Current Corona Virus Deaths in the US - 133,991
Yesterday - 133,062
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I ran up to Pam’s Tuesday morning (7/7) to pick
up a walker with wheels, while Michael headed across the street to pick up a
raised toilet seat.
After that, Janice
and I headed downstairs and she finished her quilt!!!
 |
| podering what to do next |
 |
| all done!! |
My honey made me a smurfy breakfast to keep going:
And then Janice proceeded to load up my quilt:
and pick a new pattern and continued
quilting.
Paula stopped by to show off a
new quilt top (I believe completed in THREE DAYS!!!)
Janice and I spent the day quilting and
sewing (I’m still working on the tablecloth, and she has started the new year long ‘leaders
and enders’ project from Bonnie Hunter (Quiltville).
We had ham and corn on the cob for dinner.
Kristin stopped over after dinner to pick up
2 charity quilts to quilt for Janice.
She brought me the MOST BEAUTIFUL bouquet:
The roses are so lush and full…I can’t stop
looking at them!!! The only down side of
the day is that our air conditioning decided to stop working, and by the time
we all went to bed, then house was almost 90 degrees :~(.
I’ve recently read 2 op-ed type pieces that for
me really put the ‘removing Confederate monuments, etc’: into perspective:
#1 ‘’NASHVILLE
— I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to
the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the
Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin
is a monument.
Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and
even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to
witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to
redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the
difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter
of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male
ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery
and Jim Crow.
According to the rule of hypodescent (the
social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the
race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the
granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black
people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more
sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing
has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic
servants and white men who raped their help.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I
am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my
genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half
white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took
what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary
power, and then failed to claim their children.
What is a monument but a standing memory? An
artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a
tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were
owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and
died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate
them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?
You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You
cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does
not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of
the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve
got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was
raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the
storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for
whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes
these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
And here I’m called to say that there is much
about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here.
There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long
last, be reckoned with.
This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant
one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified,
our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will,
a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.
But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t
deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black
ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s
reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of
my very existence, to be bad actors.
Among the apologists for the Southern cause
and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past.
They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility
and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or
question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.
To those people it is my privilege to
say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might
have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose
prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous
exploitation of black life.
The dream version of the Old South never
existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a
truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those
who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.
Either you have been blind to a truth that my
body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors
at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your
emotional investment in a legacy of hate.
#2 ‘’There
is a difference between recording history and commemorating it.
This is why Hitler’s heinous actions are well
recorded and remembered but there are no statues or memorials to him.
Removing statues does not expunge our knowledge
of historical events. It simply means we
no longer glorify them.’’ Elisabeth
Goodsall
