Looking out: Past and present?

March 22, 2000
Issue 

Looking out

Past and present?

By Brandon Astor Jones

"Doctors [in America] ... are treating more and more patients for back problems related to carrying too much weight on their backs. Furthermore, the patients reporting pain are quite young. A study published last year found that 6% of 10-year-olds complained of back pain, while 10% to 15% of 12-year-olds experienced similar problems." — Beth Gorman

Sometimes I fill this space with unconscious rambling that reveals who and what I am emotionally. To those who too often parrot, "Black people are so emotional!", I say that we have a right to be.

Today finds me reading various old newspapers, magazines and journals. The quote above is from an article in the January 25 Macon Telegraph that caught my eye, "Your backpack could be hurting you". A large number of the US's children are injuring their backs by carrying books in backpacks.

Picture"Dr Ray Brant, a chiropractor at Brant Chiropractic Clinic in Macon, said he has treated 'quite a few' patients for backpack-related pain. Brant recommends that students not carry a book bag for a prolonged period of time. 'Ten to 15 minutes at most', he said. Furthermore, the bag should only weigh 10 to 15 pounds. 'It's an unnatural way to carry things', Brant said. 'You ... should always carry things in front of your body. Your body is not meant to bend (the way book bags cause it to bend)."

The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons instructs parents and guardians not to allow the weight of a child's book bag to exceed 20% of his or her body weight. That is good advice.

A few minutes after reading this article, I came upon a review of Randall Robinson's latest book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. In case my Australian readers are wondering who Robinson is, he is the president of TransAfrica, the organisation that spearheaded the US boycott of South Africa during the final years of apartheid. Robinson's book makes a good case for the US's need to pay reparations to African-Americans for the enslavement of black people.

Before I reveal something related to the book review that has moved me to tears, let me share with you an excerpt from Robinson's book.

"While other human rights crimes, like slavery, have resulted in the loss of millions of lives, only slavery, with its sadistic patience, asphyxiated memory, and smothered cultures, psychologically hulled empty a whole race of people with intergenerational efficiency. Every artifact of the victim's past cultures, every more, every ritual, every god, every language, every trace indicia of a people's whole hereditary identity, wrenched from them and ground into a sharp, choking dust.

"Our children have no idea who they are. How can we tell them? How can we make them understand who they were before the ocean became a furnace incinerating every pedestal from which ancient Black muses had offered inspiration? What can we say to the Black man on death row? The Black mother, alone, bitter, overburdened, and spent? Who tells them that their fate washed ashore at Jamestown with twenty slaves in 1619?

"But old massa now, he knows what to say. Like a sexually abusing father with darting snake eyes and liquid lips he whispers, 'I know this has hurt and I won't do it again, but don't you tell anybody.'

"Then on the eve of emancipation, in a wet wheedling voice, old massa tells the fucked-up 236-year-old spirit-dead victims with post-hypnotic hopefulness 'Now y'all just forget about everything. Gwan now. Gwan.'

"Go where? Do what? With what? Where is my mother? My father? And theirs? And theirs? I can hear my own voice now loud in my ears.

"After World War I, the allies made successful claims against Germany, as did Jews after World War II. The Poles also laid claims against the Germans after being used by Nazis during the Second World War as slave labor. Japanese-Americans recovered from [the] Canadian government. Aborigines recovered money and large areas of land from the Australian government. Korean women, forced into prostitution by Japan during World War II, were compensated as well."

Robinson's book is a must read for African-Americans, as well as for any and all truth-loving people the world over. However, as deeply moving as his words are, they are not the source of my tears as I write this sentence.

In my book, Growing Down, which is an autobiographical account of a portion of my early life, I wrote of being age 15 when my mother, in her effort to move me far away from the lure of Chicago's street gangs, sent me to visit her sister in the Mississippi Delta.

On the second day of my visit I went with my Aunt Merdiss and her family (two daughters aged eight and nine, two sons aged 11 and 13, and her husband) to a muddy cotton field to pick cotton. That was my first and last time in a cotton field.

I can tell you from personal experience that pulling a three- to four-metre-long cotton sack gets harder with each handful of cotton you put into it. Picking cotton is not fit labour for any man or woman, let alone a child.

You have not seen the real United States of America until you have seen a child barely one and a half metres tall, bent over, struggling to pull a full cotton sack in a muddy Mississippi cotton field.

The sepia starkness of a photograph accompanying the review of Robinson's book tears at my memory and heart. It shows two black women working in a cotton field. Their sacks range from empty to full. A third, unseen person holds a full sack vertically, at its full length, above the pile of cotton at their feet. Cotton sacks like those shown in the photograph, when full, weigh at least 45 kilos.

One of the women reminds me very much of Aunt Merdiss. The first thing I noticed about Aunt Merdiss was her wide and guileless smile. The second thing I noticed was that she was bent, severely, at the waist. I asked her what caused her to be like that. "I guess it come from pickin' cotton all my life, Astor", she replied.

Although Aunt Merdiss left this life many years ago, the crippling bend in her back is especially vivid in my memory today. My question is, when will a doctor in the US show concern for those countless black backs still bent with the pain and weight of slavery past and present?

[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns (include your name and full return address on the envelope, or prison authorities may refuse to deliver it). He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-63, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA, or e-mail <BrandonAstorJones@hotmail.com>.]

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