Other Writings

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.

November, 2012

I love Cape Cod. It is sweet, and soft, and impermanent. I return here for two weeks – after the San Francisco visit, which I saw as such a triumph – for what seems like too few days. I come home to Joy, of course, and my most lovely cottage, about to get lovelier, and my most lovely son. To Thanksgiving, which for me is a National Day of Mourning, because, as we say, every day is a day of thanksgiving, and only some need to be marked for mourning, Columbus Day, and Memorial Day, for example.

The Indigenous People of MA are descendants of Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief betrayed by those lovely Pilgrims seeking religious freedom, his son’s head displayed on a pike in the village of Plymouth for twenty years after the white warriors returned home from Connecticut to celebrate the burning of 70 Pequot women and children in the first Thanksgiving. Yet the Wampanoag are still here, their language still spoken, their children still proud, the Earth still their mother, offering hope and good wishes to all, feeding 300 guests, calling for an end to war, offering hope and fellowship to their brothers and sisters struggling to protect their land and preserve their culture … in the Americas, in Palestine, and in all places where the guns and warships of the oppressor threaten the lives of the indigenous people.
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The long awaited pig roast unfolds, not exactly as scripted, but deliriously lovely in almost every way.  What was not anticipated includes my sister’s and nephew’s early arrival, without whom this roast absolutely could not have happened, not given the fact that a butterflied 160 pound pig presents some real problem in the realm of physics, fire, and balancing.  Unanticipated also was the amount of time it took for me and some of the greatest minds of my generation to fashion a wire cage strong enough to hold the pig in place, and the amount of heavy grade wire I’d have to cut to fasten the top and bottom of said cage, and the number of nicks and cuts I have all over my hands, and the burns on my fingertips, and the pain in muscles I don’t usually use, in my hands and fingers, my back, and parts of my mind. 
Most of all, although I anticipated all manner “disaster,” from rainy weather, to no one showing up, to the pig being undercooked no matter how long I cooked it, to the pig falling apart, or falling into dirt, or getting up and flying off on big Pegasus wings, none of these events unfolded, although three surprises awaited me. 
One was being left alone all day with the pig while all of the other humans entertained themselves in other ways.  Just me and the pig hanging out on a glorious fall morning and afternoon.  Hour after hour unable or unwilling to depart her side, to abandon my watch and my responsibility for this pig, my pig, and this gathering, watching the fire, tending the fire.
Then there was my forgetting, or not knowing, or not anticipating how much immense pleasure it would give me to share this adventure and this pig with Sam, and how his very presence excites and inspires me and puts a big smile on my face, and that we were able to share in this experience.
And third, though not least, what happens when you’re cooking a pig a solid three feet above the coals, and you are humming your cook-it-slowly-thoroughly-and-long mantra, and quite unthinkingly, while straightening up the yard, raking, and collecting down branches, all within sight of said pig, you take a small fallen oak tree branch that has lots of dry brown leaves still attached and in an idle offhanded way throw said branch on the low flame high heat coals, whereupon said leaves foreseeably burst into flames and said flames reach up to the downside backside hide of the hog, which until that moment has been steadily dripping 100 percent pork fat oil onto the hissing coals, when the actual flame from the burning leaves reaches the skin of the pig, and the entire pig is almost instantly engulfed in flames, a horrific sight.  And as I stand there transfixed, thinking the flames will burn themselves out, in fact they do not, and rather than die they contribute to a napalm-like fire of immense and seemingly tragic proportions, the entire pig encased in flame, feeding the fires with its dripping fat, dripping so much fat the entire skin of the pig is encased in a big oil rig fire, a runaway well that cannot be capped, and even when I remove the heat and flame source beneath the pig, the skin continues its burning in a vigorous, wind whipped independent fire, my entire pig quite literally entirely engulfed in flame, which, after a time I come to realize is not going to go out of its own volition without first consuming the entire pig, and I have to secure the garden hose and seriously spray the pig in an act of firefighter daring do, while simultaneously beating down the grass fire that has started all around the grill racing toward the shed. And thus it goes, my morning and afternoon alone with a lovely enough mammal who was alive and breathing the fresh free air two short days ago, and then had her throat cut, and was eviscerated, who drove home in the front seat of my car wearing a hat and a seatbelt so I could use the fast lane and came to rest three feet over a very very hot fire, and was transformed from living flesh and bone and organs that worked and lived, into meat cooking over a fire, and then into the very humans who consumed her, and honored her, and remember her in ways few of her kind are remembered,  once alive and now a part of me.

