Land of the Free, Home of the Slave

Reflections of history while writing my novel, American Hero.

                 Islamophobia led to Slavery                       

As many things do, this story begins with a storm at sea. A Dutch ship carrying 20 African slaves to Brazil is blown off course and slams into the outer banks of Virginia within rowing distance of the English settlement in Jamestown. The Dutch make a deal: fix our ship and we’ll give you 20 barrels of sugar. But the laborer-deficient Jimmies say, how about those men over there? Welcome to the future United States, Africans, and centuries of slavery and oppression. But wait. Not yet.

So these 20 Africans are unchained and escorted off the slave ship. The Jimmies don’t take out the whip. Instead, they hand them shovels. They give the Africans the same deal they got: seven years of backbreaking labor for The Man (the Merchant Adventurers, underwriters of the settlement) and then . . . freedom. Meaning, a lifetime of backbreaking labor for yourself. They were Indentured Servants. After their term, just like the Euro-Jimmies, the Afro-Jimmies got a few acres and a pat on the back.

Wait? Where’s the Massa and the bullwhip? Not yet.

Meet Antonio Negron, aka, Anthony Johnson. At the end of his indenture, he got some land, grew tobacco and indigo, took on his own indentured servants, got more land, more servants. He became one of the biggest planters in Virginia, with over 200 workers, mostly European.

To recap: One of the richest men in America in 1640 was a black man and he had over a hundred white men working his fields—and that was considered normal. At the end of their Hard Seven, all of them, whether they came from Gloucester or Gambia, were given the same deal; land and a handshake.

What happened?

In the classical and medieval world, there is tribalism based on religion or geography. But all that ugly racism (leading us to Nazis, Bull Connor, and the Birthers) doesn’t appear until the late 17^th century and then used to justify slavery, ipso facto.

It doesn’t start with color of skin.

It starts, as many things do, with the Puritans.

The problem with Anthony Johnson and the other Africans mixing it up in the jambalaya of humanity making it rich in the New World was not skin color, but religion.

The vast majority of Africans in America were Muslims.

The problem with Anthony Johnson was his God.

Puritans hated Islam more than Catholicism, almost as much as they hated the Jews.

So, as the Massachusetts Colony became more successful and had more clout they made laws to prohibit Muslims, Catholics, and Jews from owning land.

Eventually, Catholics got Maryland and Jews settled in Rhode Island. They had powerful connections in European politics. Muslims did not.

What did Anthony do? By this time he was a devout worshipper of the only religion that really counted in America. Keep your muezzin, show me the money. He converted to Christianity.

In compliance with the worship of money, however, businessmen gradually changed the laws to confiscate African-owned land. From there, it’s an easy step to take suddenly indigent blacks and make them work—for free and, unlike traditional slavery, for life and, here’s the real innovation, create generational slavery so children are automatically born bonded.

Like Jews in Germany, Africans in America did not at first realize the momentum of these new laws.

Once it became obvious that things were changing, Anthony bought and freed as many “slaves” as he could—in vain. Slave trading proved profitable. The game was up.

Anthony died sometime before the slave laws really kicked in. (Georgia waited until the 1750s to make slavery a legal distinction, only a generation before the Revolution for Freedom and Equality—oh wait, not for you, sorry).

How did the black people react to this unfortunate series of events? How would you? Stunned at first, disbelieving (again the parallel to the Jews in Germany), then outrage. Stories of slave revolts don’t often make it into the history books because it’s embarrassing at Back to School Night, but we’ll get to that later.

  

The Man Who Made A Man Of The World

The Man Who Made A Man Of The World

This isn’t about American history or my journalism. Since I posted my short film on You Tube (A Man Of The World.mov), a little liner note action is appropriate.

                                                                     John MacDonald and Some Strange Guy

There’s a big church on the corner of Franklin and Highland in Hollywood. I pass it on my habitual walks through the neighborhood, and frequently noticed a curious man, his arms loaded with papers, his glasses toggled onto his head, scurrying through the doors. Sometimes these impressions stay with you until they become obsessive. You either act on them or you write about it. This time, I acted.

     I followed him into the church to see what goes on. My instinct told me it was not just about praising Jesus (nothing wrong with that).

