earthly voyages

Archives

now browsing by author

 

Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg

Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg, age 13, to me, November, 2002

The clock awakens
Ticking through time
The boy grows older
Abandoning nursery rhymes.

He learns to read,
Write, and talk
Goes through school
Books, tests and chalk.

To a bright future he heads
Aging too fast
Going through college
Using his skills from the past

The boy, now a man
Becomes a lawyer
Happily marries
Is his own employer

He grows older
Wiser too
Still fresh and hip
As he was at age two

He reaches sixty-two
A perfect age to be
Is wished happy birthday
By his good old friend, me.

Photo Gallery

  • Travel Gallery

  • Other Photos & Views

  • Family, Friends, Faces

Sharna’s Great Great Grandmother

Christina LeVant was born enslaved in 1842 on a plantation in Marion S.C. Her father Frank LeVant and his wife were bought over on a slave ship from the east coast of Africa. Christina, known as Tina, worked as a lady’s maid to her slave owner Mrs. W.J. Baker. When Tina’s mother was on her deathbed, she begged her owner Mrs. Baker, not to sell her children. Mrs. Baker granted her request and later in her will, left Tina and her older sister to her brother.

Mrs. Baker died the summer before the Civil War broke out and Tina, then 17 was put in the fields by her new owner, to work as a water girl. She would fill a heavy wooden pail with water, carry it on her head and walk a mile around the plantation many times a day to carry water to the slaves working in the fields. In addition to carrying water, Tina also watched for the overseer and warned the slaves so that he wouldn’t catch them praying. She continued this work until the age of 20 when the war was over.

When the Emancipation Proclamation was in effect, many of the freed slaves stayed on the plantation under contract with the owners who agreed to give them part of the crops raised. Tina stayed for some time. During her stay, a Negro Clergyman named “Smith” went to Marion to organize a church. He distributed Bibles. Tina kept hers close to her heart and read it faithfully. She was one of the lucky slave children who was taught to read and write by her owners. One of the plantation owners gave them an acre of land to build a church. The site of the church was called African Methodist Hill.

As time went on a lay preacher, named John Platt was in charge of the African Methodist Zion church in Marion, S.C. Tina later married the son of John Platt Sr in 1868, and together they were able to save enough to buy a small plot of land for a house and garden. They raised vegetables, chickens and a few pigs. Tina spun cotton cloth to clothe her children. She also made her own bread and soap. In 1905 John Jr and Tina moved to Waterbury CT where they helped organize the Pearl St. Church. Tina and John had 11 children (Elliot, George, John, Arthur, Mary, Fannie, Daisy, Florence, Ruth, and 2 died at birth). Tina and John worked hard to give their children an education.

Three of the girls attended Livingston College and one of them became a Domestic Science teacher. Arthur graduated from Boston university Law School and practiced in Spartanburg S.C. George became one of the best trap drummers in the theater and worked with bands in Hollywood. John also graduated from Livingston College and was an ordained minister in 1915. He became a supply Minister for the New England District of the AME Zion Church.

Tina later moved to Medfield MA where she lived with her daughters Fannie and Ruth. Together they had a large garden 150 chickens and 4 pigs. In addition to her 11 children, Tina had 26 grandchildren and over 22 great grandchildren. John died in 1930 at the age of 83 but Tina lived until 1943 dying at the age of 101.

Memoirs

Maia speaks – 1998

My mother and father both loved me dearly, both wanted children dearly, were both goodly folk, kind and supportive of me. They also both abandoned me. The scar tissues that have formed over the gaping wounds of their abandonment are thick, stiff, and inflexible. I don’t want them seen, don’t want others touching or noticing them, think of them as my personal scars, protect them as well as wish them gone. I have taken of late to kneading them in the privacy of my study, to giving them a bit more attention, to tentatively rubbing warm sweet waters into the tissues in an effort to get them to soften and yield.

