1931-2014
Most history is written in a way to distance the reader from what is being reported. Not Vincent Harding's history. His history was written from the inside. He cared about what happened to the people he wrote about. He wanted to understand them, to dig deeply into their motivations and hopes in order to better understand our own. He wrote about them as if they were sitting there with him in the room.
I've been re-reading There is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, originally published in 1981. I forgot how deeply he empathized with his subjects; how much he identified with their dilemmas, challenges, tragedies, and deepest desires. He was a historian, yes, but Vincent Harding was also a signpost. An exemplar. A model for being in the world.
I thought of him last week, when so many folks were sharing the video of the actor Wendell Pierce on Bill Maher's late night show on HBO. Wendell was holding it down for how and why so many black folk had come to practice "disciplinary violence." Don't get me wrong. I don't believe in "disciplinary violence," for adults or children. But Wendell said, correctly I think, that this practice had been learned at the feet of folk who had practiced some of the cruelest violence around--namely Europeans who came to the Americas stealing the lives, labor, and land of Africans and Native peoples.
I wondered how many people thought he was exaggerating, and that's when I thought of this passage from There is a River:
"Near Christmastime in 1769, a group of blacks on a plantation in Hanover County, Virginia, decided to turn on their new steward and a neighboring overseer. They tied up the two men and, perhaps remembering their own experiences under the lash, whipped their white bosses "till they were raw from the neck to the waistband.
Not long after, in Louisiana, several men and a woman, including at least one who was African-born, killed their master and attempted to organize a larger insurrection. They failed, and the penalties were brutal. Two of the leaders were "condemned...to death by hanging...dragged to the gallows from the tail of a pack-horse with an ...halter tied to the neck, feet and hand," ...It was decreed [that the leader] was "to remain on the gibbet and to have his hands cut off and nailed on the public roads. Pedro is to receive 200, and Mariana 100 lashes at the foot of the gallows, and their ears cut off close."
Wendell was not exaggerating.
Gibbet: a gallows with a projecting arm at the top, from which
the bodies of criminals were formerly hung in chains and left suspended
after execution.
