I’ve never fully brought into the concept of coincidences, believing instead what some may attribute to mere chance, could be the byproduct of divine providence, or manipulation.
Whatever your belief, I found it fascinating that the first thing I saw Sunday morning after removing an eye patch placed following surgery two days prior, was an explosive scene in the movie “Amistad.”
Later, while enroute to services at the House of Grace, my satellite radio oldies station played the 1972 hit song, “I Can See Clearly Now.”
Then, to top things off, the opening gospel requested by my pastor, Reverend Deborah Thomas, at the morning service was, “Open Your Eyes.”
I could accept those unrelated occurrences as mere coincidence, but then again, some things operate outside our realm of understanding.
On my way home after service, I couldn’t get my mind off the Amistad movie, one of Hollywood’s best social justice films dealing with “slavery” as contrasted against the fundamental principles upon which this nation was supposedly conceived.
The Steven Spielberg epic was based on the true story of African captives caught up in a legal battle over whether they were slaves by Divine design or human beings with the God-given right to fight for their freedom.
But it wasn’t just the historical significance of the movie that obstructed my vision last Sunday. It was also the fact that DNA tests revealed my ancestors were Mende, the same tribe as Cinque, one of the central characters in the Amistad saga.
In case you’re among the naive, the disconnected or the brainwashed Colored Disciples of Snoop Doggy Dud and as such are disdainful of learning about our sorted history, particularly slavery, Amistad was the name of the Spanish slave ship overtaken by its Mende captives while heading to a Cuban slave port in 1839.
Originally captured and held at the slave fortress Lomboko in Sierra Leone, the Mende prisoners were transported to the Americas by the Portuguese.
They were then transferred to the Spanish ship La Amistad where they were to be taken to a slave auction on the Cuban island.
As fate (or coincidence) would have it, however, Cinque (also known as Sengbe Pieh) and his brethren were able to pry loose their chains and overcome the crew, killing all but two passengers who it turned out were actually the slavers.
Those two “men” convinced the escaped African’s that they would steer the ship back to the Motherland but instead headed toward America, where they were intercepted by an American patrol ship.
Based on the false testimony of the two slavers, the human cargo was put in prison, pending their execution for mutiny and murder.
But as word got out about their plight, local Connecticut abolitionists intervened and hired an attorney to represent them in court.
The original trial turned on evidence that posited the captives were not, in fact, slaves, and instead were illegally captured free Africans, and as such, had the God-given right to use whatever methods possible to secure their freedom, including the justifiable killing of their kidnappers.
To the surprise of many, the Africans prevailed in that initial trial, only to find themselves returned to prison as various special interests, including the pragmatic (spelled cowardly racist) president, appealed to the U.S. Supreme court.
The appeal was obviously politically, culturally, and theologically motivated, as pressure from southerners raised the possibility that the African’s release would set a bad precedent, as well as move the nation closer to an inevitable war over the issue of slavery and the rights of Africans.
The newly-organized defense team was headed by former president John Quincy Adams.
Most assumed the justices would overturn the lower court ruling, as seven of the nine were slave owners themselves.
Again, evidence was presented that hypothesized that the Africans were, in fact, slaves since they were captured and interned at the hellish prison camp Lomboko.
The horrific internment camp, which was later destroyed by naval bombardment, had eerie similarities to the Nazi death camps used to exterminate the Jews during WWII.
I visited a similar “house or horrors” when I visited Senegal’s Goree Island with my late son. It was one of the most moving and emotionally draining experiences of my life.
It was a Satan-conceived place of horrors where captured Africans were tortured and frequently murdered if they didn’t submit to a regimen that served as their introduction to hell on earth.
The women were brutally raped, as were some of the young boys by the “devout Christians” who didn’t recognize the tenets of the New Testament about loving your neighbor as yourself.
Or maybe they did, but didn’t consider the African captives to be neighbors or human.
Many of the proud captives were starved to death or put into insanely small grottos where they died from suffocation and disease.
The captured Africans who survived Lomboko were treated similarly on the Portuguese ship.
They were literally stacked on top of each other in damp and dreary spaces below decks, forced to defecate on each other.
The women were routinely released long enough to be assaulted.
On that particular voyage, 50 of the captives—including women and children– were tied to weights and thrown overboard because the crew miscalculated the amount of ‘mush’ needed to keep all of the Africans alive during the Atlantic Ocean voyage.
Some captives jumped overboard when they had the opportunity, preferring a sure death over continued captivity and torture. History records that sharks frequently followed the slave ships knowing they would be fed human tuna.
Those experiences reportedly brought tears to the eyes of several White courtroom observers as they had little first-hand knowledge of the real horrors of America’s inhumane and Satanic slave institution.
While slavery was legal in many Northern states, it took on a form that was vastly more ‘humane’ than it was in the south.
In the Godless south, African slaves were routinely tortured, castrated, and raped. Thousands were beaten to death if they didn’t produce enough, and a seemingly insignificant offense–like looking into a White man’s eyes–could get you burned at the stake as cheering crowds of White men, women, and children looked on.
You could say in the northern states, slaves were viewed as redeemable—albeit– inferior beings and many citizens were followers of the New Testament compared to the Old.