    He squirreled up a winding staircase and into a dank, poorly lit corridor, treading over cat-decorated carpeting and passing an out of tune piano. The hand written sign on the warped door through which he stumbled read, “First Stage.” From the piles of headshots and well-worn scripts cluttering the hall, I realized this was a theater group.

    When I knocked on the open door, John MacDonald peered up at me like I was the last line on an eye chart. “Can I be of some help to you?” he asked in his lilting Irish brogue before consenting to read a few pages I had scribbled.

   Thus I joined First Stage, a theatrical company with an impressive board of directors that included the late Paul Newman and Ed Asner.

    I had belonged to a similar group in New York, and had productions in the Lamb’s Theater and other prominent venues. However, the one negative review damned the positive when my writing was accused of being so abstract it gave the listener a headache.

    Wanting to do damage to hearts as well, I fine-tuned into several stories my mother’s mother had told me about her family’s experiences during the Holocaust. I had spent a lot of time on the Italian side of my family because the German Jewish side was, to be honest, too overwhelmingly sad. This story as it coalesced in my mind, however, had to be told. That is how Leo Brunn came into being. I think of him as the grandfather I never knew, and when I dug up the courage to ask him about the Holocaust, the play was born.

      A successful performance at First Stage prompted John to corner me in the wings of the stage. “I’ve got to make a movie of this,” he said.

      “Great,” I said. “How?”

      “I’ll get Ed Asner to star in it.”

    Wow, I thought. I loved Asner as the morally conflicted slave ship captain in Roots, the old man in Pixar’s Up, and as Lou Grant in that sitcom with Mary Who Turned The World On With Her Smile. He’s won about eight Emmys. “Do you know him?”

     I never got a clear answer, but after John and I re-visioned the play as a movie, John stalked Ed, who was appearing as Franklin Roosevelt in another theater. Taking a page from the Busby Berkley Hollywood Success Story, John showed up every night and waited backstage for Ed, who politely ignored him. Until one night when Ed confronted him with something like, “Who the hell are you?”

      John handed him my script.

      Ed called John the next day. “I have to do this,” he said.

     A few weeks later, we hired the lovely Anna Lodj, an actual Polish lady, to play the Polish lady who meets Ed’s character in Breslau on the eve of Kristallnacht, 1938, and the multi-talented Michael Perri to play a much nicer version of “me,” the son about to go to Vietnam who wants to know how his father survived the Holocaust. Instead of a tale of death camps, he gets an extraordinary love story.

     John lined up the film guru Alain Silver to produce and the brilliant cinematographer and editor Paolo Durazzo to lovingly handcraft what I think is a tender and bittersweet interpretation of my play.

     Working with Ed Asner was an experience worthy of a separate story. Let’s just say he’s as crusty and loveable as Lou Grant, but with a lot more dirty jokes. The filming, done on the hospital set used by E.R., Supernatural, and other shows, was fraught with the typical and a few atypical dramas, including 80-year-old Ed’s working two twelve-hour days in a row in his pajamas, but that any movie ever gets made is something of a miracle.

       Take a look for yourself: A Man Of The World.mov

       When I followed John into his rabbit hole, I never thought that he would get me to pop out of mine even for a little while. That, too, was a miracle.

            

The Wrath of God

The Wrath of God

Reflections on history while writing my novel, American Hero. 

Remember back in grade school when we drew turkeys from the silhouettes of our hands and learned that Squanto helped the Pilgrims during the first Thanksgiving?

Spoiler alert: I’m going to shred that illusion, so if it means a lot to you, don’t read on.

       •PILGRIM’S PROGRESS•

The Pilgrims were religious fanatics who didn’t come to America seeking religious freedom; Pilgrims came to America fleeing religious freedom. They hated those in England and, later, in Holland, who disagreed with them (Catholics, Jews, other  Protestants). Their basic belief: Some people are chosen at birth to be righteous; the rest will go to hell no matter what they do. You never know who is “good” or “bad,” but anyone who didn’t follow the Puritan rules had a seat warming up in hell.

These are the people who brought us the Salem Witch Trials. It was a reductive, joyless, intolerant way to experience life, one probably very comfortable to certain presidential candidates today.

