Delta Blues

          We were taught a lot more about the blues at Delta State University than I learned, that I can say for sure.

          I started with a text by white folklorist, William Ferris, in a book I later saw all over the gift shops in Mississippi and Tennessee--Give My Heart Ease. I appreciated what he gathered there, and I tried to listen to the accompanying CD of voices he recorded on people's porches or living rooms or churches and prison yards. I had forgotten the folklorists' method: they try to preserve the rhythm, the context of the conversation, the vitality and dirt. In this case, from the mouths of many people, the well-deserved distrust of white people and the disposable nature of Black work and bodies became very vivid. And the absolute theft in sharecropping became very clear in one description of sitting across from a white man at a table piled with money the man knew would stay there, even after harvesting 45 acres of cotton, all the while the white man was apologizing and saying if he had only picked one more acre, he could have had some of that money. Many people spoke to how singing the blues was the only thing that raised their spirits in an unjust world. Ferris also drew the several connections between gospel and blues, and some of his speakers made that connection even more unifying: One said there was no difference at all, and you just had to change the "Oh, baby" to "Oh, God!" and there it is. 

          Blues and gospel both give voice to unrelenting hardship, and both gather the strength of community in harmony with each other; but blues express the sorrow and sometimes humor, and gospel provides that sorrow but also witness and hope. 

          In Mississippi itself, we heard a lot about the dolor and the dollar. Sharecroppers lived on and worked miles of cotton, with no outlet for their fatigue and loneliness, their pain and isolation, save blues on Saturday nights and church on Sundays, though it also sounds like both of these sites were gendered--not strictly, but in the locus and tone of authority. We learned about juke joints in improvised structures that dotted the plantations, and on the bus, every once in a while we were told that if we followed that bend in the river and turned left at that stand of trees and went on a ways, you'd get to a place with open doors on Saturday nights. At Dockery Plantation, we learned how one of the first bluesmen, Charley Patton, made a fortune playing at the Dockery store for free and then on Saturdays setting up at the "frolic" house on the other side of a narrow bridge over what was essentially a moat, guaranteeing money was collected from everyone.

          We went to what our program insisted was the real crossroads where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil.
          We heard Muddy Water's nephew, Keith, play on the first night.

          We learned how the Great Migration affected the sound of the blues, getting just as industrial and electrified as Muddy Waters and BB King did themselves, ascending Highway 61 to Chicago.

          We crawled to a slow and got in trouble outside of Parchman Farms, the notorious prison where so many of the heroes we'd read about ended up, and where a haunting rhythmic music of work gangs were several times recorded.

          We had a visit from Bill Able, who said several times that he was not a blues scholar, though he spoke with more knowledge than anyone else I'd ever heard, and he demonstrated how little is needed for the many forms of blues, twanging out on electric guitars he'd made from driftwood and cigar boxes and sliding on single-string broom handles, because blues themselves are improvised from porches and wire and dirt.

          A bunch of us went to a couple of the urban juke joints in Clarksdale--Ground Zero, owned by Morgan Freeman, and the much more dilapidated and intimate one owned by Red Paden. Dancing at Red's was so close, in fact, that I spent a bunch of the time dancing with my eyes on the ground, because I was dancing over the lead guitarist's mic stand. I also had a nice dance with his wife or girlfriend.

          Probably the experience that kept coming back to us was Po' Monkey's joint. Po' Monkey died in 2016, but his "lounge" is still there, ugly and picturesque poverty porn for northerners, showing up on the cover of Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta and on a feature video of Good Morning America. Several of us went to Merigold to the third annual juke joint festival held in his honor. There we met his son, who would surely like to open the lounge again, but it's boarded up and belongs to someone else, and we met Larry Grimes, a character we heard about on the bus. He told me but mostly the three women I was with a lot of uncomfortable jokes, showed us some very rare coins he keeps on his person at all times, like a Booker T Washington silver dollar, did some magic, and spoke very fondly of his best friend, Po' Monkey, told us about his Vietnam war gut wound and military pension and his art--some of which is outside the juke joint but he fenced it in after someone drove over it. He told Caroline, I'm going to whisper something in your ear. Don't worry. It's nothing dirty. Here it is. I've got two baby dolls in my truck. They got penises. They're worth $300 each. And he told both Caroline and Lizandaa that he was kin to their husbands because now he was their husband-in-law. But he also spoke about Red with so much tenderness, how the first day he showed up, Red didn't let him pay, and he came every opening ever after, every single one, and Red never let him pay. He was always there.

