Hints and Scents

It’s been nearly a week since the election and I’ve been, as the young say, “feelin’ some kinda way.” A way I couldn’t fully express until I stumbled upon a good movie that helped me find my words. The movie was called, Free State of Jones. The genius of the movie was not in the telling of the story of one man’s struggle during the dark days of the Civil War, but in the message about history itself.

The movie was about a young man who was being prosecuted in the state of Mississippi for marrying a white woman, though he himself was white. That young man’s grandfather, Newt Knight, had a child with a freed black slave just after the war, so that his grandson had at least one-eighth black blood, making him, according to Mississippi law, Negro. Though the movie is about the grandson’s trial, if you hadn’t started at the beginning you wouldn’t know it, because the bulk of the time is spent telling the story of Newt Knight, often in graphic and brutal detail. The movie only returns to the grandson occasionally, and at the end, to frame the message of the movie.

The great message of the movie is that the grandson’s story could only be told, understood, or have meaning, through the telling of his grandfather’s story. The grandfather’s history had not only shaped who the grandson was, but was affecting his life, and calling him to make a decision based on that history. Without the context of his grandfather’s lifelong, deadly struggle against the Southern establishment, his decision to go to jail in rejection of the state’s offer of freedom on the condition that he divorce his wife and leave Mississippi forever, would seem at best to be an individual heroic love story and not the larger historic struggle for the soul of the nation.

History has that power. The power to shape us and affect our decisions. As a result, there has always been a grand struggle to get the story right. Those who look to reshape history know the power of history to influence, shape, or manipulate, depending on the motives of those telling or retelling the story.

The African American community reacted to the election results with anger, despair, and grief because some of us remember the depth of the struggle to just be free, and the depths men sank morally and ethically to keep us in bondage. We remember the concerted legal and illegal efforts now so neatly contained in academic terms like Jim Crow. Gone is the very real, pervasive and coordinated acts of terror, brutality, robbery, murder, intended to bring a people to its knees. Despite our present attempts to retell our stories of individuality, these acts were systemic; concerted; supported by both church and state. They were legal; codified. All based solely on the, cleaned up, simply stated, social construct we call race. As if race was not socially constructed for our destruction. Yeah, it was based on something as inconsequential as skin color. As if skin color did not regularly mark us for death. But when some of us remember, we remember in color.

Despite the retellers’ attempts to minimize the cruelty, diminish the concert and pervasiveness, and insistence that this history is ancient, some of us still picked up on the hints and scents of the past that mobilized rural America and “good Christian folks” to “Make America Great Again.” We know why the election map of middle America was all red. We know why rebel flags fly in rural mid-American and western states where those Southerners migrated after the war, taking their lost cause with them. We are not fooled by the election cover story of economic anxiety, because it smells of the old cover stories like States’ Rights, contrived to preserve our fragile but important notion of innocence. Lest we finally face who we are.

Sadly, the retellers have influenced us more than we know. We believe race is a powerless social construct, ignoring or ignorant of the depth of our grandparent’s fear of its power to destroy. Because our history is now so distant and sterile, more than 50% of the nation can be called to return to a time we dare called the nation, “great.” All the while being guilted into believing the one and only righteous call in this election was against abortion, as if the hints and scents of the past, laced in the rhetoric, hold no murderous threats.

History is the context for the story of our lives, without it we cannot find meaning. In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner said, “the past is never dead, it is not even past…” Even our Bible is a telling of the story of God’s acts in history, in order to make known His Son. It was recorded that the telling of the story would not be lost, lest we begin to live like it did not happen and we forget our God. There are some things we should never forget, especially those that so shape who we are. We become a shallow and ignorant people if we choose to remember the good and minimize or, God forbid, forget the bad from our history. We may miss the hints and scents, and find ourselves bound for repetition of the very bad we are trying so hard to forget.

Blessings