History Lessons

One evening when Alu and Michelle were in town, they sat the kids while Jo and I dressed up from the 20's and went as guests of Karen and Tim's to the Ballet Afrique dinner fundraiser. We were taken back in time to the (very racist) Cotton Club of Harlem with amazing performances from Duke Ellington's house band (Austin's very own Hard Proof plus some music faculty from Huston Tillotson University), and performers pretending to be Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horn, Ella Fitzgerald, and the fabulous dance performances of the Cotton Club.

At about the same time I started reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad, and while it's fiction, it gives one an amazing look into the terror crazed mind and world of a runaway slave girl from Georgia.

Then on the way to Santa Fe for spring break we stopped and spent a couple of hours in a remote corner of New Mexico and history - a place called Fort Sumner, and today the Bosque Redondo Memorial where, between 1863 and 1868, while the rest of the United States was fighting for or against slavery, the US Army was quietly killing hundreds of Navajo and Mescalero Apache - men, women and children, in captivity.

I am hoping that Vivian's education this year at home, and our travels are showing her something not always discussed in school. Slavery and genocide are not side notes in the history of this country. The founders of this great nation had to wipe out one race to take their lands and then enslave another race to work those lands in their quest for the American dream.