Well, I have traveled through east Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Bob Dylan, 1991
Some of us, Catholics, that is, can name at least a few of the martyred saints. St. Agnes of Rome, St. Mark, St. James, St, Thomas More. St. Jude, not the "betrayer," was my favorite because one prays to him when desperate and when all hope is gone. I can only imagine how many times my enslaved ancestors called upon him.
During my elementary years and well into my high school years, the Founding Fathers, I was taught, were born and left this Earth, without blemish. White school children, too, hadn't a clue about Sally Hemings, for example, or that Thomas Jefferson, recalling witnessing white children on plantations, observing, in turn, "the commerce between master and slave" the unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other." The children, he continues, will learn that being cruel to Blacks, to anyone suffering from poverty or from a disabling disease, pays off, and, therefore, to "imitate" parents' behavior is rewarding.
We never read Notes on Virginia, 1781. But we were taught to remember stories about the bravery of ragtag Confederate soldiers. Most Americans have grown up seeing Robert E. Lee sitting straight back on his horse guiding his soldiers in the fight against the Union. In my youth, he was a hero of desperate causes. Hopeless causes. So the nuns told us.
Which of these nuns, our teachers, ever spoke of the bravery and courage, of enslaved Blacks who endured 400 years of brutal exploitation, mental, and physical violence? Surely, the institution of slavery in the US appeared, from the view point of these enslaved Blacks, a hopeless cause. Nonetheless, enslaved, men and women wrote of those years, in which most, managing to escape the plantation, they learned to read and write in order to recollect lived experiences as survivors and often fugitives from the most brutal and sadistic system of abuse. Slavery was a display of cruelty Hitler would come to admire, and study.
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