In the south, our ancestors were not considered human at all, thus making their “mutiny” a crime against White privileged and manifest destiny.
But a compelling argument by Adams, which focused on the core tenets of Christianity, as well as the dichotomous foundation of American democracy itself, swayed the justices to free the captives and return them to their home country.
Ironically, Cinque, who was later elevated to national hero status both in Connecticut and West Africa, returned to Sierra Leone to find his country in a civil war. His family was never located, and it was assumed they have been captured and forced into slavery.
I guess it would be another coincidence if Cinque and his family passed each other during their respective Atlantic Ocean voyages.
The heart of the Amistad scenario, as was dutifully detailed in the historical book, “Cinque: Exploring Amistad at Mystic Seaport” by George Thompson, and Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage,” details how the subsequent trials contributed to the national dialogue on the inhumanity of slavery and the importance of that institution to America’s economic engine.
Beyond the inhumanity of America’s system of slavery, was also the essence and interpretation of the bible–the old vs. new testaments. Indeed, Christianity was put on trial, an unusual case that continues to this day.
The day before my surgery, I had just concluded reading a fascinating book, “The Road to Dawn,” about the real-life character who became the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Some may include that my chance selection of reading material was also a coincidence.
But when you combine it all, you have to question whether fate also raised its hand. And the new sight given me by VA surgeons was an action verb, prompting me to reassess my understanding of the elements of racism in America and to fuel my challenge of Christianity as presented by those with a vested interest over the past 2,000 years.
Watching Amistad again 20 years after its release, took me on a new journey. The Henson story served as a prerequisite.
Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Amistad trial were said to have contributed significantly to the eventual war that sought to unite, but instead forever divided, this country.
That dichotomy was rooted in not only political and economic realities that shaped America, but also in a battle over the very soul of Christianity.
Jude (read your bible—or borrow one—if you don’t know who he was) foretold of the philosophical conflict that led to the civil war in America that claimed more American lives than all other wars combined.
But let’s not ignore the fact the southern case for slavery (but not its methodology) was rooted in the bigots’ reading of the bible which, strangely, endorses slavery, going so far as to mandate the enslaved faithfully and obediently serve their “massas.”
Indeed, that debatable scripture was at the center of Henson (Uncle Tom’s) real-life story, a page in history I will discuss in another column.
The Amistad and Uncle Tom dramas are at the core of my conflict with Christianity and Islam.
While it is endorsed in both the Old and New Testaments, the new covenant does posit that all men are brothers and that we should love and treat each other as such.
But that has never been a reality anywhere that I know of, and various interpretations of the bible underscore the cancer that continues to eat away at our American moral fabric.
Of course, it is possible the Prophets, and later Jesus did condone slavery. But, if He did, his statements were among the excluded books of the bible or were lost in translation as the original text was translated to Greek and then Latin.
It could also be theorized the “men” who put together the template for Christianity did what men do to support an agenda or culture.
Those were among the questions my new vision focused on during the week of contemplation since watching the movie.
Did the abolitionists, and many Northerners, read a different version of the bible? Was slavery, as they proclaimed, a great moral sin and an afront to the very principles of Christianity?
It was inevitable that these two contrasting’s views would, as the most celebrated White abolitionist and cleric John Brown predicted, be decided through blood, which he said would cleanse the nation of its hypocrisy and evil.
Brown was wrong in one respect: the blood didn’t cleanse the American soil. It only stained it.
Much of my adult life has been consumed by the quest to understand how and why America is the way it is; a nation of haves vs. have nots; of separate and unequal; of Black and White, exploitation vs. salvation.
I have spent a significant segment of my life trying to understand why the God of love would allow His children to hate and torture each other.
Through those prisms, I have also tried to uncover the truth about the seeds of a cancer we erroneously refer to as racism.
Are we so naïve a people that we don’t see there is but one race, as ordained by God? But then again, had it not been for slavery and hatred, this country would probably have not morphed into the strongest “nation” on the planet.
The America I loved, served, and put my life on the line for in Vietnam and wars at home is not the place foreigner’s envy, or the beacon of democracy Donald Trump tries to convince the world it is.
But it is conversely not the “WASP nation” many of the founding fathers envisioned it would become.
I read recently there were plans during the time of the Amistad incident to project economic growth in the mid-20th century based on slavery! Can you imagine that?
Or could you imagine what America would be like if the Mende had lost that final legal battle? Or if the church had subscribed to the New Testament and fought the evil of slavery. Would Frederick Douglass have denounced what he called “White Christianity.”
Or Martin Luther King a century later had reason to write his “letter from a Birmingham Jail?”
Whoever said you can’t understand the present without exploring the past, knew of what he (or she) spoke. The courtroom battle portrayed in “Amistad” also put on trial the perceived economic necessity of slavery, the complicity of foreign nations, and the underlying truth that the devil is alive and well.
I don’t’ know what final conclusions I will draw from all of this or whether the time and energy I shall put into my internal debate will bear any fruit.
I do, however, note a quote from Frederick Douglass, who once said, “When we get a little farther away for the conflict, some brave and truth-loving man, with all the facts before him will gather from here and there the scattered fragments…and give to those who shall come after us an impartial history of this the grandest moral conflict of the century.”
And this one as well.
Hotep.
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