mom in a Man’s World: A Southern Story of Agency, Race, and Gender.”  Let me know which title sounds best to you.

I’m also starting work on another book ( my 7th!).  Caroline has finally agreed to work with me on writing a manuscript on our pioneering ministry as a clergy couple.  We were the first clergy couple to work in a local church in the former PCUS Southern Presbyterian Church.  I’m just starting out on it, but the tentative title is “Pioneers and Partners in Ministry”.  Let me know your thoughts on that too.  And, if you have any stories or insights on our ministry as a clergy couple or individually, share them with us as we build this manuscript.  

I’m grateful to our longtime friend and colleague Inez Giles, who has given me a birthday party every year (except the Covid year of 2020) since 1996, when I turned 50.  We used to do the Electric Slide at my birthday party, but lately we have been subbing Stevie Wonder’s version of “Happy Birthday.”  Last year in my birthday blog , I shared part of a Walt Whitman poem, “Song of Myself,” which I still love as the name of one’s birthday.  This year I want to share the familiar but ever powerful poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.

“Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees 

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mind.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees, 

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

The world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, “Dream Work,” 1986

"SIXTY YEARS AGO"

 “SIXTY YEARS AGO”

I entered my segregated high school as a freshman in 1960.  We were required to take civics in that year, and our teacher Ms. Frizzell had a creative assignment for us.  It was a presidential election year, and the two main candidates were Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat John F. Kennedy.  Ms. Frizzell’s assignment was for each of us to do our research, then use that research to choose which candidate we would vote for, if we could vote.  The assignment was due about November 1 of that year.  I did my due diligence, and I decided that I would vote for Richard Nixon, if I could have voted.  I chose Nixon because I liked Ike, the previous Republican president, because Kennedy was Catholic (would he obey the pope or be loyal to the USA?), and because Kennedy seemed to lean towards social justice too much (after all, I was still in deep captivity to white supremacy).

Three years later in 1963, I began my senior year, and things were in flux in my heart and mind.  The March on Washington had occurred in August, and in mid September, my white supremacist culture answered MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech by blowing up Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls in Sunday school:  Addie Mae Collins,  Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.  Even in my continuing deep captivity to racism, I was appalled by this senseless killing.  

On Friday, November 22 of that year, several of us were changing classes at Central High School, and our janitor Mr. Ellis, whom we called “Dude” (before the advent of The Big Lebowski), came up to us in the hall to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.  Dude was always joking and pulling pranks on us, so at first we thought that he was joking on this too.  Only a few minutes later, the intercom came on to announce that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was not expected to live.  We later got the news that he had indeed died.  We were all in shock.  Though few of us liked him because of his work on civil rights, we simply could not believe that anyone would shoot the President of the United States.  Kennedy was not our favorite President, but we took it personally that someone had the temerity and the arrogance to shoot the President. They were striking a blow at the nation itself.

School let out early that day, and the nation began a three day mourning period, and it seemed to me that the earth itself had changed – Kennedy’s assassination was that kind of shock.  School was out on Monday, November 25, for the funeral and memorial services for President Kennedy.  I stayed home to watch the service, and Miss Martha, a Black woman who cleaned the beauty shop for Mother, was with me, doing some ironing for Mother one day a week.  She and I both watched the service together on TV, and my racism showed itself to me that day.  As the caisson made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue with the President’s body, we both ended up crying.  I noticed Miss Martha’s crying, and I said to myself:  “Wow, she is crying like me.  Can Black people actually be like us?”  I am ashamed to admit that now, but it was one of many revelations to me about my captivity to white supremacy and about the humanity of people classified as Black.

It is hard to overestimate the impact that the assassination of President Kennedy had on me and on so many others of my generation.  Though the civil rights movement was hitting its stride, that had not yet reached our consciousness, as it would just a few years later.  The assassination of Kennedy was a jarring blow that told us that the calmness and stability (and repression) of the 1950’s was over.  What we thought was a stable order and a stable world had been shattered in Dallas.  For me, the 1960’s would be the beginning of a powerful force calling me and many others out, calling us to seek a more just and equitable world.  I still feel a bit of sadness when I watch that caisson – it was a great loss for the Kennedys, for me, and for all of us.

I still don’t know who killed President Kennedy – I don’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  Yet, to borrow from a fine song by John Prine - “we lost Davey in the Korean War, still don’t know what for, don’t matter any more,” – it don’t matter any more.  All of our lives were changed on that November day in 1963, much in the same way that 9/11 changed us and so many lives.  The assassination shattered any naivete that we had about the stability of life, and part of the chaos that ensued in the 1960’s was, for me, a direct result of those consciousness-shattering events of that day in 1963.  It was as if the earth had broken open, and new revelations were coming.  In many ways, we are still living out that impact on American culture – will we be able to go back to the 1950’s when everyone knew that white males should reign supreme, or will we affirm that tectonic shift that seeks a more inclusive, welcoming society, that seeks to live out the ideals that President Kennedy outlined in his famous inaugural speech in 1961?  