After my mother and father left the commune they lived on in the early seventies, after they separated, after my father left me in his effort to find a place to live and a way to make a living, after my mother’s breakdown, after I pushed the chair over to the wall phone and climbed up on it to call my father, to whisper into the mouth piece softly enough so my mother would not hear me that he must come and take me away, that my mother was feeding me cat food because she thought the government was poisoning us with surplus foods, that I felt unsafe, that I was unsafe, that I was scared, so scared, after that, I went to live with my father.

He lived at the time with a very gentle woman who had also lived on the commune and her two daughters. I wanted to be part of their family, of his family, I wasn’t sure I could be. They all held me and loved me, but the damage had been done. I was frightened by my mother and by the demons she shared so openly with me. I was frightened my father would leave me. I showed none of this. Knew none of this then. That summer my mother went to live with her father in another state, where she bore another daughter, sent me pictures of her new baby, gave that child up for adoption. I was five years old.

Soon afterwards my father separated from the woman he lived with and her daughters. He went to court, fought for, and was awarded custody of me. He had always wanted children of his own and there I was.

My father thought being a single parent was a gift not a burden. And, inasmuch as there was nothing more important or more exciting in his life, I derived the bulk of the benefits, and of the hardships, of his intense and focused caring and love. This is not a conceit of mine; it is historical fact. My father wanted nothing more desperately than to make a good home for me and raise me healthily and happily. My father adored me. He still does.

He had a series of jobs back then, mostly as an administrator of programs for troubled teenagers. He was also unemployed for periods of time. From the end of my third year of public school though the eighth grade, when my soon to become step-mother moved in with us, we lived on the third floor of a triple decker house he owned and maintained amidst the lovely trees, on the hill top, in our multiracial corner of the city. He was always puttering around that house, painting, hammering, sweeping the hallways, taking down walls, caulking windows, checking the boilers. He built my bed and my shelves. He cooked. He loved to cook. I think he thought if he could put good food on the table and maintain a roof over our heads he was doing well as a person. He ran or jogged everyday, tried to get me to accompany him on my bicycle or on roller skates, had a few friends he prized, and always a girlfriend or two, being a man who did not much like being alone.

Even his girlfriends were mostly pluses in my life. They knew my father was deeply committed to me, that anything they might have thought possible with my father in a long-term relationship quite naturally included me. They also seemed genuinely to like me, and I knew that. I was a cute, open, gregarious, friendly child. I was an interesting person capable of sustained thoughtful conversation. I liked their company. They liked mine. They talked to me. They admired me. I admired them, their clothes, their height, their easy way in the kitchen. They brushed my hair. They brought me costume jewelry. And except for the fact I usually had to sit in the back seat of my father’s old car whenever one of them was riding with us, I enjoyed their companionship, our shared conversations, their guidance in matters of womanly style.

It was, of course, my father who did the shopping, did the laundry, cleaned the house, painted my fingernails. The original Mister Mom. “Amazing,” he would say, his eyes genuinely beaming with wonder, “what beautiful hands you have. I can’t believe I’m actually painting my little girl’s fingernails. Unbelievable. I never painted anyone’s fingernails. Hold still will you? Do you like this color? You know this is just like miniature wall painting? Do you know about Michelangelo? Look how the polish goes on so smoothly. Oops, I smeared it. How do you like this color anyway?” He became quite proficient at doing my nails. It was just his way.

My father would also always drive me to school, engage me in conversation concerning my thoughts, his thoughts, our lives, our plans for the day, the week, future travel, the news. He would take me to the movies and athletic events, go roller skating with me, go to parent teacher conferences, encourage me to have my friends over after school or for weekend sleep over parties with the inevitable dance contests that were part of the routine. Then he’d get up in the morning and make pancakes for six or seven, clean the house, clean the kitchen, do the laundry. Write in his journal. Go for a jog. Life was good. On special occasions we would go on “dates,” usually early in the evening, to a rotating bar on the top floor of a hotel overlooking the city and the river. There would be few other patrons out early enough to be sharing the floating rotunda with us. I would order a sophisticated non-alcoholic drink. He would order and nurse a beer. The waitress would bring us cocktail snacks and think we were a cute couple. The chairs were soft and upholstered. The bar spun so slowly you almost forgot you were moving. We talked and talked, the night rode by, and we never bored of things to say.