My father was a big man, filled with life, a big smile, and arms that moved swirling through space and time against the open blue sky.  He made me laugh.  And I loved him with all my heart.  So when I came home from seventh grade classes at the East Park School in Fort Lauderdale that Wednesday in September in 1954, all skirt and legs and black flat shoes with curly blond hair bouncing, and was told that Daddy had been “taken from us” I really couldn’t fathom what my mother had said. I thought he had been arrested perhaps. Perhaps taken to jail. I looked into my mother’s ashen face. And then I knew, in her bleak clenched jaw, in the way she averted her eyes, in the set of her body. Big Al was dead.
I did not think first about his touch, about how he could still pick me up and take my breath away even though I was twelve, about the way he laughed, and made me laugh, or that he loved my laugh. I just walked into the house to look for him.
Mother did not touch me. Did not hold me. Did not say, “I’m sorry child.” She talked on the phone to neighbors and relatives. She cried. She said, “Big Al is dead,” to the shocked silence and the night air.

I sat in a straight-backed upholstered chair in the foyer. The fabric was coarse and strong. I ran my fingers over it aimlessly. Mother sat by the telephone. We did not make eye contact. We did not cry. We did not touch. My brother came home. We ate dinner at the dining room table. We had slices of canned ham. Mashed white potatoes. Peas. We did not speak of my father. Without his joyful presence we did not speak at all. Mother, both strong and frail, commanded our silence without a word. We cleared the dishes. I brushed my teeth. I went into my bedroom. I did not cry.  I was empty. I found Binky my stuffed animal and took her into bed with me. I held her. I said my prayers. I prayed my father was not dead. I spoke imaginary conversations with Binky and God. I said Big Al is gone, but I did not believe it. I did not say Al was dead.

In the morning I woke up numb and cold, which was rare in Florida. I didn’t know what to do, or what was expected of me, or where my father was. I couldn’t play. I couldn’t read. I didn’t know what to wear, or if I should go to school. I couldn’t speak what was on my mind, and much was. I heard my mother on the phone talking to people and making arrangements. I learned that yesterday Al had come home for lunch, had eaten with my mother Dorothy, and then had gone into their bedroom for a nap. That when Dorothy went in to wake him he would not get up.  He was “gone.”  And I was buried deep inside the ground days before my father was.
I was not allowed to go to his memorial service at our church in Florida. I don’t know why.  Perhaps my mother thought it would be too hard for me. Perhaps she did not want me to see her as distressed as she anticipated she would be. I do not know. I wanted to go, to be with my father again, to tell Big Al I really really did not want him to be dead. But I didn’t ask to go. And I wasn’t invited.

I rode the train with my father’s body in a casket all the way to Grand Central Station in New York City with my mother, my aunt, and my brother Little Al, six feet two inches tall and fourteen years old. We sat facing each other. We talked little. We did not laugh. We did not mourn, not openly. I thought my thoughts were hurtful, shameful, irreverent. Thought I shouldn’t think. I bore my distress myself . Bore my self.  Suppressed myself. It was all my fault. Clearly. 
I was not comforted or consoled.
In Grand Central Station we stood in vast cavernous darkness while the casket with my father’s body was unloaded from the train and wheeled to a waiting hearse. I was also not allowed to go to the memorial service at our church in New York. Again, I don’t know why. Perhaps my mother was protecting me and thought it in my best interests. It took thirty more years before I was able to suitably mark that event in a psychodrama.
I was allowed to go to the cemetery, to his burial. It rained and rained. Hard rain. I remember standing there in the gray day, near the mausoleum, at the cavernous pit. And there my memory stops until I was back in Florida, back in school, withstanding the “He’s in a better place now.” Numb.

