I was nine months old when my father died. After his death, my mother remained a widow until December 29, 1979, when she married Cooper, who, by virtue of this fact, became my stepfather, although I was twenty-seven at the time and hardly in need of a new parent. But Cooper was not new to me.
The plague that devours Oran is less a proxy for a manifestly odious occupying force than it is emblematic of the contradictions inherent in democracy, in which the limits of liberal universalism and equality collide against the violent reality of state power.
Inside Portland Place was the house made of stone, the building material of kings. Inside the house, the castle, the fortress, were Mark and Patty, heroes of an imagined apocalypse, soft centers in a crunchy shell. Looking out of their own skins.
Ignoring the blithe optimism practiced by motivational speakers even in his day, Seneca urges us toward a “steadiness of heart” that is purposeful and “cannot be dislodged from its position.” His advice sounds simplistic, the stuff of cliché and needlepoint pillows. But when have I ever pulled it off?
Unfortunately, despite our accomplishments, we are victimized by institutional racism. It is a deadly virus in its own right, founded on a social construct of white supremacy and fabricated to justify mass oppression of people of color, it plagues many of our lives. It is also pervasive in medicine, where practitioners double down, often insisting they are color-blind, and in education, where faculty and administrators find multiple reasons not to diversify colleagues or curriculum.
Frederick Douglass saw the Fourth as a mockery, because he was still a slave, but slave poet George Moses Horton saw Independence Day as one to be celebrated as a victory for all. As indeed it was.
The plan was to go back to Saigon for a second tour, but we never did due to the war, the subsequent embargo, and the dissolution of my family. My mother kept the beauty of Vietnam and its people vivid before my eyes, like a sandalwood-scented dream.
Ghosts is a drama of many themes. At its core, though, is the idea of “sickness” as the inexorable tide we push for, or against. It is the one drama—dare it be said, the only?—wherein “sickness” becomes the widest possible metaphor not just for disease, but inherited social convention, accepted ideology, and the crucible of family without which we cannot survive, but in which we can also decay and die.
Melting under conditions of extreme heat is only undertaken with considerable suffering and loss, but generations of white Americans have felt the loss of forgetting to be worth it, if not a little bit because they would rather be what is melted than the pot.
Who was George Moses Horton? I suspect that he was someone like Common, who would dance and gesture when he composed.