Rebecca, Po' Monkey's son, John, Sophia

Caroline and Larry

Mississippi Delta--the most Southern place on Earth--visits hitting me hardest

          Last week, I traveled to Cleveland, Mississippi for a teacher development program called The Most Southern Place on Earth at Delta State University. The purpose of the program is to explore the history, landscape and music of the Delta, a place where the rich alluvial soil resulting from a constantly flooding river led to a wealth in cotton, and in the frantic grasping that followed, a
barbarism that would define race relations ever after.
          We learned a lot about the origins and generative power of the blues, and were immersed in the music and place of it; I'll devote another blog post to that.
          For me, the most powerful aspect of the program had to do with ways it touched events sparking and pursuing civil rights work. I was most moved by the heroism and stark contrast between a pursuit of basics--like clean water, education, a voice, recognition that one is a human being--and the violent, screaming outrage at the effrontery of such pursuits.
          Three events in particular hit me hardest:

1. Charles McLaurin's visit to our classroom,
2. The Founders' Day celebration at Delta Health Center, and
3. The journey to the store and courthouse that betrayed Emmett Till's life and then his death.

1.

          Charles McLaurin affected me a great deal. He is a gifted speaker with a treasure of experiences both with the Civil Rights era and its heroes, including Medgar Evers, Stokely Charmichael, and most especially, Fannie Lou Hamer. He speaks with passion and love, confidence and wisdom and practical understanding, and the moments with him were worth as much to me as everything else together.

          For one thing, McLaurin helped me fall in love with Fannie Lou Hamer. I knew her--knew that she was a mover in the Freedom Summers and voter registration drives, knew the Sweet Honey and the Rock song devoted to her; but McLaurin's story, which my notes capture in the last blog post, is so full of admiration and surprise and adoring feeling that I was transported, by her courage, her heart, and her clarity.

          This was reinforced when we were on the bus with Dr. Edgar Smith and Ms. Inez Smith. They

were Mississippi transplants who'd followed an academic career of Biochemistry and administration (provost, president) to Massachusetts for forty years; at some point, Mrs. Smith was fundraising to send books and supplies to Fannie Lou Hamer, who wrote them a thank you that they read and showed to us on the bus, both of them tearful for what it meant.

          McLaurin twice said that Hamer made people feel good. I'll say it twice, too. She was an indefatigable fighter, but what McLaurin also said was that she made people feel good. She had a beautiful voice. She had strength and hope. This seems like such an important aspect of activism in our current climate of outrage activism that is more likely to judge than organize and hearten. And everyone should see the clip and hear the entirety of her speaking to the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, where she sought to replace the official Mississippi delegation with the necessarily unofficial Freedom Democratic Party delegates.

          As Charles McLaurin was talking, I felt a swelling of energy and duty and possibility. We need heroes like McLaurin and Fannie Lou Hamer to guide our values and our actions, and to fill our hearts with love and possibility. And McLaurin's approach was also so clearly not one of passion alone. He spoke on a very practical level, too. He said that people like Amzie Moore and Medgar Evers felt the sting of returning from WWII to a brutal negation of citizenship, yes, but they also returned with operational organizational abilities. McLaurin said he felt he could work a crowd into a lather at any time, yes, but he also spoke of the small pieces, gathering around a single thing, educating, discussing, motivating, getting out of the way.

