But she is facing Clytie, thinking, if the peculiar institution is dead, then the fairy tale too is dead. Yet, there is no going back. She will deny truth to an audience all too eager to accept lies. As poet laureate, her narratives will "invent" a past, making it glorious, so one day, Americans will pine for what never was.
Nonetheless, "the debacle" is none other than the victims of enslavement.
"It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction," writes Baldwin.
But I identify with someone using her past to move forward. Clytie. Quiet, but steady, Clytie recognizes she is more than a face resembling a slaveholder. She is the sister of the dead man behind the door. She is what was denied to her and enslaved blacks once labeled "property." She is the sister and the descendant from ancestors made invisible in the fairy tales of plantation gardens. But no more! Deciding to be neither the property or the debacle, Clytie offers no small act of resistance. On the contrary, her decision to act results her prohibiting a propagandist committed to whitewashing America's peculiar institution of slavery from distorting and marginalizing her lived experience and that of the lived experience of all African Americans formerly enslaved.
What's a slap? Clytie stands, immovable!
In a democratic society, woke citizens, feared by fascists, nonetheless, identify with the struggle for democracy. They have empathy. They read. They join a protest march similar to the largest ever Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. A half a million citizens (maybe more) in some 550 locations across the US lock arms and identify with the victim of police brutality.
If not today, then tomorrow. Resistance is immovable!
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