Lepers, whores, B’rer Rabbit and Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

by David Benjamin

“In dis worl, lots of folks is gotter suffer fer udder folks’ sins. Look like hit’s mighty onwrong; but hit’s des dat away. Tribbalashun seem like she’s a-waitin’ roun’ de cornder fer ter ketch one en all un us, honey.”

—Uncle Remus

MADISON, Wis. — When I was a kid, obediently memorizing the Baltimore Catechism at St. Mary’s School and pestering the staff at the Tomah Public Library, the three guys who turned me on to Black Lives Matter were Jesus, Walt Disney and Joel Chandler Harris. 

From the moment the Church started plying me with New Testament scripture at St. Mary’s, I took Jesus personally. I revered his example as devoutly as I did my other infallible mentors, Father Mulligan at school, Grandma Annie in civilian matters and Walter Kronkite at 5 pm on the news. I noticed how Jesus kept yammering on and on — all through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — about his affection for the wretched of the earth. He went around feeding, consoling, hugging and humbling himself among the riffraff that respectable folks wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot shepherd’s staff — the blind and crippled, paupers, lepers, whores, the hungry, thirsty, naked and sick, the meek and the merciful, the pure in heart and persecuted. He even found redeeming social importance in Roman infidels, criminals, cowards and his own betrayers.

The message I got from all this bleeding-heart Biblical liberalism was that God loves every human for being human and only disapproves of those who indulge in inhumanity.

This is where Walt Disney came in. In 1946, Walt released a film called Song of the South. I saw it ten years later at the Erwin Theater. I completely and childishly absorbed its gauzy image of post-Reconstruction Dixie, which Disney had cleansed of lynchings, massacres, chain gangs and the Ku Klux Klan. At seven years old, I was oblivious to the political implications that inevitably surfaced, compelling the Disney organization to hide the film in its vault.

I saw Song of the South once in my life and I only registered two impressions. One was that Uncle Remus was a black version of Papa, my grandfather, who spun yarns amiably and garrulously to anyone who would sit still and listen, but — mainly — kids. This parallel established Uncle Remus as one of my heroes. Next stop was the library, where I hunted down the non-Disney Remus, a treasury of folk tales composed by Joel Chandler Harris in the dense and musical patois of post-slavery Black folks. Even today, when I read Uncle Remus, I struggle to decipher Chandler’s transliterations of the stories he heard — about B’rer Rabbit, B’rer Fox and B’rer Tarrypin — from Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert and Aunt Crissy in the slave quarters at Turnwold Plantation. 

When I tackled Harris’ Uncle Remus, poring through it at a broad table in the oak silence of the Tomah Library, I had no grownup guidance. For me, reading was a solitary act of love without judgment. Because of Uncle Remus, a pure, wise and loving storyteller, like Papa,  my first impression of Blackness in America was a romance. I understood that Black folks were vastly, perhaps irreconcilably, different from white kids like me. But they were a wellspring of music, wit, irony and imagination. If I were true to the ethos of my sidekick, Jesus, I could not conceive of these boundlessly fascinating people as unequal to anyone else. 

From the day I watched Song of the South, I wanted to know more about Black folks. In my community, I didn’t have much company in my curiosity. The only black people in town were GIs from Camp McCoy and I was routinely advised to stay away from them. Like every white kid in America, I absorbed, by cultural osmosis, the visceral, impregnable hatred that for 400 years has pressed down on the necks of Black Americans like the knee of Derek Chauvin. 

Thanks to my sidekick Jesus, however, the hate didn’t stick. It seemed to me pretty likely that Jesus, who laid hands on lepers and washed the feet of his followers, would have to be just as kind and loving toward Black folks. In a thousand sermons, he made clear — at least to me when I was a kid — that anyone crushed unjustly beneath the heel of the rich and powerful is someone whose humanity is our mission to exalt, whose rescue from degradation is worth any sacrifice. I learned in catechism class — and from the School of Hard Knocks — that life ain’t fair. Jesus hammered this lesson home by dying on the Cross and asking his Father’s forgiveness for the bigots who crucified him.

I figured out early that dying in the cause of fairness is a Black thing. Unfairness killed hundreds of thousands of nameless slaves. Unfairness killed Nat Turner and launched a century of lynchings that killed 5,000 black men and women in 37 states. It killed hundreds in Colfax, Rosewood and Greenwood. Unfairness murdered four little girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church. It killed Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Dr. King. It killed Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and a little black boy with a toy gun in Ohio. 

Still, I’ve clung to my romance — because my first Black mentor was a storyteller, and Blackness in America is one of the great stories

By eighth grade, I was haunting another library, checking out Sam Charters’ recordings of unknown bluesmen in Louisiana and Mississippi. In school, I learned about Scott Joplin and ragtime. On my own, I studied the hazy legends of John Henry and Stacker Lee. I learned that the Blues, from which the vast oeuvre of American popular music has sprung, is the rock ’n’ roll love song of Black heartbreak. 

Over the years, as I studied the Black story, I was perhaps signaling liberal virtue and assuaging my white guilt. If so, I didn’t impress many Black folks. I grew accustomed to hearing that, because I’m white, I could neither understand their plight nor share their rage. Here was a point I was inclined, out of sympathy, to concede. But nagging at me was a riddle. Why did so many great Black thinkers poets and storytellers, dating back to Frederick Douglass, write so much about what it is, what it means, how it feels, to be Black? With every blunt reminder that my whiteness is too hard and deep to crack, I wondered, why then did W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Kenneth Clark, Claude Brown, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, Maya Angelou and a hundred other Black writers pour out their souls if not to be understood? Were they not sharing their experience, depicting Black life vividly, poignantly and passionately, so that white folks could finally penetrate the veil of their racism and awaken to the aching American need for actual equality, genuine justice and fairness to everyone?

If not to enlighten the benighted, why not just shut up?

Wasn’t Doc Rivers seeking understanding when he said, after the shooting of Jacob Blake by a white cop, “We’re the ones getting killed. We’re the ones getting shot. We’re the ones that we’re denied to live in certain communities. We’ve been hung. We’ve been shot. All you do is keep hearing about fear. It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.”?

The answer to Doc Rivers’ quandary — and he knows it — is the word he spoke: “love.” 

Despite the historic atrocity inflicted on America’s vast hostage community of Black folks, dragged here in bondage and never let go, America remains for its Black citizens — and really, for all the paupers, lepers, whores and infidels, the hungry, thirsty, sick and tempest-tost who heave up on our shores — a romance. 

Black Lives Matter, bluesy and sad but easy to dance to, is the latest love song.