          I have felt my students vibrating with goodness and hope, ready to act. In the thrum of all that, I have pressed them only to listen, think and be kind. But I have not stepped to the singular object goal that would make something move. I haven't decided if that's enough.

2.

          The Founders' Day event in Mound Bayou the night before coincided with the unveiling of an exhibit about its Delta Health Center. It wasn't originally on the agenda, but the exhibit was spearheaded by the director of our program, Rolando Herts, who also secured them funding through his role with Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area management. It was an exceptionally meaningful event for me. 

          Founders' Day is special in Mound Bayou because, 132 years ago, it was established by former slaves, and that remains a mark of great pride for its citizens. And Delta Health Center is special to them because of all the struggles and victories it represents in their community: they claim it, along with Boston, as one of the first two community health care ventures in the country, and its existence was fought by the governor and Mississippi's senators, and, when in their beginnings they sought to provide care to the violently beaten Freedom Riders, fought by the newspapers and neighboring whites. At the time, whites were saying Bolivar County already had two hospitals, but one would not serve Blacks and the other was prohibitively expensive. The community health model was especially useful in the little town of Mound Bayou, helping its citizens fight for clean water and sanitation and educating them against some of the toxic home remedies, going after environmental hazards and government neglect the way no hospital would have done.

          I was honored to be there, an event that had nothing to do with my program or the teachers it serves, but a community wine-and-dine for the local dignitaries and involved citizens that recognized their history steeped in trials and triumph and the heroes that reflected their ongoing struggles and values of dignity and wellness and Blacks and whites coming together to make that happen.

          I was talking to the CEO, John Fairman, about why it was meaningful for me to be there, and

what it was as a white northerner and the way I view racism to be framed in progressive Seattle (with our segregationist history and restrictive covenants and less visible but systemically demonstrable racism) to encounter the naked racism of the South. My father described the contrast this way: "For me, the South was a dark, hateful, frightening place; but it was clean in the naked honesty of its racism. No precious discussions of micro-aggressions there, but many courageous souls who put themselves on the line fighting cruel injustices." There is systemic racism both North and South; but the battle for something like hooking up a school to water and a sewer system is the tourniquet that makes the vein stand out.

          One 95 year old man at the event in the clinic was describing his work with the brick factory. The African Americans had to make their own, and then none of the major contractors would buy their bricks. I later heard from his son, a former mayor of Mound Bayou we ran into again last night; he said his father was the guy who took over Medgar Evers' job at the life insurance company when Evers went to fight segregation full time as NAACP's field secretary.

          The welcome we felt in Mound Bayou's triumph and honest eye toward the past was entire.

3.

          We took a bus to Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till whistled to Carolyn Bryant. The store is almost impossible to see through all the vines and no trespassing signs left by the those ready for history to swallow the story gone.

          We heard from Reverend Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till's cousin, who, as in that summer of '55, traveled down to Mississippi from Chicago, and who was at the store that day with the whistling, and in the house that night when Roy Bryant and JW Milam abducted Till from their grandfather's house at gunpoint.

          We heard from Devery Anderson, who wrote a book with exhaustive knowledge about the events following from Emmett Till's death, and he said the Bryants embraced a denial as encompassing as those kudzu vines, and they were isolated and broken by their own cage of silence. 

          We sat in the Tallahatchie County courthouse, where Bryant and Milam were exonerated of murder, and where an Emmett Till memorial now stands opposite a monument to the Confederacy.

          We saw the footage of Till's crushed and mangled face and body, which Mamie Till demanded the world see.

          And we heard this is the spark to light the march towards human rights.

          See the three minute clip the media team prepared about this experience.

          I am grateful for the reminder in these events and heroes of our shared humanity and for the clarity of our struggle.

          Yesterday, Sophie, Amelia and Maisie joined Dad and Wendy in a Lights for Liberty vigil standing against the merciless and actively dehumanizing treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants in the detention camps at our borders.

          I'm going to let it shine.

Here, too, is a video reflection to which I contributed prepared by the media team.

