[In honor of the
upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories
and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories
in comments, y’all!]
On the
counter-intuitive but real and important urgency and immediacy of hope.
Hope can
seem like a long-term proposition, an emphasis on the need for such overarching,
big-picture thinking when the present’s immediate circumstances feel untenable
or at least unchangeable. Certainly I would agree that hope does entail and
require an ability to look beyond the specifics or details of any one moment or
situation, to consider what might be possible and different tomorrow as long as
we don’t let those individual moments and situations become all-encompassing. But
on the other hand, I think there can be a real danger in the idea that hope
takes time to come to fruition, that we have to be willing and able to wait for
it; sometimes perhaps there’s no other way, but in many circumstances, as the
old saying goes, waiting gives the devil time, allows the worst of the present
to become hardened into something set and even more difficult to change.
In my very
first post on this blog, I wrote about the 1898
Wilmington, North Carolina massacre and coup, one of the darkest moments in our
nation’s history; at the end of that post, I linked to a letter
sent by an anonymous African American woman to President McKinley, pleading
for federal intervention as the massacre’s violence and horrors continued into
the weeks beyong Election Day. In the face of some of the most desperate
circumstances ever to face a community, the letter expresses not only the
despair and pain and frustration and terror that she and all of her peers were
feeling, but also in its very existence a profound hope; that is, her choice to
write and send the letter speaks to her hope, spoken “from the depths of my
heart,” that she can reach her nation’s government and its highest elected
representative, that her voice and experiences can change the course of history
and save her community. Of all the tragedies surrounding this American low
point, none is more tragic than the simple fact that her hopes were not
rewarded; McKinley and the federal government did nothing, and the events in
Wilmington continued to run their horrific course.
There are
a number of things we could learn from Wilmington, if we better remembered it,
and certainly many of them are bleak; high on that list would be the simple
fact that the federal government, like the national media and much of white
America, was all too willing to accept and even support the white supremacist
stories of events such as Wilmington. But from McKinley and company’s inaction
we can also learn just how often and how much hope must be met by action, as
urgently and immediately as that hope demands. As I wrote in that earlier post,
Charles
Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
(1901), the novel inspired by the Wilmington events that is also my favorite
American novel and one of the two with which my book will open, ends with a
moment of almost utopian hope that precisely captures this dynamic: the novel’s
final line, which I can quote without spoiling the details, is “There’s time
enough, but none to spare.” The sentence’s first clause is indeed a profoundly
hopeful one, in the face of the many horrors that have preceded it; and the
second, despite the “but” formulation, to my mind complements it, suggesting
that the hope will not endure if it is not acted upon and made into something
more concrete and lasting. The arc of history might be long, but sometimes both
history and hope require immediacy as well.
Next Carolina
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Carolinian histories or stories you'd share?
No comments:
Post a Comment