Gospel of the Redwoods

Gospel of the Redwoods – A Song
V1.

When the poet asked the redwoods

About their long past lives

They laughed so hard their seed cones

Came afallin’ from the skie

We never die, said the mothers,

To the representatives of youth

Our roots they keep on propagating

New generations of same old me

And when we fall tall over

We’re still standing don’t you see.

Chorus:

We told this to the Yurok

And they quickly understood

No beginnings and no endings

Ever conscious, ever wood.


V2.

And what I asked of happiness

Are you only old and wide

Or is there something more to know 

Of what goes on inside

And again the mighty redwoods laughed

From their roots up to their roof

You humans are such dizzy folk

We’re not quite sure you’d know the truth

Our branches are in love with light

We’re earthly bound and heaven sent

Surrounded by our friends and kin

We see and feel without lament

Chorus


V3.
You know of height, you know of light
In each of which you take delight
You feel some things I’ll never know
You know the grounds on which you grow
You know of weight and health and kin
You never stop nor quite begin
You’re a continuum of life and pleasure 
A gift for which there is no measure
Not in weeks, not days or nights
You are the mighty redwoods, 
Lovely objects of delight

Chorus

V4.
Our talk then turned to consciousness
And I’d much more to as
As I tried to wrap my mind ‘round them 
and failed in this task.
“I weigh 500 tons.” one said, 
“Yet feel quite light and thin
I’m tall and straight and happy
When I play with the north wind
I stand erect on one tap root
And dance with moons and stars
And point the compass of my passions
Toward Venus and toward Mars

Chorus

Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew

Life is suffering:
The first of the teachings explains
a world of hurt, beleaguered with pain.
It says that life is suffering
and full of strife and struggling.
From birth until death, in human form –
we can certainly expect to be consumed by the forlorn.
Within this incarnation which we reside
there will be sin and tarnation held inside.

Suffering has a reason:
The second of these meaningful teachings
expresses why there is pain and its reasons.
From the days before, until tomorrow and after
this dismay is important, with its sorrowful disaster.
The tragedy which we must endure and feel
with sadness and grief are from something sure and real.
The chaos of life has cause and effect,
where dismay, loss and strife have obvious connections.

The reason for suffering is attachement:
The third of these truths states the following:
the absurdity and abuse are related to wallowing
in desire, needs and attachments of want,
with a fire that feeds, combats our senses and taunts.
The vexing hate and confusion we sustain
are connected, related to the delusions entertained.
When we long for an outcome to be consistently granted,
we feel wronged with doubt – succumbing to differences from what was demanded.

Disconnecting from attachment brings the cessation of suffering:
The fourth jewel of wisdom that is taught and shared
is an important tool of precision in thought and cares.
Liberation from suffering can be truthfully attained,
with a situation of less struggling, and fewer pains.
By practicing detachment and ceasing desire –
with these tactics we can combat the grief, and fire.
Enlightenment is within our reach and potential
when using this insight intense, of these teachings so influential.

Written by Jake Onami Agnew, 2009

Poems by Others

A Brief History of the Attempted Genocide

Although the European invaders attempted a complete indigenous genocide they failed, and although many indigenous cultures, traditions, languages, and much wisdom has been lost, the fact is there are currently 574 federally “Recognized” tribes in the US as of 2024 as well as over 400 “unrecognized” tribes including the Herring Pond Tribe of southeastern MA. There are also approximately six million Indigenous tribal citizens now alive in the US. How odd that the best concise summary of the American Genocide of the Indigenous Peoples is to be found at The Ministry of Foreign Affairs website of the People’s Republic of China.

Commune Stories

You might be interested in an article in the Saint Albans Messenger, which documents some of the nuances of living in a communal setting back in the 70s: Echoes of the Counterculture [External Link]