SNCC activist Charles McLaurin recalls Fannie Lou Hamer and Stokely Carmichael

On SNCC work with Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers

Charles McLaurin, Delta State University, July 11, 2019

The following are taken from my notes at Delta State University on July 11, 2019, during a weeklong workshop on environment, race, blues, and history called The Most Southern Place on Earth. They likely provide inaccuracies in wording, tone, and information.

I. Fannie Lou Hamer

               I was the one who took Fannie Lou Hamer to vote.

               I wasn’t a Freedom Rider only because I was already in Jackson, Mississippi, working to mobilize the African American community to register vote with Ella Baker, a tiny little school teacher with a big presence with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). We had a big challenge. How were we supposed to stimulate movement in the grassroots when African Americans were oppressed, suppressed, and depressed?

               This is how I got there. I went to Jackson State College over the summer because that’s where all the good looking teachers were going to be. One day I went to the state fair over there in Jackson. The state fair had been advertising all the time and in every place, and I wanted to go there. So I went, and when I tried to buy a ticket, the lady in the booth said, This ain’t your fair. Ya’ll had your fair last week. This is not your fair, n—, get away from here. So I left the booth and I went away and did some thinking. And after doing some thinking, I went back to the lady in the booth. She said, I told you to get your Black ass away from here, and if you don’t, I’ll call the police. So I went away and did some thinking, and then I went back to that booth, and she called the police. The police came and took me to jail. That was how, the next day, I met Medgar Evers, the field secretary for the NAACP (National Association for Colored People). Evers bonded me out. The guard came into my cell and said, Boy, there’s a n— there to bust you out of jail. When I saw him, he was a handsome, well-dressed man. When I met Medgar it was 1961 and I was 20 years old. I said, Medgar, how are we going to stop Mr. Charlie from lynching us? He said, Get your men with you, and bring them to my office. That’s how I got involved, and that’s how my friends got involved and went to jail with me.

           So the effort to end segregation wasn’t working, and the NAACP couldn’t afford to keep busting people out of jail. John Lewis, who’s now a congressman, was then the head of SNCC. Amzie Moore tells Bob Moses and Ella Baker, get SNCC to come down to Jackson and take over the fight against segregation and the right to vote.

               Medgar Evens drew a circle around the Delta. He explained to us young people how the Mississippi congress was apportioned, and how long the application to register to vote was, and how people wanting to vote had to take complicated reading and writing tests about the Mississippi constitution, and how, after all of that, the county clerks still had the final say-so. Almost no Blacks were making it to the voter rolls. Plantation owners didn’t want their workers voting, and didn’t want them talking about voting. Plantation owners needed things to be the way they were. After Reconstruction, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and reading and writing tests helped them keep Blacks from voting. SNCC could help people navigate, but they didn’t know what to do with all of these obstacles.

               I came to the Delta in 1962. Back then, SNCC was operating out of Amzie Moore’s house. Both Moore  and Evers were World War II vets; and like many who fought for their country—fought for their country against Nazis and ethnic control—coming home to a lack of citizenship was very upsetting. They came home to a lack of citizenship, but they also came home with operational organizational abilities.

               Greenwood, Mississippi, was the main target in 1962 for the voter registration project. It was our responsibility to mobilize people around registering and voting. To register, you had to take that journey to the courthouse.

               Ruleville in Sunflower County was my project. The mayor of the town arrested us the day after we arrived. The mayor walked over to our car and told us to come with him, and we said, For what? And he pulled out a gun and said, For this. Something else, when the mayor showed up on the street, all the Blacks everywhere around us disappeared. What we found working in the Delta was fear, fear everywhere. We were not conscious of why they were so fearful here. But most everybody was working on a plantation. They were sharecropping, and getting nothing. School teachers were getting fired for being associated with SNCC. The postmaster was opening people’s mail. One kid got dragged by a tractor. People were getting burned alive and their body parts passed out as souvenirs. Plantation owners had all the power, even in towns that were 80% Black. This was how I met Fannie Lou Hamer.

