That's just from the book jacket!
GC: You're
quite the researcher!
The way I see it: As a writer, I'm interested in
details. " Details make a story, a poem, a musical composition come alive. Art is in the particulars. " What I like
about history" you follow a fact" you try tracing it back to its source" and it
takes you up a tributary of more facts, more information" and that leads to the
Great River--a Mississippi, an Amazon, a Nile" and you keep going, you keep
exploring" and you get to Source. Some
Truth bubbling out of the Earth" and you stand in that place with new
understanding, a sense of awe.
Lincoln was a boyhood hero of mine! I read bios about him, idolized him. " But,
by my 20s, I was reading Black authors like W.E.B. DuBois, LeRoi Jones
(Baraka), James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansbury. And I read Dee Brown and others on the Tribal
Peoples (the "American Indian"). And
there was a lot of cognitive dissonance.
If Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, why were Blacks still living in
misery and servitude and racism 100 yrs after the War? If the Civil War had been fought to liberate
Blacks" why, during and after that war, did the US go about its brutal business
of slaughtering "redskins"?
When I read about Lincoln authorizing the
biggest mass execution in US history--well, that put the final nail in the
coffin of my affections for him--in spite of Walt Whitman, in spite of Carl
Sandburg and all the wonderful sentiments about the great martyr.
Recently, I dug up this info on a website
called, UnitedNativeAmerica.com, which I send you under the "Fair Use"
doctrine:
"What brought about the
hanging of 38 Sioux Indians in Minnesota, December 26, 1862, was the failure
"again' of the US Government to honor its treaties with Indian Nations. Indians were not given the money or food set
forth to them for signing a treaty to turn over more than a million acres of
their land and be forced to live on a reservation.
"Indian agents keep the
treaty money and food that was to go to the Indians, the food was sold to White
settlers, food that was given the Indians was spoiled and not fit for a dog. ".Indian
hunting parties went off the reservation... looking for food" one hunting group
took eggs from a White settler's land and the rest is history.
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