This story was told to me as told to my mother Betty by her father’s mother, about her father’s mother’s husband’s brother, my great grand uncle Hiram, all people I never met, except my mother, and even that is at times arguable.
Hiram came to New York from Eastern Europe, probably Latvia, where, before he’d left, he secretly (?) married his young love, a girl named Bessie (my great grand aunt), and how Hiram had managed through deep love and diligence to bring Bessie from the old country to New York, where they lived openly and passionately together as man and wife for ten years, childless though they desired children, until Hiram died suddenly before the age of thirty, as had my mother’s father, Benjamin died before the age of thirty. People who knew the couple thought Bessie would die too, she was so sick, so pale, so bereft. She mourned and cried endlessly, but then, thanks be to god, as my mother’s father’s mother would say, after a year she came about, quiet and withdrawn, but alive. And even more amazingly, about two years after Hiram’s death another man, a cousin of Hiram’s with four children of his own whose wife had recently died in childbirth, hired Bessie to care for this newest infant child and in time took Bessie for his wife. Then, not long after their marriage, Bessie announced to the world she was pregnant and less than six months after the wedding went into labor. Only the baby she delivered was clearly not premature, and her husband, who knew he had not known her in the biblical sense, and not had conjugal relations with her before their wedding, though no one else needed to know or would necessarily have deeply cared under their circumstances, forbade Bessie from returning to his house, and she and her baby didn’t, and no one ever knew who the father was, or saw Bessie and her baby again.  And so it was in those days, said Betty, perhaps in her way trying to caution me.

The Jews are chasing me. And the Hebrews own me. The Jews send forth their messianic minions in earthly form, because that’s about all that’s left after the millennia, the holocaust, the pogroms, the Pale … some writings, some values, some proud history, some false pretenses. They won’t let go, these Jews. They’re like fundamentalists everywhere. They demand I recognize and accept the electromagnetic energetics I’m so familiar with as realities … and I do, only for me they are tribal, the DNA is tribal, the historic memories embedded in the inherited codes are tribal. The Jews also want land back. They demand I at least acknowledge being Jew-ish. And I do. And we cannot deny our wish that our sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters are Jew-ish and when they marry Jewesses, they can say their children are Jewish. Bottom line is, go back enough generations and all of our ancestors are all African. I like that.

In addition to whatever actions I’ve taken to serve my self interests as I perceived them from time to time, I have historically acted and made choices out of some sense of desire and obligation to be of service, to save the planet and protect future generations, to end suffering, to end war, to protect threatened ethnic and cultural minorities, to seek justice, to make sure “Never Again” meant Never Again for all.  Now, at 70, I see my most significant self interest as being to act in a manner that is of service to my highest self, that really “goes for it” for myself.  What the planet needs from me may be no more than that. 

As you know, I have historically protected myself from my fears and feelings of rage, from my abuse and humiliation, from my almost complete absence of safety and comfort, with a “who gives a shit” attitude, which while protecting me, was also part of what stood in the way of my caring fully about myself, and, because I was imbued with the sense that I could more or less be anything I wanted to be or get anything I wanted to get, I believed that for whatever loss I might experience there was always another more or less equally good option available behind it.  And there was.  But what is it “I” really want to make me happy, given that I know at 70 that every option, every woman, and every situation will always have its disappointing aspects built in.  And what do I do when the hot love dies?   And how do I sustain my excitement.  And most of all, who is this “I” who thinks about these things?

So while I will no doubt “act,” and do, and make personally significant choices, there is another dimension that has entered “my” consciousness and that has assumed as much importance for me in realizing/attaining my goal of world and personal peace, of world and personal enlightenment, and that is an intense awareness, beyond anything I have known before, of the potential impact of what I actually “feel” (as opposed to what I do) as one who both emanates and receives/absorbs “feelings.”  Now I suspect you will laugh and say, “Feel? You feel all the time and are very sensitive to your feelings.  What are you talking about?”  And I agree that on an “emotional/mental/psychological/gut” level I have always been aware of my feelings, and occasionally aware of their impact on others, but I have had no awareness of what I would call the energetic and spiritual impact of my feelings, no awareness of what I absorb and what I radiate out on an energetic and spiritual level.  And that subconscious energetic and spiritual impact has come to have immense importance to me. 

I believe for example that if you seek peace with hatred in your heart you are assured of failure.  So too lack of compassion, rage, self righteousness … 

So what will I do in light of that?  Much less PDA, although not none.  Much more yoga.  Much more communing with nature, feeling it, even more so.  “September 1, 1939”: “The windiest militant trash/ Important Persons shout/ Is not so crude as our wish:/ What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev/ Is true of the normal heart;/ For the error bred in the bone/ Of each woman and each man/ Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love/ But to be loved alone.”

Circa 2010