               Fannie Lou Hamer came to a SNCC and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) citizenship meeting, and volunteered to go to Indianola to register to vote.

               On August 1^st, 1962, we were on a bus, 18 people. That day, I still didn’t know Mrs. Hamer. We went to the courthouse, we registered, and we were leaving town. The Indianola police came and arrested the driver for the bus being too yellow. It was illegal back then to use yellow buses for anything but taking children to school. But that same driver would take that same bus, every summer, to get people to work a farm in Florida, every summer. And now the bus is too yellow? So now there are 17 people on the bus, sitting in the heat, and no driver. Whites drove by in trucks, swearing at us. Fannie Lou Hamer had a good voice, a beautiful voice, and in all that heat and swearing, she sang songs that made us feel good.

               When we got back to Ruleville, we were followed by the trucks, and they followed people to see where they lived. The next day, Mrs. Hamer’s bossman came to her and told her to withdraw her application to vote or get kicked out of my plantation. She said to him, I didn’t register for you; I did it for myself. But he made her choose, so she talked to her family and decided to leave that night. It meant leaving her husband, leaving her two daughters, and they had to stay and keep working so she wouldn’t owe the plantation owner. She went to stay with relatives. It was my job to find her and get her to Tougaloo College in Jackson.

               In that car, I was the oldest at 20 years old, but Mrs. Hamer was 44. She had a 6^th grade education, but she was home schooled by her parents. She learned from newspapers from the bossman’s house, radio, from the Bible. And she had such a voice, too. She could take those Bible stories and make people feel good. She’d say, If God is for you, the very gates of Hell can’t stand against you. We worked with a lot of old people who grew up on plantations where the only entertainment they had was church. So we grabbed up that woman for SNCC right away. Fannie Lou Hamer was now a SNCC organizer.

               But from 1962-1965, we had a lot of trouble registering people to vote. We were trying to grab anyone over the age of 21 and tell them to just make an X if they couldn’t write. Somehow, we had to get out the message to the rest of the nation that 40% of the Mississippi population was being suppressed, oppressed, and depressed.

               During the summer between the harvesting season, the feds cut off food aid, and Blacks living on plantations needed that aid between seasons, because they weren’t getting paid. But this was actually a boost: now people on plantations started coming to the SNCC offices themselves. By then, we were deep in the communities.

               We started the Freedom Summer, where young college kids would come down and help us with the registration, Freedom Schools and Freedom Farms. 90,000 people participated. 95% of the Freedom Summer kids were white. We put rich white kids in the homes of Black people without running water. That helped get an eye on us. The death of three civil rights workers brought us national, international attention, too. But there were a lot of racists with a lot of power, like Sam Eastman and J. Edgar Hoover.

               So we decided forget the courthouse. We were going to elect and run and campaign on our own; no more fooling around with a system purposefully designed to deny us. We were going to run our own registration. We were going to make our own application to register. We ran Aaron Henry for governor, Ed King for Lieutenant Governor, and Fannie Lou Hamer for congress. We ran candidates for three out of the five Mississippi congressional districts.

               At the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City that year, we planned to challenge the seats of the Mississippi delegation by denying them their credentials. We knew it wouldn’t work, though, unless we could raise up a floor fight during the convention. We had 8 bid state delegations backing us, including the biggest, California.

               Understand. Mississippi was a closed society. Word wasn’t getting out that we were being held hostage. But Hamer on the convention floor had the mic, and she was getting the word out.

               President Lyndon Johnson was running for re-election, though.

               Getting to the convention floor, we needed at least one, legally qualified person. So, I brought Fannie Lou Hamer to get her legally qualified to run for Congress. I was reluctant about her, because I had it in my head that you had to have some education and titles before you could do something like that, and here was this sharecropper woman with nothing but a sixth grade education.

