Today is the 4th of July, also known as Independence day in the United states, and like most people I know I'm sitting at home and playing a rousing rendition of "Firework or Gunshot!"
 |
| Pictured: An accurate representation of my face with each explosion outside |
Beyond the discomfort presented by the cacophony of barely controlled explosions in the world beyond my walls I find the weight of history and my own awareness of it bearing down upon my mind and twisting my emotions in ways both painful and cantankerous today. This day has not been one of unadulterated celebration for me since I was a child and spared from the sobering understanding that this holiday, this "Independence Day" was not in its inception or its character, meant for me. I suspect that I've struggled with this truism for some time whether I was cognizant of it or not. For many years I just saw this as another day in the year, rather than battle with the intense melancholy the day brought about, and yet today the full force of the aforementioned truism is inescapable.
Current events have exacerbated this truth for me by orders of magnitude unfathomed, and this meditation on the interwoven knots of fact and fiction associated with this day has only had its difficulty enhanced.
And through all of this a single character has been running through my mind today. A character by the name of Moses.
No, not the Moses of the Bible or the Ten Commandments but Moses from the PBS show,
Liberty's Kids.
 |
| "I am a free man–in the employ of Benjamin Franklin" |
Liberty's Kids was a show that took a rather unflinching look at the American Revolution and for a kids' show it did a number of things that still amaze me to this day. While not perfect, it examined the plight of the Native Americans in the war effort, examined the merits of both sides of the revolution (the colonists and the loyalists) and most pertinent to this post, didn't shy away from the issue of slavery, nor the uncomfortable truth of many of the founding fathers as slave owners. At the center of a great deal of this unflinching take... was a former slave and self taught engineer by the name of Moses.
As a young man Moses may have been one of my favorite characters I'd ever seen. In many ways, he was the first black man in fiction who behaved in a manner worthy of the black men I knew personally, rather than the stereotypes oft presented to the masses for consumption, especially in historical fiction. A former slave, brought in chains from West Africa to the United States he taught himself to read and write, and became a blacksmith of considerable skill. It was with that skill he purchased his own freedom and in that I have always seen an example of Liberty's kids forthrightness and power. Moses was not "rescued" from slavery. As a kids show, this would have been an easy route to follow. Moses and the leading child characters were fiction. Fabrications purely for the needs of the show and as such any number of watered down narratives could have been used for Moses, including the white savior narrative so commonly trotted out as a way to do a "not all white people" lesson to help the audience not feel so bad about Moses' plight.
Instead they chose a backstory where Moses' freedom was not granted to him, but rather he seized it for himself and that boldness shined through in Moses consistently.
Moses was kind, compassionate and wise as a caretaker for the main characters. Yet far from being the safe and neutered "Magical Negro" trope often seen in fiction where the black character only serves to pass folksy wisdom to the white characters, Moses had a will as sturdy as the metal he taught himself to shape. Though there was only so much he could get away with (the show takes place in the 18th century and is trying to be as accurate as it can be within the bounds of a children's show) he was still righteously intimidating when he had to be and had to fight and scrape for every ounce of respect he ever had. Even in a time when the white supremacy of the U.S. was so formidable, and people would attempt to intimidate the man, Moses refused to cede his ground.
More than once Moses would show his freedom papers, to another character and declare with great solemnity and pride "I am a free man–in the employ of Benjamin Franklin," and though had he been an actual figure in history, it is his employer who would likely have been his greatest protection from the injustices of his age, the pride in the voice actor's delivery at the line, "I am a free man" is always what was emphasized.
The most memorable and powerful line that cemented Moses' place as a character of unmatched strength and intensity was in a scene where he confronted a man in support of the institution of slavery. Moses, who towers over the other man and tells him in no uncertain terms...
"You are entitled to your opinion sir... just know that in its exercise, you would deny me mine!"
He manages this feat with a combination of dignity and barely suppressed rage I have rarely seen since and never in a children's show.
And so today I consider Moses. I consider how a fictional character, living in the 1700's manages to be so relevant to me today in the wake of the horrors of current events that swirl like the most turbulent of waters all around my life. Today I consider a man that had he actually lived, would have seen the signing of the Declaration of Independence for which we celebrate today, and would have to recognize that he was still not truly free. I think about the actual freedmen and women of the day who would likely look at their papers and have to wrangle the cognitive dissonance of knowing that a man heralded as one of the greatest of his age, a man who wrote: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal..." could write those words as a slave owner.
Like I imagine many a person of color before me has done and I know many are doing today, I wrestle ardently with the bones of this dissonance. I struggle with the fact that today celebrates the independence of a nation from what they considered cruel tyranny and yet in turn would have kept my ancestors as beasts of burden for its use in ways too gruesome to contemplate for long. And though the sting of knowing that history has been dulled by learning the lesson countless times, the matters of the present day make it clear that the idea of some, that we had banished racism to the four winds, is a delusion both entrenched and dangerous in the extreme. My nation's racism is not a skeleton, long dead and rotting. How can it be when in my own life I have known men and women who saw the tail end of segregation with their own eyes?
How can it be when I have had teachers and colleagues across the spectrum who attended the civil rights marches of the 1960s?
How can it be when my own mother, as a young girl in Mississippi, was not allowed to read the books she desired because they weren't in her section and as a young adult was chased from a party at which she was the only black attendee by the site of a burning cross on the yard?
So I think about Moses and by extension the real freemen and women whom his story stands as representative for. I am once again drawn to a cartoon character from one of the most unflinching shows for kids about history I've ever seen. It didn't shy away from the ugly truths of the founding fathers of this nation as slave owners, not did it pretend that life was easy for black folks once they were off the plantation whether they were in the south OR the north (much of the show's bits with Moses take place in Pennsylvania).
And in the end I think about a simple fact: we have come a long way in this country... but when one considers the issues still before us, one and all, and the terror that still seeps deep into the bones of me and those like me, for whom, due to the color of our skin, this world was not built for us, this country has a long way to go before it can live up to the truth of its ideals, rather than the mere sentiment. It's what's owed to the real men and women who's stories Moses represents.