"HARRIET TUBMAN"

 “HARRIET TUBMAN”

In finishing up this Veterans Day weekend, I want to remember Harriet Tubman as one of most distinguished yet least recognized veterans.  She was a Union spy during the Civil War and led the Union Army in a raid of the Combahee Ferry in South Carolina in 1863, freeing more than 700 people who were enslaved. She had put out the word to those who were enslaved that a raid was coming, letting the people know to be ready.  She gave the signal, and hundreds of enslaved people came out of the woods to the waiting Union Army in boats.  When the Confederate army chased the enslaved people, there were greeted with hundreds of Union soldiers, some of whom were Black.  The Confederate soldiers shrank back into the woods.

Tubman worked for years to get her pension as a soldier in the Union Army, finally receiving $20 per month in 1899.  This past summer we started our human rights tour in Auburn, New York, where Tubman established her home with assistance from Martha Wright Coffman (sister of Lucretia Mott) and Frances Miller Seward.  Her home served as a base for people escaping slavery, on their way to Canada.  She also brought her parents and much of her family up out of slavery to Auburn and on to Canada.  We were grateful to see the land and geography where she did her work against slavery, work for rights for women, and work for establishing a home for aged people on her property in Auburn. 

Through our daughter Susan’s locations in Westfield, New York and in Baltimore, we have been blessed to touch and be nurtured by the witness of Harriet Tubman.  We have visited her birthing grounds on the eastern shore of Maryland, a place where she learned the ins and outs of the countryside, so that she could become comfortable enough to make the many raids that she made by herself to free people who were enslaved in the South.  She began that career early on, when she prevented a slaveholder from catching a person running away from being punished.  She herself was punished for that deed by receiving a hard blow to her head, which almost killed her.  Even that, however, led to grace for her.  It led to visions from God for Tubman, visions telling her to seek freedom for herself and for many others.  It began a pattern of mysticism for Tubman, in which she always consulted God before going on a trip South and also in the middle of trips where she was confused or trapped.

We also visited her home and her church in St. Catherine’s, Canada, on one of our trips with Susan to Niagara Falls.  Then, finally this summer we were able to visit her American home in Auburn, a home centered in justice, compassion and fire.  Her home for aged people has been restored, and there is work being done by the AME Zion church to restore Tubman’s personal home.  We were grateful to have a passionate AME Zion pastor and his spouse as our guides on the Harriet Tubman grounds.  I learned there that Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells met at the National Association for Colored Women in DC in 1896 – talking about intersectionality – wow!  Tubman lived a simple life, but her life was rich and complex.  We were also privileged to visit her grave in the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, and we brought home pine cones from her grave.  

Harriet Tubman was a veteran who did not sit around talking about the past and what she had done way back when.  She kept her fires for justice burning, and she kept walking and working so that all might know the power of the idea that all people are created with equal dignity before God.

"WHEREAS"

 “WHEREAS”

During Native American Heritage Month, I am sharing some of the work of Layli Long Soldier in response to an apology issued by the US government in 2009, an apology not only weak in content but almost secretive in publicity.  Long Soldier wrote a book of poetry/prose called “Whereas” in response.  I am repeating my other introduction to her from my blog of October 9.

{The following are short excerpts from a much longer work of poetry and prose by Layli Long Soldier from her book “Whereas,” drawing on the official US government language of the Resolution and Apology.  She is a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Native Artist Fellowship, and a Whiting Award.  She lives in Santa Fe. She is a member of Oglala Lakota. I was introduced to her work by one of her poems in worship at North Decatur Presbyterian Church.  As I write this, Israel and Hamas are at war, and I am thinking of the many parallels of the white treatment of Native Americans and the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people.}

WHEREAS I shy. Away from the cliché my friend an artist”emotes” at my table. I shy. Away too I worry and second-guess.  Cliché’s what’s list its original effect and power

Through overuse over-reliance I wash the dishes.  I smell the citrus scented.  In ordinary tasks I can’t help the thoughts that lead me elsewhere.  We chat while I rinse our cups then I bubble my hands into a pigeonhole.  I remember the summer I armed myself with yellow rubber gloves and a bucket of bleach to scrub an abandoned pigeon nest on our porch.  My eyes stung raw with my fear of mites. Crawling in molten feathers layers of droppings hardened cakes of white.  Whereas a pigeonhole is aka a white hole the dictionary says. A white hole’s known as the white     space          between    words   set     too     far     apart     in    letterpress

printing       a term synonymous with pigeonhole we don’t want it.  Ever to say we 

suffer the assignment of a stagnant place in the system my friend avoids this as an artist.  She convinces me.  I definitely don’t want it either the stigma of a place I shy.

Away from admitting to her what’s in my work:  this location.  Where I must be firmly positioned to receive an apology the spot from which to answer.  Standing here I regard an index finger popping up pointing out a reminder:

Whereas in the infancy of the United States,

The founders of the Republic expressed their de-

sire for a just relationship with the Indian tribes,

as evidenced by the Northwest Ordinance en-

acted by Congress in 1787, which begins with 

the phrase, “The utmost good faith must always

be observed towards the Indians”;

Because when unconvinced           from this pigeonhole and no other            I can

  bleach and scrub           forehead sweat                 rubber arms        physical effort

mental force     art and shape        muscle my back    languageness     a list of moves 

            to loosen the hold         yes I can            shake my head wag      my finger too

     at that good faith       white cake             in a white           hole

                        that stained            refusal to come                     clean.