               But we drove to Jackson to the Secretary of State’s office. Mrs. Hamer says to the white lady at the desk, I want to run for Congress. There were 30 to 40 white women in there, all looking. These n—s want to run for Congress! The white lady gave us a pile of papers this big and told us to fill them out and come back. So, we filled them all out, all of them, and we came back to her. Then the white lady told us that the candidate needs to post a $500 check. So we called our people and found a way to get it and went out there and got the check and brought it back to the office. Then the white lady said, And there’s one more step. This needs to be signed by the campaign manager. So we left, but we couldn’t find anyone to be the campaign manager. It was getting late. The white lady told us we had to file by 5:00, and this was the last day. I didn’t know what we were going to do. Finally, Mrs. Hamer said, Mac: go in there and sign those papers and let’s go home. I said, I don’t know nothing about being campaign manager! She said, Mac, I don’t know nothing about running for Congress, so let’s come on! She became the Vice Chair of the Freedom Democratic Party.

               So there she was on the floor, giving her testimony, telling the whole world about us, but President Johnson was running for re-election and tried to preempt her testimony; he tried to keep her off the air. The stations cut her off and the nation didn’t see all what she had to say. He was trying to hang on to what he considered his Southern base, the Dixiecrats. We were in there. We were feeling like we could win. We were looking forward to the floor fight. But Johnson preempted the testimony and one by one, cut off our allies. He fanoogled them, told them, if you do this, you won’t get this, and if you do this, you’ll get that. But we were still in there, stirring things up. So they decided not to have a roll call vote. That year, Johnson was voted in not by roll call, which we made dangerous for him, but by acclamation.

               We did get the Democratic Party to say that—in the future—the party would not seat delegations that were not representative of their states, and women had to be allowed. That changed the political landscape forever. For one thing, once the Democratic Party was forced to be representative, the South started going Republican.

               On her deathbed, though I didn’t believe it then, in 1977, in Mound Bayou, Fannie Lou Hamer said to me, Mac, I’ve lived on a plantation all of my life. My grandparents were slaves on a plantation. My parents were sharecroppers on a plantation. I was a sharecropper on a plantation. I don’t want to be buried on a plantation. Mac. Promise me. Okay, Mrs. Hamer, all right.

               We raised $120,000 to make a tall statue in Ruleville, reaching up to the sky, so that when people walk through the gates of that memorial garden, they’d say, Wow. There’s Fannie Lou Hamer. And they’re looking up.

II. Stokely Carmichael

               James Meredith, who was forcibly stopped by Mississippi’s governor three times from being the first Black man to enroll at Old Miss until Jack Kennedy personally interceded with the governor to let Meredith enroll at the law school, was going to march from Memphis to Jackson in 1968 when he was shot down by a white man. In the hospital, Stokely Carmichael and others went to his bedside to ask permission to complete the march.

               By then, I was on Mr. Carmichael’s staff. Mrs. Hamer asked me to go get Reverend Martin Luther King to come through the Delta, through Greenwood—one of our test grounds for democracy. Mr. Carmichael, myself, and two other guys were sent ahead of the march to go and find a place for the marchers to spend the night in Greenwood. We got permission for a site before we got there. But once there, Mr. Carmichael sent us to find an alternative place on campus somewhere else just in case, but we were denied. By the time we got back, though, Mr. Carmichael was in jail. He had gotten permission for that first site, but white power came and shut him down. When he put the tents up anyway, they arrested him. The marchers were already on their way!

               So, there was a park in the Black community, open on all sides. We decided we couldn’t afford to tell the troopers anything, because they’d shut us down. We didn’t tell the leaders of the march and we didn’t tell the troopers nothing. Instead, we went from house to house, saying, Stokely’s speaking at seven in the park. But Stokely’s in jail! We didn’t tell them that. We just said come on. And when the marchers came through Greenwood, and to the park, we had the people all lined up, waiting. There was a big, big crowd.

               The priests got Mr. Carmichael out of jail, and when he was, he was mad as hell. He got to the park and said, We need Black power!

               The media took that phrase and scared everyone about his words—white people, Black people.

               But we really did need power. And he said it, straight up.