       •ANGER MANAGEMENT•

Squanto, the “good” Indian, was really Tisquantum—not a name, but a title meaning “The Wrath of God.” It conveyed his status in his Patuxet tribe as a bodyguard of the sachem (the tribal representative, not quite a “chief”). Later, after he had been kidnapped as a boy, sold into slavery in Europe, escaped twice, and returned to his village to find everyone dead of smallpox, the name reflected his enraged psyche.

Yes, he taught the Pilgrims a few tricks he learned as a slave in farms in Spain, such as sowing the earth with dead fish so their nutrients would enrich the soil.

But make no mistake about the object of The Wrath of God. Tisquantum wanted the white men out of America. Unlike most other Indians, he had been to Europe. He had seen their weapons of mass destruction. He knew their unabiding greed.

When the Pilgrims built Plymouth literally over the bones of Tisquantum’s family in Patuxet, he immediately tried to unite the warring factions of Indian tribes against them while insinuating himself among them as a spy. But Indians, contrary to Hollywood’s guilt-ridden assumptions of super-nobility, are human beings. The tribal sachems fell over themselves trying to win favor from the Pilgrims to get their guns and wipe out their enemies. Their small-minded agendas prevented them from heeding Tisquantum’s warnings.

In a desperate effort, Tisquantum falsely claimed that white men kept vats of smallpox in underground cellars to infect Indians with the deadly disease. Ironically, this bio-terrorism occurred soon after when the British sold smallpox-infected blankets to Indians.

When Tisquantum’s plot was found out, his fellow Indians felt compelled to sentence him to death in order to please the gun-selling Pilgrims. In a last act of defiance, Tisquantum took his own life one cold, rainy night on Cape Cod.

       •GIVING THANKS•

I enjoy turkey and sweet potato pie as much as the next guy. And, I always find a lot to be thankful for, perhaps mostly for people like Tisquantum who not only saw the truth but did something about it.

       If he’s not an American hero, who is?

Interviews: Neil Young (Part One) And The Damage Done

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of those bits and pieces.

Neil Young

When I was Lord Night Wind, I met Neil Young in the Mexican desert. He was drifting over sand and rock like a hawk’s shadow. It was three days after Cortez made the proud Moctezuma a puppet of the white man. These things happen. I asked Neil for his destination. He pointed north.

“Don’t go,” I warned. “In the north you’ll find the dog people. And beyond them, more miserable dog people. No one has ever gone further north, but I once met a dog person who said that the most dreadful dog people of all live north of the big river. These dogs eat your flesh and chew up your soul.

Neil twitched me a smile and headed north.

•

A few hundred years passed and I saw Neil Young again at an Exxon station in Cupertino, California.

“This where they have all those computer bodegas?” he asked me as I filled the tank of his Ford pick-up with twenty bucks unleaded.

“That’s why they call her Computertino.”

He didn’t even leave me a tip and drove north to all those computer bodegas.

•

When Neil Young switched on his screen, he didn’t expect to find me, but there I was. “Is it strange I should change?” I asked him, chuckling.

“I’m busy,” he said.

“I warned you about the most dreadful dog people. Their machines rip your flesh, capture your soul in a microchip.”

“If the machines capture our souls, then our souls are in the machines,” he said.

•

The walk up to Neil Young’s house is treacherous. It’s on a steep mountain jutting out of the California coastline like a thorn off a vine. Below me, the moonstruck ocean made love to the shore, a lot of wet heaving.

Neil was fast asleep on an old sofa. He had his arms wrapped around his guitar’s hips like she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I helped myself to a Coor’s and sat against the wall, staring at him.

Whenever I see him sing, his voice obscures his face. Asleep, he looked young like a boy who just saw his first science fiction film, and old like a drunk coming out of a Memphis bar at seven in the morning.

A few ghosts remained in the room, the kind that stay at parties too long. Roadies, old black and white TV stars, Edgar Allen Poe. A pretty Dairy Queen princess, needle marks in the inner crease of her elbow, popping M&Ms, asked me, “What’s he look at when his eyes are closed?”

When Neil began to stir, his ghosts returned to the coffins in his mind.

•

Orbiting the planet Cassandra in a space ship called Broken Arrow, I found Old Neil playing chess with a computer named Crazy Horse.

I pumped him some Vulcan Fire Water straight up.

“Here we are, a million miles from nowhere, light years from when we first met in the Mexican desert.”

