“Although
she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And
sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing
my breath of life, I will confess
I
love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her
vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving
me strength erect against her hate,
Her
bigness sweeps my being like a flood.”— African-American poet-editor Claude
McKay (1890-1948), “America” (1921),
in Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953)
As
I thought of this past weekend’s horrifying events in Charlottesville, Va., I
came across this poem. It was written at a particularly low point in this
country’s history, after Jim Crow had become entrenched not just at the state
and local level but, at the behest of southern-born President Woodrow Wilson, through
much of the federal government.
Personally,
I favor setting monuments to prominent Confederate figures in a
historical context rather than removing them. But the ugly hate and violence
displayed in the town that Thomas Jefferson called home demonstrates
not merely that these sculptures give tangible form to the inexpressible
sorrows of a region that suffered much in a war fought 150 years ago, but also
that they hold special potency to all too many bigots today.
This
is the “bread of bitterness” that Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay assailed nearly a century ago. Our
job today is to assure that the venom of the “tiger’s tooth” in America then
will be drained for good.
For
those despairing of America’s true place in the world, it would do well to
recall the Jamaican-born McKay’s own ideological journey. A Communist when
he penned these lines, he eventually turned against what was widely regarded as
the political and social order of the future. Despite all the problems he still
perceived in race relations, he nevertheless became an American citizen in
1940.
“Tradition provides a chain of provenance beginning
with the original biblical texts and extending down into our present year, with
scholars and clerics reading their predecessors and puzzling out how to apply
their thinking about God and his people to new questions that arise with time.
Instead of leaving a single conscience to the knotty business of making sense
of ancient texts, the tradition offers Christians a chorus of helpful
coreligionists passing down insight over time. An individual’s conscience plays
a role, of course, in her own interpretation of the tradition; but the weight
of time and expertise are instructive, and they whisper through space and centuries
that you are not alone.”—Elizabeth Bruenig, “Ever Ancient, Ever New," America
Magazine, Aug. 7, 2017