III. Advice to Activists

               There’s a theme running through Black history and the Black community. And that theme is education. You’ve got to organize, and you’ve got to organize for specific things. Get you five people who think like you and organize around one thing. Then bring in five people each, and when you’re all together, talk about what you want to do.

               At each stage, we educated people. We printed primers with instructions on exactly what to say and what we were about.

               Mobilize, then educate. Then stimulate, motivate, and get out of the way.

Advice to the Senior Class

Dear Seniors,

            At Roosevelt High School, we attend to racism and mental health issues, but mostly we don’t know how to talk to each other around such things. But if we can’t address the trauma and shame at the fault lines of such issues, we will nourish, in our silence or helpless outrage, continued harm. We have to be able to witness, to listen, to share our most vulnerable stories, to operate from our deepest humanity, and to do that, we have to approach each other with humility and love, treating each other’s stories as tenderly as our proffered hearts.

            Dear seniors, my advice to you is therefore about not-silence. It’s about love. If we are silent about wounds we bear from an unjust and ignorant world, abuse continues; if we are silent for fear of offending or appearing unjust or ignorant, we haven’t helped. Privilege, allow people their anger. Just listen. Pain, give room for allies to respond in ignorance. Make room for each other’s stories and pain, and, most of all, love, which, when it’s offered across trauma and difference, is a shy and fragile thing.

            When you are ready to tell your story, when you are ready to listen, do so with deepest generosity and humility. I do think we can heal.

David Grosskopf

Letter to students after many stories of personal trauma

May 3, 2019

Dear 6^th period,

            Truly, you are dear to me. Yesterday was so tender and raw. Mostly I just want to acknowledge this. What was intended as a 10 minute journal meditation on power and empowerment became a full sharing of wounds, trauma and deep wondering about how to go forth; harassment, fear, imprinted trauma and anger, and what happens to our pain and what happens when someone else’s pain is directed at us.

            You have such beautiful good hearts. When I see how the poisonous world has taken its shots at your trusting hearts, I ache—as a father and as a teacher. And when I see how you open yourselves up and genuinely try to hear each other and help make sense of the disorder and pain and loneliness that’s laid bare, I am grateful to you as a human being and inspired as a citizen of the world.

            We’ve talked about the importance of witness and what it means to witness well. It takes empathy, understanding, compassion—and space. And giving space when you are witnessing means letting go of judgment and control, and the advice and solutions that aggressively impose them.

            We have also talked about silence and shame as a mechanism of power and marginalization. Witness is the answer. Testimony is the answer. They are themselves not just an act of healing, but of healing the world.

            Our books are these acts of self-revealing shattering silence. They fight: they’re fighting not just the forces of silencing but the unchecked abuses of power and powers of abuse.

            And when you as an individual feel safe enough and ready enough to share, when you as an extraordinary class feel safe enough to share in this semi-public forum, it is brave, and it is also a gift, and not one you ever need to do before you’re ready; and you are fighting, even if you feel broken and small when you do it.

            When you as a class are listening hard and giving people room to feel their feelings and share their stories, you are not only tending to the pain, you are not only learning and growing wiser from it, you are fighting, even if you feel hurt and helpless as you do it.

            You are breaking through shame and breaking the silence, giving shape to the hurt, and you are fighting the toxic complacencies that otherwise allow smaller and larger acts of violation to keep wounding us and to keep shaping our culture with impunity.

            Testimony and witness are the first step. But it’s the step that gives heart to all the others.

            I know I dealt with the sharing awkwardly yesterday. I know it felt messy and unresolved. I sensed hurt feelings I didn’t have the wisdom to answer. And then, trying to leave you with a communal sense of something other than the raw pain we had all just shared, I inflicted a one-minute dance party on you that ended up just feeling misplaced and desperate. I still don’t have the wisdom to know how to respond to the hurts that were stirred up. So this letter is just to do two things:

            To acknowledge the tenderness of yesterday’s discussion.

            And to let you know you are important to me.

David Grosskopf