“I thought you only bother people on Earth,” he snapped, icy as outer space.

“I go where people go. I go where you go.”

“Where am I?”

“North.”

Grinning like Huckleberry Finn, he rotated away from me in zero-gravity.

I pointed to the chessboard. “Crazy Horse could have forced mate by taking your queen’s knight, but didn’t. Why?”

“She likes to keep the game going,” he answered. “That’s called love in some places.”

“You’re the heartbeat of a robot?”

“The current, the force, the chi, the mojo, the groove. It drives. Music, sex, DNA twists, gravitational tangos, the song Mother Nature sings, the song we hear before we’re born, after we die. It’s all frequencies and it’s all in the fine tuning.”

I keyed the board, inputting what I knew about Neil Young.

He looked over my shoulder and laughed, then pressed Enter.

   •

    

   

    

In Praise of Her Twisted Tongue

Reflections on history while writing my novel, American Hero. 

Shakira or Malinche

Ah, Malinche, or Malinalli, or Malintzin, or Doña Marina. No matter what name you use, no matter what mask you put on—Mayan, Aztec, Spaniard, Mestizo, slave, soldier, translator, traitor—how they hate you, how they abuse you, how they just don’t get you.

But I do.

We met at a party at Laura Esquivel’s house. The Mexican author of Como aqua para chocolate wanted to show you off. You were charming, shy, girlish, and, behind those liquid eyes, you had secrets.

Did you really love Cortez? For conquering the Aztecs with a few hundred men, he’s even more vilified than you. You know, he never got a statue for pigeons to baptize? Well, he did invade Mexico illegally. And, he ransacked Tenochtitlan and completely annihilated the city he called “the most beautiful in the world.” Oh, and he cruelly subjected any Indians not lucky enough to die from small pox to slavery, torture, humiliation, and other fates worse than death.

Cortez used the age-old Get Out Of Hell Free card by claiming his atrocities were committed in the name of God. All good Catholics know that Jesus came with a sword, not a basket of Welcome to the Neighborhood muffins.

But were the Aztecs great humanitarians? Ask those on line at their gut-wrenching ride, Heartripperouter. During one crazy Memorial Day weekend they dedefibrillated over 80,000 lucky contestants at the rate of 14 per minute. The streets of Tenochtitlan flooded with a river of human blood you could actually row a boat through.

Now the Incas didn’t do this. The Mayans didn’t do this. Even the Aztecs didn’t do this when their golden boy Emperor Quetzalcoatl ruled the roost about five hundred years earlier. In fact, old Feathered Serpent replaced humans with hummingbirds (!Ahw!) on the sacrificial hot seat. Of course, Q-coatl was banished for being soft on psycho killers, and things were brought back to normal with a reviving blood bath (good for the skin).

Into this world only Dexter could love comes young Malinche, a Mayan made a slave at age 4 and probably fast-tracked at Sacrificial Victims Academy. Since Child Services was not available, she ran away (somehow) and ended up with the Aztec version of Lost’s the Others, the Tlaxacans. That’s when Cortez came calling.

But helping the enemy of her enemy did not give me a histo-crush on Malintzin Tenépal, which in Mayan means “Woman With Tongue Made Of Twisted Grass” (trying fitting that on Twitter).

The reason I think modern day Latinos, especially Latinas, should give the chica her props is this: she kicked butt. She made her own decisions. She hated the Aztecs and wanted them dead, like a true Tarantino chick. (Not to totally dis the Aztecs, they had some good qualities, hot cocoa, I think). This was a respected woman. She married a Spanish officer and had a son (by Cortez—hey, it’s good to be the conquistador in charge) who was the first mestizo we know of and who’s family line became prominent in Mexico even today.

Malinche mothered a new race: Spanish-Indians.

Her life set a precedent of cultural blending—in contrast to the apartheid-happy English who couldn’t tolerate the Irish, much less anything that came in a shade darker than Navajo White.

Doña Marina counted us off to that crazy mambo of social, religious, musical, lingual, culinary jambalaya that is the modern Hispanic world.

There is a direct line from Malinalli to Shakira—not bad company to be in, especially at the Congo Room after a couple of mojitos.

So, mija Malinche, estoy enamorado. I’ll take your tongue any day, no matter how twisted.