Right then; so.

The afternoon before this one, I listened to part of a speech from sixty years ago, given a couple of years before the System murdered the speaker. His name was Malcolm X.

The audio is linked in yesterday’s post. Today, I’ve been letting it work its magic in me.

I started out by finding a transcript and reading the most germane eight minutes, out loud, myself, into my cheap camera, and I posted that as my vid for the day before I was fully awake.

I did it that way for a couple of reasons. I don’t know what the copyright status of the audio is, for example, and I don’t want to give the people that run YouTube any excuse at all to give me one of their stupid strikes. Also, Malcolm twice uses a word that our tenderized modern ears find far more offensive than a Fuck or a Shit. So I whispered it both times.

But mainly I felt like reading it myself, even though it was definitely not as good that way, would help me internalize it.

Also. In the process of internalizing it, I lay myself open to charges of appropriation, or privilege, and I’m willing to admit that I might be marginally guilty of such anti-woke crimes. Guilty even now–and I haven’t said an actual meaningful word yet.

Let’s fix that (and do the crime right). The speech as I found it was titled, “The House Negro and the Field Negro”, and the main thrust of it is to inform you that the Civil War changed pretty much nothing.

For me, it succeeds, and then some.

As far as I know, there is no history of Slavery as defined in the popular mind in my direct familial line. As far as I know, Malcolm wasn’t even talking to me. But … he spoke to me anyway. It felt personal.

The shape of the argument is that in the olden days of Empire, far short of two hundred years ago, there existed three main classes of Person–the Masters, the House Negroes, and the Field Negros–and that things are essentially the same, right here and now.

Malcolm was talking from a space bound by his own experience and time. I was listening bound by mine. The Sixties, the 2020s. The black and the white. The young and the old. The activist, and the belletrist.

Either way.

The Masters own the others. In the Before, that was literal and legal ownership of human beings. Now it’s dressed up. Sure you’re a citizen, a taxpayer, a voter, theoretically entitled to a speedy fair trial by a jury of your peers. Try not toiling in the fields for a while. Try not paying your taxes. Try being accused of anything from a speeding ticket to petty larceny, and tell me how many juries you run across. Yeah. They own you. It’s not Slavery, it’s just wage slavery, and income inequality, and different justice systems depending on the size of your bankroll and the color of your skin.

You are free, of course, to try to find a way to be a house servant instead of a field hand. Stay in school and stay in your lane. Go to college, get good grades, and try not to become addicted to anything. In this land of opportunity, if you’re a little smart and a little lucky and not too lazy, you stand a pretty good chance of becoming a House Negro, closer to your Master and benefiting from that closeness. Even if you don’t go to college, there are ways. Any cop or any soldier, at or above the rank of Lieutenant, is for sure working in the house, directly for the Man, making sure his belly is full and his children are clean, sober, safe.

Finally we come to the class of human that both Malcolm and I identify with. The field hands.

I spent plenty of time working up in the house in a metaphorical stiff white collar. But like I told the people I was closest too, all through it, I never embraced the identity of House Negro–I was a truck driver with a Master’s degree, and then I was a working class stiff who professed about technology. Not middle class. Not white collar. In the house, sometimes, but never of the house.

Time and again, at twenty, at thirty, at forty, and finally–definitively–in my 50s, the real house negroes came to understand that I would never really be one of them, that I was a subversive and a separatist in my heart, and they booted my ass back to the fields, for the good of the house and their Masters.

Out where the masses stay poor, oppressed, brutalized, angry and street-smart.

They’ll quote scripture and folk wisdom at you all day and all of the night. Those who don’t work, don’t eat. A penny saved is a penny earned. An eye, baby, for an eye.

My only real moral crime is that for a while, I believed that I belonged in the House, and when my position there started to fall apart, I was afraid. I didn’t want to go back to sleeping cold and eating hog guts. I wanted to see myself as smarter than that. Better than that. A cut above the common field hand.

But I don’t belong in the big house. I don’t love the Master. Finally they smelled that. Finally, I did too.

A month ago I came to this new town, and it was right, and it was good.

The very first thing I did was apply for a job at the big house on the hill. I talked a beautifully good game in the interview. They called my references. It seemed all but done.

That was a month ago now. The job is still posted. Maybe they’ll call. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter to me, not like it once would have.

Today I went to the little field downhill from the big house, and I told them yes, I would be willing. To toil in your papery public fields, for the slave wage of thirteen per hour. Plus those benefits, those human rights that cost extra.

It’s a lovely little field.

If they say no I’ll be a little bit sadder than I would be if the people on College Hill never call back.

If they say no, there are other fields, not so pretty. If they say no, maybe I’ll have to create successfully or starve. It might be the harsh motivation I need, the tough love that saves me and makes me into that rare bird they call a working artist.

Whichever of these things come to pass, I was born a field hand and I’ll die one too, at play in the fields of the Lord.

Thank you, my dead black friend. My brother, if that word is not too full of presumption, or privilege.