93,000 Miles to the Sun

 

     In the summer of 2015, just months after originally publishing Tatterdemalion, I was looking around for a new project. I'd just got done reading the Timothy Wilde trilogy by Lindsay Faye, about the first years of the NYPD in the 1840s. So, naturally, being a transplanted Massachusetts resident, I began doing research on my new Android on the history of the Boston PD to see if anyone had written a book or a series about that.

     The Boston PD's Wikipedia page didn't provide any cultural references to such a thing but it did mention the nearly forgotten Anthony Burns riots in the late spring/early summer of 1854. The riots broke out almost immediately after Burns, a 19 year-old slave who'd escaped his plantation in Virginia, virtually the same day the Boston Police Department day and night watches were finally unified into a single, professional police department.

     The internet being the way it is, I followed the trail of bread crumbs and read about the Burns riots under its own Wikipedia page and when I realized that no one had written a novel about that, I knew I was onto something. The Burns riots, and subsequent victory for those who supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, was a very big deal in its day but, in the 161 years that had elapsed between then and the time I'd first read about it, it was obvious to me that this was a watershed moment in American history that was in serious jeopardy of being all but forgotten.

     That same day, the prologue was written in that Dunkin' Donuts and the protagonist, Vesey Van Zant, was born. That project would be drafted out four months later as Gods of Our Fathers.

     It turned out to be my shortest novel, weighing in at just under 120,000 words, but it still gives a pretty rich and detailed account of what slavery was like in America in the first half of the 19th century. There are several flashback chapters that take place in 1834, Vesey's and his mother's last year at the Mississippi plantation from which they escaped.

     Vesey was only five by that time, but was already a grizzled veteran of lynchings, slave auctions, whippings, murders and a harrowing bid for freedom on the Underground Railroad. In other words, it paints a pretty dark and unflinching picture of what it was like for African Americans in the first half of 19th century America. After all, both my sons are Black. I owed this to them.

     What we're seeing in Florida, with the new "guidelines" being forced down teachers' and students' throats by the Dept. of Education, is the exact opposite. Whereas I felt I owed it to my readers to tell the facts as I saw them regarding the Anthony Burns affair, an all but forgotten but nonetheless important piece of US history, the Florida DOE is trying to whitewash history at best, expunging it at worst.

     If students are to be taught about the Tulsa Massacre of 1919 or the Greenwood Massacre a century ago, they will be taught that black people were also guilty of violent acts, essentially blaming the victims, and that they brought it on themselves. They will not be told that the 30 or so people who died in Greenwood were desperately fighting to defend themselves and their families from racist violence, they will not be told that not a single white man responsible for the Tulsa Massacre was actually convicted.

     Children in Florida will not be told about the Middle Passage, the hideously-packed and unimaginably filthy slave ships, the high mortality rates during those miserable journeys, they will not learn about the whippings at the whipping posts, the lynchings, the brutal work conditions in the cotton, tobacco or sugar cane fields or the necessity of the Underground Railroad and the people and organizations that funded them.

     Instead, they'll be told that these slaves were taught valuable skills, like picking cotton, tobacco and cutting sugar cane. Yes, they will be taught that slavery was actually a boon so that white people, God forbid, will not feel uncomfortable over their ancestors' crimes.

     All because of one book-burning fascist-in-waiting and his vendetta against an ill-defined concept such as "woke".

     It's a pathetically desperate attempt to assuage the incipient angst of white people so they don't, oh horrors, feel the weight of the countless crimes their ancestors had inflicted on Black people since 1619 when the first slaves came to Jamestown.

     It's a pathetic attempt at evading accountability or hurt fee fees because, while public schools are an invaluable hub of education, they are not the only one. Even if Florida is literally clearing all books from school libraries, there's little they can do about public libraries and even less about the books you can easily and cheaply buy on Amazon and other vendors. And Black parents will teach their children about the evils and horrors of slavery just as Native American parents teach their children about the Trail of Tears and Chinese American parents teach their children about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Jewish parents and Hebrew schools teaching children about the Holocaust.

     That's the kind of home schooling I can get behind.

     And we'd best teach our children this because all those other travesties I'd just mentioned? They're next. Diluting or rewriting AP studies is just a trial run. If the white-washed and falsified history in Florida's public schools takes hold and is not sufficiently challenged, this will spread like a cancer all over the country. Native American children in consolidated schools on reservations will no longer be allowed to learn about Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears and the Indian Removal Act. Hebrew schools will be forbidden from teaching about the Holocaust. And so forth.

     Folks, I'd like to think I'm preaching to the choir here and that I don 't have to remind you that book banning is not only UnAmerican, it's inhuman. It's inhuman to obstruct children from accessing historical knowledge and the necessary (and accurate) context of it. 

     I keep thinking of that chilling line at the beginning of a Ray Bradbury short story in which a girl and her father were going over her astronomy lessons and the girl asked her father how far away the earth was from the sun. The answer, of course, is 93,000,000 miles but the father, instead says, "93,000 miles", which obviously, would incinerate the earth in a fraction of a second. But in Bradbury's dystopian world, children of high intelligence and erudition were hunted down and exterminated because the state didn't want an informed generation.

     That's where we're headed. Soon, we'll be hearing from our kids that John Wayne's interviews will be taught in school, especially the ones in which he said white people needed land and Indians were just in the way or that he was in favor of white supremacy until Black people could become equals to white people.

     It will result in scared teachers troweling out bullshit to their classes or result in a brain drain through mass resignations. Either way, the radical right wing will win. Unless we stamp out censorship in history and science and everything else children will have to learn so that, when their generation is in charge